Meet Pam Bondi: Trump’s New Pick for Attorney General

NEW YORK — Pam Bondi, the former Florida attorney general, was chosen by Donald Trump to serve as U.S. attorney general hours after his first choice, Matt Gaetz, withdrew from consideration after a federal sex trafficking investigation and ethics probe made his ability to be confirmed dubious.

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The 59-year-old has long been in Trump’s orbit and her name had been floated during his first term as a potential candidate for the nation’s highest law enforcement role. Trump announced his plans to nominate Bondi Thursday in a social media post.

If confirmed by the Republican-led Senate, Bondi would instantly become one of the most closely watched members of Trump’s Cabinet given the Republican’s threat to pursue retribution against perceived adversaries and concern among Democrats that he will look to bend the Justice Department to his will.

Here’s a few things to know about Bondi:

She’s long been a fixture in Trump’s world

Bondi has been a longtime and early ally. In March 2016, on the eve of the Republican primary in Florida, Bondi endorsed Trump at a rally, picking him over the candidate from her own state, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.

She gained national attention with appearances on Fox News as a defender of Trump and had a notable speaking spot at 2016 Republican National Convention as Trump became the party’s surprising nominee. During the remarks, some in the crowd began chanting “Lock her up” about Trump’s Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.

Bondi responded by saying, “‘Lock her up,’ I love that.”

As Trump prepared to move into the White House, she served on his first transition team.

When Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, was ousted in 2018, Bondi’s name was floated as a possible candidate for the job. Trump at the time said he would “love” Bondi to join the administration. He ultimately selected William Barr instead.

She kept a toehold in Trump’s orbit thereafter, including after he left office. She served as a chairwoman of America First Policy Institute, a think tank set up by former Trump administration staffers to lay the groundwork if he won a second term.

She was Florida’s first female attorney general

Bondi made history in 2010 when she was elected as Florida’s first female attorney general. Though the Tampa native spent more than 18 years as a prosecutor in the Hillsborough County State Attorney’s Office, she was a political unknown when she held the state’s top law enforcement job.

Bondi was elevated in the primary after she was endorsed by former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

She campaigned on a message to use the state’s top legal office in a robust way, challenging then-President Barack Obama’s signature health care law. She also called for her state to adopt Arizona’s “show me your papers” immigration law that sparked national debate.

As Florida’s top prosecutor, Bondi stressed human trafficking issues and urged tightening state laws against traffickers. She held the job from 2011 to 2019.

She worked as a lobbyist for both U.S. and foreign clients

Bondi worked as a lobbyist for Ballard Partners, the powerful Florida-based firm where Trump’s campaign chief and incoming chief of staff Susie Wiles was a partner. Her U.S. clients have included General Motors, the commissioner of Major League Baseball and a Christian anti-human-trafficking advocacy group.

She also lobbied for a Kuwaiti firm, according to Justice Department foreign agent filings and congressional lobbying documents. She registered as a foreign agent for the government of Qatar; her work was related to anti-human-trafficking efforts leading up to the World Cup, held in 2022.

Bondi also represented the KGL Investment Company KSCC, a Kuwaiti firm also known as KGLI, lobbying the White House, National Security Council, State Department and Congress on immigration policy, human rights and economic sanctions issues.

She defended Trump during his first impeachment trial

Bondi stepped away from lobbying to serve on Trump’s legal team during his first impeachment trial in 2020.

He was accused — but not convicted — of abuse of power for allegedly pressuring the president of Ukraine to investigate his Democratic rivals while crucial U.S. security aid was being withheld. He was also charged with obstruction of Congress for stonewalling investigative efforts.

Trump wanted Ukraine’s president to publicly commit to investigating Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden, who served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company. He pushed for the investigation while holding up nearly $400 million in military aid.

Bondi was brought on to bolster the White House’s messaging and communications. Trump and his allies sought to delegitimize the impeachment from the start, aiming to brush off the whole thing as a farce.

She’s been critical of the criminal cases against Trump

Bondi has been a vocal critic of the criminal cases against Trump as well as Jack Smith, the special counsel who charged Trump in two federal cases. In one radio appearance, she blasted Smith and other prosecutors who have charged Trump as “horrible” people she said were trying to make names for themselves by “going after Donald Trump and weaponizing our legal system.”

It’s unlikely that Bondi would be confirmed in time to overlap with Smith, who brought two federal indictments against Trump that are both expected to wind down before the incoming president takes office. Special counsels are expected to produce reports on their work that historically are made public, but it remains unclear when such a document might be released.

Bondi was also among a group of Republicans who showed up to support Trump at his hush money criminal trial in New York that ended in May with a conviction on 34 felony counts.

As president, Trump demanded investigations into political opponents like Hillary Clinton and sought to use the law enforcement powers of the Justice Department to advance his own interests, including in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Bondi appears likely to oblige him.

She would inherit a Justice Department expected to pivot sharply on civil rights, corporate enforcement and the prosecutions of hundreds of Trump supporters charged in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol — defendants whom Trump has pledged to pardon.

She’s had a few of her own political issues

Bondi issued a public apology in 2013 while serving as attorney general after she sought to delay the execution of a convicted killer because it conflicted with a fundraiser for her reelection campaign.

The attorney general, representing the state in death row appeals, typically remains available on the date of execution cases in case of any last-minute legal issues.

Bondi later said she was wrong and sorry for requesting then-Gov. Rick Scott push back the execution of Marshall Lee Gore by three weeks.

Bondi personally solicited a 2013 political contribution from Trump as her office was weighing whether to join New York in suing over fraud allegations involving Trump University.

Trump cut a $25,000 check to a political committee supporting Bondi from his family’s charitable foundation, in violation of legal prohibitions against charities supporting partisan political activities. After the check came in, Bondi’s office nixed suing Trump’s company for fraud, citing insufficient grounds to proceed. Both Trump and Bondi denied wrongdoing.

Two days before being sworn in as president in January 2017, Trump paid $25 million to settle three lawsuits alleging Trump University defrauded its students.

Trump also paid a $2,500 fine to the IRS over the illegal political donation to support Bondi from the Donald J. Trump Foundation, which he was forced to dissolve amid an investigation by the state of New York.

A Florida prosecutor assigned by then-GOP Gov. Rick Scott later determined there was insufficient evidence to support bribery charges against Trump and Bondi over the $25,000 donation.

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Long reported from Washington. Associated Press writer Michael Biesecker contributed to this report.

source https://time.com/7178604/pam-bondi-trump-attorney-general/

JJ Velazquez on Finding Freedom, From Sing Sing to Sing Sing

Over Thanksgiving of 2002, an NBC Dateline producer named Dan Slepian paid a visit to Greenhaven Correctional Facility, a couple hours north of New York City, to see David Lemus. That year, while planning a series in which he followed New York detectives solving murders, Slepian had learned of Lemus’ wrongful conviction. “I knew nothing about false imprisonment, wrongful convictions, innocence. I was a middle class kid growing up in Westchester who thought the criminal legal system worked just the way it should,” he says. “That was my baptism into this world.” 

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But although he was there to see Lemus—who would be exonerated five years later thanks to Slepian’s work—another man’s story entered Slepian’s field of vision that day and never left it. Jon-Adrian “JJ” Velazquez, who happened to share a cell wall with Lemus, was receiving visitors that day, too—his mother Maria and two sons, John Junior and Jacob, then 8 and 5, respectively. Velazquez knew Lemus’ case had gained traction by way of Slepian’s efforts—this was Slepian’s tenth or so visit—so his mother approached the producer to support her son’s “mission to be heard.” Walking up to Slepian, she shared that her son was innocent. “I just felt like this panging in my chest,” Slepian says of their encounter. “This father could be the Son of Sam and I didn’t care, because these little boys should not be in prison on Thanksgiving morning.”

And so it was that, days later, Velazquez found himself allotting one of his five free weekly letters to Slepian, rather than to one of the many legal firms to which he normally addressed them. “I was pouring my soul out to anybody who would listen at the time,” he says. His missives typically included a synopsis of his case with a cover letter detailing that in 1998, he had been sentenced to 25 years to life for a crime he didn’t commit. 

This correspondence with Slepian set a precedent for how investigative journalism and media would eventually play a crucial role in Velazquez’s exoneration. Over the next two decades, Velazquez, with the help of Slepian, tapped into as many channels as possible to share his story and ultimately, this past September, realize his freedom. The result is a roster of thoughtful, revealing stories that question the efficacy of the United States’ criminal legal system, from A24’s Sing Sing to a Pulitzer Prize-nominated podcast, Letters from Sing Sing, to director Dawn Porter’s four-part documentary series The Sing Sing Chronicles, which premiered at DOC NYC on Nov. 16 and airs on MSNBC on Nov. 23 and 24.

