This vegan Caesar dressing is creamy and flavorful like the classic! Traditional Caesar dressings obtain their silky texture and bold flavor from homemade mayonnaise (made of emulsified raw egg yolk in oil), Parmesan and anchovy, but this recipe is free of all those ingredients. It’s perfect if you need an egg-free, dairy-free option.
What’s in it, you ask? This creamy vegan dressing is tahini-based, with lemon for tang! I’ve tried a variety of other vegan Caesar concepts over the years with ingredients like capers, cashews, nutritional yeast, or vegan mayo, and this version cannot be beat. I’m firmly on Team Tahini over here.
If you’re looking for Caesar dressing that’s closer to the classic restaurant variety, try my mayo-based Easy Caesar Dressing instead.
Republican Efforts to Subvert the Vote Zero in on Alaska
A couple of Republican senators are looking ahead to January and suggesting they will refuse to seat Democrat Mary Peltola should she win her Senate race.
“Under no circumstances should Mary Peltola be seated if she wins an election in a fraudulent manner,” Tim Sheehy (R-MT) tweeted on Saturday.
In a Sunday Meet the Press interview, Tim Scott (R-SC), the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, also refused to commit to accepting the results, even if they are certified by Alaska, pointing to the DOJ investigation into the dueling Dan Sullivans on the ballot.
Later that day, a federal district court judge rejected the Department of Justice’s preemptive effort to halt Alaska’s certification of the election. The DOJ wants the state to not certify until an investigation is completed into whether voters who intended to vote for incumbent senator Dan Sullivan actually cast ballots for the other Dan Sullivan, who, a New York Times investigation suggested, may have been encouraged by Democratic operatives to run. Such an investigation would be impossible, because voters’ identities are not linked to their ballots, the judge noted.
“Those cast ballots have been commingled and cannot now be segregated or the identity of the person who cast each ballot ascertained,” Judge Sharon Gleason wrote.
The DOJ appealed Sunday’s decision. That litigation is separate from DOJ efforts to investigate the non-senator Sullivan.
As the Times’ story noted, nothing it reported is “fraud,” or a violation of election law; in a world where the DOJ and congressional Republicans were not beholden to Trump, there would not be much to investigate. As many experts have pointed out, Alaska’s ranked-choice voting system is designed to ensure that, in a close election, senator Dan Sullivan will in fact win any voters who intended to vote for him, since it eliminates minor candidates.
Each state is in charge of certifying its own elections and sending the winners to Congress. The Senate, however, plays a role in determining which members to seat; contested races, have, historically, been investigated by the Senate Rules Committee.
These scenarios are rare, however, and the Senate procedures around disputed elections have often been determined by the body itself, not any law. The vagueness opens the door to a huge range of options, including opportunities for Republicans to attempt to block Peltola, and opportunities for Democrats to fight back.
House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-KY), who is also conducting an investigation into Alaska’s election, said Sunday that the Senate might refuse to seat Peltola.
One Republican who said he would accept the results is the senator Dan Sullivan.
“Are you only going to accept the election results if you win?” Jake Tapper asked him Sunday on CNN.
“No, I’m going to accept the election results,” Sullivan replied.
Haley Stevens’ Very Weird Sunday
DETROIT, UNITED STATES – 2026/11/01: Michigan Democratic Representative Haley Stevens (L) endorses Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers (R). The 2026 United States Midterm Elections, including the Michigan U.S. Senate race, will take place on November 3. (Photo by Dominic Gwinn/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
In the hours following Stevens’ dramatic switch, from supporting Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed to supporting Republican Mike Rogers — a man who in August she described as “another rubber stamp for Donald Trump’s dangerous agenda” — journalists and Michigan Democrats searched for some clue as to what prompted such a sudden reversal.
Stevens’ differences with El-Sayed were well known. But, as TPM and other outlets reported, she had the previous night assured Democrats she would not do the very thing she did. Rep. Debbie Dingell, a respected Michigan Democrat, said Stevens told her at “midnight” that the possibility she would endorse Rogers was “all a rumor and it was not true.” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) also described Stevens telling him one thing Saturday before doing the opposite Sunday.
During an Anderson Cooper interview yesterday evening, the host repeatedly pressed her to explain why the switch happened when it did. Cooper noted that while Stevens had strongly critiqued El-Sayed — saying that he had not adequately distanced himself from streamer Hasan Piker or from a super PAC ad that suggested inflation was caused by U.S. arms sales to Israel — nothing had changed on those topics between the time she assured her party members she would not endorse Rogers, on Saturday, and the time, the next day, when she did.
Stevens did hint that El-Sayed’s decision to uninvite her from a unity event, scheduled for Sunday morning, in the face of her mounting critiques, prompted her to switch allegiance. “Abdul made very clear that I was not welcome in his campaign, that he didn’t need me there, that he didn’t want me there,” she said at a press conference with Rogers.
Speculation within Democratic circles also narrowed in on Stevens’ fiancé, the political donor Jason Turkish, who endorsed Rogers last week. Journalist Zach Gorchow reported a story told by former Democratic governor James Blanchard, who was in office from 1983 to 1991 and who said he had recently had dinner with the couple. Blanchard described Turkish “working her over,” telling her fiancé that “everyone is disappointed” in her. Blanchard said he intervened to defend Stevens as a “team player.”
“I’ve known Haley for a long time. I don’t know her fiancé,” Mallory McMorrow, one of Stevens’ and El-Sayed’s primary opponents, said during a local news interview yesterday. “I don’t. But to see him out there so publicly — I can only speak for myself, but my husband and I talked about this, and my husband said if he ever tried to speak for me the way we see happening now, he was like, ‘you would leave me.’ It’s hard to watch.” Dingell, also part of the interview, added, “it’s very hard.”
Stevens chief of staff of eight years, and other staffers in her office, resigned yesterday.
I honestly crave these roasted red potatoes. They’re golden on the outside and fluffy on the inside, with the characteristically earthy flavor you’d expect from red potatoes. My mom often served red potatoes as a side dish when I was growing up, and this roasted version tastes extra special.
After some trial and error in the kitchen, I’m sharing all the tricks for roasting perfect red potatoes! Here’s a rundown:
Use parchment paper to prevent the potatoes from sticking to the pan.
Cut the potatoes into rather large two-inch chunks so you can enjoy the contrast between the creamy interiors and crisp exteriors.
Toss the potatoes with olive oil and garlic powder for irresistible seasoning. Fresh garlic burns, so powder is a better choice.
For proper browning, use relatively high heat and roast starting with the flat sides down.
Republicans wanted the 2026 midterms to be a victory lap for Donald Trump’s tax cuts. Instead, the GOP’s signature legislation from the president’s second term — 2025’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act — is shaping up to be a sleeper vulnerability for the party.
When Republicans first passed Trump’s signature bill in party-line votes in both the House and Senate in 2025, its tax cuts took effect immediately, while the deepest cuts to Medicaid were scheduled for after the midterms, when the voters who would feel them could no longer hold anyone accountable. But even then, one of their own issued a warning that now hangs over the midterms. North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, who announced his retirement after indicating he would oppose the legislation, told CNN’s Jake Tapper that the bill would result in losses of the kind Democrats suffered in 2010 after passing Obamacare.
