Giddy up! Beyoncé’s new album is out March 29, and the Grammy Award-winning artist released on Instagram what appeared to be a tracklist on March 27 that includes a reference to the chitlin circuit, a network of venues where Black musicians could perform safely between the 1930s and the 1960s.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]The heading for the Instagram post is “Cowboy Carter and the Rodeo Chitlin’ Circuit,” and it pays homage to the unsung and pioneering Black performers who came before her, who paved the way for rock ‘n’ roll.
Chitlin circuit venues tended to be in areas of the segregated South where Black performers weren’t allowed, but it was anchored by theaters in the Midwest and Northeast with large Black populations like the Apollo in New York City, the Howard in Washington D.C., and the Regal in Chicago. As music journalist Preston Lauterbach described the importance of the network in his book The Chitlin’ Circuit: And the Road to Rock ‘n’ Roll, “It was one of the few places that Black culture could be celebrated.”
The word chitlin refers to a southern dish made of pig intestines. While they’re not a particularly desirable part of the animal, many popular artists performed in spots that served the meal; performers like Blues legend Bobby Rush even claim they got chitlins as payment.
Some of the most desired Black entertainers to grace the chitlin circuit include Ray Charles, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, B.B. King, Aretha Franklin, Little Richard, the Jackson 5, and Tina Turner.
“The Chitlin’ Circuit was African-Americans making something beautiful out of something ugly,” Lauterbach told NPR in 2014, “whether it’s making cuisine out of hog intestines or making world-class entertainment despite being excluded from all of the world-class venues, all of the fancy white clubs and all the first-rate white theaters.”
Urban renewal projects of the 1960s and 1970s demolished many landmarks in Black communities, including stops on the chitlin circuit. A 1970 TIME magazine article also pointed out that increased television viewership “helped kill off the so-called “Chitlin’ Circuit” of black variety houses.” But Beyoncé’s callback to the chitlin circuit will ensure that this history will not be forgotten.
]]>NEW YORK — The number of U.S. tuberculosis cases in 2023 were the highest in a decade, according to a new government report.
Forty states reported an increase in TB, and rates were up among all age groups, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday. More than 9,600 cases were reported, a 16% increase from 2022 and the highest since 2013.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Cases declined sharply at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, but have been rising since.
Most U.S. TB cases are diagnosed in people born in other countries. Experts say the 2023 number is in part a combination of a surge in TB cases internationally—the World Health Organization said TB was behind only COVID-19 in infectious fatal diseases worldwide in 2022. And there are also increases in migration and post-pandemic international travel.
But other factors are also at play, including other illnesses that weaken the immune system and allow latent TB infections to emerge.
CDC officials expected TB numbers would rise, but the 2023 count “was a little more than was expected,” said Dr. Philip LoBue, director of the agency’s Division of Tuberculosis Elimination.
Despite the jump, the number and rate of new TB cases each year remains smaller than it was in the past, and the U.S. has a lower rate of new TB cases than most countries.
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Tuberculosis is caused by bacteria that usually attack the lungs, and is spread through the air when an infectious person coughs or sneezes. If not treated properly, it can be fatal. In the late 1800s, TB killed one out of every seven people living in the United States and Europe. But the development of antibiotics and public health efforts succeeded in treating infections and tracking down those they infected, leading to cases falling for decades.
The new CDC statistics are not a count of how many people were newly infected in 2023, but rather of how many people developed a cough or other symptoms and were diagnosed.
An estimated 85% of the people counted in 2023 were infected at least a year or two earlier and had what’s called latent TB, when the bacteria enters the body and hibernates in the lungs or other parts of the body. Experts estimate as many as 13 million Americans have latent TB and are not contagious.
When the immune system is weakened—by certain medications or other illnesses like diabetes and HIV—the TB wakes up, so to speak. Nicole Skaggs said she was infected in 2020, but didn’t develop symptoms until 2022—after she got sick from COVID-19.
“Anything that can take out or lower your immune system can put you at risk,” said Skaggs, 41, a property manager in Bothell, Washington.
CDC officials called the idea that COVID-19 has played a role in increased reactivation of TB “an important question.” Scientists are still learning what causes latent TB to reactivate and “I would consider it an unknown at this point,” LoBue said.
“It’s too early to tell” what will happen to TB trends in the next few years, he also said.
There are TB vaccines being developed, and public health workers that were focused on COVID are now back to trying new approaches to preventing TB. New York City, which saw cases jump 28% last year, is hiring TB case managers and community health workers and increasingly using video monitoring of patients taking medications to keep treatment rates high, said Dr. Ashwin Vasan, the city’s health commissioner.
On the other hand, federal TB funding for state and local health department efforts has been flat, and one of the key antibiotics used against TB has been in short supply in recent years. Plus, drug-resistant TB infections have popped up in a fraction of cases.
]]>NEW YORK — U.S. health officials are warning of an increase in rare bacterial illnesses than can lead to meningitis and possible death.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued an alert to U.S. doctors on Thursday about an increase in cases of one type of invasive meningococcal disease, most of it due to a specific strain of bacteria.
