For U.S. social media companies, the violent mob storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6 last year spurred action. They shut down then-President Donald Trump’s accounts. One year later, are Facebook, Twitter and YouTube any better prepared to face similar situations in the U.S. or in other countries? Michelle Quinn reports.
Camera: Deana Mitchell Produced by: Matt Dibble
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While the COVID-19 crisis dominated headlines for a second year, the climate crisis kept intensifying. VOA’s Steve Baragona has a look back at 2021’s major events in climate change.
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Doctors in Israel began administering a fourth dose of the COVID-19 vaccine Monday as part of a trial study to determine if the extra shot can boost immunity against the virus.
The trial study involving about 150 staffers at Sheba Medical Center near Tel Aviv comes just days after a special health advisory panel recommended that people 60 years old and older, as well as those with compromised immune systems and medical workers, receive a fourth dose of the Pfizer vaccine.Health Ministry Director Nachman Ash must give final approval to the panel’s recommendation.
Israel has outpaced much of the world in vaccinating its citizens, including offering booster shots, but the pace has slowed in recent weeks as it faces a fifth wave of new COVID-19 infections driven by the omicron variant of the coronavirus.
The fast-spreading variant has led to chaotic closures and cancellations around the world since it was first identified last month in a handful of southern African nations.
Thousands of flights in the United States and around the world were cancelled as flight crews called in sick after testing positive for COVID-19, leaving passengers stranded and unable to join family and friends during the Christmas holiday weekend.
Impact on sport events
In U.S. college football, two post-season “bowl” games scheduled this week are the latest to be cancelled due to a large outbreak of COVID-19 infections among players. Boston College was forced to withdraw from Monday’s contest against East Carolina in the Military Bowl inAnnapolis, Maryland, while the University of Virginia pulled out of its matchup against Southern Methodist University Wednesday in the Fenway Bowl, which was to be staged at the iconic home of Major League Baseball’s Boston Red Sox. The two programs join the University of Hawaii, Texas A&M and Miami to withdraw from their respective bowl games because of a high rate of infections that left them without enough players available for the game, which will cost the programs hundreds of thousands of dollars for failing to participate.
New restrictions in France
Elsewhere in the world, French President Emmanuel Macron is expected to announce a new set of COVID-19 related restrictions Monday after holding an emergency meeting with his Cabinet.
The new measures come as France posted a new single-day record of100,000 new coronavirus cases on Saturday.Among the expected new measures is limiting France’s health passport, which is required to enter restaurants and other indoor public venues, only to those who have been fully vaccinated.
China
And authorities in the northern Chinese city of Xi’an have tightened its strict lockdown of the city of 13 million residents as it continues to battle a spike in new COVID-19 cases. The new rules announced Monday bans residents from driving even within city limits unless for work or taking part in virus control work, with violators facing 10 days in detention and up to $78 in fines. Residents are already banned from leaving their homes unless they have essential jobs.
Xi’an, the home of the world-famous Terracotta Warriors, recorded 150 new cases for Sunday, bringing its total number of new infections since December 9 to well over 600, although it is not known if the surge is being driven by omicron or the previous delta variant.
Some information for this report came from the Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse.
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The hit new “Spider-Man” became the first billion-dollar-grossing film of the pandemic era over the Christmas weekend, reaching the milestone while holding firmly to the North American box office top spot, industry watcher Exhibitor Relations said Sunday.
“Spider-Man: No Way Home,” British star Tom Holland’s third solo outing in the wildly popular role, has grossed $467.3 million in North America and $587 million internationally, raking in more than $1 billion over 12 days and proving analysts’ predictions that it could reach the milestone sum.
It rocketed to that benchmark at a speed only matched by 2015’s “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” according to industry outlet Variety, and comes even as the rapid spread of the omicron COVID-19 variant casts a pall over holiday outings worldwide.
Sony’s latest installment to the comic-inspired series took an estimated $81.5 million in North America for the three-day period over the Christmas weekend, holding its top spot after scoring the third-biggest domestic opening of all time with more than $260 million, smashing early estimates.
Its debut box office sales trailed only 2019’s “Avengers: Endgame” ($357 million) and the previous year’s “Avengers: Infinity War” ($258 million), according to the BoxOfficeMojo website.
With an estimated $23.8 million, “Sing 2,” Universal’s star-studded animated jukebox musical follow-up to “Sing,” was this weekend’s runner-up.
It beat out two other new series installments: “The Matrix Resurrections” from Warner Bros, which sees Keanu Reeves reprise his iconic role as Neo, underperformed at $12 million.
In fourth place, also earning less than expected, was 20th Century’s spy prequel to the “Kingsman” films, “The King’s Man,” with $6.4 million.
Lionsgate’s “American Underdog” — based on the true story of Kurt Warner, who went from stocking shelves at a grocery store to National Football League MVP — slid in at number five on its opening weekend with an estimated $6.2 million.
Rounding out the top 10 were:
“West Side Story” ($2.8 million)
“Licorice Pizza” ($2.3 million)
“A Journal for Jordan” ($2.2 million)
“Encanto” ($2 million)
“83” ($1.8 million)
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2021 was a historic year for all-things space … from the success of private spaceflight companies to robots exploring Mars in a road trip for the ages. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi beams us through the Year in Space.
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Australia’s most populous state reported a record number of new COVID-19 cases on Sunday and a sharp jump in hospitalizations while thousands of people were isolating at home after contracting the virus or coming into contact with someone who has.
New South Wales reported 6,394 new infections, up from 6,288 a day earlier. Case numbers in the state have surged over the past two weeks but hospitalizations have lagged behind new infections.
More than 70% of cases in some Australian states are the omicron variant of the coronavirus but New South Wales does not routinely carry out genome testing to identify the variant. State Health Minister Brad Hazzard indicated Sunday that omicron is widespread.
“We would expect that pretty well everybody in New South Wales at some point will get omicron,” Hazzard said. “If we’re all going to get omicron, the best way to face it is when we have full vaccinations including our booster.”
Health officials reported 458 active cases in hospitals across the state, up sharply from 388 the day before. There were 52 people in intensive care in New South Wales.
A major laboratory in Sydney, which is located in New South Wales, said Sunday that 400 people who’d been informed a day earlier they had tested negative for COVID-19 had in fact tested positive. The lab’s medical director said those people were being contacted and informed of the error.
“An emergency response team is now investigating the cause of this mistake, which is believed to be due to human error. We sincerely apologize,” said SydPath medical director Anthony Dodds.
Doctors and pharmacists in New South Wales have said they are running short of vaccine doses amid a rush for shots spurred by concern over the omicron variant.
Victoria, the country’s second most populous state, reported 1,608 new COVID-19 cases and two deaths on Sunday, with 374 people in hospitals, including 77 in intensive care.
