July 8, 2023

Saturday, July 8, 2023. Annette’s News Roundup.

I think the Roundup makes people feel not so alone.

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Joe is always busy.

The U.S. added 209,000 jobs in June as hiring starts to slow.

U.S. employers added 209,000 jobs in June, marking another solid month of job growth, though it was slower than in previous months in an indication that a hot labor market could be cooling.

At the same time, job gains for the previuos two months were revised downward by a total of 110,000 jobs, with 306,000 jobs created in May and 217,000 in April.

Meanwhile, the unemployment rate, which is calculated from a different survey, inched down in June to 3.6 percent from 3.7 percent the month before.

Overall, the jobs data shows a labor market that continues to hum along in some sectors, but is slowing down in others in a sign that the Federal Reserve's aggressive rate hikes to fight inflation and having some impact though the job is far from done.

Employers continued to add jobs in health care, business services, and construction. But retailers cut jobs last month, and factory employment was relatively flat.

Meanwhile, average wages in June were up 4.4% from a year ago – in line with revised figures from the two previous months. Wages are now rising faster than prices, giving workers increased buying power.

That's good news for workers, but it's likely to worry the Federal Reserve, which has already indicated it will need to continue raising interest since inflation is too high for its comfort.

The Fed meets later this month again and it's widely expected to raise interest rates again after pausing at its previous meeting. (NPR).

Biden says sending cluster bombs to Ukraine was ‘difficult decision’ – as it happened.

In an interview with CNN host Fareed Zakaria on Friday, president Joe Biden said that his decision to provide Ukraine with cluster munitions was a “difficult decision”.

“It was a very difficult decision on my part. And by the way, I discussed this with our allies, I discussed this with our friends up on the Hill,” Biden said, adding, “The Ukrainians are running out of ammunition.”

“This is a war relating to munitions. And they’re running out of that ammunition, and we’re low on it and so, what I finally did, I took the recommendation of the Defense Department to – not permanently – but to allow for this transition period, while we get more 155 weapons, these shells, for the Ukrainians.”

Despite over 100 countries having outlawed the munitions under the Convention on Cluster Munitions, the US and Ukraine are not signatories.

“They’re trying to get through those trenches and stop those tanks from rolling. But it was not an easy decision,” Biden said, adding, “We’re not signatories to that agreement, but it took me a while to be convinced to do it.”

“But the main thing is they either have the weapons to stop the Russians now – keep them from stopping the Ukrainian offensive through these areas – or they don’t. And I think they needed them.” ( The Guardian)

Bidenomics moves onto health care.

The Biden administration is launching a crackdown on hidden fees in health care this morning and combining the president's Bidenomics tour with one of Democrats' most potent campaign issues.

Why it matters: Leaning into incremental health policies that build off existing wins marks a major departure from the 2020 campaign, which featured sweeping rhetoric, a mini referendum on Medicare for All and candidates staking out health platforms to the left of the Affordable Care Act.

What they're saying: "The new steps we're announcing will build on the president's tremendous track record of helping Americans save on their health care costs," Neera Tanden, chief domestic policy adviser to the president, told reporters.

• "We know there's much more work to do, but we will keep fighting until we finish the job," she added.

Zoom out: The new policies, which focus on lowering medical costs for consumers, fit squarely into the Bidenomics mission of improving the economy by easing financial pressures on middle- and lower-income Americans.

The details

Short-term insurance: The Biden administration is taking on one of the last vestiges of Trump-era health policies, by seeking to limit short-term health plans to three months of coverage, with an option for consumers to extend to four months. Consumers who currently have short-term plans can stay in their coverage, an administration official said.

• The move would reverse Trump-era expansions to limited-duration health plans, which are derided by critics for their skimpy offerings. It would also require plans to make additional disclosures to consumers about limitations in coverage.

• Short-term plans are cheap for consumers, but they come with trade-offs. They don’t have to cover the essential benefits required for Affordable Care Act plans, can deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions and cap how much they’ll pay in a year.

• With Friday's proposal, the Biden administration aims to scrap one of former President Trump's key regulations aimed at unraveling the Affordable Care Act.

Surprise medical billing: The administration also is making another attempt at addressing unexpected medical bills, issuing guidance to clarify that providers are either out-of-network and subject to surprise billing rules, or in-network and bound by the ACA's annual limitation on cost-sharing.

The guidance also emphasizes that plans and providers have to make information about facility fees — additional costs for services provided at hospital-owned clinics — publicly available.

Furthermore, providers can't skirt surprise billing protections by renaming prohibited charges as "facility fees," the guidance says.

Medical debt: Three federal agencies opened a joint request for information on medical credit cards, installment loans and other financial products marketed to patients as a way to pay for medical care.

Providers may promote these products so they can get paid faster, receive a higher payment from consumers who'd otherwise be eligible for discounts or receive some of the interest revenue generated by the companies operating such services, according to a news release from the administration.

The Health and Human Services Department, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Treasury Department are soliciting ideas from the public on how to curb the bad practices.

Worth noting: The administration also released a report Friday as part of the announcement that projects last year's redesign of the Medicare prescription drug benefit last year will save eligible Medicare enrollees nearly $400 per person. (Axios)

Biden takes aim at hidden healthcare fees

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It’s not Mother’s Day but these 3 articles struck me as interesting and worth-a-read.

Closing the Door on Motherhood After Dobbs.

In the nearly two decades that I’ve had a period, it has rarely been late. Then in December, a week passed by without it, and I became convinced that I was pregnant. I was furious at my body for doing something I didn’t want it to. I was also terrified down to my bones, feeling trapped despite knowing I had the resources to get an abortion. Since the fall of Roe v. Wade, motherhood is no longer a path I’d even consider pursuing. So when I used the restroom at one of my favorite bars while out on a Friday evening and discovered blood in my underwear, a wave of relief and gratitude washed over me.

I’ve never been pregnant, and that has been my choice. For most of my adult life, pregnancy itself had frightened me: The body produces a miracle and tears itself apart in the process. I also wasn’t sure that I was well-equipped for, or even really interested in, being someone’s mother. But by the time 2022 rolled around, my hard no on children had been steadily softening—slowly and then, suddenly, all at once.

As I headed into the year, I was facing both turning 30 and marrying my partner of nearly a decade, a loving and supportive man whom of course I could see myself raising a kid with. We were financially stable enough that scrolling through Zillow and thinking about owning a house felt less like a pipe dream and more like an achievable goal. Several of my friends had joyfully welcomed adorable, chubby babies, some of whom had already grown into funny and curious children. I saw up close that the experience has been nothing short of life-affirming for them, despite the challenges and hardships.

I had some tentative conversations with my now-husband about our future in those late-winter and early-spring days, when we could still weigh our feelings around starting a family against the logistics and the risks of getting pregnant. To choose parenthood would be to jump into the unknown. I knew I wasn’t there yet — I wasn’t sure I’d ever be — but it was deliciously tempting to toy with the idea in a way I never had before. Perhaps I’d be ready soon, I’d tell myself while posing sideways in front of the bathroom mirror, trying to imagine what my pregnant belly would look like. In those private moments, I allowed baby names I liked to roll off my tongue. I tried to picture being called “Mami” by a baby, a school-age child, a teen, an adult.

But the image of a kid in my arms crashed against reality once the Dobbs draft leaked and it became clear that the Supreme Court would overturn Roe. I live in North Carolina, where at the time the anti-abortion movement was being held at bay by a few votes in the state legislature. After the decision came down, the possibility of a ban hung over me like a scythe; in the blink of an eye, the state could take the choice of whether or not to parent away from me. Laws penalizing abortion seekers could turn my body into a crime scene and put me at risk of prosecution, whether I intended to end a pregnancy or had a miscarriage.

For years, my reporting on gender issues, including the erosion of abortion rights, had informed my complicated feelings around choosing motherhood. What had felt like a calculated risk I could maybe assume, I now couldn’t see as anything other than life-threatening. Doing this work over the last 12 months has exacerbated that awareness and anxiety. Since Dobbs, I’ve been writing almost exclusively about abortion restrictions and how they have devastated so many lives, including those of people with much-wanted pregnancies. I’ve spoken with women who were denied critical care due to their state’s abortion bans and doctors paralyzed with fear for themselvesand their patients. I know the so-called exceptions baked into these restrictions mean little in real life; if I were to face any pregnancy complications, there is no guarantee they’d apply to me. That knowledge keeps me up at night.

In hearing and reading these stories, I’ve thought a lot about a friend who nearly died giving birth a few years ago. She faced a series of complications completely devoid of logic, which is the breathtakingly beautiful and terrifying nature of pregnancy and labor: No part of the body is untouched, no one’s experience is the same, no outcomes are guaranteed. I also know being pregnant and giving birth have always been much more dangerousthan having an abortion. The statistics make clear that people in states that banned abortion after Dobbs are up to three times as likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth, or soon after giving birth. In conversations with my husband, whose ambivalence toward parenthood has always run deeper than my own, he emphasized that he wouldn’t be able to bear it if I lost my life. I wouldn’t want to risk it, either.

As part of my work, I’ve also spent hours talking — often, crying with — those who have experienced fatal fetal abnormalities and been forced to travel out of their states for a termination, as well as those forced to carry their pregnancies to term only for their children to die in their arms shortly after coming into this world. Their stories take my breath away. The grief of losing a child they wanted is a deep well, their suffering cruelly exacerbated by the bureaucratic, logistical, and financial barriers of trying to get care. I don’t know how they have survived such a nightmare — I’m deeply uncertain that I could if I found myself in their position.

