Hi, I'm Theo Balcomb, I'm one of the people who make the daily you might know my name from the credits listeners have written us and said, Hey, I really want to support you. I think you're working all the time and it really means a lot to me. Can I send you pizza? The best thing to do, though, is to just become a subscriber to The New York Times.

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Hello. I'm Wesley Morris, I'm a critic at The New York Times and a staff writer at the Times magazine. And today we're going to do something a little different on The Daily. Every year in December, the magazine puts out an issue called The Lives They Lived, and it focuses on notable people who have lost their lives throughout the year.

Some of the people in the issue tend to be very famous, and some of them tend to be people that very few people have heard of. But the point is to focus on the extraordinary and in some cases vividly ordinary life that someone lived. This year, of course, has been quite an extraordinary one for life and the loss of it. Whether it was death is the result of covid or from some form of racialized violence or death from any other cause, it's been a long year of grieving people, I guess.

I mean, if there were a national emotion this year, it probably would be bereavement and a very human thing to do at the end of a year is to. Stop and sort of take stock of the kind of year it was. And some of that involves acknowledging that, for example, some people who were here in 2020 aren't coming with us into twenty twenty one. To take a moment to reflect on what it's going to mean to not have them come forward with us into that next year and to look at your life and the complexities of the life you're living.

Through the lives that they lived. So here are four stories of lives lived and lost in 2020, written and read by writers for The New York Times, including me.

Starting with Stanley Crouch. He loved jazz so much that he was willing to fight for it. With his fists. OK, what I'm trying to say is that in reference to black on black music, most black people know more about white people and imitation black people, imitation black artists than they know about black artists. You know, that is that we have not only had Gradishar is hidden from us, but the white man is thrown imitators of those artists at us, and we know them even better than the ones that really did the first thing.

You know, what I'm trying to say is that. If you were a New Yorker out on the town in the late 1970s and 1980s, the sort of person who'd frequent house parties, bars and clubs on a Tuesday night, odds are fair that you'd run in to a large, well-dressed, bespectacled man.

Odds are actually better that he'd run into you and that at some point during the encounter, this charismatic, dark skinned cat might slip you one of his business cards. Nothing fancy vanilla. Even a name. Stanley Crouch a no.

And this an embossed pair of boxing gloves.

You know, you get used to making white men mad because he was arrogant enough to carry himself as a man like they were finished chasing Tommy Burns for the heavyweight championship title.

Crouch was known well as many things critic, intellectual, keeper of flames, holder of court friend, opponent Epicure Castigate her acolyte, mentor, lover, Krank snob, contrarian of the black condition.

So Wilson so this is this is what I find fascinating is we have Barack Obama here. Right. And then there are supposedly questions about his authenticity. Then you have to be sent over here and there's supposed to be no questions about his authenticity.

Boxing, no animated, a good deal of him, the gloves or a shorthand for temperament.

Misleading, too, since none of his fights on the page at a restaurant in the offices of the Village Voice, where he was the Weekly's first black staffer involved. Anything is formal or is gentlemanly as a glove.

In 1988, he sucked the voices rap critic Harry Allen during a conversation about hip hop, which Crouch flamboyantly loathed.

It sells a lot of tennis shoes. It gets a lot of people wear their hats backwards and it gets a lot of people to to to to put together these described doggerel that they chant oversample backbeats. You're sounding like my father. It's just bad in the fight.

Cause Crouch's job in 2004, he made the news when he slapped the literary critic and self-described hatchet man Dale Peck, at a cozy French restaurant for bludgeoning Crouch's loan novel four years earlier.

Such were his passions, they ruled him, if Crouch handed you that card, you were accepting an invitation to his intensity.

This is the only art that I know of that actually moves that what we call digital speed, which veered from imposing pugnacious to relentlessly genial gangsta chum. Even his affability could be a lot. Many of us were subjected to long, rambling drum interludes over the phone that could be quite wearying, recalled his longtime friend, Loren Schoenberg, the saxophonist and jazz scholar. I loved it, he told me, laughing. Another friend, the trumpeter Bobby Bradford, recalled his phone ringing, too.

I remember distinctly once where he was doing something that he figured out about the high hat, Bradford said.

