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As we dig into results from Tuesday’s election, we have a lot to celebrate. No, not everything went our way, but we had a lot of victories on the local level, and that’s truly amazing. For example, as covered by my colleagues, Cincinnati has elected its first Asian American mayor, New York City elected five Asian Americans onto its city council, Boston elected its first Asian American mayor, and Michigan elected three Muslim American mayors. We’ve also seen some great wins when it comes to openly LGBTQ+ folks.

One victory comes to us out of Salt Lake City, Utah, where thanks to Nov. 2’s election, four of seven people serving in the city council will be openly LGBTQ+, according to LGBTQ Nation. This is perhaps initially surprising given Utah’s reputation as a profoundly red, religiously conservative state. But Salt Lake City is relatively progressive, and the state as a whole has made some significant progress in the right direction, despite its conservative stronghold. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, this is the first time the council will be a majority of people of color. 

Incumbents Amy Fowler (who serves as City Council chair) and Chris Wharton won their reelection campaigns. Darin Mano and Alejandro Puy won their seats on the city council and also broke glass ceilings themselves; Mano is the first openly LGBTQ+ Asian person to serve on the council, and Puy is the first openly LGBTQ+ Latin person to do so. Both Mano and Puy are openly gay men.

“I didn’t get all of the politicians’ endorsements,” Puy, who immigrated from Argentina and moved to Utah for college, told the Salt Lake Tribune, “but I spent my time knocking on doors, and I think that makes a difference.”

“LGBTQ people are severely underrepresented in governments across Utah, so holding a majority of seats on the Salt Lake City Council is a milestone moment for the city and the state,” Mayor Annise Parker, who serves as President & CEO of the LGBTQ Victory Fund, said in a statement. Parker described Salt Lake as one of “just a handful” of city councils in the nation with a majority of openly queer people.

“The lived experiences of the LGBTQ members will ensure more inclusive policymaking,” Parker added.

In total, more than 80 openly LGBTQ+  candidates won elections on Tuesday, which is a huge deal. Right now, there are just over 990 openly queer people holding public office in the nation, but not all of those folks ran for reelection. According to The Advocate, when the new set of candidates are sworn in, we’ll still have more than 1,000 openly queer elected officials, however, which is huge.

To get a deeper idea of where Puy and Mano stand on issues, you can check out some debate clips from earlier this October. I especially recommend listening in if you’re interested in how some progressives want to help unhoused folks. 

Here is Puy.

And here is Mano.

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Sen. Ted Cruz is going after Big Bird. Yeah, that’s a sentence that’s perfectly at home here in 2021. We’re just going to have to pause and bask in this one for a moment:

What happened here is self-explanatory. Big Bird, as in the man-plus sized feathered Sesame Street character that helps teach children about kindness and sharing and how to cross the street without getting your innards tattooed with the over-chromed grill patterns of modern sport utility vehicles, tweeted about getting vaccinated. Because Ted Cruz, an actual sitting senator thanks to low standards and Texas, had not a damn thing better to do, he took offense to this, and we were off to the races.

Lest you think that this was just Ted Cruz having a momentary mind burp after his sixth can of vodka-spiked evening soup, yelling at Big Bird quickly became an actual thing. Weird-ass Fox News hosts were by the next morning attacking Big Bird, Sanjay Gupta, and Sesame Street for the “creepy” “propaganda” that is “targeting” children. The segment included several Enormous Damn Lies about children and COVID-19 that we will not repeat here, but which are considered holy gospel to anyone sitting on the greasy Fox News morning couch.

But let’s get back to Ted Cruz, because Ted Cruz is the devil’s personal coatrack. To believe that a Muppet telling children about COVID-19 vaccination in a non-frightening way is “propaganda,” you have to believe that vaccine advocacy is “propaganda” in general. There isn’t much nuance for Ted to have picked out of this, but he swooped in from his Senate-high perch to declare a pro-vaccine tweet from a Muppet “government propaganda.”

Ruper is right on this one: The only way you get from point A to point B is if you’re politicizing basic public health as matter of reflex. And Cruz and other Republicans aren’t even bothering to pretend they’re not doing that. Getting vaccinated, according to Republicans from Ted Cruz to Ron DeSantis, is a political decision. Not getting vaccinated is not a matter of endangering public health, but of expressing your contempt for not-Republican health experts and political figures. “Dying to own the libs” is now a belief that’s filling hospitals to capacity even  as near-universal vaccine availability should have brought the pandemic close to its end.

Big Bird is trying to familiarize the topic of vaccination, as new FDA approval allows children as young as 5 to get vaccinated against the disease that is omnipresent in their communities and that has upended their schooling, their playtime, and countless other aspects of their lives. Big Bird, and Sesame Street, are trying to talk to children about pandemic experiences in ways that will not terrify them.

Oh-ho, says freakin’ Ted Cruz. Eep, say the couch-loungers speaking to their septuagenarian morning audience. There’s government propaganda afoot.

But this is something new to Republicanism, not to Sesame Street. Sesame Street has addressed childhood fears like vaccination for a half-century. Ted Cruz may have watched this segment the day it was first broadcast, though his toddler brain may not have absorbed much of it:

Nor is the notion of turning to well-known characters of popular culture to promote public immunization drives confined to the socialist hellscape of children’s television:

What is new here isn’t Big Bird. It’s Ted Cruz. Past Republican generations did not consider vaccinations against polio, against measles, against rubella, and other diseases that once filled American cemeteries with child-sized graves to be a conspiracy against their freedoms; it was a given that American children should be protected against any death we could so trivially protect them from. There were cranks, to be sure, but the notion of an American political party reflexively opposing vaccinations as major plank in their political agenda—purely, that is, because their political rivals were boosting it—would have previously been considered bizarre.

With the advent of new Republicanism, sporting such intellectual leading lights as Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, and whoever else can shout themselves hoarse in front of an unmasked pandemic crowd, doing anything to tamp down on pandemic deaths is now considered suspect. It was considered suspect because, in the beginning, the most incompetent president to have ever been shoved into the Oval Office oversaw a complete breakdown in government readiness and pandemic response and, rather than admitting failure, claimed that he simply didn’t need to do anything because the pandemic would not come here, or would not be severe, or was not really resulting in deaths, or was only resulting in deaths in states Republicans didn’t like, or could be cured with a miracle cure one of his advisers saw on the internet, or with a different one, or that a deadly pandemic was something that we just needed to work through by getting on with our lives and The Economy and accepting that the most vulnerable among us were probably going to die but it’s not like they were important to The Economy to begin with.

Once a Dear Leader figure had declared that a worldwide and deadly pandemic was merely a politically motivated attack meant to dent his own greatness, Ted Cruz and the rest of Republicanism was duct-taped to that position and obliged to defend it. It was that or admit the emperor was nude, and for all but literally a handful of Republican leaders that choice turned out to be easy.

That said, conservatives have always had it out for Big Bird and Sesame Street, so it’s not too surprising that Cruz, who is nothing if not lazy, thought this would be an easy way to boost himself via longstanding Republican zeitgeist. Have you looked, really looked, at the sort of things children’s television programs have been teaching our children?

Sharing? What is sharing, but an introduction to communist thought?

Compassion? Republicans have firmly declared what should be done with your feelings, and compassion has no role in it.

