Let's write about old fashioned censorship- Remember the Smother's Brothers?

 

Before Jimmy Kimmel, there weree the Smothers Brothers. In fact, 

President Richard Nixon got the brothers’ variety show cancelled after they wouldn’t let up on Vietnam. 

In the wake of the new late-night wars, Dick Smothers is having flashbacks.  Echo article published in The New Yorker Magazine, by Bruce Handy.

An old letter from President Lyndon Johnson has been making the rounds on social media in the wake of ABC’s nervous-gulp suspension of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and CBS’s more definitive cancellation of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert”—decisions noisily lobbied for by our current President, whose minions contributed some Paulie Walnuts-style arm-twisting. The Johnson letter was addressed to Tom and Dick Smothers, the comedians whose hit CBS variety show, “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” took shots at the President’s stewardship of the Vietnam War in the late nineteen-sixties. L.B.J. offered magnanimity: “It is part of the price of leadership of this great and free nation to be the target of clever satirists,” he (or a secretary) wrote. “You have given the gift of laughter to our people. May we never grow so somber or self-important that we fail to appreciate the humor in our lives.”

The letter was dated November 9, 1968, five days after Richard Nixon defeated Johnson’s Vice-President, Hubert Humphrey, for the Presidency. Five months after that, with Nixon in the White House, CBS abruptly cancelled the Smothers brothers’ show. The network claimed that the series’ producers violated their contract by not providing finished episodes to its censors in a sufficiently timely manner (an assertion that would not pass muster in a subsequent civil-court case won by the brothers). Many, including the brothers themselves, felt that they were victims not only of skittish advertisers and conservative affiliates but also of the new Administration, which would prove unshy about targeting perceived foes in the media and elsewhere—though one might give that President a wee bit of credit for not going about it quite as nakedly as others.

Dick Smothers, who is eighty-six, took the long view the other day. “It sure didn’t start with us,” he insisted, when asked about politicians’ recurring habit of attempting to muzzle TV performers. “In my lifetime, it started with Edward R. Murrow, of course. But they didn’t fire him. They just switched him to a time slot not many people watched.”  This is true. In 1954, Murrow exposed many of Joseph P. McCarthy’s lies on his CBS news-magazine show, “See It Now,” a tipping point in the senator’s downfall. Just a year later, the series lost its sponsor, Alcoa, and was shunted from its Tuesday-night prime-time slot to random, irregular dead zones on the schedule.

Smothers was speaking on the phone from his home upstate, not far from Niagara Falls, in the village of Lewiston—“a booming economic juggernaut of a hundred and fifty years ago,” as he put it. (A native Californian, he moved there for love.) Tom, his older brother by two years, died in 2023. They first found acclaim, in the early nineteen-sixties, as comedic folksingers, playing night clubs and releasing popular LPs. A failed but apparently likable sitcom led to “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” which débuted in February, 1967. It was a broad tent. Guests included Jack Benny, George Burns, Kate Smith, and Red Skelton. “We wanted the people we hung around the radio listening to when we were kids, people that meant something to us,” Smothers said. But the brothers also wanted the program to be “relevant. Not a silly show.” They assembled a legendary writers’ room, which included Steve Martin, Rob Reiner, and Bob Einstein. But relevancy turned out to be a moving, even accelerating target. “The sixties hadn’t really got into top gear yet,” Smothers said. When they did, “it was like being at the scene of an accident.”

The brothers clashed with the network over silly things, like a “Mutiny on the Bounty” sketch with George Segal that had naughty, homophonic fun with the word “frigate.” 

They also got in trouble for more serious efforts, like bringing on Pete Seeger, who was still blacklisted from the McCarthy era, to sing his antiwar song “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy.” But all in all, Smothers said, the show’s satire “was gentle. We didn’t do things that were right in your face, like the monologues today.” That wasn’t meant as criticism: he said that he’s a fan of Kimmel, Colbert, and especially Jon Stewart. “They’re brilliant. Brilliant,” he said. The times, in his view, demand in-your-faceness.

Back in the day, Dick was the duo’s straight man; Tom was the pretend naïf who got the best lines and, backstage, served as the act’s guiding hand. “My brother had a little bad-boy thing,” Smothers said. “But to the day he died he also had a strong moral compass.” To that end, he recalled, Tom wrote an earnest letter to L.B.J. which both brothers signed, “basically not apologizing for what we were doing, but saying that, if we were heavy-handed, we didn’t mean to be.” Johnson’s letter to the brothers was his reply. It concluded, “If ever an Emmy is awarded for graciousness, I will cast my vote for you.”

Needless to say, the current White House occupant, an actual member of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (though Emmy-less himself), is offering no such absolution. ♦

Published in the print edition of the October 13, 2025, issue, with the headline “Muzzled.”

Let's write about history that must be told regardless of how painful it might be to read- Lithuanian Holocaust

A Daring Escape a book review published in the October, 2025 New York Review of Books, by Neal Ascherson

SS Nazi guards and Lithuanian collaborators forcing Jewish men into the Ponary forest, Lithuania, 1941

A painstaking investigation into twelve prisoners who tunneled to freedom from the Nazis in Lithuania reveals how much of their story remains unknowable.

Maine Writer- Reading and reporting about this book review added to the many other echoes I have published about the Holocaust helps me to realize how there is actually no end to the horror inflicted on the Jews during this dark time and the nightmare did not just begin and end. Rather unbelieveably, the Holocaust crimes built momentum over time.

No Road Leading Back: An Improbable Escape from the Nazis and the Tangled Way We Tell the Story of the Holocaust.

