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Ivanka Trump “is in peril” along with Allen Weisselberg, says Trump biographer

President Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump is in about as much trouble as Allen Weisselberg is, according to biographer Michael D’Antonio.

Speaking to CNN’s Jim Acosta on Sunday, D’Antonio explained that the kinds of things that Weisselberg is accused of are similar to things that Ivanka Trump also did while working for the Trump Organization.

“You know, he really is acting as if he is going to go down with the ship,” said D’Antonio of Weisselberg. “I think this is astounding given Michael Cohen’s example. But there’s another thing that I notice in the president’s — or former president’s complaints. And his idea that, ‘Well, they’re going after really good people, and they would only be going after me because of political motivations.’ Well, the big problem for him is that he invited all of this. He ran for president in the first place as a publicity stunt. He wanted to amp up his visibility and increase his bottom line. He never intended to be elected president, and then when he became president, journalists started digging into the facts of his wealth, which has always been in doubt, and then people that he really hurt, that he steamrollered offer the years leaked documents to The New York Times that gave the truth about his taxes for the world to see. Faced with all of that, the prosecutions had no choice but to go after him. So, the idea this is political is crazy. He brought it on himself. These are practices that have been going on for more than a dozen years, and he’s getting what he deserves.”

D’Antonio explained that the way of doing business for Trump associates is something that has happened for years. It resembles more of an organized crime operation than an ordinary corporation.

“The other person who I think is in peril is Ivanka Trump,” D’Antonio also said. “One of the things that Allen Weisselberg is in trouble for is taking money as a contractor and then claiming self-employed status so that he can get some of the retirement benefits that the tax code allows for self-employed people. Well, we know that Ivanka Trump got quite significant sums paid to her as nonemployee compensation. That freed the Trump Organization from paying part of her taxes, and it put her in a status that I think the IRS would have lots of questions about. So, these folks don’t know how to play the game straight. I think everything they do is crooked.”

See his explanation below:

When conservatives play the victim over satire: It’s only “free speech” when they’re making jokes

Satire has been bothering the right more than usual lately. The catch is that it seems they can’t decide if they want to defend it or attack it. First, the right-wing satirical site The Babylon Bee, a conservative version of an Onion-style comedy-news publication, made headlines when it demanded the New York Times correct a claim that the site promotes misinformation behind a guise of satire. Then we learned that Donald Trump had actually asked advisers and lawyers to investigate whether the Department of Justice could probe or mitigate sources of satirical late-night comedy, like “Saturday Night Live,” that made fun of him.

What’s sort of fun to watch is the whiplash performed when the right expresses outrage in both directions. For example, Seth Dillon, CEO of the Babylon Bee, made a classic free speech, anti-censorship argument when he complained about Facebook possibly limiting the circulation of their posts. “It’s people in positions of power protecting their interests by telling you what you can and cannot joke about. Comedians who self-censor in deference to that power are themselves a joke,” he wrote.  

Funny to think that that same comment could have been used to defend Stephen Colbert when he was hammered for “going over the line” in his roast of George W. Bush back in 2006. 

On the one hand, the Babylon Bee argues that the left — the umbrella under which the right assumes the mainstream media and Big Tech fall — is trying to censor and police their satire. On the other hand, Trump actually did try to censor satire because he was freaked out that he was being mocked.

The buzz over the Babylon Bee stems from the debate over whether the site is — depending on who you are and how you read it — hate-speech masquerading as comedy, deliberate misinformation, or actual right-leaning satire. (Dillon says the latter.) But what’s more interesting is how the arguments made in its defense are quite similar to the ones that have been made to defend satire critical of the right, and especially Donald Trump. 

And yet, for the most part, conservative pundits have either sidestepped responding to Trump’s desires to censor satirical comedy critical of him or have defended him. After a 2018 segment on “SNL” that riffed on “It’s a Wonderful Life” and suggested that everyone would be happier if Trump weren’t re-elected, there was quite the stir. Essentially, the argument was in the reverse from what is being said to support the Babylon Bee. In defending Trump, the arguments were that Trump satire needed to be reined in because it was too one-sided, too negative and possibly too successful at affecting his image.

For example, Trump himself took to Twitter to complain, “A REAL scandal is the one-sided coverage, hour by hour, of networks like NBC & Democrat spin machines like Saturday Night Live. It is all nothing less than unfair news coverage and Dem commercials. Should be tested in courts, can’t be legal? Only defame & belittle! Collusion?” And his anxieties led to debates over what conservatives should do to defend themselves against liberal bias in late-night comedy.

The fact that Trump would melt down after he saw satire critical of him was news enough, but we later found out that Trump did more than complain; he actually looked into whether he could find other avenues to restrict political comedy targeting him. As Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley reported for the Daily Beast, “According to two people familiar with the matter, Trump asked advisers and lawyers in early 2019 about what the Federal Communications Commission, the court system, and—most confusingly to some Trump lieutenants—the Department of Justice could do to probe or mitigate SNL, Jimmy Kimmel, and other late-night comedy mischief-makers.”

This story is all the more noteworthy for its coincidence with the Babylon Bee censorship brouhaha. Where were the defenders of the Babylon Bee when Trump was literally asking for late-night comedy shows to be restricted in their jokes about him? If the argument is that comedy should never concede to power, then surely Seth Dillon would be outraged over the story that Trump considered having the DOJ, the FCC and the courts look into ways to limit satire.

The Babylon Bee’s claim of discrimination stems from a line in a New York Times article, which was subsequently edited, and the site’s allegation that their content is being restricted on social media platforms like Facebook, which has had a notoriously difficult time figuring out what to do with satire anyway. Comedians on both the left and the right deal with having their posts removed because, despite attempting to create community rules, Facebook is ill-equipped to process irony and often takes satirical posts as literal.

But the Babylon Bee’s complaints of censorship fit the pattern of a broader right-wing victim rhetoric that suggests their views are being silenced even when there is considerable proof this is not the case. We hear ongoing cries of conservatives being silenced on social media — often surrounding the launch of yet another social media network claiming to be a haven for “free speech” — but in reality, the right rules online. Politico tracked millions of social media posts on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and found that “Right-wing social media influencers, conservative media outlets and other GOP supporters dominate online discussions.” Working with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based nonpartisan think tank that tracks extremism online, Politico found that “a small number of conservative users routinely outpace their liberal rivals and traditional news outlets in driving the online conversation.”

What’s even funnier (and concerning) is the fact that most of the cries that social media discriminates against the right are simply anecdotal. Stories of one tweet taken down, one post on Facebook removed, etc., don’t line up with data. If anything, it’s the reverse: The more that the right whines that they are being censored, the more bandwidth their whines receive on platforms. Even more disturbing is how their stories of being censored have shaped public perceptions. A 2020 Pew Research study found that most Americans believe social media sites censor political views, with 90 percent of Republicans saying that they believe that social media censors them.

The hypocrisy over the right’s reaction to censoring satire reveals their consistent position that they are victims. The victim narrative is the common denominator. The right constantly argues that they are being discriminated against, whether because someone is making fun of them or someone is not letting them make fun of them. For those of us who really love satire, the irony of that twisted logic is both pretty funny and pretty disturbing.

“Cheating’s OK for me, but not for thee” — inside the messy psychology of sexual double standards

Sexual double standards – in which women and men are judged differently for the same sexual behavior – will probably sound familiar to most people.

The classic one centers on multiple sexual partners: Men who are promiscuous are lauded as “studs,” “lotharios” or “ladies’ men,” while women who have a lot of sex get called “sluts” or “whores.” Men who cheat on their wives aren’t exactly praised, but they’ll often get a pass. Women who do the same, on the other hand, risk sullying their social reputations.

There’s a different sexual double standard, however, and it’s one that exists between two partners.

In my new book, “When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault,” I spend some time exploring the underlying psychology of infidelity. Thanks to the way men get a pass for their promiscuity, you might assume men are more likely to rationalize their own cheating than women.

But in what I call the “me-versus-thee double standard,” it turns out that each side is just as likely to play mental gymnastics when it comes to justifying their bad behavior.

Hypocrisy at its finest

What’s behind the classic sexual double standard, in which men get more of a pass for having multiple sexual partners?

Part of the answer lies with men’s evolved mating psychology.

Relative to women, they have a stronger desire for sexual variety, which shows up in their sex drive, the number of partners they seek out, their tendency to fantasize about different women and their patronage of prostitutes.

So throughout human history, you’ll see men in power lay down parameters that give themselves more latitude for promiscuity.

Roman emperors, for example, created harems of females guarded by eunuchs, while Joseph Smith, when he founded the Mormon religion, formalized polygamy, arguing that God wouldn’t have made women so enticing if he wanted to limit a man to one woman.

However, Smith was keen to note that the same rules didn’t apply to women.

In his handwritten documents, Smith relays how the Lord told him: “And if he have ten virgins given unto him by this law, he cannot commit adultery, for they belong to him… But if one or either of the ten virgins, after she is espoused, shall be with another man, she has committed adultery, and shall be destroyed… according to my commandment.”

Not surprisingly, women often find this sexual hypocrisy baffling and logically inconsistent.

Yet versions of this sexual double standard persist, even in the most sexually egalitarian countries on Earth, such as Norway. And recent studies of more than three dozen cultures found that it’s women, not men, who receive the brunt of the criticism for having casual sex and cheating on their partners.

“What counts as sex” isn’t so stable

The sexual double standard just outlined has to do with what’s acceptable for men versus what’s OK for women.

The other has to do with what’s acceptable for oneself versus one’s partner.

In 2008, three social scientists posed the same question to men and women: “What counts as sex?”

Only 41% of the men in existing relationships said that oral contact with someone else’s genitals would count as sex. But 65% of the men said that if their partner had oral contact, it would count as sex.

You might think that this reveals the usual sexual double standard, in which women are evaluated more harshly than men for the same conduct.

However only around one-third of women – 36% – said that if they had oral contact with someone else, it would count as sex, which is about the same as what men said. Meanwhile, 62% of women said that if their partner had oral contact with someone else, it would count as sex.

These findings reveal a previously unexplored sexual double standard – not between men and women as groups, but rather between standards people hold for themselves versus their partners: the “me-versus-thee” double standard.

If people hold sexual double standards about what counts as sex – not sex if I have contact with others, but definitely sex if you do – it’s easy to see how this quirky rationalization can lead to conflict in relationships:

It’s OK for me to kiss someone else; it doesn’t really mean anything, and besides, it’s not really sex. But you’d better not.

It’s OK for me to receive a bit of oral pleasure when you’re out of town because it’s not really sex. But if you do, it’s infidelity with a capital “I.”

Going after the competition

It turns out that just as women are equal participants in the me-versus-thee double standard, they also help perpetuate the traditional male-versus-female double standard.

For example, my research team conducted a series of studies and found that women are somewhat more likely than men to condemn cheating and casual sex. However, women in many cultures are significantly harsher on other women than men are on other men. They’re also more likely to spread gossip that other women can’t stay loyal to one partner. And although women don’t admire promiscuous or adulterous men, they express less moral condemnation toward men who cheat or sleep around than they do toward women who do the same.

It all comes back to the fact that women’s sexual psychology, like that of men’s, evolved in the brutal and amoral furnace of sexual and reproductive competition. Women’s fundamental competitors have always been other women, and sullying the sexual reputations of their rivals is a key strategy in the serious game of procreative success.

When it comes to sexual double standards, perhaps we’re all moral hypocrites.

David M. Buss, Professor of Psychology, The University of Texas at Austin College of Liberal Arts

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

Still essential: Voodoo Doughnut strike shows we need to do better by restaurant workers post-COVID

As temperatures in Portland, Oregon, surged to an all-time high of 116 degrees Fahrenheit last week, some on-duty workers at the famous Voodoo Doughnut shop staged a walkout. Attempts to mitigate the effects of the heat — wet towels, chilled Gatorade and shifting production hours to cooler times of the day — were unsuccessful and some employees reported feeling nauseous and shaky, especially when working by the fryers. 

According to Samantha Bryce, a Voodoo Doughnut employee and organizer of Voodoo Doughnut’s workers union, Doughnut Workers United, employees approached the shop’s general manager June 27 once temperatures within the shop reached 96 degrees Fahrenheit and said that the location should close. 

It was no longer safe to work inside, they said, and if the shop didn’t close, the members of Doughnut Workers United would go on strike. 

“The manager retreated to their office and stated that they didn’t want to be a part of that,” Bryce said. “They told workers that if it’s too hot, they can just go home. Then the manager just shut themselves in their office.”

The Doughnut Workers United union is not recognized by Voodoo Doughnut’s corporate office, as the unionization effort was defeated in an election certified by the National Labor Relations Board last month. In a written statement, Voodoo Doughnut spokesperson Audrey Lincoff wrote: “Employee and customer safety is our highest priority; if we felt either were at risk during this time, we would have adjusted operating hours and otherwise made sure everyone was safe.”

Over ten employees walked out or stayed home during the length of the two-day strike — during which dozens of other restaurants throughout the city closed out of caution for their workers — but as they are returning to Voodoo Doughnuts, there’s not a job waiting for them. 

“Daily, we’re losing two to three employees who had gone out on strike,”‘ Bryce said. “Each day, since the strike has happened, the workers come back to work and [management] is waiting with final checks. There is no chance of not being fired by them at this point. Everyone is just kind of waiting to go in and have the ‘final chat’ in the office.” 

Voodoo Doughnuts corporate has not issued a statement regarding the firings yet, but the union has organized a GoFundMe for workers who lost their jobs; they’ve raised nearly $4,500 so far. According to Bryce, the dispute isn’t over. 

“We have a rally and picket coming up about a month from now,” she said. “We’re aiming to put that out there in late July and we will be coming forth with more specific details on that in days to come.” 

While the heat wave in the Pacific Northwest was described by meteorologists as a once-in-a-millenium event, the situation at Voodoo Doughnuts is sadly just another example of how restaurant workers, who were lauded as essential employees during the pandemic, will continue to be treated as disposable if national attitudes and policies don’t shift as lockdown protocols are lifted. 

The signs were there that the “frontline hero” sheen bestowed upon food industry employees early in the pandemic was wearing as stay-at-home orders dragged on. 

As Salon reported in October, restaurant and grocery store owners all across the country had reached the point where they were hosting de-escalation training for employees to deal with angry, maskless patrons. Videos that highlighted the necessity of these skills flooded the internet. They had titles like “Woman asked to wear mask throws food in Dallas grocery” and “Another ‘Karen’ Has Grocery Store Meltdown Over Masks,” and featured shoppers — often older white women — berating staff after being asked to wear a mask while shopping. 

That same month, the National Restaurant Association and ServSafe launched a series of online training sessions for industry members, including a course titled “ServSafe Conflict De-escalation: COVID-19 Precautions.” 

“You don’t want an emotionally charged situation with a guest to be the first time you’ve thought about possible solutions,” the course transcript states. “A critical step is to just be aware! Recognizing disruptive behavior can help you solve little problems before they become big ones.” 

In December, the U.C. Berkeley Food Labor Research Center — in collaboration with One Fair Wage and Time’s Up Foundation — published a study that detailed, in part, how nearly 250 workers shared sexualized comments from customers,” a substantial portion of which were requests from male customers that female service workers remove their mask so that they could judge their looks, and, implicitly, determine their tips on that basis.” 

Many comments were even more sexually explicit, such as, “Pull that mask down so I can see if I want to take you home later,” and “Take off your mask so I can stick my tongue down your throat.”

In recent months, debate about eliminating tipping in favor of fixed hourly wages has intensified, as has controversy over a minimum wage increase. This is perhaps the arena in which any shifts in attitudes on the value of food labor were most evident. Where many Americans considered restaurant employees essential during the pandemic, they suddenly became unskilled burger-flippers when the idea of a $15 per hour minimum wage was proposed. 

This tension is causing the already-battered restaurant industry to further fray as stay-at-home mandates have largely been lifted across the country. While customers are heading back to dining room in droves, many owners are having difficulty sourcing workers; and while some chefs — like, disappointingly, Guy Fieri — are chastising former employees for not returning back to the kitchen, restaurants are still overwhelmingly offering workers the same low base pay, meager benefits and lack of protections that they did pre-pandemic.

Some former restaurant employees have parlayed their skills into different jobs. Others are having to determine whether the same-old-same-old, from both customers and management, is worth risking their health and wellbeing — whether that means putting their body on the line while there is still a chance of contracting COVID, or risking heat exhaustion while dropping doughnuts in a fryer. 

While many happily dedicate their lives to working in hospitality, the restaurant industry isn’t going to change until people are no longer faced with the pressure of giving their lives for the industry.

Hungry for great food writing? Sign up for our weekly newsletter — whether you’re looking for delicious new recipes, seasonal wine pairings or meaty reporting, we’ve got every appetite covered.

 

The Roberts Court is destroying voting rights — winning back state legislatures is the only answer

This week, a conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court that has dedicated itself to making it more difficult for Americans to vote struck again and drove a nail further into the heart of the already-gutted Voting Rights Act. As Republican state legislatures nationwide continue to pass restrictive laws that place additional burdens especially on voters of color, this Court, over a decade of shameful, pinched jurisprudence, has slowly eviscerated the crucial tools enacted to curb the worst instincts of lawmakers.

In a 6-3 decision that broke along sadly predictable partisan lines, the Court upheld on Thursday a pair of voter suppression laws from Arizona that banned ballot collection and severely regulated out-of-precinct voting, despite clear evidence that these laws disproportionately burdened minority voters. 

The burdens and racial intent in these cases were clear to lower courts and less determined partisan judges. Arizona officials relocate the voting precincts of Black and Latino residents at a wildly higher rate than white precincts, resulting in considerable and predictable confusion. And Native American and rural Arizonans — where household mail service is rare and often unreliable — rely on volunteers and community members to return their ballots. There has been no — zero  — proof of fraud in this important service.

None of that mattered to this Court, and indeed, the decision is not surprising to those following the Roberts Court’s steady trajectory rightward in voting cases and other civil rights. 

What this decision reinforces, however, is that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act will no longer serve as a necessary protection against legislation designed to suppress the vote of racial minorities. Even when the facts are as clear as they are here. And even in states like Arizona, where lawmakers have a century of experience in designing voting restrictions carefully crafted to preserve white political power.

That means this decision must serve as a last chance, five-fire alarm bell to progressives — indeed, all Americans who care about protecting the foundational right to vote and perhaps the most valuable piece of civil rights legislation in our history—about the urgent need to invest in state legislatures, which are ever increasing in power. State legislatures are the final boss in the Republican quest to vanquish democracy. We cannot cede this fight to them.

Brnovich: The case and decision

The path to Brnovich began in 2013, when the Supreme Court struck down the “pre-clearance” requirement under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder. Suddenly, states with a history of suppressing minority voters — including Arizona — were free to change voting rules without obtaining DOJ’s prior approval. They moved fast and took full advantage. Arizona quickly passed the laws at issue: first, making it a felony to return someone else’s signed ballot (known as ballot collection), and second, disenfranchising people who accidentally cast a ballot in the wrong precinct. 

Importantly, the plaintiffs in the case presented clear and extensive evidence demonstrating that Latino and Native American voters are disproportionately burdened by the elimination of ballot collection, and that minority voters are twice as likely to vote in the wrong precinct as white Arizonans. These restrictions, the plaintiffs argued, violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which protects minority groups from voting laws and practices that are discriminatory.

Nonetheless, Justice Samuel Alito stated for the majority that “Arizona’s out-of-precinct policy and HB 2023 do not violate §2 of the VRA, and HB 2023 was not enacted with a racially discriminatory purpose.” In doing so, the Court has upheld discriminatory voting laws and weakened Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — which will make future challenges even harder.

Latest in a long line of coffin nails for Voting Rights Act

A central goal of conservative jurisprudence is the carving back of federal protections, and the empowerment of states over vast swaths of social and civil life. This decision is part of a long trajectory of the Court limiting federal protections and devolving power back to states. Voting rights are a clear example of this trajectory, and the Brnovich decision now lays against its forebears, particularly the Shelby County v. Holder decision. And indeed, Chief Justice Roberts has been patiently preparing to dismantle Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act for 40 years. His careful long game may end in checkmate for majority rule as we know it.

