“There will be no limits”: Alarm over “increasing nuclear danger” after Putin pulls out of treaty

Russian President Vladimir Putin announced during a national address Tuesday that he is suspending his country’s participation in the New START Treaty, Moscow’s lone nuclear arms control agreement with the United States.

Non-proliferation advocates responded to the move with alarm and condemnation as fears of a broader—and possibly nuclear—conflict in Europe remain elevated, with Russia’s assault on Ukraine raging on with no end in sight.

“Suspending implementation of New START represents a dangerous and reckless decision from President Putin,” said the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). “Russia must immediately return to full compliance with the agreement and continue to adhere to warhead limits.”

Derek Johnson, a managing partner at Global Zero, wrote that while nuclear weapons inspections permitted under the treaty have “been on ice for a while” amid the coronavirus pandemic and the war in Ukraine, Putin’s move could push the world “one step closer to nuclear anarchy” if it means Russia will no longer inform the U.S. of nuclear weapons movements and exercises.

Together, the U.S. and Russia control 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons. The New START Treaty, which is formally set to expire in 2026 after both sides agreed to an extension in 2021, bars the two countries from deploying more than 1,550 nuclear warheads each, with inspections allowed to ensure compliance.

The U.S. has accused Russia of violating the treaty’s terms by refusing to allow inspections of its nuclear sites, a charge Moscow has denied. As the Financial Times reported earlier this month, “Russia and the U.S. suspended inspections during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, and originally planned to renew them last year.”

“But Russia abruptly pulled out of talks in Cairo on renewing them last November, then failed to meet a deadline to reschedule them last week, which the U.S. State Department said constituted two violations but not a material breach of the treaty,” the newspaper added.

During his speech to Russia’s Federal Assembly, Putin said he is pausing participation in the treaty because the U.S. and other NATO countries—through their military support for Ukraine—are attempting to “inflict a ‘strategic defeat’ on us and try to get to our nuclear facilities at the same time.”

Putin responded specifically to NATO’s statement earlier this month urging Moscow to comply with the terms of New START by allowing “inspections on Russian territory.”

“Before we return to discussing the treaty, we need to understand what are the aspirations of NATO members Britain and France and how we take into account their strategic arsenals that are part of the alliance’s combined strike potential,” the Russian president said.

Daryl Kimball, director of the Arms Control Association, warned that Putin’s decision to halt Russia’s participation in the bilateral treaty “makes it more likely that after New START expires, there will be no limits on U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals for the first time since 1972.”

“Without a new agreement to replace New START, each side could double the number of their deployed strategic nuclear warheads within 2-3 years,” Kimball wrote. “It would be a senseless arms race to nowhere but increasing nuclear danger. It would be a race that neither side can hope to win.”

“Smell the MAGA propaganda coming”: McCarthy exclusively gives Jan. 6 footage to Tucker Carlson

After House Republicans failed to gain any traction from holding hours of hearings in which they berated former Twitter executives for briefly suppressing a half-baked story about Hunter Biden in 2020, Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy launched another attempt to use government power to boost right-wing conspiracy theories by giving Fox host Tucker Carlson unlimited access to more than 14,000 hours of footage recorded in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Carlson, is one of many elite Republican figures who have tried to shift blame for the violent attack of that date from supporters of disgraced ex-president Donald Trump to unspecified “agents provocateur” supposedly working for the FBI. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and other far-right members of Congress have long sought to release all surveillance video in the desperate hope to find anyone they could accuse of being a federal manipulator.

In remarks last month, McCarthy stated that he was inclined to release the footage to the public. “I think the public should see what has happened on that day,” he said.

Fox representatives confirmed the arrangement after it was initially disclosed by Axios. CNN reported that McCarthy had not consulted beforehand with other Republican House leaders or with Democratic Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffries.

Concocting falsehoods about law enforcement officials on Jan. 6 is right-wing media figures’ second attempt at blame deflection for the Capitol riot. Initially, Fox hosts claimed that leftist “antifa” protesters organized the mob, even though they privately acknowledged that the group was comprised of Trump supporters.

But Republican politicians and their media allies are not the only parties who have sought the release of the surveillance footage. Since early 2021, a number of news organizations have filed legal briefs seeking all videos recorded by the federal government on the day of the attack.

In multiple court filings, the U.S. Capitol Police has sought to prevent the release of the surveillance footage. In one brief, the agency told a judge that the videos could reveal important security details about the building complex, “being collected, exposed, and passed on to those who might wish to interfere with the security of the Capitol and Congress in the future.”

Federal prosecutors have also sought to block release on the grounds that it could harm prosecution efforts against people accused of crimes committed on Jan. 6 and also potentially prevent them from receiving a fair trial.

Thus far, courts have not been persuaded by arguments to release closed-circuit footage captured by the U.S. Capitol Police, but the disbanded House select committee assigned to investigate the attack did release several specific videos during its public hearings. In response to media lawsuits, some federal judges have been allowing videos presented in court hearings to be released to the public as well.

Several Democratic former members of Jan. 6 select committee condemned McCarthy for giving Carlson unrestricted access to the security footage.

“It’s hard to overstate the potential security risks if this material were to be used irresponsibly,” Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said in a statement. “If Speaker McCarthy has indeed granted Tucker Carlson – a Fox host who routinely spreads misinformation and Putin’s poisonous propaganda – and his producers access to this sensitive footage, he owes the American people an explanation of why he has done so and what steps he has taken to address the significant security concerns at stake.”

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., another former select committee member blasted McCarthy’s decision.

“What security precautions were taken to keep this from becoming a roadmap for 2024 insurrection?” he wrote on Twitter. “Why isn’t it available to all media & public? Smell the MAGA propaganda coming.”

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., blasted McCarthy and Carlson in a statement posted to Twitter.

“Make no mistake: This isn’t about transparency, it’s about fueling dangerous conspiracy theories,” he wrote.”

Just what Carlson and his staff will do with the more than 14,000 hours of footage is unclear, but his rhetoric and actions in recent months provide some clues.

In a text message sent to his producer Alex Pfeiffer shortly after the Capitol attack revealed in a lawsuit filed by election machine company Dominion Voting Systems, the host blasted Trump as “a demonic force” an “a destroyer” who could potentially take down Fox if he turned his fanbase against the network. But in the intervening months and years, Carlson has sought to reframe the riot—in which Trump supporters assaulted police, erected gallows to hang people, and sought to kill then-vice president Mike Pence—through lies told by far-right activists who have been trying to avoid jail time for their actions. Carlson collaborated heavily with them to release a three-part online series called “Patriot Purge” which falsely claimed that federal law enforcement officials staged the Capitol siege to make Republicans look bad.

Several Jan. 6 defendants have tried similar arguments in court but their defenses have all failed.

Carlson might also take a similar approach to one that was used by several right-leaning online commentators who were given exclusive private access to emails and records kept by Twitter by its new owner, Republican activist Elon Musk. Seeking to boost the GOP’s fortunes, Musk’s commentator allies took an extremely selective approach to their data trove and used their reports to focus entirely on Twitter’s actions against right-wing figures and utterly ignore the company’s many actions supportive of Republicans or government of other countries.

Outsourcing the GOP’s Jan. 6 argument to a controversial Fox News anchor isn’t likely to produce anything of legal or political consequence, but that isn’t the point. High-level Republican politicians like McCarthy and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., are desperate to talk about anything other than the first mass attack on the U.S. Capitol since the War of 1812. Letting Tucker Carlson concoct elaborate conspiracy theories is a way of keeping the far-right base happy while also allowing McCarthy and other elite Republicans to keep their distance from the topic.

The Capitol surveillance footage is going to become the new Hunter Biden laptop.

“Wrong and honestly evil”: Even Republicans are trashing MTG’s “treasonous” call for secession

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., drew backlash from all sides after calling to divide states down party lines on Presidents’ Day.

Greene, who has repeatedly floated the concept of a “national divorce” in the past, on Monday called to separate the country “by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government.”

“Everyone I talk to says this,” she tweeted. “From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrat’s traitorous America Last policies, we are done.”

We need a national divorce.

We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government.

Everyone I talk to says this.

From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrat’s traitorous America Last policies, we are…

— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) February 20, 2023

Greene’s comments came as she and other far-right Republicans criticized President Joe Biden’s surprise visit to Ukraine, which the Georgia congresswoman called “incredibly insulting.”

“Impeach Biden or give us a national divorce,” she wrote.

Though many Republicans have tried to avoid commenting on Greene’s long history of inflammatory rhetoric, a growing number of conservatives pushed back on her secessionist call.

“This rhetoric is destructive and wrong and—honestly—evil,” tweeted Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican. “We don’t need a divorce, we need marriage counseling. And we need elected leaders that don’t profit by tearing us apart. We can disagree without hate. Healthy conflict was critical to our nation’s founding and survival.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene suggests using “Second Amendment rights” against Democrats

Former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., sought to remind Greene of “some of the governing principles of America.”

“Our country is governed by the Constitution. You swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution,” she wrote. “Secession is unconstitutional. No member of Congress should advocate secession, Marjorie.”

Former Rep. Denver Riggleman, R-Va., who served as an investigator for the House Jan. 6 committee, also lashed out at Greene’s “ludicrous statement.”

“I would think that this alone would disqualify a sitting member of Congress from serving on the Committee for Homeland Security,” he wrote.

Conservative commentator Erick Erickson reminded the congresswoman that the “confederates already lost once, Marjorie.”

“We just went through an election where the American public decided [they’d] rather stick with Democrats than crazy Republicans, and MTG doubles down on ‘hey, let’s break up the country’ and has Speaker McCarthy standing by her side. FFS. These people want to lose,” Erickson fumed.

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Conservative writer David French also condemned Greene’s tweet but warned that her support for secession is widespread among many on the right.

“The dangerous thing about this tweet is not that an individual member of Congress is this radical (there are always at least a few crank members of Congress), it’s that she speaks for a very real part of the right,” he wrote. “I hear that same sentiment all the time.”

Legal experts also reminded Greene that secession did not work out well in the past.

“In case you forgot, the Supreme Court ruled on your idea more than 150 years ago. Hint: they didn’t rule in your favor,” wrote national security attorney Bradley Moss.

“The last time some states decided to ‘separate’ from the Union, the Civil War made clear for all time that we are indivisible. We’re all in this together,” tweeted former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti. “Advocating for the dissolution of the United States is treasonous and un-American.”

Some Democrats wondered if Greene’s home state still qualifies as a “red state” after electing two Democratic senators and re-electing Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., just months earlier.

“Georgia acted like a blue state in the 2020, 2021, and 2022 federal elections. And Georgia grows woke kale,” tweeted Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif.

“You are a danger to the country and you only want to divide us,” wrote Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif. “You are literally calling for secession, which is pretty on brand for traitors like you.”

about GOP calls for secession

AI chatbots are having their “tulip mania” moment

On November 30, 2022, OpenAI announced the public release of ChatGPT-3, a large language model (LLM) that can engage in astonishingly human-like conversations and answer an incredible variety of questions. Three weeks later, Google’s management — wary that they had been publicly eclipsed by a competitor in the artificial intelligence technology space — issued a “Code Red” to staff.

Google’s core business is its search engine, which currently accounts for 84% of the global search market. Their search engine is so dominant that searching the internet is generically called “googling.” When a user poses a search request, Google’s search engine returns dozens of helpful links along with targeted advertisements based on its knowledge of the user (and it knows much more than it should about us). The links are generally helpful, but it can take several minutes to sift through the links to find what one is searching for.

GPT, in contrast, provides direct answers to user questions. No more jumping from link to link in a treasure hunt for information. Microsoft, which has its own competing search engine, thinks that’s a big deal. It invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019 and has now reportedly agreed to invest $10 billion more over several years with the hope that GPT will supercharge its languishing search engine, Bing, and wrench market share away from Google. Google thinks it’s a big deal too. Hence, the “Code Red.”

AI chatbots learned to write before they could learn to think

Google has been working on its own large language model, named LaMDA, though it has not made it available for public testing nor allowed unauthorized Google employees to disclose any information about how well it performs. Prodded by the avalanche of excitement over GPT, Google responded with a live public demonstration of LaMDA’s prowess on February 7.

Unfortunately, LaMDA bombed its job interview. When asked, “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9-year old about?,” LaMDA gave two correct responses but then incorrectly stated that the Webb telescope had taken the first pictures of a planet outside our solar system. (The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope had been the first.) Google’s stock price promptly dropped 8%, representing a $100 billion loss in the company’s market value.

These models are programmed to assert their answers with great confidence, but they do not know what words mean and consequently have no way of assessing the truth of their confident assertions.

That astonishing and sudden dip speaks to the degree to which AI has become the latest obsession for investors. Yet their confidence in AI — indeed, their very understanding of and definition of it — is misplaced.

GPT is not as great as many think, and LaMDA is not woefully far behind. LaMDA’s bad answer is simply a reflection of the inherent flaw in all LLMs, including GPT. Indeed, no one initially noticed but Bing also gave some wrong answers when Microsoft demonstrated it to reporters.

LLMs are mere text generators. Trained on unimaginable amounts of text, they string together words in coherent sentences based on statistical probability of words following other words. But they are not “intelligent” in any real way — they are just automated calculators that spit out words. These models are programmed to assert their answers with great confidence, but they do not know what words mean and consequently have no way of assessing the truth of their confident assertions. Here is one example:

Human: Who was the first female president of California?

GPT: The first female President of California was Erin Cruz, who took office on April 02, 2021.

Erin Cruz is a California Republican who ran for Congress in 2020. She lost. We asked GPT for more information about Ms. Cruz and the program informed us that she is 46 years old, has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science from Stanford, and is married to Derek Stone. None of that is true.

We asked GPT to write a biography of Gary and here is what we got:

Human: Please write a biography of Gary Smith, professor of economics at Pomona College

GPT: Gary Smith is a professor of economics at Pomona College and holds a distinguished position within the economics department. He earned his PhD in economics from Stanford University in 1986 and has taught at Pomona College since then. He is renowned for his work on labor economics, public finance, the economics of education, and industrial organization. He is widely published in books and journals and has served as a consultant to the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and United Nations Development Program. Smith is also highly involved in local communities, giving lectures and teaching seminars whenever possible. He has been awarded numerous honors for his work in economics, including the Founder’s Award from the Claremont Graduate University in 2010.

The only correct fact in this bio was given by the prompt, that Gary is a professor of economics at Pomona College.

A reliable way of demonstrating GPT-3’s unreliability is to ask it to write a biography of yourself. Do try this at home!

AI optimists might respond to GPT-3’s shortcomings by proposing that it has simply not taken in enough information. But training it on larger databases will not solve the inherent problem: LLMs are unreliable because they do not know what words mean. Period. In fact, training on future databases that increasingly include the BS spouted by LLMs will make them even less trustworthy.

LLMs are the latest wave of artificial intelligence hype. IBM’s Dr. Watson was supposed to revolutionize health care. Ten years and $15 billion later, it was sold for parts. Radiologists were supposed to be obsolete by 2021; there are now more radiologists than ever. Fully self-driving cars were supposed to be zipping back and forth between Los Angeles and New York by 2017; we’re still waiting for a car that can drive down a street reliably avoiding pedestrians, bicyclists and construction crews.

Now Bill Gates says GPT “will change our world” That may well be true, but not in the ways that most people think.

