Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 172

A new recipe for hunting alien life

Arecibo Observatory (Credit: Getty/IsaacRuiz)

Imagine stepping into a time machine, one that could traverse not only billions of years but also countless light years of space, all in search of life in the universe. Where would you find most of it, and what would it look like? The answer ��� or at least scientists��� best guess ��� might surprise you.

You might think most life out there would be like what we see on Earth today: grasses, trees and frolicking animals all orbiting yellow stars on watery worlds under blue, oxygen-rich skies. But you would be wrong. Astronomers conducting a galactic census of planets in the Milky Way now suspect most of the universe���s habitable real estate exists on worlds orbiting red dwarf stars, which are smaller but far more numerous than stars like our Sun. In part because of their immense numbers, such stars are in some respects easier for astronomers to study. Consider, for instance, the red dwarf star called TRAPPIST-1, just under 40 light-years away. In 2017 astronomers discovered it is orbited by at least seven temperate Earth-size planets. A plethora of new observatories ��� chief among them NASA���s multi-billion-dollar James Webb Space Telescope, slated to launch in 2019 ��� could soon begin studying the planets of TRAPPIST-1 and other nearby red-dwarf planets for signs of habitability and life.

In the meantime, no one really knows, of course, what you would see if you visited one of these strange worlds in your planet-hopping time machine, but if they are at all like Earth, chances are you would find a planet dominated by microbes rather than charismatic megafauna. A new study published in the January 24 edition of Science Advances explores what this curious fact might mean for alien-hunting astronomers. Co-authored by David Catling, an atmospheric chemist at the University of Washington in Seattle, the study peers deep into our planet���s history to devise a novel recipe for finding single-celled life on faraway worlds in the not-too-distant future.

Right here on Earth, most life is microbial, and a careful reading of the planet���s fossil and geochemical record reveals it always has been. Organisms like plants and animals ��� as well as the oxygen the plants produce and the animals breathe ��� are relative newcomers, having only arisen in the past half-billion years or so. Of the remaining four billion years of Earth���s history, our planet seems to have spent its first two billion as a�����slime world” ruled by��methane-belching microbes for which oxygen was not a life-giving gas, but a deadly poison. The emergence of photosynthetic cyanobacteria (named for their verdant hue, which comes from chlorophyll) defined the next two billion years, and banished the ���methanogen��� microbes to dark places where oxygen could not go ��� subterranean caverns, deep muds, and other smothered environments where they still exist to this day. The cyanobacteria gradually greened our planet, slowly filling the atmosphere with oxygen and setting the stage for today���s familiar world. Touching your time machine down on Earth at a random point in the planet���s history, roughly nine times out of 10 you would only find single-celled life or algae and would risk suffocation in the oxygen-starved open air.

This creates a quandary for scientists hoping to use the Webb telescope, rather than a time machine, to seek out other life-bearing worlds. Molecules in a planet���s atmosphere can absorb passing starlight, imprinting barcode-like signatures on the light that astronomers can then detect. Plentiful oxygen in a planet���s atmosphere is one of the most obvious barcodes to look for in a planet���s atmosphere across the light years, because it is one of the hardest things to make sans biology. In the parlance of astrobiologists, the highly reactive gas is a potent ���biosignature,��� because in large concentrations it tends to be ���out of equilibrium��� with its surroundings. That is, oxygen tends to fall out of the air as rust and other mineral oxides rather than linger as a gas, so when it exists in abundance, something ��� photosynthetic life, in Earth���s case ��� must be constantly replenishing it. But with our planet as their guide, astrobiologists are forced to acknowledge that oxygen may be the least likely thing they will ever see ��� genetic evidence suggests the complex oxygen-producing photosynthetic pathway pioneered by cyanobacteria is an extraordinary evolutionary innovation that only appeared once��throughout the entire multi-billion-year history of Earth���s biosphere. One might expect, then, that any living ���Earth-like��� world scientists will ever gaze upon through telescopes is likely to be anoxic, or lacking in oxygen. What other biosignatures should they seek instead?

Right now, the best way to find an answer is to hop back into the time machine. Not a real one, of course, but rather a virtual voyager, a computer model that plumbs the otherwise-inaccessible depths of Earth���s anoxic past (or an alien planet���s present), exploring the possible chemistry of gases in the atmosphere and ocean that could have occurred there. Use data from old rocks and other models to dial in your best guess for the environmental conditions of, for instance, the Earth circa three billion years ago, let the computer crunch the numbers, and see if any obvious imbalances ��� potential biosignatures ��� pop out. This is exactly what Catling did, working with his doctoral student Joshua Krissansen-Totton and Stephanie Olson, a PhD candidate at the University of California, Riverside.

Their ���time machine��� is essentially just a numerical approximation of an immense volume of air trapped in a large, transparent box with the open ocean at the box���s base; the computer simply calculates how the constituent gases in the box should react and mix with each other over time. Eventually the interacting gases use all the ���free energy��� available in the box and reach equilibrium ��� a point where no further reactions can occur without more energy from outside, a bit like soda water that has lost its fizz. Comparing the cocktail of exhausted gases with the livelier mixture originally trapped in the box reveals precisely where and how the world���s atmosphere was initially out of equilibrium. From first principles, this approach can replicate the most obvious example of atmospheric disequilibrium today on our planet ��� the presence of oxygen and traces of methane (the latter being the gentle exhalations of the once-mighty methanogen biosphere). Simple chemistry shows these gases should not co-exist for long, and yet on Earth they do, offering a clear sign for any watchful alien astronomers that something lives and breathes on this particular pale blue dot. But for the ancient, anoxic Earth, the modeling shows something different.