Arizona: Ground zero

It is fitting that this latest decision upholds Arizona laws. Despite eking out a Biden victory, Arizona remains a Republican trifecta controlled by arch-conservatives in the legislature and governor’s mansion. In a state where just a few votes can be dispositive to an election (just look at Biden’s 10,457-vote margin), this red trifecta has gone into voter suppression and conspiracy overdrive since the 2020 election. A drawn-out “fraudit” of the election has worked to undermine trust in democracy and has served as a blueprint to other GOP-controlled states. And a suite of laws have carved back voting rights and access, including a new bill to strip the (currently Democratic) secretary of state’s power around key aspects of election administration. 

State legislatures matter — now more than ever

As Rick Hasen has explained, Alito’s opinion in the 2018 Abbott v. Perez case makes it essentially impossible for a court to find racially discriminatory intent in voting laws when race and party categories overlap. But, obviously, given long-existing patterns of racial voting polarization, they will often overlap. This means that state legislatures can use this naturally-occurring circumstance to shield discriminatory intent to their heart’s content, without concern for violating Section 2. They can discriminate based on race while pretending they’re simply using partisanship. This has been the recent GOP strategy on gerrymandering. It will now be the go-to move in red state legislatures nationwide on voter suppression. This Court won’t stop it. They’ve rolled out green lights and eliminated any speed limit.

The bottom line is that the Brnovich decision must serve as a loud warning: The Roberts Court cannot and will not protect voting rights. And the truly breathtaking deadlock in the Democratic federal trifecta over a new federal voting rights law makes clear that we absolutely cannot wait for Congress to act either. The answer is clear: On voting rights and so much more, the buck does and will continue to stop with state legislatures. We must elect legislators who will fight to protect voting rights — down-ballot, where it matters most and is too often overlooked — or risk becoming a nation filled with democracy deserts, where your right to vote depends on where you live and your access to the polls depends on the color of your skin. 

This is John Roberts’ America. The stakes could not be higher. No one is coming to bail us out.

Obama aide Ben Rhodes on the global crisis of democracy: It’s real, and we have to fight back

An MSNBC anchor, who will remain nameless, recently called the new book by Ben Rhodes, who served as Barack Obama’s deputy national security adviser, “dark” in its description of where our nation’s democracy finds itself today. Rhodes’s book, “After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made,” is actually not dark. It’s just a brutally honest look at where our nation is heading. Everything Rhodes writes, and everything he shared in our Salon Talks conversation, should be seen both a warning and a clarion call to action for those who believe in our republic.

In defense of that MSNBC anchor, many people still don’t fully grasp the nature of the threat democracy faces today. Not just from Donald Trump, but more broadly from today’s Republican Party, which, as Rhodes and other experts have documented, have been embracing the autocratic playbook long before Trump slithered down that famous golden escalator to launch his 2016 campaign. It’s just that Trump made it impossible to ignore, especially given the Jan 6 act of “domestic terrorism,” as the FBI has defined it, and which himself Trump incited.

As experts on democracy noted in the fall of 2020, the GOP now less resembled an American political party than it does the authoritarian ruling party in Hungary headed by Viktor Orbán. Indeed, in his book, Rhodes lays out how Orbán‘s right-wing party and today’s Republicans utilize similar methods to attract support, from culture wars to the rejection of political correctness to an overt embrace of a right-wing interpretation of Christianity. As Rhodes explains, “None of this happened because of Donald Trump.”

Rhodes also detailed how other authoritarian regimes, such as Russia and China, mandate teaching students not the accurate history of their nation but a mythology that helps them remain in power. This should sound familiar, since Republicans have recently been enacting laws to ban “critical race theory,” but what they’re truly doing is copying the Chinese Communist Party tactic of only allowing the teaching of “history” that helps them politically.

Rhodes said something that has stayed with me since our talk: For the first time in his life he had “to consider what it meant to be an American while living in a country that no longer made sense to me.” I share that sentiment. Neither of us is being “dark.” We are simply being direct about where our nation finds itself.

Watch my Salon Talks episode with Ben Rhodes here, or read a transcript of our conversation below, lightly edited for length and clarity.

“After the Fall.” It’s intense. You went to several continents to write this, and it was written over four years, up until the pandemic. Share a little bit about that.

Yeah. Well, it’s not enjoyable. The subject matter is why things are moving in the wrong direction in the world. But I hope what’s enjoyable is it’s told through the stories of other people. It’s not just analysis. And the root of it for me essentially was, I was kind of knocked on my back after the 2016 election. I wanted to make sense of what’s happening in America, what’s happening around the world. And I started to travel and meet people. I ended up going to Hong Kong and immersing myself with the Hong Kong protest movement there, talking to Alexei Navalny and opponents of Putin in Russia, talking to democracy activists in places like Hungary. And through their stories, trying to understand: Why is the world all moving in this direction, and how is America connected to it?

The jumping off point for me was when I was meeting with a young anti-corruption activist from Hungary. Hungary has gone from being a democracy to a single-party autocracy in a decade. And I said, “Hey, how did this happen? How did Viktor Orbán, your prime minister, do this in 10 years?” And he said, “Well, it’s simple. He got elected on a right-wing populist backlash to the financial crisis. He redrew the parliamentary districts to entrench his party in power. He changed the voting laws to make it easier for his supporters to vote. He packed the court with far-right judges. He enriched some cronies who then bought up the media and turned it into a right wing propaganda machine. And he wrapped it up in a national us vs. them message. Us, the real Hungarians, against them — Muslims, immigrants, liberal leaders, George Soros.”

And I’m listening and I’m thinking, “Well, he’s describing America.” So what I realized is, by traveling to all these places and kind of inhabiting all these stories, I can understand not just why democracy is threatened globally, but why it’s threatened in the United States, what we may have done to contribute to that, and what people are doing to fight back?

You have a great line, “In 2017, I was forced for the first time to consider what it meant to be an American while living in a country that no longer made sense to me.” From your point of view, why didn’t America make sense to you at that moment?

It’s interesting because I mean, for me, that line also speaks to the fact that I’ve known people who live in countries where they’re repulsed by their own government. They don’t see themselves in the power that represents them. But even though I didn’t agree with the Bush administration, it wasn’t the same kind of visceral reaction that you have to someone like Trump, where you’re like, “This person stands for the opposite of everything I believe in, and he’s in the highest office.” A part of what I had to realize in writing this book is that I came of age around the end of the Cold War. That’s where my first political consciousness happened. And the narrative was that everything was moving in one direction. The history was settled that freedom and democracy and open markets were going to kind of continue to spread.

What we’ve experienced since then is the recognition that, “Well, no. History never ends.” And the same conflicts over nationalism versus democracy, authoritarianism versus the capacity of people to have individual rights, those things are constantly playing themselves out through history. We’re fighting those battles today, just like people have had to do in the past. While America doesn’t offer the promise that that’s all settled, it at least gives us the opportunity to have the fight. But it speaks to why we can’t be complacent, given the threats to our democracy around us.

Your former boss and your good friend Barack Obama was on CNN talking about how democracy is not self-executing, and informing us you can’t take things for granted. Oddly enough, that conjured up Ronald Reagan’s famous line, “Freedom is just one generation away.” The idea we’ll be telling our children one day what freedom was like. 

And if Ronald Reagan were alive today, might say the same things, if he was not part of TrumpWorld. Freedom House says Hungary is no longer a democracy. At one point it was. Where do you think we’re sliding, objectively as a nation and in terms of our government now? Not so much under Biden, but when you look at the Republican states and their continuing effort to make it harder to vote, to suppress peaceful protests, to ban what kids can learn in school unless it fits their mythology, which I can’t believe. If you read about it in another country, you’d go, “That’s not a democracy. That’s some kind of authoritarian and fascist state.” What is going on?

One of the things I did was to trace how the Chinese government has gotten even more authoritarian over the last several decades. And one of the principal ways was beginning to control the curriculum in the schools. We have to recognize these kind of common tactics of authoritarianism in different places. You mentioned Obama. He’s kind of a character in this book. He comes in and out of these conversations we’ve been having. And I relayed the eerie timing. He gave a speech to the Democratic convention, as people may remember, where he said, “Don’t let them take your power away. Democracy is on the line here.” I describe watching that speech and then I’m looking at my phone and getting the news that Alexei Navalny, the opponent to Putin in Russia, has been poisoned. And in a way, that kind of drove home the stakes, that the extreme darkness where this strain can lead was evident in what happened to Navalny.

I think the takeaway from this book is, you’ve got people like Orbán, who kind of represent how nationalism has gotten a foothold again all over the world. People like Putin, who represent the lengths that autocrats are going to in the world today, the kind of steadily escalating behavior that we see on a regular basis from authoritarians. And then you look at China, and they have an alternative way of organizing society. That’s kind of where the future is going, where you blend together capitalism and technology with this really totalitarian and intrusive government. America was the one force that was supposed to figure this out, to set an example of multiracial, multiethnic democracy.

And when you talk to people in all these other places and ask, “What do you need from America?” It’s less our foreign policy and more like, what are we modeling at home? What are we doing? When you see people methodically passing laws, trying to prevent people from voting, when you see people methodically trying to set the premise that elected officials could actually overturn a democratic election.

If America can’t get it right, then I don’t think anybody else can. Not because we’re perfect, not because we’re so much better than everybody, but because we’re supposed to be the place that, again, figured out how to do this. And we’re the country made up of people from everywhere. So I think the stakes are incredibly high and they’re going to stay high. Joe Biden’s election obviously didn’t end this. The stakes are going to stay high for a few years here.

Florida just banned critical race theory, even though they don’t use that term. We’ve seen more than 20 Republican states introduce legislation to ban a topic because they don’t like it. You touched briefly on China and authoritarianism and education. How was that intertwined? Why should people be concerned this is not just culture-war stuff, where you can roll your eyes at it? 

Here’s why, Dean. I wrote about Viktor Orbán in Hungary, and his efforts to control the past. I mean, autocrats always want to determine how people understand the past to suit their politics and the present. And what Orbán did, on everything from statues to curriculum — Hungary in the 20th century had a bad right-wing history and a left-wing history. On the left, we had the excesses of the communist regime after World War II. But you also had Nazi collaborators. You had a far-right movement in Hungary. They collaborated with the Holocaust. Orbán has slowly been whitewashing that history and he’s been elevating the nationalist history of Hungary. And what does that do? It whitewashes understanding where certain kinds of politics go.

The kind of far-right turn Orbán’s taken, history should teach us that leads to bad places. That leads to repression, that leads to conflict. Here in the United States, it’s so important to understand the full dimensions of our history. In part, so that you understand just how dark a place white supremacy can lead, or an us vs, them xenophobic politics can lead. If you’re whitewashing that stuff, then the expressions of white nationalism we see around us, people have not had the context for why that’s so damaging and so dangerous. Obviously, it shouldn’t happen anyway, but part of this is the guardrails. So what do you learn from history about what not to do? Part of that is learning the history of how people overcome those things and how you better a society.

And where I end this book is saying that American identity is supposed to be, not that we were born perfect, but that in America we do the work. It’s about trying to live up to the story that we tell about ourselves. So in every way, shape or form, banning critical race theory and trying to look away from the darkest parts of our past, that makes it more likely to happen again in the future. And it actually negates what I think is the better American story, which is that those things happened and people tried to make it better.

I find it alarming that we’re seeing the people who claim they want academic freedom, who say they despise “cancel culture,” have no problem literally defunding school. The Idaho law is to defund schools if they teach you about systemic racism. I find this deeply distressing.

I mean, this is why I ended up having the subtitle of this book “Being American in the World We’ve Made.” What the “Being American” refers to is that we have to figure out what our national identity is. That’s not settled. I think the reason why you see such intensity in our politics right now is that people can sense that’s kind of what’s being debated right now. And by the way, this too is something that’s happening everywhere. It’s a common political trend. But the reality is, when you hear, “Make America Great Again” — when only certain people were in certain rooms and had certain amounts of power — and then they’re looking at a future where this is going to be a majority nonwhite nation, unless they arrest immigration entirely.

Which is part of what Donald Trump was trying to do, in the relatively near future. Is it a coincidence that the Republican Party is trying to entrench itself through minority rule, essentially leveraging the courts and the Senate and voting laws and other things, right when that demographic shift is taking place? I’m not sure that’s a coincidence. One of the points I make in the book is that, in a way, we’ve always lived this competition. And Trump and Obama kind of represent them perfectly in opposition to one another. Is America’s story of progress and greater inclusivity and extension more rights to more people? Or is it “We want to wind back the clock,” and this is an exclusively white Christian nation that is only for some?

We’ve been living these two lives throughout our history. I mean, the Declaration of Independence says that “All men are created equal,” bit it was written by a guy who owned slaves. At every step of progress, there’s been a reaction. So I think that is happening right now, and that speaks to one reason why the political debate is so intense right now. 

Initially, President Biden kept talking about, “America’s always been a push and pull between these two forces.” He’s right. We’re seeing it now. Maybe it’s not that new, what’s going on, it just seems more intense because I’m living through it as an adult who follows politics closely.

Yeah, I think the stakes are higher right now. Again, part of why I wrote this book is because one reason why the stakes are higher is that this is happening all around the world right now, and things are moving in the wrong direction. I mean, while I’m writing this book, the Hong Kong protest movement that I was kind of profiling, gets swallowed up essentially by the Chinese Communist Party. Alexei Navalny gets poisoned and put in prison. America has Jan. 6. This is happening and it’s not a coincidence. It’s happening because there is this kind of drift towards nationalism and authoritarianism, for a lot of reasons that I described in the book. 

I focus on the 30-year period after the Cold War. I feel like the Cold War was one particular period where America wasn’t perfect, but we were for freedom and the Soviets were for the other thing, for communism and dictatorship. Then you have this 30-year period of American dominance. Trump clearly was a bit of a pivot point. Now we have to decide who we’re going to be next. I think that’s a very hotly contested question right now.

You write about the way the GOP became the one we see today, and you say, “None of this happened because of Donald Trump.” Share a little bit more about that idea.

Well, it’s kind of the mirror image of that story I told about Hungary. I know people can go back and look at Newt Gingrich and look at the things that Bush did. But this particular virulent strain of the Republican Party, I’d have the starting point be the Tea Party. And if you make it the mirror image of what happened in Hungary, the collapse of the financial system in 2008 generated a lot of anger and a sense of grievance, like, “Hey, this whole system is just kind of rigged.” People, I think, were open to different kinds of appeals than they might’ve listened to in the past. You get all this anger and then you compound thap with the fact that there’s a Black President, and there’s clearly a racialized component.

The Tea Party demonstrations, they’re chanting, “Take our country back,” and we’re being told that it’s about deficit spending. I’m not sure you “take your country back” because you’re concerned about the deficit. But it breeds this kind of new and much more belligerent Republican Party, the people who got elected there. And at the same time, you have Citizens United, which takes away any guardrails on dark money in politics. So this kind of bottom-up anger is being fueled by a lot of top-down money from people like the Koch brothers, who are just dumping money into politics, at the same time that you have Republicans getting much more aggressive in passing voter suppression laws. I talk about this in the book, there were like 25 passed at the state level while Barack Obama was president. The Supreme Court that the Republicans had designed guts the voting rights legislation, which allows those sorts of suppression laws to go forward and have a greater impact.

At every turn, the Republicans are busting norms and not even confirming a Supreme Court justice if they’re nominated by a Democrat. And by the time Trump rides down the escalator at Trump tower, he was the logical nominee. Of course he was the nominee. He was the frontrunner from the time he came down. Because the other thing that happened in this period was that with the collapse of traditional media, you have not just Fox News but the explosion of Facebook and people getting fed, just on talk radio and  online, more and more conspiracy theory-based garbage about what’s happening in the world, about Barack Obama, about Democrats.

So by the time Trump comes down the escalator, he’s like the product of that. It’s like suddenly the Fox News viewer is the head of the party. And ever since then, at every turn, people are surprised when the Republicans take the dark path. “Oh, my gosh, I can’t believe that they still believe the Big Lie. They won’t even have a commission.” Well, of course. Who do you think these people are? They’ve been telling you who they are for the last decade.

What do we do? Near the end of your book, you write, “We live in a time when the world is emerging into a single history, and we can feel the currents of that history moving in the wrong direction.” So how do we move this in the right direction?

I have lessons that I took away from all these people I talked to around the world. What are people doing that is working in different places? One thing for instance, in Hungary, is for the first time there’s an election next year. They do have elections. Orbán dominates the media. It makes it hard for people but the opposition has their first real chance of beating him. And one of the reasons why is they’ve completely united. They’ve said, “Look, we have differences, but everything is on the line here. We’re just going to put a big tent over all of our differences and we have to win this election.” And I profile a young person who started a political party, but it’s a very strange kind of polyglot coalition. But that’s one lesson for us too, because part of what autocrats need to do is keep the opposition divided, apathetic or cynical.

I think we have to stay, despite all our differences, from the center to the left in our country. On the core things, particularly when it comes time to vote, people need to be absolutely united because there are more of us than them. If we vote and don’t give up and don’t get apathetic and stay with this, we will win. So one of those things is unity. Another is, if you look at even failed movements, like the Hong Kong protest movement, movements fail and fail and fail until they succeed. And they usually succeed in a big way when they do. They create a kind of culture around democratic participation and a culture around standing up for your rights. This can’t be left just to politicians. Joe Biden alone can’t fix this.

I think we need that kind of whole-of-society commitment to democracy as well. If you look at Navalny, the reason he was such a sore spot for Putin, the reason he’s in prison, is that he’d found this huge vulnerability in exposing Putin’s corruption. I think corruption is a common thread between all these autocratic movements, including the Republican Party. Because a lot of those voters that supported Trump are angry at a corrupt system. This is why Trump always talks about the “deep state.”

Trump always talks about the system being rigged, but he is the ultimate beneficiary of the system. He’s a white guy, a fake billionaire who can do whatever he wants, who’s fabulously corrupt. We need to continue to drive home the message to some of those Obama-Trump voters about the absolute corruption of a political party that speaks one language and then just shovels tax cuts to corporations and breaks the rules themselves all the time. I think that’s the most potent argument we have to make. The last thing I’d say, though, is that the bigger structural problem is that the reason people are having an insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, the reason people believe in QAnon, is because of the radicalization that’s happening online. We have to get our arms around that in this country, social media and disinformation. I’d like to see the Biden team take that on more. Because so long as our entire media is structured to mainline rage and conspiracy theories to people, we’re going to be in this spot.

11 actors who played their own relatives

Actors sometimes go to great lengths to make sure their depictions of real-life people are accurate. Most famously, Robert De Niro got both very fit for 1980’s “Raging Bull” and then put on weight to represent dual periods in the life of boxer Jake LaMotta.

Other times, actors only have to do some research into their family history. That’s because several have portrayed one of their actual relatives onscreen. Take a look at some of the most notable examples.

1. The Rock

Before professional wrestler Dwayne Johnson became a major box office attraction, he popped up on Fox’s popular sitcom “That ’70s Show” in 1999 playing his father, Rocky Johnson, a fan favorite wrestler in the 1970s. In the first-season episode “That Wrestling Show,” family patriarch Red Forman (Kurtwood Smith) takes his son Eric (Topher Grace) to a local bout. If you don’t count wrestling, it was Johnson’s first scripted acting role.

2. O’Shea Jackson Jr.

O’Shea Jackson Jr., the son of rapper Ice Cube (real name: O’Shea Jackson), seemed to have a leg up in scoring the role of his father in 2015’s N.W.A. biopic “Straight Outta Compton.” But it apparently wasn’t a foregone conclusion. Jackson Jr. spent two years going through an audition process before director F. Gary Gray cast him in the part. “I’ve been studying my role for over 20 years,” Jackson Jr. told Entertainment Weekly in 2015. “I had his mannerisms and things like that down. It was really to get a bunch of the ’80s lingo. And really where his head was at. We would talk every day. He would ask me, ‘What scene are you doing today?’ I’d explain it to him, then he’ll sit back, reminisce, and be like, ‘Oh yeah. That day, I was really trying to figure out what was going on with Eazy[-E], because I had just asked him about the contracts.'”

3. Ruth Wilson

Ruth Wilson (“The Affair,” “Luther”) tackled a difficult part of her family history for 2019’s miniseries Mrs. Wilson. She played her grandmother, Alison Wilson, whose husband Alec—Ruth’s grandfather — was a serial polygamist, carrying on multiple marriages. The film was based on Alison’s memoirs; Wilson has said that as the story grew within her family, it became important to take care of it. “Then me playing it, well . . . it felt like that was just the most obvious way to go, that I’d end up doing it through my grandmother’s eyes,” Wilson told Entertainment Weekly. “I felt the only way I could protect her was by playing her in some way.”