Coping with intimidating situations? Republicanism already has that. It’s called “have an absolute fit.” Bonus points if it’s on an airplane and your fellow passengers have to band together to hogtie you while the pilot radios that your flight will be making an emergency landing.

Learning your letters? A gateway to book-reading, then book-learning, then academia.

Learning your numbers? Numbers are for the elites. When numbers are important, a Republican leader will tell you what the numbers are. They will tell you which numbers are bigger than which other numbers, and why, and don’t worry your tiny little head about how any of these divinations are made.

Ernie and Bert are just The Odd Couple for children, and The Odd Couple was a play, and playwrights are notorious promotors of counterculture beliefs. Elmo is what happens when you let your child run wild in their own imagination rather than sitting their asses down in front of their Ted Cruz coloring books to learn what Americanism is. Sesame Street has taken on subjects like death, like hunger, like homelessness—and it is all slanted, slanted maliciously against Republican lawmakers who have fought like hell to make sure death, hunger, and homelessness are meted out to whatever Americans might deserve such fates.

Teach children about going hungry, and they’ll grow up to support free school lunch programs. Teach children about homelessness, and they might treat their homeless peers with compassion and respect.

Teach children that even though there’s a pandemic going on that’s the reason their whole world has turned upside down, there is hope in the form of a vaccine that can help keep them safe in exchange for a momentary hurt and a sore arm, and you may be running afoul of Republican politicians who have instead insisted that the pandemic is a fiction invented by liberal elites.

Vaccination? Vaccination seems by far the most harmless of subjects, compared to any of that. And it would have been, if Ted Cruz had at any point in the last four years been able to grow a human spine. If he and the rest of his party were able to reject the notion that “a crapload of nothing” was a legitimate government response to a new planet-wide pandemic, even if Dear Incompetent Leader was insisting upon it, then the rapidly produced actual miracle cure would not today be the politically tuned and plotted culture war that it has become.

All it would have required was a moment of middling courage. At any point.

Didn’t happen.

Republicanism is devoted to pushing falsehoods and fictions out to their base for the sake of stoking whatever fears can be stoked. It is a movement that now rejects election results, rejects medicine, and rejects anything else that comes from “elites” whose expertise contradicts the stories fascist liars would prefer to tell.

Big Bird may be taking on Republicanism’s most well-known leaders, but it’s not a fair fight. The bird has them outclassed by a wide margin.

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by Natasha Ishak

This story was originally published at Prism.

In late October, the U.S. State Department announced a new sponsorship program for incoming refugees from Afghanistan. Modeled after a similar community sponsorship program in Canada, the Sponsor Circle for Afghans allows groups of U.S. citizens to sponsor a family of refugees. The program is meant to involve American community members in the resettlement process for refugees while, at the same time, providing relief to the U.S. resettlement infrastructure, which has been stretched thin in response to the crisis in Afghanistan.

Tens of thousands of Afghans fled their home country and have relocated abroad after Kabul, the Afghanistan capital, was captured under the Taliban regime following the withdrawal of U.S. troops in August. According to the Biden administration, roughly 7,000 Afghans have since been flown out and resettled in communities across the U.S.. The government’s shrunken resettlement system—which was reduced under former President Donald Trump—has not been able to withstand the sudden influx of incoming Afghan refugees.

But Hamidullah Noori, an Afghan chef who came to the U.S. as a refugee in 2015, says the resettlement system in the U.S. has been overburdened for years, even before the crisis in Afghanistan. Refugees are the ones who ultimately bear the brunt of the overwhelmed system.

“We really need more support because nonprofit organizations, they are slammed,” said Noori, who now owns an Afghan restaurant called Mantu in Richmond, Virginia. “They always say they have some management issues, their top management are not hiring more people and … most of them are working like 16 to 20 hours [a day],” he added.

The U.S. refugee resettlement infrastructure involves a network of government agencies and national nonprofits. As the number of refugees admitted to the U.S. declined drastically—falling from an admissions cap of 110,000 during President Barack Obama’s final year in office to 45,000 under Trump, with just 20,000 refugees ultimately resettled in 2018—resettlement organizations cut their operation size, leaving a dwindled network. Biden committed to processing 62,500 refugees in his first year but resettled just 11,411 refugees by the end of fiscal year 2021, which his administration attributed to the decimated resettlement infrastructure under the previous government. Now, following the Afghanistan crisis, tens of thousands more Afghan refugees are undergoing vetting at U.S. military bases and other sites abroad before they will be brought to the U.S.  

Noori experienced a lack of support when he resettled with his family in the small Virginian town of Newport News after being approved for the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV), a visa program specifically for Afghans who worked with U.S. entities in Afghanistan. Afghans who go through the SIV program do not require sponsors and instead are provided with a case manager from nonprofit partners assisting with families’ resettlement. But Noori recalled the feeling of helplessness that he experienced when he could not reach his case manager for a week while unable to access food and groceries for his family. He said the nonprofit he worked with could not find him a kitchen job that matched his skills, instead offering him a job in construction. Determined to stay in his profession, Noori rented a bike for $25 and knocked on restaurant doors around town. He eventually found a job at a Mediterranean restaurant.

Now a restaurateur himself, Noori provides free meals for his community’s unhoused residents and refugees. He emphasized the need for nonprofits and sponsors to prioritize the needs and wants of the refugees who are coming here, instead of deciding for them.

“The Afghans, they should decide what they need, not the organization,” he said.

With the new community model of sponsorship, the government hopes to ensure that incoming refugees receive consistent support as they rebuild their new lives in the U.S. Under the Sponsor Circle program, groups of five private individuals join together to form a sponsor group, which then must go through a certification process where each member is vetted and trained by the Community Sponsorship Hub (CSH), a project under government partner Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, Inc. After they are certified, sponsor groups can submit their sponsorship application. (As of this writing, the background check portion for the certification process had not been fully set up online, which means potential sponsors cannot complete their applications yet.)

“This program showcases the powerful role that individuals can play in coming together to welcome and integrate Afghans into American society, reflecting our spirit of goodwill and generosity,” read the U.S. State Department’s statement. The community-based model empowers a group of private individuals to act as surrogates for nonprofit partners that have become overwhelmed by the quick swell of Afghan refugees in the last month.

For three months, the Sponsor Circles will help their sponsoree with things like securing housing and employment, providing living funds, and helping them in their application for government benefits, among other responsibilities. As such, Sponsor Circles must secure at least $2,275 per individual refugee to cover costs.

While sponsor groups receive resettlement assistance training from partner nonprofits, some may face real-life challenges in helping refugees during the early relocation phase. For example, resettlement nonprofits in California—the state that holds the largest concentration of Afghan immigrants in the U.S.—have encountered issues in securing affordable housing for recent Afghan refugees due to the state’s skyrocketing housing prices. As a result, according to a report by LAist, refugees are only relocated to the state if they have family or relations who can provide housing.

But the needs of refugees also go beyond technical assistance.

“I think that one of the things that will really make an incredible sponsor is anyone that explains the culture,” said Walid Azami, a photographer and creative director based in Los Angeles. Azami came to the U.S. as a refugee with his parents and siblings during Afghanistan’s conflict with the then-USSR in the 1980s. A big challenge during his family’s resettlement process was dealing with culture shock.