���Our research provides the answer��� to the question of how to find anoxic life on an Earth-like planet, Catling says. ���Most life elsewhere is probably simple ��� like microbes ����� and most planets have probably not advanced to a stage of an oxygenated atmosphere. The combination of relatively abundant carbon dioxide and methane (absent carbon monoxide) is a biosignature of such a world.���

Krissansen-Totton explains in more detail: ���Having methane and carbon dioxide together is unusual, because carbon dioxide is carbon���s most oxidized state, and methane (composed of a carbon atom linked to four hydrogen atoms rather than any oxygen at all) is its least,��� he says. ���Producing those two extremes of oxidation in an atmosphere at once is challenging to do without life.��� A rocky, ocean-bearing planet with more than 0.1 percent methane in its atmosphere should be considered a potentially inhabited planet, the researchers say. And if the atmospheric methane reaches levels of 1 percent or more? In that case, ���potentially��� doesn���t cut it ��� such a world would ���likely��� be home to alien life.

Jim Kasting, an atmospheric chemist at The Pennsylvania State University unaffiliated with the study says its results are ���on the right track,��� even though ���the idea that methane might be a biosignature in an anoxic atmosphere is not exactly new.���

What is new, Catling and his co-authors say, is their robust treatment of how a methane-based biosignature would manifest itself, and how it could be discerned from nonliving sources. According to their models, methane in the atmosphere of an anoxic Earth-like planet would typically react with the carbon dioxide that still filled the air, mingling further with another ubiquitous gas, nitrogen, as well as water vapor to ultimately rain out as heavier compounds. Further calculations by Catling and his team conclude that no abiotic methane sources on a rocky planet could produce enough of the gas to counteract this process ��� whether it is volcanic outgassing from a planet���s interior, chemical reactions in hydrothermal vents, even asteroid impacts. Only a thriving planetary population of methane-belching bacteria could account for the gas. And, most crucially, even if abiotic sources could come up with enough methane, they would almost inevitably produce a great deal of carbon monoxide as well ��� a gas poisonous to animals but positively delicious to many microbes. Thus, methane and carbon dioxide together, unaccompanied by carbon monoxide, on a rocky, ocean-bearing world would best be interpreted as an airtight sign of anoxic life.

This is good news for astronomers. The Webb telescope, it turns out, will be hard-pressed to directly discern oxygen in any potentially habitable planet it surveys during its mission. Just as your eyes can see visible light but not radio waves or x-rays, Webb���s vision is tuned for the infrared ��� a portion of the spectrum ideal for studying ancient stars and galaxies, but where oxygen���s barcode-like absorption lines are rather slight and sparse. Consequently, some researchers have feared the search for life would have to wait for other, more capable telescopes many years or decades in the future. But although Webb cannot easily see oxygen, its infrared eyes could excel at glimpsing signs of anoxic life. According to Nikole Lewis, Webb���s project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, the telescope could perform the simultaneous detection of methane, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide in the atmospheres of some planets around red dwarf stars. And not just big, bloated gassy planets where we wouldn���t expect life to exist anyway. ���Webb can achieve the required precision to detect the molecules in the atmospheres of planets like those in the TRAPPIST-1 system,��� Lewis says.

Even so, Lewis and others note that Webb could still struggle to fulfill the most crucial part of Catling���s criterion ��� determining the relative abundances of each gas to pin down whether methane on some distant planet is due to an erupting volcano or burping microbes. Consequently, Catling isn���t holding his breath for Webb to find an anoxic biosphere on some red dwarf world.

���Webb probably has to get lucky to find life, but you never know, so this is potentially exciting for astrobiology,��� he says. ���We want to make more people aware that there���s more to looking for life than looking for oxygen.���

FBI targeted the left with devious tactics for years ��� now Trump gives the agency the same treatment

FBI headquarters, Washington D.C. (Credit: Wikimedia)

The release of��a Republican memo��trashing the senior Justice Department has given the FBI a taste of its own medicine: a mendacious and misleading attack designed to impugn dissent and confuse democratic discourse, all dressed up in the righteous rhetoric about the American way.

From 1958 to 1974, the FBI routinely engaged in this sort of activity against its perceived enemies. The notorious��Cointelpro����� Counterintelligence Program ��� targeted civil rights, antiwar and other leftist groups for infiltration, disruption and destruction. Now that the president and his allies are giving the FBI the Cointelpro treatment, the Bureau and its leaders are indignant, understandably so.

The Association of FBI Agents protested the release of the memo, written by House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), as unfair to its members.

Bureau officials, most of them Republicans, are stunned to discover that the Bureau���s tactics have been turned against it in the service of protecting President Trump from criticism and investigation. They are appalled that former supporters on the political right are accusing them of unpatriotic behavior. The Republican memo, charges Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Arizona), is ���clear and convincing��evidence of treason.���

In the face of such attacks, echoed by the president, FBI director Christopher Wray has chosen��not to resign��but to say “actions speak louder than words.”

One law enforcement official told the��Washington Post,�����There���s a lot of anger. The irony is it���s a conservative-leaning organization, and it���s being trashed by conservatives. At first it was just perplexing. Now there���s anger, because it���s not going away.���

Cointelpro Begins

The FBI men should have a new appreciation of how Martin Luther King Jr., the Black Panthers, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and other leftist groups felt when the FBI was trying (sometimes successfully) to destroy them in the 1960s.

The FBI is learning the hard way that Cointelpro tactics, dressed up in patriotic plumage, are not so easily deflected.

