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The pesky mushroom cookies I bake for Betsy, my late mother-in-law

It’s mid-December somewhere on the near northwest side of Chicago. The kitchen is heady with cardamom, cloves, cinnamon and fresh citrus zest, which earlier my husband and I warmed with honey and butter into a gorgeous syrup. The counter is laden with spice jars, measuring cups, bowls, and sheet pans—creating a disorderly frame around four brown dough mounds.

A 3-by-5-inch note card, titled “Mushroom Cookies (Lithuanian Grybai),” presides over the whole chaotic affair, handwritten in slanted blue cursive and stained from decades of use. We’ve reached the card’s second side, when the script gets smaller and more crammed as it guides us through the shaping, baking, icing, and assembly of these time-consuming little monsters.

This is usually around the time I start getting insolent.

“These damn cookies! Cooking and kneading and baking and gluing! And look at this mess!”

I’ve never been much of a baker, in the same way I tell myself I’m no good at math. I could probably learn, but the structure of it all makes me antsy and self-conscious. Yet I’ve come to cherish the ritual of making these delicious, mushroom-shaped morsels, which my husband and I bake each year in honor of my late mother-in-law Betsy.

Betsy was warm, bright and quick to laugh. A longtime speech therapist, she had a rich vocabulary; beautiful, curly penmanship; and a deceptively progressive core hiding beneath her turtleneck and snowman sweater-vest sets. She loved her family and loved her church, which comprised the beating heart of her wide social circle and seemingly bottomless well of recipe inspiration.

And oh, could she bake.

Burnished, lattice-topped pies bursting with cranberries and cinnamon apples; tender Hungarian coffee cakes with sweet crumble roofs; minty bricks of dense, luscious fudge. But Betsy’s baking prowess shone brightest at Christmastime—her favorite season—when she embarked on her annual “cookies of the world” operation.

For a few solid weeks starting just after Thanksgiving, she’d bake dozens of cookies amassed through generations of home bakers, choosing a slightly different mix of greatest hits and regional specialties each year—from fudgie scotch squares to airy Italian marguerites, buttery English tea dainties, and brown-sugary pecan pie bars.

Every inch of counter space in her cramped old kitchen wore a thin dusting of flour and sugar granules. She’d float among open nut bags, uncovered jars and precarious towers of baking tins in her frilly floral apron, humming as she deftly pulled one cookie tray out of the oven and slid another in its place. When it was all over, she’d pack up almost all that tasty labor and distribute it to everyone she knew.

We all had our favorite cookies. I’d rifle shamelessly through multiple tins to retrieve a coveted pecan pie square, grateful that my father-in-law usually went for the tri-colored ribbon cookies instead. My sister-in-law waffled between the mushroom cookies and pinwheel-shaped Finnish stars.

But my husband’s favorites were always the mushroom cookies, so named for their shape: tender, richly spiced sour-cream cookie caps and stems glued together with icing and sprinkled with poppyseeds. I never learned where or when Betsy’s mother Harriet got the recipe, but each year I’d marvel idly at how on earth Betsy made them, internally celebrating that they were never my charge.

That changed in 2009, when we lost Betsy to ovarian cancer just before the holidays. A few weeks later, as we sifted through 60-odd years’ worth of her things in grief-stricken silence, my father-in-law pressed her two, crammed-full recipe boxes into my arms. The one that held her cherished desserts couldn’t even close, it so overflowed with time-worn, dough-spattered recipes. Somewhere in there, those damn mushroom cookies waited.

The following year, we willed ourselves through our first holiday season without her and that frightening, first solo batch of mushroom cookies. I squinted through tears to make out Harriet’s loopy cursive; the closeness of the grief rendered the labor and mess almost insurmountable.

But slowly, year after year, I’ve leaned into this process that so wholeheartedly captures Betsy’s persona, and reminds me of her generosity and fearless knack for baking. The cookies commandeer our full attention and spill into every kitchen crevice, flooding it with memories of her most beloved season.

My husband and I always make mushroom cookies together, blasting the same two Christmas albums on repeat the whole way through. He measures the ingredients and sets up our assembly lines, while I take on the more physical tasks of dumping, stirring, kneading and rolling—which dually act as occasional frustration release valves. Every year I wonder aloud whether we’ve rolled the caps too large, even though I know Betsy’s sing-songy reply by heart: “Oh, they’ll be just fine!”

While the last batch dries, my husband makes us Manhattans—which, by the way, taste superb with these cookies. We nibble on the imperfect ones while we carefully pack the rest in bags and parchment-lined tins to be handed off a few at a time as we make the rounds to friends and family.

Admittedly, we probably keep a few more for ourselves than Betsy would have, knowing we wouldn’t dare make a second batch. Plus, some time during the past decade, they’ve become my favorite Christmas cookies, too.

***

Recipe: Lithuanian Grybai (Mushroom Cookies) From Harriet Hardy

Prep time: 3 hours 30 minutes

Cook time: 20 minutes

Makes: 36 to 40 cookies

Ingredients:

  • 1/2 cup honey
  • 1/4 cup granulated sugar
  • 2 tablespoons packed light brown sugar
  • 2 tablespoons unsalted butter
  • 1 large egg
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons ground cardamom
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons freshly grated lemon zest
  • 1/2 teaspoon freshly grated orange zest
  • 2 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
  • 3/4 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
  • 2 tablespoons full-fat sour cream
  • 2 cups confectioners’ sugar
  • 1/2 cup poppy seeds, plus more as needed

Directions:

  1. Heat the honey in a large pan over medium heat until it bubbles at the sides of the pan. Remove from the heat; stir in the granulated and light brown sugars, butter, egg, spices, and zest. 
  2. Combine the flour, baking soda, and salt into a mixing bowl; stir in the honey mixture alternately with sour cream. Turn onto a lightly floured board; knead until the dough is easy to handle and not sticky (firm enough to hold the impression of your finger), about 5 minutes. Allow the dough to rest for 20 minutes. 
  3. Heat oven to 350°F. Divide the dough into four equal parts. Make mushroom “stems” from one part. Shape into two rolls, each 25 inches long about ⅜ inch in diameter. Cut into 1-inch lengths, reshaping ends of each “stem” if necessary. Place 1 ½ inches apart on an ungreased baking sheet. Bake until firm and light brown on bottoms, about 7 minutes. Cool on wire racks. 
  4. From the remaining dough, make the same amount of “caps” as “stems.” Form the “caps” by shaping dough into 1 ½-inch balls. Make an indentation about ½-inch deep on one side of each ball with the handle of a wooden spoon. Place caps, indented side down, ½ inch apart on an ungreased baking sheet. Bake until light brown on bottoms, about 12 minutes. Cool on wire racks. 
  5. Make the icing: Mix together the confectioners’ sugar and 1 tablespoon water. Add another 2 tablespoons water a little at a time, beating well in between, until the icing is combined. 
  6. Line a baking sheet with foil, and fit with a wire rack. Enlarge the indentation in the cooled caps with a small pointed knife. Dip one end of each stem into the icing and insert in the cap. Dip the cap into the icing, sprinkle the top with poppyseeds, and set the cookie on the rack to dry. Repeat until you’ve glued together all the stems and caps, and decorated the caps. Let dry for at least 15 minutes.
  7. Store the cookies in an airtight container for up to six weeks or in the freezer for about three months, though I’ve never seen them hang around this long.

 

Donald Trump’s American carnage: He continues to ignore COVID as his GOP enablers make it worse

It may seem as if President Donald Trump has done nothing since losing to Joe Biden but watch TV and rage tweet about his stolen election fantasy, however, he’s actually been quite busy.

He’s reportedly considering a military coup or an executive order to seize the voting machines in swing states that Biden won. He spent a lot of energy pushing Attorney General Bill Barr to pursue some of his wild theories about the alleged election theft and pressed him to appoint a Special Counsel to investigate Biden’s son Hunter. He’s also been engaged in purging the federal government of those he considers disloyal, particularly at the Pentagon, where he has spent the final few weeks of his presidency installing some of his closest collaborators for reasons that remain unclear.

So you can’t say he is doing nothing — he’s just not doing his job.

Last week, we were informed that there was a major cyber intrusion into both business and government by what the intelligence services and private security companies believe was the Russian government. By all accounts, it is an unprecedented case of cyber-espionage, however, Trump had nothing to say about this for days until this weekend when he downplayed the attack:

Needless to say, he has also been silent about the worst public health crisis America has faced in over a century as COVID-19 once again surges across the country, filling up hospitals and morgues at a frightening pace. According to the Washington Post, one of his closest advisers, speaking anonymously, said, “I think he’s just done with covid I think he put it on a timetable and he’s done with covid. . . . It just exceeded the amount of time he gave it.” Trump is known for projecting his own dark thoughts onto others so I suppose it’s not even ironic that he spent most of the fall campaign insisting that after November 4th, nobody would talk about COVID anymore. For instance, he told the Republican Convention that it was all fake news, that “they want to make our numbers look as bad as possible for the election.” At one campaign rally on October 24th, he told his ecstatic crowd:

“That’s all I hear about now. That’s all I hear. Turn on television—’Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid.’ A plane goes down. 500 people dead, they don’t talk about it. Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid.’ By the way, on November 4, you won’t hear about it anymore,”

This Christmas week, our country is losing an American every 33 seconds to Covid, Covid, Covid. As the Washington Post’s Philip Bump points out, “every time you listen to Bing Crosby’s ‘White Christmas,’ about five people have died of the virus between the beginning and the end of the song.” The death toll is over 318,000 and climbing.

Oddly enough, Trump can’t even tear himself away from his scheming about the election he indisputably lost six weeks ago to take a victory lap for the successful approvals of the vaccines. All he could bring himself to do was whine pitifully to the press that they’d better not give Biden credit because it was all his doing. He has barely mentioned the successful rollouts of the first two vaccines on his hysterical Twitter feed.

This is in keeping with his attitude about the crisis from the beginning.

You may recall that both the Washington Post and the New York Times have done deep reporting on the administration’s crisis response from the emergence of the virus in January to their desperate attempt to re-open the economy in the spring to this summer’s surprise surge. They are all excellent, long-form “tick-tock” pieces of how this emergency unfolded and unraveled. It was very bad in the beginning and hasn’t gotten any better since.

In the latest installment, a report from the Washington Post called “The inside story of how Trump’s denial, mismanagement and magical thinking led to the pandemic’s dark winter,” reporters Yasmeen Abutaleb, Josh Dawsey, Ashley Parker, and Philip Rucker lay out a narrative that would be farcical if it weren’t so very, very tragic: If Trump and his cohorts had made even the slightest effort to encourage mitigation strategies and public health guidelines instead of fighting them all the way, they could have saved tens of thousands of lives.

The vaccines are, as the Post puts it, a “triumph of scientific ingenuity and bureaucratic efficiency” but they don’t make up for the fact that the president, whom they describe as being “perpetually in denial,” has led a monumentally dysfunctional federal response that was the direct cause of proportionally more deaths in the U.S. than in other developed countries. It is an embarrassment that is laid directly at his feet:

The catastrophe began with Trump’s initial refusal to take seriously the threat of a once-in-a-century pandemic. But, as officials detailed, it has been compounded over time by a host of damaging presidential traits — his skepticism of science, impatience with health restrictions, prioritization of personal politics over public safety, undisciplined communications, chaotic management style, indulgence of conspiracies, proclivity toward magical thinking, allowance of turf wars and flagrant disregard for the well-being of those around him.

He would not listen to the scientists because they didn’t tell him what he wanted to hear. That is the story of his presidency, isn’t it? It’s got to be happy talk or Trump doesn’t want to hear it.

But let’s not forget all the Republicans who enabled this catastrophe. From the governors who refused to take the measures that might have spared lives to their accomplices in Congress who refused to save businesses from going under so they wouldn’t feel compelled to open up prematurely. Instead, they all genuflected to the man who can’t hear bad news without falling apart.

For instance, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fl., actually had the temerity to post a picture of him getting the vaccine before everyone else:

The argument for doing that is that we need important and famous people, regardless of their politics, to get vaccinated so that others will know it’s safe. I have a sneaking suspicion that I could count the number of people who will be reassured by Marco Rubio getting the vaccine on one hand, however. But ok, perhaps this is what we must do. Still, how infuriating for him to have the gall to then post this:

The obtuseness on display by a man who has excused the grotesquely incompetent response to this crisis having the nerve to lecture people who tried to save lives and businesses with almost no support from the federal government is almost too much to bear.

This is on Trump, to be sure. But all of his Republican accomplices were right there with him. They couldn’t bring themselves to do what was necessary to help the economy weather the crisis and instead decided that it was better to let businesses struggle and hundreds of thousands of Americans die over these past few months. Even though the Republicans finally agreed to a $900 billion relief package late Sunday evening, i’s very late and far from being enough. According to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., Republicans only came to the table after months of stalling to help the two GOP Senators in the Georgia runoff election. The carnage they’ve helped create is unforgivable.

What you need to know about this year’s winter solstice and the great conjunction

Editor’s note: Dr. William Teets is the director of Vanderbilt University’s Dyer Observatory. In this interview, he explains what does and doesn’t happen during the winter solstice on Dec. 21. Another cosmic phenomenon is also going to occur on the same day called “the great conjunction,” where Saturn and Jupiter, both of which can be seen with the naked eye, will appear extremely close to one another.

What happens on the winter solstice?

The winter solstice this year happens on Dec. 21. This is when the Sun appears the lowest in the Northern Hemisphere sky and is at its farthest southern point over Earth – directly over the Tropic of Capricorn. For folks living at 23.5 degrees south latitude, not only does this day mark their summer solstice, but they also see the Sun directly over them at local noon. After that, the Sun will start to creep back north again.

The sequence of images below shows the path of the Sun through the sky at different times of the year. You can see how the Sun is highest in the Northern Hemisphere sky in June, lowest in December, and halfway in between these positions in March and September during the equinoxes.

The winter solstice is the shortest day in the Northern Hemisphere but not the day with the latest sunrise and earliest sunset. How is that possible?