That particular thing was good, very clever. But that wouldn't sustain a drum solo or an evening playing the drums, you know.

So, yes, one of the country's preeminent jazz critics was also an endearingly inconsiderate player of drums, no less.

Crouch knew the music he tried to make was neither as muscular or dexterous as his writing on music. Iconoclasm was his hook, his uppercut, which beloved text, what he is burse. What shibboleth would he undo? Which colossus would he raise?

In recent years, the long tradition of America's own music, jazz, has experienced a resurgence in popularity.

Regular appearances on Charlie Rose's talk show made Crouch a sort of egghead famous.

I think that the most important thing about all of these young musicians who play jazz is that they are exhibiting absolute freedom from mass media hype. See, there is nothing that tells a young musician to try to learn what Thelonious Monk was playing with. Charles Mingus was playing the music of Duke Ellington.

These care about it and learn it and and they think for themselves.

Once in 1992 with the pianist Marcus Roberts and Crouch's good friend Wynton Marsalis seated around Rose's table.

Why are you smiling?

Crowd surmised that if you had some rappers on here, if you had some rap isn't here, you wouldn't get this level of discourse. That's why that's why I know that we're going to win and they're going to lose.

Clashing culture was music to him. Modernity versus tradition. Jazz, a particular classical era of jazz against everything else.

See, to actually play jazz, you have to be able to hear. Miles Davis after 1960 was useless beyond the terrible performances and the terrible recordings Crouch wrote in The New Republic in 1990, Davis has become the most remarkable licker of moneyed boots in the music business.

Criticism was his art, and he could get carried away with it. Take concertgoer.

Whenever Schoenberg and Crouch went to see live music, they had to work out an arrangement because Crouch like to talk during the show about what was working and what stunk, we kind of sat separate and then talked after the set, Schoenberg said. Afterward, Crouch will walk right up to the band and critique the show to the players faces.

I don't think you could name me one of his peers, Schoenberg said. Who had the authority or the respect of the musicians that when he went up on the bandstand and gave them his review right there.

And it could be harsh that they actually 90 percent of the time accepted it, even if they might have rolled in IETA. I've been so influenced by by listening to jazz, by the interpretations of jazz made by people like Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, and that I've come to see it as a truly American art form that has and that contains in the very way it's made much of the sensibility of the country itself.

Crouch was hard on women novelists and young rappers, the avant garde and his heroes. He deplored the world with certain racial politics.

His writing against black grievance, at least as he understood it, was meant to denounce the separatism, sense of inferiority and pleas for special treatment that he suspected was curdling. The way we talked about politics and art, the way we talk to each other to a boxer, kid gloves are an insult to a jazzman, a traditionalist, no less.

No race that could invent that music should ever doubt itself. No race that invented that music should ever be anything other than original, free, free thinking.

We have, I believe, spiritually, emotionally and aesthetically subsidize white America long as we have been here. That is that the white American culture, what has been considered, say, innovational, you know, has usually been whatever some white person was able to get his hands on it, somebody black had already done.

You know what I'm saying is that critical shove of Miles Davis down the elevator shaft in his essay Play the Right Thing, lasts for many thousands of words and the thud still resounds. Crouch abandoned the drums to make that sort of noise to perform the leaving of his mark. The performance hurt people. The pianist Cecil Taylor, whom Crouch outed as gay in 1980 to his formidable mentor and friend Albert Murray, who distance himself from Crouch after he disparaged the rigor of Murray's writing in a piece from the mid 1990s.

Once when I visited him in New York, Bradford said he was getting the hate mail by the bundles while he was working for The Village Voice, and he said to me, well, that's how I keep working, man, because this hate mail represents that people are reading what I'm reading.

Crouch was a sportsman that way. Everything about him was don't try this at home. For here was a man who lived for more than thriving as a critic. He wanted to be criticism itself. Shere Hite. She explained how women orgasm and was hated for it, written and read by Jazmine Hughes. Shere Hite never set out to discover the female orgasm. As a child, she wanted to be either a classical composer or a person who could figure out how society got to be so irrational.

But as she once told an interviewer, how many women have you heard of becoming? Composers write.

