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I've actually always been fine with being alone with my two boys. We kind of like lean on each other. What time is it now? 8:00? Okay. Get ready for school. Let me know if you need help. I had a pretty tough life growing up. My mom abandoned me when I was about two, me and my brother. We weren't even little kids. We were babies. And, well, let's see, I ended up in a foster home. Then, when I was eight I went to another foster home. Then when I was nine I went to another foster home. Then a group home, so I was bounced from one place to another. So finally at 15, I literally ran away.
Yes. Certainly that is the goal, to bring them back and to try to make them whole. What we usually do is once we're able to make contact and convince somebody to come back, to come over to the other side, so to speak, is to take them to a mental health facility where they're able to talk to health care, you know, mental health care professionals. What we do is we put them on what we call a 5150 Welfare and Institution hold, which is usually a 72-hour psych evaluation for people who are a danger to themselves or a danger to others. Quite often they're not there for the full 72 hours, but it's at least a start for people to get back on their meds, to try to talk to somebody in a state of clarity, to find out, you know, what is, you know, the problem, what is bothering this individual, what's pushing them to the point of taking their life.
Yeah, it did. I had a bellyache, I though just a bellyache, and at various times, I'd gone into an emergency room for it because I had high fever, and it turned out to be a chronic appendix. And when I got to Libya, over the course of a week, it got worse and worse, and I woke up in the middle of the night with a ruptured appendix. It didn't really rupture that night, but had ruptured earlier, and that was very - nobody really knew anything about Libyan health care. The Libyans had only had 400 or 500 Americans in the last 30 years, and nobody really knew. And I was going short(unintelligible)…
This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan, in Washington. Bikes are everywhere, from the elite riders pace-lining through parks to the backpacked commuters heading downtown. People choose two wheels for exercise to get to and fro or just for fun. And after years of resistance, urban planners are changing the streets to accommodate them with more and more bike lanes - a sensible incentive for cheap, pollution-free transportation, yes, but some resent the loss of road space. Others protest a form of gentrification, which steals precious parking places in neighborhoods where cars matter most. And often cyclists don't help their own cause: They ride the wrong way in traffic, blow through red lights and stop signs, bob and weave between the road and the sidewalk.
Unidentified Announcer #2: Joe Sestak, relieved of duty in the Navy for creating poor command climate. Joe Sestak, the worst attendance of any Pennsylvania congressman and near the bottom of the entire Congress. Sestak called the claim about his military record a lie. Then Specter then demanded that Sestak apologize to him for calling him a liar. And so it has gone back and forth ever since. But it's the kind of high-profile dust-up a challenger dreams of and something happened, a shift in momentum. Suddenly, this week, new polls put Sestak in the lead, albeit by a very small margin. Terry Madonna of Franklin & Marshall College...
Well, we all pretty much were pretty close to Army standards. And we might have gotten away with it a little bit. The one that got away with murder, though, was Austin Webb. He had an afro, literally. And he would pack it down and put it under a hat, and I'm sure he left the Army with it under his hat. During the contest, there was a general that came through and was kind of checking it out. And he went up to Hal(ph), who was our special services director, and asked him about Austin's hair and Hal explained that that was a wig.
The way the domino works is that you have an individual who does not have a designated recipient. In this case, it was Thomas Koontz, who basically said, I'll donate my kidney to anyone who needs it. And so, he gave his kidney to a patient whose sister had wanted to give a kidney to her but was unable to because they were incompatible. And so, Thomas essentially starts the dominos falling. So Thomas gave his kidney to that patient, and then that patient's sister gave a kidney to another patient, who also had an incompatible donor. And you can see then that this sets up a chain reaction.
Thank you, NPR, writes Mona Paradi(ph) of Clinton, New York. Finally I was able to listen to a news piece that actually analyzed a politician's words for accuracy. I hope this is an approach you will use throughout this election year. Listener Jay Carlson(ph) was quite a bit less enthusiastic. The title you gave was fact-checking, Carlson writes. A better title would be We Really Don't Like President Bush. You refuted virtually every claim from the president with general statements. Where you found nothing wrong with what the president said, your quote "analysis" glossed this over and pointed to something else.
What they don't recognize is that the event will transform them. Namely, it will transform them into somebody who doesn't think all that much of their current romantic partner. He and I didn't share many of the same interests. I guess our whole time together was a bit of a lie. This gives me license to go meet new people. The human brain is magnificent in its ability to shop for new ways to think about situations that pain it. It's not news that people do this. What's interesting to us is that people don't know they will do it, and as a result they mispredict how they will react, particularly to negative events.
But Brian Jenkins of RAND says the random searches aren't dumb. It was a major player in assembling the airline security procedures when it was decided that an element of uncertainty was needed for a few reasons. One, randomness throws off potential terrorists. Anyone you pick to plant a bomb may be pulled out of line and checked. Two, randomness improves security personnel's treatment of all people pulled out of line. Three, randomness appeals to our sense of egalitarianism, somewhat placating members of the public or whole communities who may feel they're being picked on. And so that scenario, mocked by British transport police searching old white women, actually has a purpose as US airports, says Jenkins.
Sure. Well, Ben-Gurion wrote several books. One of them is called "We And Our Neighbors." And he says the idea that we are coming to an empty land is not a true idea. The idea of the Zionists in the beginning, it was idealistic to say a people without a state is looking for a state without a people. Well, that was that whole situation. There were Palestinians. By the way, the Palestinians never have had a state, you see? But anyway, Ben-Gurion says we have to understand there are Arabs or Palestinians and we have to develop with them fair relations on a democratic basis.
A friend once told me about his shelf of constant reproach. It's a bookshelf in his mind filled with the books he has always planned to read but never has. Right off the bat, I could name quite a few big important novels on my own personal shelf, starting with "Moby Dick." Another book that a lot of people may have on that shelf is "In Search Of Lost Time" by Marcel Proust. It fits all the criteria. It's complex, difficult and acclaimed. Well, now for all of you literary laggards who have been unable to get through Proust, there could be an easy way into the book in the form of a graphic version of the first volume "Swan's Way." NPR's Glen Weldon reviews graphic books for NPR, and it just so happens he has also read "Swan's Way." He joins us now to tell us whether Proust's famous madeleines have the same effect in graphic form. Thanks for being here.
The president has been reacting in the way that you would expect a president to react. He has condemned any acts or threats of political violence, saying that it's an attack on our democracy itself. And in his rally speech last night, he also said, quote, "we want all sides to come together in peace and harmony." He's talking about wanting to turn down the temperature on some of the political rhetoric, maybe not attacking one's political enemies in moral terms. Now, the reality is that he has done just that, attacking his political enemies in moral terms. But he didn't do it last night.
And I'm David Greene. Today in Your Health, we are answering your questions about the federal health law, the Affordable Care Act. Now, the biggest changes being made by the law are set to begin less than three months from now. October 1st is when people can start signing up for coverage in new state health exchanges, for insurance that would start next January 1st. We know people are more than a little confused, and two weeks ago, we asked what you most wanted to know about the new health law. You were not shy, we should say. Our inbox was stuffed.
Yes, you're right, Neal. Down at Guantanamo Bay, there is a screening procedure to determine whether someone is a combatant, an enemy combatant, and they must go through that. There is a secondary type of screening that's conducted every year to decide whether they should continue to be held down there because of intelligence value. I think, to directly answer Teresa's point, though, what sets us apart from other countries is that we are dealing with legal challenges to what's going on there. Yes, it took awhile, but the president of the United States made a determination in February of 2002 that none of these folks had any rights under the Geneva Convention, and the United States Supreme Court responded in June of 2004 and said, `Yes, they have access to our courts. They have access to challenge their detention.'