4. Shia LaBeouf

Shia LaBeouf had a heavy hand in 2019’s “Honey Boy.” In addition to writing the screenplay, he portrayed a loosely fictionalized version of his father, Jeffrey, who LaBeouf has said he had an acrimonious relationship with as a child actor. In the film, LaBeouf plays James Lort, whose son Otis rises to stardom before struggling with substance issues later on. Noah Jupe and Lucas Hedges played Otis at different points in his life. LaBeouf said his father has seen the film, directed by Alma Har’el, and that it provided him with a new perspective on their relationship.

5. Melissa Rivers

Melissa Rivers, daughter of legendary comedian Joan Rivers, agreed to portray her late mother for “Joy,” a 2015 biopic about Miracle Mop inventor Joy Mangano that stars Jennifer Lawrence. (Mangano and Rivers crossed paths on the set of home-shopping channel QVC, where Rivers was a frequent presence.) “I worked with a dialect coach,” Rivers told The Hollywood Reporter. “I didn’t want to sound like her, but I knew I had to get the inflections right. Her speech pattern was so unique that I felt like it really needed to be in the spirit of her rather than trying to mimic . . .  [director David O. Russell] gave me so much confidence there on set that what potentially could’ve been a scary, sad, frightening experience turned into such an amazingly positive experience for me.”

6. Geraldine Chaplin

Geraldine Chaplin, the daughter of silent film star Charlie Chaplin, played her own grandmother, Hannah Chaplin, in the 1993 biopic “Chapli”n starring Robert Downey Jr. Meeting Downey in costume, she said, gave her the strange sensation she was encountering a younger version of her father. “He gave me this big hug,” Chaplin told The Deseret News. “And he’s this gorgeous looking young kid. I thought, how Freudian. Here I am in my father’s arms. It was every girl’s dream. Daddy as a young boy. Robert was shaking. I was shaking.”

7. Melvin Van Peebles

To tell the story of his pioneering father’s Blaxploitation classic, 1971’s “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song,” Mario Van Peebles climbed into his dad’s shoes. In 2004’s Baadasssss!,” Van Peebles plays Melvin Van Peebles, who encounters difficulties as an independent Black filmmaker. (The 1971 film originally received an X rating for its violence.) Mario, who also produced, co-wrote, and directed the film, didn’t shy away from his father’s uncompromising approach — and both men treated the project like the pros they are. When the younger Van Peebles needed clips from “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song,” Melvin charged him $2,000.

8. Benedict Cumberbatch

Benedict Cumberbatch (“Sherlock,” “Doctor Strange”) took on the role of a distant relative when he played King Richard III in the 2016 BBC series “The Hollow Crown.” Cumberbatch is Richard III’s second cousin 16 times removed. In 2015, he attended Richard’s reinternment. (Richard’s bones had been found in a Leicester car park in 2012.) Curiously, Cumberbatch wasn’t aware of the connection when he took the part.

“It was an extraordinary bit of serendipity, as I was literally dressed as Shakespeare’s version of “Richard III” when I received an email from Leicester University saying that I was a not-altogether-ridiculously-distant descendant of Richard,” he told The Radio Times in 2016. “I was asked to read the poem written for the occasion by Carol Ann Duffy at the reinternment in Leicester Cathedral. To have been present when Richard III found his resting place was moving; I was at the burial of a king.”

9. Sophia Loren

In terms of onscreen familial commitment, few can equal Sophia Loren. The iconic Italian star played herself in the 1980 made-for-television biopic “Sophia: My Own Story.” Not content there, she also tackled the role of her mother, Romilda Villani, in the same film. Loren later said her mother, who died in 1991, refused to see it. Loren even stepped into the role a second time, portraying Villani for a 2010 Italian miniseries about her life titled “La Mia Casa E Piena di Specchi” (“My House Is Full of Mirrors”).

10. Rubén Amaro Jr.

Strictly speaking, Rubén Amaro Jr. was a pro baseball player. But when he stepped into the acting field, he adopted the identity of his late father, Rubén Amaro Sr., on the ABC sitcom “The Goldbergs.” Senior was a star for the Philadelphia Phillies, the home team of the fictional family on the Philadelphia-set series.

11. Tom Hanks

Call it serendipity or just a publicity gimmick—either way, it’s still nice to hear. Days before the 2019 opening of “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” Tom Hanks found out he’s distantly related to beloved children’s show host Fred Rogers, the subject of the biopic. The two share a great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, making them sixth cousins.

Giada’s produce-packed red, white and blue salad is perfect for the 4th — or any summer dinner

If you’re looking for a salad that’s perfect for celebrating the 4th — or any hot summer afternoon — check out Giada De Laurentiis’ Red, White and Blue Salad. 

Radicchio, crumbled gorgonzola picante and blueberry make up the “red, white and blue” elements of the salad, which is augmented with cucumber, frisee, red grapes and pistachio. “I love a salad that’s loaded up with goodies, and this one definitely fits the bill!” De Laurentiis wrote of the recipe. 

She continued: “With lightly pickled cucumbers, grapes, blueberries, pistachios and gorgonzola cheese, it’s got a ton of amazing flavor going on.” 

https://www.instagram.com/p/CQq-d4AskkF/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

What’s great about this July 4th side though is that, despite all the “goodies,” it’s fresh and light enough that it will serve as a nice accompaniment to the holiday staples like cheeseburgers, hot dogs and mayonnaise-laden pasta and potato salads. 

The most time-intensive element of the salad are the quick-pickled cucumbers, though most of that time is simply waiting for them to fully “pickle”. After bringing vinegar, sugar, water and salt to a simmer, and then allowing it to cool, you’ll pour the mixture over the cucumbers and allow them to rest for 30 minutes. 

Meanwhile, you can prepare the salad  by tossing the produce with a simple vinaigrette, made with champagne vinegar, olive oil, salt and whole grain mustard. Drain the pickles and use them to top the salad, along with the pistachios and crumbled gorgonzola. Toss one last time and then serve. 

The final result is sweet, sour, and refreshing. It also makes several hearty portions, making it perfect for family gatherings. Here are full details on making the recipe.

Being a pop star once meant baring skin — now, for some artists, it’s all about emotional stripping

In Billie Eilish’s 2019 video for “Bury A Friend,” the then-17-year-old singer blurs the lines between being in a nightmare and being committed to a psychiatric hospital.

“I want to end me,” she repeats six times before the song ends.

But somehow, that’s not what stuck with audiences, media outlets or industry decision-makers, who – until her British Vogue cover broke on May 2 – were more likely to talk about how groundbreaking she was for wearing baggy clothes than her repeated mentions of suicidal thoughts.

It’s a familiar story, whether it’s Amy Winehouse singing about not wanting to go to rehab before dying of alcohol poisoning at 27, or Kurt Cobain writing a song called “I Hate Myself and Want To Die” before dying by suicide at 27.

Audiences devour trauma narratives. Perhaps they provide a source of comfort by validating viewers’ own experiences, making them feel less alone or reminding them that they’re comparatively lucky. On the flip side, the titillating content can offer fans a sort of voyeuristic pleasure from the safety of their living rooms. In any case, the implicit agreement appears to be that artists may express their pain as long as audiences can imagine that it’s not really a problem they need to be concerned with, but is just something being amplified for artistic effect.

While these revelations can boost an artist’s popularity, they can also overshadow all other aspects of the artists’ life and work – and can end up veering into another form of exploitation.

After the clothes come off, what’s next?

As someone who has studied female pop stars for nearly two decades, I’ve written about how, since the advent of MTV in the 1980s, the music industry has fashioned women pop stars to resonate more as sexy entertainers than as talented musicians.

They are more likely to be framed as gorgeous, frivolous or “hot messes” than vocally or musically adept. In my book “Gender, Branding, and The Modern Music Industry: The Social Construction of Female Popular Music Stars,” I argue that positioning and managing female artists this way has had a negative effect on their creative expression, mental health and career longevity.

Because top stars have been shedding their clothes for decades, skin-deep revelations have become so common they no longer stand out. So, in a crisis for connection, stars reversed the order of operations, keeping their clothes on while sharing their secrets. Stars began to expose their insides – more specifically, their inner turmoil – in bids for deeper relationships with their fans.

This broke the social contract of stardom. For decades, public relations efforts presented women stars as perfect – an impossible illusion for anyone to maintain. Until stars such as Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston experienced public breakdowns, their struggles had largely been hidden to protect their impeccable brands.

Social media further changed the dynamic. Audiences demanded greater authenticity rather than PR spin. And that’s exactly what they’ve been getting for the past several years, as pop star brands have begun to embody and reflect current cultural concerns about misogyny, racism, sexual violence and mental health.

#MeToo paves the way for emotional stripping

Artists’ openness about their experiences with sexual violence, trauma and addiction represents an important shift toward thinking about them as people more than products.

However, today, many artists are making their personal vulnerabilities – not their music, their performances or their bodies – the centerpiece of their brands.

Prior to the popularization of #MeToo in 2017, pop stars had been offering their stories for years to varying levels of reception. In 2013, Madonna shared that she had been raped at knifepoint shortly after moving to New York City. In 2014, Kesha alleged that producer Dr. Luke “sexually, physically, verbally, and emotionally” abused her for years, and in 2016 Lady Gaga revealed that she had experienced sexual trauma, which resulted in ongoing PTSD.

As the #MeToo movement gained prominence in the fall of 2017, these popular artists experienced a long-overdue cultural rebranding, becoming esteemed warriors seeking to hold abusive systems and individual abusers accountable.

Audiences and media outlets became more sensitive to women’s struggles with mental health, addiction and trauma, and began to realize that maybe the stars’ breakdowns were actually reasonable human responses to various forms of gender-based abuse. They started hating the game, rather than blaming the players, and wanting to know more – all as the dominant streaming services were thirsty for more winning content.

The floodgates opened, but in typical American fashion, a good thing was overextended to the point of absurdity.

In recent years, more stars have told their own survivor stories in powerfully direct or resonant ways: Ariana Grande shared a brain scan to reveal her PTSD diagnosis in 2019; Mariah Carey released a memoir in which she discussed past abuse, her 2001 breakdown and her bipolar disorder diagnosis; and, in 2021, Pink dropped a documentary about her aptly titled “Beautiful Trauma” world tour.

Stars’ talent and musicianship has become almost incidental, subservient to their ability to process their pain in public. Pop stars’ oversharing detailed trauma stories has become routine.

I call it “emotional stripping.”

Emotional stripping is different from when artists transform trauma into great art, as Beyoncé did in “Lemonade” and Fiona Apple pulled off in “Fetch The Bolt Cutters.” In each album, the artist is able to universalize her struggles without giving away all of the personal details. These albums embolden the stars as they share their rage, fear, disappointments and vulnerabilities.

But emotional stripping prioritizes the overexposure of the star’s human self – her traumas, her addictions, and her mental health struggles – above all other aspects of her brand and her personhood. When a star emotionally strips, she peels away her brand – which, if built and managed properly, should be the protective layer between herself and her audience.

This trend signals progress in one regard – audiences are now less singularly focused on objectifying the stars’ actual bodies, as they had been trained to do for decades. But it also creates a new danger; now audiences feel entitled to know the gory details about everything that happens to and within stars’ bodies and minds. They greedily consume trauma stories rather than thinking more deeply about how to stop the production of them.

Emotional stripping pays dividends: It gets the audience’s attention.

It can also come at great expense to the artist, who doesn’t magically heal by simply telling her story from a large enough platform. Talking about trauma has value, but it does not release it; as trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk noted in the title of his bestselling book, “the body keeps the score.” It can also cause stars harm through retraumatization.

The pop star as human sacrifice

But given audience demands for authenticity and the proliferation of pop star tell-all streaming documentaries, it appears that most emerging artists vying for the top of the charts now have little choice but to reveal themselves anyway. Just as certain body types and fashion styles have defined the rules of engagement at other times, emotional stripping has become standard operating procedure in popular music.

This may seem like a dream come true. But it may be more like the waking nightmare depicted in Eilish’s video for “Bury A Friend.”

Britney Spears and other 1990s stars, from Jennifer Love Hewitt to Paris Hilton, reported being triggered by “Framing Britney Spears,” a well-intentioned, pro-Britney documentary. Spears refused to participate in the film, which chronicled her breakdown, involuntary hospitalization and subsequent conservatorship. In the documentary “Tina,” Tina Turner indicated that she was sick of talking about her abusive ex-husband Ike and wanted to move on.

The question is: Will audiences let Turner and other traumatized female pop stars move on? Or are audiences too invested in trauma narratives to let them go?

Fans’ laser focus on stars and stars’ tendency to please can even lead fans to disturbing levels of entitlement. Alanis Morissette, who wrote “Jagged Little Pill” when she was 19, shared that at the height of her popularity, fans in crowds would literally try to grab pieces of her hair and skin. They wanted to possess a piece of her and felt emboldened to just take it. Fittingly, Katy Perry’s documentary was called “Part of Me.”

Meanwhile, it’s typically the star, not the audience, who gets constructed as being crazy or needing better boundaries as the public annihilates them.

There’s a precedent for this dynamic – the religious ritual of human sacrifice.

Religion scholar Kathryn Lofton has written about this phenomenon in her analysis of Britney Spears.

“Ritual is a controlled environment, a ring for spectatorship. While there are many rituals at play in the religions of Britney Spears’ celebrity, perhaps the most tempting is that of sacrifice. Britney Spears rises and falls, time and again, is plumped for the slaughter then primed for the comeback. Watching those declines and ascents might be productively read as a sort of public sacrifice.”

Spears has become the rule, not the exception. These days, pop stars seem to exist to entertain fans and carry their burdens, and can sometimes seem to even ultimately die for them, commercially or literally. Fans then move on to the next star, gorge on their trauma and then watch them flame out.

The silver lining is that we’re in the middle of the golden age of pop star documentaries. Some, like “Amy” and “Whitney Can I Be Me,” chronicle tragic endings. Others enable stars to show their more vulnerable sides while they’re still alive and performing – “Billie Eilish: The World’s A Bit Blurry,” Taylor Swift’s “Miss Americana” and Lady Gaga’s “Five Foot Two.” Many of these documentaries complicate their subjects in positive ways, rehabilitating their troubled or entitled images by inserting nuance, empathy and context into their stories, often for the first time.

A Demi-goddess of the zeitgeist

Woman pop stars are finally starting to be seen more completely, at least superficially, as documentary filmmakers deliver to evolved and evolving audiences nuanced takes on complicated and aspirational women.

But this momentary opportunity has quickly developed into what can look like a competition for which star can be the most vulnerable.

Demi Lovato, who recently came out as nonbinary, may be winning that distinction with “Dancing With The Devil,” a four-part documentary series that explores their personal and career challenges. In it, they speak candidly about their attempts to recover from an eating disorder, several sexual assaults, drug addiction and a near-death overdose. Lovato also talks about their difficulties coming out as a queer person.

These are all important conversations started by feminist, LGBTQ, civil rights and public health activists, but only pop stars such as Lovato have the platforms to launch national and global conversations about them. Their series is bold and moving, and sheds light on the impact of trauma and addiction on the star, their loved ones and their professional team.

What remains to be seen is how the series will impact Lovato’s career. It could strengthen their relationship with their fans, or make fans focus even less on Lovato’s music than they do now, and make Lovato even more vulnerable now that their whole human self is available for public scrutiny.

Lovato, who is now 28, overdosed in 2018, surviving some brutal effects: three strokes, a heart attack and partial blindness. In “Anyone,” a song recorded days before the overdose, Lovato laments telling “secrets till my voice was sore” because “no one hears me anymore,” “nobody’s listening.”

“I’m on my ninth life,” Lovato said in “Dancing With The Devil,” “and I don’t know how many opportunities I have left.”

The need for better listening

For those consuming these films for more than their entertainment value, who thoughtfully engage with the content and internalize its lessons, key questions about existing relationships between artists and fans should be emerging. What are they processing, absorbing and sacrificing for audiences? What can be done to help them negotiate the line between revelation and self-preservation?

In her 2020 book “Call Your ‘Mutha’: A Deliberately Dirty-Minded Manifesto for the Earth Mother in the Anthropocene,” gender and sexuality scholar Jane Caputi compares the extraction of resources from the land to the enduring damage to bodies and minds caused by sexual violence. In an interview, she told me that the emotional stripping of pop stars enacts “that same paradigm of extraction without reciprocity, of taking what one wants and dumping what one refuses,” with places and peoples reduced to “sacrifice zones.”

While Caputi suggests that this emotional stripping abuse of female pop stars reflects larger patterns of exploitation, communication scholar Nancy Baym argues that music “often predicts social change.” If that’s true, maybe the regular exposure of previously taboo subjects such as addiction and sexual abuse could minimize their stigma, and make audiences less drawn to the subjects.

Perhaps then – finally – the musicians’ actual music can be the central focus of their careers.

And while it’s unlikely emotional stripping will stop, the music industry could become more involved in helping these stars survive and thrive. This could range from adding thoughtful and inclusive wellness provisions to artist contracts – including seasoned hazards-of-fame counselors in the standard artist entourage – and teaching fans how to be less reliant on their idols and more emotionally secure themselves. They could also train the parents of young artists on the cusp of fame to be more attuned to signs of distress in their children.

In “Lonely,” the closing track on Justin Bieber’s new record, he sings: “Everybody saw me sick, and it felt like no one gave a shit.” GQ reported in May 2021 that at the peak of Bieber’s fame, his bodyguards would check his pulse as he slept to make sure he was still alive.

Perhaps Bieber’s words could lead his fans and team to consider their complicity.

Despite the positive attention and accolades she receives, Eilish, too, appears to be screaming into the void. In “Bury a Friend” Eilish sings: “Honestly, I thought that I would be dead by now (Wow).” Her notebooks, shown in her documentary, reveal lines like: “I am a void. The epitome of nothing” and “I am going to drink acid.”

Yet at one point in the film, Eilish’s mother, frustrated by people calling Billie’s music “depressing,” notes that Billie’s music isn’t depressing, it’s just that teenagers are depressed.

To me, this lands like denial, gaslighting or both.

“We need a stop gap for artist care,” artist manager Janet Billig-Rich, who managed Nirvana and Hole, among others, told me. “There is a parallel to the Amy Winehouse story where people are saying, ‘At least the parents are there and really involved.’ But they’re on the payroll, too, so there’s a conflict. There need to be people in that inner circle thinking only about the artist’s interest. If we could convince the families and business people to be long-term greedy rather than short-term greedy, the artists would have longer, healthier lifespans and even more lucrative careers.”

Perhaps doing the right thing for the wrong reasons is the best we can hope for from the music business.

Kristin J. Lieb, Associate Professor, Emerson College

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

A high-stakes chinchilla relocation effort stalls

Last August, high in the Andes Mountains of northern Chile, the South African mining group Gold Fields launched an operation to relocate some 25 endangered short-tailed chinchillas. Once hunted nearly to extinction for their prized fur, the endangered rodents are now protected by Chilean law. This particular colony lives atop 3.5 million ounces of extractable gold.

After years of acquiring permits, conducting studies, and developing protocols in conversation with Chilean regulators, Gold Fields received the all-clear in 2020 to move the chinchillas three miles away, to a similar site. Doing so would make way for part of the $860-million mine construction project — although, one small-mammal trapping expert told Undark last year, the plan held risks for the animals.

Indeed, initial attempts have not followed the script.

Of the first four animals live-trapped and moved to temporary enclosures — a phase deemed necessary to allow the rodents to acclimatize to their new habitat — two died. Of the surviving two, one suffered a serious leg injury but recovered. The two chinchillas have since been released into the wild, and the company says they are doing well.

The death and injury rate, though, alarmed regulators. In November, about three months after the $400,000 relocation project began, Chilean authorities ordered the exercise to halt, and instructed Gold Fields to undertake a range of new measures that sends the project back to the drawing board. An announcement from the government about the future of the project appears to be imminent. Meanwhile, construction of the mine has commenced.

