The Brief

Nearly every pop music holiday song written in the past 80 years owes at least some of its DNA to one Christmas tune in particular: "White Christmas," written by Irving Berlin and sung by Bing Crosby, which he first recorded in 1942.

It's reportedly still one of the best-selling songs of all time in any genre, though chart data from decades ago is unreliable. Even given that murkiness, the Guinness Book of World Records named it as the best-selling physical single of all time in 2012.

"White Christmas" wrote the formula for modern secular holiday songs — despite its complex and troubling history.

Songwriter Irving Berlin wasn't destined to be a Yuletide magic maker. He was born Israel Baline in Siberia to an Orthodox Jewish family; his father was a cantor turned kosher butcher. But Berlin embraced assimilation — he married an Irish Catholic woman and had Christmas trees in his house. Even so, for Berlin, Christmas was a holiday shadowed by personal tragedy.

"On Christmas Day, 1928, his only son died. He always told members of his family that he disliked Christmas for this reason, that he could never, never get past the sadness that he experienced on Christmas Day," said author and New York Times contributing writer Jody Rosen, who wrote a book called White Christmas: The Story of an American Song.

The infant Irving Berlin Jr. died suddenly, less than a month after he was born. And at its heart, "White Christmas" is a deeply melancholic song.

Most Christmas carols and pop songs were unabashedly joyful. Berlin's song represented a turn, Rosen said: "It was strange to have a song that was all about this nose-pressed-up-to-the-glass feeling."

It also set a certain standard for Christmas songs that are about nostalgia, about some lost Christmas past. (Think, for example, of another enduring hit that came shortly after Berlin's smash: "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas," which Judy Garland sang in the 1944 film Meet Me in St. Louis, and which was written by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane.)

But there's other stuff going on too. Irving Berlin was a hit machine as a Tin Pan Alley and Broadway songwriter. As a New Yorker and an immigrant himself, he was intimately familiar with a particular genre of songs, Rosen said: "That tradition of so-called 'home songs,' you know, songs that pine for a lost place, a lost ideal. These songs are so huge because we have an immigrant population, lots of people who've done a lot of moving. So there were songs about Irish people longing for Ireland and Italians longing for the old country there."

He said Berlin took that genre and flipped it into a Christmas song.

That's especially true of a largely forgotten, tongue-in-cheek introductory verse Berlin originally wrote for "White Christmas." The narrator is a New Yorker stuck in California (as Berlin frequently was, churning out songs for Hollywood): "The sun is shining, the grass is green, the orange and palm trees sway ... but it's December the 24th, and I am longing to be up north!" the protagonist sings.

Rosen said most people listening to "White Christmas" are missing additional subtext. He said that much of that nostalgic vibe in "White Christmas" — all that longing for a pristine, innocent Christmas of yore — is a reference to explicitly racist minstrel songs like Stephen Foster's "Old Kentucky Home," sung by Al Jolson and others — music that was still a staple in Berlin's day.

Foster was inspired by the Harriet Beecher Stowe novel Uncle Tom's Cabin and the song, hailed by Frederick Douglass and Paul Robeson, was meant to be empathetic to the abolitionist cause — the narrator is longing to be reunited with his wife and children, but their family has been torn apart by slaveholders. It later became a popular tune at minstrel shows, with its saddest lines omitted and its meaning twisted.

In "Old Kentucky Home," Rosen said, "You have, grotesquely, the freed Black man longing for life back below the Mason-Dixon line, back on the plantation. Here, instead of a Black man in the north longing for the sultry south, we have a well-to-do white person longing for the wintry north."

But the racial dynamics of "White Christmas" aren't just a matter of subtle references to older songs. Irving Berlin had great commercial expectations for "White Christmas." He built a whole movie around it: 1942's Holiday Inn, starring Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire.

Holiday Inn is stuffed with racist stereotypes and an entire blackface number. (That scene is usually excised from TV broadcasts today, but the whole film is available to stream online.) As Crosby and his love interest, played by Marjorie Reynolds, prepare to perform a song about Abraham Lincoln, Crosby spreads greasepaint on her face, as the orchestra plays "White Christmas" underneath. Not only is "White Christmas" the movie's biggest hit, it's also the film's romantic theme.

Blackface on stage and on screen was very much a recent memory for 1940s audiences, said scholar Brynn Shiovitz. She's the author of the book Behind the Screen: Tap Dance, Race, and Invisibility During Hollywood's Golden Age.

In Holiday Inn, Shiovitz said, "We get a pairing of nostalgia for Christmas, but also nostalgia for blackface, because so many of the people that were watching Holiday Inn when it premiered in the theaters grew up watching vaudeville, grew up watching their parents maybe even perform in blackface."

