The Deadly Challenges of War Coverage in Gaza - The New Yorker | Three Great Football Coaches Crossed Paths for Years, and Now They’re Leaving Together - The New Yorker | Naomi Osaka Is Returning to Tennis Right When the Game Needs Her - The New Yorker | How Israel’s Inspection Process Is Obstructing Aid Delivery

You Might Like

The Deadly Challenges of War Coverage in Gaza - The New Yorker (Full Access)

On December 12th, the CNN correspondent Clarissa Ward became the first Western reporter to enter Gaza without an I.D.F. escort since the war began. Crammed into the back seat of a car, she and her crew captured images of the bombed-out buildings and streets of Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza which shares a border with Egypt. According to one recent U.N. estimate, eighty-five per cent of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents had fled there. Crowds milled outside a bakery, and parents walked hand in hand with their children past mountains of rubble. “The Israeli military says it has hit Gaza with more than twenty-two thousand strikes,” Ward said during the ride. “That by far surpasses anything we’ve seen in modern warfare in terms of intensity and ferocity, and we really, honestly, are just getting a glimpse of it here.”

Since the start of the Israeli invasion, it has been largely Arab media that have provided the world with on-the-ground reporting from Gaza, where the death toll has surpassed an estimated twenty-three thousand in just three months. The coverage is often harrowing and raw. A recent live report from Rafah by the Al Jazeera reporter Hani Mahmoud captured what sounded like the whine of a plane overhead and several missiles hitting a group of buildings, one after the other, sending plumes of dense black smoke into the air. “Oh, my God,” Mahmoud can be heard saying after ducking out of the frame to take cover. “That’s the hospital!” According to a later Al Jazeera report, the strike did not hit the hospital but nearby residential buildings, killing at least ten people.

As of Friday, eighty-two journalists have been killed in Gaza; many others have lost family members. In October, Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief, Wael Al-Dahdouh, was informed during an on-air report that members of his family had fallen victim to an air strike; his wife, teen-age son, seven-year-old daughter, and infant grandson were killed. On Sunday, his twenty-seven-year-old son, Hamza, who also worked for Al Jazeera, was killed in a separate Israeli air strike—which Al Jazeera, in a statement, called an “assassination.” (The I.D.F. released its own statement saying that Hamza was a member of a “Gaza-based” terrorist organization and had been operating a drone “posing a threat” to Israeli troops. Al Jazeera disputes that the pair were operating a drone, and the families of the men denied that they were part of any terrorist organization.) In December, Dahdouh himself was injured while on assignment with the Al Jazeera cameraman Samer Abu Daqqa, who bled out and died from his wounds following an Israeli air strike. Salman Al Bashir, a journalist for Palestine TV, which is run by the Palestinian Authority, wept during his report on the death of his colleague Mohammed Abu Hatab and eleven of Abu Hatab’s family members in an air strike. “We are victims, live on air,” Bashir said, removing his press helmet and body armor, which he said offered only the illusion of protection.

Continued here

You Might Like

Three Great Football Coaches Crossed Paths for Years, and Now They’re Leaving Together - The New Yorker (Full Access)

In 1979, Pete Carroll, then twenty-eight years old, was a secondary coach at Ohio State. One former colleague remembered how he'd sit at his desk, listening to the Beach Boys with a smile on his face. But behind the smile was a ruthless competitor, a student of aggressive defensive schemes, and, the next year, he left to become the defensive coÃ¶rdinator at North Carolina State. His replacement was another twenty-eight-year-old, Nick Saban, who'd been the defensive-backs coach at West Virginia. Saban was different from Carroll, more punctilious but no less competitive or curious about defenses, with an unusually keen eye for identifying talent. Even so, two years later, Saban was fired, along with most of Ohio State's defensive staff.

He moved to Navy for a year, where he worked alongside a scout named Steve Belichick. At Belichick's house for dinner one day, Saban began a friendship with Steve's son, Bill, who was also a football coach, and roughly the same age. The relationship deepened a few years later, when Saban and Bill met up in West Point to discuss the complexities of the Cover Two defense. By then, Saban was on the staff of the Houston Oilers, and Belichick was the defensive coÃ¶rdinator for the New York Giants. The meeting was covert; fraternizing with the enemy was not allowed. But, when Belichick became the head coach of the Cleveland Browns, in 1991, he hired Saban to be his defensive coÃ¶rdinator. During their first three seasons together, the Browns were a losing team. Then, in 1994, the defense was among the league's best, and the team went 11-5 and won a wild-card playoff game before being blown out by the Steelers. Saban left to become the head coach of Michigan State.

