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On her next project, currently titled Stories Of My Teeth

It's a novel that I wrote in installments for workers in a juice factory in Mexico. So for a series of months, maybe four or five months, I wrote sort of chapbooks, much in the early-20th-century style, that I sent to the factory. They were printed there and handed out amongst the workers. And they would read the pieces out loud and comment [on] them and criticize them. And all those session were recorded and then sent back to me here in New York. And then I would listen and write the next installment and so on. So it's a very different procedure.

I mean, I had no idea what I was gonna write about when I started writing. I wrote a first installment just to make initial contact with them. And the first time I heard them reading out loud, I was struck of course by the variety of voices and accents, and some very colloquial forms of saying things. And I started picking those forms up and bringing them into the novel.

I think — I mean, this novel would have been impossible without the collaboration of the workers. They weren't just listeners. They really helped me build it.

Read an excerpt of Sidewalks

translation

Mexico City

writing

New York

Kurdish fighters, supported by coalition warplanes, pushed into the town of Sinjar in northern Iraq, days after breaking a siege of a mountain where ethnic Yazidis had been trapped for months by Islamist extremists.

Massoud Barzani, an Iraqi Kurdish leader claimed his peshmerga forces had already taken a "large area" of the town of Sinjar, which has been held since August by fighters of the so-called Islamic State.

NPR's Deborah Amos reports that breaking the months-long siege of Mount Sinjar "was the largest military operation in Iraq since the U.S. took a direct role, 8,000 Kurdish troops backed by U.S. air power."

Barzani, on a visit to the recently captured area on Sunday, praised God that his forces had "opened and controlled all the roads" to the mountain.

"The liberation of the center of Sinjar town was not part of our plans, but we have managed to take control of a large area of it," he was quoted by the BBC as saying.

"Most of the districts are under our control," Barzani told his troops. "We will crush the Islamic State."

The peshmerga launched the military operation last week and managed to first open up a corridor to Mount Sinjar, allowing thousands of Yazidis trapped there to escape.

Now, the fighters are pressing an offensive to retake the town itself. The Associated Press reports that as the battle continued to rage in the city on Sunday, where loud explosions and gunfire echoed from inside the town and coalition warplanes bombed ISIS positions.

Nabil Mohammed, a 28-year-old Kurdish fighter, said there were "snipers everywhere inside" the town.

"One of them fired a rocket-propelled grenade at us," he said. "I ran into a house and I was hit by a sniper's bullet in my thigh."

The AP quotes a spokesman for the Kurdish forces, Jabbar Yawar, as saying the fighters are still facing resistance from pockets of militants still inside the town and that it is "far from cleared." He declined to provide more details on the ongoing operation, the news agency said.

peshmerga

Islamic State

Kurds

Iraq

President Obama tells CNN that he doesn't consider North Korea's hack of Sony Pictures an act of war, but instead a case of "cybervandalism." But, he stands by his criticism of the movie studio for pulling the satirical film The Interview because its plot angers Pyongyang.

"If we set a precedent in which a dictator in another country can disrupt through cyber, a company's distribution chain or its products, and as a consequence we start censoring ourselves, that's a problem," Obama told CNN's State of the Union this morning.

"And it's a problem not just for the entertainment industry, it's a problem for the news industry," he said. "CNN has done critical stories about North Korea. What happens if in fact there is a breach in CNN's cyberspace? Are we going to suddenly say, are we not going to report on North Korea?"

The film depicts comedy duo Seth Rogen and James Franco as journalists who score an interview with North Korea's reclusive leader, Kim Jong Un. In the film, the CIA recruits the pair to assassinate Kim.

The president's latest remarks on CNN follow a Friday news conference in which called Sony's decision to cancel the release of The Interview a mistake.

"Sony is a corporation. It suffered significant damage. There were threats against its employees. I'm sympathetic to the concerns that they faced," Obama said. "Having said all that, yes I think they made a mistake."

