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The uncanny genius of “Walking on Thin Ice,” Yoko Ono and John Lennon’s poignant final collaboration

Along with “Give Peace a Chance” and “Imagine,” “Walking on Thin Ice” holds a vaunted place among the collaborative works of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Indeed, it would be the final, poignant act in the story of their remarkable artistic association.

Composed by Ono, “Walking on Thin Ice” began to take shape for Yoko during one of the Lennons’ car trips between their estate in Cold Spring Harbor and New York City’s Dakota apartment building. After writing the song’s ethereal lyrics, Yoko challenged herself to concoct an ambitious new sound to bring the composition’s music to fruition. “I wanted to push it a little further, experimentally,” she later recalled. “So I was thinking about Alban Berg, in one of his operas, you know, where a drunk is going ‘ahaahaahaa.’ Just sort of saying things, but in such a way that the emphasis is all wrong, distorted” (Madeline Bocaro, “Just a Story: ‘Walking On Thin Ice,'” December 8, 2016).

“Walking on Thin Ice” was originally attempted during Lennon and Ono’s August 1980 recording sessions at the Hit Factory. Recorded in seven takes, the song featured some wicked guitar runs from Earl Slick, backed by Tony Levin’s galloping bass and Yoko’s dance-club vocal turn. After one of the takes, John suggested that guitarist Hugh McCracken restrict his playing to the backbeats. “That’s great, really funky,” said Yoko, and the guitarist tried out the new playing style.

Love the Beatles? Subscribe to Ken’s podcast “Everything Fab Four.”

For his part, John was jazzed about Yoko and the band’s progress on the song, which was still relatively simple at this juncture, save for Slick’s ambient guitar sounds. When Yoko and the group finished the last take, John couldn’t wait for her to join him in the control booth for the playback. “Come and listen before I break your neck!” he said to his wife, anxious for her to hear what he had been experiencing in the booth with producer Jack Douglas. After they listened to the most recent run-through, John couldn’t contain himself any longer. “I think you just cut your first number one, Yoko,” he announced, borrowing the phraseology, if not the intuition, of George Martin’s proclamation to the Beatles nearly 18 years earlier. On that day back in November 1962 at EMI’s Abbey Road Studios, Martin activated the studio PA and announced, “Gentlemen, you’ve just made your first number-one record” after witnessing the band’s performance of “Please Please Me” (George Martin with Jeremy Hornsby, “All You Need Is Ears,” 1979).

But for all of the Lennons’ excitement, “Walking on Thin Ice” didn’t make the final cut for their November 1980 “Double Fantasy” album release. Undeterred, John and Yoko returned to the studio — in this case, New York City’s Record Plant — during the first week in December. “We’re going back. Again. I feel like I just don’t want to leave the studio,” John told Douglas. “Just you and me and Yoko. That’s all I want. Get an assistant, get an engineer, and produce” (Ben Yakas, “Record Producer Jack Douglas Opens Up about Working with John Lennon,” Gothamist, July 18, 2016).

Douglas met the Lennons in a small 10th-floor studio, where they began hatching plans to remake “Walking on Thin Ice.” As Douglas later recalled, “We only had a germ of that record, so we made a loop of I think eight bars. It’s just loop-based. And a loop then was just a tape machine, I had it on a two-track spinning back to a multitrack, cutting bars together.” With the tape loop in place, Jack and John were able to begin overdubbing voices and instruments to the song. On that first night back in the studio, Yoko remade her lead vocal, while also recording a spoken-word middle section: “I knew a girl who tried to walk across the lake,” she said in an intentionally nonchalant, even disconnected voice. “‘Course it was winter, when all this was ice.” As Jack remembered, “Yoko was great,” and her poetic interlude was the turning point for the song. “John knew that Yoko was onto something with that one — especially with that spoken-word” (Yakas).

On Thursday, December 4, John enjoyed one of the finest moments of his storied career when he overdubbed a sizzling guitar part onto “Walking on Thin Ice.” When it came to the guitar that John used, Jack didn’t have any doubt about the instrument’s identity. “It was the Capri,” he recalled, referring to John’s fabled 1958 Rickenbacker 325, the very instrument that Lennon had played on “The Ed Sullivan Show” back in February 1964. For the solo, John simply wailed on the guitar, executing a series of power chords as Douglas, sitting nearby, reached over and worked the instrument’s Bigsby tailpiece. As with a whammy bar, the Bigsby tremolo arm allowed the producer to manipulate the vibrato sound and heighten the eerie ambience they had been creating for “Walking on Thin Ice” (author’s interview with Douglas, August 2018).

Love the Beatles? Subscribe to Ken’s podcast “Everything Fab Four.”

By Monday, December 8, the song had evolved into a discothèque-friendly six-minute opus, complete with Yoko’s eerie vocal sound effects, spoken-word poem, and Lennon’s seering guitar solo. John was ecstatic as he listened to the mix in all of its glory. “From now on,” he told Yoko, “we’re just gonna do this. It’s great!” — adding that “this is the direction!” After listening to the latest mix of “Walking on Thin Ice” with record executive David Geffen, the couple agreed to release it after the Christmas holidays to allow for a full media blitz (Ken Sharp, “Starting Over,” 2010).

As history well knows, John wouldn’t live to see the song’s 1981 release. But as he had predicted, “Walking on Thin Ice” eventually topped the charts. Following through on the couple’s plans, Yoko released the single in February 1981. “Getting this together after what happened was hard,” Yoko wrote in the liner notes. “But I knew John would not rest his mind if I hadn’t. I hope you like it, John. I did my best.” In its initial pass at the Billboard charts, “Walking on Thin Ice’ landed a number-58 showing. But even more impressively, it fell into heavy rotation in the dance clubs. But the song’s fate hadn’t been sealed just yet. In the new century, “Walking on Thin Ice” enjoyed new life through a series of dance club remixes and cover versions by the likes of the Pet Shop Boys. And in 2003, John’s prophecy came true when the track notched the number-one spot on the US Hot Dance Club charts.

Listen to “Walking on Thin Ice”:

My grief made me cynical about men

At five years old, I was the poster girl for innocence and optimism. At the core of my existence were my glittery jellies — chancletas, my cousins and Puerto Rican neighbors in our Bronx housing project would call them — Little Debbie Donut Sticks, complete with sugar palm oil and thiamin mononitrate that I’d eat every morning, and my parents.

My parents met each other in 1977 and married in 1980 with the blessing of my mother’s dad, who passed away and went on to glory just as she found out she was pregnant with me in 1991. Mommy always says my grandfather and I passed each other going down and coming up to heaven. By the time I was born, after 15 years together, my mother and father were well out of their honeymoon phase. At the time of my birth, they were separated and living apart. I remember being as young as five years old and feeling like a repellent to any masculine presence in my life. What is it about me? I’d wonder then. As an adult, I had similar questions: What is it about me that keeps men from wanting to be there for me, or with me? I’d ask the men I’d date and find casual entanglements with. 

The housing projects where we lived on Third Avenue were only a stone’s throw away from Webster Avenue, where my mother was raised. The projects had inexplicably hot baths upstairs, and men who stayed up all night playing dominoes on Formica and chrome fold-out tabletops downstairs. I could count on those men being there every day on the red-tiled steps, slamming their black and white marble pieces down, more than I could count on the men in my own family at that point. And my perception of men, shaped by the lack of a consistent presence of them in my own home, only worsened over time.

Our grocery store of choice was CTown. When we’d get to CTown my mother would grab my fat little chin, lovingly, to ground me from our walk and give me her Black mother’s spiel, finger-wagging about keeping my hands to myself and not on the store shelves. She warned me many times not to run in the market, but did I listen? No, and I still have the scar on my head from the time I was knocked out after colliding with a rack of goldfish crackers at the end of an aisle at full speed. While Mommy and I would walk home from CTown I would drag my strapped jelly sandals and little toes along the concrete jungle and daydream of all sorts of things, like the Spice Girls and when I’d next see my Daddy.

Our visits happened on random weekends, with no rhythm or reason I could detect. He’d pick me up and take me and my glittery pink Minnie Mouse satchel that I called my “daddy bag” home with him to Queens. Sometimes I’d sit near the entrance of our apartment and wait for his lanky body to stroll through the door, but he wouldn’t show. He wouldn’t call with an explanation. That never dampened my excitement for our next scheduled visit, until it did. 

Feeling abandoned and disappointed gets old quick. Initially, my whole heart was in Queens. Daddy would put hot dogs and sugar in his spaghetti sauce, creating a gourmet dish worth a five-year-old’s dreams, and he allowed me to run through CTown as fast as I wanted. Daddy would play cassette tapes on the silver sound system he kept encased in a breakfront chest. The system was worth more than anything else in his small one-bedroom apartment, and the tapes he played ranged from DJ Premier mixes to Mary J Blige’s “What’s the 411.” Later I realized that his choices in music and food, let alone our trips to see daddy’s friends at the playground, weren’t appropriate for children. His behavior was wrong, but to a kid it felt so right. Being with him felt like being at Disney World, but it was just brash-ass Queens. Daddy had a way of making ordinary things feel extraordinary, maybe because they were often unexpected — his visits were frequently as untimely as his eventual death. 

Daddy’s final exit from my life started long before it happened, with a routine call from my mother’s sister Vanessa. I watched her curl the coiled phone cord around her finger with her red Revlon nails. I was never too far from my mother in those days and I attribute our synchronous nature now to that early closeness. After that phone call, during bath time, my mother posed a life-altering question to me. “Do you want to move to Baltimore?” I was five years old, a hardheaded daydreamer who inherited at least 50 percent of my developing decision-making matrix from a haphazard if loving father. Mommy has always taught me that even a child should have an equal say in their own life. Looking back, she had probably already decided to move to Baltimore, where Auntie Vanessa already lived, anyway, but knowing that she included little me felt good. “Yes,” I answered. 

The week I left The Bronx I was six years old. My leaving was unceremonious; it wasn’t like in the movies — no old Ford with suitcases and a rocking chair hitched to the top. And my dad didn’t come to see us off. We had said most of our goodbyes to close friends and family in the weeks prior to leaving. It hurt leaving all five years of what I had known behind — pissy project elevators, enchanting playdates on the Lower East Side. New York held a quinquennium of history for myself and 40 years for mommy, and that history included my daddy. I was pleased with myself and our decision to move over 200 miles from the gum-laden concrete walks to CTown, but as we packed I wondered if she would miss my dad as much as I would. My mother much kept a poker face when it came to her feelings about my dad. For leaving behind someone she had been with for 20 years, she seemed relaxed and unbothered. So I followed suit.

Once in Baltimore, we lived with my Aunt Vanessa and her family, and I started school at Deer Park Elementary. In my daydreams, I’d wonder what it would be like to to have my mother’s finger-wags and my dad’s mixtapes in the same house. My mother must have been dreaming too, because after our first year, in what I guess was a Hail Mary attempt at keeping my father in our lives, she asked him come down and help us move our things out of storage where we put them while she saved for our new apartment, and he did. When we were settled into our new third floor apartment on Old Court Road, Daddy never left.

Old Court Road was a far cry from Queens, and we didn’t have that kind of grass, bike riding hills or this many kids to play with in the Bronx. I couldn’t have been happier. Baltimore County must have had something in the air. All of a sudden the friction between my parents was quelled. My daddy’s chest was warm as his beating heart inside. He could fill a room with his snaggled grin. Days in Baltimore county with dad were filled with stops to Snowball stands, learning how to plant my feet on mountain bike pedals, and all types of food, from Jamaican jerk to spicy Korean barbecue. If we ordered, the whole neighborhood ate.

Why my parents had separated in the first place remained a mystery to me then. I had traced out every blemish on him as a little girl, hoping to bump into a flaw that might lead me to why my mother just couldn’t live with him, but found only a scar, big and visible, from when he swallowed a paper clip as a child, sitting just a few finger paces away from his belly button. He and my mom even renewed their vows in a beautiful ceremony. But just when everything felt perfect, he died due to complications from a cocaine addiction he had been battling since our days in New York. 

It’s hard to make sense of grief as an adult, let alone as a pre-teen. Was it my fault? Was it because of our decision to move? Was I a bad daughter? I was angry with God, Baltimore, cocaine, and for a while, all Black men. For years after his death, I asked why my father had abandoned me again, and this time for good.

When I got older, I asked my mother why she and Daddy separated. She sat me down and told me how cocaine riddled their marriage. My mother admitted that she had done coke as well, but stopped before she became pregnant with me. Daddy just didn’t. She grew up and focused on life and family, while he continued to play the same games. Despite their history together she still loved him and dreamed of a life with him; she hurled herself into him at top speed despite the warnings their history gave her. I’m sure mommy had her own scars from her relationship with Daddy — scars I couldn’t have known were there. Now I had my own.

In the months before he died, I watched my father fall apart. He had a rough time in finding work in Baltimore, and fitting society’s definition of what a man should be. The food and snowball dates stopped, and the laughing and joking went away, too. For too many nights I would stay up late, or sleep close to the door on our old white couch, waiting for his keys to jingle in the door. Some nights they wouldn’t jingle at all. That feeling of disappointment — waiting for him with my sparkly daddy bag packed, only for him not to show — came rushing back.

That childhood feeling that followed me from New York to Baltimore continues to find me as an adult. After my father’s death, a man leaving me was the worst thing I could imagine. So even when there were warning signs, I turned into a clone of my mother and ran toward men who would hurt me, holding onto them for dear life, trying not to feel the pain of my father leaving me. And that created a bitterness inside of me that I carried into many of my romantic relationships. From the first date to the break-up text, I already knew, somewhere deep in my mind, that my relationships weren’t going to work out. Dad left, so every other man will leave, too.

It took me years to realize that every Black man is not my father. Dating, falling in and out of love, meeting new and interesting people, and learning how to break up with men who try to hold on to me for dear life, taught me that all men are not the same. Some open doors and some don’t. Some are aggressive and some are sensitive. And the collective of them are all perfect and flawed in their own ways, unique sums of their experiences, influences and ideas. Blaming one man and one formative, traumatic experience for all men’s possible and present shortcomings was a cycle I had to break.

Facing the unknown, knowing something might not work out and mapping the scars on a new person anyway is a  daunting task. We should inspect the scars of those we are dating, but there are always going to be scars we don’t see, or not right away. I scanned my father so many times, and even his biggest visible scars didn’t tell me everything I needed to know. It’s taken me years to unlearn my fear that every relationship with a Black man will end in a nasty spill and a new scar of my own.

In hindsight, my mother asking me at five if I wanted to move — which made me feel, in my grief, like I bore some responsibility for my father’s death — caused me to have so much anxiety about committing to things, to places, to people. But taking that risk also brought so much beauty to my life. All that time and closeness I had with my father, while watching my mother be loved by him, was very important for me to see. Men might leave and that might hurt. But not every one will, I know now. Even relationships that don’t last my lifetime might give us worthwhile time together. I know that now. I can pack away that sparkly bag from childhood that held so much disappointment, and vow never to carry it with me again. 

George Conway hands Biden’s DOJ a roadmap to make sure Trump ends up in jail

On Friday night, writing for The Washington Post, conservative attorney George Conway laid out the way forward to investigate former President Donald Trump for his criminal conduct in office now that he is a private citizen — and prosecute him where appropriate.

“Trump departed the White House a possible — many would say probable, provable — criminal, one who has left a sordid trail of potential and actual misconduct that remains to be fully investigated,” wrote Conway. “A desperate fear of criminal indictment may even explain Trump’s willingness to break any number of laws to stay in office despite losing his reelection bid, democracy and the Constitution be damned.”

While President Joe Biden is correct to pledge to stay out of prosecutorial decisions surrounding Trump, wrote Conway, the Justice Department should not — and everything from the Russia obstruction of justice, to the Ukraine bribery scheme, to his attacks on the election and incitement of the Capitol riot, should be on the table to prosecute.

One important avenue, wrote Conway, is to follow the lead of New York prosecutors.

“[Manhattan DA Cyrus] Vance is running a state investigation, but if Trump has committed bank or insurance fraud, that would be chargeable as federal offenses as well, including mail or wire fraud,” wrote Conway. “So, too, with state tax offenses, given how Trump’s federal and state returns would no doubt track one another. Trump apparently had good reason to be concerned about who would fill [Preet] Bharara’s old job.”

Also important, Conway argued, is for future Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint a special counsel — or, ideally, more than one of them.

“With Trump, there’s so much to investigate criminally that one special counsel can’t do it all,” wrote Conway. “Could you imagine one prosecutor in charge of addressing Trump’s finances and taxes, his hush-money payments, obstruction of the Mueller investigation, the Ukraine scandal, and post-election misconduct, for starters? It would be an impossible task for one team. One special counsel’s office couldn’t do it all, not in any reasonable amount of time, and it’s important for prosecutors to finish their work as quickly as possible. Three or four special counsels are needed. Under the regulations, each would be accountable to the attorney general.”

You can read more here.

The secretive, sweet — and sometimes saccharine — history of artificial birthday cake flavor

At my local supermarket, there are currently 42 birthday cake-flavored items lining the aisles outside of the bakery section: Oreos with “birthday cake flavor creme;” Annie’s Organic Birthday Cake Bunny Grahams that are “sprinkled with fun;” breakfast foods like cereal and waffles; and a smattering of health foods, such as rice cakes, protein bars, granola and collagen supplements. 

Once I started looking, it felt like birthday cake was all around me. At the liquor store, there are seven cake-flavored vodkas and one birthday cake-flavored beer. I don’t smoke, but I even stopped on a nearby street where three vape shops had seemingly sprouted up overnight. Two of them sold birthday cake-flavored “ejuice,” while the other sold a more generically labeled “Party Time!” variety that promised notes of rich yellow cake and sugary vanilla. 

It was like a macro-level version of this summer’s TikTok trend of slicing into everyday items — water glasses, slabs of smoked salmon, a can of baked beans — only to reveal that they were, in fact, made of cake. But in this reality, I was living inside the world’s cake-filled and sprinkle-adorned center. 

Thoughts of my newfound, cake-covered landscape dominated my brain space. Through my incessant googling to try to figure out the scope of the birthday cake flavor phenomenon, I’ve likely permanently altered the algorithm that feeds me social media advertisements. There are so many Milk Bar B’Day Truffles knock-offs on Instagram. Videos of sprinkles being made — transforming from big blocks of dye-saturated cornstarch dough into lacquered, uniformly oblong decorations — became my ASMR analogue. I dulled my taste buds with fake cake flavor in dozens of forms, and I’m surprised that my quarantine pod members didn’t enact a polite moratorium on birthday cake trivia. 

But I was still left with several pressing questions. Namely, how did we as a society go from maybe indulging in birthday cake several times a year — at your party and others — to tossing its essence into and on everyday items like coffee creamer and popcorn? Was this a new phenomenon, born out of the dearth of social interaction (i.e. birthday parties) during these unprecedented times? And, perhaps most importantly, what exactly is artificial birthday cake flavor? 

***

Flavor science is a notoriously secretive industry. There are only 700 active members of the global Society of Flavor Chemists, and I emailed just more than a dozen U.S.-based ones to inquire about the makeup of lab-created birthday cake flavor. Most of those who responded begged off, citing “industry secrets” and “client confidentiality.” 

Tom Gibson, who is the chief flavorist at Flavorman — a beverage development company in Louisville, Ky., that has worked with Ocean Spray, Jones Soda Co. and Ballotin Chocolate Whiskey — agreed to talk in generalities. 

