It started with good intentions: Raise funds for pandemic relief in India, the world’s hardest-hit country in measures of death and devastation by COVID. The biggest names were set to play, including five-time world chess champion Viswanathan Anand. Among his opponents was the country’s youngest billionaire, Nikhil Kamath, who made his fortune by co-founding a brokerage company.

But as the game progressed, Anand, who was universally expected to lay waste to his billionaire opponent, faced a series of suspiciously flawless moves from Kamath. They were so computerlike that onlookers wondered if Kamath was running an engine in violation of the rules. Miraculously, the billionaire won. The game of a lifetime.

And sure enough, soon after public pressure and a global outcry, Kamath confessed to cheating: “I had help from…computers,” he announced. “It is ridiculous that so many are thinking I really beat Vishy in a chess game. That is almost like me waking up and winning a 100mt race with Usain Bolt.” “This was fun for charity,” Kamath added. “In hindsight, it was quite silly” to deceive the legendary champion and supporters of COVID relief on the global stage. “Apologies.”

His cheating has come under scrutiny as an affront to Anand, who graciously said, “I just played the position on the board and expected the same from everyone,” and called it a “fun experience upholding the ethics of the game” from one side. But it gets worse before it gets better. Chess.com’s chief chess officer and Fair Play Team leader shared a statement making heads spin, saying the cheating billionaire would not stay banned: “Given…that not all the rules were properly understood, neither Chess.com nor Anand himself see any reason to uphold the matter further,” in effect relaxing the site’s strict rules against cheaters and letting a billionaire slide on account of prominence, a gesture scarcely afforded to nonbillionaires and noncelebrities.

But there’s good news. Top players are speaking out against it, among them five-time US champion Hikaru Nakamura, who blasted the decision: “There have been people caught cheating against me…and I don’t think they get unbanned, so I don’t really buy this. It just feels like [a] slap on the wrist.” “I thought the rules would be the same for billionaires. I was naive. They can cheat,” said Lichess.com founder Thibault Duplessis.

Nakamura agreed: “I’m definitely associated with Chess.com but I have to say I actually do agree with Thibault here. This is just ridiculous. If someone cheats in a game of chess, you can’t have a separate set of rules just because they happen to have a lot of money. I guarantee you that if [the player cheating] was someone who’s not of prominence, they would have stayed banned. Plain and simple.”

“Too bad Bill Gates was not aware of the billionaire club rule back then: engine help allowed,” chess historian Olimpiù G. Urcan said, recalling 23-year-old Magnus Carlsen’s defeat of Bill Gates in nine moves in 2014.

Happy Thursday. (Our Recharge department welcomes fundraisers against chess-dabbling billionaires, with no engines allowed, at recharge@motherjones.com.)

It’s an all-too-familiar story of state-sanctioned theft, land grabs in violation of Indigenous rights, and selective memory in the national news media. But the latest turn marks a major milestone. After Maine split away from Massachusetts generations ago, land controlled by the Passamaquoddy tribe was stripped. The tribe had acquired it under a treaty signed with Massachusetts, which then included Maine, after the Revolutionary War.

Now, thanks to a sale of the island, supported by Indigenous communities, the tribe has reacquired almost all of the 150 acres in southwestern Maine’s Big Lake, which had been taken in violation of the treaty. A number of reporters have amplified the story, from the Boston Globe’s Charlie McKenna to the Portland Press Herald’s Colin Woodard, the Bangor Daily News’ Robbie Feinberg, and the Good News Network’s editorial staff, creating a composite portrait of local gains with national reverberations.

Read their write-ups, and send more good news about Indigenous land and other areas of human rights to recharge@motherjones.com.

Each Friday, we bring you an article from our archives to propel you into the weekend.

Earlier this week, Jeff Bezos, the soon-to-be-ex-CEO of Amazon and the richest man in the world, said he would be blasting himself into space. Okay! Sure. Also, why? But mainly: Go for it. The new, brawny Bezos will be on board the inaugural flight of his space company: Blue Origin. He will spend three minutes in outer space without a pilot.

