Cabaret was once considered somewhat seedy. In Germany between the world wars, it was, in the words of Betty Buckley, “a gathering place for fantasy and escape, with a sense of the subversive.”

Today, it’s still a place to escape the world for a few hours, but otherwise it has little in common with the aesthetic of the musical “Cabaret.” It’s more likely to take you to a place of domestic bliss — or at least a facsimile thereof.

“Ultimately, we want to make it feel like you’ve stumbled into our living room,” said Megan Hilty, who will perform this week at Segerstrom Center for the Arts with a band that includes her husband, Brian Gallagher.

Laura Benanti, who brings her act to California twice in early 2020 — Walnut Creek in January and Costa Mesa in April — echoed Hilty’s sentiment: “I want people to feel like they’re in my living room, and I’m singing them songs and telling them stories.”

So put down the knitting and find yourself a spot on the sofa.

For the performers, the real question is how do you make a 300-seat theater feel like home? Five world-class cabaret singers produced a consensus answer: authenticity.

“I don’t see the point of doing cabaret if you’re not willing to make yourself vulnerable and share a part of yourself,” said Cheyenne Jackson, who will costar with Hilty at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Arts in February.

Veteran vocalist Lillias White agreed. “If I’m moved by a lyric or a melody, the audience will be as well.”

That said, a personal connection is the first of many considerations when choosing songs for a cabaret act. Working closely with their music directors, some singers constantly tweak their set lists, while others start from scratch on a regular basis.

“It takes months for me to put a show together,” said Buckley, who has been singing cabaret since 1982 and puts together a new show every year. “I’m a kind of portrait painter. I think of each as my new gallery show.

“I’m not really into nostalgia,” she added. “I’m not interested in constantly presenting songs that I’m particularly known for. What I enjoy is seeking out new material — or at least new to me. Songs that resonate in the time period in which we’re living.”

Hilty said she’s changing constantly, so her show changes constantly too. She agreed that new material is essential, arguing that “otherwise, it’s like, ‘I can see all this on YouTube.’”

Benanti sees cabaret as a way to express her eclectic taste in music.

“I think people know they’re going to hear musical theater songs, but I hope they’re pleasantly surprised when they also hear Joni Mitchell and Harry Chapin or Tori Amos,” she said.

Benanti chats with the audience between every song; she calls her approach “very conversational.” In contrast, Buckley and White have cut back on their banter over the years.

“I’m always looking for the most succinct way to talk to an audience, so I don’t waste their time with my long-windedness,” Buckley said with a laugh. “That is always a challenge for me.”

“I actually have several different stories to introduce most of my songs,” Hilty said. “I’ll choose one over another depending on how I’m feeling in the moment and how it connects to what we just said. If I feel I’m losing an audience, I’ll cut the banter altogether.

“I want everybody to be on kind of an energy ride. There are certain spots in the set that need a certain type of song. With attention spans being what they are, I feel ballads need to be earned. If you do too many, people won’t listen to the lyrics. They’ll just tune out. I want people to really hear them. So I’m very selective about what ballads I do, where they’re placed, and when I think the audience is ready to hear them.”

Buckley, who is similarly careful about sequencing, sees her mission in spiritual terms.

“It’s about bringing people into that remembrance of their spirit, their soul,” she said. “To the degree I’m capable of doing it, that’s my mission: to remind people we’re all in this together, and to move the stress of the moment off their hearts. You pick stuff that will allow people to have some kind of catharsis, whether it’s a release of sadness or joy.”

Much of that “stress of the moment” can be traced to our nation’s intense polarization, but all the performers tread lightly when it comes to making political statements. Both Buckley and Jackson sing the song “Hope,” which Jason Robert Brown (“The Last Five Years,” “Parade”) wrote just after the 2016 election in a poignant attempt not to give in to despair.

For her part, Hilty performs “a couple of songs that aren’t overtly political but you can hear them that way, such as Don Henley’s ‘The Heart of the Matter.’ Although they were written 30 years ago, those lyrics resonate today in a subtle but powerful way.”

White, who admitted that television news sometimes brings her to tears, went in a different direction: Her current show “Get Happy” is designed to lift spirits during depressing times. In a similar spirit, Benanti places her emphasis on comedy and warmth.

“Cabaret can be thought of as stuffy or archaic, but it doesn’t have to be,” she argued. “There are opportunities for humor and heart, improvisation and connection. I feel the highest compliment I have been given is when people say to me, ‘I want to be your best friend.’”

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The lead of “Jojo Rabbit” looks like a tiny rock star, cool blue eyes and blond shock of asymmetrical mad-artist — or electrical-socket-toucher — hair … though he admits his mother chose his “Yellow Submarine” T-shirt. And it’s his first professional acting gig.