“It can be difficult to make assumptions on specifically what unique profile a client is looking for since ‘birthday cake’ is a fanciful name for a wide variety of takes on a similar flavor,” Gibson said. “That being said, what most people will initially have in mind is an indulgent, rich vanilla but with a twist. Ultimately, this ‘twist’ is what will make a particular product’s version of birthday cake stand out against what already exists on the market.” 

There are some flavor elements that differentiate birthday cake flavor from just straight vanilla extract, according to Gibson. Where French vanilla has an eggy quality, birthday cake can have a “stronger, more powdery vanilla” flavor with an almost artificial almond or cherry-like quality on the palate.

On her blog, Flavor Science, food scientist Susie Bautista provided some clues about what provides those notes. 

“The aroma chemicals the flavor chemist chooses for the creamy note are also very important,” she wrote. “Some creamy notes I use are delta Decalactone (FEMA 2361), delta Dodecalactone (FEMA 2401), Sulfurol (FEMA 3204) and Dimethyl Sulfide (FEMA 2746). Ethyl butyrate (FEMA 2427) will enhance the creamy character of the birthday cake flavor in addition to providing a berry top note.” 

But there’s no real industry standard for “birthday cake,” according to Gibson. That means the term can denote different things for different consumers. 

“As flavorists, it’s our job to find the essence of the experience of eating a birthday cake— something that is universally familiar, yet simultaneously individualized for us all — and capture it as a single, multi-faceted flavor. But there is no exact version of a birthday cake flavor,” Gibson said. “It’s a consumer-driven fantasy, so it comes down to how that specific brand wants to conceptualize the experience. The possibilities are endless.” 

***

While it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when and where the first artificial birthday cake flavor was developed — again, “industry secrets” — there are some important dates that help us narrow in on a general time frame. 

In 1858, the pharmacist and biochemist Nicholas-Theodore Gobley extracted the very first samples of pure vanillin, the active flavoring principle of vanilla beans. He eventually developed artificial vanilla flavor by evaporating that pure extract, then recrystallizing the dry compound by adding hot water. This major breakthrough in food science led to two German scientists — Ferdinand Tiemann and Wilhelm Haarman — to open the world’s first vanillin factory two decades later. 

Vanillin is the dominant compound that gives vanilla its signature aroma. It can also be found in other, less expensive places outside the vanilla plant: clove oil, pine bark and rice bran. Because of these developments, the flavor and aroma of vanilla, which had been a rare and sought-after ingredient, suddenly became exponentially more accessible. 

This event dovetailed with the popularization of birthday cakes as we know them. People have been marking special occasions like religious holidays and weddings with sweet treats for millenia, but the 19th Century marked several developments in home baking, according to food historian Jessica Reed, who specializes in the history of cakes.

“Temperature-controlled ovens and the hand-crank beater were invented,” she said. “Leaveners, such as baking soda and powder, were introduced, and common ingredients became accessible both in quantity and cost to the masses making a celebratory cake for something as individual as a birthday possible . . . This is also the era when the layer cake is introduced.” 

Though many people — Reed included — associate yellow or white cakes with chocolate icing and sprinkles with childhood birthdays, cakes with fluffy vanilla icing and sprinkles were anecdotally more of a bakery item.

“Once women were working outside of the home more and no longer baking at home as often, cakes were being bought from such shops,” Reed said. 

The amount of women working outside the home spiked during World War II, which is also a point in time where new developments in food science absolutely skyrocketed. As Anastacia Marx de Salcedo wrote in her 2015 book “Combat-Ready Kitchen: How the U.S. Military Shapes the Way You Eat,” the need for flavorful rations underlie a number of grocery store staples. 

“In the universe of processed food,” she wrote. “World War II was the Big Bang.”

Flavor additives were an easy way to make shelf-stable items more palatable, and since there was a shortage of many foods and spices, the U.S. flavor industry quickly developed artificial substitutes for ingredients like black pepper, mustard and warm spices. 

Following the war, boxed cake mix really took off in supermarkets. Gibson said he would place the invention of artificial birthday cake about a decade after that. 

“My best guess is that the birthday cake flavor — at least as we know it today— appeared sometime between the late ’60s and early ’70s,” he said. 

It would go on to be perfected as advances in food science directly paved the way for McCormick to begin experimenting with creating its own fake vanilla flavor — one more complex than basic vanillin — in 1976 using modern technology like gas chromatography and mass spectrometry after the price of Madagascar vanilla beans skyrocketed. It was finally released on the market in 1982. 

In 1989, Funfetti, a portmanteau of “fun” and “confetti,” was developed by Pillsbury. The original commercial featured the Pillsbury Doughboy pushing a purple tub of frosting with a short, lit fuse sizzling from the top.

“Want a bigger bang out of your next birthday?” the deep-voiced narrator queried, before the frosting bursted like a firecracker, revealing a cake flecked with neon sprinkles. “Nothing says lovin’ like Funfetti.” 

And indeed, the OG Funfetti flavor —featuring those tiny saccharine sprinkles suspended in light, boxed white cake — soon became synonymous with kids’ birthday parties, likely solidifying the white (or yellow) cake adorned with vanilla frosting and colorful sprinkles as the de facto birthday cake flavor for another entire generation. 

***

One of the first major brands to release a special-edition birthday cake flavor was Oreo. It was part of the cookie company’s 100th anniversary celebration. At the time, the Huffington Post described the cookies by saying they “look like standard Oreos, except the white frosting has flecks of rainbow sprinkles inside.” 

“As soon as we opened the package, there was a familiar (and potent) smell that was reminiscent of a supermarket bakery aisle, but in a pleasant, albeit slightly overpowering, way,” the outlet added.

Within a year of the limited-edition Oreos launch, at least 17 more birthday cake-flavored items made their way to market — ranging from blended coffee drinks at Coffee Bean Tea & Leaf, to Good Humor Birthday Cake bars, to “Party Cake Peeps.”

After the initial influx, there seems to have been a lull in new items hitting the shelves. But more products flooded the market in 2017, and their popularity continued to surge. According to Nielsen, the flavor “birthday cake” has seen sales increase “more than 29% since 2017.”

Part of this trend is tied directly to a parallel Funfetti craze —which I’ve reported on, and which the New York Times termed the “Funfetti explosion” — both of which got a boost from social media sites like Instagram and Pinterest because of inherently photogenic nature of bright sprinkles against a vanilla-cream background.

Another element of the appeal of birthday cake flavor — especially for well-known brands — is that it’s pretty universally known. Manufacturers don’t need to educate consumers, because they already have an innate sense of what flavors they’re about to unwrap. “It appeals to a wide variety of consumers and is easily understandable of what it will deliver,” a spokesperson for Kit Kat told me via email.

In 2020, Kit Kat released limited-edition birthday cake-flavored bars, which were made with the candy’s trademark crispy wafer interior but coated in “birthday cake flavored crème with the addition of sprinkles.” “The flavor is unique, while not polarizing to the mainstream consumers,” the manufacturer added. 

While some assert birthday cake flavor isn’t polarizing, my polls of food professionals indicated that might not be completely accurate. The intrinsically artificial nature of it is really off-putting to some people, and it can result in a very saccharine product that’s almost waxy from the use of butter-flavored vegetable shortening (which is simply another layer of artificiality). 

Peg Aloi, a baker and writer, told me that she felt like artificial birthday cake flavor was “the Axe Body Spray of food flavoring,” while Jonathan Exum — a Louisville-based chef with a killer palate — described trying a product that “used a ‘white chocolate’ that coated the roof of your mouth like cheap frosted doughnuts.” That being said, Exum is a fan of the flavor overall, because it denotes both nostalgia and indulgence. 

“It goes against any kind of ‘whole foods’ or natural foods preparation,” he said. “But I also think that’s why a lot of people love it, because it’s a quick way to ‘cheat’ on a healthy diet that basically summarizes all the flavors of processed food into one sweet morsel and brings back memories of childhood or stoned [or] drunk binge-eating.” 

Cake historian Jessica Reed echoed this sentiment, citing two overarching reasons for the flavor’s popularity. First, birthday cake is a food of comfort and happiness. “To companies looking to sell a product, this is gold,” she said.

“Two: We live in a society that prizes restriction when it comes to sweets,” Reed continued. “If you can’t eat it, taste it from your lipgloss or in your cocktail — which is oddly not as maligned.”

According to flavor scientist Tom Gibson, birthday cake flavor has always experienced waves of popularity when people need comfort. Christina Tosi’s beloved Birthday Cake, which was Funfetti-inspired, helped put her bakery Milk Bar on the map back in 2008 amid the economic recession.

As stress surrounding the Trump presidency began to really accelerate, so too did the mass production of birthday cake-flavored snack foods. Consumers are now seeking simple comfort food amid the pandemic, Gibson said.

“Classic, nostalgic flavors like birthday cake are not only familiar but offer a sense of decadent indulgence,” he said. “This is especially significant during a time when we’ve had to go without many experiences, including birthday parties. It’s been a tough year, so we can all use something to celebrate. Birthday cake-flavored products allow us to treat ourselves despite these limitations.”

USDA might finally update the definition of natural nitrites and nitrates used in processed meats

Scan the bacon section at your local Whole Foods and you’d be forgiven for thinking that nitrites and nitrates had been banished definitively from the land of natural and organic groceries. Package after package of shrink-wrapped slices of pork belly proclaims itself to be virtuously “uncured” and both nitrate and nitrite free. This is in contrast with the slabs of conventionally prepared Oscar Mayer and Boar’s Head on offer at supermarket chains pitching to a more general audience, which are cured with sodium nitrite or nitrate, similar preservative compounds used in processed meats. While both are used as curing agents, research has linked nitrites to an increased likelihood of colorectal cancer and other chronic diseases; nitrates can be transformed into nitrites through the digestion process.

As has been reported for years, though (see: this piece from The New York Times, from back in 2011), some experts argue (and still others refute) that the distinction here between cured and uncured, nitrite-full and nitrite-free, is based on a fallacy. It’s one that the USDA aimed to at least partially correct when it announced on December 10 that it would consider prohibiting inaccurate labeling claims on natural and organic processed meats, and include celery powder and other “naturally” derived nitrites and nitrates in its definition of curing agents. The agency letter was in response to a 2019 petition filed by Consumer Reports and consumer advocacy non-profit Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) about how processed meat products are presented to consumers.

At issue is the fact that so-called uncured bacon, hot dogs, salami, ham and other deli meats, are still preserved — cured — in order to inhibit the growth of harmful bacteria. This is accomplished with celery powder and, a lot less frequently, cherry powder, which are ingredients that sound harmless enough. But Consumer Reports and CSPI argue they’re actually naturally occurring forms of nitrate, that get further chemically processed into nitrite, which expose the human body to the same ill effects as their synthetic cousins.

“Consumers are being told implicitly that something is safer when it may not be,” says CSPI policy director Laura MacCleery. “At a bare minimum, labels should not mislead consumers.”

Sodium nitrite is strictly regulated; the USDA allows 120 parts per million, or .012%, in bacon, for example. But the amount of celery powder that manufacturers can use in processing meats is ungoverned, as Jesse Hirsch reported in The Counter.  In some instances, the 2011 Times article points out, amounts of nitrate residue on meats from “natural” sources were 10 times higher than what are found in regularly cured products.

That’s because, from a regulatory perspective, the USDA “does not consider celery powder a source of nitrates,” says Charlotte Vallaeys, who was a senior policy analyst at Consumer Reports when the USDA petition was penned. This in spite of the fact that, “from a science perspective, everybody agrees it’s a source of nitrates.” Part of the issue, says MacCleery, is that the USDA has little expertise in “thinking about toxicological safety outside short-term food safety concerns, such as with longer-term health related to cancer risk. It sees itself in service to the meat industry rather than a regulator that holds nutrition advice fully in hand.”

Natural and organic meat producers, Consumer Reports and CSPI argue, succeed in duping consumers by allowing them to believe they are buying products that are healthier than conventional alternatives. They accomplish this with labels that claim their contents are “uncured” and have “no nitrate or nitrite added;” in small print, the labels state, “except those naturally occurring in celery powder.”

Says Vallaeys, “It’s a rare instance in the landscape at the supermarket where the label is saying almost the opposite of what is in a product. You will see ‘No growth hormones’ on poultry, which is technically true but meaningless because no one uses growth hormones in chicken and it’s illegal to do so.” But natural and organic processed meat labels are “actively lying to consumers by saying they’re not cured, and that no nitrates were added.” (This in spite of the fact that even natural and organic meat company Applegate, which presumably benefits from the misleading claim, petitioned the USDA back in 2011 requesting transparent labeling for products containing vegetable-based nitrates.)

The Consumer Reports and CSPI’s petition urged the USDA to reserve claims of “uncured” and “no nitrates or nitrites added” only for meats that were truly not processed with nitrates/nitrites derived from any source. The petitioners asked, too, that labels fully disclose when nitrates and nitrites have been used in processing meats, in “lettering of easily readable style and at least one-half the size and prominence as the product name,” and that the source be added to the ingredient list. Finally, the organizations asked that the USDA formally set maximum allowances of celery salt and other “natural” curing agents — just as it has for sodium nitrite.

A year later, the USDA partially accommodated these multiple requests. It agreed to propose new rules that would ban companies that use celery powder from claiming that their products are “uncured” and “nitrate and nitrite free.” Although, points out Vallaeys, “[Their] letter is informing us only that they’re planning to do this; they can change their minds.”

Additionally, the agency said that “rather than requiring disclosure statements about the use of nitrates or nitrites on labels of meat and poultry products,” it was proposing to instead “establish new definitions for ‘Cured’ and ‘Uncured.'” That’s a mixed blessing. On the one hand, “It’s always good when a regulatory decision aligns with scientific reality,” says Vallaeys. On the other hand, the USDA won’t compel companies to call out celery salt as a nitrate or nitrite on labels, which CSPI says will keep consumers “in the dark about the presence of these compounds in celery powder and other similar sources.”

Still, says MacCleery, “The industry has been all too happy to profit off consumer confusion, and this is a nice corrective action for a small piece of the picture.” She hopes the incoming administration will tackle the “second half of our requests, by providing clarifying language.”

Elaine Watson, in Food Navigator, reported on a public comment to the petition and subsequent USDA response by the North American Meat Institute (NAMI), in which the lobbying group said that Consumer Reports and CSPI “misrepresent the science on processed meat consumption and cancer risk;” NAMI also claims that “Nitrite is . . . safe.” It’s perhaps an indication of some industry pushback to come as USDA moves (or doesn’t) towards reclassifying celery powder. “It’s not final till it’s final,” says Vallaeys.

“Dickinson” creator on Emily and fame: “The spotlight was a dangerous place for her to be”

Never again let it be said that Emily Dickinson wasn’t a woman with heart heated by desire. In the second season of “Dickinson” Emily (Hailee Steinfeld) has already loved and lost once, and pines in secret for two people. One of them, her best friend Sue (Ella Hunt), has permanently captured her heart. The other, newspaper publisher Sam Bowles (Finn Jones), is dashing, seductive and a little too charming to be trusted.

He also inspires Emily to dream, very lustily, about achieving fame by publishing her poetry . . .  although something inside her keeps holding her back. Nevertheless, Sam allows the poet to indulge her ego in ways her controlling but doting father (Toby Huss) never does. To boost her confidence prior to attending a party, she talks herself up in the mirror, only it’s not her own voice that pumps up her ego. It’s Sam’s. 

 “Hope isn’t good enough,” she imagines Sam purring in her ear. “Look at yourself and say, ‘I deserve this. I earned it. It’s now my time to shine.'”

“Dickinson” creator Alena Smith isn’t nearly as shy about boldly approaching her subject or blending historic details with modern slang and wit, and reams of creative license.

In Season 2 this materializes as an examination of fame that both evokes Dickinson’s obsession with it and speaks to an age ruled by TikTok and Instagram. Emily gets a taste of the influencer life when she wins a local baking contest, which actually happened. (Salon’s Ashlie D. Stevens even baked the cake that scored the top prize.)

But there’s another purpose in showing how fame toys with Emily’s emotions, which Smith discussed in a recent conversation about the new season.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The second season begins with a narrator explaining that there’s a point at which the concrete, biographical details of Dickinson’s life aren’t as fully chronicled as they were in the timeframe that’s been previously depicted. Did knowing that free you a little bit more? I mean, obviously this was never a creatively constricted series, but what does that mean in terms of the second season storytelling?  

I think there’s something misleading about that intro. My intention is actually to leave the door open in the audience’s imagination for the ways that we push the surrealism of the show in Season 2. So in other words, this is not really about which facts are true and which facts are not true because in truth, the story is just as factual. I use the same methodology as I did in Season 1: There really was a Sam Bowles. He really did come to Sue and Austin’s house. The poem that ends up going in the newspaper is a poem that was in The Springfield Republican. Emily did win the Amherst Cattle Show Baking Contest.

The facts are still the facts. But the meaning of that intro, the key line is when it says perhaps the truth is hidden in her poems.

I guess I’m pushing people to sort of question their ideas of the truth of anyone’s experience, but particularly someone like Emily whose imagination so far exceeds the sort of mundane realities of her external circumstances.

I would say that like the facts about Emily Dickinson’s life that always remained the most shrouded in mystery to us are fundamentally, “Why didn’t she choose to publish in the traditional sense? And what was her relationship with Sue?”

The letters dry up around the years of that we’re looking at here, and as always with Emily Dickinson there are these sort of delicious gaps that we get to fill.

Was the secret publication of the abolitionist newspaper a storyline you had originally intended to pursue when you originally developed the show?

Actually I’m so glad you just reminded me of that, because that’s another place of where the introduction is relevant. That is all entirely made up, but it is made up in a way that can’t sort of be proven or disproven. There’s the theme of visibility versus invisibility, who gets to be seen versus who is overlooked or who has to work in the dark. The whole idea there is that there were many of those types of publications. I mean the most famous one is Frederick Douglass’s The North Star.

But there were many black abolitionists who worked in secret basically because their lives were at stake, so they had to keep their identities a secret. So in other words, they couldn’t have been famous for their work even if they had wanted to be. But because those histories have been suppressed, we haven’t learned their story.

So again, it’s a thing of, “Is the truth to be found in the history books? Or is it to be found in poetry?” There’s more to history than what we were taught in school, because there were all these lives that went unrecorded or were actively erased. And the project of the show is about reclaiming and restaging American history to bring people into the center of it who have not traditionally been put there.

I think that there are elements of the interiority of Emily’s life that those letters illuminate quite clearly. The main subjects of her poems were death and fame. There are many ways that Emily contends with fame that resonate with modern women watching this, in terms of what does it mean to really put yourself out there?

The show talks about fame and looks at fame in a way that one you can understand why Emily would want to keep her private thoughts and ideas private and not publish them in a newspaper. When you were constructing the season’s plot how much of those questions that modern women face play in this season’s construction?

In Season 1 we sort of get one answer to the question of “Why didn’t Emily publish?” We’re presented with a set of facts, or a set of interpretations of facts that says, ‘Well, she didn’t publish because it was a patriarchy and her father was conservative and he was opposed to it.’

And so she sort of struck this Faustian bargain with him that said, ‘I can be a writer, as long as I hide out in my room and don’t show anyone that I’m writing.’

But in Season 2, we kind of upend what we thought was a settled set of facts and we present a very different and more complex and nuanced, and in some ways just as sinister interpretation from a feminist perspective, which is, “Emily didn’t publish because ultimately as a female artist stepping into the spotlight, she became disconnected from her own true voice, that the spotlight was a dangerous place for her to be.”

