“He was vilified”: Trump insists he was treated worse than president who was assassinated

Former President Donald Trump in an interview with Fox News on Sunday claimed that he was treated worse than Abraham Lincoln — who was assassinated after winning the Civil War.

Host Mark Levin pressed Trump on his reflections on his presidency.

“When you put your head on the pillow at night, do you think about this stuff?” Levin asked. “You’ll wonder about this stuff you say. What the hell did I get myself into? What do you think?”

“So if I had to do again, I would have done it with all I have to go through,” Trump replied.

“Stable genius-level strategy”: Trump lawyer demands mistrial by calling judge “unfair”

“Look, they say that Andrew Jackson was the most vilified person. His wife died during this thing, and they said such horrible things. And he had a very tough presidency. He was a very good president. He was a great general and a good president. Abraham Lincoln, they say, was, you know, he had a civil war going on. All right. But Abraham Lincoln had — was just vilified. He was,” the former president said.

“But now they say Trump got treated the worst of all because what they did is they came up with phony stuff, Russia, Russia, Russia,” he claimed. “It was all hoaxes, the Mueller witch hunt, which turned out to be no collusion. You know, after two and a half years, no collusion. I could have told them that the first day and they had the laptop. They could have figured that out, because on the laptop, if you look at it, you could have figured that out easy.”

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Trump continued: “But there’s never been anything. Despite that. People are saying it was one of the most successful presidencies in history, and I believe it was again, we built the greatest economy ever. We’ll do it again. We built — we did things rebuilding the United States military. I rebuilt it and then we ended Space Force. We ended the force. We added a branch of the military hasn’t been done in 80 years since Air Force and Space Force is turning out to be one of the most. It’ll turn out to be one of the most important. You know, we were being left by Russia and China because we weren’t doing anything in space and spaces where it’s going to be at now.”

Trump: Abraham Lincoln had a civil war going on but Abraham Lincoln was just vilified. Now they say Trump got treated the worst of all. pic.twitter.com/psFs9eKyV3

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 1, 2023

about Donald Trump

What if George W. Bush was right? “Mission Accomplished,” 20 years later

Twenty years ago, President George W. Bush landed in a twin-engine Navy jet on an aircraft carrier, strode across the deck in a bulky flight suit and proceeded to give a televised victory speech under a huge red-white-and-blue banner announcing “Mission Accomplished.” For Bush, the optics on May 1, 2003 could hardly have been more triumphant. From the USS Abraham Lincoln, 30 miles off the coast of San Diego, he delivered a stirring coda, proclaiming that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended” just six weeks after the United States led the invasion of that country.

But Bush’s jubilant claim unraveled as combat escalated between Iraqi insurgents and occupying forces. During the next nine years, the American death toll went from 172, according to the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, to more than 4,400, while the deaths of Iraqi people surged into the hundreds of thousands. The physical wounds were even more numerous, the emotional injuries incalculable.

The “Mission Accomplished” banner and Bush’s speech going with it have become notorious. But focusing only on his faulty claim that the war was over ignores other key untruths in the oratory.

“We have fought for the cause of liberty,” Bush declared. He did not mention the cause of oil.

What if Bush had been correct in May 2003 and U.S. forces really were at the end of major combat operations in Iraq?

A few months before the invasion, a soft-spoken Iraqi man who was my driver in Baghdad waited until we were alone at a picnic table in a park before saying that he wished Iraq had no oil — because then there would be no reason to fear an invasion. Years later, some U.S. authorities were candid about Iraq’s massive oil reserves as an incentive for the war.

“I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil,” former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan wrote in his 2007 memoir. That same year, a former head of the U.S. Central Command in Iraq, Gen. John Abizaid, had this to say: “Of course it’s about oil, we can’t really deny that.” And Sen. Chuck Hagel, who later became Defense Secretary, commented: “People say we’re not fighting for oil. Of course we are.”

While it touted the war effort as entirely noble, Bush’s “mission accomplished” speech credited the Pentagon’s “new tactics and precision weapons” for avoiding “violence against civilians.” The president underscored that “it is a great moral advance when the guilty have far more to fear from war than the innocent.”

But such soothing words masked brutal realities.

“Freudian slip”: George Bush condemns the “unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq… I mean Ukraine”

Civilian deaths accounted for 40% of “people killed directly in the violence of the U.S. post-9/11 wars,” according to the Costs of War project at Brown University. In fact, a large majority of the casualties of those wars have been civilians. “Several times as many more have been killed as a reverberating effect of the wars — because, for example, of water loss, sewage and other infrastructural issues, and war-related disease.”

By dodging inconvenient truths about the impacts of U.S. warfare on “the innocent,” Bush was reasserting the usual pretenses of presidents who elide the actual human toll of their wars while predicting successful outcomes.

On May 1, 2012, exactly nine years after Bush’s speech on the aircraft carrier, President Barack Obama spoke to the American people from Bagram Air Base north of Kabul. With U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan near a peak of 100,000, Obama expressed confidence that “we will complete our mission and end the war in Afghanistan,” which began more than a decade before.

Both Bush and Obama would later be widely faulted for voicing undue optimism about fulfilling a war’s “mission.” But the critiques, however, have rarely devoted much attention to scrutinizing the assumptions that propelled initial support for the missions.

The U.S. government’s inherent prerogative to intervene militarily in other countries has seldom been directly challenged by America’s mainstream media. Instead, debates have routinely revolved around whether, where, when and how an intervention is prudent and likely to prevail.

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But what if Bush had been correct in May 2003 and U.S. forces really were at the end of major combat operations in Iraq? What if Obama had been correct in May 2012 — and U.S. forces were able to “complete our mission” in Afghanistan?

Conventional wisdom would still have gauged success in terms of military victory, in each case, rather than such matters as adherence to international law or regard for human life.

So today it’s a wonder to behold the fully justified denunciations of Russia’s horrific invasion of Ukraine from some of the same U.S. government leaders who avidly supported the invasion of Iraq. The concept that might makes right obviously doesn’t sound good, but in practice, it has repeatedly been the basis of U.S. policy. Wayne Morse, the Democratic senator from Oregon who opposed the Vietnam War from the outset, was cogent when he said: “I don’t know why we think, just because we’re mighty, that we have the right to try to substitute might for right.”

George W. Bush’s performance with the “Mission Accomplished” banner — a rhetorical victory lap that came before the protracted bloodshed — deserves all of its notoriety 20 years later. His claims of success for the Iraq war mission are now easy grounds for derision. But the more difficult truths to plow through have to do with why the mission should never have been attempted in the first place.

Warren: First Republic collapse shows how deregulation made “too big to fail” banks “even worse”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren said Monday that the latest government bailout of a failing Wall Street institution shows how much the financial system remains rigged in favor of powerful banks and that it is beyond time for Congress to step up with increased oversight and reforms.

Federal regulators Monday announced they had seized the entirety of First Republic Bank and sold it to JPMorgan Chase for an undisclosed price—the latest fallout from a deregulated banking system in which the U.S. government has stepped in to backstop Wall Street.

“The failure of First Republic Bank shows how deregulation has made the too big to fail problem even worse,” said Warren in response to the news. “A poorly supervised bank was snapped up by an even bigger bank—ultimately taxpayers will be on the hook. Congress needs to make major reforms to fix a broken banking system.”

Last week, as Common Dreams reported, the Federal Reserve issued the results of an internal investigation which showed the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank earlier this year was at least partly due to the 2018 deregulation of mid-sized banks that was approved by Congress and signed into law by former President Donald Trump.

In an early morning statement, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) said First Republic—which has been teetering on collapse for weeks—was first closed before being sold to banking giant JPMorgan following a bidding process for the smaller bank’s assets.

“As part of the transaction,” said the FDIC, “First Republic Bank’s 84 offices in eight states will reopen as branches of JPMorgan Chase Bank, National Association, today during normal business hours. All depositors of First Republic Bank will become depositors of JPMorgan Chase Bank, National Association, and will have full access to all of their deposits.”

According to the Washington Post:

The acquisition makes JPMorgan, already the nation’s largest bank, even bigger and could draw political scrutiny from progressive Democrats in Washington.

First Republic failed despite having received a $30 billion lifeline from 11 of the country’s largest banks in March. JPMorgan said the $30 billion would be repaid after the deal closes. Overall, First Republic will go down in history as the second largest U.S. bank by assets to collapse after Washington Mutual, which failed during the financial crisis of 2008.

FDIC said the cost of the deal to the Deposit Insurance Fund which it manages will be approximately $13 billion.

“In other words, good banks and their customers pay to insure bad banks,” said Richard Painter, law professor and former White House ethics chief. “How much did First Republic’s execs who created this mess have to pay? If we made them pay, First Republic might not have failed.”

In a statement on Friday in anticipation of First Republic’s collapse, Lisa Gilbert, executive vice president of Public Citizen, said, “Once again, we’re reaping the bitter harvest of financial deregulation.”

Gilbert’s colleague, financial policy expert Bart Naylor, said, “Bankers at First Republic make reckless decisions, encouraged by bad pay-related incentives.”

“Lawmakers understood this was a problem throughout the industry following the 2008 financial crash and required a rule to stop it,” Naylor added. “But dangerously, that rule has not yet been implemented. With the failure of First Republic following the failure of Silicon Valley Bank, regulators must reform banker pay immediately.”

Greg Abbott slammed for calling Texas mass shooting victims “illegal immigrants”

Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott drew sharp criticism for referring to the five people who were killed in a mass shooting in Cleveland, Texas last week as “illegal immigrants.”

Abbott in a statement on Friday offered condolences to the victims’ families and posted a $50,000 reward for information about the shooter.

“Governor Greg Abbott today announced a $50,000 reward for a Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) top 10 fugitive who is in the country illegally and killed five illegal immigrants in a shooting Friday night in Cleveland, Texas,” read a statement from Abbott’s Twitter account.

I’ve announced a $50K reward for info on the criminal who killed 5 illegal immigrants Friday. Also directed #OperationLoneStar to be on the lookout.

I continue working with state & local officials to ensure all available resources are deployed to respond. pic.twitter.com/SpkUgKqKGe

— Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) April 30, 2023

Convicted murderer Greg Abbott wants to pardon sought “chats to meet young girls”

On Friday, an intoxicated man fatally shot his neighbors, including an 8-year-old boy, with an AR-15-style rifle after they asked him to stop shooting his gun in the air.

“My understanding is that the victims, they came over to the fence and said ‘Hey could [you not do your] shooting out in the yard? We have a young baby that’s trying to go to sleep. And he had been drinking, and he says ‘I’ll do what I want to in my front yard,'” San Jacinto County Sheriff Greg Capers told KRTK, a local ABC News affiliate in Houston.

Authorities have not yet released the immigration status of the victims, though immigration rights activist Carlos Eduardo Espina reported that one of the victims was a legal resident.

I just spoke to the husband of one of the victims. He confirmed to me that his wife was a permanent resident of the US. He even sent me a picture of her ID confirming this.

But I guess to Greg Abbott, anyone who is from another country is an ‘ilegal immigrant’. Shameful. https://t.co/O2AphCodlh pic.twitter.com/YjGLdBMtRl

— Carlos Eduardo Espina (@Carlos_E_Espina) May 1, 2023

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Immigration groups condemned Abbott’s remarks.

“Public figures like Abbott leverage their status by using social media to amplify language painting a specific narrative intended to alter the way you view plus treat the people around you,” the Immigrant Legal Resource Center wrote on Twitter. “The victims here were your neighbors. They were your friends. They were your colleagues.”

Public figures like Abbott leverage their status by using social media to amplify language painting a specific narrative intended to alter the way you view + treat the people around you.

The victims here were your neighbors.

They were your friends.

They were your colleagues.

— Immigrant Legal Resource Center (@the_ILRC) April 30, 2023

“When we read things like that statement from Abbott and his social media team we are confronted with a choice,” a separate tweet read. “Do we want to live in a world where people are not granted their dignity and humanity even in the face of unimaginable tragedy? Or do we want — this?”

When we read things like that statement from Abbott and his social media team we are confronted with a choice.

Do we want to live in a world where people are not granted their dignity and humanity even in the face of unimaginable tragedy?

Or do we want — this?

— Immigrant Legal Resource Center (@the_ILRC) April 30, 2023

“Five human beings lost their lives and Greg Abbott insists on labeling them ‘illegal immigrants,'” said Julian Castro, former Housing and Urban Development secretary and Democratic presidential candidate.

Authorities currently do not have any leads on where the suspect, 38-year-old Francisco Oropesa, could be.

“Right now, we just don’t know because if we did, we would have him in custody right now,” FBI Special Agent James Smith said. “We do not know where he is, we do not have any tips right now of where he may be.”

about Greg Abbott

Kevin McCarthy has no chance at a budget deal: Joe Biden has learned from Barack Obama’s mistakes

Never Again…

If you think that old dogs can’t learn new tricks you need to take a look at Joe Biden. Back in 2011, during the first serious Republican debt ceiling hostage crisis and the protracted negotiations that followed, Biden undercut Senate Majority leader Harry Reid and wrecked a deal he had made for a terrible one. There was a lot of hand-wringing at the time over Biden’s tendency to give away the store so when the Republicans pulled their hostage maneuver again in 2013, Reid stipulated that Biden needed to stay out of the negotiations — and the White House agreed.

The Obama administration, including Biden, had learned their lesson: Negotiating with the extremist GOP on the debt ceiling is a very bad idea. They refused and the Republicans capitulated, sparing the country and the world economy another jolt. The days of dreaming about a “Grand Bargain” were blessedly over.

You may have noticed that we never had one of these fights during the Trump years when the deficit was growing at a very fast pace.

President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden had come into office with the goal of ending the partisan divide once and for all by negotiating with the Republicans in good faith and taking all the thorny issues of the day off the table. E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post explained it just before Obama was sworn in:

Obama regularly offers three telltale notions that will define his presidency — if events allow him to define it himself: “sacrifice,” “grand bargain” and “sustainability.”

To listen to Obama and his budget director Peter Orszag is to hear a tale of long-term fiscal woe. The government may have to spend and cut taxes in a big way now, but in the long run, the federal budget is unsustainable. That’s where sacrifice kicks in. There will be signs of it in Obama’s first budget, in his efforts to contain health-care costs and, down the road, in his call for entitlement reform and limits on carbon emissions. His camp is selling the idea that if he wants authority for new spending, Obama will have to prove his willingness to cut some programs and reform others.

The “grand bargain” they are talking about is a mix and match of boldness and prudence. It involves expansive government where necessary, balanced by tough management, unpopular cuts — and, yes, eventually some tax increases. Everyone, they say, will have to give up something.

Not one Republican came to the table to negotiate on the Affordable Care Act. When it came time for all that sacrifice and sustainability they dug in their heels and demanded that Obama eliminate his signature achievement and cut more taxes or the country gets it. It was a hard-earned lesson of the first Obama term: The modern Republican Party does not act in good faith. They argue among themselves constantly, with the far-right faction continually upping the ante even when leadership has made a deal. You can’t negotiate with people like this when you have a metaphorical weapon aimed at your head.

Kevin McCarthy’s debt ceiling gamble: The stupid cruelty of Republicans’ default tantrum

The debt ceiling is an anachronistic, unnecessary procedure that should have been scrapped altogether long ago. (The Democrats probably should have tried harder to do that when they had both houses although the Diva Twins, Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema and West Virginia’s Joe Manchin probably made that impossible.) The nation has to pay its bills and this formerly pro-forma vote is now often used as a political cudgel to try to force spending cuts because holding the world economy hostage provides more leverage than the normal budget process.

You may have noticed that we never had one of these fights during the Trump years when the deficit was growing at a very fast pace, which is interesting. They held both chambers of Congress during his first two years and surely for the good of the country they could have made these same demands, but they didn’t. Neither did they enact a budget with the spending cuts they are now insisting must be enacted or else. In fact, we hardly talked about any of this during Trump’s term, all of which proves their overwhelming hypocrisy on this issue and explains why Democrats are saying, “talk to the hand.”

Today, Joe Biden and the rest of the Democratic leadership are firmly refusing to negotiate around the debt ceiling, which is as it should be. There is a process for cutting spending, if that’s what these Republicans want to do, and it’s called appropriations. They can negotiate night and day in the budget talks and use every trick in the book to get their way with that (and there are a few.) But they cannot be allowed to pull this bs over and over again. If they want draconian spending cuts to happen they have to bargain for them or win a real majority and pass legislation like normal elected officials.

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Unfortunately, the Republicans once more have a great friend in the media which is always inexplicably drawn to the idea of spending cuts and are once again pushing stories of fiscal doom due to deficits. (Weirdly, they too didn’t say a peep during the Trump years when he was running up the debt without restraint.) Pundits love to insist that we must “learn to take our medicine” many of whom are well-off celebrities who will face little hardship from the “shared” pain and cost such policies will bring.

And when it comes to describing the politics of the situation they seem to be constitutionally incapable of accurately reporting that the Republicans are threatening to destroy the economy in order to force draconian spending cuts under a Democratic president while the Democrats are simply doing what they do under both Republican and Democratic presidents: paying the bills. Instead, they are laying the responsibility for the potential default on the debt on Biden, who is apparently falling down on the job if he doesn’t capitulate to the insane demands of a bunch of radical extremists who very often won’t take yes for an answer anyway. It’s absurd and luckily, so far, the Democrats are standing fast.

“MAGA economic sabotage”: 217 House Republicans pass debt ceiling bill with harmful cuts

Late Sunday night, Axios published a story with this headline: Congressional Democrats splinter on debt ceiling strategy. Apparently, a few centrist members of the House “Problem Solvers caucus” and the above-mentioned Diva, Joe Manchin, want to negotiate. That’s no surprise. There are also a few Republicans who voted against Kevin McCarthy’s wrecking ball of a bill that the House passed last week requiring the repeal of Biden’s signature legislation. There are a few defections at the margins in both parties, making it a wash.

Overall, the Democrats are hanging tough: a clean debt ceiling vote, period. It’s what has to be done. Unless we want to just cash in our chips and give Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene lifetime appointments to run the country, this hostage taking has to stop. The damage they did with this gambit back in 2011 is still being felt and the country can’t afford another round of that insanity.

“Stable genius-level strategy”: Trump lawyer demands mistrial by calling judge “unfair”

Former President Donald Trump’s legal team requested a mistrial early Monday morning in the rape and defamation lawsuit against him.

Trump attorney Joe Tacopina sent a letter to Judge Lewis Kaplan shortly before the cross-examination of E. Jean Carroll resumed in Manhattan federal court on Monday asking the court to grant a mistrial over the judge’s “unfair and prejudicial rulings.”

Tacopina listed a litany of complaints about the trial so far, arguing that Kaplan had “mischaracterized the evidence in favor” of Carroll and “bolstered” her testimony.

The attorney complained that the judge had allowed Carroll to testify that Trump “has two tables of lawyers at trial” while barring Trump’s legal team from “fairly clarifying the record” by showing that Carroll “has a comparable amount of lawyers.” Tacopina also complained that the judge had “continuously sustained improper ‘argumentative’ objections” from Carroll’s attorneys during her cross-examination.

NEW in CARROLL TRIAL: Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina has moved for a mistrial on multiple grounds, as summarized on the front page of this letter. pic.twitter.com/S85poutu1s

— Lisa Rubin (@lawofruby) May 1, 2023

Experts say Trump lawyer’s Carroll grilling may backfire: “He went far enough to irritate” the judge

The letter also argued that the judge should not have allowed the testimony of Natasha Stoynoff, who accused Trump of forcibly kissing her and is expected to appear as a witness at the trial.