He recalled one example where his family had been confused after receiving a notice from the school informing them about ice cream sundae giveaways on Friday, which they had mistaken for a day off—Sunday. His mother had to walk his siblings to school to get an explanation of what it was about.

“I remember that, thinking, ‘Well, that was so easy to solve,’ and I was in second grade. But what a wrench that throws into a family’s operation just figuring out things,” which for a traditional American family would not be a big deal, he said. “Yes, we’ll learn the [English language] words. Yes, there’s a lot of apps and smartphones and the internet and everything. But learning the culture is really difficult, especially for parents that have multiple kids, and they might be working double jobs. They don’t have time to learn that.”

Regardless of the potential challenges, becoming a sponsor for Afghan families is a unique opportunity to help people directly, providing them with community and a fresh start to their lives, after they’ve lost nearly everything. Khalid Ahmadzai, the director for economic advancement at Canopy Northwest Arkansas, an organization that provides long-term resettlement assistance for refugees, emphasized the importance of community involvement—particularly from other community members of color—in welcoming refugees to the U.S.

Ahmadzai hopes that news of the need for more support for resettlement assistance for refugees will inspire community members to “check out their refugee resettlement agencies and say, ‘Hey I want to volunteer, I want to be a mentor.’ Just play a part.”

Natasha Ishak is a New York City-based journalist who covers politics, public policy, and social justice issues.

Prism is a BIPOC-led nonprofit news outlet that centers the people, places, and issues currently underreported by national media. We’re committed to producing the kind of journalism that treats Black, Indigenous, and people of color, women, the LGBTQ+ community, and other invisibilized groups as the experts on our own lived experiences, our resilience, and our fights for justice. Sign up for our email list to get our stories in your inbox, and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

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A network of organizations along the southern borderlands is calling on Congressional leaders to open an investigation into what they describe as possibly “the largest and longest-standing shadow police unit that is operating today in the federal government.” They say in a statement that Border Patrol’s Critical Incident Teams (BPCITs) have for years acted to cover up abuses at the hands of agents, with a “stated purpose is to mitigate civil liability for agents. There is no known equivalent in any other law enforcement agency.”

“The actions of these Border Patrol units to withhold, destroy, and corrupt evidence and to tamper with witnesses have gone unchecked for decades,” the Southern Border Communities Coalition (SBCC) says in the Oct. 27 letter to top Senate and House lawmakers. “It’s time for Congress to investigate them fully.”

“Known by many names, BPCITs have existed since at least 1987, and appear to be operating in many, if not all, Border Patrol sectors in the country,” lawmakers write, noting they operate “as shadow police units outside of federal law and without congressional authority. Their existence poses a threat to public safety by concealing agent misconduct, enabling abuse, and exacerbating impunity within the nation’s largest law enforcement agency, U.S. Customs and Border Protection(CBP). Immediate investigations into BPCITs are imperative.”

SBCC notes the role of BPCITs in the cover-up around the 2010 killing of Anastasio Hernandez Rojas, a father of five U.S. citizen kids, at the hands of agents. He was hog-tied, beaten, and tased into unconsciousness, later dying in a hospital. Earlier this year, the Los Angeles Times reported that as many as 17 agents were involved in his killing.

“Anastasio’s death sparked public outcry and congressional action when an eyewitness video was revealed on national television exposing the lies that agents told,” SBCC tells legislators. “Border agents had initially described Anastasio as aggressive, standing and kicking an agent, but the video revealed he was actually handcuffed and lying face down on the ground surrounded by a dozen agents who ended his life.”

“The San Diego BPCIT (known there as CIIT) was the first to be notified by border agents,” the letter continued. “The BPCIT never notified SDPD, the agency with jurisdiction to conduct the criminal investigation. Instead, the BPCIT contacted the FBI and asked them to charge Anastasio with assault while he lay brain dead in the hospital. The FBI declined. SDPD only became aware of the incident through a media inquiry and located the scene of the incident on their own a day later, without help from the BPCIT or other border agents.”

The letter then states that the BPCIT “tampered with evidence,” including an initial Border Patrol apprehension report that said Hernandez Rojas had been compliant. The agent who wrote that report would later “[paint] a picture of an erratic and problematic Anastasio” to police investigating the death.

“Additionally, the BPCIT failed to preserve video evidence,” the letter continues. “Over several weeks, in an act of deliberate omission that led to the destruction of evidence, BPCIT members repeatedly withheld video surveillance footage requested from SDPD and instead gave SDPD footage that did not pertain to the incident, while allowing the requested footage to be erased and taped over.” It’s intentional—federal immigration officials already have a history of deleting key video footage surrounding the deaths of immigrants.

SBCC notes that when no officers faced charges for Hernandez Rojas’ killing,” the family petitioned the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which accepted review of the case in the first-ever probe of an extrajudicial killing by law enforcement in the United States. The Inter-American Commission is currently awaiting a response from the United States in the case.”

Former Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott, appointed to the position by the previous president and dismissed by the current one, was named as a participant in that cover-up, The LA Times noted. In a testament to his anti-immigrant animus, Scott threw a fit over Biden administration’s policy that requires “undocumented noncitizen” be used in place of the offensive term “illegal alien.”

“The overreach of the BPCITs is profound,” SBCC tells legislators in urging an investigation. “The scale of their unlawful behavior jeopardizes public safety and public trust. And the fact that they have been able to operate for decades without scrutiny is alarming. As Border Patrol’s primary tool to shield agents from accountability, the BPCITs must be called into question by Congress.”

“The fact that no border agent has ever been successfully prosecuted in the nearly 100-year history of the Border Patrol is not accidental,” SBCC Director Vicki Gaubeca said. “It is by design, and for more than three decades has resulted in impunity directly due to the interference of unauthorized Border Patrol cover-up units that have protected agents rather than the members of the public harmed by them. This must end, and Congress can play a pivotal role. We call on Congress to investigate these cover-up units, assess the harm they have caused, and shut them down.”

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A former McDonald’s employee has filed a federal complaint alleging she was fired for reporting a racist comment another worker said to her, according to Business Insider. Shanece Tailo filed the complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission after a human resources dispute in January ended in her termination.

Tailo, a nurse, was also working as a floor manager at a McDonald’s in Florida when she drove through another location’s drive-thru, placed an order, and asked an employee for extra sauce. Tailo said in the complaint obtained by Business Insider that the employee tried to charge her for the extra sauce, which she knew to be a violation of company policy. Tailo said she explained as much to the unnamed employee, who responded with: “You people want everything for free.”

McDonald’s USA said in a statement: “McDonald’s unequivocally stands behind the need for equality and fairness on both sides of the counter in our restaurants, and we do not tolerate discrimination or retaliation of any kind by anyone. We take these claims seriously and will review the allegations and take action accordingly.”

Tailo said she doesn’t think the other employee, who she knew, recognized her because she was wearing a nurse uniform and mask at the time and when she pulled down her mask, the employee apologized and offered her the sauce for free. Tailo reported a complaint through McDonald’s customer service line and she sent a text message to the store’s regional manager, Business Insider reported. She said the regional manager acknowledged that the company does not charge for extra sauce and weeks later she was asked to attend a meeting with the manager and a human resources worker. 

