Eve

Twelve years ago, coach Lane Kiffin was humiliated, fired by USC athletic director Pat Haden on an airport tarmac at 3 a.m. moments after the Trojans had flown in from Phoenix after getting crushed by Arizona State, 62-41.

OK, so maybe it wasn’t the tarmac, maybe that’s just Trojan lore, maybe the abrupt firing took place in a small room next to the runway.

Either way, the memory has been burned in Kiffin’s heart and mind, helping motivate him to increased success on the field and seemingly heartfelt balance in his personal life.

Now the tables have turned. Kiffin, 50, has led Ole Miss to a No. 5 national ranking and 10-1 record, the fourth year in the last five the Rebels have won at least 10 games. He seemingly shed the reputation for aloofness and me-first attitude that dogged him as a failed NFL head coach at age 32 and as an Alabama assistant let go by Nick Saban days before a national title game for focusing too much on his next job.

Yet, here we are again, Kiffin apparently contemplating the unthinkable. Would he really abandon Ole Miss on the eve of the College Football Playoff for Florida or Louisiana State, fellow SEC schools and established national powers hunting for head coaches?

A young fan shows his support for Mississippi coach Lane Kiffin during the second half of a game against Florida in Oxford, Miss., on Nov. 15, 2025.

(Rogelio V. Solis/Associated Press)

Kiffin’s ex-wife Layla — they are on friendly terms — and 17-year-old son Knox recently were flown on private jets to Gainesville, Fla., and Baton Rouge, La., presumably to check out the livability and vibes of the potential next entry on Kiffin’s resume.

Ole Miss is well aware of Kiffin’s impending decision and clearly want to know the answer ahead of the Rebels’ regular-season finale Nov. 28 against Mississippi State. Kiffin, however, denied rumors that Ole Miss athletic director Keith Carter had given him an ultimatum to decide before then.

“Yeah, that’s absolutely not true,” Kiffin told “The Pat McAfee Show” on ESPN on Tuesday. “There has been no ultimatum, anything like that at all. And so I don’t know where that came from, like a lot of stuff that comes out there. Like I said, man, we’re having a blast. I love it here.”

In fairness to Kiffin, the urgency to decide now rather than at season’s end is a function of today’s college football recruiting calendar and transfer portal. The high school signing period begins Dec. 3 and the transfer portal opens Jan. 2.

The first round of the CFP will be Dec. 19 and 20. The quarterfinals are on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. Florida and LSU can’t wait that long to hire a coach.

What should he do? Most seasoned pundits believe he should not budge.

“Kiffin should stay and see the season out; attempt to win, try to reach the Final Four or beyond, make the memories, and forge the deep bonds that coaching is supposed to be about,” longtime columnist Dan Wetzel wrote for ESPN.

Reasons to jump to LSU or Florida are that both schools are in talent-rich states with massive fan bases and deep tradition. The ceiling is higher and the stands fuller than in Oxford, Miss. Also, coaches at those established SEC powers tend to dig in for years. Who knows when a similar opportunity will present itself?

Kiffin’s quandary is understandable. Old Miss administrators, however, vividly recall 2022 when Kiffin was courted by Auburn and allowed the issue to linger and sabotage a potentially great season. The Rebels were 8-1 when the rumors began and then lost four in a row.

Nobody at Ole Miss wants another collapse because Kiffin — again — had a wandering eye. His decision is difficult, and won’t wait.

L.A. is a harmony of contradictions: It’s a bankrupt skyscraper covered in graffiti, a Mercedes-Benz G-class SUV with an expired registration, the quiet confusion of wondering whether a stranger’s outfit means they’re unhoused or just new to Silver Lake. L.A.’s refusal to make sense is what makes it irresistible, and no one understood that better than writer, artist and provocateur Eve Babitz, who died in 2021.

“Los Angeles isn’t a city. It’s a gigantic, sprawling, ongoing studio,” she wrote in her 1974 book “Eve’s Hollywood.” “Everything is off the record.”

Born in Hollywood in 1943 to a classical violinist father and an artist mother — and with Igor Stravinsky as her godfather — Babitz was destined for “It”-girl-ism. While people tend to flee their hometowns to start over in a new city, usually a place like L.A. or New York, Babitz knew she was exactly where she was meant to be. She tried New York once as a typist for Timothy Leary, because it’s where “real writers” lived and worked; she gave it one year before moving back to L.A.

