Republicans turn Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings into a QAnon circus

The common wisdom in the Beltway media was that the confirmation hearings for Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Joe Biden’s first nominee to the Supreme Court, would be a relatively low drama affair. Prior to her naming, there had been a flurry of fake outrage from the Fox News pundits over Biden’s promise to nominate the first Black woman to the court. In the face of Jackson’s impeccable resume, however, even the most racist Republicans struggle to deny her qualifications.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s efforts to “raise questions” about Jackson’s credentials fell mostly flat. More importantly, Democrats have a slim majority in the Senate. Republicans can’t block her nomination, since Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell destroyed the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees in 2017 when he wanted to seat Donald Trump nominee Neil Gorsuch. Her nomination won’t really change the balance of the court, as Jackson is replacing liberal Justice Stephen Breyer, so the assumption is that Republicans won’t bother to put up much of a fight. But, of course, that assumption overlooks one critical factor in the hearing process: Senate Republicans with presidential aspirations see these hearings as a way to pander to the racist, misogynist, conspiracy theory-loving GOP base.

Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri — who is heavy competition with fellow Senate Judiciary Committee member Ted Cruz of Texas for the title of “Most Repulsive Creep In The GOP” — previewed his nakedly QAnon-inspired line of attack against Jackson last week in a series of tweets where he insinuated, and not with any subtlety, that she supports child pornography.

Jackson “has a pattern of letting child porn offenders off the hook for their appalling crimes,” Hawley falsely claimed, adding that she believes it’s “controversial” to send “child predators to jail.”

Needless to say, Hawley’s accusations are lies, as Ian Millhiser of Vox carefully explained. For one thing, Jackson “ios one of the most scrutinized individuals in the entire legal profession,” having been vetted “by the Senate on three separate occasions, by the nation’s largest police union, and by an organization representing over 30,000 police leaders.” Millhiser has done the hard work of laying out the compelling but highly technical case for why none of these accusations make sense, and how Hawley, a graduate of Yale Law, knows full well that Jackson has done nothing wrong or even controversial.

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But, of course, Hawley’s outrage is wholly fake. He’s counting on the fact that few, if any, of his followers will pay attention to the legalese-drenched debunkings on his lies. Instead, they will focus on the titillating accusations that Jackson supposedly champions pedophiles for reasons. Hawley doesn’t need to spell out what reasons Jackson, the mother of two, supposedly has for protecting child pornographers. Instead, he can count on QAnon, the far-right conspiracy theory cult that is increasingly colonizing the Republican base, to do that dirty work for him.

And boy, are they.

As Media Matters detailed on Friday, right-wing networks and popular conspiracy theory social media feeds used Hawley’s insinuations as a launching pad to tie Jackson to the QAnon belief that the Democratic Party harbors a secret network of pedophiles who drink children’s blood. Ordinary Republicans who hear Hawley’s accusations will go online to learn more will end up reading content from these conspiracy communities. Many will be sucked into QAnon and other conspiracy communities. It’s part of the larger feedback loop between high-profile GOP figures like Hawley and the folks at Fox News — who are also amplifying this baseless attack — and the sewer-dwelling conspiracy theory world on the right.

In other words, this isn’t just a baseless smear of a qualified Supreme Court nominee. It’s also part of a larger strategy by leading GOP figures like Hawley to radicalize the Republican base by funneling them to conspiracy theories like QAnon. The end game here isn’t particularly mysterious. QAnoners were the backbone of the January 6 insurrection and continue to be a source of energy for the growing fascist movement that backs Trump.

Hawley’s strategy is one that’s grown in popularity since the January 6 insurrection.

Carlson, as usual, led the way in pushing his viewers towards QAnon. He’s defended the cult as “gentle people” who merely “like the country.” More importantly, he’s done multiple segments portraying the cult as purveyors of forbidden views that are suppressed by liberals who supposedly can’t handle the truth. That’s delicious bait to the trigger-the-liberals crowd, and Carlson knows it. But it’s not just Fox News nudging Republican voters to explore their QAnon urges.

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Defenders of Florida’s “don’t say gay” bill, both in the Republican leadership and in right-wing punditry, have been accusing opponents of “grooming” children for pedophilia. In part, those lies are just an attempt to deflect from the radically bigoted nature of the bill. But it’s also about feeding the QAnon-inspired cloud of insinuations that Democrats have massive pedophilia-and-child-murder rings.

Most people, even on the right, don’t actually believe QAnon conspiracy theories. But this constant, baseless chatter about pedophilia helps create a permission structure in the larger GOP base for reframing their radicalization as a noble effort to “save the children.” Even the moral panic over “critical race theory” and storming-school-boards mania is part of this strategy. It allows Republican voters who are in a racist snit over Black Lives Matter and losing the 2020 election to reimagine themselves as noble warriors “protecting” children from Marxism and pedophiles and whatever other nonsense they’re riling themselves up about.

Tellingly, the school board freakout has almost nothing to do with actual parents and children. As Jessica Grose of the New York Times explained over the weekend, polling shows that most people who actually have children in public schools “are happy overall with their children’s education.” The people who are angry about the supposed evils of modern education are just hyped up on right-wing propaganda and have no idea what’s really going on. This comports with data from Virginia’s 2021 gubernatorial election, in which “anger” over education supposedly turned the tide towards Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin. Voter turnout data, however, shows that Youngkin won because of a surge of white senior citizens voting, not parents of school-age children. It turns out “critical race theory” is less a funnel for real angst about education, and mostly just a bunch of racists using “saving the children” as cover for their less savory impulses.

And why “the children” have become the lightning rod for right-wing rage isn’t especially mysterious. What’s driving the current Republican turn towards authoritarianism is a freakout over an America that is changing both in its demographics and its values. “The children” aren’t real people to the right, so much as a symbol of the future that is looking very different — less bigoted, more secular, more inclusive — than the America they envision. Conspiracy theories about pedophiles and “critical race theory” are a conduit for this reactionary anger. It allows the MAGA crowd to feel like the good guys, instead of the villains they are.

Jackson, by being the first Black woman nominated to the highest court, will be a magnet for right-wing anxieties about a changing America. The blunter racism that was initially rolled out by Fox News probably won’t get traction, because even the most diehard Trumpers still like to pretend they “don’t see race.” By invoking QAnon conspiracy theories about pedophile Democrats “grooming” children, Republican propagandists can tickle those ugly urges while talking around their racist, sexist anxieties. They may not be able to block Jackson’s nomination, but they aren’t going to let a good opportunity to further radicalize their base go to waste.

A cheesy, creamy, 2-ingredient tomato sauce

Big Little Recipe has the smallest-possible ingredient list and big everything else: flavor, creativity, wow factor. That means five ingredients or fewer — not including water, salt, black pepper, and certain fats (like oil and butter), since we’re guessing you have those covered. Inspired by the column, the Big Little Recipes cookbook is available now.

If espresso martinis and fanny packs can make a comeback, why not sun-dried tomatoes? This wrinkly, tangy ingredient peaked in the ’90s, then fell out of favor in the decades since. But it never left my pantry.

Tomatoes are chock-full of glutamates, the amino acid behind umami. Transforming them from juicy orbs to little nuggets concentrates that meaty, savory flavor, not unlike beef jerky without the beef.

Amid a shelf of convenient tomato products — whole peeled, diced, pureed, paste — sun-dried are the most convenient. The most accommodating when you’ve had a long day. They don’t need to be sautéed or simmered or seasoned. They just need to be opened.

And in this recipe, chopped. Toss in a bowl, smash into cream cheese, and done. Like their names suggest, these two ingredients are all you need for an intensely creamy, cheesy tomato sauce.

It comes together in less time than it takes for water to reach a rolling boil. Which means you can spend the eight-ish minutes that the pasta is cooking pouring yourself a glass of wine and whipping up a crunchy topping.

Stream a slick of that sun-dried tomato oil — you didn’t think we were going to forget about it, did you? — in a skillet. Once it’s shimmering, add a spoonful of plump capers, which will puff and split, like popcorn. Sprinkled on top, these channel flaky salt, grated Parmesan, and crunchy bread crumbs all at the same time.

The hardest part is not eating them all before the pasta is ready. But lucky for us, the pasta will be ready in just a second.

Recipe: Sun-Dried Tomato Pasta with Crispy Capers

Supreme Court waits two days to reveal Clarence Thomas is hospitalized, will miss oral arguments

Justice Clarence Thomas was admitted to the hospital on Friday with flu-like symptoms, according to a Sunday court statement revealing that he’d come down with an infection.

“It is not COVID related. The Justice does not have COVID,” a spokesperson for the Supreme Court confirmed. “His symptoms are abating, he is resting comfortably, and he expects to be released from the hospital in a day or two. Justice Thomas will participate in the consideration and discussion of any cases for which he is not present on the basis of the briefs, transcripts, and audio of the oral arguments,” they added.

The court did not reveal why it waited two days to disclose Thomas’ condition.

All nine justices have been fully vaccinated against the COVID-19 virus, according to The New York Times. At least two members, Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, have contracted the disease, but both have fully recovered.

Thomas, 73, will be the oldest justice on the bench after the impending resignation of Justice Stephen Breyer, 83, who recently pledged to step down by the end of his term in June. Thomas was originally tapped by President George H.W. Bush in 1991 to succeed former Justice Thurgood Marshall, the court’s first Black justice. In 2018, Thomas became a senior associate justice and the longest-serving member on the bench.

Thomas’ sudden hospitalization comes as the court is poised to fill Breyer’s soon-to-be vacancy with Ketanji Brown Jackson, 51, the former vice chair of the United States Sentencing Commission who now serves as a federal judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Nominated by President Biden in late February, Jackson would be the court’s first Black female justice. She would also be the first justice to have worked as a public defender.

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Thomas, a stalwart conservative, leads the court’s 6-3 conservative majority set in stone by former President Trump’s appointments of Kavanaugh, Barrett, and Justice Neil Gorsuch. Throughout his career, Thomas has been a somewhat mysterious figure, often remaining silent during oral arguments.

But in recent years, the justice has become far more vocal about his jurisprudence, handing down a spate of conservative rulings that critics say have stretched the letter of law.

Apart from his decisions, critics have also expressed concern over his ill-defined relationship with his wife, Ginni Thomas, a conservative activist and operative who recently had a hand in Trump’s failed crusade to reinstall himself as president in the 2020 election.

Biden must prepare: Republicans plan to exploit Ukraine for political gain — again

You would think after five years of the Republican standard-bearer telling anyone who will listen that the United States is “stupid” and that “the whole world is laughing at us” while kissing up to dictators and insulting U.S. allies, that members of the GOP would now be embarrassed to fall back on their old playbook of calling Democrats unpatriotic and soft of defense. But as we know, they are shameless so that isn’t something that would stop them.

As it stands, after a few weeks of confusion and disarray (which I wrote about here) — not really sure if their supporters’ adoration for that gorgeous hunk Vladimir Putin was so deeply felt that they would support the invasion of Ukraine — GOP leadership has mostly come around to the idea that Russia probably shouldn’t be ruthlessly murdering massive numbers of civilians. Being the timorous followers these leaders really are, they couldn’t just take a moral and principled stand at the outset, particularly since the leader of the party, Donald Trump, was out there saying that Putin was a genius and very savvy for just going in and taking the prime property he coveted. (Perhaps it reminded him of the good old days when he would take elderly widow’s land under eminent domain to build parking lots for his casinos.) But they needn’t have worried too much. The muscle memory of right-wing anti-communism is still viable in the GOP’s body politic.

A majority of Republican voters easily relinquished their love for the Russian president without really even knowing why. To GOP leadership’s relief, they found they were free to engage in bellicose denunciations of Putin without fear of offending their followers. Even Trump has moderated his support for his good buddy Vlad, although he’s so used to giving him props that they just slip out anyway. He told Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro this week:

You say, what’s the purpose of this? They had a country. You could see it was a country where there was a lot of love and we’re doing it because, you know, somebody wants to make his country larger or he wants to put it back the way it was when actually it didn’t work very well.

There was just so much love in the old Soviet Union and “somebody” just wanted to make his country larger and put it back the way it was. What’s the problem?

Although Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., appeared on “Meet the Press” on Sunday claiming that there were only a few such “lonely voices,” there are still some pretty influential people making the case for Putin:

https://youtu.be/qZPK4tZi21E

Nonetheless, Republicans have settled back into their comfortable groove of calling Democrats a bunch of weak sisters who don’t know how to defend the country or lead the world. If there’s one thing they can all agree on, it’s that.

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Former Republican ad man Rick Wilson, one of the most brutal of all of them, sounded the alarm about how that’s going to play out as we launch into the midterm election season. He wrote in the Washington Post that it won’t be pretty:

[The GOP] wants to play the most beloved game in the GOP playbook: that the Democrats are weak on defense. In my decades as a GOP ad maker and strategist, I made some pretty notorious ads about it. And I can tell you they work.

Democrats too often miss the optics and politics of foreign policy, hoping good choices will outweigh the dark, emotional games Republicans like to play when it comes to national security. Republicans specialize at turning Democratic successes overseas into disasters. It’s a slow-burn strategy designed to trigger an outrage culture that doesn’t stop at the water’s edge. GOP leaders don’t care about reality; their audience doesn’t care about the truth, and their political media apparatus always stays on message.

Donald Trump bungled the 2020 negotiations ending the war in Afghanistan, freeing the Taliban at scale and setting a date certain for U.S. withdrawal. When Biden stuck with that commitment to exit, Republicans leveraged the inevitable chaos in Kabul into a cataclysmic political fable; if only the weak Democrats had held on for another year, victory was ensured.

Similarly, the terrorist attack on the Benghazi facilities in 2012 was another faux scandal-in-a-box because it gave Republicans — me included — a populist tale to be weaponized, embedded in the right’s mythos and deployed repeatedly. I distinctly recall being in a focus group that year and watching the pollster tease from participants how Benghazi could be used to offset the 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden under Barack Obama and transformed into a political millstone for Hillary Clinton.

Recall that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy helped blow his chance to become Speaker of the House when he went on TV and admitted the GOP’s plan to exploit Benghazi for political gain:

“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened, had we not fought.”

And think about John Kerry, a decorated war hero who was painted as a cowardly liar who faked his record. The GOP conventioneers all wore purple band-aids on their faces to mock him. Wilson lays out exactly how Republicans are going to do the same with Ukraine:

[T]he GOP will soon try to flank Biden on Ukraine. Some, like Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), will try to box him in on a no-fly zone — ignoring the negative externality of a nuclear exchange — while others will push him further than he wants on lethal aid to Ukraine. Win or lose, the GOP will declare that Biden blew his main chance. Even many sober foreign policy thinkers in the GOP will try to leverage Democratic “weakness” in Ukraine in the 2022 elections.

Sadly, this will end up folding very neatly into their pre-existing narrative that Biden is a doddering old fool who can barely tie his shoes.

The latest Pew poll shows that large majorities of both parties support Biden’s leadership in gathering allies to put pressure on Russia and support Ukraine and most are in favor of the sanctions even if it means some personal sacrifice. At the moment, only a third would back a no-fly zone even if it risks nuclear war (which it would.) So, it would seem that Democrats are in a strong position. But they must remember what Wilson says: “GOP leaders don’t care about reality; their audience doesn’t care about the truth, and their political media apparatus always stays on message.”

