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In terms of best for society category, I think the ability of the Academy Awards to shed light on documentaries, many of which will be available to people much more than they used to be through Netflix or On Demand. The ability to bring a documentary, like "How to Survive a Plague," about AIDS activism in New York in the '80s and '90s; the ability to cast light on a movie like that and bring it out to where more people will see it and be aware of it, I think the Academy Awards does a world of good for movies like that.
That's right. I mean, obviously mistakes are an occupational hazard. But one thing that - one of Internet's - one of the Internet's great visionaries, David Weinberger(ph), once observed that perhaps transparency is the new objectivity. If you can tell people how to get to the essence of the information, if you can offer them the links, the documents, maybe some of the raw interviews from which you derived your story, then they don't have to just trust you, and they don't have to be suspicious of investing that kind of trust in you, nor do you, as a reporter, have to ignore your experience and the wisdom gleaned over decades covering a beat and abstain from offering a true judgment on what you've seen, because people can then have the information to agree or disagree.
Sabado Gigante used to have the models in beautiful evening gowns. Now they have dancers in booty shorts. Even in the news programs, the women reporters don't dress professionally. They're in mini-skirts and always trying to keep up their appearance. I guess they think the more women show, the higher ratings they'll get, but they're wrong. It loses the more mature audience. Everything now is corny and flashier. El Gordo la Flaca(ph) is a show with a skinny lady and a fat man reporting the latest gossip in a Jacuzzi. They invite guests in bathing suits and talk about celebrity lives. Teenagers don't usually watch that stuff unless they weren't born here or they can't change the channel because their parents are watching it.
Well, I think he probably surely means that they have gotten out as much as possible of the malignant tumor, called a glioma, without causing damaged to areas nearby that cause - that control things like speech and thought and movement. The goal really is to reduce the tumor in size. The surgeons talked about debulking it. And that gives radiation and chemotherapy a better shot at controlling the remaining tumor. And it also, you know, worry - doctors worry about swelling in the brain from radiation, which he'll have later, and by reducing the tumor size. They may also lower the risk that swelling could cause problems later on.
No, no, absolutely. And there's no returns - no tax returns of Donald Trump that have been publicly examined or looked at, and it's obviously a huge issue in this campaign. And the big number on the form, it's a negative $915.7 million - what's called a net operating loss. And what that is is simply there was a lot of business wreckage in Donald Trump's background from the late '80s and early '90s, and he declared those business losses on his tax return. And he's able to use that number in future years going forward - in 1995, it was 15 years forward - to reduce his taxable income going forward, which means if he can get it to zero, he pays no taxes. We haven't seen his taxes going forward, so we don't know if he used it. But we would assume he did in order to reduce his taxable income and get rid of the income tax that he would've had to pay.
In fact, as far as France was concerned, there was an enormous need to demonstrate that France was not, as it had appeared to be, simply the state that actually collaborated with dictators in the Middle East. It had done so in Tunisia. This was a chance for President Sarkozy to show that France was something very different. And for Britain, I'm afraid to say that Britain became involved largely because it wanted to show that it was a state engaged in a moral crusade in a wider world. That's now have been done. We have to hope that actually this has been a learning and sobering experience for the leaders concerned, and that they won't be quite so ready to do it again quite so quickly.
Well, the biggest thing they said is ours is $100 cheaper. There are some people who speculated that they actually waited for Microsoft to say that before they announced their price, and that was very warmly received. Also the fact that on Sony you can absolutely use used games. Now, this is a huge market among gamers and Microsoft has been really cagey about it. So when Sony made this announcement that you could use used games, there was a standing ovation. I mean people were elated, which I know, that sounds crazy, but when I actually talked to Microsoft about this, they were really evasive to that question. They kept referring people back to their website. I played both consoles and I enjoyed the Sony one a little more - I have to say. But we're still waiting. You know, this is going to be a slow unveil through November, when they finally hit the shelves.
The timing was interesting. Just as Vladimir Putin was ceremoniously installing his protégé, Dmitri Medvedev as president and himself as prime minister, it became known that the Russian government had ordered the expulsion of three American diplomats and military attaches and that two Russian diplomats in the United States had also been expelled. The tit-for-tat expulsion started last November and it was not clear in what order that it happened, why they happened or why the news had been withheld by both governments for so long. One senses a whiff of the Cold War, and one of its favorite instruments, PNG - persona non-grata - or person not welcome.
Any time - this is Jon speaking. Anytime somebody is seriously injured, the chaplain would just appear at the bedside. He never seemed to sleep. He never seemed to rest. And he was always there trying to comfort the soldiers. And the other thing he had to do was pray over the soldiers that died in the hospital. And we filmed far too many of those occasions, as we were making this movie. And he said to us, I can't stop and count and tell you the number of people that I've prayed over right now, because it would paralyze me and I wouldn't be able to function. But when I get back home I'll count them up, and I'll let you know. And he came up to us the other day and he says, I've been meaning to tell you something. It was 117, and I miss and mourn every single one of them.
I would hope that he and the other legislators would notice one thing. People like me who never been arrested are not leftist radicals. I stood next to another minister who was a rabbi. There was a Muslim cleric. There were social workers, doctors. They don't make their way down to Raleigh every week to protest. So I would hope that the legislature would say to itself if the people who really make North Carolina work, these people are upset, then maybe before we push through what we want, maybe we ought to ask ourselves, is this what North Carolinians want?
That's right. I mean, you point out the Communists. The Communists are a good example of a party that wasn't ostensibly sectarian. It didn't have a kind of a broader mandate or a broader reputation that can often transcend these ethnic and sectarian lines. It's just--you know, the Communist Party doesn't really have an audience anymore. You really don't have any movement--I guess the best way to put it is there's no leader in Iraq at this point that's really speaking in a national voice which is a--it is a divergence from the past. There's nobody that can claim to have significant representation that will cross those lines. You know, how that plays out in the future is a question, but, you know, when we talk about reconciliation or we talk about the constitution being a means to reconciliation, it's difficult how that process will actually begin when so much is being organized around sect and ethnicity.
One of the world leaders President Obama called before his speech about Afghanistan was the president of Pakistan. In his speech, Mr. Obama said that success in Afghanistan is linked to a partnership with Pakistan. The two share a border and also a Taliban insurgency. To get one view from Pakistan, we turn to journalist Ahmed Rashid. His latest book on his country is called �Descent into Chaos� and we reached him in Lahore. Well, let's begin with how President Obama's Afghanistan strategy is viewed in Pakistan. I know the speech came early in the morning there. Have you been able to talk to people?
Right. That was part of the strip, the story that I - that when my partner, Carlos Castellanos, who draws the strip - when we were talking about this idea and executing it, one thing we wanted to do was present a story that is unique to Latinos, unique to the Latino veterans of the time and what they went through. So going through the research - and I was very much inspired by the work done at the U.S. Latinos and Latinas World War II Oral History Project at the University of Texas at Austin, one thing I pulled out from this research was that back in the '40s, there was discrimination and there was a feeling of why should I do this if I - if people here don't even like me, people here discriminate me, why should I go fight for freedom?
We've changed our strategies to try to reduce the crime rate, Torres says. But the criminals have also changed their strategies. They attack. We attack. We are continuing the fight, and we are confident that soon we'll bring calm to Ciudad Juarez. But so far, the murder rate just keeps going up. In March, the Mexican army took over the police department in an effort to stem the killings. It worked at first. There were even a few days when the newspaper headlines proclaimed zero murders. But by last month, those days were long gone. In August, according to Torres, there were 338 homicides, the highest number ever recorded in a single month.
Well, definitely what's going on in Israel, but possibly a new election for the president among the Palestinians. The election of the Iranian president next year, the Iranian-American-Western nuclear negotiations, the Syrian-Israeli negotiations, I mean, you've got about five or six real big- sticker items out there taking place simultaneously. And I think this is a sign of the times in the sense that all of the big problems in the region are on the verge of being - people are on the verge of attempting to negotiate solutions to them. And people have fought militarily in other ways, now they're exploring diplomatic possibilities. This is a very positive sign. The trouble is that almost all these conflicts are linked in one way or another. So you really have to try to address them all simultaneously, which is very difficult, but this is the consequence of our own modern history and to the leadership decisions that have been taken.
James also stops to point out his mom, who's waving furiously at us from the third floor of an old wooden building. He says she's really proud of him and his turn-around. With his earnings from the tour and his fruit stand, James is putting his younger sister through college. She too beams at us from across the street as we continue on the tour. Police crime stats testify to the old city's revitalization. There's only been one robbery this year. Hardin and the James cousins hope they can spread that good fortune and pacification strategies to other parts of the country and even beyond. But while Panama is struggling with a growing gang problem and new ties to international crime groups, violence here is nowhere near the levels experienced in El Salvador or Honduras, says Ana Selles de Palacio, of the Institute of Criminology at Panama University.
Lady Vols are doing - you know, they're still in there. It's been obviously a challenging year. I talked to some people who cover the Lady Vols on a regular basis. Pat Summitt is still coaching. She has delegated a lot of that to her assistant. You know, she suffers in comparison to her former self. She is known as a fireball. You know, we all remember her pacing the sidelines, screaming at refs, screaming at players, screaming at anything. Anything less than that is going to be obvious and it is, as she is a more subdued version of who she was before.
Well, I think you alluded to one of the key ideas, which is that technology is accelerating. And, actually, that might seem obvious, but relatively few observers take that into consideration. We're doubling the power of information technology every year, doubling the price performance, the capacity, the bandwidth, and it's not just electronics; it's really anything having to do with information, including, for example, biology, which you were just talking about. It took us 15 years to sequence HIV; we sequenced SARS in 31 days. Our knowledge of the brain, which is our information processes, is doubling every year. The amount of data we have, the spatial resolution, our brain scanning is doubling every year. I mean, we could list 50 or 60 different...
Well, there's two sentiments here. Turks feel Europeans are - what Europe is telling us is, keep your borders open so we can keep our borders closed for people. And there is a sense that these are people in need. And I think Turkish society does deserve credit for having really taken in refugees and without much of a fuss. We do not have nearly as much economy as European countries have. But I think there is also another response, which is part of the deal. And our written part of the deal is that Europeans will turn a blind eye to Turkey's increasingly deteriorating human rights record - human rights situation, freedom of press, crackdown on media and the Kurdish issue. We're not hearing anything from Europe. And basically, they're willing to keep quiet for now, and I think that's disappointing to many, especially pro-Western Turkish intellectuals, writers, journalists, et cetera, who had seen, up until this point, Europe as the benchmark for democracy.
It's been more than three years since the maker of the morning-after contraceptive called Plan B asked the FDA to allow the drug to be sold over-the-counter. Plan B, which is not the same as the abortion pill RU-486, can prevent most pregnancies if taken within 72 hours of unprotected intercourse. Still, the issue has been controversial. During those three years, two FDA commissioners have come and gone, and now a third nominee is before the Senate. Yesterday, the FDA summoned the drug's manufacturer - Barr Pharmaceuticals - to discuss whether to limit non-prescription sales to those age 18 and over, and how to enforce those age restrictions. Barr originally asked that only younger teens, those under 16, be required to get a doctor's permission. FDA Spokeswoman Susan Bro says the FDA's latest action on the Plan B over-the-counter request was intentionally timed to coincide with today's hearing. She says von Eschenbach wants to assure the Senate Health Committee that the matter can be resolved, possibly in the next few weeks.
Very personal. So for the past two years, Brazilians have been watching their economy slump. And they're also seeing seemingly endless revelations about corruption in government. And Dilma was head of Petrobras when that bribery scheme was going on there. So right after she was reelected, opponents started demonstrating against her and filing impeachment charges. For them, now is their big success moment. But then you have the other side, and they say this whole process is illegitimate. And they say if people don't like the president, they can just vote for another one in the next election. That's why things are getting so polarized.