No, I really don't. I think the horses that are racing in the Derby are really rather mature horses. They - if you look at the catastrophic-injury data, it is actually in the older horses that have the higher percentages. I think it's a real misconception that younger horses are the cause of this particular problem. I will admit that I think it needs some more careful examination. You really need some epidemiological studies to find out where those risks are, but I don't think age has anything to do with it. I do think, and if you look at the research that's been done where I'm based, at the School of Veterinary Medicine at UC Davis, that Dr. Stroble has shown that overtraining is, in fact, a factor in catastrophic racing injuries and training injuries. And there has been a change in the way horses are trained.
This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. In his article for Esquire, Chris Jones describes a scene out of control: Dozens of wild animals set loose in Zanesville, Ohio, the owner dead from a gunshot wound to the head, almost all those animals were killed by law enforcement, some as they ran into nearby neighborhoods. We've posted a link to that article on our website. Go to npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. Chris Jones is our guest today. The episode in Ohio set off calls for new regulations on exotic animals, including from animal expert Jack Hanna, who joins us in just a moment.
Well, ever since the government was announced last Thursday, the insurgents have upped their activity, particularly in the capital, and there's been more than 120 people killed in the last four days. You know, most of the victims of these bombings are civilians or just the ordinary policeman on his beat, but they appear designed to try and intimidate the new government and particularly because the new government has not yet reached a full agreement with the Sunni minority. You know, the question of the day is whether the prime minister, Ibrahim Jafari, can come to some agreement with the Sunni minority over which positions they'll hold in the Cabinet that will make everybody happy. Right now the Sunnis who are negotiating with him have threatened that they will not participate in the Cabinet swearing-in, which is supposed to take place on Tuesday, unless he accepts their candidate for the Ministry of Defense.
Well, I think we are fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, but we're not just fighting the Taliban. We're fighting more than the Taliban. The whole identity of the Taliban, it seems to me, has changed over the last few years. We're not just talking about, you know, the refugee camp children who were educated in Pakistan, but there's - and I'm sure other people can speak more eloquently about this - but now there are these so-called foreign Taliban who are much more virulent brand of insurgents who carry out some of the more reprehensible acts that you hear in Afghanistan. In terms of change, you know, Afghanistan is a country still trying to, you know, shake from 30 years of disaster. You know, of war and civil war and famine and drought and hunger and impunity and criminality. So, you know, it - one of the things that - one of the messages that I wanted to bring back from Afghanistan, one of the things I realized there that it is an incredibly slow and frustrating and complex process in the rebuilding of a country. And we have to recognize that and I think…
I guess my comments about Hillary's run for the presidency are two-fold. One, I think she tried to be more of a man than the male she was running against. She tried to be stronger, tougher - and she's a woman. I mean, why not be a feminist? Why not be a true feminist and be a woman while you're running? I mean - I'm not sure if you know what I mean by that. And the second point is, she had what I felt was a real albatross around her neck and that, unfortunately, was her husband. He could not keep his mouth shut, and he couldn't stay out of the picture.
Well, right, but they - the - I think what they are doing - what they have to do is say, we're not for open borders, and this is an attempt to push us away from issues related to economics, to health care and to the issues that a lot of voters are voting on to the point where Republicans have had to essentially mislead - that's a terrible word - about where they stand on health care. And I think they are doing that quite effectively in a lot of local races, governors' races and I think in a great many House races, too.
A liberal perspective and a lot of tension with Conservatives, basically. The Scottish Nationalists came to great success by opposing austerity, opposing cuts to social service programs, both of which are the complete opposite position from the Conservative Party. They are far to the left on the political spectrum, and they now have more than 50 seats in Parliament. That's not enough to chart the course of government, but it's enough to make a lot of noise, give big headaches to the Conservative government and fight for more power for Scotland. So especially as the center-left Labour Party is feeling weak and defeated, the Scottish National Party feels like it's on a tear. As the former leader of the party, Alex Salmond, said the Scottish Lion has roared. That roaring is probably going to give a big headache to Conservatives.
Well, the full context was I was in couples therapy with my girlfriend in the morning and then going into my office and writing porn copy, where we used every term imaginable for women except for woman. We used demeaning terms; we used ridiculous terms. When I started the job, I sort of told myself I would separate it from my own identity. And what my article is about, how it becomes impossible to separate one's self from that kind of job. How do you go from writing those terms and then try to use terms of endearment with the woman you're with?
…found some interesting cases from the past, including that 1958 California case that was such a great story. But it was not a case of someone actually leaving the Senate to challenge a sitting governor of his own party. The closest we can find to that, going back - and I've spoken to the associate Senate historian about this, and he's puzzling about it too. The closest we can find for a precedent to what Kay Bailey Hutchinson is doing in Texas, would be Jon Corzine four years ago, wanting to be governor of New Jersey, being in the Senate at that time, and being willing, apparently, to challenge the acting governor who never left his job as Senate president there in New Jersey, Richard Cordey(ph) - Codey rather. And he's still on that job today, I believe. And Richard Codey did not actually run for governor in 2005. He was acting governor for awhile after Jim McGreevey resigned, remember, after owning up to having an affair with a man and leaving the office.
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is one of a handful of ideas from quantum physics to expand into general pop culture. It says that you can never simultaneously know the exact position and the exact speed of an object and shows up as a metaphor in everything from literary criticism to sports commentary. Uncertainty is often explained as a result of measurement, that the act of measuring an object's position changes its speed, or vice versa. The real origin is much deeper and more amazing. The Uncertainty Principle exists because everything in the universe behaves like both a particle and a wave at the same time. In quantum mechanics, the exact position and exact speed of an object have no meaning. To understand this, we need to think about what it means to behave like a particle or a wave. Particles, by definition, exist in a single place at any instant in time. We can represent this by a graph showing the probability of finding the object at a particular place, which looks like a spike, 100% at one specific position, and zero everywhere else. Waves, on the other hand, are disturbances spread out in space, like ripples covering the surface of a pond. We can clearly identify features of the wave pattern as a whole, most importantly, its wavelength, which is the distance between two neighboring peaks, or two neighboring valleys. But we can't assign it a single position. It has a good probability of being in lots of different places. Wavelength is essential for quantum physics because an object's wavelength is related to its momentum, mass times velocity. A fast-moving object has lots of momentum, which corresponds to a very short wavelength. A heavy object has lots of momentum even if it's not moving very fast, which again means a very short wavelength. This is why we don't notice the wave nature of everyday objects. If you toss a baseball up in the air, its wavelength is a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a meter, far too tiny to ever detect. Small things, like atoms or electrons though, can have wavelengths big enough to measure in physics experiments. So, if we have a pure wave, we can measure its wavelength, and thus its momentum, but it has no position. We can know a particles position very well, but it doesn't have a wavelength, so we don't know its momentum. To get a particle with both position and momentum, we need to mix the two pictures to make a graph that has waves, but only in a small area. How can we do this? By combining waves with different wavelengths, which means giving our quantum object some possibility of having different momenta. When we add two waves, we find that there are places where the peaks line up, making a bigger wave, and other places where the peaks of one fill in the valleys of the other. The result has regions where we see waves separated by regions of nothing at all. If we add a third wave, the regions where the waves cancel out get bigger, a fourth and they get bigger still, with the wavier regions becoming narrower. If we keep adding waves, we can make a wave packet with a clear wavelength in one small region. That's a quantum object with both wave and particle nature, but to accomplish this, we had to lose certainty about both position and momentum. The positions isn't restricted to a single point. There's a good probability of finding it within some range of the center of the wave packet, and we made the wave packet by adding lots of waves, which means there's some probability of finding it with the momentum corresponding to any one of those. Both position and momentum are now uncertain, and the uncertainties are connected. If you want to reduce the position uncertainty by making a smaller wave packet, you need to add more waves, which means a bigger momentum uncertainty. If you want to know the momentum better, you need a bigger wave packet, which means a bigger position uncertainty. That's the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, first stated by German physicist Werner Heisenberg back in 1927. This uncertainty isn't a matter of measuring well or badly, but an inevitable result of combining particle and wave nature. The Uncertainty Principle isn't just a practical limit on measurment. It's a limit on what properties an object can have, built into the fundamental structure of the universe itself.