Biden’s leadership has been steady and stalwart but the “Democrats are a bunch of weak-kneed wimps” is a powerful meme in American politics. I hope they are prepared for it this time.

The best place to feel lonely is in a bagel shop

In the loneliest time in my life, I spent a lot of time in my local bagel shop. I was living in Baltimore, a new city, and had just gone through a splintering breakup. As a middle school teacher living with two others, I was often surrounded by people. And yet I was lonely in my classroom full of students and lonely in my apartment full of roommates. I was lonely in my room at night, where Netflix would accost me with the passive aggressive, “Are you still watching?”

On Sunday mornings at the bagel shop though, being alone never felt so bad. I had my Sundays down to a science. Grabbing my latest book, I drove eight minutes to the bagel store by the water, one of the few routes I had memorized. There, I waited in line while watching for a booth to empty.

A bagel store on a Sunday morning is like an exhibit of dioramas, perfect human moments displayed in miniature all around you. The college kids in sweatpants, clutching chocolate milk in their fists like hangover talismans. Parents wiping schmear from their children’s cheeks as the little ones babbled and squawked. Each person who approached the counter seemed deserving of attention, of appreciation. (Except for the blueberry bagel types. You know the ones.)

There’s a Mary Oliver poem, “Why I Wake Early”, in which she wrote, “Hello, you who make the morning.” In the context of the poem, Oliver is addressing the sun, but it seems obvious to me that this line was actually written about bagels. Bagels, those who bake them, and those who eat them, all colluding to make the morning.

On my favorite Sundays it was raining, and I stood in a shorter line. These people, with raincoats thrown over pajamas, were the warriors who had volunteered to brave the wilderness so that their families could stay warm and dry. As I ate, I felt a pinprick of pleasure from imagining their children and partners at home. Their emissary returning to them with a heavy brown paper bag.

Even as I ate alone, though, my envy wasn’t a sour one. I always took my time, working my way slowly through a bag of potato chips and filling the hours with people watching. From my booth I saw a million mornings, and I felt a part of them all. Huddled there with my extra toasted everything bagel with lettuce and tomato, witnessing was enough. The scene I was watching was also one that, just by eating my bagel, I was co-creating. Once, I even spotted my roommate there, having breakfast with a friend. Without thinking about it I slouched lower on the vinyl bench and out of her eye line. I found that I preferred, for once, to be alone.

Now, more isolated than ever, I find myself nostalgic for the pretty loneliness of those mornings. It’s something I think about a lot, having not eaten in a restaurant in almost two years. I aim to avoid crowds and public spaces when possible. And when I do encounter strangers, my first response, rather than to witness or wonder, is often to cross the street. The pleasure of people watching is dampened by the wariness our era demands.

It may seem silly to crave one isolation from another, but these past years have given me an added appreciation for the unique beauty that comes with feeling alone in a crowd. There are moments now when I wish I could dine out again, for a candlelit date or a birthday celebration or a normal night when I want to meet a friend for dinner. None of those cravings stand up to this one, though.

I never could have anticipated, in those lonely years, that I was living something I would be nostalgic for later. Whether that says more about the sweetness of that moment or the bleakness of this one, I’m not sure. But I still think of those Sundays. The toasty smelling shop, the coffee-clutchers and gossipers, the cream cheese slathered bagels stuffed into eager hands. I haven’t eaten in a bagel shop in years, but I look forward to the day I do, the strangers who will accompany me, and the morning we will make.

Pro-Trump group sent armed members door-to-door in Colorado to “intimidate” voters: Lawsuit

Voting rights groups have filed a lawsuit seeking to stop a pro-Trump group from going door-to-door in Colorado in search of evidence to support voter fraud allegations that have already been debunked and rejected by courts.

The lawsuit alleges that the U.S. Election Integrity Plan — led by Shawn Smith, an ally of former Trump strategist Steve Bannon and MyPillow founder Mike Lindell — is sending armed members door-to-door in areas with large numbers of voters of color, questioning people about how they voted and taking photographs of their homes.

The lawsuit, which is backed by the state chapter of the NAACP, the League of Women Voters and Mi Familia Vota, alleges that the “voter intimidation” campaign violates the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, a post-Civil War law aimed at preventing white vigilantes from terrorizing Black people to stop them from voting.

The lawsuit cites the “County & Local Organizing Playbook” used by the group, which instructs members to “undertake citizen audit activities to either refute or confirm serious allegations of election malfeasance” in order to “support future legal action.” The group, some of whose members are armed, has been going door-to-door in El Paso, Mesa and Weld counties in Colorado, using public voter lists to identify areas where they believe ballots were fraudulently cast, the Colorado Times Recorder reported last year. The report prompted an alert from Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, who warned voters of unofficial canvassing efforts and urged residents to report harassment and threats to local law enforcement or the Justice Department.

“Defendants’ objectives are clear. By planning to, threatening to, and actually deploying armed agents to knock on doors throughout the state of Colorado, USEIP is engaged in voter intimidation,” the lawsuit states. “USEIP’s public-facing actions are a clear signal to Colorado voters — especially voters of color — that to vote in an upcoming election means facing interrogation by potentially armed and threatening USEIP agents at their doorstep thereafter.”

The lawsuit claims that some members have worn “badges” and falsely accused voters of fraud.

“Sometimes armed and donning badges to present an appearance of government officiality, USEIP agents interrogate voters about their addresses, whether they participated in the 2020 election, and — if so — how they cast their vote,” the complaint says. “It is reported that multiple agents have claimed to be from ‘the county,’ and have, without any evidence, falsely accused the residents of casting fraudulent ballots.”

The voting rights groups say the group’s efforts to seek out areas where they believe voter fraud occurred has largely focused on high-density housing areas and communities experiencing a growth in the number of minority voters.

“No one should have to be afraid to go to the polls or fear that doing so will mean being threatened in their own homes,” Courtney Hostetler, senior counsel for Free Speech for People and one of the lawyers leading the lawsuit, said in a statement. “Free and fair elections can only occur when people know that they are able to safely vote without reprisal or intimidation.”

The group’s “playbook” thanks Lindell, a leading election conspiracy theorist. Smith, the group’s founder, attended Lindell’s election conspiracy-laden “symposium” last year in South Dakota along with former Colorado election clerk Tina Peters, who was indicted earlier this month for her role in leaking sensitive voting system data that was published by QAnon conspiracy theorists and right-wing websites. Griswold’s office said earlier this year that Smith had also convinced another election official, Elbert County Clerk and Recorder Dallas Schroeder, to make copies of his office’s hard drives that he later gave to “unauthorized people in violation of Election Rules.”

Shawn Smith, the head of USEIP last month led a “lock her up” chant while discussing Griswold at a rally and said that “if you’re involved in election fraud, you deserve to hang.”

He can also be seen in a video among a group of violent Trump supporters who clashed with police outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He was accompanied by Colorado state Rep. Ron Hanks, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate who has also pushed false election claims.

Smith is also the president of another “election integrity” group called Cause of America, also funded by Lindell, which Smith announced on Bannon’s “War Room” podcast.

USEIP appears to have fully embraced the QAnon conspiracy theory. Its website and the first page of its “playbook” include the slogan “We Are the Plan,” frequently associated with QAnon believers. During a presentation organized by Sherronna Bishop, the former campaign manager for Rep. Lauren Boebert, USEIP leader Cory Anderson (who is also a member of the anti-government Three Percenter militia) described the briefing as “being red-pilled,” according to the Times Recorder. (That expression, originally drawn from “The Matrix,” is popular among QAnon followers and other far-right conspiracy theorists.)

The lawsuit names Smith, as well as co-founders Holly Kasun and Ashe Epp, who was also at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

It alleges that their attempted canvassing for election fraud evidence had the “purpose and effect of intimidating Coloradans from voting, trying to vote, helping others to vote, supporting or advocating for certain political beliefs, or exercising the right to speak, peaceably assemble, or petition the government for redress of grievances, in violation of Section 11(b) of the Voting Rights Act.” The suit also accuses the group of violating a section of the Ku Klux Klan Act that bans “conspiracy to interfere with civil rights.”

“Sadly, efforts to intimidate voters are nothing new,” NAACP general counsel Janette McCarthy Wallace said in a statement. “The NAACP has a long and proud history of opposing those who would seek to thwart democracy. We could not sit idly by and allow voters to potentially be bullied out of exercising their rights.”

The lawsuit does not offer specific examples of voters being intimidated or harassed by armed canvassers, but last year USEIP leader Charity McPike urged armed members to provide “security” for the group.

“We are attempting to line up security. However, anyone who carries protection might want to let us know so we can offer your cell phone numbers to those who are concerned,” McPike said, according to Colorado Pols.

“No voter should ever feel threatened in the safety of their own homes,” Celina Stewart, League of Women Voters chief counsel, said in a statement. “The nefarious actions of the USEIP are a blatant form of voter intimidation used to target and with the intent to silence Colorado voters of color, which is in clear violation of the Voting Rights Act.”

The USEIP is also working with the Colorado Republican Party on its “Election Integrity Operations,” according to the Times Recorder. A USEIP member is in charge of the GOP’s program and has given joint presentations with Epp, the group’s co-founder. Heidi Ganahl, the leading Republican candidate for Colorado governor, promoted the group during a recent event, declaring that they are “doing great things.”

USEIP did not respond to a request for comment. The group’s website says it plans to expand to other states, including Arizona, Georgia and New Hampshire. Its training materials are already being used by conspiracy theorists in Utah who call themselves the Utah Voter Verification Project, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.

Residents in Hurricane, Utah, alerted Washington County officials in December that members of the group, who refused to identify themselves, showed up at their doors with personal voter information, according to the report. The members also recorded voters without their consent.

“We can record anyone without telling them. We don’t need permission,” one unidentified trainer told the outlet. The group’s training manual also stressed that “you do not have to identify yourself at all.”

The goal of the Utah group appears to be to collect affidavits from voters who claim to have evidence of illegal votes. In the wake of Trump’s 2020 defeat, his legal team attempted to submit voter affidavits to prove their debunked allegations, but those efforts were almost entirely rejected by judges and discredited by election officials.

There has been no credible evidence of voter fraud in Utah, which Trump won by more than 20 points. Republican Gov. Spencer Cox and Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson condemned those who are spreading “misinformation” about the election and dismissed claims of fraud as “absolute falsehoods.”

Other Trump supporters have tried similar door-to-door audits. Cyber Ninjas, the bankrupt company that led Arizona’s failed “forensic audit,” sought to send canvassers door-to-door in Maricopa County but ultimately relented after the Justice Department warned that such an effort would violate federal laws against voter intimidation.

Another group called the New Mexico Audit Force also sent its members door-to-door in heavily Republican Otero County, which had already spent $50,000 on an “audit” confirming that Trump had won the county by more than 25 points. The House Oversight Committee last Thursday announced a probe of the effort, warning that the audit “illegally interferes with Americans’ right to vote by spreading disinformation about elections and intimidating voters.”

USEIP also appears to have had trouble vetting its volunteers. The group’s training manual says that the group intends to check volunteers’ social media and called on them for a “gut check,” saying leaders had “learned (roundaboutly) that there were a couple of people in our group, who were volunteering for our events, who had a criminal history of sexual misconduct,” and adding, “it’s unfortunate that we must check volunteers for pedophilic leanings.”

Read more:

Won’t someone, anyone stand up to protest Tucker Carlson, Putin’s biggest fanboy?

Recently, the world watched with a mixture of astonishment, delight and concern as an employee of Russian state television Channel One interrupted the evening news program by coming onto the set, shouting “Stop the war! No to war!” while holding up a large handmade sign that said: Don’t believe the propaganda. They’re lying to you here.

News editor and producer Marina Ovsyannikova rushed out behind a female anchor (reportedly a Putin favorite), who was presenting the national state-sanctioned “news,” with a sign decrying the lies being told there about Putin’s war against Ukraine.

She also released a pre-recorded video, in which she opens by saying, “What is happening right now in Ukraine is a crime, and Russia is the aggressor. And the responsibility for this aggression lies on the conscience of only one person. This man is Vladimir Putin.” She then notes that her father is Ukrainian and her mother is Russian and calls what Putin is doing a “fratricidal war.”

She movingly calls on her fellow Russians to follow her, to stand up for what is right. Many have already been doing just that.

For her courageous act, Ovsyannikova said she was interrogated for 14 hours and has been fined. She faces an unknown fate — conceivably years in a Putin prison.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy praised her for the brave act of defiance, for telling the truth in the face of Putin’s demand that his war against Ukraine be called a “special military operation” in support of Ukraine.

My question is, who will stand up for journalistic integrity here at home behind Tucker Carlson, the most vocal Putin cheerleader on Fox News? It immediately became a meme, but who will actually do it?

You know, Master Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson, pretend populist, who grew up rich because members of the actual proletariat were eating his stepmother’s TV dinners; Tucker-of-the-Inevitable-Bowtie Carlson, who somehow manages to get U.S. males whipped up by strategically fretting about men being emasculated; Tucker of the Perpetually Confused Expression, who happily weaponizes stupidity; the Fox News “host” who, with a lot of competition among his colleagues, has stepped up as Putin’s No. 1 apologist in the United States — so much so, that the Kremlin has noted how important it is for their propaganda efforts to showcase Carlson’s work as often as possible.

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I planned to give some examples of Carlson’s fawning for Putin, but where does one begin? So many times has Tucker lavished praise on Putin or attempted to undermine Putin’s critics that he is being called the “TuckyoRose” of his generation, and some call for him to be investigated by the Department of Justice.

A recent personal favorite of mine was his whining, dexterous double-pandering of “Has Putin ever called me a racist?” (Hm. That he was whining may mean that it was actually a triple pander. Let’s enumerate: one, to his main man, Vlad; two, to white supremacists in his viewership; three, to the generally aggrieved viewership of Fox nation, for whom whining — especially by white men — elicits a Pavlovian response.)

Speaking of which, suffice it to say that when it comes to all things Vladimir, Tucker — much like our former president — is like that squirmy little dog that rolls onto its back (occasionally going so far as to pee itself) to show the dominant dog due obeisance. (Imagine that dog wearing a spiffy bow tie.)

No one feels animosity for such a dog, only pity. In the human realm? Well, the feelings may vary.

The question of the moment is this: How can democracies defend themselves against all the weapons utilized by authoritarians? Weapons like relentless propaganda and disinformation campaigns, attacks on journalists and the free press in general, and lawless oligarchs laundering their money in London, Amsterdam and New York while cozying up to officials with charitable giving and political donations.

Atlantic writer Anne Applebaum, author of “Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism,” who also wrote “The Autocrats Are Winning” last December, will testify to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about what must the world’s democracies must do to fight back against what she calls “Autocracy Inc,” the loose but potent affiliation of autocrats who want to stay in power. What is needed, she writes, is a complete rethinking of our approach.

First among Applebaum’s suggestions is to do a much better job of fighting disinformation. Which naturally brings us back around to the case of Tucker Carlson and his ever-growing ilk.

