Sleep significantly influences the effectiveness of care that caregivers provide to dementia and Alzheimers patients, according to the results of a study led by a UB faculty member considered one of the countrys foremost researchers on mental health, dementia and addiction in older adults.

Caregiver fatigue is significantly influenced by sleep quality, states the study led by Yu-Ping Chang, Patricia H. and Richard E. Garman Endowed Professor and associate dean for research and scholarship in the School of Nursing. Nurses should routinely assess caregivers level of fatigue and provide advice on monitoring fatigue and sleep quality on a regular basis.

Caregivers should manage fatigue by getting sufficient sleep and reducing stress, as well as seeking the appropriate health care when fatigue worsens, so that they can remain healthy for themselves and the dementia patients they look after, the study says.

The study notes that family members care for approximately 80 percent of individuals with dementia.

These caregivers are truly at risk of developing physical and emotional problems of their own while they are trying to provide care for their loved ones, says Chang, adding that fatigue can contribute to an increased susceptibility to illness and lead to decreased levels of energy and focus.

Often caregivers are so immersed in providing care that they are unable to see that their own well-being is declining, leading to the both a decline in health on the part of the caregiver and a decline in the quality of care they are able to provide, which also negatively impacts the recipient.

The study, Fatigue in Family Caregivers of Individuals With Dementia: Associations of Sleep, Depression and Care Recipients Functionality, was published this month in the Journal of Gerontological Nursing. It was co-authored by Rebecca Lorenz, Meg Phillips, His-Ling Peng and Kinga Szigeti.

The study surveyed 43 caregivers of dementia and Alzheimers patients. Participants were asked to provide information on the associations among fatigue, depression, sleep and care recipient functionality. They were monitored for high levels of fatigue and poor sleep quality.

The study found significant associations between fatigue and depression, sleep onset latency, sleep quality and care recipient functionality. The study also measured associations among energy and depression, sleep quality and care recipient functionality.

Caregivers who reported a higher level of depression were more likely to experience a higher level of fatigue and lower level of energy, according to the study results. Similarly, caregivers with poorer sleep quality experienced more fatigue and less energy. As care recipient functionality decreased, caregiver fatigue increased, and energy decreased.

Results indicated caregiver sleep quality was a significant predictor of fatigue and energy, according to the study.

The study adds to the limited information currently available about fatigue among caregivers of individuals with dementia, according to the researchers. Chang says more research is needed on how sleep quality affects depression and caregivers ability to provide quality care.

Further study in this area can help us better understand fatigue experienced by caregivers, providing insight into ways to improve the care-giving experience, the study says. Fatigue needs to be recognized as an important symptom among caregivers of individuals with dementia.

Chang notes that self-care is a necessity for family caregivers. Tending to your own physical and emotional well-being is just as important as making sure your family member gets their medication on time or is taken to their doctor appointment, she says. If the stress of caregiving isnt addressed, it can lead to burnout, and then both the caregiver and the person they are providing care for will be suffering.

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Fatigue, sleep play major roles in quality of care for dementia, Alzheimer's patients - UB Now: News and views for UB faculty and staff - University...

A Monterey County Superior Court employee who works at the Monterey courthouse has tested positive for Covid-19, and certain courthouse personnel are being told to self-quarantine for two weeks and get tested for the virus.

In an email sent to court personnel today, Sunday, June 14, Court Administrative Officer Chris Ruhl says certain court personnel who were physically at the courthouse starting on Tuesday, June 9 are being told to stay home, get tested and self quarantine for two weeks. The employees include all clerks area employees on the first and second floors of the courthouse.

Other employees, including bailiffs, private security staff, attorneys, probation officers and judicial officers who may be impacted, are being contacted directly today, June 14.

Cases for the Monterey courthouse will continue to be heard this coming week, Ruhl writes, and the courthouse underwent sanitization on Saturday. The clerks office windows will be closed to the public on Monday, June 15, but may reopen again on Tuesday for the rest of the week, depending on available staffing.

Services that have been being provided remotely, such as the Self-Help Center, will continue to be provided remotely.

The Marina courthouse, where traffic and small-claims cases are heard, was closed part of Thursday, June 11, and all day June 12 after an employee there showed symptoms of Covid-19 and then received positive test results. That courthouse was deep cleaned on Friday and will reopen to the public on Monday, June 15.

"As the employee who tested positive had limited and minimal direct interaction with the public, [the California Department of Public Health] has advised that notice to the public is not needed under these circumstances, because there is little to no risk that members of the public were exposed," Ruhl writes.

In all, between the Monterey and Marina courthouses, 35 employees are being asked to self-quarantine and get tested. The system has about 190 employees altogether.

As to the staffers on self-quarantine, "if their jobs are ones that can be done remotely, we will ask them to work remotely, or they have the option of taking leave," Ruhl tells the Weekly.

The Superior Court is doing internal contact tracing, with advice from the county Health Department on what to ask.

"We ask a whole series of questions, where they've been during the previous 48 hours, who they may have had contact with and who they've been closer to than six feet," Ruhl adds.

"We've done everything we can to make the courthouse as safe for people as it possibly can be, and there is always an element of risk here that's heightened because we're now reopened to the public and our staff is back on site."

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Monterey court staffer tests positive for Covid-19, certain employees are told to test and self-quarantine. - Monterey County Weekly

Photo-Illustration: Vulture

This article has been updated to include Apatows recent films, including this weeks The King of Staten Island.

The Judd Apatow Cinematic Universe is more than the work of just one man. And yet, whether Apatow writes, produces, or directs a film, his bighearted sensibility permeates the final product: that giddy, mockingly irreverent attitude toward romance and family that, nonetheless, has a deeply sentimental core.

Its been more than a decade since Apatow moved from TV (he was a writer-producer for the likes of The Larry Sanders Show, The Ben Stiller Show, and Freaks & Geeks) to become one of Hollywoods most bankable, distinctive comic filmmakers with The 40-Year-Old Virgin. But even before that, his affectionate, bro-friendly aesthetic which had been honed from years of stand-up and writing jokes for comics such as Roseanne could be felt in projects he wrote and produced, like The Cable Guy and Celtic Pride. But after Virgin, Apatow films were everywhere. Teaming with stars like Adam Sandler and Will Ferrell, he established a reputation for making smart variations of the typical mainstream broad comedy that celebrated overgrown adolescents but secretly hoped theyd one day find a good girl and settle down. Over time, Apatows approach has matured and grown more sophisticated, but that core pleasure remains.

To celebrate Apatows growing oeuvre, were ranking the best of his movies. But first, some ground rules. Because wevealready chronicled the highs and lows of Ferrells career, were leaving off the movies they made together:Anchorman,Anchorman 2,Step Brothers,Talladega Nights,andKicking & Screaming. And were also skippingBegin Again, the Keira KnightleyMark Ruffalo musical drama that Apatow produced because, frankly, its so thematically and tonally removed from the Judd Apatow Cinematic Universe were not entirely convinced IMDb isnt actually screwing with us.

25. Year One (2009, producer) What must have sounded like a good idea in the pitch Jack Black and Michael Cera as sort of proto-cavemen is an absolute disaster onscreen. Black looks so bored and Cera looks so deeply uncomfortable and displeased to be there that its little wonder both actors essentially rebooted their entire careers after this tanked in theaters. This is the nadir of the Apatow universe, a film that comes dangerously close to being a vicious accidental satire of Apatows entire comedic vision: dumb stoners roaming around an ugly set saying non sequiturs for quick cash. Want to know the worst part? This was Harold Ramiss last film.

24. Heavyweights (1995, writer, executive producer) Apatow has said that Heavyweights was born from the idea of a prison-break movie set at fat camp, and the thing about that idea is, well, its really not all that funny. The movie gives the kids (including a young Kenan Thompson) a certain dignity, which is to be admired, we suppose, but this is still nothing but fat jokes and a frighteningly hammy performance from Ben Stiller as a self-help guru who is using the camp to try to make a line of workout videos. (One gets the sense that if Stiller could buy up all the DVDs of this one, he would.) None of the kid actors are particularly distinguished and, honestly, this movie seems beamed in from another planet entirely. Of note for Apatow completists: Paul Feig, director of Bridesmaids, has a leading role as a skinny camp counselor. He doesnt look particularly comfortable.

23. Celtic Pride (1996, writer, executive producer) Again, a good idea: Two white Boston fans (Dan Aykroyd and Daniel Stern a odd pairing, to be sure), afraid theyre going to lose to Utah in the NBA Finals, kidnap the Jazzs star player (Damon Wayans) before Game 7. Lots could be done with this concept the inherent irrationality of sports fandom is begging to be satirized but the film doesnt capitalize on any of it. Instead, you get a lot of mugging and screaming from the two leads and no real evidence that Apatow was even near the set during filming. Celtic Pridecame out a month before The Cable Guy,delivering aone-two punch to Apatows movie dreams and sending him back to TV. For a while.

