different way

Fortunately for avid bibliophiles, Harper Lee was an inveterate pack rat. Born in rural Monroeville, Ala., in 1926, the author of “To Kill a Mockingbird” — whose first name is Nelle, her grandmother Ellen’s name spelled backward — spent much of her adult life in Manhattan after moving there in 1949.

First, she lived in a cold-water flat on the Upper East Side (subsisting on peanut butter sandwiches and meager bookstore and airline ticket agent salaries); then in a room in a Midtown hotel where Edith Wharton and Mark Twain once resided; a third-floor York Avenue walk-up ($20 a month for five years, where “Go Set a Watchman” and “To Kill a Mockingbird” were written); and, finally four decades at 433 E. 82nd St. There, amid “piles of her correspondence and practically every pay stub, telephone bill and canceled check ever issued to her, were notebooks and manuscripts” and eight previously unpublished early short stories and eight once-published essays and magazine articles. Those writings, discovered in her New York City apartment after she died in her Alabama hometown nine years ago, have been gathered into the welcome hybrid compendium “The Land of Sweet Forever.”

The short stories take up the first half of the collection, but it’s an unusual selection in the second half, “Essays and Miscellaneous Pieces,” that may reveal as much about the burgeoning author as the fictional juvenilia. In a contribution to “The Artists’ & Writers’ Cookbook” (1961), along with entries by Lillian Hellman, William Styron and Marianne Moore, Lee offered a one-page recipe for crackling bread, complete with the authorial observation, “some historians say by which alone fell the Confederacy.” The opening instruction is, “First, catch your pig.” After that, the ingredients (water-ground white meal, salt, baking powder, egg, milk) and directions might just as well function as an analogy for the process of writing and editing a manuscript.

In her introduction, Lee’s appointed biographer Casey Cep observes that it “takes enormous patience and unerring instincts to refine a scrap of story into something … keen and moving.” Lee admits to being “more of a rewriter than a writer.” In a 1950 letter to one of her sisters, she outlines her typical writing day, working through at least three drafts:

From around noon, work on the first draft. By dinnertime, I’ve usually put my idea down. I then stop for a sandwich or a full meal, depending on whether I’ve got to think more about the story or just finish it. After dinner, I work on a second draft, which involves sometimes tearing the story up and putting it together again in an entirely different way, or just keeping at it until everything is like I want it. Then I retype it on white paper, conforming to rules of manuscript preparation, and run out & mail it. That sounds simple, but sometimes I have worked through the night on one; usually I end up around two or three in the morning.

It’s all rather like testing, perfecting a recipe. If the product was these eight short stories, then “yes, chef” has baked a perfect loaf.

Each story illuminates Lee’s quintessential talents as the “balladeer of small-town culture” and the chronicler of city life. They display narrative skills, an acute ear for dialogue (especially the vernacular), development of fully rounded characters and vivid descriptions of settings. They also introduce subjects and significant themes — family, friendship, moral compass — that reappear in her nonfiction and novels.

Country life imposes restrictions on childhood characters in the first three stories. In “The Water Tank” anxious 12-year-old Abby Henderson, reacting to schoolyard rumors, believes she’s pregnant because she hugged a boy whose pants were unbuttoned. Anti-authoritarian first grader Dody (one of Harper’s nicknames) in “The Binoculars” is chastised for not tracing but writing her name on the blackboard. Early glimpses of “Mockingbird’s” Scout and Atticus Finch appear in the amusing “The Pinking Shears” when third grader “little Jean Louie” (without the later “s”) undermines gender rules when she whacks off a rambunctious minister’s daughter’s lengthy locks.

In New York City, where “sooner or later you meet everybody you ever knew on Fifth Avenue,” urban stress leads to a shocking monologue with an incendiary conclusion about feuding neighbors in “A Roomful of Kibble,” a frivolous kind of parlor game involving movie titles in “The Viewer and the Viewed,” and a humorous parking incident when one friend agrees to help another with lighting for a fashion show in “This Is Show Business?”

