For election workers, Trump's lies have meant threats, harassment and a poisoned dog by Chris Arnold

The county election worker was crossing the street with a locked bag full of ballots when he saw a Jeep Gladiator pickup truck come around the corner. It sped toward him and slammed on the brakes, skidding to a stop just past him. The driver glared.

"Then she leaned out of the car and looked at me and yelled, 'you f***ing traitor!'" he said.

The woman had been following him all day as he drove around collecting ballots from drop-boxes in Coos County, Ore. The man — whom we've agreed not to identify because he said he fears being further targeted — says she would get out and film him, and that she had a gun on her hip. 

 

 Things weren't much better over at the county elections office. Local people, apparently juiced up on misinformation related to Donald Trump's false claims about rigged elections, were camped in the hallway day after day.

"Some of them were very mean," says Dede Murphy, the county clerk during this past midterm election. One called her "a wicked woman." Another barked through a bullhorn, "you should be ashamed of yourself."

Even though Trump won 59% of the vote in this county in 2020, Murphy and the other election workers say two years later people were still yelling in their faces about voter fraud. 

 Wesley Lapointe for NPR

Some of it seemed ridiculous, but other times it was scary.

Officials set up metal detectors at the entrance to the building, and over about a month, a security guard stopped people from bringing in a total of 20 guns and 60 knives or other weapons.

The worker collecting ballots called 911 four times the day he says he was menaced by the woman in the Jeep.

"I have had somebody following me," he tells a police dispatcher in one call. "She tried to run me off the road."

The roads in this rural Oregon county wind through steep wooded hillsides, logging trucks hurtle past in the other direction. He says the woman tailgated on his bumper, driving erratically, sometimes swerving into the oncoming traffic lane next to him. 

 "I was terrified," he says. "I was worried that I might not make it off that road."

 

As the country heads into the next election, NPR obtained contact information for thousands of local election workers and reached out to them. Workers and officials across 22 different states responded and told NPR they've received threats, felt unsafe doing their jobs, feared for the safety of their families, or even their pets.

Their stories show that more than two years after the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, not only is Trump's lie that he won the election alive and well in a large chunk of the Republican Party, but the misinformation about voter fraud is endangering the people whose job it is to conduct elections.

"I actually bring a weapon with me every day to work," says Nancy Boren, the director of elections in Columbus, Ga. "We also have security here at this building who, it sounds even crazy to say this, but, walks me to and from my car."

 

NPR spoke to many election workers who didn't want to use their names for fear of further harassment or threats.

"We have a lot of, you know, just general 'f*** you's, you're trying to rig the election... you oughta be ashamed of yourself,'" says one worker in Georgia.

"They said that they were coming for my family and somebody would have to pay for this," says an official in Virginia.

A looming sense of menace

When threats are made, often they're vague and just add to a looming sense of menace. But sometimes they're more direct.

"The threat was very specific with my name and my home address, and that I had four children and that all four of my children should be killed," says Thomas Liddy, an official with Maricopa County in Arizona who was threatened this past November. The FBI tracked down and arrested the person, who pleaded guilty to a criminal charge and is awaiting a sentence of up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

 

Another official in a southern state tells NPR she too was targeted during last year's midterms. "The threat was specifically that the following week I would not be alive, my home address was made public online, and then my dog was poisoned." The official says the dog survived, barely.

There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud. Following the 2020 election, more than 60 lawsuits brought by Trump and his allies were all thrown out of court.

The election officials being targeted say they're just trying to do their jobs. They're Republicans, Democrats and independents — everyone from top state officials to lower-level county workers who handle ballots or even senior citizen volunteers. 

 

2024 could be worse

"Election officials have been under siege," says David Becker, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research. "They've been threatened, abused and harassed for nearly three years now and it's getting worse."

The Department of Homeland Security issued a bulletin in May warning that perceptions of the next presidential race could mobilize individuals to commit violence.

Many election officials say they need more resources to pay for better security and to do outreach to fight misinformation. Some election workers tell NPR they are scared by the threats and harassment and consider quitting their jobs. Others say it hardens their resolve to do the important work of running free and fair elections.

 

Other recent research backs up what NPR found. A survey from the nonprofit Brennan Center found nearly one in three election workers say they've had to deal with harassment, abuse or threats. And almost half worry about the safety of their colleagues in future elections.

"I am very nervous about next year... the presidential year," says one of the election workers in Coos County. She and her husband, the worker who says he was chased in his car, both work in the local elections office. And they've been dealing with all this while having their first baby. She was nine months pregnant this past midterm election.

"During that time I was scared every time I came into work, being at work, leaving," she says. "And I didn't get to feel safe at home either."

She says the couple was followed home from work. People knocked on their neighbors' doors asking questions about them. They even went through the couple's garbage.

It was a relentless mix of ridiculousness along with things that were more frightening, such as violent-sounding posts on social media, election workers told NPR.

An appeals court has struck down a key path for enforcing the Voting Rights Act by Hansi Lo Wang

A federal appeals court has struck down a key path for enforcing the Voting Rights Act.

The new ruling in an Arkansas redistricting lawsuit may set up the next U.S. Supreme Court fight that could further limit the reach of the Voting Rights Act's protections for people of color.

The legal dispute is focused on who is allowed to sue to try to enforce key provisions under Section 2 of the landmark civil rights law, which was first passed in 1965.

Private individuals and groups, who did not represent the U.S. government, have for decades brought the majority of Section 2 cases to court. Those cases have challenged the redrawing of voting maps and other steps in the elections process with claims that the voting power of people of color has been minimized. 

 U.S. District Judge Lee Rudofsky, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, ruled in February 2022, however, that only the head of the Justice Department, the U.S. attorney general, can bring Section 2 lawsuits and dismissed an Arkansas redistricting case brought by advocacy groups representing Black voters in the state.

 

On Monday, that lower court ruling was upheld in a 2-1 vote by a three-judge panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, whose rulings apply to Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota.

"For much of the last half-century, courts have assumed that [Section 2] is privately enforceable. A deeper look has revealed that this assumption rests on flimsy footing," wrote Circuit Judge David Stras, a Trump appointee, in the majority opinion joined by Judge Raymond Gruender, an appointee of former President George W. Bush.

Chief Circuit Judge Lavenski Smith, another Bush appointee, dissented.

 

"Until the [Supreme] Court rules or Congress amends the statute, I would follow existing precedent that permits citizens to seek a judicial remedy. Rights so foundational to self-government and citizenship should not depend solely on the discretion or availability of the government's agents for protection," Smith wrote.

The full 8th Circuit Court could be asked to review the panel's decision. Ultimately, many legal watchers say this Arkansas case may be appealed to the Supreme Court.

 

This latest ruling comes after the Arkansas State Conference NAACP and the Arkansas Public Policy Panel filed a Section 2 lawsuit over Arkansas' state House map, arguing that it dilutes the voting power of Black people. According to the 2020 census, 16.5% of the state's population is Black. But only 11 out of Arkansas' 100 state House districts in the redistricting plan drawn by Republican politicians are majority-Black districts, where Black voters have a reasonable chance of electing a representative of their choice.

In the trial court ruling dismissing the case, Rudofsky noted "there is a strong merits case that at least some of the challenged districts" in the GOP politicians' plan are "unlawful" under Section 2.

 

Attorneys for the Arkansas State Conference NAACP and the Arkansas Public Policy Panel have said they're prepared to use another route for continuing this lawsuit under a federal statute known as Section 1983, which allows people to sue state government officials when their civil rights under federal law are violated.