Al Jolson, blackface. All of that goes with that song. And I have the exact same impression of the song because the only versions I've ever heard of it, people have been either looking like they're in a minstrel show or actually are in a minstrel show. So my intention was to reconnect that song to what's happening now and the way people feel about the South now. And a lot of the battles that were fought there were resolved in the South before they were resolved in the North, because the racism that existed in the South was very blatant. You never wondered if somebody didn't like you because you were black. You knew immediately.
And now The Opinion Page. As reaction to the death of Trayvon Martin continues to reverberate across the country, it's important to remember we still don't know exactly what happened when George Zimmerman shot and killed an unarmed teenager. But we do know that the neighborhood watch volunteer pursued Trayvon Martin against police advice, and his lawyer cited Florida's Stand Your Ground law as the basis of his claim to self-defense. Proponents argue the law just allows a person to respond with force if attacked. Critics say it gives citizens unfettered power without accountability. If threatened, where's the line? 800-989-8255. Email: talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website. That's at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. Florida State Representative Dennis Baxley joins us on the phone from Ocala, Florida. He was the prime sponsor of Stand Your Ground. In a piece for Fox News, he wrote he still considers that a good law, but that from what he's seen it does not apply in the Trayvon Martin case. And, Representative Baxley, nice to have you on TALK OF THE NATION today.
Well, to the best of my knowledge, I haven't heard anything about that. I don't believe that we have any now. Is there any plans to get them? I haven't heard any. And we're looking at cutting back, you know, special units and services and that kind of thing anyway. So I agree that I think it could save money, but again the initial expenditure, you know, there's - my wife works for a smaller department, and they're actually five officers below their compliment right now. They might be able to hire one more. So in terms of who's going to show up at your door, you know, to take a missing persons report, or are we going to spend money on a drone, I think especially with the smaller departments, which most police departments are, we're probably not going to see a lot of these things up in the air. Although again, I think that they're - I think that they could be a very useful tool. I just don't think it's going to be - you know, we're not going to see the skies swarming with drones.
In the past few months, I've been traveling for weeks at a time with only one suitcase of clothes. One day, I was invited to an important event, and I wanted to wear something special and new for it. So I looked through my suitcase and I couldn't find anything to wear. I was lucky to be at the technology conference on that day, and I had access to 3D printers. So I quickly designed a skirt on my computer, and I loaded the file on the printer. It just printed the pieces overnight. The next morning, I just took all the pieces, assembled them together in my hotel room, and this is actually the skirt that I'm wearing right now. (Applause) So it wasn't the first time that I printed clothes. For my senior collection at fashion design school, I decided to try and 3D print an entire fashion collection from my home. The problem was that I barely knew anything about 3D printing, and I had only nine months to figure out how to print five fashionable looks. I always felt most creative when I worked from home. I loved experimenting with new materials, and I always tried to develop new techniques to make the most unique textiles for my fashion projects. I loved going to old factories and weird stores in search of leftovers of strange powders and weird materials, and then bring them home to experiment on. As you can probably imagine, my roommates didn't like that at all. (Laughter) So I decided to move on to working with big machines, ones that didn't fit in my living room. I love the exact and the custom work I can do with all kinds of fashion technologies, like knitting machines and laser cutting and silk printing. One summer break, I came here to New York for an internship at a fashion house in Chinatown. We worked on two incredible dresses that were 3D printed. They were amazing — like you can see here. But I had a few issues with them. They were made from hard plastics and that's why they were very breakable. The models couldn't sit in them, and they even got scratched from the plastics under their arms. With 3D printing, the designers had so much freedom to make the dresses look exactly like they wanted, but still, they were very dependent on big and expensive industrial printers that were located in a lab far from their studio. Later that year, a friend gave me a 3D printed necklace, printed using a home printer. I knew that these printers were much cheaper and much more accessible than the ones we used at my internship. So I looked at the necklace, and then I thought, "If I can print a necklace from home, why not print my clothes from home, too?" I really liked the idea that I wouldn't have to go to the market and pick fabrics that someone else chose to sell — I could just design them and print them directly from home. I found a small makerspace, where I learned everything I know about 3D printing. Right away, they literally gave me the key to the lab, so I could experiment into the night, every night. The main challenge was to find the right filament for printing clothes with. So what is a filament? Filament is the material you feed the printer with. And I spent a month or so experimenting with PLA, which is a hard and scratchy, breakable material. The breakthrough came when I was introduced to Filaflex, which is a new kind of filament. It's strong, yet very flexible. And with it, I was able to print the first garment, the red jacket that had the word "Liberté" — "freedom" in French — embedded into it. I chose this word because I felt so empowered and free when I could just design a garment from my home and then print it by myself. And actually, you can easily download this jacket, and easily change the word to something else. For example, your name or your sweetheart's name. (Laughter) So the printer plates are small, so I had to piece the garment together, just like a puzzle. And I wanted to solve another challenge. I wanted to print textiles that I would use just like regular fabrics. That's when I found an open-source file from an architect who designed a pattern that I love. And with it, I was able to print a beautiful textile that I would use just like a regular fabric. And it actually even looks a little bit like lace. So I took his file and I modified it, and changed it, played with it — many kinds of versions out of it. And I needed to print another 1,500 more hours to complete printing my collection. So I brought six printers to my home and just printed 24-7. And this is actually a really slow process, but let's remember the Internet was significantly slower 20 years ago, so 3D printing will also accelerate and in no time you'll be able to print a T-Shirt in your home in just a couple of hours, or even minutes. So you guys, you want to see what it looks like? Audience: Yeah! (Applause) Danit Peleg: Rebecca is wearing one of my five outfits. Almost everything here she's wearing, I printed from my home. Even her shoes are printed. Audience: Wow! Audience: Cool! (Applause) Danit Peleg: Thank you, Rebecca. (To audience) Thank you, guys. So I think in the future, materials will evolve, and they will look and feel like fabrics we know today, like cotton or silk. Imagine personalized clothes that fit exactly to your measurements. Music was once a very physical thing. You would have to go to the record shop and buy CDs, but now you can just download the music — digital music — directly to your phone. Fashion is also a very physical thing. And I wonder what our world will look like when our clothes will be digital, just like this skirt is. Thank you so much. (Applause) [Thank You] (Applause)
And this is, you point out, a five-star migrant labor camp. Maine is one of the best examples of the places where migrants are treated best in and around the country. Maine is where they make the best money they make, all on that trip up the Eastern Seaboard from Florida to Maine, from spring until the end of August, before they start heading back south again and repeating the pattern. But nevertheless, as you point out, it used to be a community that went out and harvested those blueberries and then celebrated in that blueberry festival, and they don't harvest it anymore.
Well, Soapy Smith was a wonderful character. He started out - off as a con man, a bunko artist as a teenager in Denver. He would hang around the Denver train station, and when people would gather around, he'd have an auction. He'd give away, raffle off, rather, bars of soap with $50 bills tucked into the bars. People would bid five, $6 to get a $50 bill, except the people who won the bars of soap were working for him. After the shills took their bars of soap with the $50 bills and exclaimed with great joy how much money they're making, then the actual auctions would begin, and people would wind up paying five or $10 for a nickel bar of soap. He did this for a while until he got run out of Denver. He got run out of Creed. He got run out of Washington.
