Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 338

Historic state fair exhibit recognizes farmworkers

In this photo taken Aug. 17, 2016, a farm worker trims grape vines in a vineyard in Clarksburg, Calif. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli) (Credit: AP)

For over 160 years the California State Fair/Cal Expo has been run by growers to showcase the wonders and wealth of the state’s agriculture. And for over 160 years the fair did this without mentioning the people whose labor makes agriculture possible: farmworkers.

This year that changed. Rick Pickering, chief executive officer of the California Exposition & State Fair, and Tom Martinez, the fair’s chief deputy general manager, asked the United Farm Workers to help put together an exhibit to remedy this historical omission. As a result, for the first time the fair, which runs through July 30, has an exhibition that not only pays tribute to field laborers, but also acknowledges the long history of their struggle to organize unions.

Growers are not happy, and fair organizers got some pushback. But at the ceremony inaugurating the exhibition, State Senator Ben Hueso D-San Diego, the head of the California Latino Legislative Caucus, explained why they no longer have veto power. “We wouldn’t be here without the work of farmworkers,” he said. “The legislature now includes members who worked in the fields themselves, or have family who did, who know what it’s like to work in 100 degree heat, to suffer the hardest conditions and work the longest hours. We want our families to work in better conditions and earn more money.”

Some of the farmworkers who came as guests of the fair were veterans of that long struggle. Efren Fraide worked at one of the state’s largest vegetable growers, D’Arrigo Brothers Produce, when the original union election was held in 1975. However, it was only after the legislature passed the mandatory mediation law, forcing growers to sign contracts once workers voted for a union, that the first union agreement went into force at the company in 2007, covering 1,500 people.

D’Arrigo workers maintained their union committee through all the years between 1975 and 2007, organizing strikes and work stoppages to raise conditions and wages. “I’m very proud to see that we’re included here,” Fraide said, gesturing toward the photographs on the walls in the cavernous exhibition hall. “It shows who we are and what we went through. Si se puede!”

As the workers were introduced by UFW President Arturo Rodriguez, they stood up from their seats to applause. Rodriguez noted that some farmworkers, like those working at Monterey Mushrooms’ sheds near Morgan Hill and Watsonville, now make a living wage of between $38,000 and $42,000 in year-round jobs with benefits. “This exhibition recognizes that farm labor is important work, and that it can be a decent job if it includes labor and environmental standards. It can come with job security, and can be professional work,” he emphasized.

“What’s been lacking is an acknowledgment of the people who do the work,” charged Sacramento County Supervisor Phil Serna, son of the capital city’s late mayor, Joe Serna, and nephew of former UFW organizer Ruben Serna. “This exhibition documents their political activism. We wouldn’t be here if it were not for the farmworkers movement.”

Netflix’s “Atypical” is offensive, but that’s not its real problem

Keir Gilchrist as Sam in "Atypical" (Credit: Netflix/Greg Gayne)

I could forgive the new Netflix series “Atypical” if it were merely offensive to autistic people. Its chief sin, however, is that it’s trite. There’s no forgiving that.

To start, the world of the show — which debuts on the streaming service this Friday, August 11 — is inhabited by the worst kind of plug-and-play stock characters. There’s the spouse with a midlife crisis and an affair to go with it.  There’s the other spouse who slowly learns how to reconnect with the children. There’s the talented kid with a scholarship opportunity that she is conflicted about accepting. The arcs of all are easy to predict for anyone who has seen their fair share of American high school dramas.

Yes, there are some talented actors inhabiting the preview episodes of “Atypical” Netflix made available — most notably Michael Rapaport and Jennifer Jason Leigh as the protagonist’s beleaguered parents. But there isn’t much they can do with the cardboard cutouts series creator and screenwriter Robia Rashid (“How I Met Your Mother,” “The Goldbergs”) has given them.

Our titularly “atypical” protagonist Sam — played by Keir Gilchrist of “United States of Tara” and “It Follows” —  isn’t any more three-dimensional. As the selling point here is the show’s take on autism, however, Sam is a somewhat newer, increasingly popular stock character — the high-functioning Aspie. Look around and you’ll see them almost everywhere in pop culture these days, nearly always as a white, heterosexual male. (Autism — which can affect non-white, female and LGBT individuals as well as white, straight men — doesn’t discriminate in real life).

Here, Sam is only a degree or two removed from the familiar caricature of the idiot savant — inept, bumbling and awkward when the plot demands it, yet capable of being refreshingly intelligent, honest and funny. Think Sheldon from “The Big Bang Theory” or Abed from “Community” when it’s a comedy, Sherlock Holmes from “Sherlock” when it’s a drama or the “self-diagnosed” Sugar Motta from “Glee” when it’s simply vile and hateful.

Of course, the one quality that makes “Atypical” different from most of its predecessors is that the autism of its character isn’t coyly hinted at. It’s front and center, the entire framework through which the series tells its story.

It should be noted here that I am autistic myself and in past articles have discussed the subject of dating when you’re on the spectrum, which is the chief dimension of living with the condition explored in this series. Indeed, dating with autism seems to have been a popular curiosity for a while (there is a reason I’ve repeatedly written about it), and it is Sam’s struggles here that are the most cringe-inducing. On one occasion, when he is about to lose his virginity, he has a freak-out in which he punches a girl as she takes her shirt off. Another time, when trying to seduce his own therapist (ick), he breaks into her house by sneaking into an open window. Elsewhere, he humiliates his girlfriend by proclaiming that he doesn’t love her in front of her entire family.

These aren’t classic signs of autism — they’re violent, creepy, cruel and make the autistic character seem like a monster. When the show then shifts gears to make us feel sorry for Sam, the characterization becomes more offensive. Arguing that those with neurological conditions shouldn’t be held accountable for hurting others is as patronizing as it is socially irresponsible.

This brings us to the uncomfortable fact that neither the show’s creators nor Gilchrist are autistic themselves. Setting aside the raging debate over which groups are over-represented or under-represented in popular culture, it’s hard to imagine a series like this being effective if the voice it aims to capture isn’t among those telling the story.

When I asked Gilchrist what he would say to members of the autism community who were concerned about this, he discussed how as the show was being developed, the writers would regularly consult experts on autism and do their own research. He recalled that himself talked to autistic children that crew members brought to the set.

“I understand the concern fully. I totally get it, in terms of like I could see how this could go very wrong and misrepresent a group of people,” Gilchrist said. “But I would hope that people would realize we never had any intentions of doing anything but really like doing something that felt true and real and then a lot of people’s opinions went into it.”

As I watched the series with Gilchrist’s sentiment in mind, I recalled an observation by autistic actor Mickey Rowe who said about “Atypical” that “while exposure is great, if the creative team does not have leadership from the community they will inevitably misrepresent it.”

There’s a lot of talent both in front of and behind the camera with “Atypical,” a show clearly made with good intentions. Even aware of the mild controversy brewing about the show’s lack of autistic representation, I went into this with hopes that it could be another “Aspie Seeks Love” (which I co-reviewed with Liskula Cohen), the 2015 documentary about an autistic man’s romantic pursuits that deftly balanced comedy, empathy and authenticity.

None of those things are in balance here and the series just doesn’t work. Each viewer can decide for themselves whether they find “Atypical” offensive, but personally I was too disappointed by the squandered potential to be particularly outraged. Indeed, if the series had really offended me, that at least would have mean that I was engaged with it.

Instead, it left me so underwhelmed that questions of under-representation became an afterthought. Honestly, the most enjoyment I got out of “Atypical” was the opportunity to write this scathing review.

“We really had a Warhol? “: Lisanne Skyler talks about her HBO documentary “Brillo Box (3¢ off)”

Brillo Box (3¢ Off) (Credit: HBO)

There’s a 40-minute documentary premiering this week on HBO that may not solve the Syrian refugee crisis or resolve our national political quagmire, but it’ll probably make you smile a little and give you a moment’s pause to consider the value of things, the importance of memory and the relevance of art in our lives. And you certainly will never see Andy Warhol’s 1964 work, “Brillo Boxes,” in which he created replicas of shipping cartons, the same way again.

Director Lisanne Skyler’s “Brillo Box (3¢ off)” tells a partial history of pop art through “Brillo Box,” and one box in particular; the one that her parents bought — and soon after, traded — in 1969 for $1,000 when she was a baby.

Salon spoke with Skyler about making the film that traces the life of the controversial art work until it’s sold, some 40 years after her parents bought it, at Christie’s for over $3 million.

You had this long history with the Brillo Box; how did you come to making the film about it?

This film had so many moments that pushed it forward. First, that picture of me in the family album was always a lingering mystery — we really had a Warhol? How did we get it? And why would we have parted with it? But aside from the family album, the first time I thought about the Brillo Box was at the 2000 MOCA show in LA. There was a room of white Brillo Boxes and then it really hit me that we once owned one and what a not-ideal thing it was to no longer have it.

I remember calling my mom about it. Then, years later, I directed a short fiction film called “Capture the Flag,” based on the novel by Rebecca Chace, about a teenager realizing, over the course of an annual game of Capture the Flag, that her parents were separating, and her family traditions were coming apart. That theme of the fragile things that hold families together kind of stayed with me, and having only done either literary adaptation in fiction or docs in which I was entering a community as an outsider, I started thinking about my own family, my own story, and that picture of me on the Brillo Box in that family album. And the incredibly vibrant world my parents were once part of, how ahead of their time they were, and what larger-than-life characters they were to me. And in my doc work I had always been interested in economic cycles and how they affect us, risk and reward decisions and how we make them.

I thought that the best way to tell a story about art collecting, and the complicated way emotions and economics co-mingle in the buying and selling of art, would be to follow the path of one work across time and changing landscapes, to look at the different decisions that shaped its journey, and explore the complex, deeply personal, even idiosyncratic, way we value art. And I always knew it had to be about the Brillo Box because, as a three-dimensional object rather than a painting on the wall, there is a different level of human interaction with it, and because as one of Warhol’s most controversial works, it is its own character in art history — a kind of trickster that keeps changing shapes.

So, I interviewed my parents, and then realized I had absolutely no idea how I would actually locate the Brillo Box. Then one day my mom called and said, “You should check the Christie’s catalog.” The viewings for the Post War Sale had just opened and my mom saw a big ad in the Times with a Soup Can and a Lichtenstein and she thought since they had a lot of Pop Art, our Brillo Box might be there. I didn’t believe that level of coincidence could even be possible, so I ignored the suggestion until she called me again, and then I finally looked at the Christie’s listing. And there was a yellow Brillo Box — the very same one that was ours, and I had found it — thanks to my mom — just in time to film the auction.

I don’t think I’m alone in going back and forth between thinking Warhol was awesome but also a sham. Your thoughts? 

You are definitely not alone. I am deep in the awesome camp. But I think Andy Warhol walked that line perfectly to the point that years later we are still debating him and arguing, and still going beneath that surface, and always coming up with new meanings and new ways in which he is relevant. You can still look at his work and be mesmerized by it on a visual level, while still thinking about all the different things a Marilyn, a Soup Can or a Brillo Box evokes in us.  What I always come back to with Warhol is the degree to which he was so ahead of his time, how he saw so far ahead of where we were when he was making work.

I mean, a Marilyn painting as a comment on celebrity desire at a time when the expression of that was monthly printed fan magazines, is kind of amazing to think about in comparison with the level of constant online consumption of celebrity content nowadays.  In the same way, a Brillo Box sculpture, the act of reproducing a consumer object in a different medium and presenting it in an art gallery as art, back then could have been seen as a very playful satire of consumerism. But looking at them today, through the way our consumer culture keeps folding onto itself, they feel much deeper.

 The film is about more than the box, but about value and the passage of time and much more. Can you relay the main themes of the film and what you were trying to portray?

Thank you for saying that. I was both interested in portraying how time changes things, both the things themselves and the way we remember them, and the ephemeral aspects of value. Making the film was a way of navigating questions of how we cope with the fact that our past always becomes somewhat mythical and larger than life. How do we navigate the unpredictable way things change, and how do we cope with loss? Ultimately, it is a film about memory and loss but also our resilience in the face of loss. And art was such a compelling way into that theme for me, because the most important aspects of art I think are the intangible, the ways it connects us, and the way it creates bonds between people, and shared memory and history.

 What’s left unsaid, but intimated, are the emotions between your parents. Please discuss how you navigated what to include and exclude.

It was very important to me that the film was not inappropriately heavy handed, and I approached it with the perspective that while I was portraying a very universal and, I think, relatable theme, it was by no means a tragedy. So it was important to use as light a touch as possible and not overly comment, and just let the facts speak for themselves. Restraint was very important to me also  something I remember learning from directing actors in fiction, is that sometimes the more emotional the onscreen reaction, the less room for discovery and personal connection for the audience, so I basically applied that to editing my parents. And I also wanted to protect them and uphold their dignity, as I would for any subject I was working with. I was also very aware that personal filmmaking is a high risk endeavor — you can lose your audience in a second, or even a frame of a second, if you dwell too long on something and I really felt like the less I said and the simpler I kept the structure and narration, the more universally relatable the story would be.   

Was it emotionally difficult filming your parents? 

Yes. It is always hard when you are interviewing documentary subjects about topics that bring up strong emotions of sadness and loss, and exponentially so when it’s your family and knowing you are essentially asking them to look at these difficult things with you and talk about them, and then linger there while you adjust the shot or retake for audio. But this was always countered by the sense that in doing so I was also documenting something incredibly unusual and special my parents did when they were young, their taste, their ahead-of-their-time thinking about art and culture and so that sense of celebration of them was what I always came back to. My parents were always great storytellers, both have a great sense of humor, and I felt that their relatability and joy in telling stories about the acquiring and living with art would counter the wistful bittersweet and tougher moments. And it is such a collaboration between them — all the family pictures in the film except one or two that my mom shot, my father took; my mother arranged them in the family album or selected them for slide projections we used to do and all of that became the basis for the film. And my parents were so collaborative and supportive throughout.  As we developed the film with HBO, and we began moving in a more personal direction, I would check in with my mom, for example, and she would always say, “You just listen to [HBO head of documentary] Sheila [Nevins]!” Or, I showed her a cut: “Well, I really agree with Sheila.”   

 What impact do you think your film will have on the value of your Brillo Box? 

The Brillo Box has since sold again and actually for a lower price so given that and how the film is about how one never can really predict these things, I am hesitant to predict its future monetary value. But I am hopeful that the film’s personal story and the exploration of the personal ways we connect with art will deepen an appreciation for both this particular art object and the intangible experiences that Warhol and all artists give us through their work, even if they haven’t made it to museums or the auction block yet.

In “Wind River,” Taylor Sheridan makes another new-looking western with a traditional spirit

Elizabeth Olsen and Jeremy Renner in "Wind River" (Credit: The Weinstein Company/Fred Hayes)

In Taylor Sheridan’s movies, motorized vehicles are conspicuous. Whether it’s an outlaw making his escape in a stolen sedan, American authorities pursuing a criminal in a pack of black government SUVs or a lone hunter kicking up white Wyoming snow with his snowmobile, the roar of an engine rings of what is absent: horses.

Sheridan’s first three films (“Sicario,” “Hell or High Water” and his newest, “Wind River”) are Westerns, set respectively around the border between Mexico and Arizona, in West Texas and in Wyoming. But Sheridan won’t let you forget that his West is not the old West. Aerial shots portray the same landscapes, barren of everything but sand or snow, that 19th Century settlers might have encountered. But when the camera zooms down to ground level, time’s toll is impossible to miss. Towns are developed and suburbanized; revolvers are no match for automatic weapons; horsepower is preferable to horse power; “cowboy” is used ironically (in “Sicario”) or derogatorily (in “Wind River”); and women hold power.

“They’re a thematic trilogy,” Sheridan recently told Vulture of the three films. “Each is exploring the modern American frontier and how it’s changed since being settled — how much do the consequences of actions taken 130 years ago reverberate today?”  

There’s no barometer for time’s reverberations. But suffice it to say that the actions taken 130 years ago come with at least three movies’ worth of consequences. Each film, more or less, takes on a different reverberation. In “Sicario,” it is drug and border policy; in “Hell or High Water,” it is the banks’ control of land; and in “Wind River,” it is Indian removal.

In each movie, entrenchment leads to crime. When men have no other way to make money, they sell drugs; when a man needs money in a hurry in order to keep his family’s home, he steals; and when lonely men are stuck in desolate lands without any entertainment but booze and drugs, they rape. (In Sheridan’s films, men are always the criminals.)  

The American West has long been a symbol of freedom — a lawless land of wide open pastures and new beginnings. Not in Sheridan’s films. In “Sicario,” “Hell or High Water” and “Wind River,” the West is a noose constricting the prospects of those whose ancestors wound up on the wrong parcels of land. The tension at the heart of each movie is of control: The authorities’ ability to maintain order presses up against a man’s ability to protect and provide for his family.

Though Sheridan’s Westerns look different from the genre’s classics, they share that central tension. In her 1992 book “West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns,” the scholar Jane Tompkins argued that the Western “isn’t about the encounter between civilization and the frontier. It is about men’s fear of losing their mastery, and hence their identity, both of which the Western tirelessly reinvents.”

Sheridan certainly reinvents this fear. He went on to tell Vulture that, “[t]he true theme of the trilogy is failed fathers — how they failed and how they overcame that failure.”

In “Wind River,” like in “Sicario,” Sheridan takes us into a world where fathers have already lost their daughters. Cory Lambert (Jeremy Renner), a hunter and tracker whose daughter died three years prior to the film’s action, tells a friend, whose daughter’s murder serves as the central event of the film, that you can’t try to escape the suffering, you just have to live with it. But that’s not what he does.

Like Alejandro (Benicio Del Torro) in “Sicario,” Cory Lambert uses violent vengeance to cope with his pain. He tries to avenge his daughter’s death — an unsolvable mystery — by exacting punishment on this other girl’s killer(s). That he would do so is taken as a given. “I’m a hunter,” he tells his mourning friend.

Lambert does so alongside a small group of reservation policemen and a by-the-books cub FBI agent named Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen). Banner plays a similar role to the one Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) played in “Sicario.” She exists to put a leash on wolves, to take the Wild out of the West. Meanwhile, Sheridan introduces Corey Lambert by showing him sniping literal wolves as they prey on sheep. The metaphor is carried over from “Sicario,” a call-back to Alejandro telling Kate that she “should move to a small town, somewhere the rule of law still exists” because “You are not a wolf, and this is a land of wolves now.”

Corey Lambert is a kinder man than Alejandro. He encourages Jane and doesn’t point a gun at her head. But the characters serve the same function. Where women unsuccessfully try to impose justice through the system, men operating outside the bounds of the system successfully met out an old-fashioned form of justice. They respond to cruelty with cruelty, compensating for their failures with brutality. The law is no match for men who know how to shoot a gun and don’t have anything to lose. When you zoom in beyond ground level, into the very fabric of Sheridan’s films, the helical structure doesn’t look so different from the traditional Westerns in which cowboys rode horses.

22 ways Sean Hannity has tried to undermine the Russia probes

FILE - In this March 18, 2016, file photo, Fox News Channel's Sean Hannity speaks during a campaign rally for Republican presidential candidate, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, in Phoenix. Veteran newsman Ted Koppel told Fox News host Sean Hannity that he is "bad for America" in an interview that aired on CBS' "Sunday Morning" that quickly became a trending topic on social media Sunday, March 26, 2017. (AP Photo/Rick Scuteri, File) (Credit: AP)

Fox News host Sean Hannity has been one of President Donald Trump’s biggest propagandists and defenders, lashing out at the president’s perceived enemies and critics to defend his actions and policies.

But Hannity has not defended Trump on any issue more staunchly than on the ongoing controversy surrounding Trump and his administration’s possible ties to Russia, which the Justice Department and both chambers of Congress are investigating. Hannity has sunk to unprecedented levels to undermine these investigations. He has made up often inconsistent conspiracy theories about who actually was behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails, has hyped dubious scandals involving former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and former President Barack Obama, has attacked former FBI Director James Comey and the special counsel for the Russia probe, Robert Mueller, and has even suggested that collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government is fine. Here are 22 examples of Hannity ignoring facts, promoting falsehoods and conspiracies, and attempting to cast blame on others in order to defend, deflect, and downplay accusations that Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia to interfere in the U.S election.

Hannity has repeatedly pushed the conspiracy theory that murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich, and not Russia, was involved in the hacking of DNC emails and that he was murdered as retribution for providing the emails to WikiLeaks. Even after Rich’s family asked him to stop, Hannity continued to push the conspiracy theory and even promoted dubious figure Kim Dotcom’s conspiracy theories about Rich, which were picked up by multiple fringe media outlets and Reddit users. A recent lawsuit from a Fox contributor, who was quoted pushing the conspiracy theory in a since-retracted FoxNews.com article, alleged that some of the talking points used by Hannity about Rich were crafted by a GOP donor in order to undermine allegations of Russian interference in the U.S. election.
In June, Hannity said that even if the Trump campaign had “talked to somebody in Russia” about releasing hacked Clinton emails, “Is that a crime?”
In March, Hannity suggested that the CIA framed Russia for 2016 election interference, a conspiracy theory pushed by Breitbart.
After former acting Attorney General Sally Yates testified before the Senate that she warned the Trump administration about then-national security adviser Michael Flynn and his contacts with Russian officials, Hannity tried to downplay it by claiming the Obama administration had unlawfully “unmasked” Flynn and other officials caught in surveillance.
Hannity has repeatedly brought up so-called “Clinton scandals” to distract his viewers from issues surrounding the Trump administration. Hannity has falsely claimed that Clinton committed multiple felonies, that the Clinton Foundation got millions of dollars due to a uranium deal with Russia (a falsehood which Trump has since pushed), and has wildly speculated about how “damning” FBI documents about the probe into Clinton’s private email server must have been.
After Trump fired Comey, Hannity immediately defended the move, smearing Comey as “very lucky that President Trump kept him around this long because of his now unhinged and very erratic behavior.” A week later, as Trump was being scrutinized for his decision, Hannity again called Comey “a national embarrassment” and “an utter and complete failure” who “deserved to be fired.”
When Trump issued a threat on Twitter suggesting that he may have recorded tapes of his conversations with Comey, Hannity called it one of the “most brilliant . . . tweets in the history of mankind.”
In May, Hannity promoted a highly dubious claim from far-right troll Jack Posobiec that Comey leaked classified information to the media and dropped a supposed probe into former national security adviser Susan Rice because it would have implicated him too, saying Comey “did nothing about the violation of fourth amendment privacy rights, and of course, leaking of classified information, which is a crime.”
After the revelations that Donald Trump Jr. had a meeting during the presidential campaign with Russians to get supposedly damaging information on Clinton, Hannity pushed a false claim originating from pro-Trump fringe media (and which Trump’s legal team encouraged) saying the meeting was some kind of a Democratic set-up against the Trumps and that former Attorney General Loretta Lynch was somehow involved in the plot.
Hannity tried to downplay the Trump Jr. meeting by falsely claiming that Clinton’s presidential campaign and the DNC had colluded more closely with the Ukrainian government than Trump had with Russia.
Hannity dubiously claimed that “the Russian lawyer” in the Trump Jr. meeting “didn’t give the Trump organization any information whatsoever,” and allowed Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow to claim Trump Jr. could have been the victim of “a blackmail job.”
Hannity has repeatedly claimed that the so-called “deep state” is out to get Trump, even saying that “a soft coup is underway” against Trump with “sinister forces quickly aligning in what is becoming now, in my mind, a clear and present danger” to Trump.
In June, Hannity promoted another false talking point from Posobiec, spread by fake news purveyors and other figures in the far-right fringe, that Comey said in May that Trump never asked him to halt any FBI probe.
After Comey testified before the Senate about Trump firing him and the release of memos describing his interactions with the president, Hannity invited Trump Jr. on his radio show to smear Comey as “weak and feckless.”
When The Washington Post reported on June 14 that Mueller was investigating Trump for potential obstruction of justice, Hannity called it the “biggest act . . . of retribution we have ever seen from the deep state in the history of this country.”
As the meeting between Trump Jr. and Russian officials was under scrutiny, Hannity asked Vice President Mike Pence on his radio show to get Clinton investigated rather than “Russia, Russia, Russia.”
On July 24, Hannity urged his viewers to harass journalists who had been reporting Trump-Russia stories, saying to “write a message to their bosses” and “take to the social media.”
Two days after pro-Trump website The Gateway Pundit and multiple fake news purveyors claimed in July that a “mysterious IT specialist” published a report proving Russia did not hack the DNC, Hannity said on his radio show that “there are reports out there that” the hacking of the DNC emails “was all done domestically.”
In July, Hannity gave credulity to Fox correspondent-at-large Geraldo Rivera’s conspiracy theory that a former IT staffer for former DNC Chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz D-Fla. could have been the source of the DNC emails Wikileaks published, asking, “Doesn’t that blow the whole [Russia narrative] out of water?”
Hannity has repeatedly hosted reporters from pro-Trump outlet Circa News, owned by conservative media giant Sinclair Broadcasting, who have discussed supposed “improprieties by former President Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice and fired FBI Director James Comey, and [have cast] doubt on rival media reports of possible Trump campaign collusion with Russia,” according to The Daily Beast. Most recently, Hannity hosted a Circa reporter on his show who dubiously hyped supposed wrongdoing by former Obama aide Ben Rhodes.
Hannity has called for Mueller’s investigation to be shut down, claiming that “there is no way that this investigation can be fair or objective” because Mueller will “side with” Comey. He has also alleged that the investigation is biased because some members on Mueller’s team have donated to Democrats (Trump and his family have also donated thousands of dollars to Democrats.)
Hannity has suggested Mueller is engaging in criminal acts.

How welfare’s work requirements can deepen and prolong poverty: Rose’s story

FILE - In this Nov. 15, 2016, file photo, Rep. Mike Conaway, R-Texas, wearing a "Make America Great Again" hat leaves a House Republican leadership meeting on Capitol Hill in Washington. House Republicans are laying the groundwork for a fresh effort to overhaul the nation's food stamp program during Donald Trump’s presidency, with the possibility of new work and eligibility requirements for millions of Americans. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen, File) (Credit: AP)

After “Rose” lost her low-wage job in a southeast Michigan nursing home, the single mother of four sought Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) benefits.

People who are eligible for this federal, time-limited welfare program for very low-income families must be working or looking for work, a feature the Trump administration and other politicians want to spread to Medicaid and other similar programs that support low-income Americans. Rose obtained the benefits but lost them after finding that the program was doing little to help her get a job and interfering with her parenting.

This fairly common experience suggests that these restrictions can prolong and worsen spells of poverty. Like many experts on American poverty relief, I don’t see why that punitive strategy makes sense.

Work requirements

When Rose told me her story while I was researching what happens to women like her, she started by saying, “I’m ashamed.” But it sounded like she wasn’t to blame. She was embarrassed about how she had lost her job, but her explanation showed just how tough a spot she had been in.

After working double shifts for a week straight and completing her duties on a Friday night at about 2:30 a.m., “I dozed off. Me and a coworker,” she said. “It’s documented that it wasn’t even 20 minutes that we had dozed off, and a supervisor walked in. We were suspended at that time.” She got fired shortly thereafter.

Rose enrolled in a local job search program. Some of these programs sent participants on job interviews, but Rose, like many of the 22 women I interviewed, said few got hired. The program wanted her to return to the training site after interviews at the end of the day.

“By that time, the kids are getting out of school. You’ve got to get back home, or you’ve got to go pick the kids up from daycare, and I thought that was pointless to do that,” Rose recounted. “If you didn’t come back, you were considered noncompliant, so you’d be cut off just like that.”

After months without securing a job and struggling to pick her children up from school on time, Rose opted for the “noncompliant” label. This meant losing US$440 a month in TANF payments, her only source of cash income until, six months later and through her own efforts, she found another low-paying job in a different nursing home. During those six months, Rose sometimes couldn’t afford diapers, which meant her youngest child sometimes went without them. When she ran out of food a couple of times, she would send her children to relatives to eat while she went hungry.

Rose’s experience illustrates the downsides of inflexible work requirements. Instead of getting help finding a new job during those six months, she joined the swelling ranks of families with no cash from welfare or jobs, some of whom wind up scraping by on incomes of $2 a day or less – a common metric for poverty in developing countries. Typically headed by single mothers, these families are cut off from or otherwise unable to access welfare while also having no earnings.

Harsh labor market

Working on a team with researchers from the Urban Institute, an independent think tank, I found that almost two-thirds of the mothers we interviewed were able to rely upon partners or family members for help. Yet this can strain the resources of people who are not much better off than them. Some may lose housing, which leads them to double up with friends, send children to live with relatives or stay in shelters.

Although more research is needed before we know whether lacking access to welfare makes poor families prone to homelessness, families living in extreme poverty are nearly twice as likely to report housing instability as other low-income families.

You could say that Rose was reaping the consequences of bad choices because she broke a rule. But as I argue in “Abandoned Families,” my book about the economic and political changes that have thwarted opportunities for upward mobility, the low-wage labor market is harsh.

National data on workplace conditions are scarce, but studies of cities and certain occupations have found that unsafe workplace conditions, irregular and unpredictable scheduling, and wage theft are common. For example, more than 30 percent of low-wage workers in Syracuse told researchers that their jobs caused a health problem. Many of the women I profiled in “Abandoned Families” told me they worked for employers who violated their rights, and mistakes were greeted with threats of or actual termination.

Should Rose have made arrangements for afterschool care for her children? Perhaps, but it’s not fair to presume that this was a viable option for her. The demand for care after classes end for the day far outstrips its availability: An estimated 18.5 million more children would be in such programs were they available in their community. Yet funding to help low-income parents pay for it is declining. The federal government spent $11.3 billion on child care in 2014, down from $12.9 billion in 2011.

A poor model

The frustrating experiences of women like Rose should make policymakers pause before considering extending work requirements to other programs serving low-income families.

Consider the situation with SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program more widely known by its pre-2008 name, food stamps. More than 60 percent of the households getting SNAP benefits that have children and what budget director Mick Mulvaney likes to call “able-bodied” adults have at least one employed member. Others are led by working-class people who are hunting for a new job. About one-third of all households with SNAP nutritional benefits earn at least some money from work, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a think tank.

My study showed that work requirements don’t always help people find jobs. Ultimately, the penalties imposed for failure to meet these rules can wind up punishing low-income kids and prolonging hard times.

Kristin Seefeldt, Assistant Professor of Social Work, School of Social Work, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, Gerald R Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan

Why the creators of “13 Reasons Why” should pay attention to the spike in suicide-related Google searches

(Credit: Google web search)

Does it matter that people seem to have become more interested in — expressing more suicidal thoughts, while becoming more likely to research ways to commit or prevent suicide — in the wake of the popular Netflix series “13 Reasons Why”?

According to new research my colleagues and I conducted, suicide-related Google searches increased in the weeks following the spring release of the popular Netflix series “13 Reasons Why.”

The show – which became the streaming service’s most discussed series on social media — chronicles a high school girl’s suicide over the course of 13 episodes. In the season finale, the suicide is depicted in a three-minute scene.

Singer Selena Gomez, the executive producer of the show, said she hoped the series would raise suicide awareness. Yet some – including educators and school psychologists — fear the series glamorizes the victim and her suicide in a way that could promote copycat behavior.

In recent months, stories about the possible effects of the series have circulated in the media. In May, The Washington Post reported that school administrators in Florida were witnessing more risky behaviors among their students, from self-mutilation to suicide threats. In June, People magazine told the story of a young man in Peru who took his own life, leaving behind recordings in a way that mimicked the main character in the series.

Our study adds to this discussion by considering a novel source: search data. Because the internet is a place where people can anonymously search for information free of judgment, researchers can see what’s on the mind of the public by monitoring what they’re searching.

For this reason, my colleagues and I will often turn to the internet to track real-time trends in mental heath and other health concerns in order to better understand how the public is thinking, feeling and behaving. (For example, earlier this year we demonstrated that Charlie Sheen’s HIV disclosure in 2015 corresponded with record levels of interest in HIV testing, which showed search trends could signal concrete prevention outcomes.)

With “13 Reasons Why,” we wanted to see how the content and volume of internet searches about suicide changed after the series’ release. We analyzed suicide-related searches from March 31, the day the series was released, to April 18, the day before former NFL star Aaron Hernandez committed suicide in prison (a national news event that likely caused suicide-related searches to spike on its own). Then we compared these results to the expected search volumes had the series never been released, figures we arrived at by analyzing daily search trends between January 15 and March 30.

Compared to the searches between January and March, searches that signaled suicide awareness (terms such as “suicide prevention”) and suicidal ideation (terms such as “how to commit suicide”) increased following the release of “13 Reasons Why.” People were also more likely to use search terms like “teen suicide,” “suicidal thoughts” and “how to kill yourself.”

Together, suicide searches were 19 percent higher for the 19 days following the series’ release compared to the period before the release. That figure reflects over one million more searches than what would have normally been expected.

While heightened suicide awareness can be a good thing, the spike in searches that indicate suicidal ideation, from ways to commit suicide to suicidal thoughts, could signal a more disturbing trend. Prior research has shown that suicide search trends are correlated with actual suicides, and media coverage of suicides concur with increased suicide attempts.

While we don’t know whether any specific search preceded an actual suicide attempt, the trends we found in search data suggest that the show’s creators probably have an obligation to mitigate suicidal ideation in the future.

Netflix did give “13 Reasons Why” a TV-MA rating, and a few episodes did have specific warnings for explicit material.

But if they want to go further, they could follow the World Health Organization’s media guidelines for preventing suicide by removing the scenes that depict the actual suicide. They could also display suicide hotline numbers at the start of each episode. These suggestions could be retrofitted to season one and considered prior to the release of the second season.

Either way, the findings underscore the value of big data from online social systems. Whether it’s searches about suicide, HIV testing or other health concerns, the rapid and reliable information from search engines can make public health agencies more responsive to the populations they serve.

Jon-Patrick Allem, Research Scientist, University of Southern California

Why it’s so hard to win you over, based on your Myers-Briggs Personality Type

(Credit: God & Man/Narratively)

INFP:

When it comes to relationships, you either go big or you go home — and you’re totally comfortable going home. You’re a romantic at heart and you have no interest in lukewarm love. You want passion, romance and fireworks (even if you loathe to admit it). It’s hard to win you over because you’re looking for someone who is every bit as passionate as you are — and we both know that’s a pretty high bar.

ENFP:

You have a lot of great, big plans for your future and getting sidetracked by a mediocre relationship isn’t one of them. You’re constantly changing jobs, relationships, countries, career paths and ideologies. You need someone who can not only keep up, but add something new to the mix. And let’s be serious — they’re going to have to chase you a little bit. Because you don’t stay in one place for long.

INFJ:

You need a partner who you can see a future with — and before you get ready to plan that future, you need to be certain you’re with someone you can trust. To win you over, any potential partner has to stand the test of time. You want to make sure you know each other inside-out, upside-down and backwards before you’re ready to take a chance on them. And building that kind of trust takes time. If not a little perseverance on their part.

ENFJ:

You don’t know how to love halfway, and you aren’t interested in being with anyone who does. You fall in love openly and deeply, and you know the ins and outs of how to make a committed relationship work. It’s hard to win you over because you want to be with someone who will be as attentive and committed to the relationship as you are – and we both know that’s a pretty high bar.

INTP:

It’s not that you lack emotions, it’s just that you aren’t always completely tuned in to the emotions of others. You often aren’t sure when someone’s flirting versus when they’re just being friendly and you need someone who isn’t afraid to be upfront with you about the way they’re feeling. The problem is, most people prefer more subtle tactics. As such, you can be hard to win over — because you need someone who isn’t afraid to pursue you boldly, directly and persistently.

ENTP:

It’s not that you’re uninterested in relationships — it’s just that you’re very, very interested in pretty much everything else. In order to win you over, any potential partner has to be able to hold your attention for long enough to make you forget about the five thousand other things you were planning on pursuing. If they manage to do so, you’re theirs. But we all know that’s a whole lot easier said than done.

INTJ:

You have impeccably high standards — and you have no qualms admitting it. You’ve poured a great deal of effort into self-improvement and developing self-awareness and you expect nothing less from a potential partner. You’re hard to win over because at the end of the day, you’re searching for something pretty damn close to perfection. And perfection can be difficult to come by.

ENTJ:

When you’re invested in a relationship, you’re invested. But before that point, you have a tendency to let other things take priority. Your to-do list is a couple miles long, and ‘falling in love’ doesn’t happen to be right at the top of it. You’re hard to win over because whoever is interested in you has to first show that they should take precedence over the ten thousand other things you’ve been planning to do — and few people have managed to do that so far.

ISTP:

You need independence like a fish needs water. While you may be happy to have casual relationships, you get squirmy when it’s time to commit. You need to make sure you’re with someone who understands your need for alone time, and who isn’t going to try to change you. It may take you a very long time to make an actual commitment to someone — and whoever you’re dating needs to be willing to stick around for that length of time.

ESTP:

You enjoy relationships — but you also enjoy adventure, independence and having the freedom to live as you please. Before settling down, you need to make sure your options are explored and there’s nothing (or no one) else you’d rather be doing. You can be tough to win over because your enthusiasm for life often exceeds your enthusiasm for love.

ESTJ:

You’re not just looking for someone whose company you enjoy — you’re looking for someone who fits sensibly into your life long-term. You want to make sure that whomever you’re dating is worth investing your time, energy and effort into. You can be hard to win over because you evaluate potential relationships with your head before you turn things over to your heart.

ISTJ:

You aren’t just looking for someone who you enjoy spending time with — you need someone whose values and long-term interests line up with yours. Before you invest your heart, you need to know that you’re with someone you can respect and trust. In order to win you over, any potential partner has to be willing to put in the time to get to know each other before you reveal your romantic side.

ESFJ:

You have no patience for flakey or half-hearted relationships. You’re looking for something real, and you need someone who isn’t afraid to step up to the plate. You’re hard to win over because you take an ‘old-fashioned’ approach to dating — that is, you expect people to text back in a timely manner, go out on actual dates and make their affections known to you. Sadly, this is getting harder and harder to come by.

ISFJ:

Once you enter into a relationship, you’re all in — which means you need to be careful about where you invest your heart. You need to make sure that you’re dating someone you could see yourself with long-term — and that means you have to be with someone who isn’t going to take advantage of your huge heart, like others have in the past.

ESFP:

You live in a world of people possibilities. There’s nothing you enjoy more than dating and getting to know new people — which means that to settle down with just one of them, it has to be someone pretty special. You’re hard to win over because any potential partner has to first convince you that they’re better than all possible alternatives. And in a world of 7+ billion, there are a LOT of alternatives.

ISFP:

You’re a romantic down to your very core — but you also scare easily when it comes to long-term relationships. You believe that everything happens for a reason, and you need to feel as though your partner is the person you’re meant to be with, before you’re able to fully commit to them. Which means you often have to do some soul-searching at the beginning of a relationship — and your partner has to be willing to wait that out in order to win you over.

Helping recipients of food assistance use their benefits wisely

(Credit: AP/Allen Breed)

The average recipient of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program(SNAP) benefits, formerly known as food stamps, runs out of a month’s worth of assistance within a week or two.

Given that there are more than 45.8 million people on SNAP, we thought it was important to find out why. To do this, Common Cents, a financial decision-making research lab supported by MetLife, partnered with Propel, a software company that aims to make America’s safety net more user friendly.

We studied the aggregated spending patterns of people who use Fresh EBT, Propel’s free mobile app that helps SNAP recipients track their money, transactions and more (electronic benefit transfer or EBT cards are what SNAP programs use to distribute benefits). We conducted qualitative interviews with SNAP recipients in California and New York. We even tried to apply for SNAP ourselves.

Here is what we learned:

There is an accelerated spending curve: For the average SNAP recipient, more than 80 percent of their SNAP benefits are spent within the first nine days. Within the first 21 days, the average SNAP recipient has nothing left. This spending curve is even worse than what the U.S. Department of Agriculture saw a few years ago.

People are not making it to the end of the month: This accelerated spending curve would not be an issue if SNAP recipients were buying in bulk at the beginning of the month and accurately planning their meals for the month. A Harvard study of SNAP recipients, however, showed caloric intake declines 10 to 15 percent over the month, meaning people are running out of both food and benefits early.

This has real downstream consequences: Talking to SNAP recipients, we often hear stories of recipients who go hungry during the end of the month because they do not have any food or SNAP benefits left. This can affect their children’s academic performance. In North Carolina, researchers found that toward the end of the month, children of SNAP households have lower test scores and more disciplinary events.

Why don’t SNAP benefits last?

There are a number of reasons why SNAP benefits do not last through the month. One of the easiest explanations is that the amount provided is just not enough to cover a household’s food costs. In addition to a lack of sufficient funds, we propose that the way SNAP benefits are disbursed only makes things worse.

Most SNAP benefits are distributed in a lump sum once a month. From social science, we know that receiving monthly lump sums can create a “windfall” mindset. This windfall effect creates a false sense of security, hindering our ability to budget. As a result, we are more likely to misallocate our funds.

The windfall effect is not just something that affects low-income communities. We are all susceptible to it. Think about how you spend your money on payday compared with the last day of the month.

What are we doing about it?

We turned to the Fresh EBT app to design a simple experiment to combat the windfall effect and help SNAP recipients budget more effectively.

In a randomized controlled trial, we provided half of all new users a recommended weekly budget. This served as a reminder to spread consumption over the month and anchored users to an appropriate weekly spend. The remaining half served as a control group with a monthly balance only. We also surveyed all users on a weekly basis, asking them about their food purchases.

Over three months, we found that the weekly budget extended users’ monthly food stamp balance by roughly two more days. Families in the control group spent 80 percent of their monthly balance after nine days, while families who received a weekly budget spent 80 percent of their balance after 11 days. This is a 21 percent increase! A family depending on SNAP to put food on the table could have about six extra meals that month, just from this simple change to how we display a person’s SNAP balance.

In addition, results from our weekly health surveys showed no difference in the healthiness of consumption patterns between the control and experimental groups, contradicting concerns that families would trade off food quality as a result of better budgeting.

What does this mean?

The implications of this research are significant. Budgeting is difficult, especially for people who live in scarcity. Our experiment proves that simple interventions, like giving SNAP recipients useful guidelines, can go a long way.

Based on the success of this pilot, Propel is in the process of rolling out weekly budgets to its entire consumer base. Our hope is that policy makers will use these results as evidence in favor of changing how they manage the SNAP program. Program administrators could print a suggested weekly budget on each EBT card, or they could significantly help families by distributing SNAP benefits weekly or biweekly.

Sex-ed for kindergarteners? Yes, please

(Credit: KPG_Payless via Shutterstock)

When my twins came home from school recently with a thick information pack entitled “Relationships, Sexual Health and Parenthood,” I didn’t know, at first, quite what I was looking at. We live in Scotland and I’m American. Despite residing here for many years, my intuitive sense of what happens in an elementary school classroom is still very much grounded in what I experienced myself. And you can bet your bottom dollar that my mom never received such a leaflet at such an age. Which is why it took me a beat or two to realize: my kindergarteners were about to embark on sex-ed!

Except they don’t call it that here in the UK, which is probably a good thing. Because what this curriculum includes, and the way it manifests in the younger years, is much broader than the mechanics of sex or pregnancy prevention — in fact, for the littlest students, it doesn’t involve the word “sex” at all. It’s a mandatory “whole school” approach to the subject that centers on the development of “decision-making skills” and a “sense of responsibility.” It encourages the kids “to challenge stereotypes” and “to identify social and cultural influences on a person’s sexuality and the sexual choices they make.”

“Our teacher is going to talk to us about our bodies,” my daughter said, matter-of-factly, as I paged through the information.

My daughter is six.

It seems incredibly wise to start conversations on these topics as early as possible. The sooner a child has an accurate understanding of his or her own body, the building blocks of a healthy relationship, and a framework for making sound sexual decisions, the better. Right? The Dutch have been proponents of comprehensive sex education for a while now, and “have garnered international attention, largely because the Netherlands boasts some of the best outcomes when it comes to teen sexual health.” In America, where sex-ed is more limited and can take the form of “abstinence only,” teenagers are not only likely to have had sex earlier and to wish they had waited longer, but to not use contraception at all.

Sex and sexuality is about so much more than learning the basics of how a baby is made — or not made. And stereotypical ideas about the body and about relationship dynamics start as early as two or three years old — what little girls think they should be wearing, what little boys are told about curbing their emotions, about being in charge — as do so many preconceptions about how boys and girls are meant to behave with regard to one another. These entrenched gender roles, ingrained and perpetuated by societal forces, play a huge part in governing the problems that girls in particular experience with sex in their teenage years and beyond. Just read a little of Peggy Orenstein’s “Girls & Sex” and you will blanch at the picture painted: girls who seem to lack a fundamental agency when it comes to their sexual interaction with boys.

The curriculum at my kids’ school is, of course, age appropriate. The different topics are calibrated according to grade. In terms of sexual abuse, for example, for first graders, the proposed outcomes involve statements like: “I am learning about respect for my body and what behaviour is right and wrong. I know who I should talk to if I am worried about this.” For a fifth grader, however, it’s to this effect: “I know that all forms of abuse are wrong and I am developing the skills to keep myself safe and get help if I need it.”

There is always going to be a backlash against talking about sex in schools, especially to five- and six-year-olds. Conservatives of all stripes worry that young children can’t handle such sensitive topics, that it’s “inappropriate.” That talking about sex makes kids have sex. That this is a subject better left to parents to disseminate — or not — in their own homes. The argument here is that sex is always laden with values, that there is no way to teach it an objective, information-only manner, and hence it doesn’t belong in the classroom. Even the idea of encouraging children to make their own informed decisions about their sexuality implies a belief in the notion of the self — and the significance of autonomy.

To be fair, it’s unclear how effective schools are at delivering messages about sex and sexual values. According to Jonathan Zimmerman, in his study of the global history of sex-ed, “Too Hot to Handle,” “Scholars around the world have struggled in vain to show any significant influence of sex education upon youth sexual behavior.” Schools, he writes, always seem to be “a step — or three — behind the sexual curve,” with institutions like the mass media holding much more sway over impressionable young minds.

And yet, Scotland appears to be moving pretty quickly. As of 2014, the year gay marriage became legal here, the sex-ed guidelines were updated to include issues surrounding same-sex and civil partnerships. So from my (admittedly liberal) point of view, the school environment, however much influence it has in the end, provides yet another forum, another opportunity to open the gateway of communication — which can be especially useful for those parents who find the subject embarrassing or difficult to broach. Sexual relationships, after all, are a hugely important aspect of human existence and one that the vast majority of our kids will have to navigate as they grow up.

We speak very frankly about these things in our house, but I still welcomed the chance to build on the conversations my kids had in their classrooms. My six-year-old told me they talked about the correct names for their body parts. “The teacher asked us what we call our privates, and some of the girls said ‘flowers.’ But I said ‘vulva!’” My nine-year-old son asked me if I knew that babies could be made in a petri dish and not simply from sex. Even my almost twelve-year-old, who suffers from a typical tween horror in respect to this stuff, joined in the discussion.

Just saying the words out loud, hearing them bounce around the car as we drove home from school, felt right. Our bodies and what we do with them are a natural part of life, perhaps the most natural. Normalising this for kids, giving them the tools to be happy and healthy in their sexual selves when the time comes, is a gift. Because ultimately they are the only ones who can make sexual decisions for themselves. Here it really does seem that knowledge is a source of power.