“Well, I played an extra in a school play. I played a tree,” says Roman Griffin Davis, with a deadpan delivery beyond his 12 years. “I took a lot of acting experience from that.”

The Londoner was 11 when he stepped into the demanding role of Johannes “Jojo” Betzler. Jojo is a wide-eyed Hitler Youth whose wacky imaginary friend is … Adolf Hitler (played by director Taika Waititi). The part requires unusual emotional availability for a child actor, and he’s in almost every scene.

Davis had to research the Hitler-Jugend for the film: “I thought it was interesting how these kids were manipulated and their life was drained.”

Waititi said, “The thing about Roman is he cares so deeply about other people. He’s extremely sensitive and extremely kind. The character wasn’t born a Nazi. The things that make you fall in love with Roman exist in Jojo; they’ve just been covered over by this other thing for a while. So that’s what you’re aiming for; getting back to the kid you fell in love with.”

After he was cast, Davis binged all of Waititi’s movies.

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“I liked how he had a specific style,” says the young actor. “It’s an interesting and funny and personal style that has a lot of good energy and life in it. I like him because it’s very personal, his work.”

Davis has always been around the industry – his father, Ben Davis, is a cinematographer and his mother, Camille Griffin, is a writer-director.

“When I went on sets I was always like, ‘Yes, I want to eat all this chicken … and gravy.’ But yes, I was influenced by my parents.”

When not acting, Davis likes to “paint a lot. I’m a big fan of an artist called Cézanne. And Lucian Freud. My mum’s also an artist.”

“Jojo” won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival, besting such heavyweight contenders as “Marriage Story” and “Parasite.” Davis notes of the vote announcement, “I was with my mom [mimes her on her phone]: ‘You can stop refreshing it. “Joker’s” won, Joaquin deserves it. I can’t take that away.’ I remember my aunt refreshes it and goes, ‘Whoa!’

“I kind of understood [the film’s win] because at the Toronto premiere, everyone’s laughing at the same bits and everyone’s crying at the same bits. That shows you they’re understanding the message and such.”

Sitting at a table near the snack bar at the Alamo Draft House for an interview, Julia Butters waits patiently, but not for any chaperone help. As the 10-year-old Butters, who’s been a working actress since the age of 4, explains, “[My mother] doesn’t sit in.”

It’s this same air of self-possession she brings to her performance in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood”: As Trudi Fraser, a child actor on a TV western, Butters commands her brief time onscreen, much of it buoying her dejected has-been co-star Rick Dalton (Leonardo Dicaprio).

Recently, on a break from her ABC sit-com, “American Housewife,” Butters talks of loving stunt-work, Tarantino’s showbiz advice, and what she learned from Trudi. “I’m not super Method — I don’t have people call me by my character’s name,” she says. “But Trudi taught me to be more focused.”

What sort of preparation goes into holding your own in a scene with Leonardo DiCaprio?
I learned lines with my parents and went to my acting coach. Then [Leo] invited me over to his house to run lines. We read it a couple of times. Sometimes he’d give me direction. For example, [the scene] when I’m comforting him when he’s crying? Before I was like [glibly] “It’s OK, it’s OK.” And Leo said, “I feel like you should treat me like a baby.” So then it was like, [low, soothing voice] ‘It’s OK, it’s OK.’”

In a saloon scene, Leo hurls you to the floor. That was his idea, right?
Yes. He said, “I feel like my motivation in this scene would be to just chuck the little girl.” I was thinking, “Oh, yeah!” I love doing stunts. Zoe Bell, the stunt coordinator, really took care of me. She had hip pads, knee pads, even wrist pads and after we’d cut she’d come over with ice packs for my hands so they wouldn’t ache in the morning from taking a fall.

You write short films.
Yes. I actually wrote a script for [Quentin] and Zoe. After I printed it out, they took the script home and actually memorized the scene. And they showed up to work and performed it. That was great. I was blown away. It was called “An Old Town Deep in the West.” It’s a Western.

Did Quentin give you any pointers on filmmaking?
He’d say, “Julia, Lorelei” – that’s my mom – “Come here, I want to show you something.” He’d pick me up and say, “What do you think about this? Do I get a fellow director’s approval?” And I’d always say “Oh, yes you do.” [laughs]

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Back to acting. Did you give Trudi a backstory?
Yes! A couple of years before, Trudi was on a family sit-com with a bunch of kids. One day the kids were like, “Hey, do you want to damage the set?” Trudi didn’t want to be excluded so she tagged along. They wrecked the set. Then they heard people coming back from lunch and they all scattered. Trudi was the only one left, just standing there like a deer in the headlights. She was instantly fired. Her mom was a very nice person but she got so upset. She convinced Trudi that it’s always [best] to be professional, focused. Trudi thought, “OK, this is what I gotta do if I don’t want to get fired again.” She used to be a super normal, playful girl then she turned into this low-profile, very professional girl. That’s her side of the story.

