Roald Dahl, James Bond are censorship's latest victims. Who's next?

Perhaps nothing better illustrates the silliness of our times than the disturbing trend to “rework” classic books to make them palatable for a modern audience.

Applying current mores to the past – and forcing the past to conform to our “enlightened” ways – is patently unwise and smacks of something from George Orwell’s “1984” or tactics of the Soviet Union.

It’s an attempt to control thought.

British children’s author Roald Dahl and James Bond-creator Ian Fleming are the latest targets of the woke publishing world, and “sensitivity readers” have been busy.

What do these popular authors think about this makeover of their works? We can’t know as both men died decades ago.

Dahl wrote the beloved classics “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “Matilda,” “James and the Giant Peach” and “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” among others. His works are known for being somewhat dark, and his eccentric characters are what have drawn generations of children to them.

'Fat' and 'ugly' are taboo words

The troubling words that may offend today’s sensitive children – and that new editions of these books have erased – include “fat,” “ugly” and “black” (not used as a racial connotation). New lines have been added. Women are given more exciting jobs.

Are these 'bad' words?:Stanford's political correctness czars deem 'American' and 'guys' harmful words (no joke)

"Female" has been changed to “woman.” Gender-neutral words are also preferred to offensive ones like “men,” “mother,” “father,” “girls” and “boys.”

A paragraph in “The Witches” talks about how the witches are bald under their wigs. Apparently, that needed an addition of this line: “There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”

You get the idea.

Dahl purists and free expression advocates have pushed back hard against this meddling. And Penguin Random House, which publishes Dahl’s books, has agreed to keep “classic” (i.e. original) copies of his works, in addition to the freshly scrubbed ones. But who knows how long it will keep doing that.

“I think once you start going down that road of applying the modern sensibilities to any art of the past or even art today that might deviate somewhat from orthodox thought or common opinions and perspectives, you really limit the range of creative expression that's available in our society,” says Aaron Terr, director of public advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression,

“And I think a society that believes in creative and artistic expression certainly doesn't rewrite books to avoid any possibility of offending potential readers.”

Progressives want to ban Amy Coney Barrett's book:How can they think that's OK?

First Dr. Seuss, now James Bond

Similarly, some of Flemings’ wording is apparently too racist for today's readers. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the Bond Girls get new personas as well. (Pussy Galore, Kissy Suzuki and Honey Ryder aren’t likely to sit well with modern women).

Such rewrites undermine what literature is all about. Books are not only engaging stories – they are windows into the past, and past ways of thinking. They reflect the time in which they were written.

It was only two years ago that Dr. Seuss – one of the most popular children’s authors of all time – was in cancel culture’s crosshairs, and six books including "McElligot's Pool," "On Beyond Zebra!," "Scrambled Eggs Super!," and "The Cat's Quizzer" were deemed “racist and insensitive” and thus inappropriate for publishing.

Much like Dahl and Fleming, Dr. Seuss creator Theodor Geisel lived in a very different time. These authors shouldn’t be punished or censored for living when they did.

Author Salman Rushdie, who has faced attacks and years of threats for his books, called the rewrites of Dahl’s work “absurd censorship.”

A 'dangerous new weapon'

Rushdie is joined by other high-profile critics.

“Amidst fierce battles against book bans and strictures on what can be taught and read, selective editing to make works of literature conform to particular sensibilities could represent a dangerous new weapon," tweeted Suzanne Nossel, CEO of PEN America, which advocates for free expression in publishing.

“Those who might cheer specific edits to Dahl’s work should consider how the power to rewrite books might be used in the hands of those who do not share their values and sensibilities."

The left likes to blame “book banning” on Republicans and parents, many of whom have valid concerns about what young children in school should learning about race and gender.

Yet those debates aren’t about “banning” books in a literal sense – rather they are about limiting where children access them. The books still exist and are easily accessible in our online world.

Fundamentally changing words or context in existing books – or trying to prevent them from being published in the first place – is more insidious.

If Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming are fair game for the thought police now, what’s to stop the censors from “fixing” a book you love next?

Ingrid Jacques is a columnist at USA TODAY. Contact her at ijacques@usatoday.com or on Twitter: @Ingrid_Jacques

Opinion: This fired chemistry professor's example shows what's ...

How Ty Cobb the truth got lost inside Ty Cobb the myth

Anna Clark

Special to the Detroit Free Press

It wasn't just baseball that was new. There was also the widespread use of electricity. The typewriter. The airplane. Moving pictures. And in those early years of the 20th Century, for the first time in history, people had enough leisure time and resources to seek out mass entertainment.

What did they choose to do? They watched baseball. And Detroit Tigers center fielder Ty Cobb was its first star.

But more than 50 years after his death, Cobb is remembered less for his astonishing ability on the field than as a monster fans love to hate. Books, plays, radio shows and newspapers have told and retold stories about Cobb as a mean-spirited egoist who sharpened his spikes to cut infielders on a slide, made racist taunts and beat up fans who looked at him funny. In the 1994 film "Cobb," starring Tommy Lee Jones, the ballplayer is introduced as unshaven, surrounded by bottles of pills and booze and recklessly shooting his gun at a guest who knocks on his door. Woozy with painkillers, the Cobb character spins himself into a fury when he can't get his biographer to describe him as "a prince among men." The Free Press itself described its hometown hero as "dangerous to the point of dementia." "No one came to his funeral," is an erroneous but oft-quoted belief.

At the same time, a small contingent of fans has argued that Cobb is misunderstood: that his bad behavior should be understood as a product of his time, and in context of the trauma of his mother killing his father in Georgia just days before he shipped north to play ball in Detroit. And, revisionists say, his good deeds — like using money he made via savvy investing to finance a hospital in Georgia and a college scholarship fund — have been unjustly unheralded.

Cobb's complexity has made it possible for fans to see in him whatever it is they want to see — and for writers, historians and filmmakers to emphasize the sides of Cobb they most want to present. It is not all that different from how the city of Detroit has experienced the public eye in the years since Cobb's death in 1961. Just as Detroit's best and worst characteristics have made it an object of fascination, Cobb's story is one we just can't drop. His talent alone would be enough to make him a legend — from the time he stole second, third and home on three consecutive pitches to the time he went on a 40-game hitting streak. But vile portrayals of the first player to be inaugurated into the Hall of Fame have lingered in our cultural memory for far more than his unmatched batting records.

'1st big celebrity'

Charles Leerhsen, a former executive editor of Sports Illustrated, aims to square the outsized image of Cobb with the real-life man in the new biography, "Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty" (Simon & Schuster, $27.50). It's the difference between "Ty Cobb" — who was portrayed in the 2004 book "American Monsters" alongside Charles Manson and John Wilkes Booth — and plain old Ty Cobb.

As Leerhsen tells it, Cobb's baseball career began at the same moment that America was ready to embrace a popular culture for the first time. Before baseball, entertainment was segregated by class: theater and horse-racing for the wealthy and bare-knuckle boxing matches and dogfights for the lower class. In 1905, Cobb's first year on the Tigers roster, cinema was still primitive, so it was left to baseball to be one of the first arenas to bring together different kinds of people — men, women and children of varied means — for a leisure activity. And given his clever and consistent play, Cobb was a draw at every game.

"You could argue that he was the first big celebrity in America," Leerhsen told the Free Press.

Baseball wasn't the same game back then. The major league was young, with the first World Series played in 1903. Players weren't well paid, and given that they made their living from a game and spent their life on the road, a whiff of disreputability hung over their heads.

But over Cobb's career, baseball evolved. Players began to sign endorsement deals for everything from vitamin tonics to cigarettes. By 1915, it had become a polished business. Numerous concrete-and-steel ballparks were built all across America, including Navin Field in 1912.

Cobb can be partly credited for that growth, according to Leerhsen. Besides his fast-moving steals, he brought an aristocratic air to the ballplayer image. He was more educated, and he carried himself accordingly. While many of his hard-drinking counterparts played day games hung over after a rough night out, Cobb kept his distance. That made him more palatable to the public, but less palatable to his fellow ballplayers. "It was a source of tension," Leershen said. "In Washington, he'd go to the Library of Congress in his off hours to read, and that annoyed the hell out of them."

For the man credited with playing an unusually intelligent ball game — he once found a way to steal home against the Yankees while the entire opposing team was crowded around the plate to protest an umpire's call — this makes sense. But that's not the kind of story about Cobb that gets repeated. Many vicious tales can be traced to sportswriter Al Stump, who collaborated with Cobb on his autobiography. After Cobb's death, Stump wrote a lurid article for True magazine and later republished the biography. These versions, he said, were true to Cobb's cruelty. The Tommy Lee Jones film was based on the second book; it was the Stump character that Cobb greeted by firing his gun.

But as Leerhsen states bluntly in his biography, Stump's renditions "contained too many inaccuracies to be useful." Stump went so far as to accuse Cobb killing a man in Detroit in 1912, just hours before a game — a claim debunked in 1996 in National Pastime journal by former prosecutor Doug Roberts. And five years ago, an epic story by William R. Cobb (no relation) in the same publication detailed Stump's memorabilia fraud: For years, he sold items that he fraudulently claimed were Cobb's, including a shotgun he claimed was the one that killed his father. Stump even forged Cobb's letters and diaries.

"Practically all of Stump's sensationalized story of the last 10 months of Ty Cobb's life is outrageously false," Cobb wrote. "Stump would have us believe that these months were the alcohol-and-drug-crazed nightmare of a raging lunatic with whom Stump lived in a state of constant fear. Actually, Stump spent only a few days on and off with Ty Cobb."

