Daily Archives: December 13, 2021

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How did HBO change television forever? James Andrew Miller will be here to talk about his new book, Tinderbox. And in what ways did immigrant women revolutionize American food? Mayukh Sen tells us about his first book, Taste Makers. Plus, my colleagues and I will talk about what were reading. This is the Book Review podcast from The New York Times. Its December 10th. Im Pamela Paul.

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James Andrew Miller joins us now from Los Angeles. He is the author of the new book, Tinderbox: HBOs Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers. Jim, thanks for being here.

Thanks for having me.

Very suitably in L.A. This is not your first oral history. Youve done one of SNL, CAA, ESPN. I was going to say they all have three initials, but we have one exception. What draws you to doing oral history as a form?

I think its the fact that I realize that no matter what I can do on the keyboard, you cant replace the intimacy and the individuality of peoples voices. And I think that hearing directly from people creates another layer of understanding for the reader. Theres a real intimacy. You get to hear people talk about their work and about their experiences in ways that you just cant do with prose. I mean, you can characterize it, but this started with the SNL book and just the idea of trying to capture someone like Dan Aykroyds voice when theyre telling stories.

I find it to be pretty captivating and transparent. The level of transparency is much higher than anything that you can do with prose. Although, obviously, prose is a big part of oral history because there is a narrative. Its not just throwing quotes out on pages there. You do have to tell a story, and you do want to make sure that youre adding context and perspective and facts and things along the way for the reader. But I just, I love hearing from people directly.

So from an outsiders perspective, they might say, well, that looks easy. All you have to do is have these really fun conversations and then throw them all on the page. I know that thats not what it takes, but explain a little for listeners whats involved in creating an oral history once you have done all those interviews.

The way Ive been able to figure it out is I think the oral history takes me twice as long. Any of these four books would have been done in half the time if I didnt have to adhere to the oral history structure. I mean, I start with an outline, and I have a basic understanding of who I want to talk to. But then, the great part of an oral history is youre talking to someone and they mention someone else or they mention an event or something. And then youre all of a sudden down another rabbit hole with someone else.

And now you have a series of quotes and an entire interview sometimes with people that you didnt imagine. And so now, the narrative has to get restructured and you have to account for some of these detours. And you also have to make sure that the quotes move together in a way that supports the narrative. You dont want there to be all of a sudden harsh right angles or synapses in the narrative itself. I get a little OCD about placement of quotes and everything else.

But, I mean, for one page, I remember I probably spent two days thinking about this. Theres four quotes from people. How do I line this up for the reader? How does it support the narrative? How does it support the facts that Im trying to download to the reader? And where, if at all, should I come in and do a course correct? Or should I just let this play out? So Im not trying to say that this is jackhammering at four oclock in the morning on a busy highway. But I do try and make sure that everything thats on the page is there for a very, very specific reason.

And of course, the other thing is I have a tendency to go long. And so, sometimes Im at the point where Im cutting 200 or 300 pages. And you all of a sudden realize that the bar has to get higher. That the price of admission has gotten higher because you have so many people talking about things that you feel are worthwhile. And so then you have to say goodbye to some of those stories. And stories that people tell me and then they say, Oh, I cant wait for my parents or somebody to see this or something. Then all of a sudden, you have to say to them, Yeah, Im sorry, that didnt make the cut.

You did 750 interviews. Does that mean 750 different people, or were some of those repeat interviews with the same people?

It was more than 500 individuals, but it was actually more than 550, I believe. But there are certain key people there was one person I interviewed 41 times.

Who was that?

I interviewed Jerry Levin, who was the chairman of Time Warner AOL, who hadnt spoken really publicly about any of these things in 15 years. I think people that are very important to the story, I have a habit of you do a little bit at a time or you go to lunch, and then theres a follow-up. Or sometimes, I will admit, I ask the same question six or seven times at various points.

Over the course of a year, I think I asked Jeff Bewkes, who was the former chairman, the same question maybe six or seven times. Because Im not testing them, Im trying to understand, Im trying to get the layers. Same thing with someone like Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Laura Dern or a lot of actors from HBO history. You try and get to different levels. And a lot of times, it proves to be successful, because youre using what they gave you before as a launching point rather than coming into it cold. And then you can get to a deeper level.

Or I can say to them, Thats interesting, because last time we talked about this, you mentioned x. And now youre focused on y. Why do you think theres a disparity? Or Can you tell me about the connective tissue between these two answers?

You started off with the book on Saturday Night Live with these oral histories. Thats such an obvious and amazing subject for oral history, because you have these incredible personalities and it was such a crazy time. Since then, how have you chosen what companies to make your subject matter?

These four entities Saturday Night Live, ESPN, Creative Artists Agency, and HBO were all born in the 1970s. They were born from the most humble of origins. In fact, 10 minutes before the first show on Saturday Night Live, Chevy Chase looked at one of the producers and said, What do you think I should do after this? Because there were no expectations that it was going to survive.

CAA was a bunch of bridge tables with their wives answering the phone after they had been fired by the William Morris Agency. ESPN was a pile of dirt in a place called Bristol, Connecticut. And when employees would get their paychecks on Wednesday, theyd run to the bank because they thought that there was not going to be any money if they waited. And HBO, of course, was almost canceled, almost basically deleted by Time Inc., its parent company, several times in its formative years. So all four of these are recognizable brands. Theyve all had a considerable impact on the culture, the technology, and the world of media and television. And so I guess thats been my spine.

I mean, you mentioned the impact on the culture. To what extent are these books and this book in particular Tinderbox, on HBO a business story, and to what extent is it about the culture and the art involved?

Well, because I try and write, quote, books of record, they wind up being somewhat schizophrenic, right? Because there are several arteries that need to be served. You need to tell the story of the business story. In all these cases, how is it decided that this was going to even begin? What were some of the chutes and ladders along the way? In the case of HBO, HBO was never on its own. I mean, theres never been a stock called HBO, right? Always been owned by Time Inc., then Time Warner, then Time Warner AOL, then AT&T, and now Discovery.

So I have to trace the pedigree of those parent organizations or the business story of it. What were the financial exigencies involved? And then, of course, you have what I consider to be the cultural component. What was it like to work at these places? And its one of my favorite parts of the book, because you get to talk to employees. And what was it like when it was a very small organization? What were the inflection points when it became bigger? How did things change? What was it like to be at those meetings?

And then you start to go into deeper things, like the growth of female executives over this time, or how certain people came and stayed there or got fired, and all the things like that. And then, of course, then theres also the impact on the culture. And when, in the case of HBO, when youre talking about shows like The Sopranos and Sex and the City and The Wire and it goes on and on and on, not to mention the documentary work and the work that they did in sports and late night shows, it just becomes a diverse and very chaotic roadmap. And thats another reason why the narrative has to be so clean, because you need to make sure that the reader is able to follow along as you chart the course of this history.

All right, lets talk a little bit about the early days of HBO, Home Box Office. Was it the first premium cable channel? Did it start out that way? What were its competitors at that time?

Dating back to the late 1940s actually, there were various experiments with pay television. And they all failed miserably. By the time HBO went on the air in 1972, even though it was only 345 subscribers in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, it wound up being the first formidable attempt to do pay television. In the 1950s, there had been some attempts. But actually, movie theater owners and the networks, as you can imagine, always tried to clamp them down. So it was a bad combination of enemies and poor technology that made it almost impossible for anything to survive.

What made HBO different? How did it survive those early days?

I think it survived because its parent, Time Inc., which at that point was one of the venerable journalistic institutions and the home for all these incredible brands like People Magazine and Time Magazine, of course, Sports Illustrated and others there were people there who were very interested in diversification. They had dipped their toes into cable television by that time. And they were determined to see if this thing could go.

One of the things that I was able to track down, though, was how many times they almost hit the delete key on HBO. And in fact, one of the things that Jerry Levin shares, which was a lot of fun, was that they had a mandate to get 20,000 homes by July 1st of 1973. And if they hadnt done it, Time Inc. was going to cancel. And they started giving away free turkeys and stopped reporting a lot of the cancellations just so they could meet that threshold. If they had done it by the books, they wouldnt have made 20,000, and the thing would have been canceled.

Today, HBO is known, of course, primarily as a venue for original programming, whether its The Sopranos, or Euphoria, or Game of Thrones, or Curb Your Enthusiasm. Was it from its origins about original programming, or was it primarily about re-airing movies? And when did that transition occur?

