“Top Chef” goes “back to the good land,” celebrating Native and indigenous ingredients

In the ninth episode of this Wisconsin-set season of "Top Chef," aptly titled "The Good Land," host Kristen Kish tasked the cheftestants with a challenging prompt.

This challenge was, bar none, my favorite of the season thus far. The idea of prioritizing — and exclusively using — only native and indigenous ingredients in every dish was a great way to honor the land in which the show is being filmed, as well as challenging the cheftestants beyond their usual repertoire; they were barred from using all dairy, sugar, wheat, chicken, beef and pork. (Though of course, it should also be noted that what is native or indigenous to chefs in Wisconsin is markedly different from what is native or indigenous to me, in New Jersey, or someone cooking in Nebraska.)

While dairy-free, sugar-free, or wheat-free cuisine can oftentimes be derided, this shows that it is: an incredibly viable way to cook, if not a preferable way to eat; totally doable; and able to result in delicious, well-made food, with or without substitutes. And in most cases you probably already have some of the ingredients needed to cook this way already on hand, such as corn, beans, squash, wild rice and much more.

Envisioning indigenous food sovereignty as "a whole ecosystem"

“The Good Land” also shows that the food can exist on its own, truly sourced from the land and the waters, with nothing to muddy up its inherent locality, its purity, its richness. And for that lesson to be communicated through a frenzied challenge in a competitive cooking reality show is pretty spectacular on its own.

Kish enlisted chefs Elena Terry and Sean Sherman to help further elucidate the challenge. Terry, who is the executive chef and founder of Wild Berries, and Sherman — co-founder of NĀTIFS (North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems), as well the chef-owner of Owanmi Restaurant in Minneapolis — also cooked a meal for the contestants, which included everything from berries, walleye, sunflowers and wild rice to rose hips, dandelion greens, bison and other wild game, corn, mushroom, duck and wild hyssop.

They also aided the cheftestants in flavor and cookery. For example, since citrus was a no-go under the rules of the challenge, Sharman and Terry advised the chefs to use ingredients like sumac or aronia in order to add notes of acidity and bitterness.

None of the cheftestants had ever eaten at a restaurant serving Native cuisine, which is a damning revelation to come out of the most prominent and well-respected culinary competition on television. It’s not a reflection on the contestants or on “Top Chef,” per se, but on the culture and restaurant industry at large. As Amanda stated, the impacts of colonization and its impact on culinary arts worldwide is something that "hasn't been thoroughly explored."

To that end, when speaking on NPR’s Fresh Air podcast in 2022 showcased, Sherman's menu offers allows for "diners [to] order off a menu that's been 'decolonized.'" Sherman, a multiple James Beard-winning chef, told NPR that one of his goals is to "to see the world differently through this Indigenous perspective of realizing that all these plants around us have some kind of purpose — whether it's food, it's medicine or crafting."

Sherman also said that "we're not cooking like it's 1491. We're not a museum piece of something like that. We're trying to evolve the food into the future, using as much of the knowledge from our ancestors that we can understand and just applying it to the modern world." Last year, Ali Elabbady wrote in Eater about another one of Sherman's efforts, an indigenous food lab and market that opened in Minneapolis.

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In 2022, Carolyn Kormann wrote "How Owamni became the best new restaurant in the United States" in The New Yorker, highlighting the food itself, but more importantly, the ethos and the advocacy behind it.

"My first plate was raw deer, or “game tartare,” listed under a menu section titled “Wamakhaskan,” the Dakota word for animal. The dish was a study in circles: the meat pressed flat and dotted with pickled carrots, moons of sumac-dusted duck-egg aioli, microgreens, and blueberries. A blue-corn tostada served as a utensil. One bite was a disco ball in the forest."

On "Top Chef," while the cheftestants dishes weren't all wins, there were some real standouts: Savannah's winning and inspired squash-and-maple "jelly cake" dessert with an array of sauces made from aronia, grapes and plum jelly, Soo's wild rice and huitlacoche "dumplings," Dan's incredibly inventive sunflower-chokes-treated-like-artichokes.

These dishes highlighted the local offerings, native ingredients which had been used for generations and generations. I so appreciated the in-depth, respectful critiques from Terry, Sherman and the other diners, all so attuned to the flavors and customs of their land, being critical and direct but not in a harsh manner. To hear the celebration and positive words for the dishes they enjoyed, though, was remarkable.

One dish even caused one of the indigenous guest diners to remark "I know that this came from my land. It feels like home.”

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Trump teases NRA convention attendees with the idea of a third term

The highlight of the National Rifle Association (NRA) annual meeting on Saturday was a speech by former president Donald Trump, which came late but was ripe with sound bites. One takeaway: he proposed the idea of a third term, which he directly spoke against during an interview with Time magazine back in April.

During his afternoon speech in Dallas, Trump — whose criminal hush-money trial in New York is expected to come to a close as soon as Tuesday — likened himself to 32nd President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had a four term presidency.

“You know, FDR 16 years — almost 16 years — he was four terms. I don’t know, are we going to be considered three-term? Or two-term?” he teased the crowd of gun rights supporters.

“Three!” shouted some convention attendees, Politico reported.

Trump mentioned extending his stay in the White House while campaigning in 2020. However, his flip-flop has added fuel to the Biden campaign’s narrative that the former president is a threat to democracy and institutional norms.

Trump's most recent remarks about extending his presidency to a third term, which isn’t allowed in the Constitution, clash with what he said in his Time magazine interview. He claimed he would be against challenging the 22nd Amendment that came into place after FDR’s four-term presidency.

“I wouldn’t be in favor of it at all. I intend to serve four years and do a great job. And I want to bring our country back. I want to put it back on the right track. Our country is going down. We’re a failing nation right now. We’re a nation in turmoil,” he said during the interview.

Don’t fall for MAGA’s “election integrity” con job

Can journalists please stop repeating the term “election integrity” just because Republicans insist on saying it?

Heck, if they don't offer credible evidence (because there is none), I wouldn’t even quote Republicans when they use the term, at least not without setting the record straight. Election laws being put into place in Republican-controlled states have nothing to do with integrity and everything to do with denying citizens their right to vote and intimidating election officials and volunteers.

The second most crucial Republican policy after cutting taxes for the already wealthy has long been to make voting more difficult for populations that tend to vote Democratic. They accomplished this in recent decades by gerrymandering, limiting polling places and hours, using scare tactics and dishing out election disinformation.

Now, the MAGA party insists on further cheating its way to permanent minority rule by denigrating the idea that voting can be fair — if the other side wins.

Project 2025 targets election 2024: A massive operation to put Trump back in the White House

If the idea that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election — which he won by more than 7 million votes, with a 306-232 electoral vote victory — is Trump’s big lie, then Republican efforts to ensure “election integrity” around the country are lies metastasizing from the malignant tumor Trump introduced into our democracy. Trump’s con about election fraud is intended to succeed where his multifaceted effort to overturn the 2020 election failed.

Led by disgraced attorney and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani — who claimed the election was stolen way back in 1989, when he lost his first mayoral race against Democratic incumbent David Dinkins — the Trump campaign brought 62 lawsuits claiming some kind of voter fraud or voting improprieties in the 2020 election. Trump's apparatchiks lost 61 of those, either because they lacked standing to sue or because they had no real evidence to offer. (As actual attorneys involved no doubt understood, presenting false evidence in court of law can get you in serious trouble.) Oh, and that one case they won, in Pennsylvania? It was about whether voters should be allowed to correct the identification on their ballot within three days of the election, and did not affect the outcome.

No evidence of significant voter fraud has existed in any recent American election. The most noteworthy instances in recent years have involved individual Republicans attempting to cast false votes, probably because Fox News–style propagandists and right-wing politicians tell them every day that Democrats are cheating.

A man came up to me the other day — big man, strong man — with tears in his eyes. He asked me, “Kirk, sir, why do Republican-controlled legislatures pass laws about election integrity when there's no evidence of voter fraud?”

As usual for Trumpists, every accusation is an admission. Who cheats at elections? You might ask the phony Republican electors charged in Michigan, Georgia and Nevada, or the 10 Republicans who admitted to what they did in the Wisconsin civil case. Ask the 11 phony electors indicted in Arizona, along with officials in the Trump White House who urged them to cheat the American people.

You might ask Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, who has been indicted both in Arizona and in Georgia for trying to help Trump overturn the 2020 presidential election. Meadows demanded an end to election fraud and, oh yeah, also registered to vote in three states.

Since 2021, more than half the states have passed new “election integrity” laws that place more responsibilities and potential liabilities on poll workers. Republicans are now bragging or threatening about how many poll watchers they are training to contest all aspects of the upcoming election in swing states. To borrow one of Trump’s con-man locutions, everybody knows this announcement is about scaring voters away and undermining the public’s trust in elections.

I could pause a moment here to mention that a man came up to me the other day — big man, strong man — with tears welling up in his eyes, and he asked me, “Kirk, sir, why do Republican-controlled legislatures pass laws about election integrity when there has been no evidence of voter fraud?” (Well, I “could” mention it — but I won’t, because it didn't happen. Just as it never happens to Trump.)

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Trump has been talking up voter fraud since before the 2016 election, claiming at rallies that the only way he can lose is if the other side cheats, repeating the lie to brainwash his followers. Every legitimate study of elections in the U.S. has shown that it's nearly impossible to cast a false ballot without getting caught.

While there’s vanishingly little fraud in voting, Trump’s brand is fraud:

Trump allegedly falsified business records about payments made to his lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen, to reimburse him for the hush money to adult film actress Stormy Daniels to quash her story about having sex with Trump in 2006 — when Melania was at home with their infant son — in an attempt to hide his infidelity from voters before the 2016 election.
Trump and his accomplices strong-armed election officials in battleground states to change vote counts. “Look, fellas, I just want 11,780 votes,” he said while haranguing the Georgia secretary of state in an infamous phone call.
Fox News pushed Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election and was sued for defamation by Dominion Voting Systems, eventually settling the case for $787.5 million. Fox Corporation was also sued by Smartmatic, another voting technology company, for more than $2 billion for allegedly making more than 100 false claims about vote rigging. In January, a New York judge ruled that case should proceed.
Trump sycophants Giuliani and John Eastman hatched the fake elector scheme, intended to throw the 2020 election to Trump by defrauding Biden voters in seven swing states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin (and, by extension, defrauding Biden voters in all 50 states).
And of course, Trump and many of his supporters and followers, including his “stand back and stand by” pals the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, perpetrated the violent insurrection and attempted coup of Jan. 6, 2021.

Since leaving the White House, Trump has been indicted in four venues on 88 felony counts. He lost two civil cases for sexually assaulting and then defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll, and another civil case for fraudulent financial statements in New York. Judges have repeatedly issued gag orders against Trump, because he cannot stop himself from publicly criticizing witnesses, jurors, prosecutors and the judges themselves, putting them in harm’s way. (As I recently wrote, we could use a nationwide gag order on Trump's calls for violence against others.)

When Republicans talk about fighting for election integrity, you know the opposite is true. By buying into Trump’s lies about elections, they're cheating the rest of us.

Parroting Trump, an increasing number of Republicans are refusing to say whether they will accept the results of this year's presidential election. Even some slightly saner Republicans are saying that MAGA-friendly members of Congress are spouting Russian propaganda. I’ve contended for years that if Trump isn’t working for Vladimir Putin, he might as well be. But that also applies to an unknown number of Republicans in Congress, not just Marjorie Taylor Greene and her friends on the far-right fringe.

As Anne Applebaum writes in her new book "Autocracy, Inc.," recently excerpted in The Atlantic, autocrats around the globe are banding together with MAGA Republicans to manipulate people into believing that democracies cannot work:

This is the core problem for autocracies: The Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, and others all know that the language of transparency, accountability, justice, and democracy appeals to some of their citizens, as it does to many people who live in dictatorships. Even the most sophisticated surveillance can’t wholly suppress it. The very ideas of democracy and freedom must be discredited — especially in the places where they have historically flourished.

Meanwhile, threats against election officials continue. The Brennan Center for Justice reports that “large numbers of election officials report having experienced threats, abuse, or harassment for doing their jobs” and that those officials have taken steps since the 2020 election to secure the safety of staff and volunteers.

When Republicans talk about fighting for election integrity, you know the opposite is true. By buying into Trump’s lies about elections, Republicans are cheating the rest of us. As a pathological narcissist (as well as the world’s biggest crybaby), Trump cannot allow himself to admit defeat, and Republicans are willing to tear the country apart to appease his toddler-like tantrums.

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Republican propaganda around voting happens so often that another glaring example occurred within the last week, while I was finishing this article. House Speaker Mike Johnson held a press conference to announce a bill that would keep non-citizens from voting. But since it's already illegal for non-citizens to vote, journalists immediately called him out on it.

Media outlets must strive not to repeat any Republican permutation of “election integrity” and must patiently spell out the truth again and again — and then again, as tiresome as that may be. They should also report on the larger Republican effort to undermine confidence in elections, pass more rules that make it harder for Democratic constituencies to vote and intimidate those voters who show up anyway.

While the Biden administration is doing what it can to promote voting, Republicans are working diligently to create the illusion that they support free and fair elections, all while creating a system of roadblocks and intimidation. They hope to create a system where voting takes place but the outcome is guaranteed. Trump and his enablers have taken that even further by claiming the only way they can lose is if the other side cheats.

As Timothy Snyder writes in "On Tyranny":

We believe that we have checks and balances, but have rarely faced a situation like the present: when the less popular of the two parties suppresses voting, claims fraud when it loses elections, and controls the majority of the statehouses. The party that exercises such control proposes few policies that are popular with society at large, and several that are unpopular — and thus must either fear democracy or weaken it.

from Kirk Swearingen on the 2024 decision

Some Trump-appointed judges keep sneaking Biblical reference into court opinions

When asked to criticize a Roman tax, Jesus famously answered: “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” Influenced by that teaching, James Madison wrote in the 1820s about the separation of church and state: “I have no doubt that every new example will succeed … in shewing that Religion & Govt. will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.”

Such lessons are not always heeded.

Four times in the past year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has “mixed together” religion and government by citing the Bible in court opinions (three of those citations by the same judge—Donald Trump appointee James C. Ho of Texas). Review of those citations provides a good reminder that Jesus and Madison had a point. The Federal Reporter should stay on a separate bookshelf from books of theology.

In State of Louisiana v. i3Verticals, decided in September 2023, a class of Louisiana sheriffs sued the sellers of allegedly defective software. The parties disputed whether the case belonged in state or federal court.

The answer turned on a part of the Class Action Fairness Act that sends a class action to state court when (among other factors) there’s an in-state defendant “from whom significant relief is sought by members of the class.” The sheriffs sued an insolvent in-state defendant who had no real chance of ever paying a judgment. The issue was whether that defendant—facing a legally viable, but practically useless claim—was one “from whom significant relief is sought.”

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The panel majority opinion, written by Judge Ho, held that the accepted meaning of “to seek” meant “to ask for.” In addition to other authorities commonly cited in such cases (the Oxford English Dictionary, similar statutes, etc.), Ho quoted from the Bible, Matthew 7:7—“Ask, and it shall be given to you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” He then explained: “[A]lthough the Bible teaches that those who seek from the Lord shall find, when we seek something from our fellow man, we don’t always get it.”

In dissent, Trump appointee Andrew Oldham responded that “no one seeks without at least an infinitesimal hope of finding.” Among other counterarguments, he addressed the majority’s citation to Matthew 7:7 and observed: “The Bible says ‘seek, and ye shall find’ precisely because God gives us hope and faith—two things that plaintiffs do not have in ‘seeking’ to recover from a defunct shell company.”

The third example comes from the Fifth Circuit’s 2023 en banc decision in Cargill v. Garland, which held that the ATF exceeded its statutory authority in regulating “bump stocks” that allow the rapid firing of a semiautomatic firearm. The case turned on grammatical issues about the controlling federal statute.

In a concurrence, addressing one of those grammatical points, Judge Ho cited Psalm 111:10: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” He noted that the phrase “‘the fear of the lord’ could refer to an anxious aristocrat, afraid of an overweening monarch or unruly populace,” but then observed: “[W]e know that the Bible means something very different—that the wise man fears God.”

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Then last week in the State of Texas v. SEC decision, which held that several states had not shown their standing to challenge a new SEC disclosure requirement,the majority opinion concluded that the states had no evidence that the new disclosures would lead to increased costs that might impact those states.

Judge Ho concurred, noting that the states could refile if they presented stronger evidence of economic injury. He discussed the potential unintended consequences of the SEC’s new law, and in so doing, included an unexplained citation to Genesis 50:20.

That verse is part of the story of Joseph, who was sold into slavery by his brothers but rose to become a wise ruler of Egypt who avoided a deadly famine. In that verse, Joseph tells his scheming brothers: “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.” The verse is generally read as illustrating the idea that divine plans are ultimately for good, even if individual events may seem harmful or unjust.

