This is You Won’t Regret It, a new weekly column featuring recommendations, tips, and unsolicited advice from the Mashable culture team.

There are few greater joys than having insanely soft baby skin. Some people are born with it while others — like me — have to labor to achieve desired softness. 

In my quest to join the ranks of those with satin-like limbs, I have tried many things. Over the years, various exfoliating brushes or gloves have made their way in and out of my bathroom. Name a cream or lotion, and I’ve probably tried that too. But nothing has come close to the dear friend and ally I have found in the Baiden Mitten — an exfoliating mitt that will have you feeling like a goddamn cloud. 

When I was younger, I was always self-conscious about the tiny bumps that littered my arms and caused my skin to feel rough to the touch. Later in life, I learned that I had a very common skin condition called keratosis pilaris (KP for short.) As a self-conscious teenager I tried various ways to scrub them away, but nothing seemed to work until I found the Baiden Mitten. 

I stumbled upon it while comparing exfoliating gloves online, and when I saw the photos of dead skin sloughing off of folks who had purchased the product, I felt the same sensation I’m sure pimple popper fanatics have felt: equal parts disgusted and utterly fascinated. 

I felt the same sensation I imagine pimple-popper fanatics have felt: equal parts disgust and utter fascination. 

The mitten is pretty simple in design, featuring tightly woven fibers are a little rough to the touch. 

Once you’ve soaked and steamed your skin in a bath or shower, you take the mitten and apply pressure to whatever area you’re exfoliating. With a firm hand, you essentially stroke up or down or side to side and dead skin just…rolls off. The clumps of skin (ew, I know) roll together and form bigger clumps that grab smaller clumps and…wow, it’s just engrossing. 

Less dead skin will slough off every time you use it, but if you’re consistent, you’ll notice long-lasting results. I moisturize liberally afterwards (rotating between jojoba oil, coconut oil, shea butter, or Amlactin lotion depending on the season) and then beg everyone in my life to touch my arm and see how smooth it is. Sorry, friends. 

I’ve come to terms with the fact that I will probably have KP forever, and it doesn’t bother me as an adult like it did when I was a kid. Still, the Baiden Mitten is one thing that’s turned into a staple in my self-care routine. Literally feeling good helps me feel good, too. 

While I use it strictly for my arms and legs, the (extremely outdated) website suggests that it can be used on the face (as long as you follow the instructions). There are plenty of pros and cons to physical exfoliation vs. chemical exfoliation for the face, so my best advice is to just do what feels best for you. 

A Baiden Mitten will run you about $50 on Amazon, and while they do last a long time, it might cost more than you’re willing to spend. Here are some alternatives that the people of Reddit’s /r/SkincareAddiction and across the internet have had success with: 

Stay smooth, friends!

People who seek only scandal and division must be answered with silence and prayer, Pope Francis said Monday as the Catholic Church continued to grapple with controversy surrounding allegations of sexual abuse.

Francis, in a homily during Mass in Vatican City, did not specifically address the growing scandal. But he said even families can have division over topics such as politics, sports and money. 

“With people lacking good will, with people who only seek scandal, who seek only division, who seek only destruction, even within the family — (respond with) silence, prayer,” the pope said.

Francis and the church have been hammered in recent weeks by a series of sexual abuse-related issues. In July, Washington Cardinal Theodore McCarrick resigned amid claims of abuse. 

Then, three weeks ago, the Pennsylvania attorney general released a grand jury report alleging that church leaders protected more than 300 “predator priests” in six Roman Catholic dioceses across Pennsylvania for decades. The report claimed the church was more interested in protecting its own interests and the abusers than tending to the victims.

More: Amid abuse scandal, fewer Irish Catholics attend Pope Francis’ Mass

More: Accuser says he has no regrets of speaking out

More: Prosecutor: Vatican knew about priest abuse cover-up in Pennsylvania

Another blow was struck last week by Italian Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, a former Vatican ambassador to the U.S., who called on Francis to resign. Vigano accused Francis of covering up McCarrick’s alleged misbehavior for years.

