Ann Brenoff’s “On The Fly” is a weekly column about navigating growing older ― and a few other things.

Dear millennials,

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news here, but you are about to get sucked into a hellhole unlike anything you’ve ever previously imagined. It will devastate you, leave you emotionally spent, make you physically ill and resentful at times. It could totally derail your career or force you to dip into your retirement savings ― and then one day it will abruptly end and leave you in a state of deep grief. Oh, and the government doesn’t really give a damn about any of this, so you are pretty much on your own. 

What is this nightmare scenario? You are about to become my generation’s caregivers. 

That’s right. A recently released AARP report, “Millennials: The Emerging Generation of Family Caregivers,” points the finger squarely at you. It notes that your caregiving responsibilities are just starting to rev up, with about 1 in 4 of you already putting in an extra 21 hours a week taking care of us. To be clear, that is 21 unpaid hours ― while you work at your real jobs and/or care for your own families at the same time.

Close to half of you will be helping a parent or a parent-in-law. In most cases (65 percent), it will be your mother, said AARP. About 76 percent of the people cared for by millennial family members are 50 or older, and the average care recipient is 60 years old. The average care recipient helped by a grandchild is 77 years old. And more than half of millennial family caregivers (51 percent) are the sole caregiver, alone in their duties. 

You can expect this trend to continue. As more people like me go not-so-gently into our elder years, more of you will be asked to step up and take care of us. Why? U.S. public policy has lagged woefully behind today’s reality that 10,000 baby boomers a day are turning 65. And that burden is headed straight to your shoulders.

So let’s start with what caregiving entails. My generation already knows this, because we’ve served as our own parents’ and spouse’s caregivers, but here’s the CliffsNotes version for you.

It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it.

Family caregivers today do many of the same things that nurses do, and then some. And much of it isn’t pretty. 

You can look forward to changing adult diapers (just don’t dare try to claim those as a caregiving expense!), giving medications, installing safety bars, taping down rugs and telling your grandmother who helped raise you that she can’t drive anymore while she sobs and asks you what your name is. Again.

You will be changing catheters and testing blood and hooking up your dad to a home dialysis machine because visiting health aides don’t come every day. Family caregivers do. You will sometimes forget to dispose of your “sharps” properly and someone will call you on it. 

You will make multiple trips a week driving your loved one to doctors, waste hours in line at the pharmacy and spend hours on the phone with insurance providers all the while trying to juggle your own life, family and job. You will blow your stack, cry yourself to sleep and endure days when you don’t even have time to shower. Your own health will suffer. The stress of trying to work while doing all this will feel unbearable at times, especially if you’re doing it without help. Impatience may become your middle name.

You not only don’t get paid; it will cost you.

You are a godsend ― that’s what everyone will tell you. After all, the work done by the nation’s family caregivers would cost about $642 billion a year if it were done by paid skilled nurses, according to the Rand Corp. Meanwhile, Rand put the annual income lost by family caregivers for the elderly at $522 billion. That was in 2014, so you can mentally adjust for inflation.

It’s staggering. Bear in mind: Family caregivers labor free of charge, contributing their time, their energy and often their own well-being. You will join their ranks out of love, obligation, guilt ― and for one other important reason: You’ll have no choice.

And it will cost you in yet another way. Caregivers’ out-of-pocket costs were nearly 20 percent of their annual income, AARP said in its 2016 report, with average annual spending of $6,954.

To cover the extra expense, AARP notes, many family caregivers cut back on their own spending. They reduce, if not stop, saving for retirement altogether. They don’t eat out or take vacations. And many have dipped into personal or retirement savings.

The damage to caregivers is long-lasting.

Many caregivers find their health adversely affected. A UCLA Center for Health Policy Research survey found that nearly one-third of the estimated 3 million-plus informal caregivers in California reported emotional stress so severe it disrupted their lives. “Caregiver syndrome” is the popular name for the anger, guilt and exhaustion that come from providing unrelenting care for a chronically ill loved one. 

As you will quickly find out for yourself, respite care ― an outsider to come in and give you a break once in a while ―  is expensive and not always available. 

Caregiving can impact your health, but what it does to your career is something awful times two. Caregivers miss days of work, don’t apply for or accept promotions, and sometimes just drop out of the paid workforce altogether to care for their loved ones. 

Lost wages and benefits average $303,880 over the lifetimes of people 50 and older who stop working to care for a parent, according to a National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine report. To add insult to that injury, a lower earnings history means reduced Social Security payments when you become eligible.

Government could help a lot but doesn’t.

That National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine report provides a very sobering look at the state of family caregiving in the U.S. It notes that caregivers are cracking under the strain, and although things could be done to support them, nobody is really paying attention.

What could be done to ease the almost certain misery you’re headed for? How about tax credits for caregiving or reimbursement for caregiving expenses? Why not offer Social Security credits so that caregivers don’t miss out down the road? And maybe pass paid family leave to take care of an elderly loved one, so that after you’ve spent the night dealing with Grandpa’s tendency to rage after sunset, you don’t have to report to work at 9 a.m. the next day?

Good luck,

Ann

P.S. Welcome to the club.

IRELAND - As many Irish people celebrate what appears to be a landslide victory for pro-choice campaigners in Ireland’s abortion referendum, tributes were paid to a woman whose death has haunted the country since 2012. 

Savita Halappanavar, a 31-year-old Indian dentist, died of sepsis when she was refused an abortion during a protracted miscarriage. She had travelled to hospital complaining of back pain when she was 17 weeks pregnant, and was told by staff that she was going to lose the child. 

But because there was a foetal heartbeat, they were barred by law – governed by the eighth amendment of the constitution – from terminating the pregnancy, forcing to her endure a week-long miscarriage. She suffered an infection and later went into septic shock, resulting in her death.

On Saturday, as it emerged that the country had overwhelming voted to repeal the amendment, which will pave the way for the government to relax the laws on abortion, many women were remembering Savita and her legacy. 

A mural bearing her image in the busy Portobello district of Dublin was adorned with notes, flowers and tributes as people flocked to pay their respects. 

Jill Jordan, 38, who was there with her baby daughter Ivy, told HuffPost UK: “It’s not yet official but I’m feeling sheer relief.

“It means we can go into the future knowing that the people of Ireland actually trust us and realise women are not shameful objects.

“The result means we won’t be exporting women for abortions, it gets rid of that hypocrisy. It just adds another layer of distress in crisis.”