Standing alone, none of these citations is particularly troubling. None are used as precedent. Each (except for the Genesis quote) is part of a broader discussion of a range of authority. And the Bible obviously has literary and cultural significance, separate and apart from its role as a religious text.

But the Bible’s a religious text. Three of these quotes were coupled with the pronouns “us” and “we.” Those are words of inclusion—Merriam-Webster, for example, reminds that “we” means “I and the rest of a group that includes me.” And as inclusive words, they imply a bond between author and some readers that plainly doesn’t include other ones. Because the original context for those words was the teaching of a specific religious faith—indeed, the Genesis citation is about faith itself—they inherently carry some endorsement of that tradition that risks sidelining readers of different or no faith.

The advice of Jesus and Madison continues to ring true. The English language offers a host of literary and cultural references that don’t come carrying religious baggage. A reminder: Federal court opinions should be written for all American citizens, not just those who sanctify a particular text.

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Forget Biden’s “pause”: Israel is destroying Gaza with a vast arsenal of U.S. weapons

On May 8, as Israel escalated its brutal assault on Rafah, President Biden announced that he had “paused” a delivery of 1,700 500-pound and 1,800 2,000-pound bombs, and threatened to withhold more shipments if Israel went ahead with its full-scale invasion of Rafah.

The move elicited an outcry from Israeli officials (National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir tweeted “Hamas loves Biden”), as well as Republicans, staunch anti-Palestinian Democrats and pro-Israel donors. Republicans immediately prepared a bill entitled the Israel Security Assistance Support Act to prohibit the administration from withholding military aid to Israel.

Many people have been asking the U.S. to halt weapons to Israel for seven months, and of course Biden’s move comes too late for 35,000 Palestinians who have been killed in Gaza, mainly by American weapons.

Lest one think the administration is truly changing its position, two days after announcing the pause, the State Department released a convoluted report saying that, although it is reasonable to “assess” that U.S. weapons have been used by Israeli forces in Gaza in ways that are “inconsistent” with international humanitarian law, and although Israel has indeed delayed or had a negative effect on the delivery of aid to Gaza (which is illegal under U.S. law), Israel’s assurances regarding humanitarian aid and compliance with international humanitarian law are “credible and reliable.”

Are the campus protests antisemitic? For many Jewish activists, a difficult debate

By this absurd conclusion, the Biden administration has given itself a green light to keep sending weapons and Israel a flashing one to keep committing war crimes with them.

In any event, as Col. Joe Bicino, a retired U.S. artillery officer, told the BBC, Israel can “level” Rafah with the weapons it already has. The paused shipment is “somewhat inconsequential,” Bicino said, “a little bit of a political play for people in the United States who are… concerned about this.” A U.S. official confirmed to the Washington Post that Israel has enough weapons already supplied by the U.S. and other allies to go ahead with the Rafah operation if it chooses to ignore U.S. qualms.

The paused shipment really has to be seen in the context of the arsenal with which the U.S. has equipped its Middle Eastern proxy over many decades.

A deluge of American bombs

During World War II, the United States proudly called itself the “arsenal of democracy” as its munitions factories and shipyards produced an endless supply of weapons to fight the genocidal government of Germany. Today, the U.S is instead, to many of its critics, the arsenal of genocide, providing 70% of the imported weapons Israel is using to obliterate Gaza and massacre its people.

As Israel assaults Rafah, home to 1.4 million displaced people, including at least 600,000 children, most of the warplanes dropping bombs on them are F-16s, originally designed and manufactured by General Dynamics, but now produced by Lockheed Martin in Greenville, South Carolina. Israel’s 224 F-16s have long been its weapon of choice for bombing militants and civilians in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria.

Most of the warplanes dropping bombs on Gaza's population are F-16s, now produced by Lockheed Martin in Greenville, South Carolina.

Israel also has 86 Boeing F-15s, which can drop heavier bombs, and 39 of the latest, most wastefully expensive fighter-bombers ever, Lockheed Martin’s nuclear-capable F-35s, with another 36 on order. The F-35 is built in Fort Worth, Texas, but components are manufactured all over the U.S. and in allied countries, including Israel. Israel was the first country to attack other countries with F-35s, in violation of U.S. arms export control laws, reportedly using them to bomb Syria, Egypt and Sudan.

As these fleets of U.S.-made warplanes began bombing Gaza in October 2023, their fifth major assault since 2008, the U.S. began rushing in new weapons. By Dec. 1, it had delivered 15,000 bombs and 57,000 artillery shells.

The U.S. supplies Israel with all sizes and types of bombs, including 285-pound GBU-39 small diameter glide bombs, 500-pound Mk 82s, 2,000-pound Mk 84s and BLU-109 “bunker busters,” and even massive 5,000-pound GBU-28 bunker-busters, which Israel reportedly used in Gaza in 2009.

General Dynamics is the largest U.S. bomb manufacturer, making all these models of bombs. Most of them can be used as “precision” guided bombs by attaching Raytheon and Lockheed Martin’s Paveway laser guidance system or Boeing’s JDAM (Joint Direct Attack Munitions) GPS-based targeting system.

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Little more than half of the bombs Israel has dropped on Gaza have been “precision” ones, because, as targeting officers explained to +972 magazine, their Lavender AI system generates thousands of targets who are suspected rank-and-file militants, not senior commanders. Israel does not consider it worth “wasting” expensive precision munitions to kill these people, so it uses only “dumb” bombs to kill them in their homes — obliterating their families and neighbors in the process.

In order to threaten and bomb its more distant neighbors, such as Iran, Israel depends on its seven Lockheed Martin KC-130H and seven Boeing 707 in-air refueling tankers, with four new state-of-the-art Boeing KC46A tankers to be delivered in late 2025 for over $220 million each.

Ground force weapons

Another weapon of choice for killing Palestinians are Israel’s 48 Boeing Apache AH64 attack helicopters, armed with Lockheed Martin’s infamous Hellfire missiles, General Dynamics’ Hydra 70 rockets and Northrop Grumman’s 30mm machine guns. Israel's Apache helicopters very likely killed an unknown number of Israelis during the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023 — a tragic day that Israel and the U.S. continue to exploit as a pretext for their own violations of international humanitarian law.

Israel’s main artillery weapons are its 600 Paladin M109A5 155mm self-propelled howitzers, which are manufactured by BAE Systems in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. To the layman, a self-propelled howitzer looks like a tank, but it has a bigger, 155mm gun to fire at longer range.

Israel assembles its 155mm artillery shells from U.S.-made components. One of the first two U.S. arms shipments that the administration notified Congress about after Oct. 7 was to resupply Israel with artillery shell components valued at $147.5 million.

Israel also has 48 M270 multiple rocket launchers. They are a tracked version of the HIMARS rocket launchers the U.S. has sent to Ukraine and fire the same rockets, made by Lockheed Martin. U.S. Marines used the same rockets in coordination with U.S. airstrikes to devastate Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq, in 2017. M270 launchers are no longer in production, but BEA Systems still has the facilities to produce them.

Israel makes its own Merkava tanks, which fire U.S.-made tank shells, and the State Department announced on Dec. 9, 2023, that it had notified Congress of an “emergency” shipment of 14,000 120mm tank shells worth $106 million to Israel.

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U.S. shipments of artillery and tank shells, and dozens of smaller shipments that it did not report to Congress (because each shipment was carefully calibrated to fall below the statutory reporting limit of $100 million), were paid for out of the $3.8 billion in military aid that the U.S. gives Israel each year.

In April, Congress passed a new war-funding bill that includes about $14 billion for additional weapons. Israel could afford to pay for these weapons itself, but then it could shop around for them, which might erode the U.S. monopoly on supplying so much of its war machine. That lucrative monopoly for U.S. merchants of death is clearly more important to members of Congress than fully funding Head Start or other domestic anti-poverty programs, which they routinely underfund to pay for weapons and wars.

Israel has 500 FMC-built M113 armored personnel carriers and over 2,000 Humvees, manufactured by AM General in Mishawaka, Indiana. Its ground forces are armed with several different types of U.S. grenade launchers, Browning machine-guns, AR-15 assault rifles, and SR-25 and M24 SWS sniper rifles, all made in the U.S., as is the ammunition for them.

For many years, Israel’s three Sa’ar 5 corvettes were its largest warships, about the size of frigates. They were built in the 1990s by Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula, Mississippi, but Israel has recently taken delivery of four larger and more heavily-armed German-built Sa’ar 6 corvettes, with 76mm main guns and new surface-to-surface missiles.

Campus activists vs. the merchants of death

The United States has a long and horrific record of providing weapons to repressive regimes that use them to kill their own people or attack their neighbors. Martin Luther King Jr. called the U.S. government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” and that has not changed since he said it in 1967, a year to the day before his assassination.

The media has adopted the line that divestment is too complicated and costly for universities. But when students set up an encampment at Trinity College in Dublin, the college quickly agreed to their demands.

Many of the huge U.S. factories that produce all these weapons are the largest employers in their regions or even their states. As President Dwight Eisenhower warned in his farewell address in 1960, “This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry” has led to “the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

In addition to demanding a ceasefire, an end to U.S. military aid and weapons sales to Israel, and a restoration of humanitarian aid to Gaza, the students who have occupied college campuses across our country are calling on their institutions to divest from these merchants of death, as well as from Israeli companies.

The mainstream media has adopted the line that divestment would be too complicated and costly for the universities to do. But when students set up an encampment at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, and called on it to divest from Israeli companies, the college quickly agreed to their demands. Problem solved, without police violence or trying to muzzle free speech. Students have also won commitments to consider divestment from several U.S. institutions, including Brown University, Northwestern University, Evergreen State College in Washington, Rutgers University, the University of Minnesota and the University of Wisconsin.

While decades of even deadlier U.S. war-making in the greater Middle East failed to provoke a sustained mass protest movement, the genocide in Gaza has opened the eyes of many thousands of young people. The gradual expulsion and emigration of Palestinians from their homeland has created a large diaspora of young Palestinians who have played a leading role in organizing solidarity campaigns on college campuses through groups like Students for Justice in Palestine. Their close links with extended families in Palestine have given them a visceral grasp of the U.S. role in this carnage and an authentic voice that is persuasive to many other young Americans.

The larger question is whether Americans of all ages will follow our young leaders and demand not just an end to the killing in Palestine but a path out of our country’s military madness and the clutches of its deeply entrenched MICIMATT (military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think-tank) complex, which has inflicted so much death, pain and desolation in so many parts of the world for so long.

about Gaza, Israel and the protests

Gen X feels left in the dark with menopause due to a lack of research and support

At age 44, Marni Penning felt extremely off. Some days, she felt as if a weight was sitting on her chest. Other days, she had an urge to just openly weep. Then there were the days she wrestled with intense anger and rage. She was so concerned about these rapidly changing mood swings that she sought out a neurologist. Penning thought she might be on the brink of dementia. It wasn’t until she went to her OBGYN’s office in tears that she found an answer. The mood swings weren’t a symptom of cognitive decline, but instead the beginning of perimenopause, which is the period before menopause.

“My doctor said, I think that you are in the first stages of perimenopause,” Penning told Salon. “And she's like, 'Here's what's going to happen: periods are going to get closer and closer together, and then they're going to start skipping.”

Why some researchers are rethinking the "grandmother hypothesis'" of menopause

Penning said nobody had ever told her this before in her life. She thought her menstrual cycle would just stop. Plus at 44, she didn’t give much thought to perimenopause. She had her son when she was 41 and nursed him until he was three. Nearly a decade later, Penning said it’s become her mission to shout it from rooftops that the “menopause talk” should be as normalized as the “period talk,” in terms of what to expect.

Indeed, Penning said she and many of her Gen X peers have felt “left in the dark” in terms of what to expect around menopause. Women know they will have their periods when they’re young. There is more discussion about what happens if a woman gets pregnant and how the body changes in the postpartum period — but what about the transition to the end of the female menstrual cycle? “I wasn't told anything,” Penning said.

Most OBGYN residency programs in the United States “lack the curriculum necessary to effectively prepare residents to manage menopausal women.”

Penning’s story mirrors a growing chorus of Gen X women experiencing menopause who are speaking out about the lack of public discourse, knowledge and research around the experience. Earlier this month, actress Halle Berry lobbied for a bipartisan legislation aimed at increasing clinical research into, and de-stigmatizing, menop ause. “Our doctors can't even say the word to us, let alone walk us through the journey of what our menopausal years look like," Berry said.

Why? A lack of resources and conversations from doctors is, in part, driven by a lack of required training on managing menopause symptoms and true level of standardized care in obstetrics. According to a survey published in 2023 in the journal Menopause, only an estimated 31.3 percent of the obstetrics and gynecology residency program directors reported having any type of menopause curriculum as part of their training. The Menopause Society said that the results show that most OBGYN residency programs in the United States “lack the curriculum necessary to effectively prepare residents to manage menopausal women.”

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“It's such a tragedy in healthcare that patients are feeling really unseen and unheard at a very vital time in their life,” Dr. Catherine Hansen, head of menopause at Pandia Health, told Salon. “Women in midlife are at their most productive peak, and yet when they're finding that their body and their physiology is somewhat holding them back — they reach out for help, but a lot of health care providers don't necessarily have the knowledge.”

The lack of research at a “bare minimum” results in “a lot of suffering.”

Hansen is a Menopause Society Certified Practitioner, which is a certification that specializes in providing resources in menopause. There are 1,000 practitioners across the country. But Hansen said that’s not a lot to cover the 6,000 patients per day who are entering menopause.

Dr. Sharon Malone, chief medical adviser at Alloy Women's Health, told Salon a lack of public discourse around what to expect also results in women feeling caught off guard.

“It’s sort of a combination of not enough information and guidance from your doctor, and not enough intergenerational conversation about what to expect,” Malone said. “We don't talk enough amongst ourselves as peers.”

Malone added that the state of research of “deplorable.” The biggest study that was done on postmenopausal women and menopausal hormone therapy concluded in 2002.

“It’s been piecemeal since then,” Malone said. “And there still is not a real serious research effort for women in perimenopause, because that's really the time to start to intervene when we've already done it, and through menopause.”

Anne L. Peterson, a 55-year-old in Texas who runs a group called Goddess Living, said menopause is a frequent topic of discussion in her women’s group. For her, perimenopause started at 42 when she had a partial hysterectomy — but at the time, nobody was calling it perimenopause. She was having very painful menstrual cycles. She went through with the partial hysterectomy, but kept her ovaries. After her procedure, she still had horrible pains that left her gasping for air once a month. When she asked her doctor, the only recommendation was to complete the hysterectomy. Throughout perimenopause, she said she found more answers from her friends.

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“All of my advances have been from my own research or talking to my girlfriends,” Peterson said. “Regularly, the conversation comes up ‘How are you guys doing? I'm getting night sweats. What do you do for night sweats?’ It's not like we treat each other, but I get more information from my women's circle.”

The lack of research, Malone said, at a “bare minimum” results in “a lot of suffering.”

“There are women that are going through hot flashes, mood swings and brain fog — all of the 34 symptoms that we associate with menopause, and they are not accessing care,” Malone said. “Not only because they don't recognize what's going on, they're aware of the fact that they're suffering they just don't know where to go, and because doctors don't know and don't really put it all together under one rubric and say, ‘This is perimenopause.’”

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Boebert ridiculed for fumbling sign of the cross during House Oversight Committee hearing

Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., must not be an "Austin Powers" fan, or else she would have likely committed "spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch" to memory, as both a quote from the film and a handy way to remember how to properly perform the sign of the cross.

During Thursday's House Oversight Committee, Boebert was seen freestyling the gesture dramatically, and incorrectly, while seated between Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Jasmine Crockett D-Tx., during a heated exchange in which Crockett referenced Greene as having a "bad-built butch body" at a session meant to cover contempt proceedings for Attorney General Merrick Garland.

After a clip of Boebert's fumble began to circulate on social media, many were quick to point out that someone who claims to be a devout Christian should know how to nail this move.

"It's worth pointing out that if a Democrat messed up the sign of the cross like this, there would be a SEA of Republican dips***s spreading conspiracy theories about how she actually worships the devil or some nonsense. When in actuality, Lauren Boebert is just SUPER dumb," writes @TheBoeskool.

"Lauren Boebert had to peek to make sure the camera was on her & she still didn't make the sign of the cross, she made the sign of the Grifter," writes @WMatire.

How do you screw up something as simple as making the sign of the cross? Boebert?pic.twitter.com/mHXhP98Knm

— Alex Cole (@acnewsitics) May 17, 2024

"Boebert's not doing the sign of the cross, she only touches her forehead and shoulders. That's the Triforce from the Legend of Zelda," writes @DerekLogue2.

