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The Four Seasons Total Landscaping fiasco gave us a reason to laugh at 2020

I woke up just in time to see Donald Trump’s tweet that started it all: “Lawyers News Conference Four Seasons, Philadelphia. 11:00 a.m.” 

It was four days after the election — a Sunday — and I’d crashed out the night before after endlessly refreshing the AP Politics Twitter feed and analyzing the cursed New York Times election needle for what felt like 90 hours straight. But for the first time in years, I woke up with a glimmer of political hope for our nation as it looked like Trump’s window to victory was closing. 

The news of the press conference, which would be led by Rudy Giuliani, read as the announcement of the campaign’s last stand. Little did I know how fitting that last stand it would be — a farcical end to a ridiculous presidency. 

Then came Trump’s clarification: “Big press conference today in Philadelphia at Four Seasons Total Landscaping. 11:30am!” This was followed by a tweet from the hotel’s account. “To clarify, President Trump’s press conference will NOT be held at Four Seasons Hotel Philadelphia. It will be held at Four Seasons Total Landscaping,” it said. “No relation with the hotel.” 

No relation with the hotel. Those words inspired a delicious kind of schadenfreude that was only topped when images from the press conference appeared online. The industrial corridor was hastily plastered with Trump signs and there was Guiliani, standing at a faux-wood lectern, peddling lies about voter fraud in front of a white pull-down garage door. To his left, there was a crematorium. To his right, a sex shop called Fantasy Island whose owner later came out and said, “We knew there had to be a screw-up somehow, because why would you pick a spot like this?” 

It felt like a gaffe Gob Bluth from “Arrested Development” would have made. Envision it: Will Arnett as Gob, on a Segway, whizzing around a display of wilting potted plants to face a dismayed Michael (Jason Bateman).

“I meant the Four Seasons Hotel, Gob,” Michael would say, reaching up to rub his temples. “Not a landscaping firm.” 

Cut to Gob muttering his endlessly GIF-able, “I’ve made a huge mistake.” 

Each update was like a hit of dopamine. A man featured at the press conference was a convicted sex offender, Politico reported the next day. The New York Times later found out that the mistake was “not in the booking, but in a garbled game of telephone” when Trump’s legal team had told the president they’d booked the landscaping firm, but he heard the name and assumed it was at the upscale hotel. 

In the end, it was just another example of Trump promising big things and under delivering. Like, you know, boasting about the creation of a massive border wall and only building 15 new miles, or inviting the Clemson Tigers, the 2019 national college football champions, for a White House dinner, only to serve them a buffet of Filet-O-Fish sandwiches and slices of Domino’s pizza. 

I’m thankful for the event for the same reason more than 3,000 people have signed a petition to place the landscaping firm on the National Register of Historic Places: “We as a nation need to remember where the travesty of the Trump administration died with a whimper.” 

Verzuz battles brought us together to bond over live music again

Early May is when the world first starting to press in on me. It became clear that this pandemic wasn’t ending any time soon. I’d seen too many people flouting mask mandates, heard too many yard parties packed with loud people getting drunk, counted out the months since I’d last stood face to face with people I loved and realized I wouldn’t see them in person any time soon.

And right when it felt like it might become too much to bear, Verzuz announced its 10th “battle”: Erykah Badu vs. Jill Scott.

Verzuz was born in the pandemic, and as millions of people have discovered, it was also made for it. Created by producers Timbaland and Swizz Beats back in March, Verzuz arose as part of a wave of musicians and DJs using streaming video and audio to reach fans in lieu of touring and stage performances. Where Verzuz found its groove was in its battle format, offering music legends and superstars going head to head on Instagram live as they showcase their best cuts.

Following the Verzuz founders’ face-off came matches between the likes of Ne-Yo and Johnta Austin, T-Pain and Lil Jon, and RZA vs. DJ Premier. A Verzuz between Teddy Riley and Babyface became famous for its technical difficulties and coined the term “the Teddy Riley echo.” Instead of being uncomfortable it came across and funny and good-natured, with both R&B V.I.P.s handling the glitches in stride.

But the Badu/Scott Verzuz was next level — a Saturday night affair that shaped up to be a celebration as opposed to a confrontation, which is precisely what a besieged audience needed in the springtime.

As each singer played their favorite from their own extensive catalogs, the other rhapsodized over what her work means to them. Both shared the histories and inspirations behind their songs, praising the artistic communities that raised them. The affection they shared for each other was genuinely moving and powerfully healing.  

More than this, they also recognized their unique position among artists struggling to make it through 2020. “Shout out to all the musicians — everybody who’s not working right now, everybody who’s looking around in circles like, what are we gonna do?” Scott said. “All we can do is create. Keep creating, keep creating. This time is sure to pass, and we have something that is beautiful and the world needs. So … hold tight. Breathe easy.”

Together they inhaled.

“Hold tight,” Badu said in refrain.

“Breathe easy,” Scott repeated.

Their battle was one of 21 that have taken place in Instagram since Verzuz launched, and it proved that not every one of these events needs to be a contest or a confrontation. Instead they showed the potential for Verzuz events to serve as a space for communities prevented by a virus from coming together to find solace in each other to gather and share. Their Verzuz was an equalizing force, too. Among the 700,000 people who tuned in over its three hours were Michelle Obama, Janelle Monae and a firmament of actors and musicians. “I have no conception of time,” Badu joked once she and Scott realized they’d been going for two hours with no sign of slowing down. “I don’t know what that means.”

Benevolent and more polished Verzuz battles like theirs followed afterward, including ones featuring Alicia Keys with John Legend, gospel legends Kirk Franklin and Fred Hammond and an iconic Sunday evening meeting between Gladys Knight and Patti LaBelle, where Dionne Warwick dropped in as a surprise guest at the end. (Both Obama and Oprah tuned in to that one.)

Don’t get it twisted; some of the battle battles have been splendid. The Brandy vs. Monica Verzuz capitalized on the alleged (and palpable) feud between the two performers and attracted around 1.2 million viewers eager to see what would happen. Even last week’s pointed conflagration between Jeezy and Gucci Mane, introduced by Stacey Abrams, gave the 1.7 million Instagram live viewers plenty to talk about. Some TV series would kill for that viewership.

Whether convivial or adversarial, Verzuz has been a gift, reminding us to dance, bounce, shout or experience togetherness virtually, allowing us to collectively exhale in release and release a few hours at a time.

Thank you, Gritty, for rallying with us to save our democracy

I’m not saying we moved to Philadelphia two years ago because of Gritty. Our official story is we  wanted an affordable house in a walkable city with the cultural amenities we’d grown accustomed to in New York City. And yet the furry orange mascot for the Flyers, Philly’s hockey team, did speak to us as we walked around our newly chosen home, and not just because his googly eyes constantly peek at you in South Philly from murals and coffee shop chalkboards. 

Gritty, who became a Philly icon within moments of being unveiled in the fall of 2018, really captures the soul of the city: dirtbaggy, no f*cks given, but still kind-hearted. His floofy orange visage made us feel at home. 

As Eduardo García-Molina said on Twitter, Gritty is “the manifestation of their city as a god, like Roma.” 

Which is why it was a pure delight to see Gritty become the de facto mascot of the hard-won defeat of Donald Trump in 2020. Gritty wasn’t just a symbol of l’esprit de Philadelphia. He embodied both the decency and barely-managed chaos of the broad Democratic coalition that managed to pull together to kick Trump out of office. 

The ostensible reason Gritty memes and jokes flew across the internet, of course, was the lengthy fight over vote-counting came down, as many predicted it would, to the city where American democracy was invented. Images of the tangerine hairball became shorthand for Philly dragging Joe Biden across the line to victory, a fun joke about how democracy was saved by one of the proudly goofier cities in the country. 

When Rudy Giuliani and Eric Trump tried to marshal an anemic group of MAGAheads to intimidate vote counters at Philadelphia Convention Center, they were driven off by a crowd of locals, many with the requisite Gritty drawings on their cardboard signs. For days, as vigilant residents stood watch over the convention center, protecting their right to vote, Gritty signs and people in Gritty costumes were a mainstay. When Biden’s victory was announced, there was Gritty, in costume and drawing, sprinkled throughout the crowd. 

But Gritty was adopted as a lefty icon before even Philadelphia’s votes were counted, and wholly without any input or consent from the Flyers management. (Still, the team leans into it — Gritty, for instance, was sporting lady’s clothing  before Harry Styles graced the cover of Vogue.) Hard exactly to say why. The character just vibes with a progressive vision of the world, and was a reminder to hang onto your sense of humor even in the face of very serious threats. 

The more that chaotic evil emanated from the orange guy in the White House, the more comforting it was to imagine Gritty pushing back with a chaotic good energy from our nation’s first capital. So it was especially satisfying to make Gritty the face of the millions of Americans — and hundreds of thousands of Philadelphians — who finally crushed Trump’s dreams of domination. 

I’m still relatively new to Philly, especially since the quarantine has kept us sequestered at home for eight months. But I love this city — not just in spite but because of its messy spirit. Like Gritty, Philadelphia is unkempt and manic. But when you need to save democracy, Philly is clutch. 

TikTok teens trolling Trump in Tulsa: A high point in an otherwise low year

I know that Claudia Conway is neither Katniss Everdeen nor Hermione Granger. I know that K-Pop fans will not save democracy. I am also the proud mom of two Gen Z daughters, and I do so love their generation’s exceptional knack for making terrible adults look ridiculous. Faced with the reckless hubris of Donald Trump, the kids took a break from vertical dancing to help deliver a blow to the narcissist-in-chief.

In early summer, the attention-addicted former reality star was pushing forward on plans for his first big re-election rally since the COVID-19 crisis began. It was a garbage fire from the outset, down to the dog whistle planned date: Juneteenth. The date was then moved to June 20, but the audacious, irresponsible edict of the whole thing remained the same — to get a whole bunch of people together in one confined space in the midst of public health crisis.

For a while, things were looking on track for a big turnout. Yuge. A week before, Trump confidently tweeted, “Almost One Million people request tickets for the Saturday Night Rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma!” As TulsaWorld reported at the time, Trump also claimed that the Cox Business Convention Center would be “increasing total capacity to 62,000.”

But in a twist that would later echo exactly how well his voter fraud hotline would pan out in November, the system was irresistibly easy to game. One might even call it … rigged.

Across TikTok and other youth-friendly platforms, the message that you could just RSVP for the rally and then forget to attend it took off like rocket at a gender reveal party: “You should be really careful, just in case you can’t make it,” user @pastaboii implored on TikTok, “you don’t want a bunch of empty seats.” 

In the end, fewer than 6,200 very determined Trump fans showed up, and the anticipated glorious overflow to the parking lot topped out at about 25 individuals. (For some who did attend, like Herman Cain, their participation soon proved fatal.) The images of rows upon rows of empty seats did not do much to make the libs feels especially owned, so Trump naturally blamed the poor showing on “very bad people outside” somehow keeping his devoted flock at bay. 

Was the whole delicious debacle as simple as a bunch of teens banding together to humiliate the president of the United States? If only. The Tulsa event bombed for a variety of factors, and the prank RSVPs didn’t come exclusively from folks born in the 2000s. Yet the giddy, subversive spirit of the undertaking had an undeniably youthful bent. And watching kids who have no voice in our electoral process find their own ways to get their message across anyway gave me reason to hope — and something, for just a little while anyway, to laugh about.

Weird Al’s “We’re All Doomed” nailed this sh*tshow of a year

The Weird Al music video “WE’RE ALL DOOMED” may not appear on a lot of “Best of 2020” lists, but I can’t think of a single pop culture artifact that did a better job of bottling up the flatulent essence of living through this shitshow of a year… and finding a way to make us laugh about it.

