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On Porchetta: An ode to the East Village stalwart

Perhaps one of my most formative food memories is the first time I bit into a porchetta sandwich at New York City’s Porchetta restaurant. Helmed by the iconic Sara Jenkins, it’s one of the best foods I’ve ever had — bar none. 

The loud, almost jarringly brittle chicharon gave way to the toothsome baguette, sumptuously unctuous, lightly herbaceous pork . . . and that’s it. No cheese, no aioli, nothing else to gussy up the experience — just expertly cooked, juicy pork, earth-shatteringly crisp crackling, and some high-quality bread. I was one word: astonished. 

From then on — and until Porchetta permanently closed — I would hike over to the East Village every time I was in the city just to get myself a sandwich. One year, right before my birthday, I ordered 6 sandwiches, ate one, and took the rest home to freeze. As the smell of the sandwiches wafted and permeated the dank bus on my ride home, I knew that that birthday would be special. 

A few years later, I walked from my then-office all the way over to Porsena — Jenkins’ sit-down restaurant at the time — which was having a “porchetta pop-up” that week as an homage to the then-closed storefront. Only a day or two later, I took the same hike with a co-worker who shared my affinity for the unbelievably crisp skin and moist meat. For years, porchetta was the scent of my trip home. (This is a conversation for another day, but some of the sides at the original Porchetta were incredible, too. Those greens and potatoes . . .)

Porchetta, which hails from central Italy, has been an italian specialty for more than 2,000 years,  according to Tenderbelly. It’s most commonly enjoyed as a sandwich or street food, but it can also be a truly noteworthy centerpiece for a special meal because it’s a real knockout. Jenkins’ recipe on Food52 notes that porchetta is traditionally made from a whole pig “or the loin wrapped in the belly.” 

While it doesn’t require many ingredients, the preparation can be challenging. Many recipes call for skin-on pork belly or even sometimes pork shoulder. Fans swear by cooking it “low and slow” to ensure the pork fat renders properly and yields an impossibly crisp skin. It’s important to score and tightly wrap the porchetta to allow for rendering and even cooking. 

Porchetta — originally an Italian street food — was the sole aim of the beloved fast-casual store of the same name, which opened in 2008, according to Starchefs. Though the store branched out a bit — a la porchetta banh mi, porchetta cubanos, and porchetta taco — Jenkins said it was singularly focused on its namesake item in a 2014 interview with Eater. She also noted that porchetta requires garlic, rosemary, sage, and wild fennel pollen, as well as “good meat.” The pork used at Porchetta was free-range antibiotic — “not commodity pork.” 

Fennel pollen might be porchetta’s secret weapon; it’s certainly not the most common pantry ingredient. The Kitchn notes that while it’s derived from wild fennel, its flavor is very different from fennel or anise. It adds a beguiling, intriguing flavor to dishes, which Serious Eats describes as “notes of licorice, citrus, and handmade marshmallows.” 

I recently spoke with Chef Ariane Duarte, who was also introduced to the “fabulous” crispy, crackly, unctuous specialty through Jenkins’ incredible iteration. The owner of New Jersey’s Ariane Kitchen & Bar tried porchetta for the first time when Jenkins was cooking at Il Buco. She hadn’t made it, and she thought that the Italian specialty seemed complicated. Through her work with the meat purveyor D’Artagnan, Duarte happened to receive some “beautiful” pork belly. She immediately knew what to do. 

Duarte made porchetta with “lots of sage, bread crumbs, and garlic” and reported that the end result was “phenomenal.” She finds that it makes a perfect Easter meal or an ideal end-of-summer dish. The ingredients are very straightforward, and once the meat is scored, stuffed, and rolled, you air dry it for a day or two in order to help advance the crackling of the skin. AKB actually sold the porchetta on its Easter 2021 menu with sweet potato and a “simple jus.” While porchetta may at first seem intimidating, Duarte notes that it is actually anything but.

While Porchetta may be no more, Jenkins has since penned many cookbooks and now operates Nina June in Rockport, Me. If Porchetta were to reopen once more, you know who’d be first in line. 

A 2008 New York Magazine review said, “Porchetta’s porchetta is drop-dead delicious, abundantly juicy, aggressively seasoned, and varied in its myriad textures, from the moist fine-grained loin meat to the chewy fatty crackling, and the little melting baconlike bits that season the potatoes.” That really about sums it all up. 

Sorry, Republicans: Joe Biden isn’t Jimmy Carter — and these aren’t the 1970s

Gasoline shortages erupted a few weeks across the Southeast and parts of the Eastern seaboard, reportedly caused by a cyberattack committed against the Colonial Pipeline stretching from Texas to New York. The shortfalls have spurred some of President Biden’s political opponents to invoke comparisons to Jimmy Carter, who suffered politically while long lines of motorists tried to fill up their gas tanks in the late 1970s, and als struggled with several other major economic issues.

On May 7, ostensibly referring to rising fears of inflation as the economy recovers from the coronavirus pandemic, Donald Trump Jr. tweeted that “Biden isn’t the next FDR he’s the next Jimmy Carter,” as one of Carter’s main domestic battles in office was also against rising prices. On May 11, when lines at gas stations began to emerge in the wake of the pipeline hack, Trump Jr. retweeted himself with the added comment “As I was saying …” The next day, his father, the former president, put out a statement claiming that the comparison was unfair — to Carter. “Joe Biden has had the worst start of any president in United States history,” said the senior Trump, even worse than the president from Georgia.

Perhaps it’s understandable that the Trumps might want to link Biden to Carter, who left office in 1981 in shame, having been thoroughly defeated in his bid for re-election by Ronald Reagan. But the comparison likely won’t stand for long, because our current situation bears little resemblance to the political morass of the late 1970s that doomed Carter’s quest for a second term in office.

Jimmy Carter wasn’t even the first president in the 1970s to experience gasoline shortages on his watch. That honor belongs to Richard Nixon: In October 1973, when the United States was caught covertly supporting Israel in its war against Egypt over control of the Sinai Peninsula, the nations of OPEC (the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) instituted gradual cutbacks in exports to the U.S. as punishment. As the embargo intensified over the following months, lines emerged at gas stations across the country, and angry motorists got into verbal arguments and fistfights as they waited, sometimes for hours, to fill their tanks. In November, Nixon proposed a domestic energy production program called Project Independence, but was too consumed by the emerging Watergate scandal to really focus on it. Consumer sentiment soured further as the months of uncertainty dragged on. But eventually, Saudi Arabia worried that its relations with the U.S. might suffer permanent harm if the embargo went on for too long, and called it off the following spring. 

But in the meantime, the embargo had done lasting damage to the American psyche. It was the first time in the post-World War II period of U.S. history that Americans faced the distinct possibility that their perpetually rising standard of living might not go on forever. The OPEC nations had successfully used oil as a tool of punishment against America for its foreign policy. What would stop them from doing it again?

After Nixon’s resignation, Gerald Ford signed into law the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975, which created the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and also established fuel economy standards that automobile manufacturers would have to meet. But Carter, who narrowly defeated Ford in the 1976 election, went much further in addressing the energy issue. Carter saw American dependence on foreign oil as an existential threat to the nation’s future but also as a moral failing, calling the energy challenge the “moral equivalent of war” in a major April 1977 speech. For Carter, in the decades following the shared sacrifices of World War II, Americans had become too selfish, greedy, individualistic and wasteful. In order to obviate the possibility of future energy crises, Americans needed not just to increase domestic energy production, but to excavate and restore the sense of shared responsibility from three decades before. Carter convinced Congress to create a federal Department of Energy that would spearhead national conservation initiatives, and spoke repeatedly of the need to rethink fundamental assumptions about the American standard of living.

Unsurprisingly, many Americans opposed this paradigm. In the past few decades, they had seen the American government defeat fascism, provide a bulwark against communism, address serious civil rights challenges and pass laws to clean up the environment. It seemed like a much smaller challenge for the government to figure out how to let Americans drive to work and take their kids to soccer practice without the looming threat of existential energy shortages. But many Americans also followed Carter’s directions, sometimes with a bit of grumbling — insulating their homes to diminish the need to use energy on heating and cooling, combining trips out and carpooling.

But in 1978 and 1979, Carter’s troubles compounded. A revolution in Iran against the ruling shah destabilized the country and brought the hardline anti-American Ayatollah Khomeini to power. Instability in that key oil-producing nation rippled outward, bringing back the lines at American gas stations from a few years before. From the perspective of many Americans, Carter had promised them that acts of individual sacrifice, along with accepting a diminished standard of living, would reap rewards in the form of energy security. Now the shortages were back anyway. In another act of national humiliation, the new Iranian regime took 52 American hostages from the U.S. embassy in Tehran. In a failed April 1980 rescue attempt, an American military helicopter crashed in a desert sandstorm, killing eight American servicemen. To many American voters, Carter seemed unable to handle any challenge laid before him. In truth, in many ways the problems facing Carter were likely out of the control of any American president, but his lecturing tone certainly didn’t help matters. Voters punished Carter in fall 1980 by handing Ronald Reagan 44 states and 489 electoral votes. 

That situation bears little resemblance to the one Joe Biden now faces. The gas shortages of May 2021 were caused not by cutbacks by foreign nations, but a cyberattack against a domestic pipeline. The crisis appears to be resolving itself now that the system is back online. Panic buying among consumers, which exacerbated the problem, won’t go on forever either. Just as toilet paper, paper towels and sanitizer returned to store shelves after the first days of pandemic panic buying, so too will gasoline return to our local stations. Gas prices will likely settle into a price somewhat higher than they were for the past year, but that’s an inevitable consequence of businesses, schools and entertainment venues opening up again. Few Americans would likely accept an indefinite extension of the necessary but dispiriting lockdowns that kept gas prices exceptionally low for the past year. Furthermore, Biden’s tone during his first few months in office has lacked Carter’s pessimism; in fact, Biden has often spoken confidently about the possible American resurgence that could take place as the country claws its way out of the pandemic. 

Of course, there is still much uncertainty ahead. Supply chains disrupted for more than a year by the virus will take time to be restored to full operation, and new variants of the virus could continue to pose a threat to public health. But jobs are beginning to return, and the explosive demand for homes means that the construction industry, a major driver of economic vitality, could have an especially bright future. One of Biden’s major challenges will be to make sure that future American jobs are good, well-paying, secure ones, and one way to help make this possible would be to raise the federal minimum wage — but since Trump’s GOP isn’t exactly eager to embrace this, they have little room to complain. Inflation will also be a concern in the near term, but if the Federal Reserve raises interest rates from their current (and unsustainable) near-zero level as the economy recovers, it may not be a major long-term problem.

It’s understandable that Trump and his son might want to link their political foe to the presidency that seemed to define American decline. But it won’t work: Joe Biden isn’t Jimmy Carter, and these most definitely aren’t the 1970s.

Will there be resource wars in our renewable energy future?

Thanks to its very name — renewable energy — we can picture a time in the not-too-distant future when our need for non-renewable fuels like oil, natural gas, and coal will vanish. Indeed, the Biden administration has announced a breakthrough target of 2035 for fully eliminating U.S. reliance on those non-renewable fuels for the generation of electricity. That would be accomplished by “deploying carbon-pollution-free electricity-generating resources,” primarily the everlasting power of the wind and sun.

With other nations moving in a similar direction, it’s tempting to conclude that the days when competition over finite supplies of energy was a recurring source of conflict will soon draw to a close. Unfortunately, think again: while the sun and wind are indeed infinitely renewable, the materials needed to convert those resources into electricity — minerals like cobalt, copper, lithium, nickel, and the rare-earth elements, or REEs — are anything but. Some of them, in fact, are far scarcer than petroleum, suggesting that global strife over vital resources may not, in fact, disappear in the Age of Renewables.

To appreciate this unexpected paradox, it’s necessary to explore how wind and solar power are converted into usable forms of electricity and propulsion. Solar power is largely collected by photovoltaic cells, often deployed in vast arrays, while the wind is harvested by giant turbines, typically deployed in extensive wind farms. To use electricity in transportation, cars and trucks must be equipped with advanced batteries capable of holding a charge over long distances. Each one of these devices usessubstantial amounts of copper for electrical transmission, as well as a variety of other non-renewable minerals. Those wind turbines, for instance, require manganese, molybdenum, nickel, zinc, and rare-earth elements for their electrical generators, while electric vehicles (EVs) need cobalt, graphite, lithium, manganese, and rare earths for their engines and batteries.

At present, with wind and solar power accounting for only about 7% of global electricity generation and electric vehicles making up less than 1% of the cars on the road, the production of those minerals is roughly adequate to meet global demand. If, however, the U.S. and other countries really do move toward a green-energy future of the kind envisioned by President Biden, the demand for them will skyrocket and global output will fall far short of anticipated needs.

According to a recent study by the International Energy Agency (IEA), “The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions,” the demand for lithium in 2040 could be 50 times greater than today and for cobalt and graphite 30 times greater if the world moves swiftly to replace oil-driven vehicles with EVs. Such rising demand will, of course, incentivize industry to develop new supplies of such minerals, but potential sources of them are limited and the process of bringing them online will be costly and complicated. In other words, the world could face significant shortages of critical materials. (“As clean energy transitions accelerate globally,” the IEA report noted ominously, “and solar panels, wind turbines, and electric cars are deployed on a growing scale, these rapidly growing markets for key minerals could be subject to price volatility, geopolitical influence, and even disruptions to supply.”)

And here’s a further complication: for a number of the most critical materials, including lithium, cobalt, and those rare-earth elements, production is highly concentrated in just a few countries, a reality that could lead to the sort of geopolitical struggles that accompanied the world’s dependence on a few major sources of oil. According to the IEA, just one country, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), currently supplies more than 80% of the world’s cobalt, and another — China — 70% of its rare-earth elements. Similarly, lithium production is largely in two countries, Argentina and Chile, which jointly account for nearly 80% of world supply, while four countries — Argentina, Chile, the DRC, and Peru — provide most of our copper. In other words, such future supplies are far more concentrated in far fewer lands than petroleum and natural gas, leading IEA analysts to worry about future struggles over the world’s access to them.

From Oil to Lithium: the Geopolitical Implications of the Electric-Car Revolution

The role of petroleum in shaping global geopolitics is well understood. Ever since oil became essential to world transportation — and so to the effective functioning of the world’s economy — it has been viewed for obvious reasons as a “strategic” resource. Because the largest concentrations of petroleum were located in the Middle East, an area historically far removed from the principal centers of industrial activity in Europe and North America and regularly subject to political convulsions, the major importing nations long sought to exercise some control over that region’s oil production and export. This, of course, led to resource imperialism of a high order, beginning after World War I when Britain and the other European powers contended for colonial control of the oil-producing parts of the Persian Gulf region. It continued after World War II, when the United States entered that competition in a big way.

For the United States, ensuring access to Middle Eastern oil became a strategic priority after the “oil shocks” of 1973 and 1979 — the first caused by an Arab oil embargo that was a reprisal for Washington’s support of Israel in that year’s October War; the second by a disruption of supplies caused by the Islamic Revolution in Iran. In response to endless lines at American gas stations and the subsequent recessions, successive presidents pledged to protect oil imports by “any means necessary,” including the use of armed force. And that very stance led President George H.W. Bush to wage the first Gulf War against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1991 and his son to invade that same country in 2003.

In 2021, the United States is no longer as dependent on Middle Eastern oil, given how extensively domestic deposits of petroleum-laden shale and other sedimentary rocks are being exploited by fracking technology. Still, the connection between oil use and geopolitical conflict has hardly disappeared. Most analysts believe that petroleum will continue to supply a major share of global energy for decades to come, and that’s certain to generate political and military struggles over the remaining supplies. Already, for instance, conflict has broken out over disputed offshore supplies in the South and East China Seas, and some analysts predict a struggle for the control of untapped oil and mineral deposits in the Arctic region as well.

Here, then, is the question of the hour: Will an explosion in electric-car ownership change all this? EV market share is already growing rapidly and projected to reach 15% of worldwide sales by 2030. The major automakers are investing heavily in such vehicles, anticipating a surge in demand. There were around 370 EV models available for sale worldwide in 2020 — a 40% increase from 2019 — and major automakers have revealed plans to make an additional 450 models available by 2022. In addition, General Motors has announced its intention to completely phase out conventional gasoline and diesel vehicles by 2035, while Volvo’s CEO has indicated that the company would only sell EVs by 2030.

It’s reasonable to assume that this shift will only gain momentum, with profound consequences for the global trade in resources. According to the IEA, a typical electric car requires six times the mineral inputs of a conventional oil-powered vehicle. These include the copper for electrical wiring plus the cobalt, graphite, lithium, and nickel needed to ensure battery performance, longevity, and energy density (the energy output per unit of weight). In addition, rare-earth elements will be essential for the permanent magnets installed in EV motors. 

Lithium, a primary component of lithium-ion batteries used in most EVs, is the lightest known metal. Although present both in clay deposits and ore composites, it’s rarely found in easily mineable concentrations, though it can also be extracted from brine in areas like Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flat. At present, approximately 58% of the world’s lithium comes from Australia, another 20% from Chile, 11% from China, 6% from Argentina, and smaller percentages from elsewhere. A U.S. firm, Lithium Americas, is about to undertake the extraction of significant amounts of lithium from a clay deposit in northern Nevada, but is meeting resistance from local ranchers and Native Americans, who fear the contamination of their water supplies.

Cobalt is another key component of lithium-ion batteries. It’s rarely found in unique deposits and most often acquired as a byproduct of copper and nickel mining. Today, it’s almost entirely produced thanks to copper mining in the violent, chaotic Democratic Republic of the Congo, mostly in what’s known as the copper belt of Katanga Province, a region which once sought to break away from the rest of the country and still harbors secessionist impulses.

Rare-earth elements encompass a group of 17 metallic substances scattered across the Earth’s surface but rarely found in mineable concentrations. Among them, several are essential for future green-energy solutions, including dysprosium, lanthanum, neodymium, and terbium. When used as alloys with other minerals, they help perpetuate the magnetization of electrical motors under high-temperature conditions, a key requirement for electric vehicles and wind turbines. At present, approximately 70% of REEs come from China, perhaps 12% from Australia, and 8% from the U.S.

A mere glance at the location of such concentrations suggests that the green-energy transition envisioned by President Biden and other world leaders may encounter severe geopolitical problems, not unlike those generated in the past by reliance on oil. As a start, the most militarily powerful nation on the planet, the United States, can supply itself with only tiny percentages of REEs, as well as other critical minerals like nickel and zinc needed for advanced green technologies. While Australia, a close ally, will undoubtedly be an important supplier of some of them, China, already increasingly viewed as an adversary, is crucial when it comes to REEs, and the Congo, one of the most conflict-plagued nations on the planet, is the leading producer of cobalt. So don’t for a second imagine that the transition to a renewable-energy future will either be easy or conflict-free. 

The Crunch to Come

Faced with the prospect of inadequate or hard-to-access supplies of such critical materials, energy strategists are already calling for major efforts to develop new sources in as many locations as possible. “Today’s supply and investment plans for many critical minerals fall well short of what is needed to support an accelerated deployment of solar panels, wind turbines and electric vehicles,” said Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency. “These hazards are real, but they are surmountable. The response from policymakers and companies will determine whether critical minerals remain a vital enabler for clean energy transitions or become a bottleneck in the process.”

As Birol and his associates at the IEA have made all too clear, however, surmounting the obstacles to increased mineral production will be anything but easy. To begin with, launching new mining ventures can be extraordinarily expensive and entail numerous risks. Mining firms may be willing to invest billions of dollars in a country like Australia, where the legal framework is welcoming and where they can expect protection against future expropriation or war, but many promising ore sources lie in countries like the DRC, Myanmar, Peru, and Russia where such conditions hardly apply. For example, the current turmoil in Myanmar, a major producer of certain rare-earth elements, has already led to worries about their future availability and sparked a rise in prices.

Declining ore quality is also a concern. When it comes to mineral sites, this planet has been thoroughly scavenged for them, sometimes since the early Bronze Age, and many of the best deposits have long since been discovered and exploited. “In recent years, ore quality has continued to fall across a range of commodities,” the IEA noted in its report on critical minerals and green technology. “For example, the average copper ore grade in Chile declined by 30% over the past 15 years. Extracting metal content from lower-grade ores requires more energy, exerting upward pressure on production costs, greenhouse gas emissions, and waste volumes.”

In addition, extracting minerals from underground rock formations often entails the use of acids and other toxic substances and typically requires vast amounts of water, which are contaminated after use. This has become ever more of a problem since the enactment of environmental-protection legislation and the mobilization of local communities. In many parts of the world, as in Nevada when it comes to lithium, new mining and ore-processing efforts are going to encounter increasingly fierce local opposition. When, for example, the Lynas Corporation, an Australian firm, sought to evade Australia’s environmental laws by shipping ores from its Mount Weld rare-earths mine to Malaysia for processing, local activists there mounted a protracted campaign to prevent it from doing so.

For Washington, perhaps no problem is more challenging, when it comes to the availability of critical materials for a green revolution, than this country’s deteriorating relationship with Beijing. After all, China currently provides 70% of the world’s rare-earth supplies and harbors significant deposits of other key minerals as well. No less significant, that country is responsible for the refining and processing of many key materials mined elsewhere. In fact, when it comes to mineral processing, the figures are astonishing. China may not produce significant amounts of cobalt or nickel, but it does account for approximately 65% of the world’s processed cobalt and 35% of its processed nickel. And while China produces 11% of the world’s lithium, it’s responsible for nearly 60% of processed lithium. When it comes to rare-earth elements, however, China is dominant in a staggering way. Not only does it provide 60% of the world’s raw materials, but nearly 90% of processed REEs.

To put the matter simply, there is no way the United States or other countries can undertake a massive transition from fossil fuels to a renewables-based economy without engaging economically with China. Undoubtedly, efforts will be made to reduce the degree of that reliance, but there’s no realistic prospect of eliminating dependence on China for rare earths, lithium, and other key materials in the foreseeable future. If, in other words, the U.S. were to move from a modestly Cold-War-like stance toward Beijing to an even more hostile one, and if it were to engage in further Trumpian-style attempts to “decouple” its economy from that of the People’s Republic, as advocated by many “China hawks” in Congress, there’s no question about it: the Biden administration would have to abandon its plans for a green-energy future.

It’s possible, of course, to imagine a future in which nations begin fighting over the world’s supplies of critical minerals, just as they once fought over oil. At the same time, it’s perfectly possible to conceive of a world in which countries like ours simply abandoned their plans for a green-energy future for lack of adequate raw materials and reverted to the oil wars of the past. On an already overheating planet, however, that would lead to a civilizational fate worse than death. 

In truth, there’s little choice but for Washington and Beijing to collaborate with each other and so many other countries in accelerating the green energy transition by establishing new mines and processing facilities for critical minerals, developing substitutes for materials in short supply, improving mining techniques to reduce environmental hazards, and dramatically increasing the recycling of vital minerals from discarded batteries and other products. Any alternative is guaranteed to prove a disaster of the first order — or beyond.

