POW nation: When will America free itself from war?

“POWs Never Have A Nice Day.” That sentiment was captured on a button a friend of mine wore for our fourth grade class photo in 1972. That prisoners of war could never have such a day was reinforced by the sad face on that button. Soon after, American POWs would indeed be released by their North Vietnamese captors as the American war in Vietnam ended. They came home the next year to a much-hyped heroes’ welcome orchestrated by the administration of President Richard Nixon, but the government would never actually retire its POW/MIA (missing-in-action) flags. Today, almost half a century later, they continue to fly at federal installations, including the U.S. Capitol as it was breached and briefly besieged last week by a mob incited by this country’s lame-duck president, ostensibly to honor all U.S. veterans who were either POWs or never returned because their bodies were never recovered.

Remembering the sacrifices of our veterans is fitting and proper; it’s why we set aside Memorial Day in May and Veterans Day in November. In thinking about those POWs and the dark legacy of this country’s conflicts since World War II, however, I’ve come to a realization. In the ensuing years, we Americans have all, in some sense, become prisoners of war. We’re all part of a culture that continues to esteem war, embrace militarism, and devote more than half of federal discretionary spending to wars, weaponry, and the militarization of American culture. We live in a country that leads the world in the export of murderous munitions to the grimmest, most violent hotspots on the planet, enabling, for example, a genocidal conflict in Yemen, among other conflicts.

True, in a draft-less country, few enough Americans actually don a military uniform these days. As 2021 begins, most of us have never carried a military identification card that mentions the Geneva Convention on the proper and legal treatment of POWs, as I did when I wore a uniform long ago. So, when I say that all Americans are essentially POWs, I’m obviously using that acronym not in a legal or formal way, but in the colloquial sense of being captured by some phenomenon, held by it, subjected to it in a fashion that tends to restrict, if not eliminate, freedom of thought and action and so compromises this country’s belief in sacred individual liberties. In this colloquial sense, it seems to me that all Americans have in some fashion become prisoners of war, even those few “prisoners” among us who have worked so bravely and tirelessly to resist the phenomenon.

Ask yourself this question: During a deadly pandemic, as the American death toll approaches 400,000 while still accelerating, what unites “our” representatives in Congress? What is the only act that draws wide and fervent bipartisan support, not to speak of a unique override of a Trump presidential veto in these last four years? It certainly isn’t providing health care for all or giving struggling families checks for $2,000 to ensure that food will be on American tables or that millions of us won’t be evicted from our homes in the middle of a pandemic. No, what unites “our” representatives is funding the military-industrial complex to the tune of $740.5 billion in fiscal year 2021 (though the real amount spent on what passes for “national security” each year regularly exceeds a trillion dollars). Still, that figure of $740.5 billion in itself is already higher than the combined military spending of the next 10 countries, including Russia and China as well as U.S. allies like France, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

Not only that, but Congress added language to the latest defense bill that effectively blocked efforts by President Trump before he leaves office on January 20th to mandate the withdrawal of all troops from Afghanistan (and some troops from Germany). Though it’s doubtful he would have accomplished such goals anyway, given his irresolute nature, that Congress worked to block him tells you what you need to know about “our” representatives and their allegiance to the war complex.

That said, an irresolute Trump administration has been most resolute in just one area: selling advanced weaponry overseas. It’s been rushing to export American-made bombs, missiles, and jets to the Middle East before turning over government efforts to shill for America’s merchants of death to President Joe Biden and his crew of deskbound warriors.

Speaking of Biden, that he selected retired General Lloyd Austin III to be his secretary of defense sends the strongest possible signal of his own allegiance to the primacy of militarism and war in American culture. After all, upon retiring, General Austin promptly cashed in by joining the board of directors of United Technologies from which he received $1.4 million in “stock and other compensation” before it merged with giant weapons-maker Raytheon and he ended up on the board of that company. (He holds roughly $500,000 in Raytheon stock, a nice supplement to his six-figure yearly military pension.)

How better than selecting him as SecDef to ensure that the “military” and the “industrial” remain wedded in that famed complex? America’s secretary of defense is, of course, supposed to be a civilian, someone who can exercise strong and independent oversight over America’s ever-growing war complex, not a lifelong military officer and general to boot, as well as an obvious war profiteer.

War Is Peace

As Quincy Institute President Andrew Bacevich so aptly put it, “many Americans have made their peace with endless war.” Within America’s war culture, peace activists like Medea Benjamin and organizations like Veterans for Peace are seen as not just “radical,” but genuinely aberrant. Meanwhile, an unquestioning acceptance of the fact that this country is now eternally at war across significant parts of the planet is considered normal, even respectable. Certainly, not something to put real time or thought into considering.

As a result, warmongers like former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton are touted in some quarters as hard-headed realists. In seeing the world as a hostile place that Americans need to (but somehow, almost 20 years later, can’t) dominate means their heads are screwed on straight, unlike those screwy thinkers who advocate for peace. But as Dorothy Day, the Catholic peace activist, once said: “Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.”

That Americans mostly refuse to see permanent war as filthy and rotten, or to think much about it or the “defense” budget that goes with it showcases the triumph of a broader war culture here. Whereas this country’s profligate and prodigal military complex has given us stunning failure after stunning failure overseas (just consider all those disastrous efforts to win “hearts and minds” from Vietnam to Afghanistan to Iraq and on and on), it has proved stunningly successful in winning — or at least taming — hearts and minds in the homeland. How else to explain the way those trillion-dollar-plus “national security” budgets are routinely rubber-stamped by Congress with hardly a murmur of protest?

In the twenty-first century, Americans are suffering a form of cognitive capture in which war has become the new normal. As an astute reader at my blog, Bracing Views, put it: “Our desire to live without war is held in a stockade, and every day that we wake up and walk out into the yard that understanding is being broken down by the powerful monied elites.”

In America’s collective stockade of the mind, activism for peace is an aberration, while acceptance of the war state is second nature. Small wonder that Biden’s proposed cabinet and administration features so many neocon-style policymakers who made their peace with war, whether in Iraq and Afghanistan or Libya and Syria (Antony Blinken as secretary of state; Jake Sullivan as national security advisor; retired general Lloyd Austin as secretary of defense; and Avril Haines as director of national intelligence). Biden’s hawkish picks avidly place their faith in U.S. military power. And they will be advising a new president, who once supported war in Iraq himself and talks not of reducing “defense” spending but of boosting it.

Perhaps you’ve noticed, in fact, how every president from George W. Bush in 2001 on has been proud to pose at some point as a “wartime” president. Perhaps you’ve noticed as well that this country can’t or won’t close Gitmo, the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, flooded with prisoners from the global war on terror beginning late in 2001, men who will likely be imprisoned until death does us part.

Perhaps this is why the U.S. government “tortured some folks,” as President Obama put it in 2014, and abused Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. (Avril Haines, Biden’s proposed national intelligence director, once helped suppress evidence of just such abuse and torture.) Perhaps this is why every president starting with George W. Bush has unapologetically smited evildoers around the world via robotic assassin drones. (Remember, the drone assassination of Iranian Major General Qasem Suleimani at Baghdad International Airport by one Donald J. Trump?) Perhaps this is also why U.S. bombing never seems to stop and those wars never end, even when a president comes into office promising that they will. After all, it’s so empowering to be a “wartime” president!

In his novel 1984, George Orwell put it simply enough when he coined the slogan “war is peace” for his fictional dystopian society. Randolph Bourne put it no less simply when, during World War I, he explained that “war is the health of the state.” Rosa Brooks, who worked at the Pentagon, put it bluntly when she titled her 2016 book How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything. What we have in America today is warfare as welfare, a form of man-made disaster capitalism, profitable for a few at the expense of the many.

Say it again: We are all POWs now.

The Time I Met a Real POW

In the early 1990s, when I was a young captain in the U.S. Air Force, I served as an escort officer for Brigadier General Robinson Risner. It’s not too much to say that Risner is held in awe in the Air Force. A skilled fighter pilot and Korean War ace, he was a colonel and on the cover of Time magazine in 1965, just as the Vietnam War was ramping up, after which he was shot down and became a POW. He later wrote The Passing of the Night, a harrowing account of the seven years he spent as a prisoner in the “Hanoi Hilton,” the sardonic name American POWs gave North Vietnam’s Hoa Lo Prison.

What sustained Risner through torture and those years of captivity was his Christian faith and patriotism. I vividly recall a talk he gave at the Air Force Academy about his experiences and how that faith of his had sustained him. I’ve never heard a more vivid evocation of the spirit of duty, honor, and country sustained by faith in a higher power. I was proud to have a photo taken with General Risner, as we stood next to the trophy named after him and annually awarded to the top graduate of the Air Force’s Weapons School, the AF’s Top Gun, so to speak.

Risner was gracious and compelling, and I was humbled to meet a POW who’d endured and overcome as much as he had. Yet, back then (to be honest), I never gave a thought to his actions as a fighter pilot leading bombing missions during Operation Rolling Thunder in Vietnam. Since the U.S. government had chosen not to officially declare war against North Vietnam, whether his missions were even legal should have been open to question. Lacking such an official declaration, one could argue that Risner and U.S. POWs like him did not enjoy the legal protections of the Geneva Convention. Using American terminology today, Risner might then have been termed an “enemy combatant” to be held indefinitely, as the U.S. today holds captives at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, POWs who have little hope of ever being released.

To your average American captured by U.S. war culture, objections here are easy. Of course, Risner’s bombing missions were legal. Of course, he deserved to be recognized as a POW and treated decently. America never goes to war without righteous cause, in this case the containment of Communism by any means short of nuclear weapons. The North Vietnamese saw it differently, however, perhaps because it was they who were being bludgeoned and flattened by U.S. military power.

My point is neither to praise Risner nor to bury him. Rather, it’s to bury war and the culture that breeds and then feeds on it. The more Americans facilitate war (largely by ignoring it and so giving it our tacit approval), the more Washington funds it, the more other people die because of “our” wars and “our” weaponry, the more this country becomes a POW nation writ large.

My Friend’s Button Again

Remember my friend’s button, the one that insisted POWs never have a nice day? As a POW nation writ large, it should apply to all of us. America won’t have a nice day again until it extricates itself from war in all its manifestations. There will be no nice day until Congress stops funding munitions makers and starts seeking peace and helping the sick and poor. There will be no nice day until Americans hate war with all the passion now saved for “patriotic” flag waving. There will be no nice day until presidents bless peacemakers instead of beseeching God to protect the troops.

So, the next time you see a POW/MIA flag outside a federal building, don’t dismiss it as a relic of America’s past. Think about its meaning and relevance in an era of constant global warfare and colossal military spending. Then, if you dare, ask yourself if you, too, are a POW of sorts — not in the strictly legal sense that applies to formal militaries in declared wars, but in the sense of this country being captured by war in all its death, destruction, and despair. And then ask yourself, what does America have to do, collectively, to break out of the POW camp in which it’s imprisoned itself?

Upon that question hinges the future of the American republic.

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Writers imagined drowned worlds for centuries — what they tell us about the future

Water was traded on Wall Street alongside oil and gold for the first time in early December 2020. That might seem bizarre, but there is a grim logic at play. Reliable sources of water that have nourished civilisations throughout history – the glaciers and ice packs that release a steady flow each spring – are shrinking. New research has revealed that the world is losing ice 65% faster now than it did in the 1990s, at a rate of 1.3 trillion tonnes a year.

In works of climate fiction, depictions of environmental disaster often focus on the very property of water that has brought it to the attention of futures traders: its volatility. It has fed fantasies of flooded future worlds throughout history. But with the melting of the world’s ice sheets tracking the worst-case scenarios of scientists, the stories no longer seem so fantastical. A sea-level rise of two-and-a-half metres is possible by 2100, according to the estimates of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration in the US.

These predictions resonate with prophecies that have haunted cultures since the dawn of language. How might life be different in a drowned world? Who is responsible for the flood? And how can people alive today face this sea-soaked future? Literature is an inevitably rich guide.

Conjuring the flood

The story of a world-destroying flood reaches back in Judeo-Christian traditions to Noah’s ark and beyond that, to the Sumerian flood story that dates to around 2000 BC. This was passed down in hushed voices around campfires until it was recorded on Tablet XI of The Epic of Gilgamesh.

Floods occur in the myths of most cultures. The Ojibwe First Nations people in North America speak of The Great Serpent and the Great Flood; the story of Manu and Matsya is a Hindu flood myth; and the Welsh tale of Dwyvan and Dwyvach is an analogue for the son of Prometheus in Ancient Greek mythology, Deucalion, who survives the flood by building a large chest upon which to float.

In most of these stories, the flood is the wrath of the gods (or god) on a hedonistic or godless community, though the “good” are saved. Zeus sends a flood to punish the arrogant Pelasgians; Noah is commanded to build the ark; and Lord Vishnu, disguised as the fish-like Matsya, warns the good-hearted mortal Manu of the coming waters. Our modern preoccupations with rising seas map directly onto these stories, as we assign fault for the global warming that is melting ice caps and inching the ocean up the shore.

An ocean of loneliness

Apocalyptic narratives have abounded for centuries, but JG Ballard’s “The Drowned World” was one of the first to offer a modern interpretation of a planet beset by rising seas. Set in 2145, the influence of the 1962 novel on contemporary fiction set in a deluged future is unmistakable. Ballard imagines a balmy London that’s mostly submerged, infested with giant alligators and traversed by mercenary scuba divers who plunder the city’s museums and cathedrals.

“The Drowned World” explores the effects of human isolation, as London is emptied of all but a few die-hard survivors, soldiers and scavengers. As separate islands, the characters wallow in the loneliness that so many of us have become used to during lockdown. Not only does the sea-level rise destroy coastal cities, it also limits emotional connections between the remnant populations. With most common ground inaccessible, Ballard projects a lonelier, more violent, world.

Working together

Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2017 novel “New York 2140” precedes Ballard’s setting by five years, but apart from depicting cities under water, the two imagined worlds couldn’t be more different. “New York is underwater but it’s better than ever,” reads one review.

Robinson moves between first and third-person narration, with several sections given over to an omniscient urban historian narrator known as “the city” or “that city smartass.” These sections describe changes in the Hudson Bay area over the last millennium, from its pre-colonisation days, through the 2008 crash, the rising seas and global disasters to the “present” day of the flooded near-future.

This deep-time perspective suggests that individual action for environmental repair is both futile and absolutely necessary as a form of reparation. This is the contradiction of optimistic pessimism common to speculative fiction. The individual must take political action against climate disaster, or face a drowned world alone, as Ballard’s anti-hero Kerans is doomed to.

Robinson’s heroes are Charlotte and Inspector Gen, two middle-aged women working in refugee resettlement and policing, respectively. They live in the same cooperative housing project in Madison Square Park as Franklin, a young futures trader manipulating water commodities. His shark-like approach to trading is altered by his community-minded neighbours, who motivate him to rebel. For Robinson, individuals can only overcome if they organise.

And overcoming the rising seas will mean more than adjusting to flooded coasts. Some works of fiction consider how a rise in sea level will limit food production, as in Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The Windup Girl.” Others depict the consequences of mass migration to the remaining habitable parts of the planet, as in EJ Swift’s “The Osiris Project.”

These stories explore a sea-level rise as an existential threat to human life that’s exacerbated by the paralysis and inaction of individuals. Recent offerings of climate fiction, such as Robinson’s “New York 2140” or “The Ministry for the Future” go further, and operate at the level of utopian imagination implicit in Ballard’s earlier dystopian vision, asking: what if we do something about it?

Chelsea Haith, DPhil Candidate in Contemporary English Literature, University of Oxford

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

“The Dig” on Netflix: a refreshingly accurate portrayal — according to an archaeologist

Edith Pretty was convinced that the mounds on her land in Sutton Hoo, Suffolk, held important archaeological secrets. In 1939, on the eve of the second world war, she was proven right as the sumptuous ship burial of an Anglo-Saxon king was uncovered. For a nation on the brink of war and facing its own “dark age,” the Sutton Hoo ship burial was a source of pride and inspiration, equivalent to the tomb of Tutankhamun.

Netflix’s “The Dig,” based on the novel of the same name by John Preston (2007), recounts the tale of this remarkable find. It transformed understanding of the “dark age” of the seventh century. Before this discovery, a dearth of written sources was presumed to signal an absence of culture in this period.

Films tend to portray archaeologists as treasure-hunters or forensic detectives – notably the Indiana Jones franchise. However, this Netflix dramatisation approaches archaeology with a new level of subtlety and accuracy, probing death, loss and memory – key themes in the archaeological study of the past.

Revealing the dead

The funerary mound contained the remains of a decayed oak ship, 27m in length, which had been dragged from the nearby River Deben to serve as a royal tomb. Over 250 artefacts revealed the sophistication of East Anglia in Anglo-Saxon times. There were riches garnered from across the known world, including silver bowls and spoons from Byzantium and gold dress accessories set with Sri Lankan garnets.

Although the body had long since disappeared, the personal regalia of a warrior-king survived, his sword, shield and ceremonial helmet. He is believed to be King Raedwald, whose reign corresponded with the early seventh-century date of the coins contained in a gold purse (c. 610-635CE).

“The Dig” focuses on the relationship between Edith Pretty (Carey Mulligan) and Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes), the local amateur excavator hired to investigate.