So for her own reasons, she realized that she could only continue to write the poems that she really wanted to write, or to speak her truth, if she only spoke it in a certain sense, privately. You know, just to Sue or just to private readers basically rather than seeking a stage where the whole world could see her. And I think that we have to see that even if this is kind of letting dad off the hook, it is still about patriarchy and it’s still about, “What does it mean to be a woman in a world that doesn’t approve of women having voices of their own? And why is it always more loaded to ‘seek attention’ as a woman than it is for a man?”

The reason why I wanted to really drill into this idea or theme is not just because it is such an important part of, of who Emily Dickinson was, but it’s because it is so relevant for our world today. And really, I think that this season of Dickinson is about us and the way that we are all today negotiating social media and the pressures of building a personal brand and as you say, putting yourself out there.

There’s this kind of intensification of the act of publicity that all of us are engaged with on a daily basis right now. I think it can be actually a taboo subject to address. It can evoke a lot of feelings in people. Everybody has an Instagram account and can put as many images of themselves out in the world every day as they want to while even just like being alone in their room.

I’m glad that you mentioned that. One of the moments that stuck with me, and I’m not going to be specific about the context…speaks to the many instances in social media where men that exploit women for their own gain. And then when they get pushback they’ll claim, “But I’m just being a good guy. I’m supporting you!”

Don’t you remember when the Harvey Weinstein accusations first came out, that he put out a bizarre, open letter where he quoted Jay Z or something like that? And he, and he talked about how he had given all this money to a fund to promote female directors or something like that.

Les Moonves too.

Right. That’s why this is still about patriarchy . . . It’s actually kind of wonderful to be reflecting on that right now, because. I think the best way that women can combat that is by lifting each other up. And the best hope that the patriarchy has is keeping us divided from each other.

That’s one thing I’ve always liked about this show is that there are so many moments of gossip and cattiness where the women in Emily’s community are shady to her. And yet when the chips are down, they do support each other. They don’t glory in another’s downfall.

Well first of all, as a feminist, that’s just not how I see the world. But I also think that it comes from Emily’s story because at the end of the day, the people who saved Emily’s poems were other women . . . Emily’s poems were ultimately preserved as these kinds of domestic objects: she kept them in her home. She sewed them into little books, she hid them in a trunk. And it was the women around her who preserved them to be handed down like heirlooms to future generations. So yes, there are tremendous acts of  mutual care and respect always between Emily and the women around her.

New episodes of “Dickinson” are released weekly on Fridays on Apple TV+.

How many vaccine shots go to waste? Many states aren’t even counting

As reports emerge across the country of health facilities throwing out unused and spoiled COVID-19 vaccines, some state governments are failing to track the wastage as required by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, leaving officials coordinating immunization efforts blind to exactly how many of the precious, limited doses are going into the trash and why.

In Washington, a health facility allegedly threw out some COVID-19 vaccine doses at the end of workers’ shifts because staff believed state guidelines blocked them from giving unused shots to people below the top priority tier. In Maryland, workers appear to have tossed thawed doses when they ran out of time to administer them safely. How many doses, exactly, have been wasted in those states is unknown because neither state is tracking unused or wasted vaccines.

In Indiana, where hospitals have told the media about discarding some shots, the state Health Department said it requires wastage to be reported but wasn’t able to tell ProPublica how many doses have been tossed statewide. Nonetheless, it asserted that “wastage has been minimal.”

Experts say that waste reporting is essential during a vaccination campaign to encourage careful handling and the use of every viable dose and, more importantly, to identify potential problems in the shipping and cold storage operations. With inconsistent reporting requirements and no enforcement of a federal mandate to report wastage, vaccine providers have little incentive to acknowledge wasting vaccines, said Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the School of Public Health at Brown University.

Jha said he thinks that the true number of wasted doses across the country is far higher than a handful. After he detailed one anecdote he heard about an ER physician forced to waste vaccine doses in a thread on Twitter, his phone quickly filled with more than a dozen messages from other medical workers, confirming what he suspected: At a time when the U.S. is desperately short on vaccines, a significant number of doses are ending up in the trash.

Clinics and hospitals have “gotten slammed” when the media has learned of them wasting even a few doses, he said. “And the signal to everybody else is, if you have waste, don’t report it. Because if you do, you’re gonna get into a lot of trouble. That combination means, at least in my assessment, there’s a lot of waste and a lot of underreporting of that waste.”

The CDC requires all organizations that administer the vaccine to report the number of vaccine doses “that were unused, spoiled, expired, or wasted as required by the relevant jurisdiction.” The CDC also asked states to describe their wastage monitoring method during the distribution planning process.

Vaccine providers, such as pharmacies and hospitals, are supposed to provide data on wasted doses to their state health agencies, which then send the information to the CDC. Like many parts of the vaccine rollout, that has not gone according to plan. State by state, ProPublica found, reporting requirements vary and are not reliably communicated to vaccine providers. Even when the rules are clear, they are not regularly enforced, nor are numbers reported to the public.

Maryland’s Hospital Association said wastage data “is not systematically collected,” while the state’s Health Department said that “unless they are reported to us, MDH does not track specific instances of accidental vaccine wastage at the local level.”A Washington State Health Department spokesperson said that the state “does not systematically capture wasted dose information.” The spokesperson added that providers are encouraged to use up all of the shots they receive and that “if a provider doesn’t have enough qualifying employees under” the top priority group, “they can help vaccinate workers who aren’t receiving vaccine directly from their employers.”

Michigan’s Department of Health and Human Services said, “We have not asked that vaccine providers report this data,” though it said that 10 wasted doses had been reported to it as of Jan. 13.In some cases, states said they were aware of specific instances of wastage. New Jersey said that it was “aware of 16 vials that had to be discarded because they arrived broken when the boxes were open.”

While a spokesperson noted that providers are instructed to give vaccines to people on waitlists to minimize the chances of vaccine being discarded, the spokesperson didn’t respond to questions about whether providers were mandated to report wasted doses.

Other states do have wastage reporting mandates. Pennsylvania, for example, said it requires providers to report any doses that are received and are not able to be used and was able to give a percentage — 0.1% of doses received for injections as of Jan. 11 — that had to be disposed of. “The majority of discarded vaccine is related to vials broken in handling and syringe issues, such as bent or broken needles or clients refusing after the vaccine dose was drawn,” said Department of Health spokesman Barry Ciccocioppo.

Colorado also said that waste is being tracked. “The state is aware that Pueblo Local Public Health rendered 300 doses of the Pfizer vaccine unusable after a portable vaccine storage unit malfunction,” a spokesperson from the state’s Joint Information Center said. “The state’s goal is to use every single available vaccine, acknowledging that emergencies may occur infrequently in the distribution process.”

In every mass vaccination effort, some share of doses unavoidably goes into the trash rather than arms. However, data on wasted shots — especially in large quantities — is an essential tool for federal and state health agencies trying to spot problems in how the vaccine is being shipped, stored and given to the public.

State vaccine officials monitor wastage numbers to determine if providers are mishandling shipments or improperly maintaining the temperature of their vials, said Dr. Kelly Moore, deputy director of the Immunization Action Coalition and former head of Tennessee’s immunization program. “Are they tracking things and responding appropriately, if you’re seeing extremely low wastage rates and everything is always perfect?” Moore said. “When things look too good to be true, they usually are.”

The two vaccines currently authorized, made by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech, both must be used within six hours of leaving cold storage, reaching room temperature and being opened. If there are no-shows for vaccination appointments, pharmacists have to quickly find replacements before the thawed vaccines expire.

Complicating the count is the fact that the number of doses available in a vial sometimes exceeds the amount prescribed on the label — pharmacists have commonly found that they can squeeze a sixth dose out of Pfizer’s vials, even though they are labeled as containing five. That means that a vaccine site could be allocated a certain number of doses on paper, have a few extra ones left that need to be tossed and still come out net positive. In that situation, it is unclear if the discarded doses should count as waste.

Data on wasted doses is routinely monitored in childhood immunizations in large part because it is required by the federal Vaccines For Children program, which provides innoculations to millions of children not covered by private health insurance, said Dr. Sean O’Leary, a professor of pediatric infectious diseases at University of Colorado Medicine. “Practices that are participating in that program, which are the vast majority of pediatric practices and a lot of family medicine practices, are used to keeping track very carefully of their vaccine inventory.”

There isn’t a federal program overseeing most adult vaccinations, so any wastage reporting for adult shots, like the flu shot, would be managed state by state.

While collecting wastage data is a good business practice, O’Leary said it is most useful as a deterrent against vaccine providers mishandling or discarding doses irresponsibly.

“It’s being tracked as a disincentive to letting [wastage] happen,” he said, “for accountability for people who are delivering the vaccines that they are doing their best to give the vaccines and store them properly.”

However, there is also a danger in stigmatizing the waste of vaccine doses, said Moore, the immunization coalition deputy director. Accidents and normal human error are going to make some vials unfit to use on patients. Doses compromised by unsafe temperatures or contamination need to be thrown out, not injected into people. “You never, ever want to have clinics feel pressured not to waste vaccine that needs to be wasted,” Moore said. “If you say, ‘No one should ever damage vaccine,’ you’re really going to be in trouble.”

The CDC says vaccine providers should avoid wastage and disclose when it happens.

“If there is excess vaccine, clinic staff should do everything possible to avoid wasting the dose. If vaccine wastage occurs, it should be reported into CDC’s Vaccine Tracking System (VTrckS),” said CDC spokeswoman Kristen Nordlund. “We are working to figure out how to provide this data online in the future when the data is more complete.”

In the meantime, federal officials have begun to urge that priority guidelines not get in the way of using vaccines. “It’s more important to get people vaccinated than to perfectly march through each prioritized group,” Alex Azar, secretary of health and human services under President Donald Trump, said at a briefing on Jan. 6.

This means that a pharmacist should use a dose that’s about to expire on any available person — even someone who isn’t in a priority group — rather than letting it go in the trash. “There’s always someone in line. The whole nation is in line,” said Lori Freeman, chief executive officer of the National Association of County and City Health Officials. “There’s no reason for any vaccine to go to waste.”

Dr. Mysheika Roberts, health commissioner of Columbus, Ohio, said in an interview last week that her local vaccination site hasn’t had to waste a single dose of vaccine so far. Initially, if there were extra doses at the end of the day, they used them on their own staff, she said. After that, the mayor allowed them to put police officers on the waitlist — even though only health care providers were technically eligible at the time — so the vaccinators could call the station if they had extra doses. Managing a waitlist is complicated, Roberts said, because you need to have people who want the vaccine and have both the transportation and flexibility to get to the vaccine clinic within about 30 minutes, but so far it has worked out. The vaccine clinic has also managed to further reduce potential waste by getting appointment confirmations and defrosting vaccine vials close to appointment times, she said.

An Ohio Department of Health spokesperson said the state requires providers to report waste, and that 165 doses of the vaccine had been recorded as wastage as of Jan. 15.

“I hope to never be in a position where I have to waste a dose,” Roberts added. “I’d go on a street corner and find someone to give the vaccine to before I have to throw it away.”

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Sex and the City: the reboot needs to look beyond its narrow view of white wealthy heterosexual sex

When “Sex and the City” first aired in 1998, its depictions of female sexuality were frank, exciting and deliciously new. Featuring formidable female characters — Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte — the show explored life and love in New York City, bringing female sexuality to the small screen like never before.

Writer Patrick McLennan recently called the show “era-defining” in the RadioTimes, noting its focus on female empowerment, and indeed, it was and remains for many an important feminist show. It broke ground through its unapologetic representations of female sexuality, handling masturbation, dirty-talk, cunnilingus, single, couple and throuple sex – remember Samantha’s famous line “I’m try-sexual. I’ll try anything once”? It also engaged with issues of infertility, single parenthood, domestic abuse and grief.

Going off the air in 2004 after six seasons, there proved to be a lasting appetite for the show, which inspired two features films. These, it seems, did not satisfy fans, and it has recently been announced that the show will be revived for ten half-hour episodes under the name “And Just Like That . . . “

However, the landscape of sex and sexuality has shifted significantly over the last two decades, and to remain relevant, the reboot will have to shift with it. The key characters — Carrie, Charlotte and Miranda (minus the indomitable Samantha) — will be in their 50s, and while this offers up some strong narrative potential, I worry it’s not enough.

Sex and the contemporary small screen

Society has come a long way in 20 years. While romance never goes out of fashion, women’s sexuality and how it’s represented on screen has moved on, and rightly so. As the writer Sanjana Varghese noted in the New Statesman, despite its feminist draw, Sex and the City is “outdated, wealthy and white“.

Recent shows such as “The Bisexual” (2018), “I May Destroy You” (2020), N”ormal People” (2020), “Fleabag” (2016) and “I Love Dick” (2016) have shown new depths of female sexuality on screen, tackling key issues of desire, identity, intimacy and rage. While overt displays of sexuality are ever present, the rendering of sex and female sexuality is now more diverse, complex and, arguably, interesting. Small screen sex has shifted from mere spectacle or punchline to thoughtful facet of a more three-dimensional character: from being “sassy” and sometimes self-indulgent, to being knowing and self-reflexive.

In Michaela Coel’s groundbreaking “I May Destroy You,” sex is something that brings issues of consent to the surface, forcing Arabella (played by Coel) to consider who she is, how she is changed by her experience, and who she wants to become. In “Fleabag,” sex and desire are central in showing dramatic power at work. Knowingly so. Some of “Fleabag”‘s best lines include “I spent most of my adult life using sex to deflect from the screaming void inside my empty heart,” and:

I’m not obsessed with sex. I just can’t stop thinking about it. The performance of it. The awkwardness of it. The drama of it.

Like in “Sex and the City,” the dramatic potential of sex is foregrounded in these shows, but in “Fleabag” and “I May Destroy You,” sex is a structuring device encouraging viewers to think beyond the act.

Sex and stratification

While contemporary depictions of sex often leave nothing to hide, female sexuality has always had an unknowable quality about it — after all, most female pleasure isn’t as visible as an erection.

While “Sex and the City” arguably imbued sex with a glamorous (and expensive) commercialism — dressing for sex, branding sex, commodifying sex – sex and indeed sexuality were stratified. The women at its core were well-dressed, well-heeled and above all, wealthy.

While there was and arguably remains a visual pleasure in the fictitious freedom of the four friends and their sexual exploits, their privilege as slender white, middle-class women afforded them a power and visibility closed off to others. Their desirability was not questioned. As the cultural theorist Richard Dyer (1997) explains:

There is something at stake in looking at, or continuing to ignore, white racial imagery.

And indeed, there is also something at stake in ignoring social class, and the attendant privilege it affords.

I’m not arguing that in the reboot the central characters should be plunged into poverty or pretend to be anything other than white. What I am suggesting though is that their prevailing ignorance of their privilege needs to change. The mode of feminism they represented in the 1990s is, in many ways, outdated.

#MeToo, Black Lives Matter and #LoveWins (about the legalisation of gay marriage), among other hard-fought movements, have restructured the sexual and social landscape and the stories that we tell about it.

It will, of course, be fascinating to see how Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte navigate the modern world — its visual scrutiny and social media, its new feminist and political agendas, their psychical and physical shifts, and their bourgeois, (hetero)sexual fulfilment. Ultimately, And Just Like That… will need to tread a fine line, taking a different and more conscious approach to sex and sexuality if it hopes to impress audiences (both new and old), remain relevant and compete in a market that is now saturated with small-screen, big-idea sex.

Beth Johnson, Associate Professor in Film and Media, University of Leeds

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

Why California’s vaccine roll-out has been such a mess

When California first received doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech coronavirus vaccine in mid-December, hospitals rushed to administer them to their frontline workers. Next in line were long-term residential workers. But a month later, the state is experiencing a disconcerting lag, and vaccines aren’t getting in arms as they should.

According to data by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) analyzed by Bloomberg, as of January 22 the state had only administered 37.3 percent of the 4,379,500 doses it received. California’s percentage of doses administered is the lowest in the country. It is followed by Minnesota, Virginia, Alabama, Nevada and Kansas. (Jurisdictions with the highest percentage of doses administered include North Dakota, District of Columbia, West Virginia, New Mexico, and South Dakota.)

At the beginning of the pandemic, California was hailed for successfully flattening the curve. Only in the last couple months has the state’s biggest cities experienced a surge in COVID-19 cases. With this in mind, many are wondering why has the vaccine roll-out been such a mess? And what’s behind the discrepancy of vaccines obtained and vaccinations administered?

Experts have a few theories. Some say it’s a result of the state’s decentralized public health system, like Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease specialist and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

“Part of the problem is that of course California is the most populous state, and because of that, it really reflects not being a national health system or state health system,” Chin-Hong said. “What you find is a bunch of duplications, redundancies or gaps — you could be a nurse for example and get an offer to get a vaccine in a nursing home if you work there, but if you also work in the hospital, you’ll also get an invitation.”

Chin-Hong said some healthcare workers are getting “multiple invitations,” while others aren’t getting invitations at all—and that’s just healthcare workers. For parts of the general population, like those over the age of 65 who Governor Gavin Newsom said were eligible for the vaccine effective immediately last week, it is even more difficult to obtain a vaccine for other reasons — namely, a lack of vaccinators.

“California is leading the nation in a surge for COVID right now, particularly in Southern California, and that makes healthcare workers who would normally administer the vaccines in short supply,” Chin-Hong said. “And enlisting an army of volunteers hasn’t been as smooth as one would think around that.”

Finally, Chin-Hong said there’s been a lack of transparency between the state, healthcare workers, and the public around what’s happening.

“Nobody really understands why we have such a discrepancy in terms of how many doses have been allocated and how many actually reached into the arms of people in California,” he said, noting that there is some variation within this sentiment.

In Long Beach, for example, food workers are getting vaccinated; teachers are already next in line. Meanwhile, in the San Francisco Bay Area, 90,000 frontline healthcare workers are eligible to get the vaccine as part of the first phase (Phase 1a) of vaccinations. According to San Francisco’s new vaccine tracker, 48,658 doses have been administered in San Francisco— but not everyone who received one lives in San Francisco (they could work at a healthcare setting in the city). Only an estimated 31,189 eligible San Franciscans have received at least one dose of the vaccine. Technically, those who are 65 and over are eligible to get vaccinated, but they are officially part of Phase 1b.

San Francisco Supervisor Matt Haney said that, until this week, there has been a “lack of transparency” and a “lot of confusion.”

“We are making some progress this week, but before Tuesday there wasn’t even a place to sign up to yet, and that’s as basic as it gets,” Haney said. “I think local and state governments are going to want to blame everything on supply, and I think supply is definitely a reason why we can’t give the vaccine to everyone tomorrow as much as we would like to. But the lack of supply is not an excuse for poor communication or no communication at all, and a lack of transparency and a lack of real responsibility for widespread distribution.”

Haney said, notably, local governments that appeared to be prepared are getting their vaccines in people’s arms.

Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told Salon that when it comes to states being effective in administering available vaccines, preparedness has been key. And unlike in cities like San Francisco, it’s the states with more rural populations that appear to have their act together, because they put together plans in advance. As reported by Reuters, West Virginia opted for a “hyper-local” approach, partnering with independent pharmacies. By the end of last month, the state had already offered the vaccine to all of its congregant-care residents. Notably, West Virginia opted out of a distribution partnership between the federal government and CVS and Walgreens.

“I think it was a really proactive approach that started long before the vaccine was available that allowed some of those states to move much faster,” Adalja said. “West Virginia is a state where paradoxically many people think it’s poorly resourced — and because of that I think they were very proactive.”