Ironically, during a 2023 speech at CS Wind — a wind turbine plant in Pueblo, which is in Colorado's 3rd Congressional District — President Biden did the sign of the cross himself after mentioning Boebert's name.

“It’s not about good apples and bad apples”: Netflix doc “Power” traces the history of US policing

Yance Ford understands how easy it is for the public to become numbed to images of violence that police commit against citizens. The ubiquity of cell phone cameras means that not a week passes without someone uploading images showing an officer employing excessive force against an unarmed person – especially right now, with protests against Israel’s war in Gaza taking place on college campuses throughout the nation.

Despite how difficult these scenes can be to watch the "Strong Island" director stressed the importance of citizens filming the police as a matter of public safety. “The cellphone camera has really disrupted the police’s ability to be the sole source of the narrative,” Ford told Salon in a recent interview conducted over Zoom. “More than anything else in a society that has yet to figure out how to regulate its police, the ability of citizens to generate narratives that reveal that police are engaged in a specific kind of calibrated storytelling is so important.”

"The discretion of each officer … each of those people has the ability to make a legal decision to take your life."

His latest film, “Power,” adds to that effort by placing the audience in the roles of active witness and participant. With insights from academics, journalists, and current and former law enforcement officials, “Power” helps us to make sense of the historical reasons why our policing system is flawed beyond reform through what Ford describes as an essay style of filmmaking.

In a style that is equally straightforward and meditative, Ford takes a subject that has been touched upon many times and presents it as an invitation to sit with difficult questions. The most sobering may be the question of who, exactly, is “we” in discussions of what degree of agency regular citizens hold over the taxpayer-funded forces who protect us, one of several topics we examined in our conversation.

"Sound of the Police" filmmaker tells his son, "No good can come from a police encounter"

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The seeds of this project began in 2020, as you’ve said in other reports. But I'm also wondering if part of it was inspired by your approach to the storytelling you employed in “Strong Island” as well.

The parts of power that have something in common with “Strong Island” are really centered around the first-person voice that I bring to the film, this kind of essayistic, intimate conversation that I'm looking to have with the audience. It's very present in “Strong Island,” much more so because I'm on camera. With "Power," I begin the film with an invitation and an acknowledgment that some people might watch this film because they’re curious about what I have to say about policing, and some might watch because they're suspicious of what I have to say. But whether it's that sort of 30,000-foot view of this institution or the very intimate view of my family “Strong Island,” there is something about the directedness and about the essay form that I like and I take to very well. At a certain point, we recognized that the film needed my voice. So that's why it got folded in.

I appreciate that you characterize "Power" as an essay film because one of the things I wanted to speak to you about is what you think that changes on the part of the receiver. The idea of incorporating the documentary style, with personal, but also the artistic choices that you make that change the flow from a classic piece of journalistic filmmaking. How do you perceive that making a difference in terms of how we take in this information?

I think that the more artistic quality that we brought to “Power” was really about helping the film be grounded in people's lived experience, as opposed to a journalistic experience which, by training has to sort of pick an objective point of view. Policing in the in the United States isn't objective. It’s a very subjective institution, driven by a set of assumptions that all of us live every day — assumptions that really shape our interactions with police.

And so, you know, we wanted there to be a clear conversation in the archival material, between the past and the present . . . asking the audience direct questions, like, who is “we”? Where is “here,” right? None of those questions in the film are rhetorical.

I'm glad that you brought up that moment in the film when there is a pause, an intentional stop where we hear you off-camera kind of processing this concept of “we.” And then you ask that question, of “Who is ‘we’?” For me answer given by the expert –

Her name is Christy Lopez.

Thank you. The answer she gave was, to me, almost open-ended and sort of unsatisfying, but I wondered if that was the point. Am I incorrect in that interpretation?

No, you are absolutely correct. Christy Lopez is a brilliant person. She oversaw the consent decree from the Justice Department in the city of Ferguson. [Lopez is currently a Professor from Practice at Georgetown Law, and previously served as a Deputy Chief in the Special Litigation Section of the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice.]

Lopez had an absolute answer to that question. We left it in the realm of the ambiguous because we wanted the audience to sit with that kind of gut-punch explanation that she gives just a moment before I say, “Who is 'we'?” which is that everything that the police do is perfectly legal.

That phrase, “perfectly legal,” after you've seen everything that's come before that moment in the film, I think is really an important one for people to stop and consider. Because the legality of police action is often decided in the moment, right, by the discretion of an individual officer, which on another level means that the discretion of each officer at 18,000 departments across the country, each of those people has the ability to make a legal decision to take your life.

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It's not about good apples and bad apples. It's not about . . . generations of reform efforts that haven't worked and haven't produced the kind of change that people want. On a very basic level, it's up to each officer that we encounter. That means that every encounter we have with the police has the potential to go completely off the rails, depending on what that person considers to be reasonable force, whether it's the use of deadly force or just to subdue someone.

And that is really something that should cause everyone to stop. In the lived experience of this country, that means that you can't possibly know what to expect if somebody pulls you over and somebody wants to search your bag, if somebody wants to stop and frisk you. Or if you call the police, for example, to reestablish order in what you consider to be a dangerous or disorderly situation, you have no idea how those officers are going to react and if they're going to be aligned with what your idea of order is. So the multitude of interpretations of the law and how it is applied to us is where we wanted to leave people.

Throughout the film, we keep returning to this ride-along that you do with a Black police officer, listening to him talking about his experiences, but also seeing him meeting with the community. And when we think about policing, and I say this as a Black citizen, we hope that every police officer is that mindful. Can you talk about your decision to include him and what that brings to your argument?

Yeah, so there are a couple of things. It was important for us to follow Charlie Adams because he is a Black police officer, because he has the experience of being in uniform, treated as a police officer, and, being out of uniform, treated as a Black man. And it's really important for people to know that switch is real, and it's lived by just about every officer of color.

Charlie Adams is also somebody who doesn't live in the community where he grew up, but he chose to serve the community where he grew up. And it is facing a different set of problems [today]. It's facing a lot of violence, facing a lot of youth crime. And he wants to solve these problems.

"Is this how police should be responding to civil disobedience?"

But he's kind of caught between a rock and a hard place, because he is an example of someone who has the best intentions, but in the end, his intentions are limited by the parameters of the institution in which he works. And the goal of the institution that he works in, and the institution in the Minneapolis Police Department, is to send the kids that he's trying to save . . . to a residential environment that’s barely a step down from incarceration for young people. So for me, Charlie is really important, because he shows us that the best intentions don't matter. At the end of the day, the institution is the greatest power in policing.

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August brings the 10th anniversary of Michael Brown’s killing which led to the Ferguson uprisings. But right now, of course, this is coming to us on Netflix and in theaters at the same time as all the pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses. What are you hoping that this will add to the conversation?

You know, there's so many conversations happening about the protests right now from lots of different angles. What I hope “Power” can bring to that conversation, is the realization that what we are seeing on campuses now, and the militarized response to civil disobedience, is a very old pattern.

There's footage in the film from 1930 where they're talking about these new troop carriers that have room for 10 men, machine guns, tear gas bombs and other riot equipment. Nothing in that scene of the film, for example, is about fighting crime. Everything in that scene, from the machine guns to the tear gas bombs to the ambiguously titled riot equipment, is about containing and controlling civilians.

And what we see now, and see the beginnings of in “Power,” is how that militarization has grown and evolved over the last 50 or 60 years.

What the police have gotten really good at is using military techniques to subdue civil disobedience. I think that we need to be asking ourselves, is this what the role of policing is in our society? Is this how police should be responding to civil disobedience? We saw in the Civil Rights movement, how police responded to peaceful protesters. We saw in 1968 how police responded to the takeover at Columbia University. We're seeing now the police respond to most of these campus protests with a level of militarization that would have you think that there's an armed presence on these campuses. For the most part, these have been peaceful protests until the police were introduced into the equation. The fact that we haven't learned that the introduction of armed police in riot gear and military outfits is the thing that tips peaceful protest into violent confrontation says how much policing has insulated itself from the lessons of history.

"Power" is currently streaming on Netflix.

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After a bit of cat and mouse, Arizona officials track down Giuliani to serve him in election case

As of Wednesday, Arizona officials were having a hard time locating Rudy Giuliani to serve him notice of his indictment for his alleged interference efforts in the 2020 election, and the cat and mouse — on Giuliani's end — seems to have been intentional.

In a since deleted post on social media, Giuliani all but said, "Catch me if you can," writing, “If Arizona authorities can’t find me by tomorrow morning: 1. They must dismiss the indictment; 2. They must concede they can’t count votes.” But catch him they did.

"The final defendant was served moments ago. @RudyGiuliani, nobody is above the law," AZ Attorney General Kris Mayes wrote in a post of her own on Friday, after her office tracked down the former NYC mayor as he was hosting a birthday party in Palm Beach, Florida attended by nearly 75 guests.

“The mayor was unfazed by the decision to try and embarrass him during his 80th birthday party. He enjoyed an incredible evening with hundreds of people who love him—from all walks of life—and we look forward to full vindication soon,” Giuliani spokesperson Ted Goodman said in a statement to The Hill.

Per reporting by The Independent, just prior to being served, Giuliani was filmed "belting out" Frank Sinatra’s classic “New York, New York” to cheers from guests.

Korean cuisine embraces mayo, but is it true love?

H Marts abound across New York City and the surrounding suburbs, featuring Korean products like tteokbokki (rice cakes), chunjang (black bean paste), kimchi (spicy pickled cabbage), and colorful bottles containing that thick, creamy sauce called mayonnaise.

Unlike rice cakes, black bean paste, and kimchi, mayo was born not in Korea or anywhere else in northeast Asia, but in western Europe, where both France and Spain claim credit for its creation. The condiment, made from the emulsification of eggs, oil, and an acidic liquid such as vinegar, was crowned by Auguste Escoffier in 1912 as the mother of French cold sauces—the culinary equivalent of being consecrated by the Pope.

Mayo has since become a sauce of the people—that is to say, commercially produced and widely available to Americans. And Americans have met abundant supply with prodigious demand. In 2021, it was the most popular condiment in the United States, with $164 million worth of jars taken off the shelves. An American, so accustomed to mayo as a fact of life, might be surprised to find that it is considered by some Koreans to be their own condiment, its section on the H Mart shelf an outpost of familiarity bobbing in a sea of foreign unfamiliarity.

Why chefs are reaching for Japanese mayo (and you should be, too)

“Mayo is such a common presence in Korean cooking now that Koreans no longer think of it as a borrowed ingredient,” says Michael J. Pettid, a Professor of Korean Studies at Binghamton University and author of "Korean Cuisine: An Illustrated History." “It’s considered to be as Korean now as ingredients that have been part of the Korean palate for far longer.”

Jiho Ahn, a bespectacled middle-aged engineer, is browsing H Mart on New York's 3rd Avenue, between 31st and 32nd Street, to restock his kitchen. “When there is something that needs sauce, but I don’t know what sauce, I like to use a spicy sauce or mayo, or best of all, a spicy mayo,” he says, ferreting out the bottle of mayo with the furthest expiration date. “It goes best on a sandwich, especially a chicken sandwich, or with just chicken by itself.”

When Jiho travels to Seoul to see his family, there is always mayo available in the kitchen. There is also a food truck near his sister’s apartment that sells Korean breakfast foods, including a sandwich that mixes scrambled eggs with mayo. It is strange, Jiho muses, that the Americans love their scrambled eggs and love their mayo, but never thought to combine the two. (This is not entirely true.) The Koreans seized on the idea, adding this kind of sandwich to their culinary repertoire.

Pettid also travels to Korea semi-regularly, and sometimes enjoys snacking on dried squid dipped in mayo during his visits there. Before the introduction of mayo, Koreans typically fortified their dried squid with gochujang, a fermented red pepper paste. Now, Pettid observes, the condiment dish that comes with the seafood is typically divided into two sections—one for the gochujang, and one for the mayo.

At Tribeca’s Michelin-starred Jungsik, chefs have removed the barrier to make gochujang aioli, part of their signature braised octopus dish. Restaurants tend to keep their sacred recipes under close guard, but such was the acclaim for this particular creation that then-executive chef Ho Young Kim appeared in an H Mart video to show the public how to cook it at home. Another Jungsik menu item pairs yukhoe (Korean seasoned raw beef) with truffle aioli, which chef de cuisine Wonsuk Jeong describes as a binding agent that brings all the flavors together while also providing its own umami-rich element.

For all the prevalence of mayo on Jungsik’s menu, Jeong does not consciously think of the condiment outside of its application in the kitchen. “It has definitely become used more and more by Koreans here and in Korea itself,” he says, shrugging. “But we don’t really think about it that way, or try to make sense of it. It is just a normal thing for us, a tool that we can use in cooking.”

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According to Pettid, mayo might have entered Korea for the first time during the period of Japanese rule from 1910 to 1945. But it did not gain widespread appeal until after 1948, when Western ingredients and dishes began to spread out from American military bases scattered across the peninsula. “Mayo, like hamburgers, was considered a novelty at first, and did not make any imprint on traditional Korean cuisine for a long time,” Pettid explains. Part of the delay, he added, might have had to do with the fact that the Japanese came as heavy-handed colonizers, while the Americans came, ostensibly, as allies to the South Korean government.

The introduction of mayo into Korean cookery faced both economic and political barriers. Korea lacked a mayo-producing tradition, having to import the condiment from the United States or from Japan, where mayo had already established a strong foothold. And because of protectionist trade policies favored by the South Korean government until the 1990s, much of the mayo and other imported products were circulated through the black market and only accessible to those who could pay an exorbitant price.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Koreans were encouraged by the government to eat natural, homegrown products, which proponents considered to be appropriately patriotic, and more importantly, healthier to both body and soul. This practice of Sinto Buri (roughly translated to “the body and the soil cannot be separated”) further hindered the proliferation of mayo, considered at the time to be a Western interloper.

So the matter stood until the 1990s, when South Korea’s pivot towards economic liberalization opened domestic markets to a flood of mayo and other foreign products. Prices for those imports dropped, mayo appeared in household kitchens, and new, experimental restaurants tried new, experimental ways of using mayo in their dishes. South Korea soon began producing and exporting its own mayo like those of the food manufacturer Samyang, which features on its Spicy Chicken Mayo bottle an angry chicken sporting a bowl cut and breathing fire out of its beak.

Christopher Kim, the executive chef of East Village’s Ariari, remembers growing up in the southern port city of Busan during the 1990s, where his mother made mayo-based dip to eat with fried chicken strips and drizzled mayo on top of salads. “To me and many other Koreans, mayo reminds us of childhood,” he says. “Which is interesting to think about… right now that might surprise Americans who do not associate Korea with mayo.”

"To me and many other Koreans, mayo reminds us of childhood."

The menu of Ariari, which serves food inspired by the cuisine of Busan—and perhaps his mother’s cooking—serves an assortment of hot and cold dishes featuring mayo infused with Korean flavors. Those include scallop rolls with scallion mayo, fried chicken with curry powder and chungyang (red pepper and soy sauce—Kim’s favorite) mayo, and fried soft-shell crab with gochugaru (red pepper flakes with a smoky veneer) aioli—all very popular selections among the customers.

While Korea and Japan have both seen a rise in mayo consumption, other East Asian countries remain unconvinced. Mayo is rarely served in Chinese restaurants, except as a dip for walnut shrimp. At Jungsik, Jeong sees the marriage of mayo and Korean cuisine as a happy, compatible union. “Korean cuisine is very strong and very sharp, and adding mayonnaise often helps tone it down a little bit, provide some contrast to make it easier to enjoy,” Jeong explains. “Other times, the mayonnaise is a base to put strong Korean ingredients in, to add more flavor to a dish that is milder. How much we want to do that affects what ingredients we might mix with the mayonnaise.”

Koreans living in the United States congregate in metro areas and can find mayo on almost every street corner, but its indigenization in Korea itself is still incomplete. Young Koreans like Kim and Jeong, who grew up just as South Korea opened its markets, are more likely to eat food with mayo compared to older Koreans who find comfort evocative of their childhood in more traditionally-prepared dishes. But the biggest divide, says Pettid, is by socioeconomic class. “Mayo is still more expensive in Korea than it is in the United States, and the trend of putting mayo in Korean dishes is occurring in trendier restaurants that poorer Koreans do not typically frequent,” he says. “At the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, you’re not necessarily exposed to these kinds of things, you don’t go abroad where mayo might be more popular, and you’re in a circle with people of similar backgrounds who aren’t pushing the envelope too much in the foods they’re trying to fix.”

Despite some demographic unevenness, Korean food in general is becoming more internationalized. Rice, long the staple of East Asian cooking and typically eaten three times a day, is both healthy and grown in abundance, but its popularity has been slowly declining as mayo trends in the opposite direction. According to the 2023 Grain Consumption Survey released by Statistics Korea, annual rice consumption per person in 2023 was 56.4 kilograms, down from 56.7 in 2022, and the lowest recorded figure since the survey began in 1963. Just ten years ago, rice consumption per person was 65.1 kilograms.

