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Members, bestow yourselves with back pats of honor, for everything is going exactly as planned!

The Knifedads talk about the meaning of Knifedaddery, and how to survive a Florida Drugfight

puritanical goons do their best to cover up the Not in NSFW images.

Are you aware of a SimCity 2000 release that came on A LOT OF FLOPPIES? As in, ten or more 3.5" disks? Because I spent the better part of an afternoon watching my friend install it in the mid 90s. Yet there's no record that this version of the game existed.

Advice you don't want from a maniac you don't trust.

Every now and then a forum member posts something so creative and impressive that I stop shouting in anger at my monitor. Today I'd like to highlight a particularly amazing post.

Let's say you have a PlayStation, either because it was already in your closet or because you decided to spend ten thousand dollars for one after the virus arrived. How can you get the most out of the console in 2020?

This week, I want to talk about corporations using global tragedy to “get their brand name out there” and otherwise profiteer off of human misery.

Welcome, you have arrived at: Yourself

Today in my craft post, I'm going to talk about a straightforward skill… while referencing a book that's wonderfully un-straightforward.

H Is for Hawk is a memoir by Helen Macdonald that weaves together several threads, the three biggest of which are: her experience of training a northern goshawk; her analysis of T. H. White's memoir about training a northern goshawk; and her grief following the death of her father. In terms of balance and weaving, it's beautifully done. In terms of psychological insight, it feels searingly true. And in terms of the expression of emotion, it's stunning.

It's also an uncomfortable book at times, in ways that recommend it. And it's a fascinating memoir for a fiction writer to read while thinking about how to write character. H Is for Hawk left me with a lot of questions, for the book and for myself.

If you just want the straightforward writing lesson, which is on the topic of writing emotion, jump ahead to the *** below. If you're interested in a fiction writer's thoughts about memoir, read on.

I sat down to read H is for Hawk because a friend had described its structure and I was intrigued. I'm not a memoir writer; it's far too personal a style of writing for me. But I like to read books that differ greatly from my own writing, and I especially like to learn to write from them. After all, the more a book diverges from your own writing, the more it can stretch you into a broader perspective of what's possible. I was curious about what a memoir that weaves separate but related threads could teach me about writing a work of fiction that weaves separate but related threads; but I was also curious about what it could teach me that I didn't know about yet.

Here are some of the unexpected questions that arose for me while reading this book:

In terms of writing character (if one can use that word with a memoir, and I believe one can; more on that later), what are the differences between memoir and fiction?

For example, what advantages does the memoir writer have? Does a reader come to a memoir with a greater willingness to believe in a character than they bring to the reading of fiction? A fiction writer often has to go through a lot of contortions to keep a character believable while also fulfilling the necessities of the plot. Push the character's behavior too far outside the characterization you've so carefully established, and the behavior becomes unbelievable. The reader is left thinking, "I don't believe they would actually do that."

In contrast, in a memoir, a character is an actual person. They did what they did. The memoir writer reports what they did and we believe it, because it's a memoir. Any "unbelievable" behavior consequently brings power with it: amusement, surprise, shock value. (This is not to minimize the work it requires to make any character in any kind of book engaging. I don't mean to suggest that a memoir writer has an easy job creating character, only that they may have a believability advantage.)

Okay then, what advantages does the fiction writer have when writing character? Well, the fiction writer can make shit up; that's a pretty huge advantage. The fiction writer also generally doesn't have to worry about getting sued for defamation of character :o).

Another huge advantage: Though it's true that as a fiction writer I sometimes encounter readers who mistakenly assume I'm like my characters, for the most part, fiction readers remember that fiction is made up. This means that the fiction writer is unlikely to be accused of having done the things their characters did, or judged for that behavior. In contrast, a memoir writer writing about her own actions is opening herself to all kinds of very personal judgment. All writing requires courage and involves exposure… But this takes things to a whole other level! Fiction writers have some built-in emotional protections that I tend to take for granted, until I read a memoir and remember.

This leads me to another question that arose while reading this book: What is the place of the memoir reader when it comes to judging the people inside the memoir? For example, Helen Macdonald writes a compassionate but blistering exposé of T. H. White in this book. It's an exposé that T. H. White wrote first; anyone can learn from White's own memoir that he was heartbreakingly, sometimes sadistically abusive to the goshawk he trained. But Macdonald presents it anew, and she presents it with an analysis of White's psychology that shows us more about White than he ever meant us to know. She shows us the abuse, familial and societal, that brought White to this place. She shows us his heartbreak, failures, and shame. White feels like an integrated, complete person in this book.

But also, she shows us what she wants to show us — she shows us the parts of White that fit into her own book, about her own experiences. She's the writer, and this is her memoir. To be clear, I don't mean this as a condemnation — I'm not accusing her of leaving things out or misrepresenting White! This is a part of all book-writing. You include what matters to the rest of your book. Everything else ends up on the cutting room floor. As far as I know, Macdonald did a respectful and responsible job of incorporating T. H. White into her book, and I expect she worked very hard to do so. I believe in the T. H. White she showed us. But I think it's important to remember this part of the process when reading any memoir. Even when a writer is writing about themselves, their book has plot and themes, it has content requirements. There'll always be something specific the writer is trying to convey, about themselves or anyone else, and there'll always be stuff they leave out. No book can contain a whole person.

Personally, when I read memoir (and biography and autobiography), I consciously consider the people inside it to function as characters. It's hard to read H Is for Hawk and not come away with some pretty strong opinions about T. H. White. But I keep a permanent asterisk next to my opinions, because White was a real, living person, but I only know him as a character in this book. No matter how many books I read about him (or by him), I'll always be conscious of not knowing the whole person.

As a fiction writer, I find all of this fascinating. I think it's because I see connections between how hard it is to present a compelling character study of a real person and how hard it is to create a believable character in fiction. What are the differences between a memoir writer who's figuring out which part of the truth matters, and a fiction writer who's creating a fiction that's supposed to invoke truth? Also, I'm fascinated by how much all of this lines up with how hard it is to understand anyone in real life. How well can we ever know anyone? How much can we ever separate our own baggage from our judgments of other people? There's a third person getting in the way of my perfect understanding of T. H. White: me.

Next question: How does a writer (of memoir or fiction) make a character ring true to the reader? How does the writer make the character compelling and real?

