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Good morning. My name is Eric Li, and I was born here. But no, I wasn't born there. This was where I was born: Shanghai, at the height of the Cultural Revolution. My grandmother tells me that she heard the sound of gunfire along with my first cries. When I was growing up, I was told a story that explained all I ever needed to know about humanity. It went like this. All human societies develop in linear progression, beginning with primitive society, then slave society, feudalism, capitalism, socialism, and finally, guess where we end up? Communism! Sooner or later, all of humanity, regardless of culture, language, nationality, will arrive at this final stage of political and social development. The entire world's peoples will be unified in this paradise on Earth and live happily ever after. But before we get there, we're engaged in a struggle between good and evil, the good of socialism against the evil of capitalism, and the good shall triumph. That, of course, was the meta-narrative distilled from the theories of Karl Marx. And the Chinese bought it. We were taught that grand story day in and day out. It became part of us, and we believed in it. The story was a bestseller. About one third of the entire world's population lived under that meta-narrative. Then, the world changed overnight. As for me, disillusioned by the failed religion of my youth, I went to America and became a Berkeley hippie. (Laughter) Now, as I was coming of age, something else happened. As if one big story wasn't enough, I was told another one. This one was just as grand. It also claims that all human societies develop in a linear progression towards a singular end. This one went as follows: All societies, regardless of culture, be it Christian, Muslim, Confucian, must progress from traditional societies in which groups are the basic units to modern societies in which atomized individuals are the sovereign units, and all these individuals are, by definition, rational, and they all want one thing: the vote. Because they are all rational, once given the vote, they produce good government and live happily ever after. Paradise on Earth, again. Sooner or later, electoral democracy will be the only political system for all countries and all peoples, with a free market to make them all rich. But before we get there, we're engaged in a struggle between good and evil. (Laughter) The good belongs to those who are democracies and are charged with a mission of spreading it around the globe, sometimes by force, against the evil of those who do not hold elections. (Video) George H.W. Bush: A new world order... (Video) George W. Bush:... ending tyranny in our world... (Video) Barack Obama:... a single standard for all who would hold power. Eric X. Li: Now — (Laughter) (Applause) This story also became a bestseller. According to Freedom House, the number of democracies went from 45 in 1970 to 115 in 2010. In the last 20 years, Western elites tirelessly trotted around the globe selling this prospectus: Multiple parties fight for political power and everyone voting on them is the only path to salvation to the long-suffering developing world. Those who buy the prospectus are destined for success. Those who do not are doomed to fail. But this time, the Chinese didn't buy it. Fool me once... (Laughter) The rest is history. In just 30 years, China went from one of the poorest agricultural countries in the world to its second-largest economy. Six hundred fifty million people were lifted out of poverty. Eighty percent of the entire world's poverty alleviation during that period happened in China. In other words, all the new and old democracies put together amounted to a mere fraction of what a single, one-party state did without voting. See, I grew up on this stuff: food stamps. Meat was rationed to a few hundred grams per person per month at one point. Needless to say, I ate all my grandmother's portions. So I asked myself, what's wrong with this picture? Here I am in my hometown, my business growing leaps and bounds. Entrepreneurs are starting companies every day. Middle class is expanding in speed and scale unprecedented in human history. Yet, according to the grand story, none of this should be happening. So I went and did the only thing I could. I studied it. Yes, China is a one-party state run by the Chinese Communist Party, the Party, and they don't hold elections. Three assumptions are made by the dominant political theories of our time. Such a system is operationally rigid, politically closed, and morally illegitimate. Well, the assumptions are wrong. The opposites are true. Adaptability, meritocracy, and legitimacy are the three defining characteristics of China's one-party system. Now, most political scientists will tell us that a one-party system is inherently incapable of self-correction. It won't last long because it cannot adapt. Now here are the facts. In 64 years of running the largest country in the world, the range of the Party's policies has been wider than any other country in recent memory, from radical land collectivization to the Great Leap Forward, then privatization of farmland, then the Cultural Revolution, then Deng Xiaoping's market reform, then successor Jiang Zemin took the giant political step of opening up Party membership to private businesspeople, something unimaginable during Mao's rule. So the Party self-corrects in rather dramatic fashions. Institutionally, new rules get enacted to correct previous dysfunctions. For example, term limits. Political leaders used to retain their positions for life, and they used that to accumulate power and perpetuate their rules. Mao was the father of modern China, yet his prolonged rule led to disastrous mistakes. So the Party instituted term limits with mandatory retirement age of 68 to 70. One thing we often hear is, "Political reforms have lagged far behind economic reforms," and "China is in dire need of political reform." But this claim is a rhetorical trap hidden behind a political bias. See, some have decided a priori what kinds of changes they want to see, and only such changes can be called political reform. The truth is, political reforms have never stopped. Compared with 30 years ago, 20 years, even 10 years ago, every aspect of Chinese society, how the country is governed, from the most local level to the highest center, are unrecognizable today. Now such changes are simply not possible without political reforms of the most fundamental kind. Now I would venture to suggest the Party is the world's leading expert in political reform. The second assumption is that in a one-party state, power gets concentrated in the hands of the few, and bad governance and corruption follow. Indeed, corruption is a big problem, but let's first look at the larger context. Now, this may be counterintuitive to you. The Party happens to be one of the most meritocratic political institutions in the world today. China's highest ruling body, the Politburo, has 25 members. In the most recent one, only five of them came from a background of privilege, so-called princelings. The other 20, including the president and the premier, came from entirely ordinary backgrounds. In the larger central committee of 300 or more, the percentage of those who were born into power and wealth was even smaller. The vast majority of senior Chinese leaders worked and competed their way to the top. Compare that with the ruling elites in both developed and developing countries, I think you'll find the Party being near the top in upward mobility. The question then is, how could that be possible in a system run by one party? Now we come to a powerful political institution, little-known to Westerners: the Party's Organization Department. The department functions like a giant human resource engine that would be the envy of even some of the most successful corporations. It operates a rotating pyramid made up of three components: civil service, state-owned enterprises, and social organizations like a university or a community program. They form separate yet integrated career paths for Chinese officials. They recruit college grads into entry-level positions in all three tracks, and they start from the bottom, called "keyuan" [clerk]. Then they could get promoted through four increasingly elite ranks: fuke [deputy section manager], ke [section manager], fuchu [deputy division manager], and chu [division manger]. Now these are not moves from "Karate Kid," okay? It's serious business. The range of positions is wide, from running health care in a village to foreign investment in a city district to manager in a company. Once a year, the department reviews their performance. They interview their superiors, their peers, their subordinates. They vet their personal conduct. They conduct public opinion surveys. Then they promote the winners. Throughout their careers, these cadres can move through and out of all three tracks. Over time, the good ones move beyond the four base levels to the fuju [deputy bureau chief] and ju [bureau chief] levels. There, they enter high officialdom. By that point, a typical assignment will be to manage a district with a population in the millions or a company with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. Just to show you how competitive the system is, in 2012, there were 900,000 fuke and ke levels, 600,000 fuchu and chu levels, and only 40,000 fuju and ju levels. After the ju levels, the best few move further up several more ranks, and eventually make it to the Central Committee. The process takes two to three decades. Does patronage play a role? Yes, of course. But merit remains the fundamental driver. In essence, the Organization Department runs a modernized version of China's centuries-old mentoring system. China's new president, Xi Jinping, is the son of a former leader, which is very unusual, first of his kind to make the top job. Even for him, the career took 30 years. He started as a village manager, and by the time he entered the Politburo, he had managed areas with a total population of 150 million people and combined GDPs of 1.5 trillion U.S. dollars. Now, please don't get me wrong, okay? This is not a put-down of anyone. It's just a statement of fact. George W. Bush, remember him? This is not a put-down. (Laughter) Before becoming governor of Texas, or Barack Obama before running for president, could not make even a small county manager in China's system. Winston Churchill once said that democracy is a terrible system except for all the rest. Well, apparently he hadn't heard of the Organization Department. Now, Westerners always assume that multi-party election with universal suffrage is the only source of political legitimacy. I was asked once, "The Party wasn't voted in by election. Where is the source of legitimacy?" I said, "How about competency?" We all know the facts. In 1949, when the Party took power, China was mired in civil wars, dismembered by foreign aggression, average life expectancy at that time, 41 years old. Today, it's the second largest economy in the world, an industrial powerhouse, and its people live in increasing prosperity. Pew Research polls Chinese public attitudes, and here are the numbers in recent years. Satisfaction with the direction of the country: 85 percent. Those who think they're better off than five years ago: 70 percent. Those who expect the future to be better: a whopping 82 percent. Financial Times polls global youth attitudes, and these numbers, brand new, just came from last week. Ninety-three percent of China's Generation Y are optimistic about their country's future. Now, if this is not legitimacy, I'm not sure what is. In contrast, most electoral democracies around the world are suffering from dismal performance. I don't need to elaborate for this audience how dysfunctional it is, from Washington to European capitals. With a few exceptions, the vast number of developing countries that have adopted electoral regimes are still suffering from poverty and civil strife. Governments get elected, and then they fall below 50 percent approval in a few months and stay there and get worse until the next election. Democracy is becoming a perpetual cycle of elect and regret. At this rate, I'm afraid it is democracy, not China's one-party system, that is in danger of losing legitimacy. Now, I don't want to create the misimpression that China's hunky-dory, on the way to some kind of superpowerdom. The country faces enormous challenges. The social and economic problems that come with wrenching change like this are mind-boggling. Pollution is one. Food safety. Population issues. On the political front, the worst problem is corruption. Corruption is widespread and undermines the system and its moral legitimacy. But most analysts misdiagnose the disease. They say that corruption is the result of the one-party system, and therefore, in order to cure it, you have to do away with the entire system. But a more careful look would tell us otherwise. Transparency International ranks China between 70 and 80 in recent years among 170 countries, and it's been moving up. India, the largest democracy in the world, 94 and dropping. For the hundred or so countries that are ranked below China, more than half of them are electoral democracies. So if election is the panacea for corruption, how come these countries can't fix it? Now, I'm a venture capitalist. I make bets. It wouldn't be fair to end this talk without putting myself on the line and making some predictions. So here they are. In the next 10 years, China will surpass the U.S. and become the largest economy in the world. Income per capita will be near the top of all developing countries. Corruption will be curbed, but not eliminated, and China will move up 10 to 20 notches to above 60 in T.I. ranking. Economic reform will accelerate, political reform will continue, and the one-party system will hold firm. We live in the dusk of an era. Meta-narratives that make universal claims failed us in the 20th century and are failing us in the 21st. Meta-narrative is the cancer that is killing democracy from the inside. Now, I want to clarify something. I'm not here to make an indictment of democracy. On the contrary, I think democracy contributed to the rise of the West and the creation of the modern world. It is the universal claim that many Western elites are making about their political system, the hubris, that is at the heart of the West's current ills. If they would spend just a little less time on trying to force their way onto others, and a little bit more on political reform at home, they might give their democracy a better chance. China's political model will never supplant electoral democracy, because unlike the latter, it doesn't pretend to be universal. It cannot be exported. But that is the point precisely. The significance of China's example is not that it provides an alternative, but the demonstration that alternatives exist. Let us draw to a close this era of meta-narratives. Communism and democracy may both be laudable ideals, but the era of their dogmatic universalism is over. Let us stop telling people and our children there's only one way to govern ourselves and a singular future towards which all societies must evolve. It is wrong. It is irresponsible. And worst of all, it is boring. Let universality make way for plurality. Perhaps a more interesting age is upon us. Are we brave enough to welcome it? Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. Bruno Giussani: Eric, stay with me for a couple of minutes, because I want to ask you a couple of questions. I think many here, and in general in Western countries, would agree with your statement about analysis of democratic systems becoming dysfunctional, but at the same time, many would kind of find unsettling the thought that there is an unelected authority that, without any form of oversight or consultation, decides what the national interest is. What is the mechanism in the Chinese model that allows people to say, actually, the national interest as you defined it is wrong? EXL: You know, Frank Fukuyama, the political scientist, called the Chinese system "responsive authoritarianism." It's not exactly right, but I think it comes close. So I know the largest public opinion survey company in China, okay? Do you know who their biggest client is? The Chinese government. Not just from the central government, the city government, the provincial government, to the most local neighborhood districts. They conduct surveys all the time. Are you happy with the garbage collection? Are you happy with the general direction of the country? So there is, in China, there is a different kind of mechanism to be responsive to the demands and the thinking of the people. My point is, I think we should get unstuck from the thinking that there's only one political system — election, election, election — that could make it responsive. I'm not sure, actually, elections produce responsive government anymore in the world. (Applause) BG: Many seem to agree. One of the features of a democratic system is a space for civil society to express itself. And you have shown figures about the support that the government and the authorities have in China. But then you've just mentioned other elements like, you know, big challenges, and there are, of course, a lot of other data that go in a different direction: tens of thousands of unrests and protests and environmental protests, etc. So you seem to suggest the Chinese model doesn't have a space outside of the Party for civil society to express itself. EXL: There's a vibrant civil society in China, whether it's environment or what-have-you. But it's different. You wouldn't recognize it. Because, by Western definitions, a so-called civil society has to be separate or even in opposition to the political system, but that concept is alien for Chinese culture. For thousands of years, you have civil society, yet they are consistent and coherent and part of a political order, and I think it's a big cultural difference. BG: Eric, thank you for sharing this with TED. EXL: Thank you.
This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Rebecca Roberts in Washington. In his new book, Randy Olson writes: A backlash has developed against science in disciplines ranging from evolution to global warming to mainstream medicine. An entire anti-science movement has emerged that truly does threaten our quality of life. Large groups of people are fighting against hard, cold, rational, data-based science, simply saying they don't care what the science says. Communication is not just one element in the struggle to make science relevant, he writes, it's the central element. The book is titled "Don't Be Such A Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style." Randy Olson is a marine biologist turned filmmaker. He wrote and directed "Flock of Dodos" and "Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy."
I think that at sometimes one has the tendency to have a simplistic approach, as if one individual can solve this war. As an individual, I've done my best and I keep pushing - not only the governments here, the Sudanese government and all around - and we all need to chip in, whether it was in Rwanda or Srebrenica or Darfur. I think we take lots of people out there who can give them alibi, when you find one person and say Kofi Annan is responsible. And at that time, all the head of the Peacekeeping Operation, and it would be very easy to say that governments are not responsible. Kofi Annan or Jean-Marie Guehenno - the head of Peacekeeping Operations - are the ones who allowed Darfur to happen. It's easier. It's simple. People may digest that better, but it's not the story. It's not the whole story. And I think we need to really tell the story as completely as possible and in all these complexities.
I mean, so much of what I was doing in this movie felt like new territory and kind of uncomfortable. And another thing that was difficult was his own personal relationship to the camera. You know, he made a lot of small films where he explained his experiments, and I watched them and he kind of has a forced casual quality. He had a glass of wine that he would pretend to drink in one of them. He would be walking down the street in a corduroy jacket talking to camera. You know, he was trying to make it accessible. It was important to him that these ideas actually get disseminated.
Probably not yet, because I still have a little bit of sight left in one eye, and I'd be afraid of tampering with it. But, you know, I worry about that. Because I worry about things like, you know, once you've committed to taking one kind of platform like that - like say, replacing the entire retina with a microchip - you can't go back if they find a better way to actually regenerate the retina, right. I mean, you've kind of - you've made your choice. And at what point do you do that? I mean, you know, I say in the book it's kind of like saying do you buy the Atari when it comes out, or do you buy the Nintendo? At a certain point, the technology's going to evolve again, and in it's earliest stages, I don't think I'd want to get involved with it, because, you know, I saw what happened to beta tape and eight-track tapes.
That's part of the problem. It's a little hard to know how much of it that is. You know, certainly banks have tightened up their standards. There's also appraisers who tell you how much a home is worth, and they - realtors will tell you they're coming in low a lot, and so that's making things difficult. But, you know, as far as access to credit, it is a problem. It's cited as a problem by the realty groups. But, you know, you can still go get an FHA loan with three percent down and, you know, a credit score that's kind of medium. So, you know, it's not as if, you know, half the country really can't qualify because they just don't have the savings or something.
He's already built ten statues of her, he says. Now she wants ten more. If the territory under Mayawati's rule were a nation, it would be the world's seventh most populous country. She's Chief Minister of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, or UP as Indians call it. Her fiefdom stretches across the plains of North India, along the river Ganges, a vast swath of land south of the Himalayas. Here, Mayawati's also known as the Queen of the Dalits, the multitude of Indians formerly called Untouchables. They're people who remain mostly untouched by India's economic boom. To see that you only need visit this slum on the banks of the Gomti river, which runs through UP's capital, Lucknow. Several thousand people live in shacks built out of trash and driftwood. Hundreds of small bedraggled children somehow survive here, among the rats, the litter, and human excrement. The slum dwellers try to wash themselves clean of the filth by bathing in the river, but its waters contain the city's raw sewage. Most of them are Dalits. Mayawati's rise to power is one of the more remarkable stories in the history of South Asian politics. She's a Dalit herself, the daughter of a clerk and one of nine children. She began her career as a schoolteacher. Now she's thought to be the richest politician in India, earning the same sort of money as a top Bollywood star. She says much of her money comes from gifts from her followers, who also these days include upper-class Brahmins. Mayawati's a homely-looking, plump woman, but she's a powerful speaker and she's lionized in UP like a film star.
Yes. I think that was certainly the story in compact fluorescents in the late '80s and '90s. Rebates was a large part of trying to transform the market back at that time. It's an interesting sideline, I think, Ira, that that was not very successful. And people, again, focused on just lumens per watt. They couldn't understand it. But the form factor of those old CFLs was very different. If you recall, Ira, they had sort of a long tube that stuck out, and sometimes they stuck down into your ceiling space and that sort of thing. The real transformation came, yes, with price. No question about that. But the form factor that the curly Q or the pigtail shape is the one that really began to get the CFL market moving because it was a form factor that were more consistent with the existing infrastructure that supports them. That was a big deal, just changing the shape.
