Normalizing separate bedrooms: Here’s why you shouldn’t feel bad about sleeping apart

Most evenings, I like to get a head start. I kiss my spouse goodnight, put in my earplugs and turn in to bed early. He then comes in a good 30 to 60 minutes later, so that I'm already deeply asleep before he heads off to dreamland — and starts snoring. Because if he wakes me up, I'm going to start tossing and turning, and then neither of us is going to get any rest until one of us winds up on the couch. Sure, we usually sleep together, but we rarely fall asleep together. And we're not so unique.

Why does sleep become more elusive as we age? It has to do with shifts in "sleep architecture"

Earlier this month, Cameron Diaz made headlines — and raised eyebrows — during a conversation on Molly Sims's "Lipstick on the Rim" podcast, when she posited that "We should normalize separate bedrooms." Diaz, who has a three year-old daughter with husband Benji Madden, added, "To me, I would literally, I have my house, you have yours. We have the family house in the middle. I will go and sleep in my room. You go sleep in your room. I’m fine. And we have the bedroom in the middle that we can convene in for our relations."

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Maybe it's not a separate room. Maybe it's a separate bed, or a separate schedule. However it's defined, though, the idea of distinct sleeping arrangements, also known by the doom-laden sobriquet "sleep divorce," sounds like a marital death knell. You can feel the judgment, the implied sense of banishment, in a New York Times story on the subject from just earlier this year. "Is it really because a partner tosses and turns too much?" writer Ronda Kaysen pondered. "Or is that an excuse to avoid talking about bigger problems at home?" One therapist quoted for it gently called the practice a "mild pink flag," whatever that means. Either it's a red flag or it isn't, right? And do we need so much semaphore to understand our relationships?

"A study from the Better Sleep Council found 63% of couples saying they "sleep most of the night separated."

That same Times story noted that an International Housewares Association survey conducted earlier this year revealed that "One in five couples sleep in separate bedrooms, and almost two thirds of those who do, do so every night." A 2017 study from the Better Sleep Council yielded similar results, with 63% of couples saying they "sleep most of the night separated" and almost 20% saying "their dream home has separate master bedrooms." With one third of us admitting we're not getting enough sleep, is it any wonder that so many Americans would want to minimize our nocturnal disruptions?

The ideal number of occupants in a bed has evolved over time. Writing in The Conversation, anthropologist and co-author of "What We Did In Bed" Brian Fagan has noted that "For most of human history, people thought nothing of crowding family members or friends into the same bed."

But the modern era brought an appreciation of space as a seemingly healthier option. In the early 20th century, alternative medicine champion Edwin F. Bowers advocated that "Separate beds for every sleeper are as necessary as are separate dishes for every eater. They promote comfort, cleanliness, and the natural delicacy that exists among human beings." Just a few decades later, however, the double, queen and king were reigning supreme. Yet as Wendy M. Troxel PhD, explained for TED back in 2020, "When sleep is measured objectively, people actually sleep worse with a partner." That's not to say that there aren't compelling reasons to konk out with your loved one. It's just, as Cameron Diaz says, it's also okay to normalize needing more space.

There are a variety of reasons why even a couple who once used to fall asleep contentedly spooning — like my husband and I — now need to regulate their circadian rhythms differently. For starters, there's aging. As we get older, our ability to fall asleep and stay asleep often diminishes. If we're sleeping less and more lightly, another body in the bed can make it all the more challenging.

"Snoring can lead to sleep disturbances and even sleep deprivation for both partners."

Chelsey Borson, a certified health and sleep expert and founder of the baby sleep coaching business Luna Leaps, offers other common causes. "For couples dealing with menopause, sleeping apart can be incredibly helpful. Menopause often brings hot flashes and night sweats, which can disrupt sleep for both partners. Similarly," she says, "snoring can also be a major issue affecting couples' sleep. Snoring can lead to sleep disturbances and even sleep deprivation for both partners." She adds, "Some couples have different work schedules, which can make it challenging to synchronize their sleep patterns." Having separate sleeping spaces, she says, can lead to "more peaceful and uninterrupted sleep, thus improving their overall well-being and energy levels during the day."

Katie McCann, a breastfeeding counselor and founder of From Bump To Bubble, also notes the sleep disruptions of pregnancy and early child rearing. "During pregnancy or postpartum periods, when sleep patterns and comfort needs drastically change, separate sleeping arrangements can ensure better rest for both partners," she says. She adds, "Quality sleep is crucial for maintaining not only physical health but also emotional well-being and relationship health. Lack of sleep can lead to irritability, decreased patience, and impaired communication, which can strain a relationship. Separate sleeping arrangements can actually preserve and enhance intimacy, by allowing partners to be more rested, patient, and emotionally available during their waking hours."

It can even lead to more, not less, sex. "Statistics show that women gaining an extra hour of sleep alone report improved intimacy scores," notes clinical psychologist and Therapy Rooms co-founder Dr Daniel Glazer. "Embracing well-rested independence can lead to feeling more understood and maintaining romance in every chapter of life."

Rod Mitchell, a Calgary psychologist with expertise in relationships and cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, shares a similar point of view. "I believe that separate sleeping arrangements, while seemingly counterintuitive, can actually lead to a stronger bond between partners," he says. "A purposeful switch to a separate bedroom arrangement allows the couple to reflect on the closeness of their relationship and plan out specific steps to maintain intimacy."

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The key, he explains, is making sure you're nurturing the relationship in other ways. He suggests that couples "establish a nightly ritual before retreating to separate bedrooms. This could be a shared activity like reading a book together, discussing the day's highlights, or a simple routine of expressing gratitude and affection." Then, he says, "Start the day with a joint morning routine, such as enjoying coffee together or a brief walk, to reconnect after spending the night apart." And when it feels right, "Consider reserving specific nights, such as weekends, for sharing the same bed. This approach keeps the element of physical intimacy alive while still reaping the benefits of separate sleeping during the work week."

It can be embarrassing to admit that you rest more easily when the person you love isn't snoozing beside you. But I try to assess my relationship more based on how we treat each other in our waking hours rather than how we behave when we're unconscious. And I can't deny that when I travel, I'm always excited to just starfish out and sleep like the dead all by myself in a big hotel bed.

Sara C. Mednick, a cognitive neuroscientist and author of "The Power of the Downstate: Recharge Your Life Using Your Body's Own Restorative Systems" reassures me that's all right. "The idea that there's a one size fits all, that we share one bed and that we sleep in this position, that we keep these hours and that we sleep for this amount of time, it's a sort of toxic way of thinking about your own life," she says. "People should understand how personal sleep is. It's a personal space, where you have your own individual needs." And waking or sleeping, she says, "You really just need to figure out what works for you inside the marriage."

about getting a better sleep

Maggie Haberman: Trump privately “concerned” Supreme Court “might rule against him” in ballot cases

Former President Donald Trump is uneasy about how the Supreme Court will rule on some states’ decisions to remove him from their ballots in the upcoming Republican primaries, according to New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman.

Some of Trump's advisers "think there is a political advantage" to the cases in Colorado and Maine, "at least in the short term," Haberman told CNN, according to Mediaite. "In Colorado, he’s still on the ballot. So even as that case is likely to go forward to the Supreme Court, he is on the ballot because the decision of the ruling there has been stayed. In Maine, we don’t quite know yet what’s going to happen. They believe, generally speaking, he and his advisers, that they will have success at the Supreme Court."

But Trump "has also voiced some concern that a court that has, you know, he appointed three of the justices to the Supreme Court and gave the conservatives a supermajority," Haberman added. "He is concerned that they are going to look as if they’re trying not to rule in his favor and might rule against him. We will see."

“Extreme sabotage”: Trump rants about new “10,000 soldiers” conspiracy theory on Truth Social

Former President Donald Trump spent a portion of his New Year’s holiday blasting perceived political adversaries on his Truth Social platform, on the heels of his Christmas rant in which he told special counsel Jack Smith, President Joe Biden, and others to “ROT IN HELL.” On Monday evening, Trump unleashed an invective targeting former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and once again at Smith.

“Why did American Disaster Liz Cheney, who suffers from TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome), and was defeated for Congress by the largest margin for a sitting Congressman or Congresswoman in the history of our Country, ILLEGALLY DELETE & DESTROY most of the evidence, and related items, from the January 6th Committee of Political Thugs and Misfits," Trump wrote. "THIS ACT OF EXTREME SABOTAGE MAKES IT IMPOSSIBLE FOR MY LAWYERS TO PROPERLY PREPARE FOR, AND PRESENT, A PROPER DEFENSE OF THEIR CLIENT, ME. All of the information on Crazy Nancy Pelosi turning down 10,000 soldiers that I offered to to guard the Capitol Building, and beyond, is gone. The ridiculous Deranged Jack Smith case on Immunity, which the most respected legal minds in the Country say I am fully entitled to, is now completely compromised and should be thrown out and terminated, JUST LIKE THE RADICAL LEFT LUNATICS DID TO THE EVIDENCE!”

While Trump’s public and online bashing of political rivals is hardly a new phenomenon, this most recent post contains traces of conspiracy theory rhetoric — that any exonerating evidence is mysteriously “gone” — is something that his followers could latch onto," Mediaite noted. Conspiracy theories such as this work because they cannot be proven false,” wrote Mediaite’s Colby Hall, referencing Trump’s claims of a stolen election in 2020. “But this is where we are at the moment,” Hall added, “and it appears that Trump has resorted to the ‘they lost my homework’ legal strategy, which may reveal just how desperate he actually is."

Expert hired by Trump to prove election fraud debunks his “steady diet of lies and innuendo”

An expert hired by Donald Trump to substantiate the former president’s voter fraud claims regarding the 2020 presidential election called him out for continuing to peddle falsehoods. Trump in November of 2020, shortly after losing the election, entered into a contract with Ken Block of Simpatico Software Systems, according to The Washington Post. However, Block on Tuesday penned an op-ed for USA Today asserting that his research never yielded anything to support Trump’s claims — and instead wholly debunked them.

“I am the expert who was hired by the Trump campaign,” Block wrote. “The findings of my company’s in-depth analysis are detailed in the depositions taken by the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. The transcripts show that the campaign found no evidence of voter fraud sufficient to change the outcome of any election. That message was communicated directly to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.” He then underscored the “steady diet of lies and innuendo” that the ex-president has used in an effort to “overcome the truth,” before noting that the “cries that the election was lost or stolen due to voter fraud continue with no sign of stopping.”

“The constant drumbeat hardens people’s hearts and minds to the truth about the 2020 election. Emails and documents show that the voter data available to the campaign contained no evidence of large-scale voter fraud based on data mining and fraud analytics,” he wrote. “More important, claims of voter fraud made by others were verified as false, including proof of why those claims were disproven.” Block also noted that his investigation’s findings have been shared with special counsel Jack Smith and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, both of whom have criminally charged Trump over his efforts to subvert the 2020 election. “What these claims don’t take into account is that voter fraud is detectable, quantifiable and verifiable. I have yet to see anyone offer up ‘evidence’ of voter fraud from the 2020 election that provides these three things,” Block continued. “My company’s contract with the campaign obligated us to deliver evidence of voter fraud that could be defended in a court of law. The small amount of voter fraud I found was bipartisan, with about as many Republicans casting duplicate votes as Democrats.”

“As a former gubernatorial candidate,” Block added, “I can admire the discipline it takes to stay on message on a single issue. There is no doubt that voter fraud can animate people. But it is one thing to provide a rallying point for supporters and quite another to drag our election infrastructure and legal system into a foundationless set of false claims.” He concluded: “A better use of time, money and energy would be to address systemic weaknesses in our election systems – such as the distressing lack of national election infrastructure to enforce election integrity, destructive practices to our elections such as gerrymandering, and leveling the playing field so that our elections become fairer and more competitive. If voter fraud had impacted the 2020 election, it would already have been proven. Maintaining the lies undermines faith in the foundation of our democracy.”

10 quirky leap year traditions you didn’t know existed, from glove penalties to whale babies

There’s much to look forward to in 2024: new resolutions, new books, new movies and, most importantly, a brand new leap year. The upcoming year promises an extra day at the end of February, instead of its usual 28 days. This extra day is added every four years to make up for Earth's orbit around the sun. Our planet takes approximately 365.25 days to complete its orbit — that added quarter day is why we have a leap year in the first place.

Feb. 29 marks a very rare and special day for many. Those born on the 29th are commonly referred to as “leap day babies” or “Leapings,” who are able to celebrate their true day of birth once every four years. Leap year, as a whole, also comes with a slew of traditions and superstitions observed all over the world. Some folks believe the added day makes for an auspicious year, while others regard it as bad luck.

5 foods that are traditionally eaten for luck in the New Year

Here are 10 quirky leap year traditions you might not know about:

Women, instead of men, can “do” the proposing

In this day and age, women are free to propose to their partner whenever (and however) they choose. For centuries, however, that role was solely reserved for men . . . except on leap day, when women could defy gender roles and get down on one knee for their partner.

Commonly known as Bachelor's Day (and sometimes Ladies' Privilege), the tradition was first conceived in Fifth century Ireland. Legend has it that Saint Bridget once asked Saint Patrick that women be given the opportunity to propose, since men were too slow to do so. Saint Patrick first suggested that women be allowed to propose on one day every seven years. He later settled on every four years thanks to Bridget’s convincing.

Bachelor's Day was well established by the 1800s. Similar traditions also exist in Scotland, Finland and parts of the United Kingdom. By the early 20th century, the tradition had reached the United States, but quickly became a thing of mockery by our patriarchal society. Cartoons poking fun at the concept depicted unmarried women who proposed as aggressive and domineering.

Women may don scarlet-hued petticoats

Proposing on such an auspicious day can also come with a specific wardrobe. In Scotland, women who choose to partake in Bachelor's Day shenanigans must wear a red petticoat under their dress. The specific color is believed to capture the attention of a man (after all, red is a pretty sultry color) and ensure great success.

Rejecting a leap day proposal, however, may come with penalties

In 1288, Queen Margaret of Scotland passed a law saying that any man who refuses a leap day proposal must pay a fine anywhere between £1 to a silk gown. That being said, the queen was only five years old when the law was supposedly issued, thus making this tale highly questionable . . .

Beyond that, refusing a leap day proposal also comes with several punishments elsewhere in the world. In Denmark, men who'd rather stay single must give the rejected woman 12 pairs of gloves – enough to wear in order to hide the shame that she has no ring to flaunt. In Finland, the men must provide the woman with enough fabric to sew a skirt.

Leap day is considered bad luck in some countries

Greek traditions and lore deem it unlucky to get married during a leap year — especially on leap day — because it is said to end in divorce.

In Scotland, it’s believed that those who are born on leap day will live a life of “untold suffering.” Leap year, in general, is also a doomed year for farmers, considering this old rhyming saying: “Leap year was never a good sheep year.”

As for Germany, another saying goes, "Schaltjahr gleich Kaltjahr." Simply put: leap year will be a cold year.

Aging Taiwanese parents get a special meal

In Taiwan, leap years are also pretty unlucky because many believe that elderly parents are more likely to die every four years. Yes, that's grim. To help promote longevity, married daughters must return home during the leap year with pig trotter noodles for her parents. The noodle dish is so delicious that it’s believed to wish aging parents good health and good fortune.

A women-only May Day tradition

A longtime tradition in Germany’s Rhineland involves young boys placing a small birch tree adorned with ribbons (also known as a Liebesmaie) on the doorstep of their crush. Taking place on the eve of May Day (April 30), the annual festivities are commonly carried out by boys. During leap years, however, the roles are reversed with only women dancing around the maypole, where in other years men can also participate.

“Leapings” get a four-day festival

In February 1988, the town of Anthony, Texas, declared itself “leap year capital of the world” thanks to Mary Ann Brown and Birdie Lewis. Brown and Lewis, who were both born on leap day, proposed a festival to celebrate the unique day. The four-day-long shindig remains a popular attraction today, with folks from all over the world traveling to Texas to enjoy live music, good food and endless fun.

Whales are particularly lucky

In Reggio Emilia, a province in northern Italy, a leap year is commonly known as l’ann d’ la baleina or the whale’s year. Italians in this region believe that whales give birth only during leap years.

A French satirical newspaper gets published

Called La Bougie du Sapeur (or Sapper’s Candle), the satirical newspaper was first published in 1980, and only publishes once every four years. Despite being the world’s least frequently published newspaper ever, the paper sold an astounding 200,000 copies when it was last published in 2020. The paper is named after an old French comic book character who was born on leap day.

There’s a cocktail just for leap year

The cocktail was invented in 1928 by Harry Craddock, a bartender at London's Savoy Hotel. Hailed as the “colorful cousin of the Martini,” the leap day cocktail was created to commemorate the hotel’s Feb. 29 celebrations. It consists of Grand Marnier, sweet vermouth, gin and lemon juice.

You can make your own rendition of the cocktail, courtesy of Craddock’s 1930 recipe book “The Savoy Cocktail Book.”

about New Year's:

The bitter thrashing of a former data darling: Nate Silver tweets through it

Giving more column inches to Nate Silver after he’s been showered with such a charitable amount of attention this week isn’t ideal, I know. After issuing a rash of half-baked tweets to the back-slapping applause of red-pill dinguses, Silver has given the internet’s Right-wingers a reason to welcome him to the club. That reason was his recent proclamation that some mysterious version of evolutionary science has anointed capitalism a triumph of natural selection. Fitting as it may be to watch one of Twitter’s earliest celebs follow the site’s latter-day arc into public odor and seeming disarray, any air you give this guy is still going to stink. So light a match.

The problem of sorting out the recent Nate fuss is that there’s already plenty of reason to survey the winding pipeline of his career. And there’s room for a sober assessment of his unique role in the landscape of digital journalism — from his days as the data-darling of baseball blogging, to his Twitter-hyped rise to fame on a lucky election prediction.

Why science and technology can't exist without the humanities

Mostly, it seems he was in the right place at the right time, or at least a product of it. He seemed to surf to success on the heady excitement of editors and reporters who thought data journalism could save newsrooms, the lucky beneficiary of the still-hopeful “pivot” era of journalism. It was back when a big chunk the country’s neo-liberal mainline Democrats believed most political problems could be solved with a West Wing walk-and-talk. Even “Orange is the New Black” intoned his name like a New Enlightenment saint in one 2013 episode.

“I believe in science. I believe in evolution. I believe in Nate Silver and Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Christopher Hitchens. Although I do admit he could be a kind of an a**hole,” the protagonist chides in a plea for reason.

I bet it was a pretty plush gig, being Nate Silver back then.

For better or worse, it can’t be denied that his influence on a new wave of data-driven journalism may have actually helped fortify some of the more scurrilous parts of political coverage against the hemming and hawing of so much inflated punditry. (Not that we humans could ever fully root it out; and, God, who would even want to?) He’s not a political genius, nor is he all that great of a statistician — but for a while he was the biggest name in the game. And that name was the main reasons a lot of political journalists like me could make a little scratch freelancing roughly coded charts for embed into some aging news site’s gnarly old content management system.

But I’ll let proper cultural historians take it from there. Giving Silver his due props is not why I’m here. I’m here to collect. Not for myself, but for a few others to whom he is indebted as a self-professed honest thinker.

"Sucks that every time some scant handful of blue-bloods goes too long without catching a good old fashioned beat-down, they have to learn this lesson all over again. But here we all are"

The precipitating event was as stupid and banal as you can imagine. On Tuesday, some podcast guy on Twitter pointed out a year-old academic analysis of some basic economic reforms that would be useful in shoring up social welfare and slowing climate-change impacts.

“The global economy is strictured around growth — the idea that firms, industries, and nations must increase production every year, regardless of whatever is needed,” reads the screenshot excerpt.

Apparently tripped up by the introductory paragraph of the analysis, the podcaster did not seem to grasp that infinite growth of any kind is not possible with finite resources.

“I didn’t find this article to be very convincing. But setting all that aside, I’ve always found this to be a weird framing. My sense is that growth or is just the normal byproduct of people going about their business as usual,” he tweeted.

Thankfully, Nate Silver was on hand to reassure the podcaster’s confidence.

"That's because you're actually a smart person instead of a weird academic and so you understand that capitalism works because it reflects human nature as selected for through thousands of generations of evolution,” Silver replied in a mystifying bolt of unintentional hilarity.

That's because you're actually a smart person instead of a weird academic and so you understand that capitalism works because it reflects human nature as selected for through thousands of generations of evolution.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) December 26, 2023

It’s a shame Silver didn’t stick around to dispute the actual analysis. Hope he at least read it. As a self-described “elite,” it would be a good time for him to brush up on the current affairs of us common parsnips. And I think the paper’s authors — a group of eight professors at internationally renowned schools across Spain, the UK, Switzerland, Austria, Canada and the US — are more than capable of speaking for themselves should Silver find himself at all interested in what they have to say before he offers his further profundity to the class.

