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The Podcast Where Icons Like Iggy Pop, U2, Björk, and Wilco Get to Totally Geek Out

by NicholHeavener Posted on March 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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The seeds of the popular podcast Song Exploder were sown in the mid-2000s, when Los Angeles musician Hrishikesh Hirway first sat down to remix other people’s songs and found himself spellbound by the nuances and complexities of the individual tracks within. “It felt like such a privileged listening experience,” he recalls.

About a decade later, in January 2014, Hirway launched the podcast—which, over two-plus years and 68 episodes, has earned him a devoted fan base and interviews with superstars such as U2, Björk, and the National. Each episode deconstructs a single song, mashing up musical elements with audio snippets of the creators geeking out on gear or talking about what drives them to make music. It’s an experience dense with sounds, ideas, and narrative momentum that culminates in the fully assembled song. But Song Exploder transcends mere music. “It’s about how you take an idea from nothing to something fully realized,” the host explains.

Hirway is familiar enough with the process. He began recording as a college junior, calling himself “The One AM Radio.” Since relocating from his Peabody, Massachusetts, hometown to LA in 2006, he’s written scores for several films. And in 2013, he co-founded the hip-hop group Moors with rapper-actor Keith Stanfield of Straight Outta Compton fame.

Hirway at home in Los Angeles. Courtesy Song Exploder

At first, Hirway recruited musician friends as his podcast subjects, but he soon began reaching outside his social circles: an email to an address he found online led to an interview with composer Jeff Beal, known for his work on House of Cards. Persistence and luck—and help from fans of the podcast—have kept the big names rolling in. Last fall, while struggling to reach Wilco, Hirway remembered that the son of bandleader Jeff Tweedy had recently followed the podcast on Twitter; the episode came together within days.

Much of the podcast’s appeal lies in Hirway’s uncanny ability to bypass journalistic awkwardness in favor of honest and intimate conversations about music and life. A single episode will introduce you to an artist, but listening religiously offers something more: a glimpse into the nature of creativity and the eccentric ways musicians cultivate it. In one arresting episode, multi-instrumentalist Nick Zammuto of the experimental duo the Books tells Hirway how he plucked the lyrics of “Smells Like Content” from educational TV shows and the facade of the Brooklyn Public Library. “People labor over lyrics a lot, but really they’re kind of all around us all the time,” Zammuto says.

In another episode, members of the noise band Health explain how a programming error—”the whole song glitches, basically”—ended up in the chorus of “Stonefist.” Again and again, Hirway’s listeners encounter artists who are learning to embrace accidents, imperfections, and curveballs that collaborators throw their way. Shared, too, is the artists’ palpable thrill in describing how some songs emerge seemingly of their own accord. “You sit back and go, ‘How did I do that?'” says Wilco’s Tweedy.

Ultimately, Hirway aims to provide an experience that even someone without a note of musical training can relate to. After all, “Creativity is not this opaque box, this laboratory that is only accessible to a chosen few…All you really need is an idea and the will to see it through.”

Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy talks music with Hirway during a taping. Courtesy of Song Exploder

Explain That Tune

Being asked to choose your favorite Song Exploder episode is like being asked to name your favorite child. But these five selections offer a good taste of what Hirway’s podcast has to offer:

The Books’ Nick Zammuto, “Smells Like Content“: If you thought there were limits to what constitutes music, Zammuto will prove you wrong. He describes his use of such humble materials as PVP pipe and vinyl records—not the music on the records, but the records themselves—in this seminal early episode.

Courtney Barnett, “Depreston“: Barnett had a big 2015. The Australian rocker’s debut album, Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, received rave reviews, and Barnett was nominated for the “best new artist” Grammy. In this episode, Barnett breaks down the track “Depreston” with characteristic wit and insight.

MGMT, “Time to Pretend“: If you’ve left your fortress in the last eight years, you’ve undoubtedly heard this song. Written when the band members were still in college, “Time to Pretend,” an anthem to imaginary stardom, had the surprise effect of making its creators famous. In this episode, MGMT recounts the song’s evolution—and how it felt to perform in druid capes on David Letterman.

Natalia Lafourcade, “Hasta la Raíz“: While Song Exploder has featured plenty of famous artists, Hirway also sees it as a vehicle for introducing accomplished musicians to a broader public. Mexican singer-songwriter Natalia Lafourcade was the perfect candidate: She won four Latin Grammys last year and an American Grammy in February, but is still little-known north of the border.