Audiences loved the song "White Christmas" and its spotlight in Holiday Inn — and American GIs stationed abroad during World War II clamored for the Armed Forces Radio Service to play the song. "White Christmas" was so sturdily successful that Hollywood made another movie centering the song in 1954 — also called White Christmas — this time starring Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen.

Since then, legions of musicians have recorded their own versions of "White Christmas" — including The Drifters, Elvis Presley, Iggy Pop and Sabrina Carpenter. And of course, each generation adds new layers of meaning to the song as it is stitched into our holiday season each year, said Shiovitz.

"With all of these other memories that people have of Christmas, whether it's being piped in while you're shopping, or it's playing on the radio in the car as you're driving to visit family — it's easy to kind of separate it from its history. People develop new memories with it. People have their own ideas of what the song represents, so it's just incredibly complex," Shiovitz said.

Today's audiences and artists don't necessarily hear or even know about the song's racist history, Shiovitz said — but that doesn't mean it's not there.
This story was edited for radio and digital by Jennifer Vanasco.
Copyright 2025 NPR

The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision along partisan lines, ruled that Louisiana's 2024 election map, which created a second majority-Black congressional district, was "an unconstitutional racial gerrymander."

Although the court kept Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act intact, Wednesday's decision all but guts the landmark law that came out of the Civil Rights Movement and protected the collective voting power of racial minorities when political maps are redrawn.

It isn't yet clear how the decision will affect November's midterms. Primaries are well underway in most states.

Once considered the jewel in the crown of the civil rights movement, the Voting Rights Act has been largely dismembered since 2013 by the increasingly conservative Supreme Court. The major exception was a decision just two years ago that upheld the section of the law aimed at ensuring that minority voters are not shut out of the process of drawing new congressional district lines.

At issue in the case was the redistricting map drawn by the Louisiana legislature after the decennial Census. Following years of litigation, the state, with a 30% Black population, first fought and then finally agreed to draw a second majority-Black district. Two of the state's six House members are African American.

Normally, that would have been the end of the case, but a self-described group of "non-African-American voters" intervened after the new maps were drawn up to object to the legislature's redistricting.

The Trump administration supported them, contending that the Black voters should not have gotten a second majority-minority district.

On Friday, the court agreed.

"Correctly understood, Section 2 does not impose liability at odds with the Constitution, and it should not have imposed liability on Louisiana for its 2022 map," Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion. "Compliance with Section 2 thus could not justify the State's use of race-based redistricting here."

In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that she dissented "because the Court betrays its duty to faithfully implement the great statute Congress wrote. I dissent because the Court's decision will set back the foundational right Congress granted of racial equality in electoral opportunity."

Copyright 2026 NPR

Six leading Democratic candidates for governor were seeking a breakout moment Tuesday night in a race that has been dominated by its lack of certainty, with two Republican candidates frequently in the lead.

None of them appeared to find one in a chaotic, combative and often hard-to-follow CBS debate at Pomona College, prompting former Orange County Rep. Katie Porter to declare at one point that “this is worse than my teenagers at dinner.”

With less than a week before ballots are mailed to voters, though, the targets were clear: Billionaire Tom Steyer, who has led fellow Democrats in polling and has already spent at least $132 million of his own money on the race; and Xavier Becerra, the former U.S. Health and Human Services secretary who has had a sudden surge in momentum since former Rep. Eric Swalwell dropped out amid allegations of sexual assault.

Porter, once a rising national progressive star, got in a dig at Steyer, who has consolidated support among many of the party’s most left-wing activists. She criticized the fortune he made in part by investing in fossil fuels when he tried to tout his climate-friendly credentials and policy of “making polluters pay.” Steyer has said that he subsequently divested from those investments and devoted himself to addressing climate change.

“How about profiteers pay?” Porter asked pointedly.

Becerra, meanwhile, was criticized by moderate Democratic San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan for his mixed record as former President Joe Biden’s health secretary and for bristling when pressed for policy specifics. At one point, Becerra argued with one of the five debate moderators over the legality of his proposal to call a state of emergency to freeze home insurance rates.

Becerra entered the debate fresh off a recent boost in polling and fundraising, buoyed by an army of online influencers whose posts adviser Michael Bustamante said are “all organic.” The candidate was eager to spar with his competitors, but his newfound spotlight has also come with scrutiny about his record on immigration and health.

Progressives and Steyer’s campaign have also highlighted Becerra’s support from companies like Chevron and his handling of an influx of unaccompanied migrant children as Biden’s health secretary. A 2023 New York Times investigation found that those children — whom Becerra had pressured officials to process and place as if they were running an “assembly line” — ended up in dangerous child labor jobs.

Becerra later dismissed the criticism as a “MAGA talking point” and said the Department of Homeland Security was responsible for the child labor.

