The parable of the world’s largest bee

While working as a curatorial assistant at the American Museum of Natural History, Eli Wyman learned about a very unusual bee that was presumed to be extinct. The bee, Megachile pluto, also known as Wallace’s giant bee, is a massive unit. It is the largest bee in the world, four times larger than a honeybee and measuring about the length of a human thumb.

Huge mandibles hang like dastardly garden shears from its head. Or, at least, did — the bee hadn’t been seen alive since 1981 and was feared lost. “I just thought ‘someday I’ve got to go to look for this bee.’ It’s a sort of unicorn in the bee world,” Wyman says. “If you love bees, as I do,” he added, “this is the greatest possible adventure to have.”

In 2019, Wyman teamed up on an expedition with Clay Bolt, a natural history photographer, and two other researchers who had similar ambitions of rediscovering the bee in its last-known stronghold in the Indonesian islands of North Maluku. Plans to take samples of the bee for genetic testing were ditched due to permitting problems, so the team settled on the singular mission of being the first to see the giant in 38 years.

The bee liked to make its home in termite nests so the modern-day adventurers took a boat to Halmahera, the largest of the North Maluku islands, and met with the head of the village where the bee was last seen to help locate the most likely nests. The next five, futile, days were spent trudging around fragmented forest looking for nests and “almost dying of heat stroke,” Wyman recalls.

By this point the men had almost resigned themselves to not finding the bee and were forlornly discussing whether they should take pictures of some birds instead, Wyman says. Then, at the end of the fifth day, they were ambling back to their car when the group spotted a termite mound located off the path. Reluctantly, an exhausted Wyman volunteered to take a close look.

A quick scan of the towering nest revealed nothing, Wyman says, but then a dark spot caught his eye and he realized it was an entrance hole. “My heart started pumping then,” he says. The hole was around 7 feet off the ground so Wyman propped up a branch, clambered upon it, and looked inside. He saw that the tunnel was lined with resin, which is what the Wallace’s giant bee does to seal its nest off from the termites.

A local guide then climbed up for a look, Wyman says, made a hand gesture that resembled an antennae and quickly helped build a platform from branches and vines to enable the group to view. At this point Wyman could clearly see the head and mandibles of the bee. Wyman’s nine-year itch had been scratched. “We were just hugging and high fiving each other,” he says. “I was so beaten down by the heat and the work and suddenly I felt light on my feet.”

The rediscovery of the Wallace’s giant bee, a rare slice of good wildlife-related news, was splashed across media outlets around the world, illustrated with pictures of a delighted Wyman and his colleagues holding a vial with the hefty insect inside. (They released it after taking photos.) Government officials in Indonesia pledged there would be a thorough survey of the bee, Wyman says, opening the way for it to be protected properly.

Wyman hoped the local population would take proud ownership of the bee in order to protect it, too, but the conversations tailed off, the momentum spluttered, he says. “That was a real bummer for us.”

Worse, knowledge of the bee’s existence lit up a murky corner of the internet that specializes in the trade of rare animals. Shortly after he got back to the U.S., Wyman saw that someone was trying to sell a specimen of the bee on eBay for a few thousand dollars — a tempting lure for the subsistence farmers and fishermen of North Maluku who could get a portion of this relative fortune.

The bee had become something unusual, a sort of rare trophy like an endangered rhino. This sometimes happens with insects: In Germany, a rare beetle named after Adolf Hitler was considered at risk of extinction more than a decade ago due to its soaring popularity as a collector’s item for neo-Nazis. Wyman had wanted to highlight the conservation potential of the Wallace’s giant bee but had also inadvertently showcased its value to private collectors, placing it in greater peril. Humanity had managed to formulate yet another way to destroy an insect species.

There are millions of undiscovered insect species living in other piles of dirt or in the bark of trees or beneath our feet that are at risk of dying off, sight unseen. The Wallace’s giant bee would’ve just been another nameless fatality, squeezed from its shrinking habitat, if it wasn’t the world’s largest bee and therefore a sort of holy grail for a bunch of Western researchers. We can now look it in the eye, say its name out loud, and know that it lives among us.

But the most sobering aspect of the bee-finding adventure is that even the flurry of interest surrounding the species didn’t provide it much of a reprieve. “No one cares,” says Wyman, glumly. “Even for something as charismatic as the world’s largest bee we can’t seem to muster enough interest to give it a conservation status or do proper surveys.” (The bee was given vulnerable status by the International Union for Conservation of Nature in 2014, but has no such status designated by the Indonesian government.)

If the world’s largest bee is vulnerable, it’s easy to feel pessimistic about all of the millions of insect species without such celebrity.

We may be grappling with the idea that bees, in general, are in trouble but the reason to care about this is usually couched in human-centric terms — they pollinate our food and are a comforting sight in a summer garden. Undoing these ties threatens us as well as them.

The Wallace’s giant bee has no such use in unknowing servitude — it isn’t zipping around making sure the locals have plenty of cucumbers and apples to eat. But the bee, like all insects, surely has its own value unrelated to humans. Insects have been on Earth more than 1,000 times longer than us, after all. They have in many ways created the world we live in and ensure that it remains steadily ticking, despite our excesses.

The giant bee deserves to be here, with its comically large jawline, just like the everyday earwigs, crickets, and moths. It is part of the astonishing fabric of life of our world, the only known life in this universe, and our blustering self-importance is a poor arbiter of which elements we should allow to be casually extinguished.

“People talk about economic value or about what ends up on our plates, but there is always an intrinsic value to insects,” says Wyman. “We are the shepherds of these incredible creatures.”

In the end, Wyman adds, “We are losing this incredible part of our natural history and Earth’s heritage.”

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

Marie Yovanovitch on Trump, Putin, Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s courage and the future of democracy

If Carl von Clausewitz‘s famous maxim that war is the continuation of politics by other means holds some truth, then the border zone between the two — the pathway into war, or the way around it — is where the mysterious art of diplomacy is practiced.

Marie Yovanovitch is a lifelong diplomat. She had spent her entire career representing American “soft power” in a variety of challenging contexts and under presidents of both parties, right up to the point when she abruptly and unexpectedly became a household name. As U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 2016 to 2019, Yovanovitch became an important supporting player in Donald Trump’s first impeachment, as the principal target of a smear campaign that even now, three years later, is too convoluted and nonsensical to be easily explained.

The short version — which isn’t all that short — is that Rudy Giuliani, the very definition of an unreliable narrator, became obsessed with Yovanovitch and decided to blame her for the fact that his attempts to dig up dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden in Ukraine were going nowhere. Along the way, Giuliani and a number of his dubious associates tried to concoct a conspiracy theory linking the Ukrainian government to the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign, in a transparent and idiotic attempt to deflect attention from Robert Mueller’s report and the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia.

In her new memoir “Lessons From the Edge,” a rich and interesting career history that covers much more than her disastrous Trump entanglement, Yovanovitch makes a convincing case that she knew virtually nothing about Giuliani’s Ukraine skulduggery or about Hunter Biden’s admittedly shady business dealings there. She was taken completely by surprise, she reports, to get star billing in Trump’s infamous “perfect” phone call with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, then Ukraine’s brand new president.

What seems clear to me, after reading her book and speaking with her by Zoom for half an hour, is that Yovanovitch is exactly the sort of person Trump and his minions identified with the “deep state” — a judicious, cerebral rule-follower who saw herself as serving a long-term narrative of “American interests” that was largely independent of politics, and had only incrementally shifted from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush to Barack Obama. In a sense, they were correct to see her as an enemy: Yovanovitch makes clear in her memoir that she came to understand the Trump administration as an Americanized version of the blatantly corrupt power politics she had observed for years as a senior diplomat in Ukraine, Russia, Kyrgyzstan and Armenia.

Another reason Yovanovitch’s story is fascinating now, of course, is because of how it may have shaped what has happened since. In the historical rear-view mirror, the events that linked Trump, Zelenskyy and Vladimir Putin in 2019 are now shaped by the far more traumatic events of 2022, which have thrust Zelenskyy onto the world stage and made Putin appear alternately more malicious and more delusional than ever before.

As you might expect, Marie Yovanovitch measures her words carefully, and expresses disagreement in tones of studied quietness. She knows both Ukraine and Russia well, and says that while she could see these events taking shape well ahead of time, like most of us she did not believe things would go so bad so quickly. She told me I was welcome to call her Masha — she was born in Canada to Russian-émigré parents — but I don’t believe I ever did. As Donald Trump found out, this is not a person to be taken lightly.

We have to start with a subject that can only be difficult for you. Personally and professionally, you have ties to both Russia and Ukraine that go pretty deep. At the risk of sounding like an interviewer on “The View,” what has this been like for you personally?

It’s hard to find the right words. Initially, it’s hard to believe that we are now one month into this war of choice. There is no reason for this war. Ukraine was not a threat to Russia, and yet here we are. And 30 days later, here we are. Originally, when the invasion first started, I was using the words “unimaginable,“ “devastating,“ etc. Now that just seems so trite.

Originally, I thought, “Oh my God, everybody I know has got a target on their back.” But it turns out that everybody in Ukraine now has a target on their back. Whether you are six months old or 60 years old, you have a target on your back. We can see this indiscriminate killing and targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure. It’s devastating. And obviously devastating, most of all, to the people of Ukraine.

From your knowledge of both of these nations and the time you’ve spent in both of them, did you see this coming? Did you think it was likely to get this bad?

While I was in Ukraine — and of course I left in 2019 — I did not believe that Vladimir Putin wanted to, so to speak, own Ukraine. I thought he wanted to destabilize Ukraine, so that it would not be a reliable partner for the West. He was doing that with his — I mean, it was a hot war in the Donbas region. Every couple of days, another civilian or soldier would die. It was a hot war, even though it was not a headline in the United States. There were cyber attacks. There were assassinations of high-level individuals. There was all sorts of economic punishment, during those eight years. I thought that was probably going to be enough for Putin.

I did feel that Putin would probably become aggressive again, because that has been his pattern with Georgia in 2008, in 2014 with the first invasion of Ukraine, and then now. But I wouldn’t necessarily have predicted that it would be Ukraine. But then, in the fall of 2021, when we started seeing the encirclement of Ukraine by Russian forces, and of course the Biden administration started releasing intelligence, in what I considered to be just a brilliant move, well, it started becoming apparent that there would be an invasion. But even in February, I did not think that he was going to try to take the whole country. I did not think that, but here we are.

That’s an interesting point about U.S. strategy. It seemed as if Antony Blinken or someone close to him had the idea that by revealing information about Russian movements — that maybe otherwise you wouldn’t — they were hoping to limit Putin’s options. Is that a correct interpretation?

That’s how I would interpret it. I think that there’s some belief that it set Putin back, in terms of the timeline of the invasion and various other things. Even now, when the Biden administration is releasing information that there could be a false flag operation around a possible chemical weapons attack by Russia, that has to make them think. It’s not as smooth as I think Vladimir Putin would have liked.

Yeah, it’s not going smoothly, to put it mildly. Are you surprised by the difficulty that the Russian military seems to have had? And on the other side, are you surprised by the fierce resistance from the Ukrainians?

When I was in government, we always used to talk about how we needed to remember the Russians are not 10 feet tall. Nevertheless, I certainly thought that they had been spending the last 20 years investing in their military and honing their capabilities. I thought they were far more capable than what we are seeing right now. I think some military experts had predicted that the corruption, the lack of leadership, the lack of reforms in the Russian military would lead to, if not the results we’re seeing now, at least not the kinds of successes that Putin had imagined.

But I am surprised by the incompetence, basically. Not just on the military side, where they don’t demonstrate the kind of tactics that you would expect in a modern military, but also the logistics. I think it was Napoleon who said that an army marches on its stomach. These guys, their stomachs seem to be somewhere in Moscow, as they are trying to attack Ukraine.

As far as the Ukrainians are concerned, I knew they were going to fight back. As you probably know, I spent six years in Ukraine, first in the early 2000s and then again from 2016 to 2019, as ambassador. The Ukrainians love their freedom. They are unruly. They are fighters. They don’t want us to tell them what to do, and they certainly don’t want the Russians to tell them what to do! So I knew they were going to fight back.

But I have to say, the uncommon courage that they are showing is remarkable. I think it’s inspiring for the whole world. It’s obviously Zelenskyy at the top, reflecting that Ukrainian spirit, but also binding his nation together, uniting them in this common cause and inspiring them, but also inspiring the world. But you also have the little grandmothers who are making Molotov cocktails: They’re ready for the Russian soldiers to come to their village! Yeah, that’s the Ukraine I know, the Ukrainian people I know.

Obviously no one, and especially not you, would have wished this on the Ukrainian nation or the Ukrainian people. But it seems like one of the ironies here is that Putin has created a level of social and political unity in Ukraine that did not exist previous to this. Is there some truth to that?

I think that is absolutely right. He managed to do that in 2014, too, with the first invasion. I was really struck when I came to Ukraine two years later, after a pause of a number of years, how proud people were of their country. I mean, Ukraine is an enormous country. And while there are regional differences, for sure, nevertheless, people saw themselves as part of one united Ukraine, which wasn’t necessarily the case before.

Vladimir Putin had a lot to do with it, and that’s not the only thing he’s managed to accomplish. He has managed to kick–start NATO, an organization that many felt had seen better days. President Biden was just at NATO, and a number of deliverables or agreements have just been announced. It’s ironic. All the things that Putin says he wants, he’s getting the exact opposite. He’s getting more NATO, not less. He’s getting a nationalistic Ukraine, not a supplicant country that is bowing down to Russia.

Yeah. The law of unintended consequences seems to be in full effect. That’s also true with President Zelenskyy, who has become an international hero. It might sound demeaning to call him a celebrity, but it’s true. I know you didn’t work closely with him, but I don’t have the sense that his presidency was an unqualified success up to this point.

No, I think that’s right. Even before this invasion, Ukraine had a lot of challenges, as many countries do. It‘s still a developing democracy, a developing market economy. Obviously, they were fighting this war on their eastern border. There were a lot of challenges. They were trying to move forward on reform and so forth, but it’s always hard. It’s hard for us, in the United States, to reform. Nobody does it, unless there’s some sort of a crisis.

So, I think you’re right that Zelenskyy, as his predecessors did, had challenges in governing and producing the kinds of results that the people of Ukraine want to see.

I don’t believe you know Vladimir Putin personally, but you spent a good deal of time in Russia earlier in your career. Where do you fall in terms of interpreting him? There’s the notion that he has become irrational and hot-headed, and there’s the argument that he is a rational actor, who is pursuing logical aims according to his understanding of the world.

That is such a hard question for me to answer, because some days I’m in one camp and other days, I’m in the other. But I do think that he has his own worldview, incorrect though it may be, in terms of the history of the last several hundred years, and of the modern era as well. I think he misrepresents that. I think he’s wrong in many of his conclusions. I mean, it’s just ahistorical, the sorts of things that he talks about. But if that is your context and you are an autocrat and you pretty much have squashed all the opposition or jailed them or driven them out of the country, then you’re probably not getting great facts.

