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Non-alcoholic drinks finally taste great — here are 12 of our favorites

For too long, the options in the non-alcoholic section of restaurant menus or liquor stores were cloying “mocktails” and syrupy fruit sodas, or maybe a dusty bottle of barely-hoppy 0% ABV beer. Not the case these days. As sobriety, “dry” months, or even just saying “I’m not drinking tonight” become more socially acceptable than ever before, the beverages had to catch up.

“Serendipitously, I removed alcohol from my life right around the time that alcohol-free mixed drinks were starting to be taken more seriously,” says Julia Bainbridge, author of the book “Good Drinks,” noting that over the past few years, bartenders have looked beyond the mocktail (“ick!”), and that people — whether they were sober or not — were interested in the results. “I knew I wouldn’t be writing the first book on non-alcoholic drinks, but I also knew my work could capitalize on this newfound acceptance and energy.” “Good Drinks“ is a collection of non-alcoholic recipes that aren’t just cocktails minus the liquor, but rather a celebration of, ahem, good drinks.

There’s a distinct vibe that the new crop of non-alcoholic beverages occupy: They’re just . . .cool. “Historically, these drinks haven’t been thought of as sexy, because, well, they weren’t!” says Bainbridge, who paid close attention to the design of her book to convey the message that these recipes weren’t going to taste like the glorified Shirley Temples of the past. “Alcohol-free drinks have a bad reputation for being unbalanced and too sweet because this is how they tasted for a long time, but now, bartenders and makers are approaching them more thoughtfully. They’ve grown up, and they should be dressed to match, so to speak.”

Though bartenders and home sippers do plenty of mixing up their own drinks with on-hand ingredients, there’s a growing number of non-alcoholic drink brands (wine, beer, and spirits), many of which receive comparable attention to similarly small-batch, artisan-made alcoholic spirits. Why now? Bainbridge has a theory: “Young people are looking for ways to find balance amid today’s global uncertainty, and they’re trying to manage high rates of anxiety and other mental health issues, which we’re finally talking about, thank goodness. Drinking doesn’t help either of these endeavors.” The other not-so-secret factor about those bottles of booze? “Alcohol is expensive!”

Bainbridge isn’t interested in demonizing alcohol, though. “Plenty of people can manage its consumption, and don’t experience negative consequences from it, and that’s great,” she notes. “But this doesn’t mean that for those who can’t consume it or choose not to, there shouldn’t be equally delicious options. The quality of American spirits, beers, and wines has improved over the past couple decades, and drinking standards will continue to be raised across the board — including, finally, in the non-alcoholic realm.”

* * * 

Curious to try some of the best new non-alcoholic spirits (and wines and beers, too)? Here are 12 of our favorites to pick up, plus recommendations from dedicated sippers.

AMASS, Riverine Non-Alcohol Spirit

The herbal, bright spirit is juniper-forward (so it’s fairly reminiscent of a floral gin, for those looking for a direct comp to an existing spirit), with notes of sumac, sorrel, lemon, apple, thyme, mint, and parsley.

Athletic Brewing Co.

Technically containing less than 0.5% ABV, these are non-alcoholic beers for those who want a break from sweet-slanting spirits. Bainbridge recommends their hoppy Run Wild IPA, and they also make a lighter-bodied golden ale.

Casamara Club Sodas

Called “amaro” sodas, yet totally non-alcoholic, the four types of Casamara Club soda (each made with a unique blend of spices, botanicals, and fruit extracts) can be sipped straight or mixed with citrus juice, bitters, or even vinegar for a more complex drink.

“I’m always looking for a more herbal or kind of buttery, nut-forward selection. I’ve found myself gravitating toward Casamara Club — they’re bright and different, somehow more savory than sweet. They really are a lot of fun.” —Madison Barker, former beverage director, Robert Bar

Ghia

A bitter aperitif-syle drink made from herbs, fruit, and roots, this can be sipped straight or used in a mixed drink. Though it can sit on a bar cart until you open it, it should then be stored in the fridge and used within a few weeks.

“I created Ghia because I really wanted to make the occasion of enjoying a drink more about the social connection than the intoxication. The response has been overwhelmingly positive, with word of mouth spreading and people sending Ghia to their friends in spite of the pandemic. Most importantly, we get countless personal messages from customers who tell us they finally feel included with Ghia in their hands. Inclusivity is at the core of what we are trying to do, so these messages mean the world to us. Socializing and alcohol have been unfairly coupled for way too long, and with Ghia they don’t have to be.” — Mélanie Masarin, Ghia founder and CEO

“It’s bitter and herbaceous like an Italian amaro. I drink it straight and slightly chilled after dinner, just like you would a digestif. It’s also great with a splash of soda.” — Laura Scholz, writer and editor

“Ghia’s postmodern-style bottle is filled with a crimson-hued and biting combination of botanicals that are at once tangy, aromatic, earthy, and a bit invigorating. It doesn’t feel like it’s pretending to be a version of another spirit. It is simply a good drink.” — Angela Hansberger, writer

Gnista Spirits

Made in two flavors — one dry and smoky, the other aromatic and floral — Gnista intends to scratch the itch of fuller-bodied spirits you might drink on a cold evening, neat or on the rocks.

“Gnista packs a punch with spice and a bit of heat and very much resembles a fine spirit. It sips like an amaro simply over ice but pairs well in a cocktail with tonic and/or citrus juices.” — Angela Hansberger, writer

Kin

These alcohol-free spirits (one herbal and smoky, one tart and floral) and canned spritzes brewed with adaptogens, nootropics, and botanicals aim to occupy the growing space of a “new category of adult beverage.” Because these contain supplements, it’s recommended that you start with a single serving. This may not be the best non-alcoholic beverage for sober folks, but for those simply looking for an alcohol alternative, it’s worth a try.

Non

With some still and some sparkling options, Non Non notes what each of their bottles most closely resemble, like dry whites, apertivi, chilled reds, pét-nats, and French farmhouse ciders.

Pentire

Made from distilled plants native to the North Cornwall coastline in England, Pentire’s flagship beverage, Adrift, has notes of sage, citrus, and sea salt. They recently made a special-edition bottle with notes of rosemary, seaweed, and grapefruit (which is currently sold out, but perhaps not forever).

Seedlip

One of the older non-alcoholic options on the market (it’s been around since 2015), Seedlip and their three flavor options (citrusy and bright; warm-spiced and aromatic; herbal and fresh) have managed to capture and hold onto the attention of the market.

“Seedlip kept me feeling fancy even while I was pregnant — it’s the best non-alcoholic spirit I’ve found! Also, the pretty bottle makes it a win-win for bar carts everywhere.” — Meaghan C. Tiernan, writer

“I am a big fan of Seedlip’s Spice 94 flavor. It occasionally gets a ‘meh’ response from people for the clove-forward taste, but I enjoy it since it lacks the ethanol afterburn from alcohol. With a bit of tonic, grapefruit juice, and a sprinkle of sea salt on top, it’s fantastic.” — Alicia Banaszewski, writer

Thomson & Scott Noughty Sparkling Chardonnay

Made by an organic vintner who avoids adding additional sugar to the production process, this is one of the less-saccharine (literally and on the palate) non-alcoholic wines out there. The brand is only producing Chardonnay right now, but who knows what the future holds.

“Alcohol-free wine hasn’t historically been very good, and that’s changing!” — Julia Bainbridge

Unified Ferments

Working within two culinary traditions with a long history, tea and fermentation, this brand is different from the bottles of “booch” you grab at the grocery store.

“I used to just think of kombucha as its own category of beverage. Something I bought at the yoga studio and made sure to have in the fridge for the morning after a night of drinking. It wasn’t until my friend Young began making kombucha with his friend Graham and opened their own fermentory, Unified Ferments, that I really saw kombucha as something that can replace wine and cocktails on the dinner table. They use 750-milliliter glass bottles like wine, the labels are gorgeous, and the flavors are complex and carefully coaxed out of high-quality tea through their small-batch fermentation process in Brooklyn. They experiment with a whole host of tea-based fermentation beverages. It’s even perfect on nights when you are drinking alcohol: It’s a great pause in between bottles of wine, or as the last drink of the night, when you’re done with the booze, but not done with your friends. And I’m convinced it helps with any potential hangover.” — Julia Rose, prop stylist and yoga teacher

Woodnose Sacré

A fermented coffee- and maple-syrup-based drink, when shaken up, Sacré looks like a cross between a dark beer and nitro coffee, though it doesn’t drink like either: Lightly sweet and low in caffeine, it’s a lovely alternative to boozy offerings at brunch.

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

Lincoln Project demands Rudy Giuliani retract “textbook act of defamation”: “Refuse at your peril”

Former New York City Mayor Rudy was put on notice that he must retract his allegations that the Lincoln Project was responsible for organizing the fatal Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

On Friday, Giuliani blamed the Lincoln Project for the riots by Trump supporters during an appearance on Steve Bannon’s podcast.

Giuliani suggested that insurrection was a false flag operation, saying that it was “wolves in sheep’s clothing” that were behind the insurrection.

The Lincoln Project responded on Saturday with a three-page letter from attorney Matthew T. Sanderson of Caplin & Drysdale.

The entire first page of the letter was just Drysdale recounting a list of reasons Giuliani has lost credibility.

The letter harshly criticizes Giuliani for pushing the election fraud lie that incited the insurrection.

“You told your zealots what to do. They listened. They vandalized. They terrorized. They injured. They killed,” the letter reads. “Rather than apologizing for your actions, you have spent the ensuing weeks deflecting blame and grasping for some way to explain your misconduct.”

The letter then details Giuliani’s allegations on Bannon’s podcast.

“You committed a textbook act of defamation. You publicly accused The Lincoln Project of an infamous and criminal act that it had nothing to do with, as you very well know. You lied,” the letter charges.

“You have until Wednesday, February 3rd to retract your statement fully and to apologize publicly to The Lincoln Project,” the letter warned. “Refuse at your peril.”

“Wild Indian” filmmaker on repression and how “traumatized people tend to perpetuate trauma”

Writer/director Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr. makes a distinctive feature debut with “Wild Indian,” a drama premiering at the Sundance Film Festival. The film opens with the text, “Some time ago . . . There was an Ojibwe man, Who got a little sick and wandered West.” After a brief episode featuring an Indigenous man, the story jumps to the 1980s. Mawka (Phoenix Wilson) and his cousin Ted-O (Julian Gopal) are teens in Wisconsin. Mawka has abusive parents and hangs out with Ted-O, because he cannot bear being at home. One day, an incident changes the boys’ lives forever. 

“Wild Indian” then skips ahead to 2019, and California, where Mawka, now anglicized to Michael (Michael Greyeyes), is a successful businessman with a white wife, Greta (Kate Bosworth), and a new baby. Meanwhile, Ted-O (Chaske Spencer of “Winter in the Blood“) is seen being released from prison. He heads to his sister Cammy’s (Lisa Cromarty) and finds work as a dishwasher. However, Michael and Ted-O’s past crime and shared trauma brings the men back into each other’s lives with volatile results.

Corbine, who has an Indigenous background, displays a restraint in his storytelling that is hypnotic. The filmmaker spoke with Salon about his debut, which features a chilling performance from Greyeyes as a man whose actions empower him and a heartfelt turn from Spencer as a man who cannot escape his past. 

The Indigenous filmmaking community is starting to grow. Can you talk about your background and how you got into cinema?

Chris Eyre the director of “Smoke Signals” reached out and requested the link — I’ve known him a couple years — and he was positive about the film. I grew up being a huge fan of film. I wanted to be a writer. I kind of pretended that I didn’t want to be a filmmaker for a while, because that’s not as legit as being a novel writer. I got involved in the film club [at school] and writing scripts, and that’s how I got into directing and writing films which was about 10 years ago. I steadily over the years kept making short films, everything from the hokiest genre to sensitive arthouse love story type films. But I found my voice when I started exploring Native themes. I grew up on reservations. Both my parents are Native and grew up on the reservation as well. It was so ingrained in me, but I didn’t want to exploit stories for filmmaking. But when I started writing about it, it became a really personal journey for me, to explore stories using the form of film, which I knew so well. The first short I made about my Native background (“Shinaab”) played Sundance, so I knew there was something there.

“Wild Indian” opens with an Indigenous man who “got a little sick and wandered West.” This is obviously a parallel for Mawka/Michael. Can you discuss this myth and its implications?

The genesis of that was not necessarily an Ojibwe myth. When settlers came, Ojibwe people would get sick and they didn’t want to infect anyone else, so they wandered upriver. If they got better, then would come back, but a lot of times they didn’t come back. They’d disappear upriver. That was specific to stories I heard from my tribe, which is Ojibwe. I was taking that and made it a parallel to what Mawka was doing. 

There is a line early in the film as Mawka is in school, listening to a priest talk about tortured spirits, and the nature of humans is to suffer. How did that idea inspire you/”Wild Indian?” 

It’s interesting that the character connects with Christian religion.

We find Ojibwe culture is very much about storytelling and taking applicable themes from those stories and having it inform the way you look at the life around you. He replaced that mode of self-discovery and the freedom of being someone Ojibwe and incorporated that meaning-seeking into the Christian religion and he found meaning there. 

The boys’ crime in the film is depicted in an almost matter of fact way; it’s not sensationalized, which makes it perhaps more horrific. Can you talk about your thoughts on this incident and the decisions you made in terms of depicting it?

I knew it was a really disturbing thing to watch. I didn’t want to linger on it too long. I just wanted it to inform who this character was and the lengths he will go to find a sense of power. Expressing it that way, and not lingering too much on them or the horror on it, doesn’t make it extra disturbing for the audience. But maybe by doing it that way that I did, maybe it is more horrific. 

Michael also has a real power, especially when he encounters a stripper or meets a woman he visits in a hospital. Michael Greyeyes give a great performance because you feel this tension every time he is in a room. Can you talk about his creating his menacing disposition?

It started with the idea of trauma. Traumatized people tend to perpetuate trauma in people’s lives. He is somebody who will get what he thinks he needs or wants at all costs. His morality is relative. I don’t necessarily think he’s a bad man, but I think when he is pushed, he makes decisions that are morally dubious, I suppose. 

When the story jumps to 2019, you show Mawka anglicized and renamed Michael, who asks his coworker (Jesse Eisenberg) about the length of his braid. How did you conceive of his adult character?

Michael has become someone free of an identity only in so far that he can use that identity to serve getting what he wants, which is a leg up, a need or want for representation in modern corporate America to further his own career. He’s leaning into it by growing his hair long and braiding it and being a symbol of Native Americanness. He’s got the perfect profile, and that’s what he’s riding on. 

In contrast, Ted-O is more thoughtful. He makes bad choices, has regrets, such as his facial tattoo. He seeks forgiveness. He is haunted. What can you say about his character as a foil for Mawka/Michael? 

Ted-O is human. He’s the heart of the film, and it was always designed that way. He doesn’t represent anything innately Ojibwe Native. What he does represent is the way that you feel the film and understand the emotions of the character. You can latch on to him. Chaske drew that out and elongated it.

Let’s talk about the performances. 

Trying to find the performance of Michael’s character, or older Mawka, was tougher because he’s so nuanced. He is very much in between the things that he says. He never says anything really about the things that are going on. It’s all about the subtext and trying to figure out ways to stage what he’s going through emotionally, but also trying to find the interesting little ways to iron out the arc of each scene. Michael is such a great performer that we figured out a way to get those scenes down. 

Chaske, I’ve been writing this for him for years. I was thinking of him constantly when writing the character. He had a sense of pathos that is hard to come by. I reached out to him and he was really excited for it, and I barely had to give him any direction. He came in and just knew and understood what I was going for. 

“Wild Indian” includes a speech where Michael asserts that Natives are all “liars and narcissists, descendants of cowards; the worthwhile ones died fighting.” Can you talk about his self-hatred and self-loathing in the Indigenous community? He assimilated into American culture, marrying a white woman, having a corporate job . . . 

I don’t necessarily think it’s a condemnation of Native people, it’s more this guy is sick and having that tirade of Natives being that way is a conflation of his own personal failing and the greater failing of Makwa. It resonates because you can see it in his perspective. Like I said, trauma perpetuates trauma. He conflated the trauma he had as a kid, with his parents, and being from an entire people and that wasn’t the case. 

Can we talk about his parents and the depiction of the abuse of Mawka?

He’s treated like he’s a resentment, and that would traumatize any kid. Every kid wants to be respected and wanted, and he’s not wanted anywhere. He’s not wanted at home or at school either; he’s bullied. I think he wants a sense of self and a way to get that sense of self is to act on what he thinks might make him feel more powerful. I didn’t want to linger on the abuse too long. It’s not anything specific to Ojibwe or Native people. There are a lot of people who grew up in that way. 

What can you say about the film’s themes of repression?

I think people in my community — and that goes for myself too — we’re not super vocal or verbal about our feelings. We keep them close to the heart. It’s not a vulnerability we, or I, want to have out in the world. That’s something I noticed in my family; I can’t speak for all Ojibwe people. I had to figure out a way to tell a story in a film that explored about us talking about everything but the thing that’s bothering us. That is repression. It was a cultural thing, but it also became a narrative tool.

The ultimate comfort bake: How to make perfect quick breads at home, according to a pastry chef

There’s no bake more comforting than a quick bread. Clean-up is a breeze with these one-bowl recipes, which you can prepare in 15 minutes or less. After you exert minimal effort, all that’s left for you to do is pop your mixture into a loaf pan before putting your feet up and letting your oven do all of the hard work for you.

We need no further explanation for why quick breads are exactly what we need in our lives right now. That’s why we’ve turned to  Salon Food resident pastry chef Meghan McGarry of Buttercream Blondie for a master class in one of our favorite bakes. 

“These are the bakes that I keep going back to right now in my own kitchen, because they’re cozy, they’re homey and they’re no-fuss,” McGarry tells Salon.

