November 10: Sesame Street Opens, Kevin's Home Alone, the Hope Diamond Arrives Three November 10ths defined by things that captured the imagination — a street that taught a generation, a house that made a holiday, and a stone that has been making people stare for three centuries Some things earn their place in the culture by being genuinely useful — by teaching children to read, or by keeping families company on a cold December afternoon, or by sitting in a museum case and silently insisting, through sheer improbability of color and size and history, that the person looking at it keep looking. November 10 has given us all three: a television street that changed how America thought about educating its youngest citizens, a film about an eight-year-old with a paint can and a plan that has outlasted every prediction about its staying power, and a blue diamond that arrived at the Smithsonian in a plain brown package and has been one of its most visited objects ever since. Can You Tell Me How to Get   On November 10, 1969, the Children's Television Workshop debuted Sesame Street on PBS — and American children's television was permanently and immediately divided into before and after. The show had been conceived by television producer Joan Ganz Cooney following a 1966 study she conducted on the potential of television as an educational tool, and it was built on a then-radical premise: that the same techniques used to make advertising memorable — repetition, jingles, short segments, vivid characters — could be used to teach preschoolers letters, numbers, and social concepts. Jim Henson's Muppets provided the characters. A cast that included actors of multiple races, on a set that depicted an urban neighborhood rather than a sanitized suburb, provided something else: a mirror for the children the show was specifically designed to reach, many of whom had never seen themselves in this context on television before. Sesame Street has now aired for more than fifty-five years, making it the longest-running children's television program in American history. It has been broadcast in more than 150 countries and adapted into local versions for dozens of cultures, with Muppet characters tailored to address specific educational and social needs — a South African version introduced an HIV-positive Muppet named Kami; an Afghan version featured a female character who modeled the importance of girls' education. More than eighty million Americans grew up watching it. Studies have consistently found that children who watch Sesame Street regularly enter school better prepared than those who don't. The show that premiered on November 10, 1969 has been, by any measure, one of the most effective educational interventions in American history — and one of the few things most Americans across every generation and political division still remember with uncomplicated warmth.   The urban neighborhood street that became, for more than eighty million American children, the most familiar address in television — warm, diverse, and designed from the ground up to teach. Merry Christmas, Ya Filthy Animal On November 10, 1990, Home Alone opened in American theaters and immediately became the highest-grossing comedy of its era — eventually earning more than $476 million worldwide on a budget of $18 million, a return that remains one of the most remarkable in Hollywood history. Written by John Hughes and directed by Chris Columbus, the film starred eleven-year-old Macaulay Culkin as Kevin McCallister, an eight-year-old (aged up slightly in the film) accidentally left behind in suburban Chicago while his enormous family flies to Paris for Christmas. What followed — two increasingly inept burglars, an elaborate series of traps, and a child whose resourcefulness is matched only by his enthusiasm for room service and junk food television — produced a comedy of such perfect internal logic that it has been replayed every holiday season for more than three decades without losing its audience. The film's longevity is the product of several things operating simultaneously: Culkin's performance, which manages to be both genuinely funny and surprisingly touching; Hughes's script, which takes its premise with complete seriousness rather than winking at the audience; and a holiday setting that anchors it to a time of year when families gather and comfort-viewing is exactly what is wanted. The booby trap sequences that occupy the film's third act have been analyzed by physicists, engineers, and personal injury lawyers — the consensus being that most of them would be significantly more lethal in reality than the film suggests. This has not diminished anyone's enjoyment. Home Alone has now been seen by multiple generations of children who have grown into adults who show it to their own children, making it one of the more reliably self-perpetuating artifacts of 1990s popular culture. The kind of snow-covered