Republicans passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act anyway. Now, across social media, Americans are sharing stories of children cut off from cancer treatment and families struggling to afford prescriptions.
On Tuesday, Children’s Mercy Hospital announced that families in the Kansas City metropolitan area who buy coverage on the Affordable Care Act marketplace will find the region’s only dedicated children’s hospital out of network on Jan. 1 — a devastating development for parents whose children depend on specialized care. It is also the kind of story that can demolish incumbent Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall’s carefully constructed distinction between cutting government spending and hurting actual people.
The story went viral fast. Influencer Jen Hamilton’s video walking viewers through what the Children’s Mercy Hospital news means for families drew 3.2 million views across three social media platforms and was shared on Facebook at 73 times her average rate. Kasey Jackson, a Kansas City mother whose son is being treated for cancer, posted a series of videos explaining that her family’s marketplace plan would stop treating his hospital as in-network when the new year arrived. Jackson explained that she previously sold her small business to pay for her son’s leukemia treatments, but had few options left with no health plans to choose from. “As entrepreneurs, we don’t really have access to a group plan, so we have to go through the [Affordable Care Act] because there’s nobody that will provide private insurance for a kid with a pre-existing condition,” she explained. One clip passed half a million views.
The Children’s Mercy news arrives at an especially dangerous moment for Marshall, who has found himself in the middle of a re-election bid that was never supposed to be competitive.
The Children’s Mercy news arrives at an especially dangerous moment for Marshall, who has found himself in the middle of a re-election bid that was never supposed to be competitive. Kansas has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1932, and Trump carried it by 16 points in 2024. Yet the Cook Political Report moved the race to a toss-up this month, and an Emerson College poll gives his challenger, Adam Hamilton, a Kansas City-area megachurch pastor running on the cost of living, a two-point lead.
Republicans have quadrupled their ad spending in the state since late September, a move that must be particularly galling for the party because as a physician, Marshall should have been inoculated against a healthcare attack. Instead, the OB-GYN specialist’s career choices have come under heavy scrutiny.
In September, The New York Times reported that Marshall’s former practice had sued more than 700 of its own patients over unpaid bills, some as small as $101, and that 81 people were arrested as a result. Hamilton’s campaign built an ad around Meischa Zimmerman, who says she was arrested while eight months pregnant after missing a $50 payment, and found herself pleading not to be handcuffed in front of her two-year-old. “Roger Marshall preyed on the low-income families of Kansas,” she says. The ad has been viewed more than a million times on X. Marshall’s lawyers have called it defamatory, demanding it come down, saying the debt was larger and the arrest was for missing court dates. Marshall himself told cameras there were “no Medicaid cuts” in the law he voted for, dismissing the Times’ reporting as a “hit job.” A doctor-senator insisting the largest Medicaid cut in American history does not exist, while his own brutal record of collecting fees runs in heavy rotation, is the Big Beautiful Bill’s national problem in miniature.
But the social media outrage is not confined to one hospital or one state. The issue is also the number one subject in Senate advertising and the number two issue in House advertising, according to the nonpartisan Cook Political Report’s Battleground Issue Tracker, which found that Democrats are airing tens of thousands more ads and spending tens of millions more on the issue than Republicans, who have all but declined to defend their own law. GOP candidates in competitive races have run a total of four television ads about the Big Beautiful Bill since its passage, according to AdImpact.
Still, a POLITICO poll released last week found an overwhelming majority of voters know the law and oppose its contents, with their views slightly worse than when the bill was passed and signed into law. At the time, a KFF survey found opponents outnumbering supporters two to one. Since then, the White House’s attempt to rebrand the package as the “Working Families Tax Cuts” has moved almost no one, per the same POLITICO poll.
The problem for the GOP is that voters do not have to agree with every Democratic argument about healthcare to dislike paying more for their own insurance. In a KFF health opinion poll conducted in June, 37% of Republican voters said healthcare costs were extremely important. More than half of Republican and Republican-leaning independents who identify with the MAGA movement said Congress had done the wrong thing by allowing enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies to expire, according to KFF polling released in March. Among marketplace enrollees, 62% blamed Republicans or Trump for the expiration.
Meanwhile, Vice President JD Vance recently announced that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services had canceled ACA enrollments covering 760,000 people, citing claims of widespread fraud. The Trump administration views its focus on fraud in federal health programs as a message that will resonate with voters. A KFF poll in mid-September found that 44% of voters and 54% of Republican voters call fraud in government programs extremely important for candidates to address, and a separate KFF and Associated Press survey found it was the top topic rural Republicans want to hear about. The administration withheld about $2 billion in Medicaid funding from California, and announced plans to defer more than $500 million in federal funds from Minnesota, claiming the state had failed to protect its Medicaid program from abuse.
Republicans are betting on energizing their base — and hoping to pull along persuadable voters. Polling, however, points the other way. A fraud crackdown may be the top concern for Republican-leaning voters, but only 44% of voters overall call it extremely important, according to KFF, which found healthcare to be the top issue for the electorate at large.
Some of the largest disruptions from the Big Beautiful Bill Act that Republicans scheduled for later are being moved forward by state budgets. Because the law shifts enormous new costs onto states in the coming years, some state lawmakers are cutting now to brace for the shortfall. Colorado, facing a $1.5 billion hole, has cut what it pays doctors who treat Medicaid patients. In Maine, a hospital has eliminated its labor and delivery unit. The $50 billion rural health fund that Republicans added to the bill at the last minute amounts to a fraction of what rural communities stand to lose from the same law.
Democrats who have made the bill’s Medicaid cuts a leading message are tied or leading in many battleground races, including in states Trump previously won. In Georgia, ACA enrollment dropped by more than half a million, hitting Trump strongholds like the district in northwestern Georgia formerly represented by Marjorie Taylor Greene, where the number of uninsured is higher than the national average. Incumbent Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., has been laser-focused on hitting GOP cuts on the campaign trail all year. In Maine, incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins is being attacked by Troy Jackson, her Democratic challenger, for casting a procedural vote to advance Trump’s cuts to Medicare and Medicaid to a Senate floor debate.,Although Collins voted against final passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill, Jackson argues her vote helped pave the way for its enactment. In the House, California Rep. David Valadao’s Central Valley toss-up district, where roughly six in 10 constituents are enrolled in Medicaid, could help give Democrats control of Congress. Valadao, a Republican, voted for the Big Beautiful Bill. During a televised Oct. 6 debate, he said there are no actual cuts to Medicaid. His Democratic challenger has supported Medicare-for-All.
The GOP’s scramble explains why, weeks before the election, the Trump administration began mailing one-time payments of $500, along with a letter from the president touting his health record, to more than 950,000 people in the 30 states that use HealthCare.gov. The money comes from accumulated marketplace user fees, but only enrollees who bought coverage without premium subsidies qualified, which means roughly one in 20 marketplace customers received a check while the rest got the higher bills. Trump has also promised every American adult $5,000 if Republicans keep Congress, and Medicare beneficiaries have been told to expect $90.
