PBS News Hour - Full Show - December 24, 2025 - PBS News Hour full episode

Episode Date: December 25, 2025

Wednesday on the News Hour, Ukraine proposes demilitarized zones in Russian-occupied areas, the latest plan for ending the nearly four-year invasion. Judy Woodruff reports from a small New Hampshire town on how the answer to nationwide political divisions may begin within our own communities. Plus, Palestinian Christians make the journey to Bethlehem, navigating Israeli checkpoints along the way. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy

Good evening. I'm William Brangham. I'm the Navaz and Jeff Bennett are away. On the news hour tonight, Ukraine proposes demilitarized zones in parts of the Russian occupied east, the latest plan for ending the nearly four-year invasion. Judy Woodruff reports from a small New Hampshire town on how the answer to political divisions may begin within our own communities. When we don't have that sense of belonging, our nervous system is literally on fire. We are vulnerable to extreme views and to extreme behaviors because we feel so unsafe. And during the Christmas season, Palestinian Christians make the journey to and from Bethlehem navigating Israeli checkpoints along the way. Welcome to the NewsHour.

Ukraine's president has floated a possible compromise to a key Russian demand that Kyiv give up territory in eastern Ukraine. Volodymyr Zelensky's proposal could address one of the main sticking points that have bogged down U.S.-led negotiations. This, as Ukraine marks its fourth consecutive Christmas under full-scale Russian invasion. But Moscow has given no indication whether it might have been. agree. Nick Schifrin joins us now. Nick, so what did Zelensky say today about this critical question about the eastern part of Donetsk? So this was a briefing that Zelensky gave to journalists in Kiev embargoed until today where he revealed the 20 points of the 20-point peace plan, and he talked about the fate of the Donets. That is the most contentious part. Zelensky says the current proposal

would be to demilitarize or create a free economic zone in the portion of Donetsk that Ukraine still holds, but is fighting over. You see, that's the light gray area inside Donetsk on the map. Ukraine's military would have to withdraw from that territory, which Russia has failed to capture through 11 years of war. The compromise that Zelensky told journalists is, quote, we consider a free economic zone, a potential option for a sovereign state to choose. He has not used that language before. The reason that its potential is the decision would be left to a national referendum. Quote, only a referendum can deterred. whether people agree to such a path

if the proposal for Ukraine is precisely this, either this or war. Zelensky's language is dramatic there because that's how he sees it, William. Either Ukrainians agree to the entire peace plan, including converting land that they fought and died for into this free economic zone, or they reject it, the war continues,

and they do not get security guarantees from the U.S. Europe. So on that referendum, what would be required for that to happen? So Zelensky went further than the war the text on the peace plan and talked about the conditions that he wanted to talk to President Trump and President Putin about. Those include a ceasefire first and then 60 days to prepare the referendum. Two, Ukrainian police would remain in this so-called free economic zone. Three, only Ukrainians living in Ukrainian territory could vote. In other words, Ukrainians under occupation will be excluded. And four, international forces must then be present on the ground to guarantee

that no one enters the free economic zone under any pretext. It is not clear whether Russia will agree to any of this, but Russia has repeatedly rejected that last point, the presence of foreign troops on the front line. And in fact, William tonight, Bloomberg is reporting that Russia is seeking changes to this text and that the text lacks provisions that are important to Moscow. Blat there, what are the other challenges still remaining?

The main one is the fate of the Zaporizia nuclear power plant. This is Europe's largest power plant. occupied by Russia since the first days of the full-scale invasion. And Zelensky said today the U.S. plan is for the U.S. to manage the plant and for the power to be somehow split between the U.S., Ukraine, and Russia. Zelensky rejects this. He said, quote, clearly for Ukraine, this sounds very inappropriate and not entirely realistic.

How can there be joint commercial activity with the Russians after everything that has happened? We are enemies. It is very difficult to have anything in common with them moving forward. Ukraine's counter-proposal, William, Russia's withdrawal from the plant and that Ukraine and the U.S. split at 50-50, even if the U.S. chooses to send some of their half to Russia. Given all that, what has been agreed to? Well, pretty much everything else. That's what Zelensky said. A couple of highlights from that everything else basket. Ukraine no longer has to give up its NATO bid. Ukraine's military is now able to stand up to 800,000 soldiers during peacetime. That's up from pre-year.

previous numbers. And crucially, security guarantees that the U.S. would respond very specifically if Russia opens fire on Ukraine. Zelensky said today that would enable a strong Ukraine. But the war rages on William. The Russians released video just overnight that it said attacking Donetsk and advancing in a small village of Donets. Meanwhile, Russia's attacks are mostly on civilian targets. Zelensky said Moscow, you see there, fired hundreds of drones and ballistic missiles, quote, this is how the godless strike, he said, ahead of Christmas. Nick Schifrin, thank you so much. Thank you.