22. Drillbit Taylor (2008, producer) At the time of its release, Drillbit Taylor had a cloud hanging over it: This Apatow-produced teen comedy was one of Owen Wilsons first films after recovering from his 2007 suicide attempt. That timing didnt do this lackadaisical film any favors. Playing a liar and panhandler who becomes a bodyguard for some high-school geeks, Wilson is his usual charming and loopy self, but Drillbit Taylor (co-written by Seth Rogen) is an infinitely lamer version of Superbads combo of boisterous adolescent laughs and unexpected sweetness. Apatows wife, Leslie Mann (a constant bright spot in his films), has some flirty fun as Wilsons love interest, but everybody involved with this dud has been much, much better somewhere else.

21. Fun With Dick and Jane (2005, writer) Such a waste of an opportunity that its still frustrating a decade later. This remake of the 1977 comedy follows an upper-middle-class couple (Jim Carrey and Ta Leoni) as they resort to crime after the company they work for turns out to be an Enron-level disaster. This is fertile territory, particularly at this specific time in American history, but the movie has little to no interest in following up on any of it. Its far more comfortable just ceding the whole screen to Carrey, who is capable of playing real characters but does the exact opposite here, hamming and mugging away in one of his absolute worst performances.

20. Get Him to the Greek (2010, producer) Sure, Russell Brands obnoxious British rock-star Aldous Snow was a kick in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, but did we really need a whole movie about him? Universal thought so, so we got this tiresome comedy about an uptight music executive (Jonah Hill) who has to ensure that the volcanic Snow makes it to a crucial comeback gig. Get Him to the Greek is far more interesting as a time-capsule memento: It documents that short, strange period when Hollywood thought Brand was going to be huge, Hills bread and butter was playing shlubby dorks in broad comedies, and dramatic actress Rose Byrne (whos hilarious as Snows pop-star girlfriend) hadnt yet figured out that she was one of her generations greatest comedic dynamos.

19. Juliet, Naked (2018, producer) Apatow has worked on a lot of films about immature men, but director Jesse Peretzs adaptation of a Nick Hornby novel shows what happens when the execution falls flat. Chris ODowd plays Duncan, a superfan of a faded fringe singer-songwriter (Ethan Hawke). Duncans longtime girlfriend, Annie (Rose Byrne), has never understood the appeal, but when she begins an unexpected email correspondence with the artist, she starts to see him and her relationship with going-nowhere Duncan in a new light. Juliet, Naked is a quirky romantic comedy helped immensely by its three appealing leads. But its also fatally adorable in how it depicts these mismatched characters and their ho-hum problems. As a result, this tame date movie isnt nearly as anarchic or wise as Apatows best man-child manifestos.

18. This Is 40 (2012, writer, producer, director) Yeesh. A movie so navel-gazing not only does Apatow cast his own wife and kids as his wife and kids, and Paul Rudd as a charming record-exec-dude version of Judd Apatow, he also spends half the film trying to get us to buy Graham Parker albums that watching it feels like being stuck at a neighbors house while he shows you pictures of his familys vacation to suburban Los Angeles. The Wealthy, White Ennui is oppressive throughout, but the worst part is that the movie isnt even funny. This is Apatow out of ideas and just grabbing at everything in arms reach; this is Apatow as that date who never asks you any questions about your life. And its nearly two-and-a-half hours long!

17. You Dont Mess With the Zohan (2008, writer) Those who complain that Adam Sandler just serves up lazy mainstream comedies tend to forget this commendably nervy satire about an Israeli commando (Sandler) who runs off to New York to follow his bliss and become a hairdresser. Co-written by Apatow, alongside Sandler and Robert Smigel, You Dont Mess With the Zohan is a grenade hurled clumsily at politically correct watchdogs, mocking both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict when its not making obvious jokes about randy middle-aged women or giddily spoofing action-movie tropes. But commendable only gets you so far, and Zohans hit-to-miss joke ratio is, well, about as good as any of Sandlers lazy mainstream comedies. That said, wed support any Kickstarter effort to finance a spinoff film focusing on John Turturros nutso terrorist character.

16. Wanderlust (2012, producer) One of those cases where a lot of funny people get together and the sparks just dont fly, Wanderlust unites directorco-writer David Wain with Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston as upwardly mobile New Yorkers who move to a Georgia commune in order to change their lives. A top-notch supporting cast that includes Ken Marino, Keegan-Michael Key, Jordan Peele, Malin Akerman, Kathryn Hahn, and Alan Alda does little to help this genial but forgettable hippies sure are goofy comedy. Justin Theroux is really funny as a condescending tree-hugger, but in retrospect, it might have been better if the filmmakers had just scrapped the whole plot and let Rudds character try to talk dirty for 90 minutes.

15. May It Last (2017, director, producer) Apatows lone feature documentary co-directed with Michael Bonfiglio follows the Avett Brothers during the making of their True Sadness album. (It played in theaters for one night before airing on HBO.) If you love the Avett Brothers, youll love this movie; May It Last is made with a gentle fans touch, and you get a real sense of how the brothers affection for each other and their family history infuses their music. But if you dont know the band, youll be on the outside looking in. Apatow loves the Avett Brothers, and why not? Theyre a great band. But thats mostly all the movie has to say. Still, were glad Apatow seemed to enjoy himself so much making it.

14. The Five-Year Engagement(2012, producer) Inevitably, as Apatow and his Rogen-Segel-Franco crew aged, their movies leaned toward themes of growing older and having a life with stakes and consequences. The problem here is that this film is about the dissolution of a relationship but it never quite steps outside of that sad-sack Why wont she love me? Apatowianism. Segel (who co-wrote this film) loves his girlfriend (Emily Blunt, mostly wasted), but they can never quite get it together, and after the umpteenth scene of them fighting with each other, you find yourself cheering for them to break it off already. This is only pretending to be a mature comedy. The movie also doesnt even realize that its supporting characters should be the leads; no offense to Segel or Blunt, but when Chris Pratt and Alison Brie (with a British accent!) have this much chemistry together, you just give the movie over to them.

13. The Cable Guy (1996, producer) A critical and commercial disaster at the time, The Cable Guy has developed an admiring cult over the years especially among those who appreciate how Jim Carrey (the worlds biggest comedy star of the time) conspired with director Ben Stiller to make an unapologetically dark character piece far removed from Ace Ventura. More daring than it is successful, the film gets a lot of mileage out of the odd-couple tension between Carreys psychotic cable guy and Matthew Brodericks milquetoast dweeb. The Cable Guy isnt always funny but its always uncomfortably strange, as Carrey tries to seduce his hesitant new buddy into becoming closer and closer friends. (Apatow, who served as producer, worked on the script but didnt receive credit.) One suspects that in our Adult Swim modern era, The Cable Guy would have found its audience easier, but back in 1996, it was simply too prickly for its own good.

12. Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008, producer) Here Segel works much better (in another film he wrote), as a hopelessly brokenhearted TV producer who goes all the way to Hawaii to escape his TV-star ex-girlfriend (Kristen Bell), only to see her show up there with her new rock-star boyfriend (Russell Brand, who has never been better in a film since). Here the woeful sad-sack character thats a staple of Apatow films works, partly because Segel plays him so winsomely, and mostly because hes written so sincerely. Not everything about the Mila Kunis character works shes a little too Perfect Woman for Sad Sacks but the Dracula puppet-show ending remains perfect.

11. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (2016, producer) All right, so it runs out of steam as it goes along, the songs (outside of Finest Girl (Bin Laden Song) and Equal Rights) arent top-shelf Lonely Island, and the celebrity cameos provide diminishing returns each time a new one shows up. Its still funny almost an updated, less movie-obsessed Walk Hard, with Andy Samberg and company satirizing musical genres one suspects Apatow doesnt listen to a lot of. One thing the Lonely Island guys and Apatow have in common (other than penis insecurity): Theyre all good-hearted, gentle satirists, so while the laughs come at you fast, theyre delivered with far more sweetness than bile. This is all good fun. And it is a LOT of good fun.

10. Funny People (2009, writer, director, producer) Yes, Funny People is Apatows longest film as a director the overstuffed two-and-a-half-hour epic he had the clout to make only after Knocked Ups box-office triumph. And sure, it meanders badly, not just telling the story of an aspiring comic (Seth Rogen), but also a lazy movie star (Adam Sandler), his ex (Leslie Mann), and her husband (Eric Bana). Nonetheless, this is a laudable swing for the fences, with Apatow trying to become the new James L. Brooks by merging comedy, romance, drama, and slice-of-life wistfulness into an often-perceptive look at the business of being funny. Outside of Punch-Drunk Love, Sandler has never been better or more revealing, dissecting his lowest-common-denominator appeal with a blunt honesty he rarely allows. Indulgent and undisciplined as Funny People may be, its also kinda thrilling, with Apatow taking risks and encouraging his star to do the same.

9. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007, writer, producer) An intriguing and essential entry in the Apatow canon because it, unlike so much of his other work, never once attempts to be serious or emotional. This is just a flat-out spoof, and its a terrific one. John C. Reilly plays the eponymous Dewey Cox, a country singer who breaks big and becomes a perfect clothesline for an impressive series of gags about music biopics, particularly Ray, Walk the Line,and even The Doors. This is as close to an old Zucker brothers joke-fest as youre going to find anymore, and though not all the gags score, most of them do. And every scene with Tim Meadows trying to stop Dewey Cox from doing drugs is perfect.This is a dark fucking period!

8. Trainwreck (2015, director, producer) Heres where Apatow confidently enters his veteran-comedic-filmmaker period, smoothly directing Amy Schumers script about a commitment-phobic mens-magazine writer (Schumer) who falls for a good guy (a superb Bill Hader). Trainwreck is the sort of New Yorkset comedy-drama that once made Woody Allen a legend, capturing the city as an endlessly romantic, bustling place where interesting, flawed people stumble over each other on the path to love. (Tellingly, Schumer takes a shot at Manhattan and Soon-Yi.) LeBron James is hilarious playing himself, Colin Quinn might actually make you teary-eyed, and a whos who of reliable comedic supporting players everyone from Vanessa Bayer to Randall Park to Jon Glaser are a constant delight. This is one of Apatows most polished and mature film, which doesnt mean there isnt room for good oral-sex jokes.

7.The King of Staten Island(2020, director, producer) For all the focus on yet another immature lead character who tries to learn how to grow up and join life with the rest of us,The King of Staten Islandreally does show a legitimate evolution for Apatow, and a desire to grow. Ironically, thats because his focus this time is on a kid named Scott (Pete Davidson, who co-wrote based on his own life story) who isnt just in a state of arrested development; hes truly, profoundly damaged. That tension, between Davidsons pain and stubborn resistance to change and Apatows traditional coming-of-age, givesThe King of Staten Islandsome real dramatic friction, making it a compelling watch even when Apatow, as usual, wanders off course occasionally. (He wouldnt be our first pick to direct an attempted robbery thats meant to be taken even slightly seriously.)

Davidson is the center of the film, but the real heart is found in the people who surround him and try to both help him and keep themselves sane in forever-shifting orbit: Marisa Tomei is wonderful as Scotts mother; Steve Buscemi hits home as the fire chief who knew his late father; Bel Powley elevates a rote role as the pseudo-love interest who cares about him but doesnt want to be dragged down by him; and best of all, Bill Burr is oddly searing and real as the potential stepfather who wants to help this kid but has plenty of his own problems. Yes, the movie is too long and has too many unnecessary subplots. But it steers toward truth and honesty in a way Apatows movies havent always. Moving forward, this is a very good sign for Apatow.

6. The Big Sick (2017, producer) The story goes that Kumail Nanjiani met with Apatow to pitch an idea about a ghost witch. Only when that went nowhere did Nanjiani decide to tell the producer about something more personal, the story of how he and his wife (screenwriter Emily V. Gordon) met. Thank God for second chances, both in pitch meetings and in relationships. The Big Sick is the result of that pitch, as Nanjiani and Gordon scripted their initial courtship, unfortunate breakup, and her subsequent stay in a hospital after she fell into a coma. One of 2017s best feel-good comedies, The Big Sick earned the screenwriting duo an Oscar nomination and helped launch Nanjiani to a whole new level of stardom. But the whole ensemble shines, particularly Holly Hunter and Ray Romano as Emilys beleaguered parents facing their own relationship issues.

5. Pineapple Express (2008, producer) This was the brief moment when it seemed that the Apatow stoner aesthetic, adapted by an indie filmmaker who had a way of wordlessly elevating every scene, could produce something approaching art. Pineapple Express is funny, to be sure, but it also raises the stakes, putting our two heroes (Seth Rogen and James Franco, in what we personally think might be the best nonSpring Breakers performance hell ever give) in a murder plot that actually requires them to engage, at last, with the world around them. The ending is a little too self-consciously Were doing 80s-movies tropes! and seeing where David Gordon Green would go after this slightly devalues what he was going for here, but this is as daring and original a movie about the friendship between dealer and stoner as humans could possibly conceive.

4. Superbad (2007, producer) 2007 was the Summer of Judd, thanks to the smash success of Knocked Up and this Apatow-produced high-school comedy about two dorks (Jonah Hill and Michael Cera) looking to get laid before they graduate. Superbad was written by Seth Rogen and his partner Evan Goldberg, and alongside director Greg Mottola, they captured the horny, anxious flop-sweat of life as a teenage boy: Your hormones make you feel invincible, but your hopeless awkwardness remind you what a putz you really are. Like a lot of high-school movies, Superbad is really about the pain of saying good-bye to childhood, but its consistently raucous enough that the sneaky sentiment surprises you. And its a sure bet that, eight years later, a lot of people still think Christopher Mintz-Plasses real name is McLovin.

3. Knocked Up (2007, writer, director, producer) Knocked Up signaled the moment when critics started taking Apatow seriously as a comedy auteur, which has been a mixed blessing considering the sometimes self-indulgent tone his movies have taken since. Nonetheless, Apatows second feature has a killer hook: Prototypical slob (Seth Rogen) has drunken one-night stand with a classic uptight workaholic (Katherine Heigl), getting her pregnant in the process. The setup plays out predictably the immature man-child grows up but Apatows screenplay is full of texture and heartfelt observations: how nobody ever really feels like an adult, how life is what happens when youre busy making other plans, whether Steely Dan are incredible or gargle balls. Watch Knocked Up now, and theres an extra layer of poignancy: Heigl bad-mouthed the movie after its release and yet never got close to making anything as good again.

2. The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005, writer, director, producer) The movie that finally broke Apatow and ushered in a whole decade of comedy is still the funniest, sweetest, and most original of all of Apatows personal productions. Sure, this has all the regular gags and ten years later, even when it could be considered problematic, the You know how I know youre gay? battle between Paul Rudd and Seth Rogen seems to sum up every white heterosexual teenager weve ever met and the Apatow signature of overgrown man-children putting off adulthood. But it also has a huge-hearted, star-making performance from Steve Carell at its center, a legitimately complicated romantic lead (played by Catherine Keener!), and as deep a comedy bench, right before they all exploded, as you will find. Seriously: Rudd, Rogen, Elizabeth Banks, Romany Malco, Jane Lynch, Mindy Kaling, Kevin Hart, Kat Dennings, and Jonah Hill as a reasonably befuddled customer.

1. Bridesmaids (2011, producer)Apatows best film brought him full circle, reuniting him with Freaks & Geeks partner Paul Feig to produce a very funny comedy co-written by Saturday Night Lives Kristen Wiig about a luckless woman (Wiig) whos asked to serve as maid of honor at her best friends (Maya Rudolph) wedding. What was deemed at the time to be a commercial risk Will audiences see a female-driven broad comedy? was actually a thing industry insiders used to wonder proved to be ground zero for many of modern comedys biggest talents. Bridesmaids didnt just cement Wiig and Feigs film careers, it also paved the way for Damages Rose Byrnes second life as Hollywoods go-to hilarious sidekick and Melissa McCarthys ascension to the A-list. (And dont forget the star-making turns from Chris ODowd and Ellie Kemper.) Though only Bridesmaids producer, Apatow oversaw a movie that merged the outrageous laughs and just-hanging-out vibe of his own films with Wiigs clear eye for the complexity of female friendships and her fascination/revulsion with getting-to-the-altar romantic comedies. Bridesmaids is great because its funny and sweet and silly andsurprisingly touching: the Apatow aesthetic perfected.

Grierson & Leitch write about the movies regularly andhost a podcast on film. Follow them onTwitteror visittheir site.

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The Best Judd Apatow Movies, Ranked - Vulture

SACRAMENTO (CBS13) Its been two weeks since the death of George Floyd. Countless protests and the fallout from Floyds death that have filled computer screens and social media accounts for 14 days can be troubling for your mental health, according to therapist Destiny Robbins.

We are being re-traumatized but on the second side of that, we are also being desensitized. So there is a part where this is becoming the norm, said Robbins, owner of Healing Solutions Therapy.

Robbins specializes in addressing trauma and depression. Since Floyds death, Robbins said she has had numerous calls from new clients asking for help and resources to process.

We dont want to lose hope and we dont want to deal with this alone, she said

As many people are looking for ways to process their emotions, Franzetta Cheathon, a Rancho Cordova resident, said she has had a hard time dealing with her emotions.

READ:Police Chief Responds To Sacramento Activists Demand For Police Reform

Its heart-wrenching because we saw a murder on tv that was taped by someones cell phone, she explained It has almost brought me to a depression. A sadness so deep that I just want to shut everything out. Its awful, its awful. He was crying mama that tore at my heart and all the hearts of mothers of sons.

