Shared posts

17 Dec 19:34

The Risk of Vaccinated COVID Transmission Is Not Low

by Jennifer Frazer
After my son got sick, I dived into the data, and it turns out vaccinated people can and do spread COVID

-- Read more on ScientificAmerican.com
07 Dec 17:32

If We Can’t Get Rid Of It, Reform It

by Sheila
One of the very few things in today’s political environment that is abundantly clear is the critical need to pass election reform. We need federal legislation to outlaw gerrymandering and a variety of vote suppression tactics, to make it easier rather than more difficult to vote, and to restore trust in the maxim “one person, […]
07 Dec 16:33

Six Heroic Defenders of Democracy

by Matt Ford

By one view, the 2020 election was an astounding success for American democracy. Despite a devastating global pandemic and spasms of civil unrest, almost 160 million Americans, or roughly 66 percent of the potential electorate, cast a ballot—the highest participation rate in an election cycle since 1900. For an optimist, the election was a stirring reaffirmation of the American ideal of self-government and its ability to overcome nearly any hurdle.

But a darker interpretation of these events is possible. Though the 2020 election saw record turnout levels, it also faced extraordinary challenges to its conduct and integrity. Every credible expert and agency concluded that there was no evidence of significant or serious fraud or misconduct, yet former President Donald Trump spent months impugning the legitimacy of the vote before Election Day and waged a cynical campaign of lies to overturn the results after he lost. On January 6, by inciting a riot to attack Congress during the Electoral College count, Trump broke America’s two-century streak of peaceful transfers of power.

Which vision of American democracy will prevail? Was the 2020 election the high-water mark for far-right groups and actors who wish to destabilize our republican systems of government for personal gain? Or was it the last, shining moment for a vision of liberal democracy that came into fruition with the civil rights reforms of the 1960s and has been steadily eroded ever since?

Jocelyn Benson

WHO SHE IS

Michigan’s secretary of state

HOW SHE’S HELPING

Jocelyn Benson guided Michigan through the 2020 elections. In early 2021, she proposed converting some of the temporary, pandemic-related changes, which states had adopted to boost turnout, into permanent reforms.

Political extremism is nothing new for Jocelyn Benson, who was elected as Michigan’s secretary of state in 2018. Two years later, during the high-stakes, high-profile clash between Biden and Trump, she found herself overseeing the state’s election process amid lawsuits and even armed protests. Benson’s gateway into voting rights was a job as a researcher for the Southern Poverty Law Center, the civil rights organization famous for its tracking of hate groups and their activities. Part of her work involved undercover surveillance of extremist groups. “My most vivid memories are of going back to my hotel room at the end of the day, and being worried that someone would follow me,” she told me. “When you overcome fears like that in a very real way, it just emboldens you.”

When Benson began her career in Montgomery, Alabama—the crucible of the voting rights movement in the 1960s—she had plans of becoming a voting rights attorney. “I just wanted to enforce the Voting Rights Act,” she told me. But she soon realized that one of the most important avenues to do that was not in the fights after Election Day, but before it, in the work of those who administer elections. Since U.S. elections are largely run by state and local officials, secretaries of state in particular can be quietly influential figures in how those elections are conducted. (Though not every secretary of state is involved in election supervision—Wisconsin’s, for instance, is largely charged with record-keeping duties.)

After moving back to Michigan, Benson began working as a law professor at Wayne State University and, in 2010, wrote the book—quite literally—on the role that secretaries of state play in protecting U.S. democracy. “I wanted to explain to voters … when you elect these election administrators, you choose who runs your democracy,” she told me. At the time, her topic was relatively esoteric—and prescient. But by the 2020 election and the disruptions of the pandemic, the importance of such figures was thrown into sharp relief. And in the months since, Benson suggested, voting rights have only been further imperiled. She has witnessed activists and some leaders in Michigan repeating the Big Lie, she said, in an effort “to sow seeds of doubt, to enable potentially partisan actors to overturn future election results.” The Big Lie is spurring policy, too. And there are “efforts to replace election officials with people who might be more willing to block or otherwise undermine the election results in the future, or who seek to pressure or intimidate those election administrators who are doing the right thing.”

Michigan, which narrowly went for Trump in 2016, found itself to be a battleground state once more in 2020. It was also facing a simmering undercurrent of right-wing unrest. In April 2020, armed anti-lockdown protesters gathered outside the Michigan Capitol in Lansing and made their way into the building itself while lawmakers debated pandemic-related measures, disrupting their session. The protesters received moral support from President Donald Trump, who called them “very good people” and urged Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer to “make a deal” with them. “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” Trump infamously urged on Twitter. Later last year, the FBI announced it had disrupted a militia plot to kidnap and execute Whitmer.

In February, Benson laid out proposals for state lawmakers aimed at expanding voting rights and protecting democracy. The proposals include many of the reforms that states temporarily adopted during the pandemic: mailing absentee ballot requests to all registered voters, creating a safe-harbor date for ballots postmarked by Election Day but received after polls close, allowing voters to cast their ballots early in person, making Election Day a state holiday, and much more. Effectively, Benson would like to convert some of the temporary, pandemic-related changes, adopted by states to boost turnout, into permanent reforms.

The Michigan Republicans who control the state legislature have a much different approach in mind. Earlier this summer, lawmakers passed a slate of election changes that seem to do the opposite of what Benson proposed. The bills limit election officials’ ability to solicit absentee ballot applications, throw up a wave of new voter-ID requirements for in-person and absentee voters alike, reduce the number of drop boxes available in each county, and make it harder for election officials to count provisional ballots. Though Whitmer has since vetoed some of the measures, Republicans are hoping to bypass her disapproval by proposing the others as petition drives instead.

Benson’s sense of optimism about the health of American self-government is tempered by the realities of the moment. “I’m hopeful that if we get through 2024, and are similarly able to look back and say democracy prevailed again, that there will be bluer skies ahead or smoother sailing ahead,” she told me. “But we are very much in the middle of a war over the future of our democracy.”

Kadida Kenner

WHO SHE IS

Executive director of the New Pennsylvania Project, an organization devoted to getting out the vote in Pennsylvania

HOW SHE’S HELPING

Kadida Kenner is working to expand the electorate in one of the most important battleground states in the country.

Perhaps the most well-known voting rights campaign of the past decade took place in Georgia, where, in 2013, then–state lawmaker Stacey Abrams and a host of other activists launched the New Georgia Project to turn out voters of color in that state’s elections. By 2019, according to the group, it had registered nearly a half-million voters across Georgia’s 159 counties. That long-term strategy changed the political complexion of a once reliably conservative electorate and helped propel Joe Biden and two Democratic senators to Washington.

Kadida Kenner, the executive director of the New Pennsylvania Project, told me that she hopes to replicate the Georgia group’s success in her own state. She said that she doesn’t expect to match its accomplishments right away. “But we do want to get to these numbers for 2022 and beyond.” As she pointed out, 1.1 million eligible yet unregistered voters remain in Pennsylvania—“there’s still so many more to engage.”

Every political campaign tries to register voters ahead of an election and increase turnout among its supporters in the weeks and months before Election Day. (Even Trump, who worked tirelessly to discredit the vote before his defeat in 2020, poured resources into making sure his supporters cast a ballot.) The New Pennsylvania Project, however, is consciously modeled on the New Georgia Project’s “secret sauce” for boosting voter engagement, as Kenner put it, which was predicated on involving voters more consistently, outside the rhythms of the election cycle. “We want to engage these folks year-round,” Kenner explained. “And we want to talk about the issues.” Just as in 2013 the New Georgia Project talked about the Affordable Care Act, the New Pennsylvania Project is talking about the American Rescue Plan, minimum wage, and the educational funding gap. “We’re talking about issues that matter to the communities that we’re in, and they all look different.”

Like many voting rights activists, Kenner hoped to engage people who were effectively disenfranchised from the process by gerrymandering or voter-suppression measures. But she said she also wanted to energize “functionally disenfranchised” voters. “They just don’t see themselves represented in government here in the commonwealth or federally,” she told me. “They don’t see someone who looks like them serving them, or they just don’t see their lives changing for the better after voting in several elections and have given up.”

The role Kenner is playing is not one she expected five years ago. Though she had worked for political campaigns early in her career, she began producing TV shows and sports broadcasts, and spent time in North Carolina at ESPNU, where she largely focused on producing football and basketball games for the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association, a Division II conference of historically Black universities. Then, in 2016, North Carolina Republicans passed House Bill 2, the controversial state law that preempted local anti-discrimination ordinances and barred transgender people from using bathrooms in public buildings that match their gender identity. H.B. 2 received nationwide backlash and boycotts, and the NCAA decided to pull its tournaments out of North Carolina, a move that left Kenner and many others in the state’s sports-broadcasting industry without work. So Kenner took a job with the Hillary Clinton campaign as an organizer in Charlotte. “I thought that after the 2016 election, I would go back to TV production,” she told me. But after the results, she found she couldn’t. “I couldn’t go back to having such a good time in production trucks and making sure commercials run. I wanted to come back home and defend democracy.”