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LLMs can be used for search queries, but people who know that LLMs can’t trusted won’t rely on them. People who don’t know that LLMs are unreliable will learn the hard way. LLMs can be used to handle customer service queries, but how many companies will be willing to jeopardize their reputation by giving their customers incorrect information? LLMs will certainly be used to fuel a firehose of internet falsehoods, but we count the coming disinformation tsunami as a very big negative.

We also count their impact on electricity usage and carbon emissions as a negative. When we asked GPT, “Who won the Super Bowl this year?,” it responded, “The Tampa Bay Buccaneers defeated the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LV, which was held on February 7, 2021.” To keep current, LLMs will have to be retrained frequently, which is enormously expensive. It has also been estimated that involving LLMs in the search process will require “at least four or five times more computing per search.”

Against these enormous costs, where are the big payoffs? As a Financial Times headline blared: “Artificial intelligence stocks soar on ChatGPT hype.” The undeniable magic of the human-like conversations generated by GPT will undoubtedly enrich many who peddle the false narrative that computers are now smarter than us and can be trusted to make decisions for us. The AI bubble is inflating rapidly.

That’s our code red.

about AI

Senators say health worker shortages ripe for bipartisan compromise

Senators are eying the growing shortage of health care workers in the United States as one of the few problems where there is room for bipartisan solutions, even in a deeply divided Congress gearing up for a presidential election cycle.

The shortage that’s only worsened since the pandemic is a prescription for skyrocketing costs, suffering, and unnecessary death, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the new chairman of the Senate’s top health committee, warned in his committee’s first hearing Thursday.

“We are going to produce legislation, and I think people will be surprised about the level of bipartisan supporters,” Sanders said in a brief interview during a break from the hearing. He called for the committee to “produce something meaningful.”

The shortage of health care workers of all sorts is a widespread problem, but is especially acute in rural areas and minority communities. Sanders pointed to the startling numbers of Americans living in medical care deserts to illustrate the point. There are nearly 100 million people who don’t have easy access to a primary care physician, almost 70 million with no dentist at hand, and some 158 million people who have few local mental health providers, Sanders said.

The covid-19 pandemic contributed to the nation’s existing worker shortage as many left the workforce as the crisis worsened. Some contracted the virus themselves, and large numbers of health care providers died. An investigation by KHN and The Guardian revealed more than 3,600 health workers in the United States died during the pandemic’s first year alone. Some got burned out or sought higher-paying jobs elsewhere.

“Despite all of our health care spending, we don’t have enough doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners, dentists, dental hygienists, pharmacists, mental health providers, and other medical professionals,” Sanders said, pointing to data that suggest the nation faces a shortfall of about 450,000 nurses and 120,000 doctors in the coming years, and 100,000 dentists now.

While Democrats and Republicans alike acknowledged the shortages hobbling care for hundreds of millions of Americans, any legislative solution must pass not only the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, but also the full Senate and House of Representatives. Far-right House Republicans have threatened to go so far as forcing the federal government to default on its debts as they demand spending cuts, and high government spending on health care could make new legislation a ripe target.

Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, the committee’s top Republican who is also a doctor, cited a few programs the committee is responsible for updating this year, such as an expiring program that trains many of the nation’s pediatricians. He said funding should reflect what works in the health care system and come “with the appropriate spending offsets.”

“We have to make sure that we’re not wasting the money we’re trying to productively spend,” he said.

None of the senators in the packed hearing room disagreed with the fundamental problem that too many medical professionals are leaving their fields and that educational institutions are not graduating enough new ones to replace them and meet the growing needs of an aging population.

Members on both sides of the aisle recognized growing levels of burnout in the medical professions; increased threats faced by health care workers; the costs and challenges of working underserved areas; and financial incentives that steer younger professionals toward more lucrative specialties and higher-income areas.

Senators agreed on some strategies to boost numbers of health workers, such as encouraging more lower-cost educational options like community college and ensuring that existing programs are extended this year, such as the National Health Service Corps that trains doctors for underserved areas and graduate education programs.

A whiff of partisan thinking drifted into the conversation, with some Republicans focused more on decrying government interference in health care. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) suggested the State Department should do a better job clearing foreign students and practitioners to immigrate here. Cassidy raised electronic health records requirements as a contributor to physician burnout, saying they consume too much time. Even in those areas, there were signs lawmakers could agree. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) also raised the idea of unjamming the immigrant backlog.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said vaccine requirements were an impediment. Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) raised regulations barring some surprise medical bills as harmful to doctors.

“I think the fact that the committee has made this the first hearing means a number of us have bills. We may try to take a bunch of them up together and see if we can combine them into something,” said Kaine, pointing in particular to the idea of expanding loan forgiveness for people willing to go into areas with shortages. “I think there’s great prospects for bipartisan progress on this.”

Senators credited Sanders with the initial progress toward a compromise. He spent his first weeks in his post meeting with committee members from both parties to identify areas of bipartisan agreement.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said Sanders reached out to meet with her and discuss her priorities. They both named workforce shortages as a top issue, she said, adding, “We’ve got good stuff to work on.”

“In my conversation with him just on the floor this week, about what we might be able to do with the workforce issue, I think he was kind of probing to see if we could put together some efforts to just focus on these on workforce shortages,” Murkowski told KHN. “There is a great deal of interest in legislating in this space.”

“What it’s going to look like, I can’t tell you yet,” she added. “We are going to produce legislation,” Sanders said as the hearing ended. “I don’t do hearings for the sake of hearings.”

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

The United Nations says Denmark and Greenland must address colonialism

In Greenland, climate change is causing fish populations to decline, invasive species to find new homes, and sea levels to rapidly rise. Between 2001 and 2011, temperatures on the island were higher than they have been in the last thousand years. Glaciers are melting nearly seven times faster than they did 25 years ago, and since 2000, Greenland has lost 5 trillion tons of ice.

As the ice melts, it may reveal large deposits of valuable minerals, like nickel and cobalt, that can be used in batteries for electric vehicles and phones, and they’re catching the attention of investors like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates.

But United Nations experts say any mining projects must receive the consent of local communities, particularly the Indigenous Inuit, who make up a majority of Greenland’s population. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, José Francisco Calí Tzay, has called on the governments of Greenland and Denmark to develop a mechanism to obtain the free, prior, and informed consent of communities where new mining and tourism projects are planned. Calí Tzay has also called on the two governments to address the negative impacts of colonialism that translate to “structural and systematic racial discrimination against the Inuit People.”

“I urge Greenland’s government to consult with the Inuit People whose traditional livelihoods will be directly affected by plans to expand mining, tourism and infrastructure,” Calí Tzay said.

Many Inuit people rely on ice and water for their livelihoods and culture, making climate change especially hard on communities, and extractive industries, like mining, can harm the environment through toxic waste and ecosystem disruption. In 2021, Greenland imposed a moratorium on uranium mining after international experts raised concerns about human rights violations caused by the mine. However, many Inuit remain open to locally-controlled mining projects that provide income and jobs.

The Inuit, who are the only recognized Indigenous people in Denmark, have called Greenland home for thousands of years, long before it was claimed by Denmark. Today, in Greenland, which has been an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark since 1953, nearly 90 percent of the roughly 57,000 people are Inuit. About 17,000 Inuit live away from their homelands in Denmark. In 1979, Greenland voted for a more independent government, giving the island control over areas like education and health and in 2009, the Self-Government Act expanded those sovereign powers, leaving only matters like national security and foreign affairs to Denmark. “Greenland’s extensive self-governance is an inspiring example of the implementation of Indigenous self government,” Calí Tzay said.

But Inuit communities continue to experience negative impacts of tourism and U.S. military installations, including leftover toxic waste. In at least one case, Inuit were relocated to make way for a military base and have not been adequately compensated. Inuit suffer from lack of adequate housing and mental health services, high rates of homelessness and suicide, and persistent policies that neglect their rights, including forced birth control and family separations. Calí Tzay also says that both governments need to improve human rights protections and services for the Inuit including reforming adoption and home care services, adding Inuit language, culture, and history to education curricula in both Denmark and Greenland, and creating specific legal processes for consulting with Indigenous communities.

In a statement, the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, “We attach great importance to the universal human rights and to the important work of the independent experts of the UN and we will look carefully at the final report of the Special Rapporteur and the recommendations therein.”

Request for comment from the government of Greenland was not immediately returned.

Although Calí Tzay gave Denmark credit for supporting international human rights agreements like the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, he said it has more work to do at home. “I would like to call upon the Government to fully embrace this commitment at the domestic level as well,” he said.

This story has been updated to include comment from the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/global-indigenous-affairs-desk/the-united-nations-says-denmark-and-greenland-must-address-colonialism/.

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

The media’s biggest addiction: Trump voters

Institutions are like people. They have personalities, histories, memories, cultures, ethics, desires, relationships, emotions, dreams, and habits. And like people, institutions also have addictions and compulsions.

The American mainstream news media has been addicted to stories about the so-called “white working class” for more than seven years – and it shows few signs of wanting to recover and heal. This addiction began in earnest during the Age of Trump and in response to what the mainstream news media and its gatekeepers saw as fascinating “human interest stories” about ‘forgotten white Americans” in rural red state America and their love for Donald Trump.

In many ways, this is nothing new. Such reporting is part of a long tradition of mostly anthropological and stereotype-laden stories about “toothless hillbillies” and poor whites in Appalachia and other parts of rural America. With Trump’s ascendance, the American mainstream news media doubled down on their addiction both as a function of embarrassment that they had so fundamentally misjudged the country’s political dynamics and to capture the money that could be made through obsessive coverage of “the white working class.”

Will the New York Times ever give Joe Biden credit for his accomplishments? Chances dim!

In one of the most recent high-profile recent examples of this addiction by the mainstream news media, the New York Times ran a front page story about President Biden’s attempts to win over the white working class through a bold series of policies and other outreach efforts:

With his call for a “blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America,” President Biden on Tuesday night acknowledged rhetorically what Democrats have been preparing for two years: a fierce campaign to win back white working-class voters through the creation of hundreds of thousands of well-paid jobs that do not require a college degree.

Mr. Biden’s economically focused State of the Union address may have avoided the cultural appeals to the white working class that former President Donald J. Trump harnessed so effectively, the grievances encapsulated by fears of immigration, racial and gender diversity, and the sloganeering of the intellectual left. But at the speech’s heart was an appeal to Congress to “finish the job” and a simple challenge. “Let’s offer every American the path to a good career whether they go to college or not,” he said….

But Democrats will have to match those jobs against Republican appeals aimed at white grievances encapsulated by fears of immigration, racial and gender diversity, and the sloganeering of the intellectual left. …

Republicans openly mocked Mr. Biden’s “Finish the Job” slogan, and among working-class voters, they have public opinion on their side. In a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll, just 36 percent of Americans without a college degree approved of Mr. Biden’s job performance, compared with 53 percent of college graduates. His approval on economic issues was even worse, with just 31 percent of voters without a degree approving of his handling of the economy.

The Times story continues with more polling data and who will “win” this political contest:

Without doubt, Democrats have their work cut out for them. About two-thirds of eligible voters do not have four-year college degrees, and over the last decade, Democrats have lost ground with them, especially with less educated white voters. In 2020, Mr. Biden won 61 percent of college graduates, but only 45 percent of voters without a four-year college degree — and just 33 percent of white voters without a four-year degree.

In a New York Times/Siena College poll in September, 59 percent of white working-class voters said Republicans were the party of the working class, compared with 28 percent who chose Democrats. Sixty-eight percent of these voters said they agreed more with Republicans than Democrats on the economy, while just 25 percent picked Democrats. Beyond economics, white working-class voters sided overwhelmingly with Republicans on building a border wall, opposing gun control, stopping illegal immigration and seeing gender as immutable and determined at birth.

Democrats, caught between those sentiments on social policy and the party’s core constituencies of people of color, women and the college-educated, are hoping that tangible improvements in well-being can persuade white voters without a college education to focus on their economic interests.

“Jobs are coming back, pride is coming back, because choices we made in the last two years,” Mr. Biden said on Tuesday. “This is a blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America and make a real difference in your lives.”

In all, the recent Times story on the “white working class” embodies some of the worst habits that typify the American mainstream news media failures in the Age of Trump and ascendant fascism and racial authoritarianism. Euphemisms such as “cultural issues” and “white grievances” are used instead of directly and transparently discussing racism and white supremacy. Moreover, such euphemisms and literal white-washed-speech norms present white supremacy and white racial resentment and rage as somehow based on legitimate grievance instead of as a function of white privilege and other unearned advantages.

The heckler’s veto: Biden masterfully stood up to the GOP. Now what?

For example, what exactly are these “white grievances” beyond a superficial listing of supposed issues? And what is “white” about them? The lack of specificity in the Times’ piece gives credibility to claims and complaints that lack substantiating evidence.

These attempts at fairness, neutrality, objectivity, bothsideism, and horserace journalism by the American mainstream news media also remove the moral component from truth-telling. Here the battle between neofascism and multiracial democracy is presented as a matter of political disagreement and partisan polarization instead of as an existential battle between good and evil. What media scholar and journalist Jay Rosen describes as “the savvy take” will not save American democracy – or the Fourth Estate’s credibility and legitimacy in this time of crisis:

One of the great attractions to horse-race journalism is that it permits reporters and pundits to play up their detachment. Focusing on the race advertises the political innocence of the press because “who’s gonna win?” is not an ideological question. By asking it you reaffirm that yours is not an ideological profession. This is experienced as pleasure by a lot of mainstream journalists. Innocence is bliss.

The quest for innocence in political reporting means the desire to be manifestly agenda-less and thus “prove” in the way you describe things that journalism is not an ideological trade. Which can get in the way of describing things. He said, she said doesn’t tell us who’s distorting the picture more. It is neutral on where the reality is, but reality is not something journalists can afford to be neutral about!

Political journalism should help us get our bearings in a world of confusing claims and counter-claims. But instead, we have savviness, the dialect of insiders bringing us into their games.

What do we actually know about the so-called white working class in the Age of Trump and beyond?

Like all addicts, the American mainstream news media needs to hit rock bottom so that it can finally admit it has a problem and then seek help to get better.

Social scientists and other experts have repeatedly shown that it was not “economic anxiety” but instead white racism and white racial resentment that explains why white “working class” (and other white voters) support Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and the larger neofascist movement. “Status anxiety” is just a proxy for anger and fear about the perceived loss of white privilege and white power. This complements other findings which show that a large number if not an outright majority of white Republicans, “conservatives”, Trumpists, and right-leaning independents would support a dictatorship in America if it meant that white people like them would not have to share power in a democracy with black and brown people.

Trump’s coup attempt on Jan. 6 is the literal embodiment of such white rage and contempt for multiracial democracy.

Political scientists and other researchers have also repeatedly shown that poor white people are more likely to support the Democratic Party and not the Republicans. There is a qualifier to this data: Poor and disenfranchised people on both sides of the color line – the ones often featured in the mainstream media’s white rural and working-class poverty porn genre – are less likely to vote than members of higher income groups.

So-called “white working class” Trump and Republican voters actually have higher median incomes (often substantially so depending on the state) than the national average: this fact is downplayed (if mentioned at all) by the American mainstream news media in their writing and other coverage of Trumplandia and its “real Americans” who everyone should bend over backward to understand and accommodate. President Biden and the Democrats hope that improving the economic conditions of rust belt and white working-class communities will somehow win those voters back to sanity and out of the orbit of the Republican Party’s fascists (and Christofascism and other right-wing extremist poison). Unfortunately, those hopes are not supported by the evidence. Mike Males at YES! Media offers this intervention:

Surveys and studies consistently find Trump’s generally older, White supporters enraged at “loss of status” and in fear of being “replaced” by non-White people. That White people are falling behind across key economic, health, and safety indexes is not due to victimization by immigrants and liberal conspiracies, however, but to victimization by other Whites and self-inflicted alcoholism, drug overdose, and suicide.