This is a strange but grimly memorable book. What makes No Road Leading Back strange is that Chris Heath, an experienced English journalist, became gripped by a drive to find and check every detail of a single Lithuanian episode in the Holocaust. That drive—he calls it “relentless”—forced him on through months and years of journeying, questioning, and research. He needed to discover what happened to the survivors of that episode, at the time and in their postwar lives. What makes the book memorable and gives it such importance is that Heath finds himself not just telling a story but telling how he pursued the story. As historians have long recognized, what “actually happened” in the past is no more significant than what different people at different times believe to have happened. Why do they evolve—or invent—new versions of the past, and how are these alternative narratives created and marketed to the public? Are historical witnesses to be believed simply because they were “there”❓

The background to No Road Leading Back is the fate of Lithuania’s Jews under the German occupation between June 1941 and August 1944. The murder of almost the entire Jewish population—some 210,000 in 1941—began immediately after the Nazi invasion and was largely completed within a few months (before the Nazis had begun gassing Jews at Auschwitz and other extermination camps). The Lithuanian genocide was exceptional, even by the standards of the Holocaust, for two reasons. The first was its appalling efficiency. Between 90 and 96 percent of the resplendent community that had long made the capital, Vilnius, a center of Judaic wisdom and civilization perished—the highest proportion of any Nazi-occupied country with a significant Jewish population. The second exceptional feature was the widespread, sometimes enthusiastic collaboration of Lithuanians in rounding up and shooting Jews. Even in other occupied Eastern European countries where antisemitism was ingrained, the Nazis did not find such a high level of voluntary support.

The largest killing site was Ponary, a forest area a few miles southwest of Vilnius. The firing squads were usually Lithuanian, many of them teenagers recruited from a variety of patriotic militias. It’s estimated that they killed over 70,000 Jewish men, women, and children at Ponary, mostly from Vilnius. Some 30,000 Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, and others also died there. They were shot into large stone-lined pits constructed during a previous Soviet occupation to hold fuel tanks. Layer upon layer of bodies accumulated in the pits, each layer covered with a scattering of sand. Later, following their usual practice, the Nazis began a concealment operation. A team of some eighty men, mostly Jews but also a few Soviet prisoners, was ordered to exhume the dead and cremate them on huge timber pyres. The ashes were then mingled with the forest sand. The team members were housed in one special pit, accessible only by ladder, and well fed for their task. It was understood that they too would be shot when their work was completed.

But a group of them, initially about a dozen, formed an escape plan. With no tools but their fingers and a few small spoons, they sank a shaft through the pit floor and then dug a deep lateral tunnel some thirty meters long, hoping to reach the surface in a place that would be unobserved. The digging started in early February 1944; the breakout, according to most accounts, took place on the night of April 15. Almost all the eighty prisoners in the pit lined up to enter the tunnel, but only the front few—the diggers—made it to safety. Alarms and floodlights were triggered, and guards opened fire. The rest of the escapees died, killed in the open or trapped inside the tunnel. All but one of the survivors joined Soviet partisan units in the forest until Vilnius was liberated by the Red Army four months later.

Some of them soon told their stories, in Yiddish, Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, and Hebrew. But the horror of what had been done at Ponary, and even the heroic tale of the tunnel, seem to have made little impression in Allied countries. The war in Europe was still going on in August 1944. Auschwitz had not yet been liberated, British troops had not entered Bergen-Belsen, and American soldiers did not come across the camp at Buchenwald until almost exactly a year after the Ponary escape. 

More broadly, the realization that the Third Reich had been engaged in a gigantic plan for the extermination of European Jewry was only beginning to dawn.

Seventy-two years later, in June 2016, Heath read an intriguing story in The New York Times. At a place in Lithuania called Ponary (he prefers the Yiddish name, Ponar), archaeologists had discovered the tunnel dug by Jewish prisoners for their escape. The report seized Heath’s imagination:

I remember being astonished not just by the story but by the fact that I’d never heard of the place where it all happened…. I wanted to understand more. I wanted to understand better what had happened here and, increasingly, I also wanted to understand how and why what had happened here could have managed to slip the world by.

Within a few months he had visited Richard Freund, the archaeologist who appeared in the New York Times report, and had made his way to Ponary. His life became consumed by his research. He wanted “the truth” about the escape and the escapees, and about the three-year slaughter at Ponary. But he also grew fascinated by the changing ways the site had been commemorated, interpreted, landscaped, or simply neglected, first by Soviet Lithuania under Stalinism, then by the post-Stalinist USSR, and finally by the independent Lithuania that left the Soviet Union in 1990.

Seventy-two years later, in June 2016, Heath read an intriguing story in The New York Times. At a place in Lithuania called Ponary (he prefers the Yiddish name, Ponar), archaeologists had discovered the tunnel dug by Jewish prisoners for their escape. The report seized Heath’s imagination:

I remember being astonished not just by the story but by the fact that I’d never heard of the place where it all happened…. I wanted to understand more. I wanted to understand better what had happened here and, increasingly, I also wanted to understand how and why what had happened here could have managed to slip the world by.

Within a few months he had visited Richard Freund, the archaeologist who appeared in the New York Times report, and had made his way to Ponary. His life became consumed by his research. He wanted “the truth” about the escape and the escapees, and about the three-year slaughter at Ponary. But he also grew fascinated by the changing ways the site had been commemorated, interpreted, landscaped, or simply neglected, first by Soviet Lithuania under Stalinism, then by the post-Stalinist USSR, and finally by the independent Lithuania that left the Soviet Union in 1990.

Soon, though, Heath was stumbling among contradictions. He faced contrasting and irreconcilable memories of events, vanished documents, and personalities who were either martyrs of Jewish self-defense or despicable collaborators with the Gestapo—or perhaps both. Simple facts split into divergent tendrils. Who first suggested a tunnel? Who crawled out of it first? Even the handful of survivors whose widows and descendants Heath was able to meet (mostly in Israel) had left narratives that often didn’t fit together. Their very names were hard to pin down. One stout-hearted old escapee known to Heath as Motke Zeidel had nineteen different versions of his name.