As images, protests and the graphic video of Floyds death circulate, people of all races and ages are demanding change. In Rancho Cordova, two high school seniors organized their own march Monday.

Voice these thoughts and emotions. Your voice is your most powerful weapon, said Cordova high school senior Khyra Clark to a group of her peers.

Clark and her best friend Rylie Dimas organized a protest from city hall to the front of the Rancho Cordova Police Department.

To know that you are not the only person feeling these emotions. Feeling the extreme happiness as a community and to know that people have your back, but to also feel the extreme sadness and fear and hurt that we even have to be our here protesting that someones life actually matters, that shouldnt be a question, said Dimas.

As people continue to process, Dimas and Clark are finding purpose in protesting.

Im glad that we took this death, even though it was so savagely done, into such an amazing thing and we can be his voice, Clark said.

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Dealing With Mental Health During Protest: Therapist Recommends Finding Connection And Practicing Self-Care - CBS Sacramento

LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--JPMorgan Chase and The Princes Trust today announce the transformation of a pre-employment healthcare programme to rapidly place young people into clinical and non-clinical roles in the health and social care sector. Traditionally delivered face-to-face, JPMorgan Chases financial support of 540,000 will help deliver the Get Started with Health and Social Care programme online.

In the midst of the COVID-19 health crisis, demand for talent from hospitals has surged across the country and the need to recruit the right people to meet that demand is urgent. This collaboration serves to address the health and social care sectors urgent hiring needs while supporting unemployed young people into training and work.

On top of digitisation of the core programme, the support from JPMorgan Chase will help The Princes Trust to increase its outreach efforts, job placements, and mentoring and coaching support for the young people. With this funding, in the next 11 months, more than 1,000 young people will receive support through the programme. Participants will be connected with work opportunities, with an aim for half to secure roles in health and social care after the completion of the programme.

Ruby Smith, NHS Director at The Princes Trust, said: "There is an incredible amount of talent, skill and insight that young people could be contributing to our healthcare system, particularly at this time of great need. We're delighted to be working with JPMorgan Chase to connect young people who are looking for work with the employers in health and social care who are looking for their future workforce. For young people and for our healthcare system, we're living in uncertain and scary times, but we are here to offer some hope. There's no doubt this collaboration will empower young people to make transformational changes to their futures and will add unquantifiable benefits to our healthcare system."

Vis Raghavan, CEO of J.P. Morgan EMEA, said: The COVID-19 crisis is having a profound impact on the economy and it is hitting our underserved communities the hardest, and also families and individuals on a low income. Through essential collaboration with local government, businesses and community organizations, and by using our business expertise, we are lifting up communities in need.

Hang Ho, Head of Global Philanthropy EMEA and LATAM, J.P. Morgan, said: As the COVID-19 crisis continues to impact the UK, young people are facing a rapidly changing labour market and job instability in the short and long term. With some schools and training centres remaining closed, helping young people towards clear pathways to good jobs is essential. This programme helps both young people into a career in healthcare, and fills an urgent demand for workers in the healthcare industry.

New JPMorgan Chase investments in the UK

Since the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, JPMorgan Chase has invested $11.2m (equivalent to approximately 8.75m) across EMEA, aimed at addressing the escalating impact of the crisis for people who are disproportionately affected such us vulnerable, hard-hit individuals, including 2.2m in the UK following todays announcement.

Today, the firm is deploying 1.4m, the latest UK portion focussed on providing immediate relief and inclusive recovery by supporting financial health for people in vulnerable communities who are struggling with loss of income, and helping workers navigate the shifting labour market and young people stay enrolled in school. Here are the new UK grants comprising the firms new 1.4m UK commitment:

The need

The COVID-19 health crisis has had and will have a deep and long-lasting impact on the global economy. The resulting economic effects and social shock are expected to have a disproportionately negative effect on those with less financial buffers, the traditionally underserved and under-represented around the world.

The need for support for advancing financial health and skills development is urgent:

Whats Next

About JPMorgan Chase

JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: JPM) is a leading global financial services firm with assets of $3.1 trillion and operations worldwide. The Firm is a leader in investment banking, financial services for consumers and small businesses, commercial banking, financial transaction processing, and asset management. A component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, JPMorgan Chase & Co. serves millions of customers in the United States and many of the worlds most prominent corporate, institutional and government clients under its J.P. Morgan and Chase brands. Information about JPMorgan Chase & Co. is available at http://www.jpmorganchase.com.

The new investments are part of JPMorgan Chases $250 million global business and philanthropic commitment to support immediate and long-term economic and public health challenges of the COVID-19 crisis. The firm is using data-driven solutions to support the most vulnerable individuals, small businesses and communities as they face financial hardship and uncertain work opportunities, the shifting business landscape and increased pressure to access or maintain affordable housing. JPMorgan Chase will continue to leverage its core businesses, areas of expertise and existing partners to develop an ongoing response to COVID-19. For more information, visit jpmorganchase.com/covid-19.

About The Princes Trust

Youth charity The Princes Trust helps young people to develop the confidence and skills they need to realise their ambitions, so that they can live, learn and earn. Founded by The Prince of Wales in 1976, the charity supports 11 to 30 year-olds who are unemployed, struggling at school and at risk of exclusion.

Many of the young people helped by The Trust are in or leaving care, facing issues such as homelessness, mental health problems, or have been in trouble with the law.

The programmes offered by the charity give vulnerable young people the practical and financial support needed to stabilise their lives, helping develop self-esteem and skills for work. Three in four young people supported by The Princes Trust move into work, education or training.

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JPMorgan Chase and The Prince's Trust Collaborate to Digitise NHS Employment Programme for Unemployed Young People - Business Wire

NEW DELHI : At northward of 11GB per user per month, India has witnessed a 30% spike in Internet data usage amid the crornavirus pandemic which has pushed data consumption 2-3 years into the future, says a new surve by professional services firm Ernst & Young.

A survey titled Digital Consumer Survey: Shaping the new normal, analyzes views of 2,600 plus consumers to highlight the changing behaviour and perception toward digital services. 76% of the respondents were high-data users while 24% were basic users.

The survey reveals, nearly 33% respondents upgraded broadband plans for higher data packages with unlimited plans accounting for 40% of total upgrades. Many basic users, or those using data only for thin web-browsing, chatting and calling are migrating to the high user bucket. Nearly 11% of basic data users upgraded their existing packs to either unlimited or 50%-100% higher data for more content streaming, gaming and video calling.

With remote working, it has increasingly becoming commonplace to adopt video conferencing and productivity tools. The survey reveals that as many as 76% respondents are either first timers or have increased the time they spent on video calling.

90% respondents are spending more time on digital activities such as content streaming, e-learning, infotainment and social media. Nearly 61% consumers are streaming more content than they were before the lockdown with time spent on video streaming having surged 1.2 times to an average of 4.2 hours per user per week. Further, 60% respondents prefer subscription-based video-on-demand, while 20% prefer TV entertainment. Nearly 50% of respondents who prefer TV, are spending more time watching movies, shows and news telecast.

The integration of digital with education has led to the emergence of a new breed of digital learners who are adopting technology faster than ever. Nearly 59% respondents are learning online and almost 50% respondents prefer learning on EdTech platforms over accessing learning material scattered on web portals. The report says that scaling network connectivity and access to technologies in far flung rural hinterlands is an opportunity to drive radical socio-economic gains.

The pandemic has also accelerated the transition to a cashless ecosystem. Digital platforms are gaining strength as a preferred medium for most purposes, nearly 38% respondents started using digital payments for the first time. Digital wallets stand strong, with 53% respondents making payments through e-wallets. In fact, telecom operators strategies to monetize digital payments are structurally positive, with 12% respondents leveraging self-care applications for payments. The market is poised for a growth with the digital payment transaction value forecast to double from 2019 to touch $135.2 billion in 2023.

The digital consumer expects speed, agility and self-service, virtually. According to the survey, nearly 50% of the service requests were raised through chatbots, self-care applications and social media platforms. Nearly 70% respondents have indicated preference toward online chats through mobile apps or outreach through instant messaging platforms for service requests. 30% users indicated preference for digital Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) or self-help tutorials and videos for troubleshooting while 51% of them cited privacy concerns as a top barrier to adoption of digital services.

Digital consumption patterns are evolving in exciting ways. The new normal is all about creating hyper-personalized and connected experiences for a digital consumer. The digital services industry is poised for growth, and the right accelerators will go a long way in enabling the lives of 1.3 billion Indians with a click and tick", Prashant Singhal, emerging markets TMT (Technology, Media & Entertainment and Telecommunications) leader at EY, said in a statement.

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The AIDS response has taught the world the importance of protecting human rights and promoting gender equality when fighting a disease. COVID-19 has amplified that lesson.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, UNAIDS has repeated the call that governments must protect human rights and prevent and address gender-based violencean issue that is even more vital now that lockdowns are putting women and girls at an even higher risk of intimate partner and sexual violence. Equally, UNAIDS has made it clear that sexual and reproductive health services should be recognized as the essential services they are.

To drive those messages to decision-making tables and to the front lines of the response, a new UNAIDS report shows how governments can confront the gendered and discriminatory impacts of COVID-19. Presenting six areas as imperatives to address the needs, and protect the rights, of women and girls during the pandemic, the report highlights the needs of women and girls in all their diversity, particularly the most marginalized, and the importance of access to essential health services. The neglected epidemic of gender-based violence, the misuse of criminal and punitive laws, the importance of education, health and well-being and the value of womens work and making unpaid care work everybodys work are also showcased.

Just as HIV has held up a mirror to inequalities and injustices, the COVID-19 pandemic has puta spotlight on the discrimination that women and girls battle against every day of their lives, said Winnie Byanyima, Executive Director of UNAIDS. Many of the drivers of inequality in the HIV epidemic are the same as those driving inequality and injustice in the COVID-19 pandemicboth epidemics can only be successfully fought by putting gender equality at the centre of the response.

The report underscores that sexual and reproductive health and rights are often the first to be sacrificed during epidemics and that the gains of the past decade must be protected. The report also makes it clear that scarce resources must be focused on the most marginalized women and girls, including sex workers, gender diverse people, women in prison and migrants and others without proof of employment or residence.

A selection of practical steps that UNAIDS has been taking with partners in countries to maintain essential health-care services, mobilize emergency legal protection and support populations facing human rights violations during the COVID-19 outbreak are presented.

For example, in Nigeria and Cte dIvoire UNAIDS is partnering with the International Community of Women Living with HIV to facilitate women living with HIV to work as community pharmacists, who help with the collection and home delivery of antiretroviral therapy and other medicines for people who were unable to access their treatment owing to COVID-19 restrictions.

In Latin America, the United Nations Population Fund and UNAIDS are offering contraceptives and HIV testing,as well as hygiene kits and information on gender-based violence and HIV, to women who are in compulsory quarantine after fleeing the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela because of COVID-19.

In Morocco, UNAIDS, in partnership with the Ministry of Health, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and civil society, is mobilizing self-help groups, medical and psychosocial support and family mediation services for populations at higher risk of HIV. Collaborations between the government and civil society have helped to ensure continued access to antiretroviral therapy, opioid substitution therapy and food aid during the pandemic.

Above all, the report has the message that health, safety, dignity and rights, especially for women and girls, in all their diversity, must not be compromised and women should lead the call for change.

Get out there and fight, use your voice to demand and take action for your communities, added Ms Byanyima.

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UNAIDS highlights six critical actions to put gender equality at the centre of COVID-19 responses - UNAIDS

By: Express News Service | Pune | Updated: June 15, 2020 9:58:12 pm The proceeds from the sale of masks will be utilised to support the Covid-19 relief efforts of Concern India Foundation a public trust that supports various NGOs. (Express/Representational)

With face masks becoming part of the new normal across the world, Masks dArt, an online charitable initiative, has attempted to raise funds for the fight against the coronavirus pandemic by capitalising on the artistic potential of masks.

The initiative organised an online exhibition of face masks featuring 50 artists across India. The masks were sourced from a womens self-help group and couriered to artists across the country.

Michelle Poonawala, one of the artists, painted her masks with a butterfly motif. Art is a powerful voice and I always try to send a message through my work. We are living through a history in making and this is the best time to introspect about what we are doing and where we go from here. For me, the butterfly symbolises freedom, positivity, hope, peace and the fragility of life. For someone else, it might be the metamorphosis of the butterfly and perhaps the world around us is changing for the better, too, she said.

Madhuri Badhuri, another artist, said, I painted the masks streamlined with my recent Moon series. The aspect of art is that it documents history and the works of artists are the statements of that particular time. Art is an integral part of the movement, so years from now, people will look at the masks and know of the time when all were wearing masks due to the pandemic. It is a unique art memorabilia, a novelty piece created by an artist.

The proceeds from the sale of masks will be utilised to support the Covid-19 relief efforts of Concern India Foundation a public trust that supports various NGOs. The funds will be used to provide ventilators, ECG machines, portable X-Ray machines, protective kits with sanitisers, disposable gloves, masks, personal protection equipment as well as the distribution food grains to orphanages, old age homes, daily wage workers and migrant labourers.

It was challenging with amid the national lockdown and the cyclone in the east. However, in spite of these roadblocks, the artists were most patient and obliging, said Radhika Gulati, director of Secure Giving, which organised the exhibition.

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The president of the Caseys convenience store chain based in Ankeny says they learned during restrictions brought on by the COVID-19 that customers like to help themselves.

Caseys president, Darren Rebelez, says people like to pick out their own slice of pizza or other food items. When we made the shift to full service our guests did not like that, Rebelez says. Although we had people with masks and gloves on handing them their food they didnt like having to wait they were accustomed to doing it themselves.

During a conference call to report quarterly earnings, Rebelez says he visited several stores, but didnt take a poll. I dont have any empirical data to share with you in terms of a percentage of like it, or dont like. All I can tell you is people were complaining when we made the change. People were happy when we changed it back, according to Rebelez.

Chief financial officer Bill Walljasper says they did see the impact in food sales. As we moved from a full service to a self-service model depending on the category thats a self-service we see an uptick from ten to 15 percent on a category, Walljasper says. So, definitely that seems to be an overwhelming desire to have that self-service. At least in our market area.

Walljasper says convenience stores are designed to get people in and out quickly and that was one of the issues with full service. Caseys has 2,154 stores in Iowa and seven other states

(Photo from Caseys website)

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Casey's finds during pandemic restrictions customers would rather help themselves - Radio Iowa

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Nearly a billion pounds of beef move through the JBS processing plant in Grand Island, Neb., every year. Except this year: Over the last two months, the company has had to slow production as meatpacking plants around the country have been roiled by coronavirus outbreaks.1

In late March, Nebraska state health officials, fearing such outbreaks, urged Governor Pete Ricketts to temporarily close the plant.2

After Ricketts rebuffed them, stories of missing hand sanitizer and soap, no personal protective gear, and insufficient safety precautions began to leak out of the plant, which as of April had 260 confirmed Covid-19 cases that can be tied back to it. Its difficult to know how many more among its 3,000 workers have been infected since then, because Ricketts has refused to disclose official plant numbers. Across the country, rural areas that contain meatpacking plants with outbreaks of Covid-19 have rates five times those of other rural areas.3

In a daily briefing on April 23, Ricketts dismissed those who thought the largely immigrant meatpacking workers in his state deserved relief by warning, Think about how mad people were when they couldnt get paper products.4

President Donald Trump issued an executive order five days later recognizing meat as a scarce and critical material essential to the national defense, adding that he would ensure a continued supply of protein for Americans under the Defense Production Act of 1950. Rickettsundeterred by the outbreaks in his state and emboldened by the White Houseissued a press release declaring May as Beef Month in Nebraska.5

Politically, this shows that meat is indispensable, said University of Notre Dame professor Joshua Specht, whose 2019 book Red Meat Republic recounts the history of American beef production. Shortages of meat will personalize the pandemic for everyone, and that is a major political problem when youre trying to say the country is open for business.6

The Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare the fragility of American supply chains, and nothing demonstrates that more acutely than the price spikes, depleted meat aisles, and imposed rationing on a food that weve come to expect in limitless quantities. The brutality of effectively sacrificing human beings to keep those aisles well stocked might be the breaking point in what was already the liveliest debate inside food: the future of beef in the American diet.7

Industrial beef is the most polluting, the most carbon-emitting, and the most resource-intensive form of protein. A 2018 study published in the journal Nature recommended that the average US citizen cut beef consumption by 75 percent if we want to keep the global temperature rise to less than 2degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. In the context of Covid-19, University of Minnesota biologist Rob Wallace has made the connection between global industrial livestock farming and the proliferation of superviruses.8

If youre reading this, youve probably already heard that you should be cutting down on beef. But Trumps and Rickettss decisions show that with beef so embedded in American culture, its not going anywhere without a fight.9

JBS: This Nebraska meatpacking plant processes nearly a billion pounds of beef a yearand is a Covid-19 hot spot for its workers.

Rickettss warning of riots if big government comes for our beef echoes the claim by former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka that the Green New Deal is a harbinger of authoritarian communism. They want to take away your hamburgers, he bellowed in a speech at the 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference. This is what Stalin dreamt about but never achieved. Gorka made it explicit: To threaten the primacy of meat in the American diet is to threaten a pillar of what it means to be a free American.10

Sebastian Gorka: The former Trump adviser warned, They want to take away your hamburgers. (CC 3.0)

Gorkas ravings about government-mandated burger confiscation sound like some nefarious plot by the same postmodern cultural Marxists decried by the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson. In 2018 he revealed on the wildly popular Joe Rogan Experience podcast that he was following an extreme form of the now trendy high-fat, high-protein paleolithic and ketogenic diets: just beef and water. Thanks to the carnivore diet, as he called it, Peterson said hed lost 50 pounds, cured his 30-year gum disease, and seen his lifelong depression cease. Meat, manIm telling you, meat, reads an endorsement of the diet beneath an Instagram photo of him solemnly cutting through a steak.11

Jordan Peterson: Claims he lost 50 pounds, and cured depression and gum disease thanks to a carnivore diet. (CC-BY-SA-2.0)

Peterson first emerged in the public consciousness after protesting a Canadian policy about observing gendered pronouns, which he claimed as evidence of creeping authoritarian rule. He subsequently rode that wave of free-speech martyrdom to a best-selling book, 12 Rules for Life, full of banal self-help infused with social Darwinism. Peterson addresses feelings of real alienation in his audience, but instead of locating the structural sources of their misery, he harks back to an imaginary past when men could be men, before Western civilization became preoccupied with social justice and feminism. In recent years hes become a kind of soothsayer for the mostly young white male demographic that is the subject of worried fascination in the current age of homegrown extremism.12

Its been 30 years since Carol J. Adamss landmark The Sexual Politics of Meat connected the subjugation of animals with the subjugation of women. Studies have shown that men are less likely to embrace eco-friendly practices because we perceive them as feminine; a recent survey of men in the United States found that they were less likely to wear a protective face mask during the pandemic because they viewed them as a sign of weakness.13

Petersons promotion of the carnivore diet was met with scornful incredulity and ridiculed as a self-defeating attempt to own the libs. But defenders of the diet pushed back, reminding us that humans are meant to eat meat and that it provides essential nourishment in the wasteland of the standard American dietdefined by high-fructose corn syrup, refined grains, and industrial seed oils.14

We shouldnt project our politics onto people who are half-dead, trying to get their lives back. Thats what his daughter, Mikhaila Peterson, 28, told me when I asked her about the politics of promoting an all-beef diet in the 21st century. She put her dad on the diet after it helped her with a crippling autoimmune disease and has since rebranded it as her very own Lion Diet.15

You have to reach a certain level of desperation to try it, she admitted. But because of how the media has been portraying Dad, the diet has been unfairly associated with the alt-right. Assigning people a conscious political identity based on their diet would be unwise; Adolf Hitler, famously, was a vegetarian.16

Adrienne Rose Bitar: Diet books replicate the 19th century religious form of the Jeremiad. (Cornell University History Dept )

But it would be equally unwise to ignore the embrace of red meat by the far right. Diet books were among the best-selling literature of the 20th century. More than simply offering guidance on which foods to eat and which to avoid, they remain a way to construct grand narratives about who we are. Self-help gets trashed as being an opiate of the masses, said Adrienne Rose Bitar, the author of Diet and the Disease of Civilization. But very few dieters see themselves on an individual quest for bodily perfection. Rather they recognize societal problems like obesity or diabetes and think that theyre going to do their own small part, however impossibly, to create a better world.17

Rogan and alt-right icons like Mike Cernovich and Alex Jones are already established in the dude self-care space, selling skin serums and supplements that might otherwise be considered ladylike. In recent years soy boy has eclipsed cuck as a term to deride the tofu-loving, beta-male archetype. The same return to a past, forgotten glory of men that is central to the appeal of people like Peterson and the nostalgic project of making America great again can also be found among advocates of low-carb regimes like the paleo, keto, and carnivore diets, which stress a return to the natural and traditional foodways of a healthier past.18

Conservative radio host Dennis Pragers faux university PragerU released a video last year titled How the Government Made You Fat, in which the low-carb cardiologist Bret Scher critiques the US Department of Agricultures food pyramid. The antiBig Government message is clear: You are responsible for your own health. Dont rely on the government to take care of you. For the One America News Network correspondent and former Pizzagate enthusiast Jack Posobiec and the far-right commentator Stefan Molyneux, praising meat-heavy, low-carb nutrition is a way to draw a contrast with the crypto-vegetarian piles of birdseed at the public schools their children attend, and Molyneux speculated it could be a communist plot. For others, eating meat is a way to police the boundaries of masculinity. In 2017 the far-right Canadian commentator Faith Goldy asked whether our fridges were the reason men were all of a sudden signing up for womens studies classes. Alex Joness former sidekick Paul Joseph Watson wondered if soy was making Western men more likely to adopt left-wing beliefs. Anthony Johnson regularly hosts paleo nutritionists as part of his premier manosphere gathering, the 21 Convention.19

Even the onetime steak salesman Trump did some nutritional virtue-signaling when it was revealed that he regularly enjoyed two Big Macs at dinner. His former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski quickly clarified to CNN that Trump never ate the bread, which is the important part. The National Cattlemens Beef Associationwhich lobbied for meatpacking plants to remain open during the pandemicdispatched its former senior director of sustainable beef production research, Sara Place, to assure the conservative media host Glenn Beck that methane emissions from cow farts were fake news and that cattle are part of the climate change solution.20

Faith Goldy: The fault is not in ourselves, but in our fridges. (CC 3.0)

Contemporary right-wing politics survives on a diet of grievance, persecution, and misdirection. In the right-wing mind, feminists and social justice warriors have been joined by the CEOs of Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, creator of the Beyond Burger (the demand for alternative meat has skyrocketed but has not surpassed the demand for beef during the pandemic), Bill Gates, animal rights activists, Greta Thunberg, and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to carry water for the vegan agenda. Modern society has created the least masculine men in history, reads one tweet by the Internets mysterious self-described meat philosopher Carnivore Aurelius. Another proclaims, The Carnivore Diet is the red pill that wakes you up to reality. In these circles, the war on meat is a war on men. Red meat is the red pill.21

Even before the current once-in-a-century public health crisis, it was an anxious time to try to eat healthy. Chronic afflictions like obesity, cancer, heart disease, and diabetescommonly referred to as diseases of civilizationpersist at rates bordering epidemic levels. As populations around the world modernize and adopt something closer to the standard American diet, health outcomes worsen. Our understanding of nutrition hasnt helped.22

The Australian historian Gyorgy Scrinis coined the term nutritionism for a paradigm that allows food corporations to rebrand and remarket ultraprocessed food as health food. In 2007 he identified a nutritional loss of legitimacy that had opened the door to the construction of new nutritional worldviews.23

The paleo diet (the defining diet of the era, according to Bitar) is one example. Drawing on evolutionary biology and the caveman mystique, paleo mimics what was supposedly available to preagricultural humans, with a meat-heavy, grain-free, minimally processed diet. Its what we ate before everyones health went to shit, to quote John Durant, the author of The Paleo Manifesto. The framing is instructive. All diet plans are an attempt to mediate the transition from an agricultural, pastoral lifestyle to an urban, industrialized oneand the distance thats put between us and our food. Existential anxiety over what that change has done to our food and thus ourselves is what unites all diet literature.24

Diet books replicate the 19th century religious form of the jeremiad, Bitar said. They say we are fat, we are ugly, we are sinnersbut together we can lose the weight and regain our understanding of what nature and God can bring. In an essay for the food studies journal Gastronomica, historian Michael Kideckel noted that this understanding of food invariably launders a reactionary view of history.25

In this philosophy of the past, Americans must rediscover a primitive instinct from a time when women did more work within the home, immigrants and indigenous people were even more marginalized, and fewer people saw culture and tradition as the product of specific human decisions, Kideckel wrote. For Durant, our collective health went to shit when women left the kitchen, outsourcing the cooking to corporations. Their traditional role was always an important one and shouldnt be trivialized, he said in a 2017 interview.26

Dieting has been considered a feminine pursuit for so long that when Weight Watchers first marketed to men in 2007, said Tulsa University professor Emily Contois, the tagline was Real men dont diet. But the first diet plans emerged during the mid- to late 19th century, when the ideal man came to be embodied in muscular selves, nations, empires and races, wrote the essayist Pankaj Mishra, who drew parallels between the 19th centurys ideas of manliness and those that contaminate politics and culture across the world in the 21st century.27

Lord Salisbury: Inventor of the eponymous steak. Civilization is harmful to your health. (History Dept. Cornell University)

The earliest diet to go by that name was a meat-heavy, proto-low-carb plan credited to a wealthy Londoner named William Banting, who in 1863 published the pamphlet Letter on Corpulence. It was such a best seller that Bant became a synonym for diet. Dr. James Salisbury, the inventor of the steaks, was another diet pioneer. He experimented with periods of eating only a single food like bread, oatmeal, baked beans, or asparagus before landing onwhat else?beef. It was the food that is most easily digested and that we can subsist on exclusively the longest, wrote Elma Stuart, a follower of Salisburys, in her book What Must I Do to Get Well?28

Diet theorist Mose Velsor: better known as Walt Whitman, inveighed against confections, sweets, salads, things fried in grease.

Salisbury saw his book The Relation of Alimentation and Disease as a way to address the character and capabilities of Western men. Civilization, he wrote, was damaging their physical and moral health, making them more likely to sin and shirk responsibility. He may have been influenced by Mose Velsor, a columnist for the New York Atlas, who in the 1850s worried that city life was producing a generation of soy boys. When Velsors columns were rediscovered and republished in 2016 as Guide to Manly Health and Training, they bore the authors real name: Walt Whitman. Healthy manly virility, he wrote, was being depleted. To foster a more pure-blooded race, Whitman recommended an end to confections, sweets, salads, things fried in grease. Instead he advocated eating fresh meat with as few outside condiments as possible.29

The connection between eating meat and the superiority of Western men was drawn out further in an 1869 essay The Diet of Brain Workers by the neurologist George Miller Beard. What have the natives of South America, the savages of Africa, the stupid Greenlander, the peasantry of Europe, all combined, done for civilization, in comparison with any single beef-eating class of Europe? he wondered. Beard is better known for his theory that the Euro-American brain was so powerful that it could overwork itself into a condition called neurastheniastress or exhaustion. In his 1881 book American Nervousness, he wrote that the affliction that came to be known as Americanitis was caused by the technological advancements of modern civilization. One such advancement was the mental activity of women.30

To cure Americanitis, Beard prescribed that men harden themselves by working on cattle ranches, of course. Theodore Roosevelt would epitomize this transformation in American masculinity. He gained a reputation in the New York Assembly as an effeminate jane-dandy but returned from his time on the frontier with the stoic, aggressive cowboy bravado that would define and plague American masculinity for at least 100 more years.31

As president, Roosevelt popularized the term race suicide to describe the fear that excessively fertile immigrants would outbreed their racial betters. Calling it an unpardonable crime, in a 1914 article, Twisted Eugenics, he castigated women who chose to attend college or use contraception instead of focusing on repopulating the white race. Its not unlike the present-day fears of white genocide or the great replacement that youll find in the tweets of Iowa Representative Steve King or in the white nationalist literature uncovered on Trump senior policy adviser Stephen Millers e-mail server.32

Toughening up on the frontier also meant interaction with Indigenous tribes. Even Salisburys beef remedy was inspired by his observations of Native Americans. There is no reason why we of civilized communities should not live to an even greater age than man does in the wild state, he wrote. But its unlikely that Salisbury ever witnessed the healthy wild state of beef eaters, because cattle are not indigenous to North America.33

Beefs journey to the top of the American diet began with the near extinction of bison and the genocide and forced removal of Indigenous tribes who subsisted on hunting that animal. Cattle ranching becomes central to the dispossession of Native lands and the takeover of western ecosystems, Notre Dames Specht pointed out. Cattle are a tool of, and a justification for, taking that land.34

At the same time that American manhood was redefined as the strong, silent type roaming the western frontier, beef became hypercommodified, readily available and relatively inexpensive for the first time in history. The idea that beef is something you eat all the time is the product of industrial agriculture, its a product of cities, and its a product of the expansion of commodity markets, Specht continued.35

To have a seemingly limitless supply of beef was such a global novelty that it became a badge of Americanness. Immigrants would write home and say, Life in America is hard, but at least I get red meat all the time, Specht said. We can but wonder how the largely immigrant workforce at the JBS plant in Grand Island felt about receiving 10pounds of free ground beef as a coronavirus bonus.36

W here do you go these days to mingle with some of the thought leaders advocating for beef to remain a central part of the American diet? Out west. Last August, over 150 people came together for three days at the University of San Diego student center for the eighth annual Ancestral Health Symposium, a big-tent conference that encompasses paleo, keto, and carnivore people along with anyone else who wants to examine current health challenges through the context of our ancestral heritage, according to the Ancestral Health Societys website. Its a heterogeneous community with plenty of internal debate, but its members share an intense skepticism of the medical, nutritional, and scientific establishment and a celebration of real, natural, traditional food.37

This is the Wild West, man. This is the fringe that the mainstream poaches from, a sturdily built, sandy-haired chiropractor from Los Angeles told me as we looked out at a room of lean, mostly white attendees outfitted for functionalitywicking athletic shirts, yoga pants, five-toed shoes, Xero sandals, blue-light-blocking shades, and slick metal water bottles. He wasnt wrong. The ancestral health community has been on the front lines of reclaiming healthy fat from unfair criticism; despite critiques of the community as overly patriarchal, some feminists have praised ancestral diets as a respite from a culture that equates beauty with thinness, to quote Bitar. If you know about collagen peptides, circadian rhythms, gut microbes, or the dangers of inflammation, these people may have had something to do with it.38

Yet there remains the fact that humans must change our relationship to meat, especially beef, if we are to avoid ecological catastrophe, let alone improve the lives of meatpacking workers or help the animals themselves. But if meat is of essential value to human health, we seem to be in an existential bind, trapped between our perceived nutritional needs and the capacity of our ecosystem and labor force to meet them. In Can Seven Billion Humans Go Paleo? the writer Erica Etelson wondered, If theres not enough animal protein to go around without cooking the planet, who should be first in line? Thats the mostly unasked question at the heart of the meat debate: one of power and ethics, not fat and protein. Thats also the dilemma that many people grapple with (this soycialist writer included) as they eat the occasional burger, steak, or oxtail.39

Ive been called right wing for saying meat is healthy, said Diana Rodgers, a farmer and dietitian. Its very political, but it shouldnt be. Youre either a less-meat environmentalist or you eat a lot of meat and dont care about the environment. Rodgers was in the midst of debunking the EAT-Lancet Commissions planetary health diet, which aims to accommodate the growing global population and planetary limits. The guidelines allow for only one serving of red meat per weeka death sentence to the people in this small auditorium. Rodgers disclosed that the General Mills meat snack company Epic Provisions had paid her way to the conference to help promote her upcoming book and documentary Sacred Cow (the nutritional, environmental and ethical case for better beat, according to her website), which was cowritten by Robb Wolf, the author of the best-selling The Paleo Solution.40

Allan Savory: Former soldier, ecologist, rancher, and originator of the controversial holistic management approach to soil conservation. (CC-by-sa-4.0)

Rodgers argues that beef is the ideal food for the health of the planet because of the potential for holistic range managementan approach to cattle rearing popularized by Zimbabwean rancher Allan Savory and his namesake institute. To oversimplify, cattle are strategically moved around a plot of land in a way that mimics the millions of bison that grazed for thousands of years in North America. This grazing technique restores grasslands and revitalizes soil in a way that allows for substantialmaybe even earth-savinglevels of carbon sequestration. While holistic range management (and the prospect of carbon-neutral burgers) makes intuitive sense and has serious momentum, its also highly polarizing.41

There are credible scientists on either side of the Savory debate, including David Briske and Richard Teague, two professors in the same department at Texas A&M University. Savorys past as an officer in the Rhodesian Army hasnt done him any favors among his critics, who portray him as a delusional iconoclast with no respect for scientific rigor. But to his proponents, which include a growing list of farmers around the world, Savory is a misunderstood sage. The complexity and dynamism of his methods cannot be fully appreciated in summary form.42

If there is a middle ground between the dystopian reality of the beef industry and the unsettling vision of a world without animal agriculture posited by Impossible Foods CEO Pat Brown, holistic range management could be just that. It doesnt seem right that the Norwegian billionaire couple behind EAT-Lancet, Gunhild and Petter Stordalen, are allowed to prescribe diets for the rest of the world while they fly around in a private jet with their own carbon footprint unregulated. I was open to the possibility that the Shake Shack burger I ate the night before was not a personal moral failing but actually a righteous rebellion against the 1 percent. That would make life easier. Then an audience member asked Rodgers if there would be enough land to support a large population on the beef-heavy diet she recommends. She assured him there would be.43

And it could sustain the same population or more as an agrarian-based economy?44

Rodgers was visibly flustered. What I can tell you is that theres too many of us, she replied. Do we want lots of people fed like crap, or do we want healthy people? Our current system is completely failing and producing sick people and killing our environment. So regenerative agriculture is actually the only solution we have moving forward. And, you know, theres too many people.45

Perhaps Rodgers should have chosen an other title for her lecture than Feeding the World a Healthy and Sustainable Dietand other opponents than EAT-Lancet and Impossible Foods. At least their visions attempt to account for the worlds population as it exists. Only 3percent of the beef produced in the United States is designated as grass-fed; even less is raised by Savorys method. Any hypothetical solution in which factory farms transform into holistically managed ranges will ultimately have to confront the multinational agribusiness industry that has been consolidating power for decades. Eating beef is political, whether we want it to be or not. But what was most troubling about Rodgerss answer was her too many people declaration: In those thought experiments, its always the less powerful who count as extra. Its not necessarily right wing to say that meat is healthy, but to quickly revert to claims of overpopulation calls up the darkest strains of both the conservation movement and ancestral health diet literature.46

In 1975 a doctor named Walter Voegtlin self-published his foundational text, The Stone Age Diet, which told a story similar to Rodgerss about the lack of sufficient animal protein to feed a surplus population. Voegtlins solution included limit[ing] reproduction to superior types of individuals and practicing euthanasia of imperfect newborns. Rodgers and others who advise people to eat more meat surely dont endorse that approach, but its worth highlighting how similar their framing is: For some to thrive, others must disappear.47

The Blonde Buttermaker: This former vegetarian liberal has become an animal-fat-obsessed white nationalist.

I kept Rodgers and Voegtlin in mind toward the end of an interview with Tristan Haggard, the proprietor of the popular keto-carnivore YouTube channel Primal Edge Health, which is also the name of his diet brand. A gregarious former vegan, he had spent much of our two-hour Skype call building his case that the plant-based-food movement evolved out of the eugenics movement and is behind a conspiracy to depopulate the world by feminizing men through industrialized vegan kibble. His mantra, Eat meat, make families, is a response to what he sees as the growing cultural degeneracy of modern city life. Instead of being concerned with how you can feed your family or protect your community, men are taught about how cool they might look in a dress, Haggard said. Thats why he fled California to raise his family on a farm in the Andes Mountains in Ecuador. Now he lives like a 21st century primal maneating grass-fed steak, drinking raw milk, and creating content for his subscribers and clients about the dangers of modern soycial engineering.48

I told Haggard I had just heard Rodgers recite the same Malthusian talking points he attributes to vegans. Im glad you brought that up. Its important to read with nuance, he said. While he recognized that overpopulation arguments are usually directed at his neighbors in the Global South, hes appeared on the white nationalist publishing company Arktoss channel to talk up the carnivore diet as part of the fight against globalist hegemony, and hes also rushed to the defense of the Nazis kicked out of the farmers market in Bloomington, Ind. It seems that for Haggard, regardless of your political leanings, if youre on the side of more meat, youre part of the resistance.49

Haggard touts small-scale, local agriculture as a weapon against the globalists, yet he calls climate change a word game and factory farming a straw man argument. His fun-house mirror of inconsistent, repellent, and altogether weird beliefs is not uncommon among prominent followers of Weston Price, the godfather of the ancestral health movement. In 1939, Price published a flawed but compelling ethnography, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, describing traditional preindustrial diets from the Alps to the Andes. He found several constants, the most important of which are the vitality of animal fat and the degeneration of peoples health after exposure to the Western industrial diet. Today his followers have translated his work into contemporary diet guidelines. Rather than eschew any specific food group, they focus on minimally processed food and old-world farming and food-preservation techniques.50

In the vendor room at the Ancestral Health Symposium, I spoke with a disarmingly friendly volunteer from the Weston A. Price Foundation about the pleasures of bone marrow and roasting vegetables in duck fat and another who was in the midst of shooting a documentary about grass-fed beef. The foundation is best known for Nourishing Traditions, the best-selling cookbook by its founder, Sally Fallon Morell, which popularized Prices work. While the pandemic has shown the importance of local, organic farms, which Prices followers have supported for years, theyre still easily dismissed as cranks because of their opposition to the scientific and medical establishment, as demonstrated by their commitment to unpasteurized dairy.51

Unfortunately, thats not the most controversial claim the foundations leaders have made. In 2018, Morrell wrote on her blog that the Earth stopped warming in the late 1990s and now is in a cooling trend, so we dont have to feel guilty for driving an SUV or eating bacon. The foundation doesnt have an official position on climate change, and when some of her followers protested in the comment section, she replied that the discourse around global warming reminded her of the relentless propaganda against animal fats. Like Haggard, she seems willing to embrace anyone sympathetic to her cause.52

In 2015, Morrell appeared on Red Ice Radio, a Swedish media platform that the Southern Poverty Law Center called one of the most effective white nationalist outlets on the Internet. Before it was banned from YouTube, Red Ice unveiled a cooking and lifestyle show hosted by a neo-Nazi domestic goddess named the Blonde Buttermaker. In an interview on the white nationalist channel NoWhiteGuilt, she spoke of how influential Prices work had been on her journey from former liberal vegetarian to animal-fat-obsessed white nationalist. In the wrong hands, emphasizing ancestral wisdom can be reinterpreted as a permission to embrace ethnonationalism.53

But Prices research does have value if read critically. In Diet and the Disease of Civilization, Bitar analyzes his work using the anthropologist Renato Rosaldos concept of imperialist nostalgia, in which agents of colonialism long for the very forms of life they intentionally altered or destroyed.54

Nowhere was such nostalgia more evident than during the symposium presentation by Paul Saladino, a young, charismatic, and totally shredded carnivore MD. Saladino described the uphill battle in consciousness to convince the world that plant fiber is unnecessary for human consumption. Repeating the ancestral health movements dictum that Indigenous cultures prized fat as a symbol of health and fertility, Saladino encouraged the audience members to swap their kale salads for rib eye and organ meats. He closed by invoking an Andean tribal saying, Wiracocha, which he translated as I wish you a sea of fat.55

Wiracocha was also used to describe Spanish conquistadors, whose white skin was foamy like fat. Its a coincidence that reveals the historical revisionism pervasive in this community. Throughout the weekend there were photographs of healthy, happy, well-fed preindustrial Indigenous groups. But there was no acknowledgment that the rise of cattle ranching depended on eliminating the means of subsistence for Indigenous tribesor that the destruction of foodways has been a deliberate strategy of colonial powers. The slideshows simply showed beautiful people victimized by the forces of nature, whose wisdom was now bestowed on us. A young woman asked Saladino what he would say to someone curious about the carnivore diet. Welcome to the tribe, he replied.56

A sympathetic look at this confused yearning for tribal belonging would take into account what Bitar discovered as the main recurring theme in paleo diet books. Surprisingly, it has little to do with food or nutrition. Our ancestors enjoyed a balanced life of working, playing, relaxing, and worshipping. They felt closeness to one another and everyone had purpose, Bitar said, quoting from Living Paleo for Dummies. Its a human need as basic as food: meaning and connection, especially in a country defined by loneliness and living through a second gilded age of economic inequality.57

This was made even clearer during the last presentation I attended, by a naturopath named Nasha Winters. She informed us that in the past three years, American life expectancy rates declined. The diseases of civilization now have companyopiate addiction, alcoholism, and suicide, the diseases of despair.58

Nowhere is the degeneration of the quality of life in the United States more acute than in the communities surrounding the meatpacking plants that dot rural areas. Americans do need better diets, but we also need to realize that while consumer politics might be transformative for individuals, as public policy, it amounts to window dressing. As University of CaliforniaSanta Cruz professor Julie Guthman noted in her book Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism, the artificially low price of food has long functioned as a replacement for a living wage and a social safety net, and it comes with serious environmental and public health consequences.59

Over the past 100 years, from Upton Sinclair to Michael Pollan, many Americans have been curious about how the sausage is made. But what most of them really want to know is whether they can keep eating it. The public became concerned with the conditions inside meatpacking plants not out of a concern for workers health but out of worry for what meat shortages might do to their own. Sinclairs famous regret was that he aimed for the publics heart with The Jungle but hit them in the stomach instead. He hoped that exposing the horrifying conditions in meatpacking plants could spark a socialist uprising, but all he got was the Meat Safety Act of 1906.60

The logic that consumer prices are the highest good in terms of social policy, thatcomes from beef, said Joshua Specht. Any movement to reduce meat consumption must address the role that cheap beef has played in providing meaning and nourishment to the masses, or else that ground will be ceded to the Sebastian Gorkas and Donald Trumps of the world.61

The coronavirus pandemic and the looming global ecological crisis are collective problems that individual solutions wont be able to solve. But as Bitar writes, the best way to approach the question of diet is not to call out ignorance but rather to understand myths. When we examine these myths, we can see them truly as the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and, perhaps, a story for which we can write a better plot. As difficult as it is to forecast what America will look like after the pandemic, it could be enough of a ground-shifting historical event to spawn new storiesabout why we eat, what we eat, and what we must change to survive.62

Food is so much about who we are and who weve been. To just change that overnight is not really that easy, actually, said Specht. But food isnt just a building block for who we are, its a building block for the kind of society we want to live in. If we can ground our food system in a more rigorous understanding of history, perhaps then we can remake it as a reflection of the society we want to live in. That would be the real red pill, waking us to a new reality.63

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How Red Meat Became the Red Pill for the Alt-Right - The Nation