When you went back to “American Housewife” did you get grilled for info?
One of the writers came to me and grabbed me and was like, “How hot was Brad Pitt?” And I was thinking, “I’m 10! I don’t have the mind to think, ‘Oh, wow. Now that’s a fine man.’”

Did Quentin ever tell you how you caught his eye?
Yes. He likes to have the TV on when he’s writing and he looked up and saw [me]. I was in a school restroom telling a story to all these kids. And he thought, “Wow, I should audition her.” Recently, I came into that restroom on the [“American Housewife”] set, the same one where [that scene was shot]. But I sat there just looking around thinking, “This is where my life changed.” I even have a picture of me just sitting there. Nobody else gets it except for me. They’re all probably like, “Why is she sitting there all nostalgic about a bathroom, the one that smells like a dead gopher?”

London — 

“The thing that scares me in my life is that I will never have enough time to be all the different versions of myself and do all the different things in the world,” says Noah Jupe, an up-and-coming actor far wiser than his 14 years. “This job really gives me insight into all the aspects of all the different people in the world.”

Today Jupe is in London for the BFI London Film Festival, which is showcasing his latest films, “Honey Boy” and “Ford v Ferrari.” The actor, who has built up a strong resume over the past five years, including films like “A Quiet Place” and “Wonder,” shot both projects in California last year. They were made so close together that Jupe says the movies feel “almost like one experience” despite the remarkable contrast between the two.

In “Honey Boy” Jupe plays 12-year-old Otis, a fictionalized version of Shia LaBeouf, who wrote the screenplay based on his experiences as a young actor. Although Lucas Hedges stars as Otis at an older age, Jupe is responsible for much of the story’s emotional heft.

“I was nervous and excited,” Jupe says of being cast. “I’ve been playing a lot of children and kids before this. This was the first time, really, that I got the weight of a part of the movie on my shoulders. Which was scary, but also what I do this for. It was definitely a perfect project for that point in my career.”

To prepare, the actors rehearsed for three months with director Alma Har’el. The actual filming took place in only two weeks, with lots of improvisation, particularly from LaBeouf, who plays Otis’ father. Jupe found it intense, but describes the set as one of the calmest he’s ever been on, which gave him space to try new things and play around. Not everything was easy, especially a tense scene where Otis confronts his father in their hotel room and gets slapped in response.

“It all got built up to this day where there’s this scene you’ve been practicing for like three months and now you’ve got to pull it off in an hour at the end of the day,” Jupe remembers. “It was the last shot of the day and I think it was one of the last shots of the shoot. It was scary, but we got there. I wouldn’t have been able to do it if I hadn’t had my mum there. And Alma was really helpful.”

To decompress at the end of the long shooting days Jupe would go home and watch “Even Stevens,” LaBeouf’s Disney Channel series that aired from 2000 to 2003 (Jupe wasn’t familiar with any of LaBeouf’s work before filming “Honey Boy”). Har’el suggested he watch one episode as research, but Jupe ended up watching the entire series – plus the TV movie. Becoming Otis made Jupe consider the positives and negatives of being a young actor, an experience he has so far enjoyed.

“I think me and Otis are very different in terms of where we are in stages of our career and the team that surrounds us,” Jupe says. “Obviously, I have a really supportive family and I feel really safe on set. I really respect my normality and my reality, and I love going home and chilling out afterward and having a place to go back and be myself after all this craziness of Hollywood. I feel like he doesn’t have that place to go back to. He feels that he’s more safe on set with these fake people.”

He adds, “That’s probably the one thing I learned from this movie, to keep that reality and keep those people who you trust and care about as close as possible. It gets tricky when you’re all alone in this world.”

Jupe found another kindred spirit on “Ford v Ferrari,” in which he portrays Peter, the son of racing driver Ken Miles, played by Christian Bale. The two spent a lot of time together, just hanging out and talking, to help make their close father-son relationship feel real onscreen, and Jupe found Bale’s experiences growing up in Hollywood relatable.

“How I feel about creating a relationship with someone to make it seem like you’ve known each other for years is that it’s about time spent,” Jupe notes. “We just spent so much time together. It developed that trust on set. It let me feel safe around the other actors. It’s about listening, too. Listening to him and what he has to say, and him listening to me. I think that’s really what creates that kind of chemistry onscreen.”

Jupe has since moved from Manchester to Chiswick, an area of London, and shot two more notable projects, recently wrapping production on the sequel to “A Quiet Place,” which will arrive in theaters next March, as well as “The Undoing,” an HBO series from David E. Kelley that also stars Hugh Grant and Nicole Kidman.