The slow acceptance that history can be dismayingly plural, that contradictory and even apparently untrue accounts all have a certain validity, is the most impressive element in this long book. “We must trust that [the tunnelers] all spoke their own truth,” Heath writes. He goes on to explain why he resisted the temptation to rely on only one voice in recounting the heroic episode of the Ponary tunnel:

We want to bind our empathy to one or more of these people whose actions will transcend adversity…. But to that end…I would have silenced the dissonant voices of those who were actually there whenever those voices proved inconvenient for the narrative. (hmmm....not sure I understand this❓😕)

About what was done at Ponary, however, there was less ambiguity. The first part of No Road Leading Back is, to put it mildly, a difficult read. It recounts in unsparing detail how, between July 1941, and August 1944, the population of the Vilnius ghetto and other settlements was murdered there. At first the Jews were marched several miles to the site; later they were brought by rail or road. On arrival they were stripped to their underwear, sometimes blindfolded, and then herded to the edges of the forest pits. There they were shot, each group falling onto the layer of fresh corpses in front of them. Nearby villagers patronized a lively market selling the heaps of clothing, shoes, and valuables the victims had left behind. Payment went either to the young Lithuanian executioners or to a Polish wholesaler. 😢😨

It was not until the winter of 1943, that the SS launched its routine cleanup operation, although executions were still taking place.

Weighed down with leg chains, savagely beaten, and urged to work faster, the exhumation squad was sent into action. Layer by layer, they dug up some 68,000 bodies rotting in the pits, extracted gold teeth or jewelry, then dragged them to the towering pyres that blazed and smoked day and night. Several of the men came across the bodies of their own families, although at the bottom of the pits the corpses were flattened beyond recognition. The overpowering stench penetrated the men’s clothing and skin. Months after their tunnel flight, Soviet partisans could not bear to stand near a Ponary escapee for long.

Immediately following the liberation of Lithuania by the Red Army in 1944, many eyewitness accounts emerged, although not yet in English. A Soviet special commission arrived almost as the last German fled and produced a full, shattering report about Ponary, complete with forensic examination of corpses found in pits as yet unopened. There were lists of clothing recovered (“French gray plaid knitted blouse, crepe de chine dress”). A few years later, as Stalin’s antisemitic paranoia reached its peak, it became the rule to call the victims “Soviet citizens,” suppressing the fact that most of them were Jewish.

After these first revelations, interest in Ponary went quiet for decades. The atrocities were nevertheless on record in the West as well as in the Soviet Union. The special commission’s report had been followed by several publications, among them a book in Yiddish by the poet Abraham Sutzkever and the report Ponary: Baza (Ponary: Base of Operations) by the Polish writer Józef Mackiewicz. 

By chance, Mackiewicz had been cycling past Ponary when a trainload of Jews was massacred as they tried to escape. Heath comments, “Between them, the bold and assertive writings of Sutzkever…and Mackiewicz about Ponar constituted a stirring, detailed, and authoritative first draft of this history.” And yet “those first voices turned out to be, for a long time to come, pretty much the only voices.”

For the world’s indifference, he offers a string of acid explanations. 

For example:

• These were “the wrong kind of deaths” (i.e., not in the gas chambers the public came to know about). 
• They happened “at the wrong time,” in the first months of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, before the world knew of the Holocaust. 
• They were “in the wrong place,” in obscure lands liberated by the Soviets rather than by the publicity-conscious Americans, British, or French. 

Heath could have added another factor: the cold war. In the West, stories from authorities behind the Iron Curtain were soon discounted as Communist propaganda. And for the few who understood anything about Lithuania, there was embarrassment. How could sympathy for a small nation imprisoned and brutalized within the USSR be reconciled with evidence of its widespread participation in Nazi crimes? By then many of the Lithuanian perpetrators had reinvented themselves as refugees from “Red tyranny” and settled in West Germany, Canada, or the United States.

Ponary was designated as a memorial. At times it was almost abandoned; at others it was radically “restored” in ways that bore little resemblance to the original ground plan. 

Meanwhile the myth of the “double genocide” took root in the country. Immediately after the war, the vengeful Soviet Union had deported to the gulag about 130,000 Lithuanians, the majority of them women and children—about 5 percent of the population. Nearly 30,000 of them died. This crime was held to “balance out” the murder of Lithuania’s Jews. (I remember vividly the bewilderment of Jonathan Miller, the opera and theater director, when he returned to London after visiting the land of his Jewish ancestors. In Vilnius he had gone to the museums, only to find that it was the sufferings of Lithuanians under Soviet rule that dominated displays of “genocide,” rather than the fate of the Jews under the Nazis.)

But by the 1980s, and especially after the restoration of Lithuania’s independence in 1990, new generations were becoming aware of the real history of their country during the Soviet and Nazi occupations, and some of them were determined to confront it. Honor had been paid, starting in Soviet times, to Lithuanians who had risked their own and their families’ lives by hiding Jews. But free Lithuania now also honored heroes of anti-Soviet resistance, some of whom, it was suggested by a few bold voices, had also supported the Nazis in their onslaught on “Jew-Bolsheviks.” Heath tells the story of the well-known writer Rūta Vanagaitė, who in 2016 published Mūsiškiai (Our People), an exposure of Lithuanians’ antisemitism and participation in the atrocities, which to her astonishment sold out in a day. Times had changed: now everyone wanted to read and argue about the book, even if they hated its content. But the next year, when she dared to hint (without much proof) that a certain anti-Soviet “hero” had another past, her books were pulled from stores.

Well before independence, Lithuanian academics had begun working diligently to draw up precise records of Ponary and other mass-murder sites—research that remained obscure to the media and most of the public. But the outside world, especially historians of the Jewish experience, was regaining interest in wartime Lithuania. In 2015 the ebullient Richard Freund, an ex-rabbi and professor of Jewish history at the University of Hartford in Connecticut (known to local newspapers as “a real-life Indiana Jones”), became involved in excavating the ruins of the Great Synagogue in Vilnius. While there, he visited Ponary and became excited by the thought that the famous escape tunnel might still exist underground.

Freund assembled a team that included a retired expert on prison escape tunnels and several geophysicists with sophisticated equipment; Heath devotes many pages to explaining the ground-penetrating technology known as electrical resistance tomography (ERT) that they used. A film unit from NOVA, a scientific documentary series, recorded proceedings. World media, including (Fake❗) Fox News and The New York Times, were alerted to stand by for the big story when the tunnel was found.