On Thursday, Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput said he has asked the pope to cancel a bishop’s conference focusing on youth scheduled for October in Rome.

“Right now, the bishops would have absolutely no credibility in addressing this topic,” he said. Chaput said the synod should instead concentrate on the life of bishops. Other bishops have made similar requests, according to the Catholic website Lifesitenews.com.

Francis addressed the global sexual abuse scandal in a speech late last month in Ireland, where outrage over abuses there overwhelmed coverage of the pope’s visit.

“The failure of … bishops, religious superiors, priests and others to adequately address these repugnant crimes has rightly given rise to outrage and remains a source of pain and shame for the Catholic community,” the pope said. “I myself share these sentiments.”

The pope has declined to respond to Vigano’s claims.

Truth is humble and silent, Francis said Monday. 

“May the Lord give us the grace to discern when we should speak and when we should stay silent,” the pope said. “This applies to every part of life – to work, at home, in society. …Thus we will be closer imitators of Jesus.”

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I am a great fan of Spike Lee’s cinema and have followed his extraordinary career closely. A few of his films, fiction and documentary, such as Do the Right Thing (1989) and 4 Little Girls (1997), I consider among the masterpieces of world cinema. Malcolm X (1992), his greatest film, is a staple of the courses I teach at Columbia. 

When his new film, BlacKkKlansman (2018) came out, a filmmaker friend and I made arrangements to go and see it right away at my regular hangout, Magic Johnson Theater in Harlem. We sat there dutifully from beginning to the end of the film waiting, hoping against hope, for the other shoe to drop. Alas! It never did. 

It is deeply disconcerting to watch the decisive failures of an iconic filmmaker you have always loved and admired. How could a gifted filmmaker who in his youthful thirties made a powerful epic like Malcolm X, in his mature 60s make a reactionary flop like BlacKkKlansman? What happened?

The question is not disappointment in one filmmaker, in one of his films. The implications of the failure, given the serious subject matter of the film, are far more important. 

What happened?

After I saw the film I went to read some of the reviews to see if I had missed anything. In the first sentence of his review of BlacKkKlansman, the prominent New York Times film critic AO Scott declares the film Spike Lee’s “best nondocumentary feature in more than a decade and one of his greatest.” 

Although we frequent the same movie theatres, he and I must have seen two different films, I thought. AO Scott’s laudatory review marked precisely where the trouble lies in this astonishingly reactionary film. 

So how could the epic filmmaker who gave the world Malcolm X be so blindsided in his latest film and how can critics fail to call him out? What happened?

Let me cut to the chase: Barack Obama happened – the most reactionary liberal affliction to the revolutionary momentum that was set in motion by generations of black critical thinkers and social movements capped by their crowning achievement, Malcolm X. That is what happened. Let me explain. (Spoiler alert: If you have not seen the film yet don’t read the rest of this essay until you do).  

BlacKkKlansman is a biopic based on the 2014 memoir Black Klansman by Ron Stallworth. Set in 1970s Colorado Springs, the film narrates the story of an African American detective who infiltrates the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. This setting provides the background against which we see the ridiculous antics and delusional racism of the KKK.  

As a period piece, the film could have been a perfectly powerful examination of the nasty roots of racism in the US. The trouble with the film starts when it leaps to larger ambitions, of being relevant today – in Trump’s America, when the deep-rooted racism, xenophobia, and bigotry definitive to this country have come out for a joyride.

With punctual references to the Black Lives Matter movement, many other suggestive phrasings, and the decisive ending of the film with footage of the Neo-Nazi white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, as well as with many interviews after the film was released, Spike Lee has made it clear this is a film about now, and not just about then.  