What makes them even more versatile is that you can have a bite of a quick loaf for breakfast or brunch, a snack or even an easy after-dinner dessert (pass the ice cream, please). These bakes work for any and every occasion — and that includes sharing.

“I really love the idea of gifting a quick loaf to a neighbor or a friend right now to make a human connection,” McGarry says. “I’ll make two and drop the second in the mail for a friend or leave it on a neighbor’s porch.”

How to ensure quick bread success, every single time

1. Read through your recipe before you start to bake. 

Baking is chemistry, so accurately measuring or weighing your ingredients is key to success. Double-check temperatures and times, too. 

2. Bring your ingredients to room temperature.

As with all other bakes, temperature matters. For example, yolks break up easier and mix better if eggs aren’t cold. 

3. These are fuss-free bakes, so substitutions are welcome. 

If you can’t find an ingredient, use your creativity. Substitute ingredients using what you already have on hand in your pantry — or just because. 

Four quick bread recipes guaranteed to please a crowd

1. Apple Spice Loaf Cake

Recommended swap: Instead of walnuts, use another popular tree nuts: pecans. 

“You don’t need a mixer or a stand mixer. You can whisk the eggs and sugar together by hand,” McGarry says of this cake. “Then you bake it a loaf pan just like a quick loaf.”

The star of this loaf cake is the Granny Smith apple, which McGarry prefers to use because of its crispness. The remainder of the ingredients enhance the flavor of this fresh fall fruit. Spices, including cinnamon and cloves, provide a hint of coziness. Walnuts lend a nice crunch to every bite. And a splash of bourbon cuts the sweetness while adding a sophisticated layer of warmth. 

Within ten minutes of turning on your oven, your entire house is guaranteed to smell like a trip to your local apple orchard. That’s why this is one of those cozy bakes that will become a staple in your recipe wardrobe for years to come.

2. Cinnamon Swirl Quick Bread

Recommended swap: Instead of whiskey, pour an orange liquor (or simply leave the alcohol out).

In her makeover of this retro bake, brown sugar, vanilla, and a hint of whisky combine together like a welcoming hug. The secret weapon is one you may not expect: buttermilk. The addition of dairy yields a bread with robust moisture. At the same time, it balances the flavors and keeps the bake light air. 

But the true star of the show is cinnamon. There’s not only a cinnamon swirl running through the center of this beautiful loaf that melts in your mouth but also a cinnamon sugar topping that adds cheer to every bite. The cinnamon sugar swirl looks like a work of art, but you don’t have to be a professional pastry chef like McGarry to knock it out of the park. All you do is add a layer of cinnamon sugar mixture halfway through adding the mixture to your loaf pan. Once you slice open the freshly-baked bread, you’ll find a gorgeous swirl spinning around the pastry.

As pretty as that swirl may be, you’ll reserve the standing ovation for the cinnamon sugar topping. The final step before your pan hits the oven requires topping the loaf with a cinnamon sugar mixture, which transforms into a crunchy topping that is the icing on the proverbial cake. In additional to the light bread and the cinnamon swirl, you get a nice contrast in texture from the crunch throughout every couple of bites.

3. Meyer Lemon Blueberry Loaf

Recommended swap: If you don’t have lemons on hand, zest a lime or an orange. (After all, it’s blood orange season.)

This loaf, which is one of the most popular recipes ever featured on Salon Food, has a pop of bright flavor guaranteed to wipe away those winter blues. Citrus is a great way to add flavor to loaves, and the zest from the lemon packs a special punch in the flavor department. This particular recipe is powered by lemons, but you can use any citrus you have on hand. Blood oranges or limes work well, too. If you don’t have citrus in your fruit bowl? Just eliminate it. 

“This is a recipe I return to time and time again,” McGarry said. “It’s not a trend. It’s not an involved project that takes a whole day. It’s simple, and it’s good.”

This loaf is super adaptable, and not only in terms of ingredients. Eat half of this loaf and freeze the rest, or double the recipe and freeze an entire loaf for a day when the therapist isn’t in session. (Or if you don’t feel like baking, you can order direct from Buttercream Blondie instead.)

4. Roasted Strawberry Banana Bread

Recommended swap:  If you don’t have strawberries (or don’t feel like roasting them), leave them out.

If you’ve ever made any recipe for banana bread before, you’ll know this is the best way to use those overripe bananas on your counter up instead of throwing them in the garbage. If you have strawberries that are on their last leg, don’t toss them out either.

Roasting this fruit is a great way to revitalize it. It intensifies the flavor and brings out the sweetness, especially when you add the vanilla bean to your pot. McGarry recommends making an extra batch of roasted strawberries, because they’re so good you’ll be tempted to eat a whole batch before you even throw them into your loaf mix. (Instead, keep this recipe on hand for Valentine’s Day.)

If you don’t have any strawberries on hand or just don’t feel like taking an extra few minutes to roast them today, you can leave them out. The base of this recipe is McGarry’s classic banana bread, and it’s perfect with only bananas. If you’re not feeling fruity or you’re trying to please someone with a sweet tooth, try tossing in a cup of chocolate chips instead. No matter which way you go, this banana bread is always a win.

How to make crisp (but not too crisp!) crostini

Some of the most complex recipes have the fewest ingredients and steps — because there’s nothing to hide behind. Success hinges on high-quality ingredients and excellent technique.

Which brings me to my biggest culinary pet peeve: sub-par crostini. When made well, these delicate toasts are a blank canvas with unlimited potential. Marcella Hazan defined them as “the easy-to-make Italian equivalent of croutons,” but crostini require a high attention to detail.

As a chef, when I delegate crostini prep to another cook, I’m extremely specific on how to cut the bread, the temperature of the oven, and the cook time. Here’s my guide to avoid common mistakes — and ensure your crostini are perfect every single time.

What Type Of Bread Works Best?

Ciabatta, sourdough, and rustic peasant bread can all be used to make crostini — just take care to cut each slice of bread into bite-size pieces. Avoid any bread that is especially dense, like certain whole-grain loaves. A dense bread may not toast well in the oven and could end up tasting slightly stale rather than crisp.

My personal preference: the best baguette I can find. Look for a baguette that has been freshly baked. The exterior should appear hearty and crunchy, with a slim shape that tapers at the ends. Avoid baguettes that seem bulbous or flabby.

How Should You Slice It?

First, focus on uniformity. If your bread is sliced inconsistently, then it will cook unevenly, with some pieces burning and others barely toasting. When working with a baguette, cut crosswise using a serrated knife, aiming for 1/4-inch thickness, the sweet spot between thick and thin.

When using a serrated knife to cut the bread, you don’t need to exert downward pressure (this will crush the loaf). Trust the sharp teeth to do the work, maintaining a steady back-and-forth motion.

Make it bite-size: It’s awkward to try to eat a crostino that’s larger than one bite. Eat half and it can crumble on you. Stuff the whole thing in your mouth and you might look ridiculous. The solution is to halve each baguette slice.

The average slice of baguette is about 3 inches wide and 1 3/4 inches tall. Use a chef’s knife to cut each slice in half. You’re probably used to seeing whole slices of baguette turned into crostini, but these bite-size pieces are more elegant and easier to eat.

What About Oil And Seasonings?

A thin drizzle of oil will help your bread get crispy in the oven. Expect to use about 1 teaspoon of oil for every 8 crostini. The ingredient quality matters. If you have a favorite extra-virgin olive oil, this is a good time to use it. Varieties with grassy, peppery notes work great.

I tend to avoid adding salt to my crostini. If you’re serving crostini with cheeses, cured meats, or other savory toppings, you likely won’t need any added salt. Freshly cracked black pepper, however, can add a welcome layer of savory flavor. If you’re in the mood, crack some pepper over the top of your crostini before baking.

Should You Bake Low-And-Slow Or Hot-And-Fast?

The ideal bite of crostini is uniformly crispy, with the tiniest hint of softness in the very center. This is achieved with a high heat and a relatively rapid cooking time. A lower heat and longer cook time result in crostini that taste too dry.

Pay close attention to the crostini while they cook. Undercooked crostini can have an unpleasant chewiness that feels almost stale, while overcooked crostini can taste brittle and may even hurt the roof of your mouth. Crostini can go from undercooked to overcooked in as little as a couple minutes. Perfectly cooked crostini will have golden-brown edges but pale centers.

Here’s How To Make Crostini:

  1. Heat the oven to 450°F. Use a serrated knife to slice 1 baguette into ¼-inch thick pieces. Now use a chef’s knife to halve each piece of bread.
  2. Line a rimmed sheet pan with a silicone baking mat or parchment paper. Arrange the bread slices in a single layer. (Don’t overcrowd — you can use another lined sheet pan if needed.) Drizzle with olive oil (about 1 teaspoon of oil for every 8 crostini).
  3. Bake the crostini for 4 to 5 minutes. If you don’t see any color, cook the crostini for 1 to 2 minutes longer. The crostini are done when the edges begin to turn brown but the center is still pale. Remove the crostini from the oven before they turn uniformly brown.
  4. Let the crostini cool to room temperature. They can be kept at room temperature in an airtight container for up to 48 hours.

Now What Are You Gonna Do With Them?

  • Top with your favorite cured meats and cheeses. Try spicy soppressata and aged provolone. Or prosciutto and ricotta.
  • Serve alongside any dips or spreads, like hummus or garlic yogurt.
  • Decorate with  seasonal veggies, from kale in the winter to fava beans in the spring.
  • Rub with a raw garlic clove and use like croutons in soup or salad.

Have Ricotta (Or Another Creamy Cheese)? Perfect!

Related recipes:

Meera Sodha’s salted miso brownies are the ideal balance of salty and sweet

If I were in charge of brownies and their taxonomy (which, sadly, I’m not), there would be a proper list of categories. The only thing that unifies them really is the chocolate, beyond which they can be cakey, crumbly, chewy, or cocoa-y (and many other things beyond those beginning with the letter “c”). This one is my perfect brownie: dense and fudgy thanks to the chia seeds; rich, but not sickeningly so; with a salted caramel-like flavor that comes from using white miso and salt together. It makes this brownie incredibly special. And there is no category for that.

(Note: Use dark chocolate suitable for vegans if vegan.)

***

Recipe: Salted Miso Brownies
Makes 16 brownies 

  • ¼ cup + 1 tbsp ground chia seeds
  • ½ cup + 2 tbsp (10 tbsp) refined
  • coconut oil
  • 9 oz dark chocolate (70%), broken
  • into small pieces
  • 1¾ cups light brown sugar
  • 1 cup all-purpose flour
  • 3 tbsp white miso
  • ¾ tsp flaky sea salt

1. Preheat the oven to 400°F and line an 8-inch x 8-inch cake pan with parchment paper. In a small bowl, mix the ground chia seeds with 1 cup + 2 tbsp of water and set aside. 

2. Place the coconut oil and broken chocolate in a medium-sized saucepan and set over a low heat. Stir occasionally until melted, then take off the heat. Mix in the sugar, flour, and miso, and crumble in the salt flakes. Finally, add the bloomed chia seeds and mix. Pour into the lined pan and gently shake to distribute the mixture.

3. Place on the middle shelf of the oven for 45 minutes or until firm to the touch around the edges with a slight wobble in the middle, then remove. The brownies might be wobbly in the middle, but they will soon settle down and become deliciously fudgy. Leave to cool completely, then cut into 16 squares.

 

“Planet Earth” at 40: The perfect debut single that boldly launched Duran Duran

Some new artists take a while to find their creative groove or footing. But the Birmingham-formed Duran Duran experienced remarkable success from the release of their first single, “Planet Earth.”

Released 40 years ago, on February 2, 1981, the song reached No. 12 on the U.K. singles chart; led to the band making an appearance on “Top of the Pops”; and even made inroads on the U.S. Billboard dance charts. Named one of the “100 Greatest Debut Singles of All Time” by Rolling Stone, “Planet Earth” remains in the band’s live setlists and has inspired younger generations: Both The Killers and My Chemical Romance’s Gerard Way have performed the song with Duran Duran.

“Planet Earth” is a bold opening salvo, based on a rhythmic foundation comprising John Taylor‘s galloping bass and Roger Taylor’s stomping beats. Atop this Duran Duran members layer shimmering synths from Nick Rhodes and a zig-zagging melodic line from guitarist Andy Taylor; these parts alternate like a genial call-and-response. The occasional burst of texture — handclaps, sparkling synth ambience, bass curlicues, and a smoldering bridge — adds verve throughout.

“I call it funky punk. I was really a punk rocker,” John Taylor told Complex in 2012 about the song. “Then I discovered disco. When I discovered disco, I didn’t want to be a guitar player in a punk band. I wanted to be a postman in a funk band. But I was a punk and I never was going to be able to play like Chic. So ‘Planet Earth’ for me, as a bass player, was an expression of sort of my punky aspiration to be danceable to have that disco thing going on.”

He wasn’t the only band member who saw parallels between other genre-blending rockers. Andy Taylor once said the “essence” of the song was from Rod Stewart’s rakish 1979 disco-rock hit “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” Taylor, who worked with Stewart later in the ’80s, added, “The synth-guitar hook line that kicks off the tune is played on the same scale and key; the first two chords Dm7 and F are the same, so the melody/counter-melody lines are interchangeable.” 

But “Planet Earth” is great because it feels like a response to trends — punk, disco, Krautrock, Bowie — not a direct replication of what had already been done. Of course, back in 1981, that desire to rearrange the status quo was a driving force for Duran Duran and other hungry young bands. In fact, circa “Planet Earth,” the group were being tagged as part of the burgeoning New Romantic movement. Popular mainly in the U.K. and spawned from certain danceclubs, the trend was distinguished by sonic melodrama and a fancy sartorial aesthetic. 

As it so happens, each of the major New Romantic bands also released stellar debut singles. Although the Steve Strange-led Visage had a major UK hit in 1980 with their second 45, “Fade to Grey,” the 1979 single “Tar” was a synth-industrial grind that presaged what electro group The Faint would do decades later. Classix Nouveaux, a band formed from the ashes of X-Ray Spex, debuted with “The Robots Dance,” a creepy slab of electro-gothic cabaret. And Spandau Ballet made a splash in 1980 with the glamorous “To Cut a Long Story Short,” which paired a swerving keyboard line with dramatic vocals and reached No. 5 on the UK singles chart.

But even then, Duran Duran were distinguishing themselves from their peers. The first verse of “Planet Earth” features the lyrics, “I heard you making patterns rhyme / Like some New Romantic looking for the TV sound,” which alludes to some suspicion about the movement. The next line, “You’ll see I’m right some other time,” hints further that the narrator knows the style is ephemeral. 

But right off the bat, the band established enigmatic bona fides with the lyrics “making patterns rhyme.” While on the surface a head-scratcher, the phrase doubles as a rather smart description of music itself, which can be an elusive and intangible thing to describe. As “Planet Earth” progresses, the mystery only deepens. The lyrical landscape alludes to new beginnings, and trying to be heard — both very relevant concerns of a young band — but the phrase “There’s no sign of life” could hint at an apocalypse or the state of culture.

Yet the song isn’t cynical or arrogant, but a proud declaration — a vibe lead singer/lyricist Simon Le Bon underscores with an urgent, confident vocal delivery that leverages his theatrical background. “You couldn’t want for a better day for a single then a song that goes, ‘This is planet Earth,'” John Taylor said in 2012. “It’s a fanfare. It’s like, ‘Planet Earth, meet Duran Duran. Duran Duran, meet planet Earth.’ It’s one of those, ‘All are welcome’ [songs].”

Check out the original video for “Planet Earth”:

Live, “Planet Earth” has taken on many forms across the decades. Back in 1981, the single had an extended “Night Version” mix with swooning sax, simmering percussion and intensive dance grooves. During the band’s 1993 commercial resurgence, the group stripped away the synth-pop sheen in favor of bustling acoustic guitars and a mysterious vibe. 

In 2019, Duran Duran performed a special show at Kennedy Space Center to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. After a meticulous, starry light show and a performance of the solemn 2015 song “The Universe Alone,” the band kicked into “Planet Earth.” On that night, the song’s lyrics (“Can you hear me now? This is Planet Earth,”) took on poignant new meaning in context with the space travel setting.

In that same spirit, after David Bowie died, Duran Duran slotted a cover of the icon’s 1969 single “Space Oddity” into live performances of “Planet Earth.” On the surface, the segue may have seemed odd: “Space Oddity” is slower and brooding, the melancholy musings of an astronaut hopelessly lost in space, not an upbeat celebration. However, the juxtaposition worked, as the stitched-together songs created an intriguing scenario. Perhaps the protagonist of “Planet Earth” is the same one featured in “Space Oddity.” Against all odds, the seemingly doomed astronaut managed to escape his fate and crash-landed on a faraway planet, where he started anew.

In another nod to their roots as Bowie fans, Duran Duran recently covered “Five Years,” the first song on 1972’s “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars,” an LP Rhodes and John Taylor particularly loved. Their version is elegiac and somber, an appropriate tone to take on a song that’s also about having a finite timeline to live.

Yet this cover is a full-circle thematic moment for Duran Duran as well, as “Five Years” is a beginning, much like “Planet Earth” was: The song is the first look at Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust persona. Unlike Ziggy, however, the band isn’t staring down the end of the world. Forty years on, with a new album on the way and tour dates (ostensibly) on the calendar, Duran Duran are still making patterns rhyme — and hurtling forward into the future.

South Carolina Republicans censure Rep. Tom Rice for voting to impeach Donald Trump

On Saturday, the South Carolina Republican Party formally censured Rep. Tom Rice — the only Republican in their caucus to vote to impeach President Donald Trump for inciting the Capitol invasion.

Rice is one of only 10 House Republicans who crossed party lines to impeach the president. Some of the others have also been formally censured by their state parties, including Rep. Fred Upton of Michigan.