The origins of Cointelpro help explain why. Cointelpro was launched by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover in 1956, but the program was turbocharged in 1958 with the help of��James Angleton, the chief of CIA counterintelligence. That’s when Angleton launched the first U.S program of mass surveillance, intercepting international mail to or from the United States on a massive scale. He fed the results to Hoover under a program called Project Hunter. With the CIA opening 10,000 letters a year, the FBI had a vast new supply of actionable intelligence. Hoover used the Hunter material to feed the Cointelpro beast. And so it grew.

The essence of Cointelpro was to use this secret intelligence against the targeted group. Armed with knowledge of the target���s personal activities, Cointelpro agents wrote anonymous letters, advocated provocative actions and spread rumors to discredit the targeted group with the public, while hobbling its ability to organize.

Cointelpro operatives eavesdropped on Martin Luther King Jr.’s extramarital affairs, threatened to disclose them and urged him to��commit suicide.��A Cointelpro informant��gave the FBI a floor plan��of the home where Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was staying, along with the false story that weapons were stored there. Hampton was then executed in a police raid to seize the non-existent weapons.

The success of Cointelpro depended on allies in Congress, such as the House Un-American Activities Committee, and friendly news organizations such as the��Hearst newspaper chain, to spread and legitimize its poisonous messages while hiding their source. Cointelpro continued until it was exposed in 1974 and the FBI was forced to renounce it.

Cointelpro��Redux

The Nunes memo reprises many Cointelpro tactics.

The selective release of secret intelligence information to justify a propagandistic line of attack? Check. The memo discloses some classified details about how the FBI sought a surveillance warrant in the case of Carter Page and twists that into a narrative of partisan bias.

The use of personal information to humiliate and divide? Check. Trump and his allies have seized on texts between��FBI agent Peter Strzok and attorney Lisa Page, with whom he was having an affair, as proof of bias and immorality.

Reliance on congressional committees and friendly news organizations to spread the misleading narrative? Check.

The House Intelligence Committee is now playing the role of HUAC, which refused to give its victims a chance to respond. The Committee refused to let the FBI comment on the memo written by chairman Devin Nunes, and refused to release the response of ranking Democrat Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). Trump preemptively charged Schiff as a “liar and a leaker” to prevent him from leaking his own memo.

Fox News and Breitbart now generate reams of copy amplifying the original misleading claims. For example, Fox News reports that an anti-Trump dossier paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign was��key to the investigation��of Trump���s associates ��� except, it wasn���t.

Carter Page was first targeted for surveillance in July 2016, three months before the FBI received the dossier from a trusted senior British intelligence officer. In addition, the memo itself reveals that the surveillance of Page had been renewed prior to receipt of the dossier. As Paul Rosenzweig, who investigated the Clinton White House in the 1990s, pointed out in��Politico, these renewals could only have been granted if��new��evidence had demonstrated sufficient grounds for suspicion of Page, meaning independent reviews by separate judges actually validated the FBI���s request.

Nonetheless, as the victims of Cointelpro learned, fighting back against false and inflammatory narratives of treachery and treason is tricky. Counterintelligence doctrine is perniciously clever in constantly seeking to use the target���s defensive tactics against him. When J. Edgar Hoover used wiretaps of Martin Luther King���s conversations with leftist adviser Stanley Levinson to spread the lie that “King is a communist,” the only way King could rebut the accusation was to repeat it ��� which is exactly what Hoover was counting on. So King did not respond and the charge lingered.

Trump and his allies know that the FBI cannot respond to the unfounded accusations without repeating them. Whether or not the accusations about the FBI���s handling of the Trump investigation are true is ultimately beside the point. It is possible that the Republicans have��overplayed a weak hand. The more attention the Nunes memo gets, the thinner its claims seem to be. Schiff���s memo, if it is made public, will provide more context and perspective for those who care about the facts.

But the goal of counterintelligence doctrine is to sow confusion, not establish facts, which the FBI men should know better than anyone. Cointelpro-style tactics work. They damaged the American left in the 1960s and ’70s and they are��damaging the FBI today,��by delegitimizing its investigation of President Trump. As the FBI man told the��Post,�����it���s not going away.���

“The Gilded Age” reflects upon our divisions then, and now

A carrying-in boy at a Virginia glass factory. He worked all night, every other week. (Credit: Museum Of The City Of New York)

It is somewhat fitting that ���The Gilded Age,��� the latest installment of the PBS series ���American Experience,��� kicks off with the story of a hotel orgy. Of wealth.

The setting is an extravagant gala that took place at Waldorf Hotel, which attracted everybody who was anybody in New York City. Photographs of attendees are styled to resemble portraiture of European aristocracy, with elaborately dressed and coiffed men and women engaging in what appears to be an insane game of one-upmanship. ��Other photo portraits of an earlier ball hosted by the Vanderbilts in 1883 are more ridiculous yet. In one, a woman wears a luxuriously feathered hat. Another features a lady of means sporting an entire taxidermized bird on her head. Both may have been outdone by one person who has made a jaunty chapeau of what appears to be half of a feline. Yes. A cat.

Though this event is meant to announce the Vanderbilts��� place in the upper crust of society, all of these visuals stand as history���s testament to how insanely broad the chasm between rich and poor had become. To contrast this opulence the documentary���s director and producer Sarah Colt includes many photos of the less fortunate and includes a brief account of an impoverished mother who records she has spent the last cent she has and was forced to send her children off to work without food.

���The Gilded Age,��� premiering Tuesday at 9 p.m. on PBS member stations, isn���t the first work to observe the distinct parallels between today���s political and economic landscape and the era comprised by the three decades following the Civil War���s end. Nor will it be the last.