Of “the idea that firms, industries and nations must increase production every year, regardless of whether it is needed,” researchers said. “This dynamic is driving climate change and ecological breakdown. High-income economies, and the corporations and wealthy classes that dominate them, are mainly responsible for this problem and consume energy and materials at unsustainable rates.”

You know what? Say more, profs.

“Wealthy economies should abandon growth of gross domestic product (GDP) as a goal, scale down destructive and unnecessary forms of production to reduce energy and material use, and focus economic activity around securing human needs and well-being.”

The analysts add that this approach can not only “enable rapid decarbonization and stop ecological breakdown” but argue that so-called degrowth strategies aim to “stabilize economies and achieve social and ecological goals, unlike recession, which is chaotic and socially destabilizing and occurs when growth-dependent economies fail to grow.”

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I may not be convinced that the strangling vines of kudzu-capitalism can be charmed back from their parasitic grasp on the poor by something that merits a polite euphemism like “degrowth.” But it seems to me, these professors are proposing one hell of a deal compared to the choppier alternatives that have worked in the past to bring down the rich.

That’s something the supposed elite often forget when they’re left to roast too long on the dais. Social-focused economic and health investment, strong labor and reproductive rights, transparent material assurance of their childrens’ safety and future — these things aren’t just some 21st-century vape-dreams of eccentric academic windbags. These are the handful of basic requirements for human survival that, historically speaking, poor people have routinely had to kill rich elites in order to secure for themselves and their families.

Sucks that every time some scant handful of blue-bloods goes too long without catching a good old fashioned beat-down, they have to learn that lesson all over again. But here we all are, entertaining pseudo-celebrity flirtations with played-out social Darwinist ideas, and wondering how anyone still has the energy to even say this dude’s name. For now, I think, we can stop. Until Nate can focus on the science again, it’s just too boring to focus on him.

An earlier version of this article originally appeared in Salon's Lab Notes, a weekly newsletter from our Science & Health team.

from Lab Notes

Poor, pitiful conservatives: How the right’s counterfeit victimhood narratives harm all of us

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a victim as someone who is “injured, damaged, or killed by something.” Experiences and stories of victimization run the gamut from the personal to the political. As a psychoanalyst, I often hear reports from my patients of feelings of victimization. I try both to empathize with my patients’ suffering and understand its unconscious meanings.

But victimhood, real or imagined, has also come to assume a central role in social, political, and cultural discourse in the U.S. A victim sensibility seems clearly to be on the rise across the political spectrum, especially on the right. But while real people are victimized in the real world all the time, not all victimization stories are the same. Some are counterfeit.

For example, talking heads at Fox News tell their viewers every night that they are victims of ruthless, power-hungry and uncaring liberal elites. They present to their audience some version of “They want to replace you with immigrants and people of color.They don’t care about you.”

Guns, Republicans and "manliness": We all suffer from the right's mental health crisis

While it may be true that conservatives suffer genuine victimization by virtue of jobs moving overseas, wages stagnating, communities fragmenting, health care becoming unaffordable, a perceived increase in crime and growing wealth inequality, it is also transparently false that these sources of legitimate suffering reflect a plot by liberal elites to “replace” them.

Still, the right-wing grievance machine continues to spew out narratives of victimization. Consider former Fox News star Tucker Carlson’s opening monologue from 2022, in which he opposed aid to Ukraine while seeking to stir up feelings of grievance in irrational, dangerous and counterfeit ways:

There is nothing in the world worse than finding out that your deepest fears are justified…. That’s the nightmare scenario, that there really is a zombie in the closet…. Let's say you're a kid and you've convinced yourself that your parents really don't love you… They claim they do, but you can tell they don’t really mean it, that they aren’t being sincere…. And then one Christmas morning, confirmation! …

You discover that they've forgotten to buy you presents … it just slipped their mind. Instead, they spent all their time and all their money buying gifts for a kid down the street that you don’t even know. … So all the things that you asked for, they gave to another 9-year-old…. Well, how would that make you feel? You would be crushed but you would also be vindicated … you would know with dead certainty that your parents really didn’t love you…. They're not really even very interested in you.

That's how a lot of Americans felt last night watching the House of Representatives approve another aid package to Ukraine.… Nothing against Ukraine, but we could probably use a lot of that money here right now.

Carlson’s rendering of his adult audience as unloved, betrayed and abandoned children is common today in conservative political circles. This kind of rhetoric produces counterfeit victims. It’s like a race to the bottom, where the group that can make the best case for being victimized earns the most care, concern and outrage. Trump, of course, is the ultimate victim. When announcing his third presidential run, he said, “We will be attacked. We will be slandered. We will be persecuted, just as I have been.”

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There is another, darker side to the victim mentality. The belief in one’s own victimization is the ultimate rationale for striking out at others without guilt or remorse. It is like a ”Get Out of Jail Free” card, justifying heinous actions by reframing them as revenge, retaliation or even a form of twisted self-care, because the “right” to fight back is now morally justified. We see this all the time, including in the debates about the morality of the current conflict in Gaza. Jewish suffering in the Holocaust justifies the killing of Palestinian civilians. The catastrophes Palestinians have suffered since the Nakba of 1948 are used by Hamas as a justification for its atrocities.

So when Carlson tells people that evil Democratic elites are ruthlessly trying to replace them, the resulting sense of victimization that he evokes easily becomes a justification for right-wing violence. Why would storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 be “bad” if those doing the storming were fighting against an insidious plot to take away their freedoms? If the election was stolen, then stealing it back makes moral sense. If brown people are being given unbridled access to our borders, benefits and jobs — as part of a sinister plot by liberal Democrats to replace hard-working white Americans — then putting immigrants in cages and breaking up their families can easily seem morally legitimate. It should come as no surprise that victims often become victimizers. We see it all the time in the observation that those who abuse children were themselves often abused as children.

When Tucker Carlson tells his audience that Democratic elites are ruthlessly trying to replace them, the sense of victimization that he evokes becomes a justification for right-wing violence.

Finally, consider all the ways that victimhood alleviates guilt. If we feel guilty about hurting others, that guilt can be diminished by drumming up a story about how those “others” are, in the first place, hurting us. Making oneself into a victim “solves” the problem. In this way, victimhood can seem almost morally adaptive; after all, a victim can’t really be condemned for acting in self-defense.

Some might argue that counterfeit claims of victimization can be seen on the left as well. There are certainly examples of students and consumers of culture making suspect claims that certain words or images traumatize them. Painter Phillip Guston was unable to show works that included bizarre figurations of people in Ku Klux Klan robes, a proscription lifted only when viewers were given a pamphlet written by a “trauma specialist” urging them to “identify your boundaries and take care of yourself,” and offering a detour around the Klan-themed works. More recently, an art history professor at Hamline University in Minnesota was fired for showing her class a 14th=century painting of the prophet Muhammad, because many religious Muslims (although not all) view visual depictions of the Prophet as blasphemous. At a town hall, an invited Muslim speaker even compared showing the images to teaching that Hitler was good.

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Some people can be made uncomfortable by hearing or seeing these kinds of “triggers” — but a trigger is not the same as a trauma. It’s difficult to equate seeing a controversial painting or hearing a professor voice an unpopular view with a returning combat veteran who has PTSD and dives to the sidewalk when a nearby car backfires. Furthermore, shaming or punishing authority figures for such perceived transgressions almost always leads to dangerous forms of censorship.

So there is no equivalence or symmetry between the ways that the right and left make claims of counterfeit victimization. Broadly speaking, progressives have identified with victims and fought to defend and care for them. Modern conservatives like Trump and Carlson, however, are basically propagandizing when they position themselves and their audiences as injured parties in order to justify anti-democratic and xenophobic measures aimed at seizing, holding and expanding their power. Their aim isn’t to defend victims, but to stir up a mob that they hope will get rid of the democratic norms that currently provide some restraint against their political aims.

It would be demeaning and patronizing to deny the suffering that real people in the real world endure when they are victimized. But when a media or political figure pushes a corrupt agenda designed to promote a counterfeit story of victimization, and run it up their respective flagpoles to advance narrow political self-interest, their actions threaten to victimize all of us.

about mental health and the American right

Meet the New Apostolic Reformation, cutting edge of the Christian right

Lance Wallnau’s book, “God’s Chaos Candidate” played a significant role in solidifying evangelical support for Donald Trump in 2016, brushing aside concerns about his obvious lack of morality.

Paula White-Cain gave the invocation at Trump’s inauguration in 2017, at his re-election campaign kick-off in 2019 and his Jan. 6, 2021, pre-insurrection rally. On the second occasion, she gave what experts describe as a ‘spiritual warfare’ prayer: “Let every demonic network that is aligned itself against the purpose, against the calling of President Trump, let it be broken, let it be torn down in the name of Jesus.”

Dutch Sheets engaged in a swing-state “prayer and prophecy tour” after Joe Biden’s election in November 2020, playing a leading role in building religious support for the Jan. 6 insurrection, in coordination with Trump’s White House.

All three are prominent members of a rapidly-growing, anti-democratic religious movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation, which few Americans have heard of, except in passing or by way of heated denials. But a new book from Canadian scholar André Gagné, “American Evangelicals for Trump: Dominion, Spiritual Warfare, and the End Times,” could change that, as the NAR seems poised to play an even bigger political role in 2024.

"Unfriending" America: The Christian right is coming for the enemies of God — like you and me

Gagné’s book is “a concise, authoritative primer on one of the most consequential religious and political movements of our time,” said Frederick Clarkson, a senior research analyst at Political Research Associates (and Salon contributor), in a recent online discussion. While the NAR may be confusing to outsiders, Gagné shows that it’s knowable, Clarkson said, as the most energetic popular expression of dominionism, defined as “the theocratic idea that … Christians are called by God to exercise dominion over every aspect of society by taking control of political and cultural institutions.”

While the online discussion itself was conducted off the record, Gagné, Clarkson and several other participants engaged with Salon afterwards.

In 2011, Lance Wallnau told his followers, “If you're talking to a secular audience, you don't talk about having dominion over them. This … language of takeover, it doesn't actually help."

“Too many of the larger public, and too many who report news, know little about this movement,” said John Dorhauer, recently retired general minister and president of the United Church of Christ, via email. “The trap one must avoid in writing about this subject and reporting on the movement is to do so in a way that comes across as credible without sounding like a conspiracy theorist. The truth is you are in fact writing about a conspiracy. Because of that, large swaths of the American public are just predisposed to dismiss this as too far-fetched to take seriously.”

Gagné’s book is significant, Dorhauer said, because he clarifies and differentiates “various ideologies, theologies and end-game scenarios” in ways particularly helpful to “those of us looking to think strategically about how to offset the damage to our democracy.”

NAR, Clarkson explained, is hard to understand because it is “constantly changing, [and] has factions in tension with one another. … They are wily because they are worried that the rest of society will figure out who they are and what they are up to.”

Wallnau himself advised caution to his followers in a 2011 discussion: “If you're talking to a secular audience you don't talk about having dominion over them. This whole idea of taking over and that language of takeover, it doesn't actually help. It's good for preaching to the choir and it's shorthand if we interpret it right, but it's very bad for media.”

Researcher Bruce Wilson describes NAR as “highly experimental, always trying new things to see what work. The star megachurch ministries, among which are Bill Johnson's Bethel Church in Redding, California, Mike Bikel's IHOP in Kansas City, and Rick Joyner's Morningstar in South Carolina, are all hotbeds of innovation,” he said. Wilson says he has uncovered well-funded programs launched “to obscure, to confuse and confound reporters and journalists and academics who are writing about and discussing dominionist Christianity.”

The "most radical change" since the Protestant Reformation

Arguably the greatest strength of Gagné’s book is its “focus on how [NAR] adherents speak of their beliefs and practices,” as he describes it, providing a coherent, objective record that can that’s not an outsider’s interpretation — thus evading an objection that religious conservatives have invoked for decades when subject to unwanted scrutiny. This is reflected both in the book’s origin and in its crucial explanation of the NAR, which C. Peter Wagner, who coined the term, described as “the most radical change in how churches operate since the Protestant Reformation.”

Rather than focusing inward on nurturing their local congregations under the guidance of elected church elders, NAR churches focus outward through networks in alignment with other churches, under the guidance of higher-up “apostles,” to engage in “spiritual warfare” against demonic forces, and conquer the “seven mountains of culture” and establish dominion over all the world. As Dorhauer says, it really is a conspiracy aimed at controlling the world — in the name of Jesus, of course, with the self-reinforcing network of apostles and prophets claiming authority in his name.

The book had its origins on Twitter, Gagné explained, as he applied knowledge from his two fields of interest — ancient biblical texts (he has translated the Gospel of Thomas) and the ways people make sense of them — to help people understand Trump’s seemingly unlikely appeal to religious voters.

“I did long threads about evangelicals and the Bible, and the reception of the Bible by evangelicals and their fascination with power and with Trump,” he told me. Initially, his biggest audience was in Europe, which led to the first version of this book being published in French in September 2000. “I wrote it in about three months because the deadline was very short,” he recalled. This in turn spurred interest in an English translation, now published with an additional preface, epilogue and indices.

This really is a conspiracy aimed at controlling the world — in the name of Jesus, of course, with a self-reinforcing network of apostles and prophets claiming authority in his name.

By focusing on the words of those involved, Gagné cuts through enormous amounts of confusion around the NAR. Its defining characteristic, he writes, “relates to the ‘amount of spiritual authority delegated by the Holy Spirit to individuals,’” which was also “applicable to non-charismatic church leaders.”

The NAR model, he writes, “revolves around the restoration of the five-fold ministry [a concept drawn from Ephesians, referring to apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers] and an apostolic system of governance. This model challenges the democratic structures of churches,” essentially reversing the Protestant Reformation’s centering of the individual believer working out their own salvation, and its democratic church governance structures based on systems of elders.

“Wagner never saw himself as the founder of the NAR, but rather coined the term ‘New Apostolic Reformation’ to describe something that he believed already existed,” Gagné told me. For example, Wagner cited the “African independent church movement” of the early 20th century and the “Chinese rural house church movement that was around in the mid-1970s. And then he talks about the third large component of the NAR, which for him was the grassroots church movement in Latin America,” also in the 1970s.

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What Wagner saw in these examples and others, Gagné said, “was a new mode of church governance which focused on apostolic leadership and networks.” So he didn’t claim credit for the idea, but did create new networks to sustain the NAR both in America and around the world, “most notably the International Coalition of Apostolic Leaders and its U.S. affiliate, USCAL.” Wagner even included “all sorts of individuals and groups and churches” who might object to their inclusion in the NAR, another source of confusion. But while he wanted to include all sorts of churches with strong, charismatic leadership, the vast majority of NAR leaders and followers are “neo-charismatic Pentecostals,” or NCPs as Gagné calls them.

Wilson takes a more microscopic approach to determine who is or isn't in the NAR. “My benchmark or heuristic for figuring that out is: Do they work together, and do they seem to be advancing a common political agenda?” he said. “In my experience, the NAR is all about networking, and who individual leaders network with, associate with, is everything.”

Dominion theology, "victorious eschatology" and the Seven Mountain Mandate

When it comes to theology, Gagné focuses on the “idea of wanting to establish the kingdom of God on earth, the notion of dominion,” a thread long present in evangelical Christianity, but largely more as an aspiration than a master plan, as it is for the NAR. “Wagner was clear on what had influenced him in terms of dominion theology,” Gagné said, and specifically referenced Calvinist philosopher and theologian R.J. Rushdoony, the founder of what is known as “Christian Reconstruction.” (See Julie Ingersoll’s book "Building God's Kingdom: Inside the World of Christian Reconstructionism,” and a Salon interview.)

Another important influence was onetime evangelical bishop Earl Paulk, who “popularized a teaching that is called ‘kingdom now,’” Gagné said, which claimed that “Christ in us must take dominion over the earth…. The next move of God cannot occur until Christ in us takes dominion.”

It’s worth noting here that the dominionist belief in dramatically expanding Christians’ power over the secular world is inherently in conflict with previously more popular evangelical beliefs that the sinful world should be left behind, as reflected in the popular “Left Behind” novel series. In contrast, Gagné said, “Wagner had a view which is called ‘victorious eschatology,” where he links that idea to dominion theology.” He quotes Wagner saying, “We no longer accept the idea that society will get worse and worse, because we now believe God’s mandate is to transform society, so it gets better and better.”

If victorious eschatology and dominion theology fit together, so do two other elements of the NAR philosophy. The first of those is the “Seven Mountain Mandate,” an idea first developed in the mid-70s by Lauren Cunningham and Bill Bright.

The dominionist belief in dramatically expanding Christians’ power over the secular world is inherently in conflict with previously more popular evangelical beliefs that the sinful world should be left behind.

“The Seven Mountain Mandate is not a theology, it's more of a strategic marketing tool to mobilize people,” Gagné explained. “If Christians are to rule … that's what I call the political theology of power. But how do you mobilize people to act upon that idea? You come up with a mobilizing strategy and that strategy is the Seven Mountain Mandate.” The mountains represent different aspects of culture: religion, politics, education, family, business, arts and entertainment, and media. “The goal is to have Christians in influential positions — maybe at the top of those mountains — to influence the culture of each of the sectors of society. And when you do that you will exercise dominion. This is how you bring about God's kingdom.”

The leading promoter of this idea was Lance Wallnau, whose book “Invading Babylon – The 7 Mountains Mandate” points toward another important element: the idea of spiritual warfare. That has long been part of evangelical rhetoric, but Wagner dramatically expanded on it in the 1990s, identifying three distinct levels.

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The first, “ground-level spiritual warfare,” involves things like exorcism and the casting out of demons, akin to the powers Jesus supposedly conferred on his disciples. The second, “occult-level spiritual warfare,” involved battling demonic powers acting through purportedly occult practices, meaning anything from yoga to Satanism to New Age spirituality. The third, “strategic-level spiritual warfare,” involves battling against an imagined hierarchy of high-ranking demonic spirits that control geographic and demographic entities, along with the demonic networks aligned against Trump that Paula White-Cain prayed to be broken and torn down.

All of this, Gagné says, is based on profoundly misreading the Bible. NAR leaders “are not always willing to anchor the reading of the Bible according to more traditional Christian interpretation — and even less so on scholarly exegesis. There's a lot of subjective interpretation, there's a lot of ‘I'm reading myself into the Bible and into the stories of the Bible.’ We need to be very very careful in how we contextualize these passages on spiritual warfare. There's no place in the New Testament where Christians are actually called to actively pursue the devil, to actively engage against spiritual forces,” he stressed. “When you read Ephesians 6, and it says you take on ‘the whole armor of God,’ it's a metaphor for faith and the word of God and salvation … this gives you strength to resist the devil. It's a very personal fight. It's not like I'm engaging the devil left and right against principalities and powers all over the place.”

Gagné has been reading the works of the early Christian monks known as the “Desert Fathers.” “They talk about spiritual war. And spiritual warfare is within them,” he said. “It's about mastering the passions that are leading you astray from God's will. It's not about engaging adversaries left and right that don't agree with you politically. There's none of that in the Bible.”

Spiritual warfare and the 2020 election

“Since the Trump presidency, and especially since the advent of Paula White-Cain as a spiritual adviser close to Trump, there has been a mainstreaming of spiritual warfare,” Gagné said. “She's the one that had the most visible platform to practice this, and we have multitudes of videos to prove this,” such as White-Cain’s aforementioned invocation at Trump’s first re-election rally, featuring a "spiritual warfare prayer” that includes “demonizing Trump's political adversaries."

Now, Gagné says, “all that language is out in public. Everybody's hearing this constantly," and right-wing political figures "are using this more and more as ways to demonize their political adversaries, to disqualify them.”

Spiritual warfare rhetoric and ideology intensified over the course of the 2020 election campaign, along with prophecies of Trump’s re-election as God’s instrument. But that "didn't turn out so well,” Gagne noted wryly, and pro-Trump “prophets wound up looking very bad.” Denial was the first response of many, who took part in various protests culminating on Jan. 6, when White-Cain spoke at the rally where Trump exhorted the crowd to go to the Capitol and “fight like hell.”

A day earlier, Trump’s hyper-Christian supporters held a “Jericho March" around the Supreme Court, where the imagery was “extremely violent,” Gagné said, driven by visions “of destruction, death … conquering one's political adversaries, turning over the actual regime. It's not surprising that [we saw] Christians involved in the storming of the Capitol with their banners and their shofars because of all this hyped-up spiritual warfare rhetoric. That was the consequence. It's an unwillingness to accept the results of democracy.”

"It's not surprising that we saw Christians involved in storming the Capitol with their banners and their shofars because of all this hyped-up spiritual warfare rhetoric. That was the consequence.”

Trump’s “big lie” was most popular among NAR believers, but also produced a split that seems to have grown more serious. In April 2021, a group of NAR leaders posted a Prophetic Standards Statement “designed to increase accountability while continuing to encourage and support this gift” (meaning the gift of prophecy), as Charisma magazine described it. But many of the most high-profile apostles and prophets didn’t sign on. Gagné and Clarkson have written about the unfolding rift here and here.

