November 29, 2023

Wednesday, November 29,2023. Annette’s News Roundup.

I think the Roundup makes people feel not so alone.

To read an article excerpted in this Roundup, click on its blue title. Each “blue” article is hyperlinked so you can read the whole article.

Please feel free to share.

Invite at least one other person to subscribe today! https://buttondown.email/AnnettesNewsRoundup

—————————————————————-

Joe is always busy.

The President’s Tweet on the shooting of 3 college-age Palestinian men in Vermont.

Jill and I were horrified to learn that three college students of Palestinian descent – two of whom were American citizens – were shot Saturday in Burlington, Vermont.

While we are waiting for more facts, we know this: there is absolutely no place for hate in America.

We join America in praying for their full recovery and stand ready to provide federal resources needed to assist in the investigation. ###

Rosalynn Carter funeral.

First Ladies Melanie Trump, Michelle Obama, Laura Bush, and Hillary Clinton, followed by President Bill Clinton. First Lady Jill Biden (not shown) entered with the President.

Americans Glimpse Jimmy Carter’s Frailty and His Resolve.

“Come hell or high water, Jimmy Carter was going to use his inner resources to be there,” the presidential historian Douglas Brinkley said of Mr. Carter’s emerging from hospice care for his wife’s memorial service.

His face was pale and gaunt, his legs were wrapped in a blanket, and his eyes never seemed to make contact with the family members huddled around him. But on Tuesday, Jimmy Carter was there, in the front row of a church in Atlanta, just a few feet from the coffin holding Rosalynn Carter, his wife of 77 years.

Mr. Carter, 99, was some 164 miles from his home in Plains, Ga., where he had been in hospice care since February. He was brought into the church in a wheelchair, as the crowd of mourners at the memorial service looked on, many of them catching their first glimpse of him in nine months.

That he would make such a trek in his condition was, to some, shocking — and, to his family, worrisome.

And yet, it was also very true to form: a display of the tenacity, bordering on stubbornness, that has been a defining characteristic of Mr. Carter, the longest-living president in U.S. history.

A strain of determination has always been core to Mr. Carter’s identity, particularly when it came to Mrs. Carter, who rebuffed him when he first asked to marry her. But it has also evolved into a quiet intensity that has propelled him — and at times dismayed his family and aides — as he has repeatedly defied illness and infirmity.

“He is a man of enormous stamina and strength and will,” the author Kai Bird, a Carter biographer, said on CNN, as the memorial service concluded on Tuesday.

Mr. Carter has rarely been seen in public since he entered hospice care, and in May, the Carter Center announced that Mrs. Carter, a longtime advocate for greater access to mental health care, had dementia. She died on Nov. 19, at age 96.

Mr. Carter’s family expressed concerns that attending Tuesday’s service could be taxing for the former president. But they also recognized the importance of his presence at the church, where he joined some of his successors and every living presidential spouse.

“He has been this moral rock for so many people, but she really was that rock for him,” his grandson, Jason Carter, said. “He’s glad he’s not going to miss it, but we’re all worried about him.”

The service for Mrs. Carter was held in Atlanta a day before her funeral in Plains, Ga. today.

Mr. and Mrs. Carter’s daughter, Amy Carter, said at the service that her father was not able to speak to the attendees. So she read a love letter that he wrote to his wife while he served in the Navy more than seven decades ago.

“My darling, every time I have ever been away from you, I have been thrilled when I returned to discover just how wonderful you are,” Mr. Carter wrote in the letter. “While I’m away, I try to convince myself that you really are not, could not be, as sweet and beautiful as I remember. But when I see you, I fall in love with you all over again.”

“Does that seem strange to you?” he went on. “It doesn’t to me. Goodbye, darling. Until tomorrow, Jimmy.” (New York Times).

—————————————————————-

10 Israeli Hostages were released yesterday.

Hamas and Israel exchange more hostages for prisoners on 5th day of cease-fire.