It draws on genuine elements of the central character’s biographies, including Pretty’s bereavement after her husband’s death and the diagnosis of her terminal illness (she died in 1942). Like many at this time, Pretty was fascinated by “spiritualism,” the idea that we can communicate with the dead through the use of a spiritual medium. Spiritualism may have spurred her archaeological patronage, just as it motivated investigations at other famous sites, especially Glastonbury Abbey, Somerset.

Turning the camera on archaeology

When the ship is revealed, Pretty and Brown are joined by “professional” archaeologists, the real-life Sutton Hoo excavation team. However, dramatic license changes their roles and ages to emphasise the hierarchical character of 1930s archaeology.

The film gives an accurate portrayal of the archaeological excavation in the 1930s, conducted using workmen with just a few skilled excavators and qualified academics. There is careful attention to archaeological detail, emphasising that the ship’s timbers had virtually disappeared, surviving as nothing more than iron rivets and a silhouette stained in the sand.

However, the rivalry between the self-taught amateur “digger,” Basil Brown, and the Cambridge-educated archaeologists is perhaps exaggerated. Brown is portrayed as having native, intuitive knowledge. He could “examine a handful of soil from anywhere in Suffolk and know exactly what farm it came from.” Although he was indeed self-taught, Brown was not exactly an amateur. He was employed as an excavator by Ipswich Museum for 30 years and was highly respected by the local archaeological community.

The Cambridge men also patronise the only female archaeologist, the real-life Peggy Piggott (Lily James), when she arrives accompanying her more experienced husband, Stuart. Peggy is welcomed because her slight frame will be ideal for working in the delicate conditions of the ship’s hull. She’s shown unearthing the first gold artefact (which really happened) but there’s no hint of the meticulous field skills for which the real Peggy was known during her illustrious career. Indeed, few professional skills are depicted at all: the archaeologists were brought in to draw, plan and record archaeological features – not simply to extract artefacts.

The professionals are portrayed cynically, exploiting the discovery to bolster personal and institutional reputations. In contrast, Pretty and Brown reflect philosophically on the meaning of the grave and the need to respect the memory of its human inhabitant.

As the skeleton of the ship emerges from the sand, it is a metaphor for the transience of human life, particularly poignant with war looming. Edith says to Brown, “We die and decay and don’t live on.” He counters, “From the first human hand-print on a cave wall, we’re part of something continuous, so we don’t really die.” The idea that all human lives are connected through the thread of the past is at the heart of burial archaeology, which is not about treasure but unearthing relationships between the living and their memories of the dead.

The Sutton Hoo ship burial was certainly exceptional in its wealth and state of preservation. Further excavations at Sutton Hoo revealed richly furnished royal burials in other mounds, including those of women and children, while comparable high-status burials have been excavated elsewhere, such as the Prittlewell Prince in Essex.

Today Anglo-Saxon archaeology explores many different social roles and lifestyles, including (pagan) women-priests and ordinary farmers. The archaeologists themselves are also a more diverse and inclusive lot, committed to working with local communities to discover their past, and giving careful reflection to ethical issues – such as whether, and under what circumstances, we should disturb the remains of the ancient dead. “The Dig” reminds us that the role of archaeology is not in treasure-seeking, but in reflecting on our complex relationship to the past, and how and why we value it.

Roberta Gilchrist, Professor of Archaeology, University of Reading

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

Why some scientists believe life may have started on Mars

On February 18, NASA’s Perseverance rover will parachute through thin Martian air, marking a new era in red planet exploration. Landing on the Jezero Crater, which is located north of the Martian equator, will be no easy feat. Only about 40 percent of the missions ever sent to Mars succeed, according to NASA. If it does, Perseverance could drastically change the way we think about extraterrestrial life. That’s because scientists believe Jezero, a 28 mile-wide impact crater that used to be a lake, is an ideal place to look for evidence of ancient microbial life on Mars.

Once it lands, Perseverance will collect and store Martian rock and soil samples, which will eventually be returned to Earth. This is known as a “sample-return mission,” an extremely rare type of space exploration mission due to its expense. (Indeed, there has never been a sample return mission from another planet.) And once Martian soil is returned to Earth in a decade, scientists will set about studying the material to figure out if there was ever ancient life on Mars.

Yet some scientists believe that these samples could answer an even bigger question: Did life on Earth originate on Mars?

Though the idea that life started on Mars before migrating on Earth sounds like some far-fetched sci-fi premise, many renowned scientists take the theory seriously. The general idea of life starting elsewhere in space before migrating here has a name, too: Panspermia. It’s the hypothesis that life exists elsewhere in the universe, and is distributed by asteroids and other space debris.

To be clear, the notion of life on Earth originating on Mars isn’t a dominant theory in the scientific community, but it does appear to be catching on. And scientists like Gary Ruvkun, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, say that it does sound “obvious, in a way.”

The evidence starts with how space debris moved around in the young solar system. Indeed, we have evidence of an exchange of rocks from Mars to Earth. Martian meteorites have been found in Antarctica and across the world — an estimated 159, according to the International Meteorite Collectors Association.

“You can assign them to Mars based on the gaseous inclusions that they have, that are sort of the equivalent of the gases that were shown by the Viking spacecraft” to exist in Mars’ atmosphere, Ruvkun said. In other words, small bubbles of air in these rocks reveal that they were forged in the Martian air. “So, there is exchange between Mars and Earth — probably more often going from Mars to Earth because it goes ‘downhill,’ going to Mars is ‘uphill,’ gravitationally-speaking.”

But for Ruvkun, whose area of expertise is genomics, it’s the timing of cellular life that he believes makes a strong case that life on Earth came from somewhere else — perhaps Mars, or perhaps Mars vis-a-vis another planet.

Ruvkun noted that our genomes reveal the history of life, and provide clues about the ancestors that preceded us by millions or even billions of years. “In our genomes, you can kind of see the history, right?” he said. “There’s the RNA world that predated the DNA world and it’s very well supported by all kinds of current biology; so, we know the steps that evolution took in order to get to where we are now.”

Thanks to the advancement of genomics, the understanding of LUCA (the Last Universal Common Ancestor) — meaning the organism from which all life on Earth evolved from — has greatly advanced. By studying the genetics of all organisms on Earth, scientists have a very good sense of what the single-celled ancestor of every living thing (on Earth) looked like. They also know the timeline: all modern life forms descend from a single-celled organism that lived about 3.9 billion years ago, only 200 million years after the first appearance of liquid water. In the grand scheme of the universe, that’s not that long.

And the last universal common ancestor was fairly complicated as far as organisms go. That leaves two possibilities, Ruvkun says. “Either evolution to full-on modern genomes is really easy, or the reason you see it so fast was that we just ‘caught’ life, it didn’t actually start here.” He adds, “I like the idea that we just caught it and that’s why it’s so fast, but I’m an outlier.”

If that’s the case, then Erik Asphaug, is a professor of planetary science at the University of Arizona, is also an outlier. Asphaug said that what we know about the oldest rocks on Earth — which have chemical evidence of carbon isotopes, tracing back to nearly 4 billion years ago — tell us that life started “started forming on Earth almost as soon as it was possible for it to happen.”

If that’s the case, it makes for an interesting precedent. “Let’s say you expect life to be flourishing whenever a planet cools down to the point where it can start to have liquid water,” Asphaug said. “But just looking at our own solar system, what planet was likely to be habitable first? Almost certainly Mars.”

This is because, Asphaug said, Mars formed before Earth did. Early in Martian history when Mars was cooling down, Mars would have had a “hospitable” environment before Earth.

“If life was going to start anywhere it might start first on Mars,” Asphaug said. “We don’t know what the requirement is — you know, if it required something super special like the existence of a moon or some factors that are unique to the Earth — but just in terms of what place had liquid water first, that would have been Mars.”

An intriguing and convincing piece of evidence relates to how material moved between the two neighboring planets. Indeed, the further you go back in time, the bigger the collisions of rocks between Mars and Earth, Asphaug said. These impact events could have been huge “mountain-sized blocks of Mars” that were launched into space. Such massive asteroids could serve as a home for a hardy microorganism.

“When you collide back into a planet, some fraction of that mountain-sized mass is going to survive as debris on the surface,” he said. “It’s taken a while for modeling to show that you can have a relatively intact survival of what we call ‘ballistic panspermia’ — firing a bullet into one planet, knocking bits off, and having it end up on another planet. But it’s feasible, we think it happens, and the trajectory would tend to go from Mars to the Earth, much more likely than from Earth to Mars.”

Asphaug added that surviving the trip, given the mass of the vehicle for the microorganisms, wouldn’t be a problem — and neither would surviving on a new, hospitable planet.

“Any early life form would be resistant to what’s going on at the tail end of planet formation,” he said. “Any organism that’s going to be existing has to be used to the horrific bombardment of impacts, even apart from this, swapping from planet to planet.”

In other words, early microbial life would have been fine with harsh environments and long periods of dormancy.

Harvard professor Avi Loeb told Salon via email that one of the Martian rocks found on Earth, ALH 84001, “was not heated along its journey to more than 40 degrees Celsius and could have carried life.”

All three scientists believe that Perseverance might be able to add credibility to the theory of panspermia.

“If you were to go and find remnants of life on Mars, which we hope to do with Perseverance rover and these other Martian adventures, I would be personally surprised if they were not connected at the hip to terrestrial life,” Asphaug said.

Ruvkun said he hopes to be one of the scientists to look for DNA when the sample from Mars hopefully, eventually, returns.

“Launching something from Mars is a seriously difficult thing,” he said.

But what would this mean for human beings, and our existential understanding of who we are and where we came from?

“In that case, we might all be Martians,” Loeb said. He joked that the self-help book “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” may have been more right than we know.

Or perhaps, as Ruvkun believes, we’re from a different solar system, and life is just scattering across the universe.

“To me the idea that it all started on Earth, and every single solar system has their own little evolution of life happening, and they’re all independent — it just seems kind of dumb,” Ruvkun said. “It’s so much more explanatory to say ‘no, it’s spreading, it’s spreading all across the universe, and we caught it too, it didn’t start here,” he added. “And in this moment during the pandemic — what a great moment to pitch the idea. Maybe people will finally believe it.”

Garum, the funky and fishy condiment that rose and fell with the Roman Empire

What is garum?

Garum was a condiment made from the drippings of fermented fatty fish that was popular in Ancient Rome. Many of the anchovy-based condiments that we use today — including colatura di alici and Worcestershire sauce — can trace their development back to the popularity and flavor profile of garum.

The condiment that fell alongside the Roman Empire

In 2019, an ancient condiment factory was uncovered outside Ashkelon, a city in modern-day southern Israel, while developers were scoping out the site for a planned sports park. The factory, or “cetaria” — which would have been operational during the height of Roman Empire — was used to make garum, an incredibly pungent, fermented fish sauce.

Fish sauce? Maggi? What’s your secret weapon ingredient? Tell us in the comments!

When most people hear the term “fish sauce,” they think of the condiment that gives many Southeast Asian dishes their signature, unique flavor (and which was likely invented millenia before the establishment of the Roman Empire). But factories like this one dotted Roman territories, Tali Erickson-Gini of the Israel Antiquities Authority told Haaretz’s Ruth Schuster in 2019.

“Ancient sources even refer to the production of Jewish garum,” she continued. “The discovery of this kind of installation in Ashkelon evinces that the Roman tastes that spread throughout the empire were not confined to dress but also included dietary habits.”

Archeologists uncovered fish pools, giant vats and jars used to age and hold sauce. The resulting smell would have apparently been overwhelming enough that there were laws throughout the Empire preventing cetariae from being built too close to urban centers; the one discovered in Israel was over two kilometers away from the outskirts of Ashkelon.

Many ancient authors dedicated page space (or, uh, papyrus space?) to ragging on the condiment’s odor and the smell of those who ate it. Pliny the Elder called it a “secretion of putrefying matter,” Plato called it “putrid garum” and Marcus Valerius Martialis, a first century Roman poet, satirically praises a friend for “maintaining amorous intentions” to his mistress after she’d indulged in six helpings of the sauce.

Despite the odor, garum was immensely popular. “Apicius,” a collection of Roman cookery recipes named for the first century gourmet Marcus Gavius Apicious, is filled with references to the condiment (including one for a lamb stew that I recreated for Salon). It was used in everything from grain porridge to olive oil and honey-based sauces. As food bloggers Jody Adams and Ken Rivard put it, “Garum was the ketchup of the gods.” Consider it the cult condiment of its time.

Much like modern day olive oil and wine, there were various grades of garum, including kosher garum used by Jews living in the Roman Empire, resulting in wildly different prices.

“According [to] the Roman writers, a good bottle of garum could cost something like $500 of today,” Italian archaeologist Claudio Giardino told NPR in 2013. “But you can also have garum for slaves that is extremely cheap. So it is exactly like wine.”

The premium garum was made with the whole fish, likely mackerel — as most surviving fermentation jugs from the period are inscribed with that ingredient — and salt. The cheaper stuff was fish blood, guts and salt.

But with the collapse of the Roman Empire came the fall of garum. Taxes on salt became astronomical making garum difficult to produce, and piracy spiked which curtailed the remaining garum trade, according to Giardino.

“The pirates started destroying the cities and the industries nearby the coast,” Giardino said. “You could be killed any moment by the pirates without the protection of the Romans.”

The once-bustling garum factories eventually became ruins, much like the ones that wouldn’t be discovered until developers were looking to break ground on a park some 2000 years later. What didn’t disappear, however, was an enduring craving across cultures for the flavor notes present in something like garum: salt, umami and a little fermented funkiness.

The closest modern analogue is likely colatura di alici, which roughly translates in English to “anchovy drippings.” It’s an amber-colored sauce made by fermenting anchovies — which are traditionally harvested from the Amalfi Coast during the five months between Annunciation and the Feast of Mary Magdalene — in brine. “It is often described as the great-grandfather of Worcestershire sauce,” which still contains anchovies on the ingredient list, as Olga Oksman wrote for “The Guardian” in 2015.

“Traditionally aged up to three years in wooden barrels, colatura has a smoothness to round out the fish forward pungency,” Alissa Fitzgerald, a personal chef and recipe developer, wrote in an email. “That said, it’s potent! Salty and briny and funky, the totality of umami, colatura is a sort of liquid gold.”

Which is likely how the Romans would have described garum.

Can I use garum or colatura di alici at home?

Modern versions of garum — which are likely definitely more mild and nuanced than their ancient predecessor — are sold online via Italian specialty stores, alongside colatura di alici.

Fitzgerald has several suggestions for how to use them again.

“Union Square Cafe has a crispy Brussels sprouts and cauliflower side dish tossed in a colatura vinaigrette,” she said. “Again, the colatura is potent, so a great way to experiment is to make your favorite vinaigrette just the way you like it, and add a few dashes of colatura at the end. The same goes for any sauce — mother or otherwise. A lobster bisque or cioppino would be great places to experiment. Beurre blanc? Absolutely. Hollandaise? Hands down.”

One of the most basic ways to use it in your home kitchen — and my personal favorite— is as an addition to pasta. This is one of my go-to, late-night lazy meals.

***

Recipe: Bucatini con Colatura di Alici
Serves 4 (or two hungry, maybe slightly tipsy, people)

16 ounces of bucatini
4 tablespoons of olive oil
2 tablespoons of colatura
1 lemon, zested
3 tablespoons of parsley
1 tablespoon (or more) of red pepper flakes
Salt and pepper to taste

1. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil, and cook bucatini according to package instructions. Reserve at least a cup of pasta water, and drain.

2. Meanwhile, whisk olive oil, lemon zest, colatura and red pepper flakes together in a small bowl and set aside.

3. Place the pasta back in the pot or a large skillet, and coat with the olive oil mixture, stirring until combined, over medium heat. Add the pasta water a tablespoon at a time until the pasta becomes glossy with sauce. Fold in the parsley, and salt and pepper to taste.

***

Brand recommendations

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More “Saucy” from our condiment shelf:

Lindsey Graham’s obstruction delays investigation into the Capitol riot

According to a report from the Daily Beast, Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) refusal to allow the now-majority Democratic Senate to schedule a hearing for President Joe Biden’s choice as new attorney general, Judge Merrick Garland, has slowed down investigations into the Jan. 6th Capitol riot that had lawmakers fleeing for their lives.

It was only this past week that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) agreed to a power-sharing agreement that allowed the Democrats to take over the committees – including the prestigious Senate Judiciary Committee that would hold hearings on Garland.

With Graham holding the reins of the committee as its chairman he refused to schedule a hearing at the request of Democrats and now it may be delayed for weeks due the to Senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump.

According to the Beast’s Sam Brodey, “With the impeachment trial of former President Trump slated to take up at least all of next week, and the chamber scheduled to be in recess the following week, it’s possible that another month could pass before Garland takes over as attorney general, said Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), a member of the Judiciary panel and a close ally of Biden.”

“That possibly lengthy setback in installing leadership at the department is especially troubling to Democratic lawmakers and outside advocates — not only because they’re itching to get started on a new DOJ agenda, but because of the acute importance of its business at the moment. Among many other things, for example, the department is investigating and prosecuting the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol,” the report states before adding, “. . . when the incoming Judiciary chairman, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), wanted to schedule a hearing for Garland, he first had to ask the permission of the outgoing chairman, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) – and Graham said no.”

