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For nearly four decades, Jean-Luc Picard of “Star Trek” has largely been presented as genteel, erudite and — at times — quite buttoned up. Yes, he loses his temper. Yes, he was reckless as a callow cadet many years ago.
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Tag: Weekend Reads
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Digital literacy: Can the republic ‘survive an algorithm’?
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SEATTLE (AP) — Shawn Lee, a high school social studies teacher in Seattle, wants to see lessons on the internet akin to a kind of 21st century driver’s education, an essential for modern life.
Lee has tried to bring that kind of education into his classroom, with lessons about the need to double-check online sources, to diversify newsfeeds and to bring critical thinking to the web. He’s also created an organization for other teachers to share resources.
“This technology is so new that no one taught us how to use it,” Lee said. “People are like, ‘There’s nothing we can do,’ and they throw their hands in the air. I disagree with that. I would like to think the republic can survive an algorithm.”
Lee’s efforts are part of a growing movement of educators and misinformation researchers working to offset an explosion of online misinformation about everything from presidential politics to pandemics. So far, the U.S. lags many other democracies in waging this battle, and the consequences of inaction are clear.
But for teachers already facing myriad demands in the classroom, incorporating internet literacy can be a challenge — especially given how politicized misinformation about vaccines, public health, voting, climate change and Russia’s war in Ukraine has become. The title of a talk for a recent gathering of Lee’s group: “How to talk about conspiracy theories without getting fired.”
“It’s not teaching what to think, but how to think,” said Julie Smith, an expert on media literacy who teaches at Webster University in Webster Groves, Missouri. “It’s engaging about engaging your brain. It’s asking, ‘Who created this? Why? Why am I seeing it now? How does it make me feel and why?’”
New laws and algorithm changes are often offered as the most promising ways of combating online misinformation, even as tech companies study their own solutions.
Teaching internet literacy, however, may be the most effective method. New Jersey, Illinois and Texas are among states that have recently implemented new standards for teaching internet literacy, a broad category that can include lessons about how the internet and social media work, along with a focus on how to spot misinformation by cross-checking multiple sources and staying wary of claims with missing context or highly emotional headlines.
Media literacy lessons are often included in history, government or other social studies classes, and typically offered at the high school level, though experts say it’s never too early — or late — to help people become better users of the internet.
Finnish children begin to learn about the internet in preschool, part of a robust anti-misinformation program that aims to make the country’s residents more resistant to false online claims. Finland has a long history of combating propaganda and misinformation spread by one of its neighbors, Russia, and expanded its current efforts after Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea set off another wave of disinformation.
“Media literacy was one of our priorities before the time of the internet,” Petri Honkonen, Finland’s minister of science and culture, said in a recent interview. “The point is critical thinking, and that is a skill that everybody needs more and more. We have to somehow protect people. We also must protect democracy.”
Honkonen spoke with The Associated Press earlier this year during a trip to Washington that included meetings to discuss Finland’s work to fight online misinformation. One recent report on media literacy efforts in western democracies placed Finland at the top. Canada ranked seventh, while the U.S. came in at No. 18.
In Finland the lessons don’t end with primary school. Public service announcements offer tips on avoiding false online claims and checking multiple sources. Additional programs are geared toward older adults, who can be especially vulnerable to misinformation compared to younger users more at home on the internet.
In the U.S., attempts to teach internet literacy have run into political opposition from people who equate it to thought control. Lee, the Seattle teacher, said that concern prevents some teachers from even trying.
Several years ago, the University of Washington launched MisinfoDay, which brought high schoolers and their teachers together for a one-day event featuring speakers, exercises and activities focused on media literacy. Seven hundred students from across the state attended one of three MisinfoDays this year.
Jevin West, the University of Washington professor who created the event, said he’s heard from educators in other states and as far away as Australia who are interested in creating something similar.
“Maybe eventually, someday, nationally here in the United States, we have a day devoted to the idea of media literacy,” West said. “There are all sorts of things we can do in terms of regulations, technology, in terms of research, but nothing is going to be more important than this idea of making us more resilient” to misinformation.
For teachers already struggling with other classroom demands, adding media literacy can seem like just one more obligation. But it’s a skill that is just as important as computer engineering or software coding for the future economy, according to Erin McNeill, a Massachusetts mother who started Media Literacy Now, a national nonprofit that advocates for digital literacy education.
“This is an innovation issue,” McNeill said. “Basic communication is part of our information economy, and there will be huge implications for our economy if we don’t get this right.”
The driver’s education analogy comes up a lot when talking to media literacy experts. Automobiles first went into production in the early 20th century and soon became popular. But it was nearly three decades before the first driver’s education courses were offered.
What changed? Governments passed laws regulating vehicle safety and driver behavior. Auto companies added features like collapsible steering columns, seat belts and air bags. And in the mid-1930s, safety advocates began to push for mandated driver’s education.
That combination of government, industry and educators is seen as a model by many misinformation and media literacy researchers. Any effective solution to the challenges posed by online misinformation, they say, must by necessity include an educational component.
Media literacy in Canadian schools began decades ago and initially focused on television before being expanded throughout the digital era. Now it’s accepted as an essential part of preparing students, according to Matthew Johnson, director of education at MediaSmarts, an organization that leads media literacy programs in Canada.
“We need speed limits, we need well-designed roads and good regulations to ensure cars are safe. But we also teach people how to drive safely,” he said. “Whatever regulators do, whatever online platforms do, content always winds up in front of an audience, and they need to have the tools to engage critically with it.”
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Klepper reported from Washington.
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Court records show political pressure behind Fox programming
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NEW YORK (AP) — In May 2018, the nation’s top Republicans needed help. So they called on the founder of Fox News, Rupert Murdoch.
President Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell were trying to stop West Virginia Republicans from nominating Don Blankenship, who had been convicted of violating mine safety standards during a lethal accident in one of his coal mines, to challenge the state’s incumbent senator, Democrat Joe Manchin.
“Both Trump and McConnell are appealing for help to beat unelectable former mine owner who served time,” Murdoch wrote to executives at Fox News, according to court records released this week. “Anything during day helpful, but Sean (Hannity) and Laura (Ingraham) dumping on him hard might save the day.”
Murdoch’s prodding, revealed in court documents that are part of a defamation lawsuit by a voting systems company, is one example showing how Fox became actively involved in politics instead of simply reporting or offering opinions about it. The revelations pose a challenge to the credibility of the most watched cable news network in the U.S. at the outset of a new election season in which Trump is again a leading player, having declared his third run for the White House.
Blankenship, who ended up losing the primary, said in an interview Wednesday that he felt the change right away, with the network’s coverage taking a harsher turn in the final hours before the primary.
“They were very smart about elections — they did their dumping the day before the election, so I had no time to react,” said Blankenship, who filed a separate, unsuccessful libel suit against Fox.
On Wednesday, the network characterized Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit as a flagrant attack on the First Amendment and said the company had taken statements out of context. According to Fox, that included an acknowledgement by Murdoch that he shared with Jared Kushner, the head of Trump’s reelection campaign and the president’s son-in-law, an ad for Joe Biden’s presidential campaign that was to air on his network. Fox said the ad Murdoch forwarded to Kushner was already publicly available on YouTube and at least one television station.
“Dominion has been caught red handed again using more distortions and misinformation in their PR campaign to smear Fox News and trample on freedom of speech and freedom of the press,” Fox said in a statement.
Fox has long been seen as a power in GOP politics with its large conservative fan base. But thousands of pages of documents released this week in the libel suit filed by Dominion show how the network blurred the line between journalism and party politics. Dominion sued after it became the target of 2020 election conspiracy theories, often promoted on Fox’s airwaves.
Murdoch also told executives at Fox News to promote the benefits of Trump’s 2017 tax cut legislation and give extra attention to Republican Senate hopefuls, the documents show. He wanted the network “banging on” Biden’s low-profile presidential campaign during the height of the pandemic in 2020.
Nicole Hemmer, a Vanderbilt University history professor and author of the book “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s,” said revelations in the lawsuit puncture Fox’s long argument that there is a dividing line between its news and opinion sides.
“The real revelation here is how much of a fiction that division is,” Hemmer said. “Some who know Fox have argued that for awhile, but now we have real evidence.”
Hemmer cited text messages disclosed in the court documents from early November 2020 sent by Fox’s chief political correspondent, Bret Baier, urging the network’s leaders to retract its correct election night call that President Joe Biden won Arizona. Baier advocated for putting Arizona “back in his column,” referring to Trump.
In the days after the election, as Trump was making increasingly wild allegations that fraud cost him the White House, Rupert Murdoch’s son Lachlan Murdoch, who is executive chairman of the Fox Corp., texted with Fox News chief executive officer Suzanne Scott in alarm about a Trump rally.
“News guys have to be careful how they cover this rally,” Lachlan Murdoch wrote, according to the legal documents. “So far some of the side comments are slightly anti, and they shouldn’t be. The narrative should be this huge celebration of the president. Etc.”
Some of Fox’s politicking — like star host Sean Hannity’s frequent conversations with Trump during his presidency — is well known. But court papers show how Rupert Murdoch, the boss, inserted himself in the action, too.
Murdoch emailed Scott in November 2017 and urged her to promote Trump’s tax cut proposal, which had passed the House and was nearing a Senate vote.
“Once they pass this bill we must tell our viewers again and again what they will get,” Murdoch wrote in the email, included in the court records. “Terrific, I understand, for all under $150k.”
After the first presidential debate in 2020, a “horrified” Murdoch told Kushner that Trump should be more restrained in the next debate. (Trump canceled that event.)
“That was advice from a friend to a friend,” Murdoch said in his deposition. “It wasn’t advice from Fox Corporation or in my capacity at Fox.”
“What’s the difference?” asked Dominion’s lawyer, Justin A. Nelson.
“You’ve been — keep asking me questions as head of Fox,” Murdoch said. “It’s a different role being a friend.”
Murdoch’s email banter with Kushner led to the exchange of the Biden ad, according to court records. That exchange is now the subject of a complaint from the liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America to the Federal Elections Commission, arguing Fox made an illegal contribution to the Trump campaign by giving it information about Biden’s advertisements. Fox said the sharing of public information can’t be considered a contribution.
Court records show that on Sept. 25, 2020, Murdoch emailed Kushner that “my people tell me” that Biden’s ads “are a lot better creatively than yours. Just passing it on.”
The same month, Murdoch wondered in an email to Col Allan, the former editor of the Murdoch-owned New York Post, “how can anyone vote for Biden?” Allen responded that Biden’s “only hope is to stay in his basement and not face serious questions.”
“Just made sure Fox banging on about these issues,” Murdoch responded, according to court records. “If the audience talks the theme will spread.”
Another prominent politician Murdoch describes as a “friend” is McConnell, whose wife, Elaine Chao, then Trump’s transportation secretary, had served on the Fox board. Murdoch said he would speak to the Republican Senate leader “three or four times a year.”
In a special 2017 Republican Senate primary in Alabama, Murdoch said in his deposition, he told his top executives that he, like McConnell, opposed Roy Moore, a controversial former Alabama chief justice. Moore ultimately won the party’s nomination but lost the general election after he was credibly accused of sexual misconduct, including pursuing relationships with teenagers when he was in his 30s. Moore denied the allegations.
Murdoch, in the deposition, also cited his personal friendship with an unnamed Senate candidate in his suggestion to Scott that the network give extra attention to Republicans in close Senate races.
Days before the 2020 election, after Fox business anchor Lou Dobbs was critical of Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., Murdoch asked Scott to have Hannity pump up Graham, who was facing an extremely well-funded challenge from Democrat Jamie Harrison.
“You probably know about the Lou Dobbs outburst against Lindsay Graham,” Murdoch wrote on Oct. 27, misspelling the senator’s first name in the copy of the message in the court documents. “Could Sean say something supportive? We can’t lose the Senate if at all possible.”
Scott replied that Graham was on Hannity’s show the previous night “and he got a lot of time.” She added, “I addressed the Dobbs outburst.”
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This story has been updated to correct the name of Dominion’s attorney, Justin A. Nelson.
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Riccardi reported from Denver. Associated Press writers Christina A. Cassidy in Atlanta, Jonathan J. Cooper in Phoenix, Gary Fields in Washington and Jennifer Peltz in New York contributed to this report.
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Bruce Lee, Anna May Wong heirs talk legacy, roles for Asians
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Almost every working Asian actor in Hollywood can trace their path back to Bruce Lee and Anna May Wong.
The Chinese American screen legends are typically talked about the way one talks about revered ancestors. One was a martial arts icon, the other an actor who stood out during the silent film era despite playing women who were either submissive or dragon ladies. Both are credited with demonstrating Asians could be more than just extras for movies about China or Chinatown.
Although Wong was born in 1905 in Los Angeles and Lee in 1940 in San Francisco, their families like to imagine they crossed paths.
“They may have. Well, they may have seen each other at like a party or something,” said Anna Wong, the elder Wong’s niece and namesake.
“My father was an actor when he was a child in Hong Kong. So, you know, he may have seen some of her films that came across,” Shannon Lee chimed in. ”He loved to see Hollywood films as well when he was young.”