More than 30,000 people in Victoria spent Christmas isolating at home, unable to celebrate with family or friends. Of those, about half were reported to be active cases who contracted the virus in the days leading up to Christmas.
Three members of the K-pop superstar group BTS have tested positive for the coronavirus after returning from abroad, their management agency said.
RM and Jin were diagnosed with COVID-19 on Saturday evening, the Big Hit Music agency said in a statement. It earlier said another member, Suga, tested positive for the virus on Friday.
All three received their second shots in August, the agency said.
BTS is a seven-member boy band. The four other members are J-Hope, Jungkook, V and Jimin.
According to the agency, RM has exhibited no particular symptoms, while Jin is showing mild symptoms including light fever and is undergoing self-treatment at home. The agency said Friday that Suga wasn’t exhibiting symptoms and was administering self-care at home in accordance with the guidelines of the health authorities.
RM had tested negative after returning from the United States earlier this month following his personal schedule there. But he was later diagnosed with the virus ahead of his scheduled release from self-quarantine, the agency said.
After returning to South Korea this month, Jin underwent PCR tests twice — upon arrival and later before his release from self-quarantine — and tested negative both times. But he had flulike symptoms on Saturday afternoon before he took another PCR test that came back positive, the agency said. Media reports said he also had traveled to the U.S.
Suga, who has had a number of personal engagements in the United States during the band’s official time off, was diagnosed with COVID-19 during quarantine after returning from the U.S., the agency said.
The agency said it will continue to provide support for the three members for their speedy recovery. It said it will cooperate with the requests and guidelines of the South Korean health authorities.
Since their debut in 2013, BTS has garnered global recognition for their self-produced music and activism, which includes giving a speech at the United Nations and publicly calling out anti-Asian racism.
BTS was named artist of the year and favorite pop duo or group, and also won the favorite pop song award for Butter at the American Music Awards in November. In October, the group’s collaboration with British rock band Coldplay, My Universe, hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was BTS’ sixth Hot 100 No. 1.
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NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, built to give the world a glimpse of the universe as it existed when the first galaxies formed, was launched by rocket early Saturday from South America’s northeastern coast, opening a new era of astronomy.
The revolutionary $9 billion infrared telescope, hailed by NASA as the premiere space-science observatory of the next decade, was carried aloft inside the cargo bay of an Ariane 5 rocket that blasted off at about 7:20 a.m. EST (1220 GMT) from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) launch base in French Guiana.
The flawless Christmas Day launch, with a countdown conducted in French, was carried live on a joint NASA-ESA Webcast.
After a 27-minute ride into space, the 14,000-pound instrument was released from the upper stage of the French-built rocket, and it should gradually unfurl to nearly the size of a tennis court over the next 13 days as it sails onward on its own.
Live video captured by a camera mounted on the rocket’s upper stage showed the Webb moving gently away high above the Earth as it was jettisoned. Flight controllers confirmed moments later that Webb’s power supply was operational.
Coasting through space for two more weeks, the Webb telescope will reach its destination in solar orbit 1 million miles from Earth – about four times farther away than the moon. And Webb’s special orbital path will keep it in constant alignment with the Earth as the planet and telescope circle the sun in tandem.
By comparison, Webb’s 30-year-old predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, orbits the Earth from 340 miles away, passing in and out of the planet’s shadow every 90 minutes.
Named after the man who oversaw NASA through most of its formative decade of the 1960s, Webb is about 100 times more sensitive than Hubble and is expected to transform scientists’ understanding of the universe and our place in it.
Webb mainly will view the cosmos in the infrared spectrum, allowing it to gaze through clouds of gas and dust where stars are being born, while Hubble has operated primarily at optical and ultraviolet wavelengths.
Cosmological History Lesson
The new telescope’s primary mirror – consisting of 18 hexagonal segments of gold-coated beryllium metal – also has a much bigger light-collecting area, enabling it to observe objects at greater distances, thus farther back into time, than Hubble or any other telescope.
That, astronomers say, will bring into view a glimpse of the cosmos never previously seen – dating to just 100 million years after the Big Bang, the theoretical flashpoint that set in motion the expansion of the observable universe an estimated 13.8 billion years ago.
Hubble’s view reached back to roughly 400 million years following the Big Bang, a period just after the very first galaxies – sprawling clusters of stars, gases and other interstellar matter – are believed to have taken shape.
Aside from examining the formation of the earliest stars and galaxies in the universe, astronomers are eager to study super-massive black holes believed to occupy the centers of distant galaxies.
Webb’s instruments also make it ideal to search for evidence of potentially life-supporting atmospheres around scores of newly documented exoplanets – celestial bodies orbiting distant stars – and to observe worlds much closer to home, such as Mars and Saturn’s icy moon Titan.
The telescope is an international collaboration led by NASA in partnership with the European and Canadian space agencies. Northrop Grumman Corp was the primary contractor. The Arianespace launch vehicle is part of the European contribution.
Webb was developed at a cost of $8.8 billion, with operational expenses projected to bring its total price tag to about $9.66 billion, far higher than planned when NASA was previously aiming for a 2011 launch.
Astronomical operation of the telescope, to be managed from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, is expected to begin in the summer of 2022, following about six months of alignment and calibration of Webb’s mirrors and instruments.
It is then that NASA expects to release the initial batch of images captured by Webb. Webb is designed to last up to 10 years.
Hundreds of thousands of people in the Philippines, Asia’s largest Roman Catholic nation, marked Christmas on Saturday without homes, adequate food and water, electricity and cellphone connections after a powerful typhoon left at least 375 people dead last week and devastated mostly central island provinces.
Elsewhere, New Zealanders are celebrating Christmas in the warmth of mid-summer with few restrictions, in one of the few countries in the world largely untouched by the omicron variant of COVID-19.
Australia is marking the holiday amid a surge of COVID-19 cases, worse than at any stage of the pandemic, which has forced states to reinstate mask mandates and other measures.
And adding more pain for travelers, airlines around the world canceled hundreds of flights as the omicron variant jumbled schedules and drew down staffing levels.
According to FlightAware, there are more than 3,900 canceled flights on Friday and Saturday, with close to half of the cancellations by Chinese airlines. About 30% of affected flights — more than 1,100 — were to, from or within the U.S. This is still a small fraction of global flights. FlightAware says it has tracked more than 100,000 arrivals in the past 24 hours.
Before Typhoon Rai hit on Dec. 16, millions of Filipinos were trooping back to shopping malls, public parks and churches after an alarming spike in infections in September eased considerably.
Gov. Arthur Yap of hard-hit Bohol province, where more than 100 people died in the typhoon and about 150,000 houses were damaged or destroyed, asked foreign aid agencies on Saturday to help provide temporary shelters and water-filtration systems to supplement Philippine government aid.
