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Yeah, there's no way I would know. I feel very lucky to be part of team. A lot of the credit goes to Chrysler, to be honest. You have to imagine, four years ago when they gave me the project, I was only 31 years old. And they put me in charge of leading one of the most significant cars that they were investing in, you know, a multi-billion dollar program. So for me, I was literally shaking, and I didn't understand what they saw in me, but they definitely had faith in me and they wanted me to--wanted to challenge me. That says a lot about a major corporation that would take a young black man and say, Here you go.

What I'm going to try to do is explain to you quickly how to predict, and illustrate it with some predictions about what Iran is going to do in the next couple of years. In order to predict effectively, we need to use science. And the reason that we need to use science is because then we can reproduce what we're doing; it's not just wisdom or guesswork. And if we can predict, then we can engineer the future. So if you are concerned to influence energy policy, or you are concerned to influence national security policy, or health policy, or education, science — and a particular branch of science — is a way to do it, not the way we've been doing it, which is seat-of-the-pants wisdom. Now before I get into how to do it let me give you a little truth in advertising, because I'm not engaged in the business of magic. There are lots of thing that the approach I take can predict, and there are some that it can't. It can predict complex negotiations or situations involving coercion — that is in essence everything that has to do with politics, much of what has to do with business, but sorry, if you're looking to speculate in the stock market, I don't predict stock markets — OK, it's not going up any time really soon. But I'm not engaged in doing that. I'm not engaged in predicting random number generators. I actually get phone calls from people who want to know what lottery numbers are going to win. I don't have a clue. I engage in the use of game theory, game theory is a branch of mathematics and that means, sorry, that even in the study of politics, math has come into the picture. We can no longer pretend that we just speculate about politics, we need to look at this in a rigorous way. Now, what is game theory about? It assumes that people are looking out for what's good for them. That doesn't seem terribly shocking — although it's controversial for a lot of people — that we are self-interested. In order to look out for what's best for them or what they think is best for them, people have values — they identify what they want, and what they don't want. And they have beliefs about what other people want, and what other people don't want, how much power other people have, how much those people could get in the way of whatever it is that you want. And they face limitations, constraints, they may be weak, they may be located in the wrong part of the world, they may be Einstein, stuck away farming someplace in a rural village in India not being noticed, as was the case for Ramanujan for a long time, a great mathematician but nobody noticed. Now who is rational? A lot of people are worried about what is rationality about? You know, what if people are rational? Mother Theresa, she was rational. Terrorists, they're rational. Pretty much everybody is rational. I think there are only two exceptions that I'm aware of — two-year-olds, they are not rational, they have very fickle preferences, they switch what they think all the time, and schizophrenics are probably not rational, but pretty much everybody else is rational. That is, they are just trying to do what they think is in their own best interest. Now in order to work out what people are going to do to pursue their interests, we have to think about who has influence in the world. If you're trying to influence corporations to change their behavior, with regard to producing pollutants, one approach, the common approach, is to exhort them to be better, to explain to them what damage they're doing to the planet. And many of you may have noticed that doesn't have as big an effect, as perhaps you would like it to have. But if you show them that it's in their interest, then they're responsive. So, we have to work out who influences problems. If we're looking at Iran, the president of the United States we would like to think, may have some influence — certainly the president in Iran has some influence — but we make a mistake if we just pay attention to the person at the top of the power ladder because that person doesn't know much about Iran, or about energy policy, or about health care, or about any particular policy. That person surrounds himself or herself with advisers. If we're talking about national security problems, maybe it's the Secretary of State, maybe it's the Secretary of Defense, the Director of National Intelligence, maybe the ambassador to the United Nations, or somebody else who they think is going to know more about the particular problem. But let's face it, the Secretary of State doesn't know much about Iran. The secretary of defense doesn't know much about Iran. Each of those people in turn has advisers who advise them, so they can advise the president. There are lots of people shaping decisions and so if we want to predict correctly we have to pay attention to everybody who is trying to shape the outcome, not just the people at the pinnacle of the decision-making pyramid. Unfortunately, a lot of times we don't do that. There's a good reason that we don't do that, and there's a good reason that using game theory and computers, we can overcome the limitation of just looking at a few people. Imagine a problem with just five decision-makers. Imagine for example that Sally over here, wants to know what Harry, and Jane, and