Ramin Djawadi, Game of Thrones theme: If you could somehow conjure up the musical equivalent to the word “epic,” it might sound like this. Composer Ramin Djawadi describes how he crafted the signature theme to the hit HBO show Game of Thrones, and what it was like to see the melody become an internet phenomenon, interpreted by fans and musicians around the world.

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The Podcast Where Icons Like Iggy Pop, U2, Björk, and Wilco Get to Totally Geek Out

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Theoretical vs. Experimental Physics: Quien Es Mas Macho?

by FrankieMarx Posted on January 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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Warning! I have not followed Deflategate except in passing.1 I don’t have the kind of grassy knoll knowledge of what happened that lots of people seem to. The naive question that I’m about to pose may inspire jeers in those of you who have immersed yourselves in it.

Anyway: the first thing that I and thousands of other geeky types thought of when Deflategate first burst onto the scene was the Ideal Gas Law. I didn’t actually try to calculate anything, but I remember vaguely thinking that the temperature probably dropped about 5 percent between the locker room and the field, so the pressure in the footballs might plausibly have dropped about 5 percent too. Then again, maybe the volume of the footballs changed slightly. Hmmm. Then I got sick and didn’t care anymore—about Deflategate or anything else. Joe Nocera writes about this today:

John Leonard is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology….When the Deflategate story broke after last year’s A.F.C. championship game between the New England Patriots and the Indianapolis Colts in January, he found himself fixated on it….“Of course, I thought of the Ideal Gas Law right away,” Leonard says, “but there was no data to test it.”

….In May, the data arrived….Numbers in hand, Leonard went to work. He bought the same gauges the N.F.L. used to measure p.s.i. levels. He bought N.F.L.-quality footballs. He replicated the temperatures of the locker room, and the colder field. And so on….The drop in the Patriots’ footballs’ p.s.i was consistent with the Ideal Gas Law.

By early November, he had a PowerPoint presentation with more than 140 slides….A viewer who watched the lengthy lecture edited it down to a crisp 15 minutes….It is utterly convincing.

This is what’s always puzzled me. You don’t need to be an MIT professor of Measurement and Instrumentation to get a good sense of what happened, and you don’t need to spend a year pondering the minutiae of the Ideal Gas Law and writing 140 slides about it. Get a bag of footballs, inflate them to 12.5 psi, and take them outside on a 50-degree day. Wait an hour and measure them again. Maybe do this a few times under different conditions (wet vs. dry, different gauges, etc.). It would take a day or two at most.2 The league office could have instructed the referees to do this quick test just to see if 11.3 psi footballs were plausibly legal, and that might have been the end of it. Why didn’t that happen? Why didn’t lots of people try this? Even if you only have one football to your name, it wouldn’t be hard to at least get a rough idea. Inflate it, put it in your refrigerator for an hour, and then remeasure it.

Since I wasn’t paying attention, it’s quite possible that lots of people did this. Did they? Did the league? What happened here?

1Yuk yuk.

2Because I’m an optimistic guy, I’m just going to assume that this would be done in at least a minimally rigorous way. Nothing that would be necessary for publication in Nature. Just good enough to satisfy Mr. Lantz, my high school physics teacher.

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Theoretical vs. Experimental Physics: Quien Es Mas Macho?

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3 Ways White Kids Benefit Most From Racially Diverse Schools

by Kieran63O330 Posted on January 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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Last week, education officials in New York City approved a controversial school rezoning plan that will reassign some affluent, white children to a high-poverty Brooklyn school that is 90 percent black and Latino. The city’s department of education proposed the plan to reduce overcrowding in the predominantly white Public School 8, which serves kids from Brooklyn Heights and Dumbo—home to some of the most expensive apartments and condos in the country. Meanwhile, their new school, P.S. 307, serves mostly kids from the nearby public housing project, the Farragut Houses.

Many parents at both schools fiercely opposed the integration plan. “When rich people come in, they have the money to force people to do what they want,” said Farragut Houses resident Dolores Cheatom. Citing historic precedents, Cheatom and others argued the rezoning would change the school to benefit wealthy newcomers and slowly push out students from the Farragut community.