Is the solution to undividing America massive federal programs to improve Republican America’s struggling economies and troubled social conditions, then? Aside from the problem that Republican members of congress (and two recalcitrant Democrats) have sabotaged beneficial initiatives, former President Barack Obama already tried that. From 2010 to 2016, the Obama administration’s economic recovery measures fostered millions of new jobs and thousands of dollars in real median income growth for Whites in urban and most rural areas alike, reversing the recession under Republican George W. Bush’s presidency.

Yet, despite these gains, White voters vehemently rejected Democrats in successive elections. Today, Trump’s base voters are electing candidates who share their racial resentment and imagined victimization, not those who actually are advancing their safety and economic well-being.

Here are several more inconvenient facts that undercut the mainstream media’s obsession with the white working class.

Trump and the Republican fascists have a solid base of support among white middle class and affluent communities in blue state America.

But that is a much more challenging and difficult story for the mainstream media to focus on because it would require critically interrogating members of their own peer group and class instead of obsessing about poor and working-class white people in rural and rust belt America.

Black and brown people are experiencing far more economic uncertainly and pain than are “white working class” people in America. Yet, they did not flock to Trumpism and neofascism. Why is this?

In the same bastions of Trumpism in rural and rust belt America that are obsessively profiled by the American mainstream news media there are liberals, progressives, Democrats, and other people who reject such politics. Where are their profiles and fawning coverage?

By definition, President Biden’s initiatives to help rust belt and rural America are “newsworthy.” But the more important question is how should the news media cover that story. Whose voices and experiences should be highlighted and elevated? Are we, the Fourth Estate, speaking truth to power and helping the public to make informed decisions? In this time of crisis are we defending democracy or aiding and abetting the rise of fascism and authoritarianism?

In the end, as Donald Trump and his successors in the Republican-fascist party and movement become even more extreme and dangerous the American mainstream news media will continue to feign being shocked and surprised by how white working-class voters support (and love) all of this horribleness.

An inability to see clearly and a perpetual state of denial about reality is what the American mainstream news media’s addiction to the white working class has wrought. Like all addicts, the American mainstream news media needs to hit rock bottom so that it can finally admit it has a problem and then seek help to get better.

Unfortunately, if current habits and trends continue, the American mainstream news media will not realize it has a problem until it is too late. After more than seven years it is clear that such a moment of clarity will not be happening.

about this journalism in the Age of Trump

Fox News texts reveal the truth: The Big Lie was a con — that the viewers were in on

Even as they were hyping Donald Trump’s Big Lie on-air, Fox News hosts knew full well that Joe Biden, not Trump, had won the 2020 presidential election. It’s what everyone already suspected, of course, but now it’s an irrefutable fact thanks to legal documents filed by Dominion Voting Systems. The ballot machine company is suing Fox News for defamation, after the network repeatedly aired Trump and his allies making false claims that their tabulation machines were “flipping” votes from Trump to Biden. But even as the network aired those lies, text messages show, Fox hosts and executives were talking about how they didn’t believe a word of it.

“Sidney Powell is lying,” host Tucker Carlson texted to fellow host Laura Ingraham on Nov. 18, 2020. Powell was a regular Fox News guest who was a primary source of Big Lie allegations.

“Sidney is a complete nut,” Ingraham texted back. “Ditto Rudy,” she added, referring to Trump’s attorney and Big Lie proponent Rudy Giuliani.

In another text chain, the two, along with fellow host Sean Hannity, discussed getting a reporter fired for tweeting out the fact that there was no evidence of voter fraud. (The host eventually took down the tweet.) The documents also show extensive chatter from Fox executives indicating that they knew Biden had won, even as they encouraged the Big Lie on-air.

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Fox News, as its name implies, purports to be a journalistic enterprise. As such, these texts should be proof of a massive betrayal of their audience’s trust. If this were another cable news outlet like CNN or MSNBC, everyone involved would be fired already, never to work again in the industry. Former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair and former New Republic writer Stephen Glass are famous examples of the career ruin that comes when journalists knowingly pass off lies as fact. And yet, no one expects a single one of these Fox “journalists” to pay for their lies. Worse, no one expects the network to lose a single viewer over it.

To most people, the idea that you “respect” someone by lying to them is nonsensical.

It’s not just that Fox News audiences don’t care if they’re lied to. Lies are what they crave. They tune into Fox News because lies are exactly what they want to hear.

I’m going to indulge for a moment in told-ya-so: I’ve long written about my view that Republican voters don’t really believe the Big Lie, even as they claim they do to pollsters. Instead, I’ve argued, it’s less a sincere belief than a collective lie Republicans tell together, as a power play and a show of tribal loyalty. In other words, Republicans aren’t fooled by Trump’s claims he “won” the 2020 election. They just think they’re in on the con. Yet every time I write about this, I get serious pushback from people insisting that Republicans “really” believe this stuff.

Well, if that were true, then audiences would be angry at Fox News for lying to their faces. That isn’t happening, and no one expects it to.

Republican voters don’t actually “believe” the Big Lie about January 6 — they’re in on the con

We’ve been down this road before, after the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection released similar text messages exposing the gap between what Fox News hosts actually think and what they say on-air. In front of cameras, Fox News hosts would claim that the Capitol riot was being orchestrated by “antifa” or the FBI, or they would deny it was violent at all. In text messages, however, they both worried about the violence and blamed Trump for it — all while begging him to call it off.

That Carlson, Hannity, Ingraham and company were knowingly lying to their audiences surprised no one — including, it turns out, their own audiences. Sure, some Trump voters may have never heard about the gap between what their favorite hosts were saying in private and what they said into microphones. But plenty of MAGA voters did hear about it, either by exposure to the mainstream coverage or even on Fox News itself, which aired some of the Jan. 6 hearings. Tellingly, though, none of these folks minded. That’s because they think they’re in on it. They aren’t being lied to by Fox News, in their eyes. They’re joining hands with Fox News to tell the lie together.

The recent batch of text messages shows that the Fox News hosts understand that lies are what their audience tunes in to hear. In discussing their errant reporter who made the mistake of sharing a fact on Twitter, Carlson groused, “It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down.” In another text message from Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott to Fox executive Lachlan Murdoch, she writes about “letting the viewers know we hear them and respect them” by escalating Big Lie content. Hannity echoed this language in another text, writing, “Respecting this audience whether we agree or not is critical.”

To most people, the idea that you “respect” someone by lying to them is nonsensical. But it makes sense if you realize they aren’t trying to deceive their audiences, not really. It’s more that they are collaborating with their viewers to prop up the narrative the viewers prefer. Since viewers don’t care about the truth, but only about winning at any cost, this is a matter of Fox News respecting their wishes.

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As one former Fox News producer told Brian Stelter for his book “Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth,” the viewers “don’t care if it’s right; they just want their side to win.”

It’s true that the presence of facts was driving off Fox News viewers. The anger started when the network correctly called Arizona for Biden, cinching the Democrat’s presidential win. It deepened in response to Fox reporters who kept saying true things, such as that there was no evidence of fraud or Biden appeared to have won fair and square. This caused viewers to turn the channel to even more unhinged right-wing networks that were even more willing to lie to them. So in order to be competitive, Fox News had to lie more often.

Trump created a permission structure for his followers to assert that reality is whatever they want.

These are the same right-wing audiences who swoon to Ben Shapiro of the Daily Wire saying, “facts don’t care about your feelings.” But, of course, that statement is just another lie. For MAGA, their feelings are all that matter. Truth simply holds no value to them. It’s one reason why we can safely describe MAGA as a fascist movement. It’s based on an ideology that all that matters is power. Empirical facts are something to be crushed under the MAGA boot. Trump’s total lack of regard for the truth doesn’t make him an outlier. He’s very much the standard Fox News viewer.

This also explains how Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis turned himself into a right-wing superstar by waging an all-out war on books and education. Most Americans are disgusted by DeSantis’ agenda, which includes scrubbing discussion of racism from history class and erasing the fact that LGBTQ people exist. For most people, deliberately lying to students about fundamental truths is grotesque. But for MAGA, it’s thrilling. Rewriting reality so that what they want to believe takes precedence over fact is the entire point for them.

Jan. 6 committee just proved Fox News knowingly lies on air — but don’t expect their viewers to care

“[I]n the eyes of a substantial number of voters, teaching uncomfortable facts is indeed a form of liberal propaganda,” Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times last week. “And once that’s your mind-set, you see left-wing indoctrination happening everywhere, not just in history and the social sciences. If a biology class explains the theory of evolution, and why almost all scientists accept it — or, for that matter, the theory of how vaccines work — well, that’s liberal propaganda. If a physics class explains how greenhouse gas emissions can change the climate — well, that’s more liberal propaganda.”

Trump created a permission structure for his followers to assert that reality is whatever they want. If they don’t want to believe in the biology of COVID-19, they will reject it, even as some of them are dying from it. If they don’t want to believe racism shaped American history, they will simply dismiss any mention as “critical race theory” and fight to keep schools from teaching these basic facts. Deep down inside, however, most of them know that the things they are saying aren’t factually correct. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Truth, Trump taught them, only matters if you say it does. If you insist on your lie loud and long enough, they believe, it becomes better than the truth.

UPDATE: In a statement received after this article was published, Fox News said that despite “a lot of noise and confusion generated by Dominion and their opportunistic private equity owners … this case remains about freedom of the press and freedom of speech, which are fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution. … Dominion has mischaracterized the record, cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context, and spilled considerable ink on facts that are irrelevant under black-letter principles of defamation law.”

“Egregious”: Meatpacking plants busted illegally employing 100+ children in dangerous conditions

Federal investigators revealed Friday that one of the nation’s largest food sanitation companies illegally employed at least 102 children in dangerous jobs at 13 meatpacking facilities across eight states, leading to $1.5 million in fines.

The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) said its Wage and Hour Division “found that children were working with hazardous chemicals and cleaning meat processing equipment including back saws, brisket saws, and head splitters.”

The probe determined that children ages 13 to 17 unlawfully worked for Kieler, Wisconsin-based Packers Sanitation Services Inc. at plants in Arkansas, Colorado, Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, Tennessee, and Texas.

Jessica Looman, principal deputy administrator of the DOL’s Wage and Hour Division, said the child labor violations “were systemic” and “clearly indicate a corporate-wide failure by Packers Sanitation Services at all levels.”

“These children should never have been employed in meatpacking plants and this can only happen when employers do not take responsibility to prevent child labor violations from occurring in the first place,” Looman charged.

The food sanitation company was employing children in the plants of well known companies like Tyson Food, Cargill, Turkey Valley Farms, and more. https://t.co/bpfX0BqfJ5 pic.twitter.com/7oM2kdKGuy

— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) February 17, 2023

Michael Lazzeri, the division’s regional administrator in Chicago, said that “our investigation found Packers Sanitation Services’ systems flagged some young workers as minors, but the company ignored the flags.”

“When the Wage and Hour Division arrived with warrants, the adults—who had recruited, hired, and supervised these children—tried to derail our efforts to investigate their employment practices,” Lazzeri noted.

The DOL—which found at least three cases where illegally employed children were injured on the job—fined the company $15,138 for each child who was not legally employed, the highest possible penalty under federal law.

As The New York Times reported:

Some researchers have criticized the civil monetary penalties, which are set by Congress, as “woefully insufficient” to protect workers and to deter employers from violating labor laws.

“It’s really shameful that the level of fine is so low,” said Celine McNicholas, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, a research group that seeks to improve conditions for workers. “It’s not sufficiently toothy enough to prevent the use of child labor in the meatpacking industry.”

Despite such criticism, Solicitor of Labor Seema Nanda framed the case as an example of accountability, delcaring Friday, “The Department of Labor has made it absolutely clear that violations of child labor laws will not be tolerated.”

“No child should ever be subject to the conditions found in this investigation,” Nanda said. “The courts have upheld the department’s rightful authority to execute federal court-approved search warrants and compelled this employer to change their hiring practices to ensure compliance with the law. Let this case be a powerful reminder that all workers in the United States are entitled to the protections of the Fair Labor Standards Act and that an employer who violates wage laws will be held accountable.”

In a lengthy statement Friday, Packers Sanitation Services said that it was “pleased to have finalized this settlement figure.”

“We have been crystal clear from the start: Our company has a zero-tolerance policy against employing anyone under the age of 18 and fully shares the DOL’s objective of ensuring full compliance at all locations,” the statement continued, noting internal audits and the hiring of “a third-party law firm to review and help further strengthen our policies.”

The statement highlighted that none of the illegally employed children still work for Packers Sanitation Services, and “the DOL has also not identified any managers aware of improper conduct that are currently employed” by the company.

Republicans in Iowa are pushing a bill to roll back child labor protections.

It would allow kids as young as 14 to work certain jobs in meatpacking plants.

What if…and hear me out…we paid adult workers a living wage and gave them benefits instead of hiring children to work?

— Robert Reich (@RBReich) February 17, 2023

The revelations come amid a renewed national debate about child labor laws sparked by Republican legislators in Iowa pushing rollbacks to allow children as young as 14 to work in jobs including animal slaughtering, logging, and mining.

The proposal in Iowa is part of a trend of GOP state lawmakers across the country advocating relaxed child labor laws in recent years.

GOP taking budget advice from Trump official who wants to cut $2 trillion from Medicaid

The right-wing official who served as budget director for the Trump administration is reportedly playing a significant advisory role for House Republicans as they seek to leverage a fast-approaching debt ceiling crisis to enact spending cuts that would disproportionately impact low-income households.

According toThe Washington Post, former Office of Management and Budget chief Russ Vought “has emerged as one of the central voices shaping the looming showdown over federal spending and the national debt.”

“As Republicans struggle to craft a strategy for confronting the Biden administration over the debt ceiling, which limits how much the government can borrow to pay for spending Congress has already approved, Vought has supplied them with a seemingly inexhaustible stream of advice: suggestions for negotiating with the White House, briefings about dealing with the media, a 104-page memo that proposes specific spending levels for every federal agency,” the Post reported Sunday.

More specifically, Vought has suggested that the GOP sideline efforts to cut Social Security and Medicare and instead focus on a “push to obliterate almost all other major forms of federal spending, especially programs that benefit lower-income Americans, and dare Biden to stand in the way.”

Vought’s agenda, the Post noted, proposes $9 trillion in federal spending cuts over the next 10 years, targeting thousands of domestic programs including Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

If adopted, Vought’s proposal would inflict $2 trillion in cuts to Medicaid, potentially compromising coverage for millions across the United States—and compounding the impact of lapsing pandemic protections.

Vought’s proposed cuts to SNAP—a food aid program long attacked by Republicans—would amount to $400 billion. A recent survey found that 64% of respondents said affording food is one of the biggest challenges they’re facing amid elevated inflation.

Tens of millions across the U.S. are currently facing what advocates have dubbed a “hunger cliff” as pandemic-related emergency boosts to SNAP funding expire.

SNAP accounts for a tiny fraction of the federal government’s overall spending.