But it is not just drastic healthcare cuts driving voters’ alienation from the GOP. An analysis published Thursday showed that millions of Americans have lost critical food assistance since Trump signed last year’s massive Republican tax giveaway for the superrich, with soaring grocery prices and cuts to school meals exacerbating the crisis. According to a report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, approximately 5.5 million people, including roughly two million children, have lost Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program assistance since July 2025. SNAP participation and spending have been falling, and the decline is much deeper than the Congressional Budget Office initially projected. These are by far the deepest SNAP cuts in history, and each month, new data reveals the damage is worse than previously anticipated. Republicans have responded that a slight reduction from an explosive increase is hardly a cut, and they have cheered SNAP participation returning to pre-pandemic levels, ignoring the mounting human toll.
As Election Day approaches, the reality of these policy choices has turned the GOP’s signature legislative victory into a major political liability. The strategic miscalculation of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is getting harder for conservatives to contain. By forcing millions of Americans to choose between basic medical care and daily necessities, Republicans transformed tax cuts for the rich into a personal crisis unfolding on screens and in living rooms nationwide.
Meet my new favorite chocolate cake recipe! It’s rich, chocolatey and indulgent, and secretly somewhat wholesome. Almond flour forms the base, which is why this cake is wonderfully tender and well-suited for gluten-free eaters. The cocoa powder largely covers up the almond flavor, though. It’s simply delicious.
This cake is plenty sweet but not too sweet, so it’s perfect if you enjoy dark chocolate. You can play up the almond factor by topping it with sliced almonds for a fun everyday snacking cake, or turn it into a special birthday treat by spreading frosting on top. I prefer this one to most bakery cakes!
The recipe is easy to stir together by hand. I’ve made it with our five-year-old’s help several times. I don’t think you could mess it up if you tried. If you’re familiar with Italian torta Caprese or French chocolate financiers, this cake reminds me a bit of both.
Jalen Hurts, the Philadelphia Eagles’ starting quarterback, is out for the season to recover from a deep vein blood clot, found after arriving in London for the game in which Hurts played between the Eagles and the Jacksonville Jaguars.
A Philadelphia sports columnist argued a few years ago that if Brock Purdy, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback, were the Eagles quarterback, he “would be a god in Philadelphia,” because of his underdog story. Hurts is an underdog as well. The difference is that Hurts is Black and Purdy is white. But like Michael Jordan’s flu game in the 1997 NBA Finals, where he played sick, playing a football game after being diagnosed with a blood clot and getting little to no rest seems godlike enough to cancel that columnist’s point.
However, questions have largely landed on Hurts. Questions about his leadership, aptitude, and attitude as the Philadelphia Eagles’ quarterback, and now about the severity of a blood clot and his commitment to the season amid roster challenges. The most egregious came from Michael Robinson of the NFL Network, who said that, in relation to Hurts’ current injury, Hurts seemed to be saying, “If everybody’s hurt, then I’m hurt too.”
But Hurts has a blood clot. Initially, it was diagnosed as a superficial vein clot, and now it is a series of deep vein clots that have since traveled to Hurts’ lungs. He’ll miss the rest of the season while he receives treatment but is expected to fully recover according to his agent Nicole Lynn. Hurts didn’t make his condition up. It wasn’t a cop-out for a season that seems to have gone down the drain. It’s the truth. Sadly, Hurts hasn’t been given the benefit of the doubt.
Hurts is perhaps one of the most disrespected players in the NFL as, in commissioner Roger Goodell’s words, a “face of the league.” National media pundits, Philadelphia media pundits, and even some Philadelphia Eagles fans disrespect him. Of course, Hurts has a cheering section, but their voices are often drowned out by the chorus and echoes of criticism. The narrative was that the 2026 season was make-or-break for Hurts, after a season when some were all too eager to offer “evidence” of Hurts’ share of the team’s offensive woes.
However, that same make-or-break standard hasn’t been applied to many of Hurts’ peers, even those who have accomplished less than Hurts. And while a contingent of Eagles fans wants Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni fired, it’s not a make-or-break season for him. Even after hiring his friend as offensive coordinator, who was clearly incompetent, or after showing himself to be inept as an offensive mind.
So what about Hurts engenders so much criticism and makes him such a polarizing figure? Last month, ESPN pundit Dan Orlovsky said Los Angeles Chargers quarterback Justin Herbert (compared to Hurts) is “what it should look like.” What about Hurts doesn’t look like how a quarterback is supposed to look? I thought a quarterback should look like a Super Bowl MVP? A better question is: how would any ex-backup quarterback, paid to define what a good, great, or elite quarterback looks like, know what that quarterback actually looks like? I assume because they’re familiar with what it doesn’t look like, but I digress.
It can’t be because he’s not a pocket passer, checked out of plays, or stoic and cryptic. It could be because women find him very attractive, making the manliest of men very insecure. Maybe it’s because some folks believed any part of the AJ Brown nonsense. But I suspect it is deeper than that. You probably won’t like the answer I am about to give, but you know what’s coming: Racism.
Racism has long been a part of the NFL’s history: long before Colin Kaepernick and Brian Flores; long before the league’s history of race-norming to prevent Black retirees from accessing concussion settlement claims. The racism goes as far back as 1933, when the league instituted a ban on Black players. Once allowed back in the league in 1946, a sorting process known as racial stacking was instituted due to the widespread belief that Black athletes weren’t smart enough to play quarterback.
The city of Philadelphia doesn’t get a pass on its racist history simply because more Black quarterbacks have started games than white quarterbacks for the Eagles over the last 40 years. Randall Cunningham, Donovan McNabb, and Michael Vick have all faced their share of racism disguised as criticism at the position. It’s Hurts’ turn to receive some of that same criticism, I suppose, but what fuels it is especially disgusting.
“They play a game, but they aren’t here to play games.”
Hurts isn’t an Allen Iverson-like figure whose tattoos, cornrows, and “posse” make him easily labeled as a “thug.” He isn’t a Joel Embiid-like figure whose struggles on the court and history of missed games make him easily labeled as “lazy.” He’s not a womanizer, he’s not violent, and he’s not unintelligent. He’s none of the easily identifiable tropes placed upon Black people.
Hurts is, however, unapologetically Black.
The unapologetically Black person wears their Blackness every day, regardless of who is offended or discomforted by it. They aren’t fazed by narratives designed to devalue their accolades and their acumen. They embrace themselves and their culture. They’ll speak, behave, relate, and respond in ways unfamiliar to the mainstream, soliciting criticism from a lens filtered by whiteness, labeling anything but white as a failure to meet a standard of posture and decorum. In short, they’re not here to make white people comfortable.
