John Madden, the Hall of Fame coach turned broadcaster whose exuberant calls combined with simple explanations provided a weekly soundtrack to NFL games for three decades, died Tuesday morning, the NFL said. He was 85. 

The league said he had died unexpectedly, and it did not provide a cause. 

Madden gained fame in a decadelong stint as the coach of the renegade Oakland Raiders, making it to seven AFC title games and winning the Super Bowl following the 1976 season. He compiled a 103-32-7 regular-season record, and his .759 winning percentage is the best among NFL coaches with more than 100 games. 

But it was his work after prematurely retiring as coach at age 42 that made Madden truly a household name. He educated a football nation with his use of the Telestrator on broadcasts; entertained millions with his interjections of “Boom!” and “Doink!” throughout games; was an omnipresent pitchman selling restaurants, hardware stores and beer; became the face of “Madden NFL Football,” one of the most successful sports video games of all-time; and was a best-selling author. 

Most of all, he was the preeminent television sports analyst for most of his three decades calling games, winning an unprecedented 16 Emmy Awards for outstanding sports analyst/personality, and covering 11 Super Bowls for four networks from 1979 to 2009. 

“People always ask, are you a coach or a broadcaster or a video game guy?” he said when he was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. “I’m a coach, always been a coach.” 

Unpretentious style 

He started his broadcasting career at CBS after leaving coaching in great part because of his fear of flying. He and Pat Summerall became the network’s top announcing duo. Madden then helped give Fox credibility as a major network when he moved there in 1994, and he went on to call prime-time games at ABC and NBC before retiring following Pittsburgh’s thrilling 27-23 win over Arizona in the 2009 Super Bowl. 

Burly and a little unkempt, Madden earned a place in America’s heart with a likable, unpretentious style that was refreshing in a sports world of spiraling salaries and prima donna stars. He rode from game to game in his own bus because he suffered from claustrophobia and had stopped flying. For a time, Madden gave out a “turducken” — a chicken stuffed inside a duck stuffed inside a turkey — to the outstanding player in the Thanksgiving game that he called. 

“Nobody loved football more than Coach. He was football,” NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said in a statement. “He was an incredible sounding board to me and so many others. There will never be another John Madden, and we will forever be indebted to him for all he did to make football and the NFL what it is today.” 

When he finally retired from the broadcast booth, leaving NBC’s “Sunday Night Football,” colleagues universally praised Madden’s passion for the sport, his preparation, and his ability to explain an often-complicated game in down-to-earth terms. 

“No one has made the sport more interesting, more relevant and more enjoyable to watch and listen to than John,” play-by-play announcer Al Michaels said at the time. 

For anyone who heard Madden exclaim “Boom!” while breaking down a play, his love of the game was obvious. 

“For me, TV is really an extension of coaching,” Madden wrote in Hey, Wait a Minute! (I Wrote a Book!).”My knowledge of football has come from coaching. And on TV, all I’m trying to do is pass on some of that knowledge to viewers.” 

Rise to the top 

Madden was raised in Daly City, California. He played on both the offensive and defensive lines for Cal Poly in 1957-58 and earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the school. 

Madden was chosen to the all-conference team and was drafted by the Philadelphia Eagles, but a knee injury ended his hopes of a pro playing career. Instead, Madden got into coaching, first at Hancock Junior College and then as defensive coordinator at San Diego State. 

Al Davis brought him to the Raiders as a linebackers coach in 1967, and Oakland went to the Super Bowl in his first year in the pros. He replaced John Rauch as head coach after the 1968 season at age 32, beginning a remarkable 10-year run. 

With his demonstrative demeanor on the sideline and disheveled look, Madden was the ideal coach for the collection of castoffs and misfits that made up those Raiders teams. 

“Sometimes guys were disciplinarians in things that didn’t make any difference. I was a disciplinarian in jumping offsides; I hated that,” Madden once said. “Being in bad position and missing tackles, those things. I wasn’t, ‘Your hair has to be combed.'” 

