Trump Just Reinstated a Global Anti-Abortion Rule That Has Increased Abortions

A health worker counsels a woman. Image: USAID

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday to reinstate a policy that blocks US foreign aid dollars from reaching any organization that provides abortion counseling or services, dubbed the “Global Gag Rule” by critics.

The policy, formally called the Mexico City Policy, was enacted first under Ronald Reagan and is a more conservative addition to the already existing Helms Amendment, which states that organizations that receive US foreign aid can’t use it toward providing abortion services.

Under the executive order, organizations like the International Planned Parenthood Foundation and Marie Stopes International, two of the largest reproductive health organizations in developing countries across the world, could lose millions of dollars in funding for programs that provide women’s health checkups, contraception and counseling.

There are some unintended consequences to not funding organizations that offer abortion services: more abortions.

These programs have been instrumental in providing safe birth control and curbing mother and child deaths in countries like Nigeria and Malawi. “Since 2012, there are 30 million more women in the world who now have access to modern family planning services,” Seema Jalan, the executive director of the United Nations Foundation’s Universal Access Project, told Motherboard.

The executive order, last upheld under the George W. Bush administration, is a fixture of the GOP, so it’s unsurprising that Trump signed off on it so quickly, and the motivation could be a mixture of ideological and fiscal beliefs. But there are some unintended consequences to not funding organizations that offer abortion services: more abortions. A 2011 study published by the World Health Organization "found robust empirical patterns suggesting that the Mexico City Policy is associated with increases in abortion rates in sub-Saharan African countries."

“There was an actually an increase in unintended pregnancies, and an increase in abortions and HIV,” last time the Global Gag Rule was in place, Jalan agreed. Women are also more likely to get unsafe abortions without the support of clean facilities and health workers.

Family planning, which encompasses birth control, prenatal care and financial counseling actually saves health systems money since families have less, and healthier children. The US has been the largest bilateral funder of reproductive health and family planning services across the world, and the new executive order will hit the poorest women, in the poorest countries, the hardest.

Get six of our favorite Motherboard stories every day by signing up for our newsletter.

from Trump Just Reinstated a Global Anti-Abortion Rule That Has Increased Abortions

The New White House Website Launched with No Mention of Healthcare

Healthcare has been an essential part of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, and his promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act—i.e. Obamacare—won him support across the GOP.

So it comes as somewhat of a surprise that healthcare is nowhere to be found on the newly launched Whitehouse.gov website. It’s not one of his top six issues, which spans jobs and energy, nor did Trump mention access to affordable health coverage in his inaugural speech.

It’s nearly impossible that this will remain the case much longer. Whether it is Trump or his new colleagues Paul Ryan and Tom Price, health care will indeed make its way back into the limelight, both online and on the Hill. It is one of the single most polarizing issues in Congress, and an inefficient health system is one of the biggest drains on the economy: we spent $3 trillion on health in 2014, but have worse life expectancy and chronic disease rates than many other developed countries.

The Affordable Care Act was meant to be former President Barack Obama’s signature move toward universal access to insurance coverage. It was flawed, it was complex, and it had a rocky start, but it was the country’s first holistic attempt at reining in premiums and debt for even the sickest Americans. And while many people have paid more for their insurance than ever since its launch, we would have paid a much higher price without it.

Read More: Repealing Obamacare Will Seriously Disrupt How Doctors Work

Repealing the ACA, meanwhile, will cost the country up to $353 billion in less than 10 years. And it’s unclear whether Trump and his party have a clear plan as to how to extend coverage to those 20 million people who have health insurance because of the law.

Meanwhile, in an earlier meeting after his election in November, Trump told Obama that he would keep some essential parts of the law, including the clause that doesn’t allow insurance companies to charge people with preexisting conditions more for their coverage. The newly elected president has also claimed he will bring down high drug prices by requiring pharmaceutical companies to work with Medicare and Medicaid, two government health programs that are meant to offer health insurance to low-income and elderly Americans.

It’s hard to predict what kind of healthcare system Trump is imagining for the country, especially when the mere mention of its existence is absent from the new White House website. For now, we’ll have to just follow his tweets.

Get six of our favorite Motherboard stories every day by signing up for our newsletter.

from The New White House Website Launched with No Mention of Healthcare

The Disease We're Getting Wrong

A couple of weeks ago we shared a fascinating documentary that challenged our assumptions about diabetes, especially in developing countries. The public perception of type II diabetes is that it’s a disease of excess—the result of too much sugar in our diets and a sedentary lifestyle. But The New Face of Diabetes, a documentary by executive producer Elliot Kirschner, director Adam Bolt, producer Jessica Harrop, and editor Regina Sobel, published here on Motherboard, builds on the idea that this is only one part of the picture when dealing with a misunderstood disease.

