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Shifting gears: The climate protest movement in the age of coronavirus

This story was originally published by Yale Environment 360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

For more than a year, just about every Friday at noon, Invaliden Park in downtown Berlin was transformed into a vivacious, noisy, swarming hubbub with teenage speakers, bands, and live dance acts — as well as Germany’s top climate scientists — all sharing a makeshift stage and a microphone. Several thousand mostly school-age pupils waved banners and placards proclaiming “There is no Planet B,” “School Strike for Climate,” and “We’re on strike until you act!” Their chants against fossil fuels and for swift, decisive action on global warming echoed against the granite facades of the federal ministries for economy and transportation, both adjacent to the square.

The happening was the weekly “school strike” in Berlin of Fridays for Future (FFF), the climate crisis movement that began in 2018 with the Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg skipping school once a week to protest her country’s half-hearted response to climate change. The movement then ricocheted across the globe, mobilizing school-age young people — in wealthy countries as well as poor — as never before. Last year, the campaign culminated in international demonstrations of millions in cities and towns from Cape Town, South Africa to Anchorage, Alaska, all with the same goal: to force their nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions and become carbon-neutral by 2050.

“There was a brilliant logic to the school strikes that drew people in,” explains Bill McKibben, author and cofounder of the climate action group 350.org. “If [the adult world] can’t be bothered to prepare a liveable world for me, why should I be bothered to sit in school and prepare for that future? That basic idea really hit home.”

Fridays for Future can claim some significant achievements, including strongly moving public opinion in favor of climate action and helping Green parties in Europe make major gains in elections. Still, even before the coronavirus outbreak and the banning worldwide of gatherings and demonstrations, the momentum of Fridays for Future had slowed. Fewer young people were attending the weekly protests, and the movement was recalibrating its strategy and tactics, shifting to stepped-up election activities and direct-action campaigns against fossil fuel interests, with mixed success.

Now, the worsening coronavirus pandemic is forcing Thunberg and other leaders of FFF to further alter tactics. Fridays for Future in Germany and other countries has suspended all public demonstrations — until now the movement’s mainspring and source of its high-profile media image, as well as donations. “In a crisis we change our behavior,” Thunberg tweeted earlier this month, “and adapt to the new circumstances for the greater good of society.” The Global Climate Strike, an international demonstration scheduled for April 24, has been called off. Thunberg proposed that FFF go digital by blanketing the internet and social media with the movement’s message.

Thunberg’s tweets don’t hint at it, but the virus and the public lockdowns have thrown the movement — already struggling to build on its spectacular protests of 2019 — into confusion. How can it pressure governments or businesses when gatherings are banned? How can the movement attract media coverage in the midst of a global pandemic? Will ordinary people faced with children at home or sick relatives or no jobs care about the climate when the COVID-19 crisis has turned their lives upside down? And will countries now sideline climate protection in order to put all of their energy and money into fighting the pandemic?

“Last year climate change was topic No. 1,” says Volker Quaschning, a professor of renewable energy systems at the University of Applied Sciences in Berlin, and one of the German scientists who had lobbied officials to take decisive steps to curb climate change. “Today it’s corona.”

“They had an incredible media presence last year,” says Moritz Sommer, a sociologist at the Institute for Social Movement Studies in Berlin. “Now there’s next to nothing in the media, and I don’t see this changing this year.”

Luisa Neubauer, the 23-year-old face of FFF in Germany, was a constant presence on talk and news shows during the height of the protests in 2019. Neubauer, who is often referred to as “Germany’s Greta,” told Yale e360 that the movement is in transition, adding, “We’re trying to figure things out now. Beating the coronavirus is the first thing we have to do, but the fight to save the climate can’t stop. It will continue in other ways and when this crisis is over the climate crisis will look different. We may even have a better chance. We know that political will, when it is there, can move mountains. We are experiencing this right now in the corona crisis.”