To choose to become a mother, or not, is an intimate decision that has become more fraught as anti-abortion lawmakers reduce us to a collection of organs. Here in North Carolina, Republicans clinched a vetoproof supermajority this spring and subsequently rammed through an unpopular12-week abortion ban. The law, which goes far beyond a simple gestational limit, is now in effect. Experts, advocates, and my own health providers have said the ban will complicate access to all types of reproductive health care. In Puerto Rico, where I am originally from, reproductive-justice advocatesconstantly say “la maternidad será deseada o no será.” I have never been sure that I desire to be a mom, let alone that I desire it enough to assume the risks. These days, however, that door is shut. I choose myself. (The Cut, New York mag).

My Disabled Body Prepared Me For Motherhood Like Nothing Else Could.

The following is an excerpt from the anthology We’ve Got This: Essays By Disabled Parents.

The night before our baby was born, I made my partner Micah take at least a hundred pictures of my full belly resting atop my paralyzed legs and wheelchair. It was important to both of us to document this intersection of symbols — parenthood and disability. So often the two are imagined separately, as if they’re a dichotomy: care receivers versus caregivers, drains on society versus contributors, diseased versus fertile. Everyone sorted tidily into boxes.

I would be lying if I said I’d always been able to imagine myself as a mum. I grew up in a body paralyzed by a series of life-saving cancer treatments that ripped through my tiny frame from the ages of 1 to 3 years old. Even as my body continued to grow into adolescence and young adulthood, there was no denying it was war-torn. I was monitored closely by many doctors, but not one of them seemed interested in talking with me about the possibility of conceiving, carrying, giving birth to, or caring for a baby. “We won’t know until we know,” I heard time and time again. Another way to put it might be, “We’ll cross that bridge when we are forced to.” But what if I was curious about the route we’d take to reach that bridge?

I was 33 when a nurse practitioner finally asked me if I wanted to have a baby. I was there for a routine exam, and she was covering appointments for the doctor I normally saw. I don’t remember exactly how she worded it — “Would you like to get pregnant?” or “Are you and your partner planning to have kids?” — but I remember she asked it warmly and casually, and it surprised me. Is this how the conversation starts for non-disabled women? No medical professional had brought this question up with such unconcerned ease before. How empowering to be invited to consider! Did I want to have a baby?

“I’ve never really known if I could have a baby!” I said in a breathy rush.

“Well,” she said, surprised herself, “let’s find out!”

She connected me with other doctors in the hospital’s high-risk pregnancy clinic, and just like that we were mapping out a route to the bridge so that we could decide for ourselves whether or not we wanted to cross it.

Despite several doctors giving us the green light to start trying, and although no one had ever given me a concrete reason why I couldn’t or shouldn’t get pregnant, I was shocked when that tiny test came back with two pink lines — positive! I should have been bursting with joy, but I actually felt full of anxiety and doubt. What did this mean? What was about to happen? Were we going to be okay? Before every appointment for at least the first 25 weeks, I was sure they’d tell me I’d lost the baby.

Each time I went to the bathroom, there was a part of me that expected to see pools of blood. If I didn’t feel the baby kick for a stretch, I prepared myself for grieving. My body’s deficiencies had been drilled so deeply into my mind that I could not fathom it being able to grow and protect a whole baby human. But it did — with very little drama.

Culturally, we’ve inscribed so much meaning into the images of a pregnant belly and a visibly disabled body. The former is shorthand for life in abundance, while the latter is so often reduced to brokenness.

As Micah and I thought through the options for our birth plan, my doctor connected me with a pelvic floor therapist. Her job was to perform an assessment so I could make decisions with more concrete information. Despite the widespread assumption that women with paralysis can’t possibly push their babies out into the world, lots of them do. But I wanted to gather as much information as I possibly could before making a choice. Before we met in person, the therapist and I had a chat on the phone. She asked me a handful of questions about my abilities — How long can you stand? How do you pee? Describe how you push when you have a bowel movement. The questions were intimate and sometimes awkward, but I did my best to answer them for this stranger on the phone.

Then, abruptly, she said, “You’re not going to be able to do this.”

Instinctively, I pushed aside the punch of her words and asked, “Why would that be? My doctor hasn’t given me any indication that I can’t give birth vaginally.”

Her answer was simple, and it didn’t seem to have much to do with me at all. “Look, I have worked with patients who are paralyzed and patients who have given birth, and I just can’t imagine that you’d be able to do it.”

“Okay, but have you ever worked with a paralyzed woman who’s given birth?”

“No, but I’ve worked with lots of paralyzed women and lots of women who’ve given birth,” she repeated, as if that should mean something to me, “and I can’t fathom how you’ll be able to do this.”

Her razor-sharp decisiveness took my breath away. The black-and-white authority she wielded on the subject directly contradicted everything my doctor had said, every bit of research I’d done on my own — and yet, in that moment, with her harsh voice ringing in my ears, I found myself feeling silly for assuming I could do this powerful act reserved for non-disabled mothers.

While I do believe our existence is in itself a sort of audacious subversion, I’m not sure how much of it I could describe as easy.

In retrospect, I wish I had pushed back instead of retreating. I wish I had asked if she’d read any literature on women with paralysis giving birth. Whether she knew that women in comas had given birth vaginally. But her voice was insistent and overwhelming; she simply could not imagine the intersection of these identities.

In the end, I did get a C-section. I agonized over the options, but we’d had a year of curveballs in other ways and ultimately I decided that a scheduled caesarean was the best choice. I would like to think that I came to this conclusion independently, that I was able to extract the ignorance of the pelvic floor therapist from my decision-making process. But I’ll never really know how big a role it played subconsciously.

Culturally, we’ve inscribed so much meaning into the images of a pregnant belly and a visibly disabled body. The former is shorthand for life in abundance, while the latter is so often reduced to brokenness. And we seem to have very little experience seeing the two entwined. As this baby grew in my paralyzed body, we busted through the tiny boxes allotted to us. It wasn’t that I proved my body wasn’t damaged — it very much is — but the brokenness and abundance folded into one another. As I splayed my fingers across my belly and felt our baby’s lively kicks and rolls the night before he was born, I felt awe at our stubborn, sturdy defiance.

After Otto was born, I expected us to continue to defy the world’s narrow expectations with as much ease as we did when he lived in my belly, and while I do believe our existence is in itself a sort of audacious subversion, I’m not sure how much of it I could describe as easy.

When he finally arrived, he shocked us with his knowing stares, his intense scowl, his loud and incessant screaming. I was enamored with him, and also terrified of him. It was so easy to set him off and so difficult to calm him down. I expected that I would come into the role of his mother naturally and intuitively. And in some ways I guess I did. We figured out nursing like two champions. My boy has never struggled with eating. But I was devastated over and over again by my inability to soothe him the way his standing, bouncing, pacing dad could. I spent months trying to wrangle him into a wrap he could tolerate. There was at least a full week when he wouldn’t even sit in my lap without howling. I wanted to be the living proof that disabled women could be mums too. See? Look at us go! But I felt profoundly incompetent. One night as Micah and I gave Otto a bath, I took a step back, looked at the two of them together, and thought, They might be better off without me here.

Slowly, oh so slowly, as the days melded into weeks, Otto and I got to know each other. I learned how to read the signs that he needed a nap, and he learned the textures and rhythms of my wheelchair; he started holding his fingers lightly against the tread on my wheels while I rolled him in soothing circles. And eventually — with time and a bit more sleep — I’ve started to recognize the sound of some familiar notes in this experience of parenting. In this realization, I discovered something jarring: parenting feels an awful lot like being disabled. How counterintuitive! I’d been taught that parenthood and disability were two separate, distinct experiences, and while my pregnancy invited me to play with the imagery, the act of parenting braided into the felt experience of disability in a breathtaking tangle of familiarity. It turns out my disabled body has actually given me the precise training I need to be Otto’s mum. With time, parenting has started to feel more and more like hearing a cover of a song I’ve known by heart since I was a child.

My body and my baby are both unpredictable and take turns derailing our plans. They flourish when we lean into flexibility, imagination, and adaptability. They require patience and endurance, attention and care — they thrive when we lean into interdependence. They inspire innovation and new ways of being together; they nurture a tender, sturdy intimacy in our family; they are bewildering, magical, and demanding.

My disabled body and my growing baby remind me that none of this lasts forever — not the good or the bad, the hard nights or the best mornings.

Disability and parenting have brought a host of limitations to the way we make (and break) plans; the venues we can (or, more often than not, can’t) visit; the way it feels to stare down a long day (especially after a sleepless night). Running on empty, cancelling plans for a nap, doing extra research before we venture out — all of this was already part of the deal for me.

Like disability, parenting gives me immediate access to an insiders’ club and fosters fast, deep bonds with people. I remember the morning I was on the phone with the doctor’s office and the person on the other end of the line heard Otto fussing. I expected her to be annoyed, but she asked, “Aww, how old? Is he teething? Oh, I know the feeling!” This brand of solidarity is something I’ve only known with other disabled people — the immediate relief that comes from being with someone who knows, really knows.