George and Frank are thinking, and sends messages to those people. Sally's giving her opinion to them, and they're giving their opinion to Sally. But Sally also wants to know what Harry is saying to these three, and what they're saying to Harry. And Harry wants to know what each of those people are saying to each other, and so on, and Sally would like to know what Harry thinks those people are saying. That's a complicated problem; that's a lot to know. With five decision-makers there are a lot of linkages — 120, as a matter of fact, if you remember your factorials. Five factorial is 120. Now you may be surprised to know that smart people can keep 120 things straight in their head. Suppose we double the number of influencers from five to 10. Does that mean we've doubled the number of pieces of information we need to know, from 120 to 240? No. How about 10 times? To 1,200? No. We've increased it to 3.6 million. Nobody can keep that straight in their head. But computers, they can. They don't need coffee breaks, they don't need vacations, they don't need to go to sleep at night, they don't ask for raises either. They can keep this information straight and that means that we can process the information. So I'm going to talk to you about how to process it, and I'm going to give you some examples out of Iran, and you're going to be wondering, "Why should we listen to this guy? Why should we believe what he's saying?" So I'm going to show you a factoid. This is an assessment by the Central Intelligence Agency of the percentage of time that the model I'm talking about is right in predicting things whose outcome is not yet known, when the experts who provided the data inputs got it wrong. That's not my claim, that's a CIA claim — you can read it, it was declassified a while ago. You can read it in a volume edited by H. Bradford Westerfield, Yale University Press. So, what do we need to know in order to predict? You may be surprised to find out we don't need to know very much. We do need to know who has a stake in trying to shape the outcome of a decision. We need to know what they say they want, not what they want in their heart of hearts, not what they think they can get, but what they say they want, because that is a strategically chosen position, and we can work backwards from that to draw inferences about important features of their decision-making. We need to know how focused they are on the problem at hand. That is, how willing are they to drop what they're doing when the issue comes up, and attend to it instead of something else that's on their plate — how big a deal is it to them? And how much clout could they bring to bear if they chose to engage on the issue? If we know those things we can predict their behavior by assuming that everybody cares about two things on any decision. They care about the outcome. They'd like an outcome as close to what they are interested in as possible. They're careerists, they also care about getting credit — there's ego involvement, they want to be seen as important in shaping the outcome, or as important, if it's their druthers, to block an outcome. And so we have to figure out how they balance those two things. Different people trade off between standing by their outcome, faithfully holding to it, going down in a blaze of glory, or giving it up, putting their finger in the wind, and doing whatever they think is going to be a winning position. Most people fall in between, and if we can work out where they fall we can work out how to negotiate with them to change their behavior. So with just that little bit of input we can work out what the choices are that people have, what the chances are that they're willing to take, what they're after, what they value, what they want, and what they believe about other people. You might notice what we don't need to know: there's no history in here. How they got to where they are may be important in shaping the input information, but once we know where they are we're worried about where they're going to be headed in the future. How they got there turns out not to be terribly critical in predicting. I remind you of that 90 percent accuracy rate. So where are we going to get this information? We can get this information from the Internet, from The Economist, The Financial Times, The New York Times, U.S. News and World Report, lots of sources like that, or we can get it from asking experts who spend their lives studying places and problems, because those experts know this information. If they don't know, who are the people trying to influence the decision, how much clout do they have, how much they care about this issue, and what do they say they want, are they experts? That's what it means to be an expert, that's the basic stuff an expert needs to know. Alright, lets turn to Iran. Let me make three important predictions — you can check this out, time will tell. What is Iran going to do about its nuclear weapons program? How secure is the theocratic regime in Iran? What's its future? And everybody's best friend, Ahmadinejad. How are things going for him? How are things going to be working out for him in the next year or two? You take a look at this, this is not based on statistics. I want to be very clear here. I'm not projecting some past data into the future. I've taken inputs on positions and so forth, run it through a computer model that had simulated the dynamics of interaction, and these are the simulated dynamics, the predictions about the path of policy. So you can see here on the vertical axis, I haven't shown it all the way down to zero, there are lots of other options, but here I'm just showing you the prediction, so I've narrowed the scale. Up at the top of the axis, "Build the Bomb." At 130, we start somewhere above 130, between building a bomb, and making enough weapons-grade fuel so that you could build a bomb. That's where, according to my analyses, the