2025-09-17 02:28:33
Conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s gruesome killing last week was both a striking visual of our nation’s intensifying polarization and, by some counts, a catalyst for it to intensify more. Even before a suspect had been identified, there was a knee-jerk reaction among some Republicans to blame the Democratic Party for his death. Some even called for retribution.
Importantly, we do not yet—and may never—know the motive, or constellation of motivations, that drove Kirk’s alleged shooter, who has been identified as 22-year-old Tyler Robinson. But we do know that targets of political violence exist across the political spectrum.
Consider some of the recent events of political violence:
In the slightly more distant past, other intended targets of political violence include Republican President Donald Trump in 2024, conservative Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in 2022, as well as those from both parties who were threatened in the weeks leading up to and following the 2020 election: Democratic Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Trump’s then-Vice President Mike Pence, and staff from both the RNC and the DNC headquarters.
But why does political violence happen at all? Who does it collectively harm? And to what extent do extremists who identify with both the political left and right support it? I was most curious to talk to an expert about who perpetrates these horrific acts. So I reached out to Sean Westwood, government professor at Dartmouth College and director of the Polarization Research Lab.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Could you start by simply defining what political violence is?
That’s a very tricky question. It’s not settled in the academy, just to preface. There are some individuals who would argue that political violence is a very large kind of catch-all category that would encapsulate violence motivated by race, violence motivated by religion, etc. And within that framework, violence is everywhere. But perhaps a more constructive definition would just look at violence motivated entirely by partisan affiliation: individuals attacking others because of their political affiliation, versus a continuation of the unfortunate racial and religious violence that’s plagued our country since its inception.
Given Charlie Kirk’s very recognizable ideology, can we presume that his killing was an act of political violence?
It’s undeniable that Charlie Kirk is a strong figure on the political right, and we know that the assailant in this case had messaging on some of his bullet casings, but it is often the case that the individuals who commit political violence in this country have incoherent ideological backgrounds. They don’t have clear manifestos, nor do they come from a background that signals attachment to one party or the other.
What really connects these folks is not a coherent ideology; it’s mental illness. It’s a sense of alienation. It’s a sense of despondence with the country. And that’s good in one sense, in that it suggests there’s not an organized movement towards political violence. But what makes countering this threat very hard is that we’re not trying to infiltrate a hierarchy. We’re not trying to stop a group of tendrils spread across the country. We’re trying to intervene in very hard-to-reach situations.
“We’re not trying to stop a group of tendrils spread across the country. We’re trying to intervene in very hard-to-reach situations.”
You’ve said publicly that there is not a mass movement of political violence. But do you think it’s fair to say that recently there has been a spike in political violence?
I think it’s certainly fair to say that there’s been an increase in high-publicity incidents in this country. Though it’s important to contextualize that by saying that this is not something that’s being demanded by the electorate. This is something that’s being imposed upon us by the darkest parts of our society. So we’ve certainly seen an uptick. But that is not an indication of a shift in public support or a shift in the public appetite for violence.
What is the public’s appetite for violence?
There are a variety of measures of support for “political violence,” including some that look at the willingness of a citizen to say negative things online or to disparage someone of the other party. There, we see pretty substantial numbers. When you narrow it down to explicit partisan murder, public support drops to below 2 percent. It’s vanishingly small, and it’s remained at that level for the last three years that I’ve collected data. We would be very, very wrong to assume that there’s a substantial portion of the public that supports political violence of the kind that we saw in Utah.
In the 1960s, there were several infamous acts of political violence: President John F. Kennedy, his assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, and the list goes on. Is there a historical parallel between that era and today?
Objectively, this is not the worst we’ve seen. In the 1960s there were organized groups committing bombings and assassinations through the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers, and other coordinated movements. The distinction today is that this is all immediately [viewable] on social media. Many Americans, unfortunately, saw the bullet enter Charlie Kirk’s neck live on social media. That’s fundamentally changed the dynamic from a setup where there’s time to mourn and reflect, to a world where anger, confusion, and sadness are all [instantly] happening in the public sphere.
As unsubstantiated finger-pointing and calls for retribution continue to spread on social media, how can elected leaders and public figures lower the temperature after an act of political violence?
After the Trump assassination attempt, we saw our political leaders—both Democrats and Republicans—condemn violence and say that this is not how American democracy functions. That didn’t happen this time. Instead of demands for collective grief, we’ve had prominent individuals label the entirety of the Democratic Party as murderers, demanding retribution and investigation, even punishment, of the Democratic Party. We’ve seen Trump label Kirk a martyr. Our elected officials have done everything they can to increase the temperature.
That’s not uniform. We’ve also seen incredibly thoughtful and careful messaging coming from some politicians. But unfortunately, those careful and rational messages are being swamped by the most incendiary commentary.
I’ve seen a lot of concerning rhetoric on social media where people are saying that the left is always responsible for political violence. Is that true?
This is not a situation where one party is always the victim and one party is always the perpetrator. If you look at the last five years, it’s easy to find examples of individuals attacked because they were Republicans, attacked because they were Democrats, attacked because they were Jewish, or attacked merely because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. The motivation for these acts of violence is really often just completely incoherent. Ideology does not appear to be consistently driving the political violence trends that we’re observing.
You mentioned mental illness as being a driver of extreme episodes of political violence against public figures. What is the solution to that?
It’s a real challenge. A lot of the data that we have on these folks suggests that they’re very anti-social and disconnected from traditional society. When that’s the case, it’s not really clear how you would intervene if you don’t have access to provide mental health services or more rational rhetoric. There’s no way to systematically predict who’s going to commit an act of political violence; it’s so rare and so individuated that it’s hard to imagine a systematic way of preventing it.