“We did everything we could,” he said.

Republican Chad Bianco, the ornery Riverside County sheriff with a penchant for the conspiratorial, was also on the offensive Tuesday night. He leapt to attack Democratic policies wholesale as “lies” whenever he could. He drew groans from the audience when he interrupted Becerra to state, falsely, that COVID-19 vaccines distributed under Biden had “poisoned” millions of Americans.

His frequent broadsides at state regulations prompted Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond to attack Bianco’s recent unprecedented seizure of 650,000 ballots in Riverside County.

Little to differentiate between Democrats

But the Democrats largely failed to differentiate themselves as they tackled questions on the cost of living, health care, education, housing and energy, struggling to promote new policies to address the crushing cost of living. They were careful not to attack the liberal policies of Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has declined to endorse any of them.

Even getting a moment in the spotlight was hard in a debate format that seemed to jump from subject to subject and in which candidates frequently interrupted one another.

“They’re all wrong,” Mahan said, as he tried to walk the line between the Republicans supporting a Trump tax policy that will cut up to 2 million people from public health coverage and Democrats calling for publicly funded single-payer health care estimated to cost $392 billion in California.

But Mahan didn’t offer much of an alternative, saying the answer was “incentivizing actual health.”

All eight said they support forcing homeless residents who refuse repeated shelter offers into mandated mental health treatment facilities. Mahan and Thurmond agreed with Republicans Bianco and Steve Hilton that the state gas tax should be suspended; Becerra, Porter, Steyer and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa disagreed.

On energy, Porter agreed with Mahan and Villaraigosa that the state should aim to keep oil refineries open amid skyrocketing gas prices while working toward greater electrification, while Steyer called for more taxes, on oil industry profits. Hilton, who has promised to eliminate many climate goals to lower the price of gas, did not say what he would do to support clean energy. He has dominated most polling in the governor’s race.

“I think I’m more confused on who to vote for now than ever,” said Pomona College politics student Kloi Ogans after the debate. “So I have a lot more researching to do.”

As part of the debate, Ogans was invited to ask the candidates about rebuilding housing in California. She said after the debate that young voters are worried about affordability and concerned about Trump’s immigration enforcement sweeps. She particularly wanted to hear from Becerra and Porter, but the sparring among candidates made her disinterested.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Proposition 36, which passed in November 2024, promised California voters a new era of “mass treatment” for people struggling with addiction and a crackdown on repeat petty thieves amid a spike in retail theft.

The debate around the measure, called “The Homelessness, Drug Addiction and Theft Reduction Act,” was fueled in part by a series of videotaped smash-and-grab robberies splashed across local TV news and images of unhoused residents shooting up drugs in the streets.

Voters signaled they wanted a crackdown and they approved Prop. 36 with nearly 70% casting ballots in favor of it.

A little more than a year later, the measure is getting mixed reviews.

Supporters say it's been effective in holding repeat offenders accountable. Critics say it's been a return to mass incarceration without the promised treatment for people with substance abuse.

How Prop. 36 works

Prop. 36 stiffened penalties for repeat theft and drug offenders.

Here’s how the measure works: If you have been convicted of two misdemeanor thefts of $950 or less, prosecutors have the option of charging your third petty theft as a felony, which carries up to a three-year prison term.

Before Prop. 36, petty theft was a misdemeanor, regardless of how many times you did it.

When it comes to drug offenses under Prop 36, if you have been convicted of two possessions of a small amount of hard drugs (fentanyl, heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine), prosecutors have the option of charging your third possession as a felony. But you don’t have to go to prison if you agree to go into drug treatment.

In 2025, California prosecutors filed more than 19,000 Prop. 36 felony drug cases and more than 15,500 felony theft cases, according to a study by the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice released in March. Most people were released on bail pending the outcome of their case.

Nearly 900 Californians have been sent to state prison under Prop. 36, since it went into effect in December 2024. County jail populations have grown by nearly 3,000 since the measure passed, driven by a surge in felony bookings of people who have not yet been sentenced.

In Los Angeles County alone, there are about 1,150 individuals in jail because of Prop. 36 — about a 9% increase in the jail population, according to county Public Defender Ricardo Garcia. The surge in defendants is adding caseloads to his already overworked attorneys, he said.

The same is happening across the state.

“This is really compounding the workload crisis,” said Kate Chatfield, executive director of the California Public Defenders Association.

The data represents a reversal of yearslong declines in incarceration, and they are occurring amid all-time lows in California’s crime rate.

“It really is a return to mass incarceration,” Chatfield argued.

Black people overrepresented

Black people are dramatically overrepresented in Prop. 36 charges, according to the study. In Contra Costa County, for example, Black residents account for more than half of all Proposition 36 theft charges, despite making up less than one-tenth of the population.