Tailo said in her complaint that she was asked to say in a statement that the worker was not racist with her and when she refused, she was shown a statement created for her. “I started to edit it, because it was not accurate,” Tailo said in her complaint. She added that the human resources worker didn’t allow her to complete the edit, taking the paper from her, and Tailo was later fired.

McDonald’s has already proved to be no friend to its workers, having refused paid sick leave to some 500,000 employees amid the coronavirus pandemic, ignored calls from employees for a $15-minimum wage for years, and allegedly mishandled sexual harassment complaints, leading to a one-day strike nationwide. Most recently, McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski has been the subject of protests in Chicago after he told Mayor Lori Lightfoot in recently-revealed text messages that parents of children shot and killed earlier this year “failed those kids,” the Chicago Tribune reported. In one of the shootings, 13-year-old Adam Toledo was killed by a Chicago police officer after footage police released showed Adam running from officers, dropping a gun he was holding, and being shot anyway.

In the other incident, 7-year-old Jaslyn Adams was killed in a gang-related shooting while in a McDonald’s drive-thru on the city’s West Side. Her father is believed to be in a gang, Chicago police told the Chicago Sun-Times. The child’s mother, Lanesha Walker, told the newspaper Kempczinski’s words about her daughter’s death cut. “I am a grieving parent. I’ve been grieving for the longest, and from your place of power, you insult me,” she said. “How dare you judge me! How dare you say I failed my child! I wasn’t there when my child was killed. I didn’t know she was at your McDonald’s with her father at that moment in time. You owe me an apology.”

Kempczinski had texted the mayor the disparaging remarks on April 19 after Lightfoot visited his headquarters. The CEO said in texts WBEZ Chicago obtained: “p.s. tragic shootings in last week, both at our restaurant yesterday and with Adam Toldeo [sic]. With both, the parents failed those kids which I know is something you can’t say. Even harder to fix.”

He later apologized. “Those comments were wrong and I’m sorry,” Kempczinski said in six-minute video Restaurant Business Magazine obtained last week. “I’m sorry I let you down. And I let myself down.” He said in a note to corporate McDonald’s workers in the United States: “When I wrote this, I was thinking through my lens as a parent and reacted viscerally. But I have not walked in the shoes of Adam’s or Jaslyn’s family and so many others who are facing a very different reality. Not taking the time to think about this from their viewpoint was wrong, and lacked the empathy and compassion I feel for these families. This is a lesson that I will carry with me.”

Talk to me when that lesson equates to an actual change in action benefitting Black and brown people, especially those who work for Kempczinski’s thriving business.

“McDonald’s has made a lot of big statements about standing with Black people, but it’s clear the company only thinks of us as ‘you people,’” Tailo told Insider. “McDonald’s can’t just say ‘Black Lives Matter’ — it needs to prove it by once and for all addressing racism that plagues its system from top to bottom.” Tailo has retained attorney Amanda Lynch, of the firm Altshuler Berzon, to represent her, with her complaint serving as an initial step to a potential lawsuit, Insider reported. “What Ms. Tailo is asking for here is to have McDonalds listen to its workers,” Lynch told Insider. “She cares about making sure this doesn’t happen to other workers.”

RELATED: ‘I wound up vomiting’: McDonald’s skirts paid COVID-19 sick leave, forcing sick worker to man grill

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An absolutely shocking story out of a middle school in Ventura, California, has me thinking back to my own days as a preteen. I attended a public school and while we were assigned debates on pre-selected issues, we weren’t really supposed to talk about the big event dominating the news at the time: invading Afghanistan. This meant (of course) that all that my classmates and I wanted to know was where our teachers stood politically. I distinctly remember essentially goading my social studies teacher into admitting, to our horror, that he backed Bush and supported invading Afghanistan (making him perhaps the least surprised of anyone who ever taught me that I ended up working at Daily Kos decades later). All of this to say: I understand teachers, like everyone, are imperfect, and I don’t necessarily think all “political” topics should be off-limits in the classroom.

But this incident out of Anacapa Middle School is so wildly inappropriate, offensive, and downright concerning, it’s not even in the same stratosphere. A history teacher at the school was recorded ranting about Hunter Biden, claiming that Biden had sex with his niece and had child pornography on his laptop. The teacher topped off the diatribe by, you guessed it, bringing up Ukraine, as reported by CBS Los Angeles. They also ranted about—you guessed it—vaccines. The teacher has not been publicly identified at the time of writing.

“People need to wake up and see the government has way too much power right now,” the teacher can be heard saying in the recording taken by a student in the classroom. The child’s parent apparently told them that if they were ever uncomfortable with what a teacher was saying, they were allowed to take out their phone and record. That’s what the student did when the incident occurred about two weeks ago, and whew, what a great thing that student did.

“Hunter Biden, for example, is doing deals with China and Ukraine where he was funneling money illegally,” the teacher says in the recording, which reportedly lasts about seven minutes. “He also had child pornography on his laptop. He was having sexual intercourse with his own niece.” Again, obviously not true, and obviously disturbingly inappropriate to say to literal children. 

Sarah Silikula, the parent of the child who recorded the teacher’s bizarre rant, said her child came home very upset and confused by the whole thing. According to Silikula, her child said: “I’m never getting vaccinated,” and declared that they’re not getting any more shots of any kind. It’s no surprise the kid is totally spooked by vaccines, given that the teacher alleged that if you have a baby in a hospital and you choose not to get vaccinated, you don’t get your baby back.

According to Silikula, her child then asked her a question that likely made her stomach drop: “Did you know Trump’s still president?” Yikes.

According to the outlet, the school district has condemned the teacher’s comments. Students in the class have been assigned to another teacher. The teacher involved in the incident is still employed at the school, and the district told the outlet it will apply its “progressive” discipline policy to handle the situation.

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Aside from communities of color existing in what are often called “food deserts,” now we’re learning that much of the food available to Black and brown people is more akin to a “food apartheid” where fast food restaurants line the streets and marginalized people live with unhealthy and potentially poisonous menus. 

A new study uncovers that many of the restaurants available those living in underserved areas have high concentrations of an extremely dangerous class of chemicals known as phthalates—a group of chemicals used to make plastics more durable—used in everything from soaps to vinyl flooring. People are exposed to phthalates by eating and drinking foods that have contacted products containing phthalates, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

The study, published in the Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology, found that when researchers visited dozens of fast food restaurants in low-income neighborhoods, they found a phthalate knowns as DnBP in 81% of the samples and another one called DEHP in 70%. And in 89% of a food samples was another non-phthalate plasticizer that is supposedly safe and is known as DEHT. 

“These results have implications for health equity since Black people in the U.S. report greater fast food consumption than other racial/ethnic groups and also face higher exposures to environmental chemicals from other sources,” authors of the study wrote.

We know that Black and brown people were disproportionately infected, hospitalized, and killed by COVID-19, and that’s directly because of the inequalities in access to healthy food across the nation as well as unequal access to health care, increased exposure to toxic chemicals, and unhealthy air, according to the U.S. Right to Know, a nonprofit investigative research group focusing on transparency for public health. 

“Unhealthy food marketing aimed at youth under age 18 is a significant contributor to poor diets and diet-related diseases. Therefore, greater exposure to this marketing by Hispanic and Black children and teens, both in the media and in their communities, likely contributes to diet-related health disparities affecting communities of color, including obesity, diabetes, and heart disease,” reads a report from the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity, Council on Black Health. 