That would be nice. It'd be nice to see some kind of a concrete proposal. I think that Michael is right. There's been a lot of rhetoric. I was shocked - you know, fine, you know, I think that they have a case to make that we do need to look at some hard choices here, but I was shocked by what Carl Levin of Michigan said. You know, he basically, I thought it was very (unintelligible). He said if they're going to have a civil war, they're going to have to do it without us. If only it were that simple. We have to come up with the way to get out of there so that we don't leave a catastrophe behind us. Because it won't just be a civil war in Iraq, it will be a civil war throughout the entire region. And I have not seen anybody yet - and maybe the plan is impossible to come up with until after the elections - but I'd like to see some kind of a concrete plan that both sides of Congress and the Iraqis can agree on. I haven't seen it yet.
But you mentioned, Ed, I noticed you said ethnic, but they've said race, which raises the issue of, you know, the Hispanics. I thought that they could both black and white of any race. So now we're going to have the dispute about of who's actually black, who's Latino. And what about the Arabs? I mean, you know, the census classifies them as white. And are they going to suggest that they're ought to be included. And what happened to the Native Americans and the multi-racials? I think that what they're trying to tap into is this sort of Jeopardy kind of thing that we have where, you know, black folks always want the young black person or the whoever black person on Jeopardy to win. We're moving away from having to think that they have to - they don't have to win but at least finish. You know, we still have that kind of competition that still exists.
It's Morning Edition from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep. Good morning. Listen to Zimbabwe's president, and you would think that his country's health crisis is over. Robert Mugabe says that an outbreak of cholera has been contained. He's the man in charge of the country, but his word is not the only one. American officials are contradicting that claim. They say their aid experts in the country are still seeing high death rates for a waterborne disease. It's a disease that killed countless people in ancient times, but is treatable. The U.S. sees this humanitarian crisis as the latest evidence that Zimbabwe's government has failed its people and that Mugabe must go. NPR's Michelle Kelemen reports.
Yes, to put it very bluntly. And here's why. We are entering the home stretch, It's the final month, essentially, as we lead up to the mid-term elections, and there is so much at stake, most notably control by the President's party of both chambers of the Congress, and while the president himself isn't on the ballot, his agenda certainly is, in the form of all the GOP members of Congress who've gotten him the votes he's needed over the past six years. So you can really see this as President Bush's last campaign. He leave office in two years, and any hope he has of really setting his own agenda for those last two years is on the line.
That's right, and now there are reports from Nepal, where melting glaciers have caused flash flooding, frequent landslides, food problems and deaths on a scale that really has never been seen before. It seems that some of these glacial lakes in remote mountain villages are rapidly filling up with--you know, as the glacier melts, the water comes down, fills the lake up, swelling it in some cases to seven times their normal size, and bursting and causing what are called outburst floods and wiping out lives and property. And Dr. James Hansen, one of the world's leading climate scientists, said this week that the world has just one decade to get its act together and limit the release of greenhouse gases, because if the temperature rises just one more degree Celsius, the Earth would go into a climate pattern it hasn't seen in half a million years, and that is unchartered territory.
Well, it's a win-win for him because it's played out his point that there had to be not one on one talks but talks with a number of nations at the table to come to some agreement. I think this is one of the only wins that I can see that he has in his column at this moment. Obviously, if the North Koreans in some way renege, then, you know, not only does he look bad but the world is in a horrible situation as well. And in fact, what's choice did he have? I mean the point was to try to get to this point and to try to level the influence of the United States through working with these other countries. So I take him at his word that John Bolton may have been his main man back in the day, but on this one, no.
So all of these opportunities we have been highlighting at DOT because we have some money for streets, and we have some money for rail. And we have decided that in order to really promote our livable and sustainable communities, the way to do it is - we know we're always going to have streets for people to drive on, but we know that people want to bike and hike and walk. And we want to provide those opportunities for the exercise it provides, for the family opportunities for people to be together, to get outdoors, and so many other things that come about as a result of it. And I wanted to ask, what do you make of the criticism - I'm sure you've read it - from the trucking industry?
That's never an easy conversation to have. It's not one that he would want to have, of course. He loved life and didn't want to think about that possibility happening and of course, neither did I. And even with the possibility of it happening, he never truly believed that it could happen, but we put the conversation off several times and first just dealt with the practicality of it of, you know, the bills or his will or whatever else. The night before he left was when we finally got into, well, if something does happen to me, here's how I want you to live your life, or here's where I want you to burry me or those kinds of things.
One thing that was really noticeable and somewhat different from me when I got out is that there's quite a pecking order and especially in federal prison. And I was considered a kind of high on the pecking order because I had done what was considered a skilled crime. And I actually did not have trouble getting a job when I got out, but I actually was taken advantage of by my employers in an ironic sort of way. I even had an employer, like, whispering to some of his better clients, hey, you ought to see who I got here running the crowd. And it was quite odd in that respect. I felt disrespected and used by that in a strange way. And to this day, that still stings a little bit.
The problem is, as people have become - love screens. So the more screens you put in the car, the more people want to look at the screen, and the basic problem is the windshield is just another screen, and as screens go, not all that an exciting one. So we have this true design challenge that we've never encountered before, which is the entire field of automotive design has to switch from how can I, the designer, stop distracting you because you really want to pay attention to the road, to a radically different world in which the driver says I don't want to pay attention to the road, and the auto designer has to say how can I force you back onto paying attention to the road? It's a really exciting challenge.
...For a while, yeah. So there is some sincerity here, but - so let's not be totally cynical (laughter). But aside from that, you know, this is the sort of thing that allows - that candidates use because voters can see the concreteness of their policies in it. Bernie Sanders talks about income inequality, but it might make more sense to a voter to see it in the company of Walmart or to try to see it in the company of Walmart. Besides that, a big, splashy policy proposal or, for example, standing up at the Walmart shareholders meeting, it just so happens to be the sort of thing that might grab attention and get you more voters to look at you.
Well, I think that the key to our success was we sort of - there were a couple of points. We offered a recursive incentive, which allowed us not only to reward the people who actually found balloons, but we could also reward the people who helped us find those people. I think that was one of the main keys there. But I think we had another strategy which was that we built a system that allowed you to really do viral collaboration. And so, a couple of aspects of that were that we made it effortless for people to participate, and in addition to the monetary rewards, people could really watch their direct impact at influencing others to join. So we had one of the students who kept bothering me, a girl named Lanthy(ph), to know how many people she signed up. And so we realized that's actually a pretty cool feature that we should build in, so people could see how big their impact was.
Well, I think people always say that capitalism and competition are synonyms. But I think they're really antonyms. If we look at the restaurant industry, it's a very competitive industry. But it's very, very hard to make money opening a restaurant because all the profits are competed away, whereas a company like Google has not had any real competition in search since 2002 when it definitively distanced itself from Yahoo and Microsoft, and is therefore a very profitable business. You can debate how much monopoly should be regulated or when is it a good monopoly that's inventing something new and is dynamic? When it is a bad monopoly that becomes more like a rent collector? But I do think the great fortunes are always made in these monopoly-like businesses.
And the other thing that I just wanted to say was that I think that, in order to facilitate communication between the school and the parents, there needs to be some sort of general meeting or mass meeting in which the school informs the parents of what exactly is there - the school expects of them and what they should expect from the teachers. Because I think a lot of times, parents expect way too much of the teachers, and then when the child doesn't perform up to par, then the parents become, you know, upset with the teachers and think that it's all the teachers fault when 50 percent of the learning happens in the classroom and 50 percent of learning happens at home, as well.
The same day The Washington Post reported that Senator Marco Rubio's parents left Cuba for Miami in 1956, the second sentence in the senator's bio on his official Senate website got changed. No longer did it claim his parents had come to the U.S., quote, "following Fidel Castro's takeover on the first day of 1959." That sentence now says Rubio was, quote, "born in Miami in 1971 to Cuban exiles who first arrived in the United States in 1956." That may put the claims made in Rubio's first TV ad during his run for the Senate last year in a different light.
The fight over judicial nominees and Senate filibusters has taken a racial turn. On Thursday, Majority Leader Bill Frist joined a group of black pastors, including one bishop who asked why Democrats are, quote, "afraid to put a black woman on the court,"--end quote. Meantime, the Congressional Black Caucus said a Republican move to seat a conservative black judge was offensive to African-Americans. As the Senate inches closer to a showdown, commentator Joseph C. Phillips wishes Republicans would act like a majority party. Mr. JOSEPH C. PHILLIPS (Actor and Syndicated Columnist): In 1964, Senator Robert Byrd spoke on the Senate floor for 14 hours and 13 minutes. His purpose? To block passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Forty years later, the Democratic Party is once again attempting to deter the march of history. Utilizing a strategy unprecedented in the history of the Senate, Democrats are using the filibuster to block the president's nominees to the appellate court. It's no wonder Senator Byrd's blood is surging. The old boy's been all over the news waxing nostalgic about the virtue of the filibuster. I suppose there's something to be said for consistency.
No, we don't, but what we're finding out today is that indeed they do, and they can produce it at very low levels. As a result in the past, given the technology it's been very hard to detect. But what you can do in trauma and things associated with trauma is that all of a sudden the endogenous morphine levels increase dramatically, and this happens in invertebrates, you know, such as the leech. We use mussels routinely in our lab. We've also--what really makes the story extremely credible, years ago we cloned an opiate receptive--that's like a lock mechanism that looks for morphine as the key--we cloned this receptor and it only responds to morphine. It does not respond to opioid peptides like metenkephalin, betaendorphine, so what we think is we have this entire new signaling family. We do we find this receptor? So far we found it on neural tissues. We found it on immune tissues. We found it on vascular tissues. And what is it doing? It's doing the same thing that worries people with substance abuse. It downregulates these tissue's ability to become excitatory and to respond. Now take that little blurb of information that covers 87 papers that I've written on it and other people have written--now you put this in perspective of what this little animal is using, and now you have a molecule that not only numbs the individually locally, and that's just want you want--locally; you don't want to numb the whole organism. You want to numb them locally and at the same time downregulate the immune response. So morphine coming from a leech--if we can demonstrate that--morphine coming from a leech is a perfect way to achieve a great meal for the leech because it's doing what morphine normally does. It downregulates tissues. And morphine, by way of this receptor that we've cloned called a mu3 receptor--Patrick Cadet in my lab did that--what we've done is demonstration--would you believe--as a result of hitting this receptor, it releases nitric oxide, a well-known vasodilator compound. So by the leech killing the sensation of pain, it creates an environment to take its own meal in. So a leech is working on the host basically by communicating with the host's already existing system.
Absolutely. Warren Harding, really, even before he ran for president, from the moment that he entered political office, in local Ohio politics, was dogged by rumors that he had black ancestors, and the rumors varied, some of the rumors focused on the ideas his great-grand mother had been a fugitive slave, or had been black, other focused on his father, other focused on other members of the family. But the rumors themselves were fairly persistent, and they were fairly widely accepted, at least, especially among Harding's opponents. But even according to rumor among the communities that Harding lived in as a young man, and there is the suggestion, in fact, that Harding's full family was understood to be black, but passing in the small communities where they grew up. And, so, when Harding became president, as he was campaigning for president, in 1920, these rumors reached a sort of fever pitch, and they were laid out, in particular, by a historian named William Estabrook Chancellor, who wrote what is now a fairly notorious and extremely hard to find book about these allegations, about Harding's mix race ancestry.
This email from Darrel(ph) in Portland. I'm a 30-year-old black male with a white mother. I have never felt comfortable with the term biracial. Race is a social construct, one which often exposes ideological bias. I often have my blackness called into question, being treated by white people as being more acceptable than typical black people. It disgusts me when people assume my speaking pattern or intelligence are the result of my having a white parent rather than coming from an educated family or growing up on a university campus, especially considering the first thing people would use to describe me if I, say, stole their car would be my race. I'm proud of my Scottish, Irish and German heritage just as I am of my West African heritage. However, my social experience in this country is that of a black man.
On the cusp of winter 2021, I went for a walk in the woods near my house in Oxford. By a bench that overlooks the city, I happened upon a moss-covered log that glistened green under the overcast sky. The moss’s leaves were as tiny and intricate as the finest embroidery, and as thin as – I hate to admit – cling film. I brushed my fingertips over the feathery bed in awe of its minuteness and complexity, before taking a dozen photographs. When was the last time I had touched moss? When was the first? I remember trees, rivers, mountains, but not moss. But, that day, I felt as if moss summoned me to pay attention to its rigour and beauty amid its great arboreal cousins. Or rather, moss represented something for me. I’d been thinking about touch, about how out of touch with nature I am. I live in a city that has many parks and meadows, but I don’t touch nature enough; rather, I see it – the ornamental birches, the canal, the roses on the hedgerows. In summertime, I’ll swim with friends, or sunbathe and roll in sand and grass, but once we are back in our sanitised homes, I continue to live out of touch. I seek nature’s touch in small, appropriate, hygienic doses. Winter is the only true season of touching. In winters, no matter how efficiently you dress up, a raindrop will find you. Fogs will enshroud you and leave their wetness on your face. Dry, cold air will crack your lips. As you inhale, mist will touch your nostrils and the inside of your throat. You will feel winter’s touch on the backs of your ears. Winter’s physicality reaches everywhere. But moss works the hardest in winters. Over every log, rock and crevice, it grows and glows. Over the course of that winter, I touched mosses everywhere in the city: on footpaths and walls, on the barks of willows, on metal-based drain covers, on tombstones, on the roofs of houseboats, on abandoned bicycles, under the railway bridge. Moss likes to grow everywhere as long as there’s enough shade and moisture. A nonvascular plant, it lacks an elaborate root and shoot anatomy; it has no roots to speak of. Mosses absorb water and nutrients from their one-celled leaves, which are uniquely designed to hold water up to 30 times their own weight. In winter, if you’ve ever paused to gaze at a moss bed and touch its surface, you’ll feel as if you’ve touched a wet sponge. You’ll also realise that while a moss bed may feel soft at first touch, it is a multi-textured world down there. As I carefully brush the backs of my fingers against moss beds, tiny stalk-like beings tickle me. Jutting out of moss leaves, these stalks are known as sporophytes; each sporophyte contains a capsule of spores at its outermost end. As wind and water carry these spores away from their source beds, mosses multiply. The sporophytes are considerably taller than the bed to allow the spores to travel far and start a new commune, a new family. One of the most common mosses in urban settlements is Tortula muralis, or wall screw-moss. It was the first one I noticed, like most beginners do. One day, under a bright blue after-rain sky, I observed that the sporophyte capsules of a wall screw-moss bed growing on a brick fence had swelled to almost thrice their size. It astonished me and I thought it might be another stage in their development that I hadn’t read about yet. Down on my knees, at eye level with the bed, I reached out with a fingertip towards a sporophyte, but my hand stopped itself midway. It took a while for my eyes to adjust but I realised that the capsules had not swelled at all. Each sporophyte was merely holding a tiny water droplet around itself, like a miniature water balloon, or a pregnant belly. Many minutes had gone by. It started raining again and more water touched and seeped into the moss bed. I remembered to go about my day, which seemed a bit absurd, if not insignificant in front of a moss bed. This, then, is the first lesson that moss taught me: you can touch Time. Not our human time, not even mammal time, but Earth Time. Hours later, when I returned from my chores in the city, the sporophytes were still there, still holding water. Often, it can take 25 years for a moss layer to put on one inch. But the moss has been around for at least 350 million years, being one of the first species to make the journey from water to dry land: moss is our elder relative, as Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us in Gathering Moss (2003). It is a species that cohabits our cities and apartments, a witness to human time and its catastrophic speed. If only touching moss were enough to live at Moss Time. Aristotle claimed that touch is the most universal sense. Lately, I’ve come to believe that touching nature may be the most effective means of reconnecting with it, known in contemporary psychology as ‘nature connectedness’. Several studies argue that activities that involve touching nonhuman entities with our bodies – walking barefoot or swimming, for instance – might help us nurture affective and ethical relationships with the nonhuman world. The phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty spent his life thinking and writing about the question of human perception. Philosophers before him had theorised that we perceive and process the world through our disembodied brains, our consciousness in the