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President Obama is not the only one thinking about the precedent set when Sony decided not to release the comedy The Interview. Around Hollywood, the action drew immediate rebuke as celebrities took to Twitter — like director and producer Judd Apatow:

I think it is disgraceful that these theaters are not showing The Interview. Will they pull any movie that gets an anonymous threat now?

— Judd Apatow (@JuddApatow) December 17, 2014

Late night host Jimmy Kimmel agreed, writing, "An un-American act of cowardice that validates terrorist actions and sets a terrifying precedent."

In writing rooms and comedy clubs in Los Angeles, however, the conversations are more nuanced.

"I feel like there's been like a schizophrenic range of reactions," says Rob Kutner, a writer for comedian Conan O'Brien who has also worked for The Daily Show and Dennis Miller. "Because I feel like in the sort of public realm, like in social media, people are saying like, 'This is an outrage and it's so stupid of Sony and so cowardly.'

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The Two-Way

CEO Says Sony Pictures 'Did Not Capitulate,' Is Exploring Options

"Nobody censors us," says Stephanie Striegel, an independent producer who's worked for Spyglass and New Line Cinemas. Like Kutner, she's been following the Sony story for weeks.

"We get to watch what we want, read what we want, produce what we want," she says. "You know, that whole First Amendment thing."

But, Kutner says, "I feel like in private conversations ... in the calm of, 'What would I do?' there's a little more trepidation." What if we did show the movie, and something happened — a bombing or a shooting?

Or nobody comes because they're scared of something happening, Striegel points out. "That could be the other thing."

Striegel worries Sony's decision could have a far-reaching effect on Hollywood.

"From a creative point of view, if you're a producer, or you're an actor, you're a writer, you know, it feels like the margin's narrowed about what kind of movies Hollywood will be making," she says.

The effect may ripple beyond Hollywood. At Flappers Comedy Club in beautiful downtown Burbank, Calif., comedians like Greg Cashmanian are taking cracks at Kim Jong Un.

"Part of me wants to believe that he's like a super big cinephile and he was like, 'Oh, they're doing a movie about me? Who's in it? James Franco? Oh, he's good,' " Cashmanian cracked. "'Who's killing me? Seth Rogen? No. No, I saw Neighbors. Zero sex appeal.' "

But Flappers owner Dave Reinitz worries that these kind of jokes could provoke an attack on his business.

"We're a tiny company, mom-and-pop place," Reinitz says. "But we got a server, we've got a website and we need that for our business. So there is a chill effect when you feel threatened."

Reinitz says that's the scariest thing, because the world needs comedy. "Comedy helps open minds and that's why they're scared of it. That's the real reason. 'Oh, we're insulted,' — No, you're worried that your people are going to see this movie and realize how hysterical and ridiculous your tinpot dictator is and maybe try to take some action to change that system."

He just hopes that we don't have to change ours. In the words of the incomparable Mel Brooks: "Humor is just another defense against the universe."

the interview

Sony data breach

Updated at 10:30 a.m. ET

The United States has released four Afghan detainees from the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who were returned to Afghanistan — the latest in a series of releases of inmates in recent weeks.

Reuters says: "The men were flown to Kabul overnight aboard a U.S. military plane and released to Afghan authorities, the first such transfer of its kind to the war-torn country since 2009, a U.S. official said."

The four were released at the request of Afghanistan's new president, Ashraf Ghani, The Associated Press reports.

The AP says:

"Obama administration officials said they worked quickly to fulfill the request from Ghani, in office just three months, to return the four, who had been cleared for transfer as a kind of reconciliation and mark of improved U.S.-Afghan relations.

"There is no requirement that the Afghan government further detain the men, identified as Mohammed Zahir, Shawali Khan, Abdul Ghani and Khi Ali Gul."

All 4 detainees sent home to Afghanistan from #Gitmo overnight were cleared for release by 2008-09 Obama Task Force. pic.twitter.com/egYuxwwxtD

— Carol Rosenberg (@carolrosenberg) December 20, 2014

In a Pentagon statement, the U.S. said it is "grateful to the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan for its willingness to support ongoing U.S. efforts to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. The United States coordinated with the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan to ensure these transfers took place consistent with appropriate security and humane treatment measures."

Even so, The Washington Post reports: "The United States and Afghanistan have not started serious discussions about repatriating the remaining eight Afghans still held at Guantanamo Bay, said the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the transfers.

Last month, five Guantanamo detainees, four of them Yemenis, were sent to Georgia and Slovakia. And, earlier this month, the U.S. transferred six inmates to Uruguay. The latest release comes as no real surprise, as it is part of a larger U.S. effort to draw down the inmate population at Guantanamo, which President Obama, in his first campaign for the White House, promised to close.

Guantanamo Bay

Afghanistan

It was Christmas Eve 2002, at the height of midsummer, when I arrived to take up a year-long job as doctor at Halley base – the most remote research station operated by the British in Antarctica.

As we cruised up to the Caird Coast of Antarctica, a crowd of us stood out on the deck of the supply ship RRS Ernest Shackleton, singing Christmas carols in the 24-hour sunlight, wearing Santa hats and reindeer antlers.

The sky was a depthless blue cupola, the ice threw off a lacquered white sheen. I was belting out "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" when, looking over the gunwale, I saw my first emperor penguin. It stood just back from the sea ice edge, chin held aloft in a suitably regal pose. I was captivated, as if the emperor was welcoming me to Antarctica. After a two-month voyage I'd arrived, just as 8,700 miles away, my family and friends would be sitting down to their Christmas celebrations.

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This is the fifth in a series of stories exploring the rich diversity of Christmastime edibles around the world, and the stories behind the food.

Explore All The Stories In This Series: 12 Days Of Quirky Christmas Foods Around The Globe

The captain and base commander had decided that Christmas Day would be a holiday — normally on reaching Halley, both ship and base swing into a frenetic period of unloading cargo. And there was a lot of cargo: 2,000 barrels of kerosene fuel, as well as enough food for a year. We'd stopped in Uruguay to fill up on hundreds of kilos of frozen meat, but from Britain the ship had also carried pallets of tins, sacks of dried food, and cases and cases of vegetables – most of which would only last the first couple of months before spoiling. For some, wintering in Antarctica can mean weeks of monotony with little variation in landscape, the weather, or the daily routine. Food takes on extraordinary importance, one of the most important morale-boosters on base.

Up on the ice shelf, Christmas morning, and the wind was literally freezing. Gusts of it blew in from the South Pole, and ice formed in my hair as I was given a snowmobile tour of base. It was my first trip up on the shelf and within minutes my cheek muscles locked solid, freezing my nervous smile to a rictus grin. I hoped everyone else felt like this when they first arrived in Antarctica.

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Halley is a remote British research station located on the Brunt Ice Shelf on the Caird Coast of Antarctica. Here, the base is seen as the sun returns after months of darkness. Courtesy of Gavin Francis hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of Gavin Francis

Halley is a remote British research station located on the Brunt Ice Shelf on the Caird Coast of Antarctica. Here, the base is seen as the sun returns after months of darkness.

Courtesy of Gavin Francis

When I reached the base we sat down to Christmas dinner under a signed photograph of the Queen. Carol music wafted through from the bar. There were about 30 of us in the dining hall. Halley is one of the smaller research stations in Antarctica; some were summer-only staff, some had just completed a year, and there were a few of us who had newly arrived. There would be just 14 of us for the 10-month winter, during which the base would be isolated.

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The chef had prepared frozen turkey that had been brought from England, dressed with reconstituted cranberry jelly, and mountains of Christmas pudding – he was determined that despite our new and unsettling surroundings we enjoy a traditional Christmas dinner. On Antarctic stations the chef is not only one of the hardest-working base members, how good he or she is at his or her job just about defines what kind of winter you're going to have. Some stations don't have a professional chef – instead the base members take turns to cook. For the first time that year, I gave thanks that Halley wasn't one of them.

It was a very British Christmas: We pulled crackers, groaned at the bad jokes that fell from them, drank brandy and donned our party hats. Everyone tried hard not to think about our loved ones back home.

Later, from the radio room, I called my girlfriend over the impossibly expensive satellite phone. The line kept dropping, and I could barely hear her over the crackle and whine of interference. 'Describe it for me!' she said, her voice bouncing tens of thousands of miles through a matrix of satellites. I stuttered and hesitated, the line fell, and I couldn't make contact again. I was alone in the radio room with a hissing telephone handset, looking out of the window at the ice.

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Antarctica, writes Francis, is "an empire of ice and of isolation." Courtesy of Gavin Francis hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of Gavin Francis

Antarctica, writes Francis, is "an empire of ice and of isolation."

Courtesy of Gavin Francis

How to describe it? An empire of ice and of isolation, a limitless plain of brilliant white, a binary world of ice and sky. I could not yet fathom that it was a scene I would watch every day for a year. It was the Earth as in Genesis, at the moment of "Let there be light."

Gavin Francis was the physician at Halley Research Station, Antarctica, for a year in 2003. This is a modified extract from Empire Antarctica - Ice, Silence & Emperor Penguins' - named Scottish Book of the Year 2013 and shortlisted for the Banff Mountain Literature Prize (Counterpoint Press).

He is a regular contributor to the Guardian, London Review of Books, and New York Review of Books. Adventures in Human Being, his book about medicine and the human body, is out next May.

Christmas foods

Antarctica

South Pole

This week's historic agreement between the U.S. and Cuba to reinstate diplomatic relations after decades of silence could launch a digital revolution in the island nation.

According to the White House, only 5 percent of Cubans have access to the open Internet, comparable to North Korea. As part of the deal, that could change overnight.

Status Check

Maribel Fonseca, a teacher in Miramar, Cuba, has never seen the Internet. A few of her more privileged students have been online.

"I work in a school where members of the military and foreigners and top people in the country are," she says over a terrible (and very expensive) phone connection. "They use it. They go shopping, they see things I haven't seen."

What she wants to see most is her family. Fonseca's sister lives in the United States, and it's been more than a decade since they've seen each other. Her voice lights up at the idea of video-chatting with her.

"I can guarantee if I could have Internet at home, I'd talk to my sister every single day. I wouldn't miss a minute of her life. I love her so much," she says.