Responding to the news, CNN’s Jake Tapper noted, “GOP officials from coast to coast doing nothing to sanction those who spread the Big Lie or incited violence at the Capitol, nothing about the calls to violence or anti-Semitic crackpottery by Rep Greene, but LOTS being done to punish the 10 Republicans who voted for impeachment.”

Trump’s impeachment trial is set to proceed in the Senate, although it does not appear that there are currently 17 Republican votes to convict the former president.

TikTok’s sea chanteys — how life under the pandemic has mirrored months at sea

If you’ve perused social media in recent weeks, you may have come across people singing chanteys, which were work songs employed on merchant sailing ships.

Historically, chanteys – which are also spelled as “shanties” or “chanties” – began with a sing-out by a crew member recognized as “the chanteyman,” usually someone prized for his voice and ability to extemporize. Fellow sailors would respond with the refrain as they toiled away at their tasks. Now we’re seeing TikTok and Twitter users belting out songs inspired by chanteys to their followers, often accompanied by the hashtag #seashanty.

As a chantey scholar, I’m fascinated by the sudden surge of interest in this genre, which dates back to the 15th century and peaked in popularity at the end of the 19th century, right before wooden ships gave way to steam vessels.

The chantey was, historically, a release valve for loneliness, fear and oppression. Finding ourselves in the midst of a pandemic – with the scourge of inequality growing more pervasive by the day – perhaps it’s no coincidence that the chantey has made a triumphant return.

Singing to fears

Sailors were often at sea for several months – sometimes years – at a time.

The work on the ship could be tedious and monotonous. But sporadic dangers were always lurking, from storms to shipboard accidents, fomenting an undercurrent of anxiety, which crews tended to confront with a morbid sense of humor.

Richard Henry Dana Jr., the author of a popular 1840 memoir detailing the two years he spent on a ship, wrote that “you must make a joke of everything at sea; and if you were to fall from aloft and be caught in the belly of a sail, and thus saved from instant death, it would not do to look at all disturbed, or to make a serious matter of it.”

This outlook inspired many chanteys: They entertained the sailors during the monotonous work of the vessel, but their upbeat and cavalier lyrics could nonetheless acknowledge the speed with which clear skies could turn to stormy clouds.

Take George Gordon’s example of the chantey “Blow the Man Down.” In it, the sailor watches, in horror, as a beautiful woman morphs from “a pretty young damsel” to one wholly changed, as she removes her ear, leg, teeth and one eye. Like life at sea, excitement and pleasure quickly transform into terror.

Importantly, there was also a utility to the songs. Cooperation on the ships was, in the words of historian Marcus Rediker, “a collectivism of necessity.”

Merchant ships hired men from varying backgrounds. The songs were a shared language that strengthened the crew’s ties, while also establishing a rhythm to repetitive tasks like hauling, which could entail hoisting sails, and heaving, which might mean walking the capstan. In fact, authentic chanteys are divided into “hauling chanteys” and “heaving chanteys,” though other descriptors exist.

Slyly speaking truth to power

In their songs, sailors told stories of women, ships, ports, food, captains and mates; they spoke to manhood, desire and longing.

Chanteys were also used to push back against the tyranny inherent to life aboard the ship, in which a small number of people – usually the captain and his mate – lorded over the rest. The tension of this dynamic could sometimes boil over into violence.

Some of the songs deployed what anthropologist James C. Scott termed “hidden transcripts” – subtle digs at those in control, who remain oblivious to what’s being said about them.

Accomplished chanteymen could take aim at captains or grouse about food or pay. For example, one rendition of “Blow, Boys, Blow” closes with the pointed line “There will be Sally, Molly, Peg and Nell / And the skipper and mate can go – —- as well.”

In a different version of “Blow, My Bully Boys, Blow,” the character bewails poor food quality aboard the ship: “What d’ye think they have for dinner? / Monkey tails and bullock’s liver.” And in Richard Warner’s 1928 version of “Handy, My Boys,” the singer growls about poor wages: “I thought I heard our old man say / Handy, me boys, so handy! / You can work all day, but you’ll get no pay.”

Similar to other forms of folk music, these chanteys hit thematic notes of dispossession, invisibility and a longing to be seen and heard.

The spirit of the chantey lives on

Many of the songs circulating on social media are not technically chanteys. To be a true chantey, the song must be authenticated as a work song of the sea, sung on ship and created by seamen for shipboard tasks. There was, in fact, a taboo against singing chanteys on land.

Instead, they might be called sea songs, shore songs or ballads.

Nonetheless, these songs echo the spirit of the chantey.

Though not adrift at sea, many of us find ourselves in territory that is alien and unsettling, with daily life changing in ways that the merchant sailor would understand all too well – a world that was, as the historian Rediker put it, “chronically uncertain.”

Perhaps we will we be able to look back on this bleak period and recognize some glimmers of levity and unity, as when people from disparate worlds connected on social media and noticed they had “a ship stout and strong, and a jolly good crew,” and so decided to sing their way to “one and all.”

Jessica Floyd, Assistant Professor and Coordinator of English, Community College of Baltimore County

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

Doctors puzzled as to why coronavirus is affecting some women’s menstrual cycles

At the end of February 2020, Alexandra Plazas-Herrera flew to Paris for her annual work trip to Fashion Week. The pandemic had yet to change everyday life in the United States and Europe, though the novel coronavirus was certainly on the public’s radar.

On March 8, 2020, Plazas-Herrera returned to New York City; the next day she woke up and felt “horrible.” After a few days of resting, thinking it could have been the flu or maybe really bad jet lag, she got a cough and her breathing worsened. At the same time, she began to have what she described as a “second period” for that month.

“It was really painful, and I would have huge blood clots,” Plazas-Herrera said. “I got nervous because I thought I was actually miscarrying or something.”

This period lasted for two weeks.

She ended up being one of four people on the work trip who returned home with COVID-19. At first, she couldn’t get tested because of a lack of testing in the area. It wasn’t until May 1, 2020, that she tested positive for COVID-19— and then again, tested positive a couple weeks later. Finally, on June 6, 2020, she tested negative, as the virus seemed to have cleared her system; yet the debilitating symptoms that came with COVID-19 didn’t go away, including the effect it appeared to have on her menstrual cycle.

For nearly six months, Plazas-Herrera didn’t have a period. Before she got infected with COVID-19, she was hoping to conceive. Back then, hormonal tests showed that she was healthy, and indicated there would be no issues in trying to get pregnant. But after COVID-19, the same hormonal test showed that her hormones were “out of whack.” And when she visited her gynecologist in August, he told her she was in menopause, at 41.

“It was a drastic change from just six months prior,” Plazas-Herrera said. “It seems that Covid caused my FSH [follicle-stimulating hormone] levels to skyrocket.”

As a “long-hauler”, meaning someone who experiences symptoms weeks or months after contracting coronavirus, Plazas-Herrera also has bouts of brain fog, shortness of breath, heart issues, neuropathy issues, and fatigue.

Alexandra Plazas-Herrera is estimated to be one of the estimated ten percent of women for which Survivor Corps, a support group for those recovering from COVID-19, surveyed who reported issues with their menstrual cycle after being infected with SARS-CoV-2. Natalie Lambert, an associate research professor at Indiana University School of Medicine, surveyed 3,292 women who had COVID-19; 9.1 percent reported having menstrual cycles that were heavier, lighter, or just different.  An estimated 10.1 percent reported having irregular or skipped menstrual cycles.

According to a study published by researchers in Wuhan, China, published in the Elsevier Public Health Emergency Collection, 25 percent of 177 hospitalized COVID-19 patients had menstrual volume changes, and 28 percent had menstrual cycle changes.

“Nearly one-fifth of patients exhibited a menstrual volume decrease or cycle prolongation,” the authors wrote. “The menstruation changes of these patients might be the consequence of transient sex hormone changes caused by suppression of ovarian function that quickly resume after recovery.”

The authors added that “there was no evidence to support that SARS-CoV-2 causes substantial impairment of fertility in female COVID-19 patients.” However, they do recommend that patients undergo an examination of sex hormones and ovarian function if someone is planning a pregnancy after being infected with COVID-19.

Lyss Stern, another long-hauler, still has no taste and smell since being diagnosed with COVID-19 on March 23, 2020; she’s also been struggling with an irregular menstrual cycle. Stern, 46, said she’s always had a regular menstrual cycle her whole life. After COVID-19, it’s been a rollercoaster.

“There were three months I didn’t get it, then I got it for a day, then I didn’t get it for another two months,” Stern said. “It’s scary because nothing’s consistent. Nobody — not even my OBGYN — nobody knows anything.” Stern said the virus had “definitely done something to my system.”

Stern said she didn’t experience irregularities with her menstrual cycle until one month after getting infected with COVID-19. Lambert said in her survey, many women noted that they experienced irregular or skipped menstrual cycles around 25 days after they tested positive for COVID-19.

“It’s good for people to know that these symptoms don’t start right when they get sick with COVID-19, there’s a little bit of a delay,” Lambert said. “And I think that’s why it’s been difficult for women to make that COVID connection — because there is a delay, but that’s actually true for a lot of COVID symptoms.”

Lambert added that in the data she’s been collecting on COVID-19 survivors, there do appear to be some symptoms that affect women more than men. According to her survey, 36.4 percent of women reported hair loss, while only 8.3 percent of men reported hair loss.

“Quite a few women report their hair falling out in patches, and that is an indicator of an autoimmune problem, and it actually does require treatment,” Lambert said. “If somebody has that, they should definitely reach out to a dermatologist.”

Lambert said she doesn’t know the underlying cause for coronavirus-related irregularity in menstrual cycles, but cautions against thinking it is merely the result of the “stress of being sick.”

“Women experience many stressful times in their lives, and we’re aware of how that impacts our cycle,” Lambert said. “Typically if something shows up in my data, people are reporting it because it’s outside of the norm.”

Tucker Carlson: “Completely untrue” that domestic terrorism is “more dangerous” than foreign threats

Fox News personality Tucker Carlson on Friday went on an angry rant about the U.S. Department of Homeland Security warning about the threat of domestic terrorism motivated by white supremacy and lies.

Despite right-wing supporters having waged a fatal insurrection at the U.S. Capitol only weeks earlier, Carlson lashed out at coverage of the National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin.

“American citizens are more dangerous than foreign terrorists?” Carlson asked in disbelief.

He then attempted to impersonate critics saying, “Fox News is so extreme.”

“No show on this channel would ever put that on the air,” he vowed. “And if anyone did, people would resign in protest because that is completely untrue and completely reckless.”

Carlson’s vow to avoid warning about the threat of white supremacist terrorism — even after the deadly insurrection by domestic terrorists — came as conservatives are attempting to rationalize the insurrection in advance of Trump’s impeachment trial. By falsely claiming there are more significant threats, conservatives seem to think that would give them an excuse for refusing to hold Trump accountable for inciting insurrection.

On Thursday, former Trump era Department of Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor said he believed the Trump White House was suppressing warnings about white supremacists to protect Trump supporters.

You can watch the video below via Twitter:

The absolute best way to cook kale, according to so many tests

In Absolute Best Tests, Ella Quittner destroys the sanctity of her home kitchen in the name of the truth. She’s boiled dozens of eggs, mashed a concerning number of potatoes, and roasted more broccoli than she cares to recall. Today, she tackles kale.

* * *

Kale has lived a thousand lives.

It’s spent decades as a frilly, slow-wilting garnish for salad bars and shrimp towers alike. Since the dawn of the 21st Century, it’s moonlighted as a status symbol for the tote-touting, farmers-market-evangelizing city dweller. It found an especially bright 15 minutes of fame as the single word emblazoned on a sweatshirt Beyoncé wore in her music video for “7/11.” It was roasted into chips by Gwyneth Paltrow on primetime television. It’s been the hero of 2,000-word profiles and the villain of snappy teardowns. It’s frost-resistant, enjoys a harvest during the time of year when the rest of us hibernate, and one cup of it has 134% of your daily recommended vitamin C, for the love of god. So there’s little to say about the leafy green that ceaseless trend pieces haven’t already bellowed.

It has been around for millennia, at least since its proliferation through Europe and Asia during the Middle Ages. Consequently, there are more ways to cook kale than there are ways I can think of to entertain myself during this final stretch of self-quarantine. Convenient. Here, I’ve narrowed the list of kale methods down to seven, and pitted them head-to-head in a competition of texture and flavor. Which bought me about two days. Shall we?

* * *

Controls and Fine Print

If you ever want to feel like you’re living in a Juice Generation, consider purchasing 10 bunches of lacinato kale and storing them front and center in your otherwise empty refrigerator. Should you then want to obliterate that fantasy instantaneously, simply toss in about 25 peeled garlic cloves and a bowl of crushed red pepper flakes. Which is a verbose way of revealing that for each test I used:

  • 1 bunch lacinato kale, ribs removed, roughly chopped (about 3 cups tightly packed)
  • 3 tablespoons olive oil
  • Juice from 1/2 lemon
  • 3 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
  • 3/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
  • 3/4 teaspoon Diamond Crystal kosher salt

Where specified, I employed additional ingredients like chicken broth and crushed tomatoes. Oil was naturally excluded in the Steam Only trial — as were the garlic and red pepper flakes, since I forgot to add both to the steamer and would have thus had to eat both raw. (I have boundaries.)

Ninety-eight words on kale choice: I used lacinato, also known as dinosaur kale, because it’s easiest to de-rib in a hurry (see above re: 10 bunches), and I love the earthy, vegetal flavor. There are many varieties of kale, all of which are worthwhile, and would lend themselves well to these methods. These include curly kale (the dark green stuff with winding tendrils of leaves), Chinese kale (broccoli-like stems you should fully hang on to and cook, with smaller leaves), and red Russian kale (red-stemmed with leaves that need not be cooked quite as long as lacinato to achieve comparable tenderness), among others.

Methods

Sauté Only

Inspired by The Kitchn.

  1. Heat 3 tablespoons of oil in a sauté pan over medium heat until shimmering.
  2. Add 3 thinly sliced garlic cloves and 3/4 teaspoon of red pepper flakes. Stir for 1 minute.
  3. Add 3 tightly packed cups of de-stemmed, roughly chopped lacinato kale. Stir until the kale begins to wilt.
  4. Partially cover and cook, stirring every now and then, for about 5 minutes, until the greens are tender. Finish with 3/4 teaspoon of salt and the juice from 1/2 lemon.

Forget what I said back there about having boundaries —I  would like to propose to the Sauté Onlykale and spend the rest of my life eating it (not in an Armie Hammer way). It was tender enough — though nothing like the velvety Blanch and Slow Sauté or Braise batches; more on those in a minute — with just an inkling of body and chew. The light scorch of the greens merged perfectly with the tart lemon, smoky-hot pepper, and piercing salt for an intense few bites. Crispy garlic was, as they say, the garlic on top. (Nobody says this.)

Sauté and Steam

Inspired by Food Network.

  1. Heat 3 tablespoons of olive oil in a sauté pan over medium heat until shimmering.
  2. Add 3 thinly sliced garlic cloves and 3/4 teaspoon of red pepper flakes. Stir for 1 minute.
  3. Add 3 tightly packed cups of de-stemmed, roughly chopped lacinato kale. Stir until the kale just begins to wilt.
  4. Add 1/3 cup chicken broth. Cover and cook until the kale is tender, about 5 minutes. Finish with 3/4 teaspoon of salt and the juice from 1/2 lemon.

The Sauté and Steam kale ranked top of the class for efficiency, but bottom for texture and flavor. The kale itself wasn’t as fully seasoned as Sauté Only kale — the broth diluted things somewhat, and I suspect also prevented the greens from taking in as much salt and acid. The kale’s texture was the tiniest bit gummy rather than silky. But it was perfectly edible (a crispy fried egg would’ve done wonders) and a little softer than the Sauté Only kale, so I will still use this method when I’m after gentler textures. But I’ll be sure to layer in more seasoning when I do.

Steam Only

  1. Set up a stockpot with a few inches of water over high heat and fit with a steamer basket. Cover.
  2. When the water reaches a boil, add 3 tightly packed cups of de-stemmed, roughly chopped lacinato kale to the steamer basket. Cover.
  3. Steam for about 10 minutes, until the kale is tender. Remove and finish with 3/4 teaspoon of salt and the juice from 1/2 lemon.

My first impression: The kale appeared fluffier than any other batch, like it had lost less water in the cooking process. (Plus, there was no oil to weigh it down.) Its texture reflected this, with a softness that seemed plusher and lighter than the leaves of other methods. Flavor-wise, this was the grassiest of the bunch, so if you’re in it for the fresh green vibes, Steam Only could be your method. Perhaps because of the lack of garlic and red pepper flakes, the lemon punched through in a big way.

Roast

  1. Heat the oven to 325°F.
  2. Toss 3 tightly packed cups of de-stemmed, roughly chopped lacinato kale with 3 tablespoons of olive oil, 3 thinly sliced garlic cloves, 3/4 teaspoon of red pepper flakes, 3/4 teaspoon of salt, and the juice from 1/2 lemon.
  3. Spread out on a sheet pan, avoiding overlapping the leaves as much as possible to encourage crisping.
  4. Roast for 20 to 25 minutes, until each leaf is stiff and crunchy.

Despite how dire and limp the situation appeared about 15 minutes in, by the 22-minute mark I had crisp, boldly flavored chips that shattered like fiberglass or my self-confidence in almost any workout class. While lacking in structural integrity — the hummus I dipped these in looked like it hosted a shipwreck — the roasted kale chips disappeared quickly, thanks to the little ones. (That’s what I call my alter-egos. I do not have children or pets.)

Braise

Inspired by Food and Wine.