The video targets the first Biden-Trump presidential debate, which I doubt anyone would choose as their favorite moment of 2020. CNN’s Jake Tapper pretty well summed up the prevailing sentiment about that ostensible forensic exhibition when he described it as “a hot mess, inside a dumpster fire.” President Donald Trump repeatedly lied, spewed out nonsense and interrupted while his opponent, future President-elect Joe Biden, struggled to get a word in edgewise.

And then The Gregory Brothers, an American musical quartet behind viral remixes like “Songify the News” on their YouTube channel Schmoyoho, came along. They brought Weird Al with them and, in their own inimitable way, they managed to create both music and comedy out of the flaming wreckage of that debate, and capture the entire zeitgeist of 2020 in the process.

To their everlasting credit, Weird Al and The Gregory Brothers make it clear that the problems facing America during the coronavirus pandemic have not been “both sides are to blame” situations. Pretending to be the debate moderator, Yankovic reacts with visible dismay when he hears that Trump deliberately downplayed the seriousness of the pandemic and is equally skeptical toward the president’s attempts to defend his record. When the president mocks Biden for wearing a mask, his voice is autotuned to sound whiny, pathetic and desperate.

Yankovic’s expressions of hysteria also manage to capture the overall mood of 2020. As he ticks off tribulations like the West Coast wildfires and economic downturn, Yankovic pleads with both Biden and Trump to recognize, “We’re living in the apocalypse. I’m begging you to put a stop to this. Pretty please!” On another occasion he refers to 2020 as “a raging hellscape” and, in a particularly clever lyric, croons that we “can’t tell what’s hell or reality.”

“Al is a singular figure in the cultural landscape,” Larry Charles, director of the first “Borat” movie and erstwhile “Seinfeld” scribe, told me in an email. “He was initially dismissed as a novelty but has not only survived but transcended by tapping into our deeper fears and anxieties through his original use of pop culture and just as importantly, pop technology.”

He had a similar observation about The Gregory Brothers, writing that “it’s amazing and ironic that the Gregory Brothers work has profoundly permeated popular culture and reached tens if not hundreds of millions of people, yet mainstream media considers them obscure.”

In Rolling Stone, Althea Legaspi praised the music video, noting that “Yankovic and the Gregory Brothers’ satirical rendering accurately summed up the general consensus following the debate.” Billboard’s headline succinctly hit the nail on the head: “‘Weird Al’ Yankovic Says What We’re All Thinking,” with author Rania Aniftos adding that it was “the only good thing” to come out of the debacle.

Personally, my favorite part of the video is how The Gregory Brothers manage to take lines from the debate — which, as anyone unfortunate enough to have actually watched it knows, was often incomprehensible due to the two candidates and moderator Chris Wallace shouting over each other — and craft surprisingly catchy refrains from them. Among the most earworm-y moments are Trump bellowing, “They wanna take out the cows! The cows!” and Biden replying, “Now here’s the deal/He has no idea what he’s talking about!”

The first 2020 presidential debate was indeed horrifying — a perfect epitome of the entire year — but thanks to Weird Al and The Gregory Brothers, I was able to find a way to find something entertaining in it. I am deeply thankful for this since, to quote President Abraham Lincoln, “I laugh because I must not cry.” 

See for yourselves:

“Schitt’s Creek” was my saving grace in the early shutdown days

Like many of us, I knew extreme change was coming before it was here. By mid-February, the handwashing memes, the worrisome upward tick of suspected cases, the reports from friends in Italy and in Seattle, foretold what was coming for the rest of the U.S. On March 13, the beginning of my local stay-at-home orders, daily life changed abruptly. One day I had a calendar full of trips and concerts and drinks dates and plays and openings; the next day nothing. The day after that, more of the same. While introverts boasted of their ability to stay home and thrive, I experienced pangs of phantom FOMO, despite knowing full well there was nothing happening to miss.

I trained for zero marathons. I did not whisper to sourdough. And after a morbid first week revisiting the ’90s TV miniseries adaptation of Stephen King’s “The Stand,” I found myself in need of something, anything, to make me laugh after a long day in the office—one room over—helping Salon document the world’s collapse.

Dan and Eugene Levy’s fish out of water sitcom “Schitt’s Creek” had long been on my to-watch list, but before March, something newer and grittier always won out, grim and prestigious with gunshot wounds and a tormented hero and a monster or two of our own making. Until I had nowhere to turn for escapism after a long day managing a news cycle full of death, dread and Donald Trump. That’s when a sitcom with a toilet gag name and Chris Elliott in the opening credits sounded, finally, just about right.

Once I started in on the story of a vacuous rich family stripped of their assets save this podunk town with a silly name that they bought as a joke, where they are exiled to learn how to function with no money, status or city amenities, I fell hard. When David Rose (Dan Levy) snapped, “I have asked you thrice now for a towel so I may wash this town off my body,” it felt like an acknowledgement of how petty inconveniences were always in danger of being magnified and distorted in our present circumstances, when they become the focal point for a great deal of ambient, unnameable distress. 

I believe there is no such thing as too much of a good thing, but my husband refuses to binge-watch. In the before, we both had busy lives, and I could swallow an entire sitcom season while he traveled to another city overnight to see a band I don’t know. Now, we have one TV and two people at home all day, every day. (“Give. Me. Some. Space,” David hissed through gritted teeth at his sister Alexis, played by Annie Murphy, in the pilot.) My “Schitt’s Creek” experience was shaped by the spirit of compromise sharing a small space demands: We could watch an episode every day, instead of spacing them out — but only one. 

As March turned to April, my own life increasingly resembled a sitcom with a meager location budget, and I felt even closer to the Roses. The same small cast of characters now rotated through my life every week, too, making the same types of jokes. There were only two businesses I frequented in my new world and I know the owners of both. I thought about adding a new pet to the cast, or buying a house to open new plot possibilities. In my darker moments, I found myself practicing Catherine O’Hara’s genius diction in full matriarch Moira Rose character: “Pick up a hammer and nail this coffin shut!” 

And yet as the show seasons passed, day by day, I watched the Roses find their way back to the best parts of themselves. If these brittle neurotics could do it, couldn’t I, also a brittle neurotic, peel myself off the couch and at least try? If Alexis could go back to school and David could open the boutique of his dreams in right there in Schitt’s Creek, I could at least finish my book proposal. If Moira could find her Crowening all the way in Bosnia, I could write a pilot script with a good friend over video chats and Google docs. And if patriarch Johnny (Eugene Levy) could greet each day in a pressed suit and a can-do attitude like the CEO he never gave up on being, I could pull myself together and lead a virtual meeting without falling apart like I desperately wanted to at times. 

The Roses gave me, a spoiled whiner with distinct preferences in airport lounges, a daily 24-minute lesson in gratitude and hope that I sorely needed in my more disoriented moments. I am lucky beyond measure to have my health, and shelter, and a partner who loves me, a safe place to live, and fulfilling work, and I know it. There are things from the before I desperately miss, including my family. I hope to see them all at a high-stakes softball game or a small-town movie premiere, as soon as it is safe to travel. For now, I have everything I need to make it through this storyline, and that’s enough. 

“This town might be your saving grace,” the lawyer tells the Roses when he gives them the bad news about where they’d be living in disgrace. How right he was, for them and for me.

“Schitt’s Creek” is streaming on Netflix. 

Fanny packs are back, baby! A weird fashion silver lining in a sweatpants year

I love fanny packs.

This, despite the humble belted bag being the object of much condescension and disdain, perhaps because early ’80s models were crafted in eye-bleeding Day-Glo colors and durable yet unglamorous nylon. I’ve never understood this bag snobbery. Pouches on waists have been worn since humans walked upright (probably) . . . or at least have been known to adorn the midriffs of Indigenous people who understood that practicality spelled survival.

When fanny packs fell out of favor after the ’90s, I vowed to keep my arms unencumbered and transitioned to awkward mini backpacks, eventually adopting the small crossbody bag as my go-to purse. But on the bottom shelf in the dark recesses of my linen closet, a plain black nylon bag sat, ready to be strapped around my waist for emergencies, or maybe a visit to a dystopic theme park. 

About two years ago, the West finally got hip to the bum bag’s potential and started outputting more versatile and stylish designs. Even though they didn’t become popular with the majority (perhaps wary of challenging the dictates of fashion drilled into their heads for decades), I began to slowly build my wardrobe.

There’s the tan pleather one with gold hardware that adds equestrian flair to my ensembles. A gift of a loud “cats in space” print is always a conversation starter at casual brunches. My skinny elastic black bag holds jogging essentials close to my body with minimal jiggle. I even invested in a rose gold quilted number that I sported in rakish crossbody fashion whilst attending a comedy in London’s West End.

When I buckle a fanny pack on, the hands-free utility immediately adds an air of insouciance to my posture. I imagine this is how the first Scotsman who adorned himself with a sporran over his kilted groin felt: proud, ready to tackle a foxy time traveler or haggis. We may have not evolved like the mysterious marsupial, but by god, we shall be equipped like one.

And then the pandemic hit, and fanny packs became essential in my eyes. The bag’s low profile and lack of swing reduces the chance of my stuff touching any tainted surfaces. A new blush-colored bag from Target is now part of my official COVID couture: big enough for everything I need, including one of those touchless button-pressing doodads and my Kindle for reading in line. It’s waterproof and easily wiped down, yet its rose gold zippers lend it style, enough that friends and strangers have asked where they could buy the same.

While panicking marketers tried to frighten us into worrying about gaining the COVID 15, I didn’t pay them any mind. Wearing a fanny pack made me feel poised for action; I would not remain idle. That would be failing the purposeful promise of the fanny pack, which keeps me honest about my girth each time I click its plastic buckle. So what if my silhouette juts out lumpily? This muffin top is removable and comes in assorted shades.

I’ve stopped using all other bags as purses; after all, I have nowhere to go except for quick forays to retrieve groceries or takeout. My job used to be filled with industry events and parties, but now I look at my dresses, rompers and accessories and wonder how long I should hold onto them. Taking a cue from the fanny pack, I consider how else I can Marie Kondo my life to only the jaunty essentials. 

We needed to hear Melania Trump say “Who gives a f*ck about Christmas”

“They say I’m complicit, I’m the same like him, I support him, I don’t say enough, I don’t do enough where I am,” I heard First Lady Melania Trump complaining in an audio clip recorded surreptitiously by her former confidant and adviser Stephanie Winston Wolkoff in the summer of 2018. The clip was then released on October 1, 2020, in support of Wolkoff’s tell-all book, which I will not read.

“I’m working like a . . .  ass, my ass off on the Christmas stuff,” Melania whinged as Wolkoff murmured supportively and the world held its breath on like a . . . like a . . . where was that sentence heading before it swerved? “Who gives a fuck about Christmas stuff and decoration, but I need to do it, right?” 

It was an experience so flavored with delirium—and I don’t say that lightly after the last five years—that I had to play it again and again to make sure I was awake, alive, not feverish, and indeed hearing the first lady of the United States say “who gives a fuck about Christmas stuff and decoration” on tape. (Not, to be clear, because I think any first partner should have to give a fuck about Christmas stuff and decoration if they don’t want to! But if you’re going to crap on White House tradition while living in it, you should at least be doing something more worthwhile instead, and complaining about magazine profiles doesn’t count.) 

Why is hearing Melania dump on Christmas something good that happened in 2020? By any normal yardstick, it’s an ugly moment! And it’s an ugly moment quickly overshadowed—just hours later, in fact—by President Donald Trump announcing that he and Melania had tested positive for COVID-19. But this grotesque little blurt of selfish, petty grievance is worth taking a beat to appreciate for what it is: the final crack in the first lady’s carefully applied veneer of ambivalence, exposing her once and for all as just another Trump, with a rotting sack of writhing worms for a heart and a knockoff Fabergé egg rattling in her skull where a brain might normally be.