Cobb enthusiasts in his hometown of Royston, Ga., were so frustrated with the way he was portrayed that they founded the Ty Cobb Museum just a few years later. Director Julie Ridgway said that there's a banner that hangs inside that describes Cobb as "fierce, calculating, feared, revered, famous, infamous, benefactor and a gentleman."

"And that's who he was," Ridgway told the Free Press. "He was all of those things." She said that the museum has been accused of being biased by portraying Cobb's story in a manner that doesn't rise to Stump-style negativity. But in truth, the museum has "been doing our best to present a complete and real picture of him" – and that meant countering some of the "legends that people just want to hang on to."

"It's unique that all the really bad stuff about Cobb started in 1961," echoed Leerhsen. "That's when he died. And it was all based on 'new evidence.' One sportswriter started an avalanche of lies." With precious little film of Cobb, and living memory dying out, Stump's take had little to counter it.

A real human being

So what's the real story? In the case of the sharpened spikes, Leerhsen punctures the myth by describing how sportswriters contributed to it. At the time, there was intense fascination at the novel shoes worn by ballplayers. Describing a game that neither the sportswriters nor their readers had played in their youth in any organized fashion, the shoes looked "at once medieval and futuristic," Leerhsen said, and so, they were prone to exaggerate their danger. But Cobb never sharpened his spikes. In fact, weary of his dirty reputation, Cobb tried to get the major league to require players to dull their spikes and have umpires inspect them before each game.

Leerhsen's biography also describes plenty of contemporary players and umpires who vouch that Cobb didn't use his spikes to cut opponents. And it wasn't as if his opponents, struggling to beat Cobb on one of his nine different slides, were wilting flowers. In 1958, Cobb rolled up the cuffs of his pants to show a New York Times reporter the scar tissue from infielders who pounded on him with their own cleats. "It was all part of the game," Leerhsen said.

But for all that it counters the conventional wisdom about the ballplayer, "Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty" isn't a revisionist take that paints Cobb in wholly complimentary terms. "I wonder if people think I just spent 400 pages bringing up myths and debunking them," Leerhsen said. "My allegiance is really not to Cobb, but to the truth, like it would be for any journalist."

What emerges is a clear-eyed portrayal of Cobb not as a tyrant and not as a saint. It showcases Cobb as a flawed and vulnerable human being who, after suffering a nervous breakdown his second season, came back to fearlessly embrace his talent in an era that was just discovering what it meant to love baseball.

But is it enough to change the tide on the story we tell ourselves? "Ty Cobb created more than the normal amount of controversy during his lifetime, and he lived to suffer the negative effects of his actions on his reputation," wrote William Cobb in "National Pastime." "Until his death in 1961, Ty was genuinely concerned with his baseball legacy, often expressing concern about being remembered for spikings, fighting, and aggressive play."

Considering that books like Stump's "Cobb: A Biography" and the Tommy Lee Jones film were on the way, his concern was well-placed. "People really resist parting with (their preconceived notions about Cobb)," Leerhsen said. "They love the myth because it gives them someone to feel superior to." That's a conundrum that the whole city of Detroit can relate to.

Contact freelance writer Anna Clark at annaclark.net.

TY COBB IN MOVIES, BOOKS, MORE

What frames our perception of Ty Cobb? Here are some examples of the Detroit Tigers great in popular culture:

"Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty," by Charles Leerhsen (2015): Leerhsen's new biography draws on primary sources — including Free Press archives and the Ernie Harwell Sports Collection at the Detroit Public Library — to unravel the myths that popular culture has cultivated about the first superstar of baseball. As the former Sports Illustrated executive editor, Leerhsen brings a journalistic eye to Cobb's story. Winner of the 2015 SABR Baseball Research Award.

"Cobb" (1994): Starring Tommy Lee Jones as a mean-spirited and drunken Cobb who wants his biographer to write only about the good stuff, this Robert Shelton film has been widely panned. "Hogwash!" wrote film critic Roger Ebert in his review for the Chicago Sun-Times.

"My Life in Baseball: The True Record," by Ty Cobb (1961): Sportswriter Al Stump ghostwrote Cobb's biography, drawing from interviews Cobb gave in the last year of his life. But Stump later decried the story as a coverup and, 30 years later, he wrote a new version. "Cobb: A Biography" described the ballplayer as a narcissistic and violent monster.

"Cobb" by Lee Blessing (1998): Debuting off-Broadway in 2000, this play showcases Cobb at three points of his life: at age 19, just beginning his Tigers career; in his early forties, struggling with middle age, and in his last years. It, too, spins a tale of Cobb's nastiness. "With Cobb, to know him is to hate him," wrote a Los Angeles Times review of the play in 2012.

The Ty Cobb Museum: It's not in Detroit; it's in Royston, Georgia. And it's not a stand-alone institution; it's inside the Ty Cobb Healthcare System, a hospital financed by Cobb in memory of his parents. Dedicated to preserving a wealth of media about "the greatness of Ty Cobb," the Cobb Museum also hosts annual vintage ball games against a team from the Shoeless Joe Jackson Museum.

'Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty' events

Talks, Q&As and signings with author Charles Leerhsen

■ Presented by Detroit Historical Society

11 a.m.-1 p.m. Sat.

Detroit Historical Museum

5401 Woodward, Detroit

313-833-1805

■ Presented by the Detroit chapter of the Society for American Baseball Research

1:30-4:30 p.m. Sun.

Detroit Yacht Club

1 Riverbank Drive, Detroit

313-824-1200

How Detroit went broke: The answers may surprise you — and don't ...

Nathan Bomey and John Gallagher

Detroit Free Press

Originally published Sept. 15, 2013

Detroit is broke, but it didn’t have to be. An in-depth Free Press analysis of the city’s financial history back to the 1950s shows that its elected officials and others charged with managing its finances repeatedly failed — or refused — to make the tough economic and political decisions that might have saved the city from financial ruin.

Instead, amid a huge exodus of residents, plummeting tax revenues and skyrocketing home abandonment, Detroit’s leaders engaged in a billion-dollar borrowing binge, created new taxes and failed to cut expenses when they needed to. Simultaneously, they gifted workers and retirees with generous bonuses. And under pressure from unions and, sometimes, arbitrators, they failed to cut health care benefits — saddling the city with staggering costs that today threaten the safety and quality of life of people who live here.

The numbers, most from records deeply buried in the public library, lay waste to misconceptions about the roots of Detroit’s economic crisis. For critics who want to blame Mayor Coleman Young for starting this mess, think again. The mayor’s sometimes fiery rhetoric may have contributed to metro Detroit’s racial divide, but he was an astute money manager who recognized, early on, the challenges the city faced and began slashing staff and spending to address them.

And Wall Street types who applauded Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s financial acumen following his 2005 deal to restructure city pension debt should consider this: The numbers prove that his plan devastated the city’s finances and was a key factor that drove Detroit to file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy in July.

The State of Michigan also bears some blame. Lansing politicians reduced Detroit’s state-shared revenue by 48% from 1998 to 2012, withholding $172 million from the city, according to state records.

Decades of mismanagement added to Detroit’s fiscal woes. The city notoriously bungled multiple federal aid programs and overpaid outrageously to incentivize projects such as the Chrysler Jefferson North plant. Bureaucracy bogged down even the simplest deals and contracts. In a city that needed urgency, major city functions often seemed rudderless.

When all the numbers are crunched, one fact is crystal clear: Yes, a disaster was looming for Detroit. But there were ample opportunities when decisive action by city leaders might have fended off bankruptcy.

If Mayors Jerome Cavanagh and Roman Gribbs had cut the workforce in the 1960s and early 1970s as the population and property values dropped. If Mayor Dennis Archer hadn’t added more than 1,100 employees in the 1990s when the city was flush but still losing population. If Kilpatrick had shown more fiscal discipline and not launched a borrowing spree to cover operating expenses that continued into Mayor Dave Bing’s tenure. Over five decades, there were many ‘if only’ moments.

“Detroit got into a trap of doing a lot of borrowing for cash flow purposes and then trying to figure out how to push costs (out) as much as possible,” said Bettie Buss, a former city budget staffer who spent years analyzing city finances for the nonpartisan Citizens Research Council of Michigan. “That was the whole culture — how do we get what we want and not pay for it until tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow?”

Ultimately, Detroit ended up with $18 billion to $20 billion in debt and unfunded pension and health care liabilities. Gov. Rick Snyder appointed bankruptcy attorney Kevyn Orr as the city’s emergency manager, and Orr filed for Chapter 9 on July 18.

For this report, the Free Press examined about 10,000 pages of documents gathering dust in the public library’s archives. Since most of those documents have never been digitized, the Free Press created its own database of 50 years of Detroit’s financial history. Reporters also conducted dozens of interviews with participants from the last six mayoral administrations as well as city bureaucrats and outside experts. Among the highlights from the review:

■ Taxing higher and higher: City leaders tried repeatedly to reverse sliding revenue through new taxes. Despite a new income tax in 1962, a new utility tax in 1971 and a new casino revenue tax in 1999 — not to mention several tax increases along the way — revenue in today’s dollars fell 40% from 1962 to 2012. Higher taxes helped drive residents to the suburbs and drove away business. Today, Detroit still doesn’t take in as much tax revenue as it did just from property taxes in 1963.