And it is this big ambition that makes BlacKkKlansman a politically outdated, retrograde, cliche-ridden nostalgia – indeed, not a period piece but a museum piece at a time when the world is in dire need not of more truisms of racism in the US but a deeper examination of the renewed roots of its resurgence, and the arts and ideas of how and where to fight it.

It is here, today, that Spike Lee in his latest film proves to be a deeply flawed, deeply reactionary filmmaker out of touch with the ugly truths of his own society.

If a film made in 2018, in Trump’s America, does not see that anti-black racism, anti-Jewish antisemitism, anti-Muslim Islamophobia, and anti-immigrant xenophobia are all variations on the same white supremacy theme, it has failed to see racism. It has fetishised the racist manufacturing of the colour “black”, bought into the white-centred codification of power, remained trapped in the dominant racist discourse, and failed to see or show beyond into any horizon of liberation form them all.

Myopic provincialism

By adopting myopic provincialism and abandoning the larger national and global context of racism and militarism, BlacKkKlansman shoots itself in the foot. Neither in the 1960s and – a fortiori – neither now, was the liberation of black people so insular and unaware of the larger global context.

While towering moral voices of the time like Martin Luther King Jr and Mohammad Ali were widely aware of the link between domestic racism and global militarism of the United States, it was Malcolm X who blasted the black liberation movement into global context by actively connecting it to African, Asian, and Latin American revolutionary mobilisations.

In his film, Spike Lee seems entirely oblivious to any such relation of what the fight against racism at home and militarism abroad means. All he had to do was to look at the aggressive militarisation of police forces, particularly in black neighbourhoods like Ferguson, and pay some attention to the fact that Israeli security forces are training them.

The reason why BlacKkKlansman doesn’t make this connection is because it targets the Obama liberals as its choice audience and stays there from beginning to end. In the process, the film gives short shrift to the most revolutionary mobilisation of African American politics in the 20th century, reducing it to cartoonish characters who speak like robots, act like mindless minions, and exude a fanatical obsession with their race.

In catering to a middle-class Obama voters’ audience, Spike Lee remains fatally limited to a white liberal constituency that join in laughing at David Duke and other ridiculous KKK caricatures and never see themselves implicated in the terror of Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and the rest of their wicked company.

These creatures did not come out of nowhere. Their roots are right under Spike Lee’s nose. But he does not see it.  

In perhaps the most abusive sequence of the film, we see the venerable figure of Harry Belafonte (as “Mr Turner”) surrounded by young revolutionary activists moved to the liberating cry of “Black Power” intercut with a KKK initiation ceremony’s crescendo to “White Power!” – devoid of any understanding of the differences between the two cries, one by a victorious racist ideology, the other by a defiant mobilisation against it. 

Behind history, not ahead of it 

Today, a racist Trump campaign aide screams at an African American man, “You’re out of your cotton-picking mind!” loudly and openly on national television and gets away with it. Today, a white Florida GOP gubernatorial nominee publicly warns a vote for his black opponent would “monkey this up” and also gets away with it.

Yet, in his film, Spike Lee decided to come nowhere near and decidedly stays far away from the roots of this evil to give his liberal white audiences a football field of comfort zone not to see themselves in such ugly phrases. BlacKkKlansman is made for a “post-racial” delusion in a pre-Civil War resurgence of racism in the United States.

Laser-focusing on the ridiculous KKK and partaking lavishly in the liberal class-conscious disdain of the white working-class places Spike Lee right next to Obama’s liberal imperialism and far from the heart of the Black Lives Matter movement, now definitive to this generation of progressive politics.

In his 2018 reading of racism, Spike Lee opts to come nowhere near a Muslim or a Mexican or an Arab or Afghan refugee as the primary targets of Trump-era xenophobia. There is not a clue of the interpolated spread of racism across the US society. Only a cliche-ridden rendition of a black police officer frozen in his cocoon, cut off from the moral fabric of his time and history.  

