Pulitzer

For a historian who writes about war, Rick Atkinson is surprisingly optimistic. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author and former journalist — who recently released the second volume in a trilogy of books about the American Revolution — believes that the bedrock of American democracy is solid enough to withstand any assaults on its founding principles.

As the guest of honor at a Sunday night dinner sponsored by the Library Foundation of Los Angeles as part of its biennial Literary Feasts fundraiser, Atkinson was the most upbeat person at the event, which took place just before Election Day. Speaking to about 18 guests gathered around two circular tables carefully laid out on the back patio at the home of fellow writers and hosts Meenakshi and Liaquat Ahamed, Atkinson buoyed the flagging spirits of those certain that the country was currently dangling on the precipice of disaster at the hands of the Trump administration.

Book lovers attend a Literary Feast dinner featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Rick Atkinson at the home of writers Meenakshi and Liaquat Ahamed.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

“We’re the beneficiaries of an enlightened political heritage handed down to us from that founding generation, and it includes strictures on how to divide power and keep it from concentrating in the hands of authoritarians who think primarily of themselves,” Atkinson said with the cheery aplomb of a man who has spent the bulk of his time burrowing deep inside archives filled with harrowing stories of the darkest days the world has ever seen. “We can’t let that slip away. We can’t allow it to be taken away, and we can’t allow ourselves to forget the hundreds of thousands who’ve given their lives to affirm and sustain it over the past 250 years.”

The questions and conversation that followed Atkinson’s rousing speech about the history of the Revolution — including riveting details about key players like George Washington who Atkinson noted had “remarkably dead eyes” in order to not give away a scintilla of his inner life to curious onlookers — was what the evening’s book-loving guests had come for.

“We’re the beneficiaries of an enlightened political heritage handed down to us from that founding generation,” said Rick Atkinson.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

A total of 40 authors are hosted at salon-style events at 40 houses with more than 750 guests over the course of a single evening, raising more than $2 million for the Library Foundation, which is a separate entity from the public library. Founded in 1992 in the wake of the devastating 1986 fire at downtown’s Central Library, which destroyed more than 400,000 books, the foundation seeks to continue the community-driven mission of the library when funding runs short, including supporting adult education, early literacy programs for children, and services for immigrants and the unhoused.

“I often describe it as the dream-fueling work, the life-changing work,” said Stacy Lieberman, the Library Foundation’s president and chief executive. “Because it’s a lot of the one-on-one support that people will get.”

The Foundation typically raises about $7 million to $8 million a year, with an operating budget of nearly $11 million, so money raised through the Literary Feasts is a significant slice of the funding pie. The feasts began in 1997 and have continued apace every other year since then, featuring a who’s who of literary accomplishment across every genre. Writers past and present include Sue Grafton, Jane Fonda, Ann Patchett, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Abraham Verghese, Scott Turow and Michael Connelly.

Dinner hosts fund the events themselves — no small outlay considering the lavish offerings.

Guests were served steak with roasted carrots, turnips and potatoes.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

The Ahameds delighted guests with a tangy grapefruit and greens salad, followed by tender steak with roasted carrots, turnips and potatoes; a dessert of hot apple tart à la mode drizzled with caramel sauce; and plenty of crisp red and white wine. Both hosts are literary luminaries in their own right: Liaquat, a former investment manager, won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for history for his book “Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World” and Meenakshi recently published “Indian Genius: The Meteoric Rise of Indians in America.”

The couple travels in bookish circles and enjoys hosting salons at their home, including one earlier this year in support of New Yorker political columnist Susan Glasser and her husband, New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker. As friends of Atkinson, the Ahameds did their part to introduce him, and later tried their best to entice him to stop taking questions and eat his dinner.

The guest of honor could not be persuaded. There was too much to say. “The Fate of the Day,” which explores the bloody middle years of the Revolution from 1777 to 1780, was released in April, and Atkinson has spent the past eight months touring and speaking on panels with documentarian Ken Burns to promote Burns’ six-part documentary series “The American Revolution,” which premieres Nov. 16 on PBS.

Atkinson is a featured speaker in the series and has been involved with it for about four years.

The dinner featuring Rick Atkinson was one of 40 taking place across town that evening. The events raised $2 million for the Library Foundation of Los Angeles.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

The week before the Literary Feast, Atkinson and Burns spoke to members of Congress in Washington, D.C., and also screened a 40-minute clip at Mount Vernon where Atkinson discussed Washington’s unique talents as a general.