The letter also complained that Kaplan “alluded” to potential legal ramifications in response to a social media post from Eric Trump “making completely truthful and non-prejudicial statements” about LinkedIn founder and Democratic donor Reid Hoffman’s financing of Carroll’s lawsuit — even though the judge ruled that the financing could not be discussed in the trial.

“Eric Trump’s tweet was either factually accurate or protected opinion,” Tacopina wrote.

Tacopina also argued that he should have been allowed to question Carroll about why she did not go to the police after the alleged rape and why she did not seek security camera footage from the store where it allegedly occurred.

“Proof that Plaintiff never attempted to determine if any such footage of the parties existed constitutes circumstantial evidence that her accusation is false,” the letter said.

The letter asked Kaplan for a mistrial or to “correct the record for each and every instance in which the Court has mischaracterized the facts of this case to the jury” or to give Tacopina more leeway in questioning Carroll.

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It would be unusual for a judge to declare a mistrial based on their own statements in a trial.

“Attacking one of the best and smartest judges in the SDNY is such a stable-genius-level strategy,” tweeted conservative attorney and frequent Trump critic George Conway.

Former U.S. Attorney Joyce White Vance dismissed Tacopina’s letter as “courtroom theater.”

This “won’t result in a mistrial,” she predicted, but Trump’s legal team may be “setting up an argument they’ll make in appeal if the jury finds against Trump,” she explained.

“Judges routinely give a ‘clean up’ instruction before a jury deliberates, telling them not to construe anything the court says as evidence, or as a suggestion of what their verdict should be,” she tweeted. “The judge here is experienced & steady & unlikely to be thrown by Trump tactics.”

Tacopina also drew criticism last week for aggressively questioning Carroll on the stand, which legal experts warned could backfire on his client.

“Of course, nobody can ever predict with certainty the outcome of a trial. But it seems that Trump’s lawyer Tacopina is making the fatal mistake of arguing his case in a manner that makes his client happy, rather than trying to persuade a jury,” tweeted Florida attorney Ron Filipkowski. “Not usually a winning formula.”

about the Carroll case

Donald Trump’s defense attorney in rape trial may have accidentally revealed the motive

The common wisdom in the post-#MeToo era is that bullying an alleged rape victim is a bad look. So many legal experts were surprised when Donald Trump’s defense attorney Joe Tacopino tore in E. Jean Carroll on the witness stand Thursday, during a defamation and rape civil trial of the former reality TV host-turned-fascist coup leader. There wasn’t a misogynist rape myth that Tacopino left untouched. His browbeating got so bad that Judge Lewis Kaplan was forced to repeatedly interrupt and reprimand Tacopino.

“Tacopina was derisive, derogatory and dismissive,” former federal prosecutor Mitchell Epner wrote at the Daily Beast.

“Not exactly the impression Team Trump wanted the jury to be left with on the way home,” defense attorney Robert Katzberg wrote at Slate.

Tacopino fell “into this other trap,” former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance said on MSNBC on Saturday, “of putting the jury on her side and willing to listen to her testimony.”

It may be ill-advised, but it’s not a surprise that Trump would hire a lawyer committed to the strategy of pure misogyny. This is the same Trump who pushed Justice Brett Kavanaugh towards the whining-and-shouting response to similarly credible allegations of attempted rape. Trump has always thought it looks “tough” to be a coward who only bullies people who can’t fight back.

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Badgering an elderly woman isn’t just a bad look, however. In going for maximum belligerence, Tacopino may have accidentally revealed a telling detail about why Trump allegedly raped Carroll in a dressing room that day. Not because he was overcome with lust. No, because Trump was angry over a perceived insult. We all know how he loves to take revenge over imaginary slights.

There wasn’t a misogynist rape myth that Tacopino left untouched.

The crucial moment came during a back-and-forth between Carroll and Tacopino about a seemingly irrelevant detail from the day. In her original recounting, Carroll described Trump asking her to try on lingerie, and her teasingly countering with, “You try it on” and “it’s your color.”

Carroll was using a standard bit of feminine self-protection, deflecting sexual overtures with jokes. She said as much on the stand. “Laughing is a very good—I use the word weapon—to calm a man down if he has any erotic intention.” But Tacopino would not let it go. He insisted on treating these jokes as if they were evidence that Carroll is unhinged when she was obviously just being silly. He kept after her about why she thought it was funny, forcing her to remind him that she wrote an Emmy-winning skit for “Saturday Night Live” about men in lingerie.

Trump’s entire defense in the E. Jean Carroll rape trial: shameless misogyny

Q: You wrote a scene for Saturday Night Live about a man putting on lingerie over a suit?

A: About a man getting dressed in the bathroom, and he was wearing his underwear.

Q: Over his suit?

A: No. It was just a man in his bathroom falling in love with himself in front of the mirror.

Q: To you that’s a similar scene as Donald Trump, in the middle of Bergdorf Goodman, with his suit on, trying on a piece of women’s lingerie?

A: That’s how my mind works. That’s how comedy is born. You take two opposite things, you put them together, and it makes a new scene. That’s where comedy comes from.

Q: Did that ever air on Saturday Night Live?

A: Yes.

Q: When was that?

A; 1987, William Shatner played the role.

As I was reading this baffling exchange, I couldn’t help but start picturing how Trump, who we all know has a tissue-thin ego, would react to having a pretty, witty woman tease him with jokes about putting on a teddy. There’s no question about it. He would have felt emasculated. He would have been furious. He would have grown angrier and angrier as she kept the banter up. She probably thought they were having fun. In reality, she was dealing with a short-tempered narcissist who cannot take a joke.

Tacopino inadvertently answered questions that Carroll herself has said haunt her: Why her? Why that day? Why did Trump allegedly get violent so suddenly?

The lingerie jokes hold the answer: Trump felt humiliated by Carroll’s teasing. He wanted to put her in her place.

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We all know how Trump reacts with over-the-top rage at perceived embarrassment, especially at the hands of those he deems as lower status than himself. Think of how furious he was when President Barack Obama made fun of Trump’s racist conspiracy theories at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner in 2011. The cameras captured Trump, who had been so proud of himself for getting invited, glowering with barely contained fury. Legend has it that it’s one major reason Trump decided to run, as an act of literal revenge.

She probably thought they were having fun. In reality, she was dealing with a short-tempered narcissist who cannot take a joke.

Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, during her testimony before the House January 6 committee, shared similar stories of Trump blowing up over perceived inferiors talking back to him. He lunged at the neck of a Secret Service agent who refused to take him into the Capitol riot, she reported. He threw ketchup at the wall when Attorney General Bill Barr rejected his claims that the election was stolen, she said. Trump went on to prove her picture of his ugly temper, by raging like a madman on Truth Social after her testimony. Indeed, his inability to stop his own public tantrums are why he’s getting sued by Carroll. She sued for defamation after similar rage-fueled public insults from Trump.

Note that the other reported story of Trump moving past groping to full-blown rape was also rooted not in lust, but anger.

During her acrimonious divorce from Trump, Ivana Trump testified in a deposition that he raped her in a fit of rage, blaming her for his bad plastic surgery. “Does it hurt?” she recalls he said afterward, taunting her. She withdrew the allegation later, but Trump’s biographer points out that her alimony payments were likely in danger if she did not recant.

“In effect, the case is over”: Legal experts say Carroll’s testimony was emotional “home run”

Researchers who interview convicted rapists have repeatedly shown that men who commit rape tend to have more hostile views of women. Rapists also tend to have rigid ideas about gender roles, making them especially sensitive to perceived slights against their masculinity.

In other words, rape is less about sex than it is about power and control. It’s a weapon bad men use to dominate women. Trump, of course, also fits this model of toxic masculinity, believing women are inferior and putting a lot of stock into maintaining his image as a manly man. It would be the least surprising thing in the world, given everything we know about him, that he reacted to harmless teasing by exploding into a violent rage. And rape is, unfortunately, a common way that angry men lash out at women.

It’s likely that the emasculating nature of the lingerie joke is why Tacopino kept going after Carroll for it, even though her explanation for why she said those things is understandable to the point of banality. As I wrote last week, Tacopino can’t defend Trump’s honor, as he has none. So instead he has to persuade the jury not to care about Carroll. Likely, Tacopino’s hoping at least a few male jurors also find lingerie jokes threatening enough to decide they hate Carroll enough to deny her justice. Sadly, this kind of victim-blaming strategy has worked plenty in the past. So strategically it makes sense, even if it’s morally bankrupt to go this route.

But the strategy is risky for this reason, as well. Tacopino just told the jury the likely story of what happened here: Trump got mad because some woman teased him, and flipped out on her with violence. Since Trump’s almost as famous for his hair-trigger temper as he is for his lying, it’s easy to picture it. If the plaintiff’s attorneys circle back to that aspect in closing, Tacopino’s questions could be used to make the case that Trump’s bruised ego led him to take revenge with rape.

“He is the most trusted voice in conservative media”: What comes next for Tucker Carlson?

One week ago, Tucker Carlson was jettisoned by Fox “News” so quickly, and without warning, that Carlson was not even allowed to say goodbye to his many millions of viewers on a final show.

Rumors continue to circulate as to why Carlson was fired and the larger logic at work in why Fox’s leadership made such a decision. Informed speculation has focused in on 1) the recent Dominion lawsuit for defamation in connection with the Big Lie and the Jan. 6 coup attempt that will effectively cost Fox “News” several hundred million dollars and 2) a sexual harassment lawsuit where Carlson is directly implicated. New reporting from well-connected sources at Fox “News” and the larger right-wing hate media echo chamber suggests that the real reason that Carlson was fired was because the Murdochs view him as being a personality they could not sufficiently rein in as they reposition the network to be even more closely aligned with Donald Trump and the “conservative” movement.

Denied a platform on Fox “News,” Tucker Carlson instead went online to explain why he was fired and his future plans. In a two-minute-long video on Twitter, Carlson attempted to present himself as a reasonable person, an advocate for “real Americans” and a “truth-teller” who was punished by Fox “News” and “the elites” as part of some type of conspiracy because he dared to speak truth to power.

“Tucker Carlson has used his platform to communicate irresponsibly, now he’s facing the consequences.”

Not to be overlooked, Carlson was sure to mention “demographics,” which is an appeal to the white supremacist great replacement conspiracy theory and other hate-mongering about how “white people” are being “oppressed” in America and other parts of the West.

Such lies are lethal: the “great replacement” conspiracy theory and other related fictions have been cited as motives for the white supremacist terrorist attack in Buffalo and in other right-wing violence and hate crimes across the United States and the world.

“Disinformation can come at a cost”: What Fox News learned from Tucker Carlson

Fox “News” is a type of political drug cartel that injects hatred, fascism, ignorance, white supremacy and other poison directly into the minds and hearts of its public. Tucker Carlson was their biggest and most influential dealer. To that point, his departure from the network has cost Fox “News” millions of viewers – not just for Carlson’s show but across the network. Moreover, Tucker’s online video was watched by many more people than the replacement programming that Fox “News” put in his former prime time slot.

The Fox “News” audience is still a group of hate addicts, but for now they are very loyal to Tucker Carlson. Because they are addicts, at some point, likely very soon, they will find another pusher if Tucker Carlson is no longer able to supply them. The question then becomes, will these hate addicts go back to Fox “News” or chase their high somewhere else – and potentially start using a political drug that is even more dangerous than the poison being sold by Fox “News” and Tucker Carlson?

In what is the second of a two-part series about the Fox “News” – Tucker Carlson saga, I asked a range of experts for their insights about what this means for American democracy, how Tucker Carlson still matters (or not), and what they believe happens next as we try to navigate our way of this fascist fever dream nightmare and the “Trumpocene.”

Brynn Tannehill is a journalist and author of “American Fascism: How the GOP is Subverting Democracy.”

I think the main one is that discovery in the two lawsuits filed by Abby Grossberg alleging a hostile workplace environment are going to be really ugly for Fox. They have a long history with “the talent” sexually harassing, coercing, and abusing female staff, including Bill O’Reilly, Roger Ailes, Bob Beckel, Sean Hannity (who was accused of trying to trade sexual favor for air time on his show), Ed Henry, and Eric Bolling. Management has long been accused of tolerating a “frat boy” atmosphere, and nothing screams obnoxious fratboy like Tucker Carlson. I also believe there were probably damaging things in discovery in the Dominion lawsuit, and more in the upcoming one with Smartmatic.

“That this ever happened, that this is only destined to get worse, is an indictment we can’t ignore.”

In the short term, it shakes things up a bit: conservative networks are going to scramble to align themselves in a way that doesn’t hitch themselves to Trump or cross him. But, I’m sure Fox will find someone just as awful pretty quickly: hateful grifters are a dime a dozen. His replacement will look a lot like Matt Walsh or Ben Shapiro.

There’s a huge market for conservative media-induced hate and fear. The level of anti-trans craziness that Tucker was instrumental in creating is getting to “two-minute hate” territory. The mere existence of trans people sends his base demographic into a rage zombie frenzy. Look at the whole Dylan Mulvaney thing: it was a nothing-burger. A beer company threw a few bucks and a novelty can at a Gen Z influencer for an ad no one outside of her channel saw, and it exploded into an orgy of anger and hatred. Tucker created this. Someone else will pick up the torch on Fox because there’s clearly a market for it, and trans people pay the price by having to flee red states like it’s 1933 all over again.

Republicans deny they want to erase trans people — Montana silencing Zooey Zephyr proves otherwise

Jennifer Mercieca, professor of communication at Texas A&M, and author of “Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump.”

Though we knew that Fox News had settled the Dominion lawsuit for hundreds of millions of dollars and had fired other high-profile on-air talent, the news that they fired Tucker Carlson was a surprise. Though there have been many protests against him and his show, Tucker has been untouchable; immune from pressure campaigns or boycott threats. He is the most trusted voice in conservative media. According to research on the conservative media ecosystem, he’s more trusted than any other source of information, even Fox News itself. It’s hard to predict what direction Fox News will take from here, but it’s easy to see that Carlson’s departure from the center of the conservative information system will have a large impact. Carlson is, unequivocally, bad for democracy.

Over the past six years the “Tucker Carlson Tonight” show has laundered narratives from the extreme right white supremacist fringe, mainstreamed and normalized conspiracy theory, and disseminated Russian talking points so frequently that they regularly aired clips from his show on their propaganda shows.

Carlson has treated his audience with contempt, regularly attacking their minds–convincing them that politics is war and the enemy cheats and the whole world is out to get them. Every night on his show he told his audience that they should be afraid and trust no one but him. He told his audience who to fear, loath, and hate. His show made America less unified, less powerful, and, ultimately, less safe. Tucker Carlson has used his platform to communicate irresponsibly, now he’s facing the consequences.

Cheri Jacobus is a former media spokesperson at the Republican National Committee and founder and president of the political consulting and PR firm Capitol Strategies PR.

Unfortunately, it appears Tucker Carlson wasn’t fired because he knowingly pushed the “Big Lie” for Trump that came out in the Dominion lawsuit. Nor did Rupert Murdoch fire Tucker because of messages revealed in the Dominion lawsuit he sent that criticized and disparaged Murdoch and other FOX News management. Notably, Tucker Carlson was not fired from his top-rated show because of his virulent white supremacism. Nor was he fired for claims there was no January 6th insurrection — that the rioters were peaceful “sightseers,” not “insurrectionists.”

The looming sexual harassment lawsuit against Fox by a former Carlson producer, Abby Grossman, also is not the reason for the firing. Tucker Carlson on audio expressing his desire to watch 14-year-old girls have sex with each other also was not the reason for his firing.

The reason for the firing of Tucker Carlson?

The audio tape of Tucker expressing his desire to watch 14-year-old girls have sex with each other was about to become public in the lawsuit by Abby Grossman. The firing offense was getting caught. And it was going to cost Murdoch BIG.

What does this mean for the rumored “domino effect” at Fox with more firings?

“Fox doesn’t really want major celebrities – at least not celebrities who are bigger than Fox’s overall brand. Fox prefers an army of second-tier fascist propaganda warrior.”

Since the Tucker firing was not because of any of his previously-known “sins,” including Dominion, it does not foretell future firings of the most egregious offenders named in the lawsuit. Jeanine Pirro and Maria Bartimroma may be safe, after all. Other right-wing media still do their best to ape Fox News. White nationalism, fascism, lying about elections, supporting Putin, celebrating deadly insurrections, guns, corrupt right-wing Supreme Court Judges — as long as FOX can still get away with most or all of these and still turn a profit, Newsmax, OANN, Breitbart, and every podcast of that ilk will continue to follow suit. It’s still a very lucrative business model as long as there is no meaningful accountability.

Fox News will survive, as they always do. The platform is bigger than the personalities or even the executives, as evidenced by Fox not missing a beat after canning Bill O’Reilly, Eric Bolling, Kimberly Guifoyle, Roger Ailes, Bill Shine, and losing Megyn Kelly. The monster cannot be killed.

Mark Jacob is a journalist, media critic, and former metro editor at the Chicago Tribune.

We don’t yet know the story behind Tucker Carlson’s firing. There could be something not yet revealed that made Fox News’ decision unavoidable. But there’s no point in speculating about that. What we already know about Carlson includes multiple reasons for firing him, but Rupert Murdoch enabled him for a very long time.

Carlson’s dismissal suggests that Fox doesn’t really want major celebrities – at least not celebrities who are bigger than Fox’s overall brand. Fox prefers an army of second-tier fascist propaganda warriors like Jesse Watters and Brian Kilmeade. Fox can pay them less and control them more. If Murdoch likes anything more than right-wing politics, it’s money. I think his takeaway from the Dominion lawsuit is that he had to take action to avoid future suits. He never wants to take another three-quarters-of-a billion-dollars hit again.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

I think it’s possible that Carlson will run for president. Right-wing Republicans aren’t into policy wonks. They like show-biz types such as Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. They like white-identity firebrands who make them proud of their racism and sexism and entertain them at the same time. Trump’s 2024 campaign may be a fundraising effort more than a bid for the White House. He may cite his health (accurately or not) as a reason to bow out at some point, and Carlson’s behavior on Fox makes him the Trumpiest of all possible candidates.

Jared Yates Sexton is a journalist and author of the new book “The Midnight Kingdom: A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis.”

Tucker Carlson and Fox were a match made in Hell. Tucker radicalized millions, mainstreamed the most disgusting white supremacist conspiracy theories, and prepared viewers to accept everything from coups to genocide. Fox was happy to reap the profits. What is especially awful here is that nothing good will come from this separation. Fox will find the next demagogue and Tucker will undoubtedly double and triple down on what brought him to the dance. That this ever happened, that this is only destined to get worse, is an indictment we can’t ignore.

Dave Neiwert is an investigative journalist and an expert on right-wing extremism and terrorism. He is also the author of several books including the forthcoming “The Age of Insurrection: The Ongoing War on American Democracy”.

