By Naomi Serviss / New York City When Adam Grupper checks in for work as the understudy for Nathan Lane in Pictures from Home, he knows he probably won’t go on. And he’s A-OK with that. The master actor, clocking in his 13th Broadway production, wouldn’t want to disappoint a theater crowd that’s coughed up mega bucks to watch Lane do Lane, as opposed to seeing an unfamiliar thespian in his stead, regardless of how wowing that lesser-known may be. On the other hand, New York theater insiders may recognize Grupper’s name (and immense talent) from decades honing his craft. Maybe you’ve caught him in a Broadway blockbuster or two like: My Fair Lady, Guys & Dolls, Fiddler on the Roof, The Addams Family, The Wild Party, Wicked or Into the Woods. Check your Playbills! These days, Grupper (pronounced GREW-per) is gratefully keeping company with his fellow standbys, as well as the irrepressible Nathan Lane, who plays patriarch Irv Sultan, Tony-winning Danny Burstein, performing as Larry Sultan and Zoë Wanamaker as Jean Sultan. Legends all. Pictures from Home opened February 9th at the (infamous) Studio 54, culled from Larry Sultan’s award-winning photo memoir published in 1992. Try to find a copy of that edition! For 10 years Larry (Burstein) regularly bunked with his California folks to capture them in intimate portraiture. Writ large. Larry hoped to churn the mundane into transcendent art, and succeeded beyond even Irv’s dreams. His father (Lane), a successful career salesman, is baffled by his progeny's endless undertaking. He vents his spleen colorfully and at high volume. Larry gives as good as he gets. Bickering and challenging each other is the family’s M.O. This complicated domestic dramedy has been skillfully adapted for the stage by Sharr White and craftily directed by Bartlett Sher. Grupper and I recently sat down for a chat to unpack what it means to be a Broadway understudy (or standby). We both sipped tea (Earl Gray for him, mint for me) at Friedman’s Restaurant in the Theater District’s Edison Hotel.

 Before it was Friedman’s, the non-descript joint was known as, “that restaurant in the Edison Hotel,” or affectionately among theater folk as “the Polish Tea Room.” It boasted a soup-to-nuts menu, specializing in deli, soup and comfort breakfast food (waffles, pancakes and the like). It’s also a well-known “secret” shortcut from West 46th to West 47th streets, sometimes clogged with hotel guests. Long been traversed by post-matinee actors who want a closeby quick bite or change of (backstage) scenery. I interviewed Grupper in 1995 (!) for a story on his role in a revival of Guys & Dolls (Benny Southstreet). We then met over matzo ball soup (him) and tea (mint) for me. Why was he so drawn to the spot? “I used to love going there after a Wednesday matinee, a two-show day, to get a generous bowl of steaming hot matzo-ball soup with crackers,” he recalled. “Some days I’d go for seconds! It was my default place to go when I wanted a bowl of comfort.” At the time of our earlier interview, Grupper was about to embark on a trip of his lifetime: a four-and-a-half-month journey through Southeast Asia. “One month each in Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia, three weeks in Nepal, and side trips to Hong Kong and Singapore,” he recalled. The exultant traveler treasures a memento from a little shop in Bali. “It’s kind of a stress figure that’s small enough to fit in the palm of my hand.” “To me it perfectly represented that state of anxiety when you are so fearful that you retreat into yourself; metaphorically curling yourself into a protective ball. It occurred to me that holding it in my hand was a perfect way to physicalize containing and controlling anxiety as I prepared for a performance backstage in my dressing room.” “Turns out, that’s exactly what its purpose is! It’s designed to be a meditative figure. By touching and rubbing its back you release your negative feelings out of your mind and body and into the figure.” Grupper relies on his Bali souvenir to ease stress before a show. “Mine has been burnished and worn down from all the years I’ve held it backstage. I’ve rubbed its smooth back with my thumb, tossed it rhythmically from hand to hand, and then gently kissed it before I hit the stage,” he said. During the pandemic, Grupper was fortunate to have an audiobook-reading career that has kept (and continues to keep) him challenged and occupied. He records in a small studio in his Brooklyn home and is always in demand, thanks to a deep, pitch-perfect register. His kids returned home from college when Covid shut the world down. They thoroughly relished family time, despite the unfortunate circumstances. Grupper rehearses or reads lines with his fellow understudies and watches two performances from the audience every week. Although he hasn’t yet subbed for Lane, he knows that might change in a heartbeat. He’s internalized Irv’s part and as a consummate pro, could pinch-hit on instant notice. “There’s a great advantage to being a standby,” he said. “It’s a steady job and I’m grateful to be working.” “Almost like being in battle. Hours of boredom punctuated by intense stress. “Seriously, everything is fantastic,” said the gifted audiobook reader and movie actor (Spirited; Trophy Kids). “One of the redeeming things about the play is Irv’s got this Socratic dialogue going on with his son, about art, life, what it means to be a parent, everything important in life.” Irv is a blustery force, prone to outbursts and endless arguing with his son and Jean. Nathan Lane is a perfect foil to Larry. He’s exhausting to watch on stage, and the role garners pathos and at times, comic relief. After all, it is Nathan Lane. When Grupper’s not performing, he’s in his dressing room, fruitfully filling his time. “These days I’ve been doing my taxes,” he laughed. Grupper made a conscious choice at the onset of his career not to aim for celebrity. “I’m a journeyman, not someone well known or a star. Just a consistently working actor in New York.” A yeoman actor who chose family over chasing fame and heady starring roles. His two college-aged children, Phoebe and Harry, did not catch the acting bug and he’s fine with that. Grupper’s wife Maxine Resnick is a successful real estate broker. Grupper and his fellow standbys have had unusual, very special rehearsal experiences. “We all arrived for work about ten days into the stars’ rehearsal period,” he recalled. “Within three days all three were out because of illness.” “Rather than postpone rehearsals until the stars recovered, our director (Bart Sher) elected to continue rehearsing the show with us three,” he said. “It was a privilege to work directly with Bart and get his insights into the characters and their complex relationships,” Grupper continued. “Generally, whenever you cover in a show, you rehearse separately from the regular performers.” The stage manager attends understudy rehearsals. “Those rehearsals generally don’t even get scheduled until well after a show has completed its main rehearsal process, finished previews and fully opened! “To be invited early on to be part of the initial rehearsal process was a treat for us,” he said. Grupper’s goal as a cover is to inspire confidence. “There’s always anxiety when a regular performer is out of a show, especially the first time they’re absent,” he said. Grupper subbed for Danny Burstein’s Tevye 44 times in the 2015 Fiddler on the Roof revival. They’ve been pals for decades. The audience doesn’t always approve, either. “With astronomical Broadway ticket prices, patrons worry, ‘Will I still get my money’s worth?’ “For the regular cast member there’s concern they’ll be saddled with someone who needs to be propped up onstage because they don’t know their lines, lyrics, blocking or choreography. “As a cover, my job is to say to everyone, ‘Don’t worry. I’m here. I’ve got this. To let people know both onstage and in the audience, that I am fully prepared and they can expect me to provide a fully-realized performance, consistent with both the director’s vision and with what they expect to see under normal circumstances,” Grupper explained. “Experienced theater audiences love seeing a cover shine and show their worth. “Maybe they’ll see a star in the making.” Once in a while, understudies become bona fide stars. Anthony Hopkins, Shirley MacLaine and Bernadette Peters broke into the business that way covering featured actors. And wise regular cast members relish having new energy when a cover hits the stage.. As Grupper knows from experience, “Having a cover perform can be theater magic!” Naomi Serviss is a New York-based award-winning journalist whose work has been published in The New York Times, Newsday, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Highroads (AAA magazine), in-flight publications, spa and travel magazines and websites, including BroadwayWorld.com

By Bonnie Fishman / San Francisco Bay Area Happy St. Patrick’s Day! That most Irish of holidays will be on coming on Friday, March 17 and we see all kinds of signs of its arrival. There are green shamrocks decorating store windows, plenty of greeting cards to send and paper goods to use, green beer, green rivers (Chicago has one), and the Irish pubs and restaurants brimming with jovial patrons. I’m guessing many of these folks are not Irish, but hey, jump on the celebratory band wagon! And of course, corned beef can’t be far behind. St. Patrick’s Day is to corned beef as Thanksgiving is to turkey. Happily, for everyone, Irish or not, beginning in March, grocery stores start selling raw corned beef at competitive prices. Heads of cabbage abound in the produce department. I always make corned beef and cabbage with potatoes and carrots this time of year. Why? Even though the Fishman Family has no Irish roots; that’s a tradition with me because it’s available and I really love that meal! Mark Kurlansky, in his book, Salt: A World History, writes “the Irish produced a salted beef around the Middle Ages that was the forerunner of what today is known as Irish corned beef and in the 17th century, the English named the Irish salted beef "corned beef”.” The beef was cured with large kernels of salt. It was not pickled like we know it here in this country; that originated in the U.S. in the late 19th century. Here, instead of the beef being just salted, it was brined in salt water with pickling spices. The Irish immigrants substituted the corned beef for their salt-cured bacon and beef. Lisa Bailey, from Marshall, Mich. knows about this firsthand as her parents immigrated to Boston from Ireland when they were young. Lisa, whom I was introduced to by an Irish friend of mine, was raised on traditional Irish food so she’s a great resource. The crazy St. Patrick’s Day celebrations that we see here in the U.S. do not happen in Ireland. Actually, Lisa says, the Irish “snicker” at our nutty behavior. Rather, she told me, it is a religious holiday when the Irish attend church to honor St. Patrick, the patron saint of the country, followed by dining on an iconic Irish meal of bacon or salt-cured beef, potatoes, and cabbage. After moving to the states, her mom had substituted corned beef in place of the bacon. I must admit, though, that my corned beef “orientation” is strictly Jewish deli, Is there anything more delicious than a hot corned beef sandwich on rye with the juices running down your arm? What better person to talk to about Jewish deli corned beef than an heir to one of the great American corned beef manufacturers, Gene Gunsberg. His last name was synonymous with the real deal, with his family having been in the meat business for almost six decades. At their peak in the ’60s and ’70s, the Gunsbergs produced as much as 10 million pounds of the stuff a year, selling to many major supermarket chains in the Midwest and on the East Coast. The Gunsbergs would begin making corned beefs during the October preceding the holiday and freeze them to able to fulfill their orders. I was lucky enough to have had a memorable corned beef experience back in 1973. My dad asked Dick Gunsberg (Gene’s father), a fraternity brother of his at University of Michigan, if his daughter (me!) could take a tour of the Gunsberg Corned Beef plant in Detroit. I have never seen to so much raw beef brisket piled so high as in the butchering room there. I would have been grossed out by this crime scene if a) I weren’t so overwhelmed and b) I was too polite to throw up. Today’s recipe offering takes corned beef to a whole new level. After boiling it in the brine with pickling spices, it is then trimmed of fat and dressed up in a new suit. I top the meat with stone ground mustard and brown sugar. Then I use Cumberland Sauce, a classic English sauce served with cooked pork, beef, and lamb, and bathe the corned beef with it as it roasts in the oven. The Cumberland Sauce is made with currant jelly, citrus rind, port, and spices. Because of its high sugar content, as it cooks with the beef, it reduces and gets very glazy. I love serving this with homemade Irish Soda Bread. What a combination! Tell us at The Insider if you’re going out to drink green beer on the holiday, make our delicious recipe or bite into a hot, juicy corned beef sandwich. Wishing you all the luck of the Irish this spring! Corned Beef with Cumberland Sauce & Irish Soda Bread 3-4 lbs. corned beef brisket, flat cut 1/2 c. stone-ground mustard 1/2 c. brown sugar Cumberland Sauce: 1 c. red currant or strawberry jelly 1/4 c. port or dry sherry 1 Tbsp. finely slivered orange rind 1 Tbsp. finely slivered lemon rind 1/4 c. finely chopped shallots 1/8 c. fresh orange juice 1/8 c. fresh lemon juice 1 1/2 tsp. dry mustard 3/4 tsp. ground ginger 3/4 tsp. coarse ground black pepper Put the corned beef in a large pot with the packet of pickling spices. Cover with 2” water. Bring to a boil; cover. Simmer for 3 1/4 hours. Remove meat to a shallow casserole, a little larger than the brisket. Reserve. While the corned beef is cooking, make the Cumberland Sauce. Combine all ingredients in a small saucepan. Slowly bring to a boil. Boil for 2 minutes. Cool. Preheat oven to 350°. Trim the fat off the top of the meat and discard.  