New drama She Said and how Hollywood has responded to Harvey Weinstein's fall

September 14

I am in my mobile mall, which is my phone’s WiFi hotspot on the NJ Transit. Paynter Jacket Co. is this British couple, Becky and Huw, who make chore jackets in micro-batches. When you purchase a jacket, you also buy its journey, from sourcing the cloth to cutting the pattern to meeting with Sergio, who serges the jackets together in Portugal. I already have their perfect chore jacket from a micro-micro-batch, a Japanese tiger-print patchwork.

The latest is a Carpenter Jacket, so, not a chore jacket at all. So different! I dither between Elizabeth and Linden about the wash – “vintage” as though I’ve owned it for generations versus “dark rich,” stiff and authentic. 195 pounds sterling plus 30 pounds sterling for shipping is GBP 225, USD 260 and change, says the internet’s calculator. It will arrive in November so I get to have it twice, now in anticipation, and when it arrives. 

At Princeton Junction, I get on the Dinky to Princeton University ($3 one-way). I go directly to Wawa to get a coffee (free, all September, for “teachers”).

Among the most-discussed aspects of Herschel Walker’s campaign for the US Senate seat in Georgia are the allegations he had episodes of violence and threatening to commit violence—allegations he later dismissed as the side effects of a mental illness known as Dissociative Identity Disorder, from which he now claims he is “healed.” 

Walker’s ex-wife Cindy Grossman, for example, said in 2008 that Walker once held a gun to her head and threatened to “blow [her] brains out.” This allegation resurfaced during Walker’s campaign against Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, which will now conclude in a runoff on December 6. Voters have also learned that on a separate occasion, Grossman’s sister claimed in an affidavit that Walker told her he was going to shoot Grossman and her new boyfriend.

Christian Walker, Walker and Grossman’s only son, condemned the trend of athletes inflicting or threatening violence—a trend in which his father has allegedly participated. He called it America’s “pandemic of professional athletes abusing women, children, and animals” in a 2021 tweet.

We have a pandemic of professional athletes abusing women, children, and animals, but their employers would rather gaslight fans into thinking the athletes are victims of a “racist society.”

— Christian Walker (@ChristianWalk1r) November 18, 2021

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Things looked scary at first for Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, the GOP senator at the top of Donald Trump’s enemies list. After crushing her opponent in the primary, Murkowski found herself behind Trump-backed Kelly Tshibaka for days after  polls closed on November 8th. But by Wednesday night, as the state’s ranked choice voting tabulation concluded, Murkowski soared to a 54–46 win.

Alaska was never going to be a Senate seat that flipped blue—at least not in this election, where the state’s new ranked-choice voting system puts the competition between two Republicans: Kelly Tshibaka (pronounced “Chewbacca,” or pretty close) and incumbent Trump-impeacher Murkowski. Pat Chesbro, a Democrat, trailed far behind with just over 10 percent of first-choice votes. Despite Murkowski’s vaunted independent streak, that’s still about 86 percent of Alaskan voters picking a Republican as their first choice. For now, that puts a hold on the wishes of anyone hoping to see the far north go purple.

But Murkowski’s win should still come as a huge relief for Americans who care about preserving democracy—she’s the only surviving Republican senator in this general election who voted to impeach Trump. 

Let’s consider who we almost had: Tshibaka, the Trump and Alaska GOP–endorsed candidate. In her campaign ad, she stands silhouetted against a mountain range, ice floes crashing behind her, looking like the Alaska version of a Gilead housewife as she talks about her parents being temporarily homeless and how she’s the first in her family to get a college degree—both claims that have been debunked by Alaska journalist Dermot Cole. Then we cut to Kelly in what we assume is her home kitchen, where she declares, “I’m a conservative: Pro-life, pro–Second Amendment, and America First.”

Tshibaka’s tried to position herself as a Washington outsider, despite spending nearly 20 years inside the Beltway, working for various federal inspectors general, before her return to Alaska in 2019 (just enough time to establish residency for a Senate run). While she acknowledges that President Biden is, well, president, she also thinks there are still “unanswered questions.” Although Tshibaka was smart enough to scrub her social media before announcing her Senate candidacy, CNN reported that she’d used it to spread baseless conspiracies about voter fraud in the 2020 election. 

For decades, it’s been unthinkable that Alaska could let a Democrat occupy its only seat in the House of Representatives, which had been held by the late GOP Rep. Don Young since 1972. But in the background, as Americans in the lower 48 were captivated by races in Georgia or Arizona, that’s exactly what’s happened: Alaskans voted 55-45 in favor of Democrat Mary Peltola, a former state legislator who just won her first full term over celebrity ex-Gov. Sarah Palin.

Peltola’s had just enough time to drop off her suitcase in Washington after winning the seat in an August special election. Palin was also her main opponent then, and in the months since, Peltola only grew her lead. She was helped in part by ranked-choice voting in its Alaska general-election debut. The system, which transfers votes to second-choice candidates when a voter’s first pick is eliminated, has drawn national attention and sometimes controversy.

Elections are a long affair in the 49th state, where challenges like distance, isolation, and tough weather abound, and mail-in ballots that are postmarked by election day have up until ten days to arrive for counting. The Alaska Division of Elections doesn’t count absentee, mail-in, and questioned ballots—many of which come from rural, predominantly Alaska Native regions—until after election day.

It’s not a system that benefits election-denying extremists like Palin, and Palin is not a good loser.  The ex-governor has been hinting since polls closed that she’ll challenge the results of the race. She was sowing doubt and misinformation about ranked-choice voting as early as August, as I reported at the time: 

“It’s bizarre, it’s convoluted, it’s confusing and it results in voter suppression,” Palin told the CPAC crowd. “It results in a lack of voter enthusiasm because it’s so weird.” None of that is true. Maine has been doing ranked-choice voting since 2016, and several cities and municipalities around the country have also adopted the system. “There isn’t a higher rate of incomplete or spoiled ballots in ranked choice races compared to ballots in elections using plurality voting,” Amy Fried, a professor of political science at the University of Maine, told Mother Jones. “Nor is turnout lower.” Rick Pildes, a constitutional law professor at the New York University School of Law, noted, “There’s no evidence voters have been confused or don’t understand how to rank candidates one, two, three.”

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In less than 10 days, two mass shootings in two different cities have taken place in Virginia. On November 13, three students at the University of Virginia were killed after a classmate allegedly gunned them down following a field trip. Then on Tuesday, a suspected gunman opened fire inside a Walmart break room, killing at least six people and injuring four, before allegedly killing himself. 

But does Glenn Youngkin know any of this? 

In several statements responding to the shootings, the state’s Republican governor condemned the acts of violence. He also expressed heartbreak and extended prayers. In one interview with Fox News, Youngkin appeared to blame the scourge of mass shootings on a “mental health crisis,” recycling the familiar Republican talking point.

But as many have pointed out, Youngkin appears to have avoided the words gun and gunman entirely when describing both shootings. In fact, a quick search of his tweets revealed that Youngkin has never referred to the words “gun, guns, or gunman,” at least from his official social media account.

But here’s a collection of what he has said since the November shootings:

The United States will block shipments of raw sugar from a top Dominican producer with close ties to two wealthy Florida businessmen after finding indications of forced labor at its sprawling Caribbean plantation. Sugar from the Central Romana Corp.’s cane fields feeds into the supply chains of major U.S. brands, including Domino and the Hershey Co. 

The ban on all imports from Central Romana went into effect today.

“Manufacturers like Central Romana, who fail to abide by our laws, will face consequences as we root out these inhumane practices from U.S. supply chains,” said AnnMarie R. Highsmith, executive assistant commissioner at U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Trade in a press release. 

The company is owned in part by the Florida-based Fanjul Corp., a global sugar and real estate conglomerate. 

The federal investigation found five indications of labor abuse among cane cutters employed and housed by Central Romana: abuse of vulnerability, isolation, withholding of wages, abusive working and living conditions, and excessive overtime. Central Romana’s plantation shipped more than 295 million pounds of raw sugar from the Dominican Republic to the U.S. last year.