And so the final death rattles of #FreeMelania finally stilled, and in their place a recording of the first lady going on to mock the unfathomable pain and trauma of children separated from their parents at the border by her husband’s henchmen’s orders. “Give me a fucking break,” she snarled, then segued into a common lie about Barack Obama — a Trump dinner table staple, I’m sure. “Where they were saying anything when Obama did that?” (They weren’t saying anything because Obama-era border policies separated children when they couldn’t prove they were with their legal guardians or there were concerns for their safety, not as a strategy to terrorize migrants, but hey, someone’s been paying attention to all of that Fox News blaring from her husband’s distant bedroom.)

That Melania can’t grasp the spiritual connection between the ritual act of giving a fuck about Christmas and her squandered opportunity to give a fuck about the children and parents terrorized by her husband’s administration told us the last thing we ever need to know about her in one authoritative audio clip.

To paraphrase an overused and misattributed phrase, better for your inevitable lifestyle brand comeback efforts to keep your mouth shut and have them wonder if you’re really a Trump than to open it and remove all doubt. But we are better off knowing for sure who Melania is and what she stands for. Now that her character is defined with hard proof, let this be our final memory of Melania Trump’s QVC Jackie O cosplay as she marches off, God willing, into the Mar-a-Lago sunset for good. 

Ronan Farrow’s voices (and other audiobook delights) helped me get through this year

Several months into lockdown, I injured both of my arms, sidelining my yoga practice for an indefinite period of time. Needing exercise to stay sane, I switched to jogging at my local park, but it wasn’t easy. I found that music did little to inspire me to keep moving — so I tried podcasts, which then segued into engrossing audio dramas. 

And then I was introduced to Libby. 

I had already been using the online OverDrive service at the library to borrow ebooks, but its Libby app does all this and more, even playing audiobooks directly on your phone. No need to shop for another app like you do with podcasts. It’s easy to use, lets you listen at faster chipmunk-friendly speeds, and is free. Also, did I mention that when you “return” a book on the app the image of the book spins away into the horizon and you’re gifted with digital flowers? I don’t often wax poetic about apps, but Libby is perfection.

But which audiobook should I listen to first? My friends had raved about the audio version of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s rock ‘n’ roll novel “Daisy Jones & the Six” with its star-studded voice cast, including Jennifer Beals, Benjamin Bratt, the always-lovable Judy Greer and Pablo Schreiber, but I at the time I was 23rd in the “Holds” queue for that title. Another time.

And then I recalled that when Ronan Farrow released “Catch and Kill” last year, reviewers made a big deal about him voicing the audiobook – especially his attempts at performing various accents and voices. Sure enough, as early as the prologue, Farrow tackles a conversation between a Russian and Ukrainian, gamely rolling his R’s and even speaking a few Russian phrases. C’mon! That’s dedication.

Throughout the book, Farrow lavishes attention to detail, setting scenes that include plenty of aural imagery, as if he knew that he’d have listeners as well as readers. But in fact, Farrow is just a damn good storyteller, one who understands how to build a driving narrative behind the journalism hoops he had to jump through to pursue these stories of sexual abuse and cover-ups. As Salon’s Erin Keane wrote last year, the book is a “a propulsive, cinematic page-turner,” and I found excuses to continue listening long after I finished exercising. All the voices – including an Aussie, a breathy Rose McGowan, and even Trump – are just a delightful bonus. (And apparently, worthy of a Grammy nomination!)

Farrow isn’t alone in attempting the multiple voices and accents, though. As I moved on to more escapist fare – ranging from action and sci-fi thrillers a la Blake Crouch to Regency-set novels in preparation for Netflix’s upcoming “Bridgerton” series – I realized that this is the norm. “Daisy Jones & the Six” is an exception, apparently.

Usually one voice actor narrates and performs all the dialogue in a book, which necessitates changes in pitch, tone, and yes, even accent at times. For example, The Fug Girls’ “The Royal We” sequel “The Heir Affair,” narrator Christine Lakin plays both men and women, and performs American, English, and an assortment of other U.K. accents. A chapter featuring a fictionalized take on “The Great British Bake Off” is especially entertaining.

I began to recognize voice actors and seek them out. Bahni Turpin reads mainly books by Black female authors and/or stories that require African-inspired accents, such as the “Children of Blood and Bone” series and “Transcendent Kingdom” by Yaa Gyasi. Nancy Wu is behind all the family squabbles in Lillian Li’s “Number One Chinese Restaurant” and other Asian books like Sayaka Murata’s “Convenience Store Woman.” Roselyn Landor is a British theater actress who has fully transitioned into audiobooks, mainly Jane Austen-type stories.

I miss every aspect of traveling (yes, even the airport food); and somehow, listening to these variously accented performers get angry, feel frightened and fall in love, engages my wanderlust in a way that watching food travel shows or the pommy “Crown” does not. Perhaps it’s the intimacy of hearing these voices directly in my ear. Maybe it’s the way my brain must fill in the gaps of the story without the benefit of visuals.

How I consume audiobooks also differs from how I watch TV or even read traditional books, which requires I be relatively sedentary. But with audiobooks, I’m restless and can’t stay still. And I don’t need to. With an audiobook I can also prep and cook a more elaborate meal, sort the contents of boxes in my shed, and frame all the art I’ve bought over the years. Plus, I can finally turn off my screens.

But for all the improving and high-minded reasons to enjoy audiobooks, I still get the most joy from the surprise vocal performances: the arrival of a Russian tough guy, a random Scottish laird or better yet, a yowling cat. (Note to self: Seek out more audiobooks with prominently featured animal characters.) With precious little in 2020 to laugh about, at least I don’t have to mourn the loss of my sense of humor.
 

“Kentucky Route Zero,” a magical realism masterpiece, is proof art can thrive in trying times

In 1827, German philosopher K. F. E. Trahndorff coined the term Gesamtkunstwerk, a German word that, roughly translated, means “total work of art.” A Gesamtkunstwerk is a synthesis, an artistic spectacle that combines multiple forms — say, music, theater, lights, video — into something wholly new. 

“Kentucky Route Zero,” an episodic video game about 8 years in the making, is a Gesamtkunstwerk par excellence. Ostensibly the story of a docile delivery driver puttering about rural Kentucky in an attempt to reach a mysterious highway known as “Route Zero,” that initial seed soon opens up an entire world of surreal intrigue — Kafkaesque bureaucracies, sound artists and television repairwomen, who flit in and out of this world.

While the makers self-describe it as a “magical realist adventure game,” the game’s major underlying theme is that of rural poverty and of community: the characters confess to their struggles with healthcare, or with money, or with artistic success, or with government bureaucracy. Yet what keeps them going is their communitarian bonhomie, revealed through dialogue and the quick friendships one strikes with these helpful strangers.

What makes it qualify as a Gesamtkunstwerk, you ask?  “Kentucky Route Zero” merges screenplay, theater, music, design, art and telephony. Better yet, it eschews the problem of the vast majority of video games, namely, that they are too reliant on tropes of user interface control that only a seasoned gamer would understand. There’s no need to memorize when to push X or ▢ or ◯, and it’s near-impossible to get lost or “stuck.”

And let’s talk about that weird, sprawling story. It is written in five “acts,” with entr’actes that often bring in briefly-mentioned side characters and expand upon them. In one scene, you’re in a small community theater, turning in circles, listening to the dialogue of actors on stage, then turning towards the audience, then back again; the lighting and the sound shift as you do.

In another scene, an experimental band takes the stage at a dive bar. The music changes dynamically as the player presses their verse of choice — letting the user dynamically write the song as it’s being performed.

Indeed, music is intrinsic to the experience, and the game features a haunting, kitschy, folk-inspired soundtrack, which can be streamed on Spotify. Composer Ben Babbitt’s “Long Journey Home,” appearing in the game’s first act, is a catchy and melancholic banjo folk ballad that sounds as if it were directly recorded from a rural Kentucky farmhouse’s creaky front porch. 

The game’s art is surreal and blocky, which opens up just enough of one’s imagination that half the story is in one’s head: the character’s body movements are pained and emotive, yet their expressions blank. In between those two poles, your imagination fleshes out the characters.

If I were forced to define it, I might call “Kentucky Route Zero” a twenty-first century merger of a Southern Gothic and magical realist novel. It is post-modern in the realest sense of the word, in that it transcends the gaming form, and comments on itself — something known as “metatext” by academics. The most impressive metatextual element is not even technically in the game: it’s a phone number that you dial, for the Echo River Tourism Bureau, which is alluded to in gameplay. In fact, you can experience it right now, from your phone, for free: Dialing (270) 301-5797 leads one to a surreal automated menu for the fictional bureau. “If you don’t remember dialing this number at all, press 5,” the operator coos at the conclusion of the first menu’s monologue.

Video games are certainly the premier artistic genre of the twenty-first century, but it’s rare to find one that truly transcends the form. Computer games were forged in the heart of the military-industrial complex; the first games, historically, were war games, and they’ve been stuck in that rut since. The most popular video games today generally involve killing, first person shooters or RPGs; the obsession over “points” and “high scores,” the quantification of victory and killing, emerged as a video game trope because it resembled military-style thinking.

Yet “Kentucky Route Zero” not only subverts that, but rethinks what a video game could be — opening up the creative and artistic potential of a genre that tends to be stuck in its ways. It’s a true Gesamtkunstwerk. It was the highlight of my 2020, and a reminder that great art can still exist, even when the rest of the world is on fire.

Getting engaged in this otherwise hellish year: An act of faith in a shared future

Huddled under a blanket of stars, I complained to my boyfriend that I was feeling extra on edge that evening.

I felt frustrated with the edits I made on my nonfiction book proposal. I was stressed about an article I was writing for work. It was a Sunday in mid-June, and I didn’t want to return to Oakland the next day where everything was still closed because of the pandemic. Plus, there was a heatwave and we didn’t have air conditioning. I felt safer away from the city, and physically cool, holed up in a small cabin surrounded by the vastness of the Sierra Nevada mountains for the weekend. While Ken insisted we look at the stars, which were pretty and all, I opted to stuff my mouth with Tostitos chips and salsa and spew out word venom instead. Little did I know that he was about to propose.

In true Ken fashion, he turned a not-so-good moment into a good one. He said he loved me so much, even when I’m stressed and anxious, that he wanted to marry me. This wasn’t new to me. We had talked about marriage before. But he proceeded to get up from his seat, get down on one knee, and pull out a ring from his pocket.

“Nicole Marie Karlis, will you marry me?”

A mix of adrenaline, shock, and some confusion, rushed through my body. Was this really happening right now? Is this the marriage proposal? Once I realized that this was in fact happening, and it was the marriage proposal, I said “yes.” We kissed, and just like that in the span of a minute we went from dating to engaged.

So yes, I’m one of those annoying people who got engaged this year. Comedians have riffed about us and essays have advised against it. We didn’t get engaged because the pandemic made us feel some kind of über-romantic way. I realize it’s kind of an awkward time. This year is far from being a sunny and fun one. But pandemic or no pandemic, it would have happened. We have a dog and a house together, and it just felt like the next logical step. The change in our relationship status didn’t necessarily feel different during a pandemic. Instead, it served as a reminder of what matters most in life, which is the people you spend your time with and love.