A writer as skilled as Macdonald knows how to bring her characters, human or hawk, alive for the reader. One way she does this is by keeping her characterizations always in motion. White is many, many things — kind and cruel, sensitive and sadistic, abused and despotic. Macdonald's hawk, Mabel, is also constantly growing and changing. Mabel is a point of personal connection for Macdonald, but she's also always just out of reach. And of course, Macdonald herself is a character in the book. Macdonald lays bare her own successes, failures, oddities, cruelties, kindnesses, insights, ambivalences, and delights, and lets us decide. Personally, as I read, I felt that I was meeting a human of sensitivity and compassion; an anxious person whose need for both solitude and connection was starkly familiar to me; someone consciously composed of contradictions; a person of deep feeling who cares about what matters; a grieving daughter; a person I can relate to. Or should I say, a character I can relate to? Having read this book, I don't presume I know Helen Macdonald.

Here's something I do know about Helen Macdonald though: She's a damn good writer. In particular, as I read, I kept noticing one specific thing she does so well that it needs to be called out and shown to other writers.





All page references are to the 2014 paperback published by Grove Press.

Okay, writers. When it comes to writing a character's emotion, there's a certain skill at which Helen Macdonald excels. Namely, she conveys emotion via action.

Put differently: rather than describing an emotion in words, Macdonald shows us a behavior, one so meaningful that we readers feel the associated emotion immediately.

Here's an example. For context, Helen Macdonald's father died suddenly one March, throwing her into a deep and unexpected grief. Listen to this description of one of the things that happened next:

"In June I fell in love, predictably and devastatingly, with a man who ran a mile when he worked out how broken I was. His disappearance rendered me practically insensible. Though I can't even bring his face to mind now, and though I know not only why he ran, but know that in principle he could have been anyone, I still have a red dress that I will never wear again. That's how it goes." (17)

While there is some effective emotional description here — like when she's rendered practically insensible — the real punch in this passage is the red dress. Macdonald tells us that there's a red dress she'll never wear again, and immediately I get it. I get that the identity of the man is irrelevant; what's relevant is the passion she had for another person and how it connected to her grief, and I feel that passion and grief because there's a red dress she'll never wear again. I can see the dress, hidden away in the back of her closet. I don't have a dress like that, but I could. I get it.

Here's another moment. This one takes place at a much later point, when Macdonald has been grieving for a long time and is finally noticing that she's capable of happiness again:

"But watching television from the sofa later that evening I noticed tears running from my eyes and dropping into my mug of tea. Odd, I think. I put it down to tiredness. Perhaps I am getting a cold. Perhaps I am allergic to something. I wipe the tears away and go to make more tea in the kitchen" (125).

It's hard to write about tears in a way that doesn't feel like a cliché shorthand for sadness, grief, catharsis, whatever you're trying to get across in that moment. Macdonald succeeds here. This dispassionate report of tears conveys what Macdonald needs to convey: that grief is layered; that a person can have many feelings at once; that sometimes your body knows what's going on before the rest of you does; that when you're grieving, sometimes happiness brings with it a tidal wave of sadness. But imagine if Macdonald had listed all those things I just listed, instead of telling us about her tears dropping into her tea. Her way is so much better, and it conveys the same information!

Let me be clear, it's not bad to describe emotion. In fact, it's necessary in places. You need to give your reader an emotional baseline so that they'll know how to contextualize how plot points feel for the character. But if you can find a balance between emotional description and the thing Macdonald is doing here — using action to convey emotion — it will gives the emotion in your writing a freshness, an impact, a punch that you can't get from description alone. It will also give the reader more opportunities to engage their own feelings — to feel things all by themselves, rather than merely understanding what's being felt by the character.

It's hard to write emotion. It's especially hard to figure out non-cliché ways to explain how a character feels. Sometimes it's fine to use a known shorthand or a cliché. Sometimes it's fine to use emotional description. You want a mix of things. But Macdonald's book reminds me that whenever I can, I want to look for ways to use plot to convey feeling. Show what my character does in response to a stimulus. Let the reader glean the emotions from behavior. Your character is happy? Show us what they do with their body. How do they stand, how do they walk? Does it make them generous? Does it make them self-centered and oblivious? Remember that an "action" doesn't have to be something physically, boisterously active. If you're writing a non-demonstrative character, it's not going to ring true if they start flinging their arms around or singing while they walk down the street. But maybe instead of "feeling ecstatic," they sit still for a moment, reveling in what just happened. Maybe instead of "feeling jubilant," they listen to a song playing inside their own head. Internally or externally, show us what they do.

Here's Macdonald describing her childhood obsession with birds:

"When I was six I tried to sleep every night with my arms folded behind my back like wings. This didn't last long, because it is very hard to sleep with your arms folded behind your back like wings." (27)

I can feel the devotion to birds. She doesn't just love birds; she wants to be a bird.

Macdonald goes on to report that as a child, she learned everything she possibly could about falconry, then shared every word of it, no matter how boring, with anyone who would listen. Macdonald's mother was a writer for the local paper. Here's a description of her mother during the delivery of one of Macdonald's lectures:

"Lining up another yellow piece of copy paper, fiddling with the carbons so they didn't slip, she'd nod and agree, drag on her cigarette, and tell me how interesting it all was in tones that avoided dismissiveness with extraordinary facility." (29)

What an endearing depiction of a mother's love for her tedious child :o).

And here's a scene that takes place at a country fair, where Macdonald has agreed to display her goshawk, Mabel, to the public. Macdonald is sitting on a chair under a marquee roof. Mabel is positioned on a perch ten feet behind her. There are so many people at the fair, too many people for the likes of both Macdonald and Mabel:

"After twenty minutes Mabel raises one foot. It looks ridiculous. She is not relaxed enough to fluff out her feathers; she still resembles a wet and particoloured seal. But she makes this small concession to calmness, and she stands there like a man driving with one hand resting on the gear stick." (206)

Oh, Mabel. I get the sense that when it comes to the writer's need to convey emotion, Mabel is a challenging character. Macdonald does such a wonderful job creating a sense of the gulf between a human's reality and a hawk's reality, the differences in perception and priority. But she also gives us moments of connection with Mabel. Since Mabel is a bird, these moments of connection are almost always described through Mabel's behavior.

I wonder if Macdonald's intense connection with the non-human world, and with hawks in particular, is partly what makes her so good at noticing behaviors and gleaning their emotional significance? And then sharing it with us, the lucky readers.

That's it. That's my lesson: When you're trying to convey feelings, find places where an action or behavior will do the job.

And read H Is for Hawk if you want an admirable example of writing emotion! Also, Helen Macdonald has a new book, just released: Vesper Flights. I'm in.

Reading like a writer.

Hi everybody.

The question I get most is: "Where do you get your ideas?"

