More artists have canceled their performances at the Kennedy Center after its Trump-acolyte-dominated board’s recent vote to add the president’s name to the performing arts center earlier this month.  The latest includes The Cookers, a jazz ensemble, which called off their New Year’s Eve show on Monday.  The band did not explicitly mention the name change, but in a statement wrote, “Jazz was born from struggle and from a relentless insistence on freedom: freedom of thought, of expression, and of the full human voice. Some of us have been making this music for many decades, and that history still shapes us.” “We are not turning away from our audience, and do want to make sure that when we do return to the bandstand, the room is able to celebrate the full presence of the music and everyone in it,” they continued. “We remain committed to playing music that reaches across divisions rather than deepening them.” The group’s drummer, Billy Hart, told the New York Times that the Kennedy Center’s renaming “evidently” played a role in the decision. The move follows Chuck Redd’s decision to drop out of a Christmas Eve concert, prompting Richard Grenell, the center’s interim president and former acting director of national intelligence during Trump’s first term, to threaten a $1 million lawsuit against Redd over what Grenell blasted as a “political stunt.” Other artists to cancel upcoming events include folk singer Kristy Lee and Doug Varone and Dancers, a dance company based in New York City. The center’s board, most of whom were handpicked by Trump, voted earlier this month to rename the Kennedy Center to “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. The decision has proven deeply unpopular, with one poll of over 1500 US adults conducted from December 20-22 by The Economist and YouGov finding only 18 percent approved. It has since sparked legal concerns, with many pointing to President Lyndon Johnson’s signing of a law that designated the arts institution as a “living memorial” to the late President Kennedy. Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH), an ex officio member of the center’s board, has since filed a lawsuit against Trump, claiming that renaming required an act of Congress.  In a social media post, Doug Varone and Dancers said that though they had opposed Trump’s move to fire board members who didn’t align with the president’s views in February, they decided to move ahead with an April 2026 performance to honor the “dance audiences in DC.” “However, with the latest act of Donald J. Trump renaming the Center after himself, we can no longer permit ourselves nor ask our audiences to step inside this once great institution,” the dance company wrote on Monday. “The Kennedy Center was named in honor of our 35th President, who fervently believed that the arts were the beating heart of our nation, as well as an integral part of international diplomacy.” “The artists who are now canceling shows were booked by the previous far left leadership,” Grenell wrote in a lengthy rant on X posted on Monday. “Boycotting the Arts to show you support the Arts is a form of derangement syndrome.” 

The president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is threatening legal action against a jazz musician who cancelled his Christmas Eve performance after the institution’s board of trustees, handpicked by President Donald Trump, voted last week to change the name of the performing arts institution. The letter from Richard Grenell, the Kennedy Center president, to Chuck Redd, a drum and vibraphone player, says that they will seek $1 million in damages for “this political stunt.” “Your decision to withdraw at the last moment—explicitly in response to the Center’s recent renaming, which honors President Trump’s extraordinary efforts to save this national treasure,” the letter, shared to the Associated Press, reads, “is classic intolerance.” And, Grenell continues, “Your action surrenders to the sad bullying tactics employed by certain elements on the left, who have sought to intimidate artists into boycotting performances.”  > “Your action surrenders to the sad bullying tactics employed by certain > elements on the left, who have sought to intimidate artists into boycotting > performances.”  The move from Grenell, who was appointed by Trump earlier this year, comes after the center’s board of trustees voted to rename the institution the Trump-Kennedy Center. It took less than 24 hours from the board’s meeting in Palm Beach to workers showing up at the building to affix “THE DONALD J. TRUMP AND” above “THE JOHN F. KENNEDY MEMORIAL CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS.”  The institution’s website now shows: “The Trump Kennedy Center.” Members of the Kennedy family have denounced the action. As The New York Times reported, “Even though Mr. Trump had already been calling it that for months in trollish posts online, he acted shocked that his handpicked board had thought to do this for him.” President Trump told reporters that he was “honored” and “surprised” by the vote.  Redd has hosted the annual “Jazz Jams” Christmas Eve concert since 2006. He told AP that once he saw the name change earlier this month, he “chose to cancel our concert.” According to the AP, Redd often included a student musician in the show, which, he said, is “one of the many reasons that it was very sad to have had to cancel.” Grenell also took personal jabs at Redd in the letter, claiming that his show wasn’t popular. “The contrast between the public’s lack of interest in your show with the success we are experiencing under our new chairman is drastic,” Grenell wrote. Trump’s board elected him as chairman in February. “The most avant-garde and well-regarded performers in your genre will still perform regularly,” he added, “and unlike you, they’ll do it to sold–out crowds regardless of their political leanings.” The center’s website still describes Redd as “an accomplished performer.” Despite Grenell’s insistence that the Kennedy Center has experienced “drastic” success under new management, The Washington Post reports that even before the renaming, ticket sales had tanked. “Nearly nine months after Trump became chair of the center and more than a month into its main season,” the Post noted, “ticket sales for the Kennedy Center’s three largest performance venues are the worst they’ve been in years, according to a Washington Post analysis of ticketing data from dozens of recent shows as well as past seasons. Tens of thousands of seats have been left empty.” Days after the renaming, Representative Joyce Beatty, a Democrat of Ohio, filed a lawsuit against President Trump and center representatives. The suit holds that the move was illegal because an act of Congress is required to rename the building. Representative Beatty is an ex officio member of the Kennedy Center’s board and called into the board meeting where the change was voted on.  “For the record. This was not unanimous,” she wrote on X. “I was muted on the call and not allowed to speak or voice my opposition to this move. Also, for the record, this was not on the agenda. This was not consensus. This is censorship.”

In the mid-’90s, two high-end New York art galleries began selling one fake painting after another–works in the style of Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Mark Rothko and others. It was the largest art fraud in modern U.S. history, totaling more than $80 million. Our first story looks at how it happened and why almost no one ever was punished by authorities.  Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. Our second story revisits an investigation into a painting looted by the Nazis during World War II. More than half a century later, a journalist helped track it down through the Panama Papers.  This is an update of an episode that originally aired in January 2020.