The situation now highlights both the NAR’s strengths and weaknesses. “Their strength is that they're stealth,” Gagné said. “Nobody has to carry a card to be part of the NAR,” which is essentially a movement of ideas that now “boasts now some 2000 apostles in 85 different countries across the world.” But the lack of rigid structure also feeds into the movement’s weakness, including the ideological or theological schisms that have recently appeared.

“Media has a very important role to play in speaking about this movement and how it will use the levers of democracy to eventually subvert democracy,” Gagné said. “If we don't get it right, people can't understand what it is.”

One major obstacle, Wilson warns, is the right-wing infrastructure meant to obscure and protect dominionism. His research has uncovered a group of sympathetic ultra-wealthy individuals known as the Gathering, who he says meet monthly. “They have experts to advise them on how to best invest their philanthropic dollars to advance the kingdom — that's explicitly what it's about." They’ve also “created their own program to advance the careers of young scholars going into the Ivy League.”

Wilson also cited “another operation called the Faith Angle Forum, which grooms journalists — it misinforms and misleads journalists about the religious right in a very advanced way” at all-expenses-paid retreats targeting “top journalists from all the top venues — the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Atlantic.” Wilson says he has audio recordings of founder Michael Cromartie “talking about how the Washington Post went to him to select good reporters to cover religion. Basically Cromartie was on the Rolodex of every religion and politics reporter of any note.”

One resource to help counter this is a three-part “reporters guide” to NAR that Gagné and Clarkson wrote for Religion Dispatches. It’s a helpful start, but more will be needed. Gagné’s book, as Clarkson notes, it’s “at once the primer for beginners and a guide for the perplexed for those who are already tackling it.”

“The rise to power of House Speaker Mike Johnson, himself an active participant in the NAR, makes this work on this subject so important,” Dorhauer said. “We are very late in the game trying to figure out what happened, who made it happen, what their motives are, what their endgame is, and how we stop this.”

One of Gagné’s final points is that “We have to stop mocking” the NAR and other dominionists, “because these people are very serious…. We have to stop downplaying it and put a light on it and say, ‘They believe this.’ We're not the measure of the entire world. People have different ways of conceptualizing the world and how people should live in it.” The important response, he said, is “taking it very seriously, and reporting about it very seriously. Politicians should know about it also, and should do what is necessary to make sure that America remains a pluralistic and democratic society.”

about the Christian right's resurgence

America’s addiction to awful people

It may be a new year, but America remains mired in a myriad of national dysfunction. The list is endless: A close ally continues to an immoral human rights disaster, Republican madness is ramping up at the behest of Donald Trump and we suffered through yet another return by the father of North and Saint West who shall not be named deciding to take fashion inspiration from the Ku Klux Klan for his latest “give me attention” moment.

But if there is one thing that is truly emblematic of our society in the United States that fully encapsulates our preference for vain flash instead of solid substance, it is the desperate decision by former Showtime comedy personality Ziwe Fuhmode to pursue and conduct an interview with the scammer of our times, George Santos.

In the aftermath of her cable show being canceled last April, Ziwe has spent her post Showtime period being online famous in continuing her spicy brand of witty, wisecrack colloquial humor. She has assembled a popular TikTok page of over one million followers and still maintains an active IG page filled with her growing number of glamorous photoshoots. The Massachusetts native of Nigerian descent also just released her first book, “Black Friend:Essays.”

Let's stop funding George Santos' theatrical dishonesty – he's not even a good liar

But this move by Fumudoh to interview arguably the most fraudulent person in the world – and whose name we still aren’t completely sure is actually his – after all his power has been completely taken away from him, with his historic expulsion from the House of Representatives, unfortunately displays why her promising show barely lasted longer than his clownish Congressional career. The shtick of a shock interviewer is far from a novel concept with the likes of Martin Short, Zionist supporter Sacha Baron Cohen and Zach Galifianakis being among the most notable to engage in the hit or miss format. Ziwe is clearly a descendant of that approach with her career either interning or working for The Daily Show, Colbert Report, The Onion, The Rundown with Robin Thede and finally Desus and Mero before Showtime greenlit her own series. No one can question the intelligence of the Phillips Academy and Northwestern alum’s antagonizing, acerbic questions and how effective her approach can be with the right interviewee. Her Instagram Live hilarious roasting of social media influencer Caroline Calloway for her hollow white privilege race solidarity a few weeks into the George Floyd-inspired summer 2020 protests is Ziwe at her promising best. Calloway is the type of person where her routine is most effective: exposing those of notoriety, fame and powerful influence who haven’t yet faced the accountability spotlight.

Instead, comedic accountability interviews with a meaningful, revealing purpose can only be effective if the guest isn’t already a proven, discredited individual who only benefits from receiving more underserved camera time. And when that nutcase you so barely want to get the giggles on with is someone like Santos, the phrase “you can’t shame the already shameless' ' applies aptly in Ziwe’s misguided pursuit for the phony-in-chief.

Her comedic talent does get her little share of funny digs at Santos when he tries to be serious. However, Ziwe unfortunately plays right into Santos’ apathetic hands when he decides to troll her right back with his own smart aleck psyche. It leads to the defining moment of not only the interview, but a grim paradigm of where mainstream American culture is at the moment.

Knowing that she hasn’t gotten Santos to angrily storm out of the interview in his pure narcissistic diva ways – or demand from him that she not air their conversation anywhere that she deeply wanted – Ziwe was left with firing intentionally rude questions that was only going to spur Santos to send back sassy, viral-esque retorts.

“What can we do to get you to go away?” Ziwe pointedly asked.

“Stop inviting me to your gigs,” Santos coolly fired back.

Taking a pause to gather herself from his blunt answer, the comedian tried again to one-up the mendacious ghoul.

“The lesson is to stop inviting you places,” she buzzed.

“But you can’t ‘cause people want the content,” a mischievous, smiling Santos countered.

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And therein lies that humorous yet disturbing truth of our current times. Santos, a person normally immune to a life of truth, correctly called Ziwe out for why she would pursue a sit-down talk with him knowing that he is the ultimate loathsome charlatan. Her sometimes annoying desire to feel much more superior, more sophisticated and cooler than the other person that’s adjacent to her interrogations had come back to bite her.Although it is not repulsive like Santos’ narcissism, Ziwe’s ego of trying to remind us all how superior she is leads to her in this unwanted interview becoming the butt of her own joke, thanks to Santos’ unwavering shamelessness. The shiny objects of viewership traffic, shared posts and retweeted clips, along with the joy of dunking all over Santos, were the only goals for Ziwe here. And the first part of that mission was accomplished. Her Santos interview easily became her most viewed YouTube video 24 hours after it was published, and her first million-viewed video on the site. It also provided big numbers for her TikTok and IG pages, and now thought pieces about it like the one you are currently reading.

But Ziwe also gave a clear win to an all-time fool in Santos, as a myriad of “He’s awful, but he ate her” responses throughout social media have come to even praise him for clowning Ziwe’s “how can we make you go away” question. One couldn’t help but deduce sadly that she needed him more, in her deep hopes that he would say yes, then he needed her. It’s a sense of victory Santos carries with him out of the interview, despite Ziwe getting him to embarrassingly admit to not knowing who American LGBTQ+ political icons Marsha P Johnson, James Baldwin and Harvey Milk were. Her quest to score more funny points on him made her forget to circle back on hammering him relentlessly for being so ignorant of a trio of gay icons, or his various lies about being Black. Or asking him about being charged with endless federal crimes of theft, wire fraud, false statements and many more criminal practices. Or if his name is even George Santos? Instead, her primary pursuit to further showcase herself as the comedian of our times led to him creating his own comedy memorable moment at her (and our) expense.

America’s overall, problematic desire to entertain, tolerate and even worship toxic, irredeemable people reaches new nadirs daily, with this meeting becoming the latest entry in that depressing list. With Santos’ fitting hero, the Disaster-in-Tweet (Trump), remaining a frightening political force as he still simultaneously faces jail time in a variety of different ways, 2024 does not look promising to this country curbing its addiction to provenly awful characters. As Salon’s Melanie McFarland recently wrote of Santos, he’s “nakedly performing the strategy that may return Donald Trump to power and, more frightfully, keep him there, which is that he follows orders like a champ.”

Hopefully Ziwe will shake off that insatiable vice as she begins her return to the comedy interviewing business. But her desire for any collaborative content with a parasitic leech like Santos is a sign that these harmful troll talks will keep hurting our eyes in the new year.

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Lauren Boebert blames district swap on Barbra Streisand

Days after Lauren Boebert made the announcement that she is switching from Colorado's 3rd Congressional District to run in Colorado's 4th Congressional District in the upcoming 2024 elections, she made an appearance on former Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s podcast where she discussed what prompted her to make this bold change.

During their chat, Bannon made mention of how Democrats raised $10m against her since her 2022 race, mostly from the ski town of Aspen, and she expressed a belief that the switch will better the odds for a conservative candidate such as herself, adding that even celebrities have it out for her.

“They do not have policies that they are running on, they're simply running against Lauren Boebert,” she said. “And it's not just Aspen that the money is coming from. It's coming from Hollywood when you have Barbra Streisand coming in and donating to the Democrat. When you have Ryan Reynolds coming in and donating to the Democrat, it shows you that Hollywood is trying to buy their way into Congress.”

Watch here:

Boebert says Barbara Streisand and Ryan Reynolds caused her to abandon her congressional district. pic.twitter.com/YUTvMjnoHH

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) January 1, 2024

My weight loss journey with Oprah – and losing the shame of wanting to be thin

I’m old enough to remember Oprah Winfrey wheeling out a red Radio Flyer wagon stacked with 67 pounds of fat to represent all the weight she’d lost in just four months. She twirled around in her size 10 Calvin Klein jeans, her face gaunt, soaking up the applause. I watched, fascinated by her dramatic transformation, wanting the same for myself. It was October 1988, and I was a junior in high school, consumed by a desire to be thin, even as I mainlined fries on late-night McDonald’s runs, speeding home with the windows rolled down so my parents wouldn’t detect the stench of stale grease in our family Volvo.

I didn’t want to exist in the world as a fat person.

It didn’t take long for Oprah’s body to start expanding again. I watched in horror as she grew bigger and bigger, my hopes of transforming into a skinny person dashed. If Oprah couldn’t stay thin, with her army of cooks and personal trainers, what hope did I have for myself, pretending to be satisfied by a single sawdust-y Fig Newton, a cookie that, along with cockroaches, could survive a nuclear winter?

Shaping morality: How weight loss drugs challenge the myth of thinness as a virtue

I’ve watched Oprah expand and contract over the years, her trajectory eerily like my own. In recent years, Oprah’s weight seemed to stay consistent. She looked curvy and healthy and happy, like she’d reached a detente with her weight struggles and had attained that Zen-like state of self-acceptance so many in the body positive movement appear to have.

Then I saw the recent videos of her on the red carpet at "The Color Purple" premiere and had to look twice. She was thinner. She looked great, but just thinking that felt like a betrayal to my feeble attempts to prize health over svelte. My first thought was Ozempic, but initially, she denied taking the drug. She’d said, in a recent panel she hosted on weight loss and obesity, that she didn’t want to take drugs, because that would be “the easy way out.” Then a few days ago, she publicly admitted to taking them. Initially, I was disappointed – my icon still pined for a smaller body no matter her age or her income? Here was a woman who seemingly had everything, still plagued by body image issues. Yet, I understood. That desire to be thin never vanishes, no matter how hard we try to convince ourselves we’re OK in our bigger bodies.

The reality is there’s no easy way out of the matrix of fatness and societal shame surrounding it. I would have done just about anything to be thin, and in fact, two years ago, I did. I underwent gastric sleeve surgery to lose weight. By then, I’d put on another 25 pounds during COVID, living alone, cooped up in my home, with nothing else to look forward to at the end of the day except Trader Joe’s fried egg rolls dripping with sticky sweet and sour sauce, followed by milk and Oreos. That tipped the scales to 300, almost 150 pounds more than I’d weighed in high school, when I believed I was fat.

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There’s no easy way out because there’s no miracle cure. Pills, surgery, SlimFast, starvation provide short-term dramatic effects that are easily reversed. Weight loss drugs aren’t meant to be taken indefinitely, and most people report weight gain once they stop taking them. The blissful hunger-free honeymoon period after weight loss surgery wears off, and after a year or two, you can eat as much as you used to. The hunger returns, and then, often, so does the weight. It is fighting a tidal wave of cravings and genetics, of physical and emotional needs, of a deep, animal desire for food, to maintain your weight, to stave off the pounds. No matter how well I’m doing, how successfully I’m controlling my weight, I will always live with an undercurrent of fear that one slice of chocolate cake will be my undoing, that it will be the lure that trips the switch in my brain to eat and eat and eat, to slide back into fatness. And honestly, I would rather die.

“I looooove bread,” she’d say emphatically, a little too naked with need for the fat person’s drug of choice: carbs.

For years, I tried to accept my large body. I followed body-positive influencers, I ditched my black t-shirt tent dress and invested in some colorful plus-sized clothes, but the desire to be thin never left me. I scrolled through vintage clothing sites, salivating over clothes that wouldn’t come close to fitting while I slathered bread with Brie. My entire life has been a pendulum swinging between my depressed, fat years and my striving to be thin and stay that way.

I’ve followed Oprah’s journey as I’ve gone through my own. I bought the cookbook "In the Kitchen with Rosie: Oprah’s Favorite Recipes" right out of college, determined to lose the 50 pounds I’d gained after transferring schools and struggling to make friends. I tried her recipes, followed her workout regimens, soaked up the advice of every weight loss guru.

In my late 20s, after finishing graduate school, I went through a terrible breakup and moved back to Alabama and lived with my parents. Jobless, directionless and sneaking chocolate chip cookies from the ceramic Cookie Monster jar, like I’d done throughout my childhood, though my brothers were no longer around to blame for the dwindling supply, I watched Oprah in the afternoons with my mother. We sat at opposite ends of the couch, and I shielded my face with my hand, silent-crying while watching Oprah give away cars and blenders and stereos to everyone in the audience. I cried because I felt like a failure. I cried, because while I sat there like a lump, accomplishing nothing, expanding back into plus sizes, there was Oprah, a large woman doing good deeds, making a mark on the world. I could be successful, regardless of my size, but I didn’t want to be. I didn’t want to exist in the world as a fat person.

By the time Oprah bought Weight Watchers and rebranded it as WW, focusing on the healthy lifestyle, pretending like it wasn’t entirely about watching our weight go up and down, I’d been on four or five WW journeys. We spent a lot of time in the meetings talking about donuts.

That Christmas, 2015, I was the heaviest I’d ever been at 276 pounds, and I watched countless commercials of Oprah waxing on about the brilliance of WW, because you could eat bread. “I looooove bread,” she’d say emphatically, a little too naked with need for the fat person’s drug of choice: carbs.

A year later, I started WW again and lost almost 75 pounds, just shy of getting into “Onederland,” the magical land under 200 pounds that everyone in WW dreams of with the same fervor as donuts. I gained all that weight back and then some after major surgery in 2018.

When I finally decided to undergo weight loss surgery, after considering it for years, I had to fill out a bunch of paperwork, my large frame dwarfed by the enormous waiting room chairs at the bariatric clinic, and one form listed out every possible weight loss method you could imagine, with a box next to it, to check if you’d tried it. There were the usual suspects: Atkins, Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, followed by stranger things: the cabbage soup diet, juicing, jaw wiring. Jaw wiring? For real? It sounded so Draconian, like when I used to joke about padlocking my refrigerator to force myself to stop eating. But wasn’t having two-thirds of your stomach removed just as crazy? It didn’t matter. I would have tried anything at that point. I had entire closets full of clothes I’d never worn that I’d dreamed of fitting into for years, trying to make the best of my fat body, artfully draping it in the paltry options available to larger women.

I’ve felt a lot of shame for my need to be thin – for not being above it all, for not being a feminist.

Over the next year and a half, I lost 150 pounds. I lost an entire person. My clothes started to fit: all the vintage dresses I’d collected over the years, like the 1940s swing dresses that swooshed as I walked. I swanned about. I could cross my legs with ease. I could hold downward dog for minutes at a time. I could hike for miles and miles without pain. I was exactly the person I’d always wanted to be. But it never quite feels like a victory I can settle into, for as anyone who’s ever struggled with their weight knows, you live in fear of gaining it back. Hunger is an enemy to be warded off every single day. For a year I was hungry, but I couldn’t eat much at a time, but in the last six months, I’ve been able to eat normal portions, and I am often hungry. I crave sugar. Like Oprah in her WW commercial, I love bread. I love cookies. I want them all the time. So, every day is a fight to distract myself from the cravings, to choose broccoli over baked goods.

I’ve felt a lot of shame for my need to be thin – for not being above it all, for not being a feminist who says f**k the system that is rigged against us and eating what I want without apology. But there’s a stronger urge that’s impossible to resist – to be thin, to look a certain way, to be admired instead of invisible, or worse, to be noticed with pity and disdain. The larger I got, the more elephantine I felt, the harder I tried to hide. Now all I want is to be seen, to dress like a rainbow and wear beautiful clothes and to take up space because I take up so much less space.

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I have a weird need for Oprah to be happy, because it feels like our happiness is intertwined. People like us will never relinquish the desire to be thin. That craving is singularly overpowered by our desire for food. I hate being beholden to what feels like vanity, but is that vanity coming from me, or is it simply a response to a world that requires thinness from me? I didn't create this system, I'm just trying to live within it. Like Oprah, I'm not going to be shamed for my desire to be thin. If I start gaining weight again, I will take a pill. I will endure nausea. I will do irrational things to stay thin, because I’ve never felt better.

about this topic

A resolution you can keep: Here’s how to eat less meat in 2024

I don't make New Year's resolutions — I disappoint myself enough all year round as it is — but I do like setting modest goals. Making small changes that are achievable and that I can stick with has always been far more constructive to my well-being than setting arbitrary aims I'm never going to achieve anyway. That's why this year, I'm not going to become a vegan. I'm not even going to become a vegetarian. I'm just going to try lean more in to where I've been going for a while now, and consume fewer animal products. That doesn't sound like such a big lift, right? You can try it too, and there are a lot of good reasons to.

First, there's our increasingly hot planet to think about. As Naoki Nitta wrote earlier this year, "Research shows that even a modest skew away from meat-based diets can shrink an individual’s carbon footprint as much as 75%." The journal Science of the Total Environment estimates that "Replacing beef with beans in the US could free up 42% of US cropland and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 334 mmt [million metric tons], accomplishing 75% of the 2020 carbon reduction target."

Then there are the physical benefits. When an otherwise healthy family member got some shocking results on a lipid panel recently, the doctor's advice was unambiguous — dramatically reduce meat and dairy consumption, or go on daily medication. It was an easy call. Non-meat eaters are also less likely to be obese or experience heart disease, and may have lower risks for diabetes 2 and certain cancers. A more plant-based diet can also be easier on the wallet. It's not just about opting out of pricey steaks, either. Egg prices have risen 70% over the past year, and milk prices are also on the upswing.

And then there are animals themselves. The ecosystem and ethics around eating animals are complex, but it is a whole lot easier to feel part of a more respectful, sustainable system when you just eat less meat and know where it's coming from.

Jessica Seinfeld on being a part-time vegan: "If I can do it, anyone can do it"

Yet for all of the compelling reasons to prioritize non meat and dairy options in our diets, it can be challenging to put into practice. Americans eat the most meat per capita of any nation on earth — and despite the increasing amount of vegan options available at the supermarket, our meat consumption is rising.

In my own life, I don't need a steak a day, but I don't want to eliminate anything entirely. It can be frustrating, though. I don't like most meat and dairy substitutes, and am as skeptical of their purported health benefits as I am of the taste (not to mention the cost). The notion of swapping out a great prosciutto with an ersatz version is just never going to happen for me. I likewise know that I feel better when I keep fish and eggs in my dietary rotation. I also just really love butter. Writing in 2019, Dariush Mozaffarian, Dean of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, explained it simply. "Not all animal-based foods are bad," he said. "Conversely, many of the worst foods are plant-based."

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So what we do to gently tweak our habits in a different direction, especially when we're living and cooking with other people whose tastes and needs may be different?

"There are lots of strategies available for people who would like to decrease their consumption of animal products without a feeling of deprivation," says Sarah Skovran, a registered dietitian nutritionist and personal trainer with a private practice in Maine. "One is to incorporate something many people have already heard of: Meatless Monday. This gives you a chance to experiment with new recipes or ways of eating, knowing that the very next day you'll be returning to things you're used to. Chances are that during these Mondays, you'll find things you like just as much as you're old stand-bys, and you might decide to eat that way more often."