She patted her daughter, adding: “She doesn’t know it yet but we did this for her.”

Speaking to the Irish Times, Savita’s father, Andanappa Yalagi, said he hoped the new legislation, promised to be enacted before the end of the year by the Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, should be called “Savita’s law”. 

Speaking from the family home in Belgaum, Karnataka in south west India, he said the family was “really, really happy” the Irish people were on course to deliver a strong ‘Yes’ in the abortion referendum.

“I want to thank you so much. I want to say ‘Thank you’ to our brothers and sisters in Ireland for voting Yes. It is very important. There has been really a lot, too much struggle for the Irish ladies.”

Anne Marie Roche, 37, said: “Savita and I were pregnant at the same time. When she died I wasn’t able to march. Now I have the strength, I wanted to come and pay tribute to her.

“She should be at home with her five-year-old like I am. She should never have been made a martyr in this country.”

Ali, who asked for her surname not to be published, laid flowers at the makeshift shrine. She said: “This is a celebration but it’s bittersweet. We failed Savita. Ireland failed Savita. But hopefully we won’t let what happened to her happen to anyone else.”

Other tributes read: “I voted for you Savita, I’m sorry we failed you” and “If I have a daughter I will name her Savita after you”.

How do you like your eggs in the morning? If you want them to be healthy, the answer probably shouldn’t be fried.

Eggs are a great part of a balanced diet as they’re jam-packed with protein, vitamin D vitamin A, vitamin B2, vitamin B12, folate and iodine. However, the way we prepare them can have an impact on how healthy they are overall.

So, what’s the best method?

[READ MORE: What do egg labels mean? From organic to free range?]

First you need to decide how many you want to eat. According to Charlotte Stirling-Reed, registered nutrition consultant and co-founder of LittleFoodie.org, the rules surrounding how many eggs it’s safe for people to eat have caused confusion for the public over the years. 

“Previously there were limits on how many eggs should be eaten a day. This is mainly due to the fact that eggs contain cholesterol and ‘high cholesterol’ in the blood is often linked to heart disease,” she explains.

“However, the cholesterol we eat in the diet doesn’t actually impact on our levels of cholesterol in the body and therefore there isn’t necessarily a limit to how many eggs we should eat each week. The most important thing is that we ensure variety in the diet and so opt for a variety of protein sources, including eggs.”

So what about the actual method of cooking? While there is some evidence to suggest the cooking method may cause some nutrient losses or increases, Stirling-Reed says these effects are “fairly minimal”.

“A more important concept is actually what we serve our eggs with,” she says. 

For example, frying with lashings of oil is likely to add extra fat and calories. In fact, the NHS says this method can increase an egg’s fat content by around 50%, so fried eggs should definitely be reserved as a treat.

Regularly making scrambled eggs with large amounts of butter can also be bad news for health. “But if you’re eating scrambled egg and using just milk - not oil or butter - then you’re likely to also be adding in extra nutrients,” Stirling-Reed says. 

Your safest bet if you’re trying to keep eggs healthy is to boil or poach them, without added salt. There is little health difference between these two methods, but Stirling-Reed is a fan of boiled. “They are perfect for eating on the go or for food for babies,” she says. 

Happy cooking!

Astronomers changed Pluto status from planet to dwarf planet, but it’s possible that it’s not any kind of planet at all.

In a study published in the journal “Icarus,” scientists have found fascinating similarities between Pluto and the 67P comet studied by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Rosetta spacecraft in 2004. 

“We found an intriguing consistency between the estimated amount of nitrogen inside [a glacier on Pluto] and the amount that would be expected if Pluto was formed by the agglomeration of roughly a billion comets or other Kuiper Belt objects similar in chemical composition to 67P, the comet explored by Rosetta,” said Southwest Research Institute’s Christopher Glein in a press release.

Based on its chemical makeup, Pluto could simply be a “giant comet,” or as Glein said, the result of a billion comets coming together.

In 2006, NASA launched the New Horizons spacecraft at Pluto, which sits 4.67 billion miles from Earth. It wasn’t until July of 2015 that the probe finally got close enough to the icy dwarf planet to analyze it.

The SRI study combines data from NASA’s New Horizons mission and data gathered by the ESA’s Rosetta mission.

All the fuss that was made about reclassifying Pluto in 2006, and we still might not know what it is. Poor Pluto.

To many fans of Donald Glover, it’s no secret that he also goes by the musical stage name Childish Gambino. But, apparently, many fans of Donald Glover and Childish Gambino didn’t know they were the same person.

For reference, this is Donald Glover.

This is Childish Gambino:

So much talent. One person. We know, it’s a lot to comprehend. And if you’re overwhelmed, don’t worry, you’re not alone. On Thursday night, Cardi B tweeted that she thought Childish Gambino and Donald Glover looked extremely similar:

“It’s amazing how Donald Glover and Childish Gambino look soo much alike,” she tweeted. “I think they secretly the same person.”

The tweet has since been deleted, but a quick poking around on Twitter indicates that her sentiments have been shared by many:

So, whether you know him as Lando from “Solo: A Star Wars Story” or as his rap alter ego in “This Is America,” he’s still just one singular dude.

An Indian-American woman made history on the New York Police Department this month.

Gursoch Kaur, a 20-year-old from Queens, New York, graduated from the New York Police Academy in May, becoming the first turbaned Sikh woman to join the NYPD. 

Her recent achievement has been widely praised across the Sikh community in the U.S.

It’s particularly significant given the statistics around Sikh representation in the department. Around 35,400 full-time uniformed officers work for the NYPD, 190 of whom are Sikh, according to the Sikh Officers Association. Around 10 are women.

“Auxiliary Police Officer Kaur’s accomplishment by joining NYPD Auxiliary has been ground breaking. She will be joining the largest Auxiliary Police Program in the United States. Officer Kaur will make all Sikhs around the world proud!” Delare Rathour, NYPD officer and vice president of the Sikh Officers Association, told HuffPost. “By the community seeing officer Kaur wearing a turban and in uniform they will feel nothing but pride, seeing one of their own serving her community.”

Kaur is now an Auxiliary Police Officer (APO), an officer who’s trained to assist local police precincts, housing police service areas and transit districts. She is currently a student at Nassau Community College, majoring in accounting.

Kaur told Desi Talk that she hopes her position as an APO will help her bring her closer to becoming a full-time, sworn-in police officer one day. 

