Soda taxes have fizzled across the country, but the mayor of Philadelphia Jim Kenney is trying one out anyway.

But unlike other places where these taxes were billed as a way to consume fewer sugary drinks, the Upshot explains he’s not going there:

He is not using the word obesity, or suggesting that people should drink less soda.

Instead, there’s a whole other strategy at play — one that perhaps matters even more to local officials:

Mr. Kenney is taking a different political tack. Instead of the usual eat-your-vegetables pitch of public health reformers, he is offering Philadelphians something delicious: a giant pot of money to fund popular city projects.

This is a big change. Soda taxes were imagined about a decade ago by public health officials who wanted to get Americans to drink less soda. Chronic illness like diabetes and obesity are linked to sugar and disproportionately affect low-income people, who also drink disproportionate amounts of soda.

But that message hasn’t resonated. As the Upshot points out, so far, soda tax proposals have failed in New York state, Washington state, and San Francisco — places generally known to be open to progressive policy proposals. (Only Berkeley, California has succeeded.)

So Kenney is reimagining the tax. Maybe soda taxes don’t sell when it’s about drinking less of the stuff, but maybe they’ll work when they’re about raising money for new community programs that improve health.

This post was updated to clarify sourcing.

Can’t find anything about the Panama Papers on NYT. What is going on D:

— Dennis Jin (@thesotaku) April 3, 2016

Why aren’t the WaPo and NYT and other US media leaders leading on the Panama Papers? Were they not included? https://t.co/ljffM7aLYH

— Jessica Reed (@GuardianJessica) April 3, 2016

The famed news organization first acknowledged the news with a wire story posted on Sunday afternoon, just as more in-depth reports, coordinated by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, were popping up all across the internet. The Times didn’t post its own, staff-authored story until after 9 pm. Even then, the story was posted to the Times website’s world section — with no mention on the homepage.

The story quickly climbed into the Times’s top 10 most-read articles, as the paper’s public editor, Margaret Sullivan, notes. But in the print edition, it was buried inside the paper, with no mention on the front page — the journalistic equivalent of an intentional snub.

Wow…
Jealousy is an ugly thing.
Professional jealousy even uglier. https://t.co/KBlAQNpJRW

— Nina L. Diamond (@ninatypewriter) April 4, 2016

Sullivan asked an editor high up in the Times hierarchy to explain the lack of coverage. Here’s how he responded:

I asked Matt Purdy, a deputy executive editor, to respond. He told me by phone that The Times is very interested in the data leak, and the articles produced from it. But he said Times editors believe that they owe it to their readers to do their own evaluation of the material. And that, he said, is happening now.

Because the Times was not a part of the global consortium and was not aware that the story was coming, it needed some time to get its own story going. “We didn’t know these documents were out there and being worked on,” Purdy said.

It’s fair for the Times to say its coverage has been minimal because its reporters didn’t have access to the documents. It’s not as plausible to argue — as the paper seems to be doing — that the lack of access diminished the importance of the story, leading the Times to place it on page A3.

There’s probably a simpler reason for the halfhearted coverage. While outlets across the US were invited to take an advance look at the data leak, including local outlets like the Miami Herald and the Dallas Morning News, the New York Times just wasn’t invited to the party.

Unfortunately, that’s the reality for Alabama, a state that prides itself for its high morals and at the same time has had to confront a burgeoning number of corrupt elected officials.

The latest and gravest among them is the scandal surrounding Robert Bentley, the state’s two-term governor, famed for his church deacon persona. On March 22, the state’s largest news organization, AL.com, quoted the state’s former top law enforcement official saying that Bentley had carried on a clandestine affair with his top aide, Rebekah Caldwell Mason, and there were recordings to prove it.

By the next day, a recording surfaced of Bentley making sexually suggestive comments on the phone to a woman he called “Rebekah.”

“When I stand behind you and I put my arms around you and I put my hands on your breasts,” he can be heard saying on the tape. A little later: “If we’re going to do what we did the other day, we’re going to have to start locking the door.”

In a press conference that day, Bentley acknowledged he had made inappropriate comments to Mason, but he denied carrying on any sort of a sexual relationship. In the past week, he has also steadfastly refused to entertain the idea of resigning his office.

“At times in the past, have I said things that I should not have said? Absolutely, that’s what I’m saying today,” Bentley said at the press conference. He insisted that he had broken no state laws during his friendship with Mason, which would be possible grounds for his impeachment.