Since March, I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on how life has changed. I remember the night I felt like everyday-normalcy was about to put on hold. I was at a friend’s apartment in San Francisco eating Thai food and drinking wine. Something I did almost every other week with this group of friends. Usually, we’d talk about our jobs and personal lives, but that night there was a peculiar sense of fear and worry in the air. We wondered if what was happening in Italy could happen here. As I walked to BART on my way home, I made more of an effort to soak up the vibe of the city, the feeling of people passing like they have somewhere to be. I’m glad I did because it’s a ghost town now. I think about the ways I’ve changed, too. I will never take an invite to do something fun for granted again when this is all over. I regret the times I cancelled plans because it felt like too much of a production. I’ve also become better at tolerating boredom, and going to bed early. A tomato plant is actually growing tomatoes in my backyard now.

On New Year’s Eve last year, Ken and I had a game night with two friends. Someone suggested we do a tarot card spread to see what our years would look like. I’m not one to regularly dabble in mysticism, but it also doesn’t take much convincing for me. I don’t remember exactly which cards we pulled, but I remember there were consistent themes within our spreads: turbulence, darkness, but also new life. That same night, we all went around and shared one peak and one valley from 2019. My peak? The house Ken and I bought together. My valley? The grief and intense anxiety that I struggled with after the man who raised me died. If we were to do that again this year, my peak would be our engagement — my valley, the rest of the year. Even in a normal year my peak would be the same.

I think a lot about these occasions; the ones that act as highways and transport us from one place in time to another. The moments that mark a before, and give us a sense of structure to the chaos. Just as one minute after midnight on New Year’s Eve carried us into one hell of a year, Ken’s proposal marked a new phase of our relationship. I’m not sure what it is about hindsight, but when I look back what sticks out most are the people by my side — and not everyone will be fortunate enough to do that at the end of this year. And that’s why getting engaged in the middle of this pandemic reminded me of what matters most. A good year is simply when you end the year and the people you love are still there; the people who will propose to you over Tostitos.

This year, we conquered breakfast: What spending mornings at home in the pandemic taught us

For the past seven months, since social distancing began, I have eaten an everything bagel with a fried egg on top for breakfast, almost exclusively. And while it may seem like a fairly intuitive recipe, especially in comparison to some of the other recipes you can find available in Salon’s food vertical, there are layers and layers of nuance that only come after spending seven months of making the same thing every morning. Or afternoon. Or whenever you find yourself getting around to breakfast these days. 

I’ll admit, I’m fairly new to the breakfast scene. For the past four years of my life I’ve either skipped it or grabbed a granola bar and called it good. But with the newfound time I acquired going into lock down, I realized I could dedicate some real effort into breakfast. So I did. 

And boy did I learn a thing or two about eggs and bagels. 

So, let’s talk ingredients. When it comes to making an everything bagel with a fried egg on top, you need to have the foundations steady. 

The search for a good everything bagel in a city like New York can probably be resolved fairly quickly, so long as you avoid the sticky debate of which everything bagel is “the best.” In a city like St. Louis, however, the search can be a bit more challenging. The first few months I made the mistake of assuming the bagel’s sole function was just to be a vessel for eggs. The actual quality of the thing itself didn’t matter so much, as long as eggs could be balanced easily on top. I deluded myself into thinking that the cheapest bagels at the grocery store were fine — plain ones, even — and even stooped to regular bread. But soon, I would have a change of heart. Soon, I would stumble upon The Bagel Factory.

The Bagel Factory (which, as far as I can tell, has no website) mimics the environment in which an everything bagel should be found naturally. They only accept cash, ensure brusque conversation, and tout the ultimate bagel brag — made with New York City water. 

That’s right, baby. New York City water. The good stuff. In St. Louis.

When it comes to the eggs, I have found there’s a bit more leeway in the purchase. That said, I like to select the brands that announce the protein content in a pretty large font on the carton, just to remind myself that, aside from being delicious, the meal has some serious nutritional value. 

Now that you have the raw materials, it’s time to get cooking. Good news is there are really only two steps. Bad news is they are oh-so-fickle.

I start by taking out a nonstick pan, putting it on the stove, and getting the heat up to just past halfway on the knob (there aren’t any numbers on my stove knobs, but give the just-past-halfway thing a try and if it doesn’t work out, let me know). This is just to warm up the pan a little. Then, I cut the bagel in two and put it into the toaster oven. It usually stays in there on the bagel setting for about four minutes, which gives me plenty of time to wrestle with the eggs. I put a very light amount of olive oil on the pan, stir it around, and crack the two eggs right in.

Now it’s a waiting game. 

This is the time I usually like to reflect on the many failures that have led up to this point. I see the ghosts of eggshells past swimming in a yolky infinity. I recall the numerous drowned bagels, soaked in undercooked egg. I relive the horror of the realization that a disfigured fried egg must be scrambled. I think back to the simple time in life when breakfast was just a whisper and nothing more.

Then the toaster oven dings.

When everything’s done, plate it. Be careful not to burn your fingers when reaching in the toaster oven for the bagels or when your eggs don’t slide off the spatula right away. That’ll get you. 

Then, salt. Maybe add some Sriracha or hot sauce to it as I’ve been doing the past couple months. 

Finally, enjoy a perfect breakfast in this far from perfect year. — Justin Pelofsky

* * *

“Breakfast foods, except for cereals that contain inordinate amounts of sugar,” the narrator of the neurotic novel “The Verificationist” says, “have, in my experience, a comforting, antidepressant quality.” I’d have to agree. During quarantine, breakfast regained its proper place in my life as a kind of everyday therapy. I found myself savoring eggs and toast with a relish I’d been missing for years. What else was there? After waking up and staring down another indistinct day of singular dread, I’d remember that breakfast still somehow existed, despite everything. The smell of coffee — ah, I can smell — could make me cry those mornings; I couldn’t remember what I’d done two days before, but I could remember what it had felt like to eat breakfast, what I’d been thinking about as I dug in. Walking the five steps to the kitchen and cooking replaced my morning commute, and breakfast became a regular but busy daily event, one that helped account for the stasis of life in lockdown.

This is how poached eggs took on great import in my 2020, something I’m grateful for today. I used to scramble my eggs, but during quarantine I grew unnerved by the deformed yellow mass that I’d be left with: too much disorder. Poaching eggs offered the opposite experience: By swirling boiling water the white chaos cohered. I enjoyed this alchemy — it felt defiant of the disarray around me — but like everyone else I grew sluggish at some point in April. Then I turned to a poacher.

The poacher made me, in my humble estimation, the egg master of my two-person household. I am an expert at cooking the kind of breakfast that required neither skill nor care, and with the poacher there was nothing to muck up — you just drop the egg into the cup and wait. But I was proud nonetheless: I’d tell my girlfriend that my internal clock was clearly set to poached-egg, subtly notifying me at the precise moment when those yolks were properly gooey. It was one thing that worked right. Outside, ambulances raced by carrying people who shouldn’t have been infected, their sirens trilling in a bleak and seemingly constant display of the Doppler effect. But we had our eggs. 

When I showed up at my girlfriend’s apartment at the start of quarantine, she opened the door holding a bottle of champagne, eager to toast to the forced acceleration of our relationship. We drank the champagne that night, but soon after breakfast became our time for celebration, a daily salute to survival. Well-poached eggs were good omens those mornings. We usually put them in tortillas with hot sauce and avocado; other times we ate them just with pepper, their yolks winking as we cut in with forks. A few months later, when the pandemic seemed to be abating in New York and I moved back to my apartment, my girlfriend sent me off with my own poacher: a gift for the egg master. — Alex Wittenberg

During a dark year, a dream realized: How the pandemic brought me back to school

If there is lemonade to be wrung out of the worst of circumstances, I will always be the person frantically squeezing citrus. This year has tested the limits of my elbow grease. And the weirdness of this is not lost on me: I would not be enrolled happily in my current master’s program if this pandemic hadn’t happened.

After testing the back to school waters via an online certification in professional studies, last December I began sending out applications to various MA programs, just a few short decades after obtaining my bachelor’s. I mostly aimed for affordable online programs, but threw in one semi-long shot — a private university in another state, with all the private university in another state’s geographic and financial obstacles in the way. But also, it was my dream program.

The pandemic hits, the world goes to garbage, my family and I are slammed with a series of setbacks and outright tragedies. It’s bad. Really, really bad. You no doubt have your own version of the macro- and micro-level horrors that 2020 has doled out relentlessly — and continues to!

It’s late July. I get a call from the school. The program has moved online and they’re offering me a little scholarship. Not a full ride, but enough to make it comparable to the lower-tier program from which I’d already accepted an offer.

I have waited, through my broke twenties and my young-child-parenting thirties. I have waited and waited, but the money was never there, and the time was never there. This year took nearly everything, but I will say this — it also gave me a modicum of financial grace and a whole lot of time. All the outside work that dried up, all the business trips canceled, all the brunches and parties and plans: they made space in my life to do the thing I dreamed of for so long. To go back to school. 

I am one semester in and many, many credits away from actually getting that piece of paper. I can report that two and a half hour-long weeknight Zoom classes are in my top three life endurance tests, along with childbirth and running a marathon. But wow, do I love this.

No one would choose this year. If there’s a 2020 where I don’t go to school but I live on a non-pandemic Earth, I would like to choose that one. Yet all around, I see so many of us who, forced into this brutal situation, discovered something. A skill, a passion, a project, a person. It doesn’t make any of this less awful. It’s just the nature of life, that sometimes from the darkest place you can pluck something beautiful that you never otherwise would have found. And that you’re thankful for it.

The people in the TV who talk to me: This is what comfort in 2020 feels like

One good thing for the horrible year that was 2020?

My best friend’s father said that there are some thoughts that should be kept private and part of the problem with the world today is that everyone has a means and compulsion to share them on the internet and elsewhere. I agree with him. But in this one instance, I will bend his rule.

My first impulse, that one good thing, was to channel Paul Beatty’s wondrous award-winning book “The Sellout” where he writes: “That’s the problem with history, we like to think it’s a book—that we can turn the page and move the fuck on. But history isn’t the paper it’s printed on. It’s memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you.”

For now, I will keep those thoughts to myself.

In the spirit in which the question was asked, my one good thing for 2020 are the people on the video screen who talk to me, in my kinder and gentler version of David Cronenberg’s film “Videodrome.”

I watch several hours of “Star Trek” every evening — or more accurately, it is on the television in the background while I do other things. I have seen every episode and every movie of every iteration of “Star Trek.” This excludes “Star Trek: Discovery” and JJ Abrams’ version of “Star Trek.” They do not exist to me. They are something called “Star Trek” without actually being the real “Star Trek.”

Several weeks ago, I realized that “Star Trek” is so comforting to me because it shows a world where in Starfleet and the Federation there are competent leaders, aliens and humans alike, working together to solve a problem. We in America should be so lucky.

The second season of the TV series “Hap and Leonard,” which is based on my friend Joe Lansdale’s novels of the same name, is one of the great stories in recent memory. The sincerity of Hap and Leonard’s friendship — one a black gay Republican and the other a former white hippie and antiwar protester — and their various adventures (and mishaps) makes me happy.  

John Witherspoon passed away in October of last year. We have his work in the “Friday” films. We have the cartoon series “Boondocks.” But watching Witherspoon’s YouTube series “Cooking for Poor People” and then making the same recipes while mimicking his monologue is a damn good thing for the year 2020, or any other for that matter.

All Elite Wrestling (AEW) is “not my cup of tea,” as they say. But listening to Jim Ross, the voice of my and many other folks’ childhoods, do commentary (and lots of teaching about the art and sport of professional wrestling, for those who are listening carefully) brings me comfort. Jim Cornette’s weekly and very spirited critique of AEW on his two podcasts is also great fun to listen to. And of course, Roman Reigns and Paul Heyman, now finally together after all these years in the WWE, are creating a beautiful story together. These are all good things about 2020. 

