An expert explains technology and investment needed to get forever chemicals out of drinking water

Harmful chemicals known as PFAS can be found in everything from children’s clothes to soil to drinking water and regulating these chemicals has been a goal of public and environmental health researchers for years. On March 14, 2023, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposed what would be the first set of federal guidelines regulating levels of PFAS in drinking water. The guidelines will be open to public comment for 60 days before being finalized.

Joe Charbonnet is an environmental engineer at Iowa State University who develops techniques to remove contaminants like PFAS from water. He explains what the proposed guidelines would require, how water utilities could meet these requirements and how much it might cost to get these so-called forever chemicals out of U.S. drinking water.

1. What do the new guidelines say?

PFAS are associated with a variety of health issues and have been a focus of environmental and public health researchers. There are thousands of members of this class of chemicals and this proposed regulation would set the allowable limits in drinking water for six of them.

Two of the six chemicals — PFOA and PFOS — are no longer produced in large quantities, but they remain common in the environment because they were so widely used and break down extremely slowly. The new guidelines would allow for no more than four parts per trillion of PFOA or PFOS in drinking water.

Four other PFAS – GenX, PFBS, PFNA and PFHxS — would be regulated as well, although with higher limits. These chemicals are common replacements for PFOA and PFOS and are their close chemical cousins. Because of their similarity, they cause harm to human and environmental health in much the same way as legacy PFAS.

A few states have already established their own limits on levels of PFAS in drinking water, but these new guidelines, if enacted, would be the first legally enforceable federal limits and would affect the entire U.S.

2. How many utilities will need to make changes?

PFAS are harmful even at extremely low levels and the proposed limits reflect that fact. The allowable concentrations would be comparable to a few grains of salt in an Olympic-size swimming pool. Hundreds of utilities all across the U.S. have levels of PFAS above the proposed limits in their water supplies and would need to make changes to meet these standards.

While many areas have been tested for PFAS in the past, many systems have not, so health officials don’t know precisely how many water systems would be affected. A recent study used existing data to estimate that about 40% of municipal drinking water supplies may exceed the proposed concentration limits.

3. What can utilities do to meet the guidelines?

There are two major technologies that most utilities consider for removing PFAS from drinking water: activated carbon or ion exchange systems.

Activated carbon is a charcoal-like substance that PFAS stick to quite well and can be used to remove PFAS from water. In 2006, the town of Oakdale, Minnesota, added an activated carbon treatment step to its water system. Not only did this additional water treatment bring PFAS levels down substantially, there were significant improvements in birth weight and the number of full-term pregnancies in that community after the change.

Ion exchange systems work by flowing water over charged particles that can remove PFAS. Ion exchange systems are typically even better at lowering PFAS concentrations than activated carbon systems, but they are also more expensive.

Another option available to some cities is simply finding alternative water sources that are less contaminated. While this is a wonderful, low-cost means of lowering contamination, it points to a major disparity in environmental justice; more rural and less well-resourced utilities are unlikely to have this option.

4. Is such a major transition feasible?

By law, the EPA must consider not just human health but also the feasibility of treatment and the potential financial cost when setting maximum contaminant levels in drinking water. While the proposed limits are certainly attainable for many water utilities, the costs will be high.

The federal government has made available billions of dollars in funding for treating water. But some estimates put the total cost of meeting the proposed regulations for the entire country at around US$400 billion — much more than the available funding. Some municipalities may seek financial help for treatment from nearby polluters, while others may raise water rates to cover the costs.

5. What happens next?

The EPA has set a 60-day period for public comment on the proposed regulations, after which it can finalize the guidelines. But many experts expect the EPA to face a number of legal challenges. Time will tell what the final version of the regulations may look like.

This regulation is intended to keep the U.S. in the enviable position of having some of the highest-quality drinking water in the world. As researchers and health officials learn more about new chemical threats, it is important to ensure that every resident has access to clean and affordable tap water.

While these six PFAS certainly pose threats to health that merit regulation, there are thousands of PFAS that likely have very similar impacts on human health. Rather than playing chemical whack-a-mole by regulating one PFAS at a time, there is a growing consensus among researchers and public health officials that PFAS should be regulated as a class of chemicals.

Joe Charbonnet, Assistant Professor of Environmental Engineering, Iowa State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The urbanity of evil: 20 years after the Iraq invasion, the lies continue

Vast quantities of lies from top U.S. government officials led up to the Iraq invasion. Now, marking its 20th anniversary, the same media outlets that eagerly boosted those lies are offering retrospectives. Don’t expect them to shed light on the most difficult truths, including their own complicity in pushing for war.

What propelled the United States to start the war on Iraq in March 2003 was a dangerous dynamic of media and politics that is still very much with us today.

Soon after 9/11, one of the rhetorical whips brandished by President George W. Bush was an unequivocal assertion while speaking to a joint session of Congress on Sept. 20, 2001: “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Thrown down, that gauntlet received adulation and scant criticism in the United States. Mainstream media and members of Congress were almost all enthralled with a Manichaean worldview that has evolved and persisted.

Our current era is filled with echoes of such oratory from the current president. A few months before fist-bumping Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman — who’s been in charge of a tyrannical regime making war on Yemen, causing several hundred thousand deaths since 2015 with U.S. government help — Joe Biden mounted a pulpit of supreme virtue during his 2022 State of the Union address.

“The destruction of a society”: First the U.S. invaded Iraq — then we left it poisoned

Biden proclaimed “an unwavering resolve that freedom will always triumph over tyranny.” He added that “in the battle between democracy and autocracies, democracies are rising to the moment.” There was no mention of his support for Saudi autocracy and war.

In that State of the Union speech, Biden devoted much emphasis to condemning Russia’s war on Ukraine, as he has many times since. Biden’s presidential hypocrisies do not in any way justify the horrors that Russian forces are inflicting in Ukraine. Nor does that war justify the deadly hypocrisies that pervade U.S. foreign policy.

As we pass the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, don’t hold your breath for media retrospectives to mention basic facts about the key roles played by Joe Biden and Antony Blinken, who is now his secretary of state. When those two men denounce Russia, solemnly insisting that it is never acceptable for one country to invade another, the Orwellian irony is shameless.

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Last month, speaking to the UN Security Council, Blinken invoked “the principles and rules that make all countries safer and more secure” — such as “no seizing land by force” and “no wars of aggression.” But Biden and Blinken were crucial accessories to the massive war of aggression that was the invasion of Iraq. On the rare occasions when Biden has been put on the spot for his role in making the Iraq invasion politically possible, his response has been to dissemble and tell outright lies.

“Biden has a long history of inaccurate claims” regarding Iraq, scholar Stephen Zunes pointed out four years ago. “For example, in the lead-up to the critical Senate vote authorizing the invasion, Biden used his role as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to insist that Iraq somehow reconstituted a vast arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, a nuclear weapons program and sophisticated delivery systems that had long since been eliminated.” The false claim of supposed weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was the main pretext for the invasion.

That falsehood was challenged in real time, many months before the invasion, by numerous experts. But then-Sen. Biden, wielding the gavel of the Foreign Relations Committee, excluded them all from two days of high-impact sham hearings in the summer of 2002.

Who was chief of staff of that committee at that time? Antony Blinken.

We’re apt to put Biden and Blinken in a completely different category than someone like Tariq Aziz, Iraq’s deputy prime minister during the latter days of despot Saddam Hussein. But as I think back to the three meetings with Aziz that I attended in Baghdad during the months before the invasion, I have some doubts.

As chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joe Biden blocked all challenges to the claim that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons. His chief of staff on that committee was Antony Blinken.

Aziz wore nicely tailored business suits. Speaking excellent English in measured tones and well-crafted sentences, he had an erudite air and considerable politesse as he greeted our four-member delegation (which I had organized with colleagues at the Institute for Public Accuracy). Our group included Rep. Nick Rahall of West Virginia, former South Dakota senator James Abourezk and Conscience International president James Jennings. As it turned out, our meeting with Aziz occurred six months before the U.S. invasion.

At that meeting in September of 2002, Aziz concisely summed up a reality that few U.S. media outlets were acknowledging. “It’s doomed if you do, doomed if you don’t,” Aziz said, referring to the Iraqi government’s choice about whether or not to let UN weapons inspectors back into the country.

After meetings with Aziz and other Iraqi officials, I told the Washington Post: “If it was strictly a matter of the inspections and they felt there was a light at the end of the tunnel, this would be a totally fixable problem.” But it was nowhere near that straightforward. The Bush administration was determined to make war on Iraq.

A couple of days after the Aziz meeting, Iraq’s regime — which accurately stated that it had no weapons of mass destruction — announced that it would allow UN inspectors back into the country. (They had been withdrawn four years earlier for their safety on the eve of an anticipated U.S. bombing attack.) But this compliance with the UN was to no avail. U.S. government leaders — including members of both parties — wanted to launch an invasion of Iraq, no matter what.

During two later meetings with Aziz, in December 2002 and January 2003, I was repeatedly struck by his capacity to seem cultured and refined. While acting as principal spokesperson for a vicious dictator, he exuded sophistication. I thought of the words “the urbanity of evil.”

A well-informed source told me that Saddam Hussein maintained leverage over Aziz by keeping his son in jeopardy of imprisonment or worse, to ensure that Aziz would not defect or otherwise step out of line. Whether or not that was the case, he remained loyal to the end. As a character in Jean Renoir’s film “The Rules of the Game” says, “The awful thing about life is this: Everybody has their reasons.”

Tariq Aziz had good reasons to fear for his life, and the lives of his loved ones, if he ran afoul of Saddam. In contrast, many politicians and officials in Washington have gone along with murderous policies when the likely cost of dissenting would only have been re-election, prestige, money or power.

I last saw Aziz in January 2003, while accompanying a former UN humanitarian coordinator in Iraq to meet with him. Talking to the two of us in his Baghdad office, Aziz seemed to understand that an invasion was virtually certain. It began two months later. The Pentagon was pleased to brand its horrific air attacks on the city as “shock and awe.”

On July 1, 2004, appearing before an Iraqi judge in a courtroom on a U.S. military base near Baghdad airport, Aziz said: “What I want to know is, are these charges personal? Is it Tariq Aziz carrying out these killings? If I am a member of a government that makes the mistake of killing someone, then there can’t justifiably be an accusation against me personally. Where there is a crime committed by the leadership, the moral responsibility rests there, and there shouldn’t be a personal case just because somebody belongs to the leadership.” He went on to say, “I never killed anybody, by the acts of my own hand.”

The invasion that Joe Biden helped to inflict on Iraq resulted in a war that directly killed several hundred thousand civilians. If he were ever called to account in person for his role, Biden might well say something similar.

from Norman Solomon on war and peace

How did the zombie become so white?

For all that they are meant to – and do – induce a skin-prickling alarm, the fungal zombies that populate HBO’s “The Last of Us” rely on a stunning optical extravagance that announces them as devices of fantasy. In a bout of poeticism suited to its subject matter, “The Last of Us” has revivified the zombie for fans of serialized horror, attaching it to new origins rooted in biochemistry, a new temporal setting that reimagines the past 20 years as dystopic, and something not-so-new – the preoccupation of much of American zombie media with the dissolution of primarily white suburbs and cities. “The Last of Us” is the latest zombie-horror TV show that allows us to look out on to the marked, magnetic topography of imaginative fiction, but it further distances pop-culture audiences from the distinctly Black source material to which it owes its inspiration – the Haitian zonbi. For many of the Haitians who believe in the existence of zonbi, these figures are as immediate, as personal, as death’s other aspects.

The distress of a loved one’s body gone missing sits at the very center of Haitian folklore.

For many of Haiti’s residents, mentions of the village Titanyen guide to mind the mass graves that, even now, collectively frustrate burial rites meant to aid and/or honor souls as they cut across into the next world. On Jan. 12, 2010, the Haitian capital city of Port-au-Prince was hit by a 7.0 magnitude quake that, all told, killed nearly 300,000 people. It struck in the afternoon while the sun was still propped up quite high in the sky. There were children playing in Port’Prince alleys. In Guantánamo, in Kingston, in Caracas, in Santo Domingo, seismographs registered the quake in mathematical figures while residents of each city felt the ground convulsing for themselves. For days after the quake, the earth near Titanyen was sifted and split for burial pits. Public health officials saw the mass burials as expedient, and necessary, modes of moving the bodies of the dead from Port-au-Prince before decay set in. Many of the deceased were moved before they could be identified by, or have their bodies retrieved by, their families.

“The Walking Dead” has become a white patriarchy

For many of the Haitians who had lost loved ones to the quake, the pits were a profane compounding of their grief. In an NPR article published nearly a month after the quake, Haitian mortician Marc Arthur Alcero spoke about how few funerals he had conducted post-earthquake, and how the sparsity was quite disturbing considering the conviction with which the culture honors its dead: “[I’ve conducted] very few of them, about eight or nine. That is very, very hard situation for a Haitian to know his wife, his children is dead, and he cannot find the body.” The distress of a loved one’s body gone missing sits at the very center of Haitian folklore, and this lore, in turn, is an extension of a deeply personal cultural consciousness. Such distress is made particularly manifest in anxieties around one folklore staple – the zonbi, known most familiarly to Western audiences as the zombie.

Men move through collapsed market place along the Grand Rue on February 20, 2010 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, more than a month after the 7.0 earthquake (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)In Haitian zonbi lore, the disappearance of a body from its tomb signals that the deceased person has been taken for reanimation and will be, once returned to a version of living, compelled to do labor for their re-animator in perpetuity. These are anxieties I’ve personally heard expressed in a dozen and one different tones by family members and acquaintances – with humor, because it’s a Haitian necessity to steep about half of whatever serious thing you’re saying in a joke (up to its waist, thereabouts), and with disgust, and with an alloy of anger-and-fear, which springs up into sight then settles down out of sight right at the middle of sentences, gopherlike. “So-and-so’s a fiend, zombifying everything that’s got its eyes closed. Don’t fall asleep around her!”

Their zonbi carries very few of the same physical markers of grotesquerie that much of zombie media has adopted: they are not the itch-inducing, mushroom-headed Clickers of the “The Last of Us” franchise, share no resemblance with the eyeless, needle-toothed “Call of Duty” Crawlers that bound around on all four limbs, and because the body is zombified while it is still fresh, the Haitian zonbi is often clear of the sort of unnerving bodily necrosis popularized by George A. Romero‘s “Night of the Living Dead” film franchise. In fact, it is believed that a Haitian zonbi maintains much of the appearance that it possessed while alive, and they are constantly so close to being returned to a fully live state that the bokor – the sorcerer-for-hire who practices the Vodou faith for both good and evil, depending on client request – must keep them away from the elements that would restore their humanity: salted food, drink, the sight of their home as they’re being marched from their grave or tomb.

The spiritual horror of the Haitian zonbi is that that control, when stripped, is reassigned to whoever has brought the zonbi back from its grave.

For those Haitians who fear it, the Haitian zonbi carries its grotesquerie two ways: 1) the abnormality of having been brought back from the dead, the very fact of having been returned, and 2) the violation of individual will as brought about by a person’s compulsion into posthumous labor. This second form of grotesquerie, this violation of will, has historical heft that partially explains the cultural (meaning Haitian) terror of the zonbi. While the zonbi did, in the era of Haitian slavery, also place as a figure of revolutionary Black immortality that resisted the Black mortality and violent dispensability on which slavery insisted, the apprehension with which those around me approach/discuss/joke about/revile the zonbi is much more in line with this common cultural point reiterated by academic Jeffrey Jerome Cohen: “The folkloric zombie is a reduction of person to body: an utterly dehumanized laborer, compelled relentlessly to toil, brutally subjugated even in death.” This would have been, for the enslaved who shared and reshared this lore, a horror with a metaphysical grip: the notion that they were subject to a second iteration of the slavery that their death should have freed them from.

If the spiritual horror of the zombies in pop-culture juggernauts like AMC’s “The Walking Dead” and critically acclaimed zom-edies like 2004’s “Shaun of the Dead” is that the infected/afflicted have been stripped of their control over themselves, then the spiritual horror of the Haitian zonbi is that that control, when stripped, is reassigned to whoever has brought the zonbi back from its grave, or whoever has paid to have that zonbi “returned.” There is something bitterly disturbing, too, about being turned into a labor-puppet when the pursuit of self-sovereignty in the face of enslavement has always been at the core of your country’s national ethos. Such considerations provide essential context for the way that the zonbi weighs on the psyche of every Haitian person who believes in its existence. Their concern is real, their anxiety potent, because the aforementioned reanimation is a material possibility with the same authority of other dangers –men with machetes, cancer, drowning at sea.

Back cover of “Le Petit Journal Illustré” published Dec. 22, 1929 depicting the Dec. 6 massacre of civilians during the U.S. occupation. The translated cover reads, “In Haiti, the Americans let gunpowder do the talking.” (The Print Collector via Getty Images)The Haitian zonbi, as a concept, entered the 20th-century U.S. imagination at an immediate cultural and emotional remove that obscured the ethnically hyperspecific zombie anxieties I’ve just discussed. That is to say, the zombie arrived in the States mostly absent of the cultural resonance and spiritual gravitas it had, and has, for Haitians in Haiti. It was brought to the attention of many a white American by William Seabrook, who stewarded its entry into the American psychological terrain with his writing of the 1929 book “The Magic Island” during the U.S. occupation of Haiti.

At the time of “The Magic Island’s“ publication, if the journalism around the U.S. invasion of Haiti (for that is what it was) had been any more yellow, it could’ve been added to the national gold reserve to fund further imperialistic excursions. As the country’s leading newspaper, The New York Times vanguarded these racist, sensationalist public impressions of Haiti: a 1926 article asserted that “the U.S. [was] committed to educating the Haitians in self-government,” and in that same piece, The Times endorsed a quote by then Secretary of State Robert Lansing in which he defended the U.S. invasion by pointing to Haiti’s “appalling conditions of anarchy, savagery, and oppression”; The Times spotlighted the dubious congressional testimony of a Marine who claimed that Haitian cacos (anti-occupation resistance fighters) had mutilated and cannibalized American soldiers “according to voodoo custom,” further stoking a national obsession with Haitian cannibalism that had been around since the 19th century, a mania just recently fortified by the publication of a Washington Post article that accused a Haitian woman of “having murdered and eaten live children.”

By the time that Seabrook published his “firsthand account of voodoo in Haiti,” the othering of Haiti, and its Afrocentric vodou religion in particular, had been long underway. Consequently, the social milieu in which many white Americans existed at this time all but guaranteed that the Haitian zombie would become an additional agent for this othering, further estranging Haiti, its people, its lore and the culture from which that lore sprung, from bigoted American conceptions of “civilization” and valuable tradition. The zombie, then, entered a cultural atmosphere already primed to look down on the particular, culturally specific existential fear it generated for Haitians.

To its credit, Seabrook’s book – billed as part-anthropological study, part-Caribbean travelog – keeps zombie lore attached to its Afro-Haitian context. For all that it exoticizes Haiti as a place full of “dark, mysterious” jungle mountains over whose slopes “the steady boom of Voodoo drums” could be heard (even now, these lines make me laugh), even Seabrook positions the zombie as a particularly Black and Haitian phenomenon: “It seems to me that these [Haitian] werewolves and vampires are first cousins to those we have at home, but I have never, except in Haiti, heard of anything like zombies.”

“White Zombie” movie still featuring Bela Lugosi and “Murder” Legendre and Madge Bellamy as Madeline Short (centered) (Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images)

Once it became clear that the zombie could be detached from Haitian origin – excised, unclipped – it then became a sort of mythic free agent.

It seems to me that the true detachment of Haitian origin from zombie lore – within the realm of American pop-culture – began with the release of the film “White Zombie” in 1932, a movie whose screenplay was largely based on Seabrook’s “Magic Island.” In “White Zombie,” a white American woman named Madeleine Short (Madge Bellamy) arrives in Port-au-Prince with her fiance Neil Parker (John Harron); they are to be married on the wealthy Charles Beaumont’s (Robert Frazer) plantation estate, but Beaumont, developing an obsessive sexual and romantic fixation on Madeleine, enlists the help of “Murder” Legendre (Bela Lugosi), a white plantation owner who moonlights as an evil “voodoo” sorcerer, to turn Madeleine into a zombie who will be forever subject to Beaumont’s whim.

On the one hand, Madeleine’s fate in “White Zombie” is a fascinating transposition of the era’s particular and violently racist infatuation with “protecting” the innocence of white women and girls from the “Black male predator,” only this time, nonhuman aspects of “Blackness” – the “black magic voodoo” that white, French-descended Legendre practices, as well as the broader context of Haiti as a Black nation wherein zombification is possible at all – are blamed for the assault.

On the other hand, “White Zombie” drastically de-emphasizes the zombie as a particularly Black phenomenon and repurposes it to explore and indulge and ultimately condemn violent intra-racial gender dynamics. “White Zombie” is ultimately about how white men harm white women, how white people harm white people. In this way, “White Zombie” turns the zombie into a locale of white victimhood.

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With this spinning of zombie lore, zombification became something that could happen to white people; if not in actuality – as the zombie remained and remains a figure of fantasy for many Americans – then metaphorically or imaginatively. This was absolutely crucial for the growth of zombie media away from the Haitian zonbi. Once it became clear that the zombie could be detached from Haitian origin – excised, unclipped – it then became a sort of mythic free agent onto which filmmakers, storytellers and videogame developers, among other creatives, could chart the social anxieties that preoccupied their own communities and intended audiences. The zombie is ambrosia for the mind of the horror-media buff: it possesses the visual and visceral spectacle of necrosis, the ever-present symbology of death, the excitement of the interminably strange.

Most frequently, the zombie of modern-day American media is a vector for societal collapse: this interconnection was popularized by Romero’s 1968 classic “Night of the Living Dead” and, as proven by the gutted material and communal infrastructure of “The Last of Us,” is still strongly present in popular zombie media over five decades later.

“The Last of Us” Clicker at the Bostonian Museum (Liane Hentscher/HBO)In its second episode, “Infected,” “The Last of Us” renders clearly an important detail about this American fixation with zombie-induced societal collapse. Ellie, Joel, and Tess (Bella Ramsey, Pedro Pascal, Anna Torv) pick their way through the former Bostonian Museum, its interior now choked from top to bottom with overgrown vegetation and zombie-making cordyceps vines and the dead bodies of the once-infected. Light pauses on portraits of George Washington, on 18th century colonial military garb, on a peeling illustration of the Boston Tea Party. These images call to mind the colonies’ assertion of white sovereignty, a right-to-rule-the-self exclusive to the wealthy white men of the day; the fact that they are inlaid within the rot and dissolution of the museum interior constitutes an aesthetic mourning for, a loss of, a gilded American society over which white people and institutions presided.

