On another night, Alienated Majesty Books near the University of Texas at Austin campus might host a conversation with a novelist or a poetry open mic. But on this Saturday, the shelves and tables holding new releases have been pushed to the side, opening up the large polished cement floor. A drum kit sits in the corner, and an electric guitar leans against a microphone stand. When a three-man band takes the makeshift stage, the crowd that had been browsing the shelves turns its attention forward. The singers take turns screaming, “Check,” into the microphones, filling the previously sedate bookshop with the first vibrations of a concert.

The store—which sells books from small and indie publishers, plus works in translation, comics, and poetry—has developed a reputation over the past year for hosting bands from more-obscure musical subgenres: shoegaze, noise, hardcore punk. It’s hosted so many shows of a certain sort that the shop is now known among Austin’s underground music scene as “the screamo bookstore.” 

Screamo materialized as a subgenre of emo music in the 1990s, distinct for its experimental nature and—as the name suggests—screamed vocals. The genre is defined by dissonance, and the atypical concert setting continues that tradition. The bookstore’s shelves hold the collected works of Karl Marx, a history of the Black Panther Party, a novel exploring fatherhood and masculinity. The lyrics screamed in the store sometimes echo the same ideas—the genre has been a medium not just for emotional introspection but for political expression.

Bands sell merchandise and music at tables in the back of the store. (Michelle Pitcher)

When the first band, Rose Ceremony, starts to play, the sound resonates through the concrete floor. The energy from the feverish drumming, wailing guitars, and piercing vocals is enough to make my teeth rattle.

Everyone here is young. Teen boys wearing ski caps despite the July heat lounge on a couch; young girls with intricate makeup group together near the front of the crowd. 

I’m told the age-inclusivity is by design. In the past, there weren’t many places “baby punks” could go to hear their favorite bands play live. The bookstore’s shows are all-ages, and while some of the older members of the crowd sip Lone Star tall boys bought from the Rio Market across the street, most drink water or energy drinks. The music is rowdy, the crowd energetic, but above all, the space feels safe. 

As Rose Ceremony wraps up, one of the singers takes a moment to address the crowd: “We love it here. Respect this space.”

When the second band takes the stage, it becomes clear why the shelves and tables had been pushed to the perimeter ahead of time. As the band creates a wall of sound, members of the crowd spill into the empty space in front of the band, turning it into a mosh pit. They’re balls of limbs and energy, thrashing and bucking, nearly colliding with one another, then rushing back to the perimeter, flushed. Catharsis.

A performance at the Rio Market (Michelle Pitcher)

A tattoo artist named Lola has set up a station in front of the nonfiction section, offering a menu of designs people can select. It’s the first time she’s offered her services at the bookstore, and she, like most other people involved in the night’s logistics, is part of the close-knit emo music community in Austin. Everyone I spoke to was at most a few degrees removed from someone in a band or someone involved in Tiny Sounds Collective, one of the groups in the “DIY music scene” that make shows in atypical venues—like bookstores, highway underpasses, and houses—possible. These shows are unique for the audience and the performers, who take on responsibilities a concert venue might usually handle, like equipment setup, crowd management, and distributing everyone’s cut of the cover fees at the end of the night. 

Alienated Majesty is a relatively new DIY music space, but it’s already cemented its place. It fits easily into the existing map of unconventional venues. Between sets at the bookstore, people amble across the street to the convenience store, where another DIY concert is taking place in the store’s aisles.

People spill out into the parking lots to talk, smoke cigarettes, and meet their favorite bands, who tend to stick around after their performances. It feels as though this community—known for its love of extreme music but underappreciated for its camaraderie—has planted its flag on this small strip of Austin.

The post A Night at the Screamo Bookstore appeared first on The Texas Observer.

By ERIC TUCKER, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — A senior adviser at the State Department and expert on Indian and South Asian affairs is accused by the Justice Department of printing out classified documents and storing more than 1,000 pages of highly sensitive government records in filing cabinets and trash bags at home.