Thank you. DOJ did not elaborate on when, where, or how the documents were found, but they said the new trove will take a few more weeks to process and release to the public. That will further delay compliance with the deadline set by Congress to release all the Epstein files by last Friday. A dozen U.S. senators have urged the Justice Department's Inspector General to investigate this ongoing delay. Returning to the war between Russia and Ukraine,

An explosion inside Moscow today killed three people, including two police officers. It's the second deadly explosion in the same area of the Russian capital in just the last three days. Russian investigators say two traffic officers approached an individual when a device detonated, killing them and a bystander. Russia blames Ukraine for the attack. Keeve has not publicly commented or claimed responsibility. The blast occurred very close to where a car. car bomb killed a high-ranking Russian general just two days earlier.

The election authority of Honduras has declared Nasri Asfura the winner of its recent embattled presidential race. President Trump endorsed Asphura days before the November 30th election. In the three weeks since, the contentious vote count has suffered technical problems and allegations of fraud. Secretary of State Marco Rubio urged all parties to accept the outcome, although Asfura's opponent has not yet conceded. Honduras's election marks the latest in a right-wing resurgence in Latin America. Just last week, Chile chose far-right politician Jose Antonio Kost as its next president. Back here at home, investigators are searching for what caused a massive explosion at a Philadelphia-area-area nursing home.

At least two people were killed and 20 injured. The blast on Tuesday occurred shortly. after a utility crew had responded to reports of a gas leak. The explosion collapsed parts of the building and shook houses blocks away. One resident died as well as a facility employee. One of the injured is in critical condition. After an hour's long search and rescue,

officials said everyone was accounted for and praised first responders for their bravery. I've never seen such heroism. They were running into a building that I could, from 50 feet away, can still smell gas. Some people couldn't talk. It was, this could have been a much more serious catastrophe. State records show that inspectors cited the facility for multiple violations back in October,

including for a lack of barriers to contain smoke across different floors. On the West Coast, a powerful storm is slamming California on the eve of what could be the wettest Christmas in years for Southern parts of that state. The atmospheric river, seen from space earlier this week, will continue dumping heavy rain all the way through Friday. It's led to scenes like this today in southern San Bernardino County and northern Mono counties, roads flooded by dangerous rushing mud. Coastal areas, including in Los Angeles, are under flash flood warnings. Meantime, the same storm is bringing snow to California's mountains. Officials warn of hazardous holocausts. holiday driving conditions.

And stock set records on this shortened day of trading before Christmas. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added nearly 300 points and notched a new record high. The NASDAQ made a 50-point gain, and the S&P 500 also ended on a record-setting high note, getting closer to 7,000 points. Still to come on the NewsHour, author David Baldacci and his wife worked to combat toxic political discourse. We explore why Christmas carols endure despite major changes in popular music. And the Armed Forces musicians bring us some holiday cheer in a News Hour tradition. This is the PBS News Hour from the David M. Rubenstein studio at WETA in Washington, headquarters of PBS News.

On this Christmas Eve, with the New Year rapidly approaching, many are gathering to reflect on the past year and look towards the next. For her series, America at a crossroads, our Judy Woodruff has been traveling around the country this year talking with grassroots groups that are working on solutions to our nation's deepest divides. For her last piece of the year, she reports from New Hampshire on how some believe the answer to many of our challenges. may begin right at home. Winter has come again to New Hampshire, and with it, snow, ice, freezing temperatures, and the need for plenty of firewood to keep stoves roaring for the next several months.

In the small town of Richmond, Tom Tagg spent many years chopping his own wood, but after receiving a pacemaker, now has to rely on others for help. Most of my life, I've been on the side where I'm serving and helping, and now I'm on the other side where sometimes I need help. He found help from some volunteers from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Better with each one. He's been a member for 40 years, including from 20-year-old Peter Brown, who's new to all of this.

Brown says before joining the church this year, he struggled with loneliness. Since I was in school and I never really had any friends, to be honest, I mean, there was a generic friend where I would wave and say hi in the classroom, but when school was over, you know, there's no really ever opportunity for me to get to know someone. Through the church and its service projects like this one, he says he's found new community and purpose. It makes me feel like I'm, you know, I'm value, I'm able to help others, and I'm able to just be myself. I'm able to be outdoors and talk to some people that I wouldn't normally have been before. I probably would be playing some sort of video game, but, you know, this really opens you up, so others, I guess. It might make me emotional, but, you know, I'm happy. to have these people to support me.