The founders of our republic knew that democracy had to have an informed citizenry to survive. How can it survive the massive dose of misinformation, disinformation, outright propaganda and bizarre conspiracy theories spewed by Fox News, Newsmax and OAN every day?

Should the First Amendment protect those who constantly muddy the waters — and steal the very possibility of citizens becoming better informed — with blatant lies?

The difference between a real journalistic enterprise and a faux journalistic enterprise, such as the channel perfectly named for a furtive mammal known for its cunning, its whining vocalizations and for pouncing on its prey, is that a misstatement of fact by a real journalistic enterprise is typically inadvertent and will be rectified. Misstatement of facts by Fox News hosts is a fundamental part of the business plan.

And, yes, Fox does have real journalists in its employ — veteran video journalist Pierre Zakrzewski, who was working for Fox, and freelance journalist Oleksandra Kuvshynova were recently killed covering Putin’s war in Ukraine, while British reporter Benjamin Hall was seriously injured — but the journalism practiced at Fox provides cover for the network’s true work, that of Carlson and Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity and Maria Bartiromo, who, as Salon’s Amanda Marcotte recently noted, launder conspiracy theories in the Fox News–QAnon feedback loop, through seemingly innocently bringing the theories up, trusting their viewers will then go online to dig in the garbage.

It is all so over-the-top treasonous that SNL recently cold-opened with a “Fox News Ukrainian Invasion Celebration Spectacular, from Mar-a-Lago,” hosted by cast members playing Carlson, Ingraham and Donald Trump.

Comedians, including the truly heroic Zelenskyy, are doing their utmost to save democracy. Can our leaders do as much? And who will step up to be America’s Ovsyannikova before the cameras at Fox News?

Read more on Tucker Carlson, Fox News and the Ukraine conflict:

Mark Meadows now under investigation for alleged voter fraud in North Carolina

Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows is under investigation for alleged voter fraud, according to the North Carolina attorney general’s office.

Meadows, who helped spread former President Donald Trump’s repeatedly debunked voter fraud claims, may have committed voter fraud himself in the 2020 election, The New Yorker reported earlier this month. Trump’s former top aide and his wife, Debbie, registered to vote in what has been called a “dive trailer” in a remote rural area. Meadows does not appear to have spent a single night there, according to the report. Local news outlet WRAL later reported that Meadows and his wife had voted via absentee ballots in North Carolina in 2020, sparking a state investigation.

State Attorney General Josh Stein’s office asked the State Bureau of Investigation to “investigate alongside the State Board of Elections,” spokesperson Nazneen Ahmed told WRAL on Thursday. “At the conclusion of their investigation, we’ll review their findings.”

Macon County District Attorney Ashley Welch requested the probe.

“I am requesting the Attorney General’s Office handle both the advisement of law enforcement agencies as to any criminal investigations as well as any potential prosecution of Mark Meadows,” she said in a letter to the AG’s office, according to the report, adding that the state attorney general typically handles “prosecutions involving alleged misconduct of government officials.”

Welch said that she was “unaware of any allegations of voter fraud surrounding Mark Meadows” until she was “contacted by the media.” She noted that Meadows had contributed to her 2014 campaign and appeared in her campaign ads.

“It is in the best interest of justice and the best interest of the people of North Carolina that the Attorney General’s office handles the prosecution of this case,” Welch wrote.

Meadows listed the Scally Mountain mobile home address in a voter registration field that asks for the residential address “where you physically live,” according to the reports. Mark and Debbie Meadows sold their prior North Carolina home when Meadows joined the Trump administration. Meadows is also registered to vote in Virginia, where the couple owns a condo, according to The New York Times. Meadows, the former chairman of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus, represented North Carolina in Congress from 2013 to 2020 and was considered a potential Senate candidate before he ultimately declined to run.

The former owner of the mobile home told WRAL that they had rented the property to Meadows’ family, but said the former Trump aide “never spent a night down there” and that Meadows’ wife only stayed for a night or two.

Melanie Thibault, the director of Macon County’s Board of Elections, told The New Yorker she was “dumbfounded” that Meadows listed the address on his voter registration form.

“I looked up this Mcconnell Road, which is in Scaly Mountain, and I found out that it was a dive trailer in the middle of nowhere, which I do not see him or his wife staying in,” she said.

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Under state law, a person cannot list a temporary residence as their residential address unless they intend to make the property a “permanent place of abode.” In election law, the term “residence” refers to a person’s “domicile,” or the place where they actually live most or all the time.

The Supreme Court in 1972 ruled that “residence simply indicates a person’s actual place of abode, whether permanent or temporary. Domicile denotes one’s permanent, established home as distinguished from a temporary, although actual, place of residence.”

State law allows a person to claim an address as their residence if they are living elsewhere temporarily but have the intention of returning. Both the New Yorker and WRAL reported that the trailer property has since sold to a different owner and the Meadowses remain registered at the address. Last year they also bought a $1.6 million home in South Carolina.

The state’s voter registration form warns that it is a Class I felony to “fraudulently or falsely” fill out the form, which could involve a prison sentence of up to one year, according to WRAL.

Meadows repeatedly pushed Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. Before the election, Meadows raised concerns over inaccurate addresses on voter rolls.

“I don’t want my vote or anyone else’s to be disenfranchised. … Do you realize how inaccurate the voter rolls are, with people just moving around?” he told CNN in August of 2020. “Anytime you move, you’ll change your driver’s license, but you don’t call up and say, ‘Hey, by the way I’m re-registering.'”

After Trump’s defeat, Meadows pressed the Justice Department to investigate the former president’s conspiracy theories. Meadows was also on the infamous phone call in which Trump pushed Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn his loss in the state. In December, the House voted to hold Meadows in contempt of Congress after he refused to cooperate with the House probe into the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.

Bobbie Richardson, the chairwoman of the North Carolina Democratic Party, told the Associated Press that Meadows’ “hypocrisy of helping to spread false claims of voter fraud in 2020 in an attempt to overturn the election” combined with his voter registration information was “unparalleled.”

The Washington Post editorial board skewered Meadows last week, calling him out for exposing the “hypocrisy of Republicans on voter fraud.”

“For the past year, the Republican Party has gone to great lengths to restrict absentee voting in state legislatures, claiming that mail-in ballots allow nefarious actors to influence the elections,” the board wrote. “This was always misdirection; fraudulent behavior is extremely rare, and election audits have repeatedly shown that the few cases that do occur do not affect elections. Will Republicans now denounce one of their own for engaging in such activity?”

Read more:

Lockheed Martin’s deep-sea mining gets backlash

A leading conservation group on Friday sounded the alarm after military-industrial complex giant Lockheed Martin filed an application with the U.S. government to renew licenses allowing deep seabed mining exploration in the Pacific Ocean.

“Mining the deep sea is as destructive as strip mining the mountains of Appalachia, extinguishing whole ecosystems with a single blow,” Miyoko Sakashita, oceans program director at the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), said in a statement. “The federal government shouldn’t renew these licenses.”

Although there are no current commercial deep seabed mining operations, the International Seabed Authority has issued exploration licenses to state-owned companies and agencies in China, France, Germany, India, Japan, Russia, and South Korea, and to private corporations including U.K. Seabed Resources, a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin.

Lockheed Martin’s licenses cover the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, located halfway between Mexico and Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean. The area is rich in polymetallic nodules potentially containing copper, nickel, cobalt, iron, manganese, and rare earth elements.

According to some experts, deep-sea mining could be worth as much as $1 trillion to the U.S. economy each year.

Some people are using the energy crisis as an excuse to push through plans for deep sea mining for minerals used by the renewables industry.

We must not let them.

There's nothing renewable about digging up the deep seabed. https://t.co/BDS8Zl4pCf

— Blue Planet Society (@Seasaver) March 11, 2022

CBD—which, through a 2015 lawsuit, forced the federal government to study the danger to ecosystems posed by such licenses—says deep seabed mining is fraught with risks.

The group said in a statement:

The areas of the deep sea where mining contracts have been issued support some of the most biodiverse and scientifically important ecosystems on Earth. Scientists fear the practice could devastate deepwater ecosystems, both directly by destroying life in the seabed, and indirectly by generating sediment plumes, light pollution, noise, and toxins that would affect life far beyond the actual mining sites.

“Before the Biden administration acts, it must take a hard look at this growing threat to the world’s oceans,” said Sakashita, who urged the federal government to “follow the lead of West Coast states and ban deep seabed mining.”

#DeepSeaMining could destroy #biodiversity and habitats, and sacrifice benefits not yet understood, says @DivaAmon.

Latest study in @PolicyMarine shows how far we still have to go to protect the #DeepSea from #seabed mining. https://t.co/MWvKLkYk2a @peterericthor @PewEurope pic.twitter.com/bNfZ0Xt6wZ

— Deep Sea Conservation Coalition (@DeepSeaConserve) March 18, 2022

Washington and Oregon have already banned the practice, while a bill introduced last month in the California state Legislature seeks to protect 2,500 square miles of seafloor from mining.

“Our oceans support and preserve life on our planet and we cannot afford to leave our deep-sea floors vulnerable to exploitation and destruction,” the bill’s sponsor, state Assemblywoman Luz Rivas (D-39), said upon introducing the measure. “We can take swift action to prevent the devastation that seabed mining would inflict upon our delicate marine ecosystems and our coastal economies.”

Mitch McConnell speaks against Republican ‘Putin wing’

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on Sunday shrugged off members of his party who seem to side with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“Congresswoman Liz Cheney has said there’s actually a Putin wing of the Republican Party,” CBS host Margaret Brennan told McConnell. “I think she’s referring to Congressman [Madison Cawthorn] who calls [Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy] a thug. Marjorie Taylor Greene said that the U.S. should not fund a war the Ukrainians cannot possibly win.”

“Is there any room in the Republican Party for this rhetoric?” she asked. “And why isn’t there more discipline?”

“Ah, well, there’s some lonely voices out there that are in a different place,” McConnell replied. “But looking at Senate Republicans, I can tell you that I would have — if I had been the majority leader — would have put this Ukraine supplemental [funding bill] up by itself. I think virtually every one of my members would have voted for it.”

McConnell insisted that the “vast majority of the Republican Party writ large” are “totally behind the Ukrainians and urging the president to take these steps quicker.”

“So there may be a few lonely voices off to the side,” he added. “I wouldn’t pay too much attention to them.”

From GOAT to ghost: Here are America’s 30 most Googled slang terms

As any good descriptive linguist will tell you, slang is and always has been a valid part of language. In the Victorian era, for example, you might say, “My chuckaboo is smothering a parrot” to describe a good friend who was sipping on an absinthe neat. And if you happened to utter that sentence around someone who wasn’t well-versed in the vernacular, their only recourse would be to ask what on Earth you were talking about.

Fortunately, we now have Google to save us from letting on that we can’t keep up with what the cool kids are saying these days. So which current slang creates the most confusion among the uninitiated? Digital jigsaw puzzle platform I’m a Puzzle compiled a list of 200 common slang terms and then analyzed Google search data to find out which ones people looked up most often throughout 2021.

The top 30 is an entertaining mixture of expressions that can mostly be traced to social media. Some are specific to TikTok: FYP is an initialism for “For You Page,” the TikTok feed that delivers an endless stream of videos curated to your interests. DC stands for “dance credit,” which you might see in a TikTok description to acknowledge the person who made up the routine being performed in the video.

Other entries, though popularized by social media, technically predate it. The first instance of GOAT, an acronym for “greatest of all time,” is from 1992: Muhammad Ali’s wife, Lonnie Ali, incorporated a company called “G.O.A.T. Inc.” to manage and license her husband’s intellectual properties. Stan, which describes any devoted fan of a celebrity, was coined by Eminem in his 2000 song “Stan,” about an obsessed Eminem fan (named Stan).

Many terms on the list, from bae to finna, come from African American Language (AAL) — also commonly known as African American English (AAE) and African American Vernacular English (AAVE) — an English dialect spoken by Black Americans. These terms’ prominence in mainstream slang can be interpreted as both a testament to America’s growing acceptance of AAL and also to its ongoing cultural appropriation of it.

Put your modern slang knowledge to the test below, and see more popular terms here.

Simp: “A man who is overly submissive to women”
Woke: “To be well-informed of and sensitive to cultural issues”
Sus: “Suspicious or suspect”
Bussin: “Really good, usually describes food”
FYP: “Abbreviation of ‘For You Page,’ part of the TikTok app”
GOAT: “Acronym for ‘greatest of all time'”
No cap: “To say you’re not lying or exaggerating”
Ratio: “When replies to a tweet vastly outnumber likes or retweets”
FOMO: “Abbreviation for ‘fear of missing out'”
IYKYK: “Abbreviation for ‘if you know, you know'”
Stan: “To be a very devoted fan”
Yeet: “Exclamation of excitement or approval”
YT: “White, as in skin color”
Bae: “Significant other”
Bet: “A term of agreement or approval”
TFW: “Abbreviation for ‘that feeling when'”
OOTD: Abbreviation for “outfit of the day”
POS: “Abbreviation for ‘piece of s***'”
AF: “Abbreviation for ‘as f***,’ used for emphasis”
Cheugy: “Uncool and untrendy”
Cringe: “Something that elicits embarrassment or disgust”
Boujee: “High-class and luxurious”
Karen: “Obnoxious, entitled white woman”
Drip: “Fashionable, stylish, or sexy”
Lowkey: “Quiet, discreet, or secret”
DC: “‘Dance credit,’ used to credit a person who came up with a dance”
Finna: “Getting ready to do something”
Savage: “Not caring about consequences”
Finesse: “To get away with something, to be manipulative”
Ghost: “Abruptly cut off contact with someone”

“The Empire Strikes Back” originally had a darker ending

Although there’s some scary stuff in them, the “Star Wars“ movies have long had a reputation for being family friendly. The darker side of “Star Wars” was perhaps never more on display than in the 1980 sequel “The Empire Strikes Back.” The original “Star Wars” got fans used to the good guys winning in the end no matter the odds, but “Empire” turned that notion on its head. After being tortured, Han Solo is frozen in carbonite and abducted by the bounty hunter Boba Fett. Luke Skywalker abandons his Jedi training to save his captured friends . . . only to lose the battle to Darth Vader (and lose a hand in the process). And of course, there was that huge reveal that Vader was Luke’s father.

All in all, it’s up there as one of the darkest endings of any “Star Wars” film. But according to Luke Skywalker actor Mark Hamill, “The Empire Strikes Back” originally had an even more “downbeat ending.” From the sound of things, the studio was concerned about the tone of the film’s final moments, and encouraged an extra scene to “reassure the audience” that not all was lost in the galaxy far, far away.

