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Julia Reed, Chronicler of Politics, Food and the South, Dies at 59 – The New York Times

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Julia Reed, an irreverent, expansive chronicler of politics, food and Southern life, died on Aug. 28 in Newport, R.I. She was 59.

The cause was cancer, said the historian Jon Meacham, a family friend. She had been on vacation visiting friends.

In reporting for Newsweek, Vogue, The New York Times Magazine and other publications, Ms. Reed covered presidents and their spouses, notably both Bushes and the Clintons, along with powerful women, country music, Southern rogues and Southern food. Her canvas was the foibles of power, and even though (or perhaps because) she was the daughter of a Nixon-era Republican grandee, she was cleareyed about the vices and virtues of both parties.

In her profile of Laura Bush in the run-up to the 2000 election, Ms. Reed wrote of the night early in her husband’s political career when Mrs. Bush told him a speech he had delivered wasn’t very good. “He drove into the garage wall,” Ms. Reed reported. “They’ve both grown a lot since then.”

In a statement to The New York Times, the Bushes wrote: “Julia was a longtime friend of ours. We loved to be with her because she was charming, observant, funny and irreverent. We’ll miss listening to her stories and laughing with her.”

Al Gore, Mr. Bush’s opponent in the 2000 election, also sent a statement. “She was an original,” he said, “one of the last who combined, among other things that seem to have passed, a deep knowledge and love of the self-conscious South and a command of the newsrooms in which she worked.”

Deeply imprinted by the Mississippi Delta traditions she grew up with, Ms. Reed was as well known for her entertaining as her journalism. In one of her many food columns for The New York Times Magazine, she described a New Year’s Eve party that had gone off the rails. There was a fistfight, more than one bathroom dalliance, the unmasking of an arms dealer, a fainting, a fire and more — all of which she missed but heard about secondhand by phone when she awoke with a hangover the next day.

“I have always said that danger — or at least the possibility of it — is a crucial element of any good party,” she wrote. “Parties thrive on secrets that are made or told, alliances formed, dalliances done, someone striking a match in someone else’s inappropriate heart.”

Credit…Barbara Davidson/Los Angeles Times, via Getty Images

Ms. Reed earned her first byline at 19, when she was a sophomore at Georgetown University in Washington and a part-time library assistant and phone answerer, as she put it, at Newsweek, a job she had help since she was a student at Madeira, an all-girls boarding school in Virginia.

When the school’s headmistress, Jean Harris, murdered her lover, Dr. Herman Tarnower, the celebrity doctor and creator of the Scarsdale Diet, Newsweek’s Washington bureau chief sent Ms. Reed to get the Madeira angle. As Ms. Reed wrote, he woke her up with an order to head back to her old school. When she wondered why, he barked, “You idiot, your headmistress just shot the diet doctor!”

Ms. Reed liked to say she was sorry the doctor had to give his life in service to her career as a journalist.

Julia Evans Reed was born on Sept. 11, 1960, in Greenville, Miss. Her mother, Judy (Brooks) Reed, came from a prominent Nashville family in the Belle Meade neighborhood there. Her father, Clarke Reed, was a businessman and Republican power broker who traveled frequently — “Saving the free world,” he liked to tell his daughter when she asked what he was up to — and entertained enthusiastically. Ms. Reed grew up cooking for William F. Buckley Jr. and George and Barbara Bush, among others.

Greenville was a place, as she wrote in “Ham Biscuits, Hostess Gowns, and Other Southern Specialties: An Entertaining Life With Recipes,” “where cooking was of paramount importance. We give food away as presents and peace offerings, and sometimes because it is just so incredibly good we have to share it. We tote it to people in times of grief (when my grandparents were killed in a car wreck, the first thing my mother told me to do as she ran out the door was to empty the refrigerator); we use it to say bon voyage or welcome back.”

Credit…Sonny Figoeroa/The New York Times

Ms. Reed was the author of eight books, many of them collections of her essays on food and the good life.

Mr. Meacham described her as a foreign correspondent in her own land, “filing dispatches about the sacred and the profane.”

Colleagues at Vogue recalled her as both larger than life and free from hubris — a rare combination at 350 Madison Avenue, Condé Nast’s old headquarters, where egos roamed free.

“We were both children of the South, but from opposite ends of the spectrum,” said André Leon Talley, the longtime Vogue editor. “She was like a brassy marquise at Versailles, and at the same time a big hunky dose of Babe Paley, Nancy Mitford, Rosalind Russell and Tallulah Bankhead, with that cognac whiskey voice.”

In the wake of her death, many tried to describe her distinctive baritone. “She sounded like Barbara Stanwyck in ‘Meet John Doe,’ if Stanwyck was from the Mississippi Delta,” Hilton Als of The New Yorker wrote on Instagram.

Mr. Talley also recounted the story of Ms. Reed’s aborted marriage to a charming Australian foreign correspondent. She canceled the wedding, a full-on Southern affair with nearly 1,000 guests, but the couple went on their honeymoon anyway — it was paid for, after all — ending up at the Ritz in Paris, where they met Mr. Talley, and holding court in the bar until the early hours of the morning, with characters as various as Madonna’s bodyguards, Kate Moss, Johnny Depp and Arlene Dahl.