Last year, 422 cases of it were reported in the U.S.—the most in a year since 2014. Already, 143 cases have been reported this year, meaning infections appear to be on track to surpass 2023, the CDC said. Most of the cases last year did not involve meningitis, though at least 17 died. The cases were disproportionately more common in adults ages 30 to 60, in Black people and in people who have HIV, the CDC said.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]The bacteria can cause a dangerous brain and spinal cord inflammation called meningitis, with symptoms that may include fever, headache, stiff neck, nausea, and vomiting. The bacteria also can cause a bloodstream infection with symptoms like chills, fatigue, cold hands and feet, rapid breathing, diarrhea, or, in later stages, a dark purple rash.
The infection can be treated with antibiotics, but quick treatment is essential. An estimated 10% to 15% of infected people die, and survivors sometimes suffer deafness or amputations.
There also are vaccines against meningococcal disease.
Officials recommend that all children should get a meningococcal conjugate vaccine, which protects against the rising strain, at around the time they enter a middle school. Since vaccine protection fades, the CDC also recommends a booster dose at age 16. Shots also are recommended for people at higher risk, like those in a place where an outbreak is occurring or those with HIV infection or certain other health conditions.
]]>I was held prisoner in Syria for two years by a group that included both Al Qaeda and ISIS, though one of the things I learned in my captivity was that there’s no real difference between them. Another thing I learned was the purpose of the violence the jihad inflicts on those who live within it. You’re supposed to withdraw yourself from earthly time right now. You’re supposed to live every moment of your life as if the ancient dream—the caliphate, the invulnerability, God’s ongoing, bloody revenge against the infidels—is coming true this instant. Will you sit idly by? If you have the courage and the physical capacity, you are meant to act.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]In my view, the outside world must learn what this dream looks like and sounds like. Though the dreamers are all around us, their dreams are as uninterpretable as hieroglyphs. We glimpse them only after it’s too late —on the day after October 7th, for instance, and now, as we wonder over the lifepaths of the Moscow attackers.
In the early days of the Syrian civil war, when ISIS and al Qaeda still belonged to one big quarrelsome family, there were times when several squads of investigators, to borrow the Syrian euphemism for torturers, would interrogate multiple prisoners in a single room. The din on these occasions was much too overwhelming for anything like an inquiry to occur. I know about everyday practices in those interrogation rooms because in October of 2012, the Syrian al Qaeda faction accused me of spying for the CIA, then locked me into a cell in the basement of what had once been, before the war, the Aleppo eye hospital. In fact, my purpose in coming to Syria had been to write essays about the war’s music, photographers, and artists—and thus to make myself into this conflict’s go-to cultural correspondent. But no matter how I pleaded—and I was desperate for my life—I couldn’t make a single member of this sprawling terrorist family believe a word I said.
One night, after a squad of fighters had inflicted one of their investigations on me, I found myself lying face down at the feet of the hospital’s chief investigator. It was some time in early winter of 2013. I wore a bloody pair of hospital pants. The cement floor was the temperature of a sidewalk, back home, in winter. My hands were cuffed behind my back. Perhaps I had lost consciousness at some point during the proceedings? I’m not sure. Anyway, I remember that it occurred to me, quite suddenly, that a second victim was being interrogated only feet from me. Evidently, this person was hanging by his wrists from a pipe beneath the ceiling. It occurred to me that this person’s feet were bicycling through the air, and that instead of engaging his interrogators, who were shouting at him at the tops of their lungs, he screamed upward, into the ceiling. There is no God but Go, he called out, over and over. I remember that the power in this person’s voice struck me as unnatural. He seemed to scream as if all that remained to him on earth was his voice, as if it were a rope by which he meant to lash himself to the world of the living.
In the midst of this cacophony, the chief investigator knelt down, then pushed his face into mine. He grinned. “Do you hear what that man is saying?” he shouted to me in his idiotic way. “Do you know these words?” Of course, I did know them. They were inscribed on every black flag. They were in the air, over and over, at every prayer. How could I not?
“Good,” said the interrogator, screaming at me though his face was practically touching mine. “This noise you are hearing. This is our music.”
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Over the following days lying alone on the floor of my cell, I contemplated this remark. Having known the interrogator for about three months by this point, I felt I had a handle on his character. He was an impish, boastful brute. Also, a bit of a showman. He loved to swish about the interrogation room in his black velvet cape, to speechify, and to promise me that one day, when the spirit moved him, as it surely would, he himself would kill me. For him, the interrogations were quite obviously performances. He often invited little crowds of fellow fighters to observe from the shadows. Now he ordered his squad of underlings to inflict pain, now he ordered them to hold off. Often, he shrieked at them. All of these underlings were Aleppo teenagers. Every once in a while, he commanded, by means of a glance, a teenager to stir his beloved maté tea.
In those days, before I had any inkling of how a terrorist organization functions, I assumed that because this man only presided over a ring of teenagers, and because I remained alive despite his threats, he was a mere flunky in the al Qaeda hierarchy.