He’s particularly excited for people to see “A Quiet Place: Part II.”

“I think, honestly, it’s quite needed, the story they’re going to tell,” he says. “It’s weird to think of the first movie as being a stand-alone movie anymore because of shooting this second one. They work so well together. I think that’s going to be cool to see the two of them side by side as a collection. I just loved the whole thing. And going back to a character I already know and have spent time with was great.”

Going forward, Jupe hopes to make his own films (he’s dabbled in the process with friends) and to continue to pick projects that open his eyes to all those different aspects of the world he’s so afraid of missing. He’s also very clear on why he wants to be an actor at all.

“Someone asked me earlier how I choose which movie to do and I will always only choose jobs that excite me,” Jupe says. “If they didn’t, what would be the point of doing them? I’m not in it for the money, or whatever. I want to do what I’m passionate about and keep doing it for the rest of my life.”

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The weekend event lineup includes lantern art in Arcadia, snowfall in L.A. and outdoor volunteering in Palos Verdes.

Arcadia

The Moonlight Forest Magical Lantern Art Festival returns to the Arboretum with new exhibits, including lantern penguins and sled dogs at Polar Dreams and a giant illuminated shark at Ocean Visions. Food trucks, music and acrobatic performances will also be on hand. Make a day of the festival by signing up for other Arboretum events, such as forest bathing, ceramics classes and docent-led walking tours.

When: Lantern festival: 5:30 p.m. Nov. 9- Jan. 12. Check the Arboretum website for other event times and information

Cost, info: Festival admission $20-$28. Family friendly. Only service dogs permitted at the festival. (626) 566-3711, bit.ly/moonlightlanternfest

Palos Verdes

Saturday with the Palos Verdes Peninsula Land Conservancy includes two family-friendly activities. Kids and parents can plant seeds, care for native plants and track butterflies at an outdoor volunteer day at George F. Canyon Preserve and Nature Center. If you’d rather hit the trails, sign up for a walk through White Point Nature Preserve, where you’ll learn how early Tongva inhabitants used native plants for survival.

When: Both activities start at 11 a.m. Nov. 16

Cost, info: Free. Family friendly. Dogs OK. (310) 541-7613, bit.ly/familyeventsPV

Burbank

The Burbank Winter Wine Walk and Holiday Street Fair starts with crafts vendors and live music along San Fernando Boulevard. In the evening, Wine Walkers can taste wine and craft beer at participating locations in downtown Burbank, then head back to San Fernando Boulevard for performances, festive lighting and snowfall.

When: Street fair at noon and Wine Walk at 4 p.m. Nov. 16

Cost, info: Free for street fair and snowfall; from $50 for Wine Walk. Street fair is family friendly; Wine Walk is for ages 21 and older only. Dogs OK at street fair but not recommended for Wine Walk. (805) 628-9588, burbankwinterwinewalk.com

Orange County

Leave the car at home for at Meet on Beach, an open-streets event taking place in seven Orange County communities (La Habra, Buena Park, Anaheim, Stanton, Garden Grove, Westminster and Huntington Beach) along Beach Boulevard. Sign up to get a free OC Bus day pass to get from healthy food in La Habra to a party on the sand at Huntington Beach, with performances, workshops and other pedestrian- and bike-friendly activities in between.

When: 9 a.m. Nov. 17

Cost, info: Free. Family friendly. Dogs OK. (213) 365-0605, meetonbeach.com

Los Angeles

Snow will fall, fireworks will light the sky and Santa will open his house to visitors at the 18th tree lighting at the Grove. Watch the 100-foot-tall white fir come to life with 10,000 ornaments and 15,000 lights, followed by performances by surprise guests.

When: 7:30 p.m. Nov. 17

Cost, info: Free. Family friendly. Dogs OK, but event will be very crowded. (323) 900-8080, bit.ly/LAgrovetreelighting

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There are two full moons left in 2019 — and one is happening right now. The first full moon of November, also known as the beaver or frost moon, started Tuesday and will appear almost full for a few more nights.

Moonrise in Los Angeles starts at 5:39 p.m. Wednesday and doesn’t set until 7:21 a.m. Thursday. By the way, the name “beaver moon” lines up with the time of year when beaver-trapping season would begin for Native Americans and early settlers. “Frost moon” connotes the time of year when the first frost appeared, particularly on the East Coast.

The last full moon of 2019 will rise at 4:37 p.m. Dec. 11.

You can gaze at the full moon from your backyard or just about anywhere in L.A., provided there’s no fog or cloud cover. Here are five places in Southern California where views could be epic this month and next.