As human beings, one of our deepest, deepest needs is to feel a sense of belonging. Shailen Romney Garrett belongs to the same church in Keene. And when we don't have that sense of belonging, our nervous system is literally on fire. We are vulnerable to extreme views and to extreme behaviors because we feel so unsafe. And I really think that that's what's happening in America.

We have so many people who just don't feel that their basic need for connection is being met. A writer and speaker, Garrett co-wrote the 2020 book, The Upswing, with political scientist Robert Putnam, featured in our first Crossroads report this year. That book described the many parallels between our own time and the Gilded Age, that late 19th century period marked by technological change, an industrial revolution, widespread dislocation, location growing inequality and political corruption and tells how those earlier Americans found their way out of those challenges. Putnam told us in February that he had assumed the economy would change first. The one thing that the data show is that's not true. Economics was the last thing to change. So then what was the first thing to change? And to my

shock, it was cultural change. It was a moral revival, is the way I want to put it. People began to say, wait a minute, it's not all about us. We have obligations to other people. We've spent much of this past year examining so-called bridging groups, which attempt to connect people from across lines of division to try to rebuild civic health. As the year closes, we wanted to ask Garrett whether she sees the kind of cultural change she and Putnam think is needed. One of the things that I see when I look at a lot of the bridging initiatives that are out there is that they're really these sort of head-centered exercises.

First of all, they have this way of foregrounding political identity as if it's defining. So we say we need to bridge Republicans with Democrats. But I wonder if we're really hitting people in the heart, if we're actually changing their feelings toward other people. Because so much of the political violence, so much of the sort of extreme end of this polarization, is about the way we're behaving toward one another,

the sort of dehumanization of the other side. And so I've begun to wonder, as I've thought and watched this over time, are we doing enough to help people have a morally formative experience when they're interacting with someone who's unlike themselves, rather than just an intellectual exercise

to try and find sort of ideological common ground? And what does it take to address the moral piece? of this, the heart. One of the things that we need to be able to do is give people experiences that help them feel genuine unity and genuine camaraderie with people in ways that have nothing to do with politics. And that's why for me, I've really started to lean into those kinds of communities that I can find right outside my doorstep.

Instead of saying, okay, I need to seek out someone who's of a different political stripe, Let's just leave politics out of the conversation entirely and approach each other's as human beings who are engaged in trying to get by in the world, who all have problems, who have ways to relate to one another on a human level. And I think finding ways to serve one another and really be in relationship on a much more human level is what we need more of. Garrett says that rather than looking to new groups and institutions to help us out of this multifaceted crisis, groups that often depend on philanthropies.

dollars, which are now in greater demand due to government cuts to programs, people should look to themselves, to their neighbors, and to their own communities to figure out how they can give back. We have to teach our children that succeeding is not just about maximizing economic interest, that succeeding is about creating communities that thrive, which means giving, serving, thinking about something bigger than myself. We're not doing enough of that. At the LDS Church that evening, Brattleboro Vermont resident, Carol Buffam, joined a women's

group for food and conversation. We had your granddaughter a couple weeks ago. Yes. To help pack hygiene kits for the homeless. And for an ornament swap, a tradition here. Neckfraker. Don't look too closely. Like Peter Brown, Carol joined the church this year after struggling for many other years with

loneliness and isolation. In her case, following an infection that altered her appearance. I didn't leave my house for five years. After my staff infection that I got, people looked at me differently, pointed, whispered, and it bothered me a lot. And then I met the missionaries and a couple other people too helped, but they said, Carol, you know, don't hide behind your mask because I wore the mask for years. And then COVID happened. And then everybody was. So I was just like everyone else.

And then I went back outside and I saw it wasn't as bad as I thought it was. She says she's so grateful for the community she's found here. She wants to bring that sense of connection back to her apartment building to help others who might be struggling. I have a community room. my building and it's free to all of us tenants. And I've been talking about starting up a group for people to just come and talk. It's just something to start. If we don't do something, it's not going to get better. I just want to make it better. The point Shailen Romney-Garrett says is not that everyone needs to join the Mormon church or even a church. But it's an example of a mutual aid

network that already exists and strengthens the bonds of community, alongside things like neighborhood associations and schools, bonds that override our differences. You have much left of your school this semester? And at this time of year, the darkest in our hemisphere, helping people like Carol and Peter find the light. If you're one of the majority of Americans who don't know your neighbor, why don't you start by going and meet your neighbor? yourself, ask them if there's anything that you can do for them. You might find that living

on your block, you have an elderly woman who doesn't have any family support. You might find that you have a 20-something young man who spends most of his time in the basement playing video games. What can you do as a neighbor to address those things? I don't think we need to wait for a church to tell us that we should do that. I can actually just ask myself, what kind of world do I want to live in? And how do I enact that right now with the person across the street? As we look to another year when our country marks 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, I'll continue to report on how those original ideals are measuring up to our present and how we might continue our search for a more perfect union.