Adalja said that it’s possible many bigger states were waiting for federal support, yet that funding didn’t get passed until Christmas weekend.

“I think it really has to do with proactivity, but much of the fault doesn’t lie necessarily with the state, it does lie mostly with the federal government for kind of not putting enough time into this last mile of vaccination and really just assuming that once the vaccine was delivered, that everything would just smooth wouldn’t run smoothly,” Adalja said, noting that the COVID-19 vaccine can’t be administered “on the fly” like the flu vaccine.

Californians are now hopeful that a change in guard will bring a sigh of relief. On Thursday, President Joe Biden released a national plan to expedite the process.

Dr. Chin-Hong said that a national strategy will definitely help, particularly considering it’s the first time that the country has had one. But he fears the confusion in California is also a symptom of public health being consistently underfunded for years.

“Public health has been defunded for many years, so you can’t put on a Broadway show overnight,” he said.

How to make Instant Pot boiled eggs (just the way you like them)

Perfectly cooked eggs seem like one of those goals the Instant Pot was designed to vanquish from the stove top forever, but the truth is that Instant Pot boiled eggs aren’t always as consistent as we might hope. Every time I want to cook eggs in the Instant Pot — whether I’m aiming for hard-boiled, soft-boiled, or somewhere in that jammy borderland we call “medium-boiled,” I have to look up the cooking time.

After skimming endless blog posts, all of which offer different instructions (low pressure or high pressure, natural release, quick release, or some combination of the two), I inevitably choose at random and end up with . . . hard-boiled eggs. Every single time. But since they’re easier to peel, I’m rarely that upset.

Because of the sheer volume of variables involved — the number of eggs being cooked, the precise amount of water used, the exact texture of yolk desired, the temperature of the eggs when the Instant Pot is sealed—it can be a challenge to churn out uniform boiled eggs every time. Nobody likes to be surprised or disappointed when they slice into an egg and see its yolk.

So once and for all, here is a reliable, easy-to-remember order of operations that takes all the guesswork out of Instant Pot boiled eggs, whether you want them soupy on the inside (to float in congee or perch on asparagus salad) or just on the cusp of chalkiness to scoop and devil with ease.

Tips for instant pot boiled eggs 

  1. Make as many eggs as you want (within reason). I’ve cooked a single soft-boiled egg in the Instant Pot (for the sake of experimentation), but you can cook up to a dozen, or as many will nestle comfortably on the steaming insert.
  2. Always add water. The eggs are actually steaming (not boiling) when they cook in the Instant Pot, and you’ll need to pour in water to provide that steam heat. Pour in 1 to 2 cups of water before sealing the machine.
  3. Cook on low pressure. It might not be good for much, but the low pressure setting comes in handy here. High pressure will also cook your eggs, but the yolks are more likely to come out chalky if overcooked (and boiled eggs tend to overcook quickly). Low pressure is much more forgiving here.
  4. Use the quick release. Not only does using the quick release decrease your wait time, it gives you more precise control over the texture of your finished eggs. The eggs will continue to cook as the pressure naturally falls, since there’s no way to remove them immediately to an ice bath, so consider than when determining total cook time. To keep your hands at a safe distance from the jets of steam, use the end of a wooden spoon to maneuver the nozzle into the release position. I also often drape a dish towel over the vent so as to avoid plunging the kitchen into humidity.
  5. Plunge the eggs into an ice bath. Once the pressure has been released, stop the residual cooking that will make all your eggs hard-boiled in just a few minutes by transferring them immediately to an ice bath. Plus, it’s easiest to peel eggs under water.
  6. Prime for peeling The best way to get an Instant Pot egg primed to shed its peel? Tap it on the top, on the bottom, and firmly in the middle. This will help the shell slide right off.

Left to right: 4 minutes, 5 minutes, 7 minutes.

How long to cook instant pot boiled eggs 

  • For soft-boiled eggs (runny yolks): Cook on low pressure for 4 minutes, then quick-release the machine, and plunge the eggs into an ice bath. Peel when cool. I also tried cooking eggs for 3 minutes. They ended up being too soft to peel, with undercooked whites.
  • For medium-boiled eggs (jammy yolks): Same process, but for 5 minutes.
  • For hard-boiled eggs (cooked yolks with little knife residue): Same process, but for at least 7 minutes (you can, of course, go longer for very firm eggs).

Now that I’ve made this my usual routine when making boiled eggs (which I do very often), it’s so easy to remember that even I won’t have to look it up next time.

Use your boiled egg bounty 

The perils of associating “white” with “privilege” in the classroom

White privilege – the social advantage that benefits white people over others simply on account of skin color – has become a racial justice catchphrase.

Peggy McIntosh, an academic who originated the term in 1989, described it like this: “An invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was meant to remain oblivious.”

As examples, she highlighted the appearance of being financially reliable, shopping alone without being harassed and seeing representation of her race in history books and the media.

In the wake of George Floyd’s death, an increasing number of white Americans agree that white privilege exists. That includes a growing number of Republicans.

Despite the term’s pervasive use, little attention has focused on how it affects victims of racial injustice, particularly young people of color whose identities are still being shaped.

As a scholar of political psychology, I believe that associating “white” with “privilege” can do more harm than good because it reinforces harmful stereotypes. It can make people of color feel that social privilege belongs only to white people.

If racial minorities believe they are perceived as disadvantaged, the stereotype can diminish their academic performance by activating a psychological phenomenon called stereotype threat – the fear of conforming to a negative stereotype.

That, in turn, induces underperformance on intellectual tasks. And it has also been shown to reduce confidence and heighten anxiety.

Discussions regarding white privilege are not restricted to social media. Increasingly, they are being adopted by university websites and racial justice activists.

This phrase can serve as a constant reminder to students of color that society perceives them as being socially inferior and economically disadvantaged by default.

In other words, those using the phrase “white privilege” to address racial inequities may, paradoxically, reinforce white privilege.

Why does stereotype threat matter?

Social psychology research shows that when minority groups are exposed to unflattering stereotypes that deem them inferior, they will often underachieve academically.

This happens because stigmatized groups subconsciously experience a fear of confirming the negative stereotype – such as “Black students struggle in college” – according to research conducted by academics at Stanford University in the 1990s.

This intimidation implies to the stigmatized person that they might not belong in the field where the tested abilities are important.

In the Stanford study, Black students underperformed compared to white counterparts when told that the test was “diagnostic” – a “genuine test of your verbal abilities and limitations.”

However, when this description was excluded, there was no such detrimental effect on performance.

Even subtle cues can activate this threat to self-image. When students were asked to record their race before the test, Black students performed worse than their white counterparts.

This phenomenon came to be known as stereotype threat.

And it has since been established across several studies to explain the underperformance of stigmatized groups, ranging from non-Asian ethnic minorities to women in quantitative fields in which math skills are important.

“Privilege” conflates race with class

With the pervasive use of “white privilege” on social media, race is more strongly associated with privilege and its connotations about socioeconomic class – that people who are privileged must be wealthy. This implies that people of color are typically poor.

That means students of color not only have to deal with stereotype threat associated with race but with class as well. And being perceived as poor and disadvantaged in the classroom can be detrimental to academic achievement.

Scholars at Princeton University and the University of Milano-Bicocca have found that class stereotypes perpetuate academic and societal inequality in several ways.

People attribute well-being, health and intelligence to people with high socioeconomic status, regardless of their own. Wealthy people are stereotyped as more competent than poor people.

Experimental studies further confirm that when children from lower-income families are reminded of their socioeconomic status – by reporting parental income or occupation before taking a test – they underperform on tests.

And that has negative consequences for their self-confidence and anxiety.

Ironically, a term created for racial justice awareness may perpetuate disadvantages already faced by students of color in academic, economic and social settings.

An exercise conducted by Kanakuk Link Year – a Christian program for post-high school students – offers a good example.

In the exercise, an instructor asks a group of teens to participate in a race for US$100. Before starting, he asks participants to take several steps forward if they meet the criteria of privilege, such as having a father figure at home or access to a private education.

At the end of the exercise, Black students found themselves standing at the back of the queue. The instructor then says that, only because they had that big head start, those standing ahead “would possibly win in the race called life…If it was a fair race, I guarantee you some of these Black dudes would smoke all of you.”

Even if the outcome is criticized as unfair, being Black is conflated with reduced privilege on account of economic status. Poor outcomes on account of reduced privilege are taken almost as a given.

Academics argue that such an exercise can do more harm than good. That’s because it stigmatizes people of color instead of challenging institutions that perpetuate inequality.

Stereotyping in the classroom can be as damaging as stereotyping on the streets. Discussions about race should involve thoughtfulness and genuine regard for the social and economic mobility of disadvantaged minorities.

These discussions could focus on unjust institutions that perpetuate socioeconomic inequality, rather than stigmatizing victims.

The protests following George Floyd’s death have triggered a racial reckoning for many Americans. This is the moment to break away from stereotypes rather than toward them.

Ritika Goel, Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science, University of California, Berkeley

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

The struggle for religious freedom — from Thomas Jefferson to Black Lives Matter

Falling midway between Donald Trump’s second impeachment and Joe Biden’s inauguration, Jan. 16 marked a less-noticed but arguably more important commemoration, the 235th anniversary of the passage of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. That is now commonly recognized as the first law to establish religious freedom, and was one of three achievements that its author, Thomas Jefferson, had inscribed on his tombstone. That date has been officially recognized as Religious Freedom Day since 1993, and amid so much political tumult, it went almost overlooked this year. But it goes to the core of what America is all about, what Trump’s supporters are trying to destroy, and what Black Lives Matter demonstrators so emphatically affirmed this past year. 

Jefferson’s statute provided unlimited freedom of conscience for all — a pluralistic paradise. But ever since Barack Obama’s election in 2008, the religious right has seized on Religious Freedom Day as a key part of its Orwellian propaganda campaign to redefine religious freedom as a license to discriminate, an exclusionary license for religious bigotry and sectarian dominance — the exact opposite of what Jefferson fundamentally believed in. So it’s only natural that both Jefferson and the Virginia Statute are almost entirely absent from any of the right’s gaslighting celebrations of religious freedom.

Since 2016 (as I’ve reported), a growing chorus of religious and secular progressives — organized in part by people like Frederick Clarkson, senior research analyst at Political Research Associates — have pushed back, seeking reclaim Jefferson’s original intent, which he later made explicit, writing that the Statute contained “within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mohametan, the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination.” Recovering the original meaning also entails pushing back against the right’s anti-choice and anti-LGBTQ politics, which they’ve sought to protect under the mantle of their own beliefs, while forcing those beliefs on others. 

Of course, Jefferson has come in for increasing criticism from the left as well, due to his slaveholder status, which looms larger than ever after last year’s historic Black Lives Matters protests. But rather than argue over Jefferson’s undeniable individual flaws, there’s a growing movement in the Black religious community to adopt a much broader and deeper critical view of the discourse of religious freedom, even if it was initially promulgated by a slave-owning empire. These new voices are more in synch than at odds with those previously engaged in the battle to reclaim religious freedom, as seen in a roundtable forum produced by Political Research Associates, “Religious Freedom and the Machinations of the Christian Right,” held on Jan. 14. 

African Americans expand our perspectives on religious freedom

Two days earlier, the shared perspective among Black Christians and non-Christians was richly explored in Freedom Forum’s book launch and webinar, “African Americans & Religious Freedom: New Perspectives for Congregations & Communities.” Black people in the Americas, enslaved with a set of Christian justifications “and displaced from their lands, culture, religions and ancestors, have a unique and fierce historical commitment to the ideals of freedom,” Baptist theologian Faith B. Harris writes in the first chapter of the book (pdf here). “With their very presence, New World Africans have a unique claim to religious freedom, despite the rhetoric embedded in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.” 

As the New York Times’ 1619 Project reminds us, this presence predates Jefferson’s statute by more than a century and a half. Harris continues: “Indeed, Black religion is best expressed by an enduring relationship to a freedom-loving/giving God. Theologian Kelly Brown Douglas argues that in the Black theological imagination, God is free and to be in a relationship with God is to be free.”

The Rev. William H. Lamar IV, pastor of the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., raises provocative questions about the very language involved. “The concept of religious freedom strikes me as another rhetorical arrow in the quiver of nationalistic propaganda,” he writes. “I am not moved by a nation that trumpets liberty while exterminating First Nations people, brutally enslaving and extracting labor from Africans and crushing the poor masses by hocking the universal benefits of capitalism.”  

From the beginning of European colonization in North America, Vanderbilt theologian Teresa L. Smallwood notes, “It was the twin discourses of race and religion which shaped the discourse of religious freedom. … The organizing principle of British colonial societies followed a religious logic and privileged landholding white men. These religious men acted brutally and used the labor of enslaved Africans to generate considerable wealth.” In contrast, she notes, “Whatever the convention — Protestant, Catholic, Muslim, Jewish, non-denominational, Indigenous —African Americans exercised religious freedom largely as a means of resistance and in the face of prolonged tyranny.”

This larger perspective — grounded in the basic material experience of slavery, resistance and continued struggled — puts the focus on deeds more than words, and on practices, institutions and history more than disembodied arguments, be they theological, philosophical, judicial or political. A key text cited by several contributors was Tisa Wenger’s 2017 book “Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal.” Wenger explained:

Rather than asking how adequately Americans have achieved this freedom or how rapidly it advanced, I wanted to know who appealed to religious freedom, for what purposes, and what it meant to them. Somewhat unexpectedly, race and empire quickly emerged as key themes in my analysis. I found that some of the most frequent and visible articulations of American religious freedom were exclusive, even coercive. The dominant voices in the culture linked racial whiteness, Protestant Christianity, and American national identity not only to freedom in general but often to this freedom in particular. The most audible varieties of religious freedom talk … helped define American whiteness and make the case for U.S. imperial rule.

But in response, the racialized and colonialized subjects of U.S. empire also rearticulated this freedom to defend themselves and their traditions. For them, religious freedom became a way to redefine communal identities, to carve out space for themselves and their traditions within the confines of a racialized empire, and even to resist its mandates.

Her book focuses on the period from the Spanish-American War of 1898 to World War II, “a pivotal period in our histories of race and empire but one that most scholarship on religious freedom has neglected,” she explains. Much the same sorts of observations can be applied all the way from the colonial era to the present. And her perspective frames both the embrace of and skepticism toward the idea of religious freedom. 

“There has always been just enough religious freedom in America for Black folk to nourish dreams of freedom, but hardly ever enough religious freedom for those dreams to be fully realized,” writes Lamar. “This conundrum is, in essence, the foundation upon which my reluctant identification with the ideal of religious freedom rests — who has unimpeachable, unassailable religious freedom in America? Wenger reminds us that for Native Americans and Black nationalists it was curtailed. Who then can take this American ideal and use it to craft theological visions unmolested by imperial power? Can Black churches ever fully enjoy this ideal?”

On the other hand, Rahmah A. Abdulaleem, executive director of KARAMAH: Muslim Women Lawyers for Human Rights, sees a stronger underlying foundation in the lived reality of African-American life — the religious diversity and pluralism she traces back to colonial times in her book chapter, “Race, Religious Pluralism and Religious Freedom,” which she brought up to date in her forum presentation. 

“I think it’s important to focus on the fact that after 9/11 so many Americans were asked, ‘Do you know any Muslims?’ and most African-Americans could say, ‘Yeah, I know Muslims. I grew up with them. They’re in in my family.’ We weren’t others,” she said. “So African Americans really need to focus on the fact that we always welcome others. It’s always been important to us because we know what’s like to be in the minority. We know what it’s like to be otherized.”

She continued with a moving and important family example:

My grandmother was blessed with 11 children and she considers herself a Universalist but not as a Universalist for the Universalist Church. She’s like, “I’m universalist because my oldest daughter was a Buddhist, I have a daughter who is a deaconess in the Baptist Church, I have a son who’s an imam, I have two sons that are Catholic.” It’s so important that for her they’re all her children and they all are having some kind of connection to something bigger than them.

Ongoing discussions

These important Black voices have not yet been woven into the heart of religious freedom debates. But the promise of their imminent inclusion is a cause for renewed hope. While the religious right feeds constantly on victimhood fantasies, the African-American experience — grounded in four centuries of actual victimhood — has produced a rich diversity of humane and sober religious responses, along with its own freethinking and atheist traditions as well. 

Indeed, a fair amount of the discussion held by Political Research Associates intersected with perspectives and concerns raised in the Freedom Forum book and webinar. As Frederick Clarkson put it:

This profoundly liberatory thing we call religious freedom came out of this morass of racism and genocide and extraordinary criminality, that the very people who were opposing Empire colonialism effectively replaced domestically. So what they did do was to give us this extraordinary idea of religious freedom: “OK, we still have an empire of sorts, but you are free to think differently than the people who hold power.” You can therefore speak differently and you can have an oppositional press and you can organize politically differently. That was the opening, and they recognized that. But they realized their time as rulers might end, and should end. That is the extraordinary paradox of American culture and democracy that we actually still live through in many respects today.

“When you talk about urgently needing to address religious freedom and decolonization,” ex-evangelical writer Chrissy Stroop said, “one thing that I think it’s important to point out is how intertwined white supremacy is with white Christianity and particularly the white evangelical tradition. S, the same people who are trying to argue that religious freedom means their freedom to discriminate against other people in a Christian nation are the primary people who are fighting to maintain white supremacism, though many of them would not admit to that.”

Stroop went on to cite the example of six seminaries within the Southern Baptist Convention, which “recently issued a statement condemning critical race theory and intersectionality as incompatible with Baptist theology, incompatible with the Bible as the Southern Baptists understand it.” Stroop noted that Southern Baptists formed in the 1840s, in a schism from Baptists in the North over whether a slaveholder could be a Christian missionary.

“The Southern Baptist Convention has apologized for that legacy, and yet fails to fully reckon with it,” Stroop said. “This explicit rejection by the official Southern Baptist structures of antiracist scholarship and antiracist analytical tools is quite striking,” particularly given what has recently transpired. 

“For someone like Albert Mohler — who is the head of the flagship Southern Baptist seminary — to come along and say after last Wednesday’s insurrection that he’s shocked that Christians would do this, that they would form a mob and storm the capital in support of the racist president, is really quite rich,” Stroop remarked. “He just basically made this very racist move, and now he’s saying, ‘I can’t believe that people would actually take that to the streets [and] try to overturn an election.”

Another participant, the Rev. Dr. Cari Jackson, director of spiritual care and activism at the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, has co-authored an article at Religion Dispatches with Clarkson, “We Can’t Have Religious Freedom Without Reproductive Freedom.” She brought that connection into the discussion as well, with specific reference to the recent Senate election in Georgia election.

“One of the issues that was raised by some regarding the Rev. Raphael Warnock [who took office this past week] was that he could not be a Christian minister and a supporter of reproductive freedom,” Jackson said. To Warnock’s opponents, it was as if “he didn’t have a right to have a conscience of his own that would embrace both of those, that in many ways he didn’t have the right to be a whole person and bring his theology and his politics in this intersectional way that came out with a different result from what people thought he should have.” 

Individual conscience is supposed to be primary in the Baptist tradition — a fact that has somehow been utterly disappeared over the last 40 years. But Jackson reminded us that Baptists weren’t alone in this regard: 

Some of you may know there is a doctrine within Catholic teaching that says the primacy of conscience has greater weight than teachings of the church, and I love that. Martin Luther, who was one of the shapers of the Reformation, also talked about the importance of conscience, and that following behind the church hierarchy was not as critical in his own spiritual and religious understanding as following his conscience. So we’re in this era now where people are being villainized if their understanding of their conscience does not align with someone else’s. That is a supremacist orientation that really not only flies in the face of what it means to be a human living in dignity, it also flies in the face of what it means to be a democratic republic.

