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Here’s What We Know About the People Who Lost Their Lives in Charleston

by Cynthia Trevino Posted on June 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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Nine people were killed in the shooting at the historic Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, on Wednesday night. On Thursday afternoon, Charleston County Coroner Rae Wooten officially identified all of the victims, some of whose names had leaked out over the course of the day. Here are brief sketches of their lives.

State Sen. Clementa Pinckney

Pinckney, 41, was a pastor at Emanuel AME and a widely respected state senator. “Sen. Pinckney was a legend,” said fellow state Sen. Marlon Kimpton on CNN. “He was the moral compass of the state Senate.” Pinckney’s desk in the statehouse was covered with a black cloth after news broke of his death:

During his remarks on Thursday afternoon, President Obama said he knew Pinckney personally, along with other members of the church. “To say our thoughts and prayers are with them and their families and their community doesn’t say enough to convey the heartache and the sadness and the anger that we feel,” he said.

Sharonda Coleman-Singleton

Coleman-Singleton, also a pastor at the church, was a coach at Goose Creek High School near Charleston. South Carolina’s high school sports governing body mourned her death on Twitter after it was announced on Thursday morning:

“I saw her at work everyday and she always had a smile on her face,” Chris Pond, the baseball coach at Goose Creek, said to the Berkeley Independent.

Cynthia Hurd

Hurd, the manager of the St. Andrews branch of the Charleston County Public Library, was identified by her employer as one of the victims.

“Cynthia was a tireless servant of the community who spent her life helping residents, making sure they had every opportunity for an education and personal growth,” the library said in a statement on Facebook.

The library announced it would shut all of its branches on Thursday to honor Hurd.

TYWANZA SANDERS

Lady June Cole, the interim president of Allen University, said on Thursday that Tywanza Sanders, a 2014 graduate of the small historically black university in Columbia, S.C., was killed in the shooting. Cole called Sanders a “quiet, well-known student who was committed to his education” and who “presented a warm and helpful spirit.”

It’s not about how much money you got it’s not about materials you possess its about love faith belief hope determination perseverance passion pain patients. God gives his toughest battles to his strongest soldiers. I love these instruments but my love for God is greater. This acoustic guitar and my first musical love my trumpet my sacrifice will bring joy to others #moneymotivatemoney #grindovermatter #success #loveyours #giveGodcredit #trustinGod

A photo posted by TyWanza Sanders (@freshwanza) on Apr 19, 2015 at 7:30am PDT

MYRA THOMPSON

Archbishop Foley Beach of the Anglican Church of North America wrote in a Facebook post on Thursday that Myra Thompson, the wife of the Rev. Anthony Thompson of Charleston’s Holy Trinity REC Church, was killed in the attack.

Ethel Lee Lance
The 70-year-old grandmother had worked at Emanuel AME for more than three decades. Her grandson Jon Quil Lance told the Post and Courier newspaper in Charleston that Lance was a hardworking Christian and “the heart of the family.”

Susie Jackson
The 87-year-old was a longtime church patron and Ethel Lance’s cousin, according to the Post and Courier.

Daniel L. Simmons Sr.
The 74-year-old was a ministry staff member at Emanuel AME and the former pastor of Greater Zion AME Church in the nearby town of Awendaw. His daughter-in-law, Arcelia Simmons, told ABC News that Simmons attended services at Emanuel on Sundays as well as weekly Bible study. Simmons died in the hospital after the attack.*

Depayne Middleton
The 49-year-old mother of four sang in the church choir.

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Allen University is located in Charleston. It is actually located in Columbia, S.C.

Correction: An earlier version of this article misspelled the town of Awendaw.

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Here’s What We Know About the People Who Lost Their Lives in Charleston

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The Pope Says Climate Change Is Real. Catholic GOP Candidates Disagree.

by INVFlorauj Posted on June 16, 2015

Mother Jones

Since ascending to the Catholic Church’s top perch in March 2013, Pope Francis hasn’t shied away from taking political stances that rankle conservatives. He has said evolution and creationism aren’t mutually exclusive. Asked about gay priests, he responded, “Who am I to judge?” And he has embraced a populist approach to tackling income inequality.

Now the pope risks drawing conservative ire on climate change. In a document set to be released on Thursday—which leaked to an Italian publication and was published as an act of “sabotage against the pope,” according to a Vatican official—Francis will apparently call for a strong, multi-country push to curb global warming and the “human causes that produce and accentuate it,” according to the Guardian. The message will reportedly call out climate deniers, saying “the attitudes that stand in the way of a solution, even among believers, range from negation of the problem, to indifference, to convenient resignation or blind faith in technical solutions.”