For the PBS News Hour, I'm Judy Woodruff in Keene, New Hampshire. Hampshire. Today, thousands of people flock to Bethlehem's Manger Square. It's the spot where Christians believe Jesus Christ was born. It's in the occupied West Bank, and celebrations were canceled the last two years because of the Israel-Hamas War. For Palestinians who live in Bethlehem and work in Jerusalem, the distance is the distance is not far, about five miles, but taking the bus this short way sometimes becomes an ordeal.

Newshour producer Carl Bostek looks at what life is like for Palestinians who live there. In Bethlehem, this bus is loading up with passengers to take them to work in Jerusalem, but they may already be late for work. This is the bus you take every morning? How long have you been doing that? Rubimani is a nurse at a Jerusalem hospital who specializes in dialysis treatment but it's the ride to work before she can even think about what the day we're bringing at the hospital that makes her more anxious

what it will be like this morning at the checkpoint into Israel despite leaving so early she already thinks she may be late almost every day we're late for our jobs at the hospital also we could wait for a long time in this cold weather and it's possible that they ask us to exit the bus

even while it's raining, so they can search it. So we always worry about our morning journey to our job with all of these checkpoints. And it's what can happen at a checkpoint that can cause so much anxiety and change everything. There was a person who used to work in the hospital and was posting on Facebook during the war. The Israelis canceled her permission,

so she can't work here anymore. Do you even feel like it's Christmas? This year is better than before, but not like it used to be before the war. But this year, at least we feel better. This time, it wasn't too bad. Everyone got off the bus and they showed their IDs and special permission papers to work in Israel, despite the war. It took about 20 minutes.

Wibble was relieved. She navigates between two worlds, the harsh reality of life in the occupied West Bank, including Bethlehem and working in Israel, especially at this time of year. In these last few days leading up to Christmas, normally this manger square here in Bethlehem would be packed with thousands of people.

Instead today, only a few hundred and also buses. You'd have more than a hundred buses pulling up to Bethlehem today and instead less than a dozen. The giant Christmas tree in Nativity Square stands lonely. Hotels are struggling to survive like this shuttered four-star hotel next to the square. In the case of Joseph Jockeman, business has collapsed during the war. Only family pride, that's part of Bethlehem's history, is keeping it open.

And this has a lot of work. Now nobody, maybe sometimes one bus comes, two buses. They come from here, people who live here, but not tourists, not tourists. So you hope the war will end soon? Yeah, of course. We don't like it. We don't like it. We need to stop.

Bethlehem's Mayor Kanawati, who is an American citizen, is numb from citing the cost of war in Bethlehem. I tell you, before the war, we had approximately 2.5 million visitors and pilgrims coming and coming through the church of the nativity. After the war, we haven't had more than a thousand a year. That's a complete collapse. Definitely it was. It was catastrophic. That is the reality Wilbur tries to put behind her, at least while she's at work, and she begins her day with eagerness but must wait for news of the patients she's expecting to see. So this is our regular day. We are waiting the patients as usual to come to the peritoneal dialysis to do our regular checkup for these patients.

But unfortunately, we can't predict their arrival because they're waiting checkpoints and maybe they are forbidden to come through this checkpoints. We have to go to another checkpoint. and we are waiting. Because Augusta Victoria Hospital provides cancer and kidney treatment for Palestinians from the West Bank and until the war began Gazans,

Vuba has become used to this unpredictability, accepting it with grace. But that doesn't make it any easier on her family. Of course, there are challenges to coming here every day, but we need to do it. After the war, there were less jobs in the West Bank,

especially that my husband is working in tourism, and we have no tourism anymore. No tourists are coming anymore. So I have to work and support my family so we can live. But Ruba also thinks about the satisfaction she has by working at the hospital. It's true that we leave in the early mornings of the hospital, leaving our homes, our children, and suffer in the checkpoint. But honestly, I'm satisfied when I come to the hospital and help my patients.