  1. Heat 3 tablespoons of olive oil in a Dutch oven over medium-high heat until shimmering. Add 3 thinly sliced garlic cloves and 3/4 teaspoon of red pepper flakes and sauté until fragrant, about 1 minute.
  2. Add 3 tightly packed cups of de-stemmed, roughly chopped lacinato kale, 1 cup of really good canned crushed tomatoes, and 3/4 cup of broth. (I used chicken but follow your heart, I’m not your mom.) Scrape up any garlicky, peppery bits as you stir to wilt the kale. Add 3/4 teaspoon of salt and the juice from 1/2 lemon.
  3. Partially cover and let simmer over medium heat for 8 to 12 minutes, until the greens are tender and the braising liquid is delicious.

Oh, baby! About once a week, I encounter a cooked vegetable situation that makes me want to drop everything and boil a pound of rigatoni so I can mix everything together and cover it in cheese. The kale from the Braise method officially joined the ranks of Most Pastable Vegetables as soon as it was ready. The braising liquid and leaves created something reminiscent of ribollita and Sunday sauce at the same time. Which is to say, I poured it directly into my mouth. Was this fair to include in the trials since it added delicious tomato to the mix? Probably not. To even the playing field, I admit that the cooked kale on its own tasted a little bitter, a flavor not present in any other method. OK, back to pouring hot kale — tomato juice into my mouth.

Simmer In Broth

Inspired by The Zuni Café Cookbook, via Orangette.

  1. Heat 3 tablespoons of olive oil in a Dutch oven over medium-low heat until warm. Add 3 thinly sliced garlic cloves, 3/4 teaspoon of red pepper flakes, and 3 tightly packed cups of de-stemmed, roughly chopped lacinato kale. Stir until the kale is wilted.
  2. Add 6 cups of broth, or enough to cover the kale by 1/2 inch. Bring to a simmer. Partially cover and simmer until the kale is tender, about 30 minutes.
  3. Finish with 3/4 teaspoon of salt and the juice from 1/2 lemon.

The texture of the Simmer in Broth kale was so wonderful and unique, it inspired me to draw a series of stars around the phrase “buttery roughage” on my to-do list. The kale was beyond soft, like silk slapped with a meat tenderizer and, despite its faded hue, had a delightfully subtle flavor. Like the Sauté and Steam kale, if I were making this outside the bounds of a restrictive head-to-head test, I would add additional seasoning, as the broth dilutes most of the salt, pepper, and lemon. Regardless, this batch begged to be poured over stale sourdough with a dollop of chile crisp. (Seriously, it wouldn’t stop begging, until one of my “little ones” threatened to pour it in the trash.)

Blanch and Slow Sauté

Inspired by Suzanne Goin’s Slow-Cooked Cavolo Nero.

  1. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Add 3 tightly packed cups of de-stemmed, roughly chopped lacinato kale and blanch for 2 minutes. Drain. Once cool, squeeze out any excess water.
  2. Heat 3 tablespoons of olive oil in a Dutch oven over low heat until warm. Add 3 thinly sliced garlic cloves, 3/4 teaspoon of red pepper flakes, 3/4 teaspoon of salt, and the blanched kale.
  3. Cook over low heat, stirring occasionally, for about 30 minutes, until soft and nearly black. Finish with the juice from 1/2 lemon.

So much to unpack. Obviously, after being slow-sautéed for 30 minutes with lots of garlic, oil, and friends, this kale tasted like something I would pay $14 for at a Tuscan restaurant. Less obviously, whoa, blanching kale! What a trip. The resulting greens lost so much volume that by the time they hit the Dutch oven, I was working with less than a cup of leaves. The blanching stripped away any hint of bitterness, which was cool, and I suspect gave the greens a jump-start in softening.

* * *

Conclusions

There are so many delightful ways to cook kale:

  • For a snack, Roast kale at 325°F after you’ve tossed it with oil, salt, and any aromatics or seasonings that appeal. (Nutritional yeast, garlic powder, cheese powder, paprika, za’atar, and gochugaru all come to mind.)
  • If time is not of the essence — but the most supremely buttery, deeply flavored kale is of the essence — turn to the Blanch and Slow Sauté method.
  • For kale that tastes a lot like kale, Steam away.
  • If you’re looking to get yourself halfway to dinner, you’d better Braise.
  • For efficient and excellent kale: Sauté.

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Marjorie Taylor Greene busted for liking tweet linking Israel to Kennedy assassination

On Saturday, CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski revealed that among the numerous tweets deleted by pro-QAnon Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) is a thread in which she liked a post suggesting that the Israeli intelligence services assassinated President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

The post is yet another example of possible anti-Semitic sentiments from the conspiracy-minded Greene, who has also suggested that wealthy Jews used a space laser to ignite the 2018 California wildfires.

Greene has rapidly become one of the most controversial members of the House Republican caucus. She has also advocated killing prominent Democrats on social media and posted videos of herself harassing a school shooting survivor. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) had to relocate one of her freshman members, Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri, to another office after she was harassed by Greene and her staff.

Calls are growing for Greene to be expelled from Congress, but so far Republicans have not suggested a willingness to join such an effort.

Voters are starting to act like hard-core sports fans — with dangerous repercussions for democracy

During Donald Trump’s presidency, the American electorate became more divided and partisan, with research suggesting that the ongoing division is less about policy and more about labels like “conservative” and “liberal.”

Essentially, voters increasingly see themselves in one of two camps – a “red team” and “blue team,” each with a faction of hard-core members.

The dangerous extent of this devotion was on display when a mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, convinced that the election had been stolen despite no credible evidence of widespread voter fraud.

How did American politics get to this point?

As sports communication researchers who have written extensively on the vast and powerful influence of identity on attitudes and behavior, we believe our work can offer some ways to understand recent events.

We’ve noted parallels between political identity and sports fandom that, when unpacked, point to some of the dangers associated with what we call “political fandom.”

Fandom can be central to identity

In sports, the spectrum of fandom is easily observable. Some fans might casually enjoy games simply while wearing their team’s shirt, whereas others ardently support and uproariously react to every play while cloaked in elaborate, outlandish outfits.

But fandom can go beyond outfits. It can become a core component of your identity – your sense of who you are.

Sports communication researchers refer to this connection as “team identification,” a concept that transcends simply supporting a team and is, instead, characterized by a deeper, emotional attachment in which fans feel psychologically connected to their favorite team.

These fans – called “highly identified fans” – are more likely to express their love of their team on social media, attend events and consume more team-related media. They’ll even buy team-related products when they don’t particularly like the product itself. For the fan, it’s all about demonstrating allegiance.

Research shows that being a fan and belonging to a group can be beneficial to someone’s well-being. But there can be a darker side to this kind of devoted fandom – particularly when a favorite team loses.

Wins and losses become personal

In sports, the final whistle signals a game’s end.

But the level to which fans identify with their team can actually influence how they feel and act after the game has been decided. For highly identified fans, a win feels like a personal victory; a loss, on the other hand, feels like a personal defeat.

After wins, highly identified fans are more likely to bask in the glory of victory, tying themselves to the team through the use of language like “us” and “we.”

For those same highly identified fans, a loss isn’t simply disappointing. Instead, it poses a threat to their identity and causes psychological discomfort that leads to stress, depression and a greater willingness to confront others. They’ll often double down in support of their team. They might declare their team the best, regardless of the outcome. They’ll say the loss was a fluke and that external causes were to blame – poor officiating, an injury or cheating by the other team.

As with sports, political identification and participation can occur on a spectrum. Some people simply vote every election cycle for their preferred political party. Others, however, are heavily invested in the party and its candidates. They devour media, purchase campaign-affiliated merchandise and frequently flaunt their support in public and on social media.

After the 2020 presidential election, we wanted to know to what extent the concept of team identification applied to politics. We surveyed voters between Dec. 16 and Dec. 20, 2020, just days after the Electoral College vote confirmed Joe Biden as president-elect. Administering a questionnaire that’s used by sport communication researchers, we were able to show “team identification” – when applied to politics – can help explain certain beliefs and behaviors after the election.

We found that 55% of Trump voters in our survey still falsely believed that Donald Trump had won the 2020 election. This result was significantly influenced by their level of team identification; voters who were highly identified Trump supporters were more likely to hold this false belief.

Of course, Trump, some members of Congress and conservative media outlets reinforced those false beliefs by sharing baseless information alleging election irregularities and voter fraud.

When we asked highly identified Trump supporters if they were likely to distance themselves after the loss, we found they retained unfettered loyalty to Trump, similar to the way a sports fan would react after a big loss. When asked why Biden had been declared president-elect, overwhelmingly, they blamed everything but Trump, most often echoing Trump’s false voter fraud claims.

The ball is in the politician’s court

This issue, however, is not unique to Trump and his supporters.

Many politicians have devoted fans. Our results showed – perhaps surprisingly – that both Biden and Trump voters rated similarly in terms of their levels of political team identification.

To us, this signals the extent to which our politics have become polarized, with voters existing in separate camps that are unflaggingly devoted to their “team” and its leaders.

The onus, then, increasingly lies on politicians, whose words wield even more power when their followers closely identify with them.

In sports, after losing a close playoff game, a star player can congratulate the other team and admit to being outplayed or can blame the refs and accuse the other side of cheating without offering evidence. The former reaction might temper the emotions of die-hard fans, while the latter could easily exacerbate their negative feelings.

It’s important for political leaders to consider the influence of political fandom. After an election, conceding after the “final whistle has blown” is an important norm and tradition, while divisive rhetoric that fans the flames of false hope is a dangerous tack to take. After all, in sports, highly identified fans are much more likely to become aggressive when they expect their team to win, only to witness a loss.

Politics, though, isn’t a game. And on Jan. 6, the world saw what happens when political fandom is harnessed and unleashed by unfounded, inflammatory rhetoric.

Michael Devlin, Associate Professor of Communication, Texas State University and Natalie Brown Devlin, Assistant Professor of Advertising, University of Texas at Austin

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

Far-right extremist violence and American presidents: The pattern isn’t what you’d think

Donald Trump’s term in office ended much as it began, with an ideologically motivated murder committed during a far-right rally that devolved into violence. The Jan. 6 Capitol riots and official warnings about future anti-government violence across the nation once again focused the media and public’s attention on deadly violence committed by American far-right extremists. Few details are publicly available, but it is known that Officer Brian Sicknick of the Capitol Police died from injuries sustained during the riots and several other people lost their lives during the mayhem. Black Capitol Police officers were chased and attacked by a mob who yelled racial slurs after they made it inside the building. 

However unprecedented the nature of the Capitol riots, deadly violence perpetrated by far-right extremists and the conspiracies and ideologies underlying this violence are anything but new in the United States. We know this because for the last 15 years we have collected and analyzed data on this type of violence from the Extremist Crime Database (ECDB). An open-source database, the ECDB includes information on ideologically and non-ideologically motivated crimes committed by far-right, left-wing and jihadi extremists, completed acts as well as failed and foiled plots. These data enable us to present findings on ideologically motivated far-right extremist murders since the early 1990s, spanning the seven terms of the last four U.S. presidents. 

Since the 1993 inauguration of President Bill Clinton, a minimum of 500 people have been murdered by far-right extremists. This number drops to 332 when the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing, which killed 168 people, is excluded — a statistical outlier that skews the results and hides underlying patterns in the victimization data. The most common victims of extreme far-right murders remain racial, ethnic, social and religious minorities, while the second most common victims are government actors, including law enforcement. This is unsurprising as, even though some far-right rhetoric exudes support for police, the actions of far-right extremists offer the greatest ideological threat against the lives of agents within the criminal justice system. Unlike other more common forms of murder in the U.S., murders committed by far-right extremists are more likely to entail expressive, symbolic attacks against strangers. While firearms are the most common type of weapon used, members of the far right are also historically more likely to rely on knives, blunt objects and bodily weapons when they kill compared to other types of murder.

The far-right violence under President Trump is currently front of mind, but our data demonstrate that far-right extremists have perpetrated ideologically motivated murders every year of Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama’s presidential terms as well. Far-right extremist violence has been a persistent, yet dynamic threat to homeland security. The influence of movement leaders and the prominence of groups and ideological nuances shift over time, but the underlying tenets of white supremacy, anti-governmentalism and conspiratorial thinking have endured along with the continued threat of fatal violence against the public and government agents like Officer Sicknick. 

Bill Clinton assumed office in 1993, five months after the federal siege on Ruby Ridge, Idaho, resulted in the death of a deputy U.S. marshal by a far-rightist, and the deaths of his son and wife by law enforcement. That same year, the federal siege of the Branch Davidian complex in Waco, Texas, fueled anti-government angst and New World Order conspiracy theories among movement sympathizers. These events stoked Second Amendment conspiracies and the resurgence of the paramilitary militia movement. 

In part as a response to this perceived government overstep, Army veteran Timothy McVeigh and his accomplices bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 children, on the second anniversary of the Waco siege. Like many far-right extremists since the 1995 bombing, McVeigh saw himself as a true patriot at war with a tyrannical government. He hoped others would follow in his steps and take up arms. The bombing, however, drastically impacted public perception and involvement in the militia movement as federal law enforcement tamped down on violent extremism. These groups quickly lost members and the movement waned. One of the final acts of fatal far-right violence during President Clinton’s first term was the bombing at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta by lone actor and serial bomber Eric Rudolph.

Clinton’s second term led up to the new millennium and related Y2K fears and conspiracies. It was during this period that the highest number of far-right extremist murders captured by the ECDB occurred, with a total of 44 incidents resulting in 68 deaths. This deadly far-right violence took multiple forms; anti-government attacks, hate-motivated murders, such as the heinous death of James Byrd Jr. in Texas, and anti-abortion violence. Skinheads and neo-Nazis beating to death those without stable housing, the Aryan Brotherhood murdering Black inmates in prison, survivalists and anti-government extremists shooting law enforcement officers, white supremacists murdering individuals in biracial relationships, a gay couple shot to death at their home by anti-Semitic and homophobic brothers, an obstetrician assassinated by a sniper while standing in his kitchen. Although some were high-profile crimes, many of these murders occurred with little to no national media attention.

President Bush’s first term in office saw a steep decline in far-right murders, with only 24 incidents and 35 deaths. One study, also relying on ECDB data, found that the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent passing of the Patriot Act resulted in a significant decrease in the frequency of far-right extremist murders in the United States. The 9/11 attacks, however, did inspire a surge in anti-Muslim violence, including a murder spree by a member of the Aryan Brotherhood. The nation also witnessed a mass shooting perpetrated by a white supremacist who killed six co-workers at an ethics and diversity class he was ordered to attend after threatening and using racist slurs against Black co-workers.

Far-right violence continued to decline, albeit slightly, during President Bush’s second term, with 28 murder victims killed in 22 incidents. However, this slight reduction was only in anti-government violence, as white supremacist-motivated murders remained stable. More than 25% of the murderers targeted Hispanic and immigrant victims. One such incident was the stabbing of an Ecuadorian immigrant at the end of a spree of anti-Hispanic attacks carried out by a group of teens in Long Island, New York. 

In hindsight, this increase in anti-immigrant and anti-Hispanic/Latinx violence is not surprising, since immigration rhetoric became increasingly negative after 9/11 as the discourse frequently characterized immigration as a criminal threat. In fact, the Minutemen Movement, an anti-immigrant group of militia members, organized during this period and patrolled the border between the United States and Mexico. Members of a similar group were tried and convicted for the murder of a Latino man and his 9-year-old daughter only five months into President Obama’s first term.

Even before his inauguration, Obama’s post-election period was met with an unprecedented increase in hate crimes. During his first four years in office, there was an increase to 28 incidents resulting in 52 people killed by ideologically motivated far-right extremists. Such violence was part of an overall backlash against the United States’ first Black president. Evidence supporting this backlash was found in increasing anti-government sentiment with a massive increase in the number of patriot and militia groups during Obama’s first term, surpassing the height of the militia movement leading up to the Oklahoma City bombing. 

High-profile ideologically motivated murders included an attack at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, the mass shooting at the Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, the assassination of two police officers in Arkansas by “sovereign citizens,” and the death of a government employee after a man flew a small plane into an IRS building in Texas during a suicide attack.

Despite a decline in both incidents and fatalities, with 46 victims over 21 incidents, Obama’s second term witnessed high-profile mass murders, including the Isla Vista killings in 2014 and the 2015 Charleston church shooting. The Isla Vista killings demonstrated the intersection of white supremacist and misogynistic beliefs and preceded an increasing number of anti-female and anti-feminist far-right attacks targeting women, such as 2015 shootings at a screening of the movie “Trainwreck” in Louisiana and at Umpqua Community College in Oregon. 

The massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, spurred activism to remove Confederate symbols of white supremacy throughout the United States, triggering a reactionary response among far-right extremists. During the 2016 presidential race, Trump supporters frequently displayed the Confederate flags at his campaign and other pro-Trump rallies. As president, Trump spoke approvingly of Confederate flags and monuments and during the Jan. 6 riot an insurrectionist marched through the U.S. Capitol with a Confederate flag.

Trump came to office amid the growing visibility of far-right extremist activity in the U.S. During his first year in office, the “Unite the Right” rally unfolded in Charlottesville, Virginia, culminating in the murder of one counterprotester who was run down by an apparent white supremacist driving a car. While Trump’s term saw a slight increase from Obama’s second term, to 25 fatal far-right incidents, there was a higher than average number of fatalities with 51 victims. 

The white supremacist mass shootings at the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue and the El Paso Walmart were particularly lethal, killing 11 and 23 people, respectively. In Trump’s final year in office, far-right extremists were particularly violent against law enforcement agents. In addition to the death of Officer Sicknick, individuals associated with the “Boogaloo boys” murdered a federal security officer and a Santa Cruz County, California, sheriff’s sergeant, and an anti-feminist far-right extremist targeted a judge, but instead murdered her son. Another unique feature of Trump’s presidency was his failure to unequivocally and consistently denounce both the ideology and the actions of far-right extremists. Dangerous rhetoric that earlier this month drew a straight line from a rally at the White House to a riot and insurrection at the Capitol. Regardless of differences in their policies and politics, neither Clinton, Bush nor Obama supported, either explicitly or implicitly, domestic terrorism or extremist violence.

