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Review: South Park: Season 14
While the last season of South Park showed that creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone could still churn out episodes filled with their notoriously sharp and timely social commentary, those smart episodes have become increasingly few and far between. With dismal entries like "Dead Celebrities" and "Butters' Bottom Bitch," season 13 did nothing to alleviate fans' concerns that their beloved series could be starting to go downhill.
Sadly, the premiere for the show's 14th season, which took on Tiger Woods and other recent fits of celebrity infidelity, has done little to quiet the grumbling. The episode felt lacking on pertinent things to say, as if Parker and Stone felt obligated to cover the Woods story just so they could maintain their reputation for quick turnaround on social issues. The duo's worldview has become increasingly didactic. Last season they spent an entire episode preaching about how it's okay to say "fag" sometimes, and the Woods episode was no less preachy. They hammer home the idea that the controversy that surrounds men like Woods and Jesse James stems from average adults trying to put themselves on a higher moral plane, when the real problem is that people even care about these scandals at all.
Another new episode, "You Have 0 Friends" takes on Facebook, an institution that's been ingrained in mainstream culture for long enough that taking shots at it now just makes Parker and Stone seem crotchety and old. At what point did the creators of South Park stop being the sharp voices of a younger generation and start sounding like ornery parents?
But just when you're ready to make a sweeping statement about South Park's decline, the show comes around and knocks your theory into the dirt. Even though Parker and Stone's take on the Woods scandal fell flat and their whining about Facebook revealed their wrinkles, the rest of the season has been on par with what people expect from the series, even in its social commentary. "The Tale of Scrottie McBoogerballs," in which the boys write a depraved gross-out story that becomes heralded as a work of literary genius, was essentially a 20-minute showcase of people vomiting. The episode took aim at its own exuberant audience, who often create subtext out of episodes that are just about pooping (look, I'm even doing it now). Even the Facebook episode takes some funny shots at the social networking site's relatively recent infestation of baby boomers, the types of people who comment on everything and use excessive punctuation!!!
In DVD commentaries for past seasons, Parker and Stone have both claimed that their favorite episodes are the ones where the boys get to act like the kids that they are. It's everyday childlike things mixed with perverse absurdities that keeps South Park grounded and funny, things like arguing over Facebook statuses, writing dirty stories, or dying from autoerotic asphyxiation accidents. These elements are still present in the show, but they sometimes get drowned out by forced social commentary. Even parts of the Tiger Woods episode were saved by Butters becoming entranced with female pubic hair.
Cast: Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Mona Marshall, April Stewart Network: Comedy Central, Wednesdays at 10 p.m. Buy: Amazon
Review: Season 3 of Star Trek: Discovery Remains Stuck in the Future's Past
The show's third season plays it ideologically and conceptually safe.2.5
Values like hope are often deployed to describe Gene Roddenberry's vision of the Star Trek universe. Season three of Star Trek: Discovery, the franchise's current flagship series, adopts this view of Roddenberry's creation as its driving theme: Titled "That Hope Is You," the season premiere finds the show's protagonist, Commander Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green), stranded alone in a galaxy-wide dystopia nearly a millennium into her future, seemingly the sole embodiment of the transcendent values of the United Federation of Planets and the interstellar government's military wing, Starfleet.
Burnham tumbles out of her temporal wormhole to discover that 931 years in the future the Federation has collapsed, seemingly leaving in its wake a society that exclusively breeds Star Wars-esque rogue smugglers like her new acquaintance, Book (David Ajala). Star Trek has tried and failed at constructing a one-episode arc around a rugged male individualist before, and Book isn't the worst instance of this archetype (see—or don't see—the notorious Next Generation episode "The Outrageous Okona"), but Book is too obvious a pulpy fabrication for the kind of emotional weight his reluctant friendship with Burnham is meant to carry.
Moreover, Discovery clearly intends Book to serve as a foil to the long-collapsed Federation and its values, but he doesn't seem much more morally ambiguous than many of the dodgy Starfleet characters we got to know in season two, nor does that contrast reveal much about the Federation. As its final representative, Burnham, teary-eyed as she so often is, speechifies at Book about the Federation being "about a vision and all those who believe in that vision," but the series doesn't get terribly specific about what those "who believe" actually see.
As symbol of a generalized hope, the Federation becomes an empty signifier in a season opener that's capped with what's essentially a moment of sentimental nationalism, as our hero casts a solemn gaze at the Federation banner. There's little doubt—particularly given the authoritarian future Earth we encounter in a later episode—that Discovery's writers would like us to understand this devastated future in terms of our own current socio-global disintegration. But the implied solution set out by the first episode and picked up as the season arc, a restoration of the political order that preceded and probably precipitated the collapse, plays it ideologically and conceptually safe.
All of which is to say: Instead of unrolling the Federation flag and misremembering it as faultless, perhaps we should be folding and stowing it away, looking toward the future rather than the past. To this Trekkie, this—and not hope per se—has been the true guiding spirit and strength of foundational Star Trek shows: their resolute future-orientation. It's not just that they were set in the 22nd or 23rd century, but that the characters themselves were boldly heading into their own unwritten future. It was a world where change, most often conceived as progress in Federation society, was possible and desirable. There's a reason Roddenberry's follow-up to the iconic The Original Series wasn't Star Trek: The Previous Generation.
For nearly two decades, Star Trek has been stuck in its own past (all shows and films but the dreadful Picard and the animated pastiche Lower Decks have been set before The Original Series). The franchise has wallowed in nostalgia for the deified nobility of earlier series, pandering to fans in a way mirrored by Burnham's patriotic reverence of the Federation. The stories have suffered as a result, with the prequels transforming Star Trek from a kind of sci-fi anthology about the ethics of encountering difference into an action franchise whose main purpose is producing content to fill in supposed gaps in the established universe.
But it might be argued that season three of Discovery, by hurdling its characters from Star Trek's past (the first two seasons are set a decade before the 2266-69 timeframe of The Original Series) into its future, at least promises it might overcome the limitations of its prequel status by jettisoning the baggage associated with the original show like a damaged warp core. And it's true that, despite the premiere's uninspired ode to the Federation as a deposit of nondescript "values," the following episodes begin to show the potential of a series that's once again fascinated more with the unknown than with the previously established.
Spinning relatively self-contained stories out of concepts like parasitic ice and the suppressed memories of a giant slug living inside a precocious teenage engineer, the remaining three episodes made available to press are more satisfying as sci-fi stories than the mindless actioner that opens the season. This shift to a more ensemble-driven, idea-focused format is welcome. Despite a premiere that augurs poorly for its broader narrative arc, Discovery's third season at least momentarily succeeds in thinking about undiscovered things to come.
Cast: Sonequa Martin-Green, Doug Jones, Anthony Rapp, Mary Wiseman, Michelle Yeoh, Wilson Cruz, Emily Coutts, David Ajala, Tig Notaro Network: CBS All Access
Review: The Good Lord Bird Infuses an Abolition Story with Wry, Dark Comedy
The series invigorates its material with the rousing trappings of a semi-comedic western.3
As abolitionist John Brown, a wild-eyed and scraggly bearded Ethan Hawke spends much of Showtime's The Good Lord Bird—based on James McBride's National Book Award-winning novel of the same name—shredding his throat as he bellows for the end of slavery. The man's fury is biblical in both a metaphorical and textual sense, dribbling spit down the hairs of his chin as he declares slavery an affront to God while fervently quoting the Bible. Brown doesn't want to negotiate, nor does he want to begin an incremental process toward change: Black people must be freed now, or else he'll shoot—and often he does.
To a young black boy like Henry Shackleford (Joshua Caleb Johnson), Brown's actions are baffling. Henry has witnessed white anger before, but he hasn't seen it deployed on his behalf. As such, he regards it with no small degree of skepticism, not least of which because one of Brown's outbursts gets the boy's father killed. Newly free but with nowhere to go, Henry travels with Brown's tiny militia, acquiring the nickname "Onion" for eating a withered good-luck charm belonging to "the old man." He's also given a new way to present his gender, courtesy of Brown mishearing Henry's name as "Henrietta" and thus taking him for a girl, giving him a dress, and treating him like an adopted daughter. Onion plays along, without making a fuss. After all, it's hard to dissuade white people once they've decided who you are.
In addition to these "gunfighters of the Gospel" who take arms against slave owners and the institutions that enable them, the world of The Good Lord Bird is full of hypocrites and apologists. It also practically oozes with wry, dark comedy. But rather than play Onion's dilemma as an unsympathetic farce, the series uses gender as an earnest metaphor for how the others see him—or rather, don't. Where he may freely be himself among the black characters, who recognize what Onion calls his "true nature" just fine, the white characters force their own perception upon him even when they have the best of intentions and are ostensibly fighting for him and his people. To them, little Onion sometimes functions like a mascot.
Johnson adeptly modulates the series's tone, with his expressions of confusion and skepticism woven into the heart of the narrative. But the showiest role belongs to Hawke, who goes big and loud in his fanatical conception of Brown, a man who does things like drag out suppertime prayer for hours and is thankful for everything that comes to his mind. He speaks to a turtle, places a pocket change bounty on the president, and generally believes that his battle plan has been handed down by the Lord Himself, even if the details tend to be fuzzy.
Brown, though, is also unambiguously right about what must be done, that the sins of the land must be washed away in blood. His capacity for violence is startling, as in one scene where he and his followers drag a man out of his home to cut off his head due to his complicity. Any blood, it seems, will do, and it's certainly easy to imagine another context where another person like Brown points his fanaticism and violence in another direction. He's prone to speaking for black people, to making decisions on their behalf about what they want or need while blind to the complexities of what it means to be free in a country that considers black freedom a threat. Brown's moral simplicity is its own kind of privilege.