"This decision is a devastating blow to the civil rights of every American, and the integrity of our nation's electoral system," said Barry Jefferson, political action chair of the Arkansas State Conference NAACP, in a statement.

Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Voting Rights Project, who is representing the Arkansas State Conference NAACP and other challengers of the Arkansas state legislative map, called the panel's ruling "a travesty for democracy."

 By failing to reverse the district court's radical decision, the Eighth Circuit has put the Voting Rights Act in jeopardy, tossing aside critical protections that voters fought and died for," Lakin added in a statement.

But Arkansas state Attorney General Tim Griffin, whose office is defending the Republican politicians on Arkansas' apportionment board and the map they approved, said Monday's decision by the panel is "a victory for our citizens and for the rule of law."

 

"For far too long, courts across the country have allowed political activists to file meritless lawsuits seeking to seize control of how states conduct elections and redistricting. This decision confirms that enforcement of the Voting Rights Act should be handled by politically accountable officials and not by outside special interest groups," Griffin said in a statement.

In a June ruling for a closely watched Alabama congressional redistricting case — which was filed by a group of Black voters in Alabama and other private groups — a majority of the Supreme Court justices reaffirmed the court's earlier rulings on how Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act prohibits racial gerrymandering in crafting political districts.

Since then, a federal judge has struck down Georgia's congressional and state legislative maps and a 5th Circuit panel has concluded Louisiana's congressional map likely diluted Black voters' power — both in similar Section 2 lawsuits originally filed not by the U.S. attorney general, but by individuals and groups who do not represent the federal government.

 

Lifestyle of world's oldest dog holds lessons for healthy aging by Jacqueline Boyd

 

Nov. 13 (UPI) -- If you have ever cared for a pet dog, it is a sad truth that you are likely to outlive them. So it's no wonder that people may be asking how to increase their pet's longevity following the news that a dog in Portugal lived longer than 30 years.

The Guinness World Record Holder of the title of World's Oldest Dog, Bobi, recently died at 31. This is an impressive age for any dog. Smaller dogs typically live longer than larger breeds but the average dog will get to around 13 years old before age inevitably catches up with them. 

 Bobi apparently lived a relatively unrestricted life in the Portuguese countryside, eating the same food as his human caregivers and enjoying free roam of the nearby forestland. His unusual longevity has been attributed to this lifestyle. While there is some debate about Bobi's actual age, his diet and lifestyle, unsurprisingly, has attracted much attention from canine caregivers. 

 There is a lot we don't understand about aging but there are common factors associated with longevity for many species. These factors seem to help increase lifespans in species as varied as the microscopic worm Caenorhabditis elegans, dogs and humans. This suggests that other species can be useful models in helping us understand our own aging process. 

 

So, what practical measures can we take to help ourselves and our dogs live as long and healthy lives as possible?

Nutritious diet

Bobi reportedly ate the same food as his owners. But dogs and humans have different nutritional needs. This means that feeding your dog the same food you eat is unlikely to meet their requirements and could even be dangerous.

However, diet does affect aging. In humans, a diet low in saturated fat and high in fruit and vegetables supports healthy aging.

 For dogs, increased levels of antioxidants support energy generation in the body's cells and aid learning and brain health in older dogs. These include vitamins C and E, and nutrients such as alpha-lipoic acid (found in red meat and organ meats) and L-cartinine (also found in red meat). These nutrients are typically provided in fortified, prepared dog food. 

 

If you feed your dog a commercial diet, check it is labeled as "complete." This ensures that if you feed the recommended amount, your dog will be getting all the nutrients at the right levels to meet their needs. Home-prepared dog diets are often deficient in key nutrients, unless they are carefully prepared.

Keep active

Physical activity is often linked to healthy aging. Studies suggest that dogs living in rural areas and large dogs are more active than their older, smaller and urban counterparts. Interestingly, older caregivers also have more active dogs compared to younger dog owners.

 

Walking is a simple way to support maintenance of a healthy body weight in dogs and their caregivers, leading to mutual health benefits. Age, size, breed, health and other variables will affect the amount of exercise a dog needs. For example, dogs originally bred to work and be highly active, such as collies and spaniels, are likely to need more physical activity (intensity and duration) than toy breeds such as pugs, who might be happy with a gentle wander around the neighborhood.

But almost without exception, walking and other activity is good for our dogs. It can also mean that you and your dog are happier, another key factor linked to healthy aging. 

 

Healthy body weight

Excess body weight is associated with reduced health and lifespan in dogs and people. Research consistently indicates that a degree of calorie restriction and a lean body weight is associated with increased longevity in a range of species. Somewhat paradoxically, photographs of Bobi suggest that he was carrying rather more body weight that would be considered healthy for a typical dog of his size.

Regular monitoring of your dog's (and your own!) body weight is a good way to maintain a healthy waistline and support longevity. It is important to know what a healthy body weight and shape looks and feels like for your own dog. Many caregivers fail to recognize what a healthy, lean animal should look like and others underestimate how much excess weight their pets are carrying.

With practice, you can become familiar with a healthy body shape by checking that your dog has a defined waistline when viewed from above, that you can feel (but not necessarily see) their ribs and that their abdomen tucks up when viewed from the side. You can use breed specific resources to understand more about the physical shapes of some dogs. 

 

Feeding your dog a suitable amount to meet their nutritional needs while maintaining a lean body weight can help reduce the chances they will develop painful and distressing conditions such as osteoarthritis.

With some simple dietary and lifestyle interventions, we can make sure our shared lives with our dogs are as happy, healthy and long as possible. Our companion dogs might not reach 31 years old, but we can certainly make mutual longevity an aim.

The floating desalination machines powered by the waves by Katherine Latham

"The ocean is an unforgiving place," says Susan Hunt. "But our technology is designed to operate there - it goes up and down in the waves, all day and all night."

Ms Hunt is chief innovation officer for a Canadian start-up called Oneka Technologies. It has developed floating desalination systems that turn seawater into fresh water.

While large, shore-based desalination plants typically require vast amounts of energy to remove the salt, Oneka's small units are powered solely by the movement of the waves.

"Desalination facilities are conventionally powered by fossil fuels," says Ms Hunt. "But the world has certainly reached a pivot point. We want to move away from fossil fuel powered desalination."

More than 300 million people around the world now rely on desalinated water, according to the global trade body, the International Desalination Association. This water is supplied by more than 21,000 plants, almost twice as many as there were 10 years ago.

Demand for such plants is likely to grow further, as the world population grows and climate change continues to put pressure on fresh water supplies.

 

At least half of the world's population "live under highly water-stressed conditions for at least one month of the year", according to one report published earlier this year. Meanwhile, a 2020 study said the desalination sector would grow by 9% each year between now and 2030.

There are currently two techniques used to desalinate seawater - thermal and membrane. In thermal-based desalination, seawater is heated until it evaporates, leaving the salt behind. It is typically very energy intensive.

The membrane-based system, also known as reverse osmosis, works by pushing saltwater through a semi-permeable membrane, which catches the salt. This still requires a significant amount of energy, but less so than thermal.

In both cases, the energy supply more often doesn't come from renewable sources or nuclear, and so contributes to carbon dioxide emissions.

Each technique also produces a waste stream of highly concentrated salt water or brine. If this is not properly diluted before being discharged back into the sea, then it can create "dead zones" - areas where the salt levels are too high to support marine life.