What should people do when they see inflammatory responses or misinformation about political violence on social media?
The most important thing to remember is that Twitter, Truth Social, and BlueSky are not a microcosm of the American public. They are a select group of individuals who want to engage in discussion. So what you see online does not reflect the attitudes of the American public writ large. And as a consequence, I think that also suggests that you shouldn’t assume that what you’re seeing online is even coming from the American public. There’s a lot of evidence to suggest that foreign actors, bots, and trolls are manipulating our social media in a way that could not only misrepresent the attitudes of the American public, but could push otherwise rational Americans to adopt more paranoid or more polarized positions.
What about when it’s people you know posting the hot takes?
People, for some reason, feel as if they can say things on social media that they would never do face-to-face. We’ve lost the filter that stopped what you might call rhetorical terrorism. It’s hard to imagine how you would fix that. I think the best advice is, if you feel as if you’re seeing content that makes you feel uncomfortable, step away. The best thing you can do is just step away.
2025-09-16 23:55:35
As Donald Trump rolled down the 18th fairway at his Turnberry golf resort in July, he was troubled by a deathly vision, slowly spinning in the Scottish distance: wind turbines. “These things are massive, and you’re looking at these ugly windmills, and it’s a shame,” Trump lamented in an interview with the New York Post—yet another salvo in the president’s escalating war on wind energy and other renewables.
“It’s a con job saying the environmentalists want it, because I can’t believe they really want it,” Trump went on. “It kills the birds, ruins the look, they’re noisy. If you see them from your house, your house is worth like 50 percent or more less. I just think it’s a very bad thing.”
“I don’t know if you could call it an industry; they just take electricity and create bitcoin.”
At Trump’s side on the course was his son Eric, who oversees his father’s golf empire as executive vice president of the Trump Organization. But a few months earlier and an ocean away, Eric had inked a remarkable series of deals in a very different industry, becoming a major player in a complex network of cryptocurrency ventures that could become a vast new source of family wealth. Key to his plans: a brand new bitcoin mine powered by a wind farm in the Texas Panhandle and a merger with a crypto company that once billed itself as “a pioneer in the realm of zero-emissions bitcoin mining.”
The bitcoin mine—known as the Vega Data Center—is a 162,000-square-foot building that will be packed to the rafters with thousands of high-end computers, cooled with water. The computers’ task is, quite literally, to print money. They’ll churn their way through increasingly complex algorithms, which, as they’re solved, release new bitcoins into the world. Bitcoin, the world’s marquee cryptocurrency, now has a market price well above $100,000; it’s a potentially lucrative project, but an enormously energy-hungry one.
That’s where wind power comes in—the Vega center was built over the last year next to the Canadian Breaks wind farm, a 200-megawatt facility in North Texas. Since 2019, the wind farm had supplied inexpensive green energy to Texas’ power grid. But last year, the farm’s owners agreed instead to sell the facility’s energy to a subsidiary of a company called Hut 8, which owns that new bitcoin mine. The deal was a triumph for Hut 8. Crypto mining is profitable only if the electricity it runs on is cheap, and, the company’s CEO told investors, the new mine “benefits from some of the lowest locational wholesale power prices in North America.”
So this past spring, when he struck a deal with Hut 8, Eric Trump became a power player in the worlds of both renewable energy and crypto mining—interlocking industries whose fortunes are being reshaped by his father’s presidency. His timing couldn’t have been better. He was locking in a low-cost source of clean power just as the Trump administration was ramping up a campaign to block construction of new wind projects around the country.
In late May, Eric and his brother Don Jr. took the stage at the annual Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas—and they had a message the crowd loved. America was now a pro-bitcoin country, and their father was a pro-bitcoin president who was going to do what he could to make American bitcoin dominant.
“We’re bringing bitcoin to America and America is going to win the crypto revolution—that much I can tell you!” Eric enthused. “We finally have a competent president in the White House. And we have a president who loves this industry. And who is behind this industry 100 percent!”
Eric wasn’t saying this as a simple emissary of his father’s political movement, delivering good news to the crypto-loving conference-goers. He was gloating about the cleverness of American Bitcoin, a new crypto company he’d recently launched with a handful of partners. Eric and Don Jr. were onstage with two of those partners—Matt Prusak and Mike Ho—hyping bitcoin and the possibility that it would keep growing in price.
It’s not illegal for the Trump kids to run a crypto empire, says Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. But the potential conflict of interest is obvious: The president and his administration “have had a lot to say about the crypto industry and whether it should be regulated and how it should be regulated.”
“The American people have always been troubled by the idea that families would want to profit from the presidency or connection to the president,” Bookbinder adds.
Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency to break into the public consciousness and remains one of the most valuable and sought-after digital coins. When it was established, its anonymous creator designed it to be a finite resource that would slowly be distributed through “mining.” By solving complex mathematical problems that validate other bitcoin transactions, new bitcoins can be unlocked and claimed—a process that at first was simple and easy, but, by design, has become increasingly difficult. Once something that could be done by a hobbyist with a home PC, bitcoin mining is now the domain of investors who tie together the computing power of hundreds of servers to slowly grind away at unlocking new wealth.
While it’s still possible to have a crack at mining your own bitcoin, realistically, the vast computing power needed to make any significant headway requires hardware and energy on an industrial scale. It’s akin to the difference between a frontiersman panning for gold and a multinational conglomerate excavating it from a milewide pit. These days, crypto mining consumes so much electricity that it rivals the energy needs of entire cities—one recent study found that combined, the 34 largest bitcoin mines in the United States used one-third more electricity than all of Los Angeles. As new mines are established, it’s the equivalent of adding whole neighborhoods worth of energy consumption.