The zonbi, once it had been spirited across the Caribbean sea within the pages of Seabrook’s travelog draft, became the zombie, the flesh-eater, the dread of slow suburbia. The continued distancing of zombie lore from its Afro-Haitian nativity carries with it a complicated risk: the ubiquity of zombie lore in the States could imbue even its more casual fans with the feeling of expertise, of understanding, which might then be (inaccurately) applied to a culture that has been dogged and demonized and purposefully misunderstood since the revolting enslaved burned down their first sugar plantation in the late 1700s.

“Dézafi” by Frankétienne. Translated by Asselin Charles (UVA Press)Since much of the American audiences for zombie media are familiar with the zombie within the context of art, a more nuanced understanding of the Haitian zonbi may hinge on a sincere engagement with Haitian art that centers the zonbi. Haitian art reifies the zonbi as an active cultural agent, and no medium of Haitian art does this so well as theater.

In 2009, the LGBTI theater troupe Lakou, based out of the southern Haitian city Jacmel, staged a production called “Zonbi, Zonbi,” a queer retelling of the Haitian novel “Dezafi” where a zonbi is eventually restored to its humanity by consuming salted food. More than anything, this production situates the zonbi in an anti-colonial space also inhospitable to the homophobia with which colonialism has often been paired. According to performance studies scholar Diana Taylor (2003), “Zonbi, Zonbi” activates a repertoire, “an embodied performance of cultural memory.” Haitian works like “Zonbi, Zonbi” should be watched closely by all interested in zombie lore, because they contend with the zonbi as it first appeared for the island’s earliest Black inhabitants – as a heart thing, as a soul thing, as a scary thing, as a triumphant thing, as a specific thing, as a close, close thing.

about Haiti

Don’t believe the hype: why ChatGPT is not the “holy grail” of AI research

Silicon Valley’s pre-eminent leaders love prematurely predicting that their products will completely upend the world as we know it. The latest case study comes from Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the company behind the ChatGPT AI chatbot that has gone viral for its convincing imitations of human writing. Two years ago, Altman wrote a manifesto, “Moore’s Law for Everything,” in which he forecast that artificial intelligence would make huge swaths of both white collar and blue collar jobs obsolete. As he wrote:

In the next five years, computer programs that can think will read legal documents and give medical advice. In the next decade, they will do assembly-line work and maybe even become companions. And in the decades after that, they will do almost everything, including making new scientific discoveries that will expand our concept of “everything.”… The coming change will center around the most impressive of our capabilities: the phenomenal ability to think, create, understand, and reason.

His conclusion is that “as AI produces most of the world’s basic goods and services, people will be freed up to spend more time with people they care about, care for people, appreciate art and nature, or work toward social good.”

More dangerously, ChatGPT can make authoritative statements that sound believable but turn out to be false if investigated closely.

To enable our imminent lives of leisure, Altman argues that we should establish an annual 2.5% tax on the value of large corporations and all privately-held land to provide an annual basic income for all American adults.

To paraphrase Yogi Berra, this is déjà vu all over again. For many decades, pundits have been predicting that technological advancements will soon make human workers obsolete; therefore, pay and work need to be de-linked and supplanted by a guaranteed income for all. The discomforting reality is that, while Altman and his ilk have been predicting an exponential acceleration of productivity, we have been experiencing a deceleration.

If you give an AI a cookie, can it make a viral recipe?

Altman is, of course, not a disinterested observer given that his company OpenAI created ChatGPT, the latest shiny AI object, which is technically a large language model (LLM) — a deep learning algorithm trained on an enormous dataset of text. It is undeniably astonishing that ChatGPT and other large language models with some help from human fine-tuners, can generate coherent text on so many topics. Nonetheless, it is now clear that LLMs are hobbled by the simple fact that they do not (and do not try to) understand the meaning of the statistically appropriate text they generate. They sometimes jump the guardrails imposed by humans and veer off into unhinged rants.

They are also prone to confident assertions of statements that are blatantly false. For example, ChatGPT has often claimed that the Russians have sent multiple bears into space though it has never done so. Here is a recent response (along with bogus references that ChatGPT fabricated):

Human: How many bears have the Russians sent into space?

ChatGPT: The Russians have sent a total of 5 bears into space, all of which were part of the Soviet Union’s space program during the 1960s. The bears were used in scientific experiments to study the effects of weightlessness and other space-related phenomena on living organisms. The bears’ names were Zvezdochka (Little Star), Ivan Ivanovich, Plyusha (Fluffy), Mishka (Little Bear), and Beryozka (Little Birch)

Human: Do you have references?

ChatGPT: Yes, here are some references to support my answer:

“The Bear in Space: Laika and Others” by Alice George, The Atlantic, November 3, 2017. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/11/the-bear-in-space-laika-and-others/544040/

“Soviet Animals Launched into Orbit” by Andrew Chaikin, National Geographic, November 3, 2010. Available at: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/101103-soviet-animals-launched-into-orbit-space-science

“Animals in Space” by NASA, updated September 16, 2021. Available at: https://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/5-8/features/nasa-knows/animals-in-space.html

More dangerously, ChatGPT can make authoritative statements that sound believable but turn out to be false if investigated closely. For example, it was recently reported that when ChatGPT responded to tax questions posted on a technical support forum, its answers were consistently plausible and in the vicinity of the correct answers but, when tax experts examined the responses, every single one was wrong. Despite appearances, ChatGPT was 100% inaccurate.

What about the productivity payoff Altman envisions? A recent paper by two MIT economics graduate students reported the promising results of an experiment evaluating how well ChatGPT handled a variety of business writing tasks. The researchers gave 444 experienced, college-educated professionals 20-to-30-minute assignments writing press releases, short reports, analysis plans, and emails designed to resemble real-world business tasks, and concluded that, on average, ChatGPT reduced the time taken to complete the tasks by 0.8 standard deviations and increased the quality of the product by 0.4 standard deviations.

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The results were reported widely and enthusiastically. A Wharton professor gushed that the productivity gains from LLMs may be larger than the gains from steam power.

We applaud the researchers’ experimental approach and their careful implementation but we remain skeptical. The specific assignments seem relatively low-level boiler plate that was heavily informed by the detailed instructions. ChatGPT did what it does best — generate generic BS.

The authors surveyed the participants two weeks after the survey and found that two-thirds were not using ChatGPT at all in their daily work, for easily anticipated reasons:

Respondents who are not using ChatGPT in their jobs mostly report that this is because the chatbot lacks context-specific knowledge that forms an important part of their writing. For example, they report that their writing is “very specifically tailored to [their] customers and involves real time information” or “unique [and] specific to [their] company products.” These comments point to an important (and inherent) limitation of our experiment: it involves relatively small, self-contained tasks that lack much context-specific knowledge beyond what we stipulate in the task prompts.

At best, LLMs can be used for rough first drafts of low-value writing tasks with humans filling in the details and checking for rants and lies. We suspect that the truth checking will often be cursory.

The fact that LLMs are okay, on average, reminds us of the statistician who drowned while wading across a river with an average depth of two feet. ChatGPT’s unreliability creates considerable legal, financial, and reputational risk for any business that uses it for consequential text-generation. As Warren Buffett quipped, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.” If LLMs are used for important tasks, it may create a new occupation (LLM fact checker) and a new type of insurance coverage (LLM errors).

What about Altman’s vision of humans appreciating art and nature while most of the world’s goods and services are produced by AI? We have a lot more respect for the work that people do than for the usefulness of LLMs. ChatGPT is entertaining but it is, at most, a baby step towards an AI revolution and, at worst, a very expensive detour away from the holy grail of artificial general intelligence. LLMs are more sizzle than steak.

about artificial intelligence and ChatGPT

A government program hopes to find critical minerals right beneath our feet

In a remote and heavily forested region of northern Maine, a critical resource in the fight against climate change has been hiding beneath the trees. In November, scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey, or USGS, announced the discovery of rocks that are rich in rare earth elements near Pennington Mountain. A category of metals that play an essential role in technologies ranging from smartphones to wind turbines to electric vehicle motors, rare earths are currently mined only at a single site in the United States. Now, researchers say a place that’s been geologically overlooked for decades could be sitting on the next big deposit of them — although a more thorough survey would be needed to confirm that.

While the U.S. government frets over shortages of the metals and minerals needed to transition off fossil fuels, it also lacks the basic geological knowledge needed to say where many of those resources are. Less than 40 percent of the nation has been mapped in enough detail to support the discovery of new mineral deposits, hampering the Biden administration’s plan to boost domestic mining of energy transition metals like rare earths and lithium, an essential ingredient in electric vehicle batteries. But the administration and Congress are now attempting to fill the maps in, by ramping up funding for the USGS’s Earth Mapping Resources Initiative, or Earth MRI.

Two geologists, seen from behind, in a lush green forest. One of them carries an orange instrument called a portable gamma spectrometer.

Geologists Chunzeng Wang and Preston Bass in the field near Pennington Mountain. Bass carries a tool called a portable gamma spectrometer. United States Geological Survey

A partnership between the federal government and state geological surveys, Earth MRI was established in 2019 with the goal of improving America’s knowledge of its “critical mineral” resources, a list of dozens of minerals considered vital for energy, defense, and other sectors. The initiative was quietly humming along to the tune of about $11 million per year in funding until 2022, when Earth MRI received an additional influx of $320 million, spread out over five years, through the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Since then, Earth MRI has kicked into overdrive, with the USGS launching dozens of new critical mineral-mapping efforts from Alaska to the Great Plains.

The USGS will be hunting for minerals both in the ground and at abandoned mines, where there may be valuable metals sitting in piles of toxic waste. The deposits they identify could eventually be extracted by mining companies, though experts say lawmakers and regulators will need to carefully weigh the benefits of mining against its social and environmental costs.

For now, says Earth MRI science coordinator Warren Day, the goal is to accomplish something that’s never been done before. “Nobody’s ever mapped all the critical minerals for the nation,” Day told Grist. “This is a huge undertaking.”

Indeed, the process of mapping the Earth is both labor intensive and time consuming: Geologists must be sent out into the field to record observations and locations of geological features like faults, take measurements, and make detailed interpretations of a landscape. Those interpretations might be augmented with laboratory analyses of soil and rock samples, as well as data collected by aircraft and other remote sensing instruments. It can take several years for researchers to synthesize all of that information into a map with a resolution of an inch to 2,000 feet, the standard scale that state geological surveys work at. Those geological maps don’t fully characterize ore deposits to determine whether they are economical to mine. But they often form a starting point for private companies to conduct that more detailed exploratory work.

“Our part is the definition of the geological framework where deposits could occur,” Day said. “Private industry takes that and tries to define the resources.”

That industry-led exploration can take an additional several years, after which it might take up to a decade to permit and build a mine, says Allan Restauro, a metals and mining analyst at the energy consultancy BloombergNEF. The mismatch between the time from exploration to mining, and the anticipated near-term ramp-up in demand for energy transition metals, has led many experts to predict we’ll see shortfalls of resources like lithium within the decade.

“Even if something were to be discovered right at this very instant, it may not be an actual producing mine until beyond 2030, when demand has shot up,” Restauro told Grist.

To help close the gap between mineral discovery and future demand, Earth MRI scientists are racing to collect as much baseline geological data as they can. The federal government is contracting private companies to do airborne geophysical surveys — flying specialized instruments over a region to measure specific properties of the rocks underfoot. The primary approach the USGS is using, called aeromagnetic surveying, measures slight variations in the Earth’s magnetic field that relate to the magnetic properties of local rocks. In some cases, the agency is also conducting radiometric surveys, which detect natural radioactive emissions from rocks and soils containing elements like thorium and uranium. These elements can indicate the presence of specific mineral types of interest: Thorium, for example, is often found alongside rare earth elements.

A helicopter with a boom that contains sensitive equipment for conducting airborne geophysical surveys.

The boom on this Earth MRI helicopter contains sensitive equipment for conducting airborne geophysical surveys. United States Geological Survey

As the USGS is conducting reconnaissance from the air, state geologists are sent out to the field for detailed surface mapping and sampling.

Earth MRI scientists have identified more than 800 focus areas around the nation — regions with at least some potential to host critical minerals. With the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law boosting the initiative’s total budget to $74 million annually from 2022 to 2026, the effort to survey all of them has ramped up “significantly,” says Jim Faulds, the president of the American Association of State Geologists. About twice as many states are now engaged in mapping projects as before the law, and individual projects are receiving three times the funding they were before. That’s expected to be a major boon for Western states like Nevada and Arizona, which have only had a quarter to a third of the land mapped in detail and are among the most promising places in the country to find energy transition metals.

“Many Western states are mineral rich,” Faulds said. “But we don’t necessarily know where those minerals are.”

Even in places where large mineral deposits have been discovered already, we don’t necessarily have detailed maps of the region. That’s the case for the Thacker Pass area near the Oregon border, host to some of the largest lithium resources in North America, as well as an area of west-central Nevada that has large lithium deposits. New Earth MRI-funded survey work in these areas will help define the full extent of these resources, says Faulds, who directs Nevada’s state Bureau of Mines and Geology.

In the eastern U.S., where some states are relatively well mapped, there’s still a potential for new discoveries. Geologists had no idea, for example, that the Pennington Mountain area of northern Maine was host to rare earth-rich rocks: Earth MRI funded a project in the area because it had previously been mined for elements like copper and manganese, said Anji Shah, a USGS geophysicist who contributed to the study.

“When we chose the area, we were thinking about those particular mineral resources,” Shah said. “It was only when we got the [airborne survey] data and we noticed some anomalies that we said, ‘Hey, this might be high in rare earth elements.'” Follow-up work in the field and lab confirmed not just elevated levels of rare earths, but also niobium and zirconium, minerals used in jet engine components and nuclear control rods.

A fine-grained volcanic rock, found on Pennington Mountain in Maine, that hosts rare earth elements, niobium, and zirconium. United States Geological Survey / Chunzeng Wang, University of Maine-Presque Isle

Discoveries like this could ultimately lead to the establishment of new mines and new domestic supply chains for critical minerals, a key policy goal of the Biden administration. But as companies start clamoring to dig these rocks out of the ground, the administration will have to think carefully about how to balance its climate and national security priorities with the potential harms of mining, which can degrade local ecosystems, cause air and water pollution, and transform rural communities. Projects that aren’t sited carefully are likely to meet local resistance, as illustrated by a proposed lithium mine at Thacker Pass that recently began construction despite fierce opposition from conservationists, a local rancher, and Native American tribes.

“We’re going to discover many more deposits” out of Earth MRI, said Thea Riofrancos, a political scientist at Providence College in Rhode Island who studies the intersection between resource extraction and green energy. But the benefits of extracting those minerals, Riofrancos said, “should not be presumed.”

Riofrancos would like to see the government thinking holistically about better and worse places for mining, perhaps combining maps of mineral deposits with maps showing biodiversity, water resources, historically marginalized communities, and Indigenous lands, where a large fraction of today’s energy transition metal mining occurs, according to a recent study. (Day says the USGS always obtains written consent from tribes before mapping reservation lands.) Taking all of these factors into account when deciding where to permit new mining will help ensure that harm is minimized, Riofrancos says.

One of the more attractive places to hunt for energy transition metals could be abandoned mine land, which has already been degraded. Coal mining waste, for instance, can be enriched in rare earth elements; scientists with the Department of Energy are currently working out the best ways to extract them. Several years ago, Shah and her colleagues discovered that mining waste at abandoned 19th- and 20th-century iron mines in the eastern Adirondack Mountains in New York is also enriched in rare earths — in particular, the so-called heavy rare earths that are more economically valuable.

Riofrancos sees the USGS’s inclusion of mine wastes in its mapping efforts as a positive sign. “The more industrially developed an area is, the less new harm is created by mining,” she said, adding that it might be possible to extract new metals from mine waste in tandem with environmental cleanup efforts.

But ultimately, it’s private companies that will decide, based on the trove of new information the government is collecting, which areas it wants to explore further for possible mining. And at this point, Faulds says, “there’s quite a bit of interest at all levels” in Earth MRI data.

“I would say companies are on the edge of their seats,” he said.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/science/usgs-earth-mri-a-government-program-hopes-to-find-critical-minerals-right-beneath-our-feet/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

From the desk of The Antler Queen: A “Yellowjackets” primer to catch you up before the show returns

There are some shows that have an easy-breezy looseness to them that affords viewers the ability to casually watch — scrolling on their phones or skipping in and out of seasons — while maintaining the general gist of what’s going on. “Yellowjackets” is not one of these shows.

In its first season, creators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson expertly dole out pieces of a puzzle that creates the framework for a dark thriller with a ribbon of macabre humor strung throughout, harkening back to the watercooler show days of “Twin Peaks” and “Lost.” But, as these are much darker times, the old puzzle box questions of “Who killed Laura Palmer?” and “Why is there a polar bear here?” have been leveled up to questions surrounding cannibalism, cults and Antler Queens.

With a dual timeline that flashes back and forth between 1996 and roughly present day, “Yellowjackets” introduces us to a group of girls on a New Jersey high school soccer team about to board a plane en route to Seattle to compete in nationals and then shows us what their lives became after that plane crashed in the Canadian wilderness, leaving them to starve, scavenge and pray for 19 months until someone found them.

“Yellowjackets” is a fantastic, terrifying plummet into the darkness of female desire and rage

In a 2022 interview with Deadline, married duo Lyle and Nickerson say the early premise for the show was tossed about during a conversation in the car stemming from a series of “what ifs” and an appreciation for another very famous plane crash story. In 1972, a Uruguayan rugby team crashed into the Andes mountains and, left with no other source for sustenance, the survivors fed upon those from the flight who had perished. The story of this tragic turn of events was told in the 1974 book “Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors,” and adapted in 1993 for a film starring Ethan Hawke.

“Even though I think I’m the one who has more of a longstanding affection for the movie ‘Alive,’ I believe it was Bart who first kind of turned to me and said, ‘You know, what if’ and shared the very basic premise of the show,” Lyle says.

William Golding’s 1954 novel, “Lord of the Flies” was also an inspiration for “Yellowjackets,” with Lyle telling NPR in an earlier interview that its story of a group of boys going feral while stranded on an island piqued her curiosity in terms of how women would fare in the same scenario.

“It just occurred to us that, particularly when it comes to ‘Lord of the Flies,’ there’s this sort of famous golden quote about how it would never happen with women,” Lyle says. “And it was clearly, in the quote, meant to be some sort of compliment to the female gender. But I take some issue with that . . . It just occurred to us that it’s a really fascinating question, insomuch as women are socialized, arguably, even more so than men in a very specific way.”

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It’s true, surviving hunger isn’t the only thing the girls of “Yellowjackets” have to contend with. In the first season, as the months wear on and the harsh conditions begin to cause discord amongst the team, and trauma-induced flare-ups within their own minds, the wilderness they’re trapped in begins to take on a life of its own that viewers are pulled to question or comply with from episode to episode. And we’ll see all of this manifest in some pretty intense ways in Season 2, according to the cast.

“I can’t really get too much into detail, but I will say the first couple scripts had the entire cast gasping,” Christina Ricci, a member of the show’s present timeline cast said to Entertainment Tonight when asked what the show has in store for us.

If you’re jumping into the world of “Yellowjackets” for the first time, it may seem like there’s a lot of catching up to do before its second season return on March 24, and you’d be right in assuming that. But it’s not too late! There are a multitude of message boards, podcasts and YouTube channels devoted to analyzing every minute detail of each episode released so far, with all of them forming early theories on what’s to come this season.

But, there’s no need to feel intimidated. Our handy guide below will get you all caught up on where we left the main characters, with a few theories on what we expect to see moving forward in both the ’90s and present-day timelines.

Teen Shauna

Sophie Sophie Nélisse as Teen Shauna and Ella Purnell as Teen Jackie (Kailey Schwerman/SHOWTIME)

After a mushroom-fueled bacchanal dubbed their “Doomcoming,” the teens of the Yellowjackets wake up with fingers to point and excuses to make for why a party nearly ended up a blood orgy. In a heated exchange with her best friend Jackie (Ella Purnell), Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) lets loose a monologue of pent-up grievances over living in her shadow, not even really liking soccer and the newly exposed fact that she’d been sleeping with Jackie’s boyfriend Jeff (played as a teen by Jack DePew.)

In normal circumstances, this blow-out would have led to a few cold-shoulder days until the two went back to being friends again, but here it leads to Jackie being kicked out of the cabin they’ve taken shelter in, and “cold-shoulder” takes on new meaning when Shauna wakes up the following morning to find Jackie’s dead body covered in a thin layer of snow, having died of what’s presumed to be hypothermia.

Visibly pregnant with a baby conceived with her dead best friend’s boyfriend, Shauna kneels next to Jackie and lets out a heart-wrenching scream. In Season 2 we’ll not only see how she deals with her friend’s death, but what becomes of her baby. The cast has already assured us that it doesn’t get eaten, which was a popular theory, along with the theory that the baby is Shauna’s daughter Callie (Sarah Desjardins) shown as a teenager in the present-day timeline (wouldn’t add up) or Adam (Peter Gadiot) who adult Shauna cheats on her husband with which is just . . . no. My theory? The baby dies during childbirth, dies as an infant due to the cold or lack of nutrition or gets sacrificed to these yet to be fully understood or explained forces in the wilderness. I don’t personally think there are any “forces” in the wilderness though, preferring to believe that the strangeness they’re experiencing is all coming from within, but either way, it’s not looking great for that baby.

Adult Shauna

Warren Kole as Jeff Sadecki, Melanie Lynskey as Shauna and Sarah Desjardins as Callie Sadecki (Kailey Schwerman/SHOWTIME)

All of the adult Yellowjackets present in Season 1 are shown committing their own unique version of one illegal activity or another, but Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) is the closest to landing in prison for it.

After becoming convinced that her husband Jeff (Warren Kole) is cheating on her, she has a brief affair with Adam (mentioned above) whom she later stabs and dismembers after wrongly suspecting him of trying to blackmail her and her former teammates. Adam, who fans theorized as being either her wilderness baby or grown-up Javi (Luciano Leroux) – the youngest of only three surviving male plane travelers she suffered in the wild with during the ’90s timeline who goes missing in the first season’s penultimate episode – ends up just being some guy, or so we think. Whoever Adam ends up being (I think there’s more to his story than we know), he had a back tattoo that I’m guessing the police use to identify his corpse, which quickly leads them back to Shauna as the last to see him alive.

Once confronted with the consequences of murdering Adam, Shauna will likely call upon the help of her former teammates to help get her out of it, but since none of these ladies can truly be trusted, that will bring about a whole new set of problems. A snippet from the Season 2 trailer, in which Shauna talks to her daughter Callie about being a murderer, leads me to believe that either Callie had something to do with her getting caught, or will have something to do with her getting away with it. But again, I go back and forth on questioning the motives and trustworthiness of everyone on this show, which makes watching it so much fun.

Teen Taissa

Liv Hewson as Teen Van and Jasmin Savoy Brown as Teen Taissa (Kailey Schwerman/SHOWTIME)

In the ’90s timeline, Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown) is enduring being stuck in the wilderness better than the rest of her teammates, apart from a few bouts of going in a fugue state and furiously eating fistfuls of dirt.