Hurts is proud to be a Black man. He makes crawfish, listens to Frankie Beverly and Maze, and doesn’t ingratiate himself with the sports media machine, largely a white institutional space. He doesn’t yell at officials in a display of passion like Tom Brady, only to be treated like Dez Bryant. He doesn’t respond to media questions the way some journalists believe he should; he doesn’t “scratch where [he doesn’t] itch, and laugh when [he wasn’t] tickled.” He isn’t happy to be in front of the media, like so many more “appreciative” athletes posit themselves to be. As Hurts has said himself, he had a purpose before everyone had an opinion. That goes for white and Black sports media talking-heads alike, whether Emmanuel Acho, Doug Gottlieb, Linda Cohn, or Stephen A. Smith.
The unapologetically Black person may be the most threatening entity to the current social order of the sports industry. They’re threatening because they’re not consumed by the traditional effort to posit themselves as “respectable” in an industry predicated on Black athletes “knowing their place.” They’re not consumed by a desire to appear thankful for the privilege to make money from playing sports. They play a game, but they aren’t here to play games.
However, we live in a culture of hot-take artists who want the immediacy of fame rather than building a record of credibility and significance. The talking heads are all too willing to critique Hurts and others like Kyrie Irving and Angel Reese, only to eat crow each time they accomplish something on the field or on the court. For example, Angel Reese’s critics are eating crow after she became only the 3rd player in WNBA history to post 30 points and at least 15 rebounds in a WNBA Finals game. Reese had 30 points and 16 rebounds.
Nevertheless, racistly-coded commentary disguised as asinine takes will continue, because those takes continue to fuel the careers of formerly respectable journalists while establishing new careers for former athletes whose trajectory mirrors that of their playing days, serviceable at best, but likely missing the mark. That commentary vis-à-vis Hurts is the only reason some of these folks are relevant. But when it comes to Hurts, the only relevant thing is that he played a football game with a condition that became life-threatening, and the only critique worth levying and entertaining is that, against the Philadelphia Eagles, there was negligence in their handling of Hurts’ health. As for Hurts’ haters, his performance against the Jaguars in London under the circumstances we now know will be praised. It has already started.
I guess all it took was almost dying … godlike behavior. But Black people working to death in exchange for white acceptance is a rite of passage imposed on Black folk. It’s the American way.
This hearty lentil curry recipe is perfect on a cool day. Featuring tender lentils and plentiful veggies, it’s nicely spiced with curry powder and cumin. Curious about the spice level? I’d classify it as mild. The dish is lightly creamy thanks to some coconut milk, but not heavy.
Make this curry when you want to warm up and eat your vegetables as the same time. I tested this recipe five times with a variety of vegetables and love the final combination of onion, bell pepper, carrot, potato and cauliflower. You could treat it as a light main dish or a vegetable side dish.
If you’re a fan of dal makhani (the classic Indian lentil curry) or lentil soup but want to try something different, give this dish a try. It yields quite a bit, so you can freeze individual portions for later in the season.
Everything you love about enchiladas, minus the fuss! This super flavorful, cheesy vegan enchilada skillet comes together in about 30 minutes with simple methods, minimal dishes, and no need to fill or roll tortillas.
This easy, nourishing dish features tender cubed sweet potato or winter squash, fiber- & protein-rich black beans, and a rich red enchilada sauce. Everything gets simmered in 1 pan and topped with a melty cashew “cheese” that makes it SUPER satisfying and delicious!
“Serling” author Alan Sepinwall didn’t know it, but he was about to enter another dimension. A dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind and, in his telling, unexpected connections. The scene was Los Angeles, where the veteran TV critic (and, full disclosure, a friend of mine) was set to moderate a 20th anniversary panel for “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.” While making small talk with series star and creator Rob Mac in the event’s green room, Sepinwall casually mentioned he was writing about Rod Serling, creator of “The Twilight Zone.”
Suddenly Mac’s face lit up. “Alan,” he said, “You have to talk to me for this book. Rod Serling is my guy. Rod Serling is a huge influence on me.”
“And thinking in my head, OK. Sure,” Sepinwall recalled. “I was deeply skeptical, but figured, all right, I will indulge him because I like Rob. We’ll see what happens.”
Once they got around to talking, Sepinwall’s doubts dissolved. Instead, he ended up seeing Mac’s shows in a whole new light. “There really is ‘Twilight Zone’ DNA in ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’ and ‘Mythic Quest’ and a lot of the other stuff he’s done,” Sepinwall said. “And I kept coming across that more than anything else.”
As long as television exists, “The Twilight Zone,” which premiered on Oct. 2, 1959, is unlikely to disappear completely. Heck, Bernard Herrmann’s eerie theme song alone will outlive humanity.
But if some calamity causes the show to fade into the mists of forgetting, Sepinwall argues in his upcoming biography, “Serling: A Journey Into the Twilight Zone with TV’s First Visionary,” that its creator’s influence is forever woven into the medium. From the greatest genre series to less obvious links, like the preposterous shenanigans at Paddy’s Pub, Serling left his mark on screens large and small, and on American audiences.
Since Sepinwall wrote the book on TV – no, really, he co-authored “TV: The Book” with fellow critic Matt Zoller Seitz – who better to break down the essence of Serling’s evergreen appeal? That’s what we did in our recent Zoom conversation about the mythic creator, writer and actor who has haunted us for most of a century by changing TV for the better.
The following interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
(Courtesy of Alan Sepinwall)
After researching your book, what have you found about people’s common understanding of Rod Serling and “The Twilight Zone” that might not be entirely accurate?
I think people assume that the guy who created “The Twilight Zone” and was this really creepy, ominous host must have been this very dark and tormented person. Obviously, and he had some darkness in him; he came back from World War II really scarred, couldn’t really deal with it . . . but he was also a very outgoing guy. A jokester, warm, fun dad, you know, had this idyllic childhood and was just a very popular people-pleaser kind of guy that you would not expect whatsoever from that image of him.
When people think about Rod Serling and his influence on TV, they basically associate him with genre television like “Lost.” But they don’t necessarily think of shows like “Sunny.” What are some others where you were kind of surprised to find DNA of “The Twilight Zone” on a closer look?
Well, this isn’t one I was surprised to find because it’s quoted a few times in the show, but it’s still like a less obvious one: “The Sopranos.” David Chase is obsessed with “The Twilight Zone.” One of the reasons that he wanted to become a writer was that he just thought Rod Serling was the coolest guy on the planet. So I’d say that’s one.
The work of Pamela Adlon, who did “Better Things” and a lot of other stuff. I mainly knew she liked “Twilight Zone,” but I didn’t realize the depth of it to the point where she named one of her kids after a character in a “Twilight Zone” episode.
So yeah, it’s all over the place. There are the obvious ones like J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof with “Lost,” Charlie Brooker with “Black Mirror.” But you look at, like, “All in the Family” or “Hill Street Blues” or a lot of these other things, and it’s hard to imagine them existing in the form that they did if there hadn’t been Rod Serling in the ‘50s, and especially with “Twilight Zone,” saying that TV can be asking these bigger questions, can be wrestling with thornier moral issues, and can really challenge people to turn their brain back on and not just, you know, have it on in the background while they’re folding laundry.