HBO goes on the air in 1972. And I would say that for the first 10 years, at least, its value proposition, what it was being sold on, was the fact that you could get uncut movies uninterrupted at home. And there was also a great combination of some live sports, particularly boxing, that people could get as well. And so there was no real original programming. In fact, if you go back and look at some of the titles, they didnt have the money to actually produce something. So they were just buying some things. Like the Polka Festival in Pennsylvania was their first big event. Nothing that anybody was going to write home about.

And then what happened was, because of the advent of the VCR and the fact that people then could go to their corner Blockbuster and get these tapes and watch these movies at home, they realized that they had to do more. And thats when they did that paradigm shift to creating shows on their own and also doing movies.

So it had to be more about just not having commercials. There had to be something else.

Exactly. And they also started to do I mean, look, the mandate was, lets just do what the networks cant. And that manifested itself with basically three headlines. One, lets show the violence that they cant. Lets show the curse words that they cant. So George Carlin did his famous routine on HBO of the seven words you cant say on television. And lets be sexual in nature in a way that networks cant. So Sheila Nevins, who was there in the early 80s, she did this late night show called Eros, which then was changed to Real Sex, which became a huge hit for the company.

And again, youre coming back to things where you cant see it on the network, and these were incredibly unique to HBO.

By the time you have Blockbuster Video and you have VCRs and people are able to watch these kinds of things on their own time and not wait for it to come on HBO, you also have competing premium cable channels, right, like Showtime and Starz. You didnt write this book about Showtime, you didnt write it about Starz. What made HBO different from those other premium primarily movie-based channels? Was it the original programming?

Showtime, Starz, The Movie Channel they never got the traction, particularly early on, that HBO did, because HBO was first to market. They had a lot of support from Time Inc. I mean, Michael Fuchs, who was basically the George Washington of HBO, was incredibly aggressive. And so he made sure that the company had incredible talent relations. So I think that I mentioned in the introduction that when HBO went on the air, there were probably less than a dozen comedy clubs and big comedy clubs in the United States.

And 10 years later, there were hundreds. They went out and made all these deals with George Carlin and Billy Crystal and, I mean, Whoopi Goldberg and everybody. And it became one of these things that created a moat around HBO. So they had a built-in talent pool that helped them even before they were doing original series. And the same thing with music. Huge concerts with Bette Midler and tons of other artists Whitney Houston and others that made sure that they had people coming back to them all the time and spending money that their competition couldnt do.

Id forgotten about all this. Youre catapulting me back to the living room sofa of the 1980s. And Im remembering, oh right, Comic Relief and Bette Midler and all of these things that were relentlessly promoted on HBO. If you had to say what it is and perhaps because this is an oral history, different people said different things about what made it successful what were the primary factors that led to HBOs creative and business success?

I think that in its first decade, it made a very smart and this was Fuchs again a very smart, calculated decision to not try and be a fourth network. It did the opposite. And so, as a result, every programming decision went through a maze. Could you do this on a network? And, is this a network show? Well, then, forget it. We dont want it. It was funny because when they started Oz, which was their first big drama there had been a couple others before, but Oz was their big drama.

The programming executive Chris Albrecht said to Tom Fontana, who created the show, he said, Let me ask you a question. Youve worked in network your whole career. Has there ever been anything that you always wanted to do that the networks wouldnt let you do? And he said, Yes, I wanted to kill the lead character in their first episode. And Albrecht looks at him and says, Go do it. I mean, they were obsessed with breaking rules. They were obsessed with making sure that there was a uniqueness. The DNA to an HBO show was different.

And so you didnt see a lot of cop shows. You didnt see medical shows. You saw very, very particular shows. And the other thing that they did, which has served them very, very well through the years, was that they made sure that they were a place that people who had worked in both television and movies before and didnt have a lot of control because studios like to have the power and networks like to have the power they gave them to the creators.

And so, somebody like Garry Shandling and somebody like Larry I mean, Larry David, I asked he could have never done Curb Your Enthusiasm for a network. He gets to do whatever he wants to do. And giving the creators and giving the stars that kind of flexibility and freedom was also a big powerful engine for their growth.

I think when most people and again, maybe Im just reflecting the people that I talk to think of HBO in like, what was the first big show, when did it all change they tend to cite The Sopranos. But you said Oz. I mean, what were the big successes that really made the difference in HBOs trajectory?

First of all, there were amazing documentaries that were winning lots of awards about the AIDS Quilt, about they took on sexuality and gender issues. They took on Vietnam. They took on race way before the networks ever did. And they got a lot of attention. Documentaries and original movies were incredible drivers. But in terms of series, there was a little show called Dream On that was done by the duo who would live on to create Friends. It was a popular little hit. It wasnt going to bring in millions, but it got a lot of attention.

So did 1st & 10, which was this wacky, very sexually provocative show with Delta Burke and a guy named O.J. Simpson, which had a lot of male viewers. And of course Larry Sanders, which predated any of the other comedies that we associate with HBO. And it was the first show that got enormous attention inside Hollywood. And what that meant was that people loved it, they loved what HBO was doing in terms of giving freedom to creators. And it brought in a slew of talent into the network.

You mentioned earlier that you had these long conversations with Jerry Levin. Who were some of the other really key sources for you on this book? And maybe did any of them surprise you in how valuable they were?

One of the things that struck me was just how emotional people were. First of all, HBO was a place that people didnt date, they married. There were people that were there for 20 years, 25 years, 30, 35 years. They stayed there for their careers. And they were very, very wedded to it. And, I mean, Im not bragging about this, but, look, Im sure there were at least more than a dozen people who cried during interviews. Who cried. Who called me back the next day and said, Now I have PTSD revisiting some of what I went through. Or, I sat down with my children last night and started telling them some of the stories that we were talking about.

Who cried? I want to know.

Laura Dern, who I mean, she started acting when she was 14. She comes from acting royalty. Shes won all sorts of awards. When she was talking about her series Enlightened, she was incredibly emotional. She won the Golden Globe, then HBO canceled it the second year, after the second year. And just going through that and what she went through in that show was incredible. And I think that Lisa Kudrow, again, who had just come off Friends, she was in a show that HBO canceled. And it was very, very emotional. People talking about Jim Gandolfini dying and all sorts of things.

One of the things that I realized was that this was not just a place that people checked in on a time clock and left. It was like a tsunami that washed over their lives. And a lot of times, they met their spouse there, or their work ethic caused a divorce, or there were all sorts of tangential things coming off of being part of the HBO experience that I try and cover in the book. And they wind up being incredibly powerful.

There also was a very, very significant amount of important people who got fired and were there for a long time. And for them to talk about those experiences, I think was very, very powerful, and I was deeply grateful for how open they became. Sometimes they were saying things that they hadnt even said to their own families.

Who wouldnt talk to you?

Eddie Murphy said no. But I was told it wasnt personal. It was about his comedy special back in the 80s. And when you look back on that comedy special, I think it was somewhat politically incorrect.

Right. Has not really stood the test of time in some ways.

Yes, yes.

What would you want to ask him if you had gotten to talk to him?

I wanted to talk about the impact that that one night had on his career. I mean, look, Roseanne Barr, she said without her HBO special, forget about it. I mean, it was just huge in her life. And there were many, many others. Billy Crystal said HBO saved me. He was going to be on Saturday Night Live, which I chronicled in the SNL book. And then he actually wound up walking out with his manager on opening night before the show went on the air and wasnt able to get back on that cast for many years after.

But in between, he said there was a life raft, and it was called HBO and it came along. Person after person, HBO elevated them to a level of notoriety that they just had never experienced before. I wish I would have been able to talk to George Carlin and Robin Williams, and of course, Jim Gandolfini. Theres always that situation where some important people are no longer with us.

Last question. For many years, obviously, when you talked about HBO, it was in the context of cable television. And now, of course, were in a world of streaming. And HBO for so long, I mean, it, as you mentioned earlier, it changed ownership. But for so long, it was essentially within the Time Warner family. And now its Discovery. How well poised do you think is HBO in this very different future? New ownership, really completely transformed ways of viewing content.

Thats a great question. Its something that the people at Discovery are wrestling with now as they wait for final approval. But, look, sometimes when the Lord wants to punish you, he answers your prayers. And HBO had such a successful run, particularly from 1999 when Sex and the City, The Sopranos and Curb Your Enthusiasm just exploded on to the culture. And then there was other hits right after that Six Feet Under and The Wire, whatever that I do think that they got a little complacent.

And for a company that had been so savvy technologically, there was this thing called Netflix that they paid attention to. At one point, there were people inside HBO who said, Lets just buy this thing. But that didnt work out. One of the things that happened around 2016, 2017, was it was no longer a level playing field. And they started to be instead of the dominant player, they started to be the one who had their nose pressed up against the proverbial window, wanting the kind of subscriber base that Netflix had.