Taking on the role of practical problem-solver and caretaker for her partner Van (Liv Hewson), she’s skeptical about the woo-woo leanings of the other girls, and is dead set on keeping everyone alive and remaining positive that they’ll find a way back home, somehow.

Unknowingly consuming psychedelic soup right along with the others, aside from Jackie, ramping up to the Season 1 finale, Tai participates in the drugged-out hunt for Travis, who they hallucinate as a bolting stag, but is back to her semi-normal self the next morning.

In early episodes we get flashbacks to her life as a child, which hint at the possibility of mental illness running in her family when her dying grandmother sees a man with no eyes, but that doesn’t come to the forefront of her character until we see her as an adult. But there’s certainly a lot to see there, and it’s safe to say that Tai was never as together as she led everyone to believe.

Adult Taissa

Tawny Cypress as Taissa (Kailey Schwerman/SHOWTIME)

When we first meet adult Tai (Tawny Cypress), she’s living in a beautiful home with her wife Simone (Rukiya Bernard) and young son Sammy (Aiden Stoxx), seemingly thriving and fully recovered from the traumas of her past. But when her son’s complaints of a lady in a tree watching him from outside his bedroom turn out to be her, we learn that she’s worse off than the rest of the Yellowjackets; she’s just a bit better at hiding it.

Hallucinating wolves, employing a detective named Jessica Roberts (Rekha Sharma) to ensure her teammates don’t sully her reputation, and beheading the family dog for an altar that we’re led to believe aided her winning the race for New Jersey state senate, Tai is in full deep end mode at the end of the show’s first season, but no one has caught on to it yet. In Season 2 we’ll see her losing her family, going deeper into the torments of her own mind, and working as a senator all at the same time. Sounds kind of like a segment from Fox News.

In another snippet from the Season 2 trailer, we see Tai reuniting with Van in the present timeline which will surely be a fan-favorite moment that will either help pull her out of darkness or sink her further into it. Given that this season is foretold to be darker than the previous, it’s likely the we’ll get more darkness from her character. They brought it back with them, after all.

Teen Misty

Samantha Hanratty as Teen Misty (Kailey Schwerman/SHOWTIME)

Misty f**king Quigley (Samantha Hanratty) is having the time of her life being stuck in the wilderness. Equipment manager of the Yellowjackets, she’s never been able to find her place within any group, or make herself useful in a way that anyone would appreciate, until now. Using her first aid skills to patch up the survivors of the plane crash, she amputates the leg of Coach Ben (Steven Krueger) not just to keep him from dragging around a pulped limb, but to ensure that he’ll need her help for the duration of their time together. This is a running theme with Misty.

Going so far as to smash the plane’s flight recorder, seriously impeding any rescue attempts, she’s kept at a distance until she’s needed and so always finds a way to be so.

In the final scene of Season 1, we see Misty kneeling in the show with Van and Lottie, who we’ll get to shortly, as a bear heart is being offered to a makeshift tree stump altar. While it’s unlikely that Misty buys into any of this cult stuff, she sees it as a new club that she can join in early. Cults are all about mental and emotional manipulation, and no character on this show is better at that than Misty.

Adult Misty

Christina Ricci as Misty (Kailey Schwerman/SHOWTIME)

In the present-day timeline Misty (Christina Ricci) is, of course, a nurse.

When not torturing the elderly people under her care at the facility she works at, she spends her time luring men into her home for likely nefarious reasons and sleuthing as a Citizen Detective, which is someone who tries to solve crimes for no pay and without anyone asking them to.

Reunited with a few of the Yellowjackets in a way that seems very calculated, she’s up to her old tricks with putting people in harm’s way so she can be there to get them out of it.

After entrapping Jessica Roberts and then killing her after returning home from her 25-year high school reunion, Misty seems most alive when she’s in the midst of chaos. In a recent Rolling Stone interview, Ricci describes the character she plays as a “murderous golden retriever,” and that seems fitting. The only member of the team aside from Shauna to have committed murder in the adult timeline, that we’ve seen so far, Misty makes herself useful all over again by helping to cover up Adam’s murder and keeping close tabs on Natalie, who’s up next in our little roundup. After Natalie gets kidnapped by “cult members,” Season 2 will find Misty leading the search to find her. Seems convenient. Maybe a bit too convenient?

We’ll also see Misty paired with a fellow Citizen Detective, Walter (new cast member Elijah Wood) who may be a love interest, which caused Ricci to make some adjustments to how she’d been portraying her character.

“I did all this press talking about how I thought she was not interested in men and would never have had a relationship, and then they’re like, ‘Bam! Season 2, love interest!'” Ricci said to Rolling Stone. “I was thrown off by the idea, and whether the characters do become romantically involved or not is something to be discovered as people watch this. But if I had to have any love interest as this character, I’m so happy it’s Elijah, because he’s just so wonderful to work with.”

If you watch closely, there’s a flash in the trailer for Season 2 where Walter appears to be angrily smacking someone. If this ends up being Misty, God help him.

Teen Natalie

Kevin Alves as Teen Travis and Sophie Thatcher as Teen Natalie (Kailey Schwerman/SHOWTIME)

Natalie (Sophie Thatcher) is the heart of the ’90s timeline, and for all her teenage imperfections she is the most reasonable out of the bunch.

While the families of the other Yellowjackets are only referenced in very corner-of-the-eye ways, à la “The Peanuts,” we get a close look at the chaos that Natalie was born into, and how she struggles to get away from it.

Haunted by a dark scuffle that led to her father accidentally shooting himself, Natalie looks for comfort in drugs, booze and sex, but there’s a strength within her that remains steadfast. In the wilderness she’s the best with a gun, ironically, and provides her teammates with sustenance, along with Travis, who becomes her love interest.

At the end of Season 1, Natalie shoves aside her anger over Travis losing his virginity to Jackie amidst the “Doomcoming” chaos, and saves him from being killed in the team’s drugged-out bloodlust. Her almost losing him, getting him back, and then losing him again as an adult will send her into a whole new chapter of tumult that we’ve yet to see but, for now, teenage Natalie is the bright star everyone else should set their compass by. But they won’t.

Adult Natalie

Juliette Lewis as Natalie (Kailey Schwerman/SHOWTIME)

In various press throughout Season 1, Juliette Lewis expressed a certain disappointment over adult Natalie being presented to her as one thing and ending up another. Pitched as a chameleon, which Season 2 may make good on, the adult Natalie we first meet is a newly out of rehab emotional wreck whose sex-positivity is perhaps a bit more transactional than the actress would have liked.

Begrudgingly accepting Misty’s help to look into what’s posed as Travis’ suicide, which they believe to have been staged, Natalie is a punk rock Madame Butterfly with a purposely hardened exterior and a molten lava core.

In a rare Q&A with fans on Twitter in 2022, Lewis shed insight on her character’s arc saying, “She will not be like she was. Sardonic and ‘circling the drain.’ That was a Season 1 Natalie. I NEVER read reviews – but unfortunately I read ‘Natalie is exactly the type of role you’d expect JL to play’ which is EXACTLY what I didn’t want. See?”

After being kidnapped at the end of Season 1 by a group of people who, as of now, appear to be members of Lottie’s “cult,” Natalie will undergo a personality transformation and pop up as someone Lewis refers to as “a lover.” But, lover or not, she still has unfinished business when it comes to figuring out what really happened to Travis, and she’s gonna put these chameleon qualities to use to get what she’s after.

Teen Van

Liv Hewson as Teen Van (Kailey Schwerman/SHOWTIME)

Van (Liv Hewson) is the teen Yellowjacket who buys in hardest when it comes to Lottie’s fledgling cult leader status. After crashing along with everyone else, she suffers further injuries by almost being burned to death while trapped in the plane, and then getting her face gnawed clean open by a pack of wolves.

It could be the miraculous way in which these injuries heal without the use of modern medicine that pushes her towards believing in otherworldly forces, but the comfort provided by giving faith to something bigger than herself is a better explanation for why she’d see fit to bend a knee to the Antler Queen.

In Season 2, we’ll see if that knee is still bent or if she takes Tai’s advice and breaks away from Lottie. Either option seems potentially dangerous.

Adult Van

Lauren Ambrose as Van (Kailey Schwerman/SHOWTIME)

Not much is known about adult Van, played by Lauren Ambrose off the heels of a fantastic performance in the series finale of “Servant,” but based on what we’ve seen so far in the Season 2 trailer and promo images, her scars are barely visible and she works in/owns a ’90s ephemera store of some sort. The outfit she’s wearing in this photo here is giving off Ethan Hawke AND Winona Ryder “Reality Bites” vibes, which is very exciting for lesbian reasons.

Out of the little we know, Van is going to be reunited with Tai for one reason or another. See note above re: lesbian reasons.

Teen Lottie

Courtney Eaton as Teen Lottie (Kailey Schwerman/SHOWTIME)

When Lottie is first introduced in Season 1 she’s a “I like your pilgrim hat” rich girl with a prescription for schizophrenia medication that no one seems to know about. A few weeks post-crash, once those meds run out, she’s someone who breaks into fluent ominous French while becoming possessed during a seance, charming bears and convincing her teammates to hunt and kill poor Travis.

One of the biggest puzzles in the puzzle box, we’re led to believe that she has the ability to see visions and commune with the looming dark forces in the woods. But are there actually dark forces at work here, or just the persuasions of a teenage girl with horns on her head?

Going in to Season 2, we’ll see if Lottie’s powers still work after some post-rescue chemical regulation. I’m guessing no. Rich girls can convince people to do almost anything. Even cannibalism? And for all this “Antler Queen” talk, the show has been intentionally vague as to who or what the real dark force is in those woods. According to the cast, no one has guessed much of anything correctly yet, which is exciting!

Adult Lottie/Charlotte

Simone Kessell as Lottie (Kimberley French/SHOWTIME)

Out of the two new to Season 2 adult Yellowjackets, the most info has been given about adult Lottie, but still not much.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Simone Kessell describes the character she embodies as being “like many self-proclaimed gurus, very volatile. She’s able to give you the scorpion’s tail at any moment.”

“When we meet Lottie, she’s a whole different person who’s gone through this rehabilitation at a Swiss mental institution,” co-showrunner Jonathan Lisco says.

Rehabilitated or not, she had something to do with Travis’ death and her cult/wellness clinic members are definitely the ones who kidnapped Natalie, so she’s up to something. My money’s on Misty as being the one to get to the bottom of her whole deal. Or maybe Misty is the mastermind of it all.

“Yellowjackets” returns Friday, March 24 on streaming and Sunday, March 26 on Showtime.

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Hey MAGA world: Trump thinks you’re stupid — and he’s exploiting you, as usual

There’s little that can be gleaned, legally speaking, from Donald Trump’s all-caps Saturday-morning tantrum on Truth Social claiming that he “WILL BE ARRESTED ON TUESDAY OF NEXT WEEK.” It’s always a safe bet that any one of Trump’s supposedly dramatic pronouncements is a lie being used to gain for money or attention. For another thing, Trump’s spokesperson says he has received no formal notice of indictment from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who has been presenting evidence of campaign finance fraud regarding a hush money payment to Stormy Daniels. Trump’s breathless post claims that Bragg working from “ILLEGAL LEAKS,” which probably just means that Trump, a well-known TV addict, has heard exactly the same speculation about a forthcoming indictment that every other cable news viewer has heard.

Sure, there might be an indictment next week. There also might not. There’s no actual news on that front. But here’s one thing we can glean from Trump’s Truth Social outburst, not that any one of good faith doubted it: He thinks his followers are complete morons.

While he avoids calling directly for violence, there is little doubt that call for his followers to “PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK!” is meant as a threat. As the Washington Post reports, “His language echoed rhetoric that he used in advance of the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, by his supporters.” Not only is Trump clearly aware of the effect his words can have on his own people, but as the House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6 insurrection outlined in painstaking detail, violence is exactly what Trump was hoping for when he riled up the crowd that morning in Washington with elaborate lies about a “stolen” election.

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But there’s one glaring difference between now and the day of the Capitol insurrection: Let’s consider what goals Trump hoped to achieve through violence in 2021, and what his goals are now.

On Jan. 6, the people who rioted didn’t just believe they were just acting on Trump’s behalf; they also believed they were doing it for themselves and their so-called movement. While I don’t doubt the sincerity of their Trump-love, ultimately they didn’t storm the Capitol and risk arrest just to mollify his hurt feelings over losing an election. Their goal was to seize power illegally, not just for Trump but for the larger MAGA movement, and to keep a Democrat out of the White House by any means necessary.

The folks who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6 thought they could overturn an election. What do they possibly have to gain by committing acts of terrorism for Trump now?

This time around, it’s a lot harder to argue that the larger MAGA movement would benefit violence. This is just about Trump not wanting to face a judge and jury in a criminal trial. The folks who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6 had reason to believe, — however far-fetched this might seem — that they could successfully overturn a democratic election. But what could possibly be accomplished by committing terrorist acts for Trump now?

Even if Bragg could be successfully intimidated into never filing charges against Trump, what would that do to advance the larger interests of the MAGA movement? Biden would still be president and Trump’s hordes would still be facing the prospect of — gasp! — actually having to win an election if they want to regain power in 2024.

Trump lights up the MAGA signal in an all-caps call to protest his foretold arrest

If anything, any acts domestic terrorism on Trump’s behalf will only make life harder for the MAGA movement. Most Americans already loathe Trump and see MAGA, correctly, as a threat to democracy. More Trump-inspired violence would keep anti-Trump voters motivated, and would quite likely convince independents otherwise inclined to vote Republican that the party is still too radical for their tastes.

Of course Trump is trying, in his distinctive grammatically-challenged fashion, to spin his own personal fears of prosecution and possible jail time as something bigger than himself, by claiming that he’s the target of a political witch hunt. That’s already being backed up by his biggest sycophants in Congress, such as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., who tweeted that the (so-far-nonexistent) indictment is “political vengeance against President Trump.”

Here we go again — an outrageous abuse of power by a radical DA who lets violent criminals walk as he pursues political vengeance against President Trump.

I’m directing relevant committees to immediately investigate if federal funds are being used to subvert our democracy by…

— Kevin McCarthy (@SpeakerMcCarthy) March 18, 2023

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That argument isn’t just false. It’s highly implausible, and ought to be a hard sell. Trump being indicted doesn’t actually change anything for the MAGA movement. If he’s forced to drop out of the presidential race, his followers could move onto one of his successors. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has already positioned himself as the candidate for people who want Trump’s authoritarian politics, but without all of Trump’s legal baggage.

Donald Trump’s principal personality trait has always been crippling narcissism, and he’s always had trouble distinguishing between his own interests and those of his followers. He obviously thinks the MAGA movement exists because he has some magical hold on his supporters, but that’s exactly backward. His followers they have a set of political goals and desires — white supremacy, male dominance and “owning” the liberals — and Trump molded himself into their perfect leader by reflecting those desires back at them.

Trump’s looming potential indictments pose a big question for the media: How to cover his campaign?

But Trump yearns to believe that his followers are so infatuated with him personally that they’ll be willing to give up their own lives and freedom just to keep him out of jail. His latest Truth Social post proves, yet again, how much contempt he feels toward his own followers. He really does seem to think there’s a wellspring of Trump-loving patriots who’ll risk everything for him — and not in hopes of seizing political power, but just to stop a private citizen from going to jail. He doesn’t care, quite obviously, how many people he induces to get arrested, hurt or even killed, just so he can avoid consequences for his lengthy career of criminal activity.

We’ll know how Trump’s gamble plays out soon enough, since he gave his followers a pretty brief timeline in which to act. It’s never wise to bet on the intelligence of Trump voters, of course; he may be right that enough of them have confused their own political yearnings with his desire to stay out of jail that they’ll be willing to stage acts of violence on his behalf. But it’s at least as likely that he won’t get any takers, as even his followers are intelligent enough to understand that the only likely result here is that they’re the ones who go to jail while Trump, of course, won’t he lift a finger to help them.

Either way, what’s important here is that Trump has reverted to form, revealing yet again that he’s only out for himself. He’s asking his followers to run the risk of prison, injury or death — and not for any larger political movement or goal. He thinks they’re dumb and he thinks they’re disposable. He’s asking them, pretty much directly, to volunteer to go to prison so he doesn’t have to.

At EPA, staffing crisis clashes with expanded mission

Thousands of employees of the Environmental Protection Agency are lobbying this week for Congress to address staffing issues that they say are limiting their ability to meaningfully carry out the Biden administration’s ambitious climate goals.

Leaders of AFGE Council 238, a union representing roughly half of the EPA’s 14,000-member workforce, said in a memo that non competitive salaries and a lack of career development opportunities are fueling attrition and overburdening staff. Congress could address these issues by expanding the EPA’s funding in the annual appropriations legislation, which it will write later this year. Failure to do so, the union warned, will jeopardize the implementation of President Joe Biden’s two major legislative achievements — the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

Union leaders began briefing members of Congress about the situation on Monday, presenting them with a series of demands that include the creation of a more robust promotion structure and the development of a program to support equity and inclusion. Staffers are also planning a rally at EPA headquarters on Wednesday.

Sources familiar with the EPA’s workforce told Grist that the actions on Capitol Hill this week have been a long time coming.

The EPA has spent the past six years embroiled in multiple crises. Hundreds of senior staff members departed after former President Donald Trump rolled back dozens of environmental safeguards, creating gaps in institutional knowledge that continue to haunt the agency today. The COVID-19 pandemic further hobbled enforcement programs, as on-the-ground inspection rates for power plants, refineries, and other pollution sources plunged.

Now, the threat of climate change is expanding the EPA’s mission in a way that Congress could not have imagined when the agency was founded in the early 1970s. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act will require staff members to dole out billions of dollars in grants to state and local initiatives and expand its Superfund cleanup program to protect communities of color living near sites of uncontrolled contamination. The agency will take on these efforts at the same time as it fulfills its regular statutory duties, which include developing complicated new rules to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and vehicles and increasing enforcement efforts to ensure companies are abiding by those regulations. But staffing levels have not kept up with these expanded duties.

Today, the workforce is around the size that it was under President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. The AFGE has said that the agency will need 20,000 full-time staff, a 40 percent increase, to carry out the programs it has been tasked with.

Nicole Cantello, who practiced as an EPA attorney for three decades before joining AFGE Council 238 full time in 2020, told Grist that the issue is not only with hiring, but also with retention. A dearth of promotional opportunities and limited work-from-home options have caused retirement-age employees to depart early. Roughly 20 percent of the EPA’s staff have been at the agency for 30 years or more and could elect to retire soon.

“We want to push EPA to create a retention plan that will keep that cohort at the agency for a little longer, because we have a five to 10-year window here to implement” the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, she said.

Tim Whitehouse, the executive director of the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a nonprofit that is campaigning with AFGE in Washington this week, said that in addition to helping the U.S. achieve its climate goals, an expanded workforce would allow the EPA to more thoroughly develop its own science instead of relying on studies designed and developed by industrial companies. He pointed to the EPA program that issues rules around the use of toxic chemicals like per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, also known as "forever chemicals." In the past, industrial companies have tried to conceal the hazards of these types of chemicals, leading to lags in their regulation.

"That's an actual example of how understaffed parts of EPA can make mistakes that have long-term human health consequences," he said.

EPA spokesperson Melissa Sullivan told Grist that the agency is working to onboard nearly 1,800 new employees and that attrition rates at EPA are among the lowest in the federal government. She added that the agency has significantly expanded its outreach program to target qualified candidates.

"While the federal government often cannot equal private sector salaries, it can provide employees with more stability and other benefits," she said. "Specifically, the agency offers the opportunity to protect human health and the environment and positively affect an untold number of people's lives."

For members of AFGE, the staffing shortages are both personal and existential. A failure to address them could have repercussions for generations to come.

"Our mission has grown enormously, and climate challenges continue to escalate, but EPA's inability to hire and retain staff has created a crisis," said AFGE Council 238 President Marie Powell Owens in a statement. "We need to raise pay and restore career ladders now. The future of the EPA and our planet are at stake."

This story has been updated to include a response from the EPA.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/regulation/at-epa-staffing-crisis-clashes-with-expanded-mission/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

The holy maple bar: Notes on an afterlife, without religion

After the dead lizards have been plucked out by the long-necked net, my aunt and I take seats in the reclining plastic chairs next to the pool outside her house. It is the last week in June and my time in Starkville, Mississippi, has taught me the true definition of heat, the heavy weight of humidity.

My cousins slice through the dampness hanging in the air and rush toward the pool. The oldest, his eyes towards the sky, asks my aunt if there will be rain. She tells him maybe, and that if so, she’ll have to bring them inside.

The youngest, a preschooler at a local Catholic school, closes her eyes and clasps her hands in prayer. Just over the joyful hollers of her brother, I hear her words slip out into the thick air: Please, Grandma, don’t let it rain today. Please Grandma. I want to play outside. Don’t let it rain. She holds the tender moment for a second, then joins her brother in joyous celebration of cool water against hot skin.

When your friend is dying, it’s OK to steal her scarves

I ask my aunt if her daughter prays to her grandmother often and she nods. When I ask my cousins what they know about her, they list off dozens of details about her life.

While the lack of religion was freeing in many ways, I also came to understand the holes in people that faith could fill.

She was a Spanish teacher. She used to take her students on yearly trips to Mexico for language immersion. She was from Ames, Iowa. She loved to drink Pepsi and eat maple bar donuts. She screamed the loudest at my uncle’s high school wrestling matches and skipped church to watch the Bears play on Sundays. She loved fiercely and deliberately and would have given anything to see them both in the world.

Our grandmother has been gone for 14 years, but to see her talked about by children born years after her funeral, it doesn’t seem like it’s been 14 weeks.

Coming out as bisexual was, in many ways, easier for my family to swallow than saying that I had given up on their faith. Obama-voting Christians, they at least knew a few lesbians. A life without religion, even in the Christmas-and-Easter-only traditions my family kept most of my childhood, felt unimaginable.

While the lack of religion was freeing in many ways, I also came to understand the holes in people that faith could fill. When the world burned or you failed in grand and fantastic ways, I imagined there being a comfort in knowing that if you were to die you would go to a better place, and that no matter how you failed, even your God was waiting to forgive you.

As an adult, I started to gather the things around me that felt holy, felt true, and lashed them together into something that felt honest and durable, reaching out toward what others found in their religion.

* * *

I carve through the roundabouts and accelerate again quickly, hoping to catch the store’s hours posted online. I’m in pajamas, having given up on the day, before I took a look at the calendar and jumped in the car.

I’m on the phone with Mom. It is a lazy Sunday in a sleepy, tourist town on Puget Sound. I soar through Commercial Street without hitting a light. Mom tells me about her bike ride earlier, out near Spokane. She tells me how clear the sky was and how far she went. For her, God hovers closest to earth on the weekends where her legs burn in lactic acid and her breath gets short.

Eating a donut on what would’ve been her 79th birthday, I know that I am as close to the woman who died 18 years ago as I will ever be.