Lee and Wong had never met before doing a recent joint Zoom interview with The Associated Press. They discovered parallel experiences protecting the legacy of a family member who happens to be an icon of both Hollywood and Asian America.
They have seen their relatives’ popularity ebb and flow over decades. They have grappled with bogus long-lost child claims, weird licensing requests and on-screen portrayals out of their control. But they’ve also seen how the fascination continues: There are museum exhibits, TV show projects and an American quarter tribute.
With “Everything Everywhere All at Once” poised to snag trophies at the Oscars on Sunday — particularly for Asian cast members Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan — both women reflected on how things have changed since the blatantly racist practices that permeated Wong and Lee’s heydays.
Lee has a “soft spot” for Yeoh because she came from kung fu cinema like her father. She’s thrilled for Yeoh’s recognition, especially because for so long Hollywood used Bruce Lee to justify casting Asians only as characters there just to karate chop.
“Of course she’s doing action in the film but being recognized for her artistry and her acting and for all of that is really heartwarming for me to see,” she said. “And Ke as well who … as a young kid was very sort of stereotyped and he was put in a box because of it.”
It’s especially phenomenal when compared with Anna May Wong’s era, according to her niece.
“Back in those days, no one had an Asian man and an Asian woman in the lead roles,” Wong said. “It’s crazy how far we’ve come. But then again, how far are we?”
While Lee was 4 when her father died, Wong never met her aunt. She knew her as “the pretty lady” in the pictures her father — Anna May Wong’s brother — kept around the house.
“When he started telling me about the pretty lady, I was wanting to realize who she was,” Wong said. “And then I became obsessed with her films and seeing all kinds of things.”
Both grew up hearing stories of how Anna May Wong and Bruce Lee fought hard against stereotypes, yet were sometimes stuck in unwinnable situations.
After gaining fame in movies like “The Thief of Bagdad” and “Shanghai Express,” Anna May Wong suffered one of the greatest disappointments of her life in 1937. She lost the lead role of a Chinese villager in “The Good Earth” to Luise Rainer, who was white. Rainer went on to win a best actress Oscar.
The younger Wong brings this up on the lecture circuit. Millennial audiences “find it completely irrational to say, ‘Okay, so let’s take a Caucasian person and make them up to look like an Asian person and … no one will notice,’” Wong said.
“It’s actually a good thing that today’s generation thinks that that’s crazy,” Lee added.
Even earning a lead role didn’t necessarily mean a big payday for Asian talent. Before Bruce Lee went to Hong Kong and made hits like “The Big Boss” and “Fist of Fury,” he was Kato in “The Green Hornet.” The TV series premiered in 1966, only lasting a season and carrying a massive pay disparity.
“When you look at the pay stubs and then they say what everyone’s getting paid, he’s like way down on the bottom,” Lee said. “Hopefully, there’s changes happening there.”
Neither actor was ever nominated for an Oscar. But the 2020 Netflix miniseries “Hollywood” depicted an alternate universe where Anna May Wong — played by Michelle Krusiec — won an Oscar. It created a nuisance for her niece and a reminder of a sad time in the actor’s life.
“After that series came out, people said, ‘Do you have her Oscar?’” Wong said. “I’m thinking, ‘You know that that series was fictionalized, right?’”
Quentin Tarantino’s 2019 flick “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood” featured a fictitious scene of Bruce Lee picking (and losing) a fight with Brad Pitt’s stuntman character. His daughter criticized the cameo as nothing but “horrible tropes,” even penning an op-ed in The Hollywood Reporter.
“With this one film now everybody’s like, ‘Oh, that’s what Bruce Lee was really like,’” Lee told the AP. “No, that was not what he was like at all.”
Anna May Wong died in 1961 at 56 and Bruce Lee died in 1973 at 32. All these years later, the interest in them hasn’t abated.
In a total coincidence, both families recently signed on as producers of biopics. Lee is working with Oscar-winning director Ang Lee (no relation), Wong with “Crazy Rich Asians” star Gemma Chan.
“Ang is a very earnest, gracious man. I think he wants to make a really great film,” said Lee, who’s been working on her movie for several years. “I would say in this moment I am cautiously optimistic.”
Wong almost walked away from her project when several self-proclaimed “Anna May Wong experts” reached out to producers — but they reassured her they’re “not going to take these people on when we can have an actual relative of Anna May Wong.”
They both also receive (and often deny) steady merchandising proposals like Anna May Wong teacups and Bruce Lee football helmets, snack bowls and tin guitars.
“I guess I have to say it does speak to the love that people have. So I’m grateful for that,” Lee said.
Both women hope people take away lessons in perseverance when looking at Bruce Lee’s and Anna May Wong’s lives. They were “symbols of what’s possible,” Lee said.
“For them to have gotten the opportunity to get on the screen, in the first place meant that they had extremely big energy, amazing work ethic and then they were able to accomplish the impossible in some way,” she added.
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Tang is a member of The Associated Press’ Race and Ethnicity team. Follow her on Twitter at @ttangAP.
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As bourbon booms, thirst for rare brands breeds skullduggery
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SALEM, Ore. (AP) — Buttery, smooth, oaky. These are characteristics of the best bourbons, and a growing cult of aficionados is willing to pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars to get their hands on scarce American spirits — and even bend or break laws.
The first challenge is figuring out which liquor stores have these premium bottles on their shelves – and that’s where inside knowledge can give bourbon hunters a leg up, and potentially get them into legal trouble.
In Oregon, several high-ranking officials at the state’s liquor regulating agency are under criminal investigation after an internal probe found they used their influence to obtain scarce bourbons.
That included the holy grail for bourbon fanatics: Pappy Van Winkle 23-year-old, which can sell for tens of thousands of dollars on resale markets. Top-end bourbons have found themselves at the center of criminal investigations in at least three other states, from Virginia to Pennsylvania to Kentucky.
Premium spirits were always expensive and sought-after, but interest is surging. Distillers have upped production to try to meet increased demand, but before the whiskey reaches stores and bars, it must age for years and even decades.
Each state gets a limited amount of Pappy Van Winkle 23-year-old, produced by Old Rip Van Winkle Distillery of Frankfort, Kentucky.
In 2022, Oregon received just 33 bottles.
“The average person cannot get good bottles,” said Cody Walding, a bourbon fan from Houston. He believes he’s years away from finding Buffalo Trace Distillery’s five-bottle Antique Collection, despite making connections with liquor store managers.
“Like, to be able to get Pappy Van Winkle or Buffalo Trace Antique Collection, unless you’re basically best friends with a store manager, I don’t even think it’s possible to get those,” he said. In a Los Angeles bar that Walding visited last week, one shot of Pappy 23-year cost $200.
Six officials from the Oregon Liquor and Cannabis Commission — including then-Executive Director Steve Marks — have acknowledged they had Pappy or another hard-to-get bourbon, Elmer T. Lee Single Barrel, routed to liquor stores for their own purchase. All six denied they resold the bourbons.
Old Rip Van Winkle Distillery’s suggested retail price of Pappy 23-year is $299.99. Because of its extreme scarcity, it can go for a lot more on the resale market.
In December, a single bottle sold at Sotheby’s for a record $52,500. Two other bottles were auctioned for $47,500 apiece. All three were originally released in 2008.
The Oregon agency’s internal investigation determined the employees violated a statute that says public officials cannot use confidential information for personal gain. Gov. Tina Kotek sought Marks’ resignation in February, and he quit. The other five are on paid temporary leave. An investigation by the state Department of Justice’s Criminal Division is ongoing.
Marks did not immediately respond to messages Wednesday seeking comment. In his replies to the commission investigator, Marks denied he had violated ethics laws and state policy. However, he acknowledged that he had received preferential treatment “to some extent” in obtaining the whiskey as a commission employee.
The practice was allegedly going on for many years and involved not only state employees but also members of the Oregon Legislature, the investigator was told.
Five bottles of Oregon’s allotment of Pappy 23-year-old went to “chance to purchase,” a lottery started in 2018. The odds of winning Pappy 23-year were 1 in 4,150.
Utah, Virginia and Pennsylvania are among other states with lotteries for coveted liquor. Two men in Pennsylvania each bought a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle after winning the liquor lottery in different years. They tried to sell their bottles on Craigslist, but undercover officers posing as buyers nailed them for selling liquor without a license.
In Virginia, an employee of the state’s Alcoholic Beverage Control Authority downloaded confidential information about which state-run liquor shops would be receiving rare bourbons. An accomplice then sold the intel to Facebook groups of bourbon fans. The now-former employee pleaded guilty to felony computer trespass in September, received a suspended prison sentence and a fine, and was banned from all Virginia liquor stores.
In Kentucky, an employee of Buffalo Trace Distillery was arrested in 2015 for stealing bourbon, including Pappy, over several years and selling it. The caper became part of “Heist,” a Netflix miniseries, in 2021.
Whiskey is a booming industry, especially the high-end products.
Supplier sales for American whiskey — which includes bourbon, Tennessee whiskey and rye — rose 10.5% last year, reaching $5.1 billion, according to the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States. Revenue for makers of super-premium American whiskey grew 141% over the past five years.
Bourbon, in particular, has a rich American heritage. It’s been around since before Kentucky became a state in 1792 and is where the vast majority of bourbon comes from. In 1964, Congress declared bourbon “a distinctive product of the United States,” barring whiskey produced in other countries from being labeled as bourbon. Today, some of the best-known Kentucky bourbon distilleries are foreign-owned.
In the 1960s and ’70s, bourbon had a reputation as a cheap drink. Then came a change: Targeting Japan, Kentucky distillers developed single-barrel and small batch versions in the 1980s and 1990s, which later blossomed in the United States, said Fred Minnick, who has written books on bourbon and judges world whiskey competitions.
“The distillers were starting to wake up — there was an interest in the whiskey, because the culture itself was beginning to change,” Minnick said. “We were going from a steak-and-potatoes nation to foie gras and wagyu.”
Minnick lovingly describes what it’s like to sip a great bourbon, which obtains sweetness by absorbing natural wood sugars from charred oak barrels.
“It begins at the front of your tongue, walks itself back, will drip a little bit down your jawline, a little bit like butter, very velvety,” Minnick said. “Caramel is one of the quintessential notes, followed by a little touch of vanilla.”
Some of the world’s top beverage companies that own major brands include Kirin (which owns Four Roses), Beam Suntory (Maker’s Mark, Jim Beam, Knob Creek, Basil Hayden), Diageo (Bulleit, I.W. Harper), Sazerac (Buffalo Trace, Van Winkle, Blanton’s) and Campari Group (Wild Turkey).
They boosted bourbon production with multimillion-dollar expansions and renovations, but there’s still not enough of the best stuff to go around.
Despite Pappy 23-year-old’s red-hot popularity, Minnick is not a big fan.
“Right or wrong, the Pappy Van Winkle 23-year-old is absolutely the most sought-after modern whiskey, year in, year out,” Minnick said. “I personally think that the 23-year is hit-and-miss. It’s typically over-oaked for me.”
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Dovarganes reported from Los Angeles. __
This story has been corrected to show that the Virginia case involved high-end bourbons, but not Van Winkle products.
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Jaded with education, more Americans are skipping college
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By COLLIN BINKLEY
JACKSON, Tenn. (AP) — When he looked to the future, Grayson Hart always saw a college degree. He was a good student at a good high school. He wanted to be an actor, or maybe a teacher. Growing up, he believed college was the only route to a good job, stability and a happy life.
The pandemic changed his mind.
A year after high school, Hart is directing a youth theater program in Jackson, Tennessee. He got into every college he applied to but turned them all down. Cost was a big factor, but a year of remote learning also gave him the time and confidence to forge his own path.
“There were a lot of us with the pandemic, we kind of had a do-it-yourself kind of attitude of like, ‘Oh — I can figure this out,’” he said. “Why do I want to put in all the money to get a piece of paper that really isn’t going to help with what I’m doing right now?”
Hart is among hundreds of thousands of young people who came of age during the pandemic but didn’t go to college. Many have turned to hourly jobs or careers that don’t require a degree, while others have been deterred by high tuition and the prospect of student debt.
What first looked like a pandemic blip has turned into a crisis. Nationwide, undergraduate college enrollment dropped 8% from 2019 to 2022, with declines even after returning to in-person classes, according to data from the National Student Clearinghouse. The slide in the college-going rate since 2018 is the steepest on record, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Economists say the impact could be dire.
At worst, it could signal a new generation with little faith in the value of a college degree. At minimum, it appears those who passed on college during the pandemic are opting out for good. Predictions that they would enroll after a year or two haven’t borne out.
Fewer college graduates could worsen labor shortages in fields from health care to information technology. For those who forgo college, it usually means lower lifetime earnings — 75% less compared with those who get bachelor’s degrees, according to Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. And when the economy sours, those without degrees are more likely to lose jobs.
“It’s quite a dangerous proposition for the strength of our national economy,” said Zack Mabel, a Georgetown researcher.