Read more: The Critical Need to Teach the History of Mass Incarceration

A long delayed exoneration

After 22 years, nearly 250 visits from Slepian, and tens of thousands of case documents, Velazquez’s innocence has finally been recognized by the Manhattan courts. On the last Monday of September in New York, the Bronx native wore a black, New Era-branded cap that read “END OF AN ERROR” while addressing a crowd of legal colleagues, fellow advocates, formerly incarcerated peers, and loved ones, including Slepian (whom he now considers “like blood”). “Right now is an emotional moment, and I don’t want to mince words,” he started, “because the judge didn’t allow us to speak in the courtroom.”

Velazquez, 48, later explained that even on a day that was “supposed to be the happiest moment of my life,” the system found a way to impose control. According to Velazquez, at the last minute, the judge changed his hearing from 9:30 to 9:15 AM, preventing more people from attending on time. That morning, the judge had also let attorneys know he expected no one to share sentiments after he addressed the room asking if anyone had objections or something to add. “The way the hearing was conducted was really disturbing,” Velazquez says. “We’re talking about 27 years of damage starting with me, then trickling down to my family and the community [who] has been waiting for this day of justice. To close [the hearing] in four minutes—how do you do that? And without an apology?” When Velazquez left the courtroom to breakouts of applause, he recalls that the judge eventually said, “All right with the celebrations.” “But this is not a celebration,” Velazquez reflected in an interview three days after the hearing. “This is an indictment of the system, because even in its closing, it was not dealt with appropriately.” 

As soon as Velazquez surrounded himself with those there to embrace him, he says, “it was like I could breathe again.” He adds: “It was a monumental moment not just for me, but for the hundreds of thousands of people just like me that are watching the TV, finding hope when they see the next exoneree.” He and an estimated 100 guests wrapped the day on the entire second floor of the Pier 17 Jean-Georges restaurant, The Fulton, which overlooks the Brooklyn Bridge. Three days after the hearing and this gathering, Velazquez still had 231 missed calls, 482 unread text messages, and upwards of 30,000 unopened emails combined from community members expressing their support.

In the two-plus decades Velazquez endured the violent reality of incarceration, he has worn many hats. He is a jailhouse lawyer who taught himself the ins and outs of the criminal legal system in order to effectively collaborate with Slepian through the many unlawful discoveries of his case—from erroneous lineup methods like “suspect shopping” that increase the likelihood of misidentification and wrongful convictions to a detective who changed Velazquez’s race in the database from “Hispanic” to “Black Hispanic” to match eyewitness descriptions. He is a freedom fighter, what Slepian refers to as a “one-man innocence project,” who also introduced Slepian to three more men who were eventually exonerated. And, perhaps the deepest thread in all of his work as a community organizer, he is a leader who seeks to shift society’s narrative around those impacted by incarceration. 

Read more: The U.S. Prison System Doesn’t Value True Justice

Sing Sing brings these stories to the masses

The most recent demonstration of this work is Velazquez’s role in A24’s Sing Sing, the film starring Colman Domingo that follows a group of actors in a theater troupe as they put on an original production inside Sing Sing Correctional Facility. The film, released in July and proving to have significant staying power, is based on an existing program, Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA). Thirteen of its alumni are prominent cast members who play versions of themselves, including Velazquez. In fact, it was only 10 months after his release from the actual Sing Sing, to which he was eventually transferred from Greenhaven, that he stepped onto set at a decommissioned prison in Fishkill, NY, to film. At that point, Velazquez had been granted executive clemency by Governor Andrew Cuomo but more roadwork remained before him to be exonerated. “As hard as I fought to get out, I had to wrestle with myself to throw myself right back into that mindset,” Velazquez says. “But [Sing Sing] gave us the opportunity to take this negative stereotype and try to humanize it in a way that people can accept. So nothing could stop me from putting those greens on.”

Sing Sing’s director Greg Kwedar immediately recognized Velazquez as a “natural, values-driven leader that has presence” when he sets foot in a room. “It was one of the [auditions] where, as soon as the Zoom was off, we were like, OK, he’s going on the board,’” Kwedar says. In fact, it was that “quiet confidence” that encouraged Kwedar and the rest of the production team to cast Velazquez as part of the theater troupe’s steering committee, the group of men inside who selected new members, chose RTA’s plays, and even finalized the cast. Throughout their time filming, Kwedar says he got to know a man who was “a student in the literal sense, but also a student of people and of systems, engaging with the world with both eyes fully open. He has very clear principles and stands behind them, and that’s quite comforting to be around.” 

It’s these principles that feel almost contagious when you meet Velazquez. When discussing Sing Sing and his time in prison, he somehow remains hopeful—despite years of being forced to spend hours in a 6 ft. by 9 ft. cell, every moment prescribed by people who referred to him as a number. Velazquez is focused on “promoting [Sing Sing] as a tool for humanity,” intent on continuing the conversation around the harms of mass incarceration and the power of healing. “I want the world to realize that this film is speaking a universal truth of human dignity,” he says. “A lot of the cast members on the film lost a huge portion of their lives, and it takes a huge loss to recognize what the real gifts in humanity are—love, redemption, relationships. If those of us doing decades in prison can come to a place where we live our lives with appreciation and gratitude, then everybody can learn to be grateful for each moment and each breath.”

His current priority is building out an impact campaign for the film alongside fellow RTA alumni and Sing Sing actors Dario Peña and John “Divine G” Whitfield; the latter is the real-life inspiration for the film’s protagonist, played by Colman Domingo. With A24 behind them, Velazquez and team hope to bring the film to more prisons across the country while simultaneously building out similar programming to what RTA provides. “We’re saying, OK, we’re ready to give you guys the blueprint on how to create this, how to structure it, and how to continuously follow up [with us] so that [your programming] becomes a sufficient process of healing.” Because, while garnering Oscar buzz and receiving praise from the likes of Regina King and Sebastian Stan are affirming responses to the film, Velazquez is focused on reaching more people who can see themselves reflected in Sing Sing’s cast. “It’s hard for guys who have been through [incarceration] to express themselves to society,” he shares. “This movie depicts sincerity and softens the opportunity for somebody else who may not be in the film to have that conversation.” For Velazquez, while it’s great if the movie can reach as many viewers as possible in general, the film was ultimately “made for people that are incarcerated.” 

A multimedia campaign centered on empathy

Over the course of his work, Velazquez has also become a bridge between those most proximate to the criminal legal system and those for whom incarceration is merely a plot point in entertainment, or a sensational headline in the news. His friendship with Slepian has resulted in a myriad of media stories, including but not limited to a 2012 NBC special proving his innocence, Porter’s The Sing Sing Chronicles, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated podcast, and Slepian’s new book The Sing Sing Files. Velazquez has thoughtfully leveraged these various media channels as tools for his freedom in collaboration with trusted partners who have invested in his story—rather than commodified it. With each of these storytelling opportunities, Velazquez seeks to “create pathways for communities to see the humanity in others who may not necessarily even be innocent, but who are just as deserving of opportunities.” Slepian shares that it is Velazquez who “opened the door for me to the irrationality, pathology, and perversity of mass incarceration as a whole.” 

Velazquez’s work, most of which he laid the foundation for while incarcerated in Sing Sing Correctional Facility, is an uphill battle in a sociopolitical landscape that still uses dehumanizing labels like “inmate” “felon” or “convict.” That has only exonerated 3,591 people since 1989 in the United States, even when experts have confirmed a 5% error rate in convictions and estimate the number is in fact much higher. That, in September alone, saw five people executed by their states. With 2 million people incarcerated in this country, the growing network of advocates committed to decarceration have a lot of work ahead. That explains why Velazquez juggles many projects, including serving as Program Director at The Frederick Douglass Project for Justice, Board member of A Second U Foundation, and Founding member of Voices from Within. He founded the latter with fellow incarcerated peers inside Sing Sing (and Slepian) based on the belief that “guys inside are the ambassadors that can help change the world.” 

Read more: The Death Penalty Fails America

When asked about what he envisions when it comes to alternatives to our current systems, Velazquez underscores collective efficacy: the idea that mitigating harm and reducing crime comes from community members taking care of each other and their environment. This model is in direct opposition to the 1980s Broken Windows Theory, which posits that visible disorder (e.g. broken windows, graffiti, abandoned buildings) in a neighborhood is an indicator of more violent crime to come. (Not only did this theory lead to over-policing of Black, brown, and low-income neighborhoods, but it has since been debunked). “When we drive through neighborhoods and see these broken windows and vandalism and litter, it’s because the community is speaking and saying, ‘We don’t feel like we belong here, so we don’t care to tend to this place,’” Velazquez shares. “Our response is to make community members feel like this is their neighborhood, bringing them together and building respect through, say, painting the community center—not shunning them and putting Scarlet letters on them.” 