Augusta Victoria Hospital has its own church for staff and patients. Ruba is Christian, and when she can, she visits to say prayer for family and for peace. After a long day of work and returning through checkpoints, Ruba is back home in Bethlehem. It's quality time with her family. Her daughter, Rain, is waiting for her, and so is dinner. At this time of year, the quality time includes a visit to the Church of the Nativity. Visitors still try to pay homage to the birthplace of Jesus, even while there is a war. And inside, tradition remains untouched for Christmas. The superior of the Armenian church

descends the staircase to the grotto, where Jesus was born to conduct a ceremony for his birth. And for this Christmas, he's optimistic about these times. Has the spirit of Christmas come back to the church? We can say yes. Yes. For the last few years, we didn't feel it because of the war, because of the corona before that. So this year, it seems like, yeah.

Ruba and Fadi are preparing their daughter, Rain, for her second Christmas, so that she will grow with love, faith, and hope. And as she grows, she will know there remains a joy to this world. For the PBS News Hour, I'm Carl Bostic in Bethlehem. David Baldacci has written more than 50 legal and suspense novels, including bestsellers like Absolute Power and Wish You Well. His latest is Nash Falls. It's a story about a successful businessman who's recruited by the FBI to expose a global crime network.

But Baldacci and his wife are now. tackling a major real-world problem, how to combat toxic political discourse. Jeff Bennett sat down with them both recently. David and Michelle Baldacci. Welcome to the News Hour. Thank you very much. When you started thinking seriously about how you wanted to be of service in this moment, what drew you to this idea, this civic discourse initiative? Well, we sort of looked around, I think, at the world and decided that this polarization

trajectory just is not sustainable. And so many people now communicate and debate via social media, where there's really very little accountability. We thought if we could bring people face-to-face, you know, who they are, get rid of this anonymity, and people would just sit down and actually have discussions and conversations that maybe it might work. And people could figure out, you know, sitting across the table from you,

I think I agree with you on more things than I thought I would. And I can see who you are, you're another human being. You're not, you know, you could be a chatbot from Russia for all, you know, if you're online. We just thought we wanted to make it simple, but have these venues and platforms and opportunities for people to come together. And how do you do it? How do you get people to engage face-to-face? Well, that's an ongoing project. We're going to have to figure that out and set up the platforms and the venues and make it work for as many people as possible.

And it's at VCU. It's in Virginia, lifelong Virginia resident. You earned your degree in political science at Virginia Commonwealth? Yes. And we thought we needed resources, we needed manpower, we needed expertise. So VCU has a statewide footprint, as of the Library of Virginia. You know, Library of Virginia sort of has the paper, the materials, the resources, the history, the facts, the knowledge. And to take that and take it across the Commonwealth is sort of, I tell people, you know, exercise to keep yourself healthy. Well, as a citizen of the democracy, you have to exercise your citizenship muscles or else atrophies, and it goes away.

And you can't wait every four years a day before to figure out who you're going to vote for. for you need to be engaged throughout the entire process. I know people are busy, but this is really important. The stuff really matters. So we were thinking, we'll give you an example of a town hall with no politicians, just people coming in in an area. We want to go where they are. We don't want people to have to come to Richmond for everything.

We want people to go where they are in these communities, in lots of different venues, and just have opportunities where it could be moderated. We could have speakers come in that have debates and conversations and dialogue afterwards. So it can take a hundred different sort of facets and elements of what this might be, but it's about bringing people together to speak peacefully, rationally, respectfully with other people. This is not about getting out there and hurling vitriol. We've had enough of that.

This is about facing problems, compromising, coming to agreement, and then moving forward as a country. And how do you plan to measure success for an initiative like this? Oh, that's a really good question. You know, the goal is to make this fun as well as educational, so hopefully we'll be able to reach out. And it'll depend on how many people attend and how many people seem interested, how many people we can get into the venues and the platforms.

It's interesting to hear you say the goal is to make it feel fun because my view of things is that something being fun doesn't dilute the mission. It really just amplifies it. You see it that way? That way? Hamilton and Schoolhouse Rock are fond examples. As someone with a lifelong view of literacy efforts, what surprising lessons have you learned about how people engage with reading and dialogue today?