At the moment, in fact, the era appears to have something of a romantic aura about it. Its very name is fascinating, with its implication of excess and glorified ostentatiousness. NBC is betting on the universality of period���s allure, in fact, to ensure the successful launch of its own scripted take: ���The Gilded Age,��� from ���Downton Abbey��� creator Julian Fellowes, is set join the broadcast schedule in 2019.

Before this FX will debut its drama that follows the Getty family, a clan whose wealthy was built after the Gilded Age faded but whose foundational members both emulated and learned from the mistakes of its predecessors.

Like all the names remembered by history the Astors, the Vanderbilts, industrialists such as Andrew Carnegie and financial giants such as J.P. Morgan carved out reputations that remain with us today. They are held of as examples that ours is a system in which anyone with pluck, drive and nerve and claim the millions waiting as a reward for their ingenuity and hard work.

This is the part of history���s refrain that���s glamorous and easy to remember. The part about ���The Gilded Age��� so many forget, as historian Nell Irvin Painter describes, is that the era���s title represents a wide deceit committed upon Americans. At that time of that Vanderbilt gala, the majority of America���s economic fortune was tied to around 4,000 families, less than one��percent of the population. Together this small group held as much wealth as the other 11.6 million families combined.

The richest represent a patina, a shiny exterior camouflaging the rot underneath.

Never does the ���The Gilded Age��� point out the similarities and connections between the parallels between the turn of the 20th century and the times we���re living in, but it doesn���t have to. Those photos and the description of the lengths to which Alva Vanderbilt goes to ensure her family���s brand is promoted in the press can be thought of as the ancestor of social media.

The Vanderbilts still have prominence in our culture, thanks to Gloria and her son and Anderson Cooper. But the family in their heyday bears more than a few similarities, perhaps, to the Kardashian-Wests.

Even the how of their wealth building may seem familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of the history of today���s tech giants, as the country���s capitalist system transformed from a structure based upon localized commerce with one dependent on an urbanized workforce tied to industry and connected by new means of shipping. At the turn of last century, it was railroads. Now, it���s planes.

All of these alterations��changed consumer habit and, in turn, shifted the distribution of wealth and the power ordinary citizens have to impact our democracy.

Still with us as well are the old ideas that America���s poor somehow deserve their lot, which leads into a political history that receives a profound examination of ���The Gilded Age.��� This counterbalance to the tales of Morgan���s aggressive bombast tells the stories of Mary Elizabeth Lease and Henry George, whose efforts spurred a swell of working class populism that threatened to topple the two-party system.

They did not succeed, as we know, but they posed the same issues with which we���re wrestling now, as we look toward a midterm election season seeking to course-correct from a path that has led American to its current socially and politically riven state.

“The essence of democracy is equality. Everybody gets one vote,��� historian H.W. Brands observes in the ���The Gilded Age,” ���The essence of capitalism is inequality.���

The question, then, is as classic as that black and white archival footage: Who does government truly work for?

As a history lesson ���The Gilded Age��� is constructed to be as pleasing to view as its information download can be stunning. Photos and sketches of the legendary Vanderbilt mansion and other architectural markers of wealth are impressive by today���s standards. Beyond all this, there is a comfort in the work���s caution, in that this time period stands as proof that we���ve been to this brink, tumbled over its cliff, survived and returned. Perhaps we���ll learn from the mistakes of yesteryear���s titans. But that requires scratching beneath the veneer of gold that seeks to distract us, even now.

“An American Marriage” by Tayari Jones: Oprah’s new book club pick delivers

An American Marriage: A Novel by Tayari Jones (Credit: AP/Jordan Strauss/Nina Subin/Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill)

The statistics on wrongful convictions and race are damning; justice, as imperfect as it already is, definitely isn���t colorblind in America. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, African Americans make up 47 percent of known wrongful convictions in America, despite being only 13 percent of the population. On sexual assault convictions, a black prisoner serving time is 3.5 times more likely to be innocent than a white person convicted of sexual assault charges; among those exonerated, African Americans still spend 4.5 years longer in prison than their white counterparts.

It is one thing to know the numbers, and another thing to know, to love, the��individuals affected. The wrongfully convicted and imprisoned lose years of freedom and parts of their humanity those on the outside can only imagine; their families and loved ones lose those years with them and also, very likely upon return, the person the exoneree was before incarceration. Exonerees of color and their families must grapple with a double dose of injustice �����the failure of the system that led to the wrongful conviction itself, and the systemic racism baked into our justice system �����and the toll that it takes on a person���s body, heart, soul.

What does that time and dual injustice, and the price both extract, do to a man, to a family, to a marriage? Tayari Jones��� intriguing fourth novel, ���An American Marriage��� (Algonquin Books), tells the suspenseful and compelling story of such a family living these ineffable questions.

Roy and Celestial first met while students at Atlanta���s venerable HBCU sibling schools, Morehouse and Spelman �����he shared a dorm room wall with her childhood best friend Andre ��� though it wasn���t until a chance encounter years later in New York, where she was a grad student and waitress and he in the city for a corporate��business��trip, that they fell in love despite their differences.

Roy hails from the small town of Eloe, Louisiana, where his hard-working (but not poor, Roy clarifies) parents Olive and Big Roy raised him; Celestial, an artist, grew up in Atlanta, the daughter of a self-made millionaire. They are enamored with each other and with each other���s ambitions,��and optimistic about their bright future together. Roy, a successful textbook sales rep with an entrepreneurial streak, sees Atlanta as the springboard for his real life, though he���s not overly resentful of his upbringing. ���Eloe may be in Louisiana,��� he narrates, ���not a state brimming with opportunity, but it is located in America, and if you���re going to be black and struggling, the United States is probably the best place to do it.��� Celestial is a rising artistic star, and when she and Roy travel down to Eloe to visit his parents one Labor Day weekend, her major problem is a disapproving mother-in-law whose approval could likely be won upon a grandchild���s birth.

