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It’s not voter suppression, stupid. The GOP’s new — and old — weapon is vote nullification

It’s quite a relief to see President Biden overseas acting like a normal president after the last four years of embarrassment on the world stage. Our traditional allies also appear to be exhaling for the first time since November of 2016 because they know that the U.S., with all of its flaws, is at least in the hands of someone who has a grasp of the job requirements. The latest Pew survey shows that the people of other countries are relieved as well. The numbers have done shifted 180 degrees since Trump left office. 

They can’t be completely reassured, of course, since Trump continues to insist that he is the true president in exile as he issues pseudo-tweets from his lavish golfing palaces and continues to spread the Big Lie. Things are still weird enough here in America that I’m sure the rest of the world still has its guard up. As anyone following events closely knows, there is something very nefarious going on around the country that could upend this brief moment of semi-normality. And while it’s taken a while for many in the media to grasp the novel nature of this latest threat, they are now getting up to speed. Take Fred Hiatt of the Washington Post, who wrote an editorial over the weekend in which he compared the Republicans to termites, “destructive but largely unseen, anti-democracy forces around the country are gnawing at the foundations of America’s free and fair elections.”

State by state, the termites are trying to change the rules to allow Donald Trump or someone like him to succeed in 2024 where Trump tried and failed in 2020: to steal an election that he lost.

That’s putting it starkly — but honestly: It is exactly what Republicans are planning to do.

Most importantly, Hiatt and others in the media are belatedly grappling with the reality that the civil rights groups and Democratic Party officials who have been fighting for the right to vote for years don’t have a lot of experience dealing with this specific type of assault on the franchise. Voter suppression is sadly familiar in American political life. Vote nullification, however, is not. And that’s what all these new laws and regulations are designed to do. If the vote doesn’t go their way, they are putting mechanisms in place to simply nullify the results through a complex set of “legal” maneuvers.

For the most part, at least since the civil rights movement, local and state elections officials have operated in a non-partisan fashion, But Trump’s all-out attempt to cajole, threaten and intimidate officials into stealing the vote for him in close states has opened the floodgates to anti-democratic activity all over the country. Republicans may not have folded in 2020 but they are making sure there are legal means to do it in 2022 and 2024. And some of those means are just rank intimidation. They have put in place criminal sanctions and huge fines for decisions undertaken by election officials and are handing power to partisan players in legislatures across the country. The consequences are already being felt, as the AP reports in an article amusingly headlined, “Exodus of Election Officials Raises Concerns of Partisanship”: 

After facing threats and intimidation during the 2020 presidential election and its aftermath, and now the potential of new punishments in certain states, county officials who run elections are quitting or retiring early. The once quiet job of election administration has become a political minefield thanks to the baseless claims of widespread fraud that continue to be pushed by many in the Republican Party.

Trump’s despicable behavior is the proximate cause of all this, of course. He has accused his political rivals of doing what he and his henchman are planning to do going forward. It’s enough to give you a migraine. But I happened to be reading the new biography of the GOP éminence grise James Baker III by the New Yorker’s Susan Glasser and the New York Times’ Peter Baker this weekend and was struck by the fact that we have thought so little about the precedent that the entire GOP establishment set when they pulled out every stop to make sure George W. Bush prevailed in the 2000 election despite his loss of the popular vote, something which had only happened once, more than a century before.

From the very beginning, Baker insisted that the system was rigged because the rules stated that manual re-counting done by representatives of both parties, overseen by non-partisan officials and even eventually sanctioned by judges themselves, was an attempt to “divine the intent of the voter.” Baker also accused the other side of wanting to keep counting until they magically found the votes they needed. The famous “Brooks Brothers Riot” was all about intimidating voting officials into stopping the count — and it worked.

It was a very close election in Florida, which just happened to be run at the time by Jeb Bush, and there is a mountain of evidence that Baker and the rest of the Republicans ruthlessly used every lever they had available, some of it hugely unethical. For example, the Baker book reveals that he got word of a critical Florida Supreme Court decision before it was announced. Baker was sure from the very beginning that the Supreme Court would decide the outcome, something which most legal scholars assumed was completely out of the question, and he plotted the strategy on that basis. They were not willing to count the votes under the laws that existed in the state before the election.

In 2000, the Republican establishment was in charge of the vote nullification process and they brought in all their heavy hitters including three lawyers who are now on the Supreme Court. They were methodical and professional and the entire party banded together to make it happen. In 2020, it was Trump and a motley crew led by Rudy Giuliani while the establishment sat it out. Everyone professed astonishment that he would undermine the electoral process this way. But it wasn’t exactly unprecedented, was it?

Considering what they did when it was someone they all wanted to see in the White House, from the lowliest intern pounding on the doors of that counting room in Miami to the five Republicans Supreme Court justices, I don’t think we should be too surprised that Republicans are happy to let Trump and his MAGA crew rig the election apparatus in important swing states. They know it will come in handy someday. 

Amazon’s labor exploitation is a return to the 1920s — and unions are our best hope out

There is perhaps no clearer manifestation of how America is failing the working class than Amazon. 

In the blink of an eye, Amazon has become the largest and wealthiest logistics company the world has ever seen. Millions of Americans work in warehouse, shipping and package delivery jobs, where Amazon heavily dominates its competitors. The company will soon be the nation’s largest employer, redefining both the American workforce and how people shop worldwide.

Amazon claims to be innovative, but its strategies of market dominance and labor exploitation are as old as capitalism itself, and were perfected by predecessors like Standard Oil, General Motors, US Steel, AT&T, Walmart and Microsoft. My union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, views this as history repeating itself. 

The Roaring ’20s were great for those at the top, but meant massive exploitation of workers. As we embark further into the 2020s, the Teamsters will make sure that Amazon cannot repeat a history where workers suffered acutely to make ends meet and were frequently injured or even killed on the job while company executives stuffed their pockets with the profits.

Even before the 1920s, the Teamsters started building our union, which is now the largest and most powerful organization of workers in the North American logistics industry. Teamster members enjoy the best wages, benefits, and working conditions in the industry because we’ve battled greedy owners and the politicians they have in their pockets, both in the streets and in the workplace. As workers, we have more in common than what divides us. We speak and act collectively, and the chorus of our voices and actions is more powerful than the sum of its parts.

Amazon workers know they are the source of Jeff Bezos’ billions and that because of their work he has become one of the richest people on the planet. Just as truck drivers and other logistics workers built power on their own terms 100 years ago, Amazon workers from Minneapolis to New York, from Chicago to California, are discovering their power and learning how to strategically wield that power to win their demands. 

Amazon workers are uniting to improve their livelihoods, and the Teamsters are supporting them because they deserve what we have, and because we need to maintain the standards for which our members have worked so hard. Years of struggle against consolidated corporate powers have taught us that focusing on one facility at a time and depending on America’s weak and hard-to-enforce legal procedures are insufficient to win against monopoly corporations like Amazon. As we saw in the closely-watched National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election at Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama warehouse, the company is willing to violate the law and spare no expense to keep its workers from forming a union. 

As Teamsters, we have been building power in the logistics industry since before meaningful labor law was enacted in this country. We fought for workers’ rights to organize and build power any way we could, including shop floor strikes, city-wide strikes and actions in the streets. Building genuine worker power at Amazon will take shop-floor militancy by Amazon workers and solidarity from warehousing and delivery Teamsters. 

This will take hard, but necessary work. As a union, we deeply understand and are constantly educating each other about the threat posed by Amazon. Many of our members have already experienced the pressure of longer hours and more work at their own jobs because of how Amazon is changing their industries. Some of our members have worked at Amazon previously or have friends and family who work there. We are training our members to support Amazon workers as they organize to build power across their company. The response has been amazing, but our union needs to be dedicated to this project for the long haul if we want to keep middle-class jobs in our core industries. 

Later this month, delegates elected by members from all 500 Teamsters local unions will convene virtually for our 30th International Convention to set the direction of the union and nominate officers who will serve for the next five years. Unions are one of the few large civic organizations left where everyday people get to practice democracy. And given the challenges we face as a society and a world in 2021, this practice has never been more important. At this year’s Convention, Teamsters will use these democratic means to fully mobilize our union against Amazon’s threat to working class communities. 

As is the case with our national politics, union politics can be polarizing and taxing. There will be necessary and healthy debate at the Convention, but the good news is that we have plenty of victories and defeats to learn from, and we stand on the shoulders of giants who have taken unprecedented action to build worker power throughout history. 

As our union’s national director for Amazon, I see that Teamster locals across the country are already stepping up to meet the challenge by engaging members, building large volunteer organizing committees, building strong community-labor alliances and integrating transformative social justice organizing into their work. This is not optional. We must expand these efforts over time because it is the only chance we have to combat the threat Amazon poses to Teamsters, our families and our communities.

There is no single strategy that will allow Amazon workers to build a strong, militant union that the company has no choice but to recognize. But it is not enough to argue about what to do— with urgency, we must dig deep to do the hard work of building worker power, to learn from successes and failures, and to keep moving forward. It is this spirit of collective struggle that is guiding workers all around the world to act — from Amazon strikes in Germany, Italy and India to general strikes in Colombia and Palestine.

The next American labor upsurge is on the horizon, but we must do the hard work necessary to make it a reality. Amazon will keep fighting workers who demand a safe workplace and a fair return on their labor, but our union and our broader movement is resilient. No company is more powerful than workers who are united and standing together, with their communities, in solidarity.

Randy Korgan is the Teamsters’ National Director for Amazon.

Former Harvard psychiatrist Lance Dodes: Trump’s psychosis is still an “enormous danger”

For at least the past five years, some of America’s and the world’s foremost mental health experts have attempted to warn the public that Donald Trump was (and is) a dire threat to public safety.

Based on Trump’s public behavior and other available information, these experts warned that he appears to be a malignant narcissist, a pathological liar who is obsessed with violence, easily manipulated by praise and other ego-stroking behavior, indifferent to the suffering of other human beings, anti-social and anti-human in his values and behavior, irresponsible and impulsive and in total quite likely a sociopath or perhaps a psychopath.

Collectively, these mental health experts predicted that Trump’s many apparent pathologies would lead to destruction and suffering for the American people and the world.

They were almost entirely correct: Donald Trump undermined and destabilized American society and democracy. He made negligent and irresponsible choices, bordering on outright sabotage, in response to the coronavirus pandemic. These choices may have killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and shortened the average lifespan of the American people by several years. He colluded with a hostile foreign power to subvert a presidential election. He attempted a coup which included an attack by his followers on the U.S. Capitol. He very nearly destroyed the American economy and presided over a regime of profound corruption. He inspired and encouraged right-wing terrorism and other political violence. He leads a political cult. He was impeached twice — which is unprecedented in American history — for his various crimes against the Constitution and the country.   

Instead of being publicly praised and rewarded for their truth-telling and their attempts to warn America and the world, many of these mental health professionals have endured death threats and other retaliation. At least one of these truth-tellers, psychiatrist Dr. Bandy X. Lee — editor of “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” — lost her position at an elite university, in large part because she continued to warn the public about Donald Trump and his movement’s escalating danger to public safety.

Many Americans, including the country’s political elites, would prefer to throw the Age of Trump down the memory well. But such acts of organized forgetting will not save them from the Trump-controlled Republican Party’s escalating assaults on American democracy. Forgetting that mental health professionals predicted the Trump nightmare and all it has wrought is an integral part of this campaign of national amnesia.

Most importantly, Donald Trump is incapable of letting America or the world forget about him. Trump’s apparent mental pathologies drive him to seek revenge against his perceived enemies and others he believes have wronged him.

To that end, Trump still appears to be hatching half-baked schemes to remove Joe Biden from the presidency, even flirting with promises by his allies that he will somehow be “reinstated” as president later this year. Trump’s followers, who comprise at least half of all Republican voters, have been convinced that he is still the legitimate president and that Biden is a usurper. Christian fascists and antisemitic QAnon conspiracy believers (two groups that overlap extensively) are among Trump’s most ardent supporters.

Mental health professionals predicted such an outcome as well. They understand that Trumpism was not an acute disease that would magically disappear once Donald Trump was no longer president. Instead, Trumpism is a potentially lethal, chronic and long-lasting disease of the nation’s mind, body and spirit.  

In an effort to assess Donald Trump’s continuing danger to American society and democracy, I recently spoke with Dr. Lance Dodes, whom I have interviewed on numerous occasions. Dodes is a retired assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a training and supervising analyst emeritus at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. He is among the foremost voices who attempted to warn the American people and the world about Donald Trump’s dangerous behavior.

In this conversation, Dodes warns that Donald Trump appears to be a psychopath and that his dangerous behavior will only get worse. He argues that Trump’s delusional beliefs fuel the Republican Party’s detachment from reality, as shown through the Big Lie, conspiratorial thinking, the right-wing propaganda media and other anti-democratic beliefs and behavior. At the end of this conversation, Dodes once again expresses the view that Donald Trump believes himself to be a type of god, and that if he somehow returns to power may actually try to create an authoritarian police state.

This conversation has been edited, as usual, for length and clarity.

Are Trump’s followers addicted to him? What would withdrawal look like for them and the country as a whole?

I don’t like to use the word “addiction” because it has a particular meaning. I would describe Trump’s most extreme devotees as members of a charismatic cult. Such cults unconditionally worship a charismatic leader who is often delusional with a grandiose, psychotic belief in his perfection, like Trump. The followers close themselves off from accurate or rational information in order to protect their connection to the godlike cult leader and to avoid questioning his delusional views, which would cause them to be shunned or expelled from the group.

What would an intervention look like for these people? You cannot help people become healthy and well if they do not want to. I fear America will be sick with Trumpism for a long time.

Trump’s followers don’t believe they need any help. Having been conned into the leader’s delusion of being a god, they believe that so long as they are following his perfect lead they could not possibly be wrong. It’s important to be clear, though, that this description of Trump’s most rabid followers likely does not apply to the Republicans in Congress who support Trump. Rather than being members of the Trump cult, they likely simply lack a decent conscience, immorally protecting their seats in Congress rather than the country or democracy.

From the Big Lie to the QAnon conspiracy theory to lies and disinformation more generally, Republicans and Trumpists believe things that are demonstrably not true and literally outside of existing reality. Is this a public mental health emergency?

It certainly is a public mental health emergency, and one that has occurred many times in human history. Followers adopt the belief system of a populist tyrant which becomes the new permitted reality, spreading to others who are swept up by their need to be included. That belief system, however fantastical or delusional, remains accepted truth until it is finally shown to be false. Those who have been conned into believing the tyrant’s lies find comfort in their conviction that they know the truth, enabling them to feel superior to doubters.

There are all these stories about Trump wandering around Mar-a-Lago, going to people’s weddings and giving speeches where he airs his grievances and shares lies and conspiracy theories about how he was betrayed and so on. He continues to rage at his “enemies” and to be gripped by paranoia and out of touch with reality more generally. What do you see in his behavior?

If there is someone who is ranting and raving about things that are obviously and demonstrably false yet insists that they are true, that is by definition delusional. If Trump were not a former president, he would be easily seen to be psychotic. Because he is a former president and has a cult following, we are expected to wonder if his behavior can be explained some other way.

Can you elaborate more on your observation that Trump is behaving as though he were psychotic?

He has been delusional for years, from the start of his presidency, when he claimed he had large crowds at his inauguration. But it’s important to add that beside being delusional, Trump’s behavior also reflects his deeply severe character disorder, his sociopathy. A person, after all, can be delusional and no danger whatsoever to anyone else. But the fact that Trump is a sociopath, a person without a conscience who is incapable of recognizing the inherent worth of other human beings, makes him the enormous danger he is. Trump has the worst of all worlds, one might say, psychotically grandiose and utterly uncaring about the harm he causes others. He is basically psychologically the same as the many infamous, cruel tyrants we know from recent and remote history.

Could Donald Trump’s children or other members of his inner circle force him to get medical help?

Unfortunately, Trump’s psychosis is not the type treatable with medication, and the severity of his character disorder means he would never be capable of engaging in introspection.

Donald Trump clearly needs narcissistic fuel from his followers and other sources of attention. What does such a need do to a person’s mind? And what happens when they are denied it?

If Trump is charged and arrested for his alleged crimes and his base of support crumbles, he could not accept going to jail. He would be more likely to flee the country, perhaps buy himself a remote island that is controlled by a friendly dictator and declare himself king.

You and other mental health professionals spent years warning the American people and the world about Trump’s apparent mental pathologies and the danger he represented. Almost all of your predictions came true. As a thought experiment, what would America now look like if those warnings had been heeded and then acted upon?

Trump would not have been elected president. If elected, he would have been quickly removed from office as a clear danger to the nation and to democracy.

What would happen if Donald Trump somehow became president again or otherwise assumed a position of national power?