The winter solstice doesn’t coincide with the latest sunrise or the earliest sunset. Those actually occur about two weeks before and two weeks after the winter solstice. This is because we are changing our distance from the sun due to our elliptical, not circular, orbit, which changes the speed at which we orbit.

If you were to look at where the Sun is at exactly the same time of day over different days of the year, you would see that it’s not always in the same spot. Yes, the Sun is higher in the summer and lower in the winter, but it also moves from side to side of the average noontime position, which also plays a role in when the Sun rises and sets.

One should also keep in mind that the seasons are due to the Earth’s axial tilt, not our distance from the Sun. Believe it or not, we are closest to the Sun in January.

What is “the great conjunction”?

Saturn and Jupiter have appeared fairly close together in our sky throughout the year. But on Dec. 21, Saturn and Jupiter will appear so close together that some folks may have a difficult time seeing them as two objects.

If you have a pair of binoculars, you’ll easily be able to spot both planets. In even a small telescope, you’d see both planets at the same time in the same field of view, which is really unheard of. That’s what makes this conjunction so rare. Jupiter and Saturn appear to meet up about every 20 years. Most of the time, however, they’re not nearly as close together as we’re going to see them on Monday, Dec. 21.

For a comparison, there was a great conjunction back in 2000, but the two planets were separated by about two full-Moon widths. This year, the orbits will bring them to where they appear to be about one-fifth of a full-Moon diameter.

We have been encouraging folks to go out and look at these planets using just their eyes between now and Dec. 21. You’ll actually be able to see how much they appear to move over the course of a single day.

The next time they will get this close together in our sky won’t be for another 60 years, so this is going to be a once-in-a-lifetime event for many people. In fact, the last time they got this close together was in the year 1623, but it was really difficult, if not impossible, to see them then because they appeared much closer to the Sun and set soon after it. Go back another 400 years to 1226 and this would have been the last time that we would have had a good view of this type of conjunction.

What advice would you give to people who want to see the great conjunction?

If weather permits at Dyer Observatory, we’ll be streaming a live view of the conjunction from one of the observatory’s telescopes, and I’ll be available to answer questions. Even if you don’t have a telescope or a pair of binoculars, definitely go out and check out this very rare alignment with your own eyes. Remember that they set soon after sunset, so be ready to view right at dusk!

William Teets, Acting Director and Astronomer, Dyer Observatory, Vanderbilt University

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

Dr. Seth Norrholm: How to survive the physical, financial and emotional abuse of the Trump era

Donald Trump has been abusing the American people for at least four years. The abuse is physical, through Trump and his administration’s willfully negligent response to the coronavirus pandemic, which has now killed more than 300,000 Americans. In addition, Trump has encouraged political violence against his perceived enemies, including Democrats, antifascists, Black Lives Matter activists, journalists and others.

The abuse is financial. Trump and the Republican Party have enacted policies — both before and during the coronavirus pandemic — that have severely harmed the economy, worsened social inequality and diverted huge sums of the public’s money to the very richest individuals and corporations. Trump and his party’s policies have resulted in record unemployment and job losses, rampant hunger and poverty, and millions of Americans living under threat of eviction and homelessness.

The abuse is emotional. Trump and his allies have caused the American people to suffer a type of collective post-traumatic stress disorder. Trumpism as a society-wide emotional and mental pathology is also shown by the way Trump’s “white working class” supporters (and even more so his non-white followers) manifest a form of Stockholm syndrome in which they identify with the abuser and “love” his mistreatment of them.

In the 2020 election, Trump was soundly defeated by Joe Biden. But like other abusers, Trump will not stop his cruel and vile behavior. Moreover, the American people’s decision to “break up” with him has caused Trump to rage and become even more abusive.

Trump has attempted a coup against democracy and the American people, and has amplified his use of stochastic terrorism and other incitements to political violence. Even after Trump (likely) leaves office next month, he will continue to claim that he is the “real president” of the United States and interfere with the normal functioning of government and society whenever and however he can.

In all probability, Donald Trump will continue to be a menacing and nearly omnipresent figure in American life, culture and politics for years to come. He is America’s very own authoritarian stalker. 

How can the American people escape Trump, and begin to heal from his reign of terror and abuse? To explore that I recently spoke with Dr. Seth Norrholm, whom I have interviewed twice before. He is a translational neuroscientist and one of the world’s leading experts on PTSD and fear. He is currently the scientific director at the Neuroscience Center for Anxiety, Stress, and Trauma (NeuroCAST) in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences at the Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit. Norrholm has also contributed several essays to Salon, co-authored with clinical psychologist Alan Blotcky and others.

In this conversation, Norrholm argues that the combination of Trump’s emotional and other abuse is a chronic stressful event that will have health impacts on the American people for years into the future, and that the Republican Party, the right-wing media and Trump’s followers have been enabling this ongoing abuse of the American people. He warns that this abusive pattern, in combination with the mass death of the coronavirus pandemic, may lead to a form of survivor’s guilt among the American people, which will require national mourning and intervention.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Donald Trump and his regime have also afflicted massive and traumatic stress on the American people, so it is not surprising that we are collectively dealing with PTSD, anxiety and depression. Even after leaving office, Trump is still going to be a large presence in American life. Using the traumatic stress, abuse and PTSD model, what happens when the abuser refuses to leave the victim alone but continues to harass and stalk them, as Trump is likely to do for years to come?

Unfortunately, that is the case with many abusive relationships. There will be some type of formal legal action taken, such as a divorce or restraining order. There will be some attempt by the abuser to push the boundaries of the restraining order, for example. That can involve physical stalking or online stalking. They may make a dummy account to track and stalk their target online as well. The relationship is formally dissolved, but the abusive elements still remain.

Now, if we think of Trump as being in an abusive relationship with the American people, this is unique in the country’s history. He is soon to be the former president. Assuming things go as planned, Joe Biden will be inaugurated on Jan. 20. Those elements of the election and transition of power are akin to the formal process of ending a relationship legally.

But with the president of the United States, there’s a lot of continuation there. He’s still referred to as “Mr. President,” he still gets a security detail, and a lot of the perks and benefits of having served in the office. We’ve never really had to confront a continuation with a malicious president. What do we do as a country with someone like Donald Trump who is so pathological, so evil and so corrupt? With a former president who has those traits, and still quite a bit of symbolic power in the country and world?

Abusers will continue to claim that the victims are in a relationship with them even when it is over. They often claim their former partners as a type of personal property. Donald Trump is going to do this by claiming that he is still the “real president” and that Joe Biden is illegitimate and a fraud.

That is part of the alternate reality that abusers and malignant narcissists create for themselves. It is an example of gaslighting and the other forms of lying intended to get the abused person to the point where they begin to doubt themselves. They ask, “Am I crazy, or is he crazy?” The victim can become disoriented in terms of their core identity.

Donald Trump is trying to maintain an alternative reality by stating, “I am the president.” There are a few ways to understand what Trump is doing there. First, I do believe he is a con man and a grifter. The longer he keeps up this fight, the more money he can generate. Regardless of his apparent psychopathology, Trump has the ability to seek wealth, power and adulation. Second, he fears exposure both legally and as a fraud. That is why he keeps up his alternate reality.

What is unusual about this situation is that there are 74 million people, Trump’s voters, along with his party, his cabinet members and others, to help keep Trump in his alternate reality. There are so many enablers for Trump and his delusions. That is very different from the typical domestic abuse situation. Trump has a team of “surrogate abusers.”

The worst thing one can do for a malignant narcissist or an abuser like Donald Trump is to tell him or her that they are correct or to otherwise validate the lies and false persona. Because then not only is this person pathologically telling themselves how special they are and how superior they are, but they have an echo chamber that is telling them the same thing.

Clinical work and other research show that the most dangerous time in an abusive relationship is the end. That is when there is likely to be an escalation of some sort. This is when the abuser is most likely to be their most volatile.

What has Trump and his allies’ emotional and physical abuse of the American people done to us collectively?

The last four years with Donald Trump have been a major chronic, continuous, stressful event. It has created a state of anxiety and unpredictability that was present on almost a daily basis. That is different from a typical PTSD case, where a person can identify one or more discrete events that happened in their life and from which there are post-traumatic consequences. An example would be a combat veteran who was hit by an IED or a motor vehicle accident victim who survived a deadly crash.

Those are distinct events. Therapeutically, a clinician would try to isolate that event for the patient, to point out that the likelihood of experiencing something like that again is quite low, for the most part. We help the patient to better see reality. There are ways to work through and process that type of post-traumatic situation.

Trump’s time in office and what he did to the country is very different. One has to recognize that the source of the persistent state of stress is not going anywhere anytime soon. Now, what are we as a society going to do with that problem? I believe that there need to be task forces comprised of experts in domestic violence and mental health and other medical professionals. Their job would be to do community outreach.

Some specifics as to what Trump and these years with him have done to the American people: There are adverse psychological, physical, and cardiovascular problems; gastrointestinal problems; appetite, diet and sleep problems. Trump and his stress have likely caused new addictions, as well as caused people to relapse. Such problems are increased with a chronic stressor.

Suicidal ideation has likely increased under Trump. Combine that with the COVID pandemic and the country is going to be struggling with a psychological tsunami of problems that will need to be addressed.

Donald Trump and his time in office will be studied for years to come by social psychologists as well as mental health professionals. It is a textbook example of a pathocracy, and how a society can be manipulated into collective anti-social behavior by a pathological leader. As an example, consider Trump’s recent rally in Georgia, which In so many ways was a crystallization of his evil and dark charisma. As an expert on mental health and neuroscience, what did you see at that event?

It was a confluence of psychological phenomena. There was the psychopathology and disordered personality of Donald Trump on full display for an hour and 40 minutes. But the crowd also demonstrated the cult dynamic that exists between Trump and his followers. Trump likely could be diagnosed with several personality disorders. Beyond any specific one, it is safe to say that his personality as a whole is disordered. At Trump’s Georgia rally, he showed his grandiosity, his sense of superiority and his disdain for people he views as inferior.

Do not overlook how Trump’s grandiosity is attractive to his followers. It is appealing, like a drug for them. That is part of the collective narcissism where Trump’s grandiosity spills over onto his followers, who are then empowered, in some cases, into becoming reckless, violent and aggressive.

The mindset is, you’re either with us or you’re an enemy. From a cult perspective, it is either all or nothing in terms of reality and loyalty. And there were, of course, literally hundreds of lies told by Trump at the rally.

As part of Trump’s god complex and his followers’ feelings of shared omnipotence, he is offering the cult members a type of promised land. Trump’s promised land is a White America in which there are no immigrants, everyone is rich and there is no racial diversity. As part of the shared omnipotence of Trump’s cult, members are told that they must not stray from the flock or oppose him or criticize him — because if they do, they are out, the relationship collapses. Trump’s power over his followers is extreme.

What role did the coronavirus play at Trump’s rally in Georgia? That event was a literal death cult meeting, in which where people were not wearing masks during a deadly pandemic.

Outright denial. Not believing that the threat is real. Ignorance. But Trump used an interesting cult tactic here. He told his followers that the coronavirus was nothing to fear, then he got it and recovered (without highlighting the extraordinary care and treatment he received) and as such “demonstrated” to them that if they get it, nothing really bad will happen. Moreover, it’s a reinforcement of the idea that the cult leader will protect me and all will be fine.

For those Americans who have survived the pandemic and the other horrors of Trump’s time in office, will they experience some type of survivor’s guilt?

Absolutely. There are going to be a significant number of people in this country with survivor’s guilt, which is the idea that somebody did not survive, and I did, and then trying to reconcile why that is. In addition, there will be a large number of people who will continue to masks in the future because they are hypersensitive to this trauma. I believe we will also see more people becoming “preppers” because of the pandemic and all the death, stress and isolation. One of the things that will need to happen, in terms of healing from Trump-related PTSD and the pandemic, is some type of national closure.

I believe the best way to accomplish that is to have an annual national day of remembrance. There should also be a monument constructed on the National Mall as a reminder of the losses from the pandemic, and also a warning and symbol of not forgetting the political and social factors that led to this disaster. We cannot let this disaster disappear from the public consciousness.

Two vaccines for the coronavirus have already been approved and are being distributed. Will Trump’s followers agree to be vaccinated?

In a cult, logic does not matter. Consider that at first Trump was calling it a hoax. Then he was talking about miracle cures. Then he started talking about a vaccine. Trump has taken his followers all the way from, “This thing doesn’t exist,” to “We’ll have a vaccine out to you shortly,” a feat of true mental gymnastics. In cult psychology, a logical pattern is not necessary. If Donald Trump is delivering the message, there does not need to be any logic for his followers to listen to him.

Kelly Loeffler says she uses private jet to save taxpayers, but took publicly-funded flights

Three days after The Atlanta Journal-Constitution broke a story in which a spokesperson for Sen. Kelly Loeffler, R-Ga., said she used her private jet to “save taxpayer money,” the unelected Republican took a taxpayer-funded commercial flight from Atlanta to Washington. Three days later, she took another one home.

In all, Loeffler has taken at least two dozen taxpayer-backed commercial flights back and forth to Washington after claiming her personal airplane was an asset that benefited the people she served, according to biannual reports published by the secretary of the Senate.

The latest of those reports covers expenditures up to Sept. 1; it is unclear how many times Loeffler has flown on commercial aircraft since then.

Senators and their staff can avail themselves of public funds for travel that is deemed necessary to their government jobs. Conversely, ethics rules allow Loeffler to use her private plane for government business as long as she doesn’t expense it to her government account. Aides told the Atlanta paper in February that the “majority” of her private flights are her trips between Atlanta and Washington, adding that the multimillionaire “occasionally” flies commercial to D.C. — in coach class, believe it or not.

At the time of that report, however Loeffler had not reported taking any commercial flights at all, according to Senate records, although her staff appears to have taken several.

In all, Loeffler’s airfare cost taxpayers $3,665.45, a sum that would likely be substantially higher in a normal year, as the steep drop in demand brought about by the coronavirus pandemic has forced major airlines to make dramatic price cuts.