As Micah and I continued to make adaptations to our house and car to accommodate Otto’s ever-evolving mobility, we relied on muscles that were already beefy from thinking creatively about how to make a new space accessible to me. We knew how important it was and how much patience it took to find the right tool. We tried so many bassinets, found a creative DIY arrangement for our crib, spent days researching high chairs, bouncy chairs and exersaucers, and tried at least four different wraps, all with the understanding that success would take time and be totally worth it.

Disability has prepared me perfectly for the inevitable moment at 2 a.m. when I become convinced that my baby will never stop crying, that this single moment is the bubble I will live in for the rest of eternity, that I will never go out for drinks with friends again. I’ve had many moments when my back and legs reached peak pain, when I lost patience with my body for needing my attention. But my body has taught me that nothing lasts forever. Even when everything stays the same, the light shifts and the story takes on a different tone. Otto brings me to this moment often, and when the familiar feeling starts to pop its head up, I know to say, “Hello, old friend! I’ve been expecting you.” My disabled body and my growing baby remind me that none of this lasts forever — not the good or the bad, the hard nights or the best mornings.

Maybe more than anything else, disability has prepared me for the both/and experience of parenthood. More than any other experiences I’ve known, these have both brought profound depth, pain, joy, loss, connection, frustration, and laughter to my life. They both make my heart ache and fill me with pride. They both bring days that make me want to quit the whole damn thing and days where all the stars align. Feeling loss does not negate gratitude. Feeling frustration doesn’t diminish joy.

Parenthood can tangle with grief and loss. Disability can include joy and abundance. And goddammit — disabled parents exist.

How interesting to sit at the intersection between disability and parenting and feel the similarities wash over me again and again. Because not only are disability and parenting often imagined as two incompatible experiences, but parenthood is generally portrayed as a net gain and disability as an unequivocal loss. Even as both experiences are complicated and all-encompassing, isn’t it interesting to see them pulled apart and pushed into such opposing categories? Can you imagine if the overwhelming response to new parents was heartbreak, condolences and pity? Or if culturally we were able to recognize potential value in disability? Can you imagine if we responded to parenthood and disability with a resounding, “That could mean anything on earth to you! How do you feel today?” Can you imagine if disabled people were seen as viable, competent parents?

These experiences aren’t a one-to-one comparison, and they aren’t interchangeable. The experience of disability doesn’t mean you automatically understand parenting, or vice versa. Obviously not. But I think we will all benefit if we allow for more possibilities surrounding each. Parenthood can tangle with grief and loss. Disability can include joy and abundance. And goddammit — disabled parents exist. We get to be both. We always get to be both.

Rebekah Taussig is a Kansas City writer, educator and consultant, with a PhD in creative nonfiction and disability studies. She writes about the nuanced experience of disability on her Instagram, @sitting_pretty, and in her book Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body.

We’ve Got This: Essays By Disabled Parents is available now on Bookshop.(Romper).

States push to end diaper taxes as abortion rights disappear.

For years, Republican states wouldn’t pass diaper laws. The end of abortion protections changed that.

Over the past 10 years, distribution at Doug Adair’s Nashville diaper bank has swelled from a couple of thousand diapers a year to nearly 3 million. Running the bank, Adair has learned and relearned the critical role diaper access plays for families. But it hasn’t always felt like most other people knew that. 

“I think more about diapers than anybody my age that is not wearing them — yet,” said Adair, a 68-year-old former mortgage banker turned diaper banker who got into this line of work because, in his words, he asked the second most expensive question he has ever asked in his life: “What can I do to help?”

Adair started Nashville Diaper Connection because there were only two places where families could get free diapers in Nashville in 2013, and one of them had a six-week waiting list. The city has no federal, state or local assistance program for diapers specifically, and families couldn’t use food stamps or WIC, the federal assistance program for women and children, to buy diapers. 

To people like Adair — who run banks with little support — diaper need, or a lack of sufficient diapers to keep babies dry and healthy, has felt invisible. But after years of going largely unaddressed by legislators across the country, something has started to shift. 

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services launched the first-ever federally funded diaper distribution program in September 2022, sending more than $8 million in grants to states and tribes to help with their efforts to tackle diaper need; this year, it renewed the program.

And state after state has started to pass bills exempting diapers from sales tax: Florida, Maryland, Colorado, Virginia, Texas, Iowa, Maine and North Dakota have all passed exemptions, and more are in the works. Nevada voters will take up the issue in November 2024. In Ohio, a bill unanimously passed the Senate. 

And in Tennessee, the state went even further. 

Republican Gov. Bill Lee proposed a program that would cover half the cost of diapers during the first two years of a baby’s life for children on TennCare, Tennessee’s Medicaid program. Pending approval from the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, it would likely go in effect in January 2024, TennCare told The 19th.

If successful, the program — which Lee called “pro-life” and “pro-family” — would be a completely new approach to addressing diaper need. Adair was shocked when he first heard it.

“As you can imagine, my phone started lighting up. I’m naturally skeptical, I’m not overly generous to our political leaders,” he said. “I think it is a game changer if they can pull it off.”

The current policy focus on diaper need has been driven by a confluence of factors that could make 2023 a banner year in terms of diaper legislation. Renewed attention following the pandemic has collided with the reversal of Roe v. Wade, encouraging state legislatures, some of which have budget surpluses this year, to search in their coffers for opportunities to support families.

Adair said he saw the first signs of a change following the pandemic, which in Nashville was preceded by a tornado just days before.

“Everybody needed everything and with the onset of the pandemic rush, when they wiped out toilet paper, they also wiped out diapers,” he said.

In Texas, Holly McDaniel saw that at the Austin Diaper Bank, which had its single largest year-over-year increase in families served in 2020. The pandemic changed “the way we look at poverty … a lot of families who were doing fine within a week weren’t,” McDaniel said. “It really got people’s attention that that rug can be pulled under us so quickly. And seeing the lack of access to basic needs for families became newsworthy.”

Advocates had been trying to pass a diaper tax repeal in Texas for seven years before it was successful this year, bolstered by a state budget surplus. Florida, which also had a budget surplus, made a one-year diaper tax exemption issued in 2022 permanent this year.

State Rep. Anna Eskamani, a Democrat from Orlando, said that in addition to the budget surplus, there was one other big thing that helped get the exemption through: “Part of it is Republicans have banned abortion,” Eskamani said, and many were looking for measures that addressed families’ needs.

State Rep. Donna Howard said she experienced the same thing in Texas, the first state to have a ban on abortion past six weeks take effect. Howard, a Democrat from Austin, said the pushback Republicans experienced following the passage of that law, particularly from GOP women who wanted to see how the state was going to support pregnant people after their kids were born, was part of the shift in focus on diaper need in 2023.

“It was a reaction at that time to say, ‘No, we care about women and families and we are going to show you that we do,’” Howard said.

Early in Texas’ legislative session, the comptroller, the governor, the speaker of the House and various other Republican legislators started to back Howard’s bill, which she had been introducing every year since 2017.

“The argument was clearly expressed: ‘We are going to have new babies, and we want to make sure we are taking care of those moms,’” Howard said.

Financial hardship is one of the main reasons people seek abortions — they don’t want to give birth to a child they can’t financially support or worry about how they will be able to care for the children they already have if they have another. Since the reversal of Roe v. Wade in the summer of 2022, many states, including Texas, Florida and Tennessee, have passed abortion restrictions that effectively outlaw the procedure.

Many Republicans who previously had not supported diaper tax legislation have adopted “pro-life” and “pro-family” language in their new campaigns to pass diaper bills this year. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis co-oped the Democratic bill as part of a goal of making the state “family friendly.” In Ohio, Republican state Sen. Tim Schaffer, who opposes abortion, called the legislation “an opportunity to encourage people nationwide to start their family in Ohio,” demonstrating “that Ohio is truly pro-child and pro-family.” In North Dakota, the diaper tax bill had the support of anti-abortion groups including North Dakota Right to Life, which said its “goal this year is to work on promoting legislation that helps solidify North Dakota as not only a pro-life state, but a pro-family state.”

Lacey Gero, the manager of state policy at the National Diaper Bank Network, the organization that lobbies for diaper relief bills in the states and on Capitol Hill, said there has been consistent and growing movement to pass legislation on diapers, particularly around sales tax exemptions, after Roe v. Wade fell.

“We have seen an increase in support from the Republicans since then just wanting to support families,” Gero said. (The 19th).

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Whatever Rebecca Traister writes, I read - even about Robert Kennedy, Jr.

While waiting for his plate of meat loaf, gravy, and an iceberg wedge at an empty restaurant in Concord, New Hampshire, on the first day of June, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was gently explaining to me that nobody knows whether HIV is the sole cause of AIDS.

“They were doing phony, crooked studies to develop a cure that killed people,” he said of the scientists laboring through the 1980s on the array of protease inhibitors and other anti-retroviral drugs that would eventually stem mass death in countries where access to the medicines was made available, “without really being able to understand what HIV was, and pumping up fear about it constantly, not really understanding whether it was causing AIDS.”

That HIV infection causes AIDS is long-established science. But the conspiracy theory Kennedy is laying out, alongside several of its associated tendrils — that HIV is a free rider on a more dangerous virus, that scientists stifled debate in order to profit from the production of AZT, the first drug approved by the FDA to treat HIV and AIDS in 1987 — has deep roots and has borne tragic fruit. For instance, Thabo Mbeki, the president of South Africa from 1999 to 2008, shared Kennedy’s skepticism, and his distrust kept crucial therapies unavailable in his country for years, resulting in an estimated hundreds of thousands of needless deaths. Still, Kennedy — who has in other instances acknowledged that HIV causes AIDS — insisted to me over lunch, “There are much better candidates than HIV for what causes AIDS.”