Well, I think that very few people read books consistently anymore, unfortunately, and that number continues to go down. I mean, social media and everything else, it's, you know, I, and being in the book world, I get all the statistics and facts where social media is actually... decreasing people's of power to be able to read a novel link form of fiction. So now instead of in college teaching novels, they are teaching excerpts of novels because kids' attention spans have atrophied so much, not just kids, adults as well. If you spend eight, nine hours on your phone every day, trust me, you can have a really

difficult time reading an entire book because your mind and your brain and your synapses reformulate. And so all of a sudden you're like, I can't go more than seven minutes on a focus because that's what my brain is now adapted to. So my hope is that this will get people more engaged. I want people to both read a lot more because part of being a citizen is you have to read. You have to understand the facts. I always point to there's a 47-page book that was written in this country hundreds of

years ago by a former Englishman named Thomas Payne called Common Sense. Back then, half the people in this country couldn't even read. I would guarantee you that every American knew every word in that book. Why? Because it mattered to them. This is either seeking their independence. I think that we can't take democracy for grain. And I think every day we need to think, if we're not working towards maintaining our democracy one day, it could go away.

Say more about that. This idea that literacy isn't just an educational issue, it's a small D. Democratic issue. Right. It's difficult to get people engaged in things that they don't think about every day because we're from Virginia outside D.C. We're kind of exposed to it all the time, whereas the rest of the country really isn't. So they don't feel like it's something they need to engage with every day, maybe every two years, every four years when there's an election, and they don't also understand the importance of local politics

and how that affects them. And I think the other issue with people not reading books is because of tweets and everything's gotten shortened, you have to give it in small doses. And obviously you write these thrilling fictional worlds filled with conflict, How has that practice of crafting narratives shaped your thinking about how to deal with real-world conflict and resolution? I have found that anything is possible. My books are bound by plausibility.

I can write about anything. You know, anything is plausible these days. And so until Gutenberg invented his little printing press, we lived in the Dark Ages, and books brought us into the Enlightenment. And if we stopped reading books, there's only one place for us to go, and that's back there. Books really are at the center of what makes us human beings. where the only species can actually read. And this is how you build, you know, intelligence. All these data centers are going up around the world.

So all the tech bros have decided, you know how to make superintelligence? We're going to feed every book ever written to them. That should tell all of us how important books are to build super intelligence, because actually we are the super intelligent ones. So if you think the tech pros are geniuses, you should be reading a book every single day of your life.

Well, I've had your latest book here on the desk throughout our entire conversation because I do intend to ask you a question about it. It's not just here as a set piece. But most of your longtime readers know you for your fast-paced, plot-driven thrillers. This book, Nash Falls, feels especially introspective. Is that a shift for you?

Was it intentional? You know, the older you get, the more you reflect back on the past. And I thought, so what I do with Nashville, Walter Nash, he's done everything he's supposed to do. He got a good education. He has worked really hard for decades, and he has reached the American dream.

And then all of a sudden, nothing he can control. Somebody came and took it away from him. And on the book tour, I told people, I feel like this thematic these days, where you've done everything you're supposed to do, everybody told you you were supposed to do, and you achieved your goals, and then it's gone. And then you have to pick yourself back up again

and move forward. And how do you do that? So me, just as an observer of the world, I took that story on because I'm going to make more international, like, everyday American, you know, and this is what happened, and where do you go from there? Because I think a lot of people are asking themselves, where do I go from here? David and Michelle Baldacci, a real pleasure to speak with you both. Thanks for being here. Thank you.

on the recent expansion for the company that's been something of a bellwether for the book business. Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown spoke with Barnes & Noble CEO about its evolving business model and the redesign of many of its stores. Here's another look at that conversation

that originally ran back in January. It's part of our arts and culture series, Canvas. It's recognizably Barnes & Noble because there are lots and lots of books piled high. But it looks very different. A pre-opening walk through a Barnes & Noble bookstore, a maze of small rooms and pathways, with company CEO James Dant. When you're very full, as this store often will be, it's creating space for people

to drop into. This store on Manhattan's Upper East Side is just a year old. It's part of a large nationwide chain, but crucially for Dant has its own look and feel. The key insight that I have is that it is about the book-selling team, and it's about how you take all of this huge number of books and arrange them and display them in a manner which really engages with your local community. The insight that gives me in terms of running lots of bookstores is leave it to the teams in each store.

The vast majority of them will do it exceptionally well, and your stores will become better and busier and the business will thrive. Barnes and Noble's beginnings can be traced to 1873. But it was in 1971 that Leonard Riggio acquired its trade name and flagship Manhattan store and grew the company into the nation's largest bookseller, offering steep discounts and a huge selection, changing the landscape for how and where Americans bought books, eventually with more than 700 superstores, all with the same titles and design. One, two, three, four.