Loeffler’s expense reports show a significant difference in cost between trips taken in the months of May and June, when airfares had cratered, suggesting that Loeffler has not always flown in coach class, as she has claimed.

For instance, the senator’s May 4 flight to Washington cost $87.31, and her return to Atlanta on May 7 cost the same amount, to the penny. For her next round trip to the nation’s capital, the first leg cost $233.36, but the return once again cost $87.31. These discrepancies, in those same amounts (with one exception), hold true for all 16 taxpayer-funded flights in May, June and July, when average fares between the two cities were almost always under $100.

In July, Loeffler said in a Fox News interview that she had been flying on Delta Airlines, which is based at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, one of the the busiest in the country. Delta’s PACs and CEO made maximum donations to Loeffler’s campaign at the end of March, as she was working on the CARES Act.

Salon reported in April that airlines that gave large amounts to President Trump’s re-election were among the first recipients of corporate bailout money included in that $2.2 trillion relief bill. Delta alone got $5.4 billion.

If Loeffler had indeed used her private jet for the “majority” of her flights to Washington, she would be squeezing in an additional 25 trips, minimum. But because the senator and her husband, Jeff Sprecher, chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, chartered their plane under a company that offers anonymity, the jet is “not available for public tracking per request from the owner/operator,” according to a database on the site FlightAware.

Loeffler’s spokesperson claimed last February that not only did the senator use her $10 million 2010 Bombardier Challenger 300 — which she and Sprecher bought after her appointment to the Senate — to save her constituents money, but that she paid for it “out of her pocket.” It appears possible, however, that the couple joined the “frenzy” of Wall Street money managers who leapt at a loophole in the 2017 Republican tax bill that turns private jets into flying tax shelters: The provision allows a company to write off the full price of a new or used airplane against the company’s earnings.

(Loeffler’s financial disclosure forms also show that Sprecher owns a Fulton County jet hangar worth $1 million, which pulls in somewhere between $100,001 and $1 million in annual rent.)

Loeffler has also used her private jet for campaign-related trips as short as an 18-minute hop from a central Georgia town to Savannah, on the Atlantic coast. 

The senator’s former Republican opponent in the 2020 primary, Rep. Doug Collins, frequently invoked the jet on the campaign trail in an effort to paint Loeffler, by far the wealthiest member of Congress, as out of touch with Georgia voters.

“Who buys a $30 million jet in secret then posts a picture with their new KIA on Facebook around the same time?” a Collins spokesperson told the Journal Constitution in February. “That’s all you need to know about Kelly Loeffler.”

Next month, Loeffler faces a runoff against her Democratic opponent, the Rev. Raphael Warnock, who grew up in government housing and later became pastor at Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church. Polls suggest the race will be very close.

As relief deal nears, AOC slams Democrats for locking “left flank in the basement”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., voiced frustration on Sunday with what she characterized as Democratic leaders’ efforts to shut progressives out of key policy negotiations, a message that came as the details of a roughly $900 billion coronavirus relief package began to slowly trickle out just ahead of an expected vote.

“One major difference between GOP and Dems is that [Republicans] leverage their right flank to gain policy concessions and generate enthusiasm, while Dems lock their left flank in the basement [because] they think that will make Republicans be nicer to them,” the New York Democrat tweeted, referencing Republican leaders’ decision to rally around a last-minute push by Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., to curtail the Federal Reserve’s emergency lending powers in the relief bill.

Toomey’s original provision — which Democrats slammed as an effort to sabotage the incoming Biden administration — was narrowed significantly in negotiations late Saturday, but the Pennsylvania Republican said Sunday that he is “very pleased” with the outcome.

Under the compromise agreement, according to the Wall Street Journal, “$429 billion previously provided to the Treasury Department to backstop losses in Fed lending programs would be revoked, and the Fed wouldn’t be able to replicate identical emergency lending programs next year without congressional approval. But the agreement wouldn’t prevent the Fed from starting other similar programs.”

As negotiations over much-needed coronavirus relief accelerated rapidly over the past week, Ocasio-Cortez and other progressives publicly aired their outrage at the exclusion of key priorities and the overall inadequacy of the package, which will ultimately be much smaller than even the pared-back version of the HEROES Act that the House passed in October. The total size of that package was around $2.2 trillion.

The relief legislation that is expected to be unveiled and potentially passed Sunday includes $600 direct payments and a $300 weekly boost to unemployment benefits — both significantly smaller than what Democratic leaders have supported in the past. Progressive lawmakers have continued pushing in recent days for direct payments of at least $1,200 per adult — a proposal supported by 88% of likely voters — and an unemployment boost of $600 a week.

As talks progressed toward the finish line Sunday, the Washington Post reported that “consensus has settled on $600 stimulus checks, which would begin to be reduced at $75,000 a year income level, similar to the last round of stimulus checks. … And Congress would also extend unemployment benefits of up to $300 per week, which could start as early as Dec. 27.”

The final legislation is also expected to include billions for vaccine distribution, rental assistance and nutrition aid.

While noting that progressives succeeded in getting direct payments back on the negotiating table, Ocasio-Cortez said Friday that a one-time check of $600 is “not enough.”

“We want $1,200 at least. And Republicans are fighting it back down to $600, which is really unfortunate,” said the New York Democrat. “We need to really make sure that we hold the Republican Party accountable for cutting people’s stimulus checks in half.”

Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., also criticized the size of the direct payments, saying in an interview Sunday that “the truth of the matter is $600 will not even cover a month’s rent.”

Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., expressed alarm that with a potential vote just hours away, she had not yet seen any legislative text.

“Still not a peep on language. It will probably be another multi-billion-dollar bill, without real debate, floor amendments, introduced and passed probably within hours,” Omar tweeted. “No time for the public input or objections. What a complete nightmarish example of representative democracy.”

Last week, as Common Dreams reported, Omar said it is “really quite shameful that we find ourselves negotiating a deal with such a small amount of money when we know just how devastated the American people are across our country.

“Think about it: In March, we were able to send $1,200 checks to people and give them $600 in unemployment insurance benefits,” Omar said. “And now we’re talking about possibly sending a one-time check, eight months later, of $600 and reducing that unemployment benefit to $300.”

Republican leaders and members of the Trump administration, meanwhile, are reportedly satisfied with the success they’ve had in pulling Democratic leaders down from their initial demand for a multi-trillion-dollar relief package, which economists say is necessary to pull the U.S. economy out of deep recession and provide adequate help to desperate Americans.

While the final package is not expected to include any form of liability shield for businesses — a Republican priority — it will also exclude additional aid to crisis-ravaged state and local governments.

“I couldn’t be more pleased where we landed this,” Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin reportedly said during a Republican conference call on Sunday.

New bill proposes stopping unemployment agencies that make mistakes from demanding money back

Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, R-Wash., and Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Fla., have introduced a bill that would shield unemployed workers from having to return federal pandemic unemployment assistance benefits when agencies have mistakenly paid them these funds. The legislation, submitted on Dec. 2, came in the wake of an article by ProPublica in October that exposed the debts and anguish faced by workers who have been overpaid by state unemployment agencies (which administer both state and federal payments), sometimes as a result of the state’s mistakes. The agencies, the article showed, have variously garnished paychecks or taxed refunds to obtain repayment, while others charged interest on the debt.

“I’m grateful to ProPublica for investigating the fallout of poorly managed unemployment benefit programs,” Herrera Beutler said. “I realize state unemployment agencies have been given a tall task, but that’s no excuse for the level of incompetence and unresponsiveness they’ve demonstrated in delivering congressionally approved unemployment benefits.”

As ProPublica reported, states are allowed to grant hardship waivers to individuals who mistakenly receive an overpayment of state unemployment benefits. But the law is different when it comes to benefits paid by the federal government. The Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, created by the CARES Act in March, bans debt forgiveness. This means that millions of American workers who are self-employed or hold nontraditional work schedules — categories that were not eligible for unemployment benefits until the PUA was established — can be held liable for a mistake made by an unemployment agency.

HR 8812, the Relief for Working Families Act, would change that, allowing states to extend waivers to PUA overpayments in cases where the individual receiving the jobless benefits is not at fault and such repayment would create further financial hardship.

The legislation would ease the plight of people like Ahmad Ghabboun, who was the focus of ProPublica’s article. Ghabboun was a freelance driver for Amazon Flex and Uber in Washington state, and he lost work during the pandemic. He was deemed eligible for aid under PUA and the CARES Act but was told, months later, to repay the state’s Employment Security Department $14,990 after accidentally stating that he could work from home — as a driver, he clearly could not — in one of his weekly online applications for benefits.

Ghabboun’s problem with the state has separately been rectified. But even that process, which included personal attention to his case in the aftermath of the ProPublica article, illustrates the daunting obstacles for people in his position. Following the publication of the article, Ghabboun received a call from a specialist at the state’s unemployment office who told him the agency would fix the error: Not only would Ghabboun’s debt be cleared, but the state would also return the funds it had previously diverted to repay the incorrect debt.

It was good news, but because of the rigid way the state’s system is programmed, it wasn’t a straightforward fix. The state employee warned Ghabboun that as the error was being untangled, the online portal would send him a series of notifications, messages and fluctuating amounts in his account; the state employee recommended Ghabboun ignore the messages. Sure enough, Ghabboun’s online account initially showed his debt to the state rising, much to his alarm, and he continued to receive contradictory messages from the state for several weeks. (“I cannot discuss this claimant’s case specifically,” the spokesman for the state agency, Nick Demerice, explained in an email. “I wish I could because each case is usually very complicated and specific. … When an agent speaks to a claimant in this situation they will often warn them about these letters and instruct them to wait before taking action so the new programs can kick in.”)

In early November, Ghabboun’s debt was cleared from his account and he was reimbursed for the funds that had been used to pay down that debt. He was also approved to receive future unemployment payments.

In the meantime, readers moved by Ghabboun’s hardship raised over $4,000 for his family on GoFundMe, alerted him to job openings and offered to donate supplies for the arrival of his first child, who is due in the coming weeks. Ghabboun has been heartened by the outpouring of support, but he also hopes that others caught on the punitive end of the unemployment system can get access to the same specialized assistance that he has. In the Facebook group for unemployment claimants in Washington state, he’s been sharing advice with people trapped in similar situations. “I want a solution that helps everyone,” he said. “It’s not fair that this is happening.”

Herrera Beutler agreed. “I’m glad to be aware of this issue as I continue to help individuals navigate the unemployment insurance system here in Washington,” she said. If the bill does not gain traction in the lame-duck session, she plans to reintroduce it in the new session of Congress. “Hopefully we can help others avoid falling into this situation, because Washington’s ESD clearly doesn’t have the ability to quickly rectify any errors.”

Why America’s survival depends on bankrupting the Republican Party

It’s time to defund the GOP, and there’s precedent and strategy for the effort.

The need to cut the party’s access to both private and government money is seen in the reaction by some extremist Republicans to news like a New York State lawmaker’s proposal to make vaccination against COVID-19 mandatory. Predictably, the far right is freaking out. “Freedom!” they scream as they run around maskless, assaulting their fellow citizens with potentially virus-laden breath.

Large parts of the Republican base now join conspiracists in the misguided belief that vaccine manufacturers are participating in mind-control experiments and that public health measures like masks are “un-American,” while we’re being sickened and dying from the highest rates of COVID-19 infection and death in the developed world.

Republicans on the Supreme Court even say the founders of our republic and the framers of the Constitution would never go along with preventing churches and synagogues from holding superspreader events during a pandemic, but, like so many things GOP, it’s a lie.

In 1798, President John Adams signed the first public health care legislation—it was to pay for medical care and hospitalization not just for the Navy but also for civilian sailors. And both he and President George Washington had participated in quarantine events during epidemics in the summers of 1793 and 1798, and both promoted inoculation against smallpox.

From 1790 to 1800, Philadelphia was the nation’s capital. When the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 recurred in 1798, that city’s board of health, with no objections raised by President John Adams or any member of Congress, ordered a block-by-block evacuation of parts of Philadelphia.

Most signers of the Declaration and Constitution were still alive, and many were in Congress and on the Supreme Court. None opposed the lockdown. Churches not only couldn’t meet; a few in the quarantine areas were closed down entirely for much of the year in America’s capital city.

From their bans on teaching sex education and evolution in our schools, to denying climate change, to this latest campaign against public health, far-right Republicans’ fight against science has damaged America’s standing in the world and destroyed the lives of millions.

Thomas Paine, in his time, wrote about “The Age of Reason.” Today we have “The Age of Intentional Republican Stupidity.” And they don’t just embrace it for themselves; they’re hell-bent on imposing it on every American, from schoolchildren on up.

They have rigged elections by making it hard to vote, seditiously tried to overturn the 2020 election, promoted racial and religious bigotry and violence, destroyed our public school systems, gutted our unions, and rewritten our tax system to screw the middle class.

Since the election of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have damaged America more in 40 years than our worst enemies could have dreamed of by other means.

These Republicans are not patriots; they’re traitors to reason, science, education, human rights, democracy and now, unbelievably, public health. They’re traitors to humanity itself.

The only way to deal with a death-dealing cult is to end it; thus, we must embark on a campaign to defund the Republican Party.

Back in 1981, the Republican Party decided to defund the Democratic Party, and actually pulled it off.

While the Republican Party had principally been funded by rich people and big business since the 1920s, the Democrats were largely reliant on the labor unions. So Ronald Reagan, as part of his “Reagan Revolution,” figured the best way to destroy the Democratic Party was to destroy America’s unions.

His first shot was to destroy PATCO, the air traffic controllers’ union, and he did it in less than a week in August of 1981. He, along with Republicans in Congress and conservatives on the Supreme Court, then embarked on a campaign to eliminate unions from the American landscape, thus gutting the Democratic Party’s ability to win elections.

It worked, and by 1992, American union membership, and union’s ability to fund elections, had collapsed so severely that Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party turned to giant corporations and billionaires to win that election year.