Roy and Celestial were married for just a year and a half when, during that emotional visit to Eloe, a chance meeting with a woman in the hotel hallway leads to Roy being wrongly charged with and convicted of rape and sent to prison. Everything they had and had built is threatened from that point on.

Told in alternating points of view, and through epistolary form during the period of incarceration, Jones��� portrait of a love still too young and fragile to know if it can withstand Roy���s sentence challenges the easy, sentimental beliefs readers might have about what they would do in the couple���s shoes.

Would you drive hours every week, submitting to the humiliating rituals of the prison visit, or would you try to maintain some semblance of the life you had been trying to build before? Would you fear a pregnancy under those circumstances or welcome it? Would you stay faithful to the person you married, even if nothing about��being married to an incarcerated person resembled what you knew a marriage to be? Who would you allow to comfort you, and how? Would you be able to pick up, after this shared horror, right where you left off?

I like to think I know how I would answer��those��questions, but who��really does until tested?��I keep returning to this haunting exchange of letters between Roy and Celestial, painfully brief but saying so much about the status of their marriage and the choices they face:

Dear Celestial,

I am innocent.

Dear Roy,

I am innocent, too.

Celestial, for her part, never thought she���d have to face these questions, either. In one of her letters to Roy, she confesses that though she knows what it means to be black in America, the way in which their lives were derailed still takes her, a child of relative privilege, by surprise:

���I even remember a man who came to speak at Spelman who had been wrongfully imprisoned for decades. Did you see him? He was there along with the white woman who pointed the finger at him in the first place. They both got saved or something. Even though they��stood��right there in front of me, they felt like a lesson from the past, a phantom from Mississippi. What did it have to do with us, college students piled��in the chapel��for convocation credit? Now I wish I could remember what they said. I���m bringing this up because I knew that things like this happen to people, but by��people, I didn���t mean us.���

Today Oprah Winfrey announced that ���An American Marriage��� is the Oprah Book Club���s latest selection. This is Jones��� fourth novel (all set in Atlanta), following 2011���s ���Silver Sparrow,��� lauded as one of the best books of that year by many outlets, including O, the Oprah Magazine and Salon. The best book club selections engage��their readers in��a true communal experience along with a story well-told, and Jones has crafted a narrative that makes a definitive statement �����the American justice system targets black men �����while allowing for rich open-ended conversations about her memorable characters to flourish (The details Jones includes about Roy���s accuser, and what she leaves out, could drive an entire evening���s discussion). “An American Marriage” delivers on all fronts,��raising questions both intimate and epic about the intersections of race and class, the burdens and joys of shared history, and��what it means to commit to a future together.

The mental health and loneliness paradox

(Credit: Getty/stock-eye)

Human closeness is fundamental to our mental well-being, but many people have hurdles to human closeness.

“The only takeaway from the Harvard Longevity Project, which is the longest running social study ever done, was that people need to have good relationships to feel well,” says Kira Asatryan, a certified relationship coach, professional coach and loneliness expert, and my first guest on this episode of “The Lonely Hour.”��“That study tracked the lives of Harvard men for 75 years. So, it’s powerful stuff.”

“The other thing is that the world has changed very rapidly in the last couple decades, but our brains are very ancient,” she adds. “Our brains want to be around other people ��� it makes us feel safe, it makes us feel cared about, it makes us feel good.”

Mental illness ��� whether it���s anxiety, depression, addiction or��something else ��� can be isolating. It can be a hurdle to human closeness, and without that, the problem might get worse.

In this episode, I also talk to Kat Kinsman, an editor at the breakfast site Extra Crispy. (She was editor at large at Tasting Table at the time of our interview.) A lifelong struggle with anxiety led Kinsman to start writing about that, too, most recently in her book “Hi, Anxiety.”

“I project a really positive and bubbly image out in the world,” says Kinsman. “I go on TV, I go on the radio, and people think a very particular thing about me. That’s because I hide myself away when I’m not in a good spot.”

Kinsman says writing about anxiety was almost a way of apologizing to her friends. “It was during the holiday time, I was missing parties, I was not coming out and seeing friends. They were hurt. I was tired of hurting people who thought I maybe was just blowing them off. I had to come out and say, ‘Sometimes I can’t leave my house. Sometimes this is what’s going on. I want to reach out to you, I can’t. I can’t even respond to your email. I’m feeling too low and too terrible.'”

“I’m only ever going to manage this better,” she says. “And I’m getting better and better at it all the time.”

Kinsman says she “lucked out” when she found her husband, who understands that she ‘s a work in progress.

“He’s a fixer, and he wants nothing more than for me to feel good and to be happy. So the biggest thing has been me saying to him, ‘Look, I love you and I know you’re doing this because you love me. But you’re not going to fix me. The best thing you can possibly do is live your life. I would die if I thought that I was keeping you from your life. Go and do the things, just tell me that you’re going to come home and you’re not going to leave.'” He listened, and “he’s never tried to change me,” she says.

Kinsman has since founded Chefs with Issues,��a publishing project that helps people in the restaurant industry deal with mental health issues.

Listen to the full episode below.

Sorry, but “Lady Doritos” are not actually happening

(Credit: AP/Mark Lennihan)

It almost could have been a��passage from “The Handmaid’s Tale” or an advertising campaign from the 1950s. But no, it was just another day in 2018.

