Lily Salter's Blog, page 274

Right-wing Sinclair Broadcast Group snubs FCC, gets away with it

Sinclair Broadcast Group, Inc.'s headquarters (Credit: AP/Steve Ruark)

Sinclair Broadcast Group is planning to merge with Tribune Media Company, in a deal that would make it the nation’s largest broadcaster. Yet in the process, the conglomerate has refused to honor a request from the Federal Communications Commission: a list of TV stations it has to sell in order to meet ownership limits.

In a document filed on Thursday, Sinclair said licenses in at least two markets would have to be sold to meet current national TV station ownership limits, the Baltimore Sun reported.

The lack of transparency in the merger poses a unique and seldom-discussed threat to newsrooms across the country.

If the $3.9 billion merger with Tribune Media Co. is approved, the broadcaster would own 233 television stations and reach 72 percent of households in the country, the Sun reported.

HBO late-night host John Oliver previously blasted the broadcast group for its injection of right-wing viewpoints into news segments, as well as its “must run” segments, which feature Sinclair executive Mark Hyman and political analyst Boris Epshteyn, a former senior adviser to President Donald Trump’s campaign.

Oliver said more people should be aware of the “potential problems in corporate consolidation of local news.”

The relationship between news media and the federal government has been on the public’s mind lately. President Trump has been openly hostile towards journalists since his campaign days; he tweeted on Wednesday that NBC should have its broadcasting license revoked and told a reporter that he thought it was “frankly disgusting [that] the press is able to write whatever it wants.” Yet his animus towards news media extends only to those who are critical of him, and his administration is poised to quietly green-light a massive media merger for a company infamous for its strong conservative biases.

Meanwhile, rather than fulfill the FCC’s request to provide information on specific station sales, Sinclair hired the investment bank Moelis & Company “to help it identify potential buyers.”

“Moelis has contacted a substantial number of potential buyers, consisting of both broadcasters and financial investor/management teams, many of which have signed non-disclosure agreements,” Sinclair said in the filing, the Baltimore Sun reported. “The outcomes of negotiations with potential buyers could impact the license divestitures Sinclair would make.”

The Sun elaborated:

The U.S. Department of Justice also is reviewing the proposed deal and is expected to complete that by the end of the year. Because the Justice Department could require specific divestitures of TV stations, it’s premature for Sinclair to finalize divestiture plans before then, the company said.

Approval of the acquisition has appeared likely because the FCC recently relaxed rules for broadcast station ownership. The proposal has generated opposition from groups such as Dish Network LLC, the American Cable Association, Free Press, Public Knowledge and Common Cause. Opponents say the deal will hurt media competition and consumers.

Regardless of Sinclair’s disregard for the FCC’s rules, the agency is likely to approve the merger.

Cara Delevingne details harrowing, homophobic encounter with Harvey Weinstein

Cara Delevingne (Credit: AP/Alastair Grant)

Following a day of bombshell revelations from Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, Asia Argento, Rosanna Arquette, Mira Sorvino and others regarding film studio executive Harvey Weinstein’s history of abuse, British actress and supermodel Cara Delevingne shared a harrowing story of her own encounter with the increasingly friendless producer.

Via her Instagram account, Delevingne detailed a disturbing run-in with Weinstein that she claims happened some two years ago, one that involved not only unwanted advances and underhanded threats, but homophobic jabs from Weinstein. Delevingne was most likely 23 at the time — roughly the same age Paltrow, Jolie, Argento and others were at the times they allege he abused them.

“When I first started to work as an actress, I was working on a film and I received a call from‎ Harvey Weinstein asking if I had slept with any of the women I was seen out with in the media,” Delevingne wrote. Delevingne is bisexual and has been spotted with famous figures such as Michelle Rodriguez and St. Vincent (Annie Clark).

“It was a very odd and uncomfortable call,” she continued. “I answered none of his questions and hurried off the phone but before I hung up, he said to me that If I was gay or decided to be with a woman especially in public that I’d never get the role of a straight woman or make it as an actress in Hollywood.” This alleged statement is striking given that Weinstein produced the pro-LGBTQ film “Carol” and other enlightened projects.

“A year or two later,” she continued, “I went to a meeting with him in the lobby of a hotel with a director about an upcoming film. The director left the meeting and Harvey asked me to stay and chat with him. As soon as we were alone he began to brag about all the actresses he had slept with and how he had made their careers and spoke about other inappropriate things of a sexual nature.”

According to Delevingne, Weinstein then engaged in what has now become pattern familiar throughout the many allegations attached to him “He then invited me to his room,” she says. “I quickly declined and asked his assistant if my car was outside. She said it wasn’t and wouldn’t be for a bit and I should go to his room.”

“At that moment I felt very powerless and scared but didn’t want to act that way hoping that I was wrong about the situation,” Delevingne continued. “When I arrived I was relieved to find another woman in his room and thought immediately I was safe.” She was wrong.

“[Weinstein] asked us to kiss and she began some sort of advances upon his direction,” she says. “I swiftly got up and asked him if he knew that I could sing. And I began to sing . . . I thought it would make the situation better . . more professional . . . like an audition . . . I was so nervous.” The gambit did not quite work.

“After singing I said again that I had to leave,” claims Delevingne. “He walked me to the door and stood in front of it and tried to kiss me on the lips. I stopped him and managed to get out of the room.”

Unlike others, Delevingne avoided a full assault. Yet the effects were considerable. “I still got the part for the film and always thought that he gave it to me because of what happened,” she said. “Since then I felt awful that I did the movie. I felt like I didn’t deserve the part.”

The sole movie featuring Delevingne on The Weinstein Company’s slate is the long-delayed “Tulip Fever.” Delevingne was cast in 2014, the same year production on the film started and ended. It debuted in limited release this September.