Trump has already told us what he would do. When he was running against Hillary Clinton, he said that he wanted to “lock her up” in prison. That’s what Trump would try to do if he were back in power. He seeks to be the same as the leader of North Korea, imprisoning or killing people if they dare to oppose him. With more power he is only going to get worse — more enraged, more paranoid, more psychotic, more violent and more dangerous. If he could, Donald Trump would turn America into a police state.

Edward-Isaac Dovere on how Democrats avoided disaster — and beat Donald Trump

Even if you follow politics closely, there are numerous moments in Edward-Isaac Dovere’s new book, “Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats’ Campaigns to Defeat Trump,” that will make your jaw drop.  His book conjures up the classic politics series of books by Theodore White, “The Making of the President” but with Dovere, the story doesn’t start on the campaign trial but right after Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016. 

The detail in the book is simply remarkable from the list of comfort items that Sen. Bernie Sanders requests for his speaking engagements (none are truly that demanding) to a nervous Andrew Yang before the first Democratic presidential debate throwing up so loudly in the dressing room bathroom that other campaign staffers could hear it. 

But it’s the substantive issues that stand out. On top of the list is that Barack Obama, after leaving office, expressed concern that Donald Trump would potentially come after him or his family personally, such as by ending Secret Service protection for his daughters. As Dovere explained, people have “a sense of Obama being cool and detached … he was not.” In fact, as Dovere shared in our conversation for “Salon Talks,” the working title of the book was a line Obama said to Democratic donors in 2018, “You are right to be concerned.”

Dovere also details how Joe Biden’s team was fully aware that Trump might try not only to litigate the election if he lost, but also in essence try to steal it. They had a legion of attorneys across the nation prepared for various “doomsday scenarios.” But not even these stable of lawyers could have predicted that Trump would incite a terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol in an effort to overturn the election results.

Watch my “Salon Talks” interview with Dovere below or read a transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity.

Some of this book is things we’ve lived through, if you follow politics closely. Some will be completely brand new. It begins with 2016, and I just want you to remind people, to give them a sense of where we were then.

It was a devastating election, 2016. People can think about it as Trump winning and beating Hillary Clinton, which was a big surprise in every way. If you’re a Democrat, that was terrible. But what was also terrible for Democrats was that there were Senate races, all over the country, that Democrats thought they were going to win and they didn’t. From North Carolina to Wisconsin, right? And House races too, governors’ races. There were not that many governors races on the ballot in 2016. But when you look at what happened, I traced some of this during the Obama presidency: Almost a thousand state legislature seats that were held by Democrats when Obama won in 2008, were held by Republicans by the time he finished. There was a decimation of the Democratic Party.

And most of the book starts from 2016 forward, but there’s a chapter at the beginning that cast back a little bit. So how is it that the Democratic Party got into this terrible state? It’s about those dynamics happening. It’s about Obama not really investing in the Democratic Party and not doing things to build the party up. Some of this he can’t be blamed for. He didn’t realize it, or he was struggling with how to grapple with it. But the issue of wages, of how people were feeling, the real economy in their lives, which obviously was very important for Trump to be able to key into in 2016 and use that as an argument that pushed him forward, that’s all going on. And those were the circumstance that the Democrats found themselves in, even before the devastating loss of 2016.

Then there’s a sort of a parallel process that starts to happen between a small group of Democratic leaders — most people wouldn’t even know who they were, except if you’re really an insider Democrat — who have meetings, start to plan things. There’s a dinner at the beginning of the book that I described happening at John Podesta’s house. People may know about Podesta, because he was Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, and they start to plot things and think about how to change what the Democrats are doing.

But at the same time, this activism blossomed that nobody was expecting, the biggest example obviously was the Women’s March. I was there in D.C. covering it. One of the people that I talked to for the book is Cecile Richards, who was then at Planned Parenthood. She told to me something to the effect of, “If an organization had tried to plan the Women’s March to be what it actually was, it would have taken millions of dollars and years.” And it just happened on its own. Those things are happening simultaneously and help create the atmosphere for Democratic primary campaign and the Democrats sorting out who they wanted to be their nominee.

It’s interesting when you talked about the meeting with these Democrats getting together after the election in 2016. Living through it and covering it on my show, it was a grassroots movement that led the party, it was not leaders that did it. What’s your reaction to that?

Look, I think it was both those things happening, right? The airport protests that you’re talking about, remember part of the reason those got elevated was because members of Congress were showing up, governors were showing up at the airports and demanding to see the people who were being detained, and that helped drive the news coverage. But of course that wouldn’t have happened if the protests weren’t happening to begin with. So there’s this back and forth that’s going on. At the Women’s March, there were leaders that I talked to at the time and then reflected on it, who were aghast that there weren’t people walking around with clipboards and getting the names of all these tens of thousands of people who were there. And you know what, those people didn’t need to get activated in the traditional way that Democratic leadership thinks about it.

But it was really hard to predict how this was going to go. And part of what the book aims to do is to trace how those two streams were happening and then how they started to intersect. And what happened when it became a question of like, well, what role does the Bernie Sanders movement that was obviously very powerful in 2016, what does that have in the Democratic Party now? How much is it the Bernie Sanders thing, or how much of it is just grassroots energy? How much does it split off to Elizabeth Warren? How much it was interested in just beating Trump, no matter what? Those are all things that are happening and playing out in the primary campaign.

Share a little bit about what the goal of that meeting was and what really happened? Did reality land on them, that we can have an impact? They raise a lot of money, they can do different things. But to think that the party was controllable, then or now, is ridiculous to me.

That dinner sort of has all the hallmarks of what people think happens, right? It was at the Four Seasons in Washington, right on the edge of Georgetown. It was in December of 2018. It was the night that Nancy Pelosi had been elected speaker, after Democrats won the House. It was organized by a big Democratic donor who sends out these invitations, you got to come. And it’s this strange collection of people, some Democratic donors, some group leaders. Pelosi is there, Schumer is there. A bunch of others: Pete Buttigieg is there, Eric Swalwell is there, Chris Coons is there. Nobody’s quite sure how this guest list exactly was the one that they landed on.

And they’re sitting around a table. And yeah, the whole question was how do we keep the primary campaign from getting too crowded? The not-very-subtle subtext was that if it’s crowded, Bernie Sanders is going to be the nominee and we don’t want that. And they’re having this debate around this big table in the Four Seasons private room, and that’s another element to it. Not only is it at the Four Seasons, but in a private room. They say like, “How do we put some guardrails on this process?”

Guy Cecil, who runs the Priorities USA super PAC, said to me, “That was the last moment when the people who thought that they could control things thought that was going to keep going.” Because within a couple of weeks of that meeting, all the candidates start announcing. Biden was the last major candidate to announce. But within a couple of weeks, Elizabeth Warren announces, Kamala Harris announces. They’re popping up everywhere. Kirsten Gillibrand announces on the Colbert “Late Show.” right? It’s all over the place. This idea that the primary campaign is going to be kept in control by the leaders, that’s ridiculous.

Obama had plans for his post-presidency, and they changed because of Trump. Share a bit, what was going on? There were concerns about what Trump might do?

Yeah. When Obama thought Trump was going to lose, he felt a little uncomfortable in the final days of the campaign. I think most people, Donald Trump included, never thought he’d actually win. And then he had a plan for his post-presidency: OK, Hillary Clinton’s going to be president and I’ll build my foundation, my library. I’ll make some money, I’ll write a book, it’ll be fine. I’ll enjoy myself, I’ll go have nice vacations. And everything changes, obviously very quickly. He had never thought he’d have to be involved with picking the next DNC chair as he then was, and got very involved making sure that Tom Perez was the DNC chair instead of Keith Ellison. 

He couldn’t talk about things publicly, about issues, because he knew that every time he did it, he might trigger Trump and give Trump fodder to attack him and make news cycles out of it, and he didn’t want to do that. When Trump tweeted accusing Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower, Obama was very upset by that, and disconcerted about it. Not just because “This is an attack on me,” but because he thought that was just so outside the bounds of what a president should accuse another president of doing. And then there are other things, like Trump attacking Susan Rice and Obama thinking about standing up for her. 

I have a moment in the book that’s right after Election Day 2018, when the Democrats win the midterms. Trump fires Jeff Sessions as attorney general. And there had already been a lot of concern in the Obama post-presidency world of, okay, what do we have to get prepared for? What’s going to happen? And they had drafted some statements, because who knows, we’ve got to have this ready to go, rather than something wild happening. At that point, the wiretapping accusation happened, all these things were going on. And when Trump fires Sessions, of course, Robert Mueller is already deep into his work. They think maybe he’s going to fire Mueller now. What do we do?

And they’re talking about it back and forth. And this idea starts getting talked about, well, maybe what we should do is try to do something like a statement with George W. Bush and Barack Obama together. And the idea of it in their minds would have been that Bush had hired Mueller as FBI director and Obama extended his term. So they would say, here’s a Republican, here’s a Democrat. We’re both presidents. You don’t agree on much, but we both hired Bob Mueller. He’s good, protect him. And put that up preemptively to stop Trump from getting to Mueller. This idea never actually got broached with Bush directly, but there was a a feeler put out to his staff to see what they thought about it, and there was not a lot of interest. Bush has been very committed to staying far away from politics.

You just see the level of concern there. There was this sense of [Obama] as cool and detached and away from things. He was not, he was really worried about it. The working title of this book, I should say, was “You Are Right to be Concerned,” which was a line I heard Obama say at a fundraiser in Beverly Hills in 2018. He was sitting and talking to Democrats and he said, “Look, if you’re looking around the country, you are right to be concerned with what’s happening.” Right? And that carried through.

And then “Battle for the Soul” is where we landed. The story that I’ve told about that is that when I was speaking to Biden at the end — I talked to him in February, so the interview with him is at the end of the book. And I said to him, “So we’re calling it ‘Battle for the Soul.’ that’s title of the book.” Of course that was drawn from what he had talked about. And he said to me, “Yeah, the difference between you and me, pal, is I actually believe it.” And I said to him, “No, I think you may have actually been onto something here with how it all turned out.”

There were other things in your book that are riveting, and I’m not sure how much reporting there has been on this. I’m talking about the post-election period, when  the Biden team actually had these doomsday scenarios. Take us through a little bit of that. I’ve not heard that talked about in detail.

Yeah. I mean, it’s funny. I was reporting this book for four years and there were a lot of conversations that I was having with people that were embargoed until the book came out. The Obama conversation — why isn’t he doing more? Why isn’t he more worried? And I would say, like, I know actually some of what’s happening. This was another piece of it that I had heard a little bit about before the election, but it wasn’t until after the election that the people involved were willing to talk to me more about it. Starting from not long after Biden sealed the nomination, and certainly from about this point last year, there was a lot of work going on, about 600 lawyers around the country who were secretly putting together essentially template briefs.

They had war-gamed all the scenarios that, OK, what happens if there’s this close result in Arizona, or they try to make this kind of claim in Georgia or wherever. All the different things that Trump’s lawyers, whether it’s his Justice Department or his allies and state parties could try to bring to court. They also had done a war-gaming of what the election certification process would look like and had been talking about it, Biden’s lawyers with Nancy Pelosi’s and Chuck Schumer’s lawyers leading up to Jan. 6.

And they had gotten as far as like, what happens if in the middle of it, Mike Pence, because he’s presiding over this, pulls out a separate slate of electors from his pocket? Literally. And what if he refuses to recognize people from the floor, one of the parliamentary procedures? They had that all mapped out. What they didn’t have mapped out is that there would be thousands of violent protesters storming the Capitol. They did not anticipate that. There’s this moment in the book where Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell, all the leaders are together, Kevin McCarthy is there too. But the three of them say, OK, we’ve got to make this happen now — that’s why they move so quickly that night to get everything certified. And McCarthy is not part of that conversation. They kind of don’t invite him in because they think he’s off on his own place on it. But they had the basis from all these preparations that they’d done. Again, everything short of a violent mob storming the Capitol.

You close the book with Joe Biden, talking about making his late son proud. Share a little bit about who Joe Biden is as a person, his humanity, his empathy?

I started covering Joe Biden when he was vice president. I spent a lot of time with him, interviewed him on a couple of occasions. Two of those interviews are in the book. One of those was one of his final interviews as vice president. There was a week before Trump’s inauguration, and he’s sitting in his office in the West Wing. The second one is where the book ends. It’s two weeks into his presidency, at the beginning of February. For that one, he was in the Oval Office. It was still COVID restrictions, so I was on the phone talking to him. I’ve been around the country with him on the campaign trail, and when he was VP. There is no more human person, I would say, than Joe Biden who has been elected president in modern history. 

The sense of loss that he carries with him always is really, really important. Of course, there’s the tragedy in 1972, when he was not even sworn in as a senator, that car crash that killed his wife and his baby daughter, and that put his two sons in the hospital. And then what happened with Beau Biden, who died in 2015 of brain cancer. That devastated Biden. I was there covering the funeral. Every time I talk about it, I get goosebumps because there was this moment where everybody was in the church and the Biden family — it’s like a clan, it’s so many people and they’re very close. The hearse pulls up and they’re all walking together and Biden is at the center of it, leading them.

There’s an interview with Beau Biden that I did in 2012. I knew him just a little bit. But there was a general feeling that Beau Biden was kind of like Joe Biden. He’d gone and served in the National Guard and done all these things. And Joe Biden had definitely wanted to be president of the United States for a long time. There’s this quick story in the book when he’s leaving a job in the early ’70s. He gives somebody a stapler and he says, “Oh, I’m going to be president one day. Hold on to that.” 

He ran for president in 1988. He almost ran a couple of other times. He ran in 2008. He had kind of given up running and had thought, “I’m transferring the dreams to Beau, to my son. It’ll be President Beau Biden.” By the way, Beau’s full name was Joseph R. Biden III. Joe Biden is Joe Biden Jr. And then the cancer hit Beau and he died. In the summer of 2015, Biden was thinking about running, in part as a coping mechanism for himself, and in part to carry Beau’s legacy. He was too overcome with grief, in part, that was why he didn’t run in 2016. Through 2020, Beau is always with him in every way. He’s always thinking about him. In one of the debates with Trump, they saw something on his sleeve. It was Beau’s rosary that he was wearing. When there was that article that ran in the Atlantic about Trump calling the military suckers and losers, Biden carries a gold star with him that the Delaware National Guard gave him.

Beau was in the Delaware National Guard. He was not killed in battle, so in this case it’s an honorary thing. Biden took it out of his pocket because he was so mad that day. And then at the end, in that final interview, I said to him, “Well, what do you think Beau would think about this?” And that’s the way the book ends. I’m reluctant to do a spoiler here, but you see all of that really building with him and this deep emotional connection that runs through family and politics and blood and legacy and everything.

Ex-Trump official battled colleagues to stop diplomatic crisis over “embarrassing” COVID-19 claim

America narrowly avoided a major diplomatic crisis from the Trump administration according to the account of a former top official.

“In the final days of the Trump administration, the State Department was embroiled in a bitter dispute over China’s role in the origins of COVID-19 that’s now spilling into public view,” BuzzFeed News reported Saturday. “In an open letter posted on Medium on Thursday, Christopher Ford, former Assistant Secretary for International Security and Nonproliferation, said he intervened to prevent the US government from ’embarrassing and discrediting’ itself by accusing China of having deliberately engineered the coronavirus — despite there being no evidence to make that case.”

“It is highly unusual for a former senior State Department official to publish a personal account of recent internal disputes. But Ford’s open letter comes in the midst of an acrimonious debate over the so-called ‘lab leak’ hypothesis for the emergence of COVID-19. The most extreme version of this theory suggests that Chinese scientists engineered SARS-CoV-2 as a bioweapon,” BuzzFeed noted. “Sourcing his account to emails put into the public domain through reporting by Fox News and Vanity Fair, Ford’s Medium post detailed his increasingly fraught relationship with David Asher, a contractor in the State Department who was running its investigation into the origins of COVID-19, and Thomas DiNanno, former acting head of the department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance (AVC).”

BuzzFeed interviewed Ford and described him as “a conservative with a record of being hawkish on the threats posed to the US by China.”

“In an interview with BuzzFeed News, Ford said his colleagues were pushing to include allegations that China had breached the international Biological Weapons Convention in a State Department report to Congress, which could have set off a diplomatic crisis with one of the US’s chief global rivals,” BuzzFeed reported. “Ford also told BuzzFeed News that Asher and DiNanno wanted to include the claim that China had breached the Biological Weapons Convention in an annual report prepared for Congress by the State Department. The report, mandated by US law, details nations’ compliance with international agreements on arms control, nonproliferation, and disarmament.”

Ford explained his perspective to BuzzFeed.