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I’m elated that I get an extra hour of sleep today, now that we are no longer on Daylight Saving Time here in New York. I keep saying “fall back, spring forward” to remember to set a few of the windup clocks I have in the house. Thankfully, my computer and cell phone reset themselves automatically.

For today’s Black Music Sunday, we’ll be exploring songs about time.

Whether it’s tick-tock sounds, metronomes, keeping time, doing time, two-timing lovers, the changing times, or time repeating, time in some form has been a theme in popular music and across multiple genres. So take a little of your spare time today, and give a listen.

Let’s kick this journey into time off with the Chambers Brothers.

First some background on the group, from music historian Richie Unterberger’s liner notes for the 2007 reissue of their 1968 LP, Shout. 

Many African-American soul and rock greats came from humble origins, but few came from as humble circumstances as the Chambers Brothers did. Willie, Joe, Lester, and George Chambers were just four brothers in a family also including four other brothers and five sisters. From a young age, they worked in the fields on their father George’s Mississippi farm, growing cotton and almost any form of food that could be eaten. There was time for singing, though, both in the fields and at home, as well as in church and other social occasions. According to a 1965 article in Sing Out! by folksinger Barbara Dane (whom the Chambers Brothers backed onstage and on a mid-1960s Folkways LP, Barbara Dane and the Chambers Brothers, reissued on CD in 2005 by DBK Works),”The little boys were sometimes asked to sing for well-to-do-whites, and the pay was…an apple. The traditional presentation of that apple was with one bite removed, so that everybody ‘kept their places.'” As demeaning as the pay was in some ways, pointed out Willie Chambers in the same story, “That was still more than the other kids had, and besides, we had enjoyed ourselves singing so much, we just didn’t worry about what we got for it.”

The family moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1950s, both in search of a better life and to escape the harsh prejudices endured by blacks in the pre-Civil Rights Act South. At first, George, Willie, Lester, and Joe performed gospel, often in church on Sundays, and for a while their group also included singers from outside the family, like Tommy James and Oscar Reed. “What we used to do,” Joe told Goldmine in 1994, “because we had such good harmonies together, the brothers would sing all the background harmonies while we’d have other singers do the lead work. We’d just keep the harmony tight in the back. But we were always called the Chambers Brothers.”

Similar to Sly and the Family Stone, the Chambers Brothers added a white drummer, Brian Keenan, thus becoming an interracial group. Their music moved into the rock realm while still maintaining roots in Black gospel and folk through the vocals.

The Chambers Brothers made psychedelic soul history with their 1967 11-minute masterpiece, “Time Has Come Today,” which is so nice, I’m gonna post it twice. First, enjoy the studio version, from The Time Has Come album.

Here we go!

Next, let’s enjoy a live performance from The Chambers Brothers with Joshua Light Show, which aired in June 1969 on German television. The concert was filmed three months earlier at the Jahrhunderthalle in Frankfurt, Germany. This live version clocks in at nearly 15 minutes!

The recording of the studio version was a “very big deal,” as Steve Jennings wrote for MIX in 2013.

Through the first half of 1967, the Chambers Brothers toured relentlessly “and built up a big following around the country,” [then-23-year-old staff producer for Columbia Records named David] Rubinson says. “They would pack into a station wagon and drive from city to city and play these gigs. They’d play ‘Time Has Come Today’ live, and they developed this whole thing where it would slow down with the cowbell, and they’d have this incredible electric jam in the middle, and it would go way out there and craziness would ensue, and then they’d bring it back to the song and be done 20 minutes later. When I saw them at the Electric Circus [a hip club in NYC], it was mind-blowing; everyone went nuts over it.”

Shortly after that appearance, in early August 1967, the band went into Columbia New York’s Studio E with Rubinson and engineer Fred Catero and cut the epic psychedelic version of “Time Has Come Today” that would appear on The Time Has Come, completely live—trippy sound effects included—in just one take.[…]

Rubinson was so excited he had Clive Davis come down to the studio at midnight to hear the track, and that is what finally convinced Davis to commit to putting out a whole Chambers Brothers album. Rubinson made an edited single version of the song, eliminating the long psychedelic section, “but an engineer at KFRC in San Francisco made his own edit, which was frankly better than mine, and [Columbia released] a second single based on the KFRC edit and it swept the country, beginning in San Francisco, where it was a Number One record.” Between the single and the album version, “Time Has Come Today” was inescapable in the summer and fall of 1968.

I had the good fortune of being a member of a girl group back in the 1960s; we opened for the Chambers Brothers at the Cheetah Club in New York City, so I got to hear them, see them, and briefly get to know them. They were mesmerizing live, and though members of the group have since passed on, whenever I hear “Time Has Come Today,” I always think of what a warm and unpretentious group of brothers they were.

A younger generation of folks, even though they may not know who the Chambers Brothers were, have likely heard their iconic tune in this commercial for Hoka running shoes.

Going back a few years to 1964, it’s about time to set the record straight on some confusion about the song “Time Is On My Side,” recorded by the Queen of New Orleans soul, Irma Thomas.

Born as Irma Lee in Ponchatoula, Louisiana, in February 1941, Thomas uses the last name of a former husband, Andrew. Carol Brennan wrote an undated biography of Thomas for Musician Guide.

The story of R&B singer Irma Thomas seems the ideal candidate for a film biography, one that would pick its leading lady from the younger generation of soul divas that carry on Thomas’s legacy. “Honey, my story sounds like a black version of the Loretta Lynn story,” Thomas joked with a writer from the New Yorker once. A native of New Orleans, Thomas cut her first record while a teen single mother in the late 1950s, and went on to have a nominally successful recording career–although she never made as much money from it as those behind the scenes. The British Invasion and cataclysmic weather put her career under water in New Orleans, so she packed up her four children and moved to California, alternating performing gigs with her sales clerk job. Returning to New Orleans in the mid-1970s was the beginning of a change of fortune for Thomas, and since then she has enjoyed a successful recording career on Rounder Records as well as the support of a loyal local fan base. A celebrity in her hometown, Thomas puts her good Grammy-nominated name to use in charity work and as the proprietor of her own club.

Thomas recorded “Time Is On My Side” in 1964, but for decades, she stopped singing it live because people thought she was covering a hit by the Rolling Stones, but the truth was that the Stones were the ones doing the cover—of Irma Thomas. But as Brennan notes:

Thomas also tours extensively, and does not shy away from performing “Time Is On My Side” any longer in her well-attended club appearances. Contemporary singer Bonnie Raitt convinced her to start singing it again one night at the Hard Rock Cafe in New Orleans. “Go ahead on and sing it regardless of what people think,” Thomas recalled Raitt saying when she spoke with the Advocate. “Just sing it! You do it better than they do anyway.”

Give Thomas’ original a listen.

Thomas tells the story of how the Stones came to overshadow her performance of the song, written by Jerry Ragovoy, in this short 2019 documentary for Dutch Public Television.

For more on Thomas’ career, pay a visit to The History Makers, where you can find a series of oral histories. Be sure to check out a new film about Thomas and her music, dropping at the end of November. 