Aidil Oscariz, a Cuban who lives in Miami, says students back home ask people abroad, like her, for the latest research papers, and even for news about Cuba. State-owned media don't report reliably on crime or corruption, but underground bloggers leak stuff out.

"Sometimes I have actually found out things that are happening in Cuba before some of my family members [there] have," Oscariz says.

Government Influence

Cuba's only telecommunications company, ETECSA, is government-controlled. This week's announcement could mark the end of that monopoly, and pave the way for free-market competition and growth.

"I don't know that the Castros are ready for an information revolution," says Alec Ross, who was a senior adviser on tech issues for the U.S. State Department. "But they're a couple old men. They're going to die sooner than later. And I think that they're trying to salvage something."

Ross, now a fellow at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, says Cuba won't just light up with bandwidth immediately. The government has to start a bidding process. Mobile operators (presumably foreign-owned) will buy leases and build networks, putting in hundreds of millions of dollars in capital. That's step one.

"Step two is determining and seeing whether, once Cubans actually go online, are they allowed free expression?" he says. "Or is the Internet more like it is in Iran?"

It's a hot question — though interestingly, it's also somewhat peripheral. In plenty of countries, Ross says, government control has a chilling effect on online speech. But as seen during the Arab Spring, if a wireless signal is there, citizens will use it.

Role Of U.S. Tech Companies

U.S. tech companies like Google, Facebook and CISCO are watching how commercial policy shapes up.

Kenth Engo-Monsen with the European telecom operator Telenor says these companies can play a huge role in keeping the Internet free: If and when a government asks for a secret surveillance deal, they can say no.

"That's not part of being a mobile operator," he says, "because you have your relationship with your customers, and that is built on the trust that you have with them."

Engo-Monsen says he's happy for Cuba, and that he views the Internet as a human right.

Nathan Eagle, a mobile technology analyst with Jana, says companies are going to compete fiercely to get the Cuba telecom contract, and that will help Cubans.

"Once third-party mobile carriers come in, they bring tariff plans — they price connectivity in a competitive way" so the average Cuban can afford service, he says.

digital divide

internet access

Raul Castro

Cuba

This Christmas Eve, many Latinos will celebrate the holiday by unwrapping a delicious little present: tamales.

At its essence, a tamale consists of masa (dough made from corn or another starch) that's been wrapped in aromatic leaves, then steamed or boiled. Some come bundled in corn husks, others in plantain, banana or mashan leaves. Some are sweetened with molasses or coconut milk, others spiced with mole or seasoned with achiote. Some are plain; others are filled with meat, cheese or vegetables.

Indeed, Latin America has hundreds of interpretations of the tamal (that's the Spanish singular, though Americans often say tamale). Tamales vary not just by country but often by region. In Mexico alone, "we have over 200 tamales," says Iliana de la Vega, a chef-instructor at the Culinary Institute of America, San Antonio, who is documenting Latin American foodways.

So whose version is best? That's a question likely to elicit a fiercely partisan response.

"Do you want me to get in trouble with my wife? Is that what you're looking for?" Luis Clemens, NPR's senior editor for diversity, replies when I pose the question.

Clemens, you see, is Cuban-American — and Cubans like their tamales with bits of pork mixed into the masa. His wife is Mexican — she favors the banana-leaf wrapped, chili-and-chocolate-mole tamales of Oaxaca. In the interest of preserving their marital bliss, I drop my line of inquiry.

The word tamal comes to us from the Aztecs, who already had myriad interpretations of the leaf-wrapped parcels when the Spanish arrived, culinary historian Maricel Presilla writes in Gran Cocina Latina. Some were stuffed with beans and chiles, others filled with "elaborate mixtures of meat, fish, turkey," worms, seeds or cherries, she says.

"So prized were tamales that they were considered food for the gods," she writes.

Aztec women, Presilla says, spent days making tamales for wedding feasts. And preparing them is still a grand production. Often friends and families will gather for tamaladas, organizing themselves into efficient assembly lines to move the bundles along. All that work helps explain why, in many Latin countries, they've long been a special treat synonymous with the holidays and other special occasions when people gather.

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Pork tamales are assembled before steaming. Tamale-making is labor intensive, one reason why the bundles of masa tend to be reserved for special occasions. Eric Seals/MCT/Landov hide caption

itoggle caption Eric Seals/MCT/Landov

Pork tamales are assembled before steaming. Tamale-making is labor intensive, one reason why the bundles of masa tend to be reserved for special occasions.

Eric Seals/MCT/Landov

"For me, tamales have to be like my grandmother made them," says Felix Contreras, a Mexican-American arts desk producer and co-host of NPR's AltLatino.

Contreras, like many Latinos, is unabashedly devoted to the taste he grew up with: a spicy pork recipe with roots in the Southwest.

"Hmm, how do I put this diplomatically?" Contreras says, choosing his words carefully. "When I've tasted some other cultures' tamales, I guess because I'm used to what I'm used to, it was a little too off-the-beaten path for me."

Trust me, I understand the pride and prejudice that tamales can engender. In the past, I've had to hold myself from snarling back at a commenter on a blog post who called Guatemalan tamales "lousy." (Yup, I'm half-Guatemalan.)

Many years ago, I briefly considered breaking off relations with a dear Mexican-American friend after she dismissed the bite of Guatemalan-style tamale I offered her with a sour grimace. Perhaps she hadn't realized that we Guatemalans put our tamales on a green-leaf-lined pedestal.

Puerto Ricans boast of pastelitos, Venezuelans hail hallacas, whose golden hue, Presilla writes, is achieved with the help of lard or oil infused with achiote. My Colombian mother has a constant hankering for the bollos of her coastal Caribbean hometown.

Guatemalan tamales, too, come in many variations. But the archetypal Guatemalan tamale – the kind I crave this time of year — is made with creamy smooth masa that's cooked prior to boiling, and stuffed with chicken or pork in a red tomato sauce, with bell peppers, olives and capers. Each is savored slowly for the true luxury that it is — scooping more than one tamale onto your plate at a time is considered bad form.

The taste is amazing – but it's also quite a departure from that of the Mexican-style, corn husk-wrapped concoctions that are most frequently encountered in the U.S. Which is why I decided to forgive my friend for her desecration of the dish. After all, taste preferences are formed early, and in this country, it is Mexican tamales whose roots run broadest and deepest.

This Christmas Eve, my sisters and I will feast on tamales prepared by a Guatemalan immigrant who makes them for us in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. None of us have time – or frankly, the know-how – to craft the savory versions that remind us of our childhood in Guatemala City. So we've sought out those who can recreate the taste of home.

Because that, ultimately, is the secret ingredient tucked inside each tamale: tradition and memory.

A version of this story was originally published Dec. 24, 2011.

latin american food

tamales

Christmas foods

I found her curled up in the fetal position on the ground, under a piece of cardboard wet from the rain, breathing quietly. Dried blood all around her mouth. Naked. Most likely she had stumbled from her ward in the middle of the night, making it past the gates meant to separate the area where patients live from the triage area, where ambulances pull in — gates that frustratingly still won't close. She had done this the day before, wandering in a semiconscious state of confusion all the way out of the Ebola treatment unit to the street — terrorizing the Ebola survivors who we were in the process of sending home.

We dress hurriedly, donning our space suits. No long surgical gloves are available, so we tape our short gloves over our covered wrists and hope the tape holds. We find the stretcher we made from two wooden poles and a body bag a couple of weeks ago, and carefully move the little girl on it. She hardly flinches. She is 10 years old, and we had admitted her, her two sisters, and her aunt two days ago. Her mom was admitted yesterday. Another family decimated by Ebola.

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A body bag and some wooden sticks were used to fashion this stretcher. Courtesy of Karin Huster hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of Karin Huster

A body bag and some wooden sticks were used to fashion this stretcher.

Courtesy of Karin Huster

We stop and think before we transport her to her ward. What do we need before we take her back to her mattress? I walk to triage and ask over the fence, which separates the "hot zone" from the normal world, for a lappa (the Krio word for a piece of cloth) that we can use as a sheet on her bed. I also request medication to help sedate her. Somehow, we will have to be creative and make some restraints so this doesn't happen again — should she miraculously stand up once more.

I need to get moving. It is already hot at 9 a.m. We carefully carry her over and transfer her to the chlorine-stained mattress we have put on the ground. It is clear she is in the advanced stages of the disease. But she has shown incredible resilience, struggling her way over to the outside world the day before as well as today. We had to give her a chance and keep trying to treat her. I run over to Triage again: an IV line, IV fluids, tape. And we jerry-rig an arm-board using a folded piece of cardboard to keep her arm straight so the fluids can get inside her body fast.

My colleagues in triage are awesome. They work fast. They know the girl is critically ill. They also desperately want to help her. Her severely dehydrated body doesn't make it easy for us to succeed, and our lack of adequate supplies makes it even harder. A latex glove as a tourniquet, an IV catheter impossibly long to use in someone her size. We work as safely and as efficiently as we can as our visors fog up. After numerous attempts, we have an IV going. I tear a piece of plastic from a disposable apron and hang the fluid bottle to the window. Our solution for restraints is to string together a bunch of disposable plastic aprons, slide this makeshift belt under the mattress, and tie it over her body. It's all we can do.

“ We sometimes run out of chlorine, an essential cleaning agent that kills the Ebola virus and allows us to work safely.

We're done. Out of there. It's been about an hour and a half, well past the time we can spend in the Hot Zone without overheating in our PPEs. But we can't leave. The other patient in the room is barely alive, but hanging on. The woman needs more IV fluids, too. Luckily, she already has an IV, so all we have to do is find IV fluids and get things going. Done. My partner and I look at each other approvingly — job well done. As well done as we ever could. Out. Now.

Our final job on our way out is to transfer a patient from the suspect to the confirmed ward. We traverse the courtyard and explain to the man that he has tested positive for Ebola and we need to take him to a different building. Frail but strong in spirit, he picks up the bucket he uses for bodily fluids and walks over with us to the confirmed ward. I have hopes for him. After all, he has been there for several days already and is stable. I remind him to drink a lot. "Pee the Ebola out," I tell him. I am not sure he's convinced.