The future of far-right extremist murders

Across the last three decades, the number of far-right ideologically motivated murders has ebbed and flowed, although the number of deadly incidents has never reached the height of Clinton’s presidency. One troubling pattern observed in our data is that while the frequency of incidents did not spike during Trump’s presidency, incidents have increasingly involved fewer co-offenders and higher death tolls. If this trend continues, the law enforcement and intelligence community under President Joe Biden will be challenged with preventing deadly attacks committed by lone actors seeking to conduct mass fatality events. 

As processes of radicalization toward extremist violence play out on an expanding number of social media platforms, where dehumanizing conspiracies and dangerous ideas can be shared and discussed in a vacuum with little oversight, we fear that plots to commit such attacks will continue, and possibly increase even after Inauguration Day. In addition, there has been a trend toward the mainstreaming of extremism, including the widespread acceptance of the “birther” conspiracy theory as well as other right-wing allegations, such as those against Obama, specifically, but also against Democrats and the U.S. government more generally. More Americans are also being exposed to far-right extremist ideas as they engage in mainstream spaces, like athletic activities, online gaming platforms and college campuses.

The Jan. 6 Capitol riots and the ongoing reports of continued threats of violence have ensured that media, politicians and the public have become hyper-aware of the dangers of extreme far-right violence in America over the last few weeks. However, when Timothy McVeigh detonated the bomb that murdered 168 Americans, the devastating impact of anti-government, conspiratorial thinking also came into sharp focus. So too was the focus on the horrific impact of white supremacist ideology after the murders that occured at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, and the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston.

The threat of far-right extremism has been identified and reported on by homeland security analysts time and again, as well as other data collection efforts. In fact, a recent Department of Homeland Security report prophetically warned that “campaign-associated mass gatherings” might become “flashpoints for potential violence.” The FBI office in Norfolk, Virginia, also issued an internal report the day before the insurrection, noting online discussions “indicating calls for violence in response to ‘unlawful lockdowns’ to begin on 6 January 2021 in Washington. D.C.” 

Unfortunately, even as companies attempt to regulate extremist content on their platforms, with no unified federal or state efforts to combat extremist ideologies and deradicalize those already involved in the movement, these fatal acts of violence will continue. After the militia movement collapsed in the mid-1990s, those who were radicalized did not disappear, nor did they no longer support white supremacy or oppose the government. Evident in the ECDB data is the unfortunate reality that these individuals continued to murder in the name of an extreme ideology at a rate similar, if not slightly higher, after the bombing in Oklahoma and during Bill Clinton’s second term. 

Similarly, Biden and his national security team should expect that both members and sympathizers of groups or ideologies such as the Proud Boys, Boogaloo boys, Three Percenters, Oath Keepers, QAnon adherents, Atomwaffen members, Incels, the alt-right and others of a similar ilk will continue to be a heightened threat to both the public and the government. Over the last four years they have been radicalized and empowered, and have shown they are willing to resort to violence to defend their extremist ideologies. Fortunately, Biden has already signaled an understanding of how dangerous these ideologies are by requesting an assessment of the threat. 

Understanding the nature and magnitude of the threat is only the first step, however; it is also imperative that resources are committed to deradicalizing those who are already ideological extremists and preventing others from following them down the rabbit hole. Only sustained political will can accomplish this, which requires a continued focus on far-right extremism by the public and the media. Anything less will continue us on the pathway we have been on for decades, with murders of the American public by far-right extremists.

 

 

COVID scams flourish despite efforts of health and law enforcement agencies

Black Plague tea. Biomagnetism treatment. Ozone therapy.

Although authorities are trying to crack down, bogus Covid-19 promotions like these are still going strong, as frightened consumers seek out and fall prey to sham treatments and cures.

The Justice Department, which reported receiving more than 76,000 tips about coronavirus scams by the fall, has filed at least 33 criminal cases, along with 13 civil actions seeking to halt the sale of fake vaccines, treatments or testing.

“A pandemic is a time when people should come together to pursue the common good,” said former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen in a press release, “but sadly there are some who instead use it as an opportunity to deceive and thieve.” 

With the U.S. coronavirus death toll surging past 425,000, genuine vaccines have arrived, though the rollout has been painfully slow. In a country of more than 330 million people, only about 23.5 million have received their first shot, and it will be months before vaccinations are available to everyone.

That has helped pandemic-related frauds to proliferate, keeping health and law enforcement officials busy.

In March, the New York State attorney general ordered televangelist Jim Bakkerto stop claiming that his “Silver Solution” could cure the coronavirus. The U.S. Justice Department brought its first case the same month against the sale of fake “World Health Organization” vaccine kits.

Since then, the department has obtained injunctions against companies like Fusion Health and Pharm Origins in Georgia, which sold unapproved vitamin D products, such as “Immune Shots,” that were pitched as treatments for Covid-19. In Dallas, Texas, a person posing as a potential customer recorded claims at a health clinic  that a bogus treatment—ozone therapy—could stop viruses like Covid from spreading through the body. A federal judge ordered the clinic to stop offering unproven treatments.

Some scam artists have been busted for selling dangerous products. In May, Rong Sun, a Georgia woman, pleaded guilty to charges of marketing an unregistered pesticide as a preventive treatment against coronavirus. In Florida, prosecutors took aim at the Genesis II Church of Health and Healing for selling Miracle Mineral Solution, a dangerous product containing bleach.  After the church co-founder Mark Grenon and his sons refused to comply with a court order prohibiting sales, they were arrested in August.

Federal authorities also have obtained restraining orders to shut down hundreds of websites touting fake vaccines, fraudulent charity drives and counterfeit medical supplies. In August, the Justice Department announced that thousands of U.S. consumers had been defrauded by scammers in Vietnam offering hand sanitizer and disinfectant wipes. Purchasers of the products never received them.

In November, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which polices false advertising, got a restraining order against 25 websites that promoted Clorox and Lysol products. Consumers duped into paying for cleaning supplies that never arrived commiserated with each other in comments on an FTC blog post.

“I was also scammed in the Lysol Flash sale… it is very stressful and spent weeks to get my money back,” said one commenter.

“Buyer beware!” another commenter wrote, after her shipment of Lysol wipes did not arrive, and the website did not provide a way to cancel the order.

The arrival of real vaccines, an otherwise happy event, has also created new opportunities for conmen. Steven McFarland, CEO of the Better Business Bureau of Southern California, said his office has received complaints about people going door-to-door to offer access to vaccines for a price.

“Nobody is going to give you early access to a vaccine in exchange for money,” McFarland said. He added that consumers should also be suspicious of fraudsters pretending to be coronavirus contact tracers who are primarily interested in getting personal information, like Medicare card numbers.

For scams to proliferate during a public health crisis is nothing new. FTC attorney Christine DeLorme said that similar cons popped up after other viral outbreaks like avian flu or Zika. But the length and severity of the pandemic has produced fraud on a different scale.

“The variety we’ve seen being sold is sort of unprecedented,” DeLorme said.

Since the pandemic started, warning letters from the FTC and the Food and Drug Administration to purveyors of vitamins, supplements, colloidal silver and the like have created a gallery of phony promotions.

The FTC has issued more than 350 such letters, DeLorme said, a volume that is “many multiples over anything we’ve ever done for a given medical condition.”

The FDA has issued more than 140 warning letters for fraudulent Covid products, according to its website. The agency has also removed many unapproved products,  such as rapid test kits, through complaints to domain registrars

According to DeLorme, most companies stop making misleading claims after getting a warning letter, and risk being sued if they don’t. In October, the FTC settled a case with a California marketer called Whole Leaf Organics that sold an “anti viral wellness booster.”

Still, the threat of legal action doesn’t stop all dubious promotions. Last month, the FDA sent a warning letter to Dr. Steven F. Hotze, a Texas physician, for marketing vitamin kits for children that he claimed would protect against the coronavirus.

Hotze also penned an op-ed on a Christian news site touting the anti-parasite drug Ivermectin as “highly effective” in treating Covid-19 infections. Hotze did not respond to a request for comment.

Ivermectin is not approved for the prevention or treatment of Covid, according to the FDA. The agency said in a post on its website that side effects can include stomach pain, seizures, a sudden drop in blood pressure and liver injury.

Hotze is not the only physician accused of peddling unproven remedies, and at least one has faced criminal charges. Last month, a federal grand jury in San Diego indicted Dr. Jennings Ryan Staley on charges stemming from the sale of Covid-19 treatment kits. An attempt to reach his attorney was unsuccessful.

According to the indictment, Staley tried to smuggle hydroxychloroquine powder into the U.S. by mislabeling it as “yam extract.” Early in the pandemic, he promoted hydroxychloroquine—an anti-malarial drug once touted by former President Trump—as a “guaranteed” cure for the coronavirus, according to the Justice Department.

Maz Jobrani doesn’t miss Trump jokes: He wasn’t just bad for America, he was bad for comedy

There is a recurring question that comedians keep getting asked lately: “Do you miss Donald Trump for all the material he provided you?” Although well-intentioned, these people have no idea how stand-up comedy actually works, which comedian Maz Jobrani made clear during our “Salon Talks” episode this week.

I spoke to Jobrani, who has starred in everything from his own comedy specials on Showtime to movies, to his latest special, “Pandemic Warrior,” now available on NBC’s streaming service, Peacock. In between discussions about his special, which was filmed in Dubai shortly before the pandemic, we kept coming back to the role that Trump, and those who share his beliefs, have had on Jobrani’s life from his stand-up act to growing up as an Iranian immigrant. 

On the comedy front, as Jobrani explained, the loyalty of Trump supporters carried over to his shows with Trumpers heckling him for telling jokes about the president. Jobrani joked that some of these people apparently “forgot we live in America where you can make fun of the President.” But the bigger issue with Trump was that it was challenging to make light of a man who was causing so much pain to so many, including in Jobrani’s own community, given the Muslim ban. President Joe Biden has since rescinded that ban on day one of his administration.

Watch my “Salon Talks” with Jobrani, or read a Q&A of our conversation below, to hear Jobrani discuss the importance of American audiences seeing people in the Arab world laughing and the human side of Iranians that we rarely ever seen in entertainment.

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

Welcome, Maz. You filmed “Pandemic Warrior” in Dubai. Does that makes you the first American comic to ever film a special there?

Thank you for having me, Dean. I think I’m the first American comic to film in Dubai, for sure.

And you filmed this in December 2019, but it’s coming out now on Peacock, which if people don’t know is NBC’s streaming platform. Why did you want to do this in Dubai?

I’ve had a chance to film all over the world. I filmed one special in Sweden, Stockholm. Then my last one that was called “Immigrant” and was filmed at the Kennedy Center in DC. I’ve filmed in LA. But as you know, when you do a special, you’re like, “Well it’s got to be special. Something’s got to be different.”

I had been wanting to do a special out of the Middle East for the longest time. One big reason was to just have people watch and go, “Oh wow. There’s people in the Middle East watching comedy.” Because even though you and I both know this and we’ve been going to the region now for the past 13 years, since we collaborated on the “Axis of Evil” in 2007, I still think there’s a lot of people that don’t know that. Trump was able to manipulate people by scaring them that Muslims are coming and that led to the Muslim ban. I thought, hey, what a better way than to show just a comedy show coming out of the Middle East and having people watch people from that part of the world laugh.

You mentioned “Axis of Evil,” which was a Comedy Central special we did 12, 13 years ago on comedy in the Middle East. Then it played in the Middle East. You went over first, in the first wave, then I came with you afterwards. Share with people what it was like going to a place to do stand-up with no history of stand-up comedy. What were your anxieties then?

Yeah, it was me, Ahmed Ahmed, Aron Kader, and you said, you came with us later. It was the first time you saw Middle Eastern performers on American television and we weren’t killed. We were telling jokes. That really helped all of us in the U.S. As you said, it became known in the Middle East. We go to the Middle East and all of a sudden, I think we did 27 sold-out shows in 30 days. There was a huge buzz. It felt like over the Atlantic, by the time we landed in the Middle East, we’d become the Beatles of that time. It was crazy. You’d walk down the street, people would recognize you. They want pictures with you.

In Beirut, the promoter had bought one show. He was going to do one show for 1,000 people. He ended up doing five shows. He added shows. It was an amazing experience. The most important thing was even though I was born in Iran, I had grown up in America since I was six years old. I hadn’t really spent time in the Middle East until then. That’s when I really went. It was eye-opening for me because they were so welcoming and they were so friendly, and it was arms wide open.

That’s the big thing that I tell people in America. A lot of times when people want to fear-monger, when you hear guys like your Tom Cottons or your Mike Pompeos or your Donald Trumps, a lot of times they tell you, “Yeah, they’re going around going, ‘Death to America.'” I say, “You know what? That’s not the case” – 99.9% of the people in the Middle East and the Arab world are trying to live their lives. They’re trying to feed their families. They’re trying to maybe have some entertainment in their lives. For us to think that they’re waking up and the first thought is to go, “Death to America.” I go, ” You sound so narcissistic that we think that they’re thinking about us all the time.” That’s not to say there aren’t bad people trying to do bad things. But unfortunately the image that we have is the negative one. When you go there and you see how great they are, you go, “Wow. More people should see this.”

It’s still like, “First we have coffee, then death to America.” Come on.

Exactly. 

In this special you talk about dealing with the censors. I remember the first time going to do a show in Dubai. It was right after your big tours. They made me write my act out, literally in hand. Then I’m like, “Wow. This isn’t funny at all.” I mean, it’s arguably funny when it’s performed, but on paper, it wasn’t. You joke a little bit about Kuwait. Tell people what it was like and why the powers that be had such a trepidation about stand-up comedy coming to that region.

I think the reason I was worried about Trump, and I’m starting to turn everything back to Trump, but he reminded me a lot of the Middle Eastern dictators or strong men that we’d seen where when we first toured in the region in the Middle East, when you would show up the promoters would say, “You can talk about anything you want, but no sex, no religion, no politics. You’d be like, “Well, hello and goodnight,” or, “Salaam-alaikum and alaikum salaam.” But the politics meant no local politics.

I remember doing shows in Egypt, this was 2007 when Hosni Mubarak was still the president. The promoters said, “Yeah, we got a call from some guy from the ministry of information. They’re wondering, do any of you have jokes about Hosni Mubarak?” I was like, “I don’t think so, but why?” He goes, “Well, they’re very sensitive,” because a few months before we arrived, some journalist had written an article where he claimed that Hosni Mubarak looked like he was getting older and they threw him in jail. I was like, “Oh no, we’re not. We got no Mubarak jokes. Don’t worry about it.”

But to come back in 2020 or 2016, and have a president who doesn’t go to the Correspondents’ Dinner, who says any criticism about him is fake, all of that stuff reminded me a lot of the things that we had to go through. The censors were always afraid that you were either going to offend a leader, or you were going to say something against religion and offend somebody. It’s always been a little bit of a dance. It also depends on the countries. When we went to Lebanon, in Lebanon, they said, “Oh, do whatever you want. Make fun of Hezbollah.” I was like, “No, you make fun of Hezbollah. I ain’t going to kill myself here.”

But all of that is to say, as you said, I’ve had times before, as well in Dubai, where they said, “Write out your set.” And I presented it. It’s not the perfect science. Because you and I both know you end up saying a lot of different things in your show than what you’ve written. But this time around, in 2019 when I went, what had happened was Russell Peters had shown up, I don’t know, a few months before I had. I guess in doing his crowd work or something, he’d said something that offended somebody. Then the promoter had gotten in trouble. Then the censors had comedy back on their radar.

When I showed up, they said, “Give us your show. We want to look at it.” I said, “Oh, well just give them my old show.” I thought they were just going to look at it. As you said, when you hand write your jokes, they don’t read as funny. Then they go, “No, we’re going to translate it to Arabic.” I go, “Well, now it’s going to be even less funny.” Then they told me, “The censor wants to watch you do your show alone, in a theater the day before.” That was the first time I ever had to do that. I literally had to go stand there. They’re still building the stage. There’s people on scaffoldings and they’re connecting things. And there’s a guy who, remember, doesn’t speak English, who’s sitting there across from me, next to a guy who does speak English and is acting as a translator and is friends with the promoters.

As I’m walking around the stage with my script in my hand, because it’s my old show, it’s not the new show I’m going to do the next night. I’m walking around just telling jokes. Every once in a while, the guy translating will lean in and be like . . .  Then the guy’s, “Okay, okay.” Then . . . I was like, “This is the craziest thing.” The funny thing is at the end of it all, being Iranian American, I have jokes about America, jokes about Iran, I got jokes about my kids. Very end of it all, the promoters . . .  And they all go off somewhere to have a discussion. The promoters come back and go, “He approved us.” I go, “Great.” He goes, “But he said, ‘Tell him to not make fun of Iran so much.”” I was like, “That’s funny. He had a request.”

We talk about the cancel culture in America, but the cancel culture in the Middle East is a little bit more, I would say, punitive. You’re not suspended from Twitter, you’re just gone. There’s no PC police. It’s actual police.

You get canceled is like you just disappear.

When I produced a comedy festival in Jordan, I remember being interviewed by reporters and saying things like “We’re not being political now.” But looking back, comedy is inherently defiant and comics are inherently anti-authority and push the boundaries. Bassem Youssef, known as the Jon Stewart of the Middle East, was probably the first to actually get arrested in Egypt. Now he lives in the States. I knew that was going to come a time where there’d be the tension between, “Hey, this is the funny thing” and someone actually saying something about the leaders of that country, and they’re going, “Joke’s over, buddy. We’re going to arrest you.”