I have never been to Texas. But I love the cartoon series “King of the Hill” and I know Hank, Bobby, Peggy, Luanne, Bill, Dale, Boomhauer, John Redcorn, and Nancy very well. It is good to know that Hank Hill, an old school honorable Republican, would have never voted for Donald Trump.

And how can I possibly resist? “Please don’t put on Dido!” Digging potholes in the alley is not a way to find true love during the pandemic or any other time either. “King of the Hill” aficionados will immediately get my meaning.

This Thanksgiving holiday, we “celebrate” America’s departure from reality

On this holiday, millions of Americans are gathering around a homemade feast of comfort food, basking in the warmth of familial love and giving each other a potentially life-threatening virus. One week ago, Erin Burnett asked during the lead segment of her nightly talk show on CNN, “The CDC is warning Americans not to travel or gather in large groups for Thanksgiving. Will they listen?”

Any fool could have answered the question: No. Millions of travelers have moved through the airports to greet their loved ones, perhaps with gestures of physical affection, all but coughing in each other’s faces. One cannot help but wonder how many families will share napkins as they debate the efficacy of masks as protection against COVID-19.

A pandemic is dangerous, frightening and chaotic enough in the best circumstances. Throw in a population given to superstition, hatred of experts as diabolical elites and hostility toward science, and reasons to give thanks — other than the ability to breathe without the aid of a ventilator — will rapidly diminish.

The farcical spectacle of ostensible adults screaming about the tyranny of face masks and indulging in megaphone-mad conspiracy theories while their neighbors die would invite howls of laughter, if it weren’t so tragic. Far surpassing the death rate of Canada, Germany, Japan and almost every other country on Earth — the planet where seemingly everyone but Americans still reside — the United States has lost more than 260,000 people to the coronavirus. As Joe Biden often said during the presidential campaign, that is 260,000 kitchen tables without a parent, spouse, sibling or child. 

Yet a baffling and terrifying amount of Americans act as if the virus is not real, or at least does not present a threat to them and their loved ones. A nurse in South Dakota, Jodi Doering, has told the surreal horror story of patients denying that COVID-19 exists, up until the moment that they die from it.

While I cannot report anything so extreme, I can say that I’ve had conversations with several people — all of them college-educated professionals — who repeat the following claims as if they are self-evident: 1) COVID death numbers are significantly inflated, because hospitals make more money from treating those patients; 2) China created the coronavirus in a lab as a biological weapon (this is one particularly incoherent, because even if true it would not negate the danger of the virus); 3) only the elderly die from COVID so we don’t have to worry about it (if this were true, it would make adherents to that belief sociopathic, not reasonable); 4) the only way to beat back the pandemic is through herd immunity.

When pressed to give their sources of evidence, they will typically fall back on what has become the favorite line of many Americans, a delightful distillation of the ignorance and arrogance of individualism and anti-intellectualism in one sentence: “I do my own research.”

According to polls, most Americans believe that COVID is not a hoax. The majority also regularly wear masks in public, even when there is no mandate. Despite the good news, there is a gap between theory and practice. The staggering amount of Thanksgiving travel is only the latest example of a general public that suffers from what psychologists are calling “pandemic fatigue.”

Having grown tired of compliance with CDC protocols, many Americans have adopted a cavalier attitude. They have resumed dining in restaurants, shopping in malls, and having parties in their homes. Gov. Gavin Newsom of California broke his own coronavirus guidelines by dining indoors with several friends, and New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo examined the potential of his family’s Thanksgiving gathering to spread the virus, determined that it was significant, and then concluded he was doing it anyway.

With friends like these, everyone concerned about succumbing to a deadly virus might as well throw a mask burning party … indoors. 

Meanwhile, the most pathetic attempt at a coup d’état in world history reaches a merciful end with Rudy Giuliani’s hair dye melting in beads down his face as he impersonates Joe Pesci, and his co-counsel on behalf of Trump, Jenna Ellis, telling Republican pollster and frequent Trump critic, Frank Luntz that he has a small penis. Despite the legal weakness of the Venezuela voter-fraud conspiracy theory, not to mention the micropenis defense, upwards of 70 percent of Republicans now believe that Joe Biden won the election by fraudulent means. 

This isn’t much different from the 51 percent of Republicans who “doubt” that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, the 50 percent of Republicans who believe that the QAnon theory that a secret ring of pedophiles run the federal government is, at least, “partially true,” and the 40 percent of Americans who are creationists.

Most of the American commentariat goes to great lengths to avoid stating the obvious. Its members will discuss the success of Russian disinformation campaigns, the cultish hold that Donald Trump has over his most loyal supporters and the dominance of “negative partisanship” as political calculus. They will not openly acknowledge that a sizable proportion of the American population is some combination or variance of ignorant, delusional or insane.

In a country with many of the best universities in the world and almost unlimited technological resources, a salient inquiry for an engaged intellectual class would be, how the hell did this happen? Why do so many Americans accept lunacy as empirical truth? 

To begin by reaching for the low-lying fruit, let’s start with the far right. The late Richard Hofstadter, a Pulitzer-winning historian, authored a famous book in 1964 called “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Despite a few errors, Hofstadter’s analysis of the delusions and fears of the right gains relevance with each year.

In his introduction, the historian explains that Americans are increasingly responsive to politics as competing gestures of emotional symbolism, rather than debates about material interest or theories of effective governance. On the right, an affinity for symbolism combines with the “apocalyptic carryovers” of the “evangelical spirit” to create the foundation for the paranoid style. Hofstadter’s nuanced and detailed definition of the eponymous term of his text is worth reading in full, but here is a key excerpt: 

When I speak of the paranoid style … it is, above all, a way of seeing the world and of expressing oneself. Webster defines paranoia, the clinical entity, as a chronic mental disorder characterized by systematized delusions of persecution and of one’s own greatness. In the paranoid style, as I conceive it, the feeling of persecution is central, and it is indeed systematized in grandiose theories of conspiracy. But there is a vital difference between the paranoid spokesman in politics and the clinical paranoiac: although they both tend to be overheated, oversuspicious, overaggressive, grandiose, and apocalyptic in expression, the clinical paranoid sees the hostile and conspiratorial world in which he feels himself to be living as directed specifically against him; whereas the spokesman of the paranoid style finds it directed against a nation, a culture, a way of life whose fate affects not himself alone but millions of others. … His sense that his political passions are unselfish and patriotic, in fact, goes far to intensify his feeling of righteousness and his moral indignation. 

The contemporary application of Hofstadter’s delineation of the “paranoid style” makes it clear that Donald Trump is flypaper for every pathology that Hofstadter, along with many psychiatrists, diagnoses, but also that Trump’s following marks the culmination of a right-wing divorce from reality that has unfolded over several decades.

The danger of the “paranoid style” is clear, but becomes profound when Hofstadter describes how the political paranoid sees the opposition, an analysis that should resonate with anyone who has watched a few minutes of Fox News, listened to Rush Limbaugh or gone through the masochistic ritual of attempting to debate a full-fledged Trump supporter: 

He [the paranoid] does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, the quality needed is not a willingness to compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Nothing but complete victory will do. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated — if not from the world, at least from the theater of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. 

Hofstadter estimated that the extreme right of the John Birch Society and similar movements comprised 15 to 20 percent of the electorate, and therefore was able to distinguish between the “working politician,” meaning the typical Republican, and his more militant voters. Fox News, social media and Donald Trump have obliterated that distinction. Americans who are curious why their Trump-devoted friends broke off all contact might want to reread the paragraph above. More importantly, people who believe that the political opposition is literally aligned with Satan, as onetime Hollywood star Jon Voight recently said about progressives — in a viral video approvingly shared by many leading Republican pundits — will fall for anything. 

If Democrats are Lucifer’s foot soldiers, working to subvert everything that is good in the world, why wouldn’t they use a pizza parlor in Washington to traffic children to pedophiles? Stealing an election is a misdemeanor by comparison.

Those who believe that their political opponents are pure evil will also justify anything, which clarifies evangelical Christians’ willingness to forgive Donald Trump’s countless offenses against decency, and so many Republicans’ evident glee as the Trump administration did everything in its power to sabotage American democracy.

Hofstadter was wise to make a connection between paranoid politics and Christian fundamentalism. Like the fundamentalist who suspects the devil of every misfortune or temptation, ranging from a car accident to the temptations of internet pornography, the far right paranoid sees the anti-American, liberal hand at work in every area of life. Wearing a mask to protect against coronavirus infection isn’t adhering with public health protocol, but yielding to the arch-conspiracy of global tyranny.

It is difficult to imagine what life must feel life for these people. They believe that a homicidal cabal of demons in human form is running the country, feverishly working to destroy their lives with multiculturalism and communism, yet they still have to pick up groceries at the market, drop their children off at school and pay their taxes. 

Paranoid delusions make them susceptible to a series of cons, from Steve Bannon’s “We Build the Wall” campaign to Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” fundraiser, but it also makes ordinary governance of the United States painfully difficult.

Before the rest of us judge our conspiracy-theorist neighbors too harshly, we should perhaps consider how their lives also require some detachment from reality. 

In January of this year, the members of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved the “Doomsday Clock” — a measurement of humanity’s proximity to global catastrophe — one minute and 40 seconds from midnight, citing the growing threat of climate change.

The United Nations warned in 2018 that the human species had only 12 years left to take decisive action on climate change, before facing existential disaster. Even the Department of Transportation under the Trump administration predicted that without major reforms, climate change would destroy life as we know it by the end of this century. 

There are inspiring movements to demand aggressive measures to combat climate change, and most Americans support them in theory. In practice, however, most of us carry along without a care in the world. There was almost no discussion of climate change during the recent presidential campaign, and the majority of Americans haven’t shown anything resembling the urgency a reasonable observer would expect from people who have learned that their entire species faces the threat of widespread destruction within a relatively brief time span.

In the past two years, major newspapers reported that humanity has eliminated 60 percent of the animal population since 1970, and that 40 percent of the world’s plant species are at risk of extinction. But this notional awareness that our planet is dying planet has little effect on political discussion, as powerful officials and influential pundits debate the margins on corporate tax rates, agree that the Green New Deal is “too radical,” and argue about Twitter should ban Donald Trump after Biden’s inauguration.

Climate change is one reason among many that Democratic calls for a “return to normal” are effectively tickets for a flight from the real world. Except for having a president who respects democratic norms and institutions, the “normal” of 2015 isn’t exactly an Edenic paradise to which we should aspire. Extreme inequality, environmental degradation and the subordination of ethics to corporate capitalism — manifesting most clearly in health care, criminal justice and decaying public infrastructure — was shot through American life then. Without transformative action, they will continue to wreak havoc in the lives of countless people long into the future.

After a survey of American culture, an obvious question might be: Where are the real realists?

Wherever they reside and struggle, they will have to live alongside the right-wing paranoiacs who threaten to undermine American democracy, and the more respectable members of the educated liberal classes, who appear content to turn up the music while the tornado siren blasts outside the window. 

Those who are curious how that might work out, especially as we celebrate Thanksgiving, might want to ask a Native American.

A sweet Thanksgiving after all: America has rebuffed Trump’s assault on democracy

Thanksgiving 2020 is not a happy time for most Americans. The year-long coronavirus pandemic has taken its toll. We have now lost 260,000 fellow citizens. Because the virus is not contained — in fact we are in the midst of a serious fall surge — relatively few Americans are traveling to see family members and loved ones. Staying safe from the virus remains a top priority. Wearing a mask and social distancing is precluding normal Thanksgiving gatherings and meals. It is a disheartening and lonely time for many of us.