Look, I think that the next two or three years is going to determine maybe perhaps the next decade in the streaming wars. Theres going to be obviously consolidation, and theres going to be some winners, and theres going to be some losers. But I dont think it can stay the way it is. And HBO went through some real hiccups with HBO Max. But I think that David Zaslav, whos coming into Discovery, and Casey Bloys, who runs all the content, I think theyre determined to get back on terra firma and somehow keep the brand alive for a new era.

All right, well, we will all be watching. And until then, we can read about how HBO got here. The book is called Tinderbox: HBOs Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers, by James Andrew Miller. Jim, thanks again for being here.

Thanks for having me. [MUSIC PLAYING]

So heres a request for our listeners. I get lots of feedback from you some complaints, lots of kind words. Really appreciate it. You can always reach me directly at books@nytimes.com. I will write back. But you can also, if you feel moved to do so, review us on any platform where you download the podcast, whether thats iTunes or Stitcher or Google Play or somewhere else. Please feel free to review us, and of course, email us at any time.

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Mayukh Sen joins us now, like many debut authors, from Brooklyn. His first book is called Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America. Mayukh, thanks for being here.

Thank you for having me. Im so honored.

So tell me, where did this idea come from? How did you decide to write this book? To decide on seven immigrant women where did this originate?

I first had the idea for this book back in 2017 when I was a staff writer at a site called Food52. I was 25 back then. And I was writing a lot of stories on figures who belonged to marginalized communities who worked in the food world in some capacity, whether they were chefs, restaurateurs, cookbook authors, what have you. And these were usually figures I felt had not been honored sufficiently in cultural memory in the same way that someone like, say, Julia Child has.

And oftentimes, these people were immigrants, immigrants of color. People of color more generally, women of color, queer people, folks who belonged to all of these different communities. And so a friend of mine looked at my budding body of work at Food52, and he was like, Huh, I wonder if theres a larger project here. And maybe it focuses on immigration and food. And I was like, oh, thats interesting. But Im 12 years old right now. I am far too young to take on a project like a book.

So I put it in my back pocket. Fast forward a year later when Im the ripe old age of 26. Im like, OK, I am ready to write a book. And I had noticed over the course of that year the proliferation of so many talking points in the American food media that were along the lines of, immigrants get the job done and immigrants feed America. And I want to be charitable here and say that maybe the editors and institutions who are peddling these talking points were well-intentioned. Yet to me, these talking points continue to center a certain kind of reader whom the American food media has privileged for so long.

That is someone who is white, middle to upper middle class. And immigrants themselves and their labor and their aspirations gets abstracted when you say something like immigrants get the job done and immigrants feed America. Theres this presumed us there who is that privileged consumer. And I felt as though the best way for me to orient readers away from that sort of perspective was to write the stories of seven immigrants, and immigrant women in particular, who had really labored to shape the way that Americans cook and eat today. And I felt as though that was all I could really do within my very limited skill set as a storyteller. So thats where this book began.

At the old age now of 29 with the book out, presumably.

Yes.

So did you immediately say it was going to be just women, and why? And was there a man that you thought, oh darn, I have to lose this person?

I was pretty firm in my resolve to focus just on women, just because so much of my storytelling at places like Food52 early in my food writing career had focused on women. And I struggle to understand or articulate really why at first. Because I realized that to this world, I present as a man. Im a queer person. And over the course of writing this book, I really came to put words to this experience in my perspective. And I came to understand that as a queer person, I have throughout my entire life had a complicated relationship to gender and gender expression.

And that might explain why I feel a sense of kinship with the stories of women more often than I do with the stories of men. And I think thats why I was gravitating towards these stories early on in my career. So it felt natural to me. Yet I still had to fight that anxiety as I was writing this book. The sense that I do present to this world as a man, even if that doesnt quite reflect the inner weather of my own gender identity, gender expression.

And Im sure that many people will look at me and ask, why is it that this person who presents as a man is materially benefiting from telling these stories? Which is why I want to be as sensitive and careful in how I rendered these stories.

In focusing on women, was that because it was particularly more difficult for women to enter the American food world, or was the American food world more hospitable?

My sense is that it was certainly more difficult for women to find their footing in the culinary world in America and certainly very difficult for them to be remembered as well. I mentioned Julia Child in this book. And she is one of the few women whos really had stamina in American cultural memory. Yet, so often, I found that the work of women in the culinary realm gets very easily overwritten and erased, especially in the proverbial history books.

And I really wanted to combat that with this book. Because when readers pick this book up, they might not know the names of most of these seven women. I gather they might the name of Marcella Hazan, just because she is a well-known figure among American home cooks. Her famous tomato sauce, for example.

I mean, and that one stood out. I was curious why you chose to include her.

To some extent, I wanted to provide an easy entry point for some readers who might have a passing interest in cooking. They might see this book and say, oh, I have heard the name Marcella Hazan. Im interested to see how she rose to fame and rose to such prominence. But she was such a fascinating figure for me in narrative terms, because she is someone whom many detractors, lets say, may have characterized as a, quote, unquote, difficult woman, which is, of course, such a sexist dog whistle. Yet, in spite of such prejudices, she was able to rise to a place with such prominence in the American mind in a way that a lot of these other women in my book have not been able to. And I really wanted to understand why through writing a chapter on her.

All right, I want to go to the other six women. But while were on Marcella, lets stay here for a moment. Where did she immigrate from? Obviously Italy, but where in Italy? And how did she become so prominent as a cookbook author in particular?

So she had been born in oh my goodness, Im going to butcher the pronunciation here Cesenatico, I believe, which is in the region of Emilia-Romagna.

Ah, the food center of Italy.

She came to America from there. And she moved to Queens, I believe, in the mid-20th century with her husband Victor, who is still alive although she is not. And she fell into food. She was not an able cook by any means when she came to America. She only knew how to make gruel for pigs during World War II. That was the extent of her culinary expertise. Yet once she came to America, she moved to Forest Hills, Queens, I believe, and she felt extremely lonely. And the food made her feel so lonely, because she just found American food culture completely baffling. She went

Not good.

Yeah, exactly. And I dont blame her. But she went to a cafe in her early days, for example, and had a hamburger. And she was totally perplexed by the idea of ketchup and this idea that you could pour just a bunch of the sludge on this glorious meat or whatever. And she hated supermarkets. She just could not quite get used to culinary life in America. And so she felt as though the best way to make a home for herself, really acclimate to this otherwise unfamiliar environment, was to begin cooking.

So she began spending time with the cookbooks of an Italian food writer named Ada Boni, whose name I hope Im not mispronouncing but I probably am. And through that, she became a more skilled cook, and she eventually began teaching cooking, which led to her first cookbook in 1973. And then she became a huge star.

How did she even get that first cookbook deal in the early 70s? Was that a time in which cookbook editors were more open to women cookbook writers, and particularly the immigrant women?

I would say after the 1965 Hart-Celler Act is when you see an increased appetite sorry for the pun.

Thats OK. Puns and mispronunciations of names are perfectly acceptable on this podcast.

Wonderful. I hope listeners feel the same. But I believe its after 1965 when you see a lot of publishers becoming more open to publishing cookbooks by immigrant female authors in particular because of loosening of immigration laws. And so that was the time in which Marcella was entering the fray, so to speak. And around that same time, you have figures like the Indian-born actress and food writer Madhur Jaffrey, who comes out with her first cookbook, An Invitation to Indian Cooking, in 1973. And there are a few other figures in my book, like the French-born Madeleine Kamman, whose first book comes out in 1971. Its called The Making of a Cook. So there certainly is an increased fervor in the publishing landscape for those sorts of cookbooks.

You chose not to include Jaffrey as a chapter.

Yeah. And its tough, because I have to admit, when I was in the proposal stage for this book, I did include her, because she is such a rich, compelling character in narrative terms. And Im someone who grew up wanting to be a film critic, actually. And so the fact that she straddled these two worlds of food and film because of her work as an actress fascinated me endlessly. Yet I found myself gravitating more towards the story of Julie Sahni, who was very much her contemporary and whose narrative I feel does not get as much attention as it might merit, especially because she is reportedly, and according to my research, the first Indian woman to be an executive chef of a New York restaurant, which is quite an accomplishment.

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A New Oral History of HBO - The New York Times

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The reports on Log4Shell indicate that the hack is a major threat to many Internet companies. This is because hackers might take advantage of it to execute code inside their systems. Patching the vulnerability is possible, and companies have started deploying fixes. But each separate internet entity will have to handle the matter on its own servers and systems. This means not everyone will deploy fixes simultaneously, risking prolonged exposure to the attacks.