Bezos is not alone in being into space. Other ultrawealthy tech folk like it too. Elon Musk is trying to make rockets. Richard Branson is into private space rockets. And the new king of SPACS, Chamath Palihapitiya, convinced people to buy into Branson’s Virgin Galactic space tourism business with a bravado pitch about the stars. (Branson is reportedly fighting Bezos to get to space faster.)

This might lead you to a simple question: What’s up with these dudes and space?

I think Fred Turner, a professor at Stanford and the author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, carves a helpful path to perhaps understand the space-obsessed tech rich. In his essay “Machine Politics” for Harper’s (and, yeah, in that mouthful of a book title, too), Turner shows the unique blend of Bay Area aesthetics and Silicon Valley money. The acid and hippies found capitalism and started Apple, in a way.

For techies, this gives a conscious capitalism sheen—an against-the-grain edge—to the big money. That’s been hard to grasp in recent years as it’s become more obvious that tech is just money stacking itself up in a new way. Still, the ethos is important. If you’re a tech lord, and you buy the narrative—disruptor!—you can see how space travel and using your massive wealth do it would be a fixation.

Because you know who loved space too? Timothy Leary.

In a fascinating piece from one of our 1976 issues, writer Don Goldsmith follows Leary as the acid-making man talks about blasting himself up into the stars for space colonization. Here’s how Leary is introduced:

The man’s name is Timothy Leary. Berkeley made him a Ph.D., Harvard a professor, LSD an ex-professor, the media a devil, the government a convict, prison a space-oriented philosopher.

This piece is sort of Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test as Apollo 11 and then devolves into listing why people want to go to space. It’s cool. It also offers a dive into the hippie culture that would come to affect the tech folk directly. Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog—a text that would underpin the fantasy of scientific utopianism that fueled Silicon Valley’s mythos—is mentioned as one of the people pushing for space colonization along with Leary.

Go read the whole piece about Goldsmith attending a meeting in Berkeley for the Network, Leary’s space mission—named “Starseed Seminar #1: S.M.I.2L.E. (S.M.I.2L.E. = Space Migration+ Intelligence Increase+Life Extension)”—here.

If you need an escape hatch from the earthly howlers and horrors of a diminished but still-thrashing Donald Trump (“Donald Trump for…speaker of the House?” asks CNN), catch tomorrow’s solar eclipse. It’s a “ring of fire” taking a rare path over the North Pole. It’s also a good way to avert your eyes for a minute, and a timely reminder of how far humanity has (mostly) come in accepting more and more scientific explanations of causation despite the crush of disinformation and delusion. The Washington Post has a classic explainer on “the strangest, scariest eclipse myths throughout history.”

Consider the ritual human sacrifice performed by Aztecs to “feed and strengthen the sun and ward off the eclipse,” and the bear-bit-the-sun theory of eclipse. Or the theory that a vampire is at fault, having tried to swallow the sun before the vamp “spat it out when it burned his tongue,” causing the eclipse. Or the belief that the sun is covered not by the moon but by a bird or “a sorcerer’s cloak rather than the moon.”

If nothing else, the eclipse can put into focus some of the strides in scientific fact-finding, resetting your clock, scaling your sense of perspective. Give yourself that much. Look up and out, if not into space, then into more space than your immediate surroundings. Unless you’re on board with the vampire theory of causation.

“Thousands of artists and fans got a chance to connect and share Indigenous hip-hop culture,” Chris Sharpe, an organizer of the first International Indigenous Hip-Hop Awards, told Indian Country Today’s Vincent Schilling after pulling off the global ceremony virtually. “We’re already planning the second” awards show.

The inaugural awards, after a pandemic year that’s disproportionately upended Native communities, touched all aspects of hip-hop as a human rights movement: creative, cultural, political, personal. Canadian First Nations duo Snotty Nose Rez Kids won best album; producer David Strickland scored three awards; duo Mike Bone hosted the ceremony; and performances were given by Emcee One, Yellowsky, Zia Benjamin, and many others. Catch the full winners list and dive deeper into the growing diaspora of Indigenous hip-hop in Schilling’s recap.

Today is the third Thursday in May, making it Accessibility Awareness Day, launched 10 years ago to expand digital access and cement the political power and gains of people with disabilities. Disabled adults make up the largest minority group in the country, at 26 percent, and the largest in the world, at 17 percent. Yet the day could use a name update; it’s a day of “action,” or can be, as much as of “awareness.” It’s also a day of demarcation, mirroring how far disability rights have and haven’t come.