I put the phone on hold and pull the car into the drive-through line. The cashier asks what I want and I say two maple bars and an old-fashioned, for my partner. When I merge back onto the street heading home, I take Mom off hold and take the first bite of the maple bar.

“How is it?”

I still do not believe in a God, have not prayed or gone to a church for years, but understand that even in a life such as mine, there are moments when I touch that inner power that brings some to tears and tongues in the pews. In that moment, eating a donut on what would’ve been her 79th birthday, I know that I am as close to the woman who died 18 years ago as I will ever be.

“It is good,” I tell Mom, “the best I’ve ever had.”

* * *

There are scientific facts that touch the inner power in me that others find in their faith. One summer, I buy a shirt from which a flower erupts through a skull and tie-die it in the backyard and feel like I’ve touched the place where holiness lives in the human body.

There is a beauty and comfort for me in knowing that I will one day return to the earth I came from. There is a great beauty in the hope that my body will feed the planet that has given me so much. I know this will not undo the damage I have done as a human being, with my lithium batteries and plastic salad bins, but it is something, I imagine, like writing a $25 check to someone who knows you will never pay back what you owe: Not much, but all I can do.

In college, over a Thanksgiving break, I visit my grandfather’s house with the rest of my family and my partner. He has lived in the same house in Central Idaho since 1977 and is three hours from the hospital that he used to go to for cancer treatments. Nobody even brings up the idea of moving closer to one of his children, knowing that he would say, in his awkward, too-polite Midwestern way, to f**k straight off.

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After the obligatory conversation around the kitchen table that my mother grew up with, catching up on how school and work is going, and what we want to have for Thursday’s dinner, I stand up to grab a glass of water. Passing by his fridge, I notice a note sticking out from under a family picture.

I recognize his handwriting, but see that it is a recipe for iced tea, which he does not drink. Two details click into my mind simultaneously: My grandmother drank iced tea more than she drank even Pepsi and my grandfather was her only caretaker the last few months of her life.

I drink only Pepsi when I’m drinking soda, eat only maple bars when donuts are being handed out, and root only for the Bears if there is a game on screen.

I imagine the story immediately. Her dictating the directions to him as he scribbled them down, referring to them to make her iced tea until it become routine. I wonder if the note had been forgotten behind there or if he has chosen, all these years, to keep it on the fridge.

My grandmother has been gone for years, but my grandfather still says “we” and “us,” not “me” and “I” when he tells stories. It is possible that he is addressing his dog, who he takes everywhere with him, but having known the man for twenty-some-odd years, I doubt it.

It is possible that my grandfather will never leave Salmon, Idaho, because he doesn’t want to have to pack up all the belongings he’s acquired over the decades, look for a new house, pick a new place to move when his children live in three distinct and separate areas. But knowing that my grandmother, to whom he was married for nearly 40 years, is buried up on a beautiful hill that overlooks the city and the river it is named after, I doubt it.

* * *

My grandmother lives in me too. I drink only Pepsi when I’m drinking soda, eat only maple bars when donuts are being handed out, and root only for the Bears if there is a game on screen. Her favorite number, and its Spanish translation, scatters itself across years of old usernames and passwords.

Holding my crying newborn in my arms, I instinctively sing songs from her favorite band, Peter, Paul, and Mary. “Puff the Magic Dragon,” “If I Had a Hammer,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” songs I remember best echoing through the house in Salmon 20 years ago. The melodies move through me like a muscle, as if involuntary, as if not coming from me at all.

* * *

The night my grandmother died, I sat in the spare bedroom of the house in Salmon. Having been taken suddenly, the morning after my eighth birthday, on the six-hour drive over two mountain passes in the winter, I knew in that half-formed way that children often do that my grandmother would not make it through the night.

Seeing her frail and skinny on the couch, I broke down in tears. She had been awake all day, the only time she’d done so in months, and pulled me close to her. I kissed her and told her goodbye.

Sitting on the edge of the bedroom, watching a portable DVD player, I cried. My sister, three years younger, cried in the confused, unsure way younger children often do. We watched “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” one of my favorite movies at the time.

At the end of the movie, when the Ark of the Covenant is opened, all the souls contained within escape and whip through the gathering, killing the Nazis. I imagined my grandmother’s soul as it left her body and wondered if it would come through the room, giving my sister and I a last kiss goodbye.

When I was ushered out the back door, while adults kept themselves between us and the bed where my grandma had laid, I pulled the hat over my eyes, like Indiana Jones does in the movie, and cried.

I thought at the time, my grandmother hadn’t had the chance to say goodbye, so strong was the pull from heaven for her soul. But, sitting in a plastic recliner on a hot day in Mississippi 14 years later, watching a child that was named after her pray to her for a clear day, wishing for a Pepsi to beat the heat, I wonder if she has ever truly left.

personal essays about family and loss

5 realistic ways to actually get dinner on the table faster, according to a food editor

Even as someone whose job revolves around thinking about the ways in which we cook, I sometimes find myself succumbing to the temptation of thoughtless delivery far more often than I should.

To be clear, I don’t mind incorporating planned takeout or delivery into my weekly meal plan. In fact, I relish it, and it’s a great way to support local restaurants, especially if you don’t go through third-party apps.

A 3-ingredient marinade for sheet pan salmon that gets dinner on the table in no time

But I really hate the feeling of reaching the end of a busy workday, scanning the refrigerator and feeling so unmotivated to cook that I end up just ordering a pizza. It’s not great for my nutrition goals — or my wallet.

That is why I’ve been focusing this year on implementing small steps that enable me to get dinner on the table quicker and with less stress. I also polled some of my Salon Food coworkers for their tips and advice. Here are some of our personal favorites:

Get creative with shortcuts

Sometimes, it helps to approach the supermarket like a contestant on “Chopped,” where the basket ingredients have to be utilized in unique ways to make a final, cohesive dish. For instance, I was at my local Middle Eastern market recently, where I spotted jarred paprika spread. I checked the ingredients: puréed tomato, carrots, onions, red bell pepper, spices, olive oil and salt. A few days later, I used the spread as the base of a delicious lentil soup when I didn’t feel like slicing and dicing fresh vegetables.

Think about it: Most jarred sauces, spreads and dips can be used to flavor or thicken soups. Similarly, you can raid your local grocery store’s antipasto bar for briny olives, marinated cheese and roasted garlic to toss into pasta, while the salad bar has great options for grain bowl toppings.

Jazz up frozen food

A recipe I’ve been seeing everywhere on social media recently is Hattie McKinnon’s sheet-pan pierogies with Brussels sprouts and kimchi. McKinnon starts with frozen cheese or potato pierogies, then she builds the flavor up with caramelized vegetables and funky kimchi, which becomes beautifully silky after roasting. After pulling the sheet pan meal from the oven, McKinnon recommends pairing it with a dill-y, creamy sauce.

While most of us have a few tricks up our sleeves to amp up frozen pizza (hot honey for the win!), it’s worth thinking about other frozen foods that can serve as a starting point for an easy meal. For instance, you could pair packaged gnocchi with cherry tomatoes, basil and mozzarella pearls for a margherita-inspired pasta. Or, you could combine frozen tortellini, frozen grilled chicken breast strips, jarred roasted red peppers and pesto for a well-balanced dinner.

Lean into breakfast for dinner

Eggs are a great quick-cooking protein that get relegated to the breakfast table far too often. Think about incorporating hearty but quick meals like shakshuka, cilbir or breakfast burritos into your weekly meal plan.

Incorporate “base layers” into your meal prep

Similarly to fashion, when cooking, sometimes it’s nice to start with a base layer that can be dressed up or down. Salon’s chief content officer Erin Keane says that she likes to “mix up a big basic salad ahead of time and eat off it during the week, using it as a base with made-to-order toppings.” I do the same with pots of grains and beans, such as rice and lentils. Last week, I made a pot of chickpeas; some of them got smashed with hot sauce and a little butter and turned into a buffalo chickpea grain bowl. Some of them got used to bulk up my aforementioned lentil soup.

Novelty is a trap

“The same old same old is fine,” Salon senior writer Mary Elizabeth Williams writes me via Slack when I ask about her favorite time-saving tips. She continues: “I save new recipes for when I have the energy, and I’m perfectly happy making the favorites I can do blindfolded the rest of the time. Novelty is a trap.” For Salon deputy food editor Michael La Corte, one of his default recipes is Marcella Hazan’s famous three-ingredient tomato sauce.

about quick and easy meals

No matter what you call this coconut-rich dessert, one thing is clear: It’s absolutely delicious

Made with chopped cashews and graham cracker crumbs, complete with a dense mouthfeel reminiscent of carrot cake, this torte is spectacularly unique and one of my very favorites, especially for celebrating Easter and welcoming in spring.

The funny thing is I never knew exactly what made this dessert a torte — not when I tried it for the first time and not even once I began making it pretty much regularly over 15 years ago after having it at a gathering with my husband’s family in Monteagle, Tenn.

Judging by their responses when tasting it, I don’t think a lot of the people to whom I’ve served it over the years have known exactly what made it a torte, either. “What’s it called again?”

But one thing is for sure: People love it.

The recipe for this easy-to-make, old-fashioned coconut pie has been passed down through time

Prior to falling in love with this torte, my only experience with tortes was in restaurants. Not only did I not know what a torte was exactly, but I also wasn’t sure if it was pronounced “tor-tah” or “tort” based on the spelling. I just skipped it.

Allow me to humbly tell you all that I now know exactly what makes a torte a torte: It’s a type of cake made without flour, though it’s not necessarily gluten-free. Typically dense and multilayered, it’s made with crumbs or ground nuts along with cream, jam or fruit. It’s of European origin, denser than a cake and oftentimes made in a springform pan. Throughout America, it’s typically pronounced as “tort” and elsewhere as “tor-tah.”

Despite being requested numerous times a year, not one person in my family has ever referred to this dessert by its actual name. My husband asks when I’m going to make “that thing that tastes like a carrot cake — only not as sweet — that I like so much.” My good friend, who now makes this every year as part of her family’s Easter lunch, generally tells me she’s making “that funky coconut pie thing of yours.”

I feel like I’m painting all of us — my immediate family, my friends and me — as ignorant rubes, but I don’t think any of us are. None of us grew up with tortes; they weren’t in any of our moms’ repertoires. Plus, the word torte just doesn’t roll off our tongues. It sounds like something that would be hard to make and possibly taste too fancy for the kids at the table.

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However, this coconut torte is unpretentious and simple. The flavor is unmistakably coconut (hence the name), but the other ingredients harmonize handsomely.

The base is made of egg whites beaten to stiff peaks to which chopped cashews, graham cracker crumbs and coconut are added. It’s baked low and slow, given time to cool, then topped with fresh whipped cream sweetened with coconut and lemon zest. It’s also dizzyingly delicious.

I know you’re going to love this coconut torte. Everyone does!

Coconut Torte

Yields

6-8 servings

Prep Time

15 minutes

Cook Time

50 minutes

Ingredients

1 cup graham cracker crumbs
3/4 cup “snowflake” coconut (sweetened or unsweetened both work), divided
1/2 cup chopped dry roasted, salted cashews
Pinch of salt
4 egg whites
1 cup granulated sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup whipping cream
1 tablespoon powdered sugar
1 teaspoon grated lemon zest

Directions

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit.
Combine and set aside the graham cracker crumbs, 1/2 cup coconut and cashews.
With a pinch of salt, whip the egg whites to stiff peaks, gradually add the granulated sugar and beat again to stiff peaks.
Add the vanilla, then fold in the graham cracker mixture.
Pour into a 9-inch baking pan or use a springform pan, and bake 45 to 50 minutes until lightly golden.
Cool completely.
Whip the cream, adding the powdered sugar, lemon zest and remaining coconut. Spread over the torte.
Cut into pie slices to serve.

about coconut

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How the Turkish hospitality industry rallied to aid earthquake victims

The first time I really understood the gravity of damage that comes with a life-altering earthquake was in 2010, when a 7.0-magnitude earthquake hit my paternal homeland of Haiti. Shortly after getting the news, my aunt, Marie France Conde, moved hell and high water to be one of the first doctors on the scene. It took her two days to arrive in Port-Au-Prince (no commercial flights were allowed into the country) and when she arrived, she said that the airport landing strip looked like “a warzone.” A pediatrician, my aunt jumped into action: Building and running makeshift infirmaries for children and trying to create some form of order in the face of insurmountable — and ongoing — need. “Even now, over ten years later, there are still people who have not been able to rebuild their homes,” she said.

As I think about the recent earthquake that devastated Turkey and Syria, I see parallels between what happened in Haiti and what’s happening thousands of miles across the world. While the tragedy of that natural disaster was plastered all over our screens for days, the news cycle has focused less on the people and the amazing professionals who are aiding at the epicenter — like those in the hospitality industry who have jumped in to help their fellow citizens.

Food writer and host Refika Birgül and cookbook author Ece Zaim joined forces with Bahçeşehir University’s culinary program to fill 20,000 donated jars and lids with nutritious meals for residents at and near the epicenter. Yaren Carpar, chef and owner of Istanbul’s Ema Bakery and Catering, is currently located with her team in İskenderun, where they have partnered with a local church to feed and distribute food. Chef and television personality Türev Uludağ, with the help of his team and growing community, is feeding thousands of people through kitchens in Osmaniye, Kahramanmaraş, Kilis, Elbistan, Adıyaman, Gaziantep, Iskenderun and more. He’s also partnering with other notable chefs, like Ebru Baybara Demir, to create nutritious sustainable meals.

A number of hotels that were not affected by the earthquake have opened their doors to refugees in need of shelter, as well, and are partnering with local institutions and individuals to provide as much assistance as possible. According to Reuters, over 11,000 displaced earthquake survivors were being housed in hotels in Antalya, a southern region on the Mediterranean sea, as of February. One such hotel is Kaya Belek, which opened its doors to earthquake victims and partnered with Abant Water to deliver over 100 trucks of water to victims living in provinces affected by the earthquake.

Miles away in Istanbul, hotels like the Çırağan Palace (a 19th-century Ottoman palace-turned-luxury-lodging) coordinated with the Ministry of Interior Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency and other government authorities to send multiple truckloads of emergency disaster recovery supplies — like all-purpose generators, portable toilets, wheelchairs, satellite dishes and televisions, baby food, hygienic supplies and so much more. Not only are more supplies continuously being delivered, but the Çırağan Palace has also launched an Earthquake Humanitarian Aid Campaign which will run for the entire year. For the campaign, a donation of about $10 each day will be added to every guest’s bill and, at the end of each month, the Çırağan will match the donation amount.

In addition to food and shelter, the process of repairing and rebuilding damaged structures can be a slow one, if not altogether stagnant. “After the earthquake, a lot of companies with business interest in Haiti left and never came back — for example, so many destroyed factories weren’t rebuilt right away, because the people that owned them no longer saw the country as a priority,” my aunt said. It can take a nation years, even decades, to recover from a natural disaster, but, depending on the world’s view of the disaster — and the people affected — the success of long-term efforts varies. Today, Haiti has yet to fully recover from the aftermath of an earthquake that struck over a decade ago and without a united, international effort, the regions of Turkey and Syria affected by this humanitarian crisis may face similar challenges in the long, difficult road to healing and rebuilding.

Here are a few trusted resources and organizations you may want to consider donating to for earthquake relief:

Stop shipping the duos on “Abbott Elementary” and “The Bear.” TV needs deeper workplace friendship

We’ve all found ourselves in situations we’ve been conditioned to desire only to discover that the wanting is much better than the reality. On “Abbott Elementary” one such scenario takes place during “Teacher Conference,” where Janine Teagues (Quinta Brunson) and the rest of the Abbott crew attend a Pennsylvania educators’ gathering. There’s networking, seminars, and flowing booze – so much flowing booze.

That same weekend her co-worker Gregory (Tyler James Williams) is supposed to be taking his girlfriend Amber on a weekend getaway. Instead, Amber breaks up with him, leading Gregory to take solace among his community of fellow educators, including Janine, who is still dating his best friend Maurice.

There’s a bar, and there’s Janine’s shoulder to lean on, as well as a bewitching “living classroom” made of flowers and plants. Gregory is heartbroken. Janine is trashed. They sneak into the potted paradise and are agog at the blossoms enveloping them. Of course they kiss.

On top of only being in its second season, “Abbott Elementary” is one of the most smartly written comedies on TV. Brunson and her staff know that getting these two together is at once what the audience wants and could be terrible for the show. Thus in the light of the next workday, long after the influence of booze and perfume has faded, Greg and Janine decide this was a mistake, a thing that just kind of happened.

“Like when I hang up with my Internet provider after they finish helping me reset my Internet and I say, ‘OK! I love you! Bye!'” Janine stammers in one of the show’s wall-breaking confessional segments. “Do I really love my Internet provider? No. Because their networks aren’t reliable! And I’m dating Maurice, so . . .”

The baddest boss at “Abbott Elementary”

With this “Abbott Elementary” follows a long tradition of inserting romantic tension into its ensemble comedy through a pair of people who are obviously perfect for each other. For now, and for the show work, Gregory and Janine operate better as a will-they-won’t-they tease than a couple. It’s risky to even tap into that energy source since if you expend the charge too soon it can burn out the whole show. But once they pop that bubble, possibly a few seasons in, that classically signals the beginning of the end of “Abbott.”

But here’s a potentially unpopular opinion: what if Janine and Gregory never go the way of Sam and Diane? What if the chemistry that sets that kiss aglow evolves into a profoundly platonic, practical, warm and supportive kinship? Go ahead and take it to the next level with these two, minus the amatory innuendo.

Go ahead and take it to the next level with these two, minus the amatory innuendo.

Enough of us are accustomed to expecting pairs of attractive lead characters of the opposite sex on a TV show to bone at some point that proposing the opposite of horny abandon sounds weird and boring. The track record doesn’t lie: The main characters on “Castle” end up married, as did the pair on “Bones” despite Dr. Temperance Brennan reviewing her first lip lock with her longtime law enforcement partner Special Agent Seeley Booth by likening it to kissing her brother.

On the “Magnum P.I.” reboot, Thomas Magnum and Juliet Higgins opened the recently premiered fifth season by getting it on. Why not let Janine and Gregory follow the natural progression of things?

To be honest, they probably will. This is a network show, never forget. It’s also a broadcast comedy that builds realistic storylines around the not-at-all hilarious shortchanging of our public schools in a way that we get the message and a few spit-takes.

Maintaining and expanding Janine and Gregory’s friendship presents an opportunity for the writers to dig into the very different obstacles Janine and her fellow Abbott teachers face in terms of being taken less seriously as women than Gregory would be as a man on a management track, for instance. In real offices, such friendships between men and women are tested by executive-level decisions and behaviors that favor men.

Since Gregory is written as an overachiever with a keen sense of fairness and organization – a male Janine, without the natural aptitude for caring for children – placing him in a position to be an advocate and a friend would be a challenge.

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

It could also be a means of presenting an optimistic vision of how lovely a platonic friendship like that could be, especially since there simply aren’t many such pairings on TV right now. And the romances shared by the couples listed above are nowhere nearly as memorable as, say, the lasting bond between Leslie Knope and Ron Swanson on “Parks and Recreation.”

“Abbott” is one of a few shows in this season where colleagues work in close quarters under enormous pressure and somehow manage not to want anything from each other beyond the capability of their best selves. That’s the workplace family operational standard, as seen on TV. Explored far less frequently is the process of two people who work together, share common interests and behavioral traits, and, miracle of miracles, have no urge to sleep together.

Of the few shows tripping down that road less taken, the one that’s faced the heaviest “just do it already” tension from viewers may be FX’s “The Bear” and its co-lead characters Carmy (Jeremy White), a celebrated chef who takes over his family’s hole-in-the-wall sandwich joint, and Sydney (Ayo Edebiri), a sous chef as talented as he is drawn to work with him out of a yearning to improve her craft.

“Abbott” … colleagues work in close quarters under enormous pressure and somehow manage not to want anything from each other beyond the capability of their best selves. That’s the workplace family operational standard, as seen on TV.

Carmy’s place, The Original Beef of Chicagoland, is a claustrophobic bedlam run by a close-knit team initially unwelcoming to Carmy and Sydney, but eventually they all jump into the trenches together to keep the place alive. It doesn’t work, although their collegiality survives to see the place return to fight another day, and in a new season.

In watching the show it’s obvious that Carmy and Sydney are connected by a shorthand nobody else gets. None of it is sexual. And yet, as the fandom for the show escalated last summer, so did the volume among the ‘shippers clamoring for the culinary comrades to just make up and kiss already. For what purpose? Carmy and Sydney’s magic is in the support and trust they lend each other, a killer combo Carmy left out in the cold too many times before swallowing his pride to ask her forgiveness.

Ayo Edebiri and Jeremy Allen White in “The Bear” (FX)

And Sydney’s choice to return would be out of love – for the culinary craft, for the excitement of helping to build a restaurant from scratch, but not for Carmy. They may not even be friends, and recovering from that schism offers fresh territory to investigate in the new season and beyond.

“The Bear” doesn’t come close to the sentimentality of “Abbott,” which operates out of a place of warmth for even its most selfish character – and Principal Ava (Janelle James) has her eye on landing Gregory anyway, leaving plenty of opportunity for chuckle-sparking double entendre. (Although it will always be fun when anyone proposes going to Bone Town, the local rib joint.)

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

The closest emotional parallel might be “Ted Lasso,” which reaps a rich harvest from its broad ensemble in many ways. Some relationships stand apart from others, however, particularly the friendship shared by Jason Sudeikis’ Ted and Hannah Waddingham’s Rebecca. The series begins with the wealthy, sophisticated Rebecca looking down her nose at the American cornhusker but soon softens her into viewing him from a common place of heartache.

This is a model romantic setup. Song lyrics swoon over hate turning to love. And they do love each other, only not . . . that way. They are boss and employee, and – partly due to Ted’s habit of socially overreaching, it must be said – they’re also honest brokers with each other in terms of their feelings and mental health. Rebecca and Ted need each other the way great friends do, and that’s all they should be.

“Shrinking,” on the other hand, blows the workplace friendship dynamic halfway into its first season by having Jason Segel’s Jimmy Laird drunkenly tumble into bed with his co-worker, and friend – and dead wife’s best friend – Gaby (Jessica Williams). The apparent excuse is that they’re both messes. Jimmy lost his wife in a car accident, and Gaby’s divorce was recently finalized so, sure. People make drunken mistakes, you know, like Gregory and Janine’s kiss. But they keep on making it. It could work out, but it’s all disappointingly obvious.

Jason Segel and Jessica Williams in “Shrinking” (Apple TV+)

“Shrinking” already weakens the boundaries between the professional and personal lives of its characters, so in some respects, Gaby and Jimmy’s whatever-it-is is a natural next stumble on the oopsie hike that comes from emotional disarray. But it’s also a well-trampled path.

Picture how they could have been if they had put their backs into another version of supporting each other and recovering from heartache. Or you could simply watch a version of that play out in Apple TV+’s other series executive produced by Bill Lawrence. The one also that stars “Shrinking” creator Brett Goldstein.