Addressing the needs of the DOJ to get to work on the threats to the country due to the delay, Coons stated, “They are trying to effectively investigate and respond to domestic terrorism. To have our country’s chief legal officer sidelined for weeks is needlessly harmful.”

The Beast’s Brodey adds, “But the central frustration stems from the fact that Biden’s chosen team will be iced out of Main Justice during a pivotal moment for the agency. Many believe Garland is especially well-suited to this moment. As a former DOJ official himself, Garland oversaw the federal investigation into the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the prosecution of its perpetrator, Timothy McVeigh. Durbin has said ‘there is no person better qualified’ to lead the investigations and prosecutions stemming from Jan. 6 than Garland.”

You can read more here.

Meera Sodha’s mushroom mapo tofu is a flavorful, vegan weeknight dinner

Mapo tofu is a well-loved Sichuanese dish that originated in Chengdu centuries ago. The fact that it is still served in most Sichuan restaurants (and weekly in the Sodha household) gives you some idea of its popularity. My version of this famous dish is made with meaty shiitake mushrooms, leeks, and broth, all layered over with bright Sichuan peppercorns and a magical sauce (toban djan) made of fermented fava beans. The result is flavor amplified—and that never grows old.

Note: Many big supermarkets stock Lee Kum Kee chile bean sauce (a fermented fava bean paste). The salted fermented black beans, however, are not so easily found: look online or in Asian supermarkets. If you can’t find them, just leave them out and season the dish to taste.

***

Recipe: Mushroom Mapo Tofu
Serves 4

1½ tsp Sichuan peppercorns
2 tbsp canola oil
3 cloves of garlic, crushed
½ inch ginger, peeled and grated
½ lb fresh shiitake mushrooms, finely chopped
1 lb leeks (2 small), cut into thin rounds
2 tbsp toasted sesame oil
2 tbsp chile bean sauce
1 tbsp dark soy sauce
2 tsp salted fermented black beans, rinsed and chopped
14 oz firm tofu, drained and cut into ½-inch cubes
2 cups vegan vegetable stock
1½ tbsp cornstarch, mixed with 1½ tbsp water
1 green onion, cut into wispy long strips

1. Put the Sichuan peppercorns into a mortar and grind well. Take a sniff and revel in their strange and wonderful grapefruit smell.

2. Heat the canola oil in a large frying pan on a medium flame. Once hot, add the garlic and ginger, and stir-fry for 2 minutes. Add the mushrooms, cook for 6 minutes, then add the leek and stir-fry for a further 2 minutes, until the leeks soften and unravel. Transfer the vegetables to a bowl.

3. Put the sesame oil, ground Sichuan peppercorns, chile bean sauce, soy sauce, and black beans into the same pan and fry for a couple of minutes, until the oil separates. Add the tofu, stir to coat, then return the vegetables to the pan. Pour over the stock, bring to the boil, then stir in the cornstarch paste and heat until the sauce thickens. Take off the heat and transfer to a serving dish. Garnish with the green onion strips and serve with plain white rice.

If you love this recipe as much as we do, check out Meera Sodha’s “East: 120 Vegan and Vegetarian Recipes from Bangalore to Beijing.”

Three small-batch bitters for better cocktails (and desserts, too)

One of the things my partner and I used to argue about was who should take out the recycling. His case was that because I blew through cans of seltzer like a grumpy sponge, the onus should fall on me to drag our bin downstairs whenever it was full. I mean, sure, totally fair. Except he still ended up being the one to do it (mea culpa, honey). His solution: surprising me with a water carbonator and a gift certificate to our local cocktail supply shop, which boasts a selection of more than 100 different bitters.

We picked an afternoon to go together and, since this was pre-COVID, we got to taste as many different bitters as we liked. Although it was a little overwhelming at first, we quickly narrowed in on a few companies that, no matter the flavor, outshined the rest with their thoughtful and meticulous craftsmanship. Whether you’re looking to spruce up your own bar, or looking for gifts for that cocktail aficionado in your life, these are our favorite small-batch bitters producers.

1. Miracle Mile Bitters Co.

Based in Los Angeles and a literal one-man operation, two of my must-have bitters come from this small company. Owner and operator Louis Anderman is pretty fussy when it comes to choosing quality ingredients, which he sources from local farms. That means some of his flavors, like peach and ume, are strictly seasonal and, depending on crop yields, could be limited to as few as 30 to 100 bottles.

The two flavors I keep on hand are yuzu, which I use almost exclusively for iced seltzer, and toasted pecan, which I use in a bourbon old fashioned, hot and iced coffee drinks, hot cocoa, and even as an ingredient in chocolate pudding. I’m also a big fan of their bay rum bitters, which is made using leaves from the West India bay tree Anderman keeps on the premises.

2. El Guapo

Founded in 2017 by Christa Cotton, this New Orleans-based bitters producer has some of the most unique, exciting flavor combinations I’ve ever seen. Their crawfish boil bitters (yes, really!) are exactly what Bloody Marys have been missing, and I dare you not to smile when you try a dash on your next oyster. One of their seasonal flavors, summer berry bitters, quickly went from something I splashed into Champagne and gin cocktails to a pantry staple. It’s lovely as an accent for lemonade, mixed with balsamic and drizzled on a fruit salad, and really shines when stirred into homemade berry jam or compote.

Holiday pie bitters is a symphony of my favorite fall flavors, pumpkin, pecans, apples, and sweet potato, and it’s my go-to for warm cocktails, like hot toddies and mulled cider or wine. A brand-new flavor is barrel-aged vanilla, a collaboration with the spice masters at Burlap & Barrel, and it’s wonderful in an Old Fashioned and, like the holiday pie bitters, warm winter cocktails.

3. Portland Bitters Project

Founded in 2013 in Portland, this producer makes my absolute favorite chocolate bitters. Their Pitch Dark Cacao Bitters pairs well with just about any dark liquor, particularly rum and bourbon. While their bottle design is minimal and chic, the flavor profiles are anything but simple. Even their very specifically named bitters, like orange and lavender, are more complex than their names would lead you to believe. The lavender is complemented with vanilla and coriander, turning what could be a one-note bottle to something more than just floral: it’s vaguely sweet with those dried fruit notes from vanilla, and a hint of fragrant citrus from the coriander.

Their aptly named woodland bitters, a combination of Douglas fir, peppermint, and orange, elevates my gin and tonics to something really special.

How do you like to use bitters? Any small producers you recommend? Let us know in the comments.

GRAB A SPATULA & COOK WITH US . . .

Use Your Better Bitters

A Queen becomes “The Equalizer”: What it means when Black women take on legacy superhero roles

Strip down “The Equalizer” to its bones and the reboot debuting Sunday after the Super Bowl isn’t very far removed from the original series, which aired between 1985 and 1989. The story still follows the exploits of McCall, a former covert operative turned guardian angel for the poor and exploited. It’s still a simplistic action-heavy spectacle that isn’t shy about showing its heroic protagonist use any means necessary to protect the downtrodden with nowhere else to turn.

Only now, in 2021, the hero goes by Robyn McCall, not Robert, and is played by Queen Latifah instead of a steely Brit.

Latifah is stepping into an arena already traveled by other Black actors by playing a legacy role originally played by Edward Woodward. The popularity of “The Equalizer” is modest compared to, say, James Bond . . . although series co-creators Richard Lindheim and Michael Sloan were obviously influenced by the iconic spy when they dreamed up their original vigilante.

But if Bond fanatics flipped out at the news of Lashana Lynch assuming the 007 designation for the upcoming film “No Time to Die,” history and knee-jerk habit tell us that some portion of the TV viewership will balk at seeing a Black woman in this role. Bet on it, even though McCall has already been resurrected by Denzel Washington, Black man.

Presumably more people will welcome the chance to watch a female “Equalizer” at least once than who will dismiss it out of hand, if past instance of bigoted outcries from pop culture fandom tell us anything. The very fact that this is a possibility is a strange factor to contemplate in the direct wake of the presidential election and the subsequent inauguration of the first Black and Asian person, also a woman, to the vice presidency.

Only recently the super-heroism of Black women was celebrated far and wide, making a show like this a natural extension of the cultural zeitgeist. CBS is smart to add this title to its list of reboots for the name recognition alone, and savvy to make some noise by casting a woman in a role that under the network’s previous regime certainly would have gone to a man. For the record, at a recent virtual press conference hosted by the Television Critics Association, Latifah shared that she and the producers received Lindheim’s blessing before he died a few weeks ago.

Unfortunately ignorant reactions to such character revamps are also typical enough for us to at least brace ourselves for impact.

The good news is that Latifah isn’t stepping into the boots of a comic book superhero. You may recall that ethno-purists within those fandoms lost it over Zendaya’s casting as Mary Jane in 2017’s “Spider-Man: Homecoming” and more recently, trolled Javicia Leslie when she was announced as the new “Batwoman.” Her character Ryan Wilder took over the cape and cowl from Ruby Rose as of January; Rose left the CW series at the end of the first season.

Not long before that, Anna Diop drew frightening levels of harassment when DC cast her as Starfire, an orange-skinned alien, on “Titans.” The series is heading into its third season and Diop is still a part of it; plainly producers were not deterred.

Other series and films built around Black women superheroes like Regina King in “Watchmen” or Kiki Layne in “The Old Guard” have been embraced and celebrated by critics and the broader culture. The distinction is that those characters were originally conceived as Black women, much like Blackbird and Lightning in The CW’s “Black Lightning.” Also these characters along with Batwoman and Starfire are pure fantasy. Some can fly. Others have bulletproof suits and endless funding from secretive billionaires.

Spies and former special ops agents of all different backgrounds actually exist in our world, however. They walk among us. That very reason lends McCall to a gender flip more easily than other fictional crusaders.

Plus, Latifah herself is believable as an action star. In the past she’s trained in kickboxing and rides motorcycles; both skills come into play during the pilot. She’s tall and physically formidable, meaning nobody could rightly question how her McCall would be able to knock out an opponent. She’s also a familiar face, having worked every corner of TV for decades, from sitcoms to talk shows to a Cover Girl spokesmodel contract. For the same reasons Denzel Washington picked up “The Equalizer” and ran away with it, it’s not hard to envision the audience buying her as the lead here.

Latifah’s starring role in “The Equalizer” highlights a rarity in broadcast television that should not be in this day and age: she’s only the fifth black woman in the history of medium to lead an hourlong drama on NBC, CBS, ABC or Fox, following in the footsteps of “Get Christie Love!” star Teresa Graves, “Scandal” lead Kerry Washington and Viola Davis on “How to Get Away with Murder,” and Simone Missick on “All Rise.”(That list is growing and will soon include a planned series about Tony Stark’s protégé Ironheart featuring Dominique Thorn as Riri Williams.)

It’s too early to predict whether “The Equalizer” reboot will enjoy the same longevity as Washington’s and Davis’ shows. The original aired for four seasons, and the first episode of the revived version is a very standard CBS crowd pleaser. Other reboots that have run for multiple seasons had less exciting launches.

Complaints about any new series are inevitable, because few pilots are perfect and most are simply serviceable. Hopefully any knocks this new “Equalizer” sustains are for reasons other than the star’s gender or her Blackness, because neither of those traits have anything to do with how effectively she can fix a common person’s problems or beat the odds against them.

“The Equalizer” premieres on Sunday, Feb. 7 on CBS immediately following the Super Bowl and after that airs Sundays at 8 p.m.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story did not include Simone Missick on “All Rise” in the count of Black women cast as leads in major network dramas. The story has been updated.

100 million COVID shots in 100 days doesn’t get us back to normal

April 30 will mark the end of the first 100 days of President Joe Biden’s tenure. That’s a benchmark presidents often set for making good on high-priority campaign promises.

In early December, Biden announced that one promise would be to get 100 million covid-19 vaccines into the arms of Americans in the first 100 days, averaging about 1 million daily doses. The U.S. reached that pace around Inauguration Day but will have to maintain it for the next three months for Biden to reach his goal.

If realized, how will everyday life change? We asked the experts.

Could 100 million doses achieve herd immunity?

First, does 100 million doses translate to 100 million people being vaccinated by April 30?

The short answer: no.

Biden has emphasized that his goal doesn’t mean 100 million people will be fully vaccinated, but rather that 100 million shots will be administered. After all, both the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines require two doses.

When we first reached out to Biden team members in early December to ask about this target number, they said they were aiming for 50 million people to receive both doses and become fully inoculated. Then, in early January, they said the president-elect instead favored releasing most of the vaccine supply as it’s produced, rather than holding back doses for people’s second shots, on the assumption that new vaccine being produced would cover those booster shots on schedule. The Trump administration, still in office, announced a similar plan. Even now, though, about two weeks into Biden’s term, confusion continues to surround the implementation of that policy, which could influence the number of people who receive both vaccine doses within the first 100 days.

At a Jan. 26 press briefing, Biden said his goal of 100 million shots “means somewhere between 60 — maybe less, maybe more — million people” will receive at least one dose of vaccine.

Some critics have said the target number should be higher. A day earlier, Biden suggested he would like to eventually increase the rate of vaccinations to 1.5 million a day.

Whether it’s 50 million or 60 million people who are fully inoculated by the end of April, that number is still well below the prevailing herd immunity threshold recommended by public health experts.

Remember, herd immunity is achieved when enough people in a population become resistant to a disease so that it has difficulty spreading. Epidemiologists estimate at least 70% of a population must be protected to reach herd immunity. Because it’s unknown how long natural immunity lasts after being infected with the coronavirus, it’s recommended that even those who have had covid be vaccinated to reach herd immunity. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has suggested the herd immunity benchmark could be higher, up to 90%, especially since it seems some new covid variants are more transmissible than the dominant U.S. strain.

For now, let’s leave the herd immunity estimate at 70% and figure out how long it would take to reach that level.

Dr. Bruce Y. Lee, a professor of health policy and management at the City University of New York, walked KHN through the math. About 330 million people live in the U.S. Seventy percent of that figure equals about 231 million.

Currently, the U.S. has access only to the two-dose Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, meaning the nation would need 462 million doses to fully vaccinate enough people to reach that 70% mark.

At a rate of 1 million doses administered per day, it would take more than 460 days. “Which we would reach sometime in early 2022,” said Lee.

An additional challenge: Of the estimated 330 million people in the U.S., about 70 million are children and not yet eligible to receive a vaccine, so the vast majority of adults would have to be vaccinated to achieve this level of herd immunity.

Others have sketched out how the timeline accelerates if vaccination numbers improve. For instance, KFF chief executive Drew Altman wrote in a column that if the U.S. increased vaccine administration to 1.9 million shots a day, 70% of the population could have vaccine coverage by Labor Day. If vaccinations were increased to 2.4 million a day, that threshold could be reached by July 4. (KHN is an editorially independent program of KFF.)

In addition, other vaccines are in the pipeline that require only one dose, such as the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, and could change these projections.

At the White House’s second covid response team briefing on Jan. 29, Andy Slavitt, senior adviser to the team, said about 1.2 million vaccine doses per day had been administered in the past week. Vaccine trackers from Bloomberg News and The Washington Post also report about 1 million people in the U.S. receiving their first dose of vaccine every day in the past week. And the Biden administration expects this number to increase significantly in the coming weeks and months.

But roadblocks loom, including a short supply of vaccine.

Between the Trump and Biden administrations, the U.S. has agreed to purchase 600 million doses, in all, of the covid vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer. One-third, or 200 million, of that amount was supposed to be delivered by the end of March. The remaining doses aren’t slated to arrive until late spring and summer.

“The brutal truth is it’s going to take months before the majority of Americans are vaccinated,” Biden acknowledged during his Jan. 26 news conference announcing the United States’ latest vaccine acquisition.

The difficulty of reaching people who may have trouble accessing the vaccine, such as rural residents or communities of color, could also hamper vaccination efforts. And certain individuals are likely to be hesitant or refuse to get vaccinated.

When Will Life Return to Normal?

What if you become one of the lucky ones to get vaccinated during Biden’s first 100 days of the vaccine rollout?

People will still not be able to return to their pre-pandemic activities, said public health experts. A sense of normalcy won’t return until we approach 70% or more of Americans vaccinated.

“As hard as it is to hear, if you get your second dose of the vaccine before we have vaccinated the majority of the population, we all still need you to take the same protective measures you were taking before you were vaccinated,” said Dr. Rachel Vreeman, director of the Arnhold Institute for Global Health at Mount Sinai’s medical school in New York City.

That means, even if you’re vaccinated, you should continue to wear a mask, practice physical distancing with those outside your household, stay home and regularly wash your hands. The same precautions are recommended for those who won’t be inoculated by April 30.

Vreeman added that a week or two after you receive your second dose of the vaccine, you are less likely to get seriously ill from covid. But you could still get sick. And it’s possible you could pass on the virus to others not yet vaccinated. Clinical trials for the covid vaccines didn’t evaluate whether it stopped asymptomatic transmission, only if symptoms were reduced.

“Immediately at the end of April, for the average American, there won’t be a dramatic change in what they’re seeing in regards to social distancing and masking,” said L.J Tan, chief strategy officer for the Immunization Action Coalition, a nonprofit that works with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to distribute vaccine information.