Read More: How a BMI Fallacy Convinced the World that Diabetes Is a Disease of Excess

In this episode of Radio Motherboard we talked to Elliot Kirschner about the film, and how science continues to evolve and change across the world. In essence, this wasn't a documentary just about diabetes. It was a useful look at how new discoveries are slowly incorporated into our worldview, and how scientists in countries like India often struggle to be accepted in the scientific community.

Motherboard will be hosting more documentaries from Kirschner and his team, and they will all be eye-opening like this one. Stay tuned.

Get six of our favorite Motherboard stories every day by signing up for our newsletter.

from The Disease We're Getting Wrong

Seaweed Could Help Clean Up Our Dirty Garment Industry

Our clothing industry is an environmental disaster, down to the very fabrics we wear.

Acrylic, a common ingredient in workout clothes or dresses, for example, is derived from petroleum, as is nylon. Petroleum is derived from crude oil, i.e. fossil fuels, meaning they are not sustainable. The further we move away from natural fibers like cotton, which are more expensive and water-intensive to grow and process, the more we wear toxic clothing, as Stockholm University reported in a study last year.

Otherwise, we’re relying on animals, from sheep to cows, for materials like leather and wool. And in that process, supporting a factory farm and tannery process that drains natural resources and forces animals into some hideous conditions across the world.

But that doesn’t need to be the end of the story. Scientists and entrepreneurs are constantly introducing new ways to create fabrics and clothing, and not all of them take a toll on the environment or our health. From spider silk to recycled waste to algae, the future of clothing doesn’t need to be mass produced plastic sweaters. It could return to plants or other biological materials generated from living organisms, as various companies and creators showed at the Biofabricate design conference in New York City yesterday.

“Spider silk is a tough material that can absorb a large amount of energy before it breaks,” said Kenji Higashi, director of Spiber, a Japanese company that makes materials using materials like spider silk.

Spiber's display. Image: Ankita Rao

Spiber, which started in 2007, has been working on prototype clothing using its product, including a collaboration with North Face on a jacket called the Moon Parka, which will be released soon. Spiber scientists isolate proteins from spiders and then synthesizes fibers in a laboratory through a process of fermentation using sugars and microbes, and then a spinning processes that turns the polymers into threads. Since every combination of DNA produces a different result, they hope to make a wide range of materials.

Higashi said proteins like keratin could replace wool, and collagen could replace leather. These materials could replace plastics and nylons in a sustainable way, since spider silk is not a finite resource. However, since the sugars used in the fermentation process still require agricultural resources and water, Higashi said they are still figuring out how to scale the idea in a sustainable way.

But mainstreaming spider silk isn’t far away. Even Adidas, the well-known athletic wear company, is using biofabrics similar to spider silk to make breathable sneakers. The company introduced the world’s first major biofabricated shoe at the Biofabricate conference, the aptly-named (if wordy) “Futurecraft Biofabric.” To make the shoes, Adidas worked with Amsilk, another German company whose signature product is “biosteel.” This is a material made up of synthetic proteins, designed to produce the same toughness as natural spider silk.

Futurecraft Biofabric, which Adidas says will be available in limited quantities (price TBD) beginning in 2017. Image: Adidas

Meanwhile, leather, which seems irreplaceable (move over, pleather) could also go through a biological revolution. MycoWorks is a company that uses fungus and other plant byproducts to create leather-like materials, which looks and feels around the same texture as normal leather, if a little softer. Phil Ross, MycoWorks' chief technology officer, said his company uses a carbon-negative process, which means they’re not just avoiding pollution, but actually creating products with a positive impact on the climate.

Biofabricated leather. Image: Evan Rodgers

Similar to fungus, seaweed seems to be one of the most versatile and unlikely way to make new clothes. If that sounds weird, or undesirable, remember that algae is probably all over your body and clothes already. Bioesters, a research group based in New York, is using polymers from kelp to make sustainable fabrics.

Brooklyn-based Aaron Nesser, a product designer with Bioesters, said he is inspired by the idea of materials and clothes that can be part of a life cycle, rather than the end of it. Right now, the main material they’ve developed from alginate, a polymer derived from brown seaweeds, doesn’t feel quite like cotton or polyester, or something you would make into a shirt, but Nesser said they are slowly developing it into what could be a versatile textile.