“They clearly appeared to be coming at this from a biological weapons angle. They got squirrelly if you pushed back on whether there was evidence to support a biological weaponry finding over the coronavirus, but they seemed to be trying to build a case,” Ford said. “Their legal arguments sounded pretty weak to me. They never presented evidence of actual [bioweapons] work.”

Read the full report.

8 fascinating facts about Nora Ephron

If romantic comedies are synonymous with anyone, it’s writer-director Nora Ephron, whose landmark movies “When Harry Met Sally…,” “Sleepless in Seattle,” and “You’ve Got Mail” are widely credited with saving the romantic comedy genre. But beyond that, Ephron was a star in her own right, writing prolifically about her experiences of being a woman, from the 1970s up until the time of her death in 2012 from pneumonia brought on by acute myeloid leukemia.

In honor of what would have been Ephron’s 80th birthday on May 19th, below are some fun facts about the creator’s life and work.

1. Nora Ephron was fictionalized from an early age.

Ephron made her living telling other people’s stories, but she’s inspired some, too — dating back to her teen years. Ephron’s parents, Hollywood screenwriters Phoebe and Henry Ephron, based their 1961 play and subsequent film “Take Her, She’s Mine” on letters Nora sent home while attending Wellesley College.

2. Nora Ephron broke into journalism in a unique way.

Ephron aspired from a young age to be two things: A journalist living in New York City and the next Dorothy Parker. After college, Ephron scored a job at Newsweek as a mail girl, but her big break came when her friend Victor Navasky asked her to write a parody of Leonard Lyons’s New York Post column for “Monocle.”

“When the Pest (get it?), a perfect visual replica of the paper, appeared, the editors at the Post wanted to sue,” Navasky wrote in a piece about Ephron following her death for The Nation. “But Dorothy Schiff, the owner, said ‘If they can parody us, they can write for us,’ and one week into a two-week tryout, they hired Nora.”

Ephron’s stint at Newsweek would later be a highlight of the Amazon drama “Good Girls Revolt.”

3. Nora Ephron once found herself in the crosshairs of the women’s liberation movement.

Following her success as a journalist, Ephron became an essayist for outlets like Esquire, where her essay “A Few Words About Breasts” helped to establish her as a feminist voice of her generation. Ephron was dispatched by Esquire to cover the burgeoning Women’s Movement, and to profile its major players, including Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan. The piece made it into her first essay collection, “Crazy Salad,” as did her interview with then much-raged-about porn actress and star of “Deep Throat,” Linda Lovelace.

4. “When Harry Met Sally . . .” wasn’t written for the reason you’d expect.

Although “When Harry Met Sally . . .” is now synonymous with the modern day rom-com, Ephron’s reasons for writing it were, well, less than romantic. She wrote openly in her essay “My Life As An Heiress” about writing the film for the money, and would later blanche at the idea that she might one day become “some queen of romance.” In 2006 Ephron admitted that romantic comedies are “almost all I’ve been able to get made,” suggesting a contrast between the purview of Ephron’s films and Ephron herself.

5. Nora Ephron made a cameo in “Sleepless in Seattle.”

Or her voice did, at least. Ephron can be heard calling into Dr. Marcia Fieldstone’s radio show as “Disappointed in Denver,” lamenting to the radio host, “Every time I come close to orgasm, he goes to make himself a sandwich.” Disappointed, indeed.

6. Nora Ephron has a complicated — but lucrative — relationship with technology.

On her famed list of things “I Won’t Miss” after she passed away, Ephron included email not once, but twice, writing “I know I already said it, but I want to emphasize it.” Despite her disdain for the electronic format, Ephron made email the linchpin of “You’ve Got Mail,” a loose remake of Ernst Lubitsch’s “The Shop Around the Corner” (1940), and one of Ephron’s most successful films.

Ephron also documented her struggles with an online Scrabble addiction, saying Scrabble Blitz turned her brain to “cheese.” No matter how Ephron felt about technology, though, she knew it was the wave of the future and invested wisely, doubling the expected value of her estate with investments in Apple, Google, and Amazon.

7. Nora Ephron planned her own funeral.

Ephron was known to have an exacting nature — and with good reason. “The problem with Nora is that she’s right about almost everything, all the time,” “You’ve Got Mail” associate producer Dianne Dreyer once said. Ephron’s own funeral was no exception. Prior to her death, the three-time Oscar nominee reserved $100,000 to pay for the occasion, which was held at Alice Tully Hall, and decided on everything from the food (a perfectly prepared brisket) to the speakers (Meryl Streep, Mike Nichols, and more) and how long each of them had to talk.

8. Somewhere out there, there’s a cookbook full of Nora Ephron’s favorite recipes.

If Ephron was known for anything beyond her impeccable wit, it was her love of food, which often made its way into her writing. An accomplished chef in her own right, she bestowed her closest family members and friends with an original Nora Ephron cookbook when she passed away. It contains 174 of her recipes and stray observations — certainly a gift that would keep on giving. The rest of us, however, will have to settle for this one Monkey Bread recipe, which was said to be her favorite breakfast.

“On the Divide” profiles three people at a Texas abortion clinic and asks: “What does choice mean?”

“On the Divide,” which is having its World Premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, profiles three people whose lives intersect at the Whole Woman’s Health abortion clinic, the only abortion clinic in the Rio Grande Valley. Filmmakers Maya Cueva and Leah Galant show all sides of this hot-button issue in McAllen, Texas, as they follow Mercedes, a pro-life protester; Rey, a security guard at the clinic; and Denisse a volunteer escort and activist. 

Mercedes is a young woman who was involved in gang life. She was ready to abort her baby but changed her mind. She became a “prayer warrior,” and loyal to Yolanda, a devout Christian woman who owns a pregnancy crisis center three doors down from the abortion clinic. Mercedes explains that folks don’t understand her, but as “On the Divide” reveals her story, it shows how complex her situation is. Rey is also religious, but he is empathetic to the women who require the abortion clinic’s services. He braces himself for Yolanda who protests on a regular basis. In contrast, Denisse is working to raise awareness about reproductive rights and pursue a degree in midwifery. She is seen protesting against Ted Cruz in a “Handmaid’s Tale” outfit, no less. (The filmmakers started working on the film in 2014 with principal photography ending in 2019).

Cueva and Galant’s observational documentary emphasizes health (both mental and physical), dignity, and justice. They spoke with Salon about their fine film.

What prompted you to tackle this topic, and profile the three people you did? Mercedes vs. Yolanda; and Rey are particularly interesting choices.

Maya Cueva: Leah and I met at Ithaca College and were randomly assigned to work in a group together during our senior thesis documentary class. We had to make a short film. We came across an article following a travelling abortion doctor. We never heard of that before or knew that kind of job existed. We connected with a doctor who travels from New Mexico to Texas, and made a short film called “The Provider.” When we made our way to Texas, we saw clinics were closing and how dire access was there, and during the production of the short that we made our way to the border and saw there was only one abortion clinic there. We thought this could be its own film. After graduating, we made it back to the border. 

We engaged with the community and met Rey when we went to the clinic the first time. He was outside being a security guard, and we ended up talking to him and learned his story of being kicked out of the church and how he grapples with his safety all the time. The reality is that there are a lot of threats to safety that these organizers have to deal with. We never thought about how a 67-year-old Latino man had a stake in this issue. That’s what made us focus on the stories we did — who are the human faces behind this issue and who are the people that you wouldn’t think would have a stake in this issue? I met Mercedes a year later when I was working on a story for NPR and connected with her on that and asked if she wanted to be a part of the film and she agreed. Denisse we met during the Ted Cruz protest. We were struck by her. She joined this movement around reproductive rights and felt like she had a purpose. We saw how different they were but how much they complimented each other. 

I like that you made an evenhanded film, giving both sides a chance to tell their story. Can you discuss that decision/approach?

Leah Galant: Maya and I like to say is that our viewpoints and our participants’ viewpoints that while pro-choice and pro-life have political ramifications that are very real, we wanted to allow our participants to tell their own story and carve out their own box and in their viewpoints that don’t fit neatly in the polarizing debate. Ultimately being able to let people live their lives in real time and what choice means when we are not afforded many options, and that’s what our characters come to decide: What does choice mean? It’s important for our participants to speak on their viewpoints from their own perspective and evade any single definition of who they are. Most of us in the world have complicated and nuanced views, and we have to honor that while also understanding what lack of health care means for anyone whatever side of the aisle you are on. We also wanted to reach outside of echo chambers and especially with everything feeling so polarized, we hope our film is a conversation starter and not an ender. We want to show what our participants go through. 

I appreciate that while you have a few scenes in the Whole Woman’s Health clinic, we never see any of the cases; but you shoot outside Yolanda’s pregnancy center, and we get to eavesdrop on one of the patient’s visits. Can you explain your strategy in your storytelling?

Cueva: We did start off by going inside the clinic, but we ended up feeling the stories we followed are the ones you don’t hear — these are the people on the front lines and who deal with the repercussions of limited access when there is no choice available. There’s a scene where someone in the film goes to get birth control and in that moment, they realize if abortion is defunded, what happens to these services? We didn’t tell them to say that, they came to that realization on their own. It was important to share that. This was someone who had to go through this to see how important choice is. It feels like both sides are yelling at each other, and there are films about abortion that talk about the legislation and the laws, but I can’t connect with anyone who might be going through the issue of not having access and we wanted to move away from the talking head experts and show the humanity of it. 

What I like about your film is that it shows how folks can be influenced into a way of thinking. What observation do you have about how people have their thinking swayed?

Galant: We made a choice to make this a verité character-driven film, and we didn’t want it to be didactic, so whatever conclusions the audience makes is a reaction to our storytelling approach. We don’t want to hit anyone over the head with specific information. The stories speak for themselves. What you see is what happens. We don’t tell our characters to say anything. I hope they feel complicated and nuanced because while they all come from different backgrounds and they intersect at this abortion clinic and you see parallels to their stories and that’s a good way to frame the issues that are coming up in the film. You can see the similarities between the participants and see where they are overlapping and intersecting, and they do have more in common than they think. There are aspects of the film — what happens at the clinic has been revealed to us for the first the time. The type of threats the clinic faces. We approached this with journalism ethics. These are stories we had never seen before, which is why we filmed specific interactions and events. Folks should be aware and make an informed decision on what they are seeing.

There is a discussion of being “neither here nor there” and you show aspects of the Latino culture in McAllen, Texas, such as a folk medicine ritual. Can you talk about that, and how the film’s subjects balance having one foot in two worlds? 

Cueva: We really wanted to highlight that because that is so much a part of their lives — living in this border region, and having influences like Día de los Muertos, and how the church doesn’t want to emphasize their similarities but that was such an important part of what Denisse was raised on. It was important to talk about that duality, what is it to be from neither here nor there? Although there were so many things going on — McAllen is home to the largest detention center in Texas. We saw families being separated and troops coming in during the Trump administration. But we felt the story was really about abortion access and those elements of living on the border and these intersecting issues were a backdrop for our characters already. The Día de los Muertos scene was so important. I’m Latina, and we wanted to highlight as much of this borderland culture as possible but not in a way that feels voyeuristic. It wasn’t to glorify a different culture. We’re not going to say, “Look at this amazing culture.” Denisse explains a little of Día de los Muertos culture, but we didn’t want to make it palatable to white people. We wanted to show it as it is a part of her life. 

There are several themes that stem out of this topic from religion and gang culture, to sexual assault, violent assault, as well as suicidal depression, financial issues, and abusive relationships. I think your film shows many of the deeper struggles that women must deal with on top of having to make decisions about birth control. What are your thoughts on that?

Galant: Any issues around the characters were organic to the fabric of their lives. There can be an issue with documentary filmmakers trying to create narratives that don’t exist or create exploitative films. Our ethos going into this project is that when we come into a community, especially as a white person or someone not from the community, the first question that we like to ask is: What stories are not being told and what is being left out of these conversations? A lot of the media coming out of McAllen is exploitative and reductive, and that creates a lot of distress for community members in allowing media in their spaces for very good reasons, so we very consciously wanted to avoid and actually do the opposite of other media has done in that region. In that sense, we let the participants guide the narrative, and the issues that were coming up organically. Our film helps connects the dots. The characters face parallel issues that Rey, Mercedes and Denisse all face. It provides ways to highlight their humanity even if they are coming from different sides of the debate.  

Your film ends with a title card that addresses Rosie’s Law, which is a bill to restore health insurance coverage for abortion. It is a response to the Hyde amendment, which revoked government funding coverage for abortion and prompted Rosaura Jimenez from getting a safe, legal, and accessible abortion she died as a result of getting an illegal abortion. Do you think this bill will be passed?

Cueva: It’s hard to say if it will be passed or not. There’s a lot of mobilizing and organizing around It. Rosie’s Law is to stop the Hyde amendment, which prevents government funding to be accessible for abortion care. This is why in Texas and a lot of other places in the South have abortion funds set up, because people can’t afford to get an abortion. Whereas in California, abortion is covered under Medi-Cal, you can get it for free. It’s being introduced now. It’s hard to say if it will pass because there are a number of other restrictive laws that are being put into place to challenge Roe v. Wade and other bills like the Heartbeat bill in Texas, which would prevent people from getting an abortion after six weeks, which is when many people find out they are pregnant. Just another way to prevent people from getting access to abortions. This film is coming out at a time when it is challenging for Reproductive rights, so we wanted to raise awareness of Rosie’s Law. She is such an important figure in the Rio Grande valley. The organizers we met taught us about her because she passed away in a hospital that used to be across from the abortion clinic. She’s a reminder why they continue to fight. 

Do you think “On the Divide” will change people’s way of thinking?

Galant: We think about this a lot. I hope that anyone who has a nuanced perspective on this issue, however you identify, will come away with more information and perspectives than you came in with and that will inform any organizing or activist work that need to be done. We don’t want to be didactic. The films we enjoy the most are ones where we are not being preached to. So, hopefully, people will be able to listen to one another better and what the needs are to the community, which they are very clearly expressing.

Cueva: I think an important point for us as the filmmakers is that we’ve always had Roe v. Wade intact and don’t know what it is like not to have access to abortion, so we want to show what is the reality like for people who have to deal with this firsthand. If Roe v. Wade is challenged and taken away, this community has to deal with the consequences. That’s what we want people to understand. It is not a black and white issue. Talking about this is a personal choice, and everyone can identify with that. What does it mean to forget about this debate and look at letting folks make the decision they want to make?

A male infertility crisis could be on the horizon

Dr. Tomer Avidor-Reiss, who teaches at the University of Toledo’s biological sciences department, knows a lot about fertility — not just because of his research, but for personal reasons, too.

“Infertility affected my family twice,” Avidor-Reiss told Salon by email. His parents, he recalled, had trouble conceiving because of RH incompatibility, a condition in which mother and fetus have incompatible blood; he was only born after his mother had already suffered a miscarriage. He and his wife, too, struggled to conceive after they were diagnosed with “unexplained infertility”; happily, they were able to conceive eventually with the aid of modern medicine.

If current studies are to be believed, Avidor-Reiss’ family plight may become more common. Birth rates are dropping, and not necessarily for positive reasons (such as women having more autonomy and choosing to delay starting families). There is growing evidence that plastic pollution is linked to dropping sperm counts, which at least in Western countries means the majority of men could reach infertility levels in mere decades if sperm counts continue to plummet linearly. Global warming may also cause male fertility problems, both in humans and animals. Even the COVID-19 pandemic could hamper fertility, as studies suggest infected men may be at a higher risk of developing erectile dysfunction. And of course there are the long-known lifestyle factors that lead to male infertility: Obesity, alcohol consumption, cigarette smoking and illicit drug use. (Notably, the pandemic led to an increase in alcoholism, drug use, and weight gain.)

So do these compounding statistics translate into medical professionals seeing more men with fertility questions? 

“I certainly have seen an increase in male infertility cases with time,” Barrett E. Cowan MD, FACS, a Stanford-educated specialist with two decades’ experience treating male fertility, wrote to Salon. He added that he “cannot explicitly blame this on a higher incidence of male infertility — it may be due to greater awareness of the issue (via the internet  and social media), a willingness to address these issues, and a more open environment where men refer their friends or colleagues to the team at Posterity Health,” a clinic that Cowan founded and where is chief medical officer.

Dr. Zaher Merhi, an OBGYN, reproductive endocrinologist, and the founder of Rejuvenating Fertility Center, also said that he had seen an increase in male infertility during his career. “About 50% of the couples I see, the male has a sperm problem,” Merhi said.

He also noted that a long-term male fertility crisis could disproportionately impact low-income males. “It is costly to be assessed by a fertility urologist,” he said. “It could also be costly to extract sperm from the testicles” to try to get around the male fertility issues.