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Fox News host says media “encouraged” Marjorie Taylor Greene’s “little” anti-Semitic remarks

Fox News host Howard Kurtz on Sunday seemed to excuse anti-Semitic remarks made by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and instead blamed the media for “encouraging” her.

“The media are pounding Marjorie Taylor Greene once again and the Georgia congresswoman is giving them plenty of ammunition,” Kurtz said. “Here’s the media question. Are journalists encouraging Marjorie Taylor Greene by giving so much coverage to remarks that even some top Republicans find to be outrageous — and that’s how she gets attention?”

Susan Ferrechio of the Washington Examiner responded by accusing both parties of engaging in a “labeling war.”

“The media loves that kind of conflict,” she said. “Those make great stories when you talk about conflict between parties and within parties. And Marjorie Taylor Greene is a case of both. She has divided the Republican Party.”

“That’s a danger to the party to have them identified with someone who tries to bring up the Holocaust to compare it to anything in the United States,” she added.

Kurtz, however, urged Ferrechio to focus on the media.

“Are the media and the negative attention helping her in a way?” he wondered. “She doesn’t have her committee assignments, the press is constantly looking for any little thing that she says — not defending in any way shape, or form the Holocaust analogy. But she can punch back against the press. In this case, she says she’s blaming the controversy on the media and the Democrats.”

Ferrechio agreed that Greene “comes across as a populist” because she attacks the media.

“You’re never going to scare the media away from a story like this,” she explained. “The media gravitate toward conflict and they gravitate toward a controversial lawmaker like Marjorie Taylor Greene so there’s going to be a lot more coverage in the future.”

Kurtz then ended the segment without condemning Greene’s remarks that compared mask mandates to the Holocaust.

“Is there a double standard between the Marjorie Taylor Greene saga and the non-coverage of the squad making questionable attacks on Israel?” he said, setting up the next panel.

Watch the video below from Fox News.

 

“Mare of Easttown” is twisty until the very end, but the best part is its grace

If you described Easttown as an incestuous place at the start of “Mare of Easttown,” you may have mixed emotions about how right you were all along. You probably didn’t mean it literally, right? And, yet.

Series creator Brad Ingelsby writes the overfamiliarity of Easttown as a blessing and a curse for detective sergeant Mare Sheehan (Kate Winslet), since everybody in the place knows her well enough to trust her while also resenting her.

Such a tightly knitted community means that anyone in that slumping burg could have a motive for murdering teen mother Erin McMenamin (Cailee Spaeny). Except, well, for Mare or her mother Helen (Jean Smart). But aside from those two the list of suspects stretched long enough to cordon off a soccer field. It also hit very close to home.

Mare’s daughter Siobhan (Angourie Rice) was among the last people to see her alive. Her ex-husband Frank (David Denman) made the mistake of being a good Samaritan, which wouldn’t have caused any trouble if Erin hadn’t turned up dead and the paternity of the son she left behind never came into question.

Suspicion bounced around from Erin’s cruel teenage ex-boyfriend Dylan (Jack Mulhern) to any number of men in her orbit. Even Guy Pearce’s literature professor and new guy in town Richard Ryan, Mare’s most persistent suitor, had a huge question mark hovering over his head. (By the “Law & Order” rule of “the most famous person in the story who isn’t a series regular probably did it” making Richard look good for the crime early on.)

But the circle eventually tightened to those closest to the victim.

The fact that Ingelsby and series director Craig Zobel insisted on ensnaring the audience in uncertainty up to and throughout the finale, even after the guiltiest looking parties confessed, is a credit to their adroit construction and manipulation of dramatic tension.

But they also worked up the audience to expect nothing less. Erin’s murder drove the A-plot, often weaving down the road through an obstacle course of misdirects and MacGuffins as the mystery of her life informed her death. Everything after that became questions leading into cliffhangers.

Was her murder a one-off or related to the disappearance of Katie Bailey, the daughter of Mare’s high school basketball teammate Dawn (Enid Graham)? Were there crimes within these crimes? In Erin’s situation, yes! Several!

The walls of crazy and theories this show inspired were impressive and highly necessary, since every character with a line and a link to Mare has a story worth knowing and, perhaps, relevant to the main murder. And through the first four episodes, anyway, the sheer number of characters jostling for space muddled the plot. But as Helen would probably attest, sometimes a muddle mixed with spirits, bitters and twists makes a smashing cocktail. The woman knows and loves her Manhattans.

In the end, what distinguishes “Mare of Easttown” from the typical murder mystery and other prestige shows – besides Winslet’s superior performance – is the way it swims with and through grief.

In my initial review I wrote about how heavily sadness hangs on this Pennsylvania working-class hamlet. The place itself has nothing on Mare, a woman whose determination to solve crimes and to serve and protect is really her way of hiding behind everyone else’s grief. If she were to stop, she’d have to mourn her son’s suicide.

When Winslet allows the dam surrounding Mare’s despair to crack a little, frosting the blank spaces between lines of dialogue with pure aching emotion, tearing your eyes away is impossible. She also nails the regional accent, from what I understand, but her dramatic muscle really flexes when she says absolutely nothing.

“Mare of Easttown” gets under your skin in those quiet interludes. From the shots of its streetscapes to its architecture, the images tell the story of a place that feels too close, crowded to the point that Mare can’t help but step on a lot of toes without wanting and meaning to. Sometimes those small hurts lead to large fractures, which is what happens with Lori and her husband John (Joe Tippett) and John’s brother Billy (Robbie Tann), who are Erin’s cousins.

The limited series’ finale, “Sacrament,” lifts some of that weight from Mare just in time for her to capture Erin’s killer, who turns out to be different from what the penultimate episode leads us to believe. This gives Mare space, at last, to actually hold the people who need her most acutely — including her best friend Lori (Julianne Nicholson), who discovers John is having an affair. Again.

A pause for one last bit of warning: From this point on, this story discusses revealing details that will blow the twists for anyone who hasn’t seen the finale. So if for some reason you ignored the alert at the top, read no further lest ye be spoiled.

“After a while, you learn to live with the unacceptable,” Mare tells a grieving Glen Carroll (Patrick McDade), who is struggling to stay upright after the death of his wife Betty (Phyllis Somerville, in her final role).

Betty was in the habit of calling Mare for small bothers, which Glen takes up — fortunately. He provides a list of things that have gone missing, but then mentions that his gun also went missing for a time only to mysteriously turn up again in the locked shed where he kept it.

It also happens to be the same out-of-production Colt pistol whose bullets were used in Erin’s murder.

This would not matter if Mare were simply interested in closing the case, which she had when Lori’s husband John confessed to killing Erin . . . after a photo surfaced that shows Erin in bed with the man. That also meant Erin’s son was actually John’s. He alleged that she threatened to spill that secret, so he killed her.

This is the finale’s first twist, since in a previous episode, it was John’s brother Billy who was ready to confess to the crime, explaining that they had hooked up at the Ross family reunion. But it was by no means its biggest. Instead, the Colt’s finding leads Mare to the only other person with access to Glen’s shed: Lori and John’s young son Ryan (Cameron Mann), whose anger at his father’s latest infidelity led him to pick up a gun and confront Erin.

The ponderous sadness Winslet dumps in to Mare’s voice as she calls dispatch to send cars to her best friend’s home to pick up the 13-year-old for murder piles another heartbreaking note on a mountain of them. Realizing what this means for Mare is especially devastating when a hysterical Lori tells her she never wants to see her again.

This, after Mare reaches out to the grieving mother of her partner Colin Zabel (Evan Peters), who was shot and killed in the harrowing mission to finding and freeing Katie, only to have the woman slap her in the face.

Mare loses even as she wins.

The eventual and ultimate success of “Mare of Easttown” unifies around Winslet, who magnetized this series from the start, carrying the mystery through its turgid spots and electrifying its finest ones. The latter outweighed the former, because as our familiarity with this small galaxy of characters increased, so did our affection.

Ingelsby and Zobel’s choice to end the story in a bright state of grace also makes this the rare kind of show that opens with a tone of encumbering woe but leads us to higher ground steadily and with intent.

The smallest calls turn out to matter greatly, and the same is true of the details. Naming the finale “Sacrament” may be the most positively Catholic moment in a show revolving around the most Catholic of families, including a cousin who’s a priest that drinks.

The hour begins with a long confession and ends with absolution — for Mare, who at last forgives herself, and for a boy guilty of murder who shouldn’t have to lose his innocence.

In the sixth episode she admits she hasn’t been up to her house’s attic since she found her own son hanging up there. Ending the series by showing her opening the hatch, pulling down the ladder and climbing up lets us know she’s found peace. It’s a simple frame, free of dialogue as it should be. With that “Mare of Easttown” departs in a way one couldn’t have predicted when it began — with a sense that life may still be tough for its heroine, but as she moves through its paces the sun may shine on her, at long last.

All episodes of “Mare of Easttown” are available to stream on HBO Max.

16 secrets of Amazon warehouse employees

When we last checked in with Amazon warehouse workers in November 2015, the consensus was that life as an employee at one of the company’s 110 domestic fulfillment centers was physically challenging but financially rewarding. On their feet for most of the day, these “Amazonians” (the company’s term for workers) receive, stock, sort, pick, pack, ship, and problem-solve the hundreds of thousands of items carried by the e-tailer in massive facilities between 600,000 and 800,000 square feet in size. Each can employ over 1,500 full-time associates.

These days, the pay is going up. Amazon recently announced hourly raises between 50 cents and $3 for 500,000 warehouse workers and other fulfillment jobs, adding to the existing minimum starting wage of $15. Employees generally agree that if you don’t mind some manual labor, you can find benefits — just not Prime benefits — inside these massive buildings.

For more on the job, Mental Floss reached out to several current and former employees. Here’s what they had to say about working with robots, finding time to pee, and the overall experience of what social media has dubbed “Amazon vest life.”

1. Amazon warehouse employees handle a lot of sex toys.

Amazon prides itself on being the “everything store,” and they mean it. Kyle, a picker who grabs items from inventory to prepare for shipping, tells Mental Floss that adult novelty items are steady sellers. Such as? “Dildos,” he says. “Sex toys. I pull out a dozen every night. BDSM shibari straps. Stuff I’ve never seen or heard of.”

2. Amazon warehouse employees have robots for co-workers.

If you find some of your co-workers a little standoffish, be glad you’re not stationed in an Amazon warehouse. An increasing number of the sites are moving to automated robots to take the burden off pickers, who can walk up to 15 miles a day searching the cavernous buildings for ordered items. Massive machines dubbed Kivas reverse that task, bringing towering eight-foot pods full of items to a picker’s workstation after they’ve been loaded by employees known as stowers.

“The robots are bringing the pods, these tall yellow pods that are coded with bins,” Kyle says. “There are eight different levels and columns with hundreds of items. The pod has four sides and can weigh up to 750 pounds. Before it comes to your station, it’s facing you with the side that has the item. If it has to turn, it will move, come back, and rotate.”

Kyle says proficient pickers who meet a quota can sometimes get their name on a robot. But that would require picking roughly 5 000 items in one 10-hour shift.

3. Amazon warehouse employees can never, ever get in the way of the robots.

If the idea of a robot carrying nearly a half-ton of products while traveling at 20 mph sounds dangerous, it could be. According to Donald, a warehouse employee trained in packing and stowing, it’s forbidden for anyone but trained robot technicians to walk into the path of the motoring machines.

“There have been times [when] something falls on the robotics floor, and only a trained person can go retrieve the item from the floor,” he tells Mental Floss. “If someone who is not trained reaches or steps out onto the robotics floor, you are instantly terminated, no matter what role you play … it is a serious safety violation.”

Fortunately, robotics workers have a protective tech vest with built-in sensors to help negate the chances of a collision. “The robotic tech vest is a specialized vest worn by trained staff,” Donald says. “The vest tells the robots on the Amazon robotics floor that they are out on the floor and pretty much communicates with the robots so that the person doesn’t get run over. The robots will not stop for anything unless a person is on the floor with a robotics tech vest.”

4. Amazon warehouse employees have vending machines that dispense medication.

Working at an Amazon warehouse can be physically challenging, with lots of bending, lifting, and moving. As a result, their vending machines offer more than just candy bars and potato chips. “We have no-cost medical vending machines,” Alex, a packer at an Amazon warehouse, tells Mental Floss. “They hold individual dosage packets of things like Advil, Tylenol, Tums. I’ve used them before when I ran out of my own stash that I bring in my bag, and they come in handy.”

Amazon also maintains a nurse’s station dubbed AMCARE (Amazon Cares) for anything requiring medical attention. “People would go there for headaches, pulled muscles, cuts, etc.,” Alex says. “It’s basically like the nurse’s office in school.”

5. Amazon warehouse employees can read your gift notes.

Packers — employees who prepare items for shipping — are the ones responsible for printing out gift notes and putting them into the packages. And it’s very possible for them to catch a glimpse of what they say. “We have a gift note printer for any item that includes one that we have to grab and then toss in the box,” Alex says. “I don’t read them, though. For one, I don’t have time to stop and read if I’m going to hit rate, but also I feel like it’s rude. I know others do.”

Alex did catch one, though. “The only interesting story I have on that—and it’s probably only interesting to me—was a gift receipt for a toilet plunger. No note, just a receipt.”

6. Amazon warehouse employees keep a digital manager with them at all times.

Many roles in an Amazon warehouse are directed by a handheld scanner dubbed a Zebra, which can tell workers what items need to be retrieved and can also inform supervisors how busy an employee is. If the scanner catches them slacking, they can be automatically reported. “The scanner brings the alert to a manager, and the manager would do the writing up,” Robert, a picker who worked at an Amazon Fresh warehouse in 2020, tells Mental Floss. “But it’s based on the data the scanner is feeding them. There are different programs. They watch to see how the process is flowing. The manager will look to see if there’s a bottleneck.”

7. Amazon warehouse employees don’t get to decide how your order gets packed.

If you’ve ever wondered how a box of protein bars winds up in a soft envelope or why a small item gets packed in an oversized box, so do many employees. “When we scan an item, we get a notification on our screen telling us which box size or envelope size to use,” Alex says. “If the chosen box [or] envelope won’t work for the item, we can override it and choose a better one, but too many overrides goes against our [packing] rate … so we are supposed to only do that if we have to.”

Third-party sellers may choose how items get packed, saving money on boxes, or may opt to pack the items themselves, bypassing packers entirely.

Alex adds that owing to employees meeting quotas, they may opt to use a different box without making a note of it, or skip air pillows. If you find a strangely empty box, it’s probably because the packer wanted to keep things moving. “Doing that process as quick as Amazon wants is the key,” Alex says. “That’s why you’ll find packers who override box sizes but don’t note it on the account, don’t use dunnage [air pillows], or don’t care that items are damaged when packing. I think that’s a small percentage of packers, though.”

8. Amazon warehouse employees have some complaints about break times.

Because Amazon monitors activity, employees tend to adhere pretty strictly to the allotted 30-minute and 15-minute break periods. The problem, according to Kyle, is that these windows don’t account for the fact that it takes time to navigate the massive facility to get to a break room, bathroom, or to the parking lot.

“When you take a break, you log out and are supposed to come back within 30 minutes, so there’s no more than 30 minutes between the last time you scanned an item and the next item,” Kyle says. “But the problem is it takes five to seven minutes to walk to your car or to the break room, so it’s not really a full 30-minute break.”

Taking a load off at your workstation, at least in Kyle’s warehouse, is off-limits. “You’re not allowed to sit on things at a station. There are no chairs provided. You can make chairs with totes or sit on the steps. I usually choose to go to my car.”

9. Some Amazon warehouse employees have to have a spotter.

According to Donald, working in the Trailer Docking and Releasing (TDR) area of a warehouse is a critical position. “Depending on the facility, the trailer yard can have anywhere from 20 to hundreds of trailers in them. [It] is an active yard, and safety precautions are a must,” Donald says. He explains that the TDR work, including the safety checklist, is done through a Kindle app. But one employee can’t do it alone.

“You always need another person to go with you when you do TDRs because you need someone to be a spotter,” Donald says. “You enter a very active trailer yard, and while one person is doing the work on the Kindle, the other person is there to spot so that they do not get hit with a trailer or a truck. If you go into a trailer yard without a spotter, you are instantly terminated, as this is a severe safety hazard.”

10. Some Amazon warehouse employees have a countdown timer.

Like Jack Bauer in 24, some Amazon employees often have to deal with the tension of a timer counting down the seconds remaining to complete a task. “It’s called takt time,” Kyle says. “You’re supposed to grab an item within 6.5 seconds of an item appearing on the screen.” While it’s doable, Kyle says it’s possible to meet quota even if it’s a little slower. “You’re trying to keep up, but it’s more like 7.5 to eight seconds.” Kyle also says finding certain items can take as long as 30 seconds.

11. Amazon warehouse employees have competitions.

In order to boost morale and productivity, Amazon fulfillment centers promote timed competitions to see who can excel at a task like picking. Though the name varies by location, some facilities call it Power Hour or King of the Hill. “We have pick competitions, where you pick a certain amount of items in a certain amount of time,” Kyle says. “They give you Amazon Bucks, or Swag Bucks, that you can turn in for [Amazon] gear.”

The reward, according to Kyle, isn’t worth the additional effort. “I ignore [competitions] now. It’s not worth it to get $1 off.”

12. Amazon warehouse employees are kind of annoyed when you order kitty litter.

Although robots are doing the heavy lifting, dragging large items from the pods can be difficult. Kyle says heavy pet items are particularly troublesome. “Most people hate kitty litter or dog food, bulky items like that,” he says. “They’re hard to handle.”

13. Amazon warehouse employees can find the work pretty isolating.

Depending on the position — and state of the pandemic — Amazon workers can find themselves going for long periods of time without talking to anyone else. “You see managers during the first couple weeks of training,” Kyle says. “But [then] you won’t have much interaction except on breaks. Even then, it’s limited.”

That’s not necessarily a bad thing for some. “I just want a job that I can punch in and out and make good money,” Alex says. “And preferably not have to interact with a bunch of people socially. Amazon gives me that.”

14. Amazon warehouse employees hear some Japanese.

According to Robert, Amazon has embraced certain tenets of Japanese logistics — so much so that words like andon (a processing mistake) and gemba (the worksite) are utilized in the fulfillment centers. “It’s part of their management philosophy,” Robert says. “It was new to me. I looked up the terms. They were from Japanese logistics ideas … When you’re new, none of it gets explained.”

15. No, Amazon warehouse employees do not get Amazon Prime free.

For all the shipping they facilitate, there’s no free two-day shipping for warehouse employees. According to Kyle, a free Amazon Prime membership isn’t offered. “We do get a $100 a year discount code for items sold directly by Amazon,” he says.

16. Amazon warehouse employees have a mascot.

His name is Peccy, and he’s available on pins given to employees as a reward for things like perfect attendance. The amorphous orange blob (above) was apparently named for Amazon’s self-described peculiar business strategies and has become a hit among employees. “He’s the Amazon mascot,” Kyle says. “I collect [the pins]. I guess that’s an incentive.”

How costumes in period dramas shape our perception of royalty

Our version of the present-day royals is carefully constructed and curated. Kept at bay behind a red velvet rope, we will never get a glimpse into the bedrooms and offices of regal power. That is, other than in period dramas.

In film and TV dramatizations of familiar royal tales, the audience is presented with a romanticized and glamorized vision of royal history. Sumptuous silks and gilded homes make up the lush material world on screen. In reality, they are far removed from the bed bugs, tedious political documents and the stench of recently used chamber pots.

The visuals are so rich that audiences will often remember the wonderful costumes, forgetting the the bloody details of the Wars of the Roses or the shady political machinations of royal court.

From the high ruffs and jeweled headpieces of the Tudors to the ballgowns and tiaras of modern royals on screen, these costume provide a glossy veneer to people and history that is, at times, quite dark. These individuals become characters in costumes. They become nothing more than well dressed princes and princesses, kings and queens in stories that often overtake reality.

Royal stereotypes

Costuming choices can reinforce well-worn and familiar royal stereotypes. If you imagine Queen Victoria in mourning, you might envision Judi Dench in black silk and a widow’s cap. Thinking about Elizabeth I might make you picture a regal Helen Mirren in a ruff protruding from her neck. And party-loving Charles II brings to mind the lustrous curly locks of Rufus Sewell in a long wig.

Costumes can also radically challenge and rewrite how we view past royals. Portraits by Hans Holbein of Henry VIII in his later years and early screen depictions have are of a corpulent king and bejeweled monarch. Joan Bergin’s costuming of Jonathan Rhys Meyers’s Henry VIII in “The Tudors” (2007-2010) instead included lots of leather, tight doublets, and open shirts. Bergin’s costumes transformed the serial groom into a sexy sportsman, rescuing this younger incarnation of Henry VIII from historical oblivion.

Dressing up like Diana

“The Crown” is the latest screen delight to offer us a glimpse behind the royal curtain and fans can’t seem to get enough of Princess Diana, portrayed by Emma Corrin.

Unlike Henry VIII, Diana was in no need of an image update. The princess was a fashion symbol in her lifetime, and The Crown’s season four costume designer, Amy Roberts, took the opportunity to recreate some of Diana’s genuine iconic outfits. Roberts’ recreation of Diana’s early wardrobe was remarkably faithful, treading a fine line between historical fact and fantasy.

Such was the furor over the fashion that brands have seized upon the outfits, creating wearable versions for a new generation of Diana fans who are eager to emulate the late princess. In October 2020, Corrin hit the cover of Vogue in a Diana-esque 1980s concoction and copies of Diana’s iconic sheep jumper can be purchased for an eye-watering £250. While Diana’s 1980s chic (now considered period costume) has enjoyed a revival in mainstream fashion, it resonates with a desire to cosplay as a royal.

Costumed characters

Even in historical documentaries about the monarchs, which are framed as authentic and factual accounts of Britain’s royal past, historians like Lucy Worsley are renowned for using dressing up as a way to breathe life into long-dead monarchs. While Worsley’s “dress-up box” version of history may not be for everyone, it plays into a desire to humanize historical characters. Like the living history interpreters that (before COVID) inhabited the Historic Royal Palaces sites that Worsley oversees, donning a doublet and hose resuscitates royals who we can otherwise only view in oil paintings.

Costume may help us time travel, but by lacing up a corset, tying on a ruff, or even donning a Sloane ranger Barbour jacket, a modern-day human being cosplays as royal, rendering that person a caricature. The costume creates a distance between the real person with all their problematic behavior and turns them into beautifully dressed symbol of a bygone Britishness. There is certainly magic in the costumes but that magic can obscure the darker parts of royal history, which should be remembered.