“What inspires me is the idea of living, breathing clothes. We could actually have clothes that are growing,” he told Motherboard.

Whether made of kelp proteins or spider silk, there are many obstacles for the "biofabric" world ahead. The supply chain of clothes, for example, depends largely on wide-scale production, cheap labor, and cheap trade. And most of these newer processes could require completely new enterprises, like growing kelp or synthesizing spider silk.

Even so, consumers may see new, ecologically sound fabrics on their shelves in the very near future, and could demand much more.

Get six of our favorite Motherboard stories every day by signing up for our newsletter.

from Seaweed Could Help Clean Up Our Dirty Garment Industry

Fuck You, Freud: New Study Says Clitoral Orgasms Are Great

Back in the early 1900s, Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, decided that clitoral orgasms were a sign of sexual and psychological immaturity, and sometimes mental illness.

Luckily, researcher Nicole Prause and her colleagues came swooping in this week with a bit of healthy validation: clitoral orgasms are not to be messed with. In fact, the new study, published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, found that women who turned to clitoral stimulation sometimes had even stronger sexual desire.

“A series of published studies made the shocking claim that women who reached orgasm by clitoral stimulation were mentally unfit in a variety of ways,” Prause said in a statement. “They were shocking because we know that a majority of women report using clitoral stimulation to help themselves experience orgasm, so these studies were pathologizing a majority of women.”

The researchers studied 88 women, from the ages of 18 to 53 years old. After a detailed interview and questionnaire about their mental and sexual health, the women viewed a series of films, some of them neutral and some of them sexual, selected from the Adult Video Network Award winners for Best Film and Best Scene. They were then asked to track their arousal throughout the process.

Later, the women reported how they were stimulated when they reached their most recent, and usual, orgasms. Most of them said it was a combination of vaginal and clitoral stimulation.

But clitoral orgasms have been a thing of great scrutiny. Most of this disconnect is because straight men have failed to understand, for centuries, why women would need anything more than what was working on their end: penetration. And they were further encouraged by Freudian theory that posited that as women developed, both psychologically and physically, they became more in tune with their vaginal orgasm.

Women don’t orgasm the same way as men. There is actually a wide range of experiences in how women orgasm, according to a study in the Archives of Sexual Behavior. In a recent survey of 2,300 women by Cosmopolitan magazine, only 57 percent of women said they orgasmed every time they had sex, compared to 95 percent of men, and 38 percent of the responders said it was because of “not enough clitoral stimulation.”

Meanwhile, women who don’t reach vaginal orgasm have not always been forthcoming about their own pleasure, and reportedly feel shy or uncomfortable approaching clitoral stimulation during sex, as the study points out.

Prause, founder Liberos laboratory, is one of the few researchers trying to demystify female desire, which is a complex combination of physical arousal and emotion. But the more myths she debunks, like that of the clitoral orgasm, the closer we get to mutual satisfaction.

“I hope that this study will give women great confidence to not worry about their orgasm source: Just enjoy!” Prause said.

from Fuck You, Freud: New Study Says Clitoral Orgasms Are Great

What It's Like to Use VR to Buy Multimillion Dollar Real Estate

To own a home in Manhattan, you essentially need to be a millionaire.

New York’s total property value soared earlier this year, reaching a record-setting value of around $1 trillion. The median sales price of a Manhattan home was $2 million, and that’s not even at the top.

To make it easier for wealthy people to see their options without the legwork, a virtual reality company is applying Oculus Rift technology to real estate. With Virtual Xperience, a startup founded by Jeff Maurer and Stephanie Davis, you can put on a VR headset and take a tour of a potential apartment or building, whether or not it has been built in real life.

While Davis and Maurer hope the technology will eventually reach the entire real estate market, it’s currently limited to luxury properties. And it could be especially helpful for foreign buyers, who are more likely to invest in luxury properties without stepping foot in them.

As part of Luxury Week, Motherboard’s dive into how the wealthy live, I took a tour of a $7 million apartment in both virtual and actuality reality.

The space that I saw was a five bedroom apartment on Prince Street, in lower Manhattan. On the VR headset I could tell it was ritzy—with high ceilings in the living room, a fireplace and a little lookout balcony on the second floor. There was customized art and detailed fixtures designed by Virtual Xperience around the house, which helped to visualize the possibilities of the apartment.

Learning how to maneuver through the VR with controllers was fairly easy, if not intuitive. But the technology is still nowhere as smooth as our regular vision, and the process of turning around in tiny movements gave me significant nausea.