Yocheved Lifshitz, 85, (center) a former hostage who was released from captivity by Hamas last month, holds a photo of her husband Oded during a protest calling for the release of hostages still held in the Gaza Strip. Hamas and other militants still hold about 160 hostages out of 240 seized in their Oct. 7 assault into southern Israel that ignited the war.

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip — Hamas and Israel released more hostages and prisoners under terms of a fragile cease-fire that held for a fifth day Tuesday as international mediators in Qatar worked to extend the truce and the United States urged Israel to better protect Palestinian civilians in Gaza if it follows through on its promise to resume the war.

In the latest swap since the cease-fire began Friday, Israel said 10 of its citizens and two Thai nationals were freed by Hamas and had been returned to Israel. Soon after, Israel released 30 Palestinian prisoners. The truce is due to end after one more exchange Wednesday night.

For the first time, Israel and Hamas blamed each other for an exchange of fire between troops and militants in northern Gaza. There was no immediate indication it would endanger the truce, which has enabled humanitarian aid to flow into Gaza.

CIA director William Burns and David Barnea, who heads Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, were in Qatar, a key mediator with Hamas, to discuss extending the cease-fire and releasing more hostages, a diplomat said on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the talks.

Tuesday’s hostage release brought to 60 the number of Israelis freed during the truce. An additional 21 hostages — 19 Thais, one Filipino and one Russian-Israeli — have been released in separate negotiations since the truce began.

Before the truce, Hamas released four Israeli hostages, and the Israeli army rescued one. Two other hostages were found dead in Gaza. (Politico)

Additional updates.

• 10-month-old baby Kfir Bibas, his 4-year-old brother and their parents Yarden and Shiri, were not released Tuesday, according to family in Israel. According to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), the family is being held by another faction, not Hamas, in the southern Gazan city of Khan Yunis.

• U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will be landing in Israel and the West Bank on Wednesday to meet with senior Israeli and Palestinian officials.

  (Haaretz)

  —————————————————————-

Let’s hold the media responsible.

—————————————————————-

At 90, Madhur Jaffrey relishes her role as a groundbreaking food writer.

Madhur Jaffrey at her home in Hillsdale, N.Y

In the late 1960s, Madhur Jaffrey’s career was at an impasse. She had come to America the previous decade armed with a prestigious acting degree from London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and she’d even managed to win a glimmering Best Actress trophy from the Berlin International Film Festival in 1965.

But such bona fides were not enough. Parts for an Indian actress like her were rooted in derogation: Think “harem girls and things like that,” she told me one day this fall, sitting in her house in Hillsdale, a hamlet in New York. “Rubbishy, rubbishy roles.”

A divorce left her with three daughters to support. When the magazine Holiday asked her to write an article recalling the food she’d eaten as a child in India, the country where she was born in 1933, she said yes. She needed the money.

Jaffrey in her home kitchen in Hillsdale, N.Y.

That piece would set Jaffrey on the path toward writing 1973’s “An Invitation to Indian Cooking,” reissued this month by Knopf in observance of its 50th anniversary. That cookbook announced the arrival of a culinary star, and Jaffrey’s subsequent cookbooks — she has authored more than 20 — have burnished her reputation as America’s most cherished envoy for Indian cooking. The James Beard Foundation has decorated her with nine medals, most recently this year with a Lifetime Achievement Award. Abroad, Britain festooned her in 2004 with the Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) title, the nation’s second-highest order behind knighthood or damehood. The Indian government garlanded her with one of its highest civilian honors, the Padma Bhushan, in 2022.

But you’d be mistaken if you were to perceive Jaffrey, now 90, primarily as a cookbook author. “I’m an actress,” she stated matter-of-factly. “And I do parts. One of the parts is playing a food writer.”

Her rose began blooming early: Jaffrey’s first role was as a brown mouse in “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” when she was a 5-year-old in the North Indian city of Kanpur, where her father operated a ghee factory. Moviegoing became a regular activity for her upper-class family through the unease of World War II. She sought to emulate the career of Marlon Brando.