Related Articles

Wall Street rises as banks and tech companies help lead the way

Storm decimates 2 Alaskan villages and drives more than 1,500 people from their homes

Today in History: October 15, Staten Island ferry collision kills 11

Jamie Foxx, Maxwell, Jill Scott, Flea, Doja Cat and more react to the death of D’Angelo

Beyond Meat shares drop below $1 on investor concerns

Ashley Tellis, who has also worked as a contractor in the Defense Department’s Office of Net Assessment, was charged in federal court in Virginia with the unlawful retention of national defense information after FBI agents who searched his home over the weekend found what they said was a trove of records marked as classified at the secret and top secret levels.

He was ordered detained Tuesday pending a detention hearing next week. One of his lawyers, Deborah Curtis, told The Associated Press that “we look forward to the hearing, where we’ll be able to present evidence” but declined to comment further.

An FBI affidavit cites several instances over the last month in which Tellis is alleged to have printed on government computers, or asked a colleague to print, classified documents on topics including U.S. military aircraft capabilities. Surveillance video shows him on several occasions exiting the State Department and a Defense Department facility with a briefcase in which he was believed to have stashed the printed-out papers, according to court documents.

Tellis also met multiple times with Chinese government officials in recent years, according to the affidavit. Tellis arrived to one 2022 dinner with a manila folder while the Chinese officials he was meeting with entered with a gift bag, the FBI says. The affidavit says Tellis did not appear to have the manila folder in his possession when he left the restaurant, but does not accuse him of providing any classified information during his meetings with the Chinese.

Tellis is a prominent foreign policy expert with a specialty in Indian and South Asian affairs. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace lists him as a senior fellow and the Tata Chair for Strategic Affairs. He also served on the White House National Security Council staff under Republican President George W. Bush.

Who’d have guessed that the place to find a killer spritz cookie recipe would be inside a cemetery?

But that’s just where Naomi Odessa Miller-Dawson’s cookie recipe lives, etched in stone at her final resting place at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery.

Related Articles

Quick Fix: Sangria Pork Chops with One-Pot Orzo and Broccoli

Five weeknight dishes: Get excited about these eggs

Recipe: This spicy olive dish from an acclaimed chef delivers the heat

Gretchen’s table: Crispy oven chorizo and potato tacos are social media darlings

Member-owners of Mississippi Market and River Market co-ops approve merger

When archivist Rosie Grant, who was was completing an internship at Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C., learned about this recipe on a gravestone back in 2021, she decided to bake the cookies and share a video of the experience on her TikTok account, @ghostlyarchives. Comments poured in, and she learned that there were gravestone recipes scattered across the U.S.

So began her quest to cook the recipes and learn the stories of the people behind them — a project that eventually yielded an entire 40-recipe cookbook. Grant’s book is more than a cookbook copying over these recipes etched in stone, however. It also explores the intersections of food, legacy and memory, while providing background information and missing details to enable anyone to cook these recipes at home.

We recently caught up with her to learn more about her brand-new cookbook, “To Die For: A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes” (Harvest, $26), which came out Oct. 7.

Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

“To Die For” cookbook author Rosie Grant is the creator behind @GhostlyArchive, a TikTok account she started while an intern at Congressional Cemetery. After finding and cooking a recipe she found on a tombstone, she kept discovering more recipes and made a cookbook out of the collection. (Courtesy of Jill Petracek)

Q: What inspires someone to put a recipe on their gravestone?

A: A lot of modern gravestones are very personalized. Maybe 200 years ago, or even 100 years ago, there would be one carver who would make a bunch of templated stones, and then just add someone’s name and dates. It was pretty standardized. Nowadays, it’s a blank slate that you get to fill in based on what was important to you. That might be a recipe, a music quote or even a call number to someone’s book in the library or a reference to their dogs. In a lot of cases shared in the book, these people were home cooks. They hosted the holidays. They loved food. There are a lot of central community figures, the ones who would do the volunteer event, host Christmas or Thanksgiving or make people’s special birthday treats. They used food to show love and celebrate other people.