Velazquez has long lived out collective efficacy alongside his incarcerated peers in an effort to “redefine what it means to pay a debt to society”; and this type of imagination for a different future is particularly evident in Sing Sing, where archaic tropes about incarcerated people à la handcuffs and belly chains are replaced with moments of tenderness, humor, passion, and love. In Kwedar’s words, “If you can imagine a theater program in prison, you can imagine many other things being different too, right? Maybe that prison not even existing anymore.”

Fierce determination to keep spreading the message

Velazquez’s story is defined by the impact he has had on his community, but also by unfathomable loss. For one: those young boys Slepian met in the prison lobby all those years ago? They’re now 27 and 30, having missed an entire childhood with their father. And while Velazquez’s exoneration on Sept. 30 is a major milestone, it took a diverse media platform and resources beyond the capabilities of one person inside a prison to get here. 

“It’s a problem when people inside are trying to reach the television producer,” says Slepian as he reflects on how many individuals have reached out to him to support their innocence. “And if it takes a guy like JJ, whose IQ is about 590, whose emotional intelligence is off the charts, who is a kind, smart, loving soul, who had never been convicted before, who is clearly innocent, who has an hour-long television documentary proving his innocence, nominated for three awards, who has celebrities like Martin Sheen and Alfre Woodard visiting him, a Pulitzer finalist podcast about his case, and a meeting with President Biden in which he apologized to JJ— if it takes all that and more to to be exonerated? God help everybody else.” 

It won’t be easy, but this is why Velazquez will keep working toward the freedom and healing of his community. “I have the ability to utilize my platform to help other innocent people and guilty people who deserve to be free. I’m going to leverage it in every way I can—in the media, in front of the Senate, whoever and however,” he says. “The biggest message I want to get out to the world is how easy it is to imprison the poor and how hard it is to free the innocent.” 

source https://time.com/7085875/j-j-velazquez-sing-sing-exoneration/

Quack-like underwater sounds off the coast of New Zealand in the '80s may have been a conversation, researcher says

Mysterious, repeating sounds from the depths of the ocean can be terrifying to some, but in the 1980s, they presented a unique look at an underwater soundscape.

source https://phys.org/news/2024-11-quack-underwater-coast-zealand-80s.html

Geospatial mapping study shows drought trend in ag-dominated Arkansas Delta

The Delta, a regional powerhouse for Arkansas agriculture built by river flows, is showing a trend of increasing droughts. Using satellite imagery, Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station researchers comprehensively analyzed drought dynamics over five years to reveal this and other short and long-term climate trends in Arkansas.

source https://phys.org/news/2024-11-geospatial-drought-trend-ag-dominated.html

New organic molecule design can lead to long-lasting, durable OLEDs for displays

Scientists have developed a method to improve the stability and efficiency of organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs), a technology used in smartphones, TVs, and other electronic displays.

source https://phys.org/news/2024-11-molecule-durable-oleds-displays.html

Greenland's meltwater will slow Atlantic circulation, climate model suggests

A team of climate scientists in Germany and China has found evidence, using a climate model, that in the coming years, freshwater inputs to the Irminger Sea Basin will have the biggest impact on the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). Their paper is published in the journal Science Advances.

source https://phys.org/news/2024-11-greenland-meltwater-atlantic-circulation-climate.html

I've studied organizational failure for decades—the Church of England needs more than a new leader

In a book I wrote with a colleague on organizational failures (The Apology Impulse) the inability of many of them to confront their failures, except to say a meaningless "we're sorry," is legend.

source https://phys.org/news/2024-11-ive-organizational-failure-decades-church.html

Investment in support services effective in increasing diversity, retention of apprentices in highway construction

New research from Portland State University demonstrates that a substantial initiative from the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries (BOLI) and Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) is an effective tool for improving the recruitment and retention of a more diverse workforce.

source https://phys.org/news/2024-11-investment-effective-diversity-retention-apprentices.html

Even a Magical Cynthia Erivo Can’t Cast a Spell Strong Enough to Save Wicked

It’s a drag to feel you’re being held hostage by someone else’s nostalgia. The stage show Wicked is beloved by many; it’s been playing on Broadway for 20 years and counting, which means a lot of little girls, and others, have happily fallen under the poppy-induced spell of Winnie Holzman and Stephen Schwartz’s musical about the complex origins of the not-really-so-bad Wicked Witch of the West. Legions of kids and grownups have hummed and toe-tapped along with numbers like “Popular” and “Defying Gravity,” one a twinkly sendup of what it takes to be the most-liked girl at school, the other a peppy empowerment ballad about charting your own course in life. The film adaptation of Wicked—directed by John M. Chu and starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande—will increase the material’s reach, giving many more people the chance to fall in love with it. Or not.

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It’s the “or nots” who are likely to be the minority. But if you fail to feel the transformative magic of Chu’s Wicked, there are some good reasons: The movie is so aggressively colorful, so manic in its insistence that it’s OK to be different, that it practically mows you down. And this is only part one of the saga—the second installment arrives in November 2025. Wicked pulls off a distinctive but dismal magic trick: it turns other people’s cherished Broadway memories into a protracted form of punishment for the rest of us.

Read more: Breaking Down Wicked’s Iconic Songs With Composer Stephen Schwartz

Wicked the movie is cobbled together from many complex moving parts, and some of them work better than others. Grande plays Glinda, the good witch of Oz—but is she really all that good? The backstory that will consume all two hours and 41 minutes of this movie—roughly the same amount of time as the stage musical, though again, this is only the first half—proves the almost-opposite. This is really the story of Elphaba, played by Erivo, who is, at the movie’s onset, a reticent young woman with dazzling supernatural powers. The problem is that she has green skin, which makes her a target for mockery and derision, an outcast. Elphaba is a reimagining of the character first brought to life by L. Frank Baum in his extraordinary and wonderfully weird turn-of-the-century Oz books, and later portrayed in the revered 1939 Wizard of Oz by Margaret Hamilton. Wicked—whose source material, roughly speaking, is Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West—is built around the idea that Elphaba wasn’t born bad, but was merely forced into making decisions that set her on a path different from that of the insufferable goody-two-shoes Glinda, her enemy turned frenemy turned friend. The story’s subtext—or, rather, its glaring bold type—is that we’re all shaped by our choices, which are at least partly determined by our response to how others treat us.

But you’ve probably come to Wicked not for its leaden life lessons, but for the songs, for the lavish, showy sets, for the chance to watch two formidable performers parry and spar. Grande brings a not-unpleasant powder-room perkiness to the role of Glinda: as the movie opens, she’s entering Oz’s Shiz University, an institution whose radically uncool name will forever tarnish, sadly, the classic and vaguely scatological phrase “It’s the shizz.” Shiz is the place where kids come to learn magic spells and stuff; Glinda arrives with a million pink suitcases, thinking she’s going to be the star pupil.

Not so fast: Elphaba has also arrived at the school, but not as a student. She’s just there to drop off her younger sister, Nessa Rose (Marissa Bode). Their father, Governor Thropp (Andy Nyman), has hated Elphaba since the day she was born— remember, she’s green and thus different—while doting on Nessa Rose who is, admittedly, so kind and lovely that it’s impossible not to love her. Elphaba, in fact, adores her. And the fact that she uses a wheelchair makes their father all the more overprotective of her. But as Elphaba goes about the business of getting her younger sister settled at Shiz, her fantastical powers—they flow from her like electricity, especially when she’s angry or frustrated—catch the attention of the school’s superstar professor, the chilly, elegant Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh). Morrible enrolls Elphaba in Shiz University immediately, making her the unwelcome roommate of Glinda (who is at this point named Galinda, for reasons the movie will explain if you’re curious, or even if you’re not).

Glinda has no use for Elphaba, and goes overboard in making her Shiz experience unbearable. She relegates her roommate to a small, dark corner of their shared quarters and literally crowds her out with mountains of frippery and furbelows, mostly in vibrant shades of pink. In a pivotal scene, she tries to humiliate Elphaba at a school dance and then inexplicably softens; the two become almost-friends. But there’s always an undercurrent of competitiveness there—Glinda isn’t half as gifted as Elphaba is, and she’s the opposite of down-to-earth. Grande has some fun with Glinda’s sugary, over-the-top manipulations: she has the fluttery eyelids of a blinking doll and the twirly elegance of a music-box ballerina. But her shtick becomes wearisome. There’s so much winking, twinkling, and nudging in Wicked that I emerged from it feeling grateful—if only momentarily—for the stark ugliness of reality.