The parents whose kids are now bound for P.S. 307 said they were most concerned about the school’s low standardized test scores—which is no surprise, since that’s a common argument against sending white kids to schools that serve large numbers of low-income black and Latino students. The assumptions behind this argument go something like this: (1) Integration mostly benefits poor Latino and black students by allowing them to attend “good,” majority-white schools with better test scores, and (2) sending white children to schools that serve students from diverse racial and economic backgrounds will hurt the academic outcomes of white children.

But here’s the thing: The academic and social advantages white kids gain in integrated schools have been consistently documented by a rich body of peer-reviewed research over the last 15 years. And as strange as it may sound, many social scientists—and, increasingly, leaders in the business world—argue that diverse schools actually benefit white kids the most.

Here’s a summary of some of the most convincing evidence these experts have used to date:

1. White students’ test scores don’t drop when they go to schools with large numbers of black and Latino students.
In 2007, 553 social scientists from across the country signed an amicus brief in support of voluntary school integration policies for a Supreme Court case known as Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District. The brief continues to serve as a treasure trove of some of the most important research in this field, and in its 5-4 decision in favor of integration, the justices concluded that the academic progress of white children is best served in multiracial schools. Soon after the seminal court case, Harvard researchers Susan Eaton and Gina Chirichigno launched the One Nation Indivisible initiative, which now serves as a clearinghouse for the most rigorous current research on the benefits of integrated schools.

When it comes to the impact on standardized test scores, research cited in the case—as well as the most recent data from the federal government—confirmed that there is no negative impact on the test scores of white children. Some studies found that test scores of all students increased, especially in math and science. Others found that they stayed the same. The debate on whether test scores increase in integrated schools continues, but there is overwhelming evidence that they don’t drop when white students go to economically and racially integrated schools.

2. Diverse classrooms teach some of the most important 21st-century skills, which matter more than test scores.
Psychologists, economists, and neuroscientists have done some really exciting research in education in the past 10 years, synthesized in the best-selling book by Paul Tough, How Children Succeed. This research tells us that some of the most important academic, social, and emotional skills—curiosity, complex and flexible thinking, resilience, empathy, gratitude—are not captured by standardized test scores but are keys to a successful and productive life.

Other researchers, including Stanford’s Prudence L. Carter, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst’s Linda R. Tropp, and Loyola University of New Orleans’ Robert A. Garda Jr., have found that skills like cross-cultural collaboration, critical thinking, problem-solving, effective communication, reduced racial prejudice, and empathy are best fostered in diverse classrooms. Many of these researchers argue that we need to expand our definition of academic advantages to include these important skills, which are captured mostly through qualitative assessments like presentations, group projects, and student surveys.

3. Graduates of socioeconomically diverse schools are more effective in the workplace and global markets.
Researchers who have been trying to figure out which office settings allow for the most powerful breakthroughs in innovation have consistently come up with the same answer: daily practice and comfort with diverse perspectives, according to Scott E. Page, the author of The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools and Societies. Virginia Commonwealth University’s Genevieve Siegel-Hawley argues that daily classroom interactions with students from different racial and economic backgrounds help students develop the ability to view and understand complex problems and events through multiple lenses. Research also shows that an integrated workforce helps companies design and sell products more effectively to a wide range of customers.

Notably, the average white student today goes to a school where 77 percent of her or his peers are white. Schools are as segregated and unequal today as they were shortly after Brown v. Board of Education was decided. This means that too many students, especially in suburban schools, are being socialized in environments that deprive them of one of the most important skills in the global economy: the ability to communicate and collaborate with people from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Research is clear that such skills are difficult to teach without daily exposure to integrated communities—a trip abroad, a diversity workshop, or an ethnic studies class taught in a predominantly white classroom isn’t enough. And because students of color are much more likely to interact with diverse people in their neighborhoods and schools, in this sense integrated schools give greater advantages to white students.

Garda writes that getting involved in the issues of income and racial inequalities at the policy level is often too daunting for many parents. But choosing a school or a neighborhood is actually one of the most meaningful ways in which parents can act out their values and help reduce income and racial disparities.

As journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones reported in her important This American Life segment last year on integration, our country made the largest gains in reducing achievement gaps at the peak of integration in the mid-1970s. And then the country gave up, mostly because white parents were afraid to put their kids in the same classrooms with students from “underperforming” schools. “We somehow want this to have been easy,” Hannah-Jones, who as a child lived in a working-class African American neighborhood in Waterloo, Iowa, and was bused to a majority-white school across town. “And we gave up really fast.”