Her move back to Pennsylvania came at an auspicious moment. The commonwealth narrowly went to Trump in 2016 but reelected Democratic Governor Tom Wolf in the 2018 midterm elections. Biden’s victory in 2020 came after an intense campaign by Trump and his allies to delegitimize the results, often by spreading false claims about voter fraud and making baseless accusations about the integrity of the vote-counting process. Even before the election itself, state Republican leaders told The Atlantic that they were considering whether the GOP-led state legislature could ignore the results and choose a slate of presidential electors itself, defying the voters’ will.

Biden’s narrow victory—and the role that voting rights protections likely played in it—have only heightened the stakes going forward. After the election, Republican state lawmakers tried to pass a series of restrictive voting measures but failed to overcome Wolf’s veto. Instead, they planned to enact the proposed law by way of a ballot initiative for the voters to decide in next year’s elections. Some state lawmakers are openly calling for an “audit” of the 2020 results, akin to the purported “audit” carried out in Arizona, in order to further delegitimize the results in the state. The point, Kenner told me, is to put “the thought in the electorate’s head here that we’re not having free and fair elections when we are.”

Though part of the New Pennsylvania Project’s engagement strategy involves discussing the issues with voters, its focus is still squarely on voting rights. To Kenner, the issues can’t be disentangled from one another. “We can care about environmental justice, we can care about economic justice, but if we can’t vote, then how do we even get to fight for these other issues that we’re hearing about? It all starts at the polls.”

Trey Martinez Fischer

WHO HE IS

Democratic member of the Texas House of Representatives

HOW HE’S HELPING

This summer, Trey Martinez Fischer helped organize Democratic legislators in Texas to leave the state in order to block new voting restrictions. The lawmakers urged Congress to pass new voting rights measures.

For the Democratic lawmaker Trey Martinez Fischer, one of the most worrying signs of the erosion of voting rights happened not in his home state of Texas but in Georgia, which in March passed a series of new restrictive measures. Park Cannon, a Georgia state lawmaker and a Democrat, tried to enter the ceremony in the state Capitol where Governor Brian Kemp planned to sign the bill into law. After knocking on the door to Kemp’s office, she was arrested by Capitol police and charged with two felonies. Prosecutors later dropped the charges, but footage of her arrest had already gone viral. “That is a memory I’ll never forget,” Fischer said. “It really was a warning to states like Texas to know that if they can silence the voices of voters in Georgia, they can do it in Texas.”

Fischer had the incident in mind later last summer, when Texas Democrats tried to block the legislature from passing new voting restrictions that would be some of the most severe in the country. Republicans in the state have firm control of the legislature and hold all the statewide offices. But the state constitution gives Democratic lawmakers a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency tool to block their GOP colleagues from enacting new laws: It requires a two-thirds quorum for the legislature to conduct business. (Congress, by comparison, only requires a bare majority of lawmakers to be present.) So Democrats, emboldened by national attention to the issue—President Biden had denounced the bill as Jim Crow—planned a walkout in order to prevent the special session from passing it.

At the time, hope that Congress would pass a new federal voting rights law was fading in Washington. In June, the Democratic-led Senate failed to overcome a Republican filibuster of the For the People Act. “Legislation is one tool,” Biden said in a July 13 address in Philadelphia, “but not the only tool.” A day later, Texas Democrats left the state and traveled to Washington to urge lawmakers to try again. Though voting rights activists pressed Democratic senators to keep working, the filibuster—and the refusal of West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema to support changes in it—remained an implacable foe.

The Texas Democrats’ gambit ultimately failed to stop the state-level bill outright—three Democratic lawmakers returned to Austin in August, giving the legislature a quorum and allowing it to pass. But the timing of the maneuver reenergized Democrats to pursue federal voting rights legislation. It’s still unclear whether such a bill can overcome the filibuster. Manchin’s efforts to rewrite a bipartisan version of Democrats’ proposal, for example, hasn’t yet yielded a single GOP vote in its favor.

For Fischer, a lawyer and a 10-term state representative hailing from San Antonio, the fight over representation is a familiar one. He is a member and former chair of the state’s Mexican American Legislative Caucus, which served as one of the plaintiffs in two major cases on voting rights over the past decade: a long-running racial-gerrymandering case where the Supreme Court overturned most of the lower courts’ findings of discrimination, and a multiyear challenge to a voter-ID law passed by Texas in 2011 that was eventually upheld by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The two rulings underscore how the federal courts have become an increasingly serious obstacle to voting rights advocates.

When I asked him about his role in those cases, he told me that it didn’t evoke a sense of pride in him. “It’s a sad state of affairs,” Fischer said, that “at a time when minorities make a majority of the state’s population, we still have to fight for these fundamental rights to be represented and to be heard.” He attributed the GOP’s move toward voter suppression to fear and opportunity. Without Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, Republicans are able to act on their terror of losing power as the state’s demographics change. “They’re gonna throw out the political Hail Mary, and do everything they can to extend their power.”

If past is prologue, more legal battles are almost certainly on the horizon. Lawsuits have already been filed to challenge the Texas voting law that Fischer and his colleagues temporarily blocked. It’s virtually guaranteed that Texas’s redistricting plan, which Governor Greg Abbott approved in October, will be challenged in court. From the time that Texas fell under the VRA’s preclearance regime to the court’s decision in Shelby County that demolished it, Fischer said, the state was never able to implement a redistricting plan without objections by the Justice Department or a federal district court. “There’s not a single decade where Texas was able to escape with a seal of approval from federal authorities when it came to voting rights through redistricting.”

Eventually, Texas may even turn blue, a transformation that is the holy grail of Democrats nationwide and the worst fear of countless conservatives. But without nationwide voting rights standards, that day will not come as soon as it could. “At the end of the day, I don’t know what all this fuss is about the need to have integrity at the ballot box,” Fischer quipped, “because for the last 20 years Republicans have been winning handily up and down the ballot.... I understand sore losers, but I don’t understand being a sore winner. That’s the part that just confuses the hell out of me.”

Lina Hidalgo

WHO SHE IS

County judge in Harris County, Texas

HOW SHE’S HELPING

Lina Hidalgo was so effective at boosting voter turnout in 2020 that the GOP-led Texas legislature banned many of her reforms.

Few election officials have as much firsthand experience with the lengths that Republicans will go to justify voter suppression as 30-year-old Lina Hidalgo, the county judge for Harris County, Texas, and the first Latina elected to the post. Texas has a unique system for local government: In addition to a handful of judicial responsibilities, county judges have a broad array of administrative, executive, and emergency powers. Harris County, which includes most of Houston, is home to more than 4.7 million people; its county judge is one of the most important local officials in the country. I caught up with Hidalgo shortly after Texas Republicans announced an “audit” of the state’s election results in four counties, including Harris. When I asked her about voting rights in the Lone Star State, her response was grim. “It’s hard to find a word to express how dangerous the situation is,” she told me. “We’ve taken so many steps backwards.”

Election audits are not inherently worrisome. Some states require a statewide audit of election results before they are certified. If done properly, by credible sources, audits can ensure confidence in an election’s outcome. Over the past year, however, state and local Republican officials in key states have embraced the idea of supposedly independent audits to pursue phantasmal evidence of voter fraud in the 2020 election. The haphazard audit of Arizona’s election results by Republican state senators and a private right-wing company would almost be funny if it weren’t so deadly serious. The campaign is part of a broader effort by Trump and his allies to delegitimize the results and undermine confidence in election outcomes—a strategy that he exploited among his base while trying to toss out the election results and hold on to power right up to the violence and bloodshed on Capitol Hill on January 6.

Hidalgo is no stranger to authoritarian regimes. After graduating from Stanford University, she worked for nonprofit groups in foreign countries on press freedom issues and, when she returned home, for the Texas Civil Rights Project. Like many immigrants—Hidalgo was born in Colombia and became a U.S. citizen in 2013—she has a deep appreciation for the potential and the promise of U.S. democracy. “I was in Thailand during the latest coup,” she told me. “I was in Colombia when it was a failed state. I was in Myanmar during the military junta. I’ve seen all this. And it’s not something to meddle with, democracy. It’s just not.”

After Trump’s election, Hidalgo decided to enter politics and run for local office. “Things are too urgent, the challenges are too big, and the president’s taking us onto a dangerous path,” she recalled thinking. “And so I need to just get in there myself.” She ran for county judge to unseat Ed Emmett, a popular Republican who had held the position for more than 10 years. Buoyed by the nationwide backlash against Trump and the GOP in the 2018 midterms, Hidalgo narrowly swept into office on a platform of criminal-justice reform and health care access. Little more than a year later, the Covid-19 pandemic struck the United States.

Part of her duties involved managing the county’s response to rising infection rates—a formidable task that became even harder after Governor Abbott began issuing executive orders to curb local officials’ public-health powers. Hidalgo and the county commissioners also took extraordinary steps to ensure that voting would run smoothly and safely in the 2020 election. Hidalgo told me that Harris County “pioneered” drive-through voting and 24-hour voting, allocated voting machines so efficiently that the county had “functionally no lines,” and expanded its poll-worker program to keep things operational. As a result, Harris County had its highest turnout rates in 30 years—“for both parties,” she added.