So she obtained bachelor's and master's degrees in history instead, and in 1968, she enrolled in Columbia University's PhD program, where she ended up studying female sexuality. Around that time, a height modeled for extra money, she was booked for a television commercial for Olivetti typewriters, but she later discovered it was being used for an advertising campaign with the tagline, the typewriter. That's so smart she doesn't have to be.

Height was livid.

She discovered that the National Organization for Women was protesting the campaign and decided to join them on the streets soon after she became a member of Now New York. By then, she had dropped out of Columbia, disheartened by its conservative standards for her studies. She came up with the idea to create a questionnaire about women's ability to orgasm for a now discussion. She found a printing press that was Quaker during the day, but she, an agnostic at night and printed her fifty eight question survey about female sexuality on pieces of colorful paper to match the colorful topic.

In 1972, she began distributing them via now, as well as abortion rights groups, university women's centers, church newsletters and women's magazines.

I received comprehensive responses, sometimes 14 or 15 pages, often from women who wrote in secret without university support. She called me, answers herself over nearly half a decade, surviving on about ten thousand dollars a year. The Hite report, published in nineteen seventy six, provoked a sexual revolution, the second smallest thing that year to elicit extensive male anxiety with the clitoris being the first.

Subtitled a nationwide study of female sexuality, it was based on the responses of more than 3000 women ages 14 to 78, who for the first time described how they felt about sex in their own words, what they liked, what they didn't integrate male shock, how vital clitoral stimulation was to orgasm.

Being asked these sorts of questions was clearly the release these women needed, number 14. How do you masturbate? Please give a detailed description, number 51. Do you think your vagina and genital area are ugly or beautiful? Height, rampages of women's responses to every question, the comments on faking orgasms run over 10 pages, confessional, forlorn and funny quote, Sometimes when I hate the partner and feel the state of my mind might lead him to violence, quote, I went along for 34 years carrying the burden of not having vaginal orgasms, never telling anyone because I felt something was wrong with me.

Quote, Yes, I always fake orgasms. It just seems polite.

The book's bombshell was that women couldn't reliably orgasm from penetrative sex, contradicting the wildly accepted Freudian theory that women who didn't were broken. According to Hyde's work, approximately 30 percent of women said they orgasm regularly from intercourse.

Traditionally, this has been referred to as a problem for women. Women have a problem supposedly having orgasm, but actually we don't have a problem having orgasm. The society has had a problem and how it defines sexuality.

Of the 82 percent who said they masturbated, almost all of them orgasm reliably from masturbation, which meant that women were orgasming all the time. They just didn't really need men for it to happen.

Many women for all too long have had to, after sex with their husband or their lover, go into the bathroom, close the door and masturbate in order to have an orgasm.

The problem, according to height, was our inaccurate expectations for sex.

That's tragic and ridiculous at the same time.

It didn't have to be a contest or a recipe. Instead, body should be in communication with each other. Penetration was not the only game in town.

I certainly didn't expect it to be a bestseller. I thought this would be academic or it would be also for feminists. But I never expected a big media reaction.

I certainly had no experience. No. Well, have you read my study completely from page to page? Nobody has read your study completely after publication, it was lambasted for being a man hater and berated by the Christian right for destroying traditional family values.

Cherie's report is flawed extensively, and she only asked women, why didn't she ask any man what they thought?

Social scientists and book reviewers alike castigated her for using unrepresentative samples of women that didn't match the census data in order to draw her conclusions, calling her findings flawed and unreliable.

Instead of communicating, saying there's something wrong, what they do is they pout or they or they have a particular attitude and you say, what's the problem? And they and they don't want to tell you what the problem is when you have a whole book of women telling what's the problem and men are reacting like they've been shot. Critics started referring to her as sheer hype, Playboy, the country's head cheerleader for male pleasure, referred to the book as the Heat report.

Wait a minute.

Let me just say that I never once used the word menthols in the book. OK, so I never use the word. But maybe someday you'll read this book and then you'll know.