Iranians were at the beginning of this year. And then the model makes predictions down the road. At 115 they would only produce enough weapons grade fuel to show that they know how, but they wouldn't build a weapon: they would build a research quantity. It would achieve some national pride, but not go ahead and build a weapon. And down at 100 they would build civilian nuclear energy, which is what they say is their objective. The yellow line shows us the most likely path. The yellow line includes an analysis of 87 decision makers in Iran, and a vast number of outside influencers trying to pressure Iran into changing its behavior, various players in the United States, and Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, and Russia, European Union, Japan, so on and so forth. The white line reproduces the analysis if the international environment just left Iran to make its own internal decisions, under its own domestic political pressures. That's not going to be happening, but you can see that the line comes down faster if they're not put under international pressure, if they're allowed to pursue their own devices. But in any event, by the end of this year, beginning of next year, we get to a stable equilibrium outcome. And that equilibrium is not what the United States would like, but it's probably an equilibrium that the United States can live with, and that a lot of others can live with. And that is that Iran will achieve that nationalist pride by making enough weapons-grade fuel, through research, so that they could show that they know how to make weapons-grade fuel, but not enough to actually build a bomb. How is this happening? Over here you can see this is the distribution of power in favor of civilian nuclear energy today, this is what that power block is predicted to be like by the late parts of 2010, early parts of 2011. Just about nobody supports research on weapons-grade fuel today, but by 2011 that gets to be a big block, and you put these two together, that's the controlling influence in Iran. Out here today, there are a bunch of people — Ahmadinejad for example — who would like not only to build a bomb, but test a bomb. That power disappears completely; nobody supports that by 2011. These guys are all shrinking, the power is all drifting out here, so the outcome is going to be the weapons-grade fuel. Who are the winners and who are the losers in Iran? Take a look at these guys, they're growing in power, and by the way, this was done a while ago before the current economic crisis, and that's probably going to get steeper. These folks are the moneyed interests in Iran, the bankers, the oil people, the bazaaries. They are growing in political clout, as the mullahs are isolating themselves — with the exception of one group of mullahs, who are not well known to Americans. That's this line here, growing in power, these are what the Iranians call the quietists. These are the Ayatollahs, mostly based in Qom, who have great clout in the religious community, have been quiet on politics and are going to be getting louder, because they see Iran going in an unhealthy direction, a direction contrary to what Khomeini had in mind. Here is Mr. Ahmadinejad. Two things to notice: he's getting weaker, and while he gets a lot of attention in the United States, he is not a major player in Iran. He is on the way down. OK, so I'd like you to take a little away from this. Everything is not predictable: the stock market is, at least for me, not predictable, but most complicated negotiations are predictable. Again, whether we're talking health policy, education, environment, energy, litigation, mergers, all of these are complicated problems that are predictable, that this sort of technology can be applied to. And the reason that being able to predict those things is important, is not just because you might run a hedge fund and make money off of it, but because if you can predict what people will do, you can engineer what they will do. And if you engineer what they do you can change the world, you can get a better result. I would like to leave you with one thought, which is for me, the dominant theme of this gathering, and is the dominant theme of this way of thinking about the world. When people say to you, "That's impossible," you say back to them, "When you say 'That's impossible,' you're confused with, 'I don't know how to do it.'" Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: One question for you. That was fascinating. I love that you put it out there. I got very nervous halfway through the talk though, just panicking whether you'd included in your model, the possibility that putting this prediction out there might change the result. We've got 800 people in Tehran who watch TEDTalks. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita: I've thought about that, and since I've done a lot of work for the intelligence community, they've also pondered that. It would be a good thing if people paid more attention, took seriously, and engaged in the same sorts of calculations, because it would change things. But it would change things in two beneficial ways. It would hasten how quickly people arrive at an agreement, and so it would save everybody a lot of grief and time. And, it would arrive at an agreement that everybody was happy with, without having to manipulate them so much — which is basically what I do, I manipulate them. So it would be a good thing. CA: So you're kind of trying to say, "People of Iran, this is your destiny, lets go there." BBM: Well, people of Iran, this is what many of you are going to evolve to want, and we could get there a lot sooner, and you would suffer a lot less trouble from economic sanctions, and we would suffer a lot less fear of the use of military force on our end, and the world would be a better place. CA: Here's hoping they hear it that way. Thank you very much Bruce. BBM: Thank you. (Applause)