The closing title short story, “The Land of Sweet Forever,” adeptly merges locations and themes. It opens with a satirical nod to Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice”: “It is a truth generally acknowledged by the citizens of Maycomb, Ala., that a single woman in possession of little else but a good knowledge of English social history must be in want of someone to talk to.” When adult Jean Louise (now with the “s”) leaves the city for home, she has a hilarious church encounter with someone she hadn’t seen since they were children, 21-year-old Talbert Wade, now with the taint of three years as an economics major at Northwestern University and a patina full of Europe, looking “suspiciously as if he had returned from a tour and had picked up a Brooks Brothers suit on the way home.” Together, they are trying to understand why the doxology, always sung “in one way and one way only” suddenly has been “pepped up” with an energetic organ accompaniment. Before it’s resolved there is an amusing anecdote about a cow obituary in verse and a concluding bow to Voltaire’s “Candide” when Jean Louise concedes that “all things happen for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds.” The story is a resounding example of Lee’s scintillating sense of wry humor.

Big themes of love, family and friendship recur in the eight previously published essays and articles (from 1961 to 2006) that appeared in Vogue, McCall’s, an American Film Institute program (about Gregory Peck), a Book of the Month Club newsletter (on the “little boy next door” Truman Capote and “In Cold Blood”), Alabama History and Heritage Festival, and O, the Oprah Magazine (a letter about the joy of learning to read). In addition to the crackling bread recipe that serves as a fingerpost to Lee’s writing process, the standout essay “Christmas to Me” details how she received a generous gift that changed her life, allowing her to become an accomplished, published writer. In 1956, best friends, lyricist-composer Michael Brown and his wife, Joy, surprised her with an envelope on the tree with a note, “You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas.” That meant $100 every month, covering more than five times her rent.

Juvenilia is tricky. It can be evanescent, exposing weaknesses or revealing strengths and talent. “The Land of Sweet Forever” reinforces Lee’s indelible voice, contributing a rewarding addition and resource to the slim canon of her literary legacy.

The recipe for crackling bread:

First, catch your pig. Then ship it to the abattoir nearest you. Bake what they send back. Remove the solid fat and throw the rest away. Fry fat, drain off liquid grease, and combine the residue (called “cracklings”) with:

1 ½ cups water-ground white meal
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 egg
1 cup milk

Bake in very hot oven until brown (about 15 minutes).

Result: one pan crackling bread serving 6. Total cost: about $250, depending upon size of pig. Some historians say by this recipe alone fell the Confederacy.

Papinchak, a former English professor, is a freelance book critic in Los Angeles. He has also contributed interviews to Bon Appetit.

SACRAMENTO — Gubernatorial hopeful Katie Porter said Friday that she mishandled a recent television news interview that called her temperament into question, but explained she felt the reporter’s questioning implied she should cater to President Donald Trump’s supporters.

Porter, an outspoken Democrat and former U.S. House representative from Orange County, said that she was “pushing back on” the reporter’s implication that she needed to be more temperate politically.

“I think Trump is hurting Californians,” said Porter, speaking at the UC Student and Policy Center in Sacramento. “I am not going to sell out our values as a state for some short-term political gain to try and appease people who are still standing and still supporting what this president is doing as he is trampling on our Constitution.”

Porter came under fire last week for snapping at the CBS reporter and threatening to end the interview. A second video has since emerged of Porter cursing at a young staffer who walked behind her during a video conference in 2021.

Porter, who was speaking as part of the policy center’s California Leaders Speaker Series, said she apologized “in real time” to her staffer.

“It was inappropriate,” she said. “I could have done better in that situation and I know that. I really want my staff to understand that I value them.”

After the videos emerged, several of Porter’s rivals criticized her behavior, including former state Controller Betty Yee, who said she should drop out of the race.

Marisa Lagos, a correspondent with KQED radio who moderated Friday’s discussion, asked if Porter felt any of the blow back was unfair, especially given Trump’s mannerisms.

Trump has a long history of belittling or targeting journalists, continually accusing them of being the “enemy of the people” and, during his 2016 presidential campaign, mocking the appearance of a disabled reporter with a congenital joint condition.

“Let me just say, Donald Trump should not be anyone’s standard for anything,” Porter said. “From how to use self-tanner to how to deal with the press, that is not the benchmark.”

Porter said she would work to demonstrate throughout the rest of her campaign that she has the right judgment to serve as governor.

“I think we all know that those were short videos that were clipped, there is always a larger context, but the reality is every second of every minute I am responsible for thinking about how to lead California and do my best,” she said.