“It was couture week, so everybody was there,” Mr. Talley explained.

Writing about that night six years later in Vogue, Ms. Reed called it “one of the most memorable evenings of my life.”

Ms. Reed’s marriage to John Pearce, a New Orleans lawyer with whom she renovated a house in the garden district there, ended in divorce in 2016. She is survived by her parents and a brother, Clarke Reed Jr. Another brother, Reynolds Crews Reed, died in 2019.

Credit…Paul Costello

Ms. Reed was a sought-after speaker, by all accounts a born entertainer — energetic, savvy and hilarious. In 2013, she took over the Delta Hot Tamale Festival in Greenville, turning a small local fair into three-day national literary and culinary extravaganza to benefit her hometown. The event concluded with a raucous barbecue on a sandbar.

Last year, Ms. Reed opened an online home goods store, Reed Smythe & Company, with her friend Keith Smythe Meacham. The store sells pieces inspired by Ms. Reed’s own taste — bronze drawer pulls shaped like the head of her beagle, Henry; porcelain plates; engraved note cards — many of which are made by Southern artisans. Last year Mississippi’s arts commission named Ms. Reed a cultural ambassador to the state. A few months ago she also opened a bookstore, Brown Water Books, in downtown Greenville.

Since 2011, Ms. Reed had been a columnist at Garden & Gun. Her last piece, posted last week, was about bedbugs and other vermin.

David DiBenedetto, the magazine’s editor, explained what it was like working with Ms. Reed. “We had standard deadlines and Julia’s deadline,” he wrote in an email. “And her excuses for filing late were often as entertaining as the actual columns or features themselves.”

On one particularly hairy occasion, he said, it was really down to the wire. The editors were sending pages to the printer when Mr. DiBenedetto received an email from Ms. Reed. It read: “Just landed in Dallas this second. Polished up at least 1,500 words before computer ran out of juice. Gonna send that when I get to the hotel and will finish the rest tonight after dinner with Laura Bush. She doesn’t drink so it will happen.”

“The piece was fabulous, as always,” he said, adding, “We were all voyeurs, in a way, her readers and editors, to a life so much larger — and more fun — than our own.”

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‘Disgraceful:’ N.S. Tory leader slams school’s request that military remove uniform

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November 8, 2024

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HALIFAX – Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston says it’s “disgraceful and demeaning” that a Halifax-area school would request that service members not wear military uniforms to its Remembrance Day ceremony.

Houston’s comments were part of a chorus of criticism levelled at the school — Sackville Heights Elementary — whose administration decided to back away from the plan after the outcry.

A November newsletter from the school in Middle Sackville, N.S., invited Armed Forces members to attend its ceremony but asked that all attendees arrive in civilian attire to “maintain a welcoming environment for all.”

Houston, who is currently running for re-election, accused the school’s leaders of “disgracing themselves while demeaning the people who protect our country” in a post on the social media platform X Thursday night.

“If the people behind this decision had a shred of the courage that our veterans have, this cowardly and insulting idea would have been rejected immediately,” Houston’s post read. There were also several calls for resignations within the school’s administration attached to Houston’s post.

In an email to families Thursday night, the school’s principal, Rachael Webster, apologized and welcomed military family members to attend “in the attire that makes them most comfortable.”

“I recognize this request has caused harm and I am deeply sorry,” Webster’s email read, adding later that the school has the “utmost respect for what the uniform represents.”

Webster said the initial request was out of concern for some students who come from countries experiencing conflict and who she said expressed discomfort with images of war, including military uniforms.

Her email said any students who have concerns about seeing Armed Forces members in uniform can be accommodated in a way that makes them feel safe, but she provided no further details in the message.

Webster did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

At a news conference Friday, Houston said he’s glad the initial request was reversed but said he is still concerned.

“I can’t actually fathom how a decision like that was made,” Houston told reporters Friday, adding that he grew up moving between military bases around the country while his father was in the Armed Forces.

“My story of growing up in a military family is not unique in our province. The tradition of service is something so many of us share,” he said.

“Saying ‘lest we forget’ is a solemn promise to the fallen. It’s our commitment to those that continue to serve and our commitment that we will pass on our respects to the next generation.”

Liberal Leader Zach Churchill also said he’s happy with the school’s decision to allow uniformed Armed Forces members to attend the ceremony, but he said he didn’t think it was fair to question the intentions of those behind the original decision.

“We need to have them (uniforms) on display at Remembrance Day,” he said. “Not only are we celebrating (veterans) … we’re also commemorating our dead who gave the greatest sacrifice for our country and for the freedoms we have.”

NDP Leader Claudia Chender said that while Remembrance Day is an important occasion to honour veterans and current service members’ sacrifices, she said she hopes Houston wasn’t taking advantage of the decision to “play politics with this solemn occasion for his own political gain.”