Sierra Leone Struggles Against Ebola Dec. 8, 2014

Such is our daily fight against Ebola in a country that so far has seen 8,356 confirmed cases of Ebola – and 2,085 deaths.

It is also a daily battle to do our work in a place with a nonexistent health infrastructure and where the international response system has been woefully inadequate and inefficient.

Millions and millions of dollars of aid are reportedly waiting to be spent – yet little of it seems to make its way to where people need it most. Droves of WHO and CDC consultants have made their way to Ebola treatment units and community care centers, observing, dispensing wise recommendations, taking plenty of notes, writing reports. And that is all well and good, but the bottom line for us and our patients is that the basics are still not met. We're fighting to get supplies. We're told they're coming. They never arrive.

Patients who come through the triage area after a two-hour ambulance ride still wait, critically ill, under the blasting sun without a shaded area to rest under. Our enclosed compound has gaping holes in the fence through which confused Ebola patients sometimes escape to the streets. Our patients lack bed sheets and soap. We sometimes run out of chlorine, an essential cleaning agent that kills the Ebola virus and allows us to work safely. There are no functioning toilets for our patients. We are still missing the tools to place an IV safely. We don't have IV poles to hang our fluids. Our gloves are too short. Staff sometimes (and understandably) strike for lack of pay. The list goes on.

The decision by Partners In Health (PIH) to become involved in the fight against Ebola by partnering with the Sierra Leonean Ministry of Health's health care facilities is a noble one – and it is the right choice. It confirms a long-term commitment to improving and strengthening the country's health infrastructure and not to just "fix the Ebola problem and get out." But it means PIH has to collaborate within an existing structure where changes are often painfully slow to come. And slow is not an answer when faced with Ebola.

Sierra Leone won't win this fight until the essentials are in place.

Yes to vaccines, ICU care, and tablets to electronically record patient care - as some ETUs have. But this is luxury, and it must come only after the basics are well in place. Where is all that money the world has given? It could have made a difference for so many patients in our Ebola treatment unit. The ten-year-old girl died that night, alone. As did her entire family.

Karin Huster, RN, BSN, MPH, is Partners In Health's clinical lead at the Maforki Ebola treatment unit in the Port Loko district in Sierra Leone. Maforki is about 80 miles from the capital Freetown in the northwest.

Sierra Leone

ebola

In this playlist, TED speakers share stories about composing songs after years of writer's block, the culture of sampling, and a glimpse inside a jazz musician's brain.

Mark Ronson: Why Would More Than 500 Artists Sample The Same Song?

Listen to the Story

Playlist

Sting: How Do You Get Over Writer's Block?

Listen to the Story

Playlist

Charles Limb: What Does A Creative Brain Look Like?

Listen to the Story

Playlist

Transcript

It took a few hours for Cubans to realize the magnitude of President Obama's announcement on Wednesday about changes in the relationship between the U.S. and Cuba, according to Cuban blogger Yoani Snchez.

Why? Because a lot of people were at the market, buying fish. "It is important to also say that the news had fierce competition, like the arrival of fish to the rationed market, after years of disappearance," wrote Sanchez, who is perhaps the most celebrated dissident on the island.

As you've probably heard — or seen, if you've traveled to Cuba — food (and, at times, the lack thereof) remains one of the most striking emblems of Cuba's dysfunctional economic system. Let's just say that the agreement between Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro will probably eventually mean big changes for the food supply in Cuba.

But if you're picturing Cubans sipping Frappuccinos at Starbucks in Havana, or a Carnival cruise ship full of American tourists unloading in the port and filing into a gleaming new McDonald's, analysts say, "Hold your horses." Such massive changes are, in theory, perhaps more possible than they were on Tuesday, but not before our two governments work out a huge number of issues embedded in our super complex trade relationship.

Obama and Castro's speeches were significant and expansive, says John Kavulich, president of the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council, but "the details are what matter. What people tend to forget is it's not what the U.S. wants to do to or for Cuba. It's about what Cuba feels is in its interest."

Most Cubans depend on monthly rations (limited amounts of deeply subsidized food) of rice, beans, coffee and a few other staple foods for their sustenance. There's also a thriving black market for food, supplying the wealthy and the foreigners with gourmet items like blue cheese and smoked salmon smuggled in by suitcase. (I traveled to Cuba in 2003 and 2007, first on a person-to-person license and then on a freelance journalist visa. Like so many other American visitors, I was utterly bewitched by the place. And I lost weight there — probably because candy bars and other snacks were so hard to come by.)

Of course, Cuba is far more food secure than many of its similarly impoverished neighbors in Latin America like Honduras and Haiti. But animal (and fish) protein is in extremely limited supply, and to buy food, Cubans have to wrestle with a "jigsaw puzzle" — different markets and currencies for different food products.

Cuba imports about 80 percent of its food, which costs the government $2 billion a year. Since 2000, a solid chunk of that has come from the U.S. In 2013, American firms sold $348 million worth of agricultural goods to Cuba, according to the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council. The top three products? Frozen chicken, soybean meal (for animal feed) and corn.

Wednesday's announcement was not the end of the embargo, of course. But Obama's new approach to Cuba includes "expanded sales and exports of certain goods and services from the U.S. to Cuba." That includes agricultural products, from commodities like rice and beans to butter.

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Banana growers at a market on the outskirts of Havana, Cuba, on Sept. 30, 2013. Cuba currently imports few fruits and vegetables from the U.S., but the American Farm Bureau says the change in relations may allow for new trade opportunities. Ramon Espinosa/AP hide caption

itoggle caption Ramon Espinosa/AP

Banana growers at a market on the outskirts of Havana, Cuba, on Sept. 30, 2013. Cuba currently imports few fruits and vegetables from the U.S., but the American Farm Bureau says the change in relations may allow for new trade opportunities.

Ramon Espinosa/AP

And for U.S. agricultural producers, the most important part of Wednesday's announcement was Obama's call to lift restrictions on financial transactions for food products, says David Salmonsen, a trade specialist with the American Farm Bureau.

Currently, any agricultural producer who wants to sell to Cuba has to get cash upfront from the Cuban government before shipping, and the money exchange must be handled through a third-party bank, which means all kinds of extra transaction costs.

If the Treasury Department and Commerce Department go along with Obama's order, then those producers will now be able to do business more directly with the Cuban government and its banks, says Salmonsen.

Without those extra transaction costs, certain U.S. producers that don't currently sell to Cuba — like fruit and vegetables producers — may finally be able to offer the Cuban government a competitive price. Or rice from the Southeast U.S.: Cuba used to buy it, until we were out-competed by Brazil and Vietnam.

Cargill, for one, says it's optimistic about the opportunities. So is the American Soybean Association.

"Depending on how it develops, it could put our producers back into a more normal trading relationship with Cuba, so that the whole supply chain evolves, and demand rises as barriers are reduced and eliminated," says Salmonsen.

But as Kavulich points out, food isn't necessarily Cuba's biggest priority: Investments in infrastructure may be more desperately needed.

Still, "there are opportunities" for food companies, he says, but what happens when the "Cubans say, 'That's all well and good, but we need help with financing?' The risk of doing business with the Cuban government is huge."

Cuba's government has considerable trade deficits with other nations, but little with the U.S. If American businesses want to sell more to Cuba, they might find themselves waiting a while to get paid, he says.

The big trade picture aside, the outlook for Cuban cuisine is also a bit murky. As I reported in 2012, Cuban chefs haven't been able to incorporate many modern cooking techniques, or exotic ingredients. (I don't think sous vides machines can get past the embargo.) So chefs may have to wait a while before they can import some of the American ingredients they covet.

As Sanchez wrote, Wednesday's announcement "is just the beginning." It's tempting to get excited about the future of Cuban food, but "keep the corks in the bottles," she says.

cuban food

2. A Handshake In South Africa

Tuesday's talk wasn't the first conversation between the two men. They spoke publicly last December at a memorial service for former South African President Nelson Mandela. Castro's brother, former Cuban President Fidel Castro, said the current Cuban leader introduced himself to Obama in English, telling him, "Mr. President, I'm Castro." The two leaders then shook hands — reportedly only the second time leaders of the two countries had shaken hands over the past half-century. As NPR's Greg Myre noted, the handshake caused a "diplomatic stir."

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Obama shakes hands with Castro during a memorial service for former South African President Nelson Mandela in Soweto, South Africa, on Dec. 10, 2013. Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro says his brother introduced himself to Obama in English, telling him, "Mr. President, I'm Castro," as the two leaders shook hands. AP hide caption

itoggle caption AP

Obama shakes hands with Castro during a memorial service for former South African President Nelson Mandela in Soweto, South Africa, on Dec. 10, 2013. Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro says his brother introduced himself to Obama in English, telling him, "Mr. President, I'm Castro," as the two leaders shook hands.

AP

3. The Elian Gonzalez Saga

One of the biggest stories in U.S.-Cuba relations prior to that handshake was Elian Gonzalez. The 6-year-old Cuban boy was rescued off the coast of Florida where his mother and others had died trying to reach the U.S. His U.S.-based relatives tried to keep him in the country, but his father in Cuba wanted him back. The legal battle went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which rejected an appeal from Elian's Miami relatives. Government officials seized the boy on April 22, 2000, and he was returned to Cuba where he still lives.

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On April 22, 2000, government officials seized Elian Gonzalez, who is seen being held in a closet by Donato Dalrymple, right, one of the two men who rescued the Cuban boy from the ocean after his mother died trying to come to the U.S. Elian's U.S.-based relatives fought to keep him here, but the U.S. finally returned him to Cuba where his father lived. Alan Diaz/AP hide caption

itoggle caption Alan Diaz/AP

On April 22, 2000, government officials seized Elian Gonzalez, who is seen being held in a closet by Donato Dalrymple, right, one of the two men who rescued the Cuban boy from the ocean after his mother died trying to come to the U.S. Elian's U.S.-based relatives fought to keep him here, but the U.S. finally returned him to Cuba where his father lived.