Those successes didn’t come without stiff resistance from the Trump campaign and its allies among Texas Republicans, who fought the measures in court and through friendly officials. Roughly one month before Election Day, Abbott issued an order that limited each county to just one drop-off site for absentee ballots. Loving County, the state’s least populous subdivision, has just 64 residents. Harris County, which is larger than Rhode Island, is home to nearly five million. The voting bill Texas passed earlier this year now bans many of the reforms that Hidalgo implemented last year, including drive-through voting and 24-hour voting, and imposes onerous new burdens for obtaining and submitting an absentee ballot.

“The biggest problem,” Hidalgo said, “is that elections themselves—and democracy itself—have suddenly become fair game for political fighting.” She largely attributed the Republicans’ turn toward voter suppression to cynicism and pandering; local officials want to run for statewide office and statewide officials want to run for national office. She described her Republican colleagues at the Harris County commissioners court as smart, serious people. When she asked them whether they were going to support the audit, “they were sort of mumbling,” she recounted. “They don’t want to ... they don’t have a good reason to support it. But they believe it’s political suicide for them not to.”

Oliver Semans

WHO HE IS

Co-executive director of Four Directions, an organization that works to advance voting rights in Indian Country

HOW HE’S HELPING

With Four Directions, Oliver Semans successfully fought for the creation of satellite election offices in South Dakota aimed at improving accessibility for Native voters and increasing voter registration.

Close elections can turn ordinary citizens into activists, as they realize how a handful of votes can shift national power. For Oliver Semans, an enrolled member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe and a longtime Native voting rights activist, his first encounter with electoral politics came in 2002, during a close race for one of South Dakota’s U.S. Senate seats. Tim Johnson, the Democratic incumbent, beat his Republican rival, John Thune, by only 524 votes. “We realized that by tribes and tribal members not being involved, it was basically an economic death wish on our part,” he told me.

His wife, Barb, the co-executive director of Four Directions, worked on Native outreach for the Johnson campaign, which proved to be pivotal in the close election. “It was kind of opening our eyes to how we needed to ensure that we were heavily involved in the electoral process,” he recalled. The Semans, who had previously been active in tribal governance, founded Four Directions to protect and expand voting rights throughout Indian country. “Our main purpose at that time was just to get out the vote,” he told me. But then they started seeing “all kinds of little barriers” that people on reservations faced that everyone else didn’t. Most of those barriers are practical: the relative geographic isolation of many reservations, poor roads and internet access, and unreliable postal services. In South Dakota, Semans and Four Directions successfully fought for the creation of satellite election offices that offer all the features of regular state election offices on the reservations, mirroring the ones provided to counties. From there, he and his allies used litigation to press Montana and Nevada to adopt similar systems. When Democrats recently took control of the Nevada legislature, Semans told me, they passed a law that allowed tribal communities in that state to request the offices, effectively enshrining in state law what he had pushed for.

As for so many other voting rights activists over the past decade, there have also been major setbacks. In 2013, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority gutted the preclearance system in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in Shelby County v. Holder. The preclearance system, described in Section 5 of the act, had required states and local jurisdictions with histories of discriminatory voting practices to clear any election-law changes with the federal government; now they didn’t have to. The two South Dakota counties that cover the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Sioux reservations came under Section 5 after Congress amended the law in 1975.

Most discussions of preclearance revolve around the Southern states that once fell under Section 5 in full. But South Dakota had its own troubled history of unequal voting laws: Native voters living on reservations had to travel to a county assessor’s office to register to vote, for example, while non-Native voters were automatically registered when they had their property taxes assessed. Semans, along with a coalition of other Native groups and activists, filed a friend-of-the-court brief in Shelby County in support of the VRA, but to no avail. “By the way, that ruling came out on June 25, the anniversary of the Battle of Little Bighorn,” he added wryly while recounting the case. “See, I think all in Indian perspective.”

The VRA suffered another grievous blow earlier this year after the Supreme Court effectively rewrote a key provision in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, narrowing the civil rights law to make it far more burdensome for litigants to challenge racial discrimination in voting laws—and that much easier for states to impose new barriers. “I got a big chuckle out of it because the Supreme Court takes 10 pages to tell you that what you thought equal meant really didn’t mean equal,” Semans told me. “I looked at it and I go, ‘Wow, this is like what a treaty writer would do and they’re treating Congress like a treaty tribe now.’”

Semans hopes that Congress will pass a federal voting rights bill this year and fully fund the Help America Vote Act of 2002, adding conditions that make it harder for states to escape their voting rights obligations. Another proposal that he supports is the Native American Voting Rights Act, a bill reintroduced earlier this year that specifically targets some of the most obvious barriers to Native voting access. Unlike other voting rights laws under consideration by Congress, this one already has bipartisan support: Oklahoma Representative Tom Cole, a Republican and an enrolled member of the Chickasaw Nation, co-sponsored the House version of the bill. It would expand the number of polling places, drop-off boxes, and registration sites in precincts on tribal land, as well as provide greater access to mail-in ballots and require that states accept tribal and federal Bureau of Indian Affairs IDs if they have voter-ID laws.

I asked Semans whether, with all his experience, he was more optimistic or pessimistic about the future of voting rights in general, and for Native communities in particular. “I’m optimistic we will find a way to create equality at that ballot box,” he replied. “But I’m also old enough and been in it long enough to know that it’s still going to be a continued fight to keep it.”

William Barber II

WHO HE IS

Minister and former head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in North Carolina.

HOW HE’S HELPING

The Reverend William Barber II has organized in support of federal voting rights legislation. The preservation of voting rights, he argues, is inseparable from the fights against poverty and injustice in American life.

After the 2010 midterms, North Carolina became a model for what Republican state governance would look like without opposition. In 2010, the state used new Census data to redraw its legislative maps; in 2013, Republicans gained a supermajority and the governorship. Almost immediately, the Reverend William Barber II told me, the party went after women’s and LGBT rights, cut a billion dollars in funding for public education, and blocked living wages. “And then,” Barber said, “they decided to go after voting rights.”

Barber responded with state and local leaders by organizing “Moral Monday” protests every week in Raleigh. “We have to bear witness to the moral wrong that is being committed here,” he said during the first protest. “We have asked the leadership to rethink their unconstitutional and immoral attack on voting rights. But now the House has passed a ruthless attack on democracy, a poll tax in disguise, an attack on college students, the elderly, minorities, and the poor. They have no ears to hear.”

Voting rights protests aren’t unusual in the United States these days. What was striking about Moral Mondays was their sweeping ambit. Barber and his allies did not limit themselves to questions of gerrymandering or voter-ID laws, but built a broader coalition around the issue of who was excluded from America’s political and economic systems and who was empowered by them. The protests foreshadowed Governor Pat McCrory’s defeat in 2016, a rare bright spot for Democrats in an election that swept Trump and a Republican Congress into Washington.

When I spoke with Barber, he had just returned from West Virginia, where he had helped pressure Joe Manchin, the conservative Democratic senator, to support federal voting rights legislation. “People like him only move when you touch him in that state,” Barber said. Hundreds of people marched to Manchin’s doorstep; two days later, he came up with a compromise. Manchin’s proposed Freedom to Vote Act is flawed, however. Barber praised some aspects but criticized the absence of ethics protections (previous versions of the bill mandated the development of a code of ethics for Supreme Court justices) and some other reforms. His most pointed criticism was aimed at the voter-ID provision, which bucked years of Democratic opposition to those proposals as discriminatory toward communities of color and low-income voters. Manchin, nodding to conservative rhetoric, added a voter-ID provision to his proposal. “That is very, very, very, very, very politically dangerous language,” Barber told me. “And we believe that needs to be amended out of what has been suggested. You can’t pass that deal with that in it, because it’s actually the Big Lie being codified into law.”

Barber’s approach to politics is distinctly fusionist: He emphasizes the shared struggles faced by poorer and low-income whites and Blacks. “The same forces that will suppress your vote will suppress your wages,” he told me. Accordingly, he believes, there are three “philosophical infrastructures” that Congress must address: voting rights protections that bolster the infrastructure “of our democracy”; infrastructure “that impacts our daily lives like living wages, and health care, and addressing the climate”; and the infrastructure “of our roads, technologies, and bridges.” All of it he sees as inseparable. “We can’t play the normal Washington politics of pitting one against the other,” he told me. “In this moment, they are all connected together.”

Barber’s organizing is not simply aimed at trying to increase voter turnout for Democrats; it’s centered on changing the broader economic balance of power. He pointed to data showing that low-income voters are 20 percentage points less likely to vote than higher-income voters. The research, by Robert Paul Hartley, an assistant professor of social work at Columbia University, found 15 states where low-income voters could have tipped the balance in the 2016 presidential election had the participation gap been closed. That disparity, Barber told me, helps produce a system where low-income voters and their interests are neglected by elected officials. “I like to say Republicans blame poor and low-wealth people for their failure,” he said. “Democrats try to run from even saying the word poverty. They say things like ‘those working to get into the middle class,’ and that kind of philosophy. When you dismiss the agency of poor or low-wealth people, it undermines your ability to think, in a way. And, importantly, it undermines your ability to build “an organizing strategy that would include … low-wealth people.”

There’s a widespread sense in Washington that Democrats are likely to lose control of one or both chambers of Congress in next year’s midterms. Barber, who also co-chairs the Poor People’s Campaign, told me that he’s focused on longer-term change. “It’s important that we point that out and have a moral conversation in this moment—not just Manchin versus Biden or Biden versus McConnell, or left versus right versus moderate,” he told me. “That language is too puny, too weak, to address the depth of the problem that we have at this moment. And God help us as a democracy if we don’t understand this.”