From there, she mirrors much of what other women have been saying about Weinstein and what women everywhere say about their abusers. “I was so hesitant about speaking out . . . I didn’t want to hurt his family. I felt guilty as if I did something wrong. I was also terrified that this sort of thing had happened to so many women I know but no one had said anything because of fear.”

As new elements to Weinstein’s story continue to spill out at a frantic rate, Delevingne is not the only young star to have detailed such an encounter with the producer today. Among others is French actor Léa Seydoux, who claimed Weinstein assaulted her at the Hôtel Plaza Athénée around 2012. She would have been 25 at the time.

“We were talking on the sofa when he suddenly jumped on me and tried to kiss me,” Seydoux told the Guardian. “I had to defend myself. He’s big and fat, so I had to be forceful to resist him.” She continued, “I left his room, thoroughly disgusted. I wasn’t afraid of him, though. Because I knew what kind of man he was all along.”

“He tried more than once,” she added, “I pushed him physically. I think he respected me because I resisted him.” Seydoux described the producer, in his late 50s at the time, as “losing control.”

Again, Seydoux’s account aligns with many others. This was never going to be about work,” she said. “He had other intentions – I could see that very clearly . . . All throughout the evening, he flirted and stared at me as if I was a piece of meat. It was hard to say no because he’s so powerful. I’m an actress and he’s a producer. My agent at the time said to stay far [away from him] and be polite.”

She notes that she did not speak out due to fear of career repercussions, and saw him regularly at events. “We are in the same industry, so its impossible to avoid him. I’ve seen how he operates: the way he looks for an opening. The way he tests women to see what he can get away with.”

She ended, “That’s the most disgusting thing. Everyone knew what Harvey was up to and no one did anything. It’s unbelievable that he’s been able to act like this for decades and still keep his career.”

Currently, Weinstein has been fired from the company he founded; the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, the organization behind the Oscars, is working to revoke his membership. Even The Weinstein Company has announced it will change it name. Still, it took no less than 30 years of abuse, some of it well-documented, for any of that to happen.

Training new doctors right where they’re needed

(Credit: AP)

Dr. Olga Meave didn’t mind the dry, 105-degree heat that scorched this Central Valley city on a recent afternoon.

The sweltering summer days remind her of home in Sonora, Mexico. So do the people of the Valley — especially the Latino first-generation immigrants present here in large numbers, toiling in the fields or piloting big rigs laden with fruits and vegetables.

Meave’s sense of familiarity with the region and its residents drew her to an ambitious program in Bakersfield whose goal is to train and retain doctors in medically underserved areas.

She is now in her third and final year of the Rio Bravo Family Medicine Residency Program, operated by Clinica Sierra Vista, a chain of more than 30 clinics, mostly in the Central Valley. Meave, 34, graduated from medical school in Mexico and has pursued additional education and training in the U.S.

She plans to practice in Bakersfield after she completes her residency next year.

“The goal is for [doctors in training] to come for three years and stay for 20,” said Carol Stewart, director of the program.

Rio Bravo is one of eight teaching health centers in California and 57 nationwide that were created by the Affordable Care Act in 2010 to serve areas with large unmet medical needs.

This academic year, there are 732 residents in teaching health centers across 24 states.

Unlike the Affordable Care Act itself, these teaching centers enjoy bipartisan support among federal lawmakers, who say such hubs will alleviate the primary care doctor shortage. But long-term funding is still in question. Last week, Congress agreed to temporarily finance the teaching health centers through the end of the year while debating whether to extend funding beyond that. President Donald Trump later signed the temporary extension.

A residency is a stage of graduate medical training that’s required after medical school and before doctors can set up their own practices. Most family practice residencies last three years.

Traditional residency programs are generally based at large, urban hospitals in areas where there are typically a sufficient number of doctors to go around.

The first teaching health centers began training residents in 2011. They operate primarily out of clinics in rural communities and other areas where primary care physicians are in short supply.

The ideal ratio of primary care physicians to patients is about 1 for every 2,000, Stewart said. The ratio in east Bakersfield “is more like 1 to 6,000, so we have a lot of catching up to do.”

Though teaching health centers remain relatively new, experts say they’re already succeeding: Their residents generally stay in the regions where they trained, putting down roots in communities with a big demand for health care.

In June, the Rio Bravo program graduated its first class of six doctors. Two joined the staff at a Clinica Sierra Vista clinic in east Bakersfield. The other four are practicing in clinics serving low-income communities in Sacramento, Riverside and Los Angeles counties.

Stewart estimates that the six recent graduates together saw nearly 10,000 patients during their three years of training.

“That’s a significant contribution,” she said.

Though not all teaching health centers have affiliations with medical schools,

the Rio Bravo program has an academic partnership with the UCLA medical school, which helps develop its curriculum, Stewart said. It also coordinates with a local hospital, Kern Medical, where residents complete rotations in different specialties related to family medicine.

A 2015 survey by the American Association of Teaching Health Centers found that 82 percent of their graduates stay in primary care and 55 percent remain in underserved communities. By contrast, about a quarter of graduates from traditional residency programs remain in primary care and work in underserved areas, according to the same survey.

Many graduates of teaching health centers have an incentive to stay in these areas because they may qualify for other programs that offer perks, such as help with paying off medical school loans.

The centers take their patient populations into consideration when selecting applicants. For instance, Rio Bravo aims to train culturally sensitive doctors, given the large local immigrant population, Stewart said.

It looks for applicants with ties to the Valley or who come from the cultures — and speak the languages — that are familiar to patients they will serve.

Meave doesn’t have a personal connection to the Valley, but she worked with low-income patients in Mexico. She has found that the population in the Valley, and its needs, aren’t much different from those in her home country.