There are so many characters, so many plot points, so many metaphors in Wicked—they’re like a traffic pileup of flying monkeys. Jonathan Bailey plays a rich, handsome prince who, upon his heralded arrival at the school, instinctively likes Elphaba but ends up going steady with Glinda, who practically hypnotizes him into compliance. Jeff Goldblum plays the Wizard of Oz, a lanky charmer who might be a jerk at best and a puppet of fascists at worst. Peter Dinklage provides the voice of a beleaguered professor-goat at the school, Dr. Dillamond. Oz is a community where animals can talk; they’re as intelligent as humans, or more so, and they mingle freely in society. But someone in Oz is seeking to stop all that, launching a campaign to silence all animals, and Dr. Dillamond becomes their unfortunate victim.

Meanwhile, the big message of Wicked—No one is all good or all bad—blinks so assaultively that you’re not sure what any of it means. Metaphorical truisms ping around willy-nilly: It’s OK, even good, to be different! Those who know best will always be the first to be silenced! The popular girl doesn’t always win! It’s tempting to interpret Wicked as a wise civics lesson, a fable for our times, but its ideas are so slippery, so readily adaptable to even the most blinkered political views, that they have no real value. Meanwhile, there are as many song and dance numbers as you could wish for, and possibly more. Chu—also the director of Crazy Rich Asians and In the Heights, both movies more entertaining than this one—stages them lavishly, to the point where your ears and eyeballs wish he would stop.

And yet—there’s Erivo. She’s the one force in Wicked that didn’t make me feel ground down to a nub. As Elphaba, she channels something like real pain rather than just showtune self-pity. You feel for her in her greenness, in her persistent state of being an outsider, in her frustration at being underestimated and unloved. Erivo nearly rises above the material, and not just on a broomstick. But not even she is strong enough to counteract the cyclone of Entertainment with a capital E swirling around her. For a movie whose chief anthem is an advertisement for the joys of defying gravity, Wicked is surprisingly leaden, with a promise of more of the same to come. The shizz it’s not.

source https://time.com/7177832/wicked-movie-review/

Recovering in-demand metals for new electronics—researchers find industrial-strength adsorbents soak up lanthanum

Nearly all technology today—from cellphones to computers to MRI scanners—contains rare earth elements (REEs). The global market for REEs is predicted to reach $6.2 billion (USD) this year and $16.1 billion (USD) by 2034.

source https://phys.org/news/2024-11-recovering-demand-metals-electronics-industrial.html

A New Era of Climate Geopolitics is Playing Out at COP29

The annual United Nations climate change summits are always a little crazy: tens of thousands of delegates from every corner of the globe descending on a far-flung city for two weeks of heated discussions on the future of global climate policy. 

This time around the conference—known this year as COP29—is nothing short of surreal. In the area where countries set up pavilions, you can take a five-minute walk from the luxurious Russian pavilion where delegates sip tea on sofas amid human-size Russian dolls to the Ukrainian pavilion decorated with a solar panel destroyed by Russian armaments. At most COPs, attendees keep their eyes peeled for notable heads of state or even celebrities; in Baku, delegates are on the lookout for members of the Taliban. Midway through the first week of the conference, the Argentinian delegation returned home at the direction of the country’s right-wing president; the French environment minister decided to skip the whole thing because of a dispute with the host country. And the entire event began with a description of fossil fuels as “a gift from God” from Azerbaijan’s president. 

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But nothing has made the conference more surreal than its timing. Opening just days after the U.S. election, the topic of President-elect Donald Trump serves as context for every conversation. The U.S. has for decades played a pivotal role in shaping the talks, brokering key agreements and, most recently, helping convince everyone that the world’s largest economy is decarbonizing. In the opening hours of the conference, John Podesta, President Joe Biden’s climate envoy, offered a blunt assessment that felt almost like an apology. “It’s clear that the next administration will try to take a U-turn and erase much of this progress,” he said. “Of course, I’m keenly aware of the disappointment that the United States has at times caused.” (He went on to make the case that the U.S. would continue climate efforts at the city and state level).

As the talks, which this year are focused on how to finance the climate transition, continue in their second week, it’s impossible to know where they will land. The organizers could eke out a brokered agreement, as often happens, or they could collapse under the strain of geopolitical pressure. Longtime COP attendees have said that these talks have at times felt closer to a breakdown than any in recent memory. 

In a way, this climate moment is very dangerous. We already feel the effects of climate-linked extreme weather today, which is costing lives in communities across the globe. Clearly, a stagnation in multilateral efforts to address that issue doesn’t help. But there are also reasons for reassurance here in Baku. Decarbonization has moved from a theoretical question, delineated in bold but toothless commitments, to a phenomenon occurring in the economy—from the small enterprises adapting to sustainability requirements to multi-billion investments from some of the world’s most influential firms.

Indeed, the questions here in Baku are less about whether the international climate push will go on but about how.  

One of the first things that struck me upon stepping out of the airport in Baku is how much the vehicles on the street have changed since I was last here seven years ago. At the time, white Soviet-era Ladas seemed to dominate the roads. This time around, the old-school cars were few and far between. Instead, I noticed the prevalence of Chinese electric vehicles. Nearly every time I called a car, an EV showed up.  

Baku’s EVs offered a small reminder, from the outset, that the energy transition is already rapidly changing the world—and not just in major economies. In 2016, when Trump was first elected, delegates gathered at that year’s U.N. climate conference wondered if the Paris Agreement—and the decarbonization push it was meant to catalyze—could survive. That’s not a question in 2024.

To some degree, the confidence comes in part from evidence from Trump’s first term. Many businesses actually accelerated their commitment to climate action in spite of Trump. And cities and states said they would step up their decarbonization policymaking. In Baku, some of those same groups have offered similar commitments. Washington Governor Jay Inslee, citing state actions, put it to me bluntly: “Donald Trump is going to be a speed bump on the march to a clean energy economy.”

But perhaps more important is the massive investment that has begun over the course of the last eight years. Baku’s EVs are just one example. Across the globe, many of the world’s largest companies have spent billions to facilitate the buildout of clean technology infrastructure. Those investments are simply too costly to undo and the momentum too strong to stop. “No one country can stop progress,” says Catherine McKenna, a former Canadian environment minister. “I said that last time [Trump was elected], but it’s even more true because now it’s in the real economy.”

But the bigger question for delegates is how the ongoing transition—not to mention the effects of extreme weather—will play out around the world. Which countries will win and lose? How will the most vulnerable fare? And will the transition happen fast enough—especially in developing countries—to avoid some of the worst effects of climate change? 

Indeed, these issues have led to brawls at COP29 over everything from how climate rules play out in trade relationships to how much different countries should pay to help their counterparts to the role of oil and gas in the transition. With tensions high, in the middle of the first week of this year some of the most prominent voices in the international climate world—including former U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres and climate scientist Johan Rockström—dropped an open letter calling for a wholesale reform of the process. Host countries should face tougher selection criteria to ensure that they’re committed to phasing out fossil fuels, and the process should be streamlined to allow faster decision making.

The post-election timing was unstated in the letter, but it wasn’t coincidental. Regardless of whether Trump follows through on his promise for the U.S. to leave the Paris Agreement for a second time, the climate world will be left with a giant vacuum. Many negotiators are quick to say that the U.S. international climate posture never amounted to real climate leadership. Even under supportive presidents like Biden and former President Barack Obama, the U.S. shaped agreements with American politics in mind, even if it weakened the deals, and struggled to deliver the climate aid that others demanded. Even so, for many, the U.S. will be missed when it’s gone.

source https://time.com/7177517/new-era-climate-geopolitics-cop29/

Entomologists call on public for help in spotting invasive insects

The next time you see an interesting bug, take a photo on your smartphone, and post it online. You just might catch an invasive species new to your area.

source https://phys.org/news/2024-11-entomologists-invasive-insects.html

New study reveals possible origins of dark matter in 'Dark Big Bang' scenario

Recent research by a student-faculty team at Colgate University unlocks new clues that could radically change the world's understanding of the origin of dark matter.

source https://phys.org/news/2024-11-reveals-dark-big-scenario.html

Chaos Erupts As Massive Crowd Gathers At 'Pushpa 2' Promotions In Patna

Chaos erupted in Patna's historic Gandhi Maidan on Sunday, where a massive crowd turned up to catch a glimpse of actors Allu Arjun and Rashmika Mandana who were in the city for the promotion of their...

source https://www.ndtv.com/patna-news/chaos-erupts-in-patna-as-massive-crowd-gathers-at-pushpa-2-promotions-7042262

4-Month Old Tiger Cub Found Dead In Tiger Reserve In Madhya Pradesh

A tiger cub, aged around four months, was found dead in Pench Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh's Seoni district on Sunday, an official said.

source https://www.ndtv.com/bhopal-news/four-month-old-tiger-cub-found-dead-in-tiger-reserve-in-madhya-pradesh-7042208

Super Typhoon Man-Yi Hits Philippines, Forcing Lakhs to Flee

Super Typhoon Man-yi battered the Philippines on Saturday, with the national weather forecaster warning of a "potentially catastrophic and life-threatening" impact as huge waves pounded the...