Let’s go back a couple years further in time to 1962, when doo-wop music was still popular. The Jive Five were from my old stomping grounds in Brooklyn. Michael Jack Kirby tells their story for Way Back Attack.

Eugene Pitt hailed from Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, musically influenced by his father, a gospel singer, who taught Eugene and his sisters how to harmonize; they performed gospel songs in churches until about 1950, when he entered his restless teenage years. The atmosphere of Brooklyn’s streets, with doo wop singers everywhere, stirred a desire for rhythm and blues stardom and by mid-decade he had joined a group called The Akrons with brothers Ray and Charles Murphy (father of future comedian and movie star Eddie Murphy). A little later Eugene sang with a group headed by Claude Johnson, but they separated when Johnson left for Long Island to join The Genies, the outfit that later scored a national hit with “Who’s That Knocking.”

In 1959 Pitt put together his own group, The Jive Five, with friends from the neighborhood. He and Jerome Hanna sang tenor, supported by Richard Harris, Thurmon “Billy” Prophet and bass singer Norman Johnson.

What’s always stuck in my head was the refrain of their hit “What Time Is It?”

(Tick-tock, tick-tock)
(Tick-tock, listen to the clock)
(Tick-tock, listen to the clock)

[…]

(Tick-tock, tick-tock, better hurry up)
And put my tie on
(Better hurry up)
It’s almost time
(Tick-tock, listen to the clock)
(Tick-tock, listen to the clock)

Take a listen and see if it becomes an “ear worm” for you!

Rock, soul, and doo-wop aren’t the only music genres to address time. Probably one of the greatest folk ballads of all time was written by Bob Dylan, released in 1964 as the title track of an album with the same name: The Times They Are A Changin’. It would go on to become an anthem for a generation, covered by a long list of artists.

As a point of personal preference, I’ll be honest: I love Dylan the writer, but I can’t stand to listen to him sing. I very much prefer it when other folks sing his songs. With that in mind, let’s enjoy Tracy Chapman’s version of “The Times They Are A Changin’,” performed live at the Bob Dylan 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration at Madison Square Garden, in October 1992. 

Times are indeed always changing, and my time is running out today, though I’ll have lots more in the comments section below. I’d like to close with a duet that never fails to move me emotionally. I first watched this remarkable performance when it was televised on the Patti Labelle Special in 1985.

Lauper wrote “Time After Time” in 1983; its genesis was documented in 2018, by Mike Hobart for The Financial Times.

Cyndi Lauper didn’t plan to write “Time after Time” at all. The New York-raised singer had already left the recording studio after — she thought — completing her first solo album, She’s So Unusual. Released in 1983, it went on to produce four top-five singles, and a Grammy in 1984 for best new artist. But before any of that, Lauper’s producer reckoned the album was coming in one number short, and could she please turn in another track?

She and her co-writer, keyboardist Rob Hyman, returned to the studio. Lauper flicked through a TV guide hoping that some title or other might jump out and kickstart a new song. One of them did: a listing for Time after Time, a 1979 film starring Malcolm McDowell as H.G. Wells in pursuit of Jack the Ripper, who has hijacked his time machine.

Lauper and Hyman dispensed with the film’s plot, coming up instead with a 1980s-defining romantic ballad that distilled the contradictory emotions of an unwinding relationship into four minutes of brilliantly conceived narrative pop. Here, a young woman moves on — not dumped — from a relationship that she still treasures: “If you’re lost you can look — and you will find me / time after time / if you fall I will catch you, I’ll be waiting, time after time.”

“Time After Time” went on to become a truly iconic tune; jazz trumpeter Miles Davis did a version, and new covers emerge regularly.

But what moves me in this duet is the palpable connection and care shown between LaBelle and Lauper as they hold hands and hold space for each other to show off, and as their voices come together. That deep connection was real, and persists offstage: LaBelle is godmother to Lauper’s son Declyn, and she even sang “Come What May” at Lauper’s wedding.

Get ready to have your heart soar.

I hope you’ll find some time to join me in the comments for more music on time. I also look forward (even though we’ve fallen back) to hearing some of your favorites.  

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Let’s dive right in!

Li Zhou of Vox writes about Friday night’s passage of the $1.2 trillion infrastructure package,and the concerns of the progressive wing of the Democratic caucus about the eventual fate of Build Back Better bill.

The result was a major step forward for President Joe Biden’s agenda, but a blow to progressives who’ve long pushed for the two bills to be tied together. Progressives were able to extract a commitment from House moderates to vote for the spending measure by November 15, although that pledge came with an important caveat.

The infrastructure bill passed the House 228-206, with 13 Republicans voting in favor. The legislation was a compromise between a bipartisan group of lawmakers and includes major investments in roads, bridges, water quality, and broadband internet. It’s known as BIF — the bipartisan infrastructure framework — because members of both parties have backed it. Because it has already passed the Senate, it now heads to President Joe Biden’s desk to become law.

[…]

The fate of the social spending bill, however, is now uncertain. Moderates are holding out for a score from the Congressional Budget Office before they move forward. And the CBO could find the spending bill would have more than the expected budget deficit impact. In that case, moderates did not say they would commit to voting for the bill, though most of the holdouts did promise to try “to resolve any discrepancies in order to pass the Build Back Better legislation.” Some could conceivably refuse to vote for it at all. In the best-case scenario, a vote on the bill isn’t expected to take place until later this month and then, should it pass, it must still get through the Senate as well.

Aaron Blake of The Washington Post reports that Republicans are in disarray following the 13 GOP votes in favor of the BIF package.

Friday’s GOP defections were even more significant than during the last Trump impeachment, when 10 Republicans voted to impeach the president — a historically high number. And the fact that on Friday they provided the votes necessary for passage makes this even more fraught.

They were also more significant than many, including McCarthy, suggested they might be. While McCarthy previously kept his powder dry on whipping against the bill, he ultimately pushed for his members to vote against it. As recently as last week, McCarthy said, “I don’t expect few, if any, to vote for it, if it comes to the floor today.” In another interview, he was asked about the infrastructure bill and said, “It will fail.”

Circumstances change, but the defections from McCarthy’s party line were significant for the modern era; they notably included Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.), whom McCarthy had made part of his whipping operation just earlier this year — the same whipping operation that failed Friday.

John Cassidy of The New Yorker writes that Friday’s positive jobs report numbers could be the beginning of good news for President Joe Biden and the Democrats.

Glenn Youngkin, the victorious Republican candidate in Virginia, used education as a culture-war wedge issue, but he also emphasized the economy, claiming that Virginia was lagging other states in recovering from the pandemic and contending that Democratic rule is throttling job growth. (Surprise, surprise: many of his claims were exaggerated.) In New Jersey, the G.O.P. gubernatorial candidate Jack Ciattarelli, who almost pulled off a shock victory, made the economy and taxes the central issue of his campaign, depicting his opponent, Phil Murphy, as an out-of-touch liberal whose big-spending policies were driving businesses from the state.

At the national level, too, there is evidence that concerns about the economy are hurting Biden and the Democrats. In an NBC News survey released last weekend, the President’s approval rating on handling the economy was at forty per cent, down from fifty-two per cent in April. Asked which party would do a better job handling the economy, the respondents to the poll gave the G.O.P. an eighteen-point advantage over the Democrats. This was the Republicans’ biggest lead in thirty years on this question from this pollster.