At Clinica Sierra Vista, she sees patients who haven’t been to a doctor in decades. “They’ve never had a physical exam, never had their eyes checked. … They just deal with their aches and pains,” she said. “I think they feel happy that I can understand them and excited that someone from the same background is providing them care.”

Teaching health centers are financed by federal grants administered by the Health Resources & Services Administration, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Congress determines the amount and duration of the funding. The current allocation, an extension of the two-year funding that expired Sept. 30, runs through the end of the year.

In July, U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) introduced legislation that would fund the program for an additional three years at about $157,000 a year per student — a total of $116.5 million annually.

The amount proposed would be a 65 percent increase from the current funding of $95,000 a year per resident.

Lawmakers are likely to begin debating the funding measure this week, and it is still subject to change.

“I’m glad we moved forward with a short-term extension of the … program, but we also must advance a long-term solution to provide certainty for our teaching health centers, their residents, and their patients,” McMorris Rodgers said in a prepared statement. “Without a sustainable funding level … the program will unravel.”

Should that happen, California’s teaching health centers could draw from a pot of money administered by the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development to pay for the remainder of the current residents’ training.

Programs in other states may not have the same safety net.

“If [federal funding] went away, our residency program would have to close,” said Dr. Darrick Nelson, director of the teaching health center at Hidalgo Medical Services in Lordsburg, N.M.

Lordsburg, with a population of roughly 2,500, is a “small railroad town,” Nelson said, and like many rural towns desperately needs versatile primary care doctors.

“What you’re getting is three doctors for the price of one,” he said. “You get someone who can do pediatrics, someone who can do obstetrical care and someone who can do internal medicine.”

In California’s Central Valley, there is no medical school, and new doctors often avoid the area in favor of richer urban centers, where they can make more money.

Earlier this year, lawmakers earmarked $465 million from the state’s new tobacco tax to boost payments for some Medi-Cal providers, which could help make poor areas like the Central Valley more attractive to doctors.

At Clinica Sierra Vista’s location in east Bakersfield, where Meave’s residency is based, 75 percent of patients are covered by Medi-Cal — the state’s version of the federal Medicaid program for low-income residents — and 15 percent are uninsured, Stewart said. Asthma, diabetes and other chronic conditions are major health problems.

Veronica Ayon, a former farmworker, is one of Meave’s patients. Like her doctor, she is a native of Sonora.

Ayon, 48, was treated for cervical cancer in 2010 and last year underwent surgery to remove a malignant brain tumor. She feels comfortable with Meave because of their similar backgrounds and language, she said.

“She is very special to me,” Ayon said, speaking in Spanish inside her home in the town of Shafter, about 20 miles north of Bakersfield. “She explains things at a level I can understand.”

This story was produced by Kaiser Health News, which publishes California Healthline, a service of the California Health Care Foundation.

White House confirms Stephen Miller was a right-wing creep back in high school too

Stephen Miller (Credit: Getty/Chip Somodevilla)

You remember Stephen Miller, don’t you? He’s the smug, dead-eyed presidential adviser the White House trots out when it needs someone to deliver its transparently dishonesttalking points about immigration. Miller’s track record as a racist xenophobe reportedly stretches back to his high school days, when he dropped a childhood friend for being Latino, showed up to meetings among students of color with the sole purpose of derailing their efforts, and suggested classmates do everything in their power to demean and humiliate janitors. Now, a New York Times profile adds one more gross detail to the Miller file, which was already thick with reasons to dislike the Roy Cohn lookalike.

[Miller] jumped, uninvited, into the final stretch of a girls’ track meet, apparently intent on proving his athletic supremacy over the opposite sex. (The White House, reaching for exculpatory context, noted that this was a girls’ team from another school, not his own.)

Just so we’re clear, the White House confirms that Miller’s latent resentment toward the women who wouldn’t date him in high school was so intense he tried to show them up by competing in a girls’ track meet. This was how he affirmed his self-worth at the time, between writing editorial takedowns of Maya Angelouand screeching about how racism didn’t exist. In college, he filled his time palling around with Richard Spencer and producing propaganda with titles like The Islamic Mein Kampf.

Here’s a video of Miller doing his thing, in case it had slipped your mind.

Let them eat caviar: When charity galas waste money

(Credit: Volt Collection via Shutterstock)

When the Arc of Palm Beach County rented Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate for its 2016 Cowboy Ball, the organization lured guests with promises of “a gourmet meal in a gilded ballroom, an exciting live auction, exhilarating casino action and mesmerizing entertainment.”

On the auction block to raise money to carry out its mission of assisting people with intellectual and developmental disabilities were yacht excursions, lunch with Bravo’s “Real Housewives of Miami” star Lea Black and a “power breakfast” during New York’s Fashion Week with a branding expert.

Why juxtapose calls to feed the hungry, house the homeless and cure cancer with champagne toasts and caviar hors d’oeuvres? As researchers who study charities, we understand why opulent bashes that raise money for good causes seem puzzling. These inherently contradictory events intended to help people in need double as vehicles for the rich and famous to show off their largesse.

Now that at least 25 nonprofits – including the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, the American Red Cross and the Palm Beach Zoo – have canceled plans to hold fancy fundraisers like the Arc’s and other events at Mar-a-Lago, we wanted to explore this ironic custom.

Why nonprofits hold galas

Since glitzy entertainment and swag are mainstays in the otherwise penny-pinching world of charity fundraising, nonprofits have long forked over as much as US$350,000 to hold galas at posh venues like Trump’s Florida home and club, which originally belonged to the Post cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post. Are they worth the steep bill?

In a sense, the surprise isn’t that rich people shell out $1,000 per plate for the privilege of hobnobbing with celebrities and their wealthy peers. It’s that accounting, legal and other factors give often cash-strapped nonprofits an incentive to hold such expensive events.