That hasn’t stopped the state ethics commission from opening an inquiry into the situation; several other state agencies refused to say whether they were looking into possible wrongdoing, too. But beyond the ick factor, how might a governor’s alleged affair cross over into criminal activity?

The basic story is a good old-fashioned sex scandal

This past fall, Dianne Bentley, the governor’s wife, filed for divorce after 50 years of marriage. It was the first tip-off to reporters in the state that rumors of an affair between Bentley and Mason might hold some water.

More than a year earlier, in August 2014, Bentley was attending a business conference when he accidentally dropped his cellphone. A law enforcement official happened to see a text message of a sexual nature on it from none other than Mason, which he reported to his boss. That’s how Spencer Collier, the then-head of Alabama’s Law Enforcement Agency, learned about the affair. He was the first to report it to AL.com.

A few days later, Collier first heard the recording that’s since become public — where Bentley speaks of touching Mason’s breasts. He told AL.com that the recording was made by Bentley’s family member “hoping for an intervention.”

Collier told AL.com that he confronted Bentley about the scandal late in 2014, who admitted it was happening and promised to stop.

“I made Governor Bentley aware of the recording that I heard,” Collier told the New York Times. “I told Governor Bentley there was no need to try and explain it for anything other than it was. It was very obvious that it was sexual in nature.”

Mason, who served as Bentley’s campaign manager, transitioned into a job as his top political advisor at the Alabama Capitol. She held so much sway with Bentley that people referred to her derisively as the “de facto governor.”

In September, it came to light that Mason was not on the state’s payroll— Bentley was paying her salary through a 501(c)(4) organization. That in itself does not signal wrongdoing, but it means that Mason was able to operate at the Alabama Capitol with virtually no transparency.

The two also appear to have taken concerted steps to hide their relationship from public view. Bentley apparently bought multiple “burner” phones from a Best Buy in Tuscaloosa to avoid surveillance. He allegedly rented a private plane to avoid its passenger manifest, which might have included Mason, from becoming public.

And Bentley recently confirmed to the Times that he and Mason shared a safety deposit box at a bank in Montgomery, the state capital.

The scandal is about much more than (alleged) sex

The timing of Collier’s revelation is far from coincidental. A month earlier, Bentley placed Collier, then the head of Alabama’s Law Enforcement Agency, on medical leave.

Collier was due to undergo back surgery, but the notification of his forced leave also followed Collier’s refusal to follow Bentley’s orders. Bentley had forbidden him from submitting a sworn statement in the ongoing court battle over the indictment of the Alabama House speaker in a separate corruption case. (The House speaker is facing 23 felony charges of corruption, but he is also a political ally of the governor.)

Collier said he submitted the affidavit because not doing so would amount to lying to a grand jury. “I told Governor Bentley that I loved him like a father and that there was nothing I wouldn’t do for him, except lie to a grand jury,” Collier told the Times.

Then the new head of Alabama’s Law Enforcement Agency — the same man whom Collier claimed saw the inappropriate text message on Bentley’s phone but who is denying he ever saw anything — opened an investigation into management of the agency under Collier’s watch. The investigation turned up “a number of concerns, including the possible misuse of state funds.”

That finding was announced on March 22, leading Bentley to fire Collier outright. That’s the same day Collier went to the press. (For the record, Collier denies any wrongdoing at the agency.)

A lot of people in Alabama want Bentley to resign

The fallout from the scandal has been swift and severe. Bentley was once revered as a man with highly public Christian morals — he served as a deacon at his church in Tuscaloosa, which Mason and her husband also attended. Now an informal online AL.com poll of 30,000 readers finds that more than 90 percent want him to resign.

After the audio of Bentley’s conversation with Mason surfaced, Mason swiftly resigned. Ironically, her husband, John Mason, is still on the state’s payroll as the state’s director of faith-based initiatives.

But Alabama lawmakers, reflecting the public mood, don’t want the resignations to end there. Lawmakers, led by Republicans, are looking into ways to begin impeachment proceedings or set up a recall. Those efforts are unlikely to pan out — the Alabama lawmakers can hardly agree on anything, despite Republicans holding supermajorities in both Houses. And their time will quickly begin to be consumed by the trial of the House speaker, which is proceeding on a separate track.

But lawmakers and investigators will continue to look for possible instances of Bentley using state resources to carry out (or cover up) his affair, which would amount to a criminal offense.