These mythologies are the chronological starting points for opinions Kennedy puts forth in his 2021 book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. Kennedy, an environmental lawyer who has spent the past two decades ever more beholden to repeatedly disproved arguments about a link between vaccines and autism, jumped thirstily into the COVID fray, becoming a vocal critic of almost every government-funded or endorsed COVID-mitigation approach, from masking to social distancing to vaccine development and mandates. His chosen nemesis was Fauci, the immunologist veteran of the AIDS fight, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022, and chief medical adviser to Joe Biden from 2021 to 2022.

In his book, Kennedy characterizes Fauci as “the powerful technocrat who helped orchestrate and execute 2020’s historic coup d’etat against Western democracy” and claims that his “remedies,” including the COVID vaccines that stopped people from dying, were “often more lethal than the diseases they pretend to treat.”

COVID, like the AIDS epidemic before it, provided fertile ground for conspiracy theorizing. A new disease of unknown origin, it exploded lives and families and the global economy; it provoked fear and a longing for answers that those in charge could not initially provide. Public-health officials and political leaders made choices, some of which proved misguided, some of which led to solutions. And, of course, as Kennedy himself will eagerly explain, corporate entities — from Amazon to Pfizer to Moderna — profiteered, in grotesque fashion, from people’s pain, loss, and confusion.

But they aren’t the only ones who took exploitative advantage of the suffering of millions: Kennedy’s vilification of Fauci as a fascist sold more than 1 million copies, and his public profile grew with his every outsize utterance, including that vaccine mandates “will make you a slave” and that “even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps to Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did,” a nadir so low that even his wife, the actress Cheryl Hines, had to issue a statement condemning it.

But however off-kilter he sounded — indeed, precisely because he was extra off-kilter in his attacks on lockdowns and vaccines and masks — Kennedy’s COVID performance became the springboard that launched his current campaign against Biden for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 2024. Kennedy kicked off his bid in Boston in April, addressing a roomful of people cheering and holding signs with his name in the air. He had the look of a man getting the reception he’d been waiting for his whole life, and his extemporaneous remarks stretched to almost two hours, his expensive education and resemblance to his famous forebears covering for quite a bit of rambling. “He can look and sound so thoughtful and contemplative,” said one person who has known him a very long time. “And he’s just bursting with madness.” Kennedy soon began polling at an eye-catching nearly 20 percent in multiple surveys, and though a recent New Hampshire poll showed him at 9 percent in June, he earned higher favorability numbers in an Economist-YouGov poll than either Biden or Donald Trump.

He has spent the summer traveling to every dark-web–cancel-cultured–just-asking-questions–anti-woke whistle-stop that’ll have him, appearing on podcasts with Bari Weiss, Joe Rogan, Russell Brand, and Jordan Peterson, among others. He can count among his reply guys and fans (and, in some cases, early endorsers) a clutch of Silicon Valley CEOs and financiers, including hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman; venture capitalists Chamath Palihapitiya and David Sacks; and Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey, the current and former overlords of Twitter, respectively. He has been friendly with many in the media, including Salon founder and former editor-in-chief David Talbot and Rolling Stone co-founder and longtime editor Jann Wenner. Kennedy’s campaign manager is Dennis Kucinich, the former Cleveland mayor and Ohio congressman. A super-PAC called American Values 2024 has reportedly raised millions in support of Kennedy’s campaign, and Sacks held a fundraising dinner for him in June for which diners paid $10,000 a ticket. Kennedy’s drive to speak his mind has been praised by those on the far right, including Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon, and some on the self-described left, like Matt Taibbi and Max Blumenthal.

Kennedy crowed to me about his horseshoe coalition gathered round a campaign he views as fundamentally populist. And it’s quite a band he has put together: crunchy Whole Foods–shopping anti-vaxxers, paunchy architects of hard-right authoritarianism looking to boost a chaos agent, Nader-Stein third-party perma-gremlins, some Kennedy-family superfans, and rich tech bros seeking a lone wolf to legitimize them. Their convening can give the impression of weightiness, but if you so much as blew on them, the alliance would shatter into a million pieces. The only thing that seems to bind them is Kennedy, the current embodiment of a warped fantasy of marginalization and martyrdom that has become ever more appealing — and thus politically significant — in an age of disinformation and distrust in government and institutions.

That’s not to say Kennedy’s campaign is a joke. He is both an addled conspiracy theorist and an undeniable manifestation of our post-pandemic politics. He is an aging but handsome scion of America’s most storied political family, facing off against an incumbent who many in his own party worry is too old and too unpopular to win a second term. Far from an exile, he is an extremely well-connected person with unparalleled access to the centers of influence in New York, Hollywood, and Washington, D.C., who either has no idea what kind of fire he’s playing with, or does and is therefore an arsonist.

He is running a surprisingly potent campaign that, thanks to the lurid dynamics of social media and the boosts he is receiving from some of the wealthiest, most listened-to people in America, stands to grow even more disruptive, his deep thoughts on Rogan’s podcast translating into overflow crowds at his rallies. Lesser threats than Kennedy have played spoilers in elections before, and if he succeeds in helping burn us all to the ground, it will not be because he is an outsider, as he claims, but because of a political and media culture that has protected and encouraged and fawned over him his whole life — handing a perpetual problem child, now 69 and desperate for attention, accelerant and matches.

Kennedy is the third of 11 children born to Ethel Skakel Kennedy and Robert Francis Kennedy. His great-grandfather P. J. Kennedy was a Boston political boss in the late-19th century. Another of Kennedy’s great-grandfathers, the legendary John Francis “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, served in Congress and as mayor of Boston; Fitzgerald’s daughter Rose married P. J.’s son Joe, a banker and movie-studio boss who would get rich during Prohibition and briefly and ignominiously serve as an ambassador to England in the lead-up to World War II. Kennedy writes in his family memoir, American Values, “During the Depression, there were only twenty-four known millionaires in the country, and among them were” Joe Kennedy and coal magnate George Skakel, his two grandfathers.

More recently, Kennedy’s uncle John Fitzgerald Kennedy served as president of the United States from 1961 to November 1963, when he was shot and killed in Dallas. Kennedy’s father, Bobby, was John’s campaign manager and attorney general and, after John’s death, the senator from New York. In 1968, Bobby Sr. ran a thrilling campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination but was assassinated in a hotel kitchen in June of that year. Kennedy’s uncle Ted was the senator from Massachusetts from 1962 until his death in 2009. In 1980, Ted launched a righteous presidential campaign to the left of incumbent Jimmy Carter; he took the fight to the convention in an election year that ended very badly for Democrats and the nation.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was 14 when his father was killed, but even before that, his life had been tumultuous. As he has written, “from the moment I climbed from my crib, chaos followed me like a loyal hound.” A feral student who was drawn more to snakes, birds, riverbeds, and wooded trails than to school, he has written that he once drove his seventh-grade tutor, a pacifist Jesuit, so bananas that the tutor punched him in the nose. Kicked out of an elite roster of prep schools, he still managed to arrive at Harvard in 1972, already using drugs that would lead him into a 14-year battle with addiction that dogged him throughout law school at the University of Virginia and culminated with a charge of possessing heroin after he was found ill in an airplane bathroom on the way to rehab in 1983.

After a brief stint as an assistant district attorney in New York, Kennedy joined Riverkeeper and the Natural Resources Defense Council. He founded Pace Law School’s Environmental Litigation Clinic and the Waterkeeper Alliance and is by many measures responsible for the mighty job of having restored the Hudson River to some semblance of health, vigorously prosecuting polluters and working to acknowledge the relationship between Indigenous communities and the land that had been stolen from them and then poisoned.

Kennedy’s trajectory juddered in the early aughts when parents who believed their children’s autism diagnoses might have been tied to vaccines approached him and persuaded him of their view. Kennedy became one of the loudest voices blaring false links between vaccination and autism. In 2005, Salon, in partnership with Rolling Stone, published a long reported story by Kennedy that pointed toward the mercury compound thimerosal, used as a preservative in vaccines, as the autism culprit. The story included significant errors, and in 2011 Salon removed it from the site.

In his current incarnation, Kennedy seems anxious not to linger on the vaccine question; his supporters consider the term anti-vaxx a smear and argue that his campaign has been for “vaccine safety.” When I told him I have every available vaccine and booster coursing through my veins, he shrugged. “I don’t care what people think about that,” he said, chasing his indifference with a tiny poisoned pill. “Generally, the only people who really understand the issue are the parents of injured children because it takes so much commitment and time to learn it. I’m one of the few people I’ve ever met who got into it just because I read the science. I don’t blame people for having faith in vaccines.”

His vaccine beliefs hooked him up with a broader world of conspiracy theorizing. In 2006, Kennedy wrote a lengthy story, again for Rolling Stone,claiming the Republican Party had “mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004,” stealing the election in Ohio via Diebold voting machines — a specious claim that was seductive to Democrats who simply could not believe George W. Bush had won his reelection bid against John Kerry. Kennedy’s doubts in electoral results have persisted, and he recently equivocated to the Washington Post’s Michael Scherer about the 2020 election, saying, “I don’t know. I think that Biden won.”