The internets on fire right now, Adam Meyers told AP News. People are scrambling to patch and all kinds of people scrambling to exploit it.

Meyers is the senior vice president of intelligence at Crowdstrick, a cybersecurity company monitoring the Log4Shell hack. He revealed that hackers fully weaponized the vulnerability just 12 hours after researchers initially disclosed it.

The AP notes that the Log4Shell hack may be the worst vulnerability in years. Thats because it impacts a utility ubiquitous in cloud servers and enterprise software used across industry and government. Hackers who exploit it can easily get into internal systems, as they dont have to hack a password to abuse the flaw.

From there, they can execute code remotely to steal data, plant malware, and do all sorts of malicious activities. Nation-state attackers who employ highly trained hackers with access to massive resources could quickly weaponize the attack. And everyone would be at risk.

Id be hard-pressed to think of a company thats not at risk, Cloudflare security officer Joe Sullivan told AP. He said that untold millions of servers might have the utility installed. As a result, the fallout from the Log4Shell hack will be a mystery for several days.

Hackers exploited the flaw in Minecraft, the report notes. Meyers and security expert Marcus Hutchins said that Minecraft users had weaponized the Log4Shell hack. They used a short message in a chat box to others to execute code on the target computers. Microsoft issued a software update for Minecraft. Anyone playing the game should update it to the latest version.

Minecraft is just one place where researchers observed the Log4Shell hack in action. But it didnt start there. Chinese tech giant Alibaba reported the vulnerability to the open-source Apache Software Foundation on November 24th. A fix was available only two weeks later. The foundation rated the Log4Shell hack as a 10 on a scale of 0 to 10.

More details about the Log4Shell patch are available at this link.

The Log4Shell hack patch arrived on Thursday, alongside reports describing the vulnerability. New Zealands computer emergency response team then reported that hackers had already exploited the flaw in the wild just hours after Thursdays news.

The Log4Shell hack is the single biggest, most critical vulnerability of the last decade, Amit Yoran warned AP. Yoran is the CEO of cybersecurity firm Tenable. He said that organizations must presume theyve been compromised and act accordingly.

Researchers say that companies like Apple, Amazon, Twitter, and Cloudflare could run servers where hackers might abuse the vulnerability. That doesnt mean hackers have attacked those companies. The point is that any internet service out there might be susceptible to the Log4Shell hack.

What internet users can do right now is ensure their software is up to date and await more details from security researchers. Its unclear how the hack might impact end-users of internet companies directly at this time.

Original post:

Internet is scrambling to fix Log4Shell, the worst hack in history - BGR

Ole Miss secured its first 10-win regular season in school history in 2021, and the Rebels were rewarded with a berth in the Allstate Sugar Bowl as a result.

The Rebels will take on Big 12 champion Baylor on the night of Jan. 1 in the Caesers Superdome in New Orleans, and this is Ole Miss' 10th appearance in the Sugar Bowl in program history.

In the modern era, the Sugar Bowl has a tie-in with the SEC and Big 12 champion if neither champion reaches the College Football Playoff. If the champion does reach the Playoff, the berth falls to the next team in the conference pecking order. Since both of the SEC's top teams, Alabama and Georgia, reached the CFP this season, that berth fell to Ole Miss for the 2021 season.

"Well, it's huge. We knew that after winning the Egg Bowl that we were going to be in a major New Year's Six game. It was just a matter of which one. We were already recruiting that day and already doing that."

-- Lane Kiffin, Sugar Bowl team selection press conference

The Sugar Bowl has been an annual event in college football since Jan. 1, 1935, and is tied with the Orange Bowl and Sun Bowl as the second-oldest bowl games in the sport behind the Rose Bowl. Once Ole Miss plays this season's installment of the game on New Year's Day, it will move into sole possession of fourth-place all-time in Sugar Bowl appearances behind Alabama (16), LSU (13) and Georgia (11).

Here are the results of Ole Miss' previous Sugar Bowl berths.

Ole Miss' first appearance in the Sugar Bowl came after the 1952 season against Georgia Tech who, at that time, was still a member of the Southeastern Conference. Ole Miss' only score in the game came in the first quarter when it jumped out to a 7-0 lead, but it was all Yellow Jackets from that point on.

With the win, Georgia Tech was named National Champion by five of the nation's polls.

The Rebels' second appearance in the Sugar Bowl under Johnny Vaught went similarly to their first as Ole Miss was shutout by Navy. This installment of the Sugar Bowl is the only appearance in the game in Navy's football history. This put a spoiler on a previously-undefeated season for Ole Miss, but the Rebels finished the year ranked No. 6 in the country.

Where Ole Miss had been outscored by a combined 45-7 in its first two appearances in the Sugar Bowl, it made up a lot of ground when it faced Texas to conclude the 1957 season, steamrolling the Longhorns 39-7. Ole Miss finished that season 9-1-1 with its lone tie coming against Mississippi State in the Egg Bowl.

After its heartbreaking loss to the Tigers earlier in the 1959 season thanks to a Billy Cannon punt return, Ole Miss bounced back against its rival in the Sugar Bowl. Syracuse was declared the National Champion by the Associated Press, but Ole Miss was retroactively given the title as well by multiple polls, giving it its first claim to a football national title in school history.

In what was Rice's only appearance in the Sugar Bowl, Ole Miss laid claim to another national championship following the 1960 season. Ole Miss finished the season 10-0-1 with its lone tie coming against LSU in Oxford. The Rebels were named National Champions by the Football Writers Association of America.

During the 1962 season, the Ole Miss campus was metaphorically ablaze with the enrollment of James Meredith in Oxford, ending the university's history of racial segregation. With this scene grabbing national headlines, the Ole Miss football team was as well, going 10-0 with a win over Arkansas in the Sugar Bowl.

This season remains as Ole Miss' only undefeated and untied football season in school history. The Rebels were retroactively named National Champions by three polls.

Ole Miss suffered its first loss in the Sugar Bowl since 1955 when it fell to Alabama following the 1963 season. The Rebels finished this season 7-1-2 with the Sugar Bowl being its only loss of the campaign. The Ole Miss regular season was bookended by ties to Memphis State and Mississippi State.

The Rebels concluded their 1969 season with a Sugar Bowl win over Arkansas for the second time in the last decade. This was the final Sugar Bowl appearance in the head coaching tenure of Johnny Vaught and the last Sugar Bowl appearance for Ole Miss until the 2015 season.

In what will forever be remembered as the pinnacle of the Hugh Freeze era in Oxford, Ole Miss dominated Oklahoma State in New Orleans to open the year 2016. The Rebels finished this season 10-3, its first 10-win season since 2003, and would not reach the postseason again until the 2020 season in year one under Lane Kiffin.

The 2017-2019 seasons were overshadowed by NCAA sanctions in Oxford left behind by Freeze's tenure. Although numerous games were vacated as a part of NCAA sanctions, the 2015 season, including the Sugar Bowl, remained untouched in the record books.

As mentioned above, this is Ole Miss' 10th appearance all-time in the Sugar Bowl. The Rebels and Bears have faced each other one time in the two schools' history, a 20-10 win by Baylor in 1975. These two teams were originally scheduled to open the 2020 season at a neutral site, but the COVID-19 pandemic sent the college football world into a landscape made up largely of conference-only schedules last year, and that matchup fell victim as a result.

Ole Miss and Baylor will kick off at 7:45 p.m. CT on Jan. 1, and the game will be televised on ESPN.

Want the latest in breaking news and insider information on the Rebels? Click Here.

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A Look Back at Ole Miss' History in the Sugar Bowl - CalBearsMaven

A collection of the interesting and sometimes unusual events that happened this week in Arizona history.

On this date in 1929, Col. Charles Goodnight, Texas pioneer for whom the famous Goodnight Trail was named, died in Tucson.

On this date in 1929, federal prohibition agents arrested three bootleggers after a wild chase down Speedway Boulevard in Tucson. The still was discovered on a ranch and included several hundred gallons of whiskey and several tons of sugar.

On this date in 1922, the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce suggested the possibility of changing the name of the Salt River Valley to something like Happy Valley or Sunny Green Spot of the West.

On this date in 1929, the new anesthetic, Sodium Amytal, was used for the first time locally during an operation at the Gila County General Hospital.

On this date in 1936, the highway over Boulder (Hoover) Dam opened.

1941 Edward Weston Archive ,1981, Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents

Boulder Dam.