You can be sure that this rocketed up to the very top of the news hierarchy at a newsroom like The Post. Just the very fact that they took nine sources that they clearly went out of their way to try to check, cross-check, double-check and question what they were about to report that the stakes were that high, that the ramifications of what they were going to report would be so significant that they were going to take this very seriously indeed. And I think you can see that by the solidity of the reporting as far as we know so far. And I think that's also a reflection of how uncertain this story has been to date. You know, if - you may remember before the election, The New York Times had reported that the FBI had found that there were no signs of, you know, such contacts. And I think on this subject, there's a care being given by The Post, by The Times and by other serious news organizations.
The president says he can legally authorize domestic wiretaps without court approval to pursue people with, quote, "known links to al-Qaeda and related terrorist organizations," unquote. But The Times cited nearly a dozen unnamed current and former government officials who said they feared the program may have broken a 1978 law against domestic spying without warrants. The Times would not comment on the investigation sparked by the story by reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau. Earlier this year, former Times reporter Judith Miller went to jail for 85 days for refusing to comply with a subpoena for her confidential source on the leak of an undercover CIA agent's identity. Miller ultimately testified that it was a senior aide to Vice President Dick Cheney and the aide was indicted for perjury.
Well, it's more than my congregants. It'd be the whole state in this case, and if you track historically, in those areas that have had same-sex marriage, same-sex relationships, invalidated by the government, you have a corresponding loss of freedoms. They fall into basically three categories, and it's primarily loss of parental rights, of parents to teach their children as they choose, a loss of business people, and a loss of religious freedoms. Ake Green in Sweden, for example, sentenced to one month in prison for simply preaching from Romans, Chapter 1. So there's a loss of freedoms that's substantial. But more important than that, we really believe firmly the social science supports the fact that a young child, a baby, deserves to have a mommy and a daddy. There's an advantage. The man who contributed the sperm, the woman who contributed the egg, they are best-suited biologically and otherwise, and emotionally, for raising that child, and a child has a right, we would say, to a mother and a father, and that's the best for society.
Yeah. The independence is kind of hedged. And one of the critical ways that it's hedged is that the superPACs are all headed by folks who come out the candidate's organization. The Gingrich superPAC is called Winning Our Future. The two people heading it - one of them was the head of fundraising for Gingrich's old political organization. The Romney's superPAC is called Restore Our Future. It's led by top people from his 2008 presidential bid. There is a superPAC for President Obama. It's called Priorities USA Action. It's headed by Bill Burton and Sean Sweeney, who came out of the Obama White House, and by Paul Begala, who, of course, is a and very prominent Democratic consultant.
Yeah. I wanted to point out that Chuck hit on a very important point that aquaculture generally uses these what are called sort of forage species that are like sardines, anchovies, things like that, that are very important components of the marine ecosystem. They serve as food for a variety of fish, marine mammals, birds, and they're being increasingly used to feed this aquaculture industry, and it's not a very efficient process. It's something on the order of two pounds of these forage fish for one pound of salmon produced. And we talk about ecosystem-based management, and one of the things that we think is the first step towards ecosystem based management is looking at those forage species and setting the catch levels with their larger role in the ecosystem in mind so that you figure out how much of that forage, either a sardine or a squid or something like that, needs to be left in the waters as food for the rest of the ecosystem. And right now that is not well done.
Well, we recently worked with researchers in three parts of the world to look at what climate change means for parks, and our concern was just those that's Lisa's been underlining, which is species' ranges will shift. We know that's what's happened in the past, and since our protected areas are fixed in place, one of the questions we wanted to answer is, well, are parks even really a relevant conservation response in an era of rapid climate change (unintelligible) human fossil fuel emissions? And we studied three different areas where large numbers of species had computer models projecting their future distributions and asked whether protected areas could improve the conservation of their future ranges as they shift across these landscapes. And somewhat to our surprise, I think, we found that protected areas could do a very good job of improving the conservation of these species in their future ranges. Now this is in the early stages of climate change, up to about 2050. But at least in that time frame we were finding that additional protected areas would serve very well to capture some of the range that has been lost as species move out of existing protected areas.
Yes. Hi, Neal. I just wanted to point out to you and your guest that, you know, as despicable as the noose and the idea behind that and it clearly hate speeches should not go unpunished, several people seem to say that they only did, you know - this happened this way and this and (unintelligible) happened this way. Now, when differences arise, they're saying, shouldn't we remember that, you know, besides hate speech there, the difference was a physical attack of six-on-one with, I mean, injuring the student, you know? Isn't a physical attack - isn't that significantly different from a hate speech, although neither are condonable?
Well you know it's very interesting. About a couple weeks ago I wrote a column praising a speech that Justice Roberts gave at Georgetown Law School and Justice Roberts said the rule of law is strengthened when there is greater coherence and agreement about what the law is, and he called for the deciding cases narrowly. That's what he declared and I think that's a good principal because it sort of creates more respect for the court, but this has been the most fractured court. If you have ever sat near a printer where you're trying to print out all the decisions they made recently, it takes forever. Why? Because there are all these fractured kind of half majority decisions and you have to put together bits and pieces here.
It's nothing you want to be in. It's nothing you want to be in. And when I was in it, the real strength of the storm hadn't hit us yet, and it's just basically kind of been coming in bands and, you know, we're sitting here without power. We haven't seen a map of the hurricane. We don't really know where it's at. We're getting phone calls saying, you know, that it's probably a good bit east of us, in the Columbia or Hattiesburg area. So we don't know if the eye's passing over us or whatever. But we're speculating that we're just getting bands of weather. Because, I mean, you know, one minute, it's--the winds are, you know, huffing and puffing and knocking trees down and all that stuff, and the next minute, it seems like it's calm and then--you know, then it's back to more sideways rain. You know, we're watching trees kind of fall down around our office and stuff like that and, you know, it seems like it's going to be a mess to clean up.
But let me say, because when you get to the merits of the case, you have to consider also the context of the people. Last year, I was in Dallas, at a literary festival for my book. Every member of the City Council who was black was under investigation. Now that is compiled a long record of the harassment of black elected officials. Congressman Mervyn Dymally put out a report when he was in the Congress and showed this massive use of the investigative power of law enforcement officials, was at the national and state level. So, there's reason here to be suspicious about this case, until all the facts are on the table. And they're not.
Yeah, "In Search Of Lost Time," which is the seven volumes of which "Swan's Way" is the first, is a massive, intricate, incredibly sprawling masterpiece, as you said, about abstractions like time and memory and love and sexuality and class. So yeah, it's a big swing. But if you think about it, if you read Proust in English - if you read any translated work - you're already at a certain distance from the original text. You get the meaning, but you miss some of the music. And I would argue that comics, if done well, can bridge some of that distance because the meaning becomes even more apparent because you see the people, the places. The bones of the story are right there before you. And I think, in a strange way, it can capture some of the music as well.
Chad Mirkin is the George B. Rathmann Professor of Chemistry and director of the International Institute for - get the mouth to work today - Nanotechnology at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, we're going to talk about, well, building a toaster, now not just any toaster, you know, you could get a Heathkit and build it from parts. This is totally from scratch. You have to go out and ore - mine the ore yourself, smelt it. We'll get into it. Believe me, it's not a pretty picture when it's done, but it's an interesting project, and the author of a new book about the Toaster Project will be with us. You stay with us. We'll be right back after this break.