Serena Dyer, Lecturer in History of Design and Material Culture, De Montfort University

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

It’s time to consign the “selfish gene” to the history books

There’s an unforgettable moment in the movie “Wall Street” when financier Gordon Gekko tells the shareholders of Teldar Paper why his buyout proposal, incorporating massive layoffs, is not only profitable, but morally legitimate. With his slicked-back hair and custom-tailored suit, he struts to the front of the hall and proclaims that there is a “new law of evolution in corporate America.” It’s a simple law, he explains:

The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed—for lack of a better word—is good.

Greed is right.

Greed works.

Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.

Greed, Gekko is declaring, is the basis of evolution and all that’s arisen from it — including human supremacy. Gekko’s speech was unleashed on moviegoers in 1987 as the world was reeling from an early encounter with the excesses arising from global financial deregulation. His signature claim — “Greed is good!” — has since become the stuff of legend, strikingly capturing the ethos of unrestrained, free market capitalism that has come to dominate mainstream thinking.

The idea that selfishness and greed are drivers of evolution, and therefore possess underlying virtue, has been around for over a century, ever since Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution became widely accepted. The archetypal robber barons, Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, both argued that the “survival of the fittest” principle justified their cutthroat tactics. But the publication in 1976 of Richard Dawkins’s bestseller, “The Selfish Gene,” adroitly repackaged the notion for modern times, reducing the complexities of evolution to a brutally elemental simplicity. As Dawkins summarized it:

The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes. Like successful Chicago gangsters, our genes have survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world. This entitles us to expect certain qualities in our genes. I shall argue that a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness. This gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behavior. . . . Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts that simply do not make evolutionary sense.

With the notion of the “selfish gene” as the ultimate driver of evolution, Dawkins helped forge the moral framework of his age. Influential thought leaders have since infused this supposed biological truth into economics, politics, and business. “The economy of nature is competitive from beginning to end,” writes sociobiologist M. T. Ghiselin, coeditor of the Journal of Bioeconomics.

It’s difficult to overstate the pervasiveness of Dawkins’s selfish gene theory in popular culture. In a nutshell, the underlying story goes something like this: All organisms in nature are simply vessels for the replication of the selfish genes that control us. As such, all living entities — including humans — are driven to compete ruthlessly to pass on their genes. This struggle for reproduction is the underlying engine of evolution, as occasional positive random mutations in genes give an entity a competitive edge to beat out weaker rivals. Any apparently altruistic behavior is merely a convenient tactic for a concealed selfish goal. Since nature works most effectively based on selfishness, human society should be similarly organized, which is why free market capitalism has been so successful in dominating all other socioeconomic models.

However, pervasive as it has become throughout our culture, the story of the selfish gene is based on fundamental misconceptions. In recent decades, researchers in evolutionary biology have overturned virtually every significant assumption in the selfish gene account. In its place, they have developed a far more sophisticated conception of how evolution works, revealing the rich tapestry of nature’s dynamic interconnectedness. Rather than evolution being driven by competition, it turns out that cooperation has played a far more important role in producing the great transitions that led to Earth’s current breathtaking state of diversity and beauty.

The trouble with the selfish gene story is not just that it is scientifically flawed; it’s also that it presents such an impoverished view of life’s dazzling magnificence. The discoveries of modern researchers showing how life evolved to its current state of lavish abundance reveal a spectacle of awe-inspiring complexity, mind-boggling dynamic feedback loops, and infinitely subtle interconnections.

Decoding the “book of life”

For nearly a century after Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution by natural selection in 1859, biologists struggled to identify precisely what caused adaptive traits to be inherited by future generations. Early in the twentieth century, they combined the ideas of Darwin with other groundbreaking researchers such August Weismann and Gregor Mendel to construct what became known as the Modern Synthesis, which has been the dominant interpretation of evolution ever since. The central concept that held it together was the gene: a hypothetical unit of natural selection that was passed on through inheritance. It was the gene that somehow specified the form an organism would take. Random mutations in an individual’s genes occasionally gave it unique traits that were different from the rest of its species, and those with the best adapted traits passed these genes onto the next generation.

What exactly were these genes, and how did they pass on their specifications? This burning question was finally answered in 1953 when James Watson and Francis Crick, along with Rosalind Franklin, discovered the double-helix shape of the DNA molecule containing an organism’s genes, and described how tiny molecular subunits, named bases, paired with each other to specify proteins that would then be constructed within a cell. Now things were becoming clear! It was as though the secret of life itself had been laid bare to scientific understanding. With headlines blaring around the world, a new story of life entered the public consciousness.

Using metaphors from the newly burgeoning field of information theory, Crick and Watson published their findings in a legendary paper in Nature, writing that “It therefore seems likely that the precise sequence of the bases is the code which carries the genetical information.” Now the race was on to “decode” what was quickly becoming known as the “book of life.”

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As computing sophistication exponentially increased, the possibility arose that combined advances in molecular biology and information processing might allow a complete mapping of the human genome. Planning began in 1984 and the Human Genome Project formally launched in 1990. During this time, information technology and genetics became tightly linked, both technically and conceptually. The genotype was seen as a “program” that determined the exact specifications of an organism, just like a computer program. DNA sequences formed the “master code” of a “blueprint” that contained a detailed set of “instructions” for building an individual. Prominent geneticist Walter Gilbert would begin his public lectures by pulling out a compact disk and proclaiming “This is you!”

Public excitement around the Human Genome Project was effervescent. The promise was intoxicating: If every gene specified a particular protein in a cell, then once we’d mapped them all, we’d eventually be able to identify the genetic cause for every attribute of a person. We’d know the genes for intelligence, for athletic prowess, for longevity—and of course find cures for a wide array of diseases. “Our fate,” Watson declared, “is in our genes.”

Thanks to dramatic advances in computing power, the human genome was triumphantly mapped in 2003, years ahead of schedule. However, some rather inconvenient facts quickly began to rain on the parade. It turned out that the entire human genome contained about twenty-one thousand genes that coded for proteins. The tiny roundworm C. elegans, rather embarrassingly, had a similar number, while wheat had more than four times as many. These humbling statistics clearly showed there was something more going on in the cell than simple one-to-one coding between genes and proteins. And even without these awkward comparisons, it was abundantly clear that there were more than twenty-one thousand attributes that determined every aspect of a human being. What was wrong with the model?

The language of the gene

At its heart, the model’s fundamental flaw was the machine metaphor it was built on. Genetic determinism, as it is sometimes called, was based on the underlying idea that organisms, like machines, are comprised of components with linear relationships that can be precisely determined.

When Crick and Watson laid the foundation for what they called the “central dogma” of molecular biology, they specified that information could only flow one way. It began with the structure of the gene, which was defined as a particular sequence of base pairs that coded for a protein. In everyday life, we think of protein as an undifferentiated substance we need for good health (as in “Are you getting enough protein?”). Within our bodies, however, proteins are a staggeringly diverse group of molecular structures that carry out most of the business of a cell. By some estimates, there are millions of different proteins within a single cell, each one of which is uniquely shaped in wildly complex configurations, a bit like a microscopic self-organized clump of squiggling steel wool. Something Crick and Watson didn’t know when they set down their central dogma was that, in addition to all their other tasks, proteins act directly on the DNA of the cell, specifying which genes in the DNA should be activated.

This is a crucial discovery, which has become a mainstay of modern molecular biology, but has not yet made it into broad public consciousness. It means that the relationship between genes and the organism is not one-way but circular. DNA can’t do anything by itself — it only functions when certain parts of it get switched on or off by the activities of different combinations of proteins, which were themselves formed by the instructions of DNA. This process is a vibrant, dynamic circular flow of interactivity. Living organisms, it turns out, are complex systems with multiple feedback loops creating nonlinear relationships. As such, they demonstrate far more complexity than even the most complicated computer.

What this means is that there is no such thing as a simple “gene for something.” Genes are expressed within the cell as a result of what is going on around them. Rather than “coding” for something, the way a programmer writes code for a computer, a more useful metaphor for what happens might be “language.” Think about how language works. Sometimes it can be a simple instruction: I might tell you to “turn right at the stop sign, then go half a mile until you see the store on the left.” But it is frequently context dependent. If I call out “Help me!” you might turn to look at what I’m doing. If I’m carrying a tray piled high with glasses, perhaps you’ll remove some to reduce the risk of them toppling. If I’m a teacher, and I’ve written some arithmetic on the board, you might call out the answer. Depending on the context, you’ll respond very differently to the same words. In addition, you might engage in conversation with me, expecting me to respond, and together we might come up with a creative approach to a situation that I wouldn’t have arrived at alone. Similarly, the gene sometimes gives clear instructions, and at other times engages in an interactive conversation with the rest of the cell. Just as words have an array of different meanings based on their context, syntax, and grammar, so DNA and proteins use their own language, with its own syntax and grammar, to determine what’s best at that moment for the cell.

Take, for example, a cute little grasshopper. It walks slowly on long, spindly legs, eating alone and minding its own business. Obviously, a different species than a locust, which has short, crooked legs, and forms terrifying swarms that can darken the sky and aggressively devour an entire region’s crops. Right? In fact, it turns out that grasshoppers and locusts have exactly the same DNA. Just like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, when a certain kind of grasshopper senses its environment changing, either from food scarcity or overcrowding, it can transform itself within hours to a manically aggressive locust. Its cells switch on different genes within its DNA, it begins shrinking its legs and wings, changing its coloring, and even growing its brain to deal with the social complexities of the swarm. Later on, when the environment improves, its cells will switch their DNA settings and the locust will magically transform back into a quiet grasshopper.

Going beyond the gene

As biologists gain a deeper understanding of the cell’s participation in genetic expression, they have also begun to re-examine the cell’s role in evolution. An increasing number of prominent evolutionary biologists have become convinced that the new understanding of evolution requires expanding the theoretical framework beyond the Modern Synthesis that has ruled for nearly a century. They’re not agitating for a Copernican-style revolution that rejects the entire conventional model; rather, they’re calling for an “Extended Evolutionary Synthesis,” arguing that the new findings require a broader conceptual framework. They are holding international conferences on the topic and their papers are flooding the most prestigious academic journals. “A profound, radical, and fascinating transformation of evolutionary theory is taking place,” writes one of their leaders, Eva Jablonka.

The foundational idea of the new thinking is that evolution is driven, not by genes alone, but by organisms which, in the words of leading proponent Kevin Laland, “play active and constructive roles in their own development and that of their descendants.” Animals, they declare, are masters at directing their own evolution by modifying their environment in ways that eventually become an integral part of their species’ repertoire. We see examples of this everywhere in nature. Think of a bird making a nest. It’s constructing a little niche in the environment that keeps its eggs safe, protecting them both from predators and temperature fluctuations. Those eggs don’t need to be as resilient against cold temperatures as they otherwise would be. And when the chicks grow up, the ones that build better nests will be more successful at rearing their own offspring. Through their niche construction (as this process is called), birds direct their own evolution as a species. The same is true for spiders, whose reliance on web construction favors offspring who can produce sticky threads and react to vibrations on the web. Plants are equally effective in producing their own niches: they have learned to change the acidity, salinity, and other characteristics of the soil to make it more nutritious for their roots and those of their neighbors.

Organisms, then, play a crucial role in looking after themselves and their offspring in sophisticated ways. But how about the “selfish” question? Have we just relocated the “selfishness” of the gene to that of an individual organism? In fact, one of the most important findings in modern biology has been that cooperation, not selfish competition, has been the foremost driving force in each of life’s major evolutionary transitions since it began on Earth billions of years ago.

The network of life

Earliest life consisted of single cells called prokaryotes, very similar to the bacteria that have thrived on Earth ever since. Prokaryotes contain relatively simple genomes, which they pass on to the next generation by dividing themselves into two, each daughter cell containing the identical DNA as the parent.

It was a billion years or so before a new type of cell arrived on the scene. Called a eukaryote (Greek for “true kernel”), this cell contained a nucleus that housed all its DNA material. Eukaryotes found a novel way to get their nutrition: they took advantage of their more flexible cell walls to engulf other bacteria and ingest them, breaking their parts down to use as food.

Except that something rather strange happened—and probably more than once. A eukaryote engulfed a prokaryote, and instead of digesting it, they started working together. This particular prokaryote was a tiny powerhouse, specialized in taking oxygen and turning it into energy. Called a mitochondrion, it formed a relationship with eukaryotes that could lay claim to be the most successful partnership on Earth. Every organism that you see around you—every plant, every insect, every animal—is comprised of eukaryotic cells containing hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of mitochondria within them (in plants they’re called plastids), producing the energy that allows the cell to go about its business. To this day, mitochondria still carry their own DNA with them, which they use to replicate separately from the rest of the cell.

This startling hypothesis was proposed by biologist Lynn Margulis in 1967, and she underwent years of ridicule from the mainstream scientific community until it was finally accepted. It is now recognized as an indisputable part of Earth’s evolutionary history — and not just any part. The cooperation initiated between eukaryotes and mitochondria is viewed by many biologists as one of the most important events ever to have occurred in the history of life on Earth.

Prokaryotes, meanwhile, may have remained relatively simple in their design, but they developed their own striking form of cooperation which has enabled them to flourish even in a world of energy-guzzling eukaryotes. They learned to share their genes with each other, in much the same way that neighbors in a tight-knit community might share their tools, favorite books, or useful gardening tips. They’ve been doing this now for billions of years, and it may be the single most important skill that has enabled them to thrive over the eons, allowing them to survive even in the most inhospitable places, such as hydrothermal vents, oil slicks, or radioactive dumps. Most of us know about this powerful networking trick of bacteria through their antibiotic resistance, which they transfer to each other through gene sharing.

In the early years of life on Earth, it’s likely that gene sharing (known officially as horizontal gene transfer) was the predominant way evolution worked. In fact, researchers now believe that the eukaryote genome was itself the result of a fusion of two prokaryotic genomes. Instead of a Darwinian “tree of life,” biologists are offering alternative metaphors such as a “bush” or “net” of life to better describe how we are all intricately connected. In the memorable words of Lynn Margulis: “Life did not take over the world by combat but by networking.”

As eukaryotes, boosted by their mitochondrial energy packs, developed larger and more complex cellular structures, horizontal gene transfer became less important for them. While they still continue to engage in it, the size and complexity of their genomes make it more difficult. Eukaryotes, however, gradually devised another form of cooperation that led to the full unfolding of the prodigious grandeur of life on Earth as we know it today—multicellularity.

Better together

Almost every manifestation of nature that we can see with the naked eye is multicellular: a daisy, a rhinoceros, and a tiny mite, are all composed of a multitude of cells doing different things, yet working together for the greater interest of the organism. The evolutionary step from a single-celled eukaryote to the emergence of multicellular life took a long, long time—about a billion or so years, during which so little changed on Earth that it’s been called the “boring billion.”

Why did it take so long? No-one knows for sure, but a clue may reside in the staggering intricacy of gene expression that multicellular life had to master. It’s one thing for a cell to organize itself and then divide into two. It’s quite another to figure out how a newly born cell can split into two new cells different from each other but working together toward a shared goal, and then continue this differentiating process time and time again.

A fundamental distinction had to be made between cells that specialized in passing on genes to the next generation (germline cells) and the somatic cells that took care of everything else. Here again, we see a major evolutionary breakthrough in the scale of nature’s cooperation. Somatic cells had to give up their own ability to reproduce in order to become part of something bigger than themselves. Without this momentous accord, there would be no complex life on Earth.

Even as they followed their unique evolutionary pathways to become redwood trees, whales, or worms, virtually all creatures on Earth have continued to share about a third of their genes from the collective ancestral pool. Because of our deep common ancestry, even though animals and bacteria have very different lifestyles, our cells are able to communicate using the same genomic language. Even as species differentiated, they developed ways to trade their own specialized skills for the unique skills of other species that could help them thrive. This process, known as mutually beneficial symbiosis (or mutualism) is so widespread throughout nature that it forms a bedrock of every ecology on Earth. The prevalence of mutualism means that life is rarely a zero-sum game, where a species can only gain at the expense of another. On the contrary, by working together, species have co-created ecosystems everywhere in which the whole is far greater than the sum of the parts.

These deeply intimate symbioses are everywhere in nature, forming the foundation of the living world. It’s impossible take a walk in the woods, eat a meal, or dip in the ocean, without participating in the deep symbioses that have nourished life’s plenitude. On the most fundamental level, plants have specialized in transforming sunlight into chemical energy that provides food for other creatures, whose waste then fertilizes the soil that the plants rely on. If you hike in the woods, you may notice how the trees provide shade that maintains moisture for creatures on the ground. Below you, mycorrhizal fungi maintain underground networks allowing “guilds” of trees to exchange carbon and nutrients among each other in a sophisticated interplay of resources that’s been dubbed the “wood-wide web.”

These symbiotic relationships are frequently so intimate that we rely on them without even knowing about it. We share our bodies with a vast multitude of bacteria—more than the number of cells we call our own. We need them to help us perform biochemical tricks that we can’t do ourselves, such as producing enzymes to digest food that our own enzymes can’t manage. These symbionts are so important to us that, after birth, a mother’s milk contains special sugars that the baby can’t digest but provide nutrition for the newborn’s symbiotic bacteria.

In countless instances, over hundreds of millions of years, life has decided time and again, that things work better together.

Cooperation, competition, and harmony

Where, then, does competition fit into the picture? It seems clear that the gene’s supposed “ruthlessly selfish” drive to replicate is not the sole explanatory factor of evolution. But surely competition has nevertheless had a significant part to play? What about all those spectacular nature documentaries showing cheetahs sprinting to catch gazelles? Male chimpanzees fighting rivals for sexual dominance? Bacteria that make us sick by overpowering our immune systems? There is no question that ruthless competition also has a central role to play in the drama of life. How can we reconcile pervasive competition with the forces of cooperation?

Let’s imagine a spectrum with extreme competition at one end and extreme cooperation at the other. We can think of an organism as an ecosystem where the different parts have agreed to coexist at the cooperative end of the spectrum. Outside the organism, however, relationships exist all along the spectrum. An ecosystem can be understood as the emergent creation of organisms acting together in different degrees of competition and cooperation. In fact, the creative tension that arises from the confluence of both competition and cooperation is itself a driving force of evolution.

A pair of prominent evolutionary biologists, David Sloan Wilson and E. O. Wilson, have developed a sophisticated theory they call multilevel selection, tracing the dynamics between cooperative and competitive behavior at different scales of life. E. O. Wilson, a world leader in the study of social insects, has shown how colonies of ants that cooperated closely were more evolutionarily successful than those that experienced internal competition. The same is thought to be true of human evolution, when early hominids developed deeply felt values such as compassion, altruism, and fairness, which enabled them to live complex lives together in community. The groups in which these attributes predominated were more successful at hunting, foraging, and defending themselves from attack.

We can conceive of evolution, now, as a multidimensional force acting through both competition and cooperation at multiple levels—within the organism, in symbiotic relationships, within a species, between species, and within an ecosystem. At each level, competitive and cooperative forces create their own dynamic tensions, while simultaneously impacting other levels.

With this in mind, we can move beyond a sterile debate of whether evolution is a result of competition or cooperation. After all, these are concepts created by humans to establish neat categories. Living systems, whether they’re genomes, cells, organisms, or ecosystems, have no interest in sticking to a category. We know that trees rely symbiotically on animals to spread their seeds. However, nut trees would have a problem if the squirrels ate all their nuts before they could germinate. To overcome this, in a phenomenon known as mast fruiting, they cooperate as a species, refrain from producing nuts for several years, and then collectively decide one year to produce an overwhelming number of nuts, so the squirrels will be unable to devour them all. Who’s competing? Who’s cooperating?

Maybe there’s another way to describe the elegantly complex interweaving of natural processes that comprise an ecosystem: harmony. In music, harmony arises when different notes sound at the same time in such a way that an emergent, more complex and pleasing sound is produced. The notes aren’t competing or cooperating with each other, but the way in which their differences act upon each other creates a blended experience that is richer, and more beautiful, than any of them alone. Could it be that the best description of how nature works is, in fact, a harmonic meshwork of life?

Mind the metaphor

The mainstream metaphors used to describe the evolution of life do a great disservice to its awesome majesty, while influencing us to think about our own lives, our planet, and our society in harmful and destructive ways. Metaphors are more than just techniques to communicate ideas—they form foundational structures of thought in the human brain that we unconsciously use to construct our worldview and shape our value system. Metaphors matter.

The most pervasive mistaken metaphor of life in common currency is that it’s merely a very complicated machine. This goes back to the seventeenth century philosophical musings of Descartes and Hobbes, but it has fused with the bedrock of modern thought ever since Crick and Watson defined the gene in terms of coded information. At this stage, it’s difficult to read any popular discourse about life without being bombarded by this misconception.

This metaphor becomes even more dangerously pervasive when it’s used to describe the human mind which, according to a pair of evolutionary psychologists, is “a set of information-processing machines that were designed by natural selection to solve adaptive problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors.” The brain, we are told, is “a computer that is made of organic (carbon-based) compounds rather than silicon chips.”

And then, of course, there’s the Gordon Gekko crowd, justifying exploitative free-market global capitalism on the basis that it’s what evolution intended. The metaphor of “life as a market” pervades public discourse so extensively that it seems like it must be nature’s own way.

How would it change our conception of nature, and of our own social norms, if we instead framed these symbiotic relationships in terms of mutual consideration?

Frequently, when cell biologists describe the mind-boggling complexity of their subject, they turn to music as a core metaphor, making statements like “the music of life is a symphony.” However, a symphony is a piece of music written by a composer, with a conductor directing how each note should be played. The awesome quality of nature’s music arises from the fact that it is self-organized. There is no outside agent telling each cell what to do.

Perhaps a more illustrative metaphor would be an improvisational jazz ensemble, where a self-organized group of musicians spontaneously creates fresh melodies from a core harmonic theme, riffing off each other’s creativity in a similar way to how we’ve seen evolution work. A related metaphor—and perhaps even more compelling—is a dance. Cell biologists increasingly refer to their findings in terms of “choreography,” and philosopher of biology Evan Thompson writes vividly how an organism and its environment relate to each other “like two partners in a dance who bring forth each other’s movements.”

If our mainstream media and commentators began using these metaphors in place of the selfish gene, before long we might begin to perceive our world in a fundamentally different way. What might happen if we applied this new understanding of nature’s harmonic dance to establish different norms for our own society? Imagine if, instead of our socioeconomic system constructed on the presumption that “the economy of nature is competitive from beginning to end,” it was structured instead on the basis of symbiosis—an ecological civilization.

Ecosystems have developed tremendous resilience from these internal dynamics, sometimes existing for millions of years, continually adapting yet remaining stable and robust. Widespread symbiosis means there are no waste products—what one species expels is nutrition for another. Healthy ecosystems embrace both competition and cooperation at multiple levels, but always within a context of harmony for the entire system. The possibility of applying these ecological principles to our own society, and using them as an alternative way for humanity to organize itself, could potentially offer a powerful new navigating principle to steer our civilization on a course to survive the existential challenges of this century.

Here’s how to properly shut down a grill

Inspired by conversations on the Food52 Hotline, we’re sharing tips and tricks that make navigating all of our kitchens easier and more fun.