“I don’t know if you could call it an industry; they just take electricity and create bitcoin,” says Colin Read, a professor at SUNY Plattsburgh who has studied the environmental economics of crypto.
Crypto mining is almost entirely unregulated in the United States, and the formula for turning a profit is relatively straightforward. “If bitcoin’s prices go up and energy prices go down, you make a lot of money,” says Del Wright, a Louisiana State law professor who generally opposes new environmental rules on crypto. “It’s really a forecast on the cost of energy versus the cost of bitcoin, because you’re speculating on both.”
“We’re bringing bitcoin to America and America is going to win the crypto revolution.”
Still, few in mainstream finance have expressed an interest in the mining business; the demand for energy quickly becomes overwhelming, and the price of bitcoin is too unstable for most investors. For years, it was primarily done by huge server farms in China, where energy could be had for rock-bottom prices. But after the Chinese government turned against crypto, the US suddenly became a viable option—especially if you have the kind of access to cheap electricity that Eric Trump has secured in Texas.
Without hard assets backing it, the value of bitcoin is largely driven by interest and enthusiasm from investors. And the easiest way to generate that enthusiasm just might be a president who is relentlessly excited about promoting crypto—and relentlessly opposed to tightening restrictions on it.
That describes Trump, who has promised to defend Americans’ sacred right to mine for crypto and has even established a “strategic bitcoin reserve” for the US government. It’s a sharp departure from Joe Biden’s administration, which had generally cracked down on crypto, proposing strict regulation of the industry as a whole and floating the idea of a 30 percent tax on mining operations. Since Trump’s election last year, the price of bitcoin has skyrocketed.
There’s nothing simple about the Trump family’s ties to crypto. There are the $TRUMP and $MELANIA meme coins and a line of NFTs bearing the president’s likeness. There’s World Liberty Financial, the Trumps’ decentralized crypto-finance exchange that has spun its own sprawling web of controversies. But the new bitcoin mining project might be the most byzantine of all.
It began with Don Jr. and Eric Trump joining a small investment bank called Dominari Holdings. Based in Trump Tower, Dominari is a publicly traded entity that began life as a pharmaceutical firm called AIkido Pharma before rebranding in 2022 as a financial services company. On January 21, the day after Donald Trump returned to office, Dominari’s stock was selling for just $1.41 a share after years of sliding since its rebirth. A few weeks after the inauguration, Don Jr. and Eric were announced as members of Dominari’s advisory board. They were each initially awarded 250,000 shares of the little bank’s stock, and eventually a total of 750,000 shares each—a stake that quickly ballooned to a value of nearly $10 million but has since slid to less than $5 million. Dominari is now trading around $6 per share.
Within a week, Dominari created a new company—working alongside the Trumps, though it’s unclear what their ownership stake might be—called American Data Centers. With the stated goal of becoming a leader in the world of giant server farms that power AI and crypto, it wasn’t yet clear to the public exactly what the operation might look like.
On March 31, the publicly traded bitcoin mining company Hut 8 announced it would buy the majority of American Data Centers, which it would rebrand as American Bitcoin. With Eric Trump as its new chief strategy officer, American Bitcoin now had a purpose—it would begin accumulating bitcoin by directing high-powered computer servers to unwind the complex algorithms.
American Bitcoin wouldn’t own any bitcoin mining machines itself—it would use equipment belonging to a different subsidiary of Hut 8. That includes the computers at Hut 8’s mammoth Vega Data Center in Texas, powered by dozens of neighboring wind turbines.
Eric’s new company will essentially serve as a digital vault for all this newly created bitcoin. In theory, as the value of the bitcoin it owns rises—through the slow creation of new coins and, hopefully, an ever-rising bitcoin market price—American Bitcoin’s value will grow with it.
Dominari Holdings and Hut 8 are themselves both publicly traded. Their new company, American Bitcoin, has also now gone public—a huge potential gold mine for its investors, including Eric and Don Jr. But going public is a difficult and onerous process if you follow the normal route of an initial public offering. To be successful, an IPO often requires teaming up with a traditional Wall Street powerhouse, like Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan, and months or years of scrutiny and paperwork.
Instead, the partners chose an easier path—a merger with an already public company in need of a new purpose. In May, Eric Trump, Dominari, and Hut 8 announced that American Bitcoin was merging with Gryphon Digital Mining, a publicly traded but relatively low-profile bitcoin mining company. The new entity is 98 percent owned and fully operated by American Bitcoin and uses that name—Gryphon’s shareholders got 2 percent of the stock and no role in the new business.
American Bitcoin, Hut 8, the Trump Organization, and the White House did not respond to requests for comment. Dominari declined to comment.
It’s a long and winding path, but it ends with Eric helping to lead a public company whose plan is to become more and more valuable with every noisy whir of a server’s fan, every watt of energy, every pro-crypto utterance from his father—and every turn of a wind turbine alongside the Vega mine.
The question of where to get the electricity this expanding empire requires is a tricky one, but at least initially, Eric Trump and his partners are turning to one of his father’s greatest bêtes noires: renewable energy. Despite Donald Trump’s well-documented loathing of green power, it has a lot of upsides for bitcoin mining—once the infrastructure is built, the cost of producing wind, solar, and hydro power is extremely low.
That’s why Eric and Don Jr. have found themselves in business with companies that are very pro–green energy. The Hut 8 data center at the core of American Bitcoin’s business was built next to the Canadian Breaks wind farm; last year, Hut 8 reached an agreement giving it “exclusive access” to buy the energy the wind farm produces to power its mining equipment. And that equipment, according to SEC filings, will now be used for American Bitcoin’s mining business.
Gryphon—the publicly traded company subsumed into American Bitcoin—has its own long-standing commitments to green energy, boasting that its electricity use has been “certified as 100% renewable.” Its website touts its adherence to ESG, the “environmental, social, and governance” business principles that investors in Don Jr.’s orbit—along with the rest of the MAGA movement—tend to vilify as “woke” capitalism. Gryphon had previously announced plans to pair natural gas-powered data centers with carbon capture technology, and as recently as last spring, it pitched the idea that its bitcoin mining operations could be “the knight in shining armor” helping to support green energy development.
In reality, the armor might not be so shiny. Crypto mining operations gobble up limited clean power resources while driving up prices for everyone else, says Read, the SUNY economist. Long before its association with bitcoin mining, the Canadian Breaks wind farm was supplying enough clean energy to power thousands of homes in Texas. But now it will be sending all that electricity to Eric Trump’s bitcoin machines instead.
“They’re not green crusaders,” Read says. “Solar and wind are some of the cheapest power sources available if you can get the permit for them, but if all of that is going to crypto, it just means it’s not going to you and me.”
Meanwhile, the president and his allies in Congress have thrown up major new roadblocks and phased out tax incentives for renewable energy development, meaning that all those turbines could become increasingly difficult to replace on the power grid. The administration has repeatedly halted construction of new wind farms, including a nearly finished project off the coast of Rhode Island that was slated to provide enough power for hundreds of thousands of New England homes beginning next year. The result of all this, according to Bloomberg, is that deployment of new wind, solar, and battery infrastructure could fall by as much as 41 percent by 2028.
Across the country, utilities are reportedly raising rates for consumers, citing the increased demand from AI and crypto mining. Beyond his research, Read has firsthand knowledge of the drawbacks of mining—for four years, he was the mayor of Plattsburgh, New York, which had extraordinarily low electricity rates thanks to the nearby Niagara Falls hydro plant. When bitcoin miners approached the city around 2016 about building a facility similar, though smaller in scale, to the one American Bitcoin will be operating, local officials got on board. But according to Read, the new mine generated virtually no meaningful economic value for the city, while sending electric bills soaring with its huge demand for energy.
Read, who has published a book on the impacts of bitcoin, says the idea that the Trumps or anyone else in the mining industry are building anything of economic substance is an illusion.
“There’s almost been nothing like it,” Read says. “It’s an industry that uses that incredible amount of power, in a pretty small footprint, and yet employs very few people.”
He points out that in both mining and AI support, a facility that consumes as much as half a gigawatt of electricity—enough to power a large manufacturing plant—might employ fewer people than a McDonald’s.
“We usually think of industry as job creation. That’s why a lot of these communities are bending over backwards for data processing units for bitcoin or AI—because they think it will somehow translate into jobs and tax bases, but it simply doesn’t,” he says.
None of those pitfalls have dissuaded the Trumps. The president has thrown the full weight of his office behind crypto—everything from slashing SEC enforcement to undoing rules on crypto exchanges. And the first family’s tireless efforts to hype the industry have likely contributed to bitcoin’s rising price.
“The fact that some of his kids are getting in, I would say they have an expectation of how those things are going to move,” says Wright, the Louisiana State law professor. “If you’re around somebody who has access to levers of power, they can probably give you a better forecast of certain things.”
This past summer, the White House released a new crypto policy roadmap endorsing a long list of industry priorities. The report, which Wired described as “everything the industry ever wanted,” derided Biden’s “regulatory overreach” and trumpeted the end of Washington’s “enforcement-first approach” to digital currency.
In an executive order reprinted in the report, Trump declared that he was fully committed to “protecting and promoting the ability of individual citizens and private-sector entities alike” to participate in the crypto economy. That, the president noted, includes your right to run a bitcoin mine. But unlike his heirs, you might not be able to use wind power to do it.
2025-09-16 22:31:51
In the days following the murder of MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk, his friends and allies have called for revenge against all kinds of groups, including trans people and the so-called radical left, even as the motivations of the alleged shooter, who was reportedly raised in a Republican household, remain far from clear. Now, some of those same rightwing figures are homing in on another target: colleges and universities, which they blame for radicalizing both the alleged shooter and, more broadly, people they accuse of celebrating Kirk’s death.
“These universities should not receive a single American tax dollar.”
Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old Utah man who is accused of shooting Kirk, reportedly attended just one semester of college at Utah State University in 2021. He later enrolled at a technical college, where he was a third-year electrical apprentice. Those facts make it clear that traditional higher education factually could not have played a meaningful role in what led him to allegedly shoot Kirk. But that logic hasn’t mattered to figures like MAGA activist and Trump confidante Laura Loomer, who tweeted on Sunday that it was “time to defund American universities. You don’t need to go to college. Charlie Kirk didn’t go to college.” (At 18, Kirk dropped out of an Illinois community college after one semester to dedicate his time to activism, with funding from Turning Point co-founder Bill Montgomery; after high school, Kirk unsuccessfully applied to West Point.)
In her tweet, Loomer tagged Harmeet Dhillon, an Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the Department of Justice, who responded, “I’m on it. And all the other haters at our American funded schools.”
Dhillon is one of the Trump-appointed officials who has been deeply involved in the push to try to expose, embarrass, or fire anyone speaking ill of Kirk or seeming to celebrate his murder. She praised actions taken against faculty members at Clemson University, where one person has been fired and two instructors suspended after making what the university called “inappropriate” remarks about Kirk following his death.
Dhillon called Clemson’s actions “a good start,” adding, “Federal funding for higher education is a privilege, NOT a right. The government is not obligated to fund vile garbage with our tax dollars.”
This general line of argument—that federal funding should be pulled from universities whose employees say things Trump and his allies don’t like—has animated the administration’s long-standing attacks on higher education. But since Kirk’s death, it’s been widely repeated in a new context. Take Representative Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), who issued a press release on Monday calling on the Department of Education to cut off “every dime of federal funding to any elementary, secondary, or post-secondary school who refuses to remove or discipline staff who glorify or justify political violence.”
“This is why these universities should not receive a single American tax dollar,” tweeted Lara Logan, a former CBS journalist turned conspiracy theorist, while reposting a report about a University of Michigan professor accused of celebrating Kirk’s death. “They preach hatred of this country, which is Marxist doctrine. It is helping to destroy this country from within—wake up.”
Other figures, like Federalist editor-in-chief Molly Hemingway, called for what could credibly be described as affirmative action to make schools more conservative. “All public universities should be required to have minimum 50% of their staff be conservative professors by spring 2026,” she tweeted. “In each department.” When a journalist on the site asked if she supported affirmative action, Hemingway responded, “No, I want to remove the left-wing oppression that has destroyed American universities.”
Beyond calls to defund colleges and universities, other figures have said that such institutions need more surveillance and campus activism from conservative students. The group includes longtime sting video maker James O’Keefe, who said his company O’Keefe Media Group “will be distributing hidden cameras nationwide to those who are witness to abuse in their school and who are willing to expose it.” O’Keefe added that he would host a livestream this week “where we will put campus corruption on blast and issuing a clear call to action: it’s time to rip the rot out of America’s education system.”
American higher education has long been depicted on the right as a hotbed of Marxism. Yet Kirk’s organization Turning Point USA itself could not have been created without institutes of higher learning; it was explicitly created to promote conservative views in high school, college, and university campuses—and it has thrived on many. Kirk himself said earlier this year that he thought his messaging was working, tweeting that he felt college students were becoming more conservative, even if the institutions themselves remained more liberal.
The right’s renewed pledge to attack universities is just one piece of what the White House has said will be a government-wide push to dismantle “radical” organizations following Kirk’s murder, which Trump has repeatedly blamed on the “radical left.” In practice, this appears to mean threatening left-leaning organizations with defunding and investigation. Speaking on Monday as a guest host of Kirk’s podcast, Vice President JD Vance also threatened to “go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates and engages in violence.”
2025-09-16 19:30:00
In the crowded world of internet gourmands and celebrity chefs, it’s difficult to imagine a cookbook more eagerly anticipated than Good Things, the second from James Beard award-winning writer Samin Nosrat. After all, she’s beloved. “Everybody loves Samin Nosrat,” a 2019 Bon Appétit headline, rather accurately, noted after the publication of Salt Fat Acid Heat, Nosrat’s first cookbook and Netflix series of the same name. The debut has since left many craving what makes Nosrat so magnetic: her unbridled delight, never self-conscious or performative, for the best bits of cooking.
But in the eight years since the success of Salt Fat Acid Heat, Nosrat, like many of us, has collected wounds. Some are shared, like a pandemic; others are deeply personal, such as the confounding loss of an estranged father. “This period of turmoil and melancholy led me (slowly, slowly) to recalibrate my values,” Nosrat writes early on in Good Things. “It was either that or perish.” What follows are recipes and rituals simply worth spending the time to make in a world constantly distracting us from each other and ourselves. This includes something Nosrat delightfully calls “Pane Criminale,” bread so abundant with garlic butter and carbs it feels nearly illicit. Or it’s the simple yet radical advice she shares in a section about gathering within an honest framework. “For example, the more socioeconomically secure members in our group take on a greater share of the financial burden so everyone can participate worry-free,” Nosrat writes.
For me, this is the standard by which to measure the success of Nosrat’s latest. Not by production or kitchen prowess, but by the inspiration she instills within us to value our time. Below, I caught up with Nosrat on the essential joys of communion, ICE’s impact on the restaurants we love, and what it takes to build a good life.
It’s a strange time for joy! Talk to me about the idea of gathering—producing, sharing, being physically present with others—as a tool to push against these bad times.
I think about this all the time. I mean, the world feels like it’s on fire—and often it literally is. It’s so easy to just hunker down and despair. When things feel terrible, the most human, healing thing for me is spending time with my people. It can be driving with a dear friend to a farm in search of a perfect apricot or cooking a meal and hearing the sound of someone’s laughter from the other room. And beyond that, just the physical act of making and eating something tends to help me get out of my head (where things are often particularly dark).
I so appreciated the section on building an “oasis in time.” What advice do you have for those who want to gather and build similar rituals, but haven’t found their community yet?
If you don’t have “your people,” start small. Like, really small. You don’t need a mile-long guest list or an exquisite tablescape; you just need a reason to spend time together. Invite two people over for tea and a snack, or to go for a walk one evening each week. There are no rules, just make it up as you go!
Building ritual is really about repetition and intention more than anything else. If you do something on a regular basis, people start to count on it. And before you know it, you have yourself a little home for joy to come and visit you week to week.
I’ve been a huge admirer of how open you’ve been about mental health struggles. How has your experience with depression influenced or evolved your relationship to cooking?
We all have days when even boiling water can feel like a task. Instead of forcing myself into what I think I “should” be doing, or cooking, or eating when I’m having one of those days, I spend a little time making something incredibly simple. It can be as easy as my favorite jam on some olive oil-fried bread, washing and cutting up some fruit, or even tearing open a bag of cheese puffs. But when I cook from that more gentle, forgiving place, it can make my day better. A good life is one where time—and its fast companion, attention—are the most precious gifts I can give or receive.
” A good life is one where time—and its fast companion, attention—are the most precious gifts I can give or receive.”
There are so many competing forces fighting for our attention, especially on social media. How do you find the discipline to stay intentional and maintain attention on the things that bring you joy?
What a big question! With all the noise vying for our attention, I try to build little anchors that I can count on to pull me back to myself. Gardening, cooking, or doing anything with my hands, really. When I’m mindful about making time to do those things, my attention and intention naturally follow. Preparing dinner on Mondays or grocery shopping on a certain weekday helps me mark the passage of time. And nothing will make you appreciate time and attention like gardening! I appreciate how I’m forced to pay attention to each plant and its needs—if the tomatoes need more sun, things like that. I find it soothing to watch things grow slowly, but surely, knowing a fruit or vegetable is on its way keeps me present and patient.
My kid is three, and dinner can feel like such a battle. Sometimes I get so anxious thinking I might be ruining his relationship with food! For young parents out there, what advice do you have for developing a child’s appreciation for cooking and gathering?
I’m not a parent, but I’m lucky to have kids in my life who are family to me. I think the best thing you can do is keep time in the kitchen joyful and low-pressure. Kids are naturally curious, so invite them to be part of the process of making a meal. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy. Just mixing ingredients, washing veggies, or setting the table for everyone gives them a sense that cooking and gathering are important and they’re a part of it. If you can make being in the kitchen, sitting at the table, and even doing dishes feel light and joyful and uncomplicated around food, that’s a great start.
Similarly, for adults, it seems as though we’re living in a moment packed with lots of things to fear in the kitchen: microplastics, cooking utensils, MAHA. Headlines about bagged spinach freak me out! But Good Things feels like a powerful antidote to this kind of looming dystopia. Any thoughts on how the broader conversation treats food and cooking right now?
“The main aim is to feed ourselves. And if we can remember that, food can feel a lot less scary and a lot more like what it’s always been: a way to take care of ourselves and each other.”
That’s very kind, thank you. There’s so much out there right now—about what’s safe, what’s healthy, what isn’t—but at the end of the day, we need to be fed and watered. In my own life, I try to shift the focus back to nourishment, asking myself, “Do I need a vegetable?” Or, “Will a little biscuit make my day brighter?” Smaller, more digestible questions tend to get lost, but those are what should guide us when we cook in our kitchens each day. The main aim is to feed ourselves. And if we can remember that, food can feel a lot less scary and a lot more like what it’s always been: a way to take care of ourselves and each other.
You’ve talked about your perspective as an outsider, an Iranian-American kid trying to fit into a white world. For those made to feel otherized right now, how can cooking show us ways to embrace what others see as different?
Regardless of what the powers that be may tell you, the American food landscape would look vastly different if not for immigration and different cultures brushing up against one another. We all bring our pocket of culture around with us, and the kitchen is no different. It took me some time, but I’d encourage you to lean into the parts of your cooking that are different. Even bring them into other recipes! For me, Persian cooking uses a lot of herbs, and I always find myself adding double the herbs a recipe calls for—does that mean my spanakopita ends up a lot herbier than yours? Absolutely!
It’s an excruciating time for restaurants and food vendors right now. How can we show up for restaurant workers, especially those prompted to stay home out of fear of immigration raids?
I don’t think most of us can really fathom the number of people whose work it takes to put food on a table at a restaurant, on the counter in our own kitchens, or on the shelves at the grocery store. So many of those people are living in fear, and we can show up for them by continuing to be a customer and educating ourselves on how to handle ICE showing up in our neighborhoods, because the truth is that our food culture just wouldn’t exist without immigrant labor.
Any restaurants in your community you want to shout out to support?
Oh, so many! But I always find myself coming back to Lunette, a Cambodian spot tucked into the Ferry Building [in San Francisco], for some deliciously comforting rice and noodles. And La Taqueria is my go-to for when I am desperately in need of a fantastic burrito or taco.
I want to end on salt. I never thought about its varieties until watching Salt Fat Acid Heat. And ever since, I eventually found my way to Maldon salt, something I now refuse to cook without. What’s one ingredient you’ve discovered more recently that’s become a staple?
One ingredient I’ve somewhat recently discovered and now love is aquafaba. It’s a fancy word for the liquid that comes in your can of chickpeas. Not fancy, not rare—and it’s probably something you already have in your pantry. When I led a kitchen, I once told cooks very sincerely to never toss any aquafaba because it is just so, so precious. It’s perfect for salad dressings, sauces, and if you happen to be cooking for a vegan in your life, it can be a really great egg substitute. It’s become an absolute staple for my kitchen.
2025-09-16 19:30:00
This story was originally published by Canada’s National Observer and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Ontario is backing a $100 million investment to build North America’s first battery-grade cobalt refinery, aimed at supporting the country’s electric vehicle production at a time when the industry is struggling with slowing sales and a deepening trade war with the US.
Led by Toronto-based Electra Battery Materials, the plan is to build the refinery in Temiskaming Shores about 250 kilometers northeast of Sudbury.
The Ontario government says it will contribute $17.5 million through the Invest Ontario Fund to help fast-track construction. Once completed, the facility would produce 6,500 tonnes of cobalt sulphate a year—enough to support production of up to one million EVs.
The province did not provide details on when construction would begin or be completed.
Ontario Economic Development Minister Vic Fedeli said the project will link northern Ontario’s mineral wealth with southern Ontario’s manufacturing base. “Electra’s investment in Temiskaming Shores will establish an integral link in the province’s critical mineral processing supply chains and fuel the next stages of Ontario’s leadership in electric vehicle battery manufacturing,” said Fedeli in a statement.
The province says the refinery will create local jobs and become North America’s only cobalt sulphate processor—a critical material for lithium-ion batteries—marking a major step “towards the province’s goal of building a complete, made-in-Ontario, critical mineral supply chain.”
Electra CEO Trent Mell said the project is essential to reducing reliance on offshore suppliers, particularly China, which currently refines more than 90 per cent of the world’s cobalt. It will also help safeguard economic and energy security, and ensure Canada plays a leading role in the global energy transition, he added.
“Unless Volkswagen or another automaker is lined up, there’s no customer.”
Canada’s $100 billion EV-sector development strategy faces turbulence. Sales growth has slowed, federal EV mandates are being revised and auto-sector investments are under strain from US tariffs. Earlier this year, Swedish battery-maker Northvolt collapsed, underscoring risks in the sector.
Both Ontario and Ottawa have pledged billions to secure critical mineral projects as a counter to US trade threats, arguing it will create jobs and strengthen economic sovereignty.
The province has promised $500 million for mineral processing, while Ottawa has invested $3.8 billion in exploration, refining and recycling. Early this year, German tech giant Siemens announced a $150-million EV battery research hub in Ontario.
Still, a report from the Canadian Climate Institute warned Canada could lose out on a $12 billion-a-year critical minerals market by 2040 without at least $30 billion in new mining investment. Global demand for copper, nickel, lithium, graphite, cobalt, and rare earths is expected to hit $770 billion by that year.
Experts welcomed the cobalt announcement but raised concerns about execution and market realities.
Ian London, executive director of the Canadian Critical Minerals and Materials Alliance, an industry advocacy group, said the project sounds positive but questioned whether there are buyers lined up given the struggling EV market. “Where is the customer? Who has committed to buying the cobalt and at what price?” he asked. “Otherwise, this feels like a supply-push model rather than demand-pull. You can say the refinery will support EV battery plants, but unless Volkswagen or another automaker is lined up, there’s no customer.”
London said $100 million is likely not enough to build a refinery of this scale and Ontario’s $17.5-million contribution is only a term sheet—a nonbinding agreement that sets out intentions but does not guarantee funding. He cautioned while the plan sounds positive, the real question is whether the plant will actually be built.
He added the refinery could make sense if Ontario secured markets abroad, such as European battery plants, which would reduce dependence on US buyers.
London also stressed that critical mineral investments should be tied to real industrial demand. He pointed to the federal government’s “nation-building” projects, such as high-speed rail, nuclear power and energy infrastructure, that will require large amounts of copper, steel and aluminum, as areas where investment may be more urgently needed.
A recent report from the Financial Accountability Office warns Ontario’s auto industry, a key pillar of the province’s economy, could lose thousands of jobs this year because of the US trade war. The sector makes up $36 billion of Ontario’s $220.5 billion in exports, with 85 per cent of goods headed to the US and most of the 1.54 million vehicles built last year sold to American consumers.
Sheldon Williamson, a professor at Ontario Tech University who focuses on EV battery systems, said the refinery is a strategically important step. The project could strengthen Ontario’s role in the global EV supply chain by making the province more attractive to battery-makers, recycling plants and automakers looking for reliable local suppliers.
Williamson says most cobalt refining currently takes place in Asia, mainly China, leaving North American supply chains exposed to trade risks. “Building North America’s first battery-grade cobalt sulfate refinery on Ontario soil fills a clear gap in the battery supply chain,” he said.
The project shows Ontario is serious about building a domestic battery supply chain, but its success will depend on customers, partnerships and how fast the EV market evolves, he added.
2025-09-15 21:00:00
Dylan Bringuel isn’t sure what’s worse: enduring what a federal agency identified as a “hostile work environment because of Bringuel’s transgender status” or that same agency abandoning them after committing to hold their employer accountable.
The first blow came in August 2022. Bringuel had just begun a housekeeping job at a Holiday Inn Express in Jamestown, New York. During the interview, Bringuel had been upfront about their gender identity and was told it wouldn’t be an issue. But from the start, their manager made it one—calling Bringuel “it” and a “Transformer” and, in a conversation a co-worker documented, blaming Bringuel for “what is wrong with society.” The day after reporting the harassment to supervisors, Bringuel was fired.
Bringuel was accustomed to such hostility, even from family members. So when the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued the hotel’s owner and operators on their behalf in September 2024, Bringuel was pleasantly surprised. “Somebody actually listened,” the now-29-year-old tells me through tears.
That feeling of being heard didn’t last long. In February, shortly after President Donald Trump took office, the EEOC asked a judge to dismiss the harassment case it had initiated. To Bringuel, it seemed like the government was giving employers permission to openly discriminate against trans workers. “It makes me feel that at any point, somebody can just do something that hurts me physically, not just mentally or emotionally,” Bringuel says.
Bringuel wasn’t alone. Citing Trump’s day-one executive order against “gender ideology extremism,” the EEOC submitted motions to dismiss all seven of its active cases pertaining to trans and nonbinary people. Dismissing the cases “is discriminatory and directly violates the agency’s core mission,” warns an EEOC employee who asked to remain anonymous to avoid retaliation. “We’re here trying to help people who have been discriminated against and disadvantaged.”
Experts say the agency and the anti-discrimination laws it enforces are being weaponized to serve the interests of Trump’s base.
The EEOC receives more than 80,000 complaints a year but only takes a few hundred to court—typically the most egregious claims, says Jocelyn Samuels, a longtime civil rights lawyer and EEOC commissioner who was fired by Trump in January. The agency’s motions under Trump to dismiss these developed cases not only harmed the 14 directly involved plaintiffs—people who the EEOC determined had been harassed about their genitalia, questioned about their sex lives, deadnamed, groped, or, like Bringuel, fired for reporting harassment—but it signaled to institutions nationwide that the administration condones such discrimination. Experts say the shift is part of a broader trend in which the civil rights–era agency and the anti-discrimination laws it enforces are being weaponized to advance the interests of Trump’s long-standing base. As Karen Ortiz, an EEOC administrative judge who was fired in June, puts it, his administration’s goal is to turn the agency into a “grievance apparatus for white, straight, Christian people.”
The racial reckoning that followed George Floyd’s 2020 murder prompted institutions to make new commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Inflamed conservatives labeled the efforts as reverse racism and rushed to challenge them in court. In 2021, Stephen Miller, now Trump’s deputy chief of staff, helped found America First Legal to, as he boasted, lead “the charge against racism targeting white, straight men.” The organization’s tactics included sending—and publicizing—letters to the EEOC accusing corporations like Nordstrom, Tyson Foods, Anheuser-Busch, and Morgan Stanley of running DEI programs that purportedly discriminate against white people.
The conservative legal movement scored a big win in June 2023, when the Supreme Court ruled that Harvard University could no longer weigh race in admissions. While the case was ostensibly about ensuring Asian students were treated fairly, groups like Miller’s seized on the decision to go after DEI in the corporate sector. According to Michael Yelnosky, an employment law expert at Roger Williams University, their targets include efforts that are “lawful and that don’t raise the issues that concerned the court” in the Harvard case.
The EEOC’s new acting chair, Andrea Lucas, has made the right’s legal fight against DEI a full-blown government objective. Before she was first appointed as a commissioner at the agency intended to protect workers from harassment, Lucas worked as a litigator who helped successfully defend Ford Motor Company against a lawsuit that included allegations it overlooked acts of racial and sexual harassment, including attempted rape, exposed genitals, racial slurs, unwanted touching, and penis-shaped objects being left on female plaintiffs’ workstations.
On January 21, the day Trump promoted her to run the agency, Lucas vowed her priorities would include “rooting out unlawful DEI-motivated race and sex discrimination.” Within weeks, I heard from staff that she had ordered a pause on investigating complaints from LGBTQ Americans.
In March, she sent public letters to 20 law firms, arguing that a photo of participants in a legal fellowship suggested the firms discriminated against white men. The picture in question, she wrote, documented “20 law students, at least 14 of whom are black students, one of whom is an Asian student, and 8 of whom are women.” While former EEOC officials say the agency is barred from publicizing employers it is actively investigating before filing suit, Lucas named and shamed the firms without identifying a single individual alleging discrimination. The tactics are increasingly reminiscent of America First Legal, which tried to grab headlines over the summer by making an EEOC complaint against the Los Angeles Dodgers, citing a commitment on the team’s website to sponsor “programs geared to women and people of color.”
While the EEOC did not respond to requests for comment, staffers say Lucas isn’t merely perverting the agency’s mission and defying established legal precedent by following in Miller’s footsteps, but upending the EEOC’s entire premise. “I just chafe every time she sends an email out, because I know it’s going to be ridiculous,” Ortiz says, “not only against the mission of the EEOC, but against actual regulatory and Supreme Court holdings.”
The landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act not only outlawed segregation in public places, but barred employment discrimination based on race, color, sex, national origin, or religion. To ensure this section—known as Title VII—was followed, Congress created the EEOC. It later expanded it to protect people from discrimination based on pregnancy, disability, and age; in 2020, the Supreme Court ruled Title VII also shields LGBTQ workers.
Title VII covers both majority groups and marginalized ones, and the EEOC has gone to bat for both. An EEOC database tracking nearly 140 Title VII lawsuits it filed and settled over the last decade shows that the largest share, about a third, involved discrimination against Black or Hispanic people. About a quarter were sexual harassment, mostly against women. Only one settlement involved the targeting of white employees, when the EEOC won $60,000 for white workers at a North Carolina Hampton Inn after a Black staffer repeatedly called them “white trash” and sabotaged rooms they cleaned. Those numbers make it impossible to suggest—as Miller and Lucas do—that white people are particularly targeted. “The vast weight of the evidence demonstrates that people still face barriers on the basis of race and sex and national origin and the existence of disability,” Samuels says.
While it is a federal offense—punishable by jail time—for agency staff to leak preliminary charges to the press, an EEOC charging document targeting Harvard and issued at Lucas’ sole discretion was published by the conservative Washington Free Beacon even though a formal legal complaint hadn’t been filed in court. Over six pages, she accused the university of “engaging in a pattern or practice of disparate treatment against white, Asian, male, or straight” job applicants and employees. Lucas cited data Harvard had made public to chart modest progress in diversifying its staff over the past decade. Those figures still show white men hold well over half of its tenured faculty positions—far above their proportion in the US population.
Harvard academics and other job applicants who believe they’ve faced discrimination over paleness or maleness can check out a how-to guide added to the EEOC’s website after Trump put Lucas in charge: “What To Do If You Experience Discrimination Related to DEI at Work.” But for folks like Bringuel, who allege harassment because they are trans or nonbinary, there’s little hope they’ll find the Trump-era EEOC sympathetic. A staffer tells Mother Jones that newly filed complaints involving harassment of a trans or nonbinary person are simply not being pursued: “They’re sitting in a digital filing cabinet with no investigative steps taken whatsoever.”