“I refuse to believe that there’s no Christmas spirit today among our people. They’re conservative Catholics. But it’s obviously very muted. There is overwhelming fear, there are no gifts, there were no Christmas Eve dinners, there is none of that today,” Yap told The Associated Press.
Yap said he was happy that many Filipinos could celebrate Christmas more safely after COVID-19 cases dropped, but he pleaded: “Please don’t forget us.”
In Manila, which was not hit by the typhoon, Filipino Catholics were relieved to be able to return to churches on Christmas, although only a fraction were allowed inside and worshippers were required to wear masks and stand at a safe distance from each other.
In South Korea, tough social distancing rules remained in place, requiring churches to allow only a limited number of worshippers — 70% of their seating capacity — and attendees had to be fully vaccinated.
In Seoul’s Yoido Full Gospel Church, the country’s biggest Protestant church, thousands of masked worshippers sang hymns and prayed as the service was broadcast online. Many churches across the country offered both in-person and online services.
South Korea has been grappling with soaring infections and deaths since it significantly eased its virus curbs in early November as part of efforts to return to pre-pandemic normalcy. The country was eventually forced to restore its toughest distancing guidelines, such as a four-person limit on social gatherings and a 9 p.m. curfew for restaurants and cafes.
Christmas celebrations were subdued in much of India, with more decorations than crowds as people feared a new wave of the omicron variant potentially sweeping the country in the coming weeks.
Authorities reintroduced nighttime curfews and restrictions on gatherings of more than five people in big cities like New Delhi and Mumbai. People attended midnight Mass in Mumbai and elsewhere but in smaller numbers.
Christians comprise just over 2% of India’s nearly 1.4 billion people.
In New Zealand, where 95% of adults have had at least one dose of the vaccine, making it one of the world’s most vaccinated populations, the only omicron cases that have been found have been safely contained at the border.
As the pandemic spread around the world the past two years, New Zealand used its isolation to its advantage. Border controls kept the worst of the virus at bay. By Christmas this year, New Zealand had recorded 50 deaths in a population of 5.5 million.
But that success has come at a cost. There were empty chairs at some tables this holiday season because some New Zealanders living and working overseas were not able to return home due to limits in the country’s managed isolation and quarantine program.
The traditional dining tables of a northern winter — turkey and all the trimmings — are common. But Kiwis also celebrate in an antipodean manner, with barbeques on beaches fringed by the native pohutukawa tree, which blooms only at Christmas.
At New Zealand’s Scott Base in Antarctica, some New Zealanders enjoyed a white Christmas. During summer on the frozen continent, the sun never dips below the horizon and in 24 hours of daylight the temperature hovers around 0 degrees Celsius.
Around 200 people pass through the base over the summer season — scientists, support staff and defense personnel who provide communications and other services. Numbers are lower this year because of the pandemic and all staff traveling to the continent have had to isolate and undergo COVID-19 testing before departure.
Most Pacific Island nations whose health systems might have been overwhelmed by COVID-19 outbreaks have largely managed to keep out the virus through strict border controls and high vaccination numbers.
Fiji has an ongoing outbreak and has had almost 700 deaths. About 92% of the adult population is now fully vaccinated, 97.7% have received at least one dose and many in the deeply religious nation will celebrate Christmas at traditional church services and family gatherings.
Health Secretary James Fong, in a Christmas message, urged Fijians to “please celebrate wisely.”
In remote Macuata province, residents of four villages received a special Christmas gift: Electricity was connected to their villages for the first time.
In his Christmas message, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison referred to the COVID-19 toll.
“This pandemic, it continues to buffet us,” Morrison said. “The omicron variant is just the latest challenge that we have faced. But together, always together and only together, we keep pushing through.”
The omicron variant is prevalent in some states and is estimated to represent more than 70% of all new cases in Queensland.
Summer heat might have discouraged outdoor Christmas feasts in some places. The temperature in Perth in Western Australia was expected to hit 42 degrees Celsius on Saturday, making it the hottest Christmas since records began more than a century ago.
On Christmas Eve, a student driver in the Northern Territory made off with a truck containing more than $10,000 in Christmas hams that was empty when it was found.
“This behavior can only be described as Grinch-like,” police detective Mark Bland said.
Despite a second year of travel restrictions because of COVID-19, the town of Bethlehem, the site of Jesus’ birth, is reviving its annual Christmas Eve celebration.
“Last year, our festival was virtual, but this year it will be face to face with popular participation,” Bethlehem Mayor Anton Salman told the Associated Press.
On a typical Christmas, the biblical town is a popular destination for tourists from around the globe. An average of 3 million tourists come each year. Much smaller crowds attended the holiday celebrations in Bethlehem on Friday, accompanied by gloomy weather.
“It’s very strange,” said Kristel Elayyan, a Dutch woman married to a Palestinian, who came to Bethlehem from Jerusalem. “If it’s one year, it’s an interesting experience,” she told Agence France-Presse. “But because this is the second year and we don’t know what is going to come in the future, it’s a huge loss for the people here.”
Events included traditional marching band parades and street celebrations. Scout bands with drums and flags gathered in Manger Square to celebrate the holiday.
While celebrations are scaled down this year, Salman is hopeful that 2021’s festivities will exceed last year’s, when residents were forced to celebrate inside their homes because of lockdown restrictions, the AP reported.
Israel’s ban on nearly all incoming air traffic, which has lasted two years, continues to prevent tourists from entering the occupied West Bank, and subsequently, the historic town.
The travel ban to curb the spread of COVID-19 was lifted in November to allow foreign tourists in but was soon reimposed with the emergence of the highly contagious omicron variant. Coinciding with the holiday season, the disease’s newest strain has hampered Christmas celebrations.
Without the flood of tourists, local authorities hoped that the Holy Land’s small Christian community would keep the holiday spirit alive.
Latin Patriarch Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the top Roman Catholic clergyman in the Holy Land, celebrated a midnight Mass at the Church of the Nativity, the grotto where Jesus is said to have been born.
“Compared to last year’s Christmas, the participation is much greater, and this is an encouraging sign,” he told the masked congregation, but regretted the absence of foreign worshippers because of the pandemic.
“We pray for them and at the same time ask for their prayers, so that all this may end soon and that the city of Bethlehem may once again be full of pilgrims,” he said, according to AFP.
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The White Fox restaurant in Mosul, Iraq, isn’t known for its comfortable atmosphere or its great food and drinks. It’s known for its servers. VOA’s Kawa Omar filed this report, narrated by Rikar Hussein.
Producer and camera: Kawa Omar.
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US President Joe Biden says defeating the coronavirus pandemic – both at home and around the world – is his top priority. VOA looks at how he handled this unprecedented global and domestic challenge during his first year as president, with this report from White House correspondent Anita Powell.