“The Sinto Buri, eating healthy mentality is not as popular with the younger generation,” Pettid says. “With globalization, there’s a changing view among Koreans of what they should and could eat.” Thursday Kitchen and Mokyo, two “modern Korean” sister restaurants run by Kay Hyun in the East Village, seem to typify the experimental, globalized model of Korean cuisine, furnishing traditional Korean dishes with Western ingredients, or the other way around. Like Ariari, one of Thursday Kitchen’s most popular dishes is a soft-shell crab—but rather than using red pepper-infused mayo, Hyun chooses to prepare the crab with wasabi remoulade, which in addition to mayo uses mustard, capers, and other herbs to enhance the flavor. Only one dish features rice, and it’s a seafood paella.

Despite the triumph of mayo, Pettid does not think there is any great danger of more traditional condiments disappearing in its wake. “The role of mayonnaise overlaps with, but does not replace, its predecessors,” he posits. Perhaps, then, the dish that was served with his dried squid best represents the current state of affairs. There is classical gochujang, but there is also mayo. And sometimes, an enterprising chef or diner will mix the two together.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story stated the period of Japanese rule in Korea took place from 1895 to 1945, when in fact, it was from 1910 to 1945. This story has been updated.

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“If the Beatles did it, it was good enough for me”: Joan Osborne on the lesson learned about albums

Grammy Award-nominated singer-songwriter Joan Osborne joined host Kenneth Womack to talk about “monolithic cultural moments,” the Beatles as makeout music, their mutual admiration for previous show guest Sophie B. Hawkins and much more on “Everything Fab Four,” a podcast co-produced by me and Womack (a music scholar who also writes about pop music for Salon) and distributed by Salon.

Osborne, who took the mid-1990s music scene by storm with the megahit “One of Us” from her Top 10 album “Relish,” grew up in Kentucky where, as she told Womack, she “used to sing in the woods with the birds” as a child and was in the school choir. As a teen, she started listening to rock music and actually bought John Lennon’s solo collection album “Shaved Fish” before getting into the Beatles as a band – and the later admiration might be attributed to a “frightening” experience she had a few years prior.

"I was in awe and unable to speak": Jeff Daniels recalls a music-filled meeting with George Harrison

“When I was 11 or 12, I got invited to a basement makeout party,” said Osborne. “They turned off all the lights and suddenly ‘Revolution 9’ came on. At that point, anybody who was making out just stopped.” Though she now laughs about the song’s famous “If you become naked” line being “a little too on point,” she later came to love the Beatles’ “White Album,” which contains the avant-garde piece amongst its 30 tracks. “Since all of the songs were so different from each other, when it came time to make my own records, I sort of internalized that. I felt like you don't have to make all your songs sound the same. You could have a wide range of material. If the Beatles did it, it was good enough for me.”

Osborne’s own career took off after playing NYC clubs in the 1980s, where she was immersed in the blues and roots scene, and then at the encouragement of a fellow film student friend she branched out across the East Coast and became well-known enough to get offered a record contract. “I’m thankful that I came up at the time that I did and the way I did,” she told Womack. “I can't wrap my head around the way people become known today. I’m grateful to have come up in a way where live performance was everything for me, because I knew my worth and my value by the time record labels came around.”

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In addition to her career, Osborne is also a social activist, having been previously honored as Planned Parenthood’s Woman of the Year and also the recipient of charitable organization Theatre Within’s “Real Love” award at their annual John Lennon Tribute show. And she’s about to embark on a summer tour in support of her latest album, “Nobody Owns You.” But as for the legacy of recorded music, she says, “You're leaving behind this time capsule. And if it has worth to it, somebody will eventually come across it.”

Listen to the entire conversation with Joan Osborne on “Everything Fab Four” and subscribe via Spotify, Apple, Google or wherever you’re listening.

“Everything Fab Four” is distributed by Salon. Host Kenneth Womack is the author of a two-volume biography on Beatles producer George Martin and the bestselling books "Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road and the End of the Beatles” and “John Lennon, 1980: The Last Days in the Life.” His latest book is the authorized biography of Beatles road manager Mal Evans, “Living the Beatles Legend,” out now.

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Diddy shown physically assaulting former girlfriend in damning surveillance video

"He's cooked," is the consensus on social media, after surveillance video footage of Sean “Diddy” Combs physically assaulting ex-girlfriend, Cassie Ventura, began circulating at the start of the weekend.

In the clip — captured during a stay at the InterContinental Hotel in Century City, Los Angeles on March 5, 2016 — Ventura, seemingly attempting to flee Combs, is seen standing by the hotel's interior elevator when he rushes down the hallway, wearing only a white towel and socks, and knocks her to the ground. From there, the footage shows Combs kicking his then-girlfriend as she's down, before attempting to drag her on the floor back to their shared room.

Having reached an undisclosed settlement with Combs on Nov. 17, 2023 in a lawsuit in which "Diddy" was accused of sexual and physical assault, Ventura declined to comment on the footage, when asked by CNN, but her attorney stepped forward with a statement.

“The gut-wrenching video has only further confirmed the disturbing and predatory behavior of Mr. Combs. Words cannot express the courage and fortitude that Ms. Ventura has shown in coming forward to bring this to light,” Douglas H. Wigdor said.

In her lawsuit, Ventura claimed that Combs paid the InterContinental Century City $50,000 for the hallway security footage, in an attempt to keep it from going public. Per NBC News, IHG Hotels & Resorts commented on the matter on Friday, saying that "the hotel in the alleged incident is no longer under IHG management," adding, “IHG did not produce this footage, did not receive money for this footage, and does not have access to it."

“They rolled me in margarita salt”: Anthony Scaramucci on surviving the Trump White House

Anthony Scaramucci — or “The Mooch” to his friends, as well as to late-night comics — is many things. A successful investor, a famously short-lived White House communications director for Donald Trump, a Harvard Law graduate, a target of “Saturday Night Live” mockery and more. Now we can add one more item to the list: A life coach, who says he can help you remain resilient in the face of challenges.

That's the theme of Scaramucci’s new book, “From Wall Street to the White House and Back: The Scaramucci Guide to Unbreakable Resilience.” I spoke with the Mooch for a “Salon Talks” conversation that went way beyond the pages of his book into his burning passion to ensure that Donald Trump — both his former boss and his former friend — never returns to the White House.

Scaramucci joked (sort of) that “Trump is as if Huey Long married Charles Lindbergh — the two fathers of the America First movement — had a baby and named him Donald Trump. And then they let Roy Cohn raise the guy.” The Mooch augmented that non-endorsement by noting that Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, along with “40-plus people” who formerly worked for Trump have refused to support him in 2024. That, Scaramucci said, should “express to you what he’s like and the threat he is to the institutions of democracy.” Scaramucci urged his fellow Republicans to be a “patriot first [and] partisan second,” meaning that it's time to put the future of our republic before the fortunes of this year's GOP nominee.

Getting back to his fun and informative new book, Scaramucci candidly discussed his unceremonious firing after just 11 days in the Trump White House. The media, he said, and especially the late-night comedy shows, “skinned me alive. They rolled me in margarita salt.” But that experience, he believes, made Scaramucci stronger and more resilient. Other people, he said, can follow his example to bounce back time and time again from life’s setbacks, and even from abject failure. We'll all need thick skins to endure what we expect Trump will throw at us between now and Election Day.

Watch my "Salon Talks" with Scaramucci here on YouTube or read a transcript of our interview below, edited for clarity and length.

You've basically written a self-help book! It’s a touchstone on life that you share to help people.

It’s a self-evaluation, and I tried to put it down in a way where somebody could pick up the book. I didn't want to write a chapter book because we're in the age of low attention spans. I said, "All right, so we're going to put 25 lessons."

You could open up the book at any point and look through it. It's a plane read. My job here is, if you're going to take a flight somewhere, you could read this. By the time you land you'll be done with the book and there'll be some things in there. I got blasted out of the White House after 11 days. It was unceremonious. They skinned me alive. They rolled me in margarita salt. They mocked me on "Saturday Night Live." They derided me on every late-night comedy show.

Bill Hader played you with the big pinky ring.

Yeah, the disaster I went through. Bill Hader said I was human cocaine … the SOB! But anyway, how do you go from an experience like that to building yourself back up, ignoring some of the noise and the chin music and staying in the game, staying resilient and not caring? It's about staying in there and not giving up under any and all circumstances.

The New York Post did an article about you with a cartoon of the SS Mooch. You’re the captain of the boat and it's going down.

Brutal.

I'm sure it impacted you — we’re all human beings. But you did something with it. Share a little bit because I think that's important.

Well, so after the White House, I made a very large investment in cryptocurrencies. It did not go well. I had teamed up with Sam Bankman-Fried, who, unfortunately, is serving time in jail now for fraud. I mean, it's a sad, sordid story there. So my Bitcoin investments, which peaked at $69,000 in November of 2021, were down to $17,000 by February of 2023.

"They skinned me alive. They rolled me in margarita salt. They mocked me on 'Saturday Night Live.' They derided me on every late-night comedy show."

The New York Post wrote a financial obituary for me. They had me in the SS Mooch, which was a rinky-dink rowboat. And I was going down. I mean, it was an unmitigated disaster. I took the picture and I enlarged it and I put it up in my office and then I made T-shirts. And then the wise guys in my office, they made a bobblehead of me sinking in the Bitcoin boat. But I said to my guys, "We're either going out of business — these guys are right, we're going out of business — or they called the bottom. Only time will tell whether they're right or if we're right." So far it's going well, but who the hell knows? We never know.

What impressed me is that you didn't run away from it. You didn't hide the copies from people in your office. You put it up there and that shows strength.

Well, yes. It shows that you got to go into things. You got to go into your weaknesses. You remember Eminem's movie “8 Mile,” and the rap-off? OK, you get up there, they're going to rap each other off and they're supposed to deride and blast each other. Well, he started out with everything that was wrong with himself and he told the whole song to music, how terrible he was. And then he handed the microphone to his opponent and he froze the guy.

Sometimes someone will, say, make fun of my height. I’ll say, but by the way, at my height, at this altitude, there's way more oxygen. You tall people have much thinner air up there. And the last time I checked, I can see the glass from this angle and the glass always looks full. I'm too short to see the glass anything other than half-full. My point is, you got to own who you are and you don't have to be bashful or ashamed of anything about who you are and what you represent.

How does your Italian heritage impact you and fuel you?

Well, I think it's a big help. Your mother loved you?

Sure, of course. She's a Sicilian.

I know she loved you. I could just tell by your personality. I could tell by the way you move your head. I could tell by the way you laugh. Your mother loved you. So when your mother loves you, you're more confident and you're more secure. And so yeah, my grandmother and my mother raised me. They love me, but they also told me to be a good boy. They told me, "You got to be nice other people. You can't think too full of yourself." You know what I mean?

That's interesting. In my family, my dad's Palestinian. He was an immigrant and he would say, "Work really hard and you'll get things." My mom would say, "No, you have to go after what you want and go take it. No one's going to say, 'Hey, you're a nice boy. Here's what you want.'" So I'm an amalgam of that. I work really hard and I go after what I want.

I love it. Can I tell a quick story? This is a real lesson.

Of course. This is what Salon's about, Anthony.

OK, so I was so insecure when I left Goldman Sachs, I was like, "OK, I'm going to join the Harvard Club." Why am I going to join the Harvard Club? Because I went to Harvard.

Right, Harvard Law.

This way, when I take Dean to the club …

Which has not happened yet. I just want to point that it out.

… I don't have to say that I went to Harvard. Look at the insecurity! I'm so insecure and I'm negotiating with people and talking. trying to bring them into my new business. And there's a guy bussing the table, like a late 30s guy. I'm always nice to him, I tip him, ba-ba.

Working for Trump "was like an unmitigated disaster for me, but I wanted the job because my ego and my pride were speaking to me. I wanted the job to fit my self-narrative."

About a year into me taking people to the Harvard Club, the bus guy looks over at me. He says, "Mr. Anthony, you're in money management?" I said yes. He explained a personal injury situation that happened to his family. He says, "I just got a check for $35 million. I don't know what to do with it. Could you manage the money for me?" This is 20 years ago, by the way. That $35 million is probably like $100 million today.

I looked at him and I said, "Well, why me?" He told me, "You're nice to me." So the point is, be nice to people. It's good karma and you don't know where things are at.

Now, I wasn't equipped to manage that money, so I gave it to a friend. I checked in and they're doing great. That money's up to over $100 million today, but the point is that with all of the negotiations, all that prospecting, the guy that was bussing the table had the most money in the room.

That's kind of remarkable. You also mention your mother in your book. You talk about how you took the job in the White House, even though your wife was like, "Don't do this." But you did it to make your mother proud.

Yeah, to make my mother proud. It fit all the boxes. I grew up in this blue-collar neighborhood. I went to college, went to Tufts and Harvard. I built two successful businesses on Wall Street. Now I'm going to work for the American president, but the American president is "gagoots" — if you watch “The Sopranos,” you might know that means that he was off his rocker.

My wife hates Trump almost as much as Melania hates him. I mean, that's like my standard of hatred with Trump. She really can't stand the guy and she told me, "Don't do it." We almost got divorced over the whole thing. It was like an unmitigated disaster for me, but I wanted the job because my ego and my pride were speaking to me, Dean. I wanted the job to fit my self-narrative.

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It was a little bit show-offy. It doesn't reflect well on me, but I write honestly about it in the book because if one person can read this book and say, "Wait a minute, let me take my pride and ego out of my decision-making," you're always going to make better decisions when you do that. Every time I've put my pride and my ego into my decision-making, I've had my comeuppance. Investing, career decisions.

How did you meet Donald Trump?

The first time I met Donald Trump was actually at a Robin Hood charity and I was in awe of the guy. You have to remember, I'm not even an outer-borough guy. Trump's chip on his shoulder is that he's from Queens. The action was in Manhattan. His father didn't want to be in Manhattan. He was a cautious guy, so Trump was going to show everybody he was moving to Manhattan. I'm not even an outer-borough guy. I lived out on Long Island. But when I got a copy of “The Art of the Deal,” I was 24 years old. I said, "This guy's a genius." I went to Trump Tower. I said, "This guy's the man."

Then they put him on TV and I ran into him. I guess it was the early 2000s at the Robin Hood Foundation Dinner. I happened to be working with CNBC at the time. He was working at NBC and then we started socializing. We went to a couple of Yankee games together. We did some charity work together and then where I really got to know him. And Michael Cohen was on the Mitt Romney campaign. People forget this, but Donald Trump endorsed Mitt Romney in 2012 and we did two fundraisers in his triplex apartment at Trump Tower.

"You got to own who you are and you don't have to be bashful or ashamed of anything about who you are and what you represent."

I liked Trump. I got along with him. He was a bit of a character, but he was a New Yorker. I figured, all right, this is fine. I can get along with the guy, but I was not supporting him for president. In 2016, I was with Scott Walker and then I was with Jeb Bush. Trump called me when I was with Jeb Bush. He said, "That guy has low energy.” I said, "He doesn't have low energy. You're being ridiculous." And he said, "Well, look, he's going to come out of the race. When he comes out of the race, I want you to come work for me."

I write about this in the book. So now, the guy winning the presidential nomination for the Republicans, I'm going to go work for him. Jeb told me not to go work for him — and Jeb disavowed the pledge. I don't know if you remember this, but in 2016, if you were a Republican running for president, you took a pledge that you would support any of the other Republicans. This was designed for when Trump left the race, so he didn't break up the party and create a third party. But he won. By the way, Trump signed that pledge, but Jeb Bush disavowed it. I said, "OK, I'm not going to do that. I'm a loyal Republican. I'm going to go work for Trump.”

And that was fine, because everybody on that campaign thought Trump was going to lose, including Donald Trump. But he won. And that's when the ego came in. That's when the decision-making started to get really bad.

Donald Trump is acting like a spoiled toddler — America must give him a permanent timeout

You mentioned Michael Cohen. You're friends with him, and he's obviously had a turn in his life. He was so close to Trump, he was his pit bull. He said he would take a bullet for Trump, and he literally just testified against him. What did think of what Cohen did — the testimony he delivered that might lead to Donald Trump being convicted? How do you think Michael's going to respond if that happens?

Well, he'll probably feel vindicated. Loyalty is not unconditional. Love is unconditional. Your mother loves you unconditionally, Dean. You can make a mistake, your mother's going to love you no matter what.

You do your best you can to love your spouse unconditionally, of course she'll love your children unconditionally. But loyalty is not unconditional. Loyalty is symmetrical. There has to be some level of symmetry to loyalty. If I'm loyal to you, you got to be loyal to me. I can't be asymmetrically loyal because then you look like a turd, so don't be asymmetrically loyal to anybody.