This was not the America of the 1970s, and this is not the America of the Trump terror. “While this platform is focused on domestic policies,” reads the platform of The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), right now in 2018, “we know that patriarchy, exploitative capitalism, militarism, and white supremacy know no borders. We stand in solidarity with our international family against the ravages of global capitalism and anti-Black racism, human-made climate change, war, and exploitation.” This is now. This is at the time that Spike Lee was making his film – and yet he is farthest removed from its towering moral power.

“The Movement for Black Lives stands with the Palestinian people and especially those in Gaza, that have been engaging in resistance at the Gaza border.” This, too, is the position of the single most powerful moral stand of Black Lives Matter today when Spike Lee made his film under the illusion that he has something to teach these brave and visionary activists.

There are a couple of references to Angela Davis in the film but no awareness of what she stood for then or what she or other luminary revolutionary leaders like Alice Walker stand for now. What sustained the civil rights movement of the 1960s were the massive demonstrations against the Vietnam war, was the now legendary MLK speech at Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, on militarism and racism, was Muhammad Ali’s heroic refusal to be drafted into the US army to go kill people who had done him no harm.

What enriches the M4BL today is in equal terms its antiwar positions in Iraq and Afghanistan and particularly against the Israeli crimes in Palestine. None of this means anything to Lee in his latest film. His myopia is blinding.  

Failing to read the present moment 

By the time we get to Spike Lee’s final montage of the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally in August 2017, when platoons of racist Americans faced courageous counterdemonstrators, he has wasted so much precious time on cliche antiquarianism and demonisation of black activism that it feels and looks like a cheap-shot slapstick.

Because of its sustained dramatic failures, the film ends with this forced denouement that fakes a Brechtian “Distancing effect” but ends up being a cop-out of any meaningful resolution to a moral crisis he had failed to map out.  

There are student activists present at that rally who have strongly objected to Lee’s use of that clip and accuse him of opportunism and of abusing their anti-racist movement to cap a deeply flawed rendition of black revolutionary activism and of whitewashing the role of the police then and now.

They have even pointed to Spike Lee receiving money from the New York Police Department to whitewash their image in black communities. But, again, serious as these charges might be, the question is not just historical inaccuracies. The issue is the moral imagination of the film itself, which is so deeply flawed.

The racist white supremacy that stages itself in bold vulgarity in Charlottesville rally or in the White House has its roots in the liberal imperialism that happily handed its reigns to the first black president for eight years before losing it to its more vulgar version that Trump embodies.

The potent liberal roots of that white supremacy get a free pass in Spike Lee’s new film, happily hide in the dark movie houses and laugh at idiot klansmen and write laudatory reviews of his film. This is what the liberal blind spot of a visionary filmmaker did not allow him to see.

I will continue to love, respect, and admire Spike Lee for the best of his work, above all for his monumental achievement Malcolm X. At issue here is not one filmmaker failing to live up to his own best work in his latest film.

The issue, rather, is the changing neoliberal climate of opposition to Trump that is abusing a legitimate criticism of a racist charlatan to muddy the water and dismantle an entire critical history of black revolutionary thinking and action against racism, with the token of Obama liberalism distorting an entire spectrum of far more serious promises.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance. 

On the weekend James Milner registered his 80th Premier League assist, we thought we’d test your knowledge of the league’s most prolific creators.

Can you name the top 20 all-time assist makers in the Premier League? (We’ve already given you one!) You’ve got four minutes.

Washington, DC – Republican Congressman Mike Bost’s big political moment this election year came in July when he and President Donald Trump toured the Granite City Steel Works near St Louis in the American heartland.

The president, appearing at a rally with Bost and other Illinois congressional Republicans, touted his steel tariffs and promised to bring industrial jobs back to the Midwest.

People in Illinois’ 12th district voted 55-40 percent for Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. Yet Bost, a Republican who has embraced Trump, is in a tight race for reelection this year.

“This is a competitive race that leans maybe slightly Republican is the way I would rate it,” said John Jackson, a political science professor at the Paul Simon Institute of Public Policy at the University of Southern Illinois in Carbondale, Ill.