Over time, however, I came to understand what real power in the jihad is. It is derived from the obvious sources, to be sure—cold bloodedness, access to ready cash, fluent command of the sacred literature. But it also comes from the ability to entrance audiences. The natural born leaders conjure fantasies to life in an instant, then hold people and places under their spell indefinitely. This particular commander, who called himself Kawa, after a mythical Kurdish warrior, was poor. He rode around on a humble Chinese motorcycle, as no actual authority in the jihad would do. Yet he certainly had a knack for summoning an Islamic fantasy to life—for him it was a caliphate—with a few softly uttered phrases. Over the minds of the many teenagers who hung around in the eye hospital basement, he certainly exercised sovereign control.
Down there, over time, I learned that music really does help the fantasy come to life.
Allegedly, Muslims of the kind who make jihads despise music. It is thought to derange the senses and to distance the listener from God. But the Koran is music. The call to prayer is music, and praying itself is a musical experience since it involves collective recitation of an explicitly musical text, and then, at the end, when the imam conveys the community’s wishes to God, a few minutes of call and response and, well, singing. Of course, in a jihad, there are also hymns. They play in the background in every conveyance, office, and corridor. In the evenings in the eye hospital basement, the fighters often gathered in the prayer room to sing the al Qaeda hymns in full throated unison. Sample lyric: “bin Laden is our leader/ we destroyed the trade towers, with civil airplanes we did it/ reduced them to dust.”
I have no doubt if he is still alive, as I hope he is not, Kawa would say of the film the ISIS fighters made of their Crocus City Hall attack just what he said of his own violence: this is our music. How happy the fighters are, he would say, what unity of purpose they exhibit, and how boldly they make the ancient dream live. There is no difference between the dream the Moscow attackers inflicted on the Crocus City Hall and the one with which Kawa bludgeoned his hospital prisoners, almost all of whom were Syrian Muslims, by the way. The dream is of invulnerability before the enemies of Islam, of simple families living in harmony with the Koran, while every day, in some far flung corner of the globe, the soldiers of the caliphate bring another one of the infidel’s capitals to its knees.
In the Syrian jihad, the authorities made this dream live through singing, prayer, and hour after hour of recitation, as one would expect. Mostly, however, they made it live through violence. When the walls of an interrogation room rang with screams, or when a roomful of young men were watching some atrocity occur on a video screen, and, now and then, when twenty-five young men ran out into the hospital parking lot to fire their Kalashnikovs at the stars, the emotion of the occasion went straight to everyone’s brain stems. I knew roughly what was happening then because it was happening to me, too.
When violence of this order is on every screen, lies behind every door, and hides, just beneath the surface, in the eyes of everyone you meet, you stop being yourself. That person dies. Under such circumstances, in my opinion, you’re grateful for the life you have, but because you expect to leave it soon, you do everything you can to relinquish your attachments to the here and now. You say goodbye. Over time, your thoughts are bound to turn to the future. I don’t see how they could not. Perhaps, you hope, life, of some kind, will somehow continue. Perhaps you will be surrounded by love at last? So the hymns tell you. The jihad is a loveless place, I’m sorry to say. Everyone dreams of being in love. So maybe it will come? Who can say that it will not? Certainly, new life—and with it, new power—will come to some. So the hymns say.
For whatever it’s worth, in Syria, I found that many of the younger terrorists I came to know were adept at slipping into the dream when they were inside the hospital, and adept at slipping out of it, in the evenings, when they went home to mom and dad. Outside, in the streets, as these young men often told me themselves, they looked and spoke like everyone else. Inside, they were like zombies. They talked, automatically, of their longing for glorious death. Even when they were by themselves, they sang the hymns they were meant to sing. When the order came to torture, they threw themselves at their “work,” to borrow their word. Afterwards, I’m pretty sure, they had only the vaguest notion of why they did what they had done.
The jihad needn’t be as impenetrable as all that. In fact, summonses to the dreams are audible in a thousand war hymns to be heard right now on YouTube. They’re visible in the many videos people who sympathize with the jihad produce. Often these videos seem innocuous enough because they consist mostly of a cappella singing and shots of young men thumbing through the Koran in a forest. To believers across the world, however, and to those who would like to believe, they give direct documentary evidence: the dream is real, the videos say. To make it live in London or Paris or wherever you happen to be, all you really have to do is to believe.
The organizers of the Paris Olympics are surely aware that as ISIS was planning out its 2015 attack on a Paris concert venue, it was also preparing to blow up the spectators at a soccer game in the Stade de France, just north of Paris. Is the outside world aware that the leaders of the international jihad feel about sporting events in the west roughly as they feel about rock concerts? These are soporifics, they believe, with which we drug ourselves by the millions. Meanwhile, every hour, somewhere on earth, our airplanes slaughter Muslim families. Are the authorities in Paris aware that their counterparts in the jihad mean to wake us from our stupor?