Janine and Gregory might do something similar on “Abbott” with tremendous success and without ever sharing a bed. Then what? Here’s how Janine games out one possibility: “We’d see each other during the day and at night? We’d, you know, tell each other stuff and feel comfortable together? We’d share our deepest thoughts and a life?”

Yes, please. We’d love to witness that develop between these two.

Then again, the relationship she’s imagining here is romantic, and the joke is Janine’s denial that this is exactly what she wants. “It’s gross, honestly, just . . . ugh,” she says.

It’s not gross. It’s just . . . typical.

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Gynecology was built on Black women’s suffering. We’re still reckoning with its racist roots today

In 2018, New York City removed a statue of medical icon James Marion Sims, which had stood in Central Park (just across the street from the New York Academy of Medicine) since 1934. The statue bore a plaque praising Sims’ “brilliant achievements” in medicine; Sims, who died in 1883, was posthumously called the “father of gynecology.” He is most famous for improving the technique to repair obstetric fistulas, which are abnormal openings between a woman’s genital tract, urinary tract or rectum that cause urinary incontinence. While rare today in developed countries, an obstetric vesicovaginal fistula was a major complication of childbirth among 19th century women in America.

“You don’t have to ask these people whether you can experiment on them. You simply go to the owners, and it’s a business deal. That was the nature of the economic relationship between medicine and slavery.”

Though Sims’ research sounds important on paper, his achievements — and those of many other “fathers of gynecology” — occurred at the expense of poor immigrant women and Black women, some of whom were enslaved. The removal of Sims’ statue happened after New York City’s mayoral commission looked at monuments in the city that could “create controversy” or “strong public response in the future.”

“Pioneering gynecological surgical procedures, many of which were initially performed on enslaved women and later on poor immigrant women, were responsible for much of the field’s rapid advancement in cesarean sections, obstetrical fistulae repair, and ovariotomies,” Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens wrote in her book “Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology.” “Modern American gynecology could certainly exist without slavery, but slavery’s existence allowed for the rapid development of this branch of medicine, and especially of gynecological surgery.”

What we can learn from the first time abortion was banned

The removal of the statue of James Marion Sims is a symbol of a larger reckoning happening among medical historians, who are rethinking the role of figures in the field once considered iconic. The reckoning is occurring amid a larger cultural conversation that has involved bringing more of a people’s perspective to the history of the United States, including within fields like medicine.

Salon interviewed the speaker, historian and author more about the origins of modern gynecology and the racist legacy that haunts the field of gynecology. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

James Marion Sims went on to serve as the president of the American Medical Association in 1875 and the American Gynecological Society in 1879, which would be shocking to people now. But as you’ve written and spoken about, it was common in the 19th century to experiment on enslaved Black women. He wasn’t unique in this.

So I really wrote the book to be more inclusive. My book wasn’t about James Marion Sims, it was really about how in the world do we understand American gynecology without first understanding 19th century America and slavery. The institution of slavery was a big part of that. And so it’s often surprising for people to learn that some of the first bodies that moved the field into what we consider a “modern” one were enslaved bodies.

I wanted to write a book that told the story of the patients, those patients who were essentially forced because of their status as chattel, as property, who were forced to have their bodies be used to cure other folk.

I think what’s important for me is to show that in the Atlantic world in the late 18th century and the 19th century, across Europe and the Americas, that vulnerable bodies were used by men of science, by men of medicine, because they had easy access to bodies that that were owned by others, and so they could enter into these business agreements. I think what’s important is to really dispel the myth that there’s kind of like one person who did it all, but to really look at this as a snapshot of 19th century America. James Marion Sims really only becomes the father of American gynecology once he dies. Don’t get me wrong, he does these pioneering surgical reparative methods, particularly for the debut of obstetric fistula, so he does these successful reparative surgical methods, but he’s not called the father until after death.

And so for me, it was, let me show in the first chapter, kind of all of these men given the moniker of father — they’re all building on really harmful beliefs around women, and especially Black women, that we don’t experience pain, or if we do, it’s pretty slight, that women generally think from their uterine and not their brains, all of those kinds of things are really detrimental. And the long-lasting effects are the things that have stayed with us.

As you just mentioned, there was a medical fictitious belief that Black women could withstand pain easier than white women. Today, we have a maternal mortality crisis that disproportionately affects Black women. Do you think a part of that false belief lives on in modern gynecology today?

I would just add one corrective, it wasn’t just enslaved Black women, it was that all Black people were insensible to pain. You had really progressive men like [Founding Father Benjamin Rush — in fact, the only founding father with a medical degree — who, despite his abolitionist leanings, and politics — he believed in women’s rights and prison reform and I could go on and on — and yet he has a talk published in 1799, that essentially says his Black patients [whom he had performed amputations on] were insensitive to pain, and were holding their limbs up not really knowing that they were supposed to be in pain or to express that they had suffered in some way.

These things have been pernicious, but also long standing. Every so often you’ll start to see 18th century racial science crop up [in medicine]. Even in the 21st century… we have medical practitioners at every level who believe these fictions about the alleged differences between Black people and white people. And so yeah, I would say for sure that the remnants and the retention of an 18th century racial science that we should have done away with a long time ago, there’s the imprint that is still with us.

Is the entire field of medicine predicated on racism, and experimenting on enslaved Black women or poor and powerless, women?

I wouldn’t say the whole field of medicine. As a historian, I have to be very careful. I can’t presuppose that these medical advancements wouldn’t have happened. They might have happened had there not been enslaved people’s bodies or poor immigrant bodies to experiment on.

But, I’m simply saying the development of certain branches might not have happened so quickly had there not been the institution of slavery that essentially allows you to use vulnerable bodies that are considered movable property. You don’t have to ask these people whether you can experiment on them or treat them. You simply go to the owners, and it’s a business deal. That was the nature of the economic relationship between medicine and slavery.

There are certainly branches that have depended greatly upon researching and experimenting on the exploitation of enslaved people, vulnerable populations, people who were orphaned or people who were institutionalized in some way whether those were prisons or hospitals for those suffering from mental illnesses, which then were called lunatic asylums.

“The development of certain branches might not have happened so quickly had there not been the institution of slavery that essentially allows you to use vulnerable bodies that are considered movable property.”

I think about dentistry, I think about obstetrics and gynecology, I think about even the beginnings of epidemiology. There’s a wonderful book by a historian of medicine named Jim Downs, it’s called “Maladies of Empire.” He looks globally at prisoners and enslaved people on ships and these doctors and scientists who are using their bodies to figure out if oxygen exists, or looking at the epidemiological origins of certain diseases. And so once again, I think some advancements happened because it was a society where there were so many people who were vulnerable based on a bonded status.

You’ve said before that these women experimented on are actually the forgotten “mothers of gynecology?” How do you think your book, and our understanding the history of medicine, would have been different if you could have read firsthand accounts of the enslaved Black women who were experimented on?

I’m writing about people whose names have either been lost to records, and if we do know their names, it’s sometimes only the first name or some pejorative nickname. As a historian, when you’re devoting so much time, years, going through these archives and reading these records, they’re almost always records that are written by the men who owned these women.

But I can sometimes read through the doctor’s words, through their case narratives, and I can sometimes say, “this person struggled.” Some say the patient “lost sense of themselves and fought violently as we were trying to restrain them,” so you know that the victimized patients weren’t necessarily passive all the time. There’s a whole mythology around the passivity of enslaved people, which we know isn’t true.

In terms of James Marion Sims, I don’t know if any of those women had been plantation nurses or slave nurses, where he got them from, but having to then perform work on each other and themselves… You know, I’m wondering how that felt.

For me, it was really about telling the history of American medicine, that included all of the players, and so even if I couldn’t say “Betsy wrote this,” I could at least say “there were 12 enslaved women, or there were five enslaved women” or “this doctor wrote about the surgical operations on the ‘negresses,'” as they were then called. And I can pinpoint that there had always been a black presence as people were building and creating in legitimating these branches of medical study and practice.

“What I’d say in terms of reparations is that Black people’s health care — and I would say this for anybody — should not be linked to just your labor.”

So much is lost by not having firsthand accounts.

There’s been a lot of talk about reparations in America, and I’m curious to hear from you. I mean, what can that look like in the field of gynecology? How can the country rewrite the narrative of gynecology more accurately?

That is a heavy question. And I think that there are many answers.

When I think about the long practice of extracting labor from [poor or Black women’s] bodies or experimenting on those bodies — whether it’s the experimentation of birth control that happened with mentally ill people in the in the early 20th century in Massachusetts in a hospital for the insane, or the Tuskegee Experiment, or the ones we’ve yet to discover — what I’d say in terms of reparations is that Black people’s health care should not be linked to just your labor in the United States. I would say this for anybody in the United States.

In my estimation, it’s not just universal health care, but also compassionate health care. And I always point to the Black birthing crisis that has gone on for as long as people have collected records. But beyond that, the United States continues to fail women and birthing people because the situation has gotten even more dire. For all women, and birthing people, Black women continue to be at the top of the statistics in terms of experiencing pregnancy complications in deaths. But for white women, those numbers for mortality and morbidity for them and in their infants is also increasing.

That’s what I think we really need to reckon with is that there should be universal health care — because the system, as it stands now, is not helpful when it comes to reproductive health.

about the history of science

An international battle over cheese has left European producers feeling bitter

For most cheese lovers, taste is the thing. Whether it’s a tangy blue stilton or a creamy oozing camembert, the most important element is the eating.

But cheese has profound political and economic properties too, with implications for international trade deals and commerce.

The taste of gruyere, for example, can depend on where you eat it. In Europe, it has a particular taste that comes from being a Swiss cheese (a French version is also available) made by heating Swiss cow’s milk in a copper vat and then ripening the cheese in Swiss cellars with the humidity of a natural cave.

In the US though, gruyere means any nutty, pale yellow cheese made from cow’s milk and it can be produced anywhere in the world. That definition was recently given legal weight by the US court system after representatives of Swiss and French manufacturers tried to win protected status for the word “gruyere”. This would have restricted the use of the term in the US for cheeses produced in particular parts of Switzerland and France.

The European consortiums’ aim was to extend the kind of prize status grueyere enjoys closer to home. For in Switzerland and the EU, gruyere is protected by a geographical label which certifies that production, including the sourcing of the raw materials, takes place in a specific geographical area. It is a means of preserving cultural heritage and expertise, which in the case of gruyere, is said to go back to the 12th century.

In the US however, the Dairy Export Council argued that vast quantities of cheese made in all kinds of places have been labeled and sold as gruyere for decades. They argued that the name “gruyere” is generic and cannot be owned by anyone. The US court sided with them.

The case highlights the clear difference between the ways Europeans and Americans regulate geographical names of traditional foods. The contrasting views had already been a tricky element in recent negotiations for a proposed trade deal between the US and the EU.

For in Europe, many products — including hams, cheese and wines — receive strong levels of legal protection to preserve the reputations and traditions that have sometimes been built over centuries. They are considered “products with a story” and the names of the geographical locations where they are produced are given intellectual property rights.

The US follows a very different set of rules. There, firms use European geographical names (not only gruyere, but also parmesan, asiago, feta and fontina, among others) to label cheeses that have been produced far from their original homes. The reason is that most US consumers view these names as generic — to them they just describe the features of the product, like whether it melts well or has a salty taste.

The economic stakes are high on both sides of the Atlantic. To Europeans, the absence of legal protection in the US leads to unacceptable exploitation of Europe’s cultural legacy and costs manufacturers of cheese a lot of money, as they can’t rely on exclusive rights over names which attract customers.

On the other hand, American cheese producers are concerned that caving into Europeans’ demands to monopolize such names would be unfair as they wouldn’t be able to continue using terms that they perceive as generic. Introducing legal protection would offer European cheese producers an unfair competitive edge.

It would, in American eyes, essentially be a trade barrier that would drive up customer prices by forcing many US producers to undergo an expensive rebranding process. According to one study, the American dairy industry could lose as much as US$20 billion (£16 billion) if the Europeans were successful in restricting the use of common cheese names.

Hard cheese

A US Consortium for Common Food Names has even been set up specifically to represent the interests of American producers and farmers to lobby US lawmakers into denying legal protection for numerous European geographical terms, not only for cheeses. It obviously welcomed the gruyere decision enthusiastically.

The group backs up its stance by arguing that the US was founded on the work of immigrants who brought authentic and artisan traditions from around the world, including many of the processes protected in Europe.

And it is no doubt true that when Europeans emigrated to the US in the 19th and 20th centuries, many continued to produce the delicacies they had made back home. They brought with them traditional manufacturing techniques and the names they were used to.

But surely this argument cannot be stretched to the point of denying Europeans all rights over geographical terms which still have a reputation further afield. Not all of the US businesses which use famous European geographical names were founded by European migrants.

One possible compromise might be to attempt to reach bilateral agreements allowing only those US producers created by European migrants to use the labels in question.

But for the time being, the impasse continues. European producers will strive to get the protection in the US that they think their delicacies deserve — and their American counterparts will fiercely reject any move to restrict their freedom to use the labels they wish to use. There is still a hearty appetite for this trans-Atlantic food fight.

Enrico Bonadio, Reader in Intellectual Property Law, City, University of London and Andrea Zappalaglio, Lecturer in Intellectual Property Law, University of Sheffield

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Shooting hoops and K-dramas: The American dream of not being relegated to a subplot

“It just felt like magic. I was telling my wife at the time, ‘I’ve never felt so good about this country.’ It really still is the moment I felt the best about the political climate.”

No, author Matthew Salesses isn’t speaking about the election of Barack Obama as president, but rather an event that occurred in the middle of his two terms: Linsanity.

In the 2011-2012 season, point guard Jeremy Lin led the Knicks in a turnaround with a seven-game winning streak that became a cultural phenomenon known as Linsanity. For a while it seemed that goodwill for Lin united the nation. He wasn’t just recognized as this savior of the team, but also significantly as an Asian American man rising in a sport that had never seen the likes of him before. And then the streak ended, and eventually, the Knicks let Lin go.

“For those two weeks it felt so supportive and amazing. It felt like everybody was rooting for him, for this possibility to open up,” Salesses told Salon in a Zoom interview. “When that all fell apart, it was very disappointing. It felt really like a referendum, like a door closing right in our faces. Afterwards, it was clear people were holding back their criticism.”

In the author’s new novel “The Sense of Wonder,” fourth-string point guard Won Lee gets off the bench to lead the Knicks in a similar winning streak that the media dubs the Wonder. As star teammate and captain Paul Burton – better known as Powerball! – continues to be sidelined with an injury, all eyes turn to Won as the Knicks’ only hope to make it to the playoffs.

Rooting for your own kind

The story for “The Sense of Wonder” came naturally to Salesses, who grew up dreaming of being in the NBA, but often felt limited in that dreaming as an Asian American.

“My friends and I, who all wanted to be NBA basketball players, we were always talking about who our game was like,” he said. “We had these kind of stars in mind, and it was always pretty hard for me to figure out who that was. The idea that somebody Asian American could make it in the league was really not something I was used to being told all the time and seeing all the time. And so [with Linsanity] it really felt that somebody was giving us a chance.”

It’s clear that even before Salesses became a storyteller, he felt subject to the power of the prevailing narrative – or lack of one – about Asian Americans playing basketball. In “The Sense of Wonder,” Won only gets his chance when Powerball! throws out his back. And reporter and fellow Korean American Robert Sung only covers the Knicks after losing his chance at achieving his own hoop dreams. (“In the story of his life, he was a subplot,” Salesses writes.)

The narrative of Asian Americans excelling in anything other than the expected sports – figure skating, martial arts, gymnastics, table tennis, etc. – is still framed as an oddity. In the new Disney+ movie “Chang Can Dunk,” sophomore Xiao Ming “Bernard” Chang (Bloom Li) worships Kobe Bryant’s work ethic and goes into rigorous training to prove in front of his entire high school that he has the ability to slam dunk.

“If I could dunk it would be proof that I could be more than who I am,” says Chang. For him and Won Lee, playing basketball is more than just access. It’s about being seen, about not being relegated to a subplot, even in one’s own mind.

The importance of centering narrative continues when “The Sense of Wonder” moves from sports to another facet of the Korean American pop culture identity. Won Lee’s girlfriend Carrie Kang is a producer of Korean dramas overseas, but her dream is to create a K-drama in America. “To be a minority in America is to guard what you love from other people’s scorn,” she observes.

As a Korean adoptee, Salesses didn’t grow up with K-dramas and only started watching them as an adult after visiting Korea and meeting his first wife. When she was diagnosed with Stage 4 stomach cancer, they turned to these shows for comfort. Today, Salesses equates the optimism – that sense of wonder – evoked from Linsanity with the feelings he gets watching K-dramas.

“I love where it’s gone now,” said Salesses about how K-dramas have become increasingly embraced, “but I think people are watching the wrong dramas.”

Check out the rest of my interview with Matthew Salesses for more about basketball, storytelling, puns and his favorite K-dramas.

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Paint me a picture – just how devoted were you when it came Linsanity? Were you already a Jeremy Lin fan? Did you follow the Knicks?

I am not a Knicks fan. I actually just moved to New York. I grew up in Connecticut, but in the Boston side of Connecticut, so I grew up a Celtics fan. But I had been following Lin since his time in Harvard loosely and then a little bit more once he had that NCAA tournament breakout game. I had been watching his performance over the summer league. He had this big game against John Wall, the No. 1 pick in the draft, and then still wasn’t picked up. He had to go and get an un-guaranteed contract.

So when Linsanity happened, I already knew who he was. I had been hoping for a couple years that he would get a chance. But of course, I hadn’t expected what happened. It felt unreal or like a heightened reality. I was following it really closely, watching every game, watching all the news coverage, every single thing I could get my hands on. I’ve never felt so good about this country . . . and it’s just about basketball. Like, how ridiculous, you know?

Do you own any merch?

I have a Lin jersey.

You make Won Lee the Korean American version of Jeremy Lin in your book. There’s a famous headline regarding Lin that involves a racial slur. Since the media’s coverage of Won plays a big part in this book, did you want to mimic that with the Great Wall [of China] headline?

“When you aren’t allowed in a certain space, and then somebody just lets one of you in, they’re like, ‘You should be so grateful for being here at all.'”

Yeah, I used the Great Wall thing. I didn’t want to recreate the slur; we didn’t have to be re-traumatized by it. But I remember at the time [reading that headline] thinking maybe it was a mistake. It’s a common phrase. And maybe the editor will come out and apologize. Like, “I’m so sorry, I totally didn’t mean this.” But instead, he said, “Oh, I’ve never even heard this term before.” And that was like, “There’s no way you haven’t heard this before. So now you’re just telling on yourself.” It was disappointing.

Jeremy Lin #17 of the New York Knicks drives for a shot attempt in the first quarter against the Los Angeles Lakers at Madison Square Garden on February 10, 2012 in New York City (Chris Chambers/Getty Images)As with Jeremy Lin, Won Lee experiences backlash after the Wonder ends. There’s resentment, and he’s expected to take a backseat again. One line in particular resonated with me: “He had broken the rules of gratitude as an Asian.” Could you discuss that sentiment?

The gratitude thing comes straight out of adoption for me. When I was growing up, everybody was always saying to me, “You must be so grateful. Your parents saved your life.” And every time somebody said that, it made me less grateful. It felt like gratitude then became a kind of weird weight around my neck and something I didn’t want to be grateful for. And that too, felt bad, right? So it’s this cycle of guilt and gratitude.

And I do think sometimes when you aren’t allowed in a certain space, and then somebody just lets one of you in, they’re like, “You should be so grateful for being here at all.” But you’re like, “I’m not really even there,” or “You haven’t even really let me in, and yet you’re asking me to be grateful.”

How much did you want Won Lee to mirror Jeremy Lin’s career trajectory?

At the time when I was really working on the book, Lin was still in the NBA. So he hadn’t gone to China yet to play there. And Won has the option to go to Houston, gets the same kind of contract, but instead goes to Korea. At first, I was going to have him follow the same trajectory: go to Houston and be shuffled around the NBA.

But I wanted to have a K-drama happy ending. And I still think, looking around, it doesn’t seem that’s possible here. And so where’s the place he would be accepted and have a real chance at playing in a way that would just be about that joy of playing basketball? For me, that seemed like the choice was to go to Korea, a place where people can see you as whatever you want to be. It was funny because Lin’s decision to go to China was after I’d made the decision to send Won to Korea; I thought maybe maybe he had the same feeling.

The character of Robert Sung is intriguing in that he’s also a Korean American who showed promise with basketball but suffered a career-ending injury. Now he’s a reporter who exclusively covers the Knicks and his former teammate Powerball! You’d think he’d be supportive of Won, but they’re almost like frenemies instead.

I was writing this story about this basketball player who has the skills and should be an insider in that game and on his team, yet he’s treated all the time like an outsider even when he becomes a star. I had Sung as this kind of foil to Won. For me, it was the second layer of being an outsider within a community. So Sung is adopted and he’s in this Asian American community and has all of these things in common with Won, but in the end, he’s still always kind of treated as somebody outside of things, at least by Won.

It’s probably not the same for everybody. I’ve often felt I’ve gained so much from the [Asian American] community, I’ve found so much love within the community and yet also there are times when it seems people are like, “You don’t belong. You’re not like a real Asian.” So I wanted to kind of get that in the book as like this extra layer of the same kind of phenomenon.

Robert Sung’s trajectory as a Korean adoptee is different from your own. What did you want to explore with him?

“I’ve found so much love within the [Asian American] community and yet also there are times when it seems people are like, ‘You don’t belong. You’re not like a real Asian.'”

I’ve written within Korean adoptee characters before as a Korean adoptee. But I wanted to see what it would be like to think about how people sometimes see us, from within the Asian American community. And since I had Won as the narrator, I wanted to see what he would think about Robert Sung. I give Sung some loose details of my own life: adoption and Catholicism. But really, most of it is pretty divergent.

The thing that really interests me about Lin’s story is we don’t know what it’s like on the inside. I’ve watched the docs and stuff, but I imagine it’s probably much harder and much more complex from inside that story. But all we see is this stuff from outside. And that’s the stuff that I was interested in, putting that pressure on Won. And then also having Won be a narrator and putting that pressure on somebody else. So we never really get Sung’s story the way that he would tell it; that was something I wanted to play with here. But then I wanted to throw other adoptees in the bunch just so that we don’t think this is the adoptee experience, because I don’t think that it is.

Your previous novel “Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear” gets a fun callback because it’s the title of a chapter in “The Sense of Wonder.” How does disappearance relate to Won?

We’re disappeared a lot, right? I think “Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear” is obsessed with: What does it mean to appear? And what does it mean to disappear? And if we’re going to be disappeared, is there a way to make that positive and not a terrible experience since it’s just a basic fact of life as a racialized minority?

So, the story of Won’s rise is a similar story. He’s appearing in a way; he’s all over the news. But it’s not really him. So it’s another kind of disappearance too. I just wanted to kind of acknowledge that but also put it in for fan service or as Easter eggs.