Michael's mistake was that Trump is congenitally asymmetrically loyal to people because he's such a narcissist that he treats everybody like an object in his field of vision. So if it's working for him at the moment, he's transactional, charming and polite. If it's not working for him — you remember that scene in “The Sopranos” where they ran the guy over at the service station and then they backed up over his head and smashed it like a cantaloupe? That's Donald Trump.

He's going to hit you with the bus. He doesn't care. So what was surprising about Michael is that he thought he was in the inner sanctum with Trump and that he was never going to get hit with the bus. But Trump hit him with the bus, and I think it shocked Michael so Michael wanted retribution. And so that's where we are right now.

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Trump has made a lot of mistakes. It's going to cost him the election because he's alienated people that were natural allies of his. The vice president that was on the ticket with him has not endorsed Donald Trump. He said he would never endorse. He's got 40 guys at work. Forget about me, I'm talking about 40 guys that were in the Cabinet. Cabinet secretaries, sub-Cabinet secretaries, generals. Under no circumstances would they endorse Donald. They saw up close and personal the insanity of him, the criminality of him. They said, "Look, I'm never going to endorse the guy. Forget it."

I tell people, "Listen, if we all worked for a pharmaceutical company who told you the drug was going to kill you, you're going to take the drug?" We told you that the plane was going to drop out of the sky. You're going to board the plane? Why is it in politics when you got the smartest people, the most patriotic people who served the country, who took the guff for serving the country, are telling the truth about somebody — who's still voting for him?

That's a question we should ask millions of people. Why do they support Trump?

It's a cultural thing. There's a segmentation thing. You're a Republican, there's a grievance. Trump represents your grievance. I get it. It's not stupid people that are supporting Trump. It's just that if they got inside the inner sanctum and they saw what I saw, they would under no circumstances support him.

You mentioned Michael Cohen getting hit by the bus, that moment. What was that for you?

Well, for me, I tried to stay loyal to him. He fired me after 11 days. I famously got fired for what I said about Steve Bannon, but that was the top story. The real story was, I was fighting with Donald Trump in the White House and he had enough of me. He said to me on the Saturday before I got fired — I was only there for 11 days, and it was the Saturday before I got fired. I was there for two Saturdays and two Mondays, only one Wednesday, if you're keeping score at home. I knew I was getting fired because on the Saturday he said, "I thought you were working for me. I thought you were a MAGA guy. You're a deep-stater.”

He said that to you?

Yeah. I said, "Mr. President, I'm not a deep-stater. I'm from Port Washington, Long Island. It's the first time I've ever been to Washington. I'm not a deep-stater, but I love my country. And when you swore me in, I took a vow to the Constitution and to the institutions of the United States and to our democracy." On Monday morning I got fired and that's it. And it's fine, I was fine with that. He's the president of the United States.

When I got fired, and I write about it in this book, it was my fault. I served at the discretion of the president of the United States, and he wanted to hire me on a Friday and fire me on the following Monday, 11 days after he hired me. No problem. I'm a big boy. I'm going to stay loyal to him. And I did, for 2017, for 2018.

"I'm getting lit up on Twitter [by Trump], and I'm going to tell you something. You see this beautiful Salon mug? That was my face. I was as white as this mug."

Halfway through 2019, I'm on the Bill Maher show. It's August of 2019 and I am defending the president of the United States. I'm a lifelong Republican. I'm defending him. One of the women on the show, she turns to me, she says, "Well, what about the Squad?" These are the four congresswomen that are hard-left leaning. One of them is AOC. Three of them were born here in the United States, and one was naturalized. And Donald Trump was tweeting at that time that these four women of the Squad should go back to the countries they originally came from. So she leans into me. She said, "What about the tweet that these congresswomen should go back to their countries?" I said, "Well, first of all, you and I both know the country they originally came from, for three of them, is the United States." That's No. 1. No. 2, that's classic American nativism.

That is racism, and they did that to my Italian-American grandmother. Maybe they did that to your Sicilian grandmother. They told these people in the 1920s NINA — no Italians need apply. Go back to the country that you came from. It was very hurtful and it upset my grandmother. I would like the president of the United States not to talk like that.

Well, in the after-party, Bill Maher came over to me and he said, "Hey, he's going to light you up on Twitter tomorrow." And I was like, "There's no way he's going to light me up on Twitter. I'm supporting him."

"No, no, no," Bill said. "You were seven for eight for Donald Trump tonight. You got to go 13 for 10 for Donald Trump. And since that's mathematically impossible, tomorrow he watches my show and he's going to light you up on Twitter."

I bet Bill Maher dinner. I lost the bet by three o'clock in the afternoon the next day. I'm getting lit up on Twitter and I'm going to tell you something. You see this beautiful Salon mug? That was my face. I was as white as this mug. He's the president of the United States and he's lighting me up on Twitter.

I was at the Beverly Hills Hotel, on one of the pool cabanas. I got up from the cabana and went to the bathroom. I was unnerved. I splashed water on my face and then my New Yorker-ness came back to me. I said, "Wait a minute. This guy's taking a shot at me on Twitter after everything I did for him?" I said, "Let me light him up." I think I tweeted back to him, "So says the fattest president since William Howard Taft," because I know he hates being so fat, right? I hit him and then he hit me back.

And then I said, "Wow, You're not really trolling properly anymore. You must be getting old." Because I know he hates that. Then he hit me again and then I hit him. It was getting fun! And every time I hit him, I got an extra 50,000 Twitter followers. And then he does what he does: He starts attacking my wife. And once he did that, I said, "OK, that's it." And I went hard because that's wrong. You're nuts. You can't handle yourself like that in the American presidency.

I know the game has changed, Dean. I know it's a rougher game. It's an uglier game. I know that it's different from the 1960s and '70s when Reagan ran. I get all that. The formality is gone. We're in a street fight. We're going to play in the gutter. I get all that, but I don't like you going after my wife. I don't like you attacking a civilian who never said a bad thing about you. He knew my wife and I were having problems in our marriage as a result of me going to work for him. It was just like a bro-code breakage, and I said, "That's it. I'm done with the guy."

Michael Cohen: Trump will go broke and may face prison — "it's going to hit him hard"

If he gets back in to the White House, are you concerned that he would come after you?

He probably would come after me, but no, I'm not concerned. I'm an American. I got raised like you did to have no fear. I got raised that this is America. These people work for us, we don't work for them. If he's coming after me, then we're in a very changed America. We're in an autocratic America. We're in an America that our ancestors didn't come to. Our ancestors were fleeing autocracies, aristocracies and they were fleeing the unpredictability of the law that comes from an aristocracy or a dictatorship.

The founding fathers understood that they had to create separation of powers in order to prevent autocracy. And that led to the success of your family and my family because we could live in a primarily merit-based society as opposed to a class system and the sclerosis that you see in Europe. So if Mr. Trump is going to change that, well, that represents a danger and a systemic change to our society.

I think it's important for people like me who understand freedom, love freedom, love the country to speak out against it. And I will. If I get retribution as a result of that, then I know the society's changed. We got to speak out even harder. We have to advocate even more. But I live my life with no fear. That's another big lesson in this book. Mel Brooks had the best line ever. You know what he said? "Relax, none of us are getting out of here alive."

I want to go out on the right side of the angels. I don't want to go out morally equivocating, like these jokers down at the courthouse [in Manhattan]. They're all wearing the same Trump outfit. They're in 100% polyester, though — you could tell this stuff was from Marshalls. They all look fully flammable with the extra long ties, and they're all auditioning to be the vice president. Some of them are wearing beards.You got to shave your beards, because Trump hates beards. He's like the George Steinbrenner of politics. I'm just trying to give these guys some fashion tips if they want to be the VP.

I think it's interesting, too, that you invoke your family. I often think about how my father came here as an immigrant for what America represented and my grandparents from Sicily came here for what America represented. And what Trump is — it’s an insult to what this nation's supposed to be about and why they came here.

"I don't want to go out morally equivocating, like these jokers down at the [Manhattan] courthouse. They're all wearing the same Trump outfit. They're in 100% polyester, though — you could tell this stuff was from Marshalls."

Trump is as if Huey Long married Charles Lindbergh and they had a baby. They named him Donald Trump and they let Roy Cohn raise the guy. That's the guy and that's what he represents. And by the way, I know that, Mike Pence knows that, Jim Mattis knows that, Gen. [John] Kelly knows that.

We have 40-plus people that are trying to express to you what he's like and the threat he is to the institutions of democracy. And I'll quote Mark Esper for a moment, the former defense secretary: "I'm a Republican. I will tolerate policy decisions from the Biden administration that I disagree with, in order to make sure that we don't have a systemic threat to the institutions of our democracy and a systemic threat to our constitution." It's that simple: Patriot first, partisan second.

You mentioned that Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy. As someone who knows him, what is he capable of?

Well, he's got a very smart group of people that are running his campaign. A lot of these Heritage Foundation people believe in something called unitary executive power. So just inviting people back to their eighth-grade social studies, we have three branches of government in the country. The Constitution says that they're separate but equal.

One of the more fun, enjoyable moments for me in the White House — and this did happen on a Wednesday, Dean. I know because I was only there for one Wednesday — it was Trump and Paul Ryan fighting. And they're tall guys. I'm not tall. And Trump was going like this to Paul Ryan [points finger]. He said, "You work for me. You work for me." Blankety blank, blankety blank. And Paul was like, "I don't work for you. I'm in a totally separate branch, totally separate article of the Constitution. It's a branch of government." I said, "And, by the way, we all work for the American people.”

Trump doesn't like that. Trump and his minions believe in something called unitary executive power, which is to expand the executive branch, empower the executive branch, and weaken the other two branches. He's also said he's going to take the FCC licenses away from people that he disagrees with or that disagree with him. He has said publicly that he's going to use the Department of Justice to persecute his enemies. He said privately to one of his defense attorneys, who immediately dropped him, that he wants to use the FBI as the Gestapo.

Now, the good thing about that is that he has no historical understanding of our civilizations. He doesn't even know what the word Gestapo really means, in the context of the inhumane things that the Gestapo did in Nazi Germany. But to say it and then to have willing participants, these willing accomplices, it represents an existential danger to the country. So we have to talk about it. We have to speak out about it, because that's the threat.

Salon interviews on the Trump danger

Samuel Alito’s snide denial of his Jan. 6 flag is just as ugly as flying it in the first place

Add one more incident to the "shocking but not surprising" pile that grows mountainously high in an era of rising fascism: Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito flew a flag at his house signaling support for the Capitol insurrection in the days after January 6, 2021.

The inverted American flag was a popular signal of support for Trump's lies about the 2020 election and the MAGA riot on the Capitol. As reported Thursday by Jodi Kantor of the New York Times, photographs and testimony from Alito's northern Virginia neighbors show an "upside-down flag was aloft on Jan. 17, 2021" at his home. At the same time, the Times notes, Alito unsuccessfully attempted to get the court to take a case undermining the 2020 election.

Republicans are rubbing people's noses in the fact that there's nothing the rest of us can do to stop them from advertising their fascist sympathies.

Gross and undeniable in its meaning, of course. But Alito, who has never been interested in honesty with the public, offered a glib rebuttal, telling the New York Times, "I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag." Instead, he blamed his wife, saying she flew the inverted flag as a "response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs."

As Joe Scarborough on MSNBC retorted Friday morning, "nobody believes him." There's no universe, Scarborough noted, in which the upside-down flag is used as a way to throw the finger to neighbors you're in a spat with. This is Alito lying by omission. As Kantor swiftly discovered, the argument the Alitos were having with their neighbors wasn't over loud parties or defecating dogs, it was over Jan. 6, which the neighbors in question vociferously objected to. Martha-Ann Alito took offense to a neighbor who "displayed an anti-Trump sign with an expletive" around the election. Things escalated, and, as neighbors and documentary evidence show, the inverted flag was up in the days after the riot.

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A more honest description of the conflict would be that the Alitos rejected their neighbor's right to express their political opinions freely. In order to convey their disapproval of this use of First Amendment rights, the Alito household sent a message of support to people who used violence in an attempt to destroy American democracy. As more than one commentator pointed out, Alito continues to run around pretending he's a champion of "free speech," but when his neighbors expressed an opinion held by most Americans, he (or his wife, if you believe him) responded with an endorsement of violence to end constitutional democracy as we know it.

When asked about this by Shannon Bream of Fox News on Friday, Alito doubled down on the faux outrage over curse words and claimed his wife only expressed support for the Jan. 6 rioters after neighbors said mean things to the couple about how violent insurrections are, in fact, bad.

As a reminder, four rioters and five police officers died as a consequence of the riot. Alito is unsubtly suggesting that those deaths somehow are less offensive than some kids seeing a curse word. Even then, his "logic" falls apart at first blush. After all, children visit the Capitol every day, yet Alito is apparently fine with it being subject to people breaking windows, smearing feces, shedding blood, and threatening murder — all with quite salty language, as the voluminous video evidence from that day shows.

Samuel Alito scandal shows why conservative justices on the Supreme Court are so whiny

Additionally, Alito's snide dishonesty is insulting, and it is meant to be.

For someone who feigns outrage at curse words, he is basically throwing a big middle finger to all American citizens. He's not just rejecting his duty as a public official to uphold democracy, but sneering at the idea that he even owes an explanation to the people he was supposedly hired to serve, who pay his salary. He feels no need to put the effort into a better lie. After all, what are any of us little people going to do about it?

Alito's quasi-denials operate as confessions, and not just of his and his wife's sympathies for fascist seditionists. His open contempt for the idea that he has to answer to anyone radiates through these fake excuses. It ends up underscoring why he and the Mrs. were so enthused about Trump's attempted coup: They agree with the foundational sentiment that the American people should not be in control of their government. As Adam Serwer recently wrote in the Atlantic, Alito "expects the public to silently acquiesce" to his authority, "without scrutiny, criticism, or protest." Alito sees us as subjects whose duty is to bend the knee to him and his preferred leaders, like Trump. With this flag gesture, he's signaled support for violence as the enforcement mechanism.

Again, shocking but not surprising. Alito has long taken a "tough on crime" attitude that leads to almost no sympathy for the rights of criminal defendants — unless those defendants are aligned with him politically. When it comes to Trump and the Jan. 6 defendants, Alito has expressed a view that the criminal charges are illegitimate. As Scott Lemieux of Lawyers, Guns & Money noted, Alito's belief that he and his are above scrutiny of the law was evident even during Alito's confirmation hearing in 2006. When Alito was questioned about his participation in an organization dedicated to keeping Princeton's student body white and male, his wife threw a massive public tantrum, weeping giant crocodile tears and stomping out of the hearing. Their self-perception is not "public servant," so much as "medieval royalty."

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As Don Moynihan wrote in a recent newsletter, far too many Republicans and their apologists seem to excuse this far-right radicalism because the people who are expressing it have expensive clothes, elite educations, and fat investment portfolios. He notes that Speaker of House Mike Johnson, R-La., is laying "the groundwork for another coup attempt in plain sight," while the media's outrage is far more focused on "scruffy students" expressing their perfectly democratic right to disagree with their country's foreign policy. Meanwhile, Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., signaled support for an organization, the Proud Boys, whose leaders are currently in prison for violent sedition.

I have one quarrel with Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo.'s claim that Gaetz is trying to be "subtle" with his message. As with Alito, the dog-whistling is no longer about trying to smuggle fascist messages to supporters without the press or liberals noticing. Republicans are rubbing people's noses in the fact that there's nothing the rest of us can do to stop them from advertising their fascist sympathies. Their impunity is part of the argument against democracy. By flaunting their untouchability, they're treating the end of democracy as a done deal. If people as unapologetically hateful can't be removed from office, their behavior suggests, then democracy is dead already.

And yes, it's hard not to look at these self-satisfied moral monsters without feeling despair. But no one should fall for their tricks. Because of Trump, anti-democratic forces have had some major victories, but the fight is far from over. President Joe Biden's presence in the White House shows that democracy prevailed in 2021. Trump's ability to mount another coup will be hamstrung by the fact that he's out of office and has fewer levers of power. That's why people like Gaetz and Alito are so focused on demoralizing their opposition. They know Trump's ability to end democracy depends heavily on whether or not people fight back. They haven't won until they've successfully scared people into thinking it's already over.

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I worked with Michael Cohen and covered Donald Trump. Guess which man I trust

To listen to the pundits inside and outside of the courtroom, the Manhattan felony case against former President Trump rests on the testimony and cross-examination of former Trump fixer Michael Cohen. I disagree.

Cohen, once Trump’s personal attorney, closest employee and greatest ally, left Trump’s inner circle after being convicted of lying on Trump’s behalf and has since become one of the former president’s greatest tormentors after spending time in a federal prison.