But this Thanksgiving is particularly sweet because our country has just rebuffed a frontal assault by Donald Trump. Democracy has just beaten back his attempt to steal this election. Our Constitution and our judicial system have prevailed over the malignant and nefarious intent of the dictator-wannabe.

Trump must have thought we were too complacent or too exhausted to care about his underhanded and conniving maneuvers. He must have thought we would not have the energy or the resolve to fight back against his takeover of our democratic way of life. He was wrong. He underestimated the resilience of our democracy and the strength of our will.

Joe Biden beat Trump fair and square in the election. He garnered the most votes by a candidate in history. His Electoral College victory was clear. And it was the most open and transparent election process in history.

Donald Trump has refused to concede the election because his narcissistic personality pathology does not allow him to acknowledge defeat or loss. Much more sinister than that, Trump believed that he was entitled to a second term because he is smarter and stronger and richer than anyone else in the room. He could not fathom the possibility that his greatness could be defeated by such an ordinary and mortal man, Joe Biden.

Trump is addicted to power and adulation and greed. He has a grandiose and superior self-image that he must feed at all times. He has no conscience and no moral compass. He knows he is likely to face federal and state criminal charges once he leaves office. He desperately tries to cover up his corruption and his purposeful cruelty.

So Trump tried to steal the election. Pure and simple. He attempted a coup against America. His intent was to subvert democracy and to figure out a way to manipulate and bully himself into an election victory. He was determined to stay in power for reasons of self-preservation and self-aggrandizement.

He started by telling the public that the election was rigged and that it had been snatched away from him by colluding Democrats and other forces. He concocted and spread conspiracy theories. He lied.

Then he insisted that there was voter fraud, which he tried to manufacture in certain states. He tried to have tens of thousands of votes thrown out — mostly votes by people of color. In the end, he urged legislatures and election officials to “flip” results in their states.

All the while, Trump or his allies kept filing baseless and frivolous lawsuits as fast as they could be typed up. But the judicial system stood stout. None of his lawsuits had merit and they were dismissed quickly in the courts.

Finally, a Republican canvassing board member in Michigan and the Republican secretary of state in Georgia sealed Trump’s fate by certifying their respective states’ election results. It was game, set, match.

Trump’s attempt to steal the election was crushed. It was over. Joe Biden is the president-elect. Donald Trump will not have a second term. He will be leaving the Oval Office — one way or another — on Jan. 20, 2021.

Let us not be naive. Trump can continue to inflict much damage on America in the next two months. Based on his personality pathology, it is likely that he will try to leave the nation in a pile of rubble for his successor. After all, he does not want another man to eclipse him in achievement or adulation from the public.

Trump does not love America, because he is too busy loving and protecting himself. He is not capable of loving others. He is not capable of being a public servant. He does not care about Americans’ safety, happiness or well-being. If he did, he would have taken active and definitive steps to contain and defeat the pandemic.

Congressional Republicans have been unapologetic enablers of Trump. They still are. Their complicity will be their legacy. History books and doctoral dissertations will be written about their blind and unhealthy loyalty to a president who was disordered and inept and cruel.

Millions of Americans have given their allegiance to an undeserving and toxic leader. Their perceptions and attitudes about him will gradually change as his misdeeds and corrupt acts are brought to light and prosecuted. They will be deprogrammed from their cult-like leader as his prominence in public consciousness is diminished.

Trump will spend his remaining years fending off criminal charges and basking in the aggrieved glow of victimhood. Americans will finally see through his thinly-veiled veneer of buffoonery. His public image will be tarnished forever. His place on the lowest rung of the presidential ladder will be set in stone. No Mount Rushmore, no Nobel Peace Prize, no Man of the Year award, no Trump vaccine.

Joe Biden will be the father figure we deserve to confront our existential challenges: a deadly pandemic, an economic recession, and the loss of trust in our democratic institutions and norms. He has the temperament, the experience, the empathy and the wisdom to lead us out of the black hole of the past four years.

Biden is not perfect. But he will provide the corrective emotional experience we need to overcome Trump’s reign of trauma, dishonesty, corruption and total lack of empathy. Biden will defeat the pandemic, revive the economy and restore trust in our institutions and the free press. We will return to an emphasis on science and truth. Racism, xenophobia and terrorism will be rooted out. We will once again be a people of unity and inclusiveness. And our shining and indispensable place in the world will be re-established.

So while this Thanksgiving will be remembered by many as a time of sadness and grieving, let us not forget that America just rebuffed the subversion of democracy by the worst president in American history. Our election was not stolen. A coup was stopped. And we will be rid of Donald Trump and his malignant narcissism in less than two months.

Good has triumphed over evil. Honesty and truth have won out over lies and conspiracy theories. Democracy has prevailed over a full frontal attack.

What a sweet Thanksgiving this is. It’s a time to celebrate our America — and a time to remember the tens of thousands of Americans who have lost their lives on our bumpy road to achieving “a more perfect union.”

We asked mental health experts how to cope with a lonely Thanksgiving

Loneliness often defies stereotypes. A traveler in a foreign country may be surrounded by strangers yet feel utterly alone, while someone living alone can have a rich social life. Loneliness is not something our society is well-accustomed to discussing; indeed, “lonely” is often synonymous with “desperate.” Yet humans are social creatures, and socializing is an innate need, like food, loneliness expert Cat Moore told me. “And like hunger, it signals that a social need isn’t being met,” Moore said.

This year, Thanksgiving — one of the most social holidays — is apt to be a particularly lonely affair for millions of Americans. Last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention urged Americans to stay home and celebrate Thanksgiving with people in their households, or alone. “Travel may increase your chance of getting and spreading COVID-19,” the CDC explained in an advisory released Thursday. “Postponing travel and staying home is the best way to protect yourself and others this year.” (Notably, record travel numbers suggest that not everyone is following this guidance).

Those pandemic heroes with few or no guests in attendance during Thanksgiving might be especially lonely given the unusual circumstances. Holiday blues aren’t a new thing — and before the coronavirus pandemic, there was a loneliness epidemic, experts say — but this year’s sense of loneliness is deeply exacerbated by the necessity of social distance.

Because this is the first modern pandemic Thanksgiving, there’s no playbook for how to cope with being alone when it feels like others around you are with loved ones. We asked four mental health experts how to tangibly deal with loneliness this Thanksgiving.

It might sound cheesy, but do something nice for someone else

In the worst-case situation, loneliness can lead to a mental downward spiral that motivates one to reach for the next-best-unhealthy thing to immediately ease the discomfort — i.e. drinking too much alcohol, doing drugs, doom-scrolling, or descending into nihilism and being social without precautions. This is referred to as “maladaptive coping” in the therapist world, which is when a person turns to something specifically to escape their problems.

“When individuals are at that point and they’re headed towards maladaptive coping skills, the first idea [that] comes to mind is to get outside of oneself and help others,” Ken Yeager,  the clinical director of the Stress, Trauma and Resilience (STAR) Program at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, who has been a mental health practitioner for over 30 years, told me. “It’s not until you get out of yourself and give to somebody else that you can move your mood forward and address the loneliness you’re experiencing.”

Yeager said if you sit and focus on what you’re missing out on this Thanksgiving, you stay “inside of yourself.”

“You’re only musing and perseverating over your issues,” Yeager said. “And it’s not until you get out of yourself and give to somebody else that you can move your mood forward and address the loneliness you’re experiencing.”

Volunteering is usually top of mind when one thinks about helping others. Since food banks across the country are struggling to keep up with the surge in demand, one COVID-safe way to help out this week is to clean out your pantry and donate to your local food bank. Another way to cope with your loneliness by helping others could be to plan out the gifts you’ll give to family and friends this year, or spend part of your day writing your holiday cards.

“You don’t have to be out in public to do something nice for somebody,” Yeager said, adding that you could also write a nice letter to the people who have helped you this year, too.

Skip the stuffing, skip the turkey

Why try and force something that’s not happening? Thanksgiving isn’t officially cancelled, but it’s definitely not the same. Hence, Yeager said another way to cope with loneliness is to “make yourself a kid again” and do something “different.” Don’t feel the need to force yourself to eat turkey alone, especially if you don’t actually enjoy turkey that much.

“If you’ve got a fireplace, roast some marshmallows over your fireplace, if you’ve got some hot dogs, roast those over the fireplace,” Yeager said.

The point is to not try and recreate a traditional Thanksgiving, because that will only “conjure up memories of previous gatherings by cooking those things,” Yeager said. “If you try to recreate Thanksgiving, it’s never the same,” Yeager added, emphasizing this is especially true for people who might be grieving the loss of a family member. Over 260,000 people have died of COVID-19 in the United States; that’s a lot of people who will be without their friends and family this year.

Another way to move through the grief, Yeager said, is to share funny stories about the people you’ve lost.

“And what that does is very suddenly begins to move people from the grieving process into the appreciating process,” Yeager said.

Put some pants on and go for a walk with a friend

Nathalie Theodore, a psychotherapist in Chicago, told Salon that another way to cope with loneliness this Thanksgiving is to think of different, unique ways to stay connected with friends and family.

“We are all experiencing Zoom fatigue at this point (not to mention overall pandemic fatigue), so it’s important to think outside the box to make this holiday fun, even under these unusual circumstances,” Theodore said via email.  “You can meet outside and go for a walk, or meet online for a yoga class.”

Theodore added that if one is planning a “Zoom Thanksgiving,” it might be worth trying to make it “more festive.”

“Make your Zoom Thanksgiving more festive by inviting friends or family members you miss and haven’t connected with recently,” Theodore said. “After dinner, get together with friends online for a game or movie night.”

“Finding creative ways to connect with friends and family will help stave off feelings of loneliness and make the day feel more festive,” Theodore said.

Remember, it’s just one day

Remember, Thanksgiving is just one day out of the year. And if you’re lonely, so are millions of other Americans going through the same thing.

Dr. Carlin Barnes, MD, and Dr. Marketa Wills, MD, MBA, who are the co-authors of “Understanding Mental Illness,” told me that it’s totally normal to feel lonely this Thanksgiving. “It can be easy to lose sight of the fact that Thanksgiving is one day and not a week or season,” they said. “Shifting your focus to a day instead of managing a holiday week or holiday season can help reduce anxiety.”

“It is important to acknowledge and validate if you are feeling lonely on this Thanksgiving holiday,” Barnes and Wills added. “If you are feeling some loneliness, this is very normal, many of us are having these same feelings.”

Together, Barnes and Wills sent me a list of activities they recommend:

  • Connect with family and friends virtually (with use of Zoom, FaceTime, or other video conferencing platforms)
  • Participate in a drive by, socially distant potluck dinner
  • Reach out via phone and reconnect with family and friends with a phone call
  • Plan activities that allow you to use your alone time enjoying fun or relaxing activities (e.g. exercise, volunteer by dropping food off to a shelter or writing letters to nursing home residents or veterans, read a good book, watch a good movie, cook a special holiday meal)
  • Meditate and/or create a gratitude list of things you’re grateful for
  • If possible, get out in nature
  • Start planning how you will spend next Thanksgiving when things are (hopefully) back to normal

Understand your needs

The suggestions from mental health professionals above might be helpful for some people, but not everyone. Yeager told me that coping mechanisms for loneliness can often depend on whether or not a person is an extrovert or an introvert.

“Extroverts need other people to gain energy,” which is why COVID-19 has been so hard on them and this holiday season might be even more challenging, Yeager said.