The Raiders responded. 

“I always thought his strong suit was his style of coaching,” quarterback Ken Stabler once said. “John just had a great knack for letting us be what we wanted to be, on the field and off the field. … How do you repay him for being that way? You win for him.” 

And boy, did they ever. Many years, the only problem was the playoffs. 

Madden went 12-1-1 in his first season, losing the AFL title game 17-7 to Kansas City. That pattern repeated itself during his tenure; the Raiders won the division title in seven of his first eight seasons but went 1-6 in conference title games during that span. 

Memorable games 

Still, Madden’s Raiders played in some of the sport’s most memorable games of the 1970s, games that helped change rules in the NFL. There was the “Holy Roller” in 1978, when Stabler purposely fumbled forward before being sacked on the final play. The ball rolled and was batted to the end zone before Dave Casper recovered it for the winning touchdown against San Diego. 

The most famous of those games went against the Raiders in the 1972 playoffs at Pittsburgh. With the Raiders leading 7-6 and 22 seconds left, the Steelers had a fourth-and-10 from their 40. Terry Bradshaw’s desperation pass deflected off either Oakland’s Jack Tatum or Pittsburgh’s Frenchy Fuqua to Franco Harris, who caught it at his shoe tops and ran in for a TD. 

In those days, a pass that bounced off an offensive player directly to a teammate was illegal, and the debate continues to this day over which player it hit. The catch, of course, was dubbed the “Immaculate Reception.” 

Oakland finally broke through with a loaded team in 1976 that had Stabler at quarterback; Fred Biletnikoff and Cliff Branch at receiver; tight end Dave Casper; Hall of Fame offensive linemen Gene Upshaw and Art Shell; and a defense that included Willie Brown, Ted Hendricks, Tatum, John Matuszak, Otis Sistrunk and George Atkinson. 

The Raiders went 13-1, losing only a blowout at New England in Week 4. They paid the Patriots back with a 24-21 win in their first playoff game and got over the AFC title game hump with a 24-7 win over the hated Steelers, who were crippled by injuries. 

Oakland won it all with a 32-14 Super Bowl romp against Minnesota. 

“Players loved playing for him,” Shell said. “He made it fun for us in camp and fun for us in the regular season. All he asked is that we be on time and play like hell when it was time to play.” 

Madden battled an ulcer the following season, when the Raiders once again lost in the AFC title game. He retired from coaching at age 42 after a 9-7 season in 1978. 

 
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The Rev. Athanasius Chidi Abanulo — using skills honed in his African homeland to minister effectively in rural Alabama— determines just how long he can stretch out his Sunday homilies based on who is sitting in the pews.

Seven minutes is the sweet spot for the mostly white and retired parishioners who attend the English-language Mass at Immaculate Conception Catholic Church in the small town of Wedowee. “If you go beyond that, you lose the attention of the people,” he said.

For the Spanish-language Mass an hour later, the Nigerian-born priest — one of numerous African clergy serving in the U.S. — knows he can quadruple his teaching time. “The more you preach, the better for them,” he said.

As he moves from one American post to the next, Abanulo has learned how to tailor his ministry to the culture of the communities he is serving while infusing some of the spirit of his homeland into the universal rhythms of the Mass.

“Nigerian people are relaxed when they come to church,” Abanulo said. “They love to sing, they love to dance. The liturgy can last for two hours. They don’t worry about that.” 

During his 18 years in the U.S., Abanulo has filled various chaplain and pastor roles across the country, epitomizing an ongoing trend in the American Catholic church. As fewer American-born men and women enter seminaries and convents, U.S. dioceses and Catholic institutions have turned to international recruitment to fill their vacancies.

The Diocese of Birmingham, where Abanulo leads two parishes, has widened its search for clergy to places with burgeoning religious vocations like Nigeria and Cameroon, said Birmingham Bishop Steven Raica. Priests from Africa were also vital in the Michigan diocese where Raica previously served. 