Oneka's floating desalination machines - buoys anchored to the seabed - use a membrane system that is solely powered by the movement of the waves.

The buoys absorb energy from passing waves, and covert it into mechanical pumping forces that draw in seawater and push around a quarter of it through the desalination system. The fresh, drinking water is then pumped to land through pipelines, again only using the power provided by the waves.

"The tech uses no electricity," says Ms Hunt. "It is 100% mechanically driven."

The units require just one metre high waves to work, and the firm hopes that it will start to sell them commercially next year. They come in three sizes, the largest of which is 8m long by 5m wide, and can produce up to 49,000 litres (13,000 US gallons) of drinking water per day.

The brine that is produced is mixed back in with the three quarters of seawater that the buoys pull in but hasn't gone through the membrane. This is then released back into the sea. "It's only about 25% saltier than the original sea water," says Ms Hunt. "It's a much lower concentration of brine compared to traditional desalination methods."

She adds that Oneka's system is modular - multiple buoys can be anchored beside each other - and that it is marine-life friendly.

In the Netherlands, Dutch firm Desolenator has a different approach to using renewable energy to power desalination - it uses solar panels.

 

The heat and electrical energy these collect is used to power a thermal evaporation system. Any electricity not immediately used is stored in batteries, while excess heat is kept in hot water tanks. This results in an uninterrupted energy supply, meaning that the desalination can continue through the night.

Desolenator also does not release any brine back into the sea. Instead it collects all the salt for commercial use.

"Brine has long been a headache in desalination," says Lauren Beck, the firm's head of projects. "Essentially it's a waste product. We crystallise the brine to produce high value salt.

"And because we don't use any harmful chemicals this is a very pure, high quality salt that can we sold for any kind of industrial use. This is really focusing on the circular economy approach."

 

Louise Bleach, Desolenator's vice president of business development, adds that global shortages of fresh water are making it ever more valuable. "You hear people talking about water like it's the next oil," she says.

Chedly Tizauoi, a professor of chemical engineering at Swansea University, is an expert on water supply and treatment systems. While he welcomes developments in desalination systems powered solely by renewable energy, he says everyone should focus on using less water in the first place.

"Use less water, only when you need it," he says. "The energy needed to pump water, the chemicals used to treat it. These are important considerations when turning on the tap."

 

Poor men south of Richmond? Why much of the rural South is in economic crisis/Peter A. Coclanis /Louis M. Kyriakoudes

For a brief moment in the summer of 2023, the surprise No. 1 song “Rich Men North of Richmond” focused the country’s attention on a region that often gets overlooked in discussions of the U.S. economy. Although the U.S. media sometimes pays attention to the rural South — often concentrating on guns, religion and opioid overdoses — it has too often neglected the broad scope and root causes of the region’s current problems.

As economic historians based in North Carolina and Tennessee, we want a fuller version of the story to be told. Various parts of the rural South are struggling, but here we want to focus on the forlorn areas that the U.S. Department of Agriculture refers to as “rural manufacturing counties” — places where manufacturing is, or traditionally was, the main economic activity.

You can find such counties in every Southern state, although they were historically clustered in Alabama, Georgia, North and South Carolina, and Tennessee. And they are suffering terribly.

Yes, the South is actually in crisis

First, let’s back up. One might be tempted to ask: Are things really that bad? Hasn’t the Sun Belt been booming? But in fact, by a range of economic indicators — personal income per capita and the proportion of the population living in poverty, for starters – large parts of the South, and particularly the rural South, are struggling.

 

Gross domestic product per capita in the region has been stuck at about 90% of the national average for decades, with average income even lower in rural areas. About 1 in 5 counties in the South is marked by “persistent poverty” — a poverty rate that has stayed above 20% for three decades running. Indeed, fully 80% of all persistently poor counties in the U.S. are in the South.

Persistent poverty is, of course, linked to a host of other problems. The South’s rural counties are marked by low levels of educational attainment, measured both by high school and college graduation rates. Meanwhile, labor-force participation rates in the South are far lower than in the nation as a whole.

Unsurprisingly, these issues stifle economic growth.

Meanwhile, financial institutions have fled the region: The South as a whole lost 62% of its banks between 1980 and 2020, with the decline sharpest in rural areas. At the same time, local hospitals and medical facilities have been shuttering, while funding for everything from emergency services to wellness programs has been cut.

Less wealth, less health

Relatedly, the rural South is ground zero for poor health in the U.S., with life expectancy far lower than the national average. So-called “deaths of despair” such as suicides and accidental overdoses are common, and rates of obesity, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease and stroke are high – much higher than in rural areas in other parts of the U.S. and in the U.S. as a whole.

Manufacturing counties in the rural South are particularly unhealthy. Residents there die about two and a half years younger than the average American, which to demographers is a staggeringly high differential.

These things, of course, didn’t happen in a vacuum. The Obama-era Affordable Care Act encouraged states to expand Medicaid coverage, but Southern states largely refused to do so. That left large portions of the low- and lower-middle-income population in the rural South uninsured. This has pushed many medical facilities in the region into a death spiral, as their business models — predicated on governmental insurance of one kind or another — became untenable.

Given all this, is it any wonder that rates of upward mobility in the rural South are among the lowest in the country? Alas, probably not — certainly not to residents of rural North Carolina, a state where more than half of its counties lost population between 2010 and 2020.

It wasn’t always this way

Although some people think that these areas have forever been in crisis, this isn’t the case. While the South’s agricultural sector had fallen into long-term decline in the decades following the Civil War — essentially collapsing by the Great Depression — the onset of World War II led to an impressive economic growth spurt.

War-related jobs opening up in urban areas pulled labor out of rural areas, leading to a long-delayed push to mechanize agriculture. Workers rendered redundant by such technology came to constitute a large pool of cheap labor that industrialists seized upon to deploy in low-wage processing and assembly operations, generally in rural areas and small towns.

Such operations surged between 1945 and the early 1980s, playing a huge role in the region’s economic rise. However humble they may have been, in the South — as in China since the late 1970s — the shift out of a backward agricultural sector into low-wage, low-skill manufacturing was an opportunity for significant productivity and efficiency gains.

This helped the South steadily catch up to national norms in terms of per-capita income: to 75% by 1950, 80% by the mid-1960s, over 85% by 1970, and to almost 90% by the early 1980s.

Although today the rise of the Sun Belt is often associated with, if not attributed to, climate, low housing costs and the growth of the South’s booming metropolitan areas, all those rural sweatshops and humble-looking processing sheds opening up in the early postwar era mattered a lot. They elevated the living standards of countless once-desperate and impoverished farmers.

The origins of the rural crisis

By the early 1980s, however, the gains made possible by the shift out of agriculture began to play themselves out. The growth of the rural manufacturing sector slowed, and the South’s convergence upon national per capita income norms stopped, remaining stuck at about 90% from then on.

Two factors were largely responsible: new technologies, which reduced the number of workers needed in manufacturing, and globalization, which greatly increased competition. This latter point became increasingly important, since the South, a low-cost manufacturing region in the U.S., is a high-cost manufacturing region when compared to, say, Mexico.

Like Mike Campbell’s bankruptcy in Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises,” the rural South’s collapse came gradually, then suddenly: gradually during the 1980s and 1990s, and suddenly after China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in December 2001.

Between 2000 and 2010, for example, manufacturing employment in North Carolina, one of the South’s leading manufacturing states, fell by about 44%. Starting a bit earlier — in 1998, when the Asian currency crisis squeezed Southern manufacturers — we find that the Tar Heel State lost 70% of its manufacturing jobs in textiles and 60% in furniture between then and 2010.