07 Dec 16:29

Conservatives Have a New Bogeyman: Critical Energy Theory

by Kate Aronoff

“This morning at the ALEC Committee meetings,” Jason Isaac, director of the Koch-funded Texas Public Policy Foundation, wrote last Friday morning, “you’ll have the opportunity to push back against woke financial institutions that are colluding against American energy producers.” The email—obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy, and first reported by CMD investigative journalist Alex Kotch—offers a window into a rapidly congealing strategy among Republican state-level officials: declaring war on “critical energy theory” within the financial sector.

The American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, held its States and Nation Policy Summit in San Diego last week. The event—attended by a mix of state legislators and representatives from the private sector—featured spirited discussions about a potential Constitutional Convention, as well as lots of excitement about Virginia Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin’s attempt to galvanize voters around “critical race theory,” the once-obscure academic subfield that right-wingers now regularly rant about, claiming that CRT has infected the K-12 curriculum and that teaching students accurate facts about slavery and segregation is somehow unfair to white people.

Now ALEC seems gearing up for a similar move on energy policy. The group’s Energy, Environment and Agriculture Task Force, which met on Friday, voted to back two pieces of model legislation that portray climate policy—even climate policy that doesn’t exist yet—as unfairly discriminating against fossil fuel companies. The ​“Resolution Opposing Securities and Exchange Commission and White House Mandates on Climate-Related Financial Matters” encourages states to take up legal challenges against forthcoming rules from federal financial regulators around climate risk and disclosures, potentially aiming to trigger a similar wave of lawsuits from states that followed the Clean Power Plan during the Obama administration. This follows a letter sent to the “U.S. Banking Industry” by state treasurers, plus a comptroller and auditor, from 16 extraction-heavy, Republican-controlled states just before Thanksgiving, pledging “collective action” against “reckless attacks on law-abiding energy companies.”

The “Energy Discrimination Elimination Act,” voted through unanimously on Friday, directs states to compile a list of entities that are supposedly boycotting fossil fuel companies, explicitly citing banks that are “increasingly denying financing to creditworthy fossil energy companies solely for the purpose of decarbonizing their lending portfolios and marketing their environmental credentials”; institutional investors that are “divesting from fossil energy companies and pressuring corporations to commit to the goal of the Paris Agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050”; and large investments that are “colluding to force energy companies to cannibalize their existing businesses.”

Both draft laws exhibit the emerging right-wing argument that policy that reduces emissions is in fact discriminatory. “Major banks and investment firms,” Isaac argued in his email to participants, urging them to vote for the measure, “are colluding to deny lending and investment in fossil fuel companies, using their market power to force companies to make ‘green’ investments.” The model legislation opposes that, he adds, by setting forth “a strategy in which states use their collective economic purchasing power to counter the rise of politically motivated and discriminatory investing practices.” Texas already has a similar law on the books. Arguing in favor of the bill, Texas state Representative Dennis Paul said there was a need to “stand up to this wokeness.”

State comptrollers would be directed to create and maintain “a list of all financial companies that boycott energy companies,” further allowing them to “request written verification from a financial company that it does not boycott energy companies.” Any company that doesn’t reply to said request within 61 days, per the model bill, would be “presumed to be boycotting energy companies.” Listed companies that don’t stop “boycotting energy companies” within 90 days would then be subject to losing state contracts or investments. State agencies would then be required to “sell, redeem, divest, or withdraw all publicly traded securities” in qualifying companies unless that would “result in a loss in value or a benchmark deviation.” Attorneys general would be empowered to enforce rules mandating that state agencies report which companies they’ve divested from and the “prohibited investments” they still hold.

The legislation is modeled explicitly on “anti-BDS” bills written to counter the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions call from Palestinian civil society groups for economic actions against firms complicit in the Israeli occupation there. But such measures have proven controversial, and in some cases unconstitutional. Arkansas’s version was struck down by the Eighth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals as a violation of the First Amendment. To counter such claims, Isaac—and those presenting the legislation, according to an attendee who spoke with The New Republic—assured lawmakers that the model bill is in fact constitutional and intended to allow each state to “protect its economic interest,” not breach fiduciary responsibility for ideological reasons.

The move marks a deepening split between a Republican Party committed to ginning up a culture war and major arms of capital. The GOP’s war on renewables is increasingly at odds with large segments of the utility sector that are ditching coal and gas for economic reasons, as well as the financial sector, where environment, social, and governance, or ESG, assets—a largely undefined umbrella category of vaguely socially conscious investments—are on track to exceed $50 trillion by 2025. Finance titans like Larry Fink have been eager to take advantage of investor interest in indistinctly green-tinged asset classes and for public spending on climate to grease the wheels for (i.e., “de-risk”) their involvement in infrastructure that will be critical to the twenty-first century: that is, for states to shoulder the risks of climate investments while corporations collect the rewards.

But contrary to right-wing rhetoric claiming liberals have it in for Exxon investors, growing private-sector buzz around greening the financial sector hasn’t so far included much of a substantive challenge to banks’ or asset managers’ continued investments in fossil fuels. In the five years since the Paris Agreement, the world’s 60 biggest banks have showered fossil fuel projects with $3.8 trillion worth of financing, according to a report released this spring from the Rainforest Action Network and the Sierra Club. The well-publicized Global Financial Alliance for Net-Zero—the allegedly $130-trillion-strong effort launched by former Bank of England turned green central banking guru Mark Carney at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow last month—included no stipulation that the asset managers involved, including Blackrock, the world’s largest, would need to stop investing in coal, oil, or gas anytime soon. As of last year, Blackrock alone controlled $87 billion in shares of fossil fuel companies.

Like fury around critical race theory, though, the Republicans’ war on critical energy theory doesn’t necessarily need to be rooted in reality. It just needs to get people riled up.

This article has been updated.

06 Dec 15:10

Easy Ham and Cheese Sliders

by Patty Catalano
Who doesn't love Hawaiian rolls? READ MORE...
03 Dec 19:31

HB 1001-2022: Employer-Vaxx and Pandemic Legislation

by Doug Masson
Needle

Recommendation: Get vaccinated whether you’re required to or not. It will make you safer, reduces the likelihood that you’ll infect your friends and neighbors,  and makes you less likely to incubate mutations that will harm more people.

*Tap* *tap* is this thing on? I haven’t posted in awhile, so I can’t imagine many people will be reading this any time soon, but the General Assembly has released the text of HB 1001-2022 for the upcoming session. This was the subject of some hearings the week before Thanksgiving, and there were some rumblings about the General Assembly convening to vote it through at the beginning of the week before Thanksgiving. I’m awfully glad they didn’t do that. I’m not a huge fan of the substance of the bill but I was really unhappy with the idea of them jamming it through at the end of November. That’s basically unprecedented. (Particularly where, as here, the text of the bill had not been released.) The General Assembly is at least notionally a part-time legislature and, as such, they do business beginning of January each year. During odd years, it’s a “long” session and they can go into May. During even years, it’s a “short” session and they wrap up in March or April. (There are rules on how long they can go, so I might be a little off on the end dates — but I’m not of a mind to look anything up at the moment.) Point being that November and December are absolutely, *not* the time to pass anything remotely controversial.

Like I said, I don’t love the substance, but now that the text of the bill has been released, it’s not as horrible as I’d feared. The first couple of sections have to do with being able to access federal funds and administer COVID vaccines even if the Governor drops the COVID emergency declaration that’s been continued month-to-month since March 2020. Another section expands the knee-jerk “immunization passport” provisions the General Assembly passed last year — to make it clear that it is intended to apply to schools and colleges. The existing law prohibits specified governmental entities from issuing or requiring an immunization passport defined as  “written, electronic, or printed information regarding an individual’s [COVID-19] immunization status.” (The law clarifies that this does not prohibit creating or storing medical records of the immunization.) There was some debate over whether existing legislation covered schools and colleges. Under this legislation, that issue would be resolved.

The big controversial bit has to do with whether employers can require COVID immunization as a condition of employment. There was some confusion about the relationship between this legislation and the federal rule coming out of OSHA. They cover similar territory but they are distinct. The federal OSHA requirements are currently held up in court. If they go into effect, I’m pretty sure they’d supersede this state legislation. But, as written, this state legislation would permit employers to require immunization with some caveats. The employer’s policy would have to recognize medical and religious exemptions and, for a period of six months after recovery, individuals who have had and recovered from COVID. The employer could require these exempt employees to get tested not more than once a week but the testing would have to be at no charge to the employee. The medical exemption and the COVID recovery exemption would require the employee to go through a medical provider and supply the employer with documentation. The religious exemption requires the employee to provide a statement in writing declaring that he or she is declining due to a sincerely held religious belief.

As I see it, the two most problematic pieces of this legislation are making the employer bear the cost of testing (or at least ensure that the employee does not bear the cost of testing) and the risk that an individual will insincerely declare a religious objection. For example, if the person complains that the COVID vaccine was developed using a fetal cell line but the person uses products also made from fetal cell lines like acetaminophen, albuterol, aspirin, ibuprofen, Tylenol, Pepto Bismol, Tums,  Benadryl, and others — one might conclude that their objection to COVID vaccines has its roots somewhere other than religion. Skepticism about people’s sincerity might be offset somewhat by the weekly testing requirement. I have to guess that the insincere would throw in the towel after a few weeks of having to jump through testing hoops.