“They have been an enormous help to us to be able to provide the breadth and scope of ministry that we have available to us,” he said. 

Africa is the Catholic church’s fastest-growing region. There, the seminaries are “fairly full,” said the Rev. Thomas Gaunt, director of Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, which conducts research about the Catholic church. 

Falling numbers

It’s different in the U.S. where the Catholic church faces significant hurdles in recruiting home-grown clergy following decades of declining church attendance and the damaging effects of widespread clergy sex abuse scandals. 

Catholic women and married men remain barred from the priesthood; arguments that lifting those bans would ease the priest shortage have not gained traction with the faith’s top leadership. 

“What we have is a much smaller number beginning in the 1970s entering seminaries or to convents across the country,” Gaunt said. “Those who entered back in the ’50s and ’60s are now elderly, and so the numbers are determined much more by mortality.”

From 1970 to 2020, the number of priests in the U.S. dropped by 60%, according to data from the Georgetown center. This has left more than 3,500 parishes without a resident pastor. 

Abanulo oversees two parishes in rural Alabama. His typical Sunday starts with an English-language Mass at Holy Family Catholic Church in Lanett, about 200 kilometers (125 miles) from Birmingham along the Alabama-Georgia state line. After that, he is driven an hour north to Wedowee, where he celebrates one Mass in English, another in Spanish.

“He just breaks out in song and a lot of his lectures, he ties in his boyhood, and I just love hearing those stories,” said Amber Moosman, a first-grade teacher who has been a parishioner at Holy Family since 1988.

For Moosman, Abanulo’s preaching style is very different from the priests she’s witnessed previously. “There was no all of a sudden, the priest sings, nothing like that. … It was very quiet, very ceremonial, very strict,” she said. “It’s a lot different now.” 

Abanulo was ordained in Nigeria in 1990 and came to the U.S. in 2003 after a stint in Chad. His first U.S. role was as an associate pastor in the diocese of Oakland, California, where his ministry focused on the fast-growing Nigerian Catholic community. Since then, he has been a hospital chaplain and pastor in Nashville, Tennessee, and a chaplain at the University of Alabama. 

Amid the U.S. clergy shortage, religious sisters have experienced the sharpest declines, dropping 75% since 1970, according to the Georgetown center.

Culture shocks

When Maria Sheri Rukwishuro was told she was being sent from the Sisters of the Infant Jesus order in Zimbabwe to West Virginia to work as a missionary nun, she asked her mother superior, “Where is West Virginia?” 

She was scared, worrying about the unknowns.

“What kind of people am I going to? I’m just a Black nun coming to a white country,” Rukwishuro told The Associated Press from Clarksburg, West Virginia, where she has been teaching religious education to public and Catholic school students since arriving in 2004.

Rukwishuro vividly remembers that at her introduction, a little girl walked to her and “rubbed her finger on my fingers all the way, then she looked at her finger and she smiled but my heart sank. … She thought I was dirty.” Despite that, Rukwishuro says most people have been very welcoming. She’s now a U.S. citizen and says, “It feels like home.” 

One of her first culture shocks was an overnight snowfall. “I really screamed. I thought it was the end of the world,” she said. “Now I love it. I do my meditations to that.” 

During their integration into American life, it is commonplace for newly arrived clergy to face culture shocks.

For Sister Christiana Onyewuche of Nigeria, a hospital chaplain in Boston administering last rites for the dying, it was cremation. She recalled thinking, “Like really? … How can they burn somebody? I can’t even imagine.” 

She came to the U.S. 18 years ago and previously served as the president of African Conference of Catholic Clergy and Religious, a support group for African missionaries serving in the U.S.

‘Jesus necks’

Onyewuche said African clergy can face communication challenges with the Americans they serve. To address this, many dioceses have offered training to soften accents, she said. Abanulo, who went through the training in Oakland, says it helped him slow down his speech and improve his pronunciations.

Abanulo, who moved to Alabama in 2020, admits he was initially apprehensive about his latest posting, which meant exchanging a comfortable role as university chaplain for two rural parishes. 