When I compare my colleagues in the black market with my colleagues in the current cannabis market here in California, the black market is filled with people of color just like the prison that I was in. And the people in the above ground market who are distributors, manufacturers and investors are all white majority, I'd have to say. Being involved in this business and possibly being prohibited from it because of my involvement in the selling of growing marijuana previously and having an arrest record for it is very unsettling. I may never be able to own a business selling, growing, manufacturing cannabis because of my record of growing, selling and manufacturing cannabis. And to me, it's a huge hypocrisy. The only reason there's a pie to be cut up is because people like myself going back decades created this pie.
And they are, I heard, Neal. I heard they're actually getting some people - one guy is in charge with the diary of the group. So it's pretty interesting. I'll tell you, the outside world - knowing that they're caring about you, you know, I'm up in the heavens but I am cut off from mankind. They're down on the depths of the earth, cut off. I think it's huge. And the soccer stars and different people trying to keep their spirits up and the world caring about them, and that's the message I would send them, is just - you know, I'm astronaut up here in Suttons Bay, Michigan and they are on my mind. They're in my prayers. I am proud of them.
Yeah, I think you can say that the one Arab uprising that was definitively put down was (unintelligible). You know, you had probably a quarter to a third of the population at one point in the streets, literally hundreds of thousands of people out in the streets calling for reform at first, later calling for the downfall of the regime. And one month later you had international intervention of a sort, but it wasn't with the protestors this time, like it was in Libya, but it was with the government. It was troops from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, they rolled into town, and the protests were ended.
Right, and you see the manifestation of the multiple registers of pride there, because in one sense the good sense of pride produced that body chiseled like Adonis, since we're evoking Greek gods here, chiseled like Adonis, an incredibly Herculean will that forced, that allowed him to come out in the Super Bowl last year. The one before this one of course. And perform at the height of his ability because of a desire, a commitment to the team that was incredible. So that pride was a collective pride that allowed him to participate as one of many. The pride about which you speak, that I think is just as effectively wrought here and just as destructive as the other one was good, is the fact that now his own desire to get his way lead him to destroy the pride of the quarterback Donovan McNabb or attempt to do so. And to wreck the pride of the team as a team. So the same function of pride or at least I say the same word functions in different ways. The same concept functions either in an edifying sense or in a wholefully destructive one.
Do it overseas, save money. But money is not always the only factor. Sometimes doing things here in the U.S. makes the most sense, in terms of quality control and delivery speed. Davidson's report on manufacturing, "Making it In America," appears in the current issue of The Atlantic. You can find a link to that and to related stories he did for NPR at our website, npr.org. Just click on TALK OF THE NATION. He's with us from our bureau in New York, as is Tim Aeppel, the Wall Street Journal's bureau chief for economics. We want to hear from you. If you work in a factory or used to, give us a call, 800-989-8255. Email talk@npr.org. What has changed on the floor and upstairs? You can also join the conversation on our website. That's at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION.
But it's a little bit different story when a person has, you know, a match, and you're a little bit - you know, it's a little bit easier to jump on their back and try to tackle them. If somebody's swinging a golf club, and it means losing your teeth on the way in, or if somebody's, you know, with a knife, I don't know that people are going to be as quick to jump all over them. And it's not just one knife or two knives. You can have a, you know, 20 people traveling together with knives who have planned to terrorize an aircraft and take over an aircraft. And I think Max(ph), the pilot who called in, had a very good point. Those passengers are his responsibility, too. And what are we asking our pilots to do? You know, not just our flight attendants who are risking their lives, but we're asking our pilots to fall short of their responsibilities. To me it's completely ludicrous.
The bishop says Veracruz has experienced violence during wars and invasions by foreign armies, but the current violence by organized crime is very different. He says the killings and the threats and the bodies being dumped in the streets are spreading fear throughout the entire population. That fear is shared by reporters. This summer, the editor of a respected daily newspaper in Veracruz was gunned down, along with his wife and son. A few weeks later, the paper's crime reporter was abducted. Her body was left in the street behind a rival publication. The journalists' deaths, like most of the deaths in this drug war, remain unsolved.
Well, there's this, Steve. The investigators actually wrote that, after the thorough investigation they conducted, if they had confidence the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, they'd say so. But they were not able to say that. There are a number of what investigators describe as disturbing incidents - 10 or more - involving the president's attempts - alleged attempts - to obstruct justice, to try to jam up the special counsel probe, to fire the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to fire Robert Mueller, the special counsel himself, and to try to get people to change their stories before they spoke with the media or other people, including trying to dangle carrots or sticks in front of people who were thinking about cooperating with Robert Mueller's probe.
Yeah. I mean, I don't think so. I think - look, I think public radio has to do a better job in making the case. I think as we look at the landscape of news in this country, commercial radio's pretty much abandoned serious news on a local basis. Newspapers are falling by the wayside every single day. There's a case to be made that we really need to have local news coverage to have an informed citizenry, and a lot of places in this country that just lack that. There is a need to have public funding, and I think it needs to be better articulated. But I would say that, you know, we've got to look at every one of our funding sources.
Seema, she was, like, the talk of the town. Like, in '83, oh, Seema could get it. She was like the iPhone 6. Like, people were like, oh, my God, have you heard of Seema? She's very slim and slender. Her family owns a camera. What, a camera? I don't believe this - right? So my dad, he hears this hype and just bee-lines down to my grandfather's house. And he just lays it on the line. He's like, what's up? I'm Najme. I'm a chemist. I'm going to America. I want to marry Seema. YOLO - bam - 10 minutes...
Yeah. It feels like we're seeing a collapse of society on just about every level this summer. Here in the capital, families are having such a hard time finding food that they're basically spending all day in bed just to save calories. We're seeing a wave of women coming in to be sterilized because it's just gotten too hard to raise a child here with no diapers, no soap, no milk. And just lately, we're seeing an uptick in reports of infanticide. It's like every social norm has broken down, and it's really shocking to see because until just recently, this was the richest country in South America.
The Endangered Species Act has saved animals and plants, including the bald eagle, the grizzly bear and the black-footed ferret, since Congress passed that legislation in 1973. But some of those conservation efforts have come at a cost to ranchers and farmers. Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming has introduced a bill to include state involvement in the process, which some ranchers say has made it difficult for them to protect their herds of sheep and cattle. Bill Kluck joins us now. He's the sheep committee chairman of R-CALF USA. And he's been ranching for 35 years in South Dakota. Mr. Kluck, thanks for being with us.
Part of my job is to foster relationships between our Chinese students and with our American students who are also living here and students from all over, and what President Obama and Xi Jinping are doing in these meetings to make sure that the connections that we're establishing aren't going away because we're making some serious developments in terms of biomedics and financial analysis and engineering as the primary schools of our scholars because we want to make sure that the connections we're making are going to be able to turn into businesses and international businesses where we are cooperating at the most basic level.
But, you know, we have considerable experience here in making reconstructions of ancient hominids - reconstructing how they looked in life. And it's very true, that when you sculpt a face onto a skull, you layer on the underlying tissues, the muscles and so forth and then the superficial tissues, and you've got this bold creature with no hair on its head or on its face. The look is very distinctive. It looks very, very different from Homo sapiens. Then when you put the wig on, it's much harder to tell apart. So that, in fact, we can make this kind of reconstruction and show it in a way in which it stands out from the rest. But if it sat next to you on the subway, you might not have too much of a notion.
Right. Well, and when you're - when you have that situation, you have to make that decision. So there are many cases - and we have a lot of telecommuters at NewWest. We cover the Rocky Mountain West. We have a lot of people who are not in the office because they're the Boise correspondent and they're going to be in Boise, for example. So it's not that telecommuting doesn't have a place. But I just think that given the choice, it's better to be in the office. If you have a very talented person who insists on working from home and you think that you really need that person and that talent, you can live with it if you have to. But all other things being equal, I think that there's a lot of power in having people in the same place, working physically close together, communicating very closely and collaborating closely.
