The “enshittification” of tech extends to space, too

Alright, rocket jockeys. Get in here. I don’t know what kind of half-cocked space-frat party you satellite barons have been throwing these last 20 years, but low Earth orbit is becoming so thoroughly and hazardously enshittified by private companies and their broken satellites that something has to be done before you send us into a global telecom blackout and turn the skies into a space-gore B-movie full of dead astronauts.

The Federal Communications Commission has started writing tickets for wrist-slap fines for space trash, beginning with the $150,000 it’s charging Dish Network after the company failed to cleanup its dead EchoStar-7 satellite. Not that $150,000 is going to matter much to a company reporting $16.7 billion in revenue in 2022, but the fact that the FCC has to do something at all should be a wakeup call that the enshittification of space has indeed commenced.

How to avoid "zombie" satellites causing atmospheric destruction? Send them to this ocean graveyard

And there’s no better term for what’s happening. It’s true that Cory Doctorow coined enshittification, as known as platform decay, specifically to address the inevitable decline of corporate-owned social media sites and other internet intermediaries which sabotage user service and interoperability for the interests of advertisers (whom platform owners invariably repel by squeezing them for greater profit).

The corporate balkanization of the internet into unusable-yet-unavoidable platforms full of garbage is a predictable foreshadowing of what the continued privatization of space is going to look like.

But the underlying principle and characteristic trash-trail of enshittification are becoming just as applicable to geosynchronous and low Earth orbit as they are to Twitter and TikTok. And don’t get snippy with me about how different social media is from low Earth orbit; the digital-physical distinction between the internet and nearby space matters little when you consider that both have become the unregulated playfields of the rich where public-option participants (be they municipal broadband outfits or NASA) are either underfunded, or actively elbowed out by private-interest lobbying.

The corporate balkanization of the internet into unusable-yet-unavoidable platforms full of garbage is a predictable foreshadowing of what the continued privatization of space is going to look like. Centralization, reckless security operations and over-collection of user-surveillance data have turned gigantic internet intermediaries into digital superfund sites where massive breaches are just waiting to happen — at which point the cybersecurity ablation cascade is sure to crash into any number of online services. The internet flirts with its own version of Kessler syndrome every time a flickering Google or AWS outage temporarily makes half your favorite sites unusable.

Meanwhile, NASA says there are more than 9,000 metric tons of space debris hanging around the globe as of January 2022. That’s about 500,000 pieces of space debris between 1 and 10 cm long, with particles larger than 1 mm exceeding 100 million in number. And those specks can move 10 times faster than a bullet. Even when they’re only at orbital speed, they’re still hurtling around that crowded zone at up to 17,500 miles per hour. And it’s all out there in a big trash-belt, just waiting to set off an internet-crashing, astronaut-killing catastrophe of inestimable proportion.

NASA hopes to clean up space junk; experts say the days of uncluttered night skies are "over"

Even though active satellites already have to dodge trash chunks routinely, an estimated 25,000 more satellites are expected to be added to the crowded zone by 2031. Among those are the thousands-strong fleets that will be launched by the likes of SpaceX, Amazon, Viasat and OneWeb.

NASA says any debris in orbits below 600 km will typically fall back to Earth (and thus burn up in the atmosphere) within “several years.” And, in one hopeful move, SpaceX has already said it plans to keep its Starlink satellites at an even lower, 500 km orbit. But that doesn’t help the problem of toxic metals from this crap which scientists say are now polluting our upper atmosphere, nor the light pollution these eyesores create.

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And what about everyone else? The majority of space trash is hanging around at the 800 km to 1,000 km orbital range.

“Debris left in orbits below 600 km normally fall back to Earth within several years. At altitudes of 800 km, the time for orbital decay is often measured in centuries. Above 1,000 km, orbital debris will normally continue circling the Earth for a thousand years or more,” NASA says.

Meanwhile, we’ve got car-sized space crud smashing into Australia, and another hunk of SpaceX scrap cratering into a Washington farmer’s property. One Congressional report from the Federal Aviation Administration estimated that by 2035 falling debris from US-approved low Earth orbit tech could kill or injure a person every two years.

Longest U.S. spaceflight record smashed thanks to space junk collision

As space environmentalist Moriba Jah wrote for Scientific American, “we are building a new space economy that is sadly reminiscent of the gold rush: companies and governments are rushing to stake their claim on as much orbital territory as possible without regard to the consequences.”

Are there plans in the works to fix this? Sure. For one, a bill from Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) would kickstart a program to reduce the debris. And the FAA is trying to create time limits for satellites to improve the decommissioning process, as some researchers try to figure out an assigned-parking style plan. The European Space Agency is already funding space missions focused on sky clean-up, and the Japanese government is throwing up to $80 million at junk-removal company Astroscale for its research program. The space-cleaning sector is heating up with emerging companies, and NASA is ready to blast this space trash with some $200,000 AI-powered lasers and $850,000 worth of TransAstra garbage bags (Hefty, this could have been your moment).

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I don’t know what else it’s going to take for you private space-faring companies to get your act together. Do we need to make a commercial for this to get the Stop Being Trashy movement off the ground? Here’s the pitch: We zoom in on an AI-generated deepfake of Iron Eyes Cody inside the International Space Station, staring through a porthole window at the Earth and its swirling trash-belt. We move to an extreme close-up as he expels a single glycerin tear into zero-G. We pull back and see he’s actually awaiting destruction by a massive object hurtling toward the station — it’s a Tesla.

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

about space trash

“Dominos are falling”: Fourth Trump co-defendant pleads guilty in Georgia election subversion case

Former Trump campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis has taken a plea deal in the Georgia election subversion case, pleading guilty to one felony count of aiding and abetting false statements, making her the fourth co-defendant in the case to do so following attorneys Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell's back-to-back guilty pleas last week.

As part of her agreement, Ellis will incur five years of probation and pay $5,000 in restitution as well as complete 100 community service hours, pen an apology letter and cooperate with Fulton County prosecutors, according to MSNBC's Katie Phang. Ellis, who maintains an active social media presence, is also barred from posting anything on social media about the case while the proceedings against her co-defendants continue.

She delivered a tearful statement to the judge Tuesday while pleading guilty.

“If I knew then what I knew now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump in these post-challenges. I look back on this experience with deep remorse,” Ellis said, adding "I failed to do my due diligence.” She also implicated Rudy Giuliani and Trump campaign lawyer Ray Smith in the deal by admitting that she aided and abetted the former New York mayor's "false statements" to Georgia lawmakers at a December 2020 hearing and acknowledging that she was "assisting with the execution of" that hearing with both Giuliani and co-defendant Smith.

"The dominos are falling," former U.S. attorney Barbara McQuade wrote on X, formerly Twitter, of the development.

The dominos are falling. https://t.co/bNnzp1lkiB

— Barb McQuade (@BarbMcQuade) October 24, 2023

"Jenna Ellis in her guilty plea acknowledges that she and the others LIED about election fraud in 2020," Phang added. "Her truthful testimony puts Trump more in a corner because it’s yet another lawyer like Powell and Chesebro saying that the Big Lie was a lie."

And again, most importantly, Jenna Ellis in her guilty plea acknowledges that she and the others LIED about election fraud in 2020. Her truthful testimony puts Trump more in a corner because it’s yet another lawyer like Powell and Chesebro saying that the Big Lie was a lie.

— Katie Phang (@KatiePhang) October 24, 2023

Ellis has raised more than $216,000 for legal fees from online crowdfunding after bemoaning the lack of financial support from pro-Trump groups.

Trump falsely claims he “was never indicted,” compares himself to Nelson Mandela

Just ahead of his campaign rally in New Hampshire, former president Donald Trump falsely claimed that he was never indicted in response to a question about his former attorney Sidney Powell.

Asked by a reporter if he was concerned that his recent assertion that Powell was never his lawyer (despite him previously saying she was) means that his communication with her would not be protected under attorney-client privilege, Trump, who has been indicted four times, falsely stated that he was actually "never indicted."

"We did nothing wrong,” Trump asserted. “This is all Biden. Indictments, impeachments — this is all about Biden. … I was never indicted. You practically never heard the word. It wasn't a word that registered.”

At the rally itself, HuffPost reports, the former president put forth a host of strange statements, one of which involved him encouraging supporters to watch other voters but advising them not to “worry about voting” themselves. In another instance, Trump proclaimed that "U.S." and "us" are spelled the same and noted that he "just picked that up" before lamenting how the media doesn't acknowledge his "genius" remarks. "Has anyone ever thought of that before?” he asked the audience. “Couple of days, I’m reading, and it said ‘us.’ and I said, you know, when you think about it, us equals U.S. Now if we say something genius, they will never say it.”

Later in the event, Trump appeared to confuse Hungary's authoritarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, with Turkey's authoritarian president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, while exalting the former as "one of the strongest leaders anywhere in the world.” He also vowed to prevent immigrants who "don't like our religion" from entering the United States, despite the First Amendment establishing that the country has no state religion. In another remark, the former president likened himself to Nelson Mandela to justify his efforts to challenge the 2020 election results.

"I don't mind being Nelson Mandela because I’m doing it for a reason."

5 common nightmares and what they could mean for your mental health, according to a dream expert

In childhood, I had a recurring nightmare I can still remember as vividly as if I had experienced it last night. I was playing in my mother’s garden when a strange man approached, setting off an epic chase scene. Unsuccessful in escaping him, I was captured and thrown into a giant, Santa Claus-style rucksack, where I spent the rest of my dream alone, in utter darkness — terrified of whether I’d make it out alive.

Dreams in which you’re being chased are actually the most common type of nightmare to have in childhood, says Deirdre Barrett, Ph.D., a dream researcher at Harvard University and author of “The Committee of Sleep.” In general, you tend to have fewer nightmares as you age, although some people remember their dreams — and nightmares — more often than others, Barrett said.

While we always experience dreams during the rapid-eye movement (REM) cycle of sleep, we only remember them when we wake up during this cycle. That may be why people with insomnia, for example, report nightmares more frequently: because they wake up in REM more often.

Real-life "Inception": Scientists have figured out how to enter your dreams

There are two tiers of nightmares: those that instill a sense of terror or distress among the dreamer, and those that more closely resemble flashbacks from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and transport the dreamer to a specific past event. While some people have even reported enjoying the former — like going to a horror movie to get an adrenaline rush — the latter form of nightmares are far more traumatic, Barrett said. So-called post-traumatic nightmares also happen at all stages of the sleep cycle, not just in REM sleep, which further distinguishes them from regular nightmares and indicates they may be physiologically similar to flashbacks that occur in waking life, she added.

Sometimes, run-of-the-mill nightmares occur as a result of events in waking life such as watching a horror film or having an anxiety-invoking day at work, but it’s still not entirely clear why we have them. Sigmund Freud famously posited that dreams were an expression of unconscious desire, although his hypothesis has been disputed and others have instead suggested that dreams might be a way to process the day’s events or rehearse threatening situations for the future.

Although Barrett strays away from ascribing universal meaning to dreams and encourages dreamers to interpret their dreams for themselves, Salon asked her to unpack what’s going on with five commonly reported nightmares.

Death — your own, or a loved one's

In a 2018 survey published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, death of a loved one was the number one most common dream reported. That was before the coronavirus pandemic killed millions and brought death a few degrees closer to everyone.

Throughout the pandemic, Barrett surveyed more than 9,000 dreamers to understand how their dreams were impacted by COVID-19. What she found was that people reported three times as many nightmares about dying or witnessing the death of a loved one in pandemic times than a control group of dreamers pre-pandemic. Another report published in the Frontiers of Psychology similarly found death was the second most common theme reported in pandemic dreams — apart from COVID-19 itself.

Interestingly, Barrett noticed that parents of young children or caretakers usually dreamt about others dying, while people who didn’t have caretaking responsibilities usually dreamt about themselves dying. While some dreams about death were gory, like the dreamer watching the dead be embalmed in a cemetery, others involved death but weren’t particularly horrific, like the dreamer having a picnic with the dead. Regardless, dreams about dying could be symbolic of a closing chapter or major transition in the dreamer's life. After all, the pandemic caused major life transitions for many.

“Ask yourself: What would be different about watching someone else die than knowing you’re about to die?” Barrett told Salon in a phone interview. “Think about why you’re dreaming about that happening to someone else and whether you’re feeling desperately responsible for it in the dream or more removed from it.”

Failing, feeling shame or getting embarrassed

In the 2018 survey, the second most common nightmare people reported was missing deadlines, feeling helpless or failing. This kind of dream doesn’t invoke the same terror that some other nightmares, like those that threaten your life, do. Instead of triggering the primal fear that other kinds of nightmares do, these dreams — which Barrett called “embarrassment dreams,” including your teeth falling out or showing up naked to a public place — seem to be activated by anxiety instead.

A widely cited study in the journal Sleep found people with more anxiety in their waking life generally have more nightmares. People who have more social anxiety might be more likely to have dreams in which they’re naked in public, for example, while people who are more anxious about being judged by authority figures may have more dreams about failing a test, forgetting about it or showing up late, Barrett said. “Being tested,” and “naked and afraid,” for example, are both anxiety-provoking metaphors we use in everyday life that could play out in nightmares, she added.

“To the extent that a few of those [dreams] with that content have a very standard symbolic meaning in our culture, the dream is likely to be representing that,” she said. “Although it may still convey something more quirky in that person's set of individual symbols.”