“I’ve seen the whole thing several times and it’s fantastic,” Atkinson said of the 12-hour film. “It’s as you would expect: beautifully filmed, wonderfully told, great narrative.”

The country is now more than four months into its semiquincentennial, which Atkinson joked “sounds like a medical procedure,” but is actually the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. It’s well known that Trump is planning a splashy party, with festivities and commemorations intensifying over the next eight months, culminating in a grand celebration in Washington, D.C., on July 4, 2026.

Rick Atkinson’s book “The Fate of the Day,” which explores the bloody middle years of the Revolution from 1777 to 1780, was released in April.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

“My hope is that as a country, we use the opportunity to reflect on those basic questions of who we are, where we came from, what our forebears believed and what they were willing to die for,” said Atkinson. “I’m optimistic because I’m a historian, because I know our history. No matter how grim things seem in 2025, we have faced grimmer times in the past, existential threats of the first order, starting with the Revolution.”

The politically deflated might also consider World War II — the subject of Atkinson’s Liberation Trilogy — the second volume of which won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for history. The writer knows his stuff. Guests — and readers — take heart.

OJAI — You can’t escape nature in Ojai. That meant that flutist Claire Chase, this year’s Ojai Music Festival music director who is often called a force of nature, fit right in.

Chase is the proudest flutist I’ve ever observed. And the most expressive. She holds her head high whether playing piccolo or the 6-foot contrabass flute, as if her instrument were a magic wand used to activate her voice in the highest registers and the deepest.

The activism is more than an analogy. Chase is also a joyous and entrepreneurial music activist, MacArthur “genius,” educator, founder of New York’s impressive International Contemporary Ensemble and commissioner of a vastly imaginative new flute repertory in her ongoing Density 2036 project. The current surge of interest in Pauline Oliveros is largely her doing.

For Ojai, Chase collected concerned composers on a quest for a kind of eco-sonics capable of conjuring up the pleasure of nature and, in the process, saving our sanity. Over four days of concerts mostly in the rustic Libbey Bowl, the names of many of the works gave away the game.

“The Holy Liftoff,” “Horse Sings From Cloud,” “How Forests Think,” “Spirit Catchers,” “A Grain of Sand Walked Across a Face, on the Skin of a Washed Picture,” are a few.

The festival’s proudest moment (30 minutes to be precise) was the West Coast premiere of Susie Ibarra’s “Sky Islands.” It was the last work in a resplendent Sunday morning program that Chase described as “multi-spiritual” and “multi-species.” The sun found its way through the trees as the composer and percussionist Levy Lorenzo stood in front of the stage and began with a ceremonial pounding of bamboo poles.

“Sky Islands” evokes the magical Philippines upper rainforests, where sounds scintillate in a thinned atmosphere that gives gongs new glories, where animals capable of great ascension exclusively live, where the mind is ready for enlightenment. Ibarra wrote the score for her Talking Gong Trio (which includes Chase and pianist Alex Peh) along with added percussion and a string quartet, here the Jack Quartet.

To the head-scratching surprise of the music establishment that has thus far paid little attention to Ibarra, “Sky Islands” won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for music. A Filipino American from Anaheim who is now based in New York, Ibarra is best known as a percussionist in experimental jazz and new music with a strong interest in environmental sound installations and Indigenous music.

The head scratching stopped in Ojai. In the three works by Ibarra on the program, she proved a capacious sonic visionary. She is a superb mimic of nature’s aural realm — the sounds of animals, of a river, of trees in the wind, of rocks falling down a hillside. She stirs spirits with the barely heard whooshes of drum brushes waved in the air. She connects with the underground as a resonant gong master. She stops to smell whatever there is to smell. She’s often funny.

Mainly, though, she simply entrances, whether she spread her percussive wares in “Kolubri” or writing for other musicians in “Sunbird” on a misty early morning at Ojai Meadows Preserve. Her lovingly sly Haydn-esque wit came out in the premiere of “Nest Box,” a duo for her and Wu Wei on sheng, the Chinese mouth organ.

Steven Schick (percussion), from left, Wu Wei (sheng) and Susie Ibarra (percussion) perform Annea Lockwood’s “bayou-borne” in Libbey Bowl at the 2025 Ojai Music Festival.