When I visited the space in real life, I was hit with a different sensation: the fear of climbing through construction site scaffolding in heels. At the actual site on Prince Street it was much harder to imagine what the apartment would look like, since there were no walls, stairs or details. The main benefit was that I got a better sense of the neighborhood, and the size of the space.

As VR continues to ease into different parts of our life, I can see why it would be an asset in the real estate market, where it’s otherwise easy to get misled by sneaky angles of tiny rooms online. And it might make it easier to flip through multiple properties, as long as you’ve got your VR sea legs.

But it won’t completely replace seeing a place in real life, unless you’re a buyer just looking to accumulate property instead of making it a home.

from What It's Like to Use VR to Buy Multimillion Dollar Real Estate

Can Money Buy You the Perfect Diet?

For the past 15 years—around the time I started making conscious choices about what to eat—food has been a source of stress, joy and medicine.

Like 30 million other people in the US, I struggled with an eating disorder when I was growing up. I spent years counting calories and miles, and watching my weight drop and rise drastically on the scale. There are months I don’t remember because I was starving, and others where I succumbed to out-of-control hunger. My quest for the perfect diet—one that was both nourishing and ethical—felt far out of reach.

I’ve always thought that some of this disconnect came from living an urban life, far from the food system. Even back in the mid-19th century, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “It is hard to provide and cook so simple and clean a diet as will not offend the imagination.” So he moved from Concord, Massachusetts to rural Walden and grew everything he ate himself. Clean eating was not invented by Gwyneth Paltrow.

Plated Sakara meals. Image: Ankita Rao

But in cities like New York—between Instagramming our prettiest meals and finding the cheapest brand of quinoa—we can’t necessarily do that. I’m surrounded by markets, restaurants and knowledge, but not always the time or money to choose the foods that nutritionists promise will make me thrive.

The only people who can do that might be the wealthy, who can pay for private chefs, or one of the many high-end meal planning services, to circumvent the decision fatigue that hits me at the grocery store. So after years of dissecting this relationship between my plate, body, and the environment, I decided to outsource my internal conflict: by paying someone to give me organic, locally grown, customized meals.

*

Choosing a meal service is harder than picking a movie on Netflix. The food industry continues to reinvent ways to save time, populating the spectrum between fast food and a personal chef.

After a few days of research, I settled on Sakara, a service that has been applauded by the likes of Lena Dunham, Victoria’s Secret models, and apparently, men on Wall Street. People just like me.

The website, splashy and white, promised locally sourced, plant-based meals, and it cost $420 for five days, about four times as much as I spend on my weekly meals. It was clear to me that I wasn’t just subscribing to a food service, I was signing up for a lifestyle, an aesthetic.

Meeting the founders of Sakara, Whitney Tingle and Danielle DuBoise, at their headquarters in SoHo was further confirmation—they’re both vibrant and trendy, accustomed to picture-perfect poses with plates of their food. The two friends from Sedona, Arizona started the company in 2012. Tingle was exhausted from her unhealthy life working on Wall Street. And DuBoise, who went to nutrition school while modeling and acting on the side, had struggled with body image issues for years. “One extreme is birthday cake in the office, and drinks after work, and the other is water fasting,” Tingle said.

DuBoise and Tingle at the Sakara office in SoHo. Image: Ankita Rao

On the Sunday night before my week of Sakara started, I got a branded refrigerated bag delivered to my door with two days of the mostly vegan meals. I also got a little bottle of “night water” and “morning water” each day, infused with “superfoods” like chlorella and rose. I was officially, as the company calls it, “on Sakara”.

The timing of my trial was impeccable—I had just moved into a new apartment and had yet to buy a pot, let alone a fork. When I opened the first meal, a dairy-free yogurt with dried fruit compote, I had to scoop it out with my fingertips. (No silver spoon here.)

Almost all of the Sakara lunches and dinners were technically salads, some with accompaniments like zaatar bread and hummus. And almost all of them were delicious—the soba noodle salad with kimchi is astringent perfection, and the dark chocolate granola is the stuff of addiction.

Meanwhile, I was digesting the company’s Cosmo-mag messaging. Most Sakara meals were inscribed with words like “sexy” and “young” listed on the label like ingredients. Youth, I knew, was something rich people have taken on as a hobby. But equating nourishment with beauty was suspect.

“Sexy is like a code word for powerful,” Tingle explained. “What surprises me the most is that most people don’t even know what that feels like.”