We don't want this super store. Its success, along with borders, put hundreds of smaller independence out of business, captured in Nora Ephron's 1998 film, You've Got Mail. Can we save the shop around the corner? Yes! But Amazon offering even steeper discounts and more supply nearly killed off Barnes & Noble, which by the time Dant arrived had closed hundreds of stores around the country. Obviously, we've come back from the brink.

The brink meaning the end? Yes. I mean, the business was a public company. It was sold really pretty much for the value of the books that were sitting on its shelves. its shelves. So that's not a really very good sign of health. The job that I had was to restore it as a bookseller. Dant brought an unusual pedigree. He'd launched Dant Books in 1990 as an independent bookseller in a gorgeous London setting that became a destination for book lovers. In 2011, he was hired to rescue Waterstones, Britain's largest chain bookstore, then near bankruptcy. And in 2019, after hedge fund company Elliott Advisors bought Barnes & Noble to attempt the same here,

his success has gained attention, as in recent years Barnes & Noble began to open stores all over the country, even reopening a flagship Washington, D.C. store that had closed in 2012. The new philosophy, half stores act and feel like an independent local shop. Victoria Hardy, assistant manager at this Upper West Side Manhattan store, has worked for Barnes & Noble for more than 10 years. We used to be told what table to do, how to curate it, where that table should go, what angle that table should be on, and what discount that table potentially is going to have. Angle of the table.

It was very, very originated. There was no thought. It might do a little better if we put Norwegian wood on. These days, Hardy and her counterparts see themselves as curators of individual tables and shelves as well as the store itself. Paying more attention to local consumers and to social media, most of all TikTok's book talk. It was a lot of young readers, almost this generation that was coming into physical bookstores looking for books.

So what I started to do with that was look at those titles, like what they were coming in for, and how do you take that one title and curate a display around it? Like what are those books that are similar, pairing them together and creating a piece? bigger display from it. So fervent in his approach is daunt that he makes Amazon, which today accounts for more than 50% of the market, sound like an ally. I actually see Amazon has been a massive positive for what it is to be a great bookseller. How can it be a massive positive if it's taken 50% of the market?

What it's taken is all the boring books out of our stores. We used to have great huge medical sections that taught doctors and nurses and all the other professionals. But those books are very boring. No more. You want to Amazon, bump fiddle rise through your letterbox three minutes later. But surely people go to Amazon for more than just what you're calling the boring books. Of course they do and and you know if you buy Pasoeverett's James from Amazon it's the same password over it I'll sell you. But if you come into this store to buy it you will come in you'll be surrounded by other books which you can browse and

engage with. Almost certainly you'll have another fellow customer saying oh have you have you read this by him? Have you read that? You will have an experience, and when you walk out of the store with it in your bag, it will lift you. It's the same book, but I promise you it's a better book, and the reading of it will be more pleasurable, because you bought it in a bookstore. That strategy applies to the nation's independent bookstores, too, of course. In fact, Barnes & Noble recently acquired one of them. Denver's much-loved, but bankrupt, tattered cover. A move being watched closely, locally and beyond.

Don says this. Bookstores get into trouble. What we now do is a chain is we rescue them. We give them a safe home. We don't change them. We don't change the people. We don't change the name. But we give them the structure of the large chain.

An earlier plot line in this long saga was Barnes & Noble is killing independence. Now they can coexist. I think bookstores do co-exist. I mean, I'm my instincts of that of an independent. bookseller. I would never open up in a location where I believed that I was threatening an independent bookseller ever, because that's totally unnecessary. We're in this vast country of ours with far too few bookstores. So, but it isn't a zero-sum game. It is a business, though, and Don't has to answer to the company's owners. The plot

of this story, that is, is still being written. For the PBS News I'm Jeffrey Brown in New York. From Silent Night to jingle bells, Christmas carols are some of the most familiar and beloved songs of the season, and some of the oldest. Stephanie Sci explores why, even as popular music changes with the times

these classics have endured. To help us dig into why Christmas, Carols have stood the test of time. I'm joined by Ariana Wyatt, a professor of voice at Virginia Tech. Ariana, it's great to have you on the news hour. You know, there are very few things that haven't changed over the years. And Christmas carols are one of them. In fact, as I was reading, I understand that some of them date back 2,000 years to the birth of Christ. Is that right? It's really remarkable, in fact, that our first Christmas Carol is really proclaimed in the gospel, the Angels Him, or Gloria and Excelsis Deo, which is a carol that we sing today in many

different versions and have over the last 2,000 years. I read that that's because angels were viewed as biblically sort of singing, that that was the biblical interpretation of what was happening. Yes, that's correct. Scholars interpret that saying as singing. And there's a lot of other references to singing and praising with, with music, with song in the gospel. So it makes sense that the angels would have been singing that. My favorite Christmas carol is, oh, holy night. And there are other carols that start with this expression, oh, right? Oh, come let us adore him. Talk about the oh, carols. Yeah, it's really a fun thing. So in the 8th century, they made in the liturgy a series of antiphons that were in preparation for the birth of Christ. So they were during the period of Advent. And there were seven specific ones that led up to December 24th. So the last would be performed on December 23rd. And they all started with O. Oh, and then a name.