Experiencing the climate crisis — even in your sleep

After climate disasters like wildfires or hurricanes, nightmares about these phenomena can increase among those affected or even those who are at a distance but immersed in news about them, Barrett said. For example, after a major 1989 earthquake in San Francisco, a study published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology found 40% of dreamers surveyed were having nightmares about earthquakes three weeks after the disaster, compared to 5% of dreamers in a control group.

Although it’s difficult to isolate climate change as a factor affecting dreams because the globe has progressively been warming for decades and it is also tied to increases in population density and all sorts of other factors, Barrett said she has heard people recall dreams that do seem to be tied to concerns related to the climate crisis. In other words, climate anxiety may be invading the dream space, too.

“There’s a hypothesis that’s very well proven across all kinds of things that people dream about the same things they are concerned about by day,” Barrett said. “That would predict that more people should have dreams that have something to do with the climate crisis now than they did many decades back.”

Free falling — and then being startled awake

Some nightmares end with the dreamer being startled awake after falling from a cliff or some other extreme height. Interestingly, most dreamers startle awake from “falling” without the visual elements of a nightmare, Barrett said. Although it's not entirely clear what causes this sensation, it's common among dreamers and there are many hypotheses on why it happens, ranging from our distant ancestors living in trees and needing this sensation to ensure they didn't fall out, to a physiological process called a hypnic jerk.

Typically when the body sleeps, the thalamus, which dictates our state of consciousness, is inhibited. It could be that when the body is falling asleep, signals sent by the balance centers in the inner ear are misinterpreted by the brain to be the sensation of falling just as the thalamus goes back online, making you lose your sense of space. This may happen on any given night while you’re unconsciously sleeping, but you’ll only feel it when the order of signals in the brain gets mixed up such that you feel the signals when you are partly conscious and are therefore startled awake by it, Barrett said.

“Once in a while, if that happens just before our consciousness is damped down quite as much as it usually is for sleep, that seems to result in people noticing this sense that their body is wildly moving around in random ways, and interpreted as falling,” Barrett said. “If anything very alarms you during sleep, that’s a wake-up cue.”

Being chased, by someone or something

Although being chased in dreams becomes less frequent with age, it’s still a nightmare for many adults. Children often report being chased by evil characters, monsters or animals in their nightmares, which could be an evolutionary adaptation, Barrett said. When human beings were living in the wild, it may have been beneficial to children’s survival for them to “rehearse” escaping predators in their dreams, she explained.

However, adults more frequently report other humans chasing them, rather than animals or monsters, and there’s usually some metaphor attached to the chase, Barrett said.

“There's one chapter in my book, ‘Trauma and Dreams,’ about how a group of immigrants from South American countries, all of which had ongoing civil wars, were being pursued either by the government forces or guerrillas, who were potentially trying to harm them, [and they were] sometimes physically being chased,” Barrett said.

One study in the journal Dreaming found that 80% of our dreams involve day-to-day situations and not fantastical chase scenes or other apocalyptic nightmares. Yet it's the latter that sticks around to haunt us for hours, days or even years thereafter. The activation-synthesis theory of dreaming posits that dreams are the way we process random activity from our neurological systems in REM sleep. That is, the dream is a visual representation of emotions sent forth from the body. Ultimately, it's up to the individual dreamer to reconcile what those visual interpretations mean for them.

"Sometimes they will be representing something that we have not realized by day or that we have repressed by day," Barrett said. "Our unconscious is either alerting us to it, giving us another angle on it, or telling us something about why this thing that happened yesterday really resonated with something very bad in our past."

about the science of dreaming

“The biggest internal threat”: Trump threatens to pull US out of NATO — again

Donald Trump has indicated that, if elected president in 2024, he will consider pulling the United States out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) if the group does not acquiesce to his demands. The former president has previously attacked NATO allies and discussed withdrawing from the transatlantic organization altogether, a move which ostensibly came about as a result of his reported relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Rolling Stone reported that Trump has already said he does not want a hypothetical second administration to be full of "NATO lovers," per two sources who have heard him make such remarks. The sources also shared that the ex-president has suggested that he is open to the idea of yanking the U.S. from NATO, although he is willing to reconsider if the group meets various demands of his, including his want for non-American members to increase their defense spending and a fundamental scrutinizing of the bedrock principle that an attack on one member is equivalent to an attack on all. Rolling Stone also reported that Trump, while in office, repeatedly derided Article 5, NATO's collective defense clause, arguing against starting "World War III" in the name of smaller NATO countries' sovereignty.

“Donald Trump's threats to weaken NATO and side with Vladimir Putin undermine America’s strength on the global stage and threaten our national security. As president, Donald Trump spent four years cozying up to dictators and making our country less safe," said Biden campaign spokesman Ammar Moussa.

Dr. Aaron Stein, a Black Sea Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, told Rolling Stone that Trump's plan would be a "tremendously stupid endeavor" and added that "trading away allies based on ignorance, and Trump is ignorant about this issue, is just silly for broader U.S. national security."

As this, and the damning tapes of Trump/Pratt conversation show, Donald Trump is the biggest internal threat to America's national security we have had since the Civil War. https://t.co/fVlt35oYwn

— Norman Ornstein (@NormOrnstein) October 23, 2023

“As this, and the damning tapes of Trump/Pratt conversation show, Donald Trump is the biggest internal threat to America’s national security we have had since the Civil War,” warned political scientist Norman Ornstein.

“Black AF History” author on whitewashing the past: “They have tried every way possible to erase us”

As an '80s baby that carved my way through the public school system, I was taught that early settlers in America were brave explorers looking for new opportunities, and that the captured Black Africans, who provided the labor that built this country, were just mindless slaves. I also learned that an early pioneer like Thomas Jefferson was a brilliant thinker, which made him an honorable president. Michael Harriot, host of the podcast "Drapetomaniax: Unshackled History" explained the dangers of a single person narrative and the incomplete, in accurate way we are educated on a recent episode of "Salon Talks."

Harriot is most known for his column at The Grio and MSNBC and CNN commentary. His new book "Black AF History" details America’s history in the most true and unapologetic way possible. Readers of Harriot’s book will learn to approach history from a vantage point opposite of the oppressor, meaning that those early settlers in America weren’t necessarily brave explorers, but land-stealing cannibals, yes they robbed Native Americans and ate brown leather belts in addition to fetuses to survive those blistering cold winters before they learned to work the land. And that the Black mindless slaves were doctors, educators and leaders in their homeland, not just laborers. And that as Thomas Jefferson wasn’t just a president, but also a slave-owning rapist. Knowing the complete truth changes everything.

You can watch my "Salon Talks" episode with Michael Harriot here or read a Q&A of our conversation below to learn more about new episodes of the "Drapetomaniax" podcast, the real history of America and the future of book banning.

The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Let's start with the title. I was wondering if you wanted to call it “Black As F**k History” and the publishing company was like, "Well, we can't say f**k on the front of a book."

I never wanted to call it anything but “Black AF History.” The publisher was wondering, "Do we want to call it ‘Black AF History’?" I was like, "That needs to be the name." I've been using that as a motto for over a decade. In poetry as a writer, I called myself The Black One and I was always Black AF. If you're wondering which Michael? The Black one. It was never a choice of any other thing that I wanted to do except “Black AF History.” So the publisher was with it, even though their only question was, because I started this project four years ago, they wondered, “Well, will 'Black AF' still be a thing by then or will 'AF' be a thing?”

Yeah, we're going to be Black AF forever.

Right. Exactly.

It don't wash off.

Yeah, I don't think so. So yeah, it was always “Black AF.”

I was reading the book and I was getting to just learn a little bit more about your personal story because I've been following your work for a while, and I was like, wow, this guy is so smart probably because he was homeschooled. What role did that play in your journey?

"This history of Black people in America starts before 1619."

Instead of having to just swallow and regurgitate information and memorize stuff, my education was largely self-directed so it made me think critically and examine stuff because there wasn't a template for how I was taught. I've been thinking about this lately because I think part of the reason they don't want us to talk like that about Jefferson or Lincoln is because they teach us about Lincoln and Jefferson and George Washington when we're in the second grade, and then when we get to high school or maybe middle school, we learn that they were slave owners and all of that, so we can't comport the two things. I think that just learning about Black people from the beginning, I realized, oh, that's why, because they don't learn about really what this country did to Black people.

They don't get it.

If they learn at all, they don't learn until they're older, so they've already idealized this valorized idea of America in their head and they can't comport the two things.

This book disrupts the narrative that they want us to subscribe to.

Right. Because one of the things about their narrative is that they try to make it seem like we're being mean to the founders. No, you don't have to say shady s**t about the founders. You can just show how incompetent they were. They don't even have to be evil because they were so incompetent.

One of the points of this book is that when you think about Black people and how we survived in this country, one of the most remarkable things is how incompetent white people have been throughout the history of America in trying to kill us. They have tried every way possible to erase us from the fabric, from the promise of this country, and they've been largely ineffective.

They're cooking up something new right now.

Right, they're going to give us some reparation bucks laced with cholera or something like that.

And Jordans that explode on your feet.

It's going to be something, but our ability to survive and thrive is remarkable. We don't have to make a villain out of them because you could just tell their story, and the viewer or the reader or the listener can make their own decision.

Moms for Liberty meets its match: Parents in this swing suburban district are fighting back

Reading your book, I learned about 1503, which is when the first Black person, Juan Garrido, came to America.

There were Black people – it wasn't just Juan Garrido – and then 1619. There was a bunch of Black people here even a century before 1619. 1619 is when the first English colonist brought enslaved Africans here, which is an arbitrary date because it matters because white people are important. That's the only reason it would matter.

Juan Garrido came here with the first European to step foot on the continent from Europe, and he came here with Ponce de León to a place. They thought it was an island; they named it La Florida or Florida. He was the first African-American, if you count stepping foot as being an African-American. If not, then the first expedition brought enslaved Africans here. They revolted in 1525, drove the white people back out of this country, and they stayed. That was nearly a century before 1619.

Then you have Esteban de Moor or Mustafa Azemmouri. He traveled more of this country probably than any other human being ever on the face of this continent. He lived here, traveled from South Carolina to Florida to Texas all the way through New Mexico, the first person to cross the Sierra Madres. As a matter of fact, the Pueblo people say, they have a saying, “the first white man we ever saw was a Black man.” The history of Black people starts before 1619. This history of Black people in America starts before 1619. But if we're going to categorize America as an English colony and what we evolve from, I think that's why people look at the 1619 date as significant.

One of the biggest misconceptions about slavery in general is when people say there were slaves in Africa too, as if slavery in Africa and slavery in America was the same thing.

Yeah. So that's another thing we talk about in the book, the distinction between — because what is a slave? Is a person in a forced marriage a slave? Is an indentured servant or agricultural worker who isn't paid? — so what we talk about is race-based constitutional servitude that reduces human being to property. That was the American form that we kind of euphemized as slavery.

"They have tried every way possible to erase us from the fabric, from the promise of this country, and they've been largely ineffective."

What we did in America was different because whatever you think about the Africans who sold slaves or whatever, or who participated in it, first of all, no one on the face of the planet could have ever conceived of what they were doing with the Black people here.

The other thing is, if Africa was in slavery, Africans were enslaving Africans and it was just as bad because of the Africans, then why wasn't it as bad over there? Why didn't they have a big slavery economy, for instance? Because we grew the same stuff over here that they grew over there. That's where we got rice from. You have to wonder, why didn't it take over Africa like it did [here]? Why didn't fireworks evolve into the deadliest weapon, gunfire, in Asia until white people showed up? Why wasn't there an international coca leaf, cocaine distribution network until white people showed up in South America? You know what I'm saying? You could say, well, there were coca leaves there and the Chinese invented fireworks, and the Africans were enslaving people, but it never gets real bad until the white people show up.

Different parts of Africa, some of what you put in the book and somehow already knew, you can marry your way out of it, you can join another tribe, you can work your way out of. You're not being hung from a tree and having your baby slit out of your belly.

And the important part is that those people were eternally involved in internal conflicts. So they were prisoners of war who initially were sold to Europeans. But when the Europeans show up, they convinced the Africans to say, "Look, if you just catch people, you steal people and sell them to us, then we could have an international economy of human trafficking." That's what the difference is between a slave and property, the thing that Europeans introduced to the Western hemisphere basically.

One of the sections that I really, really enjoyed was reading about Jemmy from Angola. Can you introduce us to Jemmy?

Yeah. First of all, I think he's probably one of the most significant figures in the history of America. So Jemmy was an Angolan warrior in South Carolina who started what we now call the Stono Rebellion in 1739. The 1739 Stono Rebellion sparked the Negro Act of 1740. Every slave code, Jim Crow law is derived from this one dude who started the Stono Rebellion. It is responsible for stuff like saying human beings are property. It's responsible for Black people can't gather groups of three or more. It's responsible for stuff like outlawing reading because Jemmy was literate. It's responsible for them saying, "Hey, we got to teach them about this Christian religion," because Jemmy worshiped African gods.

Almost all of the stuff that we see, all of the slave laws, were adoptions of the Negro Act of 1740, and that was specifically because of this Angolan warrior who basically roamed the countryside and slaves joined in and they killed every white person they saw. It was called the Stono Rebellion, and it's still significant to this day.