The Indiana Chamber of Commerce has objected to this legislation which might seem to be a challenge for the mostly Republican group who supports this bill. The Chamber and the state GOP have been fairly well aligned over the years. A fracture in that relationship probably wouldn’t be good news for either. I don’t see it happening, but maybe some kind of state funding for the weekly testing (to the extent it’s not already paid for by other sources) might bridge the divide between Chamber and GOP on this one.

My personal view is that discouraging vaccination is bad public policy that will prolong the pandemic, resulting in additional illness, death, and expense. But, understanding that the political establishment in Indiana has different views on the matter, this bill could be worse.

03 Dec 19:28

The Court

by Sheila
The newly engineered Supreme Court will soon decide two abortion-rights cases: Texas’ empowerment of “pro-life” vigilantes, and a more threatening case from Mississippi that was argued this week. When I describe today’s Court as “engineered,” I am referring to the brazenly unethical behavior of Mitch McConnell, who ensured the appointment of far-right Associate Justice Amy […]
03 Dec 18:14

The Pedestrian-Death Crisis Came to My Neighborhood

by Elaine Godfrey

Nina Larson was 24 years old, and she wanted to be an opera singer. On Saturday afternoon, she was crushed by a car on the street outside my apartment building in Washington, D.C. My neighbor heard the sound of the accident from her sixth-floor window, and the driver’s horrified screams. Nina was trapped for a while, according to police reports, before emergency workers were able to free her from the car’s underbelly. I witnessed only the aftermath—the detectives’ chalk analysis on the pavement, the flowers piling up outside the nearby restaurant where Nina was a server. On Sunday, local news stories announced that Nina had died of her injuries at the hospital. Many of those stories featured the same photo of a lump of black fabric, presumably Nina’s coat, lying in the middle of the road.

This is the part that I cannot stop thinking about: the fact that Nina’s life, in all its human complexity, was in a matter of hours reduced to a handful of images—an old Facebook profile photo, a strand of yellow caution tape, an abandoned jacket. The horrible reality is that, for the people who did not know her, Nina Larson will be remembered as one more pedestrian struck and killed in a city where it happens all the time, in a country where it happens all the time. Data from the Governors Highway Safety Association suggest that American drivers struck and killed more than 6,700 pedestrians last year, a number unmatched in this century. The rate at which drivers kill pedestrians surged by 21 percent from 2019 to 2020, the largest annual increase on record.

It’s still not clear exactly how or why the driver hit Nina that afternoon—did she simply not see her? Was Nina in the crosswalk, or somewhere else in the street? But I’ve almost been hit in the same place, at Columbia Road and Biltmore Street, approximately 100 times. The intersection comes right after a stoplight, and Columbia doesn’t have a stop sign or a speed bump. Cars zoom through at unbelievable speeds, despite the fact that the area is packed with shoppers and restaurant-goers at all hours of the day. “This was not an accident. This was someone making the choice to drive recklessly, and they killed my beautiful girl,” Nina’s mother, Matilde Larson, told The Washington Post.

My neighborhood isn’t unique. So far this year, 15 pedestrians have been killed by drivers in the nation’s capital, and total traffic fatalities are up to 37—the highest number since 2008. This is all despite Mayor Muriel Bowser’s goal to end traffic deaths by 2024 as part of the Vision Zero program signed on to by leaders of D.C. and other major U.S. cities. The District Department of Transportation has made some changes to protect walkers and cyclists, such as reducing speed limits and installing more bike lanes. Ironically, total traffic fatalities have increased steadily since the program began. (Bowser did not respond to requests for comment.)

The same trend is reflected in cities across America. Part of the increase in pedestrian deaths is probably because our vehicles are bigger than ever. “Our pickup trucks and SUVs are gigantic compared to the sizes they used to be,” giving drivers less visibility and a greater sense of security, which makes them more aggressive on the road, says Rohit Aggarwala, a fellow at the Urban Tech Hub at Cornell Tech and the former director of long-term planning and sustainability for New York City. During the pandemic’s early days, as fewer Americans drove to work or school, it seemed safe to assume that fewer pedestrians would die. Instead, fatalities have jumped. Conclusive research isn’t out yet, but the increase is likely at least in part due to a drop in traffic congestion and an ensuing increase in speed:People were still walking around their neighborhoods during lockdown, and you had a [small] number of people on the streets driving very, very fast,” Aggarwala told me. Older adults, people walking in low-income areas, and Black and Native Americans are all overrepresented in pedestrian-death statistics.

[Read: Why cars don’t deserve the right of way]

Most pedestrian deaths are preventable, and experts believe that the solutions are straightforward. Aggarwala and his team at Cornell Tech are pushing for three major changes to America’s driving infrastructure: more robust traffic-camera enforcement, to capture not just speeding but all kinds of moving violations; road redesign that would decrease lane size and add speed bumps to nudge drivers to slow down; and finally, upping the standards for vehicle safety. Car manufacturers in Europe are required to test cars for pedestrian impact; they design hoods to slope downward so that drivers can see anyone who might wander into the road. American automakers could do the same, or add pedestrian-detection systems or speed limiters to cars. Many of these changes would not only make roads safer for pedestrians but also could reduce police violence at the same time. “The U.S. hasn’t considered any of this,” Aggarwala said. “We have a tradition of focusing on vehicle safety as only being about the occupant.”

On the corner where Nina was killed this weekend, someone erected a cardboard sign reading STOP FOR NINA in spray paint. Last night, friends held a vigil for her there, next to the restaurant and its shrine of flowers, candles, and other assorted tokens of love. It’s strange, the way we so often choose to honor victims of tragedy—by reducing them to the corner where they died, the place they worked, or a 1,000-word article for a magazine. Nina Larson’s life was much bigger than the circumstances of her death. A better honor would be to make sure that no more lives end the same way hers did.

18 Nov 16:09

This Isn’t Governing–It’s Pandering

by Sheila
When he was alive, Harrison Ullmann, a former editor of NUVO, always referred to the Indiana General Assembly as “The World’s Worst Legislature.” I know a lot of states have been competing for the title lately, but he wasn’t far off. When I was scanning the (embarrassingly thin) news covered by the Indianapolis Star, I saw that the Republicans […]
18 Nov 16:08

Living In Wacko World

by Sheila
Tifmurray

never enough sheila k

There is much that I don’t understand about the Americans who continue to support Donald Trump and the Big Lie. There’s even more I don’t understand about today’s GOP, which looks absolutely nothing like the political party to which I devoted some 35 years. Here’s a smattering of what I don’t get: How do these […]
16 Nov 20:01

Electile Dysfunction

by Sheila
I have posted several times about the importance–the absolute necessity–of Congress passing the voting rights act. Among other important things this law would accomplish, it would do what the Supreme Court has shamefully refused to do–outlaw the gerrymandering that makes a mockery of democratic systems. I am certainly not the only person advocating for passage […]
16 Nov 16:20

Buttery Pepperoni Bread

by Perry Santanachote
Tifmurray

I know Chris will like this.

Deciding between ranch and pizza sauce for dipping is the hardest part. READ MORE...
15 Nov 17:11

A Thought-Provoking Conference

by Sheila
On November 6th, Women4ChangeIndiana held a conference, via Zoom, on “Resilience” and the status of women in the Hoosier State. The various presentations, all of which were excellent, went from 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., and featured a number of accomplished professional women who addressed the various challenges that face women in Indiana: the diminution […]
15 Nov 17:08

50+ One-Pot Meals for Easy Weeknight Dinners

by Nicole Rufus
Easy cooking and easy cleanup. READ MORE...
15 Nov 17:07

Reese’s Is Selling a Gigantic Peanut Butter Cup for Thanksgiving — And It Deserves a Spot on Your Table

by Abigail Abesamis Demarest
It's gloriously delicious. READ MORE...
15 Nov 17:07

Chrissy Teigen’s Artichoke, Spinach & Buffalo Chicken Dip Means You Never Have to Choose

by Amelia Rampe
It's the ultimate dip mash-up. READ MORE...
10 Nov 17:49

Unpacking Immunity

by Sheila
The defiance shown by so many police officers to vaccine mandates absolutely astonishes me, as I’ve previously posted. These are, after all, people whose job it is to enforce “mandates” over the “personal choices” of citizens whose disagreement with those mandates is irrelevant. But then I read a very informative column by Radley Balko in The […]
10 Nov 14:23

These Homemade Liège Waffles Are the Best Waffles I've Ever Had

by Nicole Rufus
No other waffles come close. READ MORE...
02 Nov 18:41

big apple crumb cake

by deb

This is the bouldered and dramatic intersection of two of my favorite things: cinnamon baked apples and a thick crumb cake. I don’t know how they make crumb cake where you are, but here in New York, and where I grew up in New Jersey, crumb cake isn’t a genteel cinnamon-ribboned or finely streusel-ed coffee cake, but a hefty square that’s 50% crumb topping and 50% a golden, sour cream-enriched cake and I wouldn’t want it any other way. Thanks to brown sugar and cinnamon, the crumb topping is always a dark stripe, and a snow-cap of powdered sugar isn’t optional. Fruit is, but this is too good with fresh apples to skip them.