■ Reconsidering Coleman Young: Serving from 1974-1994, Young was the most austere Detroit mayor since World War II, reducing the workforce, department budgets and debt during a particularly nasty national recession in the early 1980s. Young was the only Detroit mayor since 1950 to preside over a city with more income than debt, although he relied heavily on tax increases to pay for services.

■ Downsizing — too little, too late: The total assessed value of Detroit property — a good gauge of the city’s tax base and its ability to pay bills — fell a staggering 77% over the past 50 years in today’s dollars. But through 2004, the city cut only 28% of its workers, even though the money to pay them was drying up. Not until the last decade did Detroit, in desperation, cut half its workforce. The city also failed to take advantage of efficiencies, such as new technology, that enabled enormous productivity gains in the broader economy.

■ Skyrocketing employee benefits: City leaders allowed legacy costs — the tab for retiree pensions and health care — to spiral out of control even as the State of Michigan and private industry were pushing workers into less costly plans. That placed major stress on the budget and diverted money from services such as streetlights and public safety. Detroit’s spending on retiree health care soared 46% from 2000 to 2012, even as its general fund revenue fell 20%.

■ Gifting a billion in bonuses: Pension officials handed out about $1 billion in bonuses from the city’s two pension funds to retirees and active city workers from 1985 to 2008. That money — mostly in the form of so-called 13th checks — could have shored up the funds and possibly prevented the city from filing for bankruptcy. If that money had been saved, it would have been worth more than $1.9 billion today to the city and pension funds, by one expert’s estimate.

■ Missing chance after chance: Contrary to myth, the city has not been in free fall since the 1960s. There have been periods of economic growth and hope, such as in the 1990s when the population decline slowed, income-tax revenue increased and city leaders balanced the budget. But leaders failed to take advantage of those moments of calm to reform city government, reduce expenses and protect the city and its residents from another downturn.

■ Borrowing more and more: Detroit went on a binge starting around 2000 to close budget holes and to build infrastructure, more than doubling debt to $8 billion by 2012. Under Archer, Detroit sold water and sewer bonds. Kilpatrick, who took office in 2002, used borrowing as his stock answer to budget issues, and Bing borrowed more than $250 million.

■ Adding the last straw — Kilpatrick’s gamble: He’s best known around the globe for a sex and perjury scandal that sent him to jail and massive corruption that threatens to send him to prison next month for more than 20 years. The corruption cases further eroded Detroit’s image and distracted the city from its fiscal storm. But perhaps the greatest damage Kilpatrick did to the city’s long-term stability was with Wall Street’s help when he borrowed $1.44 billion in a flashy high-finance deal to restructure pension fund debt. That deal, which could cost $2.8 billion over the next 22 years, now represents nearly one-fifth of the city’s debt.

With all the lost opportunities over decades, with Detroit’s debt mounting, with the housing crash and Great Recession just over the horizon, 2005 turned out to be the watershed year.

Although no one could see it at the time, Detroit’s insolvency was guaranteed.

Postwar boom, then ugly first signs of urban decline

Coming out of World War II, American industry was triumphant, and few centers of industry were riding higher than Detroit. The Arsenal of Democracy had built the planes and tanks that carried the war effort and was ready to return to producing cars and trucks for peacetime.

The fruits of victory were everywhere. Detroit’s population was growing toward 2 million. The cityscape was crowded — 14,000 people per square mile. With almost one-third of Michigan’s population living within its borders, Detroit exercised an outsized influence on the state’s politics and economy.

But the 1950s brought the first sobering inklings of crisis, and Detroit mayors for two decades made halting attempts to get ahead of it. Albert Cobo (1950-1957) formed the Dodge Committee to recommend diversifying the city’s tax base as wartime contracts dried up. Jerome Cavanagh (1962-1970) responded to falling revenue by instituting Detroit’s first income tax. Roman Gribbs (1970-1974) spearheaded an effort to revitalize downtown and Detroit’s tax base.

But two trends were undermining Detroit and the nation’s industrial centers like no foreign enemy had been able to do.

Suburbanization: All cities spread out postwar into the farmland at their perimeters. Automakers and road builders eager to sell cars, home builders eager to sell new houses, village mayors eager for new taxes — all promoted suburban growth. So did the federal government with its subsidies and tax incentives. Eager for elbow room, families in crowded cities like Detroit and Cleveland and St. Louis began moving to the new communities. The process of spreading out hasn’t stopped yet.

Discriminatory practices, such as redlining — denying minority buyers mortgages and access to homes in white neighborhoods — made the process in Detroit and many other cities an ugly one. Unscrupulous real estate agents encouraged white flight by stoking some whites’ fears of black people moving in next door. Rancor ran deep. Experts warned of two Americas: one privileged, suburban and white; the other poor, urban and black.

Deindustrialization: Cities like Detroit and Flint that rose to power in the first half of the 20th Century were shocked to find in the second half how many factory jobs would be lost to foreign competition. Detroit auto executive Lee Iacocca once boasted that U.S. carmakers would kick their Japanese competitors back into the Pacific Ocean. He was wrong. American steelmakers learned the same hard lessons.

Even by the late 1950s, the signs of strain were showing in industrial cities. Population and housing values peaked in Detroit in the 1950s and began their long and seemingly unstoppable decline. The urban riots of the 1960s, including Detroit’s, accelerated the process.

By the 1960s, in Detroit as in city after city, the process was well under way. And mayors and civic leaders, here and elsewhere, began their long, anguished battle against decline.

Today, the revivals of downtown and Midtown are drawing young professionals of diverse race and ethnicity back to the city. But the overall population is still dropping as people leave, looking for safer neighborhoods, better schools, lower taxes and reliable city services. Detroit’s population now is about 700,000.

Other cities also have profound problems today — Chicago, Providence, R.I., Baltimore. But only Detroit is in bankruptcy court.

Cause and effect: People leave, taxes go up, more people leave

As the post-World War II manufacturing expansion leveled off and Detroit started to lose population and revenue, the city turned for the first time in 1962 to an income tax: 1% for residents, nonresidents and corporations. Only six years later, the rate for residents would double.

In the early 1980s, a nasty national recession pummeled the auto industry, and Detroit’s finances spiraled downward. Mayor Young convened a blue-ribbon panel to recommend action. They said the city would be bankrupt by summer if it did not raise taxes and reduce costs again.

Within months of a heated primary election, Young achieved the politically unthinkable: He persuaded Detroit voters to increase their own income taxes from 2% to 3%. He got Republican Gov. William Milliken to sign off, too. And he coupled it with deals to freeze wages for thousands of workers and lay off several hundred police officers.

“He could pull a lot of this off because he had such political capital in the community that a lot of folks would say, ‘If Coleman Young said it, it must be OK,’” said Tim Kiska, a professor at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.

To continue paying for city services and to pay for union benefits awarded by outside arbitrators, the city also instituted a new utility tax in 1971 and a wagering tax when casinos began operating here in 1999. As population declined, the city instituted new taxes or raised existing ones to try and keep up with falling revenues.

The total property tax burden for city homeowners, including county and school taxes, rose from 44.79 mills per thousand dollars of value in the mid-’60s to 88.178 per thousand by 1991.

“It’s almost like every decade we got a new source of income to keep our ass on the ground,” said Ed Rago, Young’s budget director.

But the problem with using taxes to raise revenue was that it made the city a more expensive — and less attractive — place to live and do business. People and corporations kept leaving.

“So, very quickly, you had a situation where the city residents were taxed far higher than anywhere else,” Buss said.

Coleman Young’s legacy: Divisive — but fiscally sound

When Coleman Young was elected mayor in 1973, Detroit had lived through one of the worst race riots in U.S. history and had lost about half a million people from its peak population years. Young has been alternately blamed for fanning the flames of racial tension, dealing out sweetheart deals to unions, expanding the city’s budget and setting Detroit on a path toward financial destruction.

Indeed, he did raise taxes, but he also recognized fiscal realities by cutting costs aggressively to shore up the budget. Contrary to the typical portrait of him, Young may have been Detroit’s most conservative modern mayor, attacking fiscal problems by shrinking government and forging new relationships with corporate America to build new Detroit auto factories during his tenure.

“Coleman Young was a fiscal conservative,” said Buss. “Not many people appreciate that about him. He knew politics, and he was also desperately afraid that his community would lose control.”

He even reduced its recreation infrastructure. For example, when Young took office in 1974, the city had 117 skating rinks, 18 city pools and five “swim-mobiles,” portable metal tanks that were filled with water and traveled to neighborhoods so kids could take a dip.

When Young left office, the city had four skating rinks and 12 city pools. The swim-mobiles were still around.

Under Young, Detroit cut about 6,000 workers from 1978 to 1984, according to financial records reviewed by the Free Press. During his two decades as mayor, he also cut about 2,000 Police Department employees and about 500 Fire Department employees.

“He did a number of things to bring costs down,” said Bob Berg, Young’s former press secretary. “He kept a pretty tight rein ... in some very difficult economic times.”

One reason Young cut public safety officers: The city lost an arbitration ruling during a bitter dispute early in his tenure in favor of hefty union compensation.

Roger Short, a budget analyst who later became one of the city’s top fiscal officials in the Archer and Kilpatrick administrations, recalled that Young also slashed the Police Department’s equipment.

“We got rid of the planes and the helicopters,” Short said. “We couldn’t afford them.”

Still, Young cannot be altogether exonerated in his role in Detroit’s financial demise. In fact, when he was serving in the state Legislature, Young wrote Public Act 312, which required binding arbitration in union compensation fights, the very same law that came back to haunt the city years later when the city lost arbitrations.