She wrote three more reports on men and sexuality, on women in love and on the family, each laden with new controversies, each receiving similarly vicious attacks. She received death threats and was followed by the paparazzi she had to redirect. Her phone calls began taking a toll on her psyche. She invented staff members, a publicist and an assistant, and sometimes assumed their identities when she spoke to the press, using them to defend her work. In nineteen ninety five, she renounced her American passport and became a German citizen, claiming that the previous decade of intellectual attacks had left her unable to do the work she wanted.

She lived in Europe until her death this year, running one final book, a report on share height, voice of a Daughter in Exile, an autobiography published in Two Thousand.

The first chapter describes an innocent detail, the first time she masturbated, feeling a strong foreign desire, come over her in figuring out how to wriggle it out of her body. After all of her studies of women and men, pleasure and pain, shame and disappointment, she realized that she'd had the ideal experience of discovering her sexuality on her own, quote, not hearing about it first through pornography or seeing naked bodies displayed for profit on every newsstand. But just alone in my room, in my own bed, finding my own sensual self.

Music has the power to bring us together this time of year. Well, maybe not as powerful as grandma's pumpkin pie, but we're doing it differently this year after the Daly turn on holiday hits, radio on Pandora and turn up the holiday spirit featuring curated modes like Mistletoe Duets mode for classic duets by the fire code. For when you're warming up on a cold winter's night and holiday party mode to get things started, there's a mode for every holiday mood you're in here.

More at Pandora dotcom slash holiday. The following is paid for and furnished by Hair Club for Men Limited.

The station is not responsible for claims, but in the following programs I've been here club client for a while now. And what I love about it is, is when I got it done, it was just so quick. It was fantastic. It was like I went in for a regular haircut and heard about Hair Club. I thought, why not try it?

Sarsaparilla. He made baldness to club. You didn't need to be ashamed to join. I'm not written in Red Batarfi producer ECKNER, The Hair Club for Men.

Does everything that advertising say to me that you see right now is the me that I want you to see. It's the best me. You are wearing a Mets cap, you are bald, it is nineteen seventy nine or nineteen eighty six or nineteen eighty nine, it doesn't matter because you're bald and you live in a culture where a man's hair is his virility is his masculinity is his worth. You pass the movie theater that has a Rambo poster in the coming soon frame Sylvester Stallone's mullet hanging down rectangular Lee like his neck, wanted a privacy shield.

You live in the cold shadow of Tom Selleck, Magnum P.I. mustache. Your wife reads a novel with Fabio on the cover. They must have brought in a wind machine to make his hair blow around like that during the shoot. For most of civilized modernity, baldness remained the third rail of masculinity, innovation in the hairless space is rare. You can wear a toupee, but people will know when the first strong wind comes around. You can get hair plugs.

But what good is the sparse hair it will yield when people can tell what you did to get it? But you saw a commercial on TV during the game the other day, if your hair is thinning like mine was calling out for your free video, in it, a man explains a hair weaving system. In our free video, you'll see our clients up close and natural, their new hair responding under any condition, just like their own.

It sounds like something that might work for you, what with it being strange to wear this hat all day, and what with your hair being at a stage five or six on the Hamilton Norwood scale of male pattern baldness in the commercial.

The man sits halfway cool, like on a desk, a bookshelf behind him. He introduces himself, I'm sorry, Spurlin, president of Hair Club for Men, Sy Sperling, president of the Hair Club for Men. He's not too handsome and he's certainly not a professional pitchman. He gives a speech that has been rehearsed and that he is operating in a Bronx Long Island slow rolling diction that is hypnotic.

If you've ever thought about doing something about your thinning hair and this important new booklet is something you should have, and I'll see that you get it free if you call a toll free number.

He holds up a picture of a man who looks just like him, a man who is him, but who has only the Mr Spaceless side fringe of his hair, left a real Hamilton Norwood, stage seven. He says he is the hair club president, by the way.

But also I'm not only the club president, but I'm also a client. He's a client.

That totally ordinary looking Joe with a bouquet of hair is wearing a wig, a rug, a toupee, a custom-made hair rig using a proprietary hair club for men system. This shocked you. The startling admission of it, the delectable subversion. How can a president also be a client?

Here is a man who did not appear to share your shame about his baldness, who addressed it as casually as if you were talking about fixing your carburetor.

So you go you arrive at the Madison Avenue headquarters and you find not a storefront, but an office building.