She went on to say that while some people are psychopaths or sociopaths, “For most of us conscience leads us to a deep morality that is rooted in compassion and love. … Conscience, I believe for most of us, guides us to a higher nature that opens our hearts and our minds and our politics to way of being in society with one another that I think is really critical.”

Fighting discrimination

Another facet of the fight to reclaim religious freedom was highlighted in a virtual briefing on the recently-heard Supreme Court case, Fulton v. City of Philadelphia. As the ACLU succinctly explains it, “On November 4, the Supreme Court heard a case that could allow private agencies that receive taxpayer-funding to provide government services — such as foster care providers, food banks, homeless shelters, and more — to deny services to people who are LGBTQ, Jewish, Muslim, or Mormon.” This briefing was closed to the press, but the moderator, Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons, from the Faith & Progressive Policy Initiative at the Center for American Progress, spoke with Salon afterwards.

“It’s a common purpose across many faith groups we work with that we cherish religious freedom and want to celebrate Religious Freedom Day, and reject the false use of religious freedom to discriminate,” Graves-Fitzsimmons said. “We want to do both at the same time.” He was admittedly one of the few people who woke up the day after the November election to listen to the oral arguments in the Fulton case. But millions of people stand to be affected. “We are facing a challenge of raising awareness around this case, because there’s so much going on and the Fulton case could have far-reaching implications beyond the particular circumstances in the case involving the City of Philadelphia and Catholic Social Services,” he said. He explaind: 

It is part of a larger trend we’re seeing, which is conservative legal advocacy groups taking something that is a real core value, like religious freedom, and using it in a deceptive way to attack LGBTQ people and create a license to discriminate that extends beyond LGBTQ people — you have this foster care agency in South Carolina that’s saying, “We won’t work with Catholics or Jews.” So the license to discriminate is broader than LGBTQ people, although that’s the issue in this case. It then extends to reproductive health and abortion rights, and we’ve seen recently at the Supreme Court the use of distorted religious freedom arguments as an excuse to spread the coronavirus. We saw a switch in the Supreme Court’s views since Amy Coney Barrett joined the Supreme Court. They went in a different direction than what Justice Roberts and the more liberal justices had done earlier in the pandemic. 

“We warned you”: The military’s religious freedom problem

But if the Fulton case, and others like it, have gotten too little attention, that’s even more true of religious freedom issues in the military, where long-standing Supreme Court doctrine subordinates religious expression to the military mission, which is to preserve freedom for all Americans. That in turn depends on maintaining unit cohesion, good order, morale and discipline — which religious proselytizing necessarily undermine. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation has been fighting Christian nationalism as a destructive force in the military for more than 15 years, warning that it is fundamentally incompatible with the military’s mission.

Some branches of the military are better, some worse, at restraining this corrosive force. The Air Force Academy, where MRFF founder and president Mikey Weinstein graduated, is arguably the worst. One of its graduates, Larry Brock, was one of two insurrectionists wearing combat gear arrested in the wake of the Jan. 6 Capitol invasion.

“The Air Force Academy is an unconstitutional train wreck of fundamentalist Christians, disgrace and shame,” Weinstein told Salon. “Everybody at the Air Force Academy, the cadet wing, the staff and the faculty, all swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, not the gospel of Jesus Christ.” The failure to live up to that oath can be seen in the fact that MRFF still has “hundreds of clients there, the vast majority of whom are Christians being persecuted by other Christians,” Weinstein explained. “For years we’ve had — we still have — cadets at the Academy pretending to be fundamentalist Christians,” purely because “they hope they’ll be left alone.”  

in an open letter to the Air Force Academy, posted at Daily Kos, the MRFF wrote: “We warned you that this radical, right-wing influence found not only at USAFA, but tolerated or even endorsed by senior officers throughout the Air Force, caused a toxic leadership environment and eroded unit cohesion, good order, morale, and discipline. We constantly worried and warned that these seemingly (to some) innocuous events would lead to embarrassment for our Air Force Academy or worse — and that’s exactly what’s happened.” The letter goes on: 

The MRFF now calls on the Air Force Academy to not only clearly and publicly condemn the actions of its graduate, Mr. Brock, in the harshest possible manner, but also to call on all other USAFA graduates who attended the insurrection to identify themselves and either turn themselves in to police if they broke the law or disavow the violence and storming of the Capitol — if they, themselves, behaved in an otherwise peaceful manner.

To further clarify, Weinstein told Salon, “When you retire and accept a paycheck, you are still under the [Uniform] Military Code of Justice.” Brock, like other ex-military insurrectionists, he argued, “should be brought back into the Air Force and should face a general court martial. He should be visibly and aggressively punished for what he did, as should anyone else that is getting a retirement check.”

This is only a small and selective slice of activities related to Religious Freedom Day. In PRA’s roundtable, for example, author and journalist Kathryn Joyce discussed her 2019 New Republic article, “The Man Behind the State Department’s New ‘Natural Law’ Focus,” illuminating how premodern Catholic teaching about natural law was used by Trump’s State Department to delegitimize modern concepts of human rights — concepts that the U.S. government has played a crucial role in developing and promoting. Another roundtable participant, Minnesota State Sen. John Marty, has introduced a resolution honoring the true meaning of Religious Freedom Day. 

In the Freedom Forum webinar, Charles Watson Jr., director of education at the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, gave a spirited articulation of the centrality of freedom, in a sense that takes nothing away from anybody else:

I always tell people, I don’t want a Biblical noose around my neck, and I don’t want God shackles around my feet. I have to be free to change my mind, if I get better information, and my faith has to be free.  And the only way for me to have that freedom is to be free to change my mind, think about God how I see fit to think about God, without government interference, and especially without somebody else that doesn’t even care enough about me and my body to take up the mantel and fight for me.

This sense of freedom has Baptist roots that long predate Thomas Jefferson — and, as Jackson noted, has Catholic and Lutheran roots as well. But Jefferson’s contribution was to enshrine that sensibility in law, protecting it as never before. Because Jefferson’s vision is so central to the American project and its entire history, there are inevitable ramifications everywhere throughout our public life. And because the religious right has mounted such a sustained attack on his vision, seeking to turn it into a vampiric, soulless caricature of itself, there are countless battlefronts — large and small — on which Jefferson’s vision must be defended and, of absolute necessity, enlarged. 

How cognitive bias can explain post-truth

To say that facts are less important than feelings in shaping our beliefs about empirical matters seems new, at least in American politics. In the past we have faced serious challenges — even to the notion of truth itself — but never before have such challenges been so openly embraced as a strategy for the political subordination of reality, which is how I define “post-truth.” Here, “post” is meant to indicate not so much the idea that we are “past” truth in a temporal sense (as in “postwar”) but in the sense that truth has been eclipsed by less important matters like ideology.

One of the deepest roots of post-truth has been with us the longest, for it has been wired into our brains over the history of human evolution: cognitive bias. Psychologists for decades have been performing experiments that show that we are not quite as rational as we think. Some of this work bears directly on how we react in the face of unexpected or uncomfortable truths.

A central concept of human psychology is that we strive to avoid psychic discomfort. It is not a pleasant thing to think badly of oneself. Some psychologists call this “ego defense” (after Freudian theory), but whether we frame it within this paradigm or not, the concept is clear. It just feels better for us to think that we are smart, well-informed, capable people than that we are not. What happens when we are confronted with information that suggests that something we believe is untrue? It creates psychological tension. How could I be an intelligent person yet believe a falsehood? Only the strongest egos can stand up very long under a withering assault of self-criticism: “What a fool I was! The answer was right there in front of me the whole time, but I never bothered to look. I must be an idiot.” So the tension is often resolved by changing one of one’s beliefs.

It matters a great deal, however, which beliefs change. One would like to think that it should always be the belief that was shown to be mistaken. If we are wrong about a question of empirical reality — and we are finally confronted by the evidence — it would seem easiest to bring our beliefs back into harmony by changing the one that we now have good reason to doubt. But this is not always what happens. There are many ways to adjust a belief set, some rational and some not.

Three classic findings from social psychology

In 1957, Leon Festinger published his pioneering book “A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance,” in which he offered the idea that we seek harmony between our beliefs, attitudes, and behavior, and experience psychic discomfort when they are out of balance. In seeking resolution, our primary goal is to preserve our sense of self-value.

In a typical experiment, Festinger gave subjects an extremely boring task, for which some were paid $1 and some were paid $20. After completing the task, subjects were requested to tell the person who would perform the task after them that it was enjoyable. Festinger found that subjects who had been paid $1 reported the task to be much more enjoyable than those who had been paid $20. Why? Because their ego was at stake. What kind of person would do a meaningless, useless task for just a dollar unless it was actually enjoyable? To reduce the dissonance, they altered their belief that the task had been boring (whereas those who were paid $20 were under no illusion as to why they had done it). In another experiment, Festinger had subjects hold protest signs for causes they did not actually believe in. Surprise! After doing so, subjects began to feel that the cause was actually a bit more worthy than they had initially thought.

But what happens when we have much more invested than just performing a boring task or holding a sign? What if we have taken a public stand on something, or even devoted our life to it, only to find out later that we’ve been duped? Festinger analyzed just this phenomenon in a book called “The Doomsday Cult,” in which he reported on the activities of a group called The Seekers, who believed that their leader, Dorothy Martin, could transcribe messages from space aliens who were coming to rescue them before the world ended on December 21, 1954. After selling all of their possessions, they waited on top of a mountain, only to find that the aliens never showed up (and of course the world never ended). The cognitive dissonance must have been tremendous. How did they resolve it? Dorothy Martin soon greeted them with a new message: Their faith and prayers had been so powerful that the aliens had decided to call off their plans. The Seekers had saved the world!

From the outside, it is easy to dismiss these as the beliefs of gullible fools, yet in further experimental work by Festinger and others it was shown that — to one degree or another — all of us suffer from cognitive dissonance. When we join a health club that is too far away, we may justify the purchase by telling our friends that the workouts are so intense we only need to go once a week; when we fail to get the grade we’d like in organic chemistry, we tell ourselves that we didn’t really didn’t want to go to medical school anyway. But there is another aspect of cognitive dissonance that should not be underestimated, which is that such “irrational” tendencies tend to be reinforced when we are surrounded by others who believe the same thing we do. If just one person had believed in the “doomsday cult” perhaps he or she would have committed suicide or gone into hiding. But when a mistaken belief is shared by others, sometimes even the most incredible errors can be rationalized.

In his path-breaking 1955 paper “Opinions and Social Pressure,” Solomon Asch demonstrated that there is a social aspect to belief, such that we may discount even the evidence of our own senses if we think that our beliefs are not in harmony with those around us. In short, peer pressure works. Just as we seek to have harmony within our own beliefs, we also seek harmony with the beliefs of those around us.

In his experiment, Asch assembled seven to nine subjects, all of whom but one were “confederates” (i.e., they were “in on” the deception that would occur in the experiment). The one who was not “in on it” was the sole experimental subject, who was always placed at the last seat at the table. The experiment involved showing the subjects a card with a line on it, then another card with three lines on it, one of which was identical in length to the one on the other card. The other two lines on the second card were “substantially different” in length. The experimenter then went around the group and asked each subject to report aloud which of the three lines on the second card were equal in length to the line on the first card. For the first few trials, the confederates reported accurately and the experimental subject of course agreed with them. But then things got interesting. The confederates began to unanimously report that one of the obviously false choices was in fact equal to the length of the line on the first card. By the time the question came to the experimental subject, there was obvious psychic tension. As Asch describes it:

He is placed in a position in which, while he is actually giving the correct answers, he finds himself unexpectedly in a minority of one, opposed by a unanimous and arbitrary majority with respect to a clear and simple fact. Upon him we have brought to bear two opposed forces: the evidence of his senses and the unanimous opinion of a group of his peers.

Before announcing their answer, virtually all dissonance-primed subjects looked surprised, even incredulous. But then a funny thing happened. Thirty-seven percent of them yielded to the majority opinion. They discounted what they could see right in front of them in order to remain in conformity with the group.

Another piece of key experimental work on human irrationality was done in 1960 by Peter Cathcart Wason. In his paper “On the Failure to Eliminate Hypotheses in a Conceptual Task,” Wason took the first in a number of steps to identify logical and other conceptual mistakes that humans routinely make in reasoning. In this first paper, he introduced (and later named) an idea that nearly everyone in the post-truth debate has likely heard of: confirmation bias.

Wason’s experimental design was elegant. He gave 29 college students a cognitive task whereby they would be called on to “discover a rule” based on empirical evidence. Wason presented the subjects with a three-number series such as 2, 4, 6, and said that their task would be to try to discover the rule that had been used in generating it. Subjects were requested to write down their own set of three numbers, after which the experimenter would say whether their numbers conformed to the rule or not. Subjects could repeat this task as many times as they wished, but were instructed to try to discover the rule in as few trials as possible. No restrictions were placed on the sorts of numbers that could be proposed. When they felt ready, subjects could propose their rule.

The results were shocking. Out of 29 very intelligent subjects, only six of them proposed the correct rule without any previous incorrect guesses. Thirteen proposed one incorrect rule and nine proposed two or more incorrect rules. One subject was unable to propose any rule at all. What happened?

As Wason reports, the subjects who failed at the task seemed unwilling to propose any set of numbers that tested the accuracy of their hypothesized rule and instead proposed only those that would confirm it. For instance, given the series 2, 4, 6, many subjects first wrote down 8, 10, 12, and were told “yes, this follows the rule.” But then some just kept going with even numbers in ascending order by two. Rather than use their chance to see whether their intuitive rule of “increase by intervals of two” was incorrect, they continued to propose only confirming instances. When these subjects announced their rule they were shocked to learn that it was incorrect, even though they had never tested it with any disconfirming instances.

After this, 13 subjects began to test their hypotheses and eventually arrived at the correct answer, which was “any three numbers in ascending order.” Once they had broken out of their “confirming” mindset, they were willing to entertain the idea that there might be more than one way to get the original series of numbers. This cannot explain, however, the nine subjects who gave two or more incorrect rules, for they were given ample evidence that their proposal was incorrect, but still could not find the right answer. Why didn’t they guess 9, 7, 5? Here Wason speculates that “they might not have known how to attempt to falsify a rule by themselves; or they might have known how to do it, but still found it simpler, more certain or more reassuring to get a straight answer from the experimenter.” In other words, at this point their cognitive bias had a firm hold on them, and they could only flail for the right answer.

All three of these experimental results — (1) cognitive dissonance, (2) social conformity, and (3) confirmation bias — are obviously relevant to post-truth, whereby so many people seem prone to form their beliefs outside the norms of reason and good standards of evidence, in favor of accommodating their own intuitions or those of their peers.

Yet post-truth did not arise in the 1950s or even the 1960s. It awaited the perfect storm of a few other factors like extreme partisan bias and social media “silos” that arose in the early 2000s. And in the meantime, further stunning evidence of cognitive bias — in particular the “backfire effect” and the “Dunning–Kruger effect,” both of which are rooted in the idea that what we hope to be true may color our perception of what actually is true — continued to come to light.

Implications for post-truth

In the past, perhaps our cognitive biases were ameliorated by our interactions with others. It is ironic to think that in today’s media deluge, we could perhaps be more isolated from contrary opinion than when our ancestors were forced to live and work among other members of their tribe, village, or community, who had to interact with one another to get information. When we are talking to one another, we can’t help but be exposed to a diversity of views. And there is even empirical work that shows the value that this can have for our reasoning.

In his book “Infotopia,” Cass Sunstein has discussed the idea that when individuals interact they can sometimes reach a result that would have eluded them if each had acted alone. Call this the “whole is more than the sum of its parts” effect. Sunstein calls it the “interactive group effect.”

In one study, J. C. Wason and colleagues brought a group of subjects together to solve a logic puzzle. It was a hard one, and few of the subjects could do it on their own. But when the problem was later turned over to a group to solve, an interesting thing happened. People began to question one another’s reasoning and think of things that were wrong with their hypotheses, to a degree they seemed incapable of doing with their own ideas. As a result, researchers found that in a significant number of cases a group could solve the problem even when none of its members alone could do so. (It is important to note that this was not due to the “smartest person in the room” phenomenon, where one person figured it out and told the group the answer. Also, it was not the mere “wisdom of crowds” effect, which relies on passive majority opinion. The effect was found only when group members interacted with one another.)

For Sunstein, this is key. Groups outperform individuals. And interactive, deliberative groups outperform passive ones. When we open our ideas up to group scrutiny, this affords us the best chance of finding the right answer. And when we are looking for the truth, critical thinking, skepticism, and subjecting our ideas to the scrutiny of others works better than anything else.

Yet these days we have the luxury of choosing our own selective interactions. Whatever our political persuasion, we can live in a “news silo” if we care to. If we don’t like someone’s comments, we can unfriend him or hide him on Facebook. If we want to gorge on conspiracy theories, there is probably a radio station for us. These days more than ever, we can surround ourselves with people who already agree with us. And once we have done this, isn’t there going to be further pressure to trim our opinions to fit the group?

Solomon Asch’s work has already shown that this is possible. If we are a liberal we will probably feel uncomfortable if we agree with most of our friends on immigration, gay marriage, and taxes, but are not so sure about gun control. If so, we will probably pay a social price that may alter our opinions. To the extent that this occurs not as a result of critical interaction but rather a desire not to offend our friends, this is likely not to be a good thing. Call it the dark side of the interactive group effect, which any of us who has ever served on a jury can probably describe: we just feel more comfortable when our views are in step with those of our compatriots. But what happens when our compatriots are wrong? Whether liberal or conservative, none of us has a monopoly on the truth.

I am not here suggesting that we embrace false equivalence, or that the truth probably lies somewhere between political ideologies. The halfway point between truth and error is still error. But I am suggesting that at some level all ideologies are an enemy of the process by which truth is discovered. Perhaps researchers are right that liberals have a greater “need for cognition” than conservatives, but that does not mean liberals should be smug or believe that their political instincts are a proxy for factual evidence. In the work of Festinger, Asch, and others, we can see the dangers of ideological conformity. The result is that we all have a built-in cognitive bias to agree with what others around us believe, even if the evidence before our eyes tells us otherwise. At some level we all value group acceptance, sometimes even over reality itself. But if we care about truth, we must fight against this. Why? Because cognitive biases are the perfect precursor for post-truth.

If we are already motivated to want to believe certain things, it doesn’t take much to tip us over to believing them, especially if others we care about already do so. Our inherent cognitive biases make us ripe for manipulation and exploitation by those who have an agenda to push, especially if they can discredit all other sources of information. Just as there is no escape from cognitive bias, a news silo is no defense against post-truth. For the danger is that at some level they are connected. We are all beholden to our sources of information. But we are especially vulnerable when they tell us exactly what we want to hear.

* * *

Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University. He is the author of several books, including “Dark Ages: The Case for a Science of Human Behavior,” “The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience,” and “Post-Truth,” from which this article is adapted.

 

No happy trees here – HBO’s “Painting With John” is a dark and dreamy contemplation of artistry

In his new HBO program “Painting with John,” John Lurie wants you to know that he knows the comparisons to Bob Ross are inevitable, but he’s there to quickly subvert them. “None of the trees in my paintings are happy,” he tells viewers as he dabs his paintbrush on to a watercolor palette. “They’re all miserable.”