Reservations about Brown are voiced by Onion, who acknowledges the potential "white savior" narrative in the first episode, as well as by others like a reluctant, newly freed recruit named Bob (Hubert Point-Du Jour) and even the renowned Frederick Douglass (Daveed Diggs). But The Good Lord Bird doesn't indulge in the easy cynicism that might have posited Brown as merely out for himself; his shortcomings and violence share space with his earnest devotion to the cause, his generosity, his willingness to listen, and his overall kookiness. This is hardly a hagiography, the off-kilter tone allowing for refreshingly complex portraits of not just Brown, but a rather stuffy conception of Douglass, whose apprehensions make sense but whose place within society and all the eyes upon him often restrict his public actions.
Where Onion's perspective is concerned, the series is a little shakier. With his presence at so many major events, he comes perilously close to a Forrest Gump of the antebellum era, the wheels of the plot contriving to deliver him at meetings with Douglass and Harriet Tubman as well as Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry. Though his presence is meant to complicate Brown's actions through how he's still perceived as a young girl, the series's skepticism gradually melts away, leaving the final episodes to drag a bit as they focus more on constructing their vision of history rather than examining the characters and their ideals. But when it works, especially at the start, The Good Lord Bird invigorates its material with the rousing trappings of a semi-comedic western that gives it a particularly memorable sort of power.
Cast: Ethan Hawke, Joshua Caleb Johnson, Hubert Point-Du Jour, Beau Knapp, Nick Eversman, Ellar Coltrane, Jack Alcott, Mo Brings Plenty, Daveed Diggs Network: Showtime
Review: Fox's Next Is an A.I. Thriller That Lacks Self-Awareness
Despite its timely trappings, the sci-fi series works best as an empty-calorie thriller.2
Fox's Next opens with a quote from Elon Musk, and the show's take on the dangers of technology is about as sophisticated as a meme with a Musk quote attached to it. Paul LeBlanc (John Slattery) is an amalgamation of various tech billionaires, from Musk to Steve Jobs to Bill Gates, and the warning about the threat of artificial intelligence that he delivers in a TED-style presentation at the beginning of the first episode is reminiscent of alarms that some of those figures have raised in real life. The series jumps almost immediately from Paul's dire warnings to the threat itself materializing in grand fashion, as an A.I. program known as Next achieves self-awareness and sets its sights on destroying humanity, beginning with a doctor (John Billingsley) who discovers its true intentions.
Next's overarching goals are a bit vague, and the series strikes an awkward balance between a grounded police drama and a world-ending sci-fi thriller. The dead doctor was an old friend of F.B.I. cybercrimes agent Shea Salazar (Fernanda Andrade), who crosses paths with Paul as she investigates the man's murder. Slattery imbues Paul with more than a little bit of the snarky entitlement of his character from Mad Men, and Shea initially dismisses Paul as a crank when he tries to convince her that the A.I. program developed by his former company has committed the crime. Though Paul suffers from a rare neurological disorder that causes hallucinations and paranoia and will most likely kill him within a few months, Next never presents him as an unreliable source, and the series sets up tension between him and the skeptical F.B.I. agents in his midst only to have it dissipate almost immediately.
With the exception of a Skynet joke in the second episode, the series takes its subject matter very seriously, even when Next's actions are particularly silly, like spreading office gossip or delivering petty insults. The dialogue alternates between incomprehensible technobabble and convenient oversimplifications (Paul calls Next's abilities an "intelligence explosion"), and Next is a poorly defined adversary, doing whatever the plot requires at any time, often without clear motivation. It's a seemingly omnipotent and omniscient foe that can take over an Alexa-like device to manipulate Shea's young son, open the doors of a prison in Honduras, or turn off a car in the midst of the owner's suicide attempt. Next's absurd level of power makes the A.I. dramatically ineffective as a villain, and it doesn't have any kind of personality or voice to allow it to develop an antagonistic relationship with the human characters.
In the show's early episodes, when Next is still theoretically contained on servers at Paul's former company, it speaks in a placid male voice that sounds a lot like HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and once Next escapes into the internet, it sometimes speaks in the voice of an off-brand Alexa or a car's GPS, but mostly it doesn't speak at all. It's an invisible, nebulous kind of enemy, able to rally an entire white supremacist sect over social media seemingly within minutes, but at another time thwarted by "keeping it on the line" during an interaction with Shea's son, like it's a bomber on the phone in a '70s hostage thriller.
Creator Manny Coto is known for his work on the Star Trek franchise and multiple seasons of 24, and Next feels very much in the law enforcement genre, treating the A.I. like a terrorist that Jack Bauer could track down and torture. The pacing also recalls that of 24: The five episodes made available to press take place over the course of just a few days, with the characters never getting a chance to rest in their relentless pursuit of the enemy. Next throws in incongruous moments of emotional bonding amid the chaos, and the forced efforts to create an intimate connection between two of Shea's team members are especially awkward. One is a reformed member of a white nationalist group, while the other is a stubborn Latina, and their growing connection is handled as clumsily as the show's other efforts at social commentary.
Despite its timely trappings, Next works best as an empty-calorie thriller, with plot points that only hold together if you don't think about them too much. "You can only do this when you've got evil computers coming after you," Shea's husband, Ty (Gerardo Celasco), solemnly tells their son at one point when they're forced to steal a car while on the run from Next. The entire series depicts that kind of obvious absurdity with a straight face. Which is to say that Next the A.I. may be self-aware, but Next the series rarely is.
Cast: John Slattery, Fernanda Andrade, Michael Mosley, Eve Harlow, Elizabeth Cappuccino, Evan Whitten, Gerardo Celasco, Jason Butler Harner Network: Fox
Review: The Third Day Leans Heavily on Mystery at the Expense of Human Drama
Much of the show's drama pivots around how successful it will be at slowly pulling back the curtain.2.5
The premiere episode of HBO's limited series The Third Day, in which a man fighting off sadness and potentially madness finds himself on a mysterious island just off the English coast, goes longer on mystery and mood than it does on plot. The feel of the series is richly atmospheric, filled with oversaturated colors and quaint cottages that would make for a nice weekend getaway were it not for the inhospitable, antagonistic, and slightly cult-ish locals. Despite the show's unsettling backdrop, though, the circular nature of the story keeps any appreciable amount of tension from building over the course of the five episodes were made available for review.
The first episode throws a lot at the audience before even getting to the island. Sam (Jude Law) is a raggedy-looking guy who volleys quickly between moods. First there's inchoate fury, as he screams into a phone about money being stolen from an office, and then irredeemable and inexplicable sadness, as he collapses by the side of a stream. Snapped out of his chaotic collapse by the sight of a teenage girl, Epona (Jessie Ross), hanging herself from a tree in the woods, he saves her life and drives her home, even as she murmurs, "They'll kill me."
Epona lives in a self-contained island community called Osea that's accessible only for a short time each day when the ocean tide uncovers a Roman-era causeway. Once there, Sam is flooded with conflicting sensations. The first is that it all feels somewhat familiar, even though as far as he knows his only connection to Osea is his grandfather being stationed there during World War II. The second is a low kind of foreboding that will be well-known to viewers of many a horror movie about urbanites stuck in remote locations. Sam knows something is amiss about this strange place with its quasi-pagan traditions and its people's alternating suspicion and over-friendliness toward outsiders, but he somehow conveniently keeps missing the short windows of time when he could just drive back to the mainland.
Triangulating a creepy space located somewhere between Ari Aster's Midsommar, Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man, and the TV cult classic The Prisoner, The Third Day works hard to not give too much away while still trying to pull viewers in. It's a difficult act, given that Sam's manic behavior and the show's intentional and often fairly clichéd attempts to blur the lines between reality and fantasy make it somewhat difficult to invest in what happens to him.
Generally more engaging are the side characters who start popping in to further confuse an already muddle-headed Sam, including the ever-bickering Martins (Paddy Considine and Emily Watson), the cosmically mismatched pair who run Osea's one pub and ricochet from suspicious to trustworthy in an instant. Jess (Katherine Waterston), an American researcher doing work on the island's traditions both ancient (Celtic bacchanals, sacrifices, and the like) and newer (a Burning Man-like festival designed to drum up tourism), is ostensibly the standard alluring woman of mystery but has grim secrets of her own that mimic Sam's dark past.
Like the stories that The Third Day appears on its surface to be emulating, much of the drama here will ultimately pivot around just how successful it will be at slowly pulling back the curtain until its final reveal. The series is certainly committed to the slow burn, with too much of its running time given over to Sam's punchy befuddlement as he tries to separate dream from reality. Further slowing down the momentum is the show's structure: The first three episodes (gathered together as "Summer") are separated from a second set of three ("Winter"), in which another outsider (Naomie Harris) traps herself on Osea by a single linking episode ("Autumn"), which is planned to screen live from London in early October.
The Third Day works best when it's not teasing out this or that secret about Osea and its cagey inhabitants. A strong undercurrent in which characters wrestle with their grief keeps wrenching the story away from its somewhat ambling mystery plot. Sam is given one of the show's most impactful lines when he tries to explain the sadness he carries: "Pain doesn't work that way, you can't share it…agony is bespoke." Although Osea is studded with gothic signposts that should be warning characters like Sam away from the place, as the series continues it zeroes in less on the horror elements and more on the more quotidian and human conflicts that keep threatening to tear the island apart. Though viewers may stick with The Third Day to the end to discover what Osea's deepest and darkest secrets might be, its human drama is more compelling than any suggestion of the unworldly.
Cast: Jude Law, Katherine Waterston, Paddy Considine, Emily Watson, Naomie Harris, John Dagleish, Nico Parker, Freya Allan Network: HBO
Review: We Are Who We Are Perceptively Homes in on the Malleability of Boundaries
The series concerns itself with boundaries between the different cultural standards of young adulthood.3
With his loud clothes and bleached hair, 14-year-old Fraser Wilson (Jack Dylan Grazer) sticks out on the U.S. Army base where he lives. He spends much of the first episode of director and co-writer Luca Guadagnino's We Are Who We Are in animal-print shorts long enough to function as pants, being restless and fidgety and a detached nuisance in that post-adolescent sort of way, taking pictures of people inside classrooms or running through the middle of a basketball game between recruits. One of his mothers, Colonel Sarah Wilson (Chloë Sevigny), has been put in charge of a garrison in Italy, so they—he, Sarah, and his other mom, Maggie (Alice Braga)—have relocated from New York, to Fraser's dismay.