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3 Ways White Kids Benefit Most From Racially Diverse Schools

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The GOP Is Running on Fear — And I’m Here to Help

by lqr8rg5rr Posted on January 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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Oh man, I’m sure glad I don’t live in Iowa. Or New Hampshire or South Carolina or Nevada or Alabama or Minnesota or Oklahoma or Alaska or Vermont or Arkansas or Tennessee or Colorado or Georgia or Massachusetts or Texas or Virginia:

Scenes of masked men toting guns and waving black Islamic State flags. Refugees scrambling across the border. Fires and explosions.

It’s not just a Donald Trump ad. Most of the Republican presidential contenders and their allies are now waging campaigns focused on fear….Former Florida governor Jeb Bush delivers a similar message in a new spot that begins airing in New Hampshire this week. “We are at war with radical Islamic terrorism,” he declares….And in Iowa, a new ad by a super PAC supporting Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas features a frightening montage of Islamic State militants, refugees on the run and rolling tanks before mocking Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida as a lightweight.

So that’s what we’re getting? A multi-month campaign to see who can out-fear the rest of the field? Well, good luck with that. I’ll even help out. Remember Ebola? That was a great bit of fearmongering. A true classic. But now we have something even better: Zika. Here’s the dope:

The Zika virus, a rare tropical disease that’s causing a panic in Brazil — because it may lead to babies being born with abnormally small heads — has now made its way to Puerto Rico….”It’s spreading really fast,” said Scott Weaver, the director of the Institute for Human Infections and Immunity at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. “I think the Zika virus is going to be knocking on the doorstep in places like Florida and Texas probably in the spring or summer.”

Zika is sort of an invisible virus: if you contract it, you’ll either feel nothing or, at most, flu-like symptoms that shortly go away. But it might cause birth defects. Maybe. There’s no need to include that qualifier, though. This is an unseen but implacable menace making its way across our borders and threatening our unborn babies. And what is Obama doing about it? Nothing, I’ll bet—and I really don’t think there’s any need to check on that. So let’s get those ads cranking, guys!

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The GOP Is Running on Fear — And I’m Here to Help

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Meet "Sledgehammer Shannon," the lawyer who is Uber’s worst nightmare

by JamePintogz Posted on December 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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In early 2012, on a visit to San Francisco, Shannon Liss-Riordan went to a restaurant with some friends. Over dinner, one of her companions began to describe a new car-hailing app that had taken Silicon Valley by storm. “Have you seen this?” he asked, tapping Uber on his phone. “It’s changed my life.”

Liss-Riordan glanced at the little black cars snaking around on his screen. “He looked up at me and he knew what I was thinking,” she remembers. After all, four years earlier she had been christened “an avenging angel for workers” by the Boston Globe. “He said, ‘Don’t you dare. Do not put them out of business.'” But Liss-Riordan, a labor lawyer who has spent her career successfully fighting behemoths such as FedEx, American Airlines, and Starbucks on behalf of their workers, was way ahead of him. When she saw cars, she thought of drivers. And a lawsuit waiting to happen.

Miriam Migliazzi and Mart Klein

Four years later, Liss-Riordan is spearheading class-action lawsuits against Uber, Lyft, and nine other apps that provide on-demand services, shaking the pillars of Silicon Valley’s much-hyped sharing economy. In particular, she is challenging how these companies classify their workers. If she can convince judges that these so-called micro-entrepreneurs are in fact employees and not independent contractors, she could do serious damage to a very successful business model—Uber alone was recently valued at $51 billion—which relies on cheap labor and a creative reading of labor laws. She has made some progress in her work for drivers. Just this month, after Uber tried several tactics to shrink the class, she won a key legal victory when a judge in San Francisco found that more than 100,000 drivers can join her class action.

“These companies save massively by shifting many costs of running a business to the workers, profiting off the backs of their workers,” Liss-Riordan says with calm intensity as she sits in her Boston office, which is peppered with framed posters of Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. The bustling block below is home to two coffee chains that Liss-Riordan has sued. If the Uber case succeeds, she tells me, “maybe that will make companies think twice about steamrolling over laws.”