Hamill recently confirmed this fun factoid on Twitter. When asked whether the final scene of “The Empire Strikes Back” was a re-shoot, Hamill said that it was in fact a totally new scene added for the final cut of the film:

Filmed 4 months after we wrapped principal photography on #ESB, it wasn't a "re-shoot", it was an added scene. Concerned about the downbeat ending & thorough defeat of the protagonists, they wanted to add an uplifting moment of hope & rejuvenation to reassure the audience. https://t.co/VIMbC3YprU pic.twitter.com/MG41dr8fgu

— Mark Hamill (@MarkHamill) March 8, 2022

The final scene of “The Empire Strikes Back” wasn’t originally in the movie

The scene in question is the one where Luke, Leia, C-3P0 and R2-D2 regroup in a ship’s medbay following the devastating events on Bespin. Luke tests out his new robotic hand while he and Leia hatch a plan with Lando Calrissian and Chewbacca to rescue Han Solo from his carbonite imprisonment. It gives the audience a glimmer of hope that even after getting beaten by the bad guys, Luke and company are already laying the groundwork for their comeback.

I’ll only speak for myself here and say that I’m really glad the decision was made to add in this scene. Could you imagine if “The Empire Strikes Back” ended with the previous sequence, where Luke is picked up by the Millenium Falcon at the bottom of Cloud City, and then they fly off and escape the Empire’s forces by the skin of their teeth? No sense of closure, just a gaping emotional wound from the duel with Darth Vader. The final scene the movie ended up with has resonated with audiences for decades so it clearly does something right.

Speaking of dark endings, another “Star Wars” film that had a pretty dark ending was “Revenge of the Sith,” which ended with Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) becoming Darth Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) going into hiding on Tatooine. The story of those brothers-in-arms turned bitter enemies will be explored further in the “Obi-Wan Kenobi” limited series, due out on Disney+ on May 25. There’s always more “Star Wars” on the horizon.

How “weaponized incompetence” is killing marriages

It wasn’t really about the dishes, of course. Six years ago, when Matthew Fray wrote his viral essay “She Divorced Me Because I Left Dishes By The Sink,” he knew it, too. It was about everything that had preceded the death of a marriage, every missed opportunity and misread expectation. It was, as he wrote at the time, the poignant metaphor of “making her feel sad, alone, unloved, abandoned, disrespected, afraid, etc.”

Fray eventually turned his experience as a bewildered, newly single father into a new career as a relationship coach, and now, as the author of “This Is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships.” In a marketplace teeming with relationship advice aimed squarely at women, Fray offers a frank and refreshingly modern view, one that never makes dated, flippant assumptions about love languages or Venus and Mars. It’s instead the story of hard earned lessons, and how to be a truly present, active partner in a healthy relationship. It also truly delivers on its title promise of hopefulness. I have never read a book about marriage that makes a better case for it than this one, an achievement all the more impressive for being written by “the guy who found out too late.”

Fray will be the first to acknowledge that his perspective is that of a cis man who was in a heterosexual relationship, just as I knew going in to our recent conversation for Salon that we would mostly be focusing on those dynamics. Yet his insights into conflict, love and what he calls “the art of getting to tomorrow” have resonance for anyone who’s ever had a broken heart — or labored to keep one from cracking.

This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

One of the things you say early on in the book that hit me like a punch in the face is that every single one of us is directly affected by divorce and by bad marriages. We’ve all had the impact of that in our lives. It informs our relationships with our friends, with lovers, with our kids, with ourselves. Talk to me about the impact of bad marriage and divorce — which are not the same things.

The way that I think about it is the way that I experienced eighteen months sleeping in a different bedroom than my wife, where I was living in real time the death of my marriage that I really believed was going to be forever. I don’t know how to articulate it with brevity. It was trying not to cry at a conference table at a work meeting. It was staring blankly at the screen at my desk for hours. It was not accepting invitations to go places because everything felt wrong. This was not only just the end of the relationship, it was the beginning of not being together anymore.

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It’s almost weird to talk about now because I’m eight, nine years removed from that and it seems like another life ago. I do remember being dejected, despondent. It didn’t feel like every other moment of my life up to that point. Nothing felt regular to me.

And so performance suffers across the board. It suffers at work. It suffers socially. It suffers with a parent-child relationship. At the time, my son was four. I was less of a father, less of a friend, less of a son, less of an employee back then. I imagine academics probably suffer when your parents are getting divorced or when you yourself are. By the way, this doesn’t have to be marriage. This can just be toxic or unhealthy relationships and the end of relationships you believed to be this central, stable thing in your life.

It doesn’t have be your own relationship, either. We watch our parents, we watch our friends, we watch our siblings, our kids, our bosses. All of that directly impacts all of us in ways we can’t even necessarily connect the dots to.

Purely conjecture, because I have zero data to back this up, but what percentage of troubled youth, of mental and emotional issues, struggles that people have in life, are correlated with being part of an unhealthy relationship, either as a child or as a member of it? I think there are negative societal consequences to bad relationships. The real tragedy is I don’t think most people are mindful of how their behavior adversely affects the relationship.

My overarching premise is that people don’t even know that things they do in their blind spots harm themselves, the other person, the relationship itself. It’s like we send millions and millions of people into this thing that they believe is going to last forever, and they’re not armed with the knowledge or the skills necessary to navigate it effectively. I find that scary, with children involved too, and with all of the people that they interact with and affect in their lives.

I have so many concerns around the fetishization of weddings to the exclusion of actually understanding marriage. You’re going to live with someone who is not perfect and is going to get some things wrong. How you maintain respect, day in and day out? Your book is examining what that need for respect looks like, and how men and women are trained differently to show that respect and consideration. You say that you can be a good person and not necessarily a good spouse. What’s the difference?

I don’t perceive myself to be qualified to decide what’s good or bad. My general idea of good is simply, intention to be a positive force in the world. Always trying to avoid harming others. I think that is the default state of most people. “Good person” is such a generic term, but I don’t really know another way to talk about it. I think people, generally speaking, know what that means.

We send millions and millions of people into this thing that they believe is going to last forever, and they’re not armed with the knowledge or the skills necessary to navigate it effectively.”

In my experience, men more than women — but again, this is all anecdotal — are quick to defend themselves when their partner is upset or hurt in a relationship. It’s on the merits of decency, on the merits of, “I’m trying to do good. I’m never trying to harm you. You always complain about these negative things that you perceive me to do, but I never get credit for the good that I do.”

The thing that I’ve worked really, really hard to do in this last decade is take a measure of the result of my actions or inactions in my relationships, rather than get too hung up on what I was attempting to do. I’ll always invalidate people if I want to be evaluated based on that. If I take responsibility for what actually happens to them in their heads and their hearts, then I can start to be the kind of person that can show up effectively in a relationship.

These are not ideas we discuss in our youth. I don’t know how many people grow up to understand that. When you fail to calculate for how our actions or inactions affect another person, and we don’t take any responsibility for that, we are going to absolutely lose the trust and then the critical amount of safety necessary to maintain relationships.

I don’t think most people do it. I think more than half don’t actively, mindfully practice that habit of accounting for the other person in the relationship. If we are going to pick on anybody, we’ll pick on men, because women’s capacity for taking the temperature of everyone’s emotional state and then adjusting what they’re doing or saying is something that many women are brought up with.

Late in the book you talk about priorities, and where men put their social circles. A man will say, “My marital family comes first,” but in reality it might be outside interests and my friends.

And yet men don’t have friends. Especially as they get older, it is a real crisis. So you have a situation that I can imagine is very difficult in marriages where men are often looking outside at their “interests,” but they don’t have those other deep sustaining relationships. Their wife is their “best friend,” but they’re not really valuing her as a best friend. What do we do then?

Another element of that is also this notion of the female partner being responsible for managing the social calendar in the relationship as well. It’s not just, “My wife is the person I lean on the most for emotional support,” but “Without my wife, I have no active social life. I don’t accept any responsibility for forging new relationships or for maintaining the existing ones or for scheduling social activities to do together.” A lot of guys, I don’t know if they opt out of that process on purpose, but they leave their wives to do that— along with so many of the other things that go on in terms of inequality in the home, shared domestic responsibilities, parenting, house cleaning, all of the things.

The only way I know how to think about it, specifically in the context of marriage, is to accept radical personal responsibility for all of the things I do or don’t do that place some unfair burden or result in pain for my partner to be responsible for my husband’s social life, to have somebody to talk to, to be his companion and do things with. If a guy values his marriage and values his wife, but failed to understand that doing this was taxing her, was eroding feelings of safety and trust in the relationship, I think that guy will actively do things to try to eliminate the pain points in his relationship.

If somebody conveys that idea in a way that resonates with him, he’s like, “Okay, I get it now. I now understand what she’s been asking me to do or not do all these years,” which is pathetic by the way. I learned this pretty late actually, that it is common for women to feel as if they communicate certain ideas to men, but until it’s repeated by a man, the guy that they’re trying to communicate this to didn’t hear it, didn’t listen, didn’t take it seriously. That’s an upsetting idea to me. Especially being a guy, it’s upsetting to me that men will praise me for saying it a way that they’d never quite heard or understood before. But the great majority of their female partners will feel as if they’ve been very clear on these issues.

It’s like, I’ve been saying this for years, but you needed to hear it at a lower register.

I’ve been asking you for 25 years, and now some divorced asshole on the internet says it and you think you’re ready to change? It’s unbelievable. I feel really awful about it. I have this lovely little dream of someday, somehow finding a way to get relationship skills, emotional skills, relational skills into some form of the educational process, whether that’s enlightening parents on a grand scale or finding ways to get it into schooling somehow. When men are as skilled as women, relationally, you won’t have them struggling with friendships in their adult years. It’s again, conjecture, but I believe that to be true.

I want to ask you about a phrase I really like — “weaponized incompetence.”

Just learned it myself.

It’s always alarming when I hear other women say, “My husband doesn’t know how to empty the dishwasher. He’s so ridiculous. I have to do everything. He doesn’t know how to fold.” I think, “You are so being played.” But there is something about the ways in which women are guilted into having everything running smoothly, that if the dishwasher isn’t loaded correctly and if the laundry isn’t folded right, that’s your failing as a woman. It’s not the couple’s failing. It’s not the family’s failing. And that does get weaponized. What can women do about that?

I’m always super hesitant to say anything that sounds like advice for women. I was on a speaking panel for a women in science group. Somebody asked me a question like this, and I’m thinking, wow, I’m the only guy in the room.

Matthew, I promise I’m not going to ask you a question and then say, “Oh, thanks for mansplaining.”

Here’s my answer to that question. I’m not currently married, but I’m speaking in a past tense way, in a hypothetical way. If my wife, without outside influence, really values this idea of a tidy home or things being a certain way, that falls squarely into the work that I do. It’s truly knowing your partner and being able to consider their emotional needs and wants in real time, and then being able to validate their emotional experiences.

Those are these key ideas my coaching work focuses on — I consider my partner all of the time in my decision making and I validate them when they communicate that something’s wrong and that something hurts. If I’m married to somebody and I’m actively doing that, I’m simply as a default measure going to participate in these things. For me, it just keeps coming back to the core idea of how to show up in a relationship.

This is super stereotypical what I’m about to say, and it might not be true. But I think that the average man in a heterosexual relationship does not go visit someone’s home and then run his finger across the window sills and look in the corners for dust bunnies and then make judge-y side eye comments about the state of whatever home that they’re visiting. I think there’s pressure from mothers and sisters and friends and other women who perhaps in an unhealthy way perceive there to be this great pressure to keep up with everybody and have the most perfect home possible.

What values are your values, versus what values are the ones that you’re trying to keep up with so that you’re not rejected by your peers or your family or whoever? We do a lot of things as human beings because we want to be liked or respected or accepted by other people. At somewhere on that spectrum, it becomes unhealthy when we’re living for other people and not ourselves.

As you know if you have ever walked inside a bookstore, the work of and the problem solving of relationships is directed towards women. It is very hard to sell to men the idea of, maybe you need to work on your communication skills. Maybe you need to be a better partner.

This is a book where you’re saying, “I’m not a man telling women how to talk to their men. I’m a man talking to men. Here’s how we can share a little bit of that burden to make better marriages.”

The only way I know how to think about this is from a place of eliminating pain points in our lives. I don’t think the average run of the mill dude in a comfortable marriage — comfortable for him — might know yet that he’s only three years away from his wife being like, “I don’t know how many more days, weeks, months I can take of this.” The conversations that pop up when we don’t tend our marriages well.

How do we reach the men? I think they have to hurt. When you’re asking a comfortable person to make significant uncomfortable change, I don’t think that’s a practical ask. I think it has to hurt. The sad reality of relationships is it has to hurt. We talked in this panel earlier about power dynamics in relationships. The person that was sitting on the panel with me really brought this up — if you want to find out what’s going on societally, culturally, or within a relationship, you ask the person with the least amount of power.

In a lot of heterosexual relationships, women have less power. You might be in a better position to even help me understand from patriarchal standpoint what that feels like, because I’m so blind to it. We’re so blind to the male privilege part of heterosexual relationships, I still have a hard time seeing it sometimes. My wife had all sorts of power at the end, but that’s when the dynamic shifted — when it started to hurt, when I felt like I was in jeopardy of losing this thing that I valued so much. That’s when I tuned in.

The way the internet works is people hurt and then they try to problem solve. They go to Google or wherever and they ask the internet for things. Some percentage of the time they’re asking about relationships, they’re finding my work. Then they’re like, “Okay, this guy talks about it in the way that I lived it, in the way that I experience it. So I’m going to take it a step further and see.” I have real concerns about how many men are going to pick up a book with a bold yellow cover that says, “This Is How Your Marriage Ends” on it. I have real concerns about what percentage of them will sit in a coffee shop or on an airplane and read that. But I am very hopeful that enough people read it to realize that this isn’t any sort of indictment on men and this isn’t anybody claiming to have all the answers.

I just believe I’ve told a story that explains how people accidentally fall out of trust and love in their relationships. The real tragedy to me is the degree to which we accidentally ruin the most valuable things in our lives. If there are people out there that can benefit from thinking about how they show up relationally in this way, I really hope they’ll take a look at it. We’ll find out.

But I think the average guy has to hurt enough to say, “Okay, clearly I don’t have an answer to a question. I better go try to find it.” It’s just things his wife already said, but tweaked a little bit to say, “Hey, I know that you’re not trying to hurt your partner. I know that you don’t think about it like that.” A great empathy lesson in all of this to me is learning how to respect the pain others report feeling.

You talk about that invalidation triple threat. Just because I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings doesn’t mean that I wasn’t hurtful. It’s not that you’re a bad person. It’s not that you’re a bad communicator. It’s in a moment when someone tells you, “Hey, this is how feel, this is my experience,” to just believe them.

I’m okay even with not believing, to be frank. Just value a person you care about feeling something bad and try to restore safety, restore trust in the relationship actively, mindfully. When we impulsively don’t agree with somebody, we have a tendency to invalidate in our response patterns. I ask anyone I’m working with to set aside this assumption of correctness or being right. I don’t think it’s useful in relationships.

It blows me away, and I really believe this is the answer to the question of why do so many relationships fail. It’s because when one person communicates that something’s wrong, that something hurts, the other person doesn’t take it seriously and do anything about it. That’s the story of why relationships end. It can apply to dishes and laundry and house cleaning and what time we get home after work or the frequency with which we text, a million things. I don’t think that when we’re getting married for the first time that these are the sorts of things we identify as landmines in our relationships.