Alan Diaz/AP

4. The Mariel Boatlift

On April 20, 1980, Fidel Castro declared the port of Mariel open, allowing any Cuban who wished to leave to go to the U.S. More than 100,000 did. But some of them were spies; others were newly released from Cuba's prisons and mental institutions. The Mariel boatlift, as it came to be known, led the U.S. to tighten its restrictions on Cuba.

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Refugees aboard a vessel in the small port of Mariel, Cuba, on April 23, 1980, wait to sail to the U.S. Fidel Castro agreed to let them leave the island for Florida in what became known as the Mariel boatlift. More than 100,000 Cubans made it to the U.S. The new arrivals included many thousands released from Cuba's prisons and mental institutions, leading to a tightening of the U.S. embargo. Jaques Langevin/AP hide caption

itoggle caption Jaques Langevin/AP

Refugees aboard a vessel in the small port of Mariel, Cuba, on April 23, 1980, wait to sail to the U.S. Fidel Castro agreed to let them leave the island for Florida in what became known as the Mariel boatlift. More than 100,000 Cubans made it to the U.S. The new arrivals included many thousands released from Cuba's prisons and mental institutions, leading to a tightening of the U.S. embargo.

Jaques Langevin/AP

5. Neighbors

Fidel Castro and his communist rebels, who included his brother Raul, ousted Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959. For nearly two years after that, the U.S. and Cuba maintained relations. Fidel Castro visited the U.S. – and even met with then Vice President Richard Nixon. For more than 50 years, the prospect of another Castro visit to Washington seemed unthinkable. Today, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said he "wouldn't rule out a visit from President [Raul] Castro."

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Castro and Vice President Richard Nixon after a nearly 2 -hour meeting in Washington on April 19, 1959. Castro described the meeting, scheduled for 15 minutes, as "very friendly." Less than two years later, the U.S. severed ties with Cuba. AP hide caption

itoggle caption AP

Castro and Vice President Richard Nixon after a nearly 2 -hour meeting in Washington on April 19, 1959. Castro described the meeting, scheduled for 15 minutes, as "very friendly." Less than two years later, the U.S. severed ties with Cuba.

AP

Raul Castro

Cuba

President Obama

Fidel Castro

Russian President Vladimir Putin lashed out at the West in a year-end news conference today, blaming international sanctions and a steep plunge in oil prices for the precipitous drop in the value of the ruble.

Putin, speaking during a more than three-hour news conference attended by some 1,200 journalists, "promised never to let the West chain or defang his proud nation," according to The Associated Press.

It was the second time this month that Putin has spoken in a nationwide forum about the country's economic woes, and the Russian leader echoed and expanded on many of the points he espoused in his Dec. 4 "state of the union speech."

He blamed "external factors," including sanctions imposed by the U.S. and EU over the Ukraine crisis as a key factor in the decline of the ruble, which plunged 19 percent in a single day on Tuesday, but has since shown signs of firming. Putin said the sanctions were about 25 to 30 percent of the ruble's troubles.

NPR's Corey Flintoff reports that Putin said the worst-case scenario would mean two years of economic unease, but that the government would protect pensions and government salaries until then. He also said the crisis will force Russia's economy to diversify away from only exporting oil and gas.

According to the AP: "Putin displayed his traditional defiant stance toward the West, which he insisted is trying to destroy Russia to grab Siberia's great natural resources."

Referring to the annexation of Crimea and Russian support for rebels in eastern Ukraine, Putin said "I believe that we were right," adding, "And I believe our Western partners are not right."

The Kremlin's moves in Ukraine came as Kiev mulled the possibility of joining NATO. The expansion of the Western alliance, Putin said, was akin to a new Berlin Wall — dividing East and West.

But the Russian leader hinted at conciliation with Ukraine. The New York Times writes:

Mr. Putin recognized the efforts of President Petro O. Poroshenko of Ukraine in ending the conflict in the southeast of that country, but he suggested that others in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, may be trying to prolong the conflict.

"Undoubtedly, the president of Ukraine certainly wants a settlement, and I have no doubt that he is striving for this," Mr. Putin said.

"But he's not alone there," he added, referring to more hawkish officials.

The Guardian notes that Putin: "said that it was illogical to blame him for current frosty relations with the west. Referring to the number of US military bases around the world and its deployment of anti-ballistic missiles in Europe, he asked how Russia could possibly be seen as the aggressor."

The Russian leader said it was too early for him to decide if he would run for president in 2018.

ruble

President Vladimir Putin

crisis in Ukraine

Russia

Russian President Vladimir Putin lashed out at the West in a year-end news conference today, blaming international sanctions and a steep plunge in oil prices for the precipitous drop in the value of the ruble.

Putin, speaking during a more than three-hour news conference attended by some 1,200 journalists, "promised never to let the West chain or defang his proud nation," according to The Associated Press.

It was the second time this month that Putin has spoken in a nationwide forum about the country's economic woes, and the Russian leader echoed and expanded on many of the points he espoused in his Dec. 4 "state of the union speech."

He blamed "external factors," including sanctions imposed by the U.S. and EU over the Ukraine crisis as a key factor in the decline of the ruble, which plunged 19 percent in a single day on Tuesday, but has since shown signs of firming. Putin said the sanctions were about 25 to 30 percent of the ruble's troubles.

NPR's Corey Flintoff reports that Putin said the worst-case scenario would mean two years of economic unease, but that the government would protect pensions and government salaries until then. He also said the crisis will force Russia's economy to diversify away from only exporting oil and gas.

According to the AP: "Putin displayed his traditional defiant stance toward the West, which he insisted is trying to destroy Russia to grab Siberia's great natural resources."

Referring to the annexation of Crimea and Russian support for rebels in eastern Ukraine, Putin said "I believe that we were right," adding, "And I believe our Western partners are not right."

The Kremlin's moves in Ukraine came as Kiev mulled the possibility of joining NATO. The expansion of the Western alliance, Putin said, was akin to a new Berlin Wall — dividing East and West.

But the Russian leader hinted at conciliation with Ukraine. The New York Times writes:

Mr. Putin recognized the efforts of President Petro O. Poroshenko of Ukraine in ending the conflict in the southeast of that country, but he suggested that others in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, may be trying to prolong the conflict.

"Undoubtedly, the president of Ukraine certainly wants a settlement, and I have no doubt that he is striving for this," Mr. Putin said.

"But he's not alone there," he added, referring to more hawkish officials.

The Guardian notes that Putin: "said that it was illogical to blame him for current frosty relations with the west. Referring to the number of US military bases around the world and its deployment of anti-ballistic missiles in Europe, he asked how Russia could possibly be seen as the aggressor."

The Russian leader said it was too early for him to decide if he would run for president in 2018.

ruble

President Vladimir Putin

crisis in Ukraine

Russia

This weekend, Will Falls decided to skip the local mall near Raleigh, N.C., and shop online instead.

"No standing in line, no finding a parking spot," he says. "Just get comfortable and go at it."

Millions of Americans did the same — Falls helped contribute to an 8.5 percent increase in online shopping Monday compared with 2013, according to data from IBM.

That growth stands in contrast to an 11 percent drop in sales reported by the National Retail Federation at brick-and-mortar stores over the Black Friday weekend compared with a year ago.

"I definitely believe there is cannibalization occurring from the perspective of online against the stores," says Bob Drbul, an analyst and managing director at Nomura Securities.

Of course, some of that cannibalization is going to the retailers' own online arms, he notes.

As for how consumers shopped online, most used desktop computers, which accounted for three-quarters of online sales — though the use of mobile devices rose sharply.

Another reason for the drop in in-store shopping this past weekend, Durbl says, is that retailers spread their Black Friday sales across the whole month of November.

Elle Phillips, a graphic designer from near Boise, Idaho, had family members visiting for Thanksgiving this past weekend. They took very different approaches to their holiday purchases, she says.

The Two-Way

Black Friday Sales Down At Stores, Surge Online

"They wanted to go Black Friday shopping," says Phillips, 37. "I prefer to avoid it at all costs."

Her brother-in-law headed for the hunting and camping retailer Cabela's at 4 a.m., Phillips says. He came back six hours later, with tales of a checkout line stretching to the back of the huge store.

"It literally took him two hours just to get through to the register with a couple of hoodie sweaters," Phillips says. "So that just sort of ... verified the reason why I don't go out on Black Friday."

Phillips, meanwhile, did her shopping online, including finding some new Doc Marten boots for her husband. She looked first for the best price on Amazon, "and then I actually went straight to the manufacturer's website ... and I found an equally good price there, all with free shipping."

That kind of price shopping and free shipping is forcing profit margins down for retailers, says analyst Drbul. But he expects a strong holiday season nevertheless.

A big reason is that falling gas prices are putting more money in consumers' pockets.

This year, Drbul says, "has the potential to be the best retail performance since 2011."

shopping malls

holiday shopping

Retail

online shopping

retail sales

Shopping

Christmas shopping

We are well into the Christmas season, and if you live in Japan, that means sponge cake.

The traditional Japanese Christmas dish is served with strawberries and cream, and it is rich, thanks to lots and lots of butter. But the Japanese have been using even more butter for their Christmas cakes this year, exacerbating what was already a national butter shortage.

Elaine Kurtenbach, a reporter for the Associated Press in Tokyo, says climate change and an aging farming industry have led to the butter crisis. (Here's her Thursday story for the AP.)

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A man prepares a Japanese-style Christmas sponge cake at the Patisserie Akira Cake shop on Dec. 23, 2011 in Himeji, Japan. Buddhika Weerasinghe/Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption Buddhika Weerasinghe/Getty Images

A man prepares a Japanese-style Christmas sponge cake at the Patisserie Akira Cake shop on Dec. 23, 2011 in Himeji, Japan.

Buddhika Weerasinghe/Getty Images

"The weather up in Hokkaido, which is the main dairy region in Japan, is getting very hot in the summer and extremely cold in the winter, so the cows are stressed, and they don't produce enough milk," Kurtenbach tells NPR's Audie Cornish on All Things Considered. "And on top of that, the average age of farmers is about 70 now, and not many young people want to do the work."

Some cake shops in Japan have switched to margarine and other shortenings, but cake lovers are still left longing for the taste of butter, Kurtenbach says.