His vituperative ad hominem rants against Trump are well known. Many have gone viral. Cohen, for example, is singularly responsible for the popular term “Vonshitzinpants” as applied to Trump, which has led to many a social media meme.

Cohen didn’t cut corners. He didn’t equivocate and he did not lie to me to make himself look better.

Trump’s defense team has tried to capture that anger and encourage Cohen to engage in that bombast inside the courtroom but has so far failed. According to reporters inside the courtroom, Cohen has remained calm, admitting his anger but showing none of it from the stand.

Defense attorney Todd Blanche upped the ante on Thursday, purposely raising his voice as he engaged in cross-examination of Cohen. Blanche painted Cohen as a prolific liar with a bone to pick against his former boss and tried to get him to show his anger as he “undertook an aggressive bid to undermine former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s credibility,” ABC News reported.

All of that could be true, but it doesn’t prove Cohen wasn’t telling the truth about Donald Trump. And that’s the conundrum. Fortunately, as Norm Ornstein, emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, said on Mary Trump’s podcast Thursday, we don’t have to rely on just Cohen’s word. “I believe him because of the receipts, the tapes and the hard evidence,” Ornstein explained. Jen Taub, professor at Western New England University School of Law, also speaking on Mary Trump’s podcast said she believes Cohen’s testimony. She once had him as a guest speaker in a college course she teaches and found him to be credible – and forthcoming about his past indiscretions.

Biden vs. Trump debate: A battle between appearance and reality

On the stand, Blanche tried to cross-up Cohen on discrepancies between his testimony and what previous witnesses said about his desire for a cooperation agreement, a presidential pardon, a job in the White House and a phone call that may or may not have been about paying off former adult film actress Stormy Daniels.

“You told people you would like to be attorney general?” Blanche asked Cohen.

“I don’t recall that,” Cohen responded.

According to those in the courtroom, Blanche’s voice rose as he interrogated Cohen with phone records and text messages over Cohen’s claim that he spoke by phone to Trump about Stormy Daniels' hush money payment. It was, according to many, the toughest moment for Cohen and the best for Trump during the entire trial.

The theory, spoken by others and intimated in the exchange is that it was Cohen’s idea to pay off the adult film star for Trump and that he lied about speaking to Trump about it. Whose ever idea it was, the fact is that there is a paper trail proving that Trump repaid Cohen, and that is a huge factor in at least one felony charge related to the IRS reporting of that repayment.

CNN’s Anderson Cooper, however, apparently wasn’t impressed with Cohen’s performance in the cross-examination Thursday, calling it “severely damaging” to the prosecution’s case. “If I was a juror in this case watching that, I would think ‘this guy’s making this up as he’s going along, or he’s making this particular story up,” Cooper added.

Stephen Collinson agreed, writing for CNN Digital said “Donald Trump finally had a good day in court,” after Cohen’s cross-examination on Thursday.

Longtime Republican lawyer George Conway, on the other hand, an eyewitness in the courtroom, posted on X (formerly Twitter) that, “This cross is remarkable today because it has not addressed at all Cohen's testimony in this case or any of the facts in this case. It's an overlong and ineffective examination on everything *but* this case.”

Finally, former White House ethics czar Norm Eisen, also an eyewitness in the courtroom wrote in his courtroom diary, “Like  in a  heavyweight boxing match, blows were landed  and the defense scored points — but in my view, Cohen stayed on his feet. He was rocked by one blow on the chin but there was no knockout punch.”

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At the end of the day the only opinions that matter will be those of the members of the jury. So, I don’t care that Cooper wasn’t impressed by Cohen’s performance and find it completely asinine to tell me what he would think “If I was a juror.” He isn’t one.

When I managed a reporting staff, it was my standing rule for reporters to observe the jury and report their reactions to key testimony. Only Eisen offered me that regarding Blanche’s cross-examination of Cohen. “I was watching the jury throughout the day,” Eisen said,  “and in particular when the cross-examination was at its most intense, as on this point.  Their scrutiny of Cohen and of Blanche was as intense as the questioning itself, at least at its hotter moments.  Unlike prior points when their attitudes appeared more transparent — such as when Cohen candidly spoke directly to jurors Tuesday about his regrets for things he did out of loyalty to Trump — I  could not read  what they thought  today.”

Apparently the jury, like the rest of the world, wonders who we should believe: Donald Trump or Michael Cohen. Unlike the rest of us, they will also be able to review all of the evidence before reaching a decision.

For the record, I spent four years in relative close proximity to Trump on a daily basis. I heard him scream at staff from two rooms away in the White House. I saw him lie continuously. I witnessed his demeanor, his anger, his frustration and his bully-like antics with all of those around him. I heard him dismiss some of his supporters at a rally as “suckers” and know from my interaction with him that he cares little what others think. His only relations are purely transactional and the only person on this planet he cares about is himself.

As for Cohen, I spent a good part of a year in close proximity with him researching and writing his latest book, “Revenge,” which has been referenced in the current trial against Donald Trump.

One of the first times I spoke with Michael Cohen I asked him a very pointed question: If Donald Trump hadn’t abandoned him, would Cohen still be inside Trump’s circle?

“Absolutely,” he said.

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Cohen didn’t cut corners. He didn’t equivocate and he did not lie to me to make himself look better. He also told me his dream job wasn’t Attorney General, but he wanted to have the job of counsel to the president without being inside the White House. “That would be the best of both worlds,” he explained. When I asked him about other jobs at the White House, he was candid about that as well. “I may have thought about them, even maybe thought I wanted them, but I would be best in a hybrid role,” he explained. That’s exactly what he told the court when Blanche asked him in court Thursday – nearly two years after he said the same thing to me. His story has remained consistent.

As I got to know him, I found that Cohen was a complicated man. He was haunted by his past and was determined, in light of what he went through, to make amends. He knew what he was up against from his angry former boss and a skeptical press.

I know reporters, some of them friends, and a few close friends who say when Cohen was with Trump he treated the press harshly. “He did me dirty,” one friend said of Cohen. Another said Cohen recorded him without his knowledge on an occasion. I don’t know if Cohen recorded any of our conversations and I don’t care. I do know that Michael Cohen has never lied to me since I met him.

I was not part of the Manhattan reporting crowd, so I cannot speak to what Michael Cohen was about before he went to prison. I can, however, tell you from personal experience that any time spent behind bars is a humbling experience. It will change you. I have no doubt that it changed Michael Cohen.

Cohen told me that working for Donald Trump was a dream come true for him. It “was never about the money,” he explained. He had ample opportunity to make a lot of money without Donald Trump. His attraction, he said, was the aura of celebrity; the ability to go backstage at a Broadway show and meet people he never thought he’d be able to meet.

Cohen paid a high price for that opportunity. Donald Trump has never paid the price for anything he’s done his entire life.

Cohen is playing a part in trying to rectify that. Blanche, doing his level best as a defense attorney, is trying to ward off the day of reckoning for Trump. Both men are doing their job. I harbor no ill will against the defense, and I applaud Cohen’s efforts as he continues to try to make amends for his past indiscretions. “That’s all I can do,” he told me on numerous occasions.

At the end of the day, Cohen took a plea deal, after being given 48 hours to do so from the Justice Department (DOJ) before he faced the possibility that his wife would be indicted along with him. He did the right thing. You may say he was forced into it, but since that day Cohen – as full of faults as we all are – has continued to try and make amends. Like he said, that’s all that he can do.

Donald Trump, meanwhile, has never had to make amends and everyone who’s ever been in his inner circle has paid dearly for being that close to his venomous and conniving personality.

It doesn’t matter what Anderson Cooper, George Conway, Norm Eisen or anyone else, including myself, think about the testimony offered by Cohen in the current trial.

The only people who matter are those on the jury who’ve heard the evidence and will deliberate Trump’s fate. There are some, notably financier Anthony Scaramucci who spent a (very) brief amount of time as Trump’s Communication Director, who believe there might be one sympathizer on the jury who could bring about a hung jury.

That may well be. But this is a Manhattan jury. Donald Trump has a history of deception well known to many in New York. New Yorkers are used to con artists. It is part of the patina of everyday life in Manhattan.

I have faith in the jury and that they won’t be fooled by Trump. I believe Michael Cohen. Like Ornstein and Mary Trump, I also believe the evidence is conclusive even if you doubt Cohen, and I sincerely hope Donald Trump decides to testify. It will be his undoing.

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“All of my friends are dead”: The overdose crisis is taking a toll on harm reduction workers

Stephen Murray’s work in harm reduction doesn’t end when he leaves the office at 5 p.m. As the Harm Reduction Program Manager at Boston Medical Center who runs the SafeSpot Overdose Hotline, he is on call 24/7. Sometimes, his phone rings at 4 a.m. to assist with an overdose.

Still, despite the hours and energy he and others put into keeping people who use drugs safe, he usually doesn't go a month without personally knowing someone who dies from a drug overdose.

“I alternate between feeling numb and feeling overwhelmed by my grief,” Murray told Salon in a phone interview. “You feel like there is no time to rest because it is just constant.”

Overdose deaths seem to have peaked in 2022, with an estimated 112,000 Americans dying from an overdose, reaching yet another annual all-time high. Preliminary data released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicates that, for the first time in five years, deaths from opioids have dropped a mere 4% per year, with 107,000 overdose deaths overall. While this seems like a positive reversal, it's worth noting that drug overdoses dropped between 2018 and 2019, only to shoot back up again during the COVID-19 pandemic, when a lot of people who use drugs were isolating.

The level of carnage, decreasing or not, is still far above historic levels, with an estimated 1 million deaths due to illicit drugs in two decades. And people who use drugs are far from the only individuals affected: federal data released earlier this month found that more than 321,000 American children lost a parent to drug overdose between 2011 and 2021.

This crisis is largely driven by increasingly dangerous drugs being introduced into the supply such as opioids like illicit fentanyl, along with drug combinations like opioids plus stimulants and xylazine. The sheer magnitude of the crisis has outpaced the extraordinary efforts many harm reduction workers undertake to reduce overdose deaths.

Staff at Prevention Point, a syringe service program in Philadelphia that offers wrap-around medical and community services for people who use drugs, recently experienced five overdoses in a single day, said the organization’s director of Drop-In Services Viviana Oritz.

“Those days are draining,” Ortiz told Salon in a video call. “I remember in 2019, it was like that for about two months.”

Touching fentanyl won’t kill you. Why won’t cops and policymakers get the memo?

Harm reduction efforts have saved thousands of lives, yet the value and legitimacy applied to other first responders often don’t apply to harm reduction, which is still shrouded in stigma and seen by some to be a controversial approach to the drug crisis, said Gillian Kolla, of the MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions in Toronto.

A wealth of scientific evidence shows that supervised consumption sites, (where drug use is monitored by medical staff), syringe access programs and naloxone trainings are all helpful tools to combat the overdose crisis. For example, OnPoint in New York, the first legal supervised consumption sites in the U.S., reversed more than 1000 overdoses as of last summer, which otherwise may have been fatal.

In spite of this, a group of harm reduction workers at supervised consumption sites in Canada surveyed in a new study published by Kolla in the International Journal of Drug Policy said the lack of broader crisis support from the government contributes to the emotional toll of this work.

“I regularly have people telling me, ‘All my friends are dead,’’ Kolla told Salon in a phone interview. “These overdose prevention sites and supervised consumption sites were not adapted and developed to deal with this level of overdoses.”

Why harm reduction is more about ending stigma than syringes and naloxone

Many in this line of work have experiencing using drugs themselves and employ their lived experiences to help guide others to treatment or safe use. However, this proximity also means that when an overdose happens in the community, it’s more likely a friend or acquaintance. Harm reduction workers who carry the overdose-reversal medicine naloxone on hand have essentially become the first responders, intervening before paramedics arrive at the scene, Murray said.

“Naloxone is in the hands of people who are using drugs and who are the closest to the overdose,” Murray said. “That has shifted the responsibility of overdose response in a lot of ways to people who use drugs and the ones that are supporting them, like harm reduction workers.”

Although the war on drugs pushes an abstinence-only model that discourages “enabling” people who used drugs, evidence suggests those strategies have only made the overdose crisis worse. Other research evaluating 100 supervised injection sites in countries that have implemented them has found they not only reduce overdose deaths but also lower community spread of HIV and hepatitis. They also increase the number of people going into treatment programs.

Why criminalization of drugs doesn't prevent overdoses

If administered in time, naloxone reverses up to 93% of overdoses. In one 2018 study published in the Addictive Behaviors journal, states that enacted laws that improved access to naloxone were associated with a 14% reduction in opioid overdose deaths. But although naloxone is being dispensed at a rate nearly 10-fold since 2016, another study in the Lancet Public Health found Arizona was the only state with an adequate supply of naloxone to meet the need.

Regardless, access to naloxone is one element of harm reduction and doesn’t address the root of the overdose crisis. Without top-down policy changes that address the mental health crisis, the housing crisis and the racial inequities so interconnected with the overdose crisis, people will continue to die.

“Often, we would get people back, and then I would show up one week, one month, or one year later to then pronounce that person back from a subsequent fatal overdose,” Murray said. “That can feel pretty hopeless in a lot of ways.”

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So far, New York is the only U.S. state to offer supervised consumption sites while Canada has 39 operational sites. Most of these were opened through grassroots efforts characteristic of the broader harm reduction movement. As a result, many sites rely on grants or donations and face chronic underfunding, which leaves many harm reduction workers doing volunteer work or being inadequately paid without health benefits or paid time off, per Kolla's study. While harm reduction is often focused on “peer” and community support, this label can also sometimes get in the way of harm reduction workers getting adequate benefits and pay, Kolla said.

“The legacy of peer programs means that you often have people who use drugs being brought into organizations to do work either as volunteers — so uncompensated — or they were just given temporary contracts with no benefits and no possibility for advancement,” Kolla said. “They need access to benefits because the benefits are crucial in terms of ensuring people have access to things like counseling and support to help them cope with the grief, loss and stress they’re facing from their jobs.”

To Kolla, this is deeply rooted in stigma against the clients harm reduction workers are serving. In general, the majority of care work is undertaken by underpaid women or marginalized groups, with one 2022 study from the U.S. Department of Labor finding the average care worker was paid $15 an hour. Similarly, many in harm reduction have insufficient wages and no access to benefits.

“Certain forms of care work, because of who's been doing it and because of the population that they care for, are really valued, and we see that reflected in pay,” Kolla said. “The care work for people who use drugs is very devalued because people who use drugs are stigmatized and devalued in our society.”

Caring for others has health benefits. But the way Americans do it is all wrong

Many harm reduction organizations do implement supportive measures for staff precisely because they are run by community members who understand the need. In Massachusetts, where Murray is based, harm reduction workers have created an organization specifically designed to support people who have witnessed overdoses called Support After a Death by Overdose.

At Prevention Point, in Philly, employees get extra days off every three months and the organization contributes to wellness services for staff. After an overdose occurs, the team gathers to debrief and employees are given the time they need to process the accident. Still, every single overdose is trying.

“You can be the person that is the most experienced with overdoses and has reversed the most overdoses, but at the end of the day, you are working with a human being,” Ortiz said. “It can take a toll on you.”

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Providing lifesaving care is my job as an emergency medicine doctor. That includes abortion care

A forthcoming Supreme Court decision this June on access to lifesaving care threatens the very basis of why I became an emergency medicine doctor: anyone, anywhere, anytime.

When a patient is rushed into my emergency department, I do not stop to ask them for their credit card. I don’t require them to put down a deposit before stopping their bleeding, treating their pain, or getting them treatment for a heart attack. I don’t stop to make sure our hospital accepts their insurance or to ask if they have insurance at all. I simply do what I have spent many years training to do: provide the best possible, and often lifesaving, care to people who are in crisis.

That’s because the federal law the court will be ruling on has guaranteed that all Americans have the right to receive care at the emergency room of any hospital, regardless of income or insurance status. When any patient comes into the emergency room experiencing a health crisis, the hospital is required to stabilize the patient and if necessary, transfer the patient to a hospital with more specialized capabilities to treat them. Recent polling shows that when asked about the law, most Americans overwhelmingly support access to the life saving care that a patient needs without restrictions.

“Incredibly dangerous”: Experts decry challenge to law protecting emergency abortion care

It wasn’t always this way. Before these legal protections guaranteed treatment regardless of the ability to pay, patients were routinely turned away from hospitals and emergency rooms – just because of their inability to pay or lack of health insurance. In one instance, a sick child was essentially thrown out of a hospital because her parents could not pay the fee. It was $7 for a week. In others, a man experiencing third-degree burns was turned away by three hospitals because he was uninsured and a 63-year-old woman experiencing homelessness was dumped by a hospital on skid row and later found wandering around the streets in a hospital gown and slippers.

I chose to go into emergency medicine to serve the most marginalized in our society, but conservative anti-abortion lawmakers are working to make it impossible for me to provide that care.