Charities have learned the same lesson as casinos, which splurge on great food and booze to make gamblers spend more on betting. Posh entertaining can coax giving in ways that other fundraising methods, like mass-mailing appeal letters, can’t.

Galas combine what researchers call key determinants of giving: awareness of needs, a direct ask for assistance, the psychological “warm glow” of appearing generous and peer pressure. That, plus the throw-caution-to-the-wind mentality an open bar stocked with fine whiskey can bring on, is meant to goose generous gifts from wealthy donors.

In short, the more fun attendees have, the more they give. What’s more, peer pressure can boost fundraising when donors gather and try to one-up each other.

Where the IRS draws the line

But these events can also be wasteful.

Perhaps the biggest problem with galas is that they frequently fail to raise more money than they cost to throw or barely break even, many nonprofit experts find. In those instances, only the venues, the entertainers and other vendors profit financially. It is true that even when they don’t make a dime, events may generate intangible benefits, such as strengthening ties between nonprofits and their donors and raising a charity’s profile. But the point is that there are more economical ways to accomplish those goals.

The first lines of defense in distinguishing real charity from partying while drawing attention to a good cause are legal and regulatory constraints. However, the IRS does little of this kind of policing, and its regulations are written and enforced in a way that encourages lavish events rather than discouraging them.

Federal tax law prohibits charities from operating businesses solely to deliver money to their particular cause. But U.S. tax regulations generally do not treat fundraising as a business – even when it looks a lot like a profit-making endeavor. When a nonprofit, say, sells trips to Paris to the highest bidder, the government sees this as just another way a charity raises money for its cause. Although it looks like forbidden for-profit activity, it doesn’t treat that nonprofit as a travel agent to penalize this businesslike behavior.

The IRS, however, might probe whether nonprofits that purchase goods and services from insiders – including board members – are overpaying them. That kind of practice would most likely violate both state charity law and federal tax law.

Built-in incentives

Ratings groups such as Charity Navigator and the Better Business Bureau have the power to exert some pressure to avoid wasteful charitable spending too. But the accounting reports that underlie their methods also encourage galas.

These accounting reports of charities split spending among three categories: programming, administration and fundraising. An organization that reports excessive spending on fundraising – especially relative to how much money it raised as a result – is a red flag for waste. However, this red flag is typically not raised for over-the-top entertaining.

Why?

The costs of a fundraising event attributable to things donors enjoy, including food, drink and auctioned items, don’t have to be recorded as fundraising expenses.

Instead they can, in accounting jargon, be “netted” against donations.

In other words, if a donor pays $1,000 to attend a gala but gets a swag bag of goodies that cost the charity $900, the event reflects a (net) donation of $100. It does not have to treat the $900 spent on the bag as a fundraising cost. That approach, in turn, helps keep the costs associated with throwing fancy galas under the radar of ratings agencies, since many of the costs are not considered fundraising expenses but instead are buried in the details.

And this routine accounting practice means that charities with incentives to be frugal are generally free to break the bank for special occasions.

The flip side of this is that donors who purchase European vacations at galas or enjoy fine dining and flashy entertainment at balls cannot deduct everything they spend for these events from their federal income taxes. Only the portion of those expenditures that exceed their fair market value are deductible.

Here’s the bottom line: While galas don’t automatically signal wasteful spending, you can’t count on the authorities or other experts to call it out when they do.

There are other options, such as holding “no-go galas” – a coordinated effort in which major donors give generously without having to get glammed up to see their money pay for champagne and lobster canapes. The St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and the Metropolitan Interfaith Association in Memphis have taken this route, as has EAH, an affordable housing group active in California and Hawaii.

Instead of refusing to hold galas at venues with baggage, these nonprofits are simply letting go of this fundraising ritual.

Philip Hackney, James E. & Betty M. Phillips Professor of Law, Louisiana State University and Brian Mittendorf, Fisher College of Business Distinguished Professor and Chair, Department of Accounting & Management Information Systems (MIS), The Ohio State University

 

12 foods chefs never order at a restaurant

(Credit: Shutterstock/Twinsterphoto)

If anyone knows what to order at restaurants, it’s chefs. Taking menus from their imaginative stages to physical manifestations on plates, chefs are experts on what to order in a way that those of us who have never managed a kitchen may never be.

However, with a few pointers in menu literacy, it is possible to order better at restaurants.

“I look for things that are eye-catching to me: Anything that I haven’t seen before or a flavor combination that I can’t imagine in my mouth,” chef Nini Nguyen of Brooklyn’s Cook Space said, explaining how she first approaches a menu. If nothing extraordinary stands out, she looks for classics she enjoys eating, like moule frites, onion soup or coq au vin (particularly at a French bistro).

Limited menus may also make ordering (and dining) easier.

“I love restaurants that only make a few things. It helps me because I am very indecisive and it gives the staff the chance to focus and really elevate those few things,” Nguyen said. She also tends to look at menus before visiting a restaurant, to get excited for the meal and perhaps pre-plan what she’ll order.

Of course, the specials can always mess up your ordering plan. And vague terminology, very popular on menus that would rather list pretentious ingredients than actual preparation methods, can lead you astray. To feel good about her choice, Nguyen looks for keywords for her favorite ingredients: Hazelnuts, mushrooms, bottarga, uni, yuzu, and anything shellfish. The only ingredient she truly avoids? Goat cheese. “I just don’t have the palate for it,” she said.

What else are chefs skipping when they dine out? We asked a few to share their insights.

1. Chicken

“I never order chicken at restaurants in general because the quality and availability of other birds such as quail and guinea hen, as well as rabbit, make for much more interesting dishes,” says Yosuke Machida, chef at San Francisco’s Chambers Eat + Drink. Unless the restaurant specializes in chicken, Machida goes with “something else.”