This story was originally published by Vox and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. If you’re reading this, chances are you care a lot about fighting climate change, and that’s great. The climate emergency threatens all of humanity. And although the world has started to make some progress on it, our global response is still extremely lacking. The trouble is, it can be genuinely hard to figure out how to direct your money wisely if you want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. There’s a glut of environmental organizations out there—but how do you know which are the most impactful? To help, here’s a list of eight of the most high-impact, cost-effective, and evidence-based organizations. We’re not including bigger-name groups, such as the Environmental Defense Fund, the Nature Conservancy, or the Natural Resources Defense Council, because most big organizations are already relatively well-funded. The groups we list below seem to be doing something especially promising in the light of criteria that matter for effectiveness: importance, tractability, and neglectedness. Important targets for change are ones that drive a big portion of global emissions. Tractable problems are ones where we can actually make progress right now. And neglected problems are ones that aren’t already getting a big influx of cash from other sources like the government or philanthropy, and could really use money from smaller donors. Founders Pledge, an organization that guides entrepreneurs committed to donating a portion of their proceeds to effective charities, and Giving Green, a climate charity evaluator, used these criteria to assess climate organizations. Their research informed the list below. As in the Founders Pledge and Giving Green recommendations, we’ve chosen to look at groups focused on mitigation (tackling the root causes of climate change by reducing emissions) rather than adaptation (decreasing the suffering from the impacts of climate change). Both are important, but the focus here is on preventing further catastrophe. And this work is particularly important right now, in a world where “climate attention has collapsed, political support has evaporated, and policy gains are under sustained assault,” Founders Pledge stressed in its assessment of today’s politically charged atmosphere. Just last month, the prominent environmental group 350.org was forced to “temporarily suspend” its US operations because of severe funding challenges, according to a letter obtained by Politico. They are among the many groups in the climate movement now buckling under existential funding cuts. At the same time, Founders Pledge argues that the climate community massively underinvested “outside the progressive bubble,” creating a movement that was not resilient to the shakeup that would come under President Donald Trump. “One of the main ways we were underprepared was the fact that climate philanthropy invested overwhelmingly on one side of the political spectrum,” the organization writes. Now, the experts say, it’s particularly important to invest in nonpartisan organizations dedicated to defending and expanding upon all of the progress made so far. Arguably, the best move is to donate not to an individual charity, but to a fund—like the Founders Pledge Climate Change Fund or the Giving Green Fund. Experts at those groups pool together donor money and give it out to the charities they deem most effective, right when extra funding is most needed. That can mean making time-sensitive grants to promote the writing of an important report, or stepping in when a charity becomes acutely funding-constrained. That said, some of us like to be able to decide exactly which charity our money ends up with—maybe because we have especially high confidence in one or two charities relative to the others—rather than letting experts split the cash over a range of different groups. With that in mind, we’re listing below a mix of individual organizations where your money is likely to have an exceptionally positive impact. CLEAN AIR TASK FORCE What it does: The Clean Air Task Force is a US-based nongovernmental organization that has been working to reduce air pollution since its founding in 1996. It led a successful campaign to reduce the pollution caused by coal-fired power plants in the US, helped limit the US power sector’s CO2 emissions, and helped establish regulations of diesel, shipping, and methane emissions. CATF also advocates for the adoption of neglected low- and zero-carbon technologies, from advanced nuclear power to super-hot rock geothermal energy. Why you should consider donating: In addition to its seriously impressive record of success and the high quality of its research, CATF does well on the neglectedness criterion: It often concentrates on targeting emissions sources that are neglected by other environmental organizations, and on scaling up deployment of technologies that are crucial for decarbonization, yet passed over by NGOs and governments. For example, it was one of the first major environmental groups to publicly campaign against overlooked superpollutants like methane. In recent years, CATF has been expanding beyond the US to operate in Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere. This is crucial: About 35 percent of climate philanthropy goes to the US and about 10 percent to Europe, which together represent only about 15 percent of future emissions, according to Founders Pledge. And this year, CATF has refocused its strategy to zero in on programs with broad nonpartisan political support to ensure those global efforts have staying power. This is part of why Founders Pledge is supporting CATF’s efforts and recommends giving to that organization. CATF is also one of Giving Green’s top picks. You can donate to CATF here. FUTURE CLEANTECH ARCHITECTS What it does: This Germany-based organization aims to promote innovation in Europe’s hard-to-decarbonize sectors by running key programs in, for example, zero-carbon fuels, industry, and carbon removal technologies. Why you should consider donating: You might be wondering if this kind of innovation really meets the “neglectedness” criterion—don’t we already have a lot of innovation? In the US, yes. But in Europe, this kind of organization is much rarer. And according to Founders Pledge, it’s already exceeded expectations at improving the European climate policy response. Most notably, it has helped shape key legislation at the EU level and advised policymakers on how to get the most bang for their buck when supporting research and development for clean energy tech. Giving Green recommends this organization, too. You can donate to Future Cleantech Architects here. GOOD FOOD INSTITUTE What it does: The Good Food Institute works to make alternative proteins (think plant-based burgers) competitive with conventional proteins like beef, which could help reduce livestock consumption. It engages in scientific research, industry partnerships, and government advocacy that improves the odds of alternative proteins going mainstream. Why you should consider donating: Raising animals for meat is responsible for more than 10 percent and perhaps as much as 19 percent of global emissions. These animals belch the superpollutant methane. Plus, we humans tend to deforest a lot of land for them to graze on, even though we all know the world needs more trees, not less. Yet there hasn’t been very much government effort to substantially cut agricultural emissions. Giving Green recommends the Good Food Institute because of its potential to help with that, noting that “GFI remains a powerhouse in alternative protein thought leadership and action. It has strong ties to government, industry, and research organizations and continues to achieve impressive wins. We believe donations to GFI can help stimulate systemic change that reduces food system emissions on a global scale.” You can donate to the Good Food Institute here. INNOVATION INITIATIVE AT THE CLEAN ECONOMY PROJECT What it does: When Bill Gates shuttered the policy arm of his climate philanthropy Breakthrough Energy earlier this year, the US lost a unique advocate for innovation at a pivotal moment in the country’s energy transition. Or did it? A group of veteran Breakthrough Energy staff recently launched the Innovation Initiative—part of a new organization called the Clean Economy Project—as part of a push to ensure the US continues on the right path in its energy transition, regardless of which party is in power. Why you should consider donating: This newly formed project may still be in its infancy, but its work builds upon years of deep experience advocating for clean energy innovation across the political spectrum. Founders Pledge helped seed the new organization with an early grant because “we see the Innovation Initiative as the best bet for donors who want to support federal energy innovation policy advocacy at a moment when this ecosystem needs coordination and strategic leadership,” they said, noting that even small-scale support for such efforts can spur massive payoffs in the space: “Relatively modest advocacy investments can influence billions” in federal spending for research and development “that accelerates breakthrough technologies with global spillover effects.” You can learn more about the Innovation Initiative here. To donate, send an email to giving@cleanecon.org, with the subject line “Donating to Innovation Initiative.” DEPLOY/US What it does: This nonpartisan nonprofit works with American conservatives to enact decarbonization policies, with the goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050. DEPLOY/US partners with philanthropic, business, military, faith, youth, policy, and grassroots organizations to shape a decarbonization strategy and generate policy change. Why you should consider donating: In case you haven’t heard of the eco-right, it’s important to know that there are genuine right-of-center climate groups that want to build support for decarbonization based on conservative principles. These groups have a crucial role to play; they can weaken political polarization around climate and increase Republican support for bold decarbonization policies, which are especially important now, with Republicans in control of the White House and Congress. Right now, these right-of-center groups remain “woefully underfunded compared to both the opportunity and necessity of correcting a large ideological