Categories
Perugia, Italy
This is based on a recipe from my favorite Louisiana cookbook, “The New Orleans Cookbook,” Rima Collin & Richard Collin. I’ve simplified it a little bit but it is still delicious.
Ingredients
2 T vegetable oil
2 lbs boneless chicken thighs or chicken tenders
2 onions, chopped
1 green bell pepper, chopped
1 bunch scallions, white parts only, chopped
4 cloves garlic, pressed
3 T chopped parsley
1 lb andouille sausage, cut into quarters and chopped
1 T salt
2 bay leaves
1 t thyme
1/2 t black pepper
1/2 t chili power
1/2 t basil
1/4 t cayenne
2 cups white or brown rice
3 cups water (3.5 for brown rice)
optional: 1 lb peeled shrimp
Directions
- In a big dutch oven, heat oil and brown chicken over medium high heat. Remove chicken to separate bowl.
- Add vegetables and cook over medium heat, stirring regularly, about 10 minutes.
- Add andouille sausage and spices, cook 5 minutes more.
- Add rice without water and cook for 5 minutes, stirring and coating rice well with cooking liquid.
- Add water and add back chicken. Bring to a boil. Set heat to lowest setting and cover. Cook one to two hours, stirring occasionally, until rice is tender and chicken has begun to fall apart. (Brown rice takes longer than white rice.)
- If using, add peeled uncooked shrimp for the last 15 minutes of cooking. Separate any large pieces of chicken with a fork. Serve hot.
Chicken and Sausage Jambalaya
I wrote this column for the Tampa Bay Times about news consumption; it subsequently appeared on PolitiFact and Poynter.org. It begins:
It’s seldom been harder to discern what’s true, whom to trust and what’s reliable than in the age of the coronavirus pandemic — nor has solid information ever been as important.
I sort out fact from fiction every day, and I want to help you do it, too. As editor-in-chief for PolitiFact, I’m monitoring a lot about COVID-19: the latest science on exposure and immunity; projected timetables for social distancing and the development of vaccines; President Donald Trump’s latest news conferences; what the nation’s governors are doing; and what’s happening with jobs, the stock market and the economy. Information is developing and changing, and there’s always something more to look at.
Humans seek information to feel informed and safe. When there are no new developments, or important questions can’t be answered, it leaves us unsatisfied. So we keep looking for information that isn’t there, and that creates frustration. It happens to both journalists and citizens during ordinary times, but it’s intense during high-stress events such as a pandemic.
Still, we can be savvy news consumers, and even find calm in how we engage with the news. I’m following three principles that bring order to how I approach my own news seeking. READ MORE
Categories
How to Fight an Infodemic
I appeared on a podcast recently to discuss the explosion of misinformation that has followed the coronavirus pandemic. Intelligence Squared host John Donvan led myself and Professor Kate Starbird of University of Washington in a wide-ranging discussion.
April 2 is International Fact-checking Day, a new holiday that the International Fact-checking Network launched in 2017. We celebrate it every year at PolitiFact.
This year, I wrote a column in the context of the coronavirus, meditating on how, these days, everyday people have to fact-check their own information consumption.
Knowing whether a particular statement or claim is true or false is the foundation on which we make sound decisions for our families and about our health. It’s the basis on which we can judge our elected officials and make decisions about how to govern ourselves in a democracy.
But the true spirit of fact-checking is so much larger than that.
We have to ask ourselves: Are we willing to use evidence, reason, science and logic to govern our actions? Or do we react on impulse and emotionally, often out of an intense flash of fear or anger? Do we use prudence and thoughtfulness to come to a decision, or do we indulge our instincts and then stick to our stance no matter what?
It’s a critical decision, and one we each get to make daily, even hourly.
“In the time of coronavirus, we’re all fact-checkers now”
PolitiFact started as a politics news website in 2007, but these days, it feels more like a mission. Over the years, we’ve evolved and grown to encompass many ways of promoting information integrity. I wrote a State of PolitiFact report for the site covering our core competencies, which include:
- Political factchecking;
- Withstanding attacks on the media;
- Fighting disinformation;
- Promoting media literacy; and,
- Working with researchers.
This summer I traveled in Ireland again with my husband Mark Holan (my third trip; his ninth). For two weeks, we toured the north and the west of Ireland. After landing in Dublin, we went north to Downpatrick, the burial place of St. Patrick, then onto Belfast for a black taxi tour and a visit to the Titanic museum. We continued north to the Antrim coast for hiking and the Giant’s causeway. We stopped to view the grave of William Butler Yeats in Drumcliff, County Sligo, before a night spent in Sligo town. Then we went on to Westport for bicycling, the Aran Islands for more hiking, Galway for book stores and then finally to Mark’s ancestral home in County Kerry. (Click a photo below to start the gallery.)
Jack B. Yeats at the Model in Sligo 
The grave of poet William Butler Yeats in Drumcliff 
The Giant’s Causeway, Northern Ireland 
A clifftop hike to the Giant’s causeway 
Ballybunion, County Kerry
For The Atlantic, I wrote an essay about why fact-checkers report and write about so many of President Donald Trump’s statements.
It’s astounding even now, two years into Donald Trump’s presidency, how many things he says on a daily basis that just aren’t true.
Here are some of the president’s most frequent falsehoods: U.S. Steel is opening six plants (it’s not); Barack Obama’s administration had the same policy as Trump’s of separating children from adults at the border (it didn’t); Trump signed the largest tax cut in history (Ronald Reagan, among others, has him beat); a caravan of migrants was stirred up by Democrats offering health care and food benefits paid for by taxpayers (not quite); other countries owe the U.S. a lot of money for nato (this is false); the building of a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border is well under way (nope). None of this is true.
Other presidents have spun whoppers to the American people for political advantage before Trump, and some of those untruths—regarding the realities of the Vietnam War, for example—were hugely consequential. READ MORE …
Me: “I’m going to see Andrew Bird!”
You: “Who is Andrew Bird?”
Me: “He’s an indie rock songwriter who plays the violin.”
You: “Oh.”
Andrew Bird usually plays in late-night clubs, but in October he appeared with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center for a pops concert; also on the bill was singer-songwriter Gabriel Kahane. (Kahane orchestrated Bird’s songs for the performance.) I bought tickets months in advance.
The performance cast Andrew Bird’s songs in a new light with the full orchestra filling out the songs and giving them a symphonic largeness. Some of the accompaniment was a little atonal for my taste — I would have preferred more melodic orchestration — but it still brought out the real beauty of great songs like “Pulaski at Night” and “Scythian Empires.” I love classical music and I love indie rock; I’d like to see more match-ups like Andrew at the Kennedy Center.
The night made me reflect on the five times I’ve seen Andrew Bird in concert … An earlier band called Andrew Bird’s Bowl of Fire in Austin at the South by Southwest music festival, probably around 1997 … At Tampa’s Straz Center in October 2012 for his album Break It Yourself … For his album Are You Serious at the 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C., in April 2016 … At Maryland’s Merriweather Post Pavilion in 2017 … At the Kennedy Center Pops Concert in October 2018.
Here is my ranking of Andrew Bird’s Top 5 albums (or EPs).
5. I Want to See Pulaski at Night (2013) – The pop song perfection of “Pulaski at Night” with its lilting violin hook is nestled between soothing instrumental variations. This is a great EP for just chilling.
4. Break It Yourself (2012) – Andrew Bird doesn’t really have “hits” per se, but the song “Eyeoneye” is a real rocker, and he played it on a late-night show or two when this album came out. The other songs are more leisurely and melodic, call it music for the planet Earth: the fragility of the natural world (“Hole in the Ocean Floor”), staving off climate change (“Desperation Breeds”), or traveling by boat (“Lusitania”) to Australia (“Fatal Shore”).
3. Armchair Apocrypha (2007) – This album has my second most-favorite song ever of Andrew BIrd’s, the thumping disco lullaby “Plasticities” with its warning to never let life’s slow unfolding lull you to sleep intellectually: “We’ll fight, we’ll fight for your music halls and dying cities/ They’ll fight for your neural walls and plasticities … precious territory.” There’s also the adventure story opening song “Fiery Crash,” the environmental warnings (again) of “Spare Ohs” (“What remains of the small flightless birds that you failed to protect?”) and the mythic galloping horse riders of “Scythian Empires.”
2. Noble Beast (2009) – So many great cuts on this one, from the mysterious sadness of “Oh No,” to the memory games of “Anonanimal,” to the pastoral longing of “Souverian.” It’s an album for sitting on a front porch at twilight on a summer’s night, sipping a cold drink.
1. The Mysterious Production of Eggs (2005) – This is the Bird album I go back to again and again and again, because just about every song on it is so memorable and sweet. There’s my No. 1 favorite song of his, “Tables and Chairs,” a wistful love song for when the end of the world arrives. There’s the elegiac and soothing “Sovay,” there’s the pulsing syncopation (and whistling) of “A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left,” there’s the child’s play marching song “Measuring Cups.” I could go on, but better that you listen yourself.
Here’s how this year’s ‘Lie of the Year’ story starts:
In the days after 17 people were viciously gunned down at a high school in Florida, the state’s Republican governor called for tighter gun laws and President Donald Trump hosted victims’ families in the State Dining Room.
The nation seemed steadfast in seeking answers and finding solutions.
“It’s not going to be talk like it has been in the past,” Trump said. “It’s been going on too long. Too many instances, and we’re going to get it done.”
But in the shadows, the internet engine of hoaxes and smears had started.
READ MORE
We also debuted the Lie of the Year on MSNBC. Here’s video