The news itself is a problem. When the violence in Gaza is spliced up, set to music, then sent out over the social networks, this material is powerful enough to do to a certain class of vulnerable young men—roughly what screaming in an underground room in Aleppo does. It entrances. It horrifies. It reveals the enemy for who he really is. It has a way of bringing all those who feel they’ll never have much hope into a dangerous kind of alignment. Are the Paris authorities aware of this? I hope so. The Olympic opening ceremony is set to occur along the banks of the Seine on what will surely be a balmy but tense Friday night this coming July.
]]>Godzilla has defeated just about anything that humanity and monsterkind have thrown at him. He stomps on tanks and knocks fighter planes out of the sky with ease, and he’s trounced King Kong and Mechagodzilla. If there’s a foe that Godzilla can’t seem to beat, though, it’s inertia. The latest movie, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, is tremendously, though certainly not unenjoyably, stupid. It also comes just a few months after the most recent Japanese Godzilla film, Godzilla Minus One, which was a critically lauded and dramatic film about war, duty, and trauma as the kaiju attacked postwar Tokyo. How is it possible that such a silly Godzilla and such a somber one can both exist in theaters a mere four months apart? There’s no paradox: the franchise has always had room for both sorts of movies. The key difference is that Minus One was a standalone film, while GxK is the fifth installment in the MonsterVerse. Three quarters of a century of Godzilla has shown us that when Godzilla gets sequels, things invariably get dumb.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Godzilla x Kong, now in theaters, doesn’t have any illusions that it’s a serious movie. The direct follow-up to 2021’s Godzilla vs Kong (which sees the return of that film’s director, Adam Wingard), the blockbuster has the titular monsters fighting an evil version of Kong and a lizard with ice breath, throwing their CGI bodies against each other in defiance of both physics and taste. At one point, they’re fighting inside hollow Earth in zero gravity. While a hoot to watch, they are weightless not just literally but metaphorically. Compare that to Godzilla Minus One, the first Godzilla movie to win an Oscar for special effects but whose computer-generated monster is much more than just flashy visuals. Minus One’s Godzilla is a horrifying presence, representing the specter of the nuclear bomb and the lingering psychic wars from Imperial Japan’s disastrous war.
Minus One is an objectively better film than GxK, but that isn’t to say that the latter is getting Godzilla “wrong” while the former is doing the King of the Monsters justice. There’s a rich history of both tones in the franchise, the silliness outnumbering the somber ones by a huge factor.
“You can just take Godzilla Minus One, and my film Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, and these two films couldn’t be more tonally different from each other. I think that’s what’s so cool about Godzilla,” Wingard recently said in a conversation with Minus One director Takashi Yamazaki, part of a nifty bit of mutually beneficial promotion. Yamazaki, whose movie is much more in line with the original 1954 Godzilla, similarly praised GxK for channeling “the psychedelic Godzilla from the Showa era,” which was “also an important element of Godzilla.”
The Showa era that Yamazaki references is the first 15 Godzilla movies, released from 1954 through 1975. The original Godzilla, which came out less than a decade after Japan was hit with two atomic bombs (and countless firebombings, also deadly), is a legitimate horror movie. Godzilla is not a protector of humanity duking it out with another rubbery monster; he is death incarnate, channeling an all-too-recent history. But, starting with the first sequel, 1955’s Godzilla Raids Again, things got less serious and would rapidly get sillier from there as the emphasis shifted from symbolism to action. Raids Again was the first time Godzilla fought another monster (Anguirus, who kinda resembles the dinosaur Ankylosaurus), and while he was still a bad guy, the focus was no longer his horrific power as a symbol but this giant-sized kaiju brawl.
He would then fight Kong in 1962’s King Kong vs Godzilla, and by the time of the fifth Godzilla movie, the big guy had fully transitioned to being a good guy. It’s easy to see why. Godzilla was popular, and it made more sense to position him as a prizefighter ready to best his latest foe—especially as he was becoming especially popular with children. Several movies at the peak of the Showa Era were explicitly kids’ movies. Eventually, though, audiences began to burn out on this Godzilla, and after Terror of Mechagodzilla sold the fewest tickets of any Godzilla movie, ‘75, the franchise went dormant for nearly a decade.
When Godzilla returned in the aptly named The Return of Godzilla in 1984, he was back to business. The first installment in the Heisei Era (these periods are named after who was Japan’s emperor when the films were coming out), The Return of Godzilla simply pretends that those 14 increasingly silly Godzilla movies don’t exist. It’s a direct sequel to the ‘54 Godzilla, and while it’s not as grim as that picture, it takes Godzilla very seriously. There are no other monsters for him to battle; instead, the movie sees humanity reckoning with the return of a dangerous threat, with the central metaphor updated to reflect new nuclear fears. The United States and the Soviet Union’s Cold War bickering is nearly as big a threat as Godzilla himself, a subplot that gives the movie some extra weight and topical relevance.
However, as the Heisei Era continued, it devolved into increasing silliness just like the Showa Era before it, albeit with consistently higher production values. Godzilla was still a bad guy when he survived to fight a giant mutated rose imbibed with the spirit of a dead woman (long story) in the next film, Godzilla vs. Biollante, but by the end of this iteration of the franchise in 1995, he was more or less back to being a good guy who fought whatever worse monster was assailing Earth—including SpaceGodzilla, an especially silly foe who was Godzilla, but from space.