 

Other states in the South’s “manufacturing belt,” such as South Carolina and Tennessee, lost about 40% of their manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2010. Although they have recouped some jobs since then, not one Southern state has as many manufacturing jobs as it did a generation ago. And most of the job growth in the southern manufacturing sector in recent decades has taken place in or near big cities.

The proportion of craftsmen and factory workers in the rural Southern labor force fell from 38% in 1980 to a little over 25% by 2020 — a trend that was particularly striking in rural manufacturing counties.

Factory jobs there increasingly gave way to low-level service-sector gigs, which generally paid less. As a result, median income per capita in rural manufacturing counties in the South has stagnated and is much lower than in rural manufacturing counties elsewhere in the U.S.

The first step is recognizing there’s a problem

Those parts of the rural and small-town South that were once heavily involved in manufacturing are in economic crisis today.

One might argue that the current mess is a legacy effect of the South’s historical dependence on a low-skill, low-cost growth “strategy” — beginning with slavery — that privileged short-term economic gains over patient investment in human capital and long-term development. That’s a big claim about a larger, more complex story.

For now, our aim is simply to call attention to the problem. One must first acknowledge it before there can be any hope of a remedy. Until then, the inhabitants of such areas will remain feeling, as the Southern writer Linda Flowers vividly put it, “throwed away.”

 

 

Cranberries can bounce, float and pollinate themselves: The saucy science of a Thanksgiving classic bySerina DeSalvio

Cranberries are a staple in U.S. households at Thanksgiving – but how did this bog dweller end up on holiday tables?

Compared to many valuable plant species that were domesticated over thousands of years, cultivated cranberry (Vaccinium macrocarpon) is a young agricultural crop, just as the U.S. is a young country and Thanksgiving is a relatively new holiday. But as a plant scientist, I’ve learned much about cranberries’ ancestry from their botany and genomics.

New on the plant breeding scene

Humans have cultivated sorghum for some 5,500 years, corn for around 8,700 years and cotton for about 5,000 years. In contrast, cranberries were domesticated around 200 years ago – but people were eating the berries before that.

Wild cranberries are native to North America. They were an important food source for Native Americans, who used them in puddings, sauces, breads and a high-protein portable food called pemmican – a carnivore’s version of an energy bar, made from a mixture of dried meat and rendered animal fat and sometimes studded with dried fruits. Some tribes still make pemmican today, and even market a commercial version. 

 

Cranberry cultivation began in 1816 in Massachusetts, where Revolutionary War veteran Henry Hall found that covering cranberry bogs with sand fertilized the vines and retained water around their roots. From there, the fruit spread throughout the U.S. Northeast and Upper Midwest.

Today, Wisconsin produces roughly 60% of the U.S. cranberry harvest, followed by Massachusetts, Oregon and New Jersey. Cranberries also are grown in Canada, where they are a major fruit crop.

 

A flexible and adaptable plant

Cranberries have many interesting botanical features. Like roses, lilies and daffodils, cranberry flowers are hermaphroditic, which means they contain both male and female parts. This allows them to self-pollinate instead of relying on birds, insects or other pollinators.

A cranberry blossom has four petals that peel back when the flower blooms. This exposes the anthers, which contain the plant’s pollen. The flower’s resemblance to the beak of a bird earned the cranberry its original name, the “craneberry.” 

 

When cranberries don’t self-pollinate, they rely on bumblebees and honeybees to transport their pollen from flower to flower. They can also be propagated sexually, by planting seeds, or asexually, through rooting vine cuttings. This is important for growers because seed-based propagation allows for higher genetic diversity, which can translate to things like increased disease resistance or more pest tolerance.

Asexual reproduction is equally important, however. This method allows growers to create clones of varieties that perform very well in their bogs and grow even more of those high-performing types.

Every cranberry contains four air pockets, which is why they float when farmers flood bogs to harvest them. The air pockets also make raw cranberries bounce when they are dropped on a hard surface – a good indicator of whether they are fresh.

These pockets serve a biological role: They enable the berries to float down rivers and streams to disperse their seeds. Many other plants disperse their seeds via animals and birds that eat their fruits and excrete the seeds as they move around. But as anyone who has tasted them raw knows, cranberries are ultra-tart, so they have limited appeal for wildlife. 

 

Reading cranberry DNA

For cranberries being such a young crop, scientists already know a lot about their genetics. The cranberry is a diploid, which means that each cell contains one set of chromosomes from the maternal parent and one set from the paternal parent. It has 24 chromosomes, and its genome size is less than one-tenth that of the human genome.

Insights like these help scientists better understand where potentially valuable genes might be located in the cranberry genome. And diploid crops tend to have fewer genes associated with a single trait, which makes breeding them to emphasize that trait much simpler. 

 Researchers have also described the genetics of the cultivated cranberry’s wild relative, which is known as the “small cranberry” (Vaccinium oxycoccos). Comparing the two can help scientists determine where the cultivated cranberry’s agronomically valuable traits reside in its genome, and where some of the small cranberry’s cold hardiness might come from. 

 

Researchers are developing molecular markers – tools to determine where certain genes or sequences of interest reside within a genome – to help determine the best combinations of genes from different varieties of cranberry that can enhance desired traits. For example, a breeder might want to make the fruits larger, more firm or redder in color.

While cranberries have only been grown by humans for a short period of time, they have been evolving for much longer. They entered agriculture with a long genetic history, including things like whole genome duplication events and genetic bottlenecks, which collectively change which genes are gained or lost over time in a population. 

 

Whole genome duplication events occur when two species’ genomes collide to form a new, larger genome, encompassing all the traits of the two parental species. Genetic bottlenecks occur when a population is greatly reduced in size, which limits the amount of genetic diversity in that species. These events are extremely common in the plant world and can lead to both gains and losses of different genes.

Analyzing the cranberry’s genome can indicate when it diverged evolutionarily from some of its relatives, such as the blueberry, lingonberry and huckleberry. Understanding how modern species evolved can teach plant scientists about how different traits are inherited, and how to effectively breed for them in the future.

Ripe at the right time

Cranberries’ close association with Thanksgiving was simply a practical matter at first. Fresh cranberries are ready to harvest from mid-September through mid-November, so Thanksgiving falls within that perfect window for eating them.

Cranberry sauce was first loosely described in accounts from the American colonies in the 1600s, and appeared in a cookbook for the first time in 1796. The berries’ tart flavor, which comes from high levels of several types of acids, makes them more than twice as acidic as most other edible fruits, so they add a welcome zing to a meal full of blander foods like turkey and potatoes.

In recent decades, the cranberry industry has branched out into juices, snacks and other products in pursuit of year-round markets. But for many people, Thanksgiving is still the time when they’re most likely to see cranberries in some form on the menu.

 

 

 

Inside Mike Johnson’s Ties to a Far-Right Movement to Gut the Constitution by Laura Jedeed

 As the interregnum without a speaker of the House came to an end last month, people from across the political spectrum came together, in a rare show of unity, to ask a single question: Who in the world is Mike Johnson? But amidst the general bewilderment, one group of conservative evangelicals with a radical cause immediately recognized the new speaker’s name.

For the last 10 years, the “Convention of States” movement has sought to remake the Constitution and force a tea party vision of the framers’ intent upon America. This group wants to wholesale rewrite wide swaths of the U.S. Constitution in one fell swoop. In the process, they hope to do away with regulatory agencies like the FDA and the CDC, virtually eliminate the federal government’s ability to borrow money, and empower state legislatures to override federal law.