“It has not been specifically proven,” AL.com’s Leada Gore told the Washington Post in a conversation about the unfolding scandal. “It has certainly been alluded to that he’s used state resources and property and perhaps personnel to carry this out.”

It may be that investigators will try to ensnare him on a related charge — like allegedly attempting to force Collier to lie to a grand jury. But the widespread sentiment that Bentley must go reflects two undeniable truths: Alabama has no tolerance of inappropriate sexual behavior, but it is by no means immune to it.

It’s April Fools’ Day, so you’re probably devoting more brainpower than you’d care to admit to potential hoaxes that your friends and co-workers – heck, even your favorite news organizations – might pull on you.

But why April 1, of all days? How did we come to associate the first day of the fourth month of the year with an opportunity to take advantage of the more gullible among us? The short answer is nobody really knows.

The longer answer: The first clear and widespread mentions of April Fools’ Day occurred in the 18th century. But even then, people wondered about its origins.

“Whence proceeds the custom of making April Fools?” one correspondent wrote in the British Apollo magazine in 1708.

By that point, the custom was already well-established across parts of Europe, enough that people there regarded its origins as long-lost history. No one is sure how, exactly, a tradition so potent could have sprung up without more frequent mentions in the written record in the centuries preceding.

But it’s clear that playing tricks and pulling pranks in the spring has a much richer history than you might expect for such a silly holiday.

Even Chaucer might have given April Fools' Day a shoutout

Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” a 1392 work, depicts a rooster named Chauntecleer being fooled by, and in turn fooling, a fox. This happens “Syn March bigan, thritty dayes and two,” which seems to be a clear reference to the 32nd day after the beginning of March, or April 1.

But scholars have thrown hot water on this theory: Most think “bigan” is a scribal error, and Chaucer actually meant 32 days after March ends, or May 2, which marked the then-recent anniversary of King Richard II’s engagement to Anne of Bohemia.

The scribal error might suggest that even then, scribes associated pranks with April 1 – but this doesn’t qualify as hard evidence. The first definite reference to April Fools’ Day comes from a 1561 Flemish poem by Eduard de Dene, in which a nobleman sends his servant on annoying, fruitless errands. (Fools’ errands!) At the end of each stanza, the servant frets that what he is being asked to do is nothing more than an April 1 joke.

So by the 16th century, there was some widespread recognition of the custom to play practical jokes on the first day of April. This, taken together with a reference to “poisson d’Avril,” a French April Fools’ custom, in a poem published in 1508, leads scholars to date the origins of the holiday to northern continental Europe – after which it probably spread to Britain.

Over the next century, April Fools’ Day jokes started to become ubiquitous.

In the early 1600s, for example, the legend about the Duke of Lorraine’s escape from prison became the stuff of folklore. On April 1, 1632, it is said that the duke and his wife escaped a prison in Nantes simply by walking out the front gate dressed as peasants. Someone noticed them and told the guards, but the guards believed it to be an April Fools’ trick, allowing the couple to escape. (The duke and duchess definitely did escape in April 1634; it’s harder to confirm whether they escaped on April 1.)

By the close of the century in England, it had become a popular prank to send gullible victims to the Tower of London to see the washing of the lions – a ceremony that certainly didn’t exist. The prank’s first mentioned appeared in a British newspaper on April 2, 1698, where an article on the front page read, “Yesterday being the first of April, several persons were sent to the Tower Ditch to see the Lions washed.” Examples of this particular hoax continued at least through the mid-1800s.

April Fools’ Day has all the hallmarks of a "renewal" festival

But the sources of April Fools’ Day are probably even older.

Nearly every culture has some kind of festival to mark the coming of spring. These occasions, which anthropologists have dubbed “renewal festivals,” typically involve some sort of organized mayhem. People play pranks on friends, wear disguises, or somehow reverse the social order: Servants give orders to masters, or children challenge their parents’ authority.

April Fools’ Day fits the pattern. For one day in spring, behaviors that are normally considered socially unacceptable – pranks, deception, even heartlessness – become temporarily socially acceptable, made lighter by the prospect of laughter.

One of the oldest versions sounds a lot like April Fool’s Day: the Roman festival of “Hilaria.” Across the Roman Empire, the festival was celebrated on March 25, to commemorate the resurrection of the Roman god Attis. The festival, which coincided with the spring equinox, invited Romans to rejoice; games, pranks, and masquerades were common.

