Lily Salter's Blog, page 144

Food scholarships could help more students finish college

Stanford University (Credit: Wikimedia/Travis Wise)

It’s hard, if not impossible, to succeed in college if you’re hungry. Seems like such an easy concept that it’s not worth mentioning.

But behind that simple concept are some staggering statistics. According to the Wisconsin HOPE Lab, more than 50 percent of community college students nationwide do not have access to healthy and affordable foods.

As a researcher who focuses on poverty, I believe campus hunger is a significant factor behind inequality in college completion rates. And “food scholarships” may be a solution.

Some elected officials have begun to take notice. Last summer, Gov. Jerry Brown of California included US$7.5 million in his budget to develop “hunger-free” college campuses. In December, advocates convened a federal briefing about campus food insecurity on Capitol Hill, where legislators are advancing bills to make it easier for undergraduates to access the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, more commonly known as SNAP.

In January, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo proposed requiring food pantries on all State University of New York and City University of New York campuses to create a “stigma-free” way to provide students with consistent access to healthy food.

In other states, such as Texas, grassroots efforts are leading the charge. These include a University of Houston and Temple University research project with which I am involved. The project is meant to study the impact of hunger on community college students and look at possible solutions.

Hunger transcends class

Who are the students that don’t have access to healthy and affordable food?

According to Sara Goldrick-Rab, a sociology professor at Temple University and founder of the Wisconsin HOPE Lab, what’s making students go hungry today is different than it was in years gone by.

“Even though a far greater percentage of college students qualify for financial aid than in the past, colleges and states have fewer dollars per student to allocate to them,” Goldrick-Rab said.

The majority of these students are financially independent and provide for others. Many are single parents. They grew up in the middle class and did not qualify for reduced-cost or free meals during their K-12 education through the federally funded School Breakfast Program and National School Lunch Program.

But once they graduate high school, parental support often ends and so do the programs meant to help feed them.

These are the students like 25 year-old Ashley Elliot at Houston Community College, who lost both parents and was left in debt, according to officials at the college. With a 3.5 GPA, Elliot is determined to finish school despite mounting financial challenges.

Food scholarships

Eighty-eight percent of the students at Houston Community College, polled last semester indicated that food giveaways helped them focus more on school, according to a survey by the college. This is why food scholarships are being pursued as a solution.

The Houston Food Bank’s Food for Change program seeks to help students by providing them with 60 pounds of food. The groceries available include seasonal produce, frozen meat, dry goods and some canned goods. Goldrick-Rab, the sociology professor at Temple University, and I are evaluating the program in a project supported by the William T. Grant Foundation and the Kresge Foundation.

We believe it’s the kind of program that could bring real change to those who need it most. At the Houston Independent School District, the largest school district in Texas and the seventh-largest school district in the United States, 77 percent of children are economically disadvantaged and qualify for the reduced-cost or free breakfast and lunch programs. A number of these students graduate and enroll in community college, including Houston Community College, the second largest community college in Texas.

These students receive financial aid, but the fact that the cost of tuition is outpacing the cost of living is making it difficult to make ends meet. Once in college, students who experience food insecurity are at risk for academic failure, including lower grade point averages.

A potential solution

The impact of HCC’s Food Scholarship Program on students’ academic performance and persistence in college will be evaluated over the next two years. If the program helps students do better in college and stay in college, those outcomes could help convince lawmakers and policymakers to do more to tackle the problem of campus hunger.

In the meantime, students such as Ashley Elliot say it’s important for students to overcome whatever reluctance they may have to ask for help. “Asking for help took me out of my comfort zone, but it was necessary,” Elliot said. “Don’t give up if you don’t initially get the help you need. Sometimes it takes just talking to the right person.”

Daphne Hernandez, Assistant Professor of Nutrition & Obesity Studies, University of Houston

Black tar, black markets: Denver’s opioid crisis and the search for a progressive fix

(Credit: yoepro via iStock)

A hypodermic needle is not what you would expect to find if you reached for a worn copy of Harry Potter from a library’s bookshelf. And the last thing you would expect is to find a 25-year-old man dead in the bathroom. But for some guests at the Denver Public Library in Colorado, this was the reality. People were coming to the library to find a private place to inject drugs such as heroin away from the eyes of police. The needles were found in books, furniture, and on the lawn, and the man in the bathroom was found by staff in February 2017.

The Denver Public Library, searching for a humane solution, took action. To prevent any additional tragedies, the library trained many of its staff to use naloxone (brand name Narcan), the antidote to an opioid overdose. Over 300 staff now carry naloxone across the library’s different branches.

“Let me be clear,” Rachel Fewell, the Central Library Administrator of the Denver Public Library, told me. “Drug use of any kind in our library is illegal and a violation of our policies. But when we see it, we try to treat the people using our library as individuals and with respect. We try to connect them with the resources and services they need.”

Fewell explained that the library has social workers and peer navigators on its staff who try to help guests deal with problems such as addiction or homelessness. Guests can access these services for free during daily drop-in hours. She told me that the library has successfully reversed 15 overdoses since they equipped staff with naloxone last year, and there have been no more deaths.

The case of the Denver Public Library shows what compassion for drug users looks like. But it also illustrates the significant challenges heroin and other drug users face when they lack a secure place to consume. Denver is home to several thousand people injecting drugs every day, many of whom are homeless. In 2016, at least 20 people died of overdoses in parks, streets or bathrooms.

In response, local advocates have proposed creating a supervised injection facility (SIF) in Denver, a secure place for people to inject drugs such as heroin or methamphetamine in the presence of trained medical staff. Typically, people bring their own drugs while the facilities offer sterile syringes. Staff monitor people and carry naloxone to reverse any overdoses.