On Feb. 2, speculation circulated��around the internet that PepsiCo was getting to ready to��introduce��a line of “Lady Doritos” ��� that is Doritos for women which would have��less audible crunch and sticky orange powder. However, it is Salon’s sad duty to report that the company announced on Monday that “Lady Doritos” aren���t happening after all.

As a statement from PepsiCo said, “The reporting on a specific Doritos product for female consumers is inaccurate,” adding “We already have Doritos for women ��� they���re called Doritos, and they���re enjoyed by millions of people every day. At the same time, we know needs and preferences continue to evolve, and we���re always looking for new ways to engage and delight our consumers.”

A spokewoman for the company told the New York Times that something target towards women was in the works, but “I can���t yet give any more details beyond what Indra relayed in the podcast . . .�� However, I will be able to in a few months.”

It was a sentiment echoed by Doritos’ official Twitter account.

We already have Doritos for women ��� they���re called Doritos, and they���re loved by millions.

— Doritos (@Doritos) February 6, 2018

Rumors surfaced after PepsiCo C.E.O. Indra Nooyi��suggested in a podcast with the��hosts of Freakonomics that the company was making plans to launch a series of snacks engineered for today’s active, easily embarrassed woman. Nooyi pointed to specific problems��that she alleged prevent women from fully enjoying the flavored corn chip.

“When you eat out of a flex bag,” said Nooyi, “one of our single-serve bags ��� especially as you watch a lot of the young guys eat the chips, they love their Doritos, and they lick their fingers with great glee, and when they reach the bottom of the bag they pour the little broken pieces into their mouth, because they don���t want to lose that taste of the flavor, and the broken chips in the bottom.��� She added, “Women would love to do the same, but they don���t.”

It���s also the possibility of crunching “too loudly in public” that makes it harder for women to eat Doritos, according to Nooyi.

“[Women] don’t like to crunch too loudly in public. And they don’t lick their fingers generously and they don’t like to pour the little broken pieces and the flavor into their mouth,” she said.

The hosts asked her if there would soon be male and female versions of chips, to which she replied, “It���s not a male and female as much as ‘are there snacks for women that can be designed and packaged differently?’ And yes, we are looking at it, and we���re getting ready to launch a bunch of them soon.”

“For women,�� low-crunch, the full taste profile, not have so much of the flavor stick on the fingers, and how can you put it in a purse? Because women love to carry a snack in their purse,” she explained in perfect internal corporatespeak.

While companies creating marketing, advertising campaigns and products specific for women is nothing new, it���s something that has attracted much criticism as of late, the idea of “Lady Doritos” being perhaps the most notable example on social media. As well,��studies continue to suggest gender-stereotypic content can influence children���s interests from a young age,��something that has been one of the many barriers keeping some women from pursuing their true passions in life and reaching overall social and economic parity with men.��Certainly, ghettoizing the snack aisle with “Lady Doritos”��wouldn’t have brought them into crunch equity with their male peers.

The “Game of Thrones” bros will helm a new “Star Wars” trilogy

David Benioff and D.B Weiss (Credit: AP/Vince Bucci)

David Benioff and��D.B. Weiss, the producers��behind HBO’s tentpole fantasy epic “Game of Thrones,” will write and produce a new series of “Star Wars” films, Disney announced today. “David and Dan are some of the best storytellers working today,” Kathleen Kennedy, president of Lucasfilm (the company behind the “Star Wars” series), said in a statement. “Their command of complex characters, depth of story and richness of mythology will break new ground and boldly push Star Wars in ways I find incredibly exciting.”

Benioff��and Weiss’ new series “will be separate from the main episodic Skywalker saga that started with ‘Star Wars: A New Hope’ and is slated to wrap up with 2019���s ‘Star Wars: Episode IX,'” Variety reported. “It will also exist independently from a Rian Johnson-helmed��series that was announced last year.”

Since Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2012, the studio has��launched multiple spinoffs to extend the��seminal scifi series��and further capitalize on their investment. Standalone films include��“Rogue One: A Star Wars Story”,��released in 2016,��“Solo”, which is��set to arrive this year, and other forthcoming projects.

The announcement from Disney also comes as “Game of Thrones” is ending. The acclaimed series, adapted from George R.R. Martin’s books, starts��its final season on HBO in 2019. Controversially, Benioff and Weiss said they were developing “Confederate,” a new series for HBO that imagined a contemporary America��in which the Confederacy won the Civil War and slavery persisted. Not even a month later, white nationalists marched in Charlottesville, many brandishing Confederate flags. Many asked aloud why we needed a series that explored an alternate history of America, when real-life white supremacists were��already actively vying for that fantasy to become reality? According to Variety, HBO declined to comment on the status of “Confederate,” though development seems to have slowed down to a gentle crawl.

In a joint statement, Benioff and Weiss breezed by that, saying the “Star Wars” films will be their next project. “In the summer of 1977 we traveled to a galaxy far, far away, and we���ve been dreaming of it ever since,” Benioff and Weiss said. “We are honored by the opportunity, a little terrified by the responsibility, and so excited to get started as soon as the final season of ‘Game of Thrones’ is complete.”

The two have also been noted for creating storylines and scenes that demonstrate a regressive approach to questions of rape and feminism. Wonton, bloody violence, something rarely seen in the “Star Wars” universe, is also a signature of the producing team. That said, they have also offered well-rounded, fierce women characters and, yes, one of the most engrossing ��� if��regularly problematic ��� shows in recent memory.

Disney did not offer any specifics for when the new films from Benioff and Weiss will hit the big screen.