I want to tell you three stories about the power of relationships to solve the deep and complex social problems of this century. You know, sometimes it seems like all these problems of poverty, inequality, ill health, unemployment, violence, addiction — they're right there in one person's life. So I want to tell you about someone like this that I know. I'm going to call her Ella. Ella lives in a British city on a run down estate. The shops are closed, the pub's gone, the playground's pretty desolate and never used, and inside Ella's house, the tension is palpable and the noise levels are deafening. The TV's on at full volume. One of her sons is fighting with one of her daughters. Another son, Ryan, is keeping up this constant stream of abuse from the kitchen, and the dogs are locked behind the bedroom door and straining. Ella is stuck. She has lived with crisis for 40 years. She knows nothing else, and she knows no way out. She's had a whole series of abusive partners, and, tragically, one of her children has been taken into care by social services. The three children that still live with her suffer from a whole range of problems, and none of them are in education. And Ella says to me that she is repeating the cycle of her own mother's life before her. But when I met Ella, there were 73 different services on offer for her and her family in the city where she lives, 73 different services run out of 24 departments in one city, and Ella and her partners and her children were known to most of them. They think nothing of calling social services to try and mediate one of the many arguments that broke out. And the family home was visited on a regular basis by social workers, youth workers, a health officer, a housing officer, a home tutor and the local policemen. And the governments say that there are 100,000 families in Britain today like Ella's, struggling to break the cycle of economic, social and environmental deprivation. And they also say that managing this problem costs a quarter of a million pounds per family per year and yet nothing changes. None of these well-meaning visitors are making a difference. This is a chart we made in the same city with another family like Ella's. This shows 30 years of intervention in that family's life. And just as with Ella, not one of these interventions is part of an overall plan. There's no end goal in sight. None of the interventions are dealing with the underlying issues. These are just containment measures, ways of managing a problem. One of the policemen says to me, "Look, I just deliver the message and then I leave." So, I've spent time living with families like Ella's in different parts of the world, because I want to know: what can we learn from places where our social institutions just aren't working? I want to know what it feels like to live in Ella's family. I want to know what's going on and what we can do differently. Well, the first thing I learned is that cost is a really slippery concept. Because when the government says that a family like Ella's costs a quarter of a million pounds a year to manage, what it really means is that this system costs a quarter of a million pounds a year. Because not one penny of this money actually touches Ella's family in a way that makes a difference. Instead, the system is just like this costly gyroscope that spins around the families, keeping them stuck at its heart, exactly where they are. And I also spent time with the frontline workers, and I learned that it is an impossible situation. So Tom, who is the social worker for Ella's 14-year-old son Ryan, has to spend 86 percent of his time servicing the system: meetings with colleagues, filling out forms, more meetings with colleagues to discuss the forms, and maybe most shockingly, the 14 percent of the time he has to be with Ryan is spent getting data and information for the system. So he says to Ryan, "How often have you been smoking? Have you been drinking? When did you go to school?" And this kind of interaction rules out the possibility of a normal conversation. It rules out the possibility of what's needed to build a relationship between Tom and Ryan. When we made this chart, the frontline workers, the professionals — they stared at it absolutely amazed. It snaked around the walls of their offices. So many hours, so well meant, but ultimately so futile. And there was this moment of absolute breakdown, and then of clarity: we had to work in a different way. So in a really brave step, the leaders of the city where Ella lives agreed that we could start by reversing Ryan's ratio. So everyone who came into contact with Ella or a family like Ella's would spend 80 percent of their time working with the families and only 20 percent servicing the system. And even more radically, the families would lead and they would decide who was in a best position to help them. So Ella and another mother were asked to be part of an interview panel, to choose from amongst the existing professionals who would work with them. And many, many people wanted to join us, because you don't go into this kind of work to manage a system, you go in because you can and you want to make a difference. So Ella and the mother asked everybody who came through the door, "What will you do when my son starts kicking me?" And so the first person who comes in says, "Well, I'll look around for the nearest exit and I will back out very slowly, and if the noise is still going on, I'll call my supervisor." And the mothers go, "You're the system. Get out of here!" And then the next person who comes is a policeman, and he says, "Well, I'll tackle your son to the ground and then I'm not sure what I'll do." And the mothers say, "Thank you." So, they chose professionals who confessed they didn't necessarily have the answers, who said — well, they weren't going to talk in jargon. They showed their human qualities and convinced the mothers that they would stick with them through thick and thin, even though they wouldn't be soft with them. So these new teams and the families were then given a sliver of the former budget, but they could spend the money in any way they chose. And so one of the families went out for supper. They went to McDonald's and they sat down and they talked and they listened for the first time in a long time. Another family asked the team if they would help them do up their home. And one mother took the money and she used it as a float to start a social enterprise. And in a really short space of time, something new started to grow: a relationship between the team and the workers. And then some remarkable changes took place. Maybe it's not surprising that the journey for Ella has had some big steps backwards as well as forwards. But today, she's completed an IT training course, she has her first paid job, her children are back in school, and the neighbors, who previously just hoped this family would be moved anywhere except next door to them, are fine. They've made some new friendships. And all the same people have been involved in this transformation — same families, same workers. But the relationship between them has been supported to change. So I'm telling you about Ella because I think that relationships are the critical resource we have in solving some of these intractable problems. But today, our relationships are all but written off by our politics, our social policies, our welfare institutions. And I've learned that this really has to change. So what do I mean by relationships? I'm talking about the simple human bonds between us, a kind of authentic sense of connection, of belonging, the bonds that make us happy, that support us to change, to be brave like Ella and try something new. And, you know, it's no accident that those who run and work in the institutions that are supposed to support Ella and her family don't talk about relationships, because relationships are expressly designed out of a welfare model that was drawn up in Britain and exported around the world. The contemporaries of William Beveridge, who was the architect of the first welfare state and the author of the Beveridge Report, had little faith in what they called the average sensual or emotional man. Instead, they trusted this idea of the impersonal system and the bureaucrat who would be detached and work in this system. And the impact of Beveridge on the way the modern state sees social issues just can't be underestimated. The Beveridge Report sold over 100,000 copies in the first weeks of publication alone. People queued in the rain on a November night to get hold of a copy, and it was read across the country, across the colonies, across Europe, across the United States of America, and it had this huge impact on the way that welfare states were designed around the globe. The cultures, the bureaucracies, the institutions — they are global, and they've come to seem like common sense. They've become so ingrained in us, that actually we don't even see them anymore. And I think it's really important to say that in the 20th century, they were remarkably successful, these institutions. They led to longer lifespans, the eradication of mass disease, mass housing, almost universal education. But at the same time, Beveridge sowed the seeds of today's challenges. So let me tell you a second story. What do you think today is a bigger killer than a lifetime of smoking? It's loneliness. According to government statistics, one person over 60 — one in three — doesn't speak to or see another person in a week. One person in 10, that's 850,000 people, doesn't speak to anyone else in a month. And we're not the only people with this problem; this problem touches the whole of the Western world. And it's even more acute in countries like China, where a process of rapid urbanization, mass migration, has left older people alone in the villages. And so the services that Beveridge designed and exported — they can't address this kind of problem. Loneliness is like a collective relational challenge, and it can't be addressed by a traditional bureaucratic response. So some years ago, wanting to understand this problem, I started to work with a group of about 60 older people in South London, where I live. I went shopping, I played bingo, but mainly I was just observing and listening. I wanted to know what we could do differently. And if you ask them, people tell you they want two things. They want somebody to go up a ladder and change a light bulb, or to be there when they come out of hospital. They want on-demand, practical support. And they want to have fun. They want to go out, do interesting things with like-minded people, and make friends like we've all made friends at every stage of our lives. So we rented a phone line, hired a couple of handymen, and started a service we called "Circle." And Circle offers its local membership a toll-free 0 800 number that they can call on demand for any support. And people have called us for so many reasons. They've called because their pets are unwell, their DVD is broken, they've forgotten how to use their mobile phone, or maybe they are coming out of hospital and they want someone to be there. And Circle also offers a rich social calendar — knitting, darts, museum tours, hot air ballooning — you name it. But here's the interesting thing, the really deep change: over time, the friendships that have formed have begun to replace the practical offer. So let me tell you about Belinda. Belinda's a Circle member, and she was going into hospital for a hip operation, so she called her local Circle to say they wouldn't see her for a bit. And Damon, who runs the local Circle, calls her back and says, "How can I help?" And Belinda says, "Oh no, I'm fine — Jocelyn is doing the shopping, Tony's doing the gardening, Melissa and Joe are going to come in and cook and chat." So five Circle members had organized themselves to take care of Belinda. And Belinda's 80, although she says that she feels 25 inside, but she also says that she felt stuck and pretty down when she joined Circle. But the simple act of encouraging her to come along to that first event led to a process where natural friendships formed, friendships that today are replacing the need for expensive services. It's relationships that are making the difference. So I think that three factors have converged that enable us to put relationships at the heart and center of how we solve social problems today. Firstly, the nature of the problems — they've changed, and they require different solutions. Secondly, the cost, human as much as financial, of doing business as usual. And thirdly, technology. I've talked about the first two factors. It's technology that enables these approaches to scale and potentially now support thousands of people. So the technology we've used is really simple, it's made up of available things like databases, mobile phones. Circle has got this very simple system that underpins it, enables a small local team to support a membership of up to a thousand. And you can contrast this with a neighborhood organization of the 1970s, when this kind of scale just wasn't possible, neither was the quality or the longevity that the spine of technology can provide. So it's relationships underpinned by technology that can turn the Beveridge models on their heads. The Beveridge models are all about institutions with finite resources, anonymously managing access. In my work at the front line, I've seen again and again how up to 80 percent of resource is spent keeping people out. So professionals have to administer these increasingly complex forms of administration that are basically about stopping people accessing the service or managing the queue. And Circle, like the relational services that we and others have designed, inverts this logic. What it says is, the more people, the more relationships, the stronger the solution. So I want to tell you my third and final story, which is about unemployment. In Britain, as in most places in the world, our welfare states were primarily designed to get people into work, to educate them for this, and to keep them healthy. But here, too, the systems are failing. And so the response has been to try and make these old systems even more efficient and transactional — to speed up processing times, divide people into ever-smaller categories, try and target services at them more efficiently — in other words, the very opposite of relational. But guess how most people find work today? Through word of mouth. It turns out that in Britain today, most new jobs are not advertised. So it's friends that tell you about a job, it's friends that recommend you for a job, and it's a rich and diverse social network that helps you find work. Maybe some of you here this evening are thinking, "But I found my job through an advert," but if you think back, it was probably a friend that showed you the ad and then encouraged you to apply. But not surprisingly, people who perhaps most need this rich and diverse network are those who are most isolated from it. So knowing this, and also knowing about the costs and failure of current systems, we designed something new with relationships at its heart. We designed a service that encourages people to meet up, people in and out of work, to work together in structured ways and try new opportunities. And, well, it's very hard to compare the results of these new systems with the old transactional models, but it looks like, with our first 1,000 members, we outperformed existing services by a factor of three, at a fraction of the cost. And here, too, we've used technology, but not to network people in the way that a social platform would do. We've used it to bring people face to face and connect them with each other, building real relationships and supporting people to find work. At the end of his life, in 1948, Beveridge wrote a third report. And in it he said he had made a dreadful mistake. He had left people and their communities out. And this omission, he said, led to seeing people, and people starting to see themselves, within the categories of the bureaucracies and the institutions. And human relationships were already withering. But unfortunately, this third report was much less read than Beveridge's earlier work. But today, we need to bring people and their communities back into the heart of the way we design new systems and new services, in an approach that I call "Relational Welfare." We need to leave behind these old, transactional, unsuitable, outdated models, and we need to adopt instead the shared collective relational responses that can support a family like Ella's, that can address an issue like loneliness, that can support people into work and up the skills curve in a modern labor market, that can also address challenges of education, of health care systems, and so many more of those problems that are pressing on our societies. It is all about relationships. Relationships are the critical resource we have. Thank you. (Applause)
The other thing is - about Sam Harris' point. I mean, every, every moral philosopher knows that moral philosophy is functionally about reducing suffering and increasing human flourishing. I don't think there's been any doubt about that since Aristotle, and that isn't a new scientific discovery. And I still wait to see how a new scientific discovery about suffering and flourishing is actually going to settle moral issues which divide us - like, for example, the extent of the freedoms we enjoy, or the way we ought to treat civilian combatants in war, or many, many other moral problems which divide people very deeply.
You're listening to Talk of the Nation: Science Friday. I'm Ira Flatow. We're looking back on the year 2008, talking about stuff that has been, might have been or shouldn't have been - we could throw that in - which should not have been with my guests, Sharon Begley, science columnist for Newsweek; Steve Mirsky is editor and writer for Scientific American magazine and host of Scientific American's "Science Talk" podcast; Paul Raeburn is a journalist and author of "Acquainted with the Night: A Parent's Quest to Understand Depression and Bipolar Disorder in His Children," he also writes the About Fathers blog for Psychology Today; K.C. Cole, author of "The Universe and the Teacup: The Mathematics of Truth and Beauty," and she's also a professor in the Annenberg School of Journalism at USC in Los Angeles. Our number, 1-800-989-8255. Let's talk about where I left off in the introduction about science and culture. There were lot of science and cultural events and I think one of those things that we talk about as a part of being science and culture - we like to throw that in - is science fiction in culture. And Steve Mirsky, you were saying you saw a remake of a classic movie.
Yeah, no doubt. I spoke to a meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Upton, N.Y., and he said this was a textbook nor'easter. A bunch of variables came together to produce a historic storm. New York City, for example, missed its record snowfall by one tenth of an inch. Thousands of flights are still canceled, schools are closed, and before the storm, New York City took the rare step of shutting down the subway system and banning travel. New York's mayor, Bill de Blasio, says that we're in the age of extreme weather. His quote, "the shape of things to come" - he says the severity and volatility of these storms might change the playbook used to prepare for them. Let's hear a little from him.
I guess the saving grace would be that the Mexican team would be advancing. And they have shown that because of the large Hispanic community in Arizona, they're capable of turning out crowds of over 20,000 to see the Mexican team play. Their fans are very loyal, they're very boisterous. And, of course, southern California has a sizeable Hispanic community, as well. So, I don't think the games will be complete flops, as long as the Mexican team goes through, because people will come out to see them. But certainly, the optimal scenario is for team USA and team Mexico to both advance, because I don't think that Canada will haul in as many fans as either of those teams.
Well, there are some similarities, maybe the happiest of which is that neither man managed to do what they set out to do. You may remember that Reed couldn't light the fuse on his shoe, so it never really went off. And this latest suspect seems to have done not much more than set himself on fire. The big difference right now with what we know seems to be that Reed actually did have al-Qaida training, and it's very uncertain right now that this other suspect, this new suspect, had that kind of training. Officials also say this device was an incendiary device rather than an explosive device, and that means it would cause a fire as opposed to an explosion. So you've got to sort of wonder what the planning was to do that on a plane instead of actually having an explosive.
No, no, no, I think it's very serious. I mean, I think that this latest incident and the events that happened afterwards certainly are of a different qualitative nature than what has happened before. Before it was all kind of, a lot of isolated incidents where some area would be bombed, or somebody would be killed, it would be followed, generally speaking, as your reporter had correctly said, by the Shiite clerics counseling caution and patience. This time it has been different in the sense that these clerics no longer are counseling patience and the Shiites seem to have just had enough. They've had this kind of thing for about a year, a year and a half, and there's a limit to anybody's patience when you get consistently being attacked.
You're listening to SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR News. I'm Ira Flatow. We're talking this hour about what it's like to be a veterinarian with my guests: Tom Gill, a large-animal veterinarian and owner of Brookside Veterinary Clinic in Auburn, New York. Lisa Fortier is president of the International Cartilage Repair Society, associate professor of large-animal surgery at Cornell. Sarah Meixell is a small-animal veterinarian and owner of Veterinary Care of Ithaca. Alfonso Torres is associate dean for public policy at Cornell University. Our number, 1-800-989-8255. Let's start right over here. Yes, step up to the mic. Unidentified Woman #1: Have any of you ever worked on any insects?
Yeah, the object is to mash up the titles of past No.1 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 pop chart to tell a story. For example, here's a runner up entry submitted this past week from listener Greg Nast (ph) of Baltimore - "Sugar Sugar," "I Heard It Through The Grapevine," "You're Having My Baby," "I Got A Feeling," "It Wasn't Me," "The Stripper." Now, Wikipedia has a list of the Billboard No.1 singles from the Hot 100 era 1958 to present, which you can use for the contest. Your story can include up to seven song titles. Entries will be judged on cleverness, naturalness of reading, memorableness (ph) of the songs and overall elegance. You can send up to three entries. And the person who submits the best one, in my opinion, will play Puzzle on the air next week.