On this date in 1889, a Tucson jury acquitted all the defendants in the Wham robbery case. The robbery took place place on May 11, 1889 when Army Paymaster Joseph Washington Wham was held up by a band of men near Cedar Springs and robbed of $28,345.10.

On this date in 1899, the Board of Regents authorized the first bond issue for the University of Arizona.

On this date in 1918, the city of Nogales reported 500 cases of influenza.

On this date in 1926, a band of Yaqui Indians south of the border near Nogales stripped a group of four cowboys of all but their underwear, shook hands with them politely and departed, leaving them to walk back to their ranch.

On this date in 1929, the city of Nogales, Sonora, was thrown open to gambling for 48 hours, with the city operating craps, roulette and blackjack games to raise funds for a $10,000 icing plant.

On this date in 2010, U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was killed in a shooting on the U.S. side of the border. Two guns found at the scene revealed the botched Fast and Furious gun-smuggling investigation in Arizona conducted by the U.S. Justice Department.

Michel Marizco

A makeshift memorial to murdered U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry in Southern Arizona.

On this date in 1871, the first telegraph station in Arizona Territory was set up at Pipe Springs in the Arizona Strip.

On this date in 1878, Edith Stratton Kitt, daughter of a pioneer Arizona mining family, was born. She was secretary of the Arizona Historical Society, collecting thousands of biographies of Arizonans for its files.

On this date in 1899, the Gila Valley Bank was founded at Solomonville. The doors opened to the public Jan. 16, 1900. It was the first of what would become the Valley National Bank.

On this date in 1903, Billy Stiles and Burt Alvord, convicted train robbers, broke out of the Tombstone jail and took 11 other prisoners with them.

On this date in 1914, Gov. George W.P. Hunt issued a proclamation announcing that the newly created Board of Pardons and Parole was in operation.

On this date in 1918, the 158th Arizona Infantry was chosen as the Guard of Honor for President Woodrow Wilson while he attended the peace conference in Paris.

Bain News Service/Library of Congress

U.S. President Woodrow Wilson (left) with French President Raymond Poincar in Paris, France on Dec. 14, 1918.

On this date in 1919, the U.S. Marshal confiscated 8,000 gallons of wine in the Globe District and poured it all in Pinal Creek.

On this date in 1928, Westward Ho Hotel in Phoenix opened with a gala celebration.

Mark Brodie/ KJZZ News

Westward Ho Hotel in downtown Phoenix.

On this date in 1902, Hi-Jolly, a Greek camel driver who came to Arizona with the first shipment of camels intended for experimental use as pack animals, died.

On this date in 1929, Congress authorized funds to expand the U.S. Veterans Hospital at Tucson to accommodate 100 additional beds.

On this date in 1929, U.S. Customs agents and border smugglers fought a blazing gun battle at Ajo. The smugglers escaped, leaving bloodstains on the ground to indicate they might have suffered casualties.

On this date in 1938, the first Navajo Tribal Fair was held at Window Rock.

On this date in 1846, Lt. Col. Phillip St. George Cooke and the Mormon Battalion took possession of Tucson and raised the American flag without encountering resistance.

On this date in 1864, the town of Callville was settled on the Colorado River by the Mormons as a landing site for river steamers.

On this date in 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt established Tonto National Monument.

Russell Lee/Library of Congress

A cliff dwelling at Tonto National Monument in Gila County, Arizona, April 1940.

On this date in 1920, state leaders held a banquet in Phoenix and formed an Arizona unit of Boy Scouts.

On this date in 1923, figures showed that Arizona led the nation in effectiveness of prohibition enforcement. Convictions were estimated at 97%.

On this date in 1929, it was announced that the Tucson Municipal Airport had accommodated a total of 1,977 airplanes at the field from the time of its opening in October 1925.

On this date in 1924, elaborate plans for a spectacular drive of 5,000 Kaibab deer across the Colorado River to new grazing lands were frustrated when the animals stampeded in a blinding snowstorm and disappeared.

On this date in 1933, the building and plant of the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson were totally destroyed by fire. The Star continued to publish at the Tucson Citizen plant.

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Here's what happened this week in Arizona history: Dec. 12-18 - KJZZ

Thom Yorke, the singer of the British band Radiohead performs on the stage of the "Rock en Seine" music festival in 2006.

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STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN/AFP via Getty Images

Radiohead fans spent several days waiting in line for free tickets to a the band's 2003 show in New York City.

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Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead plays for fans at Brisbane Entertainment Centre on November 9, 2012 in Brisbane, Australia.

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As the end of the 20th century approached, Radiohead took to the recording studio to capture the sound of a society that felt like it was fraying at the edges. Many people had high hopes for the new millennium, but for others a low hum of anxiety lurked just beneath the surface as the world changed rapidly and fears of a Y2K meltdown loomed.

Amidst all the unease, the famed British band began recording their highly anticipated follow ups to their career-changing album OK Computer. Those two albums, Kid A and Amnesiac, released in 2000 and 2001, were entrancing and eerie they documented the struggle to redefine humanity, recalibrate, and get a grip on an uncertain world. In this episode, we travel back to the turn of the millennium with Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood and the music of Kid A and Amnesiac.

Check out the full interview at NPR Music.

If you want to read more:

The Searchers: Radiohead's Unquiet Revolution, by Alex Ross

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History Is Over : Throughline - NPR

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- On Dec. 12, 1960, a blizzard dumped a near-record 21 inches of snow on Staten Island.

The storm was accompanied by strong winds, gusting to over 90 mph, and a dangerously cold air mass left in its wake. Snowdrifts reached 10 ft. in height, and abandoned vehicles rendered many roadways impassable. Some communities effectively isolated reported The Index-Journal on Dec. 13, 1960.

Drifts of the white stuff stalled traffic, and schools were closed. Bus services were halted, and trains were running sporadically. Schools re-opened, but attendance remained low for a couple of days after.

The Sanitation Department struggled to keep up with snow removal along the boroughs main arteries, as many workers could not get to work. Police and firefighters were ordered to remain on the job past their shift to deal with possible emergencies.

This blizzard was responsible for 268 deaths, 54 of them coming from the New York City area, reported the Pasadena Independent on Dec. 15, 1960.

The Sanitation Department struggles to keep up with snow removal along the boroughs main arteries, as many workers are unable to get to work. Police and firefighters are ordered to remain on the job past their shift to deal with possible emergencies.

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Today in history: Pre-winter blizzard dumps 21 inches on NYC, 61 years ago - SILive.com

A week later, General Austin S. Miller, the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, flew into Doha, and Khalilzad met him for breakfast. They were joined by Nader Nadery and Abdul Matin Bek, two young advisers to Ghani, who had spoken with Taliban envoys. Nadery and Bek reported that several Taliban had boasted contemptuously about defeating America. Theyre running with their tails between their legs, one of the Taliban negotiators had exclaimed. Bek later told Khalilzad to wake up. Please, for Gods sake, the Taliban are not in favor of negotiations, they are not in favor of a political settlement, he said. Theyre really on a victory march.

Khalilzad told him not to worry. Ive cornered them, he said. There will be a political settlement. (Khalilzad denied that this exchange took place.)

There was nothing to announce on July 14th. On August 7th, at the Diplomatic Club, the negotiating teams discussed two secret annexes to the main draft agreement, to resolve the remaining disputes. One would detail the Talibans commitments to suppressing Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. The other would attempt to link a U.S. withdrawal to a reduction in the wars violence. Recognizing that the Taliban would not end its military campaign against the Islamic Republic, Khalilzad proposed that all sides temporarily halt fighting in five of the countrys thirty-four provinces so that the U.S. could safely begin its withdrawal. In the rest of Afghanistan, the war would continue, and, if the Taliban attacked Afghan units, American forces could intervene. If the Taliban stopped attacking Afghan units in any area, the U.S. would reciprocate, and there would be a local ceasefire. But since the U.S. had an obligation to defend its Afghan allies, Phee, Khalilzads deputy, explained, the scope of this reduction in violence would be determined by the Taliban. You have the power, she said. If you dont attack, then we wont attack. She acknowledged that the proposal was complicated. Wed prefer a ceasefire everywhere, she said.

The proposal was a prescription for confusion and further conflict. Both sides accepted that the U.S. would no longer engage in offensive operations against the Taliban. But the U.S. and the Taliban disagreed about the circumstances in which the U.S. could come to the defense of its allies. The Taliban argued that Millers forces could strike only guerrillas who were directly involved in attacks on Afghan forces, whereas Miller considered this interpretation too narrow, and concluded that he was also allowed to act in other ways, including striking premptively against Taliban fighters who were planning an attack.