There’s been much made in the press recently that the minister of defense and the head of the military have not been seen in a couple of weeks. What does that mean? Are they on the outs? Does it just mean they’re in the bunker, redoing war plans? I mean, who knows? But my guess is that Putin was being told that his military could take Kyiv in a couple of days. Clearly that was not right. So he’s getting bad information. He’s probably very angry. And none of that is a good combination, especially when he’s hinting at the fact that Russia is a nuclear power. For every other country in the world, that’s a taboo. It’s not part of the arsenal of war. But with Russia, it’s part of their military doctrine, and those hints are very frightening.

A friend of mine who’s a historian thinks it’s possible that within Putin’s regime there’s actually less internal dialogue and discussion than there was during the Soviet period, except maybe under Stalin. Most of the time, there was at least an inner circle, the Politburo, where there was some degree of disagreement and debate. Putin doesn’t appear to permit anything like that.

Yeah. As you know, I’m no longer working for the U.S. government, so I don’t have the information that maybe others might have. But it seems to me that his close-in people, who have been with him since his KGB days, since his time in Petersburg, all moved to Moscow in the early Kremlin days. They’ve been together for over 30 years. Most of them are not only intelligence, but counterintelligence. That is a very special breed of people because they’re paid to be paranoid, right? They’re paid to look for the plots. So that probably also informs their worldview. It’s unclear to me to what extent they have open discussions and can tell the boss the truth, so he can make better decisions. But one hint that we got was the national security council meeting that was videotaped and then released, where Putin was dealing with his colleagues like a teacher addressing schoolboys and humiliating some of them, in a very public way.

To me, what was interesting was: This was a taped session. They could have cleaned that up, but they didn’t. That was what Putin wanted to send out to the world. I think he made it very clear that there was one person making the decisions and that the other people in the room were really nervous, at a minimum. Some people were afraid.

One central current in your book, and you express this very judiciously, is the idea that the kinds of political, governmental, social and cultural problems that you encountered in former Soviet nations — systemic corruption, to put it bluntly — began to crop up in the United States during the latter part of your career, as if it were a virus or an infection that started to spread.

Yeah. I mean, when I returned to the United States, fast forward to the July 2019 “perfect“ telephone call between President Zelenskyy and President Trump. That transcript was released in September, which was when I found out that I featured in that phone call. That is so unusual, I can’t even tell you. I featured in it in a particularly disturbing way, but even worse was the fact that the president of the United States was clearly trading on his office and his influence and holding up an arms shipment in order to get a personal or political favor from another country.

That sent a signal around the world, that this is a guy who’s trading on his office. I’d seen that in other countries, but I never thought I would see it in the United States. That doesn’t mean that I’ve agreed with every decision that our presidents have made over time. Far from it. But even when I disagreed, I didn’t think that people were doing it for some personal reason.

I think that’s the foremost thing, because that is such a betrayal of the American people. We should be able to expect that when we elect a president, that individual is working on our behalf, for our national security, not for his or her own interests. So that was really disturbing. And then just the verbal attacks on journalists, the scapegoating of minorities and women, just so much of the rhetoric was really disturbing to me.

And then we had our presidential elections, where the president of the United States refused to accept the results and actively worked with others to try to reverse those results. I want to say culminating in the Jan. 6 insurrection, except I think some people are still trying to reverse the results. I never thought I would see anything like that in the United States, never. So yeah, I think our democracy has challenges. We need to work hard to defend it and tend to it, if we are going to preserve it.

Is there a feedback loop operating in the world around that issue? There’s a lot of tension around democracy, and whether it actually still works. There are segments of the American right who have allied themselves with Putin, even if they’ve backed away from that recently. There’s a sense that democracy and capitalism no longer have to be linked, for example, and that democracy has degraded in many places.

To a certain extent, yes, I think that’s true. But I just take issue with the premise, and probably you do as well, because I think that democracy obviously is not a perfect system. No system is. Some clever person said democracy is the worst system in the world, except for all the others.

All you need to do is look at the Ukrainian people. They have a choice to follow the Russian model or to follow the European model. They have repeatedly made the choice of turning to Europe. Because they don’t think about it, and I think most Americans don’t think about it, in terms of democracy, capitalism, the rule of law. Those are important terms, but I mean, in my everyday life, I want a good job. I want my kids to have prospects. I want to live in peace. I don’t want to have to give the policemen a bribe just so I can keep driving down the road.

That’s what the Ukrainian people want. They look at Russia, and they’re not seeing any of that for themselves. They look to the West, and they see some real prospects for themselves and for their children. I think if you ask ordinary people, that’s what they want. I think that democracy and capitalism actually do provide the best results, over time, for the most people.

You mention some misgivings about the creation of the oligarch class under the Yeltsin government in Russia. In the mid-1990s, massive amounts of capital was allowed to flow upward very quickly, creating a class of essentially unaccountable ultra-rich people who had immense power in society. I’m not saying that I know what could have been done differently. You would know better than I. But the U.S. rode along with that, in the interests of keeping Yeltsin in power, and I would say the effects have been disastrous. I mean, that set the table for Vladimir Putin and the Russia we see today. Do you disagree with that?

Yeah, I don’t disagree. Well, I think that the Russian government asked us to help them, back in the days of the early 1990s, set up a market economy. So we did the best that we could, but everything had to be done at the same time. You’re literally flying the plane while you’re fixing the engine and also the wings and everything else. So it was inevitable that some things were going to go wrong.

In the early 1990s, the choice seemed to be between Yeltsin, a reformer, somebody the U.S. had a good relationship with and who seemed sober-minded about his nuclear arsenal — those were all very important issues — and in the period that you talked about, in the 1996 elections, Yeltsin looked like he was going to lose to Zyuganov, the Communist Party candidate.

And then they cooked up this deal with the very, very wealthy businessmen, the oligarchs, although that term was not common yet. The oligarchs gave the government money and in exchange they got shares of government-controlled companies. It was supposed to be a temporary thing, loans for shares. But of course, the oligarchs kept those shares and owned those companies, which they got for a song. It was the further rape of the Russian people, in my opinion.

Should we have criticized Yeltsin really harshly, and maybe given Zyuganov, the Communist, a leg up? I mean, I was so junior, I wasn’t aware of any of these conversations. But I think there must have been a decision that we weren’t going to go there. I do wonder whether there was some narrow lane we could have found, where we could have noted our concern.

Maybe that was done privately, behind closed doors. Honestly, when people are talking about their political survival, as Yeltsin was at that time, I’m not sure how successful we would have been, had we said something publicly. I think the West, and especially the United States, did lose some credibility there, as people found out about this deal that was cooked up. So yeah, I mean, that was a really sordid episode. It built the foundation for many things that were to come.

One of Putin’s principal complaints, which gets echoed by critics of U.S. policy both on the left and the right, is about the eastward expansion of NATO. As I’m sure you’re aware, this was controversial from the start. There were some old-guard foreign policy people in the U.S. who argued that it was a mistake to push NATO further east than Germany, and that it was likely to lead to future conflict with Russia. Do you think there are valid reasons now to question that policy?

No, actually I don’t. I mean, obviously one can always review history and draw certain conclusions and so forth. But in the 1990s and early 2000s, I don’t recall it as being super controversial. In fact, a number of people were talking about Russia ultimately joining NATO. This was a demand-driven enlargement. The Poles and others came knocking on NATO’s door. It wasn’t like we were looking for countries to join NATO at all. It was an engine, along with EU membership, for building up those economies, building up those democracies and building up their security as well. I think there were a lot of benefits to enlargement.

And then in the mid-2000s, Putin started this revisionist history: The breakup of the Soviet Union was the biggest disaster, etc., etc. When I look back at the 1990s, and I was there for some of it, the Russian people were getting the lion’s share of the attention. The other countries were all complaining, because the lion’s share of these pots of money was going to Russia. President Clinton brought Russia into the G7, making it the G8. We had the NATO-Russia Founding Act, which set up a special partnership for Russia in the 1990s.

I mean, there’s a lot to look back on, where we were trying to reach out a hand to Russia, and Yeltsin was actually clasping that hand, to try to bring them in to the community of nations in an important way. It’s a big country. It’s a nuclear country. It has lots of potential. We were hoping that by bringing them in, they would see how they could develop further.

That’s the last point I want to make: It’s true that the U.S. is a powerful country, and we have a lot of influence in the world. But citizens of other countries and leadership of other countries, they have agency. We tend to look at things, understandably, as, “What did the U.S. do during this time period? Was it our fault? Could we have done something different?” All of which is legitimate, but I think certainly a country like Russia has agency. It can choose its own path.

We’ve been doing a couple of thought experiments here. So here’s another one for you. If NATO had withered or if NATO had said to Poland and other entrants, “No, sorry, doors are closed,” do we imagine that right now Putin would be this pussycat who was all about love and flowers and being a good member of the international community? I don’t think so. I think he would have come to this anyway, that Ukraine is not a real country and the Ukrainians are just little Russians. I think he would’ve gotten his way, one way or the other.

How much does Putin really represent Russia? You must have thought about this question.

Yeah. This is not universally shared, but I believe that Russia is an historically expansionist country. We’ve seen that over the centuries. I think Putin is in that tradition, of trying to rebuild, whether it’s the Soviet Union or the Russian empire or whatever you want to call it. But everything that I’m hearing from friends or friends of friends in Russia, is that people don’t want this. They think of Ukrainians as fellow Slavs, as brother Slavs, and they don’t want this war.

Ted Cruz earns his “whiteness”: The Republican attack on Ketanji Brown Jackson

Racism is not just a way of describing a person’s actions. It is a core part of their behavior, reasoning and values, and how they understand themselves in relationship to other human beings and the world. This is true of both racist individuals and racist societies.

Racists and those others invested in white supremacy and white privilege in its various forms will almost always reveal themselves. This is true regardless of their race or ethnicity.

Last week’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson offered many such moments. Presuming Jackson is confirmed, as appears likely, she will be the first Black woman (and third Black person) to be a Supreme Court justice in American history. There is no doubt Jackson is eminently qualified. She has had to excel, as both a Black person and a woman, in ways more than equal to her white and male colleagues in order to forge a successful legal career.

Racists, white supremacists and other racial authoritarians possess great appreciation for the power of spectacle and timing. Senate Republicans and their supporters in the larger white right would not let Jackson’s historic moment go by without attempting to twist it to their own purposes.

Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee (and their boosters in right-wing media) pounced on Jackson with a series of insidious lies and allegations drawn from the QAnon conspiracy theory. According to this narrative, she is a pedophile-protecting, criminal-coddling “anti-white” Black supremacist who embraces “critical race theory” and seeks to destroy the “traditional family.”

As Abby Zimet wrote for Common Dreams, Jackson’s hearings “turned into a noxious maelstrom of frat boy ‘whiteness at work’ thanks to the relentless, hectoring assaults by a ‘marauding band of racist, sexist visigoths’ of the GOP, who managed to turn a more-than-eminently qualified Black female judge into a child-porn-loving, critical-race-spewing danger to the Republic.” She continues:

Sadly, the most striking feature of almost four days of hearings was not the historical moment — a nation poised to add the first Black woman to its highest court — but the bullying, badgering, appalling histrionics of a motley collection of ignorant old white guys (and one young one) subjecting a Black woman to the kind of contemptuous “jackassery” that no white counterpart, even a sniveling, lying, bellicose, sexual assaulting bro, would ever suffer, like, say, being asked the definition of a woman or if babies are racist — WTF — all while still smiling.

At the Nation, Elie Mystal offered further context:

Toni Morrison says “the very serious function of racism is distraction,” but Jackson knew it wasn’t worth being distracted by [Ted] Cruz, or any of the small-minded and condescending white people arrayed against her on the Senate Judiciary Committee. She’s worked too hard and bested too many of the white man’s little traps to get tripped up near the finish line by senators who debase themselves and their offices for 30 seconds of attention on Tucker Carlson’s show. Jackson passed her test.

But it was hard to watch her be put through the crucible of white approval. The attacks used by Republicans against her weren’t about her qualifications: Everybody knows she’s more than qualified to be on the Supreme Court, and even most of the Republicans said so. The attacks weren’t about her personal behavior or ethics: Again, even Republicans remarked that she had lived a good life and there’s been no whiff of scandal, and no suggestion of sexual assault (which is not something you can say for all Supreme Court nominees).

Instead, Republicans simply pronounced her guilty by association with people and stereotypes of people they don’t think belong in America.

As Joy-Ann Reid of MSNBC shared on Twitter, “Critical Race Theory is the new N-word. Republicans are wielding it like a burning cross in order to persecute Black people.”

At Insider, Marguerite Ward observed that Jackson “was constantly interrupted and interrogated,” and that unlike Brett Kavanaugh, “who pounded his fists and yelled during his hearing, Jackson remained poised”:

Can you imagine being interrupted and repeatedly asked about a theory that you have not studied but that people assume you support because you are Black? Can you imagine being painted as a radical, though the theory, which repeatedly you say you don’t support, centers on the notion that racism is very real?

Ward also notes that while Justice Amy Coney Barrett was sharply questioned by Democrats during her own confirmation hearings, “she was not treated with the disrespect Jackson was.”

Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin called out Judiciary Committee Democrats, with one notable exception, for enabling these attacks through their cowardice. Chairman Dick Durbin, D-Ill., failed to enforce the committee’s rules, “allowing members to constantly badger Jackson.” Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., lodged a strong objection to Republican members’ conduct, but did so off camera and outside the hearing room. “Not until Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., the only African American on the committee, spoke did Republicans get their deserved pushback.”

Perhaps even more important, Rubin highlighted how the mainstream media was also culpable in enabling the racist attacks on Jackson, by failing “to convey the visual image of angry White men screaming and interrupting a Black woman, who dares not show anger for fear of being labeled unprofessional or lacking the correct temperament”:

Combined with the insinuations about her “softness” on child pornography and the hysterics on critical race theory, the aggression barely masked the Republican outpouring of White grievance.

It behooves Republicans who do not approve of this travesty to speak up. Meanwhile, Democrats should use their majority position to put an end to such conduct (cut off Republicans’ microphones or conclude the hearing until they act appropriately), and the media should not provide camouflage for it. The refusal to afford a historic nominee with respect she deserves and to denounce baseless accusations speaks volumes about our collective failure, still, to reckon with the original sin of racism.

For all of the undeserved attacks on her character, intelligence, personhood and qualifications, Jackson remained an indomitable example of Black excellence, Black dignity and Black humanity. Ironically, her poise and skill in the face of such outrageous disrespect demonstrated, in part, why so many white people of a certain political orientation — and others invested in white privilege and the status quo — remain terrified of Black Americans’ success in the face of enormous obstacles.

Jackson’s professional and personal success is a trigger for the deep anxieties and fears that many white people, especially white men, feel about their own shortcomings and inadequacies being revealed in a society that has elevated them in large part through unearned advantages. White privilege is paradoxical in that way: It is taken for granted as just being “normal,” but its beneficiaries are fearful of losing something they simultaneously refuse to admit is real.

Entirely too many political observers and pundits (the majority of which are white) insisted that Jackson’s hearing would have “no drama” and that Republicans would likely “behave themselves,” since they cannot realistically block Jackson’s confirmation and she will not change the ideological balance of the Supreme Court. Those voices were wrong, as they have been so many other things in the Age of Trump and beyond. White privilege and white racial innocence act as blinders to reality, a truth that goes well beyond those with overtly racist attitudes and runs deep in the media and political classes.