A conversation that I think needs to be talked about in schools is the Haitian Revolution. They'll talk about the American Revolution, which ended in a republic. It doesn't even really feel that way if you're Black. If you're poor, you definitely don't feel that. The French Revolution ended in a dictatorship, but the Haitian Revolution ended in a pure democracy.

"Our ability to survive and thrive is remarkable."

Right. The other thing about the Haitian Revolution is its impact on America. The Haitian Revolution was essentially the largest slave revolt in the history of the world, and they won. They beat the French Empire, Napoleon and them. A ragtag group of Black people beat Napoleon's army and got their freedom and they beat them so bad that the French said, "Hey, look, we're going to get out this slavery game. Hey, you all want this land?" That land was the Louisiana Purchase.

So the Haitian Revolution doubled the size of the United States. We never talk about that. It's why Thomas Jefferson and the founders were really afraid at the outset because they thought . . . Haiti's right there. Haiti isn't far from America. They said, "Well, what if that kind of revolution spreads in our country? So yeah, we got to get this land. We got to have this international policy to basically separate Haiti from the rest of the world and make them pay France reparations." The United States enforced that policy, which is the reason Haiti is poor today. Their national economy has been going to pay reparations to France until 2017, and the United States enforced that.

Oh, the United States is enforcing reparations, huh? Wow.

Wait until you hear about Citibank, the bank that collected them. So yeah, all of that is in this book, man, and I think it's important because it's part of the whitewash history that we never get to hear.

And then it's also the other parts of the book that were really just inspiring and felt good to read, like about Charles Case. First stand-up.

Yeah. Charles Case was a mixed race person. His father was a banjo player and taught him how to play banjo. When he first went on stage, the string broke and he was so nervous that every time he would get to the crescendo of his joke, he would swing his arms because he didn't have that banjo string. Well, that is what they called it, the Charles Case punchline. That's what we know as a punchline now.

He was the first person really to get on stage without music or a band and just talk about himself and make people laugh. They didn't even have a name for it, even though we now call it stand-up comedy. They called him a monologist, and the man who talked about his father, which is the worst motto ever, the man who talks about his father.

Thank you to that white man down in Florida: Lessons learned from reading a banned book

I hate to say it, but we know this book is going to be banned. At this point, how do we push back and fight against that?

White people have always tried to ban Black history. What we really don't realize is our parents were the first ones who actually learned Black history. They didn't teach anything in school before the generation before me. But I think the way to push back on it is to object to the white history. If they don't want you to learn about Black people, then you should be up there saying, "I don't want my child learning about no slave rapist named Thomas Jefferson. That makes my children uncomfortable." It makes you uncomfortable to learn about these lies, like Thomas Jefferson was anti-slavery when he never freed a slave a day in his life and chased on a judge until the day he literally died. We should be objecting to our children being injected with that white nonsense for 12 years in the public system.

The only way Thomas Jefferson would free a slave is it had to be one of his kids.

Yep, yep, yep. I mean, you think about how mean you got to be to not free the man who invented macaroni and cheese. Because Thomas Jefferson's enslaved person invented macaroni and cheese. Think about, “Nah, bro, you got to stay. I know you did that. Woo, it's good. But go back to the barn now.”

It’s hard for me, especially looking at how fractured our government has been for a long time, to see a clear end in sight. When does it stop?

"White people have always tried to ban Black history."

I don't know if it ever stops. This is why I think it doesn't stop. And this is, to me, the lesson of this book. When you look at Black people in America, think about us coming here with nothing, no language, no family, no possessions, not even a culture, not even anything, and in a relatively short period of time, the blink of an eye, we own their a*s.

Whiteness has given people every privilege that an economy, a political society, a social class can have. They had every privilege, and we had nothing. In this short period of time, they're so scared that they want to ban affirmative action. They're so scared that they want to ban our history. They're so scared that they want us to believe that slavery was nice and that they taught us the things that we did for this country for free. That's how scared they are and that's how powerful our history is, and that's how important it is to know about your past because they see how empowering it is, and that's why they want to stop it. I think the lesson of this book and the reason why all of this is important is because it is a danger to the status quo. When people know, they can never forget.

I have one question about craft. This book is very smart and extremely easy to read. There's a quote that says, "Easy reading is really hard writing." Was it difficult for you to get it in this language, where somebody at Harvard could pick it up and enjoy it and somebody at high school can do the same?

Well, I think if there's anything that I do that has value is that I've always been able to do that, take complex subjects, break them down and make them easy to understand whether it was a professor or as a writer or as a journalist. I think that's the thing about this book. The reason I'm doing stuff with you and going places is because I know if you get this book, you make it cool and people get it and they open it, they can digest and read it.

It ain’t no history book like your social studies book in the 11th grade. It's a really good exercise in storytelling. All I want people to do is to get it because if they open it and see these stories, it's not like some academic prose or some really smart guy sitting from the mountaintop telling you about what happened in 1722. It is us talking to each other.

Tell us about “Drapetomaniax.”

Drapetomaniax, it comes from a title that was an actual medical term for mental illness that supposedly described Black people's desire to want to be free. But supposedly, this was a real mental illness. It was in medical books until the 1920s. What we did is we took some of these unknown stories and we tell them in the most interesting and funny way possible. It's not us sitting down and saying, "And in 1922." No. We actually get celebrities to kind of act out the stories.

We have an episode about Ida B. Wells, but instead of talking about Ida B. Wells' beefs, we do her as a battle rapper. In the book, we talk about who was the first African American. Well, we do that as a game show on “Drapetomaniax” with Charlamagne tha God and Brandon Victor Dixon. We take these ideas. We do a slave revolt as the "First 48." We have people from the culture coming in to act out and give you a new funny version of history. It's on every podcast platform and it comes out every Tuesday.

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"Salon Talks"

Most distant radio burst ever discovered contained the amount of energy our Sun makes every 30 years

Imagine a radio emission so powerful that it released as much energy in a fraction of a second as our Sun releases over 30 years. Yet unlike our massive and nearby Sun, this radio emission known as FRB 20220610A is tiny and comes from 8 billion light years away, as detailed in the journal Science. Its source is in fact a mystery, as this is a fast radio burst (FRB): an intense, extremely brief flash of radio emission. Intriguingly, this is the most distant FRB ever discovered.

"The FRB we discovered emitted the same amount of energy that the Sun emits in 30 years."

"We now know that energetic FRBs can be produced in the distant Universe," study co-author Ryan Shannon, a scientist at Swinburne University of Technology's Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, told Salon by email. "This demonstrates that FRBs are indeed extreme." Shannon detailed how the team of researchers utilized the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) in order to pinpoint a burst that they suspected might have originated from a very distant galaxy. After this was accomplished, they then utilized the Very Large Telescope in order to locate the host galaxy, at which point they "saw that the light from it had been stretched by a factor of two, meaning the burst had traveled 8 billion years between when it was emitted and when we received it at ASKAP. The burst was also very bright and energetic."

A solar storm from 14,300 years ago previews how Earth may one day plunge into darkness

Perhaps most notably, "The FRB we discovered emitted the same amount of energy that the Sun emits in 30 years."

Shannon broke down the significance of this discovery.

"Our study challenges models for FRB emission," Shannon explained. "The most likely source is a hyper magnetized neutron star (a magnetar), a dense stellar corpse the mass of the sun, the size of a small city, and magnetic field strengths a trillion times stronger than that of an MRI machine. Our study challenges models for how the pulses are produced as it shows [the] maximum energy an FRB could have is higher than previously thought."

The authors also traced the FRB to what seems to be a group of two or three galaxies that are in the process of merging. This further reinforces the popular theory that FRBs are caused by magnetars. It also makes FRB 20220610A one of nearly 50 FRBs that have been successfully traced back to their points of origin. Nearly half of those were identified by ASKAP.

Perhaps one of the most seemingly bold claims made by the researchers — who hailed from countries as diverse as Australia, the United States, the Netherlands, Japan and Chile — is that the discovery of this particular FRB will do more than simply tell us that FRBs can come from very distant parts of the universe. Additionally, they point out that their findings with FRB 20220610A actually make it possible to do something scientists previously doubted could ever be done: Measure the "missing" matter between galaxies and thereby "weigh" the Universe.

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"This relationship tells us the amount of matter there is in the Universe, and allows us to weigh it."

"The FRB signal is imprinted with the signal of all the gas they travel through," Shannon pointed out. "As the FRB passes through gas, it is subtly slowed down in a way we can measure when we detect the burst. We can use this to measure all of the gas in between where the FRB came from an us." Shannon added that this means everything – the cosmic web has diffuse gas between galaxies that scientists cannot detect any other way. "By studying FRB signals we are able to see that the amount of gas they travel through depends on how far away the bursts came from. This relationship tells us the amount of matter there is in the Universe, and allows us to weigh it. Our discovery paves the way to do this in the frontiers of the Universe."

In a statement, Shannon also elaborated on what FRB 20220610A does not prove.

“While we still don’t know what causes these massive bursts of energy, the paper confirms that fast radio bursts are common events in the cosmos and that we will be able to use them to detect matter between galaxies, and better understand the structure of the Universe,” Shannon wrote in that statement. When speaking with Salon, he was very clear about his enthusiasm for the implications of this discovery about FRB 20220610A in terms of future scientific research.

"We're excited about the future of the field and discovering more distant FRBs," Shannon explained. "We are developing more sensitive FRB search systems for ASKAP and look forward to following them up with the VLT to answer fundamental questions about the structure of the Universe."

on space travel

Like a saggy balloon, Earth’s core is leaking helium, a new analysis finds

When people hear of a helium leak, they likely imagine a comical scenario involving party balloons and high-pitched voices. Yet scientists from the California Institute of Technology and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution suspect that, like a human who has yet to fully burp out a gassy meal, Earth has pockets of helium from when it was formed that it has yet to fully release. They published their findings in a recent study in the journal Nature, and in the process may have redefined how researchers look at America's own geological history.

"Here we report the highest magmatic ³He/⁴He ratio… yet measured in terrestrial igneous rocks."

Helium is one of the most abundant elements in the entire universe, second only to hydrogen, so it's no surprise there was helium around when Earth first formed billions of years ago. Nonetheless, scientists have long operated under the assumption that any helium on Earth's surface would, because it is so light, eventually float into space or that the majority of the light noble gas would have been expelled during 4.6 billion years of volcanic eruptions. Or the helium could have been kicked off the planet by the large number of massive impacts our Earth has outlived, including the rock that crushed most of the dinosaurs and when the Moon was formed from a collision with a Mars-sized planet.

Undercutting this assumption, however, is the discovery of some of the world's highest ratios of helium 3 (³He) and the heavier isotope, helium 4 (⁴He) in the basaltic lavas on Canada's Baffin Island. Geologists believe that the most likely explanation for the presence of all this helium is that there is a literal helium leak in Earth's core. (No, it's not likely to make anyone's voice sound funny.)

Earth's inner core is slowing down — and the length of a day may change as a result

"Here we report the highest magmatic ³He/⁴He ratio(67.2 ± 1.8 times the atmospheric ratio) yet measured in terrestrial igneous rocks, in olivines from Baffin Island lavas," the scientists write. "We argue that the extremely high-³He/⁴He helium in these lavas might derive from Earth’s core."

The researchers took a number of steps to verify their hypothesis. For one thing, they accounted for the ratios of other isotopes including strontium and neodymium so that they could rule out variables that might have caused the helium to appear as it did after it was erupted to the surface. They also found that the ratio isotopes for a different noble gas, neon, matches the conditions believed to have existed on Earth when the planet was formed millions of years ago. These isotope ratios helped the scientists deduce that the helium did not come from Earth's mantle, but must have originated from the core. Among other things, this means scientists will be able to see what other materials are in that area to learn more about the composition of Earth's core, which is notoriously difficult to study given it is deep underground.

The latest report is a follow up to an earlier discovery several year ago. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution geochemist Forrest Horton discovered helium isotope ratios in olivine samples from the Baffin lava fields that had up to 50 times the concentrations found in atmospheric levels. This was a high amount of helium isotopes even for Earth's mantle, and that disproportionate concentration was also in Icelandic crusts believed to sit on a section of crust above a unique location in terms of monitoring mantle activity.

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Among other things, this means scientists will be able to see what other materials are in that area to learn more about the composition of Earth's core, which is notoriously difficult to study.

This is not the only news story from 2023 to potentially transform how people view Earth's core. A study published in January in the journal Nature Geoscience revealed that the inner core had started rotating in approximate synchrony with Earth's around 2009 but, as of early 2023, had actually started rotating at a slower pace than the rest of the planet — and may have indeed outright "paused."

"It has effects on the magnetic field and the Earth's rotation, and perhaps the surface processes and climate," Xiaodong Song, the leading author on the study and a geoscientist at Peking University responsible for pioneering work in 1996 on the inner core, told Salon by email at the time. "It may have a long-term effect (decades and centuries), but the effect on daily life is likely small." Other scientists, however, challenged Song's conclusion.

"This study misinterprets the seismic signals that are caused by episodic changes of the Earth's inner core surface," Lianxing Wen, a seismologist at Stony Brook University, told The Washington Post, also writing that the claim that the inner core rotates independently of the surface "provides an inconsistent explanation to the seismic data even if we assume it is true."

