James Harding

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast.

0:30They're kid-proof, pet-friendly, and built for everyday life. Plus, changeable fabric covers let you refresh your sofa whenever you want. Need flexibility? Our modular design lets you rearrange your sofa anytime to fit your space, whether it's a growing family room or a cozy apartment. Plus, they're earth-friendly and trusted by over 200 ,000 happy customers. It's time to upgrade to a stress-free, mess-proof sofa. Visit washablesofas.com today and save. That's washablesofas.com Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply You are listening to Ruthie's Table 4 in partnership with Montclair Recently, talking with friends about the type of movies we liked most my vote was for movies about journalism and newspapers, His Girl Friday broadcast news, The Insider and most of all, All the President's Men I don't need to watch a movie to see my favorite journalist I just call my great friend James Harding, the youngest ever editor of the Times, Washington editor of the Financial Times, and head of BBC News.

1:35In 2018, he founded Tortoise, an online news platform, and his vision for the principle of responsible deep journalism, slow news in the age of high-speed information overwhelm. Richard and I were committed supporters from the very first day, and it was then that James and my names for each other changed. I became Mrs. Graham, Catherine Graham of the Washington Post, and he became Ben, as in Ben Bradley, her brave and brilliant editor. James and I speak often about what's happening in the world, our families, what he's writing, where he is going, and a lot more. Today we're in the River Cafe to talk about food and memories, two friends, a journalist and a cook together.

2:20That's what I call news. Ben, or should I say James, has chosen a recipe for horseradish to read today on the podcast. Why did you choose horseradish? Well, hold on, before I do that, can I just tell you my favorite Mrs. Graham story? Yes. So, when I was in Washington, I was with the F team. I ended up meeting this couple, R.W. Apple Jr., who was the Washington Bureau Chief of the New York Times, Johnny Apple, they called him. And his wife was Betsy Apple, this absolutely extraordinary kind of southern character. And she was very good friends with Catherine Graham. And they'd been friends, she told me at this dinner, they'd been friends for about 18, 20 years.

3:06And one day, Mrs. Graham, and everyone in the Washington Post called her Mrs. Graham. She was obviously the steel, the kind of backbone to the paper all the way through Watergate. she'd called Betsy and said Betsy we've been friends for a long time now maybe you'd like to start calling me Kay and Betsy Apple said you know that's so lovely of you Kay of course I'd be honoured of course I'll call you Kay and there was a pause and then she said in public you're probably going to want to still call me Mrs Graham and I've always thought that was such a kind of Washington moment you know your place right you know your place and I went back years later to interview Mrs Graham she had this kind of salon and I interviewed Ben Bradley I interviewed the two of them so and Bradley had so she was in her salon in Washington in you know Georgetown and he had an office up in the old post building and by then he was no longer executive editor of the paper but he was still had a place that he looked exactly like that Jason Robards character and all the president's men.

4:12And behind him, he had a cork board. And he collected on his cork board, corrections and errors in newspapers, he cut them out of newspapers, and he put them on. And he read one out to me that was like 400 words long. It was just a layer upon layer of mistake, and error, and neglect and misjudgment. And I remember him talking about it, as if he was describing a martini. He said at the end, now that is a correction with a twist. and it was his ideal of it. Okay, so let's read the recipe for horseradish. Fresh horseradish sauce. Okay. 100 grams of fresh horseradish, one tablespoon, does this even qualify as a recipe?

4:53Yeah, of course it is. Okay, good. One tablespoon of red wine vinegar, 150 milliliters of creme fraiche, salt and freshly ground pepper. There are only three main ingredients in this sauce, so their quality is important. look for a horseradish root that is firm and clean free of cuts and deep blemishes the whiter the flesh of the horseradish the fresher it is and for the vinegar we use vulpire vinegar made on an estate in tuscany and the creme fraiche adds creaminess and balance to the sauce the freshness of this sauce makes all the difference compared to one in a jar there you go so why of all the recipes uh 37 years well the restaurant's been 37 our first cookbook was 1994 but what made you think about using horseradish as a recipe so i've been lucky to come to the river cafe and then you find yourself looking at this amazing menu and every time doing that annoying thing to the brilliant people who come and ask you for your order looking at the menu thinking long and hard about what you're going to have, deciding what you're going to have, the person arrives, indecision strikes, you're in the grip of it, and then eventually what happens is I'll order the beef with the horseradish because of the horseradish, because it's kind of creamy and strong and just irresistible, and I've got a soft spot for condiments, and all of those pickles and chutneys and chili based.