“At a moment when food distribution centers are seeing increases in demand as American families struggle to feed their children, Republican lawmakers are putting families in their political crossfire by threatening to dramatically decrease spending on essential programs like SNAP. The timing of this could not be worse,” said Ailen Arreaza, executive director of ParentsTogether. “Further cuts to essential policies helping families to keep food on the table would be unconscionable—and those politicians responsible will pay a political price.”

Vought, who is also urging Republicans to cut Labor Department funding in half and slash the Affordable Care Act, presents such austerity as needed to rein in an out-of-control federal bureaucracy. But as the Post notes, Vought “oversaw enormous increases in the national debt as Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget,” making clear to critics that his priority is gutting programs that low-income people rely on to meet basic needs.

“The Republican playbook is always to drive more people deeper into poverty, while giving kickbacks and tax breaks to their super-rich friends,” said progressive organizer and former congressional candidate Melanie D’Arrigo.

Last week, more than 70 House Republicans introduced legislation that would make 2017 Trump tax cuts for individuals permanent, a major giveaway to the rich that would cost the federal government around $2.2 trillion in revenue through 2032.

The Biden White House and congressional Democrats have indicated that they would oppose federal spending cuts as part of any deal to raise the debt ceiling and prevent a catastrophic default, which could come as soon as this summer if lawmakers don’t act.

“The only thing more odious than pushing for $3 trillion of unpaid-for tax cuts is pushing for $3 trillion of tax cuts and $3 trillion in cuts to healthcare and nutrition for low- and middle-income families,” tweeted Brendan Duke, a senior adviser to Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo.

East Palestine residents told water was safe after “sloppy” testing paid for by rail company

Thousands of people in East Palestine, Ohio have been assured by the state Environmental Protection Agency and Republican Gov. Mike DeWine that the town’s municipal water has not been contaminated by the train derailment that took place in the town earlier this month, but the only publicly available data comes from testing that was funded by the company behind the crash.

As HuffPost reported late Friday, the Dallas-based consulting firm AECOM contracted with Norfolk Southern, which operated the 150-car train that was carrying the toxic chemical vinyl chloride, to sample water from five wells and from treated municipal water.

DeWine announced on Wednesday that those tests “showed no evidence of contamination,” but as one aquatic ecologist told HuffPost, the lab report indicates several testing errors that violated federal standards and should have disqualified the results.

“Their results that claim there were no contaminants is not a reliable finding,” Sam Bickley of the advocacy coalition Virginia Scientist-Community Interface, told the outlet. “I find this extremely concerning because these results would NOT be used in most scientific applications because the samples were not preserved properly, and this is the same data they are now relying on to say that the drinking water is not contaminated.”

The testing was done on February 10, seven days after the train derailed and authorities began a controlled release of the vinyl chloride, a carcinogen, to avoid an explosion. The burning of vinyl chloride can send hydrogen chloride and phosgene into the environment. The former chemical has been known to cause throat, eye, and skin irritation and the latter can cause vomiting and difficulty breathing.

An environmental testing lab analyzed the samples on February 13 and 15, according to HuffPost, and scientists who examined that analysis found it to be flawed. As the outlet reported:

Five of the six collected samples had pH, or acidity, levels that exceeded the 2 pH limit allowed under the EPA method listed in the analysis for detecting volatile organic compounds, rendering them improperly preserved. One sample also “contained a large air bubble in its vial, while the EPA method requires that sample bottles should not have any trapped air bubbles when sealed,” the report states. David Erickson, a hydrogeologist and the founder of Water & Environmental Technologies, an environmental consulting firm in Montana, called the sampling “sloppy” and “amateur.”

The Biden administration said in a press call Friday that Norfolk Southern has not been solely behind the testing that’s been conducted so far, with a spokesperson telling reporters, “It’s been with the Columbiana County Health Department, collecting samples along with Norfolk Southern and sending those as split samples to two different labs for verification.”

The state EPA, however, did not receive the health department’s results until after DeWine declared the water safe based on AECOM’s flawed testing.

The lab report shows low levels of the chemical dibutyl phthalate, which is not linked to cancer in humans but can cause headaches, nausea, dizziness, irritation of the eyes and throat, and seizures.

Some of the residents who were told days after the derailment that they could safely return to East Palestine have reported symptoms including headaches, nausea, dizziness, and shortness of breath.

Reuters reported Friday that many East Palestine do not trust state and local authorities, and have been purchasing large quantities of bottled water as they determine whether it’s safe to stay in the town.

'The people in town are afraid': Deb Blair, a cashier in East Palestine, Ohio, says bottled water has been flying off the shelves after a train derailed and spilled toxic chemicals, causing concern about water safety https://t.co/bvTi7f2mG3 pic.twitter.com/cAouBt4woX

— Reuters (@Reuters) February 18, 2023

“We’re not getting any truth,” said Ted Murphy, who is now planning to leave the town out of safety concerns just seven months after moving to his current home. “They’re not going to own up to what’s going [into the water] until they are forced to.”

The U.S. EPA has not conducted any sampling of the municipal water. On Thursday, Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro ordered independent testing of water in local communities. East Palestine is just over the Ohio-Pennsylvania border.

The state EPA told HuffPost that water testing is ongoing.

On Friday, U.S. Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., announced the panel would launch an investigation into the handling of hazardous materials. Railroad workers have been raising alarm in recent years about their employers’ loosening of safety standards in the interest of maximizing profits, and say the reduced safety measures were to blame for the crash.

New York’s new constitutional right to a clean environment faces first judicial test

This story was published in partnership with New York Focus, a non-profit news publication investigating how power works in New York state. Sign up for their newsletter here.

In November 2021, New Yorkers overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure to amend the state constitution and enshrine their right to “clean air and water, and a healthful environment.” Those eight words created the potential for a new legal regime, offering communities the highest possible defense against pollution and environmental injustice.

But the strength of that defense depends on how courts interpret it. A county supreme court judge near Rochester provided the first indication of that in December when he ruled that a suit against the state can proceed. The state appealed the decision in late January, raising questions about whether it believes the new constitutional provision, commonly referred to as the “green amendment,” has any legal significance at all.

“The vigor of the State’s opposition to this lawsuit does not bode well for its enforcement of the Green Amendment,” Judge John Ark wrote in his decision.

The suit was brought by Fresh Air for the East Side, a grassroots organization of neighbors to the sprawling High Acres landfill, one of the state’s largest. The 1,000-acre site straddles the border of Perinton and Macedon, two towns in western New York. Though it opened in the 1970s, the facility began receiving exponentially more trash — most of it from New York City — after private owner Waste Management installed a rail line in 2015. Around the same time, the company committed a “combination of errors” that inundated the town in foul smells, according to the group’s lawyer, Linda Shaw. Residents began organizing in 2017, forming a Facebook group to share information and creating an app to collect data on when, where and how often the stench returned.

They’ve been fighting Waste Management and the state Department of Environmental Conservation, which regulates landfills, ever since. The agency and the company have taken steps to mitigate the problem, including covering parts of the site and installing gas collectors and air monitors, but residents say it still stinks. Regulators have ignored recommendations by a landfill expert hired by Fresh Air for the East Side to study the odor and emissions.

Once the green amendment passed, the group sued Waste Management, New York City, and the state, claiming they were violating residents’ right to clean air. The suit cites the odors as well as greenhouse gas emissions released by decomposing waste.

All three tried to get the case dismissed. On December 7, Monroe County judge John Ark granted New York City’s motion, ruling that it is merely a customer of Waste Management and has no duty to police the site. He also let Waste Management off, finding that the green amendment cannot be held against private companies. But Ark refused the state’s request, allowing the suit to proceed.

“Essentially what this lower court did was to give legal license to the New York green amendment,” said environmental attorney Maya van Rossum, who started a movement to pass environmental rights amendments in state constitutions across the country. The judge confirmed that environmental rights must be treated like most other constitutional rights, van Rossum noted, in that they apply to the government, not private actors.

In a court filing, State Attorney General Letitia James’ office argued otherwise. It said that the green amendment does not impose specific obligations on the state, and that it doesn’t empower courts to compel agencies to take particular enforcement decisions.

Shaw said she can’t understand why the state effectively sided with Waste Management. “It violates every other thing the state of New York is trying to do, which is reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” she said.

Grist and New York Focus asked the Department of Environmental Conservation and the attorney general’s office to clarify their interpretation of the green amendment and the protections it grants New Yorkers. Both offices said they do not comment on pending litigation.

“They’re trying to pretend nothing happened,” said Nicholas Robinson, an environmental law professor at Pace University who is not involved in the case. At the same time, Robinson said, the state’s response was not unexpected. “They feel they’re entitled to wait until the highest court in New York orders them to behave otherwise. Now, that’s kind of bad in the sense that they should want to support the bill of rights. But you can also understand that they want to be protected by a court order that tells them to do it.”

New York has many environmental regulations and protections in place, and in recent years has taken steps to strengthen them. But residents have little recourse when state officials’ fail to enforce those rules, or against contaminants like PFAS that aren’t yet regulated. Van Rossum said that’s why the ability to appeal to a higher, fundamental right is necessary.

Her green amendments crusade started after she won a seminal case in Pennsylvania in 2013 striking down a pro-fracking law on the basis of the environmental rights clause in that state’s constitution. Since then, that state has seen more than a dozen cases challenging laws, permits, and zoning decisions, mostly over oil and gas drilling and pipeline construction. Montana is the only other state with environmental rights guaranteed by its bill of rights.

Green amendments don’t make every instance of pollution a constitutional infringement. All fundamental rights have limits, van Rossum said — if a government official tells someone to shut up, it’s not considered a violation of freedom of speech. “The role of the judiciary is to help us figure out when the environmental harms that we are contending with rise to that constitutional level,” she said.

John Dernbach, a law professor at Widener University who has analyzed recent Pennsylvania court decisions on the green amendment, found that in the majority of cases in which courts required plaintiffs to demonstrate a significant level of harm to a protected resource, they failed.

While the case law in New York is still inchoate, legal experts say Ark’s decision could have significant implications. The ruling declared the green amendment self-executing, meaning it does not depend on additional legislation to go into effect. It found that the state may run afoul of the new constitutional protections even when it complies with state law. And it put the burden not on the plaintiffs to prove their rights have been violated, but on the government to show that they hadn’t been.

“That shifts the burden of proof from the individual, who is the victim, to the governmental body, that has all the resources and most of the scientific evidence, to bring that forward,” Robinson said, “and show to a judge that they have not harmed the health or the clean water or the clean air rights of the individuals who brought the case.”

At least four other green amendment cases have been filed in New York. In one, residents of Manhattan’s Lower East Side are using it to fight construction of two skyscrapers. Another was brought by Seneca Lake Guardian, an environmental group, against the state for approving a waste transfer station that could leak toxic chemicals into Cayuga Lake, a source of drinking water.

It’ll become clearer what the green amendment means in practice as those cases make their way through the courts. “You don’t change a big entity like the state of New York by just having a vote to amend the Constitution,” Robinson said. “We now have a decade-long process of implementing it.”

The true story of the U.S. president who kept his disability a secret

When 24-year-old John F. Kennedy tried to enlist during World War II, he was initially turned away. Although he was the son of one of America’s wealthiest entrepreneurs, Kennedy was not rejected because of connections. The doctors had a legitimate medical concern: Kennedy had a slipped disc around his lumbar spine, because the adjacent bone had inexplicably softened. Historian Robert A. Caro later wrote in “The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power” that it was “almost as if the spine had rotted away,” likely due to medical treatments Kennedy had received for stomach and colon pain. Kennedy was far from surprised by the spinal diagnosis, given that he had been suffering intense lower back pain for months. Yet instead of accepting that he would not serve his country, Kennedy used his rich father’s connections to get a dangerous assignment on Navy patrol torpedo boats in the South Pacific.

Although Kennedy is not often regarded as an icon for the disabled community, Kennedy’s story is the quintessential tale of overcoming a disability-caused adversity.

For his back pain, Kennedy had nothing but a brace. There is no doubt that, as he commanded the boat PT-109 in August 1943, Lieutenant Kennedy was in immense discomfort on the bobbing, rocking vessel. Despite this disadvantage, Kennedy proved himself a hero: When PT-109 was cut in half by the Japanese destroyer Amagiri (likely due to an intentional collision), he personally rescued three men, then led the group of 11 survivors on a mass swim to an island 3.5 miles away. (It was then called Plum Pudding Island; today it is known as Kennedy Island.) One of Kennedy’s crewmates was so badly injured that Kennedy had to strap him into a life jacket and then pull him with his teeth.

Previously sealed JFK assassination files released via an executive order signed by Biden

Although Kennedy is not often regarded as an icon for the disabled community, Kennedy’s story is the quintessential tale of overcoming a disability-caused adversity. Throughout his life, Kennedy struggled with constant pain, often resorting to controversial methods in order to treat it. He also had, within his family tree, a dark secret that no doubt gave him an additional sense of personal connection to the disabled community. Even as he kept his pain a secret — much like President Franklin D. Roosevelt, or FDR, had been before him — JFK fought for others who struggled because of disabilities.

“President Kennedy’s interest in the needs and rights of people with disabilities, along with the support of our organization and others, resulted in a national spotlight on the circumstances in which people with [intellectual and developmental disabilities] were forced to live,” explained Julie Ward, SEO of Public Policy at The Arc of the United States, wrote Salon. The Arc was founded in the 1950s by parents of disabled children, and Kennedy created a Presidential Panel on Mental Retardation to create momentum for important changes in national policy. Though the name of the panel would be considered offensive now, at the time it was a normal phrase to refer to intellectual disability.

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“At least to a degree, [being disabled] deepened his empathy — on a cognitive level more than an emotional one — toward the sufferings of others, much as polio did with FDR.”

“The Presidential Panel on Mental Retardation in one year made over 100 recommendations that would affect the future of research, health, social services, education, care, and professional development – all of which seeded legislation and sweeping changes over the coming years at the national and state level,” Ward explained.

In addition to his work with the panel, in the final weeks of his life Kennedy signed two landmark bills into law. The Maternal and Child Health and Mental Retardation Planning Amendment to the Social Security Act (quite a mouthful) used up-to-date scientific research to improve the care for intellectually disabled people throughout the country. In addition, it increased funding for maternal and child care that could prevent the development of certain disabilities. A second bill later significantly increased funding for institutions for treating and preventing disabilities. “The mentally ill and the mentally retarded need no longer be alien to our affections or beyond the help of our communities,” Kennedy proclaimed while signing the second bill into law.

“At least to a degree, [being disabled] deepened his empathy — on a cognitive level more than an emotional one — toward the sufferings of others, much as polio did with FDR,” explains Fredrik Logevall, the Laurence D. Belfer Professor of International Affairs at Harvard University and a Kennedy biographer. In addition to contributing to JFK’s moderation of the conservative instincts he had inherited from his Wall Street tycoon father, Joseph P. Kennedy, “no doubt, too, his constant health travails fed his deepening interest as senator and then president in health care and the government’s role in making it broadly available to the American population.”

Not all of Kennedy’s efforts succeeded during his lifetime. When JFK attempted to launch government health care for the elderly, a program that would eventually become Medicare, it flopped as his critics accused him of wanting to socialize medicine. Yet when Medicare was ultimately passed by Kennedy’s successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, it was in no small part because JFK had prioritized the policy during his administration. One of his closest supporters in the Senate, fellow Democrat Clint Anderson of New Mexico, had also been a lifelong advocate of government-funded health programs, noting his own lifelong health issues and remarking that “perhaps a man who has spent much of his life fighting off the effects of illness acquires…an understanding of the importance of professional health care to all people.”