Responding to the president's initial remarks, Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton told NPR that the studio "did not capitulate" to hackers.

"We don't own movie theaters, and we require movie theater owners to be there for us to distribute our film," Lynton told NPR's All Things Considered.

"We very much wanted to keep the picture in release. When the movie theaters decided that they could not put our movie in their theaters, we had no choice at that point but to not have the movie come out on the 25th of December," he said. "This was not our decision."

On Saturday, North Korea denied its involvement in the cyberattack against Sony Pictures and said it wanted to help the United States investigate the breach. But the regime also threatened "serious" consequences if Washington declined the offer.

the interview

hacking

North Korea

For many Norwegian-American families, the biggest Christmas treat isn't foil-wrapped chocolate or sugar-dusted cookies. It's lefse, a simple flatbread.

Lefse are sort of like soft tortillas, made mostly out of mashed potatoes (with a little fat and flour mixed in to form a tender dough). They're usually spread with butter and sugar, or rolled up with a bit of lingonberry jam. And families that make them make them by the dozens.

"It's probably one of the first foods I fell in love with," says Megan Walhood, who lives in Portland Ore., and has family roots in Norway. "The rest of the year, I would just think about, when are we going to have lefse again?"

The Salt

Why We Hold Tight To Our Family's Holiday Food Traditions

Walhood loves the unique toasty potato flavor. And, she says, "there's something so comforting about soft, starchy things."

For the Walhood family, that comfort goes way back.

Megan's dad, Dale Walhood, grew up in North Dakota, with a strong sense of his Norwegian heritage — and lefse. "On my father's side of the family, lefse arrived [with the family to the U.S.] in 1825, for the opening of the Erie Canal."

Many of the surrounding families in their rural part of North Dakota had similar roots. And it showed in the lefse. "Weddings and funerals and christenings. Anything that smacked of a lot of Norwegians there — yeah, there'd be stacks of it," Walhood remembers.

These days, lefse in America is pretty much reserved for Christmas (and, in some families, Thanksgiving). For the Walhoods, lefse-making is a true family project. Peggy Walhood, Megan's mother, has Swedish roots ("a mixed marriage," she laughs), but learned from her mother-in-law the art of wrapping up the still-warm lefse in towels to keep them soft and pliable.

As with many simple foods, much of it comes down to technique. The key to lefse, the Walhoods explain, is to keep things tender. That means chilling the mashed potatoes so that you only need a minimum of flour to form a dough, and rolling them nice and thin with a special grooved rolling pin.

"You want to roll it thin enough, and then also even," Megan Walhood explains. "You don't want to have a fat edge and a skinny edge, which are not the ideal. They're not approved by the 'Lefse Commission,' " she and her dad laugh.

There's even an art to shimmying a long flat stick — called a lefse stick — beneath the dough to transfer it to the griddle.

Then you brush off the extra flour, to keep it from either burning on the griddle or being absorbed and toughening the flatbread. It's a step that yields a nice finished product, but also a fair amount of floury mess. Dale Walhood jokes that cleanup was "about a six-hour vacuum job."

Once the lefse are finished, all warm and toasty and inviting, they're spread with butter and sugar. And devoured.

Carrying on the lefse tradition is especially poignant this year, the family says. Dale Walhood was diagnosed with cancer in the spring. They didn't think they'd get this Christmas together.

The Walhood lefse legacy extends far beyond this particular floury table. A few years back, Megan and her husband Jeremy opened a business and food truck in Portland, Ore., called Viking Soul Food. The entire menu is based around Dale's lefse.

"I'm incredibly proud of her," Dale says, nearly overcome. "Her sensitivity, and her dedication to quality. And I'm one of seven children, so they all look to her for their lefse."

Megan and Jeremy estimate that Viking Soul Food will turn about 250 pounds of potatoes into lefse this week — enough make memories on dozens of Christmas tables.

food traditions

Norway