If the MonsterVerse resembles anything right now, it’s the Heisei Era. The 2014 American Godzilla that kicked it off wasn’t nearly as serious as the original masterpiece or even The Return of Godzilla, but it has a sense of scale, importance, and a feeling that it’s set in the real world. Compare that to four films later, when characters are popping back and forth between their high-tech secret bases on the surface and also inside of hollow Earth and strapping a robotic power glove onto Kong’s arm so that he has a power-up to fight the next monster. Over the course of both series, the role of an anti-monster agency increasingly took prominence (the United Nations Godzilla Countermeasures Center in the Heisei era, Monarch in the MonsterVerse), and GxK introduces yet another similarity, as both series have made telepathic humans who can communicate with the monsters load-bearing characters.
Both the Hesei Era and the MonsterVerse offer plenty to love. (Personally, I am not sure how ironic I’m being when I say Godzilla vs. Kong is a five-star motion picture.) They’re just not serious movies. All of the serious Godzilla movies are either standalone or the first installment in their respective continuity; they’re unburdened by having to up the ante from the previous movie. For instance, 2016’s Shin Godzilla, another Japanese production, reimagines the King of the Monsters as an eldritch horror that symbolizes the Fukushima nuclear accident and the government’s poor response to it. That movie had no direct sequel, meaning that its version of Godzilla never lost its impact by becoming a routine occurrence, let alone become a heroic figure who battles other monsters.
There is as yet unconfirmed talk about a direct sequel to Godzilla Minus One, which is understandable given that film’s commercial and critical success. Should that happen, it will be far more interesting to compare the follow-up to the original than it is to compare Minus One to Godzilla x Kong. All that GxK’s unabashed, mostly charming stupidity reveals is that this is what always happens to the King of the Monsters if his stories have room to continue. Nuclear testing mutated him into a towering monster; sequels mutate him into a big goof.
]]>When the Inflation Reduction Act was first up for consideration in 2022, it received scant support from corporate America, including the oil-and-gas sector. So it may come as a surprise that it was almost an applause line when John Podesta, the senior Biden administration official charged with implementing the law, told a gathering of energy executives in Houston last week that the law is here to stay. “If you’re a politician who wants to turn your back on your community,” Podesta told the crowd. “I think you’d be very foolish.”
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Over the course of the last two years, the promise of money flowing from the law has excited companies and communities alike. In the energy industry, oil and gas firms are eager to take advantage of incentives for capturing carbon dioxide and producing hydrogen fuel. Local communities, especially in red states, have come to appreciate new clean technology jobs. In turn, a conventional wisdom has emerged: even though the law passed Congress with no Republican votes, it would likely survive future GOP control of Washington.
You don’t have to rely on Podesta to see the forces moving in that direction.
For one, corporate lobbies are gearing up to fight changes that remove incentives for their industries. At the CERAWeek by S&P Global conference in Houston, Dustin Meyer, the head of policy, economics and regulatory affairs at the American Petroleum Institute, told me that the lobbying group would “absolutely” lobby to keep IRA incentives for hydrogen and carbon capture. Dan Brouillette, Donald Trump’s second energy secretary and the head of utility lobbying group Edison Electric Institute, told me that his group would fight for the pieces of the law it likes. “It’s not going to be a full scale repeal on day one,” he told me.
Even some elected Republicans are singing a somewhat similar tune. In Houston, I asked Alaska Senator Dan Sullivan whether he would support the energy provisions in the IRA if the GOP were to win the White House in November. Sullivan criticized the Biden Administration’s implementation of the law, but told me that it would be hard to undo. Ultimately, he said, he would want to “take a hard look” at the law to decide what provisions he might support.
But Sullivan offered perhaps a more interesting tidbit: a future GOP government would likely be less concerned with rolling back the IRA and more concerned with targeting the federal agencies in charge of implementing the law and creating regulations under other existing laws. “That’s where the action is going to be,” he said.
Indeed, a future Treasury Secretary could change the way tax credits are calculated—potentially offering a more lax interpretation of the law for provisions popular with favored industries and more stringent interpretation for the ones the administration doesn’t like. And, just as importantly, the flurry of regulations that the Biden administration has implemented around the law could be rolled back. Many of these regulations were designed to work in tandem with the IRA, and the clean energy picture shifts if either goes away. And then there’s the possibility that Congress makes smaller changes to the law—say capping a tax credit as part of a budget negotiation. “I think some implementation of the IRA may change,” said Brouillette. “But the statute itself doesn’t get repealed on day one.”
How all of this shakes out matters a great deal. Most obviously, the durability of the law will in large part shape the future trajectory of U.S. emissions. But the uncertainty also has implications for businesses and consumers. Some counted on these tax incentives for investments they’ve already made. Others are holding back—not necessarily to see if the law survives, but how it does.