The SIF initiative in Denver began late last year after a special bipartisan committee in the state legislature proposed the idea. Their recommendation led to the proposed Senate Bill 40, which the legislature considered early this year. But progress hit a wall on February 14 after the Senate State Affairs Committee voted to indefinitely postpone consideration of the bill. The committee voted 3-2 along party lines, with the committee’s three Republicans voting to stall the creation of the facility.

The failed vote slows momentum for this ambitious solution to public drug use in Denver. No SIFs currently exist in the United States, though cities such as Seattle, San Francisco and Philadelphia are considering similar measures.

About 100 SIFs exist in 66 cities and nine countries globally. Vancouver, B.C. in Canada established the first SIF in North America, InSite, in 2003. A Canadian Medical Association Journal study showed that InSite’s users were more likely to use clean syringes and safe injection techniques, and more likely to seek addiction treatment. The facility, which intervened in over 1,700 overdoses in 2016, has never witnessed a fatality.

Colorado is in the news most often today for its thriving legal marijuana industry. But the state still grapples with a high opioid overdose rate that has increased dramatically in the past decade. In 2016, opioid and heroin overdoses caused 300 and 228 deaths, respectively. These numbers represent a 104 percent and 720 percent increase from 2001 numbers. But anyone who feared legal marijuana in Colorado would cause increased use of other drugs can breathe easy: Data show that opioid deaths decreased 6 percent in the two years following legal pot sales in the state.

Harm reduction and drug user organizing

Despite the political setbacks for supervised injection, advocates are pushing forward. Just across the street from the state capital in Denver, the Harm Reduction Action Center leads the fight for SIF, though they prefer the term supervised use space (SUS). HRAC delivers free services five days a week to the city’s injecting drug users. The agency, the largest of its kind in Colorado, provides clean syringes, STI/STD testing, and referrals to opioid substitution treatment.

Kat Humphries, the programs director for HRAC, operates the drop-in center in the mornings and works on data analysis in the afternoons. “We are pushing forward with any measures we can to keep people alive,” she told me. “What harm reduction means to us is meeting people where they’re at so we can ensure they live the best possible lives for themselves.”

The 15-year-old HRAC has operated its syringe access program for six years. In this time, the center has registered over 7,200 members and had over 95,000 visits, of which roughly half — 42,000 — resulted in requests for referral services.

“It’s a pretty strong argument that we need to provide these supplies to prevent HIV and Hepatitis C in our community,” Humphries said, “but we’re also just a secure place for people to access referrals and other social services when they’re ready for them.”

The other services HRAC helps its members access, either through the agency or its partners, include Medicaid, mental health treatment and PrEP. The center also holds two health education classes, and even helps its members obtain state identification.

But HRAC does more than just serve people injecting drugs; it actively engages them in its organization. About 60 percent of the agency’s staff are current or former injecting drug users. “That’s something that’s really important to us to,” Humphries said, “to make sure that the people in our community have a big say in how we’re run and are the ones running it to some extent.

“We don’t require our workers or volunteers to be abstinent from drug use to be in this space, and we have a very functional team. I think that speaks to allowing people to be who they are and meeting them where they’re at.”

Injecting drug users in Denver are at a heightened risk of overdose, both because of their use behaviors and the poor quality of their drugs. Heroin in Colorado has a unique composition, as Humphries explained to me. “You’re mainly dealing with black tar heroin here,” she said. “It’s expensive to snort or smoke, so most people here are injecting it. This puts them at a very high risk of overdose.”

According to a state survey of over 700 methadone patients in the Denver metro area, 79 percent of heroin users reported using black tar heroin. Almost half of heroin users reported using four or more times daily, and 72 percent reported injection as their method of choice.

The potent opioid fentanyl is used as an adulterant and is increasingly found in heroin in cities like Philadelphia and Boston, though not much in Colorado. HRAC members who test their heroin for fentanyl, using special testing strips provided by the center, often turn up mixed results. But even with less fentanyl, the quality of heroin in Colorado varies widely. “We know that the purity ranges hugely even in one day from the same location and supply,” Humphries said.

Data from the Drug Enforcement Administration show that street heroin agents purchased in Denver ranged between 15 and 25 percent purity. Fluctuations in purity put users at risk of overdose.

Overdoses in public have put drug users in Denver under an uncomfortable spotlight. But the issue has also created a headache for a city government struggling to find solutions. Denver, Humphries said, is known for its “open air drug market.” A bike path along the Cherry Creek Trail downtown was a notorious hotspot for drug activity. But police sought further action after they made over 120 felony arrests in the area and collected over 3,500 used syringes throughout 2016. The city’s parks department and police moved to ban suspected users and dealers from city parks — a move challenged as unconstitutional by the ACLU.

But increased enforcement will not address some of the root problems forcing drug users into public spaces. Humphries told me about 70 percent of HRAC members are homeless or in transitional housing, staying in motels or sleeping on friends’ couches when they can. The Metro Denver Homeless Initiative found in 2017 over 5,100 people suffering homelessness in the metropolitan Denver area, based on a conservative snapshot study.

Lack of secure housing exacerbates the risks facing drug users. “When people live outside they are forced to inject in public or in bathrooms,” Humphries said. “At that point you’re rushed, you’re nervous . . . You have a much higher likelihood of missing your shot, or not being able to wash the point of injection. You risk contracting a bacterial infection or causing an abscess.”

Humphries explained how many of Denver’s drug users are not merely using one drug, but multiple drugs. Many homeless people use the stimulant methamphetamine to stay up all night walking around in the winter. After being awake for over 24 hours, heroin is the easiest way for them to come down and sleep again.

Denver’s city policies do not make life any easier for people who are homeless. In 2012 the city implemented an urban camping ban allowing law enforcement to eject people sleeping in parks or public spaces. Denver police made 31 arrests for unauthorized camping between 2012 and 2017.