“I hope Tim Houston reached out to the principal of the school before making a public statement,” she said in a statement.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 8, 2024.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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Saskatchewan NDP’s Beck holds first caucus meeting after election, outlines plans

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November 8, 2024

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REGINA – Saskatchewan Opposition NDP Leader Carla Beck says she wants to prove to residents her party is the government in waiting as she heads into the incoming legislative session.

Beck held her first caucus meeting with 27 members, nearly double than what she had before the Oct. 28 election but short of the 31 required to form a majority in the 61-seat legislature.

She says her priorities will be health care and cost-of-living issues.

Beck says people need affordability help right now and will press Premier Scott Moe’s Saskatchewan Party government to cut the gas tax and the provincial sales tax on children’s clothing and some grocery items.

Beck’s NDP is Saskatchewan’s largest Opposition in nearly two decades after sweeping Regina and winning all but one seat in Saskatoon.

The Saskatchewan Party won 34 seats, retaining its hold on all of the rural ridings and smaller cities.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 8, 2024.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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Nova Scotia election: Liberals say province’s immigration levels are too high

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November 7, 2024

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HALIFAX – Nova Scotia‘s growing population was the subject of debate on Day 12 of the provincial election campaign, with Liberal Leader Zach Churchill arguing immigration levels must be reduced until the province can provide enough housing and health-care services.

Churchill said Thursday a plan by the incumbent Progressive Conservatives to double the province’s population to two million people by the year 2060 is unrealistic and unsustainable.

“That’s a big leap and it’s making life harder for people who live here, (including ) young people looking for a place to live and seniors looking to downsize,” he told a news conference at his campaign headquarters in Halifax.

Anticipating that his call for less immigration might provoke protests from the immigrant community, Churchill was careful to note that he is among the third generation of a family that moved to Nova Scotia from Lebanon.

“I know the value of immigration, the importance of it to our province. We have been built on the backs of an immigrant population. But we just need to do it in a responsible way.”

The Liberal leader said Tim Houston’s Tories, who are seeking a second term in office, have made a mistake by exceeding immigration targets set by the province’s Department of Labour and Immigration. Churchill said a Liberal government would abide by the department’s targets.

In the most recent fiscal year, the government welcomed almost 12,000 immigrants through its nominee program, exceeding the department’s limit by more than 4,000, he said. The numbers aren’t huge, but the increase won’t help ease the province’s shortages in housing and doctors, and the increased strain on its infrastructure, including roads, schools and cellphone networks, Churchill said.

“(The Immigration Department) has done the hard work on this,” he said. “They know where the labour gaps are, and they know what growth is sustainable.”

In response, Houston said his commitment to double the population was a “stretch goal.” And he said the province had long struggled with a declining population before that trend was recently reversed.

“The only immigration that can come into this province at this time is if they are a skilled trade worker or a health-care worker,” Houston said. “The population has grown by two per cent a year, actually quite similar growth to what we experienced under the Liberal government before us.”

Still, Houston said he’s heard Nova Scotians’ concerns about population growth, and he then pivoted to criticize Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for trying to send 6,000 asylum seekers to Nova Scotia, an assertion the federal government has denied.

Churchill said Houston’s claim about asylum seekers was shameful.

“It’s smoke and mirrors,” the Liberal leader said. “He is overshooting his own department’s numbers for sustainable population growth and yet he is trying to blame this on asylum seekers … who aren’t even here.”

In September, federal Immigration Minister Marc Miller said there is no plan to send any asylum seekers to the province without compensation or the consent of the premier. He said the 6,000 number was an “aspirational” figure based on models that reflect each province’s population.

In Halifax, NDP Leader Claudia Chender said it’s clear Nova Scotia needs more doctors, nurses and skilled trades people.

“Immigration has been and always will be a part of the Nova Scotia story, but we need to build as we grow,” Chender said. “This is why we have been pushing the Houston government to build more affordable housing.”

Chender was in a Halifax cafe on Thursday when she promised her party would remove the province’s portion of the harmonized sales tax from all grocery, cellphone and internet bills if elected to govern on Nov. 26. The tax would also be removed from the sale and installation of heat pumps.

“Our focus is on helping people to afford their lives,” Chender told reporters. “We know there are certain things that you can’t live without: food, internet and a phone …. So we know this will have the single biggest impact.”

The party estimates the measure would save the average Nova Scotia family about $1,300 a year.

“That’s a lot more than a one or two per cent HST cut,” Chender said, referring to the Progressive Conservative pledge to reduce the tax by one percentage point and the Liberal promise to trim it by two percentage points.

Elsewhere on the campaign trail, Houston announced that a Progressive Conservative government would make parking free at all Nova Scotia hospitals and health-care centres. The promise was also made by the Liberals in their election platform released Monday.

“Free parking may not seem like a big deal to some, but … the parking, especially for people working at the facilities, can add up to hundreds of dollars,” the premier told a news conference at his campaign headquarters in Halifax.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 7, 2024.

— With files from Keith Doucette in Halifax

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