Today: Shutting down a grill is just as important as starting it up.

The lightly charred surface of summer squash, the blackened crispy corners of a good steak, the soft, smokey flesh of stone fruit—they’re all achieved with grilling. 

Summer grilling season is a celebrated tradition for many home cooks. And like any good kitchen equipment, a grill needs to be properly cared for —including letting it cool off.

Here are the proper ways shut down a grill, because cooling it off is just as important as firing it up.

Charcoal

Never dump hot coals into a garbage or trash can. Coals can stay hot for up to 24 hours—even a little ember can cause a fire.

Many people remove the cooking grate when they are done cooking. It is not absolutely crucial. If you are going to remove it, make sure you clean it first with a long handled grill brush (or tongs). It is very important that you have a safe place to put it, as it is probably very hot. 

Find the vents on your grill—there are vents on the bottom and lid of the grill.

Stir up the charcoal, spray it with water, and put the lid on the grill. Make sure your vents are closed on the top and bottom. Next time you grill, you can add your fresh charcoal to the old stuff—stretching your charcoal and saving money.

Always keep a bucket full of water, or a fire extinguisher handy, just in case. You can always dump it on a friend when the grill is properly cooled.

More: Grilling tips from the Food52 team.

Gas Grills 

When you are done cooking your food, set a 5 minute timer. Keep the grill on, with the lid open. When the timer goes off, it’s time to clean your grill grate.

Now you can turn off your grill: turn all the knobs to the “off” position. You should hear an audible popping sound as the gas stops flowing into the grill grates. The flames should also disappear.

Now that your grill is off, you need to turn off the gas tank. On top of the tank, there is a small knob that generally has arrows pointing to the “open” and “close” positions. Turn towards the close position, which should be clockwise (righty tighty, lefty loosey!).

If you have a grill cover, wait until the grill is cool before covering. 

Now that you’ve properly shut down your grill and practiced fire safety, it’s time to enjoy the season’s most fun cooking technique.

Additional Ideas From The Editors:

OK, Let’s Get Grilling!

Grilled Spatchcock Chicken With Herby Green Sauce

“No dish screams summer quite like grilled chicken. That said, it can take time to master the grill, and chicken cooked over those ripping-hot grates runs the risk of drying out,” writes recipe developer Alexis DeBoschnek. “Enter this herby green sauce, made with yogurt and loaded with a bevy of tender herbs and alliums. This recipe acts as a twofer—the sauce is used to marinate the meat, and you save some for serving, too.”

Grilled Avocado Halves With Cumin-Spiced Quinoa & Black Bean Salad 

Meat-eaters and seafood lovers get all the attention in the summer, but here’s a grilled vegan dish that’s more exciting than just a sad single portobello mushroom. Once grilled, avocados transform into smoky, impossibly creamy goodness. Stuffed with a quinoa and black bean salad in a zingy Dijon-apple cider vinaigrette, these avocados are a self-contained meal and are a perfect reason to fire up the grill this summer.

Grilled (Or Broiled) Oysters With A Sriracha Lime Butter

If you’ve never had grilled oysters, I implore you to give them a try. They’re briny, creamy, and best served with a smoky compound butter; in this case it’s a zingy sriracha-lime butter you’ll find yourself making over and over this summer.

Speedy Romeo’s Grilled Pizza With Marinated Tomatoes & Ricotta 

Grilled pizza is one of summer’s unsung heroes—and it’s high time we changed that. This Genius Recipe hails from Brooklyn pizzeria Speedy Romeo. Since the ingredients list is simple, use the best you can find; that means good-quality ricotta, peak in-season tomatoes, and as much fresh basil as the garden (or market) will provide.

Grilled Bread Salad With Broccoli Rabe & Summer Squash

This entire salad gets grilled to a tasty char thanks to a tangy mayonnaise-based marinade, into which you’ll toss the vegetables before the hit the grill. Paired with grilled bread croutons, the breakout stars of this salad—oft-bland and watery summer squash and ho-hum broccoli rabe (or broccolini)—transform on the grill into crispy, smoky perfection. That sure sounds better than a limp side salad to me.

Grilled Strawberries Romanoff

Don’t shut off your grill before dessert! Grilled peaches tend to get all the love, but this recipe for grilled strawberries is pure magic, especially with prime in-season berries. As recipe devloper Mark Bittman writes, “just a few minutes over the fire will concentrate the sugars in the strawberries.” A little vanilla ice cream on the side, and you’ve got a guaranteed winner on your hands.

Hoagies, Wawa and that funeral spread: The stories told by the food in “Mare of Easttown”

Sure, “Mare of Easttown” is a grim, gray-scale murder mystery set in a small town where everyone seems to have secrets — but it’s also food-heavy enough that people have started affectionately referring to it as “Hoagie Broadchurch.” 

HBO is aware of the series’ reputation, and continues to tweet things like “The Mare of Easttown food pyramid: fries, peanut butter, spray cheese, vitamins, and beer” while legions of fans have taken to kicking back on Sunday nights with Rolling Rock and cheesesteaks. 

But under the surface, the use of food in the series tells a bigger story about the region in which it is set, while also giving viewers insight into various characters’ motivations and foreshadowing their development. Put another way, there’s more in that cup of Wawa coffee than initially meets the eye. 

Let’s break down some of the most memorable food items shown on the series thus far. 

All the Wawa coffee 

During last winter’s Television Critics Association press tour, Kate Winslet described her soft spot for Wawa, the Pennsylvania-native convenience store chain, which developed during her time filming “Mare” in Delco. 

“Wawa was a big part of my life for well over a year,” Winslet said, before going on to describe how co-star Evan Peters developed an obsession with “The Gobbler” hoagie, which is loaded with turkey, stuffing and cranberry sauce. 

“I’d be like, ‘I think I’m worried for you now, Evan; you keep getting this Gobbler,'” she said. “He was like, ‘No, you’ve gotta have it.’ He was fully committing, I tell you.” 

And, indeed, Wawa — specifically the coffee served there — has been a near-ubiquitous presence in the series, in both obvious and understated ways. It’s threaded throughout the show as both a regional name-check and a subtle opportunity for character development. 

Let’s just take, for example, when Zabel first attempts to introduce himself to Mare. You see his eyes linger on the Wawa coffee cup on her desk. The next morning, he brings her a Wawa coffee and, upon seeing she already has one in hand, jokes, “That for me? Because I got you one.” He continues to bring her coffee, exactly to her specifications — “two creams, no sugar” — every morning as a form of team-building, à la Ted Lasso and his “morning biscuits with the boss.” 

This clues us into the kind partner he is going to be; he’s disarmingly amenable and isn’t there to step on Mare’s toes. He even says during one of their first interactions, “You’re the chef, I’m the sous-chef. What are we cooking?” The morning he goes to give Mare her coffee and she’s gone, after having been instructed to take some time off after she planted drugs on Carrie, it’s a foreshadowing that their relationship will be cut short (RIP Zabel). 

It’s also worth pulling back a bit to investigate what Mare’s reliance on Wawa coffee means. Why not Starbucks, a local shop or a plastic mug from home? Again, it’s a nice regional nod. Wawa, which was started in 1964 in Wawa, Pa., has developed an enthusiastic fandom. People plan Wawa road trips (and write plays about Wawa road trips) and there’s a wiki-page dedicated to analyzing various facets of the chain’s offerings. 

But from a character perspective, it’s an indication that Mare is busy. According to Kae Lani Palmisano, a Philadelphia-based food writer and historian who wrote WHYY’s digital food history series “Delishstory,” the expedient nature of Wawa is one of its most endearing features. 

“There was a point in time where you could buy like a 20-ounce Wawa plastic mug and serve yourself the coffee,” she said. “All you do then is get rung up at the counter and you’re on your way. The whole process literally takes like five minutes.” 

Mare would surely get frustrated behind a Starbucks line full of customers with highly specific coffee orders (while she wouldn’t ever ask for it, I’d love to hear Mare say “oat milk“). With Wawa, she’s in, out and onto the next crime scene. That said, it’s also likely a source of routine in a life that feels increasingly unmoored. 

According to food writer and culinary historian Joanna O’Leary, you get to know your Wawa employees. 

“People recognize you,” she said. “You see, I don’t know, ‘Martha,’ who has worked at the Wawa for however long. She works the morning shift, so you see her everyday at 6 a.m., Monday through Friday, and she’s almost like a member of your family. You shoot the s**t with her.” 

It’s sort of like Dawn, who works at the local convenience store in Easttown — though obviously instead of shooting the s**t it’s more like, “Mare, why haven’t you found my daughter yet?” In a different world, Dawn could have been portrayed as working at a Wawa. 

Mare of Easttown director and executive producer Craig Zobel recently told Decider, “If we could have gotten to shoot in a Wawa, we would have.” Though Wawa is literally threaded throughout the show because his costume designers used actual Wawa customers as inspiration, Zobel said.

“I would get texts from the costume designer that were like, ‘What about this person?'” he said. “It was someone she had covertly taken a picture of at Wawa as a reference for the show. So yeah, that was just our kind of newfound love of Wawa.”

The Italian restaurant where Mare busted Brianna 

While the food in “Mare of Easttown” is perceived with a wink and a nod by most people, according to O’Leary, the creators of the show are obviously overlaying the use of food with a lot of meaning. 

“The food in ‘Mare of Easttown’ is the locus of violence, secrecy and death and conflict,” she said.  

This is established in the first episode. When Mare is called to investigate a prowler, she’s called out to Grub Road. Later that day, Erin burns her dad’s dinner, which causes him to fly off the handle and sets up the situation where she’s not allowed to use his car the night she is murdered. 

But the use of food as a device to introduce secrets comes into clearer focus in the second episode, when Mare goes to arrest Brianna (Mackenzie Lansing) after she assaulted Erin at the Italian restaurant where she works, which also happens to belong to her parents. “Should we maybe do this outside?” Zabel asks Mare as he realizes what she’s doing. “Or away from the staff and the guests watching?” 

Instead, Mare uses the opportunity to shame Brianna on the spot, while simultaneously revealing who Brianna is to the entire town; the dining room of the restaurant was packed and, after all, people talk in Easttown. 

The fact that Brianna’s parents own an Italian-American restaurant — a kind of kitschy old-school place with fake ivy crawling over the curved archways and murals of the Tuscan countryside — is a nice touch as well. According to Palmisano, there was an influx of Italian immigration to Pennsylvania in the late 19th century, which helped kickstart the development of Italian-American food. 

“You have culinary influences and techniques from Europe that are being reinterpreted with North American ingredients,” she said. “In the old country, there wasn’t as much meat and cheese, so traditional Italian dishes aren’t so meat and cheesy-heavy. So then they get to America and there are so many different types, you can make lasagna with multiple cheeses or you can make sauce or ‘gravy,’ as they say in Philly, that would have Italian sausage and meatballs. And the meatballs would have both beef and pork.” 

You see evidence of this in Brianna’s parents’ restaurant — check out the massive plates of spaghetti and meatballs while Brianna is being led out of the dining room in cuffs. 

Mare’s Rolling Rock (and everyone else’s Yuengling) 

The biggest mystery in “Mare of Easttown” is, obviously, who killed Erin McMenamin. The second biggest mystery, however, is why Mare drinks Rolling Rock when everyone around her drinks Yuengling. 

Eater Philly took a really informative deep-dive into the question and considered everything from differences in alcohol by volume, to political considerations (Dick Yuengling was a very vocal Trump supporter in 2016) to the nationwide decline in sales of craft beer.

Writer Dayna Evans also brings up that perhaps the distinction is a narrative device: “Is this setting up a tension between Mare (of Easttown) and people (likely also of Easttown) around her?” 

As a former English major, I’m partial to this read of the creator’s choice to put a Rolling Rock in Mare’s hand. As the series has progressed it becomes clear that while Mare knows everyone in town, she doesn’t really know them. Her family is hiding things from her, her ex-husband lied to her face about helping Erin with things for the baby and it even looks like her best friend, Lori, may have something to do with the murder. 

Additionally, as a detective, everyone is friendly with Mare until they come under her magnifying glass. We watch over and over again as people turn on Mare when she begins investigating their perceived misdeeds, like when Brianna’s dad stalks Mare around town or when Kenny bristles under questioning. She is one of the locals, but she’s separate from them — kind of an “in Easttown but not of Easttown” situation, so to speak.

Maybe her choice in beer is an indication of this. 

The moment when Ryan beat a bully with a school lunch tray

As O’Leary mentioned, secrecy and food intersect over and over again throughout the series, including when Deacon Mark (James McArdle) is prompted to confess to having a deeper relationship with Erin after he is assaulted by some local kids after picking up takeout. 

However, one of the most poignant examples of this pattern is when Moira (Kassie Mundhenk) is being bullied in the lunchroom by a boy who throws food on her. Her brother, Ryan (Cameron Mann) jumps into action and proceeds to hit the bully over the head over and over again with a school lunch tray. 

“[Ryan] is do disturbed by his father confiding in him about his affair again that he takes out his aggression,” she said. “Not just by defending Moira who was interrupted in her quest to have a simple lunch, but he uses the lunch tray as a weapon to beat the kid.” 

That altercation, in which food is both a backdrop and a catalyst, leads to Ryan telling Lori about his dad’s secret. 

Zabel’s dinners with his mom and Mare 

As Mare and Zabel’s relationship develops, we see them engaging outside of work more and more over food, including when Zabel asks her out for dinner. While eating, he confides in Mare that he’s trying to become a more adventurous eater. 

“Which is actually his way of communicating to Mare that he’s shy and how much it took for him to ask her out,” O’Leary said. “The food they’re trying is fancier food and his story as confessional is a proxy for his emotional and sexual interiority. But she’s either tone deaf to it or doesn’t care because she just wants to talk about the case.” 

Zabel’s mother was leery of Mare, especially so after Mare barges in on them having dinner together at their shared home. 

“When she knocks on the door and interrupts that dinner, which is a moment of intimacy between mother and son, she wedges herself right in the middle of that,” she said. “So that’s why she gets a hearty slap in the face when Zabel dies.” 

The spread at the visitation for Betty Carrol 

One of the first things we see at the visitation for Betty Carrol, one of Mare’s neighbors, is Helen loading up her plate at a folding table that’s packed with huge serving bowls of macaroni and cheese and cold potato salad, as well as smaller platters of odds and ends. This is a nice, subtle nod to Pennsylvania food culture, O’Leary said. 

“When people set out a spread for a barn raising or a church supper or anything like that, there’s an element of like — okay, you know in Korean food there’s banchan, all the little side dishes?” she said. “In central Pennsylvania, there’s an element of that where you have lots of relishes and pickled things, alongside a lot of hot and cold starches, like cold macaroni salad and hot potato salad.

This scene is another time that secrets are revealed over mealtime. As Helen is bringing a forkful of potato salad to her mouth, Glenn, Betty’s husband, makes an announcement. 

“Listen up,” he yells from the stairway landing. “First, I want to thank you all for coming here today to honor my dear Betty. But there’s something else I’d like to say, and I’d like to get it off my chest. I mean, I… I… I was going to tell Betty, but — but now it looks like that isn’t going to happen.” 

He pauses, then continues: “I can’t live with this anymore. Uh, I can’t live with the guilt. I had an affair with Helen Fahey.” 

Cut to Helen choking on her potato salad and Mare trying to keep her Rolling Rock down. 

That glorious cheesesteak and hoagie gift basket 

About 15 minutes into the first episode, we see Mare chowing down on what is the first of the many cheesesteaks to appear in the series. Fellow food obsessives have taken the time to pause, zoom and enhance on the cheesesteak frames and have determined that Mare forgoes peppers and onions on her order (which O’Leary informs me you can order by just saying, “I’ll have it without“). 

Hoagies, pronounced “whoogies,” are also a fixture. In the second episode, we find Mare sitting on her couch after bailing on Richard’s stuffy book party — where she tried and subsequently spit out the duck liver toast appetizer — swilling beer and unwrapping a ham, cheese and shredded lettuce hoagie. When Brianna’s dad tosses a milk jar through her window, the shattered glass doesn’t stop Mare from finishing her sandwich. 

A lot has been made about Mare actually eating like a normal person in the series. While chowing down on sandwiches isn’t a revolutionary act, it can feel like it when pop culture has, for so long, fetishized deprivation (for more on this, April Davidauskis’ “How Beautiful Women Eat: Feminine Hunger in American Pop Culture” is a must-read). Mare eats for energy and convenience. As such, portability and carbs are a plus. 

Both cheesesteaks and hoagies have a strong regional resonance, as well. According to Palmisano, the gift basket that Richard brought her, with hoagies from Laspada’s and cheesesteaks from Cocco’s, shows some state know-how, as well. 

“The gift basket is so unique and it paints this accurate picture of how where you get cheesesteaks is not where you get your hoagies,” she said. “The sandwiches don’t cross. You have your cheesesteak palace and your hoagie place. It’s like the distinction between the Pennsylvania beers, Yuengling and Rolling Rock.”

The popularity of Mare is feeding back into the real world of sandwiches, too. According to the Philly Voice, Don’s Deli, a Delaware County deli, has created a “The Mare” hoagie. It features roasted turkey, cranberry sauce, stuffing and mayonnaise on a long, fresh Serpe & Sons Bakery roll (sound familiar?). 

“The ingredients of The Mare are similar to other sandwiches in our area, like the Gobbler and the Bobbie,” McKinney told The Delco Times. “We chose this type of sandwich because it’s ‘a Delco thing’ and we named it after Delco’s favorite girl!”

A splash of vinegar makes (almost) everything at a summer cookout so much better

Distilled white vinegar deserves more love. 

It’s a simple ingredient, essentially made by feeding oxygen to a grain alcohol that’s similar to vodka. That fermentation process causes bacteria to grow and acetic acid to form, which gives distilled white vinegar its strength and sourness. 

And while many people keep a jug around for household chores — understandably so, since it’s tough on mildew and grime — it deserves the spotlight this summer. Seriously, a splash of vinegar makes almost everything at a summer cookout better, from main courses to sides to cocktails. It gives a nice tang to the special sauce I plan on putting on my burgers and is great for quick-pickling onions and cucumbers. 

Here are some of the other summer dishes where your vinegar belongs: 

In your starchy, mayonnaise-laden salads

I’m the kind of person who goes to a steakhouse for the sides, so the starchy salads coated in mayonnaise (pasta, potato, etc.) are honestly the main cookout draw for me. And while they’re hard to mess up — though Salon’s Melanie McFarland has thoughts on raisins in potato salads — they’re easy to make much, much better with the simple addition of vinegar. 

Think about it: Starch is often better when balanced with acid, same with fat and creaminess. You can accomplish this using citrus or a few tablespoons of sour cream, but distilled white vinegar has the benefit of not altering the texture or flavor too much. Instead, it simply enhances the flavors that are already present. Just a splash will do. 

As the base of your marinades 

Vinegar packs a one-two punch in marinades. It’s great for flavor, adding some brightness to grilling meats, especially when paired with the right herbs, salt and spices. But it also helps tenderize meat as acid — like wine, lemon juice and yogurt — break down the collagen and muscle fibers, while helping it retain all of its juices. 

Now, since distilled white vinegar is so strong, you’ll want to combine it with a fat. Olive oil makes a great pairing. 

As the star of your shrub cocktails and mocktails 

When the weather hits anything above 70 degrees, I become a shrub evangelist. Shrubs are essentially a drinking vinegar that is made by combining fresh fruit and sugar with (obviously) vinegar. They have just the right amount of pucker; if you like kombucha or sour IPAs, you’ll love shrubs. 

When picking fruits, I tend to choose stone fruits, like peaches or apricots, or berries. Apples tend to get mealy and citrus is just a little too much acid-on-acid action. 

My go-to formula is 2 cups of chopped fruit or berries, 1 ½ cups of vinegar and ¼ white sugar, which I bring to a boil in a saucepan and then remove from the heat to steep for about a half hour. That gets strained into a jar, which can be kept in the refrigerator for up to six months. 

Mix them with your favorite spirits — I like gin and tequila for summer — or ginger beer for a refreshing cocktail or  mocktail. 

I’m also convinced that we could bring the wine cooler back full-force for 2021 if we just started infusing them with some homemade shrubs. Many wine coolers use a 4-4-2 formula: 4 ounces wine, 4 ounces soda and 2 ounces of liqueur. I’ve taken to swapping out the liqueur for shrubs and it’s fantastic, especially when paired with sweet-ish, dry wine like a Zinfandel or a Riesling (it’s also a way to use up any cheap wines you have on hand that veer too-sweet) 

***

As I was testing this recipe for a strawberry shrub and rosé wine cooler, one of my best friends texted me that she had purchased a 12-foot inflatable pool, citronella candles and a fancy umbrella for “cocktail and floating” afternoons. I was able to respond, “I’ve got the perfect thing to bring.” It’s refreshing, sweet and tart and perfectly chilled. 

The New Yorker’s Helen Rosner has written at length about the virtues of pellet ice (a.k.a. “the good ice”) and, if you can snag a bag, use it in this cocktail. It’s like a mix of a strawberry slushie and a frosé. 

Recipe: Strawberry Shrub and Rosé Wine Cooler 
1 cocktail 

  • 4 ounces of chilled rosé
  • 4 ounces of club soda 
  • 2 ounces of strawberry shrub (made using the formula above) 
  • Sliced strawberries for garnish
  • Crushed or pellet ice 

1. Fill a cocktail glass half full with ice. Mix the chilled rosé and the strawberry shrub in a cocktail shaker and pour over the ice. 

2. Finish with the club soda and garnish the cocktail with sliced strawberries. 

Read More Saucy:

“The job is not done yet”: Black Wall Street documentaries detail the massacre & still seek justice

Documentaries and news reports marking the centennial of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre are scheduled to air across TV this weekend and into June, including on History Channel, PBS, CBS, CNN, OWN and National Geographic. All of them are worthwhile viewing. Regardless of which you watch, it is crucial to know that the destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood district is not a one-off tale from 100 years ago.

For the Black community still living there, it is an ongoing concern.

“The critical piece here is covering this story from the perspective that the job is not done yet,” stressed community activist Greg Robinson II, a descendant of survivors appearing in both PBS’s “Tulsa: The Fire and the Forgotten” and History Channel’s “Tulsa Burning: The 1921 Race Massacre.”

“This isn’t a story that has an ending because justice hasn’t been done,” Robinson adds. “The massacre should be covered in a way where the reality is that it’s been a massacre since 1921. And I think that if that’s the case, Tulsa will be able to be seen in in a light that is really a microcosm of what has happened to Black people across this country.”

Oklahoma’s Republican-controlled state legislature knows this. It is aware of all the ways the state has failed to act since the very same government body authorized a commission in 1997 to research the overnight obliteration of Greenwood in 1921, when it was the wealthiest Black community in the country.

Based on that commission’s findings, five specific recommendations were made in 2000. They include direct payment to survivors and descendants of the survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre; a scholarship fund for students affected by the massacre; the establishment of an economic development enterprise zone in the historic area of the Greenwood District; and a memorial for the reburial of any human remains found in the search for unmarked graves.