But Denver police counter that arrests, written warnings and citations are a small proportion of the total 14,700 contacts they made in this period. The majority of contacts with people sleeping in public resulted in verbal “move-on” orders. Local authorities maintain that protocol is first to offer people help obtaining shelter or services before taking further action. Nonetheless, the policy has prompted a class-action lawsuit in federal court, which is currently pending.

The struggle continues

People injecting drugs in Denver remain without a safe place to use, but HRAC plans to keep up the fight. They have lobbied for the SIF/SUS for over 18 months. “In the first two weeks of January 2017,” Humphries said, “we lost seven participants and that was something we decided we could never have happen again. That’s why we started pushing really hard at that point for supervised use, because our people are dying. It’s not even because of this fentanyl crisis that everyone’s focusing on, it’s just plain old black tar heroin.”

While Humphries expressed doubts about the future of SIF/SUS in Denver, she noted the overwhelming support the initiative has received so far. City council members, local medical societies and a coalition of over 30 businesses have shown support. In December, city council president Albus Brooks traveled to Vancouver to visit InSite and learn more about SIF.

Humphries described the outpouring of support during the State Committee hearing on February 14: “In over a three-hour hearing, where everyone was granted three minutes to speak, only one person spoke in opposition. Everyone else spoke up for the SIF/SUS. So right now there is no organized opposition — only party politics.”

Humphries rejected a common criticism that her agency or SIF/SUS enable illegal drug use. “We’re really just providing people with the services they need,” she said. When it comes to enabling, we say we are definitely enablers; we enable people to stay alive, to not contract HIV or hepatitis C. That’s what we’re here to do.”

Washington governor signs net neutrality bill into law

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee signs a bill March 5, 2018, that makes Washington the first state to set up its own net-neutrality requirements. (Credit: AP/Ted S. Warren)

Governor Jay Inslee, D-Wash., signed a bill today that made Washington the first state to pass a law to protect net neutrality. The move was seen as a response to the Federal Communications Commission’s wildly unpopular decision to scrap net neutrality laws late last year.

“Washington’s new law, House Bill 2282, protects those net neutrality rules at the state level, ensuring that internet providers cannot advantageously manipulate internet speeds and access to content,” wrote the governor’s office in a press release. The statement continued:

“The law will prohibit companies that offer internet services from blocking legal content, applications, services or nonharmful devices. It will prohibit them from impairing — or throttling — internet traffic based on the content internet users consume, or the apps, services and devices they use. And it will prohibit them from favoring certain traffic for the company’s own benefit, a practice referred to as paid prioritization.”

The new law marks an intriguing political reversal in recent years, as liberal states begin to use states’ rights to progressive ends. Historically, the doctrine of states’ rights — the anti-federalist notion that states have a high degree of sovereignty, one that may even snub federal law — was generally an ideological staple of the American right. The states’ rights argument was used to argue in favor of Southern states retaining legalized slavery and, later, Jim Crow laws. “For decades, ‘states’ rights advocates’ invoked the vertical separation of powers to help them subjugate blacks,” Conor Friedersdorf wrote in The Atlantic.

Yet starting in the 2010s, an increasing number of blue states and socially libertarian states, largely in the west coast, began to legalize marijuana for recreational use — a decision that explicitly violates federal law.

The federal government tolerating said states’ right to tax, sell and regulate recreational marijuana constitutes a de facto endorsement of the states’ rights view that states can pass legislation that tiptoes around federal law. This was the position under Obama: The administration largely turned a blind eye towards states’ recreational marijuana laws, though it remained illegal on the federal level.

Now, intriguingly, the net neutrality law in Washington state represents another potential win for liberals using states’ rights to justify bucking federal rules — provided the federal government doesn’t swoop in to stop it. For what it’s worth, Gov. Inslee is aware of the role reversal here; in an interview this morning, Monica Nickelsburg of GeekWire asked Inslee of Washington’s role in the burgeoning liberal states’ rights movement. “A role-reversal seems to be occurring where the Democratic establishment is trying to empower state and city governments, in defiance of the federal government… Is Washington at the forefront of that?” Nickelsburg asked Inslee. Inslee replied:

“Oh, we’re active. We’re resolute. We’re undaunted. We’re un-intimidated. Because of that, we frequently find ourselves in the van of this effort but I’m not alone. There’s a lot of governors, a lot of people across the country that are resisting in many ways, the depredations of this administration, and I’m glad to have an alliance in many ways. […] We have many people who are acting on — or several governors who’ve acted on — executive orders on net neutrality. […]We have a lot of states and governors who are joining me in an effort to stop the president’s discrimination and the immigration policies so, we’re not alone, but we certainly are the first here, I will say that. We get the gold medal here.”

During the debate over the federal repeal of net neutrality, it was widely reported that internet service providers (who largely lobbied for net neutrality to end) wanted FCC chairman Ajit Pai to enforce a policy of “preemption,” that would prevent states from passing laws like Washington’s that would enforce net neutrality on a statewide basis. “Ajit Pai has claimed the authority to preempt states and municipalities from imposing laws similar to the net neutrality rules his FCC is getting rid of,” Jon Brodkin wrote in Ars Technica. “ISPs that sue states to block net neutrality laws will surely seize on the FCC’s repeal and preemption order.”

“Marvel’s Jessica Jones” maps the rough road to recovery — for all of us

Krysten Ritter as Jessica Jones in "Jessica Jones" (Credit: Netflix/David Giesbrecht)

Before leaping into an analysis of everything that makes the first five season and two episodes of “Marvel’s Jessica Jones” one of the most worthwhile things you’re likely to watch this week, pardon me for indulging in a bit of insider-ish license.

You see, Netflix offers only a few episodes of each Marvel series to some reviewers prior to every new season. This is fairly typical of many channels and streaming services, and a few are better than one or none at all. But as of late, Marvel’s Netflix series all follow a certain cadence that essentially guarantees that the series will begin one way and end in quite another — and not always well.