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“There is nothing in the world like the food you can find in Louisiana,” Chef Isaac Toups, owner of popular New Orleans restaurant Toups Meatery, told VOA. “It’s such a unique mix of so many different cultures that converged here from around the globe. They brought their ideas about food with them and made a cuisine that is unparalleled.”
Immigrants’ culinary influences span centuries in New Orleans, a port city near the mouth of the Mississippi River. From French colonists who were the first Europeans to permanently settle in the area in 1699 to Vietnamese immigrants in the 1970s to recent arrivals from all over the world, newcomers have continually added to the DNA of local cuisine.
Liz Williams, founder of the Southern Food and Beverage Museum and author of New Orleans: A Food Biography, says there’s something unique about the way cultures – and cooking – have melded in this Southern city compared with other places in America.
“You can find every food in the world in New York City,” Williams said. “Go two blocks that way for this type of cuisine and six blocks the other way for that type of cuisine.”
New Orleans, by contrast, has spawned a gastronomical melting pot. Or, to use a local analogy, a gumbo.
“There’s no ‘New York City cuisine’ because all those immigrant groups didn’t meld together,” she said. “In New Orleans, though, all of these different immigrant cuisines have been influenced by New Orleans food and influenced New Orleans food. There’s a melding, merging and updating that seems to be constantly happening here that doesn’t happen in other places.”
Early settlers
Mention Louisiana cooking, and most people think of Creole cuisine, Cajun cuisine or some mixture of the two.
“When the two foods were first being established in Louisiana in the 18th century, they were two distinct cuisines from two distinct regions,” explained chef Donald Link, owner of several New Orleans restaurants all under the banner of the Link Restaurant Group. “Creole food was being created in New Orleans while Cajun food was in the more rural, southwestern part of the state.”
Creole culture in New Orleans arose from a mixture of the early French settlers, Spanish immigrants who followed shortly after, enslaved people taken from Africa and the Native Americans who were already here. Once the United States purchased Louisiana from France in 1803, waves of Anglo-Americans came to New Orleans as well as thousands who fled the Haitian Revolution taking place at the same time.
The confluence created a unique mix of cultures that is reflected in local cooking to this day.
“New Orleans is often called the most northern city in the Caribbean, and there was a lot of influence coming from Spanish-controlled Latin countries,” explained Link. “They brought their rice, beans, guisados and stews. And then the French brought their boudin and fricassees and all these celebrated techniques, and Africans had gumbo, which comes from the West African word for okra. It all came together to make what we call Creole food.”
Creole food is considered a cosmopolitan cuisine. It often features rich sauces, local herbs, ripe tomatoes and local seafood.
“You use what you have available to you,” said Brad Hollingsworth, owner of longtime New Orleans favorite Clancy’s. “Here, that means all these great, fresh fish from the Gulf of Mexico: speckled trout, pompano, red snapper, redfish, flounder and all the way down the line.”
Hollingsworth said cuisine from Creole culture is more focused on sauces than its Cajun counterpart. That, he said, is in large part because of the city’s ability to attract settlers from more cosmopolitan, cultured areas of France.
“They brought with them the French mother sauces that we really lean into at Clancy’s,” Hollingsworth said. “Bechamel, velouté, espagnole, hollandaise and tomato. We use them to complement our local fish or meat. It’s a combination of using what is geographically available and the techniques of the immigrant groups who came here.”
Cajun food, on the other hand, is known for being more rustic. It features meat-heavy, all-in-one-pot dishes like jambalaya and the rice-filled, spicy pork blood sausage known as boudin.
The Cajuns were also largely originally of French descent, but these French-influenced immigrants came from backcountry parts of Acadia in Canada rather than the major cities of France. They were forced out of Canada by the British in 1755, and about 3,000 arrived in rural Louisiana, where they interacted with German immigrants, Native Americans and enslaved people – all of whom added their own culinary influences.
“Cajun cuisine was more of a country food, while Creole cuisine was more of a city food,” said Toups, who grew up in the part of Louisiana known as Cajun Country, about two-and-a-half hours west of New Orleans. “That’s because the Cajuns were French fur trappers, not French-trained chefs like you might find in the city. As a poorer immigrant group, we had to add things to make our meals last. Fortunately, the region had tons of rice, which is why you find rice in our classics like boudin, jambalaya and gumbo.”
Continuing the evolution of a food
During the 19th and 20th centuries, thanks to improved methods of communication and better transportation, the two cuisines began to merge and inspire each other. They also continued to be influenced by other groups
German immigrants, for example, brought their passion for sausages to Cajun food, which helped create Louisiana’s famed spicy andouille. But the next big addition to the local food scene came when nearly 300,000 Italian immigrants – most of them Sicilian – moved to the city between 1884 and 1924.
“If you look at stuffed peppers in other places, they’re usually prepared with rice,” said Liz Williams, who will be releasing the book, Nana’s Creole Italian Table in March 2022, “but in New Orleans, our veggies are stuffed with breadcrumbs. That’s an effect of the Sicilians who arrived here.”
Red gravy, the Creole adaptation of tomato sauce – similar to how Creoles use a roux in gumbo as a thickener – and the introduction of sno-balls, made from shaved ice, to New Orleans are further examples of how New Orleanian and Sicilian cuisines merged.
“In Sicily and lots of Europe, it was common during hotter months to walk up a mountain to collect snow that you could flavor with syrup for a summertime treat,” Williams said. “In America, most places use crushed ice for more of a frozen sherbet. In New Orleans, however, shaved ice is used because it emulates more of what our Sicilians knew back home.”
In more recent decades, Mexican immigrants came to New Orleans to help rebuild after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. They, too, left an impact on their new home – not just on the cuisine, but also the way it’s served.
New Orleans is now dotted with dozens of taco trucks it didn’t have before the storm.
“Because the local ingredients are different here,” Williams explained, “so are the items sold. You’re not going to find fried oyster tacos in many places in the world, but you can find them in New Orleans.”
These examples are just the tip of the iceberg. Pots and pans in kitchens across one of the world’s most unique food cities clatter with creations that can’t be found anywhere else. At two-time James Beard award-winning chef Alon Shaya’s restaurant, Saba, Louisiana blue crab is a local addition to a traditionally Mediterranean hummus. Popular Indian restaurant Saffron NOLA adds curried seafood and basmati rice to gumbo, Louisiana’s state dish.