source https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/super-typhoon-man-yi-hits-philippines-forcing-lakhs-to-flee-7035683

NASA satellites reveal abrupt drop in global freshwater levels

An international team of scientists using observations from NASA-German satellites found evidence that Earth's total amount of freshwater dropped abruptly starting in May 2014 and has remained low ever since. Reporting in Surveys in Geophysics, the researchers suggested the shift could indicate Earth's continents have entered a persistently drier phase.

source https://phys.org/news/2024-11-nasa-satellites-reveal-abrupt-global.html

Topological defects can trigger a transformation from insulating to conductive behavior in Mott materials

Researchers at Università Cattolica, Brescia campus, have discovered that the transition from insulating to conductive behavior in certain materials is driven by topological defects in the structure.

source https://phys.org/news/2024-11-topological-defects-trigger-insulating-behavior.html

What Democrats Can Learn from America’s First Black Voters

Following Kamala Harris’ defeat and the GOP’s congressional successes in the 2024 elections, many Democrats are expressing not only rage and frustration, but fear. Donald Trump’s return to the presidency will provide him the opportunity to ensure the Supreme Court remains firmly in conservative hands for the foreseeable future. Many Democrats fear the radical and tyrannical policies Trump has promised to enact upon his ascendance to office: the revocation of broadcast licenses of critical media outlets, the punishing of politicians and entire states that did not support him, and perhaps most infamously, a claim that he would be “a dictator on day one.”

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While concerning, these threats are far from novel. Indeed, they mirror what conservatives did in the aftermath of the Civil War. Ex-confederates during Reconstruction levied claims of fraud, enacted de-registration campaigns, and even destroyed the physical ballots of their opponents. The most devastating tool conservatives had in 1868, however, was the susceptibility of white Americans to racist rhetoric, a power that remains an animating force in American politics today.

The 1868 election remains the most violent in U.S. history. Black Americans had just received the right to vote thanks to the passage of the Reconstruction Acts and the 14th Amendment, but formal suffrage rights did not guarantee that Black Americans could exercise that right without threat of reprisal. Though federal troops occupied some portions of the South to curb political and racial violence, most regions, like St. Tammany Parish, La., lacked any meaningful federal presence.

Read More: Exclusive: Donald Trump Says Political Violence ‘Depends’ on ‘Fairness’ of 2024 Election

In 1868, conservatives backed Horatio Seymour against Ulysses S. Grant, in a campaign built on the promise of disenfranchising Black Americans, and their rhetoric sparked widespread violence. The Ku Klux Klan launched murderous campaigns across the South terrorizing freedpeople to prevent newly enfranchised Black men from voting. In the months leading up to the 1868 election, the Klan had killed at least 2,000 freedpeople across the state of Louisiana with many more intimidated, assaulted, or tortured. Klan members burned Black Americans’ homes, gunned down entire families, assassinated elected officials, destroyed voter registries, and stole freedpeople’s firearms to ensure they could not fight back. The death toll of what some scholars have termed the “Killing Fields of 1868” is impossible to tabulate, but contemporaries estimated it to be in the tens of thousands with the majority of those victims having been Black women, men, and children. Yet, these horrific efforts failed in their attempt to demoralize Black voters. Despite the violence and vitriol they faced at the ballot box in 1868, Black Americans marched to voting booths by the hundreds of thousands in the years that followed.

On June 10, 1869, formerly enslaved blacksmith Mumford McCoy stepped before a congressional investigation in New Orleans to testify about the devastation of his home parish of St. Tammany during the election. Mumford McCoy had witnessed this violence firsthand. In the preceding year, the Klan had killed the local coroner John Kemp (one of the first Black men to ever hold the position in the United States), brutalized a local Black preacher and his family, and burned to the ground the community’s church that McCoy had built. Hearing McCoy describe these horrors, one of the investigators asked him, “Have you not lost courage, spirit, and faith?”

“No sir,” McCoy replied. “I have not lost any at all. It has only given me better encouragement and ambition.”

And he was not alone.

After 1868, Black Americans across the South re-formed their political organizations, with some mustering into militias to protect themselves against Klan violence. This newly re-formed political front proved incredibly effective. In Shreveport, La., for example, a group of white terrorists had summarily executed a group of Black men and boys in the local brickyard just weeks before the 1868 election, and through their violence and intimidation, ensured the parish did not register a single Republican vote. Yet, after Black suffrage was enshrined in the Constitution by the 15th Amendment two years later, over a thousand Black Americans, both men and women, marched into Shreveport, as one witness put it, “like well-drilled soldiers who had received their orders” to vote in the 1870 congressional election, undaunted by the violence they had witnessed just two years prior. As a result of their bravery, Black voters carried Shreveport and Caddo Parish for the Republican Party, still known then as the party of Lincoln and the formerly enslaved.

In the years that followed, Black voters made staggering gains in states that had witnessed some of the nation’s most horrific massacres, including in Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina. Even McCoy’s home state of Louisiana, a state carried by conservatives through intimidation and violence in 1868, saw every single one of its Congressional districts flip Republican two years later thanks almost exclusively to the unyielding efforts of Black voters.

Read More: The Supreme Court Could Gut the Voting Rights Act Even Further

Similar to their counterparts in the civil rights movement a century later, Black Americans during Reconstruction manifested a stalwart, united front in the face of racist rhetoric and political violence. They used their solidarity to their advantage, strategized on how to resist their disenfranchisement, and most importantly, refused to allow themselves to succumb to defeatism. Rather than allow themselves to be demoralized by the assassination of their leaders, the constant attacks on their communities, and the tepidness of their white allies’ support, America’s first Black voters saw each of these obstacles as yet another reason to stay politically engaged.

Those who had endured enslavement within the United States intimately understood the flaws of American democracy in ways that no person today ever could. Yet, they still voted, protested, and ran for office even in the aftermath of violent attacks on their communities and stunning electoral defeats.  Why? Because allowing ex-Confederates and former enslavers to return to positions of unchecked power would herald the end of freedom in the post-emancipation South.

Over the next years, ex-Confederates continued to wield violence and intimidation against Black Americans to expel them from politics through force, and though Black Americans fought valiantly for their political rights, their white allies in the North and South retreated from Reconstruction and allowed many freedpeople to be reduced again to a state of functional slavery in the Jim Crow South.

Yet, even after being abandoned by their allies, Black Americans persisted. Through the grassroots populist movements of the 1880s and 1890s, through labor organizations like the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and through simple acts of survival, Black Americans continued to fight because, as hard as it may be to imagine, they still had hope for the American project and an unshakeable understanding that they deserved a place within it.

Instead of allowing the Republicans’ sweeping victories to dishearten them, perhaps Democrats could take a page out of Mumford McCoy’s book and keep up their courage, spirit, and faith. The political obstacles facing Democrats are dire, but it is the very existence of these threats that renders political engagement so important in the first place. Those disappointed by this month’s result should strive to emulate America’s first Black voters and allow the immense challenges ahead to instill in them “better encouragement and ambition.”

J. Jacob Calhoun is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Nau Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia. He researches 19th-century American history including the history of Black politics.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.

source https://time.com/7176913/first-black-voters/

When ads shock: Subtle ways that disgust can shape our buying habits

Whether it's a hungry child in a war zone or a polar bear on a shrinking raft of ice, we're all familiar with shocking images in advertising. Companies use them to confront us with difficult emotions or go against societal norms as a means of grabbing our attention. Dettol, for example, once created an advertisement for its hygiene products that depicted a bloodied hand in front of the body of a man with a knife through his chest, alongside the words "When ordinary soap just won't do."

source https://phys.org/news/2024-11-ads-subtle-ways-disgust-buying.html

Chinese firms turn to executives with global expertise to counter trade war impact

Chinese firms hit by the U.S.–China trade war are increasingly hiring executives with international experience to help manage adversity, particularly those skilled in European markets and marketing, according to new research from the University of Michigan.

source https://phys.org/news/2024-11-chinese-firms-global-expertise-counter.html

13 Things to Say When Someone Asks Why You Haven’t Had a Baby Yet

Wannabe grandparents have always ruffled feathers by inquiring—sometimes aggressively—about the timing of their future progeny. They’re not the only ones to overstep: Casual friends, distant relatives, coworkers, and even complete strangers often feel entitled to ask couples about family planning.

Once two people get married, those in their orbit tend to become overly inquisitive: “When am I going to get some good news?” as Shula Melamed, a senior behavioral health coach at Headspace Health, puts it. “As soon as you hit one milestone, you’re expected to hit another.” And forget about rounding the corner into your 30s. “At a certain age, it becomes, ‘You better get started—your biological clock is ticking. Time is running out,’” she says. “It’s questions about your intimate life, it’s questions about your own body. It’s interesting that it’s still not taboo, because it doesn’t get more personal than that.”