Especially when its yoked to Fraser's perspective, the series makes the base feel vibrant and alive, given the Altmanesque use of overlapping conversations and diegetic music. Peripheral characters are always conspicuously doing things in the background, like buying food or running drills. The boy seems volatile and strange, in ways perhaps explained by the sensory overload of his POV; he's an observer and there's almost too much to observe, with dialogue and actions often carrying on out of frame. Fraser feels compelled to center himself in his own world, doing things like balancing precariously on a bridge railing or intruding on Italian homeowners sewing outside, though sometimes he allows himself to be guided by new acquaintances, like fellow army brat Britney (Francesca Scorsese).
When the second episode of the series replays many of these same overlapping events from the perspective of Caitlin Harper (Jordan Kristine Seamón), the repetitions don't feel gimmicky so much as a natural result of the show's densely packed structure. Conversations that were tangential and difficult to follow for the easily distracted Fraser are given clearer focus due to Caitlin's more confident, pensive demeanor. She's already familiar with the environment, having been at the base long enough to form a friend group that includes other teens like Britney and Caitlin's high-strung brother, Danny (Spence Moore II). And with the additional perspective, throwaway lines from the first episode take on new meanings. For example, Sarah's remark to Jenny (Faith Alabi) about respecting faiths other than the base's dominant Christian demographic gains a patronizing quality when we learn that Jenny is Danny's mother and that he's experimenting with the Islamic faith that she left behind, seemingly at the behest of her domineering husband, Richard (Scott Mescudi, a.k.a. Kid Cudi).
Of the four episodes made available to critics ahead of We Are Who We Are's premiere, the other two sync up more traditionally as Caitlin and Fraser begin to spend time with one another. Being the new kid on the base, Fraser lacks any of the preconceptions of Caitlin's friend group, so he becomes an ideal confidante for her experiments with gender expression. Going by just "Harper," Caitlin tucks her long hair beneath a hat and hits on Italian girls in town, while subtly rebuffing guys elsewhere with a quick, "I don't speak Italian."
The series concerns itself with boundaries and the way they blur, namely the differing standards of young adulthood between Italy and the base that technically functions as the United States. In one scene, Britney drags Fraser to the beach because he's allowed to drink off base. By spotlighting this interplay, the series emphasizes how we create so many of these boundaries ourselves, whether in our own heads, through procedures, or in accordance with society at large, along lines of political affinity, relationships, and sexuality.
The most significant boundary separation in the series, then, is the one between childhood and adulthood, which is hardly a rigid one. Accordingly, the kids sometimes seem wise and mature and accepting beyond their years only to fly off the handle and engage in that distinctly teenage brand of solipsism, where the people around you don't matter nearly as much as you and your own feelings. They're able to be pretentious and profound on entirely their own terms, rather than seeming like mouthpieces for middle-aged screenwriters. They leave atrocious messes in their wake, badger a lot of people, and act downright annoying, which feels true and honest in a broader sense than the occasional small detail that rings false. They have the space to change, while the adults ruminate on the decisions—the marriages, the jobs, the beliefs—that they've long since committed to. We Are Who We Are explores a world that's opening up to these kids just as it is, in many ways, preparing to snap closed.
Cast: Jack Dylan Grazer, Jordan Kristine Seamón, Chloë Sevigny, Alice Braga, Spence Moore II, Kid Cudi, Faith Alabi, Francesca Scorsese, Ben Taylor, Corey Knight Network: HBO
Review: I May Destroy You Boldly Dissects Notions of Sexual Assault and Consent
The series draws one of the most nuanced portraits of sexual assault ever depicted on TV.4
In "Ego Death," the final episode of the British comedy-drama I May Destroy You, actress, writer, and series creator Michaela Coel confidently defies convention and, with it, any expectation that the events of the series, like life, can be tied into a tidy knot. Privileging character over plot, I May Destroy You has no need for the kinds of melodramatic reveals on which other cable dramas like Big Little Lies rely, and it proves no less revelatory on that front.
Coel draws one of the most nuanced portraits of sexual assault and its psychological fallout ever depicted on TV, and along the way captures the milieu of black millennial Londoners with precise and vivid detail. For all the lived-in verisimilitude of its world, though, I May Destroy You also smoothly incorporates psychologically subjective and allegorical elements: The bar in which Arabella is assaulted is called Ego Death (a perfect summation of the consequent disintegration of her identity), and the book on sexual assault that she's writing throughout the series is likely an in-text reflection of the creation of I May Destroy You itself.
In the first episode, "Eyes, Eyes, Eyes, Eyes," we join the Ghanaian-British Arabella (Coel) as she returns to London from Italy, where she's been working on a follow-up to her published collection of social-media musings, Chronicles of a Fed-Up Millennial. Or at least that's what she's told her literary agent (Adam James) and financier (Natalie Walter), as the trip was actually motivated by a visit to her on-again, off-again beau, Biagio (Marouane Zotti), who remains noncommittal about their relationship as she departs. Back in London, she's welcomed by her group of steadfast friends, including Simon (Aml Ameen), who convinces her to suspend her all-night scramble to finish her book draft and join him at the Ego Death.
There, Arabella's drink is spiked and, as she later comes to remember and even more slowly comes to accept, raped in a bathroom stall by an unknown assailant. Brief point-of-view flashbacks to the attack that recur throughout the series complement Coel's larger fascination with the role that memory and its interpretation play in the formation of identity. Longer, structural flashbacks in many episodes challenge our perspective on Arabella's present and often serve to undermine our presumptions about victimhood and blame.
Hardly a cowed victim, but shaken and traumatized, Arabella reevaluates and rebuilds her life after her attack. It's been said that the world is revealed in breakdown—that you don't know how a car works until your carburetor fails. Arabella's assault forces her and her closest friends, Terry (Weruche Opia) and Kwame (Paapa Essiedu), to examine their own sexual encounters, relationships, and histories, leading them to disconcerting conclusions about the various roles they play in relation to each other and their sexual partners.
Similar to its exploration of the multiple dimensions of a person's identity, I May Destroy You depicts the different forms that sexual assault can take, not all of it as immediately readable as Arabella's violent rape, and not always committed by obvious villains like the man (Lewis Reeves) in Arabella's flashbacks. The series delivers an illustration of how someone can be violated even after consent is given: We repeatedly see men use deception to get people in bed, or deploy it once they've already starting hooking up. Kwame finds it impossible to process his own sexual assault, personally or legally—in part because the justice system proves to have even less infrastructure for dealing with the rape of gay men—and diverts his anguish into a distasteful act of sexual mendacity. Terry comes to rethink a threesome she ostensibly opted into, whose circumstances we explore in a flashback to her and Arabella's first trip to Italy.
But Coel isn't simply out to demonstrate the many variations of sexual assault in the manner of a sex education video; rather, I May Destroy You examines how sexual, racial, and gender exploitation weave themselves into people's identities and attitudes. Episode three, "Don't Forget the Sea," crucially plants the seed of the unexamined tension within Arabella and Terry's friendship. As in almost any long-term close friendship, both have committed inconsiderate slights against the other, but, as two black women in a sexist and racist society, such petty affronts come with high stakes. Allowing her characters to respond imperfectly to each others' crises, Coel foregrounds the importance of forgiving individuals within a broken society—daringly including among the forgiven characters who have unambiguously crossed a sexual "line spectrum border" (the title of the show's eighth episode).
I May Destroy You doesn't define its characters through moral dichotomies. Episode six, "The Alliance," poignantly explores the tangled social hierarchy that gives a measure of institutional power to white girls, but also can allow black boys to assert a form of male privilege, as a flashback to a racially and sexually charged incident that occurred when Arabella was in high school blurs the line between victim and perpetrator. And the tenth episode, "The Cause the Cure," presents what's probably the show's most moving representation of the yin-and-yang influence that loved ones can have on the course of our lives, juxtaposing Arabella's realization of a truth about her beloved father (Yinka Awoni) with her processing of her and Terry's own betrayals of each other's sisterly trust.
Arabella's circuitous route to recovery feels deeply personal, but at the same time, her story touches on more universal aspects of life for someone of her gender, race, and age. At once hyper-local and global in its concerns, I May Destroy You feels eminently contemporary, a necessary artistic distillation of a distinctly modern form of life. With the series, Coel gives voice to a generation of black and brown millennials whose realities don't reflect the fantasy of a post-racial, post-feminist society that many have tried to wish into being.
Cast: Michaela Coel, Weruche Opia, Paapa Essiedu, Aml Ameen, Marouane Zotti, Harriett Webb, Stephen Wight, Natalie Walter, Adam James Network: HBO
Review: HBO's Lovecraft Country Confronts the Evil Lurking Beneath American Life
The series eclipses its source material in capturing the omnidirectional dread of Lovecraftian horror.3
The horror of Lovecraft Country, Misha Green's adaptation of Matt Ruff's 2016 novel of the same name, is at first all too real. Set in the 1950s, it introduces Korean War veteran Atticus "Tic" Freeman (Jonathan Majors) as he returns to his hometown of Chicago after receiving news of his father's (Michael Kenneth Williams) disappearance. Left a note pointing to the man's possible location in a Massachusetts town called Ardham, Tic journeys across 1950s Jim Crow America with an old friend, Letitia Lewis (Jurnee Smollett), and his uncle, George (Courtney B. Vance), a travel agent who contributes to a guidebook, similar to The Negro Motorist Green Book, of safe places to eat and lodge for Black roadtrippers.
The first episode of the series generates much dread from Tic, Letitia, and George passing through towns as white people turn their heads in eerie unison and police cars seemingly materialize out of nowhere. Close-ups of the white walls of a diner that was previously welcoming of Black customers reveal scorch marks that were barely painted over, telling us all that we need to know about how the locals here felt about integration. Cops pull out their guns the moment they set eyes on Tic and his associates, and conversations between the main characters and white people are marked by eye-averting submissiveness and fear. In fact, when the other shoe finally drops and the monsters we expect to encounter in an H.P. Lovecraft story finally materialize, the additional layer of terror heaped onto the protagonists is somewhat offset by the relief of seeing some of their white tormenters become prey.