Similarly John Vidale, a geophysicist at the University of Southern California who was not involved in the study, told Salon that "people argue that maybe the boundary is moving by kilometers, perhaps the core is spinning tens of kilometers, which probably has almost no effect up on the surface. Since we don't actually know what's happening, we really don't know. So I guess I can't really tell you what it is that we don't know" as to whether there is anything to be concerned about in terms of the inner core's behavior.

We may think we know a lot about the Earth's core, but new research is consistently surprising us, not least of which is our mysterious core is leaking helium like a saggy balloon.

about planetary science

Trump seethes at Fox News for “sidelining” him — but the network is doing him a favor

Not to burst anyone's bubble, but Fox News is still deeply in the tank for Donald Trump. Trump, who believes he's never being worshipped as thoroughly as he deserves, disagrees, according to the Daily Beast's Zachary Petrizzo. Petrizzo, a Salon alum, reports that "Trump’s inner circle has become convinced that Fox News is essentially sidelining the former president by restricting live appearances on the network."

To be clear, the network is still devoted to licking Trump's boots. The grievance is over whether Trump is being glorified in the manner he prefers. Fox News still devotes huge amounts of time to Trump rallies, Trump interviews, Trump clips, and Trump imagery. What they don't give Trump, however, is live, unedited opportunities to ramble on without interruption. Instead, the network has focused on taped and edited interviews. This is perceived, by Trump, as a deprivation of his basic human rights.

"See, I love live television, because they can’t cut you off," Trump whined at a rally in Iowa last week. Petrizzo also quotes anonymous Trump staffers griping that "they are able to edit his words" and "they love a controlled environment" at Fox News. Donald Trump Jr. is also complaining he's not been invited on-air in months. Matt Gertz of Media Matters suggests this is likely a reaction to Fox News's multitude of legal woes. Not only did the network lose a defamation lawsuit to Dominion Voting Systems earlier this year, but they face more such lawsuits in the future. The company simply can't afford to give Trump carte blanche to lie and defame live on-air.

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Funny to imagine Trump seething over this, but I do have to push back on the assumption that this hurts Trump. On the contrary, I'd argue that Fox News is doing Trump a favor. Trump's big mouth may have initially been an asset, in that it got him the attention he needed to win the GOP nomination and then the presidency in 2016. But ever since then, Trump's lack of impulse control has done him more harm than good, both legally and with the voters.

Not that I expect a man who poops in gold toilets to understand the concept "less is more." But Fox News, I suspect, understands that dialing it back a little helps Trump a lot. Sadly, by cutting off his microphone access, Fox News is doing what they can to save Trump's skin and his electoral chances.

The hoary old myth that there's no such thing as bad publicity has hardened into a truism in some liberal circles. No doubt due to their own understandable desire to be exposed to less of Trump's voice, many folks on the left have come to reflexively assume that "platforming" Trump automatically improves his political standing. Especially on Twitter, there's been a steady drumbeat of pressure on the press to cover Trump less, on the "ignore him and he goes away" theory.

Trump keeps stepping on the GOP's so-called bombshells

This is backward, according to Barack Obama's former White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer. As he pointed out in a recent newsletter, the press has barely covered Trump's increasingly unhinged and violent rhetoric. The result is that many Americans have simply forgotten how bad Trump is. As long as Trump himself is not talking, GOP propagandists — mainly through outlets like Fox News — can push the narrative that he's not so bad and that it's just liberals being "hysterical" to claim otherwise. Especially for swing voters under significant pressure from Trump-loving relatives and neighbors, pushing Trump's grossness down the memory hole long enough to vote for him is quite alluring.

Trump has crept up in the polls in recent months, to the alarming point where he is outperforming Biden in many of them. That's likely because he's been out of office for two and a half years. Most Americans can go days, weeks — even months — without hearing his self-pity-drenched ranting. Without regular reminders that Trump sucks super bad, the rose-colored glasses start to slide up some noses.

A large percentage of Fox News viewers are MAGA weirdoes who can't get enough of listening to Trump's rambling lies, but those people were always going to vote for Trump. But those aren't the only people exposed to Fox's propaganda. A lot of maybe-Trump voters absorb Fox talking points without deliberately watching the network, as well. It's on in waiting areas at the doctor's or airport. Fox clips get shared on social media. They hear people in their lives talking about it as if it were the news. What happens on Fox gets into people's heads, even if they don't mean for it to.

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I suspect Fox executives know those people will be more easily convinced to vote for Trump if they can be bamboozled into remembering him as merely eccentric, instead of the sociopathic dissembler he actually is. This means running a lot of interference so that voters, especially those who are only half paying attention, don't hear or see much of Trump being himself. With enough heavy editing, he can sound coherent and almost like a regular politician, which is what a small but crucial number of voters need to believe in order to take their chances voting Trump again.

And, of course, by tightly controlling Trump's public image, Fox News is doing its level best to protect him legally. These days, Trump can't open his mouth without undermining his legal defense in the 4 separate criminal trials he's facing. Just this week, for instance, he claimed Sidney Powell, the lawyer most closely identified with Trump’s attack on the 2020 election, "WAS NOT MY ATTORNEY, AND NEVER WAS" after she took an eleventh-hour plea deal with prosecutors in Georgia. Within minutes, this claim was immediately debunked by journalists posting clips of Trump claiming otherwise in 2020.

Trump 2020: Sidney Powell has joined my legal team!

Trump after Powell flipped: Sidney Powell was not on my legal team. pic.twitter.com/cyrRCiHjGE

— Aaron Blake (@AaronBlake) October 22, 2023

Funny for us, but delicious for prosecutors, who can use that as one of many, many pieces of evidence that Trump lies easily and knowingly about everything. It also helps gut his supposed "advice of counsel" defense strategy. If Trump tries to argue his attempted coup was just him following his lawyer's advice, then it's a bad look, claiming she wasn't actually his lawyer.

Trump fumes over leaked audio that alleges he demanded Melania parade around White House in a bikini

Trump himself occasionally shows glimmers of understanding that it's easier for swing voters to feel warmly towards him if he's not talking. Initially, he tried to hijack his civil fraud trial in New York City that started earlier this month. He showed up even though he didn't have to, and raced towards the cameras so he could bellyache at length about the proceedings. But the spectacle did him no favors, instead serving as a reminder he's as annoying as he is dishonest. He has mostly stayed away since then. Same story with the GOP primary debates. Trump's team knows he'll only make news by saying gross stuff that reminds fence-sitting voters what they don't like about him, so he's stayed away.

It's not just swing voters in play, either. There's the people who will never vote for Trump. If he can convince a large enough percentage of his detractors to stay at home, he can win. The best way to do that is get those voters lulled into complacency. If Trump gave open-ended, live interviews on Fox News, there's a high risk he says something incredibly offensive and/or stupid that gets covered outside of Fox. That, in turn, would remind those voters why it's so important to keep him out of the White House. It may cut against every fiber of his narcissistic being, but Trump's best bet is that this is a boring, low turnout election. Because as much as his devout followers love his big mouth, most people hate it. When he's talking, he's reminding people who hate him to vote.

With any potential Republican primary rivals flaming out, Fox News knows their only path to the GOP regaining the White House goes through Trump. Even if some at Fox management hate Trump for pushing them to to say false things on-air that got them sued, they know the score: It's him or Biden. So we can safely assume that whatever they're doing for Trump is about helping Trump over the finish line. People like Trump more the less they hear from him, and Fox News knows it. They may be cutting back on how much he can blather on-air, but in the end, that's mainly to his benefit.

“Plutocrats and populists”: The GOP’s “contradictory principles” make a perfect recipe for fascism

American democracy is under siege from neofascist and other malign forces, from both within and outside. The antidemocracy movement is global. In the United States, this has taken the form, most acutely, in the form of Trumpism and the larger white right, which today’s Republican Party and “conservative” movement has willingly surrendered to. The longer story is decades-old and involves how an increasingly antidemocratic and radicalized right-wing built the institutions and gathered the resources to bring an end – so they hope – to multiracial pluralistic democracy and to replace it with a Christofascist Apartheid plutocracy.

For more than seven years, the American people and the country’s elites were warned by a small but vocal group of people – a group that I am a part of – about the existential dangers that Trumpism and the larger neofascist movement embodied. Unfortunately, the American people and their leaders chose, for the most part, not to listen to our warnings. Now matters are increasingly dire as Trump is tied with or ahead of President Biden in early 2024 Election polls.

In an attempt to make better sense of the rise of American neofascism, why so many people who should know better looked away, the ways that American fascism is both similar to and different from such movements and forces in other countries and earlier time periods, and what comes next – especially if Trump returns to the White House, I recently spoke with Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, the President of the Center for Jewish History in New York City and Professor of History at Fairfield University. Rosenfeld is the author of numerous books, including the new co-edited volume (with Janet Ward), Fascism in America: Past and Present, The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present, and Hi Hitler! How the Nazi Past is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length:

How are you feeling about America’s democracy crisis? How are you beginning to process this?

As a historian, I’m keenly aware of how contemporary fears and fantasies shape how people interpret the past, present, and future. I’m personally anxious about current political trends, especially because so many people appear to be caught in information bubbles and have little exposure to, or willingness to consider, competing ideas.

Language matters: What is this "crisis"? How do we define and apply it properly in this context?

The etymological origin of crisis (from the Greek) refers to a turning point or point of transition, originally with reference to a disease process. Many people intuitively sense that the Western world, like the world at large, is at a turning point where things could either get better or worse depending on any number of contingencies. Human action is needed on a variety of fronts to ensure we move in a positive direction That’s why it’s imperative to look back to the 1930s and 1940s and remind ourselves what was done effectively and what was done poorly to shore up liberal democracy.

How does that understanding change when we take the longer view from beyond these last seven or so years?

Crises come in many forms and in different degrees of severity, but they have always been a part of American history. The expansion of political rights to people who were never intended to have them is one arc of this story. The resistance to that expansion is the other arc. I see liberals as people who were originally elitists and applied Enlightenment principles only to themselves. This was true in Europe as well as the U. S. Over time, popular protest forced liberals to grant rights to others who had previously been denied them. Witness all the Reform Acts in 19th Century Britain and the decision of French liberals in 1848 to approve universal manhood suffrage. Those people who were willing to expand political rights remained liberals. Those who opposed doing so in 19th-century Europe and the U. S. became known as conservatives or reactionaries, while their 20th-century successors became fascists.

MAGA lawyers take a sweetheart deal for democracy. Trump should be frightened

In the U. S., rich white men were the first to claim liberal rights for themselves while denying them to poor white men without property. Andrew Jackson changed that by expanding suffrage to all white men, but of course denied those rights to white women and most people who were not white. Somewhat later, Nativists wanted to deny the same rights to other European/white men who were immigrants. The latter, of course, ultimately secured those rights, but it was always a struggle, as we know from many subsequent battles over immigration. We know how the rest of the story goes: white women, Native Americans, Black people, were eventually granted more rights as the 20th century unfolded. But it took a very long time, and at every step they faced resistance by people on the right – Southern oligarchs (who also opposed giving poor whites the vote), the second Klan, interwar fascist groups, and post-1945 segregationists. Only the Federal Government ensured the success of the Civil Rights movement.

We’re witnessing a new phase of this struggle today in the form of declining elites and social groups trying to prevent multiracial democracy.

I was one of the first people with a public platform to consistently warn that Trump and the MAGA movement and today’s Republican Party are fascists. I would define the terms and give the evidence. In response, those of us who were sounding the alarm were dismissed as “alarmists” with “Trump derangement syndrome." Why was there such denial – even given the obvious evidence about America’s neofascist crisis?

Part of it is psychological – not wanting to admit that we face serious peril in our own country. Obviously, we’ve been aware of right-wing extremists for years (the Oklahoma City bombing drove that home). But they had never acquired such a base in one of our two major political parties until Trump. The precursor to Trumpism in the form of the Tea Party remained mostly a faction without veto power over GOP policy.

Another reason why people are skeptical of the fascism charge is that it’s been used so widely by pundits and activists for decades. Literally every single president in the U. S. since FDR has been called a fascist at one point or another. I’m currently researching this phenomenon for a new book project). The ubiquity of these charges, combined with the absence of any genuine fascist regime in American history to this point, makes people skeptical of the claim that any one figure or movement is genuinely fascist. It’s the classic phenomenon of “crying wolf,” whereby people become desensitized to alarmist claims. This has been changing, however, especially since 1/6/21.

How do you define fascism? How does it look in the American mold? Is MAGA a fascist movement?

Fascism is an ideological movement that uses violence to destroy the liberal democratic order and replace it with a dictatorial system benefiting a particular social group, usually defined in ethno-nationalistic terms.

I see the MAGA movement as fascistic, though to be sure, there are competing wings – between those who are ideologues and those who are opportunists. This division is true of all political movements – even Nazism in Germany. It’s not clear to me how many MAGA supporters are truly willing to use violence to achieve their goals – as opposed to “merely” rigging the democratic process to ensure their desired outcomes. That latter authoritarian phenomenon unfortunately has a long tradition in American history, without rising to the level of fascism, in my opinion.

How have you been tracking the trajectory of the rise of Trump the figure and Trumpism as a political movement?

It’s all an outgrowth of the contradictory principles and social bases of the GOP. The party has long united plutocrats and populists, certainly since Barry Goldwater, by offering tax cuts to rich people and a stew of racist scapegoating and culture war demagoguery to poorer whites, especially from the Protestant/Nativist segment of the population).