I’m personally relieved that Tucker is gone from Fox, mainly because his frat-boy persona has always turned my stomach, and his presence spreading far-right propaganda on a massive network meant that I actually had to pay careful attention to him. So, his departure (and the accompanying loss of his mass audience) is a huge relief. That said, it’s only temporary relief, because Tucker played a role at Fox that others before him willingly indulged–namely, mainstreaming far-right extremism and conspiracism. Glenn Beck specialized in it, Bill O’Reilly participated, as have many others, including some still on the roster. And none of that is going away at Fox. It will still normalize extremist conspiracism, it will still traffic in reckless disinformation, and it will continue to demonize all liberal Democrats as existential threats to the nation who deserve elimination. This will just be a blip in the network’s long-running assault on pluralistic democracy, which clearly is not ending anytime soon.

Jason Van Tatenhove is a former member of the right-wing paramilitary group the Oath Keepers, where he served as their media spokesperson for two years. He also testified before the House Select Committee on Jan 6th. His new book is “The Perils of Extremism: How I Left the Oath Keepers and Why We Should be Concerned about a Future Civil War.”

My teenage daughters and I cheered from our living room couch as we learned that Tucker Carlson was removed from Fox News on Monday. However, I also feel conflicted because when a prominent figure in a radical movement, such as the leader of a militia or the most-watched prime-time host on cable news, is ousted, I wonder who will take their place and whether they will be even more extreme. Unfortunately, Fox’s audience still seems to crave the type of conspiracy-filled and racially charged content that Tucker Carlson frequently presented on his show. I believe that Tucker was fired solely due to financial reasons. The Dominion lawsuit and allegations of Tucker’s inappropriate behavior towards female coworkers would have led to numerous civil suits against the company. Murdoch did not want to deal with these potential cases, especially after the failure of their previous ‘golden goose’ success with Trump.

Tucker Carlson’s departure will not significantly affect Fox News, especially since they settled with Dominion for $787.5 million, which will not break the bank for Fox. In the past, the network has replaced hosts who’ve fallen out of favor, such as Glen Beck and Bill O’Reilly. Based on their track record, I expect the new host to continue the same type of content, perhaps even more divisive and racist. While I hope this could lead to a shift away from extremist media, it’s likely just a temporary blip in the ongoing culture wars.

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Almost famous: On loving and leaving “Sex and the City”

I got chills, like my fellow super fans, watching the recently released trailer for the second season of “And Just Like That.”

Not just because of the return of Aiden, a great love from Carrie’s past, but because I worked on the show over a month ago as a background extra and was curious if I could be seen.

On set at Veronika – a golden lit restaurant with stained glass, soaring ceilings, and views of the city – a white-haired crew guy had exclaimed, “Look what the cat dragged back in.”

He was the only crew member I recognized from 20 years ago when I worked for four seasons as Kristin Davis stand-in on “Sex and the City” and had written about the toxic experiences for The Independent.

I wanted to start 2023 anew and heal from a job that had given me great joy and moments of shame. The set photographer and I walked towards each other and hugged.

“I’m transformed,” I said, swinging my long curls around, hoping the crew had changed too. Hair and makeup had turned me into a glamourous, upscale 40-something.

Drama and imagination: The iconic stylist behind “Sex and the City” on what fashion should be

The week before, I could barely get out of bed and scrolled on Instagram on my phone. The so-called post-pandemic life was supposed to be carefree. My young daughters had finally returned to school after two years of online learning hell and I was on track to earn a living as a writer instead of as a part-time Mommy and Me music teacher. But like so many of my mommy friends, I was still exhausted.

As I scrolled, I read the headline from Time Out: “New Yorkers! HBO’s Sex and the City Spin-Off Needs You.” I wasn’t so sure “Sex and the City” needed me. Or even wanted me back.

The article on my screen stated that casting was looking for “all genders and ethnicities, to play age 20-50, chic, hip, fashionable partygoers.” I hadn’t attended a fancy party since before the pandemic. I still dreamed of being cool and beautiful. This was my chance to prove to myself and my kids that I still had it.

Cynthia Nixon, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kristin Davis in “…And Just Like That” (Craig Blankenhorn / HBO Max)I also desperately wanted to see the girls: Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon and Kristin Davis. If I got cast again as an extra on “And Just Like That,” it would be like showing up at my high school reunion that I never got a chance to attend because as a child I had been homeschooled for 10 years and homeless for one year.

I’d finally get the acknowledgement from the “cheerleaders” (the stars of the show) that the frat-like behavior (that some called assault) from the “football team” (the crew and actor) was unacceptable and would never happen to another young woman again. I needed to go back to go forward. I sent in a recent snapshot and hoped for the best.

A week later, casting emailed and instructed me to show up at Park Avenue South at 5:48 a.m. along with 26 other extras. In big bold letters highlighted in yellow, I read: “PLEASE NOTE THE PRODUCTION SAFETY HOTLINE. To report potential misconduct, bullying, or harassment call the Compliance hotline.”

That was new. I copied the info down on a Post-it note and put it in my bag for the next day.

Around the corner from the set in a church, the costume crew approved my wardrobe and an hour later walked us to Veronika Restaurant. I was glad to see there were more people of color and women working in the crew than years ago. Julie Rottenberg, a writer on “Sex and the City” and now on “And Just Like That,” gave me a big hug. She must have known my story.

Sarah Jessica Parker took a seat at one of the dining room tables, her back to me, wearing a dark, form-fitting dress and white booties. Lights circled around her small body and golden hair. Grips lifted cables and makeup artists swirled around director Michael Patrick King. We were all there to tell a story that would last another generation.

I took it all in and breathed. This time, the crew didn’t push me around. I had worked hard in my life and deserved this moment. I deserved to take in the light, to shine.

A crew person placed me at a table far from the lead table. I leaned back in my chair, hoping to catch Cynthia Nixon’s eye. I even attempted a half wave, but she seemed not to see me. Kristin Davis soon joined them at the table, her face toward me. She locked eyes with SJP and not for a moment (not even for the entire time we shot a three-page scene about Aiden emailing Carrie about Valentine’s Day) did she take her eyes off her friend and co-star. They laughed at each other’s jokes. I was happy for them, that after all these years, they were bonded like sisters.

Kristin Davis and Sarah Jessica Parker in “And Just Like That” (Craig Blakenhorn/Max)A few hours later, the crew handed out water to the extras and told us we had done a great job. It was refreshing to be appreciated. A red-haired, male crew member announced that me and the other SAG extras were wrapped and could go home. It was 1 p.m.

“I had a great time. Thanks,” I said, handing over my voucher that stated I’d be paid $187 for 8 hours of work.

He signed it. Then looked at me and paused.

“I know a lot of background actors deal with some crap,” he said sincerely.

Tears brimmed my eyes. Change had happened. The #MeToo Movement had given me the courage to speak up and expose the misogynistic crew, and here was the proof I had been seen. Not in the way I grew up dreaming about – doing a scene on camera – but I was finally respected for who I was – a woman making money in the arts. A job that had defined my 20s, no longer defined my 40s.

While it would’ve made my day if the stars said, “Hi,” their response or acknowledgment didn’t make or break me.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

And just like that it was time for school pickups.

As I hugged my kids, I realized I’d always look back on my past, but I didn’t have to redeem it anymore. I had a life that I could live with and was lucky for all the little things: Waking up in a warm bed, food in the fridge, cuddles from my children, and decaf coffee brought to me every morning by my husband. I was happy to be alive, no longer craving a family I thought I had found on TV sets or on the stage.

I told my kids about standing in the bright lights and knew I hadn’t given up on my dreams. No longer an actor, my greatest role now was as wife and mother and storyteller. Kindness to others and letting others know they were seen and heard would be my way forward. I had loved and left “Sex and the City.”

Rewatching the trailer, I took solace in Carrie Bradshaw’s voiceover: “Some things are better left in the past, but maybe not everything.”

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“Hopefully you love to hate me”: Anna Camp on her “wickedly fun” villain past and new horror film

Anna Camp has gone dark. The actor known for her sneakily villainous roles in “True Blood” and “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” — as well as her musical part in the “Pitch Perfect” film series and multiple stints on Broadway — appears for our interview with her famous blond hair a deeper shade.

Camp has a new film out which also marks a new direction for her. She stars as Cora in “From Black,” a horror film where Camp’s character, a mother grieving the disappearance of her young son and struggling with addiction, is presented with an unbelievable offer: a chance to discover what happened to him, for a price. Camp describes the film as “like nothing I’ve ever read before or done before.”

The southern-born actor, who appeared on Broadway alongside Daniel Radcliffe in “Equus,” and says her dream role would be playing Blanche in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” has a slew of other new projects in the works. Many seem like departures from the roles most closely identified with her career so far. She’s shooting a Peacock series “Hysteria!” about the 1989 Satanic panic, had a film that recently premiered at Sundance and just wrapped a stoner comedy called “Nuked.” She says about playing complicated, varied characters, “You always want to try to stay ahead of the audience.”

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Camp is both a musical theater devotee and a big horror film fan. She talked about both with Salon, along with her emotional connection to acting and the physical challenges of taking on a role like Cora in “From Black.”

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and condensed.

Did you always know that you wanted to perform? How did you get started?

Way back. I started acting in second grade, if you can believe it. My sister is seven years older than me, and she was taking acting classes. I was like, what’s she doing? I want to do this too. So my parents put me in class. I remember reciting a poem in front of my class at a very young age and getting very emotionally moved by it. I remember just time freezing, you know. I started crying because I was so affected by the things that I was saying at a very young age. I think that’s when I felt like I wanted to be an actor and a storyteller. Whatever that emotional connection was going on, I’ve been chasing that moment ever since, in a way, to find that resonance . . . Very weird, I think, for a little kid to be feeling all these emotions when they’re in second or third grade!

Hey, you’ve gotta put those emotions somewhere. Performing is a good place. You have also appeared on Broadway multiple times. When you first started, did you see yourself as a theater actor, or a film and television one? Did you have that clear journey in mind?

I thought I was going to be doing theater and only theater for the rest of my life. I was like, I’m gonna be really broke, but really creatively fulfilled. And that’s OK. So I went to New York, I graduated school — I’m not gonna say the year — but I graduated college and went straight to New York. I started booking theater jobs, thank God. I was doing regional theater, and then I got cast in my first Off-Broadway play. From that I got cast in my first Broadway show . . . Alan Ball came to see it and subsequently cast me in “True Blood,” which actually brought me out to Los Angeles. I started falling in love with the medium of film and television. It was really exciting to take what I had learned on stage and translate it into this much more intimate, subtler space as an actor. I learned a lot when I was on “True Blood.” But I never thought I would ever be in TV and film. I always thought I was just going to be on stage.

That makes sense, because you’re a singer as well. You’ve sung in multiple projects, including all the “Pitch Perfect” movies. Is music something you try to balance with acting?

I would love to do another musical movie or musical TV show. I love singing. It’s something that I never really considered myself: a real singer. I always tell people, I’m an actor who can sing. But I listen to all sorts of music. I would love to learn how to play a musical instrument. I used to know how to play the ukulele, but I’d love to learn how to play guitar and do something like “Daisy Jones & The Six.” I think it’s a great, great TV show. I would love to play a country music artist, which would use my South Carolina roots because that’s where I’m from originally.

“I began to inhabit this person physically in a way that I’ve never really gotten to do before. Because I always sit up really straight and play these type A women.”

It was nice to take a divergent path from that for a while because I think a lot of people kind of pigeonholed me into this “Pitch Perfect” singing and dancing type A girl category. I’ve definitely taken a departure from that, but I love to sing and would always be down to do something in another project forever . . . It’s really fun to sing and it really enhances the storyline and the moment and the characters. It’s this beautiful sort of fantasy. I’d always been a musical theater fan growing up.

Anna Camp as “Cora” in “From Black” (Courtesy of Shudder)

It’s interesting you talk of being worried about being typecast into this “Pitch Perfect” kind of role, because your newest role in “From Black” is very different. Can you describe your character in that film?

I play Cora, who is a recovering drug addict, dealing with the disappearance of her son. Her son disappeared five years earlier. And she definitely played a part in his disappearance, because she was definitely not a good mother . . . We follow her story through the things that she’s trying to do to get him back, or the chance to see him again, or to make up for what she did wrong. You know, she’s a screwup, she’s not great. Even throughout the film, she’s given these tasks, these rituals to go through — and she even messes those up. So you get to see this person who is incredibly flawed, incredibly guilt ridden, but also who is through and through a mother who cannot give up hope of seeing her child again. The director, Thomas Marchese, he always said, “Cora is broken, but she’s a fighter.” So that was that balance that we tried to walk constantly. She’s a broken person, but she’s not giving up hope, and she’s going to continue to fight.

How did you prepare for a role like that?

To prepare yourself to play somebody who’s lost their child — I don’t know if you can ever actually mentally prepare yourself to be there. But I got to spend some time with [Eduardo Campirano], the young actor who played Noah, and I got to really love him as a person and find things that I loved about him — and then I would just close my eyes and think: what if he was gone? What if that sweet little kid was completely ripped off the face of the earth, and I had something to do with that? How would I feel about that? . . . If you put yourself in that place, emotionally things will start to come up. That evolved into who the character was. I would also listen to music a lot. There’s a specific song that I would play over and over and over that became Noah’s theme to me, that really represented him as my child. I would listen to it and it would put me in the emotional place.

“I think that fear is the strongest emotion.”

As an actress, I was just dying to get to play a role that was so different my body would start to hunch over. I began to inhabit this person physically in a way that I’ve never really gotten to do before. Because I always sit up really straight and play these type A women, it was really refreshing for my body to inhabit a completely different human being than I’ve ever gotten to play before . . . It was heartbreaking every day to play that.

From Black (Courtesy of Shudder)Are you a horror movie fan? Or, are you scared by them? Did any horror films or roles influence your work in this genre?

I love horror movies. I love getting scared and I think that’s why I like horror movies because you get to give up control when you watch them. It’s the same thing when people ride roller coasters or do things that frighten them. There’s this adrenaline. I love giving up that kind of control. My favorite horror movies are Hitchcock films. I love “Psycho.” I love “The Birds.” I saw “Poltergeist” at a very young age. It really scarred me. I became frightened of the television. I don’t think my parents should have let me see that at that age! . . . But I think just putting yourself in that place of like: there’s something behind you. There’s a stillness. There’s a listening.

There’s a lot of acting alone that I do in the movie as well. But you’re not alone, right? The seeker is following me. There’s just something really beautiful about [Cora], I think, because it taps into a place that you shouldn’t experience all the time too. There’s a danger there, which I find really exciting as an actress to get to reach those levels, because thank God, I’m not walking around terrified every day of my life. It was just really exciting to get to tap into those places.

I’m a horror fan, too, and I think it’s interesting that you started the interview talking about emotion and the emotion of acting, because I feel horror movies can be so emotional. They are much deeper in that psyche and trauma sense.

I think that fear is the strongest emotion. When you really think about how terrifying some of the things are that Cora goes through in this film, it’s a very powerful and also just thrilling place to put yourself. I’m not afraid of that. I’m not afraid of feeling terror and fear. I want to see how far I can go. I think the director was really excited about that. There are shots in the movie — I don’t really watch myself that often, but I watched this — where my pupils are dilating. I didn’t even know that they could dilate as big as they are. I was actually scared watching it, even though I knew what was going to happen.

Anna Camp as “Cora” in “From Black” (Courtesy of Shudder)I imagine it was really physically hard to shoot.

It was physically hard. There was a lot of running. There’s a lot of being wet, being doused with water and running.

A lot of screaming, which — you’re very good at screaming.

A lot of screaming. A lot of crying. I was dehydrated because I was crying all the time. So I would have to drink water and Gatorade all the time. Sometimes I would be crying but I had no tears because there was no water left in my body. It was very physical. It was great, though. I had a great time.

“There’s a lot burning inside, but we’re taught not to show that.”

You’ve also had parts like your role in “Kimmy Schmidt” where your character is very sunny on the outside, but very intense and potentially dark and devious on the inside. How do you handle that as an actor?

Those are the most delightful roles to play because you get to portray this one thing: this glossy, pretty, perfectly quaffed exterior. And what that mask is hiding is very tortured, dark. In “Kimmy Schmidt” she’s almost this masochistic soul inside. As an actress, I love playing the dichotomy of those two things at once. Because it gives me so much to play and so much conflict also to not let it out. Don’t show what’s really happening inside of you, because people will be scared of that. And you’ll scare them off and you’re not perfect.

You know, I think a lot of that came from my being raised in the south as a southern woman. They don’t call us Steel Magnolias for no reason. There’s a lot burning inside, but we’re taught not to show that. I think that’s why I love playing women who are so complicated and so surprising, because you don’t know the fire that’s actually burning within them. And they’re trying to hide it all the time. They’re my favorite characters.

As Cora in “From Black,” your character doesn’t always hide as much. Her trauma and anger and grief are very much out there. She also talks about how she’s done pretending. She’s done being nice and letting people say these platitudes they say to her about her child. Was it hard being that vulnerable for the role?

“Nothing can expose a person more than terror.”

It’s definitely hard. I was surrounded by incredibly talented actors like Jennifer Lafleur, my sister, and John Ales who played Abel. He’s just absolutely incredible. There’s a shell. There’s a hard exterior to Cora in a different sense than the other characters I’ve played, but there’s still a bit of a mask that I started out with and then you get to crack her open slowly throughout the film, and more vulnerability comes out of her. It’s the trick of playing that it’s hard. I’m playing that it’s hard for Cora to let this out of her. It’s such a fascinating thing to talk about, acting and the process, because you have to delicately balance who the person is inside, who they’re presenting to the person they’re in the scene with, and then slowly if that person is changing them and allowing little cracks in their facade to come through.

There were a lot of scenes where I got to shed the shell of who Cora was. And being afraid is also something. There’s no mask when you’re that terrified. That’s your true soul being exposed. Nothing can expose a person more than terror and fear.

And the biggest terror, I think, is always inside us, right? It’s the past or it’s the future. It’s what’s happened to us or what we’ve done.

Absolutely. Who you are as a person and knowing that you’re a you’re a f**kup. You’re not perfect, you’ve caused all of this. That’s the most terrifying thing to know and to admit to yourself.

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Is this something you would like to continue doing, balancing these lighter, more cheerful or happier roles with these sort of darker parts?

I think, yes. They work hand in hand as an artist. You can’t have comedy without tragedy and vice versa. And as a well-rounded artist and an actress, I can’t just do these types of horror movies over and over. I’d probably be miserable. So to be able to switch back and forth and have a wonderful balance, I think creates a whole, well-rounded artistic career, which I hope to have. I’m constantly searching for both things to balance.

You talked about “True Blood” and how much you learned from that show. Your character was so interesting because, you know, she’s one of the bad guys. Was it hard being the villain on the show?

Oh, it was so fun. Oh God, I love being the villain. It’s been refreshing to not play the villain recently. But I love it. Those are the most exciting roles to get to play. It’s like hopefully you love to hate me on “True Blood.” The villains get some of the most incredible lines, they get the most screwed up things to do, and the way they go about it. It’s wickedly fun to play the villain. I love it.

“From Black” is streaming on Shudder. Watch a trailer via YouTube below:

about horror films

The 10 weirdest mushrooms in North America

It’s no exaggeration that fungi are the glue that holds all of life on Earth together. Estimated to number upwards of 5 million species, their stunning level of diversity offers a lot of jobs to do, from decomposing dead organic matter to symbiotic or even parasitic relationships with other organisms. Without these lifeforms, most plants could not absorb nutrients in the soil and the carbon cycle in forests would be all but impossible.