One of the things you write early in the book is that he really had a jaundiced view of nostalgia.
I mean, his relationship with nostalgia was really complicated because on the one hand, he has this idyllic childhood in Binghamton, New York, you know: doting parents, popular kid, dated all over the place. Binghamton largely resisted the effects of the depression. Then he immediately goes from there to Hell on earth, fighting in the Pacific . . . And the shock of going from one to the other really affected everything he would write about for the rest of his life.
On the one hand, there’s the part of him that wishes he had never left Binghamton and wishes he could go back to this time before the war, before humanity dropped atomic bombs on civilians, before there was this constant fear of the nuclear apocalypse and all of the other things that people were starting to worry about in the ‘50s and ‘60s and the Cold War.
On the other hand, he knew that this was a bad idea. You can’t go backward; you have to move forward. And that, as good as life was for him in those moments, it was not great for other people. And he kept trying to push humanity forward. He would argue on behalf of civil rights and nuclear disarmament, and all these other causes that he cared about. So almost every time you do a “Twilight Zone” episode where somebody goes back in time, either to their own childhood or even further back than that, it doesn’t go well for them. The past is not a place you should be.
What do you think it is about the metaphorical messages within each episode that keep “The Twilight Zone” eternally relevant?
Because people are people, and we keep making the same mistakes and facing the same challenges, even if sometimes we get better about it than at other times. But you watch these episodes, and he’s asking really elemental stuff about humanity. Like being selfish versus trying to think about the world around you, or taking the easy choice versus the hard one. You know, racism, fascism — how easy it is for us to give in to the ideas of conformity, to give in to the ideas of letting someone else do all of the thinking for us.
That’s there again and again. And so you watch those episodes, and it’s like they’re 60-plus years old. They’re in black and white. The fashions are what the fashions are, and yet over and over it feels like, really, he could have written this yesterday.
“Serling: A Journey Into the Twilight Zone with TV’s First Visionary” hits bookshelves on Tuesday, Oct. 13. You can pre-order your copy by clicking here.
All five seasons of “The Twilight Zone” are streaming on Paramount+.
Let’s get cozy with cornbread and chili! I’m so excited about how this cornbread recipe turned out. It’ll be my go-to from here on out. It has the same irresistibly crisp edges and subtle brown butter flavor that I love in my honey butter cornbread recipe, but magically tastes even more like corn.
This wholesome cornbread is gluten-free because it uses almond flour instead of regular flour. It’s an easy and nutritious swap that yields amazing cornbread. Does it taste like almonds, you ask? Not at all—the cornmeal is the star of the show here.
If you’re simply curious to try it, or looking for a gluten-free or lower-carb cornbread, this recipe is for you. I hope it becomes your new favorite, too.
Sports are not neutral. They are a political battlefield. This is especially true along the color line in America. These moments can consist of singular events: Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in Major League Baseball, Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising their black-gloved fists in defiance against American injustice at the 1968 Olympics, Jack Johnson and Muhammad Ali mastering the sweet science of boxing and delivering devastating blows against Jim and Jane Crow white supremacy and its assumptions about the mental, intellectual and physical inferiority of black people.
Black women are central to this story as well. Althea Gibson was the first black woman to break the color barrier in professional tennis. Decades later Venus and Serena Williams are trailblazing pioneers for their skill and dominance in women’s professional tennis.
More recently, of course, there is former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick and other black athletes (along with a few white ones) who have taken a knee during the national anthem to protest oppression and social injustice in post civil rights America.
There has been blowback, of course: Donald Trump won a presidential election (if only by a fluke) and remains remarkably popular among Republican and other white right-wing voters. At least in part, this reflects his strategy of condemning and threatening black athletes who dare to stand up for the value of black lives.
The politics of sports are also revealed in systemic and institutional ways. In American professional sports the vast majority of teams are owned by rich, older white men. Black and brown bodies perform on the sports field, sacrificing their mental and physical health as the raw fuel for corporate and collegiate sports franchises worth millions if not billions of dollars. Girls and women do not have the same access to sports — and the profits and privileges and opportunities that come with them — as boys and men.
Professional sports teams receive enormous subsidies and protections from local communities and taxpayers, while many of those same communities are struggling to provide basic services. The U.S. military uses the NFL and other sports as a tool for recruiting young people into its ranks. The jet and helicopter flyovers, the American flags and the frequent appearance of uniformed troops on the field are a superficial form of patriotism whose primary function is to legitimate nationalism and militarism.
Sunday’s Super Bowl game between the New England Patriots and the Los Angeles Rams will be a spectacular display of the many ways that sports are political, and not an ideologically neutral or safe space.
How and why has Donald Trump targeted black athletes in his “culture war” strategy? Why has Colin Kaepernick become so despised by many white sports fans (and some black and brown ones as well)? How do black athletes — and the public response to them — represent America’s long and problematic history along the color line? How does white privilege operate in how athletes such as Tim Tebow and Tom Brady are perceived and treated? Are black athletes held to a higher and more difficult standard of civic responsibility?
In an effort to answer these questions I recently spoke with David Leonard, a professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University. He is the author of several books on race and politics in sports, including “After Artest: The NBA and the Assault on Blackness” and the recently published “Playing While White: Privilege and Power On and Off the Field.”
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
How did this moment with Donald Trump, who is now entering his third year as president, come to be?
In many ways, we’ve always been here. We’ve just had different chapters, different manifestations of the same history of inequality, of racism and of misogyny. In the most immediate moment, Trump can be viewed as a backlash to the election of President Obama. You can see the backlash against demographic shifts. You can see it as a backlash against cultural change.
Trumpism is a continuation of hundreds of years of history. But now filtered through spectacle, consumerism and loneliness, where we go from one moment to the next without any grounding or context.
Why do sports matter in this moment? Why does Colin Kaepernick matter in particular?
Kaepernick matters because sports are political. The fact that there is so much anger directed at him demonstrates the investment in sports as a particular type of political project where nationalism and militarism and where black bodies are required to “shut up and play.”
Kaepernick also matters for those who care about justice, because he’s a reminder of the power and potential of sport as an instrument of change.
But we also have to be careful. Too many people have reduced the Revolt of the Black Athlete 2.0 down to him. There have been other moments of resistance, such as WNBA players protesting and college athletes protesting in recent years, and other resistant moments as well. We have a tendency to reduce a movement down to a single individual — in particular a male, charismatic figure who has a national spotlight on him.
Movements are bigger than single individuals. In the case of Kaepernick you have him kneeling about the persistent violence directed at the black community, about police violence, about systemic racism, about Flint. We all too often get stuck focusing on the act of protest and not on what is being protested.
How would you respond to people, especially white folks, who would say that politics should be kept out of sports?
How comforting. It must be a wonderful place of privilege to see sports as apolitical for that black athlete who deals with racial slurs coming from the stands or that young girl who wants to play sports but is denied access, who has to hear parents or coaches talk about how she “throws like a girl.”