Throughout the discussion Friday Porter also shared her support for Proposition 50, a ballot measure that would change congressional district boundaries and likely shift five more seats to Democrats in the U.S House of Representatives. The measure, which will be on the Nov. 4 statewide ballot, was drafted to counteract a redistricting plan in Texas intended to give Republicans more seats.

Lagos asked Porter how she would respond to residents who fear they’re being disenfranchised, especially those from rural areas.

Porter said she grew up in a rural area and wanted rural Californians to feel heard. But she said California was approaching redistricting in a different way than Texas by giving residents the opportunity to vote on it.

“It’s a question being put to each Californian about what they want to do in this political moment,” she said. “Circumstances were one way, and we had one policy, but the world has changed — in light of that, what do you as a Californian want to do about that?”

During a question-and-answer round at Friday’s event, a student referenced legislation on antisemitism and asked for Porter’s thoughts on whether criticizing Israel counted as antisemitism.

Porter said it was a complex issue but that criticizing Israel was not automatically antisemitic.

“There are plenty of people in Israel who criticize Israeli policy,” she said. “There are plenty of people around the world who don’t like Donald Trump and criticize (the United States) all the time. There is a right to criticize policy.”

A winless football team went bowling. It’s true.

With his players in need of a refreshing change that would still allow them to compete, UCLA interim coach Tim Skipper took the Bruins to a bowling alley last week on one of their days off from practicing.

“I also wanted to get out of the [football practice] building, to be honest, even for me and the coaches’ sake,” Skipper said Monday. “We’ve been locked in working and grinding and all that stuff, so we needed to get away and just kind of take a deep breath and compete in a different way.”

While it was the sort of team bonding exercise usually carried out in the offseason or during training camp, throwing a few strikes together could be the thing to help spare players from walking out on the rest of the season after an 0-3 start that led to the dismissal of their coach.

A week into the 30-day transfer portal window that opened for players, Skipper said no one had left the team. Additional incentive to stay could come Saturday.

A victory over Northwestern (1-2 overall, 0-1 Big Ten) in UCLA’s conference opener at Martin Stadium in Evanston, Ill., could be doubly important for a team that needs a confidence boost — and reason for players with an available redshirt season to keep playing after the four-game cutoff for preserving eligibility.

“I think the discussions might come up a little bit more after the game,” Skipper said of redshirting. “But, to me, it’s always good to win for everything, just morale and every single area that you’re in. You deal with that as it comes, but right now the guys have been attacking and everybody seems like they want to play and are eager to do that.”

Skipper said coaches have commenced a deep dive into the roster to search for players who could provide additional help after the team struggled so mightily in its first three games. As the Bruins shift from what Skipper labeled a mini-training camp last week into game mode, they will see if those new discoveries can handle the opportunity to make a bigger contribution.

UCLA interim coach Tim Skipper is trying to keep his players motivated amid the Bruins’ 0-3 start.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Nobody appears to be giving up given the energy and personal pride Skipper has seen from his players.

“Everybody has a number out there, but you also have a last name on the back of your jersey,” Skipper said. “So, that last name needs to matter and you need to represent it in a positive way, and that’s what this is all going to come down to. I don’t care what we’re doing, whether we’re bowling or playing football, whatever — compete to win.”

A defensive boost

Skipper said Kevin Coyle had arrived on campus after having coached for Syracuse in its victory over Clemson last weekend.

A senior defensive analyst with the Orange who is expected to serve in a similar capacity at UCLA after the Bruins persuaded him to make a cross-country move early in the season, Coyle has been a longtime mentor to his new boss.

Coyle, 69, was Fresno State’s defensive coordinator when Skipper was a star middle linebacker for the Bulldogs from 1997 to 2000. The duo also worked together last season at Fresno State when Skipper was the interim head coach.

Now Coyle will boost a UCLA staff that needs help after the departure of defensive coordinator Ikaika Malloe last week in what was termed a mutual parting of ways.

“He is kind of like ‘The Godfather’ to me for football,” Skipper said of Coyle. “Did a lot of teaching me the game. It’s where I originally first started learning how to play sound, good defense. So to have the opportunity to get him here is major.”

Without offering specifics, Skipper said the UCLA defensive staff had simulated the way it would call games as part of a new collaborative approach.

With President Trump continuing to bulldoze through American politics, Democrats are forced to confront a fundamental question: Do voters even want what they’ve been offering?