suburban house that Home Alone made iconic — warm, festive, and defended by an eight-year-old whose trap-building skills have been debated by engineers ever since. ❦ The Blue Diamond   On November 10, 1958, New York gem dealer Harry Winston mailed the Hope Diamond to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. — via registered first-class mail, insured for one million dollars, in a plain brown package. The postage cost $2.44. The diamond that arrived in that package is one of the largest blue diamonds in the world at 45.52 carats, a deep steel-blue stone of extraordinary clarity whose color comes from trace amounts of boron in its crystal structure. Its recorded history stretches back to 17th-century India, where it was reportedly purchased — possibly stolen — from a Hindu idol by a French merchant named Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, who sold it to Louis XIV of France. It has been cut and recut several times since, passed through the French crown jewels, survived the French Revolution, appeared in London, and eventually made its way to the United States through a series of owners whose collective misfortunes gave rise to its reputation as cursed. The curse of the Hope Diamond is, by the consensus of historians, largely a confabulation — a story assembled retroactively from the misfortunes of its various owners, some of whom had those misfortunes because they were the kind of people who buy extremely expensive diamonds and live accordingly. Harry Winston, who had owned the stone since 1949 and had toured it around the country for charitable events, donated it to the Smithsonian with the straightforward explanation that he thought it belonged in a national collection where everyone could see it. He was right. The Hope Diamond is now one of the most visited museum objects in the world — more than seven million people see it annually in the Janet Annenberg Hooker Hall of Geology, Gems, and Minerals at the National Museum of Natural History. The stone that arrived in a brown paper package on November 10, 1958 has been stared at by more people than any other object in any museum on earth. The curse, apparently, is that you cannot stop looking at it.   The Hope Diamond on display at the Smithsonian — one of the most visited museum objects in the world, mailed there in a plain brown package for $2.44 in postage on November 10, 1958.

On Nov. 10, 2001, Trade Ministers in Doha Approved China's Entry Into the World Trade Organization, Ending a Marathon Negotiation After fifteen years of talks, a conference room in Qatar cleared the way for the world's most populous country to join the global trading club. The world was still absorbed by the aftermath of September 11 when trade ministers gathered in Doha, Qatar, for the World Trade Organization's fourth ministerial conference. On Saturday, Nov. 10, 2001, they took up an item that had stalled, restarted and stalled again for a decade and a half: whether China would be admitted. The Long Wait   China had first sought to rejoin the system in 1986, when it applied to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the WTO's predecessor. The talks outlasted the GATT itself, which became the WTO in 1995, and dragged through years of bargaining over tariffs, agriculture, banking, telecommunications and the treatment of state-owned industries. Bilateral deals with major trading partners, including a landmark agreement with the United States in 1999, cleared the largest hurdles. By the time ministers convened in Doha, the substance was settled, and the formal approval of China's accession package was largely a matter of ceremony. It was a ceremony, though, that had taken the better part of a generation to schedule. Negotiators who began the process as young officials had grown into senior ones before it ended, and the country they were bargaining over had changed beyond recognition. The application had been filed by an economy that was still emerging from central planning; the approval came for one that was already a manufacturing powerhouse. The Doha decision was not the final step. China formally became the WTO's 143rd member on Dec. 11, 2001, after completing its own ratification process, and the self-governing island of Taiwan was approved as a member the day after China's approval, under the name Chinese Taipei. Membership bound Beijing to lower tariffs and open sectors of its economy to foreign competition, and it gave Chinese exporters more secure access to overseas markets. Over the following years, China's trade volume climbed steeply, and the country became central to global supply chains. Yet the conference where the approval happened had a different official purpose: ministers were launching a new round of trade talks, known as the Doha Development Agenda. That round was meant to be the headline, and it never concluded. The side agenda ended up outlasting the main event.  

■  The Pop Edition November 10: Sesame Street Debuts, Fallout 4 Ships Sesame Street premiered on this day in 1969 and Fallout 4 shipped in 2015. Plus Eve turns 48, and Miranda Lambert, Tracy Morgan and Ellen Pompeo all have birthdays. Sesame Street debuted on National Educational Television on November 10, 1969, with Muppets and neighbors sharing one stoop. November 10: Sesame Street Debuts, Fallout 4 ShipsNovember 10 is a date for building worlds people kept returning to. In 1969, a street with a stoop and a very tall yellow bird arrived on public television. In 2015, a nuclear wasteland arrived on store shelves, complete with a wrist computer you could actually wear. Add a Grammy-winning rapper's birthday and a country star's, and you get a full day of pop culture history. PRIME TIME: Sesame Street Sesame Street premiered on November 10, 1969, on National Educational Television, the forerunner of PBS. The twist was the method: creators Joan Ganz Cooney and Lloyd Morrisett designed it around research into what held a preschooler's attention, and the answer turned out to be the pace and polish of television commercials. Letters and numbers were delivered like short, catchy product pitches.The show put humans and Jim Henson's Muppets on the same urban street. The early cast included Bob McGrath, Loretta Long and Will Lee, who played shopkeeper Mr. Hooper. That was a deliberate break from the cartoon-heavy children's programming of the time, which rarely showed a neighborhood that looked like a real city block.Sesame Street was an educational experiment before it was a fixture, and it was not an instant consensus favorite. Some stations were wary of the format. But the show found its audience, and Big Bird, Kermit, Ernie and Bert, and Cookie Monster became characters generations of children grew up with. Today, 57 years later, it remains one of the longest-running children's series in American television.  Born On This DayEveBORN 1978 · TURNS 48The Philadelphia-born rapper broke through with the Ruff Ryders crew, then won a Grammy for “Let Me Blow Ya Mind,” her duet with Gwen Stefani. She moved into acting with her own sitcom, Eve, which ran from 2003 to 2006, and later joined the panel of The Talk.Miranda LambertBORN 1983 · TURNS 43The Texas-born singer first drew notice on the talent show Nashville Star in 2003. She built a career on sharp-edged country songwriting and has won multiple Academy of Country Music and CMA awards. She is also a member of the trio Pistol Annies.Tracy MorganBORN 1968 · TURNS 58The comedian joined Saturday Night Live in 1996 and stayed until 2003. He then found his most durable role as Tracy Jordan on 30 Rock, and later starred in The Last O.G..Ellen PompeoBORN 1969 · TURNS 57She has played Dr. Meredith Grey on Grey's Anatomy since the show premiered in 2005, which makes her the center of one of the longest-running dramas on American television.Richard BurtonBORN 1925 · WOULD HAVE BEEN 101The Welsh actor, who died in 1984, earned seven Oscar nominations without a win. His commanding stage voice made him a Shakespearean star, and he was also a defining screen presence in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Becket.   PRESS START: Fallout 4Fallout 4 shipped on November 10, 2015, and its collector's edition came with a wearable Pip-Boy, a replica of the in-game wrist computer, built with a cradle that held your actual smartphone. Players could run a companion app on the phone and carry the game's interface on their arm, a piece of merchandise that doubled as a prop.Developer Bethesda Game Studios set the game in a post-nuclear Boston, called the Commonwealth, and gave players a protagonist with a voiced role for the first time in the series. Players could choose to play as a man or a woman, and the German shepherd Dogmeat followed along as a companion who became a fan favorite.The game added base-building, letting players construct and defend settlements from scavenged parts. Eleven years on, it remains a cornerstone of Bethesda's catalog, and its world kept drawing attention long after launch.   Meanwhile…1969On November 10, 1969, Sesame Street aired its first episode on National Educational Television.1938Singer Kate Smith performed “God Bless America” on her radio show on November 10, 1938, the first public performance of the Irving Berlin song.1983Microsoft announced Windows at a New York press event on November 10, 1983, though the product would not ship for two more years.2015Fallout 4 reached stores on November 10, 2015, with a Pip-Boy edition that held a smartphone.1977Brittany Murphy, later the voice of Luann on King of the Hill and Tai in Clueless, was born on November 10, 1977. She died in 2009 and would have been 49.2000Mackenzie Foy, who played Renesmee in the final Twilight films and young Murph in Interstellar, was born on November 10, 2000, and turns 26. From a stoop in 1969 to a wasteland in 2015, November 10 is a reminder that the best pop culture invites you in and lets you stay. Tomorrow brings another date and another stack of stories, so come back for the next one.