Skrovan also advises heading off hunger. "Make sure you're hitting all your nutritional needs," she advises. "For a lot of people, fullness is affected by how much protein and fat they're eating. Incorporating high protein foods like tofu, beans, and quinoa, as well as healthy fats like olive oil, nuts and nut butter, and avocado can help to ensure you don't feel hungry even when you know you're eating plenty." And if you're meal planning with family members with different diets, she suggests "Make most of the meal plant-based, then add the protein at the end to individual servings. Have a veggie stir-fry, then add meat for some people and tofu for others. Make a BLT, using bacon for some people and tempeh or mushroom bacon for others." It doesn't have to be complicated — when I made a vegan chili with corn chips for my family recently, I put shredded cheddar and vegan cheddar for the table for people to top their bowls as they chose.

"One of the simplest ways that you can cut your meat consumption is to target specific types of meat."

Another easy to implement tactic is to start with just one thing. "One of the simplest ways that you can cut your meat consumption in a way that will be good for your health and the environment without going cold turkey is to target specific types of meat," says Catherine Rall, a registered dietician with the wellness company Happy V. "Generally speaking, beef is one of the most environmentally intensive meats to produce. Cows need a lot of arable land that could be used more efficiently for other purposes. They also need huge amounts of water and feed, which in turn require more land. Beef is also much higher in saturated fats and cholesterol than most other options. Opting for chicken instead of beef is one simple change you can make to your diet that will lead to a big impact."

"These things may look like meat but for most people, they'll only be a reminder of what you're missing out on."

It's tempting to want to go big, but building small habits that can be maintained is a more durable strategy. "When deciding to eat less meat, most people take the nuclear option and decide to go fully vegan," notes Joe Johnson, a certified personal trainer and weight loss coach for his company 9 to 5 Nutrition. "This can lead to resentment and eventually quitting veganism due to the limiting nature of this nutritional philosophy."

Instead, he suggests limiting consumption of animal products to certain times or days. "For example," he says, "it's unlikely you eat much meat at breakfast or lunch anyway, so create a rule that you can only eat meat after 5 pm. Once you're comfortable with this, you can then limit meat to only certain weekdays — keep adding restrictions until you're comfortable with your level of consumption." He also recommends avoiding meat substitutes. "These things may look like meat but for most people," he says, "they'll only be a reminder of what you're missing out on. Rather than pining after meat in this way, indulge in great vegan or veggie recipes." This makes complete sense to me — I'd so much rather have a platter of olives and nuts and roasted peppers than an "impossible" anything.

Making changes, especially during this high pressure time of year, can feel daunting. There's also something about the idea of eating less of something that feels intrinsically — and boringly — austere. So rather than focus on what's being reduced, I'm trying to consider what's being gained. "It's about mindset more than anything," says vegan chef and personal trainer Christy Morgan." When families or partners are doing it together, it has to be a new adventure you are embarking on — something that is exciting rather than a punishment." And having pleasurable new adventures feels like a resolution I can enjoy sticking with.

about eating less meat and enjoying it

Green Day bashes Trump during New Year’s Eve performance

During their set on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve special on Sunday night, Green Day found an opportunity to make one last swipe at Donald Trump to cap 2023.

While performing the song "American Idiot," the title track of their 2004 album which was originally a poke at George Bush, lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong changed the lyric “I’m not a part of a redneck agenda” to “I’m not a part of the MAGA agenda," causing people to flood social media with their takes on the matter.

"Green Day's been dookie for years," Brent Terhune said in a satirical TikTok video shared to X (formerly Twitter), riffing on the title of the band's most famous album, released in 1994.

MAGA is pissed at Green Day pic.twitter.com/5xUylKxB8q

— Brent Terhune in Peoria March 21-22 (@BrentTerhune) January 1, 2024

Elsewhere, journalist Brian Krassenstein weighed in with, "Green Day was right about the Bush administration in 2004 when this song was released and they are right again twenty years later. People have the right to express their political opinions through Art. That’s what this is. If you don’t like it, don’t listen to their music."

I see a lot of people melting down this morning after Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong changed the “American Idiot” lyrics to “I’m not a part of the MAGA agenda,” during their New Year’s Rockin’ Eve show.

In my opinion Green Day was right about the Bush administration in 2004… pic.twitter.com/dRhAruVRN9

— Brian Krassenstein (@krassenstein) January 1, 2024

This is not the first time that Green Day has used their stage time to speak out against Trump. During the 2016 American Music Awards, Armstrong chanted, "No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA," during the band's performance.

Till death do us part: Gaza, Israel and the end of my life

In 2023 life took a dramatic turn. I was diagnosed with a rare terminal condition. It is a matter, I was told, not of whether I will die from it, but when.

For all of the insecurities I have faced in coming to terms with this, there is little I lack to hold terminality maximally at bay.

I have employment I deeply appreciate.

I have state of the art health care that is both technically sophisticated and emotionally supportive.

I live in enormously comfortable circumstances, eating well, with access to almost anything I might want or need.

I can travel wherever and whenever I choose, walk where and when I please, exercise when I must.

From cable news to Hollywood, there's a double standard on speaking out about Gaza war

I am surrounded, physically and emotionally, by wonderfully supportive family, friends, and colleagues, close at hand and globally dispersed. We communicate — by phone, by email, on social media—whenever the calling rings out. They have driven down or flown in to see and be with me, to share time together. I too have travel in the making.

Though I live in America, I could also be describing much of life in Israel.

* * *

For all the challenges I face, I will outlive far too many people in Gaza, from babies to those of my generation. But perhaps, too, the way things are going, I will outlive Gaza itself.

My damaged body is treatable, my life extendable. Most who die in Gaza are designated as collateral damage, lives snuffed out not by their own doing or choosing, nor by a condition over which they can exercise even the remotest control. They may be buried beneath the rubble of a bomb, lost to a lack of medicine or treatment, wrecked by starvation and thirst. They are, mostly through no doing of their own, positioned on the wrong side of warring machines’ political cost-benefit ledgers.

My damaged body is treatable, my life can be extended. Most of those who die in Gaza are designated as collateral damage, lives snuffed out not by their own doing or choosing,

Nearly 90 percent of Gaza residents have lost the sort of roof over their heads I can take for granted. A population roughly equivalent to the combined total of Dallas and Indianapolis has been rendered homeless for the foreseeable future, in an area about the size of Las Vegas or Philadelphia.

I have paid employment until I can no longer work or no longer care to. Most people in Gaza have little other than scratching bare-handed through the ruins of rubbled homes. They spend their days burying the bodies and body parts of loved ones, neighbors and fellow civilians, when not searching for the next meal.

I have all the food I need and then some. More than 2 million people in Gaza have next to nothing but occasional aid-agency handouts or whatever they can scrounge. There is nothing else to see their children through to the next, unpredictable truckloads of aid.

While I can look forward to a life well lived until I am no longer able to continue living, they have nothing but the prospect of death circling vulture-like overhead.

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Is there not something disturbingly perverse, then, about Israeli couples, unable to conceive, flying to countries in Eastern Europe to adopt babies while their government leaves children in Gaza lifeless or without parents?

Each day I attend to what I must, in order to ensure I am among the 30 percent of patients with my condition who make it through the first year. I will last as long as my will to live in dignity and by my own choice holds out.

No matter what they do or what precautions they take, no one in Gaza can be sure they will make it through the next day. The kind of hospitals I rely on to keep me going have mostly been destroyed or compromised for Gaza’s residents.

My death will be marked and memorialized. Many Gazans who die today, tomorrow or the day after that will be anonymous, some buried in mass graves.

* * *

A brother of mine, who recently retired as a medical doctor, has lived in Israel for the past half century. He and his family have access there to the same comforts of my life here. And yet, having given little thought to the lives of occupied Palestinians before the terrifying events of Oct. 7, he is, like most Jewish Israelis, and for different reasons many Arab and Palestinian Israelis as well, feeling existentially threatened.

Many grieving Israelis have demanded retribution for the approximately 1,200 people murdered and 240 hostages taken on that fateful day. Hamas and its partners have blood dripping thickly from their hands. And yet, in retribution, for each of Samson’s eyes Israel’s warring logic would demand the taking of 20 “Philistine” eyes.

The current Israeli regime seems to think its survival requires Gaza’s termination. Gazans have averaged something like 300-plus deaths, largely from IDF bombs, every single day of the war’s 10 weeks to date. More than 8,000 of those wiped away have been infants and young people, with an incalculably larger number left without parents.

Don’t October’s fateful events ultimately prove that Israel’s weaponization of security, with more or less unqualified American support, has hardly made that nation “the safest place for Jews in the world”? Or or anyone, actually, including Palestinians in Israel or the occupied territories? Multiplying enemies hardly inspires safety. Won’t this spiral of death only harden feelings of bitterness and hatred?

Perhaps affording free and dignified lives to occupied Palestinians would prove a more liberating alternative. Do not these irresolvable contestations between “from the river to the sea” freedom and “Judea and Samaria” settlement, between partial liberation and absolutizing possession, result endlessly in the ongoing anxiety and vengefulness driven by debilitation and demise?

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Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Kaddish” rings with melancholic truth as a mourning for the maternal religion from which he felt alienated by the Israeli state's abandonment of its principles as much as an incantation of Yisgadal for his mother.

Israelis and Palestinians will die apart until they can bring themselves to live together. Until they realize that living together, as messy as it is likely to be, is far preferable to the existential fear of foreshortened, forestalled and anxiety-filled lives recycled forever. A small, courageous group of Jews and Palestinians in Jaffa has already created an initiative exhibiting the challenges of neighborliness in the face of prolific national anger.

Living as literal neighbors on a broader scale would no doubt be extraordinarily difficult to realize. It demands small initial steps worked out by those with far-reaching vision.

When people have dignified lives to reach and live for, aren’t they much less likely to see themselves fueled endlessly by a hopeless fight against?

In the face of terminality, that is as much a political aspiration as it is a personal one. An abiding dream, whether or not I am here to witness it: Next year in Jerusalem, together.

from Salon on the war in Gaza

America has never been united. So how do we move forward together?

Consider this another report from the inverted other, or those relegated to existing underneath the folded fabric of the American consciousness.

However, to get to the breadth of this reported narrative, we must begin with the poet Reginald Shepherd and his book "Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry," Shepard makes an interesting theoretical observation regarding race, and its impact on American society, when he asserts Whiteness and Blackness are social constructs, i.e. manmade; yet, Blackness has been designated or assigned as the “marked construct” within our national consciousness while whiteness has been allowed to fade into a privileged invisibly, insulated from the ramifications of race and racial matters. Note: we can also insert any group relegated to "other" status in Shepherd’s statement. Perhaps through my own set of constructions and analyzing those as a poet, I am compelled to see what others cannot, to create a reportage of what I know to be true, an unknown but true narrative hidden from public view.

I must report that democracy is eroding quick, fast, and now really fast.

Trump's "trickle-down racism": New research spotlights the old-fashioned hate propelling MAGA

Our judicial and criminal justice systems are laughable jokes while morality is dangling at the edge of a crumbling cliff, and the gentlest of breezes is prepared to exhale that final breath, flailing morality backward into a state of nonexistence. This current political climate we inhabit has exposed a not-so-secret racial wound within this country that has never healed. The news media constantly reminds its denizens of this so-called division through political polling that reveals there are no consequences for trying to destroy America in the eyes of those privileged to live within its invisibility. People, jurors of the common body, the state: I would like to correct one thing here. America has never been whole, so saying it is now divided is misleading, false and inaccurate.

It is, as it has always been: Divided we stand.

This current political climate we inhabit has exposed a not-so-secret racial wound within this country that has never healed.

This outgoing year of 2023 has exposed the severe racial wounds of this country through a continued mockery of the judicial system and a confluence of lies from those who play on the construction of whiteness, and those who truly believe whiteness is the pure blood of America. The problem with this school of thought is, as James Baldwin so eloquently writes in his essay, “On Being White and Other Lies,” that not one person came to America in the early days of its conception thinking they were white, and let me advance this a step further, not one slave considered themselves black in the beginning — this was a forced construct that cannot be taken back in terms of identity. The damage is irreversible on either side. This duality of construct is the genesis of the never-ending problem of race in America. Blackness or otherness, as a marked construct, shaped a twisted white-driven ideology, thereby creating a false sense of superiority that has placed this country in grave danger, a danger not seen since perhaps the Civil War; and yet, in that military conflict, the racial wound was never addressed, only given a bandage and kicked down the road like an aluminum can whose destination is to be recycled, over and over.

At the crux of this dilemma is how power, influence or wealth can skirt or bypass laws heavily enforced on those without economic means, social status and/or grace within the public sphere. Let us not forget this country originally created a system in which being associated with the criminal justice system — and yes, being charged with a crime without a conviction — has caused and continues to cause irreparable harm while influencing employment, where one can live, as well as how one can live. There have been generations affected by this practice as old as convict leasing and the Black Codes, which swelled prisons with convict labor after the Civil War. Because I break bread with and claim to be part of this marked construct, this otherness, complete with jail time within the carceral state, allow me to enlighten you.

The hypocrisy of America is on full tilt display.

2023, the year of sex, drugs and violence

Let me bring you into the intimate conversations between the common denizens of the state that may never be made public. They are often held when family and friends gather, get animated and talk smack amid a spades or bid whist card game where jokers and deuces are always wild. They occur at the barbeque cookout while eating pork ribs, baked beans and potato salad, and the conversations almost always speak of an eroding confidence, that was at best suspect, of their station in American society. They can also be heard on Christmas Eve while wrapping gifts in red wrapping paper in the living room. In all these conversations there is no unyielding belief everyone is equal, especially under the law. These sublime figures that walk among the living do not believe they fit in this deranged construct that uses its people as pawns in a game of political chess with race as the sublime. In this perverse narrative of hypocrisy that has been normalized through misinformation, blatant lying and mistruths, we must ask ourselves, when did a lie become the truth? Where they do that at?

Let’s dig a bit deeper. For example, the former president of the United States of America is running for president again, with more criminal charges than Van Camp got pork and beans.

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The hypocrisy—Oh, the hypocrisy. With that said, allow me to transport you through a portal of moving corridors to January 6, 2021. There are those in powerful stations with influence that would have you believe we did not witness what we witnessed on national television, as if it were a fabrication, or worse, necessary to save the United States of America. While watching this insurrection in real time, I remember making the comment on social media: look at all the non-melanin not get shot dead on the spot. To be clear and direct, there is not one person in my diverse group of friends that span the spectrum of color who believes if that had been any other cultural group than a white mob, they would not have all been sprayed like Raid on roaches and announced dead at the scene.

The dwindling and ever-fragile concept of democracy about to be dismantled, and the future is petrifying as it hints at the possibility of another divisive conflict from the erodible residue of the Civil War.

Of this, the marked construct is certain, and those who live within this construct understand, as presently constructed, that they do not have an amplified voice that can pierce the idea of privilege to the point it changes the current trajectory of democratic destruction through power. They see the dwindling and ever-fragile concept of democracy about to be dismantled, and the future is petrifying as it hints at the possibility of another divisive conflict from the erodible residue of the Civil War. Listen, a divided America is telling you who it is. And as we know, when someone tells you who they are, please believe them. Ask the poet, Maya Angelou.

If that is the case, what is the answer? How do we prevent a twisted narrative based on falsehoods from becoming reality? To be honest, it requires heavy lifting on the part of humanity.

This is the hard truth: There is no such thing as pure blood, and no cultural group or human being has the right to oppress another. We must acknowledge we are all different and, perhaps here within lies the answer. Each one of us, as a living thinking organism, contributes to the totality of humankind. If only we could love unconditionally, then violence and hatred would be eradicated from this nation’s lexicon. Maybe it begins in the new year with telling someone you vehemently disagree with: “I love you, my fellow human being; we are one and the same. I embrace your difference.” The only way we as a nation can begin to think about being whole and undivided is to accept the fundamental truth that universality or the universal or one cohesive group resides in the differences we have as people, as human beings. Maybe this is the blueprint to the grace needed to sustain a new and practical reality. This does not have to be the end.

about the fallout from Jan. 6:

Why you should rethink burning sage and smudging in the new year

In the new year, we want to be new people. We make lists of what's in and what's out. We want to take on healthy new habits to help revitalize our lives. Some people want to get rid of the bad energy that followed them from the past and they do that with sage.

Traditionally, burning sage or smudging sage is the practice of burning herbs to purify or bless people and places. In new-age spirituality, the practice claims to essentially eliminate negativity from your space or even yourself. Smudging can clear your emotional, energetic, spiritual and physical body. The most important aspect of it is that it should help you start fresh.

This practice has become incredibly popular with wellness people whether it is suggested by a holistic granola mommy blogger on YouTube or a Gen Z witch on TikTok, urging you to cleanse your room, office space and sometimes even body parts. Despite its seemingly wholesome appeal – herbs! starting fresh! revitalized energy! – when looked at more closely, the burning of sage may not be so positive. Here's why you should reconsider before lighting up the sage this year:

All the witchy things I do to stay connected to the occult this season and every season

Complicated Indigenous roots

While this wellness practice has been popularized by wellness gurus and witchy social media influencers, smudging sage originated with the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. For Native people, smudging is the ceremony used for spiritual cleansing or blessing, but not all Indigenous people even use sage to smudge. Furthermore, Indigenous people may use herbs like white sage for their rich medicinal properties. White sage itself is loaded with antioxidants and is said to heal colds and lower blood sugar.

Even though people have adopted forms of smudging herbs, at one point in history this freedom wasn't awarded to Indigenous people in the Americas. Smudging was banned in both Canada and the U.S. in the 1800s. The ban wasn't lifted in Canada until the 1950s and in America, it was in 1978 when the American Indian Religious Freedom Act restored the use of sage to Native Americans again.

Bustle reported that “many [Native people] were jailed and killed just for keeping our ways alive, including my great-great grandfather,” Ruth Hopkins , a Dakota/Lakota Sioux writer, told the publication. "Smudging sage was part of those banned religious practices”

That is why the co-opting of the practice of burning sage by non-Native people is a clear example of cultural appropriation. Native people were persecuted at the hands of the government because of their religious and cultural beliefs, and now it's been exploited by holistic hippies who have no idea of its historical context and cultural significance.

The dangerous demand for sage

While California white sage is currently not on the endangered list, picking white sage on public land is illegal but continues. Sadly, the popularity has resulted in an overconsumption of the herb. Over-harvesting sage by commercial sellers has significantly decreased the quantity of sage. It also has increased the threat of wildfires and urban development, showcasing how crucial white sage is to its surrounding ecosystem.

Also, a lot of the sage sold in the U.S. is illegal despite brands promoting it as ethically sourced. These grave concerns endanger Native people's long-standing access to and use of sage. Many Native people have reported visits to traditional harvesting sites and have found them bare. Their sage supply has been destroyed by commercial sellers or people who rip the plants up by their roots. It's crucial to leave the roots while harvesting because that is how the plant grows back. And as inexperienced sellers come in and destroy the plants, it will endanger them.

If I'm being frank, you probably shouldn't use sage if you're non-Native. That may not stop people from using sage or smudging it; I also have the sage I was gifted years ago by my best friend. The least we could do is decrease the overconsumption of the herb. Instead of buying white sage, we can consider the impact before purchasing it. It is said that sage should never be bought but only gifted. But even gifted sage may come from a dubious origin. It is reported that a lot of the sage sold in the U.S. is coming from illegal harvests while it is still being promoted as ethically sourced sage.

Culturally, smudging is so irretrievably tied to Indigenous people's traditions and cultural identities, that it feels wrong to rebrand this meaningful and important practice as a new wellness gimmick to usher in a new year. People who use it to cleanse their negative energy or space are often using it incorrectly according to Native people. Bianca Millar of the Wendake reserve in Québec told The Ethos, “We don’t believe you should light your smudge or your sage with a lighter. We believe that the butane in lighters kind of kills that medicine, so you should use matches.”

Alternatives to sage

If you want to continue smudging not all hope is lost. There are plenty of alternatives to white sage. Other herbs like lavender, mint and rosemary are perfect substitutes for the practice. You can even use incense, which is my preferred tool to smudge my space. Putting essential oils in a diffuser is also an option to revitalize your space. I suggest staying away from Palo Santo, another popular plant used to cleanse but it is also potentially endangered because of overconsumption. Ultimately, if we want to start fresh this new year, it's probably best to do the least harm we possibly can and that means giving up burning sage in 2024.

about this topic

The best breakout performances of 2023, from queens and jurors to . . . Billie Eilish?!

Nothing encapsulated our embattled year more than the bizarre bedfellows of "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer" at the box office. The intensity of fluffy feminism paired with the gut-wrenching celebration of inventing a weapon of war created a cinematic reflection of our conflicted American souls.

After all, this was a year that pulled the world back into a harrowing, divisive war, broke records for natural disasters and introduced yet more strains of COVID. Is it any wonder that like Barbie, we couldn't avoid seeing the cracks in our pink existence? Nevertheless, much like Greta Gerwig's sentient fashion doll, we were also empowered to seek out our own joys and meaning.