That coalition held together reasonably well until GW Bush, but the foreign policy adventures of the post 9/11 world combined with the 2008 economic crash led millions of Americans to sense they were being taken for suckers – after all, the GOP’s economic policies had never benefited these voters and the GOP rarely followed through on their culture war promises.

McCain tried to capitalize on that resentment in 2008 by selecting Sarah Palin as his running mate, but the GOP brand was tarnished by 8 years of Bush and lost the election. Obama’s victory, in turn, radicalized the GOP white base and ensured that when the nominating process of 2015/16 took place, they would not be suckered again into voting for a traditional GOP establishment type like Jeb Bush.

At that point, the white Christian masses decided they wanted a sincere racist (not just a poseur) and simultaneously moved to demand a new kind of economic populism.

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Establishment Republicans had never been willing to sincerely embrace these two principles, since they offended the donor class. All those mainstream GOP candidates not surprisingly lost to Trump in 2016, who was willing to embrace the combination of racism and populism more sincerely. Ever since, GOP politicians have had to ride the authoritarian populist tiger to stay viable in the new political universe.

Will American Exceptionalism save us or doom us? Moreover, what role does American Exceptionalism play in the Age of Trump and ascendant neofascism?

American exceptionalism has two sides reflecting the Janus-faced character of American history: we’ve committed singular misdeeds throughout history, mostly rooted in our colonial origins, but have also pursued a universalistic liberal democratic mission that has gradually been extended to more of the population thanks to their own activist efforts to force the country to live up to its ideals. Those ideals motivated lots of the antifascist efforts of the 1930s and 1940s, which need to be acknowledged and, today, serve as a source of inspiration.

What can pro-democracy Americans learn from the struggle(s) against fascism(s) and other antidemocratic formations in other countries and at times? What about the Black Freedom Struggle as one of the most successful pro-democracy movements in recent history – and perhaps ever?

Coalition building in the 1930s was crucial for halting rightwing trends in their tracks. Countless civic groups worked together to oppose the extremist groups of the period. Leftwing groups (unions, the American League Against Fascism and War, etc.) worked with liberal groups (Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, Friends of Democracy), Jewish, Catholic, and Black groups (AJC, ADL, NAACP), along with individual journalists, media outlets, local government (esp. LaGuardia’s administration in NYC), and the Federal Government to combat right wing trends. The same was true in the mid-1920s, when similar coalitions fought against the immensely popular second Ku Klux Klan. It’s the same impulse that supported 19th century abolitionism and reconstruction after the Civil War. It’s our best political tradition, to my mind.

What are some of the continuities and parallels and of course differences in what you are seeing with how Germany and other societies embraced fascism in its various forms and what is happening in the U.S. and elsewhere with the rise of the global right?

My greatest fear relates to the malicious role of declining elites jumping into bed with genuine fascists. That’s what happened in Germany in 1932/33. Conservatives desperate to preserve their political and economic power sided with the NSDAP and brought the fox into the hen house. American elites never went that far in the 1930s, because they retained faith in our democratic system, even if most of them were deeply suspicious of FDR’s New Deal. Honestly, their ability to limit the New Deal’s reach probably made them feel sufficiently confident to NOT need the aid of the far right. Also, FDR was our savior in the sense that he and his administration took the country enough to the left that labor unrest never reached a critical mass to frighten the elites into contemplating a major coup. Had FDR been killed in Miami in 1933, a different president for the rest of the decade would have probably worsened social tensions and been terrible for the country’s political stability.

What is the role of violence in Trumpism and American neofascism?

Apart from January 6th, which was partly directed by Trump and partly stochastic, Trump’s worst sin has been his never-ending rhetorical demonization of its opponents and incitement of his followers to act on their own.

What of the role(s) that white supremacy, nativism, antisemitism, sexism play in Trumpism and American neofascism?

They all go together. Though not all far right groups in American history have embraced white supremacy. To cite one example, the Christian Front (which was a Catholic form of American Nativism, which had traditionally been Protestant) appears to have been largely indifferent to race and wanted a religious form of “Christian Unity.” Race didn’t figure in much of their thinking. Relatedly, in the late 1930s, Joe McWilliams tried to recruit Black supporters to his Christian Mobilizers movement. Charles Gallagher makes that interesting point in his recent book, The Nazis of Copley Square. Those groups were primarily fixated on anticommunism coming from the traumas of the Spanish Civil War and blamed Jews for promoting communism. The Christian Front’s antisemitism was more religious and political than racial.

Now that the book is done, what are you seeing or understanding differently about American fascism and the Age of Trump? What has been reinforced?

We wanted to bridge the 1930s and the present in the volume and get people to see the connections. We want to advance current scholarship by inspiring younger historians to plunge into the field and interest the general public in a topic that’s all too often been underplayed. As we increasingly become open to seeing American history as double sided, we need to realize that the same country that won the “good war” against fascism had its own fascist groups that would’ve been happy had the Nazis won.

What happens if Trump returns to the White House?

Nothing good, that’s for sure. But we need to realize that any of his GOP imitators could wreak just as much havoc if for some reason he doesn’t become the party’s nominee for president. At this point, the social base of the GOP is driving the party’s autocratic agenda.

Where do we go from here?

All the usual claims about the need for vigilance apply, along with warnings about complacency. It’s exhausting but necessary to constantly be on guard. We also have to adapt to new geopolitical developments and not just see things in a domestic context. Between December 7th and December 11th, 1941, the ongoing standoff within American social, economic, political, and cultural life decisively shifted in favor of FDR’s left-liberal agenda.

There’s no question that international events today – the War in Ukraine, Gaza, potentially elsewhere – will have momentous consequences for American political life. I’m concerned about rifts emerging on the American left about how to respond to the horrific Hamas terror attacks.

The last thing we need is for the anti-fascist coalition between centrists, liberals, and progressives to be shattered by events in the Middle East. The weakening of the left between 1939-41 because of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact is an example of something we certainly don’t want to happen in the present-day world. We really need to keep our eyes on multiple threats simultaneously. It won't be easy but it's absolutely necessary.

about fascism

Trump’s chatter with Aussie billionaire could create “additional Espionage Act charges”

Anthony Pratt, one of Australia’s richest men, has repeatedly said that former President Donald Trump shared sensitive information with him, including discussions of Trump's calls with the leaders of Ukraine and Iraq, according to The New York Times and "60 Minutes Australia."

Pratt is listed as a potential witness against Trump in the felony case brought by special counsel Jack Smith relating to Trump's mishandling of classified information. Pratt's testimony could potentially expose the former president to further legal risks, including additional charges under the Espionage Act, legal experts say.

Pratt reportedly has a fortune measured in the billions, largely built on the paper and packaging industry. He spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on memberships at Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago resort after Trump became president, which led to a friendship between the two and reported conversations in which the former president allegedly shared sensitive or classified information with Pratt.

Jim Jordan and Donald Trump's embarrassing week reminds us: MAGA "tough guys" are cowards at heart

In one recording that was made public Sunday by the Times, Pratt recalled a conversation with Trump from 2019 in which the then-president told him about recently ordering an airstrike against Iranian-linked militants in Iraq.

"It hadn't even been on the news yet and he said, 'So I just bombed Iraq today,’" Pratt said.

In a different conversation with Pratt, Trump discussed his now-notorious phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, which helped lead to Trump’s first impeachment.

In that call, Trump urged Zelenskyy to help him win the 2020 election by investigating Joe and Hunter Biden for unsubstantiated claims of corrupt business dealings in Ukraine.

“That was nothing compared to what I usually do,” Trump told Pratt, according to the tape. “That’s nothing compared to what we usually talk about.”

Trump’s pattern of sharing sensitive government information with Pratt could create additional legal jeopardy in the form of more Espionage Act charges similar to those already filed relating to his retention of classified documents after leaving the White House, said Javed Ali, a former senior counterterrorism official at the Department of Homeland Security, in an interview with Salon.

Under the Espionage Act, Ali said, "the willful transmission of national security information to unauthorized persons" could provide a basis for such charges, "although the burden of proof would fall upon the prosecution to prove that President Trump did so with Pratt beyond a reasonable doubt."

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It’s unclear whether prosecutors had already obtained the tapes that were disclosed to the public on Sunday, but the new recordings offer Pratt’s private thoughts about Trump’s behavior and his reasons for forming a close relationship with the ex-president.

In one recorded conversation, Pratt explained that he had cozied up to Trump and his allies because they were “like the mafia,” adding, “You want to be a customer, not a competitor.”

Trump "knows exactly what to say and what not to say so that he avoids jail, Pratt said, "but gets so close to it that it looks to everyone like he’s breaking the law. Like, he won’t go up to someone and say, ‘I want you to kill someone.’ He’ll say, he’ll send someone to tell someone to kill someone.”

If Trump indeed shared classified information regarding key U.S. national security priorities with Pratt — a foreign national who was clearly not authorized to receive such information — that leads to compounded security risks, Ali explained.

“The potential risk to national security in cases like this is how then that information is passed to other individuals who similarly were not authorized to receive such," he said, along with whether "there is any compromise to intelligence sources and methods or whether U.S. policy becomes affected as a result of those unauthorized disclosures.”

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Trump has already been indicted for unlawfully mishandling and retaining classified materials, as former federal prosecutor Neama Rahmani observed. Whether or not Trump provided that classified information to a third party is not directly relevant to those charges, Rahmani added, but certainly does not help the former president's defense.

In response to the Times report about Pratt, Trump took to his social media outlet, Truth Social, to lash out at the newspaper. He said that he and Pratt had spoken about creating jobs in Ohio and Pennsylvania, but also appeared to insult the Australian billionaire as a "weirdo" and claim the story was politically motivated.

“The Failing New York Times story, leaked by Deranged Jack Smith and the Biden ‘Political Opponent Abuser’ DOJ, about a red haired weirdo from Australia, named Anthony Pratt, is Fake News,” Trump posted.

Trump and Pratt certainly appeared to enjoy a friendly relationship during the former's time in office. In 2019, Trump helped open a new Pratt Industries plant in Ohio, where he referred to Pratt as a “friend” and described him as “one of the most successful men in the world,” The Guardian reported.

"Pratt’s testimony will be powerful for jurors hearing the case," Rahmani said. "The Department of Justice will argue that these laws exist for a reason, and that Trump compromised American security interests and that of our allies. Pratt’s testimony will also be important at sentencing if Trump is convicted. Prosecutors will argue that Trump should receive prison time because of his flagrant disregard of the law."

about Donald J. Trump's decaying orbit

Republicans looks for Jesus to take the wheel in the House

As House Republicans continue to prolong weeks of infighting one GOP lawmaker is now just trolling the conservative members who ousted former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Calif., in favor of an imagined "messiah" while Donald Trump is encouraging the GOP to turn to Jesus.

Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif., inked a letter over the weekend posted to X, formerly Twitter, by Axios reporter Juliegrace Brufke.

NEW: Rep. Tom McClintock is taking aim at the members who ousted McCarthy’s recent vow that they would be willing to be disciplined and expelled from the conference in order to get Jordan the gavel, with the California Republican clapping back in a sassy new letter. pic.twitter.com/UgY8WhcOWR

— Juliegrace Brufke (@juliegraceb) October 21, 2023

McClintock, in the letter, sarcastically addresses those Republican lawmakers who paved the way for McCarthy's abrupt removal, an effort that was largely spearheaded by Rep. Matt Gaetz, Fla. Weeks later, House Republicans remain speakerless after ultra-conservative House Judiciary Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan, Ohio, failed numerous times in his bid for the position. Jordan on Friday lost his third attempt to be elected House Speaker, also flopping at a secret ballot vote afterward, with only 194 votes to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries' 210.

"We should have been moved by your willingness to suffer 'censure, suspension, or removal from the conference' to enforce your personal preferences on the overwhelming majority of your unenlightened colleagues," McClintock wrote in the letter.

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"We truly don't deserve you," the letter continued. "But your sacrifice is not in vain. You have succeeded in replacing the outdated concept of majority rule with an exciting new standard that a speaker must be elated by 98.2 percent of the Republican conference. Someday, a messiah will be born unto us who can achieve this miraculous threshold, and on that day your judgment will be vindicated and you will be hailed as the geniuses that you are."

"I think we were all truly humbled to learn that your 'fidelity to Republican virtues and principles remains unwavering,'" McClintock quipped. "Who could not be moved to tears to read that you offer your self-sacrifice 'sincerely and with the hope of unity with purpose?'"

"With this in mind, I modestly suggest that you plan your martyrdom in the only way that truly matters: to have the wisdom to see the damage you have done to our country and to have the courage to set things right before it is too late. I enclose a proposed resolution that perhaps one of you can offer as we begin the fourth week of national paralysis and as the world burns around us."

McClintock is far from being the only Republican to have gripes over the current state of the party and its incessant bickering. Donald Trump, the overwhelming favorite to capture the 2024 Republican nomination for president echoed McClintok's mention of the messiah.

"I said there's only one person that can do it all the way. You know who that is? Jesus Christ," Trump joked during a New Hampshire campaign stop on Monday. "If he came down and said, 'I want to be speaker,' he would do it."