Lurie, the founder of the art-jazz band the Lounge Lizards and late-’80s and ’90s indie film star, was diagnosed with Advanced Lyme disease in 2004 and ended up resettling in the Caribbean (he refuses to specify which island) after three decades in New York. There, he began painting. Not the kind of painting people often say they’re going to do when they’re edging up on retirement — still lifes of waxy fruit or pastoral landscapes — but earnest, dreamy work that New York Times critic Roberta Smith said existed “in the gap between William Wegman’s drolly captioned early drawings and Jean Michel-Basquiat’s acerbic diagrammatic images.” 

This six-episode unscripted show was advertised by HBO as “part meditative tutorial, part fireside chat,” wherein viewers would find “the artist ensconced at his worktable, where he hones his intricate watercolor techniques and shares his reflections on what he’s learned about life.”

The first episode is titled, “Bob Ross Was Wrong,” and as such, I was curious about its proximity in tone and form to “The Joy of Painting,” the beloved instructional art program hosted by Ross — who posthumously became something of a patron saint of puffy clouds and happy little accidents. 

But it’s quickly evident that this is no public television affair — though there is some playful straining against the genre’s conventions. Lurie spends a fair amount of the show’s introduction debating whether he should offer a “polite smile” in subsequent episodes’ introductions. “No,” he determines; his polite smile scares people. 

And other than the occasional invocation of Ross’ name (“Bob Ross was wrong; everybody can’t paint,” Lurie murmurs in the first episode) Lurie doesn’t spend too much time contemplating the artist. “Painting with John” is neither a nihilistic takedown of Ross, nor is it actually instructional — at least not if viewers are wanting a step-by-step guide to creating their own version of “The sky is falling. I am learning to live with it” or “Ghost on stilts.” 

Instead, it’s a dreamy, meandering — sometimes poignant, occasionally dark — contemplation on artistry, celebrity and isolation that vacillates between self-indulgence and self-awareness, all against the backdrop of striking footage of Lurie actually painting. It’s a window into his mind and creative process, padded with a layer or two of metaphor. 

Take the opening of the second episode, for instance. A camera drone, piloted by Lurie, flies high over a lush tangle of jungle-y foliage. It smashes into a tree. Cut to another drone crashing into a house. Another smacks into a patch of grass, then another ends up catching in some vines. In endeavoring to get the ideal shot, Lurie said, he ended up totalling seven drones. 

The audience is left to fill in their own symbolism — perhaps a modern-day Icarus story that centers on the precarious nature of taking risks in one’s craft — much in the way Lurie asks, at one point, for viewers to survey a beautiful shot of a sunset and provide their own poem or words of wisdom. 

He meant to prepare one, but didn’t have the time. 

Underlying much of “Painting with John” is a sort of cheeky (mostly) unspoken question from Lurie: “Why are you watching this?” The series is packed with anecdotes that are fun in a sort of “You had to be there,” kind of way, like when Lurie details seeing Gore Vidal on a flight to Paris and how he helped him with his bags. Interesting trivia? Sure, especially if you’re a particular fan of Lurie. 

But in concert with footage of him tossing tires down a hill for fun, or members of his domestic staff giggling as they attempt to put a magnetized toy fish back together after it tumbled off the refrigerator, I was occasionally left wondering whether this was thematically building to something greater than the sum of its parts. 

Perhaps this is because the memory of “How To with John Wilson,” another experimental unscripted HBO series, is still relatively fresh. In it, documentary filmmaker John Wilson meticulously records the events of everyday life, much in the same way other people keep a diary. He uses those clips to investigate one new topic over the course of each episode. These include things like scaffolding, small talk, splitting the check and covering furniture.

While on the surface, the topics seemed bland or scattered, Wilson ended up creating a shockingly vulnerable meditation on the inherent loneliness of urban living through the inventive use of seemingly mundane footage. In its wake, “Painting with John” registers as a little unwieldy, something that Lurie seems aware of.  “Why am I doing this show?” he asks at one point. “If you’re watching, just turn it off.”

This differentiates the show from Lurie’s 1991 series “Fishing With John,” which is now available through the Criterion Collection. That show was a deadpan parody of outdoor programs wherein Lurie, who was not a particularly adept fisher, would take to the open waters with celebrity friends like Willem Dafoe, Tom Waits and  Jim Jarmusch. 

Together they would quip back and forth while waiting for bites. Nothing really happens, but the show’s narrator (Robb Webb) would occasionally interject with dramatic details (like Dennis Hopper had “seen a map on the wall of the monks’ monastery that leads him to believe that somewhere in this area is the lair of the giant squid”) despite no footage to support them. 

It was absurdist, yes, but clearly polished for a 30-minute segment on IFC. One of the reasons that “Painting with John” likely hits differently is that Lurie initially envisioned the episodes as shorter-form social media content. 

“I thought, people are so depressed, let’s make a bunch of these one-minute-long things and put them on Instagram, just to cheer people up,” he told the New York Times. He said that he never expected it to go to network television: “So if people hate the show and go, ‘This is boring,’ blame HBO! I didn’t tell them to play it.” 

Where “Painting with John” really thrives though — in a way that a one-minute Instagram video never could have — is in Lurie’s grappling with his experiences with and proximity to fame. In the series’ fourth episode, Lurie details how he and the late chef and television personality Anthony Bourdain planned on getting lunch together, but wanted to go somewhere where neither would be recognized. Bourdain confided in Lurie that since achieving international fame, he’d developed agoraphobia. 

But inevitably, Bourdain was recognized and, as Lurie puts it, some people can be “parasitic” in the presence of celebrity. It’s a reflection that is especially poignant in light of Bourdain’s death by suicide in 2018. “I’m confused about losing him and I think about it all the time,” Lurie said. 

Lurie seems uncertain with how comfortable he is with his own fame throughout “Painting with John.” At one point, he opines that people who are good at doing television “are probably sociopaths” and that the better he has gotten at it, “the worse and worse” he has become as a person. 

“I’m not kidding,” he adds. 

Fame has its upsides — how many people can casually drop in conversation, like Lurie does in the first episode, that they did cocaine in a broom closet with Rick James? — but it can also cause some to feel isolated or seek isolation, much like Lurie has for the decade. 

Painting has since become the lens through which he views and interrogates the outside world. It’s a solitary activity, through which you can actually make something beautiful and new from digressions and memories. As such, as the season goes on, Lurie’s views on who should pick up a paintbrush seem to soften a bit. “Just put the paint on the paper and see what you have,” he said. 

It’s sometimes okay to just make art for the sake of expressing oneself and seeing who responds. “Painting with John” is evidence of that. 

“Painting With John” premiered on Friday, Jan. 22 and releases new episodes weekly at 11 p.m. ET on HBO. 

From Biden’s giant Bible to Christian flags waved by rioters, “religion” means many different things

The Bible featured prominently in the inauguration. In fact, three were used in the swearing-in ceremonies – Kamala Harris used both Thurgood Marshall’s and one belonging to a friend; Joseph Biden used a 128-year-old family Bible.

About two weeks earlier, on Jan. 6, rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol also held Bibles as a nod to the apparent religious motivations for their actions. The mob took with them flags saturated with Christian nationalist ideology, such as banners with “Jesus Saves” written on them accompanied by chants that “Christ is king, Trump is president.”

These and other religious symbols, used both in the service of the presidential transfer of power and also violent protests, demonstrate how deeply religion can motivate people in society and influence their actions politically.

Yet the way people think about religion these days, often as a set of beliefs, has evolved across time and cultures.

Religion in ancient Near East

As a scholar of the Bible and the ancient Near East, I study the role of religion in history and how this term originated and came to be understood over the centuries.

For most cultures in the ancient world, such as Egypt, Assyria and Babylon, until the second century B.C., there was no word for “religion” as a singular, abstract concept.

While these cultures had rituals and rites for worshiping gods and goddesses, there was not a singular word in these languages that refers to “religion” in the modern sense. For example, the Assyrians had a unique blend of religious devotion to their chief god Assur and a belief in a divine mandate to spread their empire, but they did not have one word to cover all such practices and beliefs.

The same is true for the Old Testament, written in Hebrew and Aramaic from approximately the ninth century B.C. to the second century B.C. There is no word that can really be translated as “religion” in the modern sense in the Old Testament, even if there were religious concepts, such as prayers and acts of piety toward the god of Israel.

The evidence from the ancient Near East and the Old Testament points to a complex set of practices that defy a singular notion of religion, such as a creed of faith or spirituality in distinction from other realms of society such as politics or economics.

Early Christianity

A similar complexity appears in the history of early Christianity in how religion functioned, both in terms of rituals and in the use of the Latin term it derives from.

The word “religion” in English originates from the Latin “religio.” One of its earliest appearances is in works such as the plays of second-century B.C. writer Plautus.

According to the classicist Niall Slater, the word defies “a theologically rigorous definition” in Plautus. It means something like “awe” in one passage, as well as reserve, in the often ironic sense of characters who find themselves in situations in which they display restraints from certain impulses. For example, in one scene in Plautus’ “Asinaria,” a woman is bound by a contract from following other male lovers, including gods, a restraint called “religiosa.”

In the classical age, religion could possibly imply “scruples,” as evident in the writings of Plautus and certainly a few decades later in the writings of playwright Publius Terentius Afer.

By the first century B.C., the word began to be associated with devotion to the divine realm. As seen in the writings of the orator and politician Cicero, one conception of the Latin religio that became frequent in Roman texts was the specific rituals and rites that were a part of worship of the gods and goddesses.

According to the classicist Clifford Ando and scholar of religion Brent Nongbri, for Cicero each ritual could be a religio, and, at the same time, when Romans performed all such rituals they could together be referred to as a “single, Roman, religio.”

However, Roman thinkers did not use this term for Christianity in its earliest phases. In the second century A.D., Roman writers such as Pliny, Tacitus and Suetonius labeled Christianity not a religio but rather a superstitio, or a “superstition,” a term usually applied to non-Roman, foreign practices.

Eventually Galen, a physician and philosopher who died in A.D. 210 in Rome, would call Christianity a “philosophical school,” elevating the status of the movement.

Early Christians who wrote in Latin, beginning with Tertullian in the second century A.D., often used the word religio to refer to their own rituals and rites, though other uses appeared as well, which were inherited from the variety of definitions employed by earlier Latin writers.

The ancient Latin translations of the New Testament, which was originally written in Greek, use religio when rendering passages such as James 1:26-27, which described true religion as care for orphans and widows and keeping oneself unstained from worldly pollution, or sin.

Modern-day interpretation

So how did the modern interpretation of religion come about?

If, according to 19th-century German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, humans are prone to imagining God in their own image, then according to the scholar of religion Brent Nongbri people are often tempted to do the same with our understanding of the word “religion.”

As Nongbri observes, people need to be aware that when they encounter the word “religion” in English translations of ancient sources, it is not the same as spirituality or belief in the sense of an abstract set of convictions.

Often religion is thought of as referring to some inner disposition or abstract belief, such as privately held convictions about salvation separate from politics. The 17th-century thinker John Locke argued this point in his book, “A Letter Concerning Toleration.”

Yet, as Nongbri argues, the concept of religion as an activity distinct from others, such as “politics, economics, and science,” is a recent and modern contrast, alien to ancient societies. In ancient societies, religion was part of every facet of life because gods and goddesses were involved in every facet of life.

Indeed, the inner, spiritual and privatized nature of what many think of as religion is more a reflection of modern Protestant Christian developments and has little to do with the origins of the term.

Samuel L. Boyd, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Jewish Studies, University of Colorado Boulder

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

The South African coronavirus mutation can infect multiple times, could hamper vaccine

A mutant strain of the novel coronavirus discovered in South Africa appears to be able to ward off antibodies from individuals who had previously recovered from COVID-19 — meaning if the new strain becomes widespread, we may see more people getting infected multiple times. 

A group of South African scientists made this discovery in a paper published earlier this week by South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases. In it, researchers describe how they studied blood samples from a small group of people who had developed COVID-19 but ultimately recovered. When the human body recovers from a disease, it produces a protein known as an antibody to identify and ultimately protect itself in the future from the bacteria or virus which caused it to become ill. (These illness-causing microorganisms are known as pathogens.) This means that people who were sick with COVID-19 should in theory have antibodies that recognize the pathogen which causes it and neutralize it in the event that they are reinfected.

Instead, according to the authors of the paper, half of the blood samples of the patients they tested did not have the antibodies necessary to protect them from the 501Y.V2 strain of the novel coronavirus, which was identified in South Africa last month. While it was a small study and more research will need to be done, the initial results are not auspicious.

Not only could this interfere with the human population’s ability to develop natural immunity, it could also hamper the efficacy of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. Both companies are distributing mRNA vaccines, which are different from traditional vaccines that train the immune system to develop antibodies against pathogens by injecting weakened or dead versions of the disease-causing agents into the body. mRNA vaccines, by contrast, inject a synthetic single-stranded molecule of RNA that infects our own cells and makes them produce the protein that grows on the “spike” on the exterior of the coronavirus. The presence of this protein in the body is then recognized as an intruder, and the immune system learns to identify the coronavirus as an enemy and protect against it.

In the case of the COVID-19 vaccines, both of them train the body to recognize a protein on the SARS-CoV-2 virus known as Spike. Spike is the protein that helps the virus enter human cells and resembles little pins that stick out from the sphere of the virus itself, like the spines that poke out all around a sea urchin. Unfortunately, the South African mutation alters that very protein, meaning that it could affect the vaccine’s efficacy.

The South African strain is not the only one raising concern. There is a new strain in Brazil that the scientists argue “also has changes at key positions” in ways that could impair antibodies’ effectiveness against the disease. Then there is a strain in the United Kingdom known as B117 that, though not deadlier than previous strains, is more transmissible.

“I think transmissible is definitely the word to go with because that highlights what we do know and what we don’t know,” Dr. Dylan Morris, a postdoctoral research scholar at UCLA, told Salon earlier this month about the British strain. “Even if the disease severity isn’t increased or even if it decreases by a small amount, ‘more transmissible’ is still a very scary thing at this point in the pandemic, because that could result in faster spread and faster exponential growth.”

Dear Mr. President: You inspired us — but “unity” with Republicans and Trumpists is a trap

Donald Trump — now the former president of the United States — was and is many things. An authoritarian and fascist and a demagogue. An abusive parent or spouse, on a societal scale, who delights in tormenting the American people. A destroyer. A person who encourages the worst of human behavior. Pathological. An apparent sociopath or psychopath. Evil, corrupt and enraptured with violence. A white supremacist. The worst president in American history. A traitor.

The American people held their breath in fear and anticipation of the horrible things that would — and did — come to pass in the final days of Trump’s regime. When Joe Biden became president of the United States at 12 noon on Wednesday, they could finally let out a sigh of relief.

While many in the news media have celebrated Joe Biden’s election, and now presidency, as averting or reversing catastrophe, that is not in fact true. Donald Trump inflicted numerous catastrophes on the United States: ramped-up authoritarianism, fascism and overt white supremacy; a coup attempt; a lethal plague; collective post-traumatic disorder; economic ruin.

Here’s a more apt description of what Biden’s presidency means for the country: If Donald Trump had won a second term, American democracy would have suffered an extinction-level event. Such is the enormous challenge facing the new administration.

Biden’s inauguration speech showed that he may in fact be more than a transitional president whose job is to tend a broken democracy, government and country by doing the bare minimum, and leaving it all somewhat better than he found it.

Considering the challenges the United States faces from its many self-inflicted wounds, a “return to normal” may actually be an accomplishment in itself.

Biden’s inauguration speech was Lincoln-esque. It was a kind of sermon reflecting on American democracy in the aftermath of the coup attempt by Trump’s supporters — a democracy that needs to be healed, renewed and energized. Biden deftly took Trump’s “Make America Great Again” and rejected the ugly energy and intent of that language while reworking it into something aspirational, inspirational and inclusive. Jazz is one of America’s gifts to the world. In that moment and others during his inauguration speech, Joe Biden was improvising, playing around the melody.

Biden’s notes were the challenges and opportunities of American history and life; a country with the capacity to regain its greatness but now lost and uncertain; a political community that is broken, but whose people have more in common than what divides them; the urge to create a new and better country while escaping the pull of those anchors from the worst parts of its past, weights that now threaten to drown us all.

On Twitter, political consultant and author David Rothkopf (whom I interviewed in November) offered an excellent summation of Biden’s inaugural address as “the delicate balancing act of elevating, inspiring, calling for unity, & saying the era of Donald Trump is over. For every high ideal, there was a counterpoint to Trump. It was a beautifully balanced, positive speech, full of truth, well-delivered.”

Whatever one may think of Biden as a politician, he has shown himself to be a decent and honorable man. As the successor to a president who had no such qualities, Biden’s humanity is one of his greatest strengths. This is especially true for a country and a people who are mired in death and loss, not just literally in the form of lives lost and ruined, but also in that Trumpism has rendered the United States almost into an undead country, unsure and lost, whose stories and myths about its own greatness and inherent goodness have been exposed as lies.

But Biden’s humanity and fundamental decency and generosity of spirit could also prove to be his greatest weakness.

The central theme of the president’s inaugural address was unity: He wants to reunite the tens of millions of Trump’s political cult members with the rest of normal society.

To accomplish this goal, Biden is asking good Americans — those who believe in democracy — to reach out to Trump’s followers and other Republicans, a group of people who have repeatedly shown that they reject multiracial democracy and embrace authoritarianism and fascism.

In essence, Biden is asking his voters and other supporters to do the emotional, moral and physical labor of reaching out to the worst elements of America, those who have exiled themselves into the alternate reality of TrumpWorld and the broader right-wing echo chamber. Biden’s approach rewards bad behavior and does not force a new maturity or wisdom onto Trumpists, Republicans and other unrepentant elements of the right. Ultimately, such an approach all but ensures that the White Right will become even more radical and dangerous.

In a new essay for the Daily Beast, Rothkopf put that threat in its historical context:

But there is a much bigger issue at play here. This is not just about Trump’s upcoming Senate [impeachment] trial. Unless leaders from both parties work to make defending democracy a joint priority then we soon again will be at risk. Indeed, if we falter, history suggests we will be following in the footsteps of other democracies that dismissed or minimized threats and soon succumbed to dictators. Not adequately responding to the threats of would-be authoritarians because those behind them seem unworthy, disorganized, or ignorant — or because it is politically hard or uncomfortable — is a dangerous error. Hitler’s Beer Hall putsch of 1923 was a failure too. It was mocked. Ten years later Hitler took power, and the result was the worst calamity in the history of the world.

Moreover, public opinion polls and other research show that a majority of Republicans do not believe that Biden legitimately won the 2020 election. Almost 50 percent of registered Republicans supported the Trump-inspired attack on the Capitol. Many Republicans also believe that Donald Trump is innocent, despite the obvious evidence that he incited insurrection and violence. Other research shows that Trump’s followers, Republicans, and other members of the right are more likely to be authoritarians who reject basic democratic norms. Trump voters are especially hostile to multiracial democracy and prefer to live in an authoritarian society if that will ensure that white people are the dominant and most powerful group.

Experts on terrorism have warned us that Donald Trump’s coup attack, like his entire presidency, will inspire more right-wing extremism and political violence, specifically targeting the Biden administration and the Democrats.

In a recent article for Yahoo News, retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, one of the world’s leading experts on counter-insurgency warfare and the former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, issued this warning:

So even if Trump exits the scene, the radical movement he helped create has its own momentum and cohesion now, and they may find they don’t need Trump anymore. They can just wait for another charismatic leader to appear. So the fabric of something very dangerous has been woven, and it’s further along than most Americans care to admit.

