Is Demi Moore's The Substance a gross-out masterpiece or shallow and sexist?

This story was originally published by Yale Environment 360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Drive through rural Minnesota in high summer and you’ll take in a view that dominates nearly the entire US Midwest: an emerald sea of ripening corn and soybeans. But on a small operation called Salvatierra, 40 minutes south of Minneapolis, Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin is trying something different. When he bought the land in 2020, this 18-acre patch had been devoted for decades to the region’s most prevalent crops. The soil was so depleted, Haslett-Marroquin says, he thought of it as a “corn and soybean desert.” Soon after, he applied 13 tons of compost, sowed a mix of prairie grasses and rye, and planted 8,200 hazelnut saplings.

While he won’t reap a nut harvest until 2025, the farmer and Guatemalan immigrant doesn’t have to wait to make money from the land. He also runs flocks of chickens in narrow grassy paddocks between the rows of the fledging trees, where they hunt for insects and also munch on feed made from organic corn and soybeans, which they transform into manure that fertilizes the trees and forage.

Salvatierra is the latest addition to Tree-Range Farms, a cooperative network of 19 poultry farms cofounded in 2022 by Haslett-Marroquin. Chickens evolved from birds known as junglefowl in the forests of South Asia, he notes, and the co-op’s goal is to conjure that jungle-like habitat. Chickens crave shade and fear open spaces; trees shelter them from weather and hide them from predators. In 2021, Haslett-Marroquin’s nonprofit, Regenerative Agriculture Alliance, purchased a poultry slaughterhouse just south of the Minnesota border in Stacyville, Iowa, where farms in the Tree-Range network process their birds. You can find the meat in natural-food stores from the Twin Cities area to northern Iowa.

A listener gets in touch asking how Rodri can possibly complain about too many games when he signed a new Man City contract after the new Champions League format was announced. Marcus, Luke and Andy discuss the idea that players should take matters into their own hands and begin rejecting new contracts if they’re really serious about the tough schedule.

Elsewhere, players that never played in the Prem who would’ve been perfect for the league – and which bald Premier League mangers would best suit their own player's hair? Light and shade people, light and shade…

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Kamala Harris‘ campaign is highlighting the preventable deaths of two women who would be alive if not for Georgia’s abortion ban. This week reporting from ProPublica proved out the warning that abortion bans could be deadly, by bringing forward the names and faces of two Georgia women, Amber Thurman and Candi Miller, who died in 2022 but would be alive today if not for the state’s ban.

“Amber’s mom shared with me that the word over and over again in her mind is ‘preventable,'” Harris said Thursday evening at a Michigan campaign forum hosted by Oprah Winfrey. Thurman’s mother and two sisters were in the audience. “This story is a story that is sadly not the only story of what has been happening since these bans have taken place.”

“There is a word: preventable. And there is another word: predictable.”

Amber Thurman and Candi Miller both died after medication-induced abortions failed to expel all the fetal tissue, resulting in fatal infections, ProPublica reported. They were among the first women to die from what could be called a modern back-alley abortion: abortions that have been pushed underground and exiled from the safety of expert medical supervision. 

This February, President Joe Biden was eating an ice cream cone with Late Night host Seth Meyers in Manhattan when a reporter asked about the chances of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. “Well,” Biden replied, prompting breaking news posts, “I hope, by the end of the weekend.” The president then assured the public: “We’re close.”

Nearly seven months later, no ceasefire is in sight. On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that multiple US officials told the paper that there is little chance of a ceasefire.

The report continued a horrific week for Biden’s foreign policy record in the Middle East. Each of the past five days has brought its own grim news about the vanishing chances of peace in the region:

Monday: Israel formally expanded its war aims to include the return of residents evacuated out of the north. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said the “possibility for an agreement is running out” with Hezbollah. Gallant explained, “Therefore, the only way left to ensure the return of Israel’s northern communities to their homes will be via military action.” It suggested a much heightened potential for a wider war between Lebanon and Israel.

In the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden was buoyed by victories in the “blue wall” states of the Upper Midwest, and a few narrow wins in the South and Southwest. But it was easy to forget that he also picked up another electoral vote in a state where Democrats had been shut out since 2008—Nebraska, a reliably red state that has apportioned its electors by congressional district since 1992. The second district, which includes much of Omaha, is an electoral-college curiosity that was offset by Trump’s victory in the second congressional district of Maine—a reliably blue state that also splits its electoral votes.

This year is different. Thanks to reapportionment following the 2020 census, winning Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania would only get Kamala Harris to 269 electoral votes—an Electoral College tie—and not 270. And because an Electoral College deadlock would be broken by a House of Representative roll-call in which each state delegation gets one vote, an Electoral College tie is effectively an Electoral College loss for Democrats. A win in Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, or North Carolina would still put Harris over the top, but the easiest path to 270 is simply to hold onto what Nebraskans refer to as “the blue dot.” Which is why this time, Republicans aren’t satisfied with Nebraska and Maine canceling each other out; they are currently trying to change the rules at the last minute to take Omaha’s vote for themselves.

Trump supporters, and his campaign itself, have been talking about changing Nebraska’s rules for a while. Turning Point founder Charlie Kirk held a rally in the second district earlier this year to try to pressure the legislature to make a change, and Trump co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita said at the Republican National Convention that he believed the state might still take action. Republican Gov. Jim Pillen has signaled his openness to calling a special session if Republicans in the unicameral legislature can prove they have the votes. But this largely theoretical exercise took on a more concrete tone this week, after NBC News reported South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham had traveled to Nebraska on behalf of the Trump campaign to lobby Republican lawmakers on the matter. And according to the Washington Post, Trump himself spoke with a Republican state senator by phone during the meeting to make his case directly.

This might seem a little late in the game to make such a major change to the Electoral College, but that’s the point: This is only happening because it’s so late in the game that Maine, because of its own state laws, can no longer change its own rules in response. It’s hard to come up with any justification for the Electoral College in the year 2024, but the Nebraska gambit makes a mockery of an already broken and deeply undemocratic system.

A new study shows that attendance at French museums, monuments and other heritage sites have recovered to pre-pandemic levels with 46.8 million visitors in 2023.

According to the latest edition of the Patrimostat, the annual reference publication on attendance at heritage sites and establishments from the Department of Studies, Foresight, Statistics and Documentation (DEPS) of the Ministry of Culture, the total number of visitors at more than 1,450 museums and 46,000 monuments is 13 percent higher than 2022 and 7 percent higher than 2019.

Some institutions which experienced above-average increases in visitors for 2023 compared to the previous year included the Musée d’Orsay (18 percent), the Musée de l’Orangerie (22 percent), and the Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac (1.4 million tickets sold for an increase of 40 percent), as well as the national monuments Mont-Saint-Michel (23 percent) and the Conciergerie (41 percent).

Other institutions received much smaller increases or experienced declines. Versailles received 8.4 million visitors, a rise of 2 percent, but the Louvre had 8.8 million (decrease of 7 percent) and visitor numbers at the Centre Pompidou fell 20 percent to 2.6 million due to weeks of strike actions.

The report said that almost two-thirds (62 percent) of French citizens visited a cultural institution of some form at least once in 2023, compared to 63 percent in 2019. But while 59 percent went to a historical monument, only 34 percent visited a museum or temporary exhibition (down from 41 percent in 2019), and 13 percent of French citizens visited a fine arts museum.