After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1996, Liss-Riordan was working at a boutique labor law firm when she got a call from a waiter at a fancy Boston restaurant. He complained that his manager was keeping a portion of his tips and wondered if that was legal. Armed with a decades-old Massachusetts labor statute she had unearthed, Liss-Riordan helped him take his employer to court—and won. “This whole industry was ignoring this law,” Liss-Riordan recalls. Pretty quickly, she became the go-to expert for employees seeking to recover skimmed tips. And before she knew it, her “whole practice was representing waitstaff.”

In November 2012, she won a $14.1 million judgment for Starbucks baristas in Massachusetts. After a federal jury ordered American Airlines to pay $325,000 in lost tips to skycaps at Boston’s airport, one of the plaintiffs dubbed her “Sledgehammer Shannon.” When one of her suits caused a local pizzeria to go bankrupt, she bought it, raised wages, and renamed it The Just Crust.

Liss-Riordan estimates that she’s won or settled several hundred labor cases for bartenders, cashiers, truck drivers, and other workers in the rapidly expanding service economy. Lawyers around the country have sought her input in their labor lawsuits, including one that resulted in a $100 million payout to more than 120,000 Starbucks baristas in California. (The ruling was later overturned on appeal.) In a series of cases that began in 2005, she has won multi­million-dollar settlements for FedEx drivers who had been improperly treated as contractors and were expected to buy or lease their delivery trucks, as well as pay for their own gas.

Her Uber offensive began in late 2012, when several Boston drivers approached her, alleging that the company was keeping as much as half of their tips, which is illegal under Massachusetts law. Liss-Riordan sued and won a settlement in their favor. But while looking more closely at Uber, she confirmed the suspicion that had popped up at that dinner in San Francisco: The company’s drivers are classified as independent contractors rather than official employees, meaning that Uber can forgo paying for benefits like workers’ compensation, unemployment, and Social Security. Uber can also avoid taking responsibility for drivers’ business expenses such as fuel, vehicle costs, car insurance, and maintenance.

In August 2013, Liss-Riordan filed a class-action lawsuit in a federal court in San Francisco, where Uber is based. Her argument hinged on California law, which classifies workers as employees if their tasks are central to a business and are substantially controlled by their employer. Under that principle, the lawsuit says, Uber drivers are clearly employees, not contractors. “Uber is in the business of providing car service to customers,” notes the complaint. “Without the drivers, Uber’s business would not exist.” The suit also alleges that Uber manipulates the prices of rides by telling customers that tips are included—but then keeps a chunk of the built-in tips rather than remitting them fully to drivers. The case calls for Uber to pay back its drivers for their lost tips and expenses, plus interest.

Uber jumped into gear, bringing on lawyer Ted Boutrous, who had successfully represented Walmart before the Supreme Court in the largest employment class action in US history. Uber tried to get the case thrown out, arguing that its business is technology, not transportation. The drivers, the company contended, were independent businesses, and the Uber app was simply a “lead generation platform” for connecting them with customers.

Techspeak aside, Liss-Riordan has heard all this before. When she litigated similar cases on behalf of cleaning workers, the cleaning companies claimed they were simply connecting broom-pushing “independent franchises” with customers. When she won several landmark cases brought by exotic dancers who had been misclassified as contractors, the strip clubs argued that they were “bars where you happen to have naked women dancing,” Liss-Riordan recounts with a wry smile. “The court said, ‘No. People come to your bar because of that entertainment. Adult entertainment. That’s your business.'”

Uber’s argument is pretty similar to that of the strip clubs. “Uber is obviously a car service,” she says, and to insist otherwise is “to deny the obvious.” An Uber spokesperson wouldn’t address that characterization, but said that drivers “love being their own boss” and “use Uber on their own terms: they control their use of the app, choosing when, how and where they drive.”

Some observers have suggested creating a new job category between employee and contractor. But Liss-Riordan is tired of hearing that labor laws should adapt to accommodate upstart tech companies, not the other way around: “Why should we tear apart laws that have been put in place over decades to help a $50 billion company like Uber at the expense of workers who are trying to pay their rent and feed their families?”

For the most part, courts have sided with her. Last March, a federal court in San Francisco denied Uber’s attempt to quash the lawsuit, calling the company’s reasoning “fatally flawed” (and even citing French philosopher Michel Foucault to make its point). In September, the same court handed Liss-Riordan and her clients a major victory by allowing the case to go forward as a class action. The judge in the Lyft case has called the company’s argument—nearly identical to Uber’s—”obviously wrong.” Last July, the cleaning startup HomeJoy shut down, implying that a worker classification lawsuit filed by Liss-Riordan was a key reason.