In the end the results didn’t match the publicity. The ERT indicated plausible though not quite conclusive routes for the tunnel, but an excavation to reveal it was ruled out as impractical. American media proclaimed the “discovery” of a “forgotten” tunnel. In fact it had never been forgotten and had been “discovered” twelve years earlier. In 2004 the Lithuanian archaeologist Vytautas Urbanavičius had thoroughly excavated the vertical shaft and the first yards of the horizontal tunnel beyond it. (He also found a bucket in the entrance containing seven antitank grenades primed to be detonated by wire—one of the remaining mysteries of the story.)

The twelve men who escaped through the tunnel and what became of them are at the center of Heath’s book. After the war almost all of the handful of Jews still alive in Lithuania made their way to Palestine, and some later moved to America. (The small Jewish community in Lithuania today is, apparently, mainly composed of postwar immigrants from Russia.) Most of them had already given their testimony about Ponary: Shlomo Gol, for example, had been a witness at the Nuremberg tribunal, where he described how he had found his brother among the corpses. Some fought in the 1948 war that established the State of Israel. Others arrived there and faced startling hostility. Motke Zeidel was asked by a panel of Tel Aviv historians, “How did you go like sheep to the slaughter?” Heath writes, “The way he told it afterward, first he slammed his fist down on the table, then shouted ‘shame on you!’ at the historians as he walked out.” Heath notes that the accusers were using words from a famous speech by Abba Kovner, a leader of Jewish resistance in the Vilnius ghetto.

Kovner’s name, in turn, opens into the story of Jacob Gens, head of the Vilnius Jewish council. In an excruciating tragedy repeated in other Nazi-organized ghettos, Gens had to choose between sending a regular quota of Jews to their doom at Ponary or facing the immediate murder of the entire population under his charge. In the end the Germans shot him, too. He left behind a speech: “In order to save even a small part of the Jewish people, I alone had to lead others to their deaths. And in order to ensure that you go with clean consciences I have to forget mine and wallow in filth.”

In late 2016, Gens’s formidable ninety-year-old daughter Ada and his granddaughter Irene agreed with Freund to search the area of a Vilnius prison for relics of him, using ground-penetrating radar. Nothing identifiable was found. But another agonizing dilemma of wartime collaboration surfaced when Irene denounced Kovner for organizing resistance and thereby provoking the liquidation of the ghetto. All over occupied Europe, and not only in ghettos, resistance movements were blamed for causing German retaliation: the killing of hostages or the burning and massacre of entire communities.

The Ponary tunnelers were at least clear of these moral pitfalls. Heath was fairly quickly able to identify eight of the twelve escapees and to speak with the relatives of all of them except one, Konstantin Potanin, a Russian soldier captured by the Germans (and wrongly designated as Jewish) who gave a Lithuanian newspaper an outstandingly eloquent interview about Ponary within weeks of the liberation. He was killed in a traffic accident a few months later. Heath was able to track seven others to Israel. They had since died, but with tact and patience he persuaded their families to repeat once more what they had been told, often unwillingly, about Ponary and the escape.

Heath learned that a few of the escapees had formed the custom of meeting on April 15, the date of their breakout in 1944. Their children remembered the reunions as occasions not of mourning but of cheerful memory-swapping at which drinking went on far into the night. It was cognac, one relative recalled. No, it was vodka, said another. But they agreed about the old men’s laughter. In old age, Motke Zeidel returned to Ponary with a film crew and entered the pit that had once held the escapees and those who didn’t escape. He ordered vodka, cured herring, and cucumber to be brought down to him, and in that place he ate and drank. That was his triumph and his revenge on those who had tried to kill him, and on death itself.

In their last years the survivors were constantly sought out for their memories. But their experience with Claude Lanzmann, the director of the towering, nine-and-a-half-hour Shoah (1985), was not happy. Two tunnelers, Yitzhak Dogin and Motke Zeidel, featured prominently in it. But, they soon came to realize that Lanzmann was interested in them only insofar as their recollections fit into his immense project, a film about the Holocaust “with no archival footage at all, just artfully juxtaposed testimony from those who were there.” Lanzmann wrote afterward, in his imperious, dramatic style, “It’s not a film about survival and survivors. It’s a film about death.” Shoah included terrible memories of the killing at Ponary, the exhumations, and the pyres, but nothing about the tunnel. When they saw it, Zeidel and Dogin felt hurt and manipulated. Angry on their behalf, Heath lists gross errors of fact in reviews of Shoah and in the published scripts.

At least one of the escapees, Shlomo Gol, later moved to the United States. Heath spent much time—typical of his lust for verifiably accurate data—trying to reconcile Gol’s various dates of birth. With the same energy he dug through Yad Vashem and Lithuanian ghetto archives to establish whether David Kantorovich had an earlier family lost in the Ponary killings. Four of the twelve escapees seemed to have vanished altogether, but Heath, through incredible persistence, managed to unearth at least traces of all of them in Europe or America. The last to be glimpsed was Lejzer Owsiejczyk, once a butcher. Heath pursued his shadow through ships’ passenger lists and newspaper clippings until he stood at last before the gravestone of “Louis Offsay,” who had drowned in Lake Erie sixty-three years earlier. Beside the English inscription were three words in Hebrew: “Leyzer, son of Abraham.”

Heath’s almost obsessive drive to chase down and record details in long narrative sequences and footnotes would be dismaying if he were not such a gifted and imaginative writer, self-critical and alert to intelligent discussion of his doubts and methods:

There’s always more, if you keep looking. Even after this book was more or less completed, I kept trawling—whenever I landed on some remote museum website to check a fact, I’d invariably stay for a while, reflexively peppering its database with search terms, just in case.

But earlier in his book, Heath reflects memorably on what he failed to find out:

I think there’s also value in being confronted, over and over, with just how little is knowable. Every barren search felt like a useful rebuke…. The truth has holes in it, and the more we cover them up, the less real the world becomes.

Neal Ascherson is an Honorary Fellow of University College London. (October 2025)

Let's write about engraving recipes on cemetery headstones? Who knew?