Jeffrey Shaman, an environmental health professor at Columbia University, said states should maintain covid restrictions, such as those related to face coverings, remote work and limited travel, during the vaccine distribution process. In a recent modeling study, Shaman and his colleagues found that if such restrictions were lifted this month, 29 million additional covid infections could emerge by summer. He recommends keeping them in place through July.

“The bottom line is, if we lift our restrictions and we go back to what it was like before the pandemic, the virus is going to take off again,” said Shaman. “Then the race to get vaccines in arms will be complicated because more people will get sick.”

Experts also said that with multiple covid variants circulating in the U.S., some of which appear to be highly transmissible, taking precautions seriously is critical — especially if vaccines aren’t as protective against them. Plus, the fewer people who get sick, the less likely it is the virus can replicate, mutate again and create more variants.

As for when things will return to normal? That depends on the rate of vaccinations and how many Americans are willing to roll up their sleeves.

“I think we will be back to life in the fall, hopefully before Thanksgiving,” said Tan.

Other experts we asked said it’s possible there could be some semblance of a return to normalcy in the summer.

But, they all agreed, it certainly won’t happen by April 30.

Joe Namath responds to first woman Super Bowl referee: “I’d be getting close to her on that field”

Legendary football quarterback Joe Namath reacted to the first woman Super Bowl referee by saying he would want to “get close to her” if he was still playing the game.

During an interview on Fox News, Namath was asked about the NFL’s decision to have Sarah Thomas work as one of the referees at Sunday night’s game.

“Oh, I’d be getting up close to her out there on that field,” Namath said. “You know, try and make a deal with her.”

“Of course, it’s awesome!” Namath said, recalling that his sister could “outplay” him at the game.

“I remember that Proposition 9 or whenever we allowed the ladies to get involved in sports in college, I was thrilled,” he said. “And I am to this day. You know, let’s treat everyone with respect regardless of gender and color.”

“You just gave me chill bumps,” Neville replied. “I’m right there with you.”

Watch the video below from Fox News.

From smartphone apps to confusing websites, vaccine sign-up is anything but simple for the elderly

How do 80 year-olds who don’t have adult children do it? The scale and the ambition of the COVID-19 vaccine — from its development to its clinical research to its rollout — has been an unprecedented challenge, and in many ways, achievement. It’s also a real garbage fire for our parents, a development that’s creating newly deputized patient navigators of millions of Americans.

This is not a rant about the ineptitude of production or distribution. This is a rant about communication, and design. This is about, wherever you live or whatever your community’s current vaccine plan may be, the multitude of ways in which it almost assuredly does not make a lick of sense to an old person.

There is an adage that translates to “Nothing about us without us.” The concept is simple: Don’t make or do things for a population without input from that population. So I have to ask, did anybody who created any of the catastrophically useless vaccine signup websites out there ever talk to their grandmas?

My mother’s vaccination, unlike anything else about her care, has been straightforward. She is in a facility in New Jersey, the state with the highest nursing home death rate in the nation. When the vaccine was approved, long term care residents in the Garden State simply went to the front of the line. My mom didn’t have to figure out how to sign up online, or wait outside in the cold.

My mother-in-law’s story, in contrast, has been one of daily exasperation. It began with a terse email from her doctor, punting her to the New York State’s vaccine site. Here’s what happens when she goes there. A message informs her that “The Am I Eligible app is the quickest way to see if you’re eligible and make an appointment.”

Like roughly 60% of seniors, my mother in law doesn’t own a smartphone. But she can, presumably, fill out the eligibility requirement form and find out where to get an appointment. She can then attempt to make the single available appointment open in her area today, and discover when she tries to confirm it that it’s disappeared. Or she could try to book one a five-hour drive away, get sent to a page that reads, “Please Select an Event,” and realize she has to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page to get to a live link.

Our state’s site informs her, “Once you have successfully scheduled an appointment, you will receive a confirmation email that contains a barcode,” a system she definitely does not understand. If she’s like her neighbor couple in her Westchester suburb, she can then go downtown to the vaccine distribution facility and be turned away because they’ve run out, and start the whole process all over again.

I know all of this because my mother-in-law did not actually do any of these things today. My spouse did, as he does every day. (The New York state vaccine site, at the moment of this writing, bears a message that it’s “down for maintenance.”) His mother is 88, has the beginnings of dementia, and arthritis that makes standing and walking difficult. But, sure.

My mother-in-law, by the way, has boatloads of privilege. She has a professional caretaker who’s with her every weekday. She has a family that can do all of the heavy lifting of slogging through a process being conducted almost entirely via a technology she is deeply uncomfortable with, one that is riddled with bugs, glitches, errors and outdated, incorrect information. She has a group of friends in similar circumstances, who call each other when an appointment, briefly, opens up. It’s a desperate, stressful situation. Now imagine adding another layer of obstacles to all of this, like the one my neighbors in upper Manhattan have been facing.

Earlier this month, the state opened up the Fort Washington Armory for New Yorkers over the age of 65 “to fight back against those forces of inequality.” It’s in Washington Heights, a neighborhood where 69.5% of the population identifies as Hispanic, and has a poverty rate of 18.4%. But as The City reported from the Armory earlier this week, “At the door, most people entering appeared to be white and unfamiliar with the neighborhood…. None of the handful of guides and security guards outside directing people spoke Spanish.” After speaking to a dozen people who’d come in for vaccines, the publication found that ten of them were “suburbanites who are either retirees or work from home.” Only one, a 69-year-old Spanish-speaking man, said he lives in the neighborhood. (The Armory is now moving to reserve a majority of appointments for local residents, and adding Spanish-speaking staff.)

It’s true that not every area is facing as difficult a process. A colleague’s elderly aunts recently had a relatively smooth experience of appointment making and vaccine obtaining. But there are myriad problems and frustrations in communities across the country, and a common theme is that seniors with internet proficiency and supportive intermediaries are vastly privileged. An Associated Press story earlier this month notes that “16.5% of U.S. adults 65 and older lack internet access,” and that “more than 25% of Black people, about 21% of Hispanic people and over 28% of Native Americans 65 and older have no way to get online.”

Even for the fortunate, the process is daunting. On Thursday, Mindy Kaling posted a photo from her journey to Dodger Stadium with her dad and wrote, “We signed up for a slot online and I wanted to keep him company in the car because we thought we might have to wait hours. There’s a lot of stress for older Americans about getting the vaccine. Will it be far away from them? Will there be bathrooms? Will they have to wait in the cold? Will the paperwork be confusing? And like most of us adult children of older Americans, their stress becomes our stress because we are worried about our parents since we know how badly the elderly are treated, generally.”

The situation is additionally fraught because once a loved one manages to jump through all the hoops and get the vaccine, they have to come back and get the second dose. Which is, in a best case scenario, very well may involve a daughter or son having to assist them in getting to the site and getting home. Somebody who may be also homeschooling their kids right now, or unable to pay for gas because they lost their job. Somebody already in extreme circumstances. And at every turn, everything seems harder than it has to be.

My friend David, who works in the healthcare industry, recently sent me a screenshot of the signup form in his New Jersey town. The questionnaire offers a long list of yes/no questions, most of which require a negative reply — “Do you have a fever? Have you received another COVID-19 vaccine?” The last one, however, requires a yes — “Will you be available for your second dose in 3/4 weeks?” It’s easy to see how anyone could reflexively click in the same column down the line, because the form is literally designed to encourage it. And it’s easy to see how a person eager for the vaccine and qualified to receive it would unwittingly rule themselves out. This is the kind of negligent design that can truly do harm, especially to a vulnerable older person. It’s enraging.

David added, “There was a lot of ‘intelligence’ built into the website. If you started typing your address, they would try to look it up and figure out your whole address for you. Because the website was getting hammered so much, those pick list type things weren’t loading. It would just kind of freeze on the page.” It also asked for the applicant’s insurer, but offered an incomplete list of possibilities.

It’s heartening that plenty of generous, motivated individuals across the nation have been pitching in to help our older Americans, like the California doctor who acquired 500 doses and set up a vaccination station at a Lafayette middle school, or the Facebook groups that have sprung up to match seniors with volunteers willing to help them set up their appointments. And there is the hope every day that we are learning from mistakes made in the frenzy of trying to fix a disaster few of us could have ever comprehended just a year ago.

In the meantime, though, David says that “I think the most any of us can do is handhold. I have taken care of registering personally, I’ve done two or three neighbors already, and I have a couple more in mind for the next time that there’s vaccine available.” We love our parents and grandparents and neighbors and friends, and want them to be okay. So we take on the challenging job of getting them vaccinated. So we keep holding their hands. We keep filling out confusing forms and crashing government websites that were clearly not created with their habits or limitations in mind, as if they didn’t have any say in the story of a crisis that has so far killed 291,000 Americans over the age of 65, and climbing. And we keeping hoping somehow they won’t be counted among them.

Texas Republicans want to keep transgender women out of women’s school sports teams

Texas Republicans are again trying to limit the ways transgender youth can participate in athletics.

Lawmakers have filed legislation that would ban transgender girls and women who attend public K-12 schools, colleges and universities from playing on single-sex sports teams designated for girls and women.

One bill filed by Rep. Valoree Swanson, R-Spring, is similar to others filed across the country that are characterized by conservative advocates as trying to maintain fairness in women’s sports. Idaho passed a law last year called the “Fairness in Women’s Sports Act.” In Montana, a similar bill, called the “Save Women’s Sports Act,” advanced to the state Senate this week.

According to a tally from the American Civil Liberties Union, nine other states have similar bills moving through the legislative process this year, including Mississippi, Connecticut and Tennessee. According to Equality Texas, more states are also filing bills this year that would apply these policies to colleges as well.

The University Interscholastic League of Texas, which governs high school athletics and extracurricular activities, relies on students’ birth certificates to determine whether they participate in men’s or women’s athletics. Notably, the UIL will recognize changes made to birth certificates to alter their gender marker.

Texas universities follow National College Athletic Association rules for division athletics, and some apply similar policies to intramural sports. Texas A&M University and the University of Houston allow students to play on the intramural team of the gender they identify.

This year’s legislative session could see yet another wave of debates over civil rights for LGBTQ youth. The next four years are likely to feature federal battles with Republican-led states, with the Biden administration already pledging to apply discrimination protections to sexual orientation and gender identity, and rolling back the order that banned transgender people from serving in the U.S. military.

In previous sessions, Texas Republicans, like those in other states, unsuccessfully pursued so-called “bathroom bills” that would prevent transgender people from using the bathroom that matched their gender identity. Now, LGBTQ advocates said conservatives across the country are latching onto issues related to athletics and health care as the latest way to spread fear about transgender children using inaccurate information, despite opposition from medical and athletic associations.

“This is bathroom bill 3.0,” said Angela Hale, senior adviser at Equality Texas. “It’s very unsettling to transgender children who just want to live. They don’t want to have to come down to the Capitol and testify every single legislative session just so that they can live and go about their daily lives.”

Republican lawmakers also filed a bill that would make it a crime for doctors and mental health providers to provide care to children that affirms their gender identity or prescribe a treatment known as puberty blockers, characterizing these actions as “abuse.” Puberty blockers are reversible drugs often used by a transgender child who wants to delay puberty, including changes such as starting a period or deepening voice. The bill would also prohibit gender-confirming surgeries and hormone therapies.

Experts say the transition process for young children is more likely to involve social affirmations such as allowing them to wear clothing they like and choose their names and pronouns. A child in puberty might then take puberty blockers, with the consultation of a doctor. Later on, a young adult might consider surgery, experts say.

Advocates said lawmakers in at least five states have filed the bill restricting medical access for trans youth in tandem with the restrictive sports bill.

Swanson’s bill allows for co-ed intramural and interscholastic sports to continue at colleges and universities, but said a “biologically male student” cannot play on a team for “biologically female students.” The bill does not define what biologically male or female means. Swanson declined an interview but said in a statement that the bill is intended to protect women’s rights under Title IX, the federal civil rights law prohibiting sex-based discrimination in schools.

“This bill is a common sense measure that is sadly necessary in a world where male athletes are robbing women of both championship trophies and educational opportunities,” Swanson said in a statement Thursday. Her staff did not respond to questions.

It would also allow students to take legal action against a school or the UIL if they felt they were deprived an opportunity to play on a sports team due to violations of this bill, or if they’re retaliated against for reporting a school for violations under this law.

A Senate bill, filed by Sen. Charles Perry, R-Lubbock, would prevent transgender girls in traditional public schools and charters from playing on a girls sports team. The bill defines “biological sex” as the one assigned at the student’s birth and “correctly stated on the student’s official birth certificate.”

Perry said transgender girls — whom he referred to in an interview as “individuals who are quote confused” — could have an unfair advantage in strength and ability. “This is purely 100% devoted to the preservation of Title IX and allowing women to compete against women in their peer groups in that biological category, so they know they can have an equal and fighting chance based on ability and not over some political narrative of the day that undermines fairness,” he said.

Medical professionals have debunked this argument, with one study showing transgender people taking hormones did not have a significant performance advantage in distance running.

“Sixteen other states have passed transgender-friendly policies regarding sports and sports are not falling apart,” said Rep. Jessica González, D-Dallas, who is a member of the LGBTQ legislative caucus. “This bill is not brought by science, but it’s by discrimination.”

If the Legislature passes either of the bills, it’s likely to be challenged in the courts.

Idaho was the first state to pass a law seeking to block transgender youth from sports last March. The law has been challenged in federal court and has been blocked by a federal judge as the legal challenge proceeds through the courts.

U.S. representatives have also filed a bill that would make it a federal civil rights violation to allow transgender women to participate in girls sports. In Connecticut, three cisgender female athletes sued in federal court, arguing that competing against transgender female athletes violates their Title IX rights.

Multiple Texas universities did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the bill, but athletic directors at universities where similar bills have been filed expressed concern about repercussions from the NCAA, which already already has extensive guidelines for transgender athletes’ participation in college athletics. It’s unclear if this law would apply to NCAA sports, but it could impact whether the organization holds events in Texas. The NCAA also relocated several events in North Carolina after the state passed a so-called bathroom bill in 2016.

Texas lawmakers have tried to limit school sports for transgender students before. In 2017, Mack Beggs, then a high school junior, was required to compete on the women’s wrestling team, despite the fact that he was a transgender boy and taking testosterone to transition. He later publicly advocated for the UIL to change its regulations for trans athletes.

That legislative session, Rep. Bob Hall, R-Edgewood, filed a bill that would allow the UIL to disqualify students who take doctor-approved steroids, effectively banning transgender athletes receiving hormone therapy from participating. The bill passed the Senate but died in committee.

Charles Evangelista, a transgender man and student at the University of North Texas, was in high school when lawmakers debated the so-called bathroom bill. At the time, he was just starting to come out as transgender and remembers being “very scared” about what the legislation would mean for his life.

Now, he sees another wave of proposals that could strike fear into transgender youth once again.

LGBTQ advocates expressed similar concerns, citing data from the Trevor Project, which saw calls to its LGBTQ suicide hotline spike in the days after Texas introduced its bathroom bill in 2017.

Disclosure: Equality Texas, Texas A&M University, the University of Houston and the University of North Texas have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

Philip Roth and race: A legendary novelist’s troubling pattern

“Well, ain’ dat somethin’. De Jew, he wanna buy de bess playuh we done got! And how much you wanna pay, Jew?”
— Philip Roth, “The Great American Novel”

In the U.S. census I am, for good or bad, counted as Caucasian.
— Philip Roth, “The Counterlife”

The main rot in the minds of “academic” liberals like yourself, is that you take your own distortion of the world to be somehow more profound than the cracker’s.
— LeRoi Jones, “Reply to Philip Roth”

Fans and scholars alike tend to believe that Philip Roth wrote sporadically and sympathetically, though perhaps not entirely unproblematically, about Black people. The assumption is based on two well-known works. The first is the 1959 novella “Goodbye, Columbus.” Its Jewish protagonist, Neil Klugman, behaves protectively toward an African American kid who marvels at post-Impressionist paintings in the Newark Public Library. Neil shows a lot of concern for “the small colored boy”; he even dreams about him.

Then there’s “The Human Stain” (2000), whose plot revolves around a Black, non-Jewish scholar who passes as a white Jew. While not without its critics, this novel won the PEN/Faulkner Award. Like “Goodbye, Columbus,” it is often lauded for its thoughtful engagement with America’s racial dilemmas.

On the basis of those two texts, one might surmise that Roth was yet another Jewish liberal, doing his small part to extend the hand of friendship to another oppressed minority. If so, the author would be following in the footsteps of many 20th-century Jewish intellectuals, artists, and activists who made common cause with African Americans. This partnership between Blacks and Jews, often called the “Grand Alliance” or “Grand Coalition,” “is the stuff of legend, as it were. In recent years scholars have questioned how stable and robust this partnership actually was. In any case, the idea that Roth depicted African Americans sporadically, thoughtfully, and sympathetically is widespread. I will refer to this way of thinking as the “Alliance Paradigm.”

Yet a study of Roth’s entire fictional corpus reveals a much more complicated state of affairs. For starters, Roth did not write sporadically, but consistently, about African Americans. To help the reader grasp how consistently Roth engaged this subject in his fiction, I have tried to take stock of every available proof text. References to Black people or Black issues are present in 26 of his 28 book-length works of fiction. No fewer than 10 of his short stories touch upon the theme as well.