Reagan’s plan not only kneecapped the Democratic Party for the next 40 years but also changed the party at its core, turning it from President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society party into Bill Clinton’s corporate-friendly Democratic Leadership Council/New Democrats, now in bed with big banks, insurance companies, etc.

Defunding the Republican Party may even force it to start focusing on the needs of regular people rather than just billionaires and corporations, which only adds to the urgency of the job. There are just a few steps through the process, which include:

  • End “Red State Welfare.” Kentucky gets $2.41 for every dollar they send to Washington, D.C. Most other red states are similarly “taker” states, so let’s fight for a law limiting states to no more than, say, $1.50 for every buck they sent to D.C. in tax revenues. Call it welfare reform!
  • End corporate welfare that gets recycled to GOP politicians. This includes $700 billion a year to fossil fuel companies, and nearly $1 trillion a year we give to Big Pharma, as well as support for insurance companies (like subsidies for the “Medicare Advantage” scam) and “Big Ag.”
  • End corporate monopolies. Break up giant corporations and make America safe again for small businesses while rejuvenating local economies. From airlines to tech to banking and retail, giant monopolies rip off working-class Americans and use some of that money to fund the GOP.
  • Bring back Eisenhower’s 91 percent top tax rate, or at least something north of 50 percent. America’s strongest economy was during the 30 years from 1950 to 1980, with a top tax rate of 91 percent to 74 percent. Progressive taxation on the super-wealthy was openly supported by Republican presidents like Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford. With that tax revenue, we built highways, schools and hospitals, and put men on the moon, while the best way CEOs could avoid the tax was to use the money to pay their workers better wages. Reagan cut that top rate to less than 30 percent, and the billionaires it produced now pour money into the GOP to keep it that way.
  • Follow Europe’s example and impose a wealth tax on great fortunes. Average Americans pay a wealth tax every year—the property tax on their largest store of wealth, their homes. Billionaires should pay a similar annual tax on their money bins.
  • End campaign contributions from corporations, end super PACs, and limit billionaires’ ability to skew our politics with their money. We did this in the 1970s after the Nixon bribery scandals, but the Supreme Court blew it up. There are multiple ways around that, and the Democratic Party should make this job one.

These simple “Progressive Contract with America” steps, along with restoring the ability of American workers to unionize, will not only revive the Democratic Party, but also restore America to economic greatness and give us a far more honest political system.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

“We are not embarrassed enough”: Ilhan Omar slams Congress for failing the public on COVID relief

With a coronavirus relief deal finally coming together after months of disastrous inaction from Congress and obstruction by the GOP, Rep. Ilhan Omar said late Wednesday that lawmakers should be “embarrassed” by the inadequacy of the emerging package given the scale of the public health and economic emergencies facing the country.

In an interview on “The Mehdi Hasan Show,” the Minnesota Democrat lamented that the $900 billion relief measure congressional leaders are close to finalizing is dramatically smaller than the $2.2 trillion CARES Act approved in March.

“It’s really quite shameful that we find ourselves negotiating a deal with such a small amount of money when we know just how devastated the American people are across our country,” said Omar, the whip for the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC). “Think about it: in March, we were able to send $1,200 checks to people and give them $600 in unemployment insurance benefits. And now we’re talking about possibly sending a one-time check, eight months later, of $600 and reducing that unemployment benefit to $300.”

“We are not embarrassed enough as leaders,” said Omar, who last week joined a CPC letter (pdf) demanding “at least $2,000 for all working individuals and families” in the relief package.

Omar’s frustration with the paltry size of the current relief measure relative to previous proposals has been echoed by other progressive lawmakers in recent days as the economic meltdown spurred by the coronavirus pandemic continues to inflict massive damage. Researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of Notre Dame estimate that nearly eight million people in the U.S. have been pushed into poverty since the summer.

“The economists say the sharp rise in poverty is occurring for two reasons: Millions of people cannot find jobs, and government aid for the unemployed has declined sharply since the summer,” the Washington Post reported. “The average unemployment payment was more than $900 a week from late March through the end of July, but it fell to about $300 a week in August, making it harder for the unemployed to pay their bills.”

Senate Republicans have repeatedly blocked necessary relief over the past several months, refusing to even consider ambitious legislation such as the $3.4 trillion HEROES Act, which the Democrat-controlled House passed in May. Republicans also brushed aside the revised $2.2 trillion version of the HEROES Act that the House passed in October.

But Democratic leaders have also come under fire for their approach to the relief talks. Alluding to a stimulus package that was discussed prior to the November presidential election but ultimately rejected by the Democratic leadership, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) tweeted earlier this week, “I was ridiculed when I said take $1.8 trillion.”

“That had $1,200 for each adult, $1000 per child, $400 [per week in additional unemployment benefits], $300 billion state and local,” Khanna noted. The California Democrat was among a small number of Democratic lawmakers who urged House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to run with the $1.8 trillion offer floated by the White House, and then pursue a larger package after the election.

Pelosi dismissed the pre-election offer as inadequate, in part because it did not include enough aid to state and local governments. The relief package currently under negotiation will likely not include any aid to state and local governments.

Speaking to Politico on Monday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) also criticized Democratic leaders for their handling of the negotiations.

“What kind of negotiation is it when you go from $3.4 trillion [in the House-passed HEROES Act] to $188 billion in new money?” the Vermont senator said, referring to the level of new funding in a bipartisan relief framework that served as a starting point for the current talks. “That is not a negotiation. That is a collapse.”

The $900 billion package that could pass by the end of the week is nowhere near the level of spending that economists say is needed to relieve widespread suffering, bring the economy out of deep recession, and ensure a speedy and just recovery.

In a paper (pdf) released earlier this month by the Groundwork Collaborative, economists Dr. Mark Paul and Dr. Adam Hersh argued that “Congress needs to provide economic relief of between $3-4.5 trillion in the short-term in order to get American families and businesses working at their full potential.”

“Whereas our estimate for needed economic relief would bring the economy in line with true full employment,” the pair wrote, “falling short of this target will only widen the current health and economic crises.”

 

“Monster Hunter” review: Jovovich and Jaa team up for a virtually unwatchable video game movie

The opening few minutes of Paul W.S. Anderson’s “Monster Hunter” are such a delightful eruption of unfettered, goofy-ass, who-cares-what-your-parents-think nerdcore that it seems as if the director of 1995’s “Mortal Kombat” (and the “Resident Evil” series after that) has reset video game movies back to the good old days when they weren’t bogged down by delusions of respectability — when they were memorably bad instead of just dull or “Assassin’s Creed.” If only.

The “Monster Hunter” franchise, which might be helpful for neophytes to think of as the Pepsi to Pokémon’s Coke, has always stood out for its high fantasy trappings, and boy oh boy does Anderson embrace those in a big way right out of the gate. We open on a hilariously self-important quote about “new worlds” that are hidden “behind the perception of our senses” as Paul Haslinger’s glitch-pop score blares in the background, and that’s an excellent start. Cut to: A galleon ship full of sand pirates cutting through a vast desert in the dead of night as a giant subterranean worm of some kind is hot on their tail. Hell yeah.

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And it only gets better from there — one of the brigands aboard the boat is Ron Perlman, the “Pottersville” star rocking a leather vest and an anime haircut as he plays a “Monster Hunter” mainstay known as Admiral (imagine someone rolled Sabretooth and Cloud Strife into 300 pounds of tenderized meat and you’ll get a sense of what this looks like). Admiral’s best friends? That’s right: “Ong-Bak” ass-kicker Tony Jaa and a giant, ginsu knife-wielding cat known as a “Meowscular Chef.” Jaa falls overboard, the music swirls around the title card in a maelstrom of hot synth action, and the 2099 Oscar season steels itself for the “Mank” that someone will inevitably write about the making of the Chinese-American co-production that brought the globe’s two biggest superpowers together even as tensions between them grew strained on the world stage.

Alas, some hidden worlds should have stayed behind the perception of our senses, and Paul W.S. Anderson — an occasionally form-bending filmmaker who’s never met a beloved franchise that he couldn’t militarize beyond all interest or recognition — sucks any trace of life out of the “Monster Hunter” series the moment his movie exchanges the cartoon sand pirates of its campy prologue in favor of some generic soldier types on our side of the dimensional rift.

From that point on, “Monster Hunter” is relentlessly terrible even by 2020 standards, as it quickly descends into a dull and colorless bit of bug-hunting that marries the production value of a SyFy Original with the scale of a tutorial level, resulting in one of the drabbest and least imaginative video game movies ever made. Series fans will feel cheated by such a chintzy and incurious take on something they love, while the rest of us will be left wondering how the source material earned itself any fans in the first place.

Milla Jovovich, the director’s wife and long-time muse, takes over in the newly invented role of Captain Natalie Artemis, a no-nonsense, no-personality U.S. Army Ranger in charge of a UN military team so bland they make the average video game NPC feel like Chekhov characters by comparison. For all of the unique energy that the likes of Clifford “T.I.” Harris Jr., Meagan Good, Diego Boneta, and Jin Au-Yeung (aka MC Jin) bring to the screen, these trigger-happy redshirts don’t share a decent line of dialogue between them (a certain joke has been excised from the film’s American release after causing a, uh, bit of an uproar in China, though the fact that it made the cut in the first place is a pretty damning indicator of Anderson’s meathead sense of humor).

The good news is that none of these characters are long for this world, and not only because they soon get swept up in an electrical storm that spirits them into Monster Hunter land or whatever it’s called — it’s the same stretch of South African desert, but the roads have been replaced by massive, hard-shelled bugs that feed on people and plant larvae in their guts (T.I.’s hilarious death scene is poised to have a long second life on social media). “Monster Hunter” fans may delight at the idea of seeing live-action Black Diablos, but it’s hard to imagine that even the most dedicated enthusiasts will be overjoyed to see how the iconic beast has been rendered with all the artistry of “Eight-Legged Freaks,” and made to look like what might happen if Zuul from “Ghostbusters” ever mated with the mean triceratops boss from the TV show “Dinosaurs.”

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It’s tempting to forgive the uninspired creature design (along with the lifeless action scene during which it comes to the fore) in the heat of the moment, as viewers naturally assume that Black Diablos will be just one of many different monsters featured in this blockbuster adaptation of a video game series that contains hundreds upon hundreds of them. Not so fast. Aside from the “Starship Troopers”-like Nerscylla, the Black Diablos is all we get until deep into the second act, as the entire first hour of “Monster Hunter” is entirely, inexplicably devoted to the tentative alliance that forms between Artemis and the titular Monster Hunter (Jaa) who rescues her amidst the sand.

These two characters don’t speak the same language — all the excuse that Anderson needs to paint the Hunter as a useful idiot — but they’ll only make it across the desert if they work together. The hour that follows essentially feels like watching two cosplayers suffer through a corporate team-building exercise as the film around them takes great pains to mute the talents of its stars. Jovovich doesn’t get anything to do besides leap, grimace, and stare longingly at an engagement ring that never becomes relevant in any way whatsoever.

As for Jaa, he’s afforded a small handful of scattered chances to show off his gifts as a martial artist — just enough that even people who’ve never seen his previous work will be able to recognize the extent to which he’s been wasted here. There are screenshots from the “Monster Hunter” games that are more exciting than anything that Anderson has Jovovich and Jaa do together. Here’s one. Here’s another. Look at those colors! The movie only gives us yellow and green. It’s such a relief when a splash of green shows up after 66 minutes that this critic made a point of marking the time in his notes.

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The cat chef and its sand pirate friends inevitably return for a climactic fight against the giant wyvern that guards the tower that connects the two worlds, but the movie is too drunk on the darkness of its CGI sludge to bother ornamenting these characters with things like motives, or personalities, or names, or any of the other highfalutin college terms that pretentious film critics have been using to slander video game movies for decades. Perlman’s character mercifully teases some kind of mythology — he learned English as a lark, and totes around some weathered maps that we hope might lead to a better film — but Anderson is only interested in the physical collision between the story’s two worlds.

If the third act kicks off with a dark and stormy “Mortal Kombat” vibe that feels like a throwback to a time when video game movies got most of their atmosphere from bad weather and worse costumes, it soon becomes clear that Anderson is just trying to cross the streams and contrive a way for the wyvern to fight a military plane. Anderson is palpably excited at the idea of using monsters to humble our faith in modern technology, but the Hunter and his pals never wield their signature weapons — giant bows, giant swords, giant bow-swords, etc. — in a way that offers a reasonable alternative to machine guns.

And while the best moments of the final battle come perilously close to being watchable (cruddy special effects and all), the story around is so gallingly hollow that it feels like something between a slap in the face and a self-own when “Monster Hunter” ends with its heroes rushing towards a fight with the biggest, coolest beast we’ve seen yet. Not since Paul Giamatti’s immortal cameo as the Rhino at the end of “The Amazing Spider-Man 2” has a film this bad tried this hard to whet our appetites for more. In this case, it’s impossible to fathom how a “Monster Hunter” movie could have given us any less. How fitting that a movie made without any imagination whatsoever should end by defying our own.

Grade: D-

Sony Pictures Releasing will release “Monster Hunter” in theaters on Friday, December 18. 

Best of 2020: Working in Hollywood as a so-called “unicorn” woman of color

Two years ago, in the autumnal sunshine of Los Angeles, I was living the Hollywood dream. I had just finished shooting a recurring role on season three of HBO’s award-winning comedy “Insecure,” and auditions were a-plenty. My phone buzzed. Another audition. This one was for a long-running successful sitcom, to play the Indian-American love interest of one of the lead characters. Having been in the industry for a while, I am jaded, wary of stereotypical roles available to people who look like me, so I prepared for the worst. I clicked open the sides — specific scenes from the script that actors memorize for auditions — and was pleasantly surprised. No stereotypes, no gimmicks, no accent needed. The character was just a normal girl who happened to be Indian-American. Like me, I thought.