As for Thunberg’s call for digital activism, Neubauer admits that it can’t replace what FFF had accomplished on the streets. “But our generation and the climate movement are already digital,” she says, “and there are things we can do.” Already, the German branches of FFF have an internet learning program on YouTube for the millions of children not attending school.

FFF has unquestionably enjoyed major successes over the past year-and-a-half. The protests struck a chord with people who until then hadn’t taken climate change seriously enough to have it impact their vote or lifestyle. The movement was strongest in Europe, but even in the United States the protests caught on and helped propel the Green New Deal, a proposal for tackling the climate crisis in the U.S., high on the agenda of Democratic presidential candidates. Last September, 250,000 people across the U.S. marched in the FFF’s Global Climate Strike — the largest number ever to turn out for a U.S. climate protest.

Luisa Neubauer, sometimes referred to as “Germany’s Greta.” ODD ANDERSEN / AFP via Getty Images

Outside of the U.S., the numbers of those prioritizing global warming shot up dramatically in the wake of the FFF demonstrations, opinion polls and elections showed. Before the coronavirus, people in Europe and in China identified climate change as the foremost challenge. And many European Green parties, which had campaigned for rigorous climate policies for years, have doubled their vote tallies in local, national, and European Union elections — a result also of the extreme weather in 2018 and 2019 that brought record droughts, heat, and floods.

The FFF demonstrations “changed the whole landscape of the climate movement and the way ordinary people think about the climate crisis,” says Insa Vries of the German anti-coal group Ende Gelände, which had been occupying coal production facilities since 2015. “They were able to get through to much larger swaths of the population than we ever could, including unions, established NGOs, older people, and the world of pop culture.”

“The Fridays’ activists accomplished in just months what we had been trying to do in the halls of power for 10 years,” explains Quaschning. “The school kids were able to jolt the government into action. A year ago Germany wasn’t close to coming up with a CO2 tax, now we have one.”

Despite these achievements, the outbreak of the coronavirus has found Fridays for Future in a period of soul searching and experimentation. The group’s leaders were growing disappointed with FFF’s concrete results, most notably that the protests had not prodded governments to respond with the resolute, far-reaching measures that would enable them to meet the goals of the 2015 UN Paris Agreement, which would hold global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius below pre-industrial levels.

A seminal moment for the German FFF movement came on September 20, 2019, when in the largest climate demonstration of the year, tens of thousands of protestors clogged Berlin’s city center, and more than a million more took to the streets in 500 other German cities and towns. As the Berlin demonstration unfolded, just a stone’s throw away at the offices of German Chancellor Angela Merkel the government announced its long-awaited climate policies package. But the proposals fell far short of the students’ demands, which were that Germany set policies that would end coal use by 2030 and generate 100 percent of the country’s electricity with renewable energy by 2035. The activists had also demanded a tax as high as 180 euros-per-ton of CO2.

“It was bizarre, scandalous, how bad it was,” says Neubauer about the German climate protection package, which proposed a mere 10 euros-a-ton tax on CO2. “Despite all of the demonstrations and lobbying, what came out wasn’t even an attempt to meet the Paris Agreement. We had to explain to our supporters why we had expected results and didn’t get them. There was a shift in spirit [in FFF circles]: from hopefulness to outrage.”

The Germans weren’t the only climate activists rethinking things in the face of tepid government action. “We concluded that school strikes alone aren’t going to make governments change anything,” explains Vipulan Puvaneswaran of France’s Youth for Climate, the French ally of Fridays for Future. “We need a more radical change — the system has to change — and for that we need more radical protest forms.” In February, the group briefly occupied the Paris offices of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, covering its walls with graffiti.

The Germans, too, shifted course, moving away from school strikes to the targeting of businesses and intervening in election campaigns. “Businesses are more flexible, they can change faster than states,” says Neubauer. “They have to step up and help us make governments change.”