I want people to be able to do that. I want people to recognize the threat. Recognize that if I have an invalidation habit or if I am very forgetful in my relationship and it causes lots of inconvenience and disrespectful moments for my partner, my relationship’s going to suffer if I don’t mitigate that somehow. I wish there was some way to give that idea to young people entering their romantic relationships. And I do think that’s universal.

More on love and marriage:

This sweet and tart lemon cake is the easiest bake you’ll ever make

In the 1950s, my great-grandmother, Mama Jessie, moved to Mexico Beach to be closer to her family. I came into the world nearly two decades later, and that spectacular Florida beach was the first beach I ever visited.

Growing up, I believed that Mexico Beach was the most beautiful place on Earth. Its unspoiled shoreline was stunning, with only sand and waves as far as the eye could see in both directions.

The trip to Mama Jessie’s house was about four hours by car. As soon as we arrived, my sister and I were greeted with big hugs. Soon to follow were big slices of our favorite homemade cakes.

As a kid, my favorite was Mama Jessie’s Angel Food Cake. My sister’s favorite was her Lemon Jell-O Cake. I don’t always like to admit when my sister is right, but I’m willing to admit the latter was the superior cake.

Lemon Jell-O Cake tastes like you went through lots of trouble in the kitchen, but it’s actually one of the easiest recipes you’ll ever make. That’s why it’s likely to become one of your go-to springtime bakes. The tartness of the lemon is perfectly balanced by the sweetness, both in the cake itself and the accompanying glaze. It’s moist and somewhat dense like a pound cake but uniquely lighter in texture.

Every time I bake this cake, I’m transported back in time to Mexico Beach. Mama Jessie’s sister, Estelle “Aunt Sister,” lived next door to her. As kids, my sister and I ran back and forth and in and out of their houses, spoiled not only by the adoring attention but also the homemade treats.

In sharing this cake, I share Mama Jessie and Aunt Sister. They were something else! These two women managed the general store, the post office and later The Sands, which was the only hotel in Mexico Beach back in the day. I’m told they were both shrewd business women who “ran a tight ship” and “did not suffer fools gladly.” I’m pretty sure that’s Southern-speak for “they were hell on wheels.”

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Throughout my childhood, Mexico Beach was virtually unknown. It’s certainly no longer a hidden gem, in part because of the media coverage of Hurricane Michael, the devastating, nearly Category 5 storm that came ashore back in October of 2018. Once a community of about 1,250, Mexico Beach now numbers about 500.

Thankfully, Mama Jessie’s house was one of a handful that remained standing after the storm. This cake brings Mama Jessie, Mexico Beach and the smell of her house when we walked inside to life. It makes me grateful for the power of family recipes, which can help us remember and relive the past. In that sense, food is magic.

Spring has arrived where I live today. My azaleas are blooming, and I just poured the glaze over my first Lemon Jell-O Cake of the season. Outside, a family of osprey are encouraging a youngling in what appears to be its first flight. What a magnificent day! I hope spring has sprung where you are, too. If not, perhaps baking this cake will help call it forth . . .

***

Before we start cookin’, here’s a closer look at some of the ingredients:

Boxed cake mix

This recipe, like so many of my recipes, is from a simpler time. The choices at the grocery store were simpler, at least. As far as Mama Jessie was concerned, Duncan Hines was the best — which is why it’s name-checked in the recipe. What’s key here is choosing a simple vanilla cake mix.

“Lemon flavor”

Back in the day, folks called this ingredient “lemon flavor,” my mom says. “Lemon flavor” is handwritten on the recipe, but I don’t know if those words actually appeared on the label — or if they were shorthand for lemon extract. (For more, see Cook’s Notes.)

***

Recipe: Mama Jessie’s Lemon Jell-O Cake

Yields

1 cake

Prep Time

10 minutes

Cook Time

55 minutes

Ingredients

Lemon Jell-O Cake

1 package Duncan Hines cake mix
1 package lemon Jell-O
2/3 cup water
2/3 cup salad oil
4 whole eggs
1 teaspoon lemon flavor (see Cook’s Note)

Lemon Glaze

1/2 pound powdered sugar
Juice of 3 lemons

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
Mix all of the cake ingredients in a bowl. Beat with an electric mixer for 5 minutes, or until completely smooth.
Pour the batter into a greased and floured bundt pan. Bake at 350 for 55 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean.
Meanwhile, make the glaze. Place the powdered sugar in a bowl and gradually add the juice of 3 lemons. Stir well.
Take the cake out of the oven. Allow it to cool in the pan, then run a knife around the edges and remove it. Pour the glaze over the top of the cake.

Cook’s Notes

1. Feel free to experiment with different boxed cake mixes, as long as you choose a vanilla mix that comes in a 15.25-ounce box. I’ve experimented with gluten-free versions, such as King Arthur, Krusteaz and Pamela’s. Even good ol’ Duncan Hines has a gluten-free yellow cake mix these days.

2. “Salad oil” appears in so many of my older recipes. (In these handed-down recipes, it’s either lard, salad oil or shortening.) You can use butter or a mixture of butter and oil of your choosing. I reached for cold-pressed sunflower seed oil the last time I made this cake, but I’ve used a combination of oil and butter many times.

3. “Lemon flavor”: This ingredient has sparked a lot of conversation at home. Do not use lemon juice as a substitute. Lemon extract, lemon flavoring and lemon zest are all fine to use. If you go with the latter, simply measure the same amount of zest as flavoring. In other words, it’s a 1:1 ratio.

More recipes from Bibi’s Southern kitchen:

The secret to the perfect grilled cheese, revealed

Grilled cheese is one of those seemingly simple dishes that can be tricky to master. Getting that optimal level of crisply toasted bread and oozy filling is a delicate art. My grandmother used to broil hers, and my childhood grilled cheeses were always well melted but a little dry.

In adulthood, I latched on to Gabrielle Hamilton’s winning method of slathering the bread in mayo and making the sandwich in a skillet — a flavorful upgrade that has never failed me. When my college-aged daughter recently shared how she had been making grilled cheeses at school, however, I was shocked by the technique.

“You add water to the pan,” she explained, as I looked at her like she was out of her mind.

“Is this what my tuition money is paying for you to learn here?” I asked. “To defile bread?”

Though Google produced surprisingly little validation for this approach, there was a fairly recent post by Alpha Foodie for cheese toasties whose instructions called for adding a tablespoon of water to the pan and covering it to steam the sandwich.

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The real game changer, though, was a 2015 recipe from Barefeet in the Kitchen. It stuck to my preferred strategy of lavishly lubricating the bread — not the skillet. I was soon rewarded with what can only described as the platonic ideal of a grilled cheese. It was the perfect ratio of buttery to crunchy to melty — and not remotely soggy. The water trick just plain works.

You can endlessly riff on this recipe by experimenting with the cheese and add-ins, but there are a few non-negotiables. Don’t use bread that is too thick; do be generous with the butter and a little restrained with the filling. If the heat can’t reach the center, you won’t get the proper melt. No matter what journey you choose, in 5 minutes flat, you’ll be enjoying the best sandwich of your life.

***

Recipe: The Very Best Grilled Cheese
Inspired by Alpha Foodie and Barefeet in the Kitchen

Yields

1 serving

Prep Time

5 minutes

Cook Time

5 minutes

Ingredients

2 thinly cut slices of your favorite bread
1/3 cup grated cheese
2-3 tablespoons butter, softened
1 tablespoon water

Directions

Heat a large skillet over medium heat.
Generously butter the slices of bread. Lightly toast them, buttered side down, in the pan for 1 or 2 minutes to just golden.
Add the cheese to the first slice of bread, then top with the second slice. To adhere the cheese to the bread, give the sandwich a good smush with a spatula.
Move the sandwich to one side of the skillet and sprinkle in the water on the other side. Cover everything with a large lid or bowl and toast for another minute.
Remove the lid and check on the bottom of the sandwich. Flip it over and toast for another minute or so. It should look golden and browned, and the cheese should be sticking if you try to open it. If you’re not there yet, give it another minute.
Plate and serve immediately.

Cook’s Notes

Cheddar, of course, is the classic cheese here. Add more cheese if your bread slices are larger.

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Your handy guide to every spring vegetable

Spring is just around the corner, or that’s what I keep telling myself. Which means we have a lot of snappy, happy produce to look forward to. Below are the spring vegetables I can’t wait to buy by the tote-full when the farmer’s market finally comes back to town. We’ll cover good-to-know tips (like how to store) and fun facts (to wow your friends at a party) — and share some of our favorite recipes, too.

Artichokes

Technically a thistle, an artichoke looks like a pine cone, prickly, jagged, and ready to ward off predators. That’s us. To get to the good stuff (the petals and heart), you have to put in a fair amount of work. Vegetable whisperer and author of Six Seasons Joshua McFadden calls them “a royal pain” — but once you master the technique, it’s like riding a bike. Just head here for some easy prep tips. What’s more: After you cook an artichoke, you need little more than mayo for dunking to have a wonderful dish.

Steamed Artichokes with Garlic Aioli

Roasted Artichoke Leaf Appetizer with Feta and Black Olives (and Cheater’s Aioli)

Slow-Cooker Lemon-Thyme Steamed Crockpot Artichokes

Carciofi alla Giudia – Roman Jewish-Style Artichokes

Arugula

Also known as Italian cress, rocket, and rucola, arugula is famous for its peppery flavor. So if you aren’t into bitter greens, don’t throw your hat into this ring. It’s wonderful in salads — especially ones with rich, fatty components, like meat, nuts or cheese — but also holds up well when wilted. Stir into brothy-chunky soups at the very end. Toss with hot pasta. Or turn into a pesto.

French Lentil and Arugula Salad with Herbed Cashew Cheese

Steak with Arugula, Lemon, and Parmesan

Potato Salad with Arugula and Dijon Vinaigrette

Roasted Onion Salad with Arugula and Walnut Salsa

Asparagus

In the 1st century, according to The Food Encyclopedia, “Romans tended to overindulge in asparagus, consider a dinner negligible unless it featured both an asparagus appetizer and main dish.” Nice! When you’re buying asparagus, avoid stalks that are discolored or floppy. And after you bring them home, try this trick from Ruffage author Abra Berens: “Store in a vase of water in the refrigerator so the stalks will continue to wick up water.” Some cooks like to snap asparagus bottoms, to get rid of the fibrous, woody parts — but I prefer to navigate this by knife, to waste as little as possible.

Tagliarini with Asparagus and Herbs

Nobu’s Fried Asparagus with Miso Dressing

Asparagus with Soft-Boiled Eggs and Anchovy Bread Crumbs

Alice B. Toklas’ Asparagus in Salt and Pepper Whipped Cream

Carrots

Sure, you can get carrots all year, but young, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed carrots are a warm-weather specialty. (And yes, these are different than the “baby carrots” you find at supermarkets — those are actually carrot stubs.) McFadden’s “ideal early carrot is about six inches long,” so it’s “delicate and sweet, but large enough to have developed some depth of flavor.” These are wonderful raw (peeling isn’t necessary), but also roasted and pureed. If you have the option to keep the tops, keep them, and turn them into a pesto or salsa verde.

Roasted Carrots with Carrot Top Pesto and Burrata

Miso Charred Carrot Soup

Carrot Salad with Charred Pineapple, Avocado, and Cumin-Lime Dressing

Turmeric-Roasted Carrots with Seeds

English Peas

Name something cuter. I’ll wait. Tiny, snappy, fresh English peas are as sweet as sugar — though not to be confused with sugar snap peas (more on those below). They’re lovely enough to eat raw, or you can quickly blanch them in salty water. These are best shelled and devoured on the day that you buy them. But if you need a day or two buffer, the fridge is the place to be.

Spring Vegetable Panzanella with Poached Eggs

Rice Pilaf with Crispy Chickpeas and Cashews

Justin Burdett’s Chilled English Pea Soup with Garlic Cream and Pickled Ramps

Paneer Bhurjee with English Peas

Fava Beans

“Fava beans are hugely popular in the Mediterranean and parts of the Middle East, but not as well known in the United States,” writes McFadden in Six Seasons. These legumes look a lot like lima beans, with a creamy texture and sweet flavor. They’re a little more work to prep than English peas, but worth it: Unzip the pod, remove the beans, and blanch them in boiling water for 30 seconds; then, drain them, shock in ice water, and peel away the outer membrane. You did it!

Fresh Raw Pea, Asparagus, and Fava Bean Salad with Herbs and Pecorino

Za’atar Grilled Chicken Wings with Fava Bean Feta Dip

Spring Soba Noodle Salad with Fava Beans

Ignacio Mattos’ Grilled Favas

Fennel

Fennel teeters the line between a late winter and early spring vegetable. It’s just the thing to grab from the produce stand when you’re craving the light, fragrant notes of spring produce but there’s still snow on the ground. Fennel is beloved for its anise-like flavor and aroma, plus its friendliness. You can cook with both the bulb and the fronds (the leafy, herb-like tops that resemble dill). Cut the bulb into wedges and roast them until caramelized; they’ll become super sweet, while still delivering some of the heartiness that you know and love from peak winter vegetables. As for the fronds, staff writer Kelly Vaughan loves to finely chop them and mix them into a seafood soup like this one.

One-Skillet Farro with Fennel, Tomatoes, and Parmesan

Roasted Apple and Fennel Salad With Toasted Hazelnuts and Goat Cheese

Bryant Terry’s Citrus and Garlic-Herb Braised Fennel

Cucumber and Fennel Salad with a Chinese Vinaigrette

Lettuces

“A bad salad pisses me off,” writes Berens in Ruffage. Yeah! As it should. A good salad starts with good produce, which could be any of the ingredients in this guide. But if you’re doing a simply-lettuce salad, treat yourself to some fresh-as-heck spring greens. Avoid anything that’s wilty or mushy. To perk up before serving, you can give them a quick soak in ice water. Just make sure you dry them very well, or else the dressing won’t be able to grab hold.

Carla Lalli Music’s Spring Lettuces with Anchovy Cream

BLT Salad

Quinoa and Mango Salad with Lemony-Ginger Dressing

Eric Korsh’s Farm Lettuces Salad with Dill Vinaigrette

Radishes

Most radishes go from seeds to vegetables within a month. They are golf ball–sized or smaller, but mighty in personality with a juicy bite, and sharp and spicy enough to make your eyes water. Arguably the best way to enjoy radishes is also the simplest: with butter and salt. Once you graduate beyond that, start to have fun with their tops, which are as worthy as any other green, and should never be thrown out. That said, if you’re storing radishes in the fridge for a couple days, separate the two, which will help them both survive longer.

Radish and Butter Tartine

Radish Salad with Anchovy Sauce

Radish Top Aioli

Radish Salad with Curry-Orange Dressing

Ramps

The darling of spring produce or, as McFadden puts it, “a cult vegetable.” Ramps are wild leeks, with rosy-hued bulbs and bright green leaves. They are proud members of the allium family, so it goes without saying that they have an oniony-garlicky flavor. Ramps’ flavor is often too potent raw, so cooking is your best bet. For storage in the fridge, the tops should be separated. Ramp season is blink-fast quick, so when you see them, snag them. And if you really want to hold on, try pickling.