Ultimately, too many (white) members of the news media and the political elite are unable or unwilling to accept a self-evident fact: Today’s Republican Party and conservative movement are fundamentally white supremacist, and their leaders cannot abandon those beliefs and that ideology because racial hatred, bigotry and white identity politics pay great political dividends, along with other material and psychological rewards.

Even by the low standard established by the other Republicans on the Judiciary Committee who attacked Jackson, Sen. Ted Cruz’s behavior stood out as especially execrable. Two moments were especially noteworthy. At one point during last Wednesday’s proceedings, Cruz posed this “question” to Jackson:

But let me ask, under the modern leftist sensibilities, if I decide right now that I’m a woman, and apparently I’m a woman. Does that mean that I would have Article III standing to challenge a gender-based restriction?… OK, if I can change my gender, if I can be a woman and an hour later if I decide that I’m not a woman anymore, I guess I would lose Article III standing. Tell me, does that same principle apply to other protected characteristics? For example, I’m an Hispanic man. Could I decide I was an Asian man? Would I have the ability to be an Asian man and challenge Harvard’s discrimination because I made that decision? … I’m asking you how you would assess standing if I came in and said if I have decided I identify as an Asian man.

Cruz is of course engaging in fear-mongering and outright distortion about gender identity, LGBTQ rights and race. His attack on Jackson also illustrates the complexities of white supremacy and the color line in post-civil rights America, where many nonwhite people are also invested in white supremacy and anti-Black attitudes and behavior.

Cruz’s attacks on Jackson are a way for him to earn his “whiteness,” and in doing so bolster his popularity among Republican voters. Race has always been a social construct that changes over time; whiteness and what groups are deemed to be “white” are malleable categories. Cruz identified himself as “an Hispanic man” in his “questioning” of Jackson, but Hispanics and Latinos are a highly diverse ethnic and cultural group, not a “race” per se. Some members of that group are Black and brown, while others identify as “white”. Some Hispanics and Latinos are not (yet) defined as “white” in America’s system of racial categorization but yearn for whiteness and its privileges.

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In addition, “colorism” and anti-Black racism are relatively common within or between Hispanic and Latino communities and play a prominent role in such calculations and behaviors. It’s important to recognize that white supremacy is an ideology and belief system. Skin color is not a requirement for doing the work of white supremacy. Justice Clarence Thomas, to cite the most obvious example, is unquestionably a Black man who for many years has supported white supremacy through his rulings, legal philosophy and other behavior. In fact, he is one of America’s most dangerous white supremacist leaders.

Last month, well before Jackson’s confirmation hearings, Ted Cruz made his white supremacist views clear during an appearance on Fox News, claiming that “Democrats today believe in racial discrimination, they’re committed to it as a political proposition.” He was objecting to President Biden’s commitment to nominate the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court:

What the president said is that only African-American women are eligible for this slot … that 94% of Americans are ineligible…. I think our country has such a troubled history on race, we ought to move past discriminating based on race. The way Biden ought to do it is to say I’m going to look for the best justice, interview a lot of people. And if he happened to nominate a justice who was an African-American woman, great. But you know what? If Fox News put a posting, we’re looking for a new host for “Fox News Sunday” and we will only hire an African-American woman or a Hispanic man or a Native American woman, that would be illegal. Nobody else can do what Joe Biden did.

There is obvious partisan and racial hypocrisy at work here: Presidents have wide latitude to determine which individuals they will consider for the Supreme Court or other prominent appointments. Most notably, Ronald Reagan promised to nominate the first female Supreme Court justice, and even Donald Trump vowed to appoint a woman after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s death. There was no outcry from Republicans about those decisions being “discriminatory.”

For most of the country’s history, full and equal citizenship in American society was not possible for Black people. Indeed, it was literally illegal: Black people were considered first and foremost human property, and even the possibility of their freedom and equality were viewed as antithetical to white freedom and white democracy.

The long arc of improving American democracy has in large part also been the story of Black Americans and their struggle to be acknowledged as full human beings and equal citizens under the law. That has made the Black Freedom Struggle in America a template for other marginalized and oppressed peoples around the world.

Ted Cruz is a highly intelligent man, a graduate of Harvard Law School. He certainly understood the context and history of his attack on Jackson in suggesting that her place in history and her seat on the Supreme Court were “illegal.”

Ketanji Brown Jackson did not allow Cruz and the other Republican attackers to make her into some type of white racist and sexist caricature. She is poised to become the first Black woman on the Supreme Court. But make no mistake: The empire always strikes back, and the Republican fascists and their followers will continue to do everything possible to destroy her, even once she is seated on the court.

Jackson will succeed and triumph nonetheless. Not because Jackson she is a “strong Black woman” — with all of the painful and often dehumanizing burdens and obligations that stereotype entails — but simply because she is a talented legal scholar, a genuine public servant and a communicator of great poise, grace and wit, who — unlike several of her future colleagues — has been preparing for this moment for decades and has earned the honor and responsibility of being a Supreme Court justice.

We didn’t start the fire — Trump and Putin did. But we’ve got to put it out

Last week while in southern Ukraine, I ran into a woman who had once lived in the United States. She told me that life here had reminded her of a runaway hay wagon on fire rolling into a small village. Instead of fleeing or trying to put the flames out, the American people argue about who’s at fault for starting the fire while the village burns.

A day after I heard that sage observation I was in Poland, where President Biden was speaking. He made a comment about Putin that was nothing more than a heartfelt observation following a prolonged meeting with Ukrainian refugees. “For God’s sake, this man can’t remain in power,” he said. The world cheered and Biden’s over-protective staff cringed, trying to walk back or clarify the statement less than an hour later. Then the president came forward the following day to clarify the clarification, standing by what he said in the first place and further explaining it.

To me, it was like watching people beat the guy to death who said the villagers should get water and put out the fiery hay wagon.

I got home just in time not to watch the Oscars ceremony and after the “slap heard around the world” made its way into my social media feed, I couldn’t be bothered. I muttered that I’d just seen displaced people, maimed and injured Ukrainians and colleagues who had died trying to report on the war. I really didn’t care who slapped who or why.

That made a few people angry. I’ll stand by my initial reaction. Arguing over a single stick on fire while the wagon burns seems silly to me, but I will say this: We seem to have forgotten the old adage about sticks and stones, and my father’s warning about starting fights. As a comedian, if you have to worry about getting slapped every time you make a joke that doesn’t land, well, there are either going to be a lot of bruised comics or a lot less comedy in America.

And that, my friends, is what the fiery wagon actually means for us: We’ve lost the ability to reason, along with our sense of humor. We’re not arguing over who’s at fault for the fiery wagon, we’re frozen in fear of it. Some of us aren’t even sure the wagon’s on fire. No one will joke about it.

That, by the way, is precisely the goal behind the steady stream of disinformation we’ve been fed by our politicians and press for at least the last two decades. We are fearful, brittle and unable to laugh — or even just frown at a bad joke. Unable to argue about who’s at fault for the fiery wagon, some of us are just pouring gasoline on it.

Those who are encouraging the fire are also stifling those who are trying to put it out — sometimes making us doubt the fire can or should be extinguished.

Take, for example, a question I asked of Kate Bedingfield, the White House director of communications, who briefed the press for the first time on Tuesday. She stepped up to the podium because Jen Psaki and her principal deputy, Karine Jean-Pierre, are both out of the office due to COVID. They’re both fine, apparently, but staying home for now.

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Bedingfield did well in her first outing, even laughing off a ridiculous question about a hypothetical bombing by Israeli forces that sounded as if it came from the mind of a five-year-old. But she couldn’t or wouldn’t explain the administration’s inability to assist Ukraine in providing air cover over its own skies. Granted, a “no-fly” zone administered by the U.S. military would inevitably lead to a confrontation with Russia that few but Vladimir Putin seem to want. There are other ways to assist, however. Ukrainian authorities I spoke with recently suggested a lend-lease act, similar to the one enacted to aid European allies before the U.S. entered the last major ground war in Europe (that would be World War II, for those who wonder). So I asked:

Has that been approached? Has the administration considered that?

Bedingfield: Well, I think the President has been explicitly clear that he does not intend to engage U.S. troops in any way in direct conflict with the Russian military.

Right. But this wouldn’t be troops.

Bedingfield: I’m sorry?

This wouldn’t be troops. They’re talking about lend-lease for the aircraft, and they would supply the pilots.

Bedingfield: So, I guess, a couple of things: One is the assessment of our military is that the anti-air, anti-tank, the munitions that we’re providing to the Ukrainians are the most effective things that they can have on the battlefield. That’s the assessment of our military commanders and, of course, something that the president factors significantly into his decision making.

The second thing I would say is that, again, he has been very clear that he is not interested in engaging the U.S. military in direct conflict with Russia. And there are — for example, on the question of the MiGs, there are significant logistical challenges that may raise those issues. As to whether there’s a specific discussion about lend-lease, I don’t have any further detail that I can provide on that, except to just lay out those two key points that have really been driving the president’s thinking and decision making on this.

That would be a classic example of a non-answer, kind of like answering the question of whether or not the wagon was on fire by saying, “Squirrel!” and pointing in the general direction of the nearest tree.

The amount of disinformation and misinformation about air superiority in Ukraine has been exacerbated by poor reporting, thus confusing the issue and perhaps the administration’s response. Maybe the White House doesn’t want to tell us the truth for fear we’ll misunderstand the answer. It’s hard to believe that Biden is unaware what lend-lease is, though perhaps Bedingfield is; still, the larger question remains about the need for Ukrainian air support. Our military assessment of what Ukraine needs doesn’t jibe with the fact that the country keeps getting bombed with impunity — so why can’t we put out that fire?

Biden recently pledged another $500 million in military aid for Ukraine. We’re already supplying a wide variety of high-tech munitions, so you have to wonder why a few airplanes that Ukrainians can fly themselves aren’t in the offing. Shortly after noon on Tuesday, Biden seemed to address that in a brief statement after speaking with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He said they had discussed weapons the U.S. has already contributed and “the critical effects those weapons have had on the conflict, and continued efforts by the United States with allies and partners to identify additional capabilities to help the Ukrainian military defend its country.”

Meanwhile, Donald Trump has a thing or two to say, of course. Keeping it real, Trump issued a press statement at about the same time I asked that question in the briefing, saying it was “100 percent true” that he’d made a hole-in-one on the seventh hole at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach. “Many people are asking,” Trump said in his statement. “Anyway, there’s a lot of chatter about it, quite exciting.”

A short time later, he asked Putin to release information about Hunter Biden’s laptop. At least we know he’s got his priorities straight.

Turns out Trump is the guy who doesn’t care about the fiery wagon or the burning village unless it benefits him — and in the meantime, he wants you to know how great he is at golf.

Billy Joel was right: We didn’t start the fire, but we sure as hell have added to the conflagration.

That’s where Putin and his demonic endeavors thrive — in the middle of horror, strife and war. As it turns out, he lit the wagon on fire and pushed it into the village. He and others like him, including the traitorous Trump and all his minions, have purposely misled the rest of us so they can loot the village as it burns. Of course it’s possible Trump is merely the village idiot con-man.

Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer and now one of his greatest critics, told me something recently that puts all this into perspective. He said he had told an acquaintance who still loves Trump that he only feels that way because he’s still making money off Trump. The man nodded in the affirmative and Cohen said, “You’re willing to sell democracy for a dollar? When democracy is gone, do you think you get to keep the dollar?”

Trump doesn’t care about you. Putin doesn’t care either. These are the people who want to watch it burn. They don’t care about the village. They don’t care about the villagers. They only care about themselves.

The rest of us have to prioritize our response. Put out the fire. Prosecute the arsonists. Rebuild the village. Together.

We can do without the village idiot and the guy who set the wagon on fire.

Read more from Brian Karem on the Biden White House:

Sanders still championing for universal Medicare

Just a day after a panel in the U.S. House of Representatives met to discuss universal healthcare legislation, Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders announced that he plans to hold a Medicare for All hearing this May.

“I’m happy to inform members of this committee that in early May we will be having a hearing—right here, in this committee—on the need to pass a Medicare for All single-payer program,” Sanders (I-Vt.) said during a meeting on President Joe Biden’s latest budget proposal.

Sanders, a longtime single-payer advocate, declared that “as a nation, we should understand what every other major country does: Healthcare is a human right, not a privilege.”

“The function of a rational healthcare system is to provide healthcare to all in a cost-effective way—not to allow private insurance companies and private drug companies to make obscene levels of profit,” he added.

The committee chair also highlighted that according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), “Medicare for All would save the American people and our entire healthcare system $650 billion each and every year.”

Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.), who co-chaired the House Oversight Committee’s Tuesday hearing about Medicare for All, welcomed Sanders’ remarks.

When people ask why yesterday’s Medicare for All hearing matters, this is what we’re talking about.⁰⁰The momentum to guarantee health care as a human right is real here in Congress.

Thank you @SenSanders, excited to watch! https://t.co/Vxgdr1veli

— Congresswoman Cori Bush (Archived) (@RepCori) March 30, 2022

As Common Dreams reported, during the House event, Bush asserted that “Congress must implement a system that prioritizes people over profits, humanity over greed, and compassion over exploitation.”

“This policy will save lives, I want to make that clear,” she added. “I hope this hearing will be one more step forward in our commitment to ensuring everyone in this country, and particularly our Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities, have the medical care they need to thrive.”

White House Correspondent says Trump is “mentally unwell”

CNN White House Correspondent John Harwood says Donald Trump, the former president, “is mentally unwell in a way that makes him interested exclusively in what benefits him.”

“Distinctions between true-false, right-wrong, America’s friends, America’s enemies are irrelevant to Donald Trump,” Harwood added on Wednesday morning on CNN’s “New Day,” in response to what the cable news outlet is calling “Trump’s brazen request to Putin.”

“Russia has helped him financially and politically over the years,” Harwood continued, “and he has aligned himself with Vladimir Putin. This is significant not just because he was president, but he’s the leader of one of America’s two political parties, he might be president again. And this is a moment of moral clarity. When Vladimir Putin is slaughtering thousands of people in Ukraine, for Republicans who do care about the difference between right-wrong, true-false, America’s friends, America’s enemies, to reflect on whether this is the person they want to attach their party to.”

CNN reports that in “a new interview published Tuesday, former President Donald Trump called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to release any damaging information he has about the Biden family, in a brazen request for domestic political assistance from America’s top adversary.”

Watch Harwood:

"Donald Trump is mentally unwell in a way that makes him interested exclusively in what benefits him."

CNN White House correspondent @JohnJHarwood reacts to a new interview where Donald Trump asks Putin for intel on the Bidens. Watch the moment here: https://t.co/GjUYRKXFob pic.twitter.com/k67KbDnbzG

— CNN (@CNN) March 30, 2022

“House of the Dragon” is coming: Here’s everything we know about the “Game of Thrones” spinoff

“Game of Thrones” may have concluded its eight-season run almost three years ago but the show is gearing up to return this August with an upcoming spinoff called “House of the Dragon.” The 10-episode prequel series, which will also premiere on HBO, travels back in time — almost two centuries before the events of “Game of Thrones” — and chronicles the Dance of the Dragons, a brutal civil war fought between rival groups within House Targaryen.