Thus far, Kaur feels her presence on the force has helped the area’s residents learn more about her culture and bring visibility to the Sikh community. 

“I feel blessed. The only reason people are interested is because of my dastar (turban),” she told Desi Talk. “People haven’t seen anything like that. It’s great because it gives me an opportunity to tell them what’s behind the turban, educate them. That’s how we love one another.” 

The Sikh turban, which stands for service, compassion and honesty, among other values, was previously banned from officers’ attire. But in December 2016, the rule was nixed and Sikh officers were permitted to wear a blue turban with the NYPD logo on it. 

“We’re really happy that the higher ups in the NYPD listened to our concerns,” Gurvinder Singh, president of the Sikh Officers Association, previously told HuffPost. “They realized this a diverse city and that a more diverse police force is necessary.”

Follow HuffPost Asian Voices on Twitter. 

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman doesn’t apologize for much. In the past year, his government has massacred civilians in Yemen, kidnapped the prime minister of Lebanon and spent $450 million of unknown provenance on a painting while rounding up hundreds of people for alleged corruption. He’s publiclydefended those actions.

But there’s one thing the crown prince is always willing to express remorse about: Islam, or at least the version dominant in his country. “We were victims,” he recently told “60 Minutes.”

Crown Prince Mohammed’s pitch to governments, citizens and, most importantly, investors, explicitly plays on global Islamophobia and many Muslims’ own frustrations about the violence committed in the name of their religion. It neatly identifies Islam as a problem and the prince as the solution. And this summer is supposed to bring a marquee moment for the battle against fundamentalist Islam the crown prince says he’s fighting: On June 24, women will gain the legal right to drive in Saudi Arabia.

But the “reformer” prince’s rhetoric is colliding with the reality of his rule. Since May 15, his government has been arresting human rights advocates — among them some of the most prominentSaudi women activists— in a crackdown that perpetuates long-standing Saudi repression.

The crown prince’s playbook is an old one. For strongmen in the Muslim-majority world, the trope of the scary Muslim is invaluable. It allows them to bond with skeptics of Islam abroad — remember the orb? — and constantly justify their continued rule.

After all, the argument goes, do you really want their people in charge instead? It’s the kind of language Syrian President Bashar Assad proudly uses to declare himself a vital defender of secularism and paint his opposition, including peaceful activists, as essentially too Muslim.

Talk of “moderation” and “modernization” has defined regional rulers seeking to solidify their control since at least the early 20th century. But Muslim leaders became especially invested in that language after the 9/11 attacks prompted global soul-searching about the roots of terrorism, according to Annelle Sheline, a George Washington University doctoral student who studies the way governments in the region brand themselves.

These leaders watched with alarm as members of the George W. Bush administration argued that the key to peace was spreading democracy.

“The Middle East regimes were not so interested in having the spotlight shined on their activities or sharing their power,” Sheline said. Eventually, “the Bush administration was fairly willing to buy into the bill of goods that a lot of Arab regimes were selling, which was that it’s not authoritarianism, it’s Islam, and we need to change Islam.”

So the regimes promised change. The Saudis pledged to cut hate speech from their textbooks. Jordan gathered 200 scholars for a declaration of Muslim tolerance and unity. Around the region, governments expanded their control over what was preached and discussed in mosques. Implicit throughout was the idea that they could identify and enshrine a “correct” Islam for subjects always on the verge of falling for fundamentalists, and that that was all the change the world needed to deal with al Qaeda and its affiliates.

When the 2011 Arab Spring protests exposed how unhappy and marginalized many Muslims remained, the region’s authoritarians were in a bind. Some — like Assad, and Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi — set off nightmarish civil wars. Others tried to be more subtle, working to boost fears internationally about the figures gaining political power for the first time.

“It was like, ‘Oh, good, if we let them have democracy, we have the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, or else we get war in Syria.’ There’s definitely been this sense that clearly these people aren’t ready for democracy,” Sheline said. She believes that argument is flawed because it doesn’t acknowledge how violent undemocratic regimes inspire more violence in their societies.

Claiming to take big steps toward moderation is especially difficult for the rulers of Saudi Arabia. Crown Prince Mohammed claims the kingdom has only espoused a strict interpretation of Islam since Iran began doing so in 1979. But the truth is that proponents of ultra-traditionalist theology have been allied with the royal family for over 200 years.

Underpinning that alliance is one goal: the survival of a regime in which the al Saud family and clerics close to them are all-powerful. As long as that remains the crown prince’s ultimate priority ― and he authorizes those working for him to punish even the slightest questioning of the system ― any moves away from state-sponsored orthodoxy won’t make his society more stable.

Abroad, too, it’s unclear that the crown prince’s vows of change will help to reduce militancy.

Muslim communities from Indonesia to Kosovo have claimed that Saudi influence is responsible for fundamentalism that never existed previously. Saudi proselytizing did become intense after Iran started challenging its regional dominance, and Crown Prince Mohammed has admitted as much. But Saudi government influence over preachers, books and centers abroad receiving Saudi funding actually started declining before 9/11 and the rise of the Islamic State.

And it’s unclear that reining in the Saudi government’s religious intervention abroad or Saudi individuals’ influence in other countries will magically reshape Islam. Violence and alienation drove people in places like Tunisia and Pakistan to terror groups long before Saudi petrodollars started flowing into their societies; they will continue to do so long after.

None of that is to say the crown prince and his ilk should start advising Muslims to become less tolerant. “To the extent that anybody buys into [Western-backed governments’ ‘moderate’ narrative], that’s good. We’d rather have the government putting out messages around toleration and moderation,” Sheline said of the view among U.S. officials.

But the cracks within Saudi Arabia, a country of 20 million people and the center of the global trade in energy and weapons, are not going away. Clamping down on intellectuals, stoking nationalism against Iran and calling activists “traitors” won’t heal them. Nor will the flows of foreign capital that Crown Prince Mohammed has identified as his top target.

Real change will require rethinking Saudi “practice” altogether — not just the religious kind.

When I was 11, I found out that my dad was gay. As shocking as this revelation was, I was relieved his sexuality was the reason my parents divorced and that my dad hadn’t left my mom to start another family that he loved more than ours. Still, I was confused. This was 1978, and there were no healthy representations of gay people in the media, and I had absolutely no idea what having a gay dad would mean for me. 