And Dong Phuong Bakery, an institution formed in 1982 after thousands of Vietnamese refugees arrived in New Orleans after the Vietnam War, has forever changed how many residents think of two of their most prized foods. Dong Phuong and their unique king cake – topped with cream cheese icing because bakery owner Huong Tran didn’t want her cake to be as sweet as the ones with traditional sugar icing – is one of the most popular in the city. Also, the bakery’s bread is sold by the thousands to restaurants across the city. The beloved Louisiana po’boy sandwich is now often made with Vietnamese-style banh mi bread instead of the more Louisiana-standard French bread.
“We came here as refugees with nothing, so of course it makes us so proud to have our new home appreciate what we can add to the food here,” explained Linh Tran Garza, president of Dong Phuong Bakery. “But we’re also continuously influenced by our home, as well.”
Garza points to the emergence of Viet-Cajun cuisine as proof that the two cultures are evolving with each other.
“It’s a great thing, I think. We should always be paying attention to the community and seeing how we can get better, give customers what they want, or create some new amazing food.”
Liz Williams said that is something New Orleans is especially able to do, perhaps more so than any other American city, because of its past.
“I think it has to do with us being originally colonized by the French while much of the rest of America was colonized by the British,” she said. “The British have a way of doing things and, historically, exercise less flexibility. The French, however, are more curious and more eager to make great food. They see it as an art, and they welcome new inspiration. The Creoles sought and welcomed that inspiration centuries ago, and I think our culture continues to do it today.”
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President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden brought some Christmas Eve cheer to hospitalized children who aren’t well enough to go home for holidays.
It’s longstanding tradition for first ladies to visit Children’s National Hospital at Christmastime, but Joe Biden’s visit on Friday was a surprise. It marked the first time that a sitting president had joined the fun, the White House said.
The Bidens are set to help a group of children making lanterns as part of a winter craft project. Jill Biden will also sit by the Christmas tree and read “Olaf’s Night Before Christmas” to the kids. Video of her reading will also be shown in patient rooms throughout the hospital.
The Walt Disney Co. provided copies of the book for each patient so they can follow along with the first lady, the White House said. Each book includes a White House bookmark designed by her office.
The annual tradition of a hospital visit by the first lady dates to Bess Truman, who served in the role from 1945-1953.
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For over four decades, novelist Dan Hurley has been writing 60-second-long stories about New Yorkers he met on the street. But apart from amusing passers-by with his literary talent, Hurley also happens to be an award-winning science writer. Anna Nelson met with Hurley on the streets of the Big Apple. Anna Rice narrates her story. Camera: Natalia Latukhina, Vladimir Badikov, Dmitry Vershinin, Alexander Barash
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Deep in the desert of the United Arab Emirates, the moment that camel breeders had been waiting for arrived.
Families hauled their camels through wind-carved sands. Servers poured tiny cups of Arabic coffee. Judges descended on desert lots.
A single question loomed over the grandstand: Which camels were most beautiful?
Even as the omicron variant rips through the world, legions of breeders from Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia and Qatar traveled to the UAE’s southwestern desert this week with 40,000 of their most beautiful camels for the Al Dhafra Festival.
The five-man jury at the annual pageant insists beauty is not in the eye of the beholder. Camel aesthetics are evaluated according to precise categories determined generations ago. Only female camels participate because males fight too much, authorities said.
As hundreds of woolly black camels trotted through the dusty pastures, necks and humps bobbing, one of the organizers, Mohammed al-Muhari, outlined the platonic ideal.
Necks must be long and slim, cheeks broad and hooves large, he told The Associated Press on Wednesday. Lips must droop. They must walk tall with graceful posture.
“It’s not so different from humans,” al-Muhari said, his robe sparkling white amid clouds of dust.
The high standards have prompted many breeders to seek an advantage, using banned Botox injections to inflate the camel’s lips, muscle relaxants to soften the face and silicone wax injections to expand the hump.
Festival spokesman Abdel Hadi Saleh declined to say how many participants had been disqualified over plastic surgery this week. All camels undergo rigorous medical exams to detect artificial touch-ups and hormones before entering Al Dhafra Festival.
Since Emirati investigators began employing X-rays and sonar systems a few years ago, Saleh said the number of cheaters has plummeted.
“We easily catch them, and they realize getting caught, it’s not worth the cost to their reputation,” he said.
A great deal is at stake. Al Dhafra Festival offers the top 10 winners in each category prizes ranging from $1,300 to $13,600. At the main Saudi contest, the most beautiful fetch $66 million. Camels change hands in deals worth millions of dirhams.
But breeders insist it’s not only about the money.
“It is a kind of our heritage and custom that the (Emirati rulers) revived,” said 27-year-old camel owner Saleh al-Minhali from Abu Dhabi. He sported designer sunglasses over his traditional headdress and Balenciaga sneakers under his kandura, or Emirati tunic.
Gone are the days when camels were integral to daily life in the federation of seven sheikhdoms, a chapter lost as oil wealth and global business transformed Dubai and Abu Dhabi into skyscraper-studded hubs with marbled malls, luxury hotels and throbbing nightclubs. Foreigners outnumber locals nearly nine to one in the country.
However, experts say Emiratis are increasingly searching for meaning in echoes of the past — Bedouin traditions that prevailed before the UAE became a nation 50 years ago.
“Younger Emiratis who have identity issues are going back to their heritage to find a sense of belonging,” said Rima Sabban, a sociologist at Zayed University in Dubai. “The society developed and modernized so fast it creates a crisis inside.”
Camels race at old-world racetracks in the Emirates, and still offer milk, meat and a historic touchstone to citizens. Festivals across the country celebrate the camel’s significance. Al Dhafra also features falcon racing, dromedary dancing and a camel milking contest.
“People in Dubai may not even think about them, but young people here care deeply about camels,” said Mahmoud Suboh, a festival coordinator from Liwa Oasis at the northern edge of the desert’s Empty Quarter. Since 2008, he has watched the fairgrounds transform from a remote desert outpost into an extravaganza that draws camel lovers from around the world.
In a sign of the contest’s exploding popularity, about a dozen young Emirati men who call themselves “camel influencers” filmed and posed with the camels on Wednesday, broadcasting live to thousands of Instagram followers.
The digital likes have proven important this year, as the coronavirus pandemic curtailed tourism to the festival and dampened the mood. Police checked that visitors had received both vaccine doses and tested negative for the virus. Authorities nagged attendees to adjust their face masks, threatening fines. There were few foreigners or other spectators strolling the site Wednesday.
Each category in the 10-day pageant is divided into two types of camels: Mahaliyat, the tan breed that originates from the UAE and Oman, and Majaheen, the darker breed from Saudi Arabia. Wednesday’s showcase focused on 5-year-old black Majaheen camels.
For hours, judges scrutinized each camel, scribbling lists of the animal’s body parts for scoring purposes. Breeders shouted to startle camels so they’d look up and show off elongated necks.
As the sun set over the sands, the winning breeders were called to accept their gleaming trophies. Down below in the dirt rings, camels were crowned with gold and silver-lined shawls.