Oklahoma hasn’t followed through on any of these.

Members of the state’s legislature surely witnessed at least some of the testimony the last three living eyewitnesses to this horror – Viola Ford Fletcher, 107; Lessie Benningfield Randle, 106; and Hughes Van Ellis, 100 – recently provided before the House Judiciary subcommittee in Washington, D.C., which is also considering reparations for Greenwood survivors and descendants.

Instead of seeking to meaningfully grapple with this stain on its history, Oklahoma’s state legislature passed a new law banning Oklahoma teachers and school administrators from requiring or making part of a course several concepts about race and gender. 

This includes any lessons that may imply “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex.” Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt signed this into law while holding a seat on the Tulsa massacre’s centennial commission, a position his office later explained away as “purely ceremonial” when the commission removed him.

Thus, one can understand the viewpoint of Oklahoma State Rep. Regina Goodwin, who lends her perspective to “The Fire and the Forgotten.” Goodwin, a descendant of the massacre’s survivors, appreciates renewed attention and media coverage devoted to the centennial. Goodwin also stresses that she doesn’t see very much changing as a result of it. After all, the national media showed up in 2000 too.

“I hope folks are clear about that,” Goodwin told Salon. “We can talk about all of the activities. We can talk about all of the folks remembering. But again, when it comes to something substantial that has come out of it for those descendants and survivors, there is no difference.”

Yet. Hopefully.

Nevertheless, Goodwin views the latest efforts to expose Greenwood’s history as a positive development. “Anytime you can tell the story and tell it truthfully, people become more educated. People become more aware. It’s a conversation that needs to be had because we’re never going to forget.”

PBS’ “Tulsa: The Fire and the Forgotten” and History Channel’s “Tulsa Burning: The 1921 Race Massacre,” join the CNN debut of “Dreamland: The Burning of Black Wall Street,” and the one-hour CBS news special “Tulsa 1921: An American Tragedy,” in addition to other coverage running throughout the weekend.

The wholesale wreckage of the Greenwood community is believed to be the single worst incident of racial violence in American history. It occurred shortly after 1919’s Red Summer, when white people committed acts of deadly violence against Black people in dozens of American cities.

But the decimation of the place known as Black Wall Street is especially significant owing to Greenwood’s financial stature. By 1921 its Black families had built substantial wealth. The district was home to many successful businesses, a thriving network of professionals and a self-sustaining local economy, including the largest black-owned and operated hotel in America. All of this was created by Black people a generation removed from enslavement.

That all ended with a pogrom that began on May 31 and ceased, officially, on June 1, leaving an estimated 300 people dead, and destroying 35 square blocks, 1,256 homes and 200 businesses. (At the time the state’s official death toll was 36.)  White pilots employed aircraft to drop incendiary devices on their Black neighbors. Tulsa’s fire department allowed blazes set by white mobs to consume Greenwood. Local law enforcement deputized and armed white men, encouraging them to shoot Black people down in the street as they were trying to escape. One witness said he saw Tulsa police officers torching Black homes.

Around 10,000 Black Tulsans lost their homes and businesses in the massacre. Six thousand were forced into local internment camps, and eventually the National Guard forced them to clean up the ruination their white tormentors left behind.

None of the perpetrators has been charged despite the wealth of photographic evidence showing individuals participating in the atrocities. Heinous images of charred bodies and destroyed houses were in fact turned into postcards and sent to white supremacists in other states.

 The fact that most Americans knew nothing about the massacre until it was portrayed in the HBO series “Watchmen” and “Lovecraft Country” indicates how effectively witnesses were terrified into silence. These new documentaries revisit the story from various angles, with History’s approaching the massacre and direct aftermath with forensic detail bolstered with accounts from historians, survivors and local residents.

“Tulsa Burning” director Stanley Nelson familiarized himself with the history of Black Wall Street while making 2019’s “Boss: The Black Experience in Business.” He knew the story of Greenwood merited more than the minutes-long segment devoted to it in that work, and began producing his two-hour film in 2020.

For him, the most amazing discovery was the wealth of film that recorded what life in Greenwood looked like before 1921. “Somebody in Greenwood had a movie camera and shot film in 1920,” he said. “So we see the people, sitting on their swings, on their porches, proud of what they’ve accomplished. We see the Black sheriff with his gun, we see people herding cattle, building churches.”

“We really wanted to have the viewer understand what was created in Greenwood,” he added. “You can’t feel the loss unless you feel what was there.”

“Tulsa: The Fire and the Forgotten” also explores Greenwood’s founding and rise, drawing extensively from DeNeen L. Brown’s coverage in The Washington Post. While it also explains what happened 100 years ago, but the ongoing effort to recover remains and the uphill battle to attain meaningful restorative justice receives detailed focus.

This part of the story takes on a renewed urgency given the age of the three remaining survivors. Robinson and Goodwin stress that the priority is for them to receive some compensation ensuring they and their families are well taken care of.

But financial reparations are only a start.  A report referenced in The Harvard Gazette places the estimated value of Black property wiped out by white rioters at $200 million in today’s dollars. But the price tag of the community’s vanished wealth accumulation, possible business expansion and innovation, all stolen from it that day, are much higher. Tulsa’s Black community never recovered from the 1921 tragedy, and the wealth gap between its Black and white residents is substantial.

“This is exactly why when you talk about the national reparations debate, Tulsa is so important,” Robinson explained. “It’s such a tangible visual of what was taken and what was never returned. And so I think that there’s a real argument to be made that we’ve got to find justice, and Tulsa is prerequisite for finding justice across the country for Black folks.”

It must be said that other losses are profoundly irreplaceable: murdered family members whose remains were never found, potentially buried in mass graves authorities are still working to locate.

Survivor descendant Brenda Nails Alford, granddaughter of a “proud, college-educated” entrepreneur, sums up the travesty in “Tulsa Burning” by reminding viewers that Greenwood’s residents did everything Americans expect law-abiding, tax-paying citizens to do.  “They wanted to be successful. These were proud, upstanding members of our community who simply wanted a piece of the American dream and truly received a nightmare.”

These films and specials, along with the documentaries that came before them and any coverage that comes afterwards, are at least doing their part in breaking what Goodwin defined as “a conspiracy of silence.”

For the representative and every Greenwood resident keeping the story alive when the cameras aren’t there, “we’re going to be forever pushing for progress and justice,” Goodwin said. “We owe that to our ancestors and to our current community. So we press on, and we know that it’s time, and it is past time. We wake up every day knowing that as long as we’ve got life, we can get it right.”

“Tulsa Burning: The 1921 Race Massacre” premieres at 8 p.m. Sunday, May 30 on The History Channel.

“Tulsa: The Fire and the Forgotten” premieres at 9 p.m. Monday, May 31 on PBS.

“DREAMLAND: The Burning of Black Wall Street” at 9 p.m. Monday, May 31 on CNN.

“Tulsa 1921: An American Tragedy” premieres at 10 p.m. Monday, May 31 on CBS and will be available to stream on Paramount+.

“The Legacy of Black Wall Street” premieres at 9 p.m. Tuesday, June 1 on OWN, with its second hour airing at 9 p.m. Tuesday, June 8.

“Rise Again: Tulsa and the Red Summer” premieres at 9 p.m. Friday, June 18, on National Geographic. It streams on Hulu starting on Saturday, June 19.

Can people vaccinated against COVID-19 still spread the coronavirus?

When the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention changed its guidelines about mask-wearing on May 13, 2021, plenty of Americans were left a little confused. Now anyone who is fully vaccinated can participate in indoor and outdoor activities, large or small, without wearing a mask or physical distancing.

Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to President Biden, said the new guideline is “based on the evolution of the science” and “serves as an incentive” for the almost two-thirds of Americans who are not yet fully vaccinated to go ahead and get the shot.

But some people cannot be vaccinated because of underlying conditions. Others with weakened immune systems, from cancer or medical treatments, may not be fully protected by their vaccinations. Children aged 12 to 15 became eligible for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine only on May 10, 2021. And no COVID-19 vaccines are yet authorized for the nearly 50 million children in the U.S. younger than 12.

As restrictions are lifted and people start to leave their masks at home, some people worry: Can you catch COVID-19 from someone who’s vaccinated?

Vaccines don’t always prevent infection

Researchers had hoped to design safe COVID-19 vaccines that would prevent at least half of the people vaccinated from getting COVID-19 symptoms.

Fortunately, the vaccines have vastly outperformed expectations. For example, in 6.5 million residents of Israel, aged 16 years and older, the Pfizer–BioNTech mRNA COVID-19 vaccine was found to be 95.3% effective after both shots. Within two months, among the 4.7 million fully vaccinated, the detectable infections fell by 30-fold. Similarly in California and Texas, only 0.05% of fully vaccinated health care workers tested positive for COVID-19.

Vaccine developers often hope that, in addition to preventing illness, their vaccines will achieve “sterilizing immunity,” where the vaccination blocks the germ from even being able to get into the body at all. This sterilizing immunity means someone who’s vaccinated will neither catch the virus nor transmit it further. For a vaccine to be effective, though, it doesn’t need to prevent the germ from infecting an immunized person.

The Salk inactivated polio vaccine, for instance, does not completely stop polio virus from growing in the human gut. But it is extremely effective at preventing the crippling disease because it triggers antibodies that block the virus from infecting the brain and spinal cord. Good vaccines provide effective and durable training for the body’s immune system, so when it actually encounters the disease-causing pathogen, it’s ready to mount an optimum response.

When it comes to COVID-19, immunologists are still figuring out what they call the “correlates of protection,” factors that predict just how protected someone is against the coronavirus. Researchers believe that an optimum amount of “neutralizing antibodies,” the type that not only bind the virus but also prevent it from infecting, are sufficient to fend off repeat infections. Scientists are also still assessing the durability of immunity that the COVID-19 vaccines are providing and where in the body it’s working.

Can a vaccinated person spread coronavirus?

Immunologists expect vaccines that protect against viral illnesses to also reduce transmission of the virus after vaccination. But it’s actually tricky to figure out for sure if vaccinated people are not spreading the germ.

COVID-19 poses a particular challenge because people with asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic infections can spread the disease – and insufficient contact tracing and testing mean those without symptoms are rarely detected. Some scientists estimate that the number of asymptomatic COVID-19 infections in the overall population could be 3 to 20 times higher than the number of confirmed cases. Research suggests that undocumented cases of COVID-19 in people who either were asymptomatic or experienced very mild disease could be responsible for up to 86% of all infections, though other studies contradict the high estimates.

In one study, the CDC tested volunteer health care personnel and other front-line workers at eight U.S. locations for SARS-CoV-2 infections weekly for three months, regardless of symptoms or vaccination status. The researchers found that fully immunized participants were 25 times less likely to test positive for COVID-19 than were those who were unvaccinated. Findings like this imply that if vaccinated people are so well protected from getting infected at all, they are also unlikely to spread the virus. But without contact tracing to track transmission in a larger population, it’s impossible to know if the assumption is true.

What we know for sure is that if someone does get sick with COVID-19 after vaccination, in what is called a “breakthrough infection,” symptoms will be milder. Studies have found that people who tested positive for COVID-19 after getting just their first vaccine dose had lower levels of virus in their bodies than unvaccinated people who tested positive. The researchers believe the decreased viral load hints that vaccinated people who do contract the virus will be less infectious because they will have much less virus that could be spread to others.

A preprint study which has not yet been peer-reviewed suggests that the Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccine can produce coronavirus-fighting antibodies in the oral and nasal fluid. Since that’s where SARS-CoV-2 makes its entry, antibodies in the mouth and nose should block the virus from getting into the body, effectively providing “sterilizing immunity.” This would also mean vaccinated people probably wouldn’t spread the virus through respiratory droplets.

These bits of evidence are promising. But without more studies, scientists cannot yet conclude that COVID-19 vaccines really do protect against all transmission. Studies attempting to directly answer this question through contact tracing are just beginning: Researchers will track COVID-19 infections among vaccinated and unvaccinated volunteers and their close contacts.

Protection and prevention go hand in hand

Vaccines help slow down the spread of an infectious disease by breaking the chain of infection. Those who are infected eventually have fewer and fewer unprotected people to pass the virus on to. This is how a vaccine increases herd immunity – susceptible and not-yet-immunized people are surrounded by a “herd” of people who have become immune, thanks to vaccination or previous infection. But studies suggest that, for a combination of biological and social reasons, vaccination alone is unlikely to achieve herd immunity against COVID-19 and fully contain the coronavirus.

In fact, vaccination alone can take a long time to eradicate any disease. Even diseases that are nearly “eliminated” – such as chickenpox, measles and pertussis – can resurface with waning immunity and declining vaccine rates.

The recent outbreak of infections among the vaccinated New York Yankees shows that vaccinated people not only can still get infected, they might also transmit the coronavirus to close contacts. Highly tested groups, such as professional sports teams, spotlight the fact that mild, asymptomatic infections among the vaccinated in the general population might actually be more frequent than reported. A similar outbreak in airport workers in Singapore shows that, even among the fully vaccinated, new and more infectious variants can spread fast.

The CDC’s relaxed guidelines on masking are meant to reassure vaccinated people that they are safe from serious illness. And they are. But the picture is less clear-cut for the unvaccinated who interact with them. Until near herd immunity against COVID-19 is achieved, and clear evidence accumulates that vaccinated people do not spread the virus, I and many epidemiologists believe it is better to avoid situations where there are chances to get infected. Vaccination coupled with continued masking and social distancing is still an effective way to stay safer.

Sanjay Mishra, Project Coordinator & Staff Scientist, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Vanderbilt University

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

Investigators reportedly approaching Trump Org. as if it were a mafia family

Prosecutors appear to be treating their investigation of former President Donald Trump’s business empire as if it were a mafia family, according to several reports out this week. 

Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance is likely considering criminal charges centered around the idea that the Trump Organization is a “corrupt enterprise” under a New York state racketeering statute resembling the federal RICO law — an abbreviation for the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, which was passed in 1970 to crack down on pervasive organized crime — several legal experts and former prosecutors told Politico.

“No self-respecting state white-collar prosecutor would forgo considering the enterprise corruption charge,” longtime New York City defense attorney Robert Anello said. “I’m sure they’re thinking about that.”

The law, known colloquially as “little RICO,” kicks in if prosecutors can establish that an organization or business has committed at least three separate crimes — a “pattern of criminal behavior,” in legal parlance. A sentence under the statute can result in up to 25 years in prison — with a mandatory minimum of one year.

Vance has even hired a veteran mob prosecutor and expert in white-collar crime, Mark Pomerantz, to bolster his team, the New York Times reported in February.

Trump himself has a long history with several prominent New York City mob families — building his signature Trump Tower in Manhattan with help from a concrete company run by Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno and Paul Castellano, who at the time were bosses of the Genovese and Gambino families, Business Insider reported.

And just like in the investigations that put Salerno and Castellano behind bars, it appears prosecutors are hoping to rely on the testimony of “family” members like Trump Organization CFO Alan Weisselberg, one of the company’s longest-tenured employees. His former daughter-in-law, Jennifer Weisselberg, is cooperating with Vance’s investigation and says she believes her ex-husband’s father will flip on Trump due to his age and aversion to spending any time in prison.

New York Attorney General Letitia James, who recently agreed to join forces with Vance on her separate investigation of Trump’s business dealings, has also forced Trump’s son, Eric, to sit for a deposition interview, according to the New York Times.

But the decision to pursue racketeering charges carries its own risks, and many legal experts say prosecutors are better off seeking straightforward indictments on specific crimes that are easier to litigate.

“Why overcharge and complicate something that could be fairly simple?” Jeremy Saland, a former prosecutor in the Manhattan DA’s office, told Politico. “Why muddy up the water? Why give a defense attorney something that could confuse a jury and be able to crow that they beat a charge in a motion to dismiss?”

Trump has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, and blasted the investigations as politically inspired “witch hunts.”

How to eat and cook with cicadas, according to an expert

The cicadas have arrived. After living underground for 17 years, billions of Brood X cicadas are emerging in parts of the eastern United States. The spectacle, in which hordes of emerging cicadas shed their exoskeletons and become winged adults, is one of North America’s most awe-inspiring entomological events. For the next couple of weeks, male cicadas will sing loudly and mate with the females to produce a new generation that will live underground for another 17 years. The cicadas that mate die a few weeks after reproducing. 

Academics have been fascinated by cicadas for years. And it’s not only because these critters sing their hearts out and become part of our summers every 17 years. It’s because they’ve long been part of colonial American and Native American culture. How do we know this? In part because of published recipes that called for cicadas from the 1700s, as Gene Kritsky, the Dean of Behavioral and Natural Sciences at Mount St. Joseph University and author of “Periodical Cicadas: The Plague and the Puzzle,” explained to Salon in a phone interview. Indeed, a mid-20th century study published in the Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences noted how the Cherokee in North Carolina viewed them as a delicacy: they ate the 17-year-old locusts (cicadas) sometimes fried in “hot fat” and sometimes pickled to preserve for later. 

In North America, eating cicadas — or any insect — is often exotified in the media as something sensational and weird. Yet eating cicadas isn’t as weird as one might think. There is nutritional value to insects, and cicada-cooking can be a fun way to partake in this summer’s cicada mania, particularly for those that are curious about how cicadas were consumed in America in the past.

Kritsky, who admits he hasn’t eaten a cicada since 1987, shared more information about how to eat cicadas safely and what to expect.

As someone who studies cicadas, what piqued your interest in consuming them too?

Well — full disclosure — I don’t eat them anymore. And that’s because in the 1890s the USDA suggested they may be in danger of going extinct over time. And my research from 1987 to 2000, from in the northern half of Indiana and Northwest Ohio, shows they are really in decline, so I can’t eat them. I like them too much.

That being said, eating cicadas goes way back. Apparently the Iroquois would harvest cicada nymphs; the Indigenous populations were consuming them. The oldest record of Brood X actually includes the English settlers in Philadelphia eating them, way back in 1715.

That’s so interesting. So considering that they are in decline, do you not advise people to eat them?

In reality, sustainable food should be here every year, not 17 years. Every 17 years is a fad. But I don’t advise them to do that, and I don’t advise them not to — that’s their prerogative.

What was your experience like eating cicadas in 1987?

I went to the newspaper morgue for the Cincinnati Enquirer and I ran across a recipe for a cicada pie from June 6, 1902. It said: “Take 50 newly emerged white female cicadas, legs and head chopped, place in a bowl with stale bread soaked in milk. Add sugar, rhubarb flavor and cream to soften the ingredients. Put the mixture into a pie crust and place a crisscross pattern similar to that of an apple pie. Bake at 400 degrees until the crust is done; people who’ve enjoyed this pie claim it tasted like partridge.”

Based on that recipe, a colleague of mine made a cicada pie. I’ve never had partridge, so I’m not sure if it tasted like partridge. We also sautéd and stir-fried them.

To me . . . they are very soft, and there’s no sticky bits or sharp bits that will get you. You can digest it all pretty easily. It had to me a very green flavor, which I felt was surprising because they’re sucking on the xylem tissue of roots that spring water and minerals from the roots up to the leaves. The flavor I’ve likened it to was whole canned asparagus — very green.

Wow, that is surprising. So how can people eat them if they’re curious about trying this?

You want to get the nymphs from the ground. They climb up a vertical surface and skin cracks open at the back, and they start to pull out as an all white cicada — all white and free from the brown skin. That’s what you want to collect.

There’s more nutrition in the females because the females have the eggs. The male abdomen is mostly hollow. So 70 percent of the emerging adults on that first couple of nights are going to be 70 percent male, but after about six or seven nights, a majority of the nymphs will be female. They’re just hanging there, so with a very light grip you can just pick them up. I’d toss them right on ice and ice water, right away, And that helps start the cleaning process. You want to stop the biochemistry process that happens as they sclerotize.

What’s the best way to clean them?

You want to rinse them thoroughly. You don’t want to rinse them in soapy water per se, but a rinse that would help remove any kind of surface bacteria. They’re coming from the dirt. So there is a lot of stuff there, a lot of fungi, other people walking through. Cleaning thoroughly is very important as far as the preparation goes. And that should be done soon after they’re collected.

What’s the nutritional value?

They’re high in protein and they’re low in fat. They’re herbivores. You have a declining amount of energy used to go up the food web. The trouble with periodical cicadas is that you get them once every 17 years, and they’re localized. Harvesting cicadas would wipe them out in general.

What are other ways people can enjoy cicada season?

You can get the app Cicada Safari, go out and see where they’re emerging and report the emergence of them near your house. I’m the co-creator of Cicada Safari.  There’s a lot of interest this year, of course.

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The best time to water your plants — and why it’s crucial

perfect amount of rainfall is every gardener’s dream, but the reality is that almost every summer, there are stretches of hot, dry days when we need to water to keep our plants alive. The question of when it’s the best time to water your garden goes hand in hand with the question of how to water. To help you get the most out of that precious H2O, here are some watering basics:

Why Water Is Necessary

You’ll recall from biology class that water is necessary for plants to perform photosynthesis—the process of transforming water into sugar and oxygen when the leaves are exposed to light. But water does more than that, it also transports nutrients inside the plant, so even in the richest of garden soils, plants will be undernourished if the water supply is insufficient.

How Much Water?

The basic rule is that your vegetable garden or raised beds needs 1 inch of rain every week. So for every 100 square feet, that translates into 62 gallons of rain. If it rained but you don’t have a rain gauge and you’re not sure how much it rained, check the local weather information.

Or, check whether the soil feels dry 2 inches below the surface. If you mulched your plants, poke a hole in the mulch to get to the soil. Don’t go by how the soil looks; instead, stick your index finger in it to feel whether it’s dry. (This is one of the few gardening activities for which I don’t wear gloves.)

There are exceptions to the 2-inch rule though—sandy soil lets water run through much faster than heavier clay soil, so it needs more frequent watering to make up for the loss.

When To Water

The best time to water is early in the morning when it’s still cool, which preps the plants for a hot day, but that’s not always easy to accomplish with a busy schedule. The second-best time is late in the afternoon or early evening. Unless you’re using drip irrigation or a soaker hose, watering in the late evening after dark is not a good idea, as the leaves won’t be able to dry off, which can spread fungi (tomatoes are prime candidates for this). That being said, always try to spray as little water on the leaves as possible and target the soil with your watering can or hose; don’t shower the plants from above. That’s why drip irrigation and soaker hoses are ideal—and they help you save water.

Again, there are exceptions to the early morning and early evening watering rule. If your plants look wilted, they are under drought stress. In this case, don’t wait—water them right away, even if it’s in the middle of a hot afternoon. The other big exception is with container plants, which need much more water than plants in the ground. They should be watered daily, even twice a day on hot days, until water drips out of the drain holes.