Madhur Jaffrey and French producer Andre Micheline at the 1965 Bear awards in Berlin. Jaffrey won a Silver Bear for Best Actress in the film "Shakespeare-Wallah.”

Jaffrey at her New York restaurant, Dawat, in 1992.

Jaffrey inched closer to that dream in 1955, when a scholarship airlifted her to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). She sought jailbreak from a corner of Indian society where men “ruled the roost,” as she put it. “And I think I rebelled against that very early in life, and I said,‘Somewhere, I’m going to find a place where I can be myself,’” Jaffrey said.

But the jaundiced slop served at the RADA canteen, she said, was “very dreadful,” indicative of the dreary condition of postwar British cuisine. Jaffrey began to pine for bowls of potatoes cooked with the glorious funk of asafetida, hissing cumin seeds and a tickle of dried red peppers — dishes like the kind her mother, Kashmiran Rani, used to cook.

Her mother, a homemaker who spoke no English, mailed her three-line recipes in Hindi with sparse instructions: A little of this masala. A little of that masala. Brown it. At first, the vagueness scared Jaffrey, who believed she had no cooking aptitude. She was wrong. She realized that she could fill in the blanks by drawing on her taste memories: Her palate had been recording this knowledge all along.

“An Invitation to Indian Cooking 50th anniversary edition” by Madhur Jaffrey.

Jaffrey’s fluency as a cook served her well when, a decade later in New York, she found herself countenancing the indignities of a stagnating acting career. Casting directors criticized her for her genteel accent, which she’d picked up in drama school; it seemed incongruent with their preconception of how an Indian woman should sound. “Nobody wanted me,” she said.

But she often showcased her culinary talents as the doyenne of dinner parties in Manhattan, putting her in front of Craig Claiborne, the New York Times food editor whose 1966 piece on her, “Indian Actress Is a Star in the Kitchen, Too,” reoriented her career. Such publicity, along with her article for Holiday, resulted in entreaties to write an Indian cookbook. She heeded the call.

The time was ripe. In 1965, a watershed immigration law, the Hart-Celler Act, ushered in a new wave of educated professionals and students from India to America. The Indian musician Ravi Shankarbecame an icon of the counterculture thanks to his association with the Beatles. But stereotypes still loomed large: “The Party” (1968) featured the English comedic genius Peter Sellers bobbing his head in brownface to play a bumbling Indian immigrant.

This limited imagination, too, infected perception of India’s food. Americans seemed to believe that all Indian food was “curry, curry, curry,” as Jaffrey put it to me. Prior cookbooks like Santha Rama Rau’s “The Cooking of India” (1969) did not meaningfully correct that distortion.

Jaffrey spent five years working on her manuscript, then titled “Curry: Myth and Reality,” before drama ensued: Her commissioning editor went silent on her. The publishing house she sent her book to dissolved, leaving her opus orphaned.

With the help of friends in the publishing world, Jaffrey’s draft landed in the hands of the perspicacious Knopf editor Judith Jones in 1971. Jones had published 1961’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” co-authored by Julia Child, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle; the book was an unexpected blockbuster, and its success put Jones at the forefront of the country’s culinary cognoscenti.

Jaffrey looks at a bookshelf in her home in Hillsdale, N.Y.

“Judith was impressed with Jaffrey’s ability to translate a cuisine entirely foreign to most Americans at the time via detailed instruction, the richness of her knowledge, and the essential warmth and approachability evoked by her style of prose,” Sara B. Franklin, author of a forthcoming biography of Jones, “The Editor” (2024), wrote in an email. Because Jaffrey’s entry into cooking had begun, like Child’s, in adulthood, she “understood the importance of clear instruction for amateur home cooks who may never have encountered a particular ingredient or technique included in their recipes before,” Franklin added.

