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And that's just, you know, and getting with this Skip Gates thing, I found that from the time I was a teenager and started driving, until now when I'm 50, like I said, that when you're stopped by a cop, the first thing he does is suppress your freedom of speech because he tells you to shut up. And if you don't shut up, he will look at his partner and say, oh, we got a smart N-word here, and on go the cuffs. And that's happened to me several times. And my brother keeps telling me, why don't you just up? I told you just…
She is a fascinating character. She was the daughter of Catholic parents, and she thought that the fact that her mother had 18 pregnancies during her lifetime - 11 children - contributed to her death at the age of 50. And she really made it her mission in life to find a way to give women more control over their fertility. As early as 1912, she was talking about the need for some magic pill that would improve contraception, make it more reliable and available. And remember, this is at a time when it was illegal to even distribute information about birth control. She was, you know, arrested when she would try to open the first birth control clinics in this country. So, she was a crusader throughout the 20th century, and it was really her work as much as anything that drove the development of the pill.
Well, it's actually quite different than it was earlier this week when they experienced an enormous wave of migrants. They had about 2,000 migrants arrive on Tuesday, and it was kind of a chaotic scene there. There was volunteers running around. There were a police presence. There were migrants. And there's a lot of people just waiting around. They've had things much more streamlined now. So the migrants arrive on trains, and they're shuffled pretty quickly through the station. And it's in a sort of back corner of the station where they're not going to be in the heavy traffic of just travelers going about their regular business. And then they go through a medical check. They get some food and some water. And they're loaded onto buses to go either someplace in Munich or elsewhere in Bavaria or Germany.
Well first of all, it's not an amnesty program. And I'm not even talking about citizenship either. What we're talking about is benchmarks for those that are here illegally, will have to pay fines, will have to pay taxes, they don't get ahead of the line of those that are trying to get in legally. They're certain standards of behavior, there's certain jobs that they have to fulfill. I don't believe it's an amnesty at all. An amnesty is, okay, you're in as of this date. You're now legal. You now have a green card. This, I believe that the measures that are in the McCain/Kennedy initiative have some strong benchmarks. Look, it's not gonna be perfect. It's not gonna be unmessy. It's gonna be messy, but this is a serious problem for the country. You can't criminalize millions of workers that are paying taxes, that are here trying to get a better life, but you setup some standards, and you don't reward those that have been violating the law. You get rid of those that have records, that are not paying taxes, that are participating in a lot of nefarious activities, and there are plenty of those.
And of course we want to hear from you. As you have watched this story develop in Egypt, what draws you in? Why do you think it matters? Give us a call, 800-989-8255. You can reach us by email, talk@npr.org. Or you can weigh in on the conversation on our Website, npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. Fouad Ajami, we were talking about how Barack Obama was sort of playing catch-up in terms of the sentiment in Egypt. Do you think now that Hosni Mubarak is gone, there is something that he or Secretary of State Hillary Clinton can do that will put the U.S. in the right place in the eyes of Egyptians?
Yes, you know, this from my collection, The Royal Ghosts, and the story called Supreme Pronouncements, and the title takes after these inspirational sayings that you find scattered all over the city of Katmandu on billboards. You know, it's sort of inspirational sayings from the king. And I grew up with a lot of these, and I went back to visit Nepal last summer. All of a sudden, there were all of these inspirational sayings from King Gyanendra, you know, talking about democracy and freedom. And I felt like I was in a world of, you know, writer Franz Kafka. So that's how this story came about. And the story--the protagonist is a political activist, who also falls in love with a woman and, you know, he's struggling between love and politics. But in this particular passage he's talking about his father.
Well, you know, we have this philosophy that fancy cooking techniques don't only have to be applied to fancy food. If you really care about the ultimate burger - we go through a whole procedure in the book to say here's how our idea of the ultimate burger is built. We make the bun from scratch. We tell you how to - a special way of preparing the tomato and the lettuce and how to make your own ketchup. Now, some people say, well, God, I don't want to go to all that trouble for a burger. I say, well, that's fine, but if you really honor the burger as a foodstuff, why not look at the ultimate expression of it, which for us is this burger. Now, for somebody else - I had someone try one, and they said, you know, well, you know, I like my burger more greasy. I said, well, okay, that's your idea and perfectly valid, but that's not mine.
Yeah. I just, kind of, want to echo a little of what you said. Sure you didn't throw their back about Pakistan. If we've committed to this war on terror, why aren't we holding the government and Bush accountable for going after where the real terrorists are? We've wasted huge amount of time and resources in Iraq that by all accounts has really just made things worse. When, in fact, the terrorists and the government that are complicit with the terrorists are still in Pakistan and Afghanistan. We may have a puppet regime in Afghanistan and is pretending to be on our side and doing what we want. But Pakistan is clearly either incapable or simply laughing at us when we say we want to address the issues with other tribes out there. And I'm wondering where it is that the opinions of - the pressure is going to be put on the government to do what we really said we are going to get out there and do. I'll take my answer off the air.
On the face of it, this all sounds very good. This could bring at least some relief to some people. But first, people should know that any borrower who graduated in 2011 or earlier will not be eligible. It's strictly for those in college now or in the future. Also, if you have defaulted on a government-subsidized loan, you're not eligible. Private loans, not subsidized by the government, are not covered by this plan. So it has a limited impact. And the people who have done a little bit of the math here have suggested that even with that 10 percent cap on discretionary income, you know, people are likely to save maybe anywhere from $30 to $50 per month. Now that may be a lot for some folks, but it is not a lot of money when you consider how much money some of these students owe.
But global health specialists don't have the luxury right now of worrying about just one potential pandemic virus at a time. There's new evidence two flu viruses that came from birds are close to becoming more contagious in humans. Both are deadly among people infected so far. The H5N1 bird flu virus that emerged a decade ago is only one or two tiny mutations away from being able to easily infect cells in the human respiratory tract, according to a team at MIT. Their report is in the journal Cell. Author Ram Sasisekharan of MIT says recent samples of another bird flu virus discovered in China this spring called H7N9 may also be getting close to spreading efficiently in humans.
What separates us from our fellow apes is a question that, rightly or wrongly, distracts anthropologists periodically. Their discussions generally focus on language, tool use, creativity or our remarkable abilities to innovate, and it is certainly the case that two decades ago these answers would have been top of the ‘exclusively human’ list. But as our knowledge of the cognitive and behavioural abilities of our primate cousins increases, the dividing line between us and them becomes more blurred, being about the extent and complexity of – rather than the presence or absence of – a behaviour. Take tool production and use. Chimps are adept at selecting and modifying grass stalks to use as ‘fishing rods’ when dipping for termites, but their ability to innovate is limited, so there’s no rapid forward momentum in tool development as would be the case with humans. However, there is one aspect of human behaviour that is unique to us but is rarely the focus of these discussions. So necessary is this trait to the survival of our species that it is underpinned by an extensive, interrelated web of biological, psychological and behavioural systems that evolved over the past half a million years. Yet, until 10 years ago, we had neglected to try to understand this trait, due to the misguided assumption that it was of no significance – indeed, that it was dispensable. This trait is human fatherhood, and the fact that it doesn’t immediately spring to mind is symptomatic of the overwhelming neglect of this key figure in our society. When I began researching fathers 10 years ago, the belief was that they contributed little to the lives of their children and even less to our society, and that any parenting behaviour a man might display was the result of learning rather than any innate fathering skill. Stories of fathers in the media centred on their absence and the consequences of this for our society in terms of antisocial behaviour and drug addiction, particularly among sons. There was little recognition that the majority of men, co-resident or not, were invested in their children’s lives. It was a given that fathers did not develop the profound bonds with their children that mothers did, because their role was confined to that of a secondary parent who existed, as a consequence of work, at a slight distance from the family. The lack of breadth in the literature and its sweeping generalisations and stereotypes was truly shocking. As an anthropologist, I struggled to accept this portrayal for two reasons. In the first instance, as someone who began her graduate career as a primatologist, I knew that fathers who stick around, rather than hot-footing it as soon as copulation is complete, are vanishingly rare in the primate world, limited to a few South American monkey species and completely absent from the apes, with the exception of ourselves. Indeed, we are among the only 5 per cent of mammals who have investing fathers. I knew that, given the parsimonious nature of evolution, human fatherhood – with its complex anatomical, neural, physiological and behavioural changes – would not have emerged unless the investment that fathers make in their children is vital for the survival of our species. Secondly, as an anthropologist whose training encompassed the societal structures and practices that are so fundamental to an understanding of our species, I was surprised to learn how little time we had spent placing this key figure under the microscope of our analysis. Ethnography after ethnography focused on the family and the role of the mother, and duly acknowledged the cooperative nature of childrearing, but very rarely was dad the particular subject of observation. How could we truly call ourselves human scientists when there was such a glaring gap in our knowledge of our own species? As a consequence, and driven partly by my own recent parenthood, I embarked on a research programme based around two very broad and open questions: who is the human father, and what is he for? To understand the role of the father, we must first understand why it evolved in our species of ape and no other. The answer inevitably lies in our unique anatomy and life history. As any parent knows, human babies are startlingly dependent when they are born. This is due to the combination of a narrowed birth canal – the consequence of our bipedality – and our unusually large brains, which are six times larger than they should be for a mammal of our body size. This has meant that, to ensure the survival of mother and baby and the continued existence of our species, we have evolved to exhibit a shortened gestation period, enabling the head to pass safely through the birth canal. The consequence of this is that our babies are born long before their brains are fully developed. But this reduced investment in the womb has not led to an increased, compensatory period of maternal investment after birth. Rather, the minimum period of lactation necessary for a child to survive is likewise drastically reduced; the age at weaning of an infant child can be as young as three or four months. A stark contrast to the five years evident in the chimp. Why is this the case? If we, as a species, were to follow the trajectory of the chimpanzee, then our interbirth interval (the time between the birth of one baby and the next) would have been so long; so complex and so energy-hungry is the human brain that it would have led to an inability to replace – let alone increase – our population. So, evolution selected for those members of our species who could wean their babies earlier and return to reproduction, ensuring the survival of their genes and our species. But because the brain had so much development ahead of it, these changes in gestation and lactation lengths led to a whole new life-history stage – childhood – and the evolution of a uniquely human character: the toddler. Life-history describes the ways in which a species invests its lifetime allotment of energy: the currency of life. How this is distributed – between reproduction, growth and maintenance – will affect aspects of the life course such as gestation and lactation length, age at sexual maturity, litter size and lifespan. In most species, including all primates apart from ourselves, this leads to three distinct life stages: infant, juvenile and adult. Infant is the time from birth to weaning; juvenile is from weaning to sexual maturity; and adult is from sexual maturity to death. But humans exhibit five life stages: infant, child, juvenile, adolescent and adult. The child stage lasts from the point of weaning to the time of dietary independence. We humans wean our babies from milk comparatively early, before they are able to find and process food for themselves. As a consequence, once weaned, they still need an adult to feed them until they are capable of doing this themselves, at which point they become juveniles. Dad was incentivised to commit to one female and one family while rejecting matings with other females So mum births her babies early and gets to invest less time in breastfeeding them. Surely this means an energetic win for her? But since lactation is the defence against further conception, once over, mum would rapidly become pregnant again, investing more precious energy in the next hungry foetus. She would not have the time or energy to commit to finding, processing and feeding her rapidly developing toddler. At this point, she would need help. When these survival-critical issues first appeared around 800,000 years ago, her female kin would have stepped in. She would have turned to her mother, sister, aunt, grandma and even older daughters to help her. But why not ask dad? Cooperation between individuals of the same sex generally evolves before that between individuals of different sex, even if that opposite-sex individual is dad. This is because keeping track of reciprocity with the other sex is more cognitively taxing than keeping track of it with someone of the same sex. Further, it has to be of sufficient benefit to dad’s genes for him to renounce a life of mating with multiple females, and instead focus exclusively on the offspring of one female. While this critical tipping point had not yet been reached, women fulfilled this crucial role for each other. But 500,000 years ago, our ancestors’ brains made another massive leap in size, and suddenly relying on female help alone was not enough. This new brain was energetically hungrier than ever before. Babies were born more helpless still, and the food – meat – now required to fuel our brains was even more complicated to catch and process than before. Mum needed to look beyond her female kin for someone else. Someone who was as genetically invested in her child as she was. This was, of course, dad. Without dad’s input, the threat to the survival of his child, and hence his genetic heritage, was such that, on balance, it made sense to stick around. Dad was incentivised to commit to one female and one family while rejecting those potential matings with other females, where his paternity was less well-assured. As time ticked on and the complexity of human life increased, another stage of human life-history evolved: the adolescent. This was a period of learning and exploration before the distractions that accompany sexual maturity start to emerge. With this individual, fathers truly came into their own. For there was much to teach an adolescent about the rules of cooperation, the skills of the hunt, the production of tools, and the knowledge of the landscape and its inhabitants. Mothers, still focused on the production of the next child, would be restricted in the amount of hands-on life experience they could give their teenagers, so it was dad who became the teacher. This still rings true for the fathers whom my colleagues and I research, across the globe, today. In all cultures, regardless of their economic model, fathers teach their children the vital skills to survive in their particular environment. Among the Kipsigis tribe in Kenya, fathers teach their sons about the practical and economic aspects of tea farming. From the age of nine or 10, boys are taken into the fields to learn the necessary practical skills of producing a viable crop, but in addition – and perhaps more vitally – they are allowed to join their fathers at the male-only social events where the deals are made, ensuring that they also have the negotiation skills and the necessary relationships that are vital to success in this tough, marginal habitat. In contrast, children of the Aka tribe of both sexes join their fathers in the net hunts that take place daily in the forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Aka men are arguably the most hands-on fathers in the world, spending nearly half their waking time in actual physical contact with their children. This enables them to pass on the complex stalking and catching skills of the net hunt, but also teaches sons about their role as co-parent to any future children. And even in the West, dads are vital sources of education. In my book The Life of Dad (2018), I argue that fathers approach their role in myriad different ways dependent upon their environment but, when we look closely, all are fulfilling this teaching role. So, while Western dads might not appear to be passing on overtly practical life-skills, they do convey many of the social skills that are necessary to succeed in our competitive, capitalist world. It is still very much the case that the wheels of success in this environment are oiled by the niceties of social interaction – and knowing the rules of these interactions and the best sort of person to have them with gives you a massive head start, even if it is just dad’s knowledge of a good work placement. Fathers are so critical to the survival of our children and our species that evolution has not left their suitability for the role to chance. Like mothers, fathers have been shaped by evolution to be biologically, psychologically and behaviourally primed to parent. We can no longer say that mothering is instinctive yet fathering is learned. The hormonal and brain changes seen in new mothers are mirrored in fathers. Irreversible reductions in testosterone and changes in oxytocin levels prepare a man to be a sensitive and responsive father, attuned to his child’s needs and primed to bond – and critically, less motivated by the search for a new mate. As a man’s testosterone drops, the reward of chemical dopamine increases; this means that he receives the most wonderful neurochemical reward of all whenever he interacts with his child. His brain structure alters in those regions critical to parenting. Within the ancient, limbic core of the brain, regions linked to affection, nurturing and threat-detection see increases in grey and white matter. Likewise enhanced by connectivity and the sheer number of neurons are the higher cognitive zones of the neocortex that promote empathy, problem solving and planning. But crucially, dad has not evolved to be the mirror to mum, a male mother, so to speak. Evolution hates redundancy and will not select for roles that duplicate each other if one type of individual can fulfil the role alone. Rather, dad’s role has evolved to complement mum’s. This is no more clear than in the neural structure of the brain itself. In her 2012 fMRI study, the Israeli psychologist Shir Atzil explored the similarities and differences in brain activity between mothers and fathers when they viewed videos of their children. She found that both parents appeared similarly wired to understand their child’s emotional and practical needs. For both parents, peaks of activity were seen in the areas of the brain linked to empathy. But beyond this, the differences between the parents were stark. The mother’s peaks in activity were seen in the limbic area of her brain – the ancient core linked to affection and risk-detection. The father’s peaks were in the neocortex and particularly in areas linked to planning, problem solving and social cognition. This is not to say that there was no activity in the limbic area for dad and the neocortex for mum, but the brain areas where the most activity was recorded were distinctly different, mirroring the different developmental roles that each parent has evolved to adopt. Where a child was brought up by two fathers, rather than a father and a mother, the plasticity of the human brain had ensured that, in the primary caretaking dad, both areas – mum’s and dad’s – showed high levels of activity so that his child still benefited from a fully rounded developmental environment. Fathers and their children have evolved to carry out a developmentally crucial behaviour with each other: rough-and-tumble play. This is a form of play that we all recognise. It is highly physical with lots of throwing up in the air, jumping about and tickling, accompanied by loud shouts and laughter. It is crucial to the father-child bond and the child’s development for two reasons: first, the exuberant and extreme nature of this behaviour allows dads to build a bond with their children quickly; it is a time-efficient way to get the hits of neurochemicals required for a robust bond, crucial in our time-deprived Western lives where it is still the case that fathers are generally not the primary carer for their children. Second, due to the reciprocal nature of the play and its inherent riskiness, it begins to teach the child about the give and take of relationships, and how to judge and handle risk appropriately; even from a very young age, fathers are teaching their children these crucial life lessons. And how do we know that dads and kids prefer rough-and-tumble play with each other rather than, say, having a good cuddle? Because hormonal analysis has shown that, when it comes to interacting with each other, fathers and children get their peaks in oxytocin, indicating increased reward, from playing together. The corresponding peak for mothers and babies is when they are being affectionate. So, again, evolution has primed both fathers and children to carry out this developmentally important behaviour together. We need to discuss the dads who coach football, read bedtime stories and scare away the night-time monsters Likewise, a father’s attachment to his child has evolved to be crucially different than a mother’s. Attachment describes a psychological state that we enter when we are in an intense, bonded relationship with someone – think of lovers, parents and children, even some best friendships. In all cases, having a strong attachment relationship acts as a secure base from which we can strike out and explore the world, safe in the knowledge we can always return to the focus of our attachment for affection and help. Where parent-child attachment is concerned, the attachment between a mother and her child is best described as exclusive, an inward-looking dyad based on affection and care. In contrast, a father’s attachment to his child has elements of affection and care, but it is based on challenge. This crucial difference leads a father to turn his children’s faces outward, encouraging them to meet fellow humans, build relationships, and succeed in the world. And it is because of this special type of attachment that studies repeatedly show fathers in particular encouraging their offspring to get the most out of their learning. It is fathers who aid the development of appropriate social behaviour, and build a child’s sense of worth. Looking back at our pool of knowledge from 10 years ago and comparing it to what we know today, my conclusion is this: we need to change the conversations we have about fathers. Yes, some fathers are absent, as are some mothers, and some might be the inept characters of marketing ads or cartoons, struggling to work the washing machine or to look after the baby alone. But the majority of fathers are not these people. We need to broaden our spectrum of who we think dad is to include all the fathers who stick around, investing in their children’s emotional, physical and intellectual development, regardless of whether they live with their children or not. We need to discuss the dads who coach football, read bedtime stories, locate rogue school socks, and scare away the night-time monsters. Who encourage their children’s mental resilience, and scaffold their entry into our increasingly complex social world. Who are defined not by their genetic relatedness to their children but because they step up and do the job – the stepdads, social dads, grandfathers, friends, uncles and boyfriends. And by broadening this conversation and sharing our newfound knowledge, we empower fathers to be more involved with their children, something that benefits us all. The sons of today who see dad as an equal to mum in the domestic setting will follow this role model when they themselves become parents. This leads to a change in culture; a move towards equality in domestic work, a sharing of the burden of the parenting tax on career development, something that is overwhelmingly borne by mothers today, and a narrowing of the gender pay gap. Further, a father’s special role in preparing his child to enter the wider world outside the family – shaping emotional and behavioural development, teaching the rules of social behaviour and language, helping to build mental resilience by dealing with risk, confronting challenge and overcoming failure – is arguably more important than ever before, when we are beset by a crisis in adolescent mental health, and live in a world that operates on new social rules, shaped by our digital, online lives. Men have evolved to father and to be an equal but crucially different part of the parenting team. By not acknowledging who they are or supporting what they do, we are really missing a trick. Some 80 per cent of men aspire to become fathers. I believe it is time we made the effort to get to know who they really are.