Of course, the reason Kennedy never lived to see Medicare brought to fruition is that he was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963. Yet even if his life had not been snuffed out by an assassin’s bullet, JFK was so sick — and used so many volatile drugs to combat what Logevall describes as “myriad ailments” — that it is unclear whether he would survived until Jan. 20, 1969 (the end of what would have been his second term if he had defeated Republican nominee Barry Goldwater in the 1964 election). Among these conditions was Addison’s disease, an adrenal gland disease that was often fatal in JFK’s era. This contributed to his back pains, which were further exacerbated because the left side of his body was smaller than the right side. In addition, JFK would often endure bouts of ulcerative colitis.

“It was a rough combination, yet what’s interesting is how little these ailments affected him, at least in terms of slowing him down,” Logevall wrote to Salon. “On the campaign trail, he would go from dawn until after midnight, day after day, driving his aides to exhaustion, never mind that his back was killing him and he had to use crutches to get around. It was almost as though he had to prove — to himself as much as to others — that his maladies would not get the better of him.”

Kennedy did not have to rely on will power alone. As Logevall recalled, the future president began steroid therapy in his late twenties, started taking cortisone in 1949 and worked with Dr. Max Jacobson, a so-called “Dr. Feelgood” known for providing nerve-soothing pharmaceutical cocktails to celebrities from Eddie Fisher and Otto Preminger to Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams. They could include everything from amphetamines and tranquilizers to placenta and vitamins, and Logevall acknowledges that Jacobson’s role in medicating Kennedy remains “murky” today. Even so, it is known that Jacobson “provided amphetamine injections to Kennedy at various points during the White House years” and that “Jacobson’s presence caused consternation among some presidential advisers, including [JFK’s brother and attorney general] Robert Kennedy.”

The drugs were not Kennedy’s only dark secret. In 1941, when JFK was using his father’s connections to enlist in the armed forces, his younger sister Rosemary was given a lobotomy by that very same father. To this day, historians are unclear about the nature of the illness that prompted Joseph Kennedy to seek that radical treatment. We know that Rosemary was prone to seizures and fits of uncontrollable anger, some of which led to violence. She appeared to have an intellectual disability of some kind, although it is unclear what exactly it was. Her parents sent her to boarding schools for intellectually disabled children, and in her teenage years she needed to be taught separately from the other students. As her behavior worsened — including possible sexual encounters — her father was convinced that a lobotomy could end her mood swings and violent outbursts.

Instead she was rendered into an invalid. She had the intellectual capacity of a two-year-old, was incontinent, never fully regained her ability to speak, struggled to perform basic daily maintenance routines, and had a palsied arm. For years her family kept her in an institution in Wisconsin — out of sight, out of mind.

Yet was she ever entirely out of JFK’s mind?

Again, the sources are unclear. Certainly it is easy to imagine that the Kennedys as a family had increased sympathy for mental illnesses due to shame and pain over their handling of Rosemary’s situation. Rosemary’s younger sister Eunice later founded the Special Olympics and acknowledged that part of the reason why was her experiences with Rosemary. Yet even without the Rosemary saga, JFK’s own life story certainly goes a long way toward explaining why he would sympathize with people who struggle in their bodies.

Despite his image as a vibrant and healthy young man, JFK too was disabled.

about JFK

7 common French cheese myths, busted

In the world of turophilia (that’s “love of cheese” for the neophytes out there), there may be no nation more afflicted than France. Cheese is omnipresent: Supermarkets often have not one but two whole aisles dedicated to the product, and cheese cloches are available in the local equivalent of Target. Traditional meals so automatically include it that when former President Nicolas Sarkozy elided the cheese course from official state lunches, citizens were outraged. It’s no wonder that France is often held up as the bastion of cheese excellence.

That said, there are some pervasive myths about French cheese that are ripe for debunking. Here are the most egregious among them.

1. “There are 246 kinds of cheese in France.”

Charles de Gaulle “famously” said that it was impossible to govern a country with 246 kinds of cheese. In reality, the quote is anecdotal at best, and moreover, it severely underestimates the true number of cheeses produced in France. At last count, according to the Centre National Interprofessionnel de l’Économie Laitière, France is home to over 1,200 cheeses, 46 of which are protected by a strict Appellation d’Origine Protégée (AOP) charter—a label that is less a mark of quality than an indicator of consistency, according to cheese educator Jennifer Greco, who offers cheese and wine tastings in Paris. “When I purchase a cheese with an AOP classification,” she says, “I am confident that it will have the flavors, textures and aromas that I associate with that particular cheese.”

2. “The older a cheese is, the smellier it is.”

It’s not a cheese’s age but rather its type that ups its stink factor. And in France, you’ve got five to choose from: fresh, blue, washed, bloomy, or pressed. This final category can be further split into pressed-and-uncooked or pressed-and-cooked—with the latter being the oldest specimens in any cheese shop (think: Alpine cheeses like Comté that can be aged up to five years). But it’s the washed rind cheeses, aged between three weeks and four months, that boast the most imposing aromas. Washed in a brine solution to promote the growth of healthy, umami-rich bacteria on the outside, these cheeses take on an aroma much akin to that of a long-forgotten gym bag—in the best way possible.

3. “Cheese belongs on a charcuterie board.”

French meals tend to follow a pretty specific format: aperitif, appetizer, main, cheese, dessert, digestif—a format that was even inscribed as Intangible Cultural Heritage by UNESCO in 2010. But despite the protected presence of pre-dinner nibbles, neither the aperitif nor appetizer is all that cheese-focused. French tradition, on the contrary, places cheese securely at the end of the meal, usually served in small quantities of about an ounce or two per person. The honor of the pre-dinner nosh, meanwhile, usually falls to charcuterie, a category of cooked or cured meat like dry-aged ham, potted pâté, or rillettes. And contrary to what you might believe from Instagram, charcuterie boards do not traditionally feature any cheese at all.

Today, things have changed somewhat, and boards featuring both cheese and charcuterie have indeed become a common offering in brasseries and wine bars. But in France, when the two are paired, the board itself stops being called a “charcuterie” board and becomes a more aptly named planche mixte, or mixed board.

TL;DR: Cheese is not, nor has it ever been, charcuterie.

4. “French cheese is vegetarian.”

As with most cheeses around the world, French cheese is made with rennet, an enzyme found in the stomach of young calves, kids, and lambs. The enzyme is what causes the curds of cheese to separate from the whey—and it cannot be harvested without killing the young animal.

Modern cheesemakers in countries other than France often use other sources of rennet, such as microbial rennet derived from fungi or vegetal rennet from thistles, to coagulate their cheeses. In France, explains Mons Formation cheese educator Susan Sturman, ACS CCP, CCSE, anything but animal rennet is forbidden for the 46 AOP cheeses. Meanwhile, for non-AOP cheeses, many of the veggie-friendly rennets permitted abroad are prohibited in France. Though there are some cheeses that, in France, would have traditionally been made via lactic fermentation, producers today usually add a touch of animal rennet to ensure that fermentation gets off to an excellent start. So, to put it simply: No, most french cheeses are not vegetarian.

5. “Cheese is best paired with red wine.”

Experts are divided as to how the tradition of drinking cheese with red wine came about. Some point to the fact that when cheese was served at the end of the meal, most would happily continue quaffing whatever bottle accompanied the main; others point to World War I, when soldiers were given a ration of 25 centiliters of red wine, which they ate with Camembert. Regardless of how the tradition took hold, experts agree that cheese is rarely happily paired with vin rouge. “Tannins in red wine can often exacerbate the salt in cheese and overwhelm its flavors,” explains Greco. “Light reds can work, however, I think white wine, generally, is an easier, more friendly choice.”

If you think outside the wine bubble, there are other cheese-friendly choices too. Beer and cider both make excellent pairings for a large variety of cheeses, while there is nothing that doesn’t pair with Champagne, it’s particularly well-suited for washed-rind delicacies.

6. “The French resist foreign cheeses.”

It’s easy to paint a portrait of the French as being too proud for imported fromage, but this is far from the case. Nathalie Quatrehomme—who, with her brother, owns their family’s eponymous cheese shops in Paris,—notes that their cheese case always boasts a selection of foreign cheeses, such as Wisconsin-made Bellavitano Espresso, a cheddar-Parmesan hybrid rubbed in coffee, or English blue Stichelton, a raw milk Stilton.

“It’s more foreigners who are attached to the idea of discovering French cheese, because they’re in France,” she says. “That’s understandable. But our clientele of Parisian regulars are very open to discoveries, no matter where they come from.”

7. “It’s illegal to bring French cheese back to the U.S. with you.”

American laws state that you can bring solid French dairy (aka cheese and butter) back for the purposes of personal consumption—with a handful of exceptions. Cheeses in brine like feta and mozzarella are not allowed, nor are any cheeses containing meat. (Though with the exception of bacon-wrapped goat cheeses, you’d be hard-pressed to find many examples of the latter in France.)

For ease of transport, you can always ask your cheesemonger to package your choices sous-vide (vacuum-sealed), which means they’re less likely to stink up your luggage on the way home.

Lessons in resilience from Chicago’s winter grapes

At the recommendation of my therapist, I’ve been going on more walks. It’s an inexpensive form of movement, requiring just some sturdy shoes and a sliver of willpower. The only catch is that, at least once a week, I need to walk a path I’ve never walked before. “Novelty is important when you feel like you’re stuck in a rut,” he noted.

A rut. That is a generous way to describe my mental health post-holidays. I’d started therapy again during a particularly gray stretch of weather; flat, uniform stratus clouds hung in the sky, seemingly insulating us from sun, rain, snow or any variety, really. On the sixth day of the year, I heard a newscaster say that Chicago, thus far, had seen the sun for only 3% of the possible daylight hours. The next day, I called to try to get an appointment.

“One more round for my friends”: Notes on becoming a “regular”

I was sent a virtual form to fill out. One of the first questions asked about my primary reason for wanting to see a professional. I thought about a phone call I had received a few weeks prior, one that left me sitting on my suitcase in an airport terminal bathroom, letting out these sniffling, shuddering sighs that were definitely more disruptive than the tears I was embarrassedly trying to hold back. A friend later messaged me, “Believe me, all across the world, women are crying in airport bathrooms.”

I started to type, I know my family loves me, but I’ve realized they don’t particularly like me, but then deleted it. I don’t know if I particularly like myself right now. Delete. And finally, Everything just feels so, so gray.

***

Initially, I was a little cynical about my therapy homework — probably because whenever I tossed on my boots and prepared to strike out, I remembered a meme that had gone viral during the first wave of the pandemic. It featured a photograph of an eagle who, I suppose depending on the viewer’s mood, looks either determined or beleaguered. He is walking, one black-tipped talon outstretched, wings flat at his side.

It is captioned: “Me going on my stupid little daily walk for my stupid physical and mental health.”

But, of course, the walks did help, especially on the days when I would chart a new path. Initially, these were spontaneous detours — I turned left instead of right when leaving the supermarket or I walked the dog down a different series of side streets, his nose pushing through thawing slush in search of novel scents. Eventually, however, I began to loosely plot the excursions as my mental map of the city’s greenways and alleys steadily expanded.

I found myself cataloging, in my ratty journal and via cell phone photographs, little moments that surprised me during these walks: there’s the vacated tavern with door handles that look like cats holding beer steins; a fence surrounding a Wicker Park home, nondescript except for an etching of the Egyptian sun god Horus carved into the wood; a purple door just a few blocks away featuring a stained glass inlay of the Cheshire Cat. And then there were the grapes.

***

Of course, grapes grow in climates harsher than Chicago’s.

(In fact, while writing this story, a coworker reminded me of the frosty line from “Slings and Arrows,” an early 2000s Canadian series, after a character tried some Canadian wine: “I, uh, didn’t know they could grow grapes this far north.”)

When on one of my walks I discovered a fence covered in knotted vines, some of which were still bejeweled with grapes that looked like miniature, deflated balloons preserved in frost, I was newly delighted by the reminder that they can not only survive, but seemingly thrive here in the city.

But when on one of my walks I discovered a fence covered in knotted vines, some of which were still bejeweled with grapes that looked like miniature, deflated balloons preserved in frost, I was newly delighted by the reminder that they can not only survive, but seemingly thrive here in the city.

“Many a homeowner has moved into an older home to find an overgrown grapevine on a trellis, fence or telephone pole in the backyard,” Beth Botts wrote for the “Chicago Tribune” in 2005. “If it covers an ugly fence, it likely will be left alone. If it looks like it will drag down the garage, it likely will be exterminated. But with a little attention, that grapevine can be tamed and actually produce a nice crop of grapes.”

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Most of the famous European wine grapes — cultivars of Vitis vinifera like Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot — are too tender to be grown in Chicago-area gardens, as well as large swaths of the United States. According to Cornell University’s horticulture department, the first colonists of what is now New York State attempted to grow European grapes, but failed.

“Successive attempts were all failures until the 1960’s,” a Cornell bulletin about the subject read. “Invariably, the failed vineyards died from winter cold injury.”

Part of this was because V. vinifera vines were particularly susceptible to certain North American pests and diseases, like grape root aphids, powdery mildew and black rot, all which detract from vine function, which in turn reduces winter weather tolerance. However, there are grapes that are simply more suited to bear the cold. Most grapes that grow well in the Midwest are actually descendents of wild grapes, of which there are about 16 species in North America.

The ones that I saw draped over that fence and others along that block, were likely Vitis labrusca or “Concord” grapes. Described by the Gardenia encyclopedia as the “standard of excellence for blue-black American grapes,” Concords are a 19th century hybrid of wild grapes; they are cold-hardy, robust and tart, their dark tannic skin concealing little orbs of sweet green flesh.

***

When done properly, I learned from a representative of the Illinois Agricultural Extension, pruning a grape plant should remove 80% to 90% of the present wood. I watched several videos online of gardeners demonstrating the process — neatly snipping with sharp shears at an interconnected network of trunk, canes and shoots. I was struck by how much of the plant itself is actually removed in order to make way for new leaves, flowers and eventually fruit. Numerous educators made the same point: When you feel like you’ve cut too much, cut just a little more.

The timing of the pruning is important, too. It should happen after the coldest part of winter has passed, but before buds start to swell. In Chicago, February and early March are good times.

I thought about this on my daily walks — how resilient these plants were. How after pruning, they probably appeared to most people to be just a tangle of branches, but how I knew their secret. Even in the face of harsh or uninspiring conditions, these grape vines weren’t barren or even dormant, really. They were using this season to prepare to flower in the next.

Maybe with a little care, I could do the same.

from this author

The Biden administration aims to make EV charging as easy as filling up

The Department of Transportation has announced standards aimed at addressing one of the greatest challenges in the transition to electric vehicles: the reliability and convenience of public charging stations.

The requirements, included in a robust set of EV charging initiatives the Biden administration released Wednesday, are the first comprehensive guidelines to address charger installation, operation and maintenance. They will apply to all federally funded projects.

“This is a major step toward a world where every EV user will be able to find safe, reliable charging stations anywhere in the country,” U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a statement. “Recharging an EV away from home will be as predictable and accessible as filling up a gas tank.”