As Lovecraft's influence on horror continues to grow in the decades since his death, artists have attempted to reckon with his racism and xenophobia, namely by recognizing that the pagan cults and corrupted humanoid monsters that make the author's work so chilling also provide insights into his pathological hatred of the Other. Lovecraft Country understands that in a world filled with underground occultists who wield strange power, such groups aren't made up of tired and huddled masses, but of folks in the upper echelons of wealth and authority. If anything, the racially and culturally diverse people whom Lovecraft saw as social pollutants would be the most routine victims of these organizations—second-class citizens whose disappearances would never be investigated by the powers that be.
The series has its share of CGI monsters, from many-limbed creatures to undead spirits, but its most compelling visual scares involve the cold framing of remote manors owned by cult leaders like Samuel Braithwhite (Tony Goldwyn) and his daughter, Christina (Abbey Lee). These individuals, with their Aryan features and stiff countenances, never betray any emotion or urgency, for they know that they live in a world where they can have whatever they want. And their sense of superiority informs Lovecraft Country's most blackly comedic moment, when Christina objects to Tic comparing their group to the KKK by saying, "My father and his associates would never fraternize with the Klan. They're too poor."
The first five episodes of the series made available to press branch out from the central plotline to cover such topics as haunted houses and body transformation, which allows Lovecraft Country to change up its scares as well as broaden its allegorical range. The realistic harassment suffered by the Black residents of a boarding house in a white neighborhood, for example, is thrown into even sharper relief by the mutilated ghosts who stalk its halls. And throughout these episodes, characters encounter gruesome objects connected to the order that hunts them, reflecting the long history of slavery and Manifest Destiny.
Green makes some significant changes to the novel, but her most rewarding come in the form of the extra time she devotes to tracking the emotional fallout of the characters' experiences, not only in relation to the horrors they witness, but the everyday degradations they suffer. One can see, for example, how an older man like George is so deeply inculcated in a racist system that, even at the height of his fear, he remains obsequious around whites. Comparatively, there's something rousing, and more than a little funny, in seeing Tic and Leti so addled by the unearthly terrors they face that they become less dutiful in abiding by the mores of Jim Crow. Eventually, they begin to lash out at harassing whites, who are so used to the power dynamics of American society that they're almost too stunned at the backtalk to be enraged by it.
Early in the first episode, a woman riding next to Tic on a bus to Chicago sees that he's reading one of Edgar Rice Burroughs's John Carter novels and expresses her disapproval of such a work with an ex-Confederate for a hero. "Stories are like people," he says. "Loving them doesn't make them perfect. You just try to cherish them and overlook their flaws." The old woman responds: "Yeah, but the flaws are still there." That exchange could be the thesis of Lovecraft Country, which eclipses even its source material in capturing the all-encompassing dread of Lovecraft's fiction while at the same time confronting head-on the most problematic aspects of his writing. The author feared America becoming infected with evil that would sink it asunder, while Green's series operates from the opposite point of view: that evil was integral to the nation's creation and that it must be fought, however futilely, to be overcome.
Cast: Jonathan Majors, Jurnee Smollett, Aunjanue Ellis, Abbey Lee, Jada Harris, Michael Kenneth Williams, Courtney B. Vance, Jordan Patrick Smith Network: HBO
Review: In My Skin Is a Bitingly Poignant, If Cluttered, Coming-of-Age Story
Though it doesn't provide room for a fully formed character arc, the series is driven by its performances and mordant humor.2.5
Sixteen-year-old Bethan Gwyndaf (Gabrielle Creevy), the protagonist of Hulu's In My Skin, has a lot going on in her life. She's the only responsible member of her household, essentially acting as caretaker for her bipolar mother, Trina (Jo Hartley), and constantly at odds with her layabout, alcoholic father, Dilwyn (Rhodi Meilir). And she's often the only voice of reason among her best friends, Travis (James Wilbraham) and Lydia (Poppy Lee Friar), who seem to always get into trouble whenever she's not around. She's also nursing a desperate crush on Poppy (Zadeia Campbell-Davies), the popular girl at school.
Bethan is a compulsive liar, so obsessed with fitting in at school that she spins elaborate stories of a home life filled with cultural activities and fancy renovations to cover for the reality that she spends much of her time taking care of Trina and tracking down Dilwyn. Her obsession with crafting a perfect external image of herself makes it impossible for her to form emotional connections with anyone, even people who genuinely care for her. Travis and Lydia, for example, want to support her in the same way she supports them, brushing off their questions about her family life and never even letting them inside her house.
Bethan is smart and sensitive, and Creevy makes the character, with her conspiratorial smile and natural aversion to being told what she can and can't do, easy to like—even as Bethan frustratingly and steadfastly refuses to let anyone in. In My Skin's Welsh-born creator, Kayleigh Llewellyn, based Bethan and Trina on herself and her own bipolar mother, and there's a lot of raw emotion in the interactions between the two characters, ranging from tender and loving to harsh and hurtful. The short-tempered Dilwyn, inspired by Llewellyn's late father, has no patience for Trina's unstable mental state, leaving her to wander the streets or tying her to the radiator to make sure she stays in the house. Her parents' combative dynamic often leaves Bethan stuck in the middle of them, attempting to play peacemaker.
As volatile as Bethan's family relationships can be, In My Skin still has plenty of humor, emanating from Bethan's biting wit and frequent flights of imagination, during which she casts herself as the romantic hero in Poppy's life, as well as a poet whose words are illustrated with perfume commercial-style images. Bethan's occasional voiceover narration is an inconsistent element of the series, but her self-aware commentary is a welcome counterpoint to her infuriatingly self-sabotaging behavior. While having Bethan explain her inner thoughts can easily become a narrative crutch, In My Skin could have benefited more from Bethan's reflective observations, which give us a deeper understanding of her often impulsive decisions.
All the more important since the first season's five half-hour episodes don't provide enough room for Bethan's arc to fully take shape, moving her only a short way down the path toward maturity and ending just as she's starting to assert herself at school, harnessing her way with words to run for student body. Her relationships with her fellow teens remain stunted, and her potential coming-out journey takes a back seat to her need to care for Trina and insulate her from trauma. Llewellyn isn't afraid to confront the dark elements of Bethan's life—the way poverty, mental illness, homophobia, and substance abuse combine to weigh her down. That her personality shines through at all is both a testament to Creevy's performance and the character's determination to make a better life for herself, however misguided.
That personality is what drives In My Skin, and Bethan's self-sufficiency is a big part of what makes her so compelling. No matter what delusion or altercation Trina involves her in throughout the show's first season, Bethan always comes back, taking on a responsibility that she never asked for and shouldn't have to handle on her own. If she doesn't always know how to balance that responsibility with everything else going on in her life, at least she's approaching every new setback with appealingly mordant humor.
Cast: Gabrielle Creevy, James Wilbraham, Jo Hartley, Poppy Lee Friar, Zadeia Campbell-Davies, Rhodri Meilir, Alexandra Riley, Di Botcher, Aled ap Steffan Network: Hulu
Review: Peacock's The Capture Wears Its Topicality Impersonally on Its Sleeve
The series sucks the juice out of its pop-cultural reference points, failing to mine our current nightmares on its own terms.2
Ben Chanan's The Capture wears its topicality on its sleeve, principally concerning the CCTV security cameras that monitor London's streets and which number in the hundreds of thousands, averaging out to one camera per dozen or so people. The casualness of the cameras' presence throughout the Peacock series is unnerving, suggesting how easily privacy can be annihilated with little in the way of pushback from the populace.
Chanan's concerns, though, aren't existential ones, as he's fashioned a murder mystery that laboriously connects modern surveillance to social media, war crimes committed in the Middle East, rising notions of fake news, and whistleblowers like Edward Snowden—all of which are referenced explicitly in the show's dialogue. Weirdly, the sociopolitical Easter eggs often feel beside the point, serving as window dressing for an impersonal game of cat and mouse.
Shaun Emery (Callum Turner) is a British soldier accused of killing a member of the Taliban during a tour of duty in Afghanistan after the man had already surrendered. Surveillance footage from a body camera seems to validate this assertion, until Shaun's bannister, Hannah Roberts (Laura Haddock), establishes a lag between the audio and the video feeds of the footage, casting doubt on the evidence. Shaun, Hannah, and others celebrate his acquittal at a local pub, after which the two kiss on the street, pointedly in view of a CCTV camera. She leaves, never to be seen again. When footage surfaces of Shaun hitting Hannah and dragging her out of the camera's sight, he denies any involvement, but he's immediately accused of a second crime that's supported by theoretically objective evidence.
This is all essentially setup, and Chanan threatens to stuff his concept up to the breaking point of contrivance. Investigating the case is Rachel Carey (Holliday Grainger), a brilliant and ambitious detective inspector with a stereotypical taste for stylish jackets and a penchant for playing by her own rules. Her superiors and peers castigate Rachel for her drive, which scans less as an acknowledgement of sexist double standards than as Chanan's need to define his characters by signpost dialogue. Shaun eludes Rachel, who's convinced of his guilt, until she begins to uncover a wealth of evidence that connects Shaun's two murder investigations, as well as a celebrated case in which Rachel foiled a potential terrorist attack.
The twist-a-minute The Capture is compulsively watchable, but we've seen much of this before. In addition to 24, which similarly pulled the rug out from under its audience with endless, sometimes ingenious reversals, The Capture also recalls Andrew Davis's The Fugitive, as well as seemingly every jargon-laden investigative crime show on TV.