Then, just when I was starting to accept my father’s sexuality, I began to question my own, and by the time I turned 16, I came out as gay too. Despite the emotional turbulence my dad and I had been through, I counted myself lucky. Not only did I have a role model in my own family, but thanks to my Dad, I had already learned something so many other gay people at my age hadn’t: Being gay didn’t have to equal being childless.  

That message stuck with me throughout my life, and 25 years after I came out, when my friend Heidi, who I met at college, and I began discussing having a child together, I did not feel the same apprehension that plagues some other gay men. Heidi was essentially family to me, and we viewed having a child as a natural extension of our close friendship. We were both single, our families knew and liked each other, and we spent many holidays together. We laughed at the same things, had lots in common and both felt a burning desire to be parents. Comments like “If neither of us is married by …” or “Could we co-parent together?” had been peppered throughout our conversations for years, and when we seriously began to discuss it, we were hard pressed to think of a reason we shouldn’t do it. It just felt right.

By 2010, when we decided to put our plan into action, media representations of alternative parenting approaches and family types had come a long way. Miranda and Carrie had discussed their biological clocks on “Sex and the City” and revealed their “scary age,” or age at which they feared they would realize it was too late to have a baby. “Will & Grace” and “Modern Family” were opening closets and shining a bright light on modern gay life while offering new definitions of family. Even though there were still no visible gay-dad-straight-mom co-parenting role models for us to look to, there were so many more possibilities when it came to parenting, and Heidi and I felt determined to make our own version of a modern family a reality.  

Navigating uncharted waters, we would be forging ahead guided solely by instinct, but what prospective parents aren’t essentially doing that in most respects, right? There were no books on Amazon titled “Gay Dad, Straight Mom” or “When Your Gay BFF Becomes Your Baby Daddy,” and there were so many issues ― from the legal to the financial ― to iron out, but those were really just details to us. I felt that as a “couple,” we were at a distinct advantage, and I remember thinking, “Aren’t Heidi and I in a better position than many other people who get pregnant without having had the benefit of 20 years of friendship?” In our hearts we knew we were doing the right thing, and in our minds we had already become Daddy and Mommy. So with our plan concealed from family and friends, we set out to try to conceive.  

The idea of having sex made us chuckle, so we decided on at-home insemination without any kind of medical intervention. Since Heidi is a nurse, we had the benefit of her medical background, and we obtained the sterile cups, syringes and the other paraphernalia needed to increase our odds of conception. We agreed that if Heidi didn’t get pregnant within three months, we would each go to a fertility doctor to determine if we were individually able to have children. If my boys were the reason that Heidi couldn’t get pregnant, I would have been disappointed but graciously bowed out of the process, wishing her well in her journey toward becoming pregnant without me. I gave it my best shot (literally!), and we inseminated whenever Heidi was ovulating. 

We made the insemination process as lighthearted as we could because, while we were attempting to do something that, if successful, would alter our lives forever, there was a comical aspect to the process of doing this ourselves. Here we were actually doing what so many other gay men and their straight college girl friends had promised each other they would do, and the faint sound of their words ― “If I’m not married by 40 …” “You’re my gay BFF. We should have a baby!” ― echoed in our heads throughout our journey.

On insemination night there was no mood lighting, no chardonnay and no Barry White playing. Instead we told each other funny stories after the process was complete. Heidi remained lying on her bed, hips raised at an angle to increase the odds of sperm meeting egg, with Led Zeppelin playing (Heidi sings in a Led Zeppelin cover band, after all), a “Seinfeld” rerun on TV and cartons of our favorite Chinese takeout within reach. After our third attempt, Heidi became pregnant. Apparently steamed shrimp dumplings plus “Stairway to Heaven” plus some Jerry, Elaine, George and Kramer craziness equaled success ― at least for us.

Throughout the pregnancy, I remained awestruck that the sonogram images of the baby in Heidi’s belly were of my child, and I found myself marveling at the fact that the in-home insemination really worked. We worked out that Heidi would have primary custody during the week, I would have the baby at my place on the weekend, we would share finances and we would create a Family Day ― one day dedicated to our all being together ― that we would share each week. 

In September 2010 our son, Nathaniel Chase, was born. We hadn’t attended one Lamaze class, since he arrived before they were scheduled to start, but Heidi was a confident champ, masterfully in tune with herself and what her body was naturally designed to do. I was steadfastly there by her side ― cheering her on and holding a knee when helpful but scurrying to move my daddy ass out of the way when the nurse screamed at me to do so. After Nate was born, we had an impromptu “circle of life” moment (cue “The Lion King”) to welcome him into the world and then had Chinese food delivered to the hospital room.

What I came to realize after our son was born was that our situation as parents was more similar to than different from those who became parents in what we now think of as a more traditional way. Our co-parenting story garnered some media attention, and we appeared on NBC, CNN and other networks with the intention of showing that we were an alternative family proud of our journey. We thought (and still think) of ourselves as simply Mommy and Daddy ― there to guide, educate, love and raise our child, just as millions of other parents do every day. My sexuality and Heidi’s choice as a single woman to become a mom were not at all relevant to our abilities to parent, and while our identities may have changed how we got to where we are today, ultimately, they do not define us as parents.  

Parenting as a gay man has been interesting, to say the least. In addition to experiencing many of the typical things that a first-time father experiences, I often find myself in situations other dads might not. In 2012, I was in a Starbucks when a well-intentioned grandmotherly type approached me and asked what so many others have asked me over the previous two years when they saw me alone with Nate: “Is it Mommy’s day off today? Are you babysitting?” Unfortunately for her, she chose the wrong guy and the wrong day to inquire and I told her what I’d been itching to tell the dozens of people who had asked me similar questions before. “I’m gay,” I responded. “How do you know that my child’s other parent is a woman, or that there even is a mommy?” The woman turned whiter than the foam on her latte. 

I don’t entirely fault her for seeing a man with a baby through a more traditional lens, probably as a result of being the product of her older generation, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a rush of satisfaction from responding the way I did. And to be honest, I also take issue with the idea that if a man is alone with a baby, that automatically means he’s babysitting or temporarily stepping into mom’s shoes when she’s not around. Men parent too, and they aren’t babysitters to their own kids.

Another time I was texting with a gay friend, and he told me that he was on his way to have a threesome. “Look what you’re missing out on by having to be home on a Saturday night with your toddler!” he wrote. “Will you ever be able to go out again?”  

I was never interested in threesomes before my son was born, but that was beside the point. It wasn’t my job to convince him that I was happy or that there was nowhere else I would rather be on a Saturday night than at home reading “Goodnight Moon” to the most important little guy in my world.        