If a researcher were to scrutinize all of these texts, it would become evident that Roth’s representation of African American characters can be neither sympathetic nor thoughtful. From “The Box of Truths” (1952), until his finale, “Nemesis” (2010), we encounter: (1) a steady flow of minor characters who are Black, (2) disparaging comments about the Blacks of Newark, (3) racist banter uttered by white gentiles, (4) racist banter uttered by white Jews, (5) caricatures of Black English, (6) asides on the physiognomy of Black bodies, especially those of women, and, (7) occasional references to prominent African Americans.

What we are about to see is surprising. Roth’s sketches of African American (and African) characters are not infrequently racist. This reeks of a double standard; he railed against anti-Semitism in the very same stories in which he indulged in racist depictions. What is also surprising is that the patterns, and even some texts to which I’ll draw your attention, remain almost completely unremarked upon. This component of his writing has seldom been flagged by Roth scholars and critics.

These considerations will prompt me to suggest that we abandon the Alliance Paradigm. Roth’s African American portraiture, I will argue, makes better sense when contextualized within the complex, shifting relationship between Blacks and Jews in the United States. Roth’s fiction often reflected the antagonisms between these two supposed “allies,” albeit in a one-sided manner. What emerged were numerous representations of Blacks that are thoughtless and occasionally quite disturbing.

Fellas

As just noted, Roth’s representation of an African American boy in “Goodbye, Columbus” has generally been interpreted as well-meaning. He depicts a youth who has the precocity to hang around a library all day, peruse Gauguin’s paintings, and drop F-bombs. That’s one likable kid!

In the same narrative, our Jewish protagonist, Neil Klugman, is often symbolically twinned with the boy. The scholar Elèna Mortara has pointed out that when “Goodbye, Columbus” first appeared in the New Yorker in 1959, the accompanying illustration was of an African American child. As far as liberalism back then went (or could go), this was the type of story that challenged American racism.

Roth may have issued the same noble challenge in “Defender of the Faith” (1959). The story is narrated by Nathan Marx, a Jewish drill sergeant. He is frustrated by a trainee of dubious sincerity who plays the Jewish Card in order to gain religious accommodations. When Marx confers with a certain Captain Barrett about the matter, his white gentile superior expounds as follows: “Marx, I’d fight side by side with a nigger if the fella proved to me he was a man.” A few sentences later Captain Barrett asks, “You’re a Jewish fella, am I right, Marx?” Two “fellas” — one Black and one Jewish. These fellas are coupled in Captain Barrett’s thoughts, likely because our author wants to spotlight a broader linkage in the white Christian mind-set.

The same linkage is seen in “Letting Go.” A working-class white woman by the name of Theresa Haug recounts a story about a boy who is hit by a car and taken to “the Jewish hospital.” “They made a Jew out of him,” she observes, implying that he was forcibly circumcised. After giggling she adds, “He was a nigger, so must be.” Later in the work, the woman with the un-kosher surname chuckles again as she wonders “what it was like to do it with a Jew.” While contemplating that erotic possibility, “she remembered the story of the little nigger boy they had taken to the hospital back home.”

That white Christians are wont to connect these two minority groups is a grim American truth Roth is eager to expose. In “I Married a Communist,” we learn that when Ira Ringold was in the armed forces, “someone in the mess hall called him a Jew bastard. A nigger-loving Jew bastard.” Ira reveals that the culprit was “a southern hillbilly with a big mouth.”

White gentiles in Roth’s works don’t always speak about Blacks and Jews; sometimes they reflect solely on Blacks. In “When She Was Good” (1967), two families, the Bassarts and Sowerbys, are discussing the pros and cons of living in Chicago. Lloyd Bassart exclaims, “They’ve got a big colored problem down there, and I don’t envy them.” To which his nephew Roy responds: “It isn’t Negroes, Uncle Lloyd. You people think everything is Negroes — and how many Negroes do you actually know? Really know, to talk to? . . . I knew one who I used to talk to a lot. . . . He was a darn smart guy too. I had a lot of respect for him.” Roy’s cousin Ellie Sowerby chimes in: “I know a girl who dates a Negro. . . . She’s probably a red.” The assembled white folks then debate the possibility of befriending Blacks (some in favor), and dating Blacks (less enthusiasm for that).

Which brings us to “The Great American Novel.” The entire tale is recounted by Word A. Smith, an octogenarian baseball writer who traffics in odious stereotypes. He introduces us to a train conductor named George who, while “scratchin’ his woolly head,” comments, “Well, suh, day don’ say nuttin’ ’bout dat in de schedule.” A few pages later Ernest Hemingway enters the storyworld and describes Melville’s “Moby Dick” as follows: “Five hundred pages of blubber, one hundred pages of madman, and about twenty pages on how good niggers are with the harpoon.”

Elsewhere, Smith (and Roth) return to literary minstrelsy. We are told that Aunt Jemima, of flapjacks fame, is a cunning businesswoman who owns an entire Negro baseball league. One might expect that an accomplished entrepreneur like her wouldn’t speak like this: “howdydo, Reverend! Ain’t we honored, though!” In Smith’s other reminiscences, racial slurs drop freely from the mouths of white baseball players who speak of “coons” and “spades.”

About 300 leaden pages into “The Great American Novel,” Smith recounts a tale featuring the long-serving manager of a feckless baseball team known as the Ruppert Mundys. Ulysses S. Fairsmith is a fervent Christian, scarred by the memory of having tried to bring the gospel to Africa twenty years prior. Clad in his “khaki short pants, half-sleeved shirt, and pith helmet,” he dreamed of Christianizing the indigenes by introducing them to the delights of baseball. Roth goes all in here, devoting some 16 pages to recounting a religious mission gone terribly wrong. The section is deeply offensive, often to the point of unreadability. The account includes references to “the primitive interior of Africa,” “savage women” and “black devils.”

Upset about a rule preventing them from sliding into first base, the mercurial tribesmen revolt against Fairsmith. The missionary and his nephew are readied to be slaughtered and eaten by the men whom they tutored in America’s pastime. During the ensuing cannibalistic ceremony, Roth describes the ritualistic “deflowering” of virgins with baseball bats.

One would have to deploy considerable ingenuity to read these asides as anything other than gratuitous racist jokes. What rankles about these descriptions is the obvious delight the author seems to have taken in creating them. As he told Joyce Carol Oates about the vibe he adapted while working on “The Great American Novel”: “I tried to put my faith in the fun I was having. Writing as pleasure.”

A final example of how Roth’s white gentiles talk about Blacks can be found in the autofictional novel “Deception.” The work is comprised of chapter-length “fragments of conversation” between “Philip” and others. One exchange is with a Czech writer named Ivan. He is convinced that his wife, Olina, is having an affair with Andrew, a Black neighbor. There is almost no racial stereotype that Ivan doesn’t deploy: “It’s that nigger that does it. I don’t say ‘black person’ I say ‘nigger.’ . . . [H]e gives her an orgasm on his black prick. . . . He’s a typical pimp type. . . . Doesn’t know how to spell, writes like a child. This half-illiterate black guy. . . . Black guy doesn’t work. Lives off her unemployment benefits. . . . I couldn’t kiss ever again that mouth that sucked that long black prick.” Unhinged Ivan soon casts aspersions on “Philip’s” talent as a writer and accuses him of also having slept with his wife. “Philip” responds to Ivan by (1) denying that he is having an affair with Olina, and (2) taking offense at Ivan’s criticism of his writing (“So, my books stink too”). “Philip” does not raise any concerns about Ivan’s racist diatribe. A few pages later, “Philip” rants about an anti-Semitic incident he endured in London.

Cracks/Malignancies

We just encountered a slew of white Christians who served up some choice racial invective. Our interest now shifts to how Roth’s Jewish characters engage with Blacks.

Ira Ringold in “I Married a Communist” is nothing like any of the white gentiles we just encountered, nor like any of the Jews we shall meet below. His Communist convictions motivate him to actually seek out working-class Black people. Young Nathan Zuckerman accompanies Ira to Newark’s Black Third Ward and observes, “I’d never before imagined, let alone seen, a white person being so easygoing and at home with Negroes.” I have a question, though: If Nathan Zuckerman is recounting this story a little before the year 2000, why does he continually refer to Blacks as “Negroes”?

In any case, Ira engages in street-corner political banter with a group of Black men. While his exchanges with them reveal him to be confident of his Communist platitudes, he is ultimately respectful. Elsewhere, he displays the well-known condescension of the know-it-all comrade. This is evident as he harangues Wondrous, the cleaning woman who works in his wife’s Greenwich Village townhouse. Ira scolds her: “I don’t know how a Negro woman can get it into her head that the Democratic Party is going to stop breaking its promises to the Negro race.” He gets so mad that he threatens to throw a dish. To which Wondrous responds: “Do what you want, Mr. Ringold. Ain’t my dish.”

Yet, as far as Roth’s depictions of Jews speaking with, and reflecting on, Blacks, Ira is the least offensive of them all. In the 1962 “Letting Go,” our secular Jewish narrator, Gabe Wallach, introduces us to an acquaintance named Blair Stott. Of this man, Wallach says that he wore two masks: “Alabama Nigger and Uppity Nigger.” The description comes absolutely out of nowhere. It’s hard to tell why Gabe Wallach (or Roth) has taken the time to drop a slur like this into his narrative, unless Gabe wants to confess his racial hang-ups to us. Such a confession, however, would seem to have no connection to the story line.

Blair speaks what Roth imagines Black English sounds like. Thus, he uncorks sentences like this: “we is all of us taking a deserved rest, for we expended a prodigious, a fantastic, a burdensomely amount of laboriousness and energy.” African American characters often talk this way in Roth novels. “Who you supposed to be?” snarls a Black drug dealer in “Zuckerman Unbound.” In “The Anatomy Lesson,” we meet a cleaning woman, Olivia, described as “a small, bottom-heavy, earthbound stranger, the color of bittersweet chocolate.” Surprised to see Nathan Zuckerman in her place of work, Olivia exclaims: “Who you!’ . . . My God, you like t’ scared me to death. My heart just flutterin’. You say you Nathan? . . . Well, you a good-lookin’ man, ain’t you?”

The convoluted ways Blacks figure in the Jewish mind is insightfully explored in “Portnoy’s Complaint.” During his therapy, Alexander Portnoy reveals that he had Communist sympathies in his adolescence. As an eighth-grader he was lauded for his “courageous stand against bigotry and hatred.” The middle-schooler led a protest when African American singer Marian Anderson was not permitted to perform in Convention Hall. As an adult, Alexander works as the “Assistant Commissioner for the City of New York Commission on Human Opportunity” in the mayor’s office, where he defends the civil rights of indigent minorities.

Liberal Alex inveighs against his parents’ racism. He excoriates his mother’s insincere and patronizing attitude to Dorothy, the African American maid. As for his father, an insurance salesman, he offers this description:

He lurks about where the husbands sit out in the sunshine, trying to extract a few thin dimes from them before they have drunk themselves senseless on their bottles of “Morgan Davis” wine; he emerges from alleyways like a shot to catch between home and church the pious cleaning ladies, who are off in other people’s houses during the daylight hours of the week, and in hiding from him on weekday nights. “Uh-oh,” someone cries, “Mr Insurance Man here!” and even the children run for cover—the children, he says in disgust, so tell me, what hope is there for these niggers’ ever improving their lot?

The coarseness of his father incenses Alex: “And I tell you, if he ever uses the word nigger in my presence again, I will drive a real dagger into his fucking bigoted heart!”

It’s ironic that at the very moment Portnoy is decrying irrational hatred for others he is indulging in it as well. His 274-page oration reveals an individual teeming with resentment toward Poles, Irishmen, Puerto Ricans, Chinese, Italians, gays, women, all gentiles and, of course, Blacks. Such sentiments, needless to say, are surprising coming from liberal Alex. Norman Podhoretz, in a controversial essay, once confessed that “we white Americans are . . . so twisted and sick in our feelings about Negroes.” Via Alex, Roth demonstrates the contradictions of racial liberalism; he manages to draw our attention to a real crack and malignancy in the Jewish American psyche.

More evidence of how some Jews really feel about Blacks surfaces in a short piece entitled “On the Air.” John Updike, Roth proudly recalls, once described it as “a truly disgusting story.” The narrative, such as it is, centers on one M. Lippman, a Jewish talent agent, intent on convincing Albert Einstein to host a radio show. “Mostly I represent colored,” Lippman informs Einstein in a meandering letter. He references two tap dancers he works with (“Buck and Wing”). Lippman boasts that he is helping these young men “to raise themselves into a respectable life.”

Then we hear Lippman’s inner thoughts: “Who were Buck and Wing when he found them? . . . They were two dumb nigger kids giving ten-cent shines outside his shoe store.” Later on Lippman muses: “All he had set out to do was to take two little jigaboos who could already tap-dance better than they could walk, and teach them to do it without saying ‘shee-yit’ every word. And to get the lice off them.” By the time we learn that Lippman taught them “to eat a piece of watermelon with a knife and a fork,” the story has vindicated Updike’s verdict.

The fictional Jews in these Roth tales are every bit as bigoted toward African Americans as their white gentile counterparts. The question is, why?

What those mourning the fragility of American democracy get wrong

For many people, the lesson from the assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 – and more broadly from the experience of the last four years – is that American democracy has become newly and dangerously fragile.

That conclusion is overstated. In fact, American democracy has always been fragile. And it might be more precise to diagnose the United States as a fragile union rather than a fragile democracy. As President Joe Biden said in his inaugural address, national unity is “that most elusive of things.”

Certainly, faith in American democracy has been battered over the last year. Polls show that 1 in 4 Americans do not recognize Joe Biden as the legitimate winner of the 2020 election. The turn to violence on Capitol Hill was a disturbing attack on an important symbol of U.S. democracy.

But there are four other factors that should be considered to evaluate the true state of the nation. Taking these into account, what emerges is a picture of a country that, despite its long tradition of presenting itself as exceptional, looks a lot like the other struggling democracies of the world.

Democratic fragility is not new

First, fragility is not really new. It’s misleading to describe the United States as “the world’s oldest democracy,” as many observers have recently done. By modern definitions of the concept, the United States has only been a democracy for about 60 years. Despite constitutional guarantees, most Black Americans could not vote in important elections before the 1960s, nor did they have basic civil rights. Like many other countries, the United States is still working to consolidate democratic ideals.

Similarly, the struggle to contain political violence is not new. Washington has certainly seen its share of such violence. Since 1950, there have been multiple bombings and shootings at the U.S. Capitol and the White House. Troops have been deployed to keep order in Washington four times since World War I – during riots and unrest in 1919 and 1968, economic protests in 1932, and again in 2021. The route from the Capitol to the White House passes near the spots where Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, James Garfield was fatally shot in 1881, and Harry Truman was attacked in 1950.

Political instability is also a familiar feature of economic downturns. There were similar fears about the end of democracy during the 1970s, when the United States wrestled with inflation and unemployment, and during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Of course, those fears had some justification. Many people wondered whether democratic governments could rise to new challenges. But there is evidence from historical episodes like this that democracies do eventually adapt – indeed, that they are better at adapting than non-democratic systems like the Soviet Union, which collapsed in 1991.

Finally, the debate about American democracy is fixated excessively on politics at the national level. This fixation has been aggravated by the way that the media and internet have developed over the last 30 years. Political debate focuses more and more heavily on Washington. But the American political system also includes 50 state governments and 90,000 local governments. More than half a million people in the United States occupy a popularly elected office. Democratic practices may be imperfect, but they are extensive and not easily undone.

On balance, claims about the fragility of American democracy should be taken seriously, but with a sense of proportion. Events since the November 2020 election have been troubling, but they do not signal an impending collapse of America’s democratic experiment.

A crisis of unity

It might be more useful to think of the present crisis in other terms. The real difficulty confronting the country might be a fragile national union, rather than a fragile democracy.

Since the 1990s, the country has seen the emergence of deep fissures between what came to be called “red” and “blue” America – two camps with very different views about national priorities and the role of federal government in particular. The result has been increasing rancor and gridlock in Washington.

Again, this sort of division is not new to American politics. “The United States” did not become established in American speech as a singular rather than a plural noun until after the Civil War. Until the 1950s, it was commonplace to describe the United States as a composite of sections – North, South and West – with distinctive interests and cultures.

In 1932, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Frederick Jackson Turner compared the United States to Europe, describing it as a “federation of nations” held together through careful diplomacy.

It was only in the 1960s that this view of the United States faded away. Advances in transportation and communications seemed to forge the country into a single economic and cultural unit.

But politicians overestimated this transformation.

Return of old divisions

Since the 1990s, old divisions have re-emerged.

America’s current political class has not fully absorbed this reality. Too often, it has taken unity for granted, forgetting the country’s long history of sectional conflict. Because they took unity for granted, many new presidents in the modern era were tempted to launch their administrations with ambitious programs that galvanized followers while antagonizing opponents. However, this winner-take-all style may not be well suited to the needs of the present moment. It may aggravate divisions rather than rebuilding unity.

Only 20 years ago, many Americans – buoyed by an economic boom and the collapse of the Soviet Union – were convinced that their model of governance was on the brink of conquering the world. President George W. Bush declared American-style democracy to be the “single sustainable model for national success.” By contrast, many people today worry that this model is on the brink of collapse.