Generally, when I'm asked this question, it's at a book event where it's difficult to answer, because… Well, the answer is long, and complicated, and hard to pin down, and most of the time, I don't really remember how it happened. When an idea starts to arrive, I get to work. I'm not paying attention to how it's happening, or how it would look to an outsider. 

But — a few weeks ago, a new book idea started knocking on the door of my mind. And this time, I decided to pay attention!

What follows is probably the most detailed explanation I'll ever give of where my ideas come from. More specifically, where this particular idea came from, because it's not always the same. But my experience of the past few weeks has been fairly typical for me, and I'll add that there are a few activities I need to engage in every single time, if I want an idea to take root. Namely: PATIENCE. LISTENING. And, LABOR. Book ideas require a certain honed receptiveness, and they require a LOT OF WORK. 

I'm yelling because I'm trying to push back against the idea that ideas simply come to writers. Yes, some parts of ideas come to writers. But when I first get a book idea, what "comes to me" probably comprises about 0.1% of what could properly be called a book idea. Often, it's little more than an inchoate feeling. With patience, listening, and labor, I transform the idea into something I can grasp, and work with.

I'll add that yes, we do hear sometimes of writers whose ideas "simply came to them," fully formed. I'm going to take a guess that (1) this doesn't happen very often, if ever, with books that have complicated structures or plots, and (2) writers who are blessed by ideas in this way probably have a long-honed practice of receptiveness.

Anyway. Warning upfront that this may be a little unstructured, because the process is a little unstructured. It's challenging to describe, and I'm still in the middle of it. But here's what my last few weeks have been like.

A few weeks ago, while watching a TV show that had a certain mood/aura that'd really sucked me in, I found myself drawn to the idea of a story involving three characters. I'm not going to tell you what TV show I was watching, and I'm not going to tell you anything about my three characters, because story ideas are intensely, intensely private. The first time I say anything publicly about it will probably be years from now, if and when this book is ever scheduled for release. But let me try to explain a bit about that moment when the first glimmering of the idea appeared. 

Like I said, I'd been watching a TV show when it happened. But my three characters weren't characters in that TV show. Nor did anyone in that TV show relate to each other the way my three characters seemed to want to relate. Nor did my three characters seem to live in a world like the world of the TV show. The TV show helped to launch the idea at me because of the show's mood and its feeling, and how much I cared about the people in it. But my idea? As is often the case, my idea came from something I saw missing in the TV show. Not missing because there was a flaw in the TV writers' story; I loved their story! But missing (for me and possibly only me) because their story was not the story I would have told.

I think that a lot of my idea seeds come from my adoration of other people's stories, but also from my noticing what's missing in those stories, for me. What story I would've like to have seen told; what characters the story lacked.

Anyway. So this idea of these three characters came to me. But when I say "idea of these three characters," already that sounds more substantial than it was. I knew they were three humans (or humanoids; I didn't know what genre the story was, so they could've been aliens on another planet, for all I knew. In fact, I actively considered whether they might have different biology than ours). I knew they cared about each other, but I didn't know in what way. I knew they were facing a challenge that would strain all of their relationships. I thought they might be grown-ups, but I wasn't sure. I thought I knew at least two of their genders, but I wasn't sure. I knew they lived in a world with magic, but I didn't know what "magic" meant in the context of their world. I didn't know where they lived, or when they lived (past? future? futuristic past? postindustrial future? any of about a hundred other possibilities). I knew a whole lot of things that the characters weren't, and that the world wasn't — which is another way of saying that my sense of what this story was was actually more defined by all the things I knew it wasn't. (Apologies if this is vague. I'm not being intentionally vague! I'll try for some concrete examples: I knew I didn't want to write a story where partway through, someone suddenly discovers they have an inborn power they didn't know they had. I knew I didn't want to write a love triangle. There's a certain kind of high-handed fantasy tone that I knew wasn't right for this story. But I didn't know what I did want yet at this point.)

Really, all I knew was that I seemed to be having an idea.

So, like a writer, I did what I needed to do: 

• I made space in my mind for receptiveness. (I scheduled uninterruptable alone time. I stopped listening to podcasts while I was out walking, and instead, just walked, so my mind could wander. I put aside non-urgent tasks for a while so that I didn't have the feeling of a to-do list hanging over my head. I gave myself permission to wool-gather, to become vague and absent-minded. I set three timers any time I cooked anything so I could feel free to forget I was cooking, but also not burn the house down. I remembered to thank my husband frequently for being willing to live with a space cadet.)
• I thought about what fertilizer might help the idea to grow, especially fertilizer in the form of books, TV, and movies. I put all other books, TV, and movies aside. (I kept watching that same TV show, and I also began reading almost exclusively one writer who had a narrative tone — and also subject matter — that helped me sustain a mood that felt concurrent with the mood of my own idea. Why does this kind of intake help? It keeps my mind in a story space, while also giving me something to bounce my own ideas off of. It's a kind of reading, or watching, that involves a state of constant interactivity and reactivity. Everything I'm consuming becomes about something else that I'm looking for. It's difficult to explain, maybe because it gets back to that inexplicable moment when new ideas form.)
• I made sure that every single time I had any new thoughts relating to my idea, I wrote them down. (This meant making reminders on my phone; sending strings of emails to myself; choosing a notebook where I began to jot things down; sending texts to myself on my husband's phone, if his phone was closer to hand than mine.)
• I looked at my schedule to give myself a sense of if and when I might have a few days soon to put my current writing project aside and give some true, devoted time to this new idea. (I was, and still am, in the middle of revisions of the next Graceling Realm book when this happened, and that was, and still is, my absolute first priority. As exciting and intense as a new idea can be, it can't unseat me from my current object of devotion.)

By chance, last week, I did in fact have some time away from my revision while it was briefly with my editor. I was able to devote an entire week to the new book idea. So, next, I'll try to describe what a week of intense idea-gathering looks like for me! (Though I should say that this will differ from book to book. It's been pretty clear to me from the beginning that this new idea is going to be slow to grow — planning this book will take way more than a week. In contrast, last fall, I found myself with a new and sudden book idea that coincided with the end of another project, so I had some free time and was able to sit down and hammer out the entire book plan, which took only a few days. I think this is because that book was shorter and less emotionally complicated than this new book will be, and was set in a less complex world. Also, at the time, I was absolutely thrumming with the adrenaline and momentum of having just finished a writing project, so book-planning became a way to channel that energy. Often these processes are subject to whatever else is going on in my life.)