I don't know about you, but I haven't quite figured out exactly what technology means in my life. I've spent the past year thinking about what it really should be about. Should I be pro-technology? Should I embrace it full arms? Should I be wary? Like you, I'm very tempted by the latest thing. But at the other hand, a couple of years ago I gave up all of my possessions, sold all my technology — except for a bicycle — and rode across 3,000 miles on the U.S. back roads under the power of my one body, fuelled mostly by Twinkies and junk food. (Laughter) And I've since then tried to keep technology at arm's length in many ways, so it doesn't master my life. At the same time, I run a website on cool tools, where I issue a daily obsession of the latest things in technology. So I'm still perplexed about what the true meaning of technology is as it relates to humanity, as it relates to nature, as it relates to the spiritual. And I'm not even sure we know what technology is. And one definition of technology is that which is first recorded. This is the first example of the modern use of technology that I can find. It was the suggested syllabus for dealing with the Applied Arts and Science at Cambridge University in 1829. Before that, obviously, technology didn't exist. But obviously it did. I like one of the definitions that Alan Kay has for technology. He says technology is anything that was invented after you were born. (Laughter) So it sums up a lot of what we're talking about. Danny Hillis actually has an update on that — he says technology is anything that doesn't quite work yet. (Laughter) Which also, I think, gets into a little bit of our current idea. But I was interested in another definition of technology. Something, again, that went back to something more fundamental. Something that was deeper. And as I struggled to understand that, I came up with a way of framing the question that seemed to work for me in my investigations. And I'm, this morning, going to talk about this for the first time. So this is a very rough attempt to think out loud. The question that I came up with was this question: what does technology want? And by that, I don't mean, does it want chocolate or vanilla? By what it wants, I mean, what are its inherent trends and biases? What are its tendencies over time? One way to think about this is thinking about biological organisms, which we've heard a lot about. And the trick that Richard Dawkins does, which is to say, to look at them as simply as genes, as vehicles for genes. So he's saying, what do genes want? The selfish gene. And I'm applying a similar trick to say, what if we looked at the universe in our culture through the eyes of technology? What does technology want? Obviously, this in an incomplete question, just as looking at an organism as only a gene is an incomplete way of looking at it. But it's still very, very productive. So I'm attempting to say, if we take technology's view of the world, what does it want? And I think once we ask that question we have to go back, actually, to life. Because obviously, if we keep extending the origins of technology far back, I think we come back to life at some point. So that's where I want to begin my little exploration, is in life. And like you heard from the previous speakers, we don't really know what life there is on Earth right now. We have really no idea. Craig Venter's tremendous and brilliant attempt to DNA sequence things in the ocean is great. Brian Farrell's work is all part of this agenda to try and actually discover all the species on Earth. And one of the things that we should do is just make a grid of the globe and randomly go and inspect all the places that the grid intersects, just to see what's on life. And if we did that with our little Martian probe, which we have not done on Earth, we would begin to see some incredible species. This is not on another planet. These are things that are hidden away on our planet. This is an ant that stores its colleagues' honey in its abdomen. Each one of these organisms that we've described — that you've seen from Jamie and others, these magnificent things — what they're doing, each one of them, is they're hacking the rules of life. I can't think of a single general principle of biology that does not have an exception somewhere by some organism. Every single thing that we can think of — and if you heard Olivia's talk about the sexual habits, you'll realize that there isn't anything we can say that's true for all life, because every single one of them is hacking something about it. This is a solar-powered sea slug. It's a nudibranch that has incorporated chloroplast inside it to drive its energy. This is another version of that. This is a sea dragon, and the one on the bottom, the blue one, is a juvenile that has not yet swallowed the acid, has not yet taken in the brown-green algae pond scum into its body to give it energy. These are hacks, and if we looked at the general shape of the approaches to hacking life there are, current consensus, six kingdoms. Six different broad approaches: the plants, the animals, the fungi, the protests — the little things — the bacteria and the Archaea bacteria. The Archaeas. Those are the general approaches to life. That's one way to look at life on Earth today. But a more interesting way, the current way to take the long view, is to look at it in an evolutionary perspective. And here we have a view of evolution where rather than having evolution go over the linear time, we have it coming out from the center. So in the center is the most primitive, and this is a genealogical chart of all life on earth. This is all the same six kingdoms. You see 4,000 representative species, and you can see where we are. But what I like about this is it shows that every living organism on Earth today is equally evolved. Those fungi and bacteria are as highly evolved as humans. They've been around just as long and gone through just the same kind of trial and error to get here. But we see that each one of these is actually hacking, and has a different way of finding out how to do life. And if we take the long-term trends of life, if we begin to say, what does evolution want? There's several things that we see. One of the things about evolution is that nowhere on Earth have we ever been where we don't find life. We find life at the bottom of every long-term, long-distance drilling core into the center of rock that we bring up — and there's bacteria in the pores of that rock. And wherever life is, it never retreats. It's ubiquitous and it wants to be more. More and more of the inert matter of the globe is being touched and animated by life. The second thing is is we see diversity. We also see specialization. We see the movement from a general-purpose cell to the more specific and specialized. And we see a drift towards complexity that's very intuitive. And actually, we have current data that does show that there is an actual drift towards complexity over time. And the last thing, I bring back this nudibranch. One of the things we see about life is that it moves from the inner to increasing sociability. And by that it means that there is more and more of life whose entire environment is other life. Like those chloroplast cells — they're completely surrounded by other life. They never touch the inner matter. There is more and more co-evolution. And so the general, long-term trends of evolution are roughly these five: ubiquity, diversity, specialization, complexity and socialization. Now, I took that and said, OK, what are the long-term trends in technology? And again, my question is, what does technology want? And so, remarkably, I discovered that there's also a drift toward specialization. That we see there's a general hammer, and hammers become more and more specific over time. There's obviously diversity. Huge numbers of things. This is all the contents of a Japanese home. I actually had my daughter — gave her a tally counter, and I gave her an assignment last summer to go around and count the number of species of technology in our household. And it came up with 6,000 different species of products. I did some research and found out that the King of England, Henry VIII, had only about 7,000 items in his household. And he was the King of England, and that was the entire wealth of England at the time. So we're seeing huge numbers of diversity in the kinds of things. This is a scene from Star Wars where the 3PO comes out and he sees machines making machines. How depraved! Well, this is actually what we're headed towards: world machines. And the technology is only being thrown out by other technologies. Most machines will only ever be in contact with other technology and not non-technology, or even life. And thirdly, the idea that machines are becoming biological and complex is at this point a cliche. And I'm happy to say, I was partly responsible for that cliche that machines are becoming biological, but that's pretty evident. So the major trends in technology evolution actually are the same as in biological evolution. The same drives that we see towards ubiquity, towards diversity, towards socialization, towards complexity. That is maybe not a big surprise because if we map out, say, the evolution of armor, you can actually follow a sort of an evolutionary-type cladistic tree. I suggest that, in fact, technology is the seventh kingdom of life. That its operations and how it works is so similar that we can think of it as the seventh kingdom. And so it would be sort of approximately up there, coming out of the animal kingdom. And if we were to do that, we would find out — we could actually approach technology in this way. This is Niles Eldredge. He was the co-developer with Stephen Jay Gould of the theory of punctuated equilibrium. But as a sideline, he happens to collect cornets. He has one of the world's largest collections — about 500 of them. And he has decided to treat them as if they were trilobites, or snails, and to do a morphological analysis, and try to derive their genealogical history over time. This is his chart, which is not quite published yet. But the most interesting aspect about this is that if you look at those red lines at the bottom, those indicate basically a parentage of a type of cornet that was no longer made. That does not happen in biology. When something is extinct, you can't have it as your parent. But that does happen in technology. And it turns out that that's so distinctive that you can actually look at this tree, and you can actually use it to determine that this is a technological system versus a biological system. In fact, this idea of resurrecting the whole idea is so important that I began to think about what happens with old technology. And it turns out that, in fact, technologies don't die. So I suggested this to an historian of science, and he said, "Well, what about, you know, come on, what about steam cars? They're not around anymore." Well actually, they are. In fact, they're so around that you can buy new parts for a Stanley steam automobile. And this is a website of a guy who's selling brand new parts for the Stanley automobile. And the thing that I liked is sort of this one-click, add-to-your-cart button — (Laughter) — for buying steam valves. I mean, it was just — it was really there. And so, I began to think about, well, maybe that's just a random sample. Maybe I should do this sort of in a more conservative way. So I took the great big 1895 Montgomery Ward's catalog and I randomly went through it. And I took a page — not quite a random page — I took a page that was actually more difficult than others because lots of the pages are filled with things that are still being made. But I took this page and I said, how many of these things are still being made? And not antiques. I want to know how many of these things are still in production. And the answer is: all of them. All of them are still being produced. So you've got corn shellers. I don't know who needs a corn sheller. Be it corn shellers — you've got ploughs; you've got fan mills; all these things — and these are not, again, antiques. These are — you can order these. You can go to the web and you can buy them now, brand-new made. So in a certain sense, technologies don't die. In fact, you can buy, for 50 bucks, a stone-age knife made exactly the same way that they were made 10,000 years ago. It's short, bone handle, 50 bucks. And in fact, what's important is that this information actually never died out. It's not just that it was resurrected. It's continued all along. And in Papua New Guinea, they were making stone axes until two decades ago, just as a course of practical matters. Even when we try to get rid of a technology, it's actually very hard. So we've all heard about the Amish giving up cars. We've heard about the Japanese giving up guns. We've heard about this and that. But I actually went back and took what I could find, the examples in history where there have been prohibitions against technology, and then I tried to find out when they came back in, because they always came back in. And it turns out that the time, the duration of when they were outlawed and prohibited, is decreasing over time. And that basically, you can delay technology, but you can't kill it. So this makes sense, because in a certain sense what culture is, is the accumulation of ideas. That's what it's for. It's so that ideas don't die out. And when we take that, we take this idea of what culture is doing and add it to what the long-term trajectory — again, in life's evolution — we find that each case — each of the major transitions in life — what they're really about is accelerating and changing the way in which evolution happens. They're actually changing the way in which ideas are generated. So all these steps in evolution are increasing, basically, the evolution of evolvability. So what's happening over time in life is that the ways in which you generate these new ideas, these new hacks, are increasing. And the real tricks are ways in which you kind of explore the way of exploring. And then what we see in the singularity, that prophesized by Kurzweil and others — his idea that technology is accelerating evolution. It's accelerating the way in which we search for ideas. So if you have life hacking — life means hacking, the game of survival — then evolution is a way to extend the game by changing the rules of the game. And what technology is really about is better ways to evolve. That is what we call an "infinite game." That's the definition of "infinite game." A finite game is play to win, and an infinite game is played to keep playing. And I believe that technology is actually a cosmic force. The origins of technology was not in 1829, but was actually at the beginning of the Big Bang, and at that moment the entire huge billions of stars in the universe were compressed. The entire universe was compressed into a little quantum dot, and it was so tight in there, there was no room for any difference at all. That's the definition. There was no temperature. There was no difference whatsoever. And at the Big Bang, what it expanded was the potential for difference. So as it expands and as things expand what we have is the potential for differences, diversity, options, choices, opportunities, possibilities and freedoms. Those are all basically the same thing. And those are the things that technology brings us. That's what technology is bringing us: choices, possibilities, freedoms. That's what it's about. It's this expansion of room to make differences. And so a hammer, when we grab a hammer, that's what we're grabbing. And that's why we continue to grab technology — because we want those things. Those things are good. Differences, freedom, choices, possibilities. And each time we make a new opportunity place, we're allowing a platform to make new ones. And I think it's really important. Because if you can imagine Mozart before the technology of the piano was invented — what a loss to society there would be. Imagine Van Gogh being born before the technologies of cheap oil paints. Imagine Hitchcock before the technologies of film. Somewhere, today, there are millions of young children being born whose technology of self-expression has not yet been invented. We have a moral obligation to invent technology so that every person on the globe has the potential to realize their true difference. We want a trillion zillion species of one individuals. That's what technology really wants. I'm going to skip through some of the objections because I don't have answers to why there's deforestation. I don't have an answer to the fact that there seem to be bad technologies. I don't have an answer to how this impacts on our dignity, other than to suggest that maybe the seventh kingdom, because it's so close to what life is about, maybe we can bring it back and have it help us monitor life. Maybe in some ways the fact that what we're trying to do with technology is find a good home for it. It's a terrible thing to spray DDT on cotton fields, but it's a really good thing to use to eliminate millions of cases of death due to malaria in a small village. Our humanity is actually defined by technology. All the things that we think that we really like about humanity is being driven by technology. This is the infinite game. That's what we're talking about. You see, technology is a way to evolve the evolution. It's a way to explore possibilities and opportunities and create more. And it's actually a way of playing the game, of playing all the games. That's what technology wants. And so when I think about what technology wants, I think that it has to do with the fact that every person here — and I really believe this — every person here has an assignment. And your assignment is to spend your life discovering what your assignment is. That recursive nature is the infinite game. And if you play that well, you'll have other people involved, so even that game extends and continues even when you're gone. That is the infinite game. And what technology is is the medium in which we play that infinite game. And so I think that we should embrace technology because it is an essential part of our journey in finding out who we are. Thank you. (Applause)
Well, I think that people saw that it made sense. The NCAA didn't start doing it in basketball until 1979 when the tournament expanded. And again, they didn't want to have, you know, the two best teams, say, meeting in the first round or the second round. They want to in theory, based on your record during the regular season, separate the best teams from one another until the last couple of rounds. They've even gone so far now that they seed the number-one teams. In other words, there's a number-one seed that's the number-one number-one seed. Then there's a number-one seed that's the number two and so on down the line. And in golf, when they have a match play event where one player faces one player in each round, again, they seed all 64 players in the match play event that'll be played here a couple weeks as an example.
Yes, the superdelegate count has been moving in his direction, really, ever since Super Tuesday and particularly in the last month or so, which is surprising given that Hillary Clinton had some wins, Ohio, the Texas primary, although not the Texas caucuses, and she had some sense of recovered momentum. I think after a Pennsylvania win, particularly if it's heavy, then I think she will be able to bring some greater equity to the movement of the superdelegates. But, for the moment, they have been trending towards Obama, and her lead among superdelegates has shrunk from about 100 to something more like two dozen.
Well, Karbaba has a very good nightlife and people go out a lot. But to be honest Mr. Conan, I really don't have time to have fun because when we came here, we left the United States, when we moved to Iraq, we came here to work. And here at our office, at my father's office, Ayatollah Qazwinie, we're always receiving politicians, receiving people that come and ask my father's advice. And my father's always giving people directions as to how to help Iraqis with a better life, how to make Iraq a better place. So, we're always working night and day. And honestly we never have time to have fun.
At the end of the term, though, law enforcement suffered a big blow. The court ruled unconstitutional the common practice of submitting crime lab reports as evidence. The justices said the Constitution guarantees criminal defendants the right to cross-examine in court crime lab technicians who conduct or analyze the tests. The vote was 5 to 4, only this time, Justice Scalia wrote the opinion for himself, fellow conservative Clarence Thomas and three of the court's liberals. It was yet another thumb in the eye to Chief Justice Roberts' stated desire to bring more consensus to the court. UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh.
I think that's certainly a risk. I think, again, you just flip back to the Maoist era itself. I think people now have this idea that, you know, China is a technocratic superpower that plans for the future. But I think if you look back to where China itself came from, there are real problems when you excessively concentrate power in the hands of a single person and you don't have checks and balances, and you start to have, you know, yes men proliferating. People don't call out the errors. And things can really start to decay. So yes, I think that this could start to create really serious problems for China in the long run.
It is a very hopeful time. You know, a number of the candidates are talking about even though Barack Obama led the way with the hope and the faith, a number of folks are talking that talk now. Edwards talks about it when he talks about the loss of his son, the illness of his wife. Hillary Clinton talks about her United Methodist roots a lot, and, you know, she's got a lot of African-American support from the pulpit. But I want to mention to you that that support from the pulpit does not transfer necessarily to the membership. And I think that people will be surprised by that. A number of people have assumed because when you see her standing and so many of the African-American pastors in South Carolina standing behind her, that means that will be the way that their congregations will go. And…
Yes. First of all, it's not really Mara Salvatrucha. Barrio 18, the 18th Street, also got really strong roots here. What happened was that after the civil wars ended, the United States started a program of massive deportations of criminals, gang members, back to this country. As you can imagine, coming out of long civil wars, there was no strong institutionality in this country. There were a lot of weapons, a lot of people military trained, and very few means to make a living. And there was a lot - a lot of broken families. So when these gang members, mainly from Los Angeles but also from the D.C. area, started to come back from El Salvador. They were very attractive models for these kids on the street and gang members started to develop their own clique in El Salvador.
That is Christina Romer, professor of economics at UC Berkeley, former chair of the president's Council of Economic Advisers. Russ Roberts, she mentioned, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, with us from a studio there. We're also talking with Louise Story, a business reporter for The New York Times, at our bureau in New York. This is all predicated on the development since Friday night, when Standard & Poor's, one of the big three ratings agencies, downgraded U.S. long-term debt from triple A to double A-plus, with a negative long-term outlook, the first time in history that U.S. debt had been anything but triple A. You're listening to a special coverage, coming to you from NPR News.
Just blocks away at the Capitol, Republicans were forced to scrap plans to vote on a bill that would ban most abortions 20 weeks after conception. Republican women and moderates drove the split over the legislation. They pushed for controversial language to be dropped from the 20-week abortion ban bill. It would have allowed an exception to the ban for rape victims, but only if they had reported to their attack to police. Some worried the bill could set the party back at exactly the moment it's looking to broaden its base ahead of 2016's elections. Congressman Charlie Dent is a moderate Republican who represents Pennsylvania.
No. We got out of the trailer. Thank God. We got our bedrooms done, a bathroom in the house completed right at around the beginning of April and we moved out of the--we were in a motor home and FEMA was good enough--FEMA came and saw us all in the motor home. There were seven of us living in a 31 foot Winnebago and they told us we were still eligible for a trailer despite the fact that we had gone out and purchased a motor home. And they brought us a trailer, so we put the boys in the trailer and we L-shaped it. It looked like a little city on my front porch--on my front, you know, lawn.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world by seeking weapons of mass destruction. These regimes pose a grave and growing danger. Pyongyang pointed to Washington's rhetoric as evidence that the U.S. was poised to attack the North or seek regime change. Kim Jong-il used the threat of U.S. hostility, meanwhile, to divert domestic attention from economic hardships. Zhang Liangui is a North Korea expert at the Chinese Communist Party's Central Party School in Beijing. Zhang says Kim's reading of his regional opponents was spot-on, and he was effective in exploiting the differences among them.