There’s a growing contingent of congressional Republicans who are Catholic, and a number of the party’s leading presidential candidates (or potential candidates) are Catholic. If those candidates’ past statements on climate change are any indication, they could soon find themselves at odds with the pope over the looming encyclical. Here’s what they’ve said:

Rick Santorum: “The church has gotten it wrong a few times on science, and I think we probably are better off leaving science to the scientists and focusing on what we’re good at, which is theology and morality.”

Jeb Bush: Bush has said anybody who thinks the science on climate change is settled is “arrogant.”

Chris Christie: The New Jersey governor’s views might be the most in line with the pope’s: “I think global warming is real. I don’t think that’s deniable. And I do think human activity contributes to it.”

Bobby Jindal: While acknowledging that human activity has had an impact on the climate, Jindal has decried Obama’s environmental regulations as “reckless and based on a radical leftist ideology that will kill American jobs and increase energy prices,” according to the Associated Press.

Marco Rubio: “I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it. That’s what I do not. And I do not believe that the laws that they propose we pass will do anything about it, except it will destroy our economy.”

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The Pope Says Climate Change Is Real. Catholic GOP Candidates Disagree.

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Jeb Bush Says Obama Has Left “Violence Unopposed.” Ask Al Qaeda.

by HunterLuiassfs Posted on June 16, 2015

Mother Jones

There were many absurd moments during Jeb Bush’s official I’m-running-for-president announcement on Monday. But the most Bizarro World instance might have come when Bush, the brother of the president who committed one of the greatest strategic blunders in US history, and the candidate who has enlisted the architects of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq as his own foreign policy advisers, embraced the right’s Obama-is-feckless meme. Bush slammed President Barack Obama and his foreign policy team for failing “to be the peacemakers.” He added, “With their phone-it-in foreign policy, the Obama-Clinton-Kerry team is leaving a legacy of crises uncontained, violence unopposed.”

This has become a conservative mantra: Obama has done nothing to counter the foes of the United States. Forgotten are the raid that nabbed Osama bin Laden, the drone strikes that have decimated Al Qaeda, the special forces assaults on the Taliban, and the bombing raids mounted against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Obama’s moves in the fight against these extremists are certainly open to debate. But his conservative critics keep insisting the guy essentially does nothing. Note Bush’s brazen accusation that Obama refuses to oppose violence.

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Jeb Bush Says Obama Has Left “Violence Unopposed.” Ask Al Qaeda.

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What I’ve Learned Photographing "a Place Where You Could Get Away With Murder"

by VivienI6863996 Posted on June 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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I’ve spent the past seven years documenting the lives of people in Chester, Pennsylvania, a predominantly African American city of some 34,000 people located just southwest of Philadelphia. Three years into my time there, I realized that being an image-maker wasn’t having the impact I desired. Whenever I spoke with my best friend in Chester, Dee Dee, she always had the same stories: how someone shot up her street just the week before, or how she struggled to find a safe place for her children to sleep. People kept saying the same thing: Chester was a place where you could get away with murder.

So I began to investigate the high frequency of unsolved murder in Chester and how that reflects a national epidemic. As Edwin Rios and Kai Wright report in “Black Deaths Matter,” 144 killings in the city have gone unsolved since 2005. “Night now in Chester is night now in many places—night now in Philadelphia, in Camden, and every other place you can think of,” says Donald Newton, an activist and lifetime resident.

Why is it so hard for families of color to get justice when a loved one is murdered? Read our story from MoJo‘s May/June issue.

I have been collecting stories of families struggling to get justice following the murder of a loved one. This project is a deep investigation into the emotional, physical, and spiritual landscape that transpires from unresolved trauma. It consists of a series of portraits of each family affected by unresolved trauma, paired with an image from the murder scene captured around the time of day the crime was committed. I’ve also collected ephemeral material (letters, oral histories, love songs, drawings, diary entries, etc.) to involve the families in their depiction. By opening drawers and revisiting albums, this work aims to restore fragile memories and forge pathways to justice, healing, and restitution for the families of Chester.

This work is personal. When I was a teenager, my best friend, a young black man, was slain with a kitchen knife. The wealthy white man who killed him was never convicted. I witnessed my friend’s single mother unravel, my mother’s love the only thing holding her up. The questions that formed and went unanswered only lanced us deeper with time. The saving grace was our solidarity. With this project, I want to provide a safe space for families in Chester who are dealing with this same formation of loss, to connect and create understanding together.