“An Invitation to Indian Cooking” appeared on American shelves in spring 1973. It was a time when cookbooks by Italy’s Marcella Hazanand Egypt’s Claudia Roden were also capturing the hearts of home cooks across America, reflecting the country’s more curious palate.

Jaffrey admitted that hers was a “small cookbook,” quilting together recipes from her own family in North India and in-laws from other parts of South Asia, such as Gujarat and Bengal. “It didn’t go through all of India, at all,” she said of her book’s ambitions. “It didn’t try to. It just said what I knew and that was in the book.”

Despite its now-incontestable reputation as a classic, “Invitation” was no immediate sales juggernaut. Jones suggested Jaffrey goose up interest by teaching cooking classes, roping in James Beard, who lived blocks away from Jaffrey, to assist. Through this, the book found its people. Her initial audience was the same that the Hart-Celler Act welcomed into America: “There were Indian students, lots of Indian students, who wanted to make kheema and dal and rice and didn’t know how to go about it,” she said.

Slowly, the book’s reach widened. American students started picking it up. Those students had children; those children later had children of their own. She still gets letters telling her what the book has meant to them and their families, even people stopping her in the street wherever she goes in the world.

Collected images and objects displayed on a mantle inside Jaffrey’s home.

Jars of ingredients line the shelves of Jaffrey’s home kitchen.

Seeing Jaffrey host the BBC program “Madhur Jaffrey’s Indian Cookery” (1982) four decades ago was nothing short of “groundbreaking,” said the British Indian cookbook author and Guardian columnist Meera Sodha. Sodha’s parents had come to the United Kingdom in the 1970s and been asked to close their windows while cooking. But Jaffrey’s presence on television, Sodha said, dignified Indian cooking as “something to be celebrated.”

Jaffrey has admirably, to Sodha’s mind, made a career of sliding freely between artistic practices. “She is one of life’s true creatives,” Sodha said. “She moved from film to food and taught me that if you follow your passion and put the work in you can, if you wish, get out of your swim lane.”

Jaffrey, though, is firm in her insistence that acting is her life’s calling. She still acts, notably as Seema’s mother on Max’s “And Just Like That …” in 2022, but she spends most of her days writing. Jaffrey has jettisoned plans for another memoir. (Her first, an account of her childhood, was published in 2006.) She doesn’t want to dredge up any old ghosts. “Life got too messy,” she said. “I don’t want to expose everyone, that messiness.”

Jaffrey's Stir-Fried Orange Pumpkin.

Jaffrey is still mildly flummoxed by the devotion her first cookbook continues to inspire. “I have no idea,” she confessed, honestly, when I asked her why this book endures. Fifty years on, Jaffrey isn’t convinced that America’s view of Indian cooking has changed in a meaningful way. Sure, American food magazines may pay lip service by printing Hindi cooking words, she said. But there’s a dimension — a soul — missing, she feels, in the superficial adoption of global flavors under the umbrella of American food. “Because how can you get the emotions of each country into the food?” she said. “You have to live it in a way.”

This may explain, then, why “An Invitation to Indian Cooking” has stood the test of time: Jaffrey writes from emotion. She lived the story she tells in that book.

Jaffrey has made peace with the reality that some projects she is working on now may go unfinished. “Well, I’m 90 years old,” she sighed. “I just have to try and keep living a bit.”

(Washington Post).

—————————————————————-

Modern Life at its best, or its worst? Certainly at its weirdest.

President Biden, speaking of America, “We’ve never set our mind to a project we haven’t accomplished if we do it together.“

He is right, of course. Can we please turn our attention to poverty, peace, disease, bigotry, gun violence, climate, not Doritos.

The sound of crunching chips is annoying. Doritos has made a silencer.

The noise of someone chomping on chips can be irritating, especially if it’s directly in your ear, on say, a voice chat or a Zoom call.

Voices — and crunching — are amplified when people are using headsets, which are often worn by gamers, many of whom spend hours at a time playing multiplayer video games.