Read more »

24 Sep 18:09

Creamy Sausage and Kale Soup

by Emma Chapman

This is another one of our favorite meals that friends brought us during the “meal train” they put together just after our son was born. My friend, Michelle, delivered this creamy sausage and kale soup one night alongside a loaf a bread and it was all quickly devoured.

This is a great meal idea if you are looking for a super filling and comforting soup recipe. I’m also going to share a few tweaks I make when I want to make a vegetarian version—it’s simple!

One thing I love about this soup is the juxtaposition of the creamy base alongside chewy kale and soft (but chunky) potatoes. Maybe this creamy sausage and kale soup would qualify as a stew; or at least could easily become one.

When I asked Michelle for the recipe, she let me know that she used the Copycat Zuppa Toscana recipe here. I’ve made a few small tweaks to this. The main thing is I don’t use bacon, as I don’t find it necessary and it just adds more fat (which this soup has plenty of already, ha).

To make this soup vegetarian, you only have to make two substitutions to the recipe below. First, swap the sausage for your favorite vegetarian version. I really like Morning Star breakfast sausage (a mix of original and spicy if you have both options available) and Impossible ground beef. But, any vegetarian sausage you like will work just fine.

And the second is to swap the chicken stock for vegetable stock. Easy! And if you’re curious, here’s a link to the pan I used. It’s my all-time favorite.

And if you’re looking for more comforting soup recipes, check these out:

I love making soup as soon as the weather turns cold—it’s the best. And this is a good one. Enjoy! xo. Emma

Print

Creamy Sausage and Kale Soup

A super simple recipe for sausage and kale soup.
Course Main Course, Soup
Cuisine American
Keyword kale, sausage, soup
Prep Time 5 minutes
Cook Time 25 minutes
Total Time 30 minutes
Servings 4 servings
Author Emma Chapman

Ingredients

  • 1 shallot finely chopped
  • 4 cloves garlic minced
  • 2 teaspoons olive oil
  • 12 ounces sausage
  • 8 ounces potatoes baby dutch yellow preferred
  • 1 tablespoon flour all-purpose
  • ⅛ teaspoon cayenne
  • ¼ teaspoon red pepper flakes
  • 32 ounces chicken stock
  • 1 cup cream heavy
  • 2 cups kale veins removed, chopped
  • salt and pepper

Instructions

  • Prep the ingredients by finely chopping the shallot, minced the garlic, and wash and cut the potatoes into bite sized pieces.
  • In a large pot, heat the olive oil over medium high heat. Add the shallot and garlic and cook for 2 minutes.
  • Add the sausage and cook until browned. Use a wooden spoon to break up any pieces while cooking.
  • Add the potatoes and sprinkle in the flour, cayenne, and red pepper flakes.
  • Add the chicken stock to the pot and cover with a lid. Cook for 12-16 minutes until the potatoes are softened enough you can mash them with a wooden spoon.
  • Add the cream and season well with salt and pepper.
  • During the last 5 minutes of cooking, stir in the kale pieces. Serve hot.

Notes

To make this soup vegetarian, simply swap the sausage for your favorite vegetarian sausage (you will likely need to reduce the cooking time on that ingredient as well) and swap the chicken stock for vegetable stock. 
Baby dutch yellow potatoes are preferred for this recipe. I like to leave the skins on. But if you are using russet baking potatoes, you may want to peel them before cutting into bite sized pieces. But this is up to you and your preferences. 
This soup is best the day it is made, but leftovers can be stored in the refrigerator for least a couple days. Just keep in mind the texture of the kale will change the longer it sits in liquid. 

Credits // Author and Photography: Emma Chapman

14 Sep 15:50

10 Recipes to Bake This Fall

by Handmade Charlotte
Tifmurray

DROOOOOL

The chillier weather always has us eager to bake and spend extra time in the kitchen whipping up some tasty fall treats with the kids. These yummy recipes feature our favorite flavors of the season: from freshly picked apples to pumpkin to cinnamon, these recipes are sure to put you in the fall mood.

10 Recipes to Bake This Fall

Caramel Apple Rolls
Head to your local orchard and pick some apples to celebrate the loveliest season of all – and then bake these tasty caramel apple rolls! This recipe features a sweet brioche dough topped with shreded apples, caramel, and pecans.

10 Recipes to Bake This Fall

Apple Pear Pie Bars
Regular old apple pies are great, but if you especially love pie crust, this is the pie for you! Baking pies in a rectangle shape and cutting them into small squares creates the perfect fruit to crust ratio.

10 Recipes to Bake This Fall

Pumpkin Bread with Cream Cheese Frosting
Pumpkin bread is a classic recipe for the autumn months. The smell of pumpkin, cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg filling the air can’t be beat. And while pumpkin bread is good, pumpkin bread with cream cheese frosting is downright delicious.

10 Recipes to Bake This Fall

Simply Scrumptious Cinnamon Swirl Muffins
These delicious muffins are swirled with cinnamon and brown sugar with a hint of tang. It is made with yogurt and butter so the dough will be a bit sticky – work fast as you carefully spoon in the layers and have clean spoons on hand in case the ones you’re using get a bit sticky!

10 Recipes to Bake This Fall

Brownies with Pumpkin Frosting
If like us, you love the pairing of chocolate and pumpkin together, you’ll fall head over heels for these brownies covered in pumpkin frosting. They are decadent, rich, and the absolute perfect way to celebrate fall.

10 Recipes to Bake This Fall

Tiny Cinnamon Rolls
Have you ever seen anything cuter? These tiny cinnamon rolls are delicious and the perfect bite-sized treat for any occasion/

10 Recipes to Bake This Fall

Ginger Snaps
Ginger snaps are one of our all-time favorite cookies! They are so tasty dipped in a glass of milk or into a mug of hot tea on a chilly day.

10 Recipes to Bake This Fall

Spiced Butternut Squash Bundt Cake
This butternut bundt cake is generously spiced with the flavors of the fall season. For the best flavor, skip the can and make your own butternut squash puree instead. And best of all, it comes together simply and just needs a dusting of powdered sugar to be centerpiece-ready!

10 Recipes to Bake This Fall
Baked Pumpkin Donuts
Baked donuts are way easier to make than regular ones! This recipe is technically for donut-tasting muffins, but they taste so much better when baked in a donut pan – incredibly moist and delicious!
10 Recipes to Bake This Fall
Pumpkin Swirl Buns
These swirl buns make the perfect breakfast, brunch, dessert, or snack for anytime of day. The pumpkin filling is sweet and full of holiday spice, then buns are tender and topped with tangy icing – a perfect bite.
01 Sep 18:42

Rising And Shining Through Early Motherhood With Designer + Illustrator, Georgia Perry

by The Design Files

Rising And Shining Through Early Motherhood With Designer + Illustrator, Georgia Perry

Family

Ashe Davenport

Georgia and baby Daisy in the family’s Seddon home. Photo – Georgia Evert.

Georgia found out she was pregnant the day before Melbourne’s 2020 lockdowns started. Photo – Georgia Evert.

The couple went through IVF after trying for a few years to get pregnant. Photo – Georgia Evert.

‘With IVF everything is so…deliberate? There are so many points where you have to consciously keep saying, “OK yep! We’re gonna do this! We’re doing this! This is the right thing to do! Let’s keep going!”’ says Georgia. Photo – Georgia Evert.

Given Daisy was born in the middle of a pandemic, she still hasn’t met lots of Georgia and Dave’s family. Photo – Georgia Evert.

Georgia and Dave have done the bulk of new mothering by themselves without their regular support networks that make up the classic ‘village’ due to restrictions. Photo – Georgia Evert.

Daisy is a squidgy bundle of joy! Photo – Georgia Evert.

‘Unfortunately after we left the hospital I really struggled with postnatal depression and anxiety. Still being in various states of lockdown / restrictions, not having my own mum or much support around, etc. It was kind of a lot,’ says Georgia. Photo – Georgia Evert.

Georgia had three months off work after she had Daisy, but found she needed to get back to her creative outlet as soon as possible. Her mental wellbeing is tied so closely to it! Photo – Georgia Evert.

Georgia has found an unexpected community on Instagram, where she receives from other new mums going through a similar experience. Photo – Georgia Evert.

The designer + illustrator cites routine and rituals as the parenting method that works best for her. She turned this enthusiasm into a deck of illustrated meditation cards named Rise & Shine last year! Photo – Georgia Evert.

‘While the world is still in this state of flux, I find the tiniest things can help delineate and give meaning to the day,’ says Georgia. Photo – Georgia Evert.

Georgia Perry makes things that trace people back to joy: a checkers umbrella, a wall chart of flowers, an enamel hair barrette that reads ‘paradise.’ On Instagram she shares new drawings and encouraging words in uninhibited colour palettes. I went into our conversation wanting to know the cause of her optimism, as if it were some kind of affliction. And how she managed to see such spectacular colour in the shadows of our modern world. 