6:28But horseradish is one that is, I'm sure there's a word for it, Ruthie, I don't know what it is, that mixture of something that is sweet and sharp and spicy all at the same time, and yours is the best in the world. The horseradish, and I say this having done the work, I've really had a look at a lot of horseradishes and this horseradish sauce is the best. There you go. So we will go back to the early days, as we could start at the beginning. You grew up in a household in North London. So on my father's side, my family came from Germany. We're German Jews, came in 1936. Where in Germany? Berlin.

7:07The family was Herchevitz. My grandmother, Elsie, my daughter's called Elsie, my grandmother Elsie was this incredibly strong character, pulled everyone together. the family table, the Friday night table was incredibly important place. The food was terrible. Like she was completely sure you can ask all members of the family. It's one of those family facts. You know, there are very few things that all families can agree on. But the fact that granny's food was just terrible. She, she was a big smoker, 80 to 120 a day, silk cut. And And she would cook with the cigarette and the ash would just bend slowly, dipping.

7:50Would it fall into the boiling pot of tongue that she was cooking? Yes. Yes, it would fall. And so you would watch this whole thing happen. Do you think she didn't want to cook? I don't think she wanted to cook. She probably didn't want to. She sounds like a cracking woman. She was an amazing woman. So her story was that she wanted to be a journalist. She wanted to be a journalist and actually at home I have her old Erica typewriter next to my desk. In 33 when the Nazis came in one of the first things they did was bar Jews from working in journalism. And so she left in 36 and she definitely would have been one of those journalists who was a great eater rather than a great feeder.

8:37She was someone who cared a lot about ideas and opinions and politics, and she had loads of that of her own. But you're right, she didn't love the cooking. Funnily enough, on my mum's side, my mother's family were Jews who'd gone from Manchester to Cape Town. My great-grandfather had TB. They moved there to South Africa. That side of the family were really, really lovers of food, of cooking and cakes and fruit. and my mum, to my great good fortune, is an amazing cook. Is she? Yeah, a wonderful cook. And all of those sweet things, you know, as I said, chocolate cakes and fruit cakes and sponges, but also chickens and casseroles and soups.

9:23And that, you can even hear in my voice, that feeling of just being taken care of by food. Your father is a very well-known doctor. Tell me about him. Funny and alive and interested in everything. In food? Loves food, but I would say loves meals with people even more. Yeah. Did he ever cook? Did a male ever go into your kitchen? Did your father? He was. I don't remember much. The moment that I remember with my dad around the stove was I slipped trying to climb over a barbed wire fence when I was, I can't remember, like six, seven, eight. and I remember my dad had made us breakfast, scrambled eggs.

10:02Every day he made you breakfast? No, this was a Saturday morning, I think, and I'd gashed my throat. It was cut under my throat and it needed stitches and I remember my dad washing out the pot from the scrambled eggs, boiling the water to sterilise the sutures and then stitching me up on the kitchen table. I remember thinking, that's quite a lot of use of the pot in the morning. That's a lot. Yeah. Yeah. So you grew up in a house where food from your grandparents, whether your grandmother's a great cook or not, there was food and discussion and around the table. Would you come home from school?

10:39How many siblings did you have? My sister. So my sister and I would sit there and we'd have supper together. Do you remember your typical dinner in your house? Yes, we were talkers. I'm sure that now that our kids, we've got two, 13, and 11, And I think you're always re-remembering, idealizing a version of a dinner that may have actually only happened twice in your entire teenage years. But the idea of sitting at the table, eating, and the one thing that is absolutely repeating is that my parents were endlessly exhausted and frustrated by my table manners. And that turns out to be hereditary. so I'm doing the same thing So was that painful?

11:28Did they sit at the table and correct you the whole time? I had a French friend and I said you have the most incredible posture and she said I said that's great, how did your parents do it? She said I have only terrible memories of my childhood because every meal I sat at I had to sit up straight I ended up with good posture but I really don't like sitting down to dinner anymore but I can't imagine it was that bad It wasn't bad at all, it wasn't bad at all You know, that was the noise. And I think with my kids, it's the same. Yeah. And when you left this cocoon of a home being cared for, and then you were at Cambridge, were you?