To connect Shinto to any form of ‘universal religion’ would appear to be a fool’s errand. After all, as any guidebook to Japan will tell you, Shinto is the traditional religion of Japan and only Japan, apart from a scattering of Shinto shrines in countries with large Japanese immigrant or expatriate populations. At the same time, Shinto is considered to be, at least in its origins, one expression of animism, the world’s oldest religion. Thus, we are left with Shinto as both a religion unique to Japan and an expression of the world’s oldest faith. The word animism is derived from anima in Latin, which literally means ‘breath’, with an extended meaning of ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’. Animism recognises the potential of all objects – animals, plants, rocks, rivers, weather-related phenomena, deceased human beings, even words – to be animated and alive, possessing distinctive spirits. As such, animism is considered to contain the oldest spiritual and supernatural perspectives in the world, dating back to the Palaeolithic Age when humans were still hunter-gatherers. Viewed from the standpoint of today’s organised religions, animistic religions can seem ‘primitive’ and are often dismissed as containing nothing more than superstitious beliefs and practices. This belittling if not antagonistic attitude toward animism has been particularly strong among the Abrahamic faiths – Judaism, Christianity and Islam. For example, in the United States it was not until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act was passed in 1978 that indigenous peoples gained the legal right to practise their traditional animistic faiths. Given this, as one of the world’s last still-flourishing animistic faiths, Shinto can provide a gateway to better understanding the origins of certain universal paradigms found in today’s organised religions. A Shinto shrine can reveal how remnants of ancient animistic practices, as embodied in contemporary Shinto, can survive in the organised religions of the contemporary world. However, today’s Shinto should not be confused with ‘State Shinto’ (or kokka-shintō in Japanese). The latter was a 19th-century political programme created by the Japanese government to effect national unity and obedience by promoting the divinity of the emperor, a programme that existed right up until Japan’s defeat in the Second World War. The Taro Inari Shrine in the rice fields at Asakusa, by Kobayashi Kiyochika, 1877-1882. Courtesy Rijksmuseum, AmsterdamOn entering a Shinto shrine area, the initial ritual practice is the cleansing of one’s hands and mouth. This is an abbreviated version of the full-body immersion that continues to be practised in Shinto, typically by standing under a waterfall. In both instances, flowing water is recognised not only as a physical cleansing agent but as a spiritual one as well. To be clean in body and mind is required prior to approaching Shinto deities known as kami. Shinto is, of course, not alone in viewing water as a spiritual cleansing agent. Remnants of this Shinto practice can be seen in the use of ‘holy water’ upon entering a Roman Catholic church, or the partial and whole-body immersion during baptism, which is practised by nearly all Christian denominations. Muslims meanwhile engage in the ritual cleansing of exposed body parts – hands, face and feet – prior to entering a mosque. And in Judaism, a mikveh is a bath used for ritual immersion in order to achieve spiritual purity. Once ritually cleansed, the Shinto practitioner approaches one or more kami, typically to offer a petitionary prayer. However, prior to seeking the kami’s blessings, practitioners are expected to make an offering, traditionally such things as food, sake or even a fine horse, but today more typically money. In other words, to ensure the kami’s blessings, the practitioner must first engage in a transactional relationship with the deity being worshipped. Of all the ways that animistic practices might have been incorporated into organised religions, this transactional relationship is potentially the most far-reaching. Simply stated, there is no organised religion existing today that does not, directly or indirectly, require the believer to make an offering of some kind as a necessary condition for receiving the deity’s blessings, as well as in order to be accepted among the faithful. Shinto conducts purification rituals on cars, personal computers and construction sites for skyscrapers Even today, there are Orthodox Jews who intend to resume the traditional practice of killing blemish-free animals as ‘burnt offerings to the Lord’ once the Third Temple is rebuilt on Temple Mount in Jerusalem. While the meaning of these burnt offerings might have changed over the millennia, their origins seem clear. And just as in today’s Shinto, the typical offerings to the deity (or deities) of all organised religions are now in the form of decidedly unburnt currency. Shinto, too, has its own form of burnt offering. Instead of a slain animal, however, a collection of wooden sticks is ritually burned in a ‘holy fire’. The Shinto practitioner first writes his name, age and gender on one side of the stick before writing his personal wish on the stick’s other side. Of course, the practitioner is expected to make a financial donation to the shrine to ensure that his wish is fulfilled as it rises to the heavens in the form of smoke. Anthropologists suggest that the ritual offering of a precious object to a deity might be the oldest form of religious practice known to Homo sapiens. Today, believers of all organised religions continue to pray to the deity (or deities) of their faith for multiple blessings – for example, abundant harvests, water in times of drought, etc. The ‘tribal’ or collective nature of these prayers appears little-changed over a period of tens of thousands of years. At the same time, requests for personal blessings – for good health, wealth, etc – are now commonly found in all faiths. Nevertheless, nationalistic or tribalistic calls such as ‘God Bless America’ (instead of ‘all nations’ or ‘all peoples’) still reverberate from the mouths of political and religious leaders of many countries. Given the tribal origins of animistic faiths, it is not surprising that few tribal or ethnic outsiders have ever been allowed to become clerics. In Japan’s case, it was not until 2014 that the Austrian Florian Wiltschko became the first non-Japanese person to receive an official licence allowing him to become a full-time Shinto priest working at a shrine in Tokyo. This development suggests that Shinto might be beginning the transition to a more universal faith. While there is a tendency to regard animistic faiths as either primitive or at least stuck in the past, Shinto belies this reputation. Not only does it accept foreign priests but it also, for example, conducts purification rituals on cars, to ensure the traffic safety of adherents. Moreover, it is even possible to bring personal computers to the shrine for ritual purification. This is in addition to more traditional purification rituals such as those performed at ground-breaking ceremonies at construction sites, whether for private residences or soaring skyscrapers. Albeit an animistic religion, Shinto is clearly capable of evolving and remaining relevant to the modern world. This flexibility and openness are no doubt one of the main reasons for its ongoing vitality. Like all animistic faiths, Shinto is polytheistic in nature. While polytheism might seem to be an artifact of primitive religion, it is important to remember that polytheism and monotheism share three essential traits. First, they are both ‘theistic’ – they share a common belief in the existence of an unseen spiritual being (or beings). The difference, albeit an important one, is whether there is one or many such beings. Second is the belief that the object (or objects) of worship are capable of conferring blessings of various kinds on their believers. The distinguishing feature is, of course, whether one deity offers multiple blessings, or multiple deities offer multiple blessings. The crucial belief they share in common is the possibility of multiple blessings. Moreover, these blessings can be enjoyed by both the individual as well as the community of believers, originally the tribe and, today, the nation. Third, although there are now a few exceptions, the deity (or deities) in organised religions, like their animistic counterparts, continue to have gender: male or female. The Sun Goddess Amaterasu is a central Shinto deity. Her younger and powerful brother Susano-o is the god of the sea and storms. In Christianity, by comparison, God has traditionally been portrayed as male, though some adherents today prefer to use the pronoun ‘she’. At the same time, there are few if any who refer to God as an ‘it’. Psychologically at least, a transactional, or interpersonal, relationship with a non-gendered ‘it’ is difficult if not impossible to imagine. Similarly, both monotheistic and polytheistic deities share the personality traits of ordinary human beings. The monotheistic deity, for example, is often described as being capable of becoming ‘angry’ and ‘jealous’ in the face of disrespect or wrongdoing, yet is equally a ‘God of love’ or ‘loving Father’ toward those adherents who act according to His wishes. For this reason, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the God of monotheism retains many of the personal characteristics of animistic predecessors, albeit at a transcendent level. It is possible to see in shamans the prototype of religious leaders of all faiths Another common feature of Shinto is that of shrine maidens or miko. Today, shrine maidens typically sit at reception counters selling such things as amulets or personal fortunes, but they also perform sacred dances known as kagura. Kagura performances suggest the critically important role that miko once played in Shinto, for these sacred dances are originally derived from ritual dances in which miko channelled the kami, speaking, singing and dancing as if they were the deity. In other words, miko were once shamanic diviners who, having been taken possession of by a kami, could convey the deity’s will or provide a divine revelation in the form of an oracle. Thus, they played the crucial role of go-between with the spiritual world. A shrine maiden at the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo in October 2012. Photo by Kazuhiro Nogi/GettyIn Japan, the position of shaman was typically, though not always, passed down from generation to generation. An acknowledged elder shaman, who might be a family member such as an aunt, would teach the girl in training how to control her trance state during dancing. It was also important that she learned how to communicate with multiple kami as well as the spirits of the deceased. All this was done to ensure the kamis’ blessings on the people and, equally, to protect them from malevolent spirits. Serving as intermediaries between gods and ordinary believers, it is possible to see in shamans, both male and female, the prototype of religious leaders of all faiths, whether they are now referred to as imams, priests, pastors, rabbis, etc. Two of the most important oracles in Japanese history concern the relationship of kamis to the Buddhist faith when it was first introduced to Japan in the mid-6th century. When the Great Buddha of Nara’s Todai-ji temple was completed in 749 CE, the Shinto god of war Hachiman – enshrined in the Usa Shrine on the southern island of Kyushu – issued an oracle that he wished to come to pay homage to the Great Buddha. A shrine maiden transported Hachiman to Todai-ji where he was installed as the temple’s official protector. This subsequently led to various Shinto kami being incorporated as protectors of Buddhist temples throughout the country. Even today, one can see these guardian deities honoured with small Shinto shrines located on temple grounds. A second and still more important oracle involved the Ise Shrine, home of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu. Tradition states that messengers were sent to Ise to secure approval of the Sun Goddess for construction of the statue of the Great Buddha. The particular Buddha chosen to be placed in the cathedral was known as Vairochana in Sanskrit, or Dainichi in Japanese, ie the Sun Buddha. The answer of the Ise oracle seemed to indicate that the Sun Buddha was identical to the Sun Goddess. Conveniently, this identification also enhanced the status of the emperor for, as the mythological descendent of the Sun Goddess, he was now directly related to an even more powerful personage, the Sun Buddha, believed to possess magical powers. There was, however, a downside to the Buddhist acceptance of Shinto deities, for it was the Shinto deities who were relegated to the role of protecting Buddhist temples, not the other way around. Their role as protectors was justified on the basis that, just like all sentient beings, kami were suffering creatures seeking to escape their present condition and attain Enlightenment. Buddhist priests created a series of tales describing the desire of various kami to receive the Buddhist teachings, thereby overcoming the negative karma that had caused them to remain as no more than deities. Some kami, it was claimed, even expressed their desire to become Buddhists by taking refuge in the Three Treasures – Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. In the following centuries, Shinto clergy accepted what was essentially second-class status for themselves and their deities. This included Buddhist control of major Shinto shrines as embodied in the construction of jingu-ji (shrine-temples), built with the encouragement of the government. At these shrine-temples, Buddhist priests recited Buddhist sutras for the sake of the kami who had, it was claimed, decided to protect the foreign faith in hopes of spiritual advancement. This development helps to explain why, when Shintoists finally had the opportunity to free themselves from Buddhist control at the time of the Meiji Restoration in 1868, they eagerly did so. Although, as noted above, ‘State Shinto’ was a political construct of the new national government, Shinto leaders nevertheless welcomed this development, for at long last Shinto could be independent. However, the cost of this independence was that Shinto leaders were expected to support the policies of the Japanese government without question. As Japan expanded and became an empire in the 1900s, Shinto also became an important spiritual support mechanism for justifying Japanese expansion. This might be considered the Achilles’ heel of not just Shinto but all animistic faiths, for they are easily captured by the tribal or ethnic zeitgeist, especially in wartime. Thus, Shinto leaders readily supported the political policies of their ethnic leaders, no matter how aggressive those policies were. With Shinto’s blessing, Japan came to be regarded as a divine land, protected by kami, and ruled over by a divine emperor who was himself, according to Shinto mythology, a descendant of the Sun Goddess. On the one hand, none of the preceding provides a rationale for embracing animistic-based faiths such as today’s Shinto. But nor is there any justification for attempting to suppress animistic faiths, other than when they become the handmaidens of repressive governments. They remain the living expression of the once-universal spiritual heritage of all Homo sapiens. None of this commentary is meant to deny the authenticity of any religious faith, past or present. The world’s major religions would not have endured for thousands of years if they failed to meet the spiritual needs of millions of their followers. Yet it is sobering, if not humbling, to consider how deeply today’s organised religions are indebted to their animistic antecedents. In fact, the acceptance of other deities, regardless of one’s own personal belief, forms the very foundation of what has become, in a globalised world, the widely accepted ideal of religious tolerance. And religious tolerance is a value that remains in all-too-short supply, even today.
Well CPAP is an achievement for obstructive sleep apnea. It's spelled C-P-A-P and that stands for Continuous Positive Airway Pressure. It's simply a mask that typically goes over the nose and out the mouth and is attached to a blower that blows in room air and not oxygen just room air. And it serves as a simple mechanical splint to keep the upper airway open. And it is used for people that have obstructive sleep apnea and it's effective in virtually everybody. Now some people have trouble tolerating it, but it is very, very effective. It will eliminate snoring and obstructive sleep apnea because it eliminates or reduces resistance to the airflow going through the upper airway. I don't know what my colleague's experience is with this, but for snoring, I don't think, we have 15,000 people using CPAP from our sleep center who are using for apnea.
Well, I would certainly say it reflects better intelligence. I'd have to say that at least in the connection of the dots, we've done a lot better now than we've ever done before, and certainly much better than 9/11. I also have to point out that some of these plots are what we call homegrown plots, where people are radicalizing themselves over the Internet or in small groups, and the larger question is, you know, what do we do about the increased radicalization of some people into an ideology of terror and hatred? And that is a much more fundamental study, which we are undertaking with a great deal of energy and a great deal of urgency.
This is SCIENCE FRIDAY, I'm Ira Flatow. Now that President Obama's been re-elected, it's clear that at least the president won't try to repeal Obamacare. But with all the political mud-slinging about the Affordable Care Act, the details sort of got lost, didn't they? Do you actually know what the law does for you, and just as importantly what it doesn't do, what changes to your health care kick in on January 1, what major changes kick in in 2014 and thereafter? How are the insurance exchanges going to work, for example? Will insurance actually be more affordable than it is today? Will your doctor still take your insurance? Can you design your own health insurance? And if more people have insurance, will there be enough doctors to go around? Take Texas, for example. It's the most uninsured state in the nation and already has a critical shortage of primary care doctors.
I think that's possible, but what you have to remember is that reading online is very different from reading off of a printed page. So, even as we might become better hopping between pages and clicking on links and processing many small bits of information, that doesn't mean that we aren't at the same time losing that other, slower, more contemplative mode of thought. And in fact, if you look at a lot of recent research on multitasking, it shows that in fact, as people optimize their ability to multitask online, they become less creative in their thinking. They become, you know, more likely to simply process information rather than think deeply for themselves about it. So even if we get better at jumping from bit to bit to bit of information, we're still losing - in fact, we'll probably lose even more - that other, contemplative, introspective mode of thought.
It is entirely possible that with all the high-profile space travel over the last 20 years, you might have forgotten or perhaps never even knew about the Cassini spacecraft. It lifted off from Cape Canaveral on October 15, 1997. Its destination? Saturn. The journey took seven years. Cassini zoomed past Venus and explored Jupiter before entering into orbit around the gas giant Saturn, the first spacecraft to do so. This week, it begins its final mission, to explore the space between Saturn and its rings. The gravity of the planet's largest moon, Titan, will pull the craft into unknown territory. It's expected Cassini will make the first of 22 dives by Wednesday. It enters into its final dive next September. That dive will end with a deliberate crash into Saturn that will destroy the spacecraft. During its many years in space, the Cassini has sent back some spectacular photos, most recently a picture of Earth. At a distance of almost 900 million miles, our planet looks like a tiny dot against a black sky. Looming over it is one of Saturn's famed rings.
The court majority admits, she noted, that its opinions hinged on moral concerns. But those moral concerns are untethered to any government interest in preserving life. And to make her point, she quoted Justice Kennedy's opinion in the 2003 gay rights case: "Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to enforce our all moral code." Undeterred, Justice Kennedy had this to say: Respect for human life finds an ultimate expression in the bond of love the mother has for her child. The partial birth ban recognizes this as well. And, said Kennedy, while we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon, it seems unexceptional to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant they created. Because patients often do not want to know the details of the procedures they will undergo, he said, it is unnecessary inference that this ban will encourage some women to carry their pregnancies to full term.
Well, let me tell you, this was a big, big show. It is called "Soul Fair: Celebrating Success of the Civil Rights Movement," and although what I will call the old-school has not been as embraced by the Obama camp as some would like, this was Danny Glover, Maxine Waters, you had people getting up on stage, Al Sharpton stole the show. And he said of - he said he was talking to a black conservative who said, you know, this is the past, civil rights is the past, and Al Sharpton told the story, civil rights didn't write your resume, but civil rights made someone read your resume. And there was an explosion of applause, and so it was a crowd that was very much there to have their moment in the sun.
Oh, I think he certainly can do it, and primarily because he has more players at his disposal. I mean, they have significant advantages, especially coming off the bench, in this series. And so the players love playing for Avery. But what Pat Riley is a little bit more of an intangible - you know, a little more toughness, you know. And he - because he has those rings on his hand - you know, he carries a little bit more weight in the locker room than the average coach does. And so, you know, he can get into an NBA - multi-millionaire NBA player's face a little bit more, you know, at ease than perhaps Avery Johnson or some of the other coaches could.
Drive at 55 or the double nickel they used to say. Now, we don't have the facts here in Congress, and we're doing all sort of types of research to see whether or not today's carburetion systems which are better, more efficient in today's cars as opposed to that generation, would a similar restriction on speed in certain areas - I would suggest this time 60 miles per hour to be the bottom figure rather than 55 - would that generate some immediate savings? Because when you drive over 60 miles per hour, the carburetion system is less efficient in most cars and as a consequence you're blowing out your tailpipe used energy. And it's not only more polluting, but it's just a loss of energy. So I'm saying let's go back and run a comparative study. It did work for the nation in 1973, 74, and indeed at that period of time, I was in the government as a Secretary of the Navy. And even in the defense area we cut back. We're the largest user of petroleum, the national defense segment of our executive branch, and today this is a crisis, people are hurting.