You can have this recipe over my dead body 😋😀😅❗

Rosie Grant has spent the past several years collecting, sharing, and cooking recipes engraved on headstones. Echo article published in the Boston Globe by Oliver Egger, an editor and writer based in New Haven, Connecticut. He received the 2025-26 Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism.

Most of the more than 600,000 gravestones at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York, look the same: name, dates, and maybe an epitaph, such as “loving mother” or “beloved son.” 

But beside the manicured gardens and crisscrossing pathways are some outliers: a miniature replica of the Great Pyramid of Giza, a metal bear perched on a gravestone, and an obelisk with a slot where visitors can deposit their secrets.

Compelling all, but for Rosie Grant, the most striking is a headstone with an open cookbook carved into the top. The book’s granite pages reveal a simple recipe for spritz cookies: “1 cup of butter or margarine, 3/4 cup sugar, 1 teaspoon vanilla, 1 egg, 2 1/4 cups of flour, 1/2 teaspoon baking powder, 1/8 teaspoon salt.” The recipe was a favorite of Naomi Odessa Miller-Dawson, a lifelong Brooklynite, postal clerk, and mother who died at 87 in 2009. An avid baker, Miller-Dawson would make trays of light and buttery cookies every holiday season. In life she kept the recipe close to her chest, but in death, she shares it with the world.

Grant first became a taphophile*, or cemetery appreciator, during a summer internship at the Congressional Cemetery — officially the Washington Parish Burial Ground — in Washington, D.C., in 2021. She has since started a popular TikTok and Instagram, @ghostly.archive, to document the history of cemeteries and unique gravestones. She discovered Miller-Dawson’s headstone recipe during the pandemic, when she, like many of us, was baking frequently. She made the cookies and posted about the experience on TikTok. That post went viral. Messages poured in from people sharing stories of their own loss and grief — and family recipes. Making a dad’s barbecue sauce or a mom’s chocolate chip cookies “was able to bring that person a little bit closer,” Grant says.

Moved by the outpouring, Grant looked into whether the tombstone recipe was part of a larger phenomenon. The first-known headstone evoking matters culinary belongs to the Roman Eurysaces the Baker, circa 50 to 20 BC, and includes pictorial engravings showing how to bake bread. But Grant could find only 52 recipe gravestones from more recent times.

She set out to document many of them — from no-bake cookies in Nome, Alaska, to meatloaf in New Braunfels, Texas, to a cinnamon roll cake in Kibbutz Na’an in Israel. In all, Grant visited 39 gravestones and shared each recipe on social media. All of them are in her forthcoming cookbook, “To Die For: A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, the majority of the recipes are for comfort foods like cookies, brownies, and cakes.

Grant doesn’t just snap a picture of each gravestone recipe — she digs through obituaries and public records and connects with the families of the deceased. She cooks the recipe with them and learns the story of their departed loved one. Grant says this experience has prompted hours-long conversations. “I don’t know how to describe it any other way than it felt like the food brought them back with us,” Grant says.

The result, says Grant, has been “a big oral history of food and legacy, mostly of women, how they were community centers, where they did all their volunteer work, how they hosted every holiday, and how they made the lives of others special.”

There is Annabell Gunderson, who worked at a school in Northern California and is buried beneath her snickerdoodle cookies recipe, which she often made for volunteer firefighters battling forest fires.

There is Marjorie Dawn Guppy from Grand Rapids, Michigan, a restaurant owner and beloved matriarch, forever memorialized by the recipe for her chocolate cookies, which were favorites in her family and across her town.

There is Mary Ann Rapp, who lived in Bristol, Tennessee, and whose tombstone is engraved with her fruitcake recipe. Her favorite saying was “A real baker always has flour on their face.” Every Christmas, Mary would dust her children’s or grandchildren’s cheeks with flour as they baked fruitcakes together.

And there is my personal favorite: Roberta Jackson, who lived in Brooklyn, New York, and whose recipe for kasha varnishkes — a traditional Jewish dish of buckwheat grains, caramelized onions, and bowtie pasta — concludes with the line: “Does it taste like mine? It does? Good!”

Grant now has 413,000 followers on TikTok and Instagram combined, and she hears from many of them that they intend to put a recipe on their own headstone. For hers, Grant has chosen a recipe for clam linguine.

Beyond inspiring future culinary headstones, Grant hopes her recipe project breaks some of the Western stigma around talking about death and inspires people to document their families’ own food history — to save precious family recipes before it’s too late.

*(AI definition): A taphophile is a person with a strong interest in cemeteries, gravestones, and the history and art associated with them, rather than a morbid fascination with death. Derived from the Greek words "taphos" (tomb) and "philia" (love), a taphophile might visit cemeteries to appreciate their historical significance, document gravestone art, research genealogy, or simply enjoy the unique atmosphere and connection to nature

Let's write about Winston Churchill and his autobiography: An insightful 1930 perspective

 Honestly, I cannot believe what the decline we are witnesssing in America, just 231 days into the Donald Trump autocratic regime.  

Social media is saturated with negativity about the evil cruelty being imposed by the Trump administration, using unlimited executive authority to terrorize immigrants and Americans who disagree with Trumpziism.  

Almost like I needed anything to help with my mental health therapy, I just hapened to find this very relevant paragraph written by Winston Churchill in his autobiography

He titled the autobiography, "My Early Life".  

He wrote this book as an update or sequel to an autobiography he wrote 30 years before this introduction (preface) was added in 1930. He dedicated his update to :To A New Generation: Preface to the Original Edition and this is what he wrote, in 1930:

"When I survey this autobiographical work, as a whole, I find I have drawn a picture of a vanished age.  The character of society, the foundations of politics, the methods of war, the outlook of our youth, the scale of values ae all changed, and changed to an extent I should not have believed possible in so short a space without any violent domestic revolution.