The hubris of the early 2000s was misguided, and so is the despair of 2021. Like many other countries, the United States is engaged in a never-ending effort to maintain unity, contain political violence and live up to democratic principles.

Alasdair S. Roberts, Director, School of Public Policy, University of Massachusetts Amherst

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

Sacha Baron Cohen trolls Rudy Giuliani yet again, culminating a year of cinematic resistance

It was a big week for actor Sacha Baron Cohen, who received Golden Globe and SAG Award nods for both his role as Kazakh journalist Borat Sagdiyev in Amazon’s “Borat” sequel and his turn as Abbie Hoffman, the activist and comedian whom Cohen played in Netflix’s “The Trial of the Chicago 7.” Both movies also earned additional nominations in their category and for other cast members, with a total of 11 nods all together.

Naturally, the funnyman used this moment in the sun to troll Rudy Giuliani, America’s Mayor and unexpected scene-stealer of “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.”

“I’m so honored — and in the event that we don’t win, I promise to hire Rudy Giuliani to contest the results,” he said in a statement released in response to the Globe nominations.

Baron Cohen also acknowledged the actual breakout star of the “Borat” sequel (sorry, Rudy), in addition to the man behind “Chicago 7.”

“These nominations are a tribute to the talented creative teams that led and supported both films from inception to this moment. I especially want to congratulate the visionary of ‘Chicago 7,’ Aaron Sorkin, and ‘Borat’s’ Tutar, the incredible Maria Bakalova,” he continued. “These two films are different, but they share a common theme — sometimes we have to protest injustice with our own farce.”

That last line is revealing in how Baron Cohen’s career has culminated in a confluence of cinematic resistance. On a surface level, the roles he played seem extremely different: a prankster who has no qualms about sprinting out of a luxury hotel in hot pink lingerie, and the real-life protester and founder of the Youth International Party. And while the films show Baron Cohen’s range as both a comedian and a dramatic actor, they are unified by the use of humor as a way to actively subvert and challenge corruption.

As such, it shouldn’t be a surprise that both movies released during 2020 and that Baron Cohen is now receiving his due. During a year marked, amid a global pandemic, by political chicanery and wild conspiracy theories that ultimately resulted in an attempted insurrection on the United States Capitol, he made the case for using or embodying absurdism to attack what’s laughably reprehensible about our society.

That concept is partially what inspired the actor to pull his iconic gray suit out of the closet and resurrect the character of Borat in 2020’s “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm,” in which his caricatured Kazakh reporter travels American with his teenage daughter Tutar (Maria Bakalova) on a bizarre mission. As Baron Cohen told the New York Times in October, he saw a huge change in American society from the first time he went to shoot “Borat” 15 years ago to the time he made the sequel.

“In 2005, you needed a character like Borat who was misogynist, racist, anti-Semitic to get people to reveal their inner prejudices,” he said. “Now those inner prejudices are overt. Racists are proud of being racists.” When the president is “an overt racist, an overt fascist,” he added, “it allows the rest of society to change their dialogue, too.

“My aim here was not to expose racism and anti-Semitism,” he said of the sequel. “The aim is to make people laugh, but we reveal the dangerous slide to authoritarianism.”

Over the course of the sequel’s 90 minutes, Baron Cohen’s Borat sneaks into CPAC dressed as Trump, hunkers down with some QAnon conspiracy theorists and brings us the now-infamous “shirt tuck” incident.

In a scene near the end of the film, Bakalova as Tutar goes undercover as a far-right journalist who scores an interview with Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani, to supposedly discuss the administration’s COVID-19 response. However, things devolve as Tutar flirts heavily with Guiliani, touching his knee several times.

Eventually, Tutar invites Giuliani into the hotel bedroom, in which hidden cameras catch Giuliani asking for her number, patting her backside and then lying back on the bed and putting his hand down his pants. Borat bursts into the room at that point to interrupt.

As Salon reported in October, Giuliani has maintained through several interviews that the scene was “doctored” footage.

“The Borat video is a complete fabrication. I was tucking in my shirt after taking off the recording equipment,” Giuliani wrote in a tweet on Oct. 21. “At no time before, during, or after the interview was I ever inappropriate. If Sacha Baron Cohen implies otherwise he is a stone-cold liar.”

Baron Cohen responded, “If he sees that as appropriate, then heaven knows what he’s intended to do with other women in hotel rooms with a glass of whiskey in his hand.” As Salon’s Roger Sollenberger reported, Giulliani had classified the scene as a political “hit job” “in retaliation for his recent smears on Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s son, Hunter.”

Although not quite as salacious, Baron Cohen’s role in “The Trial of the Chicago 7” fulfilled a similar function thanks to Abbie Hoffman’s real-life beliefs and actions. In an interview for the January cover story of “Variety,” he discussed how he was always drawn to Hoffman because he understood the power of humor to attract supporters to the peace movement.

“He knew that by becoming a standup he would have a greater impact on the crowd, and his aim was to influence people, to get people to take immense risks to fight the war in Vietnam,” says Baron Cohen. “He used humor to inspire followers, and he realized that absurdity was a way to undermine institutions that he thought were corrupt.”

As Baron Cohen continues to inspire with his outrageous and outspoken ways, one can’t help hope that he takes home at least one award for “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm,” if only to hear Giuliani’s name in the acceptance speech. Now that would be a great justice.

Here is a full list of Golden Globe nominations, and a full list of nominees for the Screen Actor Guild Awards.

My new favorite eggs — in five minutes flat

Every week in Genius Recipes — often with your help! — Food52 Founding Editor and lifelong Genius-hunter Kristen Miglore is unearthing recipes that will change the way you cook.

* * *

This recipe started as a fix for faster — much, much faster — egg salad, without having to boil and peel and cool and, with maddening unpredictability, tweeze bits of eggshell.

As a happy result, we all get egg salad in even better, more customizable form — warm, with crispy bits of ham and buttery-soft yolks, if that’s your thing. One former egg salad-phobe ate it for dinner four nights in a week. (Hi. I’m the phobe.)

All because, one night, Alex Talbot — half of the team behind Ideas in Food and Curiosity Doughnuts — didn’t feel like asking his wife Aki Kamozawa (the other half, who has more patience for peeling), to make their egg salad again. I’ll let them explain:

Alex: I really like egg salad.
Aki: He loves egg salad, and he doesn’t get it enough.
Alex: I do not get it enough. And part of it is because —
Aki: He won’t make it himself.
Alex: I won’t make it for myself. I don’t like peeling eggs, and everyone’s got a thousand ways to peel an egg, right?
Aki: Even we do, right? We have the steamed eggs.
Alex: Yeah, we have a thousand ways to peel an egg, but guess what? None of the ways actually work 100% . . . Here, you crack an egg, you cook it, and you cut it up and you dress it up, and you’ve got awesome egg salad. The other cool thing is you get warm egg salad — and warm egg salad is delicious.

Like all of their posts at Ideas in Food, the process is written to be flexible and whim-accommodating. Do you have a forgotten tuft of dill or wedge of lemon in your fridge? Not anymore. Or maybe some capers or bacon to sizzle in the pan first? Or nothing but eggs, mayo, and heels of bread? This will work too (trust me).

But even in its most elaborate form, it takes moments and is often ready before the toast. You don’t even need to chase eggs around a cutting board: Slashing with scissors makes quick work of them, much as they’re used in other parts of the world, from steak and noodles in Korean homes to pizza a taglio in Rome.

And best of all, by frying the eggs, you get to make egg salad exactly as you want it. Aki likes her eggs really tender with runny yolks, with pops of crunchy onion and celery, on soft bread. Alex goes for a more traditional egg salad texture: firmer-but-not-chalky yolks, on toasted bread. He’ll also happily eat it however Aki will cook it.

How will you make yours?

***

Recipe: Fried Egg Salad From Ideas in Food

Prep time: 5 minutes

Cook time: 5 minutes

Serves: 2

Ingredients

Butter or olive oil
Sliced onions, chopped ham, or other tasty mix-ins (optional)
Eggs
Mayonnaise
Finely chopped onions and celery, or other cold, crunchy vegetables (optional)
Salt and freshly ground black pepper, plus any other spices, herbs, or seasonings
Toast

Directions

Heat a nonstick pan over medium heat (a 10-inch pan is perfect for 6 eggs, aka 2 servings). Have a lid or sheet pan nearby to cover the pan. Add a knob of butter or a glug of oil to the pan, then add your onions, ham, or other ingredients you’ll be cooking along with the eggs. I like to make sure the onions get soft and translucent and the ham a little crispy.
Meanwhile, crack your eggs into a bowl so you can pour them into the pan all at once. Turn down the heat to medium-low, gently pour your eggs in (aiming them evenly around the pan), and cover the pan to let them gently steam and fry. Peek occasionally so you can take the eggs off the stove when they’re done to your liking. I like to jiggle the pan to make sure the yolks are a little runny and poke the whites with a spatula to make sure they’re set.
Slide the eggs (and any bonuses like onions and ham) into a mixing bowl and chop them up with scissors. Add your mayo, other seasonings, and any cold, crunchy vegetables if using. Gently mix it all together.
Serve it warm on toast for a treat, but any leftovers are delicious cold the next day, too.

Could a human enter a black hole to study it?

To solve the mysteries of black holes, a human should just venture into one. However, there is a rather complicated catch: A human can do this only if the respective black hole is supermassive and isolated, and if the person entering the black hole does not expect to report the findings to anyone in the entire universe.

We are both physicists who study black holes, albeit from a very safe distance. Black holes are among the most abundant astrophysical objects in our universe. These intriguing objects appear to be an essential ingredient in the evolution of the universe, from the Big Bang till present day. They probably had an impact on the formation of human life in our own galaxy.

Two types of black holes

The universe is littered with a vast zoo of different types of black holes.

They can vary by size and be electrically charged, the same way electrons or protons are in atoms. Some black holes actually spin. There are two types of black holes that are relevant to our discussion. The first does not rotate, is electrically neutral – that is, not positively or negatively charged — and has the mass of our Sun. The second type is a supermassive black hole, with a mass of millions to even billions times greater than that of our Sun.

Besides the mass difference between these two types of black holes, what also differentiates them is the distance from their center to their “event horizon” — a measure called radial distance. The event horizon of a black hole is the point of no return. Anything that passes this point will be swallowed by the black hole and forever vanish from our known universe.

The distance from a black hole’s center of mass to where gravity’s pull is too strong to overcome is called the event horizon. Leo and Shanshan, CC BY-ND

At the event horizon, the black hole’s gravity is so powerful that no amount of mechanical force can overcome or counteract it. Even light, the fastest-moving thing in our universe, cannot escape — hence the term “black hole.”

The radial size of the event horizon depends on the mass of the respective black hole and is key for a person to survive falling into one. For a black hole with a mass of our Sun (one solar mass), the event horizon will have a radius of just under 2 miles.

The supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, by contrast, has a mass of roughly 4 million solar masses, and it has an event horizon with a radius of 7.3 million miles or 17 solar radii.

Thus, someone falling into a stellar-size black hole will get much, much closer to the black hole’s center before passing the event horizon, as opposed to falling into a supermassive black hole.

This implies, due to the closeness of the black hole’s center, that the black hole’s pull on a person will differ by a factor of 1,000 billion times between head and toe, depending on which is leading the free fall. In other words, if the person is falling feet first, as they approach the event horizon of a stellar mass black hole, the gravitational pull on their feet will be exponentially larger compared to the black hole’s tug on their head.

The person would experience spaghettification, and most likely not survive being stretched into a long, thin noodlelike shape.

As the person approaches the event horizon of a a Sun-size black hole, the vast difference in gravitational pull between the inidvidual’s head and toes causes the person to stretch into a very long noodle, hence the term ‘spaghettification’. Leo and Shanshan Rodriguez, CC BY-ND

Now, a person falling into a supermassive black hole would reach the event horizon much farther from the the central source of gravitational pull, which means that the difference in gravitational pull between head and toe is nearly zero. Thus, the person would pass through the event horizon unaffected, not be stretched into a long, thin noodle, survive and float painlessly past the black hole’s horizon.

A person falling into a supermassive black hole would likely survive. Leo and Shanshan Rodriguez, CC BY-ND

Other considerations

Most black holes that we observe in the universe are surrounded by very hot disks of material, mostly comprising gas and dust or other objects like stars and planets that got too close to the horizon and fell into the black hole. These disks are called accretion disks and are very hot and turbulent. They are most certainly not hospitable and would make traveling into the black hole extremely dangerous.

To enter one safely, you would need to find a supermassive black hole that is completely isolated and not feeding on surrounding material, gas and or even stars.

Now, if a person found an isolated supermassive black hole suitable for scientific study and decided to venture in, everything observed or measured of the black hole interior would be confined within the black hole’s event horizon.

Keeping in mind that nothing can escape the gravitational pull beyond the event horizon, the in-falling person would not be able to send any information about their findings back out beyond this horizon. Their journey and findings would be lost to the rest of the entire universe for all time. But they would enjoy the adventure, for as long as they survived … maybe ….

Leo Rodriguez, Assistant Professor of Physics, Grinnell College and Shanshan Rodriguez, Assistant Professor of Physics, Grinnell College

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

Hawley’s old friend calls out the “Christian nationalist” senator for violating morals to gain power

An old friend called out Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) as a hypocrite and liar, and urged him to return to the Christian principles he’d once respected.

Thom Lambert, a corporate law professor at the University of Missouri School of Law, reacted to a column Hawley wrote for First Things on the GameStop stock market blowup and resulting suspension on trading by the Robinhood platform, which the senator claimed was an attack by elites on “the little guy.”

“[Josh Hawley] is lying,” Lambert tweeted. “I hate to say that of a friend, but it’s true. He’s saying things he knows are false. As many have explained, Robinhood halted certain trading to deal with a liquidity crisis. He knows there was no conspiracy to protect hedge funds.”

Lambert bashed the Missouri Republican — who graduated from Stanford University and then Yale Law School — for railing against “coastal elites” in an effort to “endear” himself “to regular folks,” all the while lying about demonstrable facts on any number of important issues.

“He’s said stuff he knows isn’t true,” Lambert wrote. “Just like he’s done when discussing Section 230. And the First Amendment. And the antitrust laws. And the validity of election challenges.”

“I know [Josh Hawley] to be a good man,” Lambert wrote. “We’ve discussed matters of faith, and I truly believe he desires to glorify God by doing the right thing. So why does he say things that he knows are not true and that so harmfully divide people?”

Lambert, who tried to recruit Hawley to attend Mizzou Law, said he believes the senator thinks those stances will help him win elections, which will then empower him to make the policy changes he believes necessary — and which his old friend often agrees with — but the law professor shamed his reasoning.

“It’s an ‘end justifies the means’ thing,” Lambert wrote. “The problem is that the end doesn’t justify the means, at least not for Christians. Jesus clearly taught that his followers are to *be* certain sorts of people, not to achieve certain ends. And a smart person who misleads others to gain power isn’t who we’re to be.”

The law professor pointed out the moral flaw in the Christian nationalism that Hawley and many other Republicans have embraced.

“Christian virtue — truthfulness, kindness, humility, peacemaking — must come first,” Lambert wrote. “‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.'”

“This new breed of Christian nationalist may retort, ‘Yeah, that’s a recipe for continued electoral defeat and ultimately anti-Christian policies,'” he added. “To which Jesus responds, ‘What doth it profit a man to gain the whole world and yet lose his soul?'”

This new breed of Christian nationalist may retort, “Yeah, that’s a recipe for continued electoral defeat and ultimately anti-Christian policies.” To which Jesus responds, “What doth it profit a man to gain the whole world and yet lose his soul?”12/x

— Thom Lambert (@profthomlambert) February 4, 2021

Food guidelines change but fail to take cultures into account

The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services have once again developed new food guidelines for Americans that urge people to customize a diet of nutrient-dense food. For the first time, they make recommendations for infant nutrition and for different stages of life.

But, as in past iterations, they lack seasoning. They do not acknowledge the nuances of culture and ethnicity at the heart of how Americans feed themselves.

Congress requires a revision of these guidelines every five years to ensure they reflect the best available science and respond to the general population’s health needs.

Ethnic variations have been suggested for years, but there is still little guidance given to Americans of different backgrounds on how to eat more healthfully.

“There’s different ways you can be racist,” said Esosa Edosomwan, a certified nutrition specialist and behavioral coach in Washington, D.C. “You can be racist by omitting people, by making guidelines that only cater to a specific group.” Edosomwan — a Nigerian American also known as the Raw Girl — began her nutrition journey while trying to find a diet that would help alleviate persistent acne. She found a raw food class and began writing about her food-as-medicine reeducation on her blog, Raw Girl Toxic World.

“I was trying to figure out what I could become that would allow me to treat people with nutrition,” she said. “I saw mostly white women in this field that were celebrity nutritionists.”

“A white dietitian, she’s probably going to tell you to have some Greek yogurt with a handful of almonds and a serving of protein the size of your fist, when what you really want is egusi soup,” Edosomwan said, referring to the West African dish made from the ground, nutrient-dense egusi seed, vegetables and meat or fish. Food is a big part of culture, and you can’t dismiss where a client comes from, she said. Her clients are encouraged to cook within their culture, but to make changes to ingredients when needed to improve nutritional quality.