I’m not sure if I felt sexy or powerful eating Sakara meals, though I did feel relieved. Having fresh, pristine vegetables delivered to my door, without needing to chop, store and get mad when my spinach wilts, was a beautiful thing. And Sakara sources from farmers in the region, so I didn’t feel terrible that it all came in plastic (compostable) boxes.

Sakara meals come in individual boxes and jars. Image: Courtesy of Sakara

But I did hit some technical difficulties. For one, I wasn’t full. I snack a lot normally, but these meals did not stick to my bones. I asked DuBoise and Tingle whether all of their clients—from the Victoria’s Secret models to 6-foot-tall finance guys—got the same amount of food, and they assured me it was enough.

“My husband and I eat this and we’re both full,” DuBoise told me. “The difference in the amount of calories we need, from male to female, is so small and incremental.” (It’s actually about 130 calories more for every 10 pounds of body weight).

I also felt uncomfortable with the pre-determined meal plan. I wanted this service to take the guesswork and stress out of my daily decisions, but the food I wanted to eat didn’t always coincide with what was in front of me. And the lack of choice was compounded by my once-threatened relationship with food. When you’re recovering from years of feeling guilty about food, any hint of rules or restrictions are a trigger.

Sakara, I was told repeatedly, is not a diet but a lifestyle. And for DuBoise, who struggled with disordered eating for years, it’s a lifestyle that has helped her heal. But for me, having three sealed, plastic boxes of meals every day, felt like giving the keys of my body to a stranger. And I wasn’t sure why people, regardless of their wealth, or the quality of the program, were willing to give that up in exchange for more time.

*

“No superfood is going to save you from anything,” said Krishnendu Ray, author and chair of the food studies department at New York University.

After my week of Sakara I was back in my normal cooking routine (i.e. make a huge amount of food on Sunday and get sick of it by Thursday), and spending less than $100 on a week of groceries. But my normal diet felt inadequate now that I knew what all the beautiful people were eating, and I wondered if I needed to go foraging for some edible flowers.

Ray put an end to that. An expert on the intersection of food and culture, he said that wealthy Americans are obsessed with longevity, and the perfect diet. “It creates a massive individualization, an absurd search for another form of narcissism of ‘how can I live well forever,'" he said.

Ray, on the far left, preparing food during a course with his students in Sydney, Australia. Image: Courtesy of Krishnendu Ray

That narcissism can take a toll on our entire food system. Ray said the conceptual problem with high-end food services, like Sakara or Provenance Meals, is that the consumers who can afford to spend $100 a day on healthy, fresh and environmentally-conscious food feel less responsibility to demand that all of our food should fit these guidelines. Our policies then suffer, and we continue to rely on imported and processed food, which has made us less healthy and less food secure. He calls it a “social eating disorder.”

“There’s hyperconsciousness about what I eat, and no concern about what others are forced to eat,” he said. Think of food deserts, the low-resource neighborhoods bereft of fresh produce. Or the dismal state of our public school lunches.

“The ugly side about this consciousness about good food is leading the upper class to be obsessed about what they eat—kale, quinoa—almost like a magical thing they want to surround themselves with to be healthy and protect themselves," Ray said.

Low access food areas. Image: USDA

There’s also the question of outsourcing the entire process of selecting your food. Tingle and DuBoise spent a lot of time studying food and cooking meals until they figured out a balance that worked for them. They went to workshops in ayurveda, an ancient Indian science that views food as medicine, and DuBoise has a degree in nutrition. And they’re capitalizing on what I feel: that not everyone has the time or energy to do that legwork.

But maybe, Ray said, there’s a compromise. Maybe, instead of stressing ourselves out about antioxidants and the perfect diet, we need to raise people in a society that places inherent value on understanding our place in the food cycle. And what better place to do that, he said, than the public school system.

*

On a sunny Wednesday morning, right on the cusp of fall, I visited a particularly aromatic classroom in Harlem to see how this could work. Two teachers, Leonisa Johnson and Jen Holder, were preparing whole grain pasta and vegetables at PS7.

This is Edible Schoolyard NYC, a non-profit program that runs in six schools across New York. The programming, which includes gardening, cooking and community farmers markets, reaches about 2,800 children across the city, most of whom live in low-income neighborhoods.

“We want the kids to be open tasters, open minded,” Holder told me as she divvied up bell peppers. “It helps give students options when they’re older.”

A few minutes later, a dozen eighth graders tumbled into the classroom in typical middle schooler fashion. A girl with a big, sweeping ponytail laughed about a kid who had cried in an earlier class. A couple of self-conscious boys in sweatshirts stood quietly around their workstations.