I cannot pretend to feel that they are in all respects changed for the better.  I was a child of the Victorian era, when the structure of our country seemed firmly set, when its position in trade and on the sea was unrivalled, and when the realisation of the greatness of our Empire and of our duty to preserve it was ever growing stronger.  In those days, the dominant forces in Great Britain were very sure of themselves and of their doctrines.  They thought they could teach the world the art of government, and the science of economics.  They were sure they  were supreme at sea and consequently safe at home.  They rested, threfore, sedately under the convictins of power and security.  Very different is the aspect of these anxious and dubious times when I write today.  Full allowence for such changes should be made by friendly readers.  Winston Churchill Chartwell Manor 1930 

And so, the moral of this message is captured in this cliche: "The more things change, the more they remain the same". Nevertheless Winston Churchill saw his vision for the world realized when his brave leadereship stood against Nazism.  I pray for the same courage from American leaders to oppose Trumpziim. 

Let's write about the difficult subject of slavery acted out in our own communities

An opinion echo essay publised in The Bollard, in Portland Maine by Samuel James, in his column titled "Racism". 

White folks tend to think of racism as someone else's personal problem. Like, it sucks to get called the "N" word or whatever, but them's the breaks. Besides, whatever hurt feelings racism may ro may not cause will eventually be solved when we finally get around to convincing everyone not to judge books by covers.  

Personally, I would be overjoyed if the problems about racism were only hurt felings. Unfortunately, it's about a little more that that.  Racism, as we know it today, can be traced to 1450, Portugal, when Prince Henry was looking for a way to justify his exclusive enslavement of Black Africans. And so, Henry's chonicler, Gomes Eanes de Zurara began writing about Black people as being inferior and deserving of enslavement. 

More than 400 years later those same dipshit ideas spewed from the mouth of Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy.  Weeks before the start of the Civil War, Stephens explained that the new Southern government's "cornerstone rests....upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition".

After the Civil War, tasks established as "slave work" became common jobs but never lost their antebellum  status. This is why many of those jobs- kitchen and wait staff, childcare specialists, farmworkers, laundry laborers, etc.- continue to be the lowest paid in the country.  Yes, COVID showed us that society completely collapses without so called "essentail workers", but racism is a hell of a drug.

The servant class isn't the only one trapped by this history.  The entertainment class is trapped as well- especially musicians.  Performers of American music are often valued much like the enslaved people who originated it.  If you have any doubt, ask a local musician how many times they've been asked to perform for free, and then have a seat, because you'e about to hear a very long list.

This truth is obscured by the pop stars who, like most American success stories, rose to the top by already being there.  Ed Sheeran, Adam Levine Win Butler, Kid Rock, Lady Gaga, Ariana Grande, Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift comprise just a drop int he bucket of famous musicians born into wealth and privilege.  Performers like this wouldn't be discouraged by the typical recording contract, which involved signing away the rights to your work in perpetuity while receiving an advance to cover touring costs that must be quickly paid back, usually by committing to a grueling touring schedule.  

A business model requiring a perpetual supply of free labor benefitting those not supplying that labor should feel disgustingly familiar to anyone who comleted fifth-grade history. (In other words...."slavery".)

The music industry is built by non-musicians for the benefit of non-musicians like managers and agents and label heads and verius other middlemen. Live Nation, for exampoe, is an international "entertainment company", claiming to be "Artist powered, and "Fan driven".

Since they promote, operate and manage ticket sales, venues and musicians' careers, I guess  that's technically true.  They're also facing various monoply-related lawsuits brought by hundreds of individuals, 39 state attorneys general and teh federal government.  These legal actins allege racketeering price gouging an dviolating anti-trust and consumer protection laws. 

Oh, and this "entertainment compnay' is trying to build a 3,300 seat venue in downtown Portland, Maine.

If Live Nation is successful, Portland can expect to experience the alleged criminality of the "entertainment company" and the loss of its local music scene as Live Nation's invasion of communities frequently leads to the closing of idnependent venues and the exodus of local musicians.  Fortunately, a moratorium has been proposed that would block the venue's construciton, and the Portland City Council is scheduled to vote on in on August 11*.  Unfortunately, its vote could be meaningless, regardless of the outcome.

Portland operates under the Council of Managers form of mucincipal government and anti-democratic, white supremacist system created to subjugate Black people. In this system, the decision-making powers belongs to an unelected city manager, while the mayor is largely a figurehead, and the city council mostly functions as lobbyyists appealing to the city manager.  Portland has operated this way cince 1923, when the Ku Klux Klan, along with their members and collaborators in the Portland Chamber of Commerce and the Portland Press Herald manipulaed an electin gerrymandered city and installed this racist structure.

This is not to say that those opposed to the Live Nation shouldn't flood council chambers (again) this month.  They absolutely should❗ But, they should also manage their expectations of a government designed to choose whose interests it represents based on the decisions of a manager whom no one voted to represent them.

If any or all of this sounds especially bleak, congratulations! You now understant that racism is a little more than someone else's personal problem.  

* Portland City Council Passes 180-Day Moratorium, Pausing Live Nation Venue Project:  Monday, August 11, 2025, the Portland City Council voted 6-3 to pass a 180-day moratorium on the development of large concert venues with a capacity of 2,000 people or more. This decision will temporarily pause the construction of the controversial Portland Music Hall, a proposed 3,300-seat venue backed by Live Nation and Mile Marker Investments. However, the moratorium will not go into effect for 30 days due to the absence of an emergency clause.

What Does the Moratorium Mean? The vote on the moratorium means that the Portland Music Hall project, planned for 244 Cumberland Ave., will be put on hold for at least six months. During this time, the city will study the potential impacts of large-scale venues on traffic, parking, local businesses, and the city’s cultural landscape. The moratorium, which is retroactive to December 1, 2024, will give the city time to consider necessary adjustments to zoning ordinances and other regulations.

The Debate: Why the Moratorium? The proposal has sparked fierce debate within the community. (Published in PortlandOldPort.com)

Opponents of the venue, including the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA) and the Maine Music Alliance, argued that a Live Nation-backed venue could be an “existential threat” to Portland’s independent music scene. Their concerns included the potential loss of jobs, venue closures, and a shift in the cultural landscape of the city, especially considering Live Nation’s involvement in a federal antitrust lawsuit.