The United States has about 160,000 charging stations. The Biden administration wants to build a national network of 500,000 by 2030, part of its goal of seeing electric vehicles comprise half of all new car sales within the same time frame. Even that ambitious buildout may not be enough. S&P Global Mobility estimates the country will need more than two million public chargers within seven years to support the 28 million EVs it expects to see on the road by then.

Building that infrastructure will require the participation of an array of vendors, manufacturers, and sites, each with its own approach to providing service. EV drivers often encounter public charging stations with varying payment requirements and interfaces. They vary in charging speed and often do not work at all.

The new standards aim to eliminate these frustrations, which threaten the widespread adoption of EVs and present equity barriers for drivers who cannot install home chargers. They address payment methods, plug types, price transparency, station reliability, charging speeds, and more as the Biden administration directs $7.5 billion toward the expansion of EV infrastructure.

“The fact that this is being thought out now will hopefully prevent gaps in terms of access and equity before the ecosystem has been completed,” said Annalise Czerny, who helps design programs at Cal-ITP, a California initiative that addresses accessibility across transit.

Standardizing payment methods across networks is particularly important for promoting equity, Czerny said. Vendors sometimes require downloading a proprietary app or depositing a minimum amount of money into an account to use a station. The new rules prohibit requiring memberships and make contactless payment options standard.

“If someone has put ten bucks into an app and doesn’t actually need it that week, it’s crazy that they can’t easily convert those dollars back to buy milk or baby formula,” said Czerny. “For folks who are living on the edge, being able to access money that is yours already is hugely important.”

The standards also set minimum requirements for charger reliability, a common sore spot for drivers. A 2022 study of 181 public stations in the Bay Area found that nearly a quarter of the connectors did not work.

“The mass market wants it to be a gas station experience where they pull up and plug in with a very simple user interface,” said Carleen Cullen, a co-author on the study and the co-founder and executive director of Cool The Earth. “We are far from that.”

The guidelines announced Wednesday require EV charge stations built with federal funding to have an average annual uptime greater than 97 percent, a standard that Cullen said will hold the industry accountable for monitoring and maintaining their hardware and will improve EV equity. “People in multifamily housing and our low-income communities don’t have charging access at home,” she said. “They’ll be relying on these fast charging stations.”

The strength of “Physical:100” is in what it has to say about our view of the perfect physique

Answering the putative question at the ripped core of “Physical: 100” should be simple: what defines the ultimate physique? Scan the room where contestants gather at the competition’s start, and you may postulate that the correct response rests in hulking muscles, low body fat and protein shake consumption.

That’s not entirely wrong . . . but it’s still incorrect. In demonstrating this, the Korean hit is continuously surprising and, in a real way, motivating.

Granted, inspiration isn’t what’s attracting people to this survival gauntlet, marketed as a melding of “Squid Game” and “Survivor,” with a few whiffs of “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome” tossed in. “Physical: 100” runs on action, but it’s really about sizing up whether the players and their impressively corded builds can handle the challenges hurled at them.

The show’s “quests,” divided into elimination stages, are efficient, effective and merciless. Any competition with nine episodes to narrow the field from 100 contenders to a single victor must be.

Further augmenting the tension is the production’s escalating theatricality. A plaster cast of each player’s torso greets them as they enter the massive stage where they initially gather, rendering them awestruck at the sight of this cross between a colosseum and a museum. They’re impressive tributes to the sweat and effort they’ve put into sculpting themselves. And if they lose, they’re required to shatter their likeness with a hammer.

With a 300 million won prize on the line (approximately $240,000 USD) there’s no room for much everyday sentiment from either producers or the gladiators. That said, the show does have a flair for the epic, as seen in a semifinal inspired by Greek myths, specifically their divine punishments.

All hail Netflix’s “African Queens: Njinga”

And yet the show’s theory of what constitutes the so-called perfect body is thrillingly oblique, which is what truly makes the show smashing. Most of the competitors are convinced they are prime beefcake, and may even have the credentials to validate that opinion. Soon we’ll have the season’s finale, and let’s just say that the overall evaluation favors neither Adonis nor Hercules. That would be too easy.

“Physical: 100” lures the viewer into believing the jacked have an advantage. Most of the eponymous 100 have rippling musculatures, but a few are downright puny. That’s what opens the show’s appeal to a broader audience than merely gym rats. Barbell bros are legion, but are vastly outnumbered by those of us who are too intimidated to step into a weight room with power lifters comparing notes on creatine.

This season’s “perfect” physical specimen won’t be revealed until Tuesday, but what that person’s victory tells us about the show’s aim may be less important than what it has already taught us by way of certain outcomes.

Here are some observations of how “Physical: 100” defines true fitness, and fitness competitions, for better or worse.

True fitness is functional

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Physical: 100 (Courtesy of Netflix)der

Since the production attracted top athletes, many of them knew each other by reputation. Those who lacked notoriety made themselves known by their hulking stature, and all of them ignored the scrawny.

They and the audience soon discover that in a competition to hang from a metal structure using only upper body strength, having pythons for arms doesn’t get you squat. Instead, it is an ice climber and member of a mountain rescue team, Kim Min-cheol, who outlasts competitive bodybuilders, Olympians, mixed martial artists and, yes, CrossFitters.

When Kim says, “My muscles . . . weren’t created in a gym. They were made in my everyday life while saving people,” we should have taken the producers’ hint. Swoleness is meaningless if you can’t hold up your weight in a real-world scenario. If your job or passion cultivate strength, endurance and flexibility, that may be all the edge you need.

Out of the four spots that have already been claimed for the ultimate quest – the last finalist will be revealed in the ultimate episode – none is held by anyone some might have predicted would be there as the show began. That’s telling.

Size matters, but not as much as than technique and strategy

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Physical: 100 (Courtesy of Netflix)_placeholder

As Kim’s early victory proves, diminutive folks shouldn’t be counted out. Conversely, woe to those who bet on hulks being slow, only to be mowed down by their speed.

But in a head-to-head battle between people of comparable size, strategy will always have a leg up on pure strength. This was proven several times in combats set in one of two “arenas,” one that favored agility, the other power. When weightlifters tangle with wrestlers or mixed martial artists, the smart money should always be on the technicians.

Technique conveys an advantage in team matches too. In a game requiring players to finish a rope bridge before carting a bag of sand across it within a time limit, the most valuable player turns out to be the “safety first” stuntwoman, Kim Da-young, who took time to make sure every slat was properly attached. The other team finished their bridge first, but their lack of care lost them half the bridge and, therefore, the whole game.

Real power comes from fortitude

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Physical: 100 (Courtesy of Netflix)eholder

One of the greatest lessons the show conveys is that stamina and will are as vital to a well-rounded athlete as physical ability. Social media star Shim Eu-ddeum, aka “Gangnam Apple Girl, wallops that point into the wood during a survival round giving eliminated contestants a chance to return.

All they have to do is grip a rope holding their plaster busts (weighing 40% of the contestant’s body) tens of feet in the air for as long as possible.

Shim, a slender woman with pink hair, is surrounded by monstrous biceps and redwood-sized thighs and does the only thing a woman in her position could do: dig deep and ignore all the doubt and insecurity around her. As other people’s plaster busts shatter around her, she doesn’t budge or change her gaze, outlasting 20 others to rejoin the competition.

Ingenuity can be the shard that separates victory from loss

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Physical: 100 (Courtesy of Netflix)holder

The season’s most heartbreaking challenge is also a backbreaker, as the surviving competitors are divided into three teams of 10 and tasked with dragging a 1.5-ton ship over sand and across a dock with an upward incline, and in the shortest time possible.

Naturally there are obstacles, in the form of heavy barrels that must be unearthed and loaded onto the ship, including one sealed inside a locked crate that could only be accessed by smashing it.

While his muscular teammates go about hucking wine casks onto the deck, baseball player Dustin Nippert grabs the sledgehammer and makes quick work of the box. Other teams have more trouble with that container because they don’t use Nippert’s tactic of smashing the hinges instead of the wood. “It’s just, not that I’m strong, I need to be smart,” he says. “Work smarter, not harder.”

What would have happened if he applied that logic to the tops of the loaded, heavy barrels and emptied them? The game’s rules say nothing about loading their contents, after all. Alas, we’ll never know.

Competitive athletics is still a sexist game

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Physical: 100 (Courtesy of Netflix)lder

Following its mission statement “to study the most perfect physique, regardless of gender, age, and race,” “Physical: 100” allows men to challenge women and vice versa, even though male contestants outnumber female ones by a vast amount. Even so, an admirable percentage of women defied expectations, none of the more inspiring than wrestler Jang Eun-sil.

“The Underdogs” episode is named for her saga, highlighting her determination and skilled leadership. Jang is respected enough to be named one of 10 team captains voted into their positions by the 50 first-round survivors. But it’s also a popularity contest, and in a room full of worshippers at the altar of hugeness, she is the 10th name called, and the only woman. In a ranked scenario, the No. 1 selection, Olympic gold medalist Yun Sung-bin, receives his choice of the crop.

Everyone picked last dejectedly falls in with Jang creating a team of three women and two men that her opponents assume is weak. They arrogantly tell her she’s going home, but she is undeterred.

“Once the game begins in the arena, we’ll show them what we got,” she said. Damn right. In the bridge challenge, her team buried their doubting adversaries. Their impressive strain and effort weren’t enough to survive the brute-strength battle of the ship-dragging round, however. If all things were equal every team would have a balance of players with speed, stamina and strength. But since the world beyond “Physical: 100” is not, there is no way the contest in its current form could be.

The oxen on other teams condescendingly declared that it would be victory enough if Jang’s team finished the ship challenge. Even in that respect, she surprised them by leading her group to a finish that was a mere two minutes slower than the second-place finishers. She may not have won, but she refused to go out defeated. That makes her one of this season’s most beloved heroes . . . if not a finalist.

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“Physical:100” sprints to the finish having served everything one could want in an addictive reality competition, including brawny godlings, heroic underdogs, a cybernetic eye surveying the meat and carnage and a disembodied voice devoid of sympathy. But its disinterest in pageantry or simple strength feats is enthralling.

One can only pray it doesn’t get adapted by American producers, which is probably wishful thinking. “Physical: 100” embodies everything our culture admires – testosterone, hardbodies, and ferocious competition. It’s reminiscent of “American Ninja Warrior” while reminding us that the original Japanese “Ninja Warrior” had a lot more heart. Something always gets lost in the translation.

Besides, we understand what “Physical: 100” is saying. It may award someone the title of “ultimate physique,” but in the end, the real definition is gloriously open to interpretation.

The first eight episodes of “Physical: 100” currently streams on Netflix with its finale on Tuesday.

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New research illuminates how the human brain creates its own psychedelic drugs

We are rutted in a deepening mental health crisis that is shortening our lifespans and undercutting the economy. The World Health Organization estimates that incidence of conditions such as depression and anxiety rose by more than 25 percent in the first year of the COVID pandemic, adding to the nearly one billion people who were already living with a mental disorder. Meanwhile, more than 800,000 people worldwide die from suicide annually.

“Everyone’s life touches someone with a mental health condition,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization, said last summer. “The inextricable links between mental health and public health, human rights and socioeconomic development mean that transforming policy and practice in mental health can deliver real, substantive benefits for individuals, communities and countries everywhere.”

One of the principal ways mental health disorders are thought to manifest is through severed connections between neurons — the winding, spindly cells in our brain and throughout our body essential for interpreting info from the external environment. Our brains are essentially fat, watery bags of neurons that are tangled together like a dense thicket of thorny weeds.

Depression and other mental health problems can act like weed killer, shriveling these connections and making it harder to function cognitively. This is known as the neurotrophic theory of depression and psychedelic drugs like ketamine (which is also a dissociative anesthetic) seem to reverse this relationship.

In contrast, certain antidepressant drugs like fluoxetine (Prozac) seem to work by increasing serotonin levels, an important neurotransmitter that the brain uses to send signals between neurons. These drugs are called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) because they stop neurons from recycling the neurotransmitter. With more serotonin available, the brain can communicate better and depression alleviates. At least, in theory.

Psychedelic startups are betting on synthetic versions of “magic” mushrooms as the future

Unfortunately, SSRIs and other antidepressants can come with significant drawbacks. They don’t work for everyone, can take weeks to months to kick in and sometimes have side effects like sexual dysfunction and weight gain. To address the growing degree of mental health deficits, we need more and better tools to heal the brain.

Many experts believe psychedelic drugs could play a substantial role in addressing this problem. They seem to act like Miracle Grow for neurons, helping them flourish like a dense forest. Once relegated to the fringes of science thanks to their notorious hallucinatory effects, psychedelics like LSD, psilocybin and ayahuasca are gaining more mainstream recognition for their ability to alleviate mental suffering and help people self-actualize. A handful of states have repealed laws banning these substances (but are still highly illegal most places) while scientific research on psychedelics has skyrocketed in the past decade.

Many patients with depression seem to experience an atrophy of the prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain associated with regulating emotional responses.

The more we study psychedelics and related drugs, the more we learn about how the brain functions and how to better repair it when it goes haywire. A new study published in the journal Science illuminates the relationship between changes in the brain and serotonin using psychedelics in mice to show how different cells react. These reactions are what seems to create changes in the brain that improve mental health.

Serotonin has been implicated in many prominent theories of depression, but this is generally an oversimplification. This research emphasizes that it’s not just the molecule that matters, but where the receptor is located. It also suggests that the body could be producing its own natural psychedelic compounds, though what those might be or what they might be doing is somewhat of a mystery.

“The theory a long time ago has been that if you increase synaptic levels of serotonin, then you could produce antidepressant effects,” Dr. David Olson, the study’s lead author, told Salon. “Where this paper comes in, is maybe explaining one of the reasons why that is. And that is the key receptor for the neuroplasticity-promoting effects of psychedelics is on the inside of the cell and is inaccessible to serotonin.”

Olson is the newly appointed director of the Institute for Psychedelics and Neurotherapeutics at University of California Davis and a co-founder of Delix Therapeutics, Inc., a psychedelic biotech company. In this experiment, Olson and colleagues experimented with chemically tweaking psychedelic drugs to see how easily they can cross cell membranes in the brains of mice. Serotonin is not able to cross this membrane, but certain psychedelics can. They found that the drugs that better crossed this membrane, such as DMT, was correlated with more neuron growth.

SSRIs can help regrow neuronal connections just like psychedelics, only the effect seems to be slower and less dramatic.

Therefore, serotonin may not play as big a role in treating depression as once thought. This is in line with research published last summer in the journal Molecular Psychiatry that systematically reviewed 17 studies and found “no consistent evidence of there being an association between serotonin and depression.”

In other words, serotonin’s influence on depression, also known as the monoamine model of depression, seems to be wrong or at least incomplete. Unfortunately, what many people on social media took away from this study was that SSRI drugs are worthless and don’t work. That is far from the case. Many people greatly benefit from these drugs. The Molecular Psychiatry study simply indicates SSRIs work via a different mechanism, which is still unknown. They can help regrow neuronal connections just like psychedelics, only the effect seems to be slower and less dramatic.

Olson explains that many patients with depression seem to experience an atrophy of the prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain associated with a wide range of cognitive functions, including regulating emotional responses, which is related to mental health.

In a depressed patient, “The neurons retract their dendrites, they cull their synapses, they have ineffective communication with their neighbors,” Olson says. “And what the SSRIs tended to do is to regrow these neurons. But here was the rub: they did so on a timescale that correlated with their clinical efficacy, not with their ability to promote serotonin increases in the synaptic cleft.”