“When they’re alone their energy level goes down, they’re not smiling as much, they’re not building the energy that they do when they’re around people because everything they do is built upon the response of others,” Yeager explained. “If the extrovert is alone, and they’re feeling that loneliness, they really need to find a way to connect with others via technology.”

During a “normal” holiday season, Yeager said, introverts usually struggle with anxiety, and thus might find relief in a change of plans this year. However, loneliness is experienced by both cohorts. “If you’re an introvert, you need to find the pieces of solace that help you to build energy and to thrive during this difficult time.”

In other words, check in on your extroverts. 

Wretched David Bowie biopic “Stardust” should be launched into the sun

Making a David Bowie biopic — especially one that is admittedly, “mostly fiction” and doesn’t feature Bowie’s music — is a risky, no, completely foolish venture. However, Gabriel Range (“Death of a President“), the director and co-writer of “Stardust,” believes that he can pull this trick off and doubles down on his limitations. The aroma of his flopsweat is unmistakable. 

This ambitious drama is set mainly in 1971, focusing on the period where Bowie (Johnny Flynn recently seen as Mr. Knightley in “Emma.“) is trying to gain some traction in the United States, and ultimately developed his alter ego Ziggy Stardust. The film opens with the performer arriving in Washington, DC, and getting delayed in customs. He is expecting to do a concert tour but is told he cannot legally perform. This setup shows the performer hamstrung, but “Stardust” presses on hoping to make the best of it. The film never does. 

Much of the drama features Bowie’s publicist, Ron Oberman (Marc Maron) — the only person who believes in Bowie (other than Bowie) — driving the rocker around the country in a wood-paneled station wagon. Ron arranges for Bowie to sing for vacuum cleaner salespeople or talk to DJs at family-oriented rock music stations in the Midwest. At one interview, Bowie performs an embarrassing mime act. Ron claims he is going to get Bowie on the cover of “Rolling Stone,” which only makes the singer scoff. It is not until the two men give each other a reality check, around the midpoint of “Stardust,” that the lackluster film generates any real emotion other than disdain.

The crux of the drama is Bowie’s disconnection. His music is “too dark,” which is why his record company does not support him. He also struggles with a family history of schizophrenia. Considerable time is spent depicting Bowie’s relationship with his brother, Terry (Derek Moran), who is eventually institutionalized. (Flashbacks show the siblings listening to Anthony Newley in the car, which is its own disconnect.) Bowie fears going mad himself. A particularly clunky sequence features Bowie being interviewed by a reporter crosscut with him talking with Doctor Reynolds (Anthony Flanagan) about the family’s history of mental illness.

This aspect of Bowie’s life is neither uninteresting nor unimportant, but Range does not provide enough of a sense of Bowie at this point in his life to illuminate his fears. It’s wise that “Stardust” focuses on this one year in the singer’s life, but most viewers will see Bowie for what he will become, not who he is, and that actually does the story a disservice. Range is trying to be ironic and dramatic at the same time, and it backfires. Is the filmmaker really going for pity here?

There is a sketchy effort to establish Bowie’s character and influences. Bowie’s wife Angie (Jena Malone, a long way from “Antebellum“), talks about how they planned to shake up society and flout conventions, such as marriage. His penchant for androgynous heels and “men’s dresses” is mocked. And his friend Marc Bolan (James Cade) insists he needs acid to “unblock.” But these moments, like much of “Stardust” are didactic. Better is a scene where Ron explains Iggy Pop‘s stage persona to Bowie illustrating how to hold a young audience captive. But it is an episode when Ron tells Bowie that he wasn’t talking with Lou Reed after a Velvet Underground performance, that captures the film’s sole insight. Bowie responds that he doesn’t care if the Lou Reed he talked to was a phony; the unreality is sometimes a better reality. 

Range is gambling that the same will be true with Flynn’s ersatz Bowie. But the charismatic actor (so good in “Beast”) appears to be channeling Andy Warhol, not David Bowie. (When Ron and Bowie are in New York, the performer makes a pit stop at the Factory and does a screen test where he mimes some more. It is as painful as it sounds). Flynn plays Bowie as soft-spoken and enigmatic. As he takes everything in — the dingy motel rooms, the unappreciative audience — his expressions convey the obvious: he wishes this was better. It is hard not to have the same reaction to “Stardust.” 

What the film needs is some sex, drugs, and rock and roll. There is very little of any of that on screen. Angie kisses a woman, and Bowie screws a groupie in a shadowy room. There are few lines of cocaine snorted in addition to the aforementioned acid, but the headiest moment in the film is the opening sequence, which feels like something out of “2001.” As for music, even without the Bowie songs, there is more Anthony Newley and Jacques Brel than T. Rex or Velvet Underground. The emphasis on mild, not wild, is very disappointing for a Bowie biopic. 

Yet arguably the worst aspect of “Stardust” is Range’s insistence on cudgeling viewers with the “Be Someone Else” message. It is repeated so often and in so many different ways that viewers may start shouting in vain at the screen hoping Bowie will finally hear it. It would be far more interesting to see a film about Bowie literally developing his Ziggy Stardust alter ego — the costumes, the music, the alien backstory — rather than being told to do so. This film is supposed to show how Ziggy Stardust was born. Instead, it feels stillborn.

“Stardust” is available in select theaters and VOD on Wednesday, Nov. 25.

Trump pardons former national security advisor Michael Flynn: “Have a truly fantastic Thanksgiving!”

President Donald Trump on Wednesday announced via tweet that he had pardoned his former national security advisor Michael Flynn.

Flynn, who served as Trump’s first national security adviser, resigned in 2017 after admitting that he had lied about his contacts with the Russian ambassador to the United States.

Flynn said in his resignation letter that he had “inadvertently briefed the Vice President Elect and others with incomplete information regarding my phone calls with the Russian ambassador. I have sincerely apologized to the president and the vice president.”

Later that year, he pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with the ambassador.

“Trump had long been expected to pardon Flynn, pummeling prosecutors and the FBI for their handling of the case, part of a concerted attack on the investigations against him. Trump has falsely accused the FBI and Justice Department of mounting a ‘coup’ against him in the years after his election,” Politico noted.

Mnuchin clawback may “sabotage” Biden by blocking $455B in COVID-19 funds — it may also be “illegal”

A member of a congressional panel overseeing coronavirus relief funds accused Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin of attempting to “sabotage” President-elect Joe Biden’s incoming administration and an “illegal” clawback of unspent stimulus funds.

Mnuchin will claw back $429 billion in funds Congress allocated to the Federal Reserve for emergency lending facilities in the Cares Act and another $26 billion allocated to the Treasury for direct loans to businesses and put it in the agency’s General Fund, a Treasury spokesperson told Bloomberg News on Tuesday. The move would block the Biden administration from using the funds without congressional approval.

“The move will leave [Janet] Yellen — selected by president-elect Joe Biden as his nominee for Treasury secretary — with just under $80 billion available in the Treasury’s Exchange Stabilization Fund,” the outlet reported, adding that “Mnuchin isn’t required to move the money into the General Fund — the Cares Act states that the Treasury Department can maintain access to the money by keeping it in its Exchange Stabilization Fund until 2026.”

Mnuchin sent a letter to Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell last week asking him to return the money. The Fed agreed to return the funds but publicly objected to the move.

The Fed said in a statement that it “would prefer that the full suite of emergency facilities established during the coronavirus pandemic continue to serve their important role as a backstop for our still-strained and vulnerable economy.”

“I think given where the economy is — and there is so much uncertainty still out there —  it is prudent to keep those things open,” Raphael Bostic, the president of the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank, told Bloomberg.

Some analysts raised questions about whether the move was even legal. Skanda Amarnath, a former analyst at the New York Fed, said the clawback was in direct “violation of the Cares Act.”

“This is Treasury’s latest ham-handed effort to undermine the Biden administration. The good news is that it’s illegal and can be reversed next year,” Bharat Ramamurti, a member of the Congressional Oversight Commission that oversees Cares Act funding, said. “For its part, the Fed should not go along with this attempted sabotage and should retain the CARES Act funds it already has.”

Ernie Tedeschi, a former Treasury Department economist, said it was a “dangerous move” ahead of what is expected to be a devastating winter.

“It’s one more enormous risk we are piling onto the winter in the U.S. atop of other risks already there,” he told Business Insider. “We may need that backstop again as cases have now blown through their prior peaks, state and local governments are making cuts, and we’re about to kick off millions of people from unemployment insurance.”

Mnuchin, whose move was backed by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told CNBC last week that Congress — which has stalled on a second round of relief funding since March — should decide how to repurpose the funds.

“We don’t need this money to buy corporate bonds. We need this money to go help small businesses that are still closed or hurt — no fault of their own — or people who are going to be on unemployment that’s running out,” he said.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, said Mnuchin’s effort was “shameful” amid a massive spike in coronavirus infections and the dire need for additional relief funding.

“As the economy backslides amid skyrocketing COVID-19 cases, Secretary Mnuchin is engaged in economic sabotage and trying to tie the Biden administration’s hands,” he said in a statement to Reuters.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said the clawback showed that Mnuchin’s pandemic response had been a “corrupt and incompetent failure.”

“He needs to stop sabotaging the Biden administration from cleaning up his mess and helping states, cities, and small businesses,” she tweeted.

Biden’s team called Mnuchin’s move “deeply irresponsible.”

“Biden will work with leaders across government to ensure Main Street businesses and state and local governments have the support and access to credit they need to weather this storm,” spokeswoman Kate Bedingfield told Bloomberg.

How to cook big meals when you’re low on kitchen space

“When the city kitchen is bad, it is really bad,” New York Daily News food correspondent Arthur Schwartz once wrote. “The landlords call them kitchenettes. You laugh at the pretension and eat out a lot.” 

But often there comes a time where, whether due to frugality, health considerations or, in the case of this year, social distancing restrictions, dining out nightly simply isn’t feasible anymore. Sure, there’s always delivery, but after a while it can feel like your countertops simply serve to display a rotating collection of take-out vessels — styrofoam containers, brown paper sacks and those flimsy white plastic bags with yellow smiley faces drawn on the side. 

That, combined with the advent of the holidays, can prompt even the most reluctant cooks to face their tiny kitchens and all that doing so entails — contending with the lack of counter space, figuring out where to balance the cutting board, navigating what cookware should go where. 

I have a little experience in this practice. Since moving out of my parent’s suburban home, I’ve lived in one-bedroom or studio apartments, all with what can best be described as galley kitchens. The kitchen islands I stupidly took for granted in my youth were conspicuously absent. Counter space for a coffee maker and toaster? Pssh, perhaps in my dreams. 

Still, I love project cooking. The more steps and moving parts the better, unless I’m experiencing serious culinary burnout. This honestly used to be an absolute mess, but I’ve found out enough workarounds that things run pretty smoothly now. (Well, smoothly enough. Ask me sometime about the weekend I made 72 babkas in two days, effectively turning my kitchen into an underground micro-bakery). 

Here are some of the things I’ve learned along the way that you can apply in your own tiny kitchen. 

Tailor your menu to fit your kitchen appliances

So, let’s take stock of the typical apartment kitchen: a one- or two-rack oven, a two- or four-burner stove and maybe a microwave. Keep this in mind when planning out your menu. While you may want to tackle six recipes that all bake in the oven at different temperatures, it’s not exactly practical. Craft a menu where some dishes can be baked in the oven, others on the stove; if you have a slow cooker or Instant Pot, use it, even if just to keep things warm. 

Also, don’t forget the appeal of no-cook dishes (everyone loves a good snack plate). 

Prep work is essential 

If you’re preparing multiple dishes, like for a holiday meal, for example, it can be tempting to work on one dish until it’s at a stopping point — on the stove or in the oven, for example — then start on the next item. But take a note from professional kitchens think about mise en place. 