Chef Tadaaki Ishizaki of Salt and Charcoal in Brooklyn, also never orders chicken at a restaurant not specializing in chicken, noting that it’s probably just on the menu as a crowd-pleaser for unadventurous eaters. Besides the inherent misery endured by chickens raised at factory farms, there’s another reason to avoid poultry in general. “The amount of chemicals in chicken just personally scares me,” Ishizaki said. “If the menu doesn’t list the provenance of a chicken, don’t order it unless you want a plate full of hormones and antibiotics.”

2. Chicken parmesan

Chef Phil Pretty, of Long Beach’s Restauration is fine with ordering chicken — unless it’s followed by parmesan. “I would never, ever order chicken parmesan,” Pretty said. “It’s always frozen before cooked and tastes like a gross version of chicken nuggets.”

3. Corned beef hash

Iron Chef alum Jehangir Mehta and current executive chef and co-owner of New York’s Graffiti Earth says he would never order corned beef hash at a restaurant. His rationale? The dish was invented during wartime when beef was rationed in extremely limited quantities.

“Although I have never been in any of the world wars, I know that people were forced to eat [corned beef hash] out of necessity,” Mehta said. “I don’t see why you would choose it for brunch in 2017 … there are plenty of delicious other options.” Mehta applies the same rationale to spam and eggs.

4. Seafood pasta

“This is a very hard question for a chef because, for the most part, I like to eat everything,” said Tim Cushman, chef/co-owner of Cushman Concepts (o ya, Hojoko Japanese Tavern and Covina). Still, on Italian menus (and depending on the restaurant), Cushman has a specific category he avoids: Seafood pasta. “It’s usually served with a really thin noodle like angel hair and is one of the hardest pastas to cook perfectly.”

5. Free bread

“I never eat the bread that comes before the meal. I’m usually too busy drooling on the menu. I love reading menus — it’s like a dorky foodie hobby of mine,” said chef Christena Quinn of Brack Shop Tavern in downtown Los Angeles. Plus, why fill up on bread when you’re at a restaurant for the dishes?

6. Super luxe ingredients

Chef Tim Carey of Pasadena’s Lost at Sea avoids high-end ingredients or menu add-ons like white truffles and caviar. “It’s cheaper for me to buy them wholesale and eat at home,” Carey said. Those who are not professional chefs may also find that buying these ingredients at specialty stores at retail pricing is still significantly less costly.

7. Fish on a Monday

Anthony Bourdain has since debunked his famous Kitchen Confidential adage that you should never order fish on a Monday, but plenty of chefs still exercise caution when considering what days of the week to dine out for seafood. “Fish markets are closed on Saturday so best case, the fish available over the weekend was caught on Thursday. Hence I never order fish on a Monday … unless I know the chef personally.” Kevin Adey, chef-owner of Brooklyn’s Michelin-starred Faro and former Le Bernardin cook said.

8. Seafood in general

“Unless I’m at a chef-driven spot, I generally don’t order seafood because I have trust issues,” said Chris Coleman, executive chef at Charlotte, North Carolina’s Stoke. “Freshness, quality and point of origin are sometimes questionable.” The environmental group Oceana estimates that one-third of all seafood sold in the U.S. is mislabeled.

9. Anything you can (easily) make at home

Eleven Madison Park chef Nini Nguyen (and current culinary director at Brooklyn’s Cook Space) is obviously pretty competent in the kitchen, but she’s not going to order anything off a menu that she can make at home easily. “If I order pasta, I want it to be freshly made pasta,” Nguyen said. “It doesn’t have to be fancy, it just has to be well executed and thoughtful.”

10. Any animal tattoed on the chef’s body

Chef Oscar Cabezas, of Teleferic Barcelona in Walnut Creek, California, also doesn’t order anything he can easily make at home and follows another rule for restaurants and his home cooking: He doesn’t eat any of the animals inked on his body. “It’s kind of a respect to them, like a deal: They offer me their protection and I protect them as well,” Cabezas said. His tattooed animals include rooster, snake, Mediterranean corvina (a fish), lynx and bald eagle (thankfully not popular on menus).

11. Artichokes

“Dining out is both a blessing and a curse for a cook,” said chef Claire Welle of Brooklyn’s Otway. “Being out means you’re not at work, you’re away from the kitchen and someone else is actually cooking the food for a change. But it also means that someone else is cooking your food, and somehow, a little guilt sets in. Out of pure respect, and, to be honest, a bit of irrational thinking, I’ll never order artichokes in a restaurant. The thistle is probably the most feared and time-consuming ingredient you can work with.”

Knowing that every order of artichokes that comes into a professional kitchen adds to cooks’ workloads, Welle can’t bring herself to order them at a restaurant.

12. Mesclun salad

Harold Moore of New York’s Harold’s Meat + Three stays away from mesclun salad on any menu because it “seems uninspired, generic and all too often not given any love.”

In Africa, boys think they’re smarter than girls. Boys think the same thing in the U.S.

(Credit: Getty Images)

A new study by humanitarian organization Save the Children finds that a striking number of fourth graders in the United States and West Africa believe fathers rule the household, boys are smarter than girls and girls need less schooling than their male peers.

The findings are announced in conjunction with The International Day of the Girl on Oct. 11.

The survey asked fourth graders if they agreed with a series of questions about education and social dynamics between males and females. Starting from the most basic assumptions, in the U.S., 37 percent of fourth-grade boys believe that boys are smarter than girls. In West Africa, two-thirds of boys believed the same thing.

This dynamic informs the opinion of the fourth graders that girls don’t need as much schooling as boys. About a quarter of American and West African students reported that girls don’t need as much school as boys (22 percent in the U.S. and 25 percent in Sierra Leone).