My family is everything to me, and I’m thankful for what I’ve been able to experience because of the people I love. I’m especially grateful for Heidi and the way that becoming parents together morphed our relationship from best friends to something even richer and deeper and built on even more trust and respect than we had for each other before. We work hard to discipline Nate consistently in our respective homes, communicate daily and try our best to parent as a united front. Not everyone supports what we are doing, and we’ve faced many challenges (including some despicably misogynistic and homophobic comments), but we expected that to some degree, and we’ve learned to tune out that ugly noise and focus on what is most important ― raising Nate and being a positive example of what a loving, modern family looks like.

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The best way to watch Harvey Weinstein walk himself into a Manhattan police precinct on Friday morning was via NBC News’ Periscope.

As the former Oscar-winning Hollywood producer and “king of indie film” marched from his black car into the police station, NBC correspondent Craig Melvin began naming some of the 95 women who have come forward with allegations against Weinstein ― Lucia Evans, Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, Lupita Nyong’o, Uma Thurman, Salma Hayek. Reaction icons started floating up the right side of the screen, little hearts of different colors, one after another after another, until they formed a cloud of “likes.”

We, the people of the internet, were engaging in a collective act of schadenfreude, and it was delicious.

Women are so often told to contain our anger, to make it more palatable, less “aggressive,” small enough to contain within the male prerogative. But I’m angry at men like Harvey Weinstein, and there’s nothing palatable about it.

The man who beckoned young women to his hotel rooms for the sole purpose of using them, who hired ex-Mossad agents to track anyone liable to expose him, who had vast resources at his fingertips and used them liberally to try to silence the dozens of women he (allegedly) victimized ― even that man is no longer untouchable.

That man had to walk past reporters as he entered a police station, submitting to the cheap cop pornography of the perp walk. That man looked haggard and tilted his head low to avoid eyes and questions. That man also carried two books with him into the police station, biographies of Big Men in Show Biz — Elia Kazan, and Rodgers and Hammerstein — because he is, after all, exactly the kind of prick who fancies himself both a legend and a victim of a pious mob. That man was charged with rape, committing a criminal sex act, sexual abuse and sexual misconduct.

It is still shocking to see powerful men face criminal charges for harming women, and even more shocking to see them convicted. And the process leading up to that ― the public offerings of private pain (hers and hers and hers and hers and hers and hers and hers and hers and hers and hers and hers …), the scrutiny of that pain, the way it’s picked apart and held up to the light and valued according to how neatly it can be added to a pile of other women’s pain ― is not a pretty one. The rapid rise of the Me Too movement has been exhilarating to witness but also exhausting.

There are few moments of relief when an eternity of systemic abuse is being unpacked and processed. When those moments do present themselves, your instinct is to seize them like a prize. Weinstein is the man behind some of the most recognizable films of my lifetime, but surely the footage many of us will most remember him for is Friday’s walk. A big man in a blue sweater, displayed like any other perp for our delectation, tokens of self-pity and self-regard in the crook of his arm.

As Rose McGowan tweeted Friday morning: “We got you, Harvey Weinstein, we got you.”

I hope all 95 women who have said Weinstein violated them saw the footage, and I hope they let themselves feel even a nanosecond of pleasure. When (some) men are (finally) held accountable for their abuses, it does not undo the pain and damage they’ve wrought. But maybe, just maybe, it feels damn good to watch.

Stock photography of East Asian–Americans often depicts us as peripheral characters or stereotypically as doctors or students. In 2018, that’s perplexing. 

At a time when Asian-Americans are demanding proper representation beyond the model minority myth, imagery plays an important role in busting the idea that we’re a monolith. Asians account for 5.1 percent of the U.S. population, but only about 3 percent of Hollywood film roles go to Asian actors, so photography is important in addressing a lack of representation.

We wanted to ensure our diverse visual stories are told, so we shot our own stock photos of Asian-Americans of all types ― people of different gender identities, ages and body types with varying styles, hair colors and professions. 

Check them out below and start seeing more Asians sitewide on HuffPost. 

No matter how much time you spend watching Netflix every week, the streaming service wants you to watch more. 

One way the company is doing this is by spending billions on acquiring and creating the best shows and movies out there. That’s great and offers real cultural value.

Another way Netflix does this is by using extremely complex algorithms and subtle marketing features to trick you into watching more... and more... and more. That’s not so great if you value your free time and don’t want to waste your precious hours on this planet watching subpar shows and movies.

You’re almost definitely well aware that Netflix programs episodes to autostart when the previous episode finishes, thus increasing the chance you get locked into an unintentional binge. That’s the kind of obvious product choice that you can spot and avoid if you want to.

Yet there are a few other tricks the company employs that you might not have noticed yet.

Netflix is also very open about these “tricks.” The company documents product rollouts extensively on various company blogs you can read for yourself. 

The Streamline mission is to help you make better and more intentional choices of what to stream, rather than waste your time with mediocre content. Hopefully, becoming aware of these subtle tricks will help you.

In any case, read about the tricks below. And if you want to stay informed about the best things that are joining Netflix on a weekly basis (because Streamline does, in fact, love Netflix), make sure to subscribe to the Streamline newsletter. 

This is part of Streamline, HuffPost’s weekly recommendation service for streaming shows and movies. Every Saturday, Streamline ranks the best shows to watch online, including a focus on Netflix. 

1. The customized images

Back in the early days of the Netflix streaming platform, the service would show you the actual promotional posters for the various shows and movies it offered. Later, Netflix decided those recommendations would be better with custom pictures.

This initial customization decision fixed a couple of problems: Netflix could start using horizontal photos that allow for bigger typeface and design variance. The images could also show character faces more clearly than just hoping the movie posters were good.

There are a lot of bad movie posters out there or at least plenty that don’t look great as small images on a television, laptop or smartphone screen. So this move by Netflix made sense.

In December 2017, Netflix announced that the customization would get fancier, by offering different promotional images to users based on that specific user’s tastes.

As seen in the example photo above provided in Netflix’s announcement, the service will try to make you think a show or movie is just like the other shows and movies you like.

The photo example focuses on variants of comedy fandom. If you’re a fan of classic comedies and there’s a famous comedian in a particular project, Netflix will show you a picture of that person. If you’re more a fan of romantic comedies, then Netflix will show you two characters from the project that might be in love.