When we look at the mistreatment athletes, those playing sports around the globe, those who work in stadiums and build stadiums, it must be nice to think of that all as an apolitical space. There are countless examples of how sports are political, such as the national anthem being played, or military planes flying overhead, or the fact that the coaches or general managers or athletic directors are overwhelmingly white men.
The discourse around sports and athletes is also very political. For example, when black athletes are talked about differently than white athletes. Black athletes are very often described as being “selfish.”
Ultimately, the history of racism and racial politics are embedded in sports culture. To those who object to black athletes taking a knee in the NFL or elsewhere I would say, “So you want protest to happen in a place that isn’t disruptive to your daily life. Where is that place?” When you tell me that place, my question would then be, “When a protest happens in that place, will you support it?”
You hear people who say, “I support the cause, but not the method or not the place.” My question is, how do you support the cause? What are those people doing? How are they demanding change? Because part of the reason, historically, that black athletes use the platform of sports is because other spaces have been closed off. This is a silencing of not only protest, but the voice of people saying that these are our lived realities.
If you don’t want sports to be used, then what other spaces would you prefer? Whether it be workplaces, place of worships, schools or other parts of the public sphere, there is a long history of white Americans saying, “Protest, but just not here. This isn’t the appropriate place. This isn’t the appropriate time.”
This policing of black athletes is also part of a broader tradition in America and the West about the control of nonwhite bodies and submission to white authority.
What sports remind us is that there is a secure place for black bodies when they are doing the “proper work.” When black bodies are doing the work that is profitable, that is desirable, that authenticates a story of American exceptionalism and of racial progress.
From the protests of WNBA players to Kaepernick and to high school athletes as well, these protests aren’t simply against persistent anti-blackness in American society, they are also a demand to be heard. They’re also saying, “No, I will not shut up and play. My existence isn’t predicated on touchdowns. My existence isn’t predicated on winning a championship.”
A comparison between how Tim Tebow and Colin Kaepernick are treated is a stark example of white privilege and white entitlement.
There are multiple levels of white privilege at work with Tim Tebow. Likewise, similar dynamics are operative with Tom Brady putting a red Trump hat in his locker, or any number of college football coaches coming out in support of Donald Trump or making statements about the Black Lives Matter movement.
Certain athletes and those connected with sports are empowered to be political. It is not that sports should not be political. Rather it is that it is OK if it is a certain kind of politics, being practiced and engaged in by certain people. Therefore, whiteness is the ability to engage in politics or not to engage in politics. Whiteness is the power to assert oneself by choice and at will.
Considering Tim Tebow as an example. The black athletic body at rest is seen as unproductive, worthless and not valuable. Whereas Tebow resting and praying is seen as not only OK but desirable. Why? Because it authenticates this notion of the white athlete bringing morality, civility and religiosity into the sporting world.
Tebow, who was kneeling — which puts a spotlight on himself — is somehow seen as focusing on something bigger before the world. He is supposedly putting his relationship with God first. And yet Kaepernick was putting justice, putting black lives, putting any number of men, women and children whose lives were taken needlessly and unjustly first and before his own immediate personal self-interest. Yet Kaepernick is somehow criticized as being selfish.
Tebow also exhibits the power of whiteness in terms of how a person is celebrated as a leader, a role model, such a winner that he was afforded multiple opportunities to have a career. Tebow hits a home run in Double A baseball and it becomes breaking news on sports radio and TV. This also reflects the longstanding investment in the white quarterback as a cultural figure. A quarterback is imagined as being the most intelligent player on the football field and also the team leader.
Those same qualities are also still seen in American culture as being the purview of white men. This same logic justifies and normalizes the hiring of white men as CEOs, as being president of the United States, as being the “rightful” and “normal” leaders in America. Such racial logic gives Tim Tebow a platform and denies one to Colin Kaepernick.
What do the videos of people burning Nike sneakers in response to the Kaepernick ad reveal about the politics of sports and society? Those videos are very evocative of spectacular lynchings and other types of violence against black bodies.
This is again an investment in a certain type of politics and sport. Kaepernick and other black and brown athletes who kneel in protest against racism and injustice are such an affront to a certain type of (usually) right-wing politics that he should be kicked out of the NFL and his whole life destroyed.
Burning the Nike sneakers also speaks to the level of anger and betrayal that his protest elicited. This shows us that there is a significant investment in sports as authenticating American exceptionalism.
The anger at Kaepernick and burning the Nike sneakers also shows how invested as a culture the American people are in brands. People define themselves through their phones, shoes and even their headphones. So you have people who believe that Nike defines their identity seeing an athlete associated with that brand fighting for racial justice. It is personal for them. They do not believe in the same things. It is almost like Nike betrayed them.
There’s other reading of Nike’s ad campaign with Kaepernick. How “resistant” or “oppositional” is it really for him to be allied with a multibillion-dollar global corporation that exploits children in sweatshops.
We can’t have it both ways. We can’t simply talk about profit-driving fostering injustice and then make an exception when there is a cause or leader we agree with involved with a corporate actor.
Part of people’s response to Nike’s campaign with Kaepernick feels like more of a celebration of him getting paid after losing out to the NFL. There needs to be a discussion of Nike and other global corporations and the context of capital, racism and the exploitation of children — especially children of color around the globe — working in the apparel industry.
Is Nike supporting Kaepernick’s politics and struggle? I have yet to see Nike support the movement for black lives. Even the inclusion of Kaepernick in the ads does not make reference to the protests. There is also no reference to the larger movement.
There is a dimension here where these critical questions are not being asked, because people are reasoning that if Donald Trump is critiquing Nike then I am by definition on the other side opposing him and what he stands for.
The relationship between Nike and Kaepernick — and of these corporations and social-change work in general — does minimize the actual struggle for racial justice and the courage involved. Taking on a sport you didn’t think you could do might be a type of courage. But that type of courage and standing up against the state and oppression are very different.
The hyper-individual neoliberal mantra “Just do it” is a theme going back to Nike’s advertising campaigns with Michael Jordan.
What happens when you “just do it” and the state comes down on you? What happens when you “just do it” and the powerful take everything away from you?
How should we think about generational differences regarding the politics of the black athlete? NFL legend Jim Brown is very conservative in terms of economic policy — going back to Nixon and “black economic empowerment” — and has been critical of Kaepernick. He also supports Donald Trump.
Your point is one that really has not been highlighted enough. Jim Brown has said that Kaepernick has the right to protest and take a knee, but that would not be his approach. It should not be shocking that Brown supports Trump. If you look at the history of black economic nationalism, something that Jim Brown embraced, one of its major ideas is self-determination simply through capital.
But that becomes a convenient way of diminishing black youth, whether it be black youth shutting down freeways or Kaepernick kneeling or high school and college students protesting. Invoking previous generations of black athletes can be used in a very conservative and reactionary way to marginalize and undercut protest movements at work today.
Therefore you will see a narrative where it goes something like, “Look, Jim Brown, one of the foremost athletes who ever protested, he even tells you you’re out of line.” This is the same playbook that was used in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s against the black freedom struggle. These generational tensions within the black freedom struggle and other human rights movements are really nothing new.