Other scholars have also associated the holiday with the Hindu festival of Holi and the medieval Feast of Fools. The Feast of Fools was celebrated in the same parts of Europe where the first traces of April Fools’ can be found. For centuries in Europe, celebrants elected a “lord of misrule” and parodied church customs, often in extremely blasphemous ways. The church attempted to stamp out the ritual, but it endured through about the 16th century.

All of this suggests that playing essentially harmless pranks in the spring has a long, cross-cultural history. But it doesn’t explain how April Fools’ itself came to be.

Did April Fools' Day come from changes to the calendar?

France and England both changed their calendars in the past 500 years, and both countries shifted New Year’s Day from early spring to January. That’s led to a theories that April Fools’ Day started as a reaction to the shift.

France changed its calendar in 1564, when King Charles IX shifted the date marking the start of the new year to January 1 from March 25. The spring celebration used to continue through April 1, and, the legend goes, many French people resisted the change or simply forgot about it, continuing to party and exchange gifts through April 1.

Mischief makers poked fun at these French conservatives and their steadfast attachment to the old tradition by sending them silly gifts and invitations to nonexistent parties. They would also stick paper fish to their backs, popularizing the French term for a person who gets duped on April Fools’ Day: “poisson d’Avril,” or “April fish.”

The idea seems to be a reference to the fact that fish are most plentiful and hungry during the spring. An “April fish” was easier to catch, i.e., more gullible, than a fish at any other time of the year.

In Britain, meanwhile, the legal switch from March 25 until January 1 wasn’t made until almost two centuries later than the rest of Europe. That has led other people to point to Britain, not France, as the country whose calendrical flub produced a day of tomfoolery.

As evidence, the first mention of the calendar change theory in the written record ascribes its origins to England, not France. In 1766, a correspondent wrote to the Gentleman’s Magazine:

The strange custom prevalent throughout this kingdom, of people making fools of one another upon the first of April, arose from the year formerly beginning, as to some purpose, and in some respects, on the twenty-fifth of March, which was supposed to be the incarnation of our Lord; it being customary with the Romans, as well as with us, to hold a festival, attended by an octave, at the commencement of the new year — which festival lasted for eight days, whereof the first and last were the principal; therefore the first of April is the octave of the twenty-fifth of March, and, consequently, the close or ending of the feast, which was both the festival of the Annunciation and the beginning of the new year.

But the timing for this theory, too, is a little off. Britain switched the start of its calendar in 1752. By then, April Fools’ Day was already an established tradition both in England and in the rest of Europe, and people were already wondering why people played tricks on each other in the spring.

Even the French theory has some problems. As far back as 1507, records show that at least some French towns exchanged gifts for the new year on January 1, following the Roman tradition. If that’s true, the legal transition away from marking the new year on Easter would have lasted more than half a century, leaving ample time for France’s culture to shift, too.

The timing of the French calendar switch fits the facts of April Fools’ Day so loosely, in fact, that many scholars now regard it as an example of “metafolklore” — when a story springs up to explain the origins of a folk holiday.

Today, April Fools' has evolved into pranks that go viral

Whether tricking people to go watch imaginary lions get imaginary baths in the 1800s or sending people fake invitations to nonexistent parties in France in the 1500s, April Fools’ pranks have maintained their silliness.

In France, people still celebrate “poisson d’Avril” on April Fools’ Day; kids try to tape paper fish on adults’ backs without them noticing.

The holiday has tricked many around the world – some cases more elaborate than others, and some from voices of greater authority:

• On April 1, 1905, a newspaper in Berlin broke the news that the US Treasury had been robbed of $268 million. The paper even reported specifically how the whole heist unfolded.
• On April 1, 1957, the BBC aired a spoof documentary about spaghetti crops in Switzerland, during which a distinguished broadcaster narrated a story about a family that harvested spaghetti from trees – it even had footage of women picking strands of spaghetti off a tree and laying them in the sun to dry.
• On April 1, 1975, an Australian TV station said the nation down under would be switching to a metric time system, where seconds became millidays, minutes became centidays, and hours became decidays.
• On April 1, 1987, Los Angeles DJ Steve Morris, from the KRTH-FM station, said all the freeways in LA and Orange County would close for major repairs for several days. His show received hundreds of angry calls that day.
• And then there is the great NPR prank of April 1, 2014, in which the media outlet promoted a story on Facebook headlined, "Why Doesn't America Read Anymore?" which sparked outrage in the post's comments section. But had the commenters actually read the article, they would have seen all it said was, "Congratulations, genuine readers, and happy April Fools' Day!"