For example, viewers may be seduced into following say, the journey of a complicated and empathetic villain such as Mahershala Ali’s Cottonmouth, the excellent antagonist initially featured in “Marvel’s Luke Cage,” only to have him switched out for a less interesting foe who makes the final episodes nearly unbearable.

We may have tuned in to season 2 of “Daredevil” only to be baffled by a couple of seemingly unrelated mythologies jammed together and competing for “A” story status, before one fizzles to the background to focus on the lesser.

This has happened enough times with Netflix’s Marvel titles to give me a touch of anxiety about what the unseen episodes of the second season of “Jessica Jones” will look like. Then again, if a consumer is feeling this way, one can only imagine the pressure showrunner Melissa Rosenberg must be feeling right now. Any time a series bursts into existence with a near-flawless freshman season, expectations for a sophomore run are invariably higher than they may be for other series.

“Jessica Jones” also carries the extra weight of returning in the midst of the #MeToo movement, and in the wake of “Wonder Woman.” Women are marching, are speaking up, are voicing their anger. Those seeking heroes who reflect their struggle and strength may not view Krysten Ritter’s motorcycle-jacket wearing, hard-drinking heroineas an ideal role model. But her role is just as vital, in that she stands as manifestation of the rage-driven side of ourselves so many of us have held inside.

Jessica Jones is that side of ourselves that we envision when we meet a slight with grace and forbearance instead of doing what we really want to do, which is to slam the offender through a wall.

In the opening episodes of the new season, dropping in its entirety on March 8 — that would be International Women’s Day — it scratches that itch well enough. But in this new chapter Jessica isn’t up against a single antagonist.

She’s facing down a hidden history she’s spent a lifetime attempting to eras with booze, part of which involves a mysterious organization called IGH, which is responsible for forcibly imbuing her with powers she resents. This is on top of the thick coats of post-traumatic rage stemming from losing her parents and brother in a childhood car accident, and being exploited by a mind-controlling psychopath to do terrible acts against her will, including submitting to rape and committing murder.

Jessica has a lot on her plate this season, in other words. So does Rosenberg, whose writers and directors are charged with rolling out an origin story in addition to introducing a nebulous and ostensibly many-headed villain (as all evil organizations tend to be), with a plausible treatment of trauma survival that matches the conisideration and honesty of its first season portrayal.

These first five new hours of “Jessica Jones” handle that task well enough to keep our curiosity piqued enough to stick around for the other hours, and that already put it ahead of the title’s less successful Netflix brethren.

Ritter’s gruff portrayal of Jessica also buys the series plenty of rope; something about her kohl-rimmed stare and seen-it-all tone of voice makes her crankiness and don’t-give-a-damn attitude charming, if that’s the right word. It helps us understand why her neighbor Malcolm (Eka Darville) refuses to let her push him away. It also provides a needed contrast to her crusading best friend Trish (Rachael Taylor), a radio host who aspires to break into the broadcast journalism world but may be held back by her own childhood baggage.

Darville’s Malcolm plays the part of Jessica’s Jiminy Cricket as ably as ever, but these new episodes lean into Jessica and Trish’s relationship more than the first season does in part because, as the story starts, Trish doesn’t have a secondary battle to fight. At times Trish’s raison d’etre in the series seems entirely based on her ability to bait and provoke, but this view discounts the honest platonic chemistry Ritter and Taylor display onscreen.

Like Malcolm, Trish reminds Jessica to behave humanely and admit that she gives a damn — a necessary element of a hero’s image.

That said, Jessica Jones’ unmistakable weariness in these new episodes infects the story itself. The storytelling has a staccato, uneven feel in its opening hours.

This could be due in part to the writers’ emphasis on drawing out the truth of who and what IGH is, and keeping Jessica’s initial quarry, played with stoic power by Janet McTeer, in the shadows for much of those opening hours. Season 1 shrouded David Tennant’s Kilgrave in a similar kind of mystery, and Tennant unleashed a singular malevolence through that character, sort of an egomania rooted in pettiness, that’s fairly difficult to top.

Adding on to this is a fairly extensive subplot involving Jessica’s frenemy Jeri Hogarth (Carrie-Anne Moss), the calculating lawyer who appears in other parts of Netflix’s Marvel universe. But here, she represents a “what if” form of Jessica — a woman who, like Ms. Jones, is a lone wolf who doesn’t trust anyone and thinks the worst of others, but channels that into career ambition and the pursuit of wealth and power.

In this respect, “Jessica Jones” sets up its second season to fascinate on a number of levels, and its heroine to represent the crucible through which all of her gender is passing in this moment. Jeri might be thought of a version Jessica taken to one extreme; McTeer’s character is obvious set up to represent another. Trish is Jessica’s opposite, the golden-haired golden girl to her dark brooding reluctant champion. Yet in many ways they’re all the same woman wearing different faces and dogged by the same problems.

Despite their best efforts, or the gifts bestowed upon them by fate or forced on them by science, none of them is invulnerable. They keep on throwing punches, in their own ways, because they have no other choice. And that’s more than enough to make the second season of “Jessica Jones” a series that speaks to how we’re feeling right now, regardless of where, and how well, this new chapter ends.

An America that eats its young

Gun Love by Jennifer Clement; The Hunger by Alma Katsu (Credit: Random House/Penguin)

“When a man gives his woman a gun it’s because he really trusts her,” Jennifer Clement writes in her enthralling new novel “Gun Love.” It’s startling to think of the gun as romantic gesture in a moment when, after the latest grisly mass shooting of children, the country seems finally on the verge of disenchantment with its weapons, but it’s also impossible to come away from “Gun Love” with a single understanding of the role guns play in our lives. Through a memorable coming-of-age story set in America’s margins, Clement makes all of these things true at once: A gun is a valentine, a secret-bearer, a penitent, a world destroyer, an exposed belly, an insurance policy, a sudden act of God. “In our part of Florida,” says narrator Pearl, who lives with her luminous young mother Margot in a 1994 Mercury Topaz in the visitors’ lot of the Indian Waters Trailer Park, “things were always being gifted a bullet just for the sake of it.”