“House of the Dragon” is based on George R.R. Martin’s 2018 fantasy novel “Fire & Blood” from his “A Song of Ice and Fire” series. The novel follows multiple generations of the Targaryen family, including the “Conquering Aegon (Daenerys Targaryen’s greatest-grandfather-uncle) and his sister-wives, Visenya and Rhaenys, a Holy Blond Trinity of fantasy archetypes: one steady ruler, one imperial warrior, one dreamy explorer,” explained TV critic Darren Franich’s in his review for Entertainment Weekly.

Yep, you read that right. The Targaryens were incestuous long before two Lannister twins tried to steal their thunder. Get ready for a lot more dragons and peroxide blonde hair.

Here’s who’s starring:

King Viserys Targaryen (Paddy Considine) is the chosen successor of the Old King, Jaehaerys Targaryen, at the Great Council at Harrenhal. Targaryen is described as a good-natured man which is foreboding in Martin’s fantasy world because “good men to do not necessarily make for great kings.” And yes, that name is also shared by his descendant, the brother of Daenerys the Unburnt who received his fatal “crown of gold.”

Prince Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith) is Viserys’ younger brother, who is a peerless warrior and a dragonrider

Emma D’Arcy as Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen and Matt Smith as Prince Daemon Targaryen in “Game of Thrones” prequel “House of the Dragon” (Ollie Upton/HBO)Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy) is Viserys & Daemon’s sister and a dragonrider herself

Lord Corlys Velaryon (Steve Toussaint) is the powerful Lord of House Velaryon who is commonly known as “The Sea Snake.”

Princess Rhaenys Targaryen (Eve Best) is Lord Corlys Velaryon’s wife and Viserys’ cousin.

Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans) is The Hand of the King

Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke) is Otto’s graceful daughter, who is also thought of as “the most comely woman in the Seven Kingdoms”

Ser Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel) is the common-born son of the steward to the Lord of Blackhaven and a skilled swordsman.

Mysaria (Sonoya Mizuno) is an ally of Prince Daemon Targaryen

Additional cast members include Milly Alcock, Bethany Antonia, Phoebe Campbell and Emily Carey.

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In October, HBO Max released the show’s teaser trailer, which did not offer many words except for this cryptic message: “Dreams didn’t make us kings. Dragons did.”

“House of the Dragon” debuts Sunday, Aug. 21 on HBO. Watch the official teaser trailer below, via YouTube:

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First look: See Elliot Page’s “Umbrella Academy” transition for the third season

Elliot Page’s character on the Netflix superhero series “The Umbrella Academy” is getting an exciting update in the new season.

On Tuesday, the actor announced on Twitter that his character— will come out as transgender in the third season, according to Variety. Page’s character will leave his previous presentation and name behind and will now be known as Viktor Hargreeves, using he/him/his pronouns, in line with the actor’s own transition. Because of his musical bent and ability to transform sound into physical force, he’s also known as the White Violin. He previously thought he lacked the super powers of his six adoptive siblings, but in actuality, they had been repressed.

Page shared a photo of Viktor in his recent tweet with the caption “Meet Viktor Hargreeves” next to an umbrella emoji. Netflix later retweeted the post and also welcomed Viktor to the Umbrella Academy family.

Meet Viktor Hargreeves ☂️@UmbrellaAcad pic.twitter.com/ZraQNBhfTb

— Elliot Page (@TheElliotPage) March 29, 2022

“FEELS SO GOOD TO SAY THIS: Elliot Page stars as Viktor Hargreeves in Umbrella Academy S3!!!,” wrote the streaming giant’s LGBTQ+ focused account, Most, in a separate tweet.

In December 2020, Page came out as transgender and identified as non-binary — the actor uses he/they pronouns — in a heartfelt Instagram post. At the time, Netflix confirmed that Page would continue to star on “The Umbrella Academy” but inside sources reportedly told Variety that his character’s gender would remain unchanged.

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The upcoming and highly anticipated season promises more adventures for the Hargreeves siblings and clan. A new villain will also be introduced, forcing members of the Umbrella Academy and the swanky Sparrow Academy from an alternate timeline to set aside their differences and team up. “Will they find a way back to their pre-apocalyptic lives? Or is this new world about to reveal more than just a hiccup in the timeline?” the logline from Netflix asks.

Tom Hopper, David Castañeda, Emmy Raver-Lampan, Robert Sheehan, Aidan Gallagher, Justin H. Min and more will also star alongside Page.

“Umbrella Academy” Season 3 and Victor Hargreeves make their debuts on June 22 on Netflix.

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With the sleepy “Moon Knight,” come for the MCU, but stay for Oscar Isaac’s dodgy cockney accent

Is there a franchise other than the Marvel Cinematic Universe that’s as skilled at lending its most mediocre titles an air of essentiality by hiring A-list talent? Even if there were a contender, the outright volume of interrelated titles and relationship upkeep places the MCU in a plane of reality by itself.

Marvel’s latest entry “Moon Knight” stars Oscar Isaac, the man who gifted Poe Dameron to the “Star Wars” universe, with Ethan Hawke playing the adversary to Isaac’s hero and features the voice of Oscar-winner F. Murray Abraham. Quite a lineup to sell a hero mainly known to deep-diving comics enthusiasts, and one with Orientalist leanings to boot.

Suited up, Moon Knight is a standard issue vigilante dating back to 1975 with connections to The Avengers and The Defenders. He has superior athletic ability whose powers, including superhuman strength, healing abilities and resurrection, come from the Egyptian moon god Khonshu.

What makes the character unique, and here is where Isaac becomes indispensable, is that he’s the alter ego of a man with dissociative identity disorder, which means he’s linked to two people living in the same body. The first one we meet is Steven Grant, a gentle, meek, disrespected gift shop clerk at a British museum that under-appreciates his Egyptology expertise. Considering the passion Isaac stirs up in his fans, it’s almost adorable to see him persuasively play a guy so inept at interpersonal interaction, and doing the simplest tasks at work, that some of his co-workers don’t even bother to learn his name.

Like every other hero, Steven has hidden depths so obscured to him that he can’t explain, for example, why he goes to bed in his humble London flat and wakes up in a Swiss Alpine village with machine-gun toting men chasing him.

Isaac’s aptitude for swimming between comedy and drama gets a workout in these scenes, which he carries off with enough aplomb to compensate for his, shall we say, questionable cockney accent. It’s not that he whiffs the imitation; rather, he nails the dialectic nuances, including the casual interjections of “alright?” and “yeah?” aptly enough to call attention to the parts that aren’t fully crisped.

Meeting his other identity, Marc Spector – American mercenary and expert killer – helps a person to get over whatever irritation that aspect of Isaac’s performance causes, since Marc is the reason Steven survives the various assaults he either stumbles into or wakes up on the other side of, hands bloodied. Marc is the personality beholden to Khonshu (voiced by Abraham), and the deity is far less patient with Steven than Marc must be.

But Marc also is the type of man we’re accustomed to watching in these roles – a brooding lone wolf who cuts himself off from those he loves, including Layla (May Calamawy). Marc communicates with Steven via mirrors and reflective surfaces like, say, polished stone, glass – any shiny surface, truly, and in “Moon Knight” he’s constantly happening upon them. This enables us to enjoy the sight of two disparate performances in one frame as well as appreciating how much more enjoyable Steven is than Marc.

All told, “Moon Knight” is an odd show in that it gives us characters and actors we’d love to spend more time with, albeit in tauter scenarios than the one presented here. Those who appreciate TV as an art form groan at producers’ hackneyed declaration that their show is “really more like a 10-hour movie.” Well, this cuts in the opposite direction, a six-hour series that would have worked better as a two-and-a-half-hour film.

Lead writer Jeremy Slater and his team luxuriate in the show’s origin story past the point of interest, so much that we barely see much of the weird man in that white suit during its first episode. Most of what happens in the 45-minute episode could have gone down in about half that time without losing any context.

Granted, if you enjoy Isaac’s aptitude for physical comedy, consider yourself amply served by the heart of that episode, specifically slap-happy mountain road car chase involving pastries and lots of frightened yelling. But that comes at the cost of seeing the title hero in action.

There is something to be said for Slater and director Mohamed Diab leaning into the notion of implied violence as opposed to explicitly showing Steven or Marc bloodying noses or impaling, stabbing or shooting people. Movie and television contains violence to space, enough to satisfy prurient appetites until the sun burns out.

Even so, “Moon Knight” does not sufficiently compensate for the dearth of action with narrative complexity. One of the most creative decisions Slater makes is also underutilized, which refers to Steven’s wonderfully nerd interpretation of the super suit he can summon as opposed to the version in which we see Marc. That choice is excellent for a laugh while also lampooning other fantasy franchises’ pictures of what a hero looks like; it’s also a marvelous character note for a mild-mannered literalist like Steven.

As the premise hints the story eventually travels from Britain to Egypt, of which Diab makes a visual feast in its depictions of bustling urban areas and silken desert landscapes surrounding the pyramids. But this trip occurs with little in the way of psychological zig-zags or conflicts beyond Marc and Steven arguing over who gets to control the body they share.

Hawke offers no stress or urgency as Arthur Harrow, the chilly servant of a rival Egyptian god hunting Steven. He comes across less like a challenging, frightening villain than a man doing this job purely for the paycheck and to impress his kids – and if that’s the case, fair enough!

However, he could at the very least put a few drops of sweat and blood into the effort for the sake of everyone investing time in this show. One could argue that he’s simply matching a level established by other god-related characters, a few of whom we meet in a listless scene depicting a conclave of the Egyptian pantheon’s rock stars. But god-related fables should not be boring, even though “Eternals” didn’t exactly set a better standard in that regard. “Moon Knight” could turn up in that storyline but, based on what this show establishes, its difficult to envision Isaac’s character adding much.

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There’s also the matter of how the series treats the psychological disorder that defines Isaac’s character, one of several defining traits that make the classic Moon Knight story, shall we say, potentially problematic.

I cannot speak with any authority on how accurate or respectful the series portrays DID. However, the script takes a few hours to acknowledge the length of time that Marc existed in the world without Steven and vice versa. Nothing in the quartet of episodes provided for review explain when and why these dual personalities come to be, although a turn at the fourth’s close may lead into that.

If the road leading to that point was much shorter didn’t play like a dull retread of every tomb-raiding story Hollywood has churned out since the first of the Indiana Jones movies, Isaac and Calamawy may have provided enough of a reason to sit through “Moon Knight.”

There also remains a chance the story could improve and enrich in the closing pair of episodes, if you have the patience to get there. But as it stands, “Moon Knight” may be one of those puzzle details someone else can fill in for you in the future prior to enjoying a better adaptation of another (and somehow related) Marvel adventure.

“Moon Knight” debuts Wednesday, March 30 on Disney+ with new episodes premiering weekly. Watch a trailer for it below, via YouTube.

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What is aphasia and who gets it? Inside the condition that led Bruce Willis to retire from acting

Bruce Willis, the 67-year-old star of numerous classic blockbusters from “Die Hard” and “Armageddon” to “The Sixth Sense,” announced on Wednesday that he has been diagnosed with aphasia and will be retiring from acting for now.

According to a post on the Instagram account of Rumer Willis, the actor’s daughter, her father is “experiencing some health issues and has recently been diagnosed with aphasia, which is impacting his cognitive abilities.”

Willis added: “As a result of this and with much consideration Bruce is stepping away from the career that has meant so much to him. This is a really challenging time for our family and we are so appreciative of your continued love, compassion and support.”

It is not difficult to see why someone with aphasia would struggle as an actor. The term “aphasia” refers to conditions which damage portions of the brain related to language. Patients with aphasia will struggle with basic skills including speaking, writing and reading. Since most people perform these tasks using the left side of their brain, aphasia victims usually suffer either a stroke or head injury that impacts that region. However, aphasia can also be caused by progressive neurological diseases and tumors.

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People with aphasia fall into two broader categories: Those with fluent aphasia (the most common type of which is Wernicke’s aphasia) and those with nonfluent aphasia (the most common type is known as Broca’s aphasia). The key difference between the two is that those with fluent aphasia tend to utter phrases that lack meaning, even though based on a purely auditory level they seem coherent. Those with fluent aphasia are capable of speaking in lengthy sentences, but often those sentences will include unnecessary words or gibberish. In addition, they will struggle with comprehending speech. People with this form of aphasia suffered damage to the side part of that brain which is language-dominant.

By contrast, people with nonfluent aphasia have suffered damage the front portion of their brain’s language-dominant regions. While they can sometimes understand what other people are saying and know what they want to say themselves, they can find it difficult to say anything more than short sentences. In addition, they will often omit words that they intended to use. People with Broca’s aphasia may also suffer from physical symptoms including weakness or paralysis in their right arm and/or leg.

If a person has suffered damage to extensive portions of the language-controlling areas of the brain, that condition is known as global aphasia. In those cases, patients will have extreme difficulty with both language comprehension and speaking.

While it is possible to cover completely from aphasia without treatment, most patients will suffer lingering effects even after they have been treated. Speech therapists usually help aphasia victims try to cope with their condition, but family members are also encouraged to adapt to an aphasia patient’s lifestyle. This includes treating them with dignity, such as not correcting them and giving them enough time to speak, as well as accommodating them such as repeating and writing down the most important words.

“Aphasia might get better over time, but many people are left with some loss of language skills,” explains Johns Hopkins Medicine. “Speech therapy can often be helpful, as can other tools, such as computers that can help people communicate.”

Willis is not the first celebrity to develop a high-profile case of aphasia. Emilia Clarke, best known as an actress from “Game of Thrones,” suffered a subarachnoid hemorrhage which caused aphasia. She later recalled that “nonsense words tumbled out of my mouth and I went into a blind panic. I’d never experienced fear like that—a sense of doom closing in. I could see my life ahead, and it wasn’t worth living. I am an actor; I need to remember my lines. Now I couldn’t recall my name.”

Another high-profile aphasia victim is former Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in the head during an assassination attempt in 2011. Because of her brain injury, she has nonfluent aphasia today and can speak only in single words or short phrases.

For more Salon stores on neurology:

The one simple tip that made my homemade focaccia instantly better

Once the pandemic hit, the types of content shared in my bread baking groups on social media slowly began to shift. As grocery store shelves thinned out, there were desperate pleas to buy flour and yeast from fellow bakers. Hoards of new members began sharing photographs of their sourdough starters; the new ones were welcomed with names, while the old ones were mourned when they stopped bubbling. What’s more, a certain genre of video began to dominate timelines.

The videos all began in a similar fashion. The camera would linger on a bulbous, smooth ball of airy dough until a hand appeared out of frame to punch the center like a boxer jabbing at a bag. It would, of course, deflate, and the camera would again linger on the indentation. The comments section was populated with some variation of the words “so satisfying.”

After the first rise, many recipes call for the baker to deflate — or “punch down” — the dough. It’s an important step: When the dough is punched down, the yeast cells are redistributed. They form a closer bond with the moisture and sugar, which aids fermentation and improves the second rise.

To boot, it was a moment in time when seemingly everyone was “rage baking” or “stress baking.” As a result, there was something inherently satisfying about this part of the bread-baking process.