I think it's fair to say that many Christians - not just Catholics, but certainly including Catholics - are very angry at their churches right now. I mean, it's not only the abuse that many vulnerable people experience. It's also the pattern of covering it up. I don't need to tell you this. I mean, the grand jury report found widespread abuse across the Pennsylvania diocese. But this has been a worldwide sort of pattern. So for people who feel this anger, people who have experienced this abuse or even people who haven't directly experienced it but feel the shame and the weight of this, how would you suggest they approach this period?
Indeed it does. He is going to make that appointment, as you said, maybe this afternoon but certainly this week sometime. There's no mystery there. He is going to appoint Dean Heller, the congressman from the Second District here, who has already announced he's running for Ensign's seat. He announced he was going to run. He made it clear he was going to run even before Ensign left. And so Sandoval and Heller are friends. There are a lot of people who work for Brian Sandoval who have worked for Heller. So that part of it is a done deal. It's what happens to Heller's seat that is causing all the controversy out here in Nevada.
No, and that's exactly the problem. The stated goal of the talks is the implementation of an agreement made about 18 months ago, which was kind of a roadmap to peace, looking to form a transitional governing body as a step towards more a democratic Syria, and one where a war isn't raging. So the opposition delegation is insisting that they're here to discuss that process. The delegation from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is insisting that they're there to discuss terrorism, to discuss the end of violence in the country. And it's really there that they've reached an impasse. They're refusing to forward.
Well, we don't know that. In fact, only 10 percent of the veterans said they - said that they would not consider using the VA. I think it's a little more complicated than that. I think that there is a number who don't use the VA because they have health care coverage through employers, through other sources that may be even more convenient; there's less waiting time; they have more access to certain specialized services. And then there may be others who really are not using it because of their past experience with discrimination. So I really think this study gives us an indication that there's something going on here and we need to look at it further.
And just with regards to discussion about the different factors that affected the decrease in violence, did you get a sense that the decision makers in the administration were objectively looking at all of these factors and, you know, were able to kind of parse through all of that and make their decisions about what policy should happen, you know, since the surge based upon these factors. Did you feel that there was, you know, any political tend to that or did you feel that, you know, that a consensus was able to mold around the factors or was there dissent about what was helping there?
You're listening to SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow. We're talking, this hour, about "Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions" written by Edwin Abbott. It's our SCIENCE FRIDAY book club discussing it. Our number: 1-800-989-8255 if you've read Flatland and you'd like to talk about it. I'm going to bring on a "Flatland" expert, Ian Stewart. He's emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Warrick in England. He's author of the book "Flatterland: Like Flatland, Only More So" and "The Annotated Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions." Thanks for being with us Dr. Stewart. DR. IAN STEWART: It's a pleasure. Thanks for having me on the show.
Well, we're doing more than thinking about it. The process is already begun, and the process begins when the CDC, which has already done, gets the virus, isolates it, gets a reference strain and tries to grow it up as a seed virus, and a seed virus for the vaccine means you get it to the point where it can be grown and reproduced, usually in eggs, and then you give it over to various pharmaceutical companies to start making what we call pilot lots to be able to do the necessary testing and seeing is it safe, does it induce an immune response that you would predict would be protective, is it something that in fact needs to be boosted with an adjuvant or not? All of those kinds of things. What is the proper dose is going to be very important because not infrequently, when you have a vaccine against a virus to which the human species has not been exposed to, if you want to get an optimal immune response, you may have to give more than one dose. We don't know that yet. Those are the things that are going to be examined during the clinical trial process. But the idea of growing up what we call seed viruses for vaccine development has already begun.
In a way, there's been too much emphasis on the foreign side of this. Yes, we import well over half our oil now and that's a bad thing and we borrow a billion dollars a day essentially to import oil. But producing the oil domestically helps solve the balance of payments problem, but that's about all it does. It will not interfere with OPEC's domination of oil. Something close to 80 percent of the world's proven reserves of oil are in OPEC states. And they are the low-cost producers and they have the big reserves. So they're going to be effectively running the international oil trade and running the cartel that runs it even if we drill more domestically. And so they're going to run the system.
Former Sec. REICH: Exactly because just do the math. I mean, 6.4 million jobs have been lost, and then another, say, about 2.7 million have not been created for the jobs that a growing population needs. So, you have more than 11 million short, right there. And if you assume that in a vigorous recovery, that the economy is capable of creating maybe 300,000 net new jobs a month, well, that's five to eight years right there, given that you still have a growing population that's going to need jobs. So this is not going to turn around fast, and many of the old jobs that have been lost are never coming back because there's been a lot of out-sourcing and also technical displacement of workers during this Great Recession.
Well, I ran into a guy who was protesting in the street, and he said he used to work in the electricity sector for 15 years. He had a big sign which said, no electricity, no medicine, no cash, no Internet, no transport. So he was protesting this. I put what the government has said about this and what the state electricity company here has said about this to him. I asked him whether it was true that this was sabotage as the state electricity company is saying or whether this was part of the economic war by the U.S. against Venezuela as the government's saying. And he totally dismissed that, saying, look; the infrastructure in the utility sector, especially electricity, is in terrible repair. So many people have left Venezuela to get jobs elsewhere. There's great problems getting parts to repair the system, and it is simply falling apart. And people here say, yes, they're used to power cuts. They've had many of those, including here in Caracas - less so here. But they said they'd never had one of this duration and of this scale. It's really across almost all of the country.
I tell you, I will say this, I do not think that reporters should be subpoenaed anything close to routinely. It should be an extraordinary case. But if you're dealing with a crime--and what's different here is the transaction is between a person and a reporter, they're the eyewitness to the crime--if you walk away from that and don't talk to the eyewitness, you are doing a reckless job of either charging someone with a crime that may not turn out to have been committed--and that frightens me, because there are things that you can learn from a reporter that would show you the crime wasn't committed. What if, in fact, you know, the allegations turned out to be true that he said `Hey, I sourced it to other reporters; I don't know if it's true'? So I think the only way you can do an investigation like this is to hear from all the witnesses. I wish Ms. Miller spent not a second in jail. I wish we didn't have to spend time arguing very, very important issues and just got down to the brass tacks and made the call of where we were. But I think it had to be done. Yes, sir?
Yeah. It kind of works like this. Like, if you get arrested and, you know, you've been picked up and you get brought before a judge, the judge basically has three options. I mean, this is sort of the basic situation. He can say, I'm going to release you on your own recognizance; I'm going to trust you to show back up. I think that you're going to come back in a month, so be here. And you're free to go. Or he can say, I'm going to give you bail. I believe that it's going to - $1,000. If you give me $1,000, you give the court $1,000 - that you will show back up. And if you show back up, I'm going to give you your $1,000 back. A lot of people won't have a thousand dollars, so they'll turn to a bail bondsman to pay it for them. And they'll pay a nonrefundable fee - usually, a couple hundred dollars to do that. And then the third option is something called pretrial release, which is sort of a newer, kind of county funded program, where you get out with some sort of supervision - surveillance, ankle bracelets, things like that.
Yes. Because prison changed that young man, and it burned away a lot of the extraneous parts of his character. And again, part of it was through his own self-analysis, but part of it is through this imposed control that prison has on you. I mean, the only thing you could control when you were in prison for all those years was yourself. I mean, I remember when I first went to his cell in Robben Island. And I walked in, I walked - nearly walked in, but I gasped when I saw it, because - I mean, Nelson Mandela, as you know, is a big man. He's 6'2" inches tall, he has big hands and a big head. And he is larger than life in a literally and figurative way.
It's a possibility and I've been fascinated with this - that idea going back to my days as a, of course, a science fiction reader. We have a science fiction museum here in Seattle. And I got a chance to meet Carl Sagan, you know, over 10 years ago before he passed away. And he pitched me on the idea of continuing to support study research when funding was being cut off. So I think that's an interesting aspect to what we're doing, but there's a huge emphasis here on two-way conventional radio astronomy to answer the questions - the fundamental scientific questions.
Well, I think the big issue here is how do you reconcile the illegal part of illegal immigrants? And so when you have individuals making an argument that, make us U.S. citizens when they came to the country illegally, I think that's where you have this disconnect. And it's not just with white males. I mean, I'll tell you point blank, you know, look I got a talk show on an all-black radio station, and man, black folks are—-I mean, it's probably running eight to ten, I mean, eight out of 10 against granting these rights. And so, you have a lot of people who are tired emotionally. And frankly, I think Congress is really in a quagmire. Because, if you go left, if you go right--you're going to face a lot of heat.
Many of you wrote to us in defense of cycling. In our coverage last week of the Tour de France, we talked about the doping cases that have plagued the Tour, in part because the Tour so rigorously tests its riders. Aviva Turosh(ph) of Tucson writes, "Bicycling is singled out as being rife with doping, but I sure don't remember the last time I watched a baseball team or a football team or a basketball team or a soccer team shuffle into a trailer at the end of a game to submit to drug testing." We also got many kind words about Gary Smith, the remarkable man who presided over our front desk during the past four years. Gary passed away earlier this month. I spoke about him in my essay last week. Drew Aicker(ph) of McLeansville, North Carolina, writes, "This was one of the best stories I've heard in a long time. It inspired me to base a Sunday school lesson on how this man was an example of someone living the beatitudes. It is a testament on how an individual can affect people through everyday living."
I talked to a couple of - a couple of people in my books had taught the novel for 25 years, including Wally Lamb, who taught high school English, and Lee Smith, the novelist. And they talk about a very similar experience that Alicia described. And I think one of the reasons that it's such a great book for teachers is because there are so many different things in it that kids can relate to, one way or another. And so if you can't get the kid in the back row with Boo, you might be able to get him with Atticus.
A genetic disorder snakes through Bonnie Rough's family tree - hypohidrotic ectodermal dysplasia, or HED, is carried by mothers and passed on to sons. Sufferers of the disorder cannot sweat, have trouble breathing, sleeping, staying awake and offer appear ill - many are. Immunodeficiency associated with the condition may lead to a lifetime of infections. Until the human genome was mapped, the women and men in Rough's family only knew that something was wrong, not what caused it. Bonnie Rough researched the disorder and discovered she was a carrier. In her new book, "Carrier: Untangling the Danger in My DNA," Rough tells the story of her own tough decisions and how the effects of HED ripped through her family.
Yeah. Yeah, he said that. And he also said that the church provided him with good services (unintelligible) because they consulted with the Catholic Church because that's their religion, the official religion in the country. And they said, what do we do with the disappeared? What do we do? And they found out - and this is what - so he implicated the church in these interviews. I mean he implicated a bunch of people because he didn't - he felt he was conducting a duty by eliminating the dissidents. So he says, oh, it's, you know, let's find a solution so the population doesn't get too upset about these disappearing - disappeared people being, you know, killed, like you said. So they throw people from planes into the ocean. And they said that was, you know, that was the best in terms of religion that they could have done.
Well, again some people who feel that there's a liberal bias in the media usually jump on any endorsement. As proof of that, if it goes in the liberal direction, but of course newspapers have been endorsing candidates since the beginning of time in the U.S.A. It's nothing new and they've done it regularly without a lot of you know controversy. It just seems that now people - some people feel, and I think legitimately in some cases, that endorsing a candidate tips your hand too much. And I would say that vast numbers of readers don't even understand that there is a separation between a newspaper's editorial staff and their newsroom. They assume they're all marching together, when actually you have many newspapers, let's say, that are quite conservative editorially, and their newsroom's very independent, or vice versus, so...
Harriet Jacobs was born into slavery in North Carolina in 1813. For the first 12 years of her life, her experience was fairly good because she had a kind mistress. But then she fell into the hands of a master who sexually harassed her. To the extent - he had fathered 11 children by other slave women and he kept pursuing her and pursuing her and it was just a horrible experience for her. In defense against him, she had a relationship, an affair, with a kindly, nice, white gentleman who lived nearby. She had two children. This was all kind of in defense against the constant sexual harassment by her master. Ultimately, she had to flee and she had to hide out in a shed, an attic, that was only nine foot long and seven foot wide and three foot high.
Well, that, you know, we basically disparaged Japan in recent years, saying it's got a stagnant economy, they've got a quasi-pacifistic outlook towards their military. But Japan's so-called stagnant economy is still the largest - third largest economy in the world. It has a very capable military. It's got four times as many warships as the British Royal Navy, great niche capacities and special forces and diesel-electric - the latest diesel-electric submarines. And Japan's lifeline for energy is the South China Sea. So Japan is very nervous about a China that is increasing its air and naval capabilities by leaps and bounds.
There will be two in Georgia and two in South Carolina, at least that's what - they're undergoing - they're the farthest along in terms of licensing, and they have money. And money is a big question. It's one thing to have a design that people like, and there are good things about the design. I mean the design is the so-called passive design. It's much safer in the sense that it doesn't have - it doesn't need all the electrical equipment to make it - to bring in coolant if there's a loss-of-coolant accident. A lot of so-called passive design, you use gravity, you use convection to bring cooling water in.
I am. But I wanted to get away faster. But, you know, I have to be patient and not to go out and overdue things yet because I'm still in the healing process, you know? And the funny part is I'm going to be out on the road. As these changes are going, as the hair is growing and my eyelashes and eyebrows are coming back, I'm going to be working. And people are going to be seeing all this stuff happen as I see it, you know? So it's - I'm like - I'm nervous. I'm like, I'm so happy that I'm getting back into the swing of things, but I'm nervous.
If they don't pay more taxes, in the long run it's going to cost them far more. They just have to bite the bullet and understand if you want to have a quality life in this state and protect the poorest of our state and protect people in the state, you have to pay more taxes. I paid plenty of taxes. I do not want to - I do not like paying taxes, but when you consider the people, and you consider the state, it's necessary. It's just - we've been very fortunate in this country that we pay so little compared to other countries.
Indeed. I think it was a moment of hope for many Zimbabweans, because it's not just a political and electoral crisis they're going through; it's also an economic crisis, Renee. This is a country where inflation is running at goodness knows what hundreds of thousands. I mean they've just issued a new banknote worth a hundred billion Zimbabwe dollars. What does it buy? Not even a loaf of bread. So trying to get their political leaders to talk and to resolve the crises in the country has become paramount for the Zimbabwean people, and now here they look at these negotiations that we were told were going to be wrapped up within two weeks, ostensibly going wrong. Although the chief mediator, President Thabo Mbeki, says they're going swimmingly. It's not a good moment for Zimbabweans. I'm sure they'll be holding their breath and thinking, whew, we really wish that our political leaders could get it right so that economically we can start getting it right in this country.
If you are a sports fan, you'll probably be watching tonight's Game 7 showdown in the NBA Finals and if you're not, you should really consider it. This is one of the most anticipated pro basketball games in decades. The Miami Heat fought back from a five-point deficit in under 30 seconds to force this Game 7. The San Antonio Spurs are trying to become the first team since 1978 to win a Finals Game 7 on the road. NPR's Mike Pesca is in Miami and he's with us. And, Mike, I understand the last time a team won Game 7 on the road, it was the Washington Bullets and they beat the Seattle Supersonics. That's how long it's been.
Right, so this is the thing (laughter) - right? - because the way we talk about whiteness is so flat, and, like, we just slam everything together. So we have all these words that we use to sort of not talk about whiteness, right? We have euphemisms like soccer moms (laughter) and evangelical and working-class and middle America. And those things obviously are code words for whiteness, right? We don't - we're not talking about black voters and Latino voters and Asian-American voters when we say those things. And so we don't talk about whiteness as identity politics, but there's a lot of the way that white Americans have always have always voted have been wrapped up in these ideas of sort of who deserves what.
Completely. I think we're in danger of over-politicizing this visit. I mean, we're going to see mass displays of faith, of devotion, for millions and millions of people - probably thousands maybe even millions will have their lives changed or reconfirmation of faith in a way that politics can't touch. And then finally, you know, we all give sermons and he'll give sermons, but the message is the person - the kind of person he is in the way he conducts himself, as E.J. says, the people he's visiting. He is displaying a devotion to God, a devotion to the least among us, a sort of soul on fire that will inspire millions of people - Muslim, atheists, Jews - it's going to be a huge cultural event, I think.
I think what's going to happen here, in the next, maybe, six weeks, 12 weeks and months, are gaps are going to get started to fill in, like filling in a crossword - a jigsaw puzzle, and starting to see where we might see oil below the surface and start to have a little bit better feel for the three-dimensional aspect. And with that data, we'll start to be able to balance this checkbook of oil that was released into what compartments that it went to. But at this time, I think that a lot of data, a lot of samples are collected, and it just takes time for them to go through the pipeline.
Well, you know, it's a plant that grows in North Africa and kind of follows a trail up through Sicily and up through Italy and up into the south of - southwest France, so it's - it really is a Mediterranean plant. And I think it's one of those flavors that's a little bit - you know, you get a little bit used to it as you eat it. And it has a slightly bitter flavor. It has a sort of artichoke tendency, so that if you were to put it into a soup, let's say, a potato and leek soup, and you would add that in, it would just give that very subtle hint of artichoke.
Well, you know, you're right. Guaido speaks with U.S. officials all the time. In fact, our interview with him got pushed back for about a half an hour because he was on the phone for a lengthy conversation with Vice President Mike Pence. He says that having the U.S. in his corner gives him a boost. He's quite proud of it. He kind of flaunts it sometimes. And - but at the same time, this allows Maduro and his socialist government and their supporters to paint Guaido as a puppet of American imperialism. And as for some kind of military action, the enthusiasm for that seems to be waning within the Trump administration. But Guaido points out that this idea is catching on among average Venezuelans.
Back at his shop in another part of Samarra, Daha Abdul Rahman is still not convinced that things can improve here. While local tribes are now fighting against al-Qaida, that could change if things don't get better for the people who live here. He says since the shrine was blown up, things have gotten worse and worse. It remains to be seen, he says, if anyone really wants to do anything for the city. He says if only the mosque is going to be rebuilt, then Samarra could be delivered again into the hands of the insurgents. Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, NPR News, Samarra, Iraq.
Well, it started in the debate on Monday. They were both asked whether they'd meet without preconditions with America's enemies - people like Hugo Chavez or the leader of Iran. Obama said he would. Hillary said she wouldn't. And for a day, the battle over who had the better answer was conducted by surrogates as it usually is. The Clinton campaign, in particular, press the point saying it showed how tough and experience she was, what a rookie and how inexperienced he was. But then, Hillary Clinton escalated it by making it personal and by delivering the charge herself. In an interview with an Iowa paper, she called Obama's answer naïve and irresponsible.
I didn't. That was the secret. Let's imagine I'm a portrait artist. This man was in my studio. I had him in one corner, I had my canvas in front of me and I put him directly onto the canvas. I was not a conduit for him. His ideology was not the guiding force of my performance. The guiding force of my performance was the victims. And his silhouette was molded by their accusation, by their memory, by their reverberating grief. But nothing from that man ever touched me or entered me. I simply transferred his image onto canvas - by that, I mean onto film. So he never got close to me. He never got near me. He never infected me.
By NIH and by organizations in the U.K. But I do think that the question you're asking has a deeper resonance, and that is that we should be thinking about ways to use science, scientific training, health research, health delivery as a component of our foreign policy. We should have more scientists in our embassies. We should be using our embassies abroad to bring scientists to other countries, especially developing countries. Science is a unifying force in the world. On the whole, it does good. Most of the work that we do is not classified. There are opportunities to build on a community that already exists as a result of international meetings to try to solidify relations between countries, even those that are having political disputes.
Well, when the recording industry sued Napster, for example, Napster was distributing entire copies of copyrighted songs that you could enjoy just like the legal original, and Google says it's not doing that. Susan Wojcicki, the Google vice president in charge of their Print Project, said, `Google respects copyright and doesn't show even a single page to users who find copyrighted books through the program, unless the copyright holder gives us permission to show more.' She went on to say at most they only show a brief snippet of text where the search term appears, along with basic bibliographic information and links to online booksellers and libraries. So if publishers say they want Google to make the whole book available through a print-on-demand program, they can do that. But otherwise, all you get is a preview of what's inside so you can buy or borrow a copy somewhere else.
That was my introduction. I was so naïve. I was - encountered him later, much later, as a graduate student, and that was my introduction to McCarthyism in America and how these witch hunts had really gutted my own field, the Asia field, how there were things you couldn't ask, there was scholarship you couldn't do. And when I was doing scholarship as a young man in the '60s and '70s, I was just beginning. The vogue was modernization theory, and what you had to do was talk about Japan as a capitalist model for development in Asia, and modernization theory was this was the model. It was an anti-communist model. It was very, in my view, ideological, but it was presented as empiricism. And that was where the money was. That was what you had to write.
I think it's a remarkably effective campaign. It's certainly - the appeal of it is obvious. The reach of it has really surprised me. And I think that Harvey Weinstein was certainly the catalyst for that. I mean, there have been some criticisms of it on the right. You know, there's this concern that it conflates maybe unwanted comments with actual sexual assault to the detriment of victims. And from the left, there's been concern that it's sort of creating a hierarchy of victimhood within all of these women who are suffering. So it is interesting to hear how the different sides have been reacting to something so powerful.
This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. From saying goodbye to the kids in the morning to leaving a job after 25 years to the end of life, exits are universal. Long or short, big or small, we've all left home or ended friendships or marriages. In a book entitled "Exit," sociologist Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot explores these endings through the stories of people in transition and asks whether exits are as clean and binary as they might first appear or whether they're messier and more complicated. She also wonders whether our small endings - the goodbyes we practice every day - can help us find grace and dignity in the bigger farewells.
OK, we're going to take another call, or we have an email here, this is from Martha(ph) in McLean, Virginia: My children were five and seven when their wonderful daddy died suddenly of a heart attack. The kids' responses to everything grief-related were totally different. It made it so much harder as a parent because we couldn't do grief work together. After seeing an amazing individual grief therapist for a while, my daughter wanted to quit. My son would've preferred that the therapist move in with us so he could talk to her every day. The one thing they agreed on was after the first year, both kids when to Camp Erin/Camp Forget-Me-Not, the weekend camp run by the Wendt Center. It was a huge turning point, especially for my daughter.
It was a major theme. David Petraeus said that they've been seeing mixed indicators, and it's very hard to read what's happening with the Iranian influence in Iraq. The U.S. has seen a decline in attacks by militias that it says is getting support from Iran. And it's also seen a decline in attacks that used the weaponry associated with Iran. But he said in the last week and a half, these sophisticated explosive devices that the U.S. believes have come in from Iran that these sorts of attacks have been on the rise in the past 10 days. So he says it's really hard to read. Ambassador Ryan Crocker was also there, and he was talking about the political side of that. He's been meeting with his Iranian counterpart in Baghdad. And he said he's ready to do it again, but they haven't heard back from the Iranians.

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