Spread top with mustard.  Sprinkle on the brown sugar and pat down.  Pour the sauce around the corned beef. Bake, uncovered, for 45 minutes, basting the meat every 15 minutes.  Allow beef to rest for at least 15 minutes. Cut into thin slices across the grain. Serve warm or at room temperature. Pour the glazy sauce over the meat.  Serve with Soda Bread NOTE: This recipe can be doubled. Irish Soda Bread Yield: 1 lg. loaf 3 c. white flour 1 1/4 c. light rye flour 3 Tbsp. sugar 1 tsp. baking soda 1 tsp. salt 1 3/4 c. buttermilk 1 lg. egg 5 Tbsp. cold butter, cut into 1/4” cubes Place a Dutch oven or covered casserole (no lid at this time) in a cold oven. Preheat oven to 400°. In a large mixing bowl, combine the dry ingredients. Mix in the butter using your fingertips or a pastry cutter. Work the mixture until it is crumbly. Scramble together the buttermilk and egg. Pour into the flour. Using a fork, stir the wet and dry together. When it gets stiff, use a wooden spoon. The dough will look shaggy. Sprinkle some flour on your work surface. Knead the dough for 30-60 seconds, just until it comes together. Form into a dome. Cut a large X in the top. Remove the hot casserole from the oven. Carefully place the dough in it with the X remaining on top. Bake, covered, for 35 minutes. Remove cover; bake for another 15-20 minutes until a nice golden crust has formed. Bonnie Fishman attended the Cordon Bleu Cookery School in London. Later, she owned and operated Bonnie’s Patisserie in Southfield, Mich. and Bonnie’s Kitchen and Catering in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. She has taught cooking for over 35 years and created hundreds of recipes. She is now living in Northern California.

By Victoria Rolfe / Red Hook, N.Y. I had an exchange with a friend a few weeks ago that got me thinking. I had lost something, looked all over for it, and was wondering if I could have possibly thrown it in the garbage by mistake. The friend was horrified! “Oh no! You will have to root through the stinky garbage to look for it?” That’s when I realized that, although I clearly remember the kitchen garbage bin being an icky, smelly thing, that has no longer been the case for us in quite some time. Nowadays our garbage consists primarily of packaging from the supermarket and other store-bought purchases. And it totals a small grocery bagful per week. My garbage never needs to be taken out because it is stinking up the joint. But where did all that ick go? I realized that, of course, it came from organic matter. So, what was it that we used to throw in the bin (and many people still do) that we no longer do? Well, first of all, back in the Dark Ages (before recycling) when we used up a can or jar or bottle of something, we just tossed it in the bin. There was no such thing as washing it out and putting it in the recycling bin. And when we prepared our meals, all the peels and scraps were thrown away in the garbage too. Now they go out into the compost. And when we cleaned out the fridge, where did all those “science experiments” we found in there go? You guessed it. Talk about stinky! Now we very rarely leave anything in the fridge to turn ugly. We are super careful about eating up whatever is in there before it can turn on us. Waste not, want not! And on the rare occasion that something does get away from us, this too goes directly outside into the compost bin. This waste not, want not attitude also extends to another common practice that we never do anymore, and that is scraping plates into the garbage after dinner. We only put the amount of food on our plates that we intend to eat, and anything that is left over, no matter how little, goes into a Tupperware to be eaten another time, be it lunch the next day or to be incorporated into another dinner. One final odiferous item that has been removed from our kitchen entirely is animal products. Since we have evolved into eating a plant-based diet, we no longer have any dairy or meat products that can stink up the trash. Now, I am not telling you all this just to brag about how sweet smelling our garbage is, but for a more consequential reason. The problem of garbage in this country has become a huge, well…. mess! It is contaminating our land and water and as toxic chemicals leach out of the landfills, into our soil and water supply. And burning it, to avoid throwing it into landfills, is polluting the air we breathe. We are running out of places to dispose of it and options to deal with it. If you are one of those people who revels in America being #1, then here’s a statistic for you: National Geographic reported in October 2020 that the U.S. leads the world in generating garbage! How’s that for something to celebrate? The EPA reports that America generates 292.4 million tons of it per day. I have seen estimates ranging from 4.5 – 7 lbs. of garbage thrown away per person per day in this country. A great deal of the waste thrown into America’s trash bins could easily be diverted into other more environmentally friendly outlets as mentioned earlier. Here is a breakdown of what we are tossing into the landfills (from Environmentamerica.org), and what we as individuals can do to alleviate this. 33.7% Food waste and yard trimmings. If you have a home with a yard, there are many options for starting your own home composting system. Choose the one that works best for you. If you live in an apartment, you might find that some municipalities are now offering food scraps pick up, or at least setting up central locations to deposit your scraps for composting. And with the use of “red wiggler” worms you can even set up a mini compost system right in your own kitchen, known as vermicomposting. This might turn some of you off at first, but believe me, they are very discreet. No one will even know they are there. A friend of mine had a vermicompost system set up in her dining room for many years, and her husband remained blissfully unaware of it. You might even come to enjoy the little critters after a while and view them as environmentally friendly pets. 23.1% Paper and cardboard. If you have a garden, you have the option of shredding these into your compost bin along with the food scraps and yard waste, or using them to smother grass and weeds when you are starting a new bed or walkway. Shredded paper can also be used as mulch. Another option, of course, is to recycle these materials. 25.2% Metal, glass and plastics. These too can be washed out and placed in the recycling bin. 15.1% Rubber, wood, leather, textiles. Depending on what these particular items are, I would say reuse, reduce, recycle them. You can, of course, repurpose old clothes into rags for instance. From the other end of the spectrum, before your items go on to become trash, think about what you are bringing into your house in the first place. Ask yourself “Is this something that I am going to ultimately be tossing in the trash?” This is especially true for paper products. Use rags, cloth napkins, real dishes and utensils, rather than paper or plastic deposable versions of these items. Try to buy products that come with little or no wrapping. Look for loose fruits and veggies, rather than those wrapped in plastic or in “clamshell” containers. Buy foods in bulk with your own container where available. Another consumer action you can employ to do your part to reduce trash is to buy used. Get your clothes and household items from thrift shops and tag sales. Look for home furnishings at estate sales and antique shops. There are many websites where you can shop used, and even some “freecycle” sites where things are listed for the taking. When you are through using something consider donating it, rather than throwing it away. Of course, government can do their part to legislate that companies produce fewer plastic containers and less packaging to market their products in, and I certainly hope someday they will. And recycling legislation and technology surely has much room for improvement, as well. But in the meanwhile, there is a lot that we as individuals can do when it comes to our garbage to help save the environment. I hope you will join me in my crusade to save the world one (less) household trash bag at a time. Thank you! A long, long time ago, after the birth of her third child, Victoria made the life-changing decision to leave the work world behind and devote herself to being a full-time mom and homemaker. Along with her new title of Domestic Engineer, she took on the role of the Chief Home Economist for the family. At first, it was scary to try to live on less than half their income, but Victoria found that she not only rose to the challenge but thrived in the enjoyment of learning to live their best life with limited resources. She embraced this new frugal lifestyle of the at-home-mom and went on to add a fourth child to the mix. And their family was complete. Along the way she acquired a great deal of wisdom in how to not only avoid debt, but pay off mortgages early, buy cars for cash, travel on a shoe-string budget, and send kids to college with no student loans, all while also saving a tidy nest egg for retirement. She currently educates others in these skills through her business Bright Future. Now living the life of a modern homesteader in the Hudson Valley, New York, Victoria has added gardening to her list of skill sets as she grows many of her own vegetables to supplement her family’s primarily vegan diet. And she has come to realize that this waste-not, want-not, carbon-friendly, sustainable life she is living is not only benefiting her own family but also our Mother Earth, and that each of us has the obligation to live a responsibly sustainable life not only for ourselves, but for the greater good of our community, and our planet. We can all do this one household and backyard at a time. We are the world! And it all begins right at home. Victoria can be reached at brightfuture2budget4@gmail.com

By John Woodford / Ann Arbor, Mich. Dahlia Lithwick’s Lady Justice: Women, the Law and the Battle to Save America has arrived when a well-funded faction in our country is planning to subvert our 2024 elections, and the U.S. Supreme Court is dominated by a clique that values reactionary political objectives more than justice. We’re living in a “frightening moment,” says Lithwick, a lawyer, scholar and journalist, an era when our Supreme Court, in overturning Roe v. Wade in last year’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, has eliminated the right of women to control their own bodies. This is the “first time in its history,” Lithwick writes, that the highest court in our land has reversed a precedent “in order to take away freedom rather than expand it.” But Lady Justice devotes no space to handwringing and moaning about our current state of affairs. Instead, Lithwick profiles outstanding and courageous women lawyers who have masterminded and fought winning legal battles over not only voting and abortion rights but on many other fronts as well. The battles Lithwick highlights include the following: the attempt to ban entry to the U.S. by foreign nationals of Muslim background; the conviction of neo-Nazi terrorists in Virginia; the right of American women to control their own bodies; the illegality of the U.S. government’s separation of immigrant families at our border; the exposure and punishment of American judges who sexually harass female colleagues; and the cancer-like growth of voter-suppression efforts in a growing number of states where reactionaries feel threatened by the will of the people. Each of the legal campaigns Lithwick describes was led by brilliant, tenacious and resourceful heroines of the law. I suggest that a graphic-novel team produce a series on these women for younger readers like the books that portray the career of the late civil rights icon, Rep. John Lewis. (See March and Run: Book One, which Lewis produced with co-writer Andrew Aydin and illustrators Nate Powell and L. Fury (Top Shelf Productions). Before focusing on the contemporary lawyers, however, Lithwick recounts the career of Pauli Murray (1910-1985), the pioneering Black American legal scholar who championed racial and gender equality. Murray received scant credit, Lithwick says, for her key contributions to the legal arguments that resulted in the desegregation of the nation’s public-school systems in the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Yet her 746-page compilation and analysis of state segregation laws in 1950 became, in NAACP lead attorney Thurgood Marshall’s words, “the bible” for the victorious side in Brown. (He should know; soon-to be Justice Marshall successfully argued the case before the high court.) The questions of “who is visible and who is seen, of who does the work and who is remembered for the work are almost as central to a book on women and the law and the Trump era as the women themselves,” Lithwick observes. And with that she introduces her readers to a group of women whose deeds are cherished in millions of households even if almost all of their names are unknown to the public. Here are some of those lawyers readers will meet in full in Lady Justice: When in January 2017 the Trump Administration attempted by executive order to “ban entry into the United States by immigrants and refugees from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen,” Trump justified the plot as a way to fight terrorism (even though travelers from Saudi Arabia, the source of a number of real terrorists who had attacked the U.S., were not included in the ban). Sally Quillian Yates, the Acting U.S .Attorney General, and a holdover from the Obama Administration, had not been consulted about her views on the legality of the ban. “She knew she would have to either defend the executive order in court or resign on the spot,” Lithwick writes. But to resign would not have protected the integrity of the Department of Justice, which is pledged to uphold the rights guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution independently and impartially. Yates knew President Trump would fire her for it, but nevertheless she wrote a public statement saying the ban violated the First Amendment’s prohibition against religious discrimination. And she was fired four hours later, accused by the president of “refusing to enforce a legal order.” Although the right-wing Supreme Court later permitted the Trump Administration to pass a watered-down version of the ban, Yates had set an example for many high-placed “legal resisters” to come. She was the “first and highest-profile person in the government to say no to the president” at the cost of their job. Yates is now back at her establishment Atlanta law firm, but she told Lithwick that the integrity of the law rests upon the zeal and values of those working inside the system, in public service, as well as those outside of it. “Women are sometimes better than men at recognizing that the law isn’t an immutable, timeless cathedral,” Lithwick says. “We know that because until relatively recently, the law insisted that women couldn’t have their own credit cards.” Becca Heller was only 35 years old when the modified travel ban Trump managed to install began to claim its first victims. As co-founder of the International Refugee Assistance project, Heller learned of perhaps 200 noncitizen travelers from the targeted Muslim countries who were being held in captivity at various U.S. borders. People like Hameed Khalid Darweesh, who had served for 10 years as an interpreter for U.S. military in Iraq. He was being held at J.F.K. Airport in New York, barred from contacting an attorney, after his wife and three children had been cleared for entry, Heller wound up spearheading the case, ultimately tried with Darweesh and another Iraqi as plaintiffs, against the U.S. government. She organized a team of 3,000 volunteer lawyers around the country. Meanwhile, refugee activists organized public protests; more than 30,000 showed up just in New York City while others gathered in various sites around the country in the “Airport Revolution.” Federal District Judge Ann Donnelly agreed with attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union that the Trump Administration had violated the Due Process and Equal Protection provisions of the Constitution and barred the government from deporting hundreds of captive Muslims. Although Darweesh and most others caught up in the early phase of the Trump ban gained their right to enter the U.S, our Supreme Court upheld a final reworking of the ban on the rationale that the Trump Administration had asserted “a sufficient national security justification” for the ban. The Supreme Court operates a shell game in which the U.S. public is the dupe. If a law protects or defends a democratic right that diminishes the interests of the elite, the Court gets rid of it in one of two ways: if a state has passed it, the Court says the executive has federal power to override the state’s action. If the federal government is the source of the measure, the Court rules that states’ rights prevail. As in a shell game, the power or right looked for is not where it’s expected to be. It’s wherever the Court has decided to put it. Nowhere are the workings of this con game more apparent than in the battle over a woman’s right to control her own body. The constitutional right of a woman to choose to have an abortion that the Supreme Court confirmed in Roe v. Wade in 1973 fell in 2022, thanks to the right-wing majority on the high court that Trump built with his appointments of Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett. The 6-3 majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruled that the issue of abortion would be “returned to the states,” many of which immediately began to criminalize abortion. Brigitte Amiri, an Iranian-American attorney for the ACLU, was well aware of the bad intentions that paved the way to Dobbs. In 2017 in Texas, a 17-year-old migrant who had fled parental abuse and other miseries in Central America and crossed the U.S.-Mexican border was seized and confined by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). When she discovered she was nine weeks pregnant, the minor, known officially as “Jane Doe,” immediately asked for an abortion, which a judge granted to her. But Scott Lloyd, an antiabortion activist placed in charge of the ORR by Trump, banned shelters working under ORR contracts from helping any pregnant migrants from obtaining abortions. The federal agency continued to impede and delay Jane Doe’s efforts to terminate her pregnancy by requiring her to attend various counseling sessions while also keeping her confined and isolated in the refugee shelter. Rochelle Garza, a guardian appointed to act in Jane Doe’s interest, worked with the ACLU to file a massive class-action lawsuit against the ORR on behalf of Jane Doe and hundreds of other migrants who sought abortions, thus the case became known as Garza v. Hargan. Amiri argued on the migrant’s behalf before a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. One of the trio was Brett Kavanaugh, not yet an appointee to the Supreme Court. The U.S .government had already delayed the young migrant’s abortion by three weeks, and now Kavanaugh was seeking to impose measures that would add another 11 days of limbo. Amiri got the case quickly transferred to another federal appeals court, which immediately reversed Kavanaugh’s ruling by a 6-3 vote. Kavanaugh wrote a bitter dissent, going so far as to defame his opponents by saying they were championing “abortion-on-demand.” But Jane Doe got her wish, thanks to more adroit maneuvering by Amiri, and later told a TV interviewer: “I want to get to the place I want to go, and, if God allows it, study, to study and get ahead. I want to be a doctor.” In the wake of Amiri’s victory, Lithwick notes, we’ve seen the attack against women’s rights to control their bodies move “rapidly from banning abortion to undermining the rights to contraception, in-vitro fertilization and surrogacy.” She says, “One of the lessons I took from the case about migrant teens at the border is that you can win, and even win big, in the courts and still face immense backsliding if you aren’t doing mass political organizing at the same time.” Robbie Kaplan showed how accurate Lithwick’s lesson was when Kaplan took on the neo-Nazi groups who marched twice in Charlottesville, VA, in 2017. The second gathering of hatemongers resulted in the murder of counter-protester Heather Heyer on August 12, when one of them intentionally drove his car into her and other anti-Nazis. Lithwick lives in Charlottesville and attests to the stream of insults and threats of harm community members who denounced and demonstrated against the various white-supremacist and Jew-hating gangs continued to receive after deadly march. Those spreaders of hate and violence were among the “good people on both sides” that President Trump praised in his assessment of the conflict. Kaplan, who had made a big name for herself as a powerful commercial litigator in a prestigious law firm, had started her own law firm right after Trump’s election. She also co-founded the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund to support women filing sexual harassment cases. She called Lithwick after the Charlottesville atrocity and said she thought she had a way to fight the neo-Nazis in court if she could get some plaintiffs. The case became known as Sines v. Kessler. Elizabeth Sines was one of the protesters injured in the car assault, and Jason Kessler was a local white supremacist and leading organizer of the march. Kaplan ingeniously combined two legal precedents, one that had held anti-abortionists liable for violence that they had fomented against Planned Parenthood on their websites, and a second that used a post-Civil War statute known as the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. That act, “passed to protect newly freed slaves from mob violence,” Lithwick writes, “makes it illegal to conspire to deprive any person or class of people of their rights in a manner that is racially motivated.” Kaplan’s victory resulted in prison sentences and/or huge fines for 24 defendants and was a big blow to the “alt-right” white nationalist movement led by defendant Richard Spencer. But Kaplan thinks it would be naive and dangerous to assume that the danger posed by the alt-right has passed. “She lives with the risk of constant threats to herself, her firm and her family,” Lithwick says. “But still she maintains that putting naked, senseless, violent hate on trial, with the attendant chaos, delay and danger, offered a once-in-a-lifetime chance at a moral reckoning in a country that at times seems to have fallen into a deep slumber on questions about violence, hate and what America really represents.” Few could have a better perspective on what a moral reckoning of our country would entail than Vanita Gupta, who grew up in Philadelphia as the daughter of immigrants from India by way of London. Still fresh in her memory is the day skinheads yelled ”Pakis, go home!” and threw French fries at her family as they ate in a McDonald’s in London when she was four. Following law school, Gupta joined the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and worked on a number of high-profile civil rights cases. Gupta concluded, Lithwick says, that our nation’s “problem lay in massive, faceless institutions that were supposed to bring about justice but were instead perpetuating its opposite. The criminal justice system 
produced gross racial disparities,” as did the “war on drugs, the for-profit prison industry, increasing police militarization and an asset-forfeiture system that financially rewarded law enforcement for predatory policing.” Gupta moved to the ACLU to direct its Center for Justice “with an eye toward policy change on a large scale” rather than a focus on litigation. Eight years later, in 2014, she was recruited to join the federal government as head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Now on the inside of state power, Gupta took aim at the many forms of injustice plaguing U.S. police departments at all levels. She oversaw the formation of legal instruments (“consent decrees”) that force institutions to reform their questionable practices. The areas Gupta addressed, Lithwick notes, included “voting rights, housing, education, hate crime legislation, LGBTQ rights, human trafficking, disability rights, predatory lending and voting.” Just two days before Trump was sworn in as president, Gupta left her government post and several months later she was named CEO and president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of 2,000 of the U. S.’s top civil and human rights organizations. From that perch Gupta watched as the Trump administration either stalled or backslid on pretty much every advance in justice and fairness the country had made. Voter participation and voting rights were special targets of Trump and the political forces behind him. Gupta saw to it that her group fought hard against measures that various states were trying to use to make it harder “for people of color, the poor, students and those who lived in cities to vote,” as Lithwick sums it up. Gupta testified on behalf of the bill known as HR 1, which would bring many pro-democracy reforms, including measures to reverse or prevent voter-suppression measures. And though it passed in the House, it has been trapped in the Senate, subject to Republican filibusters that the Democrats lack the strength to override. When Gupta returned to the public sector as Associate Attorney General of the United States in 2021, she said one reason for her acceptance of the post was that “you won’t win just through outside agitation.” We’re in an era when the country is “trying to redefine who deserves to be in this country and who is an American,” questions, Gupta says, that go to the census, to voting rights, to the drawing of voting districts as well as to who gets counted and how in the census, questions about power and democracy itself. “If,” Lithwick says, “women plus law equals change, Gupta keeps proving, from the outside in and also from the inside out, then women plus law plus organizing equals power.” It’s a lesson Lady Justice emphasizes again and again: that although struggling for justice requires a persistent fight in the courts, our legislative and judicial institutions support such struggles only when there is a large, focused and constant push from below by the people. “The law is fundamentally both the cause of and the solution to women’s equality battles in America,” Lithwick writes. “As [Vanita] Gupta put it, ‘If you come to the law with a certain premise or perspective, you understand that it’s always been a source of oppression, but also why it’s so important to be used to push for change and transformation in this country.’” That’s not so much a paradox but a description of the dynamics of reality. And no one provides a better manual on how to confront and manage contradictory forces than Stacey Abrams. Abrams, “a Black female tax lawyer, voting rights activist/litigator and organizer who is also a romance novelist and who ran for governor of Georgia in 2018,” is widely acknowledged to have masterminded and led on the ground the movement that resulted in Democratic victories in 2020 that saw the once sure-bet GOP state go for President Biden and two Democratic U.S. senators in 2020. Abrams had realized that the key was to campaign all over the state on bedrock issues and also to figure out how to get the more than 500,000 Black Georgians who were not registered to vote to become politically involved despite the new-Jim Crow efforts to discourage them through devious redistricting, vote-dilution and vote-suppression campaigns. The John Roberts Supreme Court had aided and abetted those campaigns through its 2013 ruling in Shelby v. Holder, which under cover of “states’ rights and all that stuff,” as Abrams termed it, sabotaged the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Lithwick explains that Roberts, “writing for five justices, soothed himself that racialized voting problems were long past in America.” Roberts had been valued for his cunning way back in the 1980s when he was tapped as the legal strategist for the Reagan Administration and segregationist Strom Thurmond when they wished to figure out how to dilute federal power to enforce the Voting Rights Act (VRA). So he was merely reusing an old trick, Lithwick says, when he wrote in Shelby that “things have changed dramatically,” and therefore that Section 5 of the VRA, which made states with a history of racialized voting procedures prove to federal regulators that they had ended such practices, “violated the ‘principle of equal [state] sovereignty’ and also offended states’ ‘dignity.’ The dignity of the minority voters struggling to vote in those states wasn’t materially important.” Abrams lost her election for Governor in 2018 because her opponent, Brian Kemp, who was also overseeing the election as Georgia’s secretary of state, purged more than 1.5 million voters from the state’s rolls. It was enough to bring him a win by less than two percentage points. But Black, Latino and young voters and women voters will ensure further progressive outcomes in Georgia elections if the methods of election-stealing are no worse than they are now. Abrams, who believes in campaigning in every county regardless of its voting history, knows that many Americans don’t think vote suppression is a problem worthy of their attention. In a TV interview Abrams addressed what I call the “meh-too” crowd: When you’ve never had to think of the hardship of voting, then yes, these conversations on voter suppression seem absurd to you. When you have never spent more than seven minutes in line, it is nearly impossible to imagine that there are poor Black people who stand in line for eight hours, miss an entire day’s wages, risk losing their jobs simply to cast a ballot in an election that may or may not have any benefit for their lives. “One of the things women bring to the law,” Lithwick says, “is the capacity to see outside the hermetically sealed story of the law itself: what I’ve called the split-screen understanding that the entire edifice of the legal system is a privilege that was for so long denied to so many.” Insidious but clever methods of redistricting voter districts have become high-tech weapons of the faction in U.S. politics that seeks to negate the popular will. No attorney is more aware of such practices than Nina Perales, head of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF). Of Puerto Rican background herself, Perales moved from New York City to Texas 25 years ago as a newlywed. Her father had been a founder of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund in New York, for which she’d worked after getting her law degree. In Texas, of course, most Latinos are of Mexican heritage, so she got a job with MALDEF and is now its head. Increasingly, Lithwick says, Perales has had to focus “on how electoral districts are drawn to dilute minority voting.” She has explained in a podcast that “redistricting means that even if everyone has full access to voting, you can dilute the vote even if everyone had the opportunity to register and cast a ballot. Redistricting plans can ensure that the minority voice is still suppressed.” And since Latinos are steadily increasing their percentage of our national population, curbing their representation is most easily achieved by simply not counting them. In 2006, Perales “argued and won a vote dilution case pressed by Latino voters under the Voting Rights Act, League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry.” Her victory blocked a plot in the Texas legislature to remove 100,000 Latinos from a congressional district. Her expertise and effectiveness attracted Latino groups in Arizona and Arkansas to combat similar shenanigans in their states. The evil genius behind computer-science applications to redrawing districts was a Republican operative in Texas, the late Thomas Hofeller, who began refining such schemes more than 20 years ago. Lithwick quotes him as bragging: I define redistricting as the only legalized form of vote-stealing left in the United States today. … [R]edistricting is like an election in reverse! It’s a great event. … Usually the voters get to pick the politicians. In redistricting, the politicians get to pick the voters! When deployed against Latinos, redistricting is often coupled with measures like adding citizenship questions to census questionnaires. The Trump administration and allies have tried to add such a question because they know it leads many Latinos who live in communities with undocumented immigrants to refuse to participate in the census for fear of police raids, of being hassled on the job or in the streets, and of exposing family members or acquaintances to deportation. Since political representation is tied to population counts, reducing a census total weakens a district’s political influence and entitlement to funds for local infrastructure. U.S. law specifically states that the census should count “the whole number of persons in each State,” not the number of citizens. Perales made that argument when she took on the Trumpists in La Unión del Pueblo Entero v. Ross in 2018. The victors proved that the Trump Administration had lied in describing its motives for ordering a change in the census question. The key evidence of the lie was the administration’s concealment of Hofeller’s role in the case. A New York Times reporter revealed, Lithwick says, that Republicans had asked Hofeller “to craft a mechanism for redistricting that would advantage ‘Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.’” Game over! Well, in truth, the game isn’t over—maybe just an inning. Because efforts continue to ban, frighten and disenfranchise “other” Americans, in effect to define them as non-Americans, Lithwick notes. And influential political and media figures, not to mention out-and-out racists, Jew-haters and white supremacists, continue to pollute the public mind with alt-right memes like the “you will not replace us” slogans uttered by Charlottesville marchers and Fox News commentators alike. From the slime to the meretricious, one might say. What is at issue, Lithwick concludes, is power, not so much that of leaders as the “power of followers.” It’s a form of power women are quite good at mobilizing, Lithwick says, and she shows in Lady Justice how female lawyers have harnessed it in protesting travel bans and family separations or getting out the vote. She continues: Women organizing around halting mass shootings, promoting reproductive freedoms and opposing white supremacy were also lashing the power of groups to the power of law; it was the furthest thing from a president who was announcing whimsical executive orders via Twitter and fomenting violence through mobs. Lady Justice is an Organizing Agent. Get it into the hands of as many young readers, especially college-bound-or-older young women, as you can. John Woodford lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he retired after two decades as the executive editor of Michigan Today, a University of Michigan alumni/ae publication. His career in journalism includes editing and/or reporting duties for Ebony magazine, Muhammad Speaks newspaper, the Chicago Sun-Times, the New Haven Register, the New York Times and Ford Motor company publications.

The Insider: Hi Michael--Thanks for talking with The Insider today. Michael McQuillan: The pleasure is mine. Good wishes to The Insider community. The Insider: What city do you live in? Michael McQuillan: I'm a longtime Brooklyn resident in New York City. I grew up on Manhattan's Upper West Side, which was racially diverse before that phrase was part of our vocabulary, at a time when political involvement was encouraged. The Insider: Did you go to school here in the city? Michael McQuillan: I did indeed, Joan of Arc Junior High in Manhattan plus the Bronx High School of Science. The Insider: And for college? Michael McQuillan: Washington University in St. Louis for my BA in political science. My master’s in history is from Long Island University's Brooklyn Campus. I did graduate work in Southeast Asia Studies at Ohio University after my return from the Peace Corps in South Korea.. The Tragedy of Rikers Island The Insider: How did you first get interested in the situation at Rikers Island? Michael McQuillan: Graham Rayman's Daily News reporting reignited my memory of Kalief Browder's story. The precedent of the 1971 Attica rebellion also came to mind. Could that happen on Rikers Island if local leaders didn’t lead? My own previous writings on policing and race relations on the History News Network, plus chairing the New York Police Department Training Advisory Council’s Race Subcommittee in the aftermath of the Eric Garner killing, made me ready to receive Rikers news. The Insider: Yes, I read the New Yorker's stories about Kalief. They were very sad. Could you very briefly explain what happened to him? Michael McQuillan: Kalief Browder suffered in solitary confinement through two of his three years in detention on Rikers Island while steadfastly asserting his innocence of an alleged backpack theft. While the UN Human Rights Council calls more than 15 days of isolation "torture," Kalief was repeatedly beaten, starved, and surveilled throughout his two years of solitary confinement. Kalief was ultimately released from Rikers Island without a trial, began rebuilding his life by taking classes at Bronx Community College, but trauma-scarred, hanged himself at home in 2015 at age 22. The Insider: Tragic! How did his story then become public? Michael McQuillan: Jennifer Gonnerman’s extensive reporting in the New Yorker, first in 2014, and then followed up for four years ignited protests, as did a documentary about Kalief Browder that Jay Z produced. The Insider: How did you first get involved with this? Did you attend a protest? Michael McQuillan: Yes, the Katal Center’s "Close Rikers Campaign” announced a City Hall rally that I felt compelled to attend, I felt bound by the moral imperative of Tikkun Olam in my Jewish tradition, that one must act to repair a broken world. I felt resolute that I would do more than make it to rallies, but that's how I started. I was astonished to find padlock gates along City Hall Park's perimeter. Peering through, I saw Mayor De Blasio under a striped umbrella at what seemed like a cafe table beneath the City Hall steps. A pigeon near me was the only outsider inside. Thus, the rally crowd of perhaps one hundred people squeezed itself into the commuter and tourist mass on the sidewalk outside the gates. Photos by Michael McQuillan The Insider: Do you go regularly to these public protests? Michael McQuillan: I’ve been involved since then for 18 months in a sequence of public protests. The latest rally happened last week, on February 28th, outside of 633 Third Avenue in Manhattan, the skyscraper location of New York Governor Kathy Hochul's downstate office. They are more or less monthly. Close Rikers phone banking actions occur between rallies. The Insider: Do you do these things regularly? Michael McQuillan: Absolutely. I believe that bearing witness is a moral imperative that awakens the compassion from which unforeseen ideas for actions emerge. The Insider: You've also testified about this, right? Michael McQuillan: Yes, at the December 13th public hearing that the City Council's Criminal Justice Committee conducted on the status of Rikers Island. The Insider: What was that like? Michael McQuillan: Gratifying in that I made myself present, moving to stand beside Rikers survivors who in frigid cold from the City Hall steps were addressing the media about their travails and the crisis there now. I appreciated that Public Advocate Jumanne Williams as always joined us. Not one council member came out. I then waited inside for two hours and 20 minutes to testify for an allotted two minutes to Committee Chairperson Carlina Rivera, the lone council member remaining, her colleagues and the City Hall press corps long gone. Corrections Commissioner Louis Molina, surrounded by his seven-member executive staff, ignored the Rikers Island survivors as he swept up the chamber aisle after his 90-minute dais appearance. I wondered whether Lincoln’s Gettysburg vow that a “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” which is displayed on the City Council’s ceiling, will fall prey to the arrogance of power. I averted my eyes from the scoreboard clock's scarlet numbers as I made my public statement, head held high, completing my task to my satisfaction because this was my Super Bowl. The Insider: Politicians have been talking for years about closing down Rikers Island. Why hasn't it happened, do you suppose? Michael McQuillan: Yes, they talk, but they don't close the Rikers detention facility, which now incarcerates 6,000 people--twice the intended amount. Ninety percent are awaiting trial, making a farce of the Sixth Amendment right to speedy public trials. Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman’s Independent Commission on Criminal Justice and Incarceration five years ago endorsed closing Rikers Island. That was a mandate. The Council three years ago voted a closure plan that would replace Rikers with borough-based jails into law. The current mayor, Eric Adams, however, rejects that. I wonder how many men and women inside feel compelled to plead falsely to guilt, ruining futures for themselves and their families, in order to release themselves from Hell. I mourn Kalief Browder and praise his brave assertion of innocence. The Insider: Do you think one of the reasons that Rikers Island is allowed to fester is that the population is disproportionately African American? Is this a "Black Lives Matter" situation? Michael McQuillan: Absolutely. Racism is so normal, the late Congress Member Shirley Chisholm said, that most people don't even notice. Moreover, the remote physical location of the jail complex makes it easy to ignore by both accident and intent. Whether we attach the Black Lives Matter or any other label to the human rights crisis on Rikers Island, it constitutes a human emergency that cries out for action. Apathy prevails among whites at large since the incarcerated are predominantly Black and Brown humans. When I slide off the mattress of bed in the morning, I'm aware that many at Rikers sleep on tile floors in shower stalls, knowledge I take through my day. The Insider: Has anyone ever been surprised that you are interested in this issue, since you are white? Michael McQuillan: "Why don't you help your own people for a change?" my mother asked when I was a community organizer for the NYPIRG Citizens Alliance in Queens. A friend said I should have helped get Brooklyn Heights its new library when I came home from volunteering with post-Hurricane Katrina rebuilding in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. But high school students to whom I taught history voted me "best loved and most inspiring" because, they wrote, I "practiced what I'd preached about confronting injustice." President Kennedy’s call to service was a beacon of light when I was young, and now that I’ve aged, too. The notion that "here on earth God's work must truly be our own,” concluded his Inaugural Address. The Insider: I wonder if I may ask you a nosy question on behalf of The Insider's readers? You talked about your Jewish beliefs being part of your impetus for your activism. Some of them are sure to say, "But McQuillan is an Irish name!" Michael McQuillan: With my mother being a lapsed Catholic, and my father, an atheist, a spiritual life was beyond mine for decades. However, my conversion to Judaism 26 years ago anchored me with my wife in the Brooklyn Heights Synagogue. There, we are active in the Social Action Committee, striving with others to live our values authentically, sowing a spirit of community for all people. The Insider: Many thanks for your time today, Michael! Good luck with your good cause. Michael McQuillan: Thanks for including me in The Insider’s community. Good wishes! Michael McQuillan, former U.S. Senate aide, Peace Corps volunteer and history teacher, chaired the N.Y.P.D. Training Advisory Council’s Race Subcommittee and writes for The Write Launch, History News Network, Harlem World Magazine and his blog. His work is also featured in the Covid Rebels 21 Poets anthology.

Fred Plotkin, a pleasure activist and passionate Italy and culinary expert, speaks each Friday with leading people in the arts FRED PLOTKIN is one of America’s foremost experts on opera and has distinguished himself in many fields as a writer, speaker, consultant and as a compelling teacher. He is an expert on everything Italian, the person other so-called Italy experts turn to for definitive information.  Fred discovered the concept of "The Renaissance Man" as a small child and has devoted himself to pursuing that ideal as the central role of his life. In a “Public Lives” profile in The New York Times on August 30, 2002, Plotkin was described as "one of those New York word-of-mouth legends, known by the cognoscenti for his renaissance mastery of two seemingly separate disciplines: music and the food of Italy." In the same publication, on May 11, 2006, it was written that "Fred is a New Yorker, but has the soul of an Italian."

By Andy Borowitz | The New Yorker March 2, 2023 ORLANDO (The Borowitz Report)—In a major escalation of his war with Disney, Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, has rounded up several of the company’s characters at Walt Disney World and put them on a bus headed for New York City. At least a dozen characters, including Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, and Elsa, were swept up in the shocking daytime raid, as children visiting the theme park screamed in horror. A merciless DeSantis explained the seizure of the characters at a midday press conference, in which he claimed that “all of these characters, especially the mice, are card-carrying members of the wokerati.” The Governor seemed indifferent to the fate of the Disney characters once they arrive in New York. “Let them wander Times Square with Elmo,” he said. Andy Borowitz is a Times best-selling author and a comedian who has written for The New Yorker since 1998. He writes The Borowitz Report, a satirical column on the news.

By John Rolfe / Red Hook, N.Y. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump’s main challenger for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, has been proudly gagging free speech … in the name of freedom. While promoting his ironically titled new book The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival, DeSantis recently had people carrying Trump signs threatened with arrest at one of his book-signing appearances. But the governor’s claim to fame, though, is working to make his state the place “where Woke goes to die.” Intended by Black activists to mean awareness of social injustice, “woke” has been rebranded by radical conservatives as a hysterically unfounded insensitivity to mostly perceived slights. For them, ‘tis better not to look too closely at what has been going on in this country. So DeSantis has moved Florida to limit what can be taught in Advanced Placement courses in African American Studies. He’s replaced the president at the state-funded New College of Florida while adding six right-wingers to its Board of Trustees. He also continues to punish Disney, a private corporation that gets tax breaks from the state, for speaking out against a Florida law that forbids public classroom instruction about sexual orientation or gender identity to kids in kindergarten through fifth grade. Calling Florida’s moves, “the most ambitious reform to higher education in a half-century,” DeSantis advisor and New College trustee Christopher Rufo tweeted, “Gov. DeSantis is channeling the sentiment of the voters, who have demanded that taxpayer dollars stop subsidizing left-wing racialist ideology and partisan political activism. Democracy returns.” It’s worth noting that Rufo is one of the driving forces behind the Critical Race Theory under every bed mania that has consumed the right. These so-called “education” reforms are partisan political activism, too, and basically another prong in the longtime conservative effort to do things like defund National Public Radio on the grounds that tax dollars shouldn’t be given to any organization that promotes predominantly biased (i.e. center-liberal) views. The battleground is the public sector. At stake are which views dominate there. Any talking head or politician who claims to speak for “the American people” might want to note that this country is severely polarized. In North Dakota, West Virginia, Texas, Mississippi, Montana, Iowa, Wyoming, Missouri and Indiana, laws are being proposed and passed by DeSantis-style Republicans to restrict what books public schools and libraries can stock. Most often, the subjects are race and gender. Violations can result in criminal charges based on a dangerous — and I assume intentionally — nebulous criteria of “objectionable” and “harmful to children.” What is actually harmful and to what degree should be a subject of thoughtful debate, not vague charges of “grooming” and “indoctrination.” Anyone can object to anything, and folks on the right are displaying the kind of oversensitivity they accuse liberals of harboring. Even honest, gently couched observations about how races and genders behave and interact are seen as a hateful rhetoric and intentionally divisive. So in the name of “small government” that does not intrude on people’s lives, we are getting serious government intrusion into the freedom to share one’s lived experiences and heritage, and to even discuss one’s reproductive rights. In states such as Texas and Tennessee, doctors are now forbidden to speak to patients about abortion or gender-affirming care. This hypocrisy and lack of principle is a useful tool for carving out an agenda and it permeates the right’s complaints about cancel culture … as if conservatives aren’t actively trying to cancel transgender people, drag shows, and the careers of anyone else who objects to what passes for conservatism these days. Free speech as demanded by the radical right has no sense of propriety and place. Republicans like DeSantis assail what long-oppressed minorities have to say while eagerly defending the Second Amendment rights of bigots. Their likely candidate for President, Donald Trump, openly dines with anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers. And I don’t know about you, but I have a problem with white people deciding how Black people and other groups should feel and think about the way they have been and still are being treated. It’s seriously debatable whether equity, inclusion and diversity are as harmful as racism, sexism and homophobia, but everyone is still free to speak as they wish in their own homes and public places (as long as they don’t incite violence). And everyone has the right to toss someone out of their homes or businesses if they object to what is said. While you have the the right to have me removed from your home if you don’t like my racist or antisemitic rants, I am still allowed to say them in other places. I have not been cancelled, just moved–like a Confederate statue from a public park to a private museum. That’s supposed to be the American way of allowing competing viewpoints to exist. But even private restrictions are being decried as tyranny, depending on who is doing the restricting of course. And when it comes to restricting, Ron DeSantis and his ilk are working overtime … in the name of freedom. John Rolfe is a former senior editor for Sports Illustrated for Kids, a longtime columnist for the Poughkeepsie Journal/USA Today Network, and author of The Goose in the Bathroom: Stirring Tales of Family Life. His school bus drivin’ blog “Hellions, Mayhem and Brake Failure” is parked on his website Celestialchuckle.com (https://celestialchuckle.com) with the meter running.

By Bonnie Fishman / San Francisco Bay Area You may spell it “filo,” while I spell it “phyllo.” But it’s all pronounced the same way: FEE-low. Phyllo, which means leaf in Greek, is a very thin pastry made of flour and water. It is amazingly versatile and handy to have in your freezer at all times, just in case you need to throw together a quick appetizer, dinner, or dessert. Countries around the Middle East, such as Turkey and Greece and some Balkan countries have been using this pastry for millennia. The Greeks lay claim to it because it was recorded in Homer’s Odyssey in 800 B.C. The Turks maintain that it originated in the 11th century during the Middle Ages. Many people shy away from using phyllo dough because it can be very difficult to work with. It dries out quickly and becomes brittle, causing culinary grief. The usual solution is to have a damp tea towel to cover the pack with, while you use a sheet or two at a time. I personally rarely use this technique because I work fast and just fold the pile of sheets over when not in use. But be warned: there is phyllo and there is phyllo. It is sold in the frozen section of the grocery store. In truth, not all boxes are the same. Sometimes, you’ll open a box and find that it’s already broken into strips and pieces. Worse yet, the whole box is welded together by God knows what. No salvaging that. There is no way of knowing this in advance. I recommend buying two boxes, one as a backup in case the first one is a bust. It's worth the hassle, I promise. Once you get over your fear/frustration with the dough, you’ll love it! I have never attempted to make phyllo from scratch. It’s one of those persnickety doughs that you have to stretch and stretch by hand, hoping not to punch holes in it with your fingers. Quite frankly, most recipes have so much added to the phyllo that the flavor of it is hardly a factor. Take baklava, for example. It is the quintessential Middle Eastern dessert made with ground nuts, cinnamon, sometimes rose water, and doused with honey. The dough is really a vehicle to glue all that stuff together. When I had my gourmet food shops from 1980-2009 in Bloomfield, Mich., phyllo triangles were our most popular appetizer. The beauty of these was the different fillings that we offered: spinach and cheese, mushroom and cheese, curried chicken, spicy beef with pine nuts. You get the picture. The best feature of them all was our ability to make them in huge batches and freeze them on large sheet pans raw. The customer would bake them right out of their own freezer for a terrific result. Because we had large stainless steel work benches, we would lay out piles of phyllo dough in rows, brush them with butter, cut them in strips, fill them, and roll them up in a flag fold. This was all done assembly-line style, which made for a speedier task. When I make them at home, I try to work with more than one sheet at a time to replicate the large batches. As far as desserts are concerned, one can use the dough to make individual sweetened turnovers filled with cinnamon, sugar, apples, bananas or chocolate, or even a crushed nut frangipane filling. Go for it! The versatility of phyllo dough can’t be emphasized enough. Because it is unsweetened and basically has very little flavor of its own, you have a blank canvas to work on. The most common savory use is spinach pie. It’s often baked in a large casserole and cut into squares. It can also be made as large individual triangles. One time, when I was in Albania in 2018, I discovered that they have a delicious street food called Borek, eaten with the hands. (What was I doing in Albania, you ask? I was in Corfu and it was a mere 20-minute ferry ride across the Ionian Sea.) It is layers of phyllo with spinach, cheese, egg, and other vegetables. It was so delicious! Today’s recipe is a twist on using a casserole. I’m lining a large-fluted tart pan with many layers of buttered phyllo, filling it with a Greek chicken mixture, and covering it with a top layer of dough. After baking, it is cut into wedges. It is a delightful lunch or brunch dish served with a crisp green salad. It also reheats nicely. There can be many riffs on this filling by adding different cooked vegetables. Don’t forget to use the rice as it is the binder for the ingredients. Let us know at The Insider what phyllo recipe you tackled and whether you were successful or aggravated! Greek Chicken Pie with Artichokes Yield: 8 servings 1 1/2 lbs.  thin cut boneless, skinless chicken breasts 1/2 c. white wine 2 Tbsp. olive oil 4 c. finely chopped onions 2 garlic gloves, minced 1 can artichokes, drained, coarsely chopped 3 Tbsp. Arborio rice 2 Tbsp. pine nuts 2 Tbsp. fresh chopped oregano 1 lg. egg + 1 egg white, whisked together 1 tsp. salt 1 tsp. ground black pepper 1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon 1/4 tsp. fresh grated nutmeg 1 lb. box phyllo dough 4 oz. butter or margarine, melted sesame seeds for garnish Place the chicken in a large skillet. Season with salt and pepper. Pour on the wine and add enough water to barely cover. Poach chicken in simmering liquid for about 10 minutes, turning once. Remove from the pan and place on a cutting board. Cool to room temperature.  Cut into 1/4” dice. Reserve. Measure out 1/2 c. of the poaching liquid and reserve the rest for another use. Do not rinse pan. Over moderate heat, sauté the onions and garlic until translucent. Put the chicken in a large bowl with the 1/2 cup liquid. Add the onions to the chicken.  Allow to cool. Add the rice, pine nuts, oregano, whisked eggs, and seasonings. Preheat oven to 350°. Spray an 11-12” fluted tart pan with a removable bottom with pan release. Reserve. Have melted butter ready.  Lay 1 sheet of phyllo horizontally on your work surface. Brush with butter. Lay a second sheet on a 45° angle on top of the first sheet. Brush with butter. Continue in the same fashion with 5 more sheets, always laying the phyllo on a 45° angle. Carefully lift up the pile of phyllo and set in the middle of the tart pan.  Fit into the corners of the pan. Fill with chicken mixture and smooth out the top. Create another pile of phyllo using 7 sheets in the same fashion as before. Lift this on to the top of the tart.  Using a kitchen shears, trim the dough, leaving a 2” edge. Discard excess phyllo. Tuck the edges into the tart pan, either underneath or on top.  Cut 4 incisions in the tart for steam vents.  Brush the top with melted butter. Sprinkle on the sesame seeds. Place the tart on a sheet pan as the butter sometimes leaks out of the bottom. Bake for about 55 minutes or until golden brown. Let cool for 10 minutes before removing from the pan and serving. Bonnie Fishman attended the Cordon Bleu Cookery School in London. Later, she owned and operated Bonnie’s Patisserie in Southfield, Mich. and Bonnie’s Kitchen and Catering in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. She has taught cooking for over 35 years and created hundreds of recipes. She is now living in Northern California.

By Laurence Lerman / New York City The 95th Academy Awards will be held this Sunday, March 12, at 8:00 pm EST and broadcast live around the world on ABC. This gathering marks The Insider’s third year of coverage of the much-anticipated annual event, and we’re confident the 2023 show will be as markedly different from last year’s gala as 2022’s was from the previous gathering. For starters, in 2021, in response to the pandemic, the Oscars ceremony was held at downtown Los Angeles’s Union Station. A nervous nation watched as the nominees and presenters mingled outside of the terminal and rotated in and out of the venue to allow space for physical social distancing. Last year, the show returned to the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood (since renamed Ovation Hollywood), its home since 2002, and this year’s show will be held there once again. After three years of Oscar ceremonies sans hosts, 2022’s show found Amy Schumer, Regina Hall and Wanda Sykes sharing the duties. This year, the job will be taken on by a returning Jimmy Kimmel, who oversaw the proceedings in 2017 and 2018. Kimmel’s first stint hosting in 2017 was the show that memorably climaxed with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway mistakenly announcing La La Land as the Best Picture winner. It took several minutes of on-stage confusion before the statuette was rightfully awarded to the makers of Moonlight. “Being invited to host the Oscars for a third time is either a great honor or a trap,” Kimmel joked in a statement in November when it was announced he was taking the reins again. “Either way, I am grateful to the Academy for asking me so quickly after everyone good said no.” Another notable difference is that unlike in 2022, all 23 categories will be included in the live broadcast. Last year, eight categories—editing, production design, make-up and hairstyling, original score, sound, live action short, documentary short, and animated short—were presented off the air, with highlights edited into the live show. Needless to say, this action didn’t go down to well with virtually anyone in the industry, hence the immediate change for this year. As for the awards themselves, the 2022 Oscars made some noise in terms of shattering a glass ceiling or two. Apple TV’s drama CODA, directed and co-written by Sian Heder, became the first film released by a streaming service to bring home the prize for Best Picture, while its lively co-star Troy Kotsur became the first deaf man to win an acting Oscar (in this case, for his supporting role). Meanwhile, West Side Story’s sizzling Ariana DeBose became the first openly gay woman of color to be nominated for—and win—an Academy Award in an acting category (Best Supporting Actress). Prior to his being awarded Best Actor for his performance in King Richard, Will Smith famously took to the stage and assaulted comic/actor Chris Rock in one of most unforgettable viral moments in the history of the Academy Awards. Smith won’t be around this year to repeat it, as he’s been banned from the gala and other Academy events for the next 10 years. Who knows what the movie gods have in store for the 2023 Academy Awards? Remove all the buzz and glamour and the other glittery flotsam and jetsam and you are left with the movies, and there were a number of fine ones in 2022. As the country continues to grapple with the pandemic (it’s not as pronounced, to be sure, but it’s still among us!), the frustrating politics that invade our day-to-day lives and the violent war that continues to rage on the other side of the world, I think it’s important to take a breather from the serious stuff to acknowledge—and enjoy!—the restorative properties of some really good movies. And so, I come here to offer my predictions on the Big Six categories for the 2023 Academy Awards. Read on to see who I’m thinking will triumph this year. My Picks and Predictions Best Picture: Everything Everywhere All at Once Top Gun: Maverick All Quiet on the Western Front The Fabelmans The Banshees of Inisherin Elvis Tár Avatar: The Way of Water Women Talking Triangle of Sadness What would I like to win: Everything Everywhere All at Once What will win: Everything Everywhere All at Once They don’t come much more original or non-traditional than EEAAO, the anarchic, over-the-top adventure that plops such genre elements as action, comedy, drama, sci-fi, fantasy, martial arts and animation into a Cuisinart and cranks it up to 11. Written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (collectively known as “The Daniels”), the film’s takes on such philosophical concepts as existentialism and absurdism as it tackles far-ranging themes like family dynamics, depression, wish fulfillment, generational differences and Asian-American identity. EEAAO’s production elements are simply outstanding, particularly for a large-scale, metaverse-hopping film with a budget of under $25 million. The editing, visual effects, production design, costumes, action sequences and central performances by Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan, Stephanie Hsu and Jamie Lee Curtis are all sterling. So, even while EEAAO didn’t grab me from the get-go and didn’t wholly work for me by the close, damn, I’ll say that it was as startling and refreshing as they come. And if a strange, independently made film that arrived on the scene as an outlier can garner a huge international audience and get people talking like this one did, then it deserves to be honored (as it was at the Golden Globes, Critics Choice Awards, and a slew of critics organizations). And you gotta love those hot dog fingers! Directing: Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, Everything Everywhere All At Once Steven Spielberg, The Fabelmans Martin McDonagh, The Banshees of Inisherin Todd Field, Tár Ruben Östlund, Triangle of Sadness Who would I like to win: Steven Spielberg Who will win: Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert The Best Director race is going to come down between éminence grise Steven Spielberg and rising stars The Daniels, with each holding vastly different appeals to the multi-generational Academy voting base. For Spielberg, it’s the respect he commands with older Academy members for his decades of lauded work and the autobiographical and very revealing story he chose to put forward in The Fabelmans. And for The Daniels, it’s about younger Academy members choosing the new over the old and rewarding an exciting new voice that’s taken bold cinematic steps forward in their approach to narrative filmmaking while exploring the mysteries of the universe (and metaverse). Both Spielberg and The Daniels have picked up Best Director honors at various previous awards shindigs, so I’m not sure how much that will play into the tallies. It feels really up the middle, but I’m going to call it for The Daniels, who took a wildly out-there premise, mounted a dazzling-looking and engaging film and wangled a remarkable amount of emotion out of it. As for the 76-year-old Spielberg, he’ll always be The Man—(1993’s Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List in one calendar year—enough said!) and definitely still has great work and more awards ahead of him! Actor in a Leading Role: Brendan Fraser, The Whale Austin Butler, Elvis Colin Farrell, The Banshees of Inisherin Bill Nighy, Living Paul Mescal, Aftersun Who would I like to win: Brendan Fraser Who will win: Brendan Fraser Brendan Fraser returned to the conversation as an obese and reclusive English professor hoping to reconnect with his estranged daughter in Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale. Lauded by critics and on the 2022 festival circuit, his was as surprisingly powerful a comeback performance as one could imagine by the star of such mainstream smashes as The Mummy (1999) and Journey to the Center of the Earth (2008) and art house darlings like Gods and Monsters (1998) and The Quiet American (2002). True, Fraser has popped up in a number of titles over the past decade but nothing that’s come even close to showcasing the talent that he taps into for The Whale (yes, with a fat suit to help inspire him). And Hollywood just loves a comeback story, right? As for Austin Butler, he showcased some startling range in Elvis and, yes, the Academy tends to dig real-life figures (see Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury in 2018's Bohemian Rhapsody, Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill in 2017's Darkest Hour and a bunch of others). But he’s young and still has a lot of time… Actress in a Leading Role: Michelle Yeoh, Everything Everywhere All At Once Cate Blanchett, Tár Ana de Armas, Blonde Michelle Williams, The Fabelmans Andrea Riseborough, To Leslie Who would I like to win: Cate Blanchett Who will win: Michelle Yeoh In a career that dates back to Hong Kong shoot ’em ups and Jackie Chan fight flicks in the mid-Eighties, followed by decades of regular Hollywood work, Michelle Yeoh triumphs in her role as a hard-working family woman who’s plunged into a dimension-hopping adventure to save the universe from being wiped from existence. She keeps Everything Everywhere All At Once’s on-screen craziness grounded (well, as grounded as it can be) with her deft handling of the film’s dizzying mix of action, comedy and drama. Still, even as her probable victory works for me, I preferred Blanchett’s remarkable performance as fictional composer Lydia Tár, and all the vanity, trauma, anger and confusion that accompanies it. Ditto Michelle Williams for her simply glowing take as the mother to a surrogate Steven Spielberg in Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical The Fabelmans. But Yeoh has got some serious momentum behind her with her victories at the Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild shows, and she speak to a large international audience who’ve been watching her grow from genre ass-kicker to seasoned actress over the past four decades. Actor in a Supporting Role: Ke Huy Quan, Everything Everywhere All at Once Barry Keoghan, The Banshees of Inisherin Brendan Gleeson, The Banshees of Inisherin Judd Hirsch, The Fabelmans Brian Tyree Henry, Causeway Who would I like to win: Ke Huy Quan Who will win: Ke Huy Quan Ke Huy Quan is hot, hot, hot following his victories at the Golden Globes, Critics’ Choice Awards and Screen Actors Guild honors, and there’s no reason to think he won’t follow it up with an Oscar victory. The boy who debuted as the high-kicking Short Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom back in 1984 is now a seasoned Hollywood veteran whose role as the goofily timid husband of EEAAO’s metaverse-traversing Michelle Yeoh provides a strong secondary heart to the adventurous film (after Ms. Yeoh’s, of course), Watch Quan take it home as part of a potential Everything Everywhere All at Once sweep. Actress in a Supporting Role: Angela Bassett, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever Jamie Lee Curtis, Everything Everywhere All at Once Kerry Condon, The Banshees of Inisherin Stephanie Hsu, Everything Everywhere All at Once Hong Chau, The Whale Who would I like to win: Jamie Lee Curtis Who will win: Angela Bassett A toughie this year: a victory for Stephanie Hsu or the always fun Jamie Lee would certainly help certify the aforementioned EEAAO sweep, but I think the Academy will want to spread the wealth where it’s reasonable. And as a nod to other performers, particularly to one of color who isn’t Asian, the very deserving Angela Bassett is primed to take the prize this year. She’s certainly warrants a high-profile honor and has for 30 years since she rocked us as Tina Turner in What’s Love Got to Do With It back in 1993. Her regal bearing as the Queen of Wakanda hits hard in the hit Black Panther sequel and an award here would mark the first-ever Oscar recognition for an actor in the Marvel Comics Universe, which could also be considered overdue. But oh, Jamie Lee! I’ve loved you since the 1977 TV series Operation: Petticoat (based on the 1959 comedy by the same name, starring your daddy Tony) followed by your 1978 debut as Laurie Stroud in the brand new Halloween franchise. But I don’t think your wonderful performance as IRS auditor Deirdre Beaubeirdre is gonna be awarded Oscar gold, though I’ll continue to smile at your winning speech at the Screen Actors Guild awards a couple of weeks ago, where you declared, “What a f*cking dream, man!” So, there we go! Once again, as every year, we want to hear from you, both through the contest and on this very page! Leave a comment and tell me what you think—hell, tell me that you disagree with me! I can take it—and I’m always up for a good argument! And while we’re at it, back up a month or so and consider all the nominations. No Paul Dano for Best Actor (or even Best Supporting Actor) for his quietly devastating low-key take on Steven Spielberg’s surrogate father character in The Fabelmans? (It was less showy than Michelle Williams’ mother, but no less calculated.) And how about the Best Director breakdown? All five nominees are up for what are essentially art-house films, despite there being three massive, nearly industry-saving blockbusters in the Best Picture lineup. I’m talking about Avatar: The Way of Water, Elvis and Top Gun: Maverick, helmed by James Cameron, Baz Luhrmann and Joseph Kosinski, respectively. All three directors made films—solid, entertaining films—that people actually left their homes to see in theaters! And no nominations? I’m a viewer who loves both art-house fare and mainstream movies and I truly believe that a moviemaker who swings big and goes for the fences, earns critical and audience kudos, and sells tickets comes out of the gate as an award-winner! Click below to enter The Insider's Oscar Contest: Laurence Lerman is a film journalist, former editor of Video Business--Variety's DVD trade publication--and husband to The Insider's own Gwen Cooper. Over the course of his career he has conducted one-on-one interviews with just about every major director working today, including Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Clint Eastwood, Kathryn Bigelow, Ridley Scott, Walter Hill, Spike Lee, and Werner Herzog, among numerous others. Once James Cameron specifically requested an interview with Laurence by name, which his wife still likes to brag about. Most recently, he is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the online review site DiscDish.com.

By Lydia Hope Wilen / New York City The Stamp Champ Who knew that the most popular commemorative U.S. stamp of all time is the one with Elvis Presley? It was issued in 1993 after 75% of 1.2 million mail-in voters chose this picture of a 1973 Hawaiian performance over a young Elvis from the 1950s. In case you’re wondering, the USPS printed about 500 million of these stamps. While we’re on the subject, it may come as a shock to know that Elvis recorded over 600 songs and never wrote any of them, even though he’s credited as co-writer on some tracks. Elvis never learned to read or write music. Spring Ahead on March 12 at 2:00 AM Yes, daylight saving (not savings) time. Ever wonder why the clock change takes place at 2:00 AM? We have President Woodrow Wilson to thank for that. Instead of adjusting clocks around midnight in March and November, Wilson wisely thought it would be less disruptive at 2:00 AM when no passenger trains were running in New York City. It was thought that bars and restaurants were closed by then and most people were at home, sleeping. Last year, Reuters reported that the U.S. Senate passed legislation marking daylight saving time permanent, ending the changing of clocks twice a year. The measure was called the Sunshine Protection Act and was unanimously approved by a Senate voice vote. The House of Representatives still must pass the bill before it can go to President Biden to sign. No Kidding Google's headquarters, The Googleplex. in Mountain View, Calif., covers about 12 acres of grass and trees. To go 'low-carbon.' Google brought in goats as their lawn mowers. The goats feed themselves...100 goats can eat and clear an acre in one day. As you can imagine, the goats also provide organic fertilizer. Just watch where you walk. And if you don't believe me, google it. Re-Joyce I discovered an astounding statistic about trees. It led me to think of Trees, the beautiful poem by Joyce Kilmer, which made me think of the silly schoolgirl parody we recited. The last two lines were: “Boys are loved by fools like me, ‘Cause who would like to kiss a tree?” The ironic thing is that I have become a tree hugger. In case you didn’t know, Joyce Kilmer was a man. His first name was Alfred. Getting back to the astounding statistic: our planet Earth is home to about three trillion trees. There are more trees on our planet than there are stars in the Milky Way. Three trillion trees, including the 18,000 in Central Park. Thanks to these trees, New Yorkers can breathe a little easier. Arti-Fact If Pablo Picasso had signed his baptismal name on his canvas, there wouldn’t be any room for his painting. Picasso was baptized as Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Maria de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santisima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito Ruiz y Picasso. Instead of 23 names, Picasso signed his artwork with only his last name. (Couldn’t remember the rest?) During his 91 years of life, it is estimated that he created close to 150,000 works of art. That’s a lot of signing. Jaguar – Not the Cat, the Car I have no interest in cars. The last time I drove a car was the day I took the New York State Driving Test. I passed, got my license and haven’t driven since. I’ve been renewing my license for decades to use as an ID. So why am I going to write about cars…Jaguars, to be exact? If only parents would care for their children the way the car company cares for their Jaguars. Two examples. First: Jaguars are painted. Before the paint job, in order to avoid the bare metal from attracting dust between the final cleaning and the painting, the car is brushed with ionized emu feathers because they hold an electrostatic charge. How did they know? Who thought of that? How do I find an emu feather-duster? The second example of extreme care: In order to load a car safely onto a train to transport it, the car’s driver doesn’t wear a belt or buckles and goes so far as to take out the metal shoelace eyelets from his shoes. This is done to eliminate the possibility of any part of the car being scratched. Without touching the outside of the car, the driver zips and then unzips an industrial grade cover over the car. I’ll stick with the emu feather-duster. Oy Vey! Don’t Say “Obey”! Princes Diana was only 20 when she married the then-Prince Charles, who was 12 years her senior. As young as she was, she was brave enough to buck tradition and not use the Church of England’s wedding vows. Even Queen Elizabeth II, stayed with the 1662 wording for women, promising to “obey” their husbands. Of course, men did not have to promise to obey their wives. Diana went with the church’s updated marriage service. She told Charles at the altar, she would “love him, comfort him, honor him and keep him, in sickness and in health.” Her future daughters-in-law, Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle (whom Diana never met), followed her lead and omitted “obey” from their wedding vows. Respect the Insect The buzzing of house flies is in the musical key of F. An ant can carry 10 to 50 times its body weight. One ladybug can eat 75 insects a day…5,000 in its lifetime. Gardeners love them in their gardens because ladybugs’ favorite food is aphids, the insects that can damage plants. Crickets have more protein than salmon or beef and are considered a delicacy in many parts of the world. Before you bring them into your kitchen, listen to their chirps. Supposedly, you can figure the temperature outside using this formula for a cricket outdoors: the number of chirps in one minute, divided by four, then add 40. Okay, now you can pick him up and bring him in for dinner. Butterflies can see colors that we’re unable to see. It’s due to the fact that they can perceive ultraviolet light, which is beyond our visual capabilities. Only female mosquitos bite. Insects have 6 legs. If you count 8 legs, you’re looking at a spider…or four people. Meanwhile, here’s hoping that you were amazed by some of the facts and enjoyed learning about things you ordinarily don’t contemplate. Think of these as impressive-but-casual statements at family dinners or at friendly get-togethers. If you want more of this kind of information, but are too busy or lazy to find it for yourself, let me know in the comment box or email me at: editor@theinsider1.com. Lydia Hope Wilen had a successful collaboration with her late sister Joany as nonfiction bestselling authors (18 books), journalists, TV personalities, writers and talent coordinators on a Nickelodeon series hosted by Leonard Nimoy, Reading Rainbow episodes, skit writers for Dr. Ruth's TV show, Diet America Challenge on CBS, and writers of screenplays (optioned but not produced yet). Lydia is writing on her own now and has just completed an extraordinary book for young people and their parents. It will have them laughing and learning...once she gets an agent and it gets published.

By John Rolfe / Red Hook, N.Y. I’ve often read my friends' bitter complaints about being sentenced to “Facebook Jail,” but I was never sure what they meant. Obviously they had received some kind of suspension, but exactly why wasn’t clear to me. They usually groused that something innocuous they’d posted had been deemed offensive — although in the case of one chap who dishes salty material, I wasn’t surprised that he’d run afoul of the law more than once. So I was shocked — shocked! — to receive a notice on Feb. 18 that my account had been restricted. For the next two days, I was forbidden to post things, make comments, or even render “likes.” I couldn’t imagine what had caused this sorry state of affairs … until I read that one of my comments in a school-bus drivers group had violated community standards against malicious or salacious material, hate speech, personal attacks, spam, or flooding Facebook with content. The comment in question: “There’s a kid in the back of my bus who raises hell with his friends every day. I want to poison him … until I get to his stop. Then he picks trash up off the floor, deposits it in the garbage box in front, and wishes me a nice day as he leaves.” I was also stunned to discover that I had received a commuted sentence last November for posting this reply to a friend’s comment: “I’ll give it a stab, Stu. Many thanks” I’d missed that notification and I don’t recall what the “it” I was going to stab referred to — I often use “give it a stab” instead of “try” — but Facebook considered it an innocent mistake and let me go with a warning. Now, without the context of either discussion or knowledge of my hyperbolic sense of humor (which I inherited from my sainted mother who used to say things like, “Honestly! I could just poison your father for buying that huge ham!”), I am now a two-time loser who comes across to Zuckerberg’s authorities as a drooling psycho fixated on stabbing and offing people with toxic substances. And my record of offenses is permanent, kind of like it was in grade and high school. I was given the option of filing an appeal or letting a nameless group of people levy a sentence. Ordinarily, Facebook’s justice system works on an escalating scale: a warning for a first offense, one or two days suspension for a second, three days for a third, seven days for a fourth, and 30 days for a fifth. Repeat offenders who are deemed truly dangerous, like Donald Trump for example, can have their accounts permanently suspended. Gambling that I wasn’t quite on a par with Trump, I chose to waive the appeal and take my medicine, mostly because I think it’s good that Facebook is trying to police its content. To be sure there is plenty of nasty stuff up there — usually politically-motivated attacks and misinformation — that claims “free speech” as its shield. Violations like mine are frivolous by comparison, but I still see erring on the side of civility as preferable. So with two days of inactivity ahead of me, I got to wondering what I used to do before social media and smart phones came along. I mostly scroll through Facebook during periods of down time or when trying to ignore people in a socially acceptable way. My algorithms mainly send me posts about my favorite bands and sports teams. For whatever reason, much less news and political commentary is coming my way, which is fine because I’d been frequently engaging in snarky, sometimes undignified exchanges with Trump supporters and Flat Earthers. Now I mostly gaze at photos, read pointless “greatest” lists, and engage in dumb debates with fellow New York Giants fans who trash quarterback Daniel Jones no matter how well he plays. I also called a muttonhead in a Pink Floyd fan group a “nimrod” because he told me to “enjoy the war” in Ukraine. (Facebook let that one pass.) Surely there must be better ways to spend my time, but damned if I can think of, or remember, what they are. Fortunately, I seem to be moving away from social media as a matter of course. I’ve never had the time and energy for Twitter and I’m even happier to ignore it now that Elon Musk is in charge. Likewise, I’ve no desire to trouble myself with Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, and Reddit. Facebook is all I can stand, and that likely won’t be for much longer, not because they tossed me in their hoosegow. According to news reports, FB will soon charge users for publicly verifying that their accounts are authentic and for some security features, such as two-factor authentication. I suspect even more fees will follow. Thanks, but no thanks. The friends I want to stay in touch with I can contact via text, email, the U.S. Postal Service, or carrier pigeon. I can get my news via websites, TV and radio. And with all my new free time, maybe I’ll even think of something enriching and productive to do. John Rolfe is a former senior editor for Sports Illustrated for Kids, a longtime columnist for the Poughkeepsie Journal/USA Today Network, and author of The Goose in the Bathroom: Stirring Tales of Family Life. His school bus drivin’ blog “Hellions, Mayhem and Brake Failure” is parked on his website Celestialchuckle.com (https://celestialchuckle.com) with the meter running.