“Until now we are the first in the category … We’ve received over 40 prizes (in various camel contests) this year alone,” beamed Mohammed Saleh bin Migrin al-Amri as he juggled four trophies from the day, including two golds.
Then he jumped into his Toyota Land Cruiser. The victory parade of honking SUVs and grunting camels faded behind the desert dunes.
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While many countries are fighting off their worst coronavirus outbreaks yet, Japan is detecting hardly any COVID-19 infections at all. Observers are trying to figure out why.
As recently as late summer, Japan’s coronavirus outlook wasn’t great. An outbreak coinciding with the Tokyo Olympics was killing dozens per day and overwhelming hospitals.
Starting in September, though, as Japan ramped up its vaccination campaign, the country saw a dramatic plunge in the number of reported cases and eventually the number of deaths.
Since then, the situation has only improved. Japan this month has reported an average of less than one COVID-19 death per day – a shockingly low number for a country of 126 million.
No one knows exactly why Japan has experienced such success — especially while other countries, even its immediate neighbors, have been hit by serious winter waves of the coronavirus.
There are many possible explanations. Nearly 80% of Japan’s population is fully vaccinated. Virtually everyone wears masks. Even after the government relaxed restrictions this autumn, people continued to socially distance themselves.
Some researchers have pointed to Japan’s low rates of obesity. Several recent studies have concluded that COVID-19 is more severe in obese individuals.
Cultural customs may also play a role. For instance, Japanese do not typically kiss, hug, or even shake hands during greetings. Many Japanese are also relatively quiet in public settings, points out Kentaro Iwata, an infectious disease specialist at Japan’s Kobe University.
“Masking and keeping silent in public places is very important [for fighting the virus]. Everybody knows it, but practicing it can be very difficult in some parts of the world, maybe due to cultural reasons,” said Iwata, who has dealt with infectious outbreaks for more than 20 years, by email.
Those factors, however, do not explain why neighboring South Korea, which shares many cultural traits, is dealing with its worst COVID-19 outbreak yet.
One possible explanation is that Japan is testing far fewer people, Kenji Shibuya, an epidemiologist and researcher at the Tokyo Foundation for Policy Research, said.
In the first half of December, Japan tested an average of 44,623 people per day, according to government data. South Korea, whose population is less than half that of Japan, conducted an average of 238,901 tests per day during the same period, according to official data.
Because of Japan’s lack of testing, it is difficult to believe that official case figures reflect reality on the ground, Shibuya told VOA in an email.
If the lack of testing were a major factor, though, Japan would have likely seen a surge in other indicators, such as the number of hospitalizations or deaths from respiratory illnesses, as other experts have noted.
In the absence of any definitive explanation, some researchers have tried to identify a so-called X-factor. One study even suggested many Japanese people share a genetic feature linked to white blood cells that helps the fight against COVID-19. Others theorize that the coronavirus variant spreading in Japan may have mutated itself into extinction.
Whatever the reason for Japan’s success, the battle is not over, said Shibuya, who said he still expects the country to see a winter wave of infections.
In a possible ominous sign, Japan this week identified its first cases of community transmission of the omicron variant, which scientists say spreads much faster than previous iterations of the virus. Many of those found to be infected with omicron had no history of overseas travel, officials said.
“White-knuckle” — That’s how Rusty Whitman describes the month ahead, after the launch of the historic James Webb Space Telescope, now tentatively set for Saturday.
From a secure control room in Baltimore, Maryland, Whitman and his colleagues will hold their breath as Webb comes online. But that’s just the beginning.
For the first six months after Webb’s launch, Whitman and the team at the Space Telescope Science Institute will monitor the observatory around the clock, making tiny adjustments to ensure it is perfectly calibrated for astronomers across the world to explore the universe.
The most crucial moments will come at the beginning of the mission: the telescope must be placed on a precise trajectory, while at the same time unfurling its massive mirror and even larger sun-shade — a perilous choreography.
“At the end of 30 days, I will be able to breathe a sigh of relief if we’re on schedule,” said Whitman, flight operations system engineering manager.
He leads the team of technicians who set up Webb’s control room — a high-tech hub with dozens of screens to monitor and control the spacecraft.
In the first row, one person alone will have the power to send commands to the $10 billion machine, which will eventually settle into an orbit over 1.5 million kilometers away.
In other stations, engineers will monitor specific systems for any anomalies.
After launch, Webb’s operations are largely automated, but the team in Baltimore must be ready to handle any unexpected issues.
Luckily, they have had lots of practice.
Over the course of a dozen simulations, the engineers practiced quickly diagnosing and correcting malfunctions thought up by the team, as well as experts flown in from Europe and California.
During one of those tests, the power in the building cut out.
“It was totally unexpected,” said Whitman. “The people who didn’t know — they thought it was part of the plan.”
Fortunately, the team had already prepared for such an event: a back-up generator quickly restored power to the control room.
Even with the practice, Whitman is still worried about what could go wrong: “I’m nervous about the possibility that we forgot something. I’m always trying to think ‘what did we forget?”
In addition to its job of keeping Webb up and running, the Space Telescope Science Institute — based out of the prestigious Johns Hopkins University — manages who gets to use the pricey science tool.
While the telescope will operate practically 24/7, that only leaves 8,760 hours a year to divvy up among the scientists clamoring for their shot at a ground-breaking discovery.
Black holes, exoplanets, star clusters — how to decide which exciting experiment gets priority?
By the end of 2020, researchers from around the world submitted over 1,200 proposals, of which 400 were eventually chosen for the first year of operation.
Hundreds of independent specialists met over two weeks in early 2021 — online due to the pandemic — to debate the proposals and pare down the list.
The proposals were anonymized, a practice the Space Telescope Science Institute first put in place for another project it manages, the Hubble Telescope. As a result, many more projects by women and early-career scientists were chosen.
“These are exactly the kind of people we want to use the observatory, because these are new ideas,” explained Klaus Pontoppidan, the science lead for Webb.
The time each project requires for observations varies in length, some needing only a few hours and the longest needing about 200.
What will be the first images revealed to the public? “I can’t say,” said Pontoppidan, “that is meant to be a surprise.”
The early release of images and data will quickly allow scientists to understand the telescope’s capacities and set up systems that work in lock step.
“We want them to be able to do their science with it quickly,” Pontoppidan explained. “Then they can come back and say ‘hey – we need to do more observations based on the data we already have.'”
Pontoppidan, himself an astronomer, believes Webb will lead to many discoveries “far beyond what we’ve seen before.”
“I’m most excited about the things that we are not predicting right now,” he said.
Before the Hubble launched, no exoplanets — planets that orbit stars outside our solar system — had been discovered. Scientists have since found thousands.