“He always said it was the worst mistake he ever made in public life,” Berg said.

Young embraced taxes, too. Raising taxes helped him keep the budget balanced. The city’s income tax revenue for residents doubled from 1981 to 1986, according to the Free Press analysis.

With the public safety cuts, Young stabilized the budget. In 1985, the city’s debt-to-revenue ratio in today’s dollars hit an all-time low of 0.66, according to the Free Press analysis. Today, the ratio is 7.1 — more than 10 times greater.

Kiska, who covered Young’s administration for the Free Press in the early 1980s and wrote a book about the city’s power brokers, said Young was responding to a “sense of terror” as the auto industry languished.

“If you look at what he’s done, he was behaving — and this is just my opinion — totally responsibly,” Kiska said.

Wall Street apparently agreed. In June 1986, Standard & Poor’s increased Detroit’s bond rating to investment-grade, ending a six-year stretch in which Detroit’s ability to borrow was limited.

That kicked off a spree that continued through the end of Young’s administration. From 1987 to 1994, the city’s debt load soared 72% in inflation-adjusted dollars, according to a Free Press analysis.

In 1990, for example, the city sold $130 million in limited-tax general obligation bonds, which voters had not approved, to help finance Chrysler’s Jefferson North Assembly Plant. At the time, analysts projected the deal would cost the city a total of $245 million in principal and interest over 20 years.

Still, Detroit’s debt was relatively under control under the Young administration and through the Dennis Archer years. It wasn’t until the early 2000s that it started to become unmanageable.

Missed chances to rightsize staff as population falls

One running theme in the Free Press’ review is that city leaders failed, again and again, to come to grips with the looming crisis. Young downsized the bureaucracy, but not as much as he should have in view of the city’s declining population and revenue.

And in 1994, when the Clinton-era financial boom took hold and the city’s finances appeared to be stabilizing, the city started hiring again.

Flush with new tax revenue, Archer increased the city workforce from 1994 to 2001, even as the population contracted. Those new employees added to the city’s legacy costs. By the end of the 2001 fiscal year, the city had 18,132 employees, about one worker for every 51 residents.

Archer told the Free Press that cuts were not politically palatable then, in part because the U.S. economy was booming. He defended adding employees, saying the city could afford it and budgets were balanced during his tenure.

“We wouldn’t buy things unless we could afford to,” he said. “That’s how we were able to, frankly, balance our budget and have a modest surplus, because we watched what we were doing.”

But as Detroit’s economic problems intensified, Kilpatrick, mayor from 2002 until he resigned amid a sex and perjury scandal in 2008, presided over one of the largest purges of municipal workers in the city’s history — cutting more than 4,000 employees.

When Bing, the current mayor, inherited a red-ink budget in 2009, he resorted to more cuts in an attempt to keep the city solvent, slashing another 4,000 employees in four years. In just a few years, Bing laid off nearly one of every three city workers.

Today, the city has about one employee for every 73 residents.

Costs for health care, retiree benefits soar — city fails to act

It has been obvious for at least a quarter-century that governments and industry were going to face massive legacy costs as more workers aged and retired. In fact, Detroit had about 18,000 retirees in the late 1980s, only about 3,000 fewer than today.

But Archer said the red flags weren’t obvious in the 1980s and 1990s. “During the eight years I was in office, there was some discussion that was starting to be held, quietly,” he said. It eventually became clear that “cities needed to watch out; states needed to watch out.”

Ed Hannan, one of his budget directors, agreed: “If you go way, way back, health care was not an expensive add-on,” he said. “As years went on, health care became very big.... We did go to council. We showed projections and what would happen and difficult times ahead. We were met with skepticism.”

Even in recent years, when no one questioned that the health care tab had been ballooning, city leaders failed to cut costs because of intense pressure from unions. Adverse court and arbitration rulings also stymied the city’s best efforts to cut. The city’s spending on retiree health care soared 46% from 2000 to 2012, even as general fund revenue fell by 20%.

Meanwhile, the city’s total unfunded retiree health care liabilities rose 19% from 2007 to 2011. Those numbers are critical because they show how costs have increased even though the number of employees was decreasing.

Today, the city’s retiree health care obligations continue to drain the budget and are central to its insolvency.

The city also missed opportunities to rightsize retirement benefits. For instance, when the State of Michigan switched from pensions to 401(k)-style plans in 1997, Detroit failed to follow suit.

Archer negotiated with the pensions funds to create a new plan for city workers, but it was never implemented.

In 2000, the city spent about $99 million on retiree health care benefits. That rose by almost half to about $145 million in 2012.

Bonuses to workers, retirees add up to more budget trouble

In 1994, Archer convened a meeting of his top officials the first week he took office to inspect the city’s books. Rago, Young’s budget director who stayed on during Archer’s first year, told the new mayor how the city’s pension system distributed excess earnings each year to retirees and active employees, instead of reinvesting it. The practice of distributing 13th checks and annuity bonuses dated to at least the mid-1980s.

Alarmed, Archer vowed to kill the practice. But the city doesn’t control its pension funds, which have been largely administered by union officials serving on two independent pension boards.

So Archer backed an effort to block the payments through a proposed new city charter, which actually passed in August 1996. Enraged, several city unions and a retiree group sued and won. Archer tried again to block payments through a ballot initiative, called Proposal T, but it failed.

“That’s a whole lot of money that, if it was in the pension fund, may have made a difference,” Archer told the Free Press.

Milliman, an accounting firm conducting an analysis for Detroit emergency manager Kevyn Orr, this year pegged the unfunded pension liabilities at $3.5 billion. Pension fund trustees dispute that figure, saying the funds are healthy despite the 13th check practice and a string of poor investments over the last decade.

One of the city’s two pension funds, the General Retirement System board, which represents nonuniform employees, doled out $951 million in excess earnings, mostly to retirees and active employees, from 1985 to 2008, according to a report conducted for City Council in 2011 by independent actuary Joseph Esuchanko.

He estimated that the total accumulated cost to the city from the distributions, including lost interest, was $1.9 billion as of June 30, 2008.

It’s unclear exactly how much extra money was distributed from the city’s other pension fund, which covers police and fire department employees. Officials have told the Free Press, however, it was a much less frequent practice and that it happened in earnest for only a few years. With the stock market booming under Archer’s tenure, the city agreed in negotiations with its police and firefighter unions in October 2000 to hand out $190.4 million in bonus pension payments to current and future retirees.

There were clear signs of strain in Detroit’s two pension funds going back to the 1970s. The level of benefits paid each year was rising dramatically, in actual dollar amounts and as a percentage of the city’s active payrolls.

The funds also raised benefits year after year for decades through a cost-of-living allowance and through higher benefits negotiated by unions.

Don Fuerst, a senior pension fellow at the American Academy of Actuaries, calls those rising costs “a serious red flag” for a pension fund.

“When you see costs increasing as a percentage of payroll, as a percentage of revenues, as a percentage of assets, and you see a clear trend of increasing costs, that should be a red flag of concern, no question,” he said.

Shirley Lightsey, president of the Detroit Retired City Employees Association, said many retirees have accepted that times have changed.

“We’ve told our people there’s no more 13th check, so don’t even talk about it anymore,” she said.

The pension board claims of safety and solvency were exaggerated over time in part because of a common but controversial accounting practice called “smoothing,” according to a Free Press analysis of pension reports.

That concept was used by Detroit trustees to assign a predicted annual return on assets over a seven-year period to “smooth” out the up-and-down market gyrations. But in Detroit’s case, the predicted return was too high and the reality of poor investments and falling contributions sapped the funds too quickly for the “smoothed” out numbers to remain accurate.

Detroit’s pension boards also had another problem, experts say: Seven years is too long a period for smoothing. Three to five years is a more responsible time frame for predicting market returns.

As a result, the actual value of assets for Detroit’s two pension funds is really about $5.4 billion — not the $6.77 billion claimed by the pension boards. That’s 20% off — and “really substantial,” Fuerst said.

Kilpatrick’s award-winning deal turns into a financial disaster

On Dec. 6, 2005, Kwame Kilpatrick strode to the stage of a New York City ballroom to applause. Decked out in a black tuxedo, Kilpatrick accepted a gleaming trophy for engineering a complex $1.44-billion pension deal designed to eliminate the city’s unfunded pension liabilities.

He cracked a joke on stage, and Wall Street chuckled. Photographs from the event show laughing faces, a high-priced evening, a night to envy.

The transaction — which earned Detroit the Midwest Regional Deal of the Year honors from the Bond Buyer, Wall Street’s bible for municipal investments — was hailed for its intricate legal framework and creativity. City officials openly bragged that they had to construct a byzantine legal structure to justify the deal.

The deal hailed by Wall Street was a disaster. The borrowing scheme now represents close to one-fifth of the city’s debt and stands as a key reason the city filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy on July 18.

Many said it seemed like a good idea at the time, but the financial machination now stands as a prime example of the city’s willingness to borrow huge sums — and how Kilpatrick took borrowing to new heights.

For a year, Kilpatrick had lobbied the City Council to approve the idea of borrowing to fund pensions. The mayor said the city’s pension obligation, left unaddressed, would force him to lay off 2,000 employees.

But his new deal was designed to fix all that. He estimated the city would shave $277 million a year from its pension contribution obligation and prevent layoffs. It worked like this: Detroit sold pension obligation certificates of participation and shoved the money into its pension funds, making them nearly 100% funded. Separately, the city also bought so-called swaps, or derivatives, a complex Wall Street financial deal to permanently lock in steady interest rates in the range of 6%, a comparatively good rate at the time.