"Traditionally the Japanese aren't big consumers of dairy products apart from say, the elite," she says. "But when it comes to modern Japanese, they certainly eat a lot of Western food, they eat a lot of pastries and chocolates and cakes, and especially at Christmas time, not having enough butter on the shelves is kind of galling to many people."

For more from the interview, click on the audio link above.

Christmas foods

butter

Japan

Earlier this month, more than a dozen writers, poets and activists in Gaza got threatening flyers signed with the name ISIS, the Sunni extremists fighting with brutal violence in Iraq and Syria.

But a few days later, a new flyer, also signed ISIS, also known as the Islamic State, denied responsibility and apologized.

The incident is raising the question of whether ISIS is taking root in Gaza — or if someone is just playing around.

Poet and women's rights activist Donia al-Amal Ismael received the first flyer via Facebook. It accused her and other writers of speaking ill of God and Islam, and threatened to slit their throats.

She was scared, and debated with her family what to do.

Her kids told her to stay inside, she says.

"Don't move. Don't go outside the home," they advised her.

She didn't think ISIS wrote the flyer, though. She thought it was Hamas, the Islamist Palestinian faction that no longer formally governs Gaza but remains in control of security. The group had criticized her work on women's rights before.

Ismael says she is religious, but not like Hamas.

"I am Muslim," she says, adding that she has "another vision" for Islam than Hamas' conservative interpretation.

Hamas, 'The Devil You Know'

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called Hamas and ISIS "brother organizations" and "branches of the same poisonous tree."

Washington takes a different view. The U.S. State Department labels both terrorist organizations, but says the two groups have different goals and tactics.

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Donia al-Amal Ismael is a poet and women's rights activist in Gaza. She holds a flyer purportedly from ISIS, the militant group, that accused her and other writers of criticizing God and Islam and threatening them. A second, later flyer said ISIS was not responsible for the earlier threats. Emily Harris/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Emily Harris/NPR

Donia al-Amal Ismael is a poet and women's rights activist in Gaza. She holds a flyer purportedly from ISIS, the militant group, that accused her and other writers of criticizing God and Islam and threatening them. A second, later flyer said ISIS was not responsible for the earlier threats.

Emily Harris/NPR

ISIS "uses rape as a tool of war, sells women and girls into sex slavery, offers those in its path a choice of conversion or death, and avowedly pursues genocide," a State Department spokesperson told NPR. "We have not seen Hamas take these actions."

Gazan analyst Mkhaimar Abusada says whoever put together the threatening flyer wanted to stir things up.

"To basically frighten the Palestinians or create a situation where the Palestinians would basically say that living under Hamas is definitely better than living under ISIS or other extremist organizations," he says.

Fawzi Barhoum, Hamas spokesman in Gaza, claims that Israeli intelligence sent out the flyers.

Israeli analyst Harel Chorev laughs at this. But he says given the choices, Israel actually wants Hamas to stay in power in Gaza.

"On the one hand, you have Israel [justifiably] denouncing Hamas for being a terror organization," he says. "On the other hand, Israel knows that there is no better alternative."

Hamas, he says, is "the devil you know."

There has been much talk about trying to reinstate Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, and leader of Hamas' rival political faction Fatah, as the government head in Gaza.

But so far, that hasn't happened.

Chorev says it's not a realistic option to revive Fatah in Gaza.

"(It is) too small, too depressed. Any group in Gaza is stronger today than Fatah," he says.

Who Sent The Flyers?

Like most observers of Gaza, Chorev says there are Islamist groups more extreme than Hamas there. But he doesn't believe there is any significant ISIS presence in Gaza.

If there were, Hamas "would crush them with no limits," he says, despite the group's financial and political difficulties.

Hamas has killed off rivals in the past – both secular and Islamist. It remains the power in Gaza, but is also vulnerable – unable to pay police or speed up reconstruction following a war with Israel this past summer.

Chorev says if a Gaza power vacuum gave room to more extreme groups, they might try to become famous on the back of ISIS, now known around the world. He says ISIS has become a brand name that anyone can use for self-promotion.

As far as who sent the flyers?

"I could imagine two students sitting in their underwear, writing on their laptops at home," the Israeli analyst says.

Conjuring an image of ISIS in Gaza is useful for both Israeli politicians and Hamas leaders. After the recent threat-followed-by-apology, poet and women's rights activist Ismael decided to consider the whole thing a joke.

"I think that I must deal with this as a joke," she says, "to be strong."

Islamic State

Islamic State of Iraq and Syria

Gaza Strip

Hamas

Gaza

That loveable moppet with the red dress, the curly hair, the big dog, and the even bigger voice is back.

This time though, Little Orphan Annie is back with a difference: Quvenzhane Wallis is playing an African-American orphan in an ethnically diverse, up-to-date world. And that got us thinking about other instances where producers have breathed fresh life into familiar shows by making them dance to a new beat.

In the late 1960s, after 1500 performances, Broadway's Hello Dolly! was still arguably "glowin'" and "crowin'," but was no longer "goin' strong." Carol Channing had long since departed with a touring company. And her first three replacements on the Great White Way — Ginger Rogers, Bette Grable, and Martha Raye — had been playing to ever-diminishing crowds. Newer shows like Man of La Mancha and Cabaret were making Dolly seem old-hat.

Then producer David Merrick figured out how to make Dolly the freshest face on the block. He hired not just a new star, but a whole new cast. A whole new black cast, at the height of the Civil Rights movement — Pearl Bailey, Cab Calloway, even a youngster named Morgan Freeman making his Broadway debut — and suddenly, his tired old warhorse looked new again

Left: Actress Pearl Bailey in the Broadway production of Hello, Dolly! in 1967. Right: Actress Carol Channing in the role in 1964. Left: John Dominis/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty. Right: Mark Kauffman/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption Left: John Dominis/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty. Right: Mark Kauffman/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images

Merrick was clear about one thing: This bright cartoon of a show was still a celebration of Yonkers, not Harlem — African-American only in casting, not in sensibility. What you saw with Pearl Bailey was what you'd seen with Carol Channing, and that seemed to please audiences, who lined up around the block.

Carl Van Vechten took this portrait of actress Muriel Rahn in the title role in the original 1943 stage production of Carmen Jones. Carl Van Vechten photograph collection/Library of Congress hide caption

itoggle caption Carl Van Vechten photograph collection/Library of Congress

Recasting an established show with performers-of-color was not a new idea in 1967. Broadway'd done it before, though usually working a few changes on the original to justify the casting. Producer Billy Rose, for instance, was envious when Porgy and Bess became a huge success in the 1930s for one of his competitors. How could he get a piece of that action? Maybe by adapting the opera Carmen for a black Broadway cast. He hired Oscar Hammerstein, fresh from writing lyrics for Oklahoma, to move the story from 19th-century Spain to the segregated American South, where the leading lady — now named Carmen Jones — worked in a World War II parachute factory. Happily she still sang music by Georges Bizet.

Carmen Jones qualified as a thoughtful reworking of its source material in terms of story. But not all producers have the patience for that. Some just update the orchestrations — a revival of Guys and Dolls in the 1970s started out with Broadway brass, but quickly let you know that it was a disco era staging partly financed by Motown.

Didn't take long for audiences to figure out that was not a good idea. Other revivals though, have taken far greater liberties. Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado, for instance, had sounded the same for 40 years. Then in the 1930s, an all-black Swing Mikado and a mostly black Hot Mikado, starring Bill "Bojangles" Robinson started bopping to a different, swinging beat.

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Call this a case of cultural bait and switch if you like, but note that it does not seriously alter the original. At least, not the way Romeo and Juliet was altered when it was both musicalized and Hispanicized as West Side Story.

Leaving the script alone, but hiring actors of color to play roles that usually go to white performers — "non-traditional" casting — has long been a stage tradition, not just in musicals, but in straight plays too. That tradition put a 20-year-old kid named Orson Welles on the map when he first leapt from acting to directing, with a production that became known as his "voodoo" Macbeth.

When Welles re-imagined Shakespeare's Scottish tragedy in a Caribbean jungle, he envisioned a stage full of so many black characters, New York didn't have enough professional black actors to play them. Didn't matter — even with a largely amateur cast, the show electrified audiences, and got raves from all but one of the city's major critics. The one pan, though, by the Herald Tribune's Percy Hammond, apparently distressed the cast, prompting one of the show's African drummers to lay an elaborate voodoo curse on the reviewer. Welles reportedly found this amusing ... until Hammond dropped dead of a heart attack 48 hours later.

Happier reviews — and happily, no deaths — have greeted non-Shakespearean examples of non-traditional casting, like James Earl Jones playing Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Ruby Dee as the matriarch in an African-American Glass Menagerie. And what works on stage has also worked on screen. Rob Lowe and Jim Belushi were buddies in the film comedy About Last Night in 1986.

Top: Jamie Foxx, Quvenzhane Wallis and Rose Byrne sing "I Don't Need Anything But You" in the new Annie. Bottom: Albert Finney, Aileen Quinn, Carol Burnett and others in the 1982 version. Top: Barry Wetcher/Sony Pictures Entertainment. Bottom: Columbia Pictures/Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption Top: Barry Wetcher/Sony Pictures Entertainment. Bottom: Columbia Pictures/Getty Images

Flash forward a couple of decades to this year, with Michael Ealy and Kevin Hart headlining an updated About Last Night. The new one is set in Los Angeles and is a raucous good time, which the sweeter, sultrier Chicago-based original mostly was not. Diff'rent strokes as it were, and proof that Hollywood can work some interesting variations on the remake game. Which is certainly what's happening in the updated Annie.

The new version isn't just pleasantly diverse in its casting, it's been pretty thoroughly rethought — little things like including recycling in the orphanage clean-up number "A Hard Knock Life," and bigger things like having Annie's benefactor be not a disinterested Daddy Warbucks, but a billionaire-turned-politician who's been told by his campaign manager that the photogenic foster kid will bring him higher poll numbers.

In short, this is not just a matter of changing the racial makeup of a few characters. Yes, there is non-traditional casting, and no, the new Annie is not a full-fledged rewrite, like The Wiz was of The Wizard of Oz. Instead, it occupies an intriguing middle ground, teasing new values from a show that had once traded mostly in nostalgia.