Kennedy has also come to believe many other things that run the gamut from unproven to ludicrous to dangerously irresponsible. They begin with his conviction that the CIA played a role in the murders of both his uncle and his father and that Bobby Sr. was killed not by Sirhan Sirhan but by a security guard assigned to protect him; he actively campaigned for Sirhan’s release from prison against the wishes of most of the Kennedy family, including his mother.

In 2016, Kennedy published Framed, a book that argues not just for the innocence of his cousin Michael Skakel, who served more than a decade for the 1975 murder of his Connecticut neighbor Martha Moxley, but also points a finger at two New York City teens hanging around Greenwich, one Black and one of mixed race, who he had decided were the real killers.

Kennedy has also suggested that 5G high-speed-internet towers are being used to “harvest our data and control our behavior”; posited a link between mass shootings and antidepressant use; told Rogan that Wi-Fi pierces “the blood-brain barrier,” causing “leaky brain”; and claimed the presence of atrazine in the water supply has contributed to depression and gender dysphoria among boys since atrazine is known to clinically castrate frogs when dumped into their tanks.

Again: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been polling as high as 20 percent.

Running for president, Kennedy told me, “is a lot easier” than he’d assumed it would be. Having worked for his uncle’s 1980 race, in which the candidate had given 12 speeches a day and was “always on,” Kennedy had imagined presidential campaigns as “this terrible marathon where you’re exhausted and it never stops.” The modern campaign, he told me, is a breeze: “You can actually do retail politics without leaving your house because of the podcast.”

Kennedy loves a podcast. He treats them with the same energy he brought to his launch speech, with every affirming nod or assenting grunt from a friendly host prompting him to hold forth at greater philosophical length; his exchange with Rogan stretched to three hours. “People really feel like they’re getting to know you, and they’re listening,” he told me of the benefits of the format.

They may be able to meet him, but, I asked, what about the part where he would hear from them? For that, Kennedy, like many boomers before him, has discovered Twitter, where he posts homemade videos and attacks scientists and tags Taibbi all day long. “I get all the responses,” he told me. “It’s like taking a poll every day.” He says his daughter-in-law, Amaryllis Fox, a former CIA agent whom he often cites as a key adviser, has instructed him that “they like it when you do the Twitter before you take your shower; don’t comb your hair, just do it when you’re ragged so that they’re getting a glimpse of your real life.” Some of those glimpses of his real life — like the videos of the “dog car” he drives to his hikes in Southern California, which doesn’t have seat belts because his German short-haired pointer, Attila, has eaten the buckles — show him as charismatic, funny, and appealingly self-deprecating. Others, such as a series of shirtless workout posts, display a red-faced, manic desperation.

In a mid-May conversation, Kennedy noted with clear satisfaction how well he was polling and was adamant that he intends to be president. I asked what he was doing to prepare. Was he paying attention to the election results from Turkey? Which Supreme Court decision was he awaiting with particular concern?

He cut me off. “I’ve done that. I have a lifetime of doing that,” he said, noting that his first foreign-policy essay was published in The Atlantic when he was a sophomore at Harvard. “In 2016, I had one of the most-read essays on Politico on the Syrian war. I’ve written countless articles on foreign policy since.”

I asked how the job of essay writing might differ from sitting in the Oval Office. “That is what I think about all the time,” he replied. “How do you unravel corporate capture in these agencies? I have been thinking about the CIA for most of my life. That’s a captured agency too, but they’re captured by the military-industrial complex; their function is to provide this constant pipeline of wars to feed the military-industrial complex.” Kennedy believes his father had decided to upend the CIA in the weeks before his death: “I know what my father was going to do, and I know how to fix that agency.”

But what about economic policy, what about affordable health care, what about steering the country through a post-Dobbs landscape when it comes to abortion? Kennedy is pro-choice and told me he supports the availability of mifepristone and misoprostol. “I don’t think there’s anybody in the country who has fought harder for bodily autonomy and medical freedom to be free from the government telling us what we can and cannot do with our bodies,” he said.

There was an infinitesimal pause.

“But the big issue is that 80 percent of health-care funding goes to chronic disease, and that’s the issue I intend to fix. Why are Americans the sickest people on earth? Why isn’t the NIH telling us the answer to that question? Because there are powerful interests. There are chemical companies, there are oil companies, there are food processors, industrial-agriculture and pharmaceutical companies.”

Kennedy is not wrong that the kinds of toxic exposures faced by millions thanks to generations of unchecked polluting for profit have left our planet and our bodies in trouble. He is also not wrong about the profit-seeking malevolence and rot of pharmaceutical companies or the repugnant influence they wield over Washington. This is one place Kennedy’s message resonates for lots of reasonable voters on the left and the right.

But he does not really emphasize reducing costs and making medicine and health-care treatments more broadly available to more people. If this were important to him, he would not have allowed Rogan to pit him against Dr. Peter Hotez, the Texas physician-scientist making open-source, patent-free vaccines available to poor populations around the world, undercutting the extortionate pharma companies. Kennedy’s fight is about vilifying lifesaving medical treatments in favor of others that he has decided, based on inscrutable metrics of his own, are more holistic.

“There are lots and lots of things out there that people are doing,” said Kennedy, who during COVID spoke about how alternative treatments like ivermectin, zinc, hydroxychloroquine, and azithromycin were not being studied properly, even though they were in fact studied and found ineffective against COVID. “I see what works and what doesn’t work. The worst thing is the pharmaceutical solutions.”

Kennedy is trafficking in lines that have tremendous appeal to many on the left dismayed by the Biden presidency, so much so that some have been open about a willingness to ignore what they regard as the crazy. Talbot, author of two books on the previous generation of Kennedys and my former boss when I was a writer at Salon, endorsed Kennedy via Facebook in a series of posts in which he proclaimed, “No, he’s not anti-vax. He wants to make vaccines safer. He’s not a ‘nutcase,’ as many liberals have been led to believe.” By phone, he told me he doesn’t agree with everything Kennedy has said: “Has he made some mistakes? Probably yes. Some medical and scientific mistakes, which he should roll back.” But, he went on, “I agree with maybe 60 percent of what Biden has done, and I agree with 90 percent of what Bobby says.”

Talbot sees Kennedy’s relationship to two-party American politics as analogous to his own relationship to mainstream political journalism. “I thought the media moved in lockstep; no one wants to stick their neck out. Starting Salon was my effort to really let the inmates run the asylum for once,” he said, noting that in Kennedy he saw “someone who thinks like I do, outside the box, willing to take risks.” Talbot added, “If I were to desert him now, if I were to wimp out on Bobby now because I don’t agree with him 100 percent about everything, I would not be able to live with myself.”

Wenner said by phone that he is a “firm supporter of President Biden” but expressed affection and admiration for Kennedy. “He is a crusader,” he said. “He’s much like his father: pursuing justice and fairness for people. He’s got his father’s sense of righteousness and anger and his skills and his impetuousness. He’s following in his dad’s footsteps, personally and psychologically, which is not at all unusual. The acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

Wenner defended the journalism Kennedy had done for him, specifically citing “Crimes Against Nature,” a 2003 attack on the Bush administration’s horrific environmental policies, as a “beautiful and eloquent piece.” He said he recently read a reexamination of Kennedy’s argument that the 2004 election was stolen in Ohio, determining, “I cannot find any discrediting of the piece. I find it very believable, and at worst it’s an open case.” As for the vaccine story, Wenner said, “I find it now impossible to refute the nearly unanimous wisdom of the science” that vaccines are safe. “We have a lot to feel aggrieved about, but we’re not going to get justice with the wrong facts and a meat cleaver.”

And indeed, when you get more granular than Kennedy’s banner ideas about the environment and corporate capture and the forever-wars industry, what you find is not just wrong facts, or even just the “nutcase” or “anti-vaxx” stuff, but inconsistency, hypocrisy, and a deference to the status quo.

The candidate’s environmental commitments, for example, go sideways when it comes to cryptocurrency. Kennedy delivered the keynote address at the Bitcoin 2023 conference this year, in which he said he would prevent bitcoin from being regulated as a security, even though it has proved wildly volatile and produces considerable CO2 emissions, which one 2022 study estimated to be comparable to those of the entire country of Greece. He has acknowledged the environmental pitfalls yet is still accepting campaign donations in bitcoin.

While he has railed at billionaires, he has described Sacks and Musk as “incredibly patriotic and incredibly committed to democracy.” He seems largely uninterested in many progressive economic-policy ideas, including a wealth tax, universal basic income, or a federal jobs guarantee, and regularly reaffirms that he is “a free-market-capitalism kind of guy.”

Kennedy’s anti-interventionist commitments seem to stop at his support for Israel, which he continually asserts. His positions on immigration and guns are so outside the liberal-left mainstream that people have suggested he is running in the wrong primary. When recently asked at a town hall what he would do to halt the proliferation of semi-automatic weapons, he replied, “I’m not going to take people’s guns away.” And during the Twitter Spaces conversation with Musk and Sacks in June, he said he was going to “seal the border permanently.” He told the Breaking Points podcast that he wants to shift spending out of a military-industrial interventionist mind-set and into “Fortress America — arming ourselves to the teeth at home.”