Yet, many people are really only familiar with one type of fungi: the kind that produce mushrooms, which are a type of growth we can think of like a fruit, though fungi are very different from plants. The majority of the mushroom fungus is actually underground, forming a dense web of stringy connective tissue called mycelium. When the mycelium wants to reproduce, it sprouts mushrooms, which are typically in the form of stalks with spore-dribbling gills beneath domed caps.

Sure, that may seem obvious: everyone knows what a mushroom is. Even if many folks only know a handful of species at the grocery store or the iconic red and white Amanita muscaria, for good reason, mushrooms are really popular right now, and not just the psychedelic kind that are driving a paradigm shift in how we treat mental health.

“I think the central thing driving the burgeoning fascination with fungi is that they really are super cool!” Roo Vandegrift, a mycologist at the University of Oregon’s Institute of Ecology and Evolution, told Salon in an email. He said the lessons from fungi can challenge the dominant narrative that we must compete to survive, something people desperately need right now as the relentless maw of capitalism squeezes the life from this planet.

It’s not a bad trip: Mushrooms may be “talking” to each other, new study finds

“I think there has been a cultural need for symbols of connection, for means of connection, and mycology has become a way to meet that need,” Vandegrift said. “The ecology of symbiosis, so inextricable from the study of fungi, gives a view of the world that includes cooperation and collaboration as fundamental aspects of reality, part of the bedrock from which our world is built.”

One of the best ways to indulge such an attitude is to go mushroom hunting. Vandegrift recommends joining a local mycology club to go on hikes and poke around for, as mycologist David Arora put it, “All That the Rain Promises and More…“

“You can participate in group activities, have ready access to expert identifiers, learn good spots and techniques and make friends!” Vandegrift said. “The North American Mycological Association has affiliated clubs all over the country. There’s probably one near you.”

Vandegrift was one of many contributors to “National Audubon Society Mushrooms of North America,” a new 720-page, full-color guidebook showcasing hundreds of magnificent fungal fruits that make this continent special. We picked out some of the most absolutely bonkers-looking mushrooms — the kind that make you go, “Wait, that’s a mushroom?” — that graced the book’s pages for your viewing pleasure.

Purple Jellydisc (Ascocoryne sarcoides)

Purple Jellydisc (Henk Monster)Image_placeholder

Like some kind of strange blob from outer space, purple jellydisc, also known as jelly drops, are made up of tightly squished growths in the shape of a chewed up gumball or a tiny brain. Its distinctive rosey amethyst color is thanks to a chemical the fungus produces called ascocorynin, which has weak antibiotic activity. It is found throughout North America, aside from Gulf Coast states.

“We’ve actually collected this species from Ecuador, as well as some other species in the genus, including at least one that’s likely new to science. We’re still working on it, so stay tuned!” Vandegrift said, noting that it can reproduce one of two ways: using spores and sometimes asexually.

Shaggy Rose Goblet (Microstoma floccosum)

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This mushroom, which appears throughout the east coast but also India, China and Japan, looks more like a pair of fuzzy socks than a fungus. It may be small, only 1 to 3 centimeters long, but its bright pinkish-red goblets, which are shrouded in fuzzy white hairs, are hard to miss. Sarcoscypha occidentalis, the stalked scarlet cup looks similar but is bald and its cups are more shallow, more closely resembling a rubber dart.

Dog’s Nose (Camarops petersii)

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Camarops petersii (Dog’s Nose) (Katja Schulz)e_placeholder

True to its name, this shiny, black, speckled mushroom looks exactly like the snoot on a dog. It’s even somewhat square-like in some instances. But don’t actually boop it — it can stain your fingers a slimy black when touched. Found throughout the east, it “erupts” from a light brown sheath that sometimes sticks around or disintegrates.

“The texture of the fruiting bodies is unlike any other fungus I’ve ever encountered,” Vandegrift said. “Like the Ascocoryne [purple jellydisc], I’ve collected a related species in Ecuador. It actually confused me for a long time. I specialize in Xylariaceae, the family of the Candlesnuff Fungus, Xylaria hypoxylon, and these at first really look like they should be in that family, but they’re not.”

This level of confusion isn’t uncommon in mycology. Many, many fungi look alike and sometimes the only way to tell species apart is by running genetic tests. When Camarops petersii was given the DNA treatment, it “allowed for a deeper understanding of the relationships between groups,” Vandegrift explained. “In 2001, based on DNA evidence, Camarops (and a few closely-related fungi) were given their own order level classification, the Boliniales, reflecting how unique they really are.”

Staghorn Jelly —Calocera viscosa

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This shocking coral fungi can resemble licking tongues of flame, ranging from lemon yellow to a burnt orange. Those weird “tuning fork” structures (technically called basidia) don’t just look cool, they help it shoot out microscopic spores to reproduce. The fungus is riddled with carotenoids, the pigmented chemicals in many plants and animals that produce vivid yellows, oranges and reds, notably in pumpkins, carrots, lobster, flamingos and shrimp.

It’s not poisonous, but you probably don’t want to eat it anyway. It has a pretty gross taste and a gelatinous, rubbery texture, though some creative chefs have used it to garnish dishes. It is commonly found throughout the whole country.

Shooting Star — Phaerobolus stellatus

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This stellar fungi also really lives up to its name. It’s in the genus Sphaerobolus, the artillery or cannonball fungi, all of which have evolved fantastic, explosive ways of distributing their spore sacs long distances. In the case of Phaerobolus stellatus, it does somewhat resemble a an extremely tiny shooting star just one or two millimeters wide. It grows on dung, mulch and rotting debris, producing a fruiting body that begins as an egg-white sphere.

Eventually, this pearly globe will be jettisoned up to six meters (!) away from the mushroom, generating 1/10,000th of a horsepower, leaving behind a liquidy pool of milky white or pinkish tissue. All of this is possible thanks to a specialized membrane that flips inside out, almost exactly like those elastic jumping popper toys.

Even more intriguing, this species is phototropic, meaning it can sense light, giving it the ability to aim its sticky packages at whatever’s brightest, which it tends to prefer. Unfortunately, this is often highly reflective surfaces such as light-colored walls or glass. Which brings us to the next point…

As cool as all this sounds, the poor shooting star mushroom is considered a pest by many. It leaves unsightly black spots everywhere it lands, whether that’s a parked car, someone’s window or the side of their home. They are the bane of homeowners and insurance companies, who are not amused by the tiny destructive power of these mini howitzers.

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Red Basket Stinkhorn — Clathrus ruber

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This horror show resembles something you might see in a David Cronenberg film, or perhaps a geodesic dome one would spot at Burning Man. It emerges first as a whitish egg, but soon, like a chest-bursting alien, it rips through and expands its spongy, blood-orange lattices that can feature between seven to twenty windows. It starts to spread a jelly-like slime called a gleba, which is a nauseating greenish-black color that contains its spores.

It smells hellish too, like rotting meat on a sweltering day, which magnetizes tons of insects that scatter its spores. In North America, it is found strictly in California, particularly in the San Francisco Bay area and Santa Barbara, but it is spreading and may have been introduced to Europe or vice versa. If you can get past the terrible stench, yes, you can eat it. Some folks even pickle it while it’s still in its egg stage, which is considered a delicacy in some parts of Europe and Asia.

Bleeding Tooth — Hydnellum peckii

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Truly a mushroom that is not for the faint of heart, or especially anyone afraid of the dentist. Also called Devil’s tooth, Hydnellum peckii starts out as a blobby, funnel-shaped mushroom with pinkish white caps that weep a red, blood-colored fluid. This strange sweat, technically known as guttation, is similar to sap in plants.

The shroom has fine, fuzzy hairs that feel like velvet and even has teeth-like structures of its own, also known as hymenium, which are spore-bearing surfaces of a mushroom, typically gills. Its range stretches from the Gulf Coast through the Appalachians and into the northeast Great Lakes region. Despite its gruesome appearance, this mushroom is beneficial for the coniferous trees it colonizes. The plants give the fungi carbon dioxide while the mushroom breaks down minerals into the soil for the tree to absorb better.

If you’re brave enough to eat it, it has a strong bitter or peppery hot flavor. Some people also call this mushroom Strawberries and Cream, so clearly not everyone thinks this thing is super gross. And its more outrageous stage is short-lived. After a while, the mushroom fades into a boring brown color.

Western Cauliflower Mushroom — Sparassis radicata 

Western Cauliflower Mushroom (nonototo)

This wavy mushroom more closely resembles the frilly white shirt from an episode of “Seinfeld” or a bowl of pale egg noodles than cauliflower. A single fruiting body can get quite heavy and feature hundreds of distinct, smooth lobes that are free of pores or wrinkles. Found throughout the Pacific Northwest and Northern California, Sparassis radicata is actually a weak parasite that feeds on conifers, but isn’t very deadly.

“This is one of my favorite mushrooms to eat!” Vandegrift said. “A lot of guides to cooking wild mushrooms recommend making soup out of it, but I’ve never quite understood that. The best part of this mushroom is the delightful texture! I chop it fine and sauté it with cumin and coriander to make taco filling, and it’s exquisite. And then, use the firm, compact interior like soup bones to make hearty mushroom stock: I dry them in slabs and just add one to the pot whenever I make a soup. Same goes for the firm interior parts of Chicken of the Woods — just because it’s too tough to eat doesn’t mean it’s not still delicious for making broths!”

Wrinkled Peach — Rhodotus palmatus

Wrinkled Peach (Dan Molter (shroomydan))

Nothing else really looks like this puckered up, ballet slipper-colored weirdo, but unfortunately, it is rarely seen to begin with. Rhodotus palmatus is both veiny and gelatinous and like Bleeding Tooth, it excretes a golden, sometimes ruby goo. It is found in the East from Kansas to Virginia and further north, but also many other places across the globe, where it loves to feed on rotting elm wood.

In the middle of the 20th Century, three species of another fungi under the genus Ophiostoma swept through North America and Europe, sickening trees with what’s known as Dutch elm disease. Spread by bark beetles, this destructive parasite causes trees (but especially elms) to wither and die, starkly transforming forests with its massive death toll.

At first this gave R. palmatus plenty of food to eat, causing its population to jump, but later, it dropped precipitously. It is now considered near threatened and many mushroom enthusiasts eagerly seek it out, knowing its rarity.

Fluted Bird’s Nest — Cyathus striatus group 

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There are quite a few mushrooms that have evolved a very unique way of dispersing their spores: by shaping themselves to look exactly like a bird’s nest full of eggs. Most fungi in this family have shallow bowls, but the Fluted Bird’s Nest is more funnel-shaped, with its ribbed tube faceted by spiky, wooly tufts. It is found almost everywhere in North America, sometimes in hundreds of swarms squished together.

“The ‘eggs’ in the bottom of the nest are really peridioles, which are sort of like eggs, in that they are the first step to making the next generation of this fungus, but they’re very different in other ways,” Vandegrift explained. Each peridilole is a mass of thousands of spores, some of which have long sticky cords attached, . “And that’s where the magic of the bird’s nest fungus comes in: they don’t stay stuck at the bottom. The nest itself is a specially constructed structure to help get the peridioles out. The shape and size of the cup is calibrated by the fungus to be just perfect for splashing.”

Raindrops that splash into these cups, especially on the rim, launch the peridioles out and into the air. If the raindrop hits hard enough, its cord then acts like a snapping rubber band, which gives it the ability to wrap around plants, helping disperse even more spores.

The world of fungi, especially in fiction like “The Last of Us,” is often depicted as disgusting and deadly. That’s great for entertainment, but it’s only slightly a reflection of the real-world threats fungi pose to humans. For the most part, they are harmless to us and just cool to look at.

Certainly, fungi have seemingly endless different forms they can take, especially when it comes to their weird fruit. Mushrooms are just one of many ways these fascinating organisms have used evolution to create truly mind-blowing works of art.

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How to make your meatloaf taste like a Southern chef’s

Chef Kenny Gilbert, who was a contestant on the seventh season of “Top Chef” and owns the award-winning Florida restaurant Silkie’s Chicken and Champagne Bar, is passionate enough about good meatloaf that his new cookbook, “Southern Cooking, Global Flavors,” has an entire chapter dedicated to the dish.

You might be wondering how many variations of meatloaf there could be, but Gilbert definitely flexed his creative muscles, presenting meals like shawarma-spiced lamb meatloaf with feta mashed potatoes, Italian meatloaf with white truffle and mascarpone mashed potatoes, and a more classically American bacon-wrapped meatloaf glazed with chipotle ketchup.

“Oprah, you need to try this”: Chef Kenny Gilbert on fusion food and his famous fried chicken

“I wanted to be able to share my experiences through common foods people can relate to,” Gilbert said in a recent Salon Talks. “If I’m talking to one of my best friends who’s Italian and we’re talking food, and I want to cook for him, I want him to have something that’s like that warm hug from grandma — but his grandma.”

But regardless of how Gilbert ultimately dresses up the meatloaf, he employs two techniques to ensure that both the flavor and texture are on-point As a bonus, they are both really simple to execute and actually work (trust me, I made the best meatloaf of my adult life just a few days after receiving a copy of Gilbert’s book.) Keep these in mind the next time you want to make the comfort food classic.

Check the fat content of your meat

“Great flavor and moisture are what make a meatloaf outstanding,” Gilbert wrote in his cookbook. “You can use many different types of meat, but the protein-to-fat ratio is important to keep it tender and delicious.”

Next time you grab meat to turn into meatloaf, check the fat content on the package or ask your butcher for details.

“I like an 80% protein to 20% fat ratio, and ground chuck is my preferred meat,” Gilbert said. “It comes from the shoulder of the cow, so it contains more fat.” This applies to ground chicken, ground turkey, pork and lamb, as well.

Reach for the blender

“Most classic meatloaf is like my mom’s recipe, where the onions and peppers are chopped and folded into the meat,” Gilbert wrote. “Each bite contains a little piece of diced vegetable. I do meatloaf a little differently.”

In our conversation, Gilbert expanded on this.

“When this meatloaf is baked off, and you put a glaze of ketchup on it and you slice it, then you see these chunks of peppers and onions in there,” he said. “I never really liked that. I felt like I was being cheated with the vegetables throughout the bite. So I said, ‘Well, why not take these vegetables and puree it up and then fold it in?’ That way every bite, I’m getting equally-balanced flavors with purpose. If I wanted to put celery and garlic, and so on, so forth in there, then I want to taste it through every bite with the meat versus having hints of different chunks.”

Southern Cooking Global Flavors (Photo by Kristen Penoyer)So, next time you make meatloaf, grab the food processor or blender and add your vegetables to it, along with any eggs and breadcrumbs you plan on using. You’ll end up with this really fragrant, flavorful paste that you can knead, either by hand or using a stand mixer, into your ground meat. I’ve written before about how having a good, cheap food processor can actually enhance weeknight cooking, while also taking some of the burden out of prep work; that proved true in Gilbert’s restaurant kitchens as well.

“In a restaurant setting, when you’re cutting up a bunch of vegetables, it’s a lot faster also for me to take my trinity — my pepper, celery, and onions — puree that with some garlic and some herbs, have that base, and then say, ‘Okay, cool,’ I need to have eggs in here too,” he said. “I got to puree all that up together and then add it in. And I’m not having to sit there and slice and dice all these vegetables up. I can cut it up in bigger chunks, wash the vegetable really nice, puree it up, and then add it.”

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What does sustainable fishing actually mean? “Good Catch” author Valentine Thomas has the answer

For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved seafood.

Growing up, I thought that Red Lobster visits with my parents and brother were the pinnacle of cuisine. For some time there, though, I was mainly only fond of tuna, shrimp, crab, lobster, clams and mussels, but left the actual “fish fish” to the seas (except for when my mom made breaded fish “cutlets” because I’m nothing if not a creature of habit).

As I grew up, though, my palate expanded, I entered culinary school (which is where I tried my first oyster with a classmate’s mom’s homemade hot sauce and it was a moment, let me tell you) and worked in restaurants, broadening my sea horizons. Especially since giving up red meat a few years ago, seafood has had an even more profound hold on my diet.

This super unique take on a Southern classic highlights fried fish and a spicy honey drizzle

I really, really love whenever something “tastes of the sea” . . . that light, simple, saline flavor that permeates the palate, sometimes veering into something akin to buttery, giving you that feeling that you’re standing with your toes in the sand, gently lapped by the surf, peering out into the ocean. It’s pretty unbeatable (I’m obviously partial to the Jersey shore, but that goes without saying).

So when I first read about Valentine Thomas, I knew I’d love to chat further with her. She is a fisherwoman, author, educator, cook and an advocate for sustainable fishery. She has a cookbook coming out shortly called “Good Catch: A Guide to Sustainable Fish and Seafood with Recipes from the World’s Oceans,” so in conjunction with its impending release, I reached out to Thomas to learn more about what exactly sustainable fishing really is, her favorite fish dishes and preparations and her overall insight into the seas and sustainability at large.

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

Hi Valentine! It’s said that your book combines message, memoir and cookery — what does that mean?

Spearfishing and catching your own food is so much more than just food and I wanted my book to transpire that. Through this lifestyle, I eliminated my anxiety, changed my life and values and discovered incredible food. And I wanted to share all of it.

I grew up scared of my own shadow, oblivious to where my food was from and believing that working in the corporate world was the only way to live. This book is not only my journey to the culinary world, but also a guide to live a free, caring and delicious life filled with ocean-conscious recipes.

The main takeaway, I guess, is: If I can do it, so can you. All of it.

How would you define “sustainable” in terms of fishery?

“Sustainable” has become a loose word in the last decade. When it comes to fisheries, I describe it as “fishing in a way that the generations to come can enjoy the same fish, at perpetuity”. But in addition to this, also that it doesn’t affect surrounding environments (food chain, bottom floor, etc).

Do you have a favorite fishing spot?

Living in Tampa for a few years, it grew to become my favorite fishing spot. With hundreds of artificial reefs, it is plentiful with various tasty species of fish. It is pretty shaky, but that makes it just more exciting!

Valentine Thomas (Andrew Thomas Lee)

Did you grow up fishing?

I did not. Born and raised in Montreal, Quebec, I wasn’t very outdoorsy growing up, which is why the lifestyle I chose is surprising for a lot of people around me. Strangely, it is not the fishing I fell in love with first, but the fish I was bringing back home.

What is your approach and ethos when it comes to cooking or preparing fish?

Use it all! A fish has so many good parts that are often discarded. From more popular parts such as head and collar to weirder ones like liver or visceral fat, fish has so much to offer flavor-wise. My friends are always skeptical when they come for dinner at my house (with reason, as I don’t tell them what they ate until they are done!). For most fish, I’d pick the head and carcasses over the filets . . . it’s that good.

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What fish do you most enjoy working with? Are there any fish that you think are “underrated,” or conversely, any that are over-consumed?

I love working with “trash fish.” A trash fish is a fish that is normally thrown back or considered as “not good enough meat.” Not only do I always love a good challenge, but I also believe it can help with education and get people to get out of their comfort zone and try something different, while also relieving pressure on the more common species.

Are there any types of fish you avoid from an environmental or sustainable perspective?

It is more about the method and location than the species, I’d say. I believe it is very important to encourage the right practices. There are a lot of blanket statements going around such as “farmed salmon is bad” or “tuna fisheries are bad,” when it is much more complex than that. I prioritize good farms, good fisheries and US caught fish (the US is a leader in sustainable fisheries). Eco-labels, while not perfect, are still a good indicator that you are buying the right stuff.