for God. So you had seven of them, and the last was O Emanuel, or O-C-O-C-O-C-E-M-A-M-U-M-A-M-U. And it's really interesting because if you reverse the order of the Latin, of all of those O name for Christ, all seven, it spells Aero Cross, E-R-O-C-R-A-S, which means I will come tomorrow. Now, speaking of the Latin, in the Middle Ages, you know, not a lot of people were speaking Latin. How did it become accessible when Latin itself was not particularly well known at the time of these carols? So it wasn't until the 12th century when St. Francis Savacisi in Italy started to introduce the vernacular into the Christmas story. And so he would take these Christmas hymns and put the verses in the vernacular, which was, would have been Italian, where he was. And then the choruses were remained in Latin.

And that allowed people to start to connect with the story. So previous to this, these hymns were not popular. They didn't connect with them. They didn't understand what the story was. Do we know anything about the melodies and how they've evolved? We assume that some of these melodies date back to celebrations about the winter solstice, which predate Christianity. And so they would take these folk tunes.

And they would put on new words that were around the Christmas story. And they are gradually put into the repertory and passed down through oral tradition, both by just singing to your own children, but also by groups of traveling musicians who would go from town to town and kind of sing these various songs. That's extraordinary. Speaking of speaking to children, I used to sing Silent Night to my babies as a lullaby. Is Silent Night one that dates back pretty far? It's actually one of the more recent ones. Recent is a subjective term when we're talking about 2,000 years of history, of course. But it dates to 1818. And it was composed in Austria. Then it was brought to the United States in 1839 and performed for the first time in New York City, at Trinity Cathedral. And from there, it kind of took on a world of its own.

There's a great story of the Christmas truce of 1914 during World War I, where German and American troops sang that him together from across the trenches in their respective languages because it was one of, it remains one of our shared Christmas carols. World War II also gave us some really emotionally powerful Christmas songs. What was happening in America at that time that led to songs like White Christmas? Yeah, there's, there's two large things. First, we have the invention of recorded sound. A date which will live in infamy.

that was a huge change to music and how music is transferred and shared across across continents really and so we have for the first time the ability to share music out over the radio share music that can be purchased and and listened to at home which is really remarkable and it was was really changed everything at the time but also we have two major world wars that happened in the 20th century. And as a result of that, after World War II, we have a real economic boom in the United States. And so we see a new genre of Christmas music emerge

that is really a contemporary commercial Christmas music. And it has legs because we can record it and then we can broadcast it. The first of a white Christmas, just like the ones I used to know. The first one that we really look to is White Christmas, which was broadcast for the first time on the radio on Christmas Day in 1941, which was just 18 days after Pearl Harbor. And of course, that song is built in nostalgia, is built in hope for. Christmas's future in nostalgia for Christmas's past. And, of course, the nation was reeling, as was the world at the time in the middle of a world war. And it really spoke to people, which is why it continues to speak to people today. That is Ariana Wyatt with Virginia Tech. Ariana, thank you

so much and happy holidays. Happy holidays. Go hear some music. Speaking of Christmas carols, on this Christmas Eve, we continue a news hour tradition, where we ask the members of the armed forces to record a holiday song for us. Tonight, it's joy to the world. This was produced by the Pentagon's Defense Visual Information Distribution Service. Joy to the world the Lord is calm. Let earth receive were king. That every heart prepare him room. And heaven and nature sing.

And heaven and nature sing. And heaven and heaven and nature sing. Joy to the world, the Savior reigns. Let men their songs employ. While fields and floods, rocks hills and plains, repeat the sounding joy, repeat the sounding joy, the sounding joy, repeat, repeat the sounding joy. He rules the world with truth and grace and makes the nation's proof.

The glories of his righteousness and wonders of his righteousness and wonders of his love and wonders of his love and wonders of his love and wonders wonders of his love And that is the News Hour for tonight. I'm William Brangham. Thank you so much for joining us.