So. My week of intense idea-gathering looked a lot like what I've already described — reading, watching TV, but now also with long hours of sitting staring at a blank page and/or lying on my back staring at the ceiling — but with a more specific goal. Namely, I was trying to figure out what my main questions were. For me, every book starts (and continues, as I write) with an extremely long list of questions that I'm trying to find the answers to, but it takes work to figure out what the questions are. The questions can be very different from book to book. And it's essential, at the beginning, to identify what the main questions are.

When I'm first idea-gathering, I use very short notebooks in which I scribble down all my random thoughts as they come (I like using these twenty-page notebooks from Laughing Elephant, because they're short enough not to feel intimidatingly important). Then I have one longer, thicker notebook which is for my more coherent thoughts — my more serious book planning. During my week of active idea-gathering, I came up with the following list of major questions, worthy of being written down in my thick, "serious" planning notebook:

MAJOR QUESTIONS.

• What is magic?
• How does bad human behavior manifest in this world? (for real *)
• Where/what culture does each of them come from? What family?
• How is society governed?
• Who is each of them — as a person and as a power manifestation?
• How is the narrative positioned?
• What is the plot?
• How do humans relate to the rest of the natural world?
• What is gender? (for real *)

* and by societal definition

So. I'm not sure how closely you looked at those questions — but they are pretty gigantic questions! It took me a week to identify all of them. It's going to take me much, much longer to answer them. Which goes back to my point that ideas don't just "come to me." The merest seed of an idea might come to me, and after that, I make the space, and do the work.

As I began to hammer out my questions, I continued to read, watch things, and wool-gather, but with more intense focus. Because now I was also trying to answer these questions as they came. It was interesting to observe the order in which I began to find the answers. Not surprisingly, probably since my novels tend to be character-based, it was the character-based questions that drew me in first. “What is gender" in particular, because I have a sense that in this story, my characters' relationships to gender are absolutely integral to who they are, and I can’t get very far with a book plan if I don’t know who my characters are. I also started to gather some clues about their personalities and their strengths. Enough that after a couple of days, I got to the point where I suddenly knew I needed their names. Names ground everything, and they can also change some things; at a certain point, I can't make any further progress without names. I spent one entire day last week mostly just trying to figure out three people's names. Once I had the names, I was able to return to my questions.

Then, not too long after that, a moment arose where I knew, again quite suddenly, that what I needed next was at least the broad strokes of a plot. If I’m a little scornful about the concept of inspiration — because it’s a concept that dismisses how hard I work! — I do believe in intuition, and also in experience. Intuition and experience told me that I'd reached the point in my planning where the needs of my plot would hold the answer to a lot of my other questions. Like, how this place is governed; what constitutes bad behavior; and even some character things, like what culture each of my characters is from. Sometimes, once you know what needs to happen in a story, it becomes easier to picture the structure of your world. Because a plot comes with needs; once a plot exists, it limits some of your other options. For example, let's say your plot involves a particular kind of government-based corruption. Well, thinking about that corruption will probably start to show you some of your options for the structure of the government. Once you know the structure of the government, you might begin to understand who holds governmental power — which can lead to answers about how families are structured. Which can lead to answers about culture, which can lead to answers about the societal definition of bad behavior, etc.

So. I reached the point where I needed at least a sense of my plot. But: plotting is a HUGE job. I knew it wasn't something I could do in just a few days, and at this point I also knew that I was going to need to return to my revision soon. So, intuition told me that it was time to stop. Not stop being receptive; not necessarily stop reading or watching the helpful things; not stop sending myself emails, texts, and reminders; but stop trying to make any real, meaty, major progress on this book idea. I needed to save the job of plotting for when I next had a stretch of uninterrupted worktime. Maybe another free week or two somewhere, between other projects.

So, I did some final organizing of my notebook. I transferred things into it from other notebooks and I designating a huge number of empty pages in it for future plot thoughts and future character thoughts. I did this even though in this book, as in most of my books, I sense that character and plot will ultimately end up being the same thing, so it's not going to matter much which thoughts I file where. (In other words, most of my plot is going to spring from who my characters are, and many of my characters will spring from the needs of the plot.) But at this messy stage in planning, it's important to me to feel organized. The illusion of organization stops me from feeling as overwhelmed as I probably should be feeling. So I label things, and delude myself that I can contain this messy process inside a nice neat notebook ????. 

I organized my notebook, and then I put it aside. Today I'm still open to thoughts about my new book idea, but it's not my entire worklife anymore... it's more of a promise for the future. It'll probably be good to have it simmering on the back burner for a while. I'll be able to approach it with a new freshness when I sit down with it again one day.

So. I'm not sure how satisfyingly I've answered the question "Where do you get your ideas?" After all, this idea is still very much in progress. I figured out a lot of stuff last week, but mostly what I figured out is a long list of all the things I don't know yet. There will be many, many more workweeks to go before I'll be able to claim that I truly have an idea for a book. 

But this is my best shot at an answer to the question of where my ideas come from! I guess the point I want to convey is this: I don’t necessarily believe in inspiration. But I believe that sometimes a writer will start to get the merest sense of a story that's missing from the world, and find herself wanting to write that story. At that point, if circumstance allows her the time and space to enter a state that is extremely internally-focused and possibly involves a lot of intake (reading, watching other stories), or if not that, at least an extreme level of sensitivity and receptiveness, of seeing, of listening... And if she puts in the work… her idea-seed will start to take root, and grow into a real, workable idea that might one day be the beginnings of a book! 

And of course, every writer does this differently. Many writers don't plan or plot ahead of time. They figure out the idea as they write. So there's no right or wrong way to do it. 

But this is my best explanation of how I do it.

Godspeed to all writers.

Here are a few organizations that need our support right now: 

Fund Texas Choice. A nonprofit organization funding abortion travel for people in Texas. 

Frontera Fund. Making abortion accessible for people in the Rio Grande Valley. 

Clinic Access Support Network. Providing transportation, lodging, emotional support, and more to those seeking abortion care in Houston, TX. 

Bridge Collective. A full spectrum doula collective, nonprofit organization based in Austin, TX. 

The Afiya Center. An advocacy organization based in Dallas, TX, dedicated to transforming the lives of Black womxn and girls through reproductive justice. 

Texas Equal Access Fund. Providing financial and emotional support to people seeking abortion care in the north, east, and panhandle regions of Texas. 

Lilith Fund. Financial assistance, emotional support, and building community spaces for people who need abortions in Texas — unapologetically, with compassion and conviction. 

West Fund. Working to make abortions accessible and affordable to people in West Texas. 

Thank you to the folks at @FundTexasChoice who helped me compile this list.