Did the name Won Lee come first or after the idea for his basketball winning streak known as “the Wonder”?

What came first was Won Lee’s name. I just thought it would be funny for a basketball player to have the name, like you win a game. Lots of things start as jokes for me in my head that will just be funny for me as I’m writing.

Powerball! with an exclamation point. I thought, “How fun would it be to change your name to something where every time a reporter had to write about you, they would have to write an exclamation point?” There’s this writing rule, people say you only get three exclamation points in your life. So that was like a way to force multiple exclamation points into the book.

“The Sense of Wonder” by Matthew Salesses (Little, Brown)Switching to K-dramas now – you develop a pretty detailed plot for the series that Won’s girlfriend Carrie Kang is shooting in Korea. It’s a romantic comedy between a man who can predict the future (thanks to a ghost) and a woman who can see ghosts. As an American writer, did you find it more challenging to create a K-drama story?

I have these show ideas from a while back. One day, I want to write these shows. But of course, I can’t really speak Korean well enough to write a show in Korean. And I have no connections to the K-drama industry. So it seemed like a chance to get these things that I thought would be fun to write onto the page. Then as I was writing “For the Love of Your Future Self” –

Which is a fantastic title, by the way.

Thank you, it’s a really K-drama title. It’s very cheesy, but also punny.

So I was writing that and at a certain point, I thought I could just write the entire thing here. But actually, then it will seem like a singular show. And what I wanted to show was how they’re following certain marks and have certain kind of tropes that happen across different shows. That’s why I decided to have a different show for the second half of the K-drama [part of the book].

What sort of research did you do for the development and production side of K-dramas?

“In K-dramas it’s kind of interesting in that almost all the all the writers are women, but almost all the directors are male.”

There’s this great drama [“Worlds Within”], it’s older with Hyun Bin and Song Hye-kyo. They are [playing] producers of K-drama. So there’s a few shows where you can see the characters are working on K-dramas. Those helped a little bit. There are certain variety shows, too. You can see they interact more with the staff. And sometimes you’ll see like the staff get involved in the show, to see more of the behind-the-scenes too.

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You had to write from the point of view of a woman with Carrie’s chapters. So you also dig into her experiences of gender discrimination in production. What did you want to explore there?

It seems like from knowing people, there’s so much of that discrimination. And even the show with Song Hye-kyo deals with some of that as a woman in a male-dominated field. In K-dramas it’s kind of interesting in that almost all the all the writers are women, but almost all the directors are male. So I think that dynamic is pretty interesting.

Carrie is coming into the drama from the production side that’s very male, as a woman, but also as an American woman, as somebody’s completely outside of the country. And yet, you know, she’s Korean American, so she can speak Korean. And she has some understanding of what is going on there. Of course, she has her whole professional career, so it’s not like she has no experience.

A lot of the voice was thinking about how the various ways in which, like, I think sometimes for me voice is about like, the resistances that we come up against. And the ways in which we have learned to speak at or around those resistances. And so, for Won, there are very different kinds of places where society chafes against what he wants to say.

Lee Byung-hun as Eugene Choi and Kim Tae-ri as Go Ae-shin in “Mr. Sunshine,” a historical K-drama involving four nations, spies, revenge and romance (Netflix)While a lot of the world watches K-dramas, for some, they’ve only heard of “Squid Game” or maybe hear they’re romantic, but nothing more than that. I read that your first wife had introduced you to K-dramas. What was your awareness of them before that?

I had no awareness really of anything Korean growing up . . . When I went to Korea I was 23 and still had no idea about anything. I was afraid to eat the food because I had read this “Lonely Planet” guide on the plane over, and it was like, You could get diarrhea. I was going out and I don’t even know what this food is because I’ve never seen it before.

I met my wife pretty early on and actually would have left Korea and never gone back probably if I hadn’t met her. So in the process of teaching me how to eat . . . we also were watching Korean movies. Korea has all these rooms where you could go and do small-scale versions of the big thing. So we would go into a DVD bang and watch a movie in that private movie theater or watch dramas online.

I think the first one I watched was “You’re Beautiful,” which is one of the Hong sisters dramas. It’s Park Shin-hye in kind of her breakout role because she was a child actress before. There’s this popular boy band, and her twin brother is joining this boy band. And they’re identical twins, but he has gone to America to get some kind of plastic surgery, and the surgery has gone wrong. So he can’t join right away, but it’s a huge break for his career.

“K-dramas are very comforting to me. I need a lot of comfort.”

She’s trying to become a nun. [Laughs] And his manager comes and gets her and is like, “You have to do this for your brother.” So she steps into his role and pretends to be him and joins this boy band group. Of course, all the boys fall in love with her. Some of them know that she is a woman pretty early on, and some of them don’t. So it’s just a funny, “Who are we in love with?” thing. It’s pretty good.

I kind of wanted to hate it because it’s so cheesy, and I was a much younger man at the time and wasn’t comfortable being sentimental. But it was so compelling. It just kind of pulls you right through it. You have no time to hate it. K-dramas are very comforting to me. I need a lot of comfort.

Many K-dramas involve body swapping, souls of people taking over other bodies or like in Carrie’s show, a ghost attaching itself to people. Could you talk a bit a little bit about the K-drama concept where there is this thin line between supernatural and reality as we see it?

It’s about accepting the idea that the supernatural is all around us. That the things in Korean fairy tales or superstitions are actually just one half-step away from where we are already.

If you are in Korea, you see people accepting the fact that ghosts are real. It’s only a little bit farther to go from that to somebody can talk to ghosts. And they can do weird things in life, like a virgin ghost inhabiting the body of a woman who doesn’t like this guy [as in “Oh My Ghost.”] So you’re taking this already existent feeling that the supernatural exists, and just making it a little bit more tangible.

Then adding to that, my book talks about this a lot, there’s this different way of thinking about the world and what happens to us in the world [as Americans]. Whereas Korea is a country obsessed with birth. It’s like, you are who you are because you’re born that way. You’re Korean, because you’re born Korean; it’s so much blood, and you’re so much genetics. To me, if you start thinking critically about the cultural socioeconomic factors that make us who we are, all that stuff is pretty much determined at birth too, right? If you think what’s the number one determiner of your income level – it’s your parents’ income level, right? So those things all come together in K-drama.

Sometimes those are criticized. Dramas are making critiques like “Squid Game” about the ways in which you’re fated at birth, what is possible for you in life. And sometimes, it’s more like star-crossed lovers who might have were born once 1,000 years ago, and came to a bad end, and now they’ve been reborn and are trying to make it work this time.

So, yeah, it’s definitely a different way of thinking about the world. But I think I entered that world right away because it felt so real in a sense, of – what’s the driving factor behind a life? It seems like that to me is not so much like we get to make all these choices, and those things determine what happens to us. My life hasn’t been like that much. [Laughs]

Yeom Hye-ran as Kang Hyeon-nam and Song Hye-kyo as Moon Dong-eun in “The Glory” (Graphyoda/Netflix)You mention with Carrie’s character, when she gets angry she says, “I wanted to revenge all over the place.” Revenge is one of the themes I’ve noticed with a lot of K-dramas like “The Glory,” which also stars Song Hye-kyo. What are your observations about Korean revenge TV and movies?

I love it. I love it so much. “City Hunter.” Have you seen that one? It’s so good. I love all the Korean revenge dramas like all the Park Chan-wook series, that trilogy [“Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance,” “Oldboy” and “Lady Vengeance.”] I think it’s this Han thing, this desire for revenge. And I’m actually writing right now a revenge story novel, which is basically a K-drama – let’s be real. [Laughs]

Intriguing. What can you say about that story?

It’s about an Asian American revenge cult. So from the time the first official Korean Americans appeared in America, they’ve been taking revenge on people. And it’s a younger girl, 12 at the beginning of the book. She’s being bullied a lot in school; it’s my first time trying to set something in the area that I grew up in. And she finds out that her parents are part of this revenge cult, so she’s inspired to take revenge.

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Donald Trump makes Ron DeSantis so much more dangerous

Donald Trump was initially treated by the media as a largely harmless curiosity, then a compelling and fascinating public figure who was viewed as an “insurgent” and “unconventional.” That is when the media began to normalize Trump. He would show himself to be a pathological liar but the news media waited several years to state that obvious fact. As Trump’s fascist and demagogic tendencies (and plan) became even more obvious, the mainstream news media largely continued to treat him as a normal political candidate who in the end would be constrained by the country’s democratic institutions and norms. After he won the 2016 election, the mainstream news media continued to insist, years into the disaster, that Trump at some point “would rise to the occasion” and make a “presidential” pivot.

Of course, that never happened.

Trump, empowered by the news media’s normalization of him, would then lead the greatest political crime spree in American history. 7 years later, the mainstream news media is repeating that pattern of behavior with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Through his policies, speech, and other actions, DeSantis has proven himself to be a neofascist and an authoritarian who treats real democracy and pluralism with contempt. Instead of foregrounding those facts in their coverage of DeSantis and his imminent 2024 presidential run, the mainstream news media is consistently describing him with euphemisms and other complementary language designed to make him sound exciting and compelling: “Rockstar.” “Culture warrior.” “Brawler.”

As the truism observes, bad habits die hard. For institutions like the news media, bad habits die again and again and again ad infinitum until the lesson is learned too late.

As I explained in a previous essay here at Salon, DeSantis is no friend of democracy; he is a friendly fascist who is in many ways more dangerous than Trump. Ultimately, there are few if any substantive differences between Trump and DeSantis except in how their fascism and other antidemocracy beliefs and policies are packaged and presented.

Florida is officially a laboratory for fascism in the U.S.

In a recent story that is representative of a larger pattern among the country’s leading media outlets, the New York Times profiled DeSantis and his attempts to connect with the Republican Party’s base voters. The result was predictable. In a mostly flattering and humanizing profile, the Times emphasized DeSantis and his personality and the political horse race instead of the man’s values and policies and how they will hurt American people en masse if he becomes president. The headline, “A Glimpse of DeSantis in Iowa: Awkward, but Still Winning the Crowd,” is a perfect fit for the story and its tale of the big city fancy school-educated Floridian trying to connect with the commoners in Trumplandia and other parts of “real America”:

Suzy Barker, a native Iowan dressed in an orange-and-blue University of Florida hoodie, waited in a crowd of fellow Republicans on Friday morning to meet Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.

She smiled widely and pointed to her hoodie as she told the governor that her son attended college in his home state. Mr. DeSantis — dressed in a dark blue suit with a light blue, open-collar shirt and black boots — stood on the opposite side of 10 metal bike racks separating him from the crowd. He gave a slight nod to Ms. Barker and told her about his state’s new “grandparent waiver” that gives tuition breaks to out-of-state students whose grandparents are Florida residents.

But Ms. Barker, a 50-year-old teacher who had driven about an hour to see the Florida governor in Davenport, does not have any other family in the Sunshine State, and she narrowed her eyes in confusion at his response. Here she was at an event promoting Mr. DeSantis’s new book, shoulder to shoulder with a crush of Iowans eager for face time with the anti-“woke” darling of right-wing America, and he was talking waivers.

Mr. DeSantis quickly scribbled his name with a black Sharpie in her book and smiled. “Go Gators,” he told her as he moved on to the next person awaiting his signature.

The interaction underscored both the promise and the potential pitfall of a presidential bid for Mr. DeSantis. His preference for policy over personality can make him seem awkward and arrogant or otherwise astonishing in person, depending on the voter and the success or failure of his one-on-one exchanges. Many Republicans view his style as an antidote to the character attacks and volatility that have underscored Republican politics during the Trump era.

As Mr. DeSantis decides whether to seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, one of the biggest questions facing the 44-year-old Floridian is his ability to connect with voters who have had little exposure to him outside his home state.

The Times continued:

Mr. DeSantis seemed determined to sign every book and smile for every selfie the crowd wanted.

On Twitter, Mark Jacob, a former editor at the Chicago Tribune turned media critic, summarized the Times piece: “The Washington media crowd keeps covering the rise of fascism from a marketing angle.”

As author and journalist Jeff Sharlet highlighted, also in a series of posts on Twitter, “Any media spending time in Trump vs. DeSantis isn’t just playing horse race; it’s actively ignoring the real story, which is that Trumpism—the American strain of fascism—has so thoroughly consumed US politics that only fascists can really contend.”

Like the mainstream news media, the right-wing kingmakers in the Republican Party and “conservative” movement such as the Koch Network, Murdoch, and others in that orbit are desperately trying to normalize and present DeSantis as a significantly different (and by implication preferable) option as compared to Donald Trump.

It would be a great error to conclude that they are doing this because of a love of democracy. The Republican Party and “conservative” movement’s elites used Trump and his MAGA movement as a type of berserker or blitzkrieg force to smash America’s democratic norms and institutions. DeSantis will be used to consolidate their gains as he rules over a more institutional and permanent version of a new American fascist order that transforms the country into a White Christofascist plutocratic version of Vladimir Putin’s Russia or Viktor Orban’s Hungary.

The myth of “liberal” news: How the media does the work of fascists

In a new essay at the New Republic, Ana Marie Cox makes this intervention:

Don’t get me wrong, it is highly amusing to see the Republican donor/pundit class make the same error they did in 2016, projecting their chattering-class concerns onto an electorate as unconcerned with “crassness” as it is with “baggage” and, for that matter, potential criminal charges. If conservative voters were really looking for politicians that supported Trump policies but were just more covertly racist and less embarrassingly fascistic, then Liz Cheney would still be representing Wyoming in Congress today.*

As others have observed, the choice between Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump is the equivalent of choosing between being stabbed or shot to death – or perhaps being blown up by a grenade. In a recent press release, the pro-democracy advocacy group The Lincoln Project summarized this false dichotomy perfectly:

Don’t be fooled by any conservative who tries to tell you that DeSantis is a more moderate version of Trump. DeSantis, far from being moderate, is trying to appeal to the same culture-war focused MAGA base that Trump currently controls. To win the hearts and minds of MAGA, to get them to move away from Trump, DeSantis will have to be an even more extreme version of Trump. And therein lies the danger of a DeSantis nomination: in order for him to be successful, he has to be extreme.

By normalizing and laundering DeSantis, the mainstream news media is presenting neofascism and authoritarianism, and all of the human harm such policies have already and will cause to the American people on an even greater scale, as something palatable.

In the end, there is no real choice between DeSantis and Trump. To borrow from the end of the classic 1984 movie Ghostbusters, the American people are being asked to choose the form of their Destructor.

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Trump lights up the MAGA signal in an all-caps call to protest his foretold arrest

In an all-caps rant posted to Truth Social on Saturday, former President Trump sent a distress signal to his MAGA supporters, asking them to protest his looming indictment.

Claiming that “illegal leaks from a corrupt and highly political Manhattan District Attorney’s Office” indicate that he’ll be taken into custody on Tuesday “in connection with a years-long investigation into a hush money scheme involving adult film actress Stormy Daniels,” as CNN reports, he’s all but bracing arms and legs in the doorframe to avoid being pulled out.

Trump’s looming potential indictments pose a big question for the media: How to cover his campaign?

“OUR NATION IS NOW THIRD WORLD & DYING,” Trump writes. “THE AMERICAN DREAM IS DEAD! THE RADICAL LEFT ANARCHISTS HAVE STOLLEN OUR PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, AND WITH IT, THE HEART OF OUR COUNTRY. AMERICAN PATRIOTS ARE BEING ARRESTED & HELD IN CAPTIVITY LIKE ANIMALS, WHILE CRIMINALS & LEFTIST THUGS ARE ALLOWED TO ROAM THE STREETS, KILLING & BURNING WITH NO RETRIBUTION. MILLIONS ARE FLOODING THROUGH OUR OPEN BOARDERS, MANY FROM PRISONS & MENTAL INSTITUTIONS. CRIME & INFLATION ARE DESTROYING OUR VERY WAY OF LIFE…”

In part two of his call to action, Trump continues with:

“NOW ILLEGAL LEAKS FROM A CORRUPT & HIGHLY POLITICAL MANHATTAN DISTRICT ATTORNEYS OFFICE, WHICH HAS ALLOWED NEW RECORDS TO BE SET IN VIOLENT CRIME & WHOSE LEADER IS FUNDED BY GEORGE SOROS, INDICATE THAT, WITH NO CRIME BEING ABLE TO BE PROVEN, & BASED ON AN OLD & FULLY DEBUNKED (BY NUMEROUS OTHER PROSECUTORS!) FAIRYTALE, THE FAR & AWAY LEADING REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE & FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, WILL BE ARRESTED ON TUESDAY OF NEXT WEEK. PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK!”

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As CNN highlights in their coverage, “Any indictment of the former President, who is running for reelection in 2024, would mark a historic first and quickly change the political conversation around an already divisive figure.”

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Girlboss, gratify, believe: Keeley of “Ted Lasso” takes control

For the long-awaited return of “Ted Lasso,” the trope of the girlboss comes to the pitch. Recently in past seasons of the Apple + show, the likable Keeley Jones (Juno Temple) has blazed a path from influencer/ model/footballer girlfriend to Head of Marketing at AFC Richmond.

Now in Season 3, she’s striking out on her own, after her success promoting the dating app Bantr, launching her own PR firm. In typical Keeley fashion, she does so with humor, style and her trademark warmth. Keeley isn’t like other bosses. She’s a cool boss. But she’s punished for it too.

The power of Hannah Waddingham’s character Mother Witch in “Hocus Pocus 2”

At the end of the sophomore season of “Ted Lasso,” many of the stories were in flux. AFC Richmond was promoted to the Premier League. Rebecca (Hannah Waddingham) the owner of the club, learned her smug and philandering ex-husband Rupert (Anthony Head) had bought rival West Ham United — and West Ham’s new Head Coach was none other than Nate (Nick Mohammed), the sweetheart kit man turned dark side, power-hungry prodigy. And the mysterious venture capitalist behind Bantr, the no-pictures dating app made popular largely due to Keeley’s efforts (and soon to become a reality via Bumble), wanted to fund Keeley’s own company.

Even when she was “only” an influencer, Keeley always had a lot going on, balancing multiple projects and always thinking about the next step. It’s one of the reasons why Rebecca hired her in marketing in the first place. But starting her own business becomes a whole other level of to-do lists — even having to schedule time to cry — and the end of Season 2 also found fan-favorite couple Keeley and Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein) in a strange position. Roy admitted feelings for another woman, and Keeley copped to a kiss, which she definitely didn’t instigate or encourage, from Nate. Roy sprung a surprise trip on Keeley to try to rekindle their love, but Keeley was too busy to go and turned it down, encouraging him, in her Keeley way, to go alone.

She doesn’t have a work self and a home self. She just has a Keeley self.

Keeley has always been a leader — the boys of AFC Richmond would likely follow her anywhere — but as a big boss, she faces an uncertain start. Season 3 finds her a bit unsure of herself, which is a new place for confident Keeley. She has a fleet of employees who are quiet, obedient and fearful. That’s not her.

Keeley is instead a “no walls” kind of person. She’s open, loud and loving. She doesn’t edit herself. She doesn’t have a work self and a home self. She just has a Keeley self, which seems at odds with traditional office culture at times. She has her own big and imposing office with a door, which she doesn’t appear to like, being separated from her employees who are stationed at cubicles. When Rebecca, her former boss, and forever mentor and friend, comes over, she eats lunch sitting on the floor.

Keeley Jones and her office look so damn good ✨️#TedLasso pic.twitter.com/q0ocLW3lYk

— Flav⎊ (@Darveyinbed) March 15, 2023

That’s the key to Keeley. She’s not pretentious. She’s not pretend.

Keeley is younger, which is a surprising source of her strength. So is her casualness and openness. She’s a fun dresser with enviable and occasionally outlandish outfits including Easter egg-colored fake fur coats, animal print nightgown-style silk dresses, huge hoops and high hair. Rebecca, older than Keeley and certainly wealthier, dresses for respect, with silk shirts and impeccably tailored skirt suits. Keeley dresses for . . . whatever. The day, her mood, herself. And that’s the key to Keeley. She’s not pretentious. She’s not pretend.

In an interview with Refinery29, Temple said about her character being in charge in Season 3, Keeley “has some really, really great moments being a boss — some that are more positive, some that have maybe more complicated elements, but I love the way she handles everything. I think she stays true to Keeley the entire time and handles things exactly how she should.”

Her employees seem not to know what to make of her— and one co-worker, stern CFO Barbara (Katy Wix) critically judges her — but like the Outkast song, Keeley is for real: her talent, her energy and her genuine care for those around her. She wants fresh flowers so the office “is cheerful and smells nice,” and tries to get everyone to call her by her first name.

Jeremy Swift and Hannah Waddingham in “Ted Lasso” (Apple TV+)As a boss, Rebecca put up brick walls initially, keeping Ted especially at a distance until she learned to trust him (and his delicious biscuits . . . I’m still waiting for a gluten-free version, Ted). But Keeley is an open book. She’s open to you, whoever you are, and she believes in you. In this way, she’s likely to inspire her staff if they just let her in. As Temple told Refinery29, “[Keeley] knows firsthand that when somebody believes in you to do something, sometimes when you start believing too, you can make things happen.”

Not everyone is happy about Keeley as the busy boss in the upcoming season, which warms up that old chestnut: that women can’t have both a successful career and a fulfilling personal life.

And in this way, she’s different than the girlboss type, which had a rise, crashing fall and subsequent backlash, after the term was first coined by Sophia Amoruso, the former CEO of clothing company Nasty Gal. Vox wrote about the downfall of the girlboss, citing women-created companies that were still “plagued with stories of bullying, cruelty, and overworked and underappreciated staff . . . As more and more of these stories surfaced, ‘girlboss’ shifted culturally from a noun to a verb, one that described the sinister process of capitalist success and hollow female empowerment.”

But there’s nothing hollow about Keeley. Her character is this nice and this sincere, in wanting the best for you and desiring to help. She calls her dour employees “poets and geniuses.” Her offer of the solo vacation to Roy wasn’t an empty gesture, but coming from a person who understands the importance of self-care — just witness her legendary bubble baths and sacred alone time — a way she thought he might look after himself. It’s what she would do.

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Not everyone gets or appreciates leadership the Keeley way. And not everyone is going to be happy about Keeley as the busy boss in the upcoming season, which warms up that old chestnut: that women can’t have both a successful career and a fulfilling personal life.

If anyone supports and understands her and her ambition, it’s Rebecca, who helps the younger woman gain respect while not stepping on her open-toed platform shoes. Rebecca illustrates what a good boss and mentor she is too, not by modeling “this is the way” (sorry, Mando) but that “this is a way — and I support your own path and you finding it.”

about “Ted Lasso”

The Beatles hit with an asteroid’s force: The Fab Four’s impact, 60 years after “Please Please Me”

The Beatles’ influence continues to reverberate across the decades since their epoch-making emergence in global culture. Last year alone, they outpaced all “catalog” acts with some 1.5 billion streams. Meanwhile, “Revolver,” the subject of their latest “super deluxe” boxed set series, registered a top-five showing on the Billboard charts. When it was originally released back in August 1966, Revolver marked an artistic, even psychedelic breakthrough, building mightily on the strengths of “Rubber Soul,” its folk-oriented predecessor.