I have heard the following argument made at my local barbershop, and I will admit in some ways I agree with it. Why wouldn’t Kaepernick just be quiet for now, play, get all the money he can, and work behind the scenes to do his political work? Then when he retires and has all that money saved he can say and do anything he wants, and do so with even more resources at his command.
What do we know about the history of African-American and other athletes, in terms of how those calculations are made? The fact that black athletes have to make such a calculation and that white athletes generally do not tells us everything we need to know. The fact is that white athletes can decide whether to be political or not. Whereas for black athletes there is a backlash no matter what.
For those who focus on the sport and do things behind the scenes, they are then criticized for not using their platform to create change. This happened with LeBron James.
Yet when James does speak out he’s told to shut up and play. It is very easy for white Americans to tell black athletes, “Why didn’t you do this?” Or “Why didn’t you take this approach?” or “Why didn’t you just give money?”
Yet there isn’t the demand placed on white athletes to engage in social and political change work. White athletes get a pass. Whether it be the pass that they get from the media of not being asked to take a position or the lack of expectation that they give back to their communities and the public or groups in crisis.
Why is there an expectation that LeBron James give back to Cleveland? What about other white athletes from Cleveland and Ohio?
It’s a lose-lose, right? If a black athlete speaks truth to power then he or she is a troublemaker because they are not living up to white expectations about black obedience. But if black athletes do not become involved politically or in other types of social-change work it becomes a narrative about black folks not being civically engaged, of them being bad citizens.
There are many examples of how the black athletes who speak up and engage politically are attacked as somehow betraying the traditions of Bill Russell and Tommie Smith. There is this flat understanding of the past which is used to demonize black athletes in the present.
It is as if Bill Russell or Tommie Smith or Althea Gibson were celebrated for protesting. No, they were demonized. They were punished, they were criminalized, they were treated as ungrateful, they were stripped of medals, among other things. So, it is a no-win scenario. White athletes, and white folks more generally, do not have that burden of expectation and confronting such a lose-lose scenario.
When, for example, white athletes do engage in any form of protest it is treated as “breaking news” and something to celebrate. See all the attention when Tom Brady liked the Instagram photo of the Kaepernick Nike ad. Should Brady get a medal? So what? He liked a Nike ad? There are white athletes, very few but still noteworthy, who have done so much more.
There is a deep convergence between right-wing talk radio and other media and sports talk radio and media. This is very apparent in the animus against Colin Kaepernick, Venus and Serena Williams and other black athletes.
I do think there is a shared history there. Beyond questions of media consolidation and ownership, those are both spaces that reinforce white male power and a particular understanding of the role of sports in society as a whole. Right-wing talk radio and sports talk radio also leverage a particular type of white anxiety about demographic change in America as well.
Do you think Trump’s animus towards black athletes as part of the right-wing culture war strategy will be enough for his voters to overlook his many failings and to reelect him in 2020?
It is an element. Trump’s use of culture-war narratives against nonwhites and other marginalized groups is part of the glue that will hold his electoral coalition together. In all, this reveals a great deal about the power of sports and the investment in sports as a racial political project.
Major League Baseball has played games in a cornfield, a NASCAR speedway and historic ballparks. Now, the league is apparently wondering whether it can add a national park to the list.
MLB approached the Trump administration about holding a regular-season game in a national park, and National Park Service Deputy Director Frank Lands recently visited Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming to examine three potential locations for a temporary baseball facility, The Washington Post reported.
The idea remains preliminary. No site has been selected and no permits have been issued. The White House stressed that MLB — not President Donald Trump or his administration — proposed the concept.
“This is not a Presidential directive, nor is it being directed by the White House,” the White House told the Post.
For MLB, playing somewhere unexpected has increasingly become part of the schedule. In addition to international games in England, Australia, Japan, South Korea and Mexico, the league has staged games at Iowa’s “Field of Dreams” site, historic Rickwood Field and Bristol Motor Speedway, where a temporary baseball field was constructed inside the NASCAR track.
Turning Grand Teton into the next destination could be considerably more complicated.
Hosting tens of thousands of baseball fans inside a national park could require substantial temporary infrastructure beyond the field itself, including facilities for spectators and players, broadcast crews, security, sanitation and emergency services — not to mention getting thousands of people to and from the site.
Those demands could run into Grand Teton’s rules for special events. Events cannot alter the movement of visitors, wildlife or traffic, close roads or trails, or take place in designated wilderness areas. Commercial logos, banners and tent-like structures are also prohibited.
At least one location examined by Lands is reportedly already-disturbed land used for storage rather than untouched parkland. Conservation advocates have nevertheless raised concerns about the environmental impact and precedent of staging a major professional sporting event inside a national park.
No detailed construction plan or environmental review has been released, leaving unanswered how MLB could stage the game while satisfying those protections.
Even if those hurdles can be cleared, baseball won’t be coming to the Tetons soon. MLB’s 2027 special-event schedule is already set, making 2028 the earliest possible date.
This creamy chipotle sauce is bold and punchy! It’s the kind of sauce that takes your meal to the next level, and brings together component-based dishes like tacos and burrito bowls. You can also serve it as an irresistible dipping sauce. It offers a thicker drizzle than chipotle mayonnaise and tastes better, too.
To make this chipotle sauce recipe, you’ll need a few basic ingredients. Start with a base of sour cream (use Greek yogurt if you prefer), chipotle peppers in adobo sauce (more on those below), a dollop of mayonnaise for a silky texture, dried garlic granules for intrigue, and salt and pepper.
Chipotle sauce should be somewhat spicy at minimum, but youcontrol the spice level when you make it yourself. I’ve written the recipe below with a range of chipotle peppers. Start with the lowest amount, then taste, and blend in more if you’d like.
This blackberry cobbler recipe is a summertime delight! It features jammy blackberries underneath a tender, golden, scone-like topping. I’m quite smitten with this recipe—something borderline magical happens when you bake blackberries. The heat of the oven seems to enhance their floral undertones and make them taste extra special.
This is a simple dessert that you’ll want to make over and over again. Lemon zest, a touch of cinnamon, and a dab of tangy Greek yogurt add some flavor intrigue. Your guests might ask, “Why is this so good?”
It also happens to be gluten free, since I used almond flour in the topping instead of conventional all-purpose flour. Almond flour is very easy to work with and offers a subtle almond flavor that pairs beautifully with berries. If you’ve tried my peach cobbler or blueberry cobbler, you’re already familiar with it. I hope you’ll give this one a try!
These stuffed poblano peppers are boldly flavored and legitimately hearty, boasting 20 grams of protein per pepper. They’re stuffed with soft, blended black beans followed by two kinds of cheese. The cheese turns gloriously golden in the oven while the chili peppers become nicely tender and caramelized.
Two layers of red salsa, one underneath and one drizzled on top, bring this crowd-pleasing vegetarian main dish together. Consider it a simpler alternative to enchiladas or layered casseroles that’s just as satisfying.
This recipe will be perfect for game days and casual home get-togethers as the temperatures drop. I hope you’ll make them again and again this fall—I’m already looking forward to my next batch.