Either way, the U.S. concessions to the Taliban would clearly be a blow to Ghanis military. For years, Afghan forces had relied on U.S. bombers and artillery to back up their ground attacks, and to strike Taliban encampments and supply lines. Now Afghan troops would be on their own during offensive campaigns, and, if they were attacked, they would face uncertainties about whether or when U.S. forces would go into action.

But Khalilzad believed that he had forged sufficient common ground to close the deal. He shared a draft text with Ghanialthough, initially, not the proposed annexes, because he was worried about those sections leaking. Ghani, predictably, objected to the draft, and he marked up the document with changes. Pompeo and Khalilzad ignored most of his edits and arranged to brief Trump on the deal on August 16th, at his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey.

Khalilzad joined Trump in a conference room, along with Vice-President Mike Pence, Bolton, and other national-security officials. He described the Talibans promise that they would not allow Al Qaeda to attack the U.S. When it was noted that Ghani was unhappy with the deal, Trump said, Why are you wasting your time going to talk to Ghani? Hes a crook.

Trump then asked Khalilzad if he could give the Taliban something to make them coperate.

What are you talking about, Mr.President?

Like money.

No, Khalilzad replied. Theyre on a terrorism list. We cant give them money.

Trump moved on to other topics before Khalilzad could explain that the Talibans war against Kabul was likely to continue.

On August 25th, in Doha, the Taliban accepted final annex drafts on counterterrorism and restrictions on fighting. The language prohibited the Taliban from attacking U.S. and NATO troops as they withdrew. If one American dies after the deal is signed, then the deal is off, Miller told the Taliban envoys, according to an official who was present. As for the Talibans ongoing war against the Islamic Republic, Miller would take necessary and proportionate measures to defend Kabuls troops when they came under attack, without engaging in offensive operations.

The Taliban envoys also offered verbal commitments that the American officials documented for their record. On counterterrorism, the Taliban representatives said that they welcome continued U.S. operations against the Islamic State and Al Qaeda. If the U.S. bombed the Islamic State, we will hang flowers around your neck, they said; as for Al Qaeda, they told the Americans, Kill as many as you want. In a concession to Miller, the Taliban also agreed not to attack major Afghan cities or any diplomatic facilities.

In the end, the terms prioritized a safe American withdrawal. This was at a time when U.S. casualty numbers in Afghanistan had long been on the decline. U.S. and NATO troops seldom participated in on-the-ground fighting; their main jobs were to protect the government, train the Afghan Army, and provide air support. These roles were critical to the war effort, but they were also relatively low-risk. Since 2015, fewer than a dozen American soldiers had died annually in combat in Afghanistan. The yearly death toll suffered by the Islamic Republics soldiers and police was estimated at more than eight thousand. According to the United Nations, the war also claimed the lives of several thousand civilians each year.

At the end of August, Trump came up with a plan to invite the Taliban to Camp David to sign the agreement. Then, on September 5th, a car bomb detonated in Kabul, killing about a dozen people, including Elis Angel Barreto Ortiz, a thirty-four-year-old U.S. Army sergeant. That weekend, Trump ended the peace talks with a tweet blaming the deaths on the Taliban: If they cannot agree to a ceasefire during these very important peace talks, and would even kill 12 innocent people, then they probably dont have the power to negotiate a meaningful agreement anyway.

Pompeo told Khalilzad, You should come home.

When Trump pulled out of the agreement, I literally jumped for joy, a senior White House official recalled. I was thrilled when that tweet came out. Many officials throughout the government, including Bolton and other national-security aides, thought that the terms of the deal wildly advantaged the Taliban, and some were opposed to compromising altogether. (The idea that we could negotiate ourselves with the Taliban, excluding the Afghan government, was lunacy, Charles Kupperman, who had become Boltons deputy, said.) But their victory was short-lived. Two months later, Khalilzads team secured the release of two professors from the American University of Afghanistanan American and an Australianwho had been kidnapped in 2016 and held by the Talibans Haqqani faction, a group with ties to Al Qaeda. Earlier, Ghani had freed Anas Haqqani, a young member of the network. In the aftermath of these prisoner releases, Pompeo told Khalilzad to try to re-start peace talks.

On December7th, Baradar met Khalilzad again in Doha, still seeking an American commitment to promptly leave Afghanistan. Our main goal is the designation of a date and an announcement for signing the agreement, Baradar said. They decided to sign the deal negotiated the previous summer. The Taliban promised to reduce violence for seven days before the deal was official, to demonstrate their commitment. Pompeo called Ghani to inform him that an accord was again at hand, and only then did Ghani learn that few of his objections had been taken into account.

On February29,2020, at the Sheraton Grand Doha Resort, Khalilzad and Baradar, sitting on a makeshift stage, signed the Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan. The accord stated that on March10,2020, the Taliban will start intra-Afghan negotiations to seek an enduring peace, and the United States pledged to pull out its combat forces by May of 2021. Ghani, who concluded that he had no choice but to coperate, issued a joint declaration with the Trump Administration, in which he endorsed the deals general goals while making it clear that he disagreed with the terms. At the ceremony in Doha, Pompeo told attendees that the agreement will mean nothing unless all its parties take concrete action on commitments and promises that have been made. Haibatullah Akhundzada, the Talibans reclusive supreme leader, issued a statement from an unknown location, calling the American commitment to withdraw the collective victory of the entire Muslim and Mujahid nation.

The next day, Trump called Ghani. Were relying on you to get this done, he said, meaning a power-sharing deal with the Taliban. The accord was popular among the American people, Trump went on. Its popular among my enemies as well. Ghani replied that the key would be verifiable action by the Taliban to reduce their violence, but he said that he was prepared to send a team to negotiate with them.

Great step, Trump said. We need to get this done. Call me if you need anything.

Two days later, Trump called Baradar. According to an official who listened to the exchange, Trump told him, You guys are tough fighters. Then Trump asked, Do you need something from me?

We need to get prisoners released, Baradar said, adding that he had heard Ghani would not coperate. Trump said that he would tell Pompeo to press Ghani.

Later that month, Pompeo met with Ghani in Kabul and urged him to be flexible about releasing the Talibans prisoners. But he also gave him an assurance: The United States is your leverage. If we do not get what we want, we will not leave, he said. We will only leave when there is a political resolution.

This clarity that you will stand with us in the negotiation is something that we have never had, Ghani told him.

Then Pompeo qualified his earlier statement: The only thing that will change that is if we have no progress. Ghani did not appear to absorb this warning. Later, he quoted Pompeos comment to a European diplomat, calling it a turning pointevidence that the U.S. truly would not abandon the Islamic Republic until there was a negotiated peace.

That spring, the Taliban submitted the names of the five thousand prisoners for whom it was demanding release before power-sharing talks could begin. A group of U.S. intelligence officers and other officials reviewed the Taliban names and produced an objection list, which contained several convicted murderers, including Nargis Mohammad Hasan, an Afghan police officer born in Iran who, in 2012, had killed Joseph Griffin, an American police trainer, at the Kabul police headquarters. Also on the list was a prisoner known as Hekmatullah, a former Afghan soldier who had killed three off-duty Australian soldiers while they were playing poker and the board game Risk. Their cases were just two of dozens of insider attackskillings of off-duty soldiers and civilians, typically by Taliban recruitsthat had come to shadow the American war.

Ghanis advisers were developing their own list of several hundred prisoners who they said were problematicmurderers, kidnappers, and drug traffickers, some on death row. In late May, Ghani released just under a thousand prisoners, whom his advisers had identified as low-risk. But the Taliban held firm: release all five thousand or no negotiations. The Talibs became adamant, Khalilzad recalled. They knew that we were so desperate that the intra-Afghan negotiations begin.

Rather than put more pressure on the Taliban, the Trump Administration continued to focus on getting Ghani to bend. As they wrestled over the prisoner problem, Khalilzad visited Ghani at the Arg palace, carrying a message from Trump: We are ready to work with President Ghani, but if there is a perception that the big picture is being sacrificed for small matters then we are ready to change our relationship.

Ghani was unmoved. The U.S. doesnt owe us anything, he told Khalilzad. If you want to leave, then leaveno hard feelings.