 

 

Just after the New Year, I spent some time in Vermont.

I go to Vermont to write, but ever since the start of the pandemic, I also go there for some clarity of thought. Sometimes it's easier to figure out how you're doing if you can get some distance from everything. Where I go, I have no cell service, internet, or email. I keep my fingers crossed that when I arrive, I won't discover frozen pipes. I haul a lot of wood (so much wood! Wood is heavy!). I start a fire in the stove and hole up for a while, blessed with the great good fortune to be allowed to turn briefly into a hermit.

Occasionally I'm able to talk to Kevin on the phone, and our conversations go something like this: Hi! How have you been? Could you please tell me the names of Henry VIII's wives in order and also which ones were executed? 

Because, again, I have no internet. So I keep a running list of all the things I've been wondering. And when you're listening to the audiobook of Wolf Hall while staring out the window,

sometimes you realize you want some spoilers. (The answer, if you're interested: (1) Catherine of Aragon. (2) Anne Boleyn, beheaded. (3) Jane Seymour. (4) Anne of Cleves. (5) Catherine Howard, beheaded. (6) Catherine Parr.) 

So anyway, I went to Vermont at the New Year. In previous years, I've loved the New Year. It's been a time of reflection and planning for me, a time to find balance and reconsider my intentions. Since the start of the pandemic, I've lost that New Year ritual to a certain extent, because time and its passage have gotten quite confusing. It doesn't seem possible, for example, that Winterkeep was released in 2021. Wasn't that eons ago? But also, I finalized a new book in 2021 (more on that, as soon as I'm allowed to say more) and am more than halfway through writing a new one, plus I have three other ideas begging to be written. How is that possible? Hasn't it been only a year? Didn't time used to be less springy than this? How old am I anyway? Did winter always used to make me this emotional? Why did I used to dislike my gray hair and now I love it? Why did I ever, EVER, put up with itchy tags in my clothes before now? Have my hands always been this cold? When will I see my friends' faces again?

It's really hard to sum up my last year and make plans for the next. I'm thinking in mushy blobs of time, rather than weeks, months, or years. But I am still hoping and planning. 

Here are three plans I have for the nearish future:

1. I will finish a draft of a new, contemporary book that I'm currently loving writing. (I actually think this will happen this spring!)

2. I will unveil a website. Finally, after more than a decade, I've hired someone to build me a website! I'm having so, so much fun making my own art for it. I think this will get sorted this summer.

3. I will make some strides in a project currently occupying me and some other family members: dual USA-Italian citizenship.

These are my plans. Of course, every new piece of news and frankly the world in general can gum up the works pretty easily these days. So, we'll see how everything goes. I'm trying to learn flexibility.

I hope you're able to find some flexibility too, and also some clarity of thought, as we move through the New Year.

From helping you explore even more with Immersive View to taking the stress out of your drive, here are updates on Google Maps you won’t want to miss.

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Here's how we built adaptive audio in Meet, which transforms multiple laptops in close proximity into a unified audio system so you can create ad-hoc meeting spaces IRL.

Google Play announces the 10 indie games studios receiving a share of $2 million and hands-on support as a part of the Indie Games Fund 2024.

Here are four new Chrome iOS features making it even easier to use this browser across devices.

I did not expect an immersion blender to become a kitchen essential for me, but that’s where I am now. I originally thought it’d be great for making milkshakes, but then I figured out water-in-oil emulsions, and realized that homemade mayonnaise is a million times better¹ than what comes in the jar.

Summarizing: the immersion blender turns the very technical and tedious process of emulsification into something that is so simple I got it right the first time, and haven’t failed at it yet. Here, then, is a very basic recipe for homemade mayo:

Basic Homemade Mayonnaise

Ingredients

• 1 egg
• 1 tablespoon vinegar
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/8 teaspoon mustard
• 1 cup avocado oil

Equipment

• An immersion blender with its own blending cup
• Measuring spoons & measuring cup
• A fridge-friendly container for the finished product

Instructions

1. Put everything except the oil in the blender cup.
2. Gently pour the oil atop the other stuff, and then wait a moment for things to separate. It’s very important for the oil to be on top.
3. Gently sink the blender head to the bottom of the cup, positioning it like a dome over the egg, tipping it on the way down to get the air out.
4. Blend at high speed, keeping the blender head at the bottom of the cup. Slowly lift it, and allow yourself to be amazed as it makes your mixture into mayo on the way up.
5. That’s it! Scrape it into a container and put it in the refrigerator. It’ll keep for about a week

You may be asking if you can use something other than avocado oil. You can, but I recommend starting with avocado oil because I want your first batch of mayo to taste good. Olive oil will, for organic chemistry reasons I don’t fully understand, respond poorly to the emulsion process, giving the mayo a flavor I describe as “sawdust adjacent.”

You may also be asking how this even works. Traditionally, mayonnaise is made by vigorously whisking the eggs and the watery stuff while slowly adding oil. Adding the oil too quickly will cause things to fail, and the failure mode of mayonnaise is that it separates, and the oil floats back to the top. The immersion blender, coupled with its special made-to-fit cup, solves this problem by drawing the oil down into the blend. This is why you start at the bottom and gradually lift. You’re “slowly adding oil” by slowly giving the blender head traction on the oil above it.

Emulsification is Magic

Emulsification is when two immiscible (“not mixable”) liquids get mixed with the help of something else. In the case of mayonnaise you are mixing water and oil by giving the tiny droplets of watery ingredients (the vinegar and the lemon juice) a nice coating of egg proteins.

Fun fact! Butter is also a water-in-oil emulsification. By weight it’s about 80% milk fat (cream), 20% water, and maybe a couple of percentage points of milk proteins, sugars, and “bad at math.” This may seem like useless information, but if you’re looking for a dairy-free recipe substitute for butter, you can substitute almost any other water-in-oil emulsification. The tl;dr— Yes, you can use mayo instead of butter in recipes.

Cow-milk products are pretty complex things. There is a LOT going un under (udder?) the hood, and I’ve found that the best way to swap out a milk product is to swap in something similarly complex. Mayo can be pretty bland (it is literally used in comedy routines as a stand-in for “so bland”) but if you increase the complexity a bit it’ll do just fine as a stand-in for butter.

Sandra is allergic to dairy, mustard, wheat, and yeast, but she loves Hollandaise sauce on Eggs Benedict—a dish which, if prepared traditionally, is the Yahtzee in the game of “Sandra can’t eat this.” We prepare it non-traditionally by taking a nice Hollandaise recipe and swapping out the butter for homemade no-mustard mayo. Then we serve the sauce and the eggs on a bed of wild rice, which, if I’m being completely honest, is a healthier and tastier option than an English muffin.