“These guidelines are completely incompatible with us achieving our best health,” Edosomwan said of the government guidelines. Statistics bear this out. According to a 2017 JAMA study, nearly half of all U.S. deaths from heart disease, stroke and Type 2 diabetes may be attributed in part to poor diet. These health conditions disproportionately affect people of color. For instance, 11.7% of Black people, 12.5% of Hispanics and 9.2% of non-Hispanic Asians have been diagnosed with diabetes, versus 7.5% of non-Hispanic whites, according to the 2020 National Diabetes Statistics Report.

The USDA boasts a long history of providing “science-based dietary guidance to the American public” and frequently revising it. It goes back to before World War II. An attempt to correct overeating came with the “Food Pyramid” — first published in 1992. The recommendations have more recently been branded simply as “My Plate,” with an app that can be downloaded to any mobile device. But simplifying the recommendations may make them less relevant.

“Culture is everything,” said Inez Sobczak, certified nutritionist and owner of Fit-Nez in Arlington, Virginia. Sobczak was born in Miami to Cuban refugees and has been a nutritionist for 15 years, specializing in weight loss, hormone management and emotional and crisis eating.

While USDA guidelines can’t account for every food culture, Sobczak said, they could be more inclusive. And while she can’t create a new food pyramid overnight — it’s a more complicated process than one would think — she tries to teach people of color how to eat better.

Oldways, a Boston-based organization, has been trying for decades. It first developed a Mediterranean food pyramid in 1993 and has since created charts for African, Latin American and Asian diets, as well as ones for vegetarians and vegans. It also offers classes, such as their six-week Taste of African heritage program. Kelly Toups, director of nutrition at Oldways, said the organization also participates in sessions with the USDA. But not much has changed.

“It would be great to see more cultural representations more explicitly shown in the guidelines,” she said.

Why has it never happened? Partly because the process is elaborate: A government committee of about 20 scientists and health experts study the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. The survey attempts to discover what people are eating and how healthy they are. The interviews, conducted in either English or Spanish, leave out Americans who speak other languages.

Next, the committee conducts “food pattern modeling” by looking at different food groups, the nutrients they provide and how much of each group is needed at each stage of life to establish recommendations.

These recommendations are set by age and gender but do not consider variables such as ethnicity, geographic location or access to healthy foods. “If I had to guess, you’re mostly looking at things that are available in typical grocery stores in the U.S.,” said Sarah Reinhardt, the lead food systems and health analyst in the food and environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

In July the USDA released a whopping 835-page scientific report that formed the basis for the 2020-2025 Dietary Guidelines, released at the end of December.

Wait, there’s more. The federal committee also examines piles of food research. But it cannot evaluate research that isn’t available. Vegetarian and Mediterranean diets have been rigorously examined, but not many studies are looking at West African or Native American diets, for example.

The USDA acknowledges this gap. In the 2020 report, the members highlighted the issue. “Nutrition science would benefit from scientists in the field conducting primary research in more diverse populations with varying age groups and different racial, ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds,” a USDA spokesperson said.

Still, the food industry dominates and guides the discussion. Due to a lack of public funding, Reinhardt said, a lot of nutrition research is funded by industry. “Science isn’t unbiased. It really depends on who is setting the agenda,” she said.

One issue is that the African American diet isn’t a monolith. “There are many immigrants in this country who are Black but hail from different cultural backgrounds,” Edosomwam said.

For instance, the African diet involves lots of tubers — things like yams and cassava, she said. But some African American diets, especially those traced back to slavery, are based on the “soul food” concept, which comes from the practice of making meals from leftover scraps that slave owners would allow them to eat — foods such as pig intestines, called chitterlings.

“Cultural foods and traditions matter,” she said. But part of the challenge is helping people “reimagine these dishes to make them healthier by changing the ingredients and creating new traditions.” Unfortunately, she added, “there’s no plant-based substitute for chitterlings.”

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

A new COVID vaccine is 66% effective — but how much does vaccine efficacy matter?

Last week, Novavax released results from its COVID-19 vaccine trials that are raising concerns in the United States as new, more transmissible — and perhaps more deadly — variants emerge. In Britain, where a more transmissible strain known as s B.1.1.7 is the dominant strain, the two-dose vaccine had an efficacy rate of nearly 89.4 percent. But in South Africa, where the strain B.1.351 is predominantly circulating, the efficacy rate decreased to 50 percent.

Clinical trial data from Johnson and Johson yielded similar results. The company’s single-shot vaccine had 66 percent efficacy in a large-scale trial which spanned three continents. In the US, the vaccine’s efficacy reached 72 percent. In South Africa, it was 57 percent.

While the headlines communicating the news of reduced efficacy might seem alarming, epidemiologists say it’s not time to panic yet. In the world of vaccines, 50 percent efficacy is still impressive.

“The flu vaccine has an efficacy of 36 percent,” said Dr. George Rutherford, a professor of epidemiology at the University of California, San Francisco. “The fact that we set the bar at 95 is just phenomenal; and that’s the best vaccine we have, which is the measles vaccine.”

Both the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are over 90 percent, too.

Rutherford said that news about the Johnson & Johnson and Novavax vaccines’ protecting against the new variant is “very encouraging.”

“That’s solid protection,” Rutherford said.

Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, agreed.

“You have to remember that that 50 percent number reflects how effective it is at preventing symptomatic disease, so that’s not the same thing as severe disease, death and hospitalization, where it is highly effective,” Adalja said. “So the proper story of the Novavax vaccine is that even in the face of the South African variant, the Novavax vaccine prevents severe disease from COVID-19, prevents deaths from COVID-19, prevents hospitalization from COVID-19.”

As explained by the World Health Organization, vaccine efficacy is the percentage of “reduction in disease incidence in a vaccinated group compared to an unvaccinated group under optimal conditions.” This shouldn’t be confused with vaccine effectiveness, which is the “ability of vaccine[s] to prevent outcomes of interest in the ‘real world.'”

Experts warned in the The BMJ that comparing the lower efficacy rate to higher ones is a “mistake,” especially considering how Johnson & Johnson is expected to be a game-changer in the international vaccine roll-out. Unlike the Moderna, Pfizer and Novavax vaccines, which all require two shots, Johnson & Johnson only requires one. It also has lower storage requirements that make it more flexible to store and administer.

“The real headline result is that a single shot vaccine, capable of easy long term storage and administration, provided complete protection against hospitalisation and death,” said Kevin Marsh, professor of tropical medicine at the University of Oxford, in The BMJ. “This is important, because the immediate requirement of vaccination globally is to limit deaths as quickly as possible.”

The variant B.1.351 first emerged in Durban, South Africa. Scientists were alarmed that the mutation of the virus is at the SARS-CoV-2 Spike, disguising its appearance to the immune system, which can make it easier to bypass immune protection. This is why scientists are seeing a decrease in efficacy in the vaccine, which is what they predicted would be the case from the start.

There is cause for concern that the coronavirus is mutating where it is. Yet any marginally efficacious vaccine will help stop the spread of the coronavirus. That will have a domino effect, as lower transmission means fewer viruses replicating, and therefore mutating.

“Viruses cannot mutate if they can’t replicate,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on Monday. “If you stop their replication by vaccinating widely … not only are you going to protect individuals from getting disease, but you are going to prevent the emergence of variants.”

Adalja told Salon the goal right now isn’t to eradicate the coronavirus, but instead to decrease severe outcomes.

“We’re not getting rid of this, this is not going to be eradicated like Smallpox,” he said. “What we’re trying to do is defang this virus, make it something that’s more like the other coronaviruses that cause 25 percent of our common colds by giving people immunity through a vaccine . . . so that’s what these vaccines are doing, people are forgetting that the end game here is to prevent death.”

But what if new variants emerge, and become smart enough to completely outwit our vaccines? Well, then, scientists will have to modify the vaccines. Adalja said it’s “unclear” at this point if that is something we will have to do in the future, but if we do, it’s relatively “easy to do.”

“Novavax uses a recombinant platform, which is very easy to modify,” Adalja said.

Rutherford said that the vaccines might need to be modified “as this virus evolves.” Still, he’s encouraged by news, specifically what has been making its way into the Israeli press. A man who previously recovered from COVID-19 got reinfected with the B.1.351 strain, but the second time around he had very little in the way of symptoms.

“Naturally acquired immunity seems to have some level of protection against serious disease, which is what we’re trying to do,” Rutherford said.

The Capitol raid, the Trump inauguration and COINTELPRO: Protest and “terrorism”

Everyone should take advantage of a quiet moment to imagine what might have occurred if the Jan. 6 insurrectionist mob had succeeded in its objectives. Then-Vice President Mike Pence could well have died in an act of political assassination. Not far from his corpse, several members of Congress might have also been murdered. It is likely that the right-wing traitors would have also taken other elected officials as hostages, demanding that the Senate resort to extralegal measures to install Donald Trump as dictator, and effectively destroy American democracy.

As bombs exploded around the Capitol, authority would have then fallen on Trump himself to summon the U.S. military to rescue the hostages, capture or kill the terrorists, and ensure that Joe Biden become president. Given the improbability of Trump sabotaging his own path to power, the country would have collapsed into such chaos and violence that it would have resembled a second civil war.

No aspect of this dystopian nightmare is unfathomable. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., has offered a riveting and deeply moving account of hearing members of the insurrectionist mob searching for her on the other side of the door to the bathroom where she was hiding. According to multiple reports, the same maniacs who were chanting, “Hang Mike Pence” entered a corridor merely one minute after Secret Service agents and Capitol police escorted him out of the area. Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., has said as she lay on the floor, her cheek pressed against the cold tile of the rotunda, she was “thrown back in time” to the 1978 Jonestown massacre in Guyana that she survived while on an official visit with her then-employer, Rep. Leo Ryan, whom the Jonestown cultists murdered.

It is equally easy to imagine how law enforcement agencies might have responded to the siege of the Capitol — if they treated it with the urgency that the threat demands.

An attempted coup-d’état seems slightly worse than acts of petty vandalism, but no one would know it by the example of the Department of Justice.

Various activists organized a protest against the inauguration of Donald Trump in 2017, calling their organization and the demonstration itself, “Disrupt J20.” Although that surreal day might feel like it took place decades ago, some observers might remember that a few J20 participants resorted to property destruction, damaging some businesses and offices near the Washington Mall. There was reportedly about $100,000 worth of damage.

Treating vandalism as the worst crime since the assassination of Lincoln, the Justice Department not only pressed charges against the individual vandals, but in what now appears as the richest of ironies, sought to charge the demonstration organizers with inciting others to riot and conspiracy to riot. During the “investigation,” D.C. Metropolitan police raided the house of a Disrupt J20 activist. Prosecutors even issued a warrant to obtain information from DreamHost, a web host provider, in an attempt to identify every visitor of the Disrupt J20 website. They also requested the Facebook account details for every American who had “liked” the organization’s social media account, whether or not they had actually attended the rally. Fortunately, the warrants did not survive legal challenges, and at least temporarily, civil liberties survived the attempted assault.

The hypocrisy of the Republican Party is barely worth even mentioning at this point, but it is worth nothing that Republicans in Florida, Missouri and North Dakota have introduced bills that would give immunity to motorists who strike protesters with their vehicles, at least if those protesters are “blocking traffic” and the driver can claim it was an “accident.” Curiously, vehicular homicide is never cited as an example of the insidious “cancel culture” responsible for the destruction of free speech. The same goes for a Republican proposal in the state of Washington to reclassify as a felony civil disobedience that prosecutors deem “economic terrorism.” Perhaps a teenager who throws a rock through the window of a Starbucks can make friends at Gitmo.

It certainly wouldn’t be ethical or wise for the left to advocate that the federal government resort to the same unconstitutional measures against the Jan. 6 coup planners and participants, but there is a vexing absence of creativity and aggression in what agencies are apparently prepared to do to prevent future acts of political violence. Journalists have identified various Republican groups responsible for funding the rally that led to the siege, yet there has been no evident consideration of financially crippling them. The Canadian government has officially declared the Proud Boys a terrorist group. Why hasn’t the U.S.?

The problem is that Americans expect the FBI, the ATF and other law enforcement agencies to prevent and punishment attacks on democracy when those same agencies have a history of attacking throughout their entire existence. This is one reason, among many, why the liberal faith in current and retired officials of the FBI and CIA as heroes of the anti-Trump “resistance” was, to be as charitable as possible, stunningly naïve.

As extreme as the Republican agenda to suppress free speech and punish dissent might seem, it is only one link in a bipartisan chain wrapped around the activist or radical left for centuries.

Those looking for examples could almost pick a year at random to find brutal repression of the abolition movement, the labor movement or the civil rights movement, but one particularly powerful illustration of the U.S. government’s anti-democracy aggression is the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program, better known as COINTELPRO.

Beginning in 1956, COINTELPRO was an FBI project to undermine any form of activism that challenged the prevailing power system — at least from the left. COINTELPRO operated with the full knowledge of longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and multiple presidents – surveilling, harassing, bankrupting, discrediting and even killing leaders of Marxist and socialist groups, the Black Power movement, the nascent environmental movement, the American Indian Movement and Puerto Rican independence groups. Even Martin Luther King, who famously advocated nonviolence as paramount to political protest, was on the receiving end of a government-sanctioned campaign of unconstitutional monitoring and abuse (as documented in the new film “MLK/FBI”).

FBI tactics to demolish dissent included convincing the IRS to audit activists, ruining careers and marriages through reputational destruction, and the planting of evidence to file false charges against dissidents.

Fred Hampton, the charismatic leader of the Black Panthers in Chicago, was one of the worst victims. According to the testimony of former officers and leaked government documents, the FBI enlisted the Chicago Police to murder Hampton in a raid, and make it look like a shootout. (Hampton is the subject of another new film, “Judas and the Black Messiah.”)

COINTELPRO is a stark illustration of how the U.S. government has used the FBI, and other law enforcement and intelligence agencies, not to punish attacks on democracy, but to paralyze actual democracy.

To disabuse anyone of the comforting delusion that such suppression of democratic activity was only an artifact of the Cold War, we can revisit the ancient history of 2011. The Partnership for Civil Justice obtained documents from FBI field offices around the country in that year showing a coordinated effort to conduct surveillance against the Occupy Wall Street movement. Because of this surveillance, authorities were able to block off one location where OWS activists intended to establish a camp in New York.

The Partnership for Civil Justice concluded: “These documents show that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are treating protests against the corporate and banking structure of America as potential criminal and terrorist activity.”

A pattern begins to emerge with phrases like “protests against the corporate and banking structure” and “economic terrorism,” but how does law enforcement and intelligence gathering react to genuine threats against the lives of Americans and the political stability of the country?

In 2009, Daryl Johnson, a leading analyst with the Department of Homeland Security, issued an assiduously researched report warning that the domestic terror threat from white supremacists, self-styled militia revolutionaries and other anti-government extremists had become severe. He specifically cautioned that although right-wing radicals are a small proportion of military veterans, many have had extensive military training and ca potentially succeed at planning attacks and building bombs.

Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, who prior to 9/11 was responsible for the worst terrorist atrocity on American soil, was a military veteran acting according to his racist and anti-government ideology.

When Johnson’s report leaked to the press, there was widespread outrage — not at the thought of widespread right-wing violence , but at the “thinly veiled innuendo against Republicans,” to quote Sen. Rand Paul at the time.

The Department of Homeland Security, under Barack Obama’s authority, dissolved Johnson’s team and buried the report. Since then, FBI statistics reveal that right wing extremists have committed the overwhelming majority of terrorist attacks in the United States, while the Anti-Defamation League has tracked a steady rise in hate crimes at the hands of white supremacists.

Among the most horrific crimes were the mass shooting at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin in 2012, the massacre of Black worshippers in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015, the “Unite the Right” demonstration in Charlottesville in 2017, the shootings at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, and the massacre of Latino shoppers in an El Paso Walmart store in 2019

None of this seemed to give the Trump administration pause when it ended funding for Life After Hate, one of the only programs in the country that works to de-radicalize members of neo-Nazi organizations.

In recent years, far-right Trump supporters in recent years have also planned the assassination of Democratic officials, including, to use one journalistic assessment, the “frighteningly sophisticated” plot to abduct and kill Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. The American public blasé reaction makes one wonder how the response might differ if these murderous plots had been the work of Muslim immigrants.

The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security kept the parks of New York safe from the Occupy Wall Street threat, but somehow missed the publicly accessible chatter of violence and coup-plotting leading up to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

Far-right extremists posted messages to Parler in the days leading up to the inciter-in-chief’s “Stop the Steal” rally, writing, “On January 6th, we will start systematically assassinating liberal leaders” and “It starts on the 6th, civil war 2.”

Despite these brazen pronouncements, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security were missing in action as Trump’s army of zealots stormed the Capitol, beating a police officer to death and severely injuring several others. The National Guard was absent, thanks to suspicious denials or delays in response to requests from the mayor of Washington and the governor of Maryland. Even the city and Capitol police presence was dangerously thin — the latter at least partially the result of police leadership and the federal government ignoring warnings from Black officers about the lethal prevalence of racism within the department.

Sharon Blackmon-Malloy, a retired Capitol Police lieutenant and current vice president of the U.S. Capitol Black Police Association, went so far as to say, “We got Jan. 6 because no one took us seriously.”