Shaun and Rachel are ciphers with stock backstories, and the show's dozens of other characters often fit into easily recognizable archetypes, from the jealous sidekick to the estranged, earnest wife, to the icy authority figure with shady motives. As the latter, Detective Superintendent Gemma Garland, Lia Williams acquits herself better than much of the rest of the cast, commanding the screen with seeming ease. And in a small, mysterious role, Ron Perlman revels in a sense of understatement, suggesting a bored, bureaucratic comfort with authoritarianism that's both eerie and funny.
What The Capture doesn't have is the sense of violation that made 24 such an unmooring experience in its best seasons. That show's protagonist, Jack Bauer, was a charismatic hawk who did things that most people to the left of Dick Cheney would find monstrous. Kiefer Sutherland allowed you to see the humanity and the savagery of Bauer, which rendered the character all the more disturbing. Whatever its faults, 24 is a distinctive, authentic reaction to the political atrocities that marked the post-9/11 world.
By contrast, the violence of The Capture is just noise to further the plot. Even the notion of doctored surveillance footage has been examined before and more artfully, especially in Philip Kaufman's atmospheric Rising Sun. A newer element of our surveillance state, social media, is mentioned obligatorily but is barely explored. The Capture sucks the juice out of its pop-cultural reference points, failing to mine our current nightmares on its own terms.
Cast: Holliday Grainger, Callum Turner, Laura Haddock, Cavan Clerkin, Ginny Holder, Barry Ward, Ben Miles, Peter Singh, Lia Williams, Sophia Brown, Ron Perlman, Famke Jansen Network: Peacock
Review: The Optimism of Japan Sinks: 2020 Leads to a Curious Emotional Remove
The show's reticence to dig into hopelessness and pain leaves its admirable optimism to feel strangely artificial.2.5
The latest adaptation of Japanese science-fiction writer Sakyo Komatsu's 1973 disaster novel Japan Sinks comes to us in animated form, overseen by prolific director Masaaki Yuasa at Science Saru, the studio he co-founded. The Netflix series wastes little time dishing out the apocalyptic imagery promised by its title: Soon after a low-level earthquake hits Japan, a stronger one follows, causing buildings to crumble and pound bystanders into a gory paste beneath the rubble. The Earth vomits gas and magma, and the ground violently splits open, only to be jammed back together into new, alien configurations.
Rather than the scientific and political perspectives of Komatsu's novel and its previous adaptations, however, Japan Sinks: 2020 takes a markedly more personal viewpoint of the mixed-race Muto family and the companions they pick up along the way. Coupled with some surprisingly spare and soothing music on the soundtrack, the depictions of the family's early reunion suggest a defiantly optimistic take on the large-scale disaster story, a focus on togetherness and a celebration of the human capacity to adapt even amid utter turmoil. In one scene, the Muto patriarch, Koichiro (Masaki Terasoma), uses colored lights to illuminate some trees the way he once did at their ruined home, guiding the family back together.
As bodies rain from the sky, though, Japan Sinks: 2020 shows its teeth. Characters die in sudden, jarring ways, disorienting the viewer in a similar fashion to these travelers whose only option is to press forward on an island that can offer them no refuge. Throughout the series, these characters are mostly defined by archetypal qualities, with new ones introduced almost as soon as others are lost. This gives the Muto clan's odyssey something of a mythic quality as they make their way through symbolic destinations, from an open, seemingly empty grocery store to a community that practices kintsugi, a Japanese art of pottery repair.
The show's limitations become apparent when it slows down midway through the season, no longer relying on the pure momentum of its plot twists and striking images of environmental devastation. When Japan Sinks 2020 actually allows space for us to absorb the characters' deaths, you may feel as if there's little to mourn. With a few exceptions, they're primarily vehicles for shock and dire twists of fate rather than people to empathize with.
Yuasa's prior Netflix series, the gonzo Devilman Crybaby, injected some disarming positivity into its own increasingly bleak premise, and in a way that made its tragedies feel even more devastating. But the optimism of Japan Sinks: 2020 doesn't function quite the same way since, here, it's the overriding ethos, with characters who are more than willing to come together despite catastrophe and pain and displays of self-interest like nationalism.
While this idea is noble, the series moves on from the tragedy of these characters' lives so quickly that we never get a sense of the totality of their grief. The result, despite no shortage of daring escapes, is a disaster story whose harried pace and reticence to grapple with hopelessness and pain renders it artificial, keeping us at an emotional remove.
Cast: Reina Ueda, Tomomi Muranaka, Yuko Sasaki, Masaki Terasoma, Kensho Ono, Umeji Sasaki, Nanako Mori Network: Netflix
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27:25 minutes (12.61 MB)ETT21 #150: Barbara Brueggemann, Head of School at the GWU Online High School.
March 9, 2011
Barbara Brueggemann is the Head of School at GWUOHS, a Partnership between George Washington University and K12.com in Herndon, VA. A full 9th to 12th grade online program that addresses the social and emotional learning as part of the program.
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|June 30th, 2008
Topic: Taste Is On The Agenda For Military Meals Ready To Eat
June 30, 2008 Finding a way to a soldier's heart through chipotle chicken. Next challenge: eggs.
By Tom A. Peter, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
Natick, Mass. - Like any chef, Jeanette Kennedy's pallet has become so refined over the years that, given any dish, she can single out virtually every ingredient the pinch of black pepper, the hint of oregano, or the vegetable oil subbing for olive oil.
On a recent morning she was testing a slab of pound cake, her face blank as she silenced her other senses and focused on taste and texture.
After a good long chew, Ms. Kennedy spit the cake into a paper cup an indelicacy that was not a comment on the cake (which she deemed pretty good), but the result of a high calorie occupational hazard. This pound cake is no tea party trifle; it's combat cuisine part of an MRE, Meal Ready to Eat designed to fuel soldiers lugging 100-pound packs all day.
A food technologist at the US Army Natick Soldier Systems Center (NSSC) west of Boston, Kennedy faces creative challenges unlike those before any other chef. Meals can't just taste good; they've got to last ... for three years stored at 80 degrees F., be capable of withstanding chemical or biological attacks, and survive a 10-story free fall (when packed in a crate of 12).
In this world, making something as seemingly simple as a sandwich earns a food technologist rock star status, even if only within the confines of the lab.
Ask anyone who has worn a US military uniform and they'll have an opinion about rations. MREs the name given to the rations first served in the 1980s when canned fare gave way to meals packed in sturdy beige pouches have nicknames that pretty much sum up what many troops think: Meals Rejected by the Enemy, Meals Rarely Edible, and Meals Refusing to Exit (a name that continues to stick despite the addition of more fiber).
"You go into [your first MRE] with a preconceived notion, just from what you've heard from either your instructors or other people that you're in training with, that they're not good," says Jeremy Whitsitt, a former Army soldier and now program outreach coordinator at NSSC. "But I think a lot of that has to do with the early days of the MRE, and just with military rations in general. Over time they've kind of developed a bad reputation, because for a long period of time we weren't customer focused."
Considering the difficulties of the durability requirements, it's easy to see how taste and customer satisfaction were low priorities. The only reason MREs aren't supposed to be consumed after three years is because science hasn't found a way to stop the deterioration of taste. But technically if not gustatorially they're still edible long after the expiration date.
But, Jill St. Jean, who ate a 6- or 7-year-old MRE beef patty during her training to become a certified MRE taste test evaluator at NSSC, admits, "That one pretty much tasted like dog food smells."
In years past, the canned C-rations that served the military from World War II through Vietnam actually looked a lot like wet dog food, which is also how many soldiers remember the taste. But these rations came from a very different time, an era when cigarettes were still standard issue.
Today, troop acceptance of the meals, which cost the military $7.13 each, has taken center stage. Back in 1982 when MREs debuted, designers assumed they could hang up their aprons. But when the first Gulf War broke out, the new ration moved from limited training use to the only food soldiers ate for months on end. Angry letters flooded in from the trenches, and the military realized that rations had to be a work in progress.
Now food technologists conduct focus groups with troops across the country, follow restaurant fads, and even attend culinary school to make sure their approach isn't entirely scientific.
"[MREs] really go along with the trends," says Kennedy. "As new things come out at restaurants, new flavors like chipotle or buffalo [get popular], they get incorporated into the MRE.... The trend [now is] going to more comfort foods like Salisbury steak, beef briquette, but it's not just macaroni and cheese, it's Mexican macaroni and cheese."
Just as in the first Gulf War, when NSSC misses the mark today, soldiers in the field let them know. After living off nothing but MREs for 45 days in Afghanistan, Spc. Colin Hankinson wrote a letter that included samples of packaging from Canadian rations that offered troops customer feedback cards with every meal
He also suggested that MRE designers "expunge" Cinnamon Imperial candies from the ration. "They are not satisfying to eat or useful to trade," explains Specialist Hankinson. "During the past 45-day mission, the primary consumers of Cinnamon Imperials were Afghan children and the burn pit."
Since 1993, NSSC has tried to avoid letters like Hankinson's by creating more than 189 new MRE menu items, almost 12 per year.
The kitchen lab where Kennedy and a number of other food technologists whip up the latest MRE dishes resembles a cross between a school cafeteria kitchen and a third world operating room. There are walk-in freezers, multiple meat slicers, a retorting machine bigger than a mid-size car, and lab coats and hair nets (for both head and facial hair) are required.
It was in this kitchen that Kennedy dreamed up what she considers her tastiest creation: a spicy vegetarian penne pasta. Mixed with a soy-based, non-meat sausage crumble, the pasta is covered with a zesty sauce that Kennedy says has "kick."
Asked to describe the inspiration for the penne platoon-pleaser, she ponders a moment before responding, "Well, I can't really say there was an inspiration."
Quite simply, she was under military orders to create a new vegetarian dinner with a protein source. Beyond that, she was like Michelangelo with a chisel and a slab of marble, limited only by her imagination.
The new emphasis on customer satisfaction has made it an exciting time to be a food technologist. In many ways, it's even led to rethinking the MRE.
Take the new First Strike Ration (FSR) for example. It's meant to provide service men and women with snacks throughout the day that add up to the equivalent of three square MREs. Since the FSR is intended for soldiers on the march, and not in a position to easily prepare food, it was what ultimately inspired the creation of the three-year sandwich currently barbecue beef or chicken and Italian sausage, among others.