How do groups get anything done? Right? How do you organize a group of individuals so that the output of the group is something coherent and of lasting value, instead of just being chaos? And the economic framing of that problem is called coordination costs. And a coordination cost is essentially all of the financial or institutional difficulties in arranging group output. And we've had a classic answer for coordination costs, which is, if you want to coordinate the work of a group of people, you start an institution, right? You raise some resources. You found something. It can be private or public. It can be for profit or not profit. It can be large or small. But you get these resources together. You found an institution, and you use the institution to coordinate the activities of the group. More recently, because the cost of letting groups communicate with each other has fallen through the floor — and communication costs are one of the big inputs to coordination — there has been a second answer, which is to put the cooperation into the infrastructure, to design systems that coordinate the output of the group as a by-product of the operating of the system, without regard to institutional models. So, that's what I want to talk about today. I'm going to illustrate it with some fairly concrete examples, but always pointing to the broader themes. So, I'm going to start by trying to answer a question that I know each of you will have asked yourself at some point or other, and which the Internet is purpose-built to answer, which is, where can I get a picture of a roller-skating mermaid? So, in New York City, on the first Saturday of every summer, Coney Island, our local, charmingly run-down amusement park, hosts the Mermaid Parade. It's an amateur parade; people come from all over the city; people get all dressed up. Some people get less dressed up. Young and old, dancing in the streets. Colorful characters, and a good time is had by all. And what I want to call your attention to is not the Mermaid Parade itself, charming though it is, but rather to these photos. I didn't take them. How did I get them? And the answer is: I got them from Flickr. Flickr is a photo-sharing service that allows people to take photos, upload them, share them over the Web and so forth. Recently, Flickr has added an additional function called tagging. Tagging was pioneered by Delicious and Joshua Schachter. Delicious is a social bookmarking service. Tagging is a cooperative infrastructure answer to classification. Right? If I had given this talk last year, I couldn't do what I just did, because I couldn't have found those photos. But instead of saying, we need to hire a professional class of librarians to organize these photos once they're uploaded, Flickr simply turned over to the users the ability to characterize the photos. So, I was able to go in and draw down photos that had been tagged "Mermaid Parade." There were 3,100 photos taken by 118 photographers, all aggregated and then put under this nice, neat name, shown in reverse chronological order. And I was then able to go and retrieve them to give you that little slideshow. Now, what hard problem is being solved here? And it's — in the most schematic possible view, it's a coordination problem, right? There are a large number of people on the Internet, a very small fraction of them have photos of the Mermaid Parade. How do we get those people together to contribute that work? The classic answer is to form an institution, right? To draw those people into some prearranged structure that has explicit goals. And I want to call your attention to some of the side effects of going the institutional route. First of all, when you form an institution, you take on a management problem, right? No good just hiring employees, you also have to hire other employees to manage those employees and to enforce the goals of the institution and so forth. Secondly, you have to bring structure into place. Right? You have to have economic structure. You have to have legal structure. You have to have physical structure. And that creates additional costs. Third, forming an institution is inherently exclusionary. You notice we haven't got everybody who has a photo. You can't hire everyone in a company, right? You can't recruit everyone into a governmental organization. You have to exclude some people. And fourth, as a result of that exclusion, you end up with a professional class. Look at the change here. We've gone from people with photos to photographers. Right? We've created a professional class of photographers whose goal is to go out and photograph the Mermaid Parade, or whatever else they're sent out to photograph. When you build cooperation into the infrastructure, which is the Flickr answer, you can leave the people where they are and you take the problem to the individuals, rather than moving the individuals to the problem. You arrange the coordination in the group, and by doing that you get the same outcome, without the institutional difficulties. You lose the institutional imperative. You lose the right to shape people's work when it's volunteer effort, but you also shed the institutional cost, which gives you greater flexibility. What Flickr does is it replaces planning with coordination. And this is a general aspect of these cooperative systems. Right. You'll have experienced this in your life whenever you bought your first mobile phone, and you stopped making plans. You just said, "I'll call you when I get there." "Call me when you get off work." Right? That is a point-to-point replacement of coordination with planning. Right. We're now able to do that kind of thing with groups. To say instead of, we must make an advance plan, we must have a five-year projection of where the Wikipedia is going to be, or whatever, you can just say, let's coordinate the group effort, and let's deal with it as we go, because we're now well-enough coordinated that we don't have to take on the problems of deciding in advance what to do. So here's another example. This one's somewhat more somber. These are photos on Flickr tagged "Iraq." And everything that was hard about the coordination cost with the Mermaid Parade is even harder here. There are more pictures. There are more photographers. It's taken over a wider geographic area. The photos are spread out over a longer period of time. And worst of all, that figure at the bottom, approximately ten photos per photographer, is a lie. It's mathematically true, but it doesn't really talk about anything important — because in these systems, the average isn't really what matters. What matters is this. This is a graph of photographs tagged Iraq as taken by the 529 photographers who contributed the 5,445 photos. And it's ranked in order of number of photos taken per photographer. You can see here, over at the end, our most prolific photographer has taken around 350 photos, and you can see there's a few people who have taken hundreds of photos. Then there's dozens of people who've taken dozens of photos. And by the time we get around here, we get ten or fewer photos, and then there's this long, flat tail. And by the time you get to the middle, you've got hundreds of people who have contributed only one photo each. This is called a power-law distribution. It appears often in unconstrained social systems where people are allowed to contribute as much or as little as they like — this is often what you get. Right? The math behind the power-law distribution is that whatever's in the nth position is doing about one-nth of whatever's being measured, relative to the person in the first position. So, we'd expect the tenth most prolific photographer to have contributed about a tenth of the photos, and the hundredth most prolific photographer to have contributed only about a hundred as many photos as the most prolific photographer did. So, the head of the curve can be sharper or flatter. But that basic math accounts both for the steep slope and for the long, flat tail. And curiously, in these systems, as they grow larger, the systems don't converge; they diverge more. In bigger systems, the head gets bigger and the tail gets longer, so the imbalance increases. You can see the curve is obviously heavily left-weighted. Here's how heavily: if you take the top 10 percent of photographers contributing to this system, they account for three quarters of the photos taken — just the top 10 percent most prolific photographers. If you go down to five percent, you're still accounting for 60 percent of the photos. If you go down to one percent, exclude 99 percent of the group effort, you're still accounting for almost a quarter of the photos. And because of this left weighting, the average is actually here, way to the left. And that sounds strange to our ears, but what ends up happening is that 80 percent of the contributors have contributed a below-average amount. That sounds strange because we expect average and middle to be about the same, but they're not at all. This is the math underlying the 80/20 rule. Right? Whenever you hear anybody talking about the 80/20 rule, this is what's going on. Right? 20 percent of the merchandise accounts for 80 percent of the revenue, 20 percent of the users use 80 percent of the resources — this is the shape people are talking about when that happens. Institutions only have two tools: carrots and sticks. And the 80 percent zone is a no-carrot and no-stick zone. The costs of running the institution mean that you cannot take on the work of those people easily in an institutional frame. The institutional model always pushes leftwards, treating these people as employees. The institutional response is, I can get 75 percent of the value for 10 percent of the hires — great, that's what I'll do. The cooperative infrastructure model says, why do you want to give up a quarter of the value? If your system is designed so that you have to give up a quarter of the value, re-engineer the system. Don't take on the cost that prevents you from getting to the contributions of these people. Build the system so that anybody can contribute at any amount. So the coordination response asks not, how are these people as employees, but rather, what is their contribution like? Right? We have over here Psycho Milt, a Flickr user, who has contributed one, and only one, photo titled "Iraq." And here's the photo. Right. Labeled, "Bad Day at Work." Right? So the question is, do you want that photo? Yes or no. The question is not, is Psycho Milt a good employee? And the tension here is between institution as enabler and institution as obstacle. When you're dealing with the left-hand edge of one of these distributions, when you're dealing with the people who spend a lot of time producing a lot of the material you want, that's an institution-as-enabler world. You can hire those people as employees, you can coordinate their work and you can get some output. But when you're down here, where the Psycho Milts of the world are adding one photo at a time, that's institution as obstacle. Institutions hate being told they're obstacles. One of the first things that happens when you institutionalize a problem is that the first goal of the institution immediately shifts from whatever the nominal goal was to self-preservation. And the actual goal of the institution goes to two through n. Right? So, when institutions are told they are obstacles, and that there are other ways of coordinating the value, they go through something a little bit like the Kubler-Ross stages — (Laughter) — of reaction, being told you have a fatal illness: denial, anger, bargaining, acceptance. Most of the cooperative systems we've seen haven't been around long enough to have gotten to the acceptance phase. Many, many institutions are still in denial, but we're seeing recently a lot of both anger and bargaining. There's a wonderful, small example going on right now. In France, a bus company is suing people for forming a carpool, right, because the fact that they have coordinated themselves to create cooperative value is depriving them of revenue. You can follow this in the Guardian. It's actually quite entertaining. The bigger question is, what do you do about the value down here? Right? How do you capture that? And institutions, as I've said, are prevented from capturing that. Steve Ballmer, now CEO of Microsoft, was criticizing Linux a couple of years ago, and he said, "Oh, this business of thousands of programmers contributing to Linux, this is a myth. We've looked at who's contributed to Linux, and most of the patches have been produced by programmers who've only done one thing." Right? You can hear this distribution under that complaint. And you can see why, from Ballmer's point of view, that's a bad idea, right? We hired this programmer, he came in, he drank our Cokes and played Foosball for three years and he had one idea. (Laughter) Right? Bad hire. Right? (Laughter) The Psycho Milt question is, was it a good idea? What if it was a security patch? What if it was a security patch for a buffer overflow exploit, of which Windows has not some, [but] several? Do you want that patch, right? The fact that a single programmer can, without having to move into a professional relation to an institution, improve Linux once and never be seen from again, should terrify Ballmer. Because this kind of value is unreachable in classic institutional frameworks, but is part of cooperative systems of open-source software, of file sharing, of the Wikipedia. I've used a lot of examples from Flickr, but there are actually stories about this from all over. Meetup, a service founded so that users could find people in their local area who share their interests and affinities and actually have a real-world meeting offline in a cafe or a pub or what have you. When Scott Heiferman founded Meetup, he thought it would be used for, you know, train spotters and cat fanciers — classic affinity groups. The inventors don't know what the invention is. Number one group on Meetup right now, most chapters in most cities with most members, most active? Stay-at-home moms. Right? In the suburbanized, dual-income United States, stay-at-home moms are actually missing the social infrastructure that comes from extended family and local, small-scale neighborhoods. So they're reinventing it, using these tools. Meetup is the platform, but the value here is in social infrastructure. If you want to know what technology is going to change the world, don't pay attention to 13-year-old boys — pay attention to young mothers, because they have got not an ounce of support for technology that doesn't materially make their lives better. This is so much more important than Xbox, but it's a lot less glitzy. I think this is a revolution. I think that this is a really profound change in the way human affairs are arranged. And I use that word advisedly. It's a revolution in that it's a change in equilibrium. It's a whole new way of doing things, which includes new downsides. In the United States right now, a woman named Judith Miller is in jail for not having given to a Federal Grand Jury her sources — she's a reporter for the New York Times — her sources, in a very abstract and hard-to-follow case. And journalists are in the street rallying to improve the shield laws. The shield laws are our laws — pretty much a patchwork of state laws — that prevent a journalist from having to betray a source. This is happening, however, against the background of the rise of Web logging. Web logging is a classic example of mass amateurization. It has de-professionalized publishing. Want to publish globally anything you think today? It is a one-button operation that you can do for free. That has sent the professional class of publishing down into the ranks of mass amateurization. And so the shield law, as much as we want it — we want a professional class of truth-tellers — it is becoming increasingly incoherent, because the institution is becoming incoherent. There are people in the States right now tying themselves into knots, trying to figure out whether or not bloggers are journalists. And the answer to that question is, it doesn't matter, because that's not the right question. Journalism was an answer to an even more important question, which is, how will society be informed? How will they share ideas and opinions? And if there is an answer to that that happens outside the professional framework of journalism, it makes no sense to take a professional metaphor and apply it to this distributed class. So as much as we want the shield laws, the background — the institution to which they were attached — is becoming incoherent. Here's another example. Pro-ana, the pro-ana groups. These are groups of teenage girls who have taken on Web logs, bulletin boards, other kinds of cooperative infrastructure, and have used it to set up support groups for remaining anorexic by choice. They post pictures of thin models, which they call "thinspiration." They have little slogans, like "Salvation through Starvation." They even have Lance Armstrong-style bracelets, these red bracelets, which signify, in the small group, I am trying to maintain my eating disorder. They trade tips, like, if you feel like eating something, clean a toilet or the litter box. The feeling will pass. We're used to support groups being beneficial. We have an attitude that support groups are inherently beneficial. But it turns out that the logic of the support group is value neutral. A support group is simply a small group that wants to maintain a way of living in the context of a larger group. Now, when the larger group is a bunch of drunks, and the small group wants to stay sober, then we think, that's a great support group. But when the small group is teenage girls who want to stay anorexic by choice, then we're horrified. What's happened is that the normative goals of the support groups that we're used to, came from the institutions that were framing them, and not from the infrastructure. Once the infrastructure becomes generically available, the logic of the support group has been revealed to be accessible to anyone, including people pursuing these kinds of goals. So, there are significant downsides to these changes as well as upsides. And of course, in the current environment, one need allude only lightly to the work of non-state actors trying to influence global affairs, and taking advantage of these. This is a social map of the hijackers and their associates who perpetrated the 9/11 attack. It was produced by analyzing their communications patterns using a lot of these tools. And doubtless the intelligence communities of the world are doing the same work today for the attacks of last week. Now, this is the part of the talk where I tell you what's going to come as a result of all of this, but I'm running out of time, which is good, because I don't know. (Laughter) Right. As with the printing press, if it's really a revolution, it doesn't take us from Point A to Point B. It takes us from Point A to chaos. The printing press precipitated 200 years of chaos, moving from a world where the Catholic Church was the sort of organizing political force to the Treaty of Westphalia, when we finally knew what the new unit was: the nation state. Now, I'm not predicting 200 years of chaos as a result of this. 50. 50 years in which loosely coordinated groups are going to be given increasingly high leverage, and the more those groups forego traditional institutional imperatives — like deciding in advance what's going to happen, or the profit motive — the more leverage they'll get. And institutions are going to come under an increasing degree of pressure, and the more rigidly managed, and the more they rely on information monopolies, the greater the pressure is going to be. And that's going to happen one arena at a time, one institution at a time. The forces are general, but the results are going to be specific. And so the point here is not, "This is wonderful," or "We're going to see a transition from only institutions to only cooperative framework." It's going to be much more complicated than that. But the point is that it's going to be a massive readjustment. And since we can see it in advance and know it's coming, my argument is essentially: we might as well get good at it. Thank you very much. (Applause)
Well, for Carson, these were not unrelated events. She really saw radiation and pesticide use as the sort of twin, conjoined demons of the post-war period. And she made that connection quite literally in "Silent Spring," that radiation and widespread pesticide use were contributing to this kind of global contamination of the environment that entered into the ecosystems, entered into the tissues of living things. And so these were sort of two halves of the same problem as far as Carson was concerned. That was one reason why "Silent Spring" was as influential as it was because it really spoke to a generation of people who had come of age and grown up during the Cold War and who understood the threat of radioactive fallout, but had yet to come to any kind of realization about chemical contaminants, but they got it when they read "Silent Spring."
Yeah, I mean, the people in the Gulf needed - they needed time to grieve. They didn't need to be told that everything was OK. And even though, in fact, a lot of things have played out better than our worst fears, there are still people there who are sick. And I think we're starting to appreciate this more now, that what may have looked like we completely dodged a bullet is looking like - there are quite a few wounded people still, and there's still -despite the fact that many of the fish and shrimp survived and are still there, the prices are really depressed. You know, there's some concern on the part of consumers about whether the food is tainted and those kinds of things. So people are still - you know, it's not just that the place bounced back. There are still people who are really feeling it.
Writer and MORNING EDITION commentator John Feinstein getting in his two cents earlier today. The brackets of the tournaments have spawned a sub-science: bracketology. And now enlightened bracketologists have come to understand that the method used to reduce 64 contestants to a single winner applies to a lot more than just basketball. Who's the best 18th century poet? Brackets can help decide. What's the best Oscar outfit ever, the best ad slogan, the best animation character. Plug in your nominees, let's see. Homer Simpson loses to Bart in the first round. You've got to be kidding. And the argument begins. We'll talk to a proponent of the system, Mark Reiter, who edited the brackets in the new book entitled "The Enlightened Bracketologist," and we want to hear from you. What topic would you like to see duke it out in bracketology: movies, books, department stores? Who's going to be the final four of Christmas shopping: the Internet or Target at midnight? Our number here in Washington is 800-989-8255, 800-989-TALK. E-mail is talk@npr.org.
And now it's time for the Talk of the Nation Opinion Page. Last September, Israeli jets bombed a site in northern Syria, but it took seven months for the Bush administration to confirm that the target was a nearly finished nuclear facility that Syria was building with help from North Korea. Despite that development, senior U.S. intelligence officials only say they have low confidence that Syria wants to build nuclear weapons. In an opinion piece published yesterday in the Los Angeles Times, Leonard Spector and Avner Cohen argue that, "When the intelligence community has real evidence, it should not be afraid to draw the obvious inference, and call a spade a spade." After all the mistakes in Iraq they write, the intelligence community has bent over backwards to try to overstate the case against Syria, and in doing so it has stumbled badly.