What kind of new values? Well, specifically smart ones: The story now starts in a classroom and ends with the founding of a literacy center. How's that for a declaration that the intent is to smarten things up? And by listing Jay-Z as one of their producers, the filmmakers are also signaling that their smartening will not sound like warmed-over Broadway.

Last month, American aid worker Peter Kassig was executed in Syria by the Islamic State militant group. The 26-year-old emergency medical technician had worked in hospitals, clinics and refugee camps throughout the region for more than two years. He was known for treating anyone who needed him, regardless of political affiliation. In a country like Syria, that kind of openness is both a statement of integrity and a huge personal risk.

Kassig's death is part of an alarming trend. Although health care workers have been caught in the crossfire for decades, they're now being directly targeted. And threats are at an all-time high. Since 2012, there have been 2,300 incidents of violence or threats of violence reported to the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC), though the IFRC suspects that many more go unreported. This week, the United Nations passed a resolution that recognizes this danger and strengthens existing international laws that protect health care workers in conflict zones.

International humanitarian workers and local health care providers are "literally being hunted down," says Bruce Eshaya-Chauvin, medical adviser to the IFRC, in a 2013 speech in London. Medical professionals face torture, abuse and kidnapping as they offer emergency medical care to the sick and wounded along with some semblance of primary care for chronic and treatable conditions.

"We have seen targeted bombing and killing of health workers and willful destruction of ambulances and hospitals," says Susannah Sirkin, the director for international policy at Physicians for Human Rights. "In the last few years, we have noticed an almost extreme flouting of norms and laws that exist to protect the safety of healthcare workers."

In Bahrain, for example, doctors who came to the aid of injured protesters during the Arab Spring of 2011 were kidnapped from their homes, detained with no promise of release and labeled terrorists. While in custody, they were tortured, beaten and threatened with rape and death.

This isn't a rare occurrence. Earlier this year, Fallujah General Hospital in Iraq was repeatedly shelled and bombed, allegedly by the government of Iraq. In Pakistan, since December 2012, 80 polio vaccinators have been killed by militant groups. In the Central African Republic, 42 percent of hospitals have been damaged by fighting and 80 percent of the country's medical workers have left their jobs.

And then there is Syria: "We have never seen anything like what we are seeing in Syria," says Leonard Rubenstein, chairman of the Safeguarding Health in Conflict coalition, an organization that works to protect health care workers in conflict zones. "They are doing everything they can to kill every health worker, to bomb every medical facility, to send snipers after health workers. There is something uniquely horrific happening there. It is on a different scale than anything we've seen before."

In Syria, "having a medical kid visible on your car seat can be more dangerous than having a Kalashnikov," Eshaya-Chauvin told a panel in Washington, D.C. last month.

The targeting of health care workers reflects the changing nature of warfare. Guerrilla groups are now waging war, and the goal may be "to remove whole communities and all the civilian institutions that go with that," says Sirkin. In Syria, in Iraqi territories controlled by the self-declared Islamic State and in the Central African Republic, wars are won when there is no one left to fight back. Wiping out health care is a key step to disabling a community, and the last straw for one that's barely holding on.

While local health workers are the typical victims of these attacks, there has also been an increase in violence against international health workers volunteering with humanitarian groups like Doctors Without Borders. Such nongovernmental groups have usually been able to work safely in conflict zones because they offer food and medical services, says Jeremy Konydyk, the director of U.S. foreign disaster assistance for the Department of Aid and International Development (USAID).

But now the rules have changed. In past conflicts even militant groups "want to maintain local support and respect," Konydyk says. "And if they cut off aid, that harms their reputation. That dynamic gives humanitarian groups leverage to do the work they need to do."

But in many places, rebel groups or governments no longer care about the welfare of the local community, says Konydyk. So there is no motivation to let humanitarian groups work. Aid groups can either pull out or risk the lives of their staff on the ground.

"Every day, we hear stories of unbelievable courage and heroism of those who have remained despite shelling and bombing, risking their lives every day to carry out their duties," says Sirkin. "But when civilian life becomes impossible, those who have the means will leave."

But access to a functioning healthcare system is a basic human right. That's why it is protected under the Geneva Conventions, which says that attacks on health care workers and medical facilities violate international law. There has only ever been one prosecution, after Serbian forces removed 200 people sheltering in a hospital and shot them in 1991.

To address the rising level of threat, the U.N. passed a resolution on Monday, asking states to protect all health workers from violence.

"We need to strengthen the mechanisms within the UN to respond more forcefully," says Sirkin. "The more these attacks are seen as very serious violations of human rights, if not war crimes which many times they are, the more health workers will be able to trust in the law."

Supporters of the resolution hope that it will give health care workers and governments an actual document to rely on when seeking justice.

But as long as some militant groups believe that providing health care to all is the same as aiding the enemy, health workers will be in danger.

In an interview with Safeguarding Health in Conflict, a nurse in the Democratic Republic of the Congo said, "Last month, our clinic was raided and I was tortured. I was scared, anxious but also angry. We are trying to save lives, and they are trying to kill us."

conflict zones

health care workers

ISIS

Syria

It's the first episode in a new series called Bong Appetit from Munchies, Vice Media's food channel. Vice is the media company that aspires to be "the largest network for young people in the world."

But the appeal of a marijuana cooking show apparently extends far beyond computer-bound stoners in search of a chuckle.

As the show's producer, David Bienenstock, who's based in Santa Cruz, Calif., tells The Salt, there's really so much more to the world of marijuana cuisine than pot brownies and lollipops sold at the edible shops popping up around Colorado, Washington and California. Bienenstock has been writing Vice's "Weed Eater" column since April and is a former editor at High Times.

"We're moving beyond marijuana as something frightening. A lot of people are curious, and food is a great way for people to access the culture," he says. "Once they can access it, they start to understand it's something we shouldn't be suppressing and should be celebrating."

The culinary connection is one that's been largely ignored, Bienenstock says. (Except on this blog: We've reported on a butcher who feeds marijuana to his pigs and a marijuana food truck.)

Which perhaps explains the freshness of characters like Aurora Leveroni, also known as "Nonna Marijuana." The charming 91-year-old first shared her marijuana cooking skills on YouTube in 2011, courtesy of the Wo/Men's Alliance for Medical Marijuana, which her daughter, Valerie Corral, founded.

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Marijuana-Laced Treats Leave Colorado Jonesing For Food-Safety Rules

"I like to cook with medical marijuana because I feel that it helps those who have been ill and had to endure pain, and I will use it if it helps anyone," she tells Munchies. But while Valerie has used marijuana to treat grand mal seizures since the 1970s, when she was injured in a car accident, Nonna says she doesn't partake.

The Salt

The Latest Food Truck Theme Is Marijuana For Lunch

But like any good Italian grandmother who comforts through food, she's more than happy to cook it for others. And so Nonna shares her marijuana-infused butter technique with Bong Appetit host Matt Zambric.

Then Valerie offers Zambric a tour of her impressive marijuana garden, which features 20 different strains that her organization, WAMM, supplies to patients and caregivers on donation basis.

Next it's time to get back to the kitchen to make chicken pot-cciatore and gnocchi with Nonna. We won't tell you how it ends, but suffice it to say it's delectable.

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The man at the eye of the storm in Saudi Arabia is Ahmad Aziz Al Ghamdi. He's a religious scholar, the former head of the religious police in Mecca, a group officially known as the Committee for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.

He has the pedigree of an ultra-conservative. Yet, he stunned Saudis with a religious ruling, known as a fatwa, that is very liberal by Saudi standards. He declared that the niqab, the black face veil that is ubiquitous among women in Saudi society, is not obligatory.

His answer came in a Twitter response to a tweet he receive from a Saudi woman who had turned to him for religious guidance. She asked: does Islam allow her to post a picture of her face on social media?

His affirmative answer went viral within hours, with more than 10,000 comments on his Twitter feed that ranged from congratulations to death threats.

When Twitter commentators asked, "What about his own wife?" Al Ghamdi promptly stepped up the controversy another notch.

He appeared Saturday on the most popular TV talk show in Saudi Arabia. The Badria program is broadcast each week from Dubai in the neighboring United Arab Emirates, where the traditional rules for women's dress are less restrictive. Ghamdi went on air with his wife, Jawahir Bint Shekh Ali, who appeared without a face veil.

She spoke to the program host, Badria al-Bishr, about her decision to show her face, not just among close family and friends, but in a broadcast that could be seen across Saudi Arabia. She covered her hair, but was wearing make-up, another point that enraged conservatives. Her husband specifically approved of make-up in his religious ruling.

Ahmad Aziz Al Ghamdi, a prominent religious figure in Saudi Arabia, said that the face veil for women is not mandatory. He then appeared on a popular talk show with his wife, who was not wearing the veil, known as the niqab.

The reaction on Saudi Twitter feeds was immediate and furious.

Saudi Arabia is a deeply conservative society, the only country in the world that effectively prohibits women from driving. Girls and women are forbidden from traveling, conducting official business, or undergoing certain medical procedures without permission from their male guardian.

Gender segregation is mandatory in schools, hospitals, and restaurants. Even banks have separate tellers for women. The names of mothers and sisters are not shared with others outside the family, even with best friends at school.

But norms are changing as global culture is beamed into the kingdom through social media and satellite television. Education is changing expectations in a country where the majority of the population is under 35. Twitter usage in Saudi is booming, considered the fastest growing market in the world, despite regular crackdowns by the religious police.

Ghamdi has stirred a public debate over the face veil that is unlikely to end with the television appearance. The controversy reflects a wider debate in many Saudi households as urban, college-educated, professional women abandon the face veil as impractical in a work environment.

The reaction from the top religious authorities was predictable.

Saudi Arabia's grand mufti, Sheikh Abdul Al Aziz Al Shaikh, has called on Ghamdi to repent and declared that Muslim women have a duty to cover their faces.

"Some brothers even took the step to show their wives in public. This is a very dangerous thing," he said in comments posted on a local news site.

But the Twitter debate then erupted again, challenging the interpretation of the highest religious authority in the kingdom.