Georgia’s mum was a florist. Right up until she passed away in 2009. She loved helping people celebrate their lives, and cheering them up when they were sick, even when she was sick herself. Georgia is the same way. She discovered she was pregnant with Daisy the day before Melbourne’s first lockdown, and an exceptionally lonely induction into parenthood followed. Yet she continued to make things to delight, like her illustrated card deck ‘Rise & Shine,’ a build-your-own-morning-ritual of yoga poses, meditation and words to ponder. 

When I asked her about her seemingly relentless optimism, she said she didn’t want to be known as ‘the sunshine and unicorns girl.’ She’s surprisingly dry. But I think she hit the nail on the head. Georgia Perry is warming the world and reminding us that there is magic in it. She sees colour in the shadows, because she paints them any way she likes. 

How have you navigated new parenthood? How lonely has it been on a scale of 0-6,000?

I found out I was pregnant the day before the very first lockdown in Melbourne, so I was truly entering uncharted waters. I barely saw any of my friends or family throughout my whole pregnancy, and we didn’t have any of the corny, but life-affirming rituals like babymoons / baby showers that I’d always imagined. I was so happy to be pregnant, but the world felt (still feels) insane and overwhelming at times, so it was a tricky time to navigate emotionally. 

To cope, I just did a lot of meditation and reading and watching TV throughout my pregnancy. Then, given it was so hard for me to get pregnant, and also the fact the world had been turned upside down in 2020, I chose to have a planned c-section. I’m not going to lie – it was amazing. I have fairly traumatic associations with hospital and medical stuff after losing both of my parents so young, so anything that gave me a sense of calm and control – I embraced. It was the best choice for me, and the day of Daisy’s birth was truly the most amazing day of our lives.

Can you speak to your experience getting pregnant and how that all went down?

We tried for years to get pregnant before I found out I had stage 4 endometriosis. I had no idea how common it was and, unbelievably, the only way to have it formally diagnosed is via surgery. We were told you can often get pregnant naturally / easily after the surgery, but it wasn’t the case for me. About a year after the endo surgery we started down the IVF path.  

What is it like choosing pregnancy so consciously?

With IVF everything is so… deliberate? There are so many points where you have to consciously keep saying, “OK yep! We’re gonna do this! We’re doing this! This is the right thing to do! Let’s keep going!” Rather than, say, just falling pregnant naturally and it just being done. There is certainly nothing spontaneous or romantic about IVF. Having to take so many active steps toward getting pregnant (hormone injections > a million blood tests> egg retrieval > embryo transfer, etc) gives you so many opportunities to overthink and psyche yourself out. Especially given everything going on. My partner Dave and I had so many late nights awake asking ourselves, does the world really need another kid right now?

We were super lucky all in all, as we only did one cycle of IVF and got two viable embryos. The first one failed, which was unexpectedly devastating / a low point, but thankfully the second one stuck. 

How did you find those early days of pandemic parenting? 

Unfortunately after we left the hospital I really struggled with postnatal depression and anxiety. Still being in various states of lockdown / restrictions, not having my own mum or much support around, etc. It was kind of a lot. I think I also just severely underestimated the level of hormonal fallout that can come after the birth of a baby.⁣ Just. So. Much. Uncontrollable. Weeping. ⁣Dave and my sister, Brighid were incredible though. And I sought out the help of my GP and a psychologist super early, which was life-saving. And eventually the dark fog did dissipate. 

I hear you. I’m so glad you got the help you needed. Parenting is hard enough without state-sanctioned lockdowns. 

Pandemic / village-less mothering is pretty insane. There are lots of ups and downs. We still don’t have all of our usual coping mechanisms available, and there is a lot of family that Daisy hasn’t met, but we’re doing ok. 

One of the hardest adjustments since having a baby for me has been fully accepting that your time is no longer your own. You go from doing whatever you like on a whim to this little creature being completely reliant on you 24/7. It’s such a complex feeling.  

How have you found the transition back to work? 

I had three months off work after Daisy was born, but (for better or worse) my wellbeing is so closely tied to my work and having a creative outlet. I had to get back to it as soon as I could. This has only been possible thanks to my incredible partner Dave, as he’s taking some time off work and does the lion’s share of the baby-raising during business hours.

I really like the idea of Daisy seeing her mum working and doing something that she truly loves. I’m hoping long term that I can strike a good balance between feeling fulfilled with work and balancing family stuff. I think it’s a continual work in progress.  

Where is the most unexpected place you’ve found support?

Instagram! I’ve been sharing a bit more personal stuff and it’s been such an unexpected source of comfort and encouragement. To realise there are other new mums in the same position as me, doing this without family around, in and out of lockdown, etc. It’s honestly been so uplifting. 

What sparked ‘Rise And Shine’ for you? What other daily rituals do you have?

I LIVE for routines and rituals, which definitely helps when you have a baby. I was approached by Hardie Grant to create Rise & Shine at the beginning of 2020 – little did we know how important daily rituals and “self-care” would become. 

While the world is still in this state of flux, I find the tiniest things can help delineate and give meaning to the day. For me, it’s things like putting music on and lighting incense every morning, stopping for a proper lunch every day and then turning on calming lights and lighting a candle at 5pm. Small actions like that keep me grounded in the moment. 

The adorable family unit outside their Seddon home. Photo – Georgia Evert.

FAMILY FAVOURITES

Rainy day activity?

Drawing and painting. I can’t wait until Daisy is old enough to join in. 

Go-to album?

Sound of Silver by LCD Soundsystem. Yes I still live in 2007.

Sunday ritual?

Dog walk and takeaway croissants.

Favourite cafe?

Common Galaxia in Seddon

Weekend getaway?

Daylesford for open fires and op-shopping.

01 Sep 18:35

The 2021 Dulux Colour Awards Winners!

by The Design Files

The 2021 Dulux Colour Awards Winners!

Interiors

by Amelia Barnes

Erskine House by Kennedy Nolan, winner of Residential Interior. Photo – Derek Swalwell

Erskine House by Kennedy Nolan, winner of Residential Interior. Photo – Derek Swalwell

Erskine House by Kennedy Nolan, winner of Residential Interior. Photo – Derek Swalwell

Erskine House by Kennedy Nolan, winner of Residential Interior. Photo – Derek Swalwell

Erskine House by Kennedy Nolan, winner of Residential Interior. Photo – Derek Swalwell

Bona Vista by Studio Prineas, winner of Single Residential Exterior. Photo – Chris Warnes. Styling – Anna Delprat

Bona Vista by Studio Prineas, winner of Single Residential Exterior. Photo – Chris Warnes. Styling – Anna Delprat

22 William by SJB, winner of Grand Prix Australia and Commercial & Multi Residential Exterior. Photos – Matthew Densley

Engawa House by Arcke, commended project in Single Residential Exterior. Photo – Andy Macpherson Studio

Engawa House by Arcke, commended project in Single Residential Exterior. Photo – Andy Macpherson Studio

Engawa House by Arcke, commended project in Single Residential Exterior. Photo – Andy Macpherson Studio

South Yarra Apartment by Rosanna Ceravolo Design, commended project in Residential Interior. Photo – Sean Fennessy

South Yarra Apartment by Rosanna Ceravolo Design, commended project in Residential Interior. Photo – Sean Fennessy

South Yarra Apartment by Rosanna Ceravolo Design, commended project in Residential Interior. Photo – Sean Fennessy

South Yarra Apartment by Rosanna Ceravolo Design, commended project in Residential Interior. Photo – Sean Fennessy

66 Wentworth Avenue by Welsh + Major, winner of Commercial Interior – Workplace & Retail. Photo – Ben Guthrie

66 Wentworth Avenue by Welsh + Major, winner of Commercial Interior – Workplace & Retail. Photo – Ben Guthrie

Divided House by Jackson Clements Burrows Architects, commended project in Residential Interior. Photos – John Gollings

Out of 437 entries and 105 finalists, the eight winners of the 35th Dulux Colour Awards have been announced!

Winners and commendations across the award’s seven categories were awarded at a live streamed gala event last evening. Collectively, these projects represent the most innovative and creative uses of colour across Australia and New Zealand design over the past 12 months.

Taking out the overall Australian Grand Prix award was 22 William by SJB, which also won the Commercial & Multi Residential Exterior category. The building’s facade, made up of existing brick and perforated screening, features bold jungle green gesturing a sense of play in the largely industrial Sydney suburb of Beaconsfield. Dulux Spinach Green was selected for the perfect balance of richness to contextually complement the leafy street tree canopies and city’s street signage.

A New Zealand Grand Prix prize was also awarded to Central Hotel by Naumi Hotels for its bold, whimsical and intriguing interior design by Undercurrent

Kennedy Nolan’s Erskine House won the Residential Interior for their playful yet sophisticated approach to modernising a Victorian home. Starting with a cool and calming colour palette including Dulux Duck Egg Blue, Banksia, and Red Capital, the project is a cohesive home that triggers positive memories, and helps create new ones.

Rounding out the residential winners was Bona Vista by Studio Prineas, which won the Single Residential Exterior award. This project’s colour palette including Dulux American Mahogany and Reddy Brown pays homage to the identity of the original Federation bungalow house in line with heritage guidelines, while allowing for the practicalities of contemporary living. The result is a surprising and memorable volume, articulated by partially obscured skylights filtering natural light. 

Congratulations to all the winning designers!