There's no question if you're in the VSR4 you have a significantly higher - almost double the risk of concussion than the newer, better helmets. And even here at Virginia Tech, we had this problem. Last year, about half of our team had this older VSR4, which we gave a one star. So as soon as we finalized the results, you know, I called Dr. Brolinson, Mike Goforth, and we had a very quick conversation. And we agreed that simply, we're going to get rid of all the old helmets and all of our players are going to be in the new, best five-star helmet this fall.

Well, in 1998, in the garage, were two guys - Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google. And they have become Microsoft's worst nightmare. And this is just - the announcement today is just another indication of Google's intentions. Google is creating, not just software to cloud computing and search which competes against Microsoft and all other apps which compete against Microsoft, but by creating an operating system, they're going right to the heart of Microsoft's business. Now, whether they actually make a success of it or not, we don't know. And for instance, over a year ago, they announced the Chrome browser and they said this would be a game changer. Well, it hasn't been a game changer. And there are other browsers that are deemed to be superior to Chrome. Will that be true with the new operating - Chrome operating system? I don't know.

The best thing about being out of prison, it has to be hands down the freedom of choice. In prison, you don't have the freedom of choice. You know, you don't have the freedom to say, oh, I'm going to take a shower five times a day if that's what I choose to do, or, I'm going to go outside and just sit on the porch and watch cars go by. Or, like the other day, I cooked my first breakfast. Everybody been cooking for me and taking me out and all that. So I made my first egg, bacon, potatoes. I hooked this breakfast up, messed up a gang of dishes doing it. But I had the freedom of choice to just sit there and do it.

You know, we really wanted her to stay in the band. We asked her to stay. I think that it's hard to do anything for almost 25 years. Any relationship that has lasted that long is one with the normal highs and lows. So I think all I can sort of interpret from her decision is that she was ready to do something else. And I have to respect that even though it's hard. And ironically, you know, we made this album called "The Center Won't Hold," which speaks to, you know, things that we rely upon falling apart and changing. And I think even though it's hard for us and I think it's hard for some of our fans, I think it's - you know, you can't look out into the world and find something that existed 25 years ago that is existing in its same form. You know, things change and evolve.

No, Bill is absolutely right to point out the demographic issue. In fact, strangely, France is probably the only country of the bigger Europeans that doesn't have a demographic issue. They have a rather positive demographics. Other countries, Greece included, have really dramatic old, aging populations. And so the whole implicit debt issue, or rather will there be retirement for those who are today 40 or 50 or even 30, is a really worrisome question, which somehow gets lost given the immediate economic concerns. So I think that part of what we're seeing and the raising of the retirement age in all of these countries and the stripping away of what were the social benefits that came with the nanny state, which began, actually, in 1936 with the Popular Front in France, are something that really troubles families throughout the continent. And this definitely will have to be addressed. And Francois Hollande, I think, is just making a nod that there will be some feeble, quote-unquote, "effort" to actually alleviate some of those burdens.

And, you know, you're right, Steve, about the impact of the shutdown. It has been somewhat muted up until now during the holidays except for those 800,000 federal workers who are either furloughed or working without pay. But over time, you know, the effects will begin to pile up. Later this week, we're going to see the Smithsonian museum shut down along with the National Zoo. The EPA halted operations over the weekend. So the effects will be mounting. I talked to a fellow with a nonprofit group that works at Joshua Tree National Park out in California. You know, right now they have volunteers stocking the bathrooms with toilet paper. But over time, he said, the pit toilets are going to fill up; the dumpsters are going to fill up. And that's kind of a metaphor for what's happening throughout the government.

Has the Catholic Church made enough progress in fighting abuse by its priests? That question has renewed urgency after George Pell became the highest-ranking member of the clergy to be formally charged. Cardinal Pell of Australia is a close adviser to the pope. He's been charged with sexual assault. He says he's innocent. Police in Melbourne aren't releasing the details of his accusers. Joining us to talk about the case from Dublin and the broader questions it raises is Marie Collins. She was until recently on a papal commission dealing with the sexual abuse of children by clergy. Thanks for being with us.