The garden at PS7. Image: Julian Hibbard/Edible Schoolyard NYC

Johnson and Holder got to work teaching the lesson: a tomato sauce with summer vegetables. And the next half an hour was a flurry of grating tomatoes, chopping garlic, heating up saucepans and stirring, stirring, and stirring.

At the end of the lesson the students spread out tablecloths and ladled the pasta and sauce into their plates. One of the boys put a flowery table setting in front of the girls, while a girl pulled out her phone and sent a Snapchat photo of the meal to a friend.

As they were eating, I asked the kids a little bit about what they were learning, and how it translated at home. “I’m the only one in my house who cooks breakfast,” said a boy named Zack. Another student, Jalen, said he didn’t like some vegetables before he made them in the classroom.

After the classroom, I walked through the garden, where kids help plant seeds and grow vegetables and herbs. Later that day there would be a farm stand, where kids helped organize and sell the produce.

Edible Schoolyard NYC is clearly exposing kids to both a skill, and a food cycle, that they might not otherwise learn amid the concrete jungle. And an independent analysis from Columbia University’s Teachers College proved that it impacts the kids’ food choices for the better. As Ray hypothesized, this is exactly what could combat our the disconnect that I grew up with regarding food. But education isn’t immune to financial constraints.

Teachers explain the lessons to students in small groups. Image: Julian Hibbard/Edible Schoolyard NYC

“Food is central to this community, but not everyone has the time to cook and eat together,” said Annette Slonim, the coordinator of PS7’s Edible Schoolyard NYC program. She told me that some of the kids at the school came from unstable homes, sometimes living in homeless shelters, or with parents who worked long hours.

It struck me that this idea of not having enough time was all-pervasive, sneaking its way through every socioeconomic class, and threatening the time we would normally use to prepare food. The difference was that one class could afford to pay their way out of the dilemma.

“We’re in a time famine,” Ray agreed. “And what you need for good attention to food is a little more time.”

That solution could come through a combination of policy and culture. On the one hand, Ray pointed out, we could have better labor regulations that incentivize people to only work a certain number hours a day. In Austria, for example, people get 35 days off of work every year, compared to 16 here in the US.

So we’re not fighting for access to good food, but we’re also not fighting for more time to cook it ourselves.

*

Which brings me to the simple act of cooking.

Shortly after my week of Sakara I was cooking in my new kitchen. I cut up tomatoes, onions, ginger and garlic. I soaked dried kidney beans, and then boiled them and drained them. I added garam masala, red chili powder, salt, turmeric and coriander seeds from this round, steel box that my aunt brought me when she came to visit my new apartment. And I put it all in a slow cooker and let it steep overnight.

From the turmeric under my fingernails, to the scent of the rajma cooking in my kitchen, I instantly felt at home. I was raised in a household where eating was communal, and had the luxury of eating with my family every night. And while I’ve been on my own, or on the road, for the past 10 years, I’ve always been drawn to the home-cooked meal, even if that home isn’t my own.

My spice box. Image: Ankita Rao

Ray takes this one step further. For him, cooking has been transformative. He told me that when he moved to the US from India, he was also moving away from a lifestyle where the women at home cooked all the meals, which is par for the course across the world, including the US. As a single father in New York he now cooks almost every day with his son.

“Cooking is caregiving,” he said. “I have to take care of someone’s life. His good health depends on me.”

When we outsource all of our meals to someone else, even if that someone else knows more about nutrition than we do, we might lose something more important than time. We might lose our connection to the people around us. Or the connection to the earth that grows our food. And that’s something we carry within our bodies, our social and personal eating disorders.

Tingle and DuBoise, having spent so much timing cooking themselves, seem to know that. And Sakara reflects the depth of their knowledge. DuBoise said she doesn’t want Sakara to be a crutch, but rather a reference point for people who don’t know what, or how, to eat.

But I’m not sure when that knowledge was actually lost. Maybe somewhere between industrialization, and our endless ambition, and Snapchatting avocado toast at brunch. Or maybe it is just about how we spend our time, whether it’s in our hands or dictated by our work and culture.

And I know that for me, there won’t be a replacement, or a shortcut, for choosing, or cooking my own food. Because even though my diet is far less ideal than one that experts can make for me, it’s a reflection of this imperfect journey with my body. And we’ve made it this far intact.

Luxury Week is a series about our evolving views of what constitutes luxury. Follow along here.

Get six of our favorite Motherboard stories every day by signing up for our newsletter.

from Can Money Buy You the Perfect Diet?