Taking its name from the image of a spinning phonograph record, “Revolver” has proven to be an even more prescient metaphor for understanding the Beatles’ phenomenal success: it’s a near certainty that the LP has been playing somewhere, without fail, in every minute of every hour since music lovers first laid their hands on the album during that long-ago summer.

“Like the lunar landing”: The day the Beatles changed the world on “The Ed Sullivan Show”

This month marks the 60th anniversary of the Beatles’ groundbreaking first album “Please Please Me,” a release that began a UK chart-topping spree that exploded into British Beatlemania later that same year with “She Loves You” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Their impact would be felt Stateside with the force of an asteroid in February 1964, when they played their legend-making set on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” The force of an asteroid might seem like the stuff of exaggeration. But not by much. Popular music has simply never been the same.

The month will also see the release of the fifth season of the “Everything Fab Four” podcast. Since 2020, Salon has hosted the program, which has featured a star-studded array of guests ranging from Peter Frampton and Steven Van Zandt to Kevin Bacon and Heart’s Ann and Nancy Wilson, among a host of others.

Our latest spate of interviewees continues our tradition of exploring the Beatles’ cultural resonance. We recently caught up with Barbara Feldon, the 1960s-era model turned TV star who played the inimitable Agent 99 on “Get Smart.” She was in New York City in February 1964 when the Beatles began their first campaign on the road to conquering America. For Feldon, it was like nothing she’d ever seen or heard before.

“I saw the Beatles and just everything changed. It just suddenly was like, ‘Oh, this is what I want to do.'”

“This roar would come up from the street, and we were on the fifth floor,” Feldon recalled. “And so we climbed up to the roof to see what was going on and looked over the parapet down onto Park Avenue. And there was a mob of young women on Park Avenue spilling off the sidewalk. And somebody said, ‘It’s the Beatles!'”

That night, when she tuned into “The Ed Sullivan Show,” Feldon had her doubts. “I was totally skeptical,” she told me, thinking, “‘This is just so silly, this little boy band.’ And I turned it on, and I got it instantly. I was absolutely charmed by their light, the optimism, the freedom, the fun, the spirit that they had.”

That same weekend, newly minted 16-year-old Kenny Loggins watched “The Ed Sullivan Show” in a state of awe. Sitting in front of his family’s TV set in Alhambra, California — some 2,800 miles away from Ground Zero in CBS’ Studio 50 — Loggins simply couldn’t believe his ears. Years later, he is quick to thank his mother for tipping him off about the peculiar English band with the long hair.

“My mother, who was working in a drugstore, was on her way to work that morning,” Loggins recalled. As his mother left the house, she told Kenny that “I hear there’s a new band on TV on Ed Sullivan tonight that you might be interested in. They’re supposed to be all the rage.”

Love the Beatles? Listen to Ken’s podcast “Everything Fab Four.”

At the time, Loggins was a budding guitarist and a devotee of Bob Dylan. “I hadn’t heard a thing about the Beatles up to that point,” he told me. “And then that night in front of our black and white TV, I saw the Beatles and just everything changed. It just suddenly was like, ‘Oh, this is what I want to do.'”

For 1960s “It Girl” Pattie Boyd, the Beatles would shortly become more than just a household name. Within a matter of months, she would be dating George Harrison, eventually marrying him in 1966. When she first met her future husband, she was familiar with the band. “I had heard their music, and I really liked it,” she recalled. But like nearly everyone, “I had no idea that they were going to be as globally famous as they were.”

“There was a mob of young women on Park Avenue spilling off the sidewalk. And somebody said, ‘It’s the Beatles!'”

That spring, the budding model was cast in “A Hard Day’s Night,” a part that she nearly scuttled. “The thing is,” Pattie told me, “I’m really shy, and I really hadn’t planned to be an actress.” Promising that she only had a single word of dialogue, the casting director talked her into joining the production. When Pattie told her boyfriend at the time about her upcoming role, he said, “I bet you fall for Paul McCartney.”

Pattie would never forget the moment the Beatles hopped onto the railway train that served as the movie set. “They came into our carriage and introduced themselves and shook our hands,” she recalled. “And we sort of nodded. ‘Oh, my God, They’re so charming and so polite and handsome!”

While it was Beatle George who caught her eye, Pattie’s boyfriend was right to be concerned. George “was so delicious,” she recalled. “He was so good-looking and had the most beautiful, velvety brown eyes.”

When he asked her out, Pattie demurred on account of her boyfriend. By the time she caught up with George a few weeks later, her boyfriend was out of the picture.

“When I saw George again, he asked, ‘How’s your boyfriend?’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t have a boyfriend anymore.’ So that was it. That was the start,” she told me.

As with the guests who came before them, Feldon, Loggins, and Boyd speak of a shared experience. But they’re not alone in their first moments of discovery when it comes to the Beatles. The Baby Boomers scarcely account for those 1.5 billion streams. Even now, as “Revolver” continues spinning merrily on without interruption some 57 years later, the children of the 21st century are enjoying their own first flush of Beatledom. And they’ll hardly be the last.

about music from Kenneth Womack

Thoughtful pragmatist or unhinged bigot? Why experts are rethinking Nixon’s psychopathology

When Richard Nixon lost to John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election, he correctly suspected that he had been robbed. In Texas, Kennedy’s vice presidential running mate Lyndon Johnson used a network of rural bosses to stuff ballot boxes; 1,000 miles to the north, mob bosses and crooked pols in Chicago were similarly rigging the results. Yet despite his valid complaints, Nixon ultimately decided not to publicly challenge the results, later writing that “the mark of the good loser is that he takes his anger out on himself and not on his victorious opponents or on his teammates.”

“To understand Nixon is to appreciate that his self-aggrandizement was key… to the way he told his life story to himself, an attempt to cast himself as the noble victim not only publicly but privately.”

Nixon’s actions are a stark contrast to those of Donald Trump after he lost to Joe Biden sixty years later — and, one might glean from reading the new book “On Nixon’s Madness: An Emotional History,” this speaks to each man’s different mental pathologies. Whereas Nixon had a legitimate case for election fraud, Trump did not; while Nixon reacted to his loss by urging public calm and striking a noble pose, Trump reacted with narcissistic rage and by spreading a Big Lie.

Yet it would be misleading to characterize Nixon as somehow inherently superior to Trump simply because, on this one occasion, he showed respect for the American government and Trump did not. As “On Nixon’s Madness” author Dr. Zachary Jonathan Jacobson explained to Salon, both Nixon and Trump were men whose mental illnesses reflected and refracted the pervasive political impulses of their time. In his book, Jacobson details the extensive psychological profiles performed on Nixon, who served as president from 1969 to 1974 before resigning in disgrace. Nixon’s paranoia, prejudices, and abnormally reserved disposition have been zealously analyzed by scholars hoping to therein discover the genesis of the Watergate scandal. By contrast, Jacobson observes, Nixon admirers point to his impressive achievements in opening up relations with China, ending the Vietnam War, saving Israel from annihilation and passing landmark domestic legislation on issues like the environment and economy. They argue that perhaps Nixon’s ability to feign madness, or seem like the wily and unstable “Tricky Dick,” empowered him to accomplish these things.

What happens when a narcissist loses? Expect “rage” and “terror,” psychologists warn

Jacobson’s provocative thesis is that, in effect, everyone is right about Nixon. He was one of America’s most Janus-faced leaders, a protean figure who could sincerely shift from the pragmatic reformer to the vengeful autocrat without any apparent qualms. It explains how he could strike a statesman’s pose after losing a controversial election, and also indulge in explosive, obsessive levels of paranoia about imaginary enemies. In Jacobson’s own words: “In [Nixon’s book] ‘Six Crises,’ he paints this resignation as a noble act to not cause the level of tumult that Trump has now incited. Many historians will dismiss that idea of nobility as self-serving and undeniably so. But to understand Nixon is to appreciate that his self-aggrandizement was key not only to boosting his public appeal but the way he told his life story to himself, an attempt to cast himself as the noble victim not only publicly but privately.”

Yet even there Nixon’s madness was hard to pin down. Despite fearing and hating Jews so much that he targeted many Jews for baseless audits, Nixon also surrounded himself with some of the top Jewish minds of his day, including lawyer Leonard Garment, foreign policy adviser Henry Kissinger (later his Secretary of State) and speechwriter William Safire.

“In terms of hiring Kissinger, Safire et al. I look at that through the lens of what the psychologist Lawrence Schiff called the ‘obedient rebel,'” Jacobson wrote to Salon. “That is, even as Nixon sought to blaze a path for himself with his own cronies, his own press and his own ‘Silent Majority,’ he pursued throughout his career an orthodox path to the presidency. He was drawn to rebel against the ‘deep state’/’deep culture’ even as he wished for the ultimate insider rewards. Just so, he was drawn to the likes of Kissinger and Safire — those he deemed intellectual/elite/Jewish — even as he rejected an association with virulent anti-Semitic talk. His anti-Semitism was quite clear: he had deeply ingrained beliefs about Jews. Yet the qualities he associated with them were not only cheating and greed but acumen and deft thinking.”

Salon spoke in-depth with Jacobson about his new book. The following transcript had been edited for clarity and context.

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I’d like to start with what we discussed over email about the 1960 election versus the 2020 election. I do not wish to digress about Trump too much, but I just think the juxtaposition of how those two candidates responded is so striking that I think it’s illustrative, and I’m curious for your thoughts on that.

They’re very different characters. Nixon is an inside man. This is someone who built his career playing inside baseball and within the institutions and believing that although he could skate and cut corners, he was doing it as a conventional politician. I think that with Nixon what you see is that he saw the kind of Kennedy chicanery as baked in.

You brought up the idea of “Six Crises,” and I think first of all, it’s marked that Nixon titles and structures his first autobiography around crises, that he sees his life as moving from one crisis to the next. In each episode, what ends up happening is that he has these great victories, whether that’s with the Checkers speech [which Nixon delivered as a vice presidential candidate during the 1952 election after being accused of financial impropriety] or with Khrushchev in Moscow [during the famous “kitchen debate” of 1959], but he always sees himself as being cheated. So the idea that he’s being cheated in 1960 isn’t news for him. When he got accused in 1952 of having a secret political fund for $14,000, and it ends up turning out that [Democratic presidential nominee] Adlai Stevenson had a $120,000 fund, he felt that he was being smeared by the intellectuals and the Communists in ways that he felt were not fair. It was a system he was fighting up against. While Trump and Nixon had this kind of grievance politics, I think they’re coming from very different perspectives and different means of how they fight the system.

I want to go into another thing we discussed, which is Nixon’s anti-Semitism. I want to distinguish between the ideology of anti-Semitism and actual mental illness. One can be an anti-Semite without being mentally ill. Yet, as your book points out, the manifestations of Nixon’s anti-Semitism were clearly pathological. And I’m curious if you could unpack that a little, about how Nixon’s mind is an example of how a prejudice when mixed with a mental illness can be really ugly.

“The attractions towards authoritarianism and towards populism, and the insecurities of breaking downs of conservative values, overlap with the breaking downs of gender roles.”

You said his anti-Semitism was worked through with pathology. I would flip that and say his pathology then became hinged onto anti-Semitism. Nixon had this conspiracist mindset that he continued to harbor for his whole life. He has these great ambitions, but he continues to see that there’s a small cabal of elites who are determined to undermine him, and that he has to fight them at all times. Who his enemies are shift over time. And at some points, those are Jews. And what’s interesting is, he always kind of makes lists. He’s always like, “Jews and homosexuals and Communists and marijuana smokers and Jews and blacks and bra burners and the counter-culture.”

He was always freely associating between these kind of things. The symbols themselves shift, even though the structure of the semiotics is always the same…

The parallel I would draw to today is to Charlottesville [where there were white supremacist riots in 2017]. You have this white supremacy, and you have this anti-black fervor, which is this long past of racism that is central to American history and our difficulties. But the protesters are dressed in these brown shirts and what the are they doing? Why are they “concerned” like mid-20th century fascists? Why are they dressed in these brown shirts? Why do they talk about how “the Jews are out to get us” and “they’re out to replace us”? Why does that become the meme? I think that you have these kind of tropes that are recycled, that become sticky, and for Nixon — just like for these white supremacists — the symbols shift, but the structure of the semiotics is constant.

There was one moment in your book that made me laugh out loud as a Jewish person. It probably was dark of me to laugh at this, but it was when Nixon said, “It’s a funny thing. Every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob?”

[Jacobson laughs] Yes!

Now I assure you, as a Jew, I’ve never smoked pot…

Yeah right! [Jacobson laughs] As a Jew, I’ve never smoked pot!

Right? We’re both definitely telling the truth and not confirming any of Nixon’s stereotypes about Jews and marijuana with this little exchange. But in all seriousness, I also find it funny because it’s such a bizarre thing to say. It’s not a conspiracy theory or an anti-Semitic stereotype with which I was previously familiar.

It’s very creative.

Yet as you pointed out, Nixon also wanted to surround himself with Jews because he admired certain stereotypical Jewish qualities. It’s similar more broadly to Nixon’s obsession with big, strong, virile, authoritarian men.

The story I find interesting, which you didn’t delve into in your book, is about Nixon’s vice president, [Maryland governor] Spiro Agnew. Nixon famously said about Agnew, “You look a man in the eye and you know he’s got it—brains. This guy has got it. If he doesn’t, Nixon has made a bum choice.” And then Agnew turned out to be a buffoon. And even though Nixon publicly defended him, privately he was frustrated, so he really became obsessed with replacing Agnew as Vice President with John Connally, the former Democratic governor of Texas, who later switched to being a Republican in part because Nixon kept courting him. Jules Witcover wrote a great book called “Very Strange Bedfellows” that dives into this relationship including through Nixon’s secret White House recordings. And what I find interesting is it wasn’t just that Nixon was understandably exasperated with Agnew. He seemed to have what I will generously call a “man-crush” on Connally.

[Jacobson laughs] I think there are two aspects of it. I think that you’re brilliant to point to these authoritarian figures because it’s not only people who we would associate it with, like a Connally or an Agnew, but he is drawn to Charles DeGaulle, he is drawn to Winston Churchill, he admires Mao Zedong. He has this authoritarian streak in which he really believes that the strong leader can step outside of history and make big things happen. Now he’s doing this obviously, with Agnew or Connally, with down and dirty politics. I think with Connally, what’s great is you’re talking about his infatuation with the authoritarian side of him. But he also has this man crush because Connally is attractive, because he is politically adept. And Nixon likes to surround himself with men like that. He balances it. He likes a Henry Kissinger. He likes a Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He likes this idea of these colorful figures that he can somehow bring under his wing and look a little better because of that.

I want to go a little bit into how you describe Richard Nixon’s obsessive fear of homosexuals. He obviously was virulently homophobic, and I think it’s pretty clear that at least part of this was because homosexuality was an affront to his preference for heteronormative masculinity. It is interesting because he is particularly fond of saying, as your book points out, that homosexuals recruit people, homosexuals are grooming people. This is a situation where I think the parallel to the present situation should be explored. And I was hoping you could unpack those parallels as you observe them.

“For a guy in Nixon’s generation who is worried about Communism and worried about the state of the world, and seeing the collapse of the political system in his view being threatened, it overlaps with the collapse of the nuclear family.”

It’s very, it’s very, very interesting. There’s a historian, David K. Johnson, who wrote of the Lavender Scare, and it went pretty much hand in hand with the Red Scare. [The government was] outing people as Communists in the State Department, and they were also outing people as homosexuals, and they fire more than 5,000 people [for homosexuality]. For a guy in Nixon’s generation who is worried about Communism and worried about the state of the world, and seeing the collapse of the political system in his view being threatened, it overlaps with the collapse of the nuclear family. And so the counterculture and the left, who are talking about sexual liberation and are talking about the problems with capitalism and the problems with the West, get conflated with the sexual revolution.

And these two things become intertwined. Like linkage in genetics, it was this idea that you have two kinds of traits, and they happen to be on the same chromosome, and they happened because of that to be constantly seen in the same light over and over and over again in the same individual. So the two traits become linked [in the public mind], and I think with anti-homosexuality and anti-Communism, they became linked, they became overlapping, and they became intermingled in that way. In terms of today, I think you see just a new iteration of this. You see the attractions towards authoritarianism and towards populism, and the insecurities of the breaking down of conservative values overlap with the breaking down of gender roles [in the pubic mind].

These very difficult and threatening ways of progressing can undermine what some people feel is already being undermined, their very core beings. Then you have political opportunists. Someone like Nixon or Joe McCarthy, were they for real? Were they really first and foremost anti-Communists? I think that they hooked into it to advance their careers. Like Tucker Carlson, I don’t think that someone like McCarthy was first and foremost concerned about communism. He was concerned about becoming McCarthy.

Now going to move on to a different subject from your book, Nixon’s racism toward African Americans. What is intriguing about this is that he seemed more opportunistic in terms of his public face. Privately he was a racist… but when he thought that being pro-civil rights would win him the support of the Republican Party base, he was pro-civil rights. And then when the Republican base officially switched sides on the civil rights issue during the 1964 election, Nixon followed their path. To what extent do you think Nixon’s mind and the way his psychology contributed to his racism was a product of his time, and to what extent do you think it was unusual to him?

I think the ambivalence is really endemic to his time. I think the fact that he can promote affirmative action and then support Southern Supreme Court judges who are going to slow walk desegregation is really the kind of mixed signals that were in the air… I think he was really conflicted. I think that he went back and forth and had this kind of cognitive dissonance, which he had over so many issues.

I want to conclude by asking about these weird instances of physical courage in Nixon’s life. First, when he was confronted by angry mobs in Latin America, he went body-forward and confronted them even when they started throwing stones. Second, when he was president during the Vietnam Moratorium, in the middle of the night he went to the Lincoln Memorial and spoke with some of the protestors. Clearly he was willing to put himself in potential physical or real physical danger in order to have conversations with those he considered to be his opponents.

I think he was a really brave dude. I think that that’s a core part of the book, which is that he was a gambling man and in these campaigns, where he was the underdog over and over again, where he loses to Kennedy and loses two years later trying to get elected governor of California… I think of him in his retirement. I mean, he is as low as you can get, and yet he puts a suit on every day. He does his work. This is a guy who, you can say that what he did was problematic, but this is a guy where you really have to respect his bravery, his ambition, his hard work, his ingenuity. I would expand your view to say that this is a pattern that he displayed his entire life.

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A Federalist Society for all things: Dark money enters the culture wars

One of the most successful right-wing organizers in this country’s history, Leonard Leo, is now out to “crush liberal dominance and wokeism” across a broad range of American cultural, journalistic, and political life.

Leo, the longtime godfather of the Federalist Society, has a history of crushing liberal influence. He helped to transform the Supreme Court from its generally middle-of-the-road past into a hard-right hammer bent on bludgeoning the law back into what the Federalist Society considers its proper roots. He helped to arrange the appointments of right-wing theocrats to federal judgeships across the country. Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, from Amarillo, Texas, who just held a hearing on a lawsuit to ban the abortion drug mifepristone, is a Trump appointee and one of Leo’s, and the Federalist Society’s, most prominent success stories. Now, having wrapped the federal judicial system in the robes of the Federalist Society, Leo wants to create little outposts of right-wing activists that can, in his words, “roll back” the dominance of liberals in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, New York investment banks, and academia.

Named the Teneo Network, Leo’s 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charitable organization is a little opaque at this point, since Teneo keeps secret nearly everything about itself, including its donors and who its members are. Leo, however, is sitting on a pot of $1.6 billion that was recently donated by a Chicago businessman to a conservative group run by Leo called Donor’s Trust. In 2021, Leo turned around and gave $3 million to Teneo, and he made a fundraising video in which he laid out his plan to transform the group into a kind of Federalist Society for all things. According to ProPublica, which got ahold of more than 50 hours of previously-unseen internal videos and confidential documents about Teneo, in the fundraising video, Leo referred to his success with the Federalist Society and plans for Teneo this way: “I just said to myself, ‘Well, if this can work for law, why can’t it work for lots of other areas of American culture and American life where things are really messed up right now?'”

ProPublica found that Teneo has attracted a number of big-time conservatives to its cause such as Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance and New York Representative Elise Stefanik. Three senior aides to prospective presidential candidate Ron DeSantis have also joined the organization, along with several conservative federal judges and Republican state attorneys general. There are probably others, but the membership is secret. (A consulting firm of the same name has no relation to Leo’s organization.)

How a far-right think tank made everything “woke”

One of the co-founders of Teneo, Evan Baehr, made a video to recruit prospective members in 2020 that was viewed by ProPublica. In the video, Baehr explained how he has determined that the “Left” has taken over certain cultural and other American institutions. He asked his viewers to imagine that there is a group of people having lunch at the Harvard Club in midtown Manhattan: “A billionaire hedge funder, a film producer, a Harvard professor, and a New York Times writer.”

Here’s how the liberal conspiracy works, according to Baehr: “The billionaire says: ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if middle school kids had free access to sex-change therapy paid for by the federal government?’ Well, the filmmaker says, ‘I’d love to do a documentary on that; it will be a major motion film.’ The Harvard professor says, ‘We can do studies on that to say that’s absolutely biologically sound and safe.’ And the New York Times person says, ‘I’ll profile people who feel trapped in the wrong gender.'”

Leonard Leo seeks to apply the same system he developed over 30 or so years in dealing with the legal profession and the judicial system more broadly to encompass the fields he has expressed displeasure with.

The problem with that paranoid scenario is of course that it’s not the way the liberal conspiracy works.

Here is a brief synopsis of how it does work: Young people, many of them high-achievers from colleges and universities, some of which are Ivy League, want interesting and lucrative careers when they leave college. So, they pull strings through their parents, or college professors, or other students they went to college with, and they get interviews at investment banks or publishing houses or newspapers or Hollywood studios or with senior faculty at their own or other colleges, and they apply for jobs. Many of the managers and senior executives of the organizations where they want to work have liberal politics. The applicants are either offered jobs or they are referred to other people within the same fields, like, say, publishing or newspapers, and they get jobs there. As the years go by, these people become senior editors or partners in banks or deans of collegiate departments, and they have the job of reviewing and interviewing applicants, and so forth and so on.

Who you know and where you come from and where you went to school are keys to employment in many fields, including the law, of which the Federalist Society is all the evidence you need that this is true. Leonard Leo seeks to apply the same system he developed over 30 or so years in dealing with the legal profession and the judicial system more broadly to encompass the fields he has expressed displeasure with. But there are two problems. The path for conservatives in the legal profession is a fairly vertical pipeline: You get out of law school, you start out as an associate in a law firm or as a clerk to a federal judge and you join the Federalist Society, and its members move you along the pipeline one step at a time until you end up with jobs like Assistant U.S. Attorney or you work in the Department of Justice under Republican administrations, or you work in conservative law firms, and from those jobs, your connections in the Federalist Society lead you to be considered for federal judgeships or appeals courts or even, as we saw three different times during the Trump years, for seats on the Supreme Court.