The New York Times recently reported that 1.5 million black men are missing from American communities, mostly through imprisonment and early death. How does this missing generation affect the social landscape of the places they left behind? How do familial roles transform as a result? What does justice look like for families who are missing their beloved young men? I know the answer cannot simply be to put more black men in jail. With this work, I want people to understand the complexities of living in a community like Chester, and how everything is interlocked: a patchwork of trauma and courage, deeply rooted in the foundation of American society.

Right now, the immediate goal is to create an interactive, web-based platform that will serve both as a database of memories speaking to the collective experience of unresolved trauma and as an online space for conversations between community members. I hope to invite a larger audience to look beyond the stereotypes of a community in crisis and contemplate our commonalities—beliefs and biases—rather than our differences.

One issue does not define Chester. It is a multidimensional, changing landscape, and I’ve witnessed powerful moments of strength and beauty. Ultimately, in sharing this experience, I am optimistic at the prospect of disproving popular perception: Chester is not a place where you can get away with murder.

Jabril Bradley, 20; killed at Ninth Street and Avenue of the States
Bradley was riding his bike home from a friend’s house on the east side of Chester on September 1, 2011, when an unknown gunman opened fire. He was struck once in the back but continued to ride his bike home. Blocks later, he collapsed from blood loss. He bled to death on the street.

Terrance Webster, 2; killed at Chester Apartments, Ninth and Lamokin Street
Terrance Webster, son of Tisheta Green, was killed on June 14, 2010 at 2:30 a.m. The incident occurred as the family returned from another relative’s house. As they entered their apartment, several shots were fired at the father, who was carrying Terrance. The child was struck in the head and died shortly after in the hospital.
In photo: Tisheta Green (mother) with two of her sons

Karim “Cutty” Muhammad Alexander, 29; killed on Patterson Street, close to Penn Street
Alexander walked around the corner from his house on August 5, 2008, talking to a friend on the street when he was shot multiple times by an unknown gunman.
In photo: Sherrice Alexander Hill (mother), Robert Hill (father), Karim Alexander (son), Tara Watts (sister), Ayla Muhammad (sister), Sharifah Muhammad (sister)

Karim Alexander’s photos and letters

Gary Brightwell, 30; killed at Sunoco gas station, Ninth Street and Kerlin Street, pump No. 5.
Brightwell got a phone call and went to get gas in his car. He was shot once, killed at pump No. 5 in front of a number of people.
In photo: Shanell Brightwell (daughter), Jabrae Davis (grandson), Brezhae Davis (granddaughter)

Arthur “Art” McElwee, 23; killed in alley off Ninth Street, between Booth and Clover Streets
McElwee was shot multiple times in an alleyway and was pronounced dead at the scene of the crime.
In photo: Elena McElwee (mother), Elena Jo McElwee (twin sister), Dawn McElwee and Aisha McElwee (sisters).

Art McElwee photos and childhood mementos

Emill Smith, age 22; killed at the Green Bar on East Seventh Street, between Caldwell and McIlvain Streets
In the early evening of March 11, 2008, Emill Smith was leaving the Green Bar. According to accounts by witnesses at the scene, he kissed a friend on the forehead and was getting into a car when he was shot multiple times. He wore a chain that was worth upwards of $10,000. It was stolen from him the night he was killed.
In photo: Valerie Maxwell (mother), Janiyah Van (daughter), Khaneef Taylor (brother), Ka’Marion Tayler (brother), Ka’Tavion Tayler (brother)

Valerie Maxwell’s Facebook page, where she regularly posts to her son, Emill Smith

MacMatherson Miller, age 25; killed on West Seventh St., between Booth and Harwick Streets
Miller received a call from a friend on October 7, 2009, and was told to meet on the corner of Seventh and Booth. As he waited in his car, someone opened fire, killing him instantly. Miller had great promise in high school, where he was the star quarterback for Chester High School. (He was inducted posthumously into the Chester High School Hall of Fame.)
In photo: Tareeah Garrett (girlfriend), Asir Hudson (girlfriend’s son)

James Hamler III, 30; killed near American Legion Bar, West Seventh and Lloyd Streets
Late on the night of June 17, 2007, Hamler was outside the American Legion bar when a car drove up and opened fire on the crowd. Hamler was hit and died on the scene.