Supporters of the venue, on the other hand, highlighted the potential for job creation, economic growth, and a boost to Portland’s tourism. They believe that the venue would serve as a much-needed space for national acts and large-scale events, strengthening Portland’s position as a hub for entertainment in New England.

The author of Racism, Samuel James, is giving an example about how slavery shows up in communities in very cunning ways. Live Nation obviously is looking for an opportunity to monopolize Portland, Maine's entertainment environment.  

Let's write about Ron Turcotte: A memorial tribute

Over the years, I have had the honor to write a lot about Ron Turcotte because of his French-Canadian heritage.  Sadly, I am sharing his obitury here published in Blood Horse, by Byron King. My husband and I met Ron Turcotte several years ago when he spoke to a group in Waterville Maine.  When I wrote about him, I could actually call his home and his lovely wife "Gae" would answer the phone, she was a wealth of information.💗😇  

L'Heureux photo:  Ron Turcotte (b.1941-d.2025 ✝️RIP)  in Waterville Maine 😰

Reported in Blood Horse, by Byron King:

Retired famous jockey Ron Turcotte, remembered for riding Secretariat to win the 1973, Triple Crown during a Hall of Fame career that ended prematurely in 1978, due to a tragic racing injury, died of natural causes Aug. 22, in his Drummond home outside Grand Falls, New Brunswick, in Canada. He was 84. Turcotte's family formally announced his death through Leonard Lusky, his longtime friend and business representative.
"Ron was a great jockey and an inspiration to so many, both within and outside the racing world. While he reached the pinnacle of success in his vocation, it was his abundance of faith, courage, and kindness that was the true measure of his greatness," Lusky said.

Born in French speaking Canada, as the third oldest of 12 children in 1941, in Grand Falls, Turcotte initially supported his family as a teenager as a lumberjack before finding his calling at the racetrack. In the late 1950s, Turcotte connected with E. P. Taylor, the legendary Canadian owner and breeder. Turcotte went to Taylor's farm, hotwalking Thoroughbreds.
Slight in stature, he proved well suited to becoming a jockey and rode his first winner at Fort Erie Racetrack in Ontario in 1962. By the end of the year, he was the leading rider in Canada with 180 wins. In 1963, he again earned riding honors in Canada with 216 wins before leaving in September to ride in Maryland and later New York and Delaware. He would go on to massive success in the United States.

Besides riding Meadow Stable's Hall of Famer Secretariat, Turcotte also was the primary jockey for Meadow Stable champion and Hall of Famer Riva Ridge, winner of the 1972 Kentucky Derby and Belmont Stakes. Lucien Laurin trained both colts.
When Turcotte won the 1973 Derby with Secretariat, he became the first jockey since Jimmy Winkfield in 1902, to win consecutive editions of the race. Turcotte was North America's leading stakes-winning jockey in 1972 and 1973. He was honored with the George Woolf Memorial Jockey Award in 1973. Only Laffit Pincay Jr. earned more money than Turcotte in 1973, among North American jockeys.

Turcotte also would ride Hall of Famers Arts and Letters, Dahlia, Damascus, Dark Mirage, Fort Marcy, Northern Dancer, and Shuvee in addition to the Meadow Stable stars. He captured his first Triple Crown race with Tom Rolfe in the 1965 Preakness Stakes and won 3,032 races overall.

Ron Turcotte statue in Grand Falls, New Brunswick Canada

Turcotte's riding career was cut short on July 13, 1978, when he was unseated from his mount, Flag of Leyte Gulf, in his final race of the afternoon at Belmont Park. His horse clipped heels and stumbled, tossing Turcotte. The rider broke his neck in the fall and was paralyzed from the waist down.

That year, he was awarded a Sovereign Award as Man of the Year. At the time, the only other men to receive Man of the Year honors were E.P. Taylor and Jack Diamond.

Other honors for Turcotte included Canadian Thoroughbred horse racing's 1978 Avelino Gomez Memorial Award and the Turf Publicists of America's 1978 Big Sport of Turfdom Award. In 1974, Turcotte was inducted into the Order of Canada, the country's highest civilian honor.

Following his retirement from the saddle, Turcotte made appearances at racetracks to raise money and awareness on behalf of the Permanently Disabled Jockeys Fund.
Turcotte married his childhood sweetheart, Gaetane, in 1964. The couple has four daughters: Tina, Ann, Lynn, and Tammy. After his riding career ended, he returned to Drummond to live on his farm.

"The world may remember Ron as the famous jockey of Secretariat, but to us he was a wonderful husband, a loving father, grandfather, and a great horseman," the Turcotte family said in a statement distributed by Lusky.

Turcotte recovered from setbacks during his retirement, including breaking both legs in a driving accident in 2015 when his van flipped after hitting a snowbank in New Brunswick.

Turcotte was the last surviving member of the individuals most closely associated with Secretariat's racing career. Owner Penny Chenery died in 2017, at age 95. Laurin died in 2000.
Secretariat died in 1989, euthanized after developing laminitis.
Secretariat's Triple Crown campaign and Turcotte's association with the Meadow Stable champion were depicted in the 2010 blockbuster film "Secretariat." Turcotte was further the subject of the award-winning documentary "Secretariat's Jockey: Ron Turcotte," as well as several books, including his 1992 biography "The Will to Win" by Bill Heller.

The family requests privacy while plans are formalized for a private funeral. In lieu of flowers, the family suggests contributions be made to the PDJF.

Tributes to Turcotte
"Ron Turcotte was a true Canadian icon whose impact on horse racing is immeasurable. From his incredible journey aboard Secretariat to his lifelong commitment to the sport, Ron carried himself with humility, strength, and dignity. His legacy in racing, both here at Woodbine and around the world, will live forever. We mourn his loss and celebrate a life that inspired many."—Jim Lawson, executive chair of Woodbine Entertainment

"The board of directors of the Permanently Disabled Jockeys Fund and its recipients mourn the passing of one of our greatest champions and ambassadors. Ron's tireless advocacy and efforts on behalf of his fellow fallen rider is beyond measure.