Though it might seem a minor innovation, for food technologists it was a breakthrough. Previously, finding a way to stop wet ingredients like BBQ sauce smothered chicken from seeping into the bread was impossible. But through tinkering with chemicals in the wet center. they managed a a long-life rendition of a sandwich resembling a Pop-Tart).
After clearing the sandwich hurdle, Michelle Richardson, a food technologist for 19 years, looks forward to overcoming the next MRE conquest: eggs.
"Now I'm trying to give [troops] a breakfast burrito, the same thing you can get at McDonald's but doesn't require any refrigeration and is shelf stable for two years," she says. "Egg is really kind of difficult [to preserve], but that's OK. I like a challenge and I don't get bored."


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Powerful and user-friendly operation
The high-quality TruTool DD 1010 is equipped with two speeds and achieves torques of 15 or 30 Nm in clockwise and counterclockwise rotation. The maximum speed is 1,450 revolutions per minute. The integrated LED lamp provides optimum illumination of the work area. At 2.4 pounds, including 2 Ah battery, the machine is extremely lightweight. The TruTool DD 1010 is well-suited for drilling starting holes in steel sheets, as well as for screwing and drilling in various materials.
Secure handling due to balanced design and low machine weight.
The powerful 2-speed motor features a quick-stop function.
A soft grip ensures a secure hold and enables low-vibration operation.
Battery device and charger are the same as the current TRUMPF 10.8 V Li-ion battery machines.
The following consumables and the corresponding accessories are included in the scope of delivery.
1 unit 1886525
1 unit, DE version: 1886527
1 unit, CH version: 1886529
1 unit, GB version: 1886530
1 unit, USA version: 1886528
1 unit 1966977
1 unit 1763681
Find the right consumables and accessories for your machine here.
Diameter 0.16 - 0.8 in.
For recharger 100 - 240 V
For recharger 100 - 240 V
For Li-ion 10.8 V rechargeable battery with 2 Ah or 4 Ah. Incl. cable, available in DE, CH, GB and USA versions
TruTool DD 1010 Li-ion rechargeable battery 10.8 V
|Quick clamping drill chuck
|10 mm
|Max. drilling-Ø, steel
|8 mm
|Max. drilling-Ø, wood
|20 mm
|Torque levels
|17 + Bohren
|Max. torque (soft/hard)
|15 Nm / 30 Nm
|Idle speed (1st/2nd gear)
The technical data of all product versions as a download.
This product range and information may vary depending on the country. Subject to changes to technology, equipment, price, and range of accessories. Please get in touch with your local contact person to find out whether the product is available in your country.


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posted 11/16/01
Damage to Buildings Near World Trade Center Towers Caused by Falling Debris and Air Pressure Wave, Not by Ground Shaking, Columbia Seismologists Report in November 20 issue of Eos
Researchers Call for Seismographic Stations in Urban Areas
On September 11, seismographs operated by Columbia Universitys Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, recorded seismic signals produced by the impacts of the two aircraft hitting the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, and the Towers subsequent collapse. While the ground shaking was consistent with the energy released by small earthquakes, it was not sufficient to cause the collapse of or damage to the surrounding buildings, as some have thought. Rather, the buildings around the Twin Towers were impacted both by the kinetic energy of falling debris and by the pressure exerted on the buildings by a dust- and particle- laden blast produced by the collapse.
Writing in the November 20, 2001, issue of Eos, published by the American Geophysical Union, seismologists from Columbias Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory outline the sequence of seismographic recordings on that tragic day, and argue that vibrations recorded on September 11 were of a magnitude thought to be too low to cause structural damage to buildings, especially in the northeast region of the United States.
However, the authors add that because there were no seismographic stations in or even near the World Trade Center, it is impossible to know for sure that the ground-shaking did not have any impact on the neighboring buildings. Ultimately, they say, urban officials should consider the importance of placing seismographic stations in high-density urban areas.
"Our recordings were made at considerable distance," said Won-Young Kim, who is in charge of seismological network operations for Lamont-Doherty. "However, plans are pending for an Advanced National Seismic System (ANSS) that calls for placing seismic instruments in such urban areas as New York City. The tragic events of September 11 show that such instrumentation can serve a purpose that sometimes transcends strict earthquake applications."
The paper was authored by 12 researchers at Lamont, including Kim; Lynn Sykes; Klaus Jacob, Paul Richards and Arthur Lerner-Lam. Lerner-Lam is the director of Columbias new Center for Hazards and Risk Research.
Lerner-Lam explained what happened once the planes hit the World Trade Center, and how they resulted in relatively small seismographic readings.
"The energy contained in the amount of fuel combusted was the equivalent to the energy released by 240 tons of TNT," said Lerner-Lam. "This energy was absorbed by the buildings and produced the observed fireballs, but did not immediately cause the collapse. During the collapse, most of the energy of the falling debris was absorbed by the towers and the neighboring structures, converting them into rubble and dust or causing other damage but not causing significant ground shaking."
Seismographic recordings of the tower collapses were recorded in five states, as far away as 428 kilometers [266 miles] in Lisbon, New Hampshire. Lamonts home station, in Palisades, New York, is located above the Hudson River, 34 kilometers [21 miles] from downtown Manhattan, where the towers stood. The aircraft impacts registered local magnitude (ML) 0.9 and 0.7, indicating minimal earth shaking as a result. The subsequent collapse of the towers, on the contrary, registered magnitudes of 2.1 and 2.3, comparable to the small earthquake that occurred beneath the east side of Manhattan on January 17, 2001.
The Lamont seismographs established the following timeline: 8:46:26 a.m. EDT [1240 UTC] Aircraft impact - north tower, Magnitude 0.9; 9:02:54 a.m. EDT [1302 UTC] Aircraft impact - south tower, Magnitude 0.7; 9:59:04 a.m. EDT [1359 UTC] Collapse - south tower, Magnitude 2.1; 10:28:31 a.m. EDT [1428 UTC] Collapse - north tower, Magnitude 2.3.
In addition, the seismic waves were short-period surface waves, meaning they traveled within the upper few kilometers of the Earths crust. They were caused by the interaction between the ground and the building foundation, which transmits the energy from the impacts and the collapses.
The authors also noted that as seen in television images, the fall of the towers was similar to that of a pyroclastic flow down a volcano, where hot dust and chunks of material move in a dust/mud matrix down the volcanos slope. The collapse of the WTC generated such a flow, though without the high temperatures common in volcanic flows.
The Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory operates 34 seismographic stations in the northeast in collaboration with several institutions. Network operations are supported by the United States Geological Survey. The network is part of the Advanced National Seismic System, a national seismological monitoring initiative being implemented through a USGS-university partnership.
The paper by Won-Young Kim, Lynn R. Sykes, J.H. Armitage, J.K. Xie, Klaus H. Jacob, Paul G. Richards, M. West, F. Waldhauser, J. Armbruster, L. Seeber, W.X. Du, and Arthur Lerner-Lam, "Seismic Waves Generated by Aircraft Impacts and Building Collapses at World Trade Center, New York City," appears in Eos, Volume 82, number 47 (20 November 2001), page 565.
Journalists may request a copy of the paper from Harvey Leifert, firstname.lastname@example.com, specifying a pdf or fax version. Please include your name, publication, postal address, phone, fax, and email address. There is no embargo.
To speak with any of the researchers listed above, please contact Stacey Gander, Administrative Assistant, at Columbias Center for Hazards and Risk Research: (845) 365-8909 or firstname.lastname@example.com.
Web site for the Lamont-Doherty Cooperative Seismographic Network:
About The Earth Institute
The Earth Institute at Columbia University is the world's leading academic center for the integrated study of Earth, its environment and society. The Earth Institute builds upon excellence in the core disciplines earth sciences, biological sciences, engineering sciences, social sciences and health sciences and stresses cross-disciplinary approaches to complex problems. Through research, training and global partnerships, it mobilizes science and technology to advance sustainable development, while placing special emphasis on the needs of the world's poor. For more information, visit www.earth.columbia.edu.


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Nutriment Venison & Chicken Formula Raw Frozen Adult Dog Food Tub 500g
These products are only available in store and for click and collect only. Place your order on the website and collect these products from your local Kennelgate store.
Available for Click and Collect
FREE UK Delivery on all orders over £35.00
£4.95 for UK Delivery on orders under £35.00
The Nutriment Venison & Chicken Formula RAW Frozen Adult Dog Food is available in two formats, either a 500g tub or a 1.4kg chubb.
Nutriment RAW Frozen Venison & Chicken Formula provides essential proteins, amino acids, fatty acids, vitamins and minerals need for your dog to thrive throughout its life.
Nutriment RAW Frozen Venison & Chicken Formula is made with 85% British meat, offal and bone, and 15% vegetables, fruits and natural super foods.
Our BARF recipes, (Biologically, Appropriate Raw Food) are painstakingly prepared meals consisting of top drawer meats, veg and minerals, meticulously mixed to accurately replicate what your pet might have eaten in the wild.
RAW foods, unlike their cooked or over-processed rivals, provides extra nutritious goodness, enhanced vitality and stamina and a natural shield against all manner of unfortunate afflictions ranging from: runny stools, bad breath, inflamed gums, discoloured teeth, itchy skin and lacklustre coats.
British Venison, British Chicken with Bone, British Beef Kidney, British Beef Liver, Fresh Carrots, Fresh Butternut Squash, Fresh Broccoli, Fresh Green Curly Kale, Scottish Cold Water Salmon Oil, Organic Virgin Coconut Oil, Raw Sea Kelp Powder (Laminaria japonica), Bilberry Powder (Vaccinium Myrtillus), Spirulina Powder (Spirulina platensis), Whole Milled Sesame Seeds, Wheat Germ Oil (natural vitamin E)
Analytical Constituents
Moisture 71.39%, Protein 16.9, Fat 8.21%, Ash (inorganic matter) 2.2%, Fibre 0.2%.