Are we going to get any better science out of the Gulf mess, and will things be any different after this spill, or are we just going back to business as usual? President Obama said we need to suck it up and start switching to a renewable energy source, but so has every president since Richard Nixon. Are we really going to see any changes? And can we admit that despite all the Kevin Costners out there, we really have no quick technological fix for cleaning up these messes, that as long as drill for fossil fuels, these blowouts, explosions, deaths and environmental destruction are simply the price of doing business?
It's a tough one. I - in an ideal world I take either, or. But I would probably - I'd actually I'd give Kurt Warner the slight edge, even though I'm picking the Steelers, just because he's been there and performed well before. Ben, by his only admission, while he's played well in this post-season, his last Super Bowl trip, he did not do well by his own admission. But, you know, you wipe the slate clean. He's two years removed from that performance. He can do well, but Kurt has just been unbelievable. And it's not even - obviously, the long throws to Larry Fitzgerald or Anquan Boldin, but even the little things like the third-down pass against Atlanta that sealed the game. I thought that was unbelievable. And the screen - and the shovel - and the screen pass for the touchdown against - the game-winning touch down against the Eagles when they had been in a drought. I mean, this guy has really seen everything before. The flipside is they'll be going up against Dick LaBow who has been a - Dick LaBow's defense. And he's been around as long as the National Football League has been around, I believe.
But I don't think that the Republican Party would have any leg to stand on, no matter what he said. I mean, when people are called disloyal Americans because they disagree with America's foreign policy; when people are called traitors because they disbelieve in the policy; when all kinds of labels are put on other people, it's kind of hard to turn around and say somebody shouldn't label something. But I doubt that he actually said the swastika thing because he knows, like you said, Callie, that when you use that, you obviously are going to have people attack you for that. But we wouldn't be discussing it if this language issue hadn't come up and we still aren't' discussing what he actually said about the substance of these matters.
Well, with a lot of money. They aren't reducing the principal on the loan, so the only way to get payments down is by tinkering with the interest rates, and one way to do that is using Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to refinance homes to lower rates so that people can afford them by changing restrictions on current rules administration hopes to put four to five million home owners into lower payments. Now, this is going to strain the already troubled Fannie and Freddie, so Treasury's also doubling their financial backing of both of those companies to $200 billion each.
Actually, about four of my friends came up to me and were like, Abby, I don't want to see you sell yourself short. I know you can do better than that. Or, you can get into a better school. It's hard not to get really caught up in the names of everything and the things everyone around you is saying about how great a school is, because it's Amherst, or it's Williams, or something like that. For some people, those are great schools. But what college they go to in terms of the name isn't going to decide how happy they are for the rest of their life, I think. I think it's all about how much you put into the college that you do go to.
You know, I've never actually asked her and I probably should. Because she's now 13, which is, she's a little bit more mature and can, I think, can talk about it. But, yeah, I think so. I remember when she was, you know, really young, people would ask her when her, you know, her birthday was coming up and what - when's your birthday? Well, my birthday is September 11th, and you know, people are kind of taken back almost. And I was always sort of like, you know, just thought, oh, no. I don't want people to just to react to her as much. They were like, oh, your birthday is on 9/11 or, oh, that's kind of, you know, strange because, you know, people don't realize that, yeah, things do still move forward.
Absolutely. We've seen in the last year more than 700,000 people pushed out of their homes. And we are seeing increasing accounts of villages being destroyed and are hearing horrific accounts of the military attempting to cover their acts. So committing these crimes in civilian clothes and doing other things that acknowledges that the crimes shouldn't be happening but are happening. And we've seen even efforts by the government of Myanmar, preventing journalists from getting in to document these crimes. The U.N. has been blocked from going in to undertake human rights investigations. And these are all things that Aung San Suu Kyi herself can control.
Orozco says if the government really wanted to combat obesity, it would have taxed sodas and junk food 10 years ago. He says politicians just want more money, so they go after small business owners like himself and the poor, who buy the cheap junk food. Lawmakers are proposing a 10 percent tax on sodas, about a peso per liter, and a 5 percent increase on high-calorie snacks. Small business owners, the powerful beverage industry, and billionaire bottlers have launched an aggressive ad campaign against the proposal. They're running full-page ads in major newspapers, and some have focused in on the foreign influence of the taxes, especially the financial backing by U.S. billionaire Michael Bloomberg's philanthropic group.
This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. Over the past few weeks, our colleagues at MORNING EDITION have been telling a series of stories called "Family Matters," about the challenges that over 50 million of we Americans now face: multigenerational households, homes where two or more generations of adults live under one roof. We've heard stories of emotional and financial stress, especially for the so-called sandwich generation, people who care for their elderly parents and support their still-struggling adult children. Natasha Shamone-Gilmore's family is among those featured in the series. She joins us now from Capitol Heights in Maryland, and nice to have you on TALK OF THE NATION today.
In the face of death, Amanda couldn't leave her friend behind. And her father is proud of that decision. As he mourns her the first Father's Day they are not together, he's clearly channeling that way she would take care of other people. At a vigil for the young women, people would come up to him and hug him and burst into tears. He reassured them - everything's going to be OK. He tried to comfort President Obama, too. When Obama came to meet with victims' families, Alvear noticed the president's hand was ice-cold. And he looked shaken, maybe because he's also a father. So Alvear pulled him in.
Well, first of all, I didn't have enough knowledge of what that meant, by "juicing." In many ways, it scared the heck out of me, so I didn't take that any further. But common sense and logic would say, look, it's happening in other sports. Some people've been busted in the other testing programs. If it works, then it's probably in our game, as well. But you know, this is not being done out in the open. You might see someone that comes back from the off-season next year and they're much bigger and you wonder how they got so much bigger because you know how much time you spent in the weight room and you really hadn't changed much. So I mean, I think there was some normal suspicions and some second looks sometimes, but I don't think - I know I didn't have any sort of knowledge that could actually piece all of those things together. During this whole congressional hearings and all of the talk now, I guess we're all becoming a little bit more educated, but no way did anyone ever inject anybody in the middle of the clubhouse or did they talk about it.
If you walk around New York or duly outside New York and talk to people who've seen "South Pacific" since it started performing in March, it is remarkably common how that response is, including among men as well as women, and seemingly of all generations. And I think the show touches something that's very much with us right now in terms of our own relationship to the war in Iraq, of course. And also, by happenstance, this pioneering musical about racial issues just happened to be produced when race - really, no one expected this in advance, became a big issue in the presidential campaign this election year.
You know, that's hard to say. It's hard to judge because I think it's important to bear in mind, as well, that, you know, our country has become substantially more diverse over the last couple of generations. We've had past eras where, you know, you've seen major spikes in immigration, which prompt a nativist kind of response. It happened in the 1850s in response to the wave of Irish immigration. And it happened in the 19-teens, 1920s after the second wave of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. And, you know, we have had what you probably could call a third wave of immigration coming from Latin America and Asia over the last, you know, 25 years or so.
Hello. Thank you for taking my call. The feeling that I have is one of great pride. I am American-born to parents from Taiwan. And to see Jeremy Lin and his success is really just turned into - I have a sister who works in the broadcasting business in Hong Kong, and it's just wonderful to see how the phenomenon of his rise from virtually nowhere, take over the headlines of the world. The point is everyone loves a winner. And the fact that he is American-born of Taiwanese parents, went to Harvard, not just any Ivy League school, is - really fills our hearts with pride. And I certainly hope that his rise continues, that the star doesn't fade. His achievements on the court - and I have watched him played - is really simply phenomenal, and hope that he can keep it up.
I liked Aanan as soon as I met him. My field notes read: ‘What a nice guy, you can just see from his face.’ Open-faced and conversational, he was enthusiastic about the explosive growth in his quarry operations and excited to show me around. Together, we toured the open mines where his workers carve into the earth, producing boulders that are broken down into gravel by smaller labourers, often women and children. Together with his workers, Aanan laughed at my efforts to repeat the process for myself, the sledge held high over my head before arcing down, momentarily disappearing into shards and dust. He showed me the crushing equipment that transformed gravel into silica powder, proudly explaining that the Indian multinational company, Tata, which makes generous donations to Harvard’s renowned business school, was the exclusive buyer of his materials. I had met Aanan through a friend of his, a reference that considerably eased his concerns about speaking with an outsider regarding his operations. The fact that I was most interested in challenging bonded labour – a contemporary form of slavery – didn’t matter. Around half of the world’s slaves are held in debt bondage in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Debt bondage is a very old form of slavery in which radically marginalised members of society, often from India’s ‘untouchable’ caste, must trade all their labour for single small infusions of cash. Broader social and economic systems ensure that they do not understand the terms of such loans, and that the time required to repay them is interminable. Lack of other work, lack of credit, and the need to pay for schooling and marriages effectively guarantee that there is no single contractual debt between the landlord and labourer but rather a string of interconnected informal loans. Workers are often promised that their debt will be repaid within a certain period of time, only to be told that they have somehow incurred new debts. Running debts are occasionally sold to other slaveholders, and in this way a worker can change hands several times. Local officials are more likely to turn a blind eye than to enforce a remote law. The days of owning people are over, yet slavery still persists in dark pockets of the global economy. All forms of slavery are now illegal in every country on Earth, yet the practice still festers in unreformed nests of feudalism, where threats and violence can suppress or eliminate pay for work. Where slavery is verboten, psychological control through deception and fear is the new coin of the realm. In the case of debt bondage, it is the caste system – with Brahmin at the head and ‘untouchable’ beneath – that does the delicate work of stitching debts together into a seamless, infinite coercive system that leaves labourers feeling trapped. Despite the abuse, the caste-based worldview frames these exploitative labour relations in familial terms. ‘You have to understand the mentality of labourers, and you should know how to make them work,’ says Aanan, who views himself as the caring parent and his workers as children. ‘To manage a group of labourers is like managing a group of primary-school children. They have to be provided with food or clothes, and they are taught how to behave … sometimes they start drinking alcohol; sometimes they indulge in feasts. So we have to pay them with caution. We divide them into small groups because larger numbers of workers tend to form a union and sometimes engage in mass holidays or strikes.’ Aanan says the happiness of his worker is paramount, even though his business model depends on entrapping the vulnerable and working them to the bone as they crush rock from dusk to dawn. He couldn’t come out and say this to me or to his workers – or perhaps even to himself. Withholding pay and limiting opportunities to mobilise are important strategies for controlling workers. But all of this is done for the workers’ own good, Aanan insists. Though landlords complain about alcohol, such indulgences are also tactics for increasing debt. Rowdy festivals allow workers to blow off steam, effectively directing frustration away from their abusers. These events also allow workers to spend what little money they have, increasing the likelihood that they will remain dependent on the landlord’s line of credit. To the erstwhile slaveholder, leisure activities – talking, idling, drinking – are vices, tangible manifestations of social decline When asked if he needs the workers or the workers need him, Aanan explains that: ‘The worker is my cash machine, my fate.’ In this one statement, he has captured a central contradiction inherent in most human-rights violations worldwide: exploitation takes place at the intersection of culture and capital, in the overlap between relationship and extraction, at the moment where care and exploitation intersect. Long accustomed to power, slaveholders work hard to sustain their status and baulk at any hint of equality. One previously powerful employer confided to me that his community was in decline. ‘In the olden days … labourers used to work in their fields, they used to think of their work,’ he told me. Now, however, they freshen up after work and drink coffee and tea while talking about ‘unnecessary things’, an opportunity for democratic discourse that is ‘deviating their minds’. The public square is celebrated by scholars of democracy as a pillar of free and open society. But to slaveholders this space is a cauldron of ‘enmity, ego, and hatred’. Free workers spending their free time talking about life is what gives democracy its vitality – no wonder it’s perceived to be a threat to those who have benefitted from the caste hierarchy. To the erstwhile slaveholder, leisure activities – talking, idling, drinking – are vices, tangible manifestations of social decline. For Brahmins such as Aanan, who don’t tend to drink, this stance of purity and power shrouds the larger tactical terrain in a mist of paternalistic pressure and concern. ‘Like a shepherd who knows his herd like the back of his hand, we know the labourers,’ he confides. ‘It’s like understanding psychology. Anyone can become a contractor, but a good contractor can gauge the mood of the workers and then make them work … Thus, little by little, with caution, we claim back our money. It is the emotional pressure that works.’ A key strategy for Aanan is keeping workers indebted while asking for their gratitude and undermining their perception that opportunities exist. In a form of Stockholm syndrome, the oppressed often agree. In multiple conversations, I have been told by bonded labourers that they genuinely owe a debt – some having worked for years to repay an amount that would have taken 10 days of work at prevailing wages. Maintaining this sense of obligation requires emotional pressure at a moment of economic vulnerability – say, when a grateful parent is advanced medicine money for a sick child. Bonded labour requires an actual relationship in which the perpetrator is keenly aware of what kind of pressure – threats? violence? promises? – will ensure compliant work, despite abusive conditions and a lack of pay. While not every one of the slaveholders I spoke with in the course of this research was as frank as Aanan, his approach bears all the traits of contemporary slaveholding: financial distress, emotional manipulation, illegality, and paternalism. At the end of our conversation, I inquired about Aanan with one of my research partners. Yes, they had heard of him. I updated my field notes: ‘Largest contractor in [town].’ When most people think of contemporary slavery, the popular imagination leaps to a desperate brothel, one pulled straight from the pages of a newspaper or an activist brochure. The scene is sordid: the victim – pure, and the perpetrator of this human-rights violation – an animal of the worst sort. Reality is nowhere near this simple. Contemporary slaveholders, like contemporary slavery, come in many forms. And these men have other terms for their socioeconomic roles and relationships, including ‘employer’, ‘boss’, ‘landlord’, ‘farmer’, ‘contractor’, ‘master’, and ‘landowner’. Ahmed, a middle-class slaveholder in Uttar Pradesh in India, was eager to show me around the village where he was a member of the ruling elite. While I was grateful for the warm reception, I was visiting Ahmed’s community because of gross human-rights violations – bonded labour, child exploitation, and outbound human trafficking. Fathers pleaded for help in finding missing children, long gone, lured away by the promises of traffickers. Mothers who had recently and reluctantly formed a fragile women’s group waited nervously to meet and discuss their progress in negotiating higher wages. Behind the weeping men and the expectant mothers sat the children lucky enough to remain in the community, hand-rolling local cigarettes. These scenes are common throughout rural India and are repeated across the global South, where the intertwined pressures of poverty and hope have been more likely to terminate in rights violations than a better life. Individuals exploited in slavery deserve safer lives, smarter laws and greater opportunities. There is a near-global consensus about victims’ needs. But who are the perpetrators? Do Aanan and Ahmed not see the scene – debt bondage, child labour, trafficking – as blatantly wrong? As a sociologist, my work focuses on a few straightforward questions: where does social change come from? How do people mobilise for change? When does it work and why? Like my fellow travellers in the social sciences, I’m motivated by pressing social issues – poverty, inequality, violence. Since the 1960s, telling the story of the powerless has seemed like our full-time job. The social historian E P Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class (1963) was explicit in this regard: ‘I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.’ The humanities and social sciences have spent the past few decades following suite. My fellow scholars of protest movements have rigorously catalogued critical struggles for civil rights, women’s rights, and the environment, as well as against wars and against colonial rulers. A sustained commitment to telling the stories of the powerless has increased our understanding of a previously silenced majority of downtrodden and oppressed people. But it has also narrowed our view of the oppressors. It’s only now that we are waking up to ask new questions about Right-wing movements such as the Ku Klux Klan and Al-Qaeda. A fresh generation of scholars are writing books about the Tea Party and those who protest on behalf of the rich, such as Isaac Martin’s Rich People’s Movements (2013). In conversations with rights-violators such as Aanan, I heard the same thing again and again: ‘You’re the first person to ask me about my life.’ Attention to slavery and trafficking has grown exponentially in the past decade, but interviews with rights-violators are exceptions to the rule. To understand the story of exploitation, we must talk to exploiters, too. I’ve tried to fill this gap. I got my start in the anti-slavery movement in the late 1990s in India as a representative for an advocacy group. In my first assignment, I posed as a customer in a brothel while capturing clandestine footage to help break a case against traffickers into the sex industry. In my assigned role, I demanded younger and younger girls, and then stormed out when the ‘goods’ didn’t meet my expectations. The footage was reviewed by a team of lawyers, forensics experts, and sometimes the police to determine whether a rescue operation could result in an actionable case. There was no use conducting a raid only for the case to fall apart, the perpetrator to go free, and the victim to slip through the cracks of a broken system, and then a month later show up again on our tape. Yet over a decade of such work, I couldn’t shake the feeling that locking up perpetrators was the bluntest of instruments. Wealthy slaveholders simply bribed their way out of court while poorer perpetrators got caught in the system. Perhaps the term slaveholder brings to mind a wealthy plantation-owner, and the term trafficker summons the image of a terribly violent pimp – in reality, many perpetrators are small-time operators, no matter the name. In my research, I came across a slaveholder who was surviving with help from a bonded labourer and loans from the Grameen Bank, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning microfinance organisation dedicated to extending loans to the world’s poor. He was more powerful than his slaves, but not by much. Goral paid his bonded labourer about $10 a year for two years, and then convinced him to continue working for three more years without pay What an insight my boots on the ground revealed. In my talks with powerful-looking but powerless-feeling people, I discovered the power of nostalgia. We long for the past, which we remember with warmth, and we will do almost anything to keep what we have and grasp for what we have lost. This is as true in rural India, where the caste system is remembered with nostalgia, as it is in Indiana, where an industrial era is remembered wistfully, despite a history of racial exclusion. In times of cultural, political or economic upheaval, rights-violators are often trapped between the awesomely powerful and the completely powerless. What do we know of people who might once have possessed great power, but who are now in decline? Across the Indian states of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Karnataka, and in 16 different communities, I sat down to speak with slaveholders. If you talk to rights-violators for long enough, they’ll tell you about their life. In interview after interview, these men – and they were all men – expressed a sense of loss. Each had been challenged by local efforts to end bonded labour in their community. Each yearned for the old days, when ‘we were like family’, and each member of the community knew his or her place. When I asked Goral, an older man whose bonded labourer no longer worked for him, whether there had been any change in relationships between bonded labourers and masters, he replied: ‘There is no such change. We are like family.’ He explained that the labourer came to them as a child in order to repay a debt assumed by the boy’s father in a nearby village. Over time, Goral obtained the debt and the boy along with it. When I asked how their relationship began, he explained: ‘There was debt – that is why we kept him as a bonded labourer! After repaying the debt, he also worked as a bonded labourer for a few more years. His debt was 1,000 rupees [around $20] and he worked for four or five years. He remained with me because I had a shortage of labour, and the bonded labourer had some problems at home, so I requested that he continue for a few more years.’ In other words, Goral paid his bonded labourer about $10 a year for two years, and then convinced him to continue working for three more years without pay. Goral was proud of the extent to which he had been able to care for this boy as he grew into a young man. The fact that the boy worked for years to pay off a $20 debt obscures the deeper social reality, which is that Goral cared for someone who had problems at home. This win-win was, in Goral’s retelling, an ideal form of mutual aid. It is what family does. The familial model allows for the presence of a patriarch, a role that interviewees referenced consistently. I was told that, in better times, slaveholders’ fathers had ruled with fear and respect. Across these conversations, the paternalistic lines were easy to trace; respect was expected in exchange for care: ‘We served the people. If someone was lacking something, we would give it to them. It’s like that; we helped them.’ Labourers, in this nostalgic reckoning, were hard-working, grateful and honest. They held up their end of the cosmic bargain so central to caste, and benefited in turn. Such were the olden days for slaveholders. The present, by contrast, is a time of loss and decline. As one high-caste slaveholder explained to me: ‘To be born in the higher caste has become a bane. Even when we do well, we are blamed and our rights are withheld.’ This problem is bound up in broader social change that slaveholders, in the agricultural sector especially, are ill-equipped to manage. New roads are built, new laws are passed, and new ideas spread. They face substantial changes in the form of rapid urbanisation and migration, the collapse of commodity prices, conditions of persistent drought, the disappearance of party allies, the diminished value of caste, and an uptick in challenges from the poor and marginalised. For many rural slaveholders, their surest resource is their caste status, yet rhetorical threats such as ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ ring hollow when mobile phones deliver news about better jobs in growing cities connected by bigger roads. Traditional authority is a depreciating asset for many slaveholders faced with broader social and economic change. Workers are voting with their feet. Broad trends and local activism don’t stop the powerful from doing their best to hold on to power. In many cases, slaveholders’ first response would be to lash out – threatening, beating and occasionally killing uppity workers. But persisting this way is costly, especially when the landlord’s authority is undermined by globalisation’s siren call. Better informed about what their labour is worth on the free market, workers now have a sharper understanding of what kind of employment opportunities exist in nearby cities. Landlords feel their grip loosening; wanting to act decisively, they find themselves fumbling. They fume and curse, but often they have to give up and learn to live in the new world. They’d rather continue benefiting from the exploitative status quo, but recognise that the political and economic winds are not at their backs. Worldwide, there are new laws to protect workers, and there’s increased attention to bonded labour and human trafficking. India has seen a shift from the caste economy to the cash and credit economy, and there is no turning back. In the face of these changes, some rural slaveholders have given up. But does a decision to stop exploiting others signal a change of heart, or are slaveholders biding their time? Slavery makes money for those who practise it, and that money adds up. For anti-slavery activists, the message is clear. Contemporary abolitionists must approach perpetrators such as Aanan with tactics that reflect the changing reality, so that motives for exploitation can disappear. Slaveholders should be held to account, but also enfranchised to enter the modern world. After all, as my own research revealed, they are rarely monsters. The journalist John Conroy, in his book Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People (2000), reflected on his handful of interviews with torturers only to confess that ‘some part of me hopes that the men I have interviewed are not representative of the whole, because for several of these men, I have a certain respect [for their willingness to speak candidly]’. Even more complicated, it seems, is the feeling that ‘in a few I could see myself.’ Likewise, many of the men I interviewed had children the same age as my own, and others struck me as the classic beneficiaries of the kind of international development programmes that I tend to support. In interview after interview, I came away with the same sense as Conroy: ‘The worst part of these interviews was that they were not difficult … I never met the monster I anticipated.’ Siddharth Kara – a fellow at Harvard’s Carr Center on Human Rights and the author of two important books, Sex Trafficking (2009) and Bonded Labor (2012) – found the same thing in conversation with a trafficker: ‘He was so ordinary – just a man, wearing simple village clothes. His aspect was common, his moustache trimmed, his hair neatly combed.’ No wonder we fail to recognise the villain. Human-rights violators are a far cry from John Rawls’s evil, bad and unjust men. ‘What moves the evil man is the love of injustice,’ Rawls wrote in A Theory of Justice (1971), ‘he delights in the impotence and humiliation of those subject to him and relishes being recognised by them as the wilful author of their degradation.’ The sun was setting on the slaverholders’ way of life and, in their own minds, they play the leading roles as victims and heroes in turn The contemporary traffickers and slaveholders I spoke with are not motivated by a love of injustice. They are instead driven by cultural inertia, a desire for profit or, more frequently, a need for basic sustenance. Instead of evil villains, we find husbands, fathers, mothers and neighbours working with the cultural materials available to them, surviving as best they can. The terms used here – slavery and slaveholder – never crossed the lips, nor perhaps even the minds, of the men I spoke with. As we broke bread, drank tea, explored plantations and silk-production houses, swam in deep wells, climbed coconut trees and talked late into countless evenings, the term slavery never came up. What came up, time after time, was respect, honour and dignity. The sun was setting on their way of life and, in their own minds, they play the leading roles as victims and heroes in turn. In so many ways, we all find ourselves at this juncture: in the interregnum between generations, eras and epochs. Tremendous changes have provided new opportunities for marginalised people, while the formerly powerful find themselves suddenly in possession of a form of power – caste and land – that lacks much exchange value in the new world. For the recently powerful, this transition can be devastating and demoralising. What psychologists call loss aversion is real; humans don’t want to lose what we have, no matter what. This is true whether the loss is occurring in Birmingham, Alabama – or Bihar, India. The real question is how we respond to loss – by lashing out, by learning, by opening up, or by closing down. Surely Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was right when he wrote in the The Gulag Archipelago (1973): ‘If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?’