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Dr. Michael Witt, a urologist and male fertility specialist at Reproductive Biology Associates, did not have the same observations.

“I have not seen an increase in infertility cases over the course of my career, but what I have seen is a greater willingness in men to seek out evaluation early in the process,” he said. “I have also seen an increase in improved diagnostic techniques and treatments.”

Witt noted that he is still concerned about the prospect of mass infertility.

“The possibility of an infertility crisis is real, and may occur in industrialized nations where more couples are postponing initiating a family for educational or vocational reasons, and as a result find themselves in a much poorer probability category for getting pregnant,” Witt explained.

Dr. Alan Copperman, Medical Director at Progyny and Co-founder of RMA of NY, also told Salon that “the stigma of infertility is now so much less than it used to be.” As a result, he said, more men are being evaluated and getting treated sooner. Still, Copperman had been following the numerous studies suggesting that sperm counts were dropping over time. 

Either way, as Avidor-Reiss pointed out, modern life is almost built to put male fertility in peril. He cited a laundry list of factors, including the chemicals which surround us and can disrupt our hormones (known as “endocrine disruptors”); obesity; and men choosing to delay fatherhood. In addition, he noted that men have to continue producing sperm throughout their lives to remain fertile, while women are born with all of the eggs they will ever have; that sperm production takes over two months and is complicated, meaning that it is easier to trip us; and that “reproduction is not a task the body is trying to accomplish regularly; therefore, male infertility can go unnoticed until we try to reproduce.”

“I expect that infertility will continue to grow,” Avidor-Reiss told Salon. “Significantly, recent scientific reports rely primarily on general properties such as sperm number, which is not the complete picture of male fertility. I would argue that more advanced sperm analysis that examines the sperm content may indicate that we should be much more concerned.”

Then, he added a caveat: “Because male fertility science is lagging, this argument is speculative.”

A century after the Tulsa race massacre, a grocery store opens to serve the community

Before Vanessa Hall-Harper won her District 1 City Council position in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 2016, she talked extensively with her soon-to-be constituents and learned that food security was one of the most pressing issues for residents in North Tulsa. That’s why she made it a mission to place a moratorium on dollar stores and bring in healthy food options.

“In engaging with my community, the number one issue of concern that I heard was that we don’t have a grocery store in our community where we can go and shop, that all we have are dollar stores,” said Hall-Harper in a recent phone interview. “It’s something that I didn’t suffer from because I happen to have adequate transportation, so I could go anywhere in Tulsa to shop and get what I want. But obviously, there’s a large segment of my constituents that cannot.”

Food access is just one of a number of equity issues that are in the spotlight this year, as Tulsa marks an important anniversary. One hundred years ago, a mob of white vigilantes burned down Tulsa’s Greenwood District — the area known as Black Wall Street that sits in what is now Hall-Harper’s district — killing an unknown number of people and destroying Black wealth, and health, for generations.

Read more Civil Eats: Op-Ed: Hunger is a Political Decision. We Can Work to End It.

On Monday, people from all across Tulsa and the surrounding region will come together to commemorate the centennial anniversary of the massacre. But some residents of the neighborhood will also be marking a quieter change. For the first time in more than a decade, North Tulsa is home to a new, 16,000-square-foot independently owned grocery store stocked with fresh fruit, vegetables, meats, baked goods, and other whole foods.

As its name implies, Oasis Fresh Market is meant to be an oasis in the middle of a desert, said AJ Johnson, the supermarket’s majority owner.

“North Tulsa and, really, every community needs access to fresh produce, and fresh meats because that affects their lifestyle — how you live, how you eat, the longevity of your life,” Johnson said, later adding, “Oasis means refuge, safe place, and shelter — and that’s exactly what this store means for this community.”

“Food is a basic human right,” said Hall-Harper who worked closely with Johnson and Rose Washington, the chairwoman of the Tulsa Regional Chamber, to bring the project to fruition. “I had to make it a priority for that very reason.”

A neighborhood in need

Today, North Tulsans — 61% of whom are people of color, compared to 28% in South Tulsa — are about half as likely to earn a living wage as residents of South Tulsa. There are also 10 times more banks and credit unions than payday lenders in South Tulsa compared to North Tulsa, according to the most recent Equality Indicators report from the Community Service Council.

North Tulsa has also been an area that is notorious for its lack of full-service grocery stores and farmers’ markets. In 2015, 38% of North Tulsa residents said they had worried about having enough food in the previous year (a number that is nearly twice as high as the number who responded that way in the city’s other neighborhoods). And lower incomes, coupled with a lack of easy access to healthy, affordable foods, have had predictable health impacts: North Tulsans suffer from high rates of diet-related illness and their life expectancy is nine years lower than their counterparts in south Tulsa, which is 72% white, according to the Tulsa Health Department.

In 2018, the Tulsa City Council passed the Healthy Neighborhood Overlay, a zoning measure that restricts where dollar stores can be constructed in North Tulsa. The $4 million Oasis Fresh Market is a result of investment from the Tulsa Development Authority, the city of Tulsa through HUD’s Community Development Block Grant program, and various philanthropic organizations.

Johnson, who graduated from the University of Tulsa, was executive director of the Tulsa Dream Center, an organization that provides education, food, and more to the North Tulsa community, before starting his new role.

Read more Civil Eats: How a Year of Mutual Aid Fed Minneapolis

The history of Tulsa and its once-thriving, now-reviving historic Greenwood District is ever-present in the store. On one wall is a large mural of the Mann Brothers, who in 1921 owned their own grocery store.

“Me being able to stand here today is a result of what they did and what they walked through and what they had to overcome,” Johnson said while sitting near the mural. “How do we honor that? I have an opportunity to stand on their shoulders, as do so many other Blacks and Black [business] owners in North Tulsa.”

While Oasis Fresh Market is a for-profit entity, it is connected to a nonprofit organization called The Oasis Project. It will offer a variety of services to community members, from recipes, samples, and breakdown of recipe costs for those with health issues, to wraparound services such as receiving clothes for those who need them, and free fresh produce to those who qualify.

Supermarkets as community assets

The effects of a new, independently owned grocery store on a community are multi-layered, said Allison Karpyn, co-director of the Center for Research in Education and Social Policy at the University of Delaware.

First off, they provide jobs, usually on a local scale. Sometimes they can provide jobs to people with criminal records who otherwise may not be able to earn a livable wage to support themselves and any family they may have, she said.

“Economically, supermarkets really do provide a boost to a local economy,” she added.

There is also a social-justice impact, Karpyn said. A supermarket can be a foundational resource for a community that can be an example of what investment or disinvestment looks like.

“Having a new supermarket open up in your community means someone is interested in investing in you,” she said. The coronavirus pandemic and subsequent food shortages that many individuals and families experienced early on — no matter their socioeconomic status — has shown many what it’s like to have to do without, Karpyn said.

“Seeing supermarkets expand locally — especially in communities that had been designated as food deserts — it really seems like a new day and it brings some hope and possibility, especially as sort of the gray clouds of covid begin to subside,” she said. “It represents a lot more than a supermarket.”

Alison Cohen, senior director of programs at WhyHunger, an organization devoted to ending hunger in the U.S. and around the world, said that while hunger is not a new problem in America; COVID-19 has exacerbated the social injustices that have long existed at the root of hunger, from racism to the lack of a living wage.

“The disproportionate spread of COVID-19 in Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) communities has drawn into sharp focus the systemic racism present in the U.S. food system — inequities that communities of color have faced since the founding of this country,” Cohen said. “This includes the deep contradictions in our food and social welfare systems and the resulting uneven distribution of wealth that hits women and children, and BIPOC communities in the United States the hardest.”

Johnson and Hall-Harper are both optimistic about the improved food access Oasis Fresh Market could bring to North Tulsa’s residents, and the timing is especially poignant.

“With the Centennial, the fact that a Black man, myself, [worked with two other Black leaders in the community], just shows you the power of uniting together,” said Johnson. “Essentially, three minorities have banned together to collectively open up this grocery store and bring change to so many.”

Mint sauce gets a bad rap as being boring, but we just gave it a summer glow-up

There’s this floral dress that I bought from a vintage resale shop a few years ago — a shapeless, shift dress covered in daisies that I was hoping to wear with a certain ’90s-era Julia Roberts ease. However, once I left the soft glow of the velour-padded dressing room, I realized that even in the best light, the dress was a little dowdy and undeniably old-fashioned. 

It was the kind of thing that would be perfectly nice to don for Easter before tossing it back into the closet where it would quickly be overshadowed by more current-feeling items, which is exactly what happened until I found myself in the midst of a mid-pandemic “Does this spark joy?” closet purge.

I sent a picture of myself in the dress to one of my closest friends and bemoaned how my dreams of summer breeziness had died. She promptly responded, “It just needs a few alterations, and then it’s going to be everything you want for summer.” 

Mint sauce is the culinary equivalent of that dress. Home cooks serve it alongside Easter lamb, and the whole thing feels very traditional (and perhaps a little stuffy) — but it rarely makes an appearance past that point in the season. It’s a shame because when done right, mint sauce is the key to turning casual summer dinners into something special. 

Some historians point to the Passover Seder — which features maror (bitter herbs) and a shank bone — as the origination point for the modern-day pairing of mint and lamb. Others look to a story (which is likely more folktale than fact) that suggests Queen Elizabeth I of England decreed that mutton could only be eaten with bitter herbs as a way to dissuade commoners from eating it, thus preserving the wool trade. 

Through time, mint sauce developed into its current form as a simple mixture of mint leaves, vinegar and a hit of sugar steeped in a few tablespoons of boiling water. 

But here’s the thing about mint — it pairs beautifully with so many flavors like basil, black pepper, chili peppers, citrus, dill and garlic. When combined with some of those ingredients, basic mint sauce gets a glow up, and it suddenly becomes an indispensable part of the summer dining repertoire. 

The version that I’ve come to rely on in recent weeks leans heavily into bright, herby flavors, bolstered by a little bit of heat and sweetness. I also opt to blend instead of steep to retain some of the mint’s gorgeous freshness. Is it traditional? No, but it does spark joy. 

***

Recipe: Summer Mint Sauce 
Makes 6 servings 

Ingredients:

  • 1/4 cup loosely packed mint leaves
  • 1/8 cup of dill 
  • 4 tablespoons of olive oil
  • 1 tablespoon of apple cider vinegar 
  • 1 tablespoon of lemon zest 
  • 2 cloves of garlic, smashed 
  • 2 tablespoons of crushed red pepper 
  • 1/2 tablespoon of honey 
  • 2 teaspoons of flaky sea salt

Directions: 

1. Combine all ingredients in a small blender or food processor, and pulse until a loose sauce forms. 

***

Once your sauce is ready to go, there are so many ways that you can use it. Here are some of my favorite recommendations: 

  • Serve it alongside grilled hearty white fish and potatoes. (Yes, you can grill potatoes!) 
  • Swirl it through labneh or whole-fat Greek yogurt to make a simple dip — a perfect pairing for pita chips and crudites.
  • Toss a few tablespoons with cooked pasta, chopped roasted red peppers and crumbled goat cheese for a summery pasta salad.
  • The next time that you make pork milanese, drizzle it with mint sauce for a refreshing summery update on an Italian staple.
  • Put a spoonful in your grain bowls — the herbiness blends well with earthy grains like barley, brown rice and farro.

 

Read More Saucy:

This gooey skillet s’mores dip couldn’t be simpler

This gooey skillet s’mores dip couldn’t be simpler: You just melt some chocolate in a skillet, top with marshmallows, cover, and cook. To eat, dip the graham crackers into the sauce. If you want a nicely browned top, it does help to have access to an oven’s broiler, a small kitchen torch, or a carefully wielded flaming branch.

***

Recipe: Campfire S’Mores Dip

Yield: 8 servings

Ingredients:

  • 1 tablespoon salted butter
  • 1 pound semisweet chocolate chips
  • 1/8 teaspoon kosher salt
  • 8 ounces large marshmallows, halved crosswise
  • Graham crackers, broken into individual pieces

Instructions:

Set a skillet over direct medium-high heat (400°). Melt butter, add the salt and chocolate, and stir. Top with marshmallows, cover with a lid or foil, and cook until marshmallows are melted, 7 to 10 minutes. Remove from grill and serve warm with graham crackers for dipping.

 

More from this author: 

Pelosi backtracks Ilhan Omar criticism as AOC blasts colleagues for feeding “right-wing vitriol”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi backtracked her criticism of fellow Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., during an interview on CNN Sunday — just minutes before Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, appeared on the same show to blast Pelosi and her colleagues for amplifying the “right-wing vitriol” focused on Omar.

The growing intra-party rift started with a tweet last week from Omar, which said, “We must have the same level of accountability and justice for all victims of crimes against humanity. We have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban.”

The comment sparked fierce backlash on both sides of the aisle, with many taking offense to any comparison between the U.S. and Israel to the two terrorist groups. A bipartisan group of 12 Jewish Congresspeople first released a statement saying the tweet was “as offensive as it is misguided,” before Pelosi and House Democratic leaders piled on with a rare statement of their own.

“Drawing false equivalencies between democracies like the U.S. and Israel and groups that engage in terrorism like Hamas and the Taliban foments prejudice and undermines progress toward a future of peace and security for all,” the statement read.

But several of Omar’s Democratic colleagues also rushed to her defense, including AOC, who said the comment was taken out of context. She also pointed out that the tweet came in the form of a question to State Anthony Blinken, to discuss methods of recourse for innocent victims of Israeli and Afghan government violence.

The Minnesota Democrat later clarified the remarks, saying she was in “no way equating terrorist organizations with democratic countries with well-established judicial systems.”

Pelosi thanked her for the statement and later told CNN’s Dana Bash during an interview on the network’s Sunday morning show, “State of the Union,” that she considered the incident to be over.

“Let me just say this. We did not rebuke her,” Pelosi said, waving off the subject. “What I’m saying is, end of subject. [Omar] clarified, we thanked her, end of subject.”

But later in the segment during a separate interview with Ocasio-Cortez, it became clear that the subject was still raw for progressive representatives, who have borne the brunt of recent right-wing criticism and threats since the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.

“This whole hubbub started with right-wing news outlets taking what [Omar] said out of context,” Ocasio-Cortez told Bash. “And when we feed into that, it adds legitimacy to a lot of this kind of right wing vitriol. It absolutely kind of increases that target. And as someone who has experienced that, you know, it’s very difficult to communicate the scale and how dangerous that is.”

The return of “Tuca & Bertie” sings, while ruffling some patriarchal feathers for the good of us all

“Tuca & Bertie” marks its second season arrival on Adult Swim politely, but once it dispenses with new arrival niceness it lets loose with where it stands on misogyny by way of a third episode musical statement. “A bro is a schmo who can do anything!” sings a co-worker of Bertie’s who is both a rooster and the ruder alternate term for a rooster.

Then a fellow female co-worker pirouettes into frame and offers, “Or you could be a simple sweetie and still uphold the patriarchy!”

Creator Lisa Hanawalt has enough experience in the world of animation to be familiar with all the ways the industry caters to men, along with society at large. Her show is one of the few animated respites from the bro-niverse out there – a sanctuary, but not an exclusive one, and not devoid of contributions from guys.

Still, the fact that this animated series formerly nested on Netflix won a slot on a programming schedule targeting young male viewers is a sign. Two years ago “Tuca & Bertie” landed as a bold animated series about claiming one’s agency and surviving trauma, disguised as a fun-loving ‘toon about Tuca, a fun-loving toucan (voiced by Tiffany Haddish) trying to find herself and her best friend Bertie, a tightly wound but endlessly lovable song thrush (voiced by comedian Ali Wong).

Bertie works in an office to pay the bills while baking pastries as a side gig. In the first season she lands an apprenticeship with celebrity baker Pastry Pete, who eventually triggers Bertie’s long buried memories of being sexually assaulted at camp. Hanawalt’s steering of the storyline is revolutionary in a number of respects, foremost being her conveyance of what happened to Bertie without actually showing her assailant or, as my colleague Kylie Cheung points out, the assault itself.

Examinations of this subplot abound, but it’s not all there is to this show’s magnificence, as that musical interlude demonstrates. That happens in the third episode and by that point it is thoroughly established that “Tuca & Bertie” has settled into its new home. Tuca and Bertie haven’t blithely moved on from what’s happened before, however.

Instead they’re gliding from Bertie’s first season disclosure into her next steps, which happen to align with current discussions about the toll the last few years has taken on our collective mental health.

The season premiere finds Bertie flitting between counselors in a desperate search for a therapist who can help her with her crippling anxiety, an exhausting quest that leads her back to her reliable sources of support, Tuca and Bertie’s gentle boyfriend Speckle (“Minari” star Steven Yeun).