Jim Jordan's curious rise: A tale of how Christian nationalism consumed the GOP

A new USA Today/Suffolk University poll determined that the majority of Republicans have grown weary of their party's antics, with 67 percent of Americans believing the House should elect a Speaker as soon as possible, while only 25 percent don’t care if a new Speaker is chosen. 57 percent of Republican voters indicated that they want the search for a Speaker to end, in contrast to the 34 percent who are willing to wait out the drama. The same poll determined that 54 percent of voters have a critical view of the House. “How often do you see Democrats, Republicans, and independents agree on anything in D.C.?” David Paleologos, director of Suffolk’s Political Research Center, told USA Today. “Look at every demographic: gender, geography, age, race, education level, income, political philosophy, even those who trust CNN vs Fox News. They are all speaking the same seven words in unison: ‘Elect a speaker and do your job.'”

The House Freedom Caucus on Monday released an official position "urging leadership to keep Republicans in Washington to elect a new Speaker of the House without further delay."

"House Republicans should not leave Washington again until we have a new Speaker of the House," the organization tweeted. "No more delays or breaks. The American People are depending on us."

House Republicans should not leave Washington again until we have a new Speaker of the House.

No more delays or breaks. The American People are depending on us.#NoSpeakerNoRecess pic.twitter.com/eVVNmjfMSr

— House Freedom Caucus (@freedomcaucus) October 23, 2023

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And former House Republican Rep. John Katko, N.Y., offered an ominous prediction for the Republican Party more broadly, during a recent sit-down with Politico. "I think what’s happened is that a very small number of members of the far right took it upon themselves to use a motion to vacate, and they never had a plan for what would come after they were successful," Katko said. "The chaos that’s ensued has really illuminated the divisions in the party. Not only has it illuminated them, it’s kind of deepened and hardened those divisions."

"Now we’ve got a real problem because the moderates have finally pushed back and said enough’s enough," Katko continued. "The far right feels falsely empowered because of concessions made to them by Kevin McCarthy to get the speakership."

"They’ve just got to hope sanity will prevail at some point and someone will emerge to lead this group out of this mess. But make no mistake: There’s going to be a lot of scars in this fight and those scars are going to last a long time in the party. I think it’s going to be harder to get some consensus on things, because the battle lines are now firmly drawn. Jordan did some damage with his heavy-handed tactics that turned off a lot of people. It’s going to take someone who is truly a great leader to emerge and cut through the nonsense so we can get some things done."

In regard to whether the speaker infighting will come at the cost of the GOP losing the House majority, Katko felt "it's too early to tell, and it ultimately depends on whether Trump ends up as the nominee or not."

"I think Trump being the nominee is going to have a far greater negative impact on these seats than the shenanigans that have taken place in the House," he added.

"But make no mistake about it: The shenanigans that have taken place are not going to help. Trump being on the ticket in moderate districts is going to be a very, very difficult thing."

Dave Chappelle’s Israel criticism prompts audience walkout at Boston comedy show

During his show at TD Garden on Thursday, Dave Chappelle spoke out about the Israel-Gaza conflict, which spurred a walkout by some of his audience members. According to The Wall Street Journal, the comedian first condemned Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel before slamming Israel’s bombing of Gaza and the United States of “aiding the slaughter of innocent civilians.”

Chappelle’s comments were made after he said that he didn’t think students should lose job offers for being pro-Palestine. An audience member then demanded Chappelle to “shut up,” which elicited an emotional response from the comedian. Chappelle proceeded to bash the Israeli government for cutting off water and other essentials to Gaza and accused it of killing innocent people, according to those in attendance at the Boston show.

A few members of the crowd cheered and shouted "Free Palestine” in support of Chappelle, while others yelled, "What about Hamas," the attendees said. Some individuals got up and left the show. At the end of his routine, Chappelle reportedly added that “two wrongs don’t make a right,” when speaking about Israeli policies and the Hamas attacks.

Despite the reports from the show’s audience, a spokesperson for Chappelle told The Wall Street Journal the comedian “denies being in Boston that night.” TD Garden’s website confirmed that Chappelle had two shows at the venue as part of his stand-up comedy tour, Dave Chappelle Live: It’s A Celebration, B!%?#&$!. The first show was on Oct. 19 and the second was on Oct. 20.

The basics of coffee labeling

Coffee — one of the world’s favorite drinks, with consumption on the rise — is one of the most traded global commodities. But that doesn’t mean everyone is profiting: The United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization has observed “asymmetric income distribution among actors in the value chain” — a systemic issue that, unchecked, “can threaten the livelihood of millions of smallholder producers.” And as with any commodity product, the industrialization of coffee production has also taken a significant environmental toll.

As a product grown mostly in the Global South but consumed most heavily in the Global North, coffee today in some ways mirrors the colonial structures that made it a global commodity in the first place. It’s one of the reasons Bartholomew Jones got into the business. His company, Cxffeeblack, foregrounds the product’s African roots (the plant almost certainly originated in Ethiopia) and works exclusively with Black African producers and processors. “Coffee is a $400 billion industry globally,” says Jones. “And currently, according to the president of Uganda, less than one percent of that money goes to continental Africans.”

In the latest episode of our podcast, FoodPrint spoke with Jones and other coffee professionals about how they and their colleagues are working to make supply chains more transparent, sustainable and equitable. All agreed that finding a specialty coffee company — shorthand for one that sources from individual producers or small-scale importers and exporters, rather than buying commodity beans — is the first place to start. But you can also take a closer look at the bag: The labels and terms on everyday grocery-store coffee can still help you get a sense of where it came from, how it was grown and how it got into your hand.

Below, a breakdown of the terms and certifications you might encounter — and some brands that are working to make coffee better.

Terms to know

Certain basic information will be included on most coffee packaging and there are common marketing terms you’ll often see, too. Here are a few words and phrases to expect and what they can (and cannot) tell you about the coffee you’re buying.

Single-origin

“Single-origin” is the term of choice for beans that come from — you guessed it — a single origin. While the scope is not regulated (or even universally agreed-upon) in the industry, the term usually refers to coffee sourced from a single growing region. Sometimes, it might even come from a single farm; these products can also be seen labeled as “estate” or “single-estate” coffee. The term often represents a level of traceability and conscious sourcing on the part of the roaster, but because it is not an official certification, it can’t tell you much on its own. Most specialty coffee will indicate which country (or occasionally, countries) the beans were sourced from, but not all will claim to be single-origin.

Blend

In the broadest terms, “blend” simply means that different beans have been mixed together, whether for economic reasons or, as is often the case, for taste. Blends can comprise the coffee sourced from different countries or a mix of different species entirely. (More on that below.) You may see the nebulous phrase “single-origin blend,” which usually denotes a mix of beans from different farms in the same region.

Arabica

Most coffee cultivated and consumed in this world comes from one of two species. Of these, Coffea arabica is dominant, making up about 60 percent of global production. Considered to be the superior option flavor-wise, it is often described as “smooth” or complex; almost any specialty coffee you’ll see in a café or store will be arabica beans.

Robusta

The other common coffee species is robusta (Coffea canephora). These beans are associated, sometimes unfairly, with lower-quality coffee and can be “intense” or bitter — but are key in many coffee traditions, partly because they contain about twice as much caffeine as arabica. Robusta plants are also a compellingly climate-resilient crop, named for how hardy and prolific they are even in challenging conditions; some are experimenting with grafting or studying different varieties to help the industry adapt. Saveur recently described the rise of robusta as “the 2023 coffee trend nobody saw coming.”

Roast

Typically, the first time coffee arrives in the U.S. from elsewhere, it will be “green” — meaning the coffee fruit (or “cherry”) has been picked and dried, the skin and pulp removed and the bean hulled and polished. But all coffee must also be roasted to some extent: It wouldn’t taste like coffee without it. “Some drying happens during the roasting process, but really what happens is this Maillard reaction,” says Dakota Graff of Onyx Coffee Lab, a guest on our coffee episode, “which will take all of these acids and sugars and convert them into something that’s soluble . . . and into a beautiful beverage.” Different roasting times and temperatures produce a spectrum of color and flavor, which traditionally ranges from “light roast” to “medium” to “dark.” Lighter roasts are often described as more complex or subtle, while darker roasts are “bolder,” sometimes with a smoky or nutty flavor. Companies that import and roast beans — whether for their own brand or to distribute to other businesses — are called “roasters.”

Shade-grown

Coffee is an understory plant: It grows best under a canopy of shade-providing trees. But over the past half-century or so, systems have been devised to create higher yields by growing coffee in full sun on large plantations. Often, land must be cleared to create these full-sun coffee farms and the plants require more inputs to be productive in these conditions. Alternatively, shade growing in the traditional way protects the topsoil and requires fewer fertilizers and less pest management — crucially, without contributing to deforestation and biodiversity loss. Though you’ll frequently see the term used on packaging, there is no “shade-grown” certification, though some certifications do include stipulations about shade plants (see Smithsonian Bird Friendly, which we touch on later in this piece).

Direct trade

In direct trade arrangements, coffee bypasses the commodity market and goes straight from the producer, where it is harvested and processed, to the roaster, where it is finished and packaged for sale. Dialogue between producer and roaster — and fewer stops on the supply chain — can not only mean more money going into the hands of growers, but also facilitate more sustainable practices and a higher-quality product. But this model can be prohibitively expensive even without considering factors like cultural or language barriers and is not the only way to operate responsibly.

Labels to look for

It’s certainly possible to find responsibly produced coffee that has no certifications at all, but certifications handled by third-party organizations can be a somewhat more objective measure of how your coffee was grown and processed. Below, we explain the ones you’ll see most frequently and where they might fall short. For more information, check out FoodPrint’s Food Label Guide.

Fair trade certifications

A coffee producer’s livelihood can be dependent on what is called the C-price — the commodity price of coffee, or specifically, what one pound of unroasted arabica beans will net on the Intercontinental Exchange. These commodity prices have no relation to the actual cost of producing coffee and often fall below it; according to the coffee website Sprudge, “the five years from 2015 to 2020 saw the lowest sustained green [unroasted] coffee prices in history.”

The fair trade movement aims to improve farmer livelihoods through a more equitable system that works with producer cooperatives and establishes minimum prices and guaranteed premiums. The two big fair trade labels you’ll see in the U.S. are Fairtrade and Fair Trade Certified. Both have requirements for worker protections, living wages and health insurance. But the requirements for the latter are looser, part of the reason its certifying body, Fair Trade USA, split from Fairtrade International in 2011. And while these fair trade labels have some environmental stipulations — limiting pesticide use, for example — other, more sustainability-focused certifications are much more stringent.

There are other doubts about the adequacy of the fair trade certification system. Fair trade prices don’t always keep up with rising costs and interested buyers are no guarantee. There are many who would agree with Anna Canning, a coffee industry veteran and guest on our podcast episode, who recently told Rewritten: “at this point, [ethical] certifications are working to serve corporations and the exploitative status quo.” Often, specialty roasters find they can do as much, if not more, to support farmers and other workers in coffee growing regions by simply building on-the-ground relationships themselves.

Organic certifications

One of the best sustainability certifications we have is the Department of Agriculture’s USDA Organic, which sets strong standards for organic crops: Industrial pesticides, antibiotics, synthetic fertilizers and sewage sludge are banned, as are GMOs. For a farm to earn certification, banned substances must not have been applied at any time during the previous three years. USDA works with dozens of accredited agents that certify operations to these standards around the U.S. and the world. One of the more famous is California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF) — the first body in the country to offer an organic certification program, starting in the 1970s — which, like many, also offers its own seal, CCOF Certified Organic. Because CCOF uses the USDA standards, certified companies can use either (or both) seals on their packaging. Another of the country’s most established certifiers is the Organic Crop Improvement Association, OCIA International.

It’s worth noting that USDA Organic does not set standards for worker welfare and in the case of coffee, does not enforce a minimum price or require farmers be given any additional compensation for cultivating to a higher standard. And though organic coffee is often shade-grown, there is no requirement for shade levels. Acquiring certification is a potentially expensive proposition for producers already working on slim margins; many operations grow organically in all but name, but choose to not pursue certification.

Certain “add-on” labels require USDA Organic certification as a baseline but are designed to go beyond its requirements, which some farmers see as being increasingly watered down. The Real Organic Project requires some protections for hired workers as part of its certification, but is focused on the U.S. and works with only a few farms, all in Hawaiʻi, that produce coffee. Regenerative Organic Certified (which offers bronze, silver and gold tiers) also requires that producers maintain some “social fairness” certification, like one of the fair trade labels, as a baseline. The first coffee products with this label became available in the U.S. in fall 2022.

Other certifications

Smithsonian Bird Friendly is a certification for coffee and cocoa developed by the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center. In addition to requiring a baseline USDA Organic certification, the program is focused on preventing deforestation and encouraging biodiversity as a means of conserving habitat for birds — meaning it’s shade-grown by default. This certification does not contain any stipulations about pricing or worker welfare.

Rainforest Alliance has requirements for “natural vegetation cover,” but there is no core requirement when it comes to shade. Additionally, organic certification is not required, though there is a stated focus on worker rights and living wages. Rainforest Alliance has been criticized in the past for weak standards and uneven enforcement; in the 2010s, exploitative labor practices were found at several Brazilian coffee farms certified by the organization. (After its 2017 merger with the Dutch organization Utz, Rainforest Alliance released new standards in 2020.)