Q: Were most of the recipe gravestones you found modern?

A: Pretty modern. The oldest one is from a gentleman, Joe Sheridan. He is attributed with inventing Irish coffee. The story goes that Joe was in Ireland, and this plane came in with a bunch of travelers. He was basically the airport chef, and it was raining. All the passengers were cold, and they asked Joe to make something to warm them up. So he made them his hangover cure, Irish coffee.

Joseph Sheridan, known for popularizing Irish coffee in the U.S., was a chef at the Foynes Airport in Ireland in the 1940s who introduced a plane full of stranded passengers to his hangover cure. Word spread to travel writer Stanton Delaplane, then the team at Buena Vista Cafe in San Francisco, who worked with Sheridan to perfect the recipe. (Courtesy of Jill Petracek)

There was a travel and food writer named Stan Delaplane, who, when he went back to New York, wrote about the Irish coffee, and it became this whole thing. In San Francisco, the Buena Vista Cafe heard about it. They flew Joe to San Francisco, and he basically re-created it with the restaurant owner and with Stan. And now the Buena Vista is considered the birthplace of Irish coffee. He’s buried in Oakland, and his gravestone says he gave the gift to his world, his Irish coffee recipe. And so he doesn’t even have the recipe written on it, but I got permission from the Buena Vista Cafe to include it.

“To Die For: A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes,” by Rosie Grant (Harvest, $26) showcases 40 recipes carved into gravestones, and tells the stories of the people behind them. (Courtesy of Harvest)

Q: You went and visited all of these gravestones and interviewed family members. What were some of the things you learned while doing this research?

A: The first recipe I just thought was a one-off. But it was during the pandemic, so I thought I would try to make it, because, why not?  So I cooked it, and I posted about the process, and things kind of exploded overnight. People were sending all these messages, asking lots of questions, thinking through what they would put on their gravestone if they had a recipe, or even talking about people in their lives who had passed away and the recipes that they cooked to remember them.

After I learned there were others, I made a big Google doc and map, and I started pinning where these folks are buried. I used Find a Grave, which is like the Wikipedia of gravestones and obituaries. The obituary listed out their next of kin, so from there, I would reach out to friends and family. I would send them a note. Sometimes I would just contact as many people as I could find. I would get email addresses that bounced, or in one case, I messaged this one woman on Facebook every six months for two years and later learned she’d been dead for four years.

The families have all been so lovely. It’s a fine tightrope to talk to people who have lost someone, and I wanted to be thoughtful about what they wanted. Some people just wanted to communicate via email or Instagram messenger because it hurt to talk about.

I also had to test the recipes. Usually, the first time, I would make it extremely wrong, reading it directly from the gravestone. And then I would do more research. I would meet with the families, and in some cases, cook with them. I would learn the tools that they would use.

Q: Some of the recipes were incomplete?

A: Yeah. I mean, an epitaph only has so much space. Most of these recipes are pretty simple. It’s not a lasagna or something that would take four gravestones to write out. But in some cases, the families got creative. So with Naomi, they didn’t put the instructions. They just put the ingredients to her spritz cookies. Another family had a handwritten recipe card lasered onto a woman’s gravestone, and they knew all the background details of how she would make her chicken soup. I, as a stranger, had to work with them to get the full recipe, and then that would be what ended up in the cookbook.

Q: Is it usually the person who dies or the surviving relatives who decide on the gravestone recipe?

A: It’s about half and half. In some cases, it was the relatives of the person who had passed away, trying to memorialize someone who was, in a lot of cases, larger than life and very giving. Sharing a recipe does more than just communicate, ‘She loved baking,’ or ‘She was a great host.’ It shares the tools for someone else to now partake in this tradition. It’s such an embodiment of who each of these people was.