I went in for the pre-read for casting and killed it. How did I know? I just knew. I know when I’ve bombed and I know when I’ve killed. Sometimes when I bomb I book the job, and most of the time when I kill I never hear from casting again. A week went by and I was surprised I hadn’t heard from casting for a callback (a second audition with producers). As soon as I forgot about the part, my phone buzzed. I got the callback.

I drove onto the studio lot and parked a million miles away from the callback building. I didn’t mind. I still get butterflies walking through a studio lot. I got into entertainment because of that feeling — that magical feeling that anything could happen. That your life could change in a split second. I was early so I took my time, sauntering past golf carts and honeywagons, going over my lines in my head. I smiled broadly at someone I thought I knew but who was actually the star of a hit legal drama.

I arrived at the tall, imposing brick building and was ushered into a small room, holding four other Indian-American women in my age range. I knew three of them. We audition together all the time. Indian-Americans in entertainment are still few and far between. Since our community is so small, we all know each other. I love knowing my fellow actors in the room. It makes me feel less alone.

The casting assistant lined the five of us up, single file in a specific order, outside of the room. I was first. Being first could be good or it could be bad. To psych myself up, I imagined I was first because casting liked me the best. Auditions are all about being liked. You run for a popularity contest a couple times a week, hoping by some miracle the producers chose you. In reality, casting may be saving the best for last, but I try to stay positive in auditions.

When they were finally ready for me, I walked into the room and said hi to the two producers, casting director and camera person. Relaxed, I dove into the scene. I got laughs. The main producer, a middle-aged white man, gave me some direction. I did the scene again, following his direction to a T. More laughs. I felt good. Like, real good. I nailed it. The producers said thanks and I strutted out of there, knowing the role was mine. I smiled as I walked by the four remaining Indian-American girls waiting to audition.

My phone rang and I picked up. It was my agent. She told me the producers loved me. I thought, “Well, that was quick.” My agent continued: “Casting wanted to know if you’re 100 percent Indian.” I paused. I felt my skin bristle, my cheeks flush and my stomach drop. “Yes, I’m 100 percent Indian,” I answered. “My parents are from Kolkata and I speak fluent Bengali.”

When I hung up the phone, I knew I wouldn’t book the job. I walked back to my car feeling a little less chipper. The next day, it was official. My agent told me the producers “went a different way,” a coded message that I was not Indian enough in the eyes of these powerful, white decision-makers.

This was one of the specific moments that propelled me to create my own work. A few months later, in early 2019, I went into prep on “Definition Please,” my first feature film that I wrote, produced, directed, and starred in.

As a member of the Television Academy and an Emmy voter, I’m invited to panels and screenings for shows being campaigned for awards. One event for an immensely popular drama, held at a studio lot and laden with themed appetizers and drinks, featured a panel with the show’s producer and creator, both white men. The producer started off by saying, “When [the creator] walked into my office, he reminded me of myself.” The producer bought the creator’s show during that first meeting, in the room.

That was the moment I turned off. I knew that if Issa Rae walked into this producer’s room, she wouldn’t remind him of himself. Nor would Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and nor would I.

Today’s Hollywood doesn’t look much different from yesterday’s Hollywood. Women, and especially women of color, must continuously jump through more hoops to get promoted in writer’s rooms, raise funding for their own short and feature films, and pitch original ideas to high level executives. When I log in to Zoom meetings these days, the faces on the other side call me “a unicorn,” because I am a woman of color who acts, directs, writes and produces.

I’m not interested in your labels or being the latest trend. I am interested in telling stories about marginalized voices that have never been told before. I am interested in creating authentic films and shows about brown people who are allowed to just be. I am interested in inspiring a new generation of brown filmmakers who realize their voices matter and deserve to be championed. I write, produce, direct and act because I have no other choice in today’s Hollywood. Decision-makers with the power to greenlight projects constantly elevate new talent because “he reminded me of myself” and that doesn’t apply to folks who look like me. If I didn’t fill every single one of those key positions, I would not have a job.

Am I 100 percent Indian? Or am I 100 percent unicorn? I don’t know. But what I do know is that I’m 100 percent me.

Comedian Eddie Izzard announces she/her pronouns

Comedian Eddie Izzard has announced that her pronouns are she/her.

While sitting as a model for Sky Arts’ “Portrait Artist of the Year” — a yearly special that often brings in celebrities for competitors to draw — Izzard revealed that she wants to “be based in girl mode from now on.”

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“I try to do things that I think are interesting, and this is the first program I’ve asked if I can be she and her. A little transition period,” she told contestant Curtis Holder, who went on to win the show’s top prize.

After Holder asked Izzard how it felt to announce her pronouns, she replied: “Well it feels great, because people just assume that they just know me from before, but I’m gender fluid. I just want to be based in girl mode from now on.”

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Izzard, who has starred in the series “The Riches” and films like “Ocean’s Twelve” and “Ocean’s Thirteen,” has long been a leader in the British LGBTQ+ community and open about her gender fluid identity.

The announcement of Izzard’s pronouns earned praise on social media.

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Writer Ella Dawson tweeted: “I’m so glad I was introduced to Eddie Izzard’s standup as a kid. She taught me so much about the weirdness and fluidity of gender presentation at an age when I really needed to see that. ‘Dressed to Kill’ is one of my favorite specials, one I quote with my family constantly.”

“It brings me a lot of comfort seeing #EddieIzzard, someone with a traditionally masculine name, use exclusively she/her pronouns,” another Twitter user wrote. “Names don’t have genders and pronouns don’t indicate gender but as someone with a feminine name who’s [sic] pronouns are they/them, this makes me feel seen.”

Ina Garten and Anderson Cooper both love this easy comfort food

Ina Garten literally wrote the book on comfort food. Her newest cookbook, “Modern Comfort Food,” has fast become our go-to, and its warm and hearty recipes have never been more needed. In a recent interview, Garten caught up with CNN’s Anderson Cooper during his show, “Full Circle,” and talked about all things food. And during their conversation, the two realized they share a love of one traditional — and, for many of us, nostalgic — comfort food: peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. It’s a classic food many of us grew up eating on the daily, and whipping one up takes about a minute. Simple, quick, and easy? We feel comforted already.

In the clip, Cooper — a notoriously (and self-professed) picky eater — shares a story with our Barefoot Contessa queen about a conversation he and his late mother Gloria Vanderbilt had about the food a few years back. “I was talking to my mom on the phone and I said, you know, ‘I rediscovered peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and they’re so good’ and literally she said, ‘Darling that’s amazing I just rediscovered them as well!’ and she had apparently been eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch,” he laughs.

That’s when Garten shared her own love of good ole PB&J. In fact, the chef found it so comforting, she admitted that she and her husband Jeffrey ate the sandwich routinely amid the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown.

“In the beginning of the pandemic that’s what Jeffrey and I had too,” Ina reveals. “And I don’t think I’d ever had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich — my mother never made them — and we were just like ‘This is great!'” What?! How Garten has gone this long without trying a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, we’ll never know. But we’re thrilled she’s as much of a fan as we are.

While Garten may have just recently rediscovered the classic PB&J sammy, she’s clearly long-familiar with its more decadent cousin, the PB&J bar.

Garten’s Peanut Butter & Jelly Bars recipe can be found online and is also included in her 2006 cookbook, “Barefoot Contessa at Home.” What better time to try these out than now as we continue to stay home during holiday baking season?

Read More SheKnows: 

“SNL”: Colin Jost tricked into making whitewashed casting joke about Scarlett Johansson

This weekend’s episode of “Saturday Night Live” on NBC was packed with Christmas-themed sketches, being the last “SNL” of 2020 and all. In addition, in “SNL” tradition, “Weekend Update” hosts Michael Che and Colin Jost did their annual “Joke Swap” during the segment.

Jost, delivering lines that otherwise would’ve gone to co-host Che, started off with a joke about how Creed frontman Scott Stapp is playing Frank Sinatra in an upcoming biopic about Ronald Reagan. While that’s disturbing enough, the joke took another turn as Jost was tricked into making a whitewashed casting joke about his own wife, Scarlett Johansson. “The good news is Sammy Davis, Jr. will be played by Scarlett Johansson!”

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The joke is in reference to past controversies surrounding Johansson’s casting in films like “Ghost in the Shell,” which began as a Japanese manga. The filmmakers were accused of whitewashing a role that could’ve gone to an Asian actor. Johansson later stood by the casting. Another controversy followed when Johansson was cast as a transgender man in the film “Rub and Tug,” which is based on a true story about a trans gangster in 1970s Pittsburgh who becomes embroiled in the city’s Massage Parlor War.

Johansson later withdrew from the project, saying, “In hindsight, I mishandled that situation. I was not sensitive, my initial reaction to it…I wasn’t aware of that conversation. I was uneducated. So I learned a lot through that process. I misjudged that.”  (“Rub and Tug” is now set to become a TV series with trans writer Our Lady J and a trans actor eyed for the lead.)

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As for the joke-swapped “Weekend Update” segment, which you can watch below, Che and Jost write the lines for each other, leading to such uncomfortable moments as Che eulogizing Jeffrey Epstein with “rest in power king” and Jost taking a crack at Rosa Parks.

This week’s episode was hosted by “Saturday Night Live” alumna Kristen Wiig, returning to Studio 8H and being joined by pop star Dua Lipa for the musical segments.

Read more from IndieWire: The best music videos of 2020 – year in review

In other “SNL” news, Jim Carrey recently withdrew from the role of Joe Biden. Cast member Alex Moffat, whose impression was introduced Saturday night, will take over Biden duties.

How to make a Boulevardier, a delicious bourbon Negroni with a high-flying backstory

On February 20, 1927, The New York Times ran a brief bulletin about the American expatriate culture in Paris, and included a note, remarking with some amusement that it is “hard for the French to understand… why Americans ban drink in their own country and then come to France to try to drink all there is in sight.”

That same article announced the debut of a Paris-based literary magazine by an American named Erskine Gwynne, a man to whom that previous line could’ve been personally dedicated. Handsome in his mid-20s, always well dressed, with white-blond hair and an irrepressible sense of humor, he was a descendant of the Vanderbilt family—the “Vanderbilt Playboy,” the papers called him—and was the kind of incorrigible public figure for whom whole sections of tabloids get devoted.

Quick with both wit and fists and sporting an invincible smile, the stories he generated were never unamusing: He once was physically thrown out of a casino for striking a waiter who had spoken indecently to a lady and, realizing his favorite hat was still inside, went around the building and squirmed up through a high window, just to stroll back casually across the casino floor, retrieve said hat, and tip it at the man who’d ejected him. Another time, he went to see off a group of friends about to embark on a trip to America: One parting drink turned into another, and the gathering got so out of control that he later awoke, surprised to find himself still on the ship, which was now steaming west in the middle of the Atlantic.

Most men in his social circle didn’t work, but Gwynne was a writer. He had written a couple plays as a young man, and would later write a book called Paris Pandemonium, but in 1927 decided to start a magazine, part humor and part literary, which one commenter described as “a sprightly publication dealing with the gossipy chit-chat of the world in which Gwynne was… a leading and lively participant.” The name of his new magazine? Le Boulevardier. In French, a Boulevardier—literally “a man who frequents the boulevards”—means a fashionable socialite, a sophisticated man about town, the very persona he himself embodied.

That same year, a famous bartender and friend of Gwynne’s, Harry McElhone, published his first major cocktail book, Barflies and Cocktails. Amid 300-plus recipes and some amusing asides about etiquette appears a cocktail, also called the Boulevardier, invented and named by none other than Gwynne himself.

Think about this for a second: You’re Erskine Gwynne, notorious prankster, famous socialite, a true boulevardier. You start a magazine called Le Boulevardier, so if you’re going to name a cocktail after that same concept, the cocktail itself has to be everything you want your magazine to be: elegant but not aristocratic, bold but sophisticated, important, with a bit of American impetuousness. And while Le Boulevardier the magazine never made the splash Gwynne probably hoped it would, he absolutely killed it with the cocktail.

The Boulevardier is a bourbon Negroni—bourbon, sweet vermouth and Campari. Of the 10 million or so variations on the Negroni, it is probably the oldest and almost certainly the best. The Negroni’s bright prickly gin is replaced by the broad, oaked richness of whiskey, making this a different cocktail indeed. It’s fuller and more muscular than its predecessor—bitter and bold, with a rounder flavor. It’s indisputably sophisticated but also a bit brash. It is a drink aptly named.

Gwynne died in Manhattan in 1948, probably never knowing his cocktail would go on to become a venerated classic. It fits, in a way. A true Boulevardier isn’t worried about legacy. Not while there’s a day to go out and seize.

Boulevardier

Add ingredients to a rocks glass with ice. Stir for 10 seconds if the ice is small, 30 seconds if one big cube and somewhere between if ice is somewhere between. Garnish with an orange peel.

Notes on ingredients

Whiskey: This cocktail originally called for bourbon, and bourbon works here, but the higher the rye content, the better. Sweeter (high-corn) bourbons start lacking tension and read a little boring, so high rye bourbons (Bulleit Bourbon, Wild Turkey 101, Basil Hayden’s, etc.) all work well. Better still is rye whiskey, which by definition has more rye, and adds much welcome spice and complexity. I find a linear relationship between rye content of the whiskey and how much I enjoy the cocktail: 100 percent rye is great if you can find it, but 95 percent rye—Dickel Rye, Bulleit Rye, Redemption, Templeton and so many others—fits the bill handsomely.

Sweet Vermouth: honestly, most sweet vermouths are good here. In all the tests, there wasn’t anything I wouldn’t happily drink. If we’re trying to optimize though, it depends on when you’re drinking the cocktail. If you’re having this before a meal, I prefer something light like Dolin which gives the softest possible touch, allowing a more dynamic tasting experience and letting the bitterness of the Campari to shine through. If after a meal, I like something like Carpano Antica, for a fuller balance and richer effect.

Read more Robb Report:

The top cookbooks of 2020 also make the best holiday gifts

Who could have predicted what this year would bring? It’s been a tough 365 days for everyone — some more than others — but one of the things that’s brought joy to many of us is the opportunity to find our way back into the kitchen.