“She lived in Rome for six months, and that was the only other city she loved, almost as much as L.A.,” Mirandi Babitz, Eve’s younger sister, told me. Despite her growing popularity in the ’60s and ’70s, Eve Babitz didn’t hightail it from her Hollywood bungalow to live in Pacific Palisades or Topanga or Malibu — she lived and died in the heart of it all.

When I asked Mirandi what Babitz would think of today’s coffee-shop lines, overpriced wine bodegas and tinned fish culture, she said with a laugh, “She’d roll her eyes.”

Babitz may have been synonymous with places, including the Chateau Marmont and Musso & Frank Grill, or with people such as Jim Morrison and Ed Ruscha. But it wasn’t because she was a hanger-on, desperate to be cool or famous. She was the keeper of cool, and L.A. was the only muse she gave a damn about. “I did not become famous but I got near enough to smell the stench of success. It smelt like burnt cloth and rancid gardenias,” she wrote in 1977’s “Slow Days, Fast Company: the World, the Flesh, and L.A.”

After graduating from Hollywood High, Babitz skipped the traditional UCLA route and instead took classes at Los Angeles City College. “The school was located about 4 blocks from the hospital I was born in,” she wrote in “Eve’s Hollywood.” “It was on Vermont near Melrose, which is an indeterminate lower-middle-class sort of neighborhood with no delusions. Westwood, where UCLA is, is so insanely crappy you could throw up. It’s so WHITE and it’s so clean and it’s so impervious …”

At age 20, Babitz made a name for herself in the art world. She posed nude, playing chess with a fully clothed Marcel Duchamp for Esquire — a cheeky act of revenge against her lover, Walter Hopps, who wasn’t returning her calls. Shot by Julian Wasser at the Norton Simon Museum, the now-iconic photo did its job: Hopps rang her soon after. That photo is now described by the Smithsonian Archives of American Art as being “among the key documentary images of American modern art.”

Babitz also launched her independent career as an artist, designing album covers for Linda Ronstadt, the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield. Her foray into the music scene — where she partied with (and allegedly had affairs with) legends like Morrison of the Doors (“I met Jim and propositioned him in three minutes,” she wrote in “Eve’s Hollywood”) and some original Eagles members — blossomed into a social life so magnanimous that names like Andy Warhol, Steve Martin and Annie Leibovitz came up as casually as what Babitz had for lunch that day.

She went on to publish several books and worked as a journalist, writing about everything from Salvador Dalí to the best taquito stand in L.A. (Don’t worry — we listed it below.) Although Babitz’s love life kept the city gossiping, it was always apparent that her true love was the city itself. Her books, including “Sex and Rage” (1979) and “L.A. Woman” (1982), are all love letters to a city she knew inside out. In turn, her life in L.A. became the stuff of urban legend — and decades later, we’re still talking about it.

Babitz understood L.A. better than anyone, including its seductions and secrets. Her legacy is being revisited in the Huntington’s exhibition “Los Angeles, Revisited,” which explores how L.A. has been shaped — and reshaped — by its visionaries. Babitz and her mother, Mae, a self-taught artist known for her preservation work on the Watts Towers and her sketches of L.A.’s vanishing buildings, have drawings included in the show. The exhibition runs through Dec. 1.

Consider what’s below your invitation to see L.A. as Babitz did — expansively, honestly and maybe a little recklessly. Just a heads-up, though: You won’t find a single coffee shop with a DMV-like line on this list.

New York City – For Zohran Mamdani, it starts and ends in Astoria, the Queens neighbourhood he has represented as a state assemblyman for five years, and where he made his first public address following a shock victory in the June Democratic primary for mayor.

On Monday, the 34-year-old made his final appearance before Tuesday’s election day, standing at a playground at dusk, with children laughing in the background.

His message to his army of volunteers, which the campaign has said is made up of more than 100,000: “Leave everything out there on the field”.

“These are the hands that have brought us to this point of making history in this city”, he said, “making history to show that when you focus and fight for working people, you can, in fact, remake the politics of the place that you call home”.

While US President Donald Trump may have gained from deep disquiet over an affordability crisis in the country to win the 2024 presidential vote, Mamdani has argued that it is he and his mayoral campaign that can actually address those challenges in the biggest city of the United States.

Indeed, Trump loomed large on Monday as Mamdani stood before a cadre of cheering canvassers, some clad in the campaign’s ubiquitous yellow beanies, and an equally large horde of local, national and international media.