It was also around the same time that I began to bake focaccia. I, too, derived pleasure from feeling the weight of the dough sink underneath my clenched fist. It felt not only controlled but also intensely dramatic. I could see Nicolas Cage’s Ronny Cammareri, the charismatic baker from “Moonstruck,” raging about something while aggressively punching an industrial-sized vat of dough. (I could see it so vividly that I had to rewatch the movie to see if such a scene actually existed; it doesn’t.)

Though the process was satisfying, my focaccia was always a little bit . . . off. While the focaccia I loved to order from bakeries and restaurants had an airiness and lightness, mine always looked compact in comparison. I turned to my bread baking groups for help. Everyone had a suggestion: buy a different flour, use sparkling instead of still water in the dough or pray to the bread gods for mercy.

Nothing really clicked until a helpful commenter posted a YouTube video of professional baker and cookbook writer Claire Saffitz making focaccia. “Skip ahead to 6 minutes in,” they wrote. “I think this will help you.”

At this point in the video, Saffitz’s focaccia has completed its first rise. Instead of punching it down, she makes a point to gently fold the dough instead.

“I’m going to go down around the sides and lift it up,” she said. “Then I give it a little wiggle and give the bowl a little turn.”

Saffitz repeated this step over and over until beautiful pockets of air formed under her fingers and bubbled up to the surface of the dough ball. Those bubbles remained through the second rise and the baking process, leaving the finished product similarly light to the bakery focaccia I so coveted.

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The next day, I pulled out my ingredients to attempt the same technique — and it worked. My focaccia went from flat and dense to fully-risen with a gorgeous open crumb. There’s a bread baking technique to back this up.

As Elizabeth Yetter wrote in her helpful primer “How To Punch Down Bread Dough,” the more air pockets “you can remove from the dough, the finer the grain (or crumb) will be.” While that’s great for sandwich bread or sweet rolls, it’s not as desirable for loaves, like focaccia, where you want airiness.

I feel as though there’s some metaphor here, right? At this point, we’re years into the pandemic. After the world has punched us down (so much), maybe a gentler touch is what we need in order to thrive. However, if you find yourself wanting the palpable satisfaction of punching into a ball of dough, perhaps pie crust is in your future?

This piece originally appeared in The Bite, Salon’s weekly food newsletter. Sign up here to make sure you don’t miss any original essays, how-tos and recipes.

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Following wins by other food industry unions, 50,000 California grocery workers authorize a strike

In a move aligned with the recent efforts of Starbucks and King Soopers employees to demand better working conditions, roughly 47,000 California grocery store workers have voted for their union to authorize a strike if current negotiations for a better contract are not successful.

This week, talks between union leaders and representatives from the Kroger Family of Companies — which owns chains including Ralphs, King Soopers, Albertsons, Vons and Pavilions — will continue after months of deliberation, and the pressure to keep business as usual is on.

These contract negotiations cover various demands from employees, like better pay amid historic inflation, increased staffing, better scheduling and improved safety and security in stores.

As CBS News reported, “The union said…that the companies’ wage proposal amounted to a 60-cent increase that was “shockingly low” and well below workers’ cost-of-living needs. Employees were asking for a $5-an-hour raise, among other proposals.”

Bargaining originally began in January, and has continued on since then without a result. The previous contract expired earlier this month, on March 6th, without an agreement.

The thousands of workers represented today are employed at stores like Ralphs, Albertsons, Vons, and Pavillions, situated in the central and southern regions of the golden state. The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union has several locals represented among the employees, which could mean a huge labor shortage for the various roles in each store. The walk-out could include pharmacists and grocery clerks, as well as deli and bakery workers, and any other specialized roles that customers depend on.

This isn’t the first time that these workers have had to threaten withholding their labor. In 2019, employees from these exact four grocery stores voted to authorize a strike, but an agreement was met before it was necessary.

As Salon reported in February, employees at King Soopers, which is also owned by Kroger, also opted to strike for increased wages and employee safety measures.

More stories about the labor behind our food systems:

“The Girl From Plainville”: The real-life texting-suicide case behind Hulu’s true crime series

If Hulu’s latest series “The Girl From Plainville,” which released its first three episodes on March 29, sounds familiar, that’s because the real crime it’s based on made headlines in 2017.

In the series, Elle Fanning (“The Great”) plays Michelle Carter, who encourages her 18-year-old boyfriend Conrad Roy III (Colton Ryan, “Dear Evan Hansen”) through text messages to kill himself. Over the course of eight episodes, Hulu dramatizes the events leading up to the 2014 suicide and the subsequent investigation and trial that eventually convicted Carter of involuntary manslaughter.

Carter’s case, which notably raised questions about mental health and criminal responsibility, was previously explored in the 2018 Lifetime made for TV movie “Conrad & Michelle: If Words Could Kill” and in the 2019 HBO documentary, “I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth Vs. Michelle Carter,” from filmmaker Erin Lee Carr.

Here’s everything you need to know about the “texting-suicide” case:

The beginnings of a tragic relationship

Carter and Roy’s story dates back to 2012 when the pair met in Florida while on vacation with relatives. They lived only an hour away from each other in the Boston suburbs — Roy in Fairhaven and Carter in Plainville — but strictly communicated via phone and text message. Throughout their relationship, they met in-person just five times.

Roy, who struggled with social anxiety and depression, allegedly suffered from physical and mental abuse at the hands of his father and grandfather. In October 2012, Roy planned his first suicide attempt but was discouraged by Carter, who encouraged him to “get professional help.” But two years later, shortly after Roy’s second attempt, Carter’s attitudes shifted and she began urging him to kill himself, even sending step-by-step instructions on how to successfully do it.

On July 13, 2014, Roy died by suicide. Carter’s final text to Roy encouraged him to continue even though Roy indicated he was scared.

Additional texts on Roy’s phone revealed a slew of shocking messages from Carter: “Drink bleach. Just drink bleach,” “Why haven’t you done it yet tho?” “If u don’t do it now you’re never gonna do it.” Another horrifying conversation, obtained from C NN, showcased a separate instance when Carter encouraged Roy to end his life:

CARTER: I think your parents know you’re in a really bad place. I’m not saying they want you to do it but I honestly feel like they can accept it. They know there is nothing they can do. They’ve tried helping. Everyone’s tried, but there is a point that comes where there isn’t anything anyone can do to save you, not even yourself. And you’ve hit that point and I think your parents know you’ve hit that point. You said your mom saw a suicide thing on your computer and she didn’t say anything. I think she knows it’s on your mind and she’s prepared for it. Everyone will be sad for a while but they will get over it and move on. They won’t be in depression. I won’t let that happen. They know how sad you are, and they know that you are doing this to be happy and I think they will understand and accept it. They will always carry you in their hearts.
ROY: Aww. Thank you, Michelle.
CARTER: They will move on for you because they know that’s what you would have wanted. They know you wouldn’t want them to be sad and depressed and be angry and guilty. They know you want them to live their lives and be happy. So they will for you. You’re right. You need to stop thinking about this and just do it because over turning always kills, over thinking.
ROY: Yeah, it does. I’ve been thinking about it for too long.
CARTER: Always smile, and, yeah, you have to just do it. You have everything you need. There is no way you can fail. Tonight is the night. It’s now or never.

Shortly after Roy’s death, Carter became a prominent figure at her school and received sympathy from friends and Roy’s friends. Her reputation soon took a turn after investigators uncovered Roy and Carter’s text exchanges, which prompted Carter’s trial and eventual conviction.

Commonwealth v. Michelle Carter

Carter, who was 17 at the time, was indicted in February 2015 and arraigned the following day on charges of involuntary manslaughter. In June 2017, the trial was decided and Carter was officially found guilty of her charges.

“Carter’s actions and also her failure to act where she had a self-created duty to Mr. Roy, since she had put him in that toxic environment, constituted each and all wanton and reckless conduct,” explained Judge Moniz, who announced Carter’s conviction, per People.

“She [instructed] Mr. Roy to get back into the truck, well-knowing of all of the feelings that he [had] exchanged with her: his ambiguities, his fears, his concerns,” he added.

“She did nothing. She did not call the police or Mr. Roy’s family. Finally, she did not issue a simple additional instruction [to Roy to stop].”

Carter was subsequently sentenced to two and a half years in prison — she served only 15 months of that sentence and the remaining were suspended. Carter’s lawyers also petitioned the Supreme Court to reconsider her case, arguing that her conviction violated her freedom of speech under the First Amendment since it was solely based on text messages. On January 13, 2020, the Supreme Court declined the appeal.

A few days later, Carter was released from the Bristol County House of Correction due to good behavior, according to a CNN report.

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“Ms. Carter has been a model inmate here at the Bristol County House of Corrections. She has participated in a variety of programs, held a job inside the jail, has been polite to our staff and volunteers, has gotten along with the other inmates, and we’ve had no discipline issues with her whatsoever,” Jonathan Darling, a spokesman at the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office, told CNN.

Hulu’s latest series

“The Girl From Plainville” takes place over seven years and follows Carter and Roy’s relationship, the tragedy and Carter’s trial. The miniseries also references and is based on Jesse Barron’s Esquire article of the same name. The 2017 feature delves into the sensational case and also explores Carter’s motives. The cast also includes Chloë Sevigny, Cara Buono, Kai Lennox and Norbert Leo Butz.

The first three episodes of “The Girl From Plainville” are now streaming on Hulu, with new episodes released on Tuesdays. Watch a trailer for it below, via YouTube.

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DOJ looking into why Hunter Biden was financially tied to a Chinese energy company

The investigation into Hunter Biden‘s financial dealings is ramping up, with potentially condemning new evidence discovered that ties President Biden‘s son to a Chinese energy conglomerate named CEFC China Energy.

In a review published by The Washington Post today they detail that over the course of 14-months CEFC China Energy paid $4.8 million “to entities controlled by Hunter Biden and his uncle.” Evidence to this fact was landed upon with the use of government records, court documents, newly available bank statements and emails pulled from a copy of a hard drive from a laptop believed to have once belonged to Hunter Biden, according to The Washington Post.

Although the new evidence does not indicate that President Biden was personally involved in these CEFC dealings, or that he benefitted from them in any way, there is evidence that Hunter Biden leveraged his father’s influence, and contacts President Biden has made over the years, for his own financial gain.

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Among the newly discovered materials is a $1 million legal retainer signed by Hunter Biden for the representation of a CEFC official named Patrick Ho “who would later be charged in the United States in connection with a multimillion-dollar scheme to bribe leaders from Chad and Uganda,” according to The Washington Post.

Hunter Biden has been under federal tax investigation since 2018, specifically in relation to income obtained from business deals with China, but nothing solid has come from it until around 2020.

Along with the large sum of money received from CEFC, evidence has revealed that Hunter Biden was also gifted a 2.8-carat diamond from Chinese energy tycoon Ye Jianming. The diamond, which Hunter claimed was only worth around $10,000, but is actually valued at more along the lines of $80K, was brought up in the divorce proceedings between Hunter and ex-wife Kathleen Buhle, according to The New Yorker.

The diamond was reportedly given to Hunter in 2017 when Hunter met with Jianming in Miami hoping to get his donation to the World Food Program USA nonprofit that Hunter was a board member of. During a dinner that took place on that trip, Hunter offered to use his contacts to nail down investment opportunities for CEFC China Energy and Jianming was so pleased with this, according to The New Yorker, he sent the diamond to Hunter’s hotel room as a gift of appreciation.

“I knew it wasn’t a good idea to take it. I just felt like it was weird,” Hunter said to The New Yorker, claiming to have handed it off to an associate.

Barr rejects Trump’s demand for special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden on his way out

Biden moves to freeze Russian assets in U.S.

“The View” rejects co-host’s call for bipartisanship: “Can’t build consensus with insurrectionists”

“The View” co-hosts got into a heated discussion on Wednesday about President Joe Biden’s agenda being effectively killed by Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) along with the GOP.

The show welcomed Lincoln Project’s Tara Setmayer to debate the conservative perspective, who faced off against Sunny Hostin explaining that America supports progressive legislation. Setmayer claimed that the U.S. isn’t a left-leaning country, the voters are centrists.

Hostin had a prepared list of bills that all Americans overwhelmingly support like bans on assault weapons, background checks, Medicare for All, universal pre-K, paid family and maternity leave, childcare, raising the minimum wage and a slate of others. Each are policies that Republicans have opposed.

Setmayer said that Biden is trying to enact these things through executive order, which isn’t the way laws should work and that there’s no way to pay for it. Hostin suggested that instead of going to war all the time there could be better money spent on schools instead of bombs to Iraq.

“Well, he’s trying to raise the taxes on billionaires, maybe they’ll pay for it,” said Joy Behar.

Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Setmayer explained, “wants him to rule by executive order. That’s now how our system works.”

“But he has to,” said Hostin.

“No he does not!” replied Setmayer.

“You can’t build consensus with crazy people!” Hostin said emphatically. “You cannot build consensus with insurrectionists!”

See the exchange below

Fox News anchor slams Biden White House for refusing to comment on Will Smith’s slap

Fox News host Harris Faulkner expressed outrage over the White House’s refusal to comment on the Will Smith–Chris Rock slapping incident, stressing that the U.S. has to have “a president who can communicate.”

“This is a bigger situation now with Will Smith and Chris Rock. It’s opened a door on, you know, what do we want our kids to see and what do we want our society to look like,” Faulkner said. “It’s a bigger thing. The White House has now refused to comment or condemn Will Smith for smacking Chris Rock across the face at the Oscars.”

Fellow host Pete Hegseth echoed Faulkner’s apparent outrage. “The White House has had no problem condemning issues of less consequence,” he said. “Clearly, they are copping out on this one.”

.@HARRISFAULKNER criticized the White House after they "refused to comment or condemn Will Smith for smacking Chris Rock across the face at the Oscars."

"It is a bigger thing." https://t.co/lF5X1hpihf pic.twitter.com/aAS0l8lnTX

— Mediaite (@Mediaite) March 30, 2022

The exchange came just a day after a Tuesday press briefing in which journalist Simon Ateba of Today News Africa asked White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield whether the White House had a comment on the incident, now colloquially known as “the slap heard around the world.”

“You saw the level of violence that was unleashed on Chris Rock,” Ateba said. “Is that something that the White House condones – that type of violence? Do you condemn it? And do you do anything to support comedians who have been attacked and other artists?”

Bedingfield is asked about Chris Rock and if the White House is doing anything to support comedians being attacked… pic.twitter.com/I4CJEA9ERR

— Acyn (@Acyn) March 29, 2022

“So I don’t have any official comment from the White House on the altercation,” Bedingfield responded, noting that President Biden had not watched the Oscars.

This week, numerous Fox News pundits jumped on the opportunity to politicize Smith’s conduct, as The Daily Beast noted.

Host Jeanine Pirro, for instance, condemned Smith’s slap, arguing that the “Oscars are not the hood” during a Monday broadcast. Jesse Waters meanwhile said that Smith’s display was the “first time I’ve seen the media cover Black-on-Black crime.”