“People were telling me ‘Father, don’t go there. The people there are rednecks,'” he said.

But after a year, and a warm reception, he says he now tells his friends, “There are no rednecks here. All I see are Jesus necks.” 

 
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The hit new “Spider-Man” became the first billion-dollar-grossing film of the pandemic era over the Christmas weekend, reaching the milestone while holding firmly to the North American box office top spot, industry watcher Exhibitor Relations said Sunday.

“Spider-Man: No Way Home,” British star Tom Holland’s third solo outing in the wildly popular role, has grossed $467.3 million in North America and $587 million internationally, raking in more than $1 billion over 12 days and proving analysts’ predictions that it could reach the milestone sum. 

It rocketed to that benchmark at a speed only matched by 2015’s “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” according to industry outlet Variety, and comes even as the rapid spread of the omicron COVID-19 variant casts a pall over holiday outings worldwide.

Sony’s latest installment to the comic-inspired series took an estimated $81.5 million in North America for the three-day period over the Christmas weekend, holding its top spot after scoring the third-biggest domestic opening of all time with more than $260 million, smashing early estimates. 

Its debut box office sales trailed only 2019’s “Avengers: Endgame” ($357 million) and the previous year’s “Avengers: Infinity War” ($258 million), according to the BoxOfficeMojo website.

With an estimated $23.8 million, “Sing 2,” Universal’s star-studded animated jukebox musical follow-up to “Sing,” was this weekend’s runner-up.

It beat out two other new series installments: “The Matrix Resurrections” from Warner Bros, which sees Keanu Reeves reprise his iconic role as Neo, underperformed at $12 million.

In fourth place, also earning less than expected, was 20th Century’s spy prequel to the “Kingsman” films, “The King’s Man,” with $6.4 million. 

Lionsgate’s “American Underdog” — based on the true story of Kurt Warner, who went from stocking shelves at a grocery store to National Football League MVP — slid in at number five on its opening weekend with an estimated $6.2 million. 

Rounding out the top 10 were:

“West Side Story” ($2.8 million)

“Licorice Pizza” ($2.3 million)

“A Journal for Jordan” ($2.2 million)

“Encanto” ($2 million)

“83” ($1.8 million)
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“There is nothing in the world like the food you can find in Louisiana,” Chef Isaac Toups, owner of popular New Orleans restaurant Toups Meatery, told VOA. “It’s such a unique mix of so many different cultures that converged here from around the globe. They brought their ideas about food with them and made a cuisine that is unparalleled.”

Immigrants’ culinary influences span centuries in New Orleans, a port city near the mouth of the Mississippi River. From French colonists who were the first Europeans to permanently settle in the area in 1699 to Vietnamese immigrants in the 1970s to recent arrivals from all over the world, newcomers have continually added to the DNA of local cuisine.

 

Liz Williams, founder of the Southern Food and Beverage Museum and author of New Orleans: A Food Biography, says there’s something unique about the way cultures – and cooking – have melded in this Southern city compared with other places in America.

“You can find every food in the world in New York City,” Williams said. “Go two blocks that way for this type of cuisine and six blocks the other way for that type of cuisine.”

New Orleans, by contrast, has spawned a gastronomical melting pot. Or, to use a local analogy, a gumbo.

“There’s no ‘New York City cuisine’ because all those immigrant groups didn’t meld together,” she said. “In New Orleans, though, all of these different immigrant cuisines have been influenced by New Orleans food and influenced New Orleans food. There’s a melding, merging and updating that seems to be constantly happening here that doesn’t happen in other places.”

Early settlers

Mention Louisiana cooking, and most people think of Creole cuisine, Cajun cuisine or some mixture of the two.

“When the two foods were first being established in Louisiana in the 18th century, they were two distinct cuisines from two distinct regions,” explained chef Donald Link, owner of several New Orleans restaurants all under the banner of the Link Restaurant Group. “Creole food was being created in New Orleans while Cajun food was in the more rural, southwestern part of the state.”