In Anne Applebaum’s new essay for The Atlantic, “Coexistence Is the Only Option,” she offers a similar warning about a post-Trump America:

We could also see more violence. Since the election, the Bridging Divides Initiative, a group that tracks and counters political violence in the U.S., has observed a singularly ominous metric: a sharp uptick in the number of protests outside the homes of politicians and public figures, including city- and county-level officials, many featuring “armed and unlawful paramilitary actors.” In Idaho, aggressive protesters shut down a public-health meeting; in Northern California, numerous public-health officials have resigned in the face of threats from anti-maskers. Death threats are already shaping U.S. politics at a higher level too. We may never know how many more Republicans in Congress might have voted for Trump’s impeachment last week had it not been for the ominous messages they were receiving online.

Applebaum continues: “Outside politics, outside the law, outside the norms — the seditionists have in fact declared their independence from the rest of us. January 6 was indeed their 1776: They declared that they want to live in a different America from the one the rest of us inhabit, ruled over by a different president chosen according to a different rule book. And yet they cannot be wished away, or sent away, or somehow locked up. They will not leave of their own accord, and Americans who accept Biden’s lawful victory won’t either. We have no choice except to coexist.”

President Biden has extended the hand of friendship and unity to Trump’s followers and other Republicans, and is asking his supporters and other Americans of conscience to do the same thing. Predictably, those overtures are being rejected. A new Pew Research poll shows that Republican voters want their leaders to obstruct the Democratic Party’s policies.

Almost on cue, the Republican National Committee sent out this email on Inauguration Day:

Friend,

Today begins a new chapter in our Country.

While the Left promises to implement their Big Government Socialist Agenda, the Republican Party will need to come together and work even harder if we’re going to continue putting America FIRST.

The Democrats have control of the White House, the Senate, and the House, and our Party will be relying on you now more than ever. YOU are going to play a vital role in our efforts to preserve all of our historic accomplishments over the last four years, and it’s critical that we have your support.

We need your help to send a STRONG message to the Left that Patriots, like YOU, stand with the Republican Party 100%.

Donald Trump’s name may not have been on that email, but its message — and its overtures to stochastic terrorism — were couched in his terms: Republicans are “real Americans” and true “patriots”; Democrats are the Other, an enemy to be vanquished.

Joe Biden has declared himself a president for all Americans. In practice, however, that may be impossible. Instead, Biden needs to realize, sooner rather than later, that he must be the best president possible while refusing to surrender to the demands of a Republican Party and right-wing public that views him (and his voters) as illegitimate and un-American. To compromise with such people is not a path to national healing. It is a path to the betrayal of American democracy that will only serve to undermine our new president’s ability to lead the country back to reality, sanity, health and perhaps even greatness.

With fewer resources, rural America tackles vaccine distribution

One afternoon this past December, a package arrived at Mora Valley Community Health Services in northern New Mexico. The rural clinic, which serves a county of 4,521 people, is nestled beside a pasture with a flock of chickens and a few goats. A mile up the road sits the town of Mora — a regional hub just big enough for a trio of restaurants, two gas stations, and a single-building satellite office for a nearby community college.

Shortly after the package arrived, clinic staff received an email explaining that this “ancillary convenience kit” was a test of the system designed to transport SARS-CoV-2 vaccines from the state’s warehouse to Mora and other rural communities across the state. While this package contained supplies for administering the vaccine — syringes, needles, alcohol swabs, and more — the real challenge would occur the following week. That’s when 100 doses were scheduled to be delivered, and the clinic’s staff would have 30 days at most to administer the doses before they spoiled.

As promised, the vaccine arrived on Dec. 21. Staff worked in phases, stationing patients in exam rooms in numbers to match the doses coming from each vial. Each patient completed a health questionnaire, received a shot, and then was monitored for 15 minutes to be sure the vaccine did not trigger an adverse reaction. Within a few weeks, all 100 shots were in arms.

As the United States begins its massive vaccine rollout, health departments across the country are scrambling to plan and adjust, often while simultaneously managing a surge in new Covid-19 cases. “Just trying to keep up and stay alert of what new things are coming down the line is pretty critical,” said Jessica Martinez, a Mora Valley nurse. Rural clinics face unique challenges in getting highly perishable vaccines to residents who often live many miles away. “We’re kind of out here on our own,” she said.

Additionally, data show that rural residents are less likely to receive a flu shot than residents of metropolitan areas. This trend, combined with the reluctance of rural communities to embrace coronavirus mitigation measures, has some experts worried: “Think about a person who needs to drive one hour for a shot, then do the same 20 days later for a second shot,” said Diego Cuadros, a professor of health geography and disease modeling at the University of Cincinnati. “If it’s a person who maybe doesn’t think this is too important, or has some misperception or misinformation about vaccines, this is going to be extremely challenging.”

Ultimately, Cuadros and others worry that the virus might linger in pockets of rural America, from which it could reemerge into the broader population, compromising efforts to get the virus under control. To prevent this, health care workers are starting with a public information campaign, while state health departments are encouraging pharmacies to run outreach clinics and set up new sites for vaccinations. Currently, the most pressing issue facing less populated areas is how to store and administer vaccines before they lose their effectiveness.

The messenger RNA technology used to develop the two vaccines that have received approval in the U.S. so far — one developed by the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and German drugmaker BioNTech and one by the biotechnology startup Moderna — requires that they both be kept cold. The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine needs to be kept at a temperature between –112 and –76 degrees Fahrenheit, while Moderna’s lasts longest if kept between -13 F and 5 F.

Because of its large and far-flung rural population, New Mexico was selected by Pfizer as one of four states of varying demographics and geographies to participate in a pilot program for refining the deployment of its vaccine, both in the U.S. and around the world. The company designed a temperature-controlled shipment container the size of a carry-on suitcase that weighs about 70 pounds when filled with dry ice and up to 975 vials of the vaccine and can keep the vaccine viable for up to 10 days, or up to 30 days if the dry ice is refilled. As the first round of 17,550 doses of Pfizer vaccine was being moved around New Mexico in mid-December, 75 had to be discarded after a gauge indicated they’d become too warm, either a failure in the cold-storage system or in the data-logging device. After the losses, a state official said the devices’ temperature settings were recalibrated and an alarm set to go off if they began to warm.

Purchasing super-cold storage equipment is costly and demands a higher-voltage outlet, said Eric Tichy, vice chair of supply chain management for the Mayo Clinic. Stock of that equipment — particularly of the size that would be appropriate for smaller pharmacies and clinics — is also simply sold out. That may leave many of them leaning on Pfizer’s container and dry ice refills.

With 237 vaccines in development on the World Health Organization’s list of candidates, the future will likely include vaccines that tolerate warmer temperatures. Johnson & Johnson is expected to release information later this month on a candidate that needs only refrigerator storage and a single dose. “A lot of people are focused on that one,” Tichy said. “Especially for worldwide distribution, that’s a big deal.”

It’s also possible ongoing testing will show the two vaccines already in circulation remain stable at less cold temperatures, Tichy said. Initially, Moderna’s vaccine seemed to require super-cold storage, but it’s been shown to remain effective for up to 30 days in a refrigerator at up to 46 F.

The bigger challenge Tichy sees is that once a vaccine vial is opened, staff have just six hours to use all five or 10 doses it contains. “It’s a precious resource,” he said, “You don’t want to just give it to two people and have to throw out the rest of the contents. You want to get five people vaccinated.”

* * *

The first wave of inoculations targets health care workers and residents in long-term care facilities, so there’s a central location at which vaccines can reach them. For vaccinating the public at large, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has partnered with large national pharmacy chains, as well as networks of small regional chains and independent pharmacies. The incoming Biden administration has signaled it will continue with this strategy, noting in the outline of its vaccination plan that nearly 90 percent of Americans live within five miles of a pharmacy, while also acknowledging that more will be needed to reach those who live in more isolated areas.

The Rural Policy Research Institute at the University of Iowa found 750 counties nationwide with no partnership pharmacies, and another 334 with just one such pharmacy. The majority of states have at least one county without a partnership pharmacy, and large swaths of Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Texas, and smaller chunks of Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah, reported no partnered pharmacies.

“We need to be alert to the fact that it’s not as simple as thinking you’ve got a contract with 19 franchises and that’s going to cover the nation because Walgreens and CVS are everywhere — well, no they’re not,” said Keith Mueller, director of the Rural Policy Research Institute. “It doesn’t mean you can’t figure out a way. It just means you have to get to the next level of planning.”

 

In some states, that hasn’t presented much of a hurdle. Independent pharmacies have procured doses of the vaccines and done well administering them, but rates vary widely from state to state.

Rural communities often run short on resources, whether it’s cold storage facilities or a population of retired nurses and doctors to tap to help administer vaccines, he added. The geography can also compound the disparities in access that affect racial minorities.

Kim Atwater, who owns two pharmacies in rural New Mexico towns, decided that for now, it doesn’t make sense to order doses of the vaccines. “We don’t have refrigeration facilities to keep it,” she said. “We’re just a very, very small community.”

* * *

In rural areas, the lack of pharmacies and major medical centers means that much of the vaccination effort is falling to local health clinics like the one in Mora. “We know it’s a cardinal sin to waste a dose, and we are not trying to be wasteful,” Martinez said.

Unwillingness to get vaccinated may also present a hurdle. While some national surveys report growing numbers saying they will take a Covid-19 vaccine when it becomes available to them, Cuadros said he hasn’t seen that data broken down between rural and urban respondents. Data that tracked vaccination rates for influenza shows them much lower in rural areas.

Atwater’s conversations with locals suggest that pattern may carry over to the new vaccines. “There’s a lot of people who are just saying, ‘Oh, I’m not getting that,'” she said. “We hear a lot of, ‘That? No, no, not until there’s more testing done on it.'”

Mora bucked trends this fall by making flu vaccination more convenient, Martinez said. Her clinic offered drive-through clinics, welcomed walk-ins, sent staff to patients’ homes, and even invited a UPS driver to receive a shot after dropping off packages at the clinic. As a result, they administered 400 flu vaccines compared to roughly 250 last year.

But when it comes to the new Moderna vaccine they were set to receive, Martinez said, she still heard reluctance. A poll showed only 29 of about 86 clinic staff were immediately interested in taking the vaccine. In addition to providing those staff more information to ease any concerns, she reached out to the local ambulance service, the school nurse’s office, and even a long-term residential facility to add names to the list, rather than see doses go to waste. After ramped-up education efforts and a new mandate for employees, 80 staff members were vaccinated, according to Martinez.

The plan New Mexico submitted to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention forecasts this need for flexibility, pointing out that if more doses arrive in a community than there are health care workers interested in taking it, the rules around who is first in line may need to relax.

The clinic has already worked to make it easier for residents to get a SARS-CoV-2 test. On a recent weekday afternoon, staff put out flags where the dead-end gravel road named for the clinic meets the highway that announced “Covid testing” and “flu shots.” By the time blue-gowned, masked, and face-shielded staff stepped outside, a line of vehicles threaded through the parking lot. Staff reached in the window of the first pickup truck in line, took a swab, and the driver pulled away and back onto the highway. Staff have bundled up to administer these tests even on days with below-freezing temperatures and frigid winds, and when snow has shut down other testing sites.

But with the CDC recommendation to watch people for 15 minutes after they receive a vaccine for adverse responses to it, Martinez said, a drive-through approach would be risky. Staff would have to try to keep an eye on patients through windshields, then rush into the gravel parking lot with a crash cart and epinephrine if someone had an allergic reaction. They’d considered erecting an insulated tent, but given the prioritization of elderly, potentially frail or vulnerable patients who wouldn’t do well in the winter weather, the private medical information elicited by the questions preceding a vaccine, and the need to have emergency equipment on hand, they decided to book people for 20-minute appointments inside the clinic. Now, they’re on standby for the second doses, getting “slammed with calls” from people wanting to get in line, and helping people who rushed to pop-up clinics in one town sort out how to get their second dose on time.

“It’s just going to take a lot of planning, and of course, trial and error,” Martinez said. “It is a little bit draining sometimes to try and make everything — the community — a better place and healthy and be committed to the organization and to our patients first and foremost, so we just try and tell people, ‘Wear your mask, wash your hands.'”

Trumpism isn’t “history”: But our blindness to history could lead to its comeback

In March 2016, when few political consultants, pollsters, data-jockeys, psy-ops masterminds or media maestros thought that Donald Trump could or would ever win the White House, I assessed his rise differently in a long Salon essay that few can read now because Americans barely glance into what we always call “the rear-view mirror.”

History is more than a rear-view mirror. It enables people who give it more than a quick glance to know that someone like Trump surfs a tsunami of ressentiment — a public psychopathology in which gnawing insecurities, envy and hatred, nursed by many in private, converge in scary social eruptions that present themselves as noble crusades but that diminish their participants even in seeming to make them big.

“Ressentiment‘s gloves really come off once there are enough angry ‘little-big men’ to step out en masse, with a Sarah Palin or a Glenn Beck,” I warned nearly five years ago, adding:

Trump is leading them across the Rubicon, signaling that he’ll mow down anyone and anything in his way. Legitimate grievances that fuel ressentiment sometimes drive its eruptions to a fleeting brilliance, as when Palin tapped currents of thwarted love and hope in her speeches in the 2008 campaign. But, like her public persona, such gestures soon curdle and collapse, tragicomically or catastrophically, into their own cowardice, ignorance and lies.

But how “soon” do they collapse? Trumpian ressentiment lasted for four years, which is more than just the blink of an eye in the short history of our republic. During those years I found myself elaborating my warning in many venues, including again here in Salon in 2018 (when I reported reactions to the 2016 essay) and, more recently, in Democracy Journal. 

But now that those predictions have been book-ended suitably by Susan Glasser’s “Obituary for a Failed Presidency” in the New Yorker, her summary of Trumpian ressentiment prompts me to a couple of quick observations.

First, Americans need to do more than glance into rear-view mirrors as they speed to nowhere. “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” wrote William Faulkner, novelist and interpreter of the American South. meaning not that we should impose the past upon the present but that we should learn from it as we see it at work in our lives. Non-historians should acquire the pleasing habit of checking History News Network summaries and links to op-eds and magazine essays by historians and occasional interlopers.   

Trump couldn’t have conned as many of us as he did if our schools had taught more of us about this country’s dalliances with demagogues like Huey Long and Joe McCarthy. The invaluable program “Facing History and Ourselves” now guides thousands of students in doing what its name commends. We need more of it.

Second, we need to recognize that people who feel stressed and dispossessed often demand to be lied to about their history because they want easy answers and scapegoats. By stoking ressentiment and algorithmically-driven marketing that pressures deliberating citizens to become impulse-buying consumers, Trump ushered millions into a political twilight zone where democracy is suspended by strongmen.

A good liberal democracy strides on two feet: a “left” foot of public provision — public schools, health care and other resources, without which conservatives’ cherished familial and communal values could never flourish — and a “right” foot of irreducibly personal conscience and responsibility, without which even the best-intentioned “liberal” social engineering would turn persons into cogs, clients or worse.

Finding and keeping a balanced stride is an acquired art and a discipline. History must inform it, but only wise parenting, teaching and, yes, political engagement — all of which require public as well as private resources — can teach young Americans the art and discipline of self-government instead of driving them to be “little-big men” all too likely to surrender to the next Trump who comes on to our now-badly-frayed civic culture. If something like Trumpism persists, as I believe it will, that won’t simply be because his followers will remain more loyal to him than he will to them. It will be because our society’s growing moral bankruptcy and injustices will stoke more ressentiment, whose bearers will look for — and find — a new and potentially more dangerous iteration of Trump.

A historian from the future looks back: What will be most remembered of Trump’s presidency?

How will historians remember Donald Trump?

One hundred years ago, America nearly slipped into a dictatorship. The nation was saved primarily by two things: The fact that the man who wished to be its fascist dictator, President Donald Trump, was too stupid to realize how to correctly respond to a worldwide plague, and the fact that he was a physical coward.

The first fact was by far the most important. When the COVID-19 pandemic began to ravage humanity in 2020, Trump responded in the worst ways possible: He downplayed the threat despite knowing that it was a deadly and contagious disease, defunded and sidelined agencies and individuals with the scientific expertise to contain the pandemic and failed to coordinate a coherent and effective federal response. He also promoted pseudoscience to his supporters, kept trying to prematurely reopen the economy and set a bad example by personally refusing to wear a mask, inevitably catching the disease himself. Although he was wealthy and powerful enough to receive the medical care necessary to survive to the end of his presidency, more than 400,000 Americans had died of COVID-19 by the end of his term because of his poor leadership… roughly the same number as died during World War II. This meant that Americans comprised roughly 20 percent of the total worldwide COVID-19 deaths, even though the United States had just four percent of the world’s population.

Despite these serious mistakes, Trump won 74 million votes in the 2020 election, the second-highest total ever received by a presidential candidate up to that point. This is because Trump, like many fascist leaders, had developed a cult-like following among a large segment of the population. Given how well he performed despite his failure to handle the pandemic — a failure that, in turn, caused America’s worst economic setback since the Great Depression — it is probable that he would have won if he had simply handled the pandemic better. Incumbent parties tend to win or lose based on public perceptions of whether they are doing a good job, and future President Joe Biden was not viewed as an inspiring candidate. (Biden’s main appeal was his association with a popular former president, Barack Obama, under whom he had served as vice president.) If Trump had mounted an effective federal response to the pandemic and urged the public to follow medical experts’ advice, that combined with his base’s enthusiasm and a lack of voter enthusiasm for Biden most likely would have resulted in his reelection.

But Trump bungled it. As a result, Biden won the election with 81 million votes and an electoral college margin of 306 to 232. Trump’s failure as a leader doomed his dictatorial ambitions, humiliated his supporters and saved American democracy from himself.

These are the most important facts of Trump’s presidency. His entire administration prior to the pandemic was merely a prologue to those defining moments.

During the 2016 election he openly called on Russia to help him defeat Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, and Russia did indeed meddle in that contest. Although Trump’s upset victory over Clinton was not caused by Russian interference, his willingness to work with a hostile foreign power to be elected foreshadowed his dictatorial ambitions. After taking office, Trump expressed open sympathy for white nationalist rioters in Charlottesville, Va., repeatedly praised authoritarian rulers and used fascist rhetoric that subtly urged his followers to support him as an undemocratic ruler. In 2019 he tried to coerce Ukraine into helping him smear Biden, who he accurately perceived was likely to be his opponent in the 2020 election, and became the third president to ever be impeached as a result. Although there was no reasonable doubt as to his guilt, the Senate was controlled by Trump’s fellow Republicans, who voted on party lines (with the exception of Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah) to acquit him.

Trump’s efforts to become a dictator only increased after that. He violated the First Amendment by moving to punish Twitter after the social media company fact-checked him, tried to kneecap the Post Office so that people who voted by mail (who, due to the pandemic, were more likely to be anti-Trump) would be less likely to have their votes counted and insinuated that if re-elected he would seek 12 more years in office, even though the Constitution only allowed him four. He also repeatedly refused to say whether he would accept the voters’ verdict if he lost in the 2020 election (he also did this in 2016), conditioning his supporters to believe that the only possible outcomes were either that Trump would win or that the election would be illegitimate. Ominously he told a white supremacist and misogynist group known as the Proud Boys to “stand by” during one of his presidential debates; Trump adviser Roger Stone was notoriously connected to the violent group, and they played an outsize role in Trump’s eventual coup attempt.