Tuca is still searching for romantic companionship and purpose, remaining adamantly devoted to her sobriety. Trusting that the title characters never be done with each other is the reliable core of the show.  Now that we’re familiar with them, though, the story pushes harder on the individual issues that require tending. Inevitably they fall short of each other’s expectations, as is the case during a wild girls trip adventure to the adult playground known as Planteau, a Vegas of sorts, populated by sentient plants.

But this relaxation into the show’s next phase also allows the writers to break through the veneer of each individual’s colorful cheeriness and bulk up their psychological complexity. The Tuca-centric “Nighttime Friend” provides insight into Tuca’s irrepressible confidence by tagging along with her heretofore secretive night-owl adventures.

Certainly a slice of the audience could have related to her sleeplessness back in 2019, but now that pandemic-related insomnia is a common as cicada swarms, the otherworldly quality of the piece holds fresh meaning. In every episode Hanawalt and the rest of the creative team, including fellow executive producer Raphael Bob-Waksberg, with whom she worked on “BoJack Horseman,” strike a balance between the loopy lightness of this anthropomorphic animal world and the shadows each character is navigating.

Here we’re reminded that Tuca’s positivity is genuine, but it’s also compensating for some deeply rooted issues. It also highlights Yeun’s contributions as Speckle, an even-keeled constant in all these stories for his unwavering faith in his girlfriend and best friend and as unexpected comic relief. He’s also one of the means by which “Tuca & Bertie” demonstrates that shows created in and for the female gaze are inclusive and appealing to everybody – which was why there was such as outcry over Netflix’s premature cancellation of the show in the first place.

That Adult Swim saved the show speaks to the truth of that statement. While the network is still very much aimed at young men, introducing “Tuca & Bertie” to its lineup speaks to a desire to inspire socially relevant conversations with its programming. Not long ago its lineup was mainly kept alive by the likes of “Squidbillies” or “Robot Chicken” and “Family Guy” repeats leading into late-night anime. Those remain, along with airings of the less aggressive and smarter “Bob’s Burgers” reruns. But if “Rick and Morty” lends a dark intellectual legitimacy to its stoner palace, “Tuca & Bertie” smartly perks up the lineup, reminding us of the many ways that animation tells multi-dimensional stories that speak to everybody, not just the guys.

“Tuca & Bertie” premieres Sunday, June 13 at 11:30 p.m. on Adult Swim.

Life after wildlife trafficking: what happens to rescued animals?

In 2013 authorities at Bangkok’s main airport busted a smuggler carrying 54 ploughshare tortoises from Madagascar crammed in a suitcase. The seizure of what amounted to about 10% of the critically endangered species’ wild population made news around the world.

What happened to those animals later did not generate as many headlines, says Jan Schmidt-Burbach, head of wildlife research and animal welfare at World Animal Protection.

Half of the tortoises died soon after their rescue — a surprise, he says, because the animals are tough and should have been able to survive. The rest went to a government rescue center in Thailand, only to end up among a group of animals that later disappeared and were suspected stolen. That second suspected crime was possible, in part, because there was resistance from center managers, he says, to marking the tortoises’ shells to make them traceable.

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Cases like this illustrate two of the biggest problems with the fight against the illegal wildlife trade: the scarcity of regulations for the treatment of animals after they’ve been rescued, and the lack of data regarding what happens to them.

“That lack of transparency with confiscated wild animals opens doors to laundering and just inappropriate handling,” says Schmidt-Burbach.

International pressure to tackle the illegal wildlife trade has increased in recent years. But a resulting increase in successful seizures of live wildlife also means authorities are often overwhelmed with animals, including species that require specialized care or are dangerous.

A recent paper published in the journal Animals examines what happens to these creatures, and why. Focusing on Southeast Asia, a wildlife trading hot spot, the researchers found that illegally traded wildlife are often not handled in a way most beneficial to the animals due to a combination of corruption, exploitation, and lack of policy, funding, expertise and capacity.

“Yes, they were essentially rescued,” says conservation scientist Shannon Noelle Rivera, the paper’s lead author. “But seizure does not mean rescueby any means, and a lot of times they end up right back in the trade.”

Handled correctly, some of these animals could be successfully returned to their home habitats and help replenish populations of threatened species. Instead, they are often kept in captivity, in centers that lack the expertise, funding or the will to care for them properly.

Others disappear back into the wildlife trade. Sometimes it’s because corrupt officials sell them back into the illegal wildlife market. Other times it’s because directives to care for seized animals often lack the resources to do so. Many are released en masse, whether the environment is suitable or not, because that’s the easiest thing to do.

As Rivera’s research found, large amounts of lizards, snakes and birds are being released haphazardly and not in their native habitats: “The wrong species are getting dumped all over the place,” according to a source quoted in the paper. This puts the animals at risk of dying, becoming invasive, overwhelming the ecosystem, or carrying new diseases to other fauna and humans.

The Vagaries of “Disposal”

Other researchers say the paper, although limited to Southeast Asia, reflects a global problem.

“The key themes they’ve identified definitely ring true,” says Neil D’Cruze, global head of wildlife research at World Animal Protection and an academic visitor at the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit at the University of Oxford. The best outcome, he says, is not just about following laws but ensuring the animals’ wellbeing.

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, an international agreement to regulate wildlife commerce, has guidelines for what it terms the “disposal” of rescued animals. The three options include returning them to wild, captivity or euthanasia, with the latter, as the CITES resolution states, “the simplest and most humane option available.”

But tracking which option countries choose has been difficult. D’Cruze co-authored a study in 2016 that found 70% of CITES signatory countries didn’t provide any data on animal disposals on their mandatory animal trade reports because they weren’t required to do so at the time. CITES finally added a field for this information in 2018, but it’s still not compulsory. Indeed, more recent research found that only 32% of CITES signatory countries had even submitted the mandatory reports.

Once an animal is trafficked, it’s often considered lost to conservation, says Rivera, who also points out that the term “disposal” comes with the connotations of discarding.

“Just ethically looking at the exploitation and corruption that can continue after the confiscation is really important,” she says. “We’re trying to stop [wildlife trafficking] through a lot of enforcement measures,” but what happens to the animals next “just kind of slips under the radar.”

Many animals end up in various forms of captivity of extremely varying quality of care. Some sites that position themselves as true sanctuaries are actually little more than thinly veiled tourist attractions, or are reliant on tourism dollars for funding, which can create a cycle of keeping animals in perpetuity. There is also a lack of transparency about the source of these animals — some facilities have been linked to the illegal wildlife trade.

“Trying to understand where these facilities are getting their animals is extremely difficult,” says Rivera.

Stronger legislation, political support, a reduction in demand, global participation, and wildlife seizure management are among Rivera’s recommendations. A registry of rescue centers, with licensing, oversight and inspections would be a good start, she says.

D’Cruze agrees that any care centers must have strict guidelines to follow that mean they are genuine sanctuaries and lifetime care facilities.

“That means no selfies and cuddling with the cubs, no performances or tricks or unnatural behaviors, no walking with them on a leash,” he says.

The Complexity of Releases

Of course, if at all possible, an animal rescued from the wildlife trade should be returned to its native habitat.

But releasing a trafficked animal is much more complicated than finding an open field or a forest. These animals are often wounded, malnourished or dehydrated, or they’ve potentially been exposed to pathogens when they were held in close contact with other animals and species. They often require quarantine or specialized veterinary care, expensive prospects that require expertise and commitment from governments.

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“Even if there is expertise and funding, the next biggest hurdle tends to be doing it properly and mitigating the risks of harming wild populations,” says D’Cruze. That includes minimizing other animals’ exposure to diseases and releasing animals in areas with enough territory to sustain populations. Also, some captive animals have imprinted on humans to the extent that they can’t take care of themselves in the wild, can be come nuisance animals, or are particularly vulnerable to hunters.

One success story is the Wildlife Alliance’s work with the Cambodia government to create a protocol for animals from seizure through to release or lifetime care. Thomas Gray, former director of science at the nongovernmental organization, calls the repopulation of native animals around the UNESCO World Heritage site Angkor Wat “a fantastic success story.” But, he cautions, “only a tiny proportion of the animals from the wildlife trade have been able to be released there.”

Over the years, says Gray, thousands of snakes, turtles and other reptile species have been released into the wild in Cambodia by the Wildlife Alliance and the government. Yet there is no post-release information on whether they survived and what, if any, effects they had on their environments.

“We’re assuming that they are surviving,” he says. “We’re assuming that we’re returning them into the right places ecologically. And we’re assuming that they’re not having an impact on the ecology of the places where they are released. And I think those are all safe assumptions, but there’s no hard data that supports that.”

Can This Problem Be Solved?

Much of the burden to manage the results of the illegal wildlife trade is on the countries where these animals were seized or sourced, says Rivera. But the market demand for these exotics comes overwhelmingly from elsewhere. According to recent research, wealthy nations are driving this trade — the so-called WEIRD countries: western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic. The biggest market by far is the U.S., with France and Italy trailing.

That’s why one of Rivera’s recommendations is for global participation in managing seizures, particularly when the source or intervening countries don’t have the resources. “We can’t just leave this up to countries that are doing the most seizures, or countries that have the most wildlife trade demand.”

D’Cruze agrees. If countries allow the legal importation and trade of exotic animals, he says they should help manage the consequences, especially as the legal and illegal trade are linked with, for example, poached animals being passed off as legal, captive-bred animals.

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And law enforcement and seizures alone aren’t enough — what happens afterwards is equally, if not more, important, according to the experts.

“All interventions need to be designed in such a way that the care of any live animals are explicitly built into your interventions,” says Gray. And it’s particularly important for any entity funding this work to encourage governments to create protocols for these animals, he says.

The process of developing those protocols starts with better information. The current lack of data means we’re missing the opportunity to develop and refine approaches for post-seizure release into the wild, and for finding ways to repopulate endangered species’ populations.

“I think if we were able to show how to do it successfully, or even how to do it unsuccessfully, then we can start rehabbing these animals a lot better and have that be a more viable option,” says Rivera.

Lara Trump encourages vigilantes to “arm up and get guns” along southern U.S. border

Despite violent rhetoric from her family inciting the January 6th insurrection, Lara Trump suggested vigilante violence against people perceived to be from south of the southern border during a Saturday night appearance with Fox News personality Jeanine Pirro.

The former president’s daughter-in-law suggested residents of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California should arm themselves and prepare for violence.

“And I don’t know what you tell the people that live at the southern border,” she said. “I guess they better arm up and get guns and be ready — and maybe they’re going to have to start taking matters into their own hands.”

She went on to say people shouldn’t not make the “dangerous” journey to America despite the right of asylum being guaranteed by U.S. and international law.

As science advances, does Ockham’s Razor still apply?

William of Ockham is the medieval philosopher who gave us what is perhaps the world’s only metaphysical knife. Raised by Franciscan friars and educated at Oxford in the late 13th century, he focused his energies on what can only be described as esoterica, topics spanning theology and politics. In service of this occupation, he clashed with Pope John XXII and was excommunicated by the Catholic Church.

Ockham’s exploration of the philosophical concept of nominalism and his preference for parsimony in logical arguments gave rise to the concept of Ockham’s Razor (sometimes spelled “Occam”). Stated plainly, the Razor asserts that if two models equally explain a scenario, the simpler of the two is more likely.

Remarkably, this principle has been applied and contested for seven-hundred years, though the metaphor of the Razor itself surfaced after Ockham’s death. Yet the boundaries of science have expanded into the territories of quantum mechanics, human behavior, and artificial intelligence — complicated fields, where “simplicity” may not always apply. To that, one might reasonably ask if Ockham’s Razor is still a useful principle when it comes to science. In other words: Is the Razor still sharp?

The Value of the Razor

 In his book “The Demon-Haunted World,” the late Carl Sagan introduces a thought experiment of a dragon in his garage. When Sagan convinces someone to come look at the dragon, the visitor opens the garage door and finds nothing there. Sagan then counters that “she’s an invisible dragon,” and, naturally, cannot be seen. The visitor suggests setting up an infrared camera to catch the thermal emissions from the dragon’s breath, but Sagan’s dragon gives off no heat. The visitor then suggests layering the floor with flour to detect the movement of the dragon, but Sagan’s dragon floats serenely, leaving no footprints nor stirring the air. At this point, most would agree with the visitor’s logical conclusion: Sagan’s invisible, floating, thermally-neutral pet dragon is a fiction. Ockham’s Razor cuts through the chaff of Sagan’s dubious explanations to suggest that given the state of the evidence – an empty garage – the most prudent interpretation is that there is no dragon.

For those who think the example above is far-fetched, consider instead some of the more outlandish conspiracy theories circulating on the internet. To their adherents, any rational challenge to them is met with a further amendment to the original theory. The theory becomes increasingly baroque and convoluted to respond to each subsequent challenge to its initial thesis.

If conspiracy theories are often characterized by a surplus of cobbled together amendments to shore up the original thesis, the challenges of many modern scientific research studies are more akin to a criminal investigation. The researcher finds an empty garage, looks inside, and attempts to infer what has transpired. The imaginative can concoct many stories to explain what they find, but each explanation will be subject to the biases of the investigator.

In his classic article, “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” John Ioannidis explains why research that examines a “greater number and lesser preselection of tested relationships” is prone to this problem. Stated another way: “seek and ye shall find.” Particularly in observational studies that capture vast numbers of predictor variables, it becomes quite possible that one or more of these many variables appears to have a relationship with the outcome due to chance alone. Preselection is important, as in the absence of a conjecture of what factors matter prior to the research, it is easier to concoct a story that links variables that may simply be random noise. This problem is compounded by modern statistical software packages that make it easy to test hundreds of variables against an outcome, even when the researcher has prior reason to believe that a given variable would be linked to the outcome.

Ockham’s Razor is useful in these situations by challenging research where “everything but the kitchen sink” is tested against one or more outcomes. Sometimes, the simplest explanation of unlikely results is that the study in question is inconclusive, and any apparent relationships are more noise than signal.

The challenge of knowing where to cut

In physics, Ockham’s Razor has long been associated with aesthetics. Simplicity and parsimony as formulated by Ockham become elegance and truth among Einstein and his contemporaries. It is said that Einstein was indifferent when told that experimental findings found evidence to support his theory of General Relativity. The theory had to be correct, he reasoned, as it was simply too elegant to be wrong. Or, in his own words, “the only physical theories that we are willing to accept are the beautiful ones.”

But defining what is “beautiful” in science is as contentious as it is in art. Though Einstein’s aesthetics were prescient, it is hard to build a scientific enterprise around such intuitions.

The essayist and science writer Philip Ball points out that Ockham’s Razor has been used both to advance the “Many Worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics as well as to critique it. (The Many World interpretation posits that there are numerous parallel universes in which all possible outcomes of binary quantum mechanical measurements are realized.)The simplicity and elegance of the theory are contingent on how we define the terms. The assumptions of the Many Worlds hypothesis may be simple, but its predictions and implications are vast and complex. So which way should the Razor cut?

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It is also easier to apply the Razor when examining past paradigm changes in science than when using it to evaluate current scientific disputes. Take the renewed debate on whether COVID-19 began as a natural zoonotic illness or emerged from a lab. To apply Ockham’s Razor we have to first be much more specific about what constitutes a simple explanation. We then have to ask an even more challenging question of which theory best fits the existing data. Such a question involves determining how hard it would be for COVID-19 to naturally evolve, examining both the molecular as well as the epidemiological evidence. The point being, invoking the Razor is often easier than applying it.

Nicks in the blade

Ironically the preservation of Ockham’s Razor over the centuries may be due to its own internal simplicity. Simply by uttering the phrase “Ockham’s Razor,” it is possible to challenge everything from an interpretation of a new physics experiment, to the explanation of a social movement, to a possible account for a crime scene. The Razor has broad utility in pushing back against explanations that appear to be overly complicated or continue to amend their original thesis by layering secondary and contingent explanations in response to new challenges.

Yet in science, the Razor is just one concept that researchers might use in considering a theory. How predictive is the theory? Is it falsifiable? How well does it align with other explanations that we believe are correct? How internally consistent is it? These and many more questions all are part of the discourse of science. Ockham’s Razor in and of itself is not the sole criterion for finding the truth — and applying the Razor outside of the narrow realm of statistical model selection is not so simple.

For scientists that would equate the Razor with beauty and elegance, this only sparks the question of who gets to define beauty? Past scientific revolutions have a habit of diminishing the centrality of humans; the heavens do not revolve around us, we were not created separate from the rest of nature, our minds are not perfectly rational in their function. Believing that the universe must accord with our own sense of the beautiful seems another case of hubris and unwarranted human exceptionalism.