Ramp Carbonara

Smashed Potato and Ramp Frittata

Grilled Chicken with Ramps and Rhubarb Chutney

Georgian Khachapuri Filled with Ramps, Green Onions, Herbs, and Cheese

Rhubarb

Even though rhubarb is usually paired with strawberries for pies and crisps, or compotes served with panna cotta, rhubarb is actually a vegetable. Yes, vegetable! Rhubarb is part of the buckwheat family, which also includes plants like Japanese knotweed and sorrel. Rhubarb in its raw form has an extremely tart flavor, which is why it’s usually macerated with sugar and lemon juice and served with a juicy sweet berry. It’s also one of the first vegetables to appear in spring, though it also has one of the shortest seasons. If you buy a few bundles (which you should), slice the stalks into one-inch pieces and freeze them in a single layer; this will allow you to preserve rhubarb’s pink color and tart flavor through early summer. Just use them within three months, otherwise, the vegetable will start to lose its spark.

Rhubarb Upside-Down Cake

Rye and Rhubarb Anytime Cake

Roasted Rhubarb and Strawberries

Naughty Rhubarb Scones

Scallions

Scallions, which also go by green onions, are one of my very favorite things. Their flavor is spicy but not too spicy, and grassy but not too grassy. Plus, they’re unfussy to prepare. Try charring them whole in a cast-iron skillet or on the grill, then putting that toward sauces, like salsa verde, or grain salads. Both the white and green parts are great in their own way; the former will take longer to tenderize, but only marginally because the stalk is so slim.

Spaghetti Pasta with Charred Scallion Sauce

Scallion Crostatas

Multi-Layered Scallion Pancakes (Thousand-Layer Taiwanese Pancakes)

Molly Stevens’ Sweet Braised Whole Scallions

Sugar Snap Peas

Sugar snap peas are a cross between the English pea and snow pea. As their name implies, they’re sweet, which makes them a cheery contrast in ultra-savory dishes. Pair with anything salty, fatty, or funky, or all of the above. You can thinly slice sugar snap peas on a bias and put them toward a salad-y situation. Or give them a quick sauté. I like to brown them in a skillet, deglaze that with some soy sauce and chili crisp, and pile that on warm rice.

Creamy Lemon Tortellini with Sugar Snap Peas and Soppressata

Radish, Snap Pea, and Burrata Salad

Oversized Mozzarella Arepas with Spring Vegetables

Grilled Steak Salad with Fish Sauce Vinaigrette

A less sexy “Sanditon” doesn’t evolve the plot, but so what? That’s not why people watch

For a while the fate of “Sanditon” was not certain. The show’s original broadcaster ITV cut bait on the seaside period piece due to poor ratings in the U.K., although it fared well enough on “Masterpiece” to garner enough support for ITV-owned BritBox and the venerable PBS series to clear it for a second and third season.

There remained the matter of the first run’s unexpected level of randiness which, while not quite on par with “Bridgerton” did include a rather explicit scene of a nice girl being positively ruined on a marble floor. Loyal Jane Austen fans were shocked – shocked! – that the series’ creator Andrew Davies took the author’s subtle sensual references that far. But much about the first season slid further into melodrama than one otherwise expects of a Regency tale.

If you count yourself in that camp, you’ll be pleased to know that the second go passes with nary a handy. The six-episode return is both subtler in tone and a good deal rougher on our central heroines Charlotte Heywood (Rose Williams) and Georgiana Lambe (Crystal Clarke), hewing more closely to the classic “Masterpiece” interpretation of Austen’s world.

Balls are savored and wildflowers gathered. Women contend with worries that lead them to hard realizations of their limitations. “Perhaps I will have to forgo my darning circle!” a concerned lady about town sighs.

Second season showrunner Justin Young and the rest of the writing team take the opportunity afforded by the story’s resort setting to refresh the ranks, as it were, with an influx of new suitors and opportunities for summer romance and regret.

Sandtion (Photo courtesy of Joss Barratt)At least, that is Georgiana’s fear. Now in the care of resort developer Tom Parker (Kris Marshall) and his sensible wife Mary (Kate Ashfield), Georgiana finds herself shooing away all kinds of dudes pitching woo, none of whom she trusts.

Clarke’s character is one of the more complex residents in this story, in that she’s a Black heiress aware of the power her inheritance affords her. She also wields her power by spearheading a genteel protest to raise awareness of the capitalism’s continued reliance on slave labor, one clumsily realized subplot among several.

Still, the story improves as the episodes put some distance between tying off last season’s loose ends. After a point watching Georgiana flex her savvy becomes downright entertaining: she is not keen to end up locked in an attic, like that Creole woman in another literary classic. (Yes, yes, different author, different era. Point being, Georgiana’s no dummy. She knows how these people do.)

Fearing their ward is growing lonely and bitter, the Parkers invite Charlotte back to Sanditon to keep Georgiana company. And Charlotte is pleasantly stunned to see Sanditon transformed into the bustling seaside resort town Tom Parker envisioned, with its buildings that were destroyed by the fire rebuilt grander and visitors flocking there from across the country.

Joining Charlotte is her wide-eyed younger sister Alison (Rosie Graham), just a girl jonesing for someone to put a ring on it. The Heywood daughters arrive at almost the same time that the place floods with a battalion of British soldiers. Others aren’t so sure of the army’s occupation, temporary though it may be.

None of it matters much to Georgiana, who sticks closely to the side of Tom’s sexless brother Arthur (Turlough Convery), a declared lifelong bachelor happy to click his heels in the friend zone. The redcoat march brings also returns a familiar louche to the Denham’s orbit along with the handsome Colonel Francis Lennox (Tom Weston-Jones) who trains his sights on Charlotte. Next to these men in uniform, Alexander Vlahos’ aloof wandering artist Charles Lockhart is intentionally difficult to peg and the show’s cheesiest new addition. For the same reasons he may also be its most watchable.

Sandtion (Photo courtesy of Joss Barratt)But like Georgiana, Charlotte resolves to maintain control over her life regardless of society’s demands. Since “society” is primarily represented in town by the cranky Lady Denham (Anne Reid), that seems simple enough to do.

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The winnowed-down cast translates to a more disciplined focus on Charlotte, Georgiana, Alison and Lady Esther Babbington (Charlotte Spencer), who also returns to Sanditon for health reasons. Williams’ Charlotte commands central attention as the resident Austen protagonist who, alongside Clarke’s Georgiana, embody grace, good sense and composure above all else.

Spencer’s Esther, in the meantime, floats along in a storyline that’s less connected to the others but eventually takes on the perfume of tragic melodrama. It revolves around a poignant, heartrending story that’s also par for the course in tales like these.

Charlotte’s effort to cope with having been abandoned by Tom’s brother Sidney (played by the smokin’ Theo James) has a more lasting impact. James exited the show due to scheduling conflicts, and you’ll appreciate what a pity that is when you notice the dearth of chemistry Williams has with Charlotte’s new suitors in comparison to what she and James shared.

Shown from left to right: Charlotte Heywood (Rose Williams) and Sidney Parker (Theo James) (PBS)Charlotte carries her heartbreak into season 2 by instilling in her stubborn refusal to marry, determining instead that she’d rather make her own way in the world. Austen perpetually pushed back on the common estimation that the greatest tragedy for a woman is to never have wed, which Lady Denham spells out during their first reunion.

“An unmarried woman is a worthless pariah who brings shame and ruin upon her family,” she snorts. “No one chooses to be a spinster!”

Single or otherwise, Charlotte cannot escape intrigue. First it arrives in the form of Alexander Colbourne (Ben Lloyd-Hughes) a surly widower in need of a governess for his two girls. Alexander is unbearable. The older girl is an abusive snob.

To know the corsets-and-lace genre of “Masterpiece” series is to predict, that not all men who look the part of gentlemen are gentlemen, and many brutes are hiding kind hearts, “she can fix him,” et cetera, et cetera. It all winds up with a jaw-dropping cliffhanger, although long before that bomb drops you may pine for more episodes.

Twists notwithstanding don’t expect much in the way of innovation in this second season. But here’s the counter point: who is looking for that? “Sanditon” is designed to be a balmy retreat where everything is easy on the eyes, and where abandoning your cares is the point.. Like the cliffs around the town, this latest stroll has a few trips and bumps, but is never unendurable.

The second season of “Sanditon” premieres Sunday, March 20 at 9 p.m. on PBS member stations. Watch a trailer for it below, via YouTube.

To prevent future variants, we must protect those most at risk

As the omicron wave wanes, people across the U.S. are welcoming reprieve from a virus that has killed nearly 1 million Americans and hospitalized millions more. But as recent articles in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and other outlets have pointed out, the threat of Covid-19 still looms large for millions of Americans who have compromised immune systems. As mask mandates expire and social distancing measures are curbed, cancer patients receiving chemotherapy, patients on aggressive immunosuppressive regimens, transplant recipients, and many others at high risk for severe Covid-19 continue to live in fear.

And their fear is well-founded.

Even after vaccination, severely immunocompromised people face substantial risk. For example, when researchers measured mortality of fully vaccinated solid organ transplant recipients, they found that, of those who suffered breakthrough infections, nearly one in 10 died. (Notably, this analysis predated widespread use of helpful boosters.)

But many of the pleas to protect immunocompromised patients have missed a crucial public health point: Shielding them is not only an important matter of health equity and social justice, it is a critical component in efforts to forestall the rise of new coronavirus variants. Put simply, by protecting people with weakened immune systems, we protect all of us.

Variant creation is driven by the amount of replicating virus in existence. Whether an evolutionary offshoot ultimately takes hold is a product of viral fitness, selection pressures, and host susceptibility. This equation explains why the most immunocompromised amongst us are so pivotal for preventing the rise of new mutations. When someone who is severely immunosuppressed is infected with the coronavirus, large loads of the virus can replicate for weeks or even months. And if natural immune responses and therapeutic treatments are unsuccessful, this uncontrolled viral replication can lead to the creation of mutant strains. Due to the high viral loads, the variants can easily spread to other susceptible individuals if enhanced isolation precautions are not strictly followed.

Careful case reports confirm this reality. A case study of a patient with leukemia and an acquired immune deficiency, who caught Covid-19, found that she shed the virus for as many as 70 days, and that the virus evolved significantly within her over that time. Similar reports have found evidence of within-host viral evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in transplant recipients and in patients suffering from autoimmune diseases requiring aggressive immunosuppression. Patients on regimens designed to suppress B-cells, the cells which produce our natural antibodies, appear to be at especially high risk for long-term infection and the accumulation of viral mutations.

If not used carefully, antiviral and antibody therapies, which many experts believe are even more critical in curing Covid-19 in immunocompromised hosts, risk worsening the problem by exerting evolutionary pressure that selects for resilient strains. Unfortunately, few, if any, high quality studies exist that doctors can use as guidance for maximizing the benefit of these therapies to immunocompromised patients while minimizing public health risk.

The reality of this concern was shown by researchers from Britain when they sequenced viral samples from a Covid-19 patient with lymphoma who had been treated with the antiviral remdesivir and convalescent plasma. Over time the researchers found evidence that the treatment was selecting for mutations resistant to the antibodies in the plasma. This pattern has since been replicated by researchers at the University of Sydney, who published their results last week in a correspondence in the New England Journal of Medicine. They identified eight patients with sustained SARS-CoV-2 infections who were treated with sotrovimab, the only recommended monoclonal antibody with retained efficacy against the omicron variant. Fifty percent of those treated with the antibody developed mutations which blocked efficacy of the drug.

These are not new principles in microbiology. Infectious disease experts have long known that tuberculosis patients who stop their treatments before the infection is cleared are at higher risk of developing drug-resistant strains. Similarly, patients with HIV who don’t consistently adhere to treatment regimens are more likely to develop strains of the virus that are resistant to antiretrovirals. Lawrence Corey, a virology and immunology expert at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and colleagues summarized the phenomenon in a recent commentary on Covid-19 variants: “Prolonged viral replication in the context of an inadequate immune response facilitates the emergence of immune-pressure escape mutations.”

Thankfully, we have ways to protect immunocompromised groups and fight back against the emergence of new variants. In the absence of widespread masking, access to the most effective masks, namely N-95 respirators, will be increasingly important for the “one-way” protection of immune suppressed individuals. So will other non-pharmacologic interventions, such as quality indoor ventilation, rapid antigen testing of close contacts, and maintaining options to physically distance in school and work environments. Fourth doses of vaccines and increased use of long-acting antibody therapy may add additional layers of protection. And for people who do get infected, following personalized, test-based criteria for discontinuing isolation precautions can help them avoid passing any potential new variants onto others.

However, patients with cancer, transplants, and autoimmune diseases aren’t the only immunocompromised patients. Worldwide, 38 million people are estimated to be living with HIV. Although treatment efforts have made tremendous progress, only three out of four patients were on antiretroviral treatment as of 2020, according to UNAIDS, and two-thirds of patients have fully suppressed the virus.

A case report published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last October demonstrated that patients with uncontrolled HIV/AIDS, too, carry increased risk of variant generation. In one such patient, SARS-CoV-2 was able to replicate and mutate for weeks, ultimately acquiring mutations associated with resistance to immune neutralization.

But the case report also revealed a key to preventing the emergence of new variants in patients with HIV: After the patient started antiretroviral therapy, her HIV viral load plummeted to nearly undetectable levels and, soon after, she also cleared her SARS-CoV-2 infection. The result suggests that the public health strategy of “treatment as prevention” — treating HIV to also block transmission via viral load suppression — may be doubly important for HIV patients during the pandemic as it can reduce the harm from two viruses instead of one.

The strategies for minimizing the risk of Covid-19 variant creation among patients with uncontrolled HIV/AIDS look much different than they do for transplant recipients, cancer patients, and people with autoimmune disorders. Unlike the other groups, whose lives depend on maintaining their immunosuppression, patients with uncontrolled HIV/AIDS can reverse their immunosuppression, usually by just taking one pill once a day. The challenge for patients with uncontrolled HIV/AIDS is that many of them are disconnected from the health care system. This means public health efforts must focus not just on medical innovation but on providing social support to address the multitude of maladies that disproportionately affect people with uncontrolled HIV/AIDS — a combination of poverty, stigma, substance use, housing instability, and mental illness.

As a physician who has cared for patients with Covid-19 in the clinic, hospital, and ICU, I understand all too well the acute threat that Covid-19 poses to immunocompromised patients. And I also understand that the accumulating evidence is clear: If we care about reducing the risk of the next deadly SARS-CoV-2 variant, it is imperative that we do all we can to protect the immunocompromised. By doing what we can to save them, we just might also spare the world.

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

A plastic chemical you can’t escape is linked to cancer in children

The word “phthalate” is ludicrously difficult to spell for something that is absolutely ubiquitous. Because phthalates make plastic products more consistent and durable, the chemical can be found everywhere: in plumbing pipes and medical tubing, in soap and cosmetic products, in wood finishing and countless adhesives. Since the start of the century, at least 95 percent of the American population is confirmed to have phthalates coursing through their bodies.

Now, a recent study of unprecedented scope has revealed that phthalates are linked to childhood cancers.