The meteoric rise of Zohran Mamdani, a fiery young Democratic Socialist who recently claimed a shocking New York mayoral primary win, points to a grim answer.

It’s presumptuous to extrapolate too much from one state or local race. (Remember how Scott Brown’s special election win in Massachusetts was supposed to signal the end of liberalism? Exactly.) But underestimating moments like this is also dangerous because tectonic rumbles often precede a political earthquake.

Even if Mamdani isn’t the solution — and he likely isn’t — his stunning victory suggests a sobering possibility: The very thing Democrats have been running from is precisely what voters are chasing.

For a decade now, there have been basically two prevailing theories about how to beat Trump.

The first is simple: Be whatever he isn’t. If Trump is vulgar, be decent. If Trump is chaotic, be stable. If Trump breaks things, fix them. This theory is comforting, but it also assumes that voters will respond to decency and logic. An assumption that, as it turns out, is dubious.

The second theory, while cynical, may be more accurate: Fight fire with fire. If you can’t beat him, join him. Not on policy — that would be insane — but on vibe. If Trump is a spectacle, Democrats should find one of their own.

Trump understood the importance of dominating the public’s attention from the start. Apparently, so does Mamdani. And so do a handful of other left-wing firebrands (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, et al.) who make the party’s establishment look like buttoned-up accountants.

There are different ways to break through in the modern era. You can be young and hip. You can be weird and magnetic. You can master the art of long-form podcast appearances and creating viral social media videos. But above all, you must eschew the trite pablum of scripted politicians.

In this regard, it’s difficult to divorce style from substance. It’s no coincidence that today’s most attention-grabbing pols tend to promote the most radical proposals that also happen to excite previously underserved portions of the electorate.

“Build the wall.” “Lock her up.” “Defund the police.” “Medicare for all.” These slogans are all, to varying degrees, unworkable — and previously unthinkable. But they all sound unorthodox and decisive, which in the contemporary political ecosystem is more effective than being wise or correct. Case in point: Trump can shift an entire news cycle by suggesting we should invade Canada or Greenland.

Could a mainstream Democrat, if he or she were charismatic and talented enough, cut through that noise? In theory, yes. But the problem with moderates is that they tend to be moderate. Even in how they talk and how they dress.

It’s not just their policies that feel safe — it’s their entire aesthetic. And in the attention economy, that’s a real handicap.

The center, to paraphrase Yeats, cannot meme.

This is why Mamdani’s radical take on politics is so resonant. Like Trump before him, he proposes ideas that have been wildly outside the political mainstream, and he actually seems to believe what he’s saying.

This last part is key. Younger voters, especially, don’t merely want revolutionary policy positions; they want existential authenticity.

So what is his radical take on politics? Mamdani wants to freeze rents and make buses and childcare free. He doesn’t think billionaires should exist. He has floated the idea of government-run grocery stores. He’s openly anti-Zionist. He refuses to condemn the incendiary phrase “globalize the intifada.” He’s confrontational. He’s shocking. He’s newsworthy. He’s … a complete turnoff to middle-aged, conservative commentators like me — which is proof he’s succeeding!

It might be horrible for America to have not one, but two extremist parties; but after years of trying to sell candidates who won’t scare the suburban normies (with Kamala Harris being an earnest yet flawed attempt at this), you could forgive Democrats for wondering if what they really need is a Trump of their own. Someone who is fiery, meme-ready and authentically combative (albeit in a younger and entirely different package than Trump).

It’s way too soon to say if this will be their trajectory. But it’s worth noting that, outside of Mamdani’s victory, the only Democratic moments this year that have evoked any real excitement or virality came during AOC and Bernie rallies.

Still, nothing is guaranteed. If Democrats decide to go this route (say, with an AOC candidacy in 2028), they risk alienating otherwise “gettable” swing voters and dragging down the entire ticket.

Indeed, some of Trump’s most potent 2024 ads involved pointing out Harris’ previous dalliances with “woke” politics. And that was with a candidate going out of her way to appear moderate.

What energizes the base can just as easily terrify the middle. And it could hand fresh ammunition to a suddenly rudderless Republican Party, which without Trump on the ballot in 2028 could be quite vulnerable to losing to a standard-issue “vanilla” Democrat.