During this holiday season, I truly believe that one of the most thoughtful gifts is a cookbook that’s been chosen based on the interests of the intended recipient, such as their big culinary dreams, their current eating patterns, their favorite flavors or the ways in which they want to grow in the New Year. 

We’ve put together a list of some of our favorite cookbooks of 2020, all of which would make excellent gifts for the food-lovers on your list. 

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For your friend who really wanted to get into bread making during the pandemic — but was too intimidated

Bryan Ford’s “New World Sourdough” dives into what actually makes a perfectly imperfect loaf of bread (a welcome dose of reality in a world of hyper-manicured #crumbshot posts on Instagram). The Bronx-born line cook and baker steers clear of wonky talk about hydration and percentages, instead making space for primers on crafting a good sourdough starter and recipes that tie into his Afro-Honduran heritage. 

The recipes in “New World Sourdough” are divided into two categories: “Rustic Breads” and “Enriched Sourdough Breads.” The Rustic Breads section is rooted in what a lot of readers would likely consider some of the basics of bread baking — standard loaves, wheat breads and focaccia. The Enriched Breads section adds a little more flavor, with recipes for Choco Pan de Coco and Bananas Foster Sourdough.

Ford makes the point that the definition of artisan bread could definitely be more inclusive. “A dense loaf of pan de coco is no less ‘sourdough’ than a crunchy bâtard with an open, light crumb,” he writes.

For the vegetarian in your life who’s fallen into a macaroni and cheese rut

In “Vegetable Kingdom,” James Beard Award-winning chef and author Bryant Terry thinks of himself “as a collagist — curating, cutting, pasting and remixing staple ingredients, cooking techniques and traditional Black dishes popular throughout the world to make [my] own signature recipes.”

He pulls from African, Caribbean, American Southern and Asian flavors to create dishes like Jerk Tofu Wrapped in Collard Greens and Caramelized Leek and Seared Mushroom Toast. Each recipe is paired with a different song — Terry pulls from classic and contemporary hip-hop, jazz, R&B, reggae and Afrobeats catalogues — and poignant writing about the ways in which plant-based eating has become stratified in the U.S. 

Another fantastic option is “East: 120 Vegan and Vegetarian Recipes from Bangalore to Beijing,” which was released in the U.S. in 2020 after originally being published in the U.K. Author Meera Sodha, who has a weekly vegan column for “The Guardian,” collaborated with East Asian and South East Asian home cooks to take readers from India to Indonesia, Singapore and Japan by way of China, Thailand and Vietnam. Along the way, she details how to make noodles, curries, rice dishes, tofu, salads, sides and sweets, most of which are weeknight-friendly. 

For your most spontaneous friend (or the person on your list who just dislikes planning)

Think about which of your friends would be most likely to open their fridge when they’re ready to make dinner, only to be confronted with a smattering of random ingredients. Granted, that sounds like everyone during the pandemic, but Lukas Volger’s “Start Simple,” which was released in February, is perfect for anyone who likes to whip together a full meal with just a few pantry staples. 

Vulgar asserts that magic can happen with just a few ingredients, and he lays out several building blocks with which to start: tortillas, tofu, sweet potatoes, squash, mushrooms, hearty greens, eggs, cauliflower, cabbage and beans. These can be transformed into flavorful meals, such as Steel-Cut Oats with Squash and Tahini, Honey-Orange Tofu and Carbonara with Marinated Greens and Capers. 

For the person on your list that would be happy with a wheel of cheese under the tree

The title of Polina Chesnakova’s new cookbook, “Hot Cheese,” immediately calls to mind some of the most comforting dishes on the planet: bubbling macaroni and cheese, crisp and creamy grilled cheese sandwiches and savory enchiladas. And that’s the beauty of the concept.

As Chesnakova told Salon in October, “you can find melted cheese in almost every cuisine . . . because it really does appeal to everyone.”  She compiled 50 cheese-based recipes — including her stand-out Butternut Squash, Ricotta, Pancetta Stuffed Shells with Baked Burrata — which are perfect for winter nights inside. 

For the person with whom you most miss sharing restaurant meals 

For the last 100 years, Nom Wah Tea Parlor has been a dim sum staple in New York’s Chinatown. Now, owner Wilson Tang — with the help of food writer Joshua David Stein — tells the story of how the restaurant came to be and how to prepare its legendary dishes at home. “The Nom Wah Cookbook” features recipes like egg fried rice arancini with sambal kewpie, steamed spareribs and red bean buns. 

For the amateur baker in your life who’s ready to move beyond basic banana bread 

In her first cookbook, “Dessert Person,” former Bon Appétit staffer and YouTube star Claire Saffitz takes the problem-solving skills she became known for in her series “Gourmet Makes” and applies them to more than 100 original recipes, including Apple and Concord Grape Crumble Pie, Malted Forever Brownies and Strawberry-Cornmeal Layer Cake. Each recipe comes with details on how to fix common baking mistakes, such as a cracked pie crust or a sunken cake. 

If cookies (which also make a tremendous Christmas gift!) are more your speed, Sarah Kieffer’s “100 Cookies: The Baking Book for Every Kitchen, with Classic Cookies, Novel Treats, Brownies, Bars, and More” is a must-read. Kieffer skyrocketed to baking fame after her famous pan-banging chocolate chip cookies — which are ringed like a tree trunk and layered with chunks of chocolate that rippled out from the soft center —  went viral. 

For the person whose pandemic dream was to move to the middle of nowhere and start a farm

There was likely someone in your pandemic pod who fantasized about moving from tending to their windowsill to tending real crops. Even if that’s just a daydream, Andrea Bemis’ “Local Dirt: Seasonal Recipes for Eating Closer to Home” would be right up their alley. 

Bemis, who is a farmer, provides a roadmap for home cooks on how to source and use fresh ingredients from their own communities to craft wholesome, sustainable meals — like her delectable Pumpkin and Sage Frittata. 

For the person on your list who misses traveling the most

In “Chaat,” Nashville-based chef Maneet Chauhan lays out the recipes she discovered and experienced during an epic cross-country railway journey across India. Each stop brought different local markets, street vendors and home-cooked meals, ranging from Goan Fried Shrimp Turnovers and Chicken Momo Dumplings from Guwahati in Assam, to Hyderabad’s Spicy Pineapple Chaat and Warm-Spiced Carrot and Semolina Pudding from Amristar.

For the grandmothers in your life

This year has been hard for many reasons, but being separated from parents and grandparents has been one of the hardest. “In Bibi’s Kitchen: The Recipes and Stories of Grandmothers from the Eight African Countries that Touch the Indian Ocean,” by Hawa Hassan with Julia Turshen, is a love letter to the ultimate home cooks, the matriarchs who keep us fed and inspire future generations to enter the kitchen. Part a cooking guide and part a series of profiles, Hassan interviews women like Ma Gehennet, an Eritrean who emigrated first to Canada and then to New York, and Ma Wambui from Nairobi.

 

Read more from our favorite cookbook authors: 

How Bunny the talking dog captured the internet and science’s attention

Many of us have seen a dog stare at themselves in the mirror, sometimes placing a paw on the glass. This kind of behavior might lead one to believe that dogs can recognize their own reflection. As cute as a self-aware dog might be, scientific evidence suggests otherwise. Indeed, it is widely believed that dogs don’t use mirrors to refer back to themselves like humans do — yet when TikTok’s beloved Sheepadoodle named Bunny did it in November, the entirety of the interaction was another piece of evidence hinting at Bunny’s linguistic and cognitive abilities.

In the viral 40-second TikTok video, Bunny “speaks” or communicates by pressing the buttons “who” and then “this” on her augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) device, which is a sound board made up of 78 buttons with a different word vocally recorded on each. Alexis Devine, Bunny’s human parent, narrates what’s happening. “Did you just say ‘Who this?’ and look in the mirror?” Devine proceeds to press a button with Bunny’s name on it, which causes the dog to run toward the door, and stare outside. A few moments later, Bunny presses a button that voices the word “help.”

The video led many to believe that Bunny was having an existential crisis, which spawned many entertaining TikTok memes. Still, Devine wonders if viewers are using humor to cope with something deeper. 

“I don’t think she’s actually having an existential crisis,” Devine told Salon in an interview. “I think that some people are just now beginning to realize that this isn’t just like a fluffy potato that you have in your life, this is like a deeply sentient creature that has a lot going on cognitively, that has emotions and that, you know, maybe should be treated more more as an equal than as property.”

Bunny, who has 5.7 million followers on TikTok, is one of nearly 1,400 animals enrolled in a project called “They Can Talk,” which is seeking to better understand if animals can use AAC systems to communicate with humans. The project consists of 1,300 dogs, 67 cats, plus a couple of horses. In the study led by Federico Rossano, director of the Comparative Cognition Lab at UC San Diego, participants receive instructions on how to set up their AAC buttons. They usually start with easy words like “outside” and “play” linked to their buttons. Pet parents set up cameras to constantly monitor the animals when they’re in front of their boards, data which is sent to the lab where researchers examine what they say.

There is a long history of humans exploring whether or not animals can communicate to humans. There was Chaser the Border Collie, who learned over 1,000 nouns; a parrot, Alex, who seemed to genuinely say “I love you”; and of course, Koko the gorilla, who knew American signal language. Rossano and his team aren’t trying to find the next famous animal to join that list — although, arguably Bunny already has — but instead they’re trying to better understand what dogs do when they’re trying to communicate with humans.

“Instead of their comprehension of human communication, we want to know what they do when they are trying to communicate with humans? What do they communicate? How do they organize their concepts to communicate with humans? Is this combination to some degree flexible, to the point that they can come up with a combination of signals that would look like sentences?”  Rossano explained.

These are interesting questions. But ultimately, Rossano and his team are most interested in understanding if dogs can communicate in ways that humans have long believed are “uniquely human.” For example, can they describe what they’re seeing to humans, share their emotions, understand time or communicate about something that isn’t there?

If you’ve watched Bunny’s videos, you’ve seen her ask for “scritches,” request beach trips, and press “ouch” when she had a foxtail in her paw. Part of her success is not only that she’s a mix of a Poodle and Old English Sheepdogs, two intelligent breeds that are easy to train, but also Devine’s dedication to the process.

Before Devine got Bunny, she saw Christina Hunger, a speech-language pathologist, who taught her dog Stella, to use an AAC device. Devine read her blog, and made the decision to train Bunny with a soundboard before she brought Bunny home. “I had zero expectations, and just thought I’d give it a shot and see what happened, but within a few weeks she was using it at her own volition to request outside, and at that point we added the ‘outside’ button to a board with a couple of other buttons and have been growing her vocabulary ever since.”

Now she can use 78 words. Devine said they are currently working on pronouns.

“We’ll see how that goes,” Devine said. “And we still have some words on the board that we’re working on — she’s not 100% with all 78 of the buttons.”

One would think it would take hours a day to teach Bunny how to communicate with the AAC device, but Devine said the schedule is entirely up to Bunny. “The last thing I want is for her to feel any anxiety around it,” Devine said, explaining it’s entirely up to Bunny when they work on the buttons.

“I start every morning by waking up, coming downstairs, going to the buttons and I say, ‘Good morning, Bunny. It’s morning now,’ and then I just leave them alone,” Devine said.

On rainy days, Devine said, Bunny likes to sleep. Aside from then, she’s usually pretty curious about the buttons and communicating with them.

When asked if Bunny is really “speaking,” Devine said answering that question is an “emotional roller coaster.”

“Some days I’m just astounded and I’m like there’s no way this could all be coincidence. It’s so clear, it’s so expressive, and it’s so contextually appropriate,” Devine said. “Then, you know, there are other days where it seems like she’s just sort of exploring buttons where a lot of it feels random.”

Rossano said, scientifically speaking, Bunny is not literally speaking.  She’s spontaneously pressing buttons, testing communication. The question is, is Bunny doing so in a way that is comparable to how a 2-year-old child strings their words and concepts together?

“Bunny combines buttons in ways that appear to have information structure similar to what you might see a toddler doing,” Rossano said. The open question, Rossano said, is if Bunny is learning to copy the behavior that Devine rewards after producing a sequence of words, or if Bunny is producing word-like sentences in “novel structures.” 

Bunny is certainly a “remarkable” case study in the project and has exceeded Rossano’s expectations, especially in the videos where Bunny appears to be expressing that she’s experiencing pain. Since she joined the pilot program, Rossano said, Bunny is way ahead of the curve — but there are other animals advancing. Bunny started earlier in the study, but other dogs are catching up.

“We have a few others that have approximately 40 buttons that they know how to use, and they similarly produce several button combinations,” Rossano said. “We have one pilot participant that, after six months, has managed to train his dog to learn only four buttons. You might say well that’s a massive failure, but the reality is that those four buttons are four critical buttons for communication. One is ‘outside.'”

Beyond the scientific questions, Rossano said it’s possible that this study could lead to AAC devices being used more regularly between humans and their dogs. Specifically, researchers want “to see how these kinds of tools might help the interaction and the bonding between humans and pets,” Rossano said. “We are very interested in seeing not just what it tells us about dogs’ cognition and communicative abilities, but also what it could do to potentially improve their relationship with humans and their welfare overall.”

Make this decadent, spiced gingerbread cloud cake part of your holiday tradition

In preparation for the holidays, I’ve been on a mission for the past several weeks to develop a dessert with the texture of cookbook author Richard Sax’s famous chocolate cloud cake but the flavor of a good hunk of gingerbread.

Before his death in 1995, Sax was a prolific food writer who co-wrote a monthly column for Bon Appetit and also contributed regularly to Harper’s Bazaar, Gourmet, Food & Wine and Eating Well. His cloud cake is a flourless masterpiece, made by whipping egg whites with sugar into a stiff meringue and folding in melted chocolate and cocoa powder. 