Certainly. It's a combination of one audience development, but more than that it's really looking at the enormous history of jazz - its roots in American music from the African-American community, and how it has been embraced around the world as truly America's music. We have a number of programs, but one that especially comes to mind is a program called Jazz in America, it's jazzinamerica.org. And we're teaching young kids in grades 5th, 8th, and 11th about the history of this music, the importance of music, the artists, and it's taught by American historian and social studies teachers. So by the time they graduate from high school, they would have studied jazz music and the artists and the history at least three times.

They've made their case. They've declassified more statistical information illustrating how many times they've used parts of the Patriot Act. I think--they've asserted, I think, perhaps the most important parts of the Patriot Act relate to so-called information sharing--that is, freeing up the ability of, you know, the criminal investigators at the FBI and the intelligence investigators to sort of marshal their information and that the net sum of that has facilitated terror investigations, you know, across the country. How all that works in practice, we really don't know much about that in terms of sort of a detailed understanding about how that has helped the government. You know, I think--in fact, one of the reasons I think why the Senate Intelligence Committee is meeting in closed doors today to consider the Patriot Act is perhaps that they're examining some of these questions. They want to know, `So tell us how exactly has this been helpful or not helpful?'--whatever. Unfortunately, we're all sort of left on the outside scratching our heads, wondering, you know, how much has this really helped? And so there's a large sort of `trust me' element to this whole debate, I think, and...

Then at other points in your life, you will calculate those risks differently. So, you see a difference there in gender already. But there also are clearly some indications that there's a biological component to how you behave in the moment. So, the military's done a lot of research on this, because they want to understand why two soldiers, both of whom are equally qualified and competent, and strong, and dedicated, behave so differently under extreme stress. And they have found a genetic component, literally differences in the chemicals in your blood before something goes wrong. There are differences, for example, in Special Forces soldiers even before they become Special Forces soldiers, which is interesting.

And I'm Audie Cornish. Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had his first court appearance today at his hospital bedside. A federal magistrate judge read him his Miranda rights. The judge found him alert and mentally competent. Tsarnaev responded to questions by nodding his head. He was advised by a public defender. The 19-year-old could face the death penalty for charges that include using a weapon of mass destruction resulting in the deaths of three people. Law enforcement officials say Tsarnaev, who is still recovering from serious injuries, has been communicating with investigators by writing notes. NPR's Tovia Smith begins our coverage this hour.

Well, this is an Arizona man who, as you say, has been - is one of the 20,000 plus people who've been sued by the recording industry for illegally downloading or uploading music. And what was different in this case is a statement by the lawyer in the case for the recording industry who said that it is undisputed that the defendant possessed unauthorized copies of copyrighted sound recordings on his computer. And now, there's a whole factual dispute between the recording industry and Mr. Howell about whether he indeed had music illegally in the shared files on his computer. But if you move beyond that, what's interesting here is that here and in a couple of other places, the recording industry is kind of a disconnect between its public policy statement, which is that, hey, it's okay to make a personal copy if you legally obtained the CD, you can transfer that music onto your computer for your own use. And yet, in some legal filings and statements, they've been saying things such as that ripping songs from the CD is just a nice way of saying steals just one copy. That's what the Sony lawyers said in one case.

Dahan says she sent her son away to boarding school. He was bed-wetting and had other psychological effects of living under a relentless bombardment, which peaked during the Gaza war. Dahan says she is seeing a psychiatrist and is on medication to try and cope with the continuing anxiety and dread. Sderot looks like any innocuous suburban haven - the lawns are manicured, the houses seem to belong in an American subdivision. But take a closer look at the playground, say, and you'll notice that the cute caterpillar tunnel that the children chase each other through is actually a bomb shelter in disguise.

Well, I think what James(ph) is doing is fine. He uses the ocean as entertainment, but if you build structures and infrastructure, that is different than surfing. We have invested billions, actually trillions, of dollars in surf zones, and surfing is fine, but you don't put subways or sewage treatment plants or nuclear power plants or regular power plants in the way of a hurricane if you have no protection. And that's where our nation is right now. We are unprotected. We have seen it in New Orleans when we even thought we were protected. And the real story is here, that as sea level rises, right now you need roughly a hundred year storm to make a disaster like now we have gone through a week ago. By the year 2100, by the end of the century, on a nice, sunny day, without winds, you will have the water level just about one foot below where Sandy was 10 days ago.