Efforts to destroy right-wing terrorism and white supremacy will certainly improve now that Donald Trump, their most powerful enabler, is out of the White House. President Biden has indicated that he takes the domestic terrorist threat seriously, and Democratic leaders of Congress are unlikely to forget that their lives were in danger on Jan. 6.

The most overtly deranged Republican member of Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, has been stripped of her committee assignments, but there has been little discussion of expelling or punishing Sens. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, or other elected officials who encouraged the homicidal mob. If Senate Republicans fail to convict Donald Trump in his upcoming impeachment trial, it will confirm, for the thousandth time, that they are more devoted to virtue-signaling for their demented base than they are to the health and welfare of American democracy.

As far as the internal dynamics at law enforcement and national security agencies are concerned, history shows there is little reason for optimism. The increasing right-wing tilt of police culture, and the unwritten charter to treat “protests against the banking and corporate structure” as apocalyptic — while shrugging off actual right-wing terrorism — combine to leave the United States uniquely ill-equipped to handle the escalating dangers of far-right fanatics.

This is an old story, dating clear back to the end of Reconstruction when the Ku Klux Klan was able to run wild, terrorizing and lynching Black people, along with anyone else who they felt threatened white supremacy. If the obvious question is how many warnings the American people will ignore, the more relevant and frightening one may be how many more warnings we will get.

Indirect deaths: The massive and unseen costs of America’s post-9/11 wars at home and abroad

“I got out of the Marines and within a few years, 15 of my buddies had killed themselves,” one veteran rifleman who served two tours in both Afghanistan and Iraq between 2003 and 2011 said to me recently. “One minute they belonged and the next, they were out, and they couldn’t fit in. They had nowhere to work, no one who related to them. And they had these PTSD symptoms that made them react in ways other Americans didn’t.”

This veteran’s remark may seem striking to many Americans who watched this country’s post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere unfold in an early display of pyrotechnic air raids and lines of troops and tanks moving through desert landscapes, and then essentially stopped paying attention. As a co-founder of Brown University’s Costs of War Project, as well as a military spouse who has written about and lived in a reasonably up-close-and-personal way through the costs of almost two decades of war in the Greater Middle East and Africa, my Marine acquaintance’s comments didn’t surprise me.

Quite the opposite. In the sort of bitter terms I’m used to, they only confirmed what I already knew: that most of war’s suffering doesn’t happen in the moment of combat amid the bullets, bombs, and ever-more-sophisticated IEDs on America’s foreign battlefields. Most of it, whether for soldiers or civilians, happens indirectly, thanks to the way war destroys people’s minds, its wear and tear on their bodies, and what it does to the delicate systems that uphold society’s functioning like hospitals, roads, schools, and most of all, families and communities that must survive amid so much loss.

Combat deaths: The tip of the iceberg

A major task of the Costs of War Project has been to document the death toll among uniformed American troops from our post-9/11 wars, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq. Compared to the 400,000 American deaths (and still climbing) from Covid-19 in less than a year, the approximately 7,000 American military deaths from those wars over almost two decades seem, if anything, small indeed (though, of course, that total doesn’t include thousands of military contractors who also fought and died on the American side). Even for me, as an activist and also a psychotherapist who bears witness to human suffering on a fairly regular basis, it’s easy enough to grow desensitized to the words “more than 7,000,” since my life hasn’t been threatened by combat daily.

Indeed, 7,000 is a small number compared not just to COVID-19 deaths here but to the 335,000-plus deaths of civilians in our war zones since 2001. It doesn’t even measure up to the 110,000 (and counting) Iraqi, Afghan and other allied soldiers and police killed in our wars. However, 7,000 isn’t so small when you think about what the loss of one life in combat means to the larger circle of people in that person’s community.

To focus only on the numbers of American combat deaths ignores two key issues. First, every single combat death in Iraq and Afghanistan has ripple effects here at home. As the wife of a submarine officer who has completed four sea tours and who, as a Pentagon staffer, has had to deal with war’s carnage in detail, I’ve been intimately involved in numerous communities grieving over military deaths and sustaining wounds years after the bodies have been buried. Parents, spouses, children, siblings and friends of soldiers who have been killed in action live with survivor’s guilt, depression, anxiety and sometimes addiction to alcohol or drugs.

Families, many with young children, struggle to pay the rent, purchase food, or cover health care premiums and copays after losing the person who was often the sole source of family income. Communities have lost workers, volunteers and neighbors at a time of mass illness and unrest just when we need those who can sustain intense pressure, problem solve, and work across class, party and racial lines — in other words, our soldiers. (And yes, while the storming of the Capitol earlier this month included military veterans, I have no doubt that the majority of U.S. troops and veterans would prefer to be shot before getting involved in such a nightmare.)

Second, as the testimony of the former Marine I interviewed suggests, many people suffer and die long after the battles they fought in are over. Social scientists still know very little about the magnitude of deaths because of — but not in — war’s battles. Still, a 2008 study by the Geneva Declaration Secretariat estimated that indirect deaths from war are at least four times as high as deaths sustained in combat.

At the Costs of War Project, we’ve started to examine the effects of war on human health and mortality, particularly in America’s war zones. There, people die in childbirth because hospitals or clinics have been destroyed. They die because there are no longer the doctors or the necessary equipment to detect cancer early enough or even more common problems like infections. They die because roads have been bombed or are unsafe to travel on. They die from malnutrition because farms, factories, and the infrastructure to transport food have all been reduced to rubble. They die because the only things available and affordable to anesthetize them from emotional and physical pain may be opioids, alcohol or other dangerous substances. They die because the health care workers who might have treated them for, or immunized them against, once obsolete illnesses like polio have been intimidated from doing their work. And of course, as is evident from our own skyrocketing military suicide rates, they die by their own hands.

It’s very hard to count up such deaths, but as a therapist who works with U.S. military families and people who have emigrated from dozens of often war-torn countries around the world, the mechanisms by which war creates indirect death seem all too clear to me: you find that, in the post-war moment, you can’t sleep, let alone get through your day, without debris on the highway, a strange look from someone or an unexpected loud noise outside sparking terror.

If the stress hormones coursing through your body don’t wreak their own havoc in the form of painful chronic illnesses like fibromyalgia or mental illnesses like depression and anxiety, then the methods you use to cope like overeating, reckless driving or substance abuse, very well might. If you are a child or the spouse of someone who has lived through repeated deployments to America’s 21st-century wars, then there’s a significant chance you’ll be on the receiving end of physical violence from someone who lacks the tools and self-control to deal peacefully. We aren’t counting or even describing such injuries and the deaths that can sometimes result from them, but we do need to find a way.

A gaping hole in our knowledge

My colleagues and I have started to examine the indirect costs of war through interviews with people who have born witness to war or lived through it, as has the U.S. government through its own limited collection of statistics. For example, in 2018, some 18 American active-duty military personnel or veterans died by suicide each day. (Yes, daily.) But all we really know so far is this: self-inflicted deaths from violence, car accidents, substance abuse, and chronic stress that can be traced back to this country’s post-9/11 wars are problems that plague military communities, and they didn’t exist at this magnitude before Washington decided to respond to the 9/11 attacks by invading Afghanistan and then Iraq.

Still, we have remarkably little information about the scope and nature of such problems. I’ll tell you what I do know with certainty, though: The only consistent and cohesive institutions sustaining troops home from America’s battle zones are the “families,” formal and informal, of service members and the communities in which they live — not just their spouses and children, but also extended families, neighbors and friends. When it comes to the more formal support structures — Veterans Affairs hospitals and outpatient clinics, providers that accept military insurance, small nonprofits that provide recreational and other forms of support and the like — there just aren’t enough of them.

It’s common knowledge in my community that referral processes and wait times for such aid are often long and stressful. If you’re a veteran seeking help, it’s likely that you’ll find yourself having to switch doctors more than once a year, rather than getting the continuity of care you might need to treat complex physical and emotional trauma. Meanwhile, child care and other kinds of supportive caregiving that might help control neglect and abuse are laughably sparse.

As the upper-middle-class wife of an officer in a family that enjoys the benefit of dual incomes, I can still offer examples from my own life and community that should raise questions about how someone with fewer resources and already under the stress that accompanies multiple “tours” of America’s battle zones can survive. My husband and I had to pull years’ worth of retirement savings from our bank account to afford a lifesaving prenatal treatment for me that military insurance would not then fund (though it would indeed be covered later) — a problem that could have been avoided had the customer service representatives of the Department of Defense’s health and medical program, Tricare, been appropriately funded and trained.

The wife of an officer we know whose son has autism had to go through months of letter-writing and advocacy to receive care both for that boy and her other young child so she could apply for jobs and travel to her own medical appointments during her husband’s multiple deployments. (Tricare would only fund care for one child, leaving her watching the other.) Active-duty and veteran service members I know regularly drink and use drugs heavily each night to calm their anxieties and post-traumatic stress symptoms sufficiently to sit through family dinners, watch our ever-more-distressing news, or get a few hours of sleep.

Many fear seeking mental health treatment because of the real threat that, in the military, exposure for doing so will result in professional demotion. We live in an era where so much depends on competent, trustworthy security to shield us from the dual threats of a deadly pandemic and domestic terrorism and yet our security forces often lead lives that are problematic indeed. The toll in such lives — what might be thought of as indirect deaths from combat — that we’ve endorsed by failing to welcome home and provide adequately for the some two million service members who have fought in “our” wars should be a focus of our attention and yet is largely unnoticed.

A defense bill that defends little

With such human costs of war in mind, it’s a wonder to me that the only bipartisan bill passed by Congress over a presidential veto in the Trump years was the recent monumentally funded $740 billion “defense” bill. It included spending for yet more weapons production, as well as salary raises, among other measures that were meant to shore up the fighting power of our active-duty troops (after 19-plus years of unsuccessful wars abroad).

Most striking to me, however, amid its massive support for the military-industrial complex, is how little that bill does to expand social support for military families. There is indeed a modest increase in daycare assistance for troops’ family members with disabilities, as well as limits to increased copays for those who use their military insurance in their communities. Missing totally, however, are key structural changes like protections for soldiers who seek mental health care, more robust job-training programs for those desiring to transition into the civilian workforce, greater accountability for Tricare when it comes to providing accurate information on services available in the community, and expanded childcare support for military families.

Indeed, what’s most notable about that bill’s very existence is how the leaders of both political parties keep funding war spending above all else, especially given that our foreign wars of this century have accomplished little of discernible value beyond making a mess that may never be cleaned up. To me, what that bill truly represented was the massive and unseen costs of America’s post-9/11 wars at home and abroad.

It seems that we Americans still care more about waging war in distant lands than about protecting our own people right here at home. Indirect deaths from our conflicts are a reality, however little noticed they may be. Isn’t it time to begin weaving a genuine safety net, allowing vulnerable Americans who fought in those very wars to be better supported so that, no longer committing senseless violence against others, they don’t commit it on themselves?

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Odds of conviction are poor — but Democrats must stay strong on impeachment

Anytime your lawyers walk out on the eve of the most important trial of your life, you should be in big trouble. Except, of course, if you’re Donald John Trump and you’re facing your second impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate, where the majority of Republicans are either spineless sycophants or outright authoritarians who will never vote to convict you, no matter how compelling the evidence.

That’s exactly where Trump finds himself as his latest trial is slated to begin on Feb. 9. Five members of Trump’s impeachment legal team resigned a little more than a week before the trial, ostensibly over disputes about trial strategy. According to several news outlets, Trump pressured the lawyers to center his defense on the widely debunked claims of election fraud he persists in peddling. The attorneys wanted to concentrate on constitutional issues.

The legal exodus left Trump scrambling to hire replacements and even boasting to aides that he could represent himself. He has since hired another slate of lawyers headed by two attorneys who boast strong right-wing credentials and, like Trump, have a flair for publicity.

One of the newcomers, David Schoen of Montgomery, Alabama, previously represented Trump associate Roger Stone, and met with Jeffrey Epstein in prison nine days before the accused sex trafficker’s death. Epstein reportedly asked Schoen to represent him, and Schoen has since declared he believes Epstein’s death was not a suicide.

The other new lead counsel is Bruce Castor of Pennsylvania, who once served as the district attorney of Montgomery County, a suburb of Philadelphia. In 2005, Castor made headlines when he declined to bring sexual assault charges against comedian Bill Cosby.

Ordinarily, a defendant buffeted by such a last-minute shuffle of attorneys might be expected to “lose big time,” to invoke one of Trump’s favorite catchphrases. But not in this case.

Despite the internal turmoil, Trump’s acquittal appears all but certain. On Jan. 26, 45 Senate Republicans voted in favor of a procedural motion that would have dismissed the impeachment case against Trump on the legally dubious theory that the Constitution restricts impeachment to current officeholders. Although 55 senators, including five Republicans, voted to allow the trial to proceed, convicting Trump will require a two-thirds vote of the upper chamber, and that, at least for now, seems unattainable.

Sensing defeat, some Democrats have already started to waver. Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine has announced plans to file a censure motion against Trump as an alternative to impeachment. Other Senate Democrats want to go ahead with the trial, but want to keep it as short as one week.

The hand-wringing, while predictable, is unwarranted and shortsighted. Above all, it fails to meet the vital challenge of holding Trump accountable for his plot to subvert democracy.

The article of impeachment lodged against Trump could not be more ominous. It charges him with “incitement of insurrection” for the infamous speech he delivered outside the White House on Jan. 6, exhorting an angry and armed throng of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, QAnon fanatics, and MAGA zealots to march to the U.S. Capitol building and “fight like hell” to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory, and in effect, overthrow the government.

In addition, the article maintains that: “In the months preceding the Joint Session [of Congress on Jan. 6], President Trump repeatedly issued false statements asserting that the Presidential election results were the product of widespread fraud and should not be accepted by the American people or certified by State or Federal officials.”

Leaving no doubt about Trump’s intentions, the article also alleges:

“President Trump’s conduct on January 6, 2021, followed his prior efforts to subvert and obstruct the certification of the results of the 2020 Presidential election. Those prior efforts included a phone call on January 2, 2021, during which President Trump urged the secretary of state of Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, to ‘find’ enough votes to overturn the Georgia Presidential election results and threatened Secretary Raffensperger if he failed to do so.”

Having come this far, Democrats have no choice but to mount the strongest possible evidentiary showing against Trump. Whether the trial takes a week or longer, and whether or not it features live witnesses, the House impeachment managers who will try the case against Trump must demonstrate, in the words of Rep. Liz Cheney, that “The President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing.”

On Feb. 2, the House managers filed an 80-page pretrial brief, promising to prove Trump’s responsibility for the Capitol riot. Trump’s new legal team filed a skimpy 14-page response, denying Trump caused the riot, contending the Senate cannot convict a former president, and arguing weakly that anything Trump said on Jan. 6 or about election fraud generally was protected by the First Amendment. (As I have explained elsewhere, the First Amendment does not in fact protect speech aimed at inciting insurrection.)

As a technical matter, once the trial commences, establishing Trump’s culpability should be easy. Hours of publicly available videos can be assembled and collated to document Trump’s plan to retain power at all costs.

Starting in December, Trump began to urge supporters to come to Washington on Jan. 6, tweeting on Dec. 19 that there would be a “[b]ig protest,” and inviting them to “Be there, will be wild!” Continuing the theme of impending insurrection in a tweet sent out the day after Christmas, he wrote, “If a Democrat Presidential Candidate had an Election Rigged & Stolen… the Democrat Senators would consider it an act of war, and fight to the death.” Referring specifically to Jan. 6 at a rally in Georgia on Jan. 4 to support Republican Senate candidates Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, he pledged, “We’re going to take what they did to us on Nov. 3. We’re going to take it back.”

The House managers also have access to video recordings that show, in real time, that many in the crowd on Jan. 6 thought Trump was urging them to occupy the Capitol by force, and that they were following his orders. And then, of course, there is ample video footage of the actual destruction wreaked by the mob immediately following Trump’s speech.

Democrats who need a shot of courage to move forward against the odds must take a broader historical view of the upcoming impeachment trial. It is not just the Senate that will hear the evidence against Trump, but the American people as well. And in a very real sense, it will not just be Trump on trial, but the racist and fascist insurgency he has unleashed. That insurgency will survive Trump and remain a clear and present danger to the nation for years to come. It must be vanquished and crushed by all available legal means.

Instead of anticipating just another legal loss on impeachment, Democrats should take a cue from the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, which suffered many legal setbacks along the way to transformational victories.

In particular, Democrats would do well to recall the case of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old black teenager who was kidnapped, mutilated and murdered in Mississippi in 1955 for allegedly flirting with a white woman. Two white men were indicted by a Tallahatchie County grand jury for killing Till. But despite the overwhelming evidence against them, the defendants were acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury that deliberated for a mere 67 minutes.

The verdict, though cruel and outrageous, surprised no one. The defendants were never made to pay for their crimes — and in fact, later admitted their guilt in an interview with Look magazine — but their acquittal became a catalyst for subsequent advances in civil rights.

So, too, can the Democrats link impeachment to the wider struggle against fascism, and in the process turn defeat, if it comes, into a larger long-term triumph. But only if they have the necessary vision and, most essentially, the necessary courage.