Three of the recipes in the book are actually from women who are still alive. One is a woman named Peggy who lives in Arkansas. Her husband had passed away, and they were putting up their gravestone together, since they share a marker. On his side was his hobbies and things that he liked. Asking herself, ‘What do I want to be remembered for?’ for her side of the marker, she was like, ‘I’m really darn proud of my cookie recipe.’

When I met with her and cooked with her, all of these people showed up. I thought it would be for the novelty of some random TikToker making cookies. But they told me, ‘No, we heard Peggy’s making cookies. We drop everything when we know she’s making these cookies.’

In Ferndale, California, Christine and her husband are doing pre-planning and have already purchased and engraved their gravestones in a beautiful cemetery. His says, ‘I should have listened to my wife.’ And hers says, ‘Yeah, look where we ended up.’ Her carrot cake recipe is on the back.

Q: How has this project changed how you reflect on death?

A: My parents are both ghost tour guides. We talk about cemeteries all the time, and we love a good ghost story. But when it came to the actual death side of things, I hadn’t been aware of the death-positive movement, the idea that it’s healthy to talk about death, loss and our own mortality.

Where do you look for the people you’ve lost? There’s still so much of them with you, and it shows up in a lot of really joyful ways. For me, it’s been a very positive side to something that I personally found really scary.

Q: Anything else?

A: If anyone knows of any interesting gravestones, I’m always all ears.

Gravestone recipes from ‘To Die For’

Rosie Grant’s Clam Linguine
Joe Sheridan’s Irish Coffee
Annabell’s Snickerdoodles

Details: Follow Rosie Grant on TikTok at @ghostlyarchive and Instagram at @ghostly.archive. Her cookbook, “To Die For: A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes” (Harvest, $26) is out Oct. 7.

By Tim Henderson, Stateline.org

The federal government shutdown is forcing a reckoning for two remote health care programs because they automatically expired Oct. 1.

The telehealth and in-home hospital care programs were both temporary — but increasingly popular — options for Medicare recipients. They allowed doctors and hospitals to bill Medicare for telehealth appointments and in-home visits from nurses to provide care that is generally only available in hospitals.

The shutdown has prevented Congress from extending them.

More than 4 million Medicare beneficiaries used telehealth services in the first half of the year, according to Brown University’s Center for Advancing Health Policy through Research.

As of last fall, 366 hospitals had participated in the hospital-at-home program, serving 31,000 patients, according to a federal report. The program, officially called Acute Hospital Care at Home, allows patients who would otherwise be hospitalized to get inpatient care at home with a combination of nurse visits, monitoring equipment and remote doctor visits.

The programs have their roots in the pandemic, when doctors and hospitals wanted to keep patients safe from the risks of travel and hospital stays. Both are for Medicare recipients, generally people over 65 or who are disabled. But since many private insurers follow federal guidelines, some physicians have stopped booking telemedicine appointments for non-Medicare patients, rather than risk a change in insurance coverage.

Alexis Wynn, who is in her mid-30s and covered by private insurance through her employer, tried to switch an in-person doctor appointment in Pennsylvania to a video visit last week. The office told her that “all telemedicine is uncovered by insurance as of Oct. 1” — so she had to cancel the routine appointment.

“It was just a follow-up appointment to make sure the dosing of my medication was still accurate, nothing that was pertinent to being face-to-face,” Wynn said. Her health insurance company later told her it still covered telehealth visits.

There have been other reports of insurers turning down non-Medicare telehealth appointments, said Alexis Apple, director of federal affairs for the American Telemedicine Association, a trade group.

“It’s a misunderstanding,” Apple said. “I’m not really sure what’s happening, but it’s unfortunate and very scary. There’s so much uncertainty out there now, and we see insurance payers start to pull back.”

Both telehealth and home hospital services can be a lifeline for older people, especially in rural areas, where residents may struggle to travel long distances for health care in person.

“In rural America, it’s often telemedicine or no medicine at all,” said Dr. David Newman, chief medical officer of virtual care at Sanford Health in South Dakota, in a September statement supporting congressional action to make Medicare telehealth permanent. Bipartisan bills that would have allowed telehealth to continue stalled in committee earlier this year in the Senate and House.