RELATED: Cookies make the best holiday gifts: Here are a top pastry chef’s tips for shipping your baked goods

The cake emerges from the oven with a craggy crust and a fallen, basin-like center that gets filled with cool whipped cream. For me, it’s a casual dinner party go-to, because it’s simple, decadent, naturally gluten-free (and that pile of whipped cream can hide a multitude of sins). 

I kept the structure of the cake the same for this recipe but adapted the flavor profile to register as a little more seasonal. We’ve got ingredients that pack a lot of depth — molasses and dark chocolate pair for a rich base, which is warmed with cinnamon, nutmeg, and of course, ginger. The whipped cream also gets a bit of an update through the addition of cream cheese, which yields a fluffy, slightly tangy topping.

***

Recipe: Gingerbread Cloud Cake 

Yields 1 9-inch cake 

Ingredients:

Gingerbread cake

  • 6 eggs
  • 1/2 cup of white sugar 
  • 8 ounces of chopped dark chocolate or dark chocolate chips
  • 1/2 cup of unsalted butter
  • 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil
  • 2 tablespoons of molasses 
  • 1 tablespoon of ground ginger 
  • 1 tablespoon of ground cinnamon
  • 1 tablespoon of nutmeg 
  • 2 teaspoons of vanilla extract
  • 1/4 cup of brown sugar 

Whipped cream cheese topping

  • 1 cup chilled heavy cream
  • 1/2 cup cream cheese 
  • 3 tablespoon powdered sugar
  • Ground cinnamon for decoration 

Instructions:

1. Separate the whites and yolks of four eggs into two large mixing bowls.

2. Using an electric mixer, whip the egg whites while steadily adding the white sugar until stiff peaks form. Set aside. 

3. In a small saucepan, combine the dark chocolate, butter and vegetable oil. Melt over low heat. 

4. Add the melted chocolate to the bowl of egg yolks. Then, add the molasses, ginger, cinnamon nutmeg, vanilla extract, the two additional eggs and brown sugar. Mix until thoroughly combined. 

5. Gently fold the chocolate mixture into the egg white mixture, mixing until just combined. 

7. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees, and pour the batter into a 9-inch diameter springform pan or a greased cake pan lined with parchment paper. 

8. Bake until the top begins to puff and crack, and the cake starts to pull away from the edge of the pan (35 to 45 minutes). Remove from the oven, and place on a wire cooling rack. The cake will fall in the center and continue to crack as it cools. 

9. While the cake is cooling, make the whipped topping. In a large bowl, combine the chilled heavy cream, cream cheese and powdered sugar. Using an electric mixer, beat until the mixture forms soft peaks. 

10. Carefully remove the cooled cake from the springform pan or from the parchment lined cake pan (run a knife around the edges if it’s a little stuck). 

11. Fold the whipped topping into the center of the cake. Sprinkle with ground cinnamon for decoration.

 

Read more from our recipe box: 

Obama releases his TV Top 10 List, reminding Americans that he (unlike Trump) is just like us

Over the past five years America’s outgoing president has rarely been off television. In the meantime, the Obamas have quietly consumed popular culture along with the rest of us and better still, like so many of us. Over the summer Michelle Obama casually popped in the Instagram Live audience for several Verzuz battles – there to enjoy the music like millions of everyday folks, not angling for special attention.

Earlier this week former president Barack Obama shared a few favorite TV show titles with Entertainment Weekly, pleasantly shocking comic book fandom by mentioning “The Boys” among them. To convey a full understanding of why this was such a shocker, this is a series that included a scene of a supervillain strangling one of the protagonists with a very long appendage, thereby giving new meaning to the phrase “grower not a show-er.”

This was but a moment in a slam-bang, hyper-violent season that doubled down on the larger arc’s critique of superhero worship and how easily a nation can be seduced into embracing fascism. Not exactly escapist fare for the average person, but to a man who’s still being slandered by right wing media and current (but not for long) occupant of the Oval Office? It must be cathartic, I imagine.

The rest of his top TV list, released on Friday, is much more presidential and brimming with prestige: “Better Call Saul,” fluid chess tale “The Queen’s Gambit,” the devastating “I May Destroy You,” “The Good Lord Bird,” “Devs,” “Mrs. America,” “The Good Place,” and two excellent shows about his hometown, “The Last Dance” and “City So Real.”  

Debate the merits of each of these choices all you like, but there’s enough variation on here that speaks to its realness, that lets a person know that this is someone who enjoys the quotidian pursuit of watching TV as much as the average person. These are the choices of someone who shares an ordinariness with regular people even as he is living an extraordinary life. (His range of movie favorites has a narrower appeal but is impressive nevertheless, and anyway I don’t expect Obama to publicly stan, say, “Bill & Ted Face the Music.”)

Bitter partisanship cannot overcome the connecting power of TV appreciation, but if you have some respect for Obama then perhaps you can appreciate his understanding of what popular culture means to everyday people.

Donald Trump may be the master of manipulating his way on to television and using it to persuade half of the country to abandon logic and fact, but one thing he’s never leveraged skillfully – if at all — is the medium’s power as an equalizer, its ability to reach the widest swath of people and invite them into conversation.

Fox News viewers likely disagree with this given the regularity with which Trump turned up on all of its primetime programs in the flesh, and over the phone with “Fox & Friends” or Jeanine Pirro. That strategy is about making sure he remained the star and always on.

Besides, the character Trump has played for most of his life claims to have no time for TV, although multiple reports say watching TV is how he spent most of his days while in office. Then again, if a show is about you, and for you, are you watching it or gazing into your own reflection? A question for any philosophers who aren’t pondering “The Good Place” and have nothing else better to do. 

If Trump does have an end-of-year TV list surely it includes the same suspects that topped it last year, minus Tucker Carlson’s hour. “Hannity,” it goes without saying, along with “Justice with Judge Jeanine,” “Mornings with Maria” starring Maria Bartiromo and her Fox Business News colleague Lou Dobbs, host of “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” who is still spreading the lie that Trump could overturn the election results and retake the White House.

However, Dobbs isn’t in the same ballpark of cuteness as the rotating slate of hosts at OANN, who resemble every Tracy Flick wannabe you’ve ever encountered and spew every conspiracy theory you can imagine. OANN is abundantly stocked with “The Apprentice” honchos type, making it hard to guess which program is his favorite.

Is it “Tipping Point with Kara McKinney” a show whose listless host never met a negative mischaracterization of Black Lives Matter she didn’t believe? Or is it “In Focus” host Stephanie Hamill, who resembles Ivanka enough to make any admiration Trump expresses for her seem uncomfortable? It’s easier to surmise instead that Trump probably enjoyed “Surviving Jeffrey Epstein” but for all the wrong reasons. Sadly this is not a joke.

All of these guesses demonstrate the difference between these two men, not merely in taste but in temperament. Trump’s favorite TV series are his conduits for exposure, and they’re only as good as they are effective in talking at us about what he thinks regardless of how displaced from the truth those brain blurts may be.

In contrast one can mull over Obama’s list and search for like themes, qualities that link one to the other. He’s explained why he likes each one, but sometimes a series reveals things about its observer that the person doesn’t say.

Aside from those loftier suppositions, the thrill of posting end-of-year lists of what’s best in entertainment isn’t in showing off our taste level or proving our opinion is “right” or “wrong”; by definition there’s no such thing. Instead it’s a reminder that we are united around experiences in our own time and our own living room.

Each show can be a neutralizing magnet, and each reminds people who gravitate to it that we share something in common. In these spaces it is possible to concede that although our politics don’t jibe, at the very least we can meet on this ground, peacefully sit and take in the view.

“Maria Bartiromo sold out”: Fox News viewers cry foul after host questions election fraud

Fox News viewers lashed out at the network over the weekend after several shows aired a segment undermining President Donald Trump’s claims of election fraud.

According to reports, at least one Fox Business host and as many as three Fox News hosts aired a pre-taped segment with a spokesperson from Smartmatic, a voting systems software company.

The interview was aired again on Sunday by Maria Bartiromo, one of President Donald Trump’s top defenders on the network.

The segment was met with contempt from viewers, who refused to believe that the election fraud claims had been debunked.

“So I guess @MariaBartiromo just sold out-shameful,” one viewer wrote on Twitter.

“@FoxNews needs to be ashamed for making her air this tripe,” another viewer tweeted.

“Who got to @MariaBartiromo?” another commenter complained. “Why has she put this fraud Eddie Perez, clearly an apologist for Smartmatic, on her show TWICE to read scripted denials to scripted questions– right down to reading back the questions, a deposition trick taught by good trial attorneys?”

In a legal notice sent to Fox News last week, Smartmatic accused the network of a “disinformation campaign”

“Over the course of the campaign, Fox News published and republished dozens of false and misleading statements regarding Smartmatic,” the statement said.

Watch the video and read some of the responses below.

People didn’t used to be “consumers.” What happened?

Thousands of years from now, an anthropologist might attempt to understand American culture by watching videos from Black Friday. In a typical scene, people known as “bargain hunters” gather outside Best Buy in freezing temperatures after their Thanksgiving meal to ensure they’ll be at the front of the line to snag a new TV the next morning. In the seconds after the doors open, a stampede sometimes pushes and shoves its way toward the season’s must-have gadgets and half-off laptops — occasionally resulting in injuries or even death.

This year’s holiday shopping weekend was a bit different, given the COVID-19 pandemic, but Americans remained undaunted in their ability to buy stuff. They spent a record-breaking $9 billion on Black Friday, a 21 percent increase over last year. Last week, Cyber Monday became the biggest online shopping day in U.S. history with $10.8 billion in purchases.

Reading the news, you might notice that Americans aren’t just “people” — they’re consumers, customers, and shoppers. These words seem to distill a person into a one-dimensional being whose central function is to purchase things. The English language is full of subtle reminders to shop til you drop, much of it born in the field of economics.

Underlying this vocabulary is a “fundamental story” that people are innately selfish, and that economic growth is good, no matter if it makes people better off or damages the environment, said Arran Stibbe, a professor of ecological linguistics at the University of Gloucestershire in the United Kingdom. The language of economics goads us into being more selfish than we would be otherwise, research shows. It encourages consumerism and everything it entails — the needless extraction of resources, carbon emissions from production and shipping, and a pile of waste that collects when people move onto new things. A study from 2015 found that household consumption is responsible for about 60 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and between 50 and 80 percent of all land, material, and water use.

Simply reading the word consumer prompts people to act more selfishly. One study presented participants with a hypothetical scenario where they had to share a well with four other people during a water shortage. The researchers found that people who were labeled as “consumers” rather than “individuals” were less trusting of others and less likely to work together with others to deal with the crisis. Similarly, another study found that participating in a “Consumer Reaction Study” triggered a materialistic mindset that left people more preoccupied with wealth and status than those who took a “Citizen Reaction Study.”

“Change one word and you can subtly but deeply change attitudes and behaviour,” writes Kate Raworth in Doughnut Economics, a 2017 book that sought to develop a more sustainable model for economics.

One experiment, for instance, asked corporate executives to solve riddles that contained words like “profit,” “costs,” and “growth.” After the exercise, the executives had less empathy for their colleagues and worried that expressing concern for others would be seen as unprofessional.

The vast sum of money spent on holiday shopping so far this year left some unimpressed — sales were supposed to be even higher. So media coverage was filled with negative words. A Washington Post headline said that last weekend’s sales were “disappoint[ing],” and a sign that the economic recovery from the pandemic was “stumbling.” The article noted that high unemployment and rising coronavirus cases had put a “damper on consumer spending during the all-important shopping period” after Thanksgiving, framing the situation as if the main problem wasn’t the deadly pandemic or unemployed people, but the fact that those things impeded shopping. The long-term environmental impact of Black Friday and Cyber Monday was entirely ignored.

That’s not to single out the Washington Post; this framing is a norm, a default setting that’s resistant to change. “This story is so entrenched and embedded in our culture,” Stibbe said. “The media don’t realize that they are constantly spreading this damaging story.”

* * *

The roots of consumer offer the first hints of trouble. It traces back to the Latin consumere, meaning to destroy, devour, waste, or squander. From there, it’s only a slight leap to today’s definition: “a person who uses up a commodity; a purchaser of goods or services,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

In 2013, the British writer Owen Hatherley wrote that English had become a “peculiarly capitalist” language. That same year, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, used Google Ngram — a tool that catalogues words and phrases in millions of books — to see how the language had changed over time. They found that the last two centuries had brought a remarkable increase in the use of words related to acquisition, like get, self, and choose. Meanwhile, people were using community-focused words like give less often.

This reflects a long history of regarding humans as homo economicus, rational beings in pursuit of their own selfish needs. Nineteenth-century thinkers like John Stuart Mill and William Stanley Jevons sought to simplify the complex behavior of people into what one critic called the “dollar-hunting animal.”

The term consumer grew in popularity over the 20th century, pushing aside the once-common citizen. Some of the word’s biggest critics have been, at least historically, the disparagers of capitalism: socialists. “It is clear why ‘consumer’ as a description is so popular,” wrote Raymond Williams, a Welsh socialist, in the 1961 book The Long Revolution. “[A] considerable and increasing part of our economic activity goes to ensuring that we consume what industry finds it convenient for us to produce. As this tendency strengthens, it becomes increasingly obvious that society is not controlling its economic life, but is in part being controlled by it.”

There are plenty of alternatives to consumer. The classic, of course, is the generic people. Citizen sounds promising, as it’s basically somebody who lives in a city and long carried a unifying sense of “we’re all in this together,” though the common legal use excludes non-citizens. Human has a sci-fi ring to it, seeming to imply that aliens might be out there somewhere.

Raworth writes that using words and phrases like neighbors, community members, and global citizens will be “incredibly precious for securing a safe and just economic future.” Stibbe, the ecolinguist, jokingly suggested using shopaholic.

To be sure, replacing the word consumer won’t change the underlying widespread assumption that economic growth is the top priority, Stibbe said. As a substitute for gross domestic product, some countries track “gross national happiness” — a measure of living standards, education, and mental and physical health. It was made famous by the South Asian kingdom of Bhutan, when King Jigme Singye Wangchuck first proposed the idea in 1972.