That’s the beauty of comedy, I think. You go back to Lenny Bruce being arrested back in the day for breaking the law. I think, as you said, we are the kid in the classroom and the teacher has said, “Everyone be quiet.” We can’t help ourselves. We just got to say something and we say it and we get in trouble and we get in trouble. Eventually that helps a society go towards free speech. I agree with you. We saw it firsthand in the Middle East, because I think we were all very thankful to be there. As a matter of fact, as you know, when we went to Jordan, as did you, the King of Jordan is a fan of comedy. He invited us over.

I believe Aron Kader asked him, “We were a little worried how much we could push the envelope in our jokes here in Jordan.” The king said, “Listen, just by being here, doing comedy, you’re pushing the envelope.” A few years later, I was doing shows in Saudi Arabia. Back then, this was before Saudi was doing public shows. They were doing underground shows. They were doing shows in consulates, in compounds, anywhere they could find some privacy and make it a private party. I remember doing a show and there was a Saudi kid, because they had a bunch of people opening for me before I was up. There was a Saudi kid and the guy, the promoter come back, said, “You just keep it clean and no sex, no religion.” This Saudi kid goes up and he is just cussing, cussing like a sailor. It’s just left and right.

I’m hearing, I’m backstage. I’m like, “Oh my God, are they going to execute this guy? What’s going to happen?” The crowd loved it. He came back, the promoter comes back. He said, “You were wonderful. That was amazing.” You realize, taking that analogy of the classroom again, we are the clowns. The kids are the ones that want to laugh. That’s the general public. General public wants you to go there. They want you to do a risque joke. It’s the authorities that you got to stay away from. That’s the key. If you can get away without the authorities finding out, you’re all right.

What do you say to people who think that Donald Trump must have been great for stand-up comedy?

I have many angles on this. The number one angle is as comedians, we’re not late-night comedians with a 20-person writing staff and coming up with material every night based on what he said the day before. We’re stand-up comedians. We’re trying to carve out an act that we can do for the next year until we put it out as a special and then move on with our lives and start with the new stuff.

The problem with Trump was that every time you came up with a joke, the next day he said something crazier and you’re like, “Oh, now I’ve got to do joke about that. Now I’ve got to do joke about that.” You couldn’t keep up with the guy. It was ridiculous. The pace of it . . . I say it was like the game Tetris. We were at the bottom of a Tetris game. He just kept coming at you. And you’re like, “Oh my God, I got to … Oh my God, I got to deal with this. I got to deal with that. Little Rocket Man, Pocahontas, Stormy Daniels . . . storming the Capitol . . .” So on and on and on and on. I’m so happy he’s gone for that reason.

The second reason I’m happy he has gone is a lot of people don’t realize, before Trump became president, when he was just doing “The Apprentice,” I had a couple of innocuous jokes about his hair or something. I would do it. You’d get a couple chuckles. Nobody got offended. As soon as he started saying racist stuff and ran for president, people started getting excited and they took it personally. When you would do a Trump joke, there was a, “How dare you.” It happened several times actually, in shows, where the audience would yell at me or get upset when I was doing Trump jokes, forgetting that we live in America, where you’re supposed to be able to make fun of the president. You should make fun of president Trump, Biden, Obama, whoever you want. That’s the whole point of America.

A lot of my shows, especially as the years went on and on and QAnon starts getting involved and people really think that Trump is doing some good stuff and they really are passionate about him, I started having anxiety before shows because I was like, “Okay, once I get to that Trump stuff, I just got to be ready. Someone’s going to yell. Someone’s going to yell.” It was always in the back of my mind to the point where I would back my way into the Trump material. I would say, “Listen, I’m about to do some Trump jokes. Relax. He’s not your grandmother. Just relax. My own mom likes Trump. Just relax.” I’m happy to not have to deal with that.

The third thing is, I’m so happy, Dean, for the past two weeks or whatever it is that he has not been in the news as much as he was before. It’s amazing to be able to actually deal with real news. You wake up and they’re like, “There’s a climate disaster.” You’re like, “Yes. Finally. Climate. Let’s get to it.” “There’s a pandemic.” “Yahoo. Let’s do it.”

How do you think Joe Biden’s going to be? I wonder how it will be, if comics will go after him in earnest or will those who didn’t do politics before, but did Trump jokes, just pivot away and go back to what they were doing? Trump transcended politics. He became everything.

During Obama there was jokes people made. I mean, maybe again, not at the rate that Trump was being made fun of, but there was Obama stuff, jokes. More importantly, for someone like me, who leans left, there’s always going to be stuff from the right to make fun of. Whether it’s your Ted Cruz’s, your Josh Hawley’s, an Arab getting kicked off of an airplane for speaking Arabic. I’m saying how happy was I when they were kicking white people off of airplanes? I was like, “Welcome to our world. By the way, we don’t cry when they kick us off. We just take it like a man and take the bus.”

Get some coffee and a cigarette and take the bus line.

Biden is known for making gaffes and stuff. There’ll be plenty of material to make fun. I mean, already Colbert has an impression that he does.

It’ll be interesting. It’s a new world. You were born in Iran and you have a lot of insight into your Iranian heritage. It looks like we’re going to have a new Iran deal. Should America get some Middle Easterners on our side and negotiate?

If our guys are not saying, “My friend, my friend,” then they’re dust. You got to say, “My friend,” you got to really work that in there.

Bring some presents for them. “For you, your wife, everybody,” I’m not going to judge. [Laughs]

Keep bringing tea, be like, “Have a tea, we talk. Finish the tea, then we talk.” No, I’m all for diplomacy. A lot of Iranians get upset at me when I say this, because a lot of Iran . . . Listen, Iranians in the West, the diaspora, even some Iranians in Iran are so sick of the Islamic Republic of Iran, because it’s such an oppressive government that they just want someone to take a magic wand and get rid of them.

That’s what Donald Trump claimed he could do. He kept saying, “I’m going to get a better deal. I’m going to do this. I’m going to do that.” If you look at a lot of the stuff that Trump said, a lot of it was just empty promises. Because you sit there and go, “How? How are you going to do that? How are you going to get Mexico to pay for the wall? When is infrastructure coming? How are you going to get this new healthcare? How, how, how?”

A lot of Iranians started to support Donald Trump because they thought he was going to get rid of the mullahs, especially when he killed Soleimani. They thought, “Oh, look at that. He’s a tough guy. He killed Soleimani.” Soleimani was a bad guy, but the problem with the way they went about getting rid of Soleimani was there was no next step to the plan. It’s like breaking into the bank and going, “Okay. Now, what? Did you bring the bags? Oh, you didn’t bring bags. How are we going to carry out the money?” That’s basically what they did with Soleimani. “Let’s kill Soleimani. Okay. Now what?” And then they’re like, “Oh, now war?”

Just basic logic, alright. We have been enemies with Iran for 40 years. It hasn’t worked. Our buddy, Jason Rezaian just wrote an article, an op-ed piece in The Post about how the past four years of the Trump-Pompeo policy have just hardened the Iranian leadership. They killed a lot of people in protests over there. They’ve imprisoned more people. Granted, the sanctions have probably crippled some of their overseas operations, but that said, they’re still as oppressive as before. More importantly, the people of Iran now are suffering from the sanctions.

I’ve always been open to trying. Let’s try diplomacy for five years, 10 years. Let’s see how it goes. I don’t like the government there either, but let’s see how it goes. I believe the philosophy behind the Iran deal was, “Let’s bring them into the fold, the international fold.” Then once they get a taste of how good it is for their economy to be dealing with companies from the West, at that point, if they continue to do human rights violations or they’re starting wars or carrying out acts of terror, then you have a big negotiating tool to tell them, “Guys, if you keep doing that, we’re going to have to pull out.” I’m all for trying to open up the Iran deal again, and seeing if we can somehow bring a little more prosperity to the people of Iran and also to bring a little more freedom and democracy to the people, because they’re the ones suffering, really.

You’ve just brought more humanity to the Iranian people than we see generally in our media for years. Just talking about them as fellow humans. In your comedy you talk about your immigrant parents coming to America from Iran and how they acted when you were a kid. But you’re an immigrant too. Do you think your kids are going to make fun of you?

When I came, my parents were immigrant immigrant. They didn’t speak English. They had to learn. There was a lot of looking back because a lot of what comedians do is we almost do a self-reflection or self-analysis from the past. Because you sit there and go, “Why was I doing that? Oh my God. My mom used to hit me. That’s right.” Or, “Why was I so embarrassed about my parents? Oh yeah. My dad used to be really loud and he would just embarrass the hell out of me.”

In the special I talk about having a lot of friends whose white parents would show up and they were just buttoned up and very quiet, and, “Hi, how are you? I’m here for Brock’s parent-teacher meeting. Okay. I’ll be waiting over there.” My dad would be like, “Hello, thank you very much. We are happy to be here. This is my son.” He’s just loud and immigrant-y. You know?

I look at what my kids are going through. They both love comedy. They’ve been bingeing “30 Rock.” They love “Saturday Night Live.” They listen to all the Netflix comedy stations, and yours. But I sit there sometimes and things that happen, I go, “Oh my God, if they go into comedy, that’s going to work its way in there.” For example, my wife is an immigrant from India. She moved to America when she was six months old. When it comes to academics, she’s very traditional and like, “Let’s get it. Let’s go. You got to make sure you get good study skills, this, that, the other.” Every time she’ll sign them up for some extracurricular study class I’m thinking to myself, “Okay. When these kids grow up and they’re doing stand-up comedy, they’re going to be like, ‘While the other kids got to go to,’ whatever it is, ‘swim camp, I had to go to square root camp,’ or whatever it is.” I could totally see them talking about it.

Now you can say, “You’re welcome. I just gave you your first five minutes of material.”

“Pandemic Warrior” is currently streaming on Peacock.

 

5 ways to fix “Bridgerton” next season to transform this guilty pleasure into guilt-free escapism

Shondaland fans can rejoice. Netflix recently announced that it has renewed randy costume confection “Bridgerton” for a second season. This comes as no surprise — as of early January, “Bridgerton” is one of Netflix’s Top 5 most-viewed original shows.

The Regency-era drama was adapted from Julia Quinn’s best-selling book series, but with a modern twist – imagining a “color-conscious” version of history in which a Black Queen Charlotte (Golda Roshuevel) would create more opportunities for people of color. The first season follows debutante Daphne Bridgerton (Phoebe Dynevor) as she navigates the marriage mart and her courtship of rakish Duke Simon Bassett (Regé-Jean Page) — all narrated by the “Gossip Girl”-esque Lady Whistledown (Julie Andrews) and her meddling society papers. Since the show’s release on Christmas Day, it has regularly graced Netflix’s Top 10.

If the next season presumably follows the events in Quinn’s second book of the series – one book for each of the eight Bridgerton siblings’ love stories – we can expect the spotlight to shift from Daphne to eldest son and heir Anthony Bridgerton (Jonathan Bailey) and his search for the perfect wife. After being dumped by his opera singer lover in the first season, he has decided not to risk his heart again and will simply pick whoever is deemed the “Incomparable” for a loveless yet comfortable marriage. We’ll see if that’s actually what happens.

A second season could also give the show an opportunity to dig a little deeper into its own universe. Though Season 1 was extremely popular, it received mixed reviews. Early criticism was mostly positive calling the show a fun, bingeable escape — this is where I initially landed, after watching the first few episodes. But early praise yielded to greater analysis and criticism of the show, which pointed to uneven handling of race and consent.

Here are some of the main criticisms (along with a few personal gripes) that Season 2 will hopefully address to make this guilty pleasure a little less guilty:

1) Consent issues

“Bridgerton” may have invested in Vitamin String Quartet’s rendition of “Thank U, Next” to bring us into the 2020s, but it chose to hold onto an offensive scene from the original book.

A little plot summary: Daphne thought her husband physically unable to have children, a ruse maintained because she had no idea how babies are actually made. After learning Simon can have children, but has chosen not to (which she learns through an awkward post-coitus tissue-stealing scene), Daphne coerces him into sex that would conceive a child. 

It’s jolting. The show moves quickly past the assault, framing it around Daphne’s feelings of betrayal. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, showrunner Chris Van Dusen reportedly kept that plot point in the show because “it’s a part of her journey,” going from “innocent debutante” to a “woman who gets to shed all of the constraints society has held her to, and she finally figures out who she really is and what she’s capable of.” 

But this framing implies someone’s assault can be consolidated into their partner’s story of personal growth, and it’s especially disappointing in a show that calls itself progressive. It’s also a jarring departure for a show that seems deeply invested in themes of consent, having depicted how unwanted advances from a man could lock a woman into marriage lest they “ruin” their social standing irrevocably. 

And while it’s not likely that this exact set of circumstances would be repeated in subsequent seasons, “Bridgerton” could stand to look more closely at the source material it’s adapting to see if it makes sense when viewed with modern sensibilities.

2) Colorblind historical fantasy or “color-conscious”alternative history? 

Bridgerton

Critics have pointed out “Bridgerton” can’t decide whether it’s a colorblind historical fantasy, or whether it’s trying to offer a “color-conscious” revision of history, as Van Dusen claims it is —the latter of which the show falls short of doing. 

I struggle with the way the show lands somewhere in the unconvincing middle. “Bridgerton”  selectively tackles matters of race, like in the case of the late Duke of Hastings pressuring his son to appear perfect because “he’s not how a duke traditionally looks,” Van Dusen told Salon. In other moments, the show fully embraces historical fantasy in neglecting to discuss race at all. Daphne and Simon never discuss what it means to be in an interracial relationship, despite what had been said over the rareness of Simon’s title.

The show also struggles with colorism, giving roles more central to the plot to lighter-skinned Black actors — this includes Marina Thompson (Ruby Barker), Simon, dressmaker Genevieve Delacroix (Kathryn Drysdale), Lady Danbury (Adjoa Andoh), and even Queen Charlotte —while relegating darker-skinned actors into bit roles (as in the case of Simon’s father). If the show claims to be color-conscious, then what is the conscious colorism choice that it’s making? More likely, some unconscious forces are at play, and therefore bears reexamining going forward.

3) The unenviable misfortune of Black women

Despite being set in a time when a Black queen supposedly elevates the status of people of color, Black women fare conspicuously poorly in the show. 

Marina, the one Black young woman featured on the marriage mart, is bullied by her only friend, outed as pregnant, learns her lover died in the war, and ends the season married to his brother, whom she barely knows. And the only reason that proposal is available to her is because Daphne acts as a white savior, swooping in to locate Marina’s lost soldier. In the books, Marina is the Bridgerton clan’s distant white cousin, whom readers never actually meet. To say more about her story would be giving away a possible spoiler. In this instance, to change her race to Black for such a tragic outcome hardly seems like equitable treatment.

Madame Delacroix the modiste is possibly the happiest Black woman on the show, but she’s successful only on the sufferance of the white gentry who buy into her deception that she is French and therefore buy her dress designs. Even the queen actually ends up as the heartsore queen consort, married to the mad George III, who is indisposed for the series. 

By giving white characters the brunt of speaking roles and better outcomes, the show isn’t really delivering on being inclusive escapism. 

4) Trauma and communication

Our rakish hero’s troubled temperament can be explained by a troubled upbringing. Simon’s father only cared about furthering the Hastings line—to the point of abusing his son, as he struggled with a speech impediment. As a result, Simon made a spiteful “vow” never to have children quite literally over his father’s deathbed, in a very dramatic, fairly campy flashback scene. 

This trauma obviously shapes Simon’s worldview, but the show focuses on two ways it impacts his marriage: through obsessively sticking to this “vow,” and the semantic difference between “can’t and won’t,” when Daphne asks him whether they will have children. 

So much of the couple’s troubles boil down to a standard “this couple can’t have a single normal conversation.” It’s a trope that gets old fast — I’m thinking of my flagging interest in the final episodes of Hulu’s romantic drama “Normal People,” a show I liked well enough at the beginning. Yes, one of “Bridgerton”‘s central themes is the idea that the marriage mart results in matches where husband and wife never really talk to each other (as was common for the time). And it’s adapted with a heightened, soap opera-y sense of dramatic irony conveyed through longing glances, annoyed walking, and maidenly sighing. 

But it’s also set in a fictitious world where a woman is free to turn down a proposal from a Prince in order to “save” her Duke, and where that Duke repeatedly crossed lines during their courtship. There’s some latitude to give trauma more space than “backstory.” And there will be opportunities to do so in the next season, as many of Anthony’s own hang-ups in his search for a spouse tie back to the trauma of losing his father at a young age. 

5) Sexier sex scenes 

Bridgerton

“Bridgerton” definitely is not lacking for sex scenes. But the show’s gestures towards catering to the female gaze — lots of oral sex and objectifying the male lead — aren’t enough to make sex scenes actually feel sexy. True on-screen horniness is more than urgent missionary on marble steps, rutting up against a tree (ouch), or being pushed up against a bookshelf (even if the library itself is enviable). 

It’s a matter of building chemistry and paying off tension — something the first half of the season does so much better without even showing us the two leads having sex. It’s that building of chemistry through banter and impropriety, and then ramping up anticipation through restraint — in moments as subtle as the brush of fingers at an art gallery, or as direct as Simon asking Daphne (as he gazes intently) if she’s ever touched herself.

The second half gives us a honeymoon, but it’s a little too glossy, a little too perfunctorily picture perfect for us to really feel anything. When sex scenes inspire laughter for its happy ending instead of sighing, that’s a misfire.

Scientists finally figure out why wombat feces is cube-shaped

The bare-nosed wombat is famous for many things, from its adorable features to its taxonomical membership within the marsupials. Yet one lesser-known, bizarre detail about wombats is that they poop out cubes, literally. A wombat’s feces is shaped like a six-sided cube, and they poop out almost 100 of the pellet-sized secretions every day, a fact that mystified scientists.

Until now.