These assumptions may begin in the classroom, but they don’t end there. Ninety-four percent of boys and 92 percent of girls in Sierra Leone believe that the father is in charge of the home, and one-third of American kids agreed. In both Côte d’Ivoire and the U.S., two-thirds also believed women are better at childcare and domestic work.

When the kids leave the home, their social assumptions follow them still. Men are more equipped to be the boss at work, according to the assumptions of 17 percent of American children.

“These findings have been really useful because they put in concrete terms the kinds of issues that our teams who are on the ground every day dealing with these issues see,” said Jane Leer, Research Specialist in Save the Children’s Department of Education and Child Protection.

“What was surprising was that these norms were clearly in place from such an early age,” girls and boys age around 8 to 14. Leer is concerned that the children in the study are being socialized and internalizing the unequal gender norms.

The research was done as part of Save the Children’s program measuring the impact in areas of the world where they try to shift the views on gender equality in children. The data are based on a study of roles of girls in the classroom and society in the U.S. and the West African nations of Sierra Leone and Côte d’Ivoire.

“West Africa is one of the regions in the world where it’s most urgent that we focus on improving outcomes for girls and boys,” Leer said, since “West Africa has many of the countries where rates of child marriage are the highest, disparities in terms of primary and secondary enrollment are the highest, early and unwanted pregnancy and just discrimination more broadly.”

Save the Children has found that a girl under 15 is married every seven seconds. International Day of the Girl highlights those barriers and attempts to inspire girls to reach a higher potential.

“West Africa is by no means the only place where we see these kinds of biased attitudes,” said Leer. Which is why they compared the study to the U.S.

“Girls are worth far more than what the world tells them,” said Carolyn Miles, president & CEO of Save the Children. “Globally, we know that girls are more likely than boys to miss out on school, experience violence and live in poverty. That is why we need to invest in their education and do everything possible to delay early marriage and motherhood. By providing children equal opportunities and access to learning, every girl can realize what she’s truly worth.”

“Mr. Robot” in the age of resistance

Rami Malek in "Mr. Robot" (Credit: USA/Michael Parmelee)

Nearly all of Elliot Alderson’s problems are created by his compromised ability to relate to the world around him. The unsettled protagonist of USA Network’s “Mr. Robot,” returning Wednesday at 10 p.m., is a man split in two, with one psyche operating with cold certainty of his mission and near total disregard for the collateral damage caused by his actions.

But when Elliot (Rami Malek) believes he’s in control, he actually isn’t. A cyber-security engineer and gifted hacker, Elliot relates to the world via programming code, ciphers and algorithms, languages useful for interfacing with system mainframes and machines but that don’t account for the unpredictable nature of human reasoning. Gargantuan ambition, unchecked greed, equating entire classes of people’s right to exist with the collective net worth — these are not errors Elliot can correct with one subversive action.

He knows that now, having tried in season 1 with a hack known as “5/9” implemented by the once-mysterious Mr. Robot (Christian Slater) and his team of rogue hackers called fsociety. The idea was to create a new order, putting power back into the hands of the people by wiping out all corporate balance sheets and debt: Elliot, Mr. Robot and his friend Darlene (Carly Chaikin) set out to be techo-warriors styled after Anonymous hacktivists. As Elliot viewed things, they would be heroes.

Except for the fact that Elliot’s psychological state, initially diagnosed as social anxiety disorder, is far more fractured than series creator Sam Esmail originally presented. Elliot has done little else but show us, his invisible friend, the ways that technology caters to the individual’s ego, even as it divides the whole, making it easier for conglomerates like E Corp (the multinational Elliot refers to as Evil Corp) to shape our collective will to suit their ends. The viewer is inclined to trust him, since, as far as we can tell, he’s the good guy.

But in the way of all system updates, Esmail introduces bugs in “Mr. Robot” that drastically shift Elliot’s paradigm and change the course of a narrative that was challenging to begin with. The end of season 1 revealed that Darlene is in fact Elliot’s sister; that Mr. Robot wears the face of their deceased father Edward and is a figment of Elliot’s delusions.

Elliot and Mr. Robot are a single entity — and throughout the second season, Elliot begins to realize that Mr. Robot is running his life and could destroy the modern world as we know it. Elliot attempts to stop his alter ego from destroying the office building housing E Corp’s paper records, killing everyone inside, and takes a bullet for his efforts. He doesn’t believe the man aiming the gun at him, Tyrell Wallick (Martin Wallström), is real. But he is. And Tyrell, a former adversary, pulled the trigger on Mr. Robot’s orders, indicating that Elliot has less of a grasp on reality than he ever did.

So Esmail jammed the fabled red pill and blue pill from “The Matrix” down our throats at the exact same time, in other words. Provided this didn’t wipe your memory, it was an impressive if not altogether solid gambit.

For all of these reasons and others, “Mr. Robot” can never be characterized as a passive viewing experience. Esmail constructs the storyline with the tortuous complexity of a massive multiplayer game in which he’s the only player in with a controller. The plot’s twists, reversals and restarts are simultaneously mesmerizing, befuddling and irritating in various degrees.

Neither is purely escapist, given Esmail’s employment of political issues and cultural figures only slightly removed from our present. If not for the vibrant writing and superior performances by a cast that now includes Bobby Cannavale as a quirky facilitator, the show’s depiction of America’s accelerating slide into chaos would be draining. Esmail’s brilliant and consciously stylized directing carries a significant load as well; every shot is framed to serve as a noticeable, silent chorus, coupled with masterful sound editing designed to lock us inside Elliot’s head.

This conspicuous partnership between the writing and sensory aesthetics is in keeping with the spirit of a tale about control and the illusion, peddled on a massive scale, that We the People still have some of it. These themes remain at the core of season 3, although they’re more centralized in Elliot himself as he wrestles with the damning realization that everything he believes about the world may be wrong.