Council members at the time — Maryann Mahaffey, Barbara-Rose Collins, Sharon McPhail and JoAnn Watson — blocked the original pension certificates deal for months. They warned it was too risky because of the stock market’s volatility and accused Kilpatrick of political gamesmanship.

The Free Press editorial page in February 2005 also applied pressure, calling the reluctant council members “heads-in-the-sand” politicians who “have become a threat to the stability of the community.” The editorial described the transaction as a “sound deal” that was “akin to refinancing a mortgage.”

Eventually, the council members capitulated under pressure from Kilpatrick and criticism from unions, including the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which represented city workers. The deal eventually passed council unanimously.

“Kilpatrick had to know or to believe he wasn’t going to be around at the time those payments were going to be due,” said Joseph Harris, Detroit’s auditor general from 1995 to 2005.

Three years later, interest rates tanked and the stock market collapsed. Detroit’s credit rating was downgraded. In desperation, the city pledged its casino tax revenue as collateral to creditors to avoid a payment of up to $400 million that, back then, would have pushed Detroit into a bankruptcy filing.

The city now owes $2.8 billion for principal, interest and insurance payments over the next 22 years, according to a Free Press review of the city’s records. The bill soared in part because the city made only interest payments for about five years.

“Things really got ugly as a result of that,” said Rago, the former budget director. “In the end, as you look back on it, it was the worst thing they could have done.”

Bankruptcy avoidable — until decadelong borrowing binge

Despite the city’s huge tax burden, big spending and large bureaucracy, the Free Press analysis suggests that when Archer left office in 2001, the city still could have avoided disaster. Bankruptcy was not inevitable.

But under the Kilpatrick and Bing administrations, the city started borrowing aggressively to cover its operating expenses, enabled by Wall Street’s irresponsible lending of the 2000s.

“It just makes me ill. Almost cry,” said former Mayor Gribbs, now 87, who served from 1970 to 1974. “You can’t continually borrow money and use it for operating expenses and expect never to have the trouble of paying it back. That’s where you end up going bankrupt.”

Shortly after Kilpatrick took office, his administration issued $61.07 million in “fiscal stabilization bonds.” It was the first of several bond issues championed by Kilpatrick to keep the city budget afloat.

Kilpatrick was full of ideas — like turning the crumbling Michigan Central Station into police headquarters — but was never able to build realistic budgets. He added city workers, then had to cut them. His stock answer to budget issues was to borrow. And chronic annual deficit spending started under him.

In 2009, at Bing’s urging, the city issued $250 million in fiscal stabilization bonds. He told the Free Press last week that the city was almost out of cash and that he couldn’t avoid borrowing.

“I think too many of us looked at Detroit through rose-colored glasses and thought the revenue was going to increase and therefore we didn’t have to do anything on the expenditure side,” he said. “But I knew early on that my revenue wasn’t going to increase and my only option was to cut.… I had to make sure that there was enough money in our system to carry us through the next fiscal year and maybe the next.”

The borrowing also was aided by Wall Street. As recently as the middle of the last decade, bond rating agencies, including Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, were rating Detroit debt as investment grade.

But even after eventual downgrades, investors continued to scoop up each new city bond issue. That’s because the lower the credit rating, the higher the interest paid to investors.

The demand was also fueled by Wall Street’s mistaken impression that the State of Michigan would never allow the city to file for bankruptcy.

In 2009, Harris — who became chief financial officer for Mayor Kenneth Cockrel Jr. during his single year in office 2008-09 — met with Wall Street firms and rating agencies to help the water department issue revenue bonds. At one stop with a credit agency, he discussed the city’s tenuous financial circumstances with an analyst.

“She says, ‘Well, what happens if Detroit goes bankrupt?’” Harris recalled in a Free Press interview. “I said, ‘We don’t. The state will step in and ensure that they right the ship and that the bonds are paid.’”

Finally: What would Frank do?

An echo of Detroit’s current distress can be found in memories of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Then, too, Detroit suffered overwhelming unemployment, chronic budget deficits, rampant crime.

But the city government managed to avoid a financial collapse, led by charismatic Mayor Frank Murphy, later Michigan’s governor, U.S. attorney general and associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

In a report to citizens, Murphy bemoaned the “unsatisfactory governmental administration in the near past,” the “racketeers” who were plaguing the community and the “acute” joblessness that undercut the city.

Despite an imploding economy, he called for a “stubborn stand against the allowance of deficits.” He pledged to cut the city’s budget “to the bone” and he declared war on “financial acrobatics” in a letter attached to the city’s 1930 annual report, which the Free Press uncovered in the Detroit Public Library.

His efforts helped the city survive the nation’s worst economic times.

Along the way, he made a vow.

“This is a great, rich city,” he proclaimed in the letter. “It never has repudiated an obligation nor defaulted upon a debt — and it never will.”

Contact Nathan Bomey: nbomey@usatoday.com. Follow him on Twitter @NathanBomey. Contact John Gallagher: 313-222-5173 or gallagher@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @jgallagherfreep. Staff writer Kristi Tanner contributed to this report.

How this report was done

Digital information about Detroit’s financial history is sorely lacking. In pursuit of historical context on the city’s finances, the Free Press spent weeks conducting research at the Detroit Public Library’s Burton Historical Collection and Department of Sociology and Economics.

The Free Press created its own database of 50 years of Detroit’s financial history by reviewing the city’s annual financial audits for 1960-2012, reading a half century of pension fund reports and combing through many other city records.

City financial audits before 2002 were available in print only. Reports from 1964 and 1971 were not available.

The Free Press also conducted dozens of interviews with outside experts and leaders from the last six mayoral administrations to provide context and additional information.

The Free Press uses general fund revenue figures, which are the best reflection of the city’s financial health. For some years, the city’s audited figures were later slightly adjusted because of new accounting principles, delinquent receipts or additional spending.

Many news reports have relied on Detroit emergency manager Kevyn Orr’s assertion that the city has about $18 billion in debt. However, those figures include disputed estimates of the city’s long-term liabilities, including pension funds and retiree health care. In all references to the city’s debt, the Free Press is referring to the value of general obligation bonds, pension obligation certificates of participation and secured bonds, such as water and sewer debt.

In references to inflation-adjusted figures, the Free Press uses the recommended conversion method from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.


Humza Yousaf: 'Irn-Bru-swigging' SNP frontrunner | The Week UK

Humza Yousaf has emerged as the leading candidate to replace Nicola Sturgeon as leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP) after the spectacular collapse of the campaign of former frontrunner and finance minister Kate Forbes, following comments that she would not have voted to legalise same-sex marriage.

Politico said Scotland’s health secretary “must now be considered a hot favourite to beat the other declared candidate, outsider Ash Regan” but after accident and emergency delays in Scotland worsened for the second week in a row, with more than three out of ten patients waiting longer than four hours, Yousaf has come under criticism for taking his eye off the ball.

Jackie Baillie, the deputy leader of Scottish Labour, told The Times Scotland it would be “disastrous for Scotland if Humza Yousaf’s failure was rewarded with a promotion to the top job”.

Who is Humza Yousaf?

Born in 1985 in Glasgow, Yousaf, whose grandfather emigrated from Pakistan in the 1960s, was privately educated at Hutchesons’ Grammar School before attending Glasgow University, where he studied politics and was elected President of the Glasgow University Muslim Students Association.

On his own website, Yousaf claims he never dreamed of becoming a politician. “Although I studied Politics at Glasgow University, I always thought I would do political research or some other work that involved being in the background – where I was always most comfortable,” he wrote. But in an interview with The Times last year, Yousaf said: “As an angry 16-year-old Muslim growing up in the West in the aftermath of 9/11, with all of the Islamophobia that ensued after that, I wanted to change the world, and change attitudes. Politics has given me a platform and a voice to do that.”

Involved in nationalist politics from a young age, after leaving university he worked as parliamentary assistant for several prominent MSPs, including then first minister Alex Salmond and then deputy first minister Nicola Sturgeon.

In 2011 he was elected to the Scottish Parliament for the Glasgow region, taking his oath in both English and Urdu. Appointed minister for External Affairs and International Development just a year later, he was elevated to justice secretary in 2018, the first non-white cabinet minister in the Scottish government, and finally becoming health secretary in 2021.

What kind of politician is he?

At just 37 years old he may be from a younger generation than Sturgeon, but politically Yousaf “is evidently the SNP establishment’s candidate” said Alex Massie in The Times.

Ten Things You Need to Know Today: 10 March 2023 | The Week UK

Could WhatsApp be banned?

WhatsApp could be banned in the UK, warned the head of its parent company, Meta. The UK’s upcoming Online Safety Bill could force the messaging app to weaken the end-to-end encryption that secures messages on the service, said Will Cathcart. However, he added, his company would refuse, opening the prospect of the app being banned entirely within the country. Although end-to-end encryption secures messages by ensuring that only those sending and receiving them can read them, some officials have argued that it should be weakened so that messages can be scanned for illegal content, said The Independent.


A kitchen sponge may be the best place for bacteria diversity | CNN

CNN —

An everyday item in your kitchen is a better home for many diverse types of bacteria than a petri dish in a laboratory, new research revealed.