For an important Netflix Original rollout like the latest season of “Stranger Things,” Netflix made many different custom images to appeal to different users. You can see a few of them in the image at the very top of this article.

On Feb. 7, Netflix announced that the company now uses an algorithm to comb through shows and movies to find the perfect promotional stills given different marketing requirements.

Basically, this Netflix algorithm will find stills of character close-ups in some sort of emotional moment. And then eventually another Netflix algorithm decides which characters to market to you (such as the famous comedian or the couple from the example before).

Presumably the algorithms will just get more and more powerful until every show and movie on your homepage looks like something you’d want to check out. 

2. The special attention to fonts

This is far from a Netflix specific trick. Marketing designers have long used font choices to distinguish products from each other. 

But given Netflix’s extremely large catalogue of original shows and movies, it’s worth noting how the company uses font to make everything seem unique.

Back in March, the data visualization website Venngage explored the connection between Netflix’s font choices and user psychology.

The Venngage team essentially pulled a ton of data on Netflix font selections and then showed that Netflix is putting nuanced care into this design element.

Pretty much every Netflix show has its own original font. Even a blockbuster like “Avatar” famously just used the maligned font “Papyrus.”

Although the use of customized fonts might seem like a small thing, Netflix’s special attention here exemplifies that the company is trying to use every advantage it can to get you to click on more content.

The decorative “Glow” font or the handwritten “Love” font or the mystical “Ozark” font might have been the final push you needed to click on those shows.

3. The algorithms used to customize your rows

Those rows of recommendations on your Netflix homepage are way, way, way more customized than you probably thought.

And the company is constantly experimenting with what to recommend to you.

Netflix explained the case for the “rows” concept in 2015. Understanding this technique is a good starting point for comprehending the homepage customization in general.

The Netflix announcement from 2015 described it well, so here’s the relevant paragraph:

By presenting coherent groups of videos in a row, providing a meaningful name for each row, and presenting rows in a useful order, members can quickly decide whether a whole set of videos in a row is likely to contain something that they are interested in watching. This allows members to either dive deeper and look for more videos in the theme or to skip them and look at another row. This would not be the case if, for example, the page contained a large, unorganized collection of relevant videos.

So “rows” are Netflix’s organizing principal. And as you can guess, customization can easily be achieved by showing an “action” fan a row of action movies.

As you’ve probably noticed, Netflix tends to offer genre rows that are far more specific than “action” though. So a user could get a “Cerebral TV Shows” row or “Irreverent Rant Stand-Up Comedy.”

(There’s even secret codes you can use to find these lists, as pointed out by The Daily Dot.)

But the Netflix customization gets far more nuanced than even that.

One such way is a process Netflix explained in 2017 as “interleaving.” 

Basically this process allows for a more scalpel-esque approach to gathering data on what you want to watch. Instead of just gathering the data that you’re watching a “Cerebral TV Show,” Netflix is running multiple tests within that given row.

This is definitely confusing, so here’s an attempt at a simplified example:

While you see one row of content on the homepage with one label (such as “Top Picks” for you) the Netflix algorithm has actually hidden various, even more nuanced rows of options in the same row.

Therefore, it seems that multiple subsets of, say, the “Cerebral TV Show” concept are actually in that row you perceive to be just one thing. And then if you consistently choose one particular secret subset, the whole row will shift to giving you more from that particular algorithmic recommendation.

Long story short: The algorithm is very far past a simple “user likes action movies / show more action movies” setup.

4. The “Trending Now” row is personalized too

If you thought you could use this row to choose something that would be a part of the zeitgeist, you’ll likely be disappointed.

Netflix rolled out a “Trending Now” row in 2015. At the time, the company explained that the name isn’t exactly true.

Instead of just presenting the shows and movies that are actually trending the most at any given moment, Netflix is still customizing for you personally.

This is just one more way to get you to keep watching things in your own rabbit hole of personal taste. And the “Trending Now” row only makes you think that you’re connecting to a larger community.

Of course, there still is some truth to the “Trending” moniker.

For example, as holiday-themed shows and movies gain steam around the respective holidays, these titles tend to appear in this row.

The row is basically a snapshot of what you’re most likely to want to watch right now. The answer to that will be different from user to user. But occasionally when megahits like “Stranger Things” debut a new season, the tastes of many users will align. 

5. The autoplaying trailers

This is perhaps the most hated feature about Netflix’s homepage.

“Current favorite console game: navigating Netflix without triggering autoplay promos,” director Rian Johnson (“Star Wars: The Last Jedi”) tweeted back in March. That tweet got over 31,000 likes.

But Netflix clearly has some data that autoplaying trailers are causing you to watch more shows and movies, and so this terrible feature persists.

The autoplaying trailers on the homepage debuted back in 2016. These don’t tend to happen on a desktop and were originally designed for Netflix homepages on Roku, video game consoles and smart TVs.

This distinction is important because, on these platforms, the cursor is always selected on some show or movie by default. And then after about a second, the trailer begins on the selected item. On a desktop with a mouse cursor, nothing in particular is ever selected and therefore the autoplaying would be all over the place.

The rollout announcement explained that these videos were just one more way that Netflix could try and convince you to watch something new. (A video in the announcement (embedded above) had the promotional tagline, “So you can browse less... and watch more.”)

The goal is to explicitly trick you to “watch more.” Don’t weigh your options. Don’t get off the couch and do something else. Keep watching Netflix.

Bonus: Obvious, but the incredible marketing for bad movies

I’m including this one as a bonus as it’s more just something I’ve noticed than a “trick” with hard evidence. But the marketing department at Netflix is phenomenal.

And marketing that makes bad things seem like good things is arguably the most impressive trick of all.

Netflix clearly spends considerable resources in the promotional phase to make sure the Netflix Originals all look like they could be amazing.

It’s usually fairly easy to discern from a trailer or poster if a movie or show is going to be trash, but Netflix has a knack for making just about every single trailer and poster compelling.

There have been countless posters for Netflix Originals that have been beautiful works of art and then the actual content has been bad. (See the “Mute” example above as that movie earned a 15% on Rotten Tomatoes.)

You really can’t tell whether something is actually going to be worth your time from any Netflix promotional material. I, for one, keep getting excited about Netflix projects I shouldn’t be caring about at all.

I just hope I can someday figure out how to stop getting tricked by Netflix. Until then, I’ll just keep streaming and hoping I’m getting Netflix’s best.