Meanwhile, other sharing-economy startups are changing the way they do business. The grocery app Instacart and the shipping app Shyp—Liss-Riordan has cases pending against both—have announced they will start converting contractors to full employees. Liss-Riordan says that’s her ultimate goal: to protect workers in the new economy, not to kill the innovation behind their jobs. “This is not going to put the Ubers of the world out of business,” she says.

One of her opponents has played a more creative offense. Last fall, the laundry-delivery app Washio convinced a judge that Liss-Riordan had no right to practice law in California. Liss-Riordan easily could have relied on a local lawyer to head the case, but instead she signed up to take the California bar exam in February. “Their plan kind of backfired,” she says. “I expect they’ll be seeing more of me, rather than less.”

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Meet "Sledgehammer Shannon," the lawyer who is Uber’s worst nightmare

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Every Female Democratic Senator Is Backing Clinton—With One Notable Exception

by Zeniarwpzz Posted on November 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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Hillary Clinton will make a stop in Washington, DC, on Monday night to show off her resounding support from the Democratic women in the US Senate. At a “Women for Hillary” event near the Capitol, 13 of the 14 female Democratic senators will voice their support for Clinton’s presidential campaign, with backers ranging from moderates such as Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota to liberals including Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin.

But amid that overwhelming support, it’s the lone holdout that might be most notable: Elizabeth Warren.

The progressive icon from Massachusetts is one of the few Senate Democrats who have not yet endorsed Clinton. Of the 44 Democrats in the Senate, 38 have endorsed Clinton. (Bernie Sanders has yet to lock up public support from even one of his Senate colleagues.)

But Warren has been conspicuously reticent. A favorite of the progressive base who has been pushing her Democratic colleagues to be more openly liberal, Warren has yet to throw her support behind the Democratic front-runner. In 2013, Warren joined all other Democratic women in the Senate in signing a letter encouraging Clinton to enter the 2016 race. Warren and Clinton later met at Clinton’s DC home late last year while the former secretary of state was readying her campaign launch. During that meeting, Clinton reportedly asked for Warren’s advice but not her endorsement.

But since Clinton made her campaign official earlier this year, Warren has remained largely silent on presidential politics, with her few stray comments pointing to a reluctance to align her political brand with Clinton’s. In July, Warren implicitly called out Clinton at the annual progressive activist confab Netroots Nation, stating that she couldn’t see herself supporting a presidential candidate who wouldn’t ban the revolving-door windfall bonuses Wall Streeters receive when they take a government job in Washington. Warren specifically said her endorsement was contingent on a candidate’s support for a bill introduced by Baldwin to end these so-called golden parachutes. The following month, Clinton announced her support for the legislation, which has yet to receive a vote in the Senate.

Still, Warren hasn’t cozied up to the Clinton crowd. In August, Warren met with Vice President Joe Biden while he was still flirting with the idea of a presidential campaign. And at a book release event at a Senate office building last month, Warren used her opening remarks to attack Clinton’s campaign rhetoric. She didn’t name Clinton explicitly, but said she had been disappointed to watch the Democratic debates and see candidates dismissing the need to reinstate Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era law separating commercial and investment banking that was repealed under President Bill Clinton. With both Sanders and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley backing a new Glass-Steagall, Warren didn’t have to use Clinton’s name to make it clear who she was referring to when she said Democrats shouldn’t be asking if Glass-Steagall alone could have stopped the recent recession. “I think that’s just the wrong question to ask,” she said with exasperation, “the wrong point to make.”

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Every Female Democratic Senator Is Backing Clinton—With One Notable Exception

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Purina Pet Food Is So Much More Disgusting Than We Even Knew

by OTHLeannez Posted on November 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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If you’ve ever purchased seafood or pet food from Nestlé, you may have unwittingly contributed to the abuse of migrant workers in Southeast Asia.

On Monday, Nestlé admitted that it had found indications of forced labor, human trafficking, and child labor in its supply chain in Thailand, where the Switzerland-based company sources some of the seafood that it sells in supermarkets around the world, including in the United States. The findings came after an internal investigation that was launched by Nestlé in December last year, following reports by media and NGOs that linked the company’s shrimp, prawns, and Purina brand pet foods with abusive working conditions.