Well, I - to put it in context, I also wrote that he has done a great many terrific things on the environment, and I enumerated them and said, as I will repeat, that I have a great deal of empathy for him. He faces a difficult situation. He inherited a difficult situation. I plan to support him for re-election. I like him. I do think he should do more on climate, and I actually think it would help our economy and create jobs and make us less dependent on a global oil market that's dominated by the most unstable region in the world, where we've had several wars in the last couple of decades. So I think there are many reasons why we should be doing more.
That's right - she slipped a folded personal check into Sanders's pocket as they posed for photo. I don't know how much it was for, but it's safe to assume it wasn't much. Seventy-six percent of his donations came from people giving $200 or less. Sanders raised just over $15 million total, putting him ahead of all but one Republican candidate. But when it comes to campaign cash, there's only one Hillary Clinton. She raised more than $47 million in the first months of her campaign, in large part thanks to a relentless fundraising schedule. Take June 29 - she attended three big-dollar fundraisers, including one at the home of New Jersey rocker Jon Bon Jovi.
Yeah. I have a lot of friends actually that work abroad and have to sort of go in and try to figure out the way that business is done there and get a contract and sort of - and do that work and then leave. And they're almost invariably very cavalier about it. It's always a little bit of an adventure and this wild story they can tell. And they come back without really having gained a whole lot of insight into the larger context of their work. And so it's always been just interesting to me when this expertise is sort of dropped in and all these people are dropped in and build something that might last centuries or might change, drastically, the lives of hundreds and thousands or millions of people. And then the people that built these things are gone.
Tomografia axial computada(ph), CAT scan, or otorrinolaringologo(ph), ear, nose and throat doctor. It's the terms like HMO and co-pay that don't have direct translations. But telephone interpreters deal with complicated issues that go far beyond terminology. Once, I interpreted for a nurse who was visiting new teen parents. It was a hot summer day. Their home had no air conditioning. The nurse quickly noticed that the couple's baby was red-faced, sweating, and swaddled in multiple layers of blankets. She took his temperature. He had a fever. The nurse asked gently, why did they put so much clothing on the child? The teenage mother offered a quiet explanation.
Oh, that's a great concern. And the president has talked about that. He said we don't want to go back to Iraq we want to have them do the fighting. We don't want to have American boots on the ground. He came in to office wanting to end these wars, and he did so. And Afghanistan, of course, is coming to an end, but some U.S. counterterrorism officials who I've spoken with - they're very concerned about ISIS. They said the U.S. has to act more decisively. They're afraid of this safe-haven that ISIS is creating. And they're also concerned about fighters coming from the United States and from Europe, getting trained by ISIS - maybe becoming more radicalized and then heading back home.
Well, Linda, at the moment I would say a lot comes down to essentially charting a path forward for the rest of the decade. The existing Kyoto Protocol, the treaty that guides climate right now, is fading away. Key parts are actually expiring, and in any event, many nations are giving up on it. So the replacement that's been emerging though is not making people entirely happy. It consists largely of voluntary pledges, and that's a concept that emerged in Copenhagen two years ago. But it turns out that those pledges are not nearly ambitious enough at the moment to prevent continued heating of the planet. Even so, major players, including the United States and China, don't really want to revisit those pledges until the end of the decade, and other people say, come on, you really got to do better than you're doing right now. And there's no obvious way that I see right now to resolve that major conflict at the moment.
Yes. She was an amazing woman, and I'm so happy that I got to know her over the years. She was the lone voice in parliament fighting against the repressive laws that - particularly the ones that kept people, black people, from moving around. You know, they had to carry passes, and also there were times when whites wanted particular areas of land and property, and they would have what they called forced removals. They would just move black people out to some place way away from where their normal homes were and think nothing of it. And so, she fought against all of those things. And also, another one of the more repressive of the apartheid laws was detention without trial, and she, herself a trained lawyer, as the sole representative of her party, the Liberal Progressive Party in parliament, she stood up, she spoke truth to power, and she never, never backed down in the face of just enormous opposition.
I'm saying that - to borrow a wonderful phrase from Larry Summers, who once argued that in the history of the world, nobody ever washed a rental car: We care only about what we own. And Arabs and Israelis, if this is going to succeed, have to own their own negotiations. They have to invest in them. That has not happened. So the real question is whether or not an American president can compensate for the absence of urgency, the absence of leadership, the absence of will, which is missing from the Arab-Israeli arena today with his own leadership, urgency and will. That's the question.
Well, basically, the neighborhoods, if you had mix neighborhoods with Sunnis and Shiites, the Shiites - in the predominantly Shiite part of it, the Sunnis would be pushed out; in the predominantly Sunni part of it, the Shiites would be pushed out. You had ethnic cleansing block by block by block. And until the surge started last year, American troops have been hunkered down in big bases. It was a big change to have them living in the community. And Captain Erik Peterson set up one of the first combat outposts in Gazalia. And as you'll hear, he reached out to people who just a few days before perhaps had been shooting at him.
If their mental faculties are in place - like they know what they're doing, they just don't want your help - no. You know you may be able to get a lawyer who can take it to court and say some of the things they're doing are actually jeopardizing their health and well-being. But for the most part, you got to just stand back and unfortunately in some cases just watch them go down. But if you take some of the steps, you know very, very gently say can I help you with this or you know just let me go with you. But you have to recognize they are your parents, they're grown, and you can't do what they won't allow you to do. But don't let that stop you. You know because a lot of times you know they are afraid and you want to allay their fears by just being with them and constantly calling them and letting them know that you are there when they want your help.
Yeah. Well, we do know that for life without parole, both for murder and non-murder, nationally, there are very disproportion rates of confinement for African-Americans and Latinos, far out of their proportion to the general population and somewhat higher than their proportion of the sort of regular, if you want to think of that, prison population. So very significant, and certainly that's true for these 77 kids in Florida, which is by far the leading state in the nation. Which raises questions of, you know, how are cases processed? Do these numbers just reflect criminal activity or does it reflect access to resources and decision making in the juvenile criminal justice systems?
The way it works is that you just -you put down your items one at a time. And when you're done with them, you swipe it off. And every four or so items that you remove from your list you get some kind of reward. One time my reward our a message popped up and it said: We're throwing you a party. Click your app to see where the party is. And it brought me to Antarctica. So it was obviously not a party I was going to attend. But, you know, it did make me - I'm not really a to-do list kind of guy in general. But it was fun using this because I liked the humor. And you never really know what's going to happen next, after you complete the next level. So I just found myself wanting to find out, and I would put things on the list that kind of had no business being on a to-do list; like, you know, eat today or go to work.
Absolutely, I think that it's partly because the war on terror has just paralyzed the political class in this country, black, white and elsewhere, folks are afraid to step out there. There was just a story this morning in The New York Times about Bush's ability to really, marginalize folks that speak out against the war and to simplify the debate to one where, we're trying to protect you against al-Qaeda and anybody that speaks out against that is in favor of al-Qaeda. Folks are afraid of that Bush propaganda machine and they've been afraid to speak out because they're afraid it will backfire on them, and in some cases it has.
What happened is on February 15th the Army - and the Army says that this did occur - on February 15th the division surgeon and the brigade surgeon for the 3rd Brigade of the 3rd Infantry division looked at 75 soldiers from that brigade on that day. I don't know if they did it on other days too. But at least on that day they looked at 75 soldiers with illness and injuries. I talked with eight soldiers - seven separate interviews - who met with the division surgeon that day. And they were very concerned about what happened that day. They felt like they had health problems that were being dismissed. And the next thing you know they got orders to Iraq.
That's Ardelle Ferrer Negretti. She's been visiting La Ceiba since the 1960s when it sat behind a gate on the U.S. Navy base on the island. The Navy abandoned the site in 2004, but Ferrer and other residents organized to protect La Ceiba and make it the centerpiece of a community park. History has been important to many generations of Viequenses. It has become an outdoor classroom, a place where it feeds and nurtures families and the community, their mental health and union. They all go and camp, and they hang out there on weekends. It's a very nice place to go and connect with nature.
No, it's not like - I think when it's smaller things, when it's sort of ridiculous day-to-day things, I sort of scribble as I go sometimes or I'll remember something at night and write it down. But - and the other thing is, like, stuff with your kids is generally on the whole I don't kind of go near that, you know? Because I think when it comes to sort of writing about what grown adults have got up to is one thing, and they might recognize that, but kind of using anything that feels remotely - like, at any stage my kid might watch and go hang on, that's me. I kind of feel like that's not an area I want to...
Imagine a baseball season when the New York Yankees are struggling in fourth place, the overall number of home runs is declining, and a major league team from Washington, DC, is a hit. Oh, that's right, that's this baseball season. Well, sportswriter Stefan Fatsis of The Wall Street Journal joins us, as he does most Fridays, for a glimpse of the season at the one-third mark. Stefan, let's start with the home run totals which are down around 25 percent from their peak in 2000. Now do we think that this has something to do with fewer players now taking performance-enhancing drugs?
Good because the Hemphill's need some worry-free rest after all that travel. They'll be staying put at a campground in Winnipeg, taking in some of the local sites and relaxing until Friday's game. The U.S. plays Sweden, and it's predicted to be a tough match. The Swedes tied Nigeria yesterday, so they're looking for a win to give them the best chance to move to the next round, and as Naomi and Meg Hemphill know, Sweden's Pia Sundhage used to coach the U.S. team. N. HEMPHILL: All the players have been there a long time, like, they obviously all know her really well and everything, so I think it'll be hard for them to play against their old coach.
Well, Senator Corker certainly has a point. Democrats are under tremendous political pressure to oppose this nomination from outside groups. But one of the arguments they'll say against Pompeo is that the job for being the nation's top diplomat is different than the job for being the nation's top intelligence officer. And there is a lot of skepticism among Democrats that he has the world view and the experience to lean more towards diplomacy. And in the words of Senator Chris Coons, who is one of the Democrats opposing him, there is a lot of concern among Democrats that, in his words, Pompeo will embolden President Trump's most belligerent and dangerous instincts when it comes to foreign policy.
We turn off the recorder, but that's not enough. Another guy in military fatigues comes over and says we broke the law as foreigners being so close to a Russian border. He takes our passports leaving us just to wait. So there we were, we were kind of helpless, couldn't go anywhere since we didn't have our passports and stood outside our vehicle for, you know, an hour or so. This one guy in a uniform, not sure what it was - it was sort of mismatched, the kind of thing you might buy at an army supply store. He said he was something in between the FSB, which is the modern-day KGB, and the Russian Border Patrol.
Sure you do, Ed. And we still have - you know, if you're a baby boomer, a black baby boomer, a white baby boomer for that matter, the case of Emmett Till still resonates because of the visual images that we have from the Jet magazine photo of Emmett Till's body. I think, you know, when we compare the decision by the FBI, whom today has decided not to pursue this case, compare that with the decision by next door neighbor Alabama to go back and pardon the number of folks who had been charges with violating the segregational laws, you see a part of our country who's trying to deal with a very painful part of our history. We make progress and we fall back. I think the opportunity that the state has, Mississippi, maybe the district attorney will follow-up, I'm certainly hopeful that the folks in Mississippi will not let this thing just fester. This is not something that's just going to go away. We'll be talking about this case 10 years from now, 20 years from now, 30 years from now, and this is an opportunity, while the people are still alive who do know what happened, to come forward and help us to heal a very...
Absolutely, Alex. One thing I came away with is this depth of nostalgia for the way things used to be. You know, for many conservatives, that means Christianity. They feel that culture is crude, and it's been hijacked and God's been taken out of the schools and all the familiar institutions like marriage are being redefined by the courts. And, you know, I got a sense for how strongly people feel about this when I went to Woodstock, Virginia. Judge Roy Moore's Ten Commandments monument--you know, that 5,000-pound slab of granite--was there taking a visit in Woodstock, Virginia. It was on a flatbed truck, and people came and gathered around it and they touched it like it was a holy icon. And I want to play you some tape I recorded there. It was a conversation with a woman named Janet Ferguson(ph).
Novelist Ellen Meister had a problem. She wanted to write a book about one of her lifelong heroes, the writer Dorothy Parker. But all kinds of biographies had already been written about Parker who passed away in 1967. And besides, Meister is a novelist not a biographer. She could write a character that was based on Parker but that's not as much fun. She wanted to write in Dorothy Parker's voice so Meister brought the literary star back to life as a ghost. Ellen Meister's new novel is called "Farewell, Dorothy Parker." And when I spoke with Meister, I asked her what it was about this literary figure that captured her imagination.
This is a conference and that has come up at virtually every panel in some form. Now, a lot of Johnson supporters here, but they cite the long experience Johnson had in the Congress and in the Senate, how he knew everybody in those chambers for having worked with them so long. That gives him an advantage in things like this. His personality was also very different from President Obama's. Congress itself was very different. There were more moderates from each party that Johnson could reach out to and deal with. But again, it is kind of a lingering question, how difficult it is for a president to kind of impose his will on a Congress today.
He spoke at first off just four days just before the very crucial Paris climate change talks start, and he has been really hammering on this issue all year. First, he did a - issued a teaching document called an encyclical in June. And then he spoke about this very forcefully at the U.N. in New York in September. And yesterday, he said it would be catastrophic if special interest prevail over the common good and lead to manipulation of information at the Paris conference. He didn't specify exactly what he meant, but it's clear that this is, again, this is one of his favorite themes. He's always expressed disdain for the less affair, consumer-oriented economic model and for climate change deniers. He said this is a issue that cannot be ignored. Either we improve the environment or we destroy it.
Yes. I'm a disabled veteran, and when Barack was first elected, I was watching the Veterans Committee reports for new budget and they were just trying to pass through the regular budget and made cuts in the VA. And Barack, he was on the Veterans Affairs Committee. And Barack said that you can't do that. we're fighting wars on two different fronts. There are veterans that are going to need hospitalization and mental health. And he was able to actually add money to the budget that year. And I thought, now this man has really has his priorities correct. I'd work for him.