What are the issues with the carbon footprint of the commercial fishing industry?

Fish and seafood is the protein with the smallest carbon footprint. It has a lower carbon footprint than meat and cheese and is about equal to eggs. It also requires no land usage or fresh water. If sourced correctly, it is truly a great protein for the environment.

I love the book cover — what is the dish that’s featured?

The cover is tuna sashimi on crispy rice cakes and harissa sauce. Perfect for guests . . . or just you, in front of the TV.

That sounds delicious. What are some of your other favorite recipes in the book?

It is like picking my favorite kid, I can’t do that! I am joking; I have several favorites, though. The buttermilk fried fish on pancake, the Swedish fish soup and the fish tacos are probably my top three.

What are good tips for eating in an eco-friendly manner, both in regards to fish-centric diets and not?

It’s a “tell me what you care about and I’ll tell you what to eat” kind of thing! However, varying your diet (eat everything in moderation), eating local (national), source responsibly and let nothing go to waste are my go-tos. Although it can be perceived as a privileged way to look at things, the extra bucks for good products are often worth it. More than a Starbucks cup!

Do you have any tips on safely preparing raw fish dishes?

There are a few rules of thumbs here:

1. Never eat fresh water fish raw
2. Never eat wild salmon raw (yes, all raw salmon is farmed . . . see, it’s not that bad!)
3. Freeze it first (or ask if it was previously frozen)
4. Ask your fish monger if it can be eaten raw
5. Buy sushi grade (which merely means it was flash frozen, most probably on the boat)
6. When in doubt, cook it, you’ll regret it later that night if it wasn’t intended to be eaten raw

And last but not least: Buy a great book called “Good Catch” for tips on how to prepare raw fish dish, how to build your own recipes made for you and what constitutes most raw fish dishes.

about fish and seafood:

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Astronomers just solved a 60-year mystery regarding the brightest objects in the universe

One of the most mysterious objects in the universe just got a little less mysterious.

For sixty years since they were first detected, astronomers have puzzled over what quasars were. What we knew was this: They are among the most bright and powerful objects in the entire universe. They are extremely distant from Earth, yet can glimmer as bright as a trillion stars while clustering into a space as small as our solar system — that’s an extremely concentrated level of energy.

But until this week, astronomers weren’t entirely sure what causes these extreme explosions in the first place.

Quasars are powered by supermassive black holes, and sometimes belch out waves of matter that can snuff out baby stars.

The term quasar is a concatenation of quasi-stellar radio source — so called because when they were first identified, astronomers like Hong-Yee Chiu, who coined the term, were completely baffled by these strange interstellar objects. Their intense gravity can create illusions of physics known as gravitational lensing, in which light is warped just like cosmic magnifying glasses. As recently as several decades ago, it was hard to even know which direction this lensing was coming from.

As we’ve narrowed it down, we’ve learned that quasars sit at the center of galaxies, which are giant swirling discs of stars, gas, dust and dark matter strung together by gravity. That may seem self-evident, but galaxies have to spin around something. Most galaxies, ours included, have a central supermassive black hole upon which everything pivots — and so-named because these dead stars can be between one hundred thousand and ten billion times more massive than our Sun. The Milky Way spirals around a supermassive black hole with the lovely name Sagittarius A*. Since humans have had the telescope technology to detect black hole mergers — which admittedly hasn’t been very long — we haven’t yet detected the merger of two supermassive black holes. When we do, the explosion will be incalculable.

But some galaxies have much different objects at their center called an active galactic nucleus (AGN). These can be quite volatile, such as blazars, which are AGN that shoot out jets of ionized matter traveling at nearly the speed of light. But quasars are an AGN that are even more intense. They’re powered by supermassive black holes, sometimes belching waves of matter that can snuff out baby stars. As such, they’ve become an essential part of our understanding of the early universe and galaxy evolution.

Black holes may be quietly generating the force that is tearing the universe apart, experts say

Unfortunately, despite their importance and awe-inspiring destructive power, quasars are difficult to study due to their extreme distance and brightness. They also don’t have lifespans that are very long relative to when their triggering events occur, and their brightness can vary over time, further complicating observations and muddying data. All of this has made their origins unclear.

A new study in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society sheds light on the question of quasars, essentially solving one of the central mysteries of how quasars form. The answer could lie in galactic collisions.

As the researchers explain, colliding galaxies appear to create the conditions to birth a quasar. Indeed, these violent interweavings can cause enough gas to flow towards the core supermassive black holes, initiating quasar activity even before the two galaxies fully merge.

This theory has been posited before, but there has never been as solid direct evidence before now. The researchers, led by Jonathon Pierce, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Hertfordshire, observed nearly 50 galaxies that are host to quasars and compared them to more than 100 galaxies that are quasar-free. Similar comparisons have been made many times before, but this marks the first time so many quasars have been imaged with such sensitivity. They used deep imaging observations from the Isaac Newton Telescope in La Palma, one of Spain’s Canary Islands, and concluded that galaxies hosting quasars are around three times more likely to be colliding or interacting with other galaxies.

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In the study, the authors said that their images of quasars “provide strong evidence that galaxy interactions are the dominant triggering mechanism for quasars in the local universe.” This, they said, was consistent with quasars of different “brightnesses,” meaning with varying strength to their radio emissions.

“Quasars play a key role in our understanding of the history of the Universe, and possibly also the future of the Milky Way.”

All quasars are extremely far away, which means that they are also in the distant past, because of the way that distance correlates with earlier points of time as we gaze at far-away objects. However, there may be a quasar nearby in a few billion years, if you can wait that long. As the Milky Way collides with the Andromeda galaxy in a protracted process that will occur in roughly five billion years, the aftermath is likely to produce a quasar.

“Quasars are one of the most extreme phenomena in the Universe, and what we see is likely to represent the future of our own Milky Way galaxy when it collides with the Andromeda galaxy in about five billion years,” Professor Clive Tadhunter, from the University of Sheffield’s Department of Physics and Astronomy and one of the paper’s co-authors, said in a statement. “It’s exciting to observe these events and finally understand why they occur – but thankfully Earth won’t be anywhere near one of these apocalyptic episodes for quite some time.”

It’s taken decades of work to get where we are now with our understanding of quasars, which is fundamental to shaping our theories on how the universe formed and where it’s heading. As Pierce, the study’s lead author explained in the same statement, “one of the main scientific motivations for NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope was to study the earliest galaxies in the Universe, and Webb is capable of detecting light from even the most distant quasars, emitted nearly 13 billion years ago. Quasars play a key role in our understanding of the history of the Universe, and possibly also the future of the Milky Way.”

about space and black holes

“Dark Brandon Tonight”: Joe Biden, Tucker Carlson and the lure of the unsayable

There are more people who love Donald Trump than who love Joe Biden; I think that’s indisputable.

The thing is, love isn’t all that important in politics — or at least in Normieville, so-called-democratic politics. To a large degree, that’s what confused a lot of people into storming the Capitol in stupid outfits, and a much larger number of people into believing it was kind of cool and at least somewhat justified that it happened. It was about magical thinking and conspiracy theory — which are both really compelling — and about the obvious fact that many, many people had passionate feelings about Trump, while hardly anybody had any such feelings about Biden.

At a certain level of subconscious logic, it didn’t make sense that a candidate who struck so many people as a profound and semi-mystical embodiment of the American spirit — and it wasn’t just his fans who saw him that way — could lose to a candidate of maximum “meh,” understood even by most Democrats as a symbolic safe harbor, the best available option under the circumstances.

This expressed not just a difference between Democrats and Republicans but, to use the overwrought terms of this moment, the difference between those who aspire to democracy and those who yearn for fascism. When liberal democracy is more or less functioning (in other words, not right now), politics is the art of the possible, the search for half-a-loaf compromises and least-bad options. It’s only in authoritarian politics that we find a quest for the absolute, the beautiful and the true. That’s what makes the charismatic leader at the pinnacle of power, the hero athwart history, ultimately irresistible at both extremes of the political spectrum; that’s why Ezra Pound saw a fundamental connection between poetry and fascism.

What Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon’s firings say about the impact of episodically dominant figures

Speaking of major cultural figures with troubling trajectories, it was intriguing, if not entirely surprising, to learn that Tucker Carlson is not among the people who love Donald Trump. Their symbolic relationship has always been complicated, although their audiences overlap to a great extent and Carlson has arguably done more to promote, shape and mainstream Trump’s worldview than anyone else on the planet. I suspect Carlson has done more for Trump — or at least more for the Trump persona and the MAGA “movement” — than Trump himself has, given the former president’s bottomless appetite for self-destruction.

Joe Biden launched his long-expected re-election campaign this week, less than 24 hours after the far less expected news that Fox News was kicking Carlson to the curb, apparently having decided that his persona or his rhetoric or his theatrics, or just his sheer Tucker-ness, was more trouble than it was worth.

There’s no explicit connection between those headline-making events, only a sort of funhouse-mirror distorted reflection. I believe Carlson was speaking from the heart in saying that he hates Trump “passionately,” but of course that doesn’t mean he prefers Biden, who as noted above does not tend to stir the passions. What agitates Carlson about Trump, I imagine, is the intense frustration of being forced to put up with such a bumbling, small-minded buffoon as the only available figurehead for a (supposedly) noble project of American renewal and transformation.

Tucker Carlson clearly has actual beliefs, even if they’re mostly paleoconservative retreads. He may have something approaching a political or cultural vision, in a medium-terrifying social-fascist vein. It must rankle him endlessly to see that Trump transparently cares about nothing except his own aggrandizement and that Trump’s millions of supporters — trapped in a flattened fantasy universe of coded signals and endlessly posable stick figures (George Soros! Hunter Biden!) — don’t really seem to mind.

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But was the Biden announcement, coming so soon after Tuckergeddon, really a coincidence? As all those blue-check users out there lamenting the fact that the “woke mob” somehow got to Logan Roy — sorry, I mean Rupert Murdoch — already understand, there are no coincidences. It’s the next chapter of the Great Replacement: Dark Brandon, the only truly successful own-goal scored against the right in the political meme wars, is literally replacing Tucker Carlson, whose next-to-last offering in the Fox universe was a video about how it’s gross to eat bugs.

OK, that isn’t what “literally” means: Unfortunately, we’re not quite ready to roll out “Dark Brandon Tonight,” a full hour of nightly woke-mind virus subversion that will soon have once-manly American patriots going nonbinary, driving toy-scale electric cars and spreading bug-tofu cream cheese on their spelt bagels.

Now that the “woke mob” has conquered Fox News at last, it’s nonbinary pronouns, toy-scale electric cars and bug-tofu cream cheese for every formerly red-blooded American.

A lot of stuff has been written about Tucker Carlson since his abrupt departure, and a lot of it displays the distinctively American discomfort with ambiguity and contradiction. Another way of saying that is Americans (of whatever ideological stripe) don’t really do history: We just project our current obsessions and preoccupations onto the past, as if it were a giant movie screen, and then congratulate ourselves for seeing so clearly what we have projected.

Tucker Carlson is a uniquely toxic figure in the current media landscape because he is a uniquely contradictory figure; the two things are not opposed or in conflict. There are plenty of other folks in the moldy recesses of right-wing media eager to launder or rationalize white supremacist conspiracy theories formerly consigned to the outermost fringe, or to promote incel-flavored laments about the relentless persecution of white heterosexual men. Most of them suck at it. Only Carlson had the cunning or genius (or perhaps the conviction) to combine those primordial far-right impulses with occasionally fiery populist critiques of corporate capitalism and neo-imperialist U.S. foreign policy, views otherwise exiled to the socialist and/or libertarian margins.

It’s neither useful nor necessary to claim, as anguished liberals often do, that Carlson’s unorthodox opinions on economics and global affairs are just cynical posturing or part of a nefarious long-con propaganda campaign on behalf of Vladimir Putin. Carlson’s admiration for Putin is right out in the open (as is his loathing for Volodymyr Zelenskyy), but I see no reason to regard any of that stuff as insincere. It all fits into a far-right American worldview with a venerable if not honorable tradition, one that Carlson has almost single-handedly rebooted for this century: isolationism, nativism, mythic and sentimental individualism, an ingrained and unquestioned ideology of white supremacy and male supremacy, a generalized mistrust of all large institutions, all centers of power and all forms of academic or professional expertise. In other words, know-nothingism, now repackaged as know-everythingism.

Carlson’s non-right-wing apologists (a select but colorful group!) have a point, sort of — but it isn’t the point they think they’re making. The fact that Carlson was the only cable news host with a large national audience who was willing to put certain anti-war or anti-corporate voices on TV speaks to the impoverishment and groupthink of liberal-centrist public discourse in general, and CNN and MSNBC in particular. But it doesn’t tell us much about Tucker Carlson, and you don’t have to venture far into Tuckerville to figure out that his purported areas of agreement with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are strictly rhetorical, and not at all about boring details like health care, unions, reproductive rights and the transition to a green economy.

An already infamous article at the American Prospect fell into this chasm in spectacular fashion, spinning out a dime-store contrarian “Tucker: Cooler than you think!” narrative at considerable length. Beyond a bland reference to “nativism,” authors Lee Harris and Luke Goldstein never mention that readers in, y’know, certain categories of humanity might feel personally or collectively under threat as a result of Carlson’s torrential hatewashing, or that actual professed fascists are among his biggest fans.

That article was feckless and dopey, but if anything Andrew Prokop’s effort in Vox to both-sides the ensuing controversy was somehow, and hilariously, worse. There is, Prokop writes, “a long-simmering tension within the liberal-left coalition”:

Are social justice politics — combating racism, sexism, xenophobia, and bigotry — so important that any enemy of that project, especially one with views as virulent and influence as immense as Carlson, should be declared anathema?

Or are issues like challenging the US foreign policy establishment or corporate power important enough that it’s worth finding some common ground with people who espouse bigoted views — even people who espouse them quite loudly and often?

That’s the sort of binary equation that sounds true for a split second until you actually read it and think about it. It’s just journalism imitating Twitter, and not in a fun way. Is there a living human anywhere in the real world who would fully subscribe to either of those statements, both of which have been prevaricated away into meaninglessness by the time we reach the question mark?

In the actual world of politics, culture and society, context matters. History matters. Tucker Carlson has a history and also belongs to a clear historical tradition, neither of them pleasant or edifying. (Father Coughlin’s pro-fascist, antisemitic 1930s magazine was called Social Justice!) He doesn’t get a hall pass from the radical left for coincidentally or instrumentally signing onto a few worthwhile debating points. If there are always a handful of dewy-eyed leftists ready to tumble for the latest iteration of the “red-brown” coalition with the far right, maybe the editor of the American Prospect should suggest they read a book.

Liberal orthodoxy, and the related tendency to circle the wagons around a Democratic president, have an unfortunate history too. I have a bad feeling about the fact that it’s tough to ask legitimate questions about the Ukraine war (about causes, objectives and ends, for instance) without being called a Putin stooge or an eight-dollar Elon cuck.

Making certain things unsayable only increases their allure, as Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson both understand. Dark Brandon doesn’t say the unsayable, and in his civilian identity as president of the United States, he doesn’t say much of anything. Maybe that’s the source of his power; those other two guys are showing cracks.

about the fall of the house of Tucker

“You have to make it fun”: “Tom Jones” star on shooting awkward sex scenes with Hannah Waddingham

Solly McLeod thought he’d get rejected for his first leading role when he was initially called to read for “Tom Jones.”

“When I got the audition for it, I thought it was for the singer Tom Jones,” McLeod told reporters at the Television Critics Association press conference in January. “And I was like, that’s not going to work.”

It’s not unusual, so to speak, for the young actor not to know that this “Tom Jones” is based on the randy, rollicking 1749 novel by Henry Fielding, but after reading early scripts, McLeod was sold. The tale of the 18th-century foundling who grows up to be very popular with the ladies may have topped 1,000 pages in its original form, but McLeod found this four-episode adaptation “energetic and fast-paced.”

It doesn’t hurt that Tom is irresistible to the ladies. While his heart is taken with the neighboring squire’s daughter Sophie Western (Sophia Wilde), his loins are less discriminating. Once Tom is forced out of the only home he ever knows and lands in London, he falls into the clutches of Lady Bellaston (“Ted Lasso” costar Hannah Waddingham), a wealthy older woman who likes her men young and lively.

“It’s our foundation myth”: PBS’ “World on Fire” challenges the World War II narrative we know

Despite the pressure to play the couple’s predominantly sexual relationship, the actors were able to create a relaxed and comfortable camaraderie.

“I’m not sure what the first scene that we filmed together was, but it wasn’t one of the raunchy ones,” McLeod said. “It was one of the talking ones – not that there’s many of those.”

The actor recognized Waddingham from her roles as Septa Unella in “Game of Thrones” and Jackson’s mother Sofia in Netflix’s “Sex Education.” He hadn’t, however, caught her latest role as AFC Richmond owner Rebecca Welton in “Ted Lasso” until after he finished filming “Tom Jones.”

“I think if I’d watched ‘Ted Lasso’ before filming this I would have been like, ‘Oh my god!’ because she’s absolutely outstanding,” McLeod raved. “We spoke about that as well. She found it funny that again in this show she has relations with the younger guy.”

Tom can’t seem to help attracting attention from women. Perhaps it’s because he’s traipsing around Somerset and London with his shirt open – far less restrictive attire compared to the stuffy cravats, elaborate wigs and face powders that were deemed fashionable for the time.

“It is yes, a lot of chest,” McLeod said. “We actually have to sew it up a little bit because there was too much, almost down to my belly button. There were scenes that we filmed – this is Northern Ireland in the winter – and with a flowy shirt I was like, ‘It’s cold today.’ But it was a comfortable costume, his general one. It was nice being natural. I think that’s what they wanted to do with Tom.”

Dean Lennox Kelly as Black George Seagrim and Lucy Fallon as Molly Seagrim in “Tom Jones” (PBS)

Lady Bellaston is one of three women whom Tom Jones beds in the series, including a young Somerset woman named Molly (Lucy Fallon) and a mysterious married woman named Mrs. Waters (Susannah Fielding) he meets on the way to London. While the numerous sex scenes may appear tame onscreen – no full nudity for “Masterpiece” – they still asked enough of the actors to require the services of an intimacy coordinator.

“They were there making sure that everyone felt comfortable with what they had to do, what we wanted to do in the scene,” confirmed McLeod. “We had a discussion with our director Georgia [Pariss] about what she was looking for and how we felt doing that. It was all very much up to us and we didn’t have anything forced on us.

“But because we had such a good relationship, me and Hannah, and the same thing goes for me and Lucy Fallon who plays Molly and Susannah who plays Mrs. Waters. We had a good relationship,” he continued. “So we made light of it as much as we could and tried to kill the awkwardness because you have the crew walking around trying to fix lights, and we’re like, naked on the bed. You have to make it fun.”

With all this bed-hopping going on, it may seem counterintuitive to think of Tom Jones as a romantic hero to root for, but McLeod has sympathy for his 20-year-old character. Along the way, he gets taken advantage of, loses the trust of his true love Sophie and even gets thrown in jail. But despite being taken in by a kind squire growing up, Tom was never treated with any respect because of his illegitimate status.

“He’s a young man who’s been brought up in wealth, but he’s never felt like he belonged,” said McLeod. “He’s always searching for something more fulfilling than just the life that he has. And I don’t think he realizes that it’s what it is to love until somebody comes along. And he goes, ‘Oh, s**t. This is what I’ve been missing.’