In dozens of interviews with The Associated Press, educators, researchers and students described a generation jaded by education institutions. Largely left on their own amid remote learning, many took part-time jobs. Some felt they weren’t learning anything, and the idea of four more years of school, or even two, held little appeal.
At the same time, the nation’s student debt has soared. The issue has loomed large in the minds of young Americans as President Joe Biden pushes to cancel huge swaths of debt, an effort the Supreme Court appears poised to block.
Many Americans who graduated during the pandemic are skipping college. Many have have turned instead to hourly jobs or careers that don’t require a degree. Others feel locked out, deterred by high tuition and potential student debt. (March 9) (AP Video: Patrick Orsagos)
As a kid, Hart dreamed of going to Penn State to study musical theater. His family encouraged college, and he went to a private Christian high school where it’s an expectation.
But when classes went online, he spent more time pursuing creative outlets. He felt a new sense of independence, and the stress of school faded.
“I was like, ‘OK, what’s this thing that’s not on my back constantly?’” Hart said. “I can do things that I can enjoy. I can also do things that are important to me. And I kind of relaxed more in life and enjoyed life.”
He started working at a smoothie shop and realized he could earn a steady paycheck without a degree. By the time he graduated, he had left college plans behind.
It happened at public as well as private schools. Some counselors and principals were shocked to see graduates flocking to jobs at Amazon warehouses or scratching together income in the gig economy.
The shift has been stark in Jackson, where just four in 10 of the county’s public high school graduates immediately went to college in 2021, down from six in 10 in 2019. That drop is far steeper than the nation overall, which declined from 66% to 62%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Jackson’s leaders say young people are taking restaurant and retail jobs that pay more than ever. Some are being recruited by manufacturing companies that have aggressively raised wages to fill shortages.
“Students can’t seem to resist sign-on bonuses and wages that far exceed any that they’ve seen before,” said Vicki Bunch, the head of workforce development for the area’s chamber of commerce.
Across Tennessee, there’s growing concern the slide will only accelerate with the opening of several new manufacturing plants. The biggest is a $5.6 billion Ford plant near Jackson that will produce electric trucks and batteries. It promises to create 5,000 jobs, and its construction is already drawing young workers.
Daniel Moody, 19, was recruited to run plumbing for the plant after graduating from a Memphis high school in 2021. Now earning $24 an hour, he’s glad he passed on college.
“If I would have gone to college after school, I would be dead broke,” he said. “The type of money we’re making out here, you’re not going to be making that while you’re trying to go to college.”
America’s college-going rate was generally on the upswing until the pandemic reversed decades of progress. Rates fell even as the nation’s population of high school graduates grew, and despite economic upheaval, which typically drives more people into higher education.
In Tennessee, education officials issued a “call to action” after finding just 53% of public high school graduates were enrolling in college in 2021, far below the national average. It was a shock for a state that in 2014 made community college free, leading to a surge in the college-going rate. Now it’s at its lowest point since at least 2009.
Searching for answers, education officials crossed the state last year and heard that easy access to jobs, coupled with student debt worries, made college less attractive.
“This generation is different,” said Jamia Stokes, a senior director at SCORE, an education nonprofit. “They’re more pragmatic about the way they work, about the way they spend their time and their money.”
Most states are still collecting data on recent college rates, but early figures are troubling.
In Arkansas, the number of new high school graduates going to college fell from 49% to 42% during the pandemic. Kentucky slid by a similar amount, to 54%. The latest data in Indiana showed a 12-point drop from 2015 to 2020, leading the higher education chief to warn the “future of our state is at risk.”
Even more alarming are the figures for Black, Hispanic and low-income students, who saw the largest slides in many states. In Tennessee’s class of 2021, just 35% of Hispanic graduates and 44% of Black graduates enrolled in college, compared with 58% of their white peers.
There’s some hope the worst has passed. The number of freshmen enrolling at U.S. colleges increased slightly from 2021 to 2022. But that figure, along with total college enrollment, remains far below pre-pandemic levels.
Amid the chaos of the pandemic, many students fell through the cracks, said Scott Campbell, executive director of Persist Nashville, a nonprofit that offers college coaching.
Some students fell behind academically and didn’t feel prepared for college. Others lost access to counselors and teachers who help navigate college applications and the complicated process of applying for federal student aid.
“Students feel like schools have let them down,” Campbell said.
In Jackson, Mia Woodard recalls sitting in her bedroom and trying to fill out a few online college applications. No one from her school had talked to her about the process, she said. As she scrolled through the forms, she was sure of her Social Security number and little else.
“None of them even mentioned anything college-wise to me,” said Woodard, who is biracial and transferred high schools to escape racist bullying. “It might be because they didn’t believe in me.”
She says she never heard back from the colleges. She wonders whether to blame her shaky Wi-Fi, or if she simply failed to provide the right information.
A spokesperson for the Jackson school system, Greg Hammond, said it provides several opportunities for students to gain exposure to higher education, including an annual college fair for seniors.
“Mia was an at-risk student,” Hammond said. “Our school counselors provide additional supports for high school students in this category. It is, however, difficult to provide post-secondary planning and assistance to students who don’t participate in these services.”
Woodard, who had hoped to be the first in her family to get a college degree, now works at a restaurant and lives with her dad. She’s looking for a second job so she can afford to live on her own. Then maybe she’ll pursue her dream of getting a culinary arts degree.
“It’s still kind of 50-50,” she said of her chances.
If there’s a bright spot, experts say, it’s that more young people are pursuing education programs other than a four-year degree. Some states are seeing growing demand for apprenticeships in the trades, which usually provide certificates and other credentials.
After a dip in 2020, the number of new apprentices in the U.S. has rebounded to near pre-pandemic levels, according to the Department of Labor.
Before the pandemic, Boone Williams was the type of student colleges compete for. He took advanced classes and got A’s. He grew up around agriculture and thought about going to college for animal science.
But when his school outside Nashville sent students home his junior year, he tuned out. Instead of logging on for virtual classes, he worked at local farms, breaking horses or helping with cattle.
“I stopped applying myself once COVID came around,” the 20-year-old said. “I was focusing on making money rather than going to school.”
When a family friend told him about union apprenticeships, he jumped at the chance to get paid for hands-on work while mastering a craft.
Today he works for a plumbing company and takes night classes at a Nashville union.
The pay is modest, Williams said, but eventually he expects to earn far more than friends who took quick jobs after high school. He even thinks he’s better off than some who went to college — he knows too many who dropped out or took on debt for degrees they never used.
“In the long run, I’m going to be way more set than any of them,” he said.
Back in Jackson, Hart says he’s doing what he loves and contributing to the city’s growing arts community. Still, he wonders what’s next. His job pays enough for stability but not a whole lot more. He sometimes finds himself thinking about Broadway, but he doesn’t have a clear plan for the next 10 years.
“I do worry about the future and what that may look like for me,” he said. “But right now I’m trying to remind myself that I am good where I’m at, and we’ll take it one step at a time.”
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This story was produced with support from the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program.
The Associated Press education team receives support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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How passengers teamed up to restrain man on chaotic flight
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BOSTON (AP) — A passenger who helped restrain a threatening man on a weekend flight from Los Angeles to Boston said Tuesday that the entire chaotic episode was over within seconds thanks to teamwork.
Simik Ghookasian said in a telephone interview that he was seated several rows behind the man, who had quietly tried to open an airliner’s emergency door before trying to stab a flight attendant with a broken metal spoon, according to prosecutors.
“I heard the guy getting louder and louder and I thought it was just an argument, but he started yelling and screaming and threatening people, threatening to kill them,” said Ghookasian, a Los Angeles government contractor flying to Boston on United Flight 2609 on Sunday for work.
Until the yelling, he hadn’t noticed anything unusual about the man, who federal authorities have identified as Francisco Severo Torres.
Ghookasian said he saw the spoon and he was among five or six passengers who piled onto Torres and removed it from his grasp. It turned out to be the handle of a metal spoon, from which the bowl portion had been broken off, authorities said.
“That guy was really strong and was really resisting,” Ghookasian said. “We had a hard time holding him down. It was total teamwork.”
Ghookasian asked a flight attendant for some zip ties or duct tape, and the flight attendant produced some zip ties.
Ghookasian, who said he has first aid and counter-terrorism training, said he didn’t have time to be scared, he just reacted and used his instincts.
“Everything just exploded in a few seconds,” he said.
Torres, 33, of Leominster, Massachusetts, was arrested when the plane arrived in Boston and charged with interference and attempted interference with flight crew members and attendants using a dangerous weapon, federal prosecutors said. He was detained pending a hearing scheduled for Thursday.
The plane was about 45 minutes from Boston when the crew received an alarm that a side door on the aircraft was disarmed, according to court documents. One flight attendant noticed the door’s locking handle had been moved. Another flight attendant had noticed that Torres was seen near the door and believed he had moved the handle.
Airplane doors cannot be opened once in flight due to cabin pressure.
The crew told the captain that he was a threat and the plane should be landed as soon as possible, authorities said.
Then Torres approached two flight attendants, according to the court documents. One of the flight attendants felt the metal object in Torres’ hand hit him on his shirt collar and tie three times.
Torres told investigators that he went into the airplane’s bathroom and broke a spoon in half to make a weapon, prosecutors said in the documents. They say he told authorities he wanted to open the door so that he could jump out of the plane.
Investigators said Torres admitted knowing that if he opened the door many people would die.
Torres said the flight attendants confronted him and he stabbed one of them in an attempt to defend himself, according to investigators. They said he believed the flight attendant was trying to kill him.
Authorities did not say where Torres got the spoon, but TSA rules allow airline passengers to bring metal utensils except knives onto planes.
United Airlines said no one was injured.
“Thanks to the quick action of our crew and customers, one customer was restrained after becoming a security concern on United flight 2609 from Los Angeles to Boston,” the company statement said. “The flight landed safely and was met by law enforcement.”
If convicted of the charges against him, Torres could face life in prison.
An email seeking comment from him was sent to his federal public defender, and a voicemail was left.
Torres has previously sued two mental health facilities where he was patient, according to federal court records. He sued the state-run Worcester Recovery Center and Hospital in March 2021, alleging medical malpractice for misdiagnosis. That suit was dismissed several months later.
He also sued Fuller Hospital in Attleboro, Massachusetts last May, alleging his constitutional rights were violated because he was a vegan and was denied almond milk. The suit was dismissed in June.
In both cases he acted as his own attorney.
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Lawyers fight for man they say US wrongly deported to Haiti
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SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — Paul Pierrilus was deported two years ago from the U.S. to Haiti where he has been trying to survive in a chaotic and violent country where he wasn’t born and had never lived.
Both his parents are Haitian but they emigrated to the French Caribbean territory of St. Martin where Pierrilus was born. The family did not apply for citizenship for him in either Haiti or St. Martin and later moved to the U.S. when he was 5. He grew up in New York speaking English.
Deported — after a long delay — because of a drug conviction two decades ago, Pierrilus is now in Haiti where he does not speak Haitian Creole, has been unable to find work and has little savings left as he hopes for a way to leave the increasingly unstable country.
“You have to be mentally strong to deal with this type of stuff,” Pierrilus said. “A country where people get kidnapped every day. A country where people are killed. You have to be strong.”
The 42-year-old financial consultant spends most of his days locked inside a house reading self-help, business and marketing books in a neighborhood where gunshots often echo outside.
Lawyers for Pierrilus in the U.S. are still fighting his deportation order, leaving him in legal limbo as the Biden administration steps up deportations to Haiti despite pleas from activists that they be temporarily halted because of the Caribbean country’s deepening chaos.
His case has become emblematic of what some activists describe as the discrimination Haitian migrants face in the overburdened U.S. immigration system. More than 20,000 Haitians have been deported from the U.S. in the past year as thousands more continue to flee Haiti in risky boat crossings that sometimes end in mass drownings.
Cases like Pierrilus’ in which people are deported to a country where they have never lived are unusual, but they happen occasionally.
Jimmy Aldaoud, born of Iraqi parents at a refugee camp in Greece and whose family emigrated to the U.S. in 1979, was deported in 2019 to Iraq after amassing several felony convictions. Suffering health problems and not knowing the language in Iraq, he died a few months later in a case oft-cited by advocates.
Pierrilus’ parents took him to the United States so they could live a better life and he could receive a higher quality education.
When he was in his early 20s, he was convicted of selling crack cocaine. Because he was not a U.S. citizen, Pierrilus was transferred from criminal custody to immigration custody where he was deemed a Haitian national because of his parentage and ordered deported to Haiti.
Pierrilus managed to delay deportation with several legal challenges. Because he was deemed neither a danger to the community nor a flight risk, he was released, issued a work authorization and ordered to check with immigration authorities yearly.
He went on to become a financial planner.
Then, in February 2021, he was deported without warning, and his lawyers don’t know exactly why his situation changed.
Lawyers for the nonprofit Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights organization in Washington have taken up his cause. “We demand that the Biden administration bring Paul home,” organization attorney Sarah Decker said.
French St. Martin does not automatically confer French citizenship to those born in its territory to foreign parents, and his family did not seek it. They also did not formally seek Haitian citizenship, which Pierrilus is entitled to.