Nevertheless, there’s an increasing sense that Democrats have no choice but to crawl into the carnival tent Trump built and become louder, flashier and fringier than he was. Not just because trying to be the respectable (read “boring”) party of institutions failed, but because our modern media milieu all but demands it.

Matt K. Lewis is the author of “Filthy Rich Politicians” and “Too Dumb to Fail.”

Celebrities are all too familiar with the world of deepfakes, the colloquial term for artificial intelligence-generated videos that depict actors and other Hollywood talent falsely doing or saying things that they never agreed to.

To protect themselves, actors including Steve Harvey, Beverly Hills talent agency WME and studios have enlisted the help of Vermillio, a Chicago-based company that tracks famous people’s digital likenesses and intellectual property online. Depending on what its clients want, it can have the material taken down .

But as AI technology continues to improve and becomes more widely available to the general public, regular people are getting scammed too.

Now, Vermillio says it is offering a version of its service for free to everyone.

The move comes as more and more convincing deepfakes continue to proliferate online, making it difficult for social media sites to police such activity. In 2019, there were about 18,000 deepfakes globally and this year, there have been roughly 2 trillion generative creations, said Vermillio Chief Executive and co-founder Dan Neely.

That leaves average Joes at a growing risk of being impersonated online, with little recourse.

“We can’t wait for governments to solve this problem,” Neely said. “We can’t wait for legislators to solve this problem. We can’t wait for other people to solve this problem. We just said it’s the right thing to do, so we should just be doing it.”

With this move, Vermillo is adopting a classic “freemium” model — offering partial service for no charge and up-selling for additional features.

Here’s how it works.

Using its TraceID technology, the company flags problematic content. For paying clients, Vermillio can send take-down requests to sites such as YouTube or Instagram. Additionally, Vermillio says clients can monetize their data by licensing it.

People who sign up for the free version enter information about themselves such as their name, date of birth and social media handles on sites including Instagram or YouTube.

Then, Vermillio will use that information to build a “likeness model” to scour the Internet for potential red flags involving the user’s identity. Then Vermillio alerts the user to what exists online. For example, if someone has created a fake Instagram account of that user, Vermillio would flag that.

Users are notified of this type of content and can decide for themselves what they would like to allow, or take action to remove. If the user wants Vermillio to request take-downs of the inappropriate content, users would need to upgrade to a paid account, which starts at $10 a month and includes five monthly take down requests.

While many social media platforms give an option to users to flag problematic content, Vermillio said it is faster and more effective than having users go directly to YouTube or Instagram to rectify the situation. It has built a network of partners and can escalate take-downs in as quickly as an hour, the company said.

Vermillio executives said some real life examples of deep fakes include celebrity voices used to raise money for fake charities or terrorist organizations, and high school students creating fake pornography of their classmates.

“It’s affecting regular people in the sense that they’re getting scammed by deep fakes, but it’s also affecting teenagers, so people need to understand where they stand,” said Kathleen Grace, Vermillio’s chief strategy officer. “This is an easy way for them to do that.”

While fake social media profiles have existed for years, “generative AI just poured gasoline on it,” Grace said.

The company said hundreds of people use Vermillio’s services, but didn’t specify numbers. By the end of the year, the company expects to have thousands.

Neely said the company isn’t profitable and declined to share revenue figures. Time magazine reported that revenue from Vermillio’s TraceID has increased tenfold from April 2023 to April 2024. The company makes money through the paid versions of its service and licensing. Vermillio has raised $24 million in funding.

Hollywood companies and talent are navigating artificial intelligence in different ways.

Groups such as performers guild SAG-AFTRA are pushing for more state and federal protections against deepfakes. Some celebrities such as Academy Award-winning supporting actor Jamie Lee Curtis struggled to get a fake ad of her on Instagram taken down showing her falsely endorsing a dental product.

WME announced a partnership with Vermillio last year.

“The scale of the issue is extraordinary, so if you’re a rights holder, just trying to understand how much of these AI outputs are based on or utilized my data, my IP in some way, shape or form, is a massive need,” said Chris Jacquemin, WME’s head of digital strategy.

“They’ve obviously proven that TraceID can protect the most important, most high profile public figures in the world,” Jacquemin added. “Opening it up in a much broader application, I think is a huge step forward in really democratizing how anybody can start to police use of their likeness with respect to AI and AI platforms.”