“The Oscars are not the hood.” Wait, WHAT?! Ma’am… https://t.co/ctUX6POfQU

— Charles M. Blow (@CharlesMBlow) March 28, 2022

https://twitter.com/justinbaragona/status/1508554052753399812

“Nitram” director was “terrified” of tackling mass shooting that changed Australian gun laws forever

“Nitram” is a chilling film about a mass shooting that took place in 1996 in Port Arthur, Tasmania. Director Justin Kurzel (“The Snowtown Murders“) generates an absolute sense of dread in almost every scene of his potent, disturbing film.

The 26-year-old Nitram (Caleb Landry Jones “Heaven Knows What“) – who hates his own nickname that every calls him – is restless and relentless, and he is difficult for his parents (Judy Davis and Anthony LaPaglia), whom he lives with, to control. He suffers from mental illness, but his actions are disturbing. A scene where his father stops his son from giving out fireworks to schoolchildren prompts Nitram to blare a car horn ceaselessly in defiance.

However, Nitram’s life changes when he meets Helen (Essie Davis, Kurzel’s real-life wife), a wealthy eccentric who buys him everything he wants — except guns — and allows him to move in with her. His happiness is short lived, however, as a series of tragic events unfold, leading Nitram to commit a horrendous crime that established massive gun control laws in Australia.

Caleb Landry Jones gives an exceptional performance here. (He won the Best Actor prize at Cannes last year). He makes Nitram pitiful as he searches for love and acceptance. Jones captures Nitram’s difficulty controlling his emotions and impulses. He is childlike, and his “difference” is dangerous.

In a recent interview Kurzel talked with Salon about his film and gun control laws.

The tone of your film creates a sense of unease in every frame. What prompted you to tell this story and tell it in the way you did?

It was the writer, Shaun Grant. I worked with him on two other films. He sent me a spec script out of the blue. I knew in the first few pages what it was about, and I was terrified of it. I live in Tasmania, and I am aware of how sensitive those events were here and in Australia. I started reading the script, and I felt I knew this world, this street, that family, that person you crossed the street to avoid. There was a familiarity in it that helped me unpack and understand the lead up to this event. When Nitram walks into the gun store, that crystallized why I needed to make it and what the film was trying to look at.

The film’s violence happens off-screen, with one sequence shot brilliantly from the inside of a car. Can you talk about your decisions to present the crimes in the manner you did?

I think that’s exactly it. I remember reading it and feeling so much more dread and anxiety than I did reading “The Snowtown Murders,” which was actually Shaun’s first film, which was quite explicit on screen and quite violent. I think it’s about what an audience doesn’t see and what is suggested is a car crash in slow motion, and that was probably the only way to tell a story like this. It was really important that it was a world that felt recognizable. You could take an audience to this place and time, and they could look at it and see things that were familiar.

The film has caused controversy for potentially reigniting the trauma it depicts. What are your thoughts on that?

I am completely aware of those who wish the film had never been made. I respect and understand that. But as an artist and filmmaker, and someone who read script and believed it was done with enormous sensitivity and that it is asking and wanting a discussion of a really important subject in Australia that happened 25 years ago that questions how and why these events happen, I also knew there was an audience there who were not born when events happened or may not have been in Australia at the time. It is a taboo subject to talk about, but it’s been really heartening the conversations and discussions in Australia about what happened and why it happened, and what gun reform is, and what changed and what didn’t. We made this film as a point of discussion, and I understand no matter how we portrayed these events, what point of view, and what lens we had on it, there are those who believe, rightly so, that it shouldn’t be made.

Where were you when the event happened?

I was in Sydney. It was the event that stopped the nation. I’d just started dating my wife, Essie Davis, who is Tasmanian, and I remember the phone ringing, and her family being so distraught not knowing what was going on, and if family members were down at Port Arthur or not. It was really distressing. It’s the most sleepy, quiet, beautiful place, and for something to happen, you never would imagine. Most Australians were in shock, and Tasmanians were unbelievably distraught.

Nitram, the character, is fragile and impulsive. I got the sense that he was looking for belonging and acceptance. This is what he finds with Helen, but also seeks with Jamie (Sean Keenan), a surfer he admires. What are your observations about Nitram and his relationships?

In Australia, there are definite tribes that as a young male you aspire to, whether that’s a football or surfing or car tribe. It’s a very particular thing here. If you are not part of a gang or group, you can feel isolated or be an outlier rather quickly. That was something I found really interesting — how someone can’t get into a pack or accepted in any tribe. That relationship with Helen is interesting because she is kind of the same, she’s an outlier, a hermit, and lives in this house, but strangely, the two of them connect through art and music and culture and for a time there is something quite positive in his life. It is about searching for identity constantly in this film. Even the name is a character, he is trying to run away from something he doesn’t like being called.

It’s a big part of Australian culture, especially in men — who are you and what are you and what group are you a part of, and if you are not part of something, why not. That was a very large part of the psychology of the film. It’s that awful thing, Jamie’s playing with him like a mouse, he has the power to bring him into the fold and to completely humiliate him by doing that and rejecting him. That behavior happens a lot.

Nitram’s parents are interesting. What are your impressions on how they handled him? Dad used kid gloves, while mom was a bit more no-nonsense. Do you think their actions contributed to the event? He is abusive towards his father in some respects, and indifferent towards his mother. Nitram’s mother has a telling speech about Nitram laughing at her pain.

Judy and Anthony’s performances question that — hopefully in a nonjudgmental way. Throughout the whole film, Judy is asking: Is this child the way he is because of me, and my DNA, or the way we brought him up? Am I a bad parent, or just unlucky? There is a feeling of fatigue. At 26, he is still living with them, and they are still cleaning up his mess. His father deals with the challenges in a way that almost enables him — to appease and give kid a candy, to get through it. His mother has to bring some sense of discipline. That’s the roles they have found themselves in. When we were shooting this film, so much of the conversation was about the challenges and difficulties of parenting and the constant questioning of whether you are doing it right or not. This film is a hyperextension of what can go wrong, but it still fundamentally asks: how do we bring up our children? How present are we? Are we able to shape their fate and destiny and choices that they make?

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The film addresses issues of mental illness. Nitram is given mood stabilizers. Do you think his condition could have been managed by pharmacology?

I don’t think I ever wanted to clearly come out and say this is the mental illness that Nitram had. It was difficult to understand what he was diagnosed with, and I think it’s a difficult conversation to have when you put a mental illness on someone who commits an event like this. You are blaming that mental illness. And I don’t think that was the case here. There were many reasons why this tragedy happened. But I do believe there was mental illness in him and in his family, and at the time in Tasmania in the 1990s the way of dealing with it was to chuck a whole lot of pills at him. There was very little support for those parents. It was definitely an aspect we felt was important and there was a disconnect there with how to treat some of the things in his life and there was family history of depression. Fortunately, now there is more awareness, but 25 years ago, it was very different. This mother, especially being surrounded by a husband suffering from mental illness as well, it would have been unbelievably challenging for her, absolutely. overwhelming.

There are some very emotional scenes in the film, specifically one that takes place at a funeral. Can you talk about how you humanized these characters, who are very intense, difficult people?

I think a lot of that came in the writing. It was a family I recognized when I started reading it. The real person was a very visible person around town. A lot of people knew and saw him and were aware of him. It wasn’t someone locked away and out of the blue suddenly appeared in horrific event. He was known in the community. I found that interesting. Where he lived was in a well-to-do, ordinary suburban area. He wasn’t about a disenfranchised community like in “Snowtown.” It was an everyday family, and that interested me; why someone brought up in the beautiful suburbs of Australia by two parents who are together, and trying to do the best they can — how and why does that person start to make those sort of choices and become more dangerous? That’s what I think Shaun responded to as well.

What decisions did you make in casting Caleb Landry Jones, an American, in the title role?

We saw him straight away. I had been a fan of his work and so had Shaun. There was a physicality about him that felt right. We met him in Los Angeles, and he had the most amazing input. We hoped he wanted to do it. The biggest question mark was the accent, because the accent is really hard to do, but he worked so hard to be as authentic as possible. But it really was an instant reaction to the body of work that he had done. He is so immersive as an actor. He never feels satisfied. He’s a great old school actor.

The film has an anti-gun agenda, and the scenes of Nitram purchasing weapons are chilling. What are your thoughts on the gun laws in Australia?

I have to say one of the proudest days I’ve had being an Australian is the way in which the government and the country’s attitude changed forever after that event. Within six days, gun reforms had completely changed. We had a massive buyback. The weapons you see in the film were completely banned. There was an extremely compelling response to what happened. I’ve gotta say, it changed things. I don’t see guns in Australia. When the guns came out on set, it was shocking for cast and crew. Now for Caleb, growing up in Texas, he has a very, very different relationship with guns. I understand and appreciate that in Australia, that the gun reforms have been incredibly strong. Having said that, I was astonished some of the reforms were not implemented, and, at the moment, some of these reforms are being lobbied to be loosened. I had no idea there were more guns in Australian now than in 1996. It was extraordinary what happened and what changed after the horrific event, but I was shocked by what I found out about those reforms since they were made 25 years ago.

How can this film, which is one of several on this topic, create the change we want to see?

I think we have to ask ourselves: How do we care for each other and look after each other? How do we make sure those that are feeling isolated or unwell have care? That’s an extremely important thing. I’m talking about Australia here; it’s different in America. When I talk to Americans about gun reform it’s overwhelming. We shot in November last year and in America they had just passed 480 mass shooting in a year. What is shocking about the film is that people can’t keep up with what’s going on. They don’t know about every new massacre, and every day is terrifying. In Australia, it is different, it’s a rare thing now. We have to keep on making sure that it’s not considered everyday, and we are strong enough to look after each other and protect ourselves.

“Nitram” is in theaters and available for digital rental and on AMC+ beginning March 30. Watch a trailer for it below, via YouTube.

More stories to read:

The FDA approves a second booster for those older than 50. Are they preparing for another wave?

On Tuesday, the Food and Drug Administration authorized emergency use of a second booster shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna coronavirus vaccines for people over the age of 50. To qualify, patients must have received their first booster shot at least four months prior.

The news came at a vital moment, the same week that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released data showing that BA.2, the more contagious variant of omicron, had surpassed its parent strain to become the dominant coronavirus strain circulating in the United States. Notably, the omicron variant of COVID-19 was already the most contagious virus to have ever existed in a human population in recorded history.

The news of a second booster authorization also comes at a time when some states are closing the doors of their COVID-19 testing sites, while some uninsured patients are being told they can no longer receive COVID-19 tests for free. That’s because Congress has yet to pass an emergency aid package to fight the coronavirus, a situation that has raised concerns around availability of antiviral treatments for COVID-19.

Notably, the FDA bypassed a typical procedural discussion facilitated by an FDA advisory committee to reach their decision.

The FDA’s emergency use approval for boosters for those over 50 might seem timed to the threat of an imminent BA.2 wave. Indeed, many infectious disease experts are convinced we are on the brink of some sort of surge, as Salon previously reported. In the event that another wave does happen, which some signs point to, older Americans and those who are immunocompromised who aren’t vaccinated and boosted will be the most vulnerable, which the FDA says was its reasoning behind the decision.

“Current evidence suggests some waning of protection over time against serious outcomes from COVID-19 in older and immunocompromised individuals,” Peter Marks, the director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said in a statement. “Based on an analysis of emerging data, a second booster dose of either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna COVID-19 vaccine could help increase protection levels for these higher-risk individuals.”

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Most of the data that informed the decision came from Israeli research. A newly released study, which has yet to be peer reviewed, found a significant difference in death rates between people over the age of 60 who received one or two boosters during a 40-day period. Among the 234,868 who had only one booster, 232 people died of Covid; among the 328,597 people who got a second booster, 92 died. The researchers stated the mortality rate “was significantly lower among those who had received an additional booster.”

On Tuesday, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky issed a statement in which she said a second booster “is especially important for those 65 and older and those 50 and older with underlying medical conditions that increase their risk for severe disease from COVID-19.”

Health experts tell Salon it would have been nice if the FDA held their usual Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) meeting before making the decision to approve the boosters.

“In older or high-risk individuals fourth doses appear beneficial at preventing severe disease, [but] I do not think younger age groups — apart from those with high risk conditions — benefit much from even third doses,” Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease and critical care medicine doctor, told Salon. “It’s also not optimal that the FDA bypassed its advisory group, conveniently avoiding the robust discussion that we all would have benefited from.”

Yet Adalja said it wasn’t a “major” concern — just that the advisory group convening was preferable.

“I think it would have been nice if they got to VRBPAC, but that being said, I can understand why they may not necessarily have felt an imperative to do that,” L.J Tan, chief strategy officer for the Immunization Action Coalition, told Salon. “The reason is, firstly, they’re dealing with a vaccine that they now have a lot of experience with — this is a vaccine that has already gone through multiple VRBPAC sessions.”

Tan agreed that with BA.2 becoming dominant, there may be a sense of urgency to give people more options to protect themselves.

“I think there’s some advocacy with regards to just keeping the U.S. open the way we’ve all opened up, with mandates and vaccination requirements dropping like flies,” Tan said. “I think there’s an urgency to push this out there to give people options to protect themselves.”

Indeed, the CDC also updated its recommendation for a second booster for certain individuals — but as Tan noted, the endorsement was a “shared clinical decision making” recommendation.

“Essentially what they’re saying is that if you are 50 and older, or if you’re below the age of 50 and you have a high risk condition, you should talk this over with your physician or your provider and then come to a decision as to whether you should or should not get the fourth dose booster,” Tan said. “And I like that because what it does is it says not everyone needs this . . . but there are certain people who [might] want to get this fourth dose.”

Dr. Monica Gandhi, infectious disease doctor and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, told Salon she is concerned that Congress is yet to allocate new emergency aid funding, and fears this will affect the availability of a fourth dose.

“The administration has said we have enough doses for our population [older than] 65 to get a 4th dose but not everyone,” Gandhi said via email. “If the 4th dose is opened up to those [older than] 50, I am worried we will run out of doses for those who need it most,” such as seniors who have the highest mortality rates from COVID-19.

Gandhi added: “I think those who are immunocompromised or older are the best groups to get boosters shots at this time.”

“Although the increase in antibodies from a vaccine boost may only last a short period, around 4 months, according to one CDC study, this boost will be necessary for certain groups to maintain protection against severe disease, including the immunocompromised, older people and those with multiple risk factors,” Gandhi said. Yet she said that getting a booster shot every four months wouldn’t be a “feasible” public health strategy.

“In terms of ‘harms,’ beyond the loss of trust, my only concern is that of original antigenic sin where we keep on training the immune system to respond to the ancestral strain of the virus’ spike protein instead of allowing B cells to make adapted antibodies,” Gandhi added.

Read more about COVID-19:

5 reasons you absolutely need a bench scraper in your kitchen

Your bench scraper has news for you: You’re not using it enough. A bench scraper is one of those inexpensive kitchen essentials that lasts a lifetime and has a million uses, but is somehow one of the most underrated tools. I keep mine wedged between a plastic drawer divider tray and the side of the drawer, so it’s easy to grab.

Whether you have one that’s hiding in a drawer somewhere, or you’ve yet to figure out how versatile the tool is, you might want to catch up on all the reasons why a bench scraper is so handy.