Lead by scientists at the University of Vermont Cancer Center and published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, researchers compiled data on nearly 1.3 million live births in Denmark between 1997 and 2017. Within that group, there were 2,027 cases of childhood cancer. They also assessed phthalate exposure by seeing whether mothers had filled prescriptions for medications formulated with phthalates either during their pregnancies (to measure gestational exposure) and for their children up until they were 19 years old (to measure childhood exposure).

The researchers found that “childhood phthalate exposure was strongly associated with incidence of osteosarcoma” and identified correlations with other cancers like lymphoma “driven by associations with Hodgkin and non-Hodgkin lymphoma, but not Burkitt lymphoma.” They also found that “associations were apparent only for exposure to low-molecular phthalates, which have purportedly greater biological activity.”

Although the scientists did demonstrate a correlation between the presence of phthalates and cancer, that in itself does not prove a causal link.

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“Lingering questions include which specific phthalate(s) are responsible for these associations, by what mechanisms they occur, and to what extent childhood cancer cases could be avoided by reducing or eliminating the phthalate content of medications and other consumer products,” the scientists write.

Phthalates are part of a group of chemicals known as endocrine disruptors because they alter the functioning of our hormone systems. In an interview with Salon last year, Dr. Shanna Swan — a professor of environmental medicine and public health at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City who studies endocrine disruptors — elaborated on the specific danger posed by phthalates.

“These things come into the body and then leave quickly,” Swan told Salon. “And that’s great. What’s not so great is that they’re coming in all the time because there’s so many sources of exposure. So major sources of exposure for phthalates are food. That’s probably the primary source.” Phthalates enter our food from pesticides to the processes through which they are transported to our grocery stores. She added that “another thing that phthalates do is they make cosmetics and personal care products more useful because they increase absorption into the skin. They increase the retention of color, which is great for nail polish and lipstick. And they hold odor, so anything fragrant has phthalates.”

Swan also noted that phthalates could be linked to dropping human sperm counts and other pervasive reproductive health issues. Nor are they alone in terms of being common plastic chemicals that have potentially damaging health effects.

“I talked about phthalates, which makes plastic soft. Bisphenols make plastic hard,” Swan told Salon. “There’s this Bisphenol A, there is Bisphenol S, there are many of them, and these are a class of chemicals that make plastics hard.” They can be found everywhere from tin cans and cash register receipts to pizza boxes and “have the property of being estrogenic. They apparently increase estrogen in the body, and that has a lot of reproductive effects as well.”

Primarily as a result of hormone-altering chemicals existing in plastics, Western sperm counts have dropped from 99 million per milliliter to 47 million per milliliter since the 1970s. (Below 15 million sperm per milliliter is considered a low sperm count.) Meanwhile, the average American consumes roughly a credit card worth of plastic each week through food and water contamination alone.

For more from Salon on plastic pollution, read the following articles:

Spring is here! Time to celebrate the arrival of alliums

April showers bring spring alliums. Huzzah! We snag our tote bags, skip to the farmers market, squeal at all the fruits and flowers and vegetables and then: Um, green garlic, is that you? Sorry, um, I mean, green garlic, is that you? It’s been a minute.

There’s a lot of pressure to make the most of spring alliums, which are only here for a hot second, which feels special and exciting. But that’s the problem. If you only hang out with an ingredient once a year, how are you going to get comfortable with it?

Say you go on a great first date. You talk for hours, hug, maybe even smooch, then: So long! See you next April! And that’s when you have your second date. And you repeat this every year. See how it goes. Spoiler alert: not well, don’t do this.

Spring alliums are like that. You’d want to marry them if you could. But you can’t. So, to make the most of your spring fling: a primer, a background check, a dating profile. This way, when you meet up this year, you’re already two steps ahead: You’re from New York, right? Hey, me too! You have a cat, right? Um, same! Aw, you guys. You’re going to be so great together. Consider this the dating app for members of the onion family.

Ramps

Ramps are the hottest allium on the market. Also known as: wild leeks; Allium tricoccum. their season is barely a month long but they bring a lot of energy and flavor during that short period of time. Raw or cooked, ramps’ flavor is strong, garlicky, and super oniony. What about their profile picture? In terms of looks, ramps are long, oval, green leaves with thin, tender bulbs. The pressure is now on! What are you going to do together? Keep things crunchy with a vinegar pickle; get funky a la kraut or kimchi; sauté to toss with pasta or pile on polenta; char under the broiler or on the grill, then sprinkle on pizza; or process into cheesy, nutty pesto.

Ramp Carbonara

Garlic chives

Garlic chives are a little more mysterious. They’re less popular, less of an allium about town so to speak. But give them a chance and you’ll fall in love. These vibrant greens are also known as Chinese chives, Chinese leeks, Allium tuberosum. Fun fact: Their white blossoms are edible, too (hello, Insta-friendly salad garnishes!). We love a handsome date that we can show off on the ‘gram. As for their flavor, expect something assertive and garlicky. Told you you’d be a fan.

As for looks, how does tall, dark, and brooding sound? They’re flatter and thicker than standard scallions, and taller too, (circa 15 inches!), with a dark green hue. So what does your first date look like? “One of the most important ingredients in simple supper stir-fries and dumpling stuffings,” writes Fuchsia Dunlop in Every Grain of Rice. She stir-fries them with pork or smoked tofu, and turns them into an omelet. Our favs: scrambled eggs with almost-burnt toast; buttered noodles; Green Goddess dressing.

Garlic scapes

Garlic scapes are the life of the party. Everyone gets excited when they make their appearance during spring. They also like to go by some other names, just to keep things spicy: look for garlic stems or Allium sativum. Fun fact: These grow from garlic bulbs, like hair, or a Chia pet. A delicious allium with a good gene pool? Win-win! Their flavor is grassy, garlicky, and pungent, but not as pungent as garlic itself. Much like the party-goer who likes to be the center of attention, garlic scapes are all over the place, winding this way and that, like scallion meets spaghetti. They look a little tangled with endless greens, but that what makes them so fun. How to use: Fuchsia (see above) loves these, too: “Once you’ve discovered garlic stems, you’ll never look back.” She stir-fries them with bacon or mushrooms — both begging to be served with soft-scrambled eggs. Also good: allium-forward fried rice, herby garlic bread; pesto.

Arugula and Garlic Scape Pesto

Green garlic

Green garlic is the younger, edgier sibling to regular garlic. Literally! Also known as young garlic or spring garlic, this spring allium is just immature garlic. (Who knew immature could be so tasty?). Flavor: milder than its future self, but similarly punchy when raw, mellower when cooked. Look: depends on how old the garlic is. As a tween, it’s a spring onion doppelganger with a purply-pink base. As it gets ready to go off to college, its bulb becomes more, well, bulbous. To cook with green garlic, prep like a leek, which is to say discard the tough tops (or save for down-the-road soups or broths), then chop both the green and white parts. When I worked in a bakery, we would poach chopped green garlic in honey water, then use it as a filling for crostatas. Despite the name, we treat these less like garlic and more like . . .

Green Garlic and New Potato Soup

Leeks

Also known as: “king of the soup onion” (according to The Joy of Cooking) or Allium porrum, leeks are like a sandy lifeguard. They’re hearty, slender, and super attractive. They look like a Hulk-ified scallion. Fun fact: OK, more like a warning: These hoard grit! Either split lengthwise or chop, then wash, then wash again. Remember, they’ve spent a lot of time in the sun getting ready for their first date and didn’t have time to take a deep shower. As for their flavor, leeks are quite mild, slightly oniony, and a little sweet. How to use: turn leeks into chunky, brothy soups, especially chicken-matzo ball; sauté, like onions, and put toward a frittata or creamy pasta; braise until jammy and top with something crispy, like breadcrumbs or bacon bits or both.

Braised Leeks

Spring onions

Spring onions are kind of like cousins who are super close and look alike, but aren’t actually identical. Also known as: young onions, these are not the same as a green onion (see below!). The flavor of spring onions is mild and mellow; think of them as a foot-in-the-door allium for people who “don’t like” onions. They look a lot like scallions, but with a curvier bottom; the bulb may be white or red. How to use: vinegar-pickle; grill whole; or, divide and conquer, treating the green tops like scallions, the bulbs like teeny-tiny onions.

Corn, Spring Onion, and Ricotta Tart

Scallions

Just to keep it really confusing, in Canada and the United Kingdom, these are sometimes also known as spring onions, but they’re also known as green onions. Their taste oniony, spunky, and slightly spicy. You probably recognize scallions (they’re a year-round catch), but just as a reminder they are slim with firm white bottoms and hollow, green, tubular tops. How to use: finely chop as a garnish for anything that needs a raw pop or crunchy-crunch (think grain salads, fried rice); char and turn into a gremolata for grilled proteins, from chicken to tofu, fish to steak; braise into blissful, saucy oblivion; pancakes!

California candidate running for office because Jesus spoke to her son in the closet

California Republican Rachel Hamm is running for Secretary of State in the June primary. Like many candidates, she is speaking about her motivation for running. Like many GOP candidates, she is claiming God was involved in her decision. Unlike any other candidate, Hamm says Jesus spoke to her son in a closet and told her to declare her candidacy.

“I’ve been a prophetic dreamer so I had spent a lot of 2019 and 20 having a lot of political dreams that I was in office. And because our youngest son, Ezekiel is a seer I went and got him and I said, ‘Hey, can you look around and see what you’re seeing?’ Because I just really, I get a kick out of hearing him describe, you know, what he sees?”

“And so, he said, you know, let me know if you see anything. And so he looked at my bedroom and my bathroom. He said, ‘There’s nothing there.’ And then he goes into the closet – which is where I had been when I was praying – and he said, ‘Whoa,’ and his eyes got like, big as saucers, and he kind of like started backing away, and then started bending down and he said, ‘You’ve got a really big guy in your closet, and his power is pushing me to the ground,’ and we had never had he’d never had that reaction ever, to an angel. And so I’m like, is he’s for us, not against us, right?”

“‘He’s full of light, I can’t even see his face.’ And then he said, ‘he has a scroll in his hand.’ And so I was like, then he came with a message is what is the message and the message was a commissioning. so at the very end, I asked him what his name was. ‘What angel is this?’ you know? And he said, ‘Immanuel,’ That wasn’t an angel. It wasn’t an angel that was Jesus Himself. And so that’s why I’m running for Secretary of State.”

California GOP Secretary of State candidate Rachel Hamm said today that she decided to run for office after her son found Jesus inside a closet in their home, and Jesus handed him a scroll telling her to declare her candidacy. pic.twitter.com/LdDLX1j8vS

— Hemant Mehta (@hemantmehta) March 18, 2022

Putin’s massive miscalculation: Echoes of George W. Bush — and a lesson for America’s elites

Google “Putin miscalculation” and you get more than a trillion hits. As the Russian invasion of Ukraine turned catastrophic for both Vladimir Putin’s ambitions and the Ukrainian people, many have suggested that the Russian president’s miscalculation is the result self-isolation and listening only to a shrinking handful of yes-men, a pattern that’s common in personalist autocratic regimes where power is concentrated in a single individual.

On Feb. 4, well before it was clear that Putin had decided to invade, much less how badly it would go, Adam Casey and Seva Gunitsky laid out the argument in a Foreign Affairs article entitled “The Bully in the Bubble,” arguing that Putin had fallen prey to “information isolation” and warning that “if he makes a miscalculation and launches a major invasion, it will likely be because of the personalist features of his regime.” The authors specifically cited U.S. intelligence reports that Putin was “underestimating the costs of invading Ukraine because his advisers are withholding information about the depth of local Ukrainian opposition to Russia and, relatedly, the strength of Ukraine’s resistance.”

Since the invasion, other experts who have studied personalism have weighed in to flesh out the picture, and to highlight that personalism is particularly dangerous when combined with the politics of oil. A more recent Foreign Affairs article has even asked whether this might be “The Beginning of the End for Putin?” The odds of that aren’t high, but they’re rising, the authors argued:

In personalist authoritarian regimes — where power is concentrated in the hands of an individual rather than shared by a party, military junta, or royal family — the leader is rarely driven from office by wars, even when they experience defeat…. But the thing about repressive regimes like Putin’s Russia is that they often look stable right up to the point that they are not. Putin has taken a major risk in attacking Ukraine, and there is a chance — one that seems to be growing — that it could mark the beginning of his end.

The article concludes with the statement that “Putin’s downfall may not come tomorrow or the day after, but his grip on power is certainly more tenuous than it was before he invaded Ukraine.”

The historical arc that could lead to the end Putin’s regime would be strikingly similar to the way that George W. Bush’s pursuit of the “War on Terror” brought about the collapse of the Republican establishment, which lost control of Congress and the White House to the Democrats in 2006 and 2008, before staging an apparent comeback beginning in 2010. That became something of an uncontrolled reaction, with Donald Trump emerging as GOP voters’ collective rejection, of not just the Republican leadership but the entire political establishment.

Of course, the Bush administration, dreadful as it was, is not comparable to Putin’s regime. But Bush’s “faith-based presidency,” as summed up in Ron Suskind’s 2004 article, “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” was similarly impervious to inconvenient facts. Suskind argued that “open dialogue, based on facts” was not valued in that context: “It may, in fact, create doubt, which undercuts faith. It could result in a loss of confidence in the decision-maker and, just as important, by the decision-maker.” That was amplified in the famous quote from a Bush aide (widely assumed to be Karl Rove) who dismissed the “reality-based community,” saying:

We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

Vladimir Putin could hardly have said it better. Functionally, then, the Bush administration was strikingly similar to Putin’s in suppressing unwanted information (such as the reports that Osama bin Laden was “determined to strike” the U.S.), manufacturing phony intelligence, promoting false narratives (primarily about Saddam Hussein’s imaginary weapons of mass destruction or his supposed ties to 9/11) and ultimately undermining the political support of its base, in a collapse that took Bush and his allies totally by surprise. For the most part, the broader political establishment, including the media, basically went along with them: Hence Sam Smith’s classic “A history of the Iraq War told entirely in official lies.”

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As mentioned above, in a personalist regime, power is concentrated in the hands of a single individual. Such leaders face few meaningful checks on their power, cannot be punished for failures and choose advisers primarily based on loyalty rather than competence, “surrounding themselves by scared and sycophantic underlings who feed them limited, biased, self-censored, and overly optimistic information,” as Casey and Gunitsky put it. They continue:

For strongmen, the consequences of losing power can be extreme — prison, exile, or death — and so they tend to surround themselves by sycophants. Their governing bodies can therefore descend into groupthink, and policy can lock onto a single path.

That of course does not describe the Bush administration, which faced no serious threat of prison, exile or death. Bush’s Cabinet appointees were well within U.S. political norms and had considerable reputational capital, most notably in the case of Secretary of State Colin Powell, previously a respected military general. But groupthink set in nonetheless, and the administration’s policy locked onto the single path of an all-out “war on terror,” including the invasion of Iraq, within weeks after the 9/11 attacks, as USA Today reported on the first anniversary of 9/11.