 As far-fetched as this idea might sound, the movement is gaining traction — and now, it believes, it has a friend in the speaker of the House.

“Speaker Mike Johnson has long been a supporter of Convention of States,” Mark Meckler, co-founder of Convention of States Action (COSA), told me when I asked about Johnson’s ascension. “It shows that the conservative movement in America is united around COS and recognizes the need to rein in an out-of-control federal government which will never restrain itself.”

 “I would never have dreamed we would end up with Mike Johnson of Louisiana as speaker of the House,” Rick Green, the founder of evangelical education outfit Patriot Academy, which heavily promotes COS, gushed on his “Wallbuilders” podcast the day after Johnson was elevated to his new role. “It feels like, to me, a potential real turning point.” His co-hosts, Tim and David Barton, agreed. “This is literally the kind of guy that we’ve been praying for to be in that position,” Tim replied. “We’ve known this guy for years. He’s been a friend for years.”

 “He’s tough, but he’s nice,” David Barton, Tim’s father, said later in the podcast. The elder Barton is the architect of an alternative, evangelical version of U.S. history that is at the core of the COSA movement, and someone Johnson has cited as a major influence. “[Johnson will] make you smile,” Barton continued, “before he hits you in the mouth so that he won’t bloody your lips when he breaks your teeth.”

 Before October 25th, the bespectacled and mild-mannered Johnson’s tiny public persona centered mostly around his key role in drafting and promoting a last-ditch constitutional challenge of Trump’s election loss in 2020. But the Louisiana representative has not sat idle in the years that followed. Six weeks ago, when the House speaker saga was just a gleam in Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz’s eye, Johnson convened the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government for a hearing on constitutional amendments.

 Like most congressional hearings, the meeting was quite dull. Johnson, the subcommittee chair responsible for final approval and scheduling for such hearings, used his opening statement to briefly explain the two processes for amending the Constitution. The first is the one you probably learned sometime in grade school: Two-thirds of Congress must approve a potential amendment, which then goes to the states for consideration. If three-fourths of the states approve it, the amendment is added into the Constitution.

 But Article V of the Constitution provides a second path: If two-thirds of the states petition Congress, it must call a constitutional convention, where multiple amendments could be proposed at the same time. The Constitution does not specify how to select delegates from states to this convention, provides no limit on the scope of such a convention, and offers no guidance on how the convention would ratify these new amendments. Once the convention developed a method to pass amendments, the slate of amendments they selected would return to the states for consideration. In order to become law, three-fourths of states would need to approve the slate of amendments, either through their legislatures or through statewide conventions — at least in theory.

 But the delegates to the Convention of 1784 were, in theory, only authorized to propose improvements to the Articles of Confederation. Instead, America’s framers altered the rules they were given and replaced the Articles with our current Constitution. Because Article V provides no restrictions on what a constitutional convention can consider or change, many legal scholars believe that adding such restrictions would be unconstitutional. “A convention likely cannot be limited at all by Congress or the states,” Russ Feingold — legal professor, former Wisconsin senator and current president of the American Constitution Society — wrote with Peter Prindiville in The Constitution in Jeopardy. “This clear, textual reading of Article V is supported by over a century of legal opinion from across the political spectrum.”

 

COSA insists that the language of their petition would prevent this “runaway convention” scenario. According to the mainstream legal opinion, however, an Article V convention could rewrite any part of the Constitution — including the part that requires the approval of three-fourths of the states to change it. A second Constitutional convention could therefore become a repeat of the first: One that completely restructures the U.S. government, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights according to rules they could make up as they go along.

As of now, the subject of these legal opinions remains entirely speculative. “Today, no such convention has ever been called,” Johnson said at the hearing, “but efforts have been underway in recent years to do so.” Nick Tomboulides, one of the witnesses at the hearing, is the executive director of U.S. Term Limits, an organization not directly connected to COSA that has spent years circulating state petitions for an Article V convention that would codify one of COSA’s hoped-for amendments: required term limits in Congress. Another, Thomas Jipping, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, openly supported COSA during questioning.

 For the past decade, Meckler’s group COSA — the primary activists behind this cause — has worked to call an Article V convention. As outlandish as a constitutional convention may seem during a time when any form of structural changes hits a dead end at the national level, an Article V convention only needs state governments to take action. Many already have. Nineteen states have signed COSA petitions — over halfway to the 34-state threshold required to call a convention. According to COSA, seven other states have passed its petition through one legislative chamber, and active legislation remains pending in 18 others.

 

Johnson has never directly endorsed COSA as a member of Congress, and he does not directly endorse it now. “Subcommittee hearings about a given subject should not be considered endorsements from the Chairman,” Corinne Day, Johnson’s spokesperson, told me this week.

But the newly minted speaker had plenty to say about the movement when he was a Louisiana state representative. In 2016, while the state legislature debated whether to become the eighth state to petition Congress for an Article V convention, Johnson was a vocal proponent of the cause. “This is the measure of last resort,” Johnson told his fellow representatives. “Let’s agree that government is doing too much. I will tell you it’s doing way more than the founders intended or designed it to do.”

“I came to this conclusion myself reluctantly, but I’m there,” he said. “I think we have to do it.” The measure passed, 62 to 36.

“Whenever they needed help on a legislator who was on the fence related to the convention — the state’s resolution — they would call Mike Johnson,” Dale Clary, an activist who helped pass the Louisiana petition, said on the “COS Live” videocast a week after Johnson became speaker. Though he did not work with Johnson personally, COSA state director Bryce Barris told Clary about his outsized influence. “Mike Johnson was working behind the scenes, talking to people.”

 Michael Farris, who co-founded COSA and now serves as senior adviser for the organization, believes Johnson could exert such influence again. “The Speaker has incredible power, and the number one power is to set the agenda. No piece of legislation can come to the floor unless he wants it to,” he said on the October 31st edition of the “COS Live” videocast. Beyond the power of the gavel, however, COSA advocates are saying Johnson’s perceived support could help their movement move farther into the mainstream. The “ability to play clips to state legislators of [Johnson] speaking out on this,” Farris said, will help them get the remaining state signatures they need.

 Michael Farris, who co-founded COSA and now serves as senior adviser for the organization, believes Johnson could exert such influence again. “The Speaker has incredible power, and the number one power is to set the agenda. No piece of legislation can come to the floor unless he wants it to,” he said on the October 31st edition of the “COS Live” videocast. Beyond the power of the gavel, however, COSA advocates are saying Johnson’s perceived support could help their movement move farther into the mainstream. The “ability to play clips to state legislators of [Johnson] speaking out on this,” Farris said, will help them get the remaining state signatures they need.

 Meckler, who co-founded Tea Party Patriots back in 2009 before leaving and pivoting to COSA, still wants to party like it’s 1784. In August, COSA chose delegates from 49 states (Rhode Island, which skipped the 1784 convention, sat this one out as well) to convene in — where else? — the historical reenactment village of Colonial Williamsburg for a Convention of States simulation. After three days of debate, the delegates emerged with six proposed amendments that would, among other things, make it nearly impossible for the federal government to borrow money, tighten the commerce clause in a way that would eliminate most federal regulatory bodies, and insert a nullification clause that would allow a simple majority of state legislatures to overrule any federal law or regulation. Such amendments, if passed, would make it impossible to fund Social Security, eliminate agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Education, and make federal governance virtually impossible.