Creole culture in New Orleans arose from a mixture of the early French settlers, Spanish immigrants who followed shortly after, enslaved people taken from Africa and the Native Americans who were already here. Once the United States purchased Louisiana from France in 1803, waves of Anglo-Americans came to New Orleans as well as thousands who fled the Haitian Revolution taking place at the same time.

The confluence created a unique mix of cultures that is reflected in local cooking to this day.

“New Orleans is often called the most northern city in the Caribbean, and there was a lot of influence coming from Spanish-controlled Latin countries,” explained Link. “They brought their rice, beans, guisados and stews. And then the French brought their boudin and fricassees and all these celebrated techniques, and Africans had gumbo, which comes from the West African word for okra. It all came together to make what we call Creole food.”

Creole food is considered a cosmopolitan cuisine. It often features rich sauces, local herbs, ripe tomatoes and local seafood.

“You use what you have available to you,” said Brad Hollingsworth, owner of longtime New Orleans favorite Clancy’s. “Here, that means all these great, fresh fish from the Gulf of Mexico: speckled trout, pompano, red snapper, redfish, flounder and all the way down the line.”

Hollingsworth said cuisine from Creole culture is more focused on sauces than its Cajun counterpart. That, he said, is in large part because of the city’s ability to attract settlers from more cosmopolitan, cultured areas of France.

“They brought with them the French mother sauces that we really lean into at Clancy’s,” Hollingsworth said. “Bechamel, velouté, espagnole, hollandaise and tomato. We use them to complement our local fish or meat. It’s a combination of using what is geographically available and the techniques of the immigrant groups who came here.”

Cajun food, on the other hand, is known for being more rustic. It features meat-heavy, all-in-one-pot dishes like jambalaya and the rice-filled, spicy pork blood sausage known as boudin.

The Cajuns were also largely originally of French descent, but these French-influenced immigrants came from backcountry parts of Acadia in Canada rather than the major cities of France. They were forced out of Canada by the British in 1755, and about 3,000 arrived in rural Louisiana, where they interacted with German immigrants, Native Americans and enslaved people – all of whom added their own culinary influences.

“Cajun cuisine was more of a country food, while Creole cuisine was more of a city food,” said Toups, who grew up in the part of Louisiana known as Cajun Country, about two-and-a-half hours west of New Orleans. “That’s because the Cajuns were French fur trappers, not French-trained chefs like you might find in the city. As a poorer immigrant group, we had to add things to make our meals last. Fortunately, the region had tons of rice, which is why you find rice in our classics like boudin, jambalaya and gumbo.”

Continuing the evolution of a food

During the 19th and 20th centuries, thanks to improved methods of communication and better transportation, the two cuisines began to merge and inspire each other. They also continued to be influenced by other groups

German immigrants, for example, brought their passion for sausages to Cajun food, which helped create Louisiana’s famed spicy andouille. But the next big addition to the local food scene came when nearly 300,000 Italian immigrants – most of them Sicilian – moved to the city between 1884 and 1924.

“If you look at stuffed peppers in other places, they’re usually prepared with rice,” said Liz Williams, who will be releasing the book, Nana’s Creole Italian Table in March 2022, “but in New Orleans, our veggies are stuffed with breadcrumbs. That’s an effect of the Sicilians who arrived here.”

Red gravy, the Creole adaptation of tomato sauce – similar to how Creoles use a roux in gumbo as a thickener – and the introduction of sno-balls, made from shaved ice, to New Orleans are further examples of how New Orleanian and Sicilian cuisines merged.

“In Sicily and lots of Europe, it was common during hotter months to walk up a mountain to collect snow that you could flavor with syrup for a summertime treat,” Williams said. “In America, most places use crushed ice for more of a frozen sherbet. In New Orleans, however, shaved ice is used because it emulates more of what our Sicilians knew back home.”