The stakes are high. Gold Fields says the initial construction phase is unaffected, and the first gold should be produced by the end of 2022. But expansions of the pit beyond that date will be uncertain if all of the animals have not been relocated. And analysts say the project is under the microscope of public opinion and regulatory attention, as part of a larger shift in the global mining industry toward more scrutiny of social and environmental impacts.

According to the plan laid out in advance by the environmental manager overseeing the project, the chinchillas were captured in the wild with a device called a Tomahawk trap, which closes behind the animal after it enters. That initial stage seems to have gone smoothly, with no reported issues. But problems arose soon after.

The team captured the first animal on Oct. 11, according to detailed reports filed to Chilean regulators. They fitted it with a radio collar and placed it in an enclosure — similar to a chicken coop with mesh fencing — in its new habitat. There, they hoped, it could adjust to its surrounding before a full release. The animal, according to the report, was “continually monitored via in-person inspections by the veterinarians in charge of the activity, as well as the use of three camera traps.”

Eight days later, experts monitoring the animal noticed it limping. The next day, investigators found drops of blood in the enclosure. A checkup on Oct. 22 showed that the leg was possibly fractured; the chinchilla had also lost weight.

That animal survived. Another chinchilla, captured on Oct. 27, was less fortunate. Less than three weeks later, in the afternoon, specialists monitoring the enclosure noted that the chinchilla appeared to be in poor condition. Soon after, according to the official reports, Gold Fields’ legal representative called the Atacama office of the Chilean environmental regulator with news: The chinchilla had died. Three days later, in the morning, staff found another chinchilla dead in its enclosure, with no obvious wounds.

In the report regarding the deaths of the two animals, it is clear the operation was intensely monitored, and it appears that the company immediately reported the deaths and injury. Neither the company nor regulators have released necropsy reports detailing the exact causes of the animals’ deaths.

In a February interview with Undark, outgoing Gold Fields CEO Nick Holland suggested that the government’s relocation protocols had contributed to the poor outcomes. “They said to us that we had to house them in fairly confined areas. We felt that those areas were too small, but we followed the protocol, and unfortunately two died,” said Holland, who retired in late March.

Cristóbal De La Maza, who leads Chile’s Superintendency for the Environment, or SMA, disputed that account. “All mitigation measures, including the relocation protocol, were proposed by Gold Fields during the environmental assessment of the project,” he wrote via a message on LinkedIn.

De La Maza also said that relocation failures would necessitate new protocols for the project. “SMA has the mandate to ensure that companies comply with all their environmental obligations, especially measures to mitigate impacts to endangered species such as the short-tailed chinchilla,” De La Maza wrote to Undark via a spokesperson, Jimena Quilodrán Herrera. “If required, new control measures must be established to avoid damage to the environment,” he added.

So far, details of any new relocation procedures remain uncertain. One move may to be expand the enclosures, which, according to Gold Fields’ incident report on the fatalities, were around 16 feet long and 16 feet wide. “We are talking to them about coming up with a new set of rules which we can then apply, so that we can actually provide greater space for them,” Holland said.

In its annual report, issued in March, Gold Fields said that it was also considering shortening the adaptation time in the temporary enclosures “and releasing the animals when they are in optimum physical condition.”

That wording caught the attention of Curtis Bosson, a Canadian wildlife biologist who has studied small mammal trapping and relocation, and who raised previous reservations about the project. The possibility that the animals were not in “optimum physical condition,” he said, implied “that the animals that died were possibly emaciated, dehydrated, or physically injured in some way.”

Echoing Gold Fields’ concerns, Bosson, after reviewing some details of the relocation effort, said it was possible that the animals had died because the enclosure was too small. He also said an incompatible diet, a disruption to the critters’ social structure, or the absence of a suitable den site could have harmed the animals.

“The chinchillas were probably essentially ‘scared to death,’ and had to adapt to too many things in a short amount of time,” Bosson added in a subsequent email. “Some may not have eaten the food that was given, and others may have exhausted and injured themselves trying to escape.” The relocation team, Bosson continued, perhaps should have spent more time “acclimating the chinchillas to the food, enclosures, and radio-collars” before the relocation, so that “the animals would not have had the need to adapt to so many things at once.”

Small animals can present big and unexpected problems. According to Holland, the research record on chinchilla relocation is scant. “I don’t think there are any other precedents for us to work on as far as we know,” Holland said. “We’ve still got some more learning to do here.”

* * *

The chinchilla incident comes at a time of renewed investor scrutiny of the mining industry, as boardrooms in mining and other sectors publicly commit themselves to improving their track record on so-called ESGs — environmental, social, and governance concerns.

On the environmental front, this has led major mining companies to set target dates for making operations carbon neutral. Governance issues have included drives to increase transparency regarding payments to foreign governments to reduce corruption. On the social side, investors and regulators have focused more on community relations and workforce health and safety.

Small-operation and illegal gold mining in some parts of the world remain an unregulated frontier, with widespread issues of child labor and environmental degradation. And reform at large mining companies has sometimes come in response to grim conditions. When Holland became CEO of Gold Fields in 2008, 47 miners at its operations died in work-related accidents that year — averaging almost one per week. In 2019 and 2020, the company had one fatality each year. This was largely because the company shifted to mechanized operations, replacing humans with machines in dangerous underground settings.

 

These growing ESG measures at large mining companies have also led to situations like that in Chile, in which the vagaries of environmental law, public attention, and investor policy put tremendous attention on a small group of rodents.

The relocation effort comes at a time of renewed Chilean attention to chinchilla conservation: In February, the Chilean government published a new national plan for chinchilla protection, which includes working groups to study their distribution and behavior.

For now, the exact future of the relocation project remains unclear. Shortly before the publication of this piece, Gold Fields spokesperson Sven Lunsche said the company was expecting to soon receive a decision from the Chilean regulators about the project’s next steps. De La Maza declined to offer further details. “Hopefully in the next month or so we will have news,” he wrote in a LinkedIn message. “The scale of the announcement depends on the final conclusions of the investigation.”

In its annual report, Gold Fields said that, even if the regulator gives the green light to resume the relocation, it would wait until later in 2021 because of the onset of the southern hemisphere winter.

Although Gold Fields says the start of mining is possible even in the event of a complete failure of operation chinchilla, the company acknowledges that future plans for the mine will need to be adjusted if the rodents remain. Gold Fields “will commence gold production as scheduled when construction is completed in late 2022,” Lunsche said earlier this year. “But the mine planning thereafter, such as pit expansions or drilling, would potentially have to be amended if we still need to relocate some of the resident chinchillas at the time.”

Leandro Lima, an analyst with the global risk consultancy Control Risks, said that Gold Fields was likely to face continued pressure from Chilean policymakers to account for the chinchillas. “Regulators in Chile are relatively competent and serious by Latin American standards,” Lima said. “This chinchilla issue is definitely something that could impact the timeline and the design of the project.”

Meanwhile, the two chinchillas that survived the relocation are roaming amid rocky outcrops in their new habitat, more than 12,800 feet above sea level. Whether and when they get some companionship remains an open question.

* * *

Ed Stoddard is a Johannesburg-based journalist with a focus on resource industries, wildlife, economics, and the environment in Africa. A Reuters correspondent for 24 years, he is now a regular contributor to the South African news site The Daily Maverick.

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

The best seafood for the planet is also the cheapest

With The Climate Diet, award-winning food and environmental writer Paul Greenberg offers us the practical, accessible guide we all need. This new release contains fifty achievable steps we can take to live our daily lives in a way that’s friendlier to the planet—from what we eat, how we live at home, how we travel, and how we lobby businesses and elected officials to do the right thing. Here, Paul shares on the the role of food waste in our overall climate decision making — and how it’s a much bigger deal than we think.

* * *

While of late I’ve been writing about climate and carbon footprints, fish and shellfish are my bread and butter. Over the course of a trilogy of books, I’ve tracked issues of overfishing, aquaculture, and health up and down the marine food chain. So it’s no surprise when I set out to write my latest book, The Climate Diet, I ended up looking at the carbon footprint of seafood.

There are many reasons to be careful with our seafood consumption. Since World War II, humans have quadrupled the amount of wildlife they remove from the sea annually, to the point where we now extract about 85 million tons on a yearly basis — the equivalent of the human weight of China. The damage all of this causes is getting more and more attention. Over fishing, sea slavery, the destruction of the marine environment and many of the other problems that plague the seafood industry were explosively catalogued in this year’s controversial Netflix documentary, Seaspiracy.

But curiously, when we look at the carbon footprint of seafood — i.e. the amount of greenhouse gasses emitted per meal — we actually find some reasons to choose fish for our plates. In general, wild fish are significantly more carbon efficient than our most efficient terrestrial animal protein — chicken. An average of all American wild-caught finfish comes in at 1.6 kilograms of emissions per kilogram of edible fish flesh, this compared with around 6 kilos of emissions per kilo of chicken or a whopping 27 kilos of emissions per kilo of beef. The reason for the protein’s relatively light fin-print is that wild fish don’t require feed or husbandry to reach harvestable size. Nature takes care of that. The primary emissions cost of wild fish is the burden of catching them and transporting them to market.

All this said, not all fish are good emissions bargains. The word “seafood” itself encompasses thousands of species caught and grown in dozens of different ways. Fishing methods that entail long journeys into distant waters with repeated stops to haul gear burn a lot of diesel. So, for instance, longline-caught tuna and swordfish sit near the top of the fisheries’ emissions list. Dragging heavy gear over the seafloor is also carbon-expensive, making flounder, cod, and other “bottom-trawled” species less desirable choices.

Farmed seafood presents other dilemmas. It’s difficult to assess the carbon footprints of the dozens of different species because there are so many variables. What’s more, feeding farmed seafood requires the extraction of a good deal of wild fish from the ocean; then, the processing of that feed contributes to an overall emissions per kilo rate that floats around in a space somewhere between chicken and pork.

Shrimp is by far the most consumed seafood in the United States. Just to put things in perspective: Out of the 15 pounds of fish and shellfish Americans eat each year, more than 4 pounds are shrimp. But shrimp, particularly farmed shrimp, is notably terrible from an emissions point of view — by some estimates at the level of beef. That’s in part because over the last few decades, shrimp farming has destroyed millions of acres of one of the world’s most powerful carbon-sequestering ecosystems: mangrove forests. Mangroves, on average, store more than twice the carbon dioxide per acre as tropical rainforests, but are often cleared to make way for coastal shrimp ponds. All this makes a shrimp cocktail an extremely carbon-intensive appetizer.

So, what should we eat from the sea if we want to have the lowest carbon finprint?

Good carbon bargains tend to be seafood caught in midwater trawls and purse seines — nets that don’t touch the bottom of the ocean. Alaska pollock (the fish most commonly found in your Filet-O-Fish), and small pelagic fish like mackerel, sardines, herring, squid, and anchovies, all fall into this carbon-light category. Wild salmon is also a winner, as long as you buy it frozen; air-freighted fresh fish of any kind is a carbon disaster because of the extremely high carbon cost of flying.

And how about that carbon-costly shrimp cocktail appetizer? Probably the single best swap you can make is to change your appetizer from shrimp to oysters. Farmed oysters, along with their cousins the clam and the mussel, are extremely carbon-light. They require no feed, subsisting on a diet of wild algae, and filter and clean the water as they grow fat. All this puts some bivalves in the same carbon cost range as many vegetables. Mussels, the grand emissions champions of the animal kingdom (and also one of the most affordable seafoods out there), can cost just .6 kilograms of carbon and other greenhouse gasses per kilogram of mussel meat.

And the great thing is that mussels adapt well to a whole range of culinary traditions. Do them simply, Mediterranean style with white wine and garlic. Fire them up in a Thai-inspired spicy curry or make them sing in the tune of masala. And because mussels are so inexpensive you can be expansive with them. I personally like to lightly steam them and then deep fry them as a substitute for oysters in my po boys.

Whichever way you make them, you can take the added pleasure that you’re doing your best to cook mindfully from the sea.

Trump boat parades slammed for chaos and destruction: “They don’t know what they’re doing”

Supporters of Donald Trump who have taken to the lakes and waterways to hold boat parades honoring the former president are being hammered by fellow boaters and maritime experts for literally leaving destruction in their wake after swamping other boaters and damaging the environment.

According to a report from the Daily Beast’s Jose Pagliery and Asawin Suebsaeng, the pro-Trump boat parades that the ex-president praised for showing massive support for his administration, infuriated other boaters with their lack of seamanship and disregard for other boaters.

As the report notes, even some supporters of the president were upset with what occurred while on the water.

Case in point: Tommy Gravelle, a seasoned boater who set sail on Tennessee’s Old Hickory Lake on July 4, 2020, who lost his vessel due to the parade even though he wasn’t participating.

“I’m a seasoned captain. I’ve been in big waves,” Gravelle told Beast. “If I knew there’d be that big of waves, I would’ve never left the dock.”

According to the report, “Rapidfire crests — waves that came in too fast for a simple pontoon boat to recover — overtook the front of the vessel. Seats got tossed into the water. The frothy foam nearly reached the captain’s chair. Gravelle was about to scream for his family to abandon ship, but he decided to rev the engine, cut through the next swell, and turn around. The insurance company considered the vessel totaled and cut him a check.”

“We got on the boat for a family day on the lake, and it ruined the whole day,” he recalled. “It was unorganized really. I think these people all meant well, they didn’t understand what was going on.”

Gravelle’s boating accident tied to a Trump boating rally was not an isolated incident.

“It’s been a year since the Trump flotilla phenomenon swept through the nation’s lakes and bays. Law enforcement agents, rally organizers, and boaters spoke to The Daily Beast about how these events often got out of control, causing more crashes and near-misses than previously known. In Tennessee alone, the state’s database shows that Trump flotillas made up a third of all ‘congested water’ accidents there last year,” the Beast report states. “National figures aren’t available that identify events as Trump flotillas, but a state-by-state review of incident reports in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Texas showed that most accidents never made the news.”

One Trump flotilla organizer admitted things got out of control once the parade began.

“Austin Collins, who organized one Trump flotilla on Sept. 12 at Oklahoma’s Lake Tenkiller, said he set strict rules to keep boats close together, single file, and slow. But as the lake widened, boaters started speeding around each other. Those that went too fast turned around, creating wakes that bounced off the others,” the report states with Collins confessing, “I was trying to prevent racing down the lake. It wasn’t a race, it was a parade. I kept on my normal pace … I think most people just took off.”

With the report noting a rally on Lake Travis in Texas last year resulted in five boats capsizing, Rob Crafa of the State University of New York’s Maritime College, attempted to explain why chaos seems to follows the Trump rallies.

“When you have boat parades like rallies, the energy there creates a different vibe. People standing in parts of the boat where they’re not supposed to, flags that may limit visibility for the operator of the boat, and if there’s loud music, bright sun, maybe alcohol involved … all these factors contributed to dangerous situations,” he suggested.

Captain David B. Mackey, a professor at the Mass Maritime Academy, was more succinct in his appraisal: “The bottom line here is, poor seamanship. If they’re doing this and running around, they don’t know what they’re doing. Every boater is responsible for their own wake. If they do damage to another vessel, they’re responsible. If they do damage to the shore, they’re responsible.”

The report goes on to note that, with Trump making rumblings about another presidential run, the boating rallies may start up again, which has maritime experts worried.

You can read more here.

Soy-salted coconut cream caramel sauce is this summer’s must-make ice cream topping

It’s no secret that a pinch of salt makes desserts taste instantaneously better. It’s the reason that brownies sprinkled with some flaky sea salt are irresistible, and it’s the reason that you can tell if you bite into a chocolate chip cookie that was made without it that something — even if you can’t immediately put your finger on it — is off. 

And while there are a variety of ways to add a saltiness to a savory dish, like minced briny olives or the sea-salt edge of tinned fish, the options for adding that flavor to dessert can sometimes feel restricted to the Kosher and tabletop varieties. I’d like you to consider an alternative, though: soy sauce. 

Compared to straight tabletop salt, soy sauce has a tremendous depth of flavor. At it’s best, it’s a perfect balance of umami, sweetness, saltiness and  a touch of acidity. Soy sauce also comes in multiple varieties; two of the most common on supermarket shelves are koikuchi — or dark soy sauce — and usukuchi, which is light soy sauce. 

At home, I’ve taken to using usukuchi. As Jenny Lee-Adrian wrote for “Serious Eats” in 2019, “These are lighter and thinner than their darker, richer counterparts, but have a more assertive, salty flavor and a slight sweetness from the addition of mirin, a sweet rice wine.”

She continued: “Primarily used in the Southern Kansai region of Japan, light soy sauces are used to season ingredients without turning the ingredients into a darker color. They can be used in place of dark soy sauce, but they should be used more sparingly because of their intense flavor.” 

Using soy sauce in desserts and sweet cocktails isn’t as uncommon as you might think. Mitarashi dango is a traditional dish featuring skewered rice dumplings glazed in sweet soy sauce.  Kamebishi Co., one of the oldest soy sauce brewers in Japan, makes parfaits using a soy sauce gelato. Renowned Japanese pastry chef Tsujiguchi Hironobu created the Nanaotorii Soy Sauce Roll Cake, made with a heavy two-year-old soy sauce, a soft spongy dough and custard cream. 

A few years ago, John Brown’s Underground, a Kansas City bar, developed the “Rhumami” cocktail, a shaved ice margarita with six drops of Yamaroku soy sauce inside instead of salt on the rim. And just this week, Salon’s Mary Elizabeth Williams shared her recipe for soy sauce sheet pan brownies, which was inspired by a conversation with Hattie McKinnon, a Chinese-Australian writer, about her new book “To Asia, With Love.” 

“When I started experimenting with this brownie,” McKinnon told Salon, “I realized the soy sauce not only did the job that salt does, it added these beautiful, rich caramel flavors which tell you there’s something special about the brownie. You would never say, this is a soy sauce brownie; it just adds this deep flavor that’s so effortless.” 

That flavor is what I wanted to capture in a sweet condiment of my own: a soy-salted coconut cream caramel. 

It’s peak ice cream season in my house right now and while I love a good caramel sauce topping, sometimes it is just too much straight sugar on sugar. Sure, there are some delicious sea salted caramels (Stonewall Kitchen’s variety is really good and easy to find). But this caramel sauce — which gets the saltiness from the addition of soy sauce — has some unparalleled depth, which makes even the most basic grocery store vanilla ice cream taste like a gourmet treat. 

Coconut cream has a higher fat content than plain coconut milk, making it ideal for whipping up caramel sauce, which is typically made with heavy cream or half-and-half. The flavor pairs beautifully with the salty-umami of soy sauce, especially alongside the molasses sweetness of brown sugar. 

***

Recipe: Soy-Salted Coconut Cream Caramel 
Approximately 1 cup

Ingredients

  • 1 13.5-ounce can of coconut cream 
  • ½ cup of light brown sugar
  • 3 tablespoons of light soy sauce 

Directions 

1. In a large saucepan, whisk together the coconut cream and the light brown sugar. Bring the mixture to a raging boil and stir vigorously for 30 seconds. The mixture will froth pretty aggressively, so ensure that you are whisking quickly enough that the cream doesn’t boil over. Then bring the heat down to a low simmer. Add the soy sauce. 

2. Allow the mixture to gently simmer — stirring occasionally — until its color has visibly deepened and the volume has reduced by half, about 30 minutes. Be sure when stirring that you incorporate any caramelized sugar bits from the bottom and sides of the pan into the caramel. 

3. Once the caramel has reduced to the point that the sauce will coat the back of a spoon, remove it from heat. It will continue to thicken as it cools. At this point, serve it warm (I’d recommend over vanilla ice cream and Salon’s Mary Elizabeth Williams’ soy sauce brownies) or place it in a sealed container and refrigerate it for up to two weeks. 

Read More Saucy:

New York’s bars, restaurants and distillers say they’re suffering from the abrupt end of to-go cocktails

Taking alcohol to-go in New York halted abruptly on June 25 to the outrage of many bar owners and restaurateurs, as well as local distillers, who’d come to rely on to-go cocktails as a pandemic lifeline. But some of these small business owners tell Salon the sudden end of to-go drinks is just another example of how the city and state have failed to support the bar, restaurant and local distilling industry during the economic crisis brought about by COVID-19.

At the start of the pandemic, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, under his temporary emergency executive order power, implemented a slate of policies designed to help bars and restaurants weather economic setbacks. One was a temporary modification to New York’s Alcoholic Beverage Control Law to allow bars and restaurants to sell cocktails to-go, providing a desperately-needed revenue stream as many hovered on the brink of survival.