A close shave

Let’s revisit the dragon in the garage. Imagine you are told that this invisible dragon can induce fatal burns without the heat and smoke of fire. You investigate further and conclude that since there is no evidence of a beast, neither the dragon nor its deadly force can exist. Hours later, you succumb to radiation burns from your exposure in the garage.

Though Okham’s Razor may not be well suited to all types of knowledge, at the boundaries of scientific knowledge it offers a rubric to test hypotheses. The Razor continues to demonstrate utility to whittle down chaff at the margins. It would be convenient if the Razor alone was sufficient to settle all scientific debate. But the world, it turns out, is not so parsimonious.

Low on natural light? These 6 indoor plants will thrive anyway

Looking for a plant that will survive in your dark bathroom or next to a north-facing window in your home? Or maybe in your basement window? Don’t fret — there are lots of different houseplants that thrive in low-light conditions.

But can a plant survive in a totally windowless room? The short answer to this question is . . . no. There is no living plant that will do well in a room that does not have at least a sliver of natural light, and while some of the plants on this list may be able to survive in artificial light for a short period of time, eventually — unless you give them a spin around your home to get some light every so often—they will die from lack of exposure to sunlight. If you have a windowless room in your home that’s crying out for a plant, consider adding grow lights which will help provide a plant with the light that it needs to survive.

That said, before you throw in the towel and get a fake plant to occupy the corner in your home that needs a little green, check out these top low-light houseplants.

1. Snake Plant (Sansevieria)

https://www.instagram.com/p/B8aW1kNAIw7/

Snake plants are some of the most popular low-light houseplants on the market—and for good reason. They’re easy to grow, don’t require frequent watering, and come in a variety of attractive shapes and colors. Just ask Home52 Editorial Lead, Arati Menon, whose snake plant is absolutely thriving—despite her admission that watering is infrequent at best and fresh air is a rarity. All in praise of the snake plant, though, that’s happy to take the abuse.

2. ZZ Plant

https://www.instagram.com/p/CLJ6_fAgxW1/

This tropical guy is one of the best low-light plants available. The ZZ plant (Zamioculcas zamiifolia) is characterized by dark green, thick, arc-like stems with succulent oval leaves. Since it grows from rhizomes, the ZZ plant is also extremely drought-tolerant and should be watered infrequently when grown indoors. While they can do well in medium to bright light conditions, they’re also fine with low-light as well — perfect for that north-facing window.

3. Pothos

https://www.instagram.com/p/CPOpJODg-U3/

Pothos are truly a staple in any home. They thrive in a variety of lighting conditions and require very little water. These vining house plants instantly add a tropical flair to any room and can grow up to 30 feet long (!) indoors if they’re not cut back. Pothos can be trained to grow up trellises or left to trail downwards, and they make excellent hanging plants. Popular varieties of pothos include the golden pothos, jade pothos, and marble pothos.

4. Dracaena

https://www.instagram.com/p/CPz8XYbg_KK/

Dracaena is a genus of about 120 tropical plants, most of which are notoriously easy to grow. They make popular houseplants thanks to their tolerance to low light and low water requirements. Dracaena also come in a wide range of shapes, colors, and sizes. Popular Dracaena house plants include the Dracaena ‘Janet Craig’ (Dracaena deremensis ‘Janet Craig’), lucky bamboo (Dracaena braunii), corn plant (Dracaena fragrans), and the song of India (Dracaena reflexa), to name a few.

5. Cast Iron Plant

https://www.instagram.com/p/CEuEOZ_H-ME/

As its common name indicates, the cast iron plant (Aspidistra elatior) is an extremely hardy houseplant that can survive even the most extreme conditions. This plant can grow in near darkness if required (although we don’t recommend it!) and is also drought-tolerant. Cast iron plants grow up to two feet tall indoors and are mainly grown for their bushy foliage. While they are slow-growing, it’s easy to keep them alive and rewarding once you step back and see how much they’ve changed.

6. Dieffenbachia

https://www.instagram.com/p/BiFisyFDtr5/

Plants in the Dieffenbachia genus grow well in low-light conditions, although they also do well in medium to bright indirect light. Dieffenbachia come in a wide range of sizes and colors, ranging from the relatively small and compact Dieffenbachia ‘Camilla’ to the large and showy Dieffenbachia ‘Tropic Snow’. Unfortunately, Dieffenbachia plants are highly toxic to pets and humans if ingested so parents and pet owners should exercise caution in the home.

This post contains products independently chosen (and loved) by Food52 editors and writers. Food52 earns an affiliate commission on qualifying purchases of the products we link to.

Jesse Jackson Jr. warned us about democracy: It’s hobbling, “on one broken leg, and drunk”

“The United States is not a democracy. It is moving toward democracy,” former congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. explained during our recent conversation in his Chicago home. As I began to ask him to elaborate, he cut off my sentence at the knees, giving a small semantic correction — but a politically crucial one — to his already bleak assessment: “Was. The United States was moving toward democracy.” 

We were sitting underneath the visual aid of what is a lifelong passion for Jackson: a large chart and timeline depicting a comprehensive theory for the interpretation of American history. Beginning with the colonial and slavery days of the 17th century and moving to the present, the timeline identifies the critical stages of American development using a nifty metaphor: the “tremor phase,” “the great earthquake” of the Civil War, and everything that happened subsequent to Reconstruction, including a violent mob storming the Capitol in January 2021, with many insurrectionists waving Confederate flags, as “the aftershocks.”

The chart and the book that emanates from this historical theory, “A More Perfect Union: Advancing New American Rights,” co-authored with longtime civil rights activist and political strategist Frank Watkins, were both vastly ahead of their time. Jackson recalls showing the work to visitors in his congressional office in the 1990s and early 2000s, and describes the solutions that his historical framework pulls into focus, with no small measure of modesty but not without justification, as “the most progressive ever proposed” within mainstream American discourse.

Locating racism as central to the historical development of the U.S., it was “critical race theory” before the term became familiar, and an early version of the “1619 Project,” many years prior to the New York Times series. In fact, when “A More Perfect Union” was published in 2001, the New York Times, along with nearly every other major publication, refused to review it. Its advantage over critical race theory and the 1619 Project is that it opens an exit from the oppressive structures of American law and power. Rather than collapsing into “Afro-pessimism,” it delineates a template for a radical restructuring of society.

Jesse Jackson Jr. acquired what he calls an “orientation” from coming of age as the son of one of the world’s foremost civil rights leaders, the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr., and formally studying theology and law. He was first elected to Congress, representing the South Side and southern suburbs of Chicago, in 1995, and served 17 years as a consistent advocate for voting rights, investment in public goods and services, and peace. He was also national co-chairman of the Barack Obama campaign in 2008. Following a federal investigation of his campaign finances in 2012, Jackson was forced to resign from Congress and plead guilty to one count of wire and mail fraud in connection with misuse of campaign funds. In the same period, he began receiving treatment for bipolar disorder. He ultimately served more than two years in federal prison.

Jackson rarely grants interviews these days, but is committed to carrying his intellectual and political work into the present. In 2019, he collaborated with his mother, Jacqueline Jackson, to publicize her book, “Loving You, Thinking of You, Don’t Forget to Pray: Letters to My Son in Prison.” They used their media appearances to discuss criminal justice reform, the moral failures of the penal system and how best to assimilate ex-convicts, especially those who are not former members of Congress, into roles of productive citizenship.

Insistent that his triumphs and failures, his imprisonment and redemption are all critical to his expansive perspective, Jackson began with his initial entrance to the Capitol when I inquired about why he saw voting rights as superior to all other issues in political struggle.

“When we got to Congress in 1995, our orientation prepared us for everything that was percolating in the body politic,” Jackson said, referring to himself and Watkins. “Newt Gingrich, the Republicans and some Southern Democrats were halting all progress. We walked through the Capitol, and we saw Robert E. Lee’s statue, Stonewall Jackson’s statue and Gen. Joseph Wheeler from Alabama’s statue. The customs of politics had come to accept that ‘states’ rights’ was a legitimate form of organizing an agenda.”

Jackson remembered, as a freshman congressman investigating why many of his colleagues felt such hostility toward the very notion of multiracial democracy, taking a tour of many Southern districts, including that of Gingrich, then speaker of the House, in Georgia. “We could see that the politics associated with the Civil War,” Jackson said, “was a factor in the representatives that the people send to Washington, D.C. They merely changed the name from ‘Confederate’ to ‘conservative.'”

One of his first efforts to confront the sacralization of states’ rights was to lobby for the inclusion of a Rosa Parks statue in the Capitol building. It was not until 2013 that the effort succeeded, and the civil rights hero was able to stand alongside men who committed treason in what is purportedly a pantheon of the American democratic tradition. Jackson explained, with audible disgust in his voice, that Nancy Pelosi recently told a reporter about how he had “tried” to remove the statues of Confederates from the Capitol.

“Jesse tried?” Jackson asked in response. “Well, how long has Chuck Schumer walked past those statues? How long has Nancy Pelosi herself walked past those statues? You see, it isn’t about the statues. It is about the politics that they legitimize — the politics behind them that signal it is acceptable for those figures to be there.” 

“It is business as usual,” Jackson said, summarizing the Democratic Party’s complacency on both matters of symbolism and substance, “They do not understand or appreciate the existential threat facing democracy.”

To acquire a sophisticated understanding of American democracy, Jackson argues that historical knowledge is a non-negotiable necessity, particularly “the history of the American Negro.” While making it clear that he has no desire to “elevate Black history above anyone else’s history,” he argued that the unique usefulness of Black American history is that it clears away the fog that obstructs the view of America’s ongoing conflict between authentic democracy and various forms of white supremacy and rule by the rich.

“We should legitimize the perspective of women’s history in the United States. We should legitimize Native American history. We should legitimize labor history, and LGBTQ and immigrants, and down the list,” Jackson said. “They all offer important, even essential perspectives. We’re all fighting for civil rights.” His voice rises almost to a shout, slowly drawing out the words “civil rights.”

“However, I will argue that it is the history of the Negro that shows the formulation of the government as other histories cannot,” he continued. “It will show why states left the Union. It will show why states are added to the Union — some slave, some free. It will show how the nation itself expands. It will show movements like popular sovereignty. It will show why statues were being torn down last summer, and why a mob stormed the Capitol in January of 2021. It alone will show the history of the struggle to add the 14th Amendment — a citizenship right and a personhood right — and therefore the privileges and protections of the Constitution apply to you because you are within the borders. You have to come through the history of how the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments were added to the Constitution, and you have to go through the history of the Negro to get there, in order to understand the formulation of the United States government.”

Jackson acts as docent for a history that the Democratic Party, most mainstream commentators and — as he is quick to point out — even some civil rights organizations have either failed to grasp or chosen to ignore. The history renders the following conclusion inarguable: American democracy is inherently flawed, given its systemic advantages toward the white majority and moneyed class, and “states’ rights” functions as a disguise for the reactionary politics of white supremacy. Republican strategist Lee Atwater was famously brazen in his acknowledgement of the latter point, once telling an interviewer, “You start out in 1954 by saying, N***er, n***er, n***er. By 1968 you can’t say n***er — that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff.”

Progress toward racial equity, labor rights and social justice continually collides with “states’ rights” road blocks. Voting, Jackson argues, is the most salient example, because it is the foundation of democratic participation, but also because it determines who — and, by extension, what conception of society — gains authority over the decision-making processes that govern people’s lives.

The 2013 Shelby County v. Holder Supreme Court case, which removed federal oversight from voting policies in former Jim Crow states and opened a pathway for all the voter suppression laws those states have adopted in 2021, demonstrated that under the current states’ rights system the universal franchise is forever in jeopardy. Beyond the Shelby case, the Voting Rights Act itself is inadequate. As a consequence of its insufficiencies, Congress has made five amendments to the act, and has had repeatedly extend its provisions. The obvious and frightening question then becomes, what will happen if or when Congress decides to weaken or even end the Voting Rights Act? 

“I remember when Reagan supported an extension of the Voting Rights Act for 25 years,” Jackson said, “Well, hell — he’s been dead that long. So, here we are again trying to extend civil rights protections, in the form of voting, in an environment that isn’t as tolerant as Reagan’s was.”

Karl Marx explained that capitalism carries the tools of its own demolition. Its dual reliance on extreme inequality and widespread consumption installs a crisis at its center. Similarly, American democracy will exist in permanent cycles of crisis — experiencing “aftershocks” of varying severity — as long as it allows “states’ rights” to undermine the exercise of democracy. From the Electoral College to myriad forms of voter suppression, the veto power of the states, especially in the hands of oligarchs and white nationalists, endangers all efforts to improve the nation.

The only permanent solution is to demote — or finally destroy — the corrosive concept of states’ rights. “I understand why people don’t want to talk about the long-term solutions,” Jackson said while acknowledging the “impracticality” of what he is proposing, “But the short-term solutions keep presenting themselves over and over again, and failing over and over again.”

The 10th Amendment delegates authority to the states on matters that the Constitution does not explicitly address. Therefore, to nationalize a right, the Constitution cannot remain silent on the question of whether or not that right exists. “In America, a human right has to be in the Constitution. That’s how and why we have a strong press, strong religious freedom and strong right of assembly,” Jackson said.

If Americans genuinely want a strong franchise — a universal right to vote and equal protection of that right for all citizens — we must pass a constitutional amendment guaranteeing that right. The first section of the resolution that Jackson introduced in Congress in 2003 states, “All citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, shall have the right to vote in any public election held in the jurisdiction in which the citizen resides. The right to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States, any State, or any other public or private person or entity.” The amendment would vest authority in Congress to “enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

Only a constitutional amendment could create one national standard of voting rights, under one system, impervious to interference from racist and self-serving state officials. Jackson reminded me that the TSA was created only in 2001. Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, political leaders agreed that to ensure the safety of travelers and prevent similar crimes in the future, it was essential to centralize airport security procedures under a single federal agency. Voting policy and practice, Jackson argues, could operate under similar federal protocols and regulation.

“We took airport security from the states and turned it over to the TSA,” Jackson said. “My amendment would take voting from the states and turn it over to a machinery that has thousands of vote counters, poll workers and technology that are incorruptible by local officials.

“We can no longer have the governor of Texas overseeing elections his way, the governor of Georgia doing it his way, the governor of Florida doing it his way,” Jackson added. “That’s a problem for democracy. Voting must have constitutional protection if we are going to call ourselves a democracy.”

In the short term, Jackson supports the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, but cautions that even if they are passed, the crisis will not be over. He offers the grim prediction that “as soon as the For the People Act or John Lewis Voting Rights Act passes, you’ll see 20 state attorneys general challenge it.” After those Republican objections, those laws will “run through a legal gauntlet where one of Trump’s judicial appointments will hear the case.” It might eventually arrive at the Supreme Court where, as Jackson puts it, “Amy Coney Barrett and the Supremes will say, ‘Stop in the name of states’ rights.'”

“We should support the For the People Act and the John Lewis Act, because we want our democracy to hobble into the future, even with one broken leg and drunk,” Jackson said. “But we should really work to make it so that our democracy can finally stand tall.”

In Congress, and in the book that he wrote with and Frank Watkins, Jackson also proposed amendments to guarantee Americans the right to health care, a clean environment, a quality education, housing and other rights enumerated in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Using the vocabulary of rights to support progressive goals of equality, justice and environmental sustainability could provide an overarching argument that can unite the multiple factions of the American left. If Republicans in the early 2000s, including then-President George W. Bush, could propose and promote a constitutional amendment to prohibit same-sex marriage, Democrats should overcome their deficit of imagination at least enough to discuss big ideas that can help create a better country and a better world. Even if those ideas are unlikely to succeed in the short term, they can create a sense of mission — and any movement without long-term goals will surely fail.

In terms of the survival of American democracy, the risk of failing to act on voting rights is potentially lethal. The law currently offers no preventive measures against states’ rights sabotage. In “The Sun Also Rises,” Hemingway describes the stages of going bankrupt as “First, gradually. Then, suddenly.” Americans have ignored the gradual for so long that we now face the terror of the sudden.

During my conversation with Jackson, I spelled out the nightmare scenario that historian Timothy Snyder, political scientist Anthony DiMaggio and others have recently described. Here’s a quick summary: Republicans regain control of the House and Senate in 2022, and several pro-Trump Republicans are elected as secretaries of state in Electoral College swing states. In the 2024 election, President Biden (or another Democrat) wins several of those states by narrow margins, but Republican officials, claiming “irregularities” and fabricated “fraud,” refuse to certify the results. So a candidate who lost both the popular and electoral votes becomes president, and the United States is no longer a democracy. 

When I finished outlining the hypothetical scenario, I asked Jackson, “What, right now, could stop that from happening?”

He answered without hesitation: “Nothing.”