Go Into Slow Motion

When it hasn’t rained and the soil or the mulch layer on top is very dry, you should water very little at first, using the nozzle of the watering can or a spray nozzle of a hose, until the top layer is soaked; otherwise, the water will just run off. Be patient, as it can take a few repetitions until you see the water disappearing into the soil.

Plants That Need Extra TLC

Just because it hasn’t rained for a while doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to water anything and everything in your yard. The motto here is: Water as needed. If a plant, even an established one, looks wilted and under drought stress, it needs water.

However, there are some candidates that always need your special attention: Anything newly planted (whether it’s a tree, a shrub, or a perennial) needs regular watering at least during the first year. In the absence of abundant rain, water it until the soil around the plant is well saturated.

Also, anything you have seeded needs to be kept consistently moist in order to germinate, whether it’s the lettuce in your garden or raised bed or the wildflower seeds you scattered. Unless it rains every day, you need to water those daily, and very gently, so you don’t wash out the seeds. Using a hose or a watering can fitted with a fine spray nozzle works best.

Trump furious over massive legal fees as investigations heat up: report

According to a report from Business Insider, former president Donald Trump is growing increasingly furious over his mounting legal fees stemming from a multitude of lawsuits as well as state and federal investigations into his business dealings.

With reports of a special grand jury having been empaneled in New York City to hear evidence from prosecutors looking into the ex-president taxes and business dealings — as well as civil suits filed against Trump and his family — the one-term president has told aids that his legal bills are “such pain in the ass.”

According to Business Insider, “The former president is reportedly frustrated with the investigations because of the possible legal peril they bring and the financial costs attached to them,” quoting the Daily Beast reporting, “The former president is reportedly also worried that investigators could drag the case out for years.”

During an interview on MSNBC on Saturday afternoon, former Trump Organization Executive Vice President Barbara Res told host Alex Witt, “I think he’s so angry. All the things that he put in place, the things he put in place to get elected the first time and almost get elected the second time, both were unreasonably based, and all the other things, the attorney general and the kinds of — the judges and all the things that he thought he had working for him all of a sudden are not there anymore. it’s — he can’t avoid this. This happened and this is something he thought he could avoid.”

Business Insider also is reporting, “Trump has still not paid [former New York Mayor Rudy] Giuliani for his work and instructed his aides not to pay the legal fees because he was upset that Giuliani had not done more to push back against his second impeachment that month.”

You can read more here.

Texas Republicans rush to approve restrictive new voting bill in overnight, closed door session

In the course of several hours Saturday and early Sunday, Senate Republicans hurtled to move forward on a sweeping voting bill negotiated behind closed doors where it doubled in length and grew to include voting law changes that weren’t previously considered.

Over Democrats’ objections, they suspended the chamber’s own rules to narrow the window lawmakers had to review the new massive piece of legislation before giving it final approval ahead of the end of Monday’s end to the legislative session. This culminated in an overnight debate and party line vote early Sunday to sign off on a raft of new voting restrictions and changes to elections and get it one step closer to the governor’s desk.

Senate Bill 7, the GOP’s priority voting bill, emerged Saturday from a conference committee as an expansive bill that would touch nearly the entire voting process, including provisions to limit early voting hours, curtail local voting options and further tighten voting-by-mail, among several other provisions. It was negotiated behind closed doors over the last week after the House and Senate passed significantly different versions of the legislation and pulled from each chamber’s version of the bill. The bill also came back with a series of additional voting rule changes, including a new ID requirement for mail-in ballots, that weren’t part of previous debates on the bill.

But instead of giving senators the 24 hours required under the chamber’s rules to go over the committee’s report, including those new additions, state Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, moved to ignore that mandate so the Senate could debate and eventually vote on the final version of the bill just hours after it was filed.

Around 6 p.m. Saturday, Hughes acknowledged the Senate would consider the report “earlier than usual” but tried to argue he was giving senators “more time” by alerting them about his plan to debate the final version of SB 7 at 10 p.m.

“That’s a nice spin,” state Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, shot back.

The Legislature is up against a Sunday night deadline to approve conference committee reports, like the compromise version of SB 7. Had the Senate waited until later Sunday to consider it, it could have left it in reach of a filibuster that could’ve killed the bill. The House is expected to vote on the final version of the bill later today.

Senate Democrats raised concerns that they had not had sufficient time to review the 180-page conference committee report, including a 67-page bill and a lengthy analysis of the negotiated changes. Roughly 12 pages of the bill contained additions that hadn’t been previously considered as part of the legislation and were added by the committee out of the public eye. The truncated schedule also left them without the opportunity to check in with local election officials in their districts or voting rights groups monitoring its passage, they said.

After Senate Republicans voted to suspend the rules, Hughes opened debate on a resolution to approve those 12 pages of additional changes, with Democrats questioning the origin of those changes and the lack of public input in tacking them onto the bill.

“I couldn’t in good faith vote to pass a bill the size of this one, that will affect the voting rights of every single Texan of voting age, when they’ve been deprived of the opportunity to voice their opinions on the final package of this bill,” state Sen. Beverly Powell, D-Burleson, said.

Throughout the debate, Hughes argued SB 7 was striving for “common sense” solutions that secured elections from wrongdoing and fraud.

“We want elections to be secure and accessible,” he said.

Defending the additions as a standard part of the conference committee process, Hughes argued many of the additions were pulled from other bills passed by the Senate or generally discussed by the chamber.

The new provisions include language from separate Republican bills that failed to pass that would set a new voter ID rule for mail-in ballots, requiring voters to provide their driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number, if they have one, on their applications for those ballots. For their votes to be counted, voters will be required to include matching information on the envelopes used to return their ballots.

Other changes, including a new window of 1 to 9 p.m. for early voting on Sundays, hadn’t come up until they were added to the conference committee report outside of public view. State Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, raised the possibility that change could hamper “souls to the polls” efforts meant to turn out voters after church services and questioned the justification for 1 p.m. start time.

“Those election workers want to go to church, too,” Hughes responded.

When West asked if Hughes had spoken to election workers to make that determination, Hughes admitted he hadn’t.

“We’re going to be able to buy beer at 10 o’clock in the morning but we can’t vote until 1 p.m.,” West said.

Beyond the debate over the new changes, the Senate’s discussion on SB 7 regularly landed on the detrimental effect Democrats feared the legislation would have on voters of color and the significant portions of the bill that were written to outlaw some of the voting initiatives Harris County used in the last election.

SB 7 would ban drive-thru voting and the day of 24 hours of uninterrupted early voting the county offered — both of which proved particularly successful in reaching voters of color. An analysis by Harris County’s election office estimated that Black and Hispanic voters cast more than half of the votes counted both at drive-thru sites and during extended hours.

“The provisions of this bill apply equally across the board,” Hughes said in response to Democrats’ questions about the bill’s effect on access for voters of color. He added that the provisions banning those voting initiatives could only target Harris County because it was the only county he was aware of that offered those options.

He also pointed out that the final version of SB 7 left out a provision to regulate the distribution of polling places only in the state’s largest counties — diverse, urban counties largely under Democratic control. A Texas Tribune analysis found the formula proposed by Hughes would have led to a significant drop in voting sites in largely Democratic areas, with voting options curtailed most in areas with higher shares of voters of color.

Hughes said the decision to leave out that provision had been influenced by the Senate’s initial debate on SB 7 when Democrats hammered the Republican over that proposal. But state Sen. Borris Miles, a Houston Democrat, pressed him on whether he had adequately considered the extent to which SB 7 could narrow access for voters of color, pointing to Hughes’ decision to keep the ban on drive-thru voting despite the concerns Democrats raised about that provision.

“Because I represent a majority African American district and we benefited from the drive-thru voting that you’re trying to ban now, I feel like you’re coming for my district,” Miles said.

Embracing hopelessness: Getting over our faith in reason is the only path forward

Over lunch with a high school buddy, I mentioned a college classmate’s death from pancreatic cancer, not long after he had received a Nobel prize for his own groundbreaking cancer research.” My friend, a successful advertising executive, visibly shaken, asked, “How could he have died? He must have known everyone.”

“You’re kidding,” I said. “Pancreatic cancer is the very definition of bad luck — hard to detect early, hard to treat, a generally grim prognosis.” I was quickly drowned out by his rapid-fire follow-up questions: “Are there any good screening tests? Biomarkers? dietary precautions I can take? Surely there must be something.”  

Annoyed that yet another lunch was being ruined by health anxieties, I blurted out, “It’s nothing personal, but pancreatic cancer is just one of a zillion sneaky diseases lurking in the wings. At our age, we would both be better off embracing hopelessness.”

“Wonderful,” said my friend. “My condescending doctor friend feels obliged to enlighten me by arguing that the key to life is to admit defeat. And to think you once actually took care of patients.” He pulled out some change to cover his half of the lunch and left me to pay the tip.

Alone with my coffee, I wondered why I would have intentionally provoked my friend. I wouldn’t wish the feeling of hopelessness on my worst enemy. After all, feeling hopeful is purpose’s handmaiden, an involuntary mental state, like love or joy, that softens reality’s sharp edges. But the state of hopelessness — the sober, evidence-based recognition that nothing further can be done — now that’s another story. 

Years ago, in a book on pathological altruism — how believing that you are helping others can result in unanticipated harm — I described a brilliant oncologist who, hell-bent on prolonging the life of each of his patients, often turned a deaf ear to their pleas that “enough is enough.” On numerous occasions I tried but failed to dissuade him from pursuing what I and others thought was overly aggressive intervention. The final straw was his insistence that I perform a lumbar puncture on a clearly terminal patient. I argued that the procedure was certain to cause the patient discomfort, with a negligible chance that it would affect his outcome. He countered that if I refused, he would do the puncture himself. I gave in; the patient suffered a post-spinal tap headache that persisted for his last three days. That was a dual cognitive blunder: the oncologist’s unwillingness to accept his patient’s imminent death was rivaled by my persistent inability to acknowledge the utter hopelessness of trying to convince him otherwise.

To get a sense of how difficult it is to fully embrace obvious hopelessness, I’m reminded of the time I “went broke” in a high-stakes poker game in Las Vegas. Fresh out of residency and still burdened with debt, I’d squirreled away enough winnings from our small-stakes home games to pony up a single buy-in in the “big game” held during the annual World Series of Poker. Shortly after sitting down, I found myself involved in the largest pot I had ever played. When all the cards had been dealt, I had an almost sure winner. I bet, my opponent raised, I re-raised, and my notoriously conservative opponent, after a dramatic pause, shoved in the remainder of his chips. 

I realized that he had to have the one hand that could beat me. Though it was obvious that I had no chance of winning, if I folded I’d never know for certain. Having never been in this spot before, I couldn’t shake the remote possibility that he had misread his hand or was making an uncharacteristically high-level bluff. For what seemed like forever, I sat motionless as unemotional probabilities jousted with wishful thinking. Of course, reason eventually failed; I called and lost. 

“Sorry, kid, but you had to call,” the winner said as he scooped up my chips. “You had too much money invested in the pot.” He patted me on the back. “I suppose you’re right,” I said, getting up and starting for the door. When I was presumably out of earshot, the winner said to the other players at the table, “Throwing good money after bad — what a fish.”  The others laughed. 

* * *

I’m watching a panel of TV talking heads outline the various reasons why Republicans and Democrats are constitutionally incapable of finding common ground. The pundits glumly acknowledge that the two parties exist in alternative universes governed by incompatible principles and diametrically opposed facts. Nevertheless, despite being unable to suggest any practical steps forward, they conclude with the self-canceling phrase, “Even so, I remain hopeful.”

Really? Hopeful of what? Given their convincing skeptical arguments, why on earth should we share their unjustified sense of optimism? Imagine a simple litmus test: a national betting forum in which experts were forced to place wagers on their opinions. If they were unwilling to bet any of their hard-earned dollars, we would have an independent measure of their actual degree of hopefulness.

Moving down to the personal level: would you be willing to bet that we will soon see major improvements in our educational system, stricter gun control, a revitalized power grid, highways and bridges, high-speed transit systems, an improved health care system? That additional evidence or more convincing lines of reasoning will alter the views of creationists, atheists, climate change and Holocaust deniers or anti-vaxxers or, conversely, dissuade hardcore rationalists who insist that we will one day understand how consciousness arises, and that a foolproof “theory of everything” is imminent? Though none of my politically savvy friends and colleagues have bitten on this proposition, no matter how favorable the odds I’ve offered, they continue to passionately debate and argue the nuances of a better future they do not doubt will occur.

The point is obvious but bears repeating: To recognize the myriad ways in which so-called rational discourse has failed us, and yet to act as though change is just around the corner, is the same type of misplaced hope that propelled the oncologist to deny that his patient was beyond treatment and why I lost my Las Vegas bankroll because I could not fold what I unequivocally knew to be a losing hand.

As a practicing physician, I have witnessed this conflict between emotional optimism and a dispassionate recognition of futility contribute to many of medicine’s onerous excesses. Case in point: unnecessary back surgeries performed because the surgeon cannot overcome his gut feeling that the procedure might work despite the lack of objective evidence. The same dynamic applies to failed interpersonal relationships. You glumly conclude that your spouse is serially unfaithful, abusive or hopelessly addicted to alcohol or drugs, but persist with the belief that perhaps he or she will change. Ditto for dealing with a troubled, persistently rebellious teenage child: When a therapist deems your child incorrigible and recommends commitment to a rehab program, you are forced to choose between tough love and false hope.

Admitting defeat is antithetical to our default tendency to delude ourselves when times are bad, even when the negative data is indisputable. Wherever measurable, from life expectancy and quality of health care to literacy in math and science, the world ranking of the United States is in free fall. The logical conclusion: It’s time for a societal hard love project.

No, you might counter; things will be better when cooler heads prevail. Perhaps we can gather better evidence, generate more convincing arguments, work harder toward bipartisan compromise, wait for better and more widespread educational opportunities to kick in … This commonly held bedrock belief in the power of reason to shape public opinion is understandable; our founders, fully steeped in the Enlightenment-era emphasis on rationality, could not have anticipated future cognitive science advances revealing the many deceptive ways in which conscious experience arises from perceptual illusions. We are in the process of learning that our sense of self, our agency (so-called free will), and, most importantly, our sense of thinking and assessing or judging our ideas are purely involuntary mental sensations that paradoxically create the illusion of being in conscious control of our thoughts and actions.

* * *

I confess to a certain discomfort in arguing that conscious deliberation is strictly an epiphenomenon that plays no role in our decision-making. In the past I have been willing to accept that there may be a small conscious component to our thoughts that we can use to improve critical thinking. I no longer feel, however, that clinging to this unprovable fanciful notion is even a useful fiction. As the distinction between conscious versus subliminal control over our behavior is critical to mankind’s future, a few words of explanation are in order.

We readily accept that perception occurs involuntarily, but tend to view reason, though arising from similar subconscious processing, as at least partially in control of its origins and premises. As we experience the flow of thought via symbols such as language or numbers, it is only natural that we assume they are the building blocks of our thoughts. Not so. As we can see from preverbal infants and other animals, language is not necessary for thought. What we experience as conscious thought — the vocabulary of reasoning — is at best a rough translation of poorly understood non-linguistic brain processes. 

In my 2008 book “On Being Certain,” I offered the artificial neural network (ANN)-based analogy of decision-making as the product of a subliminal committee weighing various alternatives and then sending the most appealing of them into consciousness. To highly simplify this idea, imagine each committee member as a set of neural connections representing a single genetic or innate biological predisposition, personal experience or cultural influence. Each committee member gets one vote either approving or disapproving of a piece of incoming information. The committee’s final tally is a function of its inherent open-mindedness, the prevailing strength of its already-acquired opinions and beliefs, motivations of the various committee members, and the degree to which the members of the committee value evidence-based reasoning over other modes of decision-making, such as reliance on trusted authorities and prevailing dogma. The power of conviction of this new information to sway committee members will determine whether this new information reaches awareness.

Decide whether to take your family vacation in the mountains or at the seashore. No matter what reasons you may provide and your spouse or children counter with, they are post-hoc rationalizations for personal tastes no different than the preference for chocolate over vanilla ice cream. Traditional modes of discourse — from polite debate to high-decibel exhortations — are no more likely to change another’s tastes than trying to prove that Brussels sprouts taste sweet or bitter (a distinction that has recently been shown to be genetically determined). The essential stumbling block of modern discourse: Your reasoning may not be my reasoning any more than your tastes are my tastes.

* * *

I cannot imagine a more impossible assignment than changing how we view our thoughts. And yet, if there is to be real hope for a better collective future, we need to come up with fresh approaches that are both scientifically plausible and generally palatable. Though I have no ready suggestions, we can draw a few hints from observing nonhuman ways of thinking. Two tantalizing examples come immediately to mind: artificial intelligence deep learning and insect swarm behavior.

To begin with AI, consider the rudimentary necessities for an artificial neural network (ANN), using algorithms inspired by the human brain to learn to play chess. No advance knowledge of chess is necessary. Given a clear designation of purpose (winning) and an immense amount of training data (games played) providing appropriate feedback as to the best moves, the initially ignorant ANN will soon beat the world’s greatest chess masters. (Of course, AI can only address those problems for which there is sufficient objective data; subjective issues such as human character, ethics and morality remain beyond its reach). 

These two basic requirements — a large amount of uncensored data and clarity of purpose — highlight major differences between human and machine thought. Unlike machines, our unique predispositions and different cultural influences generate highly personal hunches, intuitions and beliefs that collectively prejudge the potential value of any incoming piece of information. By contrast, the ANN initially considers every possible move, no matter how seemingly ridiculous and nonsensical to an outside observer, until it has been empirically tested. 

The second prerequisite of a deep learning AI system — clarity of purpose — points out a different version of the same problem. Unlike single-purpose algorithms designed to win at chess or poker, human motivation is multifaceted, inconsistent and often contradictory. Even when we believe in the single-mindedness of our goal — winning at our Friday night poker game — we often play sub-optimally, submarined by contrary urges such as making a low-probability bluff to humiliate an irritating opponent, or playing a bad hand with the low=probability but highly appealing possibility of making a straight flush. Unfortunately, as introspection and self-reflection arise from the same opaque circuitry that we are trying to examine, our self-knowledge boils down to trust and acceptance of those subliminally generated self-narratives that make their way into consciousness. (As I’ve written previously, our assessment of the motivation of others, based upon putting our own often-inaccurate sense of self into the shoes of another, is even more suspect).  

Some successful features of AI in comparison to human thought are worth emphasizing: There is no censoring of incoming information, reliance upon gut feelings, pride in untestable intuitions and unreliable claims of motivation — the bitter fruits of mistakenly believing that we can objectively judge our thoughts. But there’s more than observing thinking at an individual level; we also need to consider group influences. For example, witness the dramatic behavioral shifts in locusts when subjected to crowded conditions. 

During the dry season, locusts lead isolated relatively antisocial lives, shying away from contact with others and living off a limited plant diet. Then, when the rains come and vegetation blooms, they breed and their population soars. While the food supply is plentiful, they remain solitary vegetarians. When the rain stops and the vegetation dries up, the increased number of locusts crowd together in areas of remaining vegetation. This increased contact triggers a variety of stunning behavioral changes. They abandon their normally solitary behavior to seek out one another’s company, and then start reproducing explosively to form massive swarms. Their leg muscles enlarge, and they begin marching movements in time with the other locusts. Their brain size increases by 30 percent, primarily in areas of visual processing necessary to cope with the group foraging rather than solitary food finding. Even their external appearance and color changes. Within hours the locusts are transformed from solitary plant eaters to synchronized, swarming cannibalistic devourers of their brethren.

Though we cannot know what if anything a locust experiences consciously, imagine what it might be thinking if it had a mind capable of self-reflection. Might it question what came over it to go from being a loner to suddenly seeking out crowds and wanting to mate like crazy, or why it has forsaken its healthy plant diet for gross eating of its brethren’s flesh? How would it interpret its radical shift in social behavior, sexual promiscuity and indifference to the plight of others?  

Science to the rescue. Researchers have shown that this shift in locust behavior is triggered by stroking small tufts of hair located on the locusts’ hind legs — the region that most frequently comes into contact with other locusts when they are in close proximity. Stimulation of these hairs creates an outpouring of the brain neurotransmitter serotonin; blocking the serotonin release prevents the swarming behavior.  

How extraordinary that, in a Rube Goldberg-like sequence of events, increased population density leads to physiological brain and muscle changes that alter perception and behavior. Have you ever wondered what the crowds converging on Miami Beach during the height of the pandemic were thinking when they shunned mask-wearing and social distancing, caught up in the moment of seeking the company of others, perhaps even with the possibility of getting lucky and “hooking up?” Or the frenzied behavior at a political rally or international soccer game? Closer to home, have you ever been exiting a crowded stadium or theater and found yourself taking short marching steps to accommodate the milling crowds surrounding you? You are sure that you have voluntarily chosen to take smaller steps to avoid others. But what if you and the crowds at Miami Beach or the stormers of the Capitol on Jan. 6 were responding reflexively to a sudden shift in their levels of neurotransmitters? As agency is a perceptual illusion, how are we to distinguish between personal choice and indifferent biology? That crowds can structurally change brain anatomy and behavior should be a both a cautionary tale and a clue as to how we should reconsider human thought going forward. 

* * *

The above comments are not intended to in any way denigrate the value of reason, only to relocate its site of origin. Though there is no conscious control center for the mind, this does not mean that we cannot change our minds by appealing to our senses. One photo of a fatal car crash carries more weight than hours of traffic-ticket-school lectures on the evils of speeding. The smell of baked goods can enhance our desire to be charitable. A close reading of ancient Stoicism evokes an unexpected personal epiphany of acceptance of life’s circumstances. 

But learning the appeal of an elegant line of reasoning runs into the more basic problem that critical thinking, like any skill, is easier and more enjoyable for some than others. At one extreme, there are those for whom a lifetime of rumination and cogitation offers an unparalleled sense of meaning. For others, hard thought is a deeply unpleasant slog that cannot hold a candle to gut feelings, the warm comfort of communal beliefs and the unfettered promises of propaganda and demagoguery.

Even the best reasoning skills are not enough to arrive at a consensus opinion on the major issues of the day. Once we fully accept that critical thinking develops outside of conscious control, it becomes self-evident why the smartest among us, even when presented with the same evidence, prefer different lines of reasoning that often result in conflicting arguments and conclusions. Case in point: the widely disparate theories cluttering the field of philosophy of mind, from the diametrically opposed views of free will to the underlying nature of consciousness. We are better off seeing different modes of thinking in the same aesthetic light as personal tastes for or against Brussels sprouts, preferring Scotch to boxed white wine or switching from being a Yankees fan to rooting for the Mets. 

For a moment try to imagine the utter chaos of a world that fully accepted that our thoughts occur to us rather than being consciously generated. There would be no agreement as to what constituted good science, expertise, real versus fake news, correct logic, unequivocal proof or degree of personal responsibility for our thoughts and actions. The fundamental tenets of democracy — freedom to choose, equal value of each vote, what constitute the inalienable rights of the individual — would all be profoundly challenged. In short, it would look just like today’s world. 