James Hamler photos and memorial

Eddie “Fast Eddie” Swain-Lane, 29; killed at Third and Palmer Streets
Swain-Laine died after trying to save his girlfriend, Shanae Bailey, and her three-year-old daughter, Anaija Bailey, as a fire ripped through their home. He was down the street when he realized his home was on fire; he ran to the house and made the decision to go inside the burning house. The death was ruled suspicious but no investigation was completed.

Linda Rose Brown, 44; killed at Edwards Street, corner of Highway 291
In late March 1998, Brown went missing. Her body was found two weeks later in an abandoned building. The day Brown’s body was found, her son Tyrone King was called by a police officer at the scene and was told to come and identify the body. Based on physical evidence, the police told King she was strangled to death by a wire hanger, then shot in the head and later dumped.
In photo: Tyrone “TK” King (son), Hammenah Rollie (daughter), Amin Rollie (son)

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What I’ve Learned Photographing "a Place Where You Could Get Away With Murder"

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Hillary Clinton Officially Launches Campaign for White House

by SoonLdmxzi Posted on June 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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There was the first, inevitable video announcement. Then, the media-phobic “Scooby” van tour through early primary states. Now, speaking today in front of a bright New York skyline, on an island in the middle of one of the most polluted waterways in America, Clinton officially launched her campaign for presidency.

The former Secretary of State hit every major talking point of her highly publicized campaign so far. Seriously, nothing was left out of this 45-minute populist, progressive speech outlining her campaign’s policies: mass incarceration reform, LGBT equality, climate change and alternative energy, income inequality, a constitutional amendment to overhaul Citizens United, paid family leave, immigration, universal pre-K… even broadband.

“You brought our country back, now it’s time, your time, to secure the gains and move ahead—and you know what? America can’t succeed unless you succeed. That is why I am running for president of the United States.”

The speech on Roosevelt Island, opposite the UN building, would have been difficult to give in the heat; once the clouds cleared, the stage would have certainly felt hotter than 81 degrees—maybe that’s one reason the crowd appeared at times somewhat muted. The luckiest supporters crowded under the European Littleleaf Linden trees along the waterfront, which park staff assured us were low allergenic. Nonetheless, the biggest applause lines came when Clinton spoke about marriage equality and women’s rights. While the “overflow” area—where a large screen had been set up seemingly in the hopes of bigger crowds—remained nearly empty, the live TV footage would have looked pretty great: billowing American flags, and soaring in the distance, One World Trade, once known as the Freedom Tower.

Danny Jestakom (L) and Philip Fry. James West

The diversity of the supporters here today represents the Obama coalition that Clinton surely hopes to recapture. Valerie Wakin, 29, from Brooklyn, liked that Clinton was focusing on pay equality as a campaign issue, and also felt that Clinton had broad appeal: “I don’t think she just supports African American rights, she supports everyone,” she said. Ahmad Nelson, 28, from Pittsburgh admitted that while “she does have some baggage” from a long life in the public eye, he will vote for Clinton to help raise the minimum wage across the country.

Valerie Wakin, 29, from Brooklyn. James West

Noticeable in the crowd was a large cohort wearing the rainbow flag version of Hillary’s much-derided logo. Danny Jestakom, 26 and Philip Fry, 24, who have been a couple for about a year, said Clinton’s embrace marriage equality appealed to then, as did her attempts to to let voters learn more about her personal story—evident in today’s speech, which drew heavily on her biography. “She seems like a real woman, a real person,” Fry said.

“I may not be the youngest candidate in this race,” Hillary joked, “but I’ll be the youngest woman president in the history of the United States.”

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Hillary Clinton Officially Launches Campaign for White House

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These Stunning Photos Show the Urban Sky Like You’ve Never Seen It Before

by EulaMcneil816 Posted on June 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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Light pollution makes it nearly impossible for Los Angeles residents to see the stars. So a few years ago, two timelapse artists set out to show people what they’ve been missing.

As part of a book and video project called Skyglow, Harun Mehmedinovic and Gavin Heffernan photographed the night sky over places like the Grand Canyon and superimposed those images over the smoggy city lights of LA. The results are stunning, at times appearing more like paintings than photographs.

Mehmedinovic, who grew up in Bosnia, and LA-based Heffernan, originally from Canada, also captured some of the darkest places in the country, mostly national parks in the southwest. They used long exposures to let more light flood in, allowing them to show “galaxies you can’t normally see,” Heffernan says. In some cases they camped out overnight, keeping their cameras rolling for hours at a time to get enough shots for timelapse videos that depict star trails, the apparent movement of stars in the sky due to the earth’s natural rotation. In the photographs, these star trails look like streaks of light. “If you see a big circle, that means they the cameras are pointing directly north,” Heffernan explains.