 Strict constitutionalists pretending to pass impossible amendments in a building surrounded by people in colonial garb may sound like the punchline of a joke written in the early 2010s, but many experts do not find it funny. Liberal-leaning watchdog groups like the American Constitution Society and Common Cause are sounding the alarm over the real danger of such a convention. “They have been carefully training for this for years,” Feingold told me last year for an article in The New Republic. “Anybody that can ignore this kind of training and work by the right is not learning the lessons of recent history.”

 In theory, the process of constitutional amendments could provide another rare instance of consensus between the left and right. Though they do not agree on what amendments ought to pass, many political players agree that amendments to the Constitution are necessary, and that the traditional amendment process isn’t cutting it in today’s political climate. Congress has not managed to send an amendment to states for ratification in over 50 years.

 But COSA’s version of an Article V convention seems deliberately designed to leave liberals and progressives in the cold. The Constitution does not specify whether delegates would be appointed by state legislatures or popular vote, or how many votes each state would have. But COSA treats these questions as settled jurisprudence. State legislatures would choose delegates, which means the delegates, like state governments, would skew disproportionately conservative relative to the population. Each state would have only one vote, which means that Wyoming would have the same voting power as New York or California. A convention assembled under such rules would be orders of magnitude more conservative than the American electorate. “The worst case scenario is that [an Article V convention] puts all of our cherished constitutional rights and civil rights completely up for grabs,” Stephen Spaulding, vice president of Common Cause, testified at Johnson’s subcommittee hearing last month.

 

On the “COS Live” episode celebrating Johnson’s victory, Farris, the group’s cofounder, went out of his way to praise Johnson for how he has melded his politics with his religious beliefs.

“This is the highest ranking, serious, biblically-trained person with a clear Christian worldview … the highest ranking government official we’ve ever had in my lifetime,” Farris said.

 Johnson’s religious credentials may seem irrelevant for a movement that likes to talk about striking the commerce clause from the Constitution. But COSA does not see its cause as secular. Ferris, Meckler and other major supporters believe a Convention of States is the only way to save America from their foes in the godless left and restore the country to the form its deeply religious founders intended: A nation under God, evangelical, founded on biblical principles and enforcing Christian law.

 This unusual interpretation of American history, which the movement embraces completely, comes from David Barton. Barton has spent the past three and a half decades publishing books that claim to prove that the Founding Fathers were deeply religious; that the bible directly inspired both the Constitution and Declaration of Independence; and that the separation of church and state is a pernicious and ahistorical myth. His book The Jefferson Lies, which portrayed Deist and slave owner Thomas Jefferson as a religious civil rights pioneer, caused such outcry from historians that the publisher pulled the book from shelves.

 

Johnson’s affiliation with this movement is no secret. He appeared on Barton’s “Wallbuilders” podcast last May to decry the “weaponization” of the FBI to go after pro-life protesters who block access to abortion clinics. In 2021, Johnson spoke at Barton’s ProFamily Legislator’s Conference, where he talked about the impact of Barton’s teachings on his life. “I was introduced to David and his ministry a quarter century ago, and it has had such a profound influence on me, and my work and my life, and everything I do,” Johnson told the crowd. “Thanks to all of you for being willing to serve in this critical time for the country.”

“This man has a biblical worldview. I’m in tears,” Patriot Academy founder Rick Green, who like Johnson and most COSA supporters is a longtime Barton acolyte, said during a livestream on Rumble just after Johnson accepted the gavel. “We’ve been praying for leaders that have a fear of God, that we know have a foundation of biblical truth.”

 

“We’ve already been talking to [Johnson] about staff,” Barton said the next day on “Wallbuilders.” “The members that are helping him are all good guys. They’re all God guys. They’re all conservative guys.”

Green and Barton are much more vocal than Johnson about their support for the Convention of States movement. Green was a delegate to COSA’s first simulated convention back in 2016, and he co-hosts an eight-week “Biblical Citizenship” course with Meckler to spread the gospel of America’s evangelical founding. The cross-promotion works: When I attended Patriot Academy’s five-day handgun training course last year, many of my classmates actively supported COSA. Barton and Green both spoke at COSA’s Reclaiming Liberty summit in October 2022. Neither man sets aside their convictions regarding America’s religious roots when endorsing the Convention of States. Rather, they present the Convention of States as a core solution for America’s irreligiosity. The two issues, for them, are the same.

 The reason we teamed up with COS is so that you can host biblical citizenship classes in your community, where you will be planting the seeds of liberty,” Green told his Reclaiming Liberty audience last year. “It gives them hope, and it builds your team for Convention of States right there in your community.”

“You’ll find the more secular the nation becomes, the more progressive it becomes, the more anti-constitution it becomes,” Barton told the same crowd a few hours later. “It’s a bad direction for us to move.”

---

In recent years, COSA has become increasingly entrenched in the conservative firmament. Mark Meckler appeared on the CPAC stage in 2022 and was a guest on Tucker Carlson’s Fox show earlier this year. The COSA website lists 51 high-profile endorsements that include Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Jeb Bush. The Heritage Foundation reversed its longtime opposition to an Article V convention to specifically endorse Meckler and COSA two days after Johnson became speaker. John Malcolm, who penned the group’s opposition to the idea in 2016, offered a simple explanation for the change: “The situation on the ground at the moment is favorable to conservatives.”

 

School board elections are latest battleground for polarized national politics By Sarah Mueller

On Halloween in downtown Coopersburg, a borough nestled in the Lehigh Valley, Doug Durham is handing out candy to trick-or-treaters young and old.

"We're running for school board — appreciate it if you're registered," he said. "Whether you're a Republican or not, the candy's free, so have some candy regardless."

Voters are casting ballots across the U.S. for local and state races – including school boards.

In northeastern Pennsylvania, what a few years ago was a fairly sleepy school board contest focused on millage rates and teacher salaries has turned into a competitive – and combative – race centered on so-called "parental rights."

 

Durham is one of ten candidates vying for one of five spots on the Southern Lehigh school board. It's a race in a swing district in a swing state, and at stake is the chance to dramatically reshape district policy.

Durham's slate of candidates have dubbed themselves the "True Republicans." They received the endorsement of the county GOP committee and signed a pledge that, in part, is aimed at a curriculum review to keep "woke politics" out of the classroom — a move that led to criticism that they want to censor school libraries. 

 

"We're not book banners. I believe in free speech, but I don't believe that pornography should be available to children in the schools," Durham told local conservative talk show host Bobby Gunther Walsh. "It is fear mongering of the highest order, and it's really unfortunate."

The pledge Durham's group signed includes language about restricting students from using bathrooms that align with their gender identity and informing parents when students ask to go by a different name or gender pronoun.

"[Our opponents] believe that students building trust with teachers and counselors is so important that keeping parents in the dark can be excusable," Durham said. "If a child is going through difficult mental or emotional or physical issues, it's most urgent to get the parents involved to support that child."

 

Emily Gehman, who's served on the school board for eight years, said it's a question of privacy.

"Maybe the child is okay talking to a coach or a trusted teacher or a guidance counselor about how to talk to their parents about it," she said. "Yes, parents should absolutely be involved. But if we have a policy that requires [teachers] to pick up a phone in the first five minutes, that does more harm than good."

Gehman is running for reelection. She's a registered Republican, but is running on an opposing slate, along with four moderate Republicans and one Democrat.

"Being endorsed by the Republican Party at the county and local level was contingent upon signing that pledge," she said. "I chose not to sign that pledge."

These type of debates may sound familiar. 

 

"Schools sometimes become frontlines in national political battles," said Dan Hopkins, a professor at University of Pennsylvania.

He said the often noncompetitive school board races of yesteryear are quickly becoming a thing of the past, fueled in part by the COVID-19 pandemic.

"COVID led to a genuinely important shift in the sense that school boards were making very, very meaningful decisions about whether to open or close and many parents had the experience of suddenly having their kids in their houses, and oftentimes they could hear the instruction," he said.

Hopkins said what's happening in the Lehigh Valley is just another example of how local politics have become nationalized. Local candidates take cues from national groups focused on the role of parents in schools – like the far-right Moms for Liberty and its left-leaning counterpart, Stop Moms for Liberty.

"These suddenly nationally kind of charged symbols infuse a local political debate," he said. 

 Christine Slifer, who has two small children in the district, said she can't escape the tension in the school board campaign. 

 

"I'm in some local groups on Facebook — groups that have nothing to do with politics but have stuff to do with the school or the town, and I'm in there just to kind of find out what's going on," she said, sighing. "A lot of it gets brought into there and it's very divisive."

She said she's frustrated by the local coverage of the race.

"It wasn't even focusing on how great Southern Lehigh is for academics or any of our achievements," she said. "It was all these hot button topics – and it doesn't need to be like that. I just don't think it's positive for our kids."

 

 

Not All of America’s National-Security Threats Are Overseas By Susan B. Glasser

Nine days ago, the idea that an obscure 2020 election denier from Shreveport, Louisiana, with less than five thousand dollars in his household’s bank accounts, a literalist’s belief in the presence of dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark, and a dubious past as an advocate of “conversion” therapy for gay teens could single-handedly shape the fate of tens of billions of dollars in U.S. military assistance to key allies at war was even more preposterous than the notion that America might soon reëlect its four-times-indicted former President.

 But these are not normal times in our politics. As the new Republican Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson now wields outsized power over which bills get a vote in Congress, and he has decided to make the first major fight of his tenure a dispute with the White House and the Democratic-controlled Senate over emergency aid to Israel and Ukraine. In the Senate, meanwhile, Tommy Tuberville, a first-term G.O.P. member from Alabama, who is better known for his years as Auburn’s head football coach, has waged a one-man campaign to block hundreds of military promotions for the past nine months. With a new war in the Middle East and embarrassing vacancies in key Pentagon posts threatening to affect U.S. readiness, his Republican colleagues finally pushed back for real this week, spending much of Wednesday night yelling at Tuberville on the Senate floor. “I do not respect men who do not honor their word,” Joni Ernst, a senator from Iowa, huffed. Dan Sullivan of Alaska complained about Tuberville’s “national-security suicide mission.” He added, “Xi Jinping is loving this. So is Putin. How dumb can we be, man?”

 The answer, of course, is very dumb. Even after getting reamed out by his fellow-Republicans, Tuberville refused to relent on his blockade. And, in the House, Johnson is standing firm on a bizarre demand—the first substantive one of his Speakership—that fourteen billion dollars in wartime assistance to Israel be offset by an equal amount in cuts to the Internal Revenue Service. Even a ruling from the Congressional Budget Office that the cuts would actually cost the Treasury nearly twenty-seven billion dollars by reducing the amount in taxes that a budget-constrained I.R.S. could collect did not deter Johnson. The Senate is not expected to approve this approach, and the White House threatened to veto the bill if the House version with the I.R.S. cuts reached the President’s desk. Nonetheless, Johnson plunged ahead.

 While picking this fight over urgent—and historically bipartisan—money for Israel, Johnson also refused to include in the emergency spending bill sixty billion dollars in additional Ukraine aid that President Biden has requested. The result is that no one really knows yet where that leaves the money for either Israel or Ukraine. Maybe the Senate, where both parties’ leaders and a bipartisan majority support the broader funding approach, will find a way around the new Speaker, who now claims privately that he isn’t really as opposed to helping Ukraine as his record of voting against previous assistance suggests. Maybe it won’t. Such is the state of American foreign-policymaking. The week’s events on Capitol Hill ought to remind us that not all national-security threats are overseas.

I ve been watching this all play out from Berlin, where nervous allies are asking once again what the volatile state of American politics means for the rest of the world. Few countries have more at stake in the upcoming U.S. Presidential election than Germany, a favorite target of former President Donald Trump during his four years in office. The conversations I’ve had here inevitably include questions about whether Trump really can overcome his four criminal indictments and the stigma of his lies about the 2020 election to defeat Biden. “There’s a major land war going on a day’s drive from here, and I think that most Germans are more focussed on the fate of American democracy,” Daniel Benjamin, a former American diplomat and head of the American Academy in Berlin, which hosted me for a discussion on U.S. politics, said. “They’re scarred [by Trump], and they worry a lot about it.”

 The current American President is arguably much more popular here than he is in the United States—a recent Pew poll found that sixty-seven per cent of Germans trust Biden to do the right thing in international affairs, versus ten per cent of Germans who thought Trump would do so in the final year of his Presidency. (Biden’s current approval rating at home, meanwhile, stands at an average of fifty-four-per-cent disapproval and just thirty-nine-and-a-half-per-cent approval—near the nadir he hit in the summer of 2022.) This is not just about lefty Europeans turning up their noses at a crude right-wing American politician. Biden’s preference for working with allies rather than Trump’s bashing of them; his strong backing for Ukraine in contrast to Trump’s blackmailing of its leader; and his decades of support for NATO at a time when NATO is facing the biggest threat to European security since the end of the Cold War are all real, specific differences. Trump, in contrast, has threatened to pull out of NATO altogether—John Bolton, his former national-security adviser, has said he is likely to do so if given a second term—and just the other day he bragged to an audience in Sioux City, Iowa, that he had threatened not to defend other NATO countries, even in response

 to a Russian military assault. “Does that mean, if Russia attacks my country, you will not be there?” Trump quoted a fellow NATO leader asking him. “That’s right,” Trump said as his audience cheered. “I will not protect you.” Never mind that the U.S. is bound by the terms of the alliance to come to the aid of its other members. Trump does not consider himself obliged to follow either treaties or long-standing bipartisan traditions of national security—and his views are increasingly shared by other Republicans for whom talking tough on Russia was, until the Trump era, an article of bedrock conviction.

 Perhaps the most pressing fear one hears in Europe is about aid for Ukraine. However hard it is to imagine, given the enormous commitment that the West has made to Kyiv’s defense, congressional dysfunction in Washington might mean that American assistance dries up before the current Ukrainian counter-offensive is even over. Polling suggests that enthusiasm for continuing support to Ukraine is waning across the political spectrum in the U.S., especially but not exclusively among Republicans; in a recent Gallup poll, sixty-two per cent of Republicans and forty-four per cent of independents said the U.S. was doing too much to help Ukraine, an increase of ten points since June.

 

From the start of the war, Biden has worked arm in arm on Ukraine with Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Germany, as part of its so-called Zeitenwende, a painful and not fully complete pivot in its foreign policy since Russia’s invasion, is now committed to spend more than two per cent of its G.D.P. on defense—an increase that Trump loudly demanded but never could achieve. It has also broken its dependence on Russian energy, a radical shift from before the war, when Germany imported around half of its gas and more than a third of its oil from Russia and was set to open the now cancelled Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.