blindspot of the climate movement that has come to bite in 2025,” Founders Pledge writes, adding that DEPLOY/US is uniquely positioned to insulate climate policy against the shifting winds of politics. You can donate to DEPLOY/US here. ENERGY FOR GROWTH HUB What it does: Founded by Todd Moss in 2013, Energy for Growth Hub aims to make electricity reliable and affordable for everyone. The organization hopes to end energy poverty through climate-friendly solutions. Why you should consider donating: While Energy for Growth Hub is not a strictly climate-focused organization—ending energy poverty is its main goal—it’s still a leader in the clean energy space. The organization will use your donation to fund projects that produce insight for companies and policymakers on how to create the energy-rich, climate-friendly future they’re dreaming of. In June, the World Bank announced an end to its ban on funding nuclear power projects after a sustained lobbying effort from Energy for Growth Hub alongside other think tanks and policy wonks. “We all know that Washington is broken. People complain that it’s impossible to get stuff done,” Moss wrote in his Substack in response. “But then, actually quite often, stuff does get done. And sometimes, just sometimes, things happen because people outside government come together to push a new idea inside government.” You can donate to Energy for Growth Hub here. PROJECT INNERSPACE What it does: This US-based nonprofit hopes to unlock the power of heat — geothermal energy—lying beneath the Earth’s surface. Launched in 2022, Project InnerSpace seeks to expand global access and drive down the cost of carbon-free heat and electricity, particularly to populations in the Global South. The organization maps geothermal resources and identifies geothermal projects in need of further funding. Why you should consider donating: Most geothermal power plants are located in places where geothermal energy is close to the Earth’s surface. Project InnerSpace will use your donation to add new data and tools to GeoMap, its signature map of geothermal hot spots, and drive new strategies and projects to fast-track transitions to geothermal energy around the world. The group also began funding community energy projects through its newly launched GeoFund earlier this year, starting with a geothermal-powered food storage facility in Tapri, India, which will offer local farmers more power to preserve their crops. You can donate to Project InnerSpace here. OPPORTUNITY GREEN What it does: Opportunity Green aims to cut aviation and maritime shipping emissions through targeted regulation and policy initiatives. The UK-based nonprofit was founded in 2021, and since then has aimed to encourage private sector adoption of clean energy alternatives. Why you should consider donating: Aviation and maritime shipping are an enormous source of global emissions, but receive little attention because international coordination is difficult around the issue, and there are few low-carbon fleets and fuels readily available. Even so, in a few short years, Opportunity Green has managed to gain significant influence in EU and international policy discussions around shipping emissions, while also helping to bring the perspective of climate-vulnerable countries into the fray. In 2024, the group launched a major legal filing against the EU to challenge its green finance rules. “We think Opportunity Green is a strategic organization with broad expertise across multiple pathways of influence to reduce emissions from aviation and shipping,” Giving Green notes. “We are especially excited about Opportunity Green’s efforts to elevate climate-vulnerable countries in policy discussions.” You can donate to Opportunity Green here. The past several years have seen an explosion of grassroots activism groups focused on climate—from Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future to the Sunrise Movement to Extinction Rebellion. Activism is an important piece of the climate puzzle; it can help change public opinion and policy, including by shifting the Overton window, the range of policies that seem possible. Social change is not an exact science, and the challenges in measuring a social movement’s effectiveness are well documented. While it would be helpful to have more concrete data on the impact of activist groups, it may also be shortsighted to ignore movement-building for that reason. The environmentalist Bill McKibben told Vox that building the climate movement is crucial because, although we’ve already got some good mitigation solutions, we’re not deploying them fast enough. “That’s the ongoing power of the fossil fuel industry at work. The only way to break that power and change the politics of climate is to build a countervailing power,” he said in 2019. “Our job — and it’s the key job — is to change the zeitgeist, people’s sense of what’s normal and natural and obvious. If we do that, all else will follow.” Of course, some activist groups are more effective than others. And it’s worth noting that a group that was highly effective at influencing climate policy during the Biden administration, such as the Sunrise Movement, will not necessarily be as effective today. “Overall, our take on grassroots activism is that it has huge potential to be cost-effective, and we indeed think that grassroots movements like Sunrise have had really meaningful effects in the past,” Dan Stein, the director of Giving Green, told Vox. But, he added, “It takes a unique combination of timing, organization, and connection to policy to have an impactful grassroots movement.” One umbrella charity that’s more bullish on the ongoing impact of activism is the Climate Emergency Fund. It was founded in 2019 with the goal of quickly regranting money to groups engaged in climate protests around the globe. Its founders believe that street protest is crucially important to climate politics and neglected in environmental philanthropy. Grantees include Just Stop Oil, the group that made international headlines for throwing soup on a protected, glassed-in Van Gogh painting, and Extinction Rebellion, an activist movement that uses nonviolent civil disobedience like filling the streets and blocking intersections to demand that governments do more on climate. If you’re skeptical that street protest can make a difference, consider Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth’s research. She’s found that if you want to achieve systemic social change, you need to mobilize 3.5 percent of the population, a finding that helped inspire Extinction Rebellion. And in 2022, research from the nonprofit Social Change Lab suggested that, in the past, groups like Sunrise and Extinction Rebellion may have cost-effectively helped to win policy changes (in the US and UK, respectively) that avert carbon emissions. But the words “in the past” are doing a lot of work here: While early-stage social movement incubation might be cost-effective, it’s unclear whether it’s as cost-effective to give to an activist group once it’s already achieved national attention. The same research notes that in countries with existing high levels of climate concern, broadly trying to increase that concern may be less effective than in previous years; now, it might be more promising to focus on climate advocacy in countries with much lower baseline support for this issue. There are plenty of ways to use your skills to tackle the climate emergency. And many don’t cost a cent. If you’re a writer or artist, you can use your talents to convey a message that will resonate with people. If you’re a religious leader, you can give a sermon about climate and run a collection drive to support one of the groups above. If you’re a teacher, you can discuss this issue with your students, who may influence their parents. If you’re a good talker, you can go out canvassing for a politician you believe will make the right choices on climate. If you’re, well, any human being, you can consume less. You can reduce your energy use, how much stuff you buy, and how much meat you consume. Individual action alone won’t move the needle that much—real change on the part of governments and corporations is key—but your actions can influence others and ripple out to shift social norms, and keep you feeling motivated rather than resigned to climate despair. You can, of course, also volunteer with an activist group and put your body in the street to nonviolently disrupt business as usual and demand change. The point is that activism comes in many forms. It’s worth taking some time to think about which one (or ones) will allow you, with your unique capacities and constraints, to have the biggest positive impact. But at the end of the day, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good: It’s best to pick something that seems doable and get to work.

The second Trump administration has made tearing down parts of the federal government a priority. And some of those efforts have been literal. In October, President Donald Trump ordered the demolition of the White House’s East Wing to make way for the construction of a massive 90,000-square-foot ballroom. He’s also given the White House a gilded makeover, bulldozed the famed Rose Garden, and even has plans for a so-called “Arc de Trump” that mirrors France’s Arc de Triomphe. So what’s behind all of this? Art historian Erin Thompson—author of Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America’s Public Monuments—says that whether it’s Romans repurposing idols of leaders who had fallen out of favor or the glorification of Civil War officers in the American South, monuments and public aesthetics aren’t just about the past. They’re about symbolizing power today. Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. “The aesthetic is a way to make the political physically present,” Thompson says. “It’s a way to make it seem like things are changing and like Trump is keeping his promises when he’s actually not.”On this week’s More To The Story, Thompson sits down with host Al Letson to discuss why Trump has decked out the White House in gold (so much gold), the rise and recent fall of Confederate monuments, and whether she thinks the Arc de Trump will ever get built. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe. This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Al Letson: What is an art crime professor? Erin Thompson: Well, someone who’s gone to way too much school. I have a PhD in art history, and was finishing that up and thought, “Oh, I’m never going to get a job as an art historian. I should go to law school,” which I did, and ended up back in academia studying all of the intersections between art and crime. So I studied museum security, forgery, fraud, repatriations of stolen artwork. I could teach you how to steal a masterpiece, but then I would have to catch you. So is it fair to say that The Thomas Crown Affair is one of your favorite movies? No. Least favorite, opposite- Really? … because they make it seem like it’s a big deal to steal things from a museum, but it’s really, really easy to steal things from museums, as the Louvre heist just proved. I was just about to say, I think the thieves at the Louvre would agree with you. It’s hard to get away with stealing things from museums, which is why they got arrested immediately. So how did you move from studying museum pieces and art crime into monuments? Well, so my PhD is in ancient Greek and Roman arts, and when monuments began being protested in the summer of 2020 after the murder of George Floyd, people were commenting online, “Civilized people don’t take down monuments. This is horrible.” And I was thinking, “Well, studying the ancient world, everything that I study has been at one point torn down and thrown into a pit and then buried for thousands of years.” Actually, as humans, this is what we do. We make monuments and then we tear them down as soon as we decide we want to honor somebody else. So I thought I could maybe add some perspective. And then having my skills in researching fraud, I started to realize that so many of the most controversial monuments in the U.S. were essentially fundraising scams where a bunch of money was embezzled from people who wanted to support racism, essentially, by putting up giant monuments to white supremacy. So I thought, maybe that’s some interesting information for our current debates. They got got, as they should. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. As somebody who grew up in the South, I would just say as a young Black man growing up in the shadow of these monuments, watching them go down felt like finally, finally this country was recognizing me in some small way. And I was completely unsurprised at the uproar from a lot of people who wanted to keep these monuments up. But when you dig into why these monuments were placed down, a lot of them were done just … Especially when we’re talking about Civil War monuments in the South and in other places, they were primarily put there to silence or to intimidate the Black population in a said area. Yeah, I call them victory monuments. They’re not about the defeat of the Confederates, they’re about the victory of Jim Crow and other means of reclaiming political and economic power for the white population of the South. Yeah. And so talk to me a little bit about the monuments themselves and how a lot of those were scams. I had never heard of that before. So for example, just outside of Atlanta in Stone Mountain, Georgia is the world’s largest Confederate monument, a gigantic carving into the side of a cliff of Lee and Jackson and Jefferson Davis. And that was launched in 1914 by a sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, working with the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The Klan enthusiastically embraced the project. They stacked the board. They took a bunch of the donations. Essentially, no progress was made for years and years and years until the 1950s when as a sign of resistance to Brown v. Board, the state of Georgia took over the monument and finally finished it. So it wasn’t finished until the 1970s. And to me, the makers said it should be a shrine to the South. It’s more like a shrine to a scam. The Klan leaders who led the project even fired Borglum at a certain point because they thought he was taking too much money. But he landed on his feet because he persuaded some Dakota businessmen to sponsor him to carve what turned into Mount Rushmore. So he defected from glorifying the Confederacy to carve a monument to the Union. So he didn’t really care about the glory of the Confederacy, he just wanted to make some money. So in the United States, how have monuments historically been funded? Well, the American government, both state and federal has always been a bit of a cheapskate when it comes to putting up public art. So most monuments that we see were actually privately fundraised, planned, and then donated to local governments. So they’re not really public art. They were put up by small groups for reasons. If you look, for example, at the Confederate monument that used to be in Birmingham, Alabama, this is a little weird that Birmingham had a Confederate monument in the first place because they were founded as a city well after the close of the Civil War. And the monument went up in two parts, both of which were in response to interracial unionization efforts. So the leaders, the owners and managers of the mines, when the miners were threatening to strike said, “No, no, no, no, no, no. We need to remind our white workers that they have to keep maintaining the segregation that their fathers or grandfathers fought for, so let’s put up this Civil War Monument.” So monuments don’t tell you very detailed versions of history, but also even thinking about history is kind of leading you on the wrong track when you look at, well, who is actually paying for these monuments top people put up and what did they actually want from them? So tell me, just pulling back a little bit, what’s the relationship between monuments and society? Monuments are our visions of the future. We put up a monument when we want people to aspire to that condition. We put up monuments to honor people to inspire people to follow their examples. So that sounds good and cheerful, right? It’s nothing wrong with having models and aspirations, but you have to think about, well, monuments are expensive. So who has the money to pay for them? Who has the political power to put them in place permanently? And you’ll often see that monuments are used to try and shape a community into a different form than it currently has. I live in New York City, for example, and almost all of the monuments put up until the last few decades are of white men. And what kind of message does that send to this incredibly diverse community of who deserves honor? And you said earlier that throughout time we have erected monuments and taken them down. Can you talk that cycle through with me? Yeah. Well, take the Romans, for example. Roman emperors would win a victory at war and put up a big victory monument, a triumphal arch or portraits of themselves. And then after the emperor died, the Senate would vote and decide, was this a good one or a bad one? Do we want to decide officially that they have become a deity and are to be honored forever, or do we want to forget their memory? And it was about a third, a third, a third. A third was no vote, a third were deities, a third were their memories were subjected to what we call damnatio memoriae. And if that happened to you, they would chisel the face off your statues and carve on your successor. The Romans were thrifty that way. They reused sculptures- Wow. So they recycled. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. Or they would break things up or melt it down and make it into a new statue. So this was a pretty common strategy of, just like we do it in a much more peaceable form, when a new president is elected, you take down the photo of the current president from the post office and put up the successor, etc, etc. So in the ancient world they had a more intense version of this, but you can think about the tearing down of statues of Saddam after his fall or the removal of statues of Lenin across the Soviet satellite states. This is something that we do when there are changes in power, and usually we don’t notice it because it’s more peaceful. There’s an official removal of the signs of the previous regime and a substitution with the others. So what was special and different about the summer of 2020 was the change came from below. It was unofficial. We mostly saw people not tearing down monuments with their bare hands, that’s obviously hard to do, but modifying monuments by adding paints, signage, projections, etc. And that’s exactly like what you looked at in Smashing Statues is the shift that, to me, in a lot of ways had been a long time coming. There had been movements here and there that were kind of under the radar for most people. But then after George Floyd, it’s like it got an injection of adrenaline, and suddenly all over the country you start seeing this stuff happening. Yeah, and I think people lost patience. What wasn’t obvious to a lot of observers was that changing a monument or even questioning a monument is illegal in most of the U.S., or there’s just no process to do so. So I interviewed for the book Mike Forcia, an indigenous activist in Minnesota, and he had been trying for his entire adult life to get the state legislator to ask why is there a statue of Columbus in one of the cities with the largest concentrations of an urban indigenous population in the world? And all of his petitions were just thrown away. So he eventually had to commit civil disobedience, I would describe it, by pulling down the statue. There’s no other way to have that conversation. Let me ask you, just to go back a little bit, how do these monuments shape and perceive history? Because you saying that this is what we’ve always done and the Romans would switch out faces and statues, that’s totally new to me. And so as somebody who grew up with Confederate statues around or Confederate names always around, I think it’s shaped the way I view the world. And also as they were coming down, not knowing that in the long arc of history that this is what we always do, it challenged the perceptions, I think of a lot of people. Monuments are inherently simple. You can’t tell a full historical story in a couple figures in bronze. So I think they communicate very simple messages of this is the type of person that we honor. And they speak directly to our lizard brain, the part of us that sees something, “Oh, something big and shiny and higher than me is something worthy of respect.” So you can’t tell them a nuanced story in a monument, and that is used as a strength. I also think it’s a strength that they become boring. They fade