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Generally, people mean well with these queries. If you take the most generous view, “They love you, and they want more of you in the world,” Melamed says. Yet that doesn’t make it acceptable conversation fodder. Someone might be experiencing infertility, which is painful enough without feedback or questions from others—especially when it’s posed as a demand, like “Why haven’t you given me a grandchild yet?” Plus, it all feeds into outdated expectations that can make people feel inferior. “There’s the social pressure of, ‘You’re not a successful adult, or you’re not fulfilling your biological destiny, or you’re not doing something that is deemed to be a very important thing in this world,’” she says.

With that in mind, we asked experts exactly what to say the next time someone peppers you with questions about when you’re going to start reproducing.

“I’m curious why this is important to you.”

Curiosity has a way of disarming people and opening up dialogue, says Suzanne Mungalez, a perinatal psychologist who works with clients experiencing infertility, pregnancy loss, or ambivalence about conceiving. “We might have all these assumptions about why the person is asking the question, and we might take it personally,” she says. “We might assume that they’re coming at it from a space of trying to pressure us, but we don’t really know where they’re coming from.” It’s possible, for example, that they’re also struggling with their own uncertainty about having kids and are craving a safe space to explore and discuss. “It’s important to understand where they’re coming from before you jump to reacting,” Mungalez says. “It can better inform how we respond if we have a sense of why they’re asking.”

“There are lots of different ways to have a family.”

A family unit can’t be pigeonholed into one narrow definition. Mungalez likes reminding people of all the different shapes and forms it can take: a chosen family, an adopted family, a two-person family, a blended family. “There’s so many ways to create a family, and all of those ways are valid,” she says. “They’re just as valid as getting pregnant.” Own that truth, she encourages—regardless of whether or not the person on the other end of the conversation sees “family” the same way you do.

Read More: How to Break 8 Toxic Communication Habits

“What if I told you I had been trying for years—or that I experienced multiple miscarriages?”

Presenting a hypothetical invites your prying acquaintance to consider the impact of their question. “It can be a gentle way of reminding them that there are lots of different reasons why people might not want to or might not be able to have a child,” Mungalez says. “It’s not really coming at it from a defensive place, but from a place of wanting to educate, inform, and open up a dialogue.” Most people end up carrying the teaching moment with them, she adds—and will think twice before bringing the topic up again.

“What’s the next phase of your life?”

The next time someone tells you that you’re not getting any younger, turn their presumptuous comment around on them. “It’s an interesting thing, especially when older people say that to somebody, because it’s like, ‘Well, what about your biological clock, or the next phase of your life?’” Melamed says. If you don’t feel comfortable with such a sassy comeback, consider some of her toned-down but still effective alternatives: “As far as I know, my clock is functioning fine. Are there things you haven’t done yet that you’re anxious to get to?” Or: “All of our clocks are ticking everyday—I’m just grateful for another day! How about you?”

“Biology is part of starting a family, but there’s so many other things to consider. Those factors have been really interesting to sit and think about.”

You could also respond to intrusive comments about your allegedly ticking biological clock by pointing out that there are lots of other considerations that go into starting a family. That can spark a broader conversation about priorities, Melamed notes. Start the conversation like this: “I understand that timing might seem like the main factor to you, but there’s a lot else I have to consider,” she suggests. “Then they might respond, ‘What are your concerns, or some of the other things about becoming a parent that are on your mind?’” You could end up having a surprisingly meaningful—and even productive—conversation.

Read More: 8 Things You Should Do for Your Bones Every Day, According to Orthopedic Doctors

“Don’t worry—you’ll be the first to know when and if it happens.”

Letting your well-intentioned but tactless friends and family know that you’ll update them when you have news to share is a smart way to fend off further questioning. “If you’re feeling particularly tender, you could also tell them that you appreciate that they’re so invested in you starting a family,” Melamed says. Their enthusiasm, after all, isn’t the problem—they’d just be better off keeping it to themselves until further notice.

“Hmmm…How do you know we haven’t been trying?”

When Dr. Dympna Weil was struggling to get pregnant—before eventually having a daughter—people constantly prodded her about her plans to procreate. With time, she went from feeling upset about these inquiries to empowered enough to own her response. Her favorite mic-drop moment: asking the other person how they knew she and her husband hadn’t been trying—and then spinning on her heel and walking away. The typical reaction? “Mouth open, eyes wide, like, ‘Oh, crap,’ and then kind of a hush,” says Weil, an ob-gyn in Albany, N.Y. “It calms the frenzy of questioning.” While Weil wouldn’t use this comeback with, say, her grandmother, she employed it often during her residency—especially with curious (read: nosy) colleagues.

“Wow! I just haven’t had the time—good thing you reminded me!”

Weil is fond of this response because “it hints at the absurdity that they should be all up in my reproductive business,” she says. “It’s telling them lovingly and gently, ‘I got this.’ It’s kind of cheeky, without being snarky.” Those on the receiving end were typically dumbfounded, she adds, quickly apologizing and acknowledging that they knew she was busy. Did they ever ask such an intrusive question again? Not a chance.

“Why do you assume that everyone wants children?”

Regina Lazarovich, a clinical psychologist who is child-free by choice, has received countless questions about when she might start having babies.She likes to respond with this question because it exposes the other person’s shortsighted thinking. “There is definitely a bias that’s communicated in the question of whether you’re going to have a baby,” she says. “It could be a jumping off point for a conversation—if they’re actually open to having a dialogue—and hopefully, it makes them think before asking such assumptive questions again.”

Read More: Should You Use Retinol and Retinoids?

“I’m not planning on having children.”

This is Lazarovich’s most truthful response. Plus, it’s clear and to the point, without “giving in to the bait,” she says. “You’re shutting the question down, and you’re not providing any extra justifying information. You don’t have to break any personal privacy boundaries you might have.” She’s found that “unabashedly” telling people that kids simply aren’t part of her life plan helps reduce shame around not following traditional family expectations. “It’s not going to happen, period,” she says, and no one has the power to make her feel bad about that.

“How’s your sex life? How are your finances?”

Think of this approach as responding to an invasive question with an equally invasive question. “It’s for the sassier among us,” Lazarovich says. Recipients have no right to get offended:
“We’re asking a question back that actually points out the issue—that this is an intrusive question that is not appropriate to ask.” And yet, it’s not aggressive and won’t escalate the situation, she’s found. If you say it in a lighthearted way, you could even inject some humor into the conversation.

“A baby? In this economy?!”

This witty retort is a play on a viral joke—but it also happens to be an effective way to shut down unwanted conversations. The economy is a major factor in why some people are opting to be child-free, with 17% of participants in a Pew Research Center reporting they wouldn’t have children for financial reasons. “It’s expensive to have a kid, it’s expensive to get pregnant and go to all these medical appointments,” Mungalez says. “And sometimes it’s having to weigh that out—do I want to spend the money I have on a child, or do I want to use it to maybe put a down payment on something?” It’s unfortunate that we have to make these kinds of decisions, she adds, but money is also a perfectly reasonable consideration—and perhaps the person you’re talking to can relate.

“That’s a very personal question, and I would appreciate it if we didn’t discuss it further.”

You’re always within your rights to set a boundary—and you absolutely don’t have to talk about your reproductive plans if you don’t want to. It’s important to specify what the consequence will be if someone doesn’t respect your boundary, Lazarovich adds, and to make sure you enforce it. “It could be as simple as, ‘If you continue to push me on this, I’m going to hang up the phone,’ or ‘I’m going to walk out of the room,’” she says. “It depends on the power dynamics, and your boundary might differ in a work setting or family setting.” If it’s been a while since you initially set the boundary, you might even remind someone: “Hey, remember I told you I didn’t want to discuss this?” If they back off, great. But if they keep pushing, it’s time to reinforce it—because no one gets to make you talk about something you’ve said is off-limits.

source https://time.com/7097389/how-to-respond-why-no-baby-pregnancy/

Bad Sisters Needed That Brutal Twist

This article discusses, in detail, Episodes 1 and 2 of Bad Sisters Season 2.

If you’ve just finished watching the first two episodes of Bad Sisters Season 2, please accept my condolences. (And if you haven’t, here’s a second warning to stop reading this until you’ve watched—preferably with a box of tissues handy.) The gentlest and most fragile, but also the most lethal, of the five Garvey girls is dead. Two years after she strangled her psychopathic husband JP “The Prick” Williams, and just days into her second marriage, to a man who doesn’t rape her sisters or call her “mammy,” poor Grace has been crushed under the weight of the smoking, overturned car she used to flee a desperate situation. It’s a devastating end to the series’ two-part season premiere. In killing off such a sympathetic character, showrunner and star Sharon Horgan chose violence—and it was the smartest decision she could’ve made.