Dairy-Free Hollandaise

Ingredients

• 5 egg yolks (set aside or discard the egg whites²)
• 2 tablespoons champagne vinegar
• 1/4 cup water
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice
• 2 teaspoons finely minced shallots
• 1/2 cup homemade no-mustard mayo
  • OR sure you can just use a stick of softened butter instead of the mayo, but then it’s not dairy-free, obviously.

Equipment

• Immersion blender & blender cup
• Measuring spoons and cups
• Knife & board for mincing the shallots
• 1 pint canning jar with ring and lid
• A small hand-whisk or maybe just a fork that will fit into that canning jar
• Sous vide bath, because let’s do this the easy way

Instructions

1. Separate the eggs, and put the yolks in the blender cup. What you do with the egg whites is your business², but they don’t go in your Hollandaise sauce.
2. Add the vinegar, lemon juice, salt, and minced shallots. Don’t be lazy and expect the immersion blender to mince the shallots for you. It’s not a food processor. Cut them up fine using your knife!
3. Add the homemade mayo.
4. Blend with the immersion blender. You’re not trying to emulsify, so just blend away. The mix should end up yellow and a little runny.
5. Pour the pre-Hollandaise into the pint jar, and put the lid on loosely.
6. Put the jar into the sous vide. The water level should be below the lid, but above the level of the stuff in the jar.
7. Run the sous vide at 160°F for 90 minutes.
   —90 minutes later…
8. Remove the jar (carefully, it’ll be hot) and remove the lid. Whisk the contents vigorously, then (and I cannot stress this enough) shove that whisk into your mouth and slurp the delicious Hollandaise from it. Then put it into the sink, NOT back into the jar. No, not even if you live alone.
9. Lid the jar and put it into the fridge. It should keep for at least a week, assuming your whisk was clean.

When the time comes to serve the sauce, it’ll work well cold on sandwiches, or you can microwave a little bit of it for Eggs Benedict.

The Plot Thickens, AKA “I See What You Did There”

19th-century French chef Antonin Carême famously declared (in a book that got lots of traction) that there are five sauces mères or “Mother Sauces”: Espagnole, Velouté, Béchamel, Tomate, and Hollandaise. All other sauces are sauces petit, variations on the basics.

Of Carême’s five mother sauces, four are thickened with roux (butter and flour)³, while the fifth is a water-in-oil emulsion. My inner taxonomist screams, because that’s really just TWO basic sauces, so maybe the system should have been sauces mère et père, or just “saucy parents⁴.”

The point here is that an ultra-simplified water-in-oil emulsion is literally THE MOTHER OF ALL MAYONNAISE⁵.

Let me restate this more usefully: once you reduce water-in-oil emulsification to water, oil, and a binding agent, you can make any emulsified sauce you want to. In mayonnaise, the vinegar and lemon juice are “water,” the avocado oil is (SURPRISE!) “oil”, and the egg is the binding agent. The salt and mustard are irrelevant to the emulsification (provided you don’t add so much that they become relevant.)

You can make flavored mayo by messing around in the “irrelevant” column. Mother said it’s okay, really! For instance, you can make a nice Southwest seafood taco sauce by replacing the lemon and the vinegar with lime juice, using a dash of Cholula instead of mustard, and throwing in some cilantro. Did you want “spicy mayo” for sushi? Use rice vinegar and maybe two tablespoons of Sriracha instead of lemon juice, then toss in some minced ginger. As long as the general ratio of “watery” to “oily” stays the same, your mixture will emulsify deliciously.

Metrics For Science

The measurements in my recipes are all Imperial, which is problematic for two reasons:

1. Imperial. Ugh.
2. Milliliters are better than rounding to fractions of cups and spoons.

I’d switch to metric, but that would mean buying a bunch of kitchen stuff and learning new things, so it’s a project for a more ambitious day. Still, I recognize that if you really want to get fancy with your oil-in-water emulsifications, you’ll find that the metric system provides more consistent (especially with regards to the consistency of the sauce, hah!) results.

I’ve found a workaround, though, and that’s by using the lines on the immersion blender cup. My watery ingredients for a proven emulsion come halfway up to the 3-ounce line. The egg takes me up to the 3 ounce line, and I’m using 8 ounces of oil. This means my ratio of water to emulsifier to oil is 1.5 : 1.5 : 8. When I start messing around with other ingredients, I keep that ratio in mind, and use the lines on the blender cup to help me get the ratio correct. I also use it to keep track of what I did in case I need to change things on the next pass.

Would metric measurements be better? YES THEY WOULD please leave off with the pestering of the cartoonist and go update all the gear in your own dang kitchen.

But start by getting an immersion blender, because homemade mayo is, as I stated at the top of this essay, a million times better¹ than what comes out of a store-bought jar.

— notes —

¹ “A million times better” is sloppy math, but that didn’t stop me from using it twice. Fine. Let’s instead say that homemade mayonnaise is the thing casting the mayo-from-a-jar shadow on the wall of Plato’s Cave & Delicatessen.

² Now that you know how to make The Mother of All Mayo, those egg whites might be the elemental emulsifier for some (sorry-not-sorry) very saucy experimentation. You could also use them for an egg-white omelette, or perhaps a nice meringue.

³ Since roux is butter and flour, and butter is a water-in-oil emulsion, it should be possible to make a no-dairy/no-wheat roux using mayonnaise and corn starch and why are you looking at me like that?

⁴ My taxonomical howling is about a hundred and fifty years too late to get this bit of wordplay into all the best cookbooks. And even if I could yell back in time I’d be yelling in English, and I’m not a chef, so I don’t think Carême would listen to me.

⁵ Water-in-oil emulsion is also the mother of butter, and the mother of a long list of non-edible things, including industrial lubricants and hand lotions… although I suppose you could make your own hand lotion from edible ingredients and this is why I am not and never should be a chef.

This Saturday is a brand new episode of “Home Sweet Home” on Food Network. My kids are helping me shoot it, my production company in the UK is editing it together, and it’s been a great team effort! I just wanted to show you the dishes I’ll be making—it’s a fun, exciting, food-centric show! I’m […]

The Final Jeopardy clue for November 12, 2024.

The post Final Jeopardy Today November 12, 2024 – Question, Answer, Wages & Winner appeared first on ComingSoon.net - Movie Trailers, TV & Streaming News, and More.

