Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 847

Your supermarket is lying to you: Two thirds of shoppers are being suckered by “natural” products

A recent Consumer Reports study shows that nearly two-thirds of shoppers are being misled to believe the label “natural” on food packages means more than it does — including that the foods are free of GMOs, hormones, pesticides or artificial ingredients. But the truth is, these foods often contain the ingredients and chemicals consumers are trying to avoid. As an example, some “natural" shredded cheese contains natamycin, a pesticide. And “natural" fruit snacks can contain artificial preservatives like potassium sorbate and sodium benzoate. Consumers shouldn’t be misled in this way, and now there is a campaign to get the U.S. Food & Drug Administration either to fix the label "natural," or ban it altogether. In response to a petition filed by Consumer Reports, the FDA is asking for public comment (through May 10, 2016) on what the word natural should mean on food packaging. I had a chance to speak with Urvashi Rangan, the executive director of the Consumer Reports Food Safety and Sustainability Center, who is leading the organization’s fight for clearer food labeling, about the new study and campaign. Reynard Loki: What’s the problem with the “natural” label on food products? Urvashi Rangan: “Natural” is one of the most misleading labels that's out on the marketplace. Year after year when we have asked consumers about what they think it means, they think it means more than it does. We have spent the last 15 years or so reading labels on foods. We've been educating people about what natural doesn't mean for a really long time. We even give that information for free because we believe it’s a public service. RL: In December, Consumer Reports conducted a national phone survey to assess consumer opinion regarding the labeling of food. What did you find? UR: With the case of “natural,” with nearly two-thirds of consumers looking to buy that food, and thinking that it means something specific, we've been able to quantify the percentage of consumers who are mislead by the natural claim. In the story, we report what consumer expectations are around natural. There's what they think it means, and a good majority are being misled to think that it means something it doesn't: no GMO's, no artificial ingredients, no pesticides, for example. Then you ask them what they think it should mean, and almost an overwhelming majority think it should mean no chemicals used during processing, no artificial ingredients, no toxic pesticides, no GMOs. We've been helping to educate consumers about that for a long time. We've kicked that up a little bit in the last two years by really focusing on this particular label as a bad actor. RL: Have you targeted any specific food brands that are misleading the public with the natural label? UR: In this latest article we've pointed out seven major brands that are selling products that have a natural label on it, highlighting why it is we think they don't really comport with what people think of as natural, and marrying that to our new survey findings which shows that people continue to be misled by the natural label. RL: Someone could just look at the ingredients and find out that something's not natural in that food. But it wouldn't list pesticides that may have been used on one or more of the ingredients. UR: Yeah, that's true. And sometimes it isn’t so easy to figure out if an ingredient is natural. Sometimes you see things like cellulose, a dietary fiber derived from wood pulp. It's a natural compound, but not really something you would think of eating. Yet that can still be found in some things. Xanthan gum comes from a bacterial slime that is chemically extracted. Caramel color is another natural sounding ingredient, but two types are made with caustic ingredients that can create 4-MEI, a potential carcinogen. That isn’t really what we think of having in natural foods. There are lots of examples where you do not see the chemicals used to extract something on an ingredient label. Pesticides are another example of that. “Natural flavors” and “natural colors” don’t have to disclose the potentially dozens of ingredients in their formulas as they are considered to be proprietary. Things that are called processing aides, or food contact substances or secondary food additives — you will never see them listed as ingredients. RL: What would you recommend the definition of “natural” to be? UR: We would love to see it banned. Ideally, when we look at what people think it ought to mean, it comes very close to what people expect from the organic label. Organic is not perfect, but it comes a whole lot closer to providing a meaningful set of standards behind it. Ideally, we don't think the government should waste the public’s money redefining it, by coming up with a new label program. Organic has been defined. It took 12 years to do it. The government created standards behind it. There's verification required. It's got all of the basic, good fundamental elements in place. We think that the organic label can improve in some ways to meet consumer expectations, and that has a lot to do with the approval process and use of artificial ingredients in “organic” foods. Five percent of organic foods can contain certain artificial ingredients. What we'd like the government to do is ban the natural label, focus on organic and what really it should mean. If they're going to define it and won't ban it, then defining “natural” for processed foods, which is what FDA oversees, should mean organic and no artificial ingredients. At least that way it cannot mislead consumers because the bar is set high. It would really be reserved for a subset of organic processed food products out on the market. RL: How prevalent is this issue in the marketplace? UR: We haven't actually gone and counted how many foods have the natural label. This February, we showcased 25 different products that make natural claims that fall short of consumer expectations and demonstrate through a review of their ingredients exactly how. It's not that hard to find dozens of examples in the supermarket aisles. There have been a number of class action suits filed against companies for using natural labels, whether they contain GMOs, whether they contain artificial preservatives, flavorings, colors, all sorts of things. Those have been tying up the courts. There have been dozens of cases on that. So far, the government has been slow to act but they do have a mandate to prevent misleading labeling like this so we have petitioned them to ban the label and stop its misleading use. It shouldn’t be so difficult to do. RL: How have the class action suits turned out? UR: A lot of them just got settled so they never led to a final determination. In a lot of cases companies have made modifications to get more specific about their natural labeling. That doesn’t really help labeling confusion and consumers can’t necessarily tell what isn’t natural in their product. RL: So the FDA has never actually defined what the term “natural” should mean? UR: One court asked the FDA at some point to define it. FDA declined to. They didn't want to define it. It's a shame because without any standards, and with a government agency that's essentially in charge of the gate, there becomes nothing to really enforce. It's become a complete quagmire for the courts — and for consumers too. That's why with this comment period open — which has been extended to May 10, 2016 — we want as many consumers as possible to weigh in with the FDA. Thousands already have, suggesting that they're not okay with what the FDA is doing or not doing, and that they want FDA to stop the misleading practices of the natural label, one way or the other. You can sign our petition quickly to make your voice heard. RL: Is this the first time the FDA has had a public comment period in regard to the natural label? UR: Yes. We were cited as one of the reasons in the background for filing a petition with them to ban it. Grocery Manufacturers Association is cited as another group petitioning them. In some ways the FDA is responding to the growing public awareness and pressure, around this label. They are opening up this hearing period if you will, to get comments from the public on what they do or don't think natural ought to or ought not to mean. RL: Does the FDA have the regulatory authority to ban the natural label without having to go through Congress? UR: We noted in the petition that we filed in 2014 that we think they do have that authority. The FDA is supposed to not allow misleading advertising and labeling, misleading and deceptive uses of labeling. We think that the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act already gives them authority to stop that. We think they ought to use that authority to do it. RL: Will the USDA have any say in the matter? UR: Yes. We filed another, similar petition with the USDA, to ban the natural label on their side. The Federal Meat Inspection Act gives them the same authority to prevent misleading and deceptive claims on products. We petition them too, under that authority, to ban the term. There are other labels on the market that get much closer to what “natural” ought to be. “Natural” labeling on meat is also a vague and misleading term for consumers. We believe USDA should also take action. RL: What about legislative action? UR: There have been several members of Congress who have been interested in hearing about this issue. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR), for example, have been instrumental in organic laws and regulations. They're certainly interested in anything that might be undercutting that significantly. There's also Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), who is very interested on the animal side of things. His office has been really interested in trying to investigate what they can do around the natural and humane labeling of meat. It is definitely something that Congress can consider, and has been chewing on to some degree. Ideally, they would just like the agency to do something about this. RL: Have states weighed in? UR: We have had some inquiries from the New York State Governor’s Office regarding truthful labeling. In fact, New York State has been interested in truthful labeling on other things in the past, and has been trying to take a lead on cleaning ingredient disclosure. I wouldn't be surprised if we hear from some of the other states on this as well. RL: Could state legislation effectively change the national standard if companies don’t want to either make state-specific labels or withdraw from selling a product in an entire state? UR: It's really hard to say what companies will do. If we watch what happens in Vermont around GMO labels, it will be interesting to see how that thing unpacks itself. It's certainly a pressure point. The bigger the state that would do something like that, the more pressure that's on a company to tip over, in terms of making a full change. It's hard to say if just Vermont, or just Maine, or something like that did it, whether they would. Even sometimes when California does something, it doesn't necessarily change it for the whole country. But the potential for that to happen is certainly there. RL: Does the increased public interest in the GMO labeling issue make now a particularly good time to investigate the natural label? UR: There's definitely an intersection. It often gets tangled up in the GMO issue because, rightly so, people don't think GMO's are natural — they are made in a lab. Whether a product that contains GMO's should be allowed to be labeled “natural” is the subject of great controversy. The Grocery Manufacturers Association thinks they should be.   But there are a lot more things people expect out of “natural,” in addition to not having GMO ingredients. Consumers may also mistakenly believe that the “non GMO” label means no toxic pesticides or organically produced — but that’s not necessarily true. RL: How has the food industry responded? UR: It's singularly interesting, actually. For all those products that we showcase, we reached out to all those companies. If we didn't hear from them, we reached out to them several different times. We really received a range of responses from companies. Some of them said, ‘We don't actually have to tell you about that. That's proprietary information about how we produce a flavoring, what the source is, and what we use to process it,’ or, ‘We're not going to provide that information to you.’ Some companies said, ‘Yes, we use those things. but it's all legal, so it's fine." A company like Wesson just said, ‘Yes, we use GMO oils, and we extract them with chemicals. We're allowed to do that and call it natural.’ We also learned about companies that are no longer using the natural label, as Kashi told us they were planning,. We learned that during our investigation as  we had purchased a Kashi product with a “natural” label. Pacific Foods is another company that has also publicly said they are not going to use that label anymore. Gus Soda is also telling us in our inquiries that they have dropped the natural claim from their soda. That's been pretty interesting. RL: What about other food labels? UR: Like natural, we looked at other labels like organic, and free range, and all sorts of labels. We have over 200 labels in our database at greenerchoices.org. People can literally read how we rate all of these labels. We rate them like we rate products, by sending them through a similar set of criteria. Are they meaningful? Are they verified? Are they consistent in meaning? Were they transparent? Were they made with broad industry input? Are they independent labels? We rate on all those factors. Over the last couple of years we've actually looked at the first criteria, are they meaningful, and really broken that down into really discreet standards. We look at things like animal welfare standards. We must have at least 10 or 12 different criteria under that that we look at. We have work and welfare standards. We also have environmental sustainability standards. Things like pesticide use, sewage sludge, fertilizers, direct use on the farm, those types of things. We can literally rate many of the labels on food against all of those criteria as well. There's lots of gradation out there on the marketplace. There are some labels that are really doing a good job with a set of credible standards behind them. They've got a verification arm. They're doing a good job at meeting a lot of those criteria. They vary, but there's at least a good set of good labels out there. The unfortunate part is, that whole market is muddied by claims that don't have to mean anything, but sound like they do. Natural is one of those claims that we feel really mucks up the marketplace. It undermines the competition and success of credible labels which cheats consumers. RL: It seems that consumer are becoming more savvy. UR: We've been working on issues where people are misled by labeling for an awfully long time. One thing we've learned over the last 15 years of doing this work is that people care more and more about their food, and how it's produced.  They care that workers are treated fairly and animals too.  The majority don’t want their foods made with chemicals, pesticides or artificial ingredients and they care that the environment isn’t polluted from food production. They also have expectations around certain labels. The natural label falls so very short of those. That's why it's a focus of ours right now. There's really been no better time to parlay that with consumers whose awareness is growing, their wants are growing, their needs are growing, they want more sustainable production practices in the foods that they buy. RL: How can concerned consumers get involved? UR: We want to at least try and get as many people to A recent Consumer Reports study shows that nearly two-thirds of shoppers are being misled to believe the label “natural” on food packages means more than it does — including that the foods are free of GMOs, hormones, pesticides or artificial ingredients. But the truth is, these foods often contain the ingredients and chemicals consumers are trying to avoid. As an example, some “natural" shredded cheese contains natamycin, a pesticide. And “natural" fruit snacks can contain artificial preservatives like potassium sorbate and sodium benzoate. Consumers shouldn’t be misled in this way, and now there is a campaign to get the U.S. Food & Drug Administration either to fix the label "natural," or ban it altogether. In response to a petition filed by Consumer Reports, the FDA is asking for public comment (through May 10, 2016) on what the word natural should mean on food packaging. I had a chance to speak with Urvashi Rangan, the executive director of the Consumer Reports Food Safety and Sustainability Center, who is leading the organization’s fight for clearer food labeling, about the new study and campaign. Reynard Loki: What’s the problem with the “natural” label on food products? Urvashi Rangan: “Natural” is one of the most misleading labels that's out on the marketplace. Year after year when we have asked consumers about what they think it means, they think it means more than it does. We have spent the last 15 years or so reading labels on foods. We've been educating people about what natural doesn't mean for a really long time. We even give that information for free because we believe it’s a public service. RL: In December, Consumer Reports conducted a national phone survey to assess consumer opinion regarding the labeling of food. What did you find? UR: With the case of “natural,” with nearly two-thirds of consumers looking to buy that food, and thinking that it means something specific, we've been able to quantify the percentage of consumers who are mislead by the natural claim. In the story, we report what consumer expectations are around natural. There's what they think it means, and a good majority are being misled to think that it means something it doesn't: no GMO's, no artificial ingredients, no pesticides, for example. Then you ask them what they think it should mean, and almost an overwhelming majority think it should mean no chemicals used during processing, no artificial ingredients, no toxic pesticides, no GMOs. We've been helping to educate consumers about that for a long time. We've kicked that up a little bit in the last two years by really focusing on this particular label as a bad actor. RL: Have you targeted any specific food brands that are misleading the public with the natural label? UR: In this latest article we've pointed out seven major brands that are selling products that have a natural label on it, highlighting why it is we think they don't really comport with what people think of as natural, and marrying that to our new survey findings which shows that people continue to be misled by the natural label. RL: Someone could just look at the ingredients and find out that something's not natural in that food. But it wouldn't list pesticides that may have been used on one or more of the ingredients. UR: Yeah, that's true. And sometimes it isn’t so easy to figure out if an ingredient is natural. Sometimes you see things like cellulose, a dietary fiber derived from wood pulp. It's a natural compound, but not really something you would think of eating. Yet that can still be found in some things. Xanthan gum comes from a bacterial slime that is chemically extracted. Caramel color is another natural sounding ingredient, but two types are made with caustic ingredients that can create 4-MEI, a potential carcinogen. That isn’t really what we think of having in natural foods. There are lots of examples where you do not see the chemicals used to extract something on an ingredient label. Pesticides are another example of that. “Natural flavors” and “natural colors” don’t have to disclose the potentially dozens of ingredients in their formulas as they are considered to be proprietary. Things that are called processing aides, or food contact substances or secondary food additives — you will never see them listed as ingredients. RL: What would you recommend the definition of “natural” to be? UR: We would love to see it banned. Ideally, when we look at what people think it ought to mean, it comes very close to what people expect from the organic label. Organic is not perfect, but it comes a whole lot closer to providing a meaningful set of standards behind it. Ideally, we don't think the government should waste the public’s money redefining it, by coming up with a new label program. Organic has been defined. It took 12 years to do it. The government created standards behind it. There's verification required. It's got all of the basic, good fundamental elements in place. We think that the organic label can improve in some ways to meet consumer expectations, and that has a lot to do with the approval process and use of artificial ingredients in “organic” foods. Five percent of organic foods can contain certain artificial ingredients. What we'd like the government to do is ban the natural label, focus on organic and what really it should mean. If they're going to define it and won't ban it, then defining “natural” for processed foods, which is what FDA oversees, should mean organic and no artificial ingredients. At least that way it cannot mislead consumers because the bar is set high. It would really be reserved for a subset of organic processed food products out on the market. RL: How prevalent is this issue in the marketplace? UR: We haven't actually gone and counted how many foods have the natural label. This February, we showcased 25 different products that make natural claims that fall short of consumer expectations and demonstrate through a review of their ingredients exactly how. It's not that hard to find dozens of examples in the supermarket aisles. There have been a number of class action suits filed against companies for using natural labels, whether they contain GMOs, whether they contain artificial preservatives, flavorings, colors, all sorts of things. Those have been tying up the courts. There have been dozens of cases on that. So far, the government has been slow to act but they do have a mandate to prevent misleading labeling like this so we have petitioned them to ban the label and stop its misleading use. It shouldn’t be so difficult to do. RL: How have the class action suits turned out? UR: A lot of them just got settled so they never led to a final determination. In a lot of cases companies have made modifications to get more specific about their natural labeling. That doesn’t really help labeling confusion and consumers can’t necessarily tell what isn’t natural in their product. RL: So the FDA has never actually defined what the term “natural” should mean? UR: One court asked the FDA at some point to define it. FDA declined to. They didn't want to define it. It's a shame because without any standards, and with a government agency that's essentially in charge of the gate, there becomes nothing to really enforce. It's become a complete quagmire for the courts — and for consumers too. That's why with this comment period open — which has been extended to May 10, 2016 — we want as many consumers as possible to weigh in with the FDA. Thousands already have, suggesting that they're not okay with what the FDA is doing or not doing, and that they want FDA to stop the misleading practices of the natural label, one way or the other. You can sign our petition quickly to make your voice heard. RL: Is this the first time the FDA has had a public comment period in regard to the natural label? UR: Yes. We were cited as one of the reasons in the background for filing a petition with them to ban it. Grocery Manufacturers Association is cited as another group petitioning them. In some ways the FDA is responding to the growing public awareness and pressure, around this label. They are opening up this hearing period if you will, to get comments from the public on what they do or don't think natural ought to or ought not to mean. RL: Does the FDA have the regulatory authority to ban the natural label without having to go through Congress? UR: We noted in the petition that we filed in 2014 that we think they do have that authority. The FDA is supposed to not allow misleading advertising and labeling, misleading and deceptive uses of labeling. We think that the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act already gives them authority to stop that. We think they ought to use that authority to do it. RL: Will the USDA have any say in the matter? UR: Yes. We filed another, similar petition with the USDA, to ban the natural label on their side. The Federal Meat Inspection Act gives them the same authority to prevent misleading and deceptive claims on products. We petition them too, under that authority, to ban the term. There are other labels on the market that get much closer to what “natural” ought to be. “Natural” labeling on meat is also a vague and misleading term for consumers. We believe USDA should also take action. RL: What about legislative action? UR: There have been several members of Congress who have been interested in hearing about this issue. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR), for example, have been instrumental in organic laws and regulations. They're certainly interested in anything that might be undercutting that significantly. There's also Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), who is very interested on the animal side of things. His office has been really interested in trying to investigate what they can do around the natural and humane labeling of meat. It is definitely something that Congress can consider, and has been chewing on to some degree. Ideally, they would just like the agency to do something about this. RL: Have states weighed in? UR: We have had some inquiries from the New York State Governor’s Office regarding truthful labeling. In fact, New York State has been interested in truthful labeling on other things in the past, and has been trying to take a lead on cleaning ingredient disclosure. I wouldn't be surprised if we hear from some of the other states on this as well. RL: Could state legislation effectively change the national standard if companies don’t want to either make state-specific labels or withdraw from selling a product in an entire state? UR: It's really hard to say what companies will do. If we watch what happens in Vermont around GMO labels, it will be interesting to see how that thing unpacks itself. It's certainly a pressure point. The bigger the state that would do something like that, the more pressure that's on a company to tip over, in terms of making a full change. It's hard to say if just Vermont, or just Maine, or something like that did it, whether they would. Even sometimes when California does something, it doesn't necessarily change it for the whole country. But the potential for that to happen is certainly there. RL: Does the increased public interest in the GMO labeling issue make now a particularly good time to investigate the natural label? UR: There's definitely an intersection. It often gets tangled up in the GMO issue because, rightly so, people don't think GMO's are natural — they are made in a lab. Whether a product that contains GMO's should be allowed to be labeled “natural” is the subject of great controversy. The Grocery Manufacturers Association thinks they should be.   But there are a lot more things people expect out of “natural,” in addition to not having GMO ingredients. Consumers may also mistakenly believe that the “non GMO” label means no toxic pesticides or organically produced — but that’s not necessarily true. RL: How has the food industry responded? UR: It's singularly interesting, actually. For all those products that we showcase, we reached out to all those companies. If we didn't hear from them, we reached out to them several different times. We really received a range of responses from companies. Some of them said, ‘We don't actually have to tell you about that. That's proprietary information about how we produce a flavoring, what the source is, and what we use to process it,’ or, ‘We're not going to provide that information to you.’ Some companies said, ‘Yes, we use those things. but it's all legal, so it's fine." A company like Wesson just said, ‘Yes, we use GMO oils, and we extract them with chemicals. We're allowed to do that and call it natural.’ We also learned about companies that are no longer using the natural label, as Kashi told us they were planning,. We learned that during our investigation as  we had purchased a Kashi product with a “natural” label. Pacific Foods is another company that has also publicly said they are not going to use that label anymore. Gus Soda is also telling us in our inquiries that they have dropped the natural claim from their soda. That's been pretty interesting. RL: What about other food labels? UR: Like natural, we looked at other labels like organic, and free range, and all sorts of labels. We have over 200 labels in our database at greenerchoices.org. People can literally read how we rate all of these labels. We rate them like we rate products, by sending them through a similar set of criteria. Are they meaningful? Are they verified? Are they consistent in meaning? Were they transparent? Were they made with broad industry input? Are they independent labels? We rate on all those factors. Over the last couple of years we've actually looked at the first criteria, are they meaningful, and really broken that down into really discreet standards. We look at things like animal welfare standards. We must have at least 10 or 12 different criteria under that that we look at. We have work and welfare standards. We also have environmental sustainability standards. Things like pesticide use, sewage sludge, fertilizers, direct use on the farm, those types of things. We can literally rate many of the labels on food against all of those criteria as well. There's lots of gradation out there on the marketplace. There are some labels that are really doing a good job with a set of credible standards behind them. They've got a verification arm. They're doing a good job at meeting a lot of those criteria. They vary, but there's at least a good set of good labels out there. The unfortunate part is, that whole market is muddied by claims that don't have to mean anything, but sound like they do. Natural is one of those claims that we feel really mucks up the marketplace. It undermines the competition and success of credible labels which cheats consumers. RL: It seems that consumer are becoming more savvy. UR: We've been working on issues where people are misled by labeling for an awfully long time. One thing we've learned over the last 15 years of doing this work is that people care more and more about their food, and how it's produced.  They care that workers are treated fairly and animals too.  The majority don’t want their foods made with chemicals, pesticides or artificial ingredients and they care that the environment isn’t polluted from food production. They also have expectations around certain labels. The natural label falls so very short of those. That's why it's a focus of ours right now. There's really been no better time to parlay that with consumers whose awareness is growing, their wants are growing, their needs are growing, they want more sustainable production practices in the foods that they buy. RL: How can concerned consumers get involved? UR: We want to at least try and get as many people to

Inside the Democrats’ racial divide: Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton and the polls that prove this isn’t over yet

I. Bernie Sanders won four states on Super Tuesday: Oklahoma, Minnesota, Vermont and Colorado. Hillary Clinton won seven states: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia. That means, altogether, that Sanders has five states (those four plus New Hampshire) and Clinton has 10 states (those seven plus Nevada, Iowa and South Carolina). But here’s the critical thing: The elections in Nevada, Iowa and Massachusetts were either close or extraordinarily close. A little bit more time here, a little bit more organizing there, and they could easily have tipped his way. In other words, Sanders could very easily have seven states now to Clinton’s eight. He doesn’t, and coulda shoulda woulda is just that. But what this does mean, going forward, is that we have the opportunity to turn potential into actual. We’ve got time, we’ve got organizing, we’ve got money: let’s make use of it all. Clinton’s strongest weapon is the aura of inevitability that she and her supporters and the media have concocted around her. Part of that is based on reality, part of it is based on super delegates (which I refuse to concede), and part of it is based on spin. Don’t accommodate the superdelegates, don’t accommodate the spin. II. The exit polls in Massachusetts, which Clinton won narrowly, are fascinating. Here are some highlights: Sanders got 41 percent of non-white voters (they don’t break down the category further). I want to come back to this. Sanders beat Clinton among voters making under $50k, and voters making between $50k and $100k. The only income group she won was voters making over $100k. Among first-time voters, Sanders got a whopping 71 percent of the vote. Among independents, Sanders got 65 percent of the votes. Sanders won among very liberal voters and moderate voters. Clinton did better among married women than she did among unmarried women. Also, related to the gender question, in Oklahoma, Sanders nearly tied Clinton among women voters (48 percent for Clinton, 46 percent for Sanders). III. I’ve seen lots of claims that Sanders is only winning because of white men; among every other demographic, he loses. That simply isn’t true. In Vermont and New Hampshire, he beat Clinton among all women voters. In Oklahoma, as I said, he nearly tied Clinton among women voters. In Nevada, he nearly tied her among Latino voters (though the experts are still debating that one). In Massachusetts, as I said, he got 41 percent of non-white voters. We don’t have any exit polls for Colorado and Minnesota (at least not on CNN’s website, which is the one I’ve been using), but given the size of his victories there, I would be surprised if Sanders didn’t win or tie with Clinton among non-white voters and perhaps women voters. IV. The issue of race and demographics in the campaign is fascinating. There’s absolutely no question that Clinton has a commanding lead among African-American voters. She’s won that part of the electorate in every single contest thus far. But here’s where things get interesting. Back in the fall, when the issue of the gender gap between Clinton and Sanders supporters was raised, Matt Bruenig very shrewdly pointed out that the real divide there was as much one of generation as it was one of age: Younger women voters were supporting Sanders, older women voters were supporting Clinton. A lot of the subsequent polling and primary results have confirmed his premonition. I wonder if we’re not about to see something similar—if not quite as dramatic—with non-white voters. The cross-cutting factor here is not only age—Bruenig has also shown that younger black voters are trending toward Bernie (see the graph at the bottom of this post), and even in South Carolina, Sanders did much better with younger black voters than he did with older black voters—but also region. Think about it. With the exception of Nevada, the states where there’s been dramatic support for Clinton among non-white voters have all been in the South. And in Nevada, Latino voters almost went for Sanders (the experts are still debating that one). But outside the South and Nevada, there have been primaries in three states that are virtually all white (Vermont, New Hampshire and Iowa), and three other states that while majority white, have more diverse populations (Colorado, Minnesota and Massachusetts). Still no exit polls from Colorado and Minnesota (at least not on CNN’s website), but in Massachusetts, Sanders got 41 percent of the non-white vote. Compared with all those states in the South, that’s stunning. So the racial divide is real and a problem for Sanders—don’t get me wrong—but it may be more complicated than people have claimed. V. Outside the South, Sanders has won or come very close to winning every single state. From here on out, many of the states are much friendlier territory for him. Unless our brains are so completely scrambled by the Nate Silvers/Voxification of political life—where every poll is a destiny, every superdelegate a fact of nature, where everyone’s a crackpot realist rather than a citizen activist—it would be the definition of insanity to give up now. This is an uphill battle, always has been. So what? We move. Vorwärts. Always.

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My Gen X Hillary problem: I know why we don’t “like” Clinton

As many a news outlet has told us, women over 45 are supporting Hillary, and those under 45 are feeling the Bern. On the dividing line lies Generation X. (Remember us? People used to care about us.) At 43, I fall more or less right into the statistical middle and I’ve acted accordingly. Up until a few weeks ago, I supported Bernie for president, but I felt slightly guilty doing so. The man is passionate, his vision for the future is exciting, and he seems like a super-smart, slightly off-kilter uncle who would liven up Thanksgiving. He’s Bernie! We love Bernie. Also, we’re beyond needing to support a woman simply because she’s a woman. I should vote for the candidate who feels right to me. And that candidate happens to be a man.

Also, I’d never been much of a Hillary fan. She seemed fine: When she first came onto the national stage in 1992, she came across as the type of wife you’d hope someone like Bill Clinton would have. She had her own successful career. She was raising a daughter who was going through the same awkward stage I’d gone through only a few years earlier. She was the type of person I expected to grow up to be – a working mother who wore suits, supported herself financially, and had an equal say in her marriage – why would I expect anything else?  My understanding was that the bad old days were behind us (Fleetwood Mac was being played on a continuous loop that year, after all. And at college we were insisting on being called women, not girls! We were marching to take back the night! ) and that I, as a woman, would get to have whatever life I chose for myself.

But even though I had no objections to Hillary, I’d found her fans extremely off-putting. In 1992, as a summer intern with the Clinton campaign’s polling firm, I traveled to New York City for the Democratic convention. I didn’t have a badge to get inside Madison Square Garden, so I spent many hours walking around the perimeter and watching people. And I quickly identified a certain kind of woman at the convention who I actively disliked: the rabid Hillary supporter. These women were covered in buttons that read “Hillary’s husband for President” and “A woman’s place is in the House and the Senate.”  (Notably absent from that button: the Oval Office.) They would talk your ear off about how they were voting for Bill because they loved Hillary. But I didn’t get it. They felt like a throwback to another era, as though Hillary was the woman they’d dreamed of during their consciousness-raising sessions, before the vagina mirrors came out. 

We were beyond those battles now. People let us wear pants. We could get mortgages without needing our father or husband to sign for them. Help wanted ads in the paper were no longer divided by gender. No one was rejecting us from law school because they already had enough women. I knew that if someone in a meeting asked me to get coffee I’d tell them to get their own damn coffee and feel pretty good doing it. As a college student I hadn’t yet participated in a meeting, but I felt fairly certain that this would be how things would go. I was living in a coed dorm, after all. I’d seen the guy three doors down walk through the hall in his purple underwear. I was a citizen of a brave new post-sexist nation, which was nothing like the eras my mother or grandmother had inhabited. 

But while I wanted to dismiss the rabid Hillary ladies (I can still see them now with their broad grins and short bobs and fond memories of 1968), one incident kept nagging at me, making me wonder if perhaps the fight wasn’t totally over. It had to do with chocolate chip cookies.

“I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas,” Hillary had said on the campaign trail. “But what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession which I entered before my husband was in public life.”

This remark, spoken off the cuff and taken somewhat out of context, caused hellfire to rain down from the sky. Stay-at-home mothers pointed out that raising children was hard work too. People speculated on national news that Hillary might be Bill’s co-president. At Clinton’s next press conference the vast majority of questions he took were about his wife. Perhaps, my college self thought, the battle wasn’t entirely over. Here was a woman who had a demanding, powerful job, who was raising a daughter, and people still expected her to have a cookie recipe. Who has a cookie recipe, anyway? Don’t most people just use the recipe on the chocolate chip package? Doesn’t having one’s own recipe imply that one has spent hours in the kitchen tinkering with existing recipes to produce a variety that, when people bite into it, will cause them to ask if your secret ingredient is nutmeg? Hillary Clinton was not a woman who had time for that shit, people.

And then, a few months later, Hillary published her recipe for oatmeal chocolate chip cookies in Family Circle magazine. Was it really hers? Did she just rip it off the back of the Quaker Oats container, scrawl “add chocolate chips” at the bottom and fling it at her press assistant? And also: Did this mean that whatever I did in life I, too would need my own cookie recipe?

To make matters worse, the next year gave us Nannygate. Zoe Baird, Clinton’s nominee for attorney general, and the first woman to be nominated for the position, was forced to remove her name from consideration after it was revealed that she had hired a nanny off the books. The woman named to replace Baird, Kimba Wood, never made it to the confirmation hearings because she, too, had hired an undocumented immigrant as her baby sitter. The woman who eventually got confirmed was Janet Reno, who had no children. The message was clear: They’d let you in the room, but they would hold you to a different standard. I filed it away for future knowledge. Maybe I wouldn’t hire a nanny.  Maybe I wouldn’t even have kids. Maybe it wouldn’t matter because I had no plans to become attorney general.

After a few years in politics I changed careers and followed the lure of the newly commercialized World Wide Web; for the past 15 years I’ve run a small technology consultancy. And for many years in my career, the ideas I had in college about what being a woman in the workplace would look like were realized. No one asked me to make the coffee. Actually someone did once, as a joke. He never did it again. And sure, there was the odd inappropriate glance or comment, but throughout my 20s and early 30s I seemed to be moving up at a pace with my male colleagues. So: no need to vote for a woman just because she’s a woman.

Then a few weeks ago I heard a clip on the radio of a young man questioning Clinton at a town hall meeting in Iowa. “I’ve heard from quite a few people my age that they think you’re dishonest,” he said. “But I’d like to hear from you on why you think the enthusiasm isn’t there.”

It was subtle, but there was something in his tone I recognized. It was not a tone you would use to speak to someone who was a former secretary of state and senator. It was the tone you reserve for that dumb chick in your meeting who probably doesn’t know what she’s talking about. It was a tone I’d heard countless times over the course of my career, and in that moment I suddenly saw Hillary Clinton in an entirely different light.

I played his comment back in my head, trying to pinpoint exactly what I found so irksome, and realized it was the phrasing “I’d like to hear from you.” The phrase has tiny flecks of condescension in it. It’s not the way you’d phrase a question to someone you believe deserves a place at the table. And then I thought back over the course of my career, and made a mental list of all the times someone had phrased something in a way that had just a soupçon of implied incompetence to it. 

There was an initial phone call with a prospective client who, after I ran through a description of my company’s offerings asked me, “And you run the company all by yourself?” When I responded that I did, he cheered, “Good for you!” I didn’t get the business. At the time I’d shaken it off as a strange call, but then it happened again. Was it me, I wondered? Was there something about the way that I was presenting myself that made me seem insecure? When I was younger I might have chalked it up to age. I was young – I would grow into a mature way of conducting sales calls and pitch meetings. But at 43 I understand that what people mean when they ask if I run the business all by myself is “I’ve noticed you’re a woman and I’m confused by that because you don’t look or sound the way a technology business owner is supposed to, so I will discreetly take my business elsewhere.”

Worth noting: I have never, ever, had a woman ask me if I run my business all by myself.

Looking over my career I recognized other slights. Back in the first dot-com boom I’d had a series of bosses who were just a few years older than me, who were always good-looking, charismatic guys. I rarely encountered a 28-year-old female department head, but there were plenty of 28-year-old men who had been entrusted with running a section of a large agency’s interactive arm. The Internet hadn’t existed long enough for there to be a gender gap yet, but there it was.

And then in my late 30s, the women began to disappear. I was at a client’s innovation lab one day when there was a fire drill. (For those not in the tech world, “innovation lab” is code for “a bunch of T-shirt-clad developers in a room with free food and a napping area.”) On a whim, I counted the number of women as they exited the building. In an office of over a hundred people, 12 were female. Where had the women gone? Did they leave because they were sick of being told, in a million little ways, that their opinions weren’t important or that they weren’t qualified to do something for which they were clearly, abundantly qualified? Were they at home, caring for children because their employers didn’t offer flexible schedules and they didn’t want to work for a place with hours so demanding that one might need to use the nap room at the office? Were they burnt out and exhausted by doing their best and then finding out even that wasn’t good enough?

And in that moment, as the young Iowan’s voice rattled around in my head, I knew I would support Hillary. Not just because we both have a uterus (thank you, Killer Mike). Not because I’m afraid of going to a special place in hell (thank you, Madeleine Albright). I’m supporting her because as a member of Generation X, I’ve lived through enough to understand that if Hillary were a man she’d be the front-runner hands-down. I haven’t suffered the overt sexism of earlier generations, but in its place has come a more oblique, more insidious variant. It’s the kind that makes you question whether the fault might lie with you and your abilities. It gives rise to questions about why people aren’t enthusiastic about you, why they didn’t like it when you took a strident tone with them and then, when you adjusted course, complained that you weren’t aggressive enough, or why there’s something about you that just feels wrong. In politics people call this likability. And the female politicians we “like” are few and far between, because they remind us of our mothers or wives or that girl you hated in gymnastics class. We don’t have a frame of reference for what it looks like for women to be running the show, so if she’s not a man, she comes across as all wrong. In the tech world people don’t talk about “likability.” Instead they say, “Mike is going to present to the client because he’s got a great style. But don’t worry, you’ll still have a few slides that you can really own.”

I suspect that the millennial women who are supporting Bernie may simply not have gotten to a place in life where they’ve experienced this kind of chronic, internalized, institutional sexism. In order for someone to ignore you at a senior level, you need be old enough to have reached that level, and most millenials aren’t quite there yet. They’re still where I was in my early 30s, hopeful that we’ve come through the other side to a post-sexist world. Because nothing says “sexism is dead” like a woman voting for Bernie.

As much as we may want the battle to be over, the truth is that there is still much more to fight for. I understand that Hillary may not feel to voters like the perfect candidate in the same way that I don’t feel to clients like the perfect technology consultant. I understand what it’s like to be the most qualified person in the room and still be overlooked in favor of the charismatic guy just because, well, you’d rather have a beer with him. And I know that until the world sees what it looks like for this country to have a female president, we’re going to forever be finding reasons not to vote for one.  I’m done finding those reasons. I’m voting for Hillary.

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Tina Fey reinvents herself in the rich Afghan War dramedy “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot”

Paramount Pictures seems to have no idea what to do with the new Tina Fey movie “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot,” which is understandable. This is a difficult film to describe, and it’s easier to list all the things it isn’t — for example, it isn’t a spoof or a satire or a farce or a rom-com — than defining what it is. In fact, “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” is a surprisingly delicate creation, especially for a studio movie built around a famous TV comedian. There are no Sarah Palin impressions or gratuitous “30 Rock” references to be found here, and to the extent Paramount is trying to sell “WTF” as an “SNL”-flavored laff-riot they’re doing its star a grave disservice. If anything, it feels as if Fey is emulating the example of Kristen Wiig, who has reconstructed her career with a series of disparate comic and dramatic film roles. So what is “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot,” you ask in exasperation? As Ted Cruz says 164 times a day, that’s a very good question and I’m glad you asked. First of all, it’s based on “The Taliban Shuffle,” a memoir by journalist Kim Barker about her experiences as an ill-prepared war correspondent in Afghanistan and Pakistan. When Michiko Kakutani reviewed the book for the New York Times, she described Barker’s self-presentation as a zany, Tina Fey-like character. Fey read that review and then read the book and got together with “Saturday Night Live” producer Lorne Michaels to acquire the rights, and here we are! That’s an entirely unlikely origin story for a movie, but “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” has an air of care, generosity and sincerity throughout that makes me believe it’s true. So in practice the resulting film, in which Kim Barker the print journalist has become Kim Baker the TV journalist (because cameras are sexier than computers), is a character-based dramedy that leans more toward drama than comedy, and almost never reaches for laugh lines. There are a few good chuckles, but you won’t rip out those hernia stitches and your hilarity-meter will remain unbusted. It’s an unassuming feminist fable about an unexceptional “American white lady” (in Kim’s words) who reinvents her life, and a somewhat realistic war film with notes of pathos and tragedy that seeks to avoid going too dark. It’s “Eat, Pray, Love” meets “Zero Dark Thirty” in “The Year of Living Dangerously.” I recognize that description may sound intriguing to some potential viewers and unbearable to others, so let me hasten to add that the mixture of ingredients is always unstable. I was never bored by “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot,” and never felt sure where it was going next. As the marketing folks at Paramount know perfectly well, those are not necessarily good things when it comes to selling a mass-market multiplex movie. Most Saturday night ticket-buyers specifically do not want to see something unconventional or unexpected; they want to see a story they already know, told with a few new twists. On one level, nothing could be more familiar than the tale of a mildly depressed middle-class woman who chucks it all away in her 40s and heads out in search of romance and adventure. But Fey’s deeply committed performance makes the uncertainty of Kim’s self-reinvention come alive; she’s a real person trying to live through each moment as it comes. Kim is never quite sure why she makes the decisions she does, and is only intermittently able to be the sardonic observer of her own life typically demanded by the post-“Bridget Jones” genre. Credit also goes to screenwriter Robert Carlock, whose adaptation of Barker’s book evades all the usual clichés, and even more to the oddball directing duo Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, whose films are good, bad and weird in roughly equal proportion, but always worth talking about. (They made “I Love You Phillip Morris” with Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor as con-man lovers, the upside-down rom-com “Crazy, Stupid, Love” with Ryan Gosling and Steve Carell and, more regrettably, the campy Will Smith crime caper “Focus.”) Once Kim finds herself in the “Kabubble” circa 2003 — the tight-knit, hard-partying circle of Western journalists, spooks and private contractors conducting or covering the Afghan conflict — she is surrounded by several stock characters, but even those are memorably rendered. Margot Robbie plays the sexually voracious Aussie TV babe who assures Kim that even if she’s no better than a 6 or 7 at home, she’s easily a “Kabul 9.” Martin Freeman plays the lady-killing Scottish journalist who becomes Kim’s lover in a hilarious, awkward and highly realistic sex scene (a Ficarra-Requa specialty). Billy Bob Thornton plays the hard-bitten Marine officer who comes to appreciate that Kim “has got some.” Alfred Molina plays the jovial, corrupt Afghan bureaucrat installed by the Americans, who keeps trying to get into Kim’s knickers. Wait, hang on — what did I just say? It’s fair to say that the representational politics of this situation are complicated: Afghans are not Arab or Persian or South Asian; they come from diverse tribal and ethnic backgrounds and some of them have light skin and fair hair. But the fact that the two significant Afghan characters in “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” are played by Molina, who is British, and Christopher Abbott, who is American, strikes me as at least a question mark in 2016. Yes, both men are terrific actors and both are of Mediterranean ancestry; neither jumps out as inappropriate on-screen. Whatever artistic or business decisions may have been involved are invisible to us, but I wonder whether the film’s directors and producers (i.e., Tina Fey and Lorne Michaels) even thought about this as a potential problem. The fact that Molina’s character is a gross, boorish caricature who seems out of whack with the movie around him doesn't help. Whether you view that issue as a crucial flaw or a minor footnote, it points to the fact that “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” is a likable construction that points its star in a new direction without ever quite making a point. There’s a freshness and an unjaded quality to almost every scene that makes you want to keep watching, and in the sudden eruptions of terrifying violence (sometimes set to schmaltzy ‘70s pop) you can feel Ficarra and Requa reaching for a little of Robert Altman’s “M*A*S*H” and a little of Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket.” I badly wanted this to be the wry antiwar comedy about America’s recent misadventures that no one has made, and there are moments when it almost gets there. In the end, the story of Kim Barker’s reinvention has become the story of Tina Fey’s reinvention, in a movie that has no obvious role to fill in the cultural economy.

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Another feminist victory for “Mad Max”: A woman kept “Fury Road” from being just another action movie

This Sunday’s Oscars proved that “Mad Max: Fury Road” wasn’t just a feminist victory in front of the camera—it was also a win behind the scenes. Margaret Sixel was awarded her first Oscar in the best film editing category, an award she was widely expected to win. It was one of a number of tech category wins for the post-apocalyptic action masterpiece, hailed by many critics as the best film of the year. “Fury Road” also won six Oscars in total—including best sound mixing, best sound editing, best production design, best costume design, and best makeup. But what made Sixel’s win particularly special is its relative rarity: Prior to 2016, the film editing Oscar has gone to a woman just 12 times, meaning that fewer than 15 percent of all winners in the category have been female. Before Margaret Sixel, a woman hadn’t taken home the editing trophy since 2006, when Thelma Schoonmaker won her third Oscar for “The Departed.” While film editing is a profession that’s more historically friendly to women, with female editors shaping some of the greatest movies ever made, they remain relatively scarce in the industry—pushed out of a profession they helped pioneer. According to a recent report from San Diego State University, women account for just 22 percent of editors on the top 250 grossing films. That might seem like an extremely low number considering women make up a slim majority of the population, but it’s sadly commonplace in the film industry. The SDSU survey found that in 2015, women made up just 26 percent of producers, 11 percent of writers and 9 percent of directors on Hollywood’s highest-earning movies. This problem has only been getting worse in recent years. Female Oscar winners in film editing were relatively commonplace in the 1950s and '60s, when women dominated the industry. In 1940, Anne Bauchens became the first-ever woman to earn an Academy Award in the category for her work on “North West Mounted Police.” While that film is little remembered aside from Oscar trivia, women have been behind some of the most acclaimed and beloved films in history, including “Bonnie and Clyde,” “Lawrence of Arabia,” “Star Wars,” “Apocalypse Now,” “The Ten Commandments,” “Pulp Fiction,” “All About Eve,” “The Wizard of Oz,” “Singin’ in the Rain,” “Raging Bull,” “E.T.” and “Jaws.” D.W. Griffith is given much of the credit for pioneering many of the film techniques that would make 1915’s “Birth of a Nation” as artistically important as it is horrifically racist. The film, an infamous apologia for white supremacy, employs parallel editing to show scenes that unfold simultaneously. Whereas filmmakers would previously be confined to telling a single story that takes place at a given moment in time, parallel editing allowed directors to cut between scenes, weaving together disparate story lines. A team of five editors helped devise the technique, including Rose Smith, who later worked on Griffith’s “America” with her husband, James. Despite the relative few number of female film editors working today, a notable number of respected auteurs prefer to work with women behind the camera. Before she passed away in 2010, Sally Menke edited all of Quentin Tarantino’s films. The Guardian called Menke his “quiet heroine,” a key influence who would shape the director’s signature cinematic style. "The thing with Tarantino is the mix-and-match,” Menke explained. “Our style is to mimic, not homage, but it's all about recontextualising the film language to make it fresh within the new genre.” Since her death, his movies just haven’t felt the same. They lacked Menke’s distinctive stamp. Thelma Schoonmaker is perhaps the most notable example of a successful editor-director pairing, as she’s worked on every Martin Scorsese feature since “Raging Bull,” but directors like Jason Reitman and J.J. Abrams also employ women in the editing room. Dana Glauberman has worked on every single film Reitman has made thus far—with two (“Juno” and “Up in the Air”) nominated for best picture. The team of Maryann Brandon and Mary Jo Markey have been behind every J.J. Abrams film since “Mission Impossible III” a decade ago, nominated this year for their work on “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” The pair will also be editing Rian Johnson’s forthcoming sequel. Their male collaborators have differing opinions on what makes women such skilled editors—some more enlightened than others. According to Tarantino, his reason for working with female editors is that they are “more nurturing to the movie and to me.” He continued, “They wouldn't be trying to win their way just to win their way. … They wouldn't be trying to shove their agenda or win their battles with me.” Reitman compared the editing process to a marriage: “You spend more months editing than you do shooting and you do it in a tiny room sitting a few feet from each other. …  There are very few people on earth that you want to share that sort of proximity and time with, so you better have good chemistry.” If those responses are incredibly reductive, casting women in the role of work wife and support system for their male collaborators, George Miller’s thoughts on the subject indicate every reason his film is so boundary breaking. Editing “Mad Max: Fury Road” was an extraordinarily difficult task—taking 480 hours of footage and splicing them into a cohesive, two-hour narrative. According to Miller, “Fury Road” had double the number of cuts as “The Road Warrior,” despite the fact that they are nearly the exact same runtime. George Miller argued that having a woman’s perspective in such a key role is what made “Mad Max: Fury Road” such a unique experience. According to Margaret Sixel, when Miller—who also happens to be her husband—asked her to edit the film, Sixel initially balked at the offer. “Why do you want me to do an action film?” she asked. The director quickly responded: “Because if a guy did it, it would look like every other action movie.” He’s being modest. “Fury Road” feels like no other movie ever made. It’s intense and propulsive at the same time that it’s lyrical and deeply human, finding the wounded poetry in a band of female warriors searching for survival on a barren earth. Now if women can do all that in the editing room, just imagine what would happen if we let one actually direct an action movie every once in a while.This Sunday’s Oscars proved that “Mad Max: Fury Road” wasn’t just a feminist victory in front of the camera—it was also a win behind the scenes. Margaret Sixel was awarded her first Oscar in the best film editing category, an award she was widely expected to win. It was one of a number of tech category wins for the post-apocalyptic action masterpiece, hailed by many critics as the best film of the year. “Fury Road” also won six Oscars in total—including best sound mixing, best sound editing, best production design, best costume design, and best makeup. But what made Sixel’s win particularly special is its relative rarity: Prior to 2016, the film editing Oscar has gone to a woman just 12 times, meaning that fewer than 15 percent of all winners in the category have been female. Before Margaret Sixel, a woman hadn’t taken home the editing trophy since 2006, when Thelma Schoonmaker won her third Oscar for “The Departed.” While film editing is a profession that’s more historically friendly to women, with female editors shaping some of the greatest movies ever made, they remain relatively scarce in the industry—pushed out of a profession they helped pioneer. According to a recent report from San Diego State University, women account for just 22 percent of editors on the top 250 grossing films. That might seem like an extremely low number considering women make up a slim majority of the population, but it’s sadly commonplace in the film industry. The SDSU survey found that in 2015, women made up just 26 percent of producers, 11 percent of writers and 9 percent of directors on Hollywood’s highest-earning movies. This problem has only been getting worse in recent years. Female Oscar winners in film editing were relatively commonplace in the 1950s and '60s, when women dominated the industry. In 1940, Anne Bauchens became the first-ever woman to earn an Academy Award in the category for her work on “North West Mounted Police.” While that film is little remembered aside from Oscar trivia, women have been behind some of the most acclaimed and beloved films in history, including “Bonnie and Clyde,” “Lawrence of Arabia,” “Star Wars,” “Apocalypse Now,” “The Ten Commandments,” “Pulp Fiction,” “All About Eve,” “The Wizard of Oz,” “Singin’ in the Rain,” “Raging Bull,” “E.T.” and “Jaws.” D.W. Griffith is given much of the credit for pioneering many of the film techniques that would make 1915’s “Birth of a Nation” as artistically important as it is horrifically racist. The film, an infamous apologia for white supremacy, employs parallel editing to show scenes that unfold simultaneously. Whereas filmmakers would previously be confined to telling a single story that takes place at a given moment in time, parallel editing allowed directors to cut between scenes, weaving together disparate story lines. A team of five editors helped devise the technique, including Rose Smith, who later worked on Griffith’s “America” with her husband, James. Despite the relative few number of female film editors working today, a notable number of respected auteurs prefer to work with women behind the camera. Before she passed away in 2010, Sally Menke edited all of Quentin Tarantino’s films. The Guardian called Menke his “quiet heroine,” a key influence who would shape the director’s signature cinematic style. "The thing with Tarantino is the mix-and-match,” Menke explained. “Our style is to mimic, not homage, but it's all about recontextualising the film language to make it fresh within the new genre.” Since her death, his movies just haven’t felt the same. They lacked Menke’s distinctive stamp. Thelma Schoonmaker is perhaps the most notable example of a successful editor-director pairing, as she’s worked on every Martin Scorsese feature since “Raging Bull,” but directors like Jason Reitman and J.J. Abrams also employ women in the editing room. Dana Glauberman has worked on every single film Reitman has made thus far—with two (“Juno” and “Up in the Air”) nominated for best picture. The team of Maryann Brandon and Mary Jo Markey have been behind every J.J. Abrams film since “Mission Impossible III” a decade ago, nominated this year for their work on “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” The pair will also be editing Rian Johnson’s forthcoming sequel. Their male collaborators have differing opinions on what makes women such skilled editors—some more enlightened than others. According to Tarantino, his reason for working with female editors is that they are “more nurturing to the movie and to me.” He continued, “They wouldn't be trying to win their way just to win their way. … They wouldn't be trying to shove their agenda or win their battles with me.” Reitman compared the editing process to a marriage: “You spend more months editing than you do shooting and you do it in a tiny room sitting a few feet from each other. …  There are very few people on earth that you want to share that sort of proximity and time with, so you better have good chemistry.” If those responses are incredibly reductive, casting women in the role of work wife and support system for their male collaborators, George Miller’s thoughts on the subject indicate every reason his film is so boundary breaking. Editing “Mad Max: Fury Road” was an extraordinarily difficult task—taking 480 hours of footage and splicing them into a cohesive, two-hour narrative. According to Miller, “Fury Road” had double the number of cuts as “The Road Warrior,” despite the fact that they are nearly the exact same runtime. George Miller argued that having a woman’s perspective in such a key role is what made “Mad Max: Fury Road” such a unique experience. According to Margaret Sixel, when Miller—who also happens to be her husband—asked her to edit the film, Sixel initially balked at the offer. “Why do you want me to do an action film?” she asked. The director quickly responded: “Because if a guy did it, it would look like every other action movie.” He’s being modest. “Fury Road” feels like no other movie ever made. It’s intense and propulsive at the same time that it’s lyrical and deeply human, finding the wounded poetry in a band of female warriors searching for survival on a barren earth. Now if women can do all that in the editing room, just imagine what would happen if we let one actually direct an action movie every once in a while.

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Is there an optimum time of day to have sex?

In addition to the “where,” “with who” and “what do I do,” there’s another important question to ask about sex: when to have it. Sex enthusiasts may immediately weigh in that any time is a good time, and they might not be wrong. But those who find the answer isn’t so simple might want to take a look at some interesting research about sex, and the best time to have it. It'll come as no surprise that the mood tends to strike different people at different times. Recent research points to a gender difference in when arousal happens. According to Kinsey Institute, most men reach their peak testosterone levels in the early morning, which helps explain the experience of “morning wood," or waking up with an erection. For women, arousal tends to kick in a little later in the morning. Endorphin levels reach their peak between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. Because high endorphin levels can help us feel less pain and mediate the negative effects of stress, they are often associated with more pleasurable sex. There are other cycles to consider, too. Some experts suggest the best day to experience an orgasm is actually the day before you get your period. Sex therapist and couples counselor Laure Watson told Woman’s Day, “When blood accumulation makes your uterus heavy, contractions are more perceptible during orgasm.” She explains that the orgasmic tissue tends to be more sensitive when the body retains fluids. Of course, it’s not always so precise. While data points can seem compelling, not everyone is slated to fall in sync with that science. Hormone expert Alisa Vitti argues the best time of day to have sex is around 3 p.m. And by “best time” she means the most opportune time to provide both parties with a pleasurable experience. The procreative bit runs on a different clock. According to Vitti, 3 p.m. is when women experience a spike in cortisol levels. More cortisol means more energy, so if you want your lady amped and ready to go, 3 is a good time to catch her. During the same time, men experience elevated levels of estrogen, which Vitti says help make them more “emotionally present” during sex. She says this collision of conditions creates an environment where men and women can be most in tune with each other’s desires. She calls it the “perfect compromise” between the sexes in the way of heterosexual sex. "You can see why 'afternoon delight' is a thing,” she told the Daily Mail. Then again, there are other factors to consider. If Vitti’s 3 p.m. theory is correct, a lot of people will be missing out. The typical American work schedule doesn’t exactly permit mid-afternoon sex breaks. Though it might prove opportune for the adulterers out there. An extended lunch break or early-afternoon departure from the office tend to provide convenient cover for infidelities. If you live with the person you’re having sex with (my grandmother keeps mentioning this thing called “marriage,” though my polyamorous friends tell me it’s something else), having sex in the evening or before bed might make more sense. A lot of people appreciate the somnolent effects sex can have on the body, and there’s no better place to enjoy that rush than in your own bed. If you’re active in the hookup culture, you might find your sex schedule depends on other things, like what time the bars close. There’s also age to consider. As people grow older, they may find themselves getting more tired at night, which makes scheduling a sexual rendezvous for earlier in the day all the more appealing. In short, morning, noon or night all have their benefits. Carrie Weisman is an AlterNet staff writer who focuses on sex, relationships and culture. Got tips, ideas or a first-person story? Email her.  In addition to the “where,” “with who” and “what do I do,” there’s another important question to ask about sex: when to have it. Sex enthusiasts may immediately weigh in that any time is a good time, and they might not be wrong. But those who find the answer isn’t so simple might want to take a look at some interesting research about sex, and the best time to have it. It'll come as no surprise that the mood tends to strike different people at different times. Recent research points to a gender difference in when arousal happens. According to Kinsey Institute, most men reach their peak testosterone levels in the early morning, which helps explain the experience of “morning wood," or waking up with an erection. For women, arousal tends to kick in a little later in the morning. Endorphin levels reach their peak between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. Because high endorphin levels can help us feel less pain and mediate the negative effects of stress, they are often associated with more pleasurable sex. There are other cycles to consider, too. Some experts suggest the best day to experience an orgasm is actually the day before you get your period. Sex therapist and couples counselor Laure Watson told Woman’s Day, “When blood accumulation makes your uterus heavy, contractions are more perceptible during orgasm.” She explains that the orgasmic tissue tends to be more sensitive when the body retains fluids. Of course, it’s not always so precise. While data points can seem compelling, not everyone is slated to fall in sync with that science. Hormone expert Alisa Vitti argues the best time of day to have sex is around 3 p.m. And by “best time” she means the most opportune time to provide both parties with a pleasurable experience. The procreative bit runs on a different clock. According to Vitti, 3 p.m. is when women experience a spike in cortisol levels. More cortisol means more energy, so if you want your lady amped and ready to go, 3 is a good time to catch her. During the same time, men experience elevated levels of estrogen, which Vitti says help make them more “emotionally present” during sex. She says this collision of conditions creates an environment where men and women can be most in tune with each other’s desires. She calls it the “perfect compromise” between the sexes in the way of heterosexual sex. "You can see why 'afternoon delight' is a thing,” she told the Daily Mail. Then again, there are other factors to consider. If Vitti’s 3 p.m. theory is correct, a lot of people will be missing out. The typical American work schedule doesn’t exactly permit mid-afternoon sex breaks. Though it might prove opportune for the adulterers out there. An extended lunch break or early-afternoon departure from the office tend to provide convenient cover for infidelities. If you live with the person you’re having sex with (my grandmother keeps mentioning this thing called “marriage,” though my polyamorous friends tell me it’s something else), having sex in the evening or before bed might make more sense. A lot of people appreciate the somnolent effects sex can have on the body, and there’s no better place to enjoy that rush than in your own bed. If you’re active in the hookup culture, you might find your sex schedule depends on other things, like what time the bars close. There’s also age to consider. As people grow older, they may find themselves getting more tired at night, which makes scheduling a sexual rendezvous for earlier in the day all the more appealing. In short, morning, noon or night all have their benefits. Carrie Weisman is an AlterNet staff writer who focuses on sex, relationships and culture. Got tips, ideas or a first-person story? Email her. 

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The First Salon Book Awards

In December 1996, Salon published its first Book Awards, a list of the top fiction and nonfiction titles that year, compiled and judged by Laura Miller and Dwight Garner. The feature quickly became an annual Salon staple, a key fixture during our early years. Compiled below are links and the list of winners from the first Salon Book Awards, part of our SalonAt20 celebration.

In their introduction, “Books of the Year,” Laura Miller and Dwight Garner explain how they picked the winners and what qualities they fell in love with.

Laura Miller interviewed James Ellroy, 1996’s Best Books Winner for My Dark Places, in “Oedipus Wreck.” For full summaries by Laura Miller and Dwight Garner's of the 1996 winners, please visit our old archived page, Salon's First Book Awards.   Fiction The Family Markowitz by Allegra Goodman Reader’s Block by David Markson The Giant’s House by Elizabeth McCracken The Moor’s Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace   Nonfiction My Dark Places by James Ellroy The Shadow Man by Mary Gordon The Temple Bombing by Melissa Fay Greene The Living and the Dead by Paul Hendrickson Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt

In December 1996, Salon published its first Book Awards, a list of the top fiction and nonfiction titles that year, compiled and judged by Laura Miller and Dwight Garner. The feature quickly became an annual Salon staple, a key fixture during our early years. Compiled below are links and the list of winners from the first Salon Book Awards, part of our SalonAt20 celebration.

In their introduction, “Books of the Year,” Laura Miller and Dwight Garner explain how they picked the winners and what qualities they fell in love with.

Laura Miller interviewed James Ellroy, 1996’s Best Books Winner for My Dark Places, in “Oedipus Wreck.” For full summaries by Laura Miller and Dwight Garner's of the 1996 winners, please visit our old archived page, Salon's First Book Awards.   Fiction The Family Markowitz by Allegra Goodman Reader’s Block by David Markson The Giant’s House by Elizabeth McCracken The Moor’s Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace   Nonfiction My Dark Places by James Ellroy The Shadow Man by Mary Gordon The Temple Bombing by Melissa Fay Greene The Living and the Dead by Paul Hendrickson Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt

In December 1996, Salon published its first Book Awards, a list of the top fiction and nonfiction titles that year, compiled and judged by Laura Miller and Dwight Garner. The feature quickly became an annual Salon staple, a key fixture during our early years. Compiled below are links and the list of winners from the first Salon Book Awards, part of our SalonAt20 celebration.

In their introduction, “Books of the Year,” Laura Miller and Dwight Garner explain how they picked the winners and what qualities they fell in love with.

Laura Miller interviewed James Ellroy, 1996’s Best Books Winner for My Dark Places, in “Oedipus Wreck.” For full summaries by Laura Miller and Dwight Garner's of the 1996 winners, please visit our old archived page, Salon's First Book Awards.   Fiction The Family Markowitz by Allegra Goodman Reader’s Block by David Markson The Giant’s House by Elizabeth McCracken The Moor’s Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace   Nonfiction My Dark Places by James Ellroy The Shadow Man by Mary Gordon The Temple Bombing by Melissa Fay Greene The Living and the Dead by Paul Hendrickson Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt

In December 1996, Salon published its first Book Awards, a list of the top fiction and nonfiction titles that year, compiled and judged by Laura Miller and Dwight Garner. The feature quickly became an annual Salon staple, a key fixture during our early years. Compiled below are links and the list of winners from the first Salon Book Awards, part of our SalonAt20 celebration.

In their introduction, “Books of the Year,” Laura Miller and Dwight Garner explain how they picked the winners and what qualities they fell in love with.

Laura Miller interviewed James Ellroy, 1996’s Best Books Winner for My Dark Places, in “Oedipus Wreck.” For full summaries by Laura Miller and Dwight Garner's of the 1996 winners, please visit our old archived page, Salon's First Book Awards.   Fiction The Family Markowitz by Allegra Goodman Reader’s Block by David Markson The Giant’s House by Elizabeth McCracken The Moor’s Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace   Nonfiction My Dark Places by James Ellroy The Shadow Man by Mary Gordon The Temple Bombing by Melissa Fay Greene The Living and the Dead by Paul Hendrickson Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt

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5 ways Bernie Sanders is leading the fight against Big Pharma’s unconscionable greed

Today in the U.S., pharmaceutical drugs are outrageously overpriced. These unfair prices are under widespread scrutiny for the first time, thanks in part to Democratic presidential primary candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) who has been vocal on the issue for years. Americans pay by far the highest prices in the world for their pharmaceutical medicines. As Sanders has pointed out in several speeches, as well as in the Democratic primary debates, last year almost one in five Americans ages 19 to 64—35 million people—opted not to fill their prescriptions because they did not have enough money to pay for them. ThinkProgress created the following chart to sum up the “High Cost of Prescription Drugs” in America: Click to enlarge. The overpricing issue is so clear cut, it turns out, that even the GOP candidates—who maintain long-standing financial relationships with the pharmaceutical industry and the Big Pharma lobby—have included the issue in their primary platforms and speaking points. (Even so, none of the GOP presidential candidates think the government should set limits for drug company profits or that Medicare should negotiate with Big Pharma for fair drug prices.) Meanwhile, requiring Medicare to “use its bargaining power to negotiate with the prescription drug companies for better prices, a practice that is currently banned by law,” is at the very top of Sanders’ detailed plan to lower prescription drug prices. He also plans to increase competition with Big Pharma by letting individuals, pharmacists and wholesalers in the U.S. import their prescriptions from Canada; restore discounts for low-income seniors; prohibit deals that keep generic drugs off the market; strengthen the penalties for prescription fraud; and require drug companies to be transparent when it comes to the pricing and cost of drugs, i.e. show us exactly what they’re spending the money on. Sanders’ extensive plan to reel in pricing is just one of the reasons he is the most likely presidential candidate to stand up to the pharmaceutical industry and stop Americans from getting so brutally ripped off. Here are five more. 1. Hillary Clinton takes more donations from Big Pharma than any other candidate in either party. Sanders has accepted zero dollars from the pharmaceutical industry. Perhaps in response to Sanders’ plan to reduce drug costs— which he announced right out of the gate— the former Secretary of State entered the primaries revealing her comparable plan to tackle the issue. Both candidates’ plans would encourage competition, use the bargaining power of Medicare and restore senior discounts, among other things. Both candidates also have strong histories tackling major health care inadequacies, and have spoken out against the inordinate price spikes for medications. But we can’t ignore that glaring difference between the two candidates and their likelihood to actually stand up to the Big Pharma machine. Clinton has taken more donations from pharmaceutical companies than any candidate in either party. Her Big Pharma donations already totaled $164,315 in the first six months of her campaign, according to the figure compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics and reported by the Boston Globe in October. As Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Sanders and others have pointed out, Clinton’s track record hasn’t exactly been impervious to the needs and wants of her big industry funders. 2. This is not a new fight for Sanders. Back when he was a congressman in 1999, Sanders led seniors across Vermont’s Canadian border to purchase their medications at cheaper Canadian rates. Sanders' position on drug prices has not wavered since then. Responding to a 12.6 percent hike in the price of U.S. prescriptions in 2014 (according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services), Sen. Sanders introduced a bill, the Prescription Drug Affordability Act of 2015, in September to strengthen the federal government’s ability to rein in medication prices. It was assigned to a congressional committee in September 2015. 3. Sanders voted against Obama’s nominee for new head of the FDA due to his Big Pharma ties. When President Obama announced his decision to nominate Michael Califf as the new head of the Food and Drug Administration in January, Sanders formally blocked the choice, citing Califf’s close ties to Big Pharma. Sanders said in an official statement, “Dr. Califf’s extensive ties to the pharmaceutical industry give me no reason to believe that he would make the FDA work for ordinary Americans, rather than just the CEOs of pharmaceutical companies." 4. Sanders has named the overprescription of opioids a cause of the nation’s heroin epidemic. According to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, heroin use in the U.S. increased by 63% between 2002 and 2013 across age groups and income brackets. The same report shows that heroin overdose-related deaths just about quadrupled between 2002 and 2013. The report’s authors noted that heroin use is part of a larger national substance abuse problem and point to the widespread over-prescription of opioids as contributing to increased heroin addiction rates. "Heroin use is increasing at an alarming rate in many parts of society, driven by both the prescription opioid epidemic and cheaper, more available heroin," CDC director Tom Frieden said in a news release last year. Sanders has raised the issue on multiple occasions, calling out the drug companies that produce opioids for their role in creating the widespread addiction to heroin. In the Democratic primary debate on December 19, Sanders said prescribers and drug companies, “have to start getting their act together,” and in the January 17 debate he said, "There is a responsibility on the part of the pharmaceutical industry and the drug companies who are producing all of these drugs and not looking at the consequence of it." 5. Sanders thinks medical marijuana should be legal nationwide; he’s also in favor of ending federal pot prohibition.  Sanders has been an open supporter of medical marijuana use for years. He co-sponsored the States’ Rights to Medical Marijuana Act in 2001, which if passed would have moved cannabis from being listed as a Schedule I substance (the strictest listing possible, which makes it a felony drug) to a Schedule II substance. Schedule II would mean it was recognized as having an accepted potential medical use. Already, many patients are replacing their pharmaceutical drugs with marijuana in states where it is legal. Since in most of those states, medical marijuana patients can legally grow their own plants, the cost of medication can be automatically lowered for some individuals. Medical marijuana is also likely to reduce the national epidemic of overdose deaths—and thus inadvertently reduce healthcare costs overall. According to an abstract published by JAMA Internal Medicine, the use of medical marijuana in states that have legalized the drug for prescription purposes has led to just about 25% lower opioid-overdose mortality rates. In the 13 states with medical cannabis laws in place between 1999 and 2010, there was "a 24.8% lower mean annual opioid overdose mortality rate compared with states without cannabis laws." It’s not hard to reason why taking away almost a quarter of overdose deaths might translate into significant savings for U.S. healthcare at large. So while it’s conjecture, it’s possible that legalizing pot—either medically or for across the board adult use—has the potential to significantly lower medical costs for many Americans. Today in the U.S., pharmaceutical drugs are outrageously overpriced. These unfair prices are under widespread scrutiny for the first time, thanks in part to Democratic presidential primary candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) who has been vocal on the issue for years. Americans pay by far the highest prices in the world for their pharmaceutical medicines. As Sanders has pointed out in several speeches, as well as in the Democratic primary debates, last year almost one in five Americans ages 19 to 64—35 million people—opted not to fill their prescriptions because they did not have enough money to pay for them. ThinkProgress created the following chart to sum up the “High Cost of Prescription Drugs” in America: Click to enlarge. The overpricing issue is so clear cut, it turns out, that even the GOP candidates—who maintain long-standing financial relationships with the pharmaceutical industry and the Big Pharma lobby—have included the issue in their primary platforms and speaking points. (Even so, none of the GOP presidential candidates think the government should set limits for drug company profits or that Medicare should negotiate with Big Pharma for fair drug prices.) Meanwhile, requiring Medicare to “use its bargaining power to negotiate with the prescription drug companies for better prices, a practice that is currently banned by law,” is at the very top of Sanders’ detailed plan to lower prescription drug prices. He also plans to increase competition with Big Pharma by letting individuals, pharmacists and wholesalers in the U.S. import their prescriptions from Canada; restore discounts for low-income seniors; prohibit deals that keep generic drugs off the market; strengthen the penalties for prescription fraud; and require drug companies to be transparent when it comes to the pricing and cost of drugs, i.e. show us exactly what they’re spending the money on. Sanders’ extensive plan to reel in pricing is just one of the reasons he is the most likely presidential candidate to stand up to the pharmaceutical industry and stop Americans from getting so brutally ripped off. Here are five more. 1. Hillary Clinton takes more donations from Big Pharma than any other candidate in either party. Sanders has accepted zero dollars from the pharmaceutical industry. Perhaps in response to Sanders’ plan to reduce drug costs— which he announced right out of the gate— the former Secretary of State entered the primaries revealing her comparable plan to tackle the issue. Both candidates’ plans would encourage competition, use the bargaining power of Medicare and restore senior discounts, among other things. Both candidates also have strong histories tackling major health care inadequacies, and have spoken out against the inordinate price spikes for medications. But we can’t ignore that glaring difference between the two candidates and their likelihood to actually stand up to the Big Pharma machine. Clinton has taken more donations from pharmaceutical companies than any candidate in either party. Her Big Pharma donations already totaled $164,315 in the first six months of her campaign, according to the figure compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics and reported by the Boston Globe in October. As Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Sanders and others have pointed out, Clinton’s track record hasn’t exactly been impervious to the needs and wants of her big industry funders. 2. This is not a new fight for Sanders. Back when he was a congressman in 1999, Sanders led seniors across Vermont’s Canadian border to purchase their medications at cheaper Canadian rates. Sanders' position on drug prices has not wavered since then. Responding to a 12.6 percent hike in the price of U.S. prescriptions in 2014 (according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services), Sen. Sanders introduced a bill, the Prescription Drug Affordability Act of 2015, in September to strengthen the federal government’s ability to rein in medication prices. It was assigned to a congressional committee in September 2015. 3. Sanders voted against Obama’s nominee for new head of the FDA due to his Big Pharma ties. When President Obama announced his decision to nominate Michael Califf as the new head of the Food and Drug Administration in January, Sanders formally blocked the choice, citing Califf’s close ties to Big Pharma. Sanders said in an official statement, “Dr. Califf’s extensive ties to the pharmaceutical industry give me no reason to believe that he would make the FDA work for ordinary Americans, rather than just the CEOs of pharmaceutical companies." 4. Sanders has named the overprescription of opioids a cause of the nation’s heroin epidemic. According to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, heroin use in the U.S. increased by 63% between 2002 and 2013 across age groups and income brackets. The same report shows that heroin overdose-related deaths just about quadrupled between 2002 and 2013. The report’s authors noted that heroin use is part of a larger national substance abuse problem and point to the widespread over-prescription of opioids as contributing to increased heroin addiction rates. "Heroin use is increasing at an alarming rate in many parts of society, driven by both the prescription opioid epidemic and cheaper, more available heroin," CDC director Tom Frieden said in a news release last year. Sanders has raised the issue on multiple occasions, calling out the drug companies that produce opioids for their role in creating the widespread addiction to heroin. In the Democratic primary debate on December 19, Sanders said prescribers and drug companies, “have to start getting their act together,” and in the January 17 debate he said, "There is a responsibility on the part of the pharmaceutical industry and the drug companies who are producing all of these drugs and not looking at the consequence of it." 5. Sanders thinks medical marijuana should be legal nationwide; he’s also in favor of ending federal pot prohibition.  Sanders has been an open supporter of medical marijuana use for years. He co-sponsored the States’ Rights to Medical Marijuana Act in 2001, which if passed would have moved cannabis from being listed as a Schedule I substance (the strictest listing possible, which makes it a felony drug) to a Schedule II substance. Schedule II would mean it was recognized as having an accepted potential medical use. Already, many patients are replacing their pharmaceutical drugs with marijuana in states where it is legal. Since in most of those states, medical marijuana patients can legally grow their own plants, the cost of medication can be automatically lowered for some individuals. Medical marijuana is also likely to reduce the national epidemic of overdose deaths—and thus inadvertently reduce healthcare costs overall. According to an abstract published by JAMA Internal Medicine, the use of medical marijuana in states that have legalized the drug for prescription purposes has led to just about 25% lower opioid-overdose mortality rates. In the 13 states with medical cannabis laws in place between 1999 and 2010, there was "a 24.8% lower mean annual opioid overdose mortality rate compared with states without cannabis laws." It’s not hard to reason why taking away almost a quarter of overdose deaths might translate into significant savings for U.S. healthcare at large. So while it’s conjecture, it’s possible that legalizing pot—either medically or for across the board adult use—has the potential to significantly lower medical costs for many Americans.

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Trump’s rise, democracy’s fall: The Donald threatens our very system of government

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10 ways the rest of the world is putting America to shame

The Presidential candidates have been sounding off for almost two years now, pointing out (or in many cases manufacturing) all of America’s problems, and offering solutions they believe will make them the next President. The candidates, especially to the right of the political spectrum, extoll America as being exceptional, and they score empty points with voters by talking about how the rest of the planet looks to the United States to solve the world’s woes. It is surprising, then, to see how many of these seemingly intractable problems are being far more effectively tackled by the countries we are supposed to be “leading”. Maybe it’s time for America to start looking elsewhere for innovative solutions. Here are 10  examples of problems being solved everywhere but in America: 1. Peru: free solar-powered electricity for the poor. In 2013, in Peru, only about two-thirds of the 25 million people had access to electricity. The Peruvian government decided to do something about it, and instituted a program to provide free solar energy to the underprivileged. With the goal of providing at least 95% of Peruvians with electricity, Peru began the National Photovoltaic Household Electrification Program, installing free solar panels in impoverished communities. The program, which is expected to be completed by next year, has so far installed almost 15,000 photovoltaic systems. 2. Iceland: white-collar criminals go to jail. In the wake of the collapse of the housing bubble in 2008, it was not only the United States that almost fell into a deep economic depression. The same criminal activity our banks engaged in, inflating the housing market and gambling away our money while saddling crippling debt on untold millions, was also occurring around the world. One country in particular, Iceland, almost imploded. It had a far different response to the crisis, however. At the same time that the United States was bailing out our “too-big-to-fail” banks, Iceland was letting them suffer the consequences of their greed, namely bankruptcy and failure. Instead of bailing banks out, the Icelandic government bailed out homeowners by forgiving mortgages that were overvalued. While it is arguable whether a similar course of action would have been advisable in the far-larger United States, it may be more important to note that Iceland began prosecuting actual people who propagated the illegal activity. Unlike the U.S., where exactly zero bank executives have answered for their crimes, and prosecutions for white-collar crime are at a 20-year low, 26 bankers in Iceland have gone to prison for their misdeeds. 3. France: stop throwing away food. While the United States may be the richest nation on the planet, more than 15 million children go to bed hungry. Digest this fact while also noting that 133 billion pounds of food, fully a third of the available supply, goes uneaten, eventually ending up in a landfill. France, facing a similar problem, made a very simple decision: stop throwing the food away. As of early this month, it became illegal in France for large grocery stores (4300 square feet or more) to throw out unsold food. Instead, French groceries must contract with charitable organizations, which will be responsible for collecting and redistributing the food to the needy. The law also mandates educational programs in schools to raise awareness among children about the problem of food waste. 4. Sweden: the six-hour workday. Americans are the most overworked employees in the developed world. Even though the traditional work week for American workers is 40 hours, the average actual number of hours they work has crept up to 47 hours a week, almost a full extra work day. And while Americans are also among the most productive workers in the world, most social scientists will point out that many hours a week are wasted by employees who are simply burnt out and unable to focus for so many hours. Sweden thinks it has a solution. A trial six-hour work-day has been instituted by several Swedish companies. Accepting the premise that eight hours is too long to be able to focus on work-related tasks, participating companies believe that six hours is sufficient time to accomplish productive work, minimize employee burn-out and enhance the work-life balance. The hope is also that by shortening the work-week, new employment will open up from companies that by necessity need more man-hours. While the trial is ongoing, results so far are promising. 5. Portugal: decriminalize drugs. Although several states in America have legalized growing and selling marijuana, on a federal level weed is still illegal, as are many other mood-altering substances. The criminal prosecution of drug offenders has resulted in a bloated prison population and has devastated African American and Latino communities, who have borne the brunt of the prosecutions. A solution to our drug problem might be found in Portugal, where drug use (not trafficking) has been decriminalized since 2001. Although still illegal, drug users are not criminally prosecuted. Instead they are given a summons to appear in front of a “dissuasion” panel, which determines the depth of the offender’s drug problem, and may order health or social counseling, drug treatment, or may render a fine. Since decriminalizing drugs, Portugal has experienced no increase in drug use (the usual canard dragged out by the anti-drug forces), and in fact, drug use by adolescents has decreased since 2003. 6. Ireland: drug addiction is a health issue. Imagine the hullabaloo in the United States if, instead of arresting heroin addicts and throwing them in prison, bloating the system with non-violent offenders, and devastating families, we treated them like the ill persons that they are. Ireland, in the throes of a serious drug addiction plague, plans to show us what that might look like. Beginning this year in Dublin, the Irish government will be decriminalizing the personal possession of small amounts of heroin, cocaine, and other previously illegal drugs. In the case if heroin, medically supervised injection rooms will be set up for addicts to shoot up in the presence of doctors who may actually be able to help them. By removing drug addiction from the jurisdiction of the criminal justice system, the Irish politician Aodhán Ó Ríordáin told the Irish Times, “society will be saying, 'the substance is illegal, but you are not a criminal for taking it'." 7. Japan: make children self-sufficient. The helicopter parent is ever-present in the United States. It seems children aren’t allowed to walk anywhere by themselves, play by themselves or be left to themselves. Parents who do allow such self-sufficiency in the U.S. are actually looked upon as negligent. Some have even been arrested for the crime of letting their child play alone in a playground. In Japan, there is a vastly different attitude about children. Japanese parents instill a sense of self-sufficiency early. Contrast that with the warnings from American parents that every stranger is a potential child molester. Japanese children barely out of kindergarten can routinely be seen walking alone. It is common for school children to walk to and from school by themselves. Children are taught that they may rely on the group to help them if they need it, and the very number of children walking alone fosters the perception of safety, and in fact, safety itself. An old Japanese proverb is apt: “Send the beloved child on a journey.” 8. Sweden (again!): we are all feminists. Certainly in the U.S. strides have been made on gender equality. Women are no longer expected to be barefoot and pregnant. Women in the workforce are an accepted norm. Still, the glass ceiling remains intact, with women making on average far less than men in earnings (78 cents for every dollar), despite being more likely to have a college degree. Male CEOs far outnumber female. The U.S. remains one of the only developed countries to lack paid pregnancy leave. Political representation is far below the 50% of the population that women represent. And still no female president. Of the 197 constitutions across the globe,165 of them—or about 84%—explicitly guarantee gender equality, the WORLD Policy Analysis Center reports. Not the U.S. constitution. In Sweden, they take a more enlightened approach. "Gender equality is one of the cornerstones of Swedish society," Sweden's official gender equality website states. Every 16-year-old child in Sweden has been given a copy of a renowned book by the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, called We Should All Be Feminists. The Swedish organizations behind the book distribution want to explicitly prompt a discussion and awareness of gender equality and feminism. “This is the book that I wish all of my male classmates would have read when I was 16,” Clara Berglund, chair of the Swedish Women’s Lobby, told the Guardian newspaper. “It feels so important to contribute to this project. It is a gift to all second-grade high-school students, but it is also a gift to ourselves and future generations.” 9. Israel: water can be managed. California, Texas and the American Southwest have been struggling with a years-long drought that has left them with water shortages just short of catastrophic. As the domestic water table recedes, and climate change becomes more and more apparent (except to a politically expedient Republican Party), water management has become a priority that America must master or face the eventual horrific consequences. For lessons, we might turn to Israel. Situated in the parched Middle East and comprised of half-desert, Israel itself was on the brink not many years ago. In 2009, after seven years of drought, there was a very real danger that Israelis would turn on the taps and no water would come out. The solution was three-pronged. The government mandated limited use of water, even limiting the length of showers. The limits resulted in cutting water use by one-fifth. Recycling of water became public policy, with more than three-fourths of the country’s wastewater recycled and used for agricultural purposes (compare this with the U.S., which recycles only 1% of its water). The third prong was the construction of desalinization plants, which drew saltwater from the sea and produced drinkable water. Despite the concerns of some environmentalists about the effects of desalinization on the ocean, California has already partnered with the Israelis to construct a desal plant, and has implemented many of the same limits and recycling policies (13% of California water is now recycled, far more than the rest of the U.S.). 10. England: Domestic abuse isn’t always physical. Almost a third of the women in the U.S. have experienced physical abuse from their spouse or partner, according to the CDC. More than 22% of these cases have been severe physical trauma. Over 19% of these women have been raped. It is likely these percentages are actually low, since many abuse victims fear speaking about it. U.S. law certainly provides these victims a place to address their fears should they seek protection from physical abuse. But in this age of social media and digital apps, our laws may not adequately address emotional and psychological abuse. Increasingly, women find themselves being spied on online by their partners, or subtly or explicitly threatened through social media. In England, the government has addressed this problem head on. A new law has been passed with penalties of up to five years in prison for abusers who seek to control or spy on their partners online or via social media. Actions that show “a pattern of threats, humiliation and intimidation” are covered under the law. "This behavior can be incredibly harmful in an abusive relationship where one person holds more power than the other, even if on the face of it this behavior might seem playful, innocuous or loving,” Alison Saunders, director of public prosecutions, told the BBC. “Victims can be frightened of the repercussions of not abiding by someone else's rules. Often they fear that violence will be used against them, or suffer from extreme psychological and emotional abuse.” The Presidential candidates have been sounding off for almost two years now, pointing out (or in many cases manufacturing) all of America’s problems, and offering solutions they believe will make them the next President. The candidates, especially to the right of the political spectrum, extoll America as being exceptional, and they score empty points with voters by talking about how the rest of the planet looks to the United States to solve the world’s woes. It is surprising, then, to see how many of these seemingly intractable problems are being far more effectively tackled by the countries we are supposed to be “leading”. Maybe it’s time for America to start looking elsewhere for innovative solutions. Here are 10  examples of problems being solved everywhere but in America: 1. Peru: free solar-powered electricity for the poor. In 2013, in Peru, only about two-thirds of the 25 million people had access to electricity. The Peruvian government decided to do something about it, and instituted a program to provide free solar energy to the underprivileged. With the goal of providing at least 95% of Peruvians with electricity, Peru began the National Photovoltaic Household Electrification Program, installing free solar panels in impoverished communities. The program, which is expected to be completed by next year, has so far installed almost 15,000 photovoltaic systems. 2. Iceland: white-collar criminals go to jail. In the wake of the collapse of the housing bubble in 2008, it was not only the United States that almost fell into a deep economic depression. The same criminal activity our banks engaged in, inflating the housing market and gambling away our money while saddling crippling debt on untold millions, was also occurring around the world. One country in particular, Iceland, almost imploded. It had a far different response to the crisis, however. At the same time that the United States was bailing out our “too-big-to-fail” banks, Iceland was letting them suffer the consequences of their greed, namely bankruptcy and failure. Instead of bailing banks out, the Icelandic government bailed out homeowners by forgiving mortgages that were overvalued. While it is arguable whether a similar course of action would have been advisable in the far-larger United States, it may be more important to note that Iceland began prosecuting actual people who propagated the illegal activity. Unlike the U.S., where exactly zero bank executives have answered for their crimes, and prosecutions for white-collar crime are at a 20-year low, 26 bankers in Iceland have gone to prison for their misdeeds. 3. France: stop throwing away food. While the United States may be the richest nation on the planet, more than 15 million children go to bed hungry. Digest this fact while also noting that 133 billion pounds of food, fully a third of the available supply, goes uneaten, eventually ending up in a landfill. France, facing a similar problem, made a very simple decision: stop throwing the food away. As of early this month, it became illegal in France for large grocery stores (4300 square feet or more) to throw out unsold food. Instead, French groceries must contract with charitable organizations, which will be responsible for collecting and redistributing the food to the needy. The law also mandates educational programs in schools to raise awareness among children about the problem of food waste. 4. Sweden: the six-hour workday. Americans are the most overworked employees in the developed world. Even though the traditional work week for American workers is 40 hours, the average actual number of hours they work has crept up to 47 hours a week, almost a full extra work day. And while Americans are also among the most productive workers in the world, most social scientists will point out that many hours a week are wasted by employees who are simply burnt out and unable to focus for so many hours. Sweden thinks it has a solution. A trial six-hour work-day has been instituted by several Swedish companies. Accepting the premise that eight hours is too long to be able to focus on work-related tasks, participating companies believe that six hours is sufficient time to accomplish productive work, minimize employee burn-out and enhance the work-life balance. The hope is also that by shortening the work-week, new employment will open up from companies that by necessity need more man-hours. While the trial is ongoing, results so far are promising. 5. Portugal: decriminalize drugs. Although several states in America have legalized growing and selling marijuana, on a federal level weed is still illegal, as are many other mood-altering substances. The criminal prosecution of drug offenders has resulted in a bloated prison population and has devastated African American and Latino communities, who have borne the brunt of the prosecutions. A solution to our drug problem might be found in Portugal, where drug use (not trafficking) has been decriminalized since 2001. Although still illegal, drug users are not criminally prosecuted. Instead they are given a summons to appear in front of a “dissuasion” panel, which determines the depth of the offender’s drug problem, and may order health or social counseling, drug treatment, or may render a fine. Since decriminalizing drugs, Portugal has experienced no increase in drug use (the usual canard dragged out by the anti-drug forces), and in fact, drug use by adolescents has decreased since 2003. 6. Ireland: drug addiction is a health issue. Imagine the hullabaloo in the United States if, instead of arresting heroin addicts and throwing them in prison, bloating the system with non-violent offenders, and devastating families, we treated them like the ill persons that they are. Ireland, in the throes of a serious drug addiction plague, plans to show us what that might look like. Beginning this year in Dublin, the Irish government will be decriminalizing the personal possession of small amounts of heroin, cocaine, and other previously illegal drugs. In the case if heroin, medically supervised injection rooms will be set up for addicts to shoot up in the presence of doctors who may actually be able to help them. By removing drug addiction from the jurisdiction of the criminal justice system, the Irish politician Aodhán Ó Ríordáin told the Irish Times, “society will be saying, 'the substance is illegal, but you are not a criminal for taking it'." 7. Japan: make children self-sufficient. The helicopter parent is ever-present in the United States. It seems children aren’t allowed to walk anywhere by themselves, play by themselves or be left to themselves. Parents who do allow such self-sufficiency in the U.S. are actually looked upon as negligent. Some have even been arrested for the crime of letting their child play alone in a playground. In Japan, there is a vastly different attitude about children. Japanese parents instill a sense of self-sufficiency early. Contrast that with the warnings from American parents that every stranger is a potential child molester. Japanese children barely out of kindergarten can routinely be seen walking alone. It is common for school children to walk to and from school by themselves. Children are taught that they may rely on the group to help them if they need it, and the very number of children walking alone fosters the perception of safety, and in fact, safety itself. An old Japanese proverb is apt: “Send the beloved child on a journey.” 8. Sweden (again!): we are all feminists. Certainly in the U.S. strides have been made on gender equality. Women are no longer expected to be barefoot and pregnant. Women in the workforce are an accepted norm. Still, the glass ceiling remains intact, with women making on average far less than men in earnings (78 cents for every dollar), despite being more likely to have a college degree. Male CEOs far outnumber female. The U.S. remains one of the only developed countries to lack paid pregnancy leave. Political representation is far below the 50% of the population that women represent. And still no female president. Of the 197 constitutions across the globe,165 of them—or about 84%—explicitly guarantee gender equality, the WORLD Policy Analysis Center reports. Not the U.S. constitution. In Sweden, they take a more enlightened approach. "Gender equality is one of the cornerstones of Swedish society," Sweden's official gender equality website states. Every 16-year-old child in Sweden has been given a copy of a renowned book by the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, called We Should All Be Feminists. The Swedish organizations behind the book distribution want to explicitly prompt a discussion and awareness of gender equality and feminism. “This is the book that I wish all of my male classmates would have read when I was 16,” Clara Berglund, chair of the Swedish Women’s Lobby, told the Guardian newspaper. “It feels so important to contribute to this project. It is a gift to all second-grade high-school students, but it is also a gift to ourselves and future generations.” 9. Israel: water can be managed. California, Texas and the American Southwest have been struggling with a years-long drought that has left them with water shortages just short of catastrophic. As the domestic water table recedes, and climate change becomes more and more apparent (except to a politically expedient Republican Party), water management has become a priority that America must master or face the eventual horrific consequences. For lessons, we might turn to Israel. Situated in the parched Middle East and comprised of half-desert, Israel itself was on the brink not many years ago. In 2009, after seven years of drought, there was a very real danger that Israelis would turn on the taps and no water would come out. The solution was three-pronged. The government mandated limited use of water, even limiting the length of showers. The limits resulted in cutting water use by one-fifth. Recycling of water became public policy, with more than three-fourths of the country’s wastewater recycled and used for agricultural purposes (compare this with the U.S., which recycles only 1% of its water). The third prong was the construction of desalinization plants, which drew saltwater from the sea and produced drinkable water. Despite the concerns of some environmentalists about the effects of desalinization on the ocean, California has already partnered with the Israelis to construct a desal plant, and has implemented many of the same limits and recycling policies (13% of California water is now recycled, far more than the rest of the U.S.). 10. England: Domestic abuse isn’t always physical. Almost a third of the women in the U.S. have experienced physical abuse from their spouse or partner, according to the CDC. More than 22% of these cases have been severe physical trauma. Over 19% of these women have been raped. It is likely these percentages are actually low, since many abuse victims fear speaking about it. U.S. law certainly provides these victims a place to address their fears should they seek protection from physical abuse. But in this age of social media and digital apps, our laws may not adequately address emotional and psychological abuse. Increasingly, women find themselves being spied on online by their partners, or subtly or explicitly threatened through social media. In England, the government has addressed this problem head on. A new law has been passed with penalties of up to five years in prison for abusers who seek to control or spy on their partners online or via social media. Actions that show “a pattern of threats, humiliation and intimidation” are covered under the law. "This behavior can be incredibly harmful in an abusive relationship where one person holds more power than the other, even if on the face of it this behavior might seem playful, innocuous or loving,” Alison Saunders, director of public prosecutions, told the BBC. “Victims can be frightened of the repercussions of not abiding by someone else's rules. Often they fear that violence will be used against them, or suffer from extreme psychological and emotional abuse.”

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