Actor Diane Neal of “Law & Order: SVU” is running for Congress

Diane Neal (Credit: Getty/Michael Loccisano)

Law can often be an arena that predates a career in politics. Think Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton and many, many more. Thus is kinda, sorta the journey for Diane Neal, the actor who played the crusading ADA Casey Novak��on the long-running crime series “Law & Order: SVU” from 2001 to 2012.

Neal announced Tuesday morning that she is running for Congress via Twitter.

MORNING!
Ok, so it���s ON!!! But I���m doing with nearly no staff, no donations (yet), with no party. Website will be up later today (fingers crossed) and all ready to go. But goal is bigger than parties. Goal is no negativity. Goal is HIGH ROAD all the way.

— Diane Neal (@DianeNeal) February 6, 2018

Neal, 41, is a registered Democrat and New York resident, and plans to run for the 19th Congressional District seat as an independent (presuming she earns the 3,500 signatures needed to��obtain a spot on the November ballot).

And that���s why I dropped off social- to think, read, write, ponder. Reacquaint with every bit of Political Phil., History and Ethics from The Republic to Rackove. To make a plan for us worthy of American Ideals. So… pic.twitter.com/exFmokdxNl

— Diane Neal (@DianeNeal) February 6, 2018

Neal said the campaign is still in its early stages ��� she has no staff, donations or party affiliation as of yet. Neal notes that this reality means she will be “beholden to no one but US and to integrity & to the best version envisioned by imperfect, but wise, men centuries ago.”

Off to finish web stuff. I���ll be back. SOON. THANK YOU for all love and support. It going to be a wild ride. I���ll be beholden to no one but US and to integrity & to the best version envisioned by imperfect, but wise, men centuries ago. Let the Grand Experiment live on!!!

— Diane Neal (@DianeNeal) February 6, 2018

There are literally only three of us that have been working around the clock for weeks and weeks to get all campaign infrastructure up and running. I���m looking at screens so much my eyes might explode. (It���s not really a thing, but it feels like it could be!)

— Diane Neal (@DianeNeal) February 6, 2018

Neal��told the Daily Freeman��“I���m a little Libertarian, I���m a lot liberal, mostly progressive, but I have this amazing ability to be able to take really complicated policy and break it down into edible sound bites, which is something most progressive liberals cannot do.”

“I love this country,” she added. “The majority of my family, most are active service at the moment. Even my grandmother, who escaped the Holocaust, she came to New York, she joined the Navy.”

Neal also has experience with President Donald Trump. She told the Daily Freeman��that she met Trump as a judge on his TV show “The Apprentice”. During one afterparty, Neal said she was determined to find out if his hair was real.

“Donald and I are roughly the same height,” she said. “After talking with him for a while, he stood in front of me [with his back turned], and I slipped a chopstick right in that thing because I wanted to see what it was made out of, how it was attached.”

“I started getting a nice amount of loft,” she continued. “I���m sure that someone has a tape of this somewhere . . . and I swear to God it was like I was about to see the singularity. It was like all time and space was ending. Then he walked away and he took the chopstick with him, and for the last 15 years, I���ve wondered, where did it fall out?”

Neal seems genuine in her bid and her Trump story is amazing, but��even the most��well-meaning��celebrities��aren’t likely to be��the answer��those against Trump are looking for in��2018 elections (or indeed a solution for this country’s many ills).��After all, we��already have a celebrity politician in the highest office in the land. Weren’t we going to try to do better this year?

Trump roots for a government shutdown in order to get his way: report

(Credit: AP/Evan Vucci)

President Donald Trump got into a confrontation with Rep. Barbara Comstock, R-Va., at the White House because��Trump said��he revealed he’s in favor of another government shutdown.

According to a snippet of the transcript being tweeted by White House pool reporters, Comstock refuted Trump after he reportedly said he was in favor of another government shutdown if an immigration deal isn���t made by Friday.

���We don���t need a government shutdown on this,��� Comstock said, emphasizing that both parties see ���the downside of a shutdown.���

Trump reportedly interrupted Comstock and reiterated his desire ���to risk a shutdown over immigration policy.���

“You can say what you want,��� Trump said. ���We are not getting support of Democrats.���

Steven Shepard of Politico tweeted a video of the “semi-confrontation” ��� as he called it.

Video of the Comstock-Trump semi-confrontation –> https://t.co/HxNikeHgrU

— Steven Shepard (@POLITICO_Steve) February 6, 2018

Steve Holland, who covers politics for Reuters, asked Trump about his comment on the government shutdown, to which��Trump responded:

“I would shut it down over this issue. I can’t speak for everybody at the table but I will tell you, I would shut it down over this issue. If we don’t straighten out our border, we don’t have a country. Without borders we don’t have a country. So would I would shut it down over this issue? Yes. I can’t speak for our great representatives here but I have a feeling they may agree with me.”

His words��suggest that Trump��may use a government shutdown as a way to threaten policymakers to get on board with his immigration framework����� an��exploitative move,��given how Trump consistently casts blame on the Democrats. Indeed, in January Trump also blamed Democrats for the brief government shutdown.

���Democrats are far more concerned with Illegal Immigrants than they are with our great Military or Safety at our dangerous Southern Border,��� Trump tweeted during the government shutdown on Jan. 20. ���They could have easily made a deal but decided to play Shutdown politics instead. #WeNeedMoreRepublicansIn18 in order to power through mess!���

It appears to be��a lose-lose for both parties. Unless they both agree with Trump’s��proposed immigration deal, another shutdown��seems inevitable.

Did Trump just announce his 9/11 “unification” strategy?