12:07Yes. And was that a shock? It was an incredible shock. Just, I mean, you know, have you ever just driven up there in part? I remember standing in front of the collage, and it looked like a palace. You know, it was just an amazing place. But I don't associate it with food. I associate it with architecture and light and trees and obviously people, overwhelmingly people, and a pub with beer and crisps, you know, and a lot of hanging about. But I don't... It's funny, actually. I can't think of a time in my life where I think less about food. Yeah, I think you're not alone. So you were writing at that time?

12:56It was 92, so it was a weird time, actually. People looking for work, you know, coming out of university wasn't easy. And there was this amazing program to go and learn Japanese. And I learned Japanese. There was a rather wonderful, eccentric man who'd run a big Japanese firm who'd set up this scholarship program. And there were seven of us. We all learned Japanese for a year at SOAS. and then went out to work in Tokyo for a year. And it was just absolutely life-changing because you'd suddenly seen the world in a completely different way. The start of it was a homestay, and there was the first experience of food that was really different.

13:39What was that like, domestic Japanese food? I'd done it while I was at university. I did a number of trips, which really threw me into a world of different food. I'd done my first real piece of journalism. I'd gone into Pakistan and into southern Afghanistan. I remember eating kind of wobbly white sheet fat out of a pile of rice and thinking, okay, this is different. And then I remember arriving in Japan, going on this homestay up in Kushiro, up in Hokkaido, and thinking, okay, this is really a different breakfast. We are into... What would you have for Japanese breakfast? So they would give us a thing called natto, which was this it's a sort of fermented very fermented bean and you'd have it with rice it was very sticky it had a really pungent smell to it and funnily enough you know i'm sitting here in your cheese room it's the equivalent of taking a japanese person to the cheese room the the most painful and unfun and unwelcome thing but for breakfast but then you sort of you kind of nearly got into it and you sort of were getting into it to impress your japanese hosts but as soon as you could do anything like toast you were back back for that so japan changed the way i ate tell me more about food in tokyo so you were so there was a job you had to work so i had so what you did is you went to go and learn japanese in the morning and then we were all placed in a different place of work i worked in the office of a politician the chief cabinet secretary of japan a guy called kato koichi and i remember on the first day arriving and it was one political scandal after or another I arrived in my office building and there were police fans outside the office building because one of the king makers of the Japanese political party the the LDP had been found to have bars of gold in his desk drawer it was that it was it was that but I spent a year there there was a hierarchy of duties the most important to them was probably photocopying and tea and then And sometimes I could pretend that I was...

15:41Did you learn to make tea? It was really not very hard. It was like it was pour the boiling water in. But I did go and do things, some of those things you'd expect, the tea ceremony. The Japanese tea ceremony, yeah. But food was an incredibly important part of life in Japan because the days were very, very long. The office days went often until sort of 11 midnight. You'd have these late-night meetings with Japanese journalists. So the chief cabinet secretary ran background briefings with, in effect, the Tokyo political reporting teams. And they would come to his flat. And my job was to serve the tea and hang up the coats and then just sit and listen.

16:23And it was an absolutely fascinating window on Japanese politics. And then occasionally I would be asked to write a short speech in English, which felt very grand. So it's an immersion, isn't it? It's a complete immersion. It's an immersion. And also, it was a very strong food and drinking culture in the office. Like what? Well, so the day would end and then... At 11. No, what would happen was that we'd leave the office at about 8 and we would then all get taken out to eat and drink. You know, the boss, either Takebe-san or Yue-san, would take you out and we'd be taken either to Chinese restaurants or Japanese restaurants or depending who was there.

17:07And it's such a culture of eating out. You know, actually, I think the year that I was there, I was probably invited into someone else's home to eat once. But you'd be invited out to eat all the time. And you'd eat in these incredible places. And that's where you discovered everything. And you'd see these sushi places, the fugu, you know, that kind of fish. What is that? So it's a puffer fish. And it's famously poisonous if you cut it up wrong. but if you cut it up right it's very delicate all of these incredible treats but then also an enormous amount of drinking beer and miswari whiskey and water all of that and that was a whole lifestyle around food i was 22 couldn't believe it yeah and then you would sort of kind of wheel home you know because even after the thing finished you then go for a few drinks and then you'd stop at home on the way home for a bowl of ramen, miso ramen, and that was the sort of thing that more or less kept you from getting a cold and did a little bit to help you out with a hangover the next morning.