But on June 23, Cuomo declared the start of a “new chapter” when he announced that New York’s COVID-19 state of emergency — which had allowed bars and restaurants to sell alcoholic beverages to-go since March 2020 — would be lifted after June 24.

Cuomo had previously extended the state’s alcohol to go program by 30 days, set to expire on July 5, but city and state organizations took the expiration of the state of emergency as an early end to takeout cocktails for restaurants and bars, too. 

“With the ending of our state of emergency and the return to pre-pandemic guidelines, the temporary pandemic-related privileges for to-go and delivery of alcoholic beverages will end after June 24,” the State Liquor Authority said in a tweet following Cuomo’s announcement. However, bars and restaurants, in addition to “manufacturers with on-premises privileges,” may still deliver and sell beer to-go, as they could before the pandemic, a spokesperson for the SLA confirmed in an email to Salon.

The suddenness of the announcement shocked local bar and restaurant owners, although some expressed more outrage than others. 

“I can well understand the hue and cry of those in the industry who have invested thousands in canning or bottling machines and bespoke packaging materials to be able to sell cocktails to go,” Toby Cecchini, owner of the Long Island Bar and the Rockwell Place in Brooklyn, tells Salon. “The governor and the legislature have acted in a blindly cynical manner here, it seems.”

While to-go sales created “just a little trickle” in business for the Long Island Bar and Rockwell Place, the “thunder-from-above immediacy of the rescinding — without any explanation or discussion, without providing businesses that have made substantial investments in these materials at a very difficult time some kind of buffer period — is a bit demoralizing,” Cecchini adds. 

“It also makes for a very ominous precedent when one begins to wonder what’s going to happen with outdoor dining,” he said. “That has been our lifeline, and imagining it being similarly ripped away right now would be a death sentence. Outdoor dining — like the to-go cocktail initiative — is simply something people, now that they’ve seen it and gotten used to it, have found to be an overwhelmingly positive addition to our cityscape … It’s not like, ‘Okay, we’re all back to normal now, let’s take back any posture of largesse we extended to the hospitality industry.’ It’s going to be years getting back on our feet properly.”

Amanda Cohen, a James Beard-nominated chef and owner of acclaimed Lower East Side vegetable restaurant Dirt Candy, took a similar stance.

“I do think how it’s been handled by the state is incredibly short-sighted and unfair to businesses that have been relying on it as a form of revenue,” Cohen says. “While none of us thought it was going to last forever, ending it overnight was downright cruel.”

As the state lifts restrictions and reopens, New York — alongside other states — is debating the fate of expanded outdoor dining and to-go cocktails. When it comes to drinks to-go, a conversation has arisen about public health impact versus sales boost, particularly in light 2020 reports about throngs of drinkers brazenly imbibing in the streets while disregarding social distancing. The state, in response, put in stringent restrictions that held bars and restaurants responsible for cracking down on bad behavior, which some owners said went beyond reasonable expectations for enforcement.

But Cecchini says such open-air carousal wasn’t an issue at his bars. “I have read about some bad actors running virtual block parties outside of their bars in the middle of the pandemic, but from where I am, it was regular customers just asking if they could take a ‘walktail‘ down to the water to stroll the park,” he says. “It made us all seem a bit more like the self-guided adults we’re meant to be, rather than the puritanical state-coddled toddlers the blue laws still on the books paint us as. Of course, that little bit of maturity had to be grabbed back.”

Similarly, Cohen says her restaurant’s patrons tend to be fairly low-key. “Dirt Candy doesn’t really attract a big drinking crowd and we never had to police bad behavior, but it did feel unfair that the burden was placed on restaurants to enforce once the drinks were off premise,” she says. “I think most restaurant owners already felt like the COVID police throughout most of the pandemic, so having to be the alcohol police too was just one more injustice forced upon us by the state.”

Alexi Minko, owner of Alibi Lounge in Harlem, echoes Cecchini and Cohen — the sudden end of cocktails to go “came as a surprise,” he says. “It was an overnight announcement and I hear a lot of colleagues complaining about the fact that it was very short, very brief.” 

Those who’d stocked up on inventory and supplies for to-go drinks were especially peeved. Fortunately for Alibi, Minko anticipated it and prepared accordingly. Since early June Alibi pared down its takeout drinks menu to a single, wildly popular cocktail — margaritas. Additionally, Alibi’s compact size works to its advantage, whereas bigger restaurants in Manhattan that leaned heavily on takeout sales could have a harder time adjusting. Still, the importance of to-go cocktails during a rollercoaster year shouldn’t be understated. 

“Takeout and delivery of alcohol … was a lifeline for all of us,” Minko says. “At some point during the pandemic, it was our only source of revenue.” And if it ever becomes an option again, “we’ll definitely capitalize on it, especially during warmer months,” he adds.

Despite losing a lifeline, Minko is optimistic for Alibi and the industry in general. “We’re all capable of bouncing back,” he says. While he hopes cocktails to go aren’t gone for good, in the meantime, he’s focused on selling what he can — at the bar and to go. “We can still sell beers to go,” he notes, and that means beer-based cocktails, too. 

“We can be creative,” he says. 

***

Still, the rescinding of drinks to-go comes at a uniquely challenging moment for bars and restaurants as they’re already reeling from the last 15 months. 

“We’re doing better, gaining traction, starting to get our feet underneath us,” says Andrea Needell Matteliano, bar director at Clay, also in Harlem. “This time last year we were terrified of losing our business. Now we find ourselves in a much better position, but we don’t have the staff to really carry it. We hired some tremendous, outstanding new talent, but it’s not enough. There’s a dire shortage. We can’t have as many tables as we need to [in part because] I don’t have enough bartenders.” 

That’s why the return of indoor dining probably won’t make up for the loss of takeout wine and cocktails. Furthermore, it’s uncertain when — if ever — workers will return as “a significant number of restaurant industry folks have parlayed their skills into another area,” Matteliano says. 

She anticipates that it’s “going to be a slow rebuilding and a rough ride for the next year or two, at least.”

As Matteliano sees it, outrage over the end of to-go liquor speaks to a broader issue. 

“From the beginning of the pandemic, there has been a blatant disregard for the well-being of the restaurant industry,” she explains. “We’re risking our lives but still feel disregarded [despite] the substantive number of jobs and amount of tax revenue we create.” 

She says that it’s as though, in the eyes of the state, “we’re not worthy of any more than 24 hours’ notice” about this shift that only exacerbates the pandemic’s negative effects on bars’ bottom line. 

Bobby Digi, co-owner of O’Henry’s Publick House in Staten Island, also railed against the unexpected end of to-go cocktails.

“It’s unfortunate how the city and state operate,” Digi tells Salon. “The inconsistency is a major issue. Since the start of the pandemic, we [bars and restaurants] get last-minute notices. It’s like we’re being targeted to bear the brunt” of the economic hardship with “little to no support.”

O’Henry’s pulled in around 10% to 15%” of its revenue from to-go liquor, Digi says, noting that they were getting “creative as a British pub,” pairing specific cocktails with a mix of classic and elevated pub grub. But that’s “out the window now,” he laments, noting customers “want to eat and drink,” so not being able to-get a cocktail to go could hurt food sales.

“People drink on the streets anyway,” Digi says. “People drink outside bodegas. People drink on the streets, period. If customers come to our restaurants to order food to take home, we take much more ownership. We regulate. No restaurant is going to allow someone just randomly drinking on their streets.”

The quick turnaround on to-go cocktail allowances has cost some restaurant and bar owners in other ways, too. With July Fourth and other summer holidays around the corner, Digi was ready to roll out a stacked lineup of drinks specials with ample to-go cocktail options. 

“We’re going to have to pull all that advertisement,” Digi says. “Now it’s back to the drawing board. It’s difficult as is with all the challenges restaurants and small businesses face — especially minority-owned small businesses — but this is a lose-lose.”

***

But bars and restaurants aren’t the only ones hurting from the brusque return to pre-pandemic guidelines. Local distilleries also benefited from the temporary ability to deliver their spirits directly to in-state customers. Now, along with drinks to-go, direct shipping has come to an end, meaning it’s much more difficult for small distilleries to get their bottles into the hands of drinkers. 

“While the state leaders may want to get back to ‘normal,’ our on-site business has not recovered by half, and asking us to pivot, yet again, away from online sales back to in-person with a day’s notice is premature and punitive,” Kings County Distillery tweeted following Cuomo’s announcement. 

The Brooklyn-based whiskey maker implored the governor to “please consider extending the emergency orders. Bars, restaurants, distilleries and wineries are not at all back to normal. We are still in an emergency even if the immediate health threat has subsided.” 

Along with to-go cocktails and direct delivery, the end of the state of emergency nixed Kings County’s in-state virtual tasting program, the distillery said in an email on June 24 to fans of its whiskey, while offering a “final goodbye sale for 10% off everything.”

Kings County Distillery is grappling with “lingering economic damage that has to be addressed,” co-founder and distiller Colin Spoelman tells Salon, noting that the business is still operating at “about half capacity.” 

While the distillery benefited from to-go cocktails, losing the ability to deliver directly to customers is particularly detrimental because they’d invested heavily in it over the course of the pandemic. The distillery also was shipping tasting kits, and that’s been “chopped off at the knees,” Spoelman says. “We’re not recovered, the news came too soon, and I think it was mishandled,” he adds. 

The State Liquor Authority “chose to interpret the executive order very narrowly and in a way that was very punitive,” Spoelman says, considering how pandemic-era behavior patterns are still affecting a lot of businesses — including small distilleries that recently resumed in-person tours and tastings.

Spoelman notes that prior to the pandemic, Kings County’s tours and on-site sales accounted for about a third of the distillery’s overall business, whereas during the pandemic, online business came to represent about a fifth, thanks to emergency privileges like direct shipping and cocktails to-go. 

According to Spoelman, the distillery was “just back to normal” with the combined return of on-site business combined with direct shipping and to-go cocktails, but now that those privileges have been taken away, it’s “back to the pandemic again.” 

“We just lost the opportunity to break even to what things used to be — 15 months after we got the first devastating blow,” Spoelman says. 

Others on New York’s urban distilling trail also continue to struggle despite the end of the official state of emergency. Allen Katz, distiller and owner at New York Distilling Co., also in Brooklyn, says that delivery became a “very important revenue stream.” 

Katz notes there’s staunch opposition from liquor stores against extending distilleries’ direct shipping privileges. While some liquor store owners see it as a threat, Katz argues they shouldn’t. 

“We charge the same prices you see in a retail setting,” he explains. “For shipping, we’re not only charging the same retail prices you see in Brooklyn or Manhattan,” but customers must pay an additional “$8 to $15 for a bottle or two” to have it delivered to them. 

Additionally, Katz says, New York Distilling Co.’s website specifically stated that their first preference was for customers to support local retailers by shopping for distillery’s whiskey and gin there. For those unable to find it at their local liquor store, delivery “was a really wonderful outlet for us to not only create new revenue [but also] connect with potential new customers.” 

“All that being said, we sold a few hundred bottles during the harshest month of the pandemic. Our primary business is not as a retailer,” Katz says. 

The end of alcohol to go had repercussions for distilleries far beyond the five boroughs. “It affected me greatly,” says Claire Marin, founder and head distiller at Catskill Provisions Distillery in Callicoon, New York. 

“I am a farm distillery trying to survive. It’s definitely not easy — especially distilling on the grain — but it’s very rewarding,” she says. “There’s a lot of passion in it, and the ability to sell cocktails to-go and ship to people’s homes was a really good opportunity to get our brand out there.” 

Those temporary “privileges” were even more important considering that when the distillery opened its tasting room to the public recently — still requiring masks — many people were “still afraid to come out,” Marin says. Toward late May, as more people got vaccinated, they began to feel more comfortable coming inside, but not enough to make up for ending to-go cocktails and delivery, Marin adds, noting that she’s considering cutting a bartender now that cocktails to-go and direct shipping are gone.

The ability to ship directly to local customers is particularly key for small distilleries, Marin says. Craft distillers don’t necessarily have the distribution channels that big companies have, which allow them to fill “every single shelf” in liquor stores with their products. 

“We don’t have the dollars to have brand ambassadors everywhere, and our distributor is small,” Marin explains. “When somebody comes to the distillery, they love what they taste,” but may have a hard time tracking it down if their local liquor store doesn’t carry it. 

And being in upstate New York — as opposed to, say, midtown Manhattan — makes it tougher to reach new customers.”I really have to rethink a few things,” Marin says. “Thank goodness I have a good strong season to look forward to, because summer is beginning.” 

But, Marin says, that’s not going to help bottle sales outside her distillery and tasting room.

“But that’s not going to help my bottle sales outside my distillery and tasting room. Pressure was put on the government from [liquor stores], but they increased their sales one hundred percent,” Marin says. “We’re losing at least 30% to 40% of our sales due to restaurants being closed [whereas] retailers gained sales from” increased drinking at home during the pandemic. 

She continues:”Smaller business doesn’t really have the lobbying power that the larger businesses do. We are the engine of business in America, but we’re still not really given the support that we deserve.”

***

Brian Facquet — the head distiller at Do Good Spirits in Roscoe, New York, and president of New York State Distillers Guild — is perhaps one of the most committed advocates of direct-to-consumer shipping. The guild represents all distilled spirits licensees in the state, which total around 160 distilleries. 

Direct-to-consumer shipping proved a lifeline for Do Good Spirits — as it did for many of the distillers Facquet represents as guild president, he says. 

According to him, being able to deliver directly to drinkers “might’ve been the difference between paying your mortgage that month and paying your employees, or not paying them.”

“For most people this wasn’t a matter of growing your business, this was a matter of surviving,” he says. 

When that was taken away virtually overnight, Facquet says that it sent a shock through the craft distilling industry — especially since things aren’t going to otherwise normalize overnight. If the pandemic united people virtually, it distanced them physically, which created a monumental challenge for small distilleries. 

“It’s not like we have millions of people coming to our tasting rooms,” Facquet says. “We have not recovered yet and we won’t for a long time.” 

Looking ahead, Facquet is focused on survival — through a combination of collaboration, education, advocacy and sweat. “Like any small business owner, we try to adjust,” he says. “I know the loss of this is going to put some small distilleries out of business [and some] don’t necessarily qualify for a lot of the aid that’s out there.” 

He says that one of the next steps is educating consumers about why they can’t purchase alcohol and products directly from distilleries. “After 15 months we’ve proven that we can do it safely,” he says. “It was a great experiment, it worked — and now we’re supposed to pretend it didn’t happen?”

***

Katz of New York Distilling Co., as well as other bar owners and distillers, believes to-go cocktails have a chance of being resurrected. “I think the most responsible thing to do is say … let’s continue to review” the legislation, he says.

While some liquor store owners oppose making to-go drinks permanent, the state Assembly has been working on a bill that would address their concerns while extending takeout cocktails, says Assembly member John T. McDonald III, a co-sponsor of the bill. 

Some of the opposition, McDonald says, may have been sparked by upstate grocery markets putting out “cases and cases of wine and liquor for sale,” as opposed to someone buying a “nice $15 glass of wine” along with their takeout supper from a restaurant.

McDonald says it’s a stretch to view a to-go cocktail as a serious threat to liquor stores, which “did exceptionally well during COVID” when drinks to-go were allowed.

With the COVID-19 emergency coming to an end, the Legislature had a shot at extending to-go cocktails, but “chose not to extend this privilege,” an SLA spokesperson told Salon in an email. Bills were introduced in 2020 and 2021 to change the law and allow to-go sales — including S8392/A10550 and S8565/A10534A in the 2019-2020 session and S589A/A7732 and A3116 from the 2020-2021 session — but never moved from committee, the spokesperson said.

“There is no provision in the Alcoholic Beverage Control Law that would give the State Liquor Authority the power to extend the ability for restaurants to sell cocktails to go, temporarily or otherwise,” the spokesperson said. “Doing so would be contrary to the law and the Legislature’s intent.”

Meanwhile, state Sen. Patrick Gallivan also is co-sponsoring legislation to legalize to-go alcohol and urging leaders of the senate and Assembly to convene a special session of the legislature to pass the bill this summer, according to Gallivan’s office. The legislation prohibits bars and restaurants from selling full bottles of wine or liquor.

The New York State Liquor Store Association didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.

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Report: Media has “widely misunderstood” Trump Organization indictment

On Thursday, an unsealed indictment of the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg revealed a long series of serious charges, including substantial tax fraud. Shortly after, former President Donald Trump’s son Eric Trump conducted multiple interviews where he weighed in on the charges his family’s organization is facing.

At one point during his appearance on Fox News, Eric Trump waved off the incentives as “fringe benefits.” However, a comprehensive piece published by Just Security pushes back against Eric’s claims, explaining why the investigation covers much more area than that.

The piece offers several specifics that highlight why the case is not as frivolous as the former president’s son tried to suggest. It argues: “This is no mere fringe benefits case” but rather a “straight-out fraud case, claiming that the defendants kept double books: phony ones to show the tax authorities, and accurate ones to be hidden from view.”

Offering an analogy of the charges brought against the organization, author Daniel Shaviro laid out an example scenario of what has allegedly been done in comparison to the diluted version of the allegations Trump’s lawyers are trying to perpetuate:

Suppose that your employer pays you monthly, through automatically deposited paychecks that end up being included on your annual W-2. But suppose that each month you could stop by the front office, request an envelope full of cash in unmarked bills, and have your W-2 reduced accordingly. So your true income would be the same as if you hadn’t stopped by, but you’d be reporting less salary. If your employer kept careful records of all the cash it gave you, and also still deducted it all, we would basically have this case. That is far different from simple failure to pay taxes on fringe benefits, which is how the indictment has been widely misunderstood, thanks in part to Trump’s defense lawyers’ laying the groundwork before the charges were made public on Thursday.

 

As for “fringe benefits,” the publication notes that the problem centers on the fact that the items Weisselberg received that were funded by the company “had no relationship whatsoever to the sort of items that, under appropriate circumstances, might potentially constitute tax-free employee fringe benefits.”

The piece explained:

But the following items that the company paid for, on Weisselberg’s behalf, most emphatically do not fit the profile of potentially excludable fringe benefits:
• private school tuition expenses for Weisselberg’s family members (First Count ¶9).[2]
• a Mercedes Benz automobile that was the personal car of Weisselberg’s wife (First Count ¶10).
• unreported cash that Weisselberg could use to pay personal holiday gratuities (First Count ¶11).
To treat cash as a “fringe benefit” would imply that the term covers all employee compensation. Does this mean that, whenever one is paid with cash off the books and does not report it, the IRS is merely quibbling over fringe benefits? Of course not.
• personal expenses for Weisselberg’s other homes and an apartment maintained by one of his children; these included such items as new beds, flat-screen televisions, the installation of carpeting, and furniture for his home in Florida (First Count, ¶12).
• rent-free lodging and other benefits to a family member of Weisselberg (First Count, ¶13).

The extent of the charges in the indictment was also highlighted. The main charges include “New York State fraud, conspiracy, and grand larceny statutes.” Other points to highlight include double bookkeeping, deceptive bookkeeping, “and fraudulent mischaracterization of employee compensation” which make the organization’s actions appear to deliberate actions “conceal the fraud.”

Some legal experts and observers believe the current charges are only the “first wave” for what appears to be an ongoing investigation. It’s unclear yet how expansive any future charges may be.

Make your pasta salad better with salami, provolone and a sun-dried tomato vinaigrette

Inspired by traditional antipasto flavors, we wanted to create a pasta salad that could take on hearty, interesting mix-ins. We started with fusilli pasta, which was substantial enough to hold up to the larger pieces of meat and cheese. Thickly cut salami and provolone added savory bite and richness, and sliced kalamata olives added a brininess to punch up the flavor. With several rich ingredients in the mix, a mayonnaise-based dressing was overkill, so we swapped it out in favor of a bright vinaigrette accented with tangy sun-dried tomatoes, red wine vinegar, garlic, and basil. When left to marinate for a day or two, the pasta took on even more flavor; to loosen the dressing and quickly take the chill off the pasta, we stirred in a little boiling water. Chopped baby spinach added just before serving lent extra color and freshness. Other pasta shapes can be substituted for the fusilli.