Photo by Rocky Luten

It’s a scraper, of course. True to its name, you can use it to scrape congealed bread dough (sounds delicious, no?), hardened chocolate, or any other kind of wet, dry, or sticky stuff from your counter or pastry board. It makes your surfaced so much easier to wipe down with soap and water afterward. In a pinch, a bench scraper can even scrape paint or remove ice from car windows — just be sure to clean it well afterward.

It’s a straight edge. Use it to level a cup of flour, tighten a log of cookie dough in parchment paper, fold over pastry dough, or if you’re short an offset spatula, level batter in a cake or sheet pan.

Photo by Rocky Luten

It’s a knife. Use it to trim the edges of rolled-out dough, cut square or oblong cookies, or portion out bread dough for rolls.

It’s an extra-wide spatula. Use it to loosen pastries, transfer cookies or biscuits, lift a fragile cake layer, or divide and scoop sifted flour from wax paper into a mixing bowl. You can even turn a fragile fish fillet on the grill.

It’s a ruler. If you grab one that has measurements along the edge, use it to check the thickness of pie or biscuit dough, a piece of meat, length of a lady finger — the list is endless.

This post contains products independently chosen (and loved) by Food52 editors and writers. Food52 earns an affiliate commission on qualifying purchases of the products we link to.

The absolute best way to make juicy pork chops

In Absolute Best Tests, our writer Ella Quittner destroys the sanctity of her home kitchen in the name of the truth. She’s boiled dozens of eggs, seared more porterhouse steaks than she cares to recall, and tasted enough types of bacon to concern a cardiologist. Today, she tackles pork chops.

My fiancé and I disagree about a lot of things, but none comes up more regularly than the pork chop. To Nate, it is the perfect dinner. To me, it is usually a disappointment.

When we first encountered an unstoppably juicy and impeccably sauced double-cut chop just blocks from our apartment, it felt too good to be true. As it approached our table, so plump it was nearly NSFW, so tender it was basically wiggling atop a shallow pool of sauce, Nate began to huff and salivate like a well-meaning dog.

I, however, remained skeptical, until I took a bite. It beat every last thing the pork-lovers in my life had promised me about the elusive Perfect Chop™. It had an exterior so caramelized, I could have balanced a glass on it. The meat was extremely soft to cut, which prompted me to write in an iPhone note: “like butter crossed with clay.” And most importantly, the pork chop was juicy as a Gusher. It was the pork chop that changed me — that showed me what was possible, if only I opened my mind, my heart, and allowed it in.

Unfortunately, it was too good to be true. The next week, it was off the menu. And so this latest installment of Absolute Best Tests is an ode to that chop I’ll probably never have again.

Controls

For each test, I used bone-in, inch-thick pork chops. Except in extenuating circumstances (e.g., breaded chop, milk-braised chop), I seasoned with only brown sugar, kosher salt (I use Diamond Crystal), and freshly ground black pepper. I used high heat–friendly avocado oil for all methods that called for cooking fat.

My chops weren’t particularly fatty, so I didn’t need to render the fat cap, but should you like to, simply lift each chop with tongs and press the thick fatty ridge into your skillet a few minutes, twisting it so the full cap renders down, before completing your cook method

Round 1: Brining

Whether to dry brine, wet brine, or not to brine at all is an internet wormhole. A lot of accounts suggest that dry brining — merely rubbing salt and seasonings onto your meat and letting it chill, uncovered overnight in the fridge — is superior. This has certainly been my experience with whole birds.

So I was shocked when the wet brine, which involved soaking the chops overnight in seasoned saltwater, produced the juiciest chop, by a landslide. (Of pork juice. Landsliding out of my mouth every time I took a bite.) Most complaints about the wet brine suggest that the method produces blander meat, because it essentially packs extra water into the cut. I suspect because the chops I used were so flavorful to begin with, and because I brined with a high concentration of salt and sugar, the water-flooding of the chop only served to complement its flavor, with the added effect of So Much Moisture.

Next juiciest was the no brine chop, which was perfectly fine, juicy enough, just not so shockingly juicy I beckoned a neighbor to come have a look. Least juicy was the dry brine chop, which also had a slightly tougher texture. Initially, the dry brine chop felt a little juicier to the touch than the no brine chop, but it wept a lot of liquid as it rested before serving.

As far as caramelized exterior, though, dry brine pulled through hard. My dry brine chops came out with deep brown, crispy exteriors that I would have been proud to photograph and brag about on social media were my fingers not covered in pork grease. The no brine chops had the next best crust, and the wet brines had the worst, because moisture is the enemy of crispiness.

All that said, I would still recommend wet brining. Just diligently dry out your chops before searing as best you can. Like, more diligently than whatever I did.

Dry Brine

Adapted from The Kitchn, Food52, and Serious Eats.

Ingredients

1/4 cup brown sugar
2 tablespoons kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
2 (1-inch-thick) bone-in pork chops
2 teaspoons canola oil

Directions

In a small bowl, mix together the brown sugar, salt, and pepper. Dry the pork chops, then rub the sugar mixture all over. Transfer the chops to a wire rack set in a rimmed sheet pan. Refrigerate the chops, uncovered, for 8 to 24 hours.
When you’re ready to cook, heat a large, preferably cast-iron skillet over high heat for about 3 minutes. Add the oil to the skillet and, once it starts smoking, lower the heat to medium-high and add the pork chops. Cook for 10 to 12 minutes, flipping midway through when the bottom develops a caramelized crust, until an internal thermometer registers 135°F (or if you like them more well done, 145°F). Let rest 5 minutes, then serve.

Wet Brine

Adapted from Food52.

Ingredients

1/3 cup kosher salt
1/3 cup brown sugar (granulated sugar will work fine, too)
1 teaspoon black peppercorns
2 (1-inch-thick) bone-in pork chops
4 cups ice cubes
2 tablespoons canola oil

Directions

Combine 2 cups of water plus the salt, sugar, and peppercorns in a saucepan. Heat until the salt and sugar are dissolved. Remove from the heat and stir in the ice cubes. Let cool completely.
Place the pork chops in an airtight container, pour the brine on top, cover, and get in the fridge. Brine for 4 to 12 hours. If the pork chops are stacked on top of each other, shuffle them partway through to encourage even brining.
When you’re ready to cook, heat a large, preferably cast-iron skillet over high heat for about 3 minutes. Add the oil to the skillet and, once it starts smoking, lower the heat to medium-high and add the pork chops. Cook for 10 to 12 minutes, flipping midway through when the bottom develops a caramelized crust, until an internal thermometer registers 135°F (or if you like them more well done, 145°F). Let rest for 5 minutes, then serve.

No Brine

Ingredients

2 teaspoons kosher salt
2 teaspoons brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
2 (1-inch-thick) bone-in pork chops
2 tablespoons canola oil

Directions

In a small bowl, mix together the salt, sugar, and pepper.
Heat a large, preferably cast-iron skillet over high heat for about 3 minutes. Meanwhile, dry the pork chops then season all over with the salt mixture.
Add the oil to the skillet and, once it starts smoking, lower the heat to medium-high and add the pork chops. Cook for 10 to 12 minutes, flipping midway through when the bottom develops a caramelized crust, until an internal thermometer registers about 135°F (or if you like them more well done, 145°F). Let rest 5 minutes, then serve.

Round 2: Cooking

The juiciest, by far, was the roasted pork chop. It came out of the oven anemic and gray, easily the least appetizing of the bunch, like something a cartoon villain would devour in a cartoon hospital. To the touch, it was plump and juicy, but not excessively so — most similar to the no brine chop from the first round of trials. But when I cut into it, I could tell immediately that it was perfectly cooked, and that it would be weeping pork tears into my mouth. (Pork tears of happiness.)

While I tested this round all with unbrined chops, I suspect that a wet-brined + roasted chop would be unstoppable, Niagara Falls, tears at my sister’s wedding. The obvious downside was the utter lack of a crust. Despite getting the same seasoning as the other specimens, the roasted chop took on no color and no caramelization. But it may have convinced me that caramelization is unnecessary for a pork chop, and that optimizing for juicy meat is preferable. I never said you couldn’t serve crispy fries on the side.

For a juicy chop with a caramelized crust, the most effective method turned out to be the simple sear + roast chop, closely followed by the sous vide chop. The reverse-seared chop was also comparably juicy — a tiny bit drier than the sear + roast and the sous vide — but with way less browning.

The milk-braised chop was so tender I could’ve mistaken it for filet mignon, blanketed as it was in its saucey disguise.

Honorable mention to the battered + fried chop and the pound + sear. The battered + fried chop was easily the most satisfying to cut into, with its crispy shell and delicious meat. The pound + searhad the best flavor because it had the most surface area, though the meat wasn’t particularly juicy.

Skippable: the air-fried chop came out firm and shrunken and browned only around its edges, with a grayish center. The meat was on the tougher side with no added flavor from the cooking method. The grilled chop was totally fine, but not better than any other method, so I would say not worth firing up your grill.

Sear + Roast

Adapted from The Spruce Eats.

Ingredients

2 teaspoons kosher salt
2 teaspoons brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
2 (1-inch-thick) bone-in pork chops
2 teaspoons neutral oil, such as avocado, grapeseed, or canola

Directions

Heat the oven to 400°F.
Meanwhile, in a small bowl, mix together the salt, sugar, and pepper. Dry the pork chops and season all over with the salt mixture.
Heat a large, preferably cast-iron skillet over high heat for 3 minutes. Add the oil to the skillet and, once that’s hot, turn the heat to medium-high and add the pork chops. Don’t move them for 3 minutes, or until the bottom layer is a deep caramelized brown.
Flip the chops over with a pair of tongs and transfer the pan to the oven. Roast 5 to 7 minutes, until the internal temperature registers about 135°F (or if you like them more well done, 145°F). Let rest 5 minutes, then serve.

Pound + Sear

Adapted from Bon Appétit.

Ingredients

2 (1-inch-thick) bone-in pork chops
2 teaspoons kosher salt
2 teaspoons brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
2 teaspoons neutral oil (such as avocado, grapeseed, or canola)

Directions

Lightly pound pork chops with a meat mallet, rolling pin, or the heel of your hand to 1/2-inch-thick.
In a small bowl, mix together the salt, sugar and pepper.
Heat a large, preferably cast-iron skillet over high heat for about 3 minutes. Meanwhile, dry the pork chops and season all over with the salt mixture.
Add the oil to the skillet and, once that begins to smoke, add the pork chops and use tongs to press them against the hot surface. Don’t move them for 3 minutes, or until the bottom layer is a deep caramelized brown.
Cook chops, continuing to press down as you turn them every minute, until very browned, charred in spots, and an instant-read thermometer inserted into the thickest part registers 135°F (or if you like them more well done, 145°F), 5 to 8 minutes. Let rest for 5 minutes, then serve.

Reverse-Sear

Adapted from Umami Girl.

Ingredients

2 teaspoons brown sugar
2 teaspoons kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
2 (1-inch-thick) bone-in pork chops
1 tablespoon neutral oil, such as avocado, grapeseed, or canola

Directions

In a small bowl, mix together the salt, sugar, and pepper. Dry the pork chops and season all over with the salt mixture. Place on a wire rack on a rimmed sheet pan.
Heat the oven to 250°F with a rack in the center. Roast the pork chops (still on the wire rack on the sheet pan) for 20 to 30 minutes, until an instant meat thermometer reads 110°F.
Heat a large preferably cast-iron skillet over high heat for about 3 minutes. Add oil, which should immediately begin to smoke. Add pork chops and sear for 2 minutes on the first side, without tinkering, until deeply golden-brown. Flip and sear another 2 minutes or so until the other side is deeply golden-brown and an instant-read thermometer inserted into the thickest part registers 135°F (or if you like them more well done, 145°F). Let rest 5 minutes before serving.

Grill

Adapted from Food52.

Ingredients

2 teaspoons kosher salt
2 teaspoons brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
2 (1-inch-thick) bone-in pork chops
2 teaspoons neutral oil (such as avocado, grapeseed, or canola)

Directions

Build a medium-hot fire in a charcoal grill or heat a gas grill to medium-high heat.
Meanwhile, mix together salt, sugar, and pepper. Dry the pork chops dry and season all over with the salt mixture.
Brush the grill grates with oil. Place the pork chops on the grill. Grill, turning once, for 10 to 12 minutes, until browned and cooked through and an instant-read thermometer registers 135°F (or if you like them more well done, 145°F). Let rest 5 minutes, then serve.

Roast

Adapted from Food52.

Ingredients

2 teaspoons kosher salt
2 teaspoons brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
2 (1-inch-thick) bone-in pork chops

Directions

Adjust an oven rack to an upper-middle position. Heat the oven to 450°F.
Meanwhile, in a small bowl, mix together the salt, sugar, and pepper. Dry the pork chops, then season all over with the salt mixture.
Lay the chops on a rimmed sheet pan, and roast for 10 to 15 minutes, until an instant-read thermometer registers 135°F (or if you like them more well done, 145°F). Let rest 5 minutes, then serve.

Air Fryer

Adapted from The Pioneer Woman.

Ingredients

2 teaspoons kosher salt
2 teaspoons brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
2 (1-inch-thick) bone-in pork chops
2 teaspoons neutral oil (such as avocado, grapeseed, or canola)

Directions

Heat the air fryer to 400°F.
Meanwhile, in a small bowl, mix together salt, sugar, and pepper. Dry the pork chops and season all over with the salt mixture.
Place the chops in a single layer in the air fryer basket and cook for 8 minutes. Flip the chops and cook for 4 to 6 more minutes, until an instant-read thermometer registers 135°F (or if you like them more well done, 145°F). Let rest 5 minutes, then serve.

Sous Vide

Adapted from Serious Eats.

Ingredients

2 teaspoons kosher salt
2 teaspoons brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
2 (1-inch-thick) bone-in pork chops
1 tablespoon neutral oil (such as avocado, grapeseed, or canola)

Directions

Place an immersion circulator in a water bath and set the circulator to 140°F.
While that comes to temperature, in a small bowl, mix together the salt, sugar, and pepper. Dry the pork chops and season all over with the salt mixture. Place in vacuum-seal or zip-lock bags. Seal the bags and place in the water bath for 1 hour and 30 minutes.
Remove pork from the water bath and bag, and dry with paper towels.
Heat a large cast-iron skillet over high heat for about 3 minutes. Add the oil to the skillet and, once that’s smoking, add the pork chops. Cook for about 45 seconds to 1 minute until the chops have a deep brown crust, then flip and repeat on the other side. Remove from the pan and let rest a few minutes before serving.

Milk-Braised

Adapted from Lodge.

Ingredients

2 teaspoons kosher salt
2 teaspoons brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
2 (1-inch-thick) bone-in pork chops
1 tablespoon neutral oil (such as avocado, grapeseed, or canola)
1 1/2 cups whole milk
1 cup heavy cream

Directions

In a small bowl, mix together the salt, sugar, and pepper. Dry the pork chops and season all over with the salt mixture.
Heat a large, preferably cast-iron skillet over high heat for about 3 minutes. Add the oil to the skillet and, once that begins to smoke, add the pork chops. Don’t move them for about 3 minutes, until the bottom layer is a deep caramelized brown. Flip and sear on the other side for another 3 to 5 minutes.
Lower the heat to medium and add milk and cream. Use a wooden spoon or fish spatula to deglaze as you bring to a simmer. Cook for another 15 to 25 minutes, until an instant-read thermometer registers 135°F (or if you like them more well done, 145° F).
Remove chops from pan and let rest while you simmer sauce, uncovered, until thickened, about 10 minutes.