The second season repeats the refrain that nothing seen by Elliot or the audience — we also exist as a mute observer inside his head — can be trusted. Not even Elliot’s best friend Angela Moss (Portia Doubleday) is a reliable ally. And Elliot/Mr. Robot’s fsociety plan proves massively faulty. Now fsociety is in the crosshairs of law enforcement officials, with FBI Agent Dominique Dipierro (Grace Gummer) at the head of the hunting party.

And “5/9” may have cleared the way for the presumably malignant “Stage 2,” enacted by the secretive Whiterose (B.D. Wong) and the faceless zealots of The Dark Army, whose objective may be to embolden the very global conglomerates Elliot sought to take down.

Realizing that he’s created a viral fear with his intended act of liberation, Elliot wonders aloud, “Did my revolution just bury our minds instead of freeing them?”

Although the drama’s timeline places it well before the 2016 presidential election, Esmail uses it to speak to our dark present as the third season kicks off. Every thoughtfully written series does this, and in Elliot, Esmail has a shrewd mechanic of the human condition as it is processed by mobile apps, social media and search engines – those powerful predictors of human behavior and tools of mass manipulation.

Still, the drama’s portrayal of what’s really going on behind the digital curtain is particularly captivating now, when the veil between conspiracy and fact is thinner than single-ply tissue. Recent warnings made by the people who engineered the detrimental and addictive nature of social media sound a lot like the very poison Elliot rails against in voiceovers dripping with disconnected fatigue. Ongoing investigations as to the extent Facebook was intentionally used by foreign actors to mislead the American electorate shouldn’t shock anyone who watches this show.

Reality, as we know it, is frightening. But as viewed through the lens of “Mr. Robot,” Esmail makes the fictionalized version of our increasingly dystopic existence palatable, even exciting. Elliot is getting an idea that we may never be okay again, as are we. But who knows for sure if any of this is real?

Fox News host wants women to take advantage of their looks

Eboni K. Williams knows her new book, “Pretty Powerful: Appearance, Substance, and Success,” will be controversial.

In it, the Fox News host argues that having good looks and an interest in beauty should be an asset for professional women, not something that women feel makes them shallow or uninteresting — and certainly not anti-feminist.

She also rejects the idea that making this argument is perpetuating unfair beauty standards that leave out women who don’t have the physical assets to make conventional beauty work for them.

Williams says her views are simply realistic. “We look at society, I think, as we would like it to be. I’m someone who looks at society as it is,” she told me on “Salon Talks.”

“As much as I’d think we’d like to believe we’re progressing [beyond] appearance mattering as much,” she continued, “I would submit to you that with these cameras in front of us that we’re not progressing at all. In fact, I think it’s more important now what things look like than ever before.”

Williams says her book is “pro-feminist” because it encourages women to choose for themselves how they present themselves visually — a choice she says she experienced at Fox News, despite the network’s reputation for its beauty standards for on-air female talent.

“I’m also somebody who’s never been told what to wear on Fox News,” Williams said. “So I’ll wear anything from a V-neck to what amounts to a cocktail-slash-ballgown.”

While Williams describes herself as a “Southern glamour beauty queen” who likes eyelash extensions, she didn’t wear them for our interview because it was a rainy day. “You make the adjustments based on what’s viable, what’s reasonable, and what’s going to make the most sense. And really where you’re comfortable,” she said.

Watch our full “Salon Talks” conversation on Facebook.

Tune into Salon’s live shows, “Salon Talks” and “Salon Stage,” daily at noon ET / 9 a.m. PT and 4 p.m. ET / 1 p.m. PT, streaming live on Salon and on Facebook.

“All our jokes should have a purpose.”: Robin Thede lends late night new perspective

Robin Thede (Credit: Getty/Bennett Raglin)

On a Monday morning in late September, the staff of “The Rundown with Robin Thede” convened in a sunny, glass-walled conference room high atop a building on West 57th Street in Manhattan, to pitch sketches for a show that would never air. Thede, who has a strong jaw and piercing gray/blue eyes, shoulder length hair and was wearing a casual crewneck sweatshirt, sat at the head of a long conference table.

Prior to getting her own show, Thede was the head writer for “The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore.” She was the first black woman to hold that role for a late night show, and when “The Rundown” (BET) premieres on October 12, she will be the only black woman late night host on air. (She follows in the footsteps of Whoopi Goldberg, Wanda Sykes and Mo’Nique.)

For the past month, Thede’s staff, the majority of whom are women and people of color, have been building practice shows. After recapping a taped sit-down she did over the weekend with California Congresswoman Maxine Waters, Thede asked her head writer, Wayne Stamps, who was sitting next to her, what they had for her.     

This was the Monday after President Trump called football players who protested racial injustice by kneeling for the national anthem “sons of bitches” and in which he disinvited Golden State Warriors star Stephen Curry from visiting the White House. Stamps, who compared the show to “black twitter come to life,” glanced at a whiteboard on which ideas were scribbled in black marker. He told Thede that the favorite idea in the room involved her playing Stephen Curry’s five-year-old daughter, Riley.

The joke’s author elaborated. Thede, as Riley, would be in a press conference answering reporters’ questions about the incident. She could call the president a racial epithet. She could say that she just developed object permanence. Thede loved it. “We have to hit on the hypocrisy of white supremacy,” she said. “And contextualize the protests historically.”  

Other than Thede and Stamps, it was hard to tell who held what position within the room. When a premise was presented, the group of writers, researchers, producers and people in the film department resembled a memory of a good college seminar: Jokes bounced off ideas, ideas sprung from jokes. The atmosphere was jovial. From Riley Curry, the conversation turned back to the protests, and from the protests, the conversation turned to NASCAR (which Trump applauded for siding with him).   