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U.S. chipmaker Intel is facing criticism in China after it apologized Thursday for a letter the firm sent to suppliers asking them “to ensure that its supply chain does not use any labor or source goods or services from the Xinjiang region.”
On Thursday, Intel posted a Chinese-language message on its WeChat and Weibo accounts apologizing for “trouble caused to our respected Chinese customers, partners and the public. Intel is committed to becoming a trusted technology partner and accelerating joint development with China.”
Intel’s apology came as U.S. President Joe Biden signed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which bans the import of goods produced by Uyghur slave labor. Under the measure, a company is prohibited from importing from China’s Xinjiang region unless it can prove that its supply chains have not used labor from Uyghurs, ethnic Muslims reportedly enslaved in Chinese camps.
Beijing denies complaints of abuses in the mostly Muslim region.
Intel is just the latest multinational firm to be caught up in the struggle over the Uyghurs issue as China prepares to host the Winter Olympics in February. Intel is among the International Olympic Committee sponsors. According to Reuters, 26% of Intel’s 2020 total revenue was earned in China.
Earlier this month, Intel’s letter to suppliers asking them to be sure not to use labor, products or services from Xinjiang cited restrictions imposed by “multiple governments.”
That sparked a backlash in China, with calls for a boycott and criticism of the company in state and social media. Global Times, a Chinese state-run newspaper, called Intel’s request to suppliers “arrogant and vicious,” according to reports.
Wang Junkai, also known as Karry Wang, a singer with the popular boy band TFBOYS, said on Weibo on Wednesday that he would not serve as an Intel brand ambassador. “National interests exceed everything,” he said, according to wire service reports.
Chinese officials acknowledged Intel’s apology.
China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson said at a daily briefing in Beijing that “we note the statement and hope the relevant company will respect facts and tell right from wrong,” according to Reuters.
The White House also appeared to note the company’s apology.
Without naming Intel, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said at a briefing Thursday that U.S. companies “should never feel the need to apologize for standing up for fundamental human rights or opposing repression,” according to reports.
Some information for this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters.
Worried that a new COVID-19 wave could overwhelm understaffed U.S. hospitals, federal officials on Thursday loosened rules that call on health care workers to stay out of work for 10 days if they test positive.
Those workers will now be allowed to come back to work after seven days if they test negative and don’t have symptoms. Isolation time can be cut to five days or even fewer if there are severe staffing shortages, according to new guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“As the health care community prepares for an anticipated surge in patients due to omicron, CDC is updating our recommendations to reflect what we know about infection and exposure in the context of vaccination and booster doses,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said in a statement.
“Our goal is to keep health care personnel and patients safe, and to address and prevent undue burden on our health care facilities,” she added.
Isolation is designed to keep infected people away from uninfected people and prevent further spread of the virus.
CDC officials have advised that in calculating the 10-day isolation period, the first day should be the first full day after symptoms first developed or after a positive test. If a person develops symptoms sometime after a positive COVID-19 test, the quarantine period must restart, beginning one day after the symptoms develop.
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Polish Senator Krzysztof Brejza’s mobile phone was hacked with sophisticated spyware nearly three dozen times in 2019 when he was running the opposition’s campaign against the right-wing populist government in parliamentary elections, an internet watchdog found.
Text messages stolen from Brejza’s phone — then doctored in a smear campaign — were aired by state-controlled TV in the heat of that race, which the ruling party narrowly won. With the hacking revelation, Brejza now questions whether the election was fair.
It’s the third finding by the University of Toronto’s nonprofit Citizen Lab that a Polish opposition figure was hacked with Pegasus spyware from the Israeli hacking tools firm NSO Group. Brejza’s phone was digitally broken into 33 times from April 26, 2019, to October 23, 2019, said Citizen Lab researchers, who have been tracking government abuses of NSO malware for years.
The other two hacks were identified earlier this week after a joint Citizen Lab-Associated Press investigation. All three victims blame Poland’s government, which has refused to confirm or deny whether it ordered the hacks or is a client of NSO Group. State security services spokesman Stanislaw Zaryn insisted Thursday that the government does not wiretap illegally and obtains court orders in “justified cases.” He said any suggestions the Polish government surveils for political ends were false.
NSO, which was blacklisted by the U.S. government last month, says it sells its spyware only to legitimate government law enforcement and intelligence agencies vetted by Israel’s Defense Ministry for use against terrorists and criminals. It does not name its clients and would not say if Poland is among them.
Citizen Lab said it believes NSO keeps logs of intrusions so an investigation could determine who was behind the Polish hacks.
EU response
In response to the revelations, European Union lawmakers said they would hasten efforts to investigate allegations that member nations such as Poland have abused Pegasus spyware.
The other two Polish victims are Ewa Wrzosek, an outspoken prosecutor fighting the increasingly hardline government’s undermining of judicial independence, and Roman Giertych, a lawyer who has represented senior leaders of Brejza’s party, Civic Platform, in sensitive cases.
Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki on Wednesday dismissed revelations that Giertych and Wrzosek were hacked as “fake news.” Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro said he had no knowledge of “illegal actions aimed at the surveillance of citizens” but also said Poland was “not helpless” in taking action against people suspected of crimes.
Giertych was hacked 18 times, also in the run-up to 2019 parliamentary elections that the ruling Law and Justice party won by a razor-thin margin. That victory has continued an erosion of democracy in the nation where the popular 1980s protest movement Solidarity presaged the eventual collapse of the Soviet empire.
The intense tempo of the hacks of Brejza and Giertych “indicates an extreme level of monitoring” that raises pressing questions about abuses of power, Citizen Lab senior researcher John Scott-Railton said. Pegasus gives its operators complete access to a mobile device: They can extract passwords, photos, messages, contacts and browsing history, and activate the microphone and camera for real-time eavesdropping.
“My heart sinks with each case we find,” Scott-Railton added. “This seems to be confirming our worst fear: Even when used in a democracy, this kind of spyware has an almost immutable abuse potential.”
Other confirmed victims have included Mexican and Saudi journalists, British attorneys, Palestinian human rights activists, heads of state and Uganda-based U.S. diplomats.
An NSO spokesperson said Thursday that “the company does not and cannot know who the targets of its customers are, yet implements measures to ensure that these systems are used solely for the authorized uses.” The spokesperson said there is zero tolerance for governments that abuse the software; NSO says it has terminated multiple contracts of governments that have abused Pegasus, although it has not named any publicly.
Despite any measures NSO might be taking, Citizen Lab notes, the list of abuse cases continues to grow.
Doctored texts
Brejza, a 38-year-old attorney, told the AP that he has no doubt data stolen from his phone while he was chief of staff of the opposition coalition’s parliamentary campaign provided critical strategy insights. Combined with the smear effort against him, he said, it prevented “a fair electoral process.”
