Armed with a blue-collar work ethic, political savvy and mental toughness, Andrea Tantaros and her combustible brand of commentary are becoming hot commodities for Fox News Channel. She’s certainly helped ensemble shows “Outnumbered,” and “The Five,” become runaway hits. But is she the real deal or Megyn Kelly Lite? HNGN goes behind the scenes at the network to profile the intriguing firebrand. 

Andrea Tantaros (Photo : Courtesy Of Fox News Channel), originally published on HNGN.

IF YOU WANT to know who Fox News Channel’s Andrea Tantaros really is, what the firebrand is really like, what drives her or when and how she became a conservative, it’s best to get her talking about her family. Ask her about growing up during the Reagan and Bush years in Allentown, Pennsylvania – one of the places liberals denounce as flyover territory, where people go “to cling to their guns and their religion.” Get her talking about her love of country, and, specifically, about her Greek immigrant father, a self-made man who lived the American dream.

These are all parts of the same precious whole for her, deeply intertwined and impossible to tease apart. She relaxes and smiles – the first of many – in these reflective moments. Continue reading →

By Michael Q. Bullerdick

Learning how to ice skate is a tricky bit of business that requires athleticism, a healthy sense of balance, and a high pain threshold. Of course, you also need a decent pair of skates and a pond-sized patch of slippery ice. Those last two items are easier to summon than the rest and they have been for a period going on 3,000 years now. But it might be surprising to note—especially during the Winter Olympics—that until just a few years ago, physicists didn’t fully understand how skating worked. More precisely, they lacked a fundamental knowledge of what exactly makes ice slippery. Continue reading →

By Michael Q. Bullerdick

Although it’s true death row guards once routinely wagered on what a condemned man might select for his last meal, the morbid game was abandoned long ago, less out of empathy than boredom. That’s because, for the better part of a half-century or so, the penultimate menu has been fairly predictable: fried chicken, a cheeseburger or steak cooked medium rare and served with some kind of potato (almost always French fries), followed by pie á la mode (apple or pecan) or a bowl of ice cream. The real gamble, it seems, is not what an execution-bound inmate will eat—but if they’ll eat. And that decision, Cornell University researcher Kevin Kniffin recently revealed, can be a reliable “tell” of whether an inmate knows or has convinced himself that he’s innocent. Continue reading →