A common sponge’s spatial partitioning – the way it’s divided into different sectors of various sizes – caters to bacteria that prefer isolated environments and those that prefer to be around other organisms, making it the best of both worlds for microbial communities, according to a study published recently in the journal Nature Chemical Biology. Bacteria that thrive in secluded spaces, like the smaller pores of a sponge, won’t “bully” other organisms for room, while the sponge’s bigger wells allow for microbes that depend on the presence of others to survive.

“It’s just like we are going to parties and there are individuals who will really enjoy having huge room interactions with a lot of people, and it will draw energy from that,” said the study’s senior author Lingchong You, professor of biomedical engineering at Duke University in North Carolina. “But there are also individuals who feel like they want to be in a smaller environment.”

Researchers tracked bacteria growth by marking them different colors. Courtesy Andrea Weiss, Zach Holmes and Yuanchi Ha

While the results may help you better understand why your kitchen sponge is habitat central for germs, the aim of this research is to find a means to engineer diverse microbial communities that produce chemicals of medicinal or biotechnological value, You said.

Home sweet home

To arrive at these results, researchers tested E. coli density and presence in two different ways. They used plates with varying degrees of spatial partitioning, ranging from six to 1,536 isolated wells. The plates showed that the amount of division in spaces has an impact on what type of bacteria tend to thrive the most.

Researchers then performed another experiment with a kitchen sponge and a tube. The results revealed that in a sponge, there are “60% more diverse members than in a well-mixed environment,” You said, referencing the compacted habitat bacteria are in when placed inside a tube.

“The degree of this spatial partitioning plays a critical role in maintaining the microbial community diversity,” You said. “And it could be that the optimal degree of partitioning also depends on the nature of interactions in a particular community (of bacteria).”

Overall, what they found was that environments that can provide a mix of large chambers and small wells allow for the most diverse microbial communities.

Because sponges are a “perfect growth environment for microbes,” You recommended that consumers be “mindful” and replace their sponges on a periodic basis or find a way to disinfect them. It is recommended sponges be replaced on a weekly basis, according to a 2017 study published in the journal Scientific Reports. To sterilize bacteria on sponges, the United States Department of Agriculture suggests consumers use microwave heating and dishwashing with a drying cycle.

The results provide an understanding of the microbial point of view where “distances and spaces are dramatically different” from a human’s point of view, said Slava Epstein, a professor of microbiology at Northeastern University, who was not involved with the study. By studying the distance between cells, which is measured in microns, researchers are better able to understand how the importance of scale impacts microbial interactions, Epstein said.

Microbial communities in nature

Epstein added that a “natural extension” of this research would be to examine the role of spatial partitioning in nature, such as how bacteria work in soil, since the bacteria used in the study were grown artificially and controlled by researchers.

Bacteria are able to find both isolated and shared enviornments in sponges. Courtesy Andrea Weiss, Zach Holmes and Yuanchi Ha

“Working with well plates clearly indicates a very significant role in the size of compartments they can grow and whether or not there is a separation between such compartments,” Epstein said. “Once we know this, it gives you ammunition and drive to go after actual natural communities.”

Although the study cannot prove quite yet how spatial partitioning affects microbial communities in nature, You said he is optimistic overall that the results should remain consistent. Researchers are interested in experimenting with natural microbial communities, but You said these bacteria need to learn how to live with each other first.

“One member will control one step of the pathway, another member will control another step of the pathway,” You said. “But in order for this to work, they will need to co-exist, so we need to maintain their diversity, and then we’re using this partitioned environment, precisely to help maintain different members.”

Spice rack 'germiest' place in your kitchen | The Week UK

A new study had found that the spice rack is one of the “germiest” places in the kitchen, said The Telegraph. Having analysed spice jars, the team found that 48% showed evidence of cross-contamination. They were more intensely contaminated than bin lids, knives, and sinks. “Consumers may not necessarily think to wipe down or decontaminate spice containers after cooking because they are not typically targeted as high risk for cross-contamination in consumer messaging,” said the report, by the US Agriculture Department Food Safety and Inspection Service.

Ancient Roman dildo discovered

Archaeologists believe they discovered a life-size Roman dildo in Northumberland. “If it was not used as a sexual implement” then the 2,000-year-old object “may have been an erect penis-shaped pestle”, said The Guardian, a feature from a statue that people touched for good luck. The item was initially documented as a darning tool but Newcastle University archaeology senior lecturer Rob Collins, “part of me thinks it’s kind of self-evident that it is a penis”.

Man strikes gold in Birmingham

A former squaddie, who once guarded the Queen, has struck gold in Birmingham. Andy Brooke, 37, discovered specks of the precious metal while checking a stream in the city. He is keeping the location of the discovery “under wraps” for fear of “sparking a stampede to the West Midlands”, said the Daily Star. However, he advocates his detectorist hobby, telling the tabloid: “I would say if anyone wants to get outdoors and have a bit of fun, I’d recommend anyone goes and does it.”

For more odd news stories, sign up to the weekly Tall Tales newsletter.

The germiest, grimiest place in your kitchen

USATODAY

You may never look at your kitchen the same way again. A new study that looked at household germs examined 14 common household items. So which areas were the germiest? The list may surprise you. Watch as Darla Carter, health and fitness reporter for the (Louisville, Ky.) Courier-Journal, breaks down the top 6 places.

Harmful germs lurking in your kitchen can make you sick

Darla Carter

(Louisville, Ky.) Courier-Journal

CDC%3A Foodborne illnesses sicken 48 millions Americans every year

Germiest areas%3A refrigerator compartments%2C food containers%2C rubber spatulas

When was the last time you washed your blender gasket%3F

When was the last time you cleaned your refrigerator crisper or meat drawer or washed your can opener?

If it's been a while, you might want to clean up your act — or at least your kitchen.

A public health and safety organization called NSF International found potentially harmful microorganisms such as E. coli, salmonella and listeria on kitchen items that are often used for food preparation or storage.

Salmonella, listeria and some types of E. coli are among the many causes of foodborne illnesses, which sicken about 48 million Americans a year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The infections can range from mild to life-threatening but often are written off by people as brief stomach bugs.

"For a normal, healthy person, these things might not affect them that much," said Lisa Yakas, a senior project manager for NSF International, which does product testing and certification.

But certain kinds of people, such as the elderly, pregnant women, children, and individuals with compromised immune systems, may be more seriously impacted.

"Those types of people could all be in our homes, and they are the most susceptible to these organisms, so we just want to bring this to light, make these areas known, so that people can start cleaning these areas."

NSF International conducted a household germ study, using 20 Michigan families that volunteered to swab items in their kitchen and submit samples to be analyzed for NSF's 2013 Household Germ Study.

Some of the germiest areas, in terms of having microorganisms that could make you sick, included the vegetable and meat compartments of the refrigerator, rubber spatula, blender gasket, can opener and food storage container with rubber seal, according to NSF.

Some of the "bugs" that were found are less concerning than others. For example, yeasts and molds don't tend to "make people sick like normal pathogens, but if you are allergic ... then sometimes these yeasts and molds can affect you," Yakas said.

Common symptoms of foodborne illnesses caused by pathogens, such as salmonella and listeria, include nausea, vomiting, abdominal cramps and diarrhea. Serious cases can lead to hospitalization and major complications, such as kidney failure and miscarriages, depending on the culprit.

Annually, about one in six Americans gets sick, 128,000 are hospitalized and 3,000 die of foodborne diseases, according to the CDC.

University of Kentucky meat scientist Gregg Rentfrow said people should take practical steps to keep themselves safe, such as thoroughly washing fruits and vegetables before eating them, thoroughly cooking meats and cleaning up drippings from chicken and other meats.

"Just use common sense," said Rentfrow, an associate extension professor and extension meat specialist in the College of Agriculture, Food and Environment. "If you handle everything like you know it's contaminated, you'll be OK."

Rentfrow said the NSF's findings weren't surprising, though "it is kind of concerning when folks don't realize that (you) need to clean out your vegetable container and your meat container and stuff like that, especially if you're thawing out meat inside that meat container and the purge gets onto the actual refrigerator itself."

Twenty-one percent of U.S. outbreaks of foodborne illness with a known single setting resulted from food consumed in a private home, compared with 48 percent that stemmed from food eaten in a restaurant or deli, according to CDC stats for 2009-10.

At home, it's important to pay attention to manufacturers' instructions for cleaning products that come in contact with food and to get on a regular cleaning schedule, Yakas said.

Tools, such as blenders, can openers, rubber spatulas and food-storage containers, should be cleaned "after every use, whereas the vegetable bins and things like that ... can be more on a monthly routine," Yakas said.

Her group recommends doing some extra work that you might not normally think about, such as disassembling the blender to clean its various parts, separating two-piece spatulas for cleaning and paying special attention to the area around the seals of containers that have rubber seals when cleaning.

Also, "if you see a spill or drippage, clean that stuff up right away," Yakas said. And "make sure that your hands are clean and make sure that your food surfaces are clean."

In kitchens, germs can be transferred from one food to another by using the same cutting board or utensils to prepare things without washing them in between, according to the CDC.

For example, Rentfrow said some people put their hamburgers and bratwursts on a cutting board to carry them out to the grill, then start cutting vegetables on that same board without cleaning it thoroughly with hot, soapy water.

Another problem is failing to keep hot foods hot and cold foods cold, he said. By letting them sit out at room temperature for long periods, you provide an opportunity for germs to grow. "Now you're going to get yourself sick," Rentfrow said.