Text messages stolen from Brejza’s phone were doctored to make it appear as if he created an online group that spread hateful anti-government propaganda; reports in state-controlled media cited the altered texts. But the group didn’t exist.
Brejza says he now understands where TVP state television got them.
“This operation wrecked the work of staff and destabilized my campaign,” he said. “I don’t know how many votes it took from me and the entire coalition.”
Brejza won his Senate seat in that October 2019 race. But since the ruling party held on to the more powerful lower house of parliament, it has steered Poland further away from EU standards of liberal democracy.
Election monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said at the time that control of state media gave the ruling party an unfair advantage but called the elections essentially free. They were unaware of the hacking.
Brejza has been a Law and Justice party critic since it won power in 2015. For example, he has exposed large bonuses paid to senior government officials. In another case, he revealed that the postal service sent tens of thousands of dollars to a company tied to ruling party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski. Brejza fears the hacking could have compromised whistleblowers who had reached out to him with evidence.
NSO Group is facing daunting financial and legal challenges — including the threat of default on more than $300 million in debt — after governments used Pegasus spyware to spy on dissidents, journalists, diplomats and human rights activists from countries including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Mexico and the United States. The U.S. blacklisting of NSO has effectively barred U.S. companies from supplying technology to the Israeli firm.
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Under pressure from U.S. auto safety regulators, Tesla has agreed to stop allowing video games to be played on center touch screens while its vehicles are moving.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says the company will send out a software update over the Internet so the function called “Passenger Play” will be locked and won’t work while vehicles are in motion.
The move comes one day after the agency announced it would open a formal investigation into distracted driving concerns about Tesla’s video games, some of which could be played while cars are being driven.
An agency spokeswoman says in a statement Thursday that the change came after regulators discussed concerns about the system with Tesla.
The statement says NHTSA regularly talks about infotainment screens with all automakers. A message was left Thursday seeking comment from Tesla, which has disbanded its media relations department.
The agency says its investigation of Tesla’s feature will continue even with the update.
“The Vehicle Safety Act prohibits manufacturers from selling vehicles with defects posing unreasonable risks to safety, including technologies that distract drivers from driving safely,” NHTSA’s statement said. The agency said it assesses how manufacturers identify and guard against distraction hazards through misuse or intended use of screens and other convenience technology.
The agency announced Wednesday that it would formally investigate Tesla’s screens after an owner from the Portland, Oregon, area filed a complaint when he discovered that a driver could play games while the cars are moving.
The agency said that the “Passenger Play” feature could distract the driver and increase the risk of a crash.
The probe covers about 580,000 Tesla Models S, X, Y and 3 from the 2017 through 2022 model years.
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Author Joan Didion, whose essays, memoirs, novels and screenplays chronicled contemporary American society, as well as her grief over the deaths of her husband and daughter, has died at the age of 87.
The cause of death was Parkinson’s disease, her publisher Knopf said Thursday in a statement. Didion first emerged as a writer of substance in the late 1960s as an early practitioner of “new journalism,” which allowed writers to take a narrative, more personalized perspective.
Her 1968 essay collection “Slouching Toward Bethlehem,” a title borrowed from poet William Butler Yeats, looked at the culture of her native California. The title essay offered an unsympathetic view of the emerging hippie culture in San Francisco and a New York Times review called the book “some of the finest magazine pieces published by anyone in this country in recent years.”
Didion had an air of casual glamour and writerly cool and in her heyday frequently was typically photographed in oversized sunglasses or lounging nonchalantly with a cigarette dangling from her hand. She was 80 in 2015 when the French fashion house Celine used her as a model in an ad campaign for its sunglasses.
Tragedy inadvertently led to a career resurgence in the 2000s as Didion wrote of the deaths of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, in “The Year of Magical Thinking” and daughter Quintana Roo Dunne in “Blue Nights.”
Didion’s works were insightful, confessional and tinged with ennui and skepticism. The Los Angeles Times praised her as an “unparalleled stylist” with “piercing insights and exquisite command of language.”
British writer Martin Amis referred to Didion as the “poet of the Great Californian Emptiness” and she was especially incisive in writing about the state. Her 1970 novel “Play It as It Lays” showed Los Angeles, through the eyes of a troubled actor, to be glamorous and vapid while the 2003 essay collection “Where I Was From” was about the culture of the state, as well as herself and her family’s long history there.
“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means,” Didion said in a speech at her alma mater, the University of California in Berkeley, in 1975.
From California to New York
Her life and career were captured in the 2017 documentary “Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold” by her nephew, actor-filmmaker Griffin Dunne. The New Yorker magazine called the film, which borrowed its title from another Yeats work, “an intimate, affectionate, and partial portrait.”
Didion ended up in New York by winning a college essay contest that provided an internship at Vogue magazine in the late 1950s. She met Dunne there two years later.
Didion and Dunne, who were married nearly 40 years, split their lives between Southern California and New York and managed to be leading figures in both literary circles and Hollywood.
The parties at their Malibu beach house, where Harrison Ford worked as a carpenter before “Star Wars” fame, drew crowds that included singer Janis Joplin, moviemakers Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma and Martin Scorsese and actor Warren Beatty, who was reportedly infatuated with Didion.
Dunne was demonstrative and garrulous while Didion could come off as introverted. Their marriage was rocky at times and Dunne moved to Las Vegas for a while. In an essay in “The White Album,” Didion wrote that they once took a vacation in Hawaii “in lieu of filing for divorce.”
Through it all they edited each other’s work and collaborated on screenplays for the 1976 remake of “A Star Is Born,” “The Panic in Needle Park,” the 1971 film that gave Al Pacino his first starring role, as well as the movie adaptations of “Play It as It Lays” and Dunne’s novel “True Confessions.”
The couple moved to New York in 1988 and after Dunne suffered a heart attack at the dinner table in 2003, Didion wrote of the ensuing heartache in “The Year of Magical Thinking,” which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it,” she wrote.
Twenty months after Dunne’s death, Didion returned to the place of grief when Quintana Roo died from acute pancreatitis after a series of health problems, which she chronicled in “Blue Nights.”
The diminutive Didion dwindled to 75 pounds (34 kg) after the deaths but began to come out of it by working on a one-woman stage version of “Magical Thinking” that opened on Broadway in 2007 with Vanessa Redgrave starring and David Hare directing.
Didion, whose other books included the novel “A Book of Common Prayer” and non-fiction works “Miami” and “Salvador” was presented the National Medal of Arts in 2013 by President Barack Obama.
NASA looks likely to launch a much hyped and often-delayed space telescope. Plus, SpaceX makes history again, and a space tourist is already planning his next trip. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us the Week in Space.
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