In more recent decades, Mexican immigrants came to New Orleans to help rebuild after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. They, too, left an impact on their new home – not just on the cuisine, but also the way it’s served.

New Orleans is now dotted with dozens of taco trucks it didn’t have before the storm.

“Because the local ingredients are different here,” Williams explained, “so are the items sold. You’re not going to find fried oyster tacos in many places in the world, but you can find them in New Orleans.”

These examples are just the tip of the iceberg. Pots and pans in kitchens across one of the world’s most unique food cities clatter with creations that can’t be found anywhere else. At two-time James Beard award-winning chef Alon Shaya’s restaurant, Saba, Louisiana blue crab is a local addition to a traditionally Mediterranean hummus. Popular Indian restaurant Saffron NOLA adds curried seafood and basmati rice to gumbo, Louisiana’s state dish.

And Dong Phuong Bakery, an institution formed in 1982 after thousands of Vietnamese refugees arrived in New Orleans after the Vietnam War, has forever changed how many residents think of two of their most prized foods. Dong Phuong and their unique king cake – topped with cream cheese icing because bakery owner Huong Tran didn’t want her cake to be as sweet as the ones with traditional sugar icing – is one of the most popular in the city. Also, the bakery’s bread is sold by the thousands to restaurants across the city. The beloved Louisiana po’boy sandwich is now often made with Vietnamese-style banh mi bread instead of the more Louisiana-standard French bread.

“We came here as refugees with nothing, so of course it makes us so proud to have our new home appreciate what we can add to the food here,” explained Linh Tran Garza, president of Dong Phuong Bakery. “But we’re also continuously influenced by our home, as well.”

Garza points to the emergence of Viet-Cajun cuisine as proof that the two cultures are evolving with each other.

“It’s a great thing, I think. We should always be paying attention to the community and seeing how we can get better, give customers what they want, or create some new amazing food.”

Liz Williams said that is something New Orleans is especially able to do, perhaps more so than any other American city, because of its past.

“I think it has to do with us being originally colonized by the French while much of the rest of America was colonized by the British,” she said. “The British have a way of doing things and, historically, exercise less flexibility. The French, however, are more curious and more eager to make great food. They see it as an art, and they welcome new inspiration. The Creoles sought and welcomed that inspiration centuries ago, and I think our culture continues to do it today.”
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President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden brought some Christmas Eve cheer to hospitalized children who aren’t well enough to go home for holidays.

It’s longstanding tradition for first ladies to visit Children’s National Hospital at Christmastime, but Joe Biden’s visit on Friday was a surprise. It marked the first time that a sitting president had joined the fun, the White House said.

The Bidens are set to help a group of children making lanterns as part of a winter craft project. Jill Biden will also sit by the Christmas tree and read “Olaf’s Night Before Christmas” to the kids. Video of her reading will also be shown in patient rooms throughout the hospital.

The Walt Disney Co. provided copies of the book for each patient so they can follow along with the first lady, the White House said. Each book includes a White House bookmark designed by her office.

The annual tradition of a hospital visit by the first lady dates to Bess Truman, who served in the role from 1945-1953.
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Deep in the desert of the United Arab Emirates, the moment that camel breeders had been waiting for arrived.

Families hauled their camels through wind-carved sands. Servers poured tiny cups of Arabic coffee. Judges descended on desert lots.

A single question loomed over the grandstand: Which camels were most beautiful?

Even as the omicron variant rips through the world, legions of breeders from Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia and Qatar traveled to the UAE’s southwestern desert this week with 40,000 of their most beautiful camels for the Al Dhafra Festival.

The five-man jury at the annual pageant insists beauty is not in the eye of the beholder. Camel aesthetics are evaluated according to precise categories determined generations ago. Only female camels participate because males fight too much, authorities said.

As hundreds of woolly black camels trotted through the dusty pastures, necks and humps bobbing, one of the organizers, Mohammed al-Muhari, outlined the platonic ideal.

Necks must be long and slim, cheeks broad and hooves large, he told The Associated Press on Wednesday. Lips must droop. They must walk tall with graceful posture.