Congress Doesn’t Care About Zika, But It Sure As Shit Cares About Abortion

Moral panic over abortion is allowing the Zika virus to spread. But as much as the government likes to control women and their bodies, we’ve succeeded in changing abortion laws before.

There are almost 21,000 cases of Zika in the United States, and around 120,000 confirmed cases across the world. Yet the US government is still arguing over a bill that would release $1.1 billion to fight the mosquito-borne virus, largely because right-wing politicians can’t get over moral and political disagreements about family planning, whether it's abortion access or birth control.

Global views on abortion continue to dictate how we treat any public health epidemics that affect women and their uteruses. But if history, both in the US and Brazil, has a lesson for us, it’s that once in awhile, medicine trumps ideology.

Back in 1942, the rubella virus was linked to birth defects for the very first time. An Australian ophthalmologist, Norman Gregg, noticed that a rubella outbreak led to many children with congenital cataracts in their eyes, caused by maternal infection. Soon after, rubella was also found to cause deafness, heart defects and mental disabilities.

Once in awhile, medicine trumps ideology.

At this point, abortion in the US was still illegal (Roe vs. Wade didn’t pass until 1973). But then there was a rubella outbreak in the 1960s. A loophole in criminal law allowed “therapeutic abortion”, so doctors begin to administer them to women with rubella, paving the way for legislative changes ten years later.

Like rubella, the Zika virus is closely intertwined with reproductive health. It can be sexually transmitted between partners, and passed down from mother to fetus. And while it could also cause brain damage in adults, Zika is most dangerous for a pregnant woman since it puts the baby at high risk for microcephaly, a birth defect that results in babies having smaller heads and brains.

That fear has led some women to terminate their pregnancy in the US and abroad. In Latin America, abortion requests rose by anywhere from 36 percent to 108 percent. Women have also turned to illegal abortion services in the face of the threat, especially in Zika-riddled countries like Brazil, where abortion is banned except in the case of rape, or if it puts the mother’s life in danger, as Motherboard reported earlier this year.

“The majority of our politicians identify as evangelicals, they talk in the name of God, not in the name of rights or democracy,” Debora Diniz, a professor and activist in Brazil, told me.

Along with her reproductive rights group, Anis, Diniz has demanded that the Supreme Court of Brazil change abortion laws for women infected with Zika. The case, filed at the end of August, demands that women with Zika have the right to terminate a pregnancy, and that the families grappling with the virus receive access to a cash benefit program.

Debora Diniz. Image: Anis

Diniz, who recently authored a book on Zika, is not a rookie. In 2004 she helped change the Brazilian Penal Code laws on abortion for the first time in decades. She argued that doctors in Brazil should be able to administer abortions in the case of anencephaly, a disorder that results in babies being born without portions of their brains, skulls and scalp. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the change, and Brazil’s strict criminalization of abortion was eased for the first time since 1940.

If the current case wins due to the frame of a continuing Zika epidemic, it could set the precedent for other countries caught between their legislation and public health.

Here in the US, Democrats refuse to pass the bill to fund Zika efforts because Republicans wrote a provision barring any of those funds to reach Planned Parenthood-associated centers in Puerto Rico working with Zika patients, since the organization also administers birth control and abortion services. This makes pretty much everyone angry: the people waiting on funds to curb a rampant virus, and those who don’t want politicians to decide what women do with their bodies.

"Zika is a sexually transmitted disease,” said Dr. Raegan McDonald-Moseley, Planned Parenthood’s chief medical officer. “Birth control and condoms are an important defense. This is beyond just a political fight for us. The Zika crisis is very much an issue we care about and is related to the work we do across the country related to sexual and reproductive health.”

In the face of Republican opposition—which started well before Zika hit the US this year—Planned Parenthood has lobbied to receive its share of funding, arguing that states that crack down on abortion services have put women’s lives in danger.

"This is beyond just a political fight for us."

Currently, the Planned Parenthood chapters in Florida operate without state or national funding. And their Zika efforts have not been focused on abortion—in Florida, the first state to have locally transmitted Zika, Planned Parenthood launched a bilingual campaign to promote awareness, with the goal of reaching 25,000 households. A spokeswoman told me they will have to stretch their resources to continue their work. The Senate is set to vote again on Tuesday.

Read more: How the Zika Virus Is Fueling The Abortion Debate in Brazil

“We’ll be here for the community if and when they need [abortion services],” said Melissa St. Onge, a communications consultant for the organization’s Florida chapter.