Explore Marco Rubio's personal life: Meet his wife and their children. Get the full story now!

The post Who Is Marco Rubio’s Wife? Jeanette Dousdebes’ Kids & Relationship History appeared first on ComingSoon.net - Movie Trailers, TV & Streaming News, and More.

Discover all about Quinn Ewers' girlfriend, and their relationship journey. Follow their story!

The post Who Is Quinn Ewers’ Girlfriend? Madelyn Barnes’ Instagram & Relationship History appeared first on ComingSoon.net - Movie Trailers, TV & Streaming News, and More.

Kevin Federline is a popular disk jockey, dancer, and actor, arguably best known for his first marriage to pop star Britney Spears. As a dancer, he has worked with the likes of Michael Jackson, Justin Timberlake, and Pink. He also appeared alongside Spears on a reality TV series called Britney and Kevin: Chaotic. But, Federline […]

The post Who Is Kevin Federline’s Wife? Victoria Prince’s Job & Relationship History appeared first on ComingSoon.net - Movie Trailers, TV & Streaming News, and More.

Curious about Tim Hardaway Jr.‘s condition following his recent on-court injury? As fans discuss the Detroit Pistons’ nail-biting NBA Cup opener against the Miami Heat, many are also concerned about Hardaway’s recovery and when he might return to the lineup. Here’s a quick look at Tim Hardaway’s injury, recovery, and its impact on the Pistons. […]

The post Pistons’ Tim Hardaway Avoids Serious Injury After Head Collision appeared first on ComingSoon.net - Movie Trailers, TV & Streaming News, and More.

Некоммерческая организация Mozilla Foundation, занимающаяся общим управлением проектами, владеющая товарными знакам и определяющая политику Mozilla, объявила об увольнении 30% своих сотрудников. Отмечается, что увольнения связаны с проведением реорганизации структуры Mozilla Foundation в условиях неотвратимого натиска перемен в мире технологий и всё более радикального восприятия идеи ставить интересы людей выше прибыли.

Управляющий совет проекта Fedora утвердил придание сборке Fedora KDE Desktop Spin статуса базовой редакции дистрибутива, идентичной по уровню поддержки с Fedora Workstation. Таким образом, начиная с Fedora 42 варианты дистрибутива с GNOME и KDE будут иметь идентичный статус и станут преподноситься на равных. Среди прочего, Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop Edition получит аналогичный уровень маркетингового продвижения и будет иметь такое же представление на сайте fedoraproject.org. Специфичные для KDE серьёзные проблемы будут рассматриваться как блокирующие релиз, так же, как ранее блокировали релиз серьёзные проблемы в GNOME.

Компания Broadcom, год назад поглотившая бизнес VMware, представила новые условия распространения проприетарных продуктов виртуализации для рабочих станций - VMware Workstation и VMware Fusion, работающих на платформах Linux, Windows и macOS. Предоставленная весной возможность бесплатного персонального использования теперь расширена и охватывает любые применения, в том числе использование в коммерческих целях.

My latest short story is out in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. When I first started writing short stories, back in the 90s, F&SF was one of the ‘big three’ that I really wanted to get a story in to cross off my bucket list. The big three were Asimov’s, F&SF, and Analog. […]

We speak with former Ohio state senator and Bernie Sanders presidential campaign staffer Nina Turner about how the 2024 election has left her and many voters “frustrated” and “exhausted.” While she is not endorsing a candidate, she denounces the white supremacist rhetoric of the Trump campaign, which she notes is “as American as apple pie.” Turner pushes back on comparisons of the Trump movement to the rise of Nazi Germany, which she argues threaten to whitewash the United States’ own anti-democratic history. “The unfulfilled promises of this country, the undealt-with anti-Blackness and other types of racism and bigotry have not been dealt with sufficiently,” she explains. “It is us, and we need to deal with it and not push it off on some other nation.”

Kamala Harris is blasting Donald Trump for vowing to protect women whether they “like it or not” at the same time he is calling for Republican Liz Cheney to be shot in the face. We get response from The Nation's abortion access correspondent Amy Littlefield and talk about 10 states with abortion rights on the ballot, including Arizona, Nevada, Florida, South Dakota and Missouri. Trump's remarks are a “succinct and clear definition of patriarchy,” says Littlefield. She argues the 2024 election will be decided in large part by white women and whether they will vote for abortion rights. Trump is “laying out the bargain that white patriarchy has offered for white women in this country,” says Littlefield. “He is saying, 'White women, we will protect you from Brown and Black men.'”

We speak with The Nation's John Nichols in Wisconsin, where Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are spending a lot of their time in the closing days of the election in a tight battle for the state's 10 Electoral College votes. Nichols also discusses the battle for the Senate, with key races in Wisconsin and Nebraska; how New York races could tip control of the House to Democrats; and why Kamala Harris needs to expand her message beyond the threat of Trump’s authoritarianism. “At the doors, people want to talk about economics,” says Nichols.

With just days to go before the November 5 presidential election, fears are growing that Republicans intend to interfere with the official results in order to install Donald Trump as president. At Sunday’s Madison Square Garden rally, Trump said he had a “little secret” with House Speaker Mike Johnson that would have a “big impact” on the outcome, though neither he nor Johnson elaborated on what that entailed. Elie Mystal, the justice correspondent for The Nation, says the secret is almost certainly a plan to force a contingent election, whereby no candidate wins a majority of the Electoral College and the president is instead chosen by the House of Representatives, where Republicans hold a slim majority. Mystal notes that even if Democrats challenge such an outcome, the case would still end up before a Supreme Court with a conservative supermajority that is likely to side with Trump.

As Donald Trump and Kamala Harris campaign in Pennsylvania on the last day before the presidential election, false claims of voter fraud are spreading. “The truth is, none of these lies have been about election integrity. It’s always been about power,” says Neil Makhija, chair of the board of elections in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania — the battleground state that “could decide the election” — in a video essay featured by The New York Times. Makhija joins Democracy Now! to discuss his work expanding access to the vote and debunking the myth of mass voter fraud.

As Israel continues to block lifesaving humanitarian aid from entering northern Gaza, humanitarian organizations are describing its siege as “apocalyptic” and warning of mass Palestinian starvation and death. “The situation is absolutely desperate,” says Rachael Cummings of the aid group Save the Children International. Cummings joins us from Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, where aid organizations have been halted from entering the north. She responds to news of Israel’s bombing of a polio vaccination center in an area that had been marked for an official humanitarian pause, and the Knesset’s vote to ban the U.N. relief agency UNRWA.