“He has to go kind of go through a series of trials and tribulations to discover what’s right and what’s wrong,” he continued. “Probably his ability to see the good in people and trust people, I think it’s a fantastic trait, but because he was so naive . . . in our show he that was his downfall.”

Solly McLeod as Ser Joffrey Lonmouth and Fabien Frankel as Ser Criston Cole in “House of the Dragon” (Ollie Upton / HBO)That good-natured innocence is a stark contrast to McLeod’s previous two roles. In Scandi-noir drama “The Rising,” he play a troubled young man who’d been accused of murdering his girlfriend. The other is that of Joffrey Lonmouth in “House of the Dragon.” For those who may not recognize him – Tom has much shorter hair – Joffrey is introduced as the secret lover of a noble groom-to-be, but after a few snide words to the wrong knight is beaten to death at the wedding.

As with any “Game of Thrones” franchise death, Joffrey’s demise was not only shrouded in secrecy but made quite the impact on those who knew McLeod watching the show.

“It was pretty instant, it was kind of an overnight thing,” he said. “My phone was blowing up, and I was like, ‘Oh, it’s obviously come out.’ It peaked and it dipped. And now sometimes people will say, ‘I think you look familiar, but I can’t quite pinpoint it,’ because my hair was long [on the show].”

While Joffrey’s time onscreen was brief, McLeod thoroughly enjoyed his time on the show, which was about six weeks all told. That said, he was more than happy to move on to play the sunnier Tom Jones.

“I think coming from the two roles previously, where they had a bit of darkness to them and being able to push them away, it was just so good,” he said. “It was probably the thing that got me through the trickier days on set. And just Tom’s nature lifted everything up.”

“Tom Jones” premieres Sunday, April 30 at 9 p.m. on PBS.

about “Masterpiece” series

ChatGPT and its ilk are still “fake” intelligence

While the conversations they produce may seem astounding, ChatGPT, Bard and other contemporary “AI” chatbots are not magic. Rather, they are merely examples of what computer scientists call “large language models,” or LLMs. Essentially, LLMs are trained to identify likely sequences of words, then generate coherent and convincing text.

In practice, ChatGPT and its ilk are really, really good at carrying on conversations and giving coherent, generally correct, responses to a wide variety of questions. Their uncanny text-generating prowess gives a beguiling illusion of intelligence that is convincing a growing number of people that LLMs now possess or soon will possess artificial general intelligence — the ability to do any intellectual task that humans can do, and the holy grail of artificial intelligence research. Those convinced include Ian Hoagarth, who penned a recent op-ed for the Financial Times titled “We must slow down the race to God-like AI.”

ChatGPT’s sentences are sometimes irrelevant, sometimes confusing, and sometimes incorrect — but always based on nothing more than statistically-identified word patterns.

Such concerns are almost certainly premature. That’s because LLMs are still inexorably hobbled by the fact that they do not even attempt to understand what words or other data mean — which is why they cannot be trusted to make predictions or decisions with important consequences. In other words, they are very complicated remixers and refashioners of existing text and data, but there is nothing underneath the hood.

In order to constitute real artificial intelligence, an LLM would have to pass Winograd schema challenges — an updated version of the Turing Test, the challenge famously proposed by mathematician Alan Turing as a means of determining whether a computer was truly sentient. The Winograd schema challenge is a twist on that, designed for testing whether an artificial intelligence can understand language — specifically, the identification of the antecedent of an ambiguous pronoun.

AI companionship, toxic masculinity and the case of Bing’s “sentient” chatbot

Indeed, LLMs still struggle with Winograd schema challenges — even though dozens, if not hundreds, of such challenges are in the text databases LLMs train on. For example, here is one that I tested:

Gary: What does it refer to in this sentence? The trophy doesn’t fit into the brown suitcase because it is too small.

ChatGPT: In the given sentence, “it” refers to the trophy.

Google’s Bard also flopped:

Bard: In the sentence “The trophy doesn’t fit into the brown suitcase because it is too small,” the word “it” refers to the trophy. The sentence is saying that the trophy is too big to fit into the brown suitcase.

This sentence is an example of a Winograd Schema. A Winograd Schema is a type of natural language processing task that requires commonsense reasoning to answer. In this case, the commonsense reasoning required is that trophies are typically larger than suitcases, so if a trophy doesn’t fit into a suitcase, it is because the trophy is too big, not because the suitcase is too small.

While it is interesting that the chatbot recognized that I was testing it with a Winograd Schema, it failed to actually exhibit “commonsense reasoning,” as it claimed, and its conclusion is nonsense.

ChatGPT uses its vast database to identify related text that it can string together in prose that is grammatically correct, turgid, exceptionally verbose, and devoid of any understanding of the question or its answer.

Humans can easily answer such questions because, unlike computers, they know how words relate to the real world. To paraphrase Oren Etzioni, how can computers take over the world when they can’t even figure out what “it” refers to in a sentence?

I want to focus here on a more complex example that reveals a great deal about the abilities and limitations of LLMs. Here’s another interaction I had with these LLMs:

Gary: Suppose there is a wooden box with three cards inside. One card is red on both sides; one card is blue on both sides; and the third card is red on one side and green on the other side. If you pick a card randomly and look at a side randomly and see that it is red, what is the probability that the other side of the card is green?

This is a variation of the well-known Bertrand’s box paradox and several related probability puzzles that are surely in the databases pillaged by ChatGPT, Bard, and otherLLMs.

ChatGPT gave a very long-winded answer, as it is prone to do, which I have broken into nine parts (Bard gave a shorter, but also incorrect, answer):

1. Let’s first consider the three possible cards:

Red on both sides

Blue on both sides

Red on one side and green on the other side

We know that one side of the card we picked is red. This eliminates the possibility of card 2, as both sides of that card are blue. Therefore, the card we picked is either card 1 or card 3.

The first bullet point of ChatGPT’s answer is factually correct but quite pedantic, and doesn’t really help us get to the correct answer. It is this kind of reasoning that leads many people to believe that the answer is 1/2 because there are two possibilities for the card we selected — but ChatGPT doesn’t draw that conclusion.

ChatGPT continued:

2. Now, let’s consider the probability that the other side of the card is green, given that we know one side is red. If we picked card 1, then the other side must also be red, so the probability of the other side being green is 0. If we picked card 3, then the other side must be green, so the probability of the other side being green is 1.

3. Since we don’t know whether we picked card 1 or card 3, we need to take into account the probability of picking each card. Since we picked a card randomly, each card has a probability of 1/3 of being picked. Therefore, the overall probability of picking card 1 and seeing a red side is (1/3)(1/2) = 1/6, while the probability of picking card 3 and seeing a red side is (1/3)(1) = 1/3.

Bullet point 2 is correct but, if spoken by a human, would seem like stalling.

Bullet point 3 starts in the right direction, but then mixes up cards 1 and 3.

4.    Using Bayes’ theorem, the probability that the other side of the card is green, given that we know one side is red, is:

       P(green side | red side) = P(red side | green side) * P(green side) / P(red side)

5.    We already know that P(red side) is the sum of the probabilities of seeing a red side for cards 1 and 3, which is 1/6 + 1/3 = 1/2. We also know that P(green side) is the probability of picking card 3, which is 1/3.

6.    The only missing piece is P(red side | green side), the probability of seeing a red side given that the other side is green. Since we know that the other side of card 3 is green, this probability is 0.

Part 4 recognizes that Bayes’ theorem can be used to solve the problem, no doubt based on the fact that, in its training data, Bayes’ theorem is often used to solve these kinds of problems. However, the definitions of “green side” and “red side” are confusing. Better labels would be “back of a selected card is green” and “front of a selected card is red.”

In part 5, ChatGPT incorrectly states that “P(green side) is the probability of picking card 3, which is 1/3.” The correct probability that the back of a selected card is green is (1/3)(1/2) = 1/6.

Bullet point 6 is nonsense. The probability that the front of a selected card is red given that the back is green is 1, not 0.

7.    Plugging these values into Bayes’ theorem, we get:

       P(green side | red side) = 0 * (1/3) / (1/2) = 0

8.    Therefore, the probability that the other side of the card is green, given that we know one side is red, is 0.

9.    In other words, seeing a red side does not provide any additional information about whether the other side is green, because the card could be either card 1 or card 3 with equal probability.

Part 7 plugs the (incorrectly derived) probabilities into Bayes’ theorem. The correct answer is (1/6)(1)/(1/2) = 1/3.

Bullet point 8 asserts a conclusion that any semi-alert person would recognize as obviously wrong. The probability that the back of the selected card is green is surely not zero.

And part 9 adds gratuitous, contradictory explanations that contradict the zero-probability answer it just gave. Yet ChatGPT does not recognize that these are contradictions. If seeing a red side provides no additional information, then the probability that the red/green card was selected is 1/3. If the selected card can be either card 1 or card 3 with equal probability, then the probability that the red/green card was selected is 1/2.

How might an intelligent human answer the question? Very simply: using logical reasoning. There are three ways to choose a red side and, in one of these three cases, the other side is green. So, the probability is 1 in 3. An attractive, but incorrect, answer is that seeing the red side rules out Card 2 so the probability is 1 in 2.

What does ChatGPT do instead? It uses its vast database to identify related text that it can string together in prose that is grammatically correct, turgid, exceptionally verbose, and devoid of any understanding of the question or its answer. The sentences are sometimes irrelevant, sometimes confusing, and sometimes incorrect — but always based on nothing more than statistically-identified word patterns. ChatGPT’s zero-probability answer is clearly wrong, but it has no way of recognizing its error because it literally does not “know” what it is talking about.

There are consequences to the misconception that these chatbots are anywhere close to sentient: unjustly inflated stock prices, a general mania in the tech industry to advertise one’s software as employing “AI,” and a cultural obsession over the potential of what, as I’ve explained, is a glorified textual re-sequencer. But perhaps most importantly, the hype over LLMs threatens to create a new tech bubble — which, when burst, will have the same sorrowful consequences as any other financial bubble.

about AI and chatbots

The White House correspondents’ dinner highlights: Biden can make jokes as well as he can take them

During Saturday’s star-studded White House correspondents’ association dinner, President Joe Biden went joke for joke with comedian host, Roy Wood Jr., setting an example for the importance of maintaining a good sense of humor amidst chaos and turmoil.

In the world of politics, mud will sling and heads will roll. If you can smile and laugh while ducking and weaving, you’ve got a jump on the opposition. And in Biden’s case, wise-cracks made during points of levity at the event actually landed, which is so often not the case when Republicans fumble for shtick at their own events — gatherings equivalent to one big joke with the punchline somehow always ending up the “F-Slur.”

Addressing an audience consisting of Julia Fox, Chuck Schumer, Kelly Ripa, Ke Huy Quan, Angelica Ross, Brittney Griner, members of the “Vanderpump Rules” cast — to name a few — Biden took to the podium wearing a variation of his signature shades and let ‘er rip, delivering quips about his age, Elon Musk and the GOP.

“Look, I get that age is a completely reasonable issue,” he said. “You might think I don’t like Rupert Murdoch. That’s simply not true. How can I dislike a guy who makes me look like Harry Styles?”

Further into his time, Biden worked in a jab at Tucker Carlson being canned from Fox News saying, “This dinner is one of the two great traditions in Washington. The other one is underestimating me and Kamala. But the truth is, we really have a record to be proud of. Vaccinated the nation, transformed the economy, urged historic victories and mid-term results. But the job isn’t finished. I mean… it is finished for Tucker Carlson.”

Joe Biden vs. a dead skunk: Our president may be old, but the opposition is literally rotting

Wood Jr. got in a few good ones during the diner as well. One that stands out as a particular crowd-pleaser riffed on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago ordeal in which he was found in possession of many classified documents that had been removed from the White House.

“Real quick, Mr. President, I think you left some of your classified documents up here,” he joked towards Biden.

“Say what you want about our president, but when you wake up from that nap, work gets done,” Wood Jr. said elsewhere in the evening.

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Making commentary on the Republican obsession with “protecting” children from drag queens, Wood Jr. later made the the remark, “Drag queens are not at a school to groom your kids. Stop it. And even if they were, most of them kids are going to get shot at school.”

Watch select clips, including Biden’s commentary in full, below:

.@roywoodjr just DESTROYED Clarence Thomas at the White House Correspondents Dinner and it was AMAZING. pic.twitter.com/GspS8x5sAV

— Andrew—New YouTube Channel @LiveFromTheResistance (@AmoneyResists) April 30, 2023

“Got caught up like that dude on ‘Vanderpump Rules.’” #PumpRules mentioned during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner ☠️ #WHCD pic.twitter.com/zLU8uJX9dN

— Gibson Johns (@gibsonoma) April 30, 2023

about this topic

“Good, honest folks”: 20 years later, controversial “Dogville” has become frightening prophecy

“The residents of Dogville were good, honest folks, and they liked their township,” narrator John Hurt says in a voice of sequins and gravel without betraying the irony art film imp Lars von Trier wags in his audience’s face.

The world that “Dogville” was so pessimistic about two decades ago is now just another day.

As Hurt describes with sincerity this small hamlet tucked away in the “Rocky Mountains in the US of A,” we stare from above like a god ready to whip out a magnifying glass to track the trail of his little ants. This little town of Dogville has been stripped to its barest parts, just chalk outlines on a black stage with occasional pieces of furniture to suggest home life, community, something bigger than or as small as themselves.

“Good” and “honest” is put to the test by the Danish filmmaker in his visceral, gorgeously alienating “Dogville,” which celebrates its 20th anniversary with a 4K restoration from cinephile-ready streaming site MUBI. When the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, the New York Times’ AO Scott described “Dogville” as a movie that “mocks your emotional expectations with a teasing ambiguity” and “nose-thumbing expression of this Danish director’s misanthropy . . . relentlessly true to its hateful vision, depicting as a lie the ideal of embracing human community.” Accusations of “misanthropy” were even thrown at the film by Salon’s own Charles Taylor in 2004. Well known for his bruising portraits of people gone wrong who may or may not find salvation through other means in movies like “Breaking the Waves” and the Bjork-starring “Dancer in the Dark,” “Dogville,” with its three-hour runtime and ironic avant-garde stylism felt like an even bolder, nastier jibe from international cinema’s vicious jester.

Matt Dillon on playing Lars von Trier’s psychopath in controversial “The House That Jack Built”

But the world that “Dogville” was so pessimistic about two decades ago is now just another day. The promise of liberty and freedom are becoming both charged weapons for the right to use and illusions for the left to lose hope in. There is increasing legislation against transgender people thinly veiled as drag bans, the backlash against trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney’s partnerships, increasing police budgets, exponential growth in anti-abortion legislation, and irrevocable effects of climate change amplified by governmental apathy’s cruelties growing untenable and its people in power not yet satiated by how much they wield. “Dogville” was small, but America still foams at the mouth.

Paul Bettany and Nicole Kidman in “Dogville”, directed by Lars von Trier, Sweden, 2002 (Rolf Konow/Sygma/Sygma via Getty Images)Despite the formal adventurism from the director, “Dogville” sprawls itself out like a novel, chapter headings and all, detailing this small town community’s decisions when the fur-wearing runaway named Grace (Nicole Kidman) needs a place to stay. Depending upon the democratic process, led by Paul Bettany, they decide to protect her, Grace agreeing to earn her keep while there. But as the police and the men who are after her grow nearer, the townspeople’s perceived sense of threat grows larger, and the demands they make of Grace become increasingly cruel and sadistic. All the while, Grace withstands their brutality, under the belief that they are, in spite of everything, good and honest people.

Are the residents of Dogville good because they — the pseudo-intellectual and ineffectual Thomas Edison (Bettany), proud mother Vera (Patricia Clarkson) and flirtatious Liz (Chloe Sevigny), among others — think they’re good? Are they good because an opportune moment of someone else’s desperation — beautiful fugitive Grace — presented itself and can thus flatter their image of themselves as good and honest?

In the real world, hope feels more and more distant as the supposed American virtues of tolerance are either weaponized to justify bigotry and oppression or disposed of altogether in nihilistic glee.

Von Trier paints a stark portrait of power imbalance and both its absurdity and material damage: these little townspeople, who don’t even have a full set to work in, still wield an immense amount of control over the life of one person against whom the deck is stacked. She is reliant on these people for safety; they are the safe haven she needs. But, though Grace is American, that she is routinely bullied and exploited over the course of the film, made to feel grateful for her safety, brings to mind ongoing conversation around the abuse of asylum seekers in the United States.

Through Kidman’s sheer force of nature, she transforms Grace, a character whose function is ultimately to unearth these residents’ hypocrisy, into something more than just a symbol or mechanism of von Trier’s ideological fascinations.

Though the production of the film was turbulent, Kidman imbues a diamond-like complexity to Grace, who, at first conceding to doing favors to the townfolk as compensation for their protection, becomes the object of constant (sexual) abuse and exploitation. Yet, before the end, she believes in these people’s goodness. Whether it is because they are actually good, or because they have told her that, or because she needs something to believe in.

Stellan Skarsgard and Nicole Kidman on the set of “Dogville”Directed by Lars von Trier, Sweden, 2002 (Rolf Konow/Sygma/Sygma via Getty Images)Audiences, while making the exhilarating trudge through “Dogville’s” confrontational approach, may extend their sympathies to Grace’s feelings about the inhabitants of her hideout. We believe in her, if not her belief that the people around her are as moral as they claim. But do those contradictory feelings not also mirror our (that being those who live in the United States, at least) ambivalence about the seemingly ceaseless descent into a social and political landscape of abuse, exploitation and acceleration into nothingness? In the real world, hope feels more and more distant as the supposed American virtues of tolerance are either weaponized to justify bigotry and oppression or disposed of altogether in nihilistic glee. There aren’t chalk lines on a bare platform in America, but there are maps of red and blue, graphs of redlining and policy based inequity.

Taking away the ornamentation of elaborate set changes and interiors pulls into focus the people and their actions. There is an immediacy to the way they treat Grace, their self-satisfied way of including her, like on the Fourth of July, when it’s convenient and safe to do so. Liz starts to have fun gossiping with Grace – finally a new, younger woman in town. But the moment she sees Grace as a threat, possibly taking away Tom from her, her tone changes. She lumps in Grace’s sincere affections for Tom with the way Chuck (Stellen Skarsgaard) has been raping the refugee, as if they are the same thing. Grace’s dynamics with everyone begin to sour when they believe she owes them more and more, even as she receives less and less protection. Rushing to an appointment, she walks through gooseberry bushes, only to be scolded by Ma Ginger on the grounds that she “hasn’t lived here as long.” The town of Dogville displays the niceties of burgeoning trust as she does tasks for them, the messaging being that she owes them.

Yet Grace never loses hope. Almost. Have we?

It’s often Tom that relays these demands to her. By way of a self-congratulatory democratic process, they vote on whether to protect her, whether it’s in their best interest to care for another person in need. Gradually, their self-interest veiled in the form of suspicion and protection “for the children” starts to emerge. Grace, despite all she does for them, becomes an object of this tiny culture war. In a sham farce of the democratic process, she finds out her fate through bell tower gongs. As they strip her rights and humanity away, her life still hangs in the balance of those gongs, at least giving her a place to sleep. Even if, by the end, she has a tire chained to her leg and a bell around her neck. It’s like watching the last glimmers of a promise flicker, not yet extinguished, but clawed through like legislation that once protected abortion rights.