After he lost — and perhaps emboldened by his impeachment acquittal — Trump did everything in his power to stay in office. He filed five dozen frivolous lawsuits, had his attorney general, William Barr, launch an investigation into the supposedly “stolen” election and repeatedly lied to his supporters by saying that there had been widespread fraud. (He never actually alleged fraud in more than two-thirds of his lawsuits.) All of the investigations into fraud, from those filed in court to the one overseen by his own attorney general (who was notoriously obsequious throughout Trump’s presidency), concluded that Biden had legitimately won. All but one of Trump’s lawsuits failed (the exception involved a minor procedural issue in Pennsylvania), with many of the judges who sided against him being fellow Republicans, some appointed by Trump himself. The Supreme Court, though refusing to hear his case, made it clear that if it had it would have unanimously ruled against Trump; three of those judges had been appointed by Trump himself. The president’s fraud claims were debunked by experts and his efforts to pressure Republican officials in swing states that he had lost into somehow letting him win anyway did not succeed.

After that, Trump did something unprecedented: He tried to foment a violent coup.

Although ten sitting presidents before Trump had sought another term and been spurned by the voters, Trump was the first to try to use violence to illegally stay in office. At a rally on Jan. 6, 2021, he infamously urged a mob of far right extremists to storm the Capitol and force Congress to not certify Biden’s victory. The coup attempt was ultimately thwarted, but not before thousands of people swarmed the building, breaking and stealing property, threatening legislators and even killing a law enforcement official.

And that is what they did without Trump personally leading them. If he had been willing to physically join the Capitol rioters, perhaps the police — who were already shockingly restrained in their efforts to stop the rioters, even though American police were notoriously brutal toward left-wing political movements and marginalized racial groups — would have allowed them to do whatever they wanted. It is possible that anti-Trump legislators in the Capitol would actually have been physically intimidated or murdered. At that point, Trump could have literally realized his coup.

Fortunately for democracy, Trump did not join the rioters, despite telling them that “we are going to the Capitol” to give Republicans like his own vice president, Mike Pence, “the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.” (Pence was overseeing the vote certification but had no power to throw out any of the votes, although Trump erroneously insisted otherwise.) Trump instead retreated to the White House. He left his supporters — having been told that they could force Congress to overturn the election results, with his blessing — to attempt their insurrection while he was safe at home.

This is why Trump’s physical cowardice, along with his failure to address the pandemic, was the other major factor that saved democracy. It is why his term ended with him being the first president to be impeached twice, slinking off in disgrace, rather than a dictator who literally led a charge that physically overthrew anyone who might keep him out of power.

Trump was a terrible president in many other ways, but they were not unprecedented. He ignored how climate change was threatening human civilization, but so did most of the other Republicans who ran for president in 2016, as well as the previous Republican president, George W. Bush. He refused to work with the incoming Biden administration on important issues like the pandemic and economic downturn, but President James Buchanan had infamously refused to work with President-elect Abraham Lincoln to stave off a Civil War. He passed a $1.5 trillion tax cut for the wealthy that did nothing to help the working class, but other Republican presidents had also favored those types of economic policies.

He failed to deliver on the promises of his campaign and inaugural address, particularly when it came to revamping America’s infrastructure and building a wall along the entire US-Mexico border, but many other presidents have also come up short in fulfilling their agendas. He brutalized undocumented immigrants, but America has a long history of viciously racist anti-immigration policies. He stuffed America’s courts with conservative judges, but this was merely the fulfillment of an agenda that had begun when Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell obstructed President Obama’s judicial appointments, most notably of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. He had numerous financial conflicts of interest and enriched himself through his office, but corruption is hardly new to American politics.

If it had not been for his attempts to become a dictator, Trump would simply be remembered as just another in a line of terrible Republican presidents — one of the worst, to be sure, but not necessarily a shoo-in for the absolute worst. His only distinctive quality would have been that he was the first president to be elected without previous political or military service.

Instead, on the centennial anniversary of the end of Trump’s presidency, we hold him up as a reminder that democracy is a fragile thing. Terrible presidents come and go, wreaking havoc in the process, but potential dictators are a rare thing on the American scene. The only reason this nation is still free, 100 years later, is because its would-be dictator was outsmarted by a virus and too scared to risk his own life despite demanding that others do so for him.

Trump’s second failed coup: Trump reportedly tried to oust acting attorney general with DOJ aide

Only days after Donald Trump returned to private life, The New York Times published a blockbuster new story on his efforts to overturn the election.

“The Justice Department’s top leaders listened in stunned silence this month: One of their peers, they were told, had devised a plan with President Donald J. Trump to oust Jeffrey A. Rosen as acting attorney general and wield the department’s power to force Georgia state lawmakers to overturn its presidential election results,” The New York Times reported Friday evening.

“The unassuming lawyer who worked on the plan, Jeffrey Clark, had been devising ways to cast doubt on the election results and to bolster Mr. Trump’s continuing legal battles and the pressure on Georgia politicians. Because Mr. Rosen had refused the president’s entreaties to carry out those plans, Mr. Trump was about to decide whether to fire Mr. Rosen and replace him with Mr. Clark,” the newspaper reported. “The department officials, convened on a conference call, then asked each other: What will you do if Mr. Rosen is dismissed? The answer was unanimous. They would resign.”

“Their informal pact ultimately helped persuade Mr. Trump to keep Mr. Rosen in place, calculating that a furor over mass resignations at the top of the Justice Department would eclipse any attention on his baseless accusations of voter fraud. Mr. Trump’s decision came only after Mr. Rosen and Mr. Clark made their competing cases to him in a bizarre White House meeting that two officials compared with an episode of Mr. Trump’s reality show “The Apprentice,” albeit one that could prompt a constitutional crisis,” the newspaper explained.

The bombshell report was “based on interviews with four former Trump administration officials who asked not to be named because of fear of retaliation.”

Read the full report.

“Now let’s cancel them,” Demands AOC as Biden extends pause on student loan payments

Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez late Wednesday called on President Joe Biden to use his executive authority to immediately cancel student loan payments after the president signed an order extending an existing pause through at least the end of September.

“OK now let’s cancel them,” the New York Democrat tweeted in response to Biden’s order, which directs the Education Department to freeze “federal student loan payments and collections and keep the interest rate at 0%.”

“Too many Americans are struggling to pay for basic necessities and to provide for their families,” the White House said in a statement. “They should not be forced to choose between paying their student loans and putting food on the table.”

While the extension of the payment freeze was a welcome day-one action by Biden, progressives have long argued that the president has the legal authority—and a moral obligation—to unilaterally cancel the student loan debt that is saddling tens of millions of Americans.

But last month, as Common Dreams reported, Biden claimed it is “questionable” whether the president can legally cancel student loan debt via executive order and said he is “unlikely to do that.” Instead of taking executive action, Biden has proposedcanceling $10,000 in federal student debt per borrower through legislation.

Alexis Goldstein, a senior policy analyst with Americans for Financial Reform, said at the time that “it simply isn’t correct to say the legal authority to cancel student debt via executive action is ‘questionable.'”

“The authority is clear, documented, and even the Trump administration used executive authority to cancel student loan interest payments, twice,” Goldstein noted.

Just ahead of Biden’s inauguration Wednesday, The Debt Collective union launched the Biden Jubilee 100, an initiative that consists of  “100 student debt strikers refusing to pay back their student loans until President Biden cancels all student debt—which he has the power to do immediately!”

“Our communities are struggling in the midst of the Covid pandemic,” reads the The Debt Collective’s website. “Millions of us are facing eviction and food insecurity, while suffering from exploding medical costs, rising tuition, unpayable bills, and the perpetual fear of illness. Joe Biden and his administration need to act immediately… And we’re going to make him do it.”

Twitter and YouTube banned Steve Bannon. Apple still gives him millions of listeners

Late at night on Jan. 5, the day before President Donald Trump was scheduled to deliver a defiant speech before thousands of his most dedicated supporters, his former adviser Steve Bannon was podcasting from his studio near Capitol Hill. He had been on the air several times a day for weeks, hyping the narrative that this was the moment that patriots could stand up and pull out a Trump win.

“It’s all converging, and now we’re on the point of attack tomorrow. It’s going to kick off, it’s going to be very dramatic,” Bannon said in his fluent patter, on a day that would see four of his “War Room” shows posted online, up from his usual two or three. “It’s going to be quite extraordinarily different. And all I can say is strap in. You have made this happen and tomorrow it’s game day.”

The next morning Bannon was back. “We’re right on the cusp of victory,” Bannon said, as protesters massed at the Ellipse to hear from Trump.

“This is not a day for fantasy, this is a day for maniacal focus. Focus, focus, focus,” Bannon went on. “It’s them against us. Who can impose their will on the other side.”

To the protesters massing in Washington, Bannon’s message was clear: They could force the outcome by pressuring Vice President Mike Pence and Congress not to certify the electoral vote.

Ultimately, the day resulted in a bloody brawl that took the lives of both police and protesters, in a security breach unlike any America has seen in decades. It was planned in explicit detail across websites that were taken offline, like Parler, or censored, as Twitter did with thousands of QAnon-affiliated accounts and even the president’s.

But Bannon, who himself was banned from YouTube and Twitter after saying in November that Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray should be beheaded, continues to reach an enormous audience via Apple’s podcast app, which is installed by default on every iPhone. Although the app doesn’t show the number of times the show has been streamed, Bannon gives updates every few days on its popularity. As of last week, he claimed total downloads of 29 million.

Bannon did not respond to a request for comment.

It’s not just Bannon. Several podcasts that spread baseless claims of election fraud, including shows by former Trump strategist Sebastian Gorka and Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton, continue to be broadly available on major platforms. The fact that such beliefs were the battle cry of a violent mob that threatened congressional leaders has brought podcasting platforms face to face with a difficult question: What are their responsibilities when it comes to stifling what otherwise could be seen as protected speech?

In the weeks since Nov. 3, Bannon has spent several hours a day exploring the minutiae of baselessly disputed elections in several states, giving ample airtime to Trump defenders like Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and presidential adviser Peter Navarro. Using a mix of football, military and religious analogies, Bannon speaks often in apocalyptic terms about the risk of losing.

“It’s the children of light and the children of darkness,” he said on Jan. 3, after interviewing the right-wing Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, whom Pope Francis fired as the Vatican’s ambassador to the United States after he sided with anti-gay culture warriors. “One side’s going to win and one side’s going to lose. Everything that the Judeo-Christian West represents is at stake. That’s what this battle is about. That’s what Wednesday is about.”

While social media companies have become more willing over the past few months to censor accounts that engage in hate speech, podcasts are still largely unmoderated. Part of that has to do with the industry’s structure: The main podcast portals merely index the shows, like Google indexes websites. Despite canceling Bannon’s YouTube channel, Google Podcasts still indexes “War Room.” (Apple accounts for more than half of the number of podcast streams, with Spotify a distant second.)

“Online platforms know that rhetoric promoting violence and disinformation absolutely matters. That is why most of them ban such activities in their own terms of service,” said Megan Squire, a computer science professor at Elon University who has studied the right-wing podcasting ecosystem.

“However, in the case of podcasts, Apple usually explains that they are just cataloging the show and not actually distributing it,” Squire said. “For example when they banned Alex Jones, they just stopped listing him, but what guidelines they used were a bit unclear. Contrast this to their app store guidelines, which are very clear.”

Apple declined to comment on how it evaluates whether to de-list a podcast. Its terms of service prohibit “content that is illegal or promotes illegal activity, self-harm, violence, or illegal drugs, or content depicting graphic sex, gore, or is otherwise considered obscene, objectionable, or in poor taste.”

Audio files themselves are supported by a much more fragmented network of hosting services — which costs money, unlike simply being catalogued by a portal like Apple’s. “War Room” is hosted by Podbean, which did not return a request for comment. Its terms of service forbid content that is “malicious, false, or inaccurate.”

To be clear: Since his “heads on pikes” episode, Bannon has shied away from advocating violence. He sometimes caveats his calls to arms by cautioning that he’s talking about political protest or “coloring inside the lines.” He has downplayed allegations against Dominion Voting Systems, which threatened to sue other Trump allies and news outlets for spreading baseless claims of fraud. In the wake of Jan. 6, like many in the right-wing media ecosphere, he has praised peaceful protest and claimed the riot was instigated by liberal agents provocateurs rather than Trump supporters.

However, extremism experts say the rhetoric still feeds into an alternative reality that breeds anger and cynicism, which may ultimately lead to violence. Julia DeCook, an assistant professor at Loyola University Chicago’s school of communications, notes that listeners who are convinced about one conspiracy theory are more likely to accept others, which is what makes more mainstream commentators like Bannon “dangerous.”

“It’s not like they hit you with the crazy stuff all at once. It’s the little things that sow distrust and skepticism,” DeCook said. “Steve Bannon goes right up to the line of what is acceptable and what is hate speech. But platforms are really bad at understanding borderline content.”

Bannon seems to understand very well how the information he’s putting out in the world influences his audience. On the eve of the Capitol riot, one of his co-hosts interviewed a young man at a pregame rally in downtown Washington who said his whole family had been dejected after the election. After discovering “War Room,” they were increasingly encouraged and listened to every episode, resulting in his presence at Freedom Plaza that night. The “War Room” crew celebrated this exchange as evidence of its impact.

“As soon as you’re able to create the structure or the context, and let them come to their own conclusions, they’re going to be able to have their own mental map, they can then start making their own decisions, and then become disciples or force multipliers,” Bannon said. “We’ve helped provide the information to people who are jacked up.”

(Of course, Bannon also has an interest in helping Trump, who could still use his pardon powers to dismiss a federal charge concerning Bannon’s alleged misuse of funds donated to a charity that said it was helping to build a wall on the border with Mexico.)

De-platforming Bannon, however, would be tricky.

Podcast directories and hosting services are loath to open the Pandora’s box of content moderation. Todd Cochrane runs one of the largest, called Blubrry, which hosts 85,000 shows and indexes 1.3 million of them. Since Jan. 6, he said that many of his customers — especially Christian shows — are worried about being de-listed from other podcast directories. As long as they aren’t using hate speech or inciting violence, which Blubrry’s terms of service forbid, he said they’re safe on his platform.

“This is a fine line for us,” Cochrane said. Blubrry has a formal process for submitting complaints about shows with objectionable content and has only ever removed a handful. “Let’s say I respond to a social justice campaign saying this show is ultimately resulting in violence. It’s an internal decision of whether or not we want to host that content, but I wouldn’t want to be in Podbean’s position today.”

Even if “War Room” were kicked out of Apple’s directory or dumped by Podbean, that might fuel the argument — which Bannon has already exploited after being booted by Twitter and YouTube — that Big Tech has it out for conservatives. Plenty of liberal-leaning shows aren’t paragons of truth either, but they haven’t been banned.

“The inconsistency is a huge catalyst for these folks, because it gives them an endless supply of pretty accurate grievances to raise about ‘why are we being shut down in this way,'” said Peter Simi, an associate professor of sociology at Chapman University. “It amplifies their sense that there’s this left-wing conspiracy that’s hell-bent on preventing them from even expressing their views.”

Though Apple offers access to an enormous audience, it may only be a matter of time before Bannon and others are able to build up an alternative streaming universe that doesn’t depend on the grace of Silicon Valley tech giants. On Jan. 13, Bannon talked on his show with Andrew Torba, the founder of Gab.com, which has become a haven for conspiracy theorists. Torba boasted of having built up enough of his own data-center capacity to support all of the traffic from people leaving Twitter and Facebook, but service is still groaning under the weight of new traffic. In emails to Gab members, Torba has been soliciting donations to support the expansion. “No one is coming to save us,” he wrote on Jan. 8. “We must save ourselves.”

“It’s a conundrum, because now you have the right wing moving into their own silos,” said Adele Stan, the editor of Right Wing Watch, a project of the left-leaning People for the American Way. “The thing we know about the right is that they’re good at building infrastructure, in the way that the left has never gotten their act together on. We’re just at this moment of chaos where it’s hard to know if there’s a base that’s radicalized enough to be there for the long haul, when things start to not look very good for their side.”

In the meantime, Bannon seems to know exactly how far he can go before his remaining platforms have an excuse to yank his access.

Also on Jan. 13, having just been booted off YouTube after the site banned videos that spread false election fraud statements, Bannon again had Giuliani as a guest. The leader of Trump’s legal team said he had acquired videos showing “Antifa” agitators leading the Capitol violence, and at one point he suggested that one of them had actually shot Ashli Babbitt, the Air Force veteran who was, in fact, killed by a Capitol Police officer.

Bannon tried to rein in Giuliani and finally cut him off. “I don’t mind being shut down for my craziness, but I’m not going to be shut down for yours,” he told the former New York City mayor, who seemed offended. “I don’t say crazy things,” Giuliani responded, after Bannon had directed listeners to Giuliani’s website to view the videos.

“I know, I’m teasing you,” Bannon said.

Fired for storming the Capitol? Why most workers aren’t protected for what they do on their own time

Can you be fired for joining a violent mob that storms the Capitol?

Of course you can.

Among the jarring images of white insurrectionists who broke into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 was a man marching through the building holding a Trump flag with his work ID badge still draped around his neck.

It didn’t take long for internet sleuths to zoom in on the badge and alert his employer, Navistar Direct Marketing, a Maryland direct mail printing company.

The company promptly fired the man and contacted the FBI, issuing a statement that “any employee demonstrating dangerous conduct that endangers the health and safety of others will no longer have an employment opportunity.”

Even though the Capitol Police let all but 14 of the rioters walk away, the FBI and District of Columbia police have begun tracking them down. Other companies have also taken action against employees identified in the many photos from inside the Capitol. Even the CEO of a data analytics firm found himself without a job following his arrest.

Based on my experience as a law professor and lawyer specializing in employment law, I doubt that Navistar management is losing sleep over whether its decision was legally justified.

It’s not even a close case. Non-unionized workers in the United States – about 90% of all workers – are employed at-will. That means you can be terminated at any time, without notice, for any reason. It doesn’t even have to be a good reason. Unless the company has guaranteed your job in writing, or there is a specific law that protects your conduct – such as laws protecting union organizing or whistleblowing – your fate is up to them.

The law is more protective when it comes to unionized workers and government employees. These workers may have the right to be terminated only for cause, and they might get a hearing process prior to being disciplined. Government workers are also protected by the First Amendment, particularly when it comes to free speech in their capacity as citizens rather than speech related to the workplace.

That’s why the teachers and off-duty police officers spotted at the Capitol have only been suspended pending investigations, rather than fired outright. For these workers, their fate may depend on whether they were peacefully participating in the day’s earlier rally – an activity that would be considered protected speech – as opposed to engaging in violence or joining the capitol invasion, which would be unprotected illegal conduct.

Things get murky if these government workers were displaying white supremacist symbols, like a confederate flag, at the rally. Courts have recognized limits on the public speech of police officers to uphold public confidence, community relations and department morale.

But as the Brennan Center, a liberal-leaning law and public policy institute, observed in an August 2020 report, “few law enforcement agencies have policies that specifically prohibit affiliating with white supremacist groups.” The absence of such policies could make it harder for departments to later discipline off-duty police officers for their role.

State lawmakers who participated are a different matter. Because they were elected by the people, they can’t be removed like ordinary employees. That might require a recall election or a state impeachment process.

But for most of the folks who snapped selfies in the Capitol – or ended up in someone else’s – if they don’t get a knock on the door from the FBI, they may soon be getting one from HR.

Elizabeth C. Tippett, Associate Professor, School of Law, University of Oregon

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