Margot had Pearl in secret, a teen pregnancy hidden from her violent father, and lit out one day with a trunk loaded with the detritus of her wealthy upbringing and a plan to stay hidden in plain sight. They landed outside the Central Florida trailer park, bordered by a garbage dump and an alligator-infested river, for 14 years, eating peanut butter sandwiches off Limoges plates in the orbit of a tiny cast of broke-down eccentrics: An amputee war vet, a corrupt preacher, a Selena super fan, a woman who buries Barbies in the ground like a plastic garden. Mother and daughter are rare originals in an ugly world, Pearl as sharp and tart as sugar-spun Margot — “full of birthday-candle wishes,” she who plays Mozart silently on the dashboard of the car — is sweet. Pearl dreams of furniture; Margot of a future she can fall in love with, somewhere more hopeful to go every day than the veterans’ hospital where she works as a custodian. Like the pair of conjoined baby alligators that meet a violent end in the opening of the story, Pearl and her mother are entwined strange beauties, delicate and otherworldly, endangered from the start.

It might be tempting to read this novel merely as an exemplar of the neo-Southern grotesque — a lush, humid tale of rural hard-lucks made all the more strange by the incongruous beauty of Clement’s lyric prose — but “Gun Love” is neither swampy freak show nor poverty porn. Rather it’s a fable of modern American violence, and the resilience it takes to survive a childhood in its shadow.

Like Pearl, more than 1.5 million kids in this country live in families without a home, and those families are more likely than not to be led by a single mother in her twenties, like Margot. In a country of abundance, this is a kind of violence. An overwhelming majority of homeless mothers with children have experienced domestic violence, as Margot did, and they are punished for surviving it through stigma, social and institutional, levied at those without a home. This is the radical resistance of “Gun Love”: Clement pushes back at entrenched assumptions that a homeless single mother and her daughter wouldn’t lead nuanced and imaginative interior lives; that a family like theirs wouldn’t be as worth preserving; that poverty and willful ignorance necessarily go hand-in-hand.

The black market running through her extended trailer-park family reveals its full dark potential one afternoon to Pearl, and her future takes a sharp turn. But in the aftermath of that day, she finds her capacity for love — the inheritance Margot created for her in the Mercury, the one that can never be sold off — will be as vital to her survival as any self-defense instincts.

* * *

If “Gun Love” is a poetic indie film-style exploration of America’s legacy of violence, Alma Katsu’s new book “The Hunger” — an “Oregon Trail”-meets-“The Walking Dead” novelization of the doomed Donner-Reed Party — is its blockbuster cousin. One is historical fiction with a supernatural twist, the other a poetic coming-of-age tale in a state already too weird to need a fantasy injection. But in a time when stricter gun laws feel at last like a possibility — or at least the subject of a viable debate — it’s hard not to see the deep, tangled roots of our troubled romance with violence, and the lessons we’ve refused to learn from it, everywhere.

What everyone knows about the party of settlers that set out for California in 1846 is that most didn’t survive the journey, and some ate the others to stay alive. It’s a minor tale in the American story of westward expansion, enlarged by its gruesome details. Twin questions swirl around the Donner expedition, a group of seemingly normal Midwesterners warped by circumstance and the elements into a grotesque horror-show by the end. How could they? And could you? What capacity for disturbing violence, of abandoning a central tenet of our very humanity, lies in each of us? And where did it come from?

Katsu, author of “The Taker” trilogy and a former CIA analyst, attempts an answer to those questions that at first glance feels reassuring, but upon further contemplation brims with existential dread. Known for flavoring her literary page-turners with the supernatural, in this novel she combines meticulous historical research and a keen understanding of human nature with a monstrous original metaphor to reimagine the ill-fated Donner-Reed party as a haunted endeavor, doomed from its first mile.

Told through the points of view of several key members of the expedition, “The Hunger” reconstructs the covered wagon train as it moves west from Illinois to California, where the settlers, delayed and waylaid for a number of reasons, end up stranded on an experimental pass through the Sierra Nevada range without enough provisions to survive the brutal winter. A child goes missing early in the book, and is found ravaged, as if torn apart by something wild. As the families travel across punishing landscapes of prairie, desert and mountain, the wild game they expect to find along the way proves elusive, as if something ravenous has been hunting alongside them, depleting the land of its natural food sources. Are they being stalked by a pack of wolves? Or is it something else?

On the trail, the pioneers quarrel, form factions, fall in love, betray each other, and struggle to stay alive and intact as the elements, the mysterious predators and the worst sides of human nature take their toll. It’s a gritty survivalist drama sprinkled with class (and sexual) tensions and fueled by the danger that stalks the beleaguered party at every turn, plus the promise of cannibalism — that would be rich storytelling material all on its own. (Of course the film is already on its way.) But monster tales tell us about what we’re really afraid of now, and the supernatural myth Katsu weaves around this historical blip suggests it is the very neighbors we also depend on for community and survival — their appetite for acquisition, their selfishness, their indulgent ignorance, their ability to ignore the horrors happening right under their noses until it’s too late.

Not that we didn’t know this — Americans are more divided than at any time since the Civil War, after all. But “The Hunger” exposes our innate and seemingly limitless capacity for violence as a thing Americans literally spread across the country, a rotten Manifest Destiny of the soul. It’s somewhat heartening that Katsu, through a wildly different kind of story, draws a similar conclusion to Clement: maybe it’s not an unshakable curse. Maybe we can find a way to survive ourselves.

Little dumpster fires everywhere

(Credit: Getty/Baloncici)

History will judge each era by the language it embraced. And does anybody even need to tell you that we are living in the age of “dumpster fire”?