Let’s talk about hemp milk. It’s easy to make at home (no soaking required), and yields a silky-smooth, creamy milk. Hemp milk boasts the most impressive nutrition profile of my alternative milk recipes, offering nearly 10 grams of plant-based protein per serving. While hemp milk can’t compete on the calcium front, it offers an array of nutrients that can be hard to come by otherwise.
I always feel good about sprinkling some hemp seeds into my baby’s food or serving my daughter a glass of this hemp milk. It was our house milk of choice for a couple of years, though she’s grown more particular—fingers crossed that she likes the chocolate variation I made today.
If you take nothing else away from this post, consider adding a sprinkle of hemp seeds to your next smoothie recipe! They’ll blend right in and offer an easy boost of protein.
When we add another bolognese to the blog (Yes, we already have versions 1, 2, 3, and 4), you know it’s something special! This newest version is made with EGGPLANT, meaning it’s the perfect bolognese for late summer. It’s light yet satisfying, creamy yet bright, and full of bold Italian-inspired flavor — everyone will be asking for seconds!
Even better? It’s a breeze to make — just 1 pot required!
Object permanence: Urine Luck; Germany v pornoscanners; Moorcock's 3-day novels; Women's voices can never be "right"; Drone delivery v reality; Abortion activists: TNG; AI coders are a marketing claim.
Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
Post-American compute for a post-American Internet (permalink)
Obviously, the non-American world has a digital sovereignty problem – Trump has means, motive and opportunity to order his tech companies to shut down any public official, large corporation, or individual who displeases him:
But Americans face the same digital sovereignty risk. America is a lawless place now, where a pliable Supreme Court and supine Congress have affirmed that "it's not a crime if the president does it." The same tech giants who sold out to Trump for tax breaks and protection from antitrust enforcement will happily disconnect any member of the American public, any American company, any American official who displeases Trump.
It's a strange irony that in this moment when so many of us are struggling to "de-Google" our lives, a forcible, sudden de-Googling amounts to a sort of digital death penalty:
In a world dominated by tech monopolies, duopolies and cartels, there's every reason in the world to seek protection and insulation from these companies that are "too big to care" – and yet, the very same dominance that makes these companies such a danger also makes them indispensable.
Take "ICE Block," an iOS app that warns you if there's an ICE thug hunting people like you in your vicinity, which might save you from being kidnapped, disappeared, sent to a concentration camp, forced into slave labor in El Salvador, or simply murdered. In order to protect its relationship with the Trump regime (and the tax breaks, monopoly power and tariff-free access to Chinese labor that that relationship guarantees), Apple declared ICE officers to be a protected class and then removed ICE Block from its App Store:
Big Tech is key to Trump's pogroms. Without Oracle's databases, Microsoft's administrative tools, Amazon's cloud, and Google's location data, ICE would be frozen in place. Big Tech is the source of Americans' risk from authoritarian oppression. That means that Americans cannot rely on Big Tech to protect them from that authoritarianism.
And yet, after decades of regulatory forbearance and lax antitrust enforcement, Big Tech has forced nearly all its rivals out of business. Who can compete with companies that use Irish domicile to evade taxation and US domicile to evade privacy law?
There's a joke from eastern Canada I think of often in situations like this. Its punchline goes, "If you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here."
But here we are. And speaking of Canada, while it has many problems, it is not (as of time of writing) the USA, but it is connected to the USA via the internet. Which means that Americans could – hypothetically – source their computing infrastructure from suppliers that were based in Canada, and who strictly ensured that they had no dependency on US services and scrupulously avoided a US "enforcement nexus":
That is exactly what some American – and international – human rights nonprofits have done. The Technology Freedom Cooperative is a brand new organization founded by the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (San Francisco), Kilómetro 0 (Puerto Rico), Invisible Institute (Chicago), Data Cívica (Mexico) and Innocence & Justice Louisiana:
All of these organizations are longstanding, highly effective human rights fighters. They have long, storied histories of collecting, analyzing, and presenting data to address systemic discrimination, false imprisonment, extrajudicial killings, war crimes and genocides. They have concluded that they can't rely on US tech and US servers with their data. Not after Trump and Microsoft colluded to kill the online accounts of the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to punish him for swearing out a genocide warrant against Netanyahu:
Tech Freedom Coop has federated computing resources in Canada, the United States, Mexico, Puerto Rico and Europe. By spreading out their data and computation across multiple jurisdictions, they seek to ensure that a US seizure or deletion of their data will not halt their work.
This federated system serves as a replacement for Big Tech's administrative tools – email hosting, cloud storage, document collaboration. More than that: Tech Freedom Coop is also building out its own AI infrastructure, locally hosted and managed.
Groups like HRDAG have decades of experience using cutting edge statistical techniques to uncover and reveal the extent of crimes committed during civil wars, hot wars, genocides and secret wars. They built the largest human rights database ever created, to track every death in the Colombian Civil War and estimate the likelihood that each killing was carried out by a CIA-backed militia, FARC guerrillas, or the Colombian military:
They partnered with Innocence Project New Orleans to sift through mountains of arrest reports to surface cases similar to successful exonerations, helping more innocents to win their freedom:
I've known Patrick Ball, the statistician and programmer who founded HRDAG, for more than 20 years, and every time we meet, I learn something from him. He's the person who comes to mind whenever people tell me that AI is useless and that programmers who claim otherwise are deluded. Patrick is one of the best programmers I know, he is the very best statistician I know, and he's found many, many ways to use coding assistants to help him perform massive data-analysis projects that are vital to human rights struggles. He's a "centaur" if ever there was one:
It's exciting to see Patrick and his colleagues and collaborators taking these decisive steps to begin building the post-American internet and a kind of post-bubble AI, where AI tools are treated as normal technologies, capable of helping skilled practitioners who have discernment born of experience to apply them wisely to achieve important things:
For more than 20 years, HRDAG has been impressing me with the things we can do using advanced statistical analysis. The current generation of AI tools are founded in advanced stats, too. No one should think that advanced stats can solve all your problems of course. The AI bubble is madness and will lead to ruin – environmental, economic, political:
The world would be a better place without the AI bubble. But AI? It's fine. It's another form of statistical analysis and inference. There's no reason to use all the planet's energy, computing and water to perform that analysis, but the correct and desirable amount of useful AI-style computation is nowhere near zero.
The coop is building good AI tools – ones grounded in a realistic assessment of their usefulness and a reasonable commitment of resources to them. They're running open models based on their own data, on computers they own and control. Their stated goal is to "help organizations test whether models are accurate, reproducible, secure, and appropriate for specific human rights use cases."
Which brings me to the final component of Tech Freedom Coop: training. They're teaching people who work in human rights how to administer their own servers, secure their data and communications, and analyze data. As their press release says, these are all "skills that are increasingly necessary for human rights organizations documenting abuses of power."
I've known this was coming for a while now, and I'm so pleased to see that it's finally launched. At last, the first steps towards a post-American internet.
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
“Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 692 (692 total).
"The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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