]]>The author Georgia Hunter grew up hearing that her granduncle kept a fake penis foreskin on hand in case he had to show proof that he wasn’t Jewish in Warsaw during the Holocaust.
As the story was told to Hunter, her relative, an architect named Adam, was so desperate not to be discovered as Jewish that he stuck a bandage on his member with an egg white and water mixture. When a landlord’s wife confronted him, accusing him of hiding his real identity, he dropped his pants in front of her. The getup fooled her. The woman apologized profusely and hurried out of the apartment.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]That moment, depicted in Hunter’s 2017 novel We Were the Lucky Ones, appears in an episode of the TV adaptation of the same name, out Mar. 28 on Hulu. Adam (played by Sam Woolf) and Hunter’s grandaunt Halina (Joey King) collapse in giggles afterwards at the great lengths he went to hide his Jewish identity. But it was just one of many life or death situations that Adam and his family faced trying to stay alive during the Holocaust.
The novel and Hulu show are inspired by the Kurc family, Hunter’s real great-grandparents and their five children who got separated when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939. The eight-episode series is all about their efforts to come back together, and how they manage to survive and reunite after the war. Showrunners got to work off of a decade of research that Hunter, a co-executive producer, did for the novel, like oral histories available via USC’s Shoah Foundation. And several scenes in the movie are recreated from family photographs that Hunter tracked down over the years across the globe.
Hunter first learned that her grandfather Addy (Logan Lerman), a composer and engineer who lived in France when the war first broke out, came from a long line of Holocaust survivors while doing a family history assignment in high school. She then assumed the role of the family’s historian, trying to learn as much about this dark chapter in her relatives’ lives. Sheet music for her grandfather’s first big hit “The List” still exists, and Lerman plays an excerpt in the Hulu show (plus there’s a 1930s recording of it on SoundCloud.)
Through her research, Hunter learned that her granduncle Geneck had a baby with his wife in a gulag in Siberia. Hunter found handwritten descriptions of his time in Siberia at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
Adam, who kept the fake foreskin, made fake IDs for members of the underground resistance movement. His wife Halina, tried to protect her parents by getting them jobs at a gunpowder factory and then found them a family they could hide with during the duration of the war.
Hunter’s grandaunt Mila, her grandfather’s sister, had to manage hiding her Jewish identity in Warsaw and hiding her toddler named Felicia. She put her in a convent, dyed her hair blonde and changed her name to Barbara. During the day, she worked a series of brutal jobs, and as one devastating scene in episode six shows, a housewife that Mila is working for throws a vase at her head—a story Hunter says got passed down in her family. Mila donated some of the wartime dresses that Felicia wore to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust history museum in Israel, and a replica of a dress Felicia wore with the fake name “Barbara” stitched on it appears in the show.
On Mar. 26, Hunter and her family members gathered in Washington, D.C. to donate the family archive to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum so it can inform future scholarship. Among the notable artifacts are family photos, the fake IDs and papers that Adam and Halina used to pretend they were married, and Hunter’s grandfather Addy’s snakeskin wallet, where he kept declined visas, military papers, health records—various documents he used to try and get out of France and immigrate somewhere safer.
Hunter hopes learning about the Holocaust through the story of one ordinary family’s extraordinary journey will make a vast, complicated history more relatable. The series, she says, “allows us just that.” The episodes “shed light on what’s happening across borders today,” she says, adding that she hopes viewers will come away with more empathy for refugees.
]]>(NEW YORK) — A fundraiser for President Joe Biden on Thursday in New York City that also stars Barack Obama and Bill Clinton is raising a whopping $25 million, setting a record for the biggest haul for a political event, his campaign said.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]The eye-popping amount was a major show of Democratic support for Biden at a time of persistently low poll numbers. The president will test the power of the campaign cash as he faces off with presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who has already proved with his 2016 win over Democrat Hillary Clinton that he didn’t need to raise the most money to seize the presidency.
The Radio City Music Hall event will be a gilded exclamation mark on a recent burst of presidential campaign travel. Biden has visited several political battlegrounds in the three weeks since his State of the Union address served as a rallying cry for his reelection bid. The event also brings together more than three decades of Democratic leadership.
Obama hitched a ride from Washington to New York aboard Air Force One with Biden. They waved as they descended the plane’s steps at John F. Kennedy International Airport and got into the motorcade for the ride into Manhattan. Clinton was expected to meet the other two presidents at the event.
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The hourslong fundraiser has different tiers of access depending on donors’ generosity. The centerpiece is an onstage conversation with the three presidents, moderated by late-night talk show host Stephen Colbert. There’s also a lineup of musical performers — Queen Latifah, Lizzo, Ben Platt, Cynthia Erivo and Lea Michele — that will be hosted by actress Mindy Kaling. Thousands are expected, and tickets are as low as $225.
More money gets donors more intimate time with the presidents. A photo with all three is $100,000. A donation of $250,000 earns donors access to one reception, and $500,000 gets them into an even more exclusive gathering.
“But the party doesn’t stop there,” according to the campaign. First lady Jill Biden and DJ D-Nice are hosting an after-party at Radio City Music Hall with 500 guests.