A trio of older gay men offer their collective take on terms and expressions used by younger members of the queer community for a hilarious new video. 

The clip ― released Tuesday by Grindr’s online lifestyle magazine, INTO ― finds the men sounding off on popular slang phrases like “werk,” “extra” and, of course, “yas kween.”  

As the video progresses, the men offer off-the-cuff observations, as well as bits of sage advice, to their younger counterparts. 

“You guys are watching too much RuPaul,” one quips in the clip, which had been viewed over 114,000 times as of Friday afternoon. Adds another, “This is the kind of thing the Kardashians would sit around and do all afternoon.” 

If the video has an underlying message, it’s that the LGBTQ community, which is often criticized for what many interpret as internalized ageism, stands to benefit from more intergenerational reflection. 

After he graduated from college, it took Nathan two years, three unpaid internships and six bartending and retail jobs before he got his first paid gig in progressive politics. His employer was a small, millennial-focused outreach nonprofit, and his job was to supervise four interns — young kids, fresh out of school, working the same day job/night job, 80-hour-a-week cycle he had just exited.

Nathan, who wouldn’t give his real name out of fear of retaliation, asked his boss if he could start paying the interns. “I didn’t think I was going to get them federal minimum wage — that’s impossible in Washington,” he said. “But at least they could get a stipend.”

His boss refused, without offering much of a case for why they couldn’t afford to pay them.

“It just wasn’t a conversation,” Nathan said. “I didn’t have the authority to push it because I was a low-level person.”

He felt complicit, and after a few months, he quit. He’s currently in grad school to become a teacher.

“I had a lot of hope that my party would not be slimy,” he said. “But that felt slimy.”

Nathan’s experience is emblematic of a growing concern on the left: For a movement that wants to reach young people, low-income workers and people of color, progressive organizations and candidates don’t offer many paid opportunities.

“This is why we see attrition in the movement,” said Maggie Thompson, executive director of Generation Progress, the youth arm of the liberal think tank Center for American Progress (which pays its interns, incidentally).

For decades, internships, fellowships and paid travel to conferences have acted like a tractor beam, drawing young people into political movements and holding them long enough to become researchers, strategists and candidates. But the funding to support those kinds of programs hasn’t kept up with the economic realities of the young people who today’s progressives are trying to reach.

“The pipeline of young people who can get through school, deal with student debt and stay involved in politics has shrunk dramatically compared to previous generations,” Thompson said.

Progressives aren’t just out of sync with their own need to recruit and retain young people. They’re also lagging behind conservative interests. A 2017 study found that between 2008 and 2014, conservative donors gave three times more to millennial outreach groups than liberal donors. Much of that funding, Thompson says, went to things like paid fellowships, travel stipends and study grants ― creating the feeder system that will guide young people into actual jobs with political campaigns and think tanks.

“The Republicans are building an army, while the Democrats are still paying you in ‘making the world a better place,’” said Carlos Vera, the executive director of Pay Our Interns, a watchdog group. “I’ve had older people say to me, ‘Well, I did unpaid internships and I was fine.’ Then you ask them when that was and they say, ‘1972.’ You could work your way through college back then. That simply is not the case anymore.”

Vera spent last year calling every lawmaker in the House and Senate and asking whether they paid their interns. His report, Experience Doesn’t Pay the Bills, found that more than half of Republican senators offered paid internships, compared to fewer than a third of Democratic senators. In the House it was even worse: Twice as many Republicans as Democrats paid their interns.

This year, Vera has been calling nonprofits and think tanks and asking them the same thing. So far he’s found the same pattern: Fox News, the Cato Institute and Americans for Prosperity pay their interns. The Progressive Policy Institute, Let America Vote and the Human Rights Campaign don’t.

Though harder to quantify than political donations, it appears that conservatives have built a recruitment, retention and leadership development apparatus that dwarfs that of the left. The Charles Koch Institute has an “associates program” that places young professionals in conservative think tanks and pays an average of $41,000 per year. The Leadership Institute, a conservative youth organization, offers interns free accommodation, free food, an $825-per-month stipend and a $200 “book allowance.”

Thompson is on the mailing lists for several conservative youth organizations, and says they feature “nonstop travel scholarships, fellowships and opportunities.” Her progressive lists don’t offer nearly the same volume of funded positions.

While some left-leaning think tanks do offer paid internships and fellowships, they tend to be less generous. EMILY’s List, for example, offers a stipend of “up to $300 per month, dependent on schedule,” but no housing. The American Civil Liberties Union tells internship applicants that “a modest stipend may be available if the student does not receive outside funding.” The New America Foundation offers course credits to its interns, which means they may actually be paying to work.

Republicans are more deliberate about college outreach

The most glaring reason for the left-right youth investment gap is the sheer scale of the conservative political machine. In 2016, the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute both had revenues above $75 million. The largest progressive think tank, the Center for American Progress, had just $40.9 million.

Republicans are also more deliberate with their outreach on college campuses. According to its 2017 tax filings, the Leadership Institute held 355 trainings for conservative students last year. In 2015, Young America’s Foundation spent $13 million on lectures, conferences, seminars and outreach — more than twice the entire budget of Young Invincibles, its rough analogue on the left. Turning Point USA, whose mission is to “identify, educate, train, and organize” college conservatives, went from $79,000 to $4.3 million in revenue in just three years. 

Conservatives have also invested in youth-oriented news sources. These include the news outlet Campus Reform (sample headline: “Financial aid for illegals likely to cost NJ nearly $5M/year”), the blog Red Alert Politics (“A’s for liberal papers only: A conservative’s college experience”) and the viral video shop Prager University (“The Least Free Place in America”). They all focus almost exclusively on the dangers of political correctness and the threats to free speech on college campuses.

All this investment doesn’t mean, of course, that conservatives are winning the battle for millennial hearts and minds. Only 12 percent of young people considered themselves mostly or consistently conservative in a 2017 Pew poll, a 4-point drop since 2011. Progressive political organizations — as outlets like Campus Reform are always reminding us — still vastly outnumber conservative organizations on college campuses.

But these differences do demonstrate the structural challenge of building a left-wing talent pipeline. Progressives are spread across a huge range of groups and issues — income inequality, climate change, racial justice — and have fewer organizations explicitly dedicated to movement-building than conservatives. That makes it harder to prioritize long-term investments over short-term wins.