Some coffee companies are also certified as Benefit Corporations, or B Corps, a label designed to indicate “accountability and transparency” in their operations. Here, too, some have lamented what they see as diminishing standards; moves like the 2022 certification of Nespresso (whose ethical violations, including child labor, have been well-documented) have inspired criticism of its standards and process.

Brands doing better

“There are a lot of great coffee roasters in the U.S. that are doing great work and partnering with great producers,” says Graff. “It feels really good, as part of the human experience, to consume a product where you’re like, ‘You know what? I know who grew this and I care for them and I pay them a good wage.’ And that’s really what specialty coffee is about.”

Next time you’re shopping, you can look for certifications as well as efforts at transparency — brands that are willing to share their story. In addition to Onyx Coffee Lab and Cxffeeblack, there are many other companies focused on sourcing their product carefully and prioritizing equity and sustainability along the supply chain. A few that are on our radar, from which you can purchase locally or order online:

Birds & Beans

Grounded in the values of the Smithsonian Bird Friendly program, this “triple certified” company has also obtained USDA Organic and Fair Trade USA certification for all of its products and donates 5 percent of proceeds to conservation causes.

Learn more: birdsandbeanscoffee.com

Caribbrew

A Black-owned, woman-founded company, Caribbrew maintains direct trade relationships with coffee cooperatives in Haiti — half of their partner farmers are also women — and pays above the fair trade minimum with the goal of sustaining jobs in a country where un- and underemployment is a major concern.

Learn more: caribbrew.com

Equal Exchange

A pioneer in the farmer-partnership model, Equal Exchange has an online database of all the farmer cooperatives it works with and is structured as a worker co-op itself. After starting out with specialty coffee back in 1986, it has since expanded to include tea, chocolate, olive oil and more and can be found in major grocery stores.

Learn more: shop.equalexchange.coop

Junior’s Roasted Coffee

Through its Cost of Production Covered project, Junior’s works with farmers to set prices based on their actual production costs (with a minimum gross margin) and educates both consumers and other roasters about equitable pricing models.

The company has also piloted a CSA program, Community Funded Coffee.

Kahawa 1893

Kahawa 1893, founded by Kenyan-born entrepreneur Margaret Nyamumbo, sources from cooperatives of women farmers in Kenya, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Consumers make a (fully matched) tip directly to the farmers with the QR code printed onto every bag.

Learn more: kahawa1893.com

Nguyen Coffee Supply

The brainchild of Sahra Nguyen, the daughter of Vietnamese refugees, this company has a direct trade relationship with a farm in Vietnam’s Central Highlands and is one of robusta’s biggest cheerleaders in the U.S. specialty coffee scene (though it does offer arabica beans, too).

Learn more: nguyencoffeesupply.com

Stumptown

While not all of its coffee is organic, this coffee giant offers a number of OCIA-certified products, including single-origin beans sourced from cooperatives in Ethiopia and Indonesia. Stumptown coffee is available at several major grocery chains.

Learn more: stumptowncoffee.com

Were midwives the OG witches? How the history of mystic medicine and reproductive health intertwine

There is a unique power contained in a room where a woman is giving birth. There is power in the women surrounding her. It's a time of transformation, an alchemy unlike any other. No wonder, in so many places in the world, that power would be regarded as suspicious. Midwives and witches — they've always had a lot in common.

The line between the physical and the spiritual has always been permeable. As Liese Sherwood-Fabre , PhD, a novelist with over than thirty years in the area of family planning, explains it, in ancient eras, "Pregnancy had a magical aspect to it. Equating the birth of a child to an act that had occurred nine months prior was not intuitive."

"Aftershock" directors on how the anti-midwife campaign wrought the Black maternal mortality crisis

A current exhibition at Edinburgh's Surgeons' Hall Museums that explores "The Battle for Midwifery" unpacks the legacies of that engimatic relationship. "Until the 18th century childbirth was a community-focused social and ritualistic event," curator Louise Wilkie writes on the museum's blog, "with the management of births controlled by women and the lying-in chamber a female-only space. Part of a traditional midwife’s role was adherence to superstitions, and she was perceived to be particularly skilled in halting exchanges with evil spirits." Which could, in certain circumstances, make her vulnerable to accusations of being in consort with them.

It's been fifty years since Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English first connected the dots in their book "Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers." In it, they charted the marginalization of women from their own reproductive care. “If a woman dare to cure without having studied," they wrote, "she is a witch and must die.” To the authors, it was unsurprising that the European and colonial Witchcraft Acts of the 16th and 17th centuries overwhelmingly targeted females. Over 80% of the victims arrested, tortured and executed were women, a "gynocide" that they posited was centered on "control of the healing arts."

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Those healing arts encompassed a variety of reproductive concerns. "The same women who would have assisted in childbirth would have also been consulted regarding ways to avoid pregnancy," says Liese Sherwood-Fabre. "Most of these women were illiterate, so they didn't leave written records of their practices, but would have handed down their remedies to their apprentices. Apothecaries, pharmacists and botanists, however, identified a number of herbs and plants that were known to cause a miscarriage (noted as causing a woman to bleed or for pregnant women not to touch)."

"Part of a traditional midwife’s role was adherence to superstitions, and she was perceived to be particularly skilled in halting exchanges with evil spirits."

She continues, "Other plants were known to have contraceptive or spermicidal effects. These were certainly part of a midwife's provisions. Such treatments often required the woman (or man) to recite prayers or other words while using the herbs to ensure their effectiveness. Less effective, but common, practices also included wearing amulets around the neck or arm to avoid pregnancy."

Ritual and incantation, along with the use of herbal remedies, have long been pervasive across all aspects of healthcare. A 2011 paper in the journal Social History of Medicine notes that in the middle ages, "many recipes mingle ‘charms and magic’ with pharmaceutical preparations." But until the 19th century, women's healthcare "was considered women's business," says Waltraud Maierhofer, PhD, a professor of German and Global Health Studies at the University of Iowa, "especially abortion."

That hands-off approach offered women a certain level of gynecological trust and freedom around their reproductive health. But then, Maierhofer says, "The major change came with the professionalization of medicine and also the spread of universities."

The era also ushered in a conservative-leaning shift in religious ideologies, with a new distrust of women's management of their "courses" and a renewed evangelical disdain for what the International Museum of Surgical Science notes as "ameliorating the pain of delivery" (aka Eve's curse). Women soon found themselves excluded from the childbirth process, and abortion going underground. That shift "changed the whole view of what was considered abortion," says Maierhofer, "what was criminal and what was just what women did without anybody else caring about it. Men took on childbirth and women's health in general." The female midwife all but disappeared.

Midwifery is deeply rooted in the mystical, and women demonstrating competence in their own care is always regarded as troublesome. But historically, your friendly neighborhood midwife was not a surefire candidate to be singled out as a witch by her clientele.

Midwifery is deeply rooted in the mystical, and women demonstrating competence in their own care is always regarded as troublesome.

Over a nearly 200 year period in Scotland alone, roughly 4,000 individuals were accused of witchcraft. Yet digging into the archives in 2021, Professor Nicola Ring of Edinburgh Napier University discovered just 142 cases where crimes of witchcraft were "related to their healing or midwifery practices." And only 19 were explicitly identified for midwifery, like Agnes Sampsoune, "one of Scotland’s best-known witches" and "a renowned midwife."

Writing back in 1990, historian David Harley disputed the notion that midwives were singled out for persecution, asserting that "In few of the vast numbers of trials were midwives accused … A few spectacular cases have been mistaken for a general pattern." Harley's skepticism in light of surviving evidence is worth acknowledging, though it's worth investigating how members of a community might have identified themselves in any era, and how encompassing women's work has always been.

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A comprehensive, decade-long 2023 study on "Work, Gender and Witchcraft in Early Modern England" out of Cambridge University appears to bear out that women who worked in healing, childcare (including wet nurses) and other female-centric professions were indeed often more vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft. While reputable midwives might "usually" be safe, "Less reputable, more disposable healthcare workers were not."

What drove female practitioners out of obstetrics was far more the common, everyday machinations of the patriarchy rather than religious superstition. Today, midwifery, along with other less medicalized practices like home births, is gaining ground in the United States, albeit incrementally. Midwives now attend roughly 12% of births in this country. And over 32% of all births are by Cesarean. What's undeniable — and fascinating — is that our modern practice of obstetrics is so sterile, medicalized and frankly masculine that the closest analogue we have for older, more feminine methods is witchcraft. You picture a woman who perhaps prescribes herbal remedies and performs reassuring rituals related to a pregnant woman and her fetus, likely in her own home, who knows her and recognizes her pains. Sounds like a witch.

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The Rock whitewashing? Actor wants Paris wax figure updated “starting with my skin color”

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is not a fan of his new wax figure, which was recently unveiled at the Musée Grévin in Paris. The figure features a light-skinned rendition of the “Black Adam” star wearing blue slacks, a black belt, sneakers and a blue golf shirt — an ensemble that Johnson has never worn in actuality.

Johnson shared his thoughts on the figure in an Instagram post made Sunday: “For the record, I’m going to have my team reach out to our friends at Grevin Museum, in Paris France so we can work at ‘updating’ my wax figure here with some important details and improvements — starting with my skin color. And next time I’m in Paris, I’ll stop in and have a drink with myself.”

Additionally, Johnson re-shared a video of comedian James Andre Jefferson Jr. roasting his wax figure.

“You know Black-a** Samoan The Rock? That’s how Paris thinks he looks,” Jefferson Jr. said in the video. “They turned The Rock into a pebble! . . . it looks like The Rock has never seen the sun a day in his life . . . You make The Rock look like David Beckham. It looks like The Rock is going to be a part of the royal family. Did y’all even Google him?”

Johnson’s wax figure also left many of his fans in complete shock, as reported by Today. “Yikes! That is not the Rock, maybe his stuntman lol,” one person commented, while another wrote, “Dwayne Vin Diesel Johnson.” Others questioned the statue’s skin tone and accused the museum of “whitewashing” Johnson.

Women pushed out of academic work by sexism, harassment: study

In all stages of their careers, U.S. academic faculty who are women are more likely than their male counterparts to leave academia, according to new research from the University of Colorado Boulder in the journal Science Advances. In the most comprehensive retention analysis to date — analyzing 245,270 professors in 111 different academic fields — researchers found faculty men were more likely to leave a post to pursue attractive outside offers, while faculty women were more likely to be pushed out by sexism faced in both domestic and professional settings. Women were most likely to cite unequal parenting labor as their primary domestic reason for leaving academia. Lower salaries and sexual harassment were the most common professional reasons for leaving.

“We were surprised to see the gender gap actually grow after faculty received tenure, given how important the title is,” said the study's lead author, Katie Spoon, in a release. “This result suggests that perhaps the field has neglected thinking about tenured women and their experiences." Spoon said solutions "can start with asking faculty, particularly women, what needs to be done, listening, and taking specific, concrete steps to address their concerns."

Spoon and her team found that, during their appointment as assistant professors, faculty women are 6% more likely than men to leave their jobs annually. Among full professors, that rate is higher — women are 19% more likely to leave academia than men. Though previous research suggested women are more likely to leave academia for better work-life balance, the new paper found men leave at about the same rate for this reason. Researchers hope the study will spur administrators nationwide to take action on the hostile working conditions faced by women in all fields.

Pilot charged with 83 counts of attempted murder

An off-duty pilot seated in the cockpit unsuccessfully tried to shut down a plane's engines midflight and is now charged with 83 counts of attempted murder.

Alaska Airlines Flight 2059 was flying from Everett, Washington, to San Francisco on Sunday when a passenger onboard unsuccessfully tried to "disrupt the operation of the engines." The 76-seat Embraer 175 plane was operated by Alaska Airlines subsidiary Horizon Air. The flight left Everett at 5:23 p.m. local time and emergency landed in Portland an hour later.

The suspect allegedly tried to pull the fire extinguisher handles on the engines, preliminary information obtained by investigators indicated to ABC News. The suspect was reportedly overwhelmed by flight crew and subdued and then handcuffed to a seat.

“As a heads up. We’ve got the guy that tried to shut the engines down out of the cockpit. It doesn’t sound like he’s got any issue in the back right now. I think he’s subdued," one of the pilots of the plane told air traffic control in audio captured by LiveATC.com. "Other than that we want law enforcement as soon as we get on the ground and parked.”

Pilots will occasionally ride a cockpit “jump seat” when traveling in an official capacity or commuting to another airport. The suspect was en route to San Francisco, where he was scheduled to be on a flight crew of a 737, ABC News reported.

"The jump seat occupant unsuccessfully attempted to disrupt the operation of the engines," the airline said. "The Horizon Captain and First Officer quickly responded, engine power was not lost and the crew secured the aircraft without incident." Engine power, the airline said, was not lost and the crew secured the aircraft without incident.

44-year-old Joseph David Emerson was arrested by the Port of Portland Police, the law enforcement agency for the Portland International Airport in Oregon, and booked around 4 a.m. local time according to Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office booking records. No motive has been confirmed. The airline Emerson works for wasn’t immediately known.

Kieran Ramsey, FBI Portland special agent in charge, said the FBI has taken over the case and “can assure the traveling public there is no continuing threat related to this incident.” Meanwhile, the the Federal Aviation Administration said it is "engaged with Alaska and Horizon airlines and is supporting law enforcement investigations into Sunday evening’s incident aboard a Horizon Airlines flight."

Alaska Airlines said all of the passengers were able to get on later flights.