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Conceived as a limited series, then renewed by Apple TV+ after an enthusiastically received debut, Bad Sisters felt pretty decisively wrapped up by the end of what turned out to be its first season. The big mystery was solved: Grace (Anne-Marie Duff) was revealed as JP’s (Claes Bang) killer, despite her sisters’ many failed schemes to do him in. And when she withdrew her life insurance claim, the amateur sleuth at the financially strapped company that issued it—Matt (Daryl McCormack), who was also dating the youngest Garvey, Becka (Eve Hewson)—burned his file on JP’s suspicious death. The sisters were finally free to frolic together in frigid water, and viewers were left with the sense that everyone, except The Prick, lived happily ever after.

Unless she was content to coast on the characters’ charm, chemistry, and enviable knitwear, Horgan would have to introduce novel sources of suspense in Season 2. A lesser series might’ve relied on loose ends from Season 1, as Big Little Lies did in its disappointing second season, or just set up the Garveys to take down another JP-esque villain. In advance of Grace’s death, Bad Sisters does feint in both directions. From the guilt Grace’s admirer turned accomplice Roger (Michael Smiley) feels about helping cover up the murder (and his unconcealed jealousy of her new man) to the discovery of a waterlogged suitcase containing the body of JP’s father George (Paul Bentall), the show effectively mines a few residual storylines.

It also gives the Garveys a new nemesis in Roger’s sister Angelica, played by the great Fiona Shaw in a performance perfectly calibrated to make your skin crawl. (To further the BLL comparison: Adding Shaw to your female-driven cast for a pivotal second season is essentially the Irish equivalent of hiring Meryl Streep.) Nicknamed “The Wagon” (Irish slang for bitch), she’s a lonely, uptight, conniving church lady who palpably envies the sisters’ bond and is desperate to insinuate herself into Grace’s life. The first thing we see her do is embarrass Roger by bringing up his crush on Grace in front of all five Garveys. Then, after crashing Grace’s wedding, she shoves Eva (Horgan) to the ground to catch the bouquet—deranged behavior. But while both villains use religion as an excuse to act like monsters, JP was pure evil, whereas Angelica reads more as dangerously pathetic. And so far, we know barely any of her backstory.

If I’d had to place a bet on who would die at the top of this season, I would’ve gone all-in on Angelica. Which is, in part, why Grace’s accident makes such an inspired twist. The original Bad Sisters thrived on a combination of murder mystery and black comedy, with the warmth, care, and humor that the Garvey girls show each other counterbalancing horrific revelations about JP. The idea that Horgan would break up her beloved sister act, much less consign the most sympathetic sibling to death just two episodes and a richly deserved wedding into Season 2, was all but unthinkable. It reminds me of The White Lotus creator Mike White’s decision to bump off Jennifer Coolidge’s fan-favorite character at the end of that show’s second season—another twist that was well supported by the plot but that no one saw coming because Coolidge seemed so integral to the series. A provocative series that wants to maintain its edge, rather than devolve into toothless sweater porn as the seasons progress, has to swerve away from fan service sometimes.

Besides, Grace’s death creates some really compelling suspense. We don’t know for sure where she’s going when she crashes or why she has a stack of cash with her, although there are certainly clues. While he seems like a stand-up guy, we know roughly as little about her new husband, Ian (Owen McDonnell), as we do about Angelica. And we never see how Grace’s fight with him in the series premiere actually ends, after she confesses that she killed JP; we just know he’s disappeared by the next morning and she is prostrate with despair. The phone Becka finds hidden in Grace’s bathroom and the bloody garment Ursula (Eva Birthistle) pulls out of her laundry raise the possibility that he didn’t simply storm off. Grace’s daughter Blanaid (Saise Quinn) doesn’t know the whole story, either. Of the two people who do know what happened, one is missing and the other is dead.

At the same time, keeping Angelica around and her aims mysterious makes sense given the structure of the season. Whereas Season 1 toggled between the aftermath of JP’s murder and the events leading up to it—anchored by an incandescently diabolical turn from Bang—Season 2 is rooted in the present. For the show to work, though, the Garveys need a fully repugnant nemesis to band together against. Getting rid of Angelica early on would leave them with just one pair of mostly sympathetic antagonists: the detectives, Loftus (Barry Ward) and his awkward yet tenacious young partner, Houlihan (Thaddea Graham). Relying on the cat-and-mouse game between them and the Garveys would’ve made for pretty low emotional stakes.

So, yes, pour out a capacious glass of wine for Grace, prematurely eulogized by her surliest sister, Bibi (Sarah Greene), as “the best person any of us will ever know.” But when it comes to storytelling, comfort yourself with the knowledge that she died so Bad Sisters could live.

source https://time.com/7173767/bad-sisters-season-2-episode-2-recap/

Biden and Trump Prepare for the Most Cringe Meeting in Politics

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As far as scripted set pieces of American politics go, the first photo-op in the hand-off of power between one White House and the next is up there.

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There are moments of cringe, as was the case in 1980 when Ronald Reagan peppered Jimmy Carter with seemingly ancillary questions to the job they were trading, even as the incumbent rightly suspected someone in Reagan’s camp had worked to extend the Iranian hostage crisis so it would end as soon as Reagan took power. During the 1992 iteration that saw George H.W. Bush welcome Bill Clinton to his future office and home after a particularly rowdy race, the incumbent’s staff grew persnickety when incoming spokesman Dee Dee Myers spoke to reporters in the walkway between the office complex and the residence: “We don’t do press conferences in the Colonnade,” a Bush aide sniped. And then eight years later, an attempt at an amiable transition was infamously marred when Clinton’s team took the Ws off government keyboards being passed to the incoming George W. Bush administration—at a cost of almost $5,000 in damages.

But none of those moments was as norm-breakingly flagrant as four years ago when Donald Trump simply refused to invite his successor, Joe Biden, to the White House. The typical niceties mask the inevitable first steps toward accepting that the incumbent party’s window in power is racing to a close and it is time to concede the race—something that Trump never did. Biden, who had spent eight years as Vice President and knew his way around the West Wing well enough, didn’t exactly need a tour from Trump, but a briefing on the ongoing Covid-19 situation and the covert efforts to keep Russia to heel, China at bay, and the Korean Peninsula relatively stable would have been welcome. It was similar silence on Inauguration Day 2021, when the Trumps fled Washington and became the first absentee outgoing First Family since Andrew Johnson skipped Ulysses S. Grant’s 1869 swearing-in ceremony. 

So against this backdrop, Trump will head back to the White House Wednesday as a returning victor, once again forcing polar opposites to sit and debrief in the name of national stability.

Biden phoned Trump right after Election Day and invited him for a meeting that was never offered to Biden. The outgoing President, who is the only politician to defeat Trump in a campaign, has hardly hidden his contempt of his predecessor and soon-to-be successor, but friends say he’s also an institutionalist who is determined not to have Sore Loser on his epitaph.

What’s unknown to this point: Will Kamala Harris join for any of that awkward session? She, too, phoned Trump and congratulated him on his win last Wednesday. Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, Harris’ top aide, vowed Harris “would work with President Biden to ensure a peaceful transfer of power, unlike what we saw in 2020.” 

The last time a sitting Vice President lost out on a promotion was the 2000 election, and then-VP Al Gore joined the Clinton-Bush 43 conversation. By all contemporary accounts, it was unpleasant for both parties’ reps wandering the West Wing.

Harris aides did not respond to questions about Harris’ plans for Wednesday. 

To be sure, transitions are usually fairly routine affairs, especially once the balloting ends. Generally speaking, folks at this level of the game can wall-off the conflicts. During their last weekend at the presidential retreat of Camp David, the elder Bushes invited Clinton’s transition chiefs Warren Christopher and Vernon Jordan to join them in the Maryland mountains. The younger Bush insisted that his team cooperate with the incoming Obama staffers. And, through sneers and tears, Obama’s aides followed the boss’ orders, too. After all, switching out party labels is, actually, the norm.

Only twice in the last century has a party held the White House into another presidency without a mid-term death of an incumbent, and those winners are Herbert Hoover, who followed Calvin Coolidge, and George H.W. Bush, who followed Ronald Reagan. The rest were the likes of Harry Truman (elected in his own right after FDR’s death) and Lyndon Baines Johnson (elected, too, following JFK’s assassination). Basically, for the last hundred years, the White House tends to switch parties when it switches Presidents—requiring the most awkward of meetings between the newcomer and the man he likely spent the last months viciously savaging as a failed incumbent.