“The right is focused on the long game of investing in people when they find them on a college campus,” said Stephen Kent, the spokesperson for Young Voices Advocates, a nonprofit that, among other things, helps conservative students place op-eds in their college newspapers. “The left-leaning groups are working on whatever election is facing them in the next 12 months. Then all those connections die.”

Amy Binder, a researcher at the University of California, San Diego, and the co-author of Becoming Right: How Campuses Shape Young Conservatives, has spent the past year interviewing students at four large state schools. She sees the same trend.

“What the right is doing is creating a cadre of potential leaders,” she said. “When they’re on campus they aren’t necessarily doing the bidding of donors, but they’re getting to know each other. They’re professionalizing and socializing students. I don’t see that happening on the left in the same way.”

Losing talent, missing opportunities

While understandable given its constraints, the left’s challenges in movement-building are making it harder to transition from winning elections to making policy.

One veteran progressive organizer, who didn’t want to be named out of concern for losing donors, points out that winning elections is just one component of building political power.

“When you can’t get funding outside of that, you have to raise it elsewhere,” she said. “It’s a huge waste of time at a moment when statehouses are in session and we should be doing accountability work and getting laws passed.”

And that’s not the only missed opportunity. Nearly everyone I spoke to pointed out that this has created not just a generation gap in progressive groups, but racial disparities between the voters they are trying to reach and the organizations representing them. A 2013 study found that 88 percent of nonprofit staffers and 92 percent of CEOs were white. Another, in 2016, found that only 11 percent of nonprofit staffers were under 30. 

“We pride ourselves on supporting young people in our ideology, but then we don’t give them any options,” said Maxwell Love, a former president of the U.S. Student Association. He attended several left-wing political trainings as a student, he says, but there were few paid opportunities available. He’s watched many of his peers drift away from politics.

“We’re missing people at their most formative political years,” he said. “I’m blown away by all the people in student government who seemed like they would work in progressive politics and then boom, they’re working at Oracle or they’re a business consultant. I’m not going to blame anyone for doing that, but it means we can’t hold on to talent, especially working-class folks and people of color.”

The long-term ripple effects of this underinvestment are already visible. The average Democrat in Congress is 59.6 years old, almost four years older than the average Republican. The GOP has 23 senators under 60, compared to just 13 Democrats.

Love is now 27 and a Wisconsin-based organizer for Our Revolution, the continuation of the Bernie Sanders campaign. He says there’s nothing inevitable about young people remaining Democrats ― he meets many young conservatives in the course of his work.

“Maybe this isn’t a group we have on lock,” he said.

The fault in our donors

The lack of paid, entry-level jobs in progressive politics isn’t just the fault of Democrats or liberal organizations. Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, a political scientist at Columbia University, says the real culprit is donors.

He compares the largest donor networks on the left and the right, the Democracy Alliance and the network of political organizations known as the “Koch network.” They’re similar in a lot of ways: Both pool donations from wealthy donors, vet recipients and seek to pull candidates closer to their causes.

Where they differ are their structures ― and their effectiveness. Hertel-Fernandez points out that since 2012, the Koch network, despite its lack of formal structure, has become more centralized and hierarchical. It gives to the favorite causes of its founders, billionaire fossil fuel moguls Charles and David Koch, and, increasingly, to organizations they control directly. Freedom Partners, one of the Koch network’s largest nonprofits, concentrates the majority of its giving on just eight organizations.

The Democracy Alliance, on the other hand, has moved in the opposite direction, giving smaller donations to a wider range of charities and delegating control to its members, according to Hertel-Fernandez’s research. The Democracy Alliance did not respond to a request for comment.

“It’s hard to steer the ship of progressive donors,” Hertel-Fernandez said. “All of the folks participating in the Democracy Alliance have their own favorite issues and strategies. They come in with a set of organizations they’re enthusiastic about. In the Koch network, you’re signing up to support the Kochs’ agenda.”

The way this difference manifests on the ground is in the balance between united, general funding versus activity-specific and project-based funding.

Sarah Audelo, executive director of the Alliance for Youth Action, a consortium of youth-focused member organizations, says most of her donors want data and metrics on how their donations are spent. For some projects, they pay per door knock. That’s understandable ― who doesn’t want their donations to be spent efficiently? ― but it also means she has less room for experimentation, and less flexibility to hire staff and capitalize on the youth activism spreading across the country since 2016 on issues like immigration and gun violence.

“Since Parkland, we’ve got tons of young people engaging,” she said. Her groups want to scale to meet the demand, but donors don’t always want to provide the resources to hire enough full-time, paid staff.

“You can’t manage contacts and track legislation with only volunteers,” she said. “In some places, we’re literally turning away young people who are great candidates for interns and fellows because we don’t have the capacity to give them a positive experience. Progressives shouldn’t be turning away young people in states like Texas.”

Hertel-Fernandez says the strategy conservative donors have employed — get large and stay large — is part of what’s allowed conservative mobilization groups like Americans for Prosperity to mobilize so quickly around opposing Medicaid expansion, restricting public sector unions and pre-empting cities from raising the minimum wage.

“They’ve made strategic investments,” he said. “Americans for Prosperity is organized at the local, state and national level. If you want to affect politics in the United States, you have to organize at all of those levels. They’ve moved the party further and faster to the right than progressives have moved the Democrats to the left.”

Things are changing

Katie Kirchner, deputy director of the Roosevelt Network ― the campus outreach arm of the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank ― says progressive organizing has always been an uphill battle.

“Conservatives are looking to reinforce existing power structures, where we’re looking to change them,” Kirchner said. “They have a strong funding edge, but they’re still losing the moral fight in the long run. Millennials are progressive.”

She says things are changing. Many of the largest progressive organizations have started paying their interns. The Roosevelt Institute offers a part-time fellowship that pays community college students $750 a month to organize on their own campuses. NextGen America, one of the most rapidly expanding progressive groups, is currently offering paid fellowships all over the country. Love says Our Revolution pays its interns $3,000 for the summer.

Still, if progressive organizations want to build a movement that attracts and reflects the demographics crucial to their success, a much larger swath of them will have to offer something beyond 80-hour weeks, three-figure stipends and bartending side gigs.

Thompson says her first job in politics was knocking on doors for a living wage campaign in Minnesota. Her student aid paid her a stipend, and borrowing her parents’ Corolla allowed her to cover more ground. 

“Eventually, I got to work for Barack Obama,” she said. “But what it took at the beginning was an $1,800 stipend and an old car.”