***
Recipe: Fusilli Salad with Salami, Provolone, and Sun-Dried Tomato Vinaigrette
Serves 4 to 6

Ingredients

  • 8 ounces fusilli
  • ¾ teaspoon table salt, plus salt for cooking pasta
  • ¾ cup oil-packed sun-dried tomatoes, rinsed, patted dry, and minced, plus 2 tablespoons packing oil
  • ¼ cup red wine vinegar, plus extra for seasoning
  • 2 tablespoons chopped fresh basil or parsley
  • 1 garlic clove, minced
  • ¾ teaspoon pepper
  • ¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil
  • 4 (¼-inch-thick) slices deli salami or pepperoni (8 ounces), cut into 1-inch-long matchsticks
  • 4 (¼-inch-thick) slices deli provolone (8 ounces), cut into 1-inch-long matchsticks
  • ½ cup pitted kalamata olives, sliced
  • 2 ounces (2 cups) baby spinach, chopped

Directions

1. Bring 4 quarts water to boil in large pot. Add pasta and 1 tablespoon salt and cook, stirring often, until tender. Drain pasta, rinse with cold water, and drain again, leaving pasta slightly wet.

2. Whisk sun-dried tomatoes, vinegar, basil, garlic, pepper, and salt together in large bowl. Whisking constantly, drizzle in olive oil and sun-dried tomato packing oil. Add pasta, salami, cheese, and olives and toss to combine. (To make ahead, toss fusilli, salami, cheese, and olives with half of vinaigrette; refrigerate pasta mixture and remaining vinaigrette separately for up to 2 days. To serve, bring to room temperature, then stir in vinaigrette, then stir vinaigrette and ¼ cup boiling water into pasta mixture before continuing.)

3. Add spinach and gently toss to combine. Season with salt, pepper, and extra vinegar to taste. Serve.

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

“There’s so many Natives who are jokesters”: Native comedy redefines patriotism & busts stereotypes

On July 4, we’re expected to celebrate the holiday to mark U.S. independence from British rule. But for many Americans, that date in no way meant the end of colonialism. 

“I grew up on the Bishop Paiute reservation, and we love the Fourth and fireworks there. We don’t love Independence Day, though,” TV comedy writer Tazbah Rose Chavez told Salon.

For Chavez – a member of the Bishop Paiute Tribe and from the Nüümü, Diné and San Carlos Apache tribes – the atmosphere of invigorated patriotism the holiday brings reminds her of the untold stories and propaganda entangled with these celebrations. “There’s a distinction, I think for all major holidays — the same way we address Thanksgiving. We like to eat, be with our family, celebrate, come together. But there is no acknowledgement we’re celebrating Independence Day.”

Writing for the comedy “Rutherford Falls” allows Chavez to address such tensions and dueling narratives while also having fun with the modern-day relationships some Native Americans have to history and identity. In the Peacock series, Reagan Wells (Jana Schmieding) is a proud member of the fictional Minishonka Nation and even runs a cultural center to honor her people. She also happens to be best friends with Nathan Rutherford (Ed Helms), a town historian who celebrates his white ancestor who “founded” the titular town of Rutherford Falls that was built on Native land.

In the series’ fifth episode, Reagan is thrilled to see the overlooked history of the Minishonka featured in a beautiful student film. She and Nathan are ready to declare it the winner of the student history fair . . . until Reagan discovers the documentarian is a white boy named Spencer.

“Knowing that the film was made by some white kid, albeit a seemingly woke one, I just gotta question his intent about making art about my people,” Reagan says.

As she investigates further, it turns out Spencer has a history of appropriating other cultures in cringe-inducing ways. His seemingly compassionate adoption of the Minishonka Nation’s story stems from white guilt and ultimately puts his face on a project about people he refers to as “the faceless.” 

“We now live in this generation where non-Native people are becoming more conscious to Native issues,” Chavez said, on the episode. “But we haven’t been in a position to tell our own stories ever until very recently, so, in this episode, we really tried to look at the larger issues in narrative storytelling from historically excluded communities. There’s a new ownership Native people have over our storytelling now, because we have the agency and positions to do it.” 

According to Chavez, the historical and continued erasure of Native storytelling in the U.S. has been entirely intentional. “It’s not just missing, like, ‘Whoops, we don’t know where it went!'” she said. “So much effort was given to erase the life and historical contributions and teachings of Native people.”

Like Chavez, Lucas Brown Eyes is a television writer who’s worked on a number of shows, including Freeform’s “Young & Hungry” and Netflix’s “Alexa & Katie.” As an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux tribe, Brown Eyes also says he has a complicated relationship to Independence Day.

“I’m from South Dakota, so blowing stuff up and barbecue is kind of what [the Fourth of July] means to me,” he said, while also acknowledging, “The hard part is, especially when everything is ultra patriotic . . . our history has been erased. There’s all these moments of, ‘How can I celebrate when you’re not even acknowledging the pain you’ve caused?'” 

That pain continues today as Native history and contributions continue to be ignored. The discovery of the burial of thousands of Indigenous children in unmarked graves near several North American schools has received little media attention. Today, celebrating the “freedom” of a country that’s able to perpetrate and whitewash such acts is a big ask, and those who can’t celebrate don’t necessarily lack for patriotism.

“Natives have loved this land before it was called America — it’s our homeland. Just because you’re Native American doesn’t mean you can’t be patriotic, but there’s this added layer of complexity,” said Brown Eyes.

Author and humor writer Tiffany Midge, an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux, also shared her memories of the fraught “colonial holiday” with Salon. 

“I’ve been at different reservations during different times of my life on July 4th, and people stayed up all night shooting off fireworks,” she recalled. “Were they celebrating Independence Day, though? I don’t know, maybe they were celebrating their tribal sovereignty.”

In her own way, however, she’s taken part of the Declaration of Independence, and reclaimed it for herself. Where the document refers to Native Americans as “merciless Indian savages,” Midge says she’s been inspired to call herself a “merciless Indian Fabulous.”

Comedy and the future of storytelling


“Telling People You’re Native American When You’re Not Native Is a Lot Like Telling a Bear You’re a Bear When You’re Not a Bear” (Joey Clift)

As with projects like “Rutherford Falls,” some Native American writers and comedians see comedy as an opportunity to tell their stories and a vital way to fill in the many gaps in knowledge about Native American cultures and history.

“I think the reason this stuff isn’t taught in schools is it runs counter to this narrative of American exceptionalism,” comedian and writer Joey Clift told Salon. “It’s really convenient to think the pilgrims arrived in this country, in this untamed wilderness hundreds of years ago, and these mystical, wood-elf Native American creatures emerged from the woods, gave them a nice turkey dinner, said, ‘All of this land is yours,’ then disappeared like force ghosts in ‘Star Wars.’ That’s a very convenient thing to believe if you want to believe America is the best country in the world.”

Clift, an enrolled member of the Cowlitz tribe who grew up on the Tulalip Indian Reservation, discovered his passion for comedy while chasing his first dream of being a “small-town cable weatherman.” But he’d never seen or heard of Native American comedians, and thus, didn’t believe he could be one. It was only after he received encouragement from several professors, and had his comedic talent recognized in a national college media competition, that he determined to pursue comedy beyond the occasional joke in a weather report.

Clift took his first class with the Upright Citizens Brigade in Los Angeles in 2010, and joined a UCBLA house team not long after, but it would be years before he was finally able to organize a Native American comedy showcase, which he had spent years pitching and pushing for. The showcase happened in 2018 after leadership changes, but before that, he had always been given reasons for why it couldn’t take place. 

“The theater refused to give opportunities to other Native American comedians, and when I would try to make opportunities for other Native comedians, they would refuse to give them stage time because they weren’t vetted by the system,” he recounted.

But when it finally happened, the UCB Native American comedy showcase, which took place on Indigenous People’s Day, was wildly successful. “It was a sellout, we had maybe two dozen super funny Native comedians on the bill who all killed it,” Clift said. “That’s a show that took me five years of fighting to make happen.” 

Clift just wrapped the first season in the all-Native writers’ room for the upcoming Netflix animated series “Spirit Rangers,” which follows three siblings who can transform into unique animal spirits while living and working at a National Park, and also created the award-winning short animated film, “Telling People You’re Native American When You’re Not Native Is A Lot Like Telling A Bear You’re A Bear When You’re Not A Bear.” 


“Spirit Rangers” (Netflix)

He sees comedy as “one of the most effective ways to get messages for social change out into the world,” and also notes it’s “very easy to make fun of” everyday non-Native people’s ignorance about Native Americans. A short film of his that’s currently going through the festival circuit explores microaggressions and other memorable bits he’s encountered in relationships, highlighting the widespread “guilt and lack of education” on Native issues.

“I was in a relationship a couple years ago, and the woman I was dating woke me up in the middle of the night to apologize because when she was five years old her mom dressed her up as Pochahantas from Disney,” he recalls. “I was just like, ‘It’s fine, you can go back to sleep.'”

Tiffany Midge, the self-proclaimed “merciless Indian Fabulous,” has taken the writer’s route for her comedy. She’s a former humor columnist for Indian Country Today, and the author of several poetry collections, anthologies and her 2019 memoir, “Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s.”

“Native writers have always written in a plurality of genres. They must have served as an example to me,” Midge said. “Humor is a great defuser of tension, obviously. It’s one of the best aspects of Indigenous traditions.”

Almost no topic is safe from Midge’s biting humor and wit, and one she’s explored at length, from her writing on Women’s March pussy hats in her memoir, to some white women activists’ obsession with “The Handmaid’s Tale,” is white feminism. While she wouldn’t necessarily call white feminism “evil,” she’s critical of the way white women have often centered themselves in feminist activism, overlooking the specific oppressions of Indigenous women in the process.

Midge recalls facing backlash when she wrote a satire piece on “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

“I received a lot of vitriol from white women about the audacity of me to decenter their (fictional) narrative, and claim space for the horrific reality experienced by Indigenous women,” Midge said. “But it was my hope to find some healing for Indigenous women by punching up on white feminism through use of jokes and satire in that piece.”

Meanwhile, Chavez only realized she was “actually a comedy writer” some time after joining the writing staff of “Rutherford Falls,” when showrunner Sierra Teller Ornelas told Chavez she was funny. “I was like, well, two showrunners have told me I’m funny at this point, I keep finding myself writing on comedies — I think I’m a comedy writer,” Chavez recalled.

Since then, however, she says she’s struggled with walking “this tightrope” of how Native comedy can be highly effective at educating people about Native issues, while also acknowledging it shouldn’t always be on her and other Native American writers to educate non-Natives. 

“We don’t want to be perpetual teachers. There’s so much information out there people have access to, they just don’t have the willingness to take themselves there,” Chavez said. “So it’s walking this fine line between not feeling like we constantly have to spoon-feed and educate with every story we tell, and every funny thing we do has to be teaching people, while also recognizing people are starting from a very low baseline of information, and if we don’t fill in those gaps, no one else will.”

But Chavez is hopeful that with more time, storytelling, and comedy, more people will have the “education and awareness,” so that Native American writers can tell whatever stories they want to tell. “I want us to be able to have romantic comedies someday that have nothing to do with being Native, and the character will be Native, the choices they make, or the way they talk, the way they go about the world, may be Native,” she said. “But I don’t want us to constantly stay in this place of having to be educational content, because that’s not what white people have to do.”

Clift is similarly hopeful about the different directions Native American-centric storytelling and entertainment may go in the future. “Yes, it’s important to be educated about the true history of this country as it relates to Native people, but it’s also important to support Native creators nowadays, the future of Native storytelling,” he said. “Supporting the future of Native storytelling is just as important as learning the history of the Native experience in this country. So, while you’re educating yourself about that stuff, follow a bunch of Native American comedians on Twitter. We’re super funny, I promise.”

New storytelling centers Native joy and youth


“Reservation Dogs” (FX on Hulu)

Brown Eyes moved with his mother from South Dakota to “Hollywood!” (or Santa Ana, but close enough) when he was 13, after a family tragedy. On one of their first days in the state, he recalls his mother pawning her jewelry so they could buy him a video camera, and he could make an audition tape for the nearby art school, all in one day. The investment certainly paid off; Brown Eyes has been working in TV for years, and is currently writing on an upcoming HBO Max show.

While some of the previous projects Brown Eyes has worked on haven’t featured Native characters, he sees “honesty and authenticity” as universal, and crucial to his writing. “If you write these real, multidimensional characters, people will relate to them no matter who they are,” he said. 

His current project at HBO isn’t a comedy, and Brown Eyes has big dreams of writing for every genre there is at some point. But comedy has a special place in his heart. “That’s how I got started, and I’d say when you’re Native, there’s this stereotype of the stoic serious Native — that’s the dumbest stereotype I’ve ever heard,” he said. “It’s the complete opposite. There’s so many Natives who are jokesters, kind of silly, constantly joking. Part of that is just cultural, of when you’ve had such a rough go of it, everyone is telling you no, you can laugh or cry. Many of us choose to laugh.”

Chavez similarly finds the stereotype of “stoic, old Native men from black-and-white photos” is inaccurate, and will push against that with her new FX on Hulu series “Reservation Dogs,” premiering in August. “I’m so excited for people to see how vibrant, funny and alive our communities are contemporarily,” Chavez said. “I’m really, really excited for people to laugh with us and find joy in our storytelling and our existence.” 

“Reservation Dogs,” created by Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi, is the first show of its kind, emerging from an all-Native writers’ room. Where Chavez says “Rutherford Falls” has a built-in white storyline and is true to the existence of white and Native people living together on reservations across the country, “Reservation Dogs” is completely different, focusing on the everyday, hilarious lives of Native American teenagers on a reservation. 

“At different times writing this, we had to stop and go like, ‘Wait, is this too specific? Are we getting so specific no one’s going to know what we’re talking about?'” Chavez said. But actually, she says this specificity is what makes it more universally relatable, including to non-Native people, who will see the parallels in their own lives: “They’ll be like, ‘Oh, that’s like when I go to this place in my town with my people.'”

Similarly, Clift looks forward to the release of “Spirit Rangers,” next year, hoping his show about a Native family and kids will “open kids’ eyes to just a bunch of fun Native kids who go on the same adventures other kids do, experience the same joy and emotion, and they’re not entirely reliving Native trauma every episode.” 

“[‘Spirit Rangers’ is] about Native joy, and Natives flourishing and living their best lives,” Clift said. “My hope is when all of these new shows come out, and are successful, it’s going to tell Hollywood that authentic Native stories, that center Native voices and not the white gaze, are important stories to tell. They’re also great stories to tell, interesting, cool, funny, and yes, profitable.”

“Rutherford Falls” is currently streaming on Peacock. “Reservation Dogs” premieres Aug. 9 on FX on Hulu. A premiere date for “Spirit Rangers” has yet to be announced.

How the drab wardrobe on “Kevin Can F**k Himself” reflects the gender inequity in the marriage

Even on the most realistic and relatable shows, there’s a good amount of suspension of disbelief required, like high schoolers are waking up at 5 or 6 a.m. to put on a full face of makeup and meet at coffee shops before school, for starters. But arguably the most common aspect on TV requiring us to suspend our disbelief is the idea that the everyday characters on sitcoms and dramas have such infinite wardrobes, that they need never wear clothing items a second time. 

On AMC’s dark and twisted comedy “Kevin Can F**K Himself,” we see the subversion of this trope. Beleaguered sitcom housewife Allison (Annie Murphy) is a woman caught staring down a dead-end life in rural Massachusetts. Her husband Kevin (Eric Petersen), the obtuse, misogynistic sitcom husband, has spent all their money, forced her out of the only job she ever loved, and isolated her from her friends or almost any non-domestic pursuits. 

Allison, of course, frequently wears and rewears the same pieces of clothing: her signature olive green utility jacket, skinny jeans, one pair of boots, and her one, eventually chili-stained wrap dress. This was entirely intentional, “Kevin Can F**k Himself” costume designer Carol Cutshall tells Salon. Allison is an ordinary, everyday person, and unlike in many other shows, she’s actually dressed for the part.

“The repetition of Allison’s jeans, jacket and her shoes — one of the things we really wanted to show was the contrast between where the money in the family is being spent, and that she really is not spending money on herself,” Cutshall said. “She really is constricted financially and would need to get permission for anything she spent money on.”

In contrast, Cutshall highlights how “Kevin always has new sneakers,” showing “where the priority is and who is getting what treatment in their marriage.” Notably, whenever Kevin and his bonehead best friend and father are onscreen, the show is shot as a multicam, brightly lit sitcom, with an enthusiastic laugh track that encourages their dumb, sexist hijinks. And Kevin and his friends are dressed for the part. “In that sitcom world, it’s always a completely fresh outfit with him,” Cutshall said.

Kevin and his friends are also dressed in purposefully dated, older sitcom-style garb, Cutshall says, “to show how outdated those modes of thinking are.” Their emotional abuse and sexist bullying of Allison dressed as “jokes” reflect an older way of thinking that we like to believe we’ve advanced past in society. But Cutshall says not as much has changed in how we treat women as we’d like to believe.

“We like to think of these characters as, ‘Oh, people aren’t really that way, anymore, they don’t really talk that way’ — but it absolutely is, people are exactly that way,” Cutshall said. “So there’s a lot of confronting the fact that what you think is your past is actually your present, and just how unacceptable this treatment is, now, currently. It should be long gone.”


Annie Murphy and Eric Petersen in “Kevin Can F**k Himself” (AMC)

As for styling Allison’s character, specifically, Cutshall extensively researched sitcom wives, and experimented with a wide range of fabric and design that could do the job of looking bright and perfect in sitcom lighting, yet more worn and lived-in under the harsher light of the single-camera drama display.

“So, for example, it’s not just a smooth, polished, bright, pink sweater — it’s a bright, pink sweater that when you take away all that warm sitcom lighting and the camera angles, strip it down and go in really close, you can see it’s torn and it’s stained and there’s a lot of depth for the camera and viewers’ eye to go into,” Cutshall said. “It was a lot of testing what’s going to look just bright, flat on the sitcom, but also deep and textural on the single camera.”

If you look even more closely at Allison, Cutshall says, you can see all the reminders of how traditional sitcoms cater to the male gaze through her fitted and feminine clothing, as well as the deep sexism and total control in her marriage to Kevin.

“We see constantly how she’s the only one under financial restriction, and also, that she was the only one under a physical restriction,” she said. “In contrast, Kevin’s basically dressed the way any toddler would dress, in big t-shirts and shorts you can pull up and pull down, no buttons, no collar. She has a lot of restrictions of what she can and can’t do.”

Many sitcom wives are styled and positioned as “wallflowers,” meant to fade into the background of male storytelling. Allison starts the show as a wallflower herself, Cutshall says, before her story takes a turn, and she begins her fight for independence. “Allison hasn’t been making her own decisions for some time, and she’s really living in a place where all her agency is taken from her,” Cutshall said. “Her look starts with colors as sort of wallflower colors. We see her in really washed out colors whereas Kevin is in really bright saturated colors.” 

Allison decides that the only way she can get free is through killing her husband and staging the perfect crime. What follows is a dark and delightful comedy of errors, as she seeks help from numerous unlikely sources in her pursuit of liberation.

According to Cutshall, as the season progresses, we start to see Allison’s colors “get stronger, she starts to wear print,” and “it’s not just, ‘this woman could blend into the wallpaper but be useful when needed to set up a joke, or to go get the beer. . . . We start to see her make conscious choices based on her true self.”

Almost nothing in the world of “Kevin Can F**k Himself” is accidental. Cutshall told Salon that each episode is brimming with Easter eggs for audiences from Worcester, Massachusetts, or anywhere in the state, really, to recognize, including t-shirts and prints from beloved local diners and bands. But in particular, frequent outfit-rewearing from Allison and some of the other characters serve another purpose, on top of making it clear that these are working-class, everyday people with limited disposable income to spend on clothes. 

“I’m always looking to conservation, so thinking of waste in my department, and the impact of that waste,” Cutshall said. “It can be a very wasteful industry, and I just like to be as aware and proactive as I can be in doing the least amount of harm that I can.”

As “Kevin Can F**k Himself” progresses, fans can look forward to the continued evolution of Allison’s styling, and more nods to the show’s humble setting of Worcester, Mass. As for those of us who have long waited for a show to represent real people who re-wear their clothes, we can expect more of that, too.

“Kevin Can F**k HImself” airs new episodes on Sundays at 9 p.m. on AMC and streams ahead by a week on AMC+.