Luxe

If you’re OK with spending some moon-watching moola, seek out your favorite rooftop bar or restaurant, such as Perch in downtown L.A. and the High Rooftop Lounge at Hotel Erwin in Venice.

Oue Skyspace LA (633 W. 5th St. on the 70th floor of the U.S. Bank Tower in downtown L.A.) at 1,000 feet above street level has become the city’s highest observation deck. You can take in 360-degree views of the city with the big moon as backdrop. It costs $25 to go up and $1 (until Nov. 22) to ride down the side of the building on the SkySlide glass chute.

The Roof on Wilshire (6317 Wilshire Blvd. atop the Kimpton Hotel Wilshire) offers an intimate space where you can bask in moonlight with eyes fixed over the Hollywood Hills to the north and city views to the east. Make a reservation before you go as the rooftop area is small and fills fast.

Earthy

Griffith Park is the perfect outdoors playground for a full moon adventure, and it’s free to enter. There are lots of trails to explore, even at night, or you can just drive to the Griffith Observatory for panoramic views. From there, you can press on a little higher with a 1.5-mile hike up to Mt. Hollywood and watch the city twinkle under the big moon. The park and the observatory are open until 10 p.m.

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The Hollywood Bowl overlook (officially known as the Jerome C. Daniel Overlook, at 7036 Mulholland Drive in Hollywood) offers views of the bowl and, farther away, downtown Los Angeles. To the east, you can see the Hollywood sign, and to the north the San Fernando Valley. The overlook was created in 1984 for the last century’s Summer Olympic Games.

Coastal

Take a spin on the Pacific Wheel at the Santa Monica Pier (near Ocean and Colorado avenues) to catch the moon’s watery reflection in the ocean. The solar-powered Ferris wheel takes you 130 feet in the air to take in the views and the moon. It closes at 7 p.m. and costs $10 per person.

Travel, for many a 78-year-old American, is what you do on a cruise ship, or maybe just between the couch and the kitchen. For writer Paul Theroux, it’s lately been a matter of Chiapas, Oaxaca, magnificent scenery, charming hitchhikers and the occasional duck taco.

Theroux, the author of about 50 novels and travel books in the last 45 years (including “The Great Railway Bazaar” in 1975 and “The Mosquito Coast” in 1981), has just published “On the Plain of Snakes: a Mexican Journey.”

This book has little to do with the beach resorts where so many American tourists “get hog-whimpering drunk on tequila,” as the author writes. And unlike several of Theroux’s best-known travel books, this one has nothing to do with trains. It is based on months of driving the border and backroads, looking for grit and grace beyond the usual information Americans get about their southern neighbors.

“One of the ambitions I had for this book was to go to the villages that people are leaving. In Chiapas and Oaxaca in particular,” Theroux said in a recent interview. “I wanted to see why they’re going. What’s their life like there? And are they staying away? When they send money back, what happens to the money? What happens to the family?”

He is relentlessly curious, ready to be charmed by a duck taco lunch with a gaggle of bright students in Mexico City, or awed near San Luis Potosí by “magnificent mountains of sharp, shining granite peaks, some like shattered knives and others like fractured black bones, or marked with odd, inky splashes of obsidian.”

But Theroux is also as acerbic as ever. Entering Puebla, he writes that “[t]here is not a big city in Mexico — no matter how charming its plaza, how atmospheric its cathedral, how wonderful its food, or how illustrious its schools — that is not in some way fundamentally grim, with a big-box store, a Sam’s Club, and an industrial area, a periphery of urban ugliness that makes your heart sink.”

Browsing the well-trafficked museum at Frida Kahlo’s old home in Coyoacán, he decides that the artist “is a detour and a distraction. It was her genius as an artist, and her neurotic narcissism, to turn her whole self into art — her love, her suffering, her accident-prone life — and in the process make herself an icon, for the Mexican tradition is full of icons, especially Madonnas. It did not hurt her career that the 43-year-old Diego Rivera dumped his wife and married the teenage Frida (she was 19).”

At the journey’s beginning Theroux is 76 (and he does encounter a snake). He marvels at the tragedies endured and risks taken by migrants; quizzes factory workers; teaches writing; studies Spanish; pays mordidas (bribes) when extorted by authorities; gets big laughs by accidentally calling himself a cabrón (literally: male goat) in the wrong place; and sits down with one of Mexico’s most celebrated artists and its most notorious living revolutionary. In many areas, he also sees the long shadow cast by drug cartels.

“The cartels are not going to take over the country. But they’re dangerous. They’re ruthless. They’re violent. Not to tourists,” Theroux added. “But there is such a thing as crossfire.”

The writer, who has homes in Hawaii and Cape Cod (and Massachusetts plates on his car), spoke about the new project by telephone. Questions and answers are edited for sequence and brevity.

How is your Spanish?

