Helen Rosner Ferments at Home, Plus Dexter Filkins on Saudi Arabia

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 4 December 2018

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

One of the hot trends in the food world is one of the oldest: fermentation. No longer just for beer and sauerkraut, fermentation—which Helen Rosner calls “bacteria engaging with your food”—is the subject of cookbooks, and the specialty of destination restaurants like Noma, in Copenhagen, which has been called the world’s best restaurant for several years. René Redzepi, the chef at Noma, and David Zilber, the director of its fermentation lab, visited Rosner’s home kitchen to give her a lesson. A couple of weeks later, after the microbes had done their work, she brought some highly unusual fermented snacks to share with David Remnick. Plus, Dexter Filkins traces the rise to power of the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. Long before the international furor over the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi—back when bin Salman was still being hailed as a reformer—Filkins says that he eliminated political opponents, cracked down on the press, extorted other wealthy royals, and arrested human-rights activists.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios.
0:10.6	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:14.3	The killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi continues to royal Washington and much of the world.
0:19.7	The president, for his part, stands firmly behind crown prince Muhammad bin Salman.
0:25.6	Donald Trump has claimed that we don't really know if bin Salman was implicated in the murder
0:30.1	or not dismissing the CIA's own conclusion that he was.
0:34.5	But the thrust of Trump's reasoning is that the Saudi government is, after all, our ally,
0:39.6	and it's just not our business, who they kill. It's also not good business.
0:44.8	Earlier this year, Dexter Filkins published a long article in the magazine about bin Salman,
0:49.3	how he had consolidated his power, how he was going to take power very soon, and his relationship with the Trump
0:55.6	administration was also discussed, and what Dexter found was extremely troubling. I talked with Dexter
1:01.2	in April, and at that time, bin Salman was still being widely hailed as the great modernizer of
1:07.5	Saudi Arabia, and he was making a huge impression on the world stage.
1:12.3	As somebody put it to me, an American diplomat, we're used to, you know, when we get on the
1:17.9	phone with the king of Saudi Arabia, he's 85 years old, and he's kind of half asleep, and he mumbles
1:22.6	a lot, and then the phone calls over. And this guy talks, you know, he's, he's engaged. He's 32 years old.
1:28.8	He's 32 years old. He's, he's ambitious, he's impatient, he's charming, he's charismatic, he's
1:34.9	tall, he's on the make. So even as crown prince, MBS has been making some liberalizing
1:42.2	moves. He's promised to overhaul the Saudi economy. He's lifted
1:47.0	restrictions, including women driving. Is he offering real reform? Yes, but it's important to
1:54.0	distinguish what kind of reforms. He definitely wants to open up the economy. There's a lot of
1:59.6	economic reforms that he's initiated. He's trying to restrain the economy. There's a lot of economic reforms that he's initiated.
	...

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