Related Articles

Prescription drug coverage options are shrinking for Medicare shoppers

New vaccine for typhoid, salmonella shows promise

Suicide claims more Gen Z lives than previous generation

Losing a family pet gives parents a chance to teach children about death and grieving

Losing a family pet gives parents a chance to teach children about death and grieving

There’s an exception for telehealth rural residents — but only if they travel to a brick-and-mortar health care facility to get the remote health care service.

“The patients have to go to a clinic to receive that telehealth visit from a provider in a different location,” Apple said. “It kind of defeats the purpose.”

According to the Brown University report, California had the highest rate of Medicare telehealth usage in the first six months of this year, with 26% of beneficiaries using at least one telehealth appointment, followed by 23% in Massachusetts and 21% in Hawaii.

There’s no reason for non-Medicare insurers to stop covering any telehealth visits during the shutdown, and even most Medicare Advantage programs will continue to cover telehealth, according to Tina Stow, a spokesperson for AHIP, a health industry trade association.

Nevertheless, at least some health care centers are refusing to take new telehealth appointments or are converting existing ones to office visits.

“This is causing a lot of confusion. We are still working with our members who are insurers and providers to get a gauge on what folks are doing — because at this point reports we’ve seen seem to suggest it is company by company, provider by provider,” said Sean Brown, a spokesperson for the Health Leadership Council, representing CEOs of health care firms and insurers.

The hospital-at-home program serves a smaller number of patients but its pause has caused more disruption: The federal government required patients to be discharged from the program or transferred to a brick-and-mortar hospital by Oct.1.

The Minnesota-based Mayo Clinic had 30 patients in the program in Arizona, Florida and Wisconsin — all of whom either had to be released from the program or sent to brick-and-mortar hospitals. One of Mayo’s hospitals in Florida was already over capacity and had no room for transfers, according to reporting by Becker’s Hospital Review.

In Massachusetts, which requires commercial insurers to follow Medicare guidelines, all insured patients had to leave the program. Mass General Brigham, which operates many hospitals in the state, has rejiggered its plans to create more home care without relying on the hospital-at-home program, according to the Becker’s report.

Congress was unable to avert a shutdown by late September, and some individual providers and patients were caught unawares.

Nurses on social media discussed losing home-care jobs or being reassigned overnight when the hospital-at-home program closed Oct. 1. They worried about patients being taken away from children at home, or placed in hallway beds at overcrowded emergency rooms because of the abrupt change.

“Management scheduled a random call this morning with a super vague title. Then drop the bomb on us,” wrote one poster in Texas. “So no job. Perfect!”

In a direct message, the poster, who didn’t want their name used for fear of getting in trouble at their hospital, told Stateline, “This obviously wasn’t ideal for the patients. One of them had four children and now could no longer be home with them. Some didn’t even get to have a bed in the hospital because there were none available and had to stay in the ER in a hallway bed.”

Parkland Health System in Dallas started tapering off its hospital-at-home program in September because of the impending shutdown, and the last patients were discharged from the program by Sept. 30 without returning to the hospital, spokesperson Wendi Hawthorne said.

“We are hopeful that Congress will renew this innovative model of care in the future,” Hawthorne said.

Likewise, OSF Healthcare in Peoria, Illinois, had started to wind down its hospital-at-home program “to avoid needing to return multiple patients to a very crowded facility,” said Jennifer Junis, president of OSF OnCall, which handles home hospital care.

There were only three patients in the program Sept. 30, all of whom were ready to be discharged without returning to the hospital, Junis said. Since the program’s start in 2020, it has helped 980 patients with home care through OSF’s Saint Francis Medical Center in Peoria.

“It is unfortunate that we will not be able to benefit by treating qualifying patients at home, where they are most comfortable and recover faster,” Junis said. “Our digital hospital program has allowed us to free up beds for our sickest patients who need them most.”

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

©2025 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.