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A very special baby will get this adorable buggy when they are born. I'm going to send it to my friend Mikey P so he can deliver it!
Craft on!
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18th-century Paye House lies at the heart of Cromarty's historic conservation area, surrounded by cobbled lanes and listed buildings. Its first recorded owner was the keeper of the County Gaol who also ran an alehouse. In later years it served as one of the town's hubs as a general store, a doctors' surgery, a chip shop and a depot for antique toys.
Enjoy the Cromarty sunsets from the garden patio, make the most of the area's fine local ingredients on the kitchen's Rayburn and come home to a roaring open fire after walks around town.
Accommodation details
- 2 storeys
- Sleeps 6 - 2 doubles, 1 twin
- Sitting room with open fire
- Kitchen
- Dining room/study area
- Bathroom with bath and shower over bath
- WC with wash basin
- Garden with patio
- Oil fired central heating
- Free parking on Church Street, around the corner
- EPC Rating: G20
About the area
Cromarty has plenty to enchant both travellers and holidaymakers: sandy beaches, Georgian architecture, bottlenose dolphins, and bird colonies of international importance. It first became a Royal Burgh in the 13th century. In the 1700s salt-fish processing and sea-trade helped to swell the town's economy, and many of its famous merchants' houses date from this era.
Cromarty is only 40 minutes' drive from Inverness, the "capital of the Highlands".
Things to do
- Visit the birthplace of Hugh Miller. Miller was a stonemason, geologist and writer, whose thatched cottage is now a museum with a colourful garden of native plants.
- Climb the 'Hundred steps' to South Sutor, accessed via the Reeds Park Path along the shore at the east end of town. The Sutors are rocks on either side of the firth thought once to be the abode of two giant shoemakers.
- You'll be less than an hour's drive from Culloden. Discover the story behind the Jacobite uprising and the last battle to be fought on Scottish soil.
Getting there
Cromarty is 22 miles north-east of Inverness. From the Kessock Bridge in Inverness, follow the A9 north until signs for A832 to Cromarty.
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Local grocery store evacuated after possible Freon leak
Madison County dispatch confirmed the Harp's in Huntsville has been evacuated as a safety precaution after Freon leaked at the grocery store.
Huntsville Fire Chief Jeremy Shinn said the Freon leak was caused by the store's refrigeration motor.
Firefighters said they were notified about the leak earlier Wednesday evening. Customers were already cleared from the building when they arrived, firefighters said.
A Walmart store nearby was evacuated as well.
Shinn said firefighters had difficulty seeing in the building, but that there wasn't any smoke.
"It bled off all (this) Freon into the room that houses the motors, which then proceeded to go in the rest of the store, creating a haze which people thought it was smoke at first," Shinn said.
Shinn said the haze made it impossible to detect where the actual leak was. He said firefighters didn't stop the leak, but it rather ran out of Freon.
Harp's management said they were still repairing the refrigeration system, and that it was out for about two hours.


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Explore our range of garden sheds with windows. A shed with windows can have a transformational effect on the interior and exterior of your shed. Not only do windows allow for a light, airy and spacious interior, they also create a much more admiral appearance from the exterior.
A garden shed with windows can be a much-needed addition to your garden. Whether you're looking to create a vintage-inspired shed, a tranquil getaway or a garden retreat, the added extra of a window creates much more than just a shed.
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To check whether you're eligible for free delivery check-out our delivery page, or contact us for more information.


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Jessica Alba Fur Purse
Jessica Alba completed her lovely ensemble with a black M2Malletier fur purse.
Jessica Alba Cocktail Dress
Jessica Alba looked absolutely darling in a sleeveless white lace dress by Ralph Lauren during the Hollywood Stands Up to Cancer event.
Brand: Ralph Lauren
Brand: Ralph Lauren
Jessica Alba Evening Sandals
Jessica Alba kept the feminine elegance going all the way down to her black Jimmy Choo evening sandals.
Brand: Jimmy Choo
Brand: Jimmy Choo
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Message Board
W.G. Sebald Message Board
Talk about the novels, new and used books that Sebald has written!
Author Sebald's Book Reviews
Austerlitz:by W.G. Sebald: Translated by Anthea Bell: published by random House, NY 2001 "Austerlitz", the story of a young boy sent from Czechoslowakia to Wales by the Children's Transport (KinderTransport) of 1939, my be an attempt by the author, a German, to expiate the past by revealing it through the eyes of an orphan searching for his parents. Brought up by an austere minister and his even more withdrawn wife, Austerlitz does not find out that ...
The Emigrants
In the novel, "The Emigrants" , published in 1993, W.G. Sebald traces the lives of four exiles from Germany. In each story, he comes closer and closer to the subject of the Holocaust from which Sebald himself might be fleeing, at least in memory. The story of Max Ferber, the artist, is the most telling. The narrator in the story first meets Max in Birmingham, England where Max has a studio.Twenty-two years later, when he returns to the city, ...
"Vertigo", a novel by the German writer, W.G. Sebald, traces the lives and feeling of three literary figures: Casanova, Stendhal, and Kafka. His journeys take him over the Alps from Vienna to Venice and Verona as he assumes the personal of thes historical characters, bringing their impressions and experiences to live. Sebald also recounts his own travels to Italy where, in one of his side riffs, he admires the frescoes of Giotto. Overwhelmed by the pai...


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- Title
- Spatial assessment of fin whale hotspots and their association with krill within an important Antarctic feeding and fishing ground
- Description
- Fin whale (Balaenoptera physalus quoyi) habitat use and its relationship to environmental conditions are generally unknown in the Southern Ocean, presenting challenges for predicting their seasonal occurrence and potential effects of fishing pressure and climate change on this endangered species. Using biological data collected during 14 shipboard surveys off the northern Antarctic Peninsula and oceanographic data from satellite remote sensing, we mapped the distribution of fin whale hotspots, Antarctic krill abundance (biomass from acoustics, concentrations from nets) and ocean conditions during mid- and late-summer to investigate the environmental determinants of whale hotspots. Generalized additive models (GAM) were used to test the hypothesis that intra-seasonal changes in fin whale hotspot distribution relate to sea surface temperature (SST), krill abundance and eddy kinetic energy (EKE). More whale hotspots (sightings and individuals) are observed during late- than mid-summer surveys. During mid-summer, hotspots occurred near Elephant Island while in late-summer they were distributed throughout the slope region in proximity to the mean location of the southern Antarctic Circumpolar Current Front. The spatial mean of EKE did not differ between mid- and late-summer surveys, but the spatial mean of SST was significantly warmer during late-summer. The GAM for mid-summer indicates that fin whale hotspots were positively related to SST, EKE and acoustically determined krill biomass. The GAM for late-summer indicates the hotspots were negatively related to net-based krill abundance and positively related to acoustic krill biomass and EKE. This study is important because environmental determinants of fin whale hotspots may be used as reference points for implementing future conservation plans for their recovering populations. © 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.
- Author
- Santora, Schroeder, Loeb
- Date


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Conference Venue
Christchurch is a future-focused city, achieving international acclaim for its sustainable urban design.
You will discover award-winning architecture, inspiring public art, restored heritage venues and brand new meeting spaces set amongst beautiful parks and gardens.
Christchurch Airport is just 15 minutes' drive from the city
Our safe, compact and flat city
Rydges Latimer Christchurch
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Christchurch, 8011
Our Christchurch venue overlooks scenic Latimer Square, an iconic New Zealand green space with ample room for
We are offering free, unlimited Wi-Fi throughout all guest rooms, public areas and conference spaces.


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Since 1976 I have been practicing what I call " Creative Schizophrenia," a medicinal performance/theatrical character creating device that allows me to get out of my own skin safely and without the added burden of being institutionalized for public displays of difference that might offend the common good. It all started seven score years ago and was so noteworthy/bothersome that my father named me Sarah Burnhardt, commenting no doubt on my ability to feel and dramatize the atmosphere of our home, a gift I used later on as my performance modus operandi.
The seven fairy-tale-like female personas that came OUT of me in the late 1970's were from different countries and were totally fabulous: a French poet, a British neurosurgeon, a Karate Black Belt, a Jazz singer, a nun . You can see them for free on You Tube: Learning To Talk. At that time, for over a year I sat in front of a video camera and talked as them, interviewed myself as them, became them and escaped from being me which is admittedly a great Theological device but at the time was an indication of an untreated DSM's listing of medical conditions with verifiable labels like: PTSD/Depression/Untreated Grief/Tragic Trauma/Dissociation/Suicidal Ideation. If I had been a seriously practicing and loyal Hindu Vedantist at that time I would have been content and silent, not touched a video camera and meditated on their salient, holy statement which warns: "I am not this body and mind," a mantra I could have murmured over and over,"I am not this body and mind, I am not this body and mind, I am not this body and mind." My Guru from India would have applauded and approved of my using his teachings to heal myself, but no, artist that I am, I resorted to video and MY WAY, creating a therapy that fits my rebellious nature.CATHOLICISM And having grown up strict Roman Catholic and even going as far as entering a convent for 2 years so I could become a saint-in-training, I could have gone quietly into the depressed night, not made videos of myself as these successful, fabulous and professionally alluring women and instead, could have practiced a Christian mystical/Biblical version of inner persona morphing and also could have prayed mantra-like day and night: "It is not I that lives but Christ who lives in me. It is not I that lives but Christ who lives in me. It is not I that lives but Christ who lives in me." Again, art won out, I didn't do that but continued taking care of my mental business via video/performance/writing books and teaching my art-life methods all over the world and created my own " Linda's church of art." In this church, I made the rules and I was the live-in priest.
Some thirty years later, the recipe of being fantasy people so I could learn how to like being me changed from my wanting to be fairy-tale people and I began wanting to become and act like REAL people. For example; Hillary Clinton, Jill Johnston, Paul McMahon, Mother Teresa and Bob Dylan were the one's I dopplegangered in the hopes of getting close to me, not to them. See Masks, you tube.The thought is, I love being Mother Teresa and all of these sundry wonderful people, can I love being me as much as I love being them? Little did I know that being them and loving them was a lube/prompt to liking me and that I was next in line. Sometime soon I would become a maskless ME!