Breaded and Fried

Adapted from Food52.

Ingredients

1/2 cup neutral oil (such as avocado, grapeseed, or canola)
1 large egg
1/2 cup all purpose flour
2 teaspoons kosher salt
2 teaspoons brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
2 (1/2-inch-thick) bone-in pork chops

Directions

Heat the oil in a large cast-iron skillet over medium-high heat.
Meanwhile, in a shallow bowl or rimmed plate, whisk the egg. In another shallow bowl, combine the flour, salt, sugar, and pepper. Dredge the pork chops in the egg, then firmly press it into the seasoned flour mixture, coating on all sides, shaking off any excess.
When the oil is up to temperature — you can check by tossing in a few flecks of flour into the pan and listening for a slow to moderate sizzle — add the pork chops and cook about 4 minutes until golden, then flip and repeat, until an instant-read thermometer registers 135°F (or if you like them more well done, 145°F).

Giada’s citrus-packed Italian cinnamon rolls are perfect for spring brunch

If there’s one thing Giada De Laurentiis knows how to do, it’s introducing an Italian version of just about every dish you could ever want. These Italian cinnamon rolls are a bright take on Pane di Pasqua, or Italian easter bread, and combine sweetness with a little bit of spice and citrus. You’ll need to set some time and elbow grease aside to make these a success, but your patience will be rewarded with soft fluffy layers covered in delicious icing.

To start, you’ll need to sprinkle your active dry yeast over some warm water. Once it becomes creamy and bubbly, you can start prepping your other ingredients.

In an electric mixer bowl, add your dry ingredients. This includes flour, anise seeds, salt and sugar. Then, in a separate bowl, add your wet ingredients: you’ll whisk your egg yolks, melted butter, vanilla and heavy cream together.

Next will come the unification of your elements: add the wet ingredients to your dry ingredients, as well as your active yeast mixture. Combine the three with a rubber spatula, until you’re left with a rough dough. Using the dough hook attachment from the electric mixer, knead this for about 10 minutes, or until the dough is pliable and stretchy, but still has a soft and silky texture. You’ll need to cover it with plastic wrap and let the dough double in size for about an hour.

Next comes the filling for assembly. Combine your brown sugar, lemon zest, orange zest, anise and cinnamon into a paste.

Dust your work surface with some flour to prevent sticking, and get ready to roll. Pour the rested dough out, sprinkling more flour on top, and gently roll into the rectangular shape of your desired baking sheet, with about ⅓ inch of thickness.

Once your dough is rolled, wet the edges with your softened butter, and sprinkle the brown sugar mixture evenly. Then, starting with the edge closest to you, roll the dough away from yourself, and seal the farthest edge with a bit of water to seal. You should be left with a log that will need to be sliced into 12 2-inch rolls.

Butter your glass baking dish, and pop your rolls in, allowing them to rest for about 30 minutes, or until they have doubled in size. While this is happening, heat your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

Bake the rolls for about 35 minutes until they are puffed, flaky, and golden brown. You’ll need to let them cool a bit before preparing the finishing touch, aka your glaze.

For the glaze, you’ll combine your powdered sugar and orange juice until smooth. Then serve over your glorious, still warm rolls, and enjoy the culmination of culture, pastry, and easter all in one delicious bite! For measurements and the full recipe, click here.

More of our favorite Italian-inspired recipes:

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Madison Cawthorn is a GOP castaway: Kevin McCarthy fumes at House Republican’s “orgies” allegation

Members of the GOP House caucus are asking Rep. Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C., to name names after the freshman lawmaker alleged that he was invited to “orgies” by several of his Republican role models.

“It does paint the picture here that isn’t accurate,” Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Tex., told The Daily Beast. “Name names. Let’s see who he hangs out with.”

“I think it is important, if you’re going to say something like that, to name some names,” echoed Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa. said in an interview with Politico.

“You should have to name names if you are going to go make those kinds of brush stroke accusations and impugn the character of people in this institution or … anybody else in this town,” another House Republican added.

Cawthorn’s comments came during a Sunday interview on the “Warrior Poet Society” podcast, in which the freshman congressman described Congress as a hotbed for “sexual perversion.”

“I look at all these people, a lot of them that I, you know, I’ve looked up to through my life. I’ve always paid attention to politics guys that, you know, then all of the sudden you get invited to like, well, hey, we’re going to have kind of a sexual get together at one of our homes,” Cawthorn claimed.

“And then you realize they’re asking you to come to an orgy. Or the fact that, you know, there’s some of the people that are leading on the movement to try and remove addiction in our country and then you watch them doing, you know, a key bump of cocaine right in front of you and it’s like wow this is wild,” the lawmaker added.

Madison Cawthorn affirms Washington DC is like the movie House of Cards and said people that he’s looked up his whole life who are now in their 60’s or 70’s have invited him to an orgy at their home and others have done cocaine in front of him. pic.twitter.com/iJnWMJ9PIR

— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) March 27, 2022

Cawthorn’s allegations, now widely circulated online, did not sit well with a number of House Republicans.

“I’ve been here a decade, and besides the fact we’re just cruel to each other, at many levels, it’s one of the most boring places,” Rep. David Schweikert, R-Ariz., told The Daily Beast. “Truly, it’s one of the most banal places you can imagine.”

Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Tex., also appeared to dispute Cawthorn’s account, saying, “I haven’t seen those parties. So, I need to find out more about it before I comment, because that just seems rather bizarre.”

On Tuesday, Politico reported that Cawthorn was subject to a stern talking-to by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., about the freshman’s vague insinuations. McCarthy told the outlet that Cawthorn has “lost my trust” and “is gonna have to earn it back.” According to CNN, Cawthorn also admitted during the meeting that his remarks “were exaggerated/untrue.”

“You can’t make statements like that as a member of Congress, it affects everybody else and the country as a whole,” McCarthy fumed.

McCarthy, asked if he wants to know the names of the individuals that Cawthorn suggested took part in the orgies and cocaine consumption, said Cawthorn told him:

He "thinks he saw maybe a staffer in a parking garage maybe 100 yards away and that he doesn't know what is."

— Olivia Beavers (@Olivia_Beavers) March 30, 2022

McCarthy’s response indicates that Cawthorn will face greater political repercussions for his comments than Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., who the House speaker has condemned – but not punished – for her promotion of antisemisitic conspiracy theories and attendance at a white nationalist conference.

Cawthorn has a known history of both stretching the truth and lying altogether. On the campaign trail, for instance, the lawmaker claimed that he “had an opportunity for the Paralympics for track and field.” However, Cawthorn competed in no qualifying races for the event. Cawthorn has also exaggerated the success of his real estate firm and, according to The Washington Post, may have taken significant creative liberties with the story of his own paralysis. Cawthorn also was a big propagator of Donald Trump’s Big Lie, for which McCarthy has not offered public condemnation.

Merrick Garland is ignoring the DOJ’s original mission: Battling seditionists like Donald Trump

In remarks scheduled the day before the one-year anniversary of the Capitol insurrection, Attorney General Merrick Garland swore that his agency would not let power and privilege shield those responsible for the assault on our democracy.

“The Justice Department,” he promised, “remains committed to holding all January 6th perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law.” Department of Justice (DOJ) lawyers, he said, would “follow the facts wherever they lead.”

It’s now been nearly three months since those remarks, and unfortunately, it’s starting to look very much like the elite Republicans who were part of a conspiracy to overthrow democracy are, in fact, too swaddled by status and wealth to be held accountable under the law. Every day, the extent of the conspiracy and the number of high-level GOP officials and activists involved with Donald Trump’s attempted coup becomes more clear. Yet the DOJ appears to be doing little, if anything, to charge them with crimes. It’s gotten to the point where the members of the January 6 committee are publicly beging Garland to do something.

“Attorney General Garland,” Rep. Elaine Luria, D-Va said Monday evening, “do your job so we can do ours.” Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., concurred by noting that “there is no oversight, and without oversight, no accountability.”

If Garland’s hesitation comes from a belief that prosecuting coup-related crimes is too “political” to be handled by the DOJ, well, then he needs to be a better student of history. It’s not just that dealing with people like Trump and his co-conspirators has always been a part of the DOJ’s mission, it’s that stopping racist and anti-democratic criminal conspiracies like Trump’s attempted coup is quite literally what the DOJ was founded to do.

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Quick history lesson: The modern DOJ — which was originally called the U.S. Department of Justice and Civil Rights Enforcement — was founded in 1870 under President Ulysses Grant. Its most important mission, as Bryan Greene at the Smithsonian Magazine explained in a 2020 article, “was the protection of black voting rights from the systematic violence of the Ku Klux Klan.” In 1871, Congress passed the Ku Klux Klan Act, which empowered the DOJ to break up the white supremacist criminal conspiracies that had risen up throughout the former Confederacy to intimidate Black citizens from voting.

It’s not a coincidence that this 1871 law is now being used by civil rights groups, Capitol law enforcement, and some Democratic members of Congress to sue Trump and his alleged co-conspirators for inciting violence on January 6. It’s also being leveraged by civil rights groups and Democratic officials to sue Trump supporters engaged in campaign and voter intimidation across the country. That’s because the January 6 insurrection and these voter intimidation efforts are very much the historical descendants of the KKK and similar white supremacist groups the DOJ was explicitly founded to quash.

“The January 6 insurrection and these voter intimidation efforts are very much the historical descendants of the KKK “

Trump wasn’t exactly subtle in his false claims of “voter fraud” aimed at cities like Philadelphia and Detroit. Everything that followed from the Big Lie, from the attempts to decertify the election to the Capitol riot, flowed from the same impulse that shaped the KKK: A belief that white Americans are the only legitimate Americans and that a president elected by a racially diverse coalition is illegitimate. Like the KKK, Trump and anyone else involved in the attempted coup would rather destroy democracy than accept sharing power with people who don’t look like them.

The DOJ’s failure to act, meanwhile, can’t be chalked up to a lack of facts or possible charges, either.

The House of Representatives referred Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, on contempt of Congress charges three and a half months ago, and so far, Meadows has not been arrested. Instead, more stories have come out about how he and his wife likely committed voter fraud, aka more crimes they will likely be too rich and powerful to have to answer for. The committee’s public call for Garland to act this week came after they referred two more Trump officials — Dan Scavino and Peter Navarro — to the DOJ for refusing subpoenas.

In just the past week and a half, the amount of evidence of the high-level conspiracy to overthrow the 2020 election has been frankly overwhelming. Trump fought to keep White House call logs from January 6, 2021 hidden for months. They have finally been turned over to the January 6 committee — and sure enough, seven hours are missing, despite a mountain of witness testimony showing that Trump was glued to his phone throughout this period. Former national security advisor John Bolton has confirmed that Trump liked to talk about using “burner phones,” which is exactly the sort of evidence that establishes criminal intent in trials against people who actually face charges because they aren’t high-ranking Republicans. A federal judge in California also just ruled “it more likely than not that President Trump” conspired with his lawyer, John Eastman, to commit crimes — and the evidence of that is being entered into the public record.

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There’s also this big-time story about how Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, was part of a larger circle of people plotting ways for Trump to steal the 2020 election. According to new reporting from the Washington Post, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tex., was also heavily involved, fleshing out schemes to block Joe Biden’s electoral win certification. While it’s unclear if either of them can be charged with crimes, what is clear is that there was an extensive, high-level conspiracy to deny Americans the right to choose their own leaders, one that was fueled by white supremacist intent. Which is exactly the sort of thing the DOJ was founded to stop.

“What is clear is that there was an extensive, high-level conspiracy to deny Americans the right to choose their own leaders, one that was fueled by white supremacist intent.”

The good news is that there are whispers that the DOJ is planning to hire more lawyers to handle the January 6 investigations, which many DOJ watchers took as a sign that Garland is finally — almost 16 months after the Capitol riot — starting to take seriously his duty to do something about the conspiracy to end democracy. Unfortunately, this may just be more wish-casting. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco did recently reiterate the promise of holding perpetrators accountable “no matter at what level.” Still, she mostly talked about how, “We are going to continue to do those cases.” So far, “those cases” have strictly involved the low level idiots who actually stormed the Capitol, as well as some fringe leaders of neo-fascist street gangs. While these folks are known to be in communication with Trump’s inner circle, the actual inner circle people — as well as Trump himself — remain untouched.

Perhaps that will change. If so, Garland is nearly out of time.

The midterm elections are a mere seven months away, and if Republicans retake the House of Representatives, as most polling shows they likely will, one thing is certain: They will do anything and everything in their power to destroy any meaningful DOJ investigation into high-ranking coup conspirators. As they are the people who control the budget to hire all those lawyers the DOJ is finally asking for, this could get ugly fast. So the clock is ticking. If Garland has some secret desire to do his job, the time to get it done is nearly out.

Former Trump advisor Peter Navarro calls Mike Pence a “traitor to the American Caesar of Trump”

Peter Navarro, a former Donald Trump advisor who may be held in contempt of Congress, called former vice president Mike Pence a “traitor to the American Caesar of Trump” on Wednesday, saying that Pence’s refusal to subvert the election was Trump’s “Et tu, Brute?” moment.

“It started flawlessly with [Senator] Ted Cruz challenging the results in Arizona,” Navarro said in a Newsmax interview. “It was a tragedy that Mike Pence decided to be a traitor to the American Caesar of Trump. I liken it in [my book] to a Shakespearean moment, the ‘Et tu, Brute?’ moment.”

He added: “But it was all designed, basically, to take out President Trump, who was anathema to money who backed people like Mike Pence.”

https://twitter.com/jasonscampbell/status/1509145586511093761

Navarro is of course referring to his legally dubious scheme to subvert the election, also known as the “Green Bay Sweep,” which called on dozens of congressional Republicans to challenge the election during the Electoral College vote count on January 6. Once Congress had established a strong enough basis to overturn the election, Pence, by Navarros’ account, would have hypothetically been able to send any “questionable” electoral votes back to the battleground states for review.

In the end, however, the former vice president refused to go along with Navarro’s plan, arguing that his role in the vote-counting ceremony was no more symbolic in nature.

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According to a January interview with Rolling Stone, Navarro reportedly “[provided] Congress, via [his] reports, the analytical material they needed to actually make the challenges.”

This week, the January 6 select committee charged with investigating the Capitol riot recommended that Navarro be cited for contempt of Congress. The recommendation came after the panel said that Navarro “stonewalled” their subpoenas. Navarro, for his part, has called the inquiry a “witch hunt” that’s “predicated on the ridiculous legal premise that Joe Biden can waive Donald Trump’s Executive Privilege.”

“The Supreme Court will say otherwise when the time comes – as it surely must – and the DOJ knows such nonsense would gut Executive Privilege and the critical role it plays in effective presidential decision making,” the former Trump advisor added in a statement.

If charged with contempt of Congress, Navarro theoretically faces up to $100,000 in fines and a year in prison, though few people charged with contempt see any jail time.