But, for the most part, the outgoing and the incoming tend to play nice for the cameras and often find themselves discussing serious matters outside the glare of political gamesmanship. Trump himself has said his 90-minute session with Obama in 2016 was incredibly enlightening and helped him understand the fuller map beyond campaign rhetoric—especially putting into plain language that North Korea was the biggest under-appreciated threat to the incoming administration. (Obama also told Trump not to hire Mike Flynn, whom Obama dismissed from a top intelligence gig; Trump did not heed that but did can Flynn as National Security Adviser after just 22 days.)

Most Presidents with an eye toward history understand the needs of this final act, both for responsible governing and for their personal legacies. Most modern presidencies don’t hit this final stride exactly riding a wave. Truman set the low bar at 32% job approval when he left office. (Nixon would be lower, at 24%, but his resignation in the wake of Watergate has to be treated with a bold-faced asterisk.) Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H.W. Bush all were given the boot by the electorate given a choice. Reagan was far from atop his game by the end, Clinton had emerged a survivor—albeit a bruised one benched by Gore—yet still left office with a 66% job approval rating. George W. Bush spent the 2008 GOP convention touring Africa, far away from delegates and parked at a Trumanesque 34% job approval. Trump raged his way out of office, refusing to accept he had, in fact, lost to Biden. And Biden is currently parked at 41% in Gallup’s decades-long tracking of that office.

All of which is to say this: by this point in their presidencies, the men who run the White House are generally eager to start the legacy-building projects in earnest. Most often than not, they hate their successors. But a photograph—even a group one, as happened with Obama’s transition, for the first such confab in 27 years—goes a long way toward showing unity, normalcy, and even legitimacy.

As much as Biden is going to grit his teeth through Wednesday’s session, he knows the alternative is not an option. While Trump availed himself of that easier route in 2020’s defeat, that’s not how Biden sees the job. And at a time when he’s drawing a fair share of blame for Trump’s return, Biden understands that the best thing for his legacy, and the country, is handling this uncomfortable moment with the composure and grace that the man he is preparing to greet never offered to him. 

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source https://time.com/7175559/donald-trump-oval-office-biden-meeting/

The 2024 Election Was the Culmination of America’s Love Affair With Rolling the Dice

Late in the 2024 election, Elon Musk made a tantalizing and outlandish offer: a sweepstakes offering $1 million daily to voters who pledged to sign on to his petition proclaiming support for the First and Second Amendments. The stunt raised questions about money in politics, but also about the use of what appeared to be a lottery to sway voters’ choices. Later the political action committee admitted that it would select the “winners” ahead of time, not pluck them out by chance. So, not a lottery after all.

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But it was a fitting ploy for our times, where elections are big business and the rules of the game are subject to plenty of manipulations: duplicitous texts, hours-long lines to vote in some neighborhoods, and of course, the arcane Electoral College that shapes how campaigns are run and whose votes are considered valuable. Musk’s purported lottery made sense in America’s betting-obsessed culture, where it isn’t enough to see stock markets rise and fall around election time; instead dedicated prediction markets now allow speculators to bet on electoral outcomes.

The widespread embrace of gambling, betting, and lotteries is a regressive method of shoring up revenues for public goods in an age of austerity and tax cuts. Lotteries, then, reflect and increase inequality, while holding out the promise of a big windfall for individual winners. Indeed, the same political and economic conditions that gave rise to the popularity of lotteries, games of chance, and speculation have also ushered in a new political era, shaped by Donald Trump—who, after all, built a career in casinos. Uncertainty and insecurity have made us into a nation of gamblers, betting that fortune’s wheel, rather than shared investment in our democracy, brings prosperity

Lotteries have a long history in the U.S., stretching back to the colonial era. Then, legislatures used lotteries to raise funds for colonial governments, relief for the poor, and universities, among other public goods. During the 1820s and 1830s, though, many states took steps to ban state and private lotteries after scandals emerged about rigged and unfair games. Reformers criticized lotteries as regressive and harmful to working people, and state constitutions soon prohibited them.

Read More: The Problem With Mega Jackpots Like the $2 Billion Powerball Drawing

After the Civil War, lotteries became popular again. Southern states saw them as an easy way to raise revenues without imposing new taxes. Soon, people were purchasing tickets for the Louisiana State Lottery by mail, not just within the state but across the nation. Concerned about the corruption of public morality, and as President Benjamin Harrison put it, “the robbery of the poor,” Congress used its power to regulate interstate commerce to crack down on state lotteries by the end of the 19th century.

But legal gambling emerged again in the 20th century. Nevada legalized casino gambling during the Great Depression. State lotteries followed, beginning with New Hampshire, in 1964. The Granite State was one of few states without income or sales taxes, and the lottery’s proceeds were to go to the public school system. Entering cost $3 and people dreamt about taking home the winnings, which were pegged to a horse race. People might walk away with a prize ranging from anywhere between few hundred dollars and $150,000.

People played enthusiastically, and other states soon followed in the 1970s and 1980s as cities and states became more fiscally strained, thanks to inflation, low corporate taxes, and veneration of the free market. Politicians hesitated to raise direct taxes on citizens, lest they lose reelection, and so lotteries became a popular method of raising funds. 

Some states turned to casino gambling as another source of revenue. In 1976, New Jersey voters opted to legalize gambling in Atlantic City, a decision that drew casino operators to the storied boardwalk in droves over the next decade. The city was once a premiere destination for visitors hoping to catch sun and sea down the shore, but the city had fallen on hard times. Casino gambling was understood as a good bet for reviving tourism and raising revenues.

In 1984, Trump made his first foray into Atlantic City’s casino business, and he would expand his empire to three casinos over the following decade. He did well, but his casinos didn’t—the projects took on excessive debts, or failed to register a profit, and each underwent bankruptcies (Trump Taj Mahal in 1991, Trump Plaza and Trump Castle, 1992) before eventually shuttering or changing hands. Neither did the city’s residents; people’s homes had been cleared to make way for casinos that choked the city off from the beachfront. And yet, tourists flocked to the growing opportunities to hit it big. In 1986 Atlantic City welcomed 30 million visitors, making it the number one tourist destination in the country.

In the 1980s, the culture—like the administration of President Ronald Reagan—venerated wealth acquisition, and the expansion of the financial industry was accompanied by Hollywood films like Wall Street and Working Girl. Even when reckless speculation and deregulation led to crashes like the Savings and Loan Crisis and “Black Monday,” on Oct. 19, 1987, Americans doubled down on risk-taking and markets. Instead of creating a system that aimed to serve everybody’s needs, the logics of markets and competition triumphed and became applied to every part of life.

Such logic extended even to the immigration system. Since 1965, the system had largely limited visas to immigrants with a close family member or employer to sponsor them. Yet many more people want to immigrate to the U.S., drawn by better opportunities. In 1990, policymakers decided to create a way for them to get visas. Perhaps reflecting the glorification of risk-taking dominating the culture, they made it into a game of chance. The new Diversity Visa lottery gave people from around the world a chance to win an immigrant visa.

Read More: An Explosion in Sports Betting Is Driving Gambling Addiction Among College Students

Allocating valued but scarce goods via lottery made sense to policymakers for practical reasons; it was cheaper to administer this way than to sift through and assess detailed applications, weighing the pros and cons of each aspiring entrant. But it was a fortuitous choice: Making luck the animating premise of the program also appealed to aspiring immigrants who felt that chance offered better odds than restriction-minded bureaucrats.

This lottery, like others, acknowledges the randomness that shapes our lives, particularly in the 21st century as countries like the U.S. have reduced social safety nets and embraced deregulation, allowing inequality to shape our society and making rights dependent on things largely outside our control: where we are born, our gender, the state in which we reside. The resulting precarity only deepens our sense of insecurity and distrust.

Luck shapes our lives more than we are comfortable admitting, and the explosion of lotteries and gambling in our society in recent years both recognizes and reinforces this fact. When hard work and dedication don’t reliably bring us stability, it makes a kind of sense to turn to lottery tickets and betting in the hope of a big win—even when the odds are stacked against us.

Yet, while lotteries may be popular, and they may generate needed revenues, they are a poor substitute for robust investment in the public goods that we all depend upon, like schools, health care, infrastructure, and housing. Such insecurity and uncertainty may undermine our trust in each other, in the government, and in democracy itself to deliver what we need to survive and to thrive. After all, almost everyone who enters a lottery loses; the winner’s luck depends on everybody else’s lack of it.

Access to a good life seems more than ever to depend on luck. Now, by sending Trump back to the White House, the electorate appears to have spun the wheel on democracy itself, leaving us to hope that whatever luck we have had in building our fragile democracy thus far in our history doesn’t run out.

Carly Goodman is assistant professor of history at Rutgers University-Camden, senior editor at Made by History at TIME, and author of Dreamland: America’s Immigration Lottery in an Age of Restriction (UNC Press, 2023).

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.

source https://time.com/7175203/trump-musk-2024-lotteries/