A group of scientists from the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Tasmania and the Taronga Conservation Society published a study earlier this month in the scientific journal Soft Matter, which explains why wombat excrement is cube-shaped. To do this, they studied the intestines and muscles of various wombats, discovering two grooves in the intestines where the flesh is more elastic and regions of the muscle and tissue that varied in stiffness and thickness. Using this information, they created a two-dimensional mathematical model that helped them better understand how these areas of the wombat’s gut move as the marsupial herbivore digests its food. Their research helped them learn that the fecal cubes are formed within the last 17 percent of the wombat’s intestine and that “the corners arise from faster contraction in the stiff regions and relatively slower movement in the center of the soft regions.”

The scientists also have hypotheses as to why the wombats’ poop has this shape.

“Wombats are drought tolerant due to the dry conditions that they live,” David Hu, a biomechanics researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a co-author on the study, told Salon by email. “Their feces is 60 percent water where human feces is 80 percent water. This dryness permits the square shape to be maintained, particularly the edges.”

Hu also pointed out that there would be evolutionary advantages to the wombats’ having cube-shaped bowel movements.

“Wombats use feces for communication,” Hu explained. “They defecate on top of rocks or stumps. If the feces were round, it would roll down these objects. Thus the flat faces and edges evolved.”

Hu also said that this knowledge can help (human) medicine, such as by helping detect colon cancer.

“Colon cancer is associated with stiff walls of the colon,” Hu told Salon. “We could start to correlate irregularities in feces shape with the presence of cancer. Ours might be the first paper to show that intestine material properties influence feces shape.”

He also speculated that their research could help with manufacturing. “We typically use sharp implements to cut cubes or use injection molding to form them by solidification,” Hu said. “The wombat method involves multiple contractions of a cylinder wall with stiff and soft sections. It shows that material properties can influence shape. This might be used to mold valuable or fragile materials, maybe like stem cells or organoids.”

Finally, Hu told Salon that this information can help human beings take better care of wombats that are held in captivity, since wombats who live in zoos do not produce feces as cubic as their wild counterparts.

“The closeness to a cube could be used to measure level of hydration in wombats in wild or captivity,” Hu explained.

Republicans are no longer a political party. They’re a mob

If the people you saw on your television in the violent mob outside the Capitol on Jan. 6 seemed familiar, that’s because they were. You have seen them before — at Donald Trump’s political rallies, standing in line behind you at the supermarket, driving the car in front of you at the drive-thru, in the pickup line at your kid’s school. If you don’t believe me, Google some videos taken that day. Look at their faces. They’re from every walk of life: middle, lower and upper class, construction workers, shop owners, stockbrokers, husbands, wives, students, off-duty cops and soldiers, accountants, actors, writers, teachers, online media stars, even one recently elected state representative.

What did they have in common? Three things: They were white, almost to a man and woman, they were supporters of Donald Trump, and they were Republicans. They are, in fact, the Republican Party. That’s why the political party that once nominated Abraham Lincoln isn’t even a party anymore. It’s a mob. They were there at the Capitol to do what their members of congress and senators were already at work doing in the well of the House of Representatives: attempting to block the certification of electoral ballots, trying to claim that the election was fraudulent and that it had been stolen from Donald Trump. Their aims were identical. Inside and outside the Capitol, they were there for Donald Trump.

Their president had sent them, directing them to “walk down to the Capitol” in his speech on the Ellipse. They didn’t have to be told what to do when they got there. They understood what Trump was telling them. They were his voters, the lot of them. They were the people who put him in the White House. They voted for the Republican representatives and senators who were at the very moment of Trump’s speech trying to overturn the election of Joe Biden. They were the Republican Party, and they were a riotous, violent mob.

Have you asked yourself why you have heard only a handful of Republicans criticize the mob that yelled “fight for Trump,” and “hang Mike Pence,” and “we’re coming for you Pelosi”? Oh, a few Republicans like Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois have stood up to the mob, and because they did, their fellow Republicans are moving to censure them and run against them and beat them in primaries when they run for office again next year. The rest of them — in effect, the entire Republican Party — have remained silent. Have you heard even one of the Republicans who voted to support Trump’s bogus claims in the House and Senate criticize the mob for assaulting 81 Capitol police officers and 58 members of the D.C. Metropolitan police force? Those are the numbers of cops who reported being injured during the attack on the Capitol, according to a document filed in federal court in Washington by the Department of Justice this week. Have you seen any television footage of Republican members of the House or Senate displaying the damage done to their desks or offices by the mob? Have you seen even one of them stand next to one of the shattered leaded-glass windows in the doors to the House chamber and point to the damage and denounce the people who committed that crime? Did even one of them hold a press conference and denounce the attack on the Capitol by a mob waving Trump flags and screaming “Fight for Trump”?

No, you haven’t, because the Republicans in the House and Senate know they can’t criticize the people who assaulted the Capitol and turned the chambers of both houses into crime scenes — because all that damage was done by the mob, not just in Donald Trump’s name, in an attempt to overturn the election, but in their name too. Those congressmen and congresswomen and senators who stood on the floors of their respective chambers only a couple of hours after they had been overrun by a mob and voted to reject the electoral ballots for Joe Biden in the states of Arizona and Pennsylvania — they believed (or pretended to believe) the fantasies about fraud and stolen ballots and Dominion voting machines and Hugo Chavez just like the mob believed them. 

The Republicans in the House and the Senate knew who put them in their seats, and they knew if they wanted to stay there, they had better do what was expected of them and vote the way the mob wanted them to vote. That’s why almost immediately after the Capitol was cleared of insurrectionists, both houses of Congress reconvened and seven Republican senators and 138 Republican members of the House voted, in effect, to overturn the election of Joe Biden and hand it to Donald Trump. 

They couldn’t vote against the will of the mob that attacked the Capitol and stole their private documents and rested feet on their desks and destroyed their place of business — the seat of government of the United States — any more than they could have voted against the man who sent the mob there, Donald Trump. To hell with the Constitution, to hell with law and order, to hell with the cops who were out there defending them and getting beaten by the mob, to hell with the sanctity of elections, to hell with representative democracy, to hell in fact with everything but Donald Trump. 

That mob wasn’t there to preserve democracy and “make America great again.” They were there to destroy it. You’ve heard the old saying that we are a nation of laws, not of men? Wrong. To that mob and the congressmen and women and senators they elected — to the entire Republican Party, for that matter — we are a nation of “not of men,” but of one man, Donald Trump.

If that sounds like Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler, it’s because that is where we are. The attack on the Capitol was our Reichstag fire, our Kristallnacht. The offices they looted and the glass they broke was in the Capitol. But what they really broke was our hearts.

U.S. cities consider treating fossil fuels like nuclear weapons

For decades, the potential for a nuclear catastrophe felt like a waking threat, just around the corner. Then, in 1968, many of the nations once responsible for pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war collectively agreed to reverse course, signing the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Member nations, including the United States and the Soviet Union, agreed to end the stockpiling of nuclear weapons and eventually move toward full disarmament. While it didn’t end the threat of nuclear weapons overnight, this framework helped set in motion a new era. Today, the global arsenal of nuclear weapons is a fifth of what it was during the height of the nuclear arms race in the 1980s.

Half a century later, the nations once stockpiling nuclear weapons are now stockpiling fossil fuels, which are already upending life on earth as we know it. That’s why a group of activists, policy experts, and academics are beginning to push for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, modeled off its predecessor on nuclear weapons. Both treaties are rooted in the idea that “there are certain technologies and certain substances that pose such a global risk to humanity that we have an obligation to address that risk together,” explained Carroll Muffett, the president of the Center for International Environmental Law. Muffett is on the steering committee of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty initiative, which officially launched last September.

In mid-December, the New York City Council held a virtual hearing to consider endorsing a resolution for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. It could become the second city in the world to do so, following Vancouver, Canada — assuming another city doesn’t get there first. The Los Angeles City Council is poised to endorse the treaty, and Barcelona, Spain has also introduced a similar resolution. By adopting the treaty, cities could build momentum for a multinational agreement to wind down the dangerous production of fossil fuels — not just curbing emissions — in a similar approach to the global disarmament of nuclear weapons.

“New fossil fuel projects are coming online, even as the world already has more fossil fuels developed than it can possibly extract while staying below 1.5 degrees,” said Muffett. “And so the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty emerged from the recognition that the world is facing a threat of truly global, historical proportion.”

[Here’s what it would look like if fossil fuel ads had warning labels]

The treaty calls for a fossil fuel phaseout to happen in three key ways: 1) non-proliferation, where countries end the expansion and exploration of fossil fuel production; 2) global disarmament, where there’s a phasing out of existing fossil fuel stockpiles, such as decommissioning old fossil fuel infrastructure and removing subsidies; and 3) a peaceful, just transition to renewable and low-carbon energy.

It is envisioned as a complement to the Paris climate accord, which commits to limiting the global average temperature rise to well below 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) above pre-industrial levels, and ideally below 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F). The landmark agreement sets to achieve these goals largely through greenhouse gas emissions cuts, without putting the onus on countries to curb the production of fossil fuels — even though fossil fuel use is the world’s primary source of carbon dioxide emissions.

“I was absolutely shocked the first time I sat down and went through the Paris accord and searched for the words ‘oil,’ ‘gas,’ ‘coal,’ and ‘fossil fuels.’ They don’t exist,” said Tzeporah Berman, a long-time Canadian activist who is the international program director at Stand.Earth, and also a member of the steering committee of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty initiative.

This omission is discussed in the recent production gap report, a collaboration between research institutions and the U.N. Environment Program, which highlights the discrepancy between countries’ climate commitments and the ongoing production of fossil fuels. Last year’s report, released in December, found that in order to keep the world below 1.5 degrees C of additional warming, countries will need to decrease fossil fuel production by 6 percent every year, adding up to a 60 percent drop in production over the next decade. And even though fossil fuel production was curbed by 7 percent in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the report warns that “countries are still planning to produce far more fossil fuels by 2030.”

Berman points out that this gap isn’t solely the failure of the Paris accord — many climate laws and policies consistently overlook the supply side of the equation. “I mean, look at even our climate champions — California, Canada, Norway — they’re all in fossil fuel production at this moment in history,” said Berman. Despite aggressive emissions goals, all of these governments continue to build new fossil fuel infrastructure, investing more deeply in the substance they have pledged to nearly eliminate from the economy.

“The theory of climate policy for 30 years since Kyoto has been that if we can reduce demand for fossil fuels and increase the price of carbon, that the markets itself will constrain production,” said Bergman. “That’s not happening fast enough. And the markets are distorted today by governments continuing to increase subsidies to the fossil fuel industry: billions and billions of dollars.”

Most recently, the majority of energy-related stimulus spending money by G20 nations has been invested in fossil fuels, continuing to lock in dangerous levels of emissions. “As of November 2020, G20 governments had committed USD 233 billion to activities that support fossil fuel production and consumption,” the production gap report states. That’s compared to only $146 billion invested in renewable energy by G20 nations. By explicitly addressing the supply side of the climate crisis, the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty offers a way for countries to shift course.

The ultimate goal is for the treaty to become a multinational, cooperative agreement in which wealthier nations with the longest histories of fossil fuel production can be the first movers. Meena Raman, who is based in Malaysia and leads the climate program for the international advocacy organization Third World Network, notes that it’s especially important for this global framework to facilitate a just transition to clean energy. “It’s really about assisting developing countries to move in that direction that needs to happen, and for developed countries to stop it, phase out, and power down,” said Raman.

The United States, the largest oil and gas producer in the world, is in a position to become a first mover. As President-elect Joe Biden moves to rejoin the Paris Agreement — which the United States officially left in November — he will also have an opportunity to put the country on a pathway to phasing out fossil fuels. There’s a lot that the Biden administration could do to this end, Muffett said, including directing the Department of Interior to halt fossil fuel lease sales and permitting, directing the Environmental Protection Agency to develop more stringent greenhouse gas emissions rules, and reinstating the crude oil import ban.

Assuming Congress could get on board, the United States could also pass its own resolution to facilitate a national phaseout of fossil fuel production as a precursor to a multinational treaty. Until then, states and cities can play a crucial role, just as they did in passing resolutions building upon the 1968 treaty to encourage further negotiation and steps toward disarmament — a history that Muffett reminded New York City councilmembers of last month.

“In 1979, faced with the existential threat of nuclear weapons, New York City took a stand and called on the U.S. and other nations to end the escalating nuclear arms race that threatened humanity with nuclear annihilation,” said Muffett. “New York has the opportunity and the urgent responsibility to show that same leadership today.”

NRA laid the groundwork for deadly Capitol riot for years, say gun control advocates

The deadly Capitol riot on Jan. 6 brought together a wide variety of right-wing militia groups and fringe conspiracy theorists, officially united by former President Donald Trump’s false narrative that the 2020 election had been stolen. But the ideology that connected these groups in the first place was cultivated for decades by the National Rifle Association, gun violence prevention groups say.

“The violence that we saw at the Capitol, the firepower that they brought with them, may not have been part of the NRA’s call. But they’re responsible for getting us to this moment,” said Nick Suplina, managing director for law and policy at Everytown for Gun Safety. “They should not be allowed to distance themselves from the Frankenstein monster that they’ve created. This is the NRA’s handiwork. Years of conspiracy peddling, fear-mongering that the government is going to come take your guns and your freedom, and the call upon Americans to do something about it, to take action, that’s what we saw on Jan. 6. That base of militia groups and white supremacist groups and other extremists has been listening to the NRA’s talking points for years, and we saw it play out.”

A new report from Everytown detailing findings in police documents shows that officers seized more than 3,000 rounds of ammunition and arrested nine people on weapons charges.

“Quite honestly, that is a likely undercount given the fact that Capitol Police were unable to stop and search everyone,” Suplina said. Capitol Police detained only 14 people during the riot, leaving federal investigators to scour social media and hundreds of thousands of tips to identify possible suspects. More than 150 people have been charged since.

“I knew they had guns — we had been seizing guns all day,” D.C. police officer Daniel Hodges told the Washington Post. “And the only reason I could think of that they weren’t shooting us was they were waiting for us to shoot first. And if it became a firefight between a couple hundred officers and a couple thousand demonstrators, we would have lost.”

Police later discovered some rioters had their own arsenals at home as well.

“Many of the people at the Capitol were armed,” Suplina said. “There was enough ammunition seized at the Capitol to shoot every member of the House and Senate five times.”

The NRA’s rhetoric has long been tied to violent groups. Many mass killers have echoed the words of NRA chief Wayne LaPierre in their “manifestos.” In the 1990s, LaPierre repeatedly railed against the “abuses” of the federal government following the standoffs at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas, calling for people to “take whatever measures necessary, including force, to abolish oppressive government.”

In 1995, LaPierre referred to federal agents as “jack-booted government thugs” and warned supporters that it was no longer “unthinkable for federal agents wearing Nazi bucket helmets and black stormtrooper uniforms to attack law-abiding citizens.”

Days later, Timothy McVeigh, a former NRA member, bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City that housed an Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) office, killing at least 168 people.

Numerous NRA board members have also been linked to militia groups.

“At that moment in 1995, the NRA could have said, ‘Oh boy, we’ve overdone it. We’ve oversold this. We’re changing our rhetoric,'” Suplina said. “But they kept it up and intensified it for another two decades, right up until the days before the insurrection at the Capitol.”

Some of the members of the Capitol mob, including Richard Barnett, the man who posed in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office, have been identified as gun activists, the Everytown report said, citing charging documents and social media posts. William Calhoun, who threatened a “war” over the election, proudly wore an NRA hat in his Twitter profile photo and organized at least one gun-rights rally following the election. Joe Biggs, a Proud Boys leader who led a group of rioters at the Capitol, has been repeatedly mentioned as a member on the NRA website. Len Guthrie, another man charged with illegally entering the Capitol, described himself as a “lifetime NRA member” and shared the “insurrectionist theory of the Second Amendment” on his Facebook page, according to the report.

The NRA did not comment on the riot until generally condemning “all unlawful acts” in a social media statement nine days later.

“The NRA has publicly condemned the tragedy that occurred at the U.S. Capitol. It is disappointing but not surprising that Everytown now seeks to exploit that event and the tragic loss of life to attack law-abiding gun owners,” NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam said in a statement to Salon.

He added: “Everytown’s assault on the Second Amendment is being firmly rejected by the American people. The recent rise in lawful gun ownership is a referendum on Everytown, Michael Bloomberg, and all who seek to dismantle constitutional freedom.”​

But gun violence prevention groups say the NRA can’t run from its past.

“For years, we’ve been watching the NRA take this very extreme position about gun rights and being willing to say things like, ‘Obama’s not only going to take your guns away,'” said Robyn Thomas, executive director of the Giffords Law Center. “They have overtly said, ‘Government agents are going to break down your door and take your guns away and haul you off to prison.’ 

“They’ve actually pivoted in the last couple of years, very aggressively, to saying, ‘What you need to fear is the government. The government is the enemy and your guns are the only thing protecting you from a government that you can’t trust.’ That’s been NRA messaging.” The Capitol siege, Thomas argued, was the “logical end” of that process.

While the NRA seized on Obama’s attempts to implement gun control measures in the wake of numerous school shootings — especially the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, in which 20 children and six adults were killed — Trump and his allies echoed the group’s rhetoric for years, including in the moments leading up to the attack on the Capitol.

“So much of the rhetoric and the kinds of speeches that we heard from Trump and [Rudy] Giuliani and other people on that stage, leading to the march from the Ellipse and the White House to the Capitol, is absolutely consistent and fueled by NRA rhetoric,” said Kris Brown, president of the gun violence prevention group Brady. That rhetoric, said Brown, “is all about this notion that the gun is the essential tool to take down a tyrannical government.”

In an effort to sell more guns, the NRA has “painted a picture of a dystopic universe” akin to “Mad Max: Thunderdome,” Brown said.

Speeches delivered at the rally that preceded the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, Brown added, were loaded with NRA talking points. “If you add guns, extremism, misinformation and white supremacy together,” she said, “the natural conclusion of that, the alchemy of those things, makes Jan. 6 and Liberate Michigan and [the protests in] many other state capitals not a notable event but an inevitable event.”