The two photographs above capture a sandstone rock formation at Coyote Buttes, in Arizona. “Once upon a time, this area, like all of California, was underwater. It used to be sand, and then it all petrified, turning into rocks and stone,” says Mehmedinovic. “For millions of years, there has been wind sweeping right through that area—what you’re seeing are tooth marks of the wind.” The photograph below shows dawn over the horizon in White Pocket, also in Arizona.

The next photograph was captured in the Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes of Death Valley National Park in California. “I set a camera and just happened to catch a meteorite in the back during the shoot,” says Mehmedinovic, of the vertical flash of light behind the tree. In the shot after that, a tiny sliver of the moon sets in White Pocket. The third photograph, in Socorro County, New Mexico, shows radio telescopes in the distance along the horizon. “If you’ve ever watched the movie Contact, you will have seen them, because that movie takes place in the same location,” Mehmedinovic says.

Mehmedinovic’s and Heffernan’s surreal images come to life in a series of timelapse videos. The one below, which the pair created before the Skyglow project, shows off the Vermillion Cliffs National Monument and White Pocket in Arizona. “We had a lot of storms during that shoot, so there was a lot of drama, getting stuck in the sand, trying not to get struck by lightning,” Heffernan says.

He and Mehmedinovic have already met their fundraising goal of $70,000 for the project on Kickstarter. Now, Heffernan says they’re trying to raise an additional $100,000 so they can donate 2,000 of their photobooks, which they hope to publish sometime next year, to inner-city schools and underprivileged kids, “so they can see what’s worth fighting for.”

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These Stunning Photos Show the Urban Sky Like You’ve Never Seen It Before

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The Future of Food Has Robot Arms and Smells Like Bacon

by JacintoHahn Posted on June 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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Cooki, a robotic cooking machine prototype, on display at the Parisoma “Future of Food” meet-up Maddie Oatman

In the not-so-distant future, a robot named Cooki will make you dinner. Cooki will follow a recipe drawn from a database of millions of crowd-sourced ideas accessed through a subscription service similar to iTunes. Then, it will stir together pre-chopped ingredients with a robotic arm. Instead of the $15 required to buy and deliver take-out food, Cooki’s meal will cost you $4 to $5.

At least, that’s how the future will look if Timothy Chen has anything to do with it.

Chen is the CEO of Sereneti Kitchen, the company producing an automated robot that can supposedly cook “restaurant-quality” meals at your kitchen counter and clean up after itself. Chen was one of around a dozen entrepreneurs pitching their victual innovations at a tech event called the “Future of Food,” hosted by the San Francisco co-working space Parisoma on Wednesday. A line snaked around the block at the entrance of the building at 7 p.m. when I arrived. Inside, designers, data-geeks, food marketers, and underground supper club hosts mingled over beers or the papaya-colored smoothie samples from the Pantry vending machine. I overheard the phrases “superfood” and “drought-friendly” more than once over the course of the evening.

Timothy Chen unwraps a plastic tray of ingredients to feed into Cooki during a demonstration

The concept behind the cooking robot comes from Chen’s 18-year-old twin sisters, Haidee and Helen, who wondered why their mom had to spend so many hours making fresh food every day. “Shouldn’t cooking be as easy as pushing a button?” their IndieGogo campaign page implores. Aside from making cooking more efficient, Sereneti’s social mission includes a desire to cut down on food waste and promote access to healthy ingredients.

Though Cooki only really does one-pot cooking, Sereneti imagines its machine making 60 percent of the world’s types of food—from pastas to salads to curries. Chen hopes to retail Cooki for around $500, or $200 if customers subscribe to a recipe and ingredients delivery service. (You could also prepare and input your own ingredients into the robot).

Midway through the “Future of Food” event, I wander over to Sereneti’s table to catch Cooki in action. Dressed in an argyle sweater and sporting rectangular glasses, Chen’s a quick-talking guy with a background in robotics. “This is the Keurig for food,” he explains, referring to the individualized coffee pod machines that I’ve covered in the past. He pulls out clear plastic trays full of raw bacon, lamb, cherries, and pine nuts that have been prepared and preserved with the help of food scientists. Once loaded up with the goods, the machine extracts one of the trays, tips it into a pot heated underneath by coils, and begins to stir. Soon, the smell of bacon oozes out from under the machine’s glossy white hood.