18:11By that time, it would be what time? Two, three in the morning, three in the morning. And then you'd be in the office at? Not that, but eight. Wow. At 30, yeah. Wow. Yeah. I mean, in the office, you know, in charge of the photocopying machine, so I don't think anyone was going to get hurt. I don't quite believe that. Yeah, but so that... You're right, I'm not even sure I was in charge of photographing machine. I was number two. But did you travel all over Japan? See regional food? Was the food in the north different from the food in the south? And did you go to the mountains where they went to ski?

18:42Yes, so in the north it was, up in the island it was, it was much more of those kind of soups and noodles. But I then came back from Japan. I got a job at the FT. That was the sort of the... So we're 1994. In 1996 I went to China. And that was essentially three years and a bit of just eating. And that was my only job, funnily enough, working in a restaurant, come to think of it. You worked in a restaurant in China? I worked in the village restaurant in Shanghai. I did. It was a very interesting thing thinking back on China then and China now. The chef in the village restaurant, or the owner of the village restaurant, I went to her restaurant.

19:21She's wonderful and warm and welcoming. And I said, how does it work? and she took me into the kitchen at the back and there was this amazing chef kind of just drumming these huge blades, these huge chopping knives. And I thought, I would love to learn how to do that, how just to get those wrists moving at that speed. And so they had me in and I learned to cook one thing, I learned to cook snake soup. I mean, when I say I worked in a restaurant, I worked in a restaurant for, I would like to say, six hours, but they would probably say 45 minutes.

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21:34Malcolm Gladwell here. I recently recorded the first episode of Smart Talks with IBM, where I learned how AI agents are joining AI assistants as a major productivity tool. Let's start with AI agents. AI agents can reason, plan, and collaborate with other AI tools to autonomously perform tasks for a user. Brian Bissell, an expert from IBM, gave me an example of how a college freshman might use an AI agent. As a new student, you may not know, how do I do with my health and wellness issue? How many credits am I going to get for this given class? You could talk to someone and find out some of that, but maybe it's a little bit sensitive and you don't want to do that.

22:15Bissell told me, you could build an AI agent, a resource for new students that helps them navigate a new campus, register for classes, access the services they need, and even schedule appointments on their behalf, which in turn buys them more time to focus on their actual schoolwork. We can see patterns of how agents and assistants can help employees and customers and end users be more productive, automate workflows so they're not doing certain types of repetitive work over and over again, and streamlining their lives and making data more accessible to them 24 hours a day. To learn more about IBM's AI agents and how they can help your business, visit ibm.com slash agents.

23:03Do you think food and journalism and food and writing and food is a revelation to both the culture you're in, the city you're in, the government that you're in? Oh, completely. It tells you, no? The culture of a country is told by the food and the way it's prepared and the way it's served. Even going to a market, I always say to people when they go to Venice, they say, where should I go first? Should I go to the Academia? I say, go to a market. Go to the Rialto and see whether they shout or whether they serve or whether they wrap it up. Don't you think? Oh, my God. Tell me about it. So my nephew Alfie is a chef.

23:38Yeah. And he has just got a job going to work in Japan. He flies into Tokyo and the job's up front. He's going to be a pizza chef, head chef in a restaurant making pizza in the Japanese mountains. He's got one day in Tokyo. I thought there's only one thing to go and see Tsukiji, the fish market and that's the place you'd want to go I mean and I think you're right markets are the place but in China China and Italy in that sense are the same the conversation is food and the way in which you you know I'm going to spare your listeners my terrible Chinese but it's the very fact that the greeting in Chinese was always, have you eaten?

24:29Really? Yeah. That was your hello. And the interesting thing was the regional food you talked about all the time. In China. All the time, everywhere you went to. What you ate in Shenyang was different from what you ate in Kunming. What you ate in Shanghai was obviously totally different from Beijing. And it meant something incredibly important. and today if you meet anyone from any of those places and you talk about those foods and it was also I think I think true about politics and I think I think it's more true than we think about the way we conceive of our society and and our politics too I went to a talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie the Nigerian author but she said something incredible at the end of this talk at the Royal Academy which was there was a whole talk about the origins of being a writer but her very last line Ruthie was and remember dignity is always as important as food and I thought to myself if you were to try and distill a great philosophy around politics I would probably go for dignity is always as important as food, and food is always as important as dignity.