We tuned in to see if one of the Roys triumphed in "Succession." The return of Miles Morales once again wowed us "Across the Spider-Verse." And this year even gave us Meg Ryan's rom-com comeback.

The worst film performances of 2023

But it's the fresh blood in movies and on TV that invigorated us and kept our hope alive. Whether these are newcomers who made their acting debuts, foreign star catching our eyes in leading roles or even a pop star showing us she can be a threat without singing, they showed us that we could still look forward talent and entertainment.

Here are the 16(-ish) breakout performances that caught our eyes this year:

Young Mazino, "Beef"

Young Mazino in "Beef" (Netflix)

Role: Paul

Why they're a standout: Starring in a Netflix series alongside Ali Wong and Steven Yeun is certainly no easy feat. But Young Mazino, in his first major role, makes it look easy while playing Paul Cho in Lee Sung Jin’s comedy-drama “Beef.” Mazino’s Paul is the aimless, himbo-coded younger brother of Yeun’s more uptight Danny. Paul spends his days playing video games, obsessing over crypto and pursuing Kayla Lexington — a woman he meets on Instagram, who is actually Amy's (Wong) catfish alter ego created to get more intel on Danny. Paul could have been purely superficial, devoid of any depth or any substance. But Mazino’s sincere portrayal adds another layer to him. We laugh at Paul, not in a belittling manner, but more so in an endearing one. In Episode 2, Danny warns Paul that Kayla is a bot and not who he thinks she is. “You’re a bot,” Paul snaps back before turning to his phone to message Kayla, “r u a bot?”

It looks like we aren’t the only ones who believe Mazino deserves all the praise for his performance in “Beef.” Mazino was nominated for a supporting actor Emmy. He also played one of SZA’s many love interests in her hit music video “Snooze.” – Joy Saha

Havana Rose Liu, "Bottoms" (Starz, Digital for rent)

Havana Rose Liu in "Bottoms" (MGM)

Role: Isabel

Why They’re a standout: The age-old question of whether straight actors should take on gay roles remains a contentious topic to this day. Some say it absolutely matters who is controlling the narrative, while others argue that it’s complicated. Statistically, the number of straight actors (or rather, actors who haven’t explicitly identified as members of the LGBTQ+ community) who play gay onscreen is pretty darn high. That’s why when an openly queer actor is also able to play a queer character, it’s a breath of fresh air.

That’s how we would describe Havana Rose Liu’s performance in Emma Seligman's gayest film yet “Bottoms.” Liu, who herself identifies as pansexual, portrays Isabel, a gorgeous high school cheerleader who is dating the star football player but actually develops the hots for Josie (Ayo Edebiri), an uncool, fresh-out-of-juvie lesbian. As Isabel grows closer to Josie — thanks to a feminist “self-defense club” — so does her true self. Isabel’s tale is one of self-discovery, which Liu portrays with such authenticity, care and innocence. We see this in the shy yet adoring glances she exchanges with Josie while the pair harbor unspoken crushes on one another. And we see this in her glowing confidence, which she garners after starting a new chapter with her newfound lady lover. It’s almost like viewers are watching Liu’s own self shine through in Isabel. After all, Liu did reveal that Isabel is also pansexual “by my choice” during this year’s SXSW Film & TV Festival.

Perhaps what’s so dang cool about Isabel though is her love for violence (the duality of women!). She utters her best line after ending things with her boyfriend upon learning that he’s been having an affair with a much older woman: “Let’s go f**k up some football players.” Cue mic drop. – Joy Saha

Jaz Sinclair, "Gen V" (Prime Video)

Jaz Sinclair in "Gen V" (Brooke Palmer/Prime Video)

Role: Marie Moreau
Why they’re a standout: It’s a large feat to replicate the magic of the Amazon hit “The Boys,” and “Gen V” comes close because of its entrusted lead, Jaz Sinclair. The “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina” alum is finally at center stage as the tortured blood-bending orphan Marie who yearns to be a superhero. In the expanding “The Boys” universe, Marie is quite different from any other supe we’ve seen. First, she’s a Black girl. Second she can manipulate people and her own blood, and third, she’s a teenager who accidentally killed her own family. I promise that’s not a spoiler.

Sinclair plays Marie with an earnest and kind soul even though her tragic backstory would paralyze just about anyone. And sometimes her traumas find their way to the front and center of her mind but it’s also the reason why she wants to become a member of the 7 and put good out into the world. Sinclair shines as the quiet but fiercely strong Marie. It’s no surprise that “Gen V” was well received and earned a second season, with Sinclair leading the way once again. – Nardos Haile

Tom Blyth, "The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes" (In theaters)

Tom Blyth and Rachel Zegler in "The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes" (Murray Close/Lionsgate)

Role: Coriolanus Snow
Why they’re a standout: The Julliard trained British actor almost feels like he popped out of nowhere as the new “The Hunger Games” prequel dominated the box office for weeks. But Blyth has quietly been on the rise since last year as he stars in MGM+ Western drama “Billy the Kid” and an episode in the HBO period drama “The Gilded Age.” But audiences grew attached to the new heartthrob for his captivating performance as the younger, blonder version of Donald Sutherland’s bone-chilling authoritative dictator President Coriolanus Snow from the original “The Hunger Games” series.

“The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” shouldn’t work because it empathizes with the man who will eventually become a genodicial villain. However, it does work because Blyth plays Corio with an apparent decency and humanity. Despite the character’s relationships with the singing tribute and eventual victor Lucy Gray (Rachel Zegler) and his best friend Sejanus (Josh Andrés Rivera) – the goodness in him becomes corrupted. Somewhere along the way Corio gets lost, and Blyth inhabits the gray of his character so authentically that keeps the audience second-guessing all of Corio’s choices and motivations. When the switch to darkness happens, it's seamless and Blyth leaves the audience haunted when Corio screams, “Lucy Gray, are you trying to kill me?!” – Nardos Haile

Olivia Washington, "I'm a Virgo" (Prime Video)

Olivia Washington as Flora "I'm a Virgo" (Prime Video)

Role: Flora

Why they're a standout: Shortly, you'll read about what I consider to be the second-weirdest sex scene on TV. But for now, Boots Riley’s gravity-defying series wins the gold medal in that category thanks to the intimate coupling between Jharrel Jerome’s 13-foot-tall Cootie and Washington’s average-sized Flora, a average-seeming young woman born with the power of super speed.

In a sequence of scenes flashing back to her childhood, Riley shows us how agonizing it is to live in a world where every moment is an eternity but the delicate, ever-positive Flora never lets her glow slip to show her burden. It’s only with Cootie that she can fully be as much of herself as someone like her can, and that manifests in their encounter, which is as bizarre and thoughtful as it is mind-melting and acrobatic. It is also merely a stitch in the intricate pattern of Washington’s performance, one that maintains a consistent delicateness and sensitivity until an unforgiving world makes her more brittle – but still, amazingly, no less bright. – Melanie McFarland

Sabrina Wu, "Joy Ride" (Starz, Digital for rent)

Stephanie Hsu as Kat, Sherry Cola as Lolo, Ashley Park as Audrey and Sabrina Wu as Deadeye in "Joy Ride" (Ed Araquel/Lionsgate)

Role: Deadeye

Why they're a standout: A road trip featuring the comedic charms of Ashley Park ("Emily in Paris"), Sherry Cola ("Good Trouble") and Stephanie Hsu ("Everything Everywhere All at Once") would've been epic enough. But the addition of Sabrina Wu as Deadeye – the fourth traveler in a journey through China to explore identity, sexuality and some good old-fashioned drug smuggling – adds a touch of much-needed whimsy and sweetness to the R-rated raunchiest. After all, it's Deadeye who is Army and brings BTS' unifying spirit into play, making friends through dance and even inspiring K-pop airport shenanigans.

With halting speech, wide smile and deceptively self-deprecating manner, Wu is a master of radiating both vulnerability and joy (even in outrage). This not only makes Deadeye a safe space for their travel companions, but is also conveyed in Wu's comedy. In their set on Netflix's "Verified Stand-Up" Wu opens up about queerness, dating insecurities and the bizarre expectations for an Asian American entertainer. The tight, hilarious 10 minutes is just a taste of what's to come. Already Wu is one of the featured performers in the 2024 Netflix Is a Joke festival and has been cast in an upcoming FX comedy pilot. We can't wait for the Year of the Wu. — Hanh Nguyen

The cast of "Jury Duty" beyond James Marsden (Amazon Freevee)

The cast of "Jury Duty" (Amazon Freevee)

Role: Various

Why they're a standout: Marsden may be the one racking up nominations this awards season, but if it weren’t for the outstanding improvisational skills of the “anonymous” jurors joining him and Ronald Gladden on this mostly unscripted lark, it never would have worked.

Everyone in the cast did something with their performance to make us love them. A few, though, brought out Gladden’s innate kindness for the camera through pushing the limits of believability, like David Brown’s painfully awkward inventor Todd, whose feigned discomfort at one point brought Gladden to the verge of tears, or Mekki Leeper’s conservatively religious Noah and his bizarre coupling with Edy Modica’s wild child Jeannie, giving us the year’s second weirdest and borderline inexplicable love scene, attended to by Marsden.

Making these heightened experiences work, however, are the extremely plausible performances delivered by Rashida Olayiwola’s bailiff Officer Nikki, Alan Barinholtz’s Judge Rosen, and my personal favorite, Cassandra Blair’s perpetually “over it” Vanessa Jenkins. She won my heart by very sanely responding to a mind-bending stupid social media manager by admitting, “When Genevieve was talking? I, like, just really wanted to fight her. Like, I just wanted to hit her.” We’ve all felt like that when faced with the insipid, but only Vanessa was brave enough to say it out loud. – Melanie McFarland

Lily Gladstone, "Killers of a Flower Moon" (Apple TV+)

Lily Gladstone in "Killers of a Flower Moon" (Apple)

Role: Mollie Burkhart
Why they’re a standout: Lily Gladstone is a force to be reckoned with in her masterful performance in Martin Scorsese’s devastating Western epic “Killers of the Flower Moon.” In the nearly four-hour-long film, Gladstone plays Mollie Burkhart, one of the many oil-wealthy Osage people in 1920s Oklahoma. But grief surrounds Osage County when Osage people begin mysteriously dying one by one, including Mollie’s family members. The film tells the horrific tale of white men’s greed and jealousy of Osage's wealth and power – and Mollie is at the center of it.

The actress performs opposite Scorsese’s veteran actors like Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro in what is her first major breakout role, and she shows them up. It is in Mollie’s deep grief and pain, that Gladstone can unlock real loaded emotion. As the character’s own husband Ernest (DiCaprio) and uncle-in-law Hale (De Niro) plot on her family and her demise – she remains steadfast in receiving justice. Gladstone is the beating heart of the film and she never flinches when she confronts her lying, murderous husband. She walks away with her head held high. – Nardos Haile

Bella Ramsey, "The Last of Us" (Max)

Bella Ramsey in "The Last of Us" (Liane Hentscher/HBO)

Role: Ellie

Why they're a standout: Given the figurative gallons of digital ink spilled in praise of Ramsey’s most famous role before this, the tiny and fearsome Lyanna Mormont, it was probably fated that their first lead role would be equally as memorable. But their portrayal of Ellie, the orphan teen immune to this story’s fungal contagion, exceeds even those expectations.

Their take on Ellie puts up a tough front and repeatedly proves that isn’t entirely an act. She is resilient, and when her life is on the line, she fights with everything she has. At the same time what makes her bond with Pedro Pascal’s Joel so precious is that neither of them lets us forget that she is still a teenager, one who loves comic books and video games. She’s also still very much a girl who misses her best friend Riley, through whom she experiences her first trip to the mall. In that episode Ramsey pushes Ellie’s innocent loving spirit to the fore, pieces of which she also shows to Joel long before he’s ready to receive it as her new father. In a series that champions optimism and a sense of hope in the face of monstrous oblivion. Ramsey’s energy reminds us that our humanity, with all its perceived weakness, can be our salvation. – Melanie McFarland

Halle Bailey, "The Little Mermaid" (Disney+)

Halle Bailey as Ariel in Disney's live-action "The Little Mermaid" (Photo courtesy of Disney)

Role: Ariel
Why they’re a standout: Halle Bailey, the Grammy-nominated, Beyoncé-backed singer in sister duo Chloe x Halle changed the game when Disney announced she would be playing Ariel in the live-action remake of “The Little Mermaid.” Racists everywhere revolted at the casting that changed the race of a beloved white character. But Bailey held her head high and dyed her hair red for the role of a lifetime. And boy did she prove the haters wrong.

The actress known for small roles in “Grown-ish” or some side parts on Disney Channel broke through in Rob Marshall’s live-action remake. Some would say the trickiest part about playing Ariel is that she’s mostly mute throughout the entirety of the film – even though she has the voice of an angel. Bailey plays Ariel pitch perfectly even when she’s not using her beautiful, siren-like voice in an emotional rendition of the classic “Part of Your World.”

But most of all when Ariel does trade her voice for legs during her quest for love on land with Prince Eric (Jonah Hauer-King), some of the best acting in the film Bailey does with her big brown beautiful eyes. As Eric and Ariel travel through his kingdom on land, they communicate through gestures and looks. It’s no wonder Eric falls for Ariel instantaneously. Bailey has a glistening wonder in her eyes as Ariel – it’s enrapturing even if the movie is a little silly. In Ariel, the star has cemented herself as a quiet force in a young generation of multi-talented performers. – Nardos Haile

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Cailee Spaeny, "Priscilla" (Digital for rent)

Cailee Spaeny in "Priscilla" (A24)

Role: Priscilla Presley

Why they're a standout: Baz Luhrmann’s 2022 biopic “Elvis” may have cast Priscilla Presley as a second thought, but Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla” places her in the spotlight. Much of the latter’s success has to be credited to Cailee Spaeny, whose remarkable portrayal of Elvis’ ex-wife heightens just how lonely and tumultuous her heavily glorified life actually was.

Spaeny nails every aspect of Priscilla, so much so that it feels like the role was meant for Spaeny and Spaeny only. Despite being in her mid-20s, Spaeny perfectly captures the youthful persona of a 14-year-old Priscilla, who meets a 24-year-old Elvis for the very first time at a party. Priscilla appears on our screens all dolled up in a ’50s-style poodle skirt and penny loafers, an ensemble that screams innocence, especially when it’s coupled with Spaeny’s awestruck gaze and soft demeanor. Although much of Priscilla’s story centers on heartbreak and loss, it’s ultimately one of self-discovery. Spaeny masters this transformation, nailing each and every one of Priscilla’s wide array of emotions, including naivete, apprehension and defiance.

“It’s an incredible responsibility to make sure that Priscilla felt seen,” Spaeny said in a behind-the-scenes clip released by A24 in October. Hopefully, Spaeny knows that she has succeeded in fulfilling that responsibility. – Joy Saha

India Amarteifio and Corey Mylchreest, "Queen Charlotte" (Netflix)

India Amarteifio as Young Queen Charlotte, Corey Mylchreest as Young King George in "Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story" (Liam Daniel/Netflix)

Role: Queen Charlotte and King George
Why they're a standout: Before “Bridgerton” couples Kate (Simone Ashley) and Anthony (Jonathan Bailey) or Daphne (Phoebe Dynevor) and Simon (Rege Jean Page) swept audiences off their feet with their sensual period romances, there was Charlotte (India Amartfelio) and George (Corey Mylchreest) in the prequel “Queen Charlotte.” This Shondaland project penned by Shonda Rhimes herself, explores Golda Rosheuval’s Charlotte that we know so well as the frigid and lonely Queen in “Bridgerton,” but more than 50 years in the past when she was just getting started.

The beating heart of “Queen Charlotte” is the focus surrounding the arranged marriage between Charlotte and George – a union meant to depict togetherness and the mixing of Black and white constituents in a newly post-racial “Bridgerton” world. Newcomers Amartfelio and Mylchreest have limited experience, only really working in British theatre and a few British television shows. But that doesn’t mean the duo isn’t up for the challenge of crafting a timeless and heartwrenching love story for “Bridgerton’s” rabid fanbase. The bubbling over chemistry between the leads works in tandem, as George shields his new young wife from his troubling mental illness and Charlotte is left wondering if life as a royal with an absent husband is worth it. The pair deliver some of the most pained love confessions. As George battles putting Charlotte in danger by being with her, she tells him, “I will stand with you between the heavens and Earth! Do you love me?!” It’s electric. Their love story stands the test of time. – Nardos Haile

David Jonsson, "Rye Lane" (Hulu)

Dom (David Jonsson) and Yas (Vivian Oprah) in "Rye Lane" (Chris Harris/Searchlight Pictures)

Role: Dom

Why they’re a standout: Some actors are praised for their ability to play the same kind of character time after time. Others are praised for their ability to tackle very contrasting roles. David Jonsson is one of very few breakout stars who successfully mastered the latter.

Those who are familiar with HBO’s “Industry” may recall Johnson’s ensemble role as Augustus "Gus" Sackey, a young, queer graduate competing for a permanent spot at a prestigious investment bank in London. Sackey is composed, confident and badass . . . traits that can’t be said of Jonsson’s lead character in “Rye Lane.” Jonsson’s Dom is sweet, reserved and sensitive. For much of the film, Dom struggles to process how his girlfriend of six years could cheat on him with his best mate Eric (Benjamin Sarpong-Broni). But even after he gets his well-deserved happy ending, Dom still remains the sweet, reserved and sensitive man we met at the film’s start.

Jonsson plays Dom with a tenderness that’s infectious. We can’t help but root for him when he’s cooped up in the bathroom, crying all by himself. Or when he’s timidly bonding with Yas (Vivian Oparah), who’s also recovering from her own relationship troubles, at a playground and at karaoke. It also helps that Jonsson effortlessly rocks Dom’s signature pink high-tops and bulky headphones, which he wears around the neck. – Joy Saha

Alison Oliver, "Saltburn" (Prime Video)

Alison Oliver in "Saltburn" (Amazon Studios)

Role: Venetia

Why they’re a standout: The true underrated star of Emerald Fennell’s twisted black comedy is undoubtedly Alison Oliver’s Venetia. When Venetia is first introduced, she’s seen lurking around the halls of Saltburn manor, as if she’s merely a living extension of the sprawling estate itself. We’re led to believe that Venetia is just a background character, one who exists in the shadows of her brother Felix (Jacob Elordi), mother Lady Elspeth (Rosamund Pike) and father Sir James (Richard E. Grant). Beyond that, we don’t really learn much more about her. All we know is that she belongs at Saltburn. Venetia is one of the chosen few who was born into this life and is able to embrace it so effortlessly. So despite her character being awarded very little backstory, how did she manage to steal the show?

That’s why credit must be awarded to Oliver, who brought so much life and depth to this ephemeral character. Her expressive smirks and body language alone communicates so much of Venetia’s sense of arrogance, boredom and entitlement. Oliver is absolutely intoxicating as she struts down a tennis court in full glam and lounges in the house garden wearing nothing but the most delicate of night gowns. Oliver delivers one of the most brutal and vulnerable monologues in the entire film when Venetia teeters precariously over the precipice of an all encompassing grief following her brother’s sudden death. Her emotional range in this scene is harrowing and makes for a stand-out moment.

Simply put, when it comes to playing a stunning and haughty heiress like Venetia, Oliver gets it right. – Joy Saha

Luke Tennie, "Shrinking" (Apple TV+)

Luke Tennie in "Shrinking" (Apple TV+)

Role: Sean

Why they're a standout: There are so many ways Tennie’s part could have been utterly disastrous. “Shrinking” is a comedy about people learning to get back on their feet after life knocks them down, centered on recently widowed therapist Jimmy (Jason Segel) whose erratic behavior since his wife’s death has estranged him from his teen daughter Alice (Lukita Maxwell), who is also still grieving.

Into this mix comes Sean, a military veteran with explosive anger issues who moves in with Jimmy and Alice after his parents kick him out. Many worse shows would have eagerly jumped into an assortment of horrendous tropes set up by this scenario but thanks to both the conscientious writers and Tennie’s tender performance, Sean’s arc becomes one of individual growth for his own sake, one that isn’t solely there to uplift Jimmy or Alice, with whom she forges a fraternal bond that endures even after her hormones misinterpret his gentle perceptiveness for something else. Tennie has had many roles before this one, including as a key ensemble player in the short-lived action pleasure “Deadly Class.” But his work in “Shrinking” allows us to immerse ourselves in his widest emotional range yet, commanding our attention. In a cast that includes Harrison Ford, that’s no small accomplishment. – Melanie McFarland

Billie Eilish, "Swarm" (Prime Video)

Billie Eilish in "Swarm" (Amazon Studios)

Role: Eva

Why they're a standout: Maybe it was the long blonde wig with bangs that threw us off. It could have been the crunchy floral jumpsuit she was wearing. Between those and her unaffected performance, it took a few beats to recognize the soothing leader of a white-girl cult as Eilish, for whom Eva represents her first TV credit.