Rebecca Solnit, writing for The Guardian, shares the good news for progressives arising out of last Tuesday’s elections—and there’s a lot of it.

As for this week’s election, it swept in a lot of progressive mayors of color. The most prominent was Michelle Wu, who won the Boston mayor’s seat as the first woman and first person of color. Elaine O’Neal will become Durham, North Carolina’s, first Black woman mayor, and Abdullah Hammoud will become Dearborn’s first Muslim and Arab American mayor. Aftab Pureval will become Cincinnati’s first Asian American mayor. Pittsburgh elected its first Black mayor, and so did Kansas City, Kansas. Cleveland’s new mayor is also Black. New York City elected its second Black Democratic mayor, and Shahana Hanif became the first Muslim woman elected to the city council (incidentally, New York City and Virginia have about the same population). In Seattle, a moderate defeated a progressive, which you could also phrase as a Black and Asian American man defeated a Latina. A lot of queer and trans people won elections, or in the case of Virginia’s Danica Roem, the first out trans person to win a seat in a state legislature, won reelection.

In Philadelphia, Larry Krasner, who in 2017 was the first of a wave of ultra-progressive district attorneys to take office across the country, swept to a second term with 69% of the vote. “I want to congratulate him. He beat my pants off,” said his Republican rival. In Cleveland, Austin, Denver and Albany, citizens voted in police-reform measures, and while a more radical measure in Minneapolis lost, it got a good share of votes. 2021 wasn’t a great election year for Democrats but it’s not hard to argue that it wasn’t a terrible one, and either way it just wasn’t a big one, with a handful of special elections for congressional seats, some state and local stuff, and only two gubernatorial elections.

It is true that the Democratic Party is large and chaotic with a wide array of political positions among its elected officials, which is what happens when you’re a coalition imperfectly representing a wide array of voters, by class, race, and position from moderate to radical on the political spectrum. It’s also true the US is a two-party system and the alternative at present is the Republican party, which is currently a venal and utterly corrupt cult bent on many kinds of destruction. It’s the party whose last leader, with the help of many Republicans still in Congress, produced a violent coup in an attempt to steal an election.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t share Solnit’s interview with Amanda Marcotte at Salon, where Solnit points out that even George Orwell stopped to smell the roses … and even tended to them.

Renée Graham of The Boston Globe writes about why a majority of white women continue to vote Republican.

White women who vote Republican seek to maintain their privilege. This means voting against candidates who back policies that could alter the racial inequalities that keep the deck stacked in white supremacy’s favor. I’ve long suspected that some white people oppose legislation that would help all regardless of race because what they’re really against is anything that could erode their unearned power by leveling the field for historically disadvantaged groups.

It’s why 63 percent of white Alabama women voted for Roy Moore, a Republican and accused sexual predator, when he unsuccessfully ran for the Senate in 2017. It’s why only 31 percent of white women in Georgia voted for Reverend Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, whose victories in that state’s two runoff elections this year gave Democrats a fragile majority in the Senate.

“The elephant in the room is white and female, and she has been standing there since 1952,” Jane Junn, a University of Southern California professor of political science and gender and sexuality studies, wrote in her essay “Hiding in Plain Sight: White Women Vote Republican.” It was published days after Trump defeated Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.

Like Graham (I suspect), I wish that we could retire the phraseology that voters vote “against their own best interests.” Voters can and do have multiple interests and voters can and do prioritize those interests.

Jon Allsop of Columbia Journalism Review urges caution in latching onto narratives about last Tuesday’s elections being pushed by the pundit class.

In the days since Youngkin, a Republican, beat McAuliffe, a Democrat, in Virginia’s gubernatorial election—and Phil Murphy, the incumbent Democratic governor of New Jersey, narrowly won a closer than expected race—journalists, pundits, and politicos have collectively unleashed an avalanche of analysis as to the reasons Democrats had a bad night. No single reason, of course, has unifying explanatory power; indeed, many of those listed above are perfectly compatible with one another. Different voters are motivated by different issues, and often themselves contain multitudes: a given parent, for instance, might both have been frustrated with COVID protocols in their child’s school and also receptive to the Youngkin campaign’s dog whistles around the teaching of race; the latter can be both a local grievance against a specific school or teacher and also part of an explicit, nationalized campaign to make “critical race theory” a catch-all boogeyman for the Trumpian right. To the extent that different media takes have privileged different explanations in isolation, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It is, rather, how political debate tends to work in the public sphere.

Still, there are a number of reasons why we should approach debates about electoral wins and losses—and this week’s wins and losses, in particular—with care. Firstly, some of the explanations for the results appear less compatible than others, in ways that call for considered elucidation. It’s hard, for instance, to see how Biden’s actions in office have been both too progressive and not progressive enough; it’s possible that voters who instinctively think the former might have been swayed by the timelier passage of his agenda if its benefits accrued directly to them, but those benefits aren’t usually tangible overnight, and in any case, gubernatorial elections are not federal elections. It’s likewise tricky to reconcile the take that COVID has fundamentally restructured American politics with the take that there’s nothing to see here because the new president’s party almost always gets cleaned out in Virginia a year in. It makes more sense to conclude that Youngkin replicated an old political trend but for new reasons, and with the support of a shifting coalition. Disentangling what seems old and what seems new is always an urgent challenge for the press, and COVID has supercharged it.

Jonathan Watts of The Guardian offers a summary and commentary of the first week of the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland.

Even with a stronger US presence, the global roll call remained incomplete. If this were a school register, the teacher would note that some the naughtiest kids in the climate class were all absent: Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, president of the world’s biggest deforesting nation; Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, crown prince of the world’s second biggest oil pumper; and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, president of the world’s second biggest gas producer. China’s Xi Jinping, president of the biggest coal consumer and carbon emitter, was also missing, though at least he had a sicknote owing to the Covid crisis.

India provided the biggest fillip of the high-level segment when its prime minister, Narendra Modi, announced that the country would get 50% of its electricity from renewables by 2030 and go net zero by 2070. That is three generations away, but still a big advance compared with previous plans. Along with the unveiling of Nigeria’s first carbon-neutral plan this week, countries representing more than 70% of the world’s emissions have now signed up to long-term goals.

If Cops have any value, it is in forcing those who have profited from the climate crisis to look into the eyes of the victims. But are the leaders of the US, EU and China and the CEOs of Exxon, Shell and BP still able to see? This was the question posed by Mia Mottley, the prime minister of Barbados, in an opening-day speech that brought goosebumps to many of those watching.

Stephanie Zimmerman of the Chicago Sun-Times reports on an investigation into the administration of the GI Bill, spurred by a whistleblower’s complaint.

A long-secret investigation of a whistleblower’s complaint has found widespread and longstanding problems with the federal government’s administration of the GI Bill that could be at fault for veterans and their families having been denied money they were entitled to for college.

The investigation found that, because of bad record-keeping, some vets were shortchanged on their service time — a key element in qualifying to transfer their Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits to their children to pay for school.

In a series of reports since 2019, the Chicago Sun-Times has documented how such bureaucratic errors led to the children of long-serving veterans losing out on Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits for college. In some cases, families were told they had to repay college money the government already paid on their behalf.