It is rather bizarre that our bodies make trace amounts of a chemical that is also created by toads to serve as a psychedelic venom.

In other words, if serotonin really was what was helping alleviate mental health problems, then SSRIs would presumably work much more quickly. Again, they can take weeks to start working. In contrast, psychedelics can promote this kind of regrowth in as little as 24 hours, often less.

But Olson’s recent research gives us a better idea of how this happens and it seems to be related to the location of the serotonin receptor, on the inside on the cell, rather than the outside.

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This leads into the intriguing study of how and why the human body produces its own psychedelic compounds. Our bodies already produce its own opioids (called endorphins) and endogenous cannabinoids, which are like the drugs in marijuana. In fact, pretty much the only reason drugs have a psychoactive effect on us at all is because they closely resemble chemicals our body already produces. And some research indicates that humans naturally produce the psychedelics DMT and bufotenine, as well as mebufotenin (5-MeO-DMT), a powerful psychedelic also found in toad venom. However, the amounts of these drugs probably aren’t substantial enough to “trip.”

If you think about it, it is rather bizarre that our bodies make trace amounts of a chemical that is also created by toads to serve as a psychedelic venom. But as the Science study points out, “they are rapidly degraded in vivo [in a living organism], which makes their detection by classic analytical methods quite challenging,” Olson and his colleagues wrote, meaning they can be hard to find, let alone figure out their function. They concluded, “The possibility that endogenous psychedelics play a role in health or disease should therefore be thoroughly investigated.”

The fact that our bodies makes psychedelic compounds actually isn’t so remarkable — many animals and plants produce DMT or similar compounds — but researchers still aren’t sure what DMT is doing there in humans.

“The big question is, where are they produced? When are they produced? And what quantities are they produced?” Olson says. “And that is completely unanswered. And so a lot more work needs to be done, but it’s quite possible that they are playing some kind of role in just normal physiology.”

Most psychedelic drugs like LSD, DMT and psilocybin are structurally similar to serotonin, so they can act on serotonin receptors, but in a slightly different way. You can think of it like clumsily-made lockpicks that still work in a lock designed for a specific key. But even the slight differences can have profound effects, specifically, altered perception of time and space and intensified colors and sounds. This is why these drugs can trigger hallucinations.

Such hallucinatory experiences can be pleasant or uncomfortable, depending on the situation. Of course, psychedelics are not a panacea and not everyone will benefit from them. In fact, not everyone can or should take them. People with heart problems or conditions like schizophrenia are generally discouraged from taking psychedelics. And some folks that take them still don’t necessarily experience miraculous recovery.

That’s why Olson’s lab is working on non-hallucinogenic compounds that are similar to psychedelic drugs, called psychoplastogens. Olson’s lab has produced analogs of drugs like DMT and ibogaine that are seemingly devoid of the psychedelic aspect but still promote those changes in the brain, which could help someone who couldn’t handle a mushroom trip.

Olson says his lab is intending to test these substances for the first time in humans later this year in May. Despite lacking those trippy, introspective effects, psychoplastogens are not intended to replace SSRIs or psychedelics, but instead could give us an additional tool to fight mental health problems.

Of course, a chemical solution to mental health is only part of the equation. Let’s not ignore the fact that our planet is crumbling thanks to climate change and pandemics, while income inequality is rampant throughout a stumbling economy. There is considerable research that depression and anxiety are just as much linked to society and the environment as they are to chemicals in the brain.

But it’s worth researching if psychedelics, SSRIs or related chemicals can help people and how exactly they function in the brain. Given the scale of our mental health crisis, even relieving a little mental suffering will go a long way.

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Of course Joe from “You” is an English professor – but how is he? We grade our antihero academic

In 2021, The Atlantic, following accusations of rape against former English teacher and Philip Roth biographer Blake Bailey wrote, “This kind of abuse seems to be everywhere — in the real world and in fiction inspired by it — abuse by men who allegedly found girls who loved books, girls who were conspicuously vulnerable to the written word, and then manipulated and mangled that love in enduring ways.” The article cites books like the memoirs “Consent” and “Excavation,” and the novels “My Dark Vanessa” and “His Favorites,” all of which include abuse committed not just by educators but specifically by educators of English.

More recently, Daisy Alpert Florin’s searing 2023 novel “My Last Innocent Year” deals with the long fallout of a young Jewish woman’s affair with her writing professor in the late 1990s. English departments sure hire a lot of creeps and in the cultist and cloistering nature of academia, tend to close rank around their most mediocre sons, despite the actual harm they might be inflicting upon young students. So perhaps the only thing surprising about Joe (Penn Badgley), the charming and murderous lead of Netflix’s thriller series “You,” posing as an English professor is that it took him this long.

“I’m still unraveling it”: “Keep This Between Us” filmmaker on being groomed as a child

In a teaser for the fourth season, the first part of which is now streaming on Netflix, Joe swears, “Gone are the days of unrequited love and longing. This time around I’m focusing on academia and instruction while keeping my typical extracurricular activities strictly professional.” Joe is a killer, possibly a psychopath, with little teaching experience and lots of lying, and of course he got a job. But how does he stack up as a professor? Let’s grade the academic now going by the name of Jonathan Moore.

His outfits

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Penn Badgley as Joe Goldberg in “You.” (Courtesy of Netflix)

Joe as Jonathan leans into the archetype of a professor. He grows a beard — how distinguished! The respectability of his faked profession gains him entrée into spaces where he otherwise would not be welcomed (i.e., the rich kids’ club). He dresses shabbily, but that’s just the absent-minded academic in him so he will be excused, allowed inside. He’s so brilliant, after all, so preoccupied with books and deep thoughts. He wears corduroy blazers and little buttoned vests with burgundy ties. And tweed. So much professorial tweed. He carries a battered briefcase and rolls his sleeves up when he teaches. He looks exactly like he belongs in the center of a campus scandal.

His class

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Penn Badgley as Joe Goldberg, Amy-Leigh Hickman as Nadia Farran in “You.” (Courtesy of Netflix)

Joe is a busy man. He’s left a trail of bodies behind him, has assumed a fake identity in a new country, and being Joe, is occupied with obsessing over two women, one from his recent past and one right here in front of him. With all these obligations, who has time to do their job?

A hardscrabble murderer, Joe never went to college himself before assuming a position at a fictional English university. Talk about boot straps. He’s teaching a course called “American Iconoclasts of the Short Story” with assigned writers including Ted Chiang. His star student (yes, that’s a dangerous position) Nadia (Amy-Leigh Hickman) appreciates how he doesn’t assign the “usual canonical, vaguely racist men that drink” but Edgar Allan Poe is on his syllabus. Twice. No women appear to be, though Nadia does makes him read Agatha Christie on his own time.

His teaching style

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Penn Badgley as Joe Goldberg in “You.” (Courtesy of Netflix)

Joe tells himself, in one of his many voiceovers, that he’s great at this “professor-ing.” His pedagogy seems to be a mixture of luck, arrogance, winging it and charm. He phones it in, allowing students to teach themselves under the guise of a being a cool guy, a relaxed prof. He leans back against a table, with those aforementioned sleeves rolled up, crosses his arms and lets his students do the work.

“There are tricks to being a professor,” he says in his voiceover. “Like this.” Then he says aloud to his seminar, “Say more.” He muses in his head, “Wind them up. Let them go. Teenagers will argue for you.” You know he’s not returning papers on time. Like every white guy who fell up, Joe says to himself, “I needed cash but it turns out teaching’s fun.”

His ego

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Amy-Leigh Hickman as Nadia Farran and Penn Badgley as Joe Goldberg in “You.” (Courtesy of Netflix)

It makes sense that Joe would revel in the power of his position. He’s king, at least in the confines of his classroom. Joe has always had a high opinion of himself and teaching young people who hang on his every word feeds his ego. To be called “professor” while not actually having a PhD, not having any degree, is to confirm what he’s always believed about himself: he’s smart and right and his ways, no matter how illegal, are correct. “This is my class,” he tells Nadia, asserting his authority as she looks at him, adoringly.

Showrunner Sera Gamble told EW, “Very early on in the life of the series, [author] Caroline Kepnes told me that she envisioned him in this academic setting eventually, and I just loved that image . . . we’ve known for years that we wanted to eventually put him in a university. It’s also fun because for the first time, really, he’s talking about the books he loves so much and getting the correct level of respect that he never really got.” Joe being Joe, he’s unlikely to last anywhere for long (he keeps peskily murdering people), but one could imagine him firmly planting himself in the university, never publishing, never serving on the committees marginalized faculty are forced to, never facing consequences and refusing to retire.

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A killer prof

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Penn Badgley as Joe Goldberg in “You.” (Courtesy of Netflix)

Joe is a murderer, racking up nearly a dozen bodies in seasons past. He’s far from the only professor to have killed. From Harvard poisoner Eric Muenter to Ohio University murderer and most-wanted escapee Gene Isaac Stees to University of Georgia professor, poet and killer George Zinkhan to Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski, professors have murdered.

Perhaps like Joe, an elevated sense of self combined with the fawning attentions of impressionable young students and academia’s lack of consequences reinforces the belief that one can do anything, get away with everything, once in an ivory tower. Teaching doesn’t seem like it will be good for Joe (definitely not for his students) but as a narcissist, nothing sticks to him, least of all self-improvement. And change won’t happen in an antiquated place, sheltered and self-important as many storied academic institutions are. As fellow professor Malcolm Harding (Stephen Hagan) says to Joe, “Rouse young minds and et cetera. Perks of the job, rumor has it. I wouldn’t possibly know.”

“You” Season 4, Part 1, is now streaming on Netflix. Watch a trailer via YouTube below.

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The unexpected history of Aldi’s first United States store

If you’ve ever stepped foot in an Aldi, you know that the multinational family-owned discount supermarket chain (it’s a mouthful!) touts a wide selection of goods, from must-have budget buys to household essentials. The grocery chain also flaunts a cult-following, particularly amongst millenials who recently elected Aldi as their top-choice market.

Nowadays, it seems like there’s an Aldi at every corner of town. But surprisingly, the grocery chain didn’t originate in the United States but rather, in Germany. Per Aldi, its very first store opened in Germany in 1961 before the chain expanded to the United States 15 years later.

So, how exactly did Aldi make its way from Europe to the States? According to a report from Winsight Grocery Business, “Aldi expanded to the United States from Essen, Germany, via an undisclosed investment in Benner Tea Co., a Burlington, Iowa grocer with origins in the early part of the century.” Located in the Kmart Plaza in Iowa City, Iowa, the store was originally a Giant Food store before it reopened as an Aldi in late March of 1976.

Among millennials, this is the most popular grocery chain

At the time, discount supermarkets were on the rise as the country suffered from high unemployment and high inflation due to a 16-month-long recession. Aldi, however, was not like most stores because it featured a discount scheme that was unfamiliar to most consumers. Early advertisements reminded shoppers to bring their own bags for carrying groceries and specified that products were available for purchase in their original cartons:

“We have no bags. Bring your own box or bag — we pass these supply savings to you,” read one advertisement. Another simply said, “We have no fancy shelving. We sell right from the original carton — less handling means savings for you.”

The Iowa City Aldi carried only 450 items and listed each individual price on paper sheets that customers could carry as they shopped. There was also no refrigeration equipment or freezers, so the only perishable items available were onions, potatoes, bread and margarine.

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“The treasure hunt of the Aldi Finds section, coin-released shopping carts and payment by credit card were also still in the future, but the idea that U.S. consumers would shop for private label foods in a no-frills environment if only the price and quality were there had been established in a way that no store had before or since quite as successfully,” the report further explained.

Today, Aldi has more than 2,000 stores across 36 states in the United States with over 25,000 employees.

If you’re looking to close out this month with new goodies from Aldi, be sure to check out Aldi’s best February buys for Super Bowl, Valentine’s Day and sweater weather.

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Will the New York Times ever give Joe Biden credit for his accomplishments? Chances dim!

“Chances of Recession Start to Dim.” That heading teased a recent front-page New York Times story. Was this headline on an economics story a Freudian slip — and perhaps also a Friedmanian slip?

Having long ago been a journalism student who had to write headlines, I know there’s an art to it. Given space constraints, it’s tempting to use short words, like “dim.”

Still, allow me to mimic quintessential New Yorker John McEnroe: You cannot be serious!

One writes that something positive (like hope) begins to dim, not something negative — such as the chances of a recession that will hurt us all. The Times might as well have phrased it this way: “GOP hopes of recession start to dim.” That would arguably have been more coherent, and would have made perfect sense to the many of us who think corporate media is greatly underplaying Joe Biden’s accomplishments while placating those right-wing Putin fans — T-shirts that say “I’d Rather Be Russian than a Democrat” are still for sale — who constantly work the refs, constantly complaining that the media is “liberal” while consistently voting against the interests of the vast majority of Americans.

How the New York Times helped Republicans win the House

That headline kept working in my mind, but when I went back to check again, the Times had revised it: “What Recession? Some Economists See Chances of a Growth Rebound.” A different and more neutral take, at least.

Had I imagined the first version? I had not. Buried in the 600-some comments on the Times website, Raphael from Tampa repeated the original headline (which only appeared online) while asking: “Why devise such a convoluted, negative headline to say something positive”?

Well, precisely. One wonders what other similarly twisted “heds” we might see from editors at the Times? “Chances of More Gun Violence Grow Slim”? “Prospects Wane for Further Right-Wing Insurrections”?

I don’t claim to know much about economics. I took the notoriously difficult Econ 51 course at the University of Missouri with the inimitable and feared Dr. Walter Johnson. I worked hard and did pretty well, but my lab TA knew my brother and may have cut me some slack. In any case, the sober-minded experts at the Federal Reserve supposedly know what they are doing in managing inflation, and these days the general economic news seems almost cheery — strong job growth, low unemployment, higher wages, large investments being made in infrastructure and job creation, more workers voting for collective bargaining.

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As a short-lived hed scribbler half a lifetime ago, learning to fit words into the meager picas in a one- or two-column piece in the pages of the Columbia Missourian, I know it can be challenging. Reading that nearly inscrutable piece on the economy — with one economist saying this, another saying that, and everyone hedging their bets — I can easily see why the first editor wrote a confused, dizzying headline. I can also see why the second version was a complete transformation.

A lot of people complain about headlines not fitting the story. Come to think of it, that might make for a challenging new game the Times could roll out for readers. Call it “Get to the Hed,” “Bet Your Hed” or “The Hed-less Scribe.” Challenge readers to write a better headline for a key article within the precise parameters of characters allowed by the column width. (Which also apply on the internet, by the way: My Salon editor informs me that article headlines must be 100 characters or less, with “coverlines” — the ones you see on the home page — limited to just 40.)

The footnote on the article says that the original print version in the New York edition was headlined “Recession Worry Eases as Growth Shows Resilience.” Well, damn! That’s quite a different spin, to put it mildly — one seen only by the small and declining proportion of Times readers who live in New York and get the physical paper delivered.

Let me try one: “Chances of The Times Giving Biden Credit Start to Dim.”

It would be helpful for the Times, and other major publications to provide information whenever a headline is changed, perhaps with a more transparent correction notice. Here’s my suggestion: “This article first appeared in the national online edition on Feb. 10 (where, yes, it was shared by everyone and their brother), with the wrongheaded and telling headline, ‘Recession Chances Start to Dim.’ We regret our constant, shameless, cowardly pandering to the right. We’ll try to do better, but don’t hold your breath.”