Amazon asked critics not to spoil her casting which didn’t make sense at first; she’s one of several pop stars showing up in this series. Once I watched her performance, though, I understood – Eilish plays the perpetually serene Eva with a natural familiarity with the character’s type. Eva is a shepherd of lost white girls with names like Cricket and Salem, a version of Mother God with better real estate and design sense. Unto her she gathers Instagram influencers decked out in Anthropologie-style frocks who rave about nonsensical treatments that Eva clearly made up. When Dominique Fishback’s Dre crosses their paths, they’re overjoyed to add a Black woman to their collection; the modern hippie finds us to be so primal, earthy and spiritual! Inevitably Dre snaps, and appropriately it happens during a stupid drum circle. Eilish works overtime to build toward the catharsis of watching the wild-eyed Dre dispatch her character, as if acknowledging she would too. That knowing quality makes me curious to see what she does with the other acting roles that come her way. – Melanie McFarland

looks back at the year 2023

How to ring in a spirited, non-alcoholic New Year’s Eve, according to expert bartenders

Arguably more than any year that preceded it, 2023 has seen an influx of people eschewing alcohol, with a bevy of spirit-free products on the market that taste and look just like the "real thing" — without any of those side effects of, you know, actual alcohol.

Holidays like New Years Eve, though, can cause even the most ardent non-drinker to be tantalized by the siren song of liquor, especially if those around you are swigging champagne and craft cocktails with nary a concern as the ball begins to fall.

But that doesn't have to impact your spirit-free night. You can most certainly ring in the New Year with a glass in your hand that doesn't have a scintilla of liquor — and still have a positively magnificent time. Trust me (and non-alcoholic beverage experts all across the country).

My perfect Moscow mule doesn't need alcohol

While it may be a bit premature to say that alcohol will soon be passé, the shift in recent years is pretty darn remarkable. As Nielsen reports, "Between August 2021 and August 2022, total dollar sales of non-alcoholic drinks in the US stood at $395 million, showing a year-on-year growth of +20.6%." This can also be seen across various realms, from supermarket non-alcoholic options to restaurant drink menus with a special spirit-free section and even bars that sell entirely non-alcoholic options. No matter if non-alcoholic beer, wine or spirits, there has been significant growth across the markets. Chelsea Torres writes in Fox Business that "the trend is growing mostly among Generation Z and Millennials, who are opting for a healthier lifestyle."

This means that all year long — but especially on New Year’s Eve — bars across the country are making sure that there are non-alcoholic cocktails on the menu with all the complexities and nuances modern customers now expect, especially as the holiday now kicks off “Dry January” for many people.

For those who want something that mimics the traditional New Year’s Eve bubbly, there are establishments like Spago Beverly Hills that make their own non-alcoholic analogue. Adam Fournier, their bar director, describes their spirit-free rose champagne, containing rose petal, Sakura white tea, verjus rouge and "a smattering of other small components we force carbonate."

You can also buy non-alcoholic versions for pouring at home. As far as recommendations, Judy Elahi, the Beverage Director of 101 Hospitality based in Washington, D.C likes the Leitz Eins Zwei Zero Sparkling Riesling and Lyre's Classico Sparkling, while Fournier recommends Three Spirits for optimal pours while at home.

At Ruse Restaurant at the Wildset Hotel, general manager Tanner Collins said that his staff has six fresh juices and roughly eight to 10 different syrups and cordials, as well as non-alcoholic sparkling rose and blanc de blanc.

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"During the New Years Eve weekend we will have extra juices and syrups prepped to make sure folks can order any mocktail they can think of,” Collins said.

Having that flexibility makes the process of creating more innovative options possible.Collins says that the "fan favorite" cocktail right now is the Roman Holiday non-alcoholic option, which is comprised of pomegranate cordial, lemon juice, club soda and non-alcoholic Sparkling Rose by Leitz Eins Zwei Zero, which is from Germany.

"For Dry January we’re looking to expand the offerings to try out some new recipes, looking at glassware that can set the serves apart,” Fournier said. “As well as looking at how they could fit into the dining experience. We examine traditional pairings and seeing how those can be tweaked in interesting non-alc ways."

For some restaurants and bars, especially during a particularly frenzied rush, like on New Years, some bartenders may just opt to simply remove the alcohol and serve the cocktail as is otherwise, which can oftentimes fall flat.

"I think that there are things that can be learned from more traditional menus,” Fournier said. “For example, I always aim to create a spirit-free drink that replaces the experience of the beverage it’s modeled after rather than trying to make a non-alcoholic traditional cocktail."

He said for any special event, spirit-free bartenders — both out in the world and at home — should consider the intention of the drink, just as they would a typical cocktail: "Is it to start the meal? Is it celebratory? Is it an after-dinner drink with dessert? It is the experience, the ritual and the hospitality surrounding the serve that elevates a non-alcoholic serve in the same way it elevates a more traditional cocktail."

What will I be sipping on this New Years? Well, I'm thinking of adapting my colleague Bibi Hutching's terrific sangria recipe (sans vodka and swapping in a spirit-free champagne) and happily drinking it throughout the night. No matter what or where you're drinking, though, I hope you have a ball. Just don't feel like you must consume any alcohol if that's not what you'd like. Peer pressure is never fun.Happy New Years!

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The 6 worst tech fails in 2023

Just when we thought America’s spiraling descent into tech-fueled corporate surveillance dystopia couldn’t get any more gallows-hilarious, 2023 came along to prove us wrong. Even setting aside the explosive rise of artificial intelligence into every internet corridor, it’s still remarkable how many incredibly dumb battles were lost when surveying the tech fails of the past year.

On the social media front, we glimpsed a new kind of tech-focused Sinophobia from Congress members during hearings on TikTok. We also witnessed billionaires get into online slap-fights that were so pathetic they made the early-90s forum flame-wars look like United Nations debates. But away from the circus of superficiality and the reckless scattershot of AI companies, more pressing matters took shape that deserved attention.

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The Department of Homeland Security got caught with its hand in the surveillance cookie jar again, despite having more pressing things to do — like hopefully preventing a major cyberattack by neo-Nazis. Meanwhile, the Right-wing tech Medici of Silicon Valley, Peter Thiel, appeared to be a major influence on one of the valley’s worst bank runs. Then the Pentagon asked for a new suite of nuclear bombs more powerful than anything we’ve ever seen. And that’s not even mentioning Google’s monumental case before the Supreme Court.

Depending on the particular flavor of your coping mechanisms and how deeply into tech you are, 2023 was a year in tech that likely either overwhelmed your stress responses enough to make you numb and apathetic to the whole ordeal or possibly just radicalized your convictions in some way. And if you experienced neither? Then here’s a list of the worst garbage-fire moments in tech that made the rest of us feel like our brain’s short-circuited this year.

The unholy swarm of AI wretchedness

Samuel Altman, CEO of OpenAI, appears for testimony before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law May 16, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)Image_placeholder

Let’s get this out of the way right now because not only did the explosion of AI in 2023 prove to be the dominant strain of brain rot among tech news topics, its towering philosophical stupidity ultimately rose to overshadow a lot of otherwise quite pressing tech fails that deserve to be slung into the literary sky and double-barrel obliterated like clay pigeons.

While some lawmakers fumbled with the topic like a freshman fumbling with a bra hook in the backseat, others seemed genuinely interested and informed — seeking to craft a careful set of AI-use regulations with the aid of informed testimony from academics, activists, and industry leaders. Thus, the stage was set this year for Open AI CEO Sam Altman’s Congressional charm offensive. It was a hit.

That’s nice and all, but nothing much seemed to change. Bills protecting personal data and copyright seemed to go nowhere, a spate of regulatory proposals fizzled and died, and President Joe Biden’s executive order on AI doesn’t seem (yet) to have any real teeth. Meanwhile, some sites are offering “bounties” for people who are wiling to drum up some AI-generated deepfake pornography of women they know. And none of these tech giants seems to care how more and more of these deepfakes are of little girls — or at least not enough to stomp this garbage out with the same tenacity that they stomp out user-posted links to pirated Disney movies.

When I say that I believe this year in tech radicalized a lot of people, I don’t mean it in an insulting way, nor in a partisan way. This kind of thing should indeed radicalize us toward healthy material action if we have anything of a conscience left. And, if we’re lucky, it might just do it effectively enough to create new cohesion among ideologically diverse groups who are all similarly sick of kids getting sexually targeted and exploited this way. Here’s hoping.

Read the coverage

Zen and the artificial intelligence: We should be "somewhat scared," says OpenAI CEO, not paralyzed

NASA, do you still love us?

In this handout image provided by the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA, the International Space Station and the docked space shuttle Endeavour orbit Earth during Endeavour's final sortie on May 23, 2011 in Space. (Paolo Nespoli – ESA/NASA via Getty Images)

If you want to know what the opposite of “planned obsolescence” looks like in tech, then all you’ve had to do for the last 20 years in look up at the sky and watch the International Space Station pass overhead.

A symbol of hope for international academic cooperation, and NASA’s long-running bet on a future where scientific pursuits are for the purpose of knowledge and species-wide benefit as opposed to military supremacy — the decision to kill the ISS and watch it (at least partially) crash into the sea was a psychological uppercut with the same relative force and momentum as watching Old Yeller get shot.

NASA, we didn’t need that L this year. Why couldn’t you just tell us that you were sending the ISS to live on a farm upstate? At the very least, can you please just hit the brakes on the nightmarish pursuit of a future where space exploration is relegated solely to private companies who vampirically slurp up publicly-funded scientific research?

If not, no worries. Just thought I’d ask because sometimes I don’t know if you still love us or not, and I’m tired of seeing you outsource our relationship to a third-party like Elon. I know you’re busy and could use the help but it just doesn’t feel believable when he says “of course, I still love you.”

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NASA's plan to crash and burn the ISS explained and what space commercialization means for science

He coulda been a contender

SpaceX CEO and Twitter-purchaser Elon Musk (JOEL SAGET/AFP via Getty Images)

Maybe I wouldn’t be the first person to describe twin wet baguettes Mark Zuckerburg and Elon Musk as Faulknerian idiot man-children, but if that old chestnut is still worth using about anyone then surely it’s Silicon Valley’s fortunate sons.

I’d normally find it unfathomably adorable if a seemingly emotionless nerd spent the whole summer sweating his nips off building a special backyard “No Girls Allowed!” fort for he and his dumber-but-bigger friend so they could have tickle fights in it, and sip dandelion wine while laying on their backs in the still-warm grass at sunset. I’d weep at the simple, heartbreaking beauty of two neighborhood lads on the edge of innocence, basking in the odd miracle of nature’s reckless splendor amid so much human suffering, filling the guileless expanse of boyhood’s waning hour with voice-cracking giggles late into the night over secret crushes and fart jokes — and finally, in tender whispers beneath the fleeting wink of a comet, promising each that no matter what happens they will always be friends. Forever? Yes, reader, always and forever.

But that’s not what we got. What we got was a couple of insufferable soggy noodles — damp white guys who look like all the carbs they miss eating, threatening to fight each other in a cage match for months on end. We got a couple of moist boys whose billions of dollars and Congressional bill-burying powers still aren’t enough to resolve their individual inferiority complexes — but instead appear to inspire a literal desire to see each other’s genitals.

And if there’s anyone whose genitals should never be seen, it’s two grown men who spend all their time on vacation yet so successfully avoid the sun that it’s less accurate to describe them as white dudes, and more accurate to say they look like a fresh pair of shrimp-stuffed Vietnamese spring rolls that learned to walk upright and hire lobbyists.

Maybe they didn’t actually end up fighting each other, but they fought their way onto this list fair and square.

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Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg: Fight me, cowards

Cybersecurity theater and The Aristocrats

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) building. (JASON REDMOND/AFP via Getty Images)

The most messed-up thing about the Department of Homeland Security getting exposed for operating a “shady” surveillance program unchecked, is that they have so many other pressing priorities to address that you’d think they’d be a bit busy. Aren’t the DHS supposed to be focused on making sure US infrastructure is secured against the rise in neo-Nazi cyberattacks that has them so “concerned”?

Or how about they help some other agencies take a look at the Fed hacks that happened this year that involved a deeply weird deployment of porn? At the very least, the Securities and Exchange Commission could probably use some help with its exhausting marathon game of Whack-a-Mole that it’s been playing against cryptocurrency launderers. Maybe the DHS could even meet Lindsey Lohan and the other flashy celebs that got sued for shifty crypto fiddling?

If that’s not interesting, maybe DHS could focus more on making sure that the Pentagon’s nuke silos and surrounding local areas are not full of hacker-friendly holes. After all, if the Pentagon is going to keep begging for an entirely new fleet of nuclear weapons more powerful than anything we have ever seen, then I guess someone should make sure some third-party contractors aren’t accidentally leaving the digital barn door open.

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"Immoral" spy program: DHS collecting domestic intelligence in "shady" operation

Democrats mostly letting Sohn twist in the wind alone

Gigi Sohn (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images)

The hardest thing to watch in the world of tech aren’t the can’t-look-away moments where massive corporations legally get away with Lex Luther antics, but when you see an ethics titan take a fall.

It was hard to watch Biden’s Federal Communications Commission nominee, Gigi Sohn, get smeared in a homophobic campaign by Right-wing groups. It was even harder to watch most Democrats sit it on their hands and return no campaign punches, leaving her out there to take the hits largely alone.

"As someone who has advocated for my entire career for affordable, accessible broadband for every American, it is ironic that the 2-2 FCC will remain sidelined at the most consequential opportunity for broadband in our lifetimes," Sohn said in her statement. "This means that your broadband will be more expensive for lack of competition.”

"It is a sad day for our country and our democracy when dominant industries, with assistance from unlimited dark money, get to choose their regulators. And with the help of their friends in the Senate, the powerful cable and media companies have done just that."

Sad day, indeed. They did Gigi dirty, and I hope I'm around to laugh when comeuppance finally arrives for those responsible. Here's hoping FTC Chair Lina Khan keeps fighting the good fight, and that this isn't the last we see of Sohn.

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"A major injustice is being done": Biden's FCC nominee faces dark money, homophobic smears

Microsoft mewling about Google in the biggest tech monopoly case since Microsoft got similarly sued

In this photo illustration, a Google logo is seen on a smartphone with a Microsoft logo in the background. (Photo Illustration by Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

What could be more hilarious and rich than Microsoft whining to the US Supreme Court about Google maybe having a monopoly? If you pitched it as fiction, they’d say you were too on the nose.

The Justice Department and 38 US state attorneys general accused Google of using monopolistic business practices to corner the search-engine market by illegally paying Apple billions of dollars to make Google the default search engine of Apple’s Safari browser. That seems a bit overdue, but fairly tame as far as a joke setup. The punchline, though, is that despite the whole hearing centering on a possible illegal pay-for-play deal between Google and Apple, Microsoft openly told the court that it too was also ready to throw down $15 billion a year if Apple would just choose Bing for its products’ default search engine instead of Google.

The withering pleas of Microsoft fell on deaf ears among those who watched Microsoft gather into a literal monopoly through the early '90s, then fight its way through a losing battle in 1998 as the feds sued it for using a 70% market share to further entrench itself with anti-competitive behavior. The Google antitrust case is the biggest since then.

“Everybody talks about the open web, but there is really the Google web,” Microsoft’s CEO said at the trial.

It’s difficult to imagine a more delicious scene than that of Microsoft, decades after its backstabbing of Apple, falling to its knees and begging for Apple’s help as Google threatens to crush the once-ruler of the desktop world. Difficult, yes — but not impossible. Just ask any devoted Linux user.

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Won’t someone think of the Bing!? Microsoft laughably accuses Google of monopoly

about our cyberpunk dystopia

In a year marred by ethics scandals, 4 Supreme Court rulings let marginalized Americans down

The U.S. Supreme Court spent much of 2023 embroiled in scandal as a slew of reports exposed the ethical lapses of two of its most senior justices. But as the high court faced harsh criticism and sharper scrutiny, it delivered a spate of controversial rulings that let many Americans down.

A series of ProPublica reports revealed that Justice Clarence Thomas had accepted decades-worth of luxury trips funded by GOP megadonor Harlan Crow and other billionaires, while Crow had purchased Thomas' mother's home in 2014 and paid the tuition of the justice's great-nephew in the mid-2000s. The outlet also found that Justice Samuel Alito had in 2008 accepted a lavish fishing trip paid for by right-wing billionaire Paul Singer. Both justices failed to disclose these gifts in their relevant annual financial disclosures, and Alito did not recuse himself from cases when Singer's hedge fund came before the court.

The exposés sparked widespread calls for an ethics code to be imposed on the high court, a move the justices seemed to reject until adopting one last month. But their new code of conduct, legal experts and watchdogs say, flops in neglecting to provide a mechanism for enforcement.

The Supreme Court’s term of clear corruption and the innocence of influence

The controversy has loomed over many of the court's 2023 decisions as the justices sided with largely conservative opinions in several hallmark cases, some of which have left the nation's most marginalized with less access and fewer federal protections than they had the year prior. These are some of the Supreme Court's most disappointing rulings of 2023:

Arizona v. Navajo Nation

After filing its initial complaint against the U.S. Department of the Interior and other federal agencies 20 years ago, the Navajo Nation was again set back in its efforts to secure water access in June after the Supreme Court denied its request to force the federal government to help the tribe quantify, determine and access its water rights.

The court rejected the request in a 5-4 vote — with conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch joining the liberal justices in dissenting — ruling that the 1868 treaty that established the Navajo Reservation in the Colorado River Basin as the tribe's "permanent home" did not require the U.S. to make efforts toward securing the tribe's water.

"The 1868 treaty ‘set apart’ a reservation for the 'use and occupation of the Navajo tribe,'" Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in the majority opinion. "But it contained no ‘rights-creating or duty-imposing’ language that imposed a duty on the United States to take affirmative steps to secure water for the Tribe.”

Supreme Court leaves Navajo Nation high and dry

According to ProPublica, the Navajo Nation filed the suit in 2003 in hopes of pushing the federal government to move more quickly in helping to settle its water rights as guaranteed by treaties and court cases. A third of families on the reservation, an area that includes parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, lack access to clean water and must transport it from wells, purchase bottled water or use contaminated water to meet their needs, according to DigDeep, a nonprofit that filed an amicus brief in support of the Navajo Nation.

The tribe was on the verge of a settlement with Arizona in 2010 but the deal died in Congress after being deemed too expensive. Another attempt two years later was rejected by the tribal council after Arizona officials insisted on a provision for a coal mine, while another fizzled in 2020 after state lawmakers suggested imposing a condition pertaining to casino license renewal.

"Today, the Court rejects a request the Navajo Nation never made," Gorsuch wrote in the dissent, asserting that the nation simply asked the United States to identify the water rights it holds for them.

“The Navajo have tried it all. They have written federal officials. They have moved this Court to clarify the United States’ responsibilities when representing them. They have sought to intervene directly in water-related litigation,” Gorsuch added. “At each turn, they have received the same answer: ‘Try again.’”

Leaders of Native American rights groups lambasted the ruling and vowed to continue fighting to secure their water rights.

"Water is necessary for all life, and when our ancestors negotiated agreements with the United States to secure our lands and our protection, water was understood and still is understood to be inseparable from the land and from our peoples," said Fawn Sharp, the president of the National Congress of American Indians in a statement at the time.

"Today, the Supreme Court has once again assisted in the United States' centuries-long attempts to try to get out of the promises they have made to Tribal Nations by stating that treaties only secure access to water, but do not require the United States to take any steps to protect or provide that water to our people."

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Students For Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina

On June 29, the Supreme Court declared race-based affirmative action in college admissions unlawful and in violation of the U.S. Constitution's equal protection clause, effectively barring colleges from considering the race of a prospective student during the admissions process.

The court ruled 6-3 in favor of Students For Fair Admissions, a conservative-funded membership group challenging race-based affirmative action, which claimed that UNC's policy discriminated against white and Asian applicants. The same-day ruling of a parallel case against Harvard University brought by the same group — claiming Harvard's policy discriminated against Asian applicants — saw the justices vote 6-2, with liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Harvard alum with other ties to the university, recusing herself.

In the majority opinion, which Thomas, Alito and the other conservative justices joined, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that Harvard and UNC's race-based consideration practices "lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points."

KBJ rips “let-them-eat-cake obliviousness” of affirmative action ruling — calls out Clarence Thomas

The Supreme Court's decision sparked outcry among civil rights groups and Democratic leaders, with many arguing that the ruling denies Black and brown youth equal opportunity in their pursuit of higher education. Leaders of Asian Americans Advancing Justice noted that the change would also put many of the Asian American students SFFA purported to advocate for at a disadvantage, particularly "Pacific Islander, Native Hawaiian, and Southeast Asian communities who continue to face significant barriers to higher education."