Ghani clearly preferred a long-term military alliance with Washington, and he spent much of his Presidency pleading with American envoys for more support. But the Afghan President chafed at the expectations placed on him by the U.S. Notionally, he was the sovereign leader of a constitutional democracy. He considered this a matter of high principle, and annoyed diplomats by often falling back on legalistic and formalistic expressions of Afghan legitimacy, as a senior State Department official put it. In reality, the state that Ghani led was deeply dependent on American money and military power. They would give us hints about what they wanted us to do, but if we did not do those things then we would get heavy pressure, Mohib, Ghanis national-security adviser, said. Ghanis suggestions that the Republic would be fine without the U.S. were either shows of bravado or simply wishful thinking.

That July, Trump decided that he would cut U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan by roughly half, to about four thousand. Khalilzad was disappointed: he had expected the Trump Administration to conduct a formal review of the Talibans compliancewith the Doha deal before withdrawing more troops, but it hadnt. At that point, Khalilzads assessment was that Taliban compliance was mixed. They had refrained from attacking U.S. forces, as promised, and had reduced fedayeen-style assaults and truck bombings in cities and large district capitals. They delivered a three-day ceasefire over Eid al-Fitr in late May that mostly held up well. Yet they continued to attack Afghan forces, costing hundreds of Afghan lives.

Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, met with Ghani in Kabul and assured him that the pullout didnt mean that the U.S. was giving up on Afghanistan. We have signed up for a conditional drawdown, he said, using language that had been given to him by Pompeo: U.S. troops would stay until certain conditions had been met, and one of those conditions was that the Taliban and the Islamic Republic engage in negotiations. And yet it was obvious to everyone by now that Trump could overrule his generals at any time.

On July 29th, Khalilzad and Miller, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces, met with Ghani at his residence, with new assurances from Baradar. They conveyed to Ghani that, if he released everyone on the Taliban list, the Taliban would very likely reduce violence significantly and start power-sharing talks right away. Ghani recoiled at the proposition. If the U.S. wants to release people who have death sentences, and the biggest drug traffickers in the world, then you should take responsibility for it, he said. Im not.

Eventually, Ghani found a compromise that gave the Americans what they wanted. He called a loya jirga, a traditional consultative assembly, to decide the fate of the most problematic Taliban prisoners. In early August, the loya jirga approved the release of everyone on the Talibans list, including Hasan and the other prisoners on the objection list. (An Afghan intelligence official said that, weeks after Hasan was released, someone from the F.B.I. asked if she could be recaptured, but she had already fled to Iran.)

On September 12th, at the Sharq resort, intra-Afghan talks were formally inaugurated, six months after the Doha accord had specified. The group of twenty-one delegates sent by Kabul had been preparing for months, like athletes training for a big season perpetually delayed, and a German foundation had delivered seminars on how to negotiate for peace. But, at the Sharq, the Kabul team found that the Taliban were exceedingly stubborn. It took more than two months to resolve one agenda item. The Taliban were feeling a kind of pride that they had defeated the United States, Habiba Sarabi, one of the delegates, recalled.

At the same time, the guerrillas mounted offensives in Kandahar and Helmand that were clearly violations in spirit, if not the written word of the Doha accord, Miller said. During the last three months of 2020, after the prisoner releases, violence spiked across Afghanistan, and civilian casualties rose by forty-five per cent, compared with 2019. The onslaught exacerbated the environment of fear and paralyzed many parts of society, the U.N. reported. The Taliban also protested many American strikes carried out in support of Afghan forces, calling them a violation of the Doha accords annex on managing combat. Like aggressive corporate litigators seeking to drown their opponents in paper, the guerrillas filed more than sixteen hundred complaints to Khalilzads team, and used them to justify their intensifying military campaign against Kabul.

When Joe Biden ran for Senate in 1972, at the age of twenty-nine, he campaigned on his opposition to the Vietnam War. He did not claim that the war was immoral; rather, he believed that it was merely stupid and a horrendous waste of time, money and lives based on a flawed premise, as he later wrote in his memoir. Biden has approached the Afghan war with similar skepticism. In 2009, as Vice-President, Biden met Karzai, the Afghan President at the time, who urged him to work harder to end Pakistans support for the Taliban. Mr.President, Biden replied, according to Karzai and another Afghan present, Pakistan is fifty times more important to the United States than Afghanistan. In 2015, Ghani and Abdullah joined Biden for breakfast in Washington, where he told them that the Afghan war was unwinnable. According to Mohib, Ghanis national-security adviser, Afghan officials were left convinced that if Biden were ever President he will probably want to withdraw.

After Biden was elected, in November, 2020, he named Jake Sullivan as national-security adviser and Antony Blinken as Secretary of State. Both men had years of experience working in government, and they were well acquainted with the miserable set of policy options in Afghanistan. It was unclear whether Biden would follow Trumps deal to the letter, abandon it, or make adjustments in response to the Talibans violence. During the Presidential transition, Sullivan, Blinken, and other advisers sent Biden a memo reporting that the talks with the Taliban werent going anywhere. Khalilzad had apparently failed to get the Taliban and the Islamic Republic to work together, but Biden asked him to stay on as special representative at least through the spring. He knew all the players, and if the Biden Administration wanted to meet the Doha accords May 1st deadline for a full U.S. troop withdrawal, it would have to work quickly.

As soon as Biden took office, Mohib sought a meeting at the White House, but was told that only a phone call would be possible. Mohib, who had earned a doctorate in electrical engineering in Britain and had served as Afghanistans Ambassador in Washington from 2015 to 2018, had been Ghanis national-security adviser for three years. Methodical, calm, and hard to read, he was intensely loyal to Ghani, whose ideas inspired him, but he was increasingly seen as the instrumentif not the instigatorof Ghanis micromanaging.

On January 22nd, Mohib spoke on the phone with Sullivan. The new Administration sought to preserve Afghanistans social and economic gains, Sullivan said, including democracy, rights of women, and rights of minorities. If the Taliban did not engage in meaningful and sincere negotiations in Doha, they will bear the consequences of their choices. He added that he did not mean this with a view to escalate the conflict but to take a hard-nosed look at the situation.

Sullivan inaugurated an interagency policy review at the National Security Council: briefings and debates that would inform Bidens decision on Afghanistan. The U.S. troop presence had fallen to twenty-five hundred. Miller, the Resolute Support commander, felt strongly that Biden should keep these troops in place beyond the deadline, pessimistic about what would happen to the Afghan military if U.S. forces left. Much of the discussion came down to whether it made sense to keep trying to forge a deal between the Taliban and the Islamic Republic, and, if so, for how long.

More:

The Secret History of the U.S. Diplomatic Failure in Afghanistan - The New Yorker

Taylor & Francis Group, the largest publisher in performing arts, has just released the first-ever book on the history of the theatre-costume business under its Routledge imprint. Written by a trio of practicing professionals with vast and varied experience, the book features interviews with award-winning actors, designers, and the costume makers themselves. It is ground-breaking journalism, moving first-hand accounts, and a rare peek behind the curtain on Broadway and around the world.

Stage clothes are haute couture that works for a living: custom made with the finest materials and with the strength to endure eight shows a week for years. There are innumerable books about the stage - actors, directors, designers, impresarios, even the theaters themselves - but the story of the people who make stage clothes has never before been told.

Chita Rivera relates how the skirt in West Side Story helped her and Jerome Robbins remember choreography. James Monroe Iglehart laughs over how he flew through the air in a Cowardly Lion costume, and escaped a magnet trap. Paul Tazewell explains the collaboration among designer, actor, and costume maker. William Ivey Long marvels at the moment Patricia Zipprodt made theater history in the basement of Barbara Matera's costume shop. The work of more than a decade of research and reporting, the book tells the stories of people who can no longer tell their own: Ray Diffen, founder of the business as it exists today; Danny Geoly, owner of the last of the great rental shops of mid-century; designers Willa Kim and Desmond Heeley.

All three authors have decades of experience in their fields. Triffin I. Morris worked in most of the major Broadway shops, collaborating with many designers in building costumes for dozens of blockbuster shows. She now is head of the graduate costume technology program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her husband Gregory DL Morris is an independent business journalist and historian who has reported from around the world. Rachel E. Pollock has been a craftsperson on Broadway and regional theater around the country. She also teaches at UNC.

Lavishly illustrated, the 222-page book features costumes from the sublime to the ridiculous, as well as photographs of the rarely seen people who made them. It includes a groundbreaking family tree of costume shops over more than a century.

Creators of Character is available in paperback or digital download. It can be ordered from local bookstores, on-line booksellers, or directly from the publisher.

https://www.routledge.com/A-History-of-the-Theatre-Costume-Business-Creators-of-Character/Morris-Morris-Pollock/p/book/9781138484290

More here:

First Ever Book On The History Of The Theatre Costume Business is Out Now - Broadway World

Recently, on Twitter, the political scientist Lee Drutman issued a challenge to his followers and readers.