Cartesian sense of the word; and the closest ally of consciousness in this task was sight. But for Merleau-Ponty, it was through the body’s perception and proprioception that we come to know the world: our perceptual awareness of the body’s location with respect to other bodies and objects, and its inter-corporeality: the fact of its material existence within a world of other bodies and objects. While sight is important here – for it is through sight that we tell, in relation to our bodies, whether an object is far or near, large or small – touch is equally, if not more, important. Moss is touch. It doesn’t poke the skin of the being it touches In Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Merleau-Ponty writes: In visual experience, which pushes objectification further than does tactile experience, we can, at least at first sight, flatter ourselves that we constitute the world, because it presents us with a spectacle spread out before us at a distance, and gives us the illusion of being immediately present everywhere and being situated nowhere. Tactile experience, on the other hand, adheres to the surface of our body; we cannot unfold it before us, and it never quite becomes an object. Correspondingly, as the subject of touch, I cannot flatter myself that I am everywhere and nowhere; I cannot forget in this case that it is through my body that I go to the world, and tactile experience occurs ‘ahead’ of me, and is not centred in me. Touch reorients us to the fundamental condition of being – to the inevitability of others, both human and nonhuman. In touching, we are most vulnerable because we are always also being touched back. The analogy that Merleau-Ponty uses in his posthumously published work, The Visible and the Invisible (1964), is this: when my one hand touches the other, which one is doing the touching, and which one is being touched? We have eyelids; we can pinch our noses and shut our ears; but there are no natural skin-covers. We cannot turn off our sense of touch. To be a human in the world is to be tactile, to always be touching and touched with every single pore of our bodies. That touching nature could bridge interspecies borders makes sense intuitively. And is there any being in the plant kingdom that embodies touch more than moss and its family, the bryophytes? Moss is touch. It doesn’t poke the skin of the being it touches. And it takes practically nothing from the host it is in contact with: moss is no parasite. Yet it softens trees, prevents soil erosion, and shelters animals too small for us to notice. It is continuously in touch with Earth and all its beings, including us. Inside a rainforest and on the city pavement, moss beckons us. Moss isn’t everywhere and nowhere; moss is here. In the 921-year history of the University of Oxford, my current home, moss’s touch has enchanted many people. But, as the historian Mark Lawley notes, a separate study of mosses in Britain did not begin until the late 17th century. One of the key figures who recorded the diversity of mosses in Britain in painstaking detail was Johann Jakob Dillenius, a German botanist. Dillenius studied medicine, while maintaining a strong interest in botany, at the University of Giessen where he wrote his first major work, Catalog of Plants Originating Naturally Around Giessen (1718). In the Catalog, he identified several mosses and fungi, under the heading ‘Cryptogams’, denoting plants that reproduce via spores, also known as ‘the lower plants’. Perhaps only a handful of botanists at the time would have bothered spending their days with their hands touching the ground that other people walk on and animals relieve themselves on. But Dillenius did, and his work impressed William Sherard, a leading English botanist. Sherard had recently acquired a huge collection of plants from Smyrna (present-day İzmir in Turkey) and had been searching for somebody to help organise it. He offered Dillenius a job at his garden in Eltham, Kent; and, in 1721, Dillenius migrated to Britain to work on Sherard’s plant collection, the mosses of Britain, and a pinax (illustrated book) of Britain’s plants. 11617From Johann Jakob Dillenius’s book Historia Muscorum (1741). Courtesy the Internet Archive/Smithsonian1161811619For the first seven years of his time in Britain, Dillenius lived between Eltham and his own lodgings in London. In 1724, he produced his first book in Britain, the third edition of Synopsis methodica stirpium Britannicarum, originally written by the Cambridge-based botanist and naturalist John Ray in 1670. In the second edition of his Synopsis (1696), Ray had identified 80 types of mosses to which Dillenius added, according to George Claridge Druce’s account, 40 types of fungi, more than 150 types of mosses, and 200-plus seed plants. Dillenius divided cryptograms into Fungi and Musci, excluding ferns and equisetums. For perhaps the first time, somebody had paid meticulous and singular attention to the ‘lower plants’. It fascinated me to imagine an 18th-century gentleman spending hours and years touching and collecting the mosses of Kent, London, Oxford and Wales. We don’t know much about Dillenius’s inner life, but one can glean from his letters that he loved mosses and liked his life in their company. His life among English people? Not so much. Why did Dillenius, a rather unwelcome immigrant, pour all his energy and hope into plants we tend to overlook? After three years of exacting work, his edition of Ray’s Synopsis was published, but it did not bear his name. His publishers (and Sherard) feared that the people of Britain would not appreciate the name of a foreigner on a book about the mosses of their land. In a letter to Richard Richardson, another leading English botanist and a colleague, Dillenius announced the publication of his anonymous Synopsis and regretted that he didn’t have the opportunity to dedicate the book to Dr Richardson publicly. Despite this omission, he wanted Richardson to convince Sherard to let him work on his dream – the History of Mosses. He wrote: I mean the History of Mosses, if I could find time to finish it … would [you] please … persuade him to let me have one day in a week for this purpose.It wouldn’t be until 1732 that Dillenius could find that one day a week he needed to write his History. While Dillenius enjoyed his work on the pinax, his true passion lay with the lower plants. For approximately four years, he worked on Sherard’s pinax hoping that one day he’d be free to devote himself to the mosses. When Sherard died in 1728, Dillenius’s fate changed overnight. Sherard left his books and plants to Dillenius and a considerable amount of money to be used toward the maintenance of a professorship of botany at Oxford. In his will, he appointed Dillenius as the first such Sherardian professor. In 1728, Dillenius moved to Oxford where he lived until his death. Here, James Sherard, the younger brother of his former patron, who behaved rather contemptuously towards Dillenius, asked him to stop working on the mosses and the pinax, coercing him instead into writing a book on the garden at Eltham, Hortus Elthamensis (1732), for which Dillenius endured significant financial loss. As a professor of botany, Dillenius had entered the elite circle of scientists and botanists in Britain. By 1724, he’d been elected as a member of the Royal Society, but his personal life remained unfortunate. Before migrating to Britain, he’d pilloried a contemporary German botanist, Augustus Quirinus Rivinus, which made Dillenius a despised figure in academic circles. He had some admirers, most important of them Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist whose work Systema Naturae (1735) radically altered the field of botany, but he didn’t have many friends and we know next to nothing about his personal life. After Hortus, Dillenius pledged his career and life to the study of mosses and, in 1741, he published Historia Muscorum, or History of Mosses. In painstaking detail, over 576 pages and in 85 illustrated plates, the book described 661 taxa of lower plants, including mosses, fungi, lichens, algae, liverworts, hornworts and lycopods. He divided the Musci, or mosses, into six genera: Mnium, Hypnum, Polytrichum, Bryum, Sphangnum and Lycopodium – classifications that are useful today. But the book, his life’s mission, did not fare well in the market. Soon, he started writing an abridged version that he thought people might want to buy at a reduced price, but time had bested him. His Italian contemporary Pier Antonio Micheli had already written a detailed and genre-defining book on the cryptogams more than a decade before. In 1747, Dillenius died of a stroke at his home in Oxford, the abridged version of the History of Mosses unpublished. Here was somebody who had touched mosses his entire adult life, breathed and lived among mosses. I wonder if it reconnected him with nature. I wonder if he was happy. Did he feel anger, disappointment or betrayal when his name was removed from his book? Did he feel used and misled when James Sherard left him with little to no money? What was it like being considered a foreigner after spending your entire adult life in a place? Was he a foreigner to mosses too? Did he miss home? The saddest part of Dillenius’s story is that even today, his contribution is grouped under ‘Continental Botanists’ in the history of British bryology. He is neither celebrated in Germany, his homeland, nor in England, where he lived and is buried. His was a migrant’s fate. I felt an immediate affinity with Dillenius, a stranger who’d become a friend to me. During my walks along the Thames, I kept his stunning illustrations to hand and learnt to differentiate Polytrichum from Mnium in his company. I’d always enjoyed gazing at trees and listening to the woodland winds, but it takes an intentional reorientation of the mind and the senses to attend to moss. Moss doesn’t leap at you, it doesn’t arrest you like a pine’s needles or an oak’s arms; even when it appears marvellous, it doesn’t sustain your interest long enough to observe its minutiae. I wondered why a person like Dillenius, a rather unwelcome immigrant, poured all his energy and hope into plants we tend to overlook? As a historian, I’m tempted to list reasons: the rise of the scientific worldview, colonialism, the impulse to taxonomise the world of plants and peoples, the establishment of a botanical garden in Giessen in 1609. And all this might well be correct, but why mosses? Why this man? The archive is never complete. I grew up in a rain-drenched town in Punjab, India, where most months of the year I waded through mud and blocked rainwater to reach the corner shop of my neighbourhood. During monsoon, while the heavens poured and thundered, I’d play catch with my friends in the community park. I remember slipping over moss-covered rocks. I remember our bruised hips. We’d slip over kai twice, sometimes three times in one game. In Punjabi, kai doesn’t exactly mean moss. We don’t taxonomise lower plants into one category, like Bryophytes, based on their method of reproduction. The ancient texts of Ayurveda (a traditional healing system of north India) such as Susruta Samhita and Caraka Samhita classify plants into different categories based on their shape, texture, appearance, medicinal properties and habitats. For instance, Ceratophyllum demersum, or coontail, a hornwort, is known in Ayurveda by the names jalini, jalaja and jalanili, all of which mean: a plant that grows in water. Oral culture too attributes plants that we now know to be quite different morphologically to one category. I wonder if we classify them based on how they feel to our bodies, on the basis of touch, since kai is a common word used for all kinds of slippery plants – algae, lichen, mosses (but not all mosses). Any plant growth, especially near the ground, that makes you slip, fall or both is kai. The phrase that we use to refer to algae, lichen or a slippery moss over a rock is pathar utte kai jammi hoyi hai. The phrase has two meanings, at least. Roughly, it means: ‘Moss is frozen over the rock’ or ‘Moss is birthed by the rock.’ The rock is to moss what the soil is to a tree. I don’t mean to romanticise things, but I suspect the business of scarping and selling moss will never take off in Punjab. In the UK, however, moss is used ornamentally in homes, airports and hotels. Sphagnum moss, also known as peat or bog moss is used to increase the productivity of gardens; its habitats are home to rare wildlife and carbon reserves, but its use in horticulture is colossal. I wonder if, in addition to the labyrinth of a world-political economy in which Punjab has mostly been a site of agricultural experimentation and extraction rather than consumption, language has had a role to play in these historically different approaches to moss? In English, moss carpets a garden. Built into the language is the idea of moss as decoration, moss as a beautiful addition to nature. The word ‘carpet’ originates from the Latin carpere, which means to ‘pull to pieces’. To carpet an object is to pull and cover, cover and pull, the two actions deciding the fate of moss. Modern botany owes a considerable debt to opportunities provided by colonialism In the centuries that followed Dillenius, moss was pulled from all over the world to cover other worlds. In the name of science and civilisation, colonisers extracted and exploited Indigenous peoples and foreign lands and ecosystems. Historians of science such as Patricia Fara and Zaheer Baber have demonstrated that botanical expeditions of English and European scientists such as Joseph Banks helped consolidate Britain’s imperial power. In accompanying colonial officials on expeditions around the globe, botanists acquired economically and culturally pertinent botanical and agricultural knowledge through their practices of collection in various parts of the world including India. In the 1780s, the third Sherardian Professor of Botany at Oxford, John Sibthorp, travelled to Greece and present-day Turkey to observe and collect lichens. In April 1795, Sibthorp went to Cardamoula (present-day Kardamyli in Greece). Remarking on his journey, he wrote: ‘The nature of man seemed here to recover its erect form; we no longer observed the servility of mind and body which distinguishes the Greeks subjugated by the Turks.’ This was the era of colonialism and orientalism; Sherardian professors of botany were no exception. Modern botany and its near-global dominance owes a considerable debt to opportunities provided by colonialism. That the scientific collection or extraction of plants and the subjugation of peoples occurred simultaneously means that the colonisers touched everybody. Robert Clive touched India in 1748, only a year after Dillenius’s death, which arguably defined the course of British colonialism in the subcontinent. By 1794, the year Sibthorp wrote his Flora Oxoniensis, the most valuable historical account of the flora of Oxfordshire we have today, the East India Company had firmly established itself in India. The modern history of touching moss is one of elitism, colonialism and racism. When I touch moss on the ancient walls, cobblestone streets and gated colleges of Oxford, I realise touching moss has never been a question of intent but one of access. In 19th-century Britain, there were many working-class botanists, men and women who’d taught themselves botany by memorising the Latin names of plants in pubs after long and taxing work-hours. But the idea of doing botany in a public house was utterly disgraceful and horrifying for elite classes. While artisan botany became widespread in Manchester and Lancashire, it didn’t take off amid the spires of Oxford. In Britain’s colonies, colonialism turned touch into a privilege. While colonisers employed Indigenous peoples to do the touching for them, they retained the rights to knowledge about that which the ‘natives’ touched: mosses and the more-than-human world. They also repudiated any emotions and affects that anybody may have had towards the nonhuman. A plant became an object to be scrutinised. A moss, a carpet to be scraped and examined. You touch moss to bring it home and look at its structure under your university’s new microscope. You touch moss and yet you do not touch moss. Touching mosses, I did not feel at one with nature. I felt severed. There is no pure touch. No return to an unadulterated relationship with nature. No Moss Time. Between my fingertips and the sporophytes of a moss bed exist centuries of exploitation and extraction, and behind them, human hands, and the all-too-human touch. While working on this essay, I regularly visited an ash tree near my house. On its trunk, two types of mosses had begun to grow: common striated feather moss and Atrichum undulatum, a moss species with star-shaped leaves. I touched them every other day, but I didn’t know what to think or say about them. I wanted moss to tell me its story. Quiet, humble and peaceful, it said nothing. For weeks, I came home vexed and confused. Perhaps moss didn’t want me to tell its story in isolation, since moss is never alone. If anything, its story is one of touching barks, water, rocks, mountains, logs and humans. I can’t go to moss for peace and solitude, or to rejuvenate myself in nature’s lap, perhaps not even to ruminate on the nature and limitations of language. Touching moss will amount to nothing if I don’t question the web of human and more-than-human relationships from within which I touch it. Perhaps it is absurd, even fatuous, to contemplate if there is anything redemptive about touch. If touch itself, as an intersubjective sense of perception, has become corrupt, where does that leave our forever touching bodies and selves? I want to push against this interpretation. Because there is a touch beyond the history of touching too: the human capacity for touch and its existential, precarious, fleshy nature. The kind of touch that animated Dillenius’s days in Oxford despite everything. In a history of botany in England, the author Richard Pulteney in 1790 calls Dillenius as a ‘recluse’, described by a correspondent once as ‘busy in painting Fungi’. Busy touching nature. Richard Kearney, a continental philosopher, writes in his book Touch (2021): To touch and be touched simultaneously is to be connected with others in a way that prizes us open. Flesh is open-hearted – where we are most exposed, skin on skin, keenly attentive to wounds and scars (starting with the navel), alert to preconscious memories and traumas.In the Greek myth of King Midas, cursed with the ability to turn whatever he touches into gold, what perturbs and touches me is Midas’ desire to touch, and the metallic loneliness of his hand, but also what he forgets and what he remembers each time he touches somebody. The ‘fleshiness’ of touch bares us to the other – human and nonhuman, but also ourselves Touch as a haunting reminder of the violence inherent in the body. Touch that returns us to the past and its rugged terrain. As a kid, I used to play touch-and-go with my friends, the whole premise of which is that one person chases everybody else in an attempt to touch them. You had to tread the fine line between running with full force towards your friends, and hurting them with your eager hand. It wasn’t easy, and we sustained a few injuries, but we also came up with a solution: your touch counts only if it doesn’t hurt anybody. Touch as a cautious hand. The ‘fleshiness’ of touch bares us to the other – human and nonhuman, but also ourselves. The act of touching constitutes both the perceived and the perceiver, proposes Merleau-Ponty. In touching the nonhuman, I’m thrown into the world, in a Heideggerian sense, over and again, and each time I must reintegrate myself as what I was before touching. In this continuous operation of disintegration and reintegration, there is a generative moment where I’m not certain who I am, neither past-me, nor future-me. Am I human? Am I a part of this world? Can I change? If, in the act of touching nature, I’m not practising guileless ‘nature connectedness’ but a complicitous, historical and also utopian touch, perhaps touch can be reconceptualised as a complex, layered and resilient sense-perception. Perhaps it is the other way round. Not touch itself as the deliverance of one-dimensional, immediate experience, but what we – our history and present – have engineered it to be. Perhaps the apparent superficiality of touch is the fiction. The histories (colonial, racial, elitist) of human relationships with the nonhuman may have whitewashed and pigeonholed touch and its potential for radical reciprocity and for reckoning with the past and the present. I wonder if I can cultivate and harness touch not as a cure for my estrangement from the nonhuman world, but as an open-hearted exposure to that world, and ours. Touch from the old French toche, a blow or, even, an attack. Touch as a prizing open. Just before spring, I went for a walk in the woods. More logs had fallen. Glittering wood-moss, a moss species with red stems and feathery leaves, shimmered on the forest floor. I was reminded of the poem ‘Wild Garlic’ (2020) by Séan Hewitt in which he writes: ‘The world is dark / but the wood is full of stars.’ With no moon in sight and an overcast sky, the walk back home was melancholy. I pulled out my keys from my jacket and they fell on the ground. Under the streetlight, a silver-green moss, Bryum argenteum, shone out, cradling my keys. Moss is Earth’s memory living at my doorstep. I must welcome it inside: I must touch it and let it undo me.