Kennedy insists, “I still consider myself a Democrat, and I have all the values that I grew up with, nothing changed.” When I told him I am often a critic of Biden from the left, he nodded and said, “Me too.” But when I asked which other members of the party he finds promising, he came up blank. When I noted that there are lawmakers in the party, like the Squad, who do give voice to many of the leftist-sounding critiques he makes, he shrugged them off as having “caved” on U.S. support of Ukraine before immediately changing the subject to the “warmongers” Biden and Hillary Clinton. Kennedy recently bumped into Clinton at a Las Vegas event. “I knew it was going to be awkward,” he said, “because her Zeitgeist is pro-war and pro-vaccine … But I went up and said hello.” Clinton just looked at him, he told me, “and said, ‘I don’t know what to say.’” Reached for comment, Clinton said, “I still don’t.”

If Kennedy has a hard time saying anything nice about any other Democrat, he speaks with nimble warmth about members of the team he would ostensibly be trying to beat should he find himself in the general election. Kennedy called Tucker Carlson “breathtakingly courageous.” This spring, he posted a photo of himself with far-right activist James O’Keefe, who has used deceptively edited videos as attack vehicles against ACORN, Planned Parenthood, and NPR.

He told me he would rather run against Trump than Ron DeSantis because “I feel like I can really beat Trump at debates. I have an advantage that nobody else has because I can hold him responsible for the lockdowns.” Like many in his party, Kennedy had been friendly with Trump. He met with him soon after he was elected president to discuss the danger of vaccines. “Then he sold out to Pfizer,” he told me. “And I would love to bring that up to his face and confront him with that and his cowardice in terms of not standing up to Fauci, which I don’t think anybody else can.” He added, “I’ve known him for years. I’ve beat him twice in lawsuits back in the old days, and I feel like I’ll enjoy that part.”

“Look at my Twitter,” he said. “It’s one after the other: ‘I’m a Republican, I voted for Trump. I’m going to vote for you.’” For his part, Trump, a connoisseur of primary dynamics who is clearly enjoying the heartburn Kennedy’s campaign is causing, said recently, “You know, he’s a commonsense guy and so am I, so whether you’re conservative or liberal, common sense is common sense.”

Kennedy has publicly expressed his sympathies for DeSantis’s stated desire to “burn” the NIH “to the ground,” casually aligning himself with a governor who has gutted Florida’s education system, all but banned abortion there, and signed a law that permits the state to remove minors who have been given access to gender-affirming health care from their families. To me, he said, “All of my interactions with DeSantis have been extremely friendly, and I really like his wife, Casey, and I’ve had good relationships with him, and I agree with a lot of the stuff he did during COVID.” On the other hand, he went on, “My wife can’t stand him; she’s from Florida, and she is done, so I can’t even mention his name in our house.”

The first question Kennedy asked me was whether I planned to read his book American Values, a pretty astonishing chronicle of the multigenerational exploits of his family. There is an uncle raising a glass to his friends gathered on the runway before crashing his out-of-control plane into a canyon in Idaho. There is Kennedy’s pet coati attacking his seven-months’ pregnant mother, Ethel, sending her into early labor. There is his father’s passing mention to Indonesia’s Sukarno that his son loved Komodo dragons, two of which — ten and 12 feet long and capable of eating a child of Bobby’s size — soon arrived as a gift. “I was disappointed that we were not able to keep them,” Kennedy writes, noting that he continued to visit them at the National Zoo, where he worked on weekends and after school, feeding them frozen piglets and rats.

American Values is also a laundering of a lot of dirty Kennedy linen. There is but one mention of Chappaquiddick and lots of florid encomiums about how devoted everyone was to one another with little mention of the famously chronic infidelity that ran rampant in the family. He lauds ancient Grandma Rose for her “curiosity about people of all backgrounds,” including “fishermen, actors, cabbies, political leaders, bus drivers, tourists, movie stars, heads of state, strangers in elevators,” a list that suggests that the full and dazzling range of humanity may fall into three categories: famous people, people who transport them to places, and others they may meet by chance on Cape Cod.

When I asked him over lunch about why he wanted me to read that book over all the others — about mercury, about how his cousin definitely didn’t murder his neighbor in 1975, about Fauci, about Francis of Assisi — Kennedy said, “That’s my favorite.”

He is leaning hard into his family in this contest; his logo even borrows the iconography of his father’s 1968 campaign. It makes it all the more awkward that almost no members of the Kennedy family are supporting him. Many have already publicly endorsed Biden, who employs at least three Kennedys in his administration. Kennedy’s sister, the filmmaker Rory Kennedy, told CNN, “Due to a wide range of Bobby’s positions, I’m supporting President Biden.” On the day Kennedy filed his paperwork with the Federal Election Commission, his cousin Bobby Shriver tweeted that it was “a good day” to remind everyone he had been an early supporter of Biden in the 2016 primary.

I asked Kennedy about his relationships with the relatives who disapprove of his campaign. “I understand people are going to disagree with me,” he said, “and that I just need to maintain my spiritual center and love people, even though I sometimes have to love them from a distance.” He then started searching his phone to show me “breakup texts” from friends, most of which he received during his COVID activism. He tells me at least one was from his longtime family friend and adviser Tim Hagan. (Hagan did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) He gave me a hangdog look and said, “A lot of times you make decisions that are the correct decisions, but they hurt people you really love. Breaking up with the girlfriend, whatever, they’re hurtful and they feel terrible, but it’s the right thing to do. I feel like I have to make up my mind about what’s the right thing and then do it and try to comfort people who are hurt by it and not return hate with hate or anything like that, but keep walking, keep up the positive high vibrations and not descending to lower vibrations.” The people I spoke to for this piece who have been close to Kennedy and his family, all of whom declined to speak on the record, described the distress and heartache his candidacy is causing among those who care for him.

Much has been made of the awkward position in which his campaign puts his wife, a star of Curb Your Enthusiasm who has spent her career among fellow Hollywood liberals. To me, he said that Hines’s opinion is the only one he cares about, that he plays to “an audience of one.” He peppers his conversation with jokes about how much his wife disagrees with him, telling me she couldn’t read his Fauci book, despite trying several times, because “it just made her depressed.” Yet he is out here running for president. And for all her protestations, she is out there publicly supporting him.

The assumption that Kennedy would enter politics has been long-standing; this magazine put him on its cover in 1995, labeling him “a New York political player with a future.” He recalled he had considered running in 2000 for Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s vacated New York Senate seat, the one Clinton wound up winning. “Because I was having family problems, I decided not to,” he said. Then when Clinton was tapped to head the State Department in 2008, Governor David Paterson “called me and offered me her Senate seat,” he said. But Kennedy declined, saying he wanted to spend more time with his wife and six children. I asked if he regretted that choice.

No, he said. “It was the right decision at the time. My wife took her own life not long after. My kids needed me. There’s a lot of things that I would do differently if I could do the whole thing over again, but you don’t get that choice, and that’s not one of them.”

Kennedy and his second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, the best friend of his sister Kerry, announced their separation in 2010. In 2012, Mary hanged herself in an outbuilding of their home in Mount Kisco. More than a year later, the New York Post published excerpts of a diary from earlier in his marriage in which he kept an account of the 16 women he’d had sex with that year. In 2014, he married Hines.

One of the keys to Kennedy’s appeal with a certain segment of the population is his view of himself as an outcast and victim. When his inaugural campaign speech went long, he joked with the crowd, “This is what happens when you censor somebody for 18 years.”

He was in fact banned from Instagram during the depths of the pandemic, though his account has since been reinstated. Still, reality doesn’t match up with his self-depiction as a rejected outsider. To date, his campaign has been covered at length in profiles in Time, the Washington Post, the New York Times, The Atlantic, and now this magazine. His books are distributed by Simon & Schuster, and he has promoted those books on Bill Maher’s show and Fox News.

Being shunned in any way for ideas that, when it comes to vaccines, are not just about individual choice but about our collective responsibility is perhaps anathema to people raised to assume their voices would be heard and understood as legitimate. Public-health directives during COVID were crude and sometimes wrong — messaging on masking changed repeatedly, masking outdoors now seems silly, the school closures lasted longer than they should have — but the objections made by people like Kennedy were not rooted in special advance scientific knowledge. Rather, they stemmed from the fury of normally powerful people affronted by the argument that their individual impulses put them on the wrong side of a moral question of communal engagement and compassion. It is a dynamic many managed to reframe as their willingness to stand in patriotic challenge to weak-minded, compliant, vaccinated sheep. And it is the type of environment in which men born with immense wealth and power — the kind who casually mention that governors have called and offered them Senate seats that they have turned down — can recast themselves as martyred heroes.

“He’s been pilloried in the press,” John Gilmore, head of his super-PAC, told Time. “He’s lost jobs. He’s been pushed out of organizations, he gets trashed sometimes by members of his own family. So he’s not a poser, to say the least.”

But of course he’s a poser. This entire campaign is a pose, as is his outsider stance. He is a Kennedy. He is the fifth member of his family to run for president. His sister Kerry was married to the man who would become the governor of New York, whose brother was a television journalist; his cousin Maria was married to the governor of California, who also happened to be a movie star. His grandfather owned a movie studio. He has written, in American Values, of attending the 1960 Democratic convention at which his uncle was nominated; he was 6, and his family stayed at the home of Marion Davies, the actress and the mistress of his grandfather’s good friend William Randolph Hearst. At that convention, Frank Sinatra hosted cocktail parties celebrating his family. Kennedy’s own wife is a star whom he met through another television star, his friend Larry David, who recently offered the Times this classic clarification about his relationship with the candidate: “Yes love and support, but I’m not ‘supporting’ him.”