So the chip brand Doritos created Doritos Silent, a crunch cancellation software that removes the sound of chewing from voice chat, Zoom or any call that uses headphones. But it was really created for gamers.

“It works on anything that accepts a microphone,” said Dylan Fashbaugh, lead developer at Brooklyn-based Smooth Technology which worked with Doritos to create the free app that launched earlier this month.

It can be used on any PC, and the company says it will eventually be expanded to other devices.

Fashbaugh has been a gamer for about 20 years, and said he is familiar with the annoyance of fellow gamers chewing loudly on chips.

“Crunch is one of the most distracting features that could throw someone off their game,” said Mustafa Shamseldin, chief marketing officer of international foods at PepsiCo, which owns Doritos.

Doritos surveyed more than 3,000 people — including in China, India, Portugal, Britain and the United States — and found that gamers like to snack while playing, but they also think the sounds of other people snacking is distracting.

Of the 200 people surveyed in the United States, 90 percent snack while gaming, and the majority said chips make the most bothersome noise when another gamer is eating them.

Research also showed that the crunch of Doritos is part of what people like about them, said Fernando Kahane — the head of global marketing for the chip brand.

“There is something about the crunch that has to do with it, funnily enough,” he said.

Many people crave crunchy foods because they are more stimulating to eat than soft foods, which is why chips are a go-to snack.

“That’s one of the reasons Doritos is so popular with gamers,” Kahane said.

Knowing the crunch was a draw for the eater and a drawback for the listener, they came up with a workaround for what they call a “pain point.”

“Instead of having to launch new Doritos, we could actually solve that pain point with a technology,” said Kahane.

The prospect of making a less crispy Doritos chip surfaced several years ago, and was widely mocked.

In 2018, the former chief executive of PepsiCo claimed Doritos was developing a “chip for women,” which was intended to be a low-crunch alternative, with reduced orange finger dust. There was backlash online, and PepsiCo later said it was a misunderstanding, and it was not, in fact, releasing a specific Doritos product for women.

To address the crunch issue in the gaming community, Doritos turned to technology.

That’s always been a distraction for me,” Fashbaugh said of the chomping in his headphones. “I’ll lose my focus when one person starts eating. That sound of crunching can just take you out of the experience, but you still want to enjoy your snack because realistically snacking and gaming go hand-in-hand.”

Working on this software, Fashbaugh said, has “unified two of my big interests of creating technology and gaming.”

He and his team began the process by researching and testing out various noise cancellation techniques. Then, “we got a lot of people to crunch Doritos into a microphone,” said Fashbaugh.

About 500 people were recorded munching on Doritos, and those recordings were used to simulate 5,000 different crunch sounds.

“Then, we took sounds of lots of us talking and other people talking, and mixed those together with the crunch sounds so we could generate an AI that could learn the sound of crunching and voicing,” said Fashbaugh. “We needed to make something that could really separate the sounds of voices and crunches.”

While the AI software is “trained exclusively on Doritos,” he said, it actually works on some other crunch sounds, including different types of chips, crackers and raw vegetables.

“I think it’s going to have an impact,” said Fashbaugh, adding that it was designed to keep voice chat clear.

Kahane said this is just the beginning of the chip brand’s AI ambitions.

“In the past, we would think about food innovation. Now, we are thinking about the whole consumer experience,” Kahane said. (The Washington Post).

—————————————————————-

The White House celebrates the holiday season.

Jill Biden unveils White House holiday decor for 2023. See photos of the Christmas trees, ornaments and more.

Ninety-eight Christmas trees, more than 142,000 twinkling lights and nearly 34,000 ornaments deck the halls of the White House in ways that first lady Jill Bidenhopes will inspire visitors to embrace their inner child and experience the "magic, wonder and joy" of the season. It's her theme for the holiday décor.

"I don't know how you feel, but I feel it's just breathtaking," the first lady said to applause and cheers during an event unveiling the White House's holiday decorations. "The holidays offer a time for reflection and a break from our hurried lives, a season to be fully present with our friends and our families." 