Top six cleaning tips to get rid of kitchen germs

Refrigerator vegetable compartment: Remove the drawer from the refrigerator if possible. Use a clean sponge or soft cloth and wash the bin with a mild detergent mixed with warm water. Rinse with tap water and wipe dry with a clean towel. To help control odors, use warm water mixed with a baking soda solution (about 1-2 tablespoons of baking soda to 1 quart of water). Rinse and wipe dry. Clean monthly.

Refrigerator meat compartment: Remove the compartment/drawer from the refrigerator if possible. Use a clean sponge or soft cloth and wash the bin with a mild detergent mixed with warm water. Rinse with tap water and wipe dry with a clean towel. To help control odors, use warm water mixed with a baking soda solution (about 1-2 tablespoons of baking soda to 1 quart of water). Rinse and wipe dry. Clean monthly and whenever you see any spilled meat juices.

Blender gaskets: Unplug the blender and remove the blender jar from the base. Completely disassemble the jar, removing the blade and gasket at the bottom. If dishwasher safe, place all pieces in the dishwasher after each use. If hand washing, wash the gasket, blade assembly, jar and lid thoroughly in hot soapy water, rinse and dry before re-assembling. Perform this cleaning procedure after each use.

Can opener: Place the can opener in the dishwasher after each use (if dishwasher safe). If hand washing, wash the can opener in hot soapy water, rinsing thoroughly with clean tap water before air drying after each use. If hand washing, pay special attention to the area around the cutting blades to be sure all food residue is removed.

Rubber spatula: For two-piece spatulas, it's important to separate the handle from the spatula portion and, if dishwasher safe, place both sections in the dishwasher after each use. If hand washing, wash in hot soapy water, rinsing thoroughly with clean water. For one-piece spatulas, if dishwasher safe, place in the dishwasher after each use. Otherwise, hand wash thoroughly in hot soapy water, paying special attention to the area where the handle joins the spatula. Rinse thoroughly and dry.

Food storage container with rubber seal: If dishwasher safe, place both the container and the lid in the dishwasher and wash after each use. If hand washing, wash both the container and lid in hot soapy water, paying special attention to the area around the seal as well as any grooves where the cover attaches to the container. Rinse thoroughly and allow to air dry.

Source: NSF International

Keurig, Nespresso, Mr. Coffee: How to properly clean your coffee ...

If you're an avid coffee drinker, you’re probably making multiple trips to the kitchen to get your fix. But have you ever thought about how dirty your home or office coffee maker can get after all those uses?

Whether it’s the single-serve Keurig, espresso Nespresso machine or a traditional coffee maker, it’s important to keep these appliances clean to prevent the growth of bacteria, yeast or even mold.

Lisa Yakas, senior product manager of Consumer Products at NSF International, formerly known as the National Sanitation Foundation, says that these appliances are relatively harmless as long as clients follow the manufacturer’s cleaning directions.

However, without routine cleaning, they can get pretty grimy.

Mold and yeast like to grow in your coffee maker

Yakas points to the water reservoir – the part of the coffee maker that stores water – as one of the dirtiest parts of the kitchen if not cleaned on a regular basis.

A NSF International study of kitchen products in 2011 found that 50% of the sampled reservoirs in coffee makers had mold or yeast.

“It wasn’t on their radar,” Yakas said of the families involved in the study.

According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, food borne yeast and mold can be a source of sensitivity for people with allergies and may even cause infections.

Yakas recommends to always empty out the unused water in the reservoir and leave the lid off to let it dry out.

“Some of these organisms like these moist and damp places, that’s where they like to grow,” Yakas said. “If you eliminate that moisture altogether… then you eliminate their conditions to grow.”

Her motto is “keep it dry and keep it clean.”

Other places germs appear in and around your coffee maker

Chuck Gerba, professor of microbiology at the University of Arizona, said coffee break rooms have more bacteria than restrooms in most office buildings.

If the office has a coffee pot, Gerba says the first thing that gets germiest is the coffee pot handle. However, on a single-use machine, he says the top of the machine where the people place the plastic pod has the most germs.

“When you use the machine, it could get in your coffee,” he said.

Gerba also said that another big source of germs are coffee cups, especially if they’re shared amongst co-workers. A 1997 study he co-authored examining office coffee cups found that E. coli and even fecal matter were found in some of the cups.

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According to Gerba, the sponges that people were using to clean out their cups were actually contaminating them. If the office has a dishwasher, he recommends using it.

“Dishwashers work great because you have a high temperature and it dries out,” he said.

However, if the sponge can’t be avoided, Gerba says it’s important to wipe the coffee cup dry with a paper towel instead of using a cloth or letting it dry out on a rack.

Yuck:Sponges left in sinks become fecal germ bombs

How to clean your coffee maker: Keurig, Nespresso, Black & Decker, Mr. Coffee

Both Gerba and Yakas say that the heat from the coffee maker can kill most germs, but it shouldn't replace ritual cleaning or descaling, which should happen every one to six months depending on the manufacturer's recommendations.

“While it’s possible the heat of coffee brewing might kill some microbes, why take a chance?" Yakas said. "We think it’s best to go to the source and keep the coffee maker clean."

So, here's how to properly clean your coffee maker according to the product's manufacturer:

Keurig: Turn off the Keurig and empty out the water reservoir, removing the filter. Pour Keurig descaling solution into the reservoir. After pouring the entire solution in, fill the empty bottle with water and add that into the reservoir. Power the Keurig back on, place a mug, perform a cleansing brew using 10 oz. brew size and then pour out the contents of the mug. Repeat until the "add water" light comes on. Let the Keurig sit for about 30 minutes (with the power still on) and then rinse out the reservoir thoroughly. Fill the reservoir with fresh water and perform at least 12 cleansing brews.

Nespresso: Rinse and clean the water tank before filling it with fresh water and then put the water tank in place. Rinse the cup support and place a container of at least 0.5 liters under under the coffee outlet. Then open the machine head, let the used capsule be ejected, and empty and rinse the capsule container. Close the head and turn lever until in the "locked" position. Push the button three times within two seconds, the button should start blinking quickly. It will take less than two minutes for a flow to come out, then the cleaning procedure will run automatically for five minutes for three cycles. The company urges that consumers to not use any cleaning agents or vinegar in the process. The company offers their own descaling products to use instead.

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Black & Decker: The coffee maker will indicate when it's time for a cleaning cycle. Fill the reservoir with equal parts white vinegar and cold water, then place a paper filter into the filter basket and close the cover. Press the auto clean button on the control panel. About half of the liquid will pour into the pot right away, but the second half will take about 30 minutes. When the process is done, the pot should be full and the coffee maker will automatically shut off. Before brewing coffee again, run another cycle with just cold water.

Mr. Coffee: Some traditional coffee makers aren't programmable with a cleaning cycle, in which it's recommended to clean your coffee maker with the vinegar solution every 40 to 80 uses. Instead of using the auto clean button, turn on the coffee maker until the carafe is three cups full. Turn if off and wait 30 minutes, then turn it back on and brew the rest.

Gerba said that vinegar will clear out most of the mold and yeast, but it’s not considered to be a disinfectant by the U.S. Environmental and Protection Agency and doesn’t get rid of all the bacteria that can make a person sick.

That’s why Yakas recommends taking out each removable piece of the coffee maker and cleaning it by hand. Some coffee maker parts are dishwasher safe.

Follow Adrianna Rodriguez on Twitter: @AdriannaUSAT.

Coronavirus: On the road? See how to sanitize your hotel room

Caroline Costello

SmarterTravel.com

Your hotel room is your home away from home, with a few exceptions: the hundreds or even thousands of strangers from every corner of the world who have slept there. And the hotel staff may not have the same standards of cleanliness that you do at home.

Having a sanitary hotel room is important under normal circumstances but with coronavirus cases mounting in the United States, it's a crucial way of helping protect travelers from picking up the COVID-19 virus, which a new study authored by scientists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institiutes of Health, Princeton and UCLA says can live on surfaces for anywhere from a few hours to days.

If you can't avoid traveling – or are trying to make your way home – during the coronavirus pandemic, try the following steps to achieving a clean hotel room to help improve your odds of staying healthy – and lower your anxiety level.

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Read the reviews

There are no international standards for hotel cleanliness. Price, location, or a brand name will not guarantee completely sanitary digs. So until some international “clean commission” starts sending out fastidious officials to size up squalid toilets in hotels around the world, your best bet is to find out what your fellow travelers are saying. Most travel and hotel review sites have cleanliness as a category for evaluation. The largest hotel-review site is TripAdvisor (SmarterTravel’s parent company) with user ratings of thousands of hotels, restaurants, and businesses around the world; you can also find hotel reviews on major booking engines such as Booking.com, Hotels.com, and Expedia.

Grab some supplies from a nearby store

First, you'll need cleaning supplies, such as Lysol Disinfectant Spray or Clorox wipes. Not all travel wipes and cleaners kill norovirus, so if that's your goal, read labels and pick a product that does the job. (Note that if you buy something strong or hospital-grade, containing bleach, you might also need to bring gloves and a mask to keep yourself safe.) Also, grab a box of large zip-top bags; disposable gloves and dish soap are optional.

Can't find these items at the local supermarket or drugstore? Try home improvement or office supply stores. And if you or a traveling companion are a veteran and there's a military base in town, try the PX.

Wash your hands

Frequent hand washing has been proven to reduce the transfer of colds and viruses, and will prevent bacteria getting from whatever it is you’re touching (why is this remote control sticky?) to your mouth, eyes, or nose. So even if your hotel room is poorly sanitized, washing your hands will help keep the icky germs at bay. Oh, and once you're done cleaning all the items on this list, wash your hands again.