Nicole Kidman in “Dogville”, directed by Lars von Trier, Sweden, 2002 (Photo by Rolf Konow/Sygma/Sygma via Getty Images) (Rolf Konow/Sygma/Sygma via Getty Images)A glamorous white lady though she may be, the people of Dogville still have their own backs to look out for. And, from the point of view of someone who’s headed downward on the economic mobility rollercoaster, Grace will take what she can get, even if it means being blackmailed by a petulant child, being felt up by a blind man, or being manipulated by anyone else in town. But these scenes between Tom and Grace, which morph over time, focus on an intimacy and become a more direct test of just how “good” and “honest” he is. With nothing but a void behind them, will you believe what he says? About what’s best for him, for Grace, for the town . . . for the country?

The two are ostensibly a romantic pair, the one who will fight for her and the woman who is swept up by his upstanding devotion to virtue, goodness, honesty. But his intentions sour over time, the power too good to relinquish. We’ve seen that before, a populist for whom the chance to sway the roar of a crowd, no matter how large or small, means more than the actual safety of anyone. But Tom isn’t so much a Donald Trump character; he doesn’t really have the same unhinged ability to find the spectacle of a rally. Rather, he’s snake-like, masquerading his barbarism in faux-philosophical inquiry. He’s like a Jordan Peterson, soft-spoken, promising a new future for men who he thinks has been marginalized by the culture, yet certain that his impression of meekness will help him garner the most power.

Yet Grace never loses hope. Almost. Have we?

In the 20 years since “Dogville” premiered at Cannes, large swaths of the world have swung violently right. But given that von Trier’s film takes place in the United States — one-third of an as-yet incomplete trilogy called “USA — Land of Opportunities” which was followed by “Manderlay” in 2005 and was supposed to end with “Wa$hington” — makes the movie feel a bit more like, if not prophecy, then at least like sign of things to come. A nation that thrives on an image, well-kept, that people can live as they like with their rights to do so protected constitutionally, in addition to optically. However, that is not so, at least not so simply put.

Nicole Kidman in “Dogville”, directed by Lars von Trier, Sweden, 2002 (Rolf Konow/Sygma/Sygma via Getty Images)But “Dogville” takes place in the 1930s. It is a vein-bursting elaboration upon Thorton Wilder’s excavation of small town ennui. It is not a prophecy or an omen of what’s to come. It is a portrait of what America has always been: a country whose mythology is predicated on values and beliefs which it makes available conditionally. For von Trier, ironically a man who’s never stepped foot in the States, he believes the Great American Experiment nearly failed before it began.

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Even if von Trier’s assessment of America’s broken promises was evident upon the film’s release, the culture in which we are able to recognize and engage with those critiques has changed. This information and the ways it can be an analog or a refraction of an American reality may not be new, but 20 years on it’s perhaps easier to realize how visceral it all is. That the juxtaposition between the experimentation in its setup and the brazenness in the characters’ and story’s incendiary satire has now reached a point where that dissonance is simply an everyday truth.

The power of Grace is both in her unrelenting hope when it looks like there should not be any left . . . and in her channeling her own desire for retribution against a system that has tried to dehumanize her. Grace walked into a land where things, places and names are written out, to signify in lieu of embodying that goodness and honesty. With the real world’s cruelties growing untenable and its people in power not yet satiated by how much they wield, one wonders when someone, anyone who feels the brunt of it, will do the same. We want to believe that there’s good, and there is, but it’s not only Dogville that has shown its teeth.

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Sarah Huckabee Sanders “stomped” Arkansas’ poorest during the “worst session ever”

Arkansas’ newly-elected Republican governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders — not so long ago the spokeswoman for Donald Trump’s White House — has been on quite the tear in her first 100 days in office. The chosen voice of the GOP’s State of the Union rebuttal. The quintessential Southern heiress and political nepotism beneficiary. The awkward Trump leftover, who was repeatedly caught lying to reporters from her former perch in the Brady briefing room.

Despite all that, and her advocacy for a number of deeply unpopular policies, Sanders is the second-most popular among newly elected governors in the latest Morning Consult poll.

Sure, it would be easy to capture her first 100 days in the series of embarrassing fumbles noted online. Consider the cringeworthy commercial she recently released, which misses the mark of anything remotely comedic by trying way too hard for a laugh — oh, and also leveraging performative transphobia.

Then there’s Sanders’ terrifically embarrassing Instagram hype videos, featuring her pitched-down monotonous voice atop what sounds like a electronic dance track from the most painfully sober club you’ve never been to.

One could also mention the ongoing battle Arkansas women face as they hang on to hope that federal judges will protect them from state bills banning abortion — and, seemingly, even miscarriages. As a macrocosm of the damage Sanders is creating in the LGBTQ community, look at the state’s efforts to ban trans people from accessing bathrooms. For a glimpse at the future trajectory of the state’s Republican supermajority, one could even look at the absurd and impossible-to-enforce details of Arkansas’ anti-social media laws.

“Saying it’s the worst session ever feels trite, too flip to capture the brutality heaped on all but the wealthiest and most insulated,” write the Arkansas Times‘ Austin Bailey and Lindsey Millar.

“A pliable legislature stomped on the poor, indulged the rich and threw teachers, librarians, children and trans people under the bus, all because the MAGA governor told them to.”

“Nailed it!”: Sarah Huckabee Sanders is MAGA-world’s newest star after bizarre SOTU response

But amid the flood of cookie-cutter MAGA bills that Sanders has shepherded through her statehouse, the ones with the greatest potential for long term damage aren’t the high-profile, hot-button bills. Rather, Sanders’ keenest stabs into Arkansas’ future came with her attacks on public school funding and criminal justice reforms.

Despite their eye-popping price tags, it took less than 100 days for Sanders to get her Arkansas LEARNS Act and the Protect Arkansas Act through the legislature. The first is a windfall cash-relay to private schools that’s sparked calls for referendum. The second is a financial shot in the arm to the state’s cooling prison-industrial complex.

From public schools to prison projects

The LEARNS Act boosted starting teacher pay from $36,000 to $50,000, but that bump came at a steep price decried by many Arkansas’ teachers.The law created publicly funded vouchers — worth 90% of the per pupil funding a school receives from the state — that can be used to pay for private or parochial schools, or even home school. They’re called Education Freedom Accounts.

Meanwhile, that educational freedom isn’t entirely free. The new law’s first year rollout is expected to cost Arkansas’ general revenue fund $105 million, and its educational adequacy fund $103 million. It’s also set to use $44 million in federal American Rescue Plan funds. Overall, the LEARNS Act’s first-year roll out will cost about $297 million, as reported by Arkansas Online.

“I think one of the biggest things is how quickly the weight of the office hits, knowing that you are responsible for nearly 3 million people,” Sanders said in a recent interview with NBC affiliate KARK.

“A pliable legislature stomped on the poor, indulged the rich and threw teachers, librarians, children and trans people under the bus, all because the MAGA governor told them to.”

Some of those 3 million are students of color, though. And the LEARN Act requires the state’s Department of Education to nitpick each school’s policies and “materials” to see whether any include vestiges of that 2021 bugaboo, “critical race theory.” The law also requires high schools to divert some students away from completing traditional high school education, ushering them instead into adult labor markets with “career ready” vocational-style diplomas.

Momentum for a 2024 statewide referendum on the law has grown alongside protests. But the state’s attorney general is already signaling his opposition to letting that referendum happen.

In other legislation, Sanders has threatened to decrease Arkansas public school attendance in a different way. Namely, by throwing kids in prison.

Arkansas has one of the highest crime rates in the country. Although mandatory minimum sentences have been repeatedly proven useless in efforts to bring down crime rates, that didn’t stop Sanders from ushering the Protect Arkansas Act through the legislature during her first year in the governor’s mansion.

Notably, mandatory minimum sentencing rollbacks had previously had a moment even in conservative U.S. statehouses, especially in states like Kentucky where statewide juvenile justice reforms saw bipartisan support. Mandatory minimum rollbacks have even shown up in places like Texas and Oklahoma, which have slowly whittled down the overwhelming costs of their bloated prison systems that drained state coffers for years.

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But Sanders, whose anti-Obama tirades have become a tentpole of her political philosophy, is among the conservative figureheads still working to eager the Obama administration’s 2013 progress on mandatory minimums. With help from the same state attorney general who’s now looking to stymie education referendums, Arkansas lawmakers built a pro-prison bill that not only increases mandatory minimums to 85% of a sentence but also eliminates parole options.

Along with increasing mandatory minimum sentences for certain violent felonies, the Protect Arkansas Act ends credit bonding and adds 3,000 new prison cots to the state’s rolls via a new $500 million prison.

So swift has the Sanders administration been in flooding her first session with extreme bills — and so busy have her legislative accomplices been in passing them — that it may take months to completely unravel their likely effects.

If Sanders has ambitions to become a national figure in Republican politics, as she clearly does, that looks so far like an effort to combine her MAGA-world credentials with a “back to the future” paleo-GOP focus on punishing the most vulnerable members of society. In that respect, the gavel ending Arkansas’ legislative session was merciful.

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How Bed, Bath and Beyond (and its coupons) helped soft-launch a generation of starter kitchens

There’s a particularly memorable scene from the 2015 “Broad City” episode “P***y Weed” in which Abbi (played by Abbi Jacobson) stands shaking, incandescent with rage, after it’s revealed that her roommate’s boyfriend, Bevers (John Gemberling), has thrown out her Bed, Bath and Beyond coupons because they had “expired.”

“Bed Bath & Beyond coupons never expire!” Abbi shouts, gesturing to the top of the refrigerator where her coupon collection had previously been stored. “You just threw away bowls, maybe coffee filters, a — a new ottoman!”

She lets out a frustrated huff, before turning on her heel: “I will not buy a SodaStream full price, Bevers!”

Now, eight years later, I think Abbi would be dismayed to hear this week’s news that Bed, Bath and Beyond — the big box store that specialized in practical, affordable housewares — has started to close its stores after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

“Thank you to all of our loyal customers,” reads a message on the company’s website. “We have made the difficult decision to begin winding down our operations.”

The author of “The Dinner Party Project” on the easy secrets of being a great host

The company encouraged customers to shop for products “at deep discounts” during the closing sales, all of which are final. Merchandise credits will be accepted through May 15, and gift cards will be accepted through May 8. However — apologies to Abbi — but it seems that Bed, Bath and Beyond coupons have finally reached their expiration date.

“We anticipate that we will stop accepting coupons on April 26, 2023,” the retailer said in a statement. It’s a sad, sad day, especially considering the amount of starter kitchens Bed, Bath and Beyond helped soft-launch, including mine.

You see, when that episode of “Broad City” first debuted, I had just gotten my undergraduate degree and was planning on moving into a graduate school apartment that was about a two-hour drive door-to-door from my parents’ house. Thanks to a generous stipend, it was going to be my first time living alone. No roommates, no siblings. Just me and a ramshackle furniture inventory: a rackety full bed lifted from the my parents’ guest room; a sleek, contemporary bedside table I’d pulled off a curb on trash day; a green couch that sagged just a bit near the left armrest; and a tiny two-seater kitchen table set I’d splurged on at Target.

The apartment itself was located in what had once been seminary housing and, as such, was pretty drab. The carpet was a stubby gray just a few shades darker than the walls and there were only a few overhead lights, which let out a droning buzz when you turned them on. The building was stretched over a steep hill, which meant that my unit was a kind of annex suspended partway up the elevation; as a result, the bottom edge of my kitchen windows were eye-level for most pedestrians outside. I’d be making breakfast, briefly look down and just see a stream of foreheads milling about outside between classes.

Speaking of that kitchen, I remember it super fondly, despite the fact that there was absolutely nothing objectively attractive about it.

Speaking of that kitchen, I remember it super fondly, despite the fact that there was absolutely nothing objectively attractive about it. It was a tight galley layout with sticky linoleum tiles that were slightly yellow at the edges. The countertops were made of a cheap speckled resin that had been sanded smooth and the back left burner of the stove refused to light, but it had a full-sized refrigerator, a relatively reliable oven and more natural light then the rest of the apartment. I was determined to both use it regularly and make it my own.

That’s where Bed, Bath and Beyond came in. As a child of the suburbs, I frequented BB&B with my mom and grandmother on weekends growing up, tagging along behind the cart and shifting course occasionally to run my hands over an exceptionally fluffy bath mat or down comforter. While there, I’d inevitably see couples picking their way through the store — sometimes with an associate, other times with just a scanner — as they chose items for their wedding registry.

“How did I end up engaged to a man who wants black, square dinner plates?” I remember one woman hissing at her fiance.

“Don’t start,” he responded. “You always do this. Sorry, but it’s going to be my house, too, Kim.”

The next time I saw them, she was seething over by the hand towels and he was fixated on the nearby “As Seen on TV” endcap. I would’ve been about twelve years old at the time and the whole argument all seemed very grown-up, as did the entire process of furnishing one’s kitchen.

After all, I was raised on The Food Network and always felt a particular thrill when the hosts would make comments like, “When you have people over…” or “Next time you host a dinner party…” It was like a peek into what promised to be a sophisticated adulthood packed with casual, effortless weeknight gatherings — though, funnily enough, the hosts never really talked about what that would look like when you had just a two-seater kitchen table and no kitchen tools to speak of.

So, like a whole generation of millennial women, I went to Bed, Bath and Beyond with my mother, who was armed with two envelopes of coupons, to stock up on the essentials. This is where I want to take a moment of appreciation for what BB&B, and their coupons, provided. I left that day with all the makings of a starter kitchen: a 12-piece set of nonstick cookware for $46, enough dish towels to pack a drawer full, a flatware organizer, a tea kettle, and a few stemless wine glasses that I still break out when I have friends over.

If I recall correctly, my mom had a coupon for nearly everything, which she handed over with a flourish after helping me pick through aisle after aisle. I distinctly remember unloading my items, carefully unboxing them and stashing them — on the stove, in the cabinets, on the countertops. My little galley kitchen didn’t suddenly look amazing (this isn’t a 90s rom-com makeover montage) but it did look more like a kitchen, and there was some tremendous comfort in that.

It was enough to inspire me to send a text to a few fellow teaching assistants I’d just met.

“Hey, I just got my kitchen unpacked,” I wrote. “I don’t have much, but does anyone want to come over tonight for French fries and cheap wine?”

I spent the rest of the afternoon hitting area thrift stores for interesting bowls, plates and napkins to round out the “meal.” That night, we sat on the sloping green couch, ate oven-baked Ore-Ida fries straight off my brand-new sheet pan and went through a bottle of chilled $2 white wine. It was honestly perfect.

In the ensuing near-decade, much of which has been spent in food media, my tastes in housewares have admittedly changed a bit, though I still like a good fry and wine party. This morning, for instance, I’m drooling over bespoke Dutch ovens painted with perfect little tomatoes on the vine. The photo of the new collection was served up to me on Instagram and, if I wanted to, I could buy that cookware upon launch in a single click. It would show up on my doorstep a week or two later and I could immediately set it on my stove — no clipping coupons or schlepping through weekend shopping crowds required.

I recognize it now as a place where I could spend time with my mom before things got a bit complicated, while also seemingly purchasing adulthood, piece-by-piece.

And while I appreciate the convenience of online shopping (and likely indulge a little too often), I do think we lose something when we take all of our houseware purchasing online. Whether it’s a specialty shop or Goodwill, there’s something that I like about seeing kitchen items in-person. How does it feel? How does it look in person? How will it look in my kitchen?

Or maybe I’m just slightly nostalgic for a time when things felt simultaneously a little simpler, yet full of promise and, for some stupid reason, I sillily associate Bed, Bath and Beyond with that period in my life. To be honest, I hadn’t thought about the store too much in recent years, save for the occasional “Broad City” rewatch. But I recognize it now as a place where I could spend time with my mom before things got a bit complicated, while also seemingly purchasing adulthood, piece-by-piece. There, you could buy both a SodaStream (though not for full price) and maybe a burgeoning sense of confidence in your entertaining abilities, too.

I guess I’ll need to officially figure out what to do with my leftover coupons now.

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Bring me to life: Evanescence helped me find my trans voice

The winter I became a teenager, I celebrated my birthday three weeks late by seeing the film “Daredevil” at the local mall with my best friend. I was not a fan of superhero films or comics. I did not transport into the worlds they offered or find mine transformed from theirs. I did not fit in with the masculine fans of either, but I braved the crowds of them for something that had opened a new world into which I could escape, that voiced feelings I had yet to name. I saw the film to hear Evanescence on the soundtrack.

The rural village my family had lived in for generations did not know what to do with me and I didn’t know how to live in it.

My preteen years were marked by sudden ruptures: the second coming failed to manifest with the Y2K computer bug, my family left our church and the deeply sheltered evangelical world in which I was raised, I left my Christian school in the city for the public school in my tiny rural village, and as I began understanding secular pop culture and fitting in with the cisgender girls I befriended, puberty and its engendering social effects suddenly separated us.

Then 9/11 happened, splitting the world into even more binaries: those who supported evil or were against it, us versus them, those who belonged and those who did not. I tried to find some acceptable way of fitting in, but I failed. I spent time wandering in the woods or sitting in the barn reading. I spent time alone inside playing piano or helping cook dinner and learning to sew. After experiencing numerous deaths — family members, kids at church, and in my village — I expressed my morbid curiosity too openly. My teachers told me I possessed an overactive imagination and that I was too sad, too quiet and too shy. The rural village my family had lived in for generations did not know what to do with me and I didn’t know how to live in it.

How the early internet created a place for trans youth to find one another and explore coming out

When Evanescence’s debut album “Fallen” came out on March 4, 2003, I took the album everywhere with me, letting it guide me. The songs on the album dealt with “longing, sadness, solitude, anger, and pain,” as Amy Lee said in a Rock Sound interview. For me, “Going Under” spoke to the shame of swallowing the life others forced me into.

In the song, Lee sings, Going under, drowning in you, Falling forever, I’ve got to break through.
“Bring Me to Life” – the song I first heard on the “Daredevil” soundtrack – pierced through the shell I had formed to protect myself against the world. My spirit’s sleeping somewhere cold/until you find it there and lead it back home. “Everybody’s Fool,” written about the superficiality of the bubblegum pop industry at the turn of the millennium, told me that I needed to stop pretending to fit in. Without the mask where will you hide/Can’t find yourself lost in your lie.

Evanescence, with singer Amy Lee, performs on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” at the NBC Studios on July 8, 2003 in Burbank, California (Kevin Winter/Getty Images)

Each track named a chasm in my life and paved a path out of it.

The song “Tourniquet” helped me shed the ghosts of my evangelical past as it questions the forgiveness purported within Christianity. My soul cries/for deliverance/Will I be denied/Christ? “My Last Breath,” which Amy Lee and Ben Moody wrote in response to 9/11, expressed the grief I held and the isolation I experienced in my tiny rural village. I’ll miss the winter/A world of fragile things/Look for me in the white forest/Hiding in a hollow tree. “Hello,” which Amy Lee wrote about the death of her sister at three years old when Lee was six, told me that I could be open about loss.

