A Cookless Thanksgiving and the "Zipless F---"

I didn’t bake or cook one single thing for Thanksgiving.

Last year, we hosted a big Thanksgiving dinner - the kind where you cobble together a big table and stretch it out into the foyer - with our extended, blended family.

But this year, we had a lot of moving parts, including the fact that I was guest hosting Weekend Edition Sunday. There was a lot of ground to cover, literally and metaphorically, and not much time.

Can you guess which NPR colleague named Scott left this for me in the studio? (Hint: he hosts an evening show, not a morning one!) /Sarah McCammon

Thanksgiving day itself started with brunch with one part of the family in one state and ended with turkey and pie with another (neighboring state). Then, a visit from my sister on Saturday. And before and after and in between - recording lots of segments for Weekend Edition.

So I let other people do the cooking this year, and I feel mostly okay with that.

Instead, I was cooking up a bunch of radio segments.

Guest hosting for holidays is always a fun challenge - we’re typically working around thinner staffing across the network, potential interviewees’ vacation schedules, and the demands of the holiday itself. That means planning ahead - days or sometimes weeks in advance - to schedule segments that will round out the show and make sure you have something great to listen to while you hang out in your pajamas noshing on leftovers (that’s what I like to picture you all doing on holiday weekend mornings, anyway!).

So for this week, we prepped segments like this interview with the producer for New Orleans blues legend Walter “Wolfman” Washington, whose gorgeous, and sadly, posthumous, final album was recently released. We also had this really fun conversation with Molly Jong-Fast, a writer and podcaster in her own right and the daughter of Erica Jong. Jong’s classic feminist novel Fear of Flying is turning 50 this year. Despite being married, the main character in Jong’s book - revolutionary in 1973 for its frank discussions of female sexuality - famously fantasized about the “zipless fuck” - the kind of easy, very hot, consequence-free sex that she longed for.

To mark this half-century, I half-expected Jong-Fast (who, like me, is in her 40s and was born after the book was written) to describe the novel and her mother - who is still living but suffers from memory problems - in hagiographic terms. But instead, Jong-Fast spoke with raw frankness about both the personal advantages and costs that accrued from having such a famous mom, and the limitations of her mother’s advice to her readers about romantic relationships:

“I love her so much, and she is such a fabulous woman. She had some of the worst advice for me I'd ever gotten in my life - I mean, just incredibly bad advice. So I pray to God that these women never got a letter back. Look. You don't get married four times without having some judgment issues.”

~Molly Jong-Fast, on readers who asked for advice from her mother, writer Erica Jong, who wrote ‘Fear of Flying’ 50 years ago

The world doesn’t stop because Americans are eating turkey.

So in addition to the things we can plan for, there are lots of things we can’t. We spent much of holiday weekend watching for news from Israel, where after an hours-long delay on Saturday, a second group of hostages was released by Hamas in exchange for Palestinian prisoners released by Israeli authorities.

A third exchange unfolded on Sunday, and because the show “rolls over” as we call it - broadcasting first in the Eastern Time Zone and then repeating with updates as needed as listeners wake up in the Central, Mountain, and Pacific zones, we spent the morning and early afternoon regularly updating the show with news for listeners across the country. That meant fresh, live conversations with my colleagues Asma Khalid, for the White House perspective, and Greg Myre, reporting from Tel Aviv.

For more context on the Israel-Hamas war:

• I talked with Itay Raviv, whose 9-year-old cousin Ohad and two other family members were released by Hamas on Friday. Raviv told me, “They seem fine physically; mentally, they’re still in shock” after being held for almost 50 days in Gaza. He said they were slowly coming to understand the full scope of the terrorist attacks of October 7th, which killed another family member. The boy’s grandfather, Abraham, is still being held by Hamas, as far as they know.

• I also spoke with retired General Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, former head of U.S. Central Command, about Israel’s military strategy in the West Bank, which is not controlled by Hamas. Big picture, McKenzie told me he believes Israel’s goal is to avoid a wider regional war while eliminating Hamas and quashing terrorist activity in the West Bank. The end game, he said, should likely involve a two-state solution that “probably has to involve the Palestine Authority or some other Arab entity from a coalition of nations that might be willing to contribute…So bloody as this fight might seem right now, this conflict brings an opportunity, perhaps, for a reset.”

How was your Thanksgiving? Did you cook more than I did (literally anything)? Anyway, I guess it’s time to start Christmas/Hanukkah shopping…