Prosecutors say the law has been effective.

“It’s been a valuable tool to go after chronic and repeat thieves,” Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman said.

Hochman said his office brought more than 3,300 Prop. 36 felony cases against people charged with their third petty theft in 2025.

He said his office brought over 1,900 felony cases against people charged with their third possession of hard drugs.

He said he couldn’t immediately provide numbers on how many of the drug defendants opted for rehabilitation over prison.

Statewide, fewer than 1 in 5 people arrested on Prop. 36 drug charges have been ordered to treatment, and fewer than 1 in 100 have completed a program, according to the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice study.

Lack of treatment beds

One reason for the low treatment numbers is a scarcity of treatment beds throughout the state.

“There just isn’t enough treatment to meet the need,” said the center’s Maureen Washburn. “People aren’t getting connected to treatment. They aren’t succeeding in treatment programs once they’re in them.”

Treatment, a major promise of Prop. 36, has been an “abject failure,” she said.

Hochman agreed treatment is lacking.

“We do not have anywhere close to enough drug treatment and mental illness beds in a county of 10 million people,” he said.

The district attorney argued the state needs to provide more funding for treatment beds.

“Sacramento has not funded at any meaningful level,” he said.

In a March letter to the chair of the Senate Budget and Fiscal Review Committee, the co-author of Prop. 36 — Senator Tom Umberg (D-Santa Ana) — said at least $400 million dollars in new funding is needed for treatment facilities.

“I think spending taxpayer dollars on drug treatment — both in the short term and in the long term — is a smart way to address public safety issues,” Umberg told LAist.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has requested in his budget $100 million dollars for treatment over three years.

But Chatfield said people facing Prop. 36 charges shouldn't be locked up in the first place. Drug offenses should be handled as a public health issue, she argued.

“Even the low level misdemeanors for theft are economic crimes,” she said. “These are crimes of poverty.”

Unequal application of Prop. 36

In addition to a paucity of treatment beds, the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice study found charging rates vary dramatically by county. Orange County alone accounted for nearly 20% of Prop. 36 drug charges and 40% of theft convictions in 2025 despite representing just 8% of the state’s population.

“This inconsistency across counties exacerbates California’s longstanding problem of providing differing ”justice by geography,” the report stated.

Empirical evidence of the effect of Prop. 36 on the crime rate is lacking. But Umberg said he believes it has reduced retail theft.

“I have been told by a huge number of folks in law enforcement and also in the business community — particularly in the retail community — that it has had an effect on retail theft,” Umberg said.

Hochman said it's too early to tell if people are being deterred by Proposition 36.

“We’re waiting on statistics that we’ll probably get sometime this year to see if the deterrent aspect is also working — that we actually have fewer people going ahead and committing these crimes,” Hochman said.

But crime was on the way down before Proposition 36 passed. Violent crime fell 6% and property crime dropped 8.4% in California in 2024 — the year Prop. 36 passed.

Chatfield of the California Public Defenders Association maintains voters were “sold a bill of goods” on the measure.

“They were told this was about homelessness. They were told this was about treatment. And it absolutely was not," she said. "It was about increasing incarceration.”

Using a tablet or TV to calm a fussy child might work in the short-term, but a new study out of UC Irvine finds it could backfire later.

The study, published in Developmental Psychology, found that higher device use was linked to more behavior issues among toddlers, like biting or hitting or kicking — as well as more parental stress.

The study followed more than 200 families in Orange County and Washington, D.C., over time, from when a child was 9 months old to 2-and-a-half years old.

“Emotion regulation skills — like their own ability to calm and distract themselves — [they] might be being displaced by devices instead,” said Stephanie Reich, professor of education at UC Irvine. “And if [kids] don't have that skill, they might act out more, have more behavior problems.”

More behavioral problems in turn can make parenting more stressful, which means it’ll make it more likely that kids get devices again, creating a cycle parents can get stuck in, Reich said.

The study also found that mothers experienced more stress later when using devices to distract their children, but that wasn’t the experience for fathers. While higher device use was linked to more behavior problems, fathers did not feel the level of stress as much as mothers.

When mothers were stressed, they were more likely to use devices, Reich said. She couldn’t definitively explain why there was a difference between parents, but said that in general, parenting work falls more to mothers.

“They just might be more overwhelmed, or taking on more than fathers when it comes to day-to-day parenting,” she said.

The study notes the type of parent-child interactions that might be replaced by devices, including picking them up, holding and rocking them, and talking to them calmly and reminding them to breathe.

“All of these types of interactions, from physical touch to language use to breathing tips for calming, offer the developing child opportunities to cultivate their self-regulatory skills,” the authors wrote.