Obama and Clinton are helping Biden expand his already significant cash advantage over Trump. Biden had $155 million in cash on hand through the end of February, compared with $37 million for Trump and his Save America political action committee.
The $25 million tally for the New York City event Thursday includes money from supporters who handed over cash in the weeks ahead of the fundraiser for a chance to attend. It’s raising $5 million more than Trump raised during February.
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“This historic raise is a show of strong enthusiasm for President Biden and Vice President Harris and a testament to the unprecedented fundraising machine we’ve built,” said campaign co-chair Jeffrey Katzenberg. “Unlike our opponent, every dollar we’re raising is going to reach the voters who will decide this election — communicating the president’s historic record, his vision for the future and laying plain the stakes of this election.”
Trump has kept a low profile in recent weeks, partially because of courtroom appearances for various legal cases, the bills for which he’s paying with funds from donors. He is also expected to be in the area on Thursday, attending the Long Island wake of a New York City police officer who was shot and killed during a traffic stop in Queens.
His next political rally is scheduled for Tuesday in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Some Republican leaders have become concerned that his campaign doesn’t have the infrastructure ready for a general election battle with Biden.
Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesperson, dismissed the import of Biden’s Thursday fundraiser.
“Crooked Joe is so mentally deficient that he needs to trot out some retreads like Clinton and Obama,” he said.
Leon Panetta, who served in top positions under Clinton and Obama, described the fundraiser as an important moment for Biden’s campaign.
“What it does, first and foremost, is to broaden and reinforce the support of all Democrats,” he said.
Panetta said Clinton and Obama, both known as effective political communicators, could help Biden develop a better pitch for his reelection.
“I can’t think of two people who would be better at putting together that kind of message,” he said.
Obama’s attendance on Thursday is a reminder of his role in boosting Biden’s reelection. A joint fundraiser with Biden and Obama raised nearly $3 million in December. And people who served in the Obama administration are also raising money for Biden, scheduling their own event on April 11.
“Consider what you’ll donate this cycle and do it now,” said an email that went out to a network of people. “Early money is far more valuable to the campaign.”
]]>Walking is often thought of as a mere mode of transportation: a way to get from point A to point B. Few of us consider the fact that it’s one of the most fundamental, accessible physical activities a person can do.
Walking might not be as impressive as holding a plank or doing mountain climbers, but “it’s considered a bodyweight exercise, because your large muscle groups are working to move the weight of your body,” says Dr. Marie Kanagie-McAleese, a pediatric hospitalist at University of Maryland Upper Chesapeake Health and the leader of the Bel Air, Md. chapter of Walk With a Doc.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]As you walk, “your quadriceps, hamstrings, calves—even your abdominals, biceps, and shoulders—are all using oxygen to contract,” says Ali Ball, an exercise physiologist and outpatient cardiac rehab/wellness coordinator at OSF HealthCare in Urbana, Ill. That also makes walking a form of aerobic exercise, she adds, which means it keeps your heart rate elevated for a sustained amount of time. One study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology found that 15 minutes of walking was as beneficial as five minutes of running.
From a physiological perspective, that’s a one-two punch of health benefits.
“First, walking improves the health of our cardiovascular system,” says McAleese. “With improved oxygen delivery to our organs, we see a decrease in the risk of heart disease, stroke, obesity, metabolic syndrome, diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol.”
Read More: Your Brain Doesn’t Want You to Exercise
Research bears this out. In a 2021 study published in JAMA Network Open, people who logged at least 7,000 steps per day had a 50 to 70%lower risk of early death, compared to those who walked less than 7,000 steps per day. Meanwhile, a 2023 meta-analysis published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine concluded that doing moderate-intensity physical activity—like brisk walking—for just 11 minutes a day is enough to lower the risk of diseases such as heart disease, stroke, and a number of cancers.
Plus, it’s the easiest way to counter the risk of a sedentary lifestyle, says McAleese. “Walking more throughout the entire day, even if you’re not doing it at a moderate-intensity level, is critically important,” since sitting too much increases the risk of getting—and dying from—many chronic diseases.
It can’t do everything. Federal physical-activity guidelines recommend at least 150 minutes of aerobic physical activity a week, plus two or more sessions of muscle-strengthening activities involving all major muscle groups per week. Both types of physical activity have to be of at least moderate intensity.
With a few tweaks, your walk can fulfill the first aerobic category. “Most people just don’t do it hard enough because they don’t think about it as exercise,” says Ball. If you’re used to a casual stroll, it’s easy to increase your intensity and get into that moderate range: You can increase the pace, walk on an incline, walk on a different terrain, or add weight via a vest or pack.
Read More: Forget 10,000 Steps. Here’s How Much Science Says You Actually Need to Walk
Not so much for the second category. “Walking does provide a low level of bodyweight exercise, but there are a lot of other muscle groups that we’re not really exercising when walking,” says McAleese. Strength training comes with a lot of additional health benefits, like lowering your risk of injury and improving mobility and flexibility.