You get into an elevator and when you alight onto the correct floor, you're in front of a giant monogram.

HCM, nothing to give away to the other people on the elevator.

While you're there, you marvel at the black marble floor.

In the waiting room, you're brought back for a consultation where you sit on a leather sectional and are shown your hair restoration options on a TV with a built in VCR.

You are taken to the styling floor and treated to the hair clubs strand by strand system, during which a pretty woman makes a plastic wrap mold of the affected region of your scalp and then marks with a Sharpie where the new hair needs to go.

Several strands of your remaining hair are pulled in order to match its color, texture and curl.

You come back in a few weeks, a custom piece of hair is then sewn into your remaining hair.

In later years, they will glue it with a proprietary adherent called Poly Fuse. You weren't getting a rug. I had banned the word to pay to pay implied in a countryman. What I was giving you was something that was now part of you.

Shake your head, get into that shower, let a woman run her hands through your glorious new mane.

There was nothing to call it except all yours. How had no one ever thought about approaching baldness with such kindness before? Maybe Cy came at it from a point of necessity. He was a born salesman, a charming guy who worked with his brother to sell home improvement products, swimming pools, carpeting. I kid you not. He himself was twenty six when upon his scalp appeared the reflection of the light bulb over his head. He was divorced already with two kids.

He was bald already. He was staring down the barrel of a life, being the butt of a joke. He got his own hair replacement and maybe it wasn't the most pleasant experience. He and his brother saw an opportunity and rented an office on 34th Street in a dingy walkup and hired a few stylists and created their own not too pleasant experience. But I knew they could do better, so he took one of the stylist's, the one he was dating, the one who ended up being his second wife and rented a better place on Madison Avenue right around the corner.

What if hair restoration didn't need to be done in dingy walk ups? What if you presented a man with a place that made the secret, shameful project feel more like a spa day? What if you made a person's worth as important as his hair? The business grew thick, franchises sprouted everywhere. His widow, his third wife, Susan, told me he was moved when he was recognized when a man in a restaurant with a full head of hair winked at him on the way to the restroom or when someone stopped him in the condo to say his life was changed by his hair club experience.

Sperling got out of the game in 2000, just at the dawn of the power shave. But there are more of his stores than ever before. And it's not the hair club for men anymore. It's now just called the Hair Club so that anyone can join.

And there are more options tattooed on your head that will simulate stubble called restring and something called exacty extreme hair therapy and something called Ekstrand Plus and Sweet Lord, something called bio graft.

But fundamentally, Sperling's contribution was balding. Last great innovation. Not since he humbly, cheerfully displayed his own shiny paper and his own client status and led the way to the promised land of dignified headedness. Has anyone else been brave enough to speak up on the bulbs behalf? There is no iconic spokesman for Rogaine. And this made Sparling proud, it gave him a good life. It gave you one, too. It was second only to having a full head of hair.

Linda Tripp. She was cast as the ultimate villain during the impeachment of Bill Clinton, written in read by Arena Alexander. And let's face it, Monica, the situation is overwhelming. Won't it almost be two years? Yes. Yes, we're in October. You have had two years of emotional hell. How could you not be? You would have to be robotic not to be in a bad condition right now, truly. So it's not you. You're a victim.

Think late one night in February of 2004, a pregnant horse dropped into Linda Tripp swimming pool. The horse's name was Oksana. She had wandered into Tripp's backyard and mistaking a pool covering for solid ground fellate. Tripp, the former civil servant whose audiotapes of Monica Lewinsky led to the impeachment of Bill Clinton six years earlier was at home. She and her husband, Dieter Roush, ran out and found Oksana thrashing near the defense.

Chip called for help, but her property sits at the end of a series of gravel roads in rural Virginia. If they waited, Oksana could drown. While Rousch cut the pool cover Tripp's daughter, Alison Donovan, to rescue Oksana. Eventually, the fire department arrived and pulled Oksana out of the pool. A month later. Oksana gave birth to a healthy foal. Before Allison told me the story, I'd heard it from Leon NEFA, who interviewed Tripp in 2013 for his podcast, Slover never ended up not using the anecdote like the ducks that once landed and Tony Soprano's pool, the horror story seemed to contain some key symbolism.