Saudi Arabia

Crop dusting pilots are the adrenaline junkies of the agriculture world. They whiz through the air, flying under power lines to sow seeds or spread pesticides on farmers' fields.

It's a dangerous job, and now these pilots are facing a new challenge — short towers that can sprout up in fields overnight. These towers are used to gather data for wind energy companies.

Pilot Mike Lee started Earl's Flying Service in Steele, Mo., in the early 1970s and he's been flying ever since.

"I know some people who have had accidents. I've had friends that got killed in these things," he says.

When he's crop dusting, Lee flies at 155 miles an hour at the crazy-low elevation of 12 feet. Farmers hire him because it's a quick, efficient way to get things done. There's no driving out to remote fields or slogging equipment through the mud. It's all done by air from the cockpit.

Crop dusters are the ultimate multitaskers. They fly while dodging obstacles like trees and power lines. They don't want to pour pesticides on a farmhouse by mistake or sprinkle the wrong seeds on a neighbor's field. Pilots are stumbling across a new hazard now: unmarked towers that are used to prospect for wind energy projects.

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Missouri pilot Mike Lee stands next to a crop duster. "I know some people who have had accidents. I've had friends that got killed in these things," he says. Jacob McCleland /Harvest Public Media hide caption

itoggle caption Jacob McCleland /Harvest Public Media

Missouri pilot Mike Lee stands next to a crop duster. "I know some people who have had accidents. I've had friends that got killed in these things," he says.

Jacob McCleland /Harvest Public Media

"You have to be able to just be able to fly by the seat of your pants and not even think about flying to do all of that. You gotta spend all your concentration looking outside and doing all the controlling the seed or fertilizer or chemical or whatever it may be at the time," Lee says.

That's part of what makes this job so dangerous. A pilot's attention is divided and they work long hours. During the growing season, they fly sunrise to sunset.

"Radio towers seems to be the No. 1 problems. You know, these little weather MET towers they stick up overnight and nobody knows about. It's been a major problem in our industry," Lee says.

Those MET towers — or meteorological evaluation towers — are thin and metal, they kind of blend in from the air. Farmers lease some of their land to wind energy companies that use them to gather data.

National Transportation Safety Board investigator Jennifer Rodi says these towers are very hard to see.

"They are below the 200-foot requirement that the FAA has that requires them to be lit and marked to increase their visibility," she says.

In a report earlier this year, Rodi and the NTSB made recommendations to the FAA to mark and light those towers and to create a database with the location of each one.

Tom Vinson of the American Wind Energy Association says the wind industry supports marking towers with orange-and-white paint, and putting up orange balls on guy wires.

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But lighting is trickier because towers are often in remote locations without a power source. And wind farm development is a very competitive process. That's why the database with each tower's location is a thornier recommendation.

"People are very hesitant to let competitors know where they may be looking, and so there has been some concern about having widely available public databases," Vinson says.

Since 2000, three pilots have died after striking unmarked MET towers. Just this September, the family of a California pilot was awarded a $6.7 million wrongful death settlement following his crash into an unmarked MET.

When you look at the big picture, crop dusting has become safer. Accidents are down, and fewer crashes are fatal.

Pilots have better training, and Mike Lee says the airplanes now are designed for safety. Pointing to one of his planes, he says it was made to absorb energy in a crash.

"Kind of a like a NASCAR, it's going to disintegrate around you and most likely you'll still be holding the stick and in the seat when it's all said and done," he says.

That may be reassuring for some crop dusters, but from the pilot's perspective, knowing the exact spot of every potential hazard works even better.

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crop dusting

wind energy

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Only about 1 percent of the Japanese population is Christian. But you might not realize that if you visited a major metropolitan area during Christmas time. Just like in America, you'll find heads topped with red Santa hats everywhere and elaborate seasonal displays: train sets, mountain scenes and snow-covered trees. Often, these are set inside of bakeries hawking one of the highlights of the holiday season in Japan: Christmas cake.

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The 12 Days Of Quirky Christmas Foods Around The Globe

"It's basically sold on practically every street corner," says anthropologist Michael Ashkenazi from the Bonn International Center for Conversion, who studied Japanese culture and tradition.

The dessert is a snow-white sponge cake, delicately covered with whipped cream and topped with perfectly shaped, ruby red strawberries. It's a beloved December-time treat on the island nation — and not just because it's delicious. In fact, Christmas cake is now a symbol of commercialism and prosperity, its story intertwined with Japan's rise from ruins after its defeat in World War II.

To understand why, we need to take a little historical detour.

After World War II, American soldiers led the work of rebuilding an occupied Japan. The Japanese economy was in shambles and food shortages were common. Even rarer were sugary sweets. The sweet treats from the U.S. that the Americans handed out were a memorable luxury to a people still recovering from the ravages of war.

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A man in a reindeer costume hawks Christmas cake outside a bakery in Kobe, Japan, Dec. 23, 2011. Buddhika Weerasinghe/Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption Buddhika Weerasinghe/Getty Images

A man in a reindeer costume hawks Christmas cake outside a bakery in Kobe, Japan, Dec. 23, 2011.

Buddhika Weerasinghe/Getty Images

"Sweet chocolates, above all, given by American soldiers epitomized the utmost wealth Japanese children saw in American lives," cultural anthropologist Hideyo Konagaya wrote in a 2001 paper on the history of the Christmas cake published in the Journal of Popular Culture. Sweets fed a longing for wealth and a desire to Americanize, he says.

But it wasn't just soldiers that came to Japan. Christian missionaries also made the journey, bringing gifts and the concept of Christmas to Japanese schools and families. Missionaries had actually introduced Christianity to Japan as early as the 16th century. But Christmas didn't catch on as a popular holiday until these post-war years, when the Japanese embraced a glitzy, commercial version of the holiday that was less about religion than about prosperity, explains Konagaya.

"The Christmas celebrations gave the Japanese the most tangible pictures that could convey images of prosperous modern lives in America," Konagaya writes.

And so Japan embraced the trappings of a picture-perfect, American-style Christmas — including Santa Claus, an ornament-bedecked tree and a sugar-filled cake. As David Plath, a renowned Japan-scholar, writes in a paper on the popularity of Christmas festivities in Japan, "Family Christmas gatherings do not center around dinner, as in the American ideal, but rather upon mutual partaking of a Christmas cake."

So why cake?

Well, sponge cake had been available in Japan since the 17th century, but the items needed to make it — sugar, milk and butter — were rarities on the island nation, so the cake was a luxury reserved for the elite. After WWII, Japan's economy rebounded, the ingredients became more widely available, and Japan's newly formed middle-class adopted this once-exclusive dessert as a symbol that they had finally made it.

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Japanese Christmas cake: It's even in your smartphone, on the emoji keyboard. NPR hide caption

itoggle caption NPR

Japanese Christmas cake: It's even in your smartphone, on the emoji keyboard.

NPR

And so, inspired by America, a wholly Japanese tradition was born. "The Christmas cake became a center of attention in the whole festival [of Christmas]," writes Konagaya.

Even the cake's shape and colors are symbolic: It's red and white, echoing the Japanese flag. And traditionally it's round. "Anything that's white and round would normally be associated with shrines," says Ashkenazi.

These days, Christmas cake has become so ingrained in Japanese culture that you can even find some in your smartphone: There are two versions of the cake on the emoji keyboard. (Emoji, as the name suggests, originated in Japan.) The cakes go on discount once Dec. 25th rolls around – a fact that's given birth to an unfortunate bit of Japanese slang: "Christmas cake" is used to refer to an unmarried woman who is over 25 and thus, considered past her prime. (Sigh. We know.)

However, while the cake has become firmly entrenched in Japanese culture, Christmas itself hasn't – it's not a national holiday in Japan. In fact, it's celebrated more like Valentine's Day is in America, and it's often thought of as a day for romantic couples to share. (It's also a big day for chowing down on KFC, but that's an entirely different story.)

Says Ashkenazi: "This [cake] is part of a whole complex of things that the Japanese adopted from the West, modified to their own needs, and have completely different meaning and different implications for Japanese society than from whatever host society they borrowed it from."

We haven't tried whipping up a Christmas cake ourselves, but if you're curious, this video from a Japanese cooking show called Cooking With Dog has a recipe. Because nothing says Christmas like a dog sous chef in a Santa hat.

Alison Bruzek is a former intern with NPR.

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Cake

Japan

Holidays

Christmas

As the latest Congress draws to a close, economists are looking back — and seeing little.

Lawmakers passed no measures addressing tax reform, trade, immigration or even the minimum wage.

But judged by the very low standards of recent years, the 113th Congress did manage to win at least light applause from economists who are watching as the curtain goes down.

Sure, Congress allowed a disruptive government shutdown in 2013 — but it avoided repeating that drama in 2014.

"The biggest positive was that at least this year, there wasn't any debt-ceiling or budget crisis," said John Silvia, chief economist for Wells Fargo Securities. "Not having a government shutdown is something," he noted.

Not much, of course. But something.

Both the House and Senate have approved a bipartisan budget package to finance most government operations through the remainder of the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2015. That legislation, passed in recent days, has removed the specter of a closed government, at least for a while.

Congress had another non-accomplishment of note: It did not get in the way of the federal budget deficit's shrinkage.

During the worst of the Great Recession in 2009, the annual budget shortfall ballooned to nearly 10 percent of the size of the entire economy, as measured by GDP. Since then, the deficit has been melting away, and is on track to drop to just 2.6 percent of GDP in fiscal 2015.

At that level, "the deficit can easily be financed," Silvia said.

Congress might have derailed such fiscal progress by significantly increasing spending or cutting tax revenues. By standing pat, lawmakers allowed the upbeat business cycle to go forward in 2014, which generated new revenues.

Congress did manage to take one step that pleased many people in the agriculture sector. It approved a five-year legislative package that provided growers and ranchers with more certainty about farm and nutrition programs.

At the time of the bill signing earlier this year, Tom Stenzel, who heads the United Fresh Produce Association, said in a statement that the legislation was "nothing less than a solid win" for providers of fruits and vegetables.