Although he is appropriately recognized as a member of the Racing Hall of Fame for his accomplishments in the saddle, his contributions to the PDJF established him as a giant in the hearts of all associated with this organization. His memory and his impact will live on forever. Our thoughts and prayers are with Gaetane, their daughters, and his family and friends at this difficult time."—William J. Punk Jr., PDJF chairman


"The National Horsemen's Benevolent and Protective Association joins the entire racing community in mourning the passing of Ron Turcotte, one of the sport's most celebrated and beloved jockeys. Best remembered as the rider of Secretariat during the unforgettable 1973 Triple Crown, Ron's place in racing history is secure. Yet beyond the record-breaking victories, he was admired for his humility, courage, and lifelong dedication to Thoroughbred racing. His legacy will forever be intertwined with the greatness of our sport. 

On behalf of horsemen and horsewomen across the country, we extend our deepest condolences to Ron's family, friends, and all who were touched by his remarkable life."—The National Horsemen's Benevolent and Protective Association

"Ron Turcotte was an icon and will forever be fondly remembered as the trusted partner of legendary Kentucky Derby and Triple Crown winner Secretariat, arguably the most popular Thoroughbred in history. As a two-time Kentucky Derby winner, Ron's many accomplishments on the racetrack and his deep passion for horse racing brought countless fans to the sport. He will be greatly missed. We extend our deepest condolences to his family, friends, and fans all over the world."—Churchill Downs racetrack president Mike Anderson

"Ron Turcotte will be forever remembered for guiding Secretariat to Triple Crown glory in 1973. While his courage as a jockey was on full display to a nation of adoring fans during that electrifying time, it was after he faced a life-altering injury that we learned about the true character of Ron Turcotte. By devoting himself to supporting fellow jockeys struggling through similar injuries, Ron Turcotte built a legacy defined by kindness and compassion. NYRA extends our sympathies to Ron Turcotte's family and friends, and we join the horse racing community in mourning his loss."—David O'Rourke, president and CEO of the New York Racing Association

Let's write about Adolf Hitler

“Führer”: An archived echo report published in The New Yorker magazine:

Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)

Janet Flanner’s job was never easy, exactly, but for the first decade it wasn’t all that morally freighted. Beginning in October of 1925, using the pseudonym Genêt, she mailed her editors at this magazine a fizzy bimonthly column under the rubric Letter from Paris. Instead of telling readers what they needed to know—that was what newspapers were for—she focussed on what they might want to know: the new fad of backless dresses in the cabarets, the rising cost of champagne. “She thought of herself as a high-class gossip columnist,” Brenda Wineapple writes in her biography “Genêt.” Striving for an “unflappable, ever-ironic” style, “she did not predict outcomes, take sides, or search for causes. Obviously, this itself was a side, but Janet was not yet willing to admit that.”

The New Yorker was inventing its voice, and Flanner was in the clique of tinkerers. “Lunched with D. Parker,” she wrote to Harold Ross, the founding editor, from her rented fourth-floor room on Rue Bonaparte. “How dare you say Thurber uses more parenthesis than I? . . . I’ll stop, (if I can.)” When Flanner first arrived in Europe, as an expat from Indianapolis, she was still married, technically, to a man; but they soon divorced and she lived openly (in both senses) with her female partner, the poet Solita Solano. They were chummy with everyone who was anyone: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Djuna Barnes. Flanner roamed the Continent, filing occasional reports from London and Berlin. “I think a Brussels Letter a good idea,” she wrote to Ross. “I’m passing by there anyhow.” She filed pieces on Edith Wharton and Igor Stravinsky, and a subtly undermining story about her frenemy Gertrude Stein, and a write-around Profile of the Queen of England. In time, she became more than a gossip columnist; she became one of the great journalists of her generation.

In early 1936, she published her weightiest piece yet—a three-part Profile of Adolf Hitler. This one, too, was a write-around: unlike Dorothy Thompson, an American journalist who had interviewed Hitler for Cosmopolitan (and whose unflattering portrayal got her kicked out of Germany), Flanner never secured an interview with the Führer, and it’s not clear how hard she pushed for one. She was neither an antifascist, like her friend Dorothy Parker, nor a Fascist, like her friend Ezra Pound; she was against crude bigotry, but she was not the world’s greatest philo-Semite. (In a letter to her mother, she once denigrated the writer Rebecca West as “a little Jewish.”) “Dictator of a nation devoted to splendid sausages, cigars, beer, and babies, Adolf Hitler is a vegetarian, teetotaller, nonsmoker, and celibate,” the first sentence of the Profile read. She had him pegged as a strange little man, teeming with contradictions—true, but hardly the most salient of his known flaws, even then.

In the first installment of the Profile, we learn about the Führer’s taste in movies, his “second-rate tailor,” and his preferred recipe for South German porridge. Readers would have to wait until the following week for a mention of the Nazi Party’s increasingly visible repression of German Jews, which Flanner dispatched in a single paragraph (“The Jewish problem Hitler has raised is a vast one in emotional importance . . . numerically, from the German point of view, it is a small one”). A few lines later, she was on to a night-club comedian who told sly Hitler jokes. (“No one knows why he isn’t in a concentration camp.”) There were a few intimations of violence, but in the mode of pointing out Hitler’s personal inconsistencies: “He becomes sick if he sees blood, yet he is unafraid of being killed or killing.”

The piece was ambiguous, and it had a mixed reception. “I was in Hollywood yesterday and the Jewish film gentlemen candidly said they thought my Hitler article was not unfriendly enough!” Flanner wrote in a letter. “No pleasing everybody.” Still, for the rest of her life she never included the Hitler Profile among her collected pieces. For a writer who wants to seem sophisticated and all-knowing, it may feel intolerably risky to pick sides in a grubby political fight, or to make falsifiable predictions about the future. But refusing to take sides can also be a way to miss the story. 

As Flanner wrote in a Letter from Budapest in 1938, “History looks queer when you’re standing close to it.” ♦