Thede is from Davenport, Iowa, the daughter of Dave and Phyllis Thede. Her parents named her after Robin Williams. For most of her childhood, the family was poor. Dave was and is a teacher. Phyllis, who currently serves as a Democrat in the Iowa House of Representatives, worked for Headstart as a teacher’s aid, and in the library of Thede’s old middle school. They lived in a trailer park and were on food stamps. “I didn’t live in a house with a real door until I was a senior in high school,” Thede said.

The Thedes did have a few basic channels though, and Thede and her father would sometimes stay up late watching stand-up or “Saturday Night Live.” But it was Whoopi Goldberg and “In Living Color,” the ‘90s sketch show from the Wayans brothers, that were most formative. “I remember watching Whoopi Goldberg’s one woman show on VHS or PBS when I was a little kid, and I just remember being so blown away by her. She just did everything, and she does everything. And with ‘In Living Color,’ it was eye opening to me to see all those black people on television making me laugh.”

In assembling a staff, Thede was looking for people who had been underestimated in the rest of their careers. She wanted the staff to “resemble the fabric of America and not just be white dudes who went to Harvard.” She added: “I distinctly remember being in all male writer’s rooms and being referred to as ‘the girl writer.’ Or they would only let me speak if they had something for the girl character to do. So sure, as a woman or as a person of color, you feel like your opinions aren’t as valuable as other people’s. I think for me that has always been a motivator. I don’t feel like I’m a victim. I just feel like, ‘Oh, okay, I’ll just create my own things and make my own way.’”

When, during the NASCAR discussion, someone pitched a sketch where Thede would play a NASCAR driver who can’t get around the track without being pulled over, everyone laughed. But after some enthusiastic riffing on the idea from the room, Thede weighed in. “You guys are going to hate me for saying this. But” — she paused — “it feels like the easy joke. Where we can do things high quality, let’s do it high quality.”  

In her gold-accented office after the meeting, Thede explained why she liked one joke and not the other. “Playing Riley Curry will enable me to say some really powerful stuff in a super silly way. But with the NASCAR thing, it’s like ‘Oh I get it, another black person got pulled over.’ It feels like an old joke. It feels like the first joke. It’s funny, but I’m not really saying anything. It comes back to a lesson I learned from ‘The Nightly Show,’ which is that all your jokes should have a purpose.”

When “The Nightly Show” was canceled in August of 2016, Thede was devastated. “It came out of nowhere,” she said. “I think we were really about to hit the next level with the election coming.”

But the experience made Thede think that she could host a similar type of show, and it put her in the position to do so. It also informed what she didn’t want to do: “I did not want to do a daily show. It’s too hard. It’s so much work. When it came to creating my own show, I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, once a week.’ It’s why John Oliver and Sam Bee are so good — they get to spend time crafting the message and crafting what they’re going to say.”

Later that night, Thede proved to be more selective with her jokes than the most popular late night show in the country. In his “Late Show” monologue, Stephen Colbert made a version of the NASCAR joke that Thede rejected.

Where “The Rundown” will be tighter than the nightly shows, it will be different than other weeklies, like “Full Frontal” and “Last Week Tonight,” in that Thede will focus on politics and pop culture in equal measure, there will be more sketch and Thede will primarily cover issues that are relevant to black audiences.

In one of Thede’s most popular and memorable segments as a correspondent on “The Nightly Show,” she did a Women’s History Month report on “Black Lady Sign Language.” She parsed, for instance, the difference between a black woman doing a “double hand clap” and a “double hand clap on syllables” — the former being your standard congratulatory clap and the latter a furious demand.

The bit stood out to Rory Albanese, who was showrunner of “The Nightly Show” while Thede was head writer, as being funny and beyond the territory of most late night shows but also as being disarming.

“She took something where white guys might’ve been going, ‘Oh what the hell does that mean?’ and it was like, ‘Oh that’s awesome, that’s what that means!’” Albanese said. “That’s the nice thing about Robin’s whole approach, is it makes everyone feel welcome.”

In recent years, late night has been transformed as the internet has become the place where young audiences consume late night and Donald Trump’s daily newsmaking. These factors have arguably turned late night into a contest over the best take. The network shows will always have a ratings advantage over the cable shows, but come the next morning, anyone’s segment can go viral.

As the only black woman hosting a late night show, Thede is in a unique position. There are jokes that only she can tell and perspectives on issues that only she can convey. While seemingly every other host has a Donald Trump impression, Thede is the only host ready to roll out a Riley Curry impression. She can spin the camera and point a spotlight on angles and issues that are ignored by the other shows.

Albanese couldn’t think of anyone to compare Thede to comedically. “It’s not like people are going to watch her show and go, ‘Oh, this feels like Chris Rock’s standup, what the heck?’” — Rock, incidentally, is a producer of “The Rundown” — “or ‘This is like David Spade. She really has her own style and her own vibe, and I think that that’s what kind of makes it special.”

But while Thede will have space to differentiate herself from the mostly white, male competition, she also anticipates that being a black woman will be a turnoff to some viewers. “If anything, there’s a hill to climb. Because people are like, ‘Well, what is she going to have to say that matters to me?’”

There’s also the issue of audiences confusing a single voice for a singular voice. “I certainly do not represent every black person,” Thede said. She hoped that audiences would not mistake her views for those of an entire race or gender. But she also was quick to recognize the special position she would be in. The conversation turned to tragedies; at this point addressing the nation in the aftermath of a tragedy is part of a late night host’s job. So, when a tragedy occurs —  when, for instance, an unarmed black man is killed by the police — how does she process that?

“For me it’s sadness, and then it’s mobilization,” Thede said. “And yeah, it’s a weird thing to be like, ‘I wish I had a show to talk about this.’ But I know that I am in a place of privilege. Literally every other black woman in the country does not have that option but me. That’s crazy now that I think about it.”