But its level of military assistance is only a small subset of the large sums that Washington has spent supplying Kyiv. American aid is, for now, irreplaceable on the battlefield.

And yet the more profound worry—here in Berlin, and elsewhere in the West—goes far deeper than how much is spent in sending long-range missiles to Ukraine or on helping Israel eradicate Hamas. It’s about the real possibility of America reëlecting a President who is not committed to the basic principles of either the Western alliance or, for that matter, the American Constitution. In “The Divider,” the recent book that I wrote with my husband, we recounted how John Kelly, the former Marine general and Trump’s chief of staff, was shocked by Trump’s admiration for the Nazi generals who prosecuted the Second World War. “You fucking generals, why can’t you be like the German generals?” Trump told Kelly at one point. Recounting this story to an audience in Berlin elicited only stunned silence.

Germans don’t get a vote in the upcoming U.S. Presidential election, but, as much as anywhere in the world, they get what is on the line. ♦

Modern medicine has its scientific roots in the Middle Ages − how the logic of vulture brain remedies and bloodletting lives on today by Meg Leja

Nothing calls to mind nonsensical treatments and bizarre religious healing rituals as easily as the notion of Dark Age medicine. “The Saturday Night Live” sketch Medieval Barber Theodoric of York says it all with its portrayal of a quack doctor who insists on extracting pints of his patients’ blood in a dirty little shop.

Though the skit relies on dubious stereotypes, it’s true that many cures from the Middle Ages sound utterly ridiculous – consider a list written around 800 C.E. of remedies derived from a decapitated vulture. Mixing its brain with oil and inserting that into the nose was thought to cure head pain, and wrapping its heart in wolf skin served as an amulet against demonic possession.

“Dark Age medicine” is a useful narrative when it comes to ingrained beliefs about medical progress. It is a period that stands as the abyss from which more enlightened thinkers freed themselves. But recent research pushes back against the depiction of the early Middle Ages as ignorant and superstitious, arguing that there is a consistency and rationality to healing practices at that time.

 As a historian of the early Middle Ages, roughly 400 to 1000 C.E., I make sense of how the societies that produced vulture medicine envisioned it as one component of a much broader array of legitimate therapies. In order to recognize “progress” in Dark Age medicine, it is essential to see the broader patterns that led a medieval scribe to copy out a set of recipes using vulture organs. 

 

The major innovation of the age was the articulation of a medical philosophy that validated manipulating the physical world because it was a religious duty to rationally guard the body’s health.

Reason and religion

The names of classical medical innovators like Hippocrates and Galen were well known in the early Middle Ages, but few of their texts were in circulation prior to the 13th century. Most intellectual activities in northern Europe were taking place within monasteries, where the majority of surviving medical writings from that time were written, read, discussed and likely put into practice. Scholars have assumed that religious superstition overwhelmed scientific impulse and the church dictated what constituted legitimate healing – namely, prayer, anointing with holy oil, miracles of the saints and penance for sin. 

 However, “human medicine” – a term affirming human agency in discovering remedies from nature – emerged in the Dark Ages. It appears again and again in a text monks at the monastery of Lorsch, Germany, wrote around the year 800 to defend ancient Greek medical learning. It insists that Hippocratic medicine was mandated by God and that doctors act as divine agents in promoting health. I argue in my recent book, “Embodying the Soul: Medicine and Religion in Carolingian Europe,” that a major innovation of that time was the creative synthesis of Christian orthodoxy with a growing belief in the importance of preventing disease.

 Establishing an intellectual framework for medical study was an accomplishment of early medieval scholars. Doctors faced the risk of being lumped together with those who dealt in sorcery and pagan folklore, a real possibility given that the men who composed the Greek medical canon were pagans themselves. The early medieval scribes responsible for producing the medical books of their age crafted powerful arguments about the respectability and piety of the doctor. Their arguments manifest in illustrations that sanctified the human doctor by setting him parallel to Christ.

 

This sanctification was a crucial step in including medicine as its own advanced degree program at the first universities that were established around 1200 in Europe. Thus began the licensing of healers: the elite “phisici” – the root of the English word “physician” – trained at the university, along with empirical practitioners like surgeons, herbalists and female healers who claimed a unique authority to treat gynecological illnesses.

Today, religious dogmatism is often equated with vaccine hesitancy and resistance to basic scientific truths like evolution. But deeply religious thinkers of the past often saw rational medicine as an expression of faith, not something endangering it. Herbal remedies were scribbled into the margins of early medieval works on theology, history, church sacraments and more. This suggests that book owners valued such knowledge, and people of all classes were actively exchanging recipes and cures by word of mouth before writing the most useful ones down. 

 

The body in nature

Though the Dark Ages is a period from which no case histories survive, we can still form a picture of an average healing encounter. Texts from that period emphasize the need for the doctor to be highly learned, including being well read in philosophy, logic, arithmetic and astronomy. Such knowledge enabled healers to situate their observations of sick bodies within the rules that governed the constant transformations of nature.

There was no way to perceive the internal state of the body via technology – instead, healers had to be excellent listeners and observers. They sought to match the patient’s description of suffering with signs that manifested externally on the body. The inside of the flesh could not be seen, but the fluids the body excreted – sweat, urine, menstrual blood, mucus, vomit and feces – carried messages about that invisible realm to the outside. The doctor’s diagnosis and prognosis relied on reading these “excreta” in addition to sensing subtle changes in the pulse.

Medieval people were detailed investigators of the natural world and believed the same forces that shaped the landscape and the stars operated inside bodies formed from the same four elements of earth, water, air and fire. Thus, as the moon’s waxing and waning moved the ocean tides, so did it cause humors inside the body to grow and decrease.

The way the seasons withered crops or provoked tree sap to flow might manifest in the body as yellow bile surging in the summer, and cold, wet phlegm dripping in the winter. Just as fruit and meats left untouched began to rot and putrefy, so did dregs and undigested material inside the body turn poisonous if not expelled. Standing water in ponds or lakes generated slime and smell, and so were liquids sitting stagnant in the body’s vessels seen as breeding grounds for corrupt vapors.

In this sense, the menstrual cycle was representative of all bodies, undergoing internal transformations according to seasonal cycles and periodically purged in order to release pent-up fluids.

 

According to this logic, health depended above all on maintaining the body’s relationship to the physical environment and ensuring that substances were passing through their proper transformations, whether it was food turning into humors, blood disseminating throughout the body, or excess fluids and wastes leaving the body. Bloodletting was a rational therapy because it could help rebalance the fluids and remove toxins. It was visible and tangible to the patient, and, to the extent that we now better understand the placebo effect, it may well have offered some kind of relief.

Fasting, purging, tonics and, above all, monthly dietary regimens were also prominent tools healers used to prevent and relieve sickness. Several medical books, for instance, specified that consuming drinks with cinnamon in November and pennyroyal in August could recalibrate the body’s temperature in winter and summer because one drink was warming while the other was cooling.

 

Some medieval remedies – such as one produced from wine, cow bile, garlic and onion to heal eye infections – were later proven to be likely effective in treating sickness. But whether these remedies worked isn’t the point. For medieval doctors, vulture brains and cow bile operated according to the same logic that continues to inform research today: Nature operates in mysterious ways, but rational deduction can unlock the hidden mechanisms of disease. The M.D. has direct roots in the Dark Age elevation of “human medicine.”

Before mocking medieval doctors, consider how popular juice cleanses and detox regimens are in the 21st century. Are we really so far from humoral medicine today?