Thanks to this law that guarantees lifesaving care, patients are now able to receive the treatment they urgently need in emergency departments. It has no exceptions and applies to all kinds of emergencies–including when emergency abortion care is necessary to preserve the patients’ health or to save their life. But anti-abortion extremists want to exclude pregnant people from these long-standing protections and force doctors like me to turn away patients suffering life-threatening pregnancy complications.

The Supreme Court is now taking up a consolidated case– Idaho v. United States and Moyle v. United States– that will determine if state abortion bans and restrictions take precedence over this decades-old legislation that has saved countless lives. If the same Supreme Court that struck down the constitutional right to abortion sides with anti-abortion extremists again, it will have nationwide implications for the right to emergency abortion care and endanger the most vulnerable people who this legislation was enacted to protect. Nearly four in five voters polled support that the law takes precedence over state abortion bans in the case of an emergency.

We are currently facing a maternal mortality crisis in this country, which has only been made worse by the many abortion bans and restrictions put in place after the overturning of Roe v. Wade. If the Supreme Court rules to exclude pregnant people from the lifesaving care protections, Black and Indigenous women who face high rates of maternal mortality and morbidity will be disproportionately impacted. The ruling would also further harm people who visit ERs at higher rates due to systemic barriers to health care including those in rural areas, those who earn low-incomes, are Latinx, Black or Indigenous, or are immigrants.

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These attacks won’t only impact pregnant patients who need emergency care or the most vulnerable among us – it will make it harder for emergency physicians like myself to provide care to all patients that come through our doors. If this group of patients is excluded from these critical legal protections, who will be next?

This case is not an isolated attack on our reproductive freedoms; it is part of anti-abortion extremists’ strategy to completely ban abortion nationwide. This year alone, both Florida and my home state of Arizona have enacted extreme abortion bans – and just last month the Supreme Court heard a case that will have far-reaching implications for access to the abortion medication mifepristone.

I chose to go into emergency medicine to serve the most marginalized in our society, but conservative anti-abortion lawmakers are working to make it impossible for me to provide that care and are inserting themselves between me and my patients in every state in this country. Everyone who needs emergency care– including abortion– should be able to get the care they need without interference from politicians. Anyone, anywhere, anytime.

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Sorry, Harrison Butker, the Benedictine College nuns reject your “narrow definition” of Catholicism

The religious sisterhood order that co-founded Benedictine College, the small academic institution in Atchinson, Kansas, has disavowed the 2024 commencement speech by Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker, which has been widely panned as misogynistic and homophobic.

The Sisters of Mt. Scholastica issued a statement declaring their shared sentiment that Butker's speech does not "represent the Catholic, Benedictine, liberal arts college that our founders envisioned and in which we have been so invested.

"Instead of promoting unity in our church, our nation, and the world, his comments seem to have fostered division," the statement continued. "One of our concerns was the assertion that being a homemaker is the highest calling for a woman. We sisters have dedicated our lives to God and God’s people, including the many women whom we have taught and influenced during the past 160 years. These women have made a tremendous difference in the world in their roles as wives and mothers and through their God-given gifts in leadership, scholarship, and their careers.

"Our community has taught young women and men not just how to be 'homemakers' in a limited sense, but rather how to make a Gospel-centered, compassionate home within themselves where they can welcome others as Christ, empowering them to be the best versions of themselves," the sisterhood added. "We reject a narrow definition of what it means to be Catholic. We are faithful members of the Catholic Church who embrace and promote the values of the Gospel, St. Benedict, and Vatican II and the teachings of Pope Francis."

They concluded, "We want to be known as an inclusive, welcoming community, embracing Benedictine values that have endured for more than 1,500 years and have spread through every continent and nation. We believe those values are the core of Benedictine College."

Following Butker's speech, NFL senior Vice President Jonathan Beane, the league’s chief diversity and inclusion officer, stated that “Harrison Butker gave a speech in his personal capacity. His views are not those of the NFL as an organization. The NFL is steadfast in our commitment to inclusion, which only makes our league stronger."

Celebrities push for Kevin Spacey’s return to Hollywood on the heels of fresh allegations

A spate of A-list public figures recently have advocated for Kevin Spacey's return to the movie industry.

Liam Neeson, Sharon Stone, F. Murray Abraham and Stephen Fry all stated their support for the former "House of Cards" actor, who has faced a series of sexual assault allegations made by numerous men. In 2017, during the height of the #MeToo movement, actor and Broadway performer Anthony Rapp told Buzzfeed that Spacey had assaulted him during a party at his New York City apartment in 1986 when Rapp was only 14 years old. Spacey at the time took to X/Twitter to issue the "sincerest apology for what would have been deeply inappropriate drunken behavior," asserting that he had no recollection of the incident. He also used the post as an opportunity to officially and publicly come out as gay, a move that was harshly condemned by many people inside and outside the LGBTQ+ community.

Rapp's claims led to more than a dozen subsequent allegations, culminating in Spacey being charged with four counts of sexual assault against three men. A British jury in July 2023 ruled that he was not guilty of the assaults, which Spacey's accusers reported took place between 2001 and 2013. The two-time Academy Award winner was also involved in a $40 million sexual battery lawsuit with Rapp, for which a New York jury sided with Spacey, determining that he was not guilty in October 2022.

The limits of #MeToo in Hollywood: Allegations have "limited influence" on audiences

Now, speaking to The Telegraph, multiple stars have defended the "American Beauty" actor, arguing in favor of his reinstatement in Hollywood.

“I was deeply saddened to learn of these accusations against him. Kevin is a good man and a man of character,” Neeson told the outlet, per Entertainment Weekly. “He’s sensitive, articulate and non-judgmental, with a terrific sense of humor. He is also one of our finest artists in the theatre and on camera. Personally speaking, our industry needs him and misses him greatly.”

Stone said that she “can’t wait to see Kevin back at work,” adding that “He is a genius. He is so elegant and fun, generous to a fault and knows more about our craft than most of us ever will.

"It’s terrible that they are blaming him for not being able to come to terms with themselves for using him and negotiating with themselves because they didn’t get their secret agendas,” she continued.

The stars' vocal support for Spacey follows the revelation of new allegations of harassment and sexual misconduct in "Spacey Unmasked," a two-part documentary from British network Channel 4 that was released stateside on Max on May 13. According to Vulture, the documentary includes the following statement from Spacey: “I have consistently denied — and now successfully defended — numerous allegations made both in the US and UK, both criminal and civil, and each time have been able to source evidence undermining the allegations and have been believed by a jury of my peers.”

On May 2, Spacey wrote on X/Twitter that he had “repeatedly requested that @Channel4 afford me more than 7 days to respond to allegations made against me dating back 48 years and provide me with sufficient details to investigate these matters. Channel 4 has refused on the basis that they feel that asking for a response in 7 days to new, anonymized and non-specific allegations is a ‘fair opportunity’ for me to refute any allegations made against me.

“I will not sit back and be attacked by a dying network's one-sided ‘documentary’ about me in their desperate attempt for ratings,” Spacey continued. “There's a proper channel to handle allegations against me and it’s not Channel 4. Each time I have been given the time and a proper forum to defend myself, the allegations have failed under scrutiny and I have been exonerated.”

Over the last week, I have repeatedly requested that @Channel4 afford me more than 7 days to respond to allegations made against me dating back 48 years and provide me with sufficient details to investigate these matters. Channel 4 has refused on the basis that they feel that…

— Kevin Spacey (@KevinSpacey) May 2, 2024

Fry in his statement to The Telegraph leveled criticism at “Spacey Unmasked” for trying to “bracket [Spacey] with the likes of Harvey Weinstein,” and “to continue to harass and hound him, to devote a whole documentary to accusations that simply do not add up to crimes . . . How can that be considered proportionate and justified?”

“Surely it is wrong to continue to batter a reputation on the strength of assertion and rhetoric rather than evidence and proof?” Fry asked. “Unless I’m missing something I think he has paid the price.”

Abraham, whom Entertainment Weekly noted was accused of sexual misconduct on the set of “Mythic Quest,” said, “I vouch for him [Spacey] unequivocally. Who are these vultures who attack a man who has publicly accepted his responsibility for certain behavior, unlike so many others? He is a fine man, I stand with him, and let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”

Speaking to Chris Cuomo for a NewsNation interview on Thursday, Spacey said that he is “enormously pleased that my friends have stood up for me this past day, but quite frankly, they've been standing up for me for a long, long time,” as noted by The Hollywood Reporter.

The actor added that he is “so much happier today, living a more authentic and open life.

“Now, I want to prove that I’m a man of great character,” Spacey said. “I look forward to being able to prove to people that I am the merit of who I am as a human being.”

Spacey also told Cuomo that while he accepts “accountability,” that he will not “be accountable for things I didn’t do or that were exaggerated or greatly changed.

“I’ve been very fortunate to have all the people who’ve stepped up, and I know there’s going to be more coming soon,” Spacey said. “But there are also people that I’ve spoken to who, they love me, they believe in me. They’ve stood with me in private . . . but they’re afraid to stand up. And I’ve been very fortunate that people have been honest with me about that. And I think that’s a shame, that we’ve come to a place as a society where people are afraid to say what they believe and what they feel because they’re afraid they’re going to get canceled too.”

“I use to always want to be just the best actor and now I want to prove that I’m a man of great character” @KevinSpacey broke his silence tonight. pic.twitter.com/vyW2MdwEI4

— Christopher C. Cuomo (@ChrisCuomo) May 17, 2024

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“Out of control”: Legal experts say Justice Alito’s “Stop the Steal” symbol is a huge red flag

Legal experts are lamenting the lack of an enforceable judicial ethics code, with some calling for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito's recusal, following a New York Times report that a symbol of the “Stop the Steal” movement to reject the 2020 election was flown outside Alito’s home in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

Ten leading legal experts told Salon Friday that the conduct — the flying of an upside-down flag, a known symbol of the movement to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, at a justice's home — appears to violate the Supreme Court's own ethics code, adopted last last year, by creating an appearance of bias.

Those experts said it’s far past time for the nine justices who enjoy lifetime appointments to hold themselves to the highest ethical standards. But, they noted, the Supreme Court has shown itself reluctant to do so.

"The situation is out of control," Richard Painter, a former White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush who worked with Justice Alito on his 2006 Senate confirmation, told Salon. "This is after the insurrection, so it's really him weighing in, getting involved publicly in a dispute over the insurrection."

"Peak gaslighting": Legal scholars shred Supreme Court's spin on new "unenforceable" ethics code

The U.S. Flag Code says the flag should only be displayed upside-down as a “signal of distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property.” Movements including the Tea Party and “Stop the Steal” have used upside-down flags as a symbol of protest and despair.

In an emailed statement, Alito told The Times: “I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag. It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”

The Times said its interviews found that his wife, Martha-Ann Alito, had a dispute with a neighbor over their anti-Trump sign. It’s unclear how long the upside-down flag flew, but a neighbor in a Jan. 18, 2021 email said the flag had been upside down for several days.

Fox News attorney and journalist Shannon Bream said on X that she spoke with Alito, who said a neighbor put up a “F— Trump” sign near a school bus stop. Bream said that Alito’s “distraught” wife put up the flag upside down “for a short term” after a neighbor put up a sign blaming Alito’s wife for the Jan. 6 attacks. Alito also claimed that a man called her “the c-word.”

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Legal experts said judges have a responsibility to hold themselves to the highest standard.

“I don’t know why we have a Supreme Court justice flying a flag upside down, weighing in on an election, why his wife would be doing that,” Painter, a law professor at the University of Minnesota, said. “His wife is well aware of the impartiality obligations of a federal judge.”

Painter said he was not convinced by Alito attributing the up-side down flag to his wife, particularly when it was flown on their joint property. "When the house is used this way, I'd be shocked that she would do that without talking about it with him first."

Call for Recusal

Painter, who has called for an inspector general for the Supreme Court, said the Times report also raises “serious questions about whether he can impartially adjudicate any case related to Jan. 6.” He also suggested that special counsel Jack Smith should file a motion for Alito's recusal in the pending Trump v. United States case, in which the Supreme Court will weigh in on presidential immunity from criminal prosecution.

Several legal experts expressed concern about how Alito would handle that case in particular.

“A more blatant revelation of bias in a pending case is hard to imagine,” Washington & Lee University School of Law professor Jim Moliterno told Salon. “It was literally waving a banner that said, ‘I favor election-deniers.’”

"Who can possibly think he will decide this case in a neutral manner?" Professor Leslie Levin, a University of Connecticut School of Law professor, told Salon. "Of course, Justice Alito's political leanings were already well-known. But the flag flying incident indicates he has strong views about the facts underlying this case. His decision seems pre-ordained."

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Earlier this year, Donald Sherman, executive director of advocacy group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, argued before the Supreme Court in Trump vs. Anderson, where the justices unanimously held that states couldn't determine eligibility for federal office. Colorado had tried to remove Trump from its ballot, pointing to the Constitution's insurrection clause.

"It would have been helpful if this information had been revealed to the public before our clients case was heard in Anderson before Justice Alito in February," Sherman told Salon.

Painter said the Senate Judiciary Committee should invite Alito to offer further explanation.

Painter said additional details could help Alito if “he thought it was inappropriate, he asked her to take it down, that would be a different explanation,” Painter said.

Moliterno said Alito’s response “reveals his utter lack of understanding of basic concepts of judicial ethics.”

“Had his wife posted a statement on her social media, for example, he might at least be able to argue that the statement was hers and did not reflect any bias by him in favor of election deniers,” Moliterno said. “But the flag, raised by whomever, was on their yard in front of their house. All reasonable people would regard it as a reflection of the household’s view, including his.”

Richard Zitrin, emeritus lecturer at UC Law San Francisco, said the flag being flown over the Alito home appears to be a "direct statement."

"We’re familiar with Justice Thomas declining to be disqualified from cases due to his wife’s political actions," Zitrin told Salon. "But here, this flag was flown over not just over Mrs. Alito’s house, but their house."

Professor Renee Knake Jefferson, who holds the Doherty Chair in Legal Ethics at the University of Houston Law Center, said Alito's response alone reinforces public distrust in the Supreme Court.

“It’s concerning that Justice Alito had no explanation like this, but instead placed blame on his wife and apparently still allowed the flag to remain for a period of days,” she told Salon. “I would expect a judge or justice who is dedicated to ensuring the court is neither political, nor perceived to be so, would state unequivocally that he denounces that the flag was flown in this way and will take steps to prevent a recurrence. Not saying so under these circumstances reinforces critiques that the court is as much a political institution as the other branches of government, which if accepted means a core institution of democracy is compromised.”

Unenforceable ethics code

Last November, the Supreme Court adopted its first-ever ethics code, which legal experts widely panned as unenforceable.

The Supreme Court's own ethics code reads in part: “a justice should disqualify himself or herself in a proceeding in which the Justice’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned, that is, where an unbiased and reasonable person who is aware of all relevant circumstances would doubt that the Justice could fairly discharge his or her duties.”

Professor Renee Knake Jefferson said the displaying of the upside down flag falls under the code’s provision discussing recusal.

“But the code does not require him to do so,” she said. “Ultimately, it is his decision alone to make. Unlike all other courts, there is no place for review or to appeal the decision of a Supreme Court justice who declines to disqualify themselves.”

Russell Wheeler, non-resident senior fellow with the Brookings Institution, said there's no way to file an ethics complaint and spark a special committee investigation against Alito — although he could have faced such an ethics process during his time on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

Wheeler, who has written about such enforcement mechanisms, said the Supreme Court borrowed some language from the binding ethics code for U.S. federal judges.

But he pointed out one line they omitted, which reads: "A judge must expect to be the subject of constant public scrutiny and accept freely and willingly restrictions that might be viewed as burdensome by the ordinary citizen."

Wheeler told Salon: "It's rather telling that the court was not willing to endorse what regardless is just the basic, common sense observation that once you have the additional power and prestige of being a Justice of the Supreme Court or a federal judge at all, there are certain restrictions on your behavior that you have to accept, and that you wouldn't have to accept if you are just an ordinary citizen."

The Supreme Court’s code also says that a justice should not publicly endorse or oppose a candidate for office, engage in “other political activity” and “avoid impropriety and the appearance of impropriety in all activities.” In addition, justices “should not engage in behavior that is harassing, abusive, prejudiced or biased,” reads the code.

"Not a bad return on investment": AOC calls out Justice Alito for luxury fishing trip with GOP donor

Alfini said the American Bar Association's model code of judicial conduct does not include a family exemption when it comes to endorsing other candidates.

"If a family member endorses a publicly endorses a candidate for office, the code says it could be imputed to the judge," Alfini said.

Alfini said it's past time for the Supreme Court to come up with their own enforcement mechanism.