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Ditch the bedspread and decorative pillows

You’ve probably heard this one before: Most hotels do not wash heavy bedspreads after each unique guest. The frequency of laundering varies from hotel to hotel, so if the idea of an anonymous stranger cuddling up with the blanket that now lies across your queen bed creeps you out, call your hotel and ask how often the staff washes the bedspreads. Or bring your own travel-friendly blanket and remove the hotel’s altogether.

Carry wipes

If you’re feeling a little icky in your dumpy budget hotel room or you just want to be extra cautious, simply hitting frequently touched surfaces with some antibacterial wipes could make your life a whole lot cleaner. Key places to spray for germs include the phone, door knobs, toilet handle, ice bucket, remote control, and bathroom faucet handles. Another option is to wave a UV wand over places prone to germs.

Clean all hard surfaces

Wipe down hard surfaces, such as the night table, coffee table, desk and shelves. You don't need to do them all, but prioritize surfaces where you will set down things that will go near your face or in your mouth. (Think shelves that house glassware, or nightstands where you put your glasses.)

Wipe down bathroom surfaces

Bathrooms can be germ central, so spray or wipe down all hard surfaces, including the toilet seat and lid.

Wipe down all door handles and light switches

These high-touch areas are used by everyone in your room, as well as housekeeping and anyone else visiting your room. Give them a good wipe down on day one; you might want to revisit the task later in the cruise, as well.

Avoid the glassware

There’s no guarantee that your room glasses and mugs aren’t simply rinsed off under the tap by the cleaning staff, or even wiped down with the same sponge that’s used to clean other parts of the bathroom. The quick way to deal with this is to run your cup under hot water for a minute or two before using it; this will kill most bacteria. Or you can pack a travel mug from home.

Bag the remote

It's common knowledge that one of the germiest items in a hotel room is the remote control – touched by many and with lots of crevices that can't be effectively wiped down. Pick it up with a tissue or gloves, put it in a plastic bag and zip it shut. You can still operate the remote, but never have to actually touch its surface.

How to clean a keyboard: 8 tips for washing gunk from computer ...

Think back to the last time you washed your hands. How many things have you touched since then? A breakfast sandwich, your face, your dog, the refrigerator handle, a chair, the desk, scratched itch on your foot, your hair and, lastly, your keyboard.

Now, think about where your computer sits. Do you eat your lunch over the keyboard? Are you in the office with people walking past? Or in a home where someone is coughing or sneezing?

Add all of these factors together and you’re left with a lot of germs living on your keyboard. So many that WebMD ranks keyboards the fourth germiest place in the office.

How can I safely clean my keyboard?

There are a few easy ways to clean your keyboard:

Blow the keyboard with compressed air

Wipe it down with distilled water

Make your own cleaner that is safe for keyboards and screens

Use a cotton swab to get into the smaller places, like in-between keys

Disinfectant wipes, but do not use these on your screen

Do not spray liquids directly on to the keyboard

Avoid products with bleach

Do not put your keyboard in water

How can I keep it clean?

A 2018 study from the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found disinfecting your keyboard just once can significantly reduce germs and bacteria.

Regular disinfecting in addition to frequent hand washing and avoiding activities like eating over the keyboard won’t keep the germs away, but it will cut down on all of the germs and bacteria living in the keyboard capital of QWERTY.

More problems, solved

Shop our favorite Samsung appliances for the kitchen, laundry room ...

— Recommendations are independently chosen by Reviewed’s editors. Purchases you make through our links may earn us a commission.

You’d be hard pressed to find a consumer who hasn’t heard the name Samsung. From laptops, mobile phones, and televisions to refrigerators, ranges, and robot vacuums, this megabrand has its hand in many aspects of your life.

As an appliance manufacturer, Samsung makes some of our favorites (yes, ones we’ve tested and love), dressed in both sleek design and above-average functionality. And, since Samsung is also a frontrunner in phone and computer technology, its appliances are well equipped with cutting-edge, app-based tech intended to make preparing dinner or vacuuming floors a lot easier.

If you’re in the market for a new appliance, Samsung is offering some killer deals on its website right now. Not to mention that it’s pretty easy to get these appliances delivered and installed at your home.

Here are our favorites—the best-performing Samsung appliances that we’ve tested out already.

Samsung RF263BEAESG French-door refrigerator

If you’re looking for a refrigerator built for a family, this is for you. We like the Samsung RF263BEAESG for its fingerprint resistant stainless steel, ability to store large items, and its smart shelving and drawers. The in-door shelving is able to fit two gallons of milk at once, so it’s built for buying in bulk. Another perk is the crisper drawers, which maintain optimal humidity levels to keep produce fresh. Additionally you only need to open one of the fridge doors to access the crisper drawer, meaning that you’re keeping the air in your fridge at more level temps.

Get the Samsung RF263BEAESG for $1,349

Samsung RS27T5200SR side-by-side, counter-depth refrigerator

For remarkably steady temperatures, the Samsung RS27T5200SR is a go-to. This model lacks Samsung’s smart home feature, Family Hub, but it makes up for it in reliability and spaciousness. While reviewing this model, we found that it has a remarkably larger capacity than the average standard side-by-side.

Get the Samsung RS27T5200SR for $1,439

Samsung Bespoke 4-door Flex refrigerator

Samsung’s Bespoke fridge has had our attention since the beginning of 2021 when Samsung announced it for American consumers. You can customize its stunning design with interchangeable panels in a variety of colors and finishes, and you can also customize the temperatures of its individual freezer and refrigerated compartments.

No need to worry if there’s enough room in the fridge for a filtered water pitcher because this fridge has one built in, and it refills automatically. This model additionally features UV technology that deodorizes the fridge.

We currently have the Bespoke 4-door Flex in our labs for testing, but we’re intrigued by the promise of this model and impressed with our first peek.

Samsung DW80R9950UT dishwasher

After going through our lab testing, the Samsung DW80R9950UT comes out the other side as an Editor’s Choice winner. It has over a 99% efficacy in removing stains at both the normal and heavy cycles, while also offering a stunning fingerprint-resistant stainless steel outer. Like other high-end dishwashers on the market, this model features a third rack that is adjustable to accommodate oversized utensils, and it runs quietly while not sacrificing on efficiency.

Get the Samsung DW80R9950UT dishwasher for $1,084

Samsung NX58K9500WG slide-in gas range with True Convection

The Samsung NX58K9500WG earned an Editor’s Choice badge when we tested it. With its five burners and True Convection single oven, this range has everything you could want. It offers a great cooktop that includes a griddle that fits into the middle burner. This oven is a baker’s delight with its ability to quickly pre-heat, in addition to offering a great convection oven that evenly bakes anything from sugar cookies to a dense cake. If you’ve kept up your quarantine bread hobby alive or you’re getting ready to host loads of dinner parties, there’s a warming drawer ready to proof bread or keep dishes warm.

Get the Samsung NX58K9500WG slide-in gas range with True Convection for $2,599

Samsung NY63T8751SS Flex Duo slide-in dual fuel range

The Samsung NY63T8751SS is one of the best gas ranges we’ve tested, and the full review is coming soon. This smart range offers many tech-forward features, including a smart dial, Wi-Fi, and an air fry setting. It can learn your cooking habits and simplify oven settings so it “knows” just what you need. You can even use your smartphone to change the temperature and check on cooking time without being nearby. Even better, it features an air fry mode, which negates the need for a separate countertop air fryer and saves you the space and expense of another kitchen device.

Get the Samsung NY63T8751SS Flex Duo slide-in dual fuel range for $3,329

Samsung ME21F707MJT over-the-range microwave

The Samsung ME21F707MJT microwave offers a sleek design, including a horizontal control panel that sits at eye level, making it user-friendly while perched above your range. Its heat sensor technology does a good job of heating items and offers plenty of one-touch presets.

Get the Samsung ME21F707MJT over-the-range microwave for $469

Samsung WF45R6300AV smart, front-load washing machine

If you’re looking for a front-loading washing machine that can work quickly, the Samsung WF45R6300AV is an exceptional machine. It effectively removes 75% of stains that we tested, and for the germiest of loads, the machine’s Sanitize cycle effectively kills bacteria. This front-loader features smart technology so that rather than listening for the machine to signal that it’s done, you can receive a notification on your smartphone. It’s a great value with customizable cycle options that get done quickly with the SuperSpeed option.

Get the Samsung WF45R6300AV smart, front-load washing machine for $1,034

Samsung DVE45R6100C dryer

Available in both electric or gas models, the Samsung DVE45R6100C works to near perfection with great capacity and settings to dry any load. It offers specialized settings for bedding that allow your sheets and comforters to come out fully dry. If you have allergies, this machine has a Sanitize option that can rid your laundry of allergens. A design-forward look means it will also look nice in your home. In a fun twist, this dryer has a light that flashes before the next cycle if you’ve forgotten to empty the lint trap after the last load.

If an error comes up for the machine, you can use your smartphone to scan the code provided and the Samsung app will tell you what’s wrong.

Get the Samsung DVE45R6100C dryer starting at $944

Samsung Jetbot AI+ robot vacuum

Samsung’s brand new Jetbot AI+ has just arrived at our lab for testing, but first impressions look great. It has promising features including object recognition that helps it identify the surface it’s cleaning and adjusting its suction level accordingly. Maybe the best part of this machine is its hygienic. With the accompanying clean station, this machine automatically empties itself.

Get the Samsung Jetbot AI+ for $1,299

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