But what was it exactly to review? In ninety six, Lewinsky, a former White House intern, found her way to Tripp's cubicle at the Pentagon and began confiding in Tripp about her affair with the president.

Last time I heard from him was October twenty third by phone, but the ground was not solid. Yeah, but remember, I mean, before that it was pretty routine.

Relative to slow down, Tripp made secret recordings of their conversations, which he then gave to Ken Starr, an independent counsel investigating the president. She said she did this to help Lewinsky. So who was the horse and who was drowning? Did anyone actually get saved in that story? Trip was portrayed not as the hero, but as the villain of the impeachment scandal. The tapes confirm the affair, but they also revealed Tripp sustained deception. It was Tripp who had encouraged Lewinsky to not dry-cleaned the blue gap dress to ask the president for a job, to use the messenger service to send him letters, all to build a body of evidence.

I believe that had I been documenting a very crucial time in the sequence of events, there would be no doubt in any of your mind, certainly not to the public, that there was complicity in ensuring that Monica Lewinsky, everything to jump from her side in recent years have been kinder to women.

We've judged harshly just Hollywoods rehabilitation of Tonya Harding, Marcia Clark and Lorena Bobbitt. Lewinsky, everyone now seems to agree, was at the very least taken advantage of by her boss and slut shamed by the country. Trip is unlikely to ever get the same redemption, but now that we have a better understanding of how stories are told and by whom, reducing her to a one note villain feels like lazy storytelling.

I know what it's like to be in the crosshairs of the most powerful person in the world, to be attacked viciously, not because I said something untrue, but because I said something people did not want to hear. Restoring humanity to her doesn't in any way let her off the hook, the filmmaker Blair Foster told me it only makes her more interesting with her A&E documentary series, The Clinton Affair, Foster set out to return full personhood not only to Lewinsky, but also Paula Jones, who described Clinton inviting her to his hotel room where he exposed himself to her, and Juanita Broderick, who accused him of rape.

Like those women, Tripp was eviscerated in the press.

Hi, I'm meeting a friend here. Your name? Monica Lewinsky. Oh, yes. Right this way, this trip is already on Saturday Night Live. She was played by John Goodman, who screwed his face into a rodent like Grimace.

I enjoyed talking to you last night about your numerous sexual trysts with President Bill Clinton and shoveled fast food into his mouth.

The crux of the joke was her weight and her looks.

No, Linda, you have been such an amazing friend to me. And all I ever do is talk about myself. I want to hear what's going on with you. Do you still want to get liposuction on your jowls?

The president got to be a fully formed human whose flawed and complex, Foster said. But the women were always reduced to stereotypes, and that includes Linda. Alison told me that to understand her mother, we have to begin with her childhood in New Jersey in the 1950s. Her father was an American soldier when he met her mother, then a teenager in Germany where he was stationed. He was unfaithful and physically abusive and according to Alison Tripp, received regular beatings.

A raging bully is how Tripp later described him. It is probably a good part of the reason that I could not tolerate the behavior of Bill Clinton, the supreme bully. All those years later, she wrote in her book A Basket of Deplorable. Eventually, Tripp's father ran off with another woman leaving trip with no money for college. She attended secretarial school and at twenty one married an Army lieutenant. Once they divorced in 1990, Tripp's career thrived. She got a job in the Bush White House and stayed on for the Clintons.

In 1993, she was transferred to the Pentagon, where Lewinsky arrived three years later. One of the great mysteries is why Tripp did what she did, the reasons given at the time, mostly not by her, were myriad. She was an opportunist after a book deal, being that it was the book agent, Lucianne Goldberg, who advised her to make the recordings, she was part of that, quote, vast right wing conspiracy that Hillary was always talking about.

She loathed the Clintons, whom she saw as hippies invading the White House. Among the offenses she lists in her book, where their genes take out boxes and reams left by soda cans. But according to Tripp, it was none of the above.

She felt it was her moral duty to expose the president and rescue Lewinsky from a man she considered a sexual predator.

You know, in my case, my duty, my oath was to the office of the presidency, to the institution, not to the sitting incumbent. And I was true to that oath. I told the truth. But I do fault myself for not having the gumption or the courage to do it sooner.