Chen has pretty big dreams for Cooki: As he sees it, it will not only save parents time, it could also make them money. By crowd-sourcing recipes and charging people one-time-use fees, “every time someone uses your recipe—you get paid,” Chen explains. “It’s the ultimate in multi-level marketing,” he says to me—”and it’s not even a Ponzi scheme!”

Okay. While Cooki’s frying, I decide to check out some of the other booths. A man with watery blue eyes and a thick French accent passes out crackers smudged with bone-white brie made from almond milk. Unlike some of the tasteless, pasty vegan cheeses I’ve sampled in the past, Kite Hill’s cheese draws from the traditional cheesemaking process: Cultures and enzymes are added to the milk to create an actual curd. Kite Hill claims to be the only company treating almond milk this way. The result is impressive—if I didn’t know any better, I would think it was a sheep’s milk cheese. Kite Hill’s cheesemaker, Jean Prevot, who hails from France, spent 15 years in the dairy industry before turning to almond milk “for the challenge of it.”

Soft ripened almond brie from Kite Hill

At the table across the way, two chipper, unblinking blonde women dish up crackers made with flour from ground-up crickets. Their San Francisco-based company, Bitty Foods, produces the cookies as well as a cricket-based baking flour “that’s high in protein, drought-resistant, and lower in greenhouse-gas emissions,” as cofounder Megan Miller tells one taster. I overhear two men discussing their cookies in between bites. “There’s a little aftertaste,” one says. “It’s subtle—if I wasn’t thinking about it, I wouldn’t have picked up on it.”

Leslie Ziegler and Megan Miller serve cricket-flour cookies from their company Bitty

Over to the Kuli Kuli Foods table, where women in acid-green aprons peddle samples of bars made of moringa, a leafy plant that Time recently deemed the new kale. Kuli Kuli is the first US company marketing moringa. Its founder, Lisa Curtis, first learned about the plant while in Peace Corps in Niger in 2010. Feeling malnourished on the local diet, she was urged to try the nutrient-dense moringa plant, which is high in calcium, protein, amino acids, and vitamin C. The plant grows super fast and thrives in hot, dry climates. Curtis realized that locals weren’t marketing the superfood because they had no international market, so she set out to create one in the US by importing the plant in powder form. Aside from fueling her own fruit and nut bar company, she tells me that local juice joints around San Francisco are picking it up for use in smoothies. (Side note: Fidel Castro is a huge moringa fan.)

Moringa bar samples from Kuli Kuli

I want to love moringa. If the current California drought is any predictor, we’re going to need plants that survive harsher conditions and provide such an impressive array of nutrients. But this one tastes rather grassy, and goes down like a shot of wheatgrass, which is to say, abruptly. So power to Kuli Kuli, but here’s hoping its moringa recipes continue to evolve.

I make it back to Chen’s table just in time for the tasting of Cooki’s “sauteéd lamb and macerated cherries” dish. Cooki had certainly cooked through the lamb, softened the cherries, and roasted the pine nuts. I don’t eat meat, so I had to rely on other people’s tastebuds to know how the dish turned out. “It’s pretty good,” one woman, Barb, told me, and shrugged. “I do wonder how it will cook vegetables,” another taster said. Neither of them were aware that the dish included bacon grease. To which, I had to ask—doesn’t everything taste pretty good when coated in bacon grease?

Lamb, cherries, and pine nuts (and bacon) made by Cooki

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The Future of Food Has Robot Arms and Smells Like Bacon

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A GOP Operative Just Got 2 Years in Prison For Breaking Super-PAC Rules

by Lenard6121 Posted on June 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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The Department of Justice scored a victory Friday morning in the fight to rein in the campaign finance Wild West that has come with the rise of super-PACs: A GOP operative in Virginia was sentenced to two years in federal prison for breaking a small, but crucial, campaign finance law in the 2012 election. It’s unclear whether this signals a sustained effort by the Justice Department to crack down on campaign finance law violators. But one thing’s for sure: it’s more than the grid-locked Federal Election Commission has done to enforce the law in this area.

There isn’t much that a super PAC can’t do under the 2010 Citizens United ruling. These outfits can raise and spend unlimited cash, soliciting funds from individuals and corporations alike. The one thing that can’t happen is coordination between a super-PAC and a candidate for elected office. And that’s the issue that was at the heart of the Justice Department’s case against GOP operative Tyler Harber, once named a “rising star” by Campaigns & Elections magazine (since revoked), who was sentenced to two years in prison for illegal coordination and lying to the FBI.