Over lunch in New Hampshire, I asked Kennedy how his conversation with Republican New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu had gone following his address to the state legislature; Kennedy told me, “It was nice. I knew his father” — who was also governor. It can seem as if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. knows the father of every powerful person in America. Perhaps more important, they knew his father and his uncles and his grandfathers.

So he gets traction where no one else would. His relationship with the political media, which has published him, written about him, and seen him as a full and flawed and interesting human, has always been guided by his core identity as an insider, a member of the family that this country was taught to love above all others and to pity in their many public tragedies. As a journalist who has been told for decades that my empathy for the female candidates I often cover is probably overemotional and built too strongly on personal identification, let me just tell you that you should never stand between a white male political journalist over the age of 40 and his feelingsabout the Kennedys.

I was a young person in journalism in New York at the turn of the millennium when a lot of people I worked for and with were Kennedy’s dining companions, buddies, and neighbors. Peter Kaplan (another of my former bosses), then editor of the New York Observer, had been his roommate at Harvard and was one of his best friends. Kennedy and his cousin John Jr. — who ran the magazine George — were big handsome puppies who frolicked among a generation of political junkies who had grown up worshipping their dads and then wound up at the same schools, jobs, and parties as the sons. I saw this at Talk and the Observer and Salon; it was true at The New Yorker and the New York Times and The New Republic and The Atlantic and the places that published Kennedy from the 1970s on, providing him the mainstream credentials he cited when I asked him about his preparation for the presidency. For what it’s worth, in those same years, I was often asked to cover Trump, then a local celebrity and bargain-basement version of a Kennedy himself, an easy call to get a quote to fill a column, with every mention making his name more recognizable, his words more legitimate. How do we think these guys got here?

If Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were your uncle, you might well love him a whole lot. As I sat listening to him spin untruths, looking at me intently with his doggy blue eyes, I did not like him. But he certainly recalled to me other people in my life whom I have loved — addicts and infidels, men whose complicated family lives sent them into woods and streams to find sense and solace in birds and snakes. He made me think of other people in my life who in fact did love him, sometimes very much.

If he can have that effect on me, what must his draw be for those who have not spent hours reading about thimerosal and AZT and Diebold machines just double-checking that all this stuff he says with such assuredness is, indeed, nonsense? Imagine how strong it could be for millions of scared Americans who look at him and see shadows of people they’ve lost, of men the country has lost.

If he were your uncle, you would likely consider that he is fighting some serious psychological headwinds. His own uncle was assassinated when Bobby was 9. He was pulled from school at 14 and flown to the deathbed of his father, also assassinated. His cousin drove a plane into the sea on the way to Bobby’s sister’s wedding. One brother died in a skiing accident, another of a drug overdose. His wife died by suicide. All this in a family in which his grandfather’s dictum was “There will be no crying in this house.”

If he were your uncle, you also might try hard not to pick a fight with him at Thanksgiving, or maybe you would eagerly pick a fight with him at Thanksgiving. And maybe you would tussle lightly with your parents and siblings and cousins about whether you felt sorry for him or whether he was actually just an asshole.

But if he were your uncle, he would not be performing surprisingly well in a Democratic presidential primary and gobbling the attention of the national press with his every word. That he is tells us as much about this country’s broken systems as any of his diatribes do.

And it’s not benign. Because while, no, he is certainly not likely to win the Democratic nomination or ever become president, he could do well in a rogue New Hampshire primary in which Biden is declining to participate, and his performance in that state could trigger further distrust in our elections and throw more fuel on the legitimacy crisis that is raging across this democracy — a crisis that is dangerous, insurrectionist, violent, and terrifying. This campaign will mean his views gain a broader audience, and that too is terrifying when it comes to the erosion of the public’s understanding of disease, science, and public-health measures.

And then there is the bracing reality that, here in Trump’s America, another clearly damaged man, a man whose own close-knit family has waved red flags about his fitness for office, is getting this far in the anti-Trump party.

Talbot observed to me that Kennedy’s forerunners had a brain trust around them: “They had people who told them when they were going too far, gave them advice — Ted Sorensen, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Peter Edelman.” Kennedy used to have that kind of protective support from the journalists and politically powerful friends who shined him up, in many cases literally editing his words. But Kaplan died, his cousin died, and Hagan broke up with him.

Now his brain trust appears to be the hyperonline, hard-right masculinity influencers who give him the approval he craves and encourage him to do things like post videos of himself shirtless, his chest and arms improbably pumped, doing nine janky push-ups.

Not so distant from this performance of retro white machismo is the fact that at least some of the blame for this wretched state of affairs lies with Biden and the Democratic Party. When elected, Biden promised to be a bridge president: to formulate, alongside the equally senescent leadership of his party, a succession plan of some sort. But these aging leaders have not done that, so here we are with some of the anti-Biden energies among Democratic voters getting directed toward a man who looks like the saviors of old, a glitchy hologram of fabled politicians who once represented youth and hope.

He never, ever, ever should have been here. In this position. In these pages, in this context. He should never have been a politician or a public figure at all. He should have been a veterinarian.

In American Values, amid all his bizarre hagiography of his family members and rehashing of the Bay of Pigs, is story after story after story of pure delight and joy and love and fulfillment: There are the falcons and hawks and pigeons, the Komodo dragons, the matricidal coati, a red-tailed hawk named Morgan. There’s a California sea lion, Sandy, who “took up residence in our swimming pool” and “ate mackerel by the barrel, devouring everything but the eyeballs, which we found scattered like marbles across the pool, patio and lawn.” One day, after causing a traffic jam on the Georgetown Pike, Sandy, like the dragons, winds up at the National Zoo. And how about Carruthers, the 16-pound leopard tortoise brought back from Africa under the diplomatic protection of his uncle Sargent Shriver in Ethel Kennedy’s Gucci suitcase? Carruthers spent 21 years roaming the house at Hickory Hill in Virginia alongside “ten horses, eleven dogs, a donkey, two goats, pigs … a 4-H cow, chickens, pheasants, ducks, geese, forty closely related rabbits” and Hungarian homing pigeons, a nocturnal honey bear who “slept away his days in the playroom crawl space,” and a jill ferret who “fed her pups under the kitchen stove.”

“In those days,” he writes of his childhood, “whenever anybody asked me about my future plans, I replied without hesitation: I wanted to be a veterinarian or a scientist.” But as he would tell Tablet, “When my dad died, my priorities reoriented, and I felt kind of an obligation to pick up the torch. So I went on a different path, which ended up in law school.” Only as he was getting sober, in his telling, did he realize he had to find some sort of middle ground and turned to environmental law.

This guy could have been patching up owl wings in Virginia, California, or New Hampshire, just like George W. Bush (the guy he’s sure stole the 2004 election) might have enjoyed a modest career painting in Kennebunkport or Texas.

But this country, with its political system built around white patriarchal ideals of who powerful men are supposed to be, and its very limited view of what other kinds of power might look like, has created too irresistible an opportunity for someone with a famous name, a tremendous ego, and a persecution complex. So here we are, eight years after Trump descended the elevator in Trump Tower, listening to a man talking about ivermectin and the fascism of Fauci and the castration of frogs and watching him run riot in a Democratic primary. (New York Magazine).

5 Noteworthy Falsehoods Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Has Promoted.

He has promoted a conspiracy theory that coronavirus vaccines were developed to control people via microchips. He has endorsed the false notion that antidepressants are linked to school shootings. And he has pushed the decades-old theory that the C.I.A. killed his uncle, former President John F. Kennedy.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental lawyer, is a leading vaccine skeptic and purveyor of conspiracy theories who has leaned heavily on misinformation as he mounts his long-shot 2024 campaign for the Democratic nomination.

But as voters express discontentment at a likely rematch between President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Kennedy has garnered as much as 20 percent of the vote in recent Democratic primary polling.

Mr. Biden and the Democratic National Committee have not publicly acknowledged Mr. Kennedy’s candidacy and have declined to comment on his campaign. Nevertheless, the public scrutiny that accompanies a White House bid has highlighted other questionable beliefs and statements Mr. Kennedy has elevated over the years.

Here are five of the many baseless claims Mr. Kennedy has peddled on the campaign trail and beyond.

He has falsely linked vaccines to various medical conditions.

Mr. Kennedy has promoted many false, specious or unproven claims that center on public health and the pharmaceutical industry — most notably, the scientifically discredited belief that childhood vaccines cause autism.

That notion has been rejected by more than a dozen peer-reviewed scientific studies across multiple countries. The National Academy of Medicine reviewed eight vaccines for children and adults and found that with rare exceptions, the vaccines are very safe, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Seen by many as the face of the vaccine resistance movement, Mr. Kennedy has asserted that he is “not anti-vaccine” and seeks to make vaccines more safe. But he has advertised misleading information about vaccine ingredients and circulated retracted studies linking vaccines to various medical conditions.

At a rally in Washington last year, he compared the vaccination records some called “vaccine passports” to life in Germany during the Holocaust, a statement he later apologized for. And he falsely told Louisiana lawmakers in 2021 that the coronavirus vaccine was the “deadliest vaccine ever made.”

Children’s Health Defense, an organization Mr. Kennedy originally founded as the World Mercury Project, has frequently campaigned against vaccines. Facebook and Instagram removed the group’s accounts last year for espousing vaccine misinformation, and Mr. Kennedy has often lamented the perils of “censorship” in campaign speeches since.

He has made baseless claims about a connection between gender dysphoria and chemical exposure.