But with a difference. We have been sold an unwarranted bill of goods as to our uniqueness in the animal kingdom. Like all other creatures, we are decision-making organisms, not rational agents. Our use of language and numbers and the ability to think about our thinking (metacognition), no matter how spectacular and profound, is as subliminal in origin as a termite’s ability to build a termite mound. 

Forget hostile debate and impassioned oratory. A willingness to change our minds requires a deeply felt acceptance that our decision-making arises out of impossible-to-fully-unravel subterranean inclinations. To get to a “we’re all in this together” communal spirit, we must fully abandon our sense of pride, defensiveness and certainty in our thoughts, or even our conviction that our thoughts are solely of our own choosing (think of the locust example). My unwarranted wishful thought: perhaps stepping back from our favorite arguments will allow a glimpse of a shared humanity lurking beneath conflicting urges and ideologies. It’s hard to imagine, and even harder to bet on, but just maybe — and the slightest perhaps is still better than nothing, which is why I retain a modest bit of hope in the face of the utter hopelessness of our times. 

“Have more Asian friends”: James Chen reflects on Hollywood, activism & new series “Run the World”

Actor and activist James Chen currently appears in Starz’s new series “Run the World.” In the Harlem-set comedy, his character Brian gets romantically involved with Ella (Andrea Bordeaux), one of four friends who are navigating relationships and work. Chen also just finished shooting the third season of Dick Wolf‘s CBS series “FBI” where he plays Ian Lim, an FBI agent and analyst in the Joint Operations Command. 

The actor works mainly in television — he had a recurring role in “The Walking Dead”—has also played romantic characters, in feature films, including the ensemble “Fluidity,” and, most notably, as a closeted actor in the gay romantic drama, “Front Cover” with Jake Choi back in 2015.

A graduate of Yale School of Drama as well as the University of Pennsylvania, Chen is involved in Asian activism, participating in community meetings, live chats, and panels to highlight visibility and representation of Asian Americans in politics, culture, and society.

He has also recorded nearly three dozen audiobooks with Asian themes for Audible and uses his Instagram account to speak out about the recent hate crimes against his community. He recently chatted with Salon about his work, his activism, and the perils of being a sex symbol.

It’s the last days of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. But we should not honor the AAPI community just in May, but all year long. How have you celebrated this year?

A lot of it was activism-related and celebration-related, acknowledging our community leaders who have stepped up in these really trying times. Daniel Dae Kim has been such a fantastic face and voice — he uses his platform so well and is so articulate — and even down to the grassroots activists that no one has ever heard of, who are doing community organizing, which is really powerful. They are amplifying that signal and spreading that message. I am trying to participate as much as I can. I was contributing to Asian Americans Advancing Justice and Stop AAPI Hate. It’s funny, I feel this year, it’s more of a vocalization as opposed to a celebration of our heritage. I’m reflecting on what it means to be Asian American through a lens of pride and not victimhood. 

As an Asian actor in this industry, I think the system historically has not been set up for diversity until relatively recently, so now is the time to celebrate great authentic storytelling. Series like The CW’s “Kung Fu” showcase more authentic family dynamics. There are strong Asian men in “Mortal Kombat,” which is exciting. Every day there is a new show or series being developed by an Asian author or showrunner. And those are making positive waves, which I want to get behind.  

You are currently appearing in “Run the World” which gives you the opportunity to play up your sex appeal. It’s great to see non-white and mixed-race couples coupling up on the show. What observations do you have about that in general and playing the Sexy Asian Man in particular? Do you feel objectified, tokenized, exploited, or are you just working it?

I didn’t feel exploited. Depicting interracial sexual passion was something I’d never done before. It was exciting and groundbreaking, and felt more authentic to my real-life experiences. Yes, it was intimate; bedroom scenes are always awkward and uncomfortable when you are shooting with a crew around you. We worked with an intimacy coordinator, which added a layer of respect and dignity. But there was a sense of relief, because it wasn’t a big political statement to make this couple interracial. In fact, it was based off the writer’s experience, so it was art imitating life. We need to counteract all these years of negative stereotypes, right? 

“Run the World” is an ensemble, like much of your television work — e.g. “FBI,” “The Walking Dead,” etc. We went 25 years between “The Joy Luck Club” and “Crazy Rich Asians.” How do you perceive the changes in opportunities for Asian actors? Have things improved?

Hopefully we are in a renaissance of Asian content and representation and getting to see more nuance. The ball is in our court to create our own things, and there’s space and room for us to express ourselves authentically. The industry has shown that they are hungry for more and varied stories. There is a marked movement in diversity, inclusion, and equity in all industries but especially in the entertainment industry. So larger networks, studios, and companies are examining that in front of and behind the camera and in development. 

People are being more respectful and mindful when others try to denigrate or erase or be flat out racist. For example, there was a Texas comic [Tony Hinchcliffe] who was dropped by his representation. In an attempt to be funny, he spewed racist things to his Chinese host at a comedy festival. He was shut down. That sends a signal that this is not tolerated. It came from the offended individual as well as the community. We’re speaking out against those kinds of awful behaviors and are being listened to. We have allyship as well, which means a greater sense of community is on board.  

You recently appeared on a virtual panel for STARZ about expanding the imagination of Asians on screen. I know the Latinx community tried to gain some traction with their La Letter, but little has changed. What are you noticing about Asian casting and creatives? 

There was a lot of celebration in the trades last week that a popular Filipino anime, “Trese,” was voiced by Filipino actors. It really does take a village. Gold House has been very active and effective in prompting awareness but also behind-the-scenes development and pipeline things. They are doing collaborations with other companies and minority activist groups for positive advancement of Asian Americans in media. 

It shouldn’t take 25 years for Hollywood to make the next all-Asian film to get released. There should be a number of films in the pipeline. There should be at least one a month! 

Amen, man! But, it’s track record. There is a history of very few Asian-American stars. In the STARZ panel, people asked, “What can we do to help to open the minds, change opinions, or convince executives of the need for diversity?” And I said, “Have more Asian friends.” It sounds like a joke, but if a person doesn’t have Asian friends, or associations with other Asian people, then Asians will be foreign to them — as a consumer and a developer of content. I feel social media has changed things tremendously. Anyone can have a platform. Asians have been early adopters of that. There have been a lot of popular projects that have had Asian leads on streaming services that have put some more Asian on the map and in the public’s consciousness. They want to make sure they populate their world with at least an Asian. But next step is a lead. 

I really object to these multiethnic casts where they have one Black, Asian, and/or Latino character which seems token-ish. We couldn’t possibly have two people of the same color. 

Sometimes they prove how box-checking these supporting characters become, they will check two boxes with one character. The supporting character [of color] will be gay or trans whereas the lead is arguably more mainstream. 

It’s facile! To your earlier point, in order to be more diverse, we need to meet and know more diverse groups of people.

The change comes from within. Maybe you do change the hearts and minds of people but that doesn’t prove on paper that someone can carry a show or a film. It’s a long-term solution. If you have more Asian friends, and vice versa — for Asians to reach out, because there can be a tendency for Asians to self-congregate. Maybe they were raised to be private people because their parents are immigrants. We can’t do that anymore. We have to be very conscious about speaking up, standing out, being seen, heard, and reaching out to make connection so people feel and remember that we are here and hear our opinions. That’s the work we as Asian Americans have to do, day after day and for years and years and years. 

A friend of mine, who is Black and gay, wrote that he doesn’t like being described as a “minority” because that suggests he is inferior, not equal. He says people don’t get how offensive and demeaning the word “minority” is.

Labeling a minority does things messaging-wise. That word can imply something minor or less than, which can have real life psychological influence for how people view themselves as well as how they may be viewed by non-ethnic people — causing a separation with labels. As Bruce Lee said, “Under the Heavens, there is but one family.”

Do you want to talk about the model minority myth?

It’s such an interesting topic. There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to — no one wants to — conform to a preconceived idea of who or what you are; everyone has a unique identity. But there’s a rebelliousness against a hardworking model minority. At the same time, if you are an ambitious human being, you’ve got to work hard. We have to reframe it, or own or define “hardworking” in our own terms or own way, because we want to realize potential and fulfill our dreams not to please parents or to impress other people. We need to find a healthier way to do it, but at the end of the day, we still have to work our asses off. 

Do you find that you are offered roles that rely on your looks or ethnicity, or that you are pursuing only open-ethnicity parts?

I’m auditioning for a lot of different kind of roles these days, some are Asian-specific, and some are not, which is a great mix. At the end of the day every actor — and no human — wants to be defined just by their ethnicity. Of course, it’s part of your identity, especially if you grew up in that culture and are proud of your identity. But actors want to be cast based on ability and the hard work they put into that ability. If you were just cast in Asian roles, where your ethnicity is always front and center, it would be extremely limiting and exhausting. To not apply your skills is a painful, frustrating limitation. But there are Asian people in the world who have lived lives and have stories that are worth telling and those should be told by Asian people — no more Emma Stone, or Scarlett Johansson s**t. So, it’s beautiful if an Asian person has the opportunity to tell a story that is authentic or true. “Front Cover” was a good example of that. And recently, “The Half of It,” with Leah Lewis.

It’s a double-edged sword. You want to represent your community, but you don’t want to only represent your community. 

Yes, I think that’s what it is.  

Let’s talk about visibility, and working against stereotypes, for inclusion and representation. Can you discuss how you are creating change and what folks can do to help?

It’s been relatively recent. George Floyd and the last year’s BLM protests, so many awoke to a greater sense of responsibility and allyship and being informed on how this system everyone is in effects everyone. These are our Black brothers and sisters just as we are their Asian American brothers and sisters. And when Trump’s hate speech of calling the coronavirus the “Kung Flu” and the China virus without a doubt contributed to an increase of violence on Asian people. It was horrifying to keep up with the news. I felt like I had to do and say even more than I had. I am a pretty private person, but silence is complicity. It affects everyone.  

Let’s circle back to you being a sex symbol. 

Let’s do it! I need get more shirtless photos. Simu Liu is trying to corner the market and I can’t have it. We have to share the limelight, and let the shirtless glisten. It’s something you don’t see often. Psychologically, this goes back to having more Asian friends. At Yale Drama School I had to organize a Shakespeare master class to be taught by Randall Duk Kim, primarily so a white community can see that an Asian person could do Shakespeare at that level. Dispel the myth by showing them something they haven’t seen before. So, I’m more than fine with people complimenting me on my ass. [Laughs]

Is there pressure to show that Asian men can be sexy?

There’s probably a layer of that. We are in a business. Every actor always wants to look their best, and it’s a very competitive field, but more on a personal journey level, there’s a joy in embracing a sex positivity within myself and sharing that. That’s the way I view it, rather than trying to push myself to be sexy for some other purpose. At the same time, I feel like it is “the good work” too. Because the stereotypes against Asian men are pretty damaging. It is a positive contribution to the community if you can just counter or contradict those stereotypes. 

Confidence is sexy . . .

Confidence is also under-depicted in media, Asians taking confident, decisive action, or confident Asian men is not popular, or often seen. That all falls under the umbrella of “the good work.” 

Are you actively looking to do more love or sex scenes to claim sex symbol status? 

I’m not actively looking. It has to do with the project. It if adds to the project, that’s a good idea.

When someone is naked or doing revealing things, it can upstage everything else. And if a person does that too often — and you are completely chiseled with a sexy body — it clearly becomes a huge part of what you are trying to get people to look at. At the end of the day, acting is about what you are thinking, feeling, and saying in relation to other people, but If you are just presenting yourself as eye candy, it can become too much too quickly.

“Run the World” airs Sundays at 8:30 p.m on Starz or on the Starz app. “FBI” airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on CBS. 

As the pandemic slowly abates, humanity will have to reckon with historical trauma

Last year in May, only a couple months after America entered a state of lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I found myself in an interview with Dr. David Reiss. I was wondering even at that time how people would react to the fear of getting sick or dying, to the frustration of not being able to resume their normal lives and to the unhealthiness of so sharply curtailing their social interactions.

“When things are very uncontrolled and uncertain, people who are vulnerable can really fall into an existential type depression,” Reiss told me. “And then that kicks off in both serious depression for others who aren’t as vulnerable. It just could create a lot of uncertainty, a lot of anger and reactivity.”

As vaccines slowly but surely begin to roll back the tide of the pandemic, we are entering a phase in which people undergoing this deeply traumatic experience will now have to rejoin society despite their suffering. While usually trauma victims’ experiences are individual, however, here they are far from alone: Just as we need to figure out how to rejoin society, society needs to figure out how to recover from the collective trauma it has endured.

A glance at history offers a number of prospects, some more promising than others. It all boils down to how we recover from this historical trauma, a term defined by scholars in 2011 as meaning the “cumulative psychological and emotional wounding across generations… [emanating] from massive group trauma.”

We can start with perhaps the most famous epidemic of all time, the Black Death. Striking Europe in the mid-14th century, the Black Death took anywhere from 75 million to 200 million lives through a feverish disease that made your armpits and groin swell with pus and your skin break out in bloody rashes. The bad news was that it wiped out anywhere from 30 percent to 50 percent of Europe’s population. Yet the Black Death arguably led to some positive political and social outcomes in the long-run: The Renaissance, the Reformation, updated knowledge of medicine and an end to feudalism can all be traced in one way or another to the direct ramifications of the plague.

The 1918-1919 influenza pandemic also left a generation of Americans traumatized. Killing at least 50 million people worldwide, including approximately 675,000 in the United States, it arrived during and after World War I and is often lumped in with the larger trauma of the planet’s first truly global conflict. Americans responded to the end of those two horror shows by craving a return to “normalcy,” as 1920’s successful presidential candidate Warren Harding famously put it. (He was elected by the largest popular landslide in history up to that point.) As soon as they could, Americans ditched the hardships of war and quarantining in order to dive head first into the Roaring 1920s.

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Pandemics are not the only historical events that can lead to generational trauma. One study found that children who lived during the Great Depression were more likely to exhibit social anxiety status and worry about their peers’ opinions of them. The generations which endured World War II grappled with various forms of collective trauma, particularly the millions of Americans who fought in the military conflict. When they came home, they were more determined than ever to build a better world for their children than the one in which they had been raised. This led to the Baby Boom shortly thereafter.

There are other instances of historical trauma that do not impact the entire country, but still a very large portion of it. A 2004 study found symptoms of severe trauma from Lakota elders who were humiliated and displaced from their land. A 2006 study found historical trauma among Japanese Americans who were interned during World War II, and an unsurprising 2008 study found historical trauma among Holocaust survivors.

The question for the COVID-19 era is, what can we expect from the future based on the trauma we have endured since 2020?

One likely change is that it could spawn more hypochondriacs, or at least germophobes. Indeed, the pandemic seems to have more of us worried about our health.

“The pandemic has made everybody concerned about their health. And I think that once the pandemic passes, that concern will continue, which is a good thing rather than a bad thing,” Dr. Ellen Langer, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, told Salon by email earlier this year.

But as Reiss told Salon previously, the pandemic’s legacy will depend on how the multiple generations whose lives were disrupted at the same moment by this wind up reacting.

“This will take generations to get past,” Reiss said. “And that’s because at every stage of development, things have been disrupted — whether you’re talking about like my two-year-old grandchild who somehow has to understand seeing family members in masks, to four and five-year-old kids who are just starting to socialize, to adolescents who can’t socialize and all through different stages of life.”

Making sense of the great whip spider boom

About 18 years ago, Andrea Colla got an unusual request. Would he come survey the fauna of a Nazi air-raid shelter? Even by entomologists’ standards, the task was weird. This warren lay under the Italian city of Trieste, and it was built in secret between 1943 and 1944 at the orders of a war criminal who wanted a subterranean escape route from his villa. Eventually, the tunnels had become a museum, managed by the cave enthusiasts of the Trieste Alpine Club; they wanted to know who else was hanging out down there, besides tourists, school groups, and them.

One afternoon, after finishing his work at Trieste’s natural history museum, Colla went down with a headlamp to poke around and set some traps. For bait, he used Gorgonzola because, he said, it’s “better if it is a cheese that smells a lot.”

Colla is a man of cave insects. Like many Triestinos, he’d grown up spelunking: Instead of going to the cinema, he and his tobacconist dad spidered down ropes and followed waterworn paths through limestone — a hobby that became part of Colla’s job. Aboveground Europe, he believed, had few creatures left uncatalogued. To describe and classify new species — advancing the science of taxonomy, one bug at a time — he looked to the isolated spots he’d explored as a child. “In caves,” he said, “there are still surprises.”

But Colla didn’t expect anything too surprising from a bunker. When he went to check his traps, he was right: Not much beyond standard basement crickets and spiders.

So he was taken aback in 2019 when one of the air-raid tunnel guides sent him a snapshot of a cartoonishly evil-looking creature — like a cross between a tarantula and a crab, with skin-crawlingly long legs, barbed pincers, and a brownish coat of armor. To Colla, it was unmistakable. This was a harmless arachnid called an amblypygid, sometimes known as a whip spider or tailless whip scorpion, which was neither spider nor scorpion. And it was not supposed to be in Italy at all.

Amblypygids were popping up elsewhere, too. In 2018, an undergraduate in suburban Athens found a few scuttling through his bathroom and kitchen — now he’s credited with uncovering the species’ presence in continental Europe. In 2019, there was the first confirmed record of amblypygids in Jordan, also in a bathroom. In both cases, the person who helped identify the critters was Brazilian arachnologist Gustavo de Miranda. And he’s just outdone himself: Last year he submitted a paper, the publication of which is forthcoming, describing 33 new amblypygid species, one of which has only ever been seen in the pipes and storage sheds of a Rio de Janeiro museum.

Such findings are more often pictured in treacherous caves and tangles of jungle, or oozing unseen in the darkest patches of ocean. The great whip spider boom shows that’s only part of the story. On the one hand, scientists find it heartening: the planet seething with so much undiscovered life that it’s lurking not only in the backcountry but in basements and bathrooms. But the fact that these species haven’t yet been described has more to do with scientific fashion than with the creatures themselves. Though it might seem abstract, what does or does not get attention in the pages of, say, the Journal of Arachnology, can affect the natural world.

As de Miranda put it, “We can only preserve what we know.” His hope is that by filling in those gaps, he can map which species live where, how humans have moved them around — and prevent any more from going extinct before researchers have registered their existence.

* * *

When biologists talk about whip spiders, they invariably categorize them as a minor order of arachnids — meaning a branch that encompasses fewer species than spiders or scorpions. But minor order also has a whiff of neglect. Among eight-legged creatures, amblypygids are the forgotten stepchildren — footnotes in the natural history of the creepy-crawlies. Though amblypygids range in size, some small as a thumbnail, others wide as a pint glass, they tend to be brownish and drab. Some are sold as pets, and one even had a cameo in a Harry Potter film. But even among arachnophiles, they’re only just starting to creep toward the mainstream. “I used to be able to say, ‘I’m one of three people in the world who studies amblypygids,'” said Eileen Hebets, an arachnologist at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. “Now I don’t even know how many there are.”

To Hebets, the reason is simple: In science, attention begets attention. What began as a graduate student’s fringe obsession could become the focus of a whole lab, eventually seeding others in its wake. Hebets saw her first live amblypygid in 1998, during her Ph.D., the night she arrived in Costa Rica for a tropical ecology course. She couldn’t stop looking at the creature’s front legs. These are the whips that give whip spiders their name — elongated, antenna-like — and they were sweeping around in all directions, as if piecing together a picture of the world. Even now, over 20 years later, she isn’t sure how to describe the grace of that movement. It was like a blade of grass fluttering in the wind, if a blade of grass were purposeful. It was like an octopus tentacle. “I just immediately fell in love,” she said.

Hebets read whatever she could about amblypygids, but there wasn’t much. The only papers that might tell her how to distinguish males from females were in German; she had to ask a friend for translations. She wanted to untangle what those wispy legs were sensing. Painstakingly, she and others set up experiments to find out, blowing chemicals over the legs and tracking the resulting electrical jolts, daubing nail polish over the sensory hairs and watching how well the animal could still skulk its way home. What emerged over decades was a dazzling portrait: an invertebrate with super-powers. Some species are powdered with tiny structures that create a kind of diving bell, so they can bubble themselves with air and keep breathing in a flood.

Yet as those observations trickled in, researchers were only just determining what exactly these things were and where they lived. Even as they learned more about the behavior of this or that species, the group’s taxonomy was still fuzzy at best. Mark Harvey, head of terrestrial zoology at the Western Australian Museum, keeps spreadsheets of the minor orders of arachnids — “I have what my colleagues call ‘cataloguers’ disease,'” he joked — and his data showed an amblypygid explosion. “At the moment, there are 216 species of whip spiders recognized from around the world, and half of those — 106 of those — have been described since 1994,” he said in January. “That’s a massive increase.”

De Miranda came of age around the middle of that curve. He’d grown up in Porto Velho, Brazil, on the edge of the Amazon. His father was an agronomist, spending weekdays warning farmers about banana blight and weekends showing Gustavo how to use complex, branching charts to identify ants and beetles. When de Miranda went away to college in Rio de Janeiro and learned about the minor orders of arachnids, he saw a weird discrepancy. They were so mysterious, but so easy to find. He could unearth plenty of short-tailed whip scorpions, even in Brazil’s second biggest city.

Amblypygids became his version of Colla’s caves. It was hard to find a lab at first. Once he did, though, he became prolific contributor to Harvey’s spreadsheets, describing new species everywhere from Timor-Leste to Belize. Glancing at his oeuvre, it may seem that there’s an inexorable army of amblypygids on the move, but that isn’t it. Mostly, de Miranda said, “it’s just the lack of people looking.”

* * *

Colla had been looking, though — not for amblypygids specifically, but for whatever was living in the Italian bunker in 2003. He wasn’t the only one. Trieste sits near the top of Italy’s boot, between the Slovenian border and the Adriatic Sea. To the east lies a plateau so riddled with galleries and grottoes that Colla calls it the birthplace of cave science. The claim is arguable, but the region’s longstanding obsession with caves isn’t: Between 1880 and 1920, some 2,000 local caves were described, and members of the Trieste Alpine Club have been exploring everything from mushrooms to caverns to historical sites since 1945. With so many people popping into the natural tunnels outside of town — and the human ones beneath — it seemed unlikely that the amblypygids had simply gone unnoticed.

The whip spider research world is small, and de Miranda had gotten involved with Colla’s study soon after the club had seen the first amblypygid. This wasn’t a new species. It was, in fact, widespread, a denizen of Jerusalem’s sewers and Turkish caves — a species he’d recently helped document for the first time in Jordan, where it was expected, and in mainland Greece, where it was not. Amblypygids are tropical and subtropical, and Jordan has the right climate, the kind of place where no one had bothered to record the species until recently, but where the bug was presumed to be. Athens, though, is chillier, and de Miranda wasn’t sure whether the population there was native or introduced. But Trieste is over 1,000 miles to the northwest. Hebets, who wasn’t involved in the project, had heard rumors of unreported amblypygids in Italy. To de Miranda though, this particular region seemed improbably cold.