The Defense Department investigation into whistleblower Nicholas D. Griffo’s complaint was completed in January 2020. But the federal agency never released its findings. Griffo provided the report to the Sun-Times, saying he was frustrated that the government hadn’t made it public after 22 months.

Sudhakar Nuti pens for STAT a personal and intense account of his own burnout from treating patients during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The National Academy of Medicine defines burnout as “a syndrome characterized by a high degree of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization, and a low sense of personal accomplishment at work.” In medicine, there’s a lot of talk about burnout because it is so prevalent. It’s especially common among trainees like me, where an 80-hour workweek is the expectation. I’m supposedly among the up to 75% of trainees who experience burnout, but I find it hard to imagine that 25% of residents are feeling hunky-dory during this pandemic. And Covid-19 has only increased stress and burnout among interns, residents, and other trainees.

It’s not like vaunted medical institutions like the one I’m working for don’t know about burnout. They devise all sorts of ways to reverse exhaustion, like free dinner for a week, listening sessions, or a thank-you-for-working-during-the-pandemic Patagonia jacket, imagining my life can be fixed with an opportunity for reflection and another fleece.

There’s an underlying assumption in burnout discussions: that it can always be remedied with some notion of self-care. What’s never spoken is that burnout is the remnant of a fire. I’ve never seen a piece of charred wood and thought that some time by itself and some water will restore it to its former state. Burning can cause irreparable damage, and I haven’t heard anyone admit that about becoming burned out.

Derek Thompson of The Atlantic writes about a scientific funding program called Fast Grants—a program that arose because of the COVID-19 pandemic and that could be an alternative way to fund American scientific research.

Most scientific funding in the United States flows from federal agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. This funding is famously luxurious; the NIH and NSF allocate about $50 billion a year. It is also infamously laborious and slow. Scientists spend up to 40 percent of their time working on research grants rather than on research. And funding agencies sometimes take seven months (or longer) to review an application, respond, or request a resubmission. Anything we can do to accelerate the grant-application process could hugely increase the productivity of science.

The existing layers of bureaucracy have obvious costs in speed. They also have subtle costs in creativity. The NIH’s pre-grant peer-review process requires that many reviewers approve an application. This consensus-oriented style can be a check against novelty—what if one scientist sees extraordinary promise in a wacky idea but the rest of the board sees only its wackiness? The sheer amount of work required to get a grant also penalizes radical creativity. Many scientists, anticipating the turgidity and conservatism of the NIH’s approval system, apply for projects that they anticipate will appeal to the board rather than pour their energies into a truly new idea that, after a 500-day waiting period, might get rejected. This is happening in an academic industry where securing NIH funding can be make-or-break: Since the 1960s, doctoral programs have gotten longer and longer, while the share of Ph.D. holders getting tenure has declined by 40 percent.

Fast Grants aimed to solve the speed problem in several ways. Its application process was designed to take half an hour, and many funding decisions were made within a few days. This wasn’t business as usual. It was Operation Warp Speed for science.

Next, here are two stories about the continuing efforts to form a coalition government in Germany.

First, Laurenz Gehrke and Joshua Posaner write for POLITICO Europe about disagreements among the three political parties about climate change.

Coalition talks between the Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens and the Free Democrats (FDP) are stuttering over climate policy, with the three sides squabbling over how far-reaching their plans should be. The dispute has prompted the Greens to call on environmental groups to ramp up pressure as global leaders meet in Glasgow for the COP26 summit.

[…]

The Greens want to bring forward Germany’s coal phaseout date from 2038 and end the sale of combustion engine vehicles by 2030. They also want to create a climate ministry that would have the right to veto any other government decision to ensure policies fall in line with the Paris climate agreement.

The Free Democrats are against such a veto, for example, as well as any bans on cars. The parties are also split over carbon pricing, with the Greens cautious on EU plans to expand the bloc’s emissions trading system — a market to buy and swap emissions allowances — to cover fuels for road transport and heating.

Next, the Der Speigel investigative reporting team of Christiana Hoffman, Konstantin von Hammerstein, Christoph Schult, Severin Weiland, and Matthias Gebauer present a fascinating and detailed behind-the-scenes look at the sausage-making of a German coalition foreign policy working group.

The working group is hammering out policy for three portfolios: foreign policy, defense and development. Very little was said about these issues during the campaign, and the exploratory talks didn’t touch on them much either, with the three parties preferring to paper over their differences. Now, though, clarity must be found on the most significant issues: Germany’s relationships with the U.S., China and Russia; the future of NATO; the German military’s overseas profile; and Germany’s role in the world.

The bickering began already with the length of the joint paper. The leaders of the three parties involved decreed that the working group could only produce a maximum of five pages in Calibri font size 11, with 1.5 line spacing. No time is allowed for renegotiations and the finished paper must be submitted by 6 p.m. next Wednesday.

Some Green Party working group members, though, are rebelling against these parameters. It is impossible, they say, to outline the policy of three cabinet portfolios on just five pages. The SPD, meanwhile, has held firm. “It’s not going to change,” says an SPD member involved in the negotiations. “You can complain all you want, but it won’t help.”

Finally, while I frequently disagree with The New York Times columnist John McWhorter’s more political takes on language and linguistics, when he leans more into the linguistics side of the spectrum, he’s a wonderful read. Granted, the line between politics and linguistics can sometimes be so thin as to not even be recognizable. 

All of this is to say that McWhorter put his foot in this column on the evolution of the English language.

[B]ecause English doesn’t have the long lists of endings that some languages have, it can seem as if our language’s grammar is kind of dull. But there’s so much that we just aren’t trained to see. In Cantonese, for example, there are lots of particles that you place at the end of a sentence to convey countless degrees of sentiment. “Nei hai gam jat faan uk kei?” means just “You’re returning home today?” But “Nei hai gam jat faan uk kei gaa?” can lend a note of displeasure, as in “You’re returning home today? Seriously?”

English doesn’t have as much as Cantonese by way of particles like this. But think about what the “be” in “Don’t be telling me you can’t make it” means — that same skeptical note. Similar is “go and” if we say, for example, “Now he’s going to go and shut it all down.” It conveys disapproval of what’s about to happen, even though by itself “go and” means no such thing (nor does “be”). In terms of marking the passive, the way we’re taught is with forms of “be”: “He was included.” But what about the one with “get”? “He got hurt,” “He got laid off,” “He got hit.” English has a neutral passive — and a special passive that you use for something negative or unexpected. Note how saying, “In the battle he was hurt” sounds more clinical and less real than saying that “he got hurt,” because “be” elides that getting hurt was something bad that came as a surprise.

I also hear English as having all kinds of coded ways to throw shade, of a kind that learners could be taught just as carefully as they are taught something as straightforward as putting an “s” on a verb in the third person singular. These aren’t idioms in the sense of “call it a day” or “on the ball”; they’re grammar. Black English has even more such constructions, using the otherwise neutral verb “come”: “He come saying nobody knew until today” implies that you’re not happy with him. Black English even has a future perfect of disapproval: “I’ll be done left if she tries getting here late again.” (I owe this observation about this construction to the linguist and poet Alysia Harris.)

If The New York Times Magazine were to revive William Safire’s “On Language” column with McWhorter as the columnist, I’d put up with McWhorter’s occasionally wretched political opinions, tbh.

Everyone have a great day!