into the background of our lived landscape, and then we don’t question their messages if we just think of the monument as something, oh, we’re going to tell each other, “Meet at the foot of this guy for our ultimate Frisbee game,” or something. So it is these moments of disruption that let us think, “This is supposed to stand for who we are as a people. Do we really want that guy up on the horse telling us who we are?” In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death and these statues and monuments are coming down or they’re being defaced, my little sister lives in Richmond, Virginia and I went to visit her. And I’ve been to Richmond several times. And I think I’d seen pictures of the monuments in Richmond being graffiti on them, but I had not seen them in real life up close. And it was kind of stunning to me. Also, what was stunning about it, because in Richmond, if you’ve never been to Richmond, Richmond has like this … I don’t know what street it is, but this long row- Monument Avenue. Monument Avenue, thank you. Has Monument Avenue with all of these different monuments. After George Floyd, they were spray painted, and people were gathering around these monuments in a way that I’d never seen before. I think those monuments went up to create a certain type of community. Monument Avenue was designed as a wealthy neighborhood, and how do you prevent the quote, unquote, “wrong type of people” from moving into your nice neighborhood? Well, put up some nice monuments celebrating Civil War generals. So it’s not- You tell them they’re not welcome. Yeah, exactly. So it’s a community created by exclusion, is what these monuments were put up for. And we actually see that again and again. In Charlottesville as well, the sculpture of Robert E. Lee that was recently melted down was put up to mark the exclusion of people from a neighborhood that had formerly been a neighborhood of Black housing and businesses, which they were condemned by eminent domain and turned into a cultural and park space that was intended to be whites only in the 1920s. So monuments are a powerful course for creating community. But you’re absolutely right that the removal can be a powerful force for creating community as well. And what saddens me is if you go to Richmond today, some of the bases of those monuments are still there. The Civil War monuments have been removed from Monument Avenue, but all of the graffiti has been scrubbed off. There’s no more people gathering there. It looks just like a traffic median again. And that’s true of almost everywhere in the U.S. The authorities are always a bit nervous about this type of spontaneous use of public space, I would say. Yeah. Listeners to this podcast have heard me say this 101 times because it’s my thing, but I just believe that America is a pendulum, that it swings hard one way and then it comes right back and swings the other way. Which means that in the long-term, America sees progress in inches, but the swings are where you can see exactly where the country is right now. And so I think if we look at what happened after George Floyd died, that was a hard swing the other way. I’m curious if what we see right now coming from the Trump administration, and not just like in military, he’s reverting the names or changing the names of military bases back to people whose names have been taken off these military bases, all of that type of stuff, but also he’s planning to put an Arc de Trump in D.C., the East Wing Ballroom, all of that stuff, do you feel like that is the opposite swing of what we saw during George Floyd’s death? Oh, yeah. And even literally, recently the Trump administration said that they were going to reverse removal of statues. So they re-erected a Confederate general statute in D.C., and they’ve said that they’re going to put up the Arlington Confederate Monument, which would cost millions and millions and millions of dollars to put up. So we will see if that actually happens. But just declaring that you’re going to do it is enough of a propaganda victory, I think, in this situation. Right. It might seem silly or not worthy of attention to look into the Trump administration’s aesthetic decisions, all of the gold ornamentations smeared all over the Oval Office and ballrooms and Arc de Trumps, and etc, but the aesthetic is a way to make the political physically present. It’s a way to rally people’s energies. It’s a way to make it seem like things are changing and like Trump is keeping his promises when he’s actually not. I think he hasn’t really changed Washington in the way that he’s told his base he’s going to change. The elite are still in control of political power and wealth, but he is literally changing the White House by tearing part of it down. And you can channel people’s attention into rooting for that type of change instead of actual change. And the style choices that he’s making are very congruent with his political message, in that he’s appealing to a vision of the past, which is greater than the present. But in both his political message and his aesthetic style, this vision of the past, you can’t pinpoint it. It’s not an actual time. It’s a fuzzy, hand-wavy, things were prettier and nicer than. And so you can’t fact-check that type of vision. You can’t see if we’ve actually gotten closer to it. And so putting up a gilded tchotchke counts as progress towards that, and he can claim the credit, which he’s happy to do. Yeah. And I think that’s intentional, because if you can’t land on the specific time period, you can’t be held accountable for how that time period played out for the disenfranchised. Or for the powerful of that time period. Right. Right, exactly. Appealing to making the White House look like Versailles. We all know what happened to the French kings, but apparently we’re not paying much attention. And there’s another current right tendency to appeal to the glory of Caesar. Everybody wants to be like Julius Caesar when that’s really not a good life choice, if you want to end up like him. I think the other thing when I think about Trump’s aesthetic, so I grew up in the South but I am originally from New Jersey, and I remember Trump when I was really young, primarily because my dad was from Pleasantville, New Jersey, which is right outside of Atlantic City. And so there were conversations that I didn’t understand as a kid, and Trump was a part of those because he had his casinos and all of that type of stuff. And I just remember being a little kid and seeing a commercial for, I guess either it was Trump’s properties or it was a casino or whatever. And I just remember looking at it on the TV and seeing gold everywhere. That was his thing, gold. And the older I get, the more I realize that the way Trump sees gold and all the fittings that he has around, really is like him surrounding himself what he perceives of as wealth, and what people who don’t have wealth perceive of as wealth. But the actual uber-rich, usually from what I’ve seen, do not decorate their houses in all gold, do not flaunt. Their wealth is present but quiet, whereas Trump’s wealth is present but loud. And that speaks to a lot of people who do not have the wealth. And in a sense, him putting gold around the White House is a secret, in my opinion, aspirational message to poor folks who do not have that, “One day you can have.” I don’t know, it’s just like a theory that I’ve been cooking in my head since I was a little kid. I think absolutely. We have the proverb, “All that glitters is not gold” because people keep needing to be reminded. And yeah, again, in our primitive lizard brains, we think shiny equals good and I want that, and we don’t look below the surface. And I think that Trump’s focus on glitzing up the White House, on making these new constructions now in his second term is not accidental, because you often see populist leaders focusing on aesthetic projects towards the end of their political life. In Hitler’s last days in the bunker, he was still pouring over models for a museum that he was building in his hometown of Linz, in which he was planning to put all of the masterpieces seized from victims of the Holocaust from other museums across Europe. It was going to have 22 miles of galleries, all stuffed full of the artistic wealth of the world. And I think there’s a comfort in this idea. Like, if I make something spectacular and beautiful enough, all of the cruelty that went into making it will be justified. I will be forgiven. So when I’m feeling depressed about the world, I think maybe this focus on the gold now is such an obsession because he recognizes that he’s on his way out. What does it mean to a society that some of the tech leaders are now turning their attention towards building statues? You were just talking about how leaders when they’re beginning their twilight are … I guess they’re thinking about their legacy, and so they’re putting up these monuments and doing other things. But what does it mean for us when we have these tech bros that are doing it now? Well, we’ve always seen this. Think about the Pantheon in Rome, that big circular temple. Across the front of it, you can still see the shapes of the letters that it used to have that was erected not by an emperor, but by a wealthy Roman who was doing so in service of the imperial cause. So big donors making big, splashy public projects have always been realizing that this is a good way to get in with the regime to shape things, to get loyalty from the public to their point of view as well. So today you look at people’s reactions to Elon Musk is very similar, I think to what you were talking about, the idea of, “I can also have this splashy level of wealth maybe someday, so I will follow somebody who I could see as a model of getting wealth, rather than someone who is actually going to do anything that’s actually good for me.” Do you think that the Arc de Trump will ever be built? That’s the thing about these Trumpian aesthetic actions, you can just put out the promise, you can release a picture of the renderings and claim victory, even though you haven’t actually done anything. I very much doubt that this arch is going to go up for a huge variety of reasons, but if it would go up, I don’t understand how it can be justified to spend that much money. When on the one hand you’re saying we are trying to cut government expenditure, there’s no justification for having tens of millions probably going on an arch to yourself.

This story was originally published by Vox and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. On Thursday, tens of millions of Americans will partake in a national ritual many of us say we don’t especially enjoy or find meaning in. We will collectively eat more than 40 million turkeys—factory farmed and heavily engineered animals that bear scant resemblance to the wild birds that have been apocryphally written into the Thanksgiving story. (The first Thanksgiving probably didn’t have turkey.) And we will do it all even though turkey meat is widely considered flavorless and unpalatable. “It is, almost without fail, a dried-out, depressing hunk of sun-baked papier-mâché—a jaw-tiringly chewy, unsatisfying, and depressingly bland workout,” journalist Brian McManus wrote for Vice. “Deep down, we know this, but bury it beneath happy memories of Thanksgivings past.” So what is essentially the national holiday of meat-eating revolves around an animal dish that no one really likes. That fact clashes with the widely accepted answer to the central question of why it’s so hard to convince everyone to ditch meat, or even to eat less of it: the taste, stupid. > On a day meant to embody the best of humanity, and a vision for a more perfect > world, surely we can come up with better symbols. Undoubtedly, that has something to do with it. But I think the real answer is a lot more complicated, and the tasteless Thanksgiving turkey explains why. Humans crave ritual, belonging, and a sense of being part of a larger story—aspirations that reach their apotheosis at the Thanksgiving table. We don’t want to be social deviants who boycott the central symbol of one of our most cherished national holidays, reminding everyone of the animal torture and environmental degradation that went into making it. What could be more human than to go along with it, dry meat and all? Our instincts for conformity seem particularly strong around food, a social glue that binds us to one another and to our shared past. And although many of us today recognize there’s something very wrong with how our meat is produced, Thanksgiving of all occasions might seem like an ideal time to forget that for a day. In my experience, plenty of people who are trying to cut back on meat say they eat vegetarian or vegan when cooking for themselves—but when they are guests at other people’s homes or celebrating a special occasion, they’ll eat whatever, to avoid offending their hosts or provoking awkward conversations about factory farming. But this Thanksgiving, I want to invite you, reader, to flip this logic. If the social and cultural context of food shapes our tastes, even more than taste itself, then it is in precisely these settings that we should focus efforts to change American food customs for the better. “It’s eating with others where we actually have an opportunity to influence broader change, to share plant-based recipes, spark discussion, and revamp traditions to make them more sustainable and compassionate,” Natalie Levin, a board member at PEAK Animal Sanctuary in Indiana and an acquaintance of mine from vegan Twitter, told me. > I’ve come to love Thanksgiving as a holiday ripe for creative reinvention. Hundreds of years ago, a turkey on Thanksgiving might have represented abundance and good tidings—a too-rare thing in those days, and therefore something to be grateful for. Today, it’s hard to see it as anything but a symbol of our profligacy and unrestrained cruelty against nonhuman animals. On a day meant to embody the best of humanity, and a vision for a more perfect world, surely we can come up with better symbols. Besides, we don’t even like turkey. We should skip it this year. In 2023, my colleague Kenny Torrella published a wrenching investigation into conditions in the US turkey industry. He wrote: > The Broad Breasted White turkey, which accounts for 99 out of every 100 > grocery store turkeys, has been bred to emphasize—you guessed it—the breast, > one of the more valuable parts of the bird. These birds grow twice as fast and > become nearly twice as big as they did in the 1960s. Being so top-heavy, > combined with other health issues caused by rapid growth and the unsanitary > factory farming environment, can make it difficult for them to walk. > > Another problem arises from their giant breasts: The males get so big that > they can’t mount the hens, so they must be bred artificially. > > Author Jim Mason detailed this practice in his book The Ethics of What We Eat, > co-authored with philosopher Peter Singer. Mason took a job with the turkey > giant Butterball to research the book, where, he wrote, he had to hold male > turkeys while another worker stimulated them to extract their semen into a > syringe using a vacuum pump. Once the syringe was full, it was taken to the > henhouse, where Mason would pin hens chest-down while another worker inserted > the contents of the syringe into the hen using an air compressor. > > > Workers at the farm had to do this to one hen every 12 seconds for 10 hours a > day. It was “the hardest, fastest, dirtiest, most disgusting, worst-paid work” > he had ever done, Mason wrote. In the wild, turkeys live in “smallish groups of a dozen or so, and they know each other, they relate to each other as individuals,” Singer, author of the new book Consider the Turkey, said on a recent episode of the Simple Heart podcast. “The turkeys sold on Thanksgiving never see their mothers, they never go and forage for food…They’re pretty traumatized, I’d say, by having thousands of strange birds around who they can’t get to know as individuals,” packed together in crowded sheds. From birth to death, the life of a factory-farmed turkey is one punctuated by rote violence, including mutilations to their beaks, their toes, and snoods, a grueling trip to the slaughterhouse, and a killing process where they’re roughly grabbed and prodded, shackled upside down, and sent down a fast-moving conveyor belt of killing. “If they’re lucky, they get stunned and then the knife cuts their throat,” Singer said. “If they’re not so lucky, they miss the stunner and the knife cuts their throat while they’re fully conscious.” On Thanksgiving, Americans throw the equivalent of about 8 million of these turkeys in the trash, according to an estimate by ReFED, a nonprofit that works to reduce food waste. And this year will be the third Thanksgiving in a row celebrated amid an out-of-control bird flu outbreak, in which tens of millions of chickens and turkeys on infected farms have been culled using stomach-churning extermination methods. When I search for the language for this grim state of affairs, I can only describe it in religious terms, as a kind of desecration—of our planet’s abundance, of our humanity, of life itself. On every other day of the year, it’s obscene enough. On a holiday that’s supposed to represent our gratitude for the Earth’s blessings, you can understand why Thanksgiving, for many vegetarians or vegans, is often described as the most alienating day of the year. I count myself among that group, although I don’t dread Thanksgiving. I’ve come to love it as a holiday ripe for creative reinvention. I usually spend it making a feast of plant-based dishes (known by most people as “sides,” though there’s no reason they can’t be the main event). To name a few: a creamy lentil-stuffed squash, cashew lentil bake, a bright autumnal brussels sprout salad, roasted red cabbage with walnuts and feta (sub with dairy-free cheese), mushroom clam-less chowder (I add lots of white beans), challah for bread rolls, a pumpkin miso tart more complex and interesting than any Thanksgiving pie you’ve had, and rasmalai, a Bengali dessert whose flavors align beautifully with the holidays. Vegan turkey roasts are totally optional, though many of them have gotten very good in recent years—I love the Gardein breaded roast and Field Roast hazelnut and cranberry. You can also make your own. The hardest part of going meatless is not about the food. (If it were, it might not be so hard to convince Americans to abandon parched roast turkey.) “It’s about unpleasant truths and ethical disagreements being brought out into the open,” Levin said, about confronting the bizarre dissonance in celebrations of joy and giving carved from mass-produced violence. These conversations are not easy, but they are worth having. And we don’t have to fear losing the rituals that define us as Americans. To the contrary, culture is a continuous conversation we have with each other about our shared values—and any culture that’s not changing is dead. There’s far more meaning to be had, I’ve found, in adapting traditions that are no longer authentic to our ethics and violate our integrity. We can start on Thanksgiving.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. David Cross is many things: a famed comic, an Emmy award winner, and a New York Times best-selling author. But he is not a climate scientist. That fact might make him the perfect person to communicate the urgency of global heating to mass audiences. “You’ve got to speak to people in a way they can understand,” he said. That’s the purpose of a new video in which Cross co-stars with renowned environmental scientist Michael Oppenheimer. “Humor, as I think has been shown over centuries, is a very effective way to get people to absorb the information,” said Cross. The new video puts that theory to the test. In it, Oppenheimer plays the straight man, issuing a dire warning: “Heat records are being broken all over the world. In fact, last year was the hottest year since the industrial era began,” he says. Cross then interprets that message for laypeople. “Translation: The shit is hitting the fan,” he says. “And the fan is on maximum.” The video was released by the group Climate Science Breakthrough, which has over the past two years has made videos with leading UK comedians such as Nish Kumar and Jo Brand in an attempt to “help climate science break through to many more people—and unlock action.” “We’re aiming to reach beyond the converted and depolarize the debate,” said Ben Carey, one of the video’s producers. If the new video is well-received, they’ll enlist more scientists and experts to produce more of them, he said. The video series comes as part of a wave of climate-focused comedy launched in recent years. In 2023, Oscar-winning director Adam McKay launched the non-profit Yellow Dot Studios to make content about the dangers of fossil fuels, and the following year, climate advocacy organization Gas Leaks Project launched a mini series about the dangers of gas stoves. These projects could help reach people who experts aren’t often reaching, said Oppenheimer, since “most of the training for young scientist is aimed at being able to communicate enough so you get your next job, not necessarily aimed at communicating to the public.” If it seems odd to use humor to build awareness about a grim subject, Cross says it’s a tactic with a long history. Indeed, George Carlin railed against censorship in the 1970s, while Bill Hicks famously used his platform to speak out against George W. Bush’s foreign policy. “Even before standup existed, there was Moliere and Voltaire and [Jonathan] Swift and Mark Twain—there is a huge precedent for artists using humor and satire to drive home a point,” said Cross. The use of humor may help drive the urgency of the climate crisis home for certain audiences, said Oppenheimer, particularly “when the news is so chockablock full of news that competes for people’s attention.” But comedy is not the only tool that can be used to better communicate the urgency of the climate crisis, he said. “Some scientists are excellent at communicating with religious audiences and can frame the issues in a way that resonates with them [while] other scientists are great at connecting with parents,” he said. “The point is, more scientists are recognizing that it’s not always enough to lay out the facts or the data, that we have to find ways to encourage people to listen and take notice.”

Why do Republicans and their enablers insist on fantasizing about one of the most evil empires in science fiction? In a recent CNN appearance, former Mitch McConnell adviser and GOP operative Scott Jennings went on the defense, justifying Emperor Palpatine’s violent vision for a galactic empire. When podcaster and contributor Van Lathan pointed out just one of the many war crimes the Empire engaged in—blowing up Princess Leia’s adopted home planet and massacring everyone on it—Jennings replied: “I think some could argue that it was warranted, given their rebellious activities. I mean, he defended the Empire against unelected hippies and violent protesters.” The entire massacre of a planet is justified because of some “unelected hippies” and “protesters”? It turns out Jennings isn’t the only right-winger to defend the Empire’s actions—and specifically the destruction of an entire planet. For decades, the GOP and its allies have played with defending the Empire’s violence for the sake of order. (Republican and former FCC chairman Ajit Pai literally quoted Palpatine in a hearing once.) Now, of course, Star Wars is entirely science fiction. It’s not real. But this past week, the final episodes of Andor, Disney’s critical and audience hit about how the rebellion in the original trilogy came to be, dropped. And the show has pulled the Star Wars franchise into somewhat of a cultural renaissance, as its obvious point of view on authoritarianism marks a return to what made Star Wars: Dissecting the effects of state violence on the everyday people who work toward liberation. “I do think that looking at how Star Wars and other stories like it are used in our political conversation reveals something interesting about our political moment: Republicans are gunning for their own Galactic Empire, and they will blow up a planet to make it happen. Or in this case, they will blow up our country.”

Più di un adolescente su quattro, tra i 14 e i 18 anni, pensa sia frequente subire o assistere a discriminazioni legate all’orientamento o all’identità sessuale e quasi uno su quattro ritiene la pornografia una rappresentazione realistica dell’atto sessuale. I dati emergono dal nuovo rapporto “L’educazione affettiva e sessuale in adolescenza: a che punto siamo?”, realizzato da Save the Children, in collaborazione con Ipsos. La fotografia che l’indagine scatta dimostra quanto la strada verso una concreta educazione alla sessuo-affettività sia ancora lunga e necessaria da percorrere Il web, invece che scuola e famiglia, rimane la risorsa principale a cui le giovani generazioni si rivolgono per conoscere il sesso. Questo porta gli adolescenti a considerare realistiche rappresentazioni del sesso lontane dalla realtà, insieme a una serie di ambiguità sul modo di viverlo: Save The Children lo sottolinea nel nuovo rapporto “L’educazione affettiva e sessuale in adolescenza: a che punto siamo?” pubblicato lo scorso 12 febbraio in concomitanza il lancio della campagna “#Facciamoloinclasse”, insieme al Movimento Giovani per Save the Children: la rete di ragazze e ragazzi dai 14 ai 25 anni impegnati nella difesa dei diritti di adolescenti e giovani, per l’introduzione di percorsi obbligatori di educazione all’affettività e alla sessualità nelle scuole. I RISULTATI DEL RAPPORTO DI SAVE THE CHILDREN: LA PORNOGRAFIA È CONSIDERATO SESSO “REALISTICO” L’indagine “L’educazione affettiva e sessuale in adolescenza: a che punto siamo?” esplora i mezzi informativi su cui i giovani fanno affidamento, le pratiche di prevenzione del rischio da loro adottate, il ruolo della famiglia e dei servizi nell’educazione affettiva e sessuale, con un’attenzione particolare alle possibili nuove sfide e opportunità legate al digitale nelle relazioni intime tra i giovani. Vengono presentati i principali risultati di una ricerca quantitativa, realizzata in collaborazione con Ipsos, su un campione di 800 adolescenti tra i 14 e i 18 anni e un campione di 400 genitori di almeno un/una figlio/a dai 14 ai 18 anni residenti sul territorio nazionale. > Che cosa emerge? Un aspetto su tutti: anche il sesso, nella vita degli > adolescenti, è performativo e considerato un modello a cui aderire Quasi un adolescente su 4 (il 24%) ritiene la pornografia una rappresentazione realistica dell’atto sessuale, mentre il 17% dei ragazzi e delle ragazze è d’accordo che l’autoproduzione di materiale pornografico possa aiutarlo/a a soddisfare alcune necessità economiche. Solo il 12% ritiene che il sesso online abbia lo stesso valore di quello dal vivo. Il 66% ha avuto esperienze sessuali. Il 16% degli adolescenti intervistati lo ha fatto per non sentirsi diversa o diverso e quasi uno su dieci per le pressioni del/della partner.  «Per educare i giovani e le giovani a relazioni sessuali e affettive sane, prevenire comportamenti a rischio, discriminazioni e violenze, è urgente una legge che preveda l’inserimento di percorsi obbligatori di educazione all’affettività e alla sessualità, in linea con le Linee guida Unesco sulla Comprehensive Sexuality Education e gli Standard dell’Organizzazione Mondiale della Sanità, nelle scuole e all’interno dei piani formativi, coerentemente con l’età dei beneficiari», ha spiegato Giorgia D’Errico, direttrice delle Relazioni Istituzionali di Save the Children, sottolineando un dato: «dalla nostra ricerca emerge che oggi solo il 47% degli adolescenti, ovvero meno di una/o su due, ha ricevuto un’educazione sessuale a scuola, una percentuale che scende al 37% al Sud e nelle Isole». Per D’Errico, dunque, «È necessario fornire a tutte e tutti gli strumenti di base per aiutarli a camminare tra complessità emotive, sociali e culturali. Strumenti in grado di affrontare il tema della sessualità e dell’affettività in maniera olistica, trattando argomenti come consenso, rispetto, benessere, interazioni sicure nel mondo digitale, prevenzione della violenza e delle discriminazioni, salute sessuale e prevenzione delle infezioni sessualmente trasmissibili». EDUCAZIONE SESSUALE A SCUOLA, IL 91% DEI GENITORI È FAVOREVOLE Come già emerso da altre indagini sul tema, anche nel rapporto Save The Children la maggior parte dei genitori, ben il 91%, ritiene utile l’introduzione di percorsi di educazione sessuali obbligatori a scuola. Gli stessi giovani del Movimento Giovani per Save the Children e la Rete degli Studenti Medi – che hanno partecipato attivamente alla ricerca – chiedono da tempo percorsi strutturati di educazione sessuale e affettiva nelle scuole, e formazione anche per insegnanti, educatori e genitori. «È fondamentale un impegno congiunto per rispondere alle necessità dei ragazzi e delle ragazze e dei loro genitori, dando ai giovani gli strumenti per crescere come adulti consapevoli rispetto alla propria salute sessuale e in grado di costruire relazioni affettive sane, rispettose e paritarie – sostiene D’Errico – Con altrettanta urgenza, affinché i giovani abbiano accesso a informazioni esatte e accurate, da fonti scientificamente valide, utili a prevenire comportamenti a rischio, chiediamo al Ministero della Salute di promuovere campagne informative multicanale e periodiche che, con un linguaggio inclusivo e child-friendly, sensibilizzino i minori sulla loro salute sessuale e riproduttiva. Un’urgenza supportata dai dati: > L’82% del campione coinvolto non ha mai fatto un test Hiv e solo il 12% è > stato in un consultorio LEGGI ANCHE – La nuova riforma della scuola, tra Bibbia e passi indietro IL WEB RIMANE LA FONTE DI INFORMAZIONE PRINCIPALE SUL SESSO Ma come si informano i ragazzi e le ragazze riguardo il sesso e i propri diritti sessuali? La principale fonte di informazione dei su questi temi è il web. Il 47% degli intervistati sceglie siti web e articoli online per informarsi sulle pratiche sessuali e il 57% per approfondire il tema delle infezioni sessualmente trasmissibili. Ciò nonostante, dal punto di vista dei genitori, il 75% si sente a proprio agio a parlare di sessualità con i figli e più di uno su dieci (il 13%) si è trovato ad affrontare le loro relazioni “tossiche”.  «Dalla ricerca emergono passi avanti significativi nel dialogo tra giovani e genitori sui temi della sessualità. Tuttavia, il digitale rimane la risorsa principale delle informazioni su questi aspetti e colpiscono i dati sullo scarso accesso ai servizi sanitari, ai consultori e la percentuale molto limitata di adolescenti che si sottopongono al test Hiv, così come la resistenza di stereotipi e false credenze – ha affermato Antonella Inverno, responsabile ricerca e analisi dati di Save the Children -. Inoltre, preoccupa fortemente il comune sentire rispetto alle discriminazioni subite o testimoniate e ad alcuni comportamenti a rischio, come il binge drinking associato alla sessualità, anche se si tratta di dati basati sulla percezione delle e degli adolescenti rispetto ai loro coetanei». “FACCIAMOLO IN CLASSE”, LA CAMPAGNA CHE VUOLE PORTARE L’EDUCAZIONE SESSUALE A SCUOLA Un anno dopo la pubblicazione della ricerca “Le ragazze stanno bene? Indagine sulla violenza di genere onlife in adolescenza” Save the Children ha nuovamente approfondito il rapporto tra giovani e sessualità, con una pubblicazione che – come testimoniano i dati – fa emergere un maggior dialogo tra genitori e figli su questi temi, ma anche la necessità di un’educazione sessuale e affettiva sistemica e multidisciplinare, per supportare i giovani nel vivere in modo sano e consapevole le loro relazioni e la loro sessualità. Per questo, insieme al report, Save the Children ha lanciato anche la campagna “Facciamolo in classe”, insieme al Movimento Giovani per Save the Children e alla TV host e content creator Aurora Ramazzotti.  Il video ironico, che ha per protagonista Aurora Ramazzotti, simula un quiz con domande sulla sessualità e l’affettività a ragazze e ragazzi di diverse generazioni per sottolineare l’importanza di fornire a tutte e tutti gli strumenti necessari per vivere questi temi in modo responsabile e consapevole. Nelle 15 città in cui sono attivi i gruppi locali del Movimento giovani per Save the Children, i ragazzi e le ragazze organizzeranno attività di sensibilizzazione rivolte ai coetanei, nelle scuole e non solo, con l’obiettivo di coinvolgerli nella campagna e far sentire anche la loro voce. Un passo collettivo e sinergico a beneficio delle giovani generazioni. E non solo: sull’educazione alla sessuo-affettività anche i genitori sono d’accordo. Adolescenti più consapevoli sono adulti più risolti. The post Il sesso in adolescenza non può essere tabù: il nuovo rapporto Save the Children spiega perché appeared first on The Wom.

This story was originally published on Judd Legum’s Substack, Popular Information, to which you can subscribe here. A new middle school sex education curriculum in Orange County, Florida, obtained by Popular Information, eliminates previous lessons on the reproductive system, contraception, and consent. What remains is a discussion of the benefits of abstinence and a cursory review of various sexually transmitted diseases. Orange County’s new curriculum, provided to Popular Information by the Florida Freedom to Read Project, was recently approved by the Florida Department of Education (DoE). That approval was required as part of a law, HB 1069, signed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis in May 2023. The law requires schools to “teach abstinence from sexual activity outside of marriage as the expected standard for all school-age students.” The new Orange County 8th grade sex education curriculum, for example, emphasizes that abstinence is the only 100 percent effective method to prevent sexually transmitted diseases or pregnancy. The same information was included in Orange County’s previous 8th grade sex education curriculum, taught in prior years, and submitted to the Florida DoE for the 2023-24 school year, but never approved. A very large amount of material has been removed from the sex education curriculum. The 8th grade sex education curriculum submitted last year but not approved is 230 pages. The new, approved version is 36 pages. (You can review both documents in full at the end of this story.) The old curriculum included basic information about human anatomy that has now been eliminated. Eliminating this information was not required by the new law. Rather, the law requires the DoE to approve sex education materials as “appropriate for the grade and age of the student.” According to the Orlando Sentinel, department officials told educators in Broward County, Florida, that “[p]ictures of external sexual/reproductive anatomy” should not be included in “any grade level.” Officials in Orange County appear to have received similar instructions. A DoE spokesperson defended the new restrictions, telling the AP, “A state government should not be emphasizing or encouraging sexual activity among children or minors and is therefore right to emphasize abstinence.” The old 8th grade sex education curriculum in Orange County, while promoting abstinence, acknowledged that some students are sexually active. It provided information on how to prevent unintended pregnancy and protect against STDs if students engaged in sexual activity. This information has been deleted from the new curriculum. The old Orange County 8th grade curriculum also included information about the various kinds of birth control, their efficacy, and whether or not they helped reduce the risk of STDs. This information has also been removed. According to the Sentinel, state officials told Broward County officials that “[c]ontraceptives are not part of any health or science standard.” Instead, contraceptives could only be mentioned as a “health resource.” Here is what remains on contraception in the new Orange County 8th grade curriculum: > Prevention of Pregnancy > Intentional prevention of pregnancy through the use of various behaviors and > products, such as: > > * Sexual abstinence > * Condoms, pills, devices, patches, etc. > > > Abstinence and Preventing Risky Behaviors > > * Knowing the facts helps prepare someone to make informed, healthy choices. > * Pregnancy prevention methods can safeguard people from the transmission of > sexually transmitted diseases and HIV disease. There are no descriptions of the different forms of birth control and no explanation of which forms of birth control are effective in preventing the transmission of STDs. This is a particularly important issue in Florida, which is currently “reporting more HIV diagnoses than almost any other state.” Previously, Orange County’s 8th grade sex education curriculum included a detailed lesson about the importance of consent before engaging in sexual activity. Elissa Barr, a professor of public health at the University of North Florida, says that schools across Florida have also been ordered to remove content mentioning consent from sex education curricula. All discussion of consent has been removed from the new Orange County 8th grade sex education curriculum. During the 2023-24 school year, several of Florida’s largest school districts—including Orange, Hillsborough, and Polk Counties—decided not to teach sex education because the DoE never approved their proposed curricula. The department hired unnamed “experts” to review each proposed sex education curriculum. These experts were then required to evaluate all materials on 11 separate criteria, some of which were inscrutable. (Experts were paid $330 for each completed review.) That process has finally been completed, at least in Orange County, for the 2024-25 school year. The result is a sex education curriculum that includes almost no information about sex.