Stibbe suggests using language that directs people away from buying things, and toward spending time in nature and helping their communities — “all those things which would genuinely give some well-being, don’t cost anything, and don’t destroy the environment,” he said.

It’s not just ecolinguists who are searching for a new philosophy. The “degrowth” movement holds that governments should actively try to shrink their economies. “Post-growth” advocates, alternatively, would rather ignore growth altogether and focus on measures like happiness and well-being.

You can hear echoes of these ideas in speeches by Greta Thunberg, the 17-year-old Swedish climate activist. “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth,” Thunberg told world leaders at a United Nations summit last year. “How dare you!”

“Growth is always going to sound good,” Stibbe said. “What we can do is stop talking about growth altogether, and start talking about well-being instead.”

“Saturday Night Live”: Mike Pence gets vaccinated, and Kamala Harris slaps him

NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” held their final show of 2020 with a special holiday edition.

During the show’s cold open, Vice President Mike Pence prepared to receive a COVID-19 vaccine.

Pence said Trump called him a “human shield” for taking the vaccine.

The Vice President began to take off his pants and bend over – with a towel in his mouth – before the doctor informed him it wasn’t that type of procedure.

Then Vice President-elect Kamala Harris showed up, because “she won more votes.”

Harris slapped Pence across the face when he questioned the election outcome.

“You do not!” she commanded.

“I”m sorry,” he replied. “Trump made me do it. He says I have to overturn the Electoral College or he’ll make my Spotify playlist public.”

Hilarity ensued as Joe Biden, and then Rudy Giuliani, joined the skit.

Watch:

Why so many moms can’t have great sex

San Francisco mother Sara Lopes didn’t even realize she’d lost a part of herself until she got it back. “I had been so consumed with both children and starting to work again that we hadn’t had sex in maybe a year and a half,” says Lopes, 41, whose first name has been changed to protect her privacy. “Figuring out how to have dinners prepped, remembering to buy rain boots, paying our credit card bill, scheduling play dates, worrying about summer camps. I couldn’t even think about my social life, let alone my sex life.” Only after Lopes and her husband instituted Saturday night sex did the truth dawn on her: “I had needs that I had absolutely forgotten about.” 

Lopes points the finger at herself, but she is not to blame for the problem, and Saturday night sex is not necessarily the solution. A handful of experts who’ve taken a closer look at the science of female sexuality and how it’s impacted by motherhood—from newly postpartum to empty nest—say we’ve had it all wrong.

The common tale of female sexuality fails us

Cultural scripts are stories we watch play out in advertisements, sitcoms, and IRL so often that we know our part. Our roles have come to feel like second nature, like our nature. 

The cultural script we’re told, particularly in the context of heterosexual relationships, goes something like this: Men are hardwired to seek variety; women, stability. Men crave sex; women consent to it (or bargain with it). Men prefer physical closeness; women, emotional intimacy. Men need climax; women are along for the ride. 

There’s one problem with these familiar gender scripts: Scientifically speaking, they’re B.S. “Women have been sold a bill of goods,” writes Dr. Wednesday Martin in “Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free.” “In matters of sex, women are not the tamer, more demure, or reticent sex.” 

By our 30s and 40s, many of us figure that out. We embrace our sexuality after realizing, as Dr. Stephanie Buehler puts it: “We are built for pleasure.” We do our part to decrease the “orgasm gap” by seeking out sex where foreplay isn’t just an appetizer to be shoveled down as quickly as possible (or skipped entirely) prior to the main (inter)course. 

But when parenthood happens, the difference between male and female reports of desire and satisfaction yawns wider. Ultimately, “a giant share” of mothers in the U.S. aren’t having good sex, says Katherine Rowland, author of “The Pleasure Gap,” which hit shelves just before the pandemic. And that includes a lot of lesbian moms. Why? Often, it’s because a mom-specific script has stepped in. Cultural stereotypes about motherhood often fall into one of these seven ruts.

1. I can’t really think about myself right now

Lydia Elle, 40, is a single mom with a 10-year-old in Los Angeles. She told me that she felt like when she became a mom, it became all-encompassing: “almost like ‘mom’ eclipsed ‘woman,'” she says. “Nurturing is a wonderful thing, but when you feel like that’s your only role, it’s a hindrance for good sex, because for that, you have to switch from being a giver to being okay being a receiver.”

We bring up girls to be helpful and empathetic, anticipating others’ needs and satisfying them. To “have it all” can often mean to give your all. To everyone. All the time.

You can partially thank the Victorians for this. In 1862, Dr. William Acton famously said, “As a general rule, a modest woman seldom desires any sexual gratification for herself.” But this is just a belief, and not one we’ve always held. Rowland says the Greeks thought female orgasm was required for conception. There’s no reason modern Americans can’t change the way we conceive of female pleasure.

2. I’m too touched-out

With a baby at her breast and a toddler clinging to her legs, one Seattle-area mom, who prefers not to be named, said the last thing she wants at night is another set of hands on her body. Buehler, a psychologist and sex therapist who’s written multiple books, says the idea of “touch fatigue” is so popular that she was shocked to find not a single scientific study confirming the phenomenon. But it makes sense when you think about it: Have you met many moms who’ll turn down a professional massage? It’s not that parents who spend a good deal of time with young children don’t want to be touched, Buehler thinks. They just don’t want another unpleasant, obligatory touch: “You have a partner who has needs, but they may feel like demands. And then the woman is like, ‘I am not here to service everybody,'” she says. Others simply find the gear-shift hard to manage, Buehler says, thinking, “How am I supposed to be this adoring, nurturing mother by day, and then be this sex goddess by night?”

3. I don’t feel like myself

This feeling of having one’s identity pulled and even torn can be especially acute when kids are small. Becoming a mother can make us feel disconnected from partners and from our former selves. “Most people need to feel relaxed in order to feel pleasure,” says reproductive psychiatrist Alexandra Sacks, M.D., co-author of “What No One Tells You: A Guide to Your Emotions from Pregnancy to Motherhood.” “It can be hard to feel relaxed if you don’t feel like you.”

4. My to-do list is in bed with us

The domestic labor, emotional labor, and mental load that Lopes described isn’t just a time suck—it can also be a desire suck. “If mentally you are distracted, that is going to create tension in your body, and that is going to make it difficult to get aroused,” says Buehler. “To have good sex, you have to be both relaxed and aroused.” Both can be inhibited by rising maternal workload (time-use diaries indicate mothers spent twice as much time engaging with their children in 2012 as they did in 1965) that’s produced rising levels of stress. So too can inequitable division of household labor—exhaustion with a side of resentment is hardly an aphrodisiac.

5. My body’s like, ‘No way’

Dr. Sacks’s co-author, Catherine Birndorf, M.D., says physiology unique to the postpartum window also plays a role: “After you deliver, you are practically in a menopausal state.” Hormone fluctuations can lead to pain, dryness, and lack of sex drive. Moms who are menopausal and perimenopausal often know these symptoms too well. Stacy Tessler Lindau, M.D., who is director of Womanlab and a professor at the University of Chicago, says even when that’s not the case “arousal may take more effort, more concentration.” A variety of other medical diagnoses can also make sex painful, and of course, disrupted sleep has been shown to decrease sex drive.

Medications, too, can play a role. Research is mixed on whether hormonal birth control depresses libido. But, in Dr. Lindau’s clinical experience, some women do experience difficulty with libido on the pill that gets better when they switch to an IUD. Another pharmacological suspect: Women have higher rates of depression and anxiety, says Buehler, and many of the medications to treat them can dampen desire.

6. My body—especially my vagina—has seen better days

Feeling desirable has been shown to increase one’s own desire. Since shame and insecurity are not exactly relaxing, it’s no wonder that internalized ideals of flat tummies and svelte arms can tank libido. That’s true at any stage of life, but physical changes wrought by pregnancy, delivery, and the lingering effects of both can create or compound body image issues. So too can the shape shift that often accompanies menopause.

In a particularly nasty spin-off of body image stress, there’s growing concern among women that their labia are too loose or veiny, a condition dubbed “vaginal orthorexia” by Jen Gunter, M.D., author of “The Vagina Bible.” With everything from surgery to “soundwave therapy” to injection of collagen being marketed to us, the number of women who shell out for “vaginal rejuvenation” procedures has skyrocketed over the last decade, despite the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists calling most such treatments “not medically indicated” and stating that they “pose substantial risk.”

7. Sex just isn’t much fun anymore

Reasons one through six often contribute to and culminate in a seventh reason for decreased libido: All the things that make for good sex—energy, relaxation, playfulness, time, and curiosity—are in short supply after children. That leaves bad sex. And research has proven that bad sex decimates desire.

Think of it this way. The old you liked salad: Freshly rinsed butter lettuce with perfectly tender slices of chicken, ripe strawberries, toasted almonds, and goat cheese with a touch of honey. Or at least you’d hoped to find a salad like that. But these days, the only lettuce you encounter is a day-old pre-pack from an Airport kiosk. It makes sense that some women start to think they just don’t like salad.

One sexual equivalent of limp leaves and mealy tomatoes is when your partner employs what sexperts call “crude initiations”— heading straight to penetration or similarly intense activity without teasing or anticipation, making you feel not alluring so much as … convenient. It’s a form of benign neglect, where a mate or date just doesn’t put in the effort required to arouse. And then there’s habituation—your sex salad is fine, good even. But few of us find joy in eating the same salad week after week, month after month, year after year.

The point is that giving up the sexual side of ourselves after we’ve had kids can be a perfectly sensible reaction to the situation we’re in. “Women hold themselves hostage to this idea that they have low desire, and that they need to work on themselves in order to ‘fix’ a problem, when their low desire is really a healthy, rational, and reasonable response to the fact that they aren’t enjoying the kind of sex that they’re having,” says Rowland.

So what do we do about it?

First, what not to do: Take a hard pass on medicalizing solutions like vaginal rejuvenation and “female Viagra.” And you don’t need to force yourself to have sex as you might go to the gym, with an “it’s painful, but boy you’ll be glad you did it” mentality. A lingerie budget isn’t required either.

Instead of ditching your cozy jammies, say goodbye to those old gendered scripts and the mother-specific ones as well. Believing women naturally don’t like sex as much as men or are too touched out to enjoy it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy—especially when these beliefs get reinforced by distracted, unexciting sex. And that’s a shame, because as Dr. Lindau says, “libido gives people a sense of being alive.”

Instead, I think there are new mantras we can all agree on.

First, moms deserve to relax. Basic prerequisites to relaxation include reliable childcare and equitable division of labor. As Dr. Birndorf puts it, “If we had some time and had some space, we’d all be in the freaking mood.” Believe you’re entitled to it, and then share this priority with anyone who can help make it happen—your partner, your boss, your parents.

Second, moms want sex. If you feel disconnected from your partner, misunderstood, or unseen, Dr. Sacks says, you probably can’t enjoy sex with them until they get to know you again—or get to know your new self for the first time. Making time to talk can help, and you can check out Jessica Graham’s “Good Sex” for next-level info on how to use mindfulness to facilitate reconnection with your partner and yourself. You’ll likely find the new you can contain the old one too. Moms can give and claim. We can be caretakers and want sex, and not just any sex, hot sex.

And finally, moms are desirable. You need to feel hot for hot sex to happen, and this means including yourself in the definition of what’s hot. “After you have children, as you get older, you may need to challenge cultural norms of beauty and of sexuality in order to more fully enjoy your own sensuality,” Dr. Sacks says, “Because the chase to look like someone else or be someone else—and that also applies to being a younger version of yourself—certainly isn’t relaxing and it certainly isn’t on the pathway to pleasure.” But it isn’t all about you practicing self-compassion and redefining your new creases and folds as attractive. 

Your partner, whether for decades or a tryst, needs to ask what you want and then put in the time and energy needed to give it to you; you deserve someone who tells you when they like how you’ve made them feel, and brings a sense of mystery and adventure to the bedroom. But most won’t do that, they won’t even realize they should try to do that, until they too chuck the old scripts in favor of these new three. Moms deserve to relax. Moms want sex. Moms are desirable.

The author would like to thank sexy mom Stephanie Dolgoff for helping shape this article. 

Giada De Laurentiis shares a recipe you can gift — and it only takes 15 minutes to put together

The holidays are mere weeks away, and we all have two things on our minds: food and gifts. Both are synonymous with the annual festivities and are something we, personally, always look forward to. If you’re struggling to find any worthy gift or stocking stuffers ideas for your friends or family, we have a suggestion: give the gift of food this holiday season. This year, why not whip up some delicious baked goods to give to someone special in your life (and as an added bonus, you’ll have cookies leftover for yourself). We found the perfect recipe, courtesy of Giada De Laurentiis, that will bring a smile to whoever receives the baked goods: Chewy Almond and Cherry Thumbprint Cookies.

Sharing a picture of the picture-perfect cookies, De Laurentiis wrote on Instagram, “Thanksgiving was already over a week ago and we’re ready to start the baking train back up again! First up: @Giadadelaurentiis’ chewy almond and cherry thumbprint cookies. Full of flavor and just so happen to be #glutenfree! Grab the #recipe in the profile link”

While ours might not look exactly like the chef’s cookies (or hey, maybe yours will!), the taste of the snack is the kicker. De Laurentiis’ cookies have a mix of almond and cherry — two flavor staples around the holidays.

To make the recipe, you’ll need a rimmed baking sheet and 15 minutes to prep — just to name a few. The quick and easy prep time is just one of the many reasons these cookies are fantastic.

Honestly, most of us have embraced our inner chef during lockdown, and now is the time to put those skills to use and make something delicious.

Get Giada De Laurentiis’ Chewy Almond and Cherry Thumbprint Cookies recipe.

Read more SheKnows:

  1. Jamie Oliver Shares the Perfect Sunday Dinner Recipe
  2. Ina Garten Swears by These 3 Salts & Uses Them In Everything
  3. Ina Garten Has an Unusual Ingredient She Adds to Her Grilled Cheese Sandwiches