The handy-for-literally-everything-right-now phrase officially scorched its way into Merriam-Webster this week, joining 849 other concepts we’d like to burn down, including “mansplain,” “hate-watch,” “embiggen,” “glamping” and “subtweet.” Intriguingly, “narcissistic personality disorder” is also making its debut. (That, by the way, was a variation of a subtweet.)

Long ago, when dumpster fires were rarely seen outside of actual giant containers of flaming garbage, “Dumpster” was a trademarked brand name, like escalator and aspirin. In news bureaus across the land, copy editors slammed their fists on desks and growled, “I SAID IT STAYS CAPITALIZED AND THAT’S FINAL.” Like escalators and aspirin, however, the dumpster fire’s popularity soon outgrew its vernacular constraints.

“If a word is frequently used enough by some people, it has to be placed into a reference for all people,” Merriam-Webster editor-at-large Peter Sokolowski told NPR Tuesday. So congratulations, everybody. Today, freed from all its prior ties and legitimized in dictionary form, the only limit “dumpster fire” faces is that is already feels a little . . . 2016. It’s not so much that things are better; it’s more that the image of a dumpster implies containment and the possibility of extinguishment. Today, everything is ablaze. And anyone who can successfully avoid the daily dumpster fires has got to feel like, to coin a few other newly minted Merriam-Webster phrases, they’ve mastered a self-care life hack.

Amazon’s tendrils reach for the banking sector: report

Jeff Bezos (Credit: AP/Dennis Van Tine)

Having grown to dominate book-selling, cloud computing, taking a huge chunk of online retail, and starting the home assistant market, Amazon appears to be angling to get into the banking business next.

The exploration, which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, follows the company’s efforts to start up its own shipping company and its 2017 purchase of the grocery store company Whole Foods. The finance effort is said to focus on enticing people who do not currently use banking services.

Amazon’s seemingly insatiable appetite for growth and cost-cutting has raised concerns among consumer advocates and among companies and workers in the fields that it dominates; but should the Jeff Bezos-led giant decide to work to disrupt the banking industry, consumers might prefer them to Wall Street.

In a poll conducted last July for Bloomberg News, just 31 percent of respondents said that they had a favorable perception of Wall Street banks.

Frustrated with high overdraft fees, minimum balance fees, and other consumer-unfriendly policies common in the industry, about 7 percent of American households don’t use a bank at all, according to research on “unbanked” people by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Some 20 percent of Americans are “underbanked” according to the report — meaning that they use banks for things like checking accounts, but also utilize other methods of obtaining financial services.

According to the FDIC, a majority of “unbanked” households say they cannot afford to keep enough money in an account to avoid overdraft fees.

While Amazon may be able to provide lower-cost banking services to such people, it may also encourage more impulse buying by leveraging information gleaned on consumer spending to better target them for advertising or by steering them to purchase products made by Amazon instead of competitors. This scenario is not hypothetical, either. Right now, Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant will not order products that are sold by vendors who do not participate in its Prime program.

While Americans generally value low prices over privacy concerns or supporting small businesses, there may be a limit to how much Amazon can expand into other sectors before encountering massive resistance. Without governmental oversight, it’s become rather clear — as Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, noted in an article for The Nation last month — that Amazon simply will not stop until it has become the global infrastructure company. As Mitchell wrote:

Bezos has designed his company for a far more radical goal than merely dominating markets; he’s built Amazon to replace them. His vision is for Amazon to become the underlying infrastructure that commerce runs on. Already, Amazon’s website is the dominant platform for online retail sales, attracting half of all online US shopping traffic and hosting thousands of third-party sellers. Its Amazon Web Services division provides 34 percent of the world’s cloud-computing capacity, handling the data of a long list of entities, from Netflix to Nordstrom, Comcast to Condé Nast to the CIA. Now, in a challenge to UPS and FedEx, Amazon is building out a vast shipping and delivery operation with the aim of handling both its own packages and those of other companies.

By controlling these essential pieces of infrastructure, Amazon can privilege its own products and services as they move through these pipelines, siphoning off the most lucrative currents of consumer demand for itself. And it can set the terms by which other companies have access to these pipelines, while also levying, through the fees it charges, a tax on their trade. In other words, it’s moving us away from a democratic political economy, in which commerce takes place in open markets governed by public rules, and toward a future in which the exchange of goods occurs in a private arena governed by Amazon. It’s a setup that inevitably transfers wealth to the few—and with it, the power over such crucial questions as which books and ideas get published and promoted, who may ply a trade and on what terms, and whether given communities will succeed or fail.

Trump bashes low-rated Oscars, and Jimmy Kimmel has an epic response

Jimmy Kimmel; Donald Trump (Credit: AP/Chris Pizzello/Evan Vucci)

President Donald Trump joined the chorus of conservative voices bashing the Oscars on Tuesday as he blamed the low ratings on a lack of star power like his own.

“Lowest-rated Oscars in history. Problem is, we don’t have stars anymore – except your president (just kidding, of course)!” he wrote on Twitter.

Lowest rated Oscars in HISTORY. Problem is, we don’t have Stars anymore – except your President (just kidding, of course)!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 6, 2018

In a stinging response, Oscars host Jimmy Kimmel presented the president, who is well-known as an avid consumer of polls, with a different set of data to ponder. “Thanks, lowest rated president in history,” Kimmel tweeted back at Trump.