But while lawmakers boosted farmers with that bill, they allowed other business causes to languish. For example, the Senate still has not renewed dozens of temporary tax breaks, known as the "extenders," including big ones for business research, wind power, college tuition and more. A vote on that legislation is expected this week, just before the Senate limps out of town.

"Gridlock was the defining characteristic of this Congress," said Sean Snaith, director of the University of Central Florida's Institute for Economic Competitiveness.

Not only were new measures not passed, but older ones did not get the fine-tuning needed to make them more effective, he said. Specifically, the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank Act were each so sweeping in their changes to health care and financial services, respectively, that they needed tightening, he said.

"There's a fog of uncertainty about the impact of these laws," Snaith said. While the government spending bill included a provision that weakened the Dodd-Frank Act's restrictions on banks' derivative trading, those two huge legislative efforts from 2010 have still "left businesses with unanswered questions," and subsequent gridlock has made a legislative response impossible, he said.

On their wish lists for the incoming Congress, mainstream economists are virtually unanimous in naming five issues: trade promotion; immigration; tax reform; infrastructure and entitlement-program reform.

No matter what the 114th Congress does, it has almost nowhere to go but up in terms of public opinion. A Gallup Poll showed that when Congress allowed the government to shutdown in October 2013, its job approval rating plunged to an all-time monthly low of 9 percent.

A new poll, released Monday, showed that Americans' job approval rating for Congress averaged 15 percent for this year. That is, after all, progress.

Economy

Congress

Nine men sit turned away from the camera; their faces are never shown. Many are shirtless or naked. They answer questions like: When did you become a black man? Do you cry? How were you raised to deal with your emotions?

This short film, called #Blackmendream, is the latest piece by Philadelphia-based multidisciplinary artist Shikeith Cathey. His work centers around the social, cultural and political misconceptions about black men in America, and the new film explores the emotional experience of black men, born out of those misconceptions.

The men seem both vulnerable and powerful as they thoughtfully respond to these basic, but piercing, questions. To the viewer, there's a feeling that you're eavesdropping on a therapy session.

"That's the response that I would get after wrapping the interview," Shikeith, who goes by his first name, tells NPR's Arun Rath. "The participants, the men, they would say, 'I haven't been able to express like this in so long and it feels like a weight was lifted off of my shoulder.' "

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Shikeith Cathey, 25, works in many platforms — photography, sculpture, installations and video art. Courtesy artist hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy artist

Shikeith Cathey, 25, works in many platforms — photography, sculpture, installations and video art.

Courtesy artist

He says most of the interview subjects were strangers, but it wasn't hard to get them to participate.

"Honestly, I just asked — and that was the point. These questions, as simple as they are ... they aren't discussed. I couldn't remember a time when someone asked me, 'How do you feel?' " he says.

"I think it's just assumed that I'm angry as a black man. It's assumed that I don't possess these feelings that are part of my humanity."

Shikeith does all of his work in black and white and says the aesthetic composition of this piece — the nudity, the fact that we never see the faces of the subjects — is all symbolic.

"I wanted to expose what it was like to be dressed in assumptions, before even opening your mouth to say hello."

He adds, "My work is a reflection of that internal battle all black men have to face when you're not necessarily seeing things in black and white, but rather in gray."

This project has gained a lot of attention, as it adds to conversations about race and police use of deadly force. But Shikeith says the timing is mere coincidence.

"I don't look at what's happening now as situational," he says. "It's not trendy; it's not something that just began. It's something that has been ongoing in this country for a very long time."

“ I don't look at what's happening now as situational. It's not trendy; it's not something that just began. It's something that has been ongoing in this country for a very long time.

- Shikeith

The inspiration for #Blackmendream actually came two years ago, Shikeith says: "I posted a status on Facebook that said, 'What do black men run from?' "

He was expecting answers that revolved around misconceptions of black manhood. But instead, he got a lot of negative stereotypes — mostly from African-American men and women.

"They were writing, 'Black men run from the police, black men run from love, black men run from child support.' "

Disappointed, he set out to create a project that would change that conversation and showcase an emotional side of black masculinity.

He got a grant from the Pittsburgh Foundation's Advancing Black Arts initiative. Going forward, he hopes the film and the hashtag will add to a more complex discourse around black manhood.

"We can be different. We can be ourselves. We can respect individuality within our own community. And as we project that, I think the community at large will understand more what it exactly is to be a black man. Overall there'll be a healing."

Watch the film here.

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race

As The Conversation About Serial reaches a fever pitch in certain circles, those of us behind Code Switch and Monkey See have been talking quite a bit about the show. You can read Matt Thompson's initial entry in this conversation here and Gene Demby's contribution here.

Below is the third part of our exchange.

Matt, Gene and Kat,

I think Gene is absolutely right that the specific timeliness of Serial cannot possibly be anything its creators could have anticipated, really. And I think Matt is absolutely right that Serial has served as a lesson in how little, at least in some cases, the justice system in fact resembles the justice system in theory. What jurors are told to ignore, they often don't. The way we imagine memory to work, it often doesn't. Stories are not always entirely false or entirely true; they can be part-true, part-false, part-lie, part-error. People act in good faith and bad faith at the same time, in the same case, in the same interview, in the same sentence.

But I think it's even more than that – Serial is true crime, and it has the quality that true crime always has, which is not just a fascination with the way the system doesn't work in logical ways, but also an appreciation of the way people don't work in logical ways.

I think one of the things Koenig has done, whether this was a conscious part of the structure or not, was to slowly close off the explanations in which what everyone did can be made to make sense – even what we'd think of as criminal "sense." It's not just that she can't tell you a very satisfying conclusion, but that she's making it increasingly clear that there isn't one to be had. If you were waiting to hear that Adnan had a history of behavior that would make it seem believable that he'd suddenly murder his girlfriend, it never came. If you were waiting to hear that Jay seemed obviously shady or had ulterior motives or might have been guilty himself, that didn't really come either. No, it doesn't seem like it's all a terrible misunderstanding and it was a marauding stranger, because Jay knew where the car was. No, it doesn't seem like there was a secret history of violence. No, it doesn't seem like there were longstanding beefs that explain how all of this went so crazy.

Thus, here we are: It's hard, based on what the show has revealed, to intuitively picture Adnan, who had no history of violence and in fact had a history as a peacemaker, suddenly murdering a young woman with his bare hands just for breaking up with him and then coldly displaying the body and bragging about like an ice-blooded sociopath the way Jay says he did. That doesn't seem right. But it's also hard to intuitively picture Jay, who knew where her car was and seems not to have been a stranger to the crime, implicating Adnan vindictively, spinning that tale out of whole cloth. That doesn't seem right either.

Koenig put me personally in a position where it's hard to wrap my logical mind around a story where Adnan is guilty, and hard to do so with a story where he is not guilty. It's not just the law that's a lot more vexing than it's often given credit for; it's people.

This is something any lawyer will tell you, and perhaps something lawyers and reporters have in common as a piece of life experience: people do things that don't really make any sense, even with the checks we think we have on our expectations for logical behavior. Stories arise that don't even fit any of our commonly understood narratives for uncommon acts. They do things that just seem ... unmotivated, random, not in range. Why does somebody send an e-mail that will obviously be evidence against him? Why does someone renew a relationship in which they're mistreated? And that's not even to mention the questions that are elemental: why do people hurt people they love? Why do they take huge risks for small gains? Why are people vindictive? Why do they lie? Why do they reward kindness with viciousness? Why do they give love that seems not deserved? That's not to say those things all happened in this case; it's just to say ... these are things that happen.

And they make for interesting stories, and that's why true crime is popular. It's not just the salacious details of investigations and twists and violence and betrayals; it's the way people act. People are weird and complicated and hard to predict and mean for no apparent reason, and they're beautiful and generous and forgiving and precious to each other. Koenig, as a storyteller, has proved one thing to me beyond a reasonable doubt, and that's that this is a story in which no matter what the answer is, some things happened in this case that are really hard to understand. They're counterintuitive, they cut against what we think we know, they challenge our narratives about human behavior, they're illogical, and they happened anyway. What we don't know is which of the weird things that could have happened, happened.

Crimes are a rich topic for people who are fascinated by behavior, in part because they leave records. They are investigated, documented, researched, contested, vetted. Imagine if you could do this with breakups or firings or family arguments. Imagine if there were a file about your worst breakup in which everyone had been interviewed.

That, in a lot of ways, is what This American Life always does, only with different evidence: it investigates stories that normally do not leave that many traces, or that have to be constructed from imperfect memories. And it prides itself on finding something essential within those stories; something that can be understood, appreciated, empathized with. It peers curiously at families, marriages, travel, business partnerships, love affairs – but although it certainly has done crime stories, it hasn't done one like this, in this much detail, with this much exactitude, over this many months. And it has appeared to me as a listener that the deeper Sarah Koenig gets into this story, the more it wriggles away from her and the less she feels confident that she's equipped to figure out what's essential in this story and what can be understood from it other than — you guessed it — a contemplation on the nature of the truth.

Very often, This American Life leaves you with something resonant but complex: that in a given story, for instance, everyone has done their best and everyone has partly failed. It has never feared ambiguity in that regard. But true crime is a very particular beast, because what essence can you take from this story that's meaningful and makes sense whether Adnan strangled Hae on the one hand, or has languished in prison for 15 years despite being innocent on the other?

One of the most fascinating through-lines, for me, has been Koenig's constant nervous concern that she's being had, that she's a sucker, that she's being taken in. My sense is that as a person, she worries about being duped by Adnan because everyone fears being duped, but as a storyteller, she worries about being duped because if she is, she'll learn –and then share – the wrong thing from the story. She's clearly not going to leave you with a firm "guilty" or "not guilty," but there's no way she intends to leave you with nothing.

This is where you find that gauzy line between pure reporting and storytelling, as much as those concepts have enormous overlap. Reporting can be just "I am telling you this because it is true, because it happened, and because it's important." Storytelling tends to have something else at its core: "I am telling you this because it is meaningful." As a reporter, it matters not at all if Koenig doesn't know what to make of all this. As a storyteller, it matters more. And that may be why, more and more, the story is the only one she can really tell — the story of her own travels with this case.