How palm oil became the world’s most hated, most used fat source

Palm oil is everywhere today: in food, soap, lipstick, even newspaper ink. It’s been called the world’s most hated crop because of its association with deforestation in Southeast Asia. But despite boycott campaigns, the world uses more palm oil than any other vegetable oil – over 73 million tons in 2020.

That’s because palm oil is cheap. The plant that makes it, the African oil palm, can produce up to 10 times more oil per hectare than soybeans.

But as my new book on palm oil’s history shows, this controversial commodity hasn’t always been cheap. It became that way thanks to legacies of colonialism and exploitation that still shape today’s industry and that make it challenging to shift palm oil onto a more sustainable path.


Palm oil and its derivatives are ubiquitous in consumer products but can appear under of names, such as glyceryl and sodium lauryl sulfate.

From slavery to skin care

Palm oil has long been a staple food in a region stretching from Senegal to Angola along Africa’s western coast. It entered the global economy in the 1500s aboard ships engaged in the transatlantic slave trade.

During the deadly “middle passage” across the Atlantic, palm oil was a valued food that kept captives alive. As the author of a 1711 book noted, traders also smeared captives’ skin with palm oil to make them “look smooth, sleek, and young” before sending them to the auction block.

By the mid-1600s, Europeans were rubbing palm oil on their own skin, too. European writers, learning from African medicinal practices, claimed that palm oil “does the greatest cures upon such, as have bruises or strains on their bodies.” By the 1790s, British entrepreneurs were adding palm oil to soap for its reddish-orange color and violetlike scent.

After Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807, traders sought out legal products. In the following decades Britain slashed tariffs on palm oil and encouraged African states to focus on producing it. By 1840, palm oil was cheap enough to completely replace tallow or whale oil in such products as soap and candles.

As palm oil became increasingly common, it lost its reputation as a luxurious good. Exporters made it even cheaper with labor-saving methods that allowed palm fruit to ferment and soften, though the results were rancid. European buyers, in turn, applied new chemical processes to strip away foul odors and colors. The result was a bland substance that could be freely substituted for more expensive fats and oils.

Palm oil colonialism

By 1900, a new industry was gobbling up all kinds of oils: Margarine was invented in 1869 by the French chemist Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès as a cheap alternative to butter. It soon became a mainstay of working-class diets in Europe and North America.

Palm oil was first used to dye margarine yellow, but it turned out to be a perfect main ingredient because it stayed firm at room temperature and melted in the mouth, just like butter.

Margarine and soap magnates like Britain’s William Lever looked to Europe’s colonies in Africa for larger quantities of fresher, edible palm oil. However, African communities often refused to provide land for foreign companies because making oil by hand was still profitable for them. Colonial oil producers resorted to government coercion and outright violence to find labor.

They had more success in Southeast Asia, where they created a new oil palm plantation industry. Colonial rulers there gave plantation companies nearly unlimited access to land. The companies hired “coolies” – a derogatory European term for migrant workers from southern India, Indonesia and China, based on the Hindi word Kuli, an aboriginal tribal name, or the Tamil word kuli, for “wages.” These laborers toiled under coercive, low-paying contracts and discriminatory laws.

The oil palm itself also adapted to its new locale. While scattered palms grew to towering heights on African farms, in Asia they remained short in tight, orderly plantations that were easier to harvest efficiently. By 1940, plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia were exporting more palm oil than all of Africa.

A golden gift?

When Indonesia and Malaysia gained independence after World War II, plantation companies retained their access to cheap land. Indonesian authorities dubbed palm oil from their fast-growing plantation industry a “golden gift to the world.”

Palm oil consumption grew as competitors dropped away: first whale oil in the 1960s, then fats like tallow and lard. In the 1970s and 1980s, health concerns about tropical oils such as coconut and palm undercut demand in Europe and North America. But developing countries snapped up palm oil for frying and baking.

Plantations expanded to meet the demand. They kept costs down by recruiting poorly paid and often undocumented migrant workers from Indonesia, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Nepal, reproducing some of the abusive practices of the colonial era.

In the 1990s, U.S. and EU regulators moved to ban unhealthy trans fat, a type of fat found in partially hydrogenated oils, from foods. Manufacturers turned to palm oil as a cheap and effective substitute. From 2000 through 2020, EU palm oil imports more than doubled, while U.S. imports shot up almost tenfold. Many consumers didn’t even notice the switch.

Because palm oil was so inexpensive, manufacturers found new uses for it, such as replacing petroleum-based chemicals in soaps and cosmetics. It also became a biodiesel feedstock in Asia, although research suggests that making biodiesel from palms grown on newly cleared land increases greenhouse gas emissions instead of reducing them.

The EU is phasing out palm oil biofuels because of concerns over deforestation. Undeterred, Indonesia is working to increase the palm component in its biodiesel, which it markets as “Green Diesel,” and to develop other palm-based biofuels.

Boycott or reform?

Today there are enough oil palm plantations worldwide to cover an area larger than the state of Kansas, and the industry is still growing. It is concentrated in Asia, but plantations are spreading in Africa and Latin America. A 2019 investigation of one company in the Democratic Republic of Congo found dangerous conditions and abusive labor practices that echoed colonial-era palm oil projects.

Endangered animals have received more press. According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, tropical forest clearing for oil palm plantations threatens nearly 200 at-risk species, including orangutans, tigers and African forest elephants.

However, the IUCN and many other advocates argue that shifting away from palm oil is not the answer. Since oil palm is so productive, they contend, switching to other oil crops could cause even more harm because it would require more land to cultivate substitutes.

There are more just and sustainable ways to make palm oil. Studies show that small-scale agroforestry techniques, like those historically practiced in Africa and among Afro-descendant communities in South America, offer cost-effective ways to produce palm oil while protecting the environment.

The question is whether enough consumers care. Over 20% of palm oil produced in 2020 received certification from the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil, a nonprofit that includes oil palm producers and processors, consumer goods manufacturers, retailers, banks and advocacy groups. But barely half of it found buyers willing to pay a premium for sustainability. Until this changes, vulnerable communities and ecosystems will continue to bear the costs of cheap palm oil.

Jonathan E. Robins, Associate Professor of Global History, Michigan Technological University

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

Showtime’s “The One and Only Dick Gregory” pays tribute to the legend who left comedy for activism

Dick Gregory was a groundbreaking comedian who spoke truth to power. He used humor as a way of calling attention to politics and social issues. Andre Gaines’ terrific documentary, “The One and Only Dick Gregory,” debuting on Showtime on July 4, shows Gregory’s activism was more important to him than his comedy and wealth. In 1962, he went to Mississippi to help Medgar Evers with voting rights. “He could have sent a check,” someone in the documentary acknowledges, but Gregory put in the time and money to assist others — even at the expense of raising his family. 

“The One and Only Dick Gregory,” traces the comedian’s brilliant career from his groundbreaking set in 1961 at the Playboy club in Chicago — performing for a white, Southern audience, no less — and his appearance on “The Jack Parr Program,” which generated a big salary bump. He gained considerable fame and success but stopped performing to work for social justice in the civil rights movement. He was frequently jailed and spoke out against police brutality, the Vietnam war, and was under surveillance by the FBI. 

Later in life, Gregory reinvented himself yet again. He went on a fast (and lost nearly 200 pounds) to advocate about obesity, hunger and inequality. He eventually became an entrepreneur, developing the Bahamian diet, and working on weight-loss products while also advocating for vegetarian and vegan diets.

Gaines recounts all this and more (but not Gregory’s run for president) in “The One and Only Dick Gregory.” The film uses interviews, archival footage, film clips, and commentary by Chris Rock, Lena Waithe, Wanda Sykes, Harry Belafonte, and others. Gaines spoke with Salon about the legendary comedian and activist, and what he learned from Dick Gregory during the recent AFI DOCS festival. 

Where did you first see Dick Gregory? What do you recall about him? 

I was child of the ’80s, and Dick Gregory had this Bahamian diet, which was the answer to Slim Fast, and was a slim-slow system. Pretty much every Black family had this shake — it was a powder that you mix with juice or water — and he was doing a multi-level marketing thing. It was super-popular, and mentioned in “House Party,” and “Martin” and “Seinfeld.” That was my first introduction to him — as a drink. I didn’t know hm as the contemporary comedian of my youth. That was Bill Cosby and “The Cosby Show.” I knew about Richard Pryor, and Eddie Murphy. It was comedy we were not allowed to listen to as kids. 

Later in life, as an adult grad student at NYU film school, I discovered Dick Gregory as this comedian and a precursor to Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor. Their styles were sort of ripping off this guy. I fell in love with [Gregory’s] work. In 2008, when Barack Obama first ran for president, there was something called “State of the Black Union,” which was an annual symposium of America’s best Black thinkers, politicians, academics, etc. that would get together and discuss the state and condition that Black America was in. Dick Gregory was on this panel, and he brought the whole house down. He was incredible. Really, really funny, poignant, heartfelt and, at the same time, hilarious. He had an incredible gift and technique and skill. He was able to outshine everyone on that panel, and I thought I’ve got to make a movie about him. 

So, you didn’t you know his whole story when you started the project? What did you learn from immersing yourself in his life? You didn’t even get to his running for president. 

Yeah, we had to take that [running for president] out. The funny thing is that so many people who knew Dick Gregory, and felt that they knew his story, were amazed by what they didn’t know after watching our film. That was really astounding to discover. Even his own children didn’t know all of the facets of their father’s life. A lot of people, including his colleagues, managers, agents, and publicists did not know every facet of Dick Gregory’s life.

Obviously, it was such an enormous burden to try to adequately tell this story in a single film. Had I known the vastness of Dick Gregory’s life I might not have volunteered to do this project. I was fascinated with the man. I loved him. He was an incredible mentor and a brilliant, brilliant mind. And he was fun to be around. He would curse you out, then tell a joke and embrace you, and ask you how your family was doing all in the same breath. It was a joy to be around him and get to know him. But the heavy lift, and the complicated nature of his many lives — which we couldn’t adequate cover in two hours — was really complex. 

How did Gregory inspire you, or influence your behavior?

When you look at a life like Dick Gregory’s — but there really was no other life like Dick Gregory’s; he was the one and only Dick Gregory, which is why we named the film that — you think, Man, I need to do more. Most of us are preoccupied with a slew of mundane tasks on a daily basis, responding to email and social media. Our lives are occupied with us staring down at a phone and considering that as getting something done. But the reality is that there is so much more than you can do to make a difference. Take one of Dick Gregory’s lives, or the subset of one of those lives, and use that as tool or a blueprint for yourself. He inspired me not just as a storyteller, but as a man, particularly as a Black man in America, to spend my time doing a lot more. He inspired me to do and was impressed upon when first meeting him, was being concerned with the lives of others. 

There is a line Gregory has in the film about the true test of a man is to strip away everything he has to see his real worth. It was as if he was foreshadowing what would happen to him. What observations do you have about his highs and lows? 

When you look at most of these stories, when it relates to entertainers making a lot of money and losing it, it has to do with an accountant or an agent or manager ripping them off and having them sign contracts that are not in their favor. Or when you hear stories of musicians or comedians, you hear about them taking their millions and squandering their money on drugs, or alcohol, or addictions to gambling or women, or whatever vices that they had. Dick Gregory is none of that. The uniqueness of his story is that he could have gone on and continued to make millions of dollars. At the time, he was making more money than Frank Sinatra. But Gregory was giving the money away. His mismanagement of it as a businessman had more to do with the fact that he didn’t put value in the money he was making. The value was for the sacrifice for the movement. He wasn’t squandering it in scandalous vices, like drugs, alcohol, gambling or women. He was literally giving it away. 

Because he was going down to these marches and protests in the South, that meant that the gigs he had booked anywhere in the world were being lost. They filled those [gigs] with Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor, so literally by Gregory abandoning his career to fight for the movement, he’s launching the careers of these titans — comedians who went on to open the doors for Eddie Murphy, Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock. His sacrifices were noble, but they did have consequences in his personal life, and his family life, and his pocketbook.

I was impressed how magnanimous Gregory was. Do you think he always operated in everyone’s best interest? He helped the cause — but at what cost? The FBI was after him. 

We formulated, as a filmmaking team, a narrative question that we would theoretically answer in the film: What did it cost him? When you talk to a lot of these comedians and entertainers — Chris Rock, Nick Cannon, etc. — they appreciated and accepted the noble sacrifices that Dick Gregory made. But pretty much anyone you talk to, is not willing to make that degree of sacrifice themselves. Dave Chappelle says it best at the end of the film. It’s a level of sacrifice that is not always required of every artist, but when you see people who do that, you have to praise them and give them as much respect, and honor, and attention as you possibly can to say thank you for what they did so we can enjoy the luxuries that we enjoy now. Dick Gregory stands alone as the one entertainer who abandoned it all and stepped away from it entirely to fight for the movement. We pay homage to that. And reiterating what I was saying about the consequences, something is going to be neglected. You can’t give 100-150% of yourself to any one thing without something falling apart to some degree. Without his wife Lilian there as the cornerstone of the family, Dick Gregory would not have been able to be the man we know and see in this film. 

Likewise, there are certainly parallels drawn in the film between then and now. You contrast the Los Angeles riots and other scenes of unrest with Ferguson and Minneapolis. Things have not changed enough in Dick’s lifetime. How do you think we are continuing the fight that Gregory started? 

He would often say to me that the universe is cyclical. What’s past is prologue and what is present is what we are going to see in future. He would always laud the progress that we made and felt that not acknowledging the progress we made is a disservice and disrespectful to the freedom fighters who got us here in the first place, himself included. What I wanted to do as the director was really show the parallel of what he was saying as far back as 1963 to what we are dealing with now in 2020 and 2021. “The fight just continues,” he would always say. It is a fight that is going to continue, and what we have to do is follow the path of our ancestors, but also look toward the future and try to understand how to rectify some of the mistakes of our past.

He would say America is a country with no mother. Your mom would clean out your ears, and nose and wash you up and put you in a new suit and send you out into this world. But America is this place that has no Mother. It has never cleaned up the filth of its past. It just put on a new suit and went out to the world still covered in the same stink that it had from the past. It is our job to shed light on that and clean it up and create a better future for our kids That was inspiration, that so many folks in the industry, entertainers, and activists now see this as call for action. 

Your film creates a legacy for Gregory. Some folks remember him for his humor, others for his activism, and others for being an entrepreneur and his advocacy. He was always in someone’s eye, but he had different impacts. What was your agenda?

That was not the impetus to start the film, but it was definitely the motivator to finish it. He had not gotten his due. There were several filmmakers who attempted to tell his story over the decades, and they were not able to find the financing. My company, Cinemation, self-financed it until Showtime purchased it. For a lot of these filmmakers, they were not able to pin down this story because it was still a work in progress. So, it was hard to find an ending. It was the right place, right time for me, but once I started to lift up the hood and talk to these other filmmakers and talk to entertainers and comedians, from Judd Apatow and Bill Maher, and Rob Schneider, and Lawrence O’Donnell to Chris Rock, W. Kamau Bell, and Dave Chappelle, that love this man — and considered him a guru and mentor and provided a road map for their careers — I realized how much impact that he had on everyone. It was my duty to get this to the finish line.  

I was inspired by his need to perform at the Playboy club — that he worked too hard to get here to turn this gig down. If he had walked away, he wouldn’t have the career he did. 

It was a metaphor for his life. He was kind of this “celebrity celebrity.” When you talk to celebrities, the “celebrity celebrity” they all talk about is like, Michael Jackson, who was larger than life. But Michael Jackson called on Dick Gregory and deferred to him. Muhammad Ali deferred to Dick Gregory and his guidance and the influence that he had. They reached out to him when they needed spiritual or nutritional support, or to get off drugs, or get their health back. He was this “celebrity celebrity.” There is a story we couldn’t put in the film about the first time Nelson Mandela met Dick Gregory, and Dick Gregory was bowing to Nelson Mandela, and he instead, turned around and bowed down to Dick Gregory and kissed his feet. This story about how somebody like Nelson Mandela would have a degree of deference for what Dick Gregory provided to this world is a testament to the power of what it is that Dick Gregory imbued upon the sacrifices he made for the rest of us.

“The One and Only Dick Gregory” airs Sunday, July 4 at 9 p.m. on Showtime.

The humble water heater could be the savior of our energy infrastructure woes

There’s widespread agreement that in order to wean humanity off of climate-altering fossil fuels, we should switch over to renewable sources of electricity. Yet one of the biggest problems with renewables is logistical: unlike a gas power plant, you can’t simply turn the flow of wind or solar energy on or off; those energy sources come and go as nature pleases.

As a result, the question of how to store surplus wind and solar power for when it’s needed is more timely than ever. Unfortunately, many of the solutions being advanced only create new problems, and frequently cost more than necessary. And perhaps the best solution for energy savings — and one that would avoid having to build any new dams to facilitate energy storage — is sitting right under noses. Or, more accurately, it is sitting in our closets and basements.

The big battery problem

One flashy idea for storing energy goes something like this: dam a river, use “free” surplus green power to pump that water up to another higher dam; then, when electricity is needed, release that water back down to the lower dam, spinning a generator along the way. The industry jargon for this set-up is “pumped-storage hydro“. It is, in effect, a big, big battery.

At first blush, this sounds almost elegant: Use clean energy to store more clean energy. Even some environmental groups are getting seduced.

But there are several snakes in the garden. First, these dams are destructive: physically, ecologically, and culturally. Making matters worse, about a quarter of the energy is cannibalized to do all that pumping.

Adding insult to injury, immense amounts of precious water are lost by evaporation from the idling reservoirs. Climate change is making this worse. On the Arizona/Nevada border, water levels at Lake Mead — which is the downstream collection point for the Colorado basin — have fallen to less than a third of its capacity; hence, officials are looking at hydroelectric disruptions due to severe drought going into this summer and beyond. More water withdrawals, especially into enormous reservoirs that experience significant evaporation, accelerate the problem.

Ironically, this situation pushes the electric grid back toward costlier and dirtier gas-fired power plants. And these projects cost a fortune. 

One high-profile proposal initially sought to dam the Little Colorado River upstream from its breathtaking confluence with the main Colorado, submerging a popular spot in the heart of Grand Canyon country.

About 30,000 people float “The Canyon” each year, and a few days into the trip many pause where these rivers meet to cool off and marvel at the layer cake of cinnabar cliffs sandwiched between azure sky and turquoise pools. I’ve had the good fortune to visit this hallowed place, twice, first with my father and later in life with my son. More importantly, this site has deep significance to the Hopi and Navajo peoples. 

A “lower-impact” variant of the project, known as Big Canyon, was offered after the initial proposal met stiff resistance. It entails 4 miles of dam and other water-retention structures (9 reservoirs in all), 6 miles of water transport infrastructure, and two 14-mile-long high-voltage transmission lines to shunt the power gridward.

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The project’s estimated 3.6 billion watts is a pile of power. The National Hydroelectric Power Association predictably calls such projects “affordable.” Yet, the results from past endeavors imply a price tag of $10 to $20 billion for Big Canyon. Even repurposing existing infrastructure, as has been proposed for the Hoover Dam, would cost many billions.

A dam mistake?

The technological enthusiasm underpinning this undertaking is reminiscent of a stubborn syndrome that existed until the 1970s, before OPEC woke the world up to the problems of energy dependency. In those days, energy planners reflexively gravitated towards huge, capital-intensive supply-side solutions, bypassing more elegant and dispersed “demand-side” options for instead proactively reducing the energy needed to get the job done. 

A central pillar of the early energy efficiency movement of the 1970s was the idea of avoiding the construction of new electric power plants by instead deploying scores of efficient light bulbs, refrigerators, etc. One such project, dubbed “Merlin,” sought to make a California power plant disappear by making the rest of the state more energy-efficient. And it cost a fraction of a new power plant.

Fast forward 50 years and we have succeeded. Energy use per unit of economic activity is down by more than half, compared to 1970s practices. Power plants were indeed cancelled. 

And now, in service of the goal of decarbonizing the remaining energy required to meet our needs, we’re producing lots and lots of renewable power to fill the remaining gap. We’re even beginning to have a surplus, meaning that we sometimes generate more than can be instantly consumed. Hence the big dams.

Again today, there is a better way … with a twist: trim and shift the demand for energy and target storage to where it’s needed. It’s Merlin 2.0.