The term, which is French for “putting in place,” is shorthand for whatever preparation needs to be done to readily complete a dish: gathering, washing and chopping vegetables; trimming meat; measuring out dry ingredients and spices; placing all these items into appropriately-sized containers for easy access.

Before you jump into cooking, take a look at your recipe list and make a quick plan for how to prepare all your ingredients for use. Move dish by dish, and place ingredients that you don’t need yet separately from the ones you do. 

Clean as you go

This is a boring, but essential tip: clean as you go. In a small kitchen, you can’t afford to sacrifice that counter space that’s become home to a smattering of dirty dishes. Between recipes — or perhaps between steps, if it’s a complex recipe that calls for multiple mixing bowls and pan — take a couple minutes to do dishes, wipe off the countertop and grab your mise en place for your next dish. 

Think about bringing in extra surfaces (and use them to set up stations)

When you don’t have a ton of countertop space, it’s time to start thinking about other flat surfaces for things like, you know, chopping and ingredient storage. If you have the space and extra money, invest in a rolling, foldable kitchen island or cart. If you’re running short on either, take a look around your apartment for a quick fix. Do you have a coffee table you could clear off? Or maybe a slim television console or desk that’s light enough to drag closer to the kitchen? These make great temporary solutions 

Once you’ve added some more flat surfaces to your kitchen space, think about setting up stations. Mentally walk through the steps you’ll need to take to finish your meal. Will you need space to let dough rise or meat rest? What about room to roll out biscuits or ice a cake? Group similar activities (chopping, resting, storing) together. 

Half-sheet baking pans are a godsend

Half-sheet baking pans — which average about 13 inches by 18 inches — are incredibly useful for stashing your prepped ingredients or recipes in progress. They are rimmed, fit easily on most countertops and can be picked up and moved to make space (I’ve definitely tucked a few on top of my refrigerator during big meal preparations before). 

Stash your utensils while you’re cooking

While you’re cooking, keep a large jar or class closeby to store the utensils you aren’t using, but aren’t quite ready to clean. This keeps them close at hand, but you won’t find yourself knocking them around between recipe steps. Clutter is the enemy of a streamlined cooking experience. 

Go vertical for storage

Before your next big cooking project, look for vertical storage options that would fit in your kitchen. Wire or steel baker’s racks (which you can typically get pretty affordably from restaurant supply centers) are fantastic storage additions. Magnetic knife strips that you can adhere to the wall keep you from having to use a bulky knife block. 

And if, like me, you have under-utilized space above your kitchen cabinets, consider taking a page from food blogger and recipe developer Deb Perelmen’s book and use it to store the bakeware that you don’t use everyday — muffin tins, springform pans, bundt cake pans. Use the space you make down below to store things you’re more likely to grab on a regular basis. 

Bonus tip

Prepping and staying organized can take time, so get comfortable and settle in with the audio entertainment of your choice. Try Broadway recordings, your favorite news/music station, podcasts, audiobooks, audio dramas, or perhaps this lo-fi playlist that will make you more productive.

How the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade will be different in 2020 on NBC

Prep for this year’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on NBC had already been basting for months when the COVID-19 pandemic forced organizers to cook up a new way to pull it off.

“We have to plan this thing about 18 months out, because we do things like select the bands, we design and build our floats, our balloons and everything,” said executive producer Susan Tercero. “As you can imagine, when we got to March of this past year, we’d already had a parade plan.”

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Many of those ingredients still remain: Musical performances, balloons, floats and a Santa Claus finale. But as the months went on and it became apparent that the world still wouldn’t be back to normal in the fall, producers came up with a new recipe for this year’s event.

The biggest change: This year’s 94th annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade will be for television audiences only. There won’t be the normal 2.5-mile parade route or crowds along the way; instead, the event will be tied only to the cameras in front of the Macy’s Herald Square flagship store on 34th Street in New York City.

“Every year we have two parades: There’s the one for New Yorkers who line the parade along the streets, and we knew that couldn’t happen, we couldn’t march from uptown to downtown,” Tercero said. “The other parade is the one that happens on television for 50 million people. We knew that was going to be our safest way of moving forward.”

Because the producers are treating this year’s parade like a movie set, they’ve been able to work with the city of New York and the New York Police Department in identifying areas to block off, so that crowds don’t try to crash the parade.

Savannah Guthrie, Hoda Kotb and Al Roker of NBC’s “Today Show” will host the three-hour telecast, produced by Brad Lachman Prods. Jimmy Fallon and the Roots are scheduled to open the show.

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Other performers include Lauren Alaina, Sofia Carson, Tori Kelly, Patti LaBelle, Matthew Morrison, Leslie Odom Jr., Keke Palmer, Dolly Parton, Pentatonix, Bebe Rexha and Jordin Sparks. The casts of “Ain’t Too Proud – The Life and Times of The Temptations,” “Hamilton,” “Jagged Little Pill” and “Mean Girls” are also set to be showcased.

“We found ways to have a balance of both [live and pre-tape],” Tercero said. “We will still be doing it live because there is some magic in that. I think that people are missing live entertainment, one of those things where you never know what’s going to happen. And people will want to tune in to see how we put it all together.”

The production will be aired seamlessly so that viewers won’t necessarily be able to tell what’s live and what’s not. Some of the balloons, for example, will be live, while others will be pre-taped. According to Macy’s and NBC, “the overall number of participants have now been reduced by approximately 88 percent, and split over three days.”

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Among other changes: No high school or college marching bands (which have been pushed to 2021), as the parade won’t include anyone under 18 this year due to health and safety concerns.

“We realized that schools weren’t sure where they were going to be [in fall],” Tercero said. Most schools were closed. They did not know if they were even going to have a marching band program in the fall. We had to make that decision quickly for them because there was a lot of unknown in their world.”

Instead, this year’s parade will rely on performances and elements from other New York City parades that didn’t get a chance to march this year, such as the Puerto Rican Day, St. Patrick’s Day, NYC Pride, West Indian Day and Coney Island USA Mermaid parades.

“We invited them to come and be a nice representation, really of what New York is and what we all know New York to be,” she said. “And we get to share it with people across the country. So while they didn’t get to have their parade live and in person this year, they’ll get to do a piece of it for 50 million viewers on TV.”

Also, instead of the nearly 100 people who usually operate each balloon, Toro tractor vehicles will be towing them.

“You’re still going to see them flying high,” Tercero said. “It’s just the way that they are being carried down the street is different. We have done many, many iterations of this and training to try and make sure that this is the right way to go. I think it’s going to still get the same essence and the balloons flying high amongst the buildings that we’re used to seeing.”

Macy’s also won’t hold its usual balloon inflation public event in New York, which usually takes place the night before Thanksgiving.

Tercero said Macy’s got a taste of how to pivot during the pandemic when it produced a different version of its Fourth of July Fireworks this year. But the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade was a bigger challenge, particularly recently as COVID-19 cases have grown and concerns over gatherings have become more acute in recent weeks.

“We attempted to build a plan to have an event, based on what we knew at the time and a lot of our decisions were made in June and continued to evolve after that,” she said. “Every week has brought a different concern for us in the city in this country of where we are in terms of pandemic. And we have had to make adjustments according to that… We’re just really excited that we’re still able to deliver this this year to everybody in a safe way. That’s really our goal.”

Besides airing at 9 a.m. ET on NBC, NBCUniversal has also partnered with Verizon for the fifth year to livestream the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on YouTube.com/Verizon, on Twitter via @Verizon and other Verizon Media properties, including Yahoo.

Another holiday special that had to switch gears this year was ABC’s “The Wonderful World of Disney: Magical Holiday Celebration,” which airs on Thanksgiving at 9 a.m. The fifth annual edition of the special features hosts Derek and Julianne Hough, as well as Trevor Jackson (“Grown-ish”) from Walt Disney World. But beyond that, much of the special will feature performance highlights from previous years, including Ciara (2017), Kelly Clarkson (2016), Jason Derulo (2017), Meghan Trainor (2018), Boyz II Men (2016) and Shaggy (2019).

“SNL” brings back Morgan Wallen after cancellation, Timothee Chalamet to make hosting debut

“Saturday Night Live” is giving country singer Morgan Wallen a second chance.

The sketch comedy show has slated Wallen as the musical guest for Dec. 5, with host Jason Bateman, following the cancellation of a scheduled October appearance after videos surfaced of Wallen partying and kissing fans without a mask, an apparent breach of “SNL” COVID-19 safety protocols.

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NBC announced the “SNL” slate for the last three shows of the year, with Timothee Chalamet set to make his hosting debut on Dec. 12, alongside musical guest Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. Kristen Wiig and Dua Lipa are slated to take the “SNL” stage on Dec. 19.

Wallen had originally been slated to perform in Studio 8H on Oct. 10. But a number of TikToks revealed that he had been socializing maskless at multiple locations in Alabama the weekend prior, including a crowded bar and house party. The criticism on social media was swift, condemning the singer for what appeared to be a cavalier attitude toward the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

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The musician was apologetic, posting an Instagram video from a New York City hotel room on Oct. 7, where he had been preparing to go on “SNL” before being informed by producers that he would no longer be able to play the show three days away.

Wallen called his decisions “short-sighted” and took ownership for his actions, telling fans that he had “some growing up to do.” Jack White wound up replacing Wallen as the Oct. 10 musical guest.

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“Let’s try this again,” tweeted Wallen, shortly after NBC announced his re-scheduled appearance.

Ken Jennings’ past tweets mocking the disabled surface after “Jeopardy” guest hosting announcement

Twenty four hours after Sony Pictures Television announced that “Jeopardy” fan favorite Ken Jennings would be one of several guest hosts taking over the popular quiz show in January in the aftermath of the death of Alex Trebek, a four-year-old tweet has returned to put a cloud over the occasion.

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After Jennings’ gig was announced last night, actress and activist Yvette Nicole Brown posted a tweet decrying the casting choice. When asked by followers why she directed them to a tweet posted by Jennings on September 22, 2014 where he posted: “Nothing sadder than a hot person in a wheelchair.” Jennings never condemned his actions at the time, and as of this writing the tweet is still up on his timeline. (Neither Jennings nor Sony Pictures Television responded for comment.)

It wasn’t until 2018, in response to someone retweeting his comments, that Jennings responded on Twitter, saying: “I never did a public flogging for this but I did apologize personally to angry/hurt people who reached out personally. It was a joke so inept that it meant something very different in my head [and] I regret the ableist plain reading of it.”

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This is not the first time Jennings has been cited for being cruel in his tweets. In 2015 he tweeted, “It can’t be a good sign that every fan who has seen the new Star Wars movie died shortly thereafter,” in response to the death of Daniel Fleetwood, a “Star Wars” fan who died of cancer and wanted to see “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” before his death. Two years later Jennings was in the spotlight again after responding to then 11-year-old Barron Trump seeing the image of Kathy Griffin holding a bloody Trump mask with “Barron Trump saw a very long necktie on a heap of expired deli meat in a dumpster. He thought it was his dad & his little heart is breaking.” And in 2018 he described an elderly women mourning her deceased son by saying: “This awful MAGA grandma is my favorite person on Twitter.”

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It’s doubtful this tweet, or any of what Jennings has said on Twitter, will affect his position with “Jeopardy,” but factoring in that Jennings has never removed the tweet or made any attempt to overtly apologize, the resurfaced comments are not the best introduction to his guest takeover. It is doubly unfortunate as it’s unclear if “Jeopardy” has even had a wheelchair-user as a contestant. (That’s not to say they haven’t had any disabled contestants. In 1999, Eddie Timanus, who is blind, won $69,700 playing the game.)