I don't know about one year. I think we're in a very dark period right now. It's going to take a long time for Egyptian politics or for Syria to come back from the horrible situation they're in right now. But I think if you look more at the five-year or even 10-year frame, I actually do remain optimistic. I mean, I think that the reason that we had these uprisings in 2011, it was fundamentally grounded in the failure of these governments to deliver and the rising demands of this new generation of empowered publics. And I think that you've seen those publics have failed to deliver on stable democracy or meaningful change, but they're still there. They're still powerful. They're still unsatisfied. And the governments have not found any significant way of responding to their grievances.
And actually, I want to see nothing else. I think we've seen enough. I was with the 203rd FSB 3rd Brigade 3rd ID from Ft. Benning and Ft. Stewart. And every day is a reminder of things that we've seen over there. And I'm sorry that my voice is a little bit sketchy, you know, but it's just listening to you guys there talk about the humor and stuff that happened, it brings a lot of memories. But I know the media needs to know. People needs to know what happened, but when are we going to forget this, you know? And who's going to help us? That's the only thing I need to say.
Well, I don't necessarily think it's a - I wouldn't say it's a military running amok. I mean, I think right now it's some isolated situations. I don't want to disparage the entire military saying that's completely the case. I think what the Supreme Court decision did demonstrate is, though, that they are definitely going to, I think, have to follow more of the Geneva Conventions in terms of dealing with al-Qaida. Whether that is such a good idea, because al-Qaida is not an official military force, an official army, which the Geneva Convention says it is. However, the Geneva Conventions says that those are for official armies, which al-Qaida is not.
What you're seeing is a lot of political nostrums here, the ideas that haven't worked very well on the state level or, in our experience with windfall profits in the past. What you're not seeing is movement either on the supply side, finding more supplies in the United States and letting oil companies get at them, or measures on the demand side to curb our appetite for gasoline. If you could somehow improve the efficiency of the transportation sector, you could make a big dent in that problem, but I don't think either one is going to happen in this Congress.
You know, it is obviously to the problem with a clinical perspective, we see each others failures. Dr. Gordon doesn't see people who have done very well on medicine, and never come to him and Mary doesn't see people have done terrifically with yoga and meditation and don't come to her. This thing is something I should have said earlier is that I have really struggled with the data, the statistics, you know, what do we really know on this and put a lot of little essays about this sort of tutorials on Web site, which is associated with Psychology Today, my part of it called impractice. And have - tried to make sense about why things look better and worse, that is why is it that psychotherapy isn't doing as well in studies lately than it has done in the past. And I'm a great fan and a practitioner and teacher of psychotherapy.
The Indiana law, like most others, was enacted by a Republican legislature on a party-line vote over Democratic protest. Republicans said the law was needed to prevent voter fraud, while Democrats said people who are poor or elderly often do not have such identification and are unable to get the certified birth certificate and other secondary proof of identification needed to get a state-provided ID in Indiana. The Democrats challenged the state law in court, noting that there was not a single recorded case of voter impersonation fraud in the state's history. Today a splintered Supreme Court majority acknowledged that, but still upheld the voter ID law.
Yeah, I don't think it's going to shoot the Republican Party. I think it's certainly going to be hung around Newt's neck, and it should be. I mean, I think part of it is, you know, this notion that we are drowning in our own ignorance and arrogance here in the United States and we need to understand sort of where the world is today. One of my favorite photos I've ever taken is with a group of young boys in Ghana, and there were four of them. And these were kids who were aged I'd say eight to 12, and each of them spoke about five different languages. And I thought that was just incredible, because you don't get that in the United States. We have such a narrow vision of the world that we truly believe we are at the center of everything.
The Obama administration says it is committed to the fight in Afghanistan. President Obama himself has called it a war of necessity. But the White House has signaled it's in no hurry to take up the question of troop reinforcements. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs has said it will be, quote, "many, many weeks before the president gets to any sort of decision about that," end quote. That would delay a decision on whether to add to the 68,000 U.S. troops already approved for Afghanistan well into the autumn or winter, when heavy snows and bitter cold have traditionally slowed the fighting. It would also square with the counsel of Democrats such as Senator Levin, who chairs the Armed Services Committee. Today, he repeated his advice to the president: Avoid escalating the war, focus instead on training Afghan security forces.
Having the pope say that he was in Palestine praising the relationship between the Vatican and the State of Palestine was a big deal for Palestinians. It was a big deal even before he came because he put on his official itinerary he was visiting the State of Palestine. This is a point where Israel disagrees with the Vatican. And although Israel is very excited to have Pope Francis visit and welcomes the pope very warmly, they do point out that they have some disagreements on foreign policy with the Vatican. And this is the prime example. The prayer at the wall got a lot of attention in part because it was unplanned, and so the pope asked to stop and pray. The last two popes who visited this area did speak with the wall as a backdrop. So having the pope pray there was, again, a boost for the Palestinians.
Yes I have. I mean, it's - it puts you up against the wall, definitely, is that there's certain things that you just can not get away with any more. I know, again, personally, with gas, even though gas is coming down to a certain degree, you know, I still look at the gas tank, I'm more cognizant of it. So I think that things are changing for the best as far as our mental attitudes, but there are still others who - I mean, even pop - from a pop culture standpoint, I see hip-hop still talking about patrolling and that kind of thing, and I'm scratching head like, why are we still dancing to - with champagne and women's behinds are still bouncing and that kind of thing? Nothing is changing - for some people, things have changed, for others it has not.
All right. Let me take you back to my question and that was the idea of, quote, "demanding a little bit more" in terms of being more forthcoming from all of these nominees, quite frankly. Mr. McWHORTER: But this man could be revulsed by the notion of a woman having an abortion and still get on the bench and be able to make decisions based on precedent and his position in the larger policy. And if he doesn't want to make himself red meat by saying what he probably feels around the kitchen table, then given our culture, isn't that absolutely predictable?
No. I think that - actually, the main problem here is that, I honestly don't think that our president is somebody who was one for thinking ahead. This is someone who thinks in broad strokes. And if things had gone better, we'd think of him as a kind of hero as prescient, et cetera - things did not happen to go that way. I think that people like, for example, Cheney, who I think is more of a details man than President Bush, are surprised that the number of things that have blown up in their faces. But then there's an extent to which you get the feeling they think of the public as, you know, nattering nabobs as it was said in a different context back in the day. It's somehow that's just something that we don't know. And I would love to see what it is that we don't know, given that it is rather clear at this point that there really might not be much of anything.
: Oh, I went and got a job as a courier for a wholesale florist. And my goal was to get in as a driver, 'cause I love driving, and to work my way up into a sales position where I'm bringing in $50K a year or something, you know what I mean, but, like, with benefits. And get a house, a little house, a little nice place somewhere in south Minneapolis, you know. And when I made that decision, that's when people started paying attention to my rapping, and that's when we started the record label. That's when we started putting out tapes and CDs and - I don't think we ever really could have foreseen where it was going to go.
I don't know, you know, and I can't really speculate about the campaign's feelings about this. I agree with the questions about her family. I mean, I think that's interesting. I certainly relate, I'm a mother myself, and I love the idea of a mother being a part of this campaign and part of the discussion and bringing a different unique perspective to the entire debate. But my questions for her as a journalist have to do with the issues that I think are front and center in this campaign and that the McCain campaign frankly have made front and center and that has to do with her experience qualifications for the job.
If anything characterises the 21st-century social signalling of sex differences, it is the increased emphasis on ‘pink for girls and blue for boys’, with female ‘pinkification’ probably carrying the most strident message. Clothes, toys, birthday cards, wrapping paper, party invitations, computers, phones, bedrooms, bicycles – you name it, the marketing people seem prepared to ‘pinkify’ it. The ‘pink problem’, now quite often with a hefty helping of ‘princess’ thrown in, has been the subject of concerned discussion in the past decade or so. Peggy Orenstein wrote about it in her book Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture (2011), noting that there were more than 25,000 Disney Princess products on the market. The topic of this rampant pinkification has been frequently criticised, in books such as this and many others, so I had thought that I might not have to cover the pink issue again. But unfortunately for us all, this is a whack-a-mole problem and it shows little evidence of disappearing any time soon. For a talk I was giving recently, I was mining the internet for examples of those dreadful pink ‘It’s a Girl’ cards when I came across something even more jaw-droppingly awful: ‘gender reveal’ parties. If you haven’t already heard of these, they go something like this: at about 20 weeks into a pregnancy, it is usually possible to tell the sex of the child you are expecting from an ultrasound scan, thus, apparently, triggering the need for an expensive party. There are two versions, and both are a marketing dream. In version 1, you decide to remain in ignorance, and instruct your ultrasound technician to put the exciting news in a sealed envelope and send it to your gender-reveal party organiser of choice. In version 2, you find out for yourself but decide to break the news at the party. You then summon family and friends to the event via invites bearing a question such as ‘A bouncing little “he” or a pretty little “she”?’, ‘Guns or Glitter?’ or ‘Rifles or Ruffles?’ At the party itself, you might be confronted with a white iced cake that can be cut open to reveal blue or pink frosting (it might also be decorated with the words ‘Buck or Doe? Cut to know’). Or there could be a sealed box that, when opened, will release a flotilla of pink or blue helium-filled balloons; a wrapped outfit from your nearest nursery store that will be opened to reveal the pink or blue creation into which you will stuff your newborn; even a piñata that you and your guests can hammer away at until it releases a flood of pink or blue candy. There are guessing games that appear to involve toy ducks (‘Waddle it be?’) or bumblebees (‘What will it bee?’), or some sort of raffle where, on arrival, you put your guess in a jar and win a prize once the reveal is made. Or (the frontrunner for the most tasteless) you are given an ice cube containing a plastic baby, and in a ‘my waters have broken’ race, you try to find the quickest way of melting your ice cube to reveal whether the baby is pink or blue. So, 20 weeks before little humans even arrive into it, their world is already tucking them firmly into a pink or a blue box. And it is clear from the YouTube videos (yes, I became obsessed) that, in some cases, different values are attached to the pinkness or blueness of the news. Some of the videos show existing siblings watching the excitement of ‘the reveal’ and it’s hard not to wonder what the three little sisters made of the screams of ‘At last!’ that accompanied the cascading blue confetti. Just a harmless bit of fun, maybe, and a marketing triumph, for sure, but it is also a measure of the importance that is attached to these ‘girl’/‘boy’ labels. Even efforts to level the playing field get swamped in the pink tide – Mattel has produced a STEM Barbie doll to stimulate girls’ interest in becoming scientists. And what is it that our Engineer Barbie can build? A pink washing machine, a pink rotating wardrobe, a pink jewellery carousel. You might wonder why any of this matters. What it all comes down to is the debate over whether pinkification is signalling a natural biological divide or reflecting a socially constructed coding mechanism. If it is really the sign of a biological imperative, then perhaps it should be respected and supported. But if we’re looking at a social set-up, then we need to know if the associated binary coding is still serving the two groups well (if it ever did). Are our journeying girl brains helped out by being directed away from construction toys and adventure books, and those of their boy counterparts from cooking sets and dolls’ houses? Perhaps we should ask whether the power of the pink tide has a biological basis. In 2007, a team of vision scientists suggested that this preference was linked to an ancient need for the female of the species to be an effective ‘berry gatherer’. Responsiveness to pink would ‘facilitate the identification of ripe, yellow fruit or edible red leaves embedded in green foliage’. An extension of this was the suggestion that pinkification is also the basis of empathy – aiding our female caregivers to pick up those subtle changes in skin tone that match emotional states. Bearing in mind that the study, carried out on adults, used a simple forced-choice task involving coloured rectangles, this is quite a stretch, but it clearly struck a chord with the media, who hailed the finding as proof that women were ‘hardwired to prefer pink’. However, three years later the same team carried out a similar study in four- to five-month-old infants, using eye movements as a measure of their preference for the same coloured rectangles. They found no evidence of sex differences, with all babies preferring the reddish end of the spectrum. This finding was not accompanied by the media flurry that greeted the first one. The study with adults has been cited more than 300 times as support for the notion of ‘biological predispositions’. The study with infants, where no sex differences were found, has been cited 61 times. Parents will still exclaim that there must be something fundamental about this preference for pink when they find that, despite their best efforts at ‘gender-neutral parenting’ for their daughters, all is swept away by the pink-princess tide. Children as young as three will allocate genders to toy animals based on their colour; pink and purple ones are girl animals, and blue and brown ones are boy animals. Surely, there must be a biological driver behind the emergence of a preference this early and this determined? But a telling study from the American psychologists Vanessa LoBue and Judy DeLoache tracked more closely just how early this preference emerges. Nearly 200 children, aged seven months to five years, were offered pairs of objects, one of which was always pink. The result was clear: up to the age of about two, neither boys nor girls showed any kind of pink preference. After that point, though, there was quite a dramatic change, with girls showing an above-chance enthusiasm for pink things, whereas boys were actively rejecting them. This became most marked from about three years old onwards. This tallies with the finding that, once children learn gender labels, their behaviour alters to fit in with the portfolio of clues about genders and their differences that they are gradually gathering. Gender-related colour-coding was established 100 years ago, and seems to vary with fashion What about the evidence of a pink/blue divide being a culturally determined coding mechanism? Why (and when) pink became linked to girls and blue to boys has been a matter of earnest academic debate. One side has claimed that this used to be the other way round, and that, until the 1940s, blue was actually seen as the appropriate colour for girls, possibly because of its links with the Virgin Mary. This idea has been critiqued by the psychologist Marco Del Giudice at the University of New Mexico who, after a detailed archive search via Google Books Ngram Viewer, said he found little evidence of the blue-for-girls/pink-for-boys claim. He dubbed this the pink/blue reversal and, naturally, an acronym (PBR) has followed; he’s even awarded it the status of a ‘scientific urban legend’. But the evidence for some kind of cultural universality for pink as a female colour is not that powerful either. Examples from Del Guidice’s own review suggests that any kind of gender-related colour-coding was established little more than 100 years ago, and seems to vary with fashion, or depending on whether you were reading The New York Times in 1893 (‘Finery For Infants: Oh, pink for a boy and blue for a girl’) or the Los Angeles Times in the same year (‘The very latest nursery fad is a silky hammock for the new baby … First on the net is laid a silk quilted blanket, pink for a girl, blue for a boy’). In terms of understanding the significance of pinkification for our journeying brains, the key issue is not, of course, pink itself but what it stands for. Pink has become a cultural signpost or signifier, a code for one particular brand: Being a Girl. The issue is that this code can also be a ‘gender segregation limiter’, channelling its target audience (girls) towards an extraordinarily limited and limiting package of expectations, and additionally excluding the non-target audience (boys). Paradoxically (and in fairness to the other side of the argument), sometimes pink appears to serve as a kind of social signature that ‘gives permission’ for girls to engage with what would otherwise be seen as a boy domain. But, as STEM Barbie suggests, pinkification is all too often linked with a patronising undertow, where you can’t get females to engage with the thrills of engineering or science unless you can link them to looks or lipstick, ideally viewed through – literally – rose-tinted glasses. The whole issue of the increased gendering of toys and the contribution that this is making to the sustaining of stereotypes has been the focus of much concern in recent years, even to the extent of the White House holding a special meeting to discuss it in 2016. Might toy choice be a major chicane for our journeying brains? Or have they already been set on this route before birth? Do toy choices reflect what is going on in the brain? Or do they determine what is going on in the brain? Researchers can be pretty firm about the status quo in this aspect of children’s behaviour: ‘Girls and boys differ in their preferences for toys such as dolls and trucks. These sex differences are present in infants, are seen in nonhuman primates, and relate, in part, to prenatal androgen exposure.’ This statement, from researchers at the University of Cambridge in 2010, neatly encapsulates the sets of beliefs about toy choice in children, so let’s explore the story of toys, who plays with what and why – and whether it matters at all. The issue of toy preference has acquired the same kind of significance as the pink/blue debate. From a fairly young age, possibly as young as 12 months, it appears that boys and girls show preferences for different kinds of toys. Given the choice, boys are more likely to head for the truck or gun box, whereas girls can be found with dolls or cooking pots. This has been adopted as evidence for several different arguments. The essentialist camp, supported by the hormone lobby, would claim that this is a sign of differently organised brains following their differently channelled pathways; for example, an early preference for ‘spatial’ or construction-type toys is an expression of a natural ability. The social-learning camp would claim that gendered toy preference is the outcome of children’s behaviour being modelled or reinforced in gender-appropriate ways; this could arise from parent or family gift-giving behaviour or it could be the outcome of a powerful marketing lobby determining and manipulating their target market. Who actually decides what is a ‘boy toy’ and what is a ‘girl toy’? A cognitive-constructionist camp would point to an emerging cognitive schema, where fledgling gender identities latch on to objects and activities that ‘belong’ to their own sex, scanning their environment for the rules of engagement that specify who plays with what. This would suggest a link between the emergence of gender labelling and the emergence of gendered toy choice. And there are yet other arguments about the consequences of toy preference. If you spend your formative years playing with dolls and tea sets, will that steer you away from the useful skills that playing with construction kits or playing target-based games might bring you? Or might these different activities just be reinforcing your natural abilities, offering you appropriate training opportunities and enhanced talents for the occupational niche that will be yours? Looking particularly at the 21st century, if the toys you play with carry the message that appearance, and quite often sexualised appearance at that, is the defining factor of the group you belong to, does that have different consequences from playing with toys that offer the possibility of heroic action and adventure? And might any of these consequences be found not only at the behavioural level but also at the brain level? As ever, the causes and consequences issues are entangled. If gendered toy preference is an expression of a biology, then the interpretation tends to be that it is inevitable and shouldn’t be interfered with, and that those who challenge it should be sent away with the mantra ‘Let boys be boys and girls be girls’ ringing in their ears. Specifically for researchers, it would mean that sex differences in toy preference could be a very useful index of sex differences in underlying biology, a genuine brain-behaviour link. On the other hand, if gendered toy preference is actually a measure of different environmental input, it would be possible to measure the different impacts of that input and, perhaps more importantly, the consequences of changing it. However, before we launch into the pros and cons of the various theories attached to toy preference, we need to look at the actual characteristics of these differences. Is it a robust difference, reliably found at different times, in different cultures (or even just in different research studies)? Who actually decides what is a ‘boy toy’ and what is a ‘girl toy’? Is it the children who play with them or the adults that supply them? In other words, whose preferences are we actually looking at? Among adults, there appears to be pretty widespread agreement as to what constitutes male-typed, female-typed and neutral toys. In 2005, Judith Blakemore and Renee Centers, psychologists from Indiana, got nearly 300 US undergraduates (191 females, 101 males) to sort 126 toys into ‘suitable for boys’, ‘suitable for girls’, or ‘suitable for both’ categories. Based on these ratings, they generated five categories: strongly masculine, moderately masculine, strongly feminine, moderately feminine, and neutral. Interestingly, there was fairly universal agreement between males and females about the toys’ genders. There were ratings disagreements about only nine of the toys, with the largest difference concerning a wheelbarrow (rated as strongly masculine by men and moderately masculine by women); similarly, there was a bit of arm-wrestling over toy horses and hamsters (rated moderately feminine by men and neutral by women), but there were no incidences of cross-gendering. So it would appear that ‘toy typing’ is pretty clear-cut in adult minds. And do children agree with these ratings? Do all boys choose boy toys, all girls choose girl toys? Brenda Todd, a psychologist from City, University of London, researches children’s play, and decided to study their behaviour with toys from dolls to cars. Do all little boys obligingly head for the car/digger/ball/blue teddy bear? And all little girls for the doll/cooking pot/pink teddy bear? To find out, she tested three groups of children, aged nine to 17 months (identified as the age when children first start to engage in independent play), 18 to 23 months (when children show signs of acquiring gender knowledge), and 24 to 32 months (when gender identities become more firmly established). Among the findings: boys were more obliging to the researchers in picking the ‘boy toys’, showing a steady age-related increase in the amount of time they played with the car and the digger. If you’re wondering what happened to the blue teddy bear and the ball, the researchers decided (post hoc) to drop the former as there was ‘no significant sex difference in play’. They also decided to drop the pink teddy bear because the older children didn’t play with either bear. And they then noticed that there were an uneven number of toys in their two categories, so they also dropped the ball (even though it actually showed a sex difference, with boys playing with it more than girls). So now it was the car and digger versus the doll and cooking pot – this meant the odds were stacked in favour of the most gender-targeted toys. The study revealed an element of self-fulfilling prophecy: boys played longer with the toys that had been labelled ‘boy toys’, and the girls with the ‘girl toys’. Interestingly, there was a little twist in the overall picture. For boys, a steady increase in play with boy toys paralleled a decrease in play with girl toys, but the story was different for girls. Although the younger girls appeared to be more interested in girl toys than boys were in boy toys, this interest wasn’t sustained in the middle group, where there was actually a drop in the amount of time they spent with girl toys. In fact, girls showed an increase in the amount of time they played with boy toys as they got older. So, even though the researchers cheerfully admitted to ‘stacking the odds’ with respect to the gender-labelling of the toys they used, their little participants did not show the kind of neat dichotomy that might be expected. Given the emphasis put on toy choice as a powerful index of the essential nature of gender differences, together with the contemporary insistence from the gendered-toy marketing lobby that they are merely reflecting the ‘natural’ choices of boys and girls, this kind of nuance in the whole toy-story saga should really be given more air time. Girls heading for the toy trucks? No problem! Boys selecting a tutu? Hold on a second Perhaps the matter might be settled by a recent research article that reports a combination of a systematic review and a meta-analysis of studies in this area. The article looked at 16 different studies, encompassing 27 groups of children (787 boys and 813 girls) overall. If anything could confirm the reliability, universality and stability of toy preference, might this be it? The overall conclusion was that boys played with male-typed toys more than girls, and girls with female-typed toys more than boys. But we were not given any details about what these toys were or who decided their ‘gender’. Nor were we given any information about whether the children had siblings, and what kind of toys were found in their home environment. Bear this in mind when considering one of the review’s overall conclusions that ‘the consistency in finding sex differences in children’s preferences for toys typed to their own gender indicates the strength of this phenomenon and the likelihood that [it] has a biological origin’. An additional force we might need to consider is the messages our little gender detectives are picking up about what they are ‘allowed’ to play with, given the assumption in the kind of studies we have looked at above that children are given a free toy choice. But even if they are supposedly given free rein, it is not necessarily symmetrical. Girls heading for the toy trucks? No problem! Boys selecting a tutu from the dressing-up box? Hold on a second. Even if there is an overtly egalitarian message, children are pretty astute at picking up the truth. A small-scale study by Nancy Freeman, a teacher-education expert from South Carolina, illustrated this neatly. Parents of three- to five-year-old children were quizzed on their attitudes to childrearing, and were asked to indicate their agreement or disagreement with statements such as ‘A parent who would pay for ballet lessons for a son is asking for trouble,’ or ‘Girls should be encouraged to play with building blocks and toy trucks.’ Their children were then asked to sort a pile of toys into boy toys and girl toys, and also to indicate which toys they thought their father or mother would like them to play with. There was agreement about which toys were which, divided along predictably gendered lines, with further agreement of parental approval for playing with matched-gendered toys: tea sets and tutus for the girls; skateboards and baseball mitts for the boys (yes, some of these children were only three years old). Where the disconnect emerged was that these little children had very clear understanding of what level of approval they would get for playing with a ‘cross-gendered’ toy. So, for example, only 9 per cent of five-year-old boys thought that their father would approve of them choosing a doll or a tea set to play with, whereas 64 per cent of the parents had claimed they would buy their son a doll, and 92 per cent didn’t think ballet lessons for boys were a bad idea. With a rule-scavenging brain on the lookout for gender clues, these children have either misread the message or, as Freeman proclaims in the title of her paper, are good at picking up ‘hidden truths’. What happens if you deliberately invent the labels of toys as ‘for boys’ or ‘for girls’? This was tested on another group of three- to five-year-olds; 15 girls and 27 boys. Children were presented with a shoe shaper, a nutcracker, a melon baller and a garlic press, either in pink or blue, with the objects randomly labelled ‘for girls’ or ‘for boys’. Children were asked how much they liked the toys and who they thought would like and play with them. Boys were much less affected by either the colour or the labels, rating them all as just about equally interesting. Girls, however, were much more gender-label compliant at one level, quite strongly rejecting the blue boy toys and approving of the pink girl toys. But they also showed a significant shift in approval rating for so-called boy toys if they were painted pink, for example, earnestly indicating that other girls might just like the ‘boyish’ garlic press if it could be produced in pink. The authors describe this as a ‘giving girls permission’ effect, where the effect of boy labelling can be counteracted with a girlish colour wash. What a dream result for the marketing industry! So, with respect to toys at least, girl choices do seem to be affected more by the social signals, in this case verbal and colour gender labels. Why might the same not be true for boys – why would they not be equally enthused by a ‘girly’ melon baller if they could have it in blue? Could it be that, while girls are generally not discouraged from playing with boy toys, and, indeed, might occasionally be given permission to pick up the odd hammer (as long as it has a soft pink handle, of course), the reverse is not the case, with evidence of active intervention, particularly from fathers, if boys appear to be choosing to play with girl toys? The extreme gendering of toys as a recent phenomenon has received much attention. Those of us who had our children in the 1980s and ’90s feel that the marketing of toys to their children is much more gendered now than it was then. According to Elizabeth Sweet, a sociologist in San Jose who has made a detailed study of the history of toy marketing, this might be because we were then experiencing the effects of the second wave of feminism. She points out that there was clear evidence of gendered toy marketing in the 1950s with a focus on fitting little humans into their stereotypical roles – toy carpet-cleaners and kitchens for the girls, construction sets and tool kits for the boys. Between the 1970s and the ’90s, gender stereotypes were much more actively challenged, and this was reflected in more egalitarian toys (which could, of course, be good news for any attempts to reverse the gendered toy marketing trend). But that seems to have been swept away in recent decades, partly due, Sweet feels, to the deregulation of children’s television, so that children’s programmes could be commercialised and used as marketing opportunities, driving the ‘need’ for Rainbow Brite or She-Ra or the next Power Ranger. It is clear that boys and girls play with different toys. But an additional question should be – why? Why do boys prefer trucks and girls dolls? Is there some kind of innate driver behind toy preference, or are children meekly complying with the social rules that their families, social media and marketing moguls are pressing upon them? The answer to these questions could lie in our new understanding of how, from the moment of birth (if not before), our brains drive us to be social beings – to understand social scripts, social norms, social behaviour – to make sure we understand the groups we should belong to and how we can fit in. Like the deep learning systems powering artificial intelligence, our brains are scouring our world for the rules of the social game – and if that world is full of powerful messages about gender, helpfully flagged by all sorts of gendered labelling and gendered colour-coding, our brains will pick up such messages and drive their owners to behave ‘appropriately’. Babies come into the world like tiny social sponges, picking up social hints from the world around them – the sight of a familiar face, the sound of a familiar voice – and they rapidly turn into junior gender detectives, eagerly hunting for clues as to what being a girl or a boy means, what girls or boys should be wearing or what they should be playing with. If the answers to their questions bring different experiences, different expectations, then this will be reflected in their brains and their behaviour. A gendered world produces a gendered brain. Copyright © 2019 by Gina Rippon. Extracted from the book ‘Gender and Our Brains: How Neuroscience Explodes the Myths of the Male and Female Minds’, published in the US by Pantheon, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC / ‘The Gendered Brain: The New Neuroscience That Shatters the Myth of the Female Brain’, published in the UK by The Bodley Head.
As the sun rises on a fall morning in 55 BCE, Camma lays two pigeons on the altar at the center of her village. She offers a prayer to Matrona mother goddess of the Earth, and Lugus chief of the gods. Then, she wrings the birds’ necks and cuts them open to examine their entrails for divine messages. Camma is a druid. This means she conducts religious rites, but she also serves as a judge, healer, and scholar, teaching children and mediating conflict between Celtic tribes. She began her studies as a child, memorizing the countless details necessary to perform her many roles, since the druids’ knowledge is considered too sacred to record in writing. Like many druids, she spent years studying in Britain. Now, she is a resident Druid of the Veneti tribe in a small farming village near the western coast of Gaul, in what is now France. Since returning to Gaul, she has received many offers of marriage– but she has decided to devote herself to her work, at least for now. This morning, the omens are troubling. They tell of war and strife, as they often have in recent months. A neighboring tribe, the Redones, have raided their village and stolen cattle in broad daylight twice this fall. The children have gathered around to watch her work. Camma plays her lyre and sings to them. She weaves stories of the powerful kings who once ruled their land – brave warriors who were slain naked in combat but who will be reborn, as will all the Celts. When the children go off to help in the fields, Camma heads across the village to visit an old woman with an eye infection. On the way to the old woman’s hut, she passes men salting pigs for the winter food supply and women weaving clothing from dyed wool. She delivers a remedy for the injured eye– it’s made from mistletoe, a sacred healing plant, but deadly if used incorrectly. From there, Camma visits the chieftain to discuss the omens. She convinces him to go and talk through their problems with their neighbors. Accompanied by several warriors, they head through the forest and demand a meeting outside the Redones’ village walls. The Redones’ representatives bring their own druid, who Camma recognizes from the annual gathering in central Gaul where head druids are elected. The chieftains immediately begin to argue and threaten each other. Camma steps between the opposing sides to stop them from fighting— they must honor her authority. Finally, the Redones agree to pay Camma’s tribe several cattle. In spite of this resolution, Camma still feels uneasy on the long walk home. As they approach the village walls, a bright streak shoots across the sky— another omen, but of what? Back home, Camma sits among the elders for her evening meal of porridge, a bit of meat, and a cup of wine. While they were out during the day, an intercepted parchment arrived. Camma recognizes the writing immediately. Although the druids are forbidden from recording their knowledge, she and many other young druids can read Latin. From the message, she learns that the Romans are drawing closer to their lands. Some of the elders say that the tribe should flee to the nearby hills and hide, but Camma counsels them to trust in the gods and remain in their home. Privately, she has her doubts. Should the Romans reach them, her power to help might be limited. Unlike the other Celtic tribes, Roman legions have no regard for the druids’ sacred role as peacemakers. Before going to bed, she observes the course of the planets and consults her charts, trying to make sense of the meteor she saw earlier. The signs are converging on a larger threat than their neighbors.
In this country, we've been talking a great deal in recent years about memory and memorials - about who and what deserves to be remembered. It's been fraught, especially when the people at the center of the question have qualities that deserve to be celebrated and vilified. There's a similar controversy in England right now over one of the country's most celebrated authors, Rudyard Kipling. Recently, some students at the University of Manchester in England discovered that a new mural of Kipling's famous poem "If" had been painted in their student union. They weren't happy about it - not because of that specific poem, but because some of Kipling's other works expressed views now seen as racist, including a full-throated support for British colonialism. So the students painted over the mural with Maya Angelou's poem, "Still I Rise." And, as you might imagine, other people took issue with that.
In April, the state's Fish and Game Commission will vote on proposed changes to bear hunting. One key regulation would stay the same: only one bear killed per hunter each season. What would change is how the end of bear hunting season would be defined. Currently, it's based on the number of bears killed. Last year, the quota was 1,700. Under the new proposal, the season would close on a date - the end of December. That's a couple weeks later than it closed this past year. The Department of Fish and Game anticipates no more than 600 more bears will be killed each season under the new proposals.