The existential crisis of “Loki”

“What if I was a robot and didn’t know it?” Loki asks in the first episode of his eponymous Marvel series on Disney+. 

In the scene, the fan-favorite God of Mischief (Tom Hiddleston) is reluctant to walk through what appears to be a metal detector but in actuality is used to confirm he’s an organic creature and has a soul. The ordeal is just one more piece of red tape to cut through when getting processed by the Time Variance Authority (TVA).

On one hand, Loki’s question could be seen as apprehension dealing with the TVA’s bureaucratic slog. Director and executive producer Kate Herron confirmed this interpretation in an interview with Salon.

“A lot of our writers spoke about the DMV, and I would talk about trying to go through Customs at the airport because I get very anxious trying to do that,” she said. “They put you in different queues and you’re like, ‘Oh, God, please let me through.’ So I think we wanted to kind of bring that human feeling of just being very disoriented.”

Approached from a different angle, however, Loki’s throwaway line could indicate a bigger question he has about himself and his new bizarre reality. After all, this is a different Loki from the one who died in “Avengers: Infinity War.” Escaping much earlier in the series thanks to the Tesseract inadvertently falling into his hands, this Loki is having his own “Sliding Doors” moment when he’s getting a do-over that involves helping the TVA and possibly even earning some sort of redemption.

“Our show is about identity and it is about Loki finding what is his sense of self now because he isn’t on the path that he was supposed to be on. He was supposed to be arrested and go to Asgard and become the Loki that we’ve seen across the films,” said Herron. “But this isn’t that Loki; he’s done something very different now. I think that was the real joy in putting him into this very new scenario, like, ‘Well, nature versus nurture – how will he react to this new environment?’ It’s a question that definitely echoes across the whole show.”

In some ways, Loki is the ideal character to be put into this situation. He has never lived on the binary, whether it’s his gender, his morality or even as a supposed god who has proven to be mortal. Now he’s thrust into a similarly ambiguous position as a criminal who’s trying to take down a possibly more alternate timeline variant of himself, working in an office that exists outside space and time, and one that is simultaneously futuristic and yet riddled with old equipment like brass service bells. Is it any wonder he’s having a bit of an existential moment?

Check out the rest of the interview with Herron, who discusses Hiddleston’ contribution to the series, the show’s retro look and the fun of playing with time travel.

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

There’s a discussion Loki has with Mobius (Owen Wilson) about hurting people as a trick to inspire fear, creating an illusion of power to establish his villainous cred. What observations do you have about this epiphany?

I think the thing that’s so interesting about it is that he gets this view on himself that our Loki across the last 10 years, very slowly got through changing through those films. So I think the thing I love about it is, I think there’s that moment where building off what he says there to Mobius, “You know, people just see me as a villain.” And Mobius is like, “Well, that’s not how I see it.” And I think that’s really powerful for me, because it shows that Loki obviously is feeling some empathy towards his actions, but at the same time, it kind of reminded me a bit of like “Good Will Hunting” with how Mobius is towards him. He’s this kind of mentor, but also I think it lays the foundation that hopefully there can be a friendship with these characters going forward. Because Mobius is like, “I don’t just see the bad in you. I acknowledged it . . . ” – he mentioned when Loki took out a guy’s eyeball not that long ago – “. . . but I don’t think that’s all the sum of your parts.” I think it’s very interesting to see a character talk about themselves in a way that I suppose we probably spoke about him on Reddit.

LokiTom Hiddleston in “Loki” (Disney+/Marvel Studios)

There’s been a lot said about Tom Hiddleston’s input into this. Not only is he the star and a producer on the series, but he also held a sort of lecture for the others to understand Loki’s history in the MCU. What was it like working with him on the show? What does he bring?

We spoke a lot about story. There’s moments in Episode 1 where Loki sees certain bits from his life, and we all discussed those. I think that was a really good foundation for what would happen there and from Michael [Waldron]’s script. But there were some moments that I know Tom pitched like the “I love you my sons” scene with Odin. He’s been playing the character for 10 years, so he does have all these incredible ideas and he’s an executive producer on this project as well. So it is like you have the Loki expert across the show, which was great.

The other thing I would say, we were filming this before the shutdown, and when the world changed, it was very unique going back and trying to make something like this during COVID. And it was scary at times. People didn’t know what was going to happen. No one completely understood the virus. And I’m very grateful to everyone for coming back and isolating so we could finish it in a safe way. But Tom always kept that level of joy up. It was really infectious and really good for morale for the whole team. I don’t think he’d mind this, but I always describe this bit like a wrestler. When he comes to set, he plays music like a wrestler entering the ring. It’s like, “Oh, Tom is here.” It was always great, and the team loved it. He plays these really fun bits of music, and it lifts everyone’s spirits. It really tied everyone together like a family. 

What was it like balancing the energies of Loki and Mobius, especially since Owen Wilson has his own chattiness and humor that he brings to the project?

Something that was really fun for me was that Tom is a classically trained actor; he’s done Shakespeare. You can hear it by just the beautiful way that he just uses language in his words. Then you have Owen, who obviously is a massive comedy actor, but his roots were in indie film, like “Bottle Rocket” and “Royal Tenenbaums.” They were some of the films that made me want to be a filmmaker. 

We had rehearsal and we had them reading in the room together, and the actors were contributing as well. Owen, sometimes he would just throw out lines, and then Tom in the tennis match would improvise the line back to him. It was just really fun to see these two fantastic actors really going to work. I think in that way, the chemistry between them is built just out of respect for each other’s work. 

Could you discuss Owen’s take on Mobius and Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Ravonna Renslayer, both of whom exist already in the MCU but have different interpretations on the show?

Owen’s character is one in the comic books, who was actually based on a very famous person [Mark Gruenwald] who worked at Marvel. Mobius has a mustache, which is a direct reference to this person. But when the actors get handed these characters, they take on a life their own. When I was talking to Owen about the character, because he wanted to look and feel different in the character, he was like, “I think it’d be cool if I had [this hair.]” He had done I think, a thing for “SNL” where he had silver hair, and I was like, “Oh, yeah, that’d be great.”

With Gugu’s character, this is a very new version of the character. She’s in the comics, there’s no escaping that. But I think for me, what’s exciting about it is that we’re setting up this character, because it’s the first time you’re seeing her on an MCU project. The version we have in our show is very much of our show, and it’s definitely like a new story for her. Gugu was in my pitch [for casting on the show]. 

I’ve enjoyed your work on “Sex Education” and the post-apocalyptic zombie series “Daybreak,” which are both comedies featuring younger characters. It’s an eclectic resume. So how did you come on to this show?

Basically, I love Loki and I found out that Marvel were making a television show about him. Like everyone, I saw him die in “Infinity War,” and I was horrified. And then “Endgame” happened [where he escaped at a point before his death]. And I was like, “You’re playing with my emotions now.” I was like, I need to know where this character is going. I asked my agents, “Can you just keep calling them and get me a seat in the room to chat to them about it?” And Marvel met me. 

There were three meetings, and basically, in the very first one, they were like, “Look, it’s a very casual meet and greet. Don’t prepare a pitch.” They sent me the first script and an outline, and I loved it. And I was like, “Well, I’m going to prepare a pitch,” mainly just because as you mentioned, I’ve done a lot of teen stuff. My background’s in comedy. I can bring the heart and the humor to this, but I haven’t done a lot of stuff with action and effects. As a writer, I’ve written lots of stuff like that, but as a director, I just didn’t have that experience. 

So I was like, well, I’m going to show them that I’m not just going to be like, “Oh, well, you know, the visual effects, I’ll be carried along by the team.” Instead, I had ideas for that and things I think would be cool to try and how I want to approach it. So I just did this massive pitch. I had everything in my head – casting ideas, I made a playlist of music, ideas for the design, like architecture, technology we have in the TVA, how I wanted to film it like a film noir kind of style. I had like a reel of action scenes in terms of how I wanted to approach the action, the visual effects ideas for that I thought could be cool. And also why I loved the character of Loki and why I thought if they were into what my idea and my take was, why I’d be the best candidate for that. 

What did you envision as the look for “Loki”? There’s so much going on, and the TVA has its own unique mix of styles that adds to Loki’s and the viewers’ disorientation.

In my pitch, I loved the idea of marrying up this Brutalist architecture with this like Midwest kind of style. And I think because you know, the timekeepers are these all-knowing, powerful beings that oversee it, so the Brutalist style really lends itself to that. Whereas the Midwest is like in the TVA – it’s very heroic and it’s very classy. 

I knew I wanted these aspects of the TVA, and we were pulling from lots of different sci-fi movies. For example, the font on the computers was loosely inspired by “Alien,” and the time doors were inspired by “Dune.” My production designer Kasra [Farahani], when he came in and pitched, he hadn’t seen my pitch document. We had pictures of old computers from the ’70s that were the same in both our documents. 

Loki, for example, when he’s arrested, he goes through these processing rooms. And Kasra was like, “Oh, we should make them cubes that he like falls through.” And I thought that was so funny. And the idea of having the cat in one of them because I really wanted the TVA to feel like it was a real challenge because it’s this office environment, but it exists outside of time and space. Something with me and Kasra was always talking about what how do we make this feel like a real, living, breathing office space. I pulled a lot from my own experiences as an office temp. They’ve got like, those little cone paper cups and technology that obviously on one hand feels very retro futuristic like in “Brazil,” but for me also having worked in offices, they do have computers that probably should be updated. They’re not going to get like the latest tech. 

What went into the creation of the TVA mascot/spokesperson, the animated talking clock Miss Minutes (Tara Strong)? She has such a specific retro look, but is also cheeky.

With Miss Minutes, we were really inspired by – I love the idea of Felix the Cat and that era of cartoons. I thought it’d be cool to call upon that because it felt to me like it was fitting in the era of where the TVA obviously just last had what seems like an internal design update. In terms of the cartoon, likewise, like I thought it’d be really cool if it was hand drawn. 

We want it to I feel like a kind of public service announcement kind of video. I love that video because I feel like the team always talk about it like our Mr. DNA from “Jurassic Park” moment. What’s so smart in the writing of it is that I feel like you’re learning about the world through comedy. Miss Minutes is obviously just a hoot. She’s a hoot. It’s also helpful in a way that we have this animated Southern talking clock in the first episode because it really sets the bar for, “If this is the status quo, then when’s it gonna go weird?”

I very much enjoyed the revelation of Loki as the mysterious real-life skyjacker D.B. Cooper. What was the conversation around that and what sort of impact the show wanted to make with it?

I felt if we were going to show these memories, not wanting it to feel like a clip show. Something I pitched was – I really loved the movie “Minority Report,” and there’s that scene where he sees his wife, and her image is projected. And it’s so painful, right? It’s like she’s in the room, but she’s not in the room. I was inspired by that with “Loki” because I thought, well, rather than cut to full screen to these clips from the films, I think it’d be cool if it’s almost like he’s watching a play of his life on a stage. It also meant we could stay in the room with our Loki and see his reactions to these moments. 

The [D.B. Cooper] moment is really earned, right? It’s so fun to see Loki have a win. But the fun for me with that scene is that it’s a new memory that fans hadn’t seen yet before. And it’s joyous and we could go full screen with it. Also our actor, Erika [Coleman], who played our air hostess [Florence Schaffner] – they had great chemistry. That was actually our first day of filming and it was actually a really fun way to kind of kick it all off. 

Loki
Tom Hiddleston in “Loki” (Disney+)

When it comes to time travel storytelling, is there a benefit of visiting known events like the D.B. Cooper hijacking? How much will we see of that sort of event? What are the dangers of that from a storytelling perspective?

For us, there are moments where there are things that are more familiar, but I think the thing that makes it interesting, is that we’re seeing these moments through Loki’s POV. That is the interesting slant on it, is that it’s a moment in time that obviously I might feel very differently about it, but how is Loki going to react in that situation? 

Also, what I loved is when I got the script, a lot of the places we do go to, they’re unexpected. It was always about making it feel like a real moment in time. It wasn’t like zany or heightened in a way that we didn’t feel like we were really in it. I wanted it to feel texturally like we were really going to that time period. 

How much deeper will we get with understanding who the three timekeepers are? And how does the arc of this show reflect what might be future seasons?

In terms of the story, we always worked on it and designed it to be these six episodes. But yeah, the show is setting up the TVA, and the excitement of setting up somewhere like the TVA is I do hope to see in future Marvel projects, yeah. It’d be so cool to see people go back there and be a part of building that. 

“Loki” releases new episodes on Wednesdays on Disney+.

Ethan Russell on the Beatles’ final photos, why John Lennon liked him and his own unbeatable luck

Celebrated rock photographer, director and author Ethan Russell joined host Kenneth Womack to talk about his storied career and work with the Beatles, his new book “Ethan Russell Photographs,” and much more on “Everything Fab Four,” a podcast co-produced by me and Womack (a music scholar who also writes about pop music for Salon) and distributed by Salon.

Russell, the godson of songwriter Cole Porter, holds the distinction as being the only photographer to have shot album covers for the Beatles, Rolling Stones and The Who. But as he tells Womack, he actually started out as an English major —until a chance meeting with Mick Jagger in London changed the trajectory of his career. As Russell says, he “had the job of rock photographer before it was considered a profession,” and that if “Cambridge had accepted me, I would have never done the cover for ‘Let It Be.'”

In fact, it was photographing Jagger for magazines that led to him being the go-to for the 1968 “Rolling Stones Rock & Roll Circus” special, where he first met John Lennon. He built a relationship with Lennon, who was “very friendly to me” and liked having Russell around because “I took good pictures of his girlfriend [Yoko Ono].”

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After filming of the “Circus” was over, Russell was contacted by the Beatles’ assistant Neil Aspinall, who wanted to see the pictures of John. “If you were working with one of [the Beatles],” says Russell, “you were probably in pretty good stead to work with all of them.” From there, he ended up shooting the “Get Back” project sessions (which would later become “Let It Be”) at Twickenham Studios, the Beatles’ famed Apple rooftop concert, and eventually what would be the band’s final photo shoot, at Tittenhurst Park in August 1969.

“What you get from those last photos [at Tittenhurst] is the way they really were,” explains Russell. “And the way they were, was over.”

Still, he says the Beatles’ music will always live on due to the harmonies and just being “smart.” As he tells Womack, “The Rolling Stones had ‘the look,’ but the Beatles were more revolutionary – not to take anything away from the Stones (with whom he toured for several years).” Paraphrasing an article once written about him, Russell says that working with all these people, he’s had “more luck than any human being should ever be allowed to have.”

Listen to the entire conversation with Ethan Russell on “Everything Fab Four” and subscribe via Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.

“Everything Fab Four” is distributed by Salon. Host Kenneth Womack is the author of a two-volume biography on Beatles producer George Martin, the bestselling book “Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road and the End of the Beatles,” and most recently “John Lennon, 1980: The Last Days in the Life.”

Matt Gaetz’ law school classmates spill the tea on his hard-partying ways: report

In interviews with Business Insider, former classmates of Rep. Matt Gaetz (R -FL) when he was attending William & Mary Law School, expressed dismay at continuing reports of his sex scandals and want him to resign immediately.

Along the way, they recalled his hard-partying ways when they were in school with him, with one adding of his recent exploits that have him under federal investigation, “Am I surprised he’s partying with people or doing that kind of stuff? No.”

According to the report, “In interviews, many of Gaetz’s former friends and acquaintances from William & Mary Law School’s class of 2007 said they were embarrassed by the constant headlines about the GOP congressman’s scandals. Insider spoke with 14 of Gaetz’s former classmates. Most of them spoke on condition of anonymity to protect personal and professional relationships,” with Insider adding, “One former law-school classmate regularly trolls Gaetz on Twitter by welcoming the congressman’s critics to the ‘Matt Haetz Society.'”

Insider reports that “Of the more than 500 William & Mary Law School alumni who signed a petition urging Gaetz to resign, 34 of them were members of Gaetz’s own class of 2007, of which there were about 200 people overall.”

One former classmate admitted that they dread each report on the lawmaker.

“Every time The Daily Beast breaks another story on a Friday, it’s like, ‘Oh boy, go check Twitter,'” they stated.

During the interviews, emails from Gaetz’s college days were shared with one being an invitation to a Super Bowl party that also promised gambling and strippers — which one associate of the now-Florida lawmaker said was a joke.

“His invitation included specific requests: chips, one-dollar bills, and strippers,” Insider reports while quoting Gaetz writing, “I may ask you to bring some incidentals (napkins, cups, chips, strippers, ext.).P.S – After entering all of your email addresses it is painfully obvious that I don’t know enough girls – so bring some.”

According to the schoolmate who said they weren’t surprised by the lawmaker’s current partying, they admitted they were stunned that he might have had sex with underaged women, telling insider Gaetz “… has a very high sense of self-preservation. I’m surprised he wouldn’t check their references.”