Many of the workers in question are migrants from Thailand’s less developed neighbors, Burma and Cambodia, who are tricked into laboring on fishing boats after fleeing persecution and poverty at home, according to the Massachusetts-based nonprofit Verité, which at Nestlé’s request interviewed workers at six of the company’s production sites in Thailand. Workers “had been subjected to deceptive recruitment practices that started in their home countries, transported to Thailand under inhumane conditions, charged with excessive fees leading to debt bondage in some cases, exposed to exploitative and hazardous working conditions, and, at the time of assessment, were living under sub-par to degrading conditions,” Verité wrote in its report.

But Nestlé isn’t the only one with a tainted supply chain: The mistreatment of migrants is systematic in Thailand’s fishing sector, Verité found, meaning that other American and European companies that buy seafood from the country are likely complicit in similar labor abuses. These abuses have been highlighted by the US State Department, which last year downgraded Thailand to the lowest level in its annual report on human trafficking, and they underpin several lawsuits that have been filed recently against retailers including Nestlé and Costco Wholesale Corp. Steve Berman, managing partner of the law firm Hagens Berman, which in August filed a class-action lawsuit against Nestlé, told the New York Times that the company’s report on Monday was “a step in the right direction,” but added that “our litigation will go forward because Nestlé Purina still fails to disclose on its products, as is required by law, that slave labor was used in its making.”

For its part, Nestlé has vowed to publish a strategy to protect workers in Thailand, including by bringing in outside auditors and training boat owners about human rights. “This will be neither a quick nor an easy endeavour, but we look forward to making significant progress in the months ahead,” Magdi Batato, Nestlé’s executive vice president in charge of operations, said in a statement.

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Purina Pet Food Is So Much More Disgusting Than We Even Knew

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Charter Schools: Great in Cities, Ho-Hum in Suburbs?

by DaneLabynm Posted on November 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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Evaluating charter schools is tricky. Maybe highly motivated parents send their kids to charters and others don’t. The solution is to identify schools that are oversubscribed and track students who won and lost the lottery to get in. That way you get a random set of parents on both sides. But maybe charters kick out bad students after they’ve attended for a year or two. The solution is to tag lottery winners as charter kids forever. They count against the charter’s performance regardless of where they end up later. Fine, but maybe oversubscribed charters are different in some way. What about less popular charters where you can’t do any of this lottery-based research?

Susan Dynarski, an education professor at the University of Michigan, acknowledges all of this, but says we can draw some conclusions anyway:

A consistent pattern has emerged from this research. In urban areas, where students are overwhelmingly low-achieving, poor and nonwhite, charter schools tend to do better than other public schools in improving student achievement. By contrast, outside of urban areas, where students tend to be white and middle class, charters do no better and sometimes do worse than other public schools.

This pattern — positive results in low-income city neighborhoods, zero to negative results in relatively affluent suburbs — holds in lottery studies in Massachusetts as well in a national study of charter schools funded by the Education Department.

Interesting. But if this is really the case, why?

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Charter Schools: Great in Cities, Ho-Hum in Suburbs?

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Israeli military offers a death-free experience — for soldiers’ diets, at least

by RoderickTinline Posted on November 17, 2015

Israeli military offers a death-free experience — for soldiers’ diets, at least

By on 17 Nov 2015commentsShare

It sounds like the plot of a Portlandia sketch: Vegans have invaded the military and are demanding soy-based meat, leather-free combat boots, and wool-free berets. The scenario is just begging for a three-minute clip of Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen earnestly telling their superior officers why the army would benefit from a violence-free existence. But it turns out, vegans are invading the military — just not ours.

According to The Atlantic, the Israeli army is, indeed, offering vegan-friendly foods and animal-free clothing to its soldiers. The move came after a group of those soldiers protested last year over the lack of vegan options in the mess halls. Unlike the U.S., Israel has a mandatory military service policy, so trends among its citizens are likely to become trends among its soldiers, and turns out, veganism has become quite the trend over there. Here’s more from The Atlantic:

Veganism has surged in Israel in recent years. According to Israeli news sources, nearly 5 percent of Israelis now forgo meat, dairy, and eggs, making the Jewish state the most vegan nation, per capita, in the world. Vegan activists point to a 2012 visit from Gary Yourofsky, an American animal-rights crusader, as a turning point. One Yourofsky YouTube video with Hebrew subtitles racked up 1 million views, a substantial number in a country of 8 million people. Israeli restaurants soon jumped on the bandwagon, with Tel Aviv brasseries and Domino’s franchises alike rolling out special vegan menus.