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“Incredibly insulting”: Republicans attack Joe Biden over surprise Ukraine visit

President Joe Biden made a surprise visit to Kyiv on Monday nearly one year after Russia invaded Ukraine.

Biden walked down the streets of the Ukrainian capital with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as air sirens blared in the background, CNN reported. The show of support came months after Zelenskyy traveled to D.C. to meet with Biden in the Oval Office and address a joint session of Congress.

“One year later, Kyiv stands. And Ukraine stands. Democracy stands,” Biden said, announcing a $500 million package of additional assistance to Ukraine, including military equipment and ammunition.

Biden also announced new sanctions against Russia over its “brutal invasion.”

“When Putin launched his invasion nearly one year ago, he thought Ukraine was weak and the West was divided. He thought he could outlast us. But he was dead wrong,” Biden said, adding that later this week the government will “announce additional sanctions against elites and companies that are trying to evade or backfill Russia’s war machine.”

"This is so much larger than just Ukraine… it's about freedom and democracy writ large"

President Joe Biden pays a surprise visit to Kyiv for talks with his counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskiy, as air raid alarms sound in the Ukrainian capital https://t.co/vRqlhZHP9k pic.twitter.com/1DCXmgM9BF

— Bloomberg (@business) February 20, 2023

Biden is the latest world leader to visit Ukraine amid its fight against Russia, joining the likes of French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and British Prime Ministers Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. First lady Jill Biden also made a surprise visit to a small town in western Ukraine last Mother’s Day.

“I thought it was critical that there not be any doubt, none whatsoever, about US support for Ukraine in the war,” Biden told reporters during a joint appearance with Zelenskyy. “The Ukrainian people have stepped up in a way that few people ever have in the past.”

Biden during his comments emphasized that Ukraine maintains bipartisan support even as a growing number of Republicans push back on additional aid.

“For all the disagreement we have in our Congress on some issues, there is significant agreement on support for Ukraine… It’s not just about freedom in Ukraine … It’s about freedom of democracy at large,” he said.

But some House Republicans quickly seized on the visit, criticizing Biden over the trip.

“This is incredibly insulting,” tweeted Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. “Today on our President’s Day, Joe Biden, the President of the United States chose Ukraine over America, while forcing the American people to pay for Ukraine’s government and war. I can not express how much Americans hate Joe Biden.”

Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., wrote that it was “breathtaking that President Biden can show up in Ukraine to ensure their border is secure, but can’t do the same for America.”

Donald Trump Jr. tweeted, “Of course Joe Biden is in Ukraine and not Ohio…Because screw Americans.”

“Ungrateful international welfare queen”: MTG, Don Jr. lead GOP attacks on Zelenskyy’s D.C. visit

Biden made the decision to travel to Kyiv on Friday after huddling with national security advisers at the Oval Office, officials told CNN. The U.S. informed Russia of the plan a few hours before Biden departed for “deconfliction purposes,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters.

“This was risk that Joe Biden wanted to take,” said communications director Kate Bedingfield. “It’s important to him to show up, even when it’s hard, and he directed his team to make it happen no matter how challenging the logistics.”

Biden during his remarks said nearly a year after the invasion, “Putin’s war of conquest is failing.”

“Putin thought Ukraine was weak and the West was divided. He thought he could outlast us. I don’t think he’s thinking that right now,” he said. “He’s just been plain wrong. One year later, the evidence is right here in this room. We stand here together,” he added.

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Biden during his speech recalled how “Russian planes were in the air and tanks were going across your border” when he spoke to Zelenskyy by phone ahead of the invasion.

“You told me that you could hear explosions in the background. I’ll never forget that,” Biden said, recalling Zelenskyy’s plea to rally world leaders behind Ukraine.

“One year later, Kyiv stands. And Ukraine stands. Democracy stands,” Biden added. “The Americans stand with you and the world stands with you.”

Zelenskyy said Biden’s visit “brings us closer to victory.”

Zelenskyy said the two leaders have discussed the U.S. sending additional military hardware to Ukraine and described the recent decision to send Abrams tanks to Ukraine as pivotal.

“The decision of the US on Abrams tanks has already presented a foundation for establishing a tank coalition and is of historic importance,” he said. “We’ve also talked about long-range weapons and the weapons that may still be supplied to Ukraine – even though have not been supplied before.”

Zelenskyy added that the “results of this visit will surely be seen, and will surely have repercussions on the battlefield in liberating our territories.”

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Netflix: Is mainstream content squeezing out the daring plots viewers originally fell for?

Since the field of cultural studies got its start in the 1950s, academics have been investigating what different pop cultures have to say about society. While popular culture has often been criticized as a sort of dumbing-down of “real” culture driven by purely commercial interests, research has provided important insight into modern sociology through study of subjects as diverse as Andy Warhol, hip-hop and punk music, Beyoncé, and Lady Gaga.

Netflix launched in 1997 and by 2007 it began its transformation into a true “video on demand” platform. It’s now the world’s largest streaming platform, putting it front and centre in the pop culture universe. Despite a dip in popularity in 2022, the platform has managed to accrue 220 million users and more than 5,000 titles to date.

Netflix has been able to crush its competition, even snuffing out certain services right from the outset. But is this superstore for series promoting diverse narratives and plots or is it nothing more than a gigantic conformity-producing machine? A series that’s received less praise than most of the platform’s offerings is “Emily in Paris,” which has been widely panned since its release. As Iva Dixit of The New York Times wrote, “Emily Is Still in Paris. Why Are We Still Watching?”

A bold spark in a drab landscape

When Netflix launched its U.S. streaming service in 2007, its immediate concern was distancing itself from competitors such as HBO – which began broadcasting the iconic series “Game of Thrones” in 2011. To do so, Netflix presented a bold offer of complex plots, strong characters (such as Piper in “Orange Is the New Black”) and polished productions.

Three years later, Netflix reached deals with Paramount, Lionsgate and Metro Goldwyn Mayer to provide high-quality, more diverse programming. “House of Cards” and “Orange Is the New Black” were the first of the made-by-Netflix offerings, and their success proved that this was the right decision. Original creations soon became the platform’s focus, increasing by 88% between 2017 and 2018 to reach over 5,000 titles. It was also during this year that the platform acquired its first major production studio in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Netflix Originals have since become the brand’s trademark, bringing in directors such as Martin Scorsese and Bong Joon-ho, and demanding sizeable budgets. Bold series such as “Orange Is the New Black” shook up audiences’ expectations, shedding light on important issues like feminism, gender and sexual violence – a real first in an audiovisual universe long overpowered by the “male gaze.”

Staying local yet universal

As it has grown, Netflix has been able to go global, while taking into account local factors both in its original productions and through its partnerships. The platform relies on a certain universalisation of expectations, in a world where pop culture is largely dominated by U.S. productions, but plays on differences, specific traits and regional identities in line with the spirit of “glocalization.” Its approach involves purchasing and broadcasting creations made by local studios, the most notable example being “Money Heist.” With an initial budget of $600,000 per episode – one-tenth that of “Game of Thrones” – this “minor” Spanish series reached icon status thanks to the platform.

Netflix Original series are often deeply incisive, taking aim at the Modi administration in India with “Leila” and at the Erdoğan regime in Turkey with “Ethos.” Since 2020, 18% of Netflix Originals have been produced or co-produced in Europe, 12% in Asia, 5% in Latin America and 2% in Oceania. To date, some 40 countries have been enlisted in Netflix original productions, which have been filmed in around 20 languages.

For now, this “Tower of Babel” strategy is paying off. As Cindy Holland, the platform’s then-vice president of original series, stated in 2018, “the most powerful promotional vehicle . . . is the Netflix service itself”. Put simply, Netflix constructs its own autonomy in order to maintain full control over all the inner workings of the service, from creations to in-house writers, production and distribution.

The attention economy

Although the “attention economy” has always existed, it has become the be-all and end-all of any audiovisual or editorial production. As with other platforms, the goal at Netflix is to capture our attention, which is the very basis of its profitability.

Algorithms help Netflix and other services fine-tune their attention-economy strategy, all to keep us locked inside our bubbles. They want to attract audiences and keep them engaged as long as possible, concentrating this sly tactic into the one almighty “Next Episode” button. The Netflix algorithm is immensely powerful, profiling users with every site visit, making ever more accurate suggestions and predictions and driving addiction. And so the trap snaps shut and we are turned into mere consumers, helped merrily along by the potent algorithm.

Another trap operates through the narrative arcs constructed essentially around the infamous cliffhanger – the “to be continued” of yesteryear’s soap operas. This is how subtitled Korean series such as “Squid Game” have become smash hits for Netflix, relying on fierce political and social critique. “Extraordinary Attorney Woo” follows the story of an autistic lawyer, while “The Penthouse” charts the lives of Seoul’s wealthiest and often most corrupt residents. These three series have achieved spectacular numbers, clocking in at 46 million viewing hours for “Extraordinary Attorney Woo” and 142 million for “Squid Game.” The latter represents twice the number of viewing hours enjoyed by “Bridgerton,” which was itself a huge success.

These series consistently feature highly emotional climaxes that encourage binge-watching. The same trend can be found in cinema, with multiplexes featuring much-hyped productions alongside more difficult works. For instance, the heist movie “Ocean’s Eleven” ($450 million at the box office) is a far cry from the more discreet, artistic cinema of Peter Greenaway. Whether we are dealing with a series, a film or a book, “accessibility” is the watchword.

When algorithms bite back

Netflix relies on neuro-marketing to generate powerful sensory responses. As soon as we stop watching, the dopamine hit subsides, and so we feel “required” to keep watching. In other words, it is difficult on an emotional level for us to miss the next part and the next episode. Evidently, the series-watching phenomenon obeys the stimulation-addiction logic.

Until now Netflix has been able to create daring content, broadening the scope of plots and imagined horizons. But its algorithm-driven success depends largely on binge-watching fueled by cliffhangers, the oldest of tropes. There are already series “recipes,” but these push less for conformity than for the ease that is at the heart of attention economics.

Virginie Martin is the author of “Le Charme discret des séries” (“The Understated Charm of the TV Series”), published in French by Humensciences in 2021.

Virginie Martin, Docteure sciences politiques, HDR sciences de gestion, Kedge Business School

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

Our last visit, on death row

The next morning, Alan and I went to the prison for what we knew could be our last visit with Cecil. His brother, David, was already there visiting, but the guards said we could go in anyway. While we said we would wait, David told them it’d be fine with him for us to come in.

We signed the guest book, and as that last door opened to the closet-sized visiting room, two middle-aged men turned their heads toward us and broke into smiles. David, who Alan had met once before, was standing as I had been the day before, the two plastic garden chairs pushed back into the corners. Cecil, on the other side of the glass, was so happy to have a gathering of guests, he looked like he was hosting a get-together on his patio. Come on in!

The brothers’ childhood had bonded them closer than any circumstance could break apart, and each knew his brother’s love would never end. They were reminiscing when we came in and stopped long enough for us to hug David and wave hello to Cecil.

Crime is a hot issue, but even Republicans don’t talk about the death penalty: That’s good news

“Do you remember that Christmas with the slippers?” David, continuing his story, said, and they both burst out laughing. Their mother had wanted some house shoes, and they were determined to give them to her. They had ended up stealing a pair because they had no money for gifts.

Another time, they recalled, one of their sisters had thrown a butcher knife at David, and they covered for her, so she wouldn’t get in trouble from their father. The boys took the blame, and the beating from their father had been so severe, blood splattered on a wall. Tale after tale began to flow as they laughed—even as my mouth dropped open at the horror of some of it—and finished each other’s sentences because they knew the stories by heart.

The brothers relived their childhoods and were proud to have each other’s shared history. They hardly took breaths in between the end of one story and the start of the next, as they disregarded the unspoken shadow that this might be their last chance to be together. Witnessing the two of them, I would not have guessed about the abusive family, the hunger, the betrayals, and the other dysfunctions had I not already read Cecil’s memoir. Every story they told had a boisterous punchline between them; an outside observer could see that the common thread was about overcoming terribly tragic circumstances, but that was not the focus that day. For a short time, there in that cold, hard room, there was warmth. To have a person in this world who understood every nuance of where he came from and what he had lived through was a gift no one else could give Cecil. His little brother who knew him so well was there when it counted, and we were honored to witness such a love. It is the most sincere and genuine family reunion I’ve ever been to.

The new suit reminded me of the media circus and the purpose of our visit. It was not a picnic or a proper family reunion. It was the last time we would see him.

The warden then came in, smiling, and we turned as he approached the open door to our closet-space.

“How ya doin’, Cecil? Do you need anything?” he said, and we shook his hand to meet him like we were at a business event, a grand opening of the death chamber or something. As the warden turned to leave, I noticed the string that comes on a new suit coat—the one that holds the flaps together at the back until you clip it when you buy it—was still connected. It appeared that the warden had bought a new suit for the occasion, possibly even a career-defining event where he would be in front of a lot of media. I shared an ironic smile and an eyeroll with Cecil after the warden left. I wanted to say, “Oh no, we’re all good here! Couldn’t be better—except for the part where you are about to kill my friend here—if you could work on that, we’d really be all set.” The new suit reminded me of the media circus and the purpose of our visit. It was not a picnic or a proper family reunion. It was the last time we would see him.

A woman came and took Cecil’s temperature, reaching through the mail slot.

“They want to make sure I’m well,” Cecil said. “That’s funny.” We all laughed with him, a little more forced this time, realizing that the State cared only about his health because it would mean fewer complications when it came time to kill him. That rolled off Cecil easily; he had learned early in his life that the appearance of thoughtfulness did not always indicate real caring or sympathy.

On that last visit, while Cecil was waiting to hear from his lawyers in hopes of a stay of execution, he also must have been privately preparing to die, thinking about tying up loose ends.

At least, that was on my mind. Through the glass, I said, “After you’re gone … how—”

“No, we’re not going to talk like that,” he broke in, waving his arm.

“But what is your favorite hymn? Who will—”

“We don’t need any of that. We can talk about all kinds of stuff next week.”

The State cared only about his health because it would mean fewer complications when it came time to kill him.

That’s when I realized he was sticking full force with the line of thinking that the execution that night was not going to happen.

He had a lot on his mind, I know, but he acted like it was a jinx or bad luck to even discuss the possibility that the execution would happen. I did not want to talk about it either, but I knew we would want to know his wishes. He started talking about fishing, his daughter, and how his grandkids were doing—anything to fill the otherwise dead air. Finally, he slowed down, looked straight at me, and said steadily, “Tell Anne Grace and Allie not to worry about me.” He was thinking about our two daughters who he had known for all these years.

As we prepared to leave, words didn’t come easily for any of us. Visitation was nearly over; we wanted to leave first, so the brothers could have their own moment. The knowledge that it was fewer than twelve hours until the execution time hung in the air smothering us, with just a touch of hope floating nearby.

Cecil put his palms up on the glass as Alan and I each matched a hand up to his. We sensed this was the real goodbye, and after a moment, we began backing away from the glass. Like the day before, I looked him in the eye and said, “See you tomorrow!” as if it were just another day. But Alan is always much more direct than I ever am and knew he must say what was in his heart.

“I haven’t ministered to you enough,” Alan stammered, recalling the original purpose of their visits a decade and a half ago. “You always end up ministering to me.”

Cecil just smiled and said, “See you, brother. And you take care, little sister. I love you both.”

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