“Gaetz’s law-school reputation — attention-seeking with a frat-boy vibe — is similar to how he comes across as a congressman, said a former classmate, ‘except he’s more over-the-top now,'” the report notes. “As a law student, Gaetz lived in a large multi-bedroom house near campus, more luxurious digs than the cramped apartments where some of his classmates lived. He often hosted friends there to play cards or drink from a keg in the basement.”

“There are a handful of students that stood out as being particularly intelligent, others as particularly aggressive — we call them ‘gunners,'” explained a former classmate before adding Gaetz “wasn’t either of those. He’s always been kind of a frat boy.”

With one former classmate calling Gaetz “embarrassing to the institution,” another said of his attempt to throw out the election results that led to Donald Trump’s loss, “In doing that he’s undermining our system of government and the rule of law. Obviously, it’s not great to have Matt be among our alumni. It’s not really the person you want to point to as a role model.”

You can read more here.

Are we trying to “warp speed” treatments that aren’t ready?

For a patient with a devastating diagnosis, delaying death can sometimes be the most anyone can hope for. Slowing it enough to make it to one more summer. One more graduation.

Lisa Stockman-Mauriello is a 51 year-old communications expert and mother of three sons. In early January, she was diagnosed with Bulbar Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, a rare and rapidly fatal form of ALS. She knows it would be a long shot to hope for a cure. She just wants to extend her life, something that the promising drug Tofersen, currently being developed by the biotech company Biogen, might help her do. Unfortunately, her diagnosis arrived shortly after Biogen’s the deadline passed for the latest phase of its clinical trial recruitment. Stockman-Mauriello asked for an exception to be made. She was turned down. She has since taken her case to the court of public opinion and pressure, via a change.org petition. The petition features a photograph of her, flanked by her dog and holding a sign that reads, “I don’t want to die.” It currently has over 115,000 signatures.

Over the past few months, Stockman-Mauriello’s plight has been covered on major television news shows and news outlets. The reportage has been unambiguously emotional: “Mom Battling Rare ALS Pleads for ‘Compassionate Use’ of New Life-Saving Drug Biogen Won’t Give Her,” reads the headline in People magazine. The “Today” show, meanwhile, reported, “Mom with Aggressive ALS Hopes to See Sons Graduate, Asks Drug Company for Help.” Stockman-Mauriello’s imperative is clear: she doesn’t, as she says, want to die.

Biogen’s position has also been clear: Stockman-Mauriello was not eligible for the clinical trial. The company’s reasoning, however, has been complex, especially to those unfamiliar with the stringent parameters around the clinical research and FDA approval process.

In a public conflict between a sick mom and Big Pharma, the most obvious moral resolution would be to give Stockman-Mauriello access to the drug. But this is not just a story about one person and one heartfelt plea. This has also been about the integrity of a Phase 3 clinical trial and the participants currently enrolled in it, many of whom are on a placebo. It’s been about the 15,000 Americans currently living with ALS, and the 5,000 who will be diagnosed with it this year. It’s about the ways in which US clinical trials are conducted, and the legal, ethical and scientific questions that surround them. It’s about the hope of a more integrative approach to an issue with far-ranging implications.

“Every week, I am rapidly declining from bulbar ALS which is caused by a mutation to my SOD1 gene,” Stockman-Mauriello wrote on her change.org page when she started her campaign. “My physician is one of the physicians participating in the trials for Tofersen, and he believes the drug may give me more time. And that is all I am asking for: time. My physician says that he has never seen an ALS case progress as rapidly as mine. I’m losing function every week — but it is not too late — and getting access now can extend my life.”

Dr. Neil Schneider, Stockman-Mauriello’s doctor and the director of the Eleanor and Lou Gehrig ALS Center at Columbia University’s Irving Medical Center, affirmed his position to WRAL News in April, saying, “We are very limited in what we can offer our patients. So this, I feel, is her best chance for a therapeutic that could make a meaningful difference in the course of her disease.” 

ALS is a uniquely cruel and difficult to treat progressive nervous system disease. The Mayo Clinic notes that “treatments can’t reverse the damage of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, but they can slow the progression of symptoms, prevent complications, and make you more comfortable and independent.”

The excitement, then, about Tofersen is understandable. A 2020 report published in the New England Journal of Medicine mere months before Stockman-Mauriello received her life-changing diagnosis indicated that in Phase 1 and 2 of the trial for the drug, it indeed appeared to slow the progression of the disease over a 12-week period.

But it is a tricky and, typically, long road from early trial results to successfully bringing a drug to market. When Operation Warp Speed brought clinical trials into mainstream consciousness, it moved the goalposts for patient communities, who have been advocating for years for accelerated research and development for their own conditions. Expectations and demands have shifted.

“I don’t think drug development is ever going to be the same,” Alison Bateman-House, assistant professor at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine, told Bloomberg in December. “I think ALS and metastatic breast cancer and other diseases of high unmet need are going to be demanding, ‘Where’s my Warp Speed?'”

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That results of that demand have been front and center this month, with the FDA approval for Biogen’s Alzheimer’s drug Aduhelm, the first such new approval for an Alzheimer’s drug in 18 years. But there have been strong concerns from the medical community about the effectiveness of the treatment, which will cost patients roughly $56,000 a year. Back in November, an FDA advisory panel expressed its concerns about the drug to the agency, and this week, three FDA advisors resigned in protest. 

One of them, neurologist Dr. Joel Perlmutter, stated, “Approval of a drug that is not effective has serious potential to impair future research into new treatments that may be effective. In addition, the implementation of aducanumab therapy will potentially cost billions of dollars, and these dollars may be better spent in either developing better evidence for aducanumab or other therapeutic interventions.”

For patients, however, waiting even a few months for something that could offer relief can seem unjust. FiercePharma reports that ever since the drug’s approval was announced, doctors’ phone lines across the country have been “blowing up” with requests.  Aduhelm’s blazing path to FDA approval was no doubt helped along by public demand, as well as a strategic, celebrity-backed campaign for “More time.” 

In 2018, the Right to Try Act was passed with the stated intention of avoiding these kinds of dilemmas. The act promised to assist individuals “who have been diagnosed with life-threatening diseases or conditions who have tried all approved treatment options and who are unable to participate in a clinical trial to access certain unapproved treatments.” But the Right to Try Act has been met with harsh criticism from several patient groups, who say it does not address “the primary barriers to access.” And trial sponsors still retain the right to decline.

In a March letter to Lisa Stockman-Mauriello, Dr. Maha Radhakrishnan, the Chief Medical Officer of Biogen, informed her that her company decision was just that, explaining: “Until efficacy and safety are determined, we must act with the interests of all patients in mind.”

Would it have been fair to offer the drug to Stockman-Mauriello, when others with her condition already participating in the trial are receiving the placebo? Would it have been ethical from a healthcare standpoint, given that the side effects and adverse effects are still being investigated, and Stockman-Mauriello’s condition is so precarious? Could Stockman-Mauriello, as she asked, have been enrolled and randomized? Did Biogen do the right thing?

Healthcare and drug development offers endless iterations of the proverbial trolley problem. Who do we save? Or more accurately, who do we attempt to save? The pull of a story like Stockman-Mauriello’s is undeniable, especially for those of us who know what it feels like to face a fatal diagnosis, and whose last best shot is an experimental treatment. I do; that is precisely the same abyss I was staring into a decade ago, when I had metastatic melanoma and became one of the first people in the world in a Phase 1 immunotherapy trial.

Likewise, the idea that there might be something, anything out there that could ease the suffering of my mother and my mother-in-law, both of whom have Alzheimer’s, makes me want to kick down any door in my path to get to it. Yet the call to empathic and just care must be fair and encompassing. It must consider both the seen and the unseen.

It is not cheap to make or distribute a drug. Resources are not unlimited. The precedent of allowing one person with a compelling plea to gain access to a treatment does not answer the difficult question of what to say to the next person. And the next. And the next and the next.

In a “Community Update” posted on their site earlier this year, Biogen obliquely referenced the Tofersen controversy, stating, “Among the ethical imperatives in any access program are assuring that all patients receive equal treatment and priority and preserving the integrity of ongoing studies…. We do not believe it is fair to ask participants in this study to continue to receive placebo while other SOD1-ALS patients are offered access to Tofersen, but we do believe that access could be provided as soon as the placebo-controlled study has ended.”

The tale of a single person’s quest for survival is compelling. But as Arthur Caplan, founding head of NYU School of Medicine’s Division of Medical Ethics, wrote two years ago for Stat News, “Social media campaigns are inherently unfair in that not everyone is ‘mediagenic,’ not everyone knows how to mount a campaign, and not everyone draws attention from politicians or the crowdsourcing support often needed to pay for a drug or to travel to get it.”

Instead, truly useful solutions involve a top down reframing of the entire process. “The main thing you can do is get more people into clinical trials,” says Lisa Kearns, a senior research associate at NYU Grossman School of Medicine’s Division of Medical Ethics. “But you have to have an industry that wants to greatly broaden inclusion criteria.”

Thanks to factors like limited access, lack of information, complicated requirements for acceptance and blatant historical racism, it’s estimated that fewer than 10% of eligible patients enroll in clinical trials, and fewer than 10% of those who do are people of color. The majority of clinical trials don’t meet their enrollment requirements, an outrageously costly and time-consuming failure. If we were collectively better at getting people into trials in the first place, we could bring effective treatments to market sooner, and spend a few less billion dollars getting there.

It can happen, by working with patients and advocacy groups, and by creating doctor and patient-friendly resources that give everybody clear information and a fair shot at access, unlike the current mind-numbing, labyrinthine system we have now. Similarly, becoming more sophisticated about acknowledging the demand for expanded access and establishing more space outside of the research for those special cases— as well as widening the parameters of eligibility to develop a more equitable patient population — would reduce the need to issue unpopular decisions regarding the unique cases that will inevitably arise. 

Meanwhile, those of us in the media have an obligation to examine and understand the issues we report on, to work harder to interpret complex issues and explore them with nuance and curiosity, especially when a reductive narrative of heroes and villains is so seductive. We are drowning in misinformation, and the COVID-19 crisis has well proven the devastating public health consequences of ignorance.

As for Lisa Stockman-Mauriello, she and Biogen have found some small measure of common ground. Biogen has announced that in July, after the completion of Tofersen’s Phase 3 trial, the drug company will be opening up a compassionate use program, which means that ALS patients across the country will be able to apply, via their physicians, for access to the drug. In a June 3 update on her change.org page, Stockman-Mauriello acknowledged the gesture, saying, “That will probably be too late for me, but it will help others with ALS, which is good.”

7 lessons we need to learn from COVID-19

Maybe it’s wishful thinking to declare the pandemic over in the US, and presumptuous to conclude what lessons we’ve learned. So consider this a first draft.

1. Workers are always essential

We couldn’t have survived without millions of warehouse, delivery, grocery and hospital workers literally risking their lives. Yet most of these workers are paid squat. Amazon touts its $15 minimum wage but it totals only about $30,000 a year. Many essential workers don’t have health insurance or paid leave. 
Lesson: Essential workers deserve far better.

2. Healthcare is a basic right

You know how you got your vaccine without paying a dime? That’s how all healthcare could be. Yet too many Americans who contracted Covid-19 got walloped with humongous hospital bills. People with chronic disease, Black Americans and low-income children were most likely to have delayed or foregone care during the pandemic.Lesson: The U.S. must join the rest of the industrialized world and provide universal health coverage.

3. Conspiracy theories can be deadly

Last June, about one in four Americans believed the pandemic was “definitely” or “probably” created intentionally. Other conspiracy theories have caused some people to avoid wearing masks or getting vaccinated, resulting in unnecessary illness or death. Lesson: An informed public is essential. Some of the responsibility falls on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms that allowed misinformation to flourish — and on the government for enabling them.

4. Wages are too low to get by on

Most Americans live paycheck to paycheck. So once the pandemic hit, many didn’t have any savings to fall back on. Conservative lawmakers complain that the extra $300 a week unemployment benefit Congress enacted in March discourages people from working. What’s really discouraging them is lack of childcare and lousy wages. Lesson: Raise the minimum wage, provide universal childcare, strengthen labor unions and push companies to share profits with their workers.

5. Remote work is now baked into the economy

The percentage of workers punching in from home hit a high of 70% in April 2020. A majority still work remotely. Some 40% want to continue working from home. Two lessons: Companies will have to adjust. And much commercial real estate will remain vacant. Why not convert it into affordable housing?

6. It’s past time for a wealth tax.

The combined wealth of America’s 657 billionaires grew by $1.3 trillion – or 44.6% – during the pandemic. Yet billionaires’ taxes are lower than ever. Wealthy Americans today pay one-sixth the rate of taxes their counterparts paid in 1953. Lesson: To afford everything the nation needs, raise taxes at the top.

7. Government can be the solution

Ronald Reagan’s famous quip – “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem” – can now officially be retired. Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” succeeded in readying vaccines faster than most experts thought possible. Biden got them into more arms more quickly than any vaccination program in history.

Furthermore, the $1.9 trillion Democrats pushed through in March will help the US achieve something it failed to achieve after the 2008-09 recession: a robust recovery. Lesson: The federal government did not just help beat the pandemic. It also did more to keep the nation afloat than in any previous recession. It must be prepared to do so again.

Big Oil wants you to believe a tanker full of fossil fuel can be “carbon neutral”

The fossil fuel giant Shell — which doesn’t want you to think of them as an oil company — recently announced a special shipment of fracked gas to Europe. There’s nothing inherently unique about the liquified natural gas (LNG) business, but the company — along with the supplier Cheniere — want you to think of this liquified natural gas delivery as different: this shipment of gas was deemed “carbon neutral.” This isn’t the only instance of this happening; earlier this year, Occidental Petroleum sold a shipload of crude oil it, too, deemed 100 percent “carbon neutral.”

How exactly does a massive shipment of crude oil, or fossil gas fracked in the United States and shipped across the Atlantic, manage to get a “carbon neutral” label? The greenhouse gas emissions associated with this drilling is not absorbed or erased. They are zeroed out on paper, thanks to an accounting trick: Using credits from carbon offsets.

These emissions illusions are key components to corporate climate pledges. Fortune 500 companies, including many fossil fuel polluters, have raced out to announce “net zero” commitments, often accompanied by slick self-congratulatory advertising. But these schemes are more often about image management than pollution reduction; Shell, after all, plans to grow its fossil fuel business while making “net zero” promises. 

Shell’s “carbon neutral” LNG is an instructive case. Where do these “credits” come from, exactly? Shell’s website of “nature based” credits lists one project in the United States: The GreenTrees initiative, a reforestation project in Louisiana that claims to have protected 120,000 acres and planted over 40 million trees. But a recent investigation found that it was paying landowners to do things they had already done on their own — like planting trees or simply not cutting down existing ones — while creating carbon credits to sell to companies like Shell, Duke Energy and Microsoft.

This is par for the course. One multimillion-dollar offsets program touts its role protecting threatened trees, but much of it is based on selling credits for trees that were in no danger. An investigation into a major aviation emissions offsets program found a range of similar problems. And a deep look at California’s multi-billion dollar forest offsets program found millions of “ghost credits,” purchased by polluters to enable them to continue spewing carbon into the atmosphere. 

A meaningful, effective offsets program would need to result in verifiable emissions-reducing actions that would not have happened otherwise (what’s called “additionality” in policy circles). But it’s not clear this is possible; the programs being critically scrutinized have been certified by so-called “independent” auditors.

While it’s bad that corporations are faking it when it comes to climate action, the more profound danger is that these programs are actually increasing emissions in the real world — while corporations and government regulators point to spreadsheets that show progress.

 Truly effective climate action would require direct emissions reductions at the source. Even the normally cautious, industry-friendly International Energy Agency admitted as much in its recent report, which drew banner headlines because it spoke an inescapable truth: confronting climate chaos means we must stop drilling and fracking now. But corporate polluters, along with politicians and even environmental organizations, favor the creation of complex credit markets, based on the misguided notion that direct regulation of pollution is too onerous and prescriptive. 

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These are not just theoretical concerns. The Biden administration is expected to unveil a Clean Electricity Standard designed to create a carbon-free power goal by 2035. But if that standard rests on credits and offsets, or on empty promises that gas-fired power plants can be equipped with “carbon capture” technology, we will fail. Creative accounting cannot rescue us from the climate catastrophe.

There is an alternative: A bona fide renewable energy standard, based on clear regulations, that requires a rapid shift away from burning fossil fuels. Renewable portfolio standards have been among our most effective means of reducing localized pollution and climate emissions. These proven success stories must be emulated and expanded nationally. We have no time not to embrace the most effective method to reign in the urgent threat posed by our climate crisis.