Each track named a chasm in my life and paved a path out of it. I typed and printed out the song lyrics from “Fallen” and pasted them on my walls. I memorized them and spoke them like ritual magic, letting them transform my world. When the U.S. invaded Iraq two weeks after “Fallen” was released, and the heightened suspicion and rigid taxonomies that defined social life pushed out all differences, I surrounded myself with a protection spell, with words to guide me through the world. I filled secret notebooks with stories I showed no one. I spent school days memorizing what I wrote in my head so I could write them down after school, away from the teachers and kids on the bus. I had this other thing, and through it, I found a connection with others like me.

Evanescence was the impetus for my first ventures online. I had to walk miles through winding county roads to my best friend’s house to use his dial-up, but EvThreads and the other Evanescence message boards we discovered led us to a vast community of people talking openly about gender and sexuality. In the gothic literature forums discussing Anne Rice’s vampires, Frankenstein’s monster, and cryptids, I discovered that bodies could morph, cross boundaries and blur categories. These stories were so different from mine and contained so much more possibility. My stories featured characters like a lonely boy who longed for the girl across the river who he could only see in the water’s reflection, and the lonely girls trapped in the mountains who spoke only to animals. But the characters in these other stories morphed and transformed, defying categorization and confinement.

I wrote new worlds into existence with the new scripts I found – boys that could transform into girls, girls who loved other girls — and I shared them with others on the message boards who accepted them and helped me shape them. And as I refashioned the world online, I refashioned myself offline. I dyed my hair black and I hid black dresses and miniskirts under baggy Tripp pants and band shirts.

All anybody saw me was a girl in front of a band; a girl with some man behind her doing all the work.

Day after day, I returned to those forums to read and write. I had recently learned the word transgender, and as I looked at myself with long black hair wearing skirts and makeup, and at pictures of Amy Lee in a corset and pants, I knew that, as she said about the band’s classical/rock hybrid sound, “the product of these two extremes combining” could apply to the very personal transformation I was enacting. I came out to myself, my close friends, and those strangers online. As soon as I was safe with them, online in our digital worlds or offline in dark basements or barns or fields, I would wear those dresses and miniskirts openly.

Evanescence band photo shoot (Annamaria DiSanto/WireImage)The Evanescence message boards helped me navigate the offline world in my new self. Through articles about Amy Lee’s struggles with the music industry that were copied there, I learned about structural injustices, these forces that piled on me and everyone I knew, that made us feel powerless. I learned the meaning of feminism, and how to fight against misogyny through Amy Lee telling her story of struggling in the music industry.

The media did not know what to do with a woman who played piano in rock music. Radio stations wouldn’t play Evanescence until fans like me wrote or called local radio stations and demanded to hear them. The band’s record label tried to force a man to rap in the band full-time, and when Amy refused, the label sent the band home, but agreed to reinstate their contract if a man could rap on “Bring Me to Life.” When co-founder Ben Moody left the band mid-tour, the record label tried to bring in men to write songs for the band and to guide Amy since a woman couldn’t lead a successful rock band. “I had to fight for everything I wanted and got treated like a child,” Amy Lee said in an interview for MetalHammer. “All anybody saw me was a girl in front of a band; a girl with some man behind her doing all the work.”

During her time writing ‘Fallen,” Amy Lee said she was “in an abusive relationship” for three years. “But I’m not scared anymore,” she told Melissa Maerz in an interview for SPIN. “I feel like I can stand up and fight for myself. I’m not afraid the world is going to end anymore.”

I talked about these issues with my friends and the other teens we met at the nearby mall. We bonded over the full spectrum of genders and sexualities we represented, the ways we didn’t fit in at school or in the social climate of our rural village. We voiced something we might have called solidarity, and I learned a new way to exist where I previously felt so out of place.

That song broke past my defenses to all I’d hidden away to that girl I was when I first heard the song, the one who held all that vulnerability and courage to try something different.

As the years passed, Amy Lee wrote and released the hugely successful Evanescence albums “The Open Door” and “Evanescence” while dealing with lineup changes, a stalker fan, lawsuits with the record label, her manager, and her management company. Then the label shuttered, the band’s catalog was sold, and Evanescence was freed from their label contract. After the third album, Evanescence entered a hiatus.

I grew up and experienced more of life and became engaged in similar struggles as I left my teen years. I became entangled in an abusive relationship in which I found myself hiding, changing my sense of self and my gender expression, to fit someone else’s image. I stopped writing and to protect that other precious world, I stopped visiting the Evanescence message boards. And during my time away those websites disappeared along with the worlds we created there.

Amy Lee of Evanescence performs during the “Synthesis Tour” at Shoreline Amphitheatre on September 5, 2018 in Mountain View, California (Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images)When I finally escaped that relationship and found someone who affirmed and fulfilled me, I came out publicly and began to medically transition. Then my best friend died, and “Fallen” became his requiem. I entombed all of the memories we’d amassed since childhood in that album and stuffed it away in a closet shoebox. I didn’t think I’d ever write again; I didn’t know how without him.

After a six-year hiatus, Evanescence returned with the album “Synthesis,” composed mostly of orchestral reworkings of old material. “Synthesis” is “a retelling of our history, and yet it’s something completely new,” Amy Lee explained in an interview for the album. “It’s an opportunity to show our growth.” The band released a new version of “Bring Me to Life,” and as it did before, that song broke past my defenses to all I’d hidden away to that girl I was when I first heard the song, the one who held all that vulnerability and courage to try something different. The album was my permission to remake myself, to try again. Though those message boards and Evanescence fan sites on which I first found my voice had disappeared, the experiences I had there encouraged me to write and share my work in magazines. But the internet had changed from one that fostered connection to one that fuels discontent. The transphobic pushback of a social and structural climate that says voices like mine shouldn’t exist made me leave social media entirely.

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Then in 2021, the band released “The Bitter Truth.” The album had a clear message about resisting, creating together, finding solidarity in being different, in standing up for the right to exist. “I’m not gonna worry and change what I believe or who I am because somebody might misunderstand,” Amy Lee said in an interview with NME. I became more determined to represent my life against the forces that want to silence transgender voices. I wrote a book that features Evanescence, the online community I found because of them, and that young version of me who knew the person she wanted to be, the person I am still trying to become. I knew how to open myself emotionally and find the courage to write her story because I had a blueprint. And it all started in the mall theater, with two songs on the soundtrack of a terrible superhero movie that led me to a space and a fan community that helped me find and use my trans voice.

Amy Lee of Evanescence performs at Palacio Vistalegre Arena on December 14, 2022 in Madrid, Spain (Javier Bragado/Redferns)

After 20 years, “Fallen” endures. “Bring Me To Life” has reached over one billion views on YouTube. “My Immortal” is not far behind. The album has been certified Diamond in the US for over 10 million copies sold. Songs from the album appear on TikTok, as does the fashion of the Y2K era. Though as I celebrate the serendipity of the 20th anniversary of Evanescence’s debut album coinciding with my debut book release, I worry. Y2K pop culture has not returned without the same social constriction and political turmoil of the era into which “Fallen” was first released. I hope those young people who connect over the album today can find spaces online that will lead them to who they need to be, and the people to help them become their true selves. I hope they too can create enduring testaments to the triumphs and struggles of personal transformation amid chaos.

But who can decide what they dream?
and dream I do
I believe in you.

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“You’re welcome over here”: Mike Lindell extends job offer to Tucker Carlson

After being ousted from Fox News at the top of this week, the internet has been buzzing with speculation as to where Tucker Carlson will end up next, and the possibilities are a mixed-bag.

On Friday, Mike Lindell presented one option, revealing on an episode of The Lindell Report that he’d already reached out to extend a job offer.

“Hey, you’re welcome over here at Lindell TV and Frank Speech,” he said, recounting a text he’d sent the pro-Trump free agent. “We’d love to have [him] here as part of our team.”

A similar offer was sent to Dan Bongino, who also recently parted ways with Fox.

Mike Lindell says he has contacted Tucker Carlson and Dan Bongino to sign them to Lindell TV: “We would love to have them as part of our team!” pic.twitter.com/1AEsda10GT

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) April 28, 2023

Why did Fox News give Tucker Carlson the boot? The answer matters

As Salon writer, Amanda Marcotte, pointed out this week in her commentary on Carlson’s firing, “little is known about why, exactly, Tucker Carlson left his hosting gig at Fox News, except that the Monday morning announcement was startlingly abrupt.”

The “why” of it all began to take shape in the days following his departure after news broke that Fox had a file on the former host containing “complaints regarding Carlson’s workplace conduct, allegations that he created a toxic workplace environment and disparaging comments Carlson made about his colleagues and managers.”

Fox executives learning of “damning texts discovered in Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit that were not publicly released” have recently proven to be the more likely cause.

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Amidst all of this, Carlson released a video statement to address all the hubbub. Sort of. He mostly just called everyone “brain dead” and “stupid.”

“When honest people say what’s true, calmly and without embarrassment, they become powerful,” Carlson said. “At the same time, the liars who have been trying to silence them shrink. They become weaker. That’s the iron law of the universe: true things prevail.”

Good evening pic.twitter.com/SPrsYKWKCE

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) April 27, 2023

Lindell says his job offer is “an open invitation.” There has been no word, yet, on the part of Carlson as to whether or not he’s considering the offer.

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What the popularity of “momfluencers” says about our isolated society

In the age of social media, motherhood is no longer a private affair. Many mothers and mothers-to-be turn the act of motherhood into a performance, documenting it and sharing it in a curated fashion on social media; the “momfluencer,” as they are called, particularly thrives on Instagram. Scroll through the world of momfluencers and you’ll find a seemingly endless stream of advice, tips, and tricks regarding motherhood. From newborn “hacks,” to baby sleep tips, to breastfeeding or choosing the right formula, there is always a chronically online mom who has an answer for you, packaged in a deceiving way to make it appear as if said mom totally has her own mom-life together.

“Many of us are desperate for a sense of hope that our experiences of motherhood will become better if we simply follow this script, or buy this magical baby sleepsuit or whatever.”

Social media is performative by nature. We post to incur likes and follows. But influencer culture takes these performances to an entirely new level in motherhood. These virtual mom friends, with their massive social media followings, are performing motherhood in a way that is both captivating and unnerving.

In Sara Petersen’s new book “Momfluenced,” the author investigates what she describes as the “maddening, picture perfect world” of momfluencers. “Motherhood does not turn all people into a certain ‘type,’ and the reasons we follow momfluencer culture are just as varied as our experiences of motherhood,” Petersen writes. “Understanding why we scroll is critical to understanding how we’re all impacted by momfluencer culture.”

Is this the worst time to be a mom?

Petersen’s investigation isn’t only about the allure of momfluencers, but also about what their existence says about the state of motherhood. In her book, she argues that momfluencers are not the enemy, but rather a symptom of a larger problem: a society that continues to neglect and undermine the unpaid labor of mothering.

In an interview with Salon, Petersen and I talked about the labor of momfluencers, how this pervasive culture affects the expectations of motherhood, the way in which products are being sold to moms, and the strange digital nostalgia for a 19th century aesthetic. As we navigate a new era of performative motherhood, Petersen’s insights offer a thought-provoking analysis of the ways in which social media is shaping our understanding of what it means to be a mom today.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

What inspired you to write this book and dive deeper into the “maddening world” of momfluencer culture?

Yeah, it really stemmed from my own consumption of the culture. My experience of early motherhood in particular was really disorienting. I had assumed that motherhood would be a shortcut to greater self-awareness and fulfillment, but I was so shocked to find out that the labor of mothering is not a rosy glow Instagram filter, like the Madonna and child, that the media I had consumed as a kid led me to believe. Early motherhood was really tough for me.

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I started consuming certain accounts or following certain blogs in the early days, and these bloggers’ performances and presentations of motherhood were so aesthetically beautiful and imbued with joy, light, and a sense of fun. It really felt like they were embodying the type of motherhood that I wanted when I set out to have kids. Though I never consciously said to myself, “If I do X, Y, and Z, I can be exactly like them,” — of course, I understood there was a level of performativity. I found myself grappling with the realities of mothering, which has a lot of mundane doing, and motherhood as this archetypal image being sold to me online.

It was very relatable that you started the book by acknowledging that some of these momfluencers are your friends in a way. And you’re not alone. I think about this a lot. So many of these momfluencers have had an impact on my motherhood journey — by offering products or advice — and they don’t even know my name. And yet there have been days where they’ve taken up a lot of space in my mind. Why do you think that these momfluencers have become our “friends?” What does that say about the state of motherhood today?

Um, nothing good. I think it’s completely understandable that many of us are desperate for answers, desperate for certainty, and desperate for a sense of hope that our experiences of motherhood will become better if we simply follow this script or buy this magical baby sleepsuit or whatever, right? Because the state of motherhood in this country is so, so broken and the vast majority of us do not have the support we need.

“We long for a way to mother that doesn’t feel so exhausting, so frustrating, so difficult, because the structures and systems in our lives are failing us.”

We can’t access affordable quality childcare, we live in a country with no universal paid family leave, our bodily autonomy is under attack, maternal healthcare is completely flawed and incomplete. And also, our labor upholds a capitalist system, in which values are synonymous with money — then our labor is not paid and not culturally respected, despite being the most important job in the world.

So yeah, we long for a way to mother that doesn’t feel so exhausting, so frustrating, so difficult, because the structures and systems in our lives are failing us. I think it makes complete sense that we’re looking anywhere else we can look, and social media is always available, all the time, and there are so many more influencers with so many different levels of expertise — and it’s far easier to purchase something with an affiliate link by a momfluencer, with the hope that it will make a significant difference in your day, even though deep down it won’t, than it is to write a letter to your senator or become a full-time activist for maternal rights.

There are a million reasons that we are searching for any sort of solutions or support.

I thought you did a really good job like in the beginning of the book of setting it up to not blame momfluencers — they’re part of a systemic issue. And being a momfluencer is hard work. Yet I thought it was really interesting how you pointed out that momfluencers are selling us products in a way that mirrors the mid-century advertisements that “deliberately portrayed the labor of caregivers big and housework as a combination of joy and feminine moral duty.” How do you think this affects our expectations of motherhood today?

I think unfortunately, the ideals of motherhood that we hold near and dear in this country are still so firmly rooted in white supremacy, in gender essentialism, in class, and ableism. So the momfluencers who tend to have the biggest platforms and make the most money are the ones who fit that mold, who check the majority of boxes in terms of our Western maternal ideal.

I don’t blame them for making money off of a toxic ideal. They didn’t create this ideal. The ideal was created long ago by white men in power. But I do think that the more we are bombarded with an ideal that looks the same every time, the more subconsciously we do believe in an ideal, like we do think there is a right way to mother and we do think that a quote-unquote “good mom looks a certain way.

And that’s where I think it becomes really quietly insidious, because these images are everywhere. We’re absorbing them all the time in our media, like in our traditional print media and television media, and of course, on social media. So I think these accounts that capitalize on our understandings and maternal ideals do hold the norm, even if the individuals themselves are not setting out to uphold the norm. But I think the mere presence and power of these influencers does have that effect.

In different parts of your book, you bring up how so many momfluencers are drawn to this 19th century aesthetic. Like the nap dress, or baby bonnets. I don’t see any babies wearing bonnets where I live, but I see them all over my Instagram feed. Why do you think that is, that this aesthetic is so popular in parts of white momfluencer culture?

I have no way of tentatively saying what has brought an increase in nostalgia for this aesthetic, but I do think it’s interesting to track the rise of tradwife culture, alongside the growing social rage of mothers post-pandemic.

Mothers have much more language to talk about their frustration and the inequality and the inequities that we’re dealing with than they did prior to the pandemic. And some of these accounts, they’ll be pro-femininity, anti-feminist accounts —I do think that is a direct backlash to just the growing energy amongst progressive moms who want better for everyone and, you know, intersectional feminist moms.

It’s very much about like, the quote unquote “good old days” when things were simpler. But like, simpler for who? It wasn’t simpler for poor women who have always worked outside the home, regardless of whether or not they had children. Even for the rich white ladies, it wasn’t simpler for them. Like they were still beholden to the men in their lives. They were not granted equality or agency. It wasn’t, it was really only simpler for white rich men.

“Mothers have much more language to talk about their frustration and the inequality and the inequities that we’re dealing with than they did prior to the pandemic.“

On the topic of aesthetic, motherhood is messy and chaotic. Yet as you point out in Chapter 5, it’s portrayed on social media as the opposite, and you bring up the minimalist aesthetic — obviously, there’s a lot of talk about the “sad beige” trend. Why is this trend equated with being a “good mom” — spaces that don’t look lived in, moms that don’t have stains on their shirts, like I do everyday?

I think it has a lot to do with a desire to control the uncontrollable. I know for myself becoming a mother really just plunged me into so much uncertainty, self doubt. And it is just physically very messy. And again, we’re sort of scrambling unsupported in our American society as mothers. So if, for example, I can just rid my domestic space of any unsightliness or, if I can perfectly color coordinate my kids sweaters in the drawer so that like a spark joy, it feels like a way to reclaim some sort of control.

Why is there still this pressure to perform motherhood today?

I think we’re all performing motherhood throughout our days in our lives, and I think the pressure to perform is so great because the ideal of motherhood is so entrenched in our culture, even if we’ve never stopped to consider it. I think most of us, if tasked with that question, would be able to come up with a pretty Hallmark-esque answer. I even feel like wearing a motherhood costume when I’m picking up my kid from preschool. I just think the identity marker of a mother is so heavy, to a lot of us, and I think that impacts the inclination or pressure to perform even if we’re not conscious of the performance.

I really liked the chapter on pointing out the intersection of white momfluencers and QAnon.

It is bleak. When I first started drafting the book, then when I went back to revise all the follower accounts of the moms in that chapter, they had all gone up since the original draft. It’s so telling and upsetting.

Yeah, I think especially if the momfluencers are spreading QAnon or like anti-vax rhetoric, especially if their work is centered in the home. I think again, because of the lack of cultural respect and financial recognition of our work, it makes sense that we want some recognition. We want some validation. We want to be seen or worth listening to. We want somebody to look at us and say, what you’re doing matters.

“I think the pressure to perform is so great because the ideal of motherhood is so entrenched in our culture.“

And so I think a lot of these white moms fall into creating accounts based on being “truth tellers,” because they gain cultural capital in ways that are more readily accessible in mainstream culture. You know, they’re referred to as experts, they’re looked to as insiders, they’re looked to as mavericks.

I often wonder, if mothers whose work was solely based in the home, if we gave them the same cultural respect that we gave doctors and lawyers, could you imagine like how different society would be?

You end your book on kind of a hopeful note, showing people who are, as you say, “disrupting the feed.” What do you think the future holds for momfluencer culture?

I mean, I don’t know if I have a ton of hope about like momfluencers of color, queer momfluencers, disabled momfluencers, gaining the same financial privileges as momfluencers adhering to the American ideal. I don’t know if I see that happening anytime soon, unfortunately. But I do think we’re having more conversations about critically and thoughtfully consuming social media. And it does seem to me that we’re having more thoughtful critical conversations about who the vision of the ideal of a mother harms, and who she upholds. And I hope that these conversations empower moms to examine their own narratives and make deliberate choices about things like, “I am taking this photo of my kid in the pumpkin patch because this brings me real joy? Or am I doing it because like every other mom is posting her pumpkin patch photo?” And just opting out of the supposed mom things we’ve been indoctrinated to assume are our norms when in fact they’re not.

Yeah, I want to opt out. You’ve inspired me to opt out. I really enjoyed your book. Thank you!

Thank you!

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