FFF Germany set its sights on the multinational giant Siemens, which had recently invested in a new Australian coal mine — a small investment for Siemens, but a tempting target for the climate activists. In January, FFF demonstrators besieged the company’s headquarters in Munich and other of its offices, delivering a petition with 57,000 signatures to Siemens CEO Joe Kaeser, who met one-on-one with Neubauer. Media coverage was intensive for a week, but in the end Siemens opted to proceed with the project.

“FFF has managed to mobilize enormous numbers of people and create a big buzz,” says Vries of Ende Gelände, “but we come out in the end empty-handed. Maybe we have to rethink how we pick our fights.”

FFF has enjoyed more success in targeting elections, which has greatly benefitted Europe’s Green parties. “Green parties across Northern Europe have been given an unbelievable push,” says Ellen Ueberschär of the Heinrich Böll Stiftung, a German foundation close to the Green Party. In polls, Germany’s Greens have tripled their tally since the 2017 general election, turning the Greens into the country’s second-largest party.

Now, however, FFF’s path forward is unclear. If the movement is denied street demonstrations for months, it may find its resources drying up and activists demoralized. “I’m worried that their anger and frustration, which had generated so much positive energy, will turn into hopelessness,” says Ueberschär.

“At best, what can happen,” says Neubauer, “is that we turn the crisis experience into a crisis management experience. Because we are now tackling [the coronavirus] collectively, in solidarity and sustainably, we can learn how to cope with others. This can be helpful for the climate crisis.”

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Shifting gears: The climate protest movement in the age of coronavirus

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Nothing Says "Happiness" and "Relief" Like Angela Merkel Seeing Barack Obama Again

Mother Jones

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German Chancellor Angela Merkel is having quite the day with current and former US presidents.

This morning she met with Barack Obama for breakfast and an event in front of thousands at the Brandenburg Gate, and with the rendezvous came a rhapsody of smiles and mutual affection.

“We can’t hide behind a wall,” Obama told the rapt audience, a none-too-subtle dig at his successor, in his first speaking appearance in Europe since he left office. The crowd lapped it up.

Tonight, Merkel is in Brussels meeting current US president—and handshake-refuser—Donald Trump at a NATO summit.

Two presidents, one day. How is it going? One clue can be read in their faces. Note, if you will, the sheer number and range of smiles shared between Merkel and Obama this morning.

Like this one, the “is-it-really-you, B?” smile:

Or this, the “we-were-so-good-together, remember?” smile:

The “I-know-you’ve-moved-on, but-our-old-jokes-were-better-than-others’-jokes” smile:

And then there was this elegant wave-of-the-hand smile; B.O. pleased as punch:

Nicole Kubelka/face to face via ZUMA Press

Meanwhile, in Brussels, early photos indicate a….very different rapport:

Merkel and Trump pictured during the unveiling ceremony of the new headquarters of NATO in Brussels, Wednesday.Benoit Doppagne/Belga via ZUMA Press

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Nothing Says "Happiness" and "Relief" Like Angela Merkel Seeing Barack Obama Again

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In One Executive Order, Trump Revoked Years of Workplace Protections for Women

Mother Jones

In 2014, President Barack Obama signed the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces executive order. It required companies with federal contracts to heed 14 different labor and civil rights laws, including ones aimed at protecting parental leave, weeding out discrimination against women and minorities, and ensuring equal pay for women and fair processes surrounding workplace sexual harassment allegations.

Last week, Trump revoked this order, leaving workers at thousands of companies much more vulnerable to a host of abuses from their employers—and undoing protections meant to create more equitable workplaces for women.

“We have an executive order that essentially forces women to pay to keep companies in business that discriminate against them—with their own tax dollars,” Noreen Farrell, the director of Equal Rights Advocates, told NBC. “It’s an outrage.”