Belichick and Saban respected each other, and knew enough to learn from each other, though they clashed. Belichick was notoriously stony and hard-driving, with a conservative play-calling approach; Saban was dynamic and fiery. Saban later called his time in Cleveland "the most difficult four years I ever had in my life." But he also said that he learned how to run a team there, from observing Belichick's obsession with detail, his clear expectations, his organizational control.

Continued here

You Might Like

Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium

Naomi Osaka Is Returning to Tennis Right When the Game Needs Her - The New Yorker (Full Access)

“And I don’t want to be here,” Naomi Osaka said, almost six years ago, to Sascha Bajin, her coach at the time. “Here” was a tennis stadium in Charleston, South Carolina, in April, 2018, midmatch, during a changeover. Osaka was down a set and a break and she had had it, not just with the match. Maybe it was the attention, sudden and outsized, that had come with her winning the BNP Paribas Open, in Indian Wells, California, the previous month—her first title, and on one of the sport’s biggest stages. Maybe it was that the prize money and sponsor bonuses she’d earned with that victory allowed her to realize what she then considered one of her biggest goals as a player: to earn enough to allow her mother to retire. Maybe it was everything that it had taken, since she was three, to get her tennis to that level: the abrupt childhood moves, from Japan to Long Island to Florida; the daily grind of practice until evening and homeschooling at night; the lack of friends and the pressure to perform and her mother working long hours at whatever office jobs she could find so that Osaka’s father might make of her and her older sister what Richard Williams had made of Venus and Serena. Osaka would later say, about what happened on court in Charleston, “I just woke up . . . before one of my matches and I was just thinking, like, What is the point of my life?” She was twenty years old.

The 2024 Australian Open is getting under way, and it will mark Osaka’s return to Grand Slam tennis after she gave birth, last July, to a daughter named Shai, which is Hebrew for “gift.” Since she won the Australian Open for the second time, three years ago, Osaka has rarely played at a title-contending level; before her pregnancy, she was hampered by injuries and by strains to her mental health. Last year, she described her mood after that Australian Open win, her fourth victory at a major: “I’m, like, I need to do something about it because I don’t want to keep living this way.” At that moment, no female tennis player in the world had been creating more excitement or making more money than she.

Her struggles, along with her triumphs, are detailed in “Naomi Osaka: Her Journey to Finding Her Power and Her Voice,” a thorough and deeply reported biography by Ben Rothenberg, a veteran tennis writer with a passion for the women’s game. He first met Osaka when she was a teen-ager still learning to control the power that would enable her to realize her father’s highest hopes, at least on hard courts. The book is most absorbing in the passages—and they are numerous—in which Rothenberg portrays a young woman who is made neither comfortable nor happy by doing what she was molded to do. Osaka was able to fend off her darkest turns, and jangly bouts of anxiety, long enough to play extraordinary tennis at Grand Slam tournaments, but how she did so is a mystery—to her, it would seem, and also to Rothenberg. Her frame of mind in Charleston six years ago lasted, on and off, for months, Rothenberg writes. But she rallied toward the end of that summer to win the U.S. Open, defeating Serena Williams in the most tempestuous major final in memory. Then came another bout of depression, and another, and another.

Continued here

You Might Like

How Israel’s Inspection Process Is Obstructing Aid Delivery - The New Yorker (Full Access)

Last week, the Democratic senators Jeff Merkley and Chris Van Hollen travelled to the Rafah border crossing in Egypt, the entry point for many of the aid trucks into the Gaza Strip. The humanitarian situation in Gaza, where more than twenty-three thousand people are estimated to have been killed in Israel's military campaign, is extremely dire, and the number of trucks full of food and medicine and other vital goods is insufficient. As recently as Thursday, the United Nations reported that only a hundred and forty-five trucks entered Gaza through Rafah and Israel's Kerem Shalom crossing, which is close to Rafah, but on the Israeli side; human-rights groups have stated that more than three times that many are required. Israel contends that aid trucks have to be closely scrutinized to insure that weapons are not being smuggled into Gaza, but after watching the inspection process at Rafah, Merkley and Van Hollen called the Israeli approach "arbitrary."

I recently spoke by phone with Senator Van Hollen, of Maryland, who was elected to the position in 2016, after serving seven terms in the House of Representatives. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed his view of the problems with the American-Israeli relationship, why so little aid is reaching Gazans, and whether Israel is concerned with the humanitarian situation in Gaza.

The purpose was twofold. The first was to go to the Rafah border crossing to see firsthand what the humanitarian situation was in Gaza and whether there were steps we could take to improve it. And we found a humanitarian crisis that was bad and getting worse, and we made observations on why that was the case and what we could be doing to improve the situation.

Continued here