As voters across the United States head to the polls on Election Day, many face “a choice between two unsatisfactory candidates,” says Democracy Now! co-host Juan González. This choice is especially “excruciating” for those “who are outraged by our government’s continued support for Israel’s yearlong genocidal assault on Gaza.” He says the 2024 election has echoes of 1968, when many progressives sat out the election because of anger over Vietnam, but Richard Nixon’s victory and ultimate expansion of the war proved to be disastrous. “It would take many years for some of us to realize we had made a big mistake in sitting out that election. … Making these decisions at the time of election may be difficult but sometimes necessary to do to open up the way for possible change in the future.

As voters across the United States head to the polls, we speak with New York Times writer Jim Rutenberg about how Donald Trump may try to preemptively declare victory and challenge election results. The former president has ramped up claims Democrats are “a bunch of cheats” and preemptively cast doubt on a win by Vice President Kamala Harris, following a similar playbook as 2020 when he baselessly claimed the election was stolen. Rutenberg spoke to pro-Trump election officials in battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania who say they are ready to refuse to certify local election results as part of a wide-ranging effort to throw the system into disarray. Rutenberg says after the failed insurrection of January 6, 2021, many in Trump’s orbit had a clear goal for 2024: “We have to go local.” He also discusses the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022 that makes it harder to stop the final certification of results.

Ari Berman, the voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones, details how pro-Trump forces may try to throw out the results of the 2024 election if Kamala Harris wins, with a focus on the swing state of Georgia, the “epicenter” of Trump’s failed efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. “It’s very dangerous to imagine what people who don’t believe in free and fair elections can do when given the power to oversee those very elections,” says Berman.

As Latino voters are a key voting bloc in the 2024 presidential election in battleground states like Nevada, Arizona and Pennsylvania, they have been targeted by a rise in Spanish-language misinformation. Most of the false messaging disparages Kamala Harris and supports Donald Trump, says Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Maria Hinojosa, host of Latino USA, which investigated the phenomenon in a new episode called “The Misinformation Web.” She interviewed some of the content creators in this “blob” of online vitriol and says there is almost no effective content moderation online, nor many reliable fact-checking sources in Spanish to counter the lies.

Donald Trump has been reelected president of the United States. Ahead of Kamala Harris’s expected concession speech, we speak to professors Carol Anderson and Michele Goodwin to discuss Harris’s historic campaign — and historic loss. “The Confederacy won,” says Anderson, a professor of African American studies at Emory University. “It paints a picture of what Americans are willing to embrace,” says Goodwin, a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown and an expert on healthcare law, who warns of the public health dangers of a second Trump administration and discusses the election’s implications for reproductive rights.

While Democratic candidates suffered major losses in this year’s U.S. elections, elsewhere on the ballot voters supported liberal positions. In the wake of tightening federal and state restrictions on abortion, historic ballot measures enshrining the right to an abortion passed in seven states, while other initiatives to raise the minimum wage and codify marriage equality also won by wide majorities. We’re joined by Chris Melody Fields Figueredo of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center to examine the role of ballot measures, a form of direct democracy, in elections, and why this “powerful tool” may be at risk as conservatives flood elected office. “Because we are resisting, we are winning on these progressive issues, they are trying to take that power away from us.”

Donald Trump has made the mass deportation of immigrants a centerpiece of his plans for a second term, vowing to forcibly remove as many as 20 million people from the country. Historian Ana Raquel Minian, who studies the history of immigration, says earlier mass deportation programs in the 1930s and '50s led to widespread abuse, tearing many families apart through violent means that also resulted in the expulsion of many U.S. citizens. “These deportations that Trump is claiming that he will do will have mass implications to our civil rights, to our communities and to our economy, and of course to the people who are being deported themselves,” says Minian. She also says that while Trump's extremist rhetoric encourages hate and violence against vulnerable communities, in terms of policy there is great continuity with the Biden administration, which kept many of the same policies in place.

In the wake of the reelection of Donald Trump, some of the richest people in the world saw their net worths soar as stock prices rapidly shot up. “What was different about this election was how central billionaires were in the entire political discourse,” says The Lever's David Sirota, who joins Democracy Now! to discuss the outsized role of the super-rich in U.S politics, pointing out that both Trump and Kamala Harris campaigned heavily with billionaires, including Elon Musk and Mark Cuban. “These people are not giving money simply out of the goodness of their hearts. They want things. They have policy demands,” Sirota says. “The investors, the donors, like billionaires, are looking for a return on their investment.” Sirota, who previously worked as a communications adviser and speechwriter for the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, also explains how Elon Musk's influence on Trump’s campaign is a preview of the power he could wield if he ends up appointed to the Trump administration.

The FBI is investigating a spate of racist text messages targeting Black Americans in the wake of Donald Trump’s election victory last week. The texts were reported in states including Alabama, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Virginia, addressing recipients as young as 13 by name and telling them they were “selected to pick cotton at the nearest plantation” and other messages referencing slavery. For more, we speak with Robert Greene II, a history professor at Claflin University, South Carolina’s first and oldest historically Black university in Orangeburg, where many students were targeted. “Initially when I heard about the texts, I thought it was a bit of a hoax, but … it quickly became clear that this wasn’t just a Claflin problem, it was a national issue, as well,” says Greene. We also speak with Wisdom Cole, senior national director of advocacy for the NAACP, who says “this is only the beginning,” with a second Trump administration expected to attack civil rights and embolden hate groups.

President-elect Donald Trump reportedly plans to appoint his former senior adviser Stephen Miller as his deputy chief of staff for policy. Miller will play a key role along with Trump’s border czar Tom Homan and South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, who will reportedly be the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Miller is the architect of Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda, an avowed white nationalist and a man who is spurred by his “animus to the notion of the United States as a multicultural and multiethnic democracy,” says author Jean Guerrero, author of Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda. Guerrero says the Trump administration’s “obsessive deportation” attempt to “radically reengineer the racial demographics of the United States” will “backfire” on the U.S. economy and destroy “the United States’ global reputation as a safe haven for the persecuted.”

Incoming President Trump’s vow to deport millions of undocumented immigrants when he starts his term has sent private prison stocks soaring. Immigrant rights advocates, including our guest, the executive director of Detention Watch Network, Silky Shah, are preparing for the Trump administration’s threats of mass deportation, a central tenet of his presidential campaign. “The first Trump campaign was defined by the border wall, and this one is really defined by mass deportations,” says Shah. If the Biden administration wants to protect immigrants’ rights before Trump takes office, she adds, it must begin reducing detention capacity by “shutting down facilities now.”

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