One provision of the now-revoked order required paycheck transparency by companies holding federal contracts, in which they had to provide all employees with detailed statements of their hours and compensation—a measure that’s particularly important for protecting workers against wage theft. A second provision that was jettisoned banned the use of forced arbitration clauses by federal contractors in handling sexual harassment or discrimination claims in their workplaces. These types of clauses—which require allegations to be settled privately outside of court in usually secret proceedings—are a way for companies to preemptively keep sexual harassment allegations out of the public eye.

Trump’s order also revokes the requirement that companies seeking federal contracts disclose three year’s worth of violations of the Equal Employment Opportunity executive order, first signed in 1965 by President Lyndon Johnson and since amended to include protections surrounding gender. The order now states that companies with federal contracts “will not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin.”

Nor will companies bidding on federal contracts be required to reveal their last three year’s worth of violations of the Family and Medical Leave Act, which requires that many companies provide 12 weeks of unpaid leave to new parents.

The day before President Trump signed this order, it was reported that his daughter Ivanka—who has regularly spoken about her father’s plans to improve protections for working moms, and who is currently pushing a child care tax credit as part of the administration’s upcoming tax reform initiative—would represent the United States at an upcoming women’s empowerment summit in Berlin. Here is her tweet:

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In One Executive Order, Trump Revoked Years of Workplace Protections for Women

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Why Are Erasers Pink?

Mother Jones

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A little while back I mentioned that Google Translate had gotten a lot better overnight when they switched to a new machine-learning algorithm. Their voice recognition got better too. And so did its question-answering capability.

I was chatting about this at Christmas with my family, and we all decided we should test it. But not with anything boring. We know that Siri and Google and other digital assistants can find nearby coffee shops or tell us the weather in Berlin. How about something harder? The conversation then morphed into something about pencils, and my mother said she only trusted erasers that are pink. But why are they pink, we wondered? Why indeed?

So there you have it? Not only did Google understand me, even with a cold, but it also understood the question and provided a brief and precisely on-point answer, which it read off very nicely. Impressive!

Anyway, this strikes me as close to Watson-esque. The thing is, this is not as simple a question as it seems. It requires a fairly sophisticated understanding of context and meaning. And finding a source that matches the question perfectly is also pretty amazing. If my phone can do that, how long before it can drive a car too?

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Why Are Erasers Pink?

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Two Cheers For the Nanny State

Mother Jones

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The nanny-staters at the EU are at it again:

E.U. regulations adopted in 2012 require that all newly manufactured trucks heavier than 3,500 kilograms (3.9 tons) be fitted with an advanced emergency braking system. The systems use radar and cameras to detect obstacles and warn the driver. In the event of a crash, the brakes may stop the vehicle entirely. Although the driver can override the brakes, an inexperienced user may not know how.

They just can’t get enough, can they? This raises the cost of trucks, raises the cost of goods carried in trucks, and probably has only a minuscule—

Wait. What?

The truck attack on a Christmas market in Berlin last week may have been cut short when the truck automatically deployed its brakes, the result of European Union regulations that require automatic braking systems on large trucks.

The new detail, revealed jointly by Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper and broadcasters NDR and WDR on Tuesday, may explain why the truck came to a stop after a few hundred feet. In the end, twelve people were killed in the attack, but there are indications that the E.U.-mandated advanced emergency braking system may have prevented more deaths.

How about that? The regulatory state FTW.

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Two Cheers For the Nanny State

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Here’s Why Donald Trump Needs a Facebook Page

Mother Jones

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I’ve been so fixated on Donald Trump’s mesmerizing Twitter performances that it’s escaped my attention that he also has a well-maintained Facebook page.1 As near as I can tell, it’s used for three things. First, when 140 characters won’t do and he needs someone to write an in-depth 65-word essay for him:

Second, when he wants to add some grade-school artwork to a grade-school tweet:

And third, when he wants to make a poster, suitable for scrapbooking, out of one of his quotes:

The quotes are great. I expect a Trump 2017 calendar made up of these pearls. Putin has one, after all. Plus a calendar offers tons of opportunities for keeping his message front and center. January 25: “68th anniversary of first Emmy Awards. Celebrity Apprentice should have gotten one!” February 2: “Groundhog Day! Yes, I’m still president.” March 23: “Obamacare is 7 years old. I’ll repeal it!” April 1: “Sexual Assault Awareness Month starts today!” April 15: “We’re the most highly taxed nation in the world. Sad!” May 5: “Time for a taco bowl!” June 14: “It’s my birthday!”