Vegan or not, nobody should be eating Domino’s, but it’s still great that a major pizza-peddling chain is willing to offer animal-free products. It’s even more impressive that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has his entire staff observe meatless Mondays:

Support for reduced-cruelty meal plans appears to go all the way to the top. The Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot reported that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has expressed support for Israel’s “Meatless Monday” movement, adopting a vegetarian day for his staff, security guards, and family at his residence in Jerusalem each week. According to Haaretz, Netanyahu has been reading up on the topic. “[I] understood that animals are more conscious than we thought, which is bothering me and making me think twice,” he said at a cabinet meeting.

If a similar trend infiltrated the U.S. military, it could have a major impact on our country’s eating habits. Earlier this summer, NPR’s The Salt spoke with Anastacia Marx de Salcedo, author of Combat-Ready Kitchen: How The U.S. Military Shapes The Way You Eat, about how much the foods that feed our soldiers influence the foods that the rest of us eat. According to Marx de Salcedo, we have the military to thank for things like the “cheese” in goldfish crackers and Cheetos and the high-pressure cooking technique that brought us preservative-free deli meats. Here’s more from the interview:

I literally realized that everything in my kids’ lunchboxes had military origins or influence — the bread, the sandwich meat, juice pouches, cheesy crackers, goldfish and energy bars. Even if we look at fresh items like grapes and carrots, the Army was involved in developing packaging for fruits and vegetables. In a larger sense, I estimate that 50 percent of items in today’s markets were influenced by the military.

… One thing they’re working on is shelf-stable pizza. What I mean by that is the vision of the future is really a place where we don’t need refrigeration. This pizza could just be left in your pantry for a long time, like as long as you leave [canned goods].

They’re also working on shelf-stable sandwiches, wraps and bagels. In fact, it seems like the military is moving to a system where they want to reduce or eliminate regular hot meals like breakfast, lunch and dinners. Instead, they’d just provide day-long grazing options for soldiers. I think we could definitely see this affect the consumer market in the future.

For a glimpse at the food and atmosphere of early U.S. army mess halls, check out this charming, old-timey video. “The new concept,” the narrator says, “involves preparation of food in a central location, where maximum quality and uniformity can be better ensured.” The design, he says, came out of Natick Labs, an army research complex in Massachusetts that, according to Marx de Salcedo, was responsible for much of today’s army-derived food technology.

Who knows, maybe if our soldiers ate tofu, hummus, and veggie burgers, instead of all that meatloaf, fried chicken, and sausage, we wouldn’t be the complete meatheads that we are today. Regardless, it’s never too late to start feeding our soldiers the healthy, sustainable food that they deserve. It’s also never too late to bring back those cold beer dispensers. What happened to those?

Source:

Big in Israel: Vegan Soldiers

, The Atlantic.

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Israeli military offers a death-free experience — for soldiers’ diets, at least

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Mitt Romney Admits Obamacare Was Based on Romneycare—and That It Worked

by GenevieHirsch Posted on October 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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Mitt Romney spent much of his campaign for president in 2012 battling “Obamneycare”: the claim that President Barack Obama’s health care initiative was based on Romneycare, the health care system Romney put in place as governor of Massachusetts.

Yet on Friday, Romney appeared finally to admit the obvious—that the Affordable Care Act was based on the Bay State’s successful health care initiative. What’s more, the man who ran on a platform of repealing Obamacare seemed to concede that the national health care law is working.

“Without Tom pushing it, I don’t think we would have had Romneycare,” Romney told the Boston Globe for an obituary of his friend, Staples founder Tom Stemberg, who passed away Friday. “Without Romneycare, I don’t think we would have Obamacare. So without Tom, a lot of people wouldn’t have health insurance.”

That was some admission, and a tremendous flip-flop for Romney. But then came—wait for it—another Romney flip-flop on this matter. On Friday afternoon, Romney took to Facebook to declare that he still opposed Obamacare:

Getting people health insurance is a good thing, and that’s what Tom Stemberg fought for. I oppose Obamacare and believe it has failed. It drove up premiums, took insurance away from people who were promised otherwise, and usurped state programs. As I said in the campaign, I’d repeal it and replace it with state-crafted plans.

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Mitt Romney Admits Obamacare Was Based on Romneycare—and That It Worked

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