Though he could obtain Haitian citizenship, his lawyers have argued that he is not currently a Haitian citizen, had never lived there and should not be deported to a county with such political instability.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said in a brief general statement to The Associated Press that each country has an obligation under international law to accept the return of its nationals who are not eligible to remain in the U.S. or any other country. An ICE spokeswoman said no further information about Pierrilus’ case could be provided, including what proof does the U.S. government have that he’s an alleged Haitian citizen and why 13 years passed before he was suddenly deported.
In 2005, the Board of Immigration Appeals dismissed an appeal by Pierrilus’ previous attorneys to halt his deportation, saying “it is not necessary for the respondent to be a citizen of Haiti for that country to be named as the country of removal.” Decker, his current attorney, disagrees with that finding.
Pierrilus said that while he was being deported he told immigration officers, “I’m not going anywhere. I’m not from where you’re trying to send me.”
Overpowered and handcuffed, he said he stopped resisting. As he boarded the flight, he recalled that women were screaming and children wailing. Inside, he felt the same. Pierrilus did not know when and if he would see his family or friends again.
After being processed at the airport, someone lent Pierrilus a cell phone so he could call his parents. They gave him contacts for a family friend where he could temporarily stay. Since then, gang violence has forced him to bounce through two other homes.
Warring gangs have expanded their control of territory in the Haitian capital to an estimated 60% since the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, pillaging neighborhoods, raping and shooting civilians.
The U.N. warned in January that Haitians are suffering their worst humanitarian emergency in decades. More than 1,350 kidnappings were reported last year, more than double the previous year. Killings spiked by 35%, with more than 2,100 reported.
Pierrilus says he saw a man who was driving through his neighborhood get shot in the face as bullets shattered the windows and pock-marked the man’s car.
“Can you imagine that? This guy is swirling around trying to flee the area. I don’t know what happened to the guy,” he said.
As a result, he rarely goes out and relies on his faith for hope. He says he stopped going to church after he saw a livestreamed service in April 2021 in which gangs burst into the church and kidnapped a pastor and three congregants.
Pierrilus talks to his parents at least once a week, focusing on the progress of his case rather than on challenges in Haiti.
He hesitated to share his first impressions of his parents’ homeland upon landing in Haiti two years ago. “I had mixed feelings,” he said. “I wanted to see what it looked like on my time, not under these circumstances.”
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Betting on social media as a news destination for the young
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NEW YORK (AP) — If young people are spending so much time on social media, it stands to reason that’s a good place to reach them with news.
Operators of the News Movement are betting their business on that hunch. The company, which has been operating for more than a year, hopes to succeed despite journalism being littered with years of unsuccessful attempts to entice people in their 20s to become news consumers.
The brainchild of former Dow Jones executives, the News Movement is using a staff of reporters with an average age of 25 to make tailored news content for sites like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter.
“You really have to stay humble and stay open to different trends and ideas,” said Ramin Beheshti, president and a founder of the organization with former Dow Jones CEO Will Lewis. “We’ve built a newsroom that reflects the audience that we’re trying to go after.”
Among the newsrooms the company is producing TikTok videos for is The Associated Press. The AP has provided office space for the company and Lewis is vice chairman of its board of directors.
Some of the content would startle a news traditionalist.
Recognizing his friends appreciated calming videos, one staff member created an “explainer” on the midterm elections for Snapchat that used video of a horse being groomed, pizza being made and flowers growing while an offscreen voice discusses politics.
In “Get Ready with Me,” two women prepare for work while talking about some things in the news.
There are more typical offerings: video of the earthquake in Turkey, for example, and reports on President Biden’s proposals on abortion and social media. Explainer stories take a step back to tell people why something is news.
Some stories aren’t really news at all, but stem from personal experience. One New York-based journalist who wondered why police didn’t immediately jump onto subway tracks to save someone who fell looked into it to find they were working to stop trains.
Curious about why stories about odd things done by Florida residents are a staple of news coverage, a staff member made a TikTok video showing that it’s partly because police there often release photos and details about incidents faster than other states.
There’s also relatable content that provides a service, of a sort: asking young people on the street some of the excuses they’ve used to break a date.
“News isn’t always what you think it is,” said Jessica Coen, U.S. executive editor, who’s had leadership roles at Mashable, Morning Brew and The Cut.
The News Movement is not trying to be an aggregator, and cover every headline, Coen said. “We’re trying to cover issues where we can provide context and clarity,” she said.
Story formats differ to reflect where they are placed. Most TikTok videos are about a minute, while a meaty YouTube piece about women’s safety and how London police react to assault cases ran for nearly 14 minutes.
Some 60% of people in Gen Z, or young adults up to their mid-20s, say they get news through social media, according to a study by Oliver Wyman and the News Movement. Other studies show people in Gen Z have a lower opinion of traditional news outlets than their elders.
Given this, the News Movement believes that efforts by news organizations to entice young people to their own sites or apps are tough sells.
“News shouldn’t feel like work,” Beheshti said. “It should be part of your daily consumption.”
One person who sampled some of the News Movement’s TikTok stories offered a mixed review, saying they often seemed to emphasize flash over substance. They need to “read the room” better, said Gabriel Glynn-Habron, a 21-year-old college student from Asheville, N.C. who is studying journalism.
“I do appreciate the effort,” he said. “It’s part of what the news media should do more — just show the effort.”
Often, those who try to appeal to young people are unsuccessful because they really don’t understand who they’re trying to reach, said Linda Ellerbee, whose “Nick News” programs for the Nickelodeon network in the 1990s offered a template for success. It’s a mistake to think Gen Z is apathetic; the generation led the way in protesting George Floyd’s death at the hands of police, she said.
“Most attempts to try to deliver news to young people fail because they underestimate the intelligence of their audience,” Ellerbee said. “They talk down to them. They assume that because they’re young, they’re dumb.”
One place where Ellerbee and the News Movement agree is in how many people are frustrated by traditional news because they feel like they’re getting only a piece of a story, or dipping in to a movie somewhere in the middle. That argues for more explainers.
The company’s research found that while young news consumers fact-check information more readily than older peers, they’re also more susceptible to believing misinformation.
Since news is shaky as a business, the News Movement has made diversification a part of its model from the start. It will work with traditional news organizations and help them build social media teams.
The News Movement advises brands on how to reach young consumers and has bought the Recount, which makes video content about American politics for social media and continues to operate as a separate unit.
“We can’t have one way of making money,” Beheshti said.
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Need a Lenten fish fry? There’s an interactive map for that
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WEXFORD, Pa. (AP) — By the time the doors open at 4:30 p.m., a boisterous line of 50 hungry people is looping around the gymnasium foyer at Blessed Francis Seelos Academy. Their objective: to occupy tables on the basketball court and, for the parish’s first time since the pandemic descended in 2020, sit down for an old-fashioned Lenten fish fry.
Many patrons are members of the flock — St. Aidan Catholic Parish north of Pittsburgh — and greet each other as longtime friends. But these days, newcomers figure in the mix, too. And some arrive in a way that unites two rich seams of western Pennsylvania culture — tradition and innovation.
The fish fry, a long-established Friday staple during Lent, is roaring back from COVID with an assist from something decidedly newfangled: an interactive map built by local volunteer coders that points the way to scores of churches, fire halls and other places that offer battered and breaded seafood for the taking. In the process, the new Pittsburgh is helping point the way to the old.
“I like to think that this project helps people get excited about these very old cultural and culinary traditions,” says Hollen Barmer, a Tennessee transplant who came to Pittsburgh two decades ago and started the map in 2012 for her fish-fry-loving self.
“Fish fries,” Barmer likes to say, “are an adventure.”
TWO PARTS OF PITTSBURGH
At this moment in its history, Pittsburgh is working to blend its fabled industrial yesterdays with a 21st-century economy based increasingly on services and innovation — something the map project reflects.
“Allowing people to interact with something traditional through technology, it adds an element to it that appeals to a different group of people,” says Ellie Newman, a member and the former leader of the nonprofit Code for Pittsburgh, which works with Barmer to operate the map.
During Lent, thousands of western Pennsylvanians — Catholic and non-Catholic alike — stream into Friday afternoon fish fries. Some pick up for takeout. Some chow down right there — fish and shrimp, fries and cole slaw and mac and cheese, sometimes pierogies or a local noodle-and-cabbage delicacy called haluski.
Western Pennsylvania loves the past, but the fish fry itself is steered by some very modern forces.
Long a tradition in American cities with Catholic communities, particularly around the Great Lakes, fish fries surged in popularity after the Second Vatican Council essentially told the faithful in 1966 that the practice of not eating meat on Fridays was optional — except during Lent, the period between Ash Wednesday and Easter. That made February to April a concentrated period of fish consumption.
Then came the steel industry’s foundering in the 1970s and 1980s. That upended the region, stole elements of civic pride and whipped up a fervor for traditions that shouted, loudly, “Pittsburgh!”
“There was a sense of destabilization — of `Who are we?′ And people tended to center around things that symbolized the community,” says Leslie Przybylek, senior curator at the Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh.
Food touchstones like fish fries, pierogies and the “ cookie table ” — a western Pennsylvania wedding staple — became signifiers of identity. At the same time, technological advances in frozen food and the growth of fast food were making fish more accessible. The longtime presence of powerhouse regional fish distributor Robert Wholey & Co. also honed local tastes.
“People in Pennsylvania are used to good fish,” says Bill Yanicko, a funeral director in suburban West Deer Township who runs the community fish fry at Our Lady of the Lakes Parish. “They really don’t want to see a cookie-cutter triangle fish.”
Overlay all that with a robust interactive map (and pent-up pandemic energy) and you have a potent mix that helps people in western Pennsylvania overcome the geographic hesitations of the region’s hills and valleys, and go out searching for fish.
“Putting it in a digital frame and encouraging people to engage with it, it adds a level of vocabulary to it that makes a difference,” says Przybylek, who favors the fry at the Swissvale Fire Department, just outside the city. “Different generations engage in stories in different ways. It literally takes a food tradition and puts it into a platform that speaks to them on a different level.”
MAPPING DELICIOUSNESS
Today, while churches remain a mainstay of Lenten fish fries, fire departments give them a run for their money — of which there is lots at play. Both entities use fish fries as volunteer-staffed fundraisers to offset budget challenges, and each works hard to stand out. “It takes a little army to make this happen,” says Keith Young, a retired businessman who helps with the St. Aidan fry.
Code for Pittsburgh, a group designed to create places where “civics and technology meet,” is all-volunteer as well. Its varied projects include a food access map of Pittsburgh and a cartographic catalog that helps track vehicle-pedestrian accidents.
The volunteer coding sessions held to build the fish-fry map are — how to say it? — fish-forward. Swedish Fish candies are set out. Bowls of Goldfish crackers are distributed. Radiohead’s “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” plays.
“It’s kind of the perfect marriage of things — a team of super-nerdy people who know all about maps and know all about coding, and fish fries, which are just so Pittsburgh,” Newman says. “I don’t know of any other city that has this kind of obsession. … As soon as people in the group heard about it, they were instantly hooked on it.”
Pittsburgh’s growing reputation as an innovation hub — with companies from Google to Uber establishing beachheads here — is sometimes cast as recent. But innovation lies at the heart of the region’s history. The steel industry that built it into an industrial powerhouse was a cutting-edge transformation of its day, and advances ranging from early movies to the polio vaccine have roots here.
David Schorr, an IT analyst from the Pittsburgh suburb of West Mifflin, is known locally as “ The Codfather ” for his very public affinity to — and experience with — fish fries. He knows where to go for everything — including the places to secure, as he puts it, “handmade pierogies personally pinched by church ladies.” The interactive map, he says, opens myriad possibilities of fish-fry forays.
“It makes it a treasure hunt: `Oh — let’s go to that neighborhood,’” Schorr says. “They go, ‘Oh, look, this one’s on my way home from work.’ Or `I have to go visit Aunt Edna and we’ll be driving right by it.’ Or, `Oh, they have sauerkraut soup.′ Or, `I don’t like pollock. This one has cod. I’m going there.’”
The map, Barmer and Newman say, is designed to do precisely that — turn the western Pennsylvania fish-fry culture into an adventure stamped onto the landscape that fosters community engagement and understanding for natives and newcomers alike.
“As things become more globalized and cities tend to look more and more the same, there’s something appealing about coming to a place like Pittsburgh that still has things like this that have very deep roots in the community,” Newman says. “Things may change around you every year, but you know that every year you can go to your same church basement or fire hall and get that fish sandwich.”
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Ted Anthony, director of new storytelling and newsroom innovation at The Associated Press, has been writing about American culture since 1990. Follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/anthonyted
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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
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Did dioxins spread after the Ohio train derailment?
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After a catastrophic 38-train car derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, some officials are raising concerns about a type of toxic substance that tends to stay in the environment.
Sherrod Brown and J.D. Vance, the U.S. senators from Ohio, sent a letter to the state’s environmental protection agency expressing concern that dioxins may have been released when some of the chemicals in the damaged railcars were deliberately burned for safety reasons. They joined residents of the small Midwestern town and environmentalists from around the U.S. calling for state and federal environmental agencies to test the soil near where the tanker cars tipped over.
On Thursday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ordered rail operator Norfolk Southern to begin testing for dioxins. Testing so far by the EPA for “indicator chemicals” has suggested there’s a low chance that dioxins were released from the derailment, the agency said.
A look at dioxins, their potential harms and whether they may have been created by burning the vinyl chloride that was on the Norfolk Southern train:
HIGHLY TOXIC, PERSISENT COMPOUNDS
Dioxins refer to a group of toxic chemical compounds that can persist in the environment for long periods, according to the World Health Organization.
They are created through combustion and attach to dust particles, which is how they begin to circulate through an ecosystem.
Residents near the burn could have been exposed to dioxins in the air that landed on their skin or were breathed into their lungs, said Frederick Guengerich, a toxicologist at Vanderbilt University.
Skin exposure to high concentrations can cause what’s known as chloracne — an intense skin inflammation, Guengerich said.
But the main pathway that dioxin gets into human bodies is not directly through something burning. It’s through consumption of meat, dairy, fish and shellfish that have become contaminated. That contamination takes time.
“That’s why it’s important for the authorities to investigate this site now,” said Ted Schettler, a physician with a public health degree who directs the Science and Environmental Health Network, a coalition of environmental organizations. “Because it’s important to determine the extent to which dioxins are present in the soil and the surrounding area.”
DOES BURNING VINYL CHLORIDE CREATE DIOXINS?
Linda Birnbaum, a leading dioxins researcher, toxicologist and former director of the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences, said that burning vinyl chloride does create dioxins. Other experts agreed the accident could have created them.
The “tremendous black plume” seen at East Palestine suggests the combustion process left lots of complex carbon compounds behind, said Murray McBride, a Cornell University soil and crop scientist.
McBride said it will be hard to say for sure whether these compounds were released until testing is done where the train cars derailed.
Which is likely why residents, politicians, environmentalists and public health professionals are all calling for state and federal environmental agencies to conduct testing at the derailment site.
ROUTES TO THE ENVIRONMENT
Some level of dioxins are already in the environment — they can be created by certain industrial processes, or even by people burning trash in their backyards, McBride said.
Once released, dioxins can stick around in soil for decades. They can contaminate plants, including crops. They accumulate up the food chain in oils and other fats.
In East Palestine, it’s possible that soot particles from the plume carried dioxins onto nearby farms, where they could stick to the soil, McBride said.
“If you have grazing animals out there in the field, they will pick up some of the dioxins from soil particles,” he said. “And so some of that gets into their bodies, and then that accumulates in fat tissue.”
Eventually, those dioxins could make their way up the food chain to human consumers. Bioaccumulation means that more dioxin can get into humans than what’s found in the environment after the crash.
Animals “don’t metabolize and get rid of dioxins like we do other chemicals,” Schettler said, and dioxin is stored in the fat of animals that humans eat, like fish, and builds up over time, making the health effects worse.
SHOULD EAST PALESTINE RESIDENTS BE CONCERNED?
Birnbaum and Schettler agreed that residents have reason for concern about dioxins from this derailment.
Even though they are present in small amounts from other sources, the large amount of vinyl chloride burned off from the train cars could create more than usual, McBride said.
“That’s my concern, that there could be an unusual concentration,” he said. “But again, I’m waiting to see if these soils are analyzed.”
It takes between seven and 11 years for dioxins to start to break down in the body of a person or animal. And dioxins have been linked with cancer, developmental problems in children and reproductive issues and infertility in adults, according to the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences.
Still, Guengerich thought that other potential health risks from the derailment — such as concerns that exposure to the vinyl chloride itself could cause cancer — may be more pressing than the possible dioxins: “I wouldn’t put it at the highest level on my list,” he said.
Dr. Maureen Lichtveld, dean of the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health, agreed that vinyl chloride should be of more concern than dioxins for the public and said that even the mental health of a community rocked by the catastrophic derailment should be a higher public health priority than dioxin exposure.
As with many environmental exposures, it would be hard to prove any dioxin present came from the derailment. “I think that it would be virtually impossible …. to attribute any presence of dioxin to this particular burn,” she said.
But most experts thought it was important to test the soils for dioxins — even though that process can be difficult and costly.
“The conditions are absolutely right for dioxins to have been formed,” Schettler said. “It’s going to be terribly important to determine that from a public health perspective, and to reassure the community.”
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Associated Press reporter John Seewer in Toledo, Ohio, contributed.
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Follow Maddie Burakoff and Drew Costley on Twitter: @maddieburakoff and @drewcostley.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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As Tennessee, others target drag shows, many wonder: Why?
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NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — “If I hadn’t been a girl, I’d have been a drag queen.”
Dolly Parton has uttered those words famously and often. But if she really were a drag queen, one of Tennessee’s most famous daughters would likely be out of a job under legislation signed into law by Republican Gov. Bill Lee on Thursday.
Lee signed off on the legislation without issuing a statement or having a public ceremony. The bill goes into effect July 1.
Across the country, conservative activists and politicians complain that drag contributes to the “sexualization” or “grooming” of children. Several states are considering restrictions, but none has acted as fast as Tennessee. The efforts seek to extinguish popular “ drag story hours ” at which queens read to kids. Organizers of LGBTQ Pride events say they put a chill on their parades. And advocates note that the bills, pushed largely by Republicans, burden businesses in an un-Republican fashion.
The protestations have arisen fairly suddenly around a form of entertainment that has long had a place on the mainstream American stage.
Milton Berle, “Mr. Television” himself, was appearing in drag on the public airwaves as early as the 1950s on “Texaco Star Theater.” “RuPaul’s Drag Race” is a bona fide cultural phenomenon. Highly popular drag brunches bring revenue to restaurants. That such spectacles are now being portrayed as a danger to children boggles the minds of people who study, perform and appreciate drag.
“Drag is not a threat to anyone. It makes no sense to be criminalizing or vilifying drag in 2023,” said Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, a professor of culture and gender studies at the University of Michigan and author of “Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance.”
“It is a space where people explore their identities,” said La Fountain-Stokes, who has done drag himself. “But it is also a place where people simply make a living. Drag is a job. Drag is a legitimate artistic expression that brings people together, that entertains, that allows certain individuals to explore who they are and allows all of us to have a very nice time. So it makes literally no sense for legislators, for people in government, to try to ban drag.”
Drag does not typically involve nudity or stripping, which are more common in the separate art of burlesque. Explicitly sexual and profane language is common in drag performances, but such content is avoided when children are the target audience. At shows meant for adults, venues or performers generally warn beforehand about age-inappropriate content.
The word “drag” does not appear in the Tennessee bill. Instead, it changes the definition of adult cabaret in Tennessee’s law to mean “adult-oriented performances that are harmful to minors.” It also says “male or female impersonators” now fall under adult cabaret among topless dancers, go-go dancers, exotic dancers and strippers.
The bill then bans adult cabaret from public property or anywhere minors might be present. It threatens performers with a misdemeanor charge, or a felony if it’s a repeat offense.
The bill has raised concerns that it could be used to target transgender people, but sponsors say that is not the intent.
The Tennessee Pride Chamber, a business advocacy group, predicted that “selective surveillance and enforcement” will lead to court challenges and “massive expenses” as governments defend an unconstitutional law that will harm the state’s brand.
“Tourism, which contributes significantly to our state’s growth and well-being, may well suffer from boycotts disproportionately affecting members of our community who work in Tennessee’s restaurants, arts, and hospitality industries,” chamber President Brian Rosman wrote in an email to The Associated Press. “Corporations will not continue to expand or relocate here if their employees — and their recruits — don’t feel safe or welcomed in Tennessee.”
John Camp, a Pride organizer in Knoxville, said the event in Tennessee’s third-largest city will be somber this October — describing it as “more of a march than a celebration.” There were 100 drag performers last year, he said, but he is unsure how many can participate this year.
Several other states, including Idaho, Kentucky, North Dakota, Montana, Oklahoma and Utah, are considering similar bans. And the Arkansas governor recently signed a bill that puts new restrictions on “adult-oriented” performances. It originally targeted drag shows but was scaled back following complaints of anti-LGBTQ discrimination.
“I find it irresponsible to create a law based on a complete lack of understanding and determined willful misinterpretation of what drag actually is,” Montana state Rep. Connie Keogh said in February during floor debate. “It is part of the cultural fabric of the LGBTQ+ community and has been around for centuries.”
Tennessee state Sen. Jack Johnson, the Republican sponsor, says his bill addresses “sexually suggestive drag shows” that are inappropriate for children.
Months ago, organizers of a Pride festival in Jackson, west of Nashville, came under fire for hosting a drag show in a park. A legal complaint spearheaded by a Republican state representative sought to prevent the show, but organizers reached a settlement to hold it indoors, with an age restriction.
And in Chattanooga, false allegations of child abuse spread online after far-right activists posted video of a child feeling a female performer’s sequined costume. Online commentators falsely said the performer was male, and it has gone on to be used as a rationale to ban children from drag shows.
“Rather than focus on actual policy issues facing Tennesseans, politicians would rather spend their time and effort misconstruing age-appropriate performances at a library to pass as many anti-LGBTQ+ bills as they can,” Sarah Warbelow, legal director for the Human Rights Campaign, said in a statement last week.
At times, the vitriol has become violence. Protesters, some of them armed, threw rocks and smoke grenades at one another outside a drag event in Oregon last year.
The Tennessee drag bill marks the second major proposal targeting LGBTQ people that lawmakers in the state have passed this year. Last week, lawmakers approved legislation that bans most gender-affirming care. Lee also signed that bill into law on Thursday.
Lee was fielding questions Monday from reporters about the legislation and other LGBTQ bills when an activist asked him if he remembered “dressing up in drag in 1977.” He was presented with a photo that showed the governor as a high school senior dressed in women’s clothing that was published in the Franklin High School 1977 yearbook. The photo was first posted on Reddit over the weekend.
Lee said it is “ridiculous” to compare the photo to “sexualized entertainment in front of children.” When asked for specific examples of inappropriate drag shows taking place in front of children, Lee did not cite any, only pointing to a nearby school building and saying he was concerned about protecting children.
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McMillan reported from northeastern Pennsylvania. Associated Press writers Jonathan Matisse in Nashville and Amy Beth Hanson in Helena, Montana, contributed to this report.
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Abortion clinics crossing state borders not always welcome
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BRISTOL, Va. (AP) — The pastors smiled as they held the doors open, grabbing the hands of those who walked by and urging many to keep praying and to keep showing up. Some responded with a hug. A few grimaced as they squeezed past.
Shelley Koch, a longtime resident of southwest Virginia, had witnessed a similar scene many Sunday mornings after church services. On this day, however, it played out in a parking lot outside a modest government building in Bristol where officials had just advanced a proposal that threatens to tear apart the very fabric of her community.
For months, residents of the town have battled over whether clinics limited by strict anti-abortion laws in neighboring Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia should be allowed to continue to hop over the border and operate there. The proposal on the table, submitted by anti-abortion activists, was that they shouldn’t. The local pastors were on hand to spread that message.
“We’re trying to figure out what we do at this point,” said Koch, who supports abortion rights. “We’re just on our heels all the time.”
The conflict is not unique to this border community, which boasts a spot where a person can stand in Virginia and Tennessee at the same time. Similar disputes have broken out across the country following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the landmark 1973 decision establishing a constitutional right to abortion.
As clinics have been forced to shutter in Republican-dominant states with strict abortion bans, some have relocated to cities and towns just over the border, in states with more liberal laws. The goal is to help women avoid traveling long distances. Yet that effort does not always go smoothly: The politics of border towns and cities don’t always align with those in their state capitals. They can be more socially conservative, with residents who object to abortion on moral grounds.
Anti-abortion activists have tapped into that sentiment — in Virginia and elsewhere — and are proposing changes to zoning and other local ordinance laws to stop the clinics from moving in. Since Roe was overturned, such local ordinances have been identified as a tool for officials to control where patients can get an abortion, advocates and legal experts say.
In Texas, even before Roe was overturned, more than 40 towns prohibited abortion services inside their city limits. That trend, led by anti-abortion activist Mark Lee Dickson, has since successfully spread to politically conservative towns in Iowa, Louisiana, New Mexico, Nebraska and Ohio.
Under Roe, the high court had ruled that it was unconstitutional for state or local lawmakers to create any “substantial obstacle” to a patient seeking an abortion. That rule no longer exists.
While such local ordinance changes are no longer necessary in Texas, which now has one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country, Dickson says he and others will continue to pursue them in other states with liberal abortion statutes.
“We’re going to keep on going forward and do everything that we can to protect life,” he said.
In New Mexico, which has one of the country’s most liberal abortion access laws, activists in two counties and three cities in the eastern part of the state have successfully sought ordinance changes restricting the procedure. Democratic officials have since proposed legislation to ban them from interfering with abortion access.
In the college town of Carbondale, Illinois, a state where abortion remains widely accessible, anti-abortion activists have asked zoning officials to block future clinics from opening after two already operate in town. Thus far, they’ve been unsuccessful.
Meanwhile, some of the states that have severely restricted abortion access are trying to make it harder for residents to end their pregnancies elsewhere. Employees at the University of Idaho who refer students to a clinic just 8 miles (13 kilometers) away in the liberal-leaning state of Washington could face felony charges under a recently passed state law.
Perhaps no other place so neatly encapsulates the issue as the twin cities of Bristol, Virginia, and Bristol, Tennessee. Before Roe, an abortion clinic had operated for decades in Bristol, Tennessee. After Roe, which triggered the Volunteer State’s strict abortion law, the clinic hopped over the state line into Bristol, Virginia.
That’s when anti-abortion advocates began pushing back. At the request of some concerned citizens, the socially conservative, faith-based Family Foundation of Virginia helped draft an amendment to the city’s zoning code that says, apart from where the existing clinic sits, land can’t be used to end a “pre-born human life.”
“Nobody wants their town to be known as the place where people come to take human life. That’s just not a reputation that the people in Bristol want for their area,” said foundation President Victoria Cobb.
The amendment has stalled before the Planning Commission as the city’s attorney, the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia and others question its legality. Meanwhile, the board of supervisors in Washington County, which surrounds Bristol, passed a similar restrictive zoning ordinance on Feb. 14, and at least three counties have since adopted resolutions declaring their “pro-life stance,” according to the Family Foundation.
Before Roe was overturned, such zoning restrictions would have been unconstitutional, noted ACLU attorney Geri Greenspan. Now, however, “we’re sort of in uncharted legal territory,” she said.
It’s a struggle that residents like Koch weren’t expecting.
In 2020 — when Democrats were in full control of state government — they rolled back restrictions on abortion services, envisioning the state as a safe haven for access. Virginia now has one of the South’s most permissive abortion laws, which comforted Koch when Roe was overturned.
Now, however, her relief has been replaced by anxiety.
“I realized how little I knew about the workings of local government,” she said. “It’s been a detriment.”
The Bristol Women’s Health clinic is battling multiple lawsuits but would not be affected by the proposed ordinance unless it tried to expand or make other changes. While some residents oppose the facility, “they’re more afraid that this industry is going to expand and that Bristol is going to just become a multistate hub of the abortion industry,” said the Rev. Chris Hess, who as pastor of St. Anne Catholic Church has advocated for the zoning change.
Debra Mehaffey, who has spent more than a decade protesting outside abortion clinics, said people are coming to Bristol from Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, “all over to come get abortions, you know, because they can’t get them in their state.”
“So it will be great to see it totally abolished,” she said.
Clinic owner Diane Derzis, who has owned numerous other abortion clinics — including the one in Mississippi at the center of the Supreme Court’s recent decision — downplays the pushback. She said she’s grown accustomed to protests and even experienced the bombing of a separate clinic.
But Derzis is also girding herself for many more post-Roe battles in the future.
Abortion “is just under attack and it’s going to be for years,” she said.
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Need a Lenten fish fry? There’s an interactive map for that
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WEXFORD, Pa. (AP) — By the time the doors open at 4:30 p.m., a boisterous line of 50 hungry people is looping around the gymnasium foyer at Blessed Francis Seelos Academy. Their objective: to occupy tables on the basketball court and, for the parish’s first time since the pandemic descended in 2020, sit down for an old-fashioned Lenten fish fry.
Many patrons are members of the flock — St. Aidan Catholic Parish north of Pittsburgh — and greet each other as longtime friends. But these days, newcomers figure in the mix, too. And some arrive in a way that unites two rich seams of western Pennsylvania culture — tradition and innovation.
The fish fry, a long-established Friday staple during Lent, is roaring back from COVID with an assist from something decidedly newfangled: an interactive map built by local volunteer coders that points the way to scores of churches, fire halls and other places that offer battered and breaded seafood for the taking. In the process, the new Pittsburgh is helping point the way to the old.
“I like to think that this project helps people get excited about these very old cultural and culinary traditions,” says Hollen Barmer, a Tennessee transplant who came to Pittsburgh two decades ago and started the map in 2012 for her fish-fry-loving self.
“Fish fries,” Barmer likes to say, “are an adventure.”
TWO PARTS OF PITTSBURGH
At this moment in its history, Pittsburgh is working to blend its fabled industrial yesterdays with a 21st-century economy based increasingly on services and innovation — something the map project reflects.
“Allowing people to interact with something traditional through technology, it adds an element to it that appeals to a different group of people,” says Ellie Newman, a member and the former leader of the nonprofit Code for Pittsburgh, which works with Barmer to operate the map.
During Lent, thousands of western Pennsylvanians — Catholic and non-Catholic alike — stream into Friday afternoon fish fries. Some pick up for takeout. Some chow down right there — fish and shrimp, fries and cole slaw and mac and cheese, sometimes pierogies or a local noodle-and-cabbage delicacy called haluski.
Western Pennsylvania loves the past, but the fish fry itself is steered by some very modern forces.
Long a tradition in American cities with Catholic communities, particularly around the Great Lakes, fish fries surged in popularity after the Second Vatican Council essentially told the faithful in 1966 that the practice of not eating meat on Fridays was optional — except during Lent, the period between Ash Wednesday and Easter. That made February to April a concentrated period of fish consumption.
Then came the steel industry’s foundering in the 1970s and 1980s. That upended the region, stole elements of civic pride and whipped up a fervor for traditions that shouted, loudly, “Pittsburgh!”
“There was a sense of destabilization — of `Who are we?′ And people tended to center around things that symbolized the community,” says Leslie Przybylek, senior curator at the Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh.
Food touchstones like fish fries, pierogies and the “ cookie table ” — a western Pennsylvania wedding staple — became signifiers of identity. At the same time, technological advances in frozen food and the growth of fast food were making fish more accessible. The longtime presence of powerhouse regional fish distributor Robert Wholey & Co. also honed local tastes.
“People in Pennsylvania are used to good fish,” says Bill Yanicko, a funeral director in suburban West Deer Township who runs the community fish fry at Our Lady of the Lakes Parish. “They really don’t want to see a cookie-cutter triangle fish.”
Overlay all that with a robust interactive map (and pent-up pandemic energy) and you have a potent mix that helps people in western Pennsylvania overcome the geographic hesitations of the region’s hills and valleys, and go out searching for fish.
“Putting it in a digital frame and encouraging people to engage with it, it adds a level of vocabulary to it that makes a difference,” says Przybylek, who favors the fry at the Swissvale Fire Department, just outside the city. “Different generations engage in stories in different ways. It literally takes a food tradition and puts it into a platform that speaks to them on a different level.”
MAPPING DELICIOUSNESS
Today, while churches remain a mainstay of Lenten fish fries, fire departments give them a run for their money — of which there is lots at play. Both entities use fish fries as volunteer-staffed fundraisers to offset budget challenges, and each works hard to stand out. “It takes a little army to make this happen,” says Keith Young, a retired businessman who helps with the St. Aidan fry.
Code for Pittsburgh, a group designed to create places where “civics and technology meet,” is all-volunteer as well. Its varied projects include a food access map of Pittsburgh and a cartographic catalog that helps track vehicle-pedestrian accidents.
The volunteer coding sessions held to build the fish-fry map are — how to say it? — fish-forward. Swedish Fish candies are set out. Bowls of Goldfish crackers are distributed. Radiohead’s “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” plays.
“It’s kind of the perfect marriage of things — a team of super-nerdy people who know all about maps and know all about coding, and fish fries, which are just so Pittsburgh,” Newman says. “I don’t know of any other city that has this kind of obsession. … As soon as people in the group heard about it, they were instantly hooked on it.”
Pittsburgh’s growing reputation as an innovation hub — with companies from Google to Uber establishing beachheads here — is sometimes cast as recent. But innovation lies at the heart of the region’s history. The steel industry that built it into an industrial powerhouse was a cutting-edge transformation of its day, and advances ranging from early movies to the polio vaccine have roots here.
David Schorr, an IT analyst from the Pittsburgh suburb of West Mifflin, is known locally as “ The Codfather ” for his very public affinity to — and experience with — fish fries. He knows where to go for everything — including the places to secure, as he puts it, “handmade pierogies personally pinched by church ladies.” The interactive map, he says, opens myriad possibilities of fish-fry forays.
“It makes it a treasure hunt: `Oh — let’s go to that neighborhood,’” Schorr says. “They go, ‘Oh, look, this one’s on my way home from work.’ Or `I have to go visit Aunt Edna and we’ll be driving right by it.’ Or, `Oh, they have sauerkraut soup.′ Or, `I don’t like pollock. This one has cod. I’m going there.’”
The map, Barmer and Newman say, is designed to do precisely that — turn the western Pennsylvania fish-fry culture into an adventure stamped onto the landscape that fosters community engagement and understanding for natives and newcomers alike.
“As things become more globalized and cities tend to look more and more the same, there’s something appealing about coming to a place like Pittsburgh that still has things like this that have very deep roots in the community,” Newman says. “Things may change around you every year, but you know that every year you can go to your same church basement or fire hall and get that fish sandwich.”
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Ted Anthony, director of new storytelling and newsroom innovation at The Associated Press, has been writing about American culture since 1990. Follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/anthonyted
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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
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Bills would let transgender people seal name-change requests
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SEATTLE (AP) — You can change your name, but in many states you can’t completely shed your old one — something that’s of particular concern to transgender people and that legislators in at least two states are trying to change.
A bill in Washington would allow gender expression and identity as reasons to seal, or keep out of the public record, a future petition for a name change. And a California bill would require the sealing of petitions by minors to change their name and gender on identity documents.
In states where such petitions aren’t sealed, transgender people can be susceptible to cyberbullying or even physical violence because their previous names, and by extension their lives, are an open book in the public record, advocates warn. Students, for instance, can and do easily find and share such records when they are looking for background on a new kid in town, one advocate noted.
Maia Xiao, a University of Washington graduate student, has changed her name in that state and said the publication of a transgender friend’s name-change records in an online forum led to relentless harassment, including hate mail. She wrote last summer to Democratic state Sen. Jamie Pedersen to urge reform.
“It feels very close to me,” said Xiao, who would not disclose the name of her friend, citing privacy. “I don’t live a very online life, but it’s really scary to know that something so personal can be so easily accessed by transphobic trolls who want to cause harm.”
Pedersen is sponsoring the Washington legislation, which passed the Senate this month with bipartisan support and is expected to also pass the House. The bill is modeled on laws in New York and Oregon and would also extend records privacy to refugees, emancipated minors and people who have been granted asylum.
Currently, only people subjected to domestic violence can have their name changes easily sealed in Washington. Some other states, including California, also make exceptions for victims of crimes like human trafficking, stalking and sexual assault.
“This seemed to me like a simple action that could go a long way in making transgender people a lot safer in our state,” Pedersen said.
Some officials and law enforcement officers worry that criminals who request a name change could escape accountability under the proposals. The Washington bill would allow courts to unseal a name change file if law enforcement had reasonable suspicions, and sex offenders and incarcerated people would still be ineligible for a sealed name change.
“This is not the intent of the bill, and such cases would be rare, but there needs to be procedures in place to prevent it,” Jennifer Wallace, executive director of the Washington Association of County Officials, said in an email.
The approaches in Washington and California contrast starkly with recent and mysterious moves in Florida and Texas to compile lists of trans residents using public records, and as lawmakers in at least 39 states consider a torrent of anti-trans bills.
Republicans’ “disturbing” requests for data on transgender residents in some of those states add urgency to his proposal, Pedersen said.
The office of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton last year requested data on how many people had changed the gender information on their driver’s licenses. The Texas Department of Public Safety found over 16,000 gender changes during the prior two years but didn’t turn over data because it could not determine the reason for each change.
In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis asked state universities last month for data on students who had sought or received treatments for gender dysphoria. Neither Paxton nor DeSantis explained why they requested the data.
Harassment from such disclosures can especially target young trans people who struggle with mental health issues or gender dysphoria, advocates say. The same internet forum that Xiao said had targeted her friend came under fire last year for instances of doxxing trans people, or maliciously publishing their personal information online, and has been linked to suicides.
Peers may search students’ names as they move to a new middle or high school and can easily find and share court records related to their petitions for a name and gender change, said Kathie Moehlig, executive director of the San Diego nonprofit TransFamily Support Services. She approached California Assembly Speaker Pro Tem Chris Ward with the idea for the bill after students she advises brought the trend to her attention.
Many families with trans children aren’t even aware such records are public, Moehlig said.
“Somebody’s gender identity is an innate piece about them — it’s intimate,” she said. “They deserve the right to the privacy around their identity.”
The California bill, which was introduced last month and has not yet been scheduled for a hearing, would require the state to seal any petition filed by a person under 18 for a change to gender and sex or to gender, sex and name in identity documents. Also sealed would be documents from a petitioner’s court proceedings.
San Diego lawyer Clarice Barrelet, whose 11-year-old son is transgender, said simply plugging his name into a search engine shows his legal gender change.
He had insisted by age 6 that he should not be called a girl and would grow up to be a man, Barrelet said. He came out as transgender at age 8 and changed the name and pronouns he used in school, even before his mom petitioned the court for a legal change to his identity documents.
Barrelet said she thinks those records should be sealed for children and adults to better protect their privacy.
Ward, a San Diego County Democrat and vice chair of the California Legislative LGBTQ Caucus, said he hopes his bill will reduce the risk of bullying for gender-nonconforming children. He noted that being outed can be especially traumatic for young people who are still processing their identities.
“I want them to certainly be comfortable,” Ward said, “and free to be themselves.”
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Associated Press writer Paul Weber in Austin, Texas, contributed to this report. Schoenbaum, in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Austin, in Sacramento, California, are corps members for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.
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AI learns to outsmart humans in video games – and real life
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Speed around a French village in the video game Gran Turismo and you might spot a Corvette behind you trying to catch your slipstream.
The technique of using the draft of an opponent’s racecar to speed up and overtake them is one favored by skilled players of PlayStation’s realistic racing game.
But this Corvette driver is not being controlled by a human — it’s GT Sophy, a powerful artificial intelligence agent built by PlayStation-maker Sony.
Gran Turismo players have been competing against computer-generated racecars since the franchise launched in the 1990s, but the new AI driver that was unleashed last week on Gran Turismo 7 is smarter and faster because it’s been trained using the latest AI methods.
“Gran Turismo had a built-in AI existing from the beginning of the game, but it has a very narrow band of performance and it isn’t very good,” said Michael Spranger, chief operating officer of Sony AI. “It’s very predictable. Once you get past a certain level, it doesn’t really entice you anymore.”
But now, he said, “this AI is going to put up a fight.”
Visit an artificial intelligence laboratory at universities and companies like Sony, Google, Meta, Microsoft and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and it’s not unusual to find AI agents like Sophy racing cars, slinging angry birds at pigs, fighting epic interstellar battles or helping human gamers build new Minecraft worlds — all part of the job description for computer systems trying to learn how to get smarter in games.
But in some instances, they are also trying to learn how to get smarter in the real world. In a January paper, a University of Cambridge researcher who built an AI agent to control Pokémon characters argued it could “inspire all sorts of applications that require team management under conditions of extreme uncertainty, including managing a team of doctors, robots or employees in an ever-changing environment, like a pandemic-stricken region or a war zone.”
And while that might sound like a kid making a case for playing three more hours of Pokémon Violet, the study of games has been used to advance AI research — and train computers to solve complex problems — since the mid-20th century.
Initially, AI was used on games like checkers and chess to test at winning strategy games. Now a new branch of research is more focused on performing open-ended tasks in complex worlds and interacting with humans, not just for the purpose of beating them.
“Reality is like a super-complicated game,” said Nicholas Sarantinos, who authored the Pokémon paper and recently turned down a doctoral offer at Oxford University to start an AI company aiming to help corporate workplaces set up more collaborative teams.
In the web-based Pokémon Showdown battle simulator, Sarantinos developed an algorithm to analyze a team of six Pokémon — predicting how they would perform based on all the possible battle scenarios ahead of them and their comparative strengths and weaknesses.
Microsoft, which owns the popular Minecraft game franchise as well as the Xbox game system, has tasked AI agents with a variety of activities — from steering clear of lava to chopping trees and making furnaces. Researchers hope some of their learnings could eventually play a role in real-world technology, such as how to get a home robot to take on certain chores without having to program it to do so.
While it ”goes without stating” that real humans behave quite differently from fictional video game creatures, “the core ideas can still be used,” Sarantinos said. “If you use psychology tests, you can take this information to conclude how well they can work together.”
Amy Hoover, an assistant professor of informatics at the New Jersey Institute of Technology who’s built algorithms for the digital card game Hearthstone, said “there really is a reason for studying games” but it is not always easy to explain.
“People aren’t always understanding that the point is about the optimization method rather than the game,” she said.
Games also offer a useful testbed for AI — including for some real-world applications in robotics or health care — that’s safer to try in a virtual world, said Vanessa Volz, an AI researcher at the Danish startup Modl.ai, which builds AI systems for game development.
But, she adds, “it can get overhyped.”
“It’s probably not going to be one big breakthrough and that everything is going to be shifted to the real world,” Volz said.
Japanese electronics giant Sony launched its own AI research division in 2020 with entertainment in mind, but it’s nonetheless attracted broader academic attention. Its research paper introducing Sophy last year made it on the cover of the prestigious science journal Nature, which said it could potentially have effects on other applications such as drones and self-driving vehicles.
The technology behind Sophy is based on an algorithmic method known as reinforcement learning, which trains the system by rewarding it when it gets something right as it runs virtual races thousands of times.
“The reward is going to tell you that, ‘You’re making progress. This is good,’ or, ‘You’re off the track. Well, that’s not good,’” Spranger said.
The world’s best Gran Turismo players are still finishing ahead of Sophy at tournaments, but average players will find it hard to beat — and can adjust difficulty settings depending on how much they want to be challenged.
PlayStation players will only get to try racing against Sophy until March 31, on a limited number of circuits, so it can get some feedback and go back into testing. Peter Wurman, director of Sony AI America and project lead on GT Sophy, said it takes about two weeks for AI agents to train on 20 PlayStations.
“To get it spread throughout the whole game, it takes some more breakthroughs and some more time before we’re ready for that,” he said.
And to get it onto real streets or Formula One tracks? That could take a lot longer.
Self-driving car companies adopt similar machine-learning techniques, but “they don’t hand over complete control of the car the way we are able to,” Wurman said. “In a simulated world, there’s nobody’s life at risk. You know exactly the kinds of things you’re going to see in the environment. There’s no people crossing the road or anything like that.”
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Justice Thomas wrote of ‘crushing weight’ of student loans
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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court won’t have far to look if it wants a personal take on the “crushing weight” of student debt that underlies the Biden administration’s college loan forgiveness plan.
Justice Clarence Thomas was in his mid-40s and in his third year on the nation’s highest court when he paid off the last of his debt from his time at Yale Law School.
Thomas, the court’s longest-serving justice and staunchest conservative, has been skeptical of other Biden administration initiatives. And when the Supreme Court hears arguments Tuesday involving President Joe Biden’s debt relief plan that would wipe away up to $20,000 in outstanding student loans, Thomas is not likely to be a vote in the administration’s favor.
But the justices’ own experiences can be relevant in how they approach a case, and alone among them, Thomas has written about the role student loans played in his financial struggles.
A fellow law school student even suggested Thomas declare bankruptcy after graduating “to get out from under the crushing weight of all my student loans,” the justice wrote in his best-selling 2007 memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son.” He rejected the idea.
It’s not clear that any of the other justices borrowed money to attend college or law school or have done so for their children’s educations. Some justices grew up in relative wealth. Others reported they had scholarships to pay their way to some of the country’s most expensive private institutions.
Of the seven justices on the court who are parents, four have signaled through their investments that they don’t want their own children to be saddled with onerous college debt, and have piled money into tax-free college savings accounts that might limit any need for loans.
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch have the most on hand, at least $600,000 and at least $300,000, respectively, according to annual disclosure reports the justices filed in 2022. Each has two children.
Justices Amy Coney Barrett, who has seven children, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, who has two, also have invested money in college-savings accounts, in which any earnings or growth is tax free if spent on education.
None of the justices would comment for this story, a court spokeswoman said.
Thomas wrote vividly about his past money woes in his up-from-poverty story, recounting how a bank once foreclosed on one of his loans because repayment and delinquency notices were sent to his grandparents’ house in Savannah, Georgia, instead of Thomas’ home at the time in Jefferson City, Missouri.
Thomas was able to take out another loan to repay the bank only because his mentor, John Danforth, then-Missouri attorney general and later a U.S. senator, vouched for him.
Thomas noted that he signed up for a tuition postponement program at Yale in which a group of students jointly paid for their outstanding loans according to their financial ability, with those earning the most paying the most.
At the time, Thomas’ first wife, Kathy, was pregnant. “I didn’t know what else to do, so I signed on the dotted line, and spent the next two decades paying off the money I borrowed during my last two years at Yale,” Thomas wrote.
When he was first nominated to be a federal judge in 1989, Thomas reported $10,000 in outstanding student loans, according to a news report at the time. The Biden administration has picked the same number as the amount of debt relief most borrowers would get under its plan.
Personal experience can shape the justices’ questions in the courtroom and affect their private conversations about a case, even if it doesn’t figure in the outcome.
“It is helpful to have people with life experiences that are varied just because it enriches the conversation,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor has said. Sotomayor, like Thomas, also grew up poor. She got a full scholarship to Princeton as an undergraduate, she has said, and went on to Yale for law school, as Thomas did.
Keeping people from avoiding the kinds of difficult choices Thomas faced is a key part of the administration’s argument for loan forgiveness. The administration says that without additional help, many borrowers will fall behind on their payments once a hold in place since the start of the coronavirus pandemic three years ago is lifted, no later than this summer.
Under a plan announced in August but so far blocked by federal courts, $10,000 in federal loans would be canceled for people making less than $125,000 or for households with less than $250,000 in income. Recipients of Pell Grants, who tend to have fewer financial resources, would get an additional $10,000 in debt forgiven.
The White House says 26 million people already have applied and 16 million have been approved for relief. The program is estimated to cost $400 billion over the next three decades.
The legal fight could turn on any of several elements, including whether the Republican-led states and individuals suing over the plan have legal standing to go to court and whether Biden has the authority under federal law for so extensive a loan forgiveness program.
Nebraska and other states challenging the program argue that far from falling behind, 20 million borrowers would get a “windfall” because their entire student debt would be erased, Nebraska Attorney General Michael Hilgers wrote in the states’ main Supreme Court brief.
Which of those arguments resonate with the court may become clear on Tuesday.
When she was dean of Harvard Law School, Justice Elena Kagan showed her own concern about the high cost of law school, especially for students who were considering lower-paying jobs.
Kagan established a program that would allow students to attend their final year tuition-free if they agreed to a five-year commitment to work in the public sector. While that program no longer exists, Harvard offers grants to students for public service work.
At the time the program was created, Kagan said she wanted students to be able to go to work where they “can make the biggest difference, but that isn’t the case now.” Instead, she said: “They often go to work where they don’t want to work because of the debt burden.”
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Supreme Court wrestles with lawsuit shield for social media
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WASHINGTON (AP) — In its first case about the federal law that is credited with helping create the modern internet, the Supreme Court seemed unlikely Tuesday to side with a family wanting to hold Google liable for the death of their daughter in a terrorist attack.
At the same time, the justices also signaled in arguments lasting two and a half hours that they are wary of Google’s claims that a 1996 law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, affords it, Twitter, Facebook and other companies far-reaching immunity from lawsuits over their targeted recommendations of videos, documents and other content.
The case highlighted the tension between technology policy fashioned a generation ago and the reach of today’s social media, numbering billions of posts each day.
“We really don’t know about these things. You know, these are not like the nine greatest experts on the internet,” Justice Elena Kagan said of herself and her colleagues, several of whom smiled at the description.
Congress, not the court, should make needed changes to a law passed early in the internet age, Kagan said.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, one of six conservatives, agreed with his liberal colleague in a case that seemed to cut across ideological lines.
“Isn’t it better,” Kavanaugh asked, to keep things the way they are and “put the burden on Congress to change that?”
The case before the court stems from the death of American college student Nohemi Gonzalez in a terrorist attack in Paris in 2015. Members of her family were in the courtroom to listen to arguments about whether they can sue Google-owned YouTube for helping the Islamic State spread its message and attract new recruits, in violation of the Anti-Terrorism Act. Lower courts sided with Google.
The justices used a variety of examples to probe what YouTube does when it uses computer algorithms to recommend videos to viewers, whether content produced by terrorists or cat lovers. Chief Justice John Roberts suggested what YouTube is doing isn’t “pitching something in particular to the person who’s made the request” but just a “21st century version” of what has been taking place for a long time, putting together a group of things the person may want to look at.
Justice Clarence Thomas asked whether YouTube uses the same algorithm to recommend rice pilaf recipes and terrorist content. Yes, he was told.
Kagan noted that “every time anybody looks at anything on the internet, there is an algorithm involved,” whether it’s a Google search, YouTube or Twitter. She asked the Gonzalez family’s lawyer, Eric Schnapper, whether agreeing with him would ultimately make Section 230 meaningless.
Lower courts have broadly interpreted Section 230 to protect the industry, which the companies and their allies say has fueled the meteoric growth of the internet by protecting businesses from lawsuits over posts by users and encouraging the removal of harmful content.
But critics argue that the companies have not done nearly enough to police and moderate content and that the law should not block lawsuits over the recommendations that point viewers to more material that interests them and keeps them online longer.
Any narrowing of their immunity could have dramatic consequences that could affect every corner of the internet because websites use algorithms to sort and filter a mountain of data.
Lisa Blatt, representing Google, told the court that recommendations are just a way of organizing all that information. YouTube users watch a billion hours of videos daily and upload 500 hours of videos every minute, Blatt said.
Roberts, though, was among several justices who questioned Blatt about whether YouTube should have the same legal protection for its recommendations as for hosting videos.
“They appear pursuant to the algorithms that your clients have. And those algorithms must be targeted to something. And that targeting, I think, is fairly called a recommendation, and that is Google’s. That’s not the provider of the underlying information,” Roberts said.
Reflecting the complexity of the issue and the court’s seeming caution, Justice Neil Gorsuch suggested another factor in recommendations made by YouTube and others, noting that ”most algorithms are designed these days to maximize profits.”
Gorsuch suggested the court could send the case back to a lower court without weighing in on the extent of Google’s legal protections. He participated in arguments by phone because he was “a little under the weather,” Roberts said.
Several other justices indicated that arguments in a related case Wednesday might provide an avenue for avoiding the difficult questions raised Tuesday.
The court will hear about another terrorist attack, at a nightclub in Istanbul in 2017 that killed 39 people and prompted a lawsuit against Twitter, Facebook and Google.
Separate challenges to social media laws enacted by Republicans in Florida and Texas are pending before the high court, but they would not be argued before the fall or decided until the first half of 2024.
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Associated Press writer Jessica Gresko contributed to this report.
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At 103, Sister Jean publishes memoir of faith and basketball
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CHICAGO (AP) — At age 103, Sister Jean awakes daily at 5 a.m. She sits up quickly to avoid going to sleep again — “I’ve got too much to do,” she says. After prayers for the day ahead, she reads the Gospel on her tablet.
“I guess there aren’t too many 103-year-old nuns using iPads these days – there aren’t too many 103-year-olds, period,” she writes in her memoir that will be published Feb. 28. “But I’m pretty comfortable with modern technology. I’ve always said, ‘If you’re not moving forward, you’re going to get left behind real quick.’ Adaptability is my superpower.”
In “Wake Up with Purpose: What I’ve Learned in My First Hundred Years,” Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt tells her life story, offers spiritual guidance and shares some of the lessons she’s learned.
The beloved Catholic nun captured the sports world’s imagination and became something of a folk hero as the chaplain for the Loyola Chicago men’s basketball team that reached the NCAA Final Four in 2018.
She has been featured by newspapers and TV stations across America. Her NCAA news conference, she was told, had more journalists than Tom Brady drew at the Super Bowl. Her likeness appears on socks, bobbleheads, even a Lego statue at her gallery in Loyola’s art museum. She sees the attention as a holy opportunity to tell her story and share what she’s learned; to help others wake up with purpose. Among her priorities, there’s little that she enjoys more than talking with young people.
“I love life so much and enjoy being with young people,” she told The Associated Press. “They’re the ones who keep me going because they bring such joy into my life — and they keep you updated on what’s happening in their world.”
She arrived in a wheelchair for the interview at her office in the university’s student center. She wore purple Nike Air Max sneakers with the words “Sister” and “Jean” written on the back, and her maroon and gold Loyola scarf that often gets compared to Harry Potter’s. She smiled warmly and waved to prospective students and shook hands with current students, asking them about their classes.
“What’s your dream?” she asked some of them.
Samuel Grebener, a 19-year-old freshman, told her he was thinking about medical school. They then talked about their shared love for the Loyola Ramblers. “She knows more about basketball than me,” Grebener said.
It was 9 a.m. and by then, she had already written her usual scouting report and emailed the players on the team to congratulate them on a victory.
“I believe this was a turning point and that we’re now in a winning streak” she wrote. “Our next game will be challenging, but just keep working hard. I will be there in prayer and in spirit and bless your hands virtually.”
In her office — surrounded by bobbleheads, posters and pins with her image — she studied game stats carefully in preparation to meet with the team at practice. Before a pizza lunch at the nearby cafeteria, she met other students.
Catharina Baeten, a 20-year-old-junior, told Sister Jean she had decided to attend Loyola because of its excellent programs in psychology and women-and-gender studies. “And also because of you,” she told the nun.
“Everyone loves Sister Jean,” Baeten said later, recalling that she first met the nun during a tour of Loyola when she was in high school. “There’s not a single unkind bone in her body and she represents our values… she’s the embodiment of compassion.”
Born in San Francisco in 1919, Sister Jean grew up in a devoutly Catholic family. She witnessed the impact of the Great Depression, World War II and the building of the Golden Gate Bridge, which she recalls crossing on foot when it opened in 1937.
Her religious calling, she said, came at the age of 8. She was in third grade when she met a kind, joyful teacher who belonged to the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Brimming with admiration, she would pray every day: “Dear God, help me understand what I should do, but please tell me I should become a BVM sister,” she recounts in her memoir, co-written with sportswriter/broadcaster Seth Davis.
“I guess God listened to me on that one,” she writes.
She followed her calling to the order’s motherhouse in Dubuque, Iowa, where she made her vows. She went on to teach at Catholic schools in Chicago and southern California, where she also coached girls’ basketball, before she ended at Mundelein College — on the Chicago lakefront —in the 1960s. The school became affiliated with Loyola in 1991, and Sister Jean was hired to help students with the transition.
In 1994, she was asked to help student basketball players boost their grades – “the booster shooter” she called herself, and later that year she was named chaplain of the men’s basketball team. The role, she writes in her memoir, became “the most transformational and transcendent position” of her life.
“Sports are very important because they help develop life skills,” she said. “And during those life skills, you’re also talking about faith and purpose.” Her motto: “Worship, Work, Win.”
“I know that God will call me when he wants me. So, I just feel I have a lot more work to do,” she said.
During a recent practice, she watched from the sideline in her wheelchair. On a break, the players on the men’s and women’s teams took turns shaking her hand.
“Her consistency is incredible,” said senior forward Tom Welch, 22. “She does it every day, every game. She brings the same energy to our pregame prayers.”
She also breaks down the strengths and weaknesses of the rivals in her scouting report. She’s “letting us know who’s good at shooting, who to send to the free throw line… pretty in-depth details,” Welch said. “And then sometimes, you know, she’ll make us laugh, feel good for a game.”
The laughter has been needed this season. The team is 9-16 overall and last in the Atlantic 10 conference with a 3-10 record.
Allison Guth, the women’s basketball coach, called Sister Jean a legend.
“Every day I walk in the office and she’s in her office. You talk about being there at 103. It’s because it’s a passion for her. It’s about love,” Guth said. “I think they should be telling stories about her forever.”
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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
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Haley’s candidacy shows balancing act for women in politics
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In announcing her campaign for the Republican presidential nomination this week, Nikki Haley made a subtle reference to the historic nature of her candidacy.
“I don’t put up with bullies,” Haley said in a video that launched her bid to become the first female president of the U.S. “And when you kick back, it hurts them more if you’re wearing heels.”
Haley has plenty of accomplishments, including becoming the first woman elected governor of South Carolina and representing the U.S. at the United Nations. But her introduction captured the balancing act women — particularly conservative women — often navigate as they aspire to win the top job in American politics.
They must show toughness to prove they can compete against rivals who are almost always men for a job that has only been held by men. But there’s also something of an invisible line that can’t be crossed for fear of being viewed as too tough and repelling voters.
“We’ve seen higher levels of Republican women running and winning in recent elections,” said Kelly Dittmar, director of research and a scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. “But what you also see these women often doing is working hard to meet that double bind. … It’s like, ‘I’m tough, but I’m also feminine. I’m also meeting my kind of feminine expectations.’”
Sexism in politics is hardly limited to one political party, with women in public life often under pressure to appear “likable” in ways that aren’t expected of men. During a Democratic primary debate in 2008, a male moderator pressed Hillary Clinton on the “likability issue” in relation to her rival, Barack Obama.
“I don’t think I’m that bad,” Clinton responded. Obama broke in to say, “You’re likable enough, Hillary.”
More recently, prominent Democratic women have also sought to project toughness in their campaigns. Sharice Davids, a former mixed martial arts fighter, sparred in a 2018 ad for a Kansas congressional seat. Amy McGrath, who challenged Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell in 2020, highlighted her experience as a Marine fighter pilot.
But the dynamics are different, Dittmar said, in Republican politics, where voters tend to have more traditional views about stereotypical gender roles. That can incentivize Republican women seeking top offices to demonstrate both their toughness and femininity. She noted how former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin introduced herself as a vice presidential nominee in 2008 with a joke comparing hockey moms to a pitbull with lipstick.
“It’s another way to cue” to voters that candidates are both tough and feminine, Dittmar said.
Haley’s formal announcement in Charleston, South Carolina, on Wednesday was peppered with examples. A congressman described Haley as leading with “an iron fist in a velvet glove.” The mother of Otto Warmbier, the young American who died after he was held and tortured in North Korea, said Haley taught her how to fight but also checked on her with the compassion of a fellow mom. And Haley herself called on voters to send “a tough-as-nails woman to the White House.”
Haley is one of only five Republican women to launch prominent campaigns for the office this century. By comparison, 12 Democratic women have been prominent candidates, including six in 2020, according to CAWP. The 12 include Clinton as the party’s 2016 nominee and a 2020 candidate, Kamala Harris, who became the country’s first female vice president.
Women face other hurdles their male peers do not, including online abuse that overwhelmingly targets women, especially women of color, and sometimes-sexist media coverage.
In a pointed example Thursday, CNN anchor Don Lemon said that Haley “isn’t in her prime” because she is 51. He added that “a woman is considered being in her prime in her 20s, 30s and maybe 40s.” Lemon himself is 56.
Haley’s main competition so far for the nomination, former President Donald Trump, has a long record of insulting his rivals, targeting women with sexist attacks including criticizing their appearance.
Clinton’s campaign accused Trump during the 2016 election of repeatedly interrupting her during a debate, saying it resembled a frustrating experience many women have with men. Trump also made critical remarks about the appearance of the last major Republican female candidate to challenge him for the presidency, businesswoman Carly Fiorina.
Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the last of six women to drop out of the party’s 2020 presidential primary, referenced sexism as a factor, noting the two remaining hopefuls were white men. Trump said her problem was actually a “lack of talent” and called her mean and unlikable.
Before Haley made her bid official, Trump called her “a very ambitious person,” telling conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt that Haley “just couldn’t stay in her seat.” He also said he essentially gave Haley his blessing before she reversed course on an earlier decision not to challenge him. “I said, ‘You know what, Nikki, if you want to run, you go ahead and run.’”
Haley, a former accountant and state legislator who became South Carolina’s first female and first Indian American governor, is no stranger to sexist and racist attacks.
The daughter of Indian immigrants, she has written and talked about growing up in a small town as the only brown-skinned family. During her 2010 campaign for governor, a state lawmaker used a racial slur to reference her. He later apologized.
Former Rep. Susan Brooks of Indiana, who led GOP efforts to recruit and elect more women to the U.S. House, called Haley’s candidacy “good for the party” and the country.
Olivia Perez-Cubas is spokeswoman for Winning For Women, which formed to help elect more GOP women after Democratic women led a takeover of the U.S. House in 2018. She said the group wants to ensure the Republican Party is representative of the U.S., which means it needs more diversity, including more women.
She is also hopeful that having more women in office or running as candidates will help Republicans attract more female voters, who have been more likely to support Democrats than Republicans in recent presidential elections. AP VoteCast, a broad survey of the electorate, shows 55% of women voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and 43% voted for Trump.
“Voters like to see and hear themselves reflected,” she said. “And when we can put forward a strong candidate that’s a woman, that’s great for everyone.”
Still, Perez-Cubas acknowledged that just as in many careers, the bar for women is “always just a little bit higher.”
Republican businesswoman Tudor Dixon was the first woman to be the GOP nominee for governor in Michigan, defeating four male rivals in the 2022 primary. Her nomination was surprising to some voters, Dixon said, including one woman who liked the Republican’s policies but said, “I just can’t vote for you because you have four girls and I don’t think you should be leaving them.”
Michigan was one of five states where 2022 gubernatorial contests were between two women, a U.S. record. But it also led to “disgusting” comparisons between herself and Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Dixon said, such as who was younger or more physically fit — discussions that rarely happen in contests between two men.
She applauded Haley for getting into the race, saying it’s not an easy thing to do.
“You are personally attacked. You put yourself out there, and it’s hard,” she said. “But young women should see that they can do this, and that the future is that women are doing the same things that men are doing.”
Evelyn Sanguinetti, who was Illinois’ first Latina lieutenant governor when she served with Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner, had similar experiences on the campaign trail. She was excited about Haley’s bid, noting the historic nature of electing a woman who is of Indian descent and could, she said, lead with empathy and compassion at a time when the country is greatly divided.
“I’d like for our daughters to see that, because we’ve been seeing a lot of males, particularly white males, for a really long time,” Sanguinetti said.
In her Wednesday speech, Haley made a point to eschew so-called identity politics. But she stood on stage wearing the white of the suffragette movement and had a message to her rivals.
“As I set out on this new journey I will simply say this,” Haley said. “May the best woman win.”
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Associated Press writer Emily Swanson in Washington contributed to this report.
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