Im all for envisioning doomsday scenarios so we can better prepare to avoid them, he wrote. But Id also like to read more scenarios about how American democracy improves, and really specific scenarios, not the hand-wave-y stuff about how Americans put aside their differences.

Since I am also inclined to think about doomsday scenarios for American democracy, I thought this was a useful exercise. Unfortunately, I came up empty-handed. I have many ideas for how we might improve democracy in the United States, but it is genuinely difficult for me to envision the path from A to B, from the status quo with its entrenched interests and strong bias against change to something more equal and inclusive.

With that said, in thinking through Drutmans question, I reminded myself of a truism thats worth repeating here: For as much as we might predict and project, the future is, and always will be, an undiscovered country.

We imagine the road ahead of us as a clear path. We seem to forget that, no matter how strong our powers of perception, we cant actually see every obstacle in our way, predict the detours well have to take or know when events force us on a different route entirely.

Another way to think of this is that no one in 1928 had any inkling of what the next 20 years would bring. In retrospect, of course, we can see the lines leading to depression and war, and the transformation of the world economic and political order. But in the moment, were all moving blind.

It is very possible, even likely, that American democracy continues on its present path to something dark and dangerous. That the authoritarian movement around Donald Trump continues to gain strength and that theres little appetite among rival elites to do anything about it.

For as much as there are patterns and precedents, for as much as the past can be a guide to the future, it is also true that history turns on a dime, that something might happen a crisis or a conflict or something else entirely that sweeps the pieces from the board and begins the game anew.

I do not know how we get from the current morass to a healthy, robust democracy. But whatever force or event that brings us there, I do not think well be able to see it in advance.

My Tuesday column used the controversy over the term Latinx or rather, the conversation over its impact on the electorate to make a larger point about the things that actually drive American politics.

The forces that drive politics are material and ideological, and our focus when trying to understand and explain shifts in the electorate should be on the social and economic transformations that shape life for most Americans.

My Friday column was a related argument about power within the Democratic Party and who is responsible for the partys recent (and lackluster) performance.

It is true that some progressives either Democratic lawmakers or affiliated activists hold unpopular views or use unpopular language. It is also true that Republicans have amplified this to some electoral success. But missing in this conversation is one inconvenient fact. Progressives are not actually in the drivers seat of the Democratic Party.

I was on the Youre Wrong About podcast giving listeners a brief overview of Reconstruction. And on the latest episode of my podcast, the journalist John Ganz and I discuss the 1987 thriller No Way Out.

Helen Christophi on a Justice Department counterterrorism expert with deep ties to organized white supremacists, for The Progressive magazine.

Imani Perry on Rebecca Halls adaptation of Nella Larsens Passing in Harpers Bazaar.

Charisse Burden-Stelly on racial capitalism in The Monthly Review.

Kambole Campbell on the 2010 film Tron: Legacy for Polygon.

Robert McCoy on the perils of internet fame for Slate.

Jeremy Gordon on The Beatles for Gawker.

We drove to South Carolina for Thanksgiving, and on the way back, we stopped for lunch and gas at this rest stop. I love scenes with big, bold primary colors and was compelled to take a photo. The blues and reds are very nice, I think.

This recipe is from one of the mainstays of my kitchen, Rick Baylesss Mexican Everyday. Its very simple, very straightforward and very quick from opening the book to putting dinner on the table was about 45 minutes. If you want a spicier cream sauce, roast two jalapeos along with the poblanos (and be sure to remove the seeds). If you want a richer sauce, you can use half-and-half instead of milk.

Ingredients

2 fresh poblano chiles

10 ounces spinach, about 10 cups

3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

4 garlic cloves, peeled and halved

1 to 2 tablespoons masa harina

1 cups whole milk (or half-and-half), plus a little more if needed

4 4- to 5-ounce skinless salmon fillets

salt and ground pepper

Directions

Roast the poblanos over an open flame or 4 inches below a broiler, turning regularly until blistered and blackened all over, about 5 minutes for an open flame, 10 minutes for the broiler. Place in a bowl, cover with a kitchen towel and let cool until handleable.

Place the spinach in a microwaveable bowl, cover it with plastic wrap, poke a few holes in the top and microwave on high (100%) until completely wilted, usually about 2 minutes. Uncover and set aside.

Turn your stove to its lowest setting. Heat the oil in a very large (12-inch) skillet, preferably nonstick, over medium. Add the garlic and cook, stirring regularly, until soft and lightly browned, about 4 minutes. Using a slotted spoon, scoop the garlic into a blender. Set the skillet aside.

Rub the blackened skin off the chiles and pull out the stems and seed pods. Rinse the chiles to remove bits of skin and seeds. Roughly chop and add to the blender, along with the masa harina and milk. Blend until smooth.

Return the skillet to medium-high heat. Sprinkle both sides of the fish liberally with salt and pepper. Lay the fillets in the hot oil and cook until richly browned, about 2 to 3 minutes. Use a spatula to flip the fillets, and cook until the fish barely flakes when pressed firmly with a finger or the back of a spoon (you want it slightly underdone), usually a couple of minutes longer for fish thats about 1 inch thick. Using the spatula, transfer the fish to an ovenproof plate and set in the oven.

With the skillet still over medium-high heat, pour in the poblano mixture and whisk until it comes to a boil and thickens, about 1 minute. Reduce the heat to medium-low and simmer, stirring frequently, for 5 minutes to blend the flavors. If the sauce has thickened past the consistency of a cream soup, whisk in a little more milk. Taste and season with salt, usually a generous teaspoon.

Add the spinach to the sauce and stir until it is warm and well coated with sauce. Divide the creamy spinach among four plates. Top each portion with a piece of seared fish. (Or if it seems more appealing to you, spoon the sauce over the fillets.)

Serve without delay.

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Opinion | I Have a Handle on History. The Future Is a Different Story. - The New York Times

Subin, who studied at Harvard Divinity School, clearly delights in such curious details, and Accidental Gods is brimming with them though in addition to the strange, almost scriptural stories she tells, she also has some connections and ideas to explore. This roving and ambitious book is focused on the making of modern gods instead of ancient ones on the way that Western thought in the modern age was supposed to reflect a progressive disenchantment, a rejection of irrational impulses, but was nevertheless built upon two altars, of Greco-Roman classicism and Christian creed, Subin writes, both of which had men-becoming-gods at their centers. Belief, in other words, was at the core of modernity, even if that belief was (hypocritically) denied. The philosopher Bruno Latour has defined the modern person as someone who believes that others believe.

Accidental Gods doesnt follow a strict chronological order, but its overall sweep moves backward in time, starting with 20th-century deifications in a decolonizing world and ending several hundred years before, with divinizations of European explorers in the New World. In between are several chapters on the British Raj, including a fascinating explanation of how Britains imperial reach with its bureaucracy and data collection allowed the study of comparative religion to flourish, giving rise to European scholars who proclaimed their expertise on the belief systems of various colonies even without ever stepping foot in any of them.

Subin shows how these scholars theories of religion owed quite a lot to their own preoccupations, like a fixation on the notion of pure religion and belief, and the assumption that Christianity was the one rational faith. This concept of religion as a private mystical germ, stripped away from any political or economic context meant that the Europeans viewed the locals willingness to see the divine in any manner of people and things as proof of an inherent backwardness. She gives the example of the German philologist Friedrich Max Mller, whom she depicts as so caught up in his own pristine theories that he paid no attention to the actual conditions under which his evidence was collected: The professor erased the mosquitoes, and the sleepless nights, and the violence of an army coming over a hill.

Part of what Subin sets out to do is to restore some of this texture, showing how each apotheosis was embedded in a particular historical context. She explains that Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the supreme commander for the Allied powers, was in fact deified four different ways in Japan (after encouraging Emperor Hirohito to undeify himself), Panama, New Guinea and South Korea. And therein, she says, lies the paradox of how some autocratic figures were worshiped democratically, against their own will: General MacArthur was American destruction incarnate, and he was four ways of imagining the earth renewed.

If there is a pattern that emerges in this book, it has to do with divinizations double-edge. On the one hand, Subin says, deification has been used to subjugate, to colonize, to oppress. It was used by the Europeans as evidence that Indigenous people were so childlike that they could mistake white explorers for gods. Subin also reminds us that reports of these deifications were often delivered by the explorers themselves, who recalled being asked if they had descended from the heavens even though this recollection could have itself constituted a minor miracle, given that the explorers often didnt speak a word of the Indigenous language.

Read more:

A Roving History of Mortals Considered Gods - The New York Times