In addition to discarding decades of legal precedent and social progress, "The Court subverts the constitutional guarantee of equal protection by further entrenching racial inequality in education," Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a dissent.

While the decision mostly impacts the admissions processes of highly competitive universities, experience suggests that those schools will struggle to maintain diverse student bodies that reflect the demographics of the states they serve without race-conscious admissions, according to the Wall Street Journal. Data showed that colleges in nine states that had already banned race-conscious admissions before the Supreme Court decision ultimately admitted fewer Black, Hispanic and Native American students to their universities after implementing the change despite efforts to boost numbers through alternative means.

In a scathing dissenting opinion in the UNC case, Jackson rebuked the ruling as "truly a tragedy for us all."

303 Creative LLC v. Elenis

Just a day after its affirmative action ruling, the Supreme Court stripped access and protection from the LGBTQ community and other protected groups by making it legal for business owners to reject customers seeking custom services or goods that convey messages the owner disagrees with.

In an ideological split, the justices ruled 6-3 in favor of 303 Creative LLC owner Lorie Smith, a Colorado designer who sought an exemption from the state's Anti-Discrimination Act in order to legally deny same-sex couples wedding website services she had yet to offer, citing religious protections.

Notably, Smith — represented in the case by Alliance Defending Freedom, an ultraconservative legal organization some watchdogs have designated an extremist, anti-LGBTQ group — had never received a verified request to design a custom wedding website for a same-sex couple.

Report reveals anti-LGBTQ case now before Supreme Court may have been “fabricated”

Gorsuch authored the majority opinion, establishing that Smith's hypothetical wedding website constitutes "protected First Amendment speech" and finding that Colorado's law "seeks to force an individual to speak in ways that align with its views but defy her conscience about a matter of major significance."

As LGBTQ rights groups decried the ruling, other critics also admonished the court for taking on what they saw as an unnecessary rehash of the Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, in which the court ruled in favor of a baker who refused to sell a wedding cake to a same-sex couple. In that case, the court had dodged the discrimination concern altogether.

“Today, the Court, for the first time in its history, grants a business open to the public a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class,” Sotomayor wrote in her dissenting opinion, joined by Justice Elena Kagan and Jackson.

This year's ruling, though not granting a blanket ability to discriminate against LGBTQ people, left anti-discrimination protections and other civil rights laws at risk of reinterpretation by other courts, legal experts told 19th News.

“It would potentially carve out a new and really dangerous loophole in civil rights protections, not just for LGBTQ people, but it could potentially create a precedent that would weaken civil rights protections for all people on any basis,” Olivia Hunt, policy director for the National Center For Transgender Equality, told the outlet.

Since the decision, Smith has released a slate of brief statements addressing the public, clients and the media on the 303 Creative website. As of Thursday, she has yet to offer custom wedding website services, though a banner on the company site indicates the service is "coming soon."

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Biden v. Nebraska

The Supreme Court dealt millions of Americans a disheartening blow when it struck down President Joe Biden's multibillion-dollar student debt relief plan on June 29, axing widely anticipated debt cancellation for more than 40 million Americans.

The court ruled that the Biden administration did not have the authority to enact the program because of its wide scope — aiming to release 43 million student loan borrowers from a total of $430 billion of debt. The justices voted 6-3 along ideological lines in favor of the six suing states.

In the majority opinion, Roberts wrote that the debt relief plan departed too far from the "extremely modest and narrow scope" of previous applications of the 2003 Higher Education Relief Opportunities Act, which allows the secretary of education to "waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision" pertaining to student financial aid under Title IV of the Education Act as they deem it necessary in times of war or national emergency.

Biden's plan, enacted in 2022 in response to the financial hardship caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, strove to forgive up to $10,000 for borrowers with eligible loans who make less than $125,000 and cancel up to $20,000 of debt for qualified Pell Grant recipients.

The ruling, Roberts added, aligns with the court's longtime precedent requiring Congress' input on a matter before secretaries can "unilaterally alter large sections of the American economy."

Advocacy organizations railed against the decision, with the Student Borrower Protection Center, a nonprofit organization seeking to eliminate the burden of student loan debt, accusing the court of corruption and ripping "away critical relief from 40 million borrowers and their families" in a statement at the time.

Biden, in June remarks at the White House, said the court's decision "was a mistake, was wrong," and vowed to continue fighting "to deliver borrowers what they need."

The president soon began rolling out a new program for student loan repayment shortly after the high court's decision that aims to lower monthly payments for borrowers, among other measures, according to Politico. He announced Tuesday that his administration has canceled over $130 billion in student loan debt for more than 3 million Americans this year.

Despite Republican officials' attempts to block relief, we've now cancelled a total of $132 billion in debt for over 3.6 million Americans through various actions, launched the most affordable repayment plan ever, and helped countless folks access Public Service Loan Forgiveness. pic.twitter.com/uLHmOAVNu4

— President Biden Archived (@POTUS46Archive) December 26, 2023

about the Supreme Court in 2023

The most dangerous drug of 2023: Loneliness, Donald Trump and you

Consider two phenomena that might seem unrelated.

This fall, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new data showing a marked increase in overdose fatalities nationally. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, told CNN that she had expected overdose deaths to decline after a sharp spike during the pandemic. Instead, such fatalities have only gone up.

Meanwhile, by the end of November, Donald Trump was riding high with nearly 60% support in Republican primary polling. In the past 43 years, according to the Washington Post, no candidate has had such a commanding lead and failed to win his party’s nomination.

On the face of it, his astonishing poll numbers would appear to have nothing whatsoever to do with the continued rise in overdose deaths. As it happens, though, the two phenomena are horribly intertwined, connected to a fundamental question so many Americans are grappling with: In a world that feels increasingly lonely and often hopeless, how can we feel better?

Being honest about our loneliness

One of us, Mattea, is a writer who currently uses drugs, and the other, Sean, is a doctor living in long-term recovery from a substance use disorder. Both of us were raised to believe that our accomplishments were the measure of our worth and that something out there — status, money, accolades — would make us whole. Both of us bagged various degrees and have admirable résumés, but neither of us found that such achievements brought any sense of wholeness. In fact, it’s often seemed as if the more impressive we appeared, the emptier we felt.

The COVID pandemic may be "over" — but the pandemic of loneliness is getting worse

It took us about 40 years to realize that our quest to be accomplished and better than other people was, in fact, causing us despair. And today we’re writing because we remain in pain and want to be honest about it. We have come to understand that even those people who appear to be on top often feel an emptiness they try to fill with work, antidepressants, cannabis, wine, benzodiazepines, you name it.

Meanwhile, there is a nascent but growing awareness in the medical and recovery communities that loneliness is at the root of so much addiction — and that loneliness is on the rise. According to Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, loneliness in America has indeed grown into a public health crisis. Earlier this year, Murthy released a report entitled “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation,” in which he described taking a cross-country tour and hearing countless Americans of all backgrounds disclose that they feel invisible, insignificant and isolated. That experience of loneliness coupled with trauma and a wide spectrum of mental health challenges is now tearing at the fabric of American life, driving new levels of despair and death, much of it drug-related, that are ripping through families and communities and lowering life expectancy.

In such a bleak landscape, one way to feel better is to put your hopes into a magnetic leader who makes you feel like you’re a part of something meaningful. Another way is to have a martini and any mood- or mind-altering substance — anything to numb the pain.

This is not an individual problem. This is not a moral failing or a flaw in our brain chemistry (or yours). This is a vast social problem, one that benefits The Donald immeasurably.

Disconnection nation world

Bruce Alexander is a professor emeritus of psychology at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia and the author of "The Globalization of Addiction." He struggled with alcohol as a young man and then left the U.S. for Canada, where he devoted his professional life to the study of addiction. He focused on the significance of “psychosocial integration,” the healthy interdependence with society an individual experiences when he or she feels both a sense of self-worth and of belonging to a larger whole. According to Alexander, psychosocial integration is what makes human life bearable and its lack is called “dislocation” or, in common parlance, disconnection.

In a bleak landscape, one way to feel better is to put your hopes into a magnetic leader who makes you feel like you’re a part of something meaningful. Another is to have a mood- or mind-altering substance — anything to numb the pain.

In a sense, disconnection goes hand-in-hand with our modern free-market society. Many potential sources of psychosocial integration like the sharing of food among all members of a community are today seen as incompatible with free markets or otherwise logistically implausible. Instead, each individual is meant to act in his or her own self-interest. According to Alexander, this makes a sense of disconnection not the state of a relatively few members of society, but the condition of the majority.

Such disconnection generally proves to be a psychologically painful experience that all too often leads to confusion, shame and despair. As individuals, we tend to try to manage such feelings by numbing ourselves or reaching for a substitute for genuine connection, or both. This leads masses of people to compulsively pursue and become addicted to work, social media, material possessions, sex, alcohol, drugs and more. Of course, simply to pursue any of these things doesn’t mean a person is addicted. It’s possible to have a healthy relationship with work or an unhealthy one — and that’s true of just about anything.

In this view of modern existence, addiction is a very human answer to the conditions in which we find ourselves. According to physician and childhood trauma and addiction expert Gabor Maté, addiction is so commonplace in our world that most people don’t even recognize its presence.

Yet to label people “drug addicts” is to strip them of their humanity and assign them to the lowest echelons of our society. It’s a term that implicitly undermines the validity of a person’s experience and negates their very worth. Even though different types of addictions — to drugs or money, for instance — are inherently similar, the former is stigmatized, while the latter is acceptable or even revered.

“To ostracize the drug addict as somehow different from the rest of us is arrogant and arbitrary,” writes Maté, who has been candid about his own addictions — to work and shopping — to the point of sharing his experiences with patients who were addicted to drugs. His patients, he reports, were astonished that he was “just like the rest of us.”

“The point,” Maté said in an interview with the Guardian earlier this year, “is we are all just like the rest of us.”

After more than half a century of studying addiction, Bruce Alexander no longer separates compulsive drug use from other dependencies. He categorizes addictions to alcohol, drugs, food, gambling, power, a sense of superiority and a litany of other things as responses to the same underlying pain.

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Yet he does regard one flavor of addiction as distinct from all others.

“What’s the most dangerous addiction of all in the 21st century?” he asked in a conversation with one of us over Zoom last year. And then he answered his own question. According to the octogenarian professor who has devoted his life to addiction psychology, the most dangerous addiction today is the rising obsession globally with cult political leaders like Donald Trump.

What drugs and autocracy have in common

Today, there is an emerging awareness among medical professionals that loneliness lies behind our addiction crisis. But political scientists have long known that loneliness can drive social decay, eroding political stability in unnerving ways.

Historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt understood isolation and loneliness as the essential conditions for the rise of an autocratic ruler. For a politician to seize absolute power, she wrote in 1951 in "The Origins of Totalitarianism," people must be isolated from one another. She referred to widespread isolation as a “pre-totalitarian” state, suggesting that totalitarian domination “bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.”

Hannah Arendt described widespread isolation as a "pre-totalitarian" state, suggesting that totalitarian domination “bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all."

In her moment, Arendt also saw political propaganda as both an art and a science that Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin had developed to near perfection. She labeled it the “art of moving the masses.” Had she lived into our time, she would undoubtedly have been struck by the ways in which the science of drug chemistry and the art of political propaganda have soared to novel heights. After all, we carry in our pockets, day and night, tiny computers that all too often deliver disinformation, while the drug supply has become so potent that fatal overdoses regularly occur from both legally obtained prescription pills and a continuously shifting assortment of illicit drugs.

This should be terrifying, but we’ve also learned something significant from our own experiences and those of other people who use drugs. Every person’s drug of choice — whatever it is — deserves to be understood and respected as a strategic coping mechanism. Follow the drug to the pain underneath. Gabor Maté’s mantra is: “Don’t ask why the addiction, ask why the pain.”

No matter whether people ease or numb their suffering with drugs, alcohol, television or by following a leader determined to be the one and only in their world, that strategy serves an important purpose in their life. And that’s true even if today’s widespread addiction to a would-be all-American dictator were to lead to the awarding of incontestable power and control over the world’s largest nuclear stockpile to a vengeful demagogue. It’s important to understand that a romance with a drug or with Donald Trump (or both) helps people tolerate their pain — very often, the pain of feeling that they don’t have a place in the world.

This molecule understands me, it doesn’t judge me. This guy understands me, he doesn’t judge me.

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Arendt grasped early on that the lies of political propaganda offer an alternate reality, and when masses of people support an autocratic leader, they’re casting a vote against the world as they know it — a world marked by loneliness. It’s just such loneliness that fuels support for the iron-fisted politician, while creating a hunger for mind-numbing molecules, both impulses born of a frustrated need for connection. As a New York Times headline put it, opioids feel like love (and that’s why they’re so deadly in tough times). That one can experience love through drugs might seem fantastical to many — but such love is all too real and feels better than no love at all.

Amid endemic loneliness, drugs and autocracy each provides an escape from a reality that otherwise seems unbearable.

We decided to witness each other’s pain

Our cultural modus operandi is to judge people who use drugs or are in the throes of addiction — to consider substance use an essential character flaw, a deep moral problem. In 2022, one of us led a national public health survey that found 69% of respondents across the U.S. believe society views people who use drugs problematically as “somewhat, very, or completely inferior.” In other words, the vast majority of us believe that people who use drugs are outcasts. Meanwhile, our legal system criminalizes certain substances (while similar or even identical molecules are legal and widely prescribed) and regards the people who use them as bad actors who must be punished and supervised in jails and prisons or through parole or probation.

It’s important to understand that a romance with a drug or with Donald Trump (or both) helps people tolerate their pain — very often, the pain of feeling that they don’t have a place in the world.

But once you grasp the underlying problem — that people are lonely, traumatized and in pain — it becomes all too clear that incarceration or other similar punishments are not the answer. They represent, in fact, just about the worst policy you could possibly bring to bear against people who are hurting and self-medicating in an attempt to feel better. The U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights recently called on all nations to regard drug use as a public health issue and curb punitive measures to deal with it. In the U.S., even as there is a dawning awareness that the war on drugs has been a miserable failure, many elected officials (and presidential candidates) only want to double down on harsh policies.

One of us has personally experienced criminal punishment for substance use, and the shame of being judged and punished is so physically palpable that it’s the equivalent of being stabbed and then having the knife twisted in you again and again. On top of devastating repercussions that touch every dimension of your professional and civil life, it’s common to be judged badly for your substance use by friends, family and neighbors — nearly everyone you know. That, in turn, makes recovery from a substance use disorder seem all but impossible because drugs are what numb the shame.

So we personally decided to try something different. We’re two people who have experienced loneliness and, rather than judge each other, we’ve chosen to witness one another’s pain. That means listening to our experiences without diminishing, deflecting or trying to fix the problem. And what we’ve found is that this makes us less lonely and provides a strong measure of healing.

Notably, research indicates that nonjudgmental peer support is a genuinely effective strategy for addressing substance use disorder. Whereas being jailed or otherwise punished or dismissed as weak or dirty is a barrier to emotional health (and all too often proves deadly), having the support of trusted peers and loved ones is associated with a reduction in the psychic pain that drives people to use drugs in the first place.

This squares with what Arendt thought, too. In "The Origins of Totalitarianism," she wrote that loneliness is “the loss of one’s own self” because we are social creatures, and we confirm our very identity through “the trusting and trustworthy company of [our] equals.” That is, we need one another to be our fullest selves.

To put that another way, when it comes to addictions, whether to drugs or to a dangerous leader, the true medicine is connection to each other.

on addiction and loneliness

Like long COVID, Lyme disease can become chronic — and patients are just as dismissed and desperate

Between 2012 and 2014, Tracy Jakich Davis’ 14-year-old son, Jaden, developed a host of mysterious symptoms that more than a half dozen doctors near Phoenix, Arizona could not piece together to form a diagnosis: a rash that looked like ringworm all over his head; swelling and pain in the knees that kept him from playing basketball; pain in the fingers so strong he couldn’t grip a golf club; a suppressed immune system that caused him to pick up viruses every four to six weeks; and, finally, severe migraines with blurred vision.

When Jaden was finally diagnosed with acquired Chiari, or a brain herniation caused by a spinal fluid leak, in November 2014, doctors rushed him into brain surgery. However, that only made things worse, according to his mother, and they were back in the hospital on multiple occasions for intolerable pain that ultimately spread to his teeth. At the emergency room in unbearable agony, an attending physician sent him to have his two front teeth pulled, Davis said. Yet that didn’t work to alleviate his pain, either.

Will deer-tick virus be the next big epidemic? A new study raises troubling questions

In the end, it was Davis who found the diagnosis for her son two excruciating years later while searching online through various Facebook groups for children with chronic pain. A woman had posted about a bullseye-shaped rash with a list of symptoms that remarkably resembled Jaden’s. That’s when Davis remembered the strange rings on Jaden’s head after the camping trip.

“You think, ‘Okay, now we have the answer and we can get it treated,” Davis told Salon in a phone interview. “I went to his neurologist and said ‘I think I know what this is,’ and they wouldn’t take it seriously.”

“I went to his neurologist and said ‘I think I know what this is,’ and they wouldn’t take it seriously.”

Yet finding her son’s diagnosis was just the beginning of a long journey to getting him help. After meeting a doctor who confirmed her son had chronic Lyme disease, formally known as Post-treatment Lyme Disease Syndrome (PTLDS), Davis ended up spending more than $300,000 treating her son’s condition and ensuing musculoskeletal pain before she lost count of how much she’d spent.

Many doctors didn’t accept her insurance and the costs of treatment were too high to continue long-term. One doctor they finally felt was equipped to treat him died a week after their first meeting. At one point, they were flying to Maryland to see a doctor who offered treatment at an affordable price, but the commute became impossible when her son’s pain left him bedbound.

Today, Jaden has nearly completed an associate’s degree in applied science and wants to one day become a physical therapist, inspired in part by his own experience with years of physical therapy. He has tried dozens of therapies to treat his chronic pain but still hasn’t found any long-term solutions to manage his underlying PTLDS.

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For a subgroup of patients, including Jaden, debilitating symptoms persist for years after their initial Lyme disease diagnosis. Yet despite a concerning increase in tick bites and Lyme disease as tick habitats expand due to climate change, the science on how best to treat chronic Lyme disease is “limited, emerging and unsettled,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The incidence of Lyme disease, caused by the Borrelia burgdorferi bacteria transmitted in black-legged ticks, nearly doubled between 1991 and 2018, with roughly half a million people diagnosed with the condition in 2022. For up to 10% of patients with Lyme disease, the condition will turn chronic, meaning patients remain sick for more than three or four weeks after their initial infection and begin to experience malaise, secondary cognitive or neurologic disorders and generalized musculoskeletal pain.

Many patients are diagnosed with additional infections like bartonellosis or babesiosis caused by other bacteria carried by ticks, which can complicate treatment. Jaden, for example, had both of these additional infections but had to stop taking certain antibiotics that helped with his chronic pain because they caused such severe gastrointestinal issues.

“It's like we're in this black hole,” Davis said. “I know he has an infection and antibiotics are helping, but we can't get someone to really manage the pain properly through the infection route.”

“It's like we're in this black hole."

Many people with PTLDS say their doctors initially didn’t recognize their symptoms as something stemming from Lyme disease, which delays diagnosis and treatment. For one thing, diagnostic tests are relatively inaccurate, with many patients getting false negatives. But, similar to patients with long COVID, postural tachycardia syndrome (POTS) and chronic fatigue syndrome, many patients say doctors can also be dismissive of their symptoms, leaving some gaslit families to pursue their own diagnoses and even unproven treatments online and in Facebook groups in what Davis called an “underground” network of PTLDS medical care. With research indicating that delayed diagnoses and treatment increase the chance that Lyme disease will turn chronic, the stakes are high to get the diagnosis down quickly.

Dr. Daniel Cameron, an internist and twice past president of the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society (ILADS), said he has seen many patients who have been sick for five or six years but have been passed around by so many different doctors that they become “lost in the system.”

“There are quite a few [PTLDS doctors], but I just don't think there's enough to meet demand,” Cameron told Salon in a phone interview. “Patients have trouble accessing doctors who are used to treating chronic neurologic Lyme, neuropsychiatric Lyme or POTS.”

Lyme disease symptoms could be mistaken for COVID-19, with serious consequences

It’s unclear why some patients with Lyme experience ongoing or relapsing symptoms despite completing the recommended course of antibiotics. It could be that small amounts of bacteria persist or that remnants of the initial infection linger in the body and cause ongoing inflammation, said Dr. Brian Fallon, a psychiatrist and director of the Lyme and Tick-Borne Diseases Research Center at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. The immune system might also have started to attack itself, or it could be that issues with the nervous system are causing the host of different symptoms, he added.