First lady Jill Biden speaks about the holiday season and unveils the White House holiday decor while thanking volunteers who helped set it up, on Nov. 27, 2023 in Washington, D.C.

She thanked the "hundreds of volunteer decorators and designers" who made this year's display possible. 

"Children have something to teach us, if we are wise enough to listen," the first lady said. "How to remain present, even as a busy world beckons us. How to open ourselves up to love and wonder and to marvel at every moment, no matter how ordinary." 

Throughout the décor are numerous nods to the 200th anniversary of the publication in 1823 of the poem and book "'Twas the Night Before Christmas."

The Library of Congress provided samples of editions from the past 200 years that are on display along the ground floor corridor. 

The traditional gingerbread White House recreates the classic story by featuring a sugar cookie replica of the book along with Santa's sleigh flying above the grounds. Santa's sleigh and his reindeer are also suspended above the Grand Foyer.

Reindeer pull Santa's sleigh through the Grand Foyer of the White House in the 2023 holiday decor, unveiled on Nov. 27, 2023.

The White House released a fact sheet and was allowing the news media to see all the trees, lights and ornaments before the first lady's event. National Guard families, who were joining the first lady as part of Joining Forces, her White House initiative to show appreciation for military families, were among the first members of the public to see the decorations. 

Children of these and other military families were also to be treated to a performance by the cast of the North American tour of the Disney musical "Frozen." The White House estimates it will welcome roughly 100,000 visitors throughout the holiday season.

One of the first Christmas trees visitors will see is decorated with wooden gold star ornaments engraved with the names of fallen service members.

The Blue Room of the White House can be seen through the doorway in the Cross Hall, which is lined with frosted Christmas tress.

The official White House Christmas tree, an 18.5-foot-tall Fraser fir, takes its usual place in the Blue Room, where the chandelier has to be taken down to accommodate its height. The massive tree this year celebrates cheerful scenes, landscapes and neighborhoods from across the country.

The State Dining Room has been transformed into Santa's workshop, with elves' workbenches, stools and ladders circling the Christmas trees and tools and gifts-in-progress rounding out the décor.

The gingerbread White House is seen in the State Dining Room.

The library honors the tradition of bedtime stories with golden moons and shimmering stars dangling overhead while the China Room becomes a sweet shop featuring flavors and scents of the season wafting from the holiday cakes, cookies and gingerbread filling the space.

The official White House Menorah is on display in the Cross Hall, which runs between the State Dining Room and the East Room.

"In this season of reflection and goodwill, we hope you will embrace your inner child and delight in simply being present with those you love," President Biden and the first lady wrote in a welcome letter in the commemorative 2023 White House Holiday Guide. "It is a time for our senses to awaken — for each of us to smell the aroma of favorite family recipes, to hear the warmth of a dear friend's voice, to see the glow of lights and decorations, to taste the sweetness of candies and treats, and to feel the quiet stillness and strength of faith."

The Cross Hall between the East Room and the State Dining Room is lined with frosted Christmas tress.

In her prepared remarks, the first lady said she knows that magic, wonder and joy can be hard to find, especially as the days grow shorter, the weather turns colder "and our hearts grow heavy in the face of a tumultuous world."

"But it's in these times, when we are searching for hope and healing, that we need those points of light the most, that we need each other the most," she said. "It's in these times that I hope you remember, if even just for a moment or a season, how you saw the world as a child."

Candy-colored Christmas decorations fill the rooms and hallways at the White House on Nov. 27, 2023.

Nearly 15,000 feet of ribbon, more than 350 candles and over 22,000 bells were used for the decorations, the White House said. More than 142,425 lights twinkle on trees, garlands, wreaths and other displays.

Seventy-two wreaths sporting red ribbons adorn the north and south exteriors of the White House.

Workers hang holiday wreaths on the North Portico of the White House in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 25, 2023.

—————————————————————-