July 28: “It’s been a year since Khizr Khan insulted me. He still hasn’t apologized.” August 13: “Berlin wall created. Walls work!” September 17: “Electoral College is 230 years old today. Hooray!” October 19: “Everybody says I demolished Hillary in the third debate a year ago!” November 8: “First anniversary of biggest landslide victory in presidential history!” December 3: “International Day of Persons With Disabilities!” December 31: “Last day for all the rest of you to make charitable donations!”

This has so many possibilities. Trump should be all over it.

1Also Instagram and, at least once, a famous Snapchat filter. But he’s not on Pinterest, Tumblr, or Flickr. Time to branch out, Donald.

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Here’s Why Donald Trump Needs a Facebook Page

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When Bruce Springsteen Helped Destroy the Berlin Wall

Mother Jones

The fall of the Berlin Wall has been attributed to lots of things, from Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms and Ronald Reagan’s famous plea to the ineptitude of the Politiburo and the collective courage of the East German protesters. But there’s little doubt that David Bowie and Bruce Springsteen did their own small part.

When Bowie died this past January, the German Foreign Office noted as much in a memorial tweet: “Good-bye, David Bowie. You are now among #Heroes. Thank you for helping to bring down the #wall.” For Springsteen’s role, you can read the 2013 book Rocking the Wall: Bruce Springsteen—The Berlin Concert That Changed the World. But Springsteen’s recent memoir, Born to Run, offers his full account of that epic concert for the first time.

Many Americans are surprised to learn that our rock stars were even allowed to play in East Germany while the wall, constructed in 1961, remained in place. But Communist Party leaders, noting the tremendous buildup of anger and tension among their young people during the Gorbachev “glasnost” era, decided to provide a safety valve of sorts by allowing major rock concerts starting in 1987. Tens of thousands of East German kids were already flocking to the wall to listen as Bowie and others played just on the other side—and there had been clashes between the music-starved youth and East German police.

Bowie’s June 1987 performance was remarkable on several levels. The stage was set up in West Berlin, very close to the wall, with the old Reichstag building as a backdrop. Unlike most Western performers, he had a fitting song for the occasion: “Heroes,” written a few years earlier and purportedly inspired by Bowie’s time living in Berlin. The line about standing by the wall while “the guns shot above our heads” may refer to dramatic attempts by East Germans to escape the East—which happens to be the subject of my new book, The Tunnels: Escapes Under the Berlin Wall and the Historic Films the JFK White House Tried to Kill. (You can watch Bowie’s performance that day on YouTube.) And here, from a 2003 interview, is how he described it:

It was one of the most emotional performances I’ve ever done. I was in tears…And there were thousands on the other side that had come close to the wall. So it was like a double concert where the wall was the division. And we would hear them cheering and singing along from the other side. God, even now I get choked up. When we did “Heroes” it really felt anthemic, almost like a prayer. However well we do it these days, it’s almost like walking through it compared to that night, because it meant so much more. That’s the town where it was written, and that’s the particular situation that it was written about.

By then, Bob Dylan had been invited by a youth arm of the Communist Party to play in Treptower Park in the East on September 17, 1987, along with touring mates Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Roger McGuinn. Protests were building against the regime and the wall, and East German officials hoped to defuse tensions with a few signs of openness.