Younger folks are driving it, notably 17- to 24-year-olds. The newest opportunity is an ambassadorship program for people who want to create material justice, greater participation, and wider conversation among changemakers digitally on any topic. Share this Recharge if you know activists or advocates or community leaders. I worked years ago for the team that’s now conceived of and launched it and support its broader mission and methods, and say so independently. It’s not limited to disability justice by any means, though today’s disability day intersects with it, highlights one small slice, and evokes its range. The program is for anyone 17 to 24 who wants to promote digital dialogue, equality, and progress. Hit ’em up, share widely, and send Recharge story tips to recharge@motherjones.com.

It’s International Museum Day. As mask mandates continue to be lifted across the country, museums and galleries are grappling with how to reopen safely but also how to harness a movement that predated the pandemic: efforts to unionize the art world.

Gains are being made. Almost 200 workers at the Whitney Museum moved to form a union this week, supporting the filing of a petition to vote with the National Labor Relations Board. Seventy workers at Maine’s Portland Museum of Art voted to form a union. And workers at the New Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, moved to unionize in recent years.

But familiar challenges are faced in settings notoriously fraught with interlocking injustices and institutional interests. If you’re among the museum and gallery workers finding ways to advance labor rights during the pandemic, drop a line to recharge@motherjones.com. Let us know what you’re experiencing, how and if you’re able to recharge, and if you want anonymity in sharing your stories.

A peek inside the newsroom: It’s our final week of deadlines for editing and producing the summer issue of Mother Jones magazine (subscribe! Gift it!). Pages are coming together. Entering this last stretch of days is, for me, as the copy editor with final eyes on proofs, an exercise in how sharply I can stay focused and alertly I start the week. Which takes, as a matter of course, music. Three Recharges:

Carlos Niño’s impressionistic new ballad “Pleasewakeupalittlefaster, Please” is floating before it’s grounding. A saxophone paddles under hypnotic piano chords in the spirit of earlier Niño music that caught a Pitchfork reviewer as “emanat[ing] from Alice Coltrane’s ashram.” The image works. Niño lives 10 miles from where Coltrane’s ashram stood before it burned down in California wildfires. I visited Coltrane there to record one of her last interviews. “Pouring into my spirit” is how she described her sound, and Niño shares that expressive ethos. The day she exited this realm, he recorded a live tribute in her honor. See if his latest moves you.

Giggle the Ozone’s newest is blazing, imploring, with richly textured vocals. The trio is Dylan Sparrow, Jesse Krakow, and K. Abrams, produced in collaboration with Colin Marston, and it’s a remixed collection that almost didn’t happen at all. “I found the master tapes by accident after thinking they were gone,” Sparrow tells me. The discovery prompted a striking sound; it’s all here, the uptempo drive of “Zenith Age,” the Roy Orbison inflection of “Wing How Yard,” and the climate portraiture of “Evacuate.” A stunning recharge start to finish.

Marshall Allen turns 97 next week. The venerated saxophonist’s celestial sound and membership in the Sun Ra Arkestra are honored this Sunday at a live gig in Cottage City, Maryland. The celebration is “Out Music in Outer Space.” “Seemingly boundless energy” is how the writer Nate Chinen framed his music. Energy building, booming, all needed for the week ahead.

Share Recharges at recharge@motherjones.com, and subscribe if you haven’t yet.

Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty

The Jazz Journalists Association has named the Village Vanguard the livestream producer of the year, a major rebound for a club that’s been hammered by the pandemic but adapted with unparalleled resourcefulness in weekly livestreams by legends of jazz, from David Murray to Andrew Cyrille, George Cables, Immanuel Wilkins, and Ron Carter.

Carter, the most-recorded bassist in history, won the lifetime achievement award, beating out nominees Pharoah Sanders, Roscoe Mitchell, and Charles Lloyd. No question Carter deserves recognition, but someone tell me how on earth Sanders didn’t win. Sanders all day: “I think he’s probably the best tenor player in the world,” Ornette Coleman told me in 2006. (I’m also a JJA member, for disclosure, but this isn’t even a controversial take. Sanders released Promises this year; can’t multiple lifetime achievement awards be given during the pandemic?)

Drummer Terri Lyne Carrington rightly won musician of the year; Maria Schneider pulled in four awards; Ambrose Akinmusire took the trumpet title; Branford Marsalis scored for soprano saxophone; Anat Cohen for clarinet; and Linda May Han Oh for bass. The full list of winners is an exceptional roll call.

Bonus Recharge: Tyshawn Sorey is headlining the Vanguard this weekend, and this Saturday is the second-ever livestream from the Van Gelder Studio, with organist Joey DeFrancesco on the same Hammond that Jimmy Smith recorded on. DeFrancesco joins drummer Billy Hart, saxophonist Houston Person, and guitarist Peter Bernstein. Tickets here. To gear up, sample the Van Gelder archives: the rejuvenating “Willow Weep for Me” by Stanley Turrentine and Gene Harris. Recharge tips at recharge@motherjones.com.

A year ago today, just two months into the pandemic, I wrote a Recharge headlined “The Radical Roots of Mother’s Day as a Pandemic-Fighting Movement,” a historical view long before “vaccine surplus” was a conceivable news story (and for much of the world, it still isn’t). I wrote then that for the millions of mothers working on the front lines and millions more incarcerated across America—80 percent of women in jail are mothers—spending Mother’s Day at a mandatory distance is a “test of resilience,” of “solidarity,” of many, many things. An 8-year-old and a 10-year-old had created an online newspaper with their mother called the Quarantine Times; a mother and a daughter had graduated that week in North Carolina together; doulas and midwives were organizing for workers’ rights; and 150 hospital staff got a musical surprise for Mother’s Day in the Bronx.

“Let us know how you view motherhood beyond Mother’s Day at recharge@motherjones.com,” we asked, promising to highlight your stories on “our new daily Recharge blog.”

New daily Recharge blog! A year and a blog and a vaccine later, we want to hear from you again: Is your family vaccinated? Did you see your mother or get seen by your mother yesterday? In person or remotely? Do you know the naming story and biography of our magazine’s namesake? (Are you a reader who addresses us in correspondence as “Dear Mother”?)

Mother’s Day has taken on new resonance as vaccine rates surge, but major challenges remain. The day is traceable to anti-war activist Anna Jarvis, blues pioneer Bessie Smith, voting-rights activist Julia Ward Howe (who wrote the “Mother’s Day Proclamation”), and tens of billions of women throughout history. Share your 2021 stories of motherhood at recharge@motherjones.com.

Each Friday, we bring you an article from our archive to propel you into the weekend.

Well, looks like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went ahead and did my job of pulling something from the Mother Jones archive to dig into. After a new jobs report indicated somewhat weak growth, the US Chamber of Commerce pulled out its austerity klaxon and called for the end of unemployment benefits. The argument is that the $300 a week is making people lazy. They won’t go back to work. AOC tweeted that the real problem is that many businesses still do not “actually pay a living wage.” And then she included our old article on the US Chamber of Commerce.

If you’re interested in learning more about their secretive/bizarre lobbying operation, check out this archived piece from @MotherJones

“the Chamber had been routinely inflating its membership numbers by 900 percent”https://t.co/wk3c1cQrKG

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) May 7, 2021

So, yes, you should go read our story from 2010 on the group. It outlines how the group parades as the arbiter of Main Street while cashing out for the most elite of businesses. As the Chamber moves to stop UI, it is relevant.

If you grew up listening to your local classic rock radio station, there are probably a few facts about Eric Clapton that have been engrained in your head.

He taught himself to play guitar as a teenager and became the engineer of classic rock hits including “Layla” and “Crossroads.” He’s been a member of more rock groups than you can shake a stick at: the Yardbirds, Cream, Derek and the Dominos, Blind Faith, and the Plastic Ono Band, to name a few. His four-year-old son died after falling from a high-rise window, inspiring the song “Tears in Heaven.”

There are two crucial facts that I didn’t know about Clapton until very recently. One is that “Crossroads” was not an original song but a cover of Delta blues musician Robert Johnson’s “Cross Road Blues,” first recorded in 1936. The other is that, in 1976, Clapton went on a drunken, racist diatribe at a concert, hurling racial slurs about immigrants and arguing that England should be a white country. No one knows Clapton’s precise language, because there are no known recordings of the outburst, but numerous witnesses have recounted the incident, which spurred the “Rock Against Racism” punk movement.

Clapton profited off of the work of a Black blues singer whom he revered and who had died about 30 years prior. And he held the belief that Black people and white people ought to be segregated—at least enough to drunkenly rant about it on stage one night. 

These two facts cannot be disconnected. I listened to Robert Johnson’s recordings for the first time earlier this year. I found them to be a revelation. In them, I heard the seed of much of the music I’d always known: Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones (whom I naively assumed had written “Love in Vain”), and, of course, Eric Clapton. Greil Marcus summarizes this sense of discovery in his 1975 book Mystery Train:

After hearing Johnson’s music for the first time—listening to that blasted and somehow friendly voice, the shivery guitar, hearing a score of lines that fit as easily and memorably into each day as Dylan’s had—I could listen to nothing else for months. Johnson’s music changed the way the world looked to me.

Appreciating Clapton’s art requires a certain ignorance of its origins. Clapton’s version of “I Shot the Sheriff,” for example, found more commercial success than Bob Marley’s original. But the lines “Sheriff John Brown always hated me / For what, I don’t know” undeniably carry less weight coming from a white man’s mouth.

Clapton recorded an entire studio album of Johnson’s songs, but, in the world of classic rock radio stations, Johnson is less an artist to be loved and enjoyed than a secret. I think that my ignorance about one of Clapton’s greatest influences reflects a broader cultural willingness to forget racism in favor of loving the music. But in pasting over the complexity, you lose out on the actual history.

Saturday is the 110th anniversary of Johnson’s birth. Listen to his “Cross Road Blues” here.

The press, where it’s free, is a central nervous system. It sends and receives signals, zaps and regulates information until the pathways are pinched by the malignant forces of misinformation or bad actors, or both.

But there’s good news on World Press Freedom Day, now in its third decade. This year’s theme is “information as a public good,” underscoring what the chief of UNESCO, which founded the day, calls “the indisputable importance of verified and reliable information” secured by journalists accountable to you. Mark the day three ways:

1. Join Nelufar Hedayat’s #DearWorldLive conversation about solutions to the jailing and repression of journalists around the world and the deepening divide between powerful politicians and reporters investigating them. Her guests are Syrian journalist Kholoud Helmi, who co-founded the nonprofit newspaper Enab Baladi, and Maria Salazar Ferro, the Committee to Protect Journalists’ emergencies director.

2. See the strides made by 250,000 petitioners seeking the release of jailed journalists, and thousands more supporting Free Turkey Media, a campaign launched four years ago by Amnesty International and other human rights groups.

3. Forward this Recharge to one person you know. Ask if they’ll sign up for the Mother Jones Daily newsletter if they haven’t. Whether it’s ours or another independent newsroom’s, keep the nervous system, and availability of information, protected.

Each Friday, we bring you an article from our archives to propel you into the weekend.

For some time, there was a short, lively feature in this magazine called Conspiracy Watch. It did not have an exclamation point, but I read it as such: Conspiracy Watch!

Sometimes mimicking the zeal and verve of the conspiracy writers themselves, staff members would break down why a Lady Gaga music video was probably not an Illuminati plot or why it didn’t sound quite right that infamous superdollars (counterfeit bills traced back to North Korea) were, in fact, produced by the CIA. Each is affixed with a “kookiness rating”: “1=maybe they’re on to something, 5=break out the tinfoil hat!” CIA superdollars got a 3; Lady Gaga droning you into submission got a 5.

There are others to enjoy. Rumors of Operation Couch Potato, a plan to give us better TVs so we can sit on our butts and watch in high definition instead of overturning the government. And the idea that all the gold in Fort Knox is gone. A classic? The idea that the Mafia caused the stock market crash.

Before the pandemic, for my birthday each year I’d roast a whole lechon in my Oakland yard and invite anyone I could to help eat it. It’s an odd tradition, but many Filipinos celebrate their birthdays by being the ones to treat their friends and family at the celebrant’s expense. For a social introvert like me, holding a pig roast turned out to be a smart move because I was able to gather all of my favorite people in the same place while being too busy roasting a pig to talk for too long. And if I got to share with them a little taste of home, even better.

I’d like to say I began roasting whole pigs out of a desire to share the food customs of my people. I’ve grown prouder of being Filipino as I’ve grown older, but it wasn’t always easy. Growing up in areas where Filipinos weren’t so common, I was bullied for many, many things, and the Filipino food my mom sometimes packed for school lunch was one of them. On those days I’d need to look for isolated corners of the schoolyard just so I could eat my chicken adobo and garlic rice without classmates pointing, staring, and running away because they didn’t know any better. I remember being so embarrassed one time by how the sinigang in my packed lunch smelled that I snuck out before eating to throw it away so no one would know it was mine.

Even today, as Filipino cuisine hits more levels of mainstream, there’s a mix of pride and saltiness in me that the food I was once teased for, that I was forced to hide in the shadows, was now becoming trendy. It’s hard to know how to feel when Rachael Ray decides to put her own strange twist on a Filipino classic, when at the end of the day it still helps bring awareness to Filipino food as a whole. In some ways roasting a pig resolves that tension, to be part of this arrival and bring it full center in my own world, on my own terms.

The truth is I actually began roasting pigs because someone said I couldn’t. It was a dream I’d casually talked about with friends, until someone I barely knew told me it was impossible, that it was too much work and so far from his norm that it wasn’t worth doing. Little did that long-forgotten person know that aside from pork, aside from karaoke and Catholicism, another Filipino pastime is a stubborn resolve to prove people wrong about them. I didn’t know the first thing about roasting a pig, and I was very young when I’d last experienced one in the Philippines, but our national hero, Jose Rizal, taught us Filipinos that we are capable of literally anything and everything. (Aside from being a revolutionary writer, he was a biologist, ophthalmologist, painter, and fencer, as well as a fluent speaker of 22 languages.) With a little hater juice to fuel us, not even the colonial Spanish could keep us down.

It turned out roasting a pig is quite a labor of love, and I couldn’t just roast it the way I’d wanted: on a spit over fire with an apple in its mouth while friends took turns spinning it. The best way to cook a pig evenly, I found out, is to spatchcock it like you would a chicken. (It also turns out butchers don’t have whole pigs on hand, and that first time I luckily snagged an order with the local butcher just in time for pig day.)

For each roast, I’d build an aboveground roaster from cement blocks, following wonderful advice from some folks in Miami, and wire together large grill plates and iron to sandwich the pig for roasting. I’d later learn to weld so the plates are more structurally sound. The pig needs to be marinated—I chose a citrus and oregano mojo, also from the Miami folks—in an ice tub overnight. Years later I learned to inject it with the marinade using a giant syringe, plugging holes with garlic and salting every crevice for a better roast. Roasting the same way each year didn’t feel right, and besides, I had something to prove. That guy whose name I can’t remember—I had to prove him wrong, or something.

On the big day, the pig would roast for almost eight hours, and each hour I’d pour fresh coal in. Guests trickling in were recruited to the kitchen to chop fruit, or if they were lucky they’d be pulled into rolling mountains of lumpia for the deep fryer. As the eight-hour mark grew near, I’d ask for help flipping the pig, removing layers of brick, and cranking the heat, the secret to perfect crackling. With guests hungrier by the hour, the cooked pig then needed to rest (in plain view) for a torturous few minutes. After it rested, I’d stand at a station with a big cleaver, thick rubber gloves, and an apron, and hack gleefully away at pig meat while filling the plates of people lined up. Dogs milled about the table and under plates, looking to score. Laughter, singing, slurps, Beyoncé, and the haze of Oakland fall would fill that street well into the early evening.

As the roast wound down and only my closest friends remained, I’d sit somewhere in the yard with them, quietly content as they talked around me, eyes rested on the dull embers of the pit growing fainter with the night.

Jayo Miko Macasaquit is Mother Jones’ human resources director. Share comments and Recharge story tips at recharge@motherjones.com.

Mother Jones illustration

Restaurants are still reeling from the pandemic, but opportunities are growing to transform the industry and explore new models for survival. Tune in Thursday for a conversation with chef and restaurateur Tunde Wey, One Fair Wage president Saru Jayaraman, chef and owner of Reem’s California Reem Assil, and Mother Jones senior editor Maddie Oatman as they unpack how the pandemic has laid bare fundamental inequalities but also primed restaurants to remake the industry.

Register for free, and mark your calendar for Thursday, April 29, at 3 p.m. ET / noon PT. Start with Maddie’s latest story, “Can Co-ops Save Restaurants?” And share your Recharge tips and stories at recharge@motherjones.com.

The devastation couldn’t be more severe. Yesterday, India recorded its highest single-day death toll from COVID for the ninth consecutive day, and the highest new number of cases anywhere in the world. But the United States announced it’s immediately shipping supplies and tapping “every resource at our disposal” for aid, including rapid testing kits, oxygen, protective gear, and vaccine material.

The pledge is reactive, not proactive, but it’s a big step. On the moral and medical questions, there’s an excellent interview, published yesterday, by New Yorker writer Daniel A. Gross with philosopher Peter Singer, whose pioneering texts on effective altruism—how to do the most good—contain a prescription for pandemic relief. “Where does responsibility lie for making the distribution more equitable?” Singer’s answer persuasively compares pandemic aid to climate action: “Governments should be getting together so that the burden is distributed equitably among affluent nations, just as we get together in the Paris agreement.”

It’s not a controversial idea, but he welcomes controversy on other fronts. Last week he co-launched the peer-reviewed Journal of Controversial Ideas, “a response,” Singer says, “to a worrying trend of restricting freedom of thought and discussion, including in academic life.” The journal focuses on lightning-rod ideas without fear of intimidation by “petitions or letters signed against them,” a fear that backfoots many early-career academics and media workers who wouldn’t chance their comfort or employment to discuss and defend essential questions. Which is how Singer got his own start, planting a flag for concepts, including animal rights, that land crosswise for many carnivores and traditionalists who steer clear of his philosophy. The journal is “particularly aimed at protecting junior academics who don’t have tenure.”

The full Q&A is worth a read. Whether the journal itself meets a high bar, decide for yourself. But if unflinching academic analysis makes you queasy, brace for impact. For the faint of philosophical heart, turn instead to the 10th-anniversary edition of his book The Life You Can Save: How to Do Your Part to End World Poverty.

Each Friday, we bring you an article from our archives to propel you into the weekend.

The word “downsizing” seems to have been downsized.

Looking back in the newspaper archives, there is a steep climb from 1990 to 1996 in the use of the word “downsizing” in stories. Then, it levels off—much higher than before, but well below its peak—and it plods along from there. Personally, I haven’t heard it in a few years. (Except for that Alexander Payne movie, which I reviewed long ago.) We have other terms for the horror of losing your job: laid off, fired, let go. Downsizing now might even refer more often to empty nesters scaling down to a smaller house as the nuclear family cools its reactors with kids off to college. (My personal formative experience with downsizing was Office Space.)

Downsizing refers to slashing jobs in a more permanent sense. It means restructuring and cutting the assumed fat; it would lead to some slim, slick world of only real jobs. These marks of efficiency seem to fit a certain era we’ve passed. (Sorry…that I hope we’ve passed.) It certainly makes sense it would congeal with Democrats saying the era of big government is “over.” And as the free trade consensus under President Bill Clinton implemented neoliberal reforms that fundamentally changed the market—and welcomed globalization with too little discussions of labor—perhaps downsizing fit the moment: a bit of fancy speak for the idea that it was a good thing to be losing jobs. It’s funny to think it became about the empty nesters. The irony of a generation throwing away what was necessary even if the kids were still in the house.

In 1996, at the peak, Mother Jones wrote about “The Wages of Downsizing.” A small piece, it begins with a scene of the author bemoaning those calling the middle of the 1990s a boom time for jobs (including a dig at economist Joseph Stiglitz, who would later win a Nobel Prize). And then it turns, unexpectedly, into a small parody piece. It gives you a list of questions to ask if you’re worried about being downsized. And I think we can just end with reprinting them:

Is a corporate layoff lurking in your future? Ask yourself these 10 questions:

1. When you get up the guts to say “promote me or lose me,” does your boss show concern, or a sudden fondness for counting ceiling dots?

2. Does your paycheck remind you of that old Led Zeppelin album The Song Remains the Same?

3. Has your boss asked, “What kind of future do you see for yourself here?”

4. Do you feel your company’s product is an eight-track cassette in a CD world?

5. Are you merging with another company whose CEO is nicknamed “The Guillotine”?

6. Did you get a memo saying your performance review has been “canceled until further notice”?

7. Does your Christmas bonus give you visions of Bob Cratchit?

8. Are you the highest-paid person in a department where business isn’t exactly booming?

9. Have your job responsibilities been trimmed back to the point where you’ve got time to rearrange your desk accessories—daily?

10. Do executives repeatedly cancel meetings you’ve scheduled because of “time constraints”? Do you then see them outside, playing lawn volleyball instead?

If you answered yes to several of these questions, your job may be headed for the chopping block.

Yesterday’s murder conviction marks an extremely rare moment of accountability in a history of killings by police too often unrecorded, unacknowledged, unpunished. It’s a moment of cautious exhalation, relief, and some celebration. It’s also a reminder of how much work there is to do. Let us know how you’re processing it. Is there a recharge for you? Is it a clear inflection point or an isolated respite from violence so entrenched and expected that the verdict feels overshadowed by the untold number of charges never brought? Let us know:

One recharge, if you’re looking for it, is a reminder from history: “Tyranny hates memory,” as the essayist Tom Christensen wrote in his book River of Ink: Literature, History, Art, a mapping of civilizations. He’s writing not about policing in the United States but about the role of memory in resisting tyranny that thrives on the obliteration of memory. And he’s connecting the dots between memorials to books and memorials to lives, between democracy and organizing, each attacked with impunity by the powerful parties of state, god, police, or all three throughout history.

Tyranny hates memory, he writes, because oppression flourishes when it can crush its first disinfectant, which is witnessing. But memory, witnessing, documenting—each is preservable. Each is a recharge. Let us know how you’re feeling after the verdict of Derek Chauvin.

Historically, 4/20 means one thing above all: observing, as one does, the anniversary of the first pasteurization test, named after Louis Pasteur, whose invention in 1862 improved food safety by eliminating pathogens and extending shelf life. 4/20 is also the 119th anniversary of Marie and Pierre Curie’s Nobel-winning work on radioactivity, and it’s the day, in 2008, when Danica Patrick became the first woman to win an IndyCar race.

Vibraphonist Lionel Hampton would be 113 today, and it’s the 516th anniversary of something graver—the banishing of Jews by Philibert of Luxembourg at the instigation of a bishop. It’s also the day when the historic verdict in Derek Chauvin’s murder trial is expected. 4/20 means many things to many readers, a reminder to expand, not cement, our intuitive understanding of calendar and culture. Your banner day, your dominant chord, and your frame of reference and salience lead only so far.

But on 4/20, another pattern emerges: In language lies history. Eponyms like “pasteurization” get stripped of capitalization through culture: “petri dish,” named after Julius Richard Petri; “saxophone,” Adolphe Sax; “diesel,” Rudolf Diesel; “mausoleum,” Mausolus; “nicotine,” the French ambassador to Portugal Jean Nicot, all associations faded by familiarity and living in use. As Lawrence Weschler once wrote, “Wasn’t it Pound, I think, who said, ‘Culture is what happens when we begin to forget sources’—maybe not, maybe it was somebody else.”

Pound, or Weschler—maybe it was somebody else—was right to a degree but wrong in a deeper political sense. Culture is what gets elided, erased, or transmuted, not made, when we (“we”?) begin to forget sources.

But in the spirit it’s meant, it’s wisdom. You don’t need to know Nicot to mark yesterday’s nicotine news: The Biden administration is considering making tobacco companies reduce nicotine levels in all US-sold cigarettes so they’re no longer addictive, according to the Wall Street Journal’s Jennifer Maloney. I’ll believe it when I see it, or see it when I believe it.

Lastly, 4/20 is about a plant. Have a nice day. Send good news to recharge@motherjones.com.