(Credit: JIM LO SCALZO/AFP/Getty Images)

There are two bright-red warning lights flashing right now on the dashboard of what���s left of American democracy. While Donald Trump is hyper-aware of both of them, the media and most of our politicians are ignoring them.

They are War and Crash.

War

War is one of the principal instruments of power-grabs by strong-man governments, and Donald Trump isn���t missing a beat. While hundreds of thousands of civilians in Syria right now haven���t had any humanitarian aid since November of last year and are literally dying as you read these words, Trump wants to amp up his bombing of that country.

But the biggest threat may be an unnecessary (but short-term politically useful) war with North Korea or Iran.

The day of his State of the Union speech, Trump met with a group of newspaper editors, and apparently harkening back to George W. Bush���s strategy, talked about how useful a war could be for a politician who wants the entire nation to love him and unite around him. He said: ���I would love to be able to bring back our country into a great form of unity. Without a major event where people pull together. That���s hard to do.”

Perhaps considering how Americans might react to such a statement from a president, he backtracked a bit in the next sentence: “But I would like to do it without that major event, because usually that major event is not a good thing.���

Similarly, while campaigning in 1999, George W. Bush told his biographer, Mickey Herskowitz, that if he became president, he wouldn���t make the mistake his father made in having only a short and limited war with Iraq; he���d have a big enough war so he���d become a ���war-time president��� with enough political capital to do things like privatize Social Security.

Cindy Sheehan talked about this when she testified in front of Congress in 2005. Speaking before a committee put together by John Conyers, she said:

���[I]in interviews in 1999 with respected journalist and long-time Bush family friend, Mickey Herskowitz, then Governor George Bush stated, ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as commander in chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it. If I have a chance to invade, if I have that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.������

Now the only question is, which country will provide Donald Trump���s unifying event. Will it be Syria, Iran or North Korea? Although Trump has radically escalated our military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, leading to a spike in both US soldier and civilian deaths, it���s being largely ignored by the media.

But Iraq and Afghanistan are so George Bush. Thus, Trump reasons, he needs a ���Trump war��� to bring us together behind him.

Another possibility is that he���s doing everything he can to both provoke North Korea and Iran, and piss off radicalized Muslims worldwide and in the US to attack us, so he can use that as well as George W. Bush used 9/11.

The Pentagon is apparently so freaked out about this possibility that it’s refusing to hand over to Trump limited-war plans against North Korea. As noted in the New York Times: “[T]he Pentagon, they say, is worried that the White House is moving too hastily toward military action on the Korean Peninsula that could escalate catastrophically.”

I wrote in 2003 about how wannabee dictators use attacks on a nation to consolidate power and strip human and civil rights from the populace; we need a national debate/discussion of how Bush exploited 9/11 and the long-term damage that exploitation has done to our national interests.

And we need to learn from that lesson and keep a wary and watchful eye on what Trump may do ��� and perhaps even consider legislation to require a declaration of war from Congress (as the Constitution mandates) before he can engage in any more military actions.

Crash

A Great Crash is, as we learned with the Republican Great Depression (yes, that���s what they called it until the 1940s) and FDR���s rise to power, another way that a president can pull a country together. I laid this scenario out in my book The Crash of 2016 which, while mis-timed, still lays out a pretty clear vision of how the Powell Memo was used by billionaires to hijack democracy, and how it may play out.

Apropos of that, the bond market is right now going nuts. And it could take down our entire economy, largely because the #GOPTaxScam just forced our government to quickly sell almost $1.5 trillion in bonds (how our government borrows money) to pass hand that cash over to the #MorbidlyRich billionaire class.

Normal economics dictates that when a country is doing well, it should pay down its debt and invest in its people and infrastructure. During bad times, the nation then has the room to borrow to stimulate the economy and recover from a downturn.

As John Dizard wrote for the Financial Times, the Republicans have decided not to follow that simple game plan that has kept countries stable for centuries. He writes:

���Unfortunately, that is not the case. The administration and Congress have chosen to cut taxes when the economy is at full employment.

���So the Treasury has to push out bond issues, mostly at the shorter end of the yield curve, just as the Fed has finally decided to reduce the size of its balance sheet [sell bonds] and raise short-term policy rates. This is not good timing.

���A lot of older people and opioid addicts must rejoin the labor force and work efficiently to keep the economy ticking over without an inflationary blowout or a bond market crash.���

And a bond market crash (a rapid increase in the yield that new bonds pay, dropping the value of existing/older lower-interest-paying bonds) can kill the boom in the stock market by increasing borrowing costs, particularly when companies across the nation are leveraged up to their ears as is the case today.

But billionaire Trump and the billionaire-funded Republicans (and their billionaire-owned ���news��� channel), true to color, are only interested in what will increase billionaire wealth over the short term, regardless of how badly it devastates working people or the nation long-term.

So when eight years of rational Obama policies (opposed by Fox and the GOP at every turn) handed Trump a strong and growing economy last year, he and his Koch-head buddies in Congress decided to borrow $1.5 trillion and hand it over to the billionaire class (along with a one-time ���bonus��� to a few workers).

Much of the trillions handed to corporations with the tax cut are being used right now by US companies to do stock buy-backs (illegal before Reagan, still illegal in many other countries), thus artificially inflating the companies��� stock prices while adding exactly nothing to the economy or workers��� wages.

This may stave off the stock market reckoning for as much as a year, but over the long term, it will make the fall all that much more violent.

We watched George W. Bush do the same thing, and it ended in the disaster of the Bush Crash of 2008.

Hang onto your seat and get ready. The Trump Reality Show, in all its sick horror, is just getting underway.