Recently, a friend offered to put up some shelves for me. As we drove to the hardware shop, we got to talking about relationships and he mentioned that he was polyamorous: though he lives with his primary partner, he is free to be with other women too. He told me how once, by chance, he’d found himself dancing in a nightclub with all his lovers: tickled by the memory, he tapped a beat on the steering wheel. ‘That’s cool,’ I said, smiling. Despite his being a new friend, I already knew about this fluid lifestyle; he’s attractive and easy with his body, so it didn’t surprise me. I’m a relaxed individual, too. I had no problem with what he was telling me, only I found myself discomfited by our conversation. I wondered how it worked for him. Was it consensual? Does his wife do the same? Aware of a heat rising in my cheeks, I wound down the car window. ‘Doesn’t it affect your intimacy?’ I asked. Having recently gone through a divorce, intimacy was something I wished to handle with care. I was embarking on a new relationship that was wonderful, but tender, after all that had been lost. ‘No,’ my friend said, ‘it’s the complete opposite.’ If anything, their open relationship made him and his partner closer, plus they could each pursue their needs without risking a breakup. Polyamory embraces an open relationship that relies on transparency and consent, and can be a safety net for those who find monogamy unnatural: like taking a prophylactic drug, it addresses the problem before it happens. It’s a nod, perhaps, to our permissive society, but a development, also, from our parents’ more chaotic experimentation in the 1960s and ’70s. I’d seen the sparky TED talks by Esther Perel, the couples’ therapist and all-round relationship guru, and I’d read her most recent book, The State of Affairs (2017), where she argues that in light of rising infidelity in Western cultures, it’s time to take a fresh look at the topic. This made sense to me on a cerebral level but, surprisingly, in my friend’s car, I was finding it difficult to breathe. ‘I could never do that,’ I said, failing to keep the defensiveness from my voice. ‘I just know for me it would not be possible.’ I told him about my upbringing with a father who had multiple partners, kept secret during my parents’ marriage; the shocking nature of some of his transgressions. My father was long dead – a protracted suicide through alcohol poisoning – and yet, in that moment, I felt his presence beside me, taking up most of the passenger seat. ‘That’s a lot to contend with,’ my friend said, holding my gaze. There was a knowing look in his eyes that shouted: And it sounds like you’re still pretty hung up about all this! My mind ran in circles, dizzy with self-doubt. I was reminded of the parties in my youth, mass sleepovers, girls sharing baths, boys sharing my bed. My friends being open about their sexual fluidity, and my same response – a kind of heartache, a shut-down, a closing-off. Me, old-fashioned, uptight, unevolved? My father was there again, morphed into a head on my friend’s shoulders, such a similar easy smile, the same pleading ‘love me’ eyes. Why don’t you just chill out? I gripped hold of the door handle and searched the streets for something familiar. Where are we? That’s when I caught a glimpse of myself in the wing mirror, a woman now, not a girl, my father absent. Pushing the muss of windblown hair from my eyes, I also saw clarity and a fierce, different kind of knowledge – born of the pain that comes with knowing what it is to betray and have someone betray me, its constant distraction, how it clouds and distorts, cutting you off from those you love. How hard I had worked to put that behind me. I felt myself expand again into the passenger seat. Turning back to my friend, I pointed out a good place to park. Later, my mum laughed at the end of the phone: ‘What a sexist load of twaddle. It might be all right for your friend who doesn’t have children, but can it ever be equally consensual? Sounds like an excuse to shag around –’ and I wondered why I’d been so thrown after all these years. My own private joy of intimacy, so hard-won, tested momentarily by this man, so like my father in his conviction that his way was better. My father was unfaithful, a philanderer, a serial shagger; there are many words for what he was when terms such as ‘consensual nonmonogamy’ or ‘polyamory’ were not yet in popular use. Adultery is a shameful word, a transgression from the sanctity of marriage; like ‘cheating’, ‘infidelity’ and ‘unfaithfulness’, it is not morally neutral. It derives from the Latin word adulteritas, meaning contamination. It’s no surprise that my father lied about his liaisons in his 12-year marriage to my mother, though he once boasted to his sister – true or false – that there had been 500 affairs. He took pride in being humorously subversive, doing nothing to hide his inappropriate comments to passing women when my brother and I, just children, watched wide-eyed from the back seat of his fancy car. As a young man, my father was a sexual magnet, shining and beguiling; tall with long limbs and a film-star presence, thick blond hair, eyes too big, and too blue. As a toddler, he was proudly pushed around in his pram by a mother who was made for the stage but thwarted. She took great pleasure in the attention this beautiful boy awarded her. My father was more ambivalent. He sought out attention, yet found it overwhelming; however, soon he came to rely on it, as if it were a strange kind of nourishment. I’ve spent much of my life trying to make sense of my father. Was he Cupid’s victim, wounded by an incontinent desire and too insecure to commit wholly to one woman? Or in light of our culture’s tenacious and unrealistic expectation of romance – ‘the grand ambition of romantic love’, as Perel puts it – did he simply flee from love’s loaded responsibility? My parents were teenagers when they met, children of the 1960s, romantic and idealistic. They barely knew themselves. Except that my father’s self-serving behaviour was off the scale. He would have been forgiven for a simple flirt or one-off fumble, but he was like Pan, the horned god, led by his need for conquest, speaking in riddles so as not to be found out. When my mother sensed something was wrong, when her instincts cried out for the truth, he called her paranoid. For years, I found it inconceivable that he could return each night to make love to his wife having come from the embrace of another woman. It wasn’t just my mother he hurt, or any number of the women he made promises to, their marriages broken. Were there pregnancies? Children? The tentacles of betrayal crept everywhere. As a child, I thrilled to the story of how my dad attempted to reach us when my mother was in labour with me. He’d been at a meeting up North. In his Citroën SM, he drove as fast as he could down the motorway, blind to the fact that he was running out of petrol. On the outskirts of London the fuel gauge hit zero. He glided to a layby, got out of the car and ran. He ran all the way, he told me, to get to us in time. I imagined his long legs in narrow trousers, hair flapping crazily in the wind. Did I also bathe in the fluid of his betrayal? Did the agitation course through my veins? Yet in my mind’s eye, when my father finally arrived at the hospital, I see how he avoids us; how the simple tranquility of a mother and her newborn, after all that they’ve experienced, throws his shame into relief – he is there, but also not. How could he be fully present? She was the mother of his child, and yet, as we were to find out later, my father’s body had been elsewhere. His mind, his hands, his thoughts, his heart. Whatever. This level of deceit draws a new path, another landscape, stained with guilt. We feel bad about ourselves when we lie. Withdrawing, avoiding the lover’s eye, we see fault in order to justify our behaviour – ‘Look at what you’ve driven me to.’ My mother didn’t know it at the time, but, then again, of course she did. We are all instinctive beings. When I was in utero, my mother’s spirit was sullied by him. Did I also bathe in the fluid of his betrayal? Like a child born of an addict, did the agitation course through my veins? My origin myth. Subservience to a tantalising absence. Only weeks later, my mother was up at night, waiting for my father. She stood by the window with me in her arms. Why was he so late? To add to her unease was the fear that whatever she felt would pass through her body to me, her precious daughter, heart to heart; that her tears might drop onto my tiny face as I searched for her breast: that I might ingest her pain. It went on for years. When I was five, on holiday in Greece, I walked hand in hand with him along a beach. The simple bliss of looking out for jellyfish in the sand. But a woman called his name. I stopped and squinted up at her. She was tall, her body brown and oiled. She tipped her hips and her long hair swung when she smiled. My father dropped my hand. ‘Who’s that?’ I asked, trying to catch up with him. ‘Just someone.’ That wrinkle of questioning. Things are not as they seem. There’s a photograph of me, small and bespectacled, a year after that trip to Greece. I’m hanging my father’s Y-fronts on the washing line. Growing up, I loved this image. He is in our everyday space, using our washing machine, and I am looking after him. But my mother has since told me she found it too painful to look at. She was afraid that handling my father’s wet clothes might have exposed me to a venereal disease she later discovered he was carrying. It’s not just damage to the heart, but the body as well. Why did my father do it? How could he continue to cheat on my mother despite claiming to love her all the while? Nothing went wrong in their relationship. They were passionate about each other right to the end. I know that he felt wretched at times; he later admitted to trying various therapies towards the end of their marriage. ‘What if the affair had nothing to do with you?’ Perel asks her clients. In her work with couples who are dealing with the fallout of infidelity, one motivation that crops up a lot is self-discovery, a quest for a new or lost identity. In my father’s case, there was boarding school from the age of seven. From the intimate safety of his mother’s love, he was flung to a place where he had to abide by new rules along with hundreds of other little boys. No one looking out for you, no familial soil in which to grow. In Boarding School Syndrome: The Psychological Trauma of the ‘Privileged Child’ (2015), the British psychoanalyst Joy Schaverein recognises a set of patterns of behaviour among people, such as my father, who have been sent away to prep school, including an inability to recognise emotions in one’s self and in others, to talk about feelings, and to form durable close relationships: all revolving around problems with intimacy. The boys are so young when they lose their primary attachment that they haven’t yet learned the right words to articulate their feelings. ‘There are no words to adequately express the feeling state and so a shell is formed to protect the vulnerable self from emotion that cannot be processed,’ writes Schaverein. From the certainties of home life, my dad was thrown into an anarchy where the older boys bullied those who were younger or vulnerable. As an adult, my father confessed to his sister that he had been raped. He was certainly coerced into sex games between the boys, all of them abandoned and rudderless. He grew into puberty with very little privacy, and only limited outlets for his natural curiosity. Is this what distorted his relationship to sex? Sex as power, sex as escape? It was euphoric to win over beautiful strangers. In that moment, everything felt right. In his essay ‘Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning’ (1911), Sigmund Freud identifies ‘the pleasure-unpleasure [Lust-Unlust] principle, or more shortly the pleasure principle’. In How to Read Freud (2005), the American writer Josh Cohen discusses the natural progression, from our libidinal drive for pleasure and survival as a newborn, to learning that eating too many sweets might make us sick, to the hope that finally the precarious rush of instant gratification will give way to postponement and its more measured satisfactions. Freud affiliates the pleasure-ego with wish and the reality-ego with what is useful and what guards us from damage. ‘This process is essentially a slow and reluctant shift of allegiance from the pleasure to the reality principle,’ writes Cohen. We learn to hold out, to moderate or resist. But my father was the eternal child with no restraint. He grew fat from eating too many cakes, smoked despite being prone to asthma, drank milk by the litre despite being intolerant. He always knew better than the doctors. When he ended up in intensive care for the third time and was told he’d die within the year if he didn’t stop drinking, I begged him, and he laughed: ‘But it’s so much fun.’ The religion encouraged sexual promiscuity and cast monogamy as merely a social construct He finally left us, his family, soon after that photograph of me helping with the laundry was taken; I was six, my brother eight. We four stood in the yellow-lit hallway at home: my brother on the stairs, my mum at the bannister, me in the livingroom doorway, the roses of our wallpaper, soft, blowsy and sedated. My father was in the corridor, his feet perceptibly turned away from the corners of our home, our quiet intimacy. He went to India with his new girlfriend and was blessed by his guru, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who put a mala round his neck and gave him a new name. The cult encouraged sexual promiscuity and cast monogamy as merely a social construct. The words adultery and infidelity were not muttered in the dusty pathways between meditation and darshan, when disciples gathered to hear their guru speak. My father had found himself an affirmative culture. He had found his people. On his return six months later, he told my brother and I that he had been reborn. He was cleansed of the past. He introduced my mother to his girlfriend – the three of them seated on the sofa in our living room – and asked if they could both move into the family home, she in the basement, my dad back in my mother’s bed. He wanted to pirouette like a happy prince between his two women. In pure polyamory style, my father asked for my mother’s consent. She stood up and passed him his green fedora hat. ‘You must be joking,’ she said. Although infidelity has become commonplace, it remains a leading reason for divorce. So we search for solutions, try to find new, more progressive ways to accommodate it, and a positive language that speaks of extending our love out. We remain hopelessly romantic, and yet continue to face ‘the core existential paradoxes that every couple wrestles with – security and adventure, togetherness and autonomy, stability and novelty,’ as Perel so eloquently puts it. But what of an individual’s pain? In his musings on the Conditions of Love (2002), the philosopher John Armstrong discusses how our idea of love is at any given time dependent on the prevailing culture and its shifting values, even as ‘emotional structures like jealousy and possessiveness don’t seem to change much’. This intransigence proved inconvenient for the sexual reformers of the 1960s and ’70s but polyamorists don’t shy away from the problem or try to protect those they love with lies. In fact, they pride themselves on their conscious management of jealousy and stand by the importance of total transparency. Still, if we are to consider a relationship’s boundaries, where then do we draw the line? Apologists for adultery might say, it was only sex, she or he meant nothing. Polyamorists might do the same. Either way, intimacy is the sticking point, the moment when one night turns into two; a candle-lit dinner; holding hands on the way home. Real intimacy has less of a relationship with sex than it does with trust and the naked self. Armstrong writes of a small painting by Édouard Vuillard, which depicts a naked woman plucking a gown from the back of a chair. It’s an affectionate image that speaks of the person who witnesses the act, as well as the act itself, and the ease between them: ‘A sense of trust and comfort which are connected to tender touch. This is the sensuality of a caress, rather than of intercourse.’ We all fear losing the person we love to someone better, more beloved. It’s not something that can be talked away or prepared for. ‘If love is an act of the imagination, then intimacy is an act of fruition,’ writes Perel. ‘It waits for the high to subside, so it can patiently insert itself into the relationship.’ It takes an extraordinary person to be comfortable with their true love experiencing an equal or stronger love for another person, and it’s not easy to end a relationship that has touched you deeply, whatever your intention. A warm hand finding you in sleep … This kind of intimacy is undone when a third party enters the frame My father’s legacy was complex, but there was one seed, planted deep within me and tenacious in its growth. How fearful I was of infidelity. Would it happen to me? Worse: would I be unfaithful? That fear embedded itself in my heart and grew like bindweed, constricting the blood that should have run free. In my own history of love, I gave in to being ‘motionless, at hand, in expectation’ in the shadow of the ‘absent one’, as Roland Barthes so lucidly explores in A Lover’s Discourse (1977). It made me over-alert, searching for the distraction, the other lover, to emerge. Eventually, to reclaim myself again, I fled my marriage, unable to fully explain, leaving behind much hurt. My father was never able to reflect, to accept responsibility, or acknowledge his complicity in another’s pain. He never apologised to any of us. I feared, more than anything, that I would end up like him. I understand the desire to have a totally transparent relationship. I didn’t manage it when I was preoccupied with that inflexible state that Barthes writes about, the feeling that ‘I am loved less than I love.’ But now that I know what it is to love wholeheartedly, I know there’s nothing more nourishing than giving openly and freely, or the joy that comes from total trust. Having complete communication in everything, that light and easy syncopation, spinning off in all directions and always being caught; the peace of low voices in the dark; a warm hand finding you in sleep. This kind of intimacy relies on privacy. It is undone when a third party enters the frame. Perhaps the polyamorists, like my friend in his car, will whisper among themselves that I am fearful, but maybe it’s more that I recognise how important is the closeness of a private intimacy. Besides, what if, like pain, this commitment has a purpose? Against all that can be lost, ‘the desire to hold on to what one has, and to resent it being taken by others, is a self-protective instinct,’ says Armstrong. It feels natural to want to keep this kind of ease and comfort safe. I am reassured by Armstrong’s premise that love is ‘recognition of what the needs of another may be’. He believes we really can ‘become more loving by developing a richer sense of what might be important to another person and by cultivating an interest in finding out what those needs are.’ This applies to those who practise consensual nonmonogamy, as well as those who acknowledge their inevitable attractions to other people but stay true to their one chosen love. Neither way is better, but both demand that you listen. Armstrong goes on to write about the importance of imagination in love, above intensity of feeling; some might call it empathy – the ability to know how the experience of another can differ from our own. Imagination, he writes, opens up the possibility of asking: ‘How might I do things otherwise?’ With this question in our hearts, we cease putting ourselves first; instead, by giving, we make a safe space for our partners to give in return. We create that comfortable, remedial space that nourishes and protects against the stresses of life. Why deplete our lover’s energy by igniting that terrible fear of loss? After the shelves went up, I confided in my best friend about the confession in the car, and she pulled a face, shook her head. ‘Why was he telling you this? It sounds so suspect.’ Many would have laughed it off as a bad come-on line, but I was grateful for what my pained response taught me. I learned about my own emotional landscape: that what might be considered by some as a weakness – at worst, a case of prudery; at best, a fear of letting go – is in fact my understanding of who I am, and what I need. Me, there, in the driving seat. A consensual monogamist.
I think part of it really comes from political correctness. I think political correctness is like wearing duct tape over your mouth. Because if you really are a person that has bias and hate and bile and a lot of filth running around your head and pretend that you don't and give a big broad smile and say I would've never thought that, that's going to find its way to the surface like a fissure through a volcano core. And that's why I think there's a lot of stuff going on in the world about lack of civility. But I remember Bob Reich would get up and he would say before I went to work for the Clinton Administration I was as tall as Simpson. Well, they'd just go crazy. You know, and he had a thousand of those and I have a thousand of them and the self-deprecating - but this other stuff is not humor. This is slice- 'em-up, and slice-'em-up humor may get you a laugh, may get you ratings, may get you a lot of stuff, but I tell you, when you go home to bed at night I wouldn't think you'd sleep pretty well when you're making fun of persons and their physical attributes and their weight, whatever, whatever, whatever. And they do that. That's supposed to be ho-ho funny.
