The Breslin Era

Sure, newspapers still have columnists. But the era of the city newspaper columnist has become a particularly artifact-y artifact of when newspaper journalism held real power. (No shots at Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman, but do they really feel like they’re writing as or for New Yorkers?) For The Point, Ross Barkan wrestles with Jimmy Breslin’s long shadow—and paints the portrait of a complicated man whose prose was as sharp as his views.

Certain writers curdle with time, while others manage to keep adequate pace with the accolades they amassed when alive. Breslin lacked the pretensions of his contemporaries. Although he was associated with the New Journalism that brought literary techniques to conventional journalism, he eschewed Wolfe’s pyrotechnics and Mailer’s existential swaggering; he had no signature outfit, never stabbed anyone and didn’t, like his sometimes-colleague and rival Pete Hamill, date Shirley MacLaine. He did not grasp at Hemingway’s shadow. His masculinity was not performed, nor was it tortured. He was more bookish than he let on— Dostoevsky was a favorite—and he wasn’t, unlike Hamill, prone to fits of reactionary nostalgia. Breslin’s columns, though crafted on deadline and yoked to long-faded news cycles, are wry and crackling enough—and tangle with more universal fare, like the nature of political power and the strictures of class—to appeal to those who never lived through his various heydays.

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What Does It Take to Actually Cook Like a Tradwife?

Fascinated by and somewhat jealous of the tradwife movement, Amy McCarthy attempts a weekend experiment: to live life in full tradwife mode for 48 hours, with a scrupulously clean house and food made from scratch.

The first task on my list was driving to a nearby farm, where I could buy raw milk on-site. Like most folks, I’m pretty skeptical of raw milk — pasteurization has literally saved millions of lives — but since raw milk is good for cheesemaking, and tradwives tend to love it, I was willing to risk it this one time. I plunked down $10 for a gallon and also snagged a pint of cream, because I’d need to churn my own butter, just like Smith, to cook my sandwich. Let no one suggest that I was not, at least for now, deeply devoted to tradwife cookery.

As my bread dough continued to rise, I set to work getting my gigantic Ballerina Farm pork roast into the oven. I seasoned it on both sides with lots of salt and pepper, then threw it into my cast-iron Dutch oven to sear. Dutch ovens are an important tool in the world of tradwives — preferably Staub or Le Creuset, in keeping with the subdued modern farmhouse aesthetic. Cast iron doesn’t have any of those freaky chemicals that linger in nonstick pans, and they just look old-fashioned.

Once the roast was browned on all sides, I doused it with a bottle of stout beer and put it in the oven for a low, slow cook. Then I quick-pickled a bunch of thinly sliced red onions with a little chile and dill seed, the perfect acidic foil to my decadent, porky dinner. It was at this point, about an hour in, that I realized that I was going to need that same Dutch oven to bake my bread — unlike Neeleman, my husband’s father didn’t co-found an airline, which means that I am limited to one piece of bougie cast iron at a time — and that wrinkle completely fucked with the timeline I’d planned for lunch.

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Lessons From a Mass Shooter’s Mother

In 2014, Elliot Rodger murdered six people, wounded 14 others, and killed himself in Isla Vista, California. The mass shooting, and in particular Rodger’s online associations with the “incel” community, prompted salacious news coverage that painted Rodger as an aberrant monster. In truth, he was an unwell, unstable young man whose actions—like those of all mass shooters—were ultimately preventable. Mark Follman spends time with Rodger’s mother, Chin, who since the terror and tragedy her son inflicted has made it her mission to understand what compels mass shooters to act and what it takes to stop them:

The public rarely hears from parents of mass shooters apart from brief statements of sorrow in the aftermath. (A notable exception was the mother of one of the Columbine school shooters in 1999, Sue Klebold, who became devoted to raising suicide awareness and later published a bestselling memoir.) The prevailing theme has long been that no one can see the violence coming, the parents included.

But that theme no longer holds, especially in light of a recent tragedy that could remake the legal landscape. Earlier this year, the mother and father of a 15-year-old mass shooter at Oxford High School in Michigan were convicted of involuntary manslaughter—an extreme case in which they’d ignored their son’s mental deterioration and gave him a gun just before he attacked in November 2021. In many ways, that scenario could not have been more different from Elliot’s. The Oxford shooter was an openly distressed minor living at home who was given no mental health care but access to a weapon. Elliot, by contrast, was a young adult out in the world who got extensive counseling and family support and skillfully hid his intent. Both cases, however, speak to the role of parents as potentially key to prompting expert intervention.

In a decade-plus of investigating mass shootings, I had never before heard of a perpetrator’s mother making the grueling choice to become a student of her son’s case. None of the nearly dozen threat assessment experts I spoke with for this story suggested they thought that Chin, or anyone else in Elliot’s life, was at fault for failing to anticipate what happened. Yet, Chin came to believe that there had indeed been warning signs, even though she’d had no way of knowing back then what they were. She feels she can help spread awareness, especially for people whose own loved ones might be turning dangerous. “I hope my hindsight will be others’ foresight,” she says.

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Behind the ‘Butter Board’: How the Dairy Industry Took Over Your Feed

Butter seems to be everywhere, from featured menu items at fancy restaurants to viral TikTok videos. Some dairy producers are worried that the new boom times, engineered by a powerful dairy lobby, come at a cost to the environment and to small farms:

Partnering with food companies to roll out products that contain ever-escalating quantities of dairy is one of the industry group’s tried-and-true strategies. In the last couple of years, Dairy Management has partnered with Taco Bell to launch a frozen drink mixing dairy with Mountain Dew and a burrito with ten times the cheese of a typical taco. The organization also assisted with last year’s rollout of pepperoni-stuffed cheesy bread at Domino’s and supported marketing efforts for General Mills’ Oui line of yogurts.

Thirty years after the era-defining “Got Milk?” campaign—itself a project of the California Milk Processor Board—the U.S. dairy industry’s PR machine appears to be getting a second wind. The point of all these efforts is straightforward: The dairy promotion boards’ mission is to increase demand for their products. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars, collected from farmers and milk processors, on annual research and advertising in hopes of growing the market for dairy domestically and abroad.

However, as dairy consumption and production continue to grow, so too does the industry’s environmental footprint. In 2019, the EPA estimated that U.S. dairy cattle emitted 1,729,000 tons of methane each year, pollution roughly equivalent to 11.5 million gasoline-powered cars being driven over the same period. A United Nations report found that the dairy sector’s global greenhouse gas emissions rose by 18 percent between 2005 and 2015.

Meanwhile, it’s not entirely clear that all these efforts are helping the average dairy farmer. The number of U.S. dairy farms has fallen by three quarters in the last 30 years, as farmers’ costs rise and milk prices fluctuate. Many small and mid-sized dairy farms have been driven out of business and farmers’ net returns fall below zero year after year. In 2000, farms with more than 2,000 cattle produced less than 10 percent of milk, but by 2016 farms of this size were responsible for more than 30 percent of U.S. production. The diverging trend lines have prompted some farmers to question whether the focus on market growth above all else—which has been accompanied by increasing climate pollution and the collapse of small dairy herds—is still the best policy.

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How a B.C. Student Died after Overdosing in a Victoria Dorm — and the Major Mistakes her Parents Say were Made that Night

Sidney McIntyre-Starko collapsed after ingesting fentanyl in a University of Victoria dorm room. Lori Culbert reports on the contradictions in the University of Victoria’s version of the timeline of events and the series of errors made that cost the student her life.

UVic insisted “naloxone was administered within seven minutes” of student witnesses calling for help, even though the 911 recording clearly shows it was 13 minutes. UVic said chest compressions were started three minutes after the naloxone, or about 10 minutes after students called for help, when the 911 call shows it was more than 15 minutes.

The university said it based its timeline on campus security tapes and information from the Saanich fire department, which arrived on school grounds at 6:43 p.m.

Campus security started chest compressions just as firefighters walked into the room, so UVic calculated the time of CPR starting at 6:43 p.m., roughly 10 minutes after the students called for help. UVic then deducted three minutes to determine that naloxone would have been administered about seven minutes after the phone call.

UVic’s chronology, though, didn’t account for the delay between fire trucks pulling into campus at 6:43 and arriving in the dorm room: A student who waited for the firefighters in the parking lot told Postmedia it took them several minutes to remove their gear from the truck and then they had to walk up three flights of stairs to reach the dorm room.

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Albuquerque Is Throwing Out the Belongings of Homeless People

The city has violated a court order and its own policies by discarding the personal property of thousands of homeless people, who have lost medications, birth certificates, IDs, treasured family photos and the ashes of loved ones. Pro Publica and New Mexico In Depth distributed cards to unhoused people, asking what the losses meant to them:

On a recent morning, Christian Smith ran an errand, leaving a shopping cart carrying everything she owned near the Albuquerque, New Mexico, underpass where she’d been sleeping.

When she returned, the cart was nowhere to be found.

Most of the belongings, such as clothing, makeup and blankets, could be replaced in time. But she panicked when she realized that her dentures, acquired after months of dental appointments, were also gone. Without them, Smith believed, it would be more difficult to find a job, prolonging her time sleeping on the street.

“It’s hard to eat, it’s hard to talk—I sound like a little kid,” said the 42-year-old native New Mexican. “It’s embarrassing.”

…

On a recent afternoon, Gabriel Rodriguez left a black duffel bag outside an Albuquerque shelter while he grabbed lunch. It contained a sleeping bag and clothing, as well as handwritten letters from his grandmother, who has since died.

When Rodriguez returned, it was gone and city workers said it had already been hauled away. Rodriguez said he had carried the letters from his grandmother as a reminder that even when he was going through a rough period, she had continued to check up on him.

“Everyone else in my life had forgotten about me,” he said.

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André 3000 Is at Peace (For Now)

Admittedly, the timing of this is weird: Hanif Abdurraqib and André 3000 talking about the flute album 3 Stacks dropped six months ago? But at the same time: Hanif Abdurraqib and André 3000 talking, period. As lyrical and loopy (respectively, and respectfully) as you’d hope for, with Abdurraqib making a compelling case that New Blue Sun isn’t just a flute album—it’s the exact kind of thing an artist needs to do to keep moving.

Pharoah Sanders never stayed in the same place too long. Neither did Nina Simone. Zev Love X walked out of KMD, found a mask, and MF DOOM was born. The distance between these sonic and aesthetic leaps, throughout Black music making, sometimes comes at a cost, but is the cost so much that an artist might sacrifice their own evolution, that is the question worth asking. As Don Cherry told us, “When people believe in boundaries, they become them.” 

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