“I think [the causes are] different for different people,” Fallon told Salon in a phone interview. “You can have combinations of them, or you can have, for example, a nervous system that’s gone awry and a portion of the spirochaete [bacterial infection] somewhere that’s triggering the immune system to remain activated.”

Lyme disease can also trigger neuropsychiatric conditions that further complicate treatment. Up to 40% of patients with PTLDS also have depression and 90% experience cognitive issues like brain fog. In uncommon cases, infections can cross the blood-brain barrier and cause psychosis, Fallon said.

Jaden, along with some other pediatric patients, developed Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcal Infections (PANDAS) after an infection that caused brain inflammation. Once an honors student performing high school math in seventh grade, Jaden lost his ability to read and developed tremors along with a host of other symptoms of intellectual disability.

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“When my son had it, he literally broke every door in my house and slammed his head through the wall,” Davis said. “As hard as life is now, it is nothing like it was.”

To be fair, these symptoms can be challenging for doctors to diagnose and treat, especially with a paucity of research available to help inform their decisions. Still, some doctors believe PTLDS symptoms are instead caused by conditions like fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome that happen to be coming up after the tick bite — despite a growing body of evidence suggesting these symptoms stem from the original infection.

Distinguishing these conditions from one another is essential to guide doctors in choosing appropriate treatment options. However, Fallon emphasized the importance of getting treated for whatever symptoms patients have after antibiotic therapy.

Because there is no consensus on how best to treat this condition, physicians pursue conflicting paths, and getting treatment covered by insurance is challenging.

“If you are suffering from depression are suffering with suicidal thoughts, you should definitely reach out to a mental health professional for help,” Fallon said. “That doesn't mean it's not triggered by the Lyme disease. It does mean that these are serious problems. … It's a sign that you're using all possible approaches to try to get yourself better.”

As it stands, treatments for PTLDS are all over the map, with different doctors recommending everything from antibiotics to IV immunoglobin, which is used to treat immune conditions. Because there is no consensus on how best to treat this condition, physicians pursue conflicting paths, and getting treatment covered by insurance is challenging.

Further complicating things, according to a 2016 paper in the Journal of Infusion Nursing, the Infectious Diseases Society of America initially “attached negative connotations to the term chronic Lyme and discouraged its use,” which effectively belittled the condition and led to many patients feeling marginalized medically. It wasn’t until 2015 that the CDC officially acknowledged the condition as PTLDS after it became clear that the terminology was affecting patient care.

Today, the CDC discourages the use of the term "chronic Lyme disease" because it implies that prolonged symptoms are caused by an ongoing Lyme disease infection when the cause of the symptoms isn’t actually known yet, said Dr. Grace Marx, a medical epidemiologist with the Bacterial Disease Branch at CDC’s Division of Vector-Borne Diseases.

"Regardless of the term used, prolonged symptoms can have devastating effects on a person’s life," Marx told Salon in an email. "There is a critical need to better understand the causes of prolonged symptoms in people who have had Lyme disease and the best approaches to treatment and care."

Although it varies by case, Dr. Richard Horowitz, an internist in private practice who treats patients with chronic Lyme in New York, said he treats patients with dapsone, an antibiotic used to treat leprosy, along with other antibiotics like doxycycline and azithromycin. Some evidence shows multidrug combinations work better than one antibiotic at a time. On the other hand, Marx pointed to other studies that show extended treatment with antibiotics is ineffective in treating prolonged symptoms in patients who have been treated for Lyme disease — showing how conflicting some of the research in this area can be.

“That’s why a randomized controlled double-blind placebo-controlled study [comparing Lyme disease treatments] needs to be done because we need to standardize this,” Horowitz told Salon in a video call. “Otherwise, it's like the Wild West out there, even though I've been publishing as much as I can on the efficacy and safety of these protocols.”

In a survey published last year of doctors who treated patients with persistent Lyme disease, one reported moving to another state because they said they, along with other physicians who treated complex cases like chronic Lyme, were “specifically targeted by health insurance companies for medical board complaints and other attacks, especially when they helped patients other doctors gave up on.” Davis says she has to pay a naturopath out of pocket because many doctors who treat Lyme have stopped doing so through insurance out of fear of retaliation.

“I believe that the main issue that causes many of these patients to be without access to care is the amount they need to spend on their practitioners plus the out-of-pocket costs for out-of-network testing, labs and treatment,” one physician wrote in the survey. “For most of these patients that is anywhere from $10 to $20K per year. It is a huge burden.”

The Lyme wars are upon us. We should probably read up on them

In 2019, the American Medical Association acknowledged the issue by adopting a policy that stated, “The threat posed by vector-borne diseases is increasing, and we have a limited capacity to respond.”

Marx said the agency is currently working to develop tools to better evaluate and treat patients with Lyme disease in collaboration with the CDC, starting by hosting focus groups with doctors from various specialties who treat chronic Lyme to produce resources for clinicians that should be available in 2024. The National Institutes of Health also recently awarded grants to Massachussets-based researchers to develop better diagnostic tests for chronic Lyme.

Fallon said PTLDS has been increasingly recognized by the medical community since the COVID-19 pandemic began because the long COVID community has shed light on how common and debilitating chronic symptoms following serious infections can be.

“What patients have accomplished through their extraordinary efforts to raise funds and also to lobby Congress to allocate funds for tick-borne disease research has really made a huge difference for the public health of the nation,” Fallon said. “They deserve a lot of credit, and especially the mothers, who have been huge forces for good. When they see their children ill, it motivates them to be fierce advocates on behalf of their children.”

Davis emphasized the importance of developing accurate diagnostic tests and said she’d also like to see a recognition by the medical community that chronic Lyme is real and debilitating to people like her son. These days, Jaden lives with her and sees a variety of doctors and naturopaths to try and relieve his pain. He recently tried ketamine therapy, which worked temporarily but was so debilitating that it’s likely not going to be a long-term solution.

“We need to change the attitude of doctors to recognize that people are not making this up,” she said. “I mean, they're in pain and they can't function.”

If you are in crisis, please call the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.

about Lyme disease

Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows “swatted” after removing Trump from ballot

Earlier this week, the state of Maine followed Colorado's lead in removing Donald Trump from their 2024 primary ballot and Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows has been the target of threats ever since.

After Bellows' decision, Trump did not comment directly on the removal but took to Truth Social Thursday night to direct his followers to Bellows’ official website. Accused of being a “virulent leftist” who has now “decided to interfere in the presidential election” by the GOP frontrunner's campaign, Bellows' has most recently found herself the victim of "swatting" on Friday night while she was away with her family for the holiday weekend.

According to Washington Examiner, "Law enforcement officials are investigating the incident, which reportedly occurred after a man called the Augusta Regional Communication Center to report that he had broken into the state official's house. However, when Maine State Police responded to the home, no one was at the residence."

"This behavior is unacceptable," Bellows said in a Facebook post on Saturday. "The non-stop threatening communications the people who work for me endured all day yesterday is unacceptable. It’s designed to scare not only me but also others into silence, to send a message. I am so grateful to have such an amazing team of employees at the Department of Secretary of State."

The 10 best TV episodes of 2023, from an unforgettable wedding to an unbelievable courtroom

If forcefully compelled to describe the state of television in 2023 in one word, it would be . . . serviceable. Past years would have demanded a term lamenting Peak TV's glut, but that blimp is contracting. Sadly, this decrease isn't happening in time for people to discover some outstanding shows that were canceled along with the dreck, one of which made this year-end list.

We're going to be hungry for the rich creativity powering those series next year, when we won't have "Barry" or "Succession" to consider anymore — or, really, many great shows that strove to extend the so-called Platinum era of prestige TV.

But to push aside my highfalutin' critics spectacles for a moment, there are still plenty of fine crowd-pleasers around, many of which are enjoyable as a whole without turning out any single episode that distinguishes it as extraordinary. "Drops of God" on Apple TV+ is not for everyone, but it's a gorgeously chilled masterwork focused on a contest to inherit the legacy of an oenophile. "Survival of the Thickest" is a lot more accessible, and isn't on this list either but I am not ashamed to say I rewatched the full season twice. "What We Do in the Shadows" is still reliably entertaining. The last season of "Picard" slaps, "The Gilded Age" is a glittery, vapid delight, and "Reacher" is a solid ride. None of those made my top 10.

Then again, a lot of other great shows didn't either. "Yellowjackets" fans, don't get mad — there's a certain episode that's popped up on a lot of other year-end lists, but I am behind. Maybe I'll catch up over winter break.

The 12 biggest moments in animation this year

That brings us to the usual annual disclaimers: Evaluations like this are highly subjective and must acknowledge that one person can't see every show. If your favorite episode doesn't show up here, that doesn't negate its greatness. Maybe I haven't watched it yet. Maybe I forgot about it. Maybe we simply disagree. It's allowed!

At least I was able to pull out a Top 10 that includes a few rogue selections along with the episode fellow critics likely crowned 2023 TV's finest. So enjoy. Or be horrified. Either way, watch a few of these for yourself — you (probably) won't be sorry you did.

"Succession" Season 3, Episode 3 "Connor's Wedding," HBO (Max)

Jeremy Strong and Sarah Snook on "Succession" (HBO)

Some episodes blindside the viewer with unexpected turns that change everything. This one's brilliance is in the way it takes something the audience was assured was going to happen in the first episode of the series and buries it in the batter of his least loved child's wedding cake.

"Succession" frequently cloaks consequential twists in grand social events, so we should have guessed something huge would derail Connor's big day — but not Logan Roy's death. More devastating is the way series creator Jesse Armstrong doesn't even devote a full quarter of the episode to the wedding, cutting into whatever passes for joy in this family with the terrible news that transforms all of Logan's backbiting adult children into helpless whelps.

Kieran Culkin, Jeremy Strong and Sarah Snook do some of their best work here, turning their emotions from blissful social fakery into absolute devastation in a heartbeat. Shiv, Kendall and Roman are not serious people, as their father tells them shortly before he died, but the cyclone of grief these actors spin lets us see them, ever so briefly, as frail humans worthy of our sympathy. That was unexpected.

Click here to read our full recap of the episode.

"The Bear" Season 2, Episode 7 "Forks," FX (Hulu)

Sarah Ramos as Jessica, Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Richard “Richie” Jerimovich and Andrew Lopez as Garret in "The Bear" (Chuck Hodes/FX)

The second season of this show is ostensibly about a journey to transform a decaying sandwich joint into a Michelin star-worthy bistro. Only after we digest a few episodes do we come to understand what it's really about — discovering your purpose and calling.

Every character embarks on a journey to hone their natural craft, but what about the one who has no outwardly apparent natural talent or ability? Cousin Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) is the crewmember with no real role, an unmanageable manager who insists on sticking to an old "system" that amounts to chaos. But Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) needs all hands on deck, so Carmy sends Richie to apprentice at one of the places where the chef made his bones to be humbled, humiliated . . . and slowly but surely forged into a man who understands precision, the art of service and a man who intimately understands that Every Second Counts.

"Fishes," the episode preceding "Forks," is a cinematic, star-studded tour de force in its own right, but this one taps into the heart of what make "The Bear" one of the best TV shows in any season, setting up not just Richie's triumph but one for the entire crew in the season finale.

Watch our Salon Talks conversation with Ebon Moss-Bachrach.

"The Last of Us" Season 1, Episode 3 "Long, Long Time," HBO (Max)

Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett in "The Last of Us" (Liane Hentscher/HBO)

As I wrote when this episode first aired, "The Last of Us" doesn't pretend people aren't a threat. But this hour also insists we're the cure, yielding stunningly gorgeous performances by Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett as Bill and Frank, two characters who appear in the zombie apocalypse video game from which this drama is adapted. What the game didn't do was depict the nature of their relationship, only inferring what these two were to each other.

The bulk of "Long, Long Time" is spent with Bill and Frank's relationship, allowing us to not merely meet them but know them. More than this Craig Mazin, the series co-creator who wrote the hour, uses their burgeoning romance and eventual marriage to demonstrate the ways our supposed vulnerabilites make us stronger. Bill is the survivalist of the two. But Frank expands his walled-in world, giving him plenty to live for.

The episode is named for a Linda Ronstadt song Frank performs for Bill, lowering his emotional barriers in the process, but the moment that tells the story of what this episode is about shows the men sitting beside a strawberry patch Frank plants for Bill as a surprise. They enjoy the first fruits, laughing, before Bill tells their story, and the singularly human story of true love, in one line: "I was never afraid before you showed up."

Click here to read our full recap of the episode.

"Reservation Dogs" Season 3, Episode 3 "Deer Lady," FX (Hulu)

Reservation Dogs (FX)

We wish this show continued beyond three seasons, but its last one sends it off aptly with a number of well-played cinematic references alongside stirring arcs for each main character. But one episode takes the opportunity presented by Bear (D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai) and his decision to wander home to bring back Kaniehtiio Horn's Deer Lady for one more haunting.

Only this time, the story isn't about what she did to a wicked man, but what wicked people did to her. Series creator Sterlin Harjo forges the legendary figure's origin story in a horror tale based on the appalling true history of government-sanctioned Native boarding schools. Director Danis Goulet sets us inside that terror using cinematic flourishes inspired by films such as "Suspiria."

Darkness envelops the scenes from Deer Lady's past, and the abusive nuns running the school where she's taken are made more alien by the show transforming their dialogue into incomprehensible babble, making them the other instead of the children. When Deer Lady takes her vengeance at the climax, it's sadder more than anything . . . but it's that the way things go for every misunderstood hero?

Click here to read our interview with Goulet.

"Swagger" Season 2, Episode 5 "Are We Free?" (Apple TV+)

John Carlos and Isaiah Hill in "Swagger" (Apple TV+)

In a just world, shows like "Swagger" would naturally get the respect and large viewership it deserves. But with age of Peak TV deflating and streamers carelessly tossing out the tin artificially bulking up their schedules it was inevitable that a few platinum bars would be swept up in that purge. This show, miserably, is one of those.

But Reggie Rock Bythewood's creation leaves a legacy of kinetic cinematography and thoughtful meditations on masculinity, class discrimination, abuse and race, all of which fold together precisely in this episode demonstrating how many of Coach Ikon Edwards' star players are one poor decision away from being pulled into the school to prison pipeline.

Season 2 shows his star player Jace Carson (Isaiah Hill) contending with the fallout of assault he and other players visited on an abusive coach to avenge his best friend Crystal (Quvenzhané Wallis). As they wait to hear whether they'll be charged, Ikon takes his Swagger DMV team to a local youth prison where they meet activist John Carlos, who along with fellow American sprinter and gold medalist Tommie Smith, made history by holding up a black gloved fist while standing on the winners' podium at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City. Carlos plays himself as the prison basketball team's coach. He's also their Virgil as each kid crosses paths with a version of themselves who is equally as talented but whose futures are now blighted by their convictions.

But this episode leans into joy instead of tragedy, showing all these boys as young men seeing themselves in each other and taking pride in that collective vision. “Winners are made on the court. Champions are made off the court,” Carlos tells them, explaining what a raised fist means at the end of day: Unification. Togetherness.

Click here to read our interview with Reggie Rock Bythewood.

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"Beef" Episode 10 "Figures of Light" (Netflix)

Steven Yeun as Danny and Ali Wong as Amy in "Beef" (Andrew Cooper/Netflix)

It wasn't supposed to go this far. It was inevitable things would go so badly. Sealing its role as a bizarre allegory about love and hate being opposite sides of the coin called obsession, Ali Wong's Amy Lau and Steven Yeun's Danny Cho crash the cars they're driving and sail off a cliff. Miraculously they both live. Miserably they're stranded together in a desert purgatory with no reception, no food and pestered by a murder of crows taking delight in their misery.

They feast on berries that end up being poisonous, sending them into a hallucinogenic state in which they realize what the audience has seen all along, that even when we are at our worst, we are not so unlike our perceived enemies. Amy's violent animus toward Danny was more about her dissatisfaction with life than it was about him, in the same way Amy gave Danny a convenient direction at which to lob all of his frustrations.

No wonder that when they limp out of that valley of death together they look like partners, solidified in a final scene in which Amy curls up beside a comotose Danny in his hospital bed.

Click here to read about "Beef" and the intimacy of rage.

“Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" Season 2, Episode 9 "Subspace Rhapsody" (Paramount+)

Christina Chong as La’an in "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" (Paramount+)

Musical episodes are common. Terrific musical episodes come along once in a great while. What they don't tend to do is emerge in a series' second season – but TV longevity is so uncertain; why wait?

Wisely, the writers took inspiration from one of the best musical episode in modern television, 2001's "Once More, With Feeling" from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Recruiting "Letters to Cleo" bandmates Kay Hanley and Tom Polce to write the songbook, the episode borrowed from the "Buffy" thesis of musical numbers forcing characters to betray their true emotions. In Starfleet, however, that poses a security risk — along with unmasking truths that break a few hearts, including Ethan Peck's Spock, who gets his own solo tune titled "I'm the X."

The climactic showstopper, though, is an unwilling performance by an aggressive Klingon captain forced to sing and dance their rage at the Federation into a K-pop style tune. What else can we say except . . . this one hit it.

Click here to read our look back at the second season of "Strange New Worlds."

"Abbott Elementary" Season 2, Episode 16 "Teacher Conference," ABC (Hulu)

Quinta Brunson and Tyler James Williams in "Abbott Elementary" (ABC)

The best "Abbott" episodes bring out the essence of who these characters are while surprising us. At a weekend-long professional conference held in Allentown, Penn., the almost-always responsible Barbara and the rule-bending Melissa get lit on math-a-ritas and squashing the beef Melissa has with her sister Kristen Marie. Jacob finds his people — as in, over-the-top white saviors devoted to teaching children of color.

But the big gasp was that thing we all saw coming — and maybe wished didn't, but were kind of jazzed about anyway — the drunken kiss Gregory shares with Janine, one that Janine returns. He had just been dumped; she was nerding out over a "living classroom" made of flowers. How was that lip lock not inevitable? They aren't the only teachers who pretend to regret their weekend actions after sobering up, but what happened in Allentown does not stay in Allentown ("Sexy place!" Janine says unconvincingly) heightening the rest of the season's comedic tension.

Click here to read our interview with "Abbott Elementary" star Janelle James.

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"Barry" Season 4, Episode 5 "Tricky Legacies," HBO (Max)

Bill Hader and Zachary Golinger in "Barry" (Merrick Morton/HBO)

"Barry" star Bill Hader directed all of the fourth and final season's episodes, taking cinematic leaps throughout in the smallest moments, bleeding Barry's fantasy about a life with Sally (Sarah Goldberg) into his dour prison reality, taking an eight-year leap in a future where he and Sally are married, living in a colorless prairie town under new identities and have a son.

But if a great episode comes down to a few sequences that tells us exactly where the story is headed with as little dialogue as possible, it has to be this, where everyone's lives start to definitively unravel one last time. Stephen Root's Monroe Fuches emerges from prison and picks up a lover on his way to meeting NoHo Hank (Anthony Carrigan). Hader's Barry, claimed to have found God and washed all of his mortal sins away, arrives in Los Angeles for a deadly date with Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler), set on profiting from the story of their soured friendship.

Sally, however, survives a slasher flick when, she drunkenly fends off home invaders. Or it's implied she does; we're with Sally as she's locked in her and Barry's bedroom as other attackers knock their home off its foundations, screaming along with her as the walls and floor shake her around like a helpless mannequin. In one fell 30-minute swoop, Hader gives us a horror movie, a black comedy and a tragedy to contemplate. Whatever he does next as a director, we should all watch closely.

Click here to read about "Barry" in its final season.

"Jury Duty" Episode 5 "Ineffective Assistance" (Amazon Freevee)

Mekki Leeper and Edy Modica in "Jury Duty" (Amazon Freevee)

More than a practical joke stretched over, "Jury Duty" is an experiment to test the limits of Ronald Gladden's patience and empathy. As the only person in the show who isn't an actor – and doesn't realize the civil case he believes he's considering is fake – Gladden is tested by his fellow jurors' ridiculous behavior each day that court is in session.

But what James Marden (playing the worst version of himself) inflicts on Ronald on their day off is stupendous. Left to their own devices at the hotel where half the jury is sequestered, Marsden ropes in Ronald to help him read for a role he's aching to land in the nonexistent neo-Western "Lone Pine." Each take exceeds the melodrama of the previous, made worse by Marsden pretending to drop a King Kong deuce that supposedly jams up the commode and requires profession intervention . . . which Marsden persuades Ronald to cop to out of fear that his ample turd will somehow be reported on gossip sites.

Improbably, this is topped by holy roller fellow juror Noah Price (Mekki Leeper) hooking up with devilish prankster Jeannie Abruzzo (Edy Modica) who persuades Noah to have not-sex with her by "soaking" (look it up) as Marsden facilitates by jumping on their bed. Unscripted reality showed some true human craziness this year, but this episode's cross between jaw-slackening lunacy and Ronald's genuine sensitivity and forbearance is inspired.

Click here to read our interview with James Marsden.

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