“It’s not so different from humans,” al-Muhari said, his robe sparkling white amid clouds of dust.

The high standards have prompted many breeders to seek an advantage, using banned Botox injections to inflate the camel’s lips, muscle relaxants to soften the face and silicone wax injections to expand the hump.

Festival spokesman Abdel Hadi Saleh declined to say how many participants had been disqualified over plastic surgery this week. All camels undergo rigorous medical exams to detect artificial touch-ups and hormones before entering Al Dhafra Festival.

Since Emirati investigators began employing X-rays and sonar systems a few years ago, Saleh said the number of cheaters has plummeted.

“We easily catch them, and they realize getting caught, it’s not worth the cost to their reputation,” he said.

A great deal is at stake. Al Dhafra Festival offers the top 10 winners in each category prizes ranging from $1,300 to $13,600. At the main Saudi contest, the most beautiful fetch $66 million. Camels change hands in deals worth millions of dirhams.

But breeders insist it’s not only about the money.

“It is a kind of our heritage and custom that the (Emirati rulers) revived,” said 27-year-old camel owner Saleh al-Minhali from Abu Dhabi. He sported designer sunglasses over his traditional headdress and Balenciaga sneakers under his kandura, or Emirati tunic.

Gone are the days when camels were integral to daily life in the federation of seven sheikhdoms, a chapter lost as oil wealth and global business transformed Dubai and Abu Dhabi into skyscraper-studded hubs with marbled malls, luxury hotels and throbbing nightclubs. Foreigners outnumber locals nearly nine to one in the country.

However, experts say Emiratis are increasingly searching for meaning in echoes of the past — Bedouin traditions that prevailed before the UAE became a nation 50 years ago.

“Younger Emiratis who have identity issues are going back to their heritage to find a sense of belonging,” said Rima Sabban, a sociologist at Zayed University in Dubai. “The society developed and modernized so fast it creates a crisis inside.”

Camels race at old-world racetracks in the Emirates, and still offer milk, meat and a historic touchstone to citizens. Festivals across the country celebrate the camel’s significance. Al Dhafra also features falcon racing, dromedary dancing and a camel milking contest.

“People in Dubai may not even think about them, but young people here care deeply about camels,” said Mahmoud Suboh, a festival coordinator from Liwa Oasis at the northern edge of the desert’s Empty Quarter. Since 2008, he has watched the fairgrounds transform from a remote desert outpost into an extravaganza that draws camel lovers from around the world.

In a sign of the contest’s exploding popularity, about a dozen young Emirati men who call themselves “camel influencers” filmed and posed with the camels on Wednesday, broadcasting live to thousands of Instagram followers.

The digital likes have proven important this year, as the coronavirus pandemic curtailed tourism to the festival and dampened the mood. Police checked that visitors had received both vaccine doses and tested negative for the virus. Authorities nagged attendees to adjust their face masks, threatening fines. There were few foreigners or other spectators strolling the site Wednesday.

Each category in the 10-day pageant is divided into two types of camels: Mahaliyat, the tan breed that originates from the UAE and Oman, and Majaheen, the darker breed from Saudi Arabia. Wednesday’s showcase focused on 5-year-old black Majaheen camels.

For hours, judges scrutinized each camel, scribbling lists of the animal’s body parts for scoring purposes. Breeders shouted to startle camels so they’d look up and show off elongated necks.

As the sun set over the sands, the winning breeders were called to accept their gleaming trophies. Down below in the dirt rings, camels were crowned with gold and silver-lined shawls.

“Until now we are the first in the category … We’ve received over 40 prizes (in various camel contests) this year alone,” beamed Mohammed Saleh bin Migrin al-Amri as he juggled four trophies from the day, including two golds.

Then he jumped into his Toyota Land Cruiser. The victory parade of honking SUVs and grunting camels faded behind the desert dunes.
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Author Joan Didion, whose essays, memoirs, novels and screenplays chronicled contemporary American society, as well as her grief over the deaths of her husband and daughter, has died at the age of 87. 