Though the groups that came together at the Capitol have espoused a wide range of grievances, gun rights are at the heart of their ideologies.

“The militia groups that were there, some of the far right-wing white supremacist groups that were there, the flags saying, ‘Come and take it.’ All of this is part of the vocabulary that the NRA has been pushing for years,” Suplina said. “The NRA has adopted and really fueled the insurrectionist theory of the Second Amendment, this notion that your right to bear arms is actually about taking up arms against a government that you believe is violating the Constitution or your rights. And what we’ve seen is just how dangerous that is. Because who’s the arbiter of that decision? The answer is, a mob at the Capitol that has been fed lies about elections or gun confiscation taking up arms because they think it’s their right to do that. And that’s why guns are relevant. They were there, and they are the reason that people showed up there.”

Discussions of an armed revolt started long before Trump called his followers to Washington in an effort to stop Congress from making President Joe Biden’s election official. An analysis commissioned by Giffords found 17 million mentions of guns and related terms in reaction to election-related events in the months leading up to the vote. These discussions often focused on coming to the polls armed, defending the election and preparing for violence surrounding the results.

Thomas said she wasn’t surprised to see how much overlap there was between the different groups who discussed guns because “those connections have been intentionally drawn by groups like the NRA.”

“One of the things that’s really interesting to us is the way it all fits together,” she said. “This idea that they’re being pitched: ‘You need to be afraid of your guns being taken away. You need to be afraid of the governments and how they’re going to strip away your rights.’ And the idea that you as an individual, or as a part of these groups, have an individual responsibility. They frame it in terms of fighting tyranny, but really what they’re doing is pushing people to fight legitimate government on an individual basis, using guns as a tool.”

The number of mentions of guns was “astounding” and is likely an undercount given how many of these groups operate in private on the internet, according to the report.

“When you couple it with the threats and with the aggressive extremism, it’s a huge risk,” Thomas said, adding that there may never have been “a more dangerous moment than we’re in right now.”

While militias have echoed NRA rhetoric for years, newer online-based fringe groups like QAnon and the Boogaloo Bois have adopted a similar ideology.

“It’s all lodged in the same rhetoric and the same theory,” Suplina said. “There’s a deep conspiracy to rob you of what you care about most, and the only response is a violent reckoning. That is the QAnon ‘Storm.’ That is the Boogaloo call for inciting a civil war. And the fact is, again, that the NRA’s language is not seen as hysterical by many of the people who hear it. They are hearing it as a call to action. We see it in QAnon. We see it in the Boogaloo boys. We see it in the militia groups.”

The Giffords analysis found a lot of overlap between QAnon and other groups on the topic of guns.

Many of these groups accept “absurd premises with regard to what’s happening in our government,” Thomas said, but also a “secondary piece, which is that it’s your responsibility to help trigger this overthrow.” Thomas said. “It imparts this sense of distrust, to the point of requiring you to help with this civil war, or revolution in the case of the Boogaloo Bois or the Proud Boys. I think QAnon has a lot of those same messages. That you, individually and in connection with this group, whatever that group is, have to get involved in helping spur this revolution.”

Though the NRA spread its talking points through magazines and other media for years, its foray into NRATV marked a turning point in its rhetoric. Hosts on the network repeatedly stoked anger and fear as a way to draw viewers.

“You don’t need to look much further than that to see that the NRA has helped build this framework of conspiracy backed by extreme acts of violence, and brought it into mainstream discourse,” Suplina said. “NRATV for years was talking this talk. I think they need to be held accountable by being named as a cause of this. We honestly are not going to fully deal with this problem until we recognize the role of the NRA.”

The NRA cut ties with NRATV in 2019, calling it “racist,” amid a legal dispute with the group’s longtime PR firm Ackerman McQueen, which operated the network. The NRA has since filed for bankruptcy in New York, where state Attorney General Letitia James has sued to dissolve the group over allegations of illegal self-dealing. The group has claimed that it is financially solid and intends to move to Texas to set up shop there. That, however, could backfire in bankruptcy court.

“If you are a solvent entity, bankruptcy court can’t be used to shed yourself of litigation you just don’t like,” Brown said. “We are very eager to make sure that the interests of the American public are represented here, because the American public cares, as taxpaying individuals, how nonprofits are run in this country. And what’s clear from the allegations in Tish James’ complaint is that the NRA has not been run as an organization that is consistent with the law. They think they’re above the law. They think they’re untouchable.”

Gun violence prevention groups have also called for lawmakers to step up in response to the Capitol riot and the growing threat from violent extremists. The Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday warned of a “heightened threat” of violence from groups potentially emboldened by the Capitol attack.

Thomas said Giffords is pushing to expand extreme risk protective orders, which are typically used to remove guns from people dangerous to themselves or others, for example, to “disarm an extremist who we have evidence is making specific threats or coordinating an attack, pending a hearing.” The group also believes that hate crime laws should be expanded so they could be used for “removing guns or at least preventing violence or similar types of acts.”

But many of these reforms are no different than the ones violence prevention groups have demanded for years with limited success.

“There’s things that have to happen. For one, guns don’t have a place in our democratic discourse,” Suplina said. “There should not be guns at Capitol buildings or grounds or at protests or at polling stations. Both Congress and state legislatures should take those issues up immediately, and many are.

“But more broadly, the problem of armed extremism can’t be dealt with without dealing with the gun laws that had been kept weak by the armed extremists,” he added. “Background checks have a lot of good uses, but one of them is to stop prohibited people from obtaining firearms. We know that some of the folks arrested at the Capitol were former felons and would not be allowed to legally own guns. We know that ghost guns which completely cut the background check system — or any check at all — out of the process are quickly becoming the guns of choice for militia groups and white supremacist groups because they’re untraceable, you can make them at home, and there’s no paper trail.”

Brown argued that leadership on the gun issue has to start at the top and expressed disappointment that President Joe Biden did not discuss the link to guns when discussing the risk posed to the country by white supremacy and extremism in his inaugural address.

“If you want to reduce the peril of those kinds of extremist groups to democracy and to the free and fair election process, to racial justice and all of those things, you have to also say how you’re going to tackle the issue of guns,” she said. “You can’t tackle those issues without also addressing the role of guns. We want the administration to say that.”

Brown said strengthening gun laws was critical to democracy: “I want to be free to share my views in a public square without being intimidated by someone who’s standing next to me with a semiautomatic weapon.”

“That weapon speaks to me. That weapon chills my voice, it chills my First Amendment right,” she said. “In that sense, it matters to our democracy. If we want the ability of everyday Americans to exercise their voice in the public square, and that includes voices who think guns should be everywhere, then guns can’t be part of that equation. That chills our ability to have a conversation about what needs to happen, and that’s the essence of our democracy.”

Why is science so polarizing? Blame the way we talk about it.

“Listen to the science” isn’t just a bumper sticker anymore — it’s official White House policy.

Flanked by a painting of Benjamin Franklin and a 332-gram sample of moon rock, Joe Biden spent his first day as president signing his name on a towering stack of science-forward executive orders: rejoining the Paris climate agreement, revoking the Keystone XL pipeline permit, and launching a review of the Trump administration’s decisions around public lands, methane emissions, and fuel economy standards for cars and trucks. He called for the federal government to “advance environmental justice” and “be guided by the best science,” as a guiding principle for tackling climate change.

“It is, therefore, the policy of my Administration to listen to the science,” he wrote in one executive order.

That all may seem like overkill, but it’s been a weird few years for science. The Trump administration censored scientists, impeded climate research, and dismissed public health officials’ advice at the height of a global pandemic. On the campaign trail, Biden often said “I believe in science” to contrast himself with his opponent, who denied the threats posed by climate change and the coronavirus pandemic but readily embraced conspiracy theories.

But according to polling from the Shelton Group, a marketing agency focused on energy and the environment, from last May, Americans still trust scientists more than almost any group outside of friends and family. That survey showed that more people trusted scientists even more than books, churches, or the school system — and far more than the press, big companies, or Congress.

So how, then, did science get so polarizing? In the eyes of many Americans, it has to do with the annoying way non-scientists talk about science. “Every time we say, ‘Well, I believe in the science,’ I think we come off holier than thou,” said Suzanne Shelton, CEO of the Shelton Group. “Really what we’re saying is, ‘Well, I believe in the science, dumbass!'”

The climate movement has long assumed that the overwhelming evidence behind climate change will convince people to care about the ailing planet and motivate them to take action. If those facts fit your worldview — and for plenty of people, they do — that works great. But when the evidence doesn’t fit into people’s preconceived notions of how the world works, they find ways to challenge or dismiss evidence that contradicts their beliefs. Evidence just bounces right off them.

“We need to get away from the idea that logic and rationality is always the most persuasive argument,” said Hollie Smith, an assistant professor of science and environmental communication at the University of Oregon. Hearing a message that’s counter to your beliefs can even result in what’s called a “boomerang effect” — when an attempt to persuade someone ends up doing the opposite.

And there’s another problem: Not only do experts say that catchphrases like “believe in science” and “listen to the science” are making matters worse, they’re also kind of, well, anti-science.

“Anytime you say a sentence with that word in it, it’s probably false,” said Sheila Jasanoff, a professor of science and technology studies at the Harvard Kennedy School. Academics have spent more than half a century researching what people even mean by invoking this thing called “science,” she said. Consider what climate science is: an amalgam of disciplines and knowledge that has been pieced together to come to a conclusion about the planet. It’s too big to see from a single perspective; Jasanoff compares scientific “truth” to a jigsaw puzzle or a patchwork, something that creates a fuller picture only when you add up all of its parts. The world is getting hotter and weirder, and lots of different signals point to that conclusion. But each piece taken individually might not display the same story.

All of this complexity gets glossed over when people use quippy phrases like “believe the science,” Jasanoff said. “The simplification of the message is itself an anti-scientific move, because it denies the actual network complexity of knowledge and of society.”

Science, after all, “says” a lot of different things — and as new data points on a topic emerge, some conclusions can shift over time. You read a headline that says red meat is bad for you, for example, and then next day, another headline says that’s bad advice. Those interpretations aren’t necessarily a problem from a scientific perspective — yay, more evidence to consider! — but when every surprising paper gets portrayed as an equally valid twist, people are bound to have questions about what it means to “listen to science.”

That’s not to say experts don’t have anything definitive to say on the topic of climate change. Science may not be a monolith, but neither is it an opinion free-for-all. “It’s horrifying that we’re in a world where some people can just lie with impunity and get away with it, and some people can just ignore facts and get away with it,” said Adam Rome, an environmental historian at the University at Buffalo. “But the answer isn’t to say, ‘We believe in science!’ The answer is to fight for the values and the visions you have.”

Academic articles have been critiquing this “science says” rhetoric for decades, said Darrick Evensen, an assistant professor of environmental politics at the University of Edinburgh. The word “scientized” has been used to describe the idea of making a claim “seem like it’s just about science” when it’s actually about complicated policy issues and moral and cultural questions. Science alone can’t tell us whether the United States needs a green jobs guarantee, a carbon tax, or warning labels on gas pumps.

When Biden says he “listens” to science, he might be trying to say that he’s using peer-reviewed, authoritative, and fact-checked sources, Evensen said. But the phrase can be dangerous because it “makes it seem like there’s no value judgments to be made,” he said. “The science describes what the situation is, what might happen … but it still doesn’t tell us what we should do. It’s our values and the things that we care about that tell us what we should do.”

Science, however, cannot be untangled from culture and politics. For example, when the National Science Foundation reviews research proposals, one of its criteria is “broader impacts” — in other words, how the research could benefit society. “You cannot say science is disinterested and sits apart from politics and policy,” Jasanoff said, adding that it can invite backlash when people discover that scientists aren’t detached and disinterested, but instead hoping to improve the world with their work. Biden, she noted, is the first president to appoint a deputy director for science and society, Alondra Nelson, a sociologist who has studied racism in medicine and the effects of emerging technology. It’s a step toward acknowledging “the reality of the way that science does interface with society,” Jasanoff said.

Society also doesn’t benefit when people with questions about science get shut down too quickly, Jasanoff warns. The public has understandable concerns, “whether it’s mothers, fearful for their fragile children’s health, who will not tolerate a vaccine, or communities that are dependent on fossil fuel extraction who don’t know what will happen to them if the fossil fuel industry shuts down.”

If people are hesitant about getting a COVID-19 vaccine, Heidi Larson, the director of the Vaccine Confidence Project, told NPR, the “most important thing” is to hear them out. “I think that one of the reasons that I see that the anti- and questioning and skeptical voices have gotten louder is they feel like they’ve been shut down when they tried to express a concern or have their view,” Larson said. “And it has kind of hardened the views because people feel cut out.”

If you’re actually trying to convince someone, put down the “pro-science” megaphone and try to understand where they’re coming from. Then work to find common ground. “I wish we would stop arguing so much about science, because I think it is polarizing. And I wish we would focus on our kids, because that’s not polarizing,” said Shelton, the marketing CEO. She recommends targeting messages for the type of person you’re trying to reach: Future-oriented messages tend to work for progressives, for example, but nostalgic messages are more effective for conservatives. (There’s a reason that “Make American Great Again” resonated with many Americans.) That might mean talking about the glory days of sledding in cold, snowy winters and the fun afternoons you spent fishing with your grandpa versus quoting the latest U.N. climate report.

At the end of the day, Americans would benefit from a more nuanced way of talking about science — and talking to each other. The way science gets talked about now, “You’re either for science, or you’re an ignoramus and deplorable,” Jasanoff said. “And we know that has had corrosive, corrosive impacts in the American polity that are not matched anywhere else in the world.”

Great acting can only take HBO Max’s throwback noir “The Little Things” so far

Denzel Washington is a master of smolder and brooding.  Rami Malek has a chameleonic presence that enables him to transform a scene’s mood via barely perceptible changes like the set of his jaw or a smirk. And Jared Leto excels at evoking the cartoonish side of creepy.

Taken separately each actor has a way of uplifting the work they’re in. Put them together and you’d better hope the script can handle whatever they put out.

“The Little Things,” John Lee Hancock’s 1990s-set thriller, is not up to the task despite each man giving it his best shot, especially Washington, for whom the film represents a return to familiar lawman territory. While the roles that established Washington as one of the best actors of his generation are serious biographical pieces – “Glory,” “Malcolm X,” “The Hurricane” – it was his work as a cop in 2001’s “Training Day” that finally won him the Best Actor Oscar.

After that came major action roles like “Man on Fire” and “The Equalizer” that cemented him as a major star. Washington’s recent focus has been on theater and plays adapted for the screen, which makes this West Coast noir thriller something of a throwback for him.

While fellow Oscar winners Malek (“Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Mr. Robot“) and Leto (“Dallas Buyers Club“) share the screen with Washington, the story is very plainly constructed for him and his unparalleled ability to work the hell out of silence and pauses. Even so, his character Joe Deacon is a departure from other taciturn men Washington has played, figures whose purposeful quietude serves as a lockbox holding back secrets and hiding talents.

Deke, as he’s known, is a man hiding out from a past that’s eating away at him by donning a Kern County Deputy Sheriff’s uniform. From the moment he appears it’s obvious he’s too good for this job, and soon enough we get a bit of backstory from an old colleague of his in Los Angeles, where he was the big cheese on the local homicide squad.

Something went terribly wrong back then, causing his career, marriage and health to implode within the space of half a year. “A rush-hour train wreck,” one of his old partners says as a warning to the new hot shot Jim Baxter (Rami Malek) who spots Deke while he’s in town on an errand and invites him to consult on a case he’s working. Jim knows Deke by reputation and figures he can use his help on what appears to be a serial killer case.

Since Deke is employed elsewhere Jim doesn’t fear losing his position in the department; besides, with all the warnings coming Jim’s way from superiors and co-workers it’s not as if anyone is champing at the bit to have Deke back on the force.

Hancock (“The Blind Side,” “The Founder”) wrote and directed “The Little Things,” and visually he nails the tone of the ’90s-style L.A. noir and the air of unease present in the oeuvre’s best known films from auteurs like Curtis Hanson and David Fincher. But this familiarity has its pros and cons.

Following a wary dance back and forth the two men fall into a rhythm recognizable to devourers of that era’s serial killer films set. And once Leto’s Albert Sparma enters the story the entire scene takes a turn for the aggressively outlandish. Sparma is a blue collar guy with peculiar mannerisms who rubs Deke the wrong way, transforming him from a quiet clue hunter battling the urge to pick up a case long gone cold into a rumpled, haunted crusader.

Jim, supposedly more by-the-book than Deke and described as a holy roller at that, steadily surrenders to the gravitational pull of Deke’s obsession. Everybody makes decisions that don’t many any sense building toward an outcome that you may struggle to care about.

Following “The Little Things” requires a significant amount of patience and a broad interpretation of the term “slow burn.” Washington’s and Malek’s performances are initially stalwart enough to keep our attention, and as mentioned earlier they’re both skilled as acting the hell out of whatever situation they’ve been placed in. But there comes a point at which all their energetic efforts fail to compensate for a middling script. Leto’s sideshow staginess doesn’t help matters.

I’ve long balked at movies that take their titles from a supposedly definitive line a character says. It feels hacky, for one thing, and it jerks us by the collar, taking us out of the narrative flow. Washington loads the title line with portent and melancholy as he delivers it, and it still sounds trite. That’s the nature of small annoyances, I guess; a hike to the world’s loveliest vista can be ruined by a tiny pebble in your boot.

Holding this film back is something more significant, a flaccid script written around a half-decent premise that some of the best actors currently working can sell in moments, but not as a whole. Hancock nailed the casting, and the score, soundtrack and the small details will certainly take Gen X filmgoers back to their heyday. But without that major, vital piece of the structure in place “The Little Things” is a rickety mystery that never completely comes together.

“The Little Things” is currently streaming on HBO Max.