2021 Dulux Colour Awards winners

Grand Prix

Australia winner: 22 William – SJB
New Zealand winner: Central Hotel – Naumi Hotels

Residential Interior

Winner: Erskine House – Kennedy Nolan
Commendation: Divided House – Jackson Clements Burrows Architects
Commendation: South Yarra Apartment – Rosanna Ceravolo Design

Single Residential Exterior

Winner: Bona Vista – Studio Prineas
Commendation: Engawa House – Arcke

Commercial & Multi Residential Exterior

Winner: 22 William – SJB
Commendation: RMIT Rodda Lane – Sibling Architecture

Commercial Interior – Workplace & Retail

Winner: 66 Wentworth Avenue – Welsh + Major
Commendation: DAS Studio – DAS Studio
Commendation: Beauty Block – Bergman & Co.

Commercial Interior – Public & Hospitality

Winner: Surfside Primary School – Sibling Architecture
Commendation: Poodle Bar & Bistro – Bergman & Co.

Student

Winner: Installation Art – Joanne Odisho, RMIT University
Commendation: Cremorne Mesh House – Ying Ho Shiu, RMIT University

Visit the Dulux Colour Awards website for more info

31 Aug 16:19

Here Are 8 Weeks’ Worth of Plant-Based Meals

by Kelli Foster
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31 Aug 16:19

The $20 Amazon Find That Solves the Most Annoying Thing About Cutting Boards

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30 Aug 17:48

The Rhetoric of “Personal Choice” in a Pandemic

by Doug Masson
Needle

You don’t have to take a bullet for America. Just take a needle for your neighbor.

I’ve long slagged on libertarians for not having a good drainage plan. My attitude toward “personal choice” rhetoric in a pandemic is an offshoot of that. A neighbor’s bad decisions about drainage can hurt my property because water doesn’t respect property lines. Similarly, your bad decisions about spreading plague affect those whose air you breathe. There’s a tension between liberty and community.

Locally, we’ve got people talking about “family choice” and whether their kids should be required to wear masks at school. Presumably we’ll get the same kind of rhetoric about “choice” once the COVID vaccine is approved for kids. In these conversations, one of the disingenuous talking points they like to raise is “have your kid wear a mask.” They deeply want individual decisions about risk to impact only the individual making the decision. But, that’s not how things work in a community. Your mask isn’t to protect you from the community. You should wear a mask so that the community is protected from you (you filthy anti-vaxxed plague vector.) The vaccine does have more direct benefits in protecting you from the rest of the community. However, it also helps protect the community from you — you are less likely to pick up viruses and spread them and, importantly, you are less likely to be an incubator for mutation. Another disingenuous talking point is that none of us who are vaccinated should be concerned about their disease status if we “trust” the vaccine. Of course, the vaccine isn’t 100% effective, there are those too young to be vaccinated, and there are those who are immuno-compromised for whom the vaccine is not as effective and/or not recommended.

I’m not breaking any new ground with these thoughts. These counterarguments have been advanced ad nauseum. Anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers mostly ignore them or pretend not to understand them. I suppose it’s related to Upton Sinclair’s quip that “it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” For the most part, (a few grifters and political strivers notwithstanding) there is no financial incentive to the anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers. I think there’s a lot of tribal identity at play. They certainly don’t see themselves as vectors of disease, harming their neighbors. They don’t see themselves as the asshole unvaccinated who will be the reason our community events have to be shut down. Rather they fancy themselves bold defenders of freedom. Independent thinkers who see more clearly than the rest of us sheep. But, at the end of the day, it’s tough to take seriously the big talk about how they’d take a bullet for their country when they won’t take a needle for their neighbors.

My buddy who is a doctor in southern Indiana and has been living with the harsh realities of treating COVID patients has, from time to time, been chastised about his severe language in relation to people who don’t take the pandemic seriously, who refuse to get vaccinated, and who stand in the way of public health measures to mitigate the spread of the disease. He appreciated my observation that William Lloyd Garrison had a relevant quote:

“I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or to speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; — but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.”

30 Aug 17:37

Friday Night Lights

by Doug Masson

Friday Night in West Lafayette

My growing disinterest in politics as an on-line game is spilling over into the real world. Last night, Bernie Sanders came to town. He was speaking less than two miles away from where I live. On the other hand, my kids were playing in the marching band at the high school football game less than one mile away. I don’t have any particularly negative feelings about Sanders himself and, politically, he very accurately identifies some of our problems, and I’m on board with many of his solutions. That said, I’m still pretty raw about the comportment of a number of his followers. During the 2020 primaries, I was mostly supportive of Pete Buttigieg. Too many of Sanders supporters — not Sanders himself — would’ve had me believe that Mayor Pete was a racist corporate stooge who controlled the price of bread and wasn’t that smart, actually. I didn’t see much of this from other candidates’ supporters, so it wasn’t just a generic primary fight issue. It was a strategic, scorched-earth choice on someone’s part — probably more prevalent online than on the ground.

But, truth be told, my lack of interest in the Sanders event didn’t have much to do with the scars of the primary. I actively wanted to be at the football game. I like football, and I love the community. Schools are the heart beat of a community, and this is part of why that is. There’s just something I love about gathering in the stands with people I know, cheering the good guys and booing the bad guys (and eating slightly stale, over salted popcorn from the concession stand). These are people I mostly don’t know well, but who I know well enough. Many of us have been bumping into each other at school events for a decade now. When Twitter and Facebook got going a dozen or so years ago, one of the things they promoted was referred to as “ambient intimacy.” You don’t see that so much any more once the algorithms took hold and the chronological timelines were obliterated. But, it used to be, you’d get a lightweight look into the lives of friends and acquaintances. These people would never call you up to tell you that their six year old did a cool tumble at gymnastics, but you’d see it in passing online and, if you ever did bump into them, you’d know that they had an elementary school kid who was into gymnastics. You get some of that in real life with the crowd you see at the football games. (Yeah, I know, there are people laughing at my framing real life as a spin-off of online life here when the reality should be the opposite.)

Also, let me take a moment to gush about my kids & the marching band. My son is a senior in high school and my daughter is a junior. The band community has become central to their adolescence. When they’re not studying, their primary extracurricular activities revolve around the band. They march, they play at games, their band mates make up their social circle. It’s pretty common for a crew of 10-12 of them to gather in our back yard after football games. (The fun went on past midnight last night). The band parents are a pretty fantastic group — almost all nice people, friendly and dedicated to their kids; they tend to be joiners and volunteers, happy to pitch in for a cause. The whole thing – seeing them wail on their instruments, shouting support to the team, goofing around with their friends – it’s all a source of joy and community. These are the things that bring us together and help make a place good to live in. I’m just thankful to have the opportunity to participate.

Oh, and you’ll all be happy to know that West Side beat McCutcheon 30-7.

30 Aug 15:18

Attention, Bakers: This Stunning 7-Layer Honey Cake Is Calling Your Name

by Shilpa Uskokovic
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30 Aug 15:18

This 3-Cheese White Lasagna Is Pure Comfort

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Tifmurray

god i'm hungry

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30 Aug 14:29

Deli-Style Tuna Salad

by Emma Chapman

Tuna salad is probably one of those things that you don’t necessarily need a recipe for. You can keep it simple (as I sometimes do) by adding some mayo and sweet relish to a can of tuna. The end. That being said, not all tuna salads are created equal. This deli-style tuna salad is my copycat version of what you can get at our local version of Whole Foods, which is called MaMa Jean’s. It’s SOOO good! Not your average tuna salad.

What I love about this deli-style tuna salad recipe is it’s flavorful, has the right amount of crunch, and is colorful. But there isn’t any one ingredient that necessarily overpowers the rest, it’s a good mix.

Of course this goes well in a tuna salad sandwich, but I also love it all on its own or with crackers or cucumber slices. I love this deli-style tuna salad the day it’s made, but it keeps well for a couple days in the refrigerator too. After two days, the onion flavor will begin to intensify some, so I recommend consuming it before then just for taste reasons (it won’t necessarily go bad that quickly).

For real, try this tuna salad recipe—it’s a favorite workday lunch of mine. Enjoy! xo. Emma

Print

Deli-Style Tuna Salad

a flavorful, crunchy tuna salad recipe
Course Appetizer, Main Course, Snack
Cuisine American
Keyword tuna salad
Prep Time 5 minutes
Servings 2 servings
Author Emma Chapman

Ingredients

  • 12 ounces canned tuna drained
  • 1/4 cup mayo
  • 1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar
  • 1/2 tablespoon honey
  • 1/4 cup sharp cheddar shredded
  • 1/4 cup peas
  • 1/4 cup carrots shredded
  • 1/4 cup red onion finely chopped
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1/8 teaspoon cayenne

Instructions

  • Drain the liquid from the tuna can and add the tun to a medium size mixing bowl. Shred any large chunks with a fork.
  • Shred the cheese and carrots. Add to the mixing bowl along with the peas and onion.
  • Stir in the mayo, apple cider vinegar, and honey.
  • Stir in the salt and cayenne. Taste and add more salt if needed.

Notes

I prefer to use solid white tuna in water, but you can use any variety of canned tuna that you prefer. 
Less is more with the red onion, so the 1/4 cup can be a scant 1/4 cup or even 3 tablespoons. I typically use about 1/4 of a red onion when preparing this. 
Credits // Author and Photography: Emma Chapman.