Just hours earlier, the US president had explicitly endorsed former Governor Andrew Cuomo, saying New Yorkers must choose the “bad democrat” over the “communist”, a false label he has repeatedly applied to democratic socialist Mamdani.

Soon after, billionaire Elon Musk also threw his support behind Cuomo, a Democrat who is running as an independent after losing to Mamdani in the Democratic Party’s primary.

The most recent polls showed Mamdani maintaining a commanding, if shrinking, lead over Cuomo. The late endorsements for the former governor, who has explicitly called on conservatives to jump ship from Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa and support him instead, could also further destabilise an already volatile race.

Still, Mamdani’s supporters on Monday said they hoped their candidate’s speech will be a coda on a campaign that has been widely considered as a rebuke to the entrenched, donor-dominated Democratic establishment that Cuomo is seen to represent.

“I feel amazing right now,” said Tasnuva Khan, who was among the canvassers on Monday, adding that the race had revealed both the power of Muslim voters and the city’s fast-growing Bangladeshi community.

Mamdani would be the first Muslim, first person of South Asian descent, and the first person born in Africa to lead the city, if he wins.

“But I’m trying to stay balanced. What wins elections are votes. As long as we kind of stay focused and reach out to our community members, keep canvassing, knocking on doors, then I think we can definitely deliver,” she told Al Jazeera.

But Shabnam Salehezadehi, a dentist from Long Island City, Queens, and a Mamdani supporter, said she feared the mayoral candidate’s real challenges would begin after the election.

Winning is just the bare minimum, she noted, but for Mamdani to enact many of his sweeping pledges – free buses, universal childcare, rent freezes for a large portion of city apartments, paid for by increasing taxes on corporations and the wealthy – he must win buy-in from a coalition of both state and city lawmakers.

“I’m really anxious – not so much whether he’ll win or not,” said Salehezadehi, who added she was first drawn to Mamdani for his staunch support of Palestinian rights, a break from the traditional Democratic mainstream.

“I just really hope we have the mandate to show that Zohran Mamdani is the candidate the city vehemently voted for,” she said.

Election day looms

Cuomo also spent the final day of the race cutting across the city, visiting the Bronx, Manhattan and Brooklyn.

In the Fordham neighbourhood of the Bronx, a community representative of some of the minority-dominated working-class areas Cuomo carried in the primary, the former governor stood on a park bench overlooking nearby street vendors.

He decried the “socialist city” New York would become if Mamdani were to win.

“Socialism did not work in Venezuela. Socialism did not work in Cuba. Socialism will not work in New York City,” he said, in what has become a mantra in the final days of the race.

At a subsequent stop in Washington Heights, Manhattan, he replied to a question about the nod from Trump, which comes as Cuomo has already faced scrutiny for sharing many of the same billionaire donors as the Republican president.

“He called me a bad Democrat. First of all, I happen to be a good Democrat and a proud Democrat, and I’m going to stay a proud Democrat. Mamdani is not a communist,” Cuomo said. “He’s a socialist. But we don’t need a socialist mayor either.”

But for Gwendolyn Paige, a 69-year-old special educator from the Bronx, the “socialist label” is not what’s deterring her from voting for Mamdani.

Instead, she pointed to the Cuomo legacy. Cuomo’s father, Mario Cuomo, had also served as governor of the state. The younger Cuomo left his post in 2021 amid sexual misconduct allegations.

“Cuomo is the only person who will stand up to the Trump administration,” Paige told Al Jazeera from the Fordham neighbourhood, even as she dismissed Trump’s endorsement.

“Listen, tomorrow, Trump will say something else,” she said. “So, I don’t put much stock in it”.

At least 735,000 voters have already cast their ballots in early voting, just a portion of the 4.7 million registered voters in the city.

Polls will be open from 6am to 9pm on Tuesday (11:00 GMT, Tuesday to 02:00 GMT, Wednesday), with a winner expected to emerge in the hours after. The victor will take office in January.

With just hours until election day, some votes are still up for grabs.

Lisa Gonzalez, a retired Army veteran, pointed to dire times for low-income residents of the US, including restrictions on food assistance benefits (SNAP) included in a bill passed by Trump and Republicans earlier this year.

Trump has further threatened to cut federal funding for New York City and deploy the National Guard if Mamdani is elected.

“I’m still deciding. The stakes feel really high,” she said. “So I’m just gonna be very careful tomorrow when I vote”.