Wearable devices have made mainstream the idea that everyone needs to hit 10,000 steps per day, but “that’s an arbitrary number not based in science,” says McAleese. A more important metric than steps, she says, is time. When it comes to the recommended 150 weekly minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity, “you can break that up however works for you,” she explains. “If you can only fit in 10 minutes here and 10 minutes there, it all counts.”
For walking to really qualify as “moderate-intensity” exercise, you need to be moving a little more intentionally than you would during a casual stroll from one meeting to the next. The guidelines consider walking briskly—where you could walk a mile in 15 to 24 minutes—to be moderate-intensity physical activity. That’s a purposeful, I-have-somewhere-to-be pace.
The best way to tell if you’re in that moderate-intensity range is the talk test. “If you’re able to speak in complete sentences and can carry on a conversation—but if you were to try to sing, you would become out of breath—that counts as moderate-intensity aerobic exercise,” says McAleese.
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You can also check your heart rate. An approximate (but easy-to-remember) way to find your maximum heart rate is to subtract your age from the number 220, says Ball. During moderate-intensity exercise, your heart rate should be at about 50 to 70% of that maximum heart rate, according to the American Heart Association.
And to make sure you’re getting the most out of this type of physical activity, you also need to think about your form. (Yes, there’s proper form for walking.) “Focus on staying upright and keeping your abdominals engaged,” says Ball. Squeeze your butt, and let your arms swing naturally rather than exaggeratedly pumping them. Leaning forward, especially if you increase your intensity, can cause back pain.
For many people, embracing walking as exercise might just require a slight shift in perspective. “We focus a lot on scheduling exercise as a very specific activity that happens at a certain place at a certain time during our day,” says McAleese. “But we really should be expanding our definition of exercise to include all levels and amounts of physical activity that we perform throughout the entire day.”
]]>If you’re like all but 74 Americans, you do not live in Radar Base, Texas. Seventy-four is the population of the town, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Such a tiny place may not be much to your liking, but on April 8, you’ll have cause to envy the people who do live there. That’s because Radar Base will experience four minutes and 27 seconds of totality during the eclipse that will cross the mainland U.S. that day. The celestial spectacle will track from southwestern Texas up through New England in a 185 km (115 mi.) band of totality passing over more than 31 million people. But no other U.S. city will get as much time in the darkness.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Total eclipses are dazzling things, but also exceedingly fleeting things, and just how long they’ll last is very much a function of the Earth’s orbit around the sun, the moon’s orbit around the Earth and where exactly you’re standing on the sphere of our world when the phenomenon is playing out.
Broadly speaking, a total solar eclipse is a function of a bit of cosmic serendipity: the sun is roughly 400 times bigger than the moon, but also 400 times further away, which means that the two disks appear to be about the same size in the sky. When the moon passes in front of the sun, it may thus perfectly and completely block its light, creating a deep black circle, with the fires of the sun—the corona—flaring out in all directions.
But not all eclipses are equal. The moon’s orbit around the Earth is egg-shaped, ranging from a so-called apogee of about 405,000 km (252,000 mi.)—the farthest distance from our planet—to the closer perigee of 360,000 km (224,000 mi.). A moon at or approaching apogee appears too small to block the sun completely, creating what is known as an annular eclipse—one that is less dazzling than a total eclipse since sunlight radiating from around the moon largely blinds us to the sight of the lunar disk. When a total eclipse does occur, viewing it from outside the band of totality results in a similar, less dramatic experience, with the sun appearing as a crescent, obscured only partly by the moon.
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Earth’s orbit around the sun is elliptical too, with a maximum distance, or aphelion, of about 152.1 million km (94.5 million mi.), and a minimum distance, or perihelion, of 147.1 million km (91.4 million mi.). At perihelion, the sun appears bigger to us, which can also result in an annular eclipse.
The larger the moon appears in the sky, the longer it takes to pass in front of the sun, making for a more extended period of totality. Where you’re standing within the band of totality matters too: the closer you are to the center of that 185-km strip, the more totality you’ll see.
Any number of websites, including NASA’s, Astronomy.com, and NationalEclipse.com, provide a listing of cities and the times of totality. NASA’s is perhaps the best of a large lot, allowing you to telescope in and click on any city that appears, revealing information not just on the length of totality but on the local time the eclipse moves through its various phases.
Radar Base’s four minute and 27 second period of totality begins at 1:27 p.m. CDT; totality hits Boswell, Okla. at 1:45 p.m. CDT and lasts just one minute and 59 seconds; in Cleveland, it’s three minutes and 49 seconds of totality starting at 3:13 p.m. EDT; in Skaneateles, NY, it’s one minute and 26 seconds, starting at 3:22 p.m. EDT.
There is no shortage of places from which to view the eclipse while it is playing out, and no shortage of events that are planned in both small towns and big cities to mark the moment. There are only two, true verities that will apply that day: no matter where you are during the passage of the eclipse you will, in at least small ways, be transformed; and no matter how many minutes of totality you get, they will never, ever feel like enough.
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