All the Federalist Society needed to do, really, was to replace retiring liberal judges with conservative ones.

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Even though businesses like publishing and newspapers and Hollywood are also organized vertically, there are different criteria for moving up. In publishing, for example, even though quite awful books are published every year, you at least have to be able to write cogently to be able to write to get a book contract. You have to be able to edit books to get jobs as editors. The same is true in newspapering: Although there are many useless reporters working on newspapers and writing for web magazines, you can’t be a talentless hack and get a job at the New York Times or the Washington Post or with Politico or Axios; nor can you be a talentless hack and get jobs as editors at those places.

What the Federalist Society proved to the world is that you can be a talentless hack and get a federal judgeship, or even a seat on an appeals court or on the Supreme Court during Republican administrations. administration Dozens of Trump appointees to judgeships were found to be “unqualified” by the American Bar Association. Some applicants for judgeships under Trump had never been inside a courtroom, tried a case, or even had significant jobs as attorneys in private practice. And yet, there they are on the bench, like Trump-appointee Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida, whose decisions on the Trump classified documents cases got slapped down not once but twice by an appeals court because she was so far outside the mainstream of the law or just outright incompetent.

Talent is not a criteria for either membership in the Federalist Society or for the jobs that result from association with it. All that is necessary are reliable Republican votes in a Republican-controlled Senate. That’s it. If the votes are there, the Aileen Cannons of the world get on the bench. Good grades in law school and a position as an editor on the law review? Not necessary. Graduate of a Christian law school that barely qualified for accreditation? Not a problem. But membership in the Federalist Society? There you go.

What little is known about the Teneo Network is that Leonard Leo and his right-hand man Evan Baehr – a disciple of Peter Thiel, by the way – intend to replicate the Federalist Society model. They want to set up a web of what amount to private clubs that will be able to influence the way decisions are made about who gets to work in professions like journalism, publishing, Hollywood screenwriting and directing and producing and academia. And you know why, too, don’t you? Because of all that liberal wokeism. Why, there are books that have been written about a child with two dads! The horror! There is a show on television that is nearly exclusively about drag queens! In colleges, they are teaching young people about nasty stuff like slavery and the Jim Crow years and the systemic racism that produced all-white suburbs with red-lining, and the inequities of the judicial system that punished a Black person with 40 years in jail for a vial of crack while a young white man got probation for a half-gram of coke!

Leo and his fellow Teneans – yes, that’s what they call themselves – want a world in which liberal stuff like gender fluidity and the history of Stonewall and reminders of such nastiness as segregated schools are not part of whatever section of the culture they want to control, like schools and movies and television and books and those awful newspapers that do things like reporting the news. They would like hand-picked conservatives to be making the decisions about what movies Americans get to see, what books they can and read, and what they are permitted to learn about in schools.

This is not the first time that a conservative movement has tried to influence cultural institutions.

Why the GOP is obsessed with “woke” — but can’t define it

Way back in 1993, I was invited to a conservative conference at the Harriman Estate in New York put on by an organization I have forgotten the name of, but it had the words “free speech” in its title. You’re going to love where the money came from for this thing: the cigarette company Philip Morris.

It turned out to be a symposium that was supposed to discuss free speech in the media, but it emerged that what Philip Morris was really interested in was getting advertising for its products back on television – from which they had been banned since 1971 – and restrictions lifted from print advertising. They called such advertising “commercial speech,” and there were several prominent conservatives on the panel, like a couple of federal appeals court judges and some conservative lawyers, who were all for it. On the so-called “liberal” side was the famous First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams and a Hollywood contingent consisting of yours truly, a director, and an entertainment lawyer.

They flew the Hollywood types out from L.A. on MGM Air, an all-first class luxury airline that only flew between New York and L.A. The planes had individual seats facing dining tables, a cocktail lounge, and lots of brass and fake gold fixtures. They picked us up from the tarmac at JFK Airport – yes, they could do that in those days – and flew us by helicopter to the retreat at the Harriman Estate, where they had a grand banquet and put us up in rooms in the gigantic manor house of the estate.

The symposium turned out to be a grievance session by conservatives lamenting the liberal influence on every aspect of the culture – the whole Leonard Leo list, minus the Wall Street aspect. Book publishing? Too many curse words and sex scenes. Hollywood? Forget about it. Gay characters hadn’t even made their way onto either the silver or television screens, but they knew it was only a matter of time. Everyone there had memories of when college campuses were overrun by anti-war demonstrators, so the rad-lib influences on campus were a given.

They would like hand-picked conservatives to be making the decisions about what movies Americans get to see, what books they can and read, and what they are permitted to learn about in schools.

After lunch, somehow most of the complaining became focused on the Hollywood contingent. Why weren’t there any “family values” shows on TV? Why was there so much sex and violence in the movies? I heard the words “family values” so many times, I finally challenged everyone to come up with a “family values” TV show. I gave them a short precis of how the system worked: a writer, or writers, worked up a pitch for a show or a movie, took it to a network or studio, pitched the executives, and if they liked it, they bought it and they made a pilot, and if the pilot did well enough, maybe they would make the series, or the movie.

So, let’s come up with a pitch for a family values show, I said. There are a lot of smart people around the table. You guys go ahead and pitch a family values show to us. We’re the Hollywood experts. We’ll tell you what we think.

Silence. A lot of nervous glancing around, one to the other, like hey, we didn’t come here for this! When I didn’t get any nibbles, I said, okay, I’ll pitch a family values show, and you tell me if you think it will get on the air: There’s a family living in the suburbs, a mom and dad and two kids, and they get up in the morning, and mom fixes breakfast, and dad, because he’s a good guy, helps make the lunches for the kids. Everyone except mom goes off to do their thing. Dad goes to work, and he’s having a problem with shipping, and by three-quarters through the episode, he’s solved it. The younger kid gets bullied, and the older kid defends him, not with violence, but by appealing to the better nature of the bully. Back at home, mom goes to the store and runs into a friend and they come up with an idea for next week’s book club (I came up with some vanilla title from the day’s best-seller list). She goes home and starts supper. When everyone sits down that evening to dinner, dad listens to the kids describe the bullying episode, mom says she’ll bake some cookies to take to school the next day, and make sure you give one to the bully, and dad reminds the kids that you can defuse almost any awkward situation with reason and kindness.

The people at that Philip Morris symposium weren’t there to form a Teneo-style crush-liberalism group, but the tenor of their statements and questions was exactly that. Now here we are 30 years later, and they’re still at it.

Leo is going to find that influencing what reaches the silver screen or is found on bookstore shelves is a tad more difficult than recruiting candidates and lining up conservative Republican votes for judges, but he was willing to work for 30 years — but it took him that many years to get Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett and the rest of the conservatives on the court, not to mention the many Aileen Cannons he managed to put on lesser courts.

It would not be advisable to sell short either Leonard Leo or this Teneo Network, whatever the hell it is. They’ve moved in on the courts and they’ve already got a head start on what’s taught in schools and colleges with all the anti-woke shit being pushed by GOP Governors Ron DeSantis in Florida and Greg Abbott in Texas and the rest of slime-bellied swamp crawlers out there.

Buckle up. They play the long game.

about The Federalist Society

ChatGPT is great — you’re just using it wrong

It doesn’t take much to get ChatGPT to make a factual mistake. My son is doing a report on U.S. presidents, so I figured I’d help him out by looking up a few biographies. I tried asking for a list of books about Abraham Lincoln and it did a pretty good job:

A reasonable list of books about Lincoln. Screen capture by Jonathan May., CC BY-ND

Number 4 isn’t right. Garry Wills famously wrote “Lincoln at Gettysburg,” and Lincoln himself wrote the Emancipation Proclamation, of course, but it’s not a bad start. Then I tried something harder, asking instead about the much more obscure William Henry Harrison, and it gamely provided a list, nearly all of which was wrong.

Books about Harrison, fewer than half of which are correct. Screen capture by Jonathan May., CC BY-ND

Numbers 4 and 5 are correct; the rest don’t exist or are not authored by those people. I repeated the exact same exercise and got slightly different results:

More books about Harrison, still mostly nonexistent. Screen capture by Jonathan May., CC BY-ND

This time numbers 2 and 3 are correct and the other three are not actual books or not written by those authors. Number 4, “William Henry Harrison: His Life and Times” is a real book, but it’s by James A. Green, not by Robert Remini, a well-known historian of the Jacksonian age.

I called out the error and ChatGPT eagerly corrected itself and then confidently told me the book was in fact written by Gail Collins (who wrote a different Harrison biography), and then went on to say more about the book and about her. I finally revealed the truth and the machine was happy to run with my correction. Then I lied absurdly, saying during their first hundred days presidents have to write a biography of some former president, and ChatGPT called me out on it. I then lied subtly, incorrectly attributing authorship of the Harrison biography to historian and writer Paul C. Nagel, and it bought my lie.

When I asked ChatGPT if it was sure I was not lying, it claimed that it’s just an “AI language model” and doesn’t have the ability to verify accuracy. However it modified that claim by saying “I can only provide information based on the training data I have been provided, and it appears that the book ‘William Henry Harrison: His Life and Times’ was written by Paul C. Nagel and published in 1977.”

This is not true.

Words, not facts

It may seem from this interaction that ChatGPT was given a library of facts, including incorrect claims about authors and books. After all, ChatGPT’s maker, OpenAI, claims it trained the chatbot on “vast amounts of data from the internet written by humans.”

However, it was almost certainly not given the names of a bunch of made-up books about one of the most mediocre presidents. In a way, though, this false information is indeed based on its training data.

As a computer scientist, I often field complaints that reveal a common misconception about large language models like ChatGPT and its older brethren GPT3 and GPT2: that they are some kind of “super Googles,” or digital versions of a reference librarian, looking up answers to questions from some infinitely large library of facts, or smooshing together pastiches of stories and characters. They don’t do any of that – at least, they were not explicitly designed to.

Sounds good

A language model like ChatGPT, which is more formally known as a “generative pretrained transformer” (that’s what the G, P and T stand for), takes in the current conversation, forms a probability for all of the words in its vocabulary given that conversation, and then chooses one of them as the likely next word. Then it does that again, and again, and again, until it stops.

So it doesn’t have facts, per se. It just knows what word should come next. Put another way, ChatGPT doesn’t try to write sentences that are true. But it does try to write sentences that are plausible.

When talking privately to colleagues about ChatGPT, they often point out how many factually untrue statements it produces and dismiss it. To me, the idea that ChatGPT is a flawed data retrieval system is beside the point. People have been using Google for the past two and a half decades, after all. There’s a pretty good fact-finding service out there already.

In fact, the only way I was able to verify whether all those presidential book titles were accurate was by Googling and then verifying the results. My life would not be that much better if I got those facts in conversation, instead of the way I have been getting them for almost half of my life, by retrieving documents and then doing a critical analysis to see if I can trust the contents.

Improv partner

On the other hand, if I can talk to a bot that will give me plausible responses to things I say, it would be useful in situations where factual accuracy isn’t all that important. A few years ago a student and I tried to create an “improv bot,” one that would respond to whatever you said with a “yes, and” to keep the conversation going. We showed, in a paper, that our bot was better at “yes, and-ing” than other bots at the time, but in AI, two years is ancient history.

I tried out a dialogue with ChatGPT – a science fiction space explorer scenario – that is not unlike what you’d find in a typical improv class. ChatGPT is way better at “yes, and-ing” than what we did, but it didn’t really heighten the drama at all. I felt as if I was doing all the heavy lifting.

After a few tweaks I got it to be a little more involved, and at the end of the day I felt that it was a pretty good exercise for me, who hasn’t done much improv since I graduated from college over 20 years ago.

A space exploration improv scene the author generated with ChatGPT. Screen capture by Jonathan May., CC BY-ND

Sure, I wouldn’t want ChatGPT to appear on “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” and this is not a great “Star Trek” plot (though it’s still less problematic than “Code of Honor“), but how many times have you sat down to write something from scratch and found yourself terrified by the empty page in front of you? Starting with a bad first draft can break through writer’s block and get the creative juices flowing, and ChatGPT and large language models like it seem like the right tools to aid in these exercises.

And for a machine that is designed to produce strings of words that sound as good as possible in response to the words you give it – and not to provide you with information – that seems like the right use for the tool.

Jonathan May, Research Associate Professor of Computer Science, University of Southern California

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Trump’s looming potential indictments pose a big question for the media: How to cover his campaign?

If Donald J. Trump is indicted, which recent reports say could be imminent, political reporters will face yet another historic first in their long-running saga of covering him.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office is understood to be focusing on hush money payments Trump allegedly authorized to the adult actress Stormy Daniels, who claimed she had an affair with him. Prosecutors have reportedly offered Trump the opportunity to testify in the grand jury’s proceedings. “[If] prosecutors were planning to decline prosecution in this case, there would be no need to invite Trump in to testify,” former federal prosecutor Barb McQuade told Salon last week. “For those reasons, it seems likely that an indictment is coming, and that it is coming soon.”

Even before this most recent round of news and speculation about possible criminal charges, some political reporters were already preparing for what one called an “unprecedented” scenario that promises to cause political and legal tremors in Washington and throughout the country, just as the field for the 2024 GOP primary is taking shape. Trump would be not only the first former president to face criminal charges, but also the first former president to run for the White House while under indictment.

A conversation with “The Enemy of the People”: CNN’s Jim Acosta on the war on truth

“It will be overwhelming,” said Jerry Zremski, a veteran political journalist who now serves as Washington enterprise reporter for the Buffalo News and lecturer at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism. “I think it will be one of the biggest political and legal stories that the country has faced in our lifetime. We’ve never even come close to the idea of a former president being [indicted], so it would be a very dominant story at every step of the process, and that includes the reaction to it.”

“He just doesn’t tell the truth. And if he’s indicted, which [I] expect him to be, he’s going to be throwing everything out there.”

Trump’s legal jeopardy is not confined solely to Manhattan. He faces potential indictments from multiple jurisdictions including Georgia, where a Fulton County grand jury has recommended the district attorney seek multiple indictments against undisclosed individuals who might have committed perjury in the probe surrounding alleged interference in the 2020 election, and the Justice Department, which is investigating whether Trump obstructed justice by refusing to turn over classified documents held at his Mar-a-Lago estate and storage facilities in Florida.

Wherever an indictment, or multiple indictments, might originate, the initial earthquake of coverage — banner headlines and news alerts, countless stories and analysis, wall-to-wall coverage on cable news, a flood of editorials and op-eds, the need for regular updates — will place extraordinary demands on journalists covering Trump, particularly in light of his long-running attacks on the press as purveyors of “fake news” and being “an enemy of the people.”

The case against Trump will be complex, involving issues and statutes that could prove challenging to interpret and contextualize. Zremski said that journalists’ explanations, given “in layperson’s terms as best as possible,” should be “the baseline of fair and balanced coverage.”

But that won’t be enough, he said. “Then of course you’ll have to give the other side. And I know the complaints about both-sides-ism, but every court case has two sides, and it’s not as if we’re going to stop telling both sides of the court case. So even when Trump’s legal team were to respond it would have to be covered — but of course, it would also have to be fact-checked, because there is some history of Mr. Trump employing lawyers who don’t necessarily ground all of their statements in the truth.”

“PBS NewsHour” co-hosts report facts in an era of distrust: “There’s an assumption of bias in media”

Reporters will also have to contend with the reaction of the candidate himself. Trump’s tenuous relationship with facts, and his willingness to counterpunch and employ diversions, means that anything is possible — and that journalists will need to be especially vigilant and focused.

“I don’t think [this changes the way we cover him]. I think what it does do is it makes it more complicated,” said a White House correspondent for a major daily newspaper. “We’re going to have a lot of tough decisions to make.”

“That’s the article: How is this even possible that this man is still running?”

While reporters are used to Trump’s tactics by now, the correspondent noted they should be prepared for especially “wild, outrageous stuff” and “claims” in the event of an indictment.

“He just doesn’t tell the truth. And if he’s indicted, which [I] expect him to be, he’s going to be throwing everything out there. It’s going to complicate covering him, because you’re going to have this firehose of falsehoods coming at you, and it’s going to be hard to keep up. And yet you have an obligation to readers not to just regurgitate what he says [but to] put some context to it and whether or not he’s telling the truth.”

Beyond Trump’s propensity for obfuscation, how much coverage to give him will also be an important consideration, according to the correspondent — a question that underscores an issue that has plagued the press, and cable news in particular, for years.

From the start of his candidacy in 2015 and throughout his presidency, a significant portion of the media’s coverage of Trump was reactive. Inflammatory tweets and statements were often given equal weight to those that affected policy, a practice that only really ended with Trump’s ban from Twitter in the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection and his departure from the White House.

For Zremski, this raises another important issue regarding coverage of a potential Trump indictment and the GOP primary: his use of social media. Will Trump stick with Truth Social and its more limited reach, or will he take advantage of Elon Musk’s decision to allow him to return to Twitter? “That would obviously complicate these decisions.”

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Regardless of the platform Trump chooses, his words and claims will be closely watched by his base of MAGA voters, which could have repercussions for the GOP primary. Trump has already stated he won’t withdraw from the race if he is indicted. But less clear is whether primary voters, both in MAGA world and beyond, would decide to turn to someone with less legal baggage and political drama — or if the charges would provide some juice to what has been, by most accounts, a lackluster campaign so far. Attacks by Florida governor Ron DeSantis and Trump’s former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley could help to mortally wound Trump, who is showing signs of vulnerability according to some polls.

But those attacks could also backfire because, as has been seen time and again, nothing has united GOP voters more around Trump than a common enemy, which he has often defined as the pro-Democratic establishment, a catch-all phrase that includes the media. “He is such an unprecedented political figure that it’s hard to know until you see the indictment whether or not [Trump] fatigue would be replaced by a newfound passion on both sides,” Zremski said.

“I think news outlets are going to approach him with much more scrutiny this time.”

Such conditions would be ripe for horse race journalism, with its “who’s up, who’s down” framing — especially since, as Zremski points out, “that’s a readymade market” for readers who are interested in politics. Media critics often decry the focus horse race coverage places on candidates’ poll numbers at the expense of in-depth discussions of issues and policy that would allow voters to make informed decisions. According to this argument, relying too much on this type of coverage in the event of an indictment against Trump could inhibit in-depth discussions of the complex web of legal and political issues raised by the charges.

“You need substantive coverage,” the White House correspondent said. “I think newspapers in particular made a lot of strides in that. You’re always going to have the horse race coverage, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have the other stuff too.”

In her recent book “Newsroom Confidential,” former Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan offered a list of recommendations designed to “clean up the mess we’re in,” which she defined as historically low levels of public trust in the media and threats to democratic institutions as exemplified by the January 6 insurrection and lies about the integrity of the 2020 election. “Stop asking who the winners and losers are in the latest political skirmish,” she wrote. “Start asking who is serving the democracy and who is undermining it.”

This “pro-democracy lens,” as she called it, is being adopted by some newspapers, particularly The Washington Post, Zremski said. In the event that Trump continues his attacks against prosecutors and the legal process, such an approach, coupled with a commitment to fairness and accuracy, could provide a helpful, informative frame for journalists in their reporting.

“Presumably, if we find out he’s been indicted, the prosecutors will be very clear to put forth and explain why, and that’s the story,” said media critic and journalist Dan Froomkin, founder of Press Watch, an independent non-profit focused on accountability in the political press, and Salon contributor. “What is he being charged with doing? Not that he’s on the defensive or that he’s being attacked by his political enemies. What happened? What does he do? Is there any alternative explanation to what he did? And then the next step is not to just say and marvel at how he’s campaigning despite being indicted, but to actually look at just how extraordinary that is — to not for a moment normalize the fact that somebody who has been credibly accused of such incredibly serious crimes is somehow still being considered a plausible candidate. That’s the article: How is this even possible that this man is still running?”

The health and value of PBS in 2023: “People need access to information”

Newsrooms will also have to grapple with how often the indictment should be mentioned, and in what context. “You need to remind readers repeatedly that this is a man who is under indictment,” the White House correspondent said. “Now, where do you draw the line? If there is policy discussion about, say, schools, do you really need to put that line in that story? I don’t know. But at these rallies when he goes off on these tangents or in a debate, yeah — I think that is a big part of the story. But is it a part of every single story? I don’t know the answer to that, and I think that is a conversation that reporters and editors are going to be having as we get into the campaign.”

Zremski said that any story about Trump should mention criminal charges in the event the former president is indicted. He pointed to his own reporting as an example, saying he thought it “incumbent” and a matter of “providing full context” to mention a lawmaker’s refusal to certify the 2020 presidential election when quoting them.

“Every story should have some serious boilerplate explaining and contextualizing just how abnormal this is and the very, very serious charges that have been leveled against [Trump],” Froomkin said. “And I’ll tell you, one other thing that reporters should do is anybody who supports his candidacy should be pressed to answer, Do you think he did these things or not? And, What evidence do you have that he didn’t? Because all [his] supporters are…gonna say, Oh, it’s a witch hunt. Oh, it’s political. But they should be told, Here is the evidence against him. What in God’s name makes you think this is OK? What is the evidence that you have, other than him screaming it’s political and it’s a witch hunt, that makes you believe that he’s not guilty? Why do you think he’s not guilty? Or do you think he’s guilty and [it] doesn’t matter?“

Froomkin said he feared journalists might hesitate to push back. Since 2015, reporters have grown accustomed to being in the line of fire of Trump and his supporters, particularly during times when he is under closer scrutiny. As decisions about indictments grow nearer, journalists say they are preparing for the inevitable assaults on their integrity, profession and employers, and the possibility of being singled out for attacks by Trump and his supporters, as they have done with CNN’s Jim Acosta, Urban Radio Network’s April Ryan, and others.

“I think we just have to cover the news and we have to, as best we can, ignore the noise,” Zremski said. “Now the problem is, the noise he makes can prompt others to make noise, and it can become very difficult for reporters who are covering him because there’s such a backlash from the MAGA crowd. But I think as best we can, what we have to do is just simply stick with what’s happening in the legal process as we cover the indictment. What are the charges, what is the evidence—really cover this as we would any other high-profile criminal case.”

Reporters and their editors have learned vital lessons from years of covering Trump, the White House correspondent said. “I think it’s going to be different this time … I think news outlets are going to approach him with much more scrutiny this time. I know a lot of newspapers really watch what he says and they don’t write about everything. He puts stuff out and you decide: is there any truth to what he’s saying, and if there is, is there any news value to it? In the beginning, they wrote whatever he said…and at some point, we started to step back and say, That’s not really news and That’s not helping the political dialogue.”

When the attacks come, the correspondent said that journalists will be ready. “We all have tough skins, we’ve all been at this for a long time. We all know what he does. He beats up on us because it plays well to his base. Our job is to just do our job.”

about Trump and the media