It's plausible Tripp wanted to hold someone she saw as a bad man accountable. But that doesn't feel like the whole story was publicly humiliating Lewinsky the best way to save her or to entrust the matter to a special counsel and a book agent. The trip not see that, or did she choose not to? That's the ultimate question. Did she believe that herself? No, Fox said. And the answer to that, I think, is yes.

How does that make you feel that 97 percent of America hates you? Feels like high school. Trip was deeply hurt by how she was perceived starting in 1999. She got extensive plastic surgery, including a nose job, a Chinta and a facelift.

I did not realize how ugly I was until I saw the pictures, she told 20/20.

Then she mostly retreated from public view. She moved to Middleburg, Virginia, and married Rousch, a childhood friend from Summers she spent visiting her mother's family in Germany.

Together, they opened the Christmas like a year-round holiday store. Lovely girl was how Joanne Swift, the owner of the shop next door, described her punk. Lee, who owns Journeyman's Seidler's Orlinda shop, sometimes told me people or people would take them as people, not what you read about them. A few years ago, Tripp's granddaughter, Payton, learned about her grandmother in school. Omae were you a bad person, fitness and so trips that out to clear her legacy.

She began writing a book, but died before she could finish it. Her cowriter finished it without her giving the book, its title, which Alison described as, quote, a slap in the face. It is out this month posthumously. It's hard to know how Tripp saw her story in the end on Slobber. She sounded regretful about deceiving Lewinsky, but to say it was distasteful.

To this day, I have enormous guilt about doing that, and of all the people I care about understanding, she is the one I wish I could convince. I expected more of this when I picked up her book, but that's not what it is. Trips ire for the Clintons, and it is balmes, her writing on Lewinsky, who she calls narcissistic, a flake and a pampered princess is unkind. She says they were never really friends.

And so hers wasn't really a betrayal in any way.

Lewinsky's betrayals of other people were far worse.

Part of what makes it all hard to read is the obvious hurt and anger of someone who felt so fundamentally misunderstood. The more evidence mounts to clear her name, the more it is like watching a thrashing animal unable to escape a trap of her own making.

The holidays are here, and even though your family traditions may have changed, this season is the perfect time to make new ones. After you're finished listening to the daily, gather your family and turn on holiday hits radio on Pandora and start spreading the joy around your home, featuring modes like Mistletoe Duets mode for classic collaborations by the fire mode for lounging with family and holiday party mode to get things started. There's a mode for every holiday mood you're in here.

More at Pandora dotcom slash holiday. Here's what else you need to know today, more than 30 nations, including Russia, India and Canada, have now banned travelers from Britain, suspending flights and cutting off trade routes as alarm grows over a highly transmissible variation of the coronavirus that has spread rapidly across the U.K. that set off panic buying inside Britain as residents fear food shortages in the days before Christmas. British medical officials say that while the variation may be more infectious, it is no more dangerous or lethal than the original virus.

Still, many countries took extraordinary steps to keep it out of. Saudi Arabia, for example, is banning all international travel for the next week.

Why don't we act intelligently for a change? Why don't we mandate testing before people get on the flight or halt the flights from the U.K.?

Now, so far, the United States has not banned travel from the U.K., but under an agreement reached with the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, both British Airways and Delta will require a negative coronavirus test before a passenger can board a flight from the United Kingdom to New York.

This is a major problem. And for us to once again be incompetent as a federal government and take no action is not a viable option for us in New York. Today's episode was produced by Kelly Prime. Michael Simon Johnson and Eric Krupke with help from parent Behrouz. It was edited by Mike Benowa and Lisa Tobin and engineered by Marion Lozano.

That's it for the day. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow. You know, it would sound great after the daily something to get you into the holiday spirit. No, not fruitcake. Holiday hits radio on Pandora. The holidays may feel a little different this year, but they sound better than ever. Discover holiday party mode and put some pep in that spirited step wrap presents to the warm holiday fields of by the fire mode and bring it on home with mistletoe duets mode playing timeless holiday duets.

There's a mode for every holiday mood you're in here. More at Pandora dotcom slash holiday.