I'm an historian. And what I love about being an historian is it gives you perspective. Today, I'd like to bring that perspective to education in the United States. About the only thing people can agree on is that the most strategic time for a child to start learning is early. Over 50 years ago, there was a watershed moment in early education in the US called "Head Start." Now, historians love watersheds because it makes it so easy to talk about what came before and what's happened since. Before Head Start, basically nothing. With Head Start, we began to get our nation's most at-risk children ready for school. Since Head Start, we've made strides, but there are still 2.2 million children in the US without access to early learning, or more than half of the four-year-olds in the country. That's a problem. But the bigger problem is what we know happens to those children. At-risk children who reach school without basic skills are 25 percent more likely to drop out, 40 percent more likely to become teen parents and 60 percent less likely to go to college. So if we know how important early education is, why aren't all children getting it? There are barriers that the solutions we've come up with to date simply can't overcome. Geography: think rural and remote. Transportation: think working parents everywhere. Parent choice: no state requires a four-year-old to go to school. And cost: the average cost for a state to educate a preschooler is five thousand dollars a year. So am I just going to keep talking about problems? No. Today, I want to tell you about a cost-effective, technology-delivered, kindergarten-readiness program that can be done in the home. It's called UPSTART, and more than 60,000 preschoolers in the US have already used it. Now, I know what you might be thinking: here's another person throwing tech at a national problem. And you'd be partially right. We develop early learning software designed to individualize instruction, so children can learn at their own pace. To do that, we rely on experts from fields ranging from reading to sociology to brain science development to all aspects of early learning, to tell us what the software should do and look like. Here's an example. (Video) Zero (sings to the tune of "Day-O"): Zero! Zero! Zero is the number that's different from the others. Seagulls: Zero is a big, round "O." Zero: It's not like one, I'm sure you'll discover. Seagulls: Zero is a big, round "O." (Laughter) Claudia Miner: That is "The Zero Song." (Laughter) And here are Odd Todd and Even Steven to teach you some things about numbers. And here are the Word Birds, and they're going to show you when you blend letter sounds together, you can form words. You can see that instruction is short, colorful and catchy, designed to capture a child's attention. But there's another piece to UPSTART that makes it different and more effective. UPSTART puts parents in charge of their children's education. We believe, with the right support, all parents can get their children ready for school. Here's how it works. This is the kindergarten readiness checklist from a state. And almost every state has one. We go to parents wherever they are, and we conduct a key in-person group training. And we tell them the software can check every reading, math and science box, but they're going to be responsible for motor skills and self-help skills, and together, we're going to work on social emotional learning. Now, we know this is working because we have a 90-percent completion rate for the program. Last year, that translated into 13,500 children "graduating," with diplomas, from UPSTART. And the results have been amazing. We have an external evaluation that shows our children have two to three times the learning gains as children who don't participate in the program. We have a random control trial that shows strong evidence of effectiveness, and we even have a longitudinal study that shows our children's gains last into third and fourth grade, the highest grades the children had achieved at the time. Those are academic gains. But another study has shown that our children's social emotional gains are equal to those of children attending public and private preschool. The majority of the 60,000 children who have participated in UPSTART to date have been from Utah. But we have replicated our results with African-American children in Mississippi — this is Kingston and his mother; with English language learners in Arizona — this is Daisy and her family; with refugee children in Philadelphia — this is my favorite graduation photo; and with Native American children from some of the most remote parts of the United States. This is Cherise, and this is where she lives in Monument Valley. Now, there are skeptics about UPSTART. Some people don't believe young children should have screen time. To them, we say: UPSTART's usage requirement of 15 minutes a day, five days a week, is well within the hour-a-day recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics for four-year-olds. Some people believe only site-based preschool can work, and to them, we say: site-based preschool is great, but if you can't get a child there or if a parent won't send a child there, isn't a technology-delivered, results-based option a great alternative? And we love working with site-based preschools. Right now, there are 800 children in Mississippi going to Head Start during the day and doing UPSTART at night with their families. Our audacious idea is to take UPSTART across the country — not to replace anything; we want to serve children who otherwise would not have access to early education. We have the guts to take on the skeptics, we have the energy to do the work, and we have a plan. It is the role of the states to educate their children. So first we will use philanthropy dollars to go into a state to pilot the program and get data. Every state believes it's unique and wants to know that the program will work with its children before investing. Then we identify key leaders in the state to help us champion UPSTART as an option for unserved children. And together, we go to state legislatures to transition UPSTART from philanthropy to sustainable and scalable state funding. That plan has worked — (Applause) Thanks. Thank you. That plan has worked in three states to date: Utah, Indiana and South Carolina. We've also piloted the program in a number of states and identified champions. Next, we're moving to states with the greatest geographic barriers to work the plan, and then on to states that already have early education but may not be getting great academic results or great parent buy-in to participate. From there, we go to the states that are going to require the most data and work to convince, and we'll hope our momentum helps turn the tide there. We will serve a quarter of a million children in five years, and we will ensure that states continue to offer UPSTART to their children. Here's how you can help: for two thousand dollars, we can provide a child with UPSTART, a computer and internet, and that child will be part of the pilot that makes certain other children get UPSTART in the future. We also need engaged citizens to go to their government and say just how easy it can be to get children ready for school. You wouldn't be here if you weren't an engaged citizen, so we're asking for your help. Now, will all of us this make UPSTART a watershed moment in early education? I believe together we can make it one. But I can tell you without a doubt that UPSTART is a watershed moment in the life of a child who otherwise would not be ready for school. Thank you. (Applause)
The subject that you're talking about right now is something that - I went to school for film sound, and I had a silver age Hollywood sound mixer who was teaching us, and he would talk to us a lot about compression. And it wasn't until I had enough experience to really be able to hear the difference in things. And I feel like they ought to start taking children on more school trips to hear a symphony play because I think the loudness wars have sort of bullied people's ears into a point where I'm afraid humans might evolve to where they won't even be able to hear certain frequencies at some point because they just don't need to, or they have no reason to. And I think that, you know, for people that are audiophiles and think about these kind of things, you know, I think that - or people that just like music generally, they seek these different kinds of listening out. But you know, with all the technology, the explosion of things, I do worry that it has sort of changed the basic way people listen to things and MP3s.
While the police had a briefing this afternoon. And what we know is that the suspect is Ismaaiyl Brinsley was 28. He had a pretty long arrest record. His mother actually told police she was afraid of him because he was violent. Early yesterday morning, he shot and wounded a former girlfriend in Owings Mills, Maryland. He then took a bus to New York City and ended up in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. He walked up to a police cruiser, which was parked outside a housing project and shot the two police officers inside. Their names were Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu. Brinsley then ran into a nearby subway station and shot and killed himself.
At MIT, they have a blood-cell-sized device that can detect cancer cells based on the antigens on their surface and destroy them. And there are a variety of experiments like this in animals, and these will be going into human trials in the years ahead. But I'd say the real nanotechnology revolution is a little bit far away. But if we go out to the 2020s, we will have desktop-sized devices that can fabricate three-dimensional products that will meet your material needs. Already early harbingers of this. But just as I can email you today a book or a movie or sound recording, whereas those used to be physical products, now they're just email attachments, in the future, I'll be able to email you a blouse or a physical device or food, And you'll be able to just send that email attachment to your desktop nano-replicator and it will create a three-dimensional object.
All right. Well, thanks so much there. We've got an email here from Terry(ph) in Oakland, California, who offers some advice. She's been married 40-plus years. She says she has a list for her husband called retirement requirement. It includes the following. You have to have some friends of your own, not our couple friends. You have to have an interest other than golf or sports, or learn something new that challenges your mind and makes you a more interesting person. You have to bring something interesting to the table every night. No eating dinner in front of the television. We should each have some time in the house alone to ourselves each week. And she adds that she does not do windows or lunch.
Well, I wouldn't say necessarily many. A vast proportion who live in the area slightly to the south, which has not been quite so affected in Mirpur region, they left because they were offered compensation when the Mangla reservoir was created and it flooded a certain amount of land, and that does mean that a lot of these people have relatives in--living in Britain and, in fact, we've had a huge relief effort coming from Bradford in the north of England where a number of the Pakistani families from this region, both from Mirpur and also from Muzaffarabad, because they've all got relatives living in one or other of these towns, have sent back assistance--blankets, clothes, what they can, and it's been absolutely startling what's left actually from those towns in Britain.
And then finally, and in a way the most important, is the risk assessment lacked a formal uncertainty analysis. And this is really important, especially in environmental risk assessment, because there are always going to be scientific uncertainties. Living organisms and ecosystems where these fish might end up, are very complex. There's a lot of variability. There are always things that the scientists don't fully understand. That doesn't need to paralyze, though, the risk-assessment process. Instead, the state of the art in risk assessment nowadays is that you carry out a formal uncertainty analysis throughout the risk assessment. And you gather the results of that at the end, and you make that part of the conclusions that you had to the decision-makers, so that the decision-makers are much better informed about, really, what are they accepting, and what assumptions are they making if they give an approval or if they give a denial.
I did finish it - but again, that was more because of my job. I mean, if I'm going to write about something to not finish it, people will still ask me, actually, because I write about a lot of books. They'll say, well, did you read the whole thing? And I tell them that would be like asking a movie critic if they stuck around to that - you know, past the first 15 minutes. Yes, indeed, I did. And I was glad that I finished it. In fact, one reader said to me, perhaps the whole point of getting through a book that you're not mad about is the fact that you got through it to teach you something about life. And while that sounds like a little bit of a Sunday school lesson, I thought she really had a valid point, that it's going through things that we not - that we don't think we're going to necessarily enjoy right off the bat that tells us something about ourselves, the fact that we are able to get to the end. I certainly felt that way about "Wolf Hall" at the end. I didnt regret the time I'd spent on it, but I was kind of proud of myself for sticking with it.
This is Talk of the Nation. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. And we've got this email from Dale in Tempe, Arizona: When I was laid off from my previous job due to the economy, I was very hurt. I was angry at my direct supervisor for what I thought was a lack of loyalty. As stupid as it sounds, I was angry she didn't walk out with me. I was angry she didn't stick up for me or take a pay cut to try to keep me on board. But listening to this segment today has made me think about her feelings and what she was going through. It's really good to hear the flipside. I'm glad you showcased this problem of the layoffs which most people do not consider. Well, that's exactly what we are talking about today, those who survive, those who have to give out the news. What happens when the people who've being pink-slipped leave and leave problems behind? Well, not of their making, but there are problems there, plenty of them behind including survivor guilt. Our guests are Barbara Kiviat, who's a staff writer at Time Magazine, and Mitchell Lee Marks, a faculty - on the faculty of the College of Business at San Francisco State University, author of "Charging Back Up the Hill: Workplace Recovery after Mergers, Acquisitions and Downsizing." If you like to join us, 800-989-8255; email is talk@npr.org. Let's go to David, David with us from Odessa, Texas.
I had brain surgery 18 years ago, and since that time, brain science has become a personal passion of mine. I'm actually an engineer. And first let me say, I recently joined Google's Moonshot group, where I had a division, the display division in Google X, and the brain science work I'm speaking about today is work I did before I joined Google and on the side outside of Google. So that said, there's a stigma when you have brain surgery. Are you still smart or not? And if not, can you make yourself smart again? After my neurosurgery, part of my brain was missing, and I had to deal with that. It wasn't the grey matter, but it was the gooey part dead center that makes key hormones and neurotransmitters. Immediately after my surgery, I had to decide what amounts of each of over a dozen powerful chemicals to take each day, because if I just took nothing, I would die within hours. Every day now for 18 years — every single day — I've had to try to decide the combinations and mixtures of chemicals, and try to get them, to stay alive. There have been several close calls. But luckily, I'm an experimentalist at heart, so I decided I would experiment to try to find more optimal dosages because there really isn't a clear road map on this that's detailed. I began to try different mixtures, and I was blown away by how tiny changes in dosages dramatically changed my sense of self, my sense of who I was, my thinking, my behavior towards people. One particularly dramatic case: for a couple months I actually tried dosages and chemicals typical of a man in his early 20s, and I was blown away by how my thoughts changed. (Laughter) I was angry all the time, I thought about sex constantly, and I thought I was the smartest person in the entire world, and —(Laughter)— of course over the years I'd met guys kind of like that, or maybe kind of toned-down versions of that. I was kind of extreme. But to me, the surprise was, I wasn't trying to be arrogant. I was actually trying, with a little bit of insecurity, to actually fix a problem in front of me, and it just didn't come out that way. So I couldn't handle it. I changed my dosages. But that experience, I think, gave me a new appreciation for men and what they might walk through, and I've gotten along with men a lot better since then. What I was trying to do with tuning these hormones and neurotransmitters and so forth was to try to get my intelligence back after my illness and surgery, my creative thought, my idea flow. And I think mostly in images, and so for me that became a key metric — how to get these mental images that I use as a way of rapid prototyping, if you will, my ideas, trying on different new ideas for size, playing out scenarios. This kind of thinking isn't new. Philiosophers like Hume and Descartes and Hobbes saw things similarly. They thought that mental images and ideas were actually the same thing. There are those today that dispute that, and lots of debates about how the mind works, but for me it's simple: Mental images, for most of us, are central in inventive and creative thinking. So after several years, I tuned myself up and I have lots of great, really vivid mental images with a lot of sophistication and the analytical backbone behind them. And so now I'm working on, how can I get these mental images in my mind out to my computer screen faster? Can you imagine, if you will, a movie director being able to use her imagination alone to direct the world in front of her? Or a musician to get the music out of his head? There are incredible possibilities with this as a way for creative people to share at light speed. And the truth is, the remaining bottleneck in being able to do this is just upping the resolution of brain scan systems. So let me show you why I think we're pretty close to getting there by sharing with you two recent experiments from two top neuroscience groups. Both used fMRI technology — functional magnetic resonance imaging technology — to image the brain, and here is a brain scan set from Giorgio Ganis and his colleagues at Harvard. And the left-hand column shows a brain scan of a person looking at an image. The middle column shows the brainscan of that same individual imagining, seeing that same image. And the right column was created by subtracting the middle column from the left column, showing the difference to be nearly zero. This was repeated on lots of different individuals with lots of different images, always with a similar result. The difference between seeing an image and imagining seeing that same image is next to nothing. Next let me share with you one other experiment, this from Jack Gallant's lab at Cal Berkeley. They've been able to decode brainwaves into recognizable visual fields. So let me set this up for you. In this experiment, individuals were shown hundreds of hours of YouTube videos while scans were made of their brains to create a large library of their brain reacting to video sequences. Then a new movie was shown with new images, new people, new animals in it, and a new scan set was recorded. The computer, using brain scan data alone, decoded that new brain scan to show what it thought the individual was actually seeing. On the right-hand side, you see the computer's guess, and on the left-hand side, the presented clip. This is the jaw-dropper. We are so close to being able to do this. We just need to up the resolution. And now remember that when you see an image versus when you imagine that same image, it creates the same brain scan. So this was done with the highest-resolution brain scan systems available today, and their resolution has increased really about a thousandfold in the last several years. Next we need to increase the resolution another thousandfold to get a deeper glimpse. How do we do that? There's a lot of techniques in this approach. One way is to crack open your skull and put in electrodes. I'm not for that. There's a lot of new imaging techniques being proposed, some even by me, but given the recent success of MRI, first we need to ask the question, is it the end of the road with this technology? Conventional wisdom says the only way to get higher resolution is with bigger magnets, but at this point bigger magnets only offer incremental resolution improvements, not the thousandfold we need. I'm putting forward an idea: instead of bigger magnets, let's make better magnets. There's some new technology breakthroughs in nanoscience when applied to magnetic structures that have created a whole new class of magnets, and with these magnets, we can lay down very fine detailed magnetic field patterns throughout the brain, and using those, we can actually create holographic-like interference structures to get precision control over many patterns, as is shown here by shifting things. We can create much more complicated structures with slightly different arrangements, kind of like making Spirograph. So why does that matter? A lot of effort in MRI over the years has gone into making really big, really huge magnets, right? But yet most of the recent advances in resolution have actually come from ingeniously clever encoding and decoding solutions in the F.M. radio frequency transmitters and receivers in the MRI systems. Let's also, instead of a uniform magnetic field, put down structured magnetic patterns in addition to the F.M. radio frequencies. So by combining the magnetics patterns with the patterns in the F.M. radio frequencies processing which can massively increase the information that we can extract in a single scan. And on top of that, we can then layer our ever-growing knowledge of brain structure and memory to create a thousandfold increase that we need. And using fMRI, we should be able to measure not just oxygenated blood flow, but the hormones and neurotransmitters I've talked about and maybe even the direct neural activity, which is the dream. We're going to be able to dump our ideas directly to digital media. Could you imagine if we could leapfrog language and communicate directly with human thought? What would we be capable of then? And how will we learn to deal with the truths of unfiltered human thought? You think the Internet was big. These are huge questions. It might be irresistible as a tool to amplify our thinking and communication skills. And indeed, this very same tool may prove to lead to the cure for Alzheimer's and similar diseases. We have little option but to open this door. Regardless, pick a year — will it happen in five years or 15 years? It's hard to imagine it taking much longer. We need to learn how to take this step together. Thank you. (Applause)
Some 17 years ago, I became allergic to Delhi's air. My doctors told me that my lung capacity had gone down to 70 percent, and it was killing me. With the help of IIT, TERI, and learnings from NASA, we discovered that there are three basic green plants, common green plants, with which we can grow all the fresh air we need indoors to keep us healthy. We've also found that you can reduce the fresh air requirements into the building, while maintaining industry indoor air-quality standards. The three plants are Areca palm, Mother-in-Law's Tongue and money plant. The botanical names are in front of you. Areca palm is a plant which removes CO2 and converts it into oxygen. We need four shoulder-high plants per person, and in terms of plant care, we need to wipe the leaves every day in Delhi, and perhaps once a week in cleaner-air cities. We had to grow them in vermi manure, which is sterile, or hydroponics, and take them outdoors every three to four months. The second plant is Mother-in-law's Tongue, which is again a very common plant, and we call it a bedroom plant, because it converts CO2 into oxygen at night. And we need six to eight waist-high plants per person. The third plant is money plant, and this is again a very common plant; preferably grows in hydroponics. And this particular plant removes formaldehydes and other volatile chemicals. With these three plants, you can grow all the fresh air you need. In fact, you could be in a bottle with a cap on top, and you would not die at all, and you would not need any fresh air. We have tried these plants at our own building in Delhi, which is a 50,000-square-feet, 20-year-old building. And it has close to 1,200 such plants for 300 occupants. Our studies have found that there is a 42 percent probability of one's blood oxygen going up by one percent if one stays indoors in this building for 10 hours. The government of India has discovered or published a study to show that this is the healthiest building in New Delhi. And the study showed that, compared to other buildings, there is a reduced incidence of eye irritation by 52 percent, respiratory systems by 34 percent, headaches by 24 percent, lung impairment by 12 percent and asthma by nine percent. And this study has been published on September 8, 2008, and it's available on the government of India website. Our experience points to an amazing increase in human productivity by over 20 percent by using these plants. And also a reduction in energy requirements in buildings by an outstanding 15 percent, because you need less fresh air. We are now replicating this in a 1.75-million-square-feet building, which will have 60,000 indoor plants. Why is this important? It is also important for the environment, because the world's energy requirements are expected to grow by 30 percent in the next decade. 40 percent of the world's energy is taken up by buildings currently, and 60 percent of the world's population will be living in buildings in cities with a population of over one million in the next 15 years. And there is a growing preference for living and working in air-conditioned places. "Be the change you want to see in the world," said Mahatma Gandhi. And thank you for listening. (Applause)
That's right. The Anglican - the leader of the Anglican Communion, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the number two, the Archbishop of York, have both come out today in a letter to the Prime Minister Tony Blair, saying that they support the Roman Catholic bishop in what he has said, although they're not necessarily applying it to Anglican adoption agencies. They're really lending their moral support to the Catholic Church, and saying, quote, "that the rights of conscience cannot be made subject to legislation." They're essentially saying, and they're very careful to say, that they are not against legislation that stops gay people being discriminated against. They don't want gay people to be discriminated against. But at the same time, it causes a problem because in doing this, this could start a new kind of discrimination against people of religious belief who don't feel that they can deliver goods or services as the law requires to gay people, as in the case of this catholic adoption agency.
It's not so much why we haven't cured it. But I think - first of all, we have, for a number of people, probably cured some cancers. But why haven't we benefited as many people as we need to? I think one of them is that just within the last decade or so, technologies have enabled us to learn the nature of cancer itself, right? All cancers are fundamentally disorders of acquired defects in genes. There's 20,000 genes. This is what's encoded, is the jargon term, by DNA, and the DNA science and technology can now look at all the defects and all the genes that cancers acquire. And there's probably more than a thousand to 10,000 in each cancer in each person. And knowing that gives us a better sense of what we're going to need to do to control it.
You know, I think he had seen so much horror that afterward he was determined to enjoy his life. You know, he was adored by his family and friends. In the early '50s, I do know, as he recalled, he went back to school, USC, and he earned a graduate degree in international studies. And he said to us, not long after I graduated, I received a call from the State Department and they were offering me a job, but they wanted to send me to some country in Central America that was in revolution and I paused and then I said into the phone, as he relayed this story, he said, why the hell do I want to go back into another war?
Well, that's right. I mean, he was, you know, the viceroy, in essence, of Iraq. And basically, this whole hearing is focusing on how this coalition provisional authority - which was the effective governing authority of Iraq -handled money, and particularly, handled Iraqi money - Iraqi oil revenue. And what he talked about in his opening statement - he said, look. You know, my job was to kick start the economy. The economy was flat on its back, and we had to move quickly to lay the groundwork for a new and democratic Iraq. He said I understand I made mistakes. With hindsight, I could have done things differently. But the lesson he said he came away with all of this is that it was poor planning. I mean, that's something also pretty obvious around town here, that there was little planning ahead of the invasion on Iraq of what to do after Saddam is toppled.
There is no requirement that Dave has to change his coverage. There is a requirement that everybody has to have coverage that meets minimum standards. And it sounds like Dave's coverage - and his sister Jane's coverage -already is well above that minimum standard. So it's not a constraint that's going to move him anywhere. It is generally the case, and has been for a long time, that health insurance coverage kind of declines over time. We've seen a steady erosion in what health insurance covers and a steady increase in what it costs, both for people who buy on their own and for people who get coverage at work. So I think there's no guarantee that Dave's employer won't change his coverage over time, just in response to rising health care costs. But under health reform, no matter which bill passes, there will be a requirement that health insurance policies that you get at work, that you buy on your own cover a minimum number of services and have a maximum level of cost-sharing. So that, I think, should be helpful for everybody, and it shouldn't change. It shouldn't change what Dave has because it sounds like he's on the high end of coverage right now. And if his employer feels pressure over time if health care costs continue to increase, even after health reform, then it's possible that his employer might back down toward that minimum. But I think that would happen in the absence of reform as well.
Last month, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood's announcement that he wants to make travel by bicycle and by foot as important as driving, was met with both praise and derision - in no small part due to the simmering feud between cyclists and drivers. Anyone who's pedaled through traffic knows that it's a four-wheeled world out there, where cars and trucks buzz past hapless two-wheelers and cut them off in sudden turns, while drivers complain about cyclists who weave in and out of traffic and blow through red lights. Warmer weather brings a lot more bikes on to the road. It's also a bike-to-work week, so we want to hear from cyclists and drivers: What do those other idiots need to know about sharing the road; 800-989-8255. Email us: talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website. That's at npr.org, just click on TALK OF THE NATION.
The Tea Party can also say it made many Republican candidates move to the right to secure their nominations this year, even including Romney himself. The movement also connects with the other big story of 2012 - money. From its beginnings, it's had support from such wealthy conservative donors as the Koch brothers. Its big, institutional ties include groups such as FreedomWorks, led by Dick Armey, the former majority leader of the U.S. House. These major players saw early, the historic potential of the Tea Party. Harvard professor Theda Skocpol is the co-author of the book "The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism."
We don't - we like - with this current therapy of - well, the standard therapy of pegylated interferon and ribavirin for a genotype 1, which is the most common strain of hepatitis C in the United States, overall, you can get about 40 percent clearance of - when you look at the persons treated with these drugs. Other types of strains, you even get better responses - upwards to 75 and 80 percent. As I mentioned, with these new drugs coming out, and as Neal mentioned at the introduction of this segment, these new drugs are only for genotype 1. But for that, most patients will be able to benefit from it if they have medical indications to receive it and then that will increase the chances of clearing the virus, which is essentially represents a cure of this infection from about 40 percent to over 75 percent, while for many patients shortening their duration of treatment.
Well, I should clarify that not everyone was a boyfriend. I was really just talking to all the guys that I knew over the last, let's say, eight years. And so, those obviously weren't all people whom I dated. Some were friends who we decided to be friends instead of dating. And I thought that that - their perspective was equally important because, you know, a lot of times men will have women in their lives who they put into different boxes, you know, potential-wife box, just-a-friend box. And so, really I was asking those people, what makes you decide to put me in that certain box? So, not everyone I spoke to was actually an ex; they were men that I knew.
One of the biggest thrills of my teenage life was being allowed to stay up all night to watch the Apollo 11 Moon landing (the first time I’d ever spent a whole night without going to bed). And something was very clear to me, back then on that long 1969 night: I would be going to the Moon too. Not soon, but before I died. I was realistic. I didn’t expect it to be soon, because I never saw myself as an astronaut. But I firmly expected that by the time this book was written and I was a very elderly person in my fifties, trips to the Moon would be pretty much like flights across the Atlantic were in the 1960s. Still a very special experience, not for everyone by any means, but something that would be available to the general public as a safe, scheduled pleasure trip. This seems very naïve now, but it really didn’t back in the heady days of 1969. I had read the science fiction. I knew that Moon bases and lunar cities would inevitably follow that first, groundbreaking step of making a manned landing. Why not? It seemed an entirely logical progress. Think how much had been achieved in just the previous eight years. Imagine what would be possible in another 40 or 50 years. And yet the reality was so different. There were just six brief manned Moon landings in the Apollo series, and then nothing. Not a single person has reached the Moon for decades. There have been plenty of unmanned probes, but nothing has been done toward laying the ground for those lunar cities and for the regular, commercial Moon flights I so eagerly anticipated. That glorious future has evaporated. There’s something very strange and fascinating in the way that reality has deviated so far from science fiction – especially considering how deeply rooted the Moon is in the human imagination. As soon as it was realised that the Moon was, in effect, another planet, not just a light in the sky, the idea of journeying to it became appealing to writers of fantasy, although the pre-science fiction narratives of lunar travel now seem quaint in the extreme. The writers had no idea of the kind of distances involved, assuming that a trip to the Moon would be a little like a sea journey of the time. For that matter, they had no reason to think that air would not be readily available on such journeys and on arrival on the lunar surface. The earliest known story of a trip to the Moon stretches back an impressive 1,900 years to Lucian of Samosata, a Roman living in Syria who spoke and wrote in Greek. The aim of this early writer seems not to have been to explore the wonders of ‘What if?’ that is the usual role of science fiction, but to take a sneaky satirical poke at the Oydssey and other works of fantasy that were presented as a kind of reality at a time when the notions of history and fable, fact and fiction were far more blurred than they are today. Lucian’s book True History was the second-century equivalent of The Harvard Lampoon’s Tolkein parody, Bored of the Rings. Despite this, it contains many features that would become prime themes of science fiction. True History starts much like any other exploration by sea, but after the first part of their journey, Lucian and his companions are lifted into the sky by a whirlwind, which carries them for seven days until they are dropped on to the surface of the Moon. Once there, the adventurers are caught up in a war between the kings of the Moon and the Sun over who should have the right to colonise Venus. The mode of transport may have been pure fantasy, but the experiences themselves have many suggestive pre-echoes of modern science fiction. After the invention of the telescope, the romance of the Moon continued unabated. One of the first writers of the scientific era to send a hero off to our natural satellite was the English bishop of Hereford, Francis Godwin. He wrote his book The Man in the Moone in the 1620s, though it wasn’t published until after his death in 1638. Interestingly this was pretty much the same time Galileo was getting into trouble over his support for an unwanted theory putting the sun at the centre of the universe. While that was going on, Godwin was writing a story that also went against the basics of Aristotelian cosmology, according to which the Moon was fixed to a crystal sphere and should have a surface that was a perfect sphere. Godwin distances himself from what is described by claiming the book to be the account of a Spaniard named Domingo Gonsales (presumably thinking that foreigners could get away with saying anything). But his Moon is very different from Aristotle’s perfect sphere: it is an inhabited world not unlike the Earth, with seas in the dark areas to which we still give the name mare (sea in Latin). Godwin doesn’t even attempt a reasonable mechanism for getting there, co-opting the gansas, an imaginary breed of swan that he describes as migrating to the Moon each year. On the other hand, Godwin (or rather, his narrator Gonsales) is more scientific in describing the way that he lost weight as he flew away from the Earth. If hitching a ride with a flock of lunar migrating birds seems an unlikely mode of transport, it is as nothing compared with the strange work Somnium, written by the astronomer Johannes Kepler in 1634. Kepler has his fictional hero cross an insubstantial bridge of darkness, used by lunar demons to make the journey over to the Earth during eclipses. Despite this, Kepler too throws in some interesting thinking about the experience of being on the Moon. He seems to have been one of the first to realise that when looking back at the Earth he would see it in the lunar sky as a huge, dramatic moon. And, aware of the thinning of the atmosphere at high altitudes, he noted that the space travellers needed to have damp sponges pushed into their nostrils to breathe, given the lack of air on the way. There were plenty of other stories written over the next couple of centuries making use of the Moon as a suitably detached backdrop to play with the possibilities of new social orders (or to mock existing ones – Lucian would be by no means the last to combine a trip to the Moon with satire), but the turning point from fantasy to science fiction was indubitably the arrival on the scene of the twin titans Jules Verne and HG Wells. Neither wrote very realistic science, but they brought the theme out of obscurity into the front rank of popular fiction, restoring the Moon as a place for intrepid adventurers. In Verne’s De la Terre à la Lune (From the Earth to the Moon), members of the Baltimore Gun Club – bored because of the lack of war – decide to build a giant cannon, called Columbiad, capable of firing a shell containing human beings all the way to the Moon. The 274 metre-long (900 feet) beast is constructed in Florida, pleasingly near to Cape Canaveral. Unfortunately for Verne’s would-be lunar explorers, there is a good reason why we don’t shoot anything into space from a cannon. The endeavour is both immense in scale (certainly not possible with 19th-century resources) and deadly in outcome. Georges Méliès played up the humorous possibilities that arose from Verne’s book, landing the shell in the eye of the Man in the Moon and featuring dancing girls as marines Unlike a rocket, which continues to be powered until its fuel runs out or it is switched off, a cannon can only impart momentum while the projectile is within the barrel. As soon as the shell emerges, the only forces acting on it are gravity and air resistance, both of them slowing it down. So the shell has to be moving sufficiently quickly to get away from the Earth’s gravity-well, requiring a speed of around 11.2km (seven miles) per second. This need for speed means that the vessel has to endure a huge amount of acceleration in the brief time it is in the barrel and is being pushed forward by the expanding gases of the propellant. The astronauts inside would have been turned into pulp. In the 20th century, the impetus on portraying trips to the Moon moved from books to film. There was a good reason for this. It was relatively easy to make dramatic movies about the sheer difficulty of getting there, especially when things go wrong. An audience could be kept mesmerised by the journey (with perhaps a little light relief when encountering comical aliens on arrival), even in a short silent film running just a few minutes. In comparison, a novel requires far more content; there wasn’t enough meat in ‘people travel from A to B’ to fill the length of a book. The visual impact of film also allowed a new level of immediacy, though realism was not the initial goal. The first significant movie to portray the journey, based on Verne’s book, was an epic by the standards of the day, running a full twenty-one minutes in an age when most motion pictures lasted between two and five minutes. This was the 1902 Georges Méliès film, La Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon), which played up the humorous possibilities that arose from Verne’s book, landing the shell in the eye of the Man in the Moon and featuring dancing girls as the marines who set up the cannon (Méliès was French, after all). It was, nonetheless, a milestone in the history of science fiction Moon landings. The breakthrough in film would come from the same direction as the initial work on real-world space travel – Germany. In 1929, the director Fritz Lang produced Die Frau im Mond (The Woman in the Moon, sometimes called By Rocket to the Moon). The film’s technical adviser was Hermann Oberth, the rocket scientist whose pupil Wernher von Braun would go on to bigger things. Although the plotline is no great shakes, Die Frau im Mond was the first to show something close to the actual multiple-stage space rockets that would be used 40 years later to propel human beings into space. Not only was the model work in the film based on sound rocketry principles, this was the point at which the world was introduced to one of the iconic features of any real rocket launch, including those that took the Apollo missions to the Moon. Lang felt there wasn’t enough drama in the relatively motionless buildup to the rocket’s takeoff. He wanted the audience to share in the growing tension and anticipation. And so he had someone speak a countdown to the moment of launch, a device that was rapidly adopted as a fictional standard and later copied by the real space pioneers. It seemed in the early days that, of all the fields where science fiction was closely entwined with reality, it was in the voyage to the Moon that it reached its zenith. Just as Von Braun’s V-2 rocket technology – developed for the Nazis to drop bombs on England and Belgium – formed the seed technology for the early NASA space missions that would lead to the Apollo programme, so Die Frau im Mond was linked to the first big US movie featuring a Moon journey, George Pal’s Destination Moon. Again, the technical adviser was Oberth, while the ship itself was a larger, stylised version of a V-2, lacking even the multiple stages of the earlier film. And the script was written by a man who would become one of the biggest names in American science fiction: Robert A Heinlein. Watching Destination Moon now is not easy – it hasn’t aged well and the concentration on bringing out the detail of the mission makes the actual storyline sometimes more than a little tedious – but it is interesting to contrast the fictional version with the actual landings. Perhaps the most significant difference is how much autonomy is enjoyed by the movie astronauts, who fly the ship like a bomber crew, rather than the reality of leaving them pretty much in the hands of ground control. The countdown (and, yes, there is one) is undertaken by one of the crew, not those on the ground. They’re clearly more confident in their life-support systems in the movie as well, as these astronauts wear boiler suits instead of space suits with helmets. Many writers saw parallels between the Moon and the European settlement of the New World, expecting that the lunar colony would be exploited before fighting a war of independence The Apollo missions obliterated such speculations by making Moon landings a reality – but as far as science fiction was concerned, this was only ever supposed to be the starting point of a much grander adventure. Where the earlier stories of Moon journeys were mostly about the voyage and the quaint lunar people the travellers met there (usually an opportunity to make caricatures of human behaviour, in an interplanetary version of what Swift did in Gulliver’s Travels), later science fiction began to think through the implications of living on the Moon. This wasn’t just about getting there, but the need to build lunar bases, which would have to be occupied for months or years at a time. The stories had to face up to the need for people to live and work on the Moon – not, admittedly, with the same ease as people on the Earth, but as settlers, struggling to scrape an existence in a strange and wonderful new land. The Moon became a story setting suited once more to the more sprawling opportunities of a novel. This was universally seen as the clear direction for the future, as far as science fiction writers were concerned. That first, tentative trip to the Moon would soon lead to a regular flow of exploration and then exploitation, just as we had seen a century and more before on the terrestrial frontiers. Many writers saw parallels between the Moon and the European settlement of the New World, expecting that the lunar colony would first be exploited by its remote masters before fighting a war of independence and becoming a separate entity with its own identity and a brave future. This theme has been visited in a good many stories all the way from 1931 through to the present day, but the definitive version has to be Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, written in 1966. Heinlein, then one of the best-known science fiction writers in the world, gives a brilliant feeling for the difference between the pioneering, rough-and-ready lunar environment and the self-gratifying and uncaring world of Earth. Back in the real world, the final Apollo mission, Apollo 17, landed on the Moon on 11 December 1972. Unlike the names of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, few will now remember Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt, the last men – to date – to walk on the Moon. There have been no further manned visits, and certainly no attempt at colonisation or at using the Moon as a staging post for the exploration of the solar system. Nor is any future mission planned, except in the most vague terms. What went wrong with the sci-fi vision? NASA Part of the problem, usually ignored in the heady world of fiction, is the political difficulty of financing long-term projects. The Apollo programme was achieved in record time because it had a highly focused, politically-driven goal – to get to the Moon before the Soviet Union. Once that had been achieved, the benefits that could be used to balance out the costs were less clear. Vast amounts of money would have to be put into exploration and building the initial temporary encampments before anything close to a permanent colony could be envisaged. Making the science fiction dream a reality foundered on both a commercial logic and a lack of political will. At first sight, the Moon is still the obvious target for real space colonists to head for. It’s ridiculously close in interplanetary terms, just 380,000km (240,000 miles) and three days away, versus a typical 100 million kilometre (60 million mile), six-month journey to Mars. And yet, in 2010, President Barack Obama summarily dismissed the Moon: ‘I just have to say it pretty bluntly here: we’ve been there before.’ The lack of political will to return is tied tightly to basic commercial logic. There are two levels of this. First, a colony has to be able to be self-sustaining to make it more than a base or outpost. In the long-term, it isn’t possible to have a viable, large-scale colony that has to be continually supplied from home. And second, a colony has to be able to become financially viable. This is more than being self-sustaining; it means being able to export goods or services that are worth enough to pay for the items that inevitably will still be needed from Earth. When it comes to a lunar economy, there are some rare materials on the Moon that could potentially be mined, notably helium 3 It currently costs around $10,000 to get a pound of material into orbit. You can multiply that by maybe a factor of 10 to figure the cost of getting it to the Moon. On the plus side, the Moon has all the materials needed to make cement, glass and oxygen. Once suitable equipment has been delivered, many of the raw materials needed for a colony are available on the surface. But not everything. The obvious missing essential is water. There is some evidence that ice could be present in areas shadowed by deep craters near the lunar poles. Nevertheless, the presence of water is not certain, and even if it is there, the accessible quantities may not be enough to support a colony. This is a serious issue. Probably the best hope to make a colony work would be to capture an ice-rich comet and bring it down onto the Moon’s surface. This sounds a horrendously difficult task, but it is only of similar complexity to the engineering feat of setting up a colony in the first place. We have already sent missions to comets, and NASA has outlined plans to capture a small asteroid and bring it to a lunar orbit for examination in the near future. The same approach could supply a colony with water. Addressing the financial and political barriers to returning to the Moon is a greater challenge. When it comes to a lunar economy, there are some rare materials on the Moon that could potentially be mined, notably helium 3, an isotope of the noble gas that is much rarer on the Earth, and that has the potential to provide a valuable fuel for future nuclear fusion reactors. It has also been suggested that the Moon could make use of its open spaces and heavy-duty exposure to the sun to beam energy down to the Earth, but the technology to do this is not only stretching our engineering imagination to the limit, but is hard to envisage ever being cost-effective at such a long range. Who could bring us back to the Moon, and realise some of the wonder-filled visions of the early science fiction stories? It has been suggested that the kind of people who would venture to a lunar colony are also the kind of people who make great entrepreneurs, and so the Moon could survive financially on its mental capital, selling ideas and mental work. It’s possible, but it is difficult to see that there would be sufficient extra creativity and productivity from this special breed to overcome the vast extra cost of basing the work on the Moon. It’s also the case that you would need to be a special kind of person to take on the risk of living on an isolated lunar colony, and the type of entrepreneurial spirit that would be needed to make the Moon a source of commercial genius is not necessarily the type to take excessive personal risks. If we think of the kind of geeks who built the likes of Microsoft and Apple, they might have been happy to work all night, fuelled by pizza and caffeine boosts, but not necessarily to put themselves in a position where their lives were constantly in danger. No matter how much we want the science fiction dream to come true – and personally I would love it – the reality is that a lunar colony is very unlikely to ever be financially viable. It would be no surprise if we saw more expeditions to the Moon, but all those wonderful visions of the high frontier recreated in space are more likely to apply to destinations with a better long-term future, like Mars, rather than the Moon. Seeing the Moon as potential living space is a bit like looking at the Sahara desert or Death Valley and wondering why they don’t build cities there – except that the moon is tens of times more hostile and vastly more expensive to turn into a home. The Moon could well become a staging post, but its fictitious position as the home of the next great frontier is unlikely. The quaint old sense of adventure seems, sadly, lost forever. From ‘Ten Billion Tomorrows’ by Brian Clegg. Copyright © 2015 by the author and reprinted by permission of St Martin’s Press, LLC.
Earlier this week, White House communications director Hope Hicks was interviewed by the House Intelligence Committee. She was just the latest person brought before the committee as part of their investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. And one concept that's come up as some members of President Trump's campaign or administration are called to testify is executive privilege. Some, including former White House strategist Steve Bannon, have cited executive privilege as a reason they cannot answer certain questions. So we wanted to hear more about that, so we called Mark Rozell. He is dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, which is just outside Washington, D.C. Welcome. Thanks for talking to us.
Alec Soth: So about 10 years ago, I got a call from a woman in Texas, Stacey Baker, and she'd seen some of my photographs in an art exhibition and was wondering if she could commission me to take a portrait of her parents. Now, at the time I hadn't met Stacey, and I thought this was some sort of wealthy oil tycoon and I'd struck it rich, but it was only later that I found out she'd actually taken out a loan to make this happen. I took the picture of her parents, but I was actually more excited about photographing Stacey. The picture I made that day ended up becoming one of my best-known portraits. At the time I made this picture, Stacey was working as an attorney for the State of Texas. Not long after, she left her job to study photography in Maine, and while she was there, she ended up meeting the director of photography at the New York Times Magazine and was actually offered a job. Stacey Baker: In the years since, Alec and I have done a number of magazine projects together, and we've become friends. A few months ago, I started talking to Alec about a fascination of mine. I've always been obsessed with how couples meet. I asked Alec how he and his wife Rachel met, and he told me the story of a high school football game where she was 16 and he was 15, and he asked her out. He liked her purple hair. She said yes, and that was it. I then asked Alec if he'd be interested in doing a photography project exploring this question. AS: And I was interested in the question, but I was actually much more interested in Stacey's motivation for asking it, particularly since I'd never known Stacey to have a boyfriend. So as part of this project, I thought it'd be interesting if she tried to meet someone. So my idea was to have Stacey here go speed dating in Las Vegas on Valentine's Day. (Laughter) (Applause) (Music) SB: We ended up at what was advertised as the world's largest speed dating event. I had 19 dates and each date lasted three minutes. Participants were given a list of ice- breaker questions to get the ball rolling, things like, "If you could be any kind of animal, what would you be?" That sort of thing. My first date was Colin. He's from England, and he once married a woman he met after placing an ad for a Capricorn. Alec and I saw him at the end of the evening, and he said he'd kissed a woman in line at one of the concession stands. Zack and Chris came to the date-a-thon together. This is Carl. I asked Carl, "What's the first thing you notice about a woman?" He said, "Tits." (Laughter) Matthew is attracted to women with muscular calves. We talked about running. He does triathlons, I run half-marathons. Alec actually liked his eyes and asked if I was attracted to him, but I wasn't, and I don't think he was attracted to me either. Austin and Mike came together. Mike asked me a hypothetical question. He said, "You're in an elevator running late for a meeting. Someone makes a dash for the elevator. Do you hold it open for them?" And I said I would not. (Laughter) Cliff said the first thing he notices about a woman is her teeth, and we complimented each other's teeth. Because he's an open mouth sleeper, he says he has to floss more to help prevent gum disease, and so I asked him how often he flosses, and he said, "Every other day." (Laughter) Now, as someone who flosses twice a day, I wasn't really sure that that was flossing more but I don't think I said that out loud. Bill is an auditor, and we talked the entire three minutes about auditing. (Laughter) The first thing Spencer notices about a woman is her complexion. He feels a lot of women wear too much makeup, and that they should only wear enough to accentuate the features that they have. I told him I didn't wear any makeup at all and he seemed to think that that was a good thing. Craig told me he didn't think I was willing to be vulnerable. He was also frustrated when I couldn't remember my most embarrassing moment. He thought I was lying, but I wasn't. I didn't think he liked me at all, but at the end of the night, he came back to me and he gave me a box of chocolates. William was really difficult to talk to. I think he was drunk. (Laughter) Actor Chris McKenna was the MC of the event. He used to be on "The Young and the Restless." I didn't actually go on a date with him. Alec said he saw several women give their phone numbers to him. Needless to say, I didn't fall in love. I didn't feel a particular connection with any of the men that I went on dates with, and I didn't feel like they felt a particular connection with me either. AS: Now, the most beautiful thing to me — (Laughter) — as a photographer is the quality of vulnerability. The physical exterior reveals a crack in which you can get a glimpse at a more fragile interior. At this date-a-thon event, I saw so many examples of that, but as I watched Stacey's dates and talked to her about them, I realized how different photographic love is from real love. What is real love? How does it work? In order to work on this question and to figure out how someone goes from meeting on a date to having a life together, Stacey and I went to Sun City Summerlin, which is the largest retirement community in Las Vegas. Our contact there was George, who runs the community's photography club. He arranged for us to meet other couples in their makeshift photo studio. SB: After 45 years of marriage, Anastasia's husband died two years ago, so we asked if she had an old wedding picture. She met her husband when she was a 15-year-old waitress at a small barbecue place in Michigan. He was 30. She'd lied about her age. He was the first person she'd dated. Dean had been named photographer of the year in Las Vegas two years in a row, and this caught Alec's attention, as did the fact that he met his wife, Judy, at the same age when Alec met Rachel. Dean admitted that he likes to look at beautiful women, but he's never questioned his decision to marry Judy. AS: George met Josephine at a parish dance. He was 18, she was 15. Like a lot of the couples we met, they weren't especially philosophical about their early choices. George said something that really stuck with me. He said, "When you get that feeling, you just go with it." Bob and Trudy met on a blind date when she was still in high school. They said they weren't particularly attracted to each other when the first met. Nevertheless, they were married soon after. SB: The story that stayed with me the most was that of George, the photography club president, and his wife, Mary. This was George and Mary's second marriage. They met at a country-western club in Louisville, Kentucky called the Sahara. He was there alone drinking and she was with friends. When they started dating, he owed the IRS 9,000 dollars in taxes, and she offered to help him get out of debt, so for the next year, he turned his paychecks over to Mary, and she got him out of debt. George was actually an alcoholic when they married, and Mary knew it. At some point in their marriage, he says he consumed 54 beers in one day. Another time, when he was drunk, he threatened to kill Mary and her two kids, but they escaped and a SWAT team was called to the house. Amazingly, Mary took him back, and eventually things got better. George has been involved in Alcoholics Anonymous and hasn't had a drink in 36 years. (Music) At the end of the day, after we left Sun City, I told Alec that I didn't actually think that the stories of how these couples met were all that interesting. What was more interesting was how they managed to stay together. AS: They all had this beautiful quality of endurance, but that was true of the singles, too. The world is hard, and the singles were out there trying to connect with other people, and the couples were holding onto each other after all these decades. My favorite pictures on this trip were of Joe and Roseanne. Now, by the time we met Joe and Roseanne, we'd gotten in the habit of asking couples if they had an old wedding photograph. In their case, they simultaneously pulled out of their wallets the exact same photograph. What's more beautiful, I thought to myself, this image of a young couple who has just fallen in love or the idea of these two people holding onto this image for decades? Thank you. (Applause)
Yeah. I read that all the time, and I'm asked that question all the time. And, you know, I have projects that I'm working on and things I want to get done. You know, but at the end of the day, this is a business, and I don't want to put myself out there until I'm ready to be put out there. You know, now it's a slow burn. You know, Morgan Freeman didn't pop in this business until he was well over 40. You know, if you look at Sam Jackson, Sam Jackson didn't pop in this business until he was, you know, damn near 40. So I'm in a position now where I'm allowing myself to grow. I don't want to jump out and then do something that people don't appreciate or don't like, and that I'm a one-hit wonder that you'll never hear from again. You have to allow yourself that aspect of nurturing and growing until you're ready to pop out there on the scene. And that's why I try to diversify my portfolio of roles. So when it's time for me to do that, I can bring a modicum of ideas and cultural references to a role to have people interested and have people want to see more of me. I think that's why Denzel is where he is. I think that's why Will Smith is where he is.
Well, it's just moving really slowly over the Gulf of Mexico. It's on a path to make landfall probably midday somewhere west of Morgan City, La. It's already causing flooding along the coast and in some areas that are prone to flooding. Earlier today, the Coast Guard had to rescue some people who were stranded on an island, Isle de Jean Charles. There are about 52,000 customers without power already - so already knocking down some power lines, putting some trees on power lines. Grand Isle on the Gulf of Mexico started flooding yesterday. That island is out of power as well. You know, this is going to bring both flash flooding from the rain - 10 to 20 inches is in the forecast. You're also going to see the storm surge, you know, pushing up along the coast, some wind damage and what forecasters say could be record flooding of rivers and streams. The latest path from the Hurricane Center looks like the heaviest of that rain is probably headed for the Baton Rouge region.
Well, I think there's confusion in this country because there's confusion about systems, whether or not we have competency in training at the level of, say, the scene of death and then the levels of competency at the level of the examination of the body and then at the level of certification, which is the documentation of the cause and manner of death. Determining the cause and manner of death is the major mission of both coroners and medical examiners. In each state, and sometimes even within a state, in the different counties, there are different types of systems, and that I think leads to confusion as to who does what.
Well, we are working - going to work through the collective bargaining process, because we do ask for employee concessions in our budget, and they're not insignificant. But we have good labor relations in our state, and we're going to go through that process because we believe they're going to come to the table in a constructive, thoughtful way, and we're going to work through it. But we do need to ask for people to make concessions. As I've told our citizens in the state, it's a shared-sacrifice model, where many of us have to make some sacrifice towards contributing to this deficit because by having a short-term sacrifice, by all of us taking a step back in the short term, it's really to set a foundation for Michigan's future, because Michigan is a state that's been suffering for over a decade.
Exactly, that's - gossip has its bad name because of its often vicious aspect. Somebody wants to sink somebody else's reputation in a way that's - the motive is simply viciousness, and one has to sort of guard against that kind of gossip. My own favorite is gossip about the foibles of other people, their pretensions, their little hypocrisies; their pretensions - that, to me, is the most amusing of all. I had a dear friend, I don't mention his name in the book, but he's since died. His name was John Gross(ph), and he was the editor of the Times literary supplement.
Well, that's sort of a sticky question in that - Michael Jordan was coached, so does that mean had he not been coached, he would have been as good a player? Right? So everyone needs coaching along the way, which is sort of the foundation of education. Someone else has information that you need, and to draw out your best skills and your best ability, you look for someone with more information than you have. I think the industry - the test prep industry - gets flak and - and rightfully so when you look at the cost of some of these things. All right? So it shouldn't be held for ransom someone's success.
That's correct. But there were three employees of Epstein's - some in New York and some in Florida - who were described in terms of their role in the conspiracy count of the indictment. So they weren't named with their actual names, but their role in the conspiracy was described in the indictment. And that's important because that means that Mr. Berman, the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, and his prosecutors have already identified those three specific individuals and have enough evidence about their involvement in the conspiracy that they were able to prove up that role to the grand jury that returned the indictment.
Then we use sleds, they're man-hauled from the drill site to the edge of the glacier. If you're in Tibet, you have to move it from the edge of the glacier down to where the trucks are, down in the valley. And we use yaks to do that. And to give you an example, a yak, you can get two insulated core boxes, you can get six meters of core in each of those boxes, so twelve meters per yak. And we recover five to six hundred meters of core, to give you an idea of the herd that's required to move it down to those trucks. And then there's a dash across Tibet to the nearest freezer, which happens to be in Lassa, where we can store it until we can arrange the air cargo to move it from Lassa to Beijing, where we clear customs. And then we air cargo it to Chicago, and in then it's trucked in a freezer truck down to the storage facility here at Ohio State University. So sometimes these cores can be in transit for a month from the time they leave the drill site.
In Mandela's war of attrition against the apartheid government, South African President F. W. de Klerk made several offers to free him, but Mandela would only accept his unconditional release. In 1990, de Klerk did just that. Apartheid was on its final legs and Africa's largest economy was, for the first time in centuries, headed for black majority rule. The four years between Mandela's release from prison and South Africa's first democratic elections in 1994, however, were tumultuous. Elements within the white apartheid government were desperately trying to retain power. Violent clashes between supporters of the Zulu-based Inkatha Freedom Party and Mandela's ANC left many foreign observers predicting that South Africa would disintegrate into a bloody civil war.
Yeah. You know, we all were kind of shocked because it did actually look like she was injured. You know, who knows? You know, we know that sometimes that's done in order to take some time away on the clock. So we were actually used to it because Brazil tends to do that more often than not. So we all were kind of shocked. We had thought she should have gotten more of a red card than what the ref gave her. But it all worked out in the end. And I guess, you know, everything was on our side. And so that was really good.
They might be able to get some of the information from OCR, the Office of Civil Rights, from the Department of Education, which collects a lot of data. And they might get data directly from the schools. And I think what they would get is things like average GPAs and SATs broken down by race for admissions purposes. They would also get racial breakdowns I think by various classes, get explanations of the admissions process, explanations of the various tips and weights that people get for athletics and for other things and be looking at the impact of those statistically odd admissions. I think what they'd be looking for is if there's a statistical case that is strong enough to begin to infer some kind of intentional discrimination.
Yes, and I think that was the right choice. Had I had a vote, which I don't--but had I had a vote I definitely would have voted for Alex Rodriguez. I think that a lot of people felt, perhaps correctly, that David Ortiz had come through in a lot more clutch situations for the Red Sox, and that was probably true. But the fact that Alex Rodriguez played good defense and ran the bases well definitely made up, I think, for any advantage that Ortiz might have had at the plate, and they made the right choice. I think this is a victory for the purists, even though, you know, Arod makes $25 million a year, he has a very complete game. He's arguably the most complete player in baseball today, and that's been rewarded.
Absolutely. There's two strategies in there that are so important. One was structure, you're starting to structure what you're going to do. But the other one was making your goals public. It's hard to be self-deceiving when other people know what you're doing. It's just excellent. And I think that most of us find that that kind of social support keeps us accountable, and we can't play those games in our heads anymore. And when we do, we have someone to gently nudge us along and help us say, oh, yeah, that is my intention, that is my goal. And we get back on track.
Hi. I just wanted to call and say thanks for your reporting all these years. I was an Air Force officer pilot stationed on Kadena, Okinawa in my first assignment, and it was quite lonely, you might say, at being that far away from home from my first tour of duty. And the Armed Forces Radio Network carried a broadcast of your reporting in a somewhat very strange hour of the day, but I used to always make myself available to a radio at that time, and it really helped keep my sanity there. So I just wanted to say thank you.
This is a relatively small study. Researchers say they looked at classes in hand-to-hand combat at Fort Hood, with roughly 2,000 soldiers; and they haven't finished the study yet. But here's why the findings already raise red flags. The researchers found that almost 6 percent of the soldiers in those classes reported they had been struck in the head. And they were suffering symptoms that the Pentagon says signal mild traumatic brain injuries. The soldiers were confused, disoriented; and they were nauseous. They had headaches and balance problems. And now, put that 6 percent in perspective. Army spokesmen say that more than 100,000 soldiers took hand-to-hand combat last year, at bases across the country. The classes are called combatives. Many hundreds of thousands have taken combatives over the past decade. The researchers don't know if other bases have the same problem. But if Fort Hood is typical, it could mean that thousands of soldiers who went to war, had recently suffered concussions from their training.
Justin was in a reflective mood. On 4 February 2018, in the living room of his home in Memphis, Tennessee, he sat watching the Super Bowl, eating M&amp;Ms. Earlier that week, he’d celebrated his 37th birthday, and now – as had become an annual tradition – he was brooding over what his life had become. He knew he should be grateful, really. He had a perfectly comfortable life. A stable nine-to-five office job, a roof over his head and a family who loved him. But he’d always wanted something more. Growing up, he’d always believed he was destined for fame and fortune. So how had he ended up being so… normal? ‘It was that boyband,’ he thought to himself. The one he’d joined at 14. ‘If we’d been a hit, everything would have been different.’ But, for whatever reason, the band was a flop. Success had never quite happened for poor old Justin Timberlake. Despondent, he opened another beer and imagined what might have been. On the screen, the Super Bowl commercials came to an end. Music started up for the big half-time show. And in a parallel universe – virtually identical to this one in all but one detail – another 37-year-old Justin Timberlake from Memphis took the stage. Why is the real Justin Timberlake so successful? And why did the other Justin Timberlake fail? Some people might argue that pop-star Justin’s success is deserved: his natural talent, his good looks, his dancing abilities and the artistic merit of his music made fame inevitable. But others might think that the stars are just the ones who got lucky. There’s no way to know without building a series of identical parallel worlds, releasing Timberlake into each, and watching all the incarnations evolve. This was the idea behind an experiment conducted by the sociologists Matthew Salganik, Peter Dodds and Duncan Watts in 2006 that created a series of digital worlds. The researchers built their own online music player, like a very crude version of Spotify, and filtered off visitors into a series of eight parallel musical websites, each identically seeded with the same 48 songs by undiscovered artists. In what became known as the Music Lab, a total of 14,341 music fans were invited to log on to the player, listen to clips of each track, rate the songs, and download the music they liked best. Just as on the real Spotify, visitors could see at a glance what music other people in their ‘world’ were listening to. Alongside the artist name and song title, participants saw a running total of how many times the track had already been downloaded within their world. All the counters started off at zero, and over time, as the numbers changed, the most popular songs in each of the eight parallel charts gradually became clear. Meanwhile, to get some natural measure of the true popularity of the records, the team also built a control world, where visitors’ choices couldn’t be influenced by others. There, the songs would appear in a random order on the page – either in a grid or in a list – but the download statistics were shielded from view. The results were intriguing. All the worlds agreed that some songs were clear duds. Other songs were stand-out winners: they ended up being popular in every world, even the one where visitors couldn’t see the number of downloads. But in between sure-fire hits and absolute bombs, the artists could experience pretty much any level of success. Take 52metro, a punk band from Milwaukee, whose song Lockdown was wildly popular in one world, where it finished up at the very top of the chart, and yet completely bombed in another world, ranking 40th out of 48 tracks. Exactly the same song, up against exactly the same list of other songs; it was just that, in this particular world, 52metro never caught on. Success, sometimes, was a matter of luck. Although the path to the top wasn’t set in stone, the researchers found that visitors were much more likely to download tracks they knew were liked by others. If a middling song got to the top of the charts early on by chance, its popularity could snowball. More downloads led to more downloads. Perceived popularity became real popularity, so that eventual success was just randomness magnified over time. There was a reason for these results. It’s a phenomenon known to psychologists as social proof. Whenever we haven’t got enough information to make decisions for ourselves, we have a habit of copying the behaviour of those around us. The more platforms we use to see what’s popular – bestseller lists, Amazon rankings, Rotten Tomatoes scores, Spotify charts – the bigger the impact that social proof will have. The effect is amplified further when there are millions of options being hurled at us, plus marketing, celebrity, media hype and critical acclaim all demanding your attention. All this means that sometimes terrible music can make it to the top. That’s not just me being cynical. It seems that the music industry itself is fully aware of this fact. During the 1990s, supposedly the result of a wager to see who could get the worst song possible into the charts, an English girl group called Vanilla emerged. Thanks to a few magazine features and an appearance on the BBC TV show Top of the Pops, the song managed to get to number 14 in the charts. Vanilla’s success was short-lived. By their second single, their popularity was already waning. They never released a third, suggesting that social proof isn’t the only factor at play – as indeed a follow-up experiment from the Music Lab team showed. The set-up to their second study was largely the same as the first. But this time, to test how far the perception of popularity became a self-fulfilling prophecy, the researchers added a twist. Once the charts had had the chance to stabilise in each world, they paused the experiment and flipped the billboard upside down. New visitors to the music player saw the chart-topper listed at the bottom, while the flops at the bottom took on the appearance of the crème de la crème at the top. Almost immediately, the total number of downloads by visitors dropped. Once the songs at the top weren’t appealing, people lost interest in the music on the website overall. Meanwhile, the good tracks languishing at the bottom did worse than when they were at the top, but still better than those that had previously been at the end of the list. If the scientists had let the experiment run on long enough, the very best songs would have recovered their popularity. Conclusion: both luck and quality play a role. We’re put off by the banal, but also hate the radically unfamiliar Modern algorithms also offer us insight into the popularity of films. Studies have been especially trenchant because you can measure all sorts of factors through information collected by websites such as the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) or Rotten Tomatoes. Take the study conducted by the data scientist Sameet Sreenivasan in 2013, based on keywords and descriptors in IMDb. On their own, the keywords showed that our interest in certain plot elements come in bursts; think of Second World War films, or movies that tackle the subject of abortion. There’ll be a spate of releases on a similar topic in quick succession, and then a lull for a while. When considered together, the tags allowed Sreenivasan to come up with a score for the novelty of each film at the time of its release – a number between zero and one. As it turns out, we have a complicated relationship with novelty. On average, the higher the novelty score a film had, the better it did at the box office. But only up to a point. Push past that novelty threshold, and there’s a precipice; the revenue earned by a film fell off a cliff. Sreenivasan’s study showed what social scientists had long suspected: we’re put off by the banal, but also hate the radically unfamiliar. The novelty score might be a useful way to help studios avoid backing absolute stinkers, but it’s not much help if you want to know the fate of an individual film. For that, the work of a European team of researchers conducted in 2006 might be more useful. The authors classified movies into one of nine categories, ranging from total flop to box-office smash hit. The neural network outperformed statistical techniques tried before, but still managed to classify the performance of a movie correctly only 36.9 per cent of the time, on average. It was a little better in the top category – those earning more than $200 million – correctly identifying those real blockbusters 47.3 per cent of the time. But investors beware. Around 10 per cent of the films picked out by the algorithm as destined to be hits went on to earn less than $20 million – which by Hollywood’s standards is a pitiful amount. In short, evidence points in a single direction; until you have data on the early audience reaction, popularity is largely unpredictable. Predicting popularity is tricky, but what about judging the aesthetic value of art? Some philosophers – such as Gottfried Leibniz – argue that if there are objects that we can all agree on as beautiful, say Michelangelo’s David or Mozart’s Lacrimosa, then there should be some definable, measurable, essence of beauty that makes one piece of art objectively better than another. Philosophers such as David Hume, meanwhile, argue that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Consider the work of Andy Warhol, which offers a powerful aesthetic experience to some, while others find it artistically indistinguishable from a tin of soup. Others still, Immanuel Kant among them, have said the truth is something in between – that our judgments of beauty are not wholly subjective, nor can they be entirely objective. They are sensory, emotional and intellectual all at once – and, crucially, can change over time depending on the state of mind of the observer. There is certainly some evidence to support this idea. Fans of the English artist Banksy might remember how in 2013 he set up a stall in Central Park in New York, anonymously selling original black-and-white spray-painted canvases for $60 each. The stall was tucked away in a row of others selling the usual touristy stuff, so the price tag must have seemed expensive to those passing by. It was several hours before someone decided to buy one. In total, the day’s takings were $420.14. But a year later, in an auction house in London, another buyer would deem the aesthetic value of the very same artwork great enough to spend £68,500 (at the time, around $115,000) on a single canvas. The recommendation algorithms merely offer songs and films good enough to insure you against disappointment In another, similar instance, The Washington Post in 2007 asked the internationally renowned violinist Joshua Bell to add an extra concert to his schedule of sold-out symphony halls. Armed with his $3.5 million Stradivarius violin, Bell pitched up at the top of an escalator in a metro station in Washington, DC during morning rush hour, put a hat on the ground to collect donations, and performed for 43 minutes. The result? Seven people stopped to listen for a while. More than 1,000 walked straight past. By the end of his performance, Bell had collected $32.17 in his hat. The point is this: even if there are some objective criteria that make one artwork better than another, as long as context plays a role in our aesthetic appreciation of art, it’s not possible to create a tangible measure for aesthetic quality that works for all places in all times. But an algorithm needs something to go on. So, once you take away popularity and inherent quality, you’re left with the only thing that can be quantified: a metric for similarity to whatever has gone before. When it comes to building a recommendation engine, Netflix and Spotify have the algorithm down. What do users listen to, what do they watch, what do they return to time and time again? At no point is Spotify or Netflix trying to deliver the perfect song or film. They have little interest in perfection. Spotify doesn’t promise to hunt out the one band on Earth that is destined to align wholly and flawlessly with your taste and mood. The recommendation algorithms merely offer you songs and films that are good enough to insure you against disappointment. Similarity works perfectly well for recommendation engines. But when you ask algorithms to create art without a pure measure for quality, that’s where things start to get interesting. Can an algorithm be creative if its only sense of art is what happened in the past? In October 1997, an audience arrived at the University of Oregon to hear the pianist Winifred Kerner play three short pieces. One was a lesser-known keyboard composition by the master of the Baroque, Johann Sebastian Bach. A second was composed in the style of Bach by Steve Larson, a professor of music at the university. And a third was composed by an algorithm, deliberately designed to imitate the style of Bach. After hearing the three performances, the audience was asked to guess which was which. To Larson’s dismay, the majority voted that his was the piece that had been composed by the computer. And to collective gasps of delighted horror, the audience learned that the music they’d voted as genuine Bach was nothing more than the work of a machine. David Cope, the man who created the remarkable algorithm behind the computer composition, had seen an audience duped before. ‘I [first] played what I called the “game” with individuals,’ he told me. ‘And when they got it wrong they got angry … Because creativity is considered a human endeavour.’ This had certainly been the opinion of Douglas Hofstadter, the cognitive scientist and author who had organised the concert in the first place. Years earlier, in his Pulitzer prizewinning book Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979), Hofstadter had taken a firm stance on the matter: ‘Music is a language of emotions, and until programs have emotions as complex as ours, there is no way a program will write anything beautiful.’ But after hearing the output of Cope’s algorithm – the so-called ‘experiments in musical intelligence’ (EMI) – Hofstadter conceded that perhaps things weren’t quite so straightforward: ‘I find myself baffled and troubled by EMI,’ he confessed in the days following the University of Oregon experiment. ‘The only comfort I could take at this point comes from realising that EMI doesn’t generate style on its own. It depends on mimicking prior composers. But that is still not all that much comfort. To my absolute devastation [perhaps] music is much less than I ever thought it was.’ So which is it? Is aesthetic excellence the sole preserve of human endeavour? Or can an algorithm create art? And if an audience couldn’t distinguish EMI from music by a great master, had this machine demonstrated the capacity for true creativity? Let’s try to tackle those questions in turn, starting with the last one. To form an educated opinion, it’s worth pausing briefly to understand how the algorithm works, something Cope was generous enough to explain to me. The first step in building the algorithm was to translate Bach’s music into something that can be understood by a machine: ‘You have to place into a database five representations of a single note: the on time, the duration, pitch, loudness and instrument.’ For each note in Bach’s back catalogue, Cope had to painstakingly enter these five numbers into a computer by hand. There were 371 Bach chorales alone, many harmonies, tens of thousands of notes, five numbers per note. It required a monumental effort from Cope: ‘For months, all I was doing every day was typing in numbers. But I’m a person who is nothing but obsessive.’ From there, Cope’s analysis took each beat in Bach’s music and examined what happened next. For every note that is played in a Bach chorale, Cope made a record of the next note. He stored everything together in a kind of dictionary – a bank in which the algorithm could look up a single chord and find an exhaustive list of all the different places Bach’s quill had sent the music next. In that sense, EMI has some similarities to the predictive text algorithms you’ll find on your smartphone. Based on the sentences you’ve written in the past, the phone keeps a dictionary of the words you’re likely to want to type next, and brings them up as suggestions while you’re writing. The algorithms are undoubtedly great imitators, just not very good innovators The final step was to let the machine loose. Cope would seed the system with an initial chord and instruct the algorithm to look it up in the dictionary to decide what to play next by selecting the new chord at random from the list. Then the algorithm repeats the process – looking up each subsequent chord in the dictionary to choose the next notes to play. The result was an entirely original composition that sounds just like Bach himself. Or maybe it is Bach himself. That’s Cope’s view, anyway: ‘Bach created all of the chords. It’s like taking Parmesan cheese and putting it through the grater, and then trying to put it back together again. It would still turn out to be Parmesan cheese.’ Regardless of who deserves the ultimate credit, there’s one thing that is in no doubt. However beautiful EMI might sound, it is based on a pure recombination of existing work. It’s mimicking the patterns found in Bach’s music, rather than actually composing any music itself. More recently, other algorithms have been created that make aesthetically pleasing music that is a step on from pure recombination. One particularly successful approach has been genetic algorithms – another type of machine learning that tries to exploit the way natural selection works. After all, if peacocks are anything to go by, evolution knows a thing or two about creating beauty. The idea is simple. Within these algorithms, notes are treated like the DNA of music. It all starts with an initial population of ‘songs’– each a random jumble of notes stitched together. Over many generations, the algorithm breeds from the songs, finding and rewarding ‘beautiful’ features within the music to breed ‘better’ and ‘better’ compositions as time goes on. I say ‘beautiful’ and ‘better’, but – of course – as we already know, there’s no way to decide what either of those words mean definitively. The algorithm can create poems and paintings as well as music, but – still – all it has to go on is a measure of similarity to whatever has gone before. And sometimes that’s all you need. If you’re looking for a background track for your website or your YouTube video that sounds generically like a folk song, you don’t care that it’s similar to all the best folk songs of the past. Really, you just want something that avoids copyright infringement without the hassle of having to compose it yourself. And if that’s what you’re after, there are a number of companies that can help. British startups Jukedeck and AI Music are already offering this kind of service, using algorithms that are capable of creating music. Some of that music will be useful. Some of it will be (sort of) original. Some of it will be beautiful, even. The algorithms are undoubtedly great imitators, just not very good innovators. That’s not to do these algorithms a disservice. Most human-made music isn’t particularly innovative either. If you ask Armand Leroi, the evolutionary biologist who studied the cultural evolution of pop music, we’re a bit too misty-eyed about the inventive capacities of humans. Even the stand-out successes in the charts, he says, could be generated by a machine. Here’s his take on Pharrell Williams’s song Happy, for example (something tells me he’s not a fan): ‘Happy, happy, happy, I’m so happy.’ I mean, really! It’s got about, like, five words in the lyrics. It’s about as robotic a song as you could possibly get, which panders to just the most base uplifting human desire for uplifting summer happy music. The most moronic and reductive song passable. And if that’s the level – well, it’s not too hard.Leroi doesn’t think much of the lyrical prowess of Adele either: ‘If you were to analyse any of the songs, you would find no sentiment in there that couldn’t be created by a sad-song generator.’ You might not agree (I’m not sure that I do), but there is certainly an argument that much of human creativity – like the products of the ‘composing’ algorithms – is just a novel combination of pre-existing ideas. I’m a mathematician. I can trade in facts about false positives and absolute truths about accuracy and statistics with complete confidence. But in the artistic sphere, I’d prefer to defer to Leo Tolstoy. Like him, I think that true art is about human connection; about communicating emotion. As he put it: ‘Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.’ If you agree with Tolstoy’s argument, then there’s a reason why machines can’t produce true art. A reason expressed beautifully by Hofstadter in Gödel, Escher, Bach, years before he encountered EMI: A ‘program’ which could produce music … would have to wander around the world on its own, fighting its way through the maze of life and feeling every moment of it. It would have to understand the joy and loneliness of a chilly night wind, the longing for a cherished hand, the inaccessibility of a distant town, the heartbreak and regeneration after a human death. It would have to have known resignation and world-weariness, grief and despair, determination and victory, piety and awe. In it would have had to commingle such opposites as hope and fear, anguish and jubilation, serenity and suspense. Part and parcel of it would have to be a sense of grace, humour, rhythm, a sense of the unexpected – and of course an exquisite awareness of the magic of fresh creation. Therein, and therein only, lie the sources of meaning in music.I might well be wrong here. Perhaps if algorithmic art takes on the appearance of being a genuine human creation – as EMI did – we’ll still value it, and bring our own meaning to it. After all, the long history of manufactured pop music seems to hint that humans can form an emotional reaction to something that has no more than the semblance of an authentic connection. And perhaps once these algorithmic artworks become more commonplace and we become aware that the art didn’t come from a human, we won’t be bothered by the one-way connection. After all, people form emotional relationships with objects that don’t love them back – like treasured childhood teddy bears or pet spiders. But for me, true art can’t be created by accident. There are boundaries to the reach of algorithms. Limits to what can be quantified. Among all of the staggeringly impressive, mindboggling things that data and statistics can tell me, how it feels to be human isn’t one of them. Excerpted from Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms by Hannah Fry. © 2018 by Hannah Fry Limited. Used with permission of the publisher, W W Norton &amp; Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
You know, I think, maybe, if that happens at all, guys, I think, today are looking at more someone like an every-man like a Vince Vaughn or Will Ferrell. It sort of - I think those are the new alpha males, you know. I think comedies are just as strong as they've ever been. The action movies may not stack up to the action movies of the '80s or the '90s even, but I think the comedies that are coming up - "Old School," and "Knocked Up," and, you know, "Anchorman," and "Dodgeball," and all these movies, and "Borat" are just as good as "Fast Times" and "Stripes," and all the old, you know, "Trading Places" - the '80s classics.
Well, I mean, the first thing they would tell me is that it's far, far better than the Superdome where some of them were in New Orleans. And it's far, far better than other situation in New Orleans because it's air-conditioned and they get food and water. But there's starting to be some frustration with some of the crowding inside the Astrodome. I talked to a couple of families who left because there were simply no cots to lay down on. There was another couple who had all their clothing and personal items stolen. And people are saying that people are very tense in there and there's a lot of arguments and fights. And in fact there was a doctor that left, a doctor who was working there in the Astrodome, who said that they were grossly understaffed there and there was areal health crisis inside the dome.
But there's what happens with - between people and their pets, and then there's also animals used for therapy. And in the story I did yesterday, one of the things I went and looked at was equine therapy, using horses. And they used horses both for therapy for people with disabilities - in this case it was a child with autism - but also they use them for adults with both physical and mental disabilities. And they also use horses just to help people overcome some - people with mental disabilities, emotional problems, and then also people with just physical disabilities, who just learn to ride, and that helps them overcome their physical problems. And again, those are things that are not necessarily those people's pets, but they're using the animals as an actual co-therapist.
Right, right, right. Audiences today really want to know who is reporting the news to them. You know, trust in institutions is going down, and audiences really, they want to know the people behind the story. They want to know how it's being reported to them. And so there's much more appetite for connecting with people who have expertise, a real passion around the topics they cover, a real voice. They put themselves in the story, because of that expertise. They're not afraid to share their opinion. And audiences actually want to connect to personalities. They want to know: Who are these people? So, that's a central part of, I think, what we're going to be trying to build. And I think that that's going to cover not just the national security reporting that I think is so important, the press freedom issues, but frankly, every topic. So that will be a big piece of it.

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