That report found that Bush’s determination to oust Saddam Hussein by military force “was set last fall without a formal decision-making meeting or the intelligence assessment that customarily precedes such a momentous decision.” Its key findings included:

“There wasn’t a flash moment. There’s no decision meeting,” national security adviser Condoleezza Rice says. “But Iraq had been on the radar screen — that it was a danger and that it was something you were going to have to deal with eventually … before Sept. 11, because we knew that this was a problem.”

Members of Congress weren’t consulted. Nor were key allies. The concerns of senior military officers and intelligence analysts, some of whom remain skeptical, weren’t fully aired until afterward.

That was an explosive story at the time, revealing that the decision to invade Iraq had been made almost a year earlier, with little discussion or evidence, and virtually no consideration of the potential risks — yet it was also virtually ignored. It was as if Bush’s inner circle didn’t need to think through the decision, and America’s political and media elite felt no need to question their reckless support for war. No Putin-style figure was required, in either case, to control information, curtail criticism or enforce groupthink. Yet everyone involved acted just the way such a personalist leader would have wanted.

America’s elite groupthink rapidly committed to a military response, which was precisely what Osama bin Laden wanted and intended — allowing him to wrap himself in with the mantle of “holy warrior” rather than “mass murderer.” This completely ignored the framework of military restraint, informally known as the “Powell doctrine” and formatted as a series of questions, that had been adopted in the aftermath of the U.S. debacle in Vietnam. Most pointedly, the answer to the question, “Have all other nonviolent policy means been fully exhausted?” was obviously no. The same could be said of “Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed?”

The groupthink was also visible in Congress, which authorized the Iraq invasion almost unanimously — with only Rep. Barbara Lee of California opposing it — and in elite opinion columns at the New York Times and Washington Post, where FAIR identified 44 columns stressing a military response, and just two advocating non-military ones, in the first three weeks after 9/11.

In sharp contrast, an International Gallup Poll found worldwide supermajorities, averaging over 70%, in 34 out of 37 countries, saying that the U.S. government “should extradite the terrorists to stand trial” rather than launch a military attack “on the country or countries where the terrorists are based.” The exceptions were even more telling: Public opinion in both Israel and India favored a military attack by over 70%, despite those nation’s decades-long histories of failure pursuing exactly that strategy themselves. Public opinion in the U.S. favored a military attack by 54% to 30%, but with 16% unsure.

Those responses made clear that two further questions on the Powell doctrine checklist should have been considered more carefully. First was, “Do we have genuine broad international support?” From governments, perhaps, but not from the people. As for “Is the action supported by the American people?” Even at that moment, the answer was not clear: Narrow majority support when elites are totally united offered a clear warning about the prospects for a lengthy war.

Two other parallels to the Putin predicament are worth noting: the illusion of quick victory, based on previous experience, and the role of historical fantasy. Putin apparently believed the Ukraine invasion would be a relatively quick operation, buoyed by his past successes in Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and the Crimean peninsula. He did not expect the level of Ukrainian resistance the Russian military has encountered, much less the unified opposition of the West.

Similarly, the Bush-era invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq followed a series of relatively easy military victories, as the U.S. sought to recover from its experience in Vietnam: There were the wildly lopsided ventures in Grenada under Ronald Reagan and Panama under George H.W. Bush, and then the first Gulf war of 1991, which had a limited scope and a broad international coalition.

When it comes to narcissistic historical phantasy. Putin seems to imagine himself in the tradition of Peter the Great, restoring the glory of imperial Russia, which has produced a flood of incoherent narratives about Russian-Ukrainian relations and the claim that Ukraine cannot or should not exist as a nation.

The U.S. version of this involves delusions about remaking the world in America’s image, as described by Rajiv Chandrasekaran in “Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone.” This produced a chaotic flood of free market ideologues, incompetents and grifters, all woefully disconnected from the reality of life in Iraq and the broader Middle East. The devastating portrait of folly in that 2006 book takes on a still darker tone after the emergence of ISIS a few years later. In the introduction to “ISIS: A History,” Fawaz Gerges describes four key factors behind that phenomenon:

The first is that ISIS can be seen as an extension of [al-Qaida in Iraq] which was itself a creature of the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq and its aftermath. By destroying state institutions, the invasion reinforced popular divisions along ethnic and religious rather than national lines, creating an environment that was particularly favorable for the implantation and expansion of groups such as AQI and ISIS. Second, the fragmentation of the post–Saddam Hussein political establishment and its incapacity to articulate policies that emphasized the country’s national identity further nourished intercommunal distrust, thus deepening and widening the Sunni-Shia divide.

The chaotic failure of the Iraq war to pacify the Middle East, much less curtail terrorism, began the erosion of the GOP establishment’s credibility. Next, the explosion of ISIS, which flooded Europe with refugees and shocked America, took things to another level: That was what tipped the balance toward a new/old politics of right-wing ethno-nationalism, bringing Brexit to Britain, fueling far-right parties and Europe, electing Donald Trump as president and driving many Bush-era figures out of the Republican Party entirely.

Many of those figures have become eloquent champions of democracy, staunch opponents of Trump’s limitless mendacity and corrosive attacks on democracy, and equally staunch opponents of Putin’s aggression. Some of them have even tried to grapple with their own roles in having made Trump’s politics possible. There should be no doubt about the need for a united front to defend democracy, both here and abroad. But there should also be no doubt about the collective need for a long, hard look in the mirror, one that reflects how badly our political elites failed in their responsibilities to the people. Such a failure can turn representative democracy into nothing more than a sham, virtually indistinguishable from a personalist dictatorship in terms of its horrific end results.

Read more on the Ukraine war and its consequences:

Dozens of babies trapped in Ukraine bomb shelter

Twenty babies, some born just days ago, are being sheltered in a makeshift bomb shelter in a basement in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv.

According to AP News, the babies were born to surrogate mothers and are being kept as calm and safe as possible until Russian attacks against Ukraine end and their intended parents can safely travel to pick them up and bring them to their new homes.

Although sheltered underground, the sound of bombs and gunfire is still making its way down into the makeshift shelter while the surrogacy center’s nurses, also trapped, do their best to create some form of stability for the babies who have never known anything other than war in their new lives.

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“Now we are staying here to preserve our and the babies’ lives,” said Lyudmilia Yashchenko, a 51-year-old nurse in a quote used by AP News “We are hiding here from the bombing and this horrible misery.”

According to Yashchenko, the nurses caring for the babies take them out of the bomb shelter to get some sun and fresh air whenever possible, but they can never stay out for very long due to the high level of danger around them.

“We are almost not sleeping at all,” Yashchenko said. “We are working round the clock.”

The intended parents of the babies will, when able, make their way from Europe, Latin America and China, but it doesn’t seem like they’ll be able to do so any time soon.

For now AP News reports that the shelter is equipped with plenty of food and baby supplies, and the nurses hold on to hope that peace will come soon.

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“Shining Vale” creator on the horror of midlife: “Depression and possession share similar symptoms”

Sharon Horgan has created some of TV funniest shows about disastrous couples on TV, with her best known credits being “Catastophe” and “Divorce.” But her latest comedy, “Shining Vale,” takes her comedy into another realm. It might be Hell, insanity, or a classic midlife crisis. Maybe it’s all three!

Whatever it is, Courteney Cox and Greg Kinnear‘s couple, Pat and Terry, teeters on the verge of the unknown. Pat, a writer having a tough time producing her second novel, has a one-time fling with a handyman. To recover, Terry suggests relocating to a small town, where they and their teenage children move into a creepy house.

To nobody’s surprise Pat starts seeing a woman named Rosemary (Mira Sorvino) hanging around the home’s cobwebbed recesses. Left unclear is whether Rosemary is a ghost intent on taking over Pat’s life or a hallucination resulting from a mental break. The show has kept us guessing and laughing thus far, even as the family careens farther off the rails.

RELATED: Love, “Catastrophe” style

“Shining Vale” is Horgan and writing partner Jeff Astrof’s (“Trial & Error”) way of digging into the commonalities between depression and possession through the lens of horror. In a recent conversation on “Salon Talks,” she digs into the ways that Pat evokes the craziness of menopause, the expansion of shows about women over 40 and whether Pat is an extension of her own identity as a writer.

Watch our “Salon Talks” interview here or read a transcript of the conversation below:

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

“Shining Vale,” is a horror comedy, which is tough to pull off. And you are doing it in a way that addresses both depression and midlife crisis.

Yeah. Very funny, aren’t they?

Really! But these are common themes with your work. We see a bit of through “Catastrophe.” We definitely see it in “Divorce.” Here it takes on a different tone. We have Courteney Cox’s character, Pat, who is married to Greg Kinnear’s Terry, they have a couple of kids and they are restarting. But the dynamic that’s a little bit unusual, for American television anyway, is that Pat has committed infidelity. When you and Jeff were creating this, why did you decide that Courteney’s character was going to be the one who brought the rupture in the marriage to a head?

I think I’m way more qualified to talk about anything from a female point of view. And, the affair part of it, I think is the least important and the least interesting, really. We just wanted to give them a crisis in their marriage, and a reason to get the hell out of New York and move to this place where they have to attempt to start over. . . . But outside of that, it’s not, I would say it was the catalyst for the move but beyond that, we don’t go into it too much. Except in their therapy sessions. It’s a fun aspect of the therapy sessions by the way.

There is a bit of exploration in the therapy sessions about the double standard when it comes to women’s emotions versus men’s and expressing it.

Yeah. Yeah. She’s not really believed, I would say . . . [and] the doctor’s reaction is just to up her meds. He doesn’t really hear her. He doesn’t really listen to her. And I think that’s a theme throughout. . . . I don’t necessarily think men have it any easier when it comes to mental health issues. I think everyone finds it hard to talk about these things. But definitely in our version of this story and because it’s a comedy, our therapist doesn’t really hear her. He’s more team Terry, I think.

One of the things that is announced in the beginning of the series, or established, is that depression and possession share similar symptoms.

Yeah. Just in terms of a creative starting point for the show and an actual fact, it was the thing, I think, that drew Jeff to the project most when he read the pages. Because it’s a fact, that was really helpful for us and really played into the idea of her not being believed. But also we want the audience to be unsure, to really, fully not be able to figure out whether this is going on in her head. Whether the house is truly possessed or whether she’s losing her mind.

I have a lot of female friends who are round about my age, in their 50s, and a lot of them have teenage children.

And, quite often you’ll find our heads actually spinning off of our bodies and doing a full 360 with the rage that you can feel. I’ve never felt more out-of-my-mind dangerous as when I’m having an argument with my teenage daughter. But I think, menopausally speaking as well, you feel really crazy.

. . . It’s hard to always diagnose when you’re losing your marbles just through life in general at this stage of your life. Because I just think it’s the hardest possible period. You’re in a situation where chemically, you’re all over the place. Your children are reaching an age where, usually, they’re teenagers going through terrible times themselves, and you’re at the least emotionally equipped to deal with it, because you’re also off your nut. Your parents are getting older. You’re losing people. It’s a really emotionally draining tough time. And so I think with Pat, we just gave her all of that.

We gave her a mother with a history of mental illness herself and an assumption that Pat has that it’s in the family, so therefore it’s natural that it’s going to happen to her too. We gave her writer’s block, a fear of failing. We gave her an absolutely extraordinarily horny teenage daughter, and an apathetic teenage son. And a husband who’s really a really good guy, but in trying to make the best of it . . . So it’s a huge melting pot of emotions that are just ripe for bad things that happen.

But another thing that has been a recent – I won’t necessarily say development, but definitely an expansion on TV, of the telling of women’s stories, specifically women over 40. Do you think that there’s been a shift in terms of getting the green light on shows like these? And what do you think the reason is for that, or the catalyst?

There’s usually a few reasons. Often it comes down to money, doesn’t it? It comes down to who’s watching and who you’re selling to. But also I think it depends on the broadcaster. It depends on the streamers. A lot of them now have women in very senior positions, right at the very top of the ladder. And they want to see their stories reflected back at them, whereas for years it was very heavily white male-dominated. So they were the stories that they wanted to see, and it was like boys at the top pulling the other boys up. But also, I think it’s just they can see that female stories sell and they get these huge audiences.

And just because it’s a female-authored show or female-directed show, or just seen through a female lens at all doesn’t mean that it’s only going to get a female audience. It’s proven that these stories, especially when it’s genre. Like with “Killing Eve” or, it doesn’t really matter that it has two female protagonists at the heart of it.

I feel the same way about “Shining Vale.” We are really lucky to be with a broadcaster, Starz, who [is] all about telling female stories. And, that’s really what they want to do. That’s what they actively look for.

What I love about “Shining Vale” is the fact that, along with the horror-comedy element and along with its examination of depression, is this examination through Mira Sorvino’s character, Rosemary, of repression. . . . She’s very much representative of that desperate housewife trope, from the ’50s. And I love that about that character, but I also love the fact that you see it in Pat and Terry’s marriage. You see these things that they gave up so they can just do what was prescribed for them in life. That must have been interesting to bring that into the horror comedy framework.

We just wanted to examine the idea of what could have happened to Rosemary had she lived during this time, rather than in the ’50s. Would her life have been different?. . . She was a surrendered wife and not happy with it.

. . . But, I think women weren’t listened to back then. And it was very few women who spoke out about the role that they were just told that they had to do. And if you didn’t like it, you had to lump it. I can’t imagine what that must have felt like if it really wasn’t what you wanted.

Also, there’s just something really terrifying about a ’50s housewife as an image. That being coiffed to within an inch of your life. It’s borderline psychotic in itself! And just that she gets to live through Pat, who is just the living opposite of the woman she would’ve been when she was alive.

What’s expected of Pat is, it is completely different but at the same time it’s still having to fulfill a role, isn’t it? And if you’re not happy in that role there’s something wrong with you. That’s what you’re made to feel. The idea of not finding motherhood easy, or not being a good wife or not being a natural homemaker.

Of course, it’s way more easy to say how you feel about those things now. But it still makes you feel like you’re failing in some way, certainly as a mother.

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I have to wonder, is there a part of Pat in you? What parts of you are expressing through her?

She’s so Jeff. She’s so Jeff! Jeff Astrof is an absolute dope, and I love him. And it’s been wonderful collaborating with him. But he’s so full of anxiety about his writing and hates it. And often feels like he doesn’t know where his next idea is coming from, or just says he has no ideas, or belittles himself, and he’s just full of neurosis. And so I think there’s a lot of him in Pat.

But I was laughing earlier because it is really indulgent to have two writers write about a writer. Because you get to put in all those tropes and all your worries and the phone calls with agents and just the doubt. And all the things you get to offload a bit. And in a way it’s the same when I write about relationships.

I’ve always said that I’d rather write a TV show, and make a TV show, and edit it, and put it out there than actually have a conversation with the man I was married to.

I thought if I can just get it out of me, then I don’t have to talk about it. So I think there’s huge therapy in writing about those things, and it’s also quite a relief to have a main character who’s a writer as well. And, there’s all sorts of stuff we want to do with that in the second season as well when the book hits the shelves. It’s really fun.

Oh, I can’t wait for that. Just her reading parts from it is just spectacular.

Whatever you’re thinking, it’s going to be worse than that.

New episodes of “Shining Vale” debut at 10 p.m. Sundays on Starz.

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