The bunker is known as Kleine Berlin — Little Berlin — a complex of four different shelters, three built for Italian civilians, one for German soldiers. Inside, Colla could see the earth reclaiming part of the past, wartime graffiti in some places, stalactites in others, here a toilet, there the lava-like overlay of minerals on the wall and the floor. The whip spiders were found on the Nazi side, in a wet, 260-foot-long tunnel near the courthouse, littered with rusted relics and off-limits to tourists. There they were, clinging to the wall: Not just one amblypygid, but a whole population. He and his colleagues would count nine in total. Eventually, greenish babies appeared on an adult’s back, the little antenna-legs crisscrossing, de Miranda said, “like a noodle soup.”

But as far as the researchers could tell, the entire Trieste population was female. That meant they were likely reproducing without any males, using a strategy called parthenogenesis — Greek for “virgin birth.” It’s a trick seen in certain arachnids, insects, crustaceans, and even reptiles, laying viable eggs with no sex involved. Many — including these amblypygids, it seems — are versatile, sometimes mating, sometimes making babies solo.

The trigger for going one way or another can be environmental. “It could be a factor of density, where you reach a certain age — ‘I haven’t run into any of the same species as me, I’m just going to start producing eggs,'” explained Mercedes Burns, an arachnologist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. How it works in amblypygids is still fuzzy, but in other creatures, the egg’s chromosomes doubles on their own or the egg undergoes a kind of faux-fertilization. Some of the cells involved in egg-development also contain chromosomes, and instead of being sloughed off as usual, they can act a little like sperm, providing the missing piece so the offspring has all the genetic material it needs. Generally, the maneuver is risky — one lousy curveball and the whole population might go bust — but handy for stowaways: A single female can go anywhere and found her own outpost of clones.

Someone must have unwittingly carried a single specimen into Trieste from elsewhere. From where, nobody knew. It wasn’t the kind of amblypygid kept as a pet, and every party working to solve the mystery had some tidbit that cast doubt on the origin story someone else proposed.

The pioneering whip spider might have wedged itself into some crevice on a ship — but as, arachnologist Filippo Castellucci, a Ph.D. candidate who worked on the project with Colla, put it, “it seems less likely, because the harbor in Trieste is not that close.”

The members of the Trieste Alpine Club might have carried it in on some piece of caving equipment, but as Lucio Mircovich, one of the club’s board members, put it in an email to Undark, “The materials used in the expeditions to Greece have never been placed in the Kleine Berlin.”

“Could it have been brought by German soldiers 80 years ago?” Mircovich wrote. But Colla had scoured the complex’s different chambers over a decade ago; he’s pretty sure he’d have noticed an amblypygid.

Even this species, well-documented by whip spider standards, was a riddle. The answer might have been clearer if researchers knew more about where this bug lived in the first place. It was a mis-shelved book in a library that was only half-catalogued.

* * *

To other arachnologists, that’s hardly a shock. “The most common wolf spider in my yard is currently undescribed,” said Harvey, of the Western Australian Museum. “There’s still so much to learn about biodiversity, especially in tropical areas where, literally, there are new species in our backyards.”

The discovery of those that aren’t yet known can emerge from efforts to map those that are. A few years ago, de Miranda helped examine whip spiders from three caves in Israel, two yielding the same species found in Jordan, Turkey, and Greece, and the third yielding something completely new, with weaker eyes and more pincer-spines. But such surveys are spotty, too. As Gwynne Lim, executive secretary of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, explained, sampling tends to be “opportunistic.” Range maps are extrapolations. “Our collective ignorance is so steep,” she wrote in an email to Undark.

Plus, taxonomy has a 19th-century air about it, a realm of pith-helmeted colonists with their pins and their jars. The world of contemporary science mostly rewards other things — more big-picture hypothesis-testing, less showing that the distinction a handful of species lies in counting the prickly hairs on a particular segment of leg. “The impact in science is measured by the citation rate,” said Jonas Wolff, a University of Greifswald arachnologist, referring to how often a scientific paper is cited by other researchers. “It’s kind of unfair against taxonomy, because every time someone uses a species name, normally the describer and year is given, but it’s not counted as a citation.”

Yet these sorts of findings form a kind of backbone, the foundation on which other studies can be built. De Miranda often combines them with accounts of evolutionary history — a way of doing taxonomy while keeping up with the times.

The origins of the Trieste amblypygids might seem like a mere curiosity. The mystery could be dispelled once de Miranda and Castellucci can get the specimens needed for a genetic comparison between the Italian bugs and those from elsewhere. But as it stands, it highlights the blur at the heart of de Miranda’s work, collapsing the distance between Rio and the remotest spots, concrete and jungle. In all those places lie exhibits’ worth of specimens that remain unknown, their world changing faster than scientists can uncover them. Even as de Miranda and a colleague were writing a 2016 paper to describe some new species living in a few Amazonian caves, they knew that the areas had been heavily mined for iron ore. Their newest paper describes a species that has only ever been found in the sewers of a Rio museum; two years ago, the museum burned down.

De Miranda is now a post-doctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington D.C., and one day in February, he pulled from his freezer a whip spider that was just about to become an official species. To find it, he and his colleagues spent three days in the Sooretama Biological Reserve, in Brazil, scrabbling through leaf litter, prying up rocks, logs, and tree-bark with their hands. For non-experts, that isn’t advisable: More than once, in the past, the researchers lifted something and found themselves facing a pit viper, responsible for plenty of snakebite deaths. “Most people are afraid. We’re just a little bit crazy,” de Miranda said, laughing — and well-trained, he added later, with a don’t-try-this-at-home warning.

But this time, crazy wasn’t cutting it. They’d looked for streams and moist soils, which this amblypygid was rumored to like. No luck. After three days, they’d just about given up, and ended up outside of the park, walking along the dirt roads in a nearby town. Someone spotted a log, not so far from a few buildings, and flipped it over, because sometimes being an arachnologist is just flipping over log after log.

There, like some practical joke, sat their quarry. It was a delicate thing, about the size of a dime. They popped it into a tube.

The reason de Miranda had it close at hand now — frozen, legs curved to fit inside its vial — was as a piece of history. He hoped to scour its genome for molecular timestamps, making comparisons species by species, trying to figure out if forest fragmentation some tens of thousands of years ago played a role in the proliferation of so many different kinds of amblypygids. There were definitely more of them lurking in the caves and hollows of the past than even he knew about. “Sometimes I wish I could go back to before the Europeans came to South America and started destroying everything,” he said. “Now, we are impressed by the diversity — and we only have 5 percent of the forest still standing. Imagine how it was if everything were still there.”

* * *

Eric Boodman is an award-winning journalist from Montreal who now lives near Boston. He is a reporter for STAT and his work has also appeared in The Atlantic and Discover Magazine.

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

“Evolution Gone Wrong” author: “I just didn’t realize how many things humans are up against”

Okay, humans, if we’re so smart, why do our backs hurt so much? Why do we cry? And menstruation, who thought that was a good idea?

Our existence on this planet is the product of chance, timing and a whole lot of evolutionary compromise. Our ability to speak and walk upright and gestate babies with big brains has meant sacrifice and discomfort, and this human condition we’ve created for ourselves is eternally humbling and idiosyncratic.

Alex Bezzerides knows it well. The Lewis-Clark State College biology professor is fascinated with the imperfect system that is the human body, and he explores and explains it adroitly in his fascinating, funny new book, “Evolution Gone Wrong: The curious Reasons Why Our Bodies Work (Or Don’t).” Salon spoke to the author recently about why we are the way we are, and the fallibility of the epiglottis.

I want to begin at the end of the book, because to me there is absolutely nothing stupider or more counterintuitive in the universe than our entire reproductive system. Menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth — they’re all ridiculous. Talk to me about this, Alex. Why do we have periods?

That was the hardest chapter for me to write because I went into it really not knowing the answer. That was unique, because most of the other chapters, I at least had an idea of what I was going to write about.

I started reading about the origins and evolution of menstruation, and it got complicated really quickly. I picked up this term, spontaneous decidualization, and I thought, “Oh, my gosh. How am I going to figure out how to translate this to the reader?”

What I came to learn is that the process evolved in a way as a defense for women against these really hyper-aggressive, invasive fetuses humans are. We think that human fetuses are that way because they have to feed this giant, growing, nourishing brain. The only way to do that is to burrow deep inside the woman. The degree of placentation in a human is much, much higher than it is in other mammals.

One idea for why menstruation evolved is that the woman had to start building up her uterine lining and building up this defense even before pregnancy. A big difference in mammals that experience menstruation is they start changing their lining before pregnancy, rather than in response to pregnancy. Then once that uterine lining has changed, if pregnancy doesn’t happen, it has to be sloughed. That’s one of the big ideas about why it evolved, is that it had to be there as a way to defend the mother against this burrowing human fetus. Kind of a crazy idea.

Just the volume of blood loss is astonishing. Every single month, the amount of blood loss that a woman goes through, it’s just an incredible figure. Every little time I get a teeny little cut and I lose a couple milliliters of blood, I think, “A woman can lose 30, 40, 50 milliliters. Some women, a 100 milliliters a month.” It’s just mind-boggling. You get to the end of this thing, and it’s just like, “My God. Why does anybody have kids? How does anybody have kids?” After seeing the whole thing, you feel like there should be like 40 people on earth rather than 7 billion. Like, no way. But it’s happened 7 billion times. That’s of course for the people that are currently alive. It just doesn’t seem possible.

You make a very interesting case that that our big brains are not necessarily the sole metric of our intelligence. From an evolutionary perspective, maybe this isn’t the end game, that the smarter we get, the bigger our brains are going to get, the bigger our heads are going to get, and then no one gets born anymore. Talk to me about what evolution might look like.

I think the other piece of the puzzle that has to be talked about any time you talk about the human body and the direction it’s gone is the bipedalism aspect. I think that when humans went up on two feet, and it obviously took millions of years for that transition to really fully occur, it just changed so many things about the shape and nature of the body.

One of the things for women is the change of the nature of the birth canal. One of my favorite scientists, that I lean on a lot in the book, is Dartmouth Professor Jeremy DeSilva. He is the foot, and skeletal, and paleoanthropology guy. He and this group found that, even before the brain swelled up to its current huge, ridiculous size, birth was a tight process for hominins and for early ancestors as soon as they basically went bipedal.

That right there set us on this path that made birth difficult. Then, getting into the skeletal chapters, that made our life difficult for our ankles, our feet, our arches, our knees, all these different things. Obviously there are wonderful things that come out of it. There’s a whole other book to be written about how amazing evolution has been for us, and our incredible hands and our incredible minds. I thought it was more interesting to write the the darker side of the coin, about all the ways that it’s also been difficult.

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This gets back to the overarching story of this book, the trade-offs of evolution.

I thought of the word “trade-offs” throughout the entire book. Like in the throat chapter when I talk about choking and snoring, all these things are trade-offs.

One of my favorite examples of that is where we have this incredible human feature of being able to form words, and speak, and change our vocal production in ways that other animals can’t do. But the trade-off of that is that the larynx had to get lower down deep into the throat, and you lost this fail-safe that kept us from being susceptible to choking.

I think about that all the time. Just last night I took a little drink, and my epiglottis didn’t quite do its job. I splashed a little water down into my trachea. You kind of sputter for a second. That happens all the time. It’s just this great evidence of an evolutionary trade-off in humans. But then the benefit is that I get to talk to you, which is something other animals don’t get to do.

We get to talk to each other, but then we also had to cut up our kids’ grapes for a really long time.

And my wife has to elbow me to stop me from snoring.

And the reason that we get back pain or the reason that our shoes don’t fit is because we learned to walk upright. Walking upright makes you really tired.

It’s exhausting. I think about it when I get up in the morning now and I have a little back pain. I just curse the whole curve of my spine, and all the things that are necessary for me to work my way around upright.

Thing that I really enjoyed about this book is that I kept the topics universal and broad enough that you can’t talk to anybody that didn’t have a tough birth experience, or didn’t have back pain, or didn’t have three wisdom teeth pulled and one of them was kind of a mess, or something. I find that it relates to everybody, and that’s been a really fun.

I had adult orthodontia, but I never made that connection of, “Why don’t my stupid teeth fit in my stupid mouth?” Some of these evolutionary problems are also because we’re living longer. We’ve not yet built our bodies to endure for as long as they do, so our backs give out, and our ACLs tear, and our eyesight starts to go.

There are definitely some features in the book that are exacerbated by age. There’s no question about that. I tried to focus on things that can fall apart at any point. I think teeth not fitting and eyesight going bad, those are things that can certainly happen at a young age, but it’s not helped by the fact that we’re all living to be 70, 80, 90, 100, whatever.

I love the part of the book about blinking, and why we blink as opposed to licking our eyeballs, which would be disgusting. When we talk about crying, why do we cry when we’re sad, or we’re happy, or we’re overwhelmed?

There’s this connection between our brain and our anatomy that we’re just beginning to understand. One of them is this endocrine hormonal balance with things like crying. We have a great understanding of what tears are there for — to keep our eyes moist, and it’s necessary. But then these things happen that are tied to our emotions that I don’t think we do have as good an understanding of.

The short answer is that those emotional tears have hormones in them (unlike the other types of tears) and one working hypothesis is that those hormones (like prolactin and oxytocin) help to soothe the body. More research is clearly still needed. I like to imagine a whole room of people sitting around watching “The Notebook” as researchers take measurements of all their baseline physiology. I cry at the drop of a hat (for example I cried during an episode of “Kim’s Convenience” the other day), so I’ll be keeping a wet eye out for any future crying research.

What were the things in the book that surprised you the most or made you take a step back?

The reproductive section, for me. There were a lot of things that caught me off guard with the fertility chapter. I just didn’t realize how many things humans are up against when it comes to fertility. People mostly think about fertility issues as a modern problem. Everybody’s waiting longer to have kids, and there are all these modern dilemmas related to fertility, and pollution, and incorporation of things in your body that weren’t there generations ago.

When I started reading about fertility, you realize that fertility issues have been a thing for as long as people have been around and as people have written about it. There’s this whole historical evolutionary perspective of it. A big part of it is the historical mating systems that humans had and the sperm competition that was set up, and how males had to produce overwhelming amounts of sperm in order to compete with other males.

But then females couldn’t have an egg fertilized by multiple sperm, so their bodies evolved these defenses to prevent polyspermy, where two sneak in and fertilize an egg. You end up with this reproductive back and forth, just to get over this hurdle of creating a new life. That was something that I didn’t really know anything about going into it, the whole evolutionary historical perspective of fertility difficulties. That was really eye-opening.

I remember being at a zoo one time, watching some ungulate when she was giving birth. I didn’t grow up on a farm or anything, so I hadn’t seen cows being born, or a horse being born, or anything. That was the first time I watched a big mammal being born.

She just gave birth, licked the thing, and then it hopped up shortly thereafter and wobbled around. I was like, “Seriously? That’s it? That’s ridiculous compared to what we do.” It’s like days in the hospital and weeks in bed, and then you have to hold a little horrible thing for like a year before it can even do anything. What? [laughs]

You can’t leave it around grapes. It’s ridiculous.

Ridiculous.

We have evolved so that other people have to be involved in that process, and we can’t do it alone. This feels really important for us to remember as a species, that we are designed to bring children into the world together. Because it’s a messy, incredibly painful,  incredibly dangerous process.

It is. I don’t think people realize just how many women died in the process and still die in the process. Before the advent of antibiotics, it was an incredible number of women that died during childbirth. In parts of the world where they don’t have access to antibiotics, because of the incredible trauma, infections are still a huge problem. Many, many women do still die in childbirth.

It’s a neat feature of human society and human cultural development, that birth has become such a group and a family process. It almost has to extend beyond birth, too, as an important thing about why human infants are born so helpless, because it’s another unique thing about human birth.

This whole idea that Holly Dunsworth has written a lot about, it’s because the classic explanation is that they have to come out early or then there’s compromise between women’s mobility and the shape of their hips, and the size of the baby. The Obstetrical Dilemma just really took off. There’s not much evidence for it, and she’s come up with this new idea that there is a lot of evidence for, that it’s all driven by metabolism. In fact, the baby gets to the point inside the mother where she can no longer nurture its metabolic needs as it grows, and its brain gets so big, the only way to continue to nurture it is outside the mother, and then it’s born totally helpless. Not only do you have this birth process where the mother needs a lot of help just to get through the birth, but then, even after that, a lot of help is still needed because there’s this super, super altricial infant on her hands that you need a lot of help to be taking care of.

Was there something in the book that really made you marvel? Every part of being human and walking around in these imperfect, breakable systems is kind of remarkable, but was there something in particular that really just takes your breath away?

I think the brain is, in a sense, there, but I’m going to go a different direction. Toward the end of the book, I started reading about the human hand a lot. Obviously I knew primates have different hands, and opposable thumbs were a different thing. But I didn’t appreciate how different the human hand was from other primate hands, and what that allows us to do.

I think about that all the time now when I see somebody playing a musical instrument, or doing some incredibly little dexterous craft that no other animal on earth could do. I’ve started to think of the human hand as as integral to humanness as the brain.

It’s also really interesting to me that it came around first. That once we became bipedal our hands freed up, and we went down this path that has allowed us to just create a whole world with our hands. That all happened before our brains kind of exploded. It’s a necessary step that the brain took off afterwards, and the way to really effectively use that hand.

What happens if an ex-president goes to jail (hypothetically speaking)? It wouldn’t be pretty

The United States has never had a president go to prison. Neither a sitting president, nor a former one. Arguably there are a few who should have — although that’s another matter.

Donald Trump could change that. Perhaps that’s not surprising: Trump will already be remembered by history as the first president to be impeached twice, the first president to refuse to accept losing an election, the first president to lack any prior political or military experience and one of five presidents to be elected without winning the popular vote. He has racked up questionable distinctions like Tom Brady wins Super Bowl rings.

Now Trump may face jail time for alleged financial crimes in New York — or his efforts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia, or his speech to the Jan. 6 rioters. Given his pattern of ethically iffy business dealings and ripping off the taxpayers, as well as his shady actions in Russia and Ukraine, something completely unforeseen could also arise during current investigations that lands him in jail.

At any rate, if Trump goes to prison, it will be a first in the history of this country. What, if anything, does that say about the state of our democracy?

We can start by looking at the closest equivalents to Trump’s situation, which occurred shortly after the Civil War. Without question the most volatile such case was the potential trial of Jefferson Davis, who had been president of the Confederacy and intended to argue that he did nothing illegal by siding with Mississippi once it seceded. (Whether the Confederate States of America counts as a real nation, and Davis as a real president, is a contested question.) Given that the Civil War had ended only a few years earlier, it is entirely conceivable that Davis’ trial would have sparked violence whether he was convicted. Fortunately for him, President Andrew Johnson pardoned Davis and other former leading Confederates for the crime of treason, so we don’t know how such a trial would have played out.

A lesser known case — involving an authentic, no-doubt president — is that of John Tyler, who was president from 1841 to 1845, following the death of William Henry Harrison. No one ever accused Tyler of dishonesty, but he sided with his home state of Virginia when it seceded from the Union, in 1861, serving in various Confederate legislative bodies. Tyler died of a stroke early in 1862, three years before the Civil War ended, so he was never held legally accountable for his actions and there’s no way to know how events would have played out. Tyler offers, however, the only clear example of a former U.S. president committing treason. (Until now, some would say.) 

Around the same time that Jefferson Davis faced an uncertain legal fate, the president who pardoned him, Andrew Johnson, became the first president to be impeached, in his case by a Republican-controlled Congress that opposed his lenient policies toward the conquered South. But Johnson was charged with no crime after leaving office, whereas Richard Nixon — who resigned before he could be impeached — probably would have been had Gerald Ford not pardoned him. Bill Clinton, the second president to be impeached, was accused by his enemies of all kinds of imaginary crimes, but never faced any serious threat of criminal prosecution for any aspect of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.  

So American history provides no clear or useful parallels, and we have to cast the net more widely — still without finding any obvious similar instances. One thing we can say is that a criminal conviction wouldn’t necessarily end Trump’s political career, and another is that the chances of an actual head of state literally winding up behind bars appear very low. Former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was convicted of tax fraud in 2013 — also one of Trump’s more plausible crimes — and served his “prison sentence” by doing unpaid community work because of his age. Despite his conviction, Berlusconi remains a powerful figure on the Italian right and eventually returned to politics, winning election to the European Parliament in 2019.

One case very much in the news is Israel, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has held power for the last 12 years (after also serving as prime minister in the late ’90s). He was indicted in 2019 for accepting bribes, fraud and breach of trust but has refused to leave office, clinging to power through several indecisive elections thanks to the loyalty of the Israeli right. With a new coalition government reportedly emerging this week that could end Netanyahu’s tenure, the danger of conviction and prison time is now real. 

Former French prime minister François Fillon could well be heading to prison — but even in France, this isn’t a huge story. (In the French political system, the president holds executive power and the prime minister is perhaps closer to the House speaker in the U.S.) An old-school center-right conservative, Fillon was allied with former President Nicolas Sarkozy and was was briefly seen as the frontrunner in the 2017 presidential election (eventually won by Emmanuel Macron). After Fillon was charged with embezzlement, his political fortunes collapsed, and last year he was finally convicted of fraud and misusing funds. He was sentenced to five years in prison, with three of them suspended, and is currently appealing his sentence.

What lessons have we learned about the prospect of Donald Trump ending up in a prison jumpsuit? Pretty much none. Trump is perhaps vaguely similar to the examples of Berlusconi, Netanyahu and Davis in that he has a passionate following, and leads a movement that is unwaveringly devoted to him as an individual. As with Berlusconi and Netanyahu, his supporters are unlikely to abandon him even if he is indicted or convicted. If anything, a criminal trial might turn him into a martyr, and increase his followers’ sense persecution, emboldening them to do who knows what.

John Tyler, Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton never commanded that kind of slavish devotion. Nothing even close.

Consider also that there’s no legal or constitutional impediment to an eligible citizen running for president while incarcerated. Trump could orchestrate a political resurrection from a prison cell, being “restored” to what his followers deem his rightful place either by legitimately being elected or (far more likely) because the recent wave of voter suppression laws enacted by Republicans create a situation where he can’t lose. Much as Hitler proclaimed his ascension to power as a vindication of the nine months he served in prison after the Beer Hall Putsch, Trump’s miraculous election-from-prison would be embraced by his followers as proof that it was all worth it. Most of them would shy away from the Hitler parallels, of course — but some, if QAnon rhetoric is to be believed, may not.

If Trump is actually put on trial, it will become a spectacle unlike any other in American history. Any possible verdict — acquittal, conviction or mistrial — will be received by his supporters as a great victory. No matter what happens, such a trial would serve as a flashpoint for a far-right, anti-democratic movement the likes of which has never before existed in this country. On balance, that sounds really bad.