I think it’s adequate…. I’ve been speaking Spanish since probably the mid-’70s, when I first began going to Mexico…. Really, you understand very little of Mexico if you don’t speak the language.

You’ve said you admire Mexican poet and essayist Octavio Paz, historian Enrique Krauze, novelist and journalist Juan Villoro and scholar Claudio Lomnitz for their insights on the country, and also novelist Juan Rulfo, whose 1955 novel “Pedro Páramo” explores life in a ghostly small town. Did those writers prepare you for the countryside?

One of the problems is that Mexican writers tend to live in Mexico City. So there isn’t as much writing about the provinces, about rural areas, about villages. Particularly fiction…. I’ve told Mexican writers that. “Do yourself a favor. Go live in a village and write about it. Go to Chiapas. Go to Oaxaca. Go to some distant place, live there and write about it. Be William Faulkner.”

You made it a point to meet two globally known Mexicans. One was the artist Francisco Toledo, the Oaxacan artist and activist.

He was the greatest living Mexican painter…. He was in his late 70s and I’m in my late 70s. It’s very enjoyable to talk with somebody who has seen what you have seen.” (Toledo died Sept. 5, age 79.)

You also met with Subcomandante Marcos, the Zapatista rebel leader who’s still in Chiapas.

I’m constantly trying to understand poverty, change and revolution, and he seemed to have a lot of the answers that I was looking for. If I was much younger, I would probably go and be a teacher in a Zapatista village.

On the road

As an observer, what did you gain and lose, traveling mostly by car?

Many of the places I went to are only accessible by a car with all-wheel drive or four-wheel drive….
Often when I was driving, I picked up hitchhikers…. And that was a very helpful thing, too, because I was able to ask them what their lives were like. And I also felt protected. Because if I had a hitchhiker with me, I thought, if I get a flat tire, or I get lost or something, here’s someone in my car who can help me.

Your travels took you through plenty of places where you could feel the influence of the drug cartels. But you did avoid many areas in which cartel-related violence has been most widespread, such as the states of Michoacán and Guerrero (which the U.S. State Department urges all American travelers to avoid). How did you decide what to avoid?

If a Mexican said to me, do not go there… I listened.

And if an American warned you?

A lot of people told me, “Don’t drive in Mexico.” But they tended to be Americans who had not driven there…. Big, tough people in Texas, motorcycle guys, said “Don’t go there, man. You’ll die.”

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Unforgettable Frida

It seems you have mixed feelings about Frida Kahlo.

She represents a kind of Madonna figure — the tortured woman, let’s say. But she was taken up by people from outside. When Mexicans noticed there was a lot of interest in her, they catered to that interest.

What did Francisco Toledo say about Kahlo?

He said, “I started out hating her. Then I realized that she had something.”

The past and the future

How many countries have you visited?

The honest answer is I really don’t know…. I’ve never been to Sweden. I’ve never been to Finland. I’ve never been to Norway. I’ve never been to Montana…. Never been to Idaho. And I’ve never been to Greenland. I don’t want to write a book about Greenland, but I’d like to see it… They have a history of great kayak construction.

The Huntington Library in San Marino has acquired all your papers from 1965 to 2015, during which you traveled in and wrote about Europe, Africa, Asia, the Pacific and the Americas. If I dig up your notebooks from the ‘60s or ‘70s, how different will they be from your Mexico notebooks?

I’ve always written in longhand and I’ve always kept very meticulous notes…. You get better at these things. You get better at noticing…. You ask more penetrating questions, I guess. But as you get older, you get forgetful, so you want to write everything down.

I don’t keep a daily diary, [but] I keep diaries in significant years.

And in 2020?

It’ll be great. No matter what happens. It’ll be worth watching. That’s my general feeling: Don’t let it get you down. It’s time passing and people being as stupid, or as clever, as they’ve always been.

Every fall and winter, volunteers help hatchlings on a beach in the town of Todos Santos, Mexico. Visitors can join. Christopher Reynolds of the Los Angeles Times joined a release in mid-October.

And now, one more reason to think about a trip to southern Baja California: Three species of embattled sea turtles lay eggs on the area’s beaches. As this video shows, if you head to the town of Todos Santos, you might get a chance to see tiny hatchlings scramble into the sea.

Todos Santos is on the Baja peninsula’s Pacific coast, about 70 miles northwest of Los Cabos International Airport.

In fall and winter, the charity Tortugueros Las Playitas collects and incubates eggs in Todos Santos. Most evenings at sunset from early December through late February, volunteer leader Enedino Castillo, his son Dario, and their comrades set free hatchling sea turtles and invite visitors to watch from a few feet away and perhaps contribute to the cause.

I happened to catch one release in mid-October. I arrived to find volunteers filling a blue bin full of creeping, twitching Oreos.