“We are grateful for the professional handling of the situation by the Horizon flight crew and appreciate our guests’ calm and patience throughout this event,” the carrier said.

Study: Eating red meat may increase your risk of Type 2 diabetes

As reported by Allison Aubrey at NPR, a new study has revealed that people who routinely eat a lot of red meat — as well as processed meats — "may be increasing their risk of developing Type 2 diabetes"

One of the study authors, Dr. Walter Willett of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, writes in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that "when we looked at the women and men who consumed the most red meat compared to the least, we found about a 50% increase in risk." Furthermore, most of these participants also had "higher body mass indexes," as reported by Arnold.

Now, this may be a "chicken or egg" type situation: Does the red meat increase weight, thereby resulting in an increased risk of Type 2 diabetes? Or is it the opposite? Willett notes that the heme iron in red meat may have some impact on the pancreas itself, which is where insulin is developed. As Arnold reported, another researcher, Dr. Suzanne de la Monte, of Brown University, has written that there are "compounds that form when nitrates are added to foods . . . [which] may promote insulin resistance disease." This would mean any sort of cured or preserved meat, cold cut, salumi, charcuterie meats or other similar items.

One simple way to relieve some of the risk is to follow a plant-based diet or, as Willet recommends, at least limiting your red meat intake to one serving a week.

Looking good for her age: Moon may be 40 million years older than we thought, analysis reveals

They've been on Earth since astronauts brought them home in 1972, but a new study of the lunar regolith samples collected during the Apollo 17 mission may have revealed the true age of the moon — potentially 40 million years older than previously thought. Measuring individual uranium and lead atoms found in crystallized moon dust particles, a team of researchers estimated Monday that the moon is actually 4.46 billion years old. The research was published in the journal Geochemical Perspectives Letters.

"It's amazing being able to have proof that the rock you're holding is the oldest bit of the moon we've found so far. It's an anchor point for so many questions about the Earth. When you know how old something is, you can better understand what has happened to it in its history," lead author Jennika Greer said in a release.

The crystals in the dust, composed of zircon, formed during the event that created the moon itself — when a Mars-sized object hit the Earth with such impact that a massive object was spun off with a molten surface. When that lunar magma ocean cooled, that's when the zircon crystals could finally form, locking in chemical signatures that the Field Museum scientists can now measure with radiometric dating technology.

A pig heart transplant is still working a month later, a promising result for the future of medicine

With a month behind him and the world's second transplanted pig heart inside him, new results from the University of Maryland School of Medicine show that xenotransplant recipient Lawrence Faucette is regaining strength and recovering from the surgery with no signs of organ rejection so far. After decades of failed animal-to-human transplants, Faucette became the second patient to receive the highly experimental surgery when he was ineligible for traditional heart transplant due to other health concerns.

"In many ways, this embodies the future of molecular medicine in surgery" said the medical school's dean, Mark Gladwin, in a video released Friday. "We all hope that this might be a first step toward the beginning of an era where there's no limitations of organs for patients with advanced heart failure or kidney failure. It's auspicious in terms of the potential to really change the way we practice medicine."

The University of Maryland team performed the world's first human transplant of a genetically altered pig heart last year, though the patient died after two months for unclear reasons. Traces of a pig virus were later found in the heart, spurring new virus testing ahead of Faucette's case. According to the university, more than 110,000 people are awaiting an organ transplant in the U.S., with most waiting on kidney donors and thousands likely to die in the interim. Scientists currently working to bridge the donor gap have tested pig kidneys and hearts in monkeys, aiming to gain formal approval from the Food and Drug Administration for further xenotransplant studies.

Trader Joe’s popular kimbap sold out fast. Here’s how to make it from the comfort of your own home

When Trader Joe’s introduced its own rendition of kimbap only a few months ago, people on the internet went berserk. Those who grew up eating kimbap — a traditional Korean dish often made from cooked rice, vegetables, fish, and meat rolled in dried sheets of seaweed (also known as gim) — found comfort in TJ’s vegan offering. On the flip side, those who were just trying it for the very first time found their new favorite, simple weeknight meal.

It didn’t take long for TJ’s kimbap to go viral across social media, namely on TikTok. And like clockwork, news broke out that the $3.99 Korean rolls were slowly selling out before they were officially declared out of stock until at least October. Many people were gravely disappointed: “Guys please stop buying the frozen kimbap…” wrote one user on a subreddit dedicated to the product. “I have been going every day to buy some and they have been sold out EVERY DAY.” But a few were hopeful that it would return soon.

Some stores are finally reporting restocked supplies of the product, but many customers still haven't had a chance to try it.

TJ’s, the beloved California-based retailer, has made a name for itself over its selection of international, frozen meals. Some are incredibly stellar, like TJ’s Mini Chicken Tikka Samosas or its Paneer Tikka Masala with Spinach Basmati Rice. Others, however, are pretty unsatisfactory. Taste is subjective, of course, so there’s always some kind of online discourse about the meals that TJ’s puts on its store shelves.

Kimbap: Colorful Korean rolls fit for a picnic

Per its many glowing reviews, kimbap falls into the former category of stellar TJ’s meals. It’s not hard to see why. TJ’s kimbap contains sesame oil-seasoned rice alongside “an assortment of sautéed greens, crunchy root vegetables, and crisp pickles around a base of braised tofu,” according to the store’s website. Everything is wrapped in a layer of rice and seaweed and then sliced into two-or-three-bite-sized rounds.

It’s kimbap’s simple list of ingredients that makes it so well-loved and easy to whip up yourself. The best part about making kimbap at home is that you can enjoy it fresh! That isn’t to diminish the quality of TJ’s offering but rather, to provide a bit of optimism amid the ongoing shortage.

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Prepare the rice

To make your own kimbap a-la-TJ’s, start by preparing the rice (short grain works best here) with salt and toasted sesame oil.

Prepare the fillings

In the meantime, prepare the fillings — TJ’s specifically uses tofu, braised burdock, carrots, spinach and pickled radish. Season the carrots with salt and then pan fry, making sure they still maintain their bright hue. For the spinach, start by blanching them, squeezing out all the excess water and then seasoning them with salt and toasted sesame oil. As for the tofu, cut firm tofu into thin, one-inch slices before frying.

Assemble

To assemble the kimbap, spread a layer of rice on a sheet of seaweed and arrange the fillings horizontally. Slowly roll the seaweed, making sure the rice and fillings don’t spill out. If need be, wet the tips of your fingers to prevent the rice from sticking to your fingers. Once the kimbap is fully rolled, slice it into three-or-four bite-sized rounds. You can also enjoy the roll whole — whatever your heart desires!

Although kimbap is packed with flavor, it doesn’t hurt to enjoy it alongside your favorite sauces. The rolls pair well with sriracha, gochujang sauce and soy sauce. Trust us when we say this will be your favorite go-to meal and snack. And even though it isn't made directly by TJ's supplier, "a kimbap expert in the Republic of Korea," these homemade kimbaps come pretty darn close.

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Chipotle will stay open until midnight on Halloween in these 53 college towns

Would you prefer chips and guac to fun-sized candy this Halloween? Well, you may be in luck if you live in one of 53 college towns in which Chipotle is holding special late-night hours. As reported by Nancy Luna at INSIDER, the popular chain is extending their hours until midnight — two hours later than the usual closing time. Some of the aforementioned "college towns" include: Tuscaloosa, Long Beach, Boulder, South Miami, Baton Rouge, Nashville, Austin and Salt Lake City.

"Over the past two years, Chipotle has seen a 30% increase in transactions after 8 p.m. on Halloween and 81% of 18- to 26-year-olds surveyed reported wanting to see Chipotle open until midnight," the chain told the publication. Chipotle is not alone in pursuing new, extended hours endeavors; Pizza Hut also recently announced changing their closing time to 2 a.m. at various locations of the iconic chain.

Sure, it's a fun holiday promotion, but it seems Chipotle could be testing the waters for a more permanent extension of hours. There have been several reports from employees across the country that their locations are testing staying open until 11 p.m. For now, are you looking to enjoy a burrito bowl on Halloween at 11 p.m. at Chipotle? INSIDER has the entire list of the 53 college towns.

“Nyad” star Annette Bening brought “sharp edges” to courageous swimmer and refused body touch-ups

“Nyad” is a triumph of the human spirit film, a crowd-pleasing sports drama about achieving the near impossible. It is no surprise that marathon swimmer Diana Nyad (Annette Bening) will realize her dream — to swim from Cuba to the Florida Keys in her 60s. It is how this story is told that matters.

Directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin are no strangers to real-life heroics as their documentaries, the Oscar-winning “Free Solo,” and “The Rescue,” have shown. Here, making their feature narrative film debut, Vasarhelyi and Chin use their skills as filmmakers to recreate Diana Nyad’s four subsequent attempts to swim the dangerous 103 miles having first tried to accomplish this feat back in 1978.

“Nyad” features realistic scenes of the multiple efforts, but the film also includes magical realist touches, as when Diana hallucinates. In addition, flashbacks to scenes of Diana as a teenager smitten with her swimming coach — who later sexually abused her — reveal her character.

The film does intercut some real scenes of Nyad with the narrative, and Annette Bening gives a committed performance as the title character. As Diana’s best friend and coach, Bonnie, Jodie Foster steals the film, as both Diana’s cheerleader and drill sergeant.

The beautiful failures of Diana Nyad

The filmmakers spoke with Salon about making “Nyad.”

Why did you decide to make a feature film about Diana Nyad’s story, and how was this experience or approach different than your documentaries?

Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi: There was a doc in 2013 [about Nyad] that our nephew made, “The Other Shore,” and we used some of his footage in our film. We’re interested in stories of people who push the limits of what is possible. We were looking to explore that experience from a woman’s point of view. And what two very great, rich roles for two fabulous female actors! It was a perfect storm of things coming together. The approach is very, very different. Instead of observing and watching like a documentary, you have amazing, creative collaborators who are as committed to conjuring these characters. It was a fun and challenging shift.

Jimmy Chin: We were also interested in making a narrative feature to grow as storytellers and filmmakers. We just loved the story for all the reasons Chai mentioned, but also, it is a story about friendship. There is the physical event, of course, which is amazing, but for us, the heart of the film is their friendship.

Can you talk about incorporating real footage of Diana Nyad at various times in the film?

Vasarhelyi: We were interested in how to tell a true story in narrative fiction, and how it translates from our previous work. The clip [in “Nyad”] of the real Diana on Johnny Carson is the sexiest thing I’ve seen. It doesn’t’ really get better than that. It was alluring and calling to us throughout the edit, and it is a real testament to Annette’s performance that she delivers such truth that it somehow allows your brain to think that Annette is the real Diana. When you are dealing with abuse that happened to her as a child, it’s really important to remind people that this is true, and these things happened.

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How did you approach the film visually? There are many shots in or under water, some use colored filters, some have sharks, another scene shows hallucinations.

Chin: Something we always are interested in is pushing the cinematography as far as we can. We were very fortunate to work with the visionary cinematographer, Claudio Miranda. It’s about trying to show the scale of Diana’s huge endeavor but also move in and shoot in a very intimate way that brings out Diana’s experience that also brings you into her mindset as she is battling the elements and herself.

Diana is a “force,” but she is not always likable. What observations did you have about her character?

Vasarhelyi: We were excited about this opportunity of showing a woman in her full complexity. The friendship is the beating heart of the film, but it is not often that we get to see women play roles like this, being unafraid of their ambition and their drive, and being unapologetic for who they are. That was part of the attraction of making the film for us

Chin: Annette brought this version of Diana that I thought was really courageous for Annette. She brought the sharp edges; she didn’t just come in and create a likeable character.

Vasarhelyi: She was committed to that idea, and additionally, the swimming. She trained for over year for the physical challenges. It was a very “whole body” commitment. Both Jodie and Annette were adamant that they wanted no touch-ups on their bodies. They wanted to show real women.

Jodie Foster as Bonnie Stoll and Annette Bening as Diana Nyad in NYAD (Kimberley French/Netflix)Did Diana and Bonnie have any input in the film?

Vasarhelyi: The script is based on Diana’s autobiography, “Find a Way.” Diana is a very intelligent woman who comes from 30-year career in journalism. She did something I don’t think I could do — she let go and gave us the space and freedom to make the film we wanted to make. The real Bonnie and Diana spent a lot of time with Jodie and Annette, and it was important for Jodie and Annette to see their dynamic together. But they also were able to allow Jodie and Annette to create their own respective Bonnie and Diana. The real Bonnie and Diana came to the shoot at the end, our last day in the tank, which was exciting.

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Diana has her soul ignited by a purpose. The subjects of your films are risk takers. What can you say about getting the high one character says dealing with danger and the rush and challenge of that?

Vasarhelyi: It’s not dissimilar — trying to make a film and the dreams of some extreme athletic goals. Both seem like miracles to me. But you can probably address this better, Jimmy . . .

Chin: One of the things that drew us to the story and Diana the character — and I will speak for myself, as a longtime professional climber and gear mountaineer — there is courage that people perceive about individuals who are willing to face physical dangers and physical risks. But in my mind, the real courage is pursuing and chasing a dream. There is nothing that makes you more vulnerable than the potential to fail at a dream. That is what I admire about Diana, and that what make this story for me a beautiful story: it’s a story about courage.

“Nyad” is currently in select theaters and will be released on Netflix Nov. 3

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