Naturally, the Stasi (East Germany’s notorious secret police) were on top of it. Their six-page preview was filed at their headquarters under “Robert Zimmerman, No. HA XX 17578.” It mainly covered logistics and security—no secret bugging of Dylan, apparently—and the dispersal of 81,000 tickets, with at least one-third going to party officials and their pals. The Stasi didn’t seem too worried that Dylan, then in a down period in his career, would prove to be a rabble-rouser, as he was merely “an old master of rock” with no particular “resonance” with the youth of the day. The crowd, they predicted, would be mostly middle-aged and older. Dylan would act in a “disciplined” way and not cause undo “emotions.”

In the end, the gig played out pretty much as the Stasi had anticipated. By most accounts, Dylan—whose lyrical work just earned him the 2016 Nobel Prize for literature—gave a rather lackluster performance (his norm for the time), consisting of a couple of Christian tunes mixed in with hits like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Rainy Day Women” and “Like a Rolling Stone.” He reportedly did not speak a single word from the stage.

This was not the case with Springsteen, who arrived in East Berlin 10 months later to play his biggest concert ever. More than 200,000 showed up, twice what Dylan had attracted. Springsteen opened, pointedly, with “Badlands,” but the indisputable highlight was his cover of “Chimes of Freedom,” a Dylan tune that Dylan himself had overlooked. The show, which in typical Springsteen style lasted nearly four hours, was beamed to millions of East Germans via state television. Many middle-aged Germans I interviewed for my book fondly recalled attending the performance or watching it on TV. “It was a nail in the coffin for East Germany,” one fan told the Guardian years later.

In Born to Run, Springsteen recounts a previous visit to East Berlin with bandmate Steve Van Zandt. “You could feel the boot,” he recalls. The wall, in Springsteen’s view, seemed almost “pornographic.” The experience helped shock the then-apolitical Van Zandt into decades of activism. “The power of the wall that split the world in two, its blunt, ugly, mesmerizing realness, couldn’t be underestimated,” Springsteen writes. “It was an offense to humanity.”

When Springsteen returned to East Berlin for his epic 1988 show, as I note in my own book, he unhappily discovered that the state was billing it as a “concert for the Sandinistas,” the pro-Communist Nicaraguans. So he delivered an impassioned speech. His German was grade-school level, but he got the point across: “I’m not here for any government. I’ve come to play rock and roll for you in the hope that one day all the barriers will be torn down.” East German officials backstage had somehow learned about Bruce’s original statement, which included the explosive word “walls,” and Springsteen’s manager, Jon Landau, had convinced him at the last minute to change it to “barriers.” But after finishing his statement, Springsteen quickly launched into “Chimes of Freedom,” which includes the key reference: “while the walls were tightening.”

The next day, he and the band “partied” at the East Berlin consulate, Springsteen writes, before heading back to the West to play a show for a mere 17,000 people—which “felt a lot less dramatic than what we’d just experienced.” Referring to the “stakes” of rock and roll, he writes, “The higher they’re pushed, the deeper and more thrilling the moment becomes. In East Germany in 1988, the center of the table was loaded down with a winner-take-all bounty that would explode into the liberating destruction of the Berlin Wall by the people.”

German historian Gerd Dietrich would later tell Rocking the Wall author Erik Kirschbaum, “Springsteen’s concert and speech certainly contributed in a large sense to the events leading up to the fall of the wall. It made people more eager for more and more change,” he said. “Springsteen aroused a greater interest in the West. It showed people how locked up they really were.”

As Springsteen himself would later put it, “Once in a while you play a place, you play a show that ends up staying inside of you, living with you for the rest of your life. East Berlin in 1988 was certainly one of them.”

Greg Mitchell is the author of The Tunnels: Escapes Under the Berlin Wall and the Historic Films the JFK White House Tried to Kill.