(Timothy Teague / Ojai Festival)

Gauging by the audience response, “Sky Islands” was the clear favorite of more than three dozen new or newish works. It is a complex piece that appears to set off on a well-apportioned journey led by Chase into the unknown. But at every turn, the music surprises with a melody that feels familiar until it suddenly doesn’t.

Ibarra leaves room for improvisation as a way for the performers to react to what they are encountering. Chase and Ibarra may, for instance, begin a dialogue as nervous chit-chat with staccato flute interjections with drummed responses that soon turn to broad expressions of wonder. At the end the musicians pick up percussion instruments and leave the stage in a slow, winding procession of dance steps, as if marching into the unknown.

Chase brought together other composers from all over. And she brought together superb musicians from L.A. (particularly members of Wild Up) and New York. The music was all of our time with the exception of three small pieces of early music, but even that was modernized. There was long-winded indulgence and lovely itty-bitty works, over in a flash but suggestive of a full and lovely life, like that of an insect.

The spirit of the Ojai festival need not be conveyed by a laundry list of composers and works or by value judgments. At its best, the event is a musical wilderness, like no other festival of its caliber. The audience goes on a walk in the woods, with nature calling for discovery.

Around every corner you encounter a different musical voice. Hawaiian composer and violist Leilehua Lanzilotti rocked. Cuban composer Tania León added dollops of exciting modernism. Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir commanded long stretches of empty landscape. Brazilian composer Marcos Balter conjured up the mythological Pan in a sometimes outrageous nine-part theatrical extravaganza for Chase.

New Zealander Annea Lockwood offered a 90-minute journey down the Housatonic River captured by loudspeakers in surround sound. In contrast, Australian Liza Lim, in raw instrumental outbursts, revealed the less agreeable possibilities of what forests may think (of us?).

And then there was, at long last for Ojai, the elephant in the minimalism room, the iconic California composer Terry Riley. His “In C” is the one piece Ojai has previously programmed. As Riley now approaches his 90th birthday (June 24), Chase unveiled three parts of an epic cycle of uncategorized pieces Riley has been working on since moving to the mountains of Japan five years ago.

“Pulsing Lifters,” in an arrangement for two pianos and harpsichord, is like a delicate dew. “The Holy Liftoff” realized by Samuel Clay Birmaher for flute and string quartet, opens with Chase on all five of her flutes, one played live, the others prerecorded. The effect is that of being submerged in a lush wash of beauteous flute chords. Riley then softens the spectacularly rigorous Jack Quartet with Ravel-like melody.

In “Pulsefield” pieces numbered 1, 2 and 3, Riley returns to the modular roots of “In C” a half century later. Here repeated rhythms are overlayed by a large ensemble featuring all the festival performers in ecstatic elaborations.

If this, one of the best and truest Ojai festivals in recent years, is meant not for explication but discovery, please do so. The festival has been slowly evolving a system of outdoor amplification, and it captures excellent audio on streams of the Libbey Bowl concerts. They remain archived on the OJai festival YouTube page.

Next year Esa-Pekka Salonen will return for the first time in a quarter century.

“Sirens,” premiering Thursday on Netflix, is an odd sort of a series, an interesting mix of hifalutin ideas, family drama and what might be called dark farce.

Set over Labor Day weekend on a Cape Cod island peopled by rich folks whose taste runs to pastels and floral prints, it stars Julianne Moore as Michaela, formerly a high-powered attorney who has given that up for marriage to hedge-fund billionaire Peter (Kevin Bacon) and a life dedicated to rescuing birds of prey. The queen of all she surveys, she speaks in moony aphorisms, is posing for Vanity Fair and orchestrating a fundraising gala, among minor entertainments.

Meanwhile, in Buffalo, we meet Devon (Meghann Fahy) a working-class hot mess, making her entrance out a police station door, wearing a short black dress, looking the worse for wear. Struggling to care for her father Bruce (Bill Camp), diagnosed with dementia, she goes in search of her sister, Simone (Milly Alcock), who has been working as Michaela’s personal assistant. After traveling 17 hours — carting, for reasons of comedy, the giant edible arrangement Simone has sent in lieu of an actual response to her call for help, still wearing her night-in-jail clothes — Devon will discover that her sister has been transformed: She’s removed the matching tattoos they got together, had a nose job and presents as something like the Disney version of “Wonderland’s” Alice, minus the curiosity. (“You’re dressed like a doily,” says Devon.) Ingmar Bergman fans will note the meant-to-be-noted crib from “Persona,” underlining Devon’s observation that Simone loses herself in other people.