As a country, the United States enforced slavery and segregation, engaged in bombings that killed civilians all over the world, imprisoned alleged ‘conspirators’ under false pretences during the Red Scare, and on and on. The US continues to grapple with devastating harms caused by the state, and it isn’t alone. Nearly every country and every organisation that has wielded power for any length of time has a record of moral harms. The Catholic Church subjugated, forcibly converted, murdered, and abused millions of people across continents. The legacy of the residential school system, through which the Church abducted, forcibly converted, abused and even killed Native children in the US and Canada remains an ongoing scandal, one Pope Francis is trying to address. Germany, Rwanda, the Balkans, Sudan, Turkey and Myanmar all have genocides in their history (and that list is hardly exhaustive). Most of Europe and many countries in the Middle East and east Asia have histories of colonialism that include the occupation of other states, extraction of resources, and the oppression, enslavement and murder of local populations. The individual people who perpetrated these acts are in most cases long dead, but the states and organisations remain. Individuals can commit heroic acts and horrible crimes, but so can states and organisations. Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon; the US put him there. President Andrew Jackson ordered the forcible and violent displacement of tens of thousands of Native people, killing thousands; the US, the nation, committed genocide. Armstrong and Jackson are dead but the US still exists, and the fact that states and organisations outlive individual actors creates the problem. In the US, we’re happy to claim collective responsibility for Apollo 11. Yet as a community, we are uncomfortable acknowledging collective responsibility for acts of genocide perpetrated against Native people. If we want to take collective responsibility for Apollo 11, then we should be willing to reckon with taking responsibility for genocide, too. The fact is that collectives can act. Some of those acts are analogous to acts of individuals; in the case of smaller collectives, they might even be the same. I can buy a pizza; the philosophy department can buy a pizza; the US can buy a pizza (though, usually, the US goes a bit larger than a pizza). These actions vary mostly based on procedures required for the purchase to take place. Both individuals and collectives can buy things; both individuals and collectives can act; and both individuals and collectives can take positions. I can condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine; the US, collectively, can condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But there are some acts that can be undertaken only by collectives. For example, states declare war; individuals don’t. This is because collectives coordinate the behaviour of many individuals. Acts of governance aren’t things individual people can do (unless operating as agents of the collective), because those acts of governance coordinate the behaviour of many people. An individual can commit crimes against humanity but acts such as maintaining institutions of slavery and segregation are collective acts. Those are things that the US did, acting collectively. So just how does a collective act? There are three stories to account for the way this occurs. These narratives are not mutually exclusive, so feel free to mix and match. The most prominent view is that groups are formed and act based on ‘collective intentionality’. Basically, a group of individuals shares a set of beliefs about how the world is, and those individuals (by virtue of all sharing those beliefs) create a collective identity, which then allows for collective action. From this perspective, the existence of the US depends collectively on members of the US holding shared beliefs, which include the belief that the US is a country, and that the country has a Constitution. (If no one believed that there was such a country, then there wouldn’t be one.) The existence of the US is established by that shared belief, but so are a range of facts about how the US works, including how the collective is governed (as in the three branches of government and the powers of those branches). This does not mean that the US is ‘just made up’ or that its existence is arbitrary. It just means that the beliefs of people are necessary for the US to continue existing as a collective identity. Some of the beliefs about the US are grounded by fact. There is a Constitution of the United States. Some of the beliefs about the US are grounded by the shared agreement and acknowledgement of the belief within the group. Weird beliefs are not in danger of undermining the existence of the US unless a sufficiently large portion of the collective adopts them This also does not mean that everyone in the community must share those beliefs. There are some people who might not believe the US is a country; there may be some people who might not believe the US has a Constitution. It is enough if, generally, people believe in the US. The US is not in danger of falling apart because your drunk uncle believes that the US is actually a corporation, not a country, that was created in 1910 by a cabal of bankers at Jekyll Island who supplanted the Constitution in 1913. Weird beliefs are not in danger of undermining the existence of the US unless a sufficiently large portion of the collective adopts them. In this first story, a collective is formed by the collective beliefs of the members. That collective also acts through the collective beliefs of the members, either directly as a result of belief or through the processes (like the Constitutional processes) that govern the collective. The second story holds that collectives need not have any beliefs at all. Rather, collectives act when the behaviours of individuals are coordinated in any way. The US acts when the members of the group largely behave in a similar, patterned manner. Think of individuals buying and selling on the stock market. Individuals may all have different beliefs that inform their behaviour, but if they’re mostly buying, then the values of that market go up over time and the behaviour of the group (taken together) is the behaviour of the collective. The first story gives us the most straightforward account of how declared acts of collectives work, for example establishing the formal structures of the US government. The second story gives us an account of how a collective can act without a formal declaration or the clear structures of the government. For example, the US has become increasingly urbanised over the past century. More people are moving out of rural areas and towards cities. This shift is not the result of an explicit, collective belief that we have. Rather, it is something that we are doing collectively over time, through a set of behaviours. Not everyone is moving to the city; this is an expression of a pattern within the US. There’s a good argument that acts arising from this second story aren’t appropriate sources of blame, because they’re not things that any individual (much less the collective) may actively believe should be done. So, I’d like to set the second story aside and focus on the first and third. The third story is formal. The US exists because of the collective attitudes of the people. The US also has a formal way of making decisions, namely through the explicit branches of government outlined in the Constitution. Not all collectives have such a formal structure; collectives that don’t have such a structure can act only through the first and second stories. However, the big collectives that are the source of moral concern here (the US and other countries; the Catholic Church and other religious institutions; corporations and nongovernmental organisations) all have formal structures for making decisions and acting. Formal structures supported by collective beliefs underwrote both great achievements and atrocities In the US, there is a formal process for declaring war. Even if most or even the majority of people in the US did not believe that the US was declaring a war, it would be sufficient if Congress did. Why? Because Congress is the formal structure through which the US declares war. That’s how the collective works and, as long as we collectively believe that the US is governed by the Constitution, those formal structures will be enough for the US to declare war. It’s worth noting that a collective belief doesn’t even have to be held by a majority of the people in a community to be dominant. Rather, the way that collective beliefs work often gives more weight and importance to those who have the ability to act as individuals within the collective. That means that a child who has no political agency, and believes that there are no countries, matters less to the collective beliefs than an adult. Unfortunately, it also means that the beliefs of the disenfranchised and systematically oppressed don’t contribute to the collective of the US as much as beliefs of power-players. (This seems at odds with the idea of democracy, which holds that all members of the community should have more-or-less equal standing to govern the collective and its acts.) The first and third stories show us how to evaluate the moral status of the US, where formal structures supported by widespread collective beliefs underwrote both great achievements and atrocities. The coordinated behaviour that culminated in the space programme, victory in the Second World War and other things for which we want to take credit as a country resulted from the deliberate coordination of action through the formal structures of the government and collective beliefs. But so did the great moral atrocities like slavery and oppression. Acts of collectives often have moral dimensions, and may be morally praiseworthy or blameworthy. The Holocaust is perhaps the most widely discussed instance of collective blame and responsibility. The German state (along with collaborating governments) committed genocide, targeting (among others) Jews, Roma and other ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+ people, and people with disabilities. In the years that followed, the state also recognised collective responsibility for that action, and set out to pay restitution to the groups and the individuals that it had harmed. ‘Germans deported them. Germans burned numbers on their forearms. Germans tried to dehumanise them, to reduce them to numbers, to erase all memory of them in the extermination camps. They did not succeed,’ said the German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier when he visited the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem in Jerusalem on 23 January 2020. ‘Germany’s responsibility does not expire. We want to live up to our responsibility. By this, you should measure us.’ Consider two discrete sets of phrasings here: ‘Germans [did x]’ and ‘Germany’s responsibility for [x]’. President Steinmeier does not actually say ‘Germany [did x]’ in this case, but he does acknowledge collective responsibility for the actions of various Germans, because they were acting on behalf of and as agents of the German state. He acknowledges collective responsibility, in line with the position of the German government in the years after the Second World War. When we wrestle with the legacy of slavery in the US, white people will sometimes respond that they did not personally own slaves But there’s something else curious here: Steinmeier was born in 1956, more than a decade after the end of the Second World War. He is speaking in an official capacity on behalf of the state, even as most members of the state at the time were not alive during (much less involved with) the perpetration of the Holocaust. Steinmeier’s point is that, irrespective of personal responsibility (and there were individuals who held personal responsibility: Hitler, Himmler, Eichmann, Goering, etc), the state took the actions, and the state is responsible. As such, the state paid restitution. Like the US president Jackson, the architects and perpetrators of the Holocaust are dead (though perhaps, if not to a person, then pretty close). The people acknowledging collective responsibility for the history of Germany are people who carry no individual responsibility. President Steinmeier could say: ‘Germany has a collective responsibility’ and ‘No living German is individually responsible.’ There is no contradiction between those two things. No individual living American is responsible for slavery, nor the Trail of Tears. If and when there are living individuals who are responsible for such crimes, there should be individual accountability. However, the state that perpetrated those acts exists. The United States engaged in a collective action to maintain slavery, to displace and kill thousands of Native people. Even if there is no present individual, there is a present collective. Individual and collective responsibility can of course be intertwined. The US is responsible for the bombing campaigns in Cambodia; Henry Kissinger is personally responsible for those campaigns too, as a major influencer of that policy. The US sanctioned slavery; there were individual lawmakers and slave owners who had a much higher level of personal responsibility than (for example) the Quaker abolitionists in the US. The Netflix documentary Pray Away (2021) involves several figures in the ‘conversion therapy’ movement, the attempt to ‘pray away the gay’ that includes destructive pseudo-psychiatric practices resulting in serious damage to LGBTQ+ people. The documentary considers the responsibility of groups that advocated and performed these practices, including Exodus International, the Family Research Council and several others. It also includes interviews with John Paulk, Julie Rodgers, Randy Thomas and others who were personally involved in the propagation of conversion therapy, advocating against gay rights, but who are now wrestling with their personal moral responsibility for the harms they helped promote. Their personal struggle with their guilt and responsibility for those harms illustrates one of the areas that is distinct in discussion of collective responsibility. When we wrestle with the legacy of slavery in the US, white people will sometimes respond by noting that they did not personally own slaves, or even have ancestors who owned slaves, as a way of distancing themselves from any personal responsibility. This is distinct from the position of someone like Paulk, Rodgers and Thomas, who were personally responsible as well as part of the collective that was responsible for the harms of these practices. Part of living in a society is helping to right the wrongs for which the group is responsible – whether you were personally involved or not Who’s really responsible for all these harms? It’s simpler when we are able to punish the individuals perpetrating the crime. The state of Israel hanged Adolf Eichmann; were he still alive, the US could hang president Jackson. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia convicted and imprisoned Slobodan Milošević; were he still alive, the US could imprison Justice Henry Billings Brown and other individual, institutional codifiers of segregation. But we cannot hang the United States. We cannot imprison the United States. Further, there is a strong moral argument against punitive measures aimed at collectives, even when the responsible individuals are still alive, because such punishments unjustly harm members of the collective who fought against or had nothing to do with collective action. Yet there are measures that can be taken when collectives do things that are morally wrong. Collectives themselves can act by acknowledging the harm they have caused; the US can and should acknowledge the harm done to people and groups through various collective actions, and should take responsibility as a state, as did Germany and other collectives with a morally damaged past. That is a first, simple step, yet collectives often have a difficult time following through. It is hard to say whether the US has accepted blame even for something as widely acknowledged as slavery, especially given the constant culture wars over American history. The same goes for the genocide of Native people, and the forced labour and segregation of various other minority groups. A second step is even more contentious in the US, but widely accepted in reckoning with collective responsibility for moral wrongs: collectives can offer restitution to those harmed, or to their nearest living descendants. After all, collectives often include in their membership those who were harmed. Some Holocaust survivors and their descendants live in Germany or former occupied or collaborator states; many Black people in the US are descendants of those harmed by slavery. A material way to acknowledge the harm done is to attempt some restitution. That often meets with resistance in the US. To protest the idea of restitution for slavery, people may say: ‘I never owned slaves’ or ‘My ancestors weren’t even here during the days of slavