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Thursday 30 September 2021
New top story from Time: Joe Biden’s Agenda Uncertain After Progressives Force Delay on Infrastructure Vote
For weeks, progressive lawmakers in Congress have been threatening to sink the bipartisan infrastructure bill if they were not given certain guarantees about a larger social spending bill. And for weeks, many of their colleagues thought they were bluffing.
They weren’t. And now the fate of President Joe Biden’s agenda hangs in the balance.
Progressives claimed victory Thursday night after a planned infrastructure vote was delayed following their united front to oppose the $1 trillion bill without assurances about the fate of the accompanying Democratic spending plan. The move highlighted the growing power of leftwing Democrats, and sent a strong message to the rest of their party: You can’t get one bill without the other.
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“The progressive movement has not had this type of power in Washington since the 1960s,” says Joseph Geevarghese, Executive Director of Our Revolution, a political group that grew out of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ first presidential campaign.
But the victory may be short-lived. The House plans to attempt another vote on infrastructure as early as Friday, creating another opportunity to make a deal on the Build Back Better plan. That plan, which forms the core of Biden’s domestic policy agenda, includes ambitious spending on universal pre-K, childcare funding, tuition-free community college, home health care, and climate change prevention. Democrats had planned to pass both bills in tandem, but intra-party squabbling over the size and scope of the social spending bill prevented that from happening. Thursday’s delay signaled the future of both bills will remain closely intertwined, just as progressives wanted.
The move illuminated how the newly powerful progressive movement can shape the way Biden’s agenda moves through Congress, with the power to delay or even block some moderate priorities. The progressive movement has been building in influence and organizing capacity since 2016, when Sanders’ insurgent presidential campaign breathed new life into the grassroots left. The progressive caucus has frequently threatened to withhold votes over ideological differences with more moderate Democrats, but usually failed to actually stop a major agenda item. Now, the once-fledgling progressive wing of the Democratic party has become a political force strong enough to resist the will of moderates and its own party’s leaders.
Despite Democratic leadership’s attempts to push through the infrastructure bill alone, the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) vowed to withhold their votes unless they got assurances about the larger spending bill. Aides and lawmakers within the group were keeping tabs on their members’ positions to secure their ability to sink the infrastructure bill as leverage. By 9 p.m. Thursday evening, as the caucus gathered on a call to discuss the state of play, it was clear progressives had the upper hand. Less than two hours later, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer officially announced there would not be a vote on Thursday, and the House would reconvene Friday morning.
The CPC is larger and stronger than ever before, emboldened by an organized network of leftwing organizations like Our Revolution that have been creating outside pressure on all lawmakers in the party. But CPC members were also in sync with the President, who supported the goal to pass the Build Back Better plan alongside the infrastructure bill. Aides to influential progressives said they had not been pressured by either House leadership or the White House to support infrastructure without the spending bill.
The fact that the progressive position is in line with Biden’s agenda strengthened the caucus’s resolve. That unity comes after a concerted effort by both sides during the 2020 Democratic primary to bridge the party’s internal divisions: Biden moved to the left on some issues like climate and childcare, while progressives accepted that he would never support Medicare for All. That hard-won alignment, progressives say, is why they’re fighting so hard to protect the President’s Build Back Better Plan, which includes ambitious spending on many of their longstanding policy goals.
“This is not a progressive agenda. We are fighting for the ‘build back better’ agenda, which is the President’s agenda,” Rep. Ilhan Omar, the whip of the CPC, told reporters on Thursday.
The White House and Congressional leadership have been working furiously to reach a framework that could satisfy both the progressives and moderates. “A great deal of progress has been made this week, and we are closer to an agreement than ever. But we are not there yet, and so we will need some additional time to finish the work, starting tomorrow morning first thing,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement Thursday evening.
Even before the vote was delayed, incensed moderate lawmakers slammed the progressives for continuing to fuel the notion that Washington is dysfunctional. “We have to demonstrate to the American people that we can still govern in this very partisan time,” Rep. Stephanie Murphy, a moderate lawmaker supporting the infrastructure vote, told reporters on Thursday. “This bipartisan bill has a lot of good things for the American people, and so it’s well past time that Congress delivers.”
While progressive activist groups immediately circulated exuberant press releases after the delay, it’s still too early to say whether the lawmakers will continue to hold the line. But they insist that they are not holding up the infrastructure bill infinitely, just until they get enough assurances to move forward.
“Usually [progressives] take a stand and then they get bullied into submission,” says progressive strategist Rebecca Katz. “I think it’s the dawn of a new day. Because they’ve never done this, and they’ve had a hard time coalescing and standing firm in the past, and if they do it once they can do it again.”
New top story from Time: Joe Biden Signs Funding Bill to Avert a Partial Government Shutdown
WASHINGTON — With only hours to spare, President Joe Biden on Thursday evening signed legislation to avoid a partial federal shutdown and keep the government funded through Dec. 3. Congress had passed the bill earlier Thursday.
The back-to-back votes by the Senate and then the House averted one crisis, but delays on another continue as the political parties dig in on a dispute over how to raise the government’s borrowing cap before the United States risks a potentially catastrophic default.
The House approved the short-term funding measure by a 254-175 vote not long after Senate passage in a 65-35 vote. A large majority of Republicans in both chambers voted against it. The legislation was needed to keep the government running once the current budget year ended at midnight Thursday. Passage will buy lawmakers more time to craft the spending measures that will fund federal agencies and the programs they administer.
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“There’s so much more to do,” Biden said in a statement after the signing. “But the passage of this bill reminds us that bipartisan work is possible and it gives us time to pass longer-term funding to keep our government running and delivering for the American people.”
The work to keep the government open and running served as the backdrop during a chaotic day for Democrats as they struggled to get Biden’s top domestic priorities over the finish line, including a bipartisan $1 trillion infrastructure bill at risk of stalling in the House.
“It is a glimmer of hope as we go through many, many other activities,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.
With their energy focused on Biden’s agenda, Democrats backed down from a showdown over the debt limit in the government funding bill, deciding to uncouple the borrowing ceiling at the insistence of Republicans. If that cap is not raised by Oct. 18, the U.S. probably will face a financial crisis and economic recession, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said.
Republicans say Democrats have the votes to raise the debt limit on their own, and Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky is insisting they do so.
The short-term spending legislation will also provide about $28.6 billion in disaster relief for those recovering from Hurricane Ida and other natural disasters. Some $10 billion of that money will help farmers cover crop losses from drought, wildfires and hurricanes. An additional $6.3 billion will help support the resettlement of Afghanistan evacuees from the 20-year war between the U.S. and the Taliban.
“This is a good outcome, one I’m happy we are getting done,” Schumer said. “With so many things to take care of in Washington, the last thing the American people need is for the government to grind to a halt.”
Once the government is funded, albeit temporarily, Democrats will turn their full attention to the need to raise the limit on federal borrowing, which now stands at $28.4 trillion.
The U.S. has never defaulted on its debts in the modern era and historically, both parties have voted to raise the limit. Democrats joined the Republican Senate majority in doing so three times during Donald Trump’s presidency. This time Democrats wanted to take care of both priorities in one bill, but Senate Republicans blocked that effort Monday.
Raising or suspending the debt limit allows the federal government to pay obligations already incurred. It does not authorize new spending. McConnell has argued that Democrats should pass a debt limit extension with the same budgetary tools they are using to try to pass a $3.5 trillion effort to expand social safety net programs and tackle climate change. He reiterated that warning as the Senate opened on Thursday, even as Democrats have labeled that option a “nonstarter.”
“We’re able to fund the government today because the majority accepted reality. The same thing will need to happen on the debt limit next week,” McConnell said.
House Democrats pushed through a stand-alone bill late Wednesday that would suspend the debt limit until December 2022. Schumer said he would bring the measure to the Senate floor, but the bill is almost certain to be blocked by a Republican filibuster.
The arguments made in both chambers about the debt ceiling have followed similar themes.
“You are more interested in punishing Democrats than preserving our credit and that is something I’m having a real tough time getting my head around,” House Rules Committee Chairman Jim McGovern, D-Mass., told Republicans. “The idea of not paying bills just because we don’t like (Biden’s) policies is the wrong way to go.”
Undaunted, Republicans argued that Democrats have chosen to ram through their political priorities on their own and thus are responsible for raising the debt limit on their own.
“So long as the Democratic majority continues to insist on spending money hand over fist, Republicans will refuse to help them lift the debt ceiling,” said Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla.
The Treasury has taken steps to preserve cash, but once it runs out, it will be forced to rely on incoming revenue to pay its obligations. That would likely mean delays in payments to Social Security recipients, veterans and government workers, including military personnel. The Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank, projects that the federal government would be unable to meet about 40% of payments due in the several weeks that follow.
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Associated Press writer Brian Slodysko contributed to this report.
New top story from Time: Protecting Homes From Wildfire With Aluminum Foil? A Tested Technology Gains Steam
The photo made a splash on social media: General Sherman, the majestic 2,000-year-old Californian sequoia tree with a 36-foot circumference, its craggy trunk shining with silvery aluminum foil wrapped all around it to protect from potential wildfires. Like a baked potato in the oven, commenters said.
California-based Firezat, which is currently the only company in the U.S. that sells this aluminum wrap to public and private entities at scale, has sold thousands of square feet of the material for the express purpose of structural protection against wildfires—including the piece lovingly wrapped around General Sherman. Firezat’s sales increased 30% each of the last two years as fires become increasingly prominent threats to large swathes of both public and private land, with higher temperature, higher wind speeds and longer fire seasons straining firefighting capabilities, says Firezat CEO and founder Daniel Hirning. Five years ago, about 95% of the company’s business was in sales to forest service and Bureau of Land Management customers to protect things like historic buildings; that has expanded to include private homeowners. Hirning says about “several thousand” homes would be able to deploy Firezat by now, based on cumulative sales. Now, other businesses in the space are beginning to see the potential, too. But the buy-in for aluminum wraps, which block 96% of radiant heat, is just in the nascent stages, suggests Hirning. “You think all this coverage and all this advertising exposure [would increase sales even more], but it kind of has the opposite effect,” he says. “There’s an apathy. I think people just get overwhelmed.”
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The aluminum wrap is an alternative to other go-to fireproofing methods, including fire-resistant gels and foams and water-saturation systems, that homeowners and forest service workers can use to protect structures. Priced at $680 per 1000-square-foot roll, Firezat’s option is a decently cost-effective investment in preventing a total disaster; an average single story home will require about three to four rolls of the stuff, Hirning says, and can be put up in about five or six hours. (It can also be stored and reused annually, and the average time to install the protection should decrease with practice.) A video on the website shows a foil-wrapped log cabin consumed in flames, only to emerge on the other side unscathed, surrounded by trees that look like blackened toothpicks. It’s an impressive case study.
Read More: The World Has Been On Fire for the Past Month. Here’s What It Looks Like
But the effort of wrapping up a house with Firezat ultimately lies with the end user. That’s where the start-up FireGuard hopes to play a role. Founded by civil and hydraulic engineer Shahriar Eftekharzadeh as a subsidiary of SEITec Inc., a science-based company that provides solutions for climate-change-based challenges, FireGuard is mostly a conceptual business right now. Eftekharzadeh’s vision is twofold: for preexisting buildings, his patent-pending “aluminized fiberglass fabric” would descend like protective curtains from a house’s eaves, enveloping the structure within about ten minutes. For new construction, it could be installed as a layer in exterior walls. Both options minimize the need for manual labor—and prioritize time—in the face of imminent fire. “You would know your house is equipped with a fire fighting system, the same as you’d have sprinklers for internal fires,” he says.
For his own cabin in the California woods, Eftekharzadeh has put in place the descending-curtain prototype; luckily, he’s never needed to use it. But it’s the only current example of the brand’s product in action. FireGuard launched a year ago, and has yet to become a priority in marketing; Eftekharzadeh’s primary projects include stormwater-recapture programs and compressed-air energy storage. Still, he sees it as a potentially game-changing option for homeowners—and firefighters. “The other thing we have in mind is that if you make a registry of houses that have this system, then that will really ease the burden on firefighters,” he says.
At other companies that sell aluminum-based radiant barriers commonly used for home insulation, like Texas-based Attic Foil and Innovative Insulation, it’s hard to gauge if the wildfire applications of aluminum wrapping technology have made much of a dent in sales so far, although Attic Foil CEO Ed Fritz did note a recent increase in sales to Californians in particular. But representatives from both confirmed that their materials could be useful in the face of fire—and at Innovative Insulation, their metalized cloth “Temptrol” fabric has even already been used in fire suits.
Read More: The Fight For Earth
As with any consumer product, none of these are 100% effective, says Seth Martin, assistant fire chief and fire marshal for the city of Ketchum, ID. Martin, a longtime firefighter, has plenty of experience wrapping things like forest service lookouts and even campground port-a-potties. It’s labor intensive, he cautions, and needs to be done with precision. “It takes a lot of time and manpower to actually wrap up a structure to the point where you’re fairly confident that it won’t burn,” he says. It can be extremely effective at deflecting heat and keeping embers at bay. But it’s not his go-to suggestion. “The better alternatives are taking mitigation measures ahead of time, and following the defensible space guidelines,” he says. Those include keeping the area around the house clear of potential fire fuel, and landscaping with an eye on fire safety. And those methods are free. “Prepare your house far ahead. Not days, but months, years. You have to start taking steps now to protect your home, before fire threatens,” he says.
As climate change escalates, drought worsens and public resources remain limited, however, sales for Firezat and other startups in the climate damage prevention space keep going up.
New top story from Time: Beck Bennett On Leaving Saturday Night Live And His 5 Favorite Sketches
When Beck Bennett walked out onto the Saturday Night Live stage in May in a Vin Diesel skull cap, he knew it might be his last time there as a cast member. Bennett was there to anchor the season’s last skit: a spoof of Diesel’s recent AMC commercial, in which he listed an increasingly outlandish list of reasons to go to the movies in a husky growl (“The music … the heavy doors … the pre-show video where you’re on a rollercoaster”). As Bennett delivered his lines to raucous laughter, he saw his wife sitting in the front row and SNL creator Lorne Michaels grinning next to the cue cards—a moment that he says felt prescient.
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“It really felt like the universe was telling me, ‘This is in fact time for you to leave. You’re not gonna do better than this,’” Bennett tells TIME in a phone interview on Wednesday.
Earlier this week, SNL announced that Bennett would not be a part of the cast of its 47th season, which begins on Saturday. Bennett, who was on the show for eight seasons, is now living in Los Angeles, where he says he plans to stay full time to focus on new projects and be near his wife and friends. “It’s been eight years of basically long distance with my wife, and if we are going to start a family at any point, I think we have to start that at some point soon,” he says.
In his near-decade on SNL, Bennett became an integral member of the ensemble, a glue guy tasked with playing straight men and raging idiots alike. His characters have ranged from Vladimir Putin to Mitch McConnell to the Salt Bae; last season, he had the most screentime out of anyone in the cast, according to Vulture. Ahead of the show’s 47th season, Bennett spoke with TIME about some of his favorite SNL sketches and characters, and reminisced about how they came together. These are excerpts from the conversation.
Office Boss
A staple of Bennett’s early tenure on the show was his “Office Boss” character, a high-powered CEO with the body of a baby. He shared scenes with Louis C.K., Drake and Cameron Diaz, flailing his arms, spitting up on himself, and sitting in giant booster chairs.
Bennett: Right before my SNL showcase in L.A., I was on a plane, and there was a guy with a baby in his lap sitting next to me. The baby kept putting his headphone cord into his mouth, unplugging it and throwing it on the ground, then getting upset and crying that he didn’t have it anymore. I was like, ‘Oh, man, it would be fun to create like a fully functioning person like that.’
I must have watched a couple baby videos early on when I was developing the character. Really, it came down to the act of grabbing something, shaking it, getting overwhelmed by the shaking, shoving it in my mouth, throwing it away and finding it again. After that, I would watch baby videos for how they react to eating a lemon, or somebody shaking keys, or how they put their feet in their mouths.
With Cameron Diaz, I think we did a spit-kiss type thing that was absolutely disgusting—and she was fully game. And the giant chair was actually fun. I was like, ‘This is great. Why don’t people do this?’
Brothers
“Brothers” is one of the many SNL sketches that Bennett shared with Kyle Mooney. The pair went to the University of Southern California together and were in the same sketch group, Good Neighbor; both were hired on SNL at the same time.
Bennett: From the moment we left our childhood homes, Kyle and I have been doing sketch comedy together. It kind of clicked right away—we always wrote together and had fun performing. For “Brothers,” we did a version of those characters in college in our sketch comedy group at USC. We were these brothers who were just wrestling, and their parents finally interrupt them and tell them that they’re getting divorced. It was not as well written as the one we ended up doing.
It’s rare for a sketch to do well at the table and during blocking, and there’s nothing that gets in the way. Especially because in this one, there are so many physical things that could have gone wrong. We’re getting sprayed, going through walls, breaking plates. It felt like a classic SNL sketch, like Chris Farley or Molly Shannon breaking things, falling through things—the things I watched and wanted to do on SNL if I ever got there.
But you learn that it’s really hard to do that because of the cue cards, the camera blocking. There’s so many restrictions to doing live sketch comedy on stage like that. So that experience was kind of a dream. The other people in the scene were having trouble not breaking, and it was so fun to do. It was like my best performing experience at the show, also because I got to do it with Kyle.
Take Me Back
In this pre-taped sketch, Bennett spoofs the climactic scene of a rom-com with Ego Nwodim.
Bennett: Manchildren, idiots: it’s what I love to do. I think it’s something about my instrument: My voice, my looks—it’s just what comes out, the idiot. It’s an extension of who I am, and is also what I saw around me growing up and wanted to make fun of. People who are confidently dumb are just really funny to me.
And being at SNL, I think writers are able to see something in you that you may not even fully see, and help bring that out of you. Over time, it was like, “Oh, people are writing me in this way.” And on SNL, where it’s very competitive and difficult to find your niche, you kind of go towards what works.
I also think some of the parts I play can be more nuanced on film as opposed to live: some of the angry idiots, or the out of control people freaking out, can be captured in a more disarming and funny way on film. When I got to SNL, I realized some of the things I found funny or wanted to write were maybe a little too not fun—a little too intense and scary.
In my second to last year, I did this sketch with Idris Elba where I was a competitive actor who was jealous of him. It was really big and over the top, and it did well enough to get on the show. But I look back at a similar one I did in my first year that never made it to air: it was like, much smaller and darker and intense and not fun. Film sketches can make some of those characters succeed a little bit more than in person.
Jules Who Sees Things A Little Differently
Bennett appeared several times on Weekend Update as the pig-headed contrarian Jules.
Bennett: There are some people out there in the world that Jules is based on. This is definitely an L.A. guy, although he definitely exists in New York, too. I think you see a lot of it on social media: someone on the internet thinking they have something to say, and trying to put a twist on it, but they actually aren’t saying anything at all. I sat down in Colin Jost’s office one night, like many nights, and would tell him stuff, and usually nothing would come of it. But he was always very good about finding something funny in what I’d pitched him, compile a bunch of stuff, and turn it into something a little different.
AMC Theatres Commercial
Bennett: It’s so fun to mimic Vin Diesel because he takes himself so seriously. He’s so tough, such a guy and has an incredible voice. It’s fun to step in those shoes: “I’m so cool, masculine, badass, anything I say is amazing.” I love playing confident characters, and those are often awful people. I’m not saying Vin Diesel is—but confidence is a very fun thing to play.
That sketch was written by Steven Castillo and Dan Bulla. It was something they came up with three in the morning on Wednesday, so I didn’t find out about it until right before the table read. That’s what happens a lot: it’s not an impression that you’re working on for weeks. It’s something that people hand you right before the table read.
That was one of my favorite things to perform on SNL, and it was the last thing I was in. That sketch should not have gone as well as it did, and almost should not have gotten onto air: the worry is that a long, rambling list would get old and the audience would stop laughing after a minute. But they found ways to keep it creative and interesting.
One of the reasons it was so fun is because I was the front of the audience; it was really fun and comfortable. And as soon as it ended, the band started playing the good night music, and I knew that was likely going to be my last sketch and show.
I just felt happy, relieved, grateful. With the ‘goodbye sketches,’ I don’t think it happens that often, and I’m not really one to want that. There are so many people that have been there so long and you never know who’s leaving. So it was nice to have what almost felt like a goodbye sketch.
New top story from Time: Congressional Democrats’ Infighting Is Jeopardizing a Historic Expansion of Housing Access
As Democrats spar over a sweeping bipartisan infrastructure bill and an even bigger budget reconciliation package that includes funding for everything from universal pre-k to free community college, the fate of a historic investment in America’s housing policy hangs in the balance.
Earlier this month, the House Financial Services Committee advanced $322 billion in federal spending recommendations on housing investments, including $75 billion in new funds for Housing Choice Vouchers. If that passed, it would mark the most significant investment in housing aid since the Housing Choice Voucher program, the nation’s largest source of rental assistance, was created in 1974. It would result in roughly 750,000 more federal vouchers that low-income Americans can use to underwrite the cost of affordable rental units, and eventually help roughly 1.7 million more people increasing the number of Americans served by roughly one-third, according to a new analysis by the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP).
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“This would be the biggest thing that policymakers have done in decades to reduce homeless and to help low-income people in this country afford housing,” says Will Fischer, senior director for housing policy and research at CBPP. “There’s not many programs out there where there’s a stronger evidence base showing that they work.”
Rep. Maxine Waters, chair of the House Financial Services Committee, which provides recommendations to Congress on housing policy, calls the proposed outlay “unprecedented.” “It has gotten to the point where it is very difficult for ordinary citizens working everyday to be able to have what it takes to get a decent rental unit,” she says, adding that this funding would help address the problem.
But it’s unclear if Democrats will pass a reconciliation bill at all—and if they do, whether it will include significant funding for affordable housing assistance.
Read more: How Landlords Discriminate Against Housing Voucher Holders
Senate Democrats could, in theory, pass the bill without any Republican support due to a legislative loophole allowing them to advance budgetary issues with a simple majority. But garnering support from all 50 Democratic Senators depends in large part on the votes of the two most moderate Senate Democrats, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, both of whom have said that the $3.5 trillion spending framework is too high. Politico reported on Thursday that Manchin told Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer this summer he wouldn’t support a reconciliation bill exceeding $1.5 trillion—news that could mean that Democrats have to shave roughly $2 trillion in spending from the existing package.
Some progressive Democrats have said they will withhold their votes for the $550 billion bipartisan infrastructure package until Manchin and Sinema publicly promise to back a subsequent reconciliation package with a sufficient price tag. It’s not yet clear what they define as sufficient.
Neither is it clear how much of the $322 billion in housing investments might remain in a slimmed-down bill. Waters, a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, thinks most Democratic lawmakers see federal spending on housing as a priority. “I’ve convinced my caucus that we need to pay attention to housing,” she says.
But she stopped short of saying that she would recommend voting against the final bipartisan infrastructure bill if she didn’t get assurance her housing measures would be included in the reconciliation one. “I don’t work that way…I don’t threaten, and I don’t try to leverage,” she tells TIME, adding, “We don’t know what’s going to happen in reconciliation. We don’t know what the cuts are going to be.”
The current Housing Choice Voucher program provides 2.3 million households with vouchers that can be used to offset the rent on affordable, private market units. But many more Americans are in need: only one in four people who qualify for federal housing assistance currently receive it, according to the CBPP.
Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Missouri Democrat and Chair of the Subcommittee on Housing, Community Development, and Insurance says he plans to fight for the level of funding that his committee recommended earlier this summer. As a former public housing beneficiary, he says, he cares “passionately about making sure that Americans live in decent conditions and will fight for every penny as the process continues.”
New top story from Time: The Problem With Jon Stewart Could Be Great, If It Ever Catches Up to the Present
There’s a telling moment in an early episode of The Problem With Jon Stewart. During a lively discussion on contemporary authoritarianism, Francisco Marquez, a Venezuelan activist and former political prisoner, mentions an event from the host’s Daily Show days. “I remember your march,” he says, referring to Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s jokey Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, held on the National Mall in 2010. “I think it was against insanity or something along those lines.” In the perfect sarcastic deadpan that is his trademark, Stewart cracks: “Yeah, we won.”
It’s a throwaway exchange, but one that captures Jon Stewart’s uncertain place in the culture, six years after leaving a role in which he helped launch so many still-thriving comedy careers and reshape late-night talk shows and political satire for the 21st century. At this point, the pleas for common sense and critical thinking—from politicians, the media and the public at large—that he issued nightly from his Comedy Central desk would sound hopelessly naive. Also: who is the audience for his funny, scathing rants these days? Conservatives who didn’t exactly welcome his tough love in the George W. Bush era have now shifted even further to the right. And today’s version of the young, liberal audience Stewart teased for being stoners might not be quite so enthusiastic at the prospect of a straight, white guy in his 50s yelling at them about injustice.
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So it’s something of a relief that the initially uneven but potential-packed The Problem, which premiered Sept. 30 on Apple TV+ and will release new episodes every other Thursday, is not trying to be another Daily Show (which has established a considerably less shouty, more bemused tone under Trevor Noah). Episodes are twice as long, looser in structure and, though there are plenty of jokes, more earnest in their efforts to provide information and analysis.
Like Daily Show alum John Oliver’s acclaimed HBO series Last Week Tonight, The Problem addresses a single issue in each installment. While the premiere focuses on veterans who suffered grave illnesses following exposure to burn pits in the Middle East, an additional episode sent for review takes on the slippery concept of freedom. And like Bill Maher without the smug, trollish tone, Stewart opens with a monologue before moderating a panel discussion. What’s refreshing is that, instead of celebrities, pundits or authors with books to promote, the show enlists relevant experts and people who have firsthand experience to contribute. In the burn-pit episode, that means conversations with ailing veterans who’ve unsuccessfully sought help from a VA that claims it’s still investigating why so many vets who slept next to mounds of burning, toxic trash went on to receive life-threatening diagnoses. Along with Marquez, the discussion of authoritarianism and freedom includes the dissident Egyptian comedian (and Stewart pal) Bassem Youssef and the heroic Filipino-American journalist Maria Ressa, who joined virtually because her ongoing “cyber libel” case prohibits her from leaving the Philippines.
These panels might sound dutiful on paper. In fact, the participants are so knowledgeable and articulate, and Stewart so determined not to dumb down their messages, that these might turn out to be the most consistently engaging segments of the show. “The new propaganda is a behavior modification system,” says Ressa, in explaining how oppressive regimes can manipulate social media. “A lie told a million times becomes a fact.” Stewart could be a pretty indifferent interviewer when forced to make small talk with celebs on The Daily Show (a fact he actually alludes to in The Problem), but he brings the full force of his curiosity and frustration to these conversations, and it’s clear that he’s in his element.
After just two episodes, it’s hard to get a sense of how mutable The Problem’s format will be. As is, the places where commercials would be in a linear TV show are filled with quick, forgettable sketches of and mostly dull behind-the-scenes segments that show Stewart talking through each episode with his staff. (Considering that The Daily Show faced high-profile criticism for its “woman problem” as far back as 2010, the latter clips might also serve as subtle ways of highlighting how many women and other non-white-guys Stewart has hired this time around, and how well he gets along with those staffers.) While the panel consumes the back two-thirds of “Freedom,” the burn pit episode ends with a satisfyingly, if also somewhat performatively, confrontational one-on-one interview in which Stewart pushes VA secretary Denis McDonough to simply state what kind of proof the government will need in order to start paying vets’ claims.
The show’s success will ultimately depend on its specificity and timeliness. Despite its broad title, “War,” the burn-pit episode works because it tackles a particular, relatively manageable issue that will be new to many viewers. And instead of just screeching to the choir, so to speak, as he did on The Daily Show, Stewart channels his outrage into an interview with the person who has more power than anyone else to solve the problem in question.
“Freedom” is kind of a mess, though, at least until it gets to the panel portion. In his monologue, Stewart uses the partisan split over masks and vaccines to frame his hand-wringing about how competing ideas of what it means to be free are tearing apart the U.S. It’s an apt metaphor, but also one that’s been reiterated to a pulp over the course of this 18-month pandemic. This time last year, it might’ve felt cathartic to watch Stewart respond to a montage of people declaring that they won’t get the vaccine with the exclamation “What the f-ck?!” Now? It makes you want to ask where he’s been all this time. A mock game called “What’s More Hitler?” that spoofs anti-vaxxers’ propensity to compare public health rules to totalitarianism falls completely flat.
Stewart is a polarizing figure, and one whose cranky, sarcastic grandstanding worked much better with his original, Gen X audience than it does today. But, at its best, The Problem isn’t just about self-righteous yelling; like many of Stewart’s post-Daily Show projects, it’s about using his fame to effect change, or at least raise the level of mainstream political discourse. It has a long way to go to achieve that objective. More episodes like “War” and fewer like “Freedom” would be a good start.
New top story from Time: The Enduring Hope of Jane Goodall
In the early years of World War II, when Jane Goodall was around 6 years old, she was often woken from her sleep by the blare of air-raid sirens. The sound warned that Nazi planes were flying over Bournemouth, the English seaside town where Goodall’s family had moved at the outbreak of the war. Her younger sister Judy would be up like a shot, bounding down the stairs to the bomb shelter. But Goodall refused to budge. “I did not want to leave my bed,” she says. “They had to take me down with all my bedclothes.”
Eight decades later, Goodall, now 87, is standing in the living room of the same house, an imposing redbrick Victorian building with cavernous ceilings, thick carpets and heavy armchairs. The bomb shelter is still here, now home to a washing machine and a fridge. In the rest of the house, wooden shelves are crammed with books, figurines and photographs—souvenirs from Goodall’s life as the world’s best-known naturalist. Her grandmother bought the house in the 1930s, and it has the thick layer of bric-a-brac of a home occupied by the same family for many years.
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The new occupants on this late September morning are a camera crew, moving between rooms in search of furniture to take to the garden for a photograph. Goodall, though, is still, arms crossed and eyebrows raised. Her voice cuts through the commotion. Speaking softly yet with conviction, she suggests the crew try her preferred location: her attic bedroom. She exudes the same stubbornness as the girl who clung to her bed in wartime, then leads the group upstairs, victorious.
Goodall’s quiet determination has powered her through a lifetime of waiting for others to come around. In 1960, at 26, she sat for months in the forests of Tanzania, biding her time until chimpanzees accepted her presence and she could observe them up close. When she finally did, she made the seismic discovery that they use tools, transforming our understanding of the relationship between humans and animals and catapulting her to global fame. In 1962, while pursuing her Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge in the study of animal behavior, when professors criticized her for using human names and emotions to describe chimps, she says, “I didn’t confront them. I just quietly went on doing what I knew was right.” Although she learned to couch her observations in more scientific language, her contention that chimps are intelligent social animals is now widely accepted and has paved the way for much tighter restrictions on their use in lab testing.
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After Goodall shifted from research to activism in the 1980s, her steady, non-confrontational approach allowed her to become one of the most prolific environmentalists in modern history. She leveraged her own life story—drawing on the powerful image of a lone woman living among the animals—to get people excited about environmentalism in an era when it was a fringe activity. Through the Jane Goodall Institute, which she founded in 1977, she fundraised for habitat conservation projects, poverty-alleviation programs and animal sanctuaries. The JGI now has chapters in 24 countries, from the U.S. to the United Arab Emirates. In 2004, she became a Dame Commander of the British Empire.
And as she traversed the world, she added countless new stories to her repertoire: on history, animal behavior, human ingenuity and more. These, rather than protest, became her campaign tools. “If I’m trying to change somebody who disagrees—I choose not to not to be holier-than-thou,” she says, perched on a well-loved armchair. “You’ve got to reach the heart. And I do that through storytelling.”
Before the pandemic, Goodall traveled 300 days out of the year to speak to school assemblies, at conferences and on talk shows in an effort to instill some of her determination in others. Through her stories, she has built a popular brand of environmentalism centered around hope—a word that has appeared in the titles of four of 21 books for adults Goodall has published since 1969.
A fifth comes in The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times, co-authored with Douglas Abrams and Gail Hudson, a memoir cum manifesto on the centrality of hope to activism. The book, coming Oct. 19 in the U.S. and next year in the U.K., documents three sets of interviews between Abrams and Goodall. In their conversations, Abrams questions Goodall on how she can remain hopeful despite the environmental destruction and violent human conflicts she has witnessed, as well as the grief she has experienced, in her lifetime. (Goodall lost her second husband to cancer, less than five years after marrying him, in 1980.) She gives four reasons: “the amazing human intellect, the resilience of nature, the power of young people and the indomitable human spirit,” fleshing out these concepts with the color of her life.
Something about her—her enthusiasm, the brightness of her eyes, the detail in her unusual experiences—leaves readers and audiences feeling hopeful that it’s possible, with enough effort, for us to save the planet, and ourselves, from environmental destruction. “She’s an amazing woman,” naturalist filmmaker David Attenborough told TIME in 2019, praising her ability to inspire. “She has an extraordinary, almost saintly naiveté.”
The tenacity of Goodall’s hope, in the face of the crises we now endure, might seem naive. Despite decades of institutional efforts and dedicated activism by millions across the globe, humans have driven the planet to the brink of ecological and climate catastrophe. With a long-awaited U.N. climate summit just weeks away, scientists say world leaders have failed to even pledge enough carbon-emissions cuts to make a livable future, let alone begun to deliver on their promises. The situation has led a younger generation of activists to take a much more confrontational approach than Goodall’s.
Goodall says she understands the bleak projections from climate scientists and the economic and political structures that hinder change. But she argues that hope, and her mission to spread it, are nothing short of necessary for the survival of humanity. “If you don’t hope that your actions can make a difference, then you sink into apathy,” she says. “If young people succumb to the doom and gloom—if they lose hope—that’s the end.”
In March 2020, Goodall had just climbed into a car on the wide, tree-lined street outside the Bournemouth house, the first step on her journey to an event in Brussels. It was one of dozens of trips she had planned for the year, which would take her to cities and forests all over the world, to her house in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and back to Bournemouth to meet with Abrams. But then her sister Judy ran out of the house and told her to come back inside: the event had just been canceled. It was the start of COVID-19 shutdowns in the U.K. and an abrupt end to Goodall’s life on the road.
The 19 months Goodall has now spent in her family home, accompanied by Judy and Judy’s daughter and grandchildren, amount to the longest time she has lived there since school, and the longest continuous period she has stayed in any one place in decades. Over the past year and a half, she has traded hotels and auditoriums for her bedroom, a narrow attic room with a low ceiling, crowded by chests and bookcases, littered with gifts and mementos: a long gray Andean condor feather, a brightly printed South American cloth, dozens of old photos. In the corner, there’s the single bed where she sleeps, and within arm’s reach, a narrow desk, which holds the only two totems of our time: a laptop and a ring light.
Goodall’s determination to spread her message has kept her up here for hours each day, doing, on average, three virtual lectures or interviews between breakfast and bedtime. “That’s including weekends,” she says, both proud and a little weary. “I even had something on Christmas Day and on my birthday.” It’s been hard, she says, to stare into the tiny green light of her laptop camera all day. “When you’re giving a lecture to 5,000, 10,000 people, you say something funny and people laugh, or you say something moving and you see eyes being wiped,” she says. “But if you don’t get the same energy into it, there’s no point doing it.”
If she’d had the option, Goodall says, she would have spent the pandemic period completely alone. “I’ve always loved being by myself,” she says. “If I could have chosen, I would have been in a house with nobody else, and a dog.” She pauses to look disapprovingly at Bean, the gray whippet snoozing on a chair nearby. Occasionally Bean looks up, then noses back beneath a leopard-print blanket to keep the light out of his eyes. “Not a dog like that,” Goodall says, chuckling. “A proper dog. He’s more like a cat.”
Goodall originally wanted to spend her life alone with animals. It’s the dream that sent her to Tanzania’s Gombe National Park in 1960. Although she had no formal scientific education, Goodall had managed to impress Louis Leakey, a renowned paleo-anthropologist, with her passion for animals on a trip to Kenya with a school friend in 1957. Leakey secured funding to send Goodall to Gombe. Her observations of the chimpanzees there dispelled a then widely held belief that humans were the only animals who used tools, or had emotions or personalities. After the tool discovery, Leakey famously wrote to her, “Ah! We must now redefine man, redefine tools, or accept chimpanzees as human!”
Goodall’s mother Margaret came with her, answering a demand of the British research body that funded her trip for her to have a companion, and supported her daughter through the frustrating months in which the chimps ran away whenever she approached. But it was when she was alone, crawling through undergrowth or climbing mountains, that Goodall says she experienced a “spiritual connection” with the forest and its animals. “If you’re alone, you feel part of nature,” she says. “If you’re with one other person, even somebody you love, it’s two human beings in nature—and you can’t be lost in it.”
Goodall was among the last generation of researchers to spend time in the natural world before the scale of humans’ impact on it became a major topic of discussion in the scientific community. In 1986, at a primatology conference she helped organize in Chicago, she attended a session on habitat loss around the world. “After realizing what was going on, it was never quite the same, because then I felt I’ve got to try and save it,” she says. She still feels the spiritual connection when in nature, but there’s something else there, too: “There’s a little plea in it—a plea for help.”
That new understanding would transform Goodall’s life, taking her from the isolation of field and library research to a frenetic schedule of travel, charity work and activism for the next 35 years.
She describes in The Book of Hope an essential realization: if she wanted to protect nature, she would have to take a humanistic approach, striving to alleviate the conditions that drive people to hunt vulnerable animals or cut down trees. In 1991, she set up Roots and Shoots, a youth-activism program that now has local groups across 60 countries, in which young people are running more than 5,800 community projects to support people, animals and the planet. Three years later, she launched the Jane Goodall Institute’s flagship conservation program, which invests in social programs in villages in Tanzania, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and beyond, and then enlists villagers to help with tree planting and forest monitoring. Goodall also began advocating for widening access to birth control in order to prevent population growth from putting too much pressure on natural resources.
Over the years, elements of Goodall’s philosophy have attracted criticism from some in the environmental movement. Some disagree with her focus on voluntary population control in developing countries, for example, when the wealthy contribute so much more to climate change and pollution. Others see the individual lifestyle changes that Goodall cites as inspiring examples of how “everyone can do their bit”—such as adopting a vegetarian diet or using less plastic—as a distraction from the much bigger changes that businesses and governments need to make, and a little hypocritical, given how often she flies.
Reflecting from her chair in Bournemouth, Goodall says she sees her ideas and her career as a pragmatic response to the crises. “We need to address it on every single side we can,” she says. “I try to be as environmentally friendly as I can with the life that I was sort of forced to lead.”
There’s a hint of martyrdom in Goodall’s use of the word forced. In reality, although she romanticizes the solitude she had in Gombe, she acknowledges that connecting with people gives her energy. Her eyes light up as she picks up the objects she has collected on her travels, using them as prompts to tell stories. And she says she has “five to 12” friends in every big city around the world.
There’s no denying the success of her efforts in spreading hope. Per the JGI, at least 100,000 young people are currently engaged in activism or restoration projects through the Roots and Shoots program. Vanessa Nakate, a prominent 24-year-old climate activist from Uganda, says she read about Goodall’s life online a few years before she began her own work. “Long before I learned about how bio-diversity loss is linked to climate change, I took from Jane’s work an instinctual understanding that protecting our ecosystems is so important,” she says.
For Abrams, Goodall’s co-author, one moment from their talks explained the appeal of her brand of hopeful activism. He asked her if, from what she had seen, she believed humans tended more toward good or evil. She responded that they have equal capacity for both. “The environment we create will determine what prevails,” she told him. “In other words, what we nurture and encourage wins.”
Her hope isn’t a denial of reality, Abrams says. It’s more of a choice: “Whether we focus on the devastation or the regeneration. Whether we focus on the possibility for good, or the inevitability of evil.”
Read more: A Climate Solution Lies Deep Under the Ocean—But Accessing It Could Have Huge Environmental Costs
The devastation of the planet increasingly demands our focus. Extended droughts, destructive storms and unprecedented wildfires are fast becoming part of the daily news cycle. Climate scientists say these events are just the warning shot, with climate-change impacts set to become more frequent and intense—even if we stop emitting greenhouse gases tomorrow. In November, world leaders will gather for COP26, the U.N. climate conference, where they are due to scale up their emissions targets. Expectations are high, but many activists fear the conference will end without strong agreements.
As usual, Goodall is determined to find hope. “I won’t say I’m optimistic, but I have all my fingers crossed,” she says. “The positive thing is that there’s so much more awareness. There’s so much more pressure from the public.”
But the urgency of this moment has led many activists to doubt whether heightened consciousness will be enough to trigger the drastic changes we need. Kumi Naidoo, a South African anti-apartheid activist and former Greenpeace director, says Goodall was “ahead of her time” on raising awareness and that her present-day work is unquestionably valuable. But, he adds, “All of us in the environmental movement, especially those of us who have been around for a while, must acknowledge that notwithstanding our best efforts, our sacrifices, our hard work, we have not delivered the results we set out to deliver.”
A younger generation of activists has taken up more aggressive strategies to demand radical, systemic change, focusing more on the stakes for humans than for wildlife—an approach Naidoo argues is essential for forcing action. International networks such as the Sunrise Movement and Extinction Rebellion have blocked roads, occupied buildings and created disruptive spectacles in city centers. Millions of students are regularly skipping school to protest, bearing slogans that excoriate adult politicians.
Goodall says she can understand why young activists feel they need to be more assertive. Still, for her own part, a softer touch has always felt best, she says. “But then I’ve never tried the aggressive route. I couldn’t—it’s just not me.” She believes confrontational tactics can backfire, prompting those in power to pay lip service to demands without actually changing their minds. “If you can get into the heart with a story, you may not know at the time, but people will go on thinking.”
Her own story, meanwhile, continues—although not exactly in the same way as before. She will begin traveling again next year but says she will never resume the “crazy” schedule she maintained before the pandemic, having found she can reach so many more people online. “At 87, one never knows quite what the future holds. Still, I have good genes for a long life on both sides of my family.” She’ll work to spread hope and inspire people for as long as she can, for the sake of future generations. “I’m about to leave the world, and leave it behind me with all the mess,” she says. “Young people have to grow up into it. They need every bit of help they can.”
As if remembering her mission, Goodall picks up her laptop. “I want to read you a poem,” she says, enlarging the text so she can see it. The piece she chooses is by Edgar Albert Guest, a rhythmic, staccato quasi nursery rhyme titled, “It Couldn’t Be Done.” She reads with the joyful, kindly spirit of a grandmother speaking to a child, and it’s hard not to feel warmed by the encouragement. “Just start in to sing as you tackle the thing that ‘cannot be done,’ and you’ll do it.” She looks up, eyes flashing. “Don’t you love that?”
With reporting by Alejandro de la Garza and Julia Zorthian/New York and Dan Stewart/London
New top story from Time: Ecuador Declares a Prison Emergency After 116 People Were Killed in a Riot
QUITO, Ecuador — Ecuador’s president has declared a state of emergency in the prison system following a battle among gang members in a coastal lockup that killed at least 116 people and injured 80 in what authorities say was the worst prison bloodbath ever in the country.
Officials said at least five of the dead were found to have been beheaded.
President Guillermo Lasso decreed a state of emergency Wednesday, which will give the government powers that include deploying police and soldiers inside prisons. The order came a day after bloodshed at the Litoral penitentiary in Guayaquil that officials blamed on gangs linked to international drug cartels fighting for control of the facility.
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Lasso, visibly moved by the carnage, said at a news conference that what had happened in the prison was “bad and sad.” He also said he could not guarantee that authorities had regained control of the lockup.
“It is regrettable that the prisons are being turned into territories for power disputes by criminal gangs,” he said, adding that he would act with “absolute firmness” to regain control of the Litoral prison and prevent the violence from spreading to other penitentiaries.
Images circulating on social media showed dozens of bodies in the prison’s Pavilions 9 and 10 and scenes that looked like battlefields. The fighting was with firearms, knives and bombs, officials said. Earlier, regional police commander Fausto Buenaño had said that bodies were being found in the prison’s pipelines.
Outside the prison morgue, the relatives of inmates wept, with some describing to reporters the cruelty with which their loved ones were killed, decapitated and dismembered.
“In the history of the country, there has not been an incident similar or close to this one,” said Ledy Zúñiga, the former president of Ecuador’s National Rehabilitation Council.
Zúñiga, who was also the country’s minister of justice in 2016, said she regretted that steps had not been taken to prevent another massacre following deadly prison riots last February.
Earlier, officials said the violence erupted from a dispute between the “Los Lobos” and “Los Choneros” prison gangs.
Col. Mario Pazmiño, the former director of Ecuador’s military intelligence, said the bloody fighting shows that “transnational organized crime has permeated the structure” of Ecuador’s prisons, adding that Mexico’s Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels operate through local gangs.
“They want to sow fear,” he told The Associated Press on Wednesday, urging the government to temporarily cede control of the prisons to the National Police. “The more radical and violent the way they murder,” the more they achieve their goal of control, he added.
Ecuador’s president said that care points had been set up for relatives of the inmates with food and psychological support. He added that a $24 million program to address the country’s prisons will be accelerated, starting with investments in infrastructure and technology in the Litoral prison.
The former director of Ecuador’s prison bureau, Fausto Cobo, said that inside penitentiaries authorities face a “threat with power equal to or greater than the state itself.” He said that while security forces must enter prisons with shields and unarmed, they are met by inmates with high-caliber weapons.
In July, the president decreed another state of emergency in Ecuador’s prison system following several violent episodes that resulted in more than 100 inmates being killed. Those deaths occurred in various prisons and not in a single facility like Tuesday’s massacre.
Previously, the bloodiest day occurred in February, when 79 prisoners died in simultaneous riots in three prisons in the country. In July, 22 more prisoners lost their lives in the Litoral penitentiary, while in September a penitentiary center was attacked by drones leaving no fatalities.