25:47But it's quite a distillation of everything. But you were in Afghanistan. I'm going to ask two opposite questions. When you were in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and you were working as a reporter, did you ever feel of food? Were you hungry? Did you have days when you couldn't eat? Yeah, I got sick. And you got sick. Yeah, but that's, I mean, that was, that happened occasionally. But I wasn't, no, I wasn't fearful. And were you ever in a zone where people were food denied? Yes, I've been in places. And that is there. Northern Pakistan, there were huge refugee camps that were there. I mean, actually as a reporter in many places.

26:31And I think that that, I remember traveling up through southern Africa and then flying from there to France. And I find that, as everyone does, incredibly difficult. You just can't make sense of it. You know, I remember going to Gaza the first time. You know, all of those things. It's really, you know, there's nothing you can say about it that doesn't sound either kind of glib or simplistic, but it's really hard to make sense of and live with. And in China, I think that's the curious thing. So when I was in China, mid-90s, that whole experience of the Great Leap Forward and the famine and hungry ghosts, that was within touching distance.

27:25People had memories of that and it had affected their families and their parents. And so the period that I lived in China was this just incredible explosion of excitement and optimism and food. You know, in Shanghai, restaurants were opening all the time. People were going out in a way that they never had. And obviously now that then became commonplace. But living in a country when it takes off and the experience people have around food and the joy and pleasure of eating and meals together, it's an amazing thing to witness. And what about the opposite when you went to Washington and then you were thrust into the world of American food does that stay with you that experience of when were you in Washington?

28:12I was in Washington in the early 2000s so I was in Washington just after 9-11 through Bush the Bush-Kerry election and into 2005. When I think of food in the states I think of food almost everywhere but Washington so I think of kind of meatloaf in New Hampshire or going down into you know gumbo in Louisiana these things that are real but again the U.S. in that sense is quite a lot like China it also has foods that it's really proud of Washington food those sort of steaks in the Capitol Grill and that sense I mean there was a particular restaurant called the Capitol Grill it was dark and it was furnished like it was a set from a Hollywood movie about a Washington restaurant and, you know, people lobbying and being lobbied.

28:59It's not a very romantic restaurant scene. Mexico? Oh, my God. Mexico City. Do you remember that restaurant we went to, Contramar? Contramar. We sat there for hours. Hours and hours. Now, that is one of the great restaurant cultures in the world, that you go there. I agree. Friday afternoon arrive 2 maybe 3 possibly even 4 o 'clock in the afternoon and have lunch from 4 till 9 I thought that was amazing I love the way the Mexicans have a very late breakfast and they have lunch at 4 and then they have an apple for dinner and they're all finished at about 9 o 'clock and they finish at 9 and also the thing that was interesting there was when I was there they also don't ask you what you do like their culture of lunch there's a whole culture of the way you talk to people and it's much less transactional and much more social.

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30:51Plus, our pet-friendly, stain-resistant fabrics ensure your sofa stays beautiful for years. Don't compromise quality for price. Visit washablesofas.com to upgrade your living space today with no risk returns and a 30-day money-back guarantee. Get up to 60 % off plus free shipping and free returns. Shop now at washablesofas.com. Authors are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply. Malcolm Gladwell here. I recently recorded the first episode of Smart Talks with IBM, where I learned how AI agents are joining AI assistants as a major productivity tool. Let's start with AI agents. AI agents can reason, plan, and collaborate with other AI tools to autonomously perform tasks for a user.

31:37Brian Bissell, an expert from IBM, gave me an example of how a college freshman might use an AI agent. As a new student, you may not know, how do I do with my health and wellness issue? How many credits am I going to get for this given class? You could talk to someone and find out some of that, but maybe it's a little bit sensitive and you don't want to do that. Bissell told me, you could build an AI agent, a resource for new students that helps them navigate a new campus, register for classes, access the services they need, and even schedule appointments on their behalf, which in turn buys them more time to focus on their actual schoolwork.