Enter the humble water heater. Pulling about 5,000 watts of power, conventional electric water heaters use a lot of power. They are, in other words, a prime target for reforming the grid.

Here is how such an energy-saving reform might work: First, by nudging the operating times for water heaters from peak hours in a coordinated manner; second, by switching residents over to energy-efficient heat pump water heaters. Heat pump water heaters have been around for decades, but are just now catching on in the United States.

Here’s how it works. The heat pump water heater is like a refrigerator running in reverse. Instead of taking heat out of the unit (cooling) and dumping it into the nearby room air, the heat pump water heater dumps heat from the air around it into the water. This is vastly more efficient than heating water in the old way, with a high-wattage electric coil.

There is actually a little-known tradition, going back to the late 1930s, of electric companies managing water heaters to avoid short-squeezes on the grid during times of peak consumption. Because water can be kept hot so long, consumers don’t even notice. Originally this was done with timers, later via radio signals, and today through the cloud. And, thanks to smart meters that track energy use by the minute, demand-shifts can be very precisely targeted and valued. Water heaters, reborn as big thermal batteries, are an excellent means by which lots of clean power can be strategically banked for later use. Hundreds of thousands of water heaters have already been quietly hooked up this way. This is just the tip of the potential iceberg.

Deploying one million more “flexible” water heaters in the United States would spare the Little Colorado. (Notably, around 10 million water heaters are purchased nationwide each year; one million water heaters is just 10 percent of that). The price tag would be a tiny fraction of that to build the disruptive Big Canyon hydro project, and also less costly than deploying enormous banks of batteries into the grid. Using far more efficient heat pump water heaters would still cost less (particularly the less-costly plug-in units coming to market this year, which avoid the need for electrical upgrades) and spread the benefits to four-times as many homes, displacing proportionately more carbon emissions and saving more people more money on their power bills.

As a thought experiment, were all U.S. homes converted to heat pump water heaters, reductions of 135 million metric tonnes of CO2 each year would be achieved (equivalent to that of about 30 million cars) and enough energy storage capacity would be available to avoid 20 Big Canyon projects.

This approach can be deployed far faster than dam construction, and free of protest (except perhaps from dam builders). It’s also more resilient. During last winter’s megastorms, the Big Canyon project would have provided no relief to those isolated in power networks such as the one that vexed Texas. And now this summer, we’re reminded that heatwaves can boost demand beyond the grid’s capacity even in less isolated power networks. The resulting grid congestion has already become an impediment to renewable energy development in many parts of the country. Water heaters are always local.

As we continue to decarbonize our energy systems, other flexible customer-side strategies can be supported using cash incentives for consumers who are willing to voluntarily flex their demand. Among these, usage can be shifted to times when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing via dynamic electric-vehicle charging, smart thermostats, and timed pool pumps, sending even more renewable electrons to homes while enhancing the power network’s reliability.

It’s the smart grid in action.

My witch-hunt history, and America’s: A personal journey to 1692

Last month, on the weekend of the summer solstice, I took my teenage kids to a place known as Proctor’s Ledge, which today sits in a modest residential neighborhood on the outskirts of Salem, Massachusetts. It’s not a completely unknown spot or anything: Google Maps will find it for you, and it’s mentioned in a few of the more detailed guides to Salem and its distinctive history. 

But Proctor’s Ledge, both geographically and conceptually, sits well outside the tourist economy of downtown Salem, which is built around all sorts of tangential connections to the famous witch trials and even more so on unrelated epiphenomena, including ghost-hunting walking tours, a movie-monster museum and the present-day “witches” or Wiccans who have made Salem into their unofficial capital. There are various more or less valid ways to interpret what went wrong in the sparsely populated villages of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1692, but the theory that it had anything to do with spiritual practices or folk medicine or fortune-telling is pretty far down the list.

There’s nothing to buy at Proctor’s Ledge. There’s no historical plaque to explain why the place is important. When we visited, on a sunny Sunday afternoon, there was nobody else there at all. It’s a small hill or outcropping, about 30 yards behind the rear parking lot of a Walgreens store. Most of the hill is private property, but at some point the city of Salem bought a few hundred square feet of land facing the street and, after some years of civic hesitation, commissioned a modest memorial by landscape architect Martha Lyon, which was dedicated in 2017. Its primary element is a low, semicircular stone wall with 19 names and a series of dates inscribed on it at regular intervals. A few feet in front of the wall a lone gingko tree has been planted, with a motto carved at its base: WE REMEMBER.

That’s a useful profession of faith, and in that context I found it very moving. But what we actually choose to remember, and what sense we can make of the past, is a question that hangs over all of history. Salem didn’t want to remember the grisly details of its past for a long time, and only in the last decade have researchers arrived at a consensus: Proctor’s Ledge is where 19 of the 20 people executed for witchcraft during the hysteria of 1692 were hanged. (The 20th was an 81-year-old man named Giles Corey, who was crushed to death beneath a pile of stones, a process that took three or four days. Toward the end, according to eyewitnesses, his tongue was forced out of his mouth. The presiding magistrate pushed it back in with his cane.) 

In its simplicity and its refusal to explain itself, Lyon’s memorial is a highly effective tribute to the inescapable physical reality of what happened in Salem. This quiet, nondescript place, which carries no discernible echo of the crimes committed there, creates an opportunity to contemplate one of the formative events of American history and the American consciousness, which struck some observers as a metaphor even while it was happening, and which remains poorly understood nearly 330 years later. 

It’s almost too easy to say that the Salem pattern of cruel but haphazard persecution, based on imaginary evidence, repeats itself throughout American history. Or to observe that those who protest that they are the victims of a “witch hunt” — one prominent contemporary figure comes to mind — are often the same people who inhabit a paranoid universe populated by limitless conspiracies and unseen enemies, and who make outlandish accusations supported by the modern equivalent of “spectral evidence,” which the limited minds of normies cannot comprehend.

All that is clearly true, but I have personal reasons for perceiving the Salem witch hunt (as some historians also do) in more intimate terms, as an episode of communal self-destruction in which neighbors, friends and family members turned against each other, seizing on the most damaging accusations available in 17th-century Puritan society as a way to settle old grudges, avenge perceived injuries and wreak an especially vicious form of social justice. 

Is it stretching the analogy too far to say that the same thing is happening now in American society — or at least in the American polity, which is not exactly the same thing — on a grand scale? Rather than seeing each other as combatants in the rule-bound and ritualistic arena of constitutional politics, so-called conservatives and liberals now perceive each other as irredeemably evil, each accusing the other of spreading pernicious lies, plotting to destroy democracy and abandoning shared tenets of “Americanism.” 

I’m not arguing that “both sides” are morally equivalent. They’re definitely not, and everyone reading this will hold an opinion on who is good and who is evil. I’m saying that if we set that question aside for a moment, we can see more clearly that essential conflicts and contradictions about the nature of American community, which came to the surface in Salem and have done so again now, have in fact been present the whole time. 

My kids and I went to Proctor’s Ledge partly because of what didn’t happen there. As my mother’s family history has long maintained, and genealogical research has confirmed, we are direct descendants of Abigail Faulkner, something of a witch-trials celebrity. You can hardly be whiter than I am, but in a sense I’m a product of a mixed marriage: My father came to America from Ireland as a teenager, and I know very little about his grandparents beyond their names and the towns where they lived. My mother was an old-line WASP whose ancestry can easily be traced back to 16th-century England, and in some cases further than that.

Abigail’s husband, Francis Faulkner, was one of the richest men in Andover, a few miles northwest of Salem. His parents are recorded as the first couple married in the Massachusetts colony, and his father Edmund had “purchased” the territory where Andover now stands from a Native American leader called Cutshamache, reportedly for “twenty gallons of rum and a red coat.” (I do not believe I am responsible for the deeds of my ancestors, but I’m responsible for facing the truth about them. That account was not easy to read.)

Our family catches a break with Abigail’s father, the Rev. Francis Dane, who was then the elderly pastor in the North Parish of Andover (today the separate village of North Andover) and by any standard one of the true heroes of that shameful episode. Francis had been educated at Cambridge before emigrating to America, at a time when relatively few colonists could read or write, and from the beginning he refused to take part in the witch hunt, arguing that “spectral evidence” was nonsense and that the confessions of accused witches were unreliable, since “the extreme urgency that was used with some of them … and the fear they were then under, hath been an inducement to them to admit such things.”

As repayment for standing up against bullshit evidence and confessions extracted under torture, Dane himself and numerous family members were accused of witchcraft in what looks an awful lot, from a 21st-century vantage point, like a “populist” revolt against the “cultural elite.” Dane’s extended family, in fact, accounted for about one-third of all the people accused in Salem and Andover, although his daughter Abigail — my sixth great-grandmother, as genealogy software reckons these things — was the only close relative to be tried and convicted. (Another daughter, Elizabeth Johnson, and a daughter-in-law, Deliverance Dane, both confessed to witchcraft and accused various others.) 

Abigail’s name would surely be on the Proctor’s Ledge memorial today if she hadn’t been pregnant at the time. She remained in the Salem jail on a stay of execution while everyone else convicted in August and September of 1692 went to the gallows in the mass hanging of Sept. 22. By the time she gave birth to her son the following March — she named him Ammi Ruhamah, Hebrew names from the book of Hosea taken to mean “the mercy of God’s people” — she and most other surviving accused witches had been released, the court that had handed down the death sentences had been recalled, and Salem and the surrounding communities had already begun the project of organized forgetting. 

In researching this article, I’ve encountered several historical or genealogical accounts of prominent Salem and Andover families that pass over the events of 1692 as if they hadn’t happened at all, or mention them only in footnotes as an irrelevant curiosity. I also learned what I should have suspected already, which is that my mother’s family history, while understandably celebrating Abigail Faulkner and her father as illustrious forebears, had forgotten or repressed other connections. 

The witch hysteria of 1692 took place in a small, interconnected community, whose members had only recently “acquired” their land from those who had lived there for centuries and were facing a certain amount of blowback. Native American raiders had burned down the house of Edmund Faulkner, Abigail’s father-in-law, during King Philip’s War in 1676. (There was certainly some justice in that, although that conflict ended in total catastrophe for the indigenous people of New England.) I am descended from, or otherwise related to, a great many of the white settlers who lived in that place at that time, and it’s useless to pretend that any of them, or any of us, are innocent of that history.

I didn’t know when we visited Proctor’s Ledge that another direct ancestor, an eighth great-grandfather named Moses Tyler, was one of the principal accusers in Andover, personally responsible for sending several of the 19 convicted witches to their deaths. (The history of the Tyler family is too tangled to unravel here — but yes, I do have a theory: Moses was pursuing vengeance against those he believed had wronged his father.) I also didn’t know that one of the people Moses sent to the gallows — working with, or through, his teenage stepdaughter Martha Sprague, one of the most ambiguous figures in this drama — was a 55-year-old widow named Mary Parker.

Mary was accused, tried, convicted and put to death within a span of three weeks, one of the eight people hanged in the mass execution of Sept. 22, 1692. (Said the Rev. Nicholas Noyes, presiding chaplain of the witch trials, “What a sad thing it is to see eight firebrands of hell hanging there.”) Her case remains puzzling even by Salem standards, and some scholars have suggested she was the victim not merely of false testimony but also mistaken identity. Having looked into it a little, I doubt that’s the case, but in any event where Abigail Faulkner was lucky, Mary Parker was disastrously unlucky. 

Mary’s name appears on the 15th of the 19 stones at Proctor’s Ledge. Just a few days ago I put together clear evidence that she too was a direct ancestor, a fact not mentioned in any of the existing genealogical or documentary accounts of my WASP family. I suppose on our Sunday visit we paid tribute to her the best way we could, without knowing we were related. Because what, after all, does that really mean?

Sohla’s magic ratio for turning any fruit into a crumble

Every month, in Off-Script With Sohla, pro chef and flavor whisperer Sohla El-Waylly will introduce you to a must-know cooking technique — and then teach you how to detour toward new adventures.

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When playing around with dessert, you usually have to tread carefully. Swap brown sugar for white sugar in a delicate chiffon cake, and you’ll change the moisture, the pH, the way the leavening reacts in the batter . . . in other words, it’ll be a hot mess. But fruit crumbles are endlessly forgivable, no structural integrity necessary. You can run wild and free and create whatever crumble is calling your name. Today I’ll show you how.

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The Filling

Fruit

Fun thing about fruit — it’s mostly water. Because plump blueberries, fuzzy peaches, and suggestive cherries are all just tasty little water balloons, they mostly act in the same way. Which means all you need is a scale (you’ll love it! I promise!) and my golden ratio:

1,000 grams fruit 
100 grams sweetener 
20 grams starch 

Because most fruits have roughly the same water content, they need roughly the same amounts of sugar and starch to cook up into a saucy filling. I like 10% sugar and 2% starch, based on any given weight of fruit. Those amounts can be tweaked, depending on how sweet or juicy your fruit is and how thickly set you like your filling, but that’s a solid place to start.

Sure, I could offer up volume measurements for the fruit — but that would take away your ability to riff; 1 cup of blueberries will not be the same weight as 1 cup of sliced peaches or 1 cup of pitted cherries, so the only way to spread your wings is to use a scale.

Frozen fruit works just as well as fresh. Why, you wonder? Frozen fruit is processed at the peak of freshness, and is often more flavorful than out-of-season fresh fruit. You can bake with still-frozen fruit, but I prefer to thaw it first, so the edges of my crumble don’t overbake while the center is catching up. And be sure to use all the juices that weep out of the thawed fruit (frozen fruit isn’t juicier than fresh, but the process of freezing and thawing breaks down the fruit, so it may appear as such).

Sweetener

Sugar doesn’t just sweeten a dessert; it adds to the texture and stability, too. For my Go-To Vanilla Pound Cake, if you try something seemingly innocent, like reducing the sugar by 1/2 cup, your resulting cake won’t be as fluffy, and it’ll quickly grow tough with the additional folds needed for mix-ins. If a chocolate chip cookie calls for dark brown sugar and you swap in light, the acidity of the cookie dough will decrease, changing the way the baking soda reacts and affecting its lifting powers.

Luckily, I don’t care how stable my fruit crumble is (not something I can say about any other aspect of my life). If it grows thick after sweetening with honey, I can get down with that. If ultra-ripe strawberries create an extra juicy filling, I’ll just funnel it into my mouth. Unlike a fruit pie, which needs a higher ratio of starch and sugar, not only to be sliceable but also to avoid a soggy bottom, crumbles are blissfully spoonable.

This is one recipe where the sweetener is primarily for sweetening. OK, and for body, too — so don’t get too crazy and omit or swap the sweetener completely for a sugar-free alternative, like xylitol or stevia. My recipe uses the minimum amount of sugar needed. Beyond that, go wild.

Maple syrup and brown sugar for a spiced pear crumble? That can get it! Coconut sugar with pineapple and a splash of rum for a crumble with toasty tropical vibes? Please do! Treat the measurement for the sweetener as a starting point, add more to taste, and try out various combos to your heart’s content.

Starch

Starch helps thicken the juices released by the fruit into a glossy, jammy sauce. Without it, your fruit will be swimming in runny, hot juice, and that’s no fun.

Truly any starch will do, from regular all-purpose flour to sticky sweet-potato starch — but think about how each starch behaves and whether that’s gonna get along with your crumble hopes and dreams. Flour can get, well, floury. That’s why most recipes with cooked fruit fillings, such as those in a crumble, cobbler, or pie, call for either cornstarch, arrowroot, or tapioca starch. They all cook up relatively flavorless, allowing the fruit to shine.

I prefer tapioca starch, which thickens at a lower temperature than cornstarch. This means I only have to cook my crumble until I see it bubbling around the edges to know that the starch is fully hydrated and activated. On the other hand, a cornstarch-thickened crumble needs to be baked until you see bubbles in the center of the dish, which requires you to bake it longer, losing some of that fresh fruit goodness. Another added bonus of tapioca starch is that it sets into a clear, smooth gel, while cornstarch can become murky and gloopy.

Ultimately, use what you’ve got, but know that there are different gelatinization temperatures for various starches, and they each thicken the fruit juices in their own way.

Bonuses

Lemon juice and a big pinch of kosher salt will never disappoint, but think outside the box and get creative with flavors. In-season fruit is especially floral, so try accenting that with a little dose of rose water, orange blossom water, or almond extract. Add brightness with something unconventional, like ground coriander or sumac. Whatever your choice, use a light hand, so you never overwhelm the flavors of the fruit.

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The Topping

This is what we’re here for! Without a buttery, crumbly, crunchy topping, would this even qualify as dessert? As I’ve confessed with my Black & White Pound Cake, I like a generous quantity of big boulders whenever streusel is involved.

Now, remember when I said the key to riffing with the fruit filling is measuring by weight? Plot twist: For the crumble, volume is preferable. Here’s why:

There’s a misconception that, when it comes to baking, weight is king. Using a scale does ensure precision and consistency — however, to fully understand a recipe and take it off-script, it helps to look at both weight and volume. For this crumble, what matters is the amount of space each ingredient takes up in the mixture. Here’s my streusel strategy:

1 1/2 cups flour 
2/3 cup granulated sweetener 
2/3 cup textural mix-in 
10 tablespoons fat 

Swap up to 1/2 cup of flour for another flavorful powder, such as cocoa, matcha, powdered freeze-dried fruit, kinako flour, cornmeal, even blitzed-up Cheez-Its. (Any more and your mix won’t have enough structure.)

Use any granulated sweetener, like sugar of any shade, coconut sugar, or grated piloncillo. Avoid liquid sweeteners, which can make the crumble chewy. Just keep in mind that the darker the sugar, the faster the crumble will brown, so use a foil shield if the crumble begins to get too dark.

For the textural mix-in, think granola vibes: nuts, seeds, oats, cornflakes, or wheat bran. No need to toast them in advance; they will have plenty of time to get roasty in the oven.

Butter is my choice of fat for crumbles. It’s super flavorful and solid at room temperature, so you’ll end up with a streusel that readily clumps together and doesn’t get greasy after baking. However, you can swap out up to half the butter for another fat, to bring in some extra flavor and dimension. Try extra-virgin olive oil, virgin coconut oil, or even duck fat.

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What Are You Waiting For?

Now that you know the basics, go forth! Take fruit crumbles off-script with confidence. Get started with one of my two recipes below to hone your skills. Then let me know in the comments what combinations you’re dreaming up.

Rep. Paul Gosar’s sister tells CNN he should be expelled from Congress

One Republican in the House of Representatives was slammed by his own sister on CNN as “hateful and bigoted.”

“Whether it’s lying about the 2020 election, distorting the events of Jan. 6 or sharing the stage with a Holocaust denier, far-right Congressman Paul Gosar is making a name for himself as one of the most conspiracy-addled Republicans in Congress,” CNN’s Pamela Brown reported. “In a new fundraising email obtained by a Washington Post reporter, Gosar baselessly says the FBI may have had a hand in planning and carrying out the Capitol attack. Again, that is baseless. If the Arizona congressman actually believed this inside-job nonsense and wanted to get to the bottom of it, then why did he vote against investigating the attack, twice?”

For analysis, Brown interviewed Jennifer Gosar, the congressman’s sister.

When you hear everything I just laid out, what is your visceral reaction?” Brown asked.

“My visceral reaction is disgust. It’s nausea and loathing,” Jennifer Gosar replied. “I do not understand why these people continue to work in Congress.”

“You’ve said that your brother is partly responsible for inciting the Jan. 6 attack. I mean, what do you make of his revisionism and conspiracies about that day?” Brown asked.

“Again, nausea-worthy. It’s despicable and it’s really cynical because Paul uses this to fundraise,” Jennifer Gosar replied.

The congressman’s sister offered a theory on what might work to bring her brother back to reality.

“I think censure, expulsion and investigation for criminal activity are the things that, actually, would wake my brother up. I feel my brother to be addicted to control, domination and power. So in that respect, holding him accountable is the only way to get this person’s attention. And as you’ve seen and covered, you know, CNN has covered this for some time … his actions are only becoming more and more outrageous, egregious and disgusting.”

Brown asked what she would say to her brother.

“I wouldn’t communicate with him. I don’t — you know, i don’t align myself with the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys or any other hate group,” Jennifer Gosar noted. “Why would I ally with him — just because we share DNA? I mean, I don’t — I don’t wish to speak with him.”

Watch: