Co-founder Steven Gonzalez brought podcast host Dan Pashman’s optimal pasta shape to life
“It’s not really common to make new pasta shapes,” says Steven Gonzalez, co-founder of the Sfoglini pasta factory in upstate New York. “As people who are in the pasta business, sometimes it can be a little stale, it’s just a lot of penne, fusilli, spaghetti — so I think that’s kind of why this took so well.”
He’s talking about cascatelli, a new shape of pasta dreamed up by Dan Pashman, host and creator of the Sporkful podcast . Pashman set out to create a pasta that had, in his mind, the optimal shape for holding sauce, getting pronged by a fork, and the most satisfying chew. Once he had his perfect shape designed, Pashman teamed up with Gonzalez to have Sfoglini manufacture it. “We were originally supposed to sell 5,000 pounds and call it a day,” says Gonzalez. “But we’ve kept going, so now we’ve sold probably 300,000 pounds.”
The Sfoglini pasta factory prides itself on using local, North American ingredients for its pastas, and a slow drying process. Gonzalez also emphasizes his company’s use of traditional bronze dies, versus teflon dies that bigger pasta companies use to create shapes. The bronze dies leave a rough texture, perfect for helping sauce stick to the pasta. They weigh about 100 pounds, and cost about $3,000 to $5,000 each.
Check out the full video to follow Gonzalez throughout his day, and see more of what it takes to manufacture pasta and operate a pasta factory.
The US Mint announced that it has “begun shipping the first coins in the American Women Quarters (AWQ) Program.” And it all starts with the outstretched arms of poet Maya Angelou gracing the reverse of the quarter. The Mint writes:
A writer, poet, performer, social activist, and teacher, Angelou rose to international prominence as an author after the publication of her groundbreaking autobiography, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” Angelou’s published works of verse, non-fiction, and fiction include more than 30 bestselling titles. Her remarkable career encompasses dance, theater, journalism, and social activism. The recipient of more than 30 honorary degrees, Angelou read “On the Pulse of Morning” at the 1992 inauguration of President Bill Clinton.? Angelou’s reading marked the first time an African American woman wrote and presented a poem at a Presidential inauguration. In 2010, President Barack Obama awarded Angelou the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and she was the 2013 recipient of the Literarian Award, an honorary National Book Award for contributions to the literary community.
According to NPR, other honorees in the series will include “astronaut Sally Ride; actress Anna May Wong; suffragist and politician Nina Otero-Warren; and Wilma Mankiller, the first female principal chief of the Cherokee Nation. The coins featuring the other honorees will be shipped out this year through 2025.”
When they invite you to the party
remember what parties are like
before answering.
Someone telling you in a loud voice
they once wrote a poem.
Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.
Then reply.
If they say We should get together
say why?
It’s not that you don’t love them anymore.
You’re trying to remember something
too important to forget.
Trees. The monastery bell at twilight.
Tell them you have a new project.
It will never be finished.
When someone recognizes you in a grocery store
nod briefly and become a cabbage.
When someone you haven’t seen in ten years
appears at the door,
don’t start singing him all your new songs.
You will never catch up.
Walk around feeling like a leaf.
Know you could tumble any second.
Then decide what to do with your time.”
During the 1940s and 50s, Hollywood entered a “noir” period, producing riveting films based on hard-boiled fiction. These films were set in dark locations and shot in a black & white aesthetic that fit like a glove. Hardened men wore fedoras and forever smoked cigarettes. Women played the femme fatale role brilliantly. Love was the surest way to death. All of these elements figured into what Roger Ebert calls “the most American film genre” in his short Guide to Film Noir.
If you head over to this list of Noir Films, you can find 60 films from the noir genre, including some classics by John Huston, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang and Ida Lupino. The list also features some cinematic legends like Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson, and even Frank Sinatra. Hope the collection helps you get through the days ahead.
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I've found Amazon increasingly useless over the past few years. Its search results are cluttered with ads. Sometimes my searches fail to show products I know the company stocks and sells. And Amazon Prime has lost its luster as shipping times have lengthened and Prime Video has become increasingly superfluous.
So, to learn that Amazon cheats search results by crowding out better and cheaper products in favor of it own stuff was no big shock. Yet another reason for me to take my business elsewhere, when possible. From the article:
We found that knowing only whether a product was an Amazon brand or exclusive could predict in seven out of every 10 cases whether Amazon would place it first in search results. These listings are not visibly marked as “sponsored” and they are part of a grid that Amazon identifies as “search results” in the site’s source code. (We only analyzed products in that grid, ignoring modules that are strictly for advertising.)
Despite its problems, Kim and I still find ourselves ordering from Amazon relatively often. It'd be nice to have some way to sort out some of the crap. Now there is.
Following its October article, The Markup set out to create a browser plugin that helps to identify Amazon brands (and Amazon exclusives) in the site's search results, making it easier to detect when those search results have been manipulated. Here's their description of Amazon brand detector:
Few respondents in a 1,000-person national survey we commissioned recognized the best-selling Amazon brands as owned by the company, apart from Amazon Basics.
So we decided to add some transparency for Amazon shoppers. The Markup created a browser extension that identifies these products and makes their affiliation to Amazon clear.
Brand Detector highlights product listings of Amazon brands and exclusive products by placing a box around them in Amazon’s signature orange. This happens live while shoppers browse the website.
If you too are wary of the world's third-largest company, give this browser extension a whirl. You may find it useful.
Artist Russ Mills (previously) describes his chaotic, illustrated portraits as being ruled by the absurd. Bright bursts of color, paint splatters, and doodles scrawl across the canvas and surround single figures with a mishmash of markings. “I try to convey the ridiculousness of the world we all share in a way that only I really relate to,” he tells Colossal.
Currently based near Brighton, Mills balances analog and digital techniques in his practice. He begins each piece with a sketch and scanned source materials that become the crayon-like textures and thick brushstrokes in his final works. Once he places the central figure, he layers an array of markings that both conceal and help define the subject, and the resulting portraits feature curled edges, scraps of paper haphazardly taped together, and bold streaks and splotches.
Shop prints of the pieces shown here, and explore a larger collection of Mills’s works on Behance and Instagram.
When Kurt Vonnegut first arrived in Dresden, a city as yet untouched by war, crammed into a boxcar with dozens of other POWs, the city looked to him like “Oz,” he wrote in his semi-autobiographical sixth novel Slaughterhouse-Five. After all, he says, “The only other city I’d ever seen was Indianapolis, Indiana.” When Vonnegut and his fellow GIs emerged from the bowels of the pork plant in which they’d waited out the Allied bombing of the city, they witnessed the aftermath of Dresden’s destruction. The city formerly known as “the Florence of the Elbe” was “like the moon,” as Vonnegut’s “unstuck” protagonist Billy Pilgrim says in the novel: cratered, pitted, leveled…. But the smoking ruins were the least of it.
Vonnegut and his fellow prisoners spent the next few days removing and incinerating thousands of bodies, an experience that would forever shape the writer and his stories. Whether mentioned explicitly or not, Dresden became a “death card,” writes Philip Beidler, that Vonnegut planted throughout his work. Death recurs with banal regularity, the phrase “So it goes,” peppered (106 times) throughout Slaughterhouse-Five, which Vonnegut credited to the French novelist Celine, whose cynicism tipped over into hatred. Vonnegut may have gone as far as generalized misanthropy, but his dry, wisecracking humor and his humanism stayed intact, even if it had picked up a passenger: the horror of mass death that haunted his imagination.
Vonnegut, like Billy Pilgrim, became “unstuck in time,” a condition we might see now as analogous to PTSD, his daughter Nanette says. “He was writing to save his own life,” as news from Vietnam came in and Vonnegut, a pacifist, found himself “losing his temper” at the television. “He saw the numbers, how many dead,” she adds, “that these kids were being conned, and sent to their deaths. And I think it probably set a fire under him to have his say.” A new documentary on the writer titled Unstuck in Time shows how much impact his “say” had on the country’s readers. Vonnegut wrote unbridled satire, science fiction, and social commentary, in thin books with irreverent doodles in the margins. As director Robert Weide says in the trailer above, holding a copy of Breakfast of Champions, “what high school kid isn’t gonna gobble this up?”
Weide, like most lovers of Vonnegut, discovered him as a teenager. At 23, the budding filmmaker contacted his literary hero about making a documentary. Over the course of the next twenty-five years, Weide– best known for his work with Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm (and as a meme) — filmed and taped conversations with Vonnegut until the author’s death in 2007. The resulting documentary promises a comprehensive portrait of the writer’s life, LitHub writes, from his “childhood in Indianapolis to his experience as a prisoner of war to his rise to literary stardom to the fans left in the wake of his death, all through the lens of Vonnegut and Weide’s close friendship.”
As the relationship between filmmaker and subject became part of the film itself, co-director Don Argott joined the project “to document the meta element of this story,” says Weide, “as I continued to focus on Vonnegut’s biography.” Forty years in the making, Unstuck in Time, evolved from a “fairly conventional author documentary” to what may stand as the most intimate portrait of the author put on film.Perhaps someday we’ll also see the publication of an 84-page scrapbook recently sold at auction, a collection of Vonnegut’s wartime letters, news clippings, and photographs of the ruined German city that he never fully left behind.
COVID-19’s impact on meatpacking workers was much deeper and broader than previously thought, according to a Congressional report released Wednesday.
The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis obtained data on COVID-19 cases and deaths from just the five largest meatpacking companies in the country. The new data shows cases and deaths were much higher than any previous tally for the industry. Combining the subcommittee’s data with Investigate Midwest’s tracking shows that, across the industry, about 86,000 workers tested positive during the pandemic and that 423 died.
In roughly just the first year of the pandemic, 269 people who worked for Tyson Foods, JBS, Smithfield Foods, Cargill and National Beef died due to complications from the coronavirus, according to the subcommittee’s report. The report slammed the companies for being slow to implement protections for workers in the pandemic’s early days, and it said the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, charged with overseeing worker safety in the industry, failed to mitigate the virus’s spread.
Rep. James Clyburn, the subcommittee’s chairman and a South Carolina Democrat, said it’s imperative to learn as much as possible about what meatpacking plant workers have lived through. “We must get a full accounting of what happened to them during the coronavirus pandemic,” he said, “so we can learn from these failures and to prevent a tragedy like this from ever happening again.”
The North American Meat Institute, the industry’s lobbying organization, said in a Wednesday statement that protections installed by plants prevented further spread of the virus. Many workers have also been vaccinated in the past several months, and, across the country, coronavirus cases and deaths are steadily declining, according to The New York Times.
Tyson Foods said it has invested more than $810 million in protecting workers. “Even one illness or loss of life to COVID-19 is one too many, which is why we’ve taken progressive action from the start of the pandemic to protect the health and safety of our workers,” the company said.
Smithfield Foods said it “swiftly and effectively came into compliance with all health and safety recommendations and continues to operate under that guidance today.” JBS said it has spent about $760 million to protect workers. “We have taken aggressive action to keep the virus out of our facilities and adopted hundreds of safety measures,” it said in a statement. Cargill and National Beef did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The subcommittee’s report contends the companies’ response led the virus to spread out from plants to the wider community, at least early in the pandemic. Some scientific research supports that conclusion.
Through May 2020, counties with meatpacking plants saw 10 times as many cases as counties without meatpacking plants, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture study. But then the difference in cases started to decline. As the virus became more widespread, counties with and without meatpacking plants saw similar numbers of cases.
Scientific studies have aimed to estimate the number of positive cases tied to the meatpacking industry. One calculated that, as of July 21, 2020, between 236,000 and 310,000 cases (or 6-8 percent of all U.S. cases) and between 4,300 and 5,200 deaths (or 3-4 percent of all U.S. deaths) were linked to the industry.
No federal agency has consistently tracked cases and deaths in the meatpacking industry. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention twicereleased data from several states in the first half 2020 but then stopped. Only a handful of states, such as Colorado and North Carolina, have updated figures throughout the pandemic.
Investigate Midwest has tracked cases at specific plants using news reports, company releases and government data. It has obtained some data through public records requests. Its tracking shows about 50,000 cases and at least 260 deaths across the entire industry. However, the new figures from the subcommittee show COVID-19’s true impact was much higher than previously known.
Looking at just the five companies, the subcommittee found at least 59,000 employees tested positive for the virus and at least 269 died between March 1, 2020, and Feb. 1, 2021. Investigate Midwest has tracked about 22,000 cases and 106 deaths tied to plants owned by these five companies. Adding the subcommittee’s totals skyrockets the figures for the entire industry.
Smithfield CEO Marks Up CDC Memo
The report provides more details on an incident early in the pandemic that helped set the tone for how the federal government would regulate the industry’s actions going forward.
In April 2020, a CDC team visited Smithfield’s Sioux Falls, South Dakota, plant, which had one of the first meatpacking outbreaks to make national news. The CDC compiled a detailed list of recommendations. But, as USA TODAY reported, the recommendations were watered down. CDC Director Robert Redfield instructed his staff to add in qualifiers such as “if feasible” while sitting in the White House.
The watered-down report was released April 22, 2020. A day earlier, Smithfield’s then CEO, Ken Sullivan, emailed a high-level USDA official with his thoughts on it, according to the document obtained by the subcommittee. Sullivan had written over the original CDC report, pointing out what he saw as flaws. One CDC recommendation was to identify housing for workers who could not self-isolate. Sullivan wrote, “How? We are not FEMA? We are a pork company.”
<a href=”https://embed.documentcloud.org/documents/21094579-hsscv-smith-00000806-820_redacted/annotations/2061897″>View note</a>
Another recommendation, to distribute masks in a way where people wouldn’t have to touch each other, would eat into three hours of work time, he wrote in the margins.
In his email, he wrote some of the CDC’s recommendations “are problematic for a 110 year old, 8 story plant. As discussed, social distancing is the single most challenging thing to achieve in a (dis) assembly production environment. Workers are often shoulder to shoulder and the plant in general is a beehive of activity. As you know, Sioux Falls is not different in that regard to any other plant.
You said it best,” he continued, “the best we can do in these environments is aggressively mitigate risk, not eliminate it. THANK YOU FOR YOUR HELP!!!” The USDA official replied, “We are on it.”
Other emails obtained by Public Citizen showed the USDA was invested in keeping the plant open: Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue himself emailed South Dakota’s governor asking to discuss “unintended consequences” after she asked the company to shut the plant down for safety reasons. And Smithfield repeatedly asked the USDA for help to keep plants open when local officials wanted to shut them down.
The subcommittee also shed more light on OSHA’s hands-off approach to the meatpacking industry under former President Donald Trump.
Overall, the agency conducted far fewer inspections in 2020 than it did the previous year, and a USA TODAY and Investigate Midwest story, which is cited in the subcommittee’s report, showed the agency was not inspecting every plant with a death linked to it.
Many inspections were also conducted virtually, meaning inspectors did not actually visit the plants they were investigating. These inspections represented about a fifth of all OSHA inspections of meatpacking plants from April 2020 to February 2021, when the first and last virtual inspections were conducted, respectively, according to an Investigate Midwest analysis of agency data.
To better protect workers, unions and other worker advocates wanted OSHA to issue an emergency temporary standard for the industry, a move many viewed as a first step to being better able to protect workers. But the Trump administration never implemented the standard.
OSHA officials told the subcommittee that was a “political decision,” according to the report.
Without an emergency standard, according to the subcommittee’s report, OSHA had to use the “general duty” clause—a catch-all rule requiring employers to provide safe workplaces—to hold companies accountable, a much harder ask. One former OSHA official said the agency has a “higher burden of proof” when using this standard.
Having no official, government tracking of cases in the industry also made OSHA’s oversight duties more difficult, according to the subcommittee.
An OSHA official told the subcommittee it had to rely on tracking from the Food and Environment Reporting Network to track infections and deaths. (A government agency relying on news organizations for data also appears in emails obtained by Public Citizen: A USDA official shared Investigate Midwest’s tracker with colleagues when trying to get a handle on how many plants had outbreaks.)
Many More Workers Vaccinated
The report also highlighted some of the strides companies have made with vaccinating workers.
Tyson Foods announced 96 percent of its active workforce is vaccinated. In April, after the three vaccines were widely available, about 30 percent of its workforce had been vaccinated. The company credited its “extensive testing and vaccine requirement.”
JBS said more than 75 percent of its workforce was vaccinated due to its “robust” program that includes on-site clinics, paid time off, incentive bonuses, a multilingual campaign and a sweepstakes for a year of free meat. In April, about 58 percent were vaccinated, the company said. “The vaccination rate of JBS USA team members at nearly all of our facilities exceeds the average rate of surrounding communities,” it said.
Smithfield did not provide what percentage of its workforce is vaccinated. The North American Meat Institute said it did not have an industry-wide estimate of how many workers had been vaccinated.
This article was originally published by Investigate Midwest, and is reprinted with permission.
The United States Postal Service has issued a set of colorful postage stamps that celebrate Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), an annual holiday celebrated in Mexico and beyond on the first two days of November. The vibrant stamps depict a family of four calaveras (sugar skulls) designed by Minneapolis-based Chicano artist and designer Luis Fitch who has been obsessed with postage stamps since a young age.
Every year, the day before his birthday, [Fitch] writes a list of things he wants to achieve, asking the universe. In October 2018, he remembered his old dream, designing a stamp, and made it number one, the slot for his most difficult and unrealistic goal.
The next day, the director of the stamp design program called.
He had seen the single poster Fitch wheat-pasted—on a whim, while waiting for his son—near the train exit for the National Mexican Art Museum in Chicago. And then he had gone to the museum, where twelve of Fitch’s posters were included in an exhibition on the Day of the Dead. This was just the style he was looking for, he said.
Fitch’s stamp designs incorporate multiple visual motifs traditionally used during the holiday including lit candles meant to guide deceased loved ones on their annual return journey, and cempazuchitles (marigolds), the most popular Día de los Muertos flower. Each of the four stamps depicts a different family member in the form of a sugar skull: a father with a hat and mustache, a child donning a hair bow, a curly-haired mother, and another child.
New cafes, galleries, and studios are popping up along the Vltava River in Prague, although they’re not immediately visible from atop the embankment. Tucked inside former storage units embedded within the structure itself are several tunnel-like spaces redesigned for public use. Appearing like glass-doored portals lining the waterfront, the multi-purpose project is part of the Czech city’s efforts to revitalize a four-kilometer swath of the riverbank, which previously served as a parking lot, and are the undertaking of architect Petr Janda who helms the Prague-based studio Brainwork.
Each vaulted venue contains concrete walls and flooring and gleaming stainless steel that reflects its surroundings. Six circular tunnels are designated for shops and galleries feature large, elliptical doors in glass, while the other 14 spaces are marked with a sculptural entrance, hiding the remaining area occupied by private tenants or used for public bathrooms from view. “The interventions symbiotically merge with the original architecture of the riverside wall, into which they naturally fuse,” Janda told designboom. “By using the acupuncture strategy, they re-create a monumental whole.”
Head to Instagram to find preliminary sketches for the redesign and to follow Brainwork’s future projects.
A painting? “Moving. Spiritually enriching. Sublime. ‘High’ art.” The comic strip? “Vapid. Juvenile. Commercial hack work. ‘Low’ art.” A painting of a comic strip panel? “Sophisticated irony. Philosophically challenging. ‘High’ art.” So says Calvin of Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes, whose ten-year run constitutes one of the greatest artistic achievements in the history of the newspaper comic strip. The larger medium of comics goes well beyond the funny pages, as any number of trend pieces have told us, but as an art form it remains less than perfectly understood. Perhaps, as elsewhere, one must learn by doing: hence “How to Make Comics,” a “four-part journey through the art of comics” from the Museum of Modern Art.
Created by comics scholar and writer Chris Gavaler, this educational series begins with the broadest possible question: “What Are Comics?” That section offers two answers, the first being that comics are “cartoons in the funnies sections of newspapers and the pages of comic books” telling stories “about superheroes or talking animals” — or they’re longer-format “graphic novels,” which “can be more serious and include personal memoirs.”
The second, broader answer conceives of comics as nothing more specific than “juxtaposed images. Any work of art that divides into two or more side-by-side parts is formally a comic. So if an artist creates two images and places them next to each other, they’re working in the comics form.”
That second definition of comics includes, say, Andy Warhol’s Jacqueline Kennedy III — a work of art that conveniently happens to be owned by MoMA. The museum’s visual resources figure heavily into the whole “How to Make Comics,” in which Gavaler explains not just the process of creating comics but the relationship between comics and other (often longer institutionally approved) forms of art. And to whatever degree they juxtapose images, the works of art in MoMA’s online collection — rich as so many of them are with action, character, narrative, humor, and even words — offer inspiration to comic artists budding and experienced alike. The better part of two centuries into its development, this thoroughly modern medium has the power to incorporate ideas from any other art form; the high-and-low distinctions can take care of themselves. Enter “How to Make Comics” here.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
The FDA has issued a statement confirming that 130 pets have died and hundreds more have fallen ill after eating food produced by Midwestern Pet Foods.
“Beans in the wrong stalk: A case of urethral foreign bodies.”
Beenie weenies, indeed.
Do you love surprises? I love surprises. I love opening my mailbox to find a generous TJ Maxx coupon. I love when my nosy neighbor brings me a scone because he baked too many and wants to peer inside my apartment. I love walking down the street and hearing a man scream in agony because he’s crammed six kidney beans up…
Yet another coronavirus variant has public health officials around the globe scrambling to control its spread.
The delta variant, which first emerged in India, has now spread to more than 80 countries and is quickly becoming the dominant version of the virus (SN: 5/9/21). In places like the United Kingdom, delta has dethroned the highly transmissible alpha variant, which was first identified in that country, as the most common form of the virus.
That rapid spread of the delta variant has forced health officials to react. U.K. officials, for instance, delayed plans to reopen the country, pushing the date back to mid-July. And health officials in Israel, a nation where nearly 60 percent of the population is fully vaccinated, reinstated its requirement that residents wear masks indoors — a public health measure that had been lifted 10 days before. In the United States, places like Los Angeles County recommend that even vaccinated people still wear masks indoors. The World Health Organization also urges everyone to continue wearing masks, though the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidelines that vaccinated people can go without masks in most situations remain in place.
Delta poses the biggest threat to unvaccinated people, the latest studies suggest. In the United States, delta is responsible for an estimated 26.1 percent of cases across the country. Its prevalence is doubling every two weeks. Narrowing in on regions that include states with low vaccination rates like Missouri and Wyoming reveals that delta is already causing the majority of infections in some places. On July 1, the Biden administration announced that teams of experts equipped with testing supplies and therapeutics would be sent to U.S. hot spots to control outbreaks of delta.
The concern is even greater globally. Just 23.4 percent of people around the world have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, most of whom reside in wealthy countries. Less than 1 percent of people in lower-income countries have gotten a shot.
As the delta variant takes center stage amid the pandemic, here’s what researchers know so far.
Delta spreads easily.
The coronavirus that causes COVID-19 is still around because it’s been able to adapt well to spread among humans, says Ravindra Gupta, a virologist at the Cambridge Institute of Therapeutic Immunology & Infectious Disease in England.
While the alpha variant is somewhere around 50 percent more contagious than previous versions of the virus, delta appears to have beaten that benchmark (SN: 4/19/21). Data from Public Health England, a U.K. government health agency, suggest that delta may be 60 percent more transmissible than alpha.
“That’s pretty concerning,” says Ravina Kullar an epidemiologist at UCLA and a spokesperson for the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
People who are unknowingly infected with the delta variant are more likely to pass the virus on to someone else, perhaps seven to eight others, Kullar says. “You can just see an outbreak occurring pretty rapidly if someone harbors the delta variant” but is not isolated from others.
The variant can evade parts of the immune system.
The higher chances of spreading delta to other people isn’t the only concern. With delta, “we have a virus that has all these transmission advantages that alpha did,” Gupta says. But delta can also dodge parts of the immune system, which gives it an extra advantage over alpha. “That explains, in our view, why it’s causing problems everywhere,” Gupta says.
For instance, antibodies from both recovered and vaccinated people were less potent at stopping delta from infecting cells than alpha or the original version of the virus from Wuhan, China, Gupta and colleagues report in a preliminary study posted June 22 on Research Square. And when the team analyzed a cluster of COVID-19 cases in health care workers who had been vaccinated with AstraZeneca’s shot at a hospital in India in April, the researchers found that most were infected with delta.
The same was true at two other health care centers in Delhi, a hint that delta may be more likely to infect some vaccinated people, called breakthrough infection, than variants like alpha (SN: 5/4/21).
On the whole, vaccines still seem do their job.
Even amid the threat of breakthrough infections, vaccinations are so far still protecting people from the worst of COVID-19. One preliminary study, for instance, found that COVID-19 vaccines appear to be less effective against delta than some other variants. But two shots are better than one. A single dose of Pfizer or AstraZeneca’s vaccines is around 33 percent effective at preventing symptomatic disease for delta infections three weeks after the shot, researchers report May 24 at medRxiv.org. That’s compared with 55 percent effectiveness against alpha.
A second dose of Pfizer’s jab, however, raised effectiveness against delta to nearly 88 percent against delta, down from 93.4 percent against alpha. A second dose of AstraZeneca’s shot is around 60 percent effective, down from 66 percent against alpha.
Protection from hospitalization is even better, researchers report June 21 in a separate preliminary study from Public Health England. A single dose of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine was 94 percent effective at keeping people out of the hospital after being infected with delta and one dose of AstraZeneca’s was 71 percent effective. Two doses bumped those numbers up to 96 and 92 percent, respectively.
And so far, in highly vaccinated places like the United Kingdom and Israel, for instance, the rise in COVID-19 cases hasn’t yet been linked to a large spike in hospitalizations or deaths. But hospitalizations and deaths tend to lag a couple of weeks behind case increases, so time will tell whether those numbers will go up.
There’s also not yet much information on delta and the effectiveness of vaccines like Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 shot, leaving lots of people waiting, Kullar says. One hopeful sign: A preliminary study posted July 1 at medRxiv.org suggests that antibodies sparked by that vaccine still recognize the variant. So the shot should still be effective.
The key point, however, is that the more vaccinated people there are, the less likely it is that delta will cause problems in a community.
But vaccines don’t protect everyone equally.
The good news is that young, relatively healthy people who are vaccinated are probably going to be OK. But “we are seeing hospitalizations, and we will see deaths, in people who have been vaccinated who are older, who have underlying conditions,” Gupta says. Not all individuals have the same level of protection from the vaccines. What’s more, children younger than 12 still aren’t eligible for vaccination.
Kullar agrees, noting that there are still lots of people who are immunocompromised, such as organ transplant recipients or people on cancer treatments, or elderly people who might still be at risk. Many of these people have “gotten vaccinated, they’ve done all that they can. Now, they’re relying on those other people around them to protect them.”
Experts are watching and waiting for the next variant to appear.
Delta likely won’t be the last variant to pop up amid the pandemic (SN: 5/26/20). While vaccines still protect people now, the chances that a variant that might render them far less effective will emerge goes up as the virus circulates among the unvaccinated.
Variants will continue to emerge as the coronavirus spreads, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, said at a June 25 news conference. “That’s what viruses do, they evolve, but we can prevent the emergence of variants by preventing transmission. It’s quite simple. More transmission, more variants. Less transmission, less variants.”
Dampening spread to give the virus fewer opportunities to mutate is crucial, Kullar says. “Before we thought [alpha] was concerning, now there is the delta variant, which puts [alpha] to shame. What’s to come next?”
The time to plan for the future of vaccines amid the spread of new variants that can possibly evade the immune system much more effectively than delta or other current forms of the virus may already be here, Gupta says. “This is not the end of the road.”
In August 2013, food critics in London sampled the world’s first lab-grown hamburger. Opinions on taste and texture varied, but most agreed it wasn’t all that different than meat from an animal. At the time, the cultured meat’s taste and texture didn’t seem like too big of a concern, because the cost of making the burger—a cool $330,000—meant this technology was years away from reaching the average consumer.
Now, eight years later, an Israeli company called Future Meat Technologies has opened the world’s first facility to produce lab-grown meat at scale, in an inland city south of Tel Aviv called Rehovot. While the company hasn’t released an estimate of per-burger cost, it says the facility will be able to produce 500 kilograms of meat per day, which translates to about 5,000 burger patties.
Though burger production costs remain a mystery, Future Meat’s website does say it’s already producing cultured chicken breasts at a cost of $3.90 apiece, breaking a price record in the industry. The average retail price of a boneless chicken breast in the US is $3.37, and that’s allowing for a profit for the producer and the retailer as well as covering the cost of transport and packaging.
Taken in this context, $3.90 is still quite high, and the figure will need to come down significantly to be competitive with factory-farmed meat—but it’s a far cry from the $330,000 burger, and costs will only continue to drop as the technology matures and operations scale.
“After demonstrating that cultured meat can reach cost parity faster than the market anticipated, this production facility is the real game-changer,” said Yaakov Nahmias, Future Meat Technologies founder and chief scientific officer, in a press release. “This facility demonstrates our proprietary media rejuvenation technology in scale, allowing us to reach production densities 10-times higher than the industrial standard.”
Cultured meat is made by extracting cells from animal tissue and giving them nutrients, oxygen, and moisture while keeping them at the same temperature they’d be at inside an animal’s body. The cells divide and multiply then start to mature, with muscle cells joining to create muscle fibers and fat cells producing lipids. The resulting nuggets of meat can be used to make processed products like burgers or sausages. Structured cuts of meat with blood vessels and connective tissue, like steak or chicken breast, require scaffolds, and researchers are creating these with biomaterials, like cellulose from plants. Companies are working on several varieties of more elaborate cultured products, from bacon to salmon.
As reported by Bloomberg, Future Meat aims to start offering its products in US restaurants by the end of next year—but must get approval from the FDA first. On top of that approval, public opinion is another hurdle the company and its competitors will need to clear before they see widespread success; for every person who’s opposed to factory farming, there’s a person who’s squeamish about the idea of meat grown in a bioreactor, despite the avian (or bovine, or porcine) lives being spared. Getting these consumers to view cultured meat favorably will be a matter of education, taste/texture as compared to the ‘real thing,’ and cost competitiveness.
Nahmias is up for the challenge. “Our goal is to make cultured meat affordable for everyone, while ensuring we produce delicious food that is both healthy and sustainable, helping to secure the future of coming generations,” he said.
Renewable energy is having its moment in the sun. And in the wind. And, lesser known but equally relevant, in the water.
Tidal turbines don’t get as much buzz as solar and wind farms, and there are less of them out there, but the number is growing—and a unique new one is about to go live.
A Scottish company called Orbital Marine Power built what it’s calling the “most powerful tidal turbine in the world,” a system called the Orbital O2 2MW. They’re in process of getting it up and running near the Orkney Islands, which are located off the country’s northeast coast in the North Sea (this is also where Microsoft sank a cylinder full of servers to the bottom of the ocean!).
Tidal turbines are essentially an underwater version of wind turbines, functioning much the same way; the movement of water turns blades that are attached to a rotor, turning the rotor and powering a generator.
The biggest tidal power plant in the world is Sihwa Lake station in South Korea, which has a capacity of 254 megawatts (MW), followed by a 240MW station in La Rance, France (this is also the world’s oldest tidal plant, built between 1961-1966).
Both these plants use what’s called a barrage, which is a long underwater wall (the barrage at the La Rance plant, for example, is 476 feet long) with gates that open and close with the tides in a way that capitalizes on their energy production potential. This setup works well for generating high quantities of power with multiple turbines; Sihwa Lake has 10 turbines and La Rance has 24.
But these plants are extremely expensive to build ($298 million for Sihwa, $918 million for La Rance), leading some engineers and analysts to question whether the energy they produce is even worth the high cost.
Orbital’s technology is different. The O2 doesn’t require a barrage, and the turbines are attached to a 243-foot-long floating platform. Compared to its much larger cousins, the O2 is tiny—but it’s also mighty. Its two 65-foot rotors can reach an area of 6,460 square feet under water, because rather than only being able to turn in one direction, the turbine blades can adapt to the direction the tide is flowing.
The company hasn’t provided details around the cost to build the O2, but CEO Andrew Scott did emphasize its cost competitiveness, saying the turbine “will unlock tidal markets around the world at a competitive price point and provide regulators and investors with a new, predictable renewable energy option.”
Maintenance and repairs are meant to be relatively easy, as the turbines can be brought to the water’s surface by the same “arms” that attach them to the platform. No construction needs to be done at sea, either; the O2 is built on land before setting sail all ready to go, and is basically just a giant boat that needs to be anchored and connected to the grid; the energy the system produces gets routed back to land through submerged cables.
Orbital said in a press release that the O2 “has the ability to generate enough clean, predictable electricity to meet the demand of around 2,000 UK homes and offset approximately 2,200 tons of CO2 production per year.”
Mind you, UK homes are far less power-hungry than American homes, so the 2 megawatts of power that an O2 produces would likely not go as far on the other side of the Atlantic. But given the relative ease and low cost of deploying the turbine, it seems likely we’ll start to see more of them—maybe even in American waters.
For years I have silently stewed over my children’s deep, abiding love for berries. I fully understand this infatuation, as a fresh, ripe berry is a wondrous thing, but what kids don’t understand is that they are an expensive wondrous thing. Of all the fresh, healthy produce available to us, they could not have fallen…
As CEO of Heray Spice, Mohammad Salehi is on a mission to enrich the lives of farming families in Afghanistan
Mohammad Salehi sells saffron to more than 100 professional chefs and an increasing number of home cooks, but he’s hesitant to call Heray Spice — the company he founded in Chicago in 2017 — a business. To be sure, Heray is a business, and a fast-growing one at that, but Salehi’s vision reaches beyond turning a profit or introducing Americans to some of the best saffron in the world. The 27-year-old wants his customers to understand just what they’re supporting when they buy a tiny glowing jar of this precious spice.
Saffron is the world’s most expensive spice, and Salehi is on a mission to prove to the farmers he works with in Afghanistan that growing it is a meaningful and profitable alternative to producing opium. He pays farmers significantly more for the crops they harvest than most buyers, and he invests 10 percent of Heray’s net income into educational nonprofits in Herat, where he was born. Salehi, who has a master’s degree in business information technology, wants children growing up in Afghanistan to have access to the same level of education his family ensured he received. He hopes that as his young company grows and expands to offer other spices, as well as dried fruits, he can shift the way Afghanistan is viewed by so many outsiders. Heray is a spice business, but in many ways selling saffron is just a means to an end for Salehi, a way to enrich the lives of farming families like the one he grew up in, create opportunity for the children in his home city, and introduce Americans to an Afghanistan where fields of saffron paint the landscape beautiful shades of purple and pink.
Eater: What does a typical day look like for you?
Mohammad Salehi: In Afghanistan, I have an office in Herat and spend most of my time meeting with farmers. We have to recruit new farmers, and some days we have training for farmers so they know what to do differently for the coming year. For example, last year, the water was good but they gave too much water for a few acres of land, which caused them not to produce as much crop.
When I’m in the U.S., I also have a part-time job. Because of COVID-19, I have to work as a contractor, a back-end engineer, so I can make a little bit of money so we can survive. And in the U.S., it’s a lot of meetings with chefs. I go to restaurants and bring them some saffron. Mostly, I deliver my own orders when I’m in Chicago; I want to meet the chefs. I have a team of two people making sure the packaging and the deliveries are fine. It’s a lot of work. It’s a startup life. Some days, you have to clean your whole warehouse. Sometimes it’s packaging. You do everything. It’s not like I am the boss so I don’t do this. I do packaging, delivery, cleaning, anything required. You have to do it.
You grew up in farming but then did work as a translator for the U.S. Army. Then you came back to farming. What brought you back?
In farming culture in Afghanistan, a lot of farmers are not thinking much about how they can make money, how they can make it a business. It’s more a lifestyle. When I was in high school, my family invested a lot of time in me learning English. When I graduated, I wanted to explore another culture, so I found a job as a linguist with the U.S. Army. I knew farming, and I loved to do that, but I also wanted to see what the world had to offer. I wanted to help more.
“I don’t want my country to be famous for opium; that is a big driver for me.”
The problem is a lot of these farmers are the people who are getting the least out of the product. They are selling the product to distributors — to corporations like Whole Foods or in Afghanistan, to big local markets — with a very cheap price. So for me to be able to help farmers, I have to get the saffron to the people. To do all this, I needed to have the knowledge, I needed to have the culture, I needed to know the language. That is why for three or four years, I worked with the U.S. Army, I got a degree, I learned business. So now I have a connection between the two worlds.
When you were first building this business, why did you choose saffron, versus any other crop that grows readily in Afghanistan?
Based on international standards, Afghanistan produces the world’s best saffron. And in Afghanistan, crops like chickpeas, wheat, and corn cannot compete with opium. The regions under the Taliban are cultivating drugs like crazy, and if we wanted to compete, the crops needed to make us the same amount of net income as opium — and that’s almost impossible. We had to find a way we could create a bit of profit. Saffron doesn’t produce much in the first year, but when you come to the second, third, and fourth years, saffron produces three to five times more money than opium. In contrast, poppy seeds — or opium — are an annual cultivation. It needs more care each year, and the production size is linear, meaning that it does not multiply itself annually. With saffron, every year the bulbs multiply and make new offspring. Poppy might produce more money in the first year, but in the long-term, saffron will produce more. Now we can give incentives for farmers: If you cultivate saffron, not only can you help put the world in a better place, but also you’ll make more money for yourself.
I don’t want my country to be famous for opium; that is a big driver for me. The other reason I chose saffron is that my family chose to cultivate it starting in 2008. Before that, we were cultivating potatoes and corn, and we found profit in farming saffron.
What is your business model right now?
My main goal is to help the farming community in Afghanistan cultivate saffron and help them make a good living off it. By good living, I mean not just survival mode, but to be able to educate your children, to educate your daughters, your sons, send them to school. The other aspect of the business is that we are trying to help our international partners, Americans as well as people around the globe, by providing a good product that’s pure, natural, and essentially organic. We achieve all this through two steps. We’re educating farmers on how to clean the saffron in a way that is acceptable to the Western world: It has to be naturally heated or naturally dried, without any microbiological viruses, not produced in a dirty environment. In the U.S. market, we are educating chefs: If you put fake saffron into water, it’s going to have a chemical taste. It’s food coloring plus safflower or corn silk. It’s not saffron.
Fill in the blank: The past year and a half has been _____.
A transformative year. Because we had to transform from wholesale — selling to restaurants — to online retail business, selling direct to customers. We now focus a lot on the public. It was a challenging year, but I don’t know if that’s the right word because I don’t want to give it a negative connotation. It was an opportunity full of challenges. But it created transformative thinking.
How are you making change in the food world?
I am helping people who need the most help. I am helping farmers. No one listened to their voice; they were making the least amount of money. But now we are changing that. We’re paying them more, we are educating them, we are empowering them. And I’m helping a community of chefs in America to not waste their money on a product that they don’t know the source of. We are connecting these two communities. There was a big distance between them — not a lot of chefs knew where their saffron came from — and I wanted to fill that gap.When I started the business, I could not imagine a day when I’d be helping more than 120 chefs and working with distributors in five different states. I’m still not thinking about Heray as a business. Helping more became a business model for me.
How can readers support your work?
Simply put, we need more demand. Every sale is good for a community of 30 farmers. Very little goes a long way for Afghani farmers and pushes them toward a brighter future.
Fazl Ahmad is a photographer and graphic designer based in Herat, Afghanistan.
If you go to Paris, many will advise you, you must go to the Louvre; but then, if you go to Paris, as nearly as many will advise you, you must not go to the Louvre. Both recommendations, of course, had a great deal more relevance before the global coronavirus pandemic — at this point in which art- and travel-lovers would gladly endure the infamously tiring crowdedness and size of France’s most famous museum. But now they, and everyone else around the world, can view the Louve’s artworks online, and not just the ones currently on display: through the new portal collections.louvre.fr, they can now view access every single one of the museum’s artworks online.
“For the first time ever,” says last week’s press release, “the entire Louvre collection is available online, whether works are on display in the museum, on long-term loan in other French institutions, or in storage.”
This includes, according to the about page of the collections’ site, not just the “more than 480,000 works of art that are part of the national collections,” but the “so-called ‘MNR’ works (Musées Nationaux Récupération, or National Museums Recovery), recovered after WWII,” and “works on long-term loan from other French or foreign institutions such as the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, the Petit Palais, the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, the British Museum and the archaeological museum of Heraklion.”
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Mab Segrest, veteran organizer and author of 'Memoir of a Race Traitor,' offers a long-view on right-wing militia organizing in the South and January's Capitol Insurrection.
by A.A. Newton on Skillet, shared by Marnie Shure to The Takeout
Buffalo cauliflower “wings” are a vegan junk food miracle, but making your own is a different story. If deep frying is a dealbreaker, your options are either sad, soggy “oven fried” versions or abstaining entirely. What’s a frying-averse vegan to do when the craving strikes? Easy—just buy a bag of tater tots.
With the weather getting slightly warmer and spring just around the corner, I have vaguely thought about the concept of “getting back into shape.” In college, my friends and I used to go to the Rec Barn to exercise (read: read) on the stationary bikes. If this is the kind of exercise you too are thinking about, dear reader, then this is the list for you.
“Nolan’s portrait of a relationship warped by obsession and low self-worth excavates our private hearts … Subverting traditional love stories, it illuminates the fragile tension between power and desire.” –The Evening Standard
“Through juxtaposition and collage, these stories illuminate the trickier fringes of life right now.” –Publishers Weekly
Semezdin Mehmedinović, tr. Celia Hawkesworth, My Heart
(Catapult)
“Bosnian writer Mehmedinović returns with a powerful autofictional gut punch of a novel.” –Publishers Weekly
Marguerite Duras, tr. Kelsey L. Haskett, The Impudent Ones
(New Press)
“Most notable is the psychological intensity of the central figure, mercilessly observant Maud, who boldly refuses to comply with familial or social expectations, and Duras’ ravishingly descriptive passages contrasting the stifling monotony of human struggles versus the glory and freedom of nature.” –Booklist
“Michelle Nijhuis’ spirited and engaging Beloved Beasts tracks the not always predictable course of species protection from the flora and fauna classification system developed in the 18th century by the Swede Carl Linnaeus to the present day.” –The Boston Globe
“Tenderly and compassionately told, and populated with complicated and flawed characters, the Nasrs’ story interrogates nostalgia, memory, and the morality of keeping secrets against the backdrop of a landscape and a people in constant flux.” –Publishers Weekly
Takis Würger, tr. Liesl Schillinger, Stella
(Grove Press)
“Würger skillfully intertwines fact and fiction. This subtle, thought-provoking narrative is worth a look.” –Publishers Weekly
“Rather than focus on the killer—who has all the allure of a wet cocktail napkin—he foregrounds the lives and milieus of the victims. It’s a reparative act that doubles as an extended elegy for the decades of closeted or bullied queers who encountered similar demons.” –4Columns
“Readers who enjoyed Behold the Dreamers will be pleased that Mbue persisted to tell this powerful story of the fateful clash between an American oil company and the tiny African village forced to live with the consequences of its environmental destruction.” –BookPage
“These entertainments are brisk, vinegar-sharp satires that horrify and amuse in equal measure; an alarming reality check. Like a lesson in etiquette, it’s good medicine.” –The Guardian
“Alternating between Amb’s time at college and the present day, Flynn reveals the darkness girls are capable of, building toward a thrillingly unsettling ending.” –Electric Literature
When the trailer for Cruella dropped, Twitter greeted it with jeers. People mocked it for being too much like The Joker; too much like Disney’s earlier film Maleficent; too much like Warner Brothers Birds of Prey— and contributed tweet after tweet about what an odd choice it was to rehabilitate Cruella DeVilin particular: a character who spent her original 1961 film trying to kidnap and kill puppies to make their skins into a coat.
This seems far from the response Disney expected. It introduced the trailer with the tag line, “Brilliant. Bad. A little bit mad,” calling to mind the oft-quoted characterization of Lord Byron by his ex-lover Lady Caroline Lamb: “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” The allusion carefully positions Cruella not as a villain, but a Byronic hero: a talented, melancholy rebel, tragically misunderstood by their society. Cruella’s dialogue also reflects this, as she explains: “From the very beginning I realized I saw the world differently from everyone else. That sit didn’t sit well with some people. But I wasn’t for everyone.” Cruella is not, therefore, a two-dimensional villain who likes to kill dogs and inspired a song that rivals “You’re A Mean One, Mr. Grinch” as a Renaissance blazon of bad qualities. She is a misunderstood #girlboss whose actions will be justified by the film, and whose actions most likely were in reaction to bad things other people did to her first… a hard sell for literally cartoon villain whose name is a pun on “cruel devil,” and who lives in Hell Hall.
Cruella is the reductio ad absurdum of a long trend of redemptive retellings featuring pop culture villainesses.
Cruella is the reductio ad absurdum of a long trend of redemptive retellings featuring pop culture villainesses. These female villains are introduced in two dimensions—quite literally, in many cases. But when given depth and turned from antagonist to protagonist, their narratives take on a curious similarity. These recentered stories aren’t a straight retelling of events, but a complete restructuring of the narrative. We don’t merely get the villain’s perspective; we get her justification. She had to kidnap Dorothy, curse a baby, smuggle a machine gun into a mental asylum, or kill a hundred and one puppies. We, the audience, just didn’t have the whole story. We didn’t know the context of her actions—which exonerate her. And in the end, she really wasn’t punished for her crimes in the end, but redeemed—so you see, she isn’t really a villain! She was just tragically misunderstood. She was good all along.
We don’t see this sort of reboot with say, Jafar from Aladdin, or Count Olaf from A Series of Unfortunate Events. Even Joker allowed its main character to exist within a realm of moral ambiguity; though it was clear social systems had failed him on every level, the movie makes no apologies for Arthur Fleck’s descent into murder. But when big media conglomerates decide to make their villainesses—their literally cartoonishly evil villainesses—into main characters, they also make them into heroines who repent of their evil ways, while also demonstrating that they were never really that evil after all.
American culture tends to want to explain away the evil actions of women—mostly fictional women, but sometimes real ones—because female villainy rests uncomfortably with lingering cultural perceptions of women’s purity and virtue. The idea that all women must be innately virtuous took form in the mid-19th century, in the movement towards “True Womanhood,” which historians like Barbara Welter have dubbed “the cult of domesticity.” Building off of the late 18th-century idea of “separate spheres,” which claimed that innate gender differences made men more suited for public life and women for private life, the cult of domesticity provided social regulation for the rapidly expanding American middle class and a sense of social stability in a time of great political, economic, and societal upheaval. Middle and upper-class white women became revered for the domestic labor to which they had been confined: social regulation enshrined as near-religion. Women were the center of the family, the light of the home, and the angel of the house. “True Women,” as Welter put it, were known by their domesticity, submissiveness, piety, and purity. In a case of mingled cause and effect, women showed their mastery of the domestic sphere by displaying these qualities, and the display of these qualities proved that they were naturally fitted for that sphere because they were more pious and pure. Indeed, they were naturally religious and moral. Popular fiction of the time often showed criminal men redeemed by the virtue of a true woman. Their moral fiber was perceived to be so much stronger and purer than their male counterparts that a woman could never really commit a crime, and a woman who did commit a crime must have been tricked into it, or led into it by the bad influence of men. Within this structure, such a woman then becomes “fallen.” And yet the very language of exclusion centers on the angelic nature of woman. She is not bad or evil or a villain, she is fallen, like an angel into hell.
Middle and upper-class white women became revered for the domestic labor to which they had been confined.
More than 100 years later, this idea of women’s inherent goodness has proven hard to shake. The cult of domesticity centered around cis white women, whose virtue is still used as a pretext for violent rhetoric and action against Black and trans people, from whom their purity must be protected. And in fiction, when pop culture focuses on a woman who committed a crime, it’s either a cautionary tale or one of these rehabilitation stories, focused on the idea that the villainess’s fallen state is not her fault and is certainly not permanent.
This justification (it isn’t her fault she’s a villain) and the means of showing it (recentering a popular narrative around a female villain) reached popular prominence in 1995, with Geoffrey Maguire’s novel Wicked, and with the musical adaptation in 2003. Both the book and the musical reconsider the Wicked Witch of the West from L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The witch, whom Maguire named Elphaba, does have a song in the second act of the musical where she makes a conscious commitment to give up trying to be good, but the show goes to great lengths to point out that Elphaba was not born wicked, and though she may make a big show of giving up good deeds, she never consciously chooses to do an evil one. Her greatest sin in the show—animal abuse in the form of magically creating flying monkeys— is something she was tricked into, and her villainous reputation thereafter springs mostly from Elphaba setting herself up as the Wizard’s enemy, and the Wizard mounting an extremely effective PR campaign against her. In the end, Elphaba regains her goodness by playing into stereotypes about her villainy and then completely rejecting her wicked reputation. The Wicked Witch dies because her soul is so unclean, water can melt her; Elphaba lives thanks to a trap door, and gets her “happily ever after” with her love interest, outside of Oz.
Maleficent, Disney’s first retelling centering on a female villain, likewise uses its reframed narrative to prove the heroine’s inherent goodness but gives her even less agency in her fall from grace. In the original 1959 Sleeping Beauty animated film, evil fairy Maleficent curses the infant princess out of pique at being left out of the baby’s welcome party. This is an enjoyably petty reason for committing a villainous action—who hasn’t wanted to hex someone for a social snub?—but it’s not deep or detailed or justified, because it doesn’t have to be. Maleficent enters the movie a villain, spends the film acting like a villain, and then dies like a villain. By contrast, in Maleficent, the 2014 live-action movie that revisits the character’s early life, she begins in innocence in an almost Edenic forest, and falls in love with her childhood friend, Stephen. Maleficent is a fairy guardian of a beautiful natural landscape and fights only to protect it. But what turns her into a villain, complete with a costume change from earth-toned gauzes to heavy black draperies, is a heavily implied (the film is rated PG) sexual assault by an intimate partner: Stephen drugs Maleficent and cuts off her wings.
In pop culture, sexual assault is still one of the most common motivators for female vengeance—and, by implication, an acceptable justification for a woman committing a bad or violent action. If Stephen gave her “true love’s kiss” and then cut off her wings, thus proving that true love does not exist, then it is not only appropriate but righteous for Maleficent to curse his baby to die, with the caveat that only true love’s kiss can save her. (Elphaba, at least, chose to oppose the Wizard and thus be branded wicked.) In the end, Maleficent provides “true love’s kiss” herself, and regains her wings, returning her to the angel she really was at heart.
Harley Quinn, in the 2020 Birds of Prey, also ascribes the heroine’s misdeeds to trauma. The film opens by showing how her father abandoned her and her boyfriend abused her and how this led directly to Harley’s transformation from psychologist helping to rehabilitate villains to becoming a villain herself. Once Harley is free of their influence, however, and has real female friends, she becomes a hero of Gotham. She does not choose to be a villain; the emotional abuse she experienced from the men in her life is the true cause of her crimes.
They don’t commit evil actions because they want to; they do it because they have been tricked or because they have been so wronged, they have no other choice.
In an odd way, these updated villains have less agency than their initial incarnations. They don’t commit evil actions because they want to, even if the want is extremely petty; they do it because they have been tricked or because they have been so wronged, they have no other choice but villainy— which is more a reaffirmation of a damaging patriarchal stereotype than a refutation of it. But this still leaves us with the fact that the traditional literary and pop culture canon is dominated by male creators, and many of their best female characters are, in fact, villains. If we want to interrogate those traditional, familiar stories by centering the most interesting and compelling female character, how should we do it?
Madeline Miller’s Circehas one good way forward: allow female characters to exercise their agency by consciously choosing to do evil, and then to repent. Circe transforms her romantic rival Scylla into a monster not because she was tricked into it, or because she didn’t know what would happen, or because she was so wronged she had to redress it, or because someone had done something so bad to her it rattled her sense of right and wrong. She did it because she was jealous. She wanted to do it, so she did. Circe’s later regret over this evil deed drives her actions at the climax of the book, where she rights this wrong by killing the monster Scylla’s become. Having chosen to do evil because she wanted to, her choice to do good— again because she wants to—shows her growth and gives her moral journey real weight.
Circe has the benefit of being a novel, rather than a corporately owned and produced piece of intellectual property. Miller had the creative freedom to rehabilitate her villain in a way that is truly transformative, rather than reinforcing outdated ideas. But the book shows that a villainous character can remain fully culpable—Circe deliberately turned another nymph into a monster and owns it at every opportunity—without being unrelatable, uninteresting, or unsympathetic character. Hopefully the HBO Max adaptation of Circe will preserve what makes it so truly interesting a retelling starring a female villain: its instance on and its acknowledgement of the fact that giving a female character agency means that sometimes the character will choose to be bad.
Given recent events, 2019 may now seem to us like the distant past. But to those who were thinking hard about the future the year before last, nothing that has happened since has been wholly unexpected — and especially not to those who’d already been thinking hard about the future for decades. Take Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired magazine and writer on technology as well as a host of other subjects. It was in 2019 that state telecommunications company China Mobile commissioned him to give a series of 36 short video lectures on the “Future of X”: not the future of the internet in China and the future of India in competition with China, but a range of topics that will surely affect us all, no matter our part of the world.
Self-driving cars, virtual reality, 5G, robots: Kelly has given consideration to all these much-discussed technologies and the roles they may come to play in our lives. But the important thing about them isn’t to know what form they’ll take in the future, since by definition no one can, but to develop habits of mind that allow you to grasp as wide a variety of their possibilities as you can right now.
The future, as Kelly frames it in his talk on uncertainties, consists of “known knowns,” “known unknowns,” and “unknown unknowns.” Those last, better known as “black swans,” are events “completely unexpected by anybody” that “change the world forever.” As examples of possible black swans to come he names World War Three, the discovery of cheap fusion energy, and, yes, a pandemic.
Societal preparation for the future, to Kelly’s mind, will involve developing “a very systematic way of collecting these unknown unknowns and turning them into known unknowns.” Personal preparation for the future, according to his talk on schools and learning, will involve ceaseless acquisition and refinement of knowledge and understanding.
If we want to thrive in an uncertain future, he argues, we should “adopt a method of learning called deliberate practice, falling forward or failing forward,” in which we keep pushing ourselves into unknown intellectual territory, always remaining “newbies” at something, assisted all the while by technology.
Just a couple of decades into the 21st century, we’ve already caught a glimpse of what technology can do to optimize our learning process — or simply to enable learning where it wouldn’t happen otherwise. “I don’t imagine that we’re going to go away from a classroom,” Kelly says, but we also “have the online video world, and more and more people today are learning how to do an amazing variety of things, that we wouldn’t have thought would work on video.”
Of course, since he spoke those words, one black swan in particular has pushed much of humanity away from the classroom, and we’ve found out a good deal more about what kind of learning works (and doesn’t) over the internet. The future, it seems, is now.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Food, like a great novel, can tell a story. The storytelling opportunities are endless: the way we eat, the culinary traditions we pass down from one generation to the next, and communal rituals can provide deeper insight into ourselves and the world around us.
For the Spring 2021 edition of Oxford American, food is the central theme. The Food Issue, guest edited by New York Times best-selling author Alice Randall, promises to explore “the intersections of food, art, and identity.”
Here is the cover, shot by Frank Frances, from his series Remember the South.
Randall, who is an award-winning songwriter, educator, and food activist, and a frequent contributor to the Oxford American, writes in her introduction to the issue:
“Black Lives Matter. Say Her Name. Sedition. These seven words, one for each day of the week, were the words high in my mind as we worked on this issue in January. Reckoning comes before reconciliation and often begins at the table. Reading the getting-to-final drafts of the articles and stories and poems in this issue, I was astounded to discover, one more time, how the sweetness of the table can ease our most bitter hour. There is joy in that. And joy for the table is where art and history enter our bodies and through our bodies our lives, through food and conversation.”
Randall won the NAACP Image Award for her novel Soul Food Love (written with Caroline Randall Williams). Her latest novel, Black Bottom Saints, was published in August 2020.
The issue features 22 writers, 28 visual artists, 6 recipes, 1 playlist, and a special section on sweet potato pie. The contributors include Crystal Wilkinson, Cynthia R. Greenlee, Channing Gerard Joseph, Ashanté M. Reese, Brad Johnson and Tandy Wilson; Tarfia Faizullah and Caroline Randall Williams; J. Shores-Argüello and Eugenia Collier; and Ayana Contreras.
Readers can pre-order the issue here. Subscribers will receive their copies on March 10, 2021. Not a subscriber? You can subscribe to Oxford Americanhere.
The Food Issue will be available on newsstands nationwide on March 23, 2021.
We humans did a number on ourselves, as they say, when we invented agriculture, global trade routes, refrigeration, pasteurization, and so forth. Yes, we made it so that millions of people around the world could have abundant food. We’ve also created food that’s full of empty calories and lacking in essential nutrients. Fortunately, in places where healthy alternatives are plentiful, attitudes toward food have changed, and nutrition has become a paramount concern.
“As a society, we are comfortable with the idea that we feed our bodies,” says neuroscientist Lisa Mosconi. We research foods that cause inflammation and increase cancer risk, etc. But we are “much less aware,” says Mosconi—author of Brain Food: The Surprising Science of Eating for Cognitive Power—“that we’re feeding our brains too. Parts of the foods we eat will end up being the very fabric of our brains…. Put simply: Everything in the brain that isn’t made by the brain itself is ‘imported’ from the food we eat.”
We learn much more about the constituents of brain matter in the animated TED-Ed lesson above by Mia Nacamulli. Amino acids, fats, proteins, traces of micronutrients, and glucose—”the brain is, of course, more than the sum of its nutritional parts, but each component does have a distinct impact on functioning, development, mood, and energy.” Post-meal blahs or insomnia can be closely correlated with diet.
What should we be eating for brain health? Luckily, current research falls well in line with what nutritionists and doctors have been suggesting we eat for overall health. Anne Linge, registered dietitian and certified diabetes care and education specialist at the Nutrition Clinic at the University of Washington Medical Center-Roosevelt, recommends what researchers have dubbed the MIND diet, a combination of the Mediterranean diet and the DASH diet.
“The Mediterranean diet focuses on lots of vegetables, fruits, nuts and heart-healthy oils,” Linge says. “When we talk about the DASH diet, the purpose is to stop high blood pressure, so we’re looking at more servings of fruits and vegetables, more fiber and less saturated fat.” The combination of the two, reports Angela Cabotaje at the University of Washington Medicine blog Right as Rain, results in a diet high in folate, carotenoids, vitamin E, flavonoids and antioxidants. “All of these things seem to have potential benefits to the cognitive function,” says Linge, who breaks MIND foods down into the 10 categories below:
Leafy greens (6x per week) Vegetables (1x per day) Nuts (5x per week) Berries (2x per week) Beans (3x per week) Whole grains (3x per day) Fish (1x per week) Poultry (2x per week) Olive oil (regular use) Red wine (1x per day)
As you’ll note, red meat, dairy, sweets, and fried foods aren’t included: researchers recommend we consume these much less often. Harvard’s Healthbeat blog further breaks down some of these categories and includes tea and coffee, a welcome addition for people who prefer caffeinated beverages to alcohol.
“You might think of the MIND diet as a list of best practices,” says Linge. “You don’t have to follow every guideline, but wow, if how you eat can prevent or delay cognitive decline, what a fabulous thing.” It is, indeed. For a scholarly overview of the effects of nutrition on the brain, read the 2015 study on the MIND diet here and another, 2010 study on the critical importance of “brain foods” here.
Rhode Island School of Design Continuing Education is excited to announce more than 140 online courses for adults and teens this spring—including RISD’s Advanced Program for High School Students. RISD CE Certificate Programs are now being offered 100% online.
Continuing Education students can take online classes from anywhere in the world, at any time of day or night. Courses are taught by professional artists, designers, and makers, and RISD CE is open admission—everyone is welcome.
Students can enroll in online courses for personal or professional enrichment and as part of a RISD CE Online Certificate Program. Designed for those looking to accelerate their creative lives and work, subjects range from interior design, product development, and graphic design to painting, photography, and animation.
While some teens may attend RISD CE Online Teen Courses for fun and enrichment, others have academic goals. Online courses like animation, illustration, fashion design, and art school prep provide a strong grounding in the visual arts, encouraging creative and personal growth through self-expression.
While Rhode Island School of Design has made the difficult decision to cancel the 2021 RISD Pre-College program and will not be hosting in-person classes this summer, RISD’s Advanced Program for High School Students will be available to help young adults develop as artists and grow their college application portfolios.
The spring term starts March 1, 2021. For more information on RISD CE Online Spring Courses, visit ce.risd.edu.
Brands like DoorDash and Uber Eats promise volume and convenience. But some restaurateurs are sticking with in-house delivery or small local companies instead.
One of the first things Sylvan Mishima Brackett did after the mayor of San Francisco issued a lockdown order in March was walk a few blocks to a local Best Buy to buy a phone. The chef and owner of Rintaro, a San Francisco Japanese restaurant, planned to set up a bento hotline for people to call and order thoughtfully packaged and impeccably designed to-go meals.
Everything about Rintaro, a six-year-old izakaya in the Mission District of San Francisco, is thoughtful. Food is grilled over a traditional charcoal grill; udon is handmade; Wasabi root is grown locally. Sylvan’s father, who apprenticed as a temple carpenter in Kyoto, built the space, including booths made from 100-year-old redwood wine casks and mud walls made from iron-rich red soil from Sylvan’s childhood home in Northern California’s gold country. It feels refined, relaxed, upscale, and approachable all at the same time. To translate this aesthetic to go, takeout food is creatively wrapped in compostable packaging and adorned with colorful custom labels. In May, Eater SF referred to the bento as some of the “prettiest takeout in San Francisco.”
Rintaro’s bento boxes were especially popular during the earliest days of lockdown. “In the beginning of COVID, there were not that many restaurants like us doing takeout, so we were super busy. The person on the phone was just inundated with calls,” Brackett says. Guests started to get frustrated that they couldn’t get through. One person called 60 times to place an order, only to be greeted by one busy signal after another. Even then, Brackett says he never considered signing up with a big third-party delivery service, even though the headquarters of two of the country’s largest providers, Uber Eats and DoorDash, are within walking distance of his restaurant. Still, his experience underscores how much time, thought, effort, and money is required to purposely avoid the apps.
“They’re an extractive industry that puts in a middleman which takes more or less what the profit would be, or more than the profit would be,” he says. An exceptionally successful restaurant might run a 20 percent profit, he explains. “If a third party is taking anywhere between 15 to 30 percent of the order, then that’s more than the profit of the people who are actually doing the work.”
Restaurateurs’ complaints about third-party delivery services have taken on a different urgency as we near a year of pandemic health and safety restrictions. These companies have always charged for their services; COVID didn’t change that. But as delivery became a lifeline for restaurants in distress due to dining room closures, delivery companies posted record growth. In April, May, and June 2020, DoorDash actually made money for the first time, over $20 million. Meanwhile, Uber’s CEO has promised investors the company will finally make a profit by the end of this year, largely thanks to its delivery business.
Delivery companies promise restaurants easy ordering and incremental sales. They say their huge footprint — DoorDash has 18 million customers — will bring more business. They offer sign-up promotions that reduce or eliminate commissions. The prospect of signing on, getting a tablet in the mail, plugging it in, and accepting orders is tough to resist. While DoorDash doesn’t officially share how many independent restaurants use its service, a December filing referenced 180,000 local restaurants on its platform, representing a significant portion of DoorDash’s 390,000 merchants. Delivery apps have grown quickly, reworking how we order and receive restaurant food, and how we judge convenience — the apps tout an average delivery time around 30 minutes. Larger companies justify high commissions by explaining they provide a service that would cost the restaurant time and money to operate themselves.
Brackett tried a few setups looking for the right fit. He briefly used Tock’s to-go offering, which charges 3 percent for each order, a number that Tock’s CEO has said was the absolute minimum the company could charge while keeping its own lights on. Even at that low rate, Brackett says it was costing Rintaro thousands of dollars in fees and credit card processing charges. “When you’re making negative 4 or 5 percent profit, losing another 2 or 3 percent isn’t great,” he says.
Now, Brackett only accepts delivery orders over the phone and slots them into one of three evening timeslots. Three servers have stayed on “super part time” to work as delivery drivers. The restaurant uses one driver per day to deliver between three and eight orders each night within a three- to four-mile radius, serving more or less half of the city thanks to the restaurant’s central location. Delivery costs the guest $10. For carryout, diners can place online orders through the restaurant’s website, which is tied directly to its point-of-sale system. The restaurant pays a credit card processing fee on each order, something it would pay no matter how it served customers, but online orders cost an extra 1.2 percent on top of the typical fee. It’s called a “card not present” transaction, and the higher rate has to do with the higher risk of fraud associated with processing a transaction without swiping a card. In December, this cost Rintaro about $3,000. The restaurant processes between 30 and 60 to-go orders per night.
When outdoor dining was allowed in San Francisco, Brackett says the restaurant was able to break even, or even turn a small profit, with its 26 outdoor seats. San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic Soleil Ho recently added Rintaro’s bento to the paper’s Top 25 list, and after that, “We were quite busy,” Brackett says. “We broke even.” That’s a good week — during a bad week, the restaurant loses between $5,000 and $8,000 offering only takeout and delivery.
Since January 1, delivery companies are prohibited from listing California restaurants without explicit permission. Brackett says he used to field sales calls from delivery apps wanting to add Rintaro to their platforms, but hasn’t heard from them in a while. “I think they gave up,” he says. Looking ahead, Brackett expects to continue with bento takeout and delivery for several months or until indoor dining is reopened at full capacity and business returns. “We don’t have the bandwidth in the kitchen to do both,” he says.
A restaurant owner doesn’t have to build their own intricate delivery system or even be particularly tech-savvy to avoid the big apps. Nicolle Dirks owns the Portland, Oregon, restaurant Epif with her husband, chef Pepe Arancibia. It’s a five-year-old, full-service vegan restaurant that serves food inspired by the Andes region of South America. The pair reopened the restaurant in early May, offering takeout for the first time — but only to guests who ordered ahead online. At the time, she said, the prospect of speaking to anyone face to face was daunting. “I actively wouldn’t even accept a walk-up order. I’d point through the window to the sign that had our website and that said order online only,” Dirks said.
Two months later, she noticed a flyer from a local bicycle delivery service. “My husband used to be a bike courier in Boston. And I’m just like, yes, those are my people, that’s who we want to do business with.”
The service is called CCC PDX. “We started in 2017 because we wanted to provide a nice service for nice people to have food delivered quickly and affordably by bike! We’ve seen the way apps do it and we think it SUXXX!” the website reads.
“The couriers, the people who are doing the work should be paid a fair amount and make money doing this job,” says CCC co-owner Ponce Christie. “This was the whole reason I got into it, too, because I wanted to ride bikes and make money riding a bike. And now at this point, I want to make that a possibility for someone else.”
Since March, order volume delivered by CCC has grown nearly 1,000 percent, and the company works with about 100 Portland restaurants. At the beginning of the pandemic, CCC had seven active couriers. Now it has 40, including several former restaurant workers who lost their jobs due to COVID. Restaurants pay a 10 percent delivery charge, and the diner pays $3 to $5, depending on the restaurant and their location. CCC takes 5 percent of the order fee and $1 from the delivery fee; everything else goes to the courier, including the full tip. The company uses software developed by another bicycle messenger company that can be tied directly to many restaurants’ online ordering platforms.
“I think our goals are different,” says CCC’s Christie of larger delivery companies. “Their goal is to capture enough market share that they can put us and everyone else out of business and then raise prices to actually be profitable. Our goal is to not do that — it’s to, like, just exist. And ride bikes.”
As for why it works so well in her Portland community, Dirks says, “Smaller single-location businesses are perhaps a little bit more aware of keeping the local money in this local economy.”
The vast majority of Epif’s orders still come from its own website, placed by local and loyal guests. Thanks to what Dirks calls “multiple fortunate situations,” the restaurant breaks even. “The big one is that my husband and myself as the owners are also the ones who are doing all the work.” It also doesn’t hurt, she says, that the empanadas that they’ve always served travel particularly well.
In October, as the weather cooled, Dirks was looking for more ways to increase business. A friend suggested trying DoorDash, and Dirks reluctantly agreed. “She was like, ‘Nicolle, I know you are so averse to working with any big companies. But you can get so many new customers through these third-party apps.’”
Orders are sporadic — sometimes four or five come in one night, sometimes just one per week. Compared to orders placed for pickup and those delivered by CCC, Dirks knows next to nothing about the customers who place DoorDash orders. Once, a customer ordered through DoorDash but picked up the order themselves. “I wanted to say something when the customer picked up to be like, ‘Hey, if you ordered directly from our website, that would help us out so much more,’” Dirks says. “But I felt like I’m not in a place to tell [that to] people.”
Dirks has also learned that working with a large third-party delivery partner doesn’t mean any less work on her part. She’s taken to writing the time on every bag she packs before sending it out with a DoorDash driver. “So hopefully the customer understands that I had my food ready for you at the right time — it’s your driver that didn’t show up for another 20 minutes or half an hour.” This is also why she likes working with the local service. “I’m directly contacting Ponce via email or by phone and he’s in direct contact via open radio with his couriers,” she says. “So, any problems get solved immediately.”
In March, DoorDash temporarily waived pickup fees for restaurants. According to a company spokesperson it’s no longer offering that promotion, though pickup is offered at a reduced rate for merchants. Over the course of the pandemic, delivery companies have made other product changes, too. Restaurants on the large national platforms can accept orders directly on their own websites without paying commission fees, using a service like DoorDash to deliver the food. Of course, this requires a customer to order directly from a restaurant, not by quickly opening a mobile app. Our app-based ordering habits are tough to break: The majority of DoorDash’s business in 2020 came from repeat users, not diners who were new to DoorDash. And these companies have deep advertising and marketing pockets; DoorDash just announced its first Super Bowl ad, featuring actor and rapper Daveed Diggs and a few Sesame Street muppets. Uber Eats has run an ad campaign for months featuring Olympic gymnast Simone Biles and beloved Queer Eye host Jonathan Van Ness.
Portland, like other U.S. cities, has instituted a temporary 10 percent cap on commissions delivery services can charge restaurants, and Epif’s Dirks says she’s had no trouble with DoorDash respecting the regulation on her bill. But if the city mandate ends and commissions rise, she says she’ll close her account and work only with CCC.
At Rintaro, Brackett’s choice to stay off the apps comes down to his view on their fundamental business model. “It rubs me the wrong way in all sorts of ways. It’s white-collar versus blue-collar, it’s venture capital money versus people who are doing really hard physical work and taking the money from that.” Plus, he says, “It’s been really nice for some of the post-COVID regulars to get delivery from servers that they know.”
Kristen Hawley writes about restaurant operations, technology, and the future of the business from San Francisco.
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