They were hatchling olive ridley sea turtles, which are an endangered species on Mexico’s west coast. At water’s edge, volunteers released the hatchlings from the bin and watched as they lurched toward the surf — a stirring sight.

Most will die young, Dario Castillo told me, but the hardiest will live decades (nobody is sure exactly how long) and grow to 100 pounds. The hatchling releases happen about 5 p.m. (around sunset) at Las Playitas (the beach at the foot of Camino Internacional).

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Stocks on Wall Street closed nearly flat Tuesday after an early rally lost momentum toward the end of the day.

The Nasdaq composite index still finished with its second record high in three days, while the Dow Jones industrial average ended at the same all-time high it set a day earlier.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 crossed above the 3,100 level for the first time, placing the index on track for its own milestone finish, but the gains didn’t hold. Still, the benchmark index rebounded nearly all the way back from its Monday loss.

“There was some excitement on breaking 3,100,” said JJ Kinahan, chief market strategist at TD Ameritrade. “But we’ve had such an amazing two weeks that without any blockbuster news, it was going to be difficult for us to continue higher.”

President Trump gave an update Tuesday on trade negotiations with China, saying both sides are close to a “Phase 1” deal. The markets didn’t react much to his remarks.

The S&P 500 rose 4.83 points, or 0.2%, to 3,091.84. The index, which is near the record high it set Friday, has notched gains the last five weeks.

The Dow closed unchanged at 27,691.49 points. The Nasdaq rose 21.81 points, or 0.3%, to 8,486.09, a record.

The Russell 2000 index of smaller companies inched up 0.35 of a point, or less than 0.1%, to 1,595.12.

The market’s momentum has been mostly upward for more than five weeks as worries about the U.S.-China trade war have eased, among other factors.

Trump gave markets more reason for optimism on trade during his Tuesday speech at the Economic Club of New York. Trump said the two sides are “close,” and that a “Phase 1” deal on trade “could happen soon.”

Trump’s latest update on trade followed conflicting signals from U.S. and Chinese officials last week on whether the two sides have agreed to any tariff rollbacks as part of the tentative trade agreement they’re negotiating.

Besides expectations for a stopgap deal on the trade war, stocks have jumped recently because of interest-rate cuts by the Federal Reserve, data showing the economy is still growing solidly and corporate earnings reports for the summer that weren’t as weak as expected.

The rising confidence in markets has meant fewer buyers piling into the safety of gold, which dropped Tuesday to its lowest price in more than three months.

Treasury yields fell slightly after trading resumed after Monday’s holiday in observance of Veterans Day. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note slipped to 1.92% from 1.93%. It was below 1.50% in early September and has been rallying with confidence in the economy’s strength.

Reports have shown that the job market is still growing, which should help households keep spending at a strong clip. Such spending makes up the bulk of the economy, and the expectation is that it can more than make up for the weakness in manufacturing that the trade war is causing.

“That’s the next thing we look for,” Kinahan said, noting that Black Friday, traditionally one of the busiest shopping days of the year, is only a couple of weeks away. “Expectations are really high for spending. So, does the consumer live up to it?”

Healthcare, technology and communication services stocks led the gainers Tuesday, outweighing losses in energy companies and elsewhere.

Disney rose 1.3% on the day that its highly anticipated streaming video service, Disney+, launched. The service had some technical difficulties in the morning, an indication that demand may have been higher than expected.

Rockwell Automation jumped 10.5% — one of the biggest gains in the S&P 500 — after the company reported earnings that were better than analysts expected.

Advance Auto Parts skidded 7.5% after the auto parts retailer cut its full-year estimates for sales and income.

Across the S&P 500, companies are on track to report a 2.4% drop in third-quarter earnings per share compared with a year earlier. That’s not as bad as the 4% decline analysts initially expected, according to FactSet. About 90% of the companies in the S&P 500 have reported their results so far.

It’s a busy week for economic data. The U.S. Labor Department will give updates on consumer and wholesale inflation. Economists expect a government report to show that retail sales returned to growth in October.

And Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome H. Powell is scheduled to give testimony to Congress on Wednesday about the U.S. economy. Most investors expect the Fed to keep interest rates steady for now after cutting them three times since the summer.

Benchmark crude oil fell 6 cents to $56.80 a barrel. Brent crude oil, the international standard, fell 12 cents to $62.06 a barrel. Wholesale gasoline was little changed at $1.61 a gallon. Heating oil fell 1 cent to $1.90 a gallon. Natural gas fell 2 cents to $2.62 per 1,000 cubic feet.

Gold fell $3.40 to $1,451.10 an ounce. Silver fell 9 cents to $16.68 an ounce. Copper fell 2 cents to $2.64 a pound.