I can hear weeds growing outside. I can hear my pores clogging. I can hear dust settling on the furniture. I can hear an ant finding its way under the back door. I can hear my arteries hardening. You try to prevent these things from happening, but there is no escape. Paint peels from the baseboards; the refrigerator hums, waiting to break; sunlight sears a faded spot across the rug; peaches grow soft and mouldy in a wire basket on the counter. And then there is the dirty laundry. Even as I am sleeping, dirty laundry fills hampers and overflows the sides, scatters across the floor, and begins its inexorable trek toward the washing machine. Nothing embodies the domesticated adult’s powerlessness quite like dirty laundry: its awesome flow through the home, a colourful river of little mud-spattered pants, stained dresses, greasy placemats, and musty towels. I might unclog a few pores, I could smash one or two ants, I can throw out the mouldy peaches, but trying to staunch that flow of dirty laundry is like trying to stop the flow of a river to the ocean. When I attempt to build a dam, the gods rain down more dirty laundry, and my dam breaks. Dirty laundry is eternal: it knows no boundaries. We learn a lot about ourselves, about our plight in life as former free spirits who mutated into heads of household, when we gaze into that crashing river of dirty laundry that rushes through the closets and hallways of our habitat. Do we feel powerless, when we finally recognise that we’ll never truly conquer it? Here’s how it is. One day, you’re sitting there, reading a good novel or watching something ridiculous on TV. The next day, you’re racing around the house, frantically wiping up spills, doing dishes, changing diapers, reading that goddamn pigeon-driving-the-bus book for the millionth time in a row, and you’re running behind. You’re always running behind, in fact. The fridge is empty, the kids are hungry, the floors are filthy, the bed is unmade, the dogs are restless, and all you and your husband want to know is: can we pay someone to do all of this taxing work so we can get fall-down-drunk on margaritas instead? And it’s almost comforting, to think that you could just hire someone and then go get wasted, as is your birthright. But whom could you possibly pay to tame the wild and turbulent surging of dirty laundry through your house? No mortal could be hired for this purpose, and thinking otherwise is an exercise in fantasy. In truth, there is no escape. You will be running around in little circles, spraying stains and emptying pockets for the rest of your life. You can feel your own mortality there, among the filthy socks and leggings with muddy knees Yes, it’s true that every now and then, you stop and say: ‘There. I did the laundry. The laundry is done.’ You are a fool. For even as you speak the words, the hamper is filling up. Saying ‘The laundry is done’ is like saying: ‘There, I am old. I am all done ageing.’ No. Just as you will get older and older until you die, you will always have laundry to do. Are you wearing clothes right now? That’s more laundry that needs to get done. Short of ditching your family and moving, all alone, to a remote nudist colony in the tropics, there will always be more dirty laundry. Sometimes I think of the old days, when laundry was just something I shoved aside, peeling off this top that smelled like an ashtray after a night out at a bar with friends, or tossing these shorts, sweaty from a morning jog, toward the hamper. The hamper filled slowly back then. One dirty towel added, one bra, one pair of pants. After a month or so, it would finally overflow and I’d load up two giant suitcases and head to the laundromat. There I’d empty everything into two industrial machines, then sit and read for a while. Laundry was just an excuse to leave the house and finish a good book. It was just a task I figured I wouldn’t do anymore, once I got rich. Ha, ha! Remember how we were all going to get rich some day? We were so full of possibilities, weren’t we, back when laundry was discrete, limited, bounded by space and time. You can feel your own mortality there, among the filthy socks and leggings with muddy knees. Once, you imagined that your life would be unfathomably glamorous. Why did you ever think that, again? What gave you the idea that you might live effortlessly in some spotless expanse of sunshiny wood floors, with healthy plants thriving, nice-smelling meals being cooked by someone else, and babies toddling about adorably? Instead, your children wade through enormous piles of dirty laundry, and proof of your inadequacy is everywhere. Five wet washcloths hanging on the shower curtain, two pairs of dirty socks under the dining room table, four crumpled dresses on the bedroom floor. These soiled artefacts embody the trivial chores that will fill up your balance of days on the earth, preventing you from achieving greatness. This is the strange gift that laundry brings to our lives. Its sheer mass, its magnitude, its ceaselessness make us aspire to greatness Of course, back when you were single and untroubled by laundry, were you actually progressing steadily toward greatness? No. You were trying to decide whether to order the pastrami or the roast beef for lunch, or you were getting your hair highlighted while flipping impatiently through a heavy fashion magazine, or you were neurotically reviewing your drunken conversation with a guy you met the night before for clues as to whether or not he was interested. But this is the strange gift that laundry brings to our lives. Its sheer mass, its magnitude, its ceaselessness make us aspire to greatness, even as such aspirations become less and less possible. When faced with such awesome power, we want to rise up, to harness the best within ourselves, to create something inspiring and wise! Why, then, must we spray stain remover on this little white smock instead? Why must our brilliant thoughts lie fallow, as we gather armfuls of laundry from hampers? One thing stands between you and the enviable career, the lasting legacy that you so richly deserve: dirty laundry. Dirty laundry also prevents you from communing intimately with your spouse. Surely you’d be uncorking a nice bottle of red, pouring it into glasses, and having a gentle and rambling talk about your day, if not for the numbing, impenetrable nothingness of piles of clean laundry, those folded stacks crowding you on your own bed, rendering impulsive affectionate gestures or intimate touches an impossibility. Children can’t be seen or heard, either, since they’re usually surrounded by dirty laundry. Sure, you would stop and give this one a little squeeze, or flash that one a smile, but, alas, there is laundry to be done. You awake before sunrise, hoping for a little time to yourself, but then you spot something: a pile of napkins from last night’s meal, cluttering up the hallway. You do your best to ignore it, but when you sit down to work, the image dominates your mind. No calm moments can be yours, with such soiled things creeping about, even in the dark of night. How can you leave the house, with so much laundry to do? Isn’t going out a little stupid, when you consider how far behind you’ll be on laundry? Why do anything, really, when it’ll only get interrupted by a washing-machine buzzer? The other day I watched a bear on a bicycle chase a monkey on a bicycle, in a YouTube video shot at a Shanghai circus. First the bear and the monkey pedalled furiously at opposite ends of the ring, riding in a circle. Slowly, the bear starting gaining on the monkey. Finally, the bear caught up to the monkey, crashing his bike into the monkey’s bike. Then the bear ate the monkey. One circus trainer yanked at the bear, trying to rip the monkey out of its claws, but this was obviously wasted energy. Another circus trainer stood and watched, but did nothing. Both circus trainers must have known how this story would end the day they bought that bear a bicycle. How many times did the bear dream of feeling that monkey between its jaws? How many nights did the monkey lie awake, worrying about it? By the time the monkey found itself inside that bear’s jaws, it must’ve felt like sweet relief, like salvation, a deliverance from lifelong suffering. The laundry will never be done. It doesn’t mean anything. Rather than pedalling faster and faster, the only answer is to surrender to the eternal tide. My life is no longer turgid with possibility. It is turgid with trivialities instead. But is there really that much of a difference between the two? Stare into that rushing river of textiles and ask the gods: ‘Why does it matter what I do? Who is watching, anyway?’ My children just look at me. Maybe their mom is a little unhinged. That’s OK. They’ll understand eventually We all have an undetermined number of days left on the earth, and there’s not much we can do to extend them. We have children who will grow up to be depressed or happy or resentful or generous, and we can’t form them like clay or guarantee that they’ll turn out one way or another. We have the things we have, rich or poor — or, like most of us, somewhere in the insecure in-between. Our windows are clean or dirty, our rugs are vacuumed or covered in dog hair, our closets are a mess or well-ordered, there are dirty dishes laying about or not. These things don’t define us, no matter how stubbornly we cling to the notion that they do. ‘Relax, you’ll die poor,’ someone wrote somewhere the other day. And it’s true: I’ll never have all the money and all the time in the world, to go anywhere or do anything. And even if I did, I’d probably still stay right here anyway, worried or overwhelmed or distracted by something unimportant. So instead, I will resolve to complete these repetitive tasks without wondering why, without wishing someone else would do them for me. Instead of viewing the chaos, the filth, the messes, the dirty windows, as a reflection of my ineffectual self, I will choose to see them through some kind of Zen, accepting haze. Instead of sorting and folding clothes faster and faster, maybe I’ll try to sit down for a second, and think about where I am and what I have. I have a house filled with dirty clothes. I have a machine to wash them in. I have big windows to smudge up. I have crazy dogs shedding all over my dirty floors. I can’t prevent the next mess, or clean this one up fast enough. What kind of small mind fixates on trivia, when the world is filled with so much beauty, and so many opportunities to love and be loved? Why run around making things look clean, when you can leave the dishes in the sink and order a pizza and eat it on the couch with the kids in front of the TV set, even though that’s supposed to mean you’re a bad parent, even though American Idol isn’t exactly educational programming? So what? Doesn’t that one girl make me cry every time she opens her mouth to sing? Doesn’t her voice change everything? And when my kids ask me why tears are rolling down my cheeks, I tell them that when someone can focus like that, with an open heart, with a calm mind, it’s like they’re channelling some divine force. There is nothing quite like that moment, I tell them, when you realise that you’re very small, that you’re not in control, but the grace of the whole world, the spirits of the dead, are rallying around you. In the soaring sound of her voice you can hear it: the sky is on her side. My children just look at me. Maybe their mom is a little unhinged. That’s OK. They’ll understand eventually. In the meantime, I will sit here, listening to the weeds growing outside, listening to my pores clogging, listening to the dust settling on the furniture, listening to the ant finding its way under the back door, listening to my arteries hardening. I will be still, letting the paint peel from the baseboards, letting the refrigerator hum until it breaks, letting the sunlight sear a faded spot across the rug, letting the peaches grow soft and mouldy in a wire basket on the counter. I will let these things happen. And it will feel good to be alive.
That's very true. And I think that what surprises me about that is the way that white America still really has no idea about the racial disparities that take place in the criminal justice system. I think with what O.J. Simpson did and what Katrina has done, these are issues that have highlighted the very starkly contrasted views between blacks and whites when they look at issues of race. And as--the O.J. Simpson verdict was one of those events that I will always remember where I was, what I was doing, similar to September 11th or--it was a huge event. I was in college at the time, and I can remember watching the students of Howard University cheering and high-fiving and feeling sick to my stomach about that because here we knew--it was rather obvious that this man was guilty. But a non-guilty verdict was returned because it was purely about race. And the--it was almost--it was...
Every single thing that's in the HHS, the health bill, there's job training, various feeding assistance for the homeless, there's more money for cancer research. There are all kinds of things that had been neglected during the last years when the Congress controlled the Congress, and now they're in there. But you can see earmarks that one can laugh at without knowing what they are. If there's a catamaran, or whatever it is, I don't know whether a Democrat or a Republican did that. So there are earmarks from both sides, and some of it is job training things. They are distressed districts where people have constituents who want things in their district.
In 1913, when the world seemed to totter precariously between progress and catastrophe, Henry Theophilus Finck published a book arguing that the source of the United States’ troubles was its citizens’ indifference to the attractions of a good meal. ‘The most important problem before the American public,’ he insisted in Food and Flavor: A Gastronomic Guide to Health and Good Living, ‘is to learn to enjoy the pleasures of the table.’ Part-manifesto, part-scientific treatise, part-culinary travelogue, Finck’s remarkable volume rejects puritanical hang-ups around gustatory indulgence, and proposes gourmandising as the key to both personal health and US national advancement. Finck argued that ‘Flavour’ – transcribed throughout the book ‘with a big “F” to emphasise its importance’ – was not a luxury, but a necessity. Enjoying ‘the pleasures of the table’, Finck wrote, ‘is our moral duty’. Even more, it was a civic responsibility. ‘We have not as a nation understood that there is nothing in the world on which our health and hourly comfort, our happiness and our capacity for hard work, depend so much as on the Flavour of food – those savoury qualities which make it appetising and enjoyable, and thus digestible and helpful,’ he wrote. The future of the US as a vital, productive, progressive nation depended on Americans taking flavour seriously. During his lifetime, Finck was best-known as a music critic. Born in Missouri in 1854 to German immigrant parents, he had grown up in rural Oregon – he was the first Oregonian to attend Harvard College – and had travelled widely throughout the US, as well as in Europe and Japan. He was in Germany for the first Bayreuth festival in 1876, which he wrote about for the New York World. He went on to serve as the New York Evening Post’s chief music writer, championing composers such as Franz Liszt and Edvard Grieg during a 40-year career at the paper. A polymath, Finck’s interests were far-ranging. In addition to many volumes on music, his published works include a theory of romantic love, a treatise on gardening, and a dieting book. Finck took up the cause of deliciousness at a time when the food that people ate and where it came from were changing rapidly. Industrialisation, urbanisation and new technologies such as cold storage, canning and hydrogenation were transforming how food was produced and consumed. More Americans were eating food prepared outside the home, including processed food made in factories by giant companies such as Heinz, Campbell’s, and the National Biscuit Company (Nabisco). Finck fretted that these changes made for an increasingly ‘ungastronomic America’. Everywhere flavour receded before increased profits or improved efficiency. ‘Time was when a crisp slice of bacon would give zest to a whole breakfast,’ Finck complained, ‘but the bacon served now… has no more flavour than sawdust,’ as chemical preservatives replaced time-honoured methods of smoking and curing. Machine-polished rice was white and ‘pretty to look at’ but, ‘deprived of its nutritious outer parts’, it was ‘as tasteless as the paste that a paper-hanger brushes on his rolls of wallpaper’. The US frozen chicken was ‘foul’; its sodden canned oysters insipid; its butter bland … ‘the melancholy list of gastronomic misdeeds might be prolonged indefinitely,’ he wrote. In comparison, Europe boasted crusty loaves, dazzling varieties of cured meats, savoury vegetable salads and redolent cheeses. The problem was not that industrial modernity seemed to produce only diluted simulacra of remembered bacon, or that food technology had somehow made it impossible to find honestly smoked whitefish in New York City. The problem, Finck lamented, was that most Americans did not care. They consumed food insensibly, bolting down poorly prepared slop during rushed meals. They had no respect for the art and science of cooking, for the intelligence, skill and creativity of the trained chef. They didn’t know how to savour flavour. Finck believed that the neglect of flavour had an enervating effect on the US people, despite the country’s bounty of food. Dyspepsia was a ‘national plague’, a chronic condition that sapped the vitality, productivity and fertility of US citizens. ‘The stomach is the source of most preventable diseases,’ Finck testified, a view widely shared by contemporaries ranging from John Harvey Kellogg, whose Battle Creek Sanitarium helped to define the epidemic and its cereal-based cure, to Harvey Wiley, who, as chief of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Bureau of Chemistry, had spearheaded the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. Unique among his peers, however, Finck pleaded for the primacy of gustatory pleasure in the movement to fortify national health. Others shared Finck’s misgivings about the changing US diet. The aforementioned Pure Food and Drug Act, the pioneering national law to preserve public health and prevent fraud, reflected the growing consensus that regulation was necessary to ensure the safety and integrity of the food supply. The Bureau of Chemistry – a precursor to the Food and Drug Administration – was deputised to enforce the law, using laboratory methods to detect contamination and to weed out consumer deceptions. The Bureau, however, focused on matters that could be resolved with scientific evidence: whether or not milk was tainted or watered-down, or whether glucose syrup was being dishonestly sold as honey. Its agents were not quality or taste of food staples. Around the same time, the emerging science of nutrition was changing the way people thought about food and human needs. Nineteenth-century chemical analysis had shown all edible matter to be composed of certain basic types of molecules, such as proteins and starches that the body utilised in distinct ways, and that had definite energetic values, measured in kilocalories. The body was an engine, and food was its fuel. Nutritionists calculated the ideal diet in terms of macronutrients and calories. Maximal nutritional efficiency meant meeting human metabolic needs at the lowest possible cost. This ideology shaped government policies and progressive efforts for food reform. Where did flavour fit into these new nutritional equations? In short, it didn’t. Flavour was not, strictly speaking, necessary: it had no quantifiable ‘food value’. Once flavour was factored out, equivalencies and substitutions between very different foods – cheap baked beans, say, for costlier lamb chops – could be established. As the historian Helen Zoe Veit at Michigan State University pointed out in Modern Food, Moral Food (2013), the rationalisation of food and eating in the Progressive era emphasised self-control and self-discipline, not enjoyment and indulgence. In fact, many health reformers preferred bland, highly processed foods, believing that spices, condiments and other flavourings acted as stimulants that could derange a delicate system. Into this quantifying consensus on the meaning of rational eating, Finck launched his defence of the pleasures of the table, his plea for gustatory self-indulgence as a ‘moral duty’. Like the proponents of the ‘New Nutrition’, Finck also claimed to have science on his side. In particular, he drew on the work of Ivan Pavlov, the Russian physiologist whose studies on digestion earned him the 1904 Nobel Prize. Pavlov’s experiments on dogs focused on the glands, the ‘chemical factories’ of digestion. Pavlov had shown that the operation of this apparently mechanistic system was dependent on a ‘psychic secretion’ – appetite. Appetite, a mental phenomenon, triggered a cascade of physiological changes – the activation of the salivary glands, the release of digestive enzymes, and the flow of gastric fluid – without which proper digestion could not occur. In Finck’s account of Pavlov’s findings, ‘appetite juice’ flowed plentifully in those who ate with true desire and delectation. But Finck warned that ‘the man who eats without noticing his food’ was setting himself up for ‘digestive disturbances with all the various diseases following them’. He blamed, in part, modern society, which left man ‘unable to distract his thoughts from his work’ in the ‘incessant turmoil of large cities’. Medical science would be powerless to help until modern man ‘reforms and eats rationally’. ‘Slow and rational eating’ would reveal unsuspected depths of flavour even in hardtack biscuits or potatoes Eating rationally, for Finck, meant eating with sensual enjoyment and appreciation. By stimulating the appetite, flavour allowed the body to convert the latent, abstract nutritional value of foods into utilitarian value. Here Finck claimed the full experience of taste as the currency that could build and sustain living bodies. If health began in digestion, it was flavour that made the stomach work. Finck also called upon the authority of popular health reformers, most notably Horace Fletcher, to make his case. Fletcher, known as ‘the great masticator’, claimed to have restored his own debilitated health through a programme of deliberate and intensive chewing. According to Fletcher, dyspepsia resulted from a faulty division of labour between mouth and belly. By chewing every mouthful until it dribbled down the gullet in a state of complete liquefaction, those troubled in body and spirit could achieve strength and serenity, immunity from disease, and odourless bowel movements. Finck expressed some reservations about Fletcher’s regimen, and does not appear to have subscribed to the full masticatory programme. He did, however, endorse Fletcher’s assertion that ‘slow and rational eating’ would reveal unsuspected depths of flavour even in plain foods, such as hardtack biscuits or potatoes. He approvingly repeated Fletcher’s observation that those who hastily gobble down their meals receive ‘none of the exquisite taste that Nature’s way offers as an allurement for obeying her beneficent demands’. Finck invoked his own scientific findings to affirm this poetic view of nature and nutrition. As an undergraduate at Harvard, he had studied sensation and perception in humans and animals. A fellowship allowed him to continue his studies in Germany, then the centre of scientific research on the senses. Finck was drawn to the relatively neglected senses of smell and taste. His experiments demonstrated the central role of odour in flavour perception – a connection not widely recognised at the time. ‘Gastronomic delights,’ he noted, ‘come to us through the sense of smell.’ In the 1880s, Finck was among the first to describe a distinct olfactory pathway through the back of the throat, one stimulated by exhalation while eating. This phenomenon, now known as retronasal olfaction, has come to be recognised as crucial to human flavour perception, and also, perhaps, to the evolution of our species. Finck assembled these pieces into a practical method of eating, one where the habits of the gourmand aligned with the body’s actual needs. The rational eater chewed thoroughly and thoughtfully, each slow exhalation carrying food’s delectable aromas through the nose’s back-door to the perceiving, delighted mind. This not only ‘quintupled’ pleasure and increased connoisseurship, it also stimulated the appetite, readying the body to assimilate food’s nutritional value. In other words, good taste leads to efficient, serene digestion, which builds healthy, disease-free bodies, productive citizens of a strong and vital nation. By connecting sensory experience with physiological wellbeing, Finck’s science of flavour had uncovered a biological circuit where pleasure and virtue coincide. Once Americans were awakened to flavour-consciousness, Finck predicted the dawning of a ‘Gastronomic America’. Welcome to flavour country. In Finck’s telling, ‘Gastronomic America’ was not just a healthier, more productive place, where pleasures were superabundant. It would occasion a profound reordering of social relations, customs and economies. Cooks would no longer be regarded as low-status labourers, but would achieve new levels of respect, celebrity and remuneration. Food and Flavor contains a lengthy, full-throated celebration of the local, the particular and the regionally specific. Farmers would turn to cultivating varieties of fruits, grains and vegetables that tantalised the palate. Just as novelists had ‘coined large sums by exploiting local colour in their tales’, Finck suggested that women could earn extra money by making preserves and other products that captured local flavours of wild fruits and berries. Manufacturers would favour processes that preserved flavour, even at somewhat higher costs. Flavour, after all, was not just health, it constituted commercial value – an economic force that could turn the food producers who paid attention to it into ‘millionaires’. Finck’s vision was deliberately non-elite and determinedly democratic. What he called ‘a civilised meal’ should be available, he insisted, ‘not only in those who can cross the ocean and pay for Parisian dainties’, but also to the ‘humblest tiller of the soil or railway employee’. A full third of Food and Flavor comprises a picaresque journey through European capitals and countrysides, detailing the gastronomic highlights of France, Italy, central Europe and Britain. Yet Finck is not interested in replicating old-world food traditions on US soil, but transplanting effective systems for producing and distributing flavourful foods. For instance, Finck describes the networks of refrigerated steamers and express trains in Germany that delivered fresh fish throughout the country; the policies that protected Italian olive oil from cottonseed and other cheaper substitutes; the network of market gardens that supplied Les Halles with vegetables and fruits. In other words, achieving a ‘Gastronomic America’ would take more than crafty ladies selling their loganberry jam at the farmer’s market. A nation of gourmets required assembling a system that could produce appetising food at scale, distribute it nationally, and make it available at a reasonable cost. ‘Real epicurism is economical,’ he insisted. Finck enumerated ‘three cardinal principles of gastronomy’ that should guide the US: The food from which we chiefly derive our nourishment is for the most part cheap. We need more or less expensive flavour in food to make it appetising and digestible; but, fortunately We need very little of the savoury material to flavour a bountiful meal.Certainly, Gastronomic America would mean alterations to individual eating and cooking habits. But Finck’s programme was also a supply-side proposition, a programme for the mass-production of deliciousness. Finck called for a ‘governmental gastronomy’, a directed programme of investment, education and research conducted through the USDA and state scientific agencies. Government researchers would produce the scientific and technical knowledge necessary to assist farmers, manufacturers and ordinary citizens in the great project of flavour improvement. Contrary to the conventional wisdom of our own day, in Finck’s vision the modern and scientific industrial food system and a Gastronomic America were not at odds, but deeply interdependent. Finck dedicated Food and Flavor to Luther Burbank, a pioneering horticulturalist. Burbank operated within the industrial food system, not against it, developing varieties of fruits and vegetables that could survive long-distance transportation without damage, that were suitable for processing, canning and large-scale cultivation. Finck recognised the flavour deficits of the industrial foods of his own day, but he did not believe this to be an inevitable consequence of industrialisation or of large-scale food production. It was, instead, evidence of food science’s misapplications and mistaken goals. In a Gastronomic America, good taste would guide good science – leading to technological leaps in production and processing that multiplied, intensified and distributed more and better flavours to more and more people. Finck died in 1926, of a cerebral haemorrhage. He was 72. Food and Flavor faded into the dusty oblivion of used bookshops and library deaccessions. Yet in some ways, Finck’s extraordinary vision came to pass. The 20th century brought us an organised, multidisciplinary science of flavour. As in Finck’s plan, government agencies – USDA laboratories, agricultural experiment stations, federally funded land-grant colleges, and the US military – played a major role. The food industry and associated businesses, such as the flavour and fragrance industry, have flourished, and in them scientists and engineers developed ways of stabilising, standardising, imitating and enhancing flavours. Meanwhile, techniques for studying human psychological and behavioural responses to food have followed. Certainly, the benefits of flavour science were unevenly distributed in the food-production system, favouring flavour that was added rather than grown-in. Yet flavour technology has recalibrated our expectations for the kinds of sensations that all food should deliver, whether it’s a stalk of broccolini or a unicorn latte. If our great-grandparents, a century ago, were more concerned with the external accoutrements of a meal, its social contexts or its nutritional contents, we are increasingly concerned with our subjective experiences, sensory satisfactions and personal tastes. If we all now accept that flavour is necessary, in a food system saturated with flavours of all kinds, the qualitative question of flavour remains, perhaps more than ever, unsettled. For Finck, flavour’s value was self-evident. Although he acknowledged that there can be no consensus on matters of taste, any food that gave pleasure would stimulate the appetite – that firm handshake between mind and body that was the hallmark of efficient, untroubled digestion. There was no good or bad flavour, just flavour, whose appreciation would lead, unerringly, both to more pleasure and to better health. We can have it all: pleasure and health, baked into a pure loaf studded with self-congratulatory nuggets of goodness Although the precise logic of Finck’s argument is in history’s dustbin, the link between good taste and good health has increasing cultural currency. The recuperation of the gastronomic reputation of health food is evidence of this. Not long ago associated with dismal, underseasoned pap, health food now tumbles together ‘global’ authenticity, transformative nutrition and socially progressive values into Instagrammable vignettes: jewel-toned superfoods packed with powerful antioxidants and phytonutrients, ‘exotic’ grains such as quinoa and freekeh, golden turmeric and nutty mylks. In today’s cultural landscape, a healthy diet is not characterised by deprivation and asceticism, but by multisensory, passionate indulgence and, importantly, ethical action. The uplifting message of our moment echoes Finck’s of a century ago: we can have it all. Pleasure and health. Authentic, yummy, fresh food. Sustainability and economic renewal. Baked together into a pure and golden loaf studded with self-congratulatory nuggets of goodness. ‘Eat real food,’ Michael Pollan counsels, and pleasure and wellness will follow. We are warned against flavours that are delicious without being ‘good’. Today, food technology is singled out for designing food that is literally irresistible. As Michael Moss described in Salt, Sugar, Fat (2013), ‘big food’ has organised itself around the pursuit of the ‘hyperpalatable’, products aiming for the sensory ‘bliss point’, delivering compulsive flavour while withholding nutritional value. The eaters of these foods, the ones who prefer them, are disdained for their tastes even as their choices are to be pitied, bearing on their bodies the stigma. The stakes of good taste seem higher than ever, separating those whose virtuous choices reinforce health and life from those whose bad appetites lead them towards disease and death. But promising health and wellbeing as the outcomes of individual good taste has implications that we might pause to consider. The food that gets counted as ‘good’ (‘real food’) is less evidently technological, more ‘natural’, less ‘processed’ – and often more expensive. As the historian Rachel Laudan has noted, eating less processed food means processing more of your own food – a redistribution of labour towards the private household, and often women. Unlike Finck’s democratising vision of flavour and health, good food is often associated with the resources, the access and the time to procure, prepare and enjoy it. Good taste – and good health – remains elite, a mark of distinction, and chiefly a privilege of the fortunate or the wealthy. More importantly, food habits are portrayed primarily as matters of individual choice (reflections of good or bad taste) and personal responsibility, rather than the results of complex social and technological systems. Flavour is necessary, but it is not health.
You know, it's called the theory of evolution, but really among scientists it is so widely accepted as to be closer to a law, like the law of gravity. You can't violate the law of gravity. But what's also very interesting about Kansas is that the Board of Education actually rewrote the definition of the word `science' so that they could meet this requirement. Science is no longer--at least in Kansas, science is no longer just a search for the natural explanation for the world around us using nature. You're not limited to nature in Kansas. Presumably that means that supernatural explanations can be used in this version of science.
All the time. The phrase, which is called Takbeer, turns up again and again in religious contexts. For example, the call to prayer begins with four repetitions of Allhu Akbar. Muslims also say it after slaughtering an animal, and some whisper it along with the rest of the call to prayer into the ear of a newborn baby. Muslims can use Allhu Akbar to express general approval or even as an exclamation of surprise. Sometimes crowds will shout the phrase as a form of applause, the way people might yell bravo at the end of a performance. It can be heard after Quranic readings and at soccer matches. Allhu Akbar isn't appropriate for all occasions. A pious person wouldn't say it in the bathroom and might frown upon its use in jokes. Although newspapers often translate the phrase as God is great, the proper translation is actually God is greater.
Well, good morning. You know, the computer and television both recently turned 60, and today I'd like to talk about their relationship. Despite their middle age, if you've been following the themes of this conference or the entertainment industry, it's pretty clear that one has been picking on the other. So it's about time that we talked about how the computer ambushed television, or why the invention of the atomic bomb unleashed forces that lead to the writers' strike. And it's not just what these are doing to each other, but it's what the audience thinks that really frames this matter. To get a sense of this, and it's been a theme we've talked about all week, I recently talked to a bunch of tweeners. I wrote on cards: "television," "radio," "MySpace," "Internet," "PC." And I said, just arrange these, from what's important to you and what's not, and then tell me why. Let's listen to what happens when they get to the portion of the discussion on television. (Video) Girl 1: Well, I think it's important but, like, not necessary because you can do a lot of other stuff with your free time than watch programs. Peter Hirshberg: Which is more fun, Internet or TV? Girls: Internet. Girl 2: I think we — the reasons, one of the reasons we put computer before TV is because nowadays, like, we have TV shows on the computer. (Girl 3: Oh, yeah.) Girl 2: And then you can download onto your iPod. PH: Would you like to be the president of a TV network? Girl 4: I wouldn't like it. Girl 2: That would be so stressful. Girl 5: No. PH: How come? Girl 5: Because they're going to lose all their money eventually. Girl 3: Like the stock market, it goes up and down and stuff. I think right now the computers will be at the top and everything will be kind of going down and stuff. PH: There's been an uneasy relationship between the TV business and the tech business, really ever since they both turned about 30. We go through periods of enthrallment, followed by reactions in boardrooms, in the finance community best characterized as, what's the finance term? Ick pooey. Let me give you an example of this. The year is 1976, and Warner buys Atari because video games are on the rise. The next year they march forward and they introduce Qube, the first interactive cable TV system, and the New York Times heralds this as telecommunications moving to the home, convergence, great things are happening. Everybody in the East Coast gets in the pictures — Citicorp, Penney, RCA — all getting into this big vision. By the way, this is about when I enter the picture. I'm going to do a summer internship at Time Warner. That summer I'm all — I'm at Warner that summer — I'm all excited to work on convergence, and then the bottom falls out. Doesn't work out too well for them, they lose money. And I had a happy brush with convergence until, kind of, Warner basically has to liquidate the whole thing. That's when I leave graduate school, and I can't work in New York on kind of entertainment and technology because I have to be exiled to California, where the remaining jobs are, almost to the sea, to go to work for Apple Computer. Warner, of course, writes off more than 400 million dollars. Four hundred million dollars, which was real money back in the '70s. But they were onto something and they got better at it. By the year 2000, the process was perfected. They merged with AOL, and in just four years, managed to shed about 200 billion dollars of market capitalization, showing that they'd actually mastered the art of applying Moore's law of successive miniaturization to their balance sheet. (Laughter) Now, I think that one reason that the media and the entertainment communities, or the media community, is driven so crazy by the tech community is that tech folks talk differently. You know, for 50 years, we've talked about changing the world, about total transformation. For 50 years, it's been about hopes and fears and promises of a better world. And I got to thinking, you know, who else talks that way? And the answer is pretty clearly — it's people in religion and in politics. And so I realized that actually the tech world is best understood, not as a business cycle, but as a messianic movement. We promise something great, we evangelize it, we're going to change the world. It doesn't work out too well, and so we actually go back to the well and start all over again, as the people in New York and L.A. look on in absolute, morbid astonishment. But it's this irrational view of things that drives us on to the next thing. So, what I'd like to ask is, if the computer is becoming a principal tool of media and entertainment, how did we get here? I mean, how did a machine that was built for accounting and artillery morph into media? Of course, the first computer was built just after World War II to solve military problems, but things got really interesting just a couple of years later — 1949 with Whirlwind, built at MIT's Lincoln Lab. Jay Forrester was building this for the Navy, but you can't help but see that the creator of this machine had in mind a machine that might actually be a potential media star. So take a look at what happens when the foremost journalist of early television meets one of the foremost computer pioneers, and the computer begins to express itself. (Video) Journalist: It's a Whirlwind electronic computer. With considerable trepidation, we undertake to interview this new machine. Jay Forrester: Hello New York, this is Cambridge. And this is the oscilloscope of the Whirlwind electronic computer. Would you like if I used the machine? Journalist: Yes, of course. But I have an idea, Mr. Forrester. Since this computer was made in conjunction with the Office of Naval Research, why don't we switch down to the Pentagon in Washington and let the Navy's research chief, Admiral Bolster, give Whirlwind the workout? Calvin Bolster: Well, Ed, this problem concerns the Navy's Viking rocket. This rocket goes up 135 miles into the sky. Now, at the standard rate of fuel consumption, I would like to see the computer trace the flight path of this rocket and see how it can determine, at any instant, say at the end of 40 seconds, the amount of fuel remaining, and the velocity at that set instant. JF: Over on the left-hand side, you will notice fuel consumption decreasing as the rocket takes off. And on the right-hand side, there's a scale that shows the rocket's velocity. The rocket's position is shown by the trajectory that we're now looking at. And as it reaches the peak of its trajectory, the velocity, you will notice, has dropped off to a minimum. Then, as the rocket dives down, velocity picks up again toward a maximum velocity and the rocket hits the ground. How's that? Journalist: What about that, Admiral? CB: Looks very good to me. JF: And before leaving, we would like to show you another kind of mathematical problem that some of the boys have worked out in their spare time, in a less serious vein, for a Sunday afternoon. (Music) Journalist: Thank you very much indeed, Mr. Forrester and the MIT lab. PH: You know, so much was worked out: the first real-time interaction, the video display, pointing a gun. It lead to the microcomputer, but unfortunately, it was too pricey for the Navy, and all of this would have been lost if it weren't for a happy coincidence. Enter the atomic bomb. We're threatened by the greatest weapon ever, and knowing a good thing when it sees it, the Air Force decides it needs the biggest computer ever to protect us. They adapt Whirlwind to a massive air defense system, deploy it all across the frozen north, and spend nearly three times as much on this computer as was spent on the Manhattan Project building the A-Bomb in the first place. Talk about a shot in the arm for the computer industry. And you can imagine that the Air Force became a pretty good salesman. Here's their marketing video. (Video) Narrator: In a mass raid, high-speed bombers could be in on us before we could determine their tracks. And then it would be too late to act. We cannot afford to take that chance. It is to meet this threat that the Air Force has been developing SAGE, the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment system, to strengthen our air defenses. This new computer, built to become the nerve center of a defense network, is able to perform all the complex mathematical problems involved in countering a mass enemy raid. It is provided with its own powerhouse containing large diesel-driven generators, air-conditioning equipment, and cooling towers required to cool the thousands of vacuum tubes in the computer. PH: You know, that one computer was huge. There's an interesting marketing lesson from it, which is basically, when you market a product, you can either say, this is going to be wonderful, it will make you feel better and enliven you. Or there's one other marketing proposition: if you don't use our product, you'll die. This is a really good example of that. This had the first pointing device. It was distributed, so it worked out — distributed computing and modems — so all these things could talk to each other. About 20 percent of all the nation's programmers were wrapped up in this thing, and it led to an awful lot of what we have today. It also used vacuum tubes. You saw how huge it was, and to give you a sense for this — because we've talked a lot about Moore's law and making things small at this conference, so let's talk about making things large. If we took Whirlwind and put it in a place that you all know, say, Century City, it would fit beautifully. You'd kind of have to take Century City out, but it could fit in there. But like, let's imagine we took the latest Pentium processor, the latest Core 2 Extreme, which is a four-core processor that Intel's working on, it will be our laptop tomorrow. To build that, what we'd do with Whirlwind technology is we'd have to take up roughly from the 10 to Mulholland, and from the 405 to La Cienega just with those Whirlwinds. And then, the 92 nuclear power plants that it would take to provide the power would fill up the rest of Los Angeles. That's roughly a third more nuclear power than all of France creates. So, the next time they tell you they're on to something, clearly they're not. So — and we haven't even worked out the cooling needs. But it gives you the kind of power that people have, that the audience has, and the reasons these transformations are happening. All of this stuff starts moving into industry. DEC kind of reduces all this and makes the first mini-computer. It shows up at places like MIT, and then a mutation happens. Spacewar! is built, the first computer game, and all of a sudden, interactivity and involvement and passion is worked out. Actually, many MIT students stayed up all night long working on this thing, and many of the principles of gaming today were worked out. DEC knew a good thing about wasting time. It shipped every one of its computers with that game. Meanwhile, as all of this is happening, by the mid-'50s, the business model of traditional broadcasting and cinema has been busted completely. A new technology has confounded radio men and movie moguls and they're quite certain that television is about to do them in. In fact, despair is in the air. And a quote that sounds largely reminiscent from everything I've been reading all week. RCA had David Sarnoff, who basically commercialized radio, said this, "I don't say that radio networks must die. Every effort has been made and will continue to be made to find a new pattern, new selling arrangements and new types of programs that may arrest the declining revenues. It may yet be possible to eke out a poor existence for radio, but I don't know how." And of course, as the computer industry develops interactively, producers in the emerging TV business actually hit on the same idea. And they fake it. (Video) Jack Berry: Boys and girls, I think you all know how to get your magic windows up on the set, you just get them out. First of all, get your Winky Dink kits out. Put out your Magic Window and your erasing glove, and rub it like this. That's the way we get some of the magic into it, boys and girls. Then take it and put it right up against the screen of your own television set, and rub it out from the center to the corners, like this. Make sure you keep your magic crayons handy, your Winky Dink crayons and your erasing glove, because you'll be using them during the show to draw like that. You all set? OK, let's get right to the first story about Dusty Man. Come on into the secret lab. PH: It was the dawn of interactive TV, and you may have noticed they wanted to sell you the Winky Dink kits. Those are the Winky Dink crayons. I know what you're saying. "Pete, I could use any ordinary open-source crayon, why do I have to buy theirs?" I assure you, that's not the case. Turns out they told us directly that these are the only crayons you should ever use with your Winky Dink Magic Window, other crayons may discolor or hurt the window. This proprietary principle of vendor lock-in would go on to be perfected with great success as one of the enduring principles of windowing systems everywhere. It led to lawsuits — (Laughter) — federal investigations, and lots of repercussions, and that's a scandal we won't discuss today. But we will discuss this scandal, because this man, Jack Berry, the host of "Winky Dink," went on to become the host of "Twenty One," one of the most important quiz shows ever. And it was rigged, and it became unraveled when this man, Charles van Doren, was outed after an unnatural winning streak, ending Berry's career. And actually, ending the career of a lot of people at CBS. It turns out there was a lot to learn about how this new medium worked. And 50 years ago, if you'd been at a meeting like this and were trying to understand the media, there was one prophet and only but one you wanted to hear from, Professor Marshall McLuhan. He actually understood something about a theme that we've been discussing all week. It's the role of the audience in an era of pervasive electronic communications. Here he is talking from the 1960s. (Video) Marshall McLuhan: If the audience can become involved in the actual process of making the ad, then it's happy. It's like the old quiz shows. They were great TV because it gave the audience a role, something to do. They were horrified when they discovered they'd really been left out all the time because the shows were rigged. Now, then, this was a horrible misunderstanding of TV on the part of the programmers. PH: You know, McLuhan talked about the global village. If you substitute the word blogosphere, of the Internet today, it is very true that his understanding is probably very enlightening now. Let's listen in to him. (Video) MM: The global village is a world in which you don't necessarily have harmony. You have extreme concern with everybody else's business and much involvement in everybody else's life. It's a sort of Ann Landers' column writ large. And it doesn't necessarily mean harmony and peace and quiet, but it does mean huge involvement in everybody else's affairs. And so the global village is as big as a planet, and as small as a village post office. PH: We'll talk a little bit more about him later. We're now right into the 1960s. It's the era of big business and data centers for computing. But all that was about to change. You know, the expression of technology reflects the people and the time of the culture it was built in. And when I say that code expresses our hopes and aspirations, it's not just a joke about messianism, it's actually what we do. But for this part of the story, I'd actually like to throw it to America's leading technology correspondent, John Markoff. (Video) John Markoff: Do you want to know what the counterculture in drugs, sex, rock 'n' roll and the anti-war movement had to do with computing? Everything. It all happened within five miles of where I'm standing, at Stanford University, between 1960 and 1975. In the midst of revolution in the streets and rock and roll concerts in the parks, a group of researchers led by people like John McCarthy, a computer scientist at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, and Doug Engelbart, a computer scientist at SRI, changed the world. Engelbart came out of a pretty dry engineering culture, but while he was beginning to do his work, all of this stuff was bubbling on the mid-peninsula. There was LSD leaking out of Kesey's Veterans' Hospital experiments and other areas around the campus, and there was music literally in the streets. The Grateful Dead was playing in the pizza parlors. People were leaving to go back to the land. There was the Vietnam War. There was black liberation. There was women's liberation. This was a remarkable place, at a remarkable time. And into that ferment came the microprocessor. I think it was that interaction that led to personal computing. They saw these tools that were controlled by the establishment as ones that could actually be liberated and put to use by these communities that they were trying to build. And most importantly, they had this ethos of sharing information. I think these ideas are difficult to understand, because when you're trapped in one paradigm, the next paradigm is always like a science fiction universe — it makes no sense. The stories were so compelling that I decided to write a book about them. The title of the book is, "What the Dormouse Said: How the '60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry." The title was taken from the lyrics to a Jefferson Airplane song. The lyrics go, "Remember what the dormouse said. Feed your head, feed your head, feed your head." (Music) PH: By this time, computing had kind of leapt into media territory, and in short order much of what we're doing today was imagined in Cambridge and Silicon Valley. Here's the Architecture Machine Group, the predecessor of the Media Lab, in 1981. Meanwhile, in California, we were trying to commercialize a lot of this stuff. HyperCard was the first program to introduce the public to hyperlinks, where you could randomly hook to any kind of picture, or piece of text, or data across a file system, and we had no way of explaining it. There was no metaphor. Was it a database? A prototyping tool? A scripted language? Heck, it was everything. So we ended up writing a marketing brochure. We asked a question about how the mind works, and we let our customers play the role of so many blind men filling out the elephant. A few years later, we then hit on the idea of explaining to people the secret of, how do you get the content you want, the way you want it and the easy way? Here's the Apple marketing video. (Video) James Burke: You'll be pleased to know, I'm sure, that there are several ways to create a HyperCard interactive video. The most involved method is to go ahead and produce your own videodisc as well as build your own HyperCard stacks. By far the simplest method is to buy a pre-made videodisc and HyperCard stacks from a commercial supplier. The method we illustrate in this video uses a pre-made videodisc but creates custom HyperCard stacks. This method allows you to use existing videodisc materials in ways which suit your specific needs and interests. PH: I hope you realize how subversive that is. That's like a Dick Cheney speech. You think he's a nice balding guy, but he's just declared war on the content business. Find the commercial stuff, mash it up, tell the story your way. Now, as long as we confine this to the education market, and a personal matter between the computer and the file system, that's fine, but as you can see, it was about to leap out and upset Jack Valenti and a lot of other people. By the way, speaking of the filing system, it never occurred to us that these hyperlinks could go beyond the local area network. A few years later, Tim Berners-Lee worked that out. It became a killer app of links, and today, of course, we call that the World Wide Web. Now, not only was I instrumental in helping Apple miss the Internet, but a couple of years later, I helped Bill Gates do the same thing. The year is 1993 and he was working on a book and I was working on a video to help him kind of explain where we were all heading and how to popularize all this. We were plenty aware that we were messing with media, and on the surface, it looks like we predicted a lot of the right things, but we also missed an awful lot. Let's take a look. (Video) Narrator: The pyramids, the Colosseum, the New York subway system and TV dinners, ancient and modern wonders of the man-made world all. Yet each pales to insignificance with the completion of that magnificent accomplishment of twenty-first-century technology, the Digital Superhighway. Once it was only a dream of technoids and a few long-forgotten politicians. The Digital Highway arrived in America's living rooms late in the twentieth century. Let us recall the pioneers who made this technical marvel possible. The Digital Highway would follow the rutted trail first blazed by Alexander Graham Bell. Though some were incredulous ... Man 1: The phone company! Narrator: Stirred by the prospects of mass communication and making big bucks on advertising, David Sarnoff commercializes radio. Man 2: Never had scientists been put under such pressure and demand. Narrator: The medium introduced America to new products. Voice 1: Say, mom, Windows for Radio means more enjoyment and greater ease of use for the whole family. Be sure to enjoy Windows for Radio at home and at work. Narrator: In 1939, the Radio Corporation of America introduced television. Man 2: Never had scientists been put under such pressure and demand. Narrator: Eventually, the race to the future took on added momentum with the breakup of the telephone company. And further stimulus came with the deregulation of the cable television industry, and the re-regulation of the cable television industry. Ted Turner: We did the work to build this, this cable industry, now the broadcasters want some of our money. I mean, it's ridiculous. Narrator: Computers, once the unwieldy tools of accountants and other geeks, escaped the backrooms to enter the media fracas. The world and all its culture reduced to bits, the lingua franca of all media. And the forces of convergence exploded. Finally, four great industrial sectors combined. Telecommunications, entertainment, computing and everything else. Man 3: We'll see channels for the gourmet and we'll see channels for the pet lover. Voice 2: Next on the gourmet pet channel, decorating birthday cakes for your schnauzer. Narrator: All of industry was in play, as investors flocked to place their bets. At stake: the battle for you, the consumer, and the right to spend billions to send a lot of information into the parlors of America. (Music) PH: We missed a lot. You know, you missed, we missed the Internet, the long tail, the role of the audience, open systems, social networks. It just goes to show how tough it is to come up with the right uses of media. Thomas Edison had the same problem. He wrote a list of what the phonograph might be good for when he invented it, and kind of only one of his ideas turned out to have been the right early idea. Well, you know where we're going on from here. We come into the era of the dotcom, the World Wide Web, and I don't need to tell you about that because we all went through that bubble together. But when we emerge from this and what we call Web 2.0, things actually are quite different. And I think it's the reason that TV's so challenged. If Internet one was about pages, now it's about people. It's a customer, it's an audience, it's a person who's participating. It's the formidable thing that is changing entertainment now. (Video) MM: Because it gave the audience a role, something to do. PH: In my own company, Technorati, we see something like 67,000 blog posts an hour come in. That's about 2,700 fresh, connective links across about 112 million blogs that are out there. And it's no wonder that as we head into the writers' strike, odd things happen. You know, it reminds me of that old saw in Hollywood, that a producer is anyone who knows a writer. I now think a network boss is anyone who has a cable modem. But it's not a joke. This is a real headline. "Websites attract striking writers: operators of sites like MyDamnChannel.com could benefit from labor disputes." Meanwhile, you have the TV bloggers going out on strike, in sympathy with the television writers. And then you have TV Guide, a Fox property, which is about to sponsor the online video awards — but cancels it out of sympathy with traditional television, not appearing to gloat. To show you how schizophrenic this all is, here's the head of MySpace, or Fox Interactive, a News Corp company, being asked, well, with the writers' strike, isn't this going to hurt News Corp and help you online? (Video) Man: But I, yeah, I think there's an opportunity. As the strike continues, there's an opportunity for more people to experience video on places like MySpace TV. PH: Oh, but then he remembers he works for Rupert Murdoch. (Video) Man: Yes, well, first, you know, I'm part of News Corporation as part of Fox Entertainment Group. Obviously, we hope that the strike is — that the issues are resolved as quickly as possible. PH: One of the great things that's going on here is the globalization of content really is happening. Here is a clip from a video, from a piece of animation that was written by a writer in Hollywood, animation worked out in Israel, farmed out to Croatia and India, and it's now an international series. (Video) Narrator: The following takes place between the minutes of 2:15 p.m. and 2:18 p.m., in the months preceding the presidential primaries. Voice 1: You'll have to stay here in the safe house until we get word the terrorist threat is over. Voice 2: You mean we'll have to live here, together? Voices 2, 3 and 4: With her? Voice 2: Well, there goes the neighborhood. PH: The company that created this, Aniboom, is an interesting example of where this is headed. Traditional TV animation costs, say, between 80,000 and 10,000 dollars a minute. They're producing things for between 1,500 and 800 dollars a minute. And they're offering their creators 30 percent of the back end, in a much more entrepreneurial manner. So, it's a different model. What the entertainment business is struggling with, the world of brands is figuring out. For example, Nike now understands that Nike Plus is not just a device in its shoe, it's a network to hook its customers together. And the head of marketing at Nike says, "People are coming to our site an average of three times a week. We don't have to go to them." Which means television advertising is down 57 percent for Nike. Or, as Nike's head of marketing says, "We're not in the business of keeping media companies alive. We're in the business of connecting with consumers." And media companies realize the audience is important also. Here's a man announcing the new Market Watch from Dow Jones, powered 100 percent by the user experience on the home page — user-generated content married up with traditional content. It turns out you have a bigger audience and more interest if you hook up with them. Or, as Geoffrey Moore once told me, it's intellectual curiosity that's the trade that brands need in the age of the blogosphere. And I think this is beginning to happen in the entertainment business. One of my heroes is songwriter, Ally Willis, who just wrote "The Color Purple" and has been an R and — rhythm and blues writer, and this is what she said about where songwriting's going. Ally Willis: Where millions of collaborators wanted the song, because to look at them strictly as spam is missing what this medium is about. PH: So, to wrap up, I'd love to throw it back to Marshall McLuhan, who, 40 years ago, was dealing with audiences that were going through just as much change, and I think that, today, traditional Hollywood and the writers are framing this perhaps in the way that it was being framed before. But I don't need to tell you this, let's throw it back to him. (Video) Narrator: We are in the middle of a tremendous clash between the old and the new. MM: The medium does things to people and they are always completely unaware of this. They don't really notice the new medium that is wrapping them up. They think of the old medium, because the old medium is always the content of the new medium, as movies tend to be the content of TV, and as books used to be the content, novels used to be the content of movies. And so every time a new medium arrives, the old medium is the content, and it is highly observable, highly noticeable, but the real, real roughing up and massaging is done by the new medium, and it is ignored. PH: I think it's a great time of enthrallment. There's been more raw DNA of communications and media thrown out there. Content is moving from shows to particles that are batted back and forth, and part of social communications, and I think this is going to be a time of great renaissance and opportunity. And whereas television may have gotten beat up, what's getting built is a really exciting new form of communication, and we kind of have the merger of the two industries and a new way of thinking to look at it. Thanks very much.
They seemed so important at the time, didn't they? The breaking news stories over which much blogging was blogged and cable TV careers were made. But as 2009 gets ready to jump its own shark, what seemed monumental then, in retrospect, has all the significance of a Michael Steele press release. So before they're buried in the potter's field of time, let's take a look back on some of the top nontroversies of 2009. The other shoe in the Palin resignation. Remember that huge scandal that was going to almost just about pretty much for sure break days after Sarah Palin left office? She was pregnant with John Edwards' love child or something like that - still waiting for it. Come on, haters. There are better reasons to dislike Palin than her early resignation.
...for example. But again, the - as you mentioned, they vary wildly and for your listeners in New York City, I'm sure many of them would have noted that when they get their carton of milk in New York City, it has a different expiration date from the rest of the state or Connecticut or Pennsylvania. And, you know, that really confused me for a long time. And I learned that it's because New York City is the only city within the entire country that has its own rules for milk. And it was decided upon by the New York health department in the 1950s and you know, they say that apparently at that time, it was a common practice to - for out-of-town grocery stores to resell milk that was about to expire to New York City markets and especially into the more deprived areas. And so to prevent that, they instituted that New York City had to have a more conservative date.
Absolutely. The neighborhood of Iraq couldn't be worse, when you consider the impossible neighborhood of the poor Iraqis, when you consider the schemes upon them by their Iranian neighbor to the east, when you consider the sabotage that the Syrians waged against Iraq, the thousands of jihadists they allowed across the Syria-Iraq frontier to come to Iraq to kill and fight Americans, to kill and fight Shia, when you consider the Saudis and the entire hostility of the Arab world to this new Iraqi project, when you consider the Turks with their schemes on Iraq, with their memory that they had once governed Iraq for several centuries, you can see that in fact the neighborhood of Iraq was very difficult. The neighborhood of Libya is very forgiving. You've got Egypt on one side. You've got Tunisia on another side, very favorable. You have African states like Niger and Chad, but they're not really players. So considering the neighborhoods of both countries, Libya and Iraq, I think we can be optimistic about what attends this Libyan venture.
We also heard about Parkland shooting survivor and gun rights activist Kyle Kashuv. His offer of admission from Harvard was rescinded after the University discovered he sent a series of texts and online messages with numerous racial slurs and vicious racist stereotypes when he was 16. Kashuv has apologized for the comment, saying he was competing with friends to be outrageous and saying he's learned from the mistake. And about the decision, Kashuv tweeted, in the end, this isn't about me. It's about whether we live in a society in which forgiveness is possible or mistakes brand you as irredeemable. So what about that? We decided to take this up in the Barbershop because that's where we talk to interesting people about what's in the news and what's on their minds. Joining us today are Monica Hesse, columnist for The Washington Post Style section. She recently wrote about this very question.
Yes. This does seemed to be a theme for a lot of people who have been at the highest levels of politics and been, in some cases, most unfairly characterized or even destroyed largely by character assassination, in some cases, or by dirty tricks or skullduggery - as in the case of some of the Watergate goings-on in '71 and '72 - making their peace not only with the general idea of what happened to them, but in an almost Gandhi-esque sort of way, going back and forgiving the people who had the dirty hands, the people who actually did it to them, put the knife in their back. This is, I suppose, a good thing. This is something that we should be glad we still have in our politics, because so much of our politics has gone the other way.
And I think that's something that rarely comes into the conversation about what we're saying our post-racial moment is. And I think that Professor Neal was also talking about something that I believe is where we're going, as I said at the beginning of the program, is a multiracial society, where these differences are - they're valued a lot more than perhaps they are now. I think there's a sense - as I said, there was two definitions of a post-racial society, one being completely color blind, where there are no differences. We are all Americans. That's - we really can't get there, but at least recognizing those differences. And what, you know, as I said before, will save us, maybe demographics, because that the big shift that's coming about right now.
One of the things that concerns me the most about Senator Obama becoming the next president of the United States is that at this juncture, I'm not quite sure who he is. He has been a member of the United States Senate for less than three years. He hasn't amassed a very formidable record. He discusses working in a bipartisan manner and hopes to bring change to Washington, but yet he's been one of the more partisan and one of the more divisive figures in the United States Senate. So regardless of his ideology, regardless of his background, we just don't know who he is.
I don't think Dr. Callahan is intentionally scamming anyone in terms of he really believes that this works, and his sincerity certainly came across, as did the sincerity of almost all the people that are practicing, I mean, I want to say this up front. The people that are working with survivors of Katrina, I know most of these people personally, and they're very compassionate, well-intentioned people who really do want to help, but I think they just got too invested in the whole thing and lost their objectivity completely and have not done the proper scientific studies to support their claims.
In that aforementioned quest for a billion dollars, notably, the Ball family had been seeking a business partner for Big Baller Brand, the family's apparel company, instead of the typical endorsements for Lonzo. But with none of those giant corporations interested, Big Baller Brand was left to set its own retail price, which is why Lonzo's custom-designed sneaker can now be had for a mere $495, which is more than twice as expensive as any Nikes endorsed by LeBron James. When this was announced last week, NBA coaches like Golden State's Mike Brown had roughly the reaction you'd expect in response to a reporter's question.
Well, one of the big problems was there was no rational thinking behind the levee system. I mean, around the world people laugh at the standards that the U.S. uses for flood protection. In Holland, they use a 10,000-year standard. They protect against ocean floods for one-in-10,000 chance every single year. And for river floods, they protect anywhere from, depending how populated the area is, from a 250-year standard minimum up to over a 1,000-year standard. And roughly the same standards are used in Japan and other advanced societies. And we're still fighting to reach a 100-year standard. Many of the levees in the upper Midwest were less than a 100-year standard. So the level of investment in the infrastructure just isn't there. No one ever thought through the meaning of what the standard meant.
The baba is the head of the Bektashi. The Bektashi is the most liberal form of Shiites. And I'm quoting from the book, "We Bektashis see God everywhere in everyone. God is in every pore and every cell, therefore, all are God's children. There cannot be infidels. There cannot be discrimination. If one sees the good face, one is seeing the face of God. God is beauty. Beauty is God. There is no God but God." And under the Nazi occupation, the foreign minister of Albania was a Bektashi. And he sent out a secret message to all Bektashi that the Jewish children will sleep in the same bed as your children. The Jewish children will eat the same food as your children. The Jewish children will be your family.
Hey, good morning, Rachel. It's really fascinating. You know, the - just like you were saying, the Conservative Party actually lost their parliamentary majority in last June's vote, but they won overall, remained in power. But, you know, if you walk around this convention center right now, you would feel like they lost. They are in - really disarray. There's a sense of an identity crisis. They're not sure who they - what they stand for. There's not really a sense of where they're going. And it reminds me a little bit about the way the Democrats in the United States felt last November after Hillary Clinton - that surprise loss to Donald Trump.
It's so interesting because what Carter said at the time was, I mean, it's very poignant to look at the talk. You may remember this, he said. In the year 2000, these will either be up there on the roof generating power, or they'll be in a museum somewhere. And in fact, they are in a museum. One of the other panels is in the private museum of the Chinese solar baron Huang Ming, who's put 60 million of these arrays across rooftops in China. We need to get back in the forefront of the industry that we once led and that we've now ceded to the rest of the world.
Well, I think there are actually three things going on. One is that the forms can be excessively complicated. There should be an organized attempt to streamline them so that consumers see the most important things that they need to make their decisions. We also need to increase the financial literacy of consumers so that consumers have a better idea what they're shopping for as they're shopping. And the third point is that many of these sub-prime, exotic loans are so complicated that I don't think many of the people who take these loans really understand them. And it's difficult, if not impossible, to shop for a product that you fundamentally don't understand.
First, I think you start with sanctions, as we have, targeted at him personally and the 100 or so people around him. And we've already got steps against them. And I think those now need to go global. And we need to chase their financial assets. We need to chase them when they travel with potential human rights arrest warrants. We perhaps have to look at preventing their children going abroad to college and university. It may be that we will need to target the companies that are associated with them while trying to protect the broader mass of Zimbabweans, because the United States and the U.K. both remain very generous in humanitarian assistance, because we don't want them to be the victims of these sanctions.
I would like to see a system that is based entirely on a not-for-profit organization. All-for-profit health care organizations should be replaced by not-for-profit organizations. Doctors should be working for a salary in private groups, multi-specialty groups, and they should be paid on a per capita basis from a central authority, a single-payer authority, which provides coverage for comprehensive care. The doctors are paid a salary for their time. They don't get paid on a piece-work, fee-for-service basis as they are now, and so they won't have incentives to over-provide care, and because it'll be not for profit and will be regulated, they won't have any incentives or opportunity or reason to under-provide care. They'll do what doctors should do, namely, take good care of patients.
Well, everything that Herman Cain - first of all, they're not - I've looked back - I don't remember any black Republican ever elected president - I mean, I've gone back, you know, decades, and I've never seen one. Look, he's an unusual candidate. He was not the polished Mitt Romney, and we've seen, as we've said, you know, from months now, voters clearly look for somebody who's not the polished ways of Washington that we've seen so far, which is so funny about Newt Gingrich's rise in the polls because in many ways he is a creature of Washington, getting the million-plus from Freddie Mac and doing all this kind of things, and yet, he seems to be the new flavor. So, look, it's a very improbable year. And if anybody was most improbable, it was the candidacy of Herman Cain.
I loved it. It was favorite ad of the night. That and the Google ad, I thought, were delightful. You know, more Betty White, thats the answer to everything - more Betty White. She was funny. It was it made the point. And especially for Snickers, two years after their ridiculous offensive homophobic ad about the two guys whose lips accidentally touched when theyre eating a Snickers bar and then they have to rip off their chest hair. I just thought this was a great comeback and it really makes the point that you can do something that is kind of dud, one year, and come back with something thats really fresh and funny and entertaining and that people can enjoy.
I think, and I argue quite strongly in my book, that, no, there is not logic to that. Every human language can fulfill all the needs that its users want to make of it. And if it really needs a word to articulate the wrist and distinguish the hand from the arm, well, they'll jolly well invent one so as to do so. And if they haven't invented one, it's because actually they're all sort of other ways around it because life is a very flexible thing. I'm personally very skeptical of the idea that any language, any of the languages that human communities have, constrains them to talk about the world in any particular way. It may make it easier to talk about the world in some particular ways, but if you really need to make a distinction, well, you invent a word. You do something new. Language is forever changing in response to their users need.
The three-day meeting, attended annually by the heads of state of eight major industrial nations, is focusing heavily this year on boosting aid to Africa. Prime Minister Tony Blair has spearheaded an effort to dramatically increase the West's involvement. Last month he convinced these leaders to cancel the obligations of 18 heavily indebted nations, 14 of which are in Africa. Now he wants G8 nations to double their aid outlays to Africa to $50 billion a year by 2010. From the G8 Summit to recent Live 8 concert series, the world is again asking the questions of what rich countries can and should do to aid Africa. But is aid what Africa needs? A growing voice is saying no, including many Africans. Over the last 40 years, Africa has received roughly $450 billion in aid, and many say that not only has it failed to help; in fact, it may hinder African development. They argue that aid money comes with too many strings attached, often ends up lining the pockets of leaders and contributes to economic stagnation.
MR. NEWHART: That's not me, no. I was there with my wife and my daughter Jennifer, and she developed - I think it was roseola. And so I had to call in the producers, Dave Davis and Lorenzo Music, and I said guys, I won't be able to shoot today because we've got to go to the hospital with my daughter. And so they got a guy who they taught to walk like me. And he doesn't walk like me at all. So every time I see it I scream at the television, I don't walk like that, you know. We're talking with Bob Newhart about his new book, I Shouldn't Even Be Doing This! And Other Things That Strike Me as Funny. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.
Well, I think at some point, Boas and each of his students had a kind of transformational experience somewhere. For Mead, it was in American Samoa. For Boas, it was on Baffin Island, living with the Inuit in the Arctic. And all of them at some point had an experience in which they realized that while they were educated, they could make their way through their own culture and their society, in the place that they found themselves in that moment, they were stupid. They didn't know how to survive. They didn't know how to be a proper person. They didn't know what kind of food you could eat or what would kill you. And each of them took from that experience, I think, the understanding that how you make your way in the world is a product of your education, your circumstance, your culture. It's not a thing that is inherent to you. Your place in the world is determined by your surroundings. And they elevated that into an entire theory of society.
That would be a Syrian, probably constituted Syrian court. And it's a Syrian war and ultimately requires a Syrian solution. But criminal justice is not an end in itself. And it's not about revenge or punishment because only a small number of offenders, I think, will ever be prosecuted. It's a highly symbolic exercise. So, what you want to do is create a certain type of narrative and at the same time break damaging social narratives that are false. So, the prevailing narrative on the opposition side is that the Syrian regime is an Alawite structure - Alawites are a subsector of Shia Islam - that the regime is a sectarian structure bent on the destruction of Sunni. And point of fact, the regime is a complex multi-sectarian power political structure. So, when prosecuting regime figures would be folly to only prosecute Alawites because you're going to reinforce a damaging social narrative which is in fact false. There's plenty of Christians and Kurds and Sunni and other groups in the highest reaches of the regime.
Possibly, although I don't think it's that deep. You know, if you take a look at the Clinton campaign Farai, you can do a circular firing squad and everyone will be guilty as charged. There was a lot of things they did right and there was a lot of things they did wrong. If you take a look at the financial angle and if you take a look at the grassroots angle, everything they did wrong is catching up to them now. Senator Clinton was in Texas earlier this week where she spoke in front of a large Latino crowd. The Latino crowd there, specifically has said that they will embrace Senator Clinton. The reason being is because she has a long history with the Latino community, the least in Texas but also nationwide. And they are very skeptical of Senator Obama because he does not have that history with Latino Americans. So the real question is, is whether or not Senator Clinton can get at least 60 percent of the vote, Latino, African— American, white in Texas and Ohio. Here's why. She needs that number in order to keep up with the delegate game. If she does not, she is in deep, deep trouble. She is in deep trouble now, but moving on to Pennsylvania, I, as Donna mentioned, I do know something about that state. And that's a state that's very similar to Ohio in terms of it's blue collar background, in terms of being in economic distress. That's why the Clinton campaign is saying you, we are just holding our fire. You just wait until you see what we have in Ohio and Pennsylvania. It's a risky strategy Farai, because they are putting all of their eggs in one basket and it's all or nothing for them.
Well, our friends over in France have a study on the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry that says instead of pouring Champagne the traditional way, which is straight down in to the upright glass, they say you should pour it down the side just like you do with beer, which saves more of the CO2 from bubbling out of your bubbly during the pour. And that solves one of the mysteries of Champagne drinking protocol, the pouring part. But there are others like how cold should you keep it? What if you don't finish a bottle? What's the best way to store it? Uncorked? You know, there are all kinds of old wives' tales and the cultural things to say, well, there are different ways to store it. How about putting a metal spoon in the neck, people say in France. They do it that way. Some people say in Italy, they say you put metal spoon down the neck. Does that work? Other people say, well, let's put the top, right? Put the top back on and we'll keep the bubbly in. Have you ever heard some people say let's put a balloon. We had a tweet from somebody who said let's put a balloon on top and that will keep it expanding and it'll keep the gas inside.
Go out of business and tell all the depositors, you're out of luck. So the question on my mind is what - how do you regulate them? Not whether you do. Just how do you do it? And I think that's really - you know again, Devin may be the exception here but I think, you know, that really is the debate and in principle, you want to do it clear eyes. You know, what's the public interest? Obviously, you know the banks hire their lobbyist. They have a lot of people out there pushing their case. What we need to try to do, is make sure that these regulations get made in the public interest, not to suit the bankers' profits.
Well, the superficial answer is that people like to watch what they know is popular. So if you have a sense that a bunch of other people are watching a show, you might want to check it out. But I think the deeper answer is that if Netflix or Amazon can control how our perception of how popular a TV show is - how many people are watching it - that controls the TV industry. So that controls what kind of shows the viewer ultimately gets to see. Right? And there's other people, actors and producers, they want to get paid. And they also want people to recognize that they're creating shows that are popular. And beyond that, there's a question about privacy. How much does Netflix know about your particular viewership habits? Is there a way to press a button and find out exactly what you've watched? Because that information isn't public, we don't necessarily know what they know or how they know it or how they can grab it. So there's still a lot of open questions about how this works and a lot of pressure to make some of that data public.
Right. Well, of course. But you know, I was - but I just have apropos of that, one of the things that struck me about the report as I was looking at it is, yeah, there's always an issue of money. And I know that hospitals, especially when they are obliged to treat patients without insurance, are running up costs that they're not in a position to get back; but one of the interesting things about this report is it wasn't saying, you know, money, money, money, money. Some of it was just structural, that we need to make structural changes. How are those going to help?
There is one in play. Google has a little - I think with the money they've committed to Motorola now, they can't just reach into their wallet and buy T-Mobile. But a partnership actually could make a lot of sense, you know, again, everything Google does is constrained by the idea that the government is looking over their shoulder there. But the government also is very much committed to having competition in terms of a broadband and networks there. So they might like idea that there's another player instead of T-Mobile going into the hands of the biggest wireless company, AT&T...
How do you see it being used? And I ask this, you know, I - we all know that there's such a scarcity of records of humanity prior to - about 2,000 years ago. We're looking at pottery shards in the dirt and using archeology to understand who we were. On the other hand, nowadays, with digitized information, there is so much. I recently was going through a hard drive and found thousands and thousands of photographs of my kids, more than I can ever keep track of or look at. And in a sense you're creating an archive of that volume. This thing will be there and residing if you - if things work out - for hundreds of years, but there will be so much of it.
It's hard to see how they would not. These are the most difficult and least attractive jobs in the economy, by in large, whether it's washing dishes, whether it's harvesting crops outdoors and extreme temperatures, whether it's doing dangerous work with respect to construction or timbering or what have you. Many of these jobs are hard to fill and people who have gotten more education and gotten a little bit ahead in life, and whose parents have helped them move along in life, don't really want to go to those kinds of jobs. And so these industries have looked to where they could find people who would do the work and do it, from the business's stand point, economically.
You know, Renee, we have to say two things. It's - you have to say it's brazen and you have to say it's bizarre. I mean the idea here was allegedly to assassinate a diplomat on U.S. territory. That is pretty brazen. The Iranians have been known to send out hit squads before, Renee, against dissident exiles, against the Jewish community in Argentina, but this goes way above and beyond. The Iranians here are alleged to have approved a plan to bomb a restaurant where the Saudi ambassador would be having dinner here in Washington, D.C. on U.S. territory without apparent regard for civilian casualties. Here is what the U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York, Preet Bharara, said yesterday. He's talking about what the informant relayed of his conversation with the Iranian operative.
Yeah, and that's actually how Belichick got the idea. Belichick was talking with ESPN's Chris Berman a few weeks ago and Berman mentioned it. Berman is a huge Canadian football fan. He's always talking about Canadian football. And he mentioned to Belichick that he had seen Flutie when he was in Canada do a dropkick. And so Belichick called Flutie into his office to find if that's true and Flutie told him he could make it if the opportunity arose. I mean, you know, Flutie said he had about 80 percent confidence in himself in it, which for an extra point you should have about 99.9. So clearly they were having some fun there. But it was Chris Berman's idea in the first place, who told Belichick, who told Flutie and here we are talking about it the next day.
Yeah, and I think that the evidence says that these were once free-living bacteria. And in my mind they're still bacteria, they're just not free-living any longer. They replicate on their own schedule, they have their own genes, as you said. They have their own (unintelligible), et cetera, that look - all of which look very much like bacterial components. And it's even been argued by some people who studied it more carefully that I that maybe all of the cellular organelles represent at some level some interaction with another organism at some point. But I'm pretty comfortable about mitochondria and chloroplasts, the similar sorts of organs that work in plants that convert sunlight into sugar.
This rule is really aimed at the large influx of families and children who have been coming to the U.S. border from Central America. If you look at the overall number of people crossing the border illegally, it's way down from its peak a generation ago. But the makeup of that population has changed. We're not talking so much now about single adults from Mexico, who are easy to expel, but families and children from Central America who, for legal reasons, wind up staying in the U.S., are harder for the government to deal with. And so that's who they're trying to address with this new rule.
And then you had President Obama and his team come in, and they responded very seriously and very aggressively, and so did the Fed - seriously, aggressively, creatively. Not everything they tried worked. But over the course of 2009, they really did arrest this terrible, terrible tailspin we were in. I mean, if you look at the data on things like stock prices, industrial production, global trade, it really did look like the beginning of the Great Depression. An economist named Barry Eichengreen at the University of California has done that, and it was actually a little bit worse on many of those measures than the Great Depression. And then it stopped getting so bad. And it really did improve. It still didn't feel good, but it was no longer getting worse.
But not all of downtown's residents see the value of these changes. Skid Row, one of LA's poorest communities, sits in the shadow of these architectural landmarks. Most of Skid Row's inhabitants live in single-room-occupancy hotels, or SROs. These hotels were built around the same time as the rest of the historic downtown. Years of neglect and abuse have left the buildings in ruin. Health and safety violations continually threaten to close them for good. But SROs are the only affordable housing available to some of LA's poorest residents. Rising real estate prices make Skid Row increasingly attractive to developers. As this happens, the threat of displacement looms ever larger. Mr. JEFFREY BROWN(ph) (Resident): My name is Jeffrey Brown, and my wife and family lives in unprotected housing.
You know, I even asked the United States assistant secretary of state, Jendayi Frazer, when we visited the State Department. I said, how is it that elections take place in this one? And the European Union observes them and validates them as free and fair. And you never get the African Union or any African country -Nigeria or Zimbabwe or whatever - saying no, we have followed elections in Portugal. Even though the European Union says that they were free and fair, we don't believe they were free and fair, and we are going to impose sanctions who are in Portugal. But this is exactly what happens in our situation.
Well, the outcome was that. In other words, the perception in the West about democratization in the region was that you were liberating suppressed citizens, giving them civil rights, constitutional rights, and limiting state power. The assumption was that you're dealing with societies that are very clearly defined, only along citizenship lines. But the reality in the region is that in many countries you have vertical divisions in society. You have ethnic or sectarian or communal minorities and majorities. And in some of these countries, like Syria, Iraq, you've had - or Bahrain - you have a minority rules over a majority, and the distribution of wealth and power is very clearly along the majority-minority line.
Absolutely. It's like - it's a situation of who is going, you know, who is going to cave in first, the Dodgers or Manny. It's like they both want to be with one another, but nobody is willing to concede to the other's offer. The Dodgers don't feel that anybody else - there's anybody else out there willing to pay Manny Ramirez what they want to offer, and Manny - I don't know what he's doing, why the negotiations taking so long. I believe the latest offer is two years, $45 million, except with the difference being from the first offer, this gives him a player option for the second year as opposed to a team option.
Well, that's an interesting question. I know the Army surgeon general's office right now is looking about 11 deaths of soldiers who were outpatients in these new Warrior Transition Units. And some of them were the result of accidental overdose of prescription drugs. We've got soldiers who were on multiple potent medications, methadone, morphine and powerful pain relievers. So there've been these overdoses including some of these deaths. And the Army is trying to figure out what - how to prevent some of these. In addition to the risk assessment that General Tucker talked about, there's also new rules trying to prevent access to liquor by some of the soldiers who are on some of these drugs. But there have been some really pretty horrible deaths including one of a soldier at Fort Knox, Gerald Cassidy, last September. It took about three days before someone checked on him and it was like he was alive but unconscious for a few days before people at the Warrior Transition Unit - and this was in Fort Knox actually - found him. And as a result some people lost their jobs there.
They already are racking up a very large proportion of their sales around the world. Technology is one of the most thoroughly globalized industries. But it does get very complicated. If you think of, say, companies like - a company like Cisco, sure it's selling more routers and similar devices around the world. It's much more competitive. At the same time, though, Cisco has very extensive operations in India. They wouldn't answer exactly - when the question was posed, exactly how much more it costs them, but it's a pretty fair assumption that unless they cut everybody's salaries, all those Indian operations are costing them 13 percent more.
It has popped up, but like some of these diseases, it pops up, and there's an outbreak, a local outbreak, and the case of Hendra usually infects no more than one or two humans, might kill one out of two. In some of the other cases, like Ebola virus in Central Africa, it might kill a dozen or a few dozen people. There's been an outbreak going on in the Democratic Republic of the Congo this summer. And then these diseases disappear. They might disappear for years at a time. Then again there's another outbreak. When they're gone, when they're missing, they're living secretly, inconspicuously, harmlessly in some sort of an animal, some sort of an animal species. The scientists call that the reservoir host.
(Laughter) Yeah, I didn't remember saying that. I interviewed someone I was on that reality TV with - I interviewed my former castmates, and one of them remembered me saying - like, 'cause they all wanted to be famous. You know, they came with headshots. You know, they wanted to be actors. That was never something I was interested in. I thought that I didn't want to be famous. And then my friend - you know, this castmate - he was like, I remember this conversation where you said, I want to be famous for writing a book. And it was a reminder to myself of how, sometimes, truths emerge much later than we think they will. And yeah, part of the book is trying to see clearly against all of these incentives that, you know, were provided - that are provided by, you know, let's say, like, the Internet and, you know, the world of barre classes and chopped salad. And it's trying to understand - you know, trying to see myself clearly against these distortions and also to see those distortions for what they are and to be able to sit with the contradictions that they create. I think that was important to me.
Well, as you well know, and Ron is also a veteran of Capitol Hill, the key thing right now is reconciliation. They have to reconcile two vastly different bills in terms of what's stimulus versus what's tax credits or tax cuts. I think what you will hear later as this process continue is that the House will insist that some of the money for school reconstruction be put back in. The Senate will insist that the tax credits that they have provided to homeowners and car buyers be retained. And at the end of the day, we will have a compromise. It will not be a perfect bill but it will be a piece of legislation that will help invest in America future, the saving create over three million jobs and help struggling homeowners.
Clinton was scheduled to speak at the U.N. to commemorate the 20th anniversary of this very famous speech she gave in Beijing where she said, human rights are women's rights, and women's rights are human rights. And this was supposed to be part of sort of a choreographed ramp-up to her all-but-certain presidential campaign. But then the controversy over these emails became all-consuming. She's been silent on it for a week, aside from just one tweet. And it got to the point where she had to come out and say something. Getting into the U. N. is pretty challenging if you aren't credentialed, so reporters had to go through this security gauntlet. But even so, it was packed. She called on seven reporters, and from start to finish, the press conference lasted 20 minutes. So there's still going to be some pent-up demand. Also after the press conference, the head of the select committee investigating Benghazi came out and said he's going to have to call her to appear before the committee.
Heavy. You know, I think it is a marvelous teacher. That excellent essay, by the way, was written by Marvelyn Brown, who works in New York for the POZ Foundation. It opened my eyes certainly to the tremendous quest by many within our communities to better understand why HIV is here and what we need to do to properly respond to it. And I think in order to effectively have a conversation about HIV and AIDS within our community particularly, you have to promise yourself that you're not going to make any accusations, there's going to be no finger pointing. And as Regina said earlier, you're not there to make judgments but you're there to have an honest dialogue about what this disease is and what behaviors trigger folks to put themselves at risk.
Well, that's another big part of the argument is, if you say that post traumatic stress disorder is worthy of a Purple Heart, then they're saying that that might help get rid of some of the stigma that's attached to the disease. And it's actually - it actually played into the argument on the blogosphere - was that there's such a stigma already attached to it that that's why they were saying it would denigrate it, like some people don't necessarily believe that it's a real injury or that people are faking it or something, you can't see it and that causes a problem.
I, like many of you, am one of the two billion people on Earth who live in cities. And there are days — I don't know about the rest of you — but there are days when I palpably feel how much I rely on other people for pretty much everything in my life. And some days, that can even be a little scary. But what I'm here to talk to you about today is how that same interdependence is actually an extremely powerful social infrastructure that we can actually harness to help heal some of our deepest civic issues, if we apply open-source collaboration. A couple of years ago, I read an article by New York Times writer Michael Pollan, in which he argued that growing even some of our own food is one of the best things that we can do for the environment. Now at the time that I was reading this, it was the middle of the winter and I definitely did not have room for a lot of dirt in my New York City apartment. So I was basically just willing to settle for just reading the next Wired magazine and finding out how the experts were going to figure out how to solve all these problems for us in the future. But that was actually exactly the point that Michael Pollan was making in this article — it's precisely when we hand over the responsibility for all these things to specialists that we cause the kind of messes that we see with the food system. So, I happen to know a little bit from my own work about how NASA has been using hydroponics to explore growing food in space. And that you can actually get optimal nutritional yield by running a kind of high-quality liquid soil over plants' root systems. Now to a vegetable plant, my apartment has got to be about as foreign as outer space. But I can offer some natural light and year-round climate control. Fast-forward two years later: we now have window farms, which are vertical, hydroponic platforms for food-growing indoors. And the way it works is that there's a pump at the bottom, which periodically sends this liquid nutrient solution up to the top, which then trickles down through plants' root systems that are suspended in clay pellets — so there's no dirt involved. Now light and temperature vary with each window's microclimate, so a window farm requires a farmer, and she must decide what kind of crops she is going to put in her window farm, and whether she is going to feed her food organically. Back at the time, a window farm was no more than a technically complex idea that was going to require a lot of testing. And I really wanted it to be an open project, because hydroponics is one of the fastest growing areas of patenting in the United States right now, and could possibly become another area like Monsanto, where we have a lot of corporate intellectual property in the way of people's food. So I decided that, instead of creating a product, what I was going to do was open this up to a whole bunch of codevelopers. The first few systems that we created, they kind of worked. We were actually able to grow about a salad a week in a typical New York City apartment window. And we were able to grow cherry tomatoes and cucumbers, all kinds of stuff. But the first few systems were these leaky, loud power-guzzlers that Martha Stewart would definitely never have approved. (Laughter) So to bring on more codevelopers, what we did was we created a social media site on which we published the designs, we explained how they worked, and we even went so far as to point out everything that was wrong with these systems. And then we invited people all over the world to build them and experiment with us. So actually now on this website, we have 18,000 people. And we have window farms all over the world. What we're doing is what NASA or a large corporation would call R&D, or research and development. But what we call it is R&D-I-Y, or "research and develop it yourself." (Laughter) So, for example, Jackson came along and suggested that we use air pumps instead of water pumps. It took building a whole bunch of systems to get it right, but once we did, we were able to cut our carbon footprint nearly in half. Tony in Chicago has been taking on growing experiments, like lots of other window farmers, and he's been able to get his strawberries to fruit for nine months of the year in low-light conditions by simply changing out the organic nutrients. And window farmers in Finland have been customizing their window farms for the dark days of the Finnish winters by outfitting them with LED grow lights that they're now making open source and part of the project. So window farms have been evolving through a rapid versioning process similar to software. And with every open source project, the real benefit is the interplay between the specific concerns of people customizing their systems for their own particular concerns, and the universal concerns. So my core team and I are able to concentrate on the improvements that really benefit everyone. And we're able to look out for the needs of newcomers. So for do-it-yourselfers, we provide free, very well-tested instructions so that anyone, anywhere around the world, can build one of these systems for free. And there's a patent pending on these systems as well that's held by the community. And to fund the project, we partner to create products that we then sell to schools and to individuals who don't have time to build their own systems. Now within our community, a certain culture has appeared. In our culture, it is better to be a tester who supports someone else's idea than it is to be just the idea guy. What we get out of this project is support for our own work, as well as an experience of actually contributing to the environmental movement in a way other than just screwing in new light bulbs. But I think that Eleen expresses best what we really get out of this, which is the actual joy of collaboration. So she expresses here what it's like to see someone halfway across the world having taken your idea, built upon it and then acknowledging you for contributing. If we really want to see the kind of wide consumer behavior change that we're all talking about as environmentalists and food people, maybe we just need to ditch the term "consumer" and get behind the people who are doing stuff. Open source projects tend to have a momentum of their own. And what we're seeing is that R&D-I-Y has moved beyond just window farms and LEDs into solar panels and aquaponic systems. And we're building upon innovations of generations who went before us. And we're looking ahead at generations who really need us to retool our lives now. So we ask that you join us in rediscovering the value of citizens united, and to declare that we are all still pioneers. (Applause)
That's on top of the job she already has as a personal care worker helping a woman with a disability fix meals, bathe and get dressed, two hours a day, seven days a week. She's driving to that woman's house now. And with this car and her license, she figures she can get new clients in the suburbs where the pay is well above minimum wage. Plus, she goes to school three days a week at the technical college where she's studying to be a pharmacy assistant. And she's the mother of a 4-year-old boy. Her mother, who lives across town, helps look after him. So all this striving starts with that driver's license. But she almost didn't get it.
Well, the argument is that - and we know this from the archeological record - that there was - agriculture was being introduced on to the Anatolian plain beginning of the 10 to nine and a half thousand years ago. There are some wonderful sites in Anatolia, like Catalhoyuk, one of the better studied ones, where through the layers of the archeological records, you can see the beginning of agriculture. And so those populations, or some of the descendants, eventually started to move out from Anatolia as - and taking agriculture with them. The idea, I guess, is that the agricultural populations would have been growing, population density would have been increasing, and they would have expanded out. And so they take their agricultural technology with them and their language. And that process, generation by generation, would have expanded the Indo-European languages or the languages that would then become Indo-European.
Are opportunities limited because there aren't enough players or are there not enough players because opportunities are limited? Many of the women we contacted said pickup basketball, dominated by men, isn't an option. Some said it was dangerous, with the men often bigger and more physical. Others said it's an affront to the fundamentally sound basketball they learned as girls. As one respondent wrote, the selfishness in a pickup game, the suppressed sexist decisions and the sloppy fundamentals can borderline ruin it. The scene at Portland's Hillside Center seems to be an antidote to what ails adult women's basketball. Women of varying abilities are playing a pretty crisp, officiated game. There are working mothers, like Tanya Martin and like Lei Hart. She played college ball at George Washington University. She's a 41-year-old lawyer who has carved out the time, even with two kids.
That is a very good question. I think, with skating, there's a lot of controversy about that. I think that it takes two. Skating is about the other stuff and, you know, about maybe the art. But I don't know, I think, for guys' skating, that it is a little more athletic than the women's because I think people watch, you know, female skaters and they're very, you know, pretty on the ice and that's more for the art. But I think, for men - at least for me as a skater - I love the jumps and I love being an athlete, you know, doing tricks.
You're listening to Talk of the Nation: Science Friday. I'm Ira Flatow. We all know President-elect Obama learned a thing or two, pursuing his political science degree, but how much does he know about physics? My next guest says a brilliant circle of science advisers is not enough to help Obama make the right decisions about counter terrorism, energy, climate change. He insists that Obama needs to understand some basic physics instead, but not to worry. This physics prof's curriculum is a bit more fun than solving problem sets with friction planes or blocks on springs. Joining me now to talk about those presidential physics is my guest Richard Muller, professor in the Department of Physics at UC Berkeley. He's also a faculty senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley lab in California and author of the book "Physics for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines." He joins us from Berkeley. Welcome to the program, Dr. Muller.
Let's say you really need a vacation. You decide to stay here in the U.S. but when you're making your plane reservations, the booking agent advices you to bring a valid passport to the airport. Not possible, you say? Well, if you live in New Mexico, it may sound familiar because it turns out some people don't realize that New Mexico is part of the United States. In fact, this happen so often that New Mexico Magazine has a monthly compilation of these stories called "One Of Our 50 Is Missing." Its editor is Walter Lopez. He joins us now from Santa Fe.
It's got to be the biggest white collar crime case in the history of West Virginia. Don Blankenship was an incredibly powerful man in the coal industry and in politics here. He's facing, if he's convicted, 31 years in prison. There's an important kind of tie-in with Freedom Industries and the chemical spill here, where the U.S. attorney in southern West Virginia, Booth Goodwin, is actually going out and trying to find people that he believes are responsible for chemical leaks and for mine explosions and bringing charges against the individual officers of those companies and trying to send those people to jail. And that's really a remarkable turn of events here in the state where these industries have really run things for so long.
Well, not only did Bel Biv Devoe wore some strange pants but they also had some really tall hair. Now, Bel Biv Devoe, this song "Poison" was also big when I was in high school. And for me, where I grew up, this sound was fresh and new. I didn't have a lot of exposure to rap artists like Young MC that we heard earlier or to R&B artists like Bel Biv Devoe. And I think it opened up a new musical genre for me. And when I hear these songs, I think back to the fond memories I had of high school.
You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION: SCIENCE FRIDAY. I am Ira Flatow. A brief program note: coming up on Monday, the day after the Academy Awards, Neal Conan looks back at the international guilty pleasure of Oscar night: the gossip, the dresses, the red carpet, the speeches - the Oscar went to…Well, we'll find out on Monday's TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. We're talking this hour about evolution. My guests are Edward Humes, Pulitzer Prize winner, author of the new book, "Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America's Soul", Randy Olson, filmmaker and director of, "Flock of Dodos", Nick Manski, public information project director for the National Center for Science Education.
The streets of Toledo, Ohio, are calm today after a weekend protest by a neo-Nazi group sparked violence in one of the city's racially mixed neighborhoods. The National Socialist Movement alleged black gangs were mistreating white residents. Vehicles and stores were vandalized, more than a hundred people were arrested, one police officer seriously injured. It appears that members of the National Socialist Movement were not far from the area, and this angered some residents. Roberta de Boer is a columnist for The Toledo Blade, was at the scene on Saturday. She joins us now by phone from her office in Toledo. Very good of you to be with us today.
Yeah, I think you can see this in city after city around the world, places that we do think of as nightmares, like Lagos. Edward Glaeser who wrote an excellent book called "Triumph of the City" points out that even though there are water shortages, for example, in Lagos, water, clean water may be more available there than in the countryside. In a place like Karachi, I was able to look at the United Nations statistics for people's health, for their education levels, for their income. They're all better in these supposedly nightmare cities than in the countryside. There is a reason that people are moving from villages to the city, the same reason that they - many people moved to cities in the United States in recent decades.
: I wish that I could say men dominating the commercial mainstream music industry as a surprise or a shock, but even today, in this era of great pop divas - and, of course, Taylor Swift and Rihanna are both nominated for three Grammys this year - and Kelly Clarkson, of course, her great song "Stronger," is going to hopefully win a Grammy - even in this day and age of great pop divas, the tradition of mainstream, rock oriented, recorded music unfortunately, it remains a boys game. And that's changing but it hasn't totally changed yet and I think this is the evidence of it, this year. Ann Powers, music critic, thanks very much.
Many, many Republicans privately simply do not care whether another person is gay. On the other hand, a very important constituency in the Republican Party is the religious right. And to keep religious conservative happy, the party has steadfastly resisted efforts to support anti-discrimination laws to ease discrimination in the military against gay people and so on. So what we have here is a welding of what I would call private acceptance and public rejection of homosexuality in the Republican Party. And I think that's why we're seeing these occasional eruptions, if one wants to call it, that of the public moral dramas involving gay Republicans.
Yes, we did. Jeb Bush, who some people a year ago thought would be the next Republican nominee, has said he cannot vote for the Republican nominee if it's Donald Trump in November of 2016. Speaker Paul Ryan, who is the highest ranking Republican in the federal government, has said he's not ready to support Donald Trump yet. He might yet, but he wants to see Trump change. Senator Lindsey Graham, who was also a presidential candidate, he said he can't vote for Trump. Senator Ben Sasse from Nebraska, leading younger light in the Senate on the Republican side, says he can't vote for Donald Trump. Former presidents or presidential nominees of the Republican Party have either said they're not going to the convention or that they can't commit.
They would for the most part. We should note that the vote on the report was 10 to five, with - there were two Republicans, Chuck Hagel and Olympia Snowe, who crossed over and voted with the Democrats. But the five Republicans who voted against this report said they have a number of issues with it. They have issues with the substance, and they argue that the report's conclusions only highlight the issues that seem important now. You know, they're saying hindsight is 20-20 and the report, as it's laid out, presents a distorted picture of what was actually handed to policymakers at the time back in 2003. Some of the Republicans are also mad, and this is an interesting one. They're mad because a big chunk of the report is 81 pages -let me repeat that - 81 pages of names.
A special skill would probably be acting. To my mind, the really terrible thing about social engineering is it exploits the human propensity to try to help people. And the people who are experts at social engineering are really wonderful at pulling on people's heart strings and coming up with great excuses of why, you know, the dog ate my homework and can you really help me out. And people like to be helpful. And as a result, information disappears. And this has been, you know, a tried-and-true technique used by computer hackers and others for a long time and it's used by professional PIs in this case to get information.

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