Yes. And in fact, the model comes from the deep seabed. There is an overarching piece of international law for the sea, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and the seabed resources to be regulated--or, sorry, the use of those resources is to be regulated by a special part of that piece of international law so that all mankind benefits from the mining of the minerals in the deep seabed. So you could look at that as a model for how to manage the living resources in the water above the seabed in a very similar way and redistributing the wealth that comes from mining those resources.
Joe Biden has been in public service for more than 40 years. But the events of several days in October of 1991 are overshadowing the first hours of his newly minted presidential candidacy. We're talking about the confirmation hearings of now-Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and the testimony of Anita Hill. She had accused Thomas of sexual harassment. Biden's handling of the hearings has been scrutinized in the wake of the #MeToo movement. And as he prepared to announce his run, Biden reached out to Anita Hill to apologize. Hill told The New York Times that Biden's apology left her deeply unsatisfied. Biden offered a version of that apology on ABC's "The View" this morning.
U.S. patent number D486486 reads, quote, "a display device with a movable assembly attached to a flat-panel display and to a base," end quote. Then there's patent number D469109 for, quote, "the ornamental design for a media player substantially as shown and described." Those are just a couple of the hundreds of patents that bear the name Steven P. Jobs, the late CEO of Apple. A new exhibition opened on Friday at the Smithsonian's Ripley Center here in Washington, D.C., and it's titled :The Patents and Trademarks of Steve Jobs: Art and Technology that Changed the World." Walter Isaacson is the author of Steve Jobs' biography. He joins us now in our studio. Thanks so much for coming in.
Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. She excuse me she also served for 10 years as a senior professional staff member for the Near East and South Asia on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and with us today from the Studios at AEI here in Washington, D.C. Coming up, a new IMAX film tells us the story of one of the biggest industrial projects in history: the development of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. Test pilot Mike Carriker took it out on its first flight. He joins us next. Stay with us.
Basically, if you work for a - I mean, in a traditional employment situation, you're paying about 7.5 percent of the payroll tax that covers entitlement programs. If you work for yourself, you're paying 15 percent. You know, there's an economic theory about this that it at all evens out. But, you know, that's not how it generally feels to people or to employers. And, in fact, that represents a huge obstacle for people of more modern incomes who would take advantage of the situation, and that, you know, that payroll tax is just antiquated. And I don't think it would federalizing any programs or asking government to take on any new, huge cost to think about how you finance your entitlement programs differently and more equitably in a world where people - where we want to encourage people to have as much control over their lives and as much flexibility in their workplaces as possible.
Well, you're very kind. I think, you know, "Seven Pillars" is remarkable because, first of all, though it's not an easy book to read, I mean it goes into the category of great works literature, like James Joyce's "Ulysses," that are, you know, you recognize the greatness but it's also a difficult task to read that book. And the same is true of "Seven Pillars of Wisdom," except - and this is very curious - except for the battle scenes. The battle scenes are written in spare, compelling prose, which had a great effect on Ernest Hemingway and which reads very often like Ernest Hemingway, although needless to say Lawrence never read Ernest Hemingway.
Well, my heart tells me yes, but my head tells me no. No, because I don't think we want to conspire in an effort for - that he would like to have us conspire in - for him to be a martyr. And I also take Margaret's point that I don't think anyone here wants to do anything that jeopardizes journalists' ability to keep the security of their sources - after all, intelligence officers have that same interest - and - nor interfere with their ability to encrypt things and so forth. So if that's part of an indictment, I think prosecutors and defenders will have to work through that to sort of segregate what is it that he can be legitimately charged with here without endangering freedom of speech, the First Amendment or the rights of journalists. I'm all for avoiding those dangers.
Yes, the minute we get - the first thing David does when he gets to the office is head for the refrigerator and make sure that there's a cold Fresca in the refrigerator. Now, there are so many levels on which this (Laughing) was surprising to me, like, A, David's like a food snob, you know, he's - you know, food - the natural and the farmer's market. So, the idea that's not even 10 a.m., and he's having a cold soda is sort of a surprise to me. So, I'm happy to learn that. And B, David, like, has a prima donna fit because somebody's forgotten to put the col - and he's like - he's like heat coming off of his body. He's so angry about the fact that nobody put a Fresca.
Well, I think it's bigger than that because that makes it too formulaic. We're talking about something huge, because we're teaching children that sex is no more important than chewing gum and racism is the price you pay to live in America. And quite frankly, I'd rather not have a list where you could ever call somebody something like that unless you were a police officer who is trying to pick up someone who called themselves that for a living. You know, I'm still reeling from the story out of Union Parrish down in Louisiana about the five fifth-graders who were caught having sex in an unsupervised classroom while other students watched. Don Imus is sort of caught in the middle of something that's bigger than he is, and it's just his time, because we don't have lives anymore. I want respect for women. I want sexist rap to be available only in dirty little theaters with Triple X on the front and, you know, instead of bringing sexy back I want to bring the line back. So that means I don't want to try and figure out how to make it work. I just don't want it to work.
Well, as far as we know, and the French aren't too generous with the information they provide, the French forces and the aircraft backing them have now cleared out all the major towns inside the north of Mali. That leaves, of course, the Islamist opposition, which is apparently dispersed into neighboring villages and into the desert itself. And the Malian army is now supposed to be moving in to carry out mopping-up operations in the north, but they are unlikely to be able to complete that task, and there is supposed to be an African Union ECOWAS force coming in, some 7,000 strong, to complete the task and completely pacify the north over the next six months.
Well, I was listening for a level of commitment to securing Iraq by the Iraqi government and the Iraqi army and police force that has been missing, and I didn't hear that. I don't see where our putting in more American troops is likely to bring that about. So what I came away with, Steve, is a very strong opposition to the president's plan for escalation. And instead, I would like to see us cap the number of American troops in Iraq at the level that we had as of January 1st and begin to deploy them out of Baghdad and eventually out of Iraq.
I had to tell you, Tony, I led a delegation on behalf of United States to Great Britain, upon which Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were the co-sponsors of the event, and I sat down with the then Exchequer of the currency Gordon Brown for several hours on a one-on-one consultation. And his intellect is remarkable. His grasp and his comprehension of economic issues to me, I found, was particularly staggering. I mean, he really does understand what he's talking about. So, I find that the American-British relationship has always been a strong one. I think that this President Obama and this new prime minister need to sit down. I'm glad that they have the opportunity to sit down face to face to talk about the impact in a reach of this crisis which is reached around the world. We must find a way out of this, and one of the ways that will find the way out of this is close consultation and working with their allies both here in the United States and in the banking industry as well our foreign leaders and our foreign friends around the world to dig our way out of this. So I'm very encouraged not only by Gordon Brown's meeting with the president this morning, but also with the opportunity for the prime minister to address the joint session of the Congress later in the day.
Yes. The main U.S. Army regiment that's here, it's the 3rd Squadron, 4th Cavalry Regiment, they have sent in several patrols of soldiers into the city. The commander of that unit, Colonel Frost, is spending the night tonight in Tal Afar at the castle where the mayor's office and the city council offices are. It's sort of divides the city in two. The Shias live on one side, the Sunnis live on the other. And the U.S. forces have been going in all day long from this space just a few miles outside of Tal Afar. They've been going in to patrol the city and working with the Iraqi army and Iraqi police to help calm the situation.
Foreign policy eventually did get its due, and that's where we want to start this week's conversation with Ted Koppel who joins us on many Mondays. He's managing editor of the Discovery Channel as well. We want to hear from you. What are the foreign policy issues most important to you? Did they get addressed during Friday's debate? What did the candidates say that interested you? What did they not say? 800-989-8255, email us talk@npr.org. And Ted, always nice to have you on the program. TED KOPPEL,: Thank you, Neal. If you'll excuse me for a moment I have to run out and bury some stocks in the backyard.
This is one of the things we're seeing happen at this convention. Again, this is the first national Tea Party convention, but it has not been sanctioned by all Tea Party groups. In fact, there's been a good bit of controversy within the Tea Party movement because of the high registration fees and the fact that this is an - for profit event. But the leaders of this convention are saying it is time to get beyond shouting slogans and waving placards. And those of us who've been covering this movement know that they're often very angry slogans and angry placards and signs that they wave. They have formed here separate from the convention, a political action committee and a nonprofit corporation, a 501(c)(4). They hope to raise money that they say they're going to channel into congressional races around the country. They have identified about 10 of them so far where they see opportunities for their kind of conservative candidates.
Kurt Masur was born in Brieg, Silesia, in 1927 and came of age in what was then East Germany. His first major appointment was with the Dresden Philharmonic in 1955. But he truly made his mark with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, where he was kapellmeister, or music director, from 1970 to 1996. The orchestra is one of the oldest in the world, with a history that dates back more than 500 years. One of the leaders was Johann Sebastian Bach, and Masur recounted on a New York Philharmonic broadcast in 1985 that a lot of other composers had close relationships with the ensemble as well.
Yes. Well, you know, what you're seeing going on in the Senate chamber today is largely symbolic because Democrats know perfectly well that Republicans are going to block any tax cut extension that doesn't keep all the Bush-era tax cuts in place next year. They're voting on two different proposals. One would cap household incomes eligible for the extension at a quarter of a million dollars, and the other would cap it at a million dollars. And since Republicans seem determined to vote against both those measures, Democrats plan to accuse them of holding those lower income tax breaks hostage to tax cuts for millionaires. You can almost hear those campaign ads already playing on your TV.
Well, it certainly is an incredibly important test for the media of how they conduct themselves and how they spend their time and their researches during this period. I happen to think that some of these issues, particularly this past week around the media are kind of red herrings. They're exactly what the Trump administration wants the media to do is to get into a battle with him. It's what Bannon said or, you know, like, come on, like, publish this, like, we want you to tell the public that we're in this fight. That's exactly what they want, and there are so many critical issues out there that I think the media ought to be so aggressive on. For me, the single biggest one is to continue to investigate whether there was or is some kind of a link between the Trump campaign and a foreign adversary in Russia. There are just yuge (ph), yuge issues. There are any number of things that are going on with our policy right now - foreign policy and domestic. And I hope the media doesn't get distracted by things that are less important.
Well, I'll try to make a perfect case. Apartheid is a word that is an accurate description of what has been going on in the West Bank. And it's based on the desire or avarice of a minority of Israelis for Palestinian land; it's not based on racism. Those caveats are very clearly made in the book. This is a word that's a very accurate description of the forced separation within the West Bank of Israelis from Palestinians and the total domination and oppression of Palestinians by the dominant Israeli military. : Why not just describe that rather than bring in this word that's freighted with so much history from another place?
I think region by region, there is some early attempt to do exactly that. And there have been some well-publicized episodes of illness related to permafrost food cellar failure. So - and it isn't the only kind of threat that that permafrost changes has made. A village that has a sewage lagoon that has a permafrost containment and pins on that, if that permafrost begins to melt in the summer, at the level of the sewage, then you can get subsurface migration without anything being visible on the surface to nearby surface-water supplies. So there are lots of different things that we have to begin to look at and monitor on a village-by-village basis, and often the response to it is pretty intuitive once you know the problem is there and the extent of it. Sometimes, it isn't intuitive. But all that needs to be, I think, addressed in a systematic fashion, and it is not right now. There are interested agencies in it. However, it's not yet moved into the - that place in the public's priority that says let's finally do something about this.
This has not been a very bipartisan year (laughter). I hope in the new year we're going to pivot here and become more cooperative. Almost every other issue you can think of including immigration can't be done in one party only. The president's actually incentivized us by putting a time limit on the DACA program to come forward and see what we can agree to for not only a permanent change on that but also some other items as well. And there are constructive bipartisan discussions going on already. I put together a group with Senator Grassley, Senator Durbin and others to address that issue. And we have until March to do that, and I'm confident we will.
Well, it's interesting because I think that there are a couple of things that you said and Mickey said that play into this. I mean, one, as Mickey pointed out is there are more people buying foreign cars in the United States than they are buying these American-made cars. So to some degree, most consumers actually have in some ways moved on. They are voting with their pocketbooks if you look at driveways around the country. See a lot of Toyotas and Nissans and Hondas. The other thing is you've been referring to them as the Big Three. I've stopped doing that in print. I don't know what The Times does? I don't - but they are no longer really very big. They are nothing what they were, as Mickey was saying, if you go back to the 60s, I mean they were absolutely dominant. They were so powerful and so tied to the American psyche and in the brief time that I've covered - I think if I go back to 2005, at least a quarter of a million jobs have been lost in the auto industry in just that period of time and it looks like a lot more will be. One thing that might be interesting is to see what happens on Capitol Hill right now is if this week, there isn't something of a referendum on the relationship between the American government, the American taxpayer, and the Detroit auto industry because I think you're going to hear some very interesting things and if it doesn't pass this time around, and it looks like it's going to be difficult, then under an Obama administration with more Democratic's, you know, help in the House and the Senate, to see if we don't have another conversation and see how that turns out.
I'm not so sure if it was bad luck as just what goes with the territory in those days, you know, where they had big, heavy, cumbersome camera equipment and so on. And yes, he used to get people to pose on icebergs and they fell off icebergs. And he was trying to film killer whales, and then they decided that they'd try and eat him and came up under the ice, bumping it in the technique that they have, and decided they'd quite like him for lunch, so he nearly got eaten by killer whales. And on another occasion, he licked his lips whilst taking a photograph and it - his tongue stuck to a little part of the metal work on the camera, and it froze to the camera and he had to jerk his head away and left the tip of his tongue stuck to the camera. So...
That's true. Now I mean in everyday life, they're probably not meaningful in that sense, because I think humans have been around for a long time, depending upon which theory you want to believe, whether it's 100,000, a couple hundred thousand, or a couple million. It's very clear that we can get by without reading microexpressions. We need to read the other expressions, however, macroexpressions. And I think societies would not function if we did not read each other's macroexpressions correctly. But with the microexpressions, you know, it's very clear that humans have done well without reading the microexpressions. So in terms of everyday social life, probably not that meaningful.
And what could be better on your vegetables then a little lard? Animal fats are being reconsidered. Pork fat - lard, beef fat - tallow, and chicken fat - schmaltz. 'Nduja, from the French Andouille, is the new kid at the Italian table. This spicy, spreadable Calabrian sausage is showing up on pizza, bruschetta and pasta. And Brooklynites are finding their inner Eastern European with new farm-to-table Jewish delis. We're talking gefilte fish as a craft food. Craft, by the way, is the new artisanal. There's one more foreign food to address. We need to get beyond ick and embrace eating bugs. Cricket flower is already showing up in protein bars. Insects are gluten-free, high in protein and emit fewer greenhouse gases than cattle. Cricket cuisine may even play in Peoria because New York is no longer restaurant Mecca. Many chefs are packing their knives and heading for smaller cities. Today, everyone everywhere has a sophisticated palate. And fine dining continues its decline. You don't need a white tablecloth to eat crickets.
It didn't seem to change anything. It was a pseudo-event and it was a way for the White House to answer a sort of non-ideological question and an argument by Republicans that you need some sort of public debate on health care. We need to rip these discussions from out of the back rooms and into the view of C-SPAN cameras. But both parties, in the run-up to it, it was clear, they were talking more about how they were going to stage it and how they were going to argue, and not at all about what they were going to propose. The things they were proposing and the legislative strategy on both sides are basically unchanged. The White House still has reconciliation on the table for a 51-vote, you know, majority to pass health care. The Republicans still want to block everything. And none of that really was finessed at all by this.
Well, first we weren't even going to make the movie unless we could really tell the story from the villain and the victims' side. And, you know, when I first met with Mark Ciavarella and approached him on the idea of doing this film - of course, I didn't know these folks at all - first, I had to make sure he understood that he was the villain. And he said that he was. Secondly, is that he ultimately agreed to do the film, but he did not want to tell his attorneys that he was actually participating in the film. And that was the same with Judge Conahan. And I think that was sort of the first peering into how important, perhaps, they thought it was for them to tell their side of the story.
This is an incredibly interesting case. We had a little bit of a foreshadow of it in the last term when there was an important environmental case that had to do with water regulations. But this has to do with whether the environmental protectioncy(ph) agency has the authority to regulate greenhouse gasses that lead to the so-called greenhouse effect. The EPA said since there's real scientific uncertainty about whether there is a greenhouse affect, they're not going to regulate the carbon emissions. And twelve states have - disagree with that and have sued. So this is a really important test case about whether or not an agency can say, well, because of scientific uncertainty we're just not going to regulate this effect.

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