Thanks, lowest rated President in HISTORY. https://t.co/E01UgDaZ3T

— Jimmy Kimmel (@jimmykimmel) March 6, 2018

Sunday’s broadcast of the 90th annual Academy Awards finished with record-low ratings for the second year in a row. Approximately 26.5 million viewers watched the awards show, a 19 percent decline from 2017, which means the telecast was “easily the least-watched Oscars in history,” according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Whether actually a joke or not, the president suggested his presence would have given the ceremony a necessary jolt of gravitas. Other conservative thought leaders suggested the real culprit was an unwelcome injection of progressive politics into the broadcast. Sarah Palin tweeted a link to a story accusing Kimmel, who touched on issues including sexual harassment and gun violence, of “lecturing America.” Disgraced pundit Bill O’Reilly bragged that he didn’t watch the show, but he still shared his opinion about it. “Right now there is a judgement jihad in Hollywood about politics and behavior. Cheap shots and false perceptions are running riot,” he wrote.

Oops. https://t.co/QSNW4L2zJw

— Sarah Palin (@SarahPalinUSA) March 6, 2018

Was very happy not to watch the Oscar show last night because phonies on parade has zero appeal for me. Right now there is a judgment jihad in Hollywood about politics and behavior. Cheap shots and false perceptions are running riot. https://t.co/dUfJei2Tkc

— Bill O'Reilly (@BillOReilly) March 5, 2018

O’Reilly’s former colleagues at Fox News were equally dismayed. “Fox & Friends” host Brian Kilmeade said that “Jimmy Kimmel is basically Chuck Schumer with a sense of humor.” While Ainsley Earhardt said of the show, “If you are a Democrat, you love it. If you’re a Republican, you probably don’t watch.” To illustrate their point, Fox News played a selectively-edited montage of jokes that targeted Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and the right-wing network itself as evidence of the Oscars’ bias.

In reality, political discourse was largely toned down from a year ago when Trump was newly installed as president. This time around, the president and his antics took a backseat to the through line of the #MeToo movement and an onstage celebration of diversity anchored by wins for “Coco” and “A Fantastic Woman.” But that didn’t stop conservatives from taking a victory lap over the Academy’s poor ratings.

Didn’t the ABC producers warn Kimmel to ease off the politics at the Oscars?

He didn’t.

Lowest ratings EVER.

Should’ve listened, Little Jimmy.

— Jack Murphy (@RealJack) March 6, 2018

Jimmy Kimmel’s divisive, politically charged #Oscars are now the lowest on record at 26.5 million viewers, falling substantially behind 2008’s record low of 32 million.

— Alana Mastrangelo (@ARmastrangelo) March 5, 2018

The real plunge in the ratings took place pre-show on the red carpet, where politics could not be made a scapegoat. E’s “Live from the Red Carpet“ coverage dropped a staggering 35 percent, far greater than Oscars’ loss. E! attempted to forgo any backlash against host Ryan Seacrest, accused by his former stylist of sexual harassment, by implementing a 30-second delay. Swaths of viewers tuned out instead.

Blame Australia! Conservatives roll out another Clinton conspiracy to discredit Russia probe

(Credit: AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)

Conservatives are hurriedly peddling a brand new right-wing conspiracy theory to delegitimize special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation that requires some serious mental gymnastics.

This time the theory involves former Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, who in his official capacity secured $25 million in aid to the Clinton Foundation in 2006 in order to combat the AIDS epidemic in Asian nations, according to a new report publicized as a “bombshell” by The Hill with the breathless headline: “Australian diplomat whose tip prompted FBI’s Russia-probe has tie to Clintons.”

Records showed Australia was just one of the four governments that donated more than $25 million to CHAI, The Hill noted. The money had originally been allocated to the Clinton Foundation but was later put into the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI).

Hours after the story was published, GOP lawmakers and conservative pundits jumped to claim Downer exposes political motivations behind the Mueller investigation. This is because Downer is the same person who went to the FBI after former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos reportedly told Downer about Russia having political dirt on Clinton in the form of thousands of emails. That information helped spark the Mueller probe, and conservatives believe that’s reason to discredit the investigation.

New information tonight. Very interesting… https://t.co/RvMwKtwoix

— Devin Nunes (@DevinNunes) March 6, 2018

“The Clintons’ tentacles go everywhere. So, that’s why it’s important,” Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio told The Hill. “We continue to get new information every week it seems that sort of underscores the fact that the FBI hasn’t been square with us.”

The leaps of evidence-free claims continued on President Donald Trump’s favorite show, “Fox & Friends.”

“As it turns out ladies and gentlemen,” co-host Steve Doocy said on Tuesday morning. “Mr. Papadopoulos who met Alexander Downer that night didn’t realize he was meeting a guy who donated $25 million to the Clinton Foundation to eradicate AIDS.”

You know the right-wing spin has failed to take off when even Brian Kilmeade has to step in and point out the factual inaccuracies.

“Was that Australian government money? I’m sure he didn’t have $25 million” Kilmeade said to Doocy, noting that the money was not a personal donation to the Clintons.

An undeterred Doocy doubled down.

He went on to describe the perceived revelation, along with the idea that the infamous Trump-Russia dossier, compiled by former spy Christopher Steele, was also discredited by the partisan memo released by Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif. The memo was widely discredited, yet Doocy described the incidents as “two lynchpins, both regarding Hillary Clinton, to get the dirt on Donald Trump.”

“Both connected to Hillary,” co-host Ainsley Earhardt chimed in. “So the question is, what does that dirty dossier really prove? It proves, apparently, that the Clinton camp was the one that was dirty.”

The Cold War’s toxic legacy: Costly, dangerous cleanups at atomic bomb production sites

FILE - In this July 9, 2014, file photo, a sign informs visitors of prohibited items on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation near Richland, Wash. Officials for the Hanford Nuclear Reservation are trying to determine if a second giant underground tank containing radioactive waste from the production of plutonium for nuclear weapons is leaking, the U.S. Department of Energy revealed on Tuesday, April 26. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren, File) (Credit: AP)

Seventy-five years ago, in March 1943, a mysterious construction project began at a remote location in eastern Washington state. Over the next two years some 50,000 workers built an industrial site occupying half the area of Rhode Island, costing over US$230 million — equivalent to $3.1 billion today. Few of those workers, and virtually no one in the surrounding community, knew the facility’s purpose.

The site was called Hanford, named for a small town whose residents were displaced to make way for the project. Its mission became clear at the end of World War II. Hanford had produced plutonium for the first nuclear test in the New Mexico desert in July 1945, and for the bomb that incinerated Nagasaki on Aug. 9.

As a researcher in environmental and energy communication, I’ve studied the legacies of nuclear weapons production. From 2000 to 2005, I served with a citizen advisory board that provides input to state and federal officials on a massive environmental cleanup program at Hanford, now one of the most contaminated sites in the world.

As U.S. leaders consider producing new nuclear weapons, I believe they should study lessons from Hanford carefully. Hanford provides one of the more dramatic examples of problems that unfolded — and persist today — at nuclear sites where production and secrecy took priority over safety and environmental protection.

www.hanford.gov

A nationwide nuclear network

Hanford was one of three large facilities anchoring the Manhattan Project — the crash program to build an atomic bomb. It was part of a larger complex linking facilities across the nation. A plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, enriched uranium and operated a prototype nuclear reactor. Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico assembled a cadre of world-class scientists to design and build the weapons, using materials produced at the other sites. Smaller facilities across the nation made other contributions.

As World War II phased into the Cold War and the U.S.-Soviet arms race escalated, new sites were added in Ohio, South Carolina, Florida, Texas, Colorado and elsewhere. Secrecy masked much of the work at these sites until well into the 1980s, with serious consequences for public health, worker safety and the environment. Nuclear and chemical wastes caused severe contamination at Hanford and the other sites, and dealing with them has proved to be difficult and costly.

Major sites in the Cold War nuclear weapons production complex.

USDOD

Contamination at Hanford

When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, the United States had mass-produced some 70,000 nuclear bombs and warheads. Hanford made most of the plutonium used in those weapons. Workers irradiated uranium fuel in reactors, and then dissolved it in acid to extract the plutonium produced. This method, called reprocessing, generated 56 million gallons of liquid wastes laced with radioactive and chemical poisons.

Hanford’s nine reactors were located along the Columbia River to provide a source of cooling water, and discharged radiation into the river throughout their lifetimes.

Fuel was sometimes reprocessed before its most highly radioactive isotopes had time to decay. Managers knowingly released toxic gases into the air, contaminating farmlands and grazing areas downwind. Some releases supported an effort to monitor Soviet nuclear progress. By tracking intentional emissions from Hanford, scientists learned better how to spot Soviet nuclear tests.

Liquid wastes from reprocessing were stored in underground tanks designed to last 25 years, assuming that a permanent disposal solution would be developed later. The U.S. Department of Energy, which now operates the weapons complex and its cleanup program, is still working on that solution.

Meanwhile, at least a million gallons of tank wastes have leaked into the ground. This material, and the prospect of more to follow, threatens the Columbia River, a backbone of the Pacific Northwest’s economy and ecology. Some groundwater is already contaminated. Estimates of when that plume will reach the river are uncertain.

Radioactive trash still litters parts of Hanford. Irradiated bodies of laboratory animals were buried there. The site houses radioactive debris ranging from medical wastes to propulsion reactors from decommissioned submarines and parts of the reactor that melted down at Three Mile Island. Some nuclear decision makers have called Hanford a “national sacrifice zone.”

A struggle for accountability

In the mid-1980s, local residents grew suspicious about an apparent excess of illnesses and deaths in their community. Initially, strict secrecy — reinforced by the region’s economic dependence on the Hanford site — made it hard for concerned citizens to get information.

Once the curtain of secrecy was partially lifted under pressure from area residents and journalists, public outrage prompted two major health effects studies that engendered fierce controversy. By the close of the decade, more than 3,500 “downwinders” had filed lawsuits related to illnesses they attributed to Hanford. A judge finally dismissed the case in 2016 after limited compensation to a handful of plaintiffs, leaving a bitter legacy of legal disputes and personal anguish.

Cleanup operations at Hanford began in 1989, but have been hamstrung by daunting technical challenges and management errors. The current estimate assumes work will continue through 2060 and cost over $100 billion, beyond the approximately $50 billion already spent.

A key challenge is building a facility to extract the most toxic materials from the tank wastes and enclose them in glass logs to be sent elsewhere for permanent burial. Projected costs have ballooned to over $17 billion, and the estimated completion date is now 2036. And with the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada mired in controversy, there is still no final resting place for these materials, which will be dangerous for tens of thousands of years.

Cleanup has progressed in other areas. The reactors have been shut down and enclosed in concrete and steel “cocoons” until their radioactivity decays further. Hanford’s “B Reactor,” the world’s first large-scale nuclear reactor, is now part of the Manhattan Project National Historic Park.

Buffer lands around the outer parts of the site, presumably clean enough for the purpose, have been converted to wildlife refuge areas. And in 2015, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Observatory (LIGO), with a station located at Hanford, detected the first gravitational waves predicted by Albert Einstein. LIGO scientists chose Hanford for its remote location and minimal interference from human activity.

Inside Hanford’s B Reactor.

Lessons to remember

The Department of Energy now considers many of its former nuclear weapons production sites to be fully cleaned up. Some remaining sites are involved in maintaining the current nuclear arsenal and could play roles producing new weapons. Others, like Hanford, are “legacy” sites where cleanup is the sole mission.

There is more oversight of the nuclear weapons complex today, but serious concerns remain. Notably, inspectors have found problems at Los Alamos National Laboratory dating back to 2011 related to handling of beryllium, a toxic material that can cause cancer and lung disease.

These issues at Hanford and other nuclear sites are reminders that nuclear weapons production is a risky process — and that in Washington state and elsewhere, legacies of the Cold War are still very much with us.

William J. Kinsella, Professor, Department of Communication, North Carolina State University