Just last night, May 27, 2017, Woodstock NY celebrated Bob Dylan's 76th birthday at the Bearsville Theatre. The organizer, Luann Bielawa, offered me a comp ticket because I had already performed a 7 hour Bob Dylan lip-synch event on a lift for 7 hours a few years ago and she knew of this performance and my belief that I looked like him and wanted everyone else to believe that as well. See Tobe Carey's you tube, Linda As Bob. Actually my two brothers really do look like him and when I self-apply a thin moustache on my upper lip and wear the right hat, jacket, cowboyish pants and sunglasses, I pass for him a little. So last night I applied the moustache at home, drove to the theatre, drank my semi-cold Genesee beer in the car when I arrived there and then began my walk to the venue into invisibility because only twice that entire night did I "get" the reaction, get the applause, get the nod, get the "Oh look, it's really Bob," reaction that I expected. In fact, what I got was an interesting non-nod of "let's not notice this person because IT MIGHT BE BOB and we are Woodstockians and we are so cool and so used to illuminati and famous personages being in our town, in our midst, in our bars, in our restaurants, that it is actually RUDE to acknowledge them and spoil their need for privacy, anonymity and real time presence." So they didn't paparazzi me, didn't ask for an autograph, didn't smile, except for that one woman who flirted with/wanted me and the other woman friend who got that it was me/Bob but never came over to let me know that she knew.
Thank God that a man scrambling to his seat in the theatre, rubbed past my legs and gave me at least an, "Excuse me sir," and that made my day but after two hours of listening to incredibly phenomenal Bob Dylan music played superbly by Woodstock musician artists, I was blown into such happiness and let-me-touch-your-feet appreciation of people who don't look like Bob but sound his words, his feelings, his poetry and his brilliance sans a faux moustache, Dylan hat or sunglasses that I realized, I'm closer to letting them honor Bob and letting me just be ME!
DSM begone. My mask is almost off.
Linda Mary Montano


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Word around town is that Will Smith is not so officially involved with "I Am Legend 2" as we thought he was. Well I actually didn't know they were making a sequel so I guess I didn't think anything. But you get the idea. In a recent interview Big Willy said he has no involvement with the project right now but may if the script turns out to be great. What a magical world it would be if we could all call our boss every morning and say I'm not really into work today but if it turns out to be fun there give me a ring and I'll head in. But maybe not.
"In the Dark" is a new horror anthology and today we've got some exciting casting news for one if its sequences titled "To Be Loved". Gwendolyn Sweet, whom the 15 people that still subscribe to Playboy will recognize as a model of theirs, will play the lead in the chapter that follows a young lass who looks to be sweet and innocent on the outside but has a dark twisted side that comes out behind closed doors. Full disclosure here, I subscribed to Playboy for close to ten years and for the past 2 years they call me at least once a month asking me to come back. It's pretty funny to listen to a 75 year old woman ask me about my Playboy subscription. I recommend it to everyone.
There's really nothing funny about The West Memphis Three. A true life story about 3 teens who were imprisoned for close to 10 years for a murder they didn't commit. The film about the whole ordeal titled "Devil's Knot" is in the works and today we've learned that both Dane DeHaan and Amy Ryan have been added to the cast. I mean "Devil's Knot" is kind of funny, cause you know it sounds like a porn. But other than that this is 100% serious.
Kathy Baker will always hold a special place in my heart as the slutty chick who wanted to bang Edward Scissorhands really bad. I didn't get out much as a kid. And now she's been cast in the film "Model Home" along side Monique Gabriela Curnen. The flick tells the story of a single mother who's recruited to live in unsold homes and finds herself entertaining dangerous thoughts. I have no fond memories of Monique but the first girl who saw me nude had that same name and she had weird sunken eyes so that's something I guess.


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What show recently impressed you?
Oh man, so many good shows lately! I have to say the one that stands out in my mind was Giant at The Public. The score! The cast (Kate Baldwin/Katie Thompson — to die for)! The orchestra! When do you get to hear a full pit like that today? Amazing.
What production are you most excited to see?
I think it's split three ways between Kinky Boots, Matilda and Pippin. It's tough to get to the theatre on your night off — but I absolutely would for those three. Especially because I'm in love with Billy Porter and Patina Miller (CMU, represent!) and couldn't be more thrilled for their [Tony] wins. So happy for them.
What play/musical would you most like to revive on Broadway, and which role would you want to play?
Hmmmm...definitely Thoroughly Modern Millie, Jimmy. Les Miserables, Marius (though I'm more an Enjolras probably). In the Heights, Benny (yeah, I said it...). Miss Saigon, Chris. That's enough, right? Let's start there
What are your current/upcoming projects?
I'm pretty excited to be working on my first EP, "Songs About A Girl," hopefully out in 2014. Since 2006 I've had this youtube channel, and I'm always updating it with new videos (YouTube.com/zakresnick). A Justin Timberlake cover coming soon with Mr. Jason Gotay! And a couple of things that hopefully I'll be able to tell you about soon! Keep your eyes and ears open.


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One of the key causes that is taken up by human rights advocates is that of paid maternal and family leave. Writing in the New York Times, Professor Stephanie Koontz asks with evident disdain why, fifty years after the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, the United States—along with such countries as Suriname, Liberia, and Tonga—is alone among the developed nations of the world in denying paid maternity leave to mothers.
Similarly, the movement for mandatory paid-sick leave, as reported by Melanie Trottman in the Wall Street Journal, has also gathered support in the wake of recent flu outbreaks at the city, state, and national level. About 40 percent of private workers do not get this benefit.
These pushes for change ignore all of the inter-firm differences that make certain policies unwise for some companies even when they make good sense to others. Yet when the objection is raised that "such laws weigh on businesses and ultimately hurt workers," the point is treated as odd. Recent evidence from Connecticut indicates that when firms with greater than fifty employees are required to let workers accrue sick leave (up to five days per year)—one hour for each 40 hours worked—jobs are lost.
But none of these concerns are sufficient to slow down the train wreck. After all, it is always possible to shrug and proclaim that "employers are going to have to re-evaluate their financial situation"—which they may well do by lowering wages or refusing to expand their labor force.


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Relativity is the reigning theory of gravity. In situations where we can measure it directly, such as binary neutron stars, its predictions match the real world with remarkable precision. And, when supplemented with inflation and dark matter, relativity nicely reproduces the large-scale structure of the Universe. But this reliance on other models like dark matter means that we don't have a direct, large-scale test of relativity. Now, scientists have measured the redshifting of light by galaxy clusters to give use the biggest test of relativity yet. Their results show that relativity passes muster, while modified forms of Newtownian gravity fall short.
Light emitted by distant objects rarely makes it to Earth at the same wavelength that it started out at. The fabric of the Universe is expanding, which causes a redshift. Most objects are also moving relative to the Earth, which adds a Doppler shift to the light. Finally, light that has to climb out of a large gravity well on its way to Earth also gets red-shifted.
In theory, it should be easy to account for the distance and Doppler shift; anything that's left over should be the effect of gravity. Unfortunately, even with something as massive as a galaxy cluster, the gravity-induced redshift is about two orders of magnitude smaller than a typical Doppler shift. On top of that, the motion of galaxies within clusters should be random relative to the Earth, creating a broad, Gaussian distribution of color shifts. Picking a gravitational signal out of that curve would require a large data set to help cut down on the statistical noise.
Thanks to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, we now have an absolutely enormous data set, containing over 7,800 galaxy clusters. The authors identified the brightest galaxy in a cluster, defined that as the cluster's center, and used it to calibrate the red shift of the cluster due to distance. From there, they calculated the relative red and blue shifts of all nearby galaxies.
This created the expected Gaussian curve. The flat sections of the curve represent galaxies that were in the field of view, but not gravitationally associated with the cluster. Within the cluster, the random relative motion of the galaxies relative to Earth creates a rounded peak. The authors were able to look for deviations from the expected Gaussian curve, and relate those to the predicted mass of the cluster in order to test for a gravitational red shift.
It worked. With a 99 percent confidence level, they've detected a gravitational red shift effect that is consistent with the one predicted by relativity, provided the mass takes into account the predicted levels of dark matter.
The relativity/dark matter combination, however, is just the most successful theory of gravity; it's not the only one. Some researchers have been attempting to develop a form of modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) that is consistent with relativity, called the tensor-vector-scalar (TeVeS) theory. So, the authors plugged TeVeS into their calculations instead, and checked whether it could account for the effects they had detected. Close to the center of the cluster, TeVeS worked just as well as relativity. But at larger distances, the predictions and measurements start to diverge, and the authors conclude they can reject TeVeS with a 95 percent confidence.
The authors note that this measurement isn't dependent on any specific assumption about the structure of the Universe; it simply measures the ability of TeVeS to predict the behavior within galaxy clusters. "This implies that the discrepancy between TeVeS theory and the observations is unlikely to be a consequence of a specific choice of cosmological parameters," they write, "but indeed points to the inadequacy of this model to describe the Universe on very large scales."
So dark matter is in, MOND is out. What about inflation and dark energy? The authors plugged a dark energy model called f(R) into their calculations. Even under some unfavorable assumptions, dark energy remained consistent with the data from the galaxy clusters, so that it was impossible to distinguish between relativity and dark energy and relativity alone. If we wait a few billion years, it should be possible to get a clearer answer (my conclusion, not that of the authors).
The authors wrap up the paper by citing past results on gravitational red shifts, showing that they've now been detected everywhere from lab experiments on Earth to large galaxy clusters: "These results make gravitational red-shift the only effect predicted by general relativity that has been confirmed on spatial scales spanning 22 orders of magnitude." Overall, an impressive feat.
Nature, 2011. DOI: 10.1038/nature10445 (About DOIs).