Since Citizens United, it’s been fairly clear that rules against coordination were being short-circuited, if not broken outright. Candidates’ political aides have resigned from their campaigns only to resurface at the helm of super PACs supporting that very same candidate; parents and spouses of candidates have created super PACs and pour money in; most significantly, in the run up to 2016, Jeb Bush has merged his campaign with his super PAC, allowing him to raise unlimited amounts of money and hobnob with mega-donors, while hiding behind the excuse that he is not formally a candidate. Campaign finance reformers have cried foul over Bush’s use of this loophole, but the reality is no one is likely to do anything about it. The FEC is, for all intents and purposes, putting itself on the bench this election cycle.

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A GOP Operative Just Got 2 Years in Prison For Breaking Super-PAC Rules

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Donald Rumsfeld Apparently Forgot the Times He Said the Iraq War Was Good for Democracy

by LatriceHarrhy Posted on June 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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A few days ago, Donald Rumsfeld tried to distance himself from former President George W. Bush on the Iraq War, noting that he never bought into the Bush-Cheney argument that a US invasion of Iraq would lead to democracy there.

“I’m not one who thinks that our particular template of democracy is appropriate for other countries at every moment of their histories,” the former defense secretary told the Times, a British newspaper, in a piece published last week. “The idea that we could fashion a democracy in Iraq seemed to me unrealistic. I was concerned about it when I first heard those words.”

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Donald Rumsfeld Apparently Forgot the Times He Said the Iraq War Was Good for Democracy

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Why You Should Never, Ever Shake Your Martini

by AlejandroGrevill Posted on June 8, 2015

Mother Jones

A version of this story was originally published by Gastropod.

Whether you sip it with friends, chug it before hitting the dance floor, or take it as a post-work pick-me-up, there’s clearly nothing like a cocktail for bracing the spirit. In addition to its peculiar history as a medicinal tonic, plenty of hard science lies behind the perfect cocktail, from the relationship between taste perception and temperature to the all-important decision of whether to shake or stir.

In this episode of Gastropod—a podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history—we discover the cocktail’s historical origins, its etymological connection to a horse’s butt, and its rocky history, post-Prohibition. We also investigate the science of the perfect cocktail with culinary scientist Dave Arnold. Here are three tips he shared with us that will improve your drinks and wow your guests. Cheers!

Tip #1: Add salt—but not too much. It might seem counterintuitive, but, in a world overflowing with fancy bitters and spherical ice makers, the thing your cocktail is missing is actually much simpler: salt. Arnold, the mixologist behind high-tech cocktail bar Booker and Dax, shared this secret with Gastropod. It’s just one of several scientific tricks contained in his new book, Liquid Intelligence: The Art and Science of the Perfect Cocktail.

Of course, the most important ingredient in a cocktail is the liquor. The sugar, acids, and ice choices also have flavor implications, making every cocktail recipe into a kind of calculus that factors in the physics of energy transfer as well as variations in the molecular structures of different sweeteners.

But salt can play a crucial role. Arnold is quick to point out that you should only add a very tiny amount—”We are not talking about salting the rim of your glass here!” he told Gastropod.

Cocktail construction chart, created by the US Forest Service in 1974, now housed in the National Archives

Arnold’s insight draws on the same logic that calls for adding a pinch of salt to most baked goods, from ice cream to pastry. “These very, very small quantities of salt really just cause all the flavors to kind of pop,” Arnold explains, because of the way our taste buds work. Recent research has begun to tease out how the receptor cells on our tongues responds to sour, bitter, sweet, and salty tastes differently depending on their concentration and how they are combined. For example, if you add a tiny sour note to a bitter-flavored drink, it will actually boost the bitter sensation, but at a more moderate concentration, sour tastes suppress bitterness. (Try this at home, by adding a drop of lime to a margarita, versus the full ounce.)

Similarly, at very low concentrations, salt doesn’t register as a taste at all, but instead reduces bitterness and boosts sweet and sour notes in the food or drink you add it to. Basically, says Arnold, “next time you make a cocktail, add a tiny little pinch of salt to it and stir—and then tell me you don’t like it better.”

Tip #2: Shake daiquiris, not martinis. James Bond is famous—some might say notorious—for preferring his martini shaken, not stirred. But science-minded bartenders would urge you not to follow his lead—though Arnold is quick to point out that the right way to make a drink is the way it tastes good to you. Still, there’s some solid science behind why a martini should be stirred and a daiquiri shaken, rather than the other way around. Both methods chill, dilute, and blend your drink—but they have different effects on flavor and texture that work better with some cocktail recipes than others.

Typically, Arnold explains, when you shake a drink, it will get colder—and thus more diluted—than it would be after stirring. “Banging ice rapidly around inside a shaking tin is the most turbulent, efficient, and effective manual chilling/dilution technique we drink makers use,” he explains. Because flavor perception, and sweetness, in particular, is blunted at cooler temperatures, a shaken drink needs to start out significantly sweeter than its stirred equivalent.

Shaking also adds texture to a drink, in the form of lots of tiny air bubbles. That’s a good thing when you’re making a cocktail with ingredients that taste nice when they’re foamy, like egg whites, dairy, and even fruit juice, and not as good when you’re mixing straight liquor with bitters. Sorry, Mr. Bond.

Or, as President Jed Bartlet put it, “James is ordering a weak martini and being snooty about it.”

The other thing to bear in mind is that you really shouldn’t linger over a shaken drink. “The minute that someone hands you a shaken drink, it is dying,” says Arnold. “I hate it when people don’t drink their shaken drink right away.” We can’t responsibly advise you to chug them, so we recommend making your shaken drinks small, so that you can polish them off before the bubbles burst.

Tip #3: Add milk. And then remove it. Ever since the first ice-cube was added to the original cocktail recipe of liquor, bitters, and sugar, mixologists have loved their bar gear. Ice-picks, mallets, swizzle sticks, shakers, strainers, and even red-hot pokers were all standard features of the nineteenth-century celebrity bartender’s toolkit. Today, Dave Arnold has added rotary evaporators, iSi whippers, and liquid nitrogen to the mix, placing the most cutting-edge cocktails out of reach of the home mixologist.

But there is one super trendy, high-tech trick that you can try at home. It’s called “booze-washing,” and it makes use of protein to remove the astringency from a drink. It actually has a historic basis—even Ben Franklin wrote down his own a recipe for milk punch that uses the casein protein in milk to strip out the phenolic compounds and turn a rough-around-the-edges brandy into a soft, round, soothing drink. But Arnold came up with the idea when he was trying to make an alcoholic version of an Arnold Palmer, the delicious iced tea/lemonade mix.

“I knew that adding milk to tea makes it less astringent, which is why the Brits do it,” Arnold explained. “And then I wanted to get rid of the milk, because I didn’t want a milk tea, I wanted a tea tea.” So he added citric acid, which caused the milk to curdle, so he could separate it out in a centrifuge. “And only afterwards was I like, oh yeah, milk punch!”

Arnold washes drinks to remove flavors, rather than add them. He’s taking advantage of the chemical properties of protein-rich ingredients—milk, eggs, or even blood—that preferentially bind to the plant defense chemicals that can give over-oaked whiskey, certain red wines, tea, coffee, and some apple varieties a mouth-puckering dryness. He’s found that as well as smoothing out a drink, booze-washing has the side benefit of creating a lovely, velvety texture.

Arnold demonstrates booze-washing in a sequence of photos from his new book, Liquid Intelligence. Photos by Travis Huggert, who is also responsible for the image used in the embedded Soundcloud player, above.

The good news is that you don’t need a centrifuge to make the perfect milk punch or alcoholic Arnold Palmer at home. You follow Arnold’s recipe (which he shares on the Gastropod website), let it sit overnight, and then strain out the curds through a cloth and then through a coffee filter. According to Arnold, your yield will be a little lower than with a centrifuge, but the result will be just as tasty. His only word of warning is that you have to drink the resulting cocktail within a week, or else the proteins will clump together and the drink will lose its foaming power. But that shouldn’t be too difficult…

Listen to Gastropod’s Cocktail Hour for much more cocktail science and history, including an introduction to the world’s first celebrity bartender, an unexpected use for Korean bibimbap bowls, and a cocktail personality test based on Jungian analytics.

Gastropod is a podcast about the science and history of food. Each episode looks at the hidden history and surprising science behind a different food and/or farming-related topic—from aquaculture to ancient feasts, from cutlery to chile peppers, and from microbes to Malbec. It’s hosted by Cynthia Graber, an award-winning science reporter, and Nicola Twilley, author of the popular blog Edible Geography. You can subscribe via iTunes, email, Stitcher, or RSS for a new episode every two weeks.

This article has been revised.

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Why You Should Never, Ever Shake Your Martini

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