"Their own code certainly is not as expansive as the code for lower federal judges," Alfini said. "But they need to come up with a mechanism for enforcing — whether it's the nine of them getting together and deciding whether Alito, for instance, should recuse himself under these circumstances, or a smaller group of them being sort of an enforcement forcing body. They don't have any means right now to enforce any ethics rules, including their own."

And Sherman, of CREW, said any enforcement mechanism needs to consider situations where justices decide to stay on a case despite allegations of a conflict.

"But the ball remains with the justices to make that decision," Sherman said.

Push for impartiality

Geyh said he expects a wide-ranging public debate about whether Alito violated the code.

"Justice Alito has already attributed the flag to his wife, which complicates the analysis in ways that stalemate the issue," Geyh said.

Geyh said he finds such a debate “fruitless” given the lack of discipline attached to the code.

And he said our focus should be on installing justices who work to keep their biases at bay and remain open-minded.

Geyh said the pledge by 13 Trump-nominated federal judges to not hire future Columbia University students as law clerks, citing the tenor of pro-Palestinian protests, is another recent example of a shift toward overt partisanship in the judiciary.

"That's really out of character with what the federal judiciary has historically done,” Geyh said. “We need to push back against that.”

Geyh said he expects to see motions for disqualification filed against Alito — but doesn’t expect such motions to be successful.

“I think it's unlikely in the extreme that he will disqualify himself from those cases,” Geyh said.

Sherman, of CREW, questioned whether litigants will feel empowered to raise recusal motions.

"The system really puts the burden on litigants to raise those concerns," Sherman said. "And owners are reluctant to do that when ultimately Justice Alito is going to make his own decision and could potentially hold it against them or their clients."

Former federal judge Jeremy Fogel called for the Supreme Court to "create an independent, panel of experienced retired judges with deep experience in judicial ethics to advise it about recusals and difficult ethical questions."

"Such a panel wouldn’t provide a way to investigate situations like the current one involving the flag, but it could provide a check on the justices’ judgments going forward, including questions such as whether Justice Alito should recuse from pending [Jan. 6] cases," Fogel, executive director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute, told Salon.

Alfini called on Alito to at least provide the public with a letter explaining why he won't recuse himself. Former Justice Antonin Scalia did so in 2004, when he rejected calls for recusal after inviting his long-time acquaintance former Vice President Dick Cheney on a duck-hunting trip.

But Alito himself has balked at calls for more transparency and stringent ethical requirements, telling the Wall Street Journal, for example, that “Congress lacks the power to impose a code of ethics on the Supreme Court.”

“I marvel at all the nonsense that has been written about me in the last year," Alito continued. "The traditional idea about how judges and justices should behave is they should be mute. But that's just not happening, and so at a certain point I've said to myself, nobody else is going to do this, so I have to defend myself."

about the January 6 and its fallout

“I’m very naked”: “Bridgerton” star Nicola Coughlan rejects body shamers through her sex scenes

Nicola Coughlan as Penelope Featherington has ditched the wallflower moniker and traded it in to blossom into the diamond of the season for the latest season of Netflix's period drama "Bridgerton.” The Irish star has some choice words for the body shamers who have relentlessly criticized her body: "F**k you."

"Bridgterton" is known for its simmering romances and steamy, sultry sex scenes. This season, Penelope and Colin's (Luke Newton) friends-to-lovers relationship is at center stage, which comes with the expectation that they will also follow suit and deliver some intimate scenes. However, only the first half of the season has aired so far, which has included some intimacy, but ultimately leaving fans . . . unfulfilled.

Not to worry, in an interview with Stylist, Coughlan teased an upcoming scene coming to the second half of the season on June 13. She said she was enthusiastic about being “very naked” for a scene in “Bridgerton" because of the unrelenting comments about her body and weight made online.

"Bridgerton" examines the perks and perils of its wallflower's power

The Irish actor told the publication that she worked closely with intimacy coordinator Lizzy Talbot on this season's sex scenes. Between Coughlan and Talbot, Coughlan was able to decide how much of herself would be exposed. “You go, ‘OK, what do I want to show? What don’t I want to show? What’s scripted, and what do I want to add?'”

She added that, “Not only did I consent to it but I drove it.

“I specifically asked for certain lines and moments to be included,” Coughlan explained. “There’s one scene where I’m very naked on camera, and that was my idea, my choice. It just felt like the biggest ‘f**k you’ to all the conversation surrounding my body; it was amazingly empowering. I felt beautiful in the moment, and I thought: ‘When I’m 80, I want to look back on this and remember how f*****g hot I looked!’”

This is not the first time that Coughlan has addressed body shamers about their vocal criticisms of her weight. In an Instagram post in 2022, the actress wrote, “If you have an opinion about my body please, please don’t share it with me . . . It’s really hard to take the weight of thousands of opinions on how you look being sent directly to you every day.”

This season has been empowering overall for Coughlan's character, both as the anonymous gossip columnist Lady Whistledown and as a woman who's finally embraced her own unique physical beauty. While Julia Quinn's novel on which Penelope's romance is based included weight loss as part of the character's makeover, the TV series takes a different approach. In Penelope’s glow-up, she does not change her body, but rather she finally takes charge of how she is styled, from choosing her own clothes – in hues more flattering and subdued from the way her mother dressed her – to trying a new, more internationally inspired hairstyle. She also learns how to come out of her shell and talk to men whose last names are not Bridgerton.

“The change that needs to happen is much more about her confine than it is about her external impression,” showrunner Jess Brownell told the Independent.

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Meanwhile, Coughlan isn’t the only actress who has felt empowered by their nude scenes. “Game of Thrones” actress Emilia Clarke said that while doing nude scenes isn’t the easiest thing, "I'm in control of it."

For the now-canceled Netflix show, "GLOW" actress Alison Brie shared, “Even the nudity on the show, to me, has been very empowering.”

“It kind of reminds myself that I love my body and I’m not ashamed to share it in a non-sexual way on a show . . . ” Brie continued. “To show nudity as a representation of female friendship and their closeness and their intimacy was very exciting to me and very true to who I am. I feel a little bit more like myself every year of the show.”

Even actress Jennifer Lawrence, whose personal nude photos were leaked in the 2014 iCloud leak, said that she felt “empowered” to film a nude scene in “Red Sparrow.”

In a “60 minutes” interview, she told Bill Whitaker, “I feel like something that was taken from me, I got back, and am using in my art. It’s my body and it’s my art and it’s my choice.”

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Right-wing conspiracy theorist who assaulted Nancy Pelosi’s husband sentenced to 30 years in prison

David DePape, the man convicted of breaking into former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's home and brutally attacking her husband with a hammer, was sentenced Friday to 30 years in prison, the Associated Press reported.

DePape, 44, was found guilty last November. He was given credit for the 18 months he's been behind bars since the October 2022 assault.

In sentencing DePape, Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley said she took into consideration the fact that he had no prior record, but noted that his extreme politics — he espoused far-right politics on his personal blog — led him to commit a violent crime.

“He actually went to the home, that is completely, completely unprecedented," Corley said.

Paul Pelosi, who was 82 at the time, suffered two head wounds in the attack, including a skull fracture that had to be mended with permanent plates and screws. His right arm was also injured.

Despite the brutality of the crime, the attack was mocked by the likes of Donald Trump Jr., who promoted a conspiracy theory that DePape was an estranged lover, not in fact a supporter of his father, the former president.

During this trial testimony, DePape admitted that he broke into the Pelosis’ home in San Francisco on October 28, 2022, with the intent of holding the speaker hostage and to “break her kneecaps” if she lied to him. He also confessed to bludgeoning Paul Pelosi with a hammer, adding that his plan was to end what he perceived as government corruption.

The attack on Paul Pelosi, which occurred a few days before the midterm elections, was captured on a police body camera video

DePape also admitted to jurors that he had planned on wearing an inflatable unicorn costume when recording his interrogation of Nancy Pelosi, who turned out not to be home at the time of his intrusion. DePape had rope, zip ties, and body cameras on his person.

Paul Pelosi testified at the trial too. He recounted being awakened by a large man who burst into his bedroom asking, “Where’s Nancy?” When he told the man that his wife was in Washington, DePape responded by tying him up, intending to wait for his wife's return.

“It was a tremendous sense of shock to recognize that somebody had broken into the house, and looking at him and looking at the hammer and the ties, I recognized that I was in serious danger, so I tried to stay as calm as possible,” Pelosi told jurors.

In state court, DePape was also charged with assault with a deadly weapon, elder abuse, and residential burglary among other felonies. The jury selection in that trial is expected to start Wednesday.

Aaron Bennet, a spokesperson for Nancy Pelosi, welcomed news of the sentence.

“The Pelosi family couldn’t be prouder of their Pop and his tremendous courage in saving his own life on the night of the attack and in testifying in this case,” he said. “Speaker Pelosi and her family are immensely grateful to all who have sent love and prayers over the last eighteen months, as Mr. Pelosi continues his recovery."

“That’s beneath even you”: Bedlam erupts after Marjorie Taylor Greene attacks Black lawmaker

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s antics in Congress may possibly have hit a new and racist low, the events that transpired at a House Oversight Committee hearing on Thursday resembling a trainwreck that one can’t stop watching.

At 8 p.m, the members of the Republican-led committee congregated for what was supposed to be a debate on whether to hold Attorney General Merrick B. Garland in contempt of Congress. It was the Republicans who had recommended charging Garland, but they were also the reason the hearing gathered so late — instead of sticking around for their jobs, some of them had traveled to Manhattan earlier to show support for Donald Trump in his hush money trial.

It was also a Republican who started what turned into the likes of a bar brawl: Greene, the MAGA conspiracy theorist from Georgia, who used her speaking time to mock Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, who is Black.

“I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading,” Greene said in response to a question from Crockett.

“That’s beneath even you, Ms. Greene,” shot back the top Democrat on the panel, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland.

Greene’s remark also prompted a response from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez, D-N.Y. She demanded Greene’s words be “taken down” from the record, which would also mean barring the Georgia lawmaker from speaking for the rest of the session.

“How dare you attack the physical appearance of another person?” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said.

“Are your feelings hurt?” Ms. Greene responded.

“Oh baby girl, don’t even play,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez shot back.

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Although Greene finally did agree to have her words stricken from the record, she refused to apologize and continued to badger Cortez.

“Why don’t you debate me?” Greene said at one point.

“I think it’s self-evident,” Cortez responded.

“Yeah, you don’t have enough intelligence,” Greene said, a remark that garnered considerable outrage from several Democrats who demanded Greene take back what she said.

“That’s two requests to strike!” Cortez said.

As the fighting continued, Crocket decided she would not let Greene’s remarks go unaddressed herself. She launched her jab in a thinly veiled question, as allowed under committee rules.

“I’m just curious,” Crocket said, “just to better understand your ruling: If someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody’s bleach-blonde, bad-built, butch body, that would not be engaging in personalities, correct?”

“I think my body’s pretty good,” said Greene, who actively posts videos of herself working out, said at one point.

Cortez later took to X to explain her reaction to Greene, plain and simple: “I stand up to bullies, instead of becoming one.”

Why King Charles’ portrait is so grotesque. Hint: It’s not just the color

The explanation is at first glance quite straightforward — it’s that no other color affects us like it. You don’t want to upset anybody? Get yourself some tasteful neutrals. You want to cause a ruckus? Trot out the red. Red is death. It’s violence. It’s sex. It’s beauty. It’s power. (Just ask Taylor.) So when King Charles III unveiled his first official portrait since his coronation earlier this week at Buckingham Palace, of course there were gasps heard round the world. But it’s not just the overabundance of a divisive primary color that makes the image so unnerving.

I’d describe his style as reminiscent of something you’d find in your overpriced Airbnb or a walk-in shopping mall gallery.

As envisioned by British artist Jonathan Yeo, the king wears the scarlet uniform of the Welsh Guards and rests his hands lightly on his sword. A butterfly flits near his shoulder, to symbolize how, Yeo has stated, “the subject’s role in our public life has transformed.” (And here I thought it was because it's a monarch.) The kicker of the piece, though, is that Charles seems to melt into a background as vivid red as his attire is, making this the perhaps first royal portrait to evoke that meme of Elmo engulfed in flames.

"Bathing in blood" portrait of King Charles III draws mixed reactions

The outsized, 7.5 foot-by-5.5 foot image evoked strong responses as soon as the 75-year-old ruler, who has recently been in treatment for cancer, stepped away from the canvas. “Obsequious, oversized and unaccountably frightening” declared the Washington Post’s critic Sebastian Smee. The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones meanwhile slammed the “facile pseudo-portraiture with the cheery serotonin of random color,” while on The Cut, Danielle Cohen wondered if “Perhaps this is an imagined depiction of King Charles rotting in hell in real time.” (Taking a contrarian view, art historian Richard Morris has said that “I really like the portrait,” adding that Yeo had captured the king’s “flaws and mortality.”) You can say this for it; it's not a thing to feel meh about.

Red is a deeply emotional color. That’s why it’s always been a particular favorite in art, from the walls of Pompeii to the works of Henri Matisse. Francis Bacon used reds and blacks to convey eroticism, horror and beauty, often all at once. Warhol deployed the same colors to illuminate how we relate to our surroundings, whether in car wrecks or soup cans. In portraiture, like Sargent’s Dr. Pozzi at Home or Raphael’s Portrait of a Cardinal, red can communicate faith, sensuality or power. It has a potent beauty unlike any other color.

Earlier this spring, as I regarded the deep reds and blacks of Mark Rothko’s Seagram murals, I found myself so overwhelmed with the sadness of the work that I started to cry. My friend, meanwhile, said she felt a buzzing in her ears and had to leave the room. That’s the genius of a Rothko, though, an artist who could communicate something so intense about his own humanity with abstract strokes and well-deployed colors he provokes a visceral response in the viewer. But what does Yeo’s color statement say about Charles, other than that he has a uniform?

Yeo has previously painted, with somewhat more restraint, Queen Camilla and Prince Phillip, as well as an array of celebrities. I’d describe his style as reminiscent of something you’d find in your overpriced Airbnb or a walk-in shopping mall gallery, but then, nobody’s ever asked me to paint a king recently. In his career, Yeo has been known to get a little cheeky — his 2007 collage of George W. Bush is fashioned from images culled from porn magazines — but if there’s a recurring theme to the self-taught artist’s body of work, I’d say it’s a palpable want of intimacy. And that, even more than the overwhelming, horror movie poster color choice, is what really makes the Charles portrait so unsettling.

Charles first sat for Yeo back in June of 2021, and then sat for him three more times, with the final visit occurring in November of 2023. The final work then is a reflection of a period in the king’s life in which he lost his mother, assumed the throne, and faced a presumably serious health diagnosis. Yeo says that the work “reflects exactly who he is, everything he represents and what he's been through.” He must have hit at least some of the mark, because when she first saw the final work, Camilla reportedly told Yeo, “Yes, you've got him.” Got him, what, though, on fire?

Taking the subject’s own wife’s assessment into mind, I’ve tried reconsidering the painting as a provocative but thoughtful depiction of a son, husband and father, a man stepping into the role he’s been preparing for from birth. A portrait free of background elements and metaphors, save that single butterfly.

Take away all the red, then, and what remains? There’s an enigmatic half-smile. There’s a weariness. Yet Charles remains, except perhaps to Camilla, unknowable here. There may be only so much honesty you can expect from an image of a leader, but contrast Yeo’s portrait of Charles with Kehinde Wiley’s bold, leafy image of Barack Obama, and the difference is striking. Both are notable for their modern, singular thematic focus. Yet Wiley’s work feels rich in symbolism and spontaneity, an image of a man fixed in history and in a specific moment of his own life. Charles, tellingly, doesn’t stand out in his portrait; he is receding into it. The result is a piece that is at once in your face and ephemeral, a classic royal family bit of showiness and nothingness. And if it has incited strong distaste, it’s not just because it’s ugly. Ugly things can be great; museums are full of them. It’s because it's ugliness that's brutally superficial, in a work that’s trying to act like it’s daring.

Charles remains, except perhaps to Camilla, unknowable here.

The British monarchy has in recent years undergone an intense public reconsideration, as the cracks in its previously tightly controlled image have become more pronounced. It is an institution that, as evidenced acutely by the spin around both King Charles and Princess Catherine’s cancer diagnoses, the estrangement of Prince Harry and the ongoing embarrassment that is Prince Andrew, seems to be fumbling to figure out its identity and its relevance. It can make front page news with a painting. That doesn't answer the question of what it's actually good for.

It’s one thing to incite strong feelings; that’s easy in art and in celebrity. It’s another to form a real connection. The hollowness of the portrait of Charles rests on both its artist and its subject, neither of whom seem here to have anything really to say but are saying it loudly nonetheless. Maybe Yeo truly has, as Camille says, “got him.” The statement the portrait makes then, of a head and pair of hands swallowed up in their surroundings, is not of shock or horror. It's of a King of England with very little of himself to show.

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