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Nike Inc. is breaking up with Amazon.com Inc.

The athletic brand will stop selling its sneakers and apparel directly on Amazon’s website, ending a pilot program that began in 2017.

The split comes amid a massive overhaul of Nike’s retail strategy. It also follows the hiring of former EBay Inc. Chief Executive John Donahoe as its next CEO — a move that signaled the company is going even more aggressively after e-commerce sales, apparently without Amazon’s help.

“As part of Nike’s focus on elevating consumer experiences through more direct, personal relationships, we have made the decision to complete our current pilot with Amazon Retail,” the company said in a statement. “We will continue to invest in strong, distinctive partnerships for Nike with other retailers and platforms to seamlessly serve our consumers globally.”

The relationship was engineered to ease the concerns big brands had about devaluing their products on a giant e-commerce platform, where fake merchandise can flourish and unauthorized distributors can undermine prices. Under the pilot program, Nike acted as a wholesaler to Amazon, rather than just letting third-party merchants hawk its products on the site.

Amazon operates an online marketplace, essentially a digital mall where merchants can sell products. More than half of all goods sold on Amazon come from independent merchants who pay the Seattle-based company a commission on each sale.

Amazon also operates as a traditional retailer, buying goods from wholesalers and selling them to customers.

Nike said it will continue to use Amazon’s cloud-computing unit, Amazon Web Services, to power its apps and Nike.com services.

Amazon didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. But the company has been preparing for the move, according to two people familiar with the matter. It has been recruiting third-party sellers with Nike products so that the merchandise is still widely available on the site, they said.

The question now is whether other Amazon partners follow Nike’s lead. Few other brands possess the kind of muscle Nike has, so it may be harder for them to leave.

“Nike has enormous reach and its products are in demand, so it can afford to be selective about where its products are distributed because customers will come find Nike where it is offered,” said Neil Saunders, an analyst at GlobalData Retail. “I don’t think as many brands can be as selective as Nike.”

For years, the only Nike products sold on Amazon were gray-market items — and counterfeits — sold by others. Nike had little control over how they were listed, what information about the product was available and whether the products were even real.

That changed in 2017, when Nike joined Amazon’s brand registry program. Executives hoped the move would give them more control over Nike goods sold on the e-commerce site, more data on their customers and added power to remove fake Nike listings.

The news of the Amazon tie-up, which Nike executives called a “small pilot,” sent shoe-retailer stocks tumbling and left many wondering if other major Amazon holdouts would quickly follow.

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But Nike reportedly struggled to control the Amazon marketplace. Third-party sellers whose listings were removed simply popped up under a different name. Plus, the official Nike products had fewer reviews, and therefore received worse positioning on the site.

Leaving Amazon won’t necessarily solve Nike’s problems, which represent a big brand struggling to adapt to selling products in the digital age, said James Thomson, a former Amazon employee who now helps brands sell products online through Buy Box Experts.

“Just because Nike walks away from Amazon doesn’t mean its products walk away from Amazon and doesn’t mean its brand problems disappear,” Thomson said. “Even if every single Nike product isn’t on Amazon, there will be enough of a selection that someone looking for Nike on Amazon will find something to buy.”

Shortly after its Amazon pilot began, Nike unveiled plans to overhaul its retail strategy. With more attention aimed at direct-to-consumer avenues, particularly the Nike app and Nike.com, executives said the company would drastically reduce the number of retailers it partnered with.

In 2017, Nike did business with 30,000 retailers around the world. Elliott Hill, head of consumer and marketplace operations, told investors that year that Nike would focus its future efforts primarily on about 40 partners.

Nike wasn’t specific on what would separate those 40 partners from what it called “undifferentiated retail.” Reading between the lines, it appeared to want partners that gave Nike a separate brand space — such as Nordstrom’s “Nordstrom x Nike” shop on its website — and was less interested in retailers that just place Nike alongside its other smaller competitors.

The Wall Street Journal reported at the time that Amazon was one of those 40 that Nike intended to prioritize.

About 68% of Nike’s annual sales come from wholesale channels, down from 81% in 2013. Though wholesale is still the bulk of the company’s sales, in that span Nike’s direct business has grown three times faster than top-line revenue.

Nike’s departure will rob Amazon’s brand registry program of a big name — and potentially stoke the concerns of its partners. Nike’s participation had signaled that Amazon was taking the concerns of major brands seriously.

Such brands have expressed frustration that Amazon doesn’t do enough to fight counterfeits. They also fear that giving Amazon too much control over prices will devalue their products.

Amazon’s foray into private-label products has added to the fears. The company now sells everything from batteries to mattresses to snacks, further complicating the relationship between Amazon and brands.

Novy-Williams and Soper write for Bloomberg.