In an interview last month with Jordan Peterson, a conservative Canadian psychologist and public speaker, Mr. Kennedy falsely linked chemicals present in water sources to transgender identity.

“A lot of the problems we see in kids, particularly boys, it’s probably underappreciated how much of that is coming from chemical exposures, including a lot of sexual dysphoria that we’re seeing,” he said. He referred to research on an herbicide, atrazine, in which scientists found that it “induces complete feminization and chemical castration” in certain frogs.

But no evidence exists to indicate that the chemical, typically used on farms to kill weeds, causes the same effects in humans, let alone gender dysphoria. And according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Most people are not exposed to atrazine on a regular basis.”

He has falsely linked antidepressants to school shootings.

Drawing on longstanding dubious claims, Mr. Kennedy has repeatedly endorsed the idea that mass shootings have increased because of heightened use of antidepressants.

“Kids always had access to guns, and there was no time in American history or human history where kids were going to schools and shooting their classmates,” he told the comedian Bill Maher on a recent episode of the podcast, “Club Random With Bill Maher.” “It really started happening conterminous with the introduction of these drugs, with Prozac and the other drugs.”

While both antidepressant use and mass shooting occurrences have increased in the last several decades, the scientific community has found “no biological plausibility” to back a link between the two, according to Ragy Girgis, an associate professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University.

Antidepressants often have warnings that reference suicidal thoughts, Mr. Girgis said. But those warnings refer to the possibility that people who already experience suicidal ideation might share pre-existing beliefs aloud once they take the medicine as part of their treatment.

Mr. Kennedy, however, has pointed to such warnings as evidence of the false notion that the drugs might induce “homicidal tendencies.”

Several high-profile figures, including Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, have amplified similar claims following recent mass shootings.

Most school shooters were not prescribed with psychotropic medications before committing acts of violence, a 2019 study found. And even when they were, researchers wrote, “no direct or causal association was found.”

He has bolstered a conspiracy theory that the C.I.A. assassinated his uncle.

Mr. Kennedy has long promoted a conspiracy theory that the C.I.A. killed his uncle, President John F. Kennedy.

He claimed, without evidence, during a Fox News interview with Sean Hannity in May that Allen W. Dulles, a C.I.A. director fired by President Kennedy, helped cover up evidence of the organization’s involvement when he served on the Warren Commission, convened in 1963 to investigate the Kennedy assassination.

Referencing a House committee inquiry in 1976, he said: “Most of the people in that investigation believed it was the C.I.A. that was behind it because the evidence was so overwhelming to them.”

But even that investigation, which found that President Kennedy was “probably” the victim of a conspiracy of some kind, flatly concluded that the C.I.A. was “not involved.”

The Warren Commission found that the killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, acted alone and was not connected to any governmental agency.

And he has said that Republicans stole the 2004 presidential election.

Mr. Kennedy told The Washington Post in June that he still believed that John Kerry, the Democratic candidate, had won the 2004 presidential election.

Mr. Kennedy first promoted that idea in a 2006 article in Rolling Stone, asserting that Republicans had “mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people” and assure the re-election of President George W. Bush. He claimed that their efforts “prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted.”

But it is one thing to complain of vote suppression; it is another thing to demonstrate that Mr. Kerry won more of the votes cast.

Mr. Bush defeated Mr. Kerry by a margin of 35 electoral college votes nationally; he carried Ohio and its 20 electoral votes by more than 118,000 ballots.

The Times reported in 2004 that a glitch in an electronic Ohio voting machine added 3,893 votes to Mr. Bush’s tally. That error was caught in preliminary vote counts, officials said. But the event, alongside other voting controversies nationwide, spurred widespread questions about election integrity that caught traction with people like Mr. Kennedy.

Mr. Kerry, however, conceded the race a day after the election. (New York Times).

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Disappointing news.

Raskin passes on Senate bid.

Rep. Jamie Raskin is now the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee. | AP

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) officially passed Friday on a bid for a Senate seat in deep-blue Maryland.

“At this moment, I believe the best way for me to make the greatest difference in American politics in 2024 and beyond is this: to run for reelection to the House of Representatives in Maryland’s extraordinary 8th District,” he said in a lengthy statement released Friday evening citing the reasons for his staying in the House.

The Maryland lawmaker has become a powerful entity in the House, rocketing to national fame as the lead manager of President Donald Trump’s second impeachment and as a member of the Jan. 6 select committee. He’s now the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee.

Sen. Ben Cardin’s (D-Md.) retirement announcement in May immediately fueled speculation that Raskin would run. But he delayed his decision after a recent bout with cancer that is now in remission and has cited his work with the Oversight Committee as a top reason to stay in the House.

Raskin’s statement cited his work on the House Oversight panel and the possibility of becoming its chair as a reason for staying in the lower chamber. In the weeks leading up to his announcement, Raskin, a constitutional law expert, had openly wondered whether he would have more impact as a junior senator or as chair of the Oversight Committee if Democrats recapture the House next year and had privately sought advice from his colleagues. Democrats are optimistic they can flip the lower chamber, though the path to keeping their Senate majority is much narrower.

Raskin acknowledged the conflict in his statement, saying that “if I had two political careers, I would gladly give one of them to the year-and-a-half campaign for the Senate,” but that he had a “different and more urgent calling right now” and would not be able to leave the House. He’d privately sought out advice from his colleagues in recent weeks on how to proceed.

His perch on the Oversight panel was a hard-won position, with Raskin beating out more senior colleagues for the role. Raskin has elevated younger, progressive colleagues on the high-profile panel, naming “squad” member Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) as his number two.

Raskin’s decision not to run leaves the progressive lane in the primary open. Top competitors in the primary currently include Montgomery County Council Member Will Jawando, Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks and Rep. David Trone (D-Md.). Alsobrooks is banking on some institutional support, drawing the backing of Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), and has posted strong fundraising numbers. Trone is able to draw on a deep well of his own funds for the race, having self-funded previous congressional bids. And Jawando has touted his own liberal credentials. (Politico).

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Bad news for Giuliani.

Giuliani Should Lose His Law License in D.C., Bar Panel Says.

The recommendation for disbarment of Rudolph W. Giuliani followed a hearing where evidence was presented that he had improperly sought to help Donald J. Trump overturn the results of the 2020 election. Read the whole article here.

(New York Times).

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A good First Couple.

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Have you eaten PawPaw?

The word is - the taste of the pawpaw, which has a creamy texture, resembles the taste of bananas.

The unsung pawpaw is a delicious, low-maintenance, native N. American fruit tree.

Looking to plant something unusual, easy to grow and exotically delicious? Let me introduce you to Asimina triloba, the pawpaw tree.

Also known as Hoosier banana, poor man’s banana and false banana, the sadly underused fruit tree will transport you to the tropics, its 12-by-5-inch, droopy, dark green leaves swaying in the breeze.

Except it isn’t tropical at all. The pawpaw is a North American native.

Found growing wild from southern Ontario and Michigan east to western New York and south to Texas and Florida, pawpaws are hardy in horticultural zones 4-8 or 5-9, depending on the variety. The small, pyramid-shaped trees top out at about 25 feet tall, love humidity and are highly frost-tolerant.

Odd-smelling maroon blossoms reminiscent of fermented grapes cover the branches in spring, followed by clusters of heavy, 3-to-5-inch-long fruits that look like mangoes. In autumn, the trees’ vibrant yellow or gold foliage will brighten your landscape. And deer tend to avoid them.

The pawpaw is about as low-maintenance as a fruit tree could be. Select a sunny to partly sunny spot that offers some wind protection, and plant it in well-draining, slightly acidic soil with a pH level between 5.5 and 5.7.

Water young trees regularly for a year or two until they’re established, and apply a 20-20-20 fertilizer once a month in April, May and June only. As far as care, the only other thing you’ll want to do is remove suckers that grow around the base of the tree. Pawpaws are not invasive but will form a thicket if left unchecked.

In most cases, you’ll need to grow two different pawpaw cultivars to ensure cross-pollination and fruit production. Seek out grafted, named cultivars, such as Davis, Mary Foos Johnson, Overleese, Sweet Alice and Taylor, which will bear fruit in a couple of years, as opposed to seed-grown trees, which can take as long as six to 10 years to produce. Sunflower is a rare self-fertile variety that theoretically should bear fruit if planted solo but would be more reliable if paired with a mate.

Avoid buying balled-and-burlapped trees, which are grown in fields and then dug up for sale; the practice risks damage to pawpaws’ long taproots, impacting their ability to take up water effectively.

Harvest the fruits in late summer when they are soft to the touch and detach easily. To outsmart birds and other wildlife that may try to swipe perfectly ripe fruit, you can pick them a little before they are completely ready, and the last bit will ripen soon afterward. But hard pawpaws picked too early will not fully ripen off the tree.

Some folks swear pawpaws taste like bananas; others insist their flavor is more papaya-like. Regardless, the highly nutritious, creamy fruits, rich in vitamins, minerals and amino acids, can be eaten raw or used in any recipe calling for bananas, such as puddings, smoothies, muffins, cakes and breads. Just discard the fruit’s thick skin and seeds, as they contain toxins.

If you’re curious about tasting pawpaws but aren’t ready to grow them, you’re probably out of luck. The perishable fruits keep for just a few days, making it impractical to transport them, so you won’t find them at your local supermarket.

Just about the only way to experience them is to grow them yourself. (Associated Press)

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