Simone, for her part, is delighted that she gets to call Michaela “Kiki,” “which is really a special honor,” and faithfully amplifies Michaela’s mercurial requests to the staff, personified by Felix Solis’ Jose, who hate her. (They maintain a text chain to joke about her.) For all that she’s loyal to Michaela, and considers her a best friend, she’s been hiding both her working-class roots and the fact that she’s been sleeping with Ethan (Glenn Howerton), Peter’s also-rich pal and neighbor.

Ethan (Glenn Howerton), Simone (Milly Alcock) and Devon (Meghann Fahy) during a gathering at Michaela’s home.

(Netflix)

Though Michaela worries he might be having an affair, Peter, for his part, comes across as an essentially good guy, for a hedge fund billionaire. He’s friendly with the help, who worked for him before his marriage to Michaela — there are a first wife and adult children offstage — can cook for himself and hides away from the pastel people in the mansion’s tower, where he strums a guitar and smokes a little pot. But room has been left for surprises.

“Sirens” is the sisters’ shared special code for “SOS,” which seems less practical than, you know, SOS, but ties into the vague Greek mythological references with which the series has been decorated — more suggestive than substantial, I’d say, though it’s possible that is my lack of classical education showing. The house Siri system is called Zeus. One episode is titled “Persephone,” after the goddess of the dead and queen of the underworld; Simone does indeed say to Michaela, “You are literally a goddess” — she does dress like one, in flimsy, flowing gowns — while Devon thinks that something’s gone dead behind Simone’s eyes, that she’s been zombified: “You’re in a cult.”

It was the sirens’ sweetly singing, of course, that drew sailors to their deaths in the old tales, and at one point Michaela looks out over the ocean and muses on the boats of whalers crashing bloodily on the rocks. (She is particular about the blood.) There is, in fact, a sailor in the series, Jordan (Trevor Salter), who captains Ethan’s yacht and whom Devon picks up in a hotel bar, but he is perhaps the least likely character in the show to crash into anything. And Michaela is attended by a trio of women (Jenn Lyon as Cloe, Erin Neufer as Lisa and Emily Borromeo as Astrid) who, suggesting the title creatures, speak in harmony and act as one, but they are more the embodiment of a notion, a throwaway joke, than active participants in the story. Michael Abels’ score features a choir of female voices, opts for something that one might well identify as ancient Greek music even with no notion of what ancient Greek music might have sounded like.

Kevin Bacon plays Peter, a hedge fund billionaire married to Michaela.

(Macall Polay / Netflix)

The core of the series is the struggle between Devon and Michaela for the soul of Simone, though there are ancillary battles that will help decide the fate of the war. For a viewer, it’s natural to side with Devon, who, after locking horns with Michaela, will go undercover at the mansion, dressing according to the house rules while she pokes around. (There is the suggestion of a murder mystery.) However hot a mess she may be, she isn’t pretentious; she has energy, boldness and consistency, and whatever she gets wrong, she lives in the world that most of us do. (I am assuming you are not a billionaire with a mansion on a cliff, a birdhouse full of raptors and a large staff to tend to your needs and whims, but if you are — thanks for reading!) That isn’t to say that Michaela doesn’t have her troubles — indeed, her neediness, which expresses itself as caretaking, resembles Devon’s. “I take care of everything in my orb,” says Michaela, “big and small, prey and predator.”

I hadn’t known when I watched “Sirens” that it was based on a play, the 2011 “Elemeno Pea,” by Molly Smith Metzler, who created the series as well, but I thought it might be. It had the scent of the stage in the way characters — including Bruce and Ray (Josh Segarra), Devon’s boss and adulterous occasional hookup — kept piling in, along with its farcical accelerations, its last-act revelations and reversals.

At “only” five episodes, it stays more focused than most limited series, though the tone shifts a bit; some characters come to seem deeper and more complex, which is good on the face of it, but also can feel a bit manufactured. Some bits of business are planted merely to bear practical fruit later. The ending I found half-satisfying, or half-frustrating, from character to character, but there are great, committed performances along the way, and I was far more than halfway entertained.