One telling sign, the Granite City steelworkers union threw their support to Bost’s Democrat challenger, Brendan Kelly, a former state prosecutor and political moderate.

On November 6, some 80 million Americans – perhaps more depending on turnout – will cast ballots for all 435 seats in the US House of Representatives where Republicans now hold a 23-seat majority.

Historically called “midterm” elections, the vote is essentially a referendum on the party of the president whose performance in office is watched closely.

“Trump’s job approval is one of the critical factors and thus there is some reason to believe a Democratic wave is coming,” Jackson told Al Jazeera.

Recent polls show American voters increasingly hold negative views of the president. Sixty percent of registered voters in an August 29 Washington Post-ABC News poll disapproved of the job the president is doing, up from 54 percent in April.

Democrat revival?

Now, as Republicans begin their reelection campaigns in earnest, most analysts are predicting Democrats will gain control of the House, an outcome that would match historic norms.

“My forecast is that the Democrats will pick up a net of about 30 House seats. I don’t see a huge wave. But I think they will take the House,” said Greg Valliere, chief global strategist and Washington analyst at Horizon Investments LLC, a financial advisory firm.

Republican losses, however, easily could be higher depending on the depth of a potential backlash against Trump.

Republicans face credible challenges from Democrats in 62 congressional districts while Democrats face competition in only four, according to The Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan publisher of US political analysis.

In California, affluent suburban voters in Orange County have historically provided Republicans a reliable base of support. Not so this year.

“We used to be the county that Ronald Reagan said all good Republicans go to die,” Dan Chmielewski, publisher of TheLiberalOC, an Orange County political blog, told Al Jazeera.

“Hillary won Orange Country in 2016, the first time a Democrat has taken this county since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. There are significant cities that have voter registrations that are majority Democrat now,” he said.

‘House battlefield’ 

Three Orange County Republicans face Democratic challengers in races analysts rate as toss ups.

In the agricultural San Joaquin and San Fernando valleys, where Hispanics make up one-third or more of voters and Trump’s anti-immigrant policies hurt migrant workers, two more Republicans face competitive races.

In particular, Representative Dana Rohrbacher, now in his 15th term as a congressman, faces criticism at home for his connections to Russians amid the US Department of Justice’s special investigation into Trump’s campaign and potential collusion with Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Rohrbacher blames a “deep state” conspiracy for the investigation of Trump and says he doubts the veracity of criminal charges brought against Russians by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

Rohrbacher’s opponent Harley Rouda has aggressively tied him to Trump and argued the Republican has failed to hold the president accountable, a campaign theme that plays well in California.

Nationwide, a combination of demographic change and disaffection with Trump’s brand of politics – particularly among suburban white, college-educated women – has created a challenge for incumbent House Republicans who four years ago might have counted on easy reelections.

“The House battlefield is largely in districts that either Clinton won, or where Trump didn’t really run that far ahead. There are a lot of suburban districts where they like Republicans but maybe not a Republican like Trump,” Kyle Kondik, who analyzes House races for the University of Virginia Center on Politics, told Al Jazeera. “And so I don’t think the president is an asset.”

‘Gift to the wealthy’

Democrats have led Republicans in national congressional preference polls all year. The average spread has widened recently to 8.4 percent, according to RealClearPolitics.com.

House races in Texas are emblematic both of the depth of Republican troubles this year and how American politics are shifting at the grassroots level in response to Trump.

Representative John Culberson has held the wealthy Texas 7th district in suburban Houston for 18 years. It’s a district once held by former President George HW Bush when he began his political career. Today it is more diverse with a population that is 44 percent White, 32 percent Hispanic, 13 percent Black, and 10 percent Asian.

Culberson now faces a tough challenge by Democrat Lizzie Fletcher, a relatively inexperienced, progressive liberal who is focusing her campaign on organising local turnout and resentment about the federal response to Hurricane Harvey, a Category 4 storm that caused $125bn in damage.