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When Bruce Springsteen Helped Destroy the Berlin Wall

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Netflix and Grill: Michael Pollan Takes His Food Evangelism to the Small Screen

Mother Jones

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“Fire,” the first episode of a new docuseries called Cooked, opens with sweeping shots of a barren landscape in western Australia, dotted with huge, roaring fires. At dusk, Aborigine families gather around the flames to roast bush turkeys and goannas—a large Australian lizard—beneath the glowing embers. A mother baptizes her toddler in the smoke as it rises.

The four-part docuseries that premiered on Friday is based on the New York Times best-selling book Cooked. Its author, science writer Michael Pollan, has built an empire writing books (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food, Food Rules) that argue Americans should eat simple, home-cooked foods. Each episode in the Netflix series is inspired by the four elements used to transform raw ingredients into food—fire (barbeque), water (braising), air (bread making), and earth (fermentation). Each episode has a different director and follows the everyday cooks profiled in Pollan’s book, as well as the writer’s own culinary quests.

In “Fire” we meet Ed Mitchell, the pit master from North Carolina who grills hogs on the barbeque with techniques passed down from his great-grandfather, and we watch Pollan attempt to create a whole-hog cookout himself. Later, in the Earth episode, Noella Marcellino, a nun in Connecticut with a doctorate in microbiology, separates curds and whey in a large wooden barrel to make cheese.

Pollan’s prolific body of work asks readers to question what and how much they eat. (On an Inquiring Minds podcast in 2014, he argued that the Paleo diet is nowhere near how hunter-gatherers actually ate.)

But Cooked is different. Instead of evangelizing about which foods to eat, Pollan urges us to prepare our own.

“I’m hopeful that there will be a renaissance in cooking,” Pollan says in the series. “If we’re going to cook, it’s going to be because we decide we want to, that it is important enough to us, pleasurable enough to us, necessary enough to our health and our happiness.”

“Cooked” premiers on Netflix February 19. Photo courtesy of Netflix

Much of the information presented in the Cooked Netflix series won’t be new to foodies who follow Pollan’s work. It touches on the rise of industrialization and processed food, the beneficial gut microbes that thrive when we eat fermented food, and the importance of eating meat that came from ethically treated animals. However, even viewers obsessed with health food trends will be seduced by the series’ vibrant scenes, which provide a glimpse of how cultures around the world make—and break—their proverbial bread.

We’re told that the United States spends less time on cooking than any other nation in the world, and Pollan stresses that “time is the missing ingredient in our recipes and in our lives.” Yet the series doesn’t offer viewers detailed advice about how to increase how much they cook. Cooked offers only a few general tips, such as doing meal prep on Sundays.

Pollan got blowback for an essay he wrote in the New York Times in 2009 that suggested that Betty Friedman’s 1963 The Feminine Mystique got women out of the kitchen and was linked to the decline of home cooking. In Water, the episode that addresses the realities of processed foods and the restaurant industry, Pollan and director Caroline Suh said they were careful how they approached the issue.

“The collapse of cooking can be interpreted as a byproduct of feminism, but it’s a lot more complicated and a lot more interesting than that,” Pollan said in an interview. “Getting it right in the film took some time, but it was important to tell the story of the insinuation of industry into our kitchens, and show how the decline of cooking was a supply-driven phenomenon.”

Richard Bourdon makes his sourdough with three ingredients: wheat, water, and salt. Photo courtesy of Netflix.

Whether it’s men or women who wear the apron, the message of Cooked is clear—we should make home-cooked meals a habit, for our bodies and for our souls.

Jessica Prentice, author of Full Moon Feast and coiner of the term “locavore,” once wrote that if someone cannot drive we find it incomprehensible, yet if someone admits to not knowing how to cook, we see it as normal.

Cooked aims to get us back in the driver’s seat.

“Is there any practice less selfish,” Pollan asks in Cooked, “any time less wasted than preparing something nourishing and delicious for the people you love?”

The series premiered at the Berlin Film Festival on February 16 and on Netflix on February 19.

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Netflix and Grill: Michael Pollan Takes His Food Evangelism to the Small Screen

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Germany Closes Its Border With Austria, Hoping to Stop the Refugee Flow

Mother Jones

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Two weeks ago I wrote about what might happen if Germany decided to start policing its borders again in response to the huge numbers of refugees and migrants entering the country. Now we’re going to find out.

The German government has announced that the country is closing its border with Austria and also suspending train traffic its southern neighbor, the route by which tens of thousands of refugees have entered Germany in recent days. Those borders have been open for nearly 20 years under the Schengen Agreement, which turned most of the European Union into one large free-travel zone with no internal border checks. Until now, you could go from Berlin to Amsterdam or Paris much like you were going from New York to DC. Along with the euro, the Schengen zone is considered one of the EU’s most important achievements, a powerful symbol of European unity as a well as a major booster of trade and tourism. All of that now hangs in the balance as the refugee crisis strains internal EU politics.

German politicians, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, have been hinting at closing German borders for weeks, hoping to get the EU moving on a quota system that would send more of the refugees to other countries. Germany is currently taking in the majority of asylum-seekers and migrants, while other EU countries are resisting. Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel told Berlin’s Der Tagesspiegel newspaper that Germany is “reaching the limits of its capabilities” and called for an EU-wide response to the refugee influx. “By the time thousands of people are walking on the Autobahn, it’s too late,” he said.

Reinstating border checks is sign of how frustrated the German government is with its neighbors—and how divisive the refugee problem is within the EU. “The migrants have to accept that they cannot simply choose an EU member country,” Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière said while announcing the new policy.

Germany says the border closure is temporary. But it’s the first major EU country to take such a step to deal with an ongoing crisis like this, and many are wondering whether it will prompt other Schengen countries to do the same.

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Germany Closes Its Border With Austria, Hoping to Stop the Refugee Flow

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Chris Christie Is Sitting on a Bill to Seize Guns From Domestic Abusers

Mother Jones

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For the past three weeks, a bill to crack down on gun possession by domestic abusers has been languishing on Chris Christie’s desk. The bipartisan bill would give New Jersey courts and police greater authority to enforce current state gun laws against suspected and convicted abusers, but so far Christie has refused to say whether he will sign or veto it.

Christie’s silence coincides with what political observers see as his shift toward more permissive gun laws as he revs up his campaign for the GOP presidential nomination.

It also comes at a time when New Jersey lawmakers are scrambling to strengthen legal protections for victims of domestic violence, spurred by the June 3 murder of Carol Bowne in Berlin Township by her ex-boyfriend, a convicted felon. On June 25, the New Jersey legislature passed A-4218, the bill now awaiting action from Christie. Democrats had introduced the measure in February, but it sat in committee; after Bowne’s death, it advanced speedily.

A spokesman for Christie’s office said it does not discuss pending legislation until the governor’s office has given the bill “a thorough review.” If Christie does nothing for 45 days, the legislation will become law when the General Assembly reconvenes.

At the time of her death, Bowne was trying to obtain a gun permit for her self-defense. Christie responded to the murder by creating a commission to determine if any state firearms laws “infringe on New Jerseyans’ constitutional rights” and require modification. His announcement came on the night of June 29, just hours before he kicked off his campaign for president.

State Senator Gabriela Mosquero (D), one of the bill’s sponsors, says it is not unusual for a bill to sit for several weeks.* But Christie’s swift creation of the committee, via executive order, has caused her and other Democrats to suspect that Christie is concerned about pressure from gun rights groups.

“He quickly released his executive order as a way of showing he is serious about victims of domestic violence,” Mosquero says, adding that her inquiries to Christie’s office have been met with radio silence. “He could have signed our bill the same day. I’m not sure what he’s waiting for.”

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Chris Christie Is Sitting on a Bill to Seize Guns From Domestic Abusers

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