 

The cause of death was Parkinson’s disease, her publisher Knopf said Thursday in a statement. Didion first emerged as a writer of substance in the late 1960s as an early practitioner of “new journalism,” which allowed writers to take a narrative, more personalized perspective. 

 

Her 1968 essay collection “Slouching Toward Bethlehem,” a title borrowed from poet William Butler Yeats, looked at the culture of her native California. The title essay offered an unsympathetic view of the emerging hippie culture in San Francisco and a New York Times review called the book “some of the finest magazine pieces published by anyone in this country in recent years.” 

 

Didion had an air of casual glamour and writerly cool and in her heyday frequently was typically photographed in oversized sunglasses or lounging nonchalantly with a cigarette dangling from her hand. She was 80 in 2015 when the French fashion house Celine used her as a model in an ad campaign for its sunglasses. 

Tragedy inadvertently led to a career resurgence in the 2000s as Didion wrote of the deaths of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, in “The Year of Magical Thinking” and daughter Quintana Roo Dunne in “Blue Nights.” 

 

Didion’s works were insightful, confessional and tinged with ennui and skepticism. The Los Angeles Times praised her as an “unparalleled stylist” with “piercing insights and exquisite command of language.” 

 

British writer Martin Amis referred to Didion as the “poet of the Great Californian Emptiness” and she was especially incisive in writing about the state. Her 1970 novel “Play It as It Lays” showed Los Angeles, through the eyes of a troubled actor, to be glamorous and vapid while the 2003 essay collection “Where I Was From” was about the culture of the state, as well as herself and her family’s long history there. 

 

“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means,” Didion said in a speech at her alma mater, the University of California in Berkeley, in 1975. 

 

From California to New York

 

Her life and career were captured in the 2017 documentary “Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold” by her nephew, actor-filmmaker Griffin Dunne. The New Yorker magazine called the film, which borrowed its title from another Yeats work, “an intimate, affectionate, and partial portrait.” 

 

Didion ended up in New York by winning a college essay contest that provided an internship at Vogue magazine in the late 1950s. She met Dunne there two years later. 

 

Didion and Dunne, who were married nearly 40 years, split their lives between Southern California and New York and managed to be leading figures in both literary circles and Hollywood.

 

The parties at their Malibu beach house, where Harrison Ford worked as a carpenter before “Star Wars” fame, drew crowds that included singer Janis Joplin, moviemakers Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma and Martin Scorsese and actor Warren Beatty, who was reportedly infatuated with Didion. 

 

Dunne was demonstrative and garrulous while Didion could come off as introverted. Their marriage was rocky at times and Dunne moved to Las Vegas for a while. In an essay in “The White Album,” Didion wrote that they once took a vacation in Hawaii “in lieu of filing for divorce.” 

 

Through it all they edited each other’s work and collaborated on screenplays for the 1976 remake of “A Star Is Born,” “The Panic in Needle Park,” the 1971 film that gave Al Pacino his first starring role, as well as the movie adaptations of “Play It as It Lays” and Dunne’s novel “True Confessions.” 

 

The couple moved to New York in 1988 and after Dunne suffered a heart attack at the dinner table in 2003, Didion wrote of the ensuing heartache in “The Year of Magical Thinking,” which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it,” she wrote. 

 

Twenty months after Dunne’s death, Didion returned to the place of grief when Quintana Roo died from acute pancreatitis after a series of health problems, which she chronicled in “Blue Nights.” 

 

The diminutive Didion dwindled to 75 pounds (34 kg) after the deaths but began to come out of it by working on a one-woman stage version of “Magical Thinking” that opened on Broadway in 2007 with Vanessa Redgrave starring and David Hare directing. 

 

Didion, whose other books included the novel “A Book of Common Prayer” and non-fiction works “Miami” and “Salvador” was presented the National Medal of Arts in 2013 by President Barack Obama. 

 

 

 
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