A senior member of the House committee that doles out federal money, Culberson played a key role in delivering billions in federal aid to Texas after Harvey but hasn’t been personally visible in the district. Like many other Republicans, his hopes of campaigning on the popularity of a huge tax cut enacted in 2017 under Trump have fallen flat.

“An awful lot of Republicans thought the tax cuts would be a major plus for them in the election,” Valliere said. “We’ve seen a lot of Republicans abandoning campaign advertising, bragging about the tax cuts. People, especially the Trump base, feel that the tax cuts were a gift to the very wealthy and the corporations.”

Unpopular policies

Other pieces of the Republican agenda in Congress have proved unpopular, particularly the 2017 repeal of Obamacare, the 2010 Affordable Care Act that set up mandated health insurance markets designed to cut costs and make healthcare more accessible for Americans.

In Illinois, Bost was forced to discontinue holding town hall meetings to avoid irate constituents.

The National Republican Congressional Committee, which is the political arm of the House Republican party, adopted the theme “Protecting Our Historic Republican Majority” in its campaign and fundraising communications. One by one, it is attempting to paint Democrats as “radical leftists” opposed to “conservative values”.

But without a popular national platform, the anti-Trump political climate has left Republicans scrambling to play on local issues or, in some cases, use dirty tricks to smear Democrat opponents.

In Virginia’s 7th district, defined by suburbs of the state capital Richmond, Tea Party darling Dave Brat is in a tough fight against Democrat challenger Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA operative whose security clearance application was improperly leaked by a political group tied to Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan.

Ryan’s working-class Wisconsin district outside of Milwaukee was carried by Trump 53-42 percent over Clinton in 2016. He announced in April he would not seek reelection, one of 39 House Republicans choosing to retire rather than face voters this year.

“There’s where the Achilles heel in the Trump movement is,” Jackson said.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump began Labor Day by criticizing the head of the country’s largest federation of labor unions.

Trump tweeted that AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka poorly represented his union in a recent television interview.

“Some of the things he said were so (against) the working men and women of our country, and the success of the U.S. itself, that it is easy to see why unions are doing so poorly. A Dem!” Trump tweeted.

In a Fox News interview Sunday, Trumka said Trump has done more to hurt workers than help them. Trumka said the administration has overturned workplace regulations that protect employees and hasn’t come up with an infrastructure program that “could put a lot of us back to work.”

Wages are down and gas prices are up, he added. And Trumka criticized the tax cuts Trump signed into law, saying they encourage companies to outsource jobs.

“Unfortunately, right now, the scale is weighted against him,” Trumka said.

Trump tweeted Monday morning that the American worker is doing better than ever. Unemployment is “setting record lows,” he said. And “the U.S. has tremendous upside potential as we go about fixing some of the worst Trade Deals ever made by any country in the world.”

The unemployment rate is 3.9 percent, which is not a record. It hit 3.9 percent near the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency and dipped to 2.5 percent in 1953 under President Dwight D. Eisenhower.  

Trump is in the middle of renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico. He reached a tentative deal with Mexico that would provide for duty-free imports of cars assembled in Mexico – but only if at least 75 percent of the parts originate in the U.S. or Mexico. And many of those parts would have to be made by workers earning at least $16 an hour. 

Trump told Congress Friday that he wants to go forward with a U.S.-Mexican trade pact to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement even if he can’t reach a separate agreement with Canada.

Trumka said Sunday that it’s “pretty hard to see how that would work without having Canada in the deal.”

Trumka also said a lot more work is needed before the agreement with Mexico is complete.

“If we can’t monitor it and enforce it effectively,” he said, “then the agreement will fail for workers and it will fail for the country.”

More: Trump starts clock on withdrawing from NAFTA even as trade talks with Canada continue

More: Journalist says Bloomberg not source of Trump’s off-the-record Canada remarks

 

 

 

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