Get six of our favorite Motherboard stories every day by signing up for our newsletter.

from Congress Doesn’t Care About Zika, But It Sure As Shit Cares About Abortion

Two Months of Internet Blackouts Have Taken a Toll on Kashmir

Earlier this summer, the north Indian state of Kashmir was hit with a new wave of riots when young militant leader Burhan Wani was killed by state police. Wani was the controversial head of Hizbul Mujahideen, a group fighting for the state to separate from India. He was embraced as a freedom fighter by many in Kashmir, and considered a terrorist by Indian officials.

Kashmiris have been forced to live with regular curfews and military presence in their daily lives. Their mountain and valley homes have been caught in the crosshairs of border wars between India, Pakistan and China for decades. But in moments of peak violence the law enforcement in Kashmir has started wielding a new means of control: mobile and digital blackouts.

This is a new burden for the people of Kashmir, who have endured endless violence since India became independent in 1947. In just the past two decades there have been 22,000 incidents involving significant violence, and more than 44,000 people have died in terrorist attacks. And the uprising that left dozens dead after Wani was killed was yet another reason to mourn.

When 21-year-old Wani was shot on July 8, 2016, the police in Kashmir shut down all mobile networks and mobile data, except for the government-run BSNL, almost immediately. In some areas, broadband internet was unavailable as well. Almost two months later, some people still do not have mobile internet on their devices and phones.

In a region already complicated by geography and turbulence, the impact of telecom blackouts is significant. “There is no getting around the fact that cutting mobile links [and internet] affects flow of information, from basic human contact to people facing health issues, to the injured—and there are thousands—not being able to reach families,” said Najeeb Mubarki, a journalist in Kashmir.

Kashmir's shared borders makes it vulnerable to power play. Image: Wikimedia

He told me the blackout means Kashmiris don’t know what is happening in their own communities, and try to send messages with people or ambulances traveling through their towns. Newspapers have resorted to working from memory sticks, and many people attempt to piggyback from the few wifi spots that are still working.

Police usually justify telecom shutdowns with section 144 of the federal penal code, a law that permits Indian states to disrupt the assembly of ten or more people if they suspect violence. Burhan Wani was popular on social media, and Hizbul Mujahideen gained traction through videos shared widely on Facebook and Twitter. Some of them included threats of attack on communities they deemed non-Kashmiri. The police in Kashmir cite violence, and militants organizing online and through apps like WhatsApp, for their crackdown.

But Wani’s death doesn’t explain an elongated two-month blackout, or why it was implemented with little public notice. And Madeline Earp, the Asia research analyst with civil liberties organization Freedom House, said the internet in Kashmir has been intentionally disrupted more than any other Indian state, and at least three times in the past year. This does more than cut people off from their families. She said a free and open internet could counter the same violence police are hoping to avoid.

“You have people trying to debunk aggressive messages, and then you’re essentially cutting off access to information that would be countering threat in a more effective way.”

Policing and censorship in Kashmir is heavier than the rest of India given its perception as a war zone. But the entire country has a history of draconian laws when it comes to free speech, particularly on the internet. In recent years, India has threatened press freedom (27 reporters have been killed with complete impunity since 1992), curbed mobile data access during protests, and shut down accounts on Twitter that mocked the prime minister.

In the world’s largest democracy, not all of these bans are constitutional, said Karuna Nundy, a Delhi-based lawyer who was instrumental in striking down 66A, a section of the Information and Technology Act that prohibited any “objectionable” online content, at the Supreme Court of India. She said the police were only allowed to exercise blackouts with proper notice, with good reason and at a proportionate scale, neither of which happened in Kashmir.

In addition, an attempt to crackdown on violence still needs to comply with 69A, a law that governs speech on the internet and regulates when the government can prevent access to websites, including Twitter. “There’s an incentive problem. Officials tend to be conservative on anything related to security. No one wants to be the guy who allowed the free speech but then something happens,” Nundy told Motherboard.

“These kind of blanket bans are hugely problematic. People use these [mobile networks] to socialize, to work, to look people up in case of an emergency.”

Meanwhile, Kashmiri families are nervous their connection to the world can be cut off at any given time. Some reports say the connectivity has been restored, but Mubarki has been forced to report and live from the city of Srinagar without internet on his devices. He said the police’s arbitrary control of their phones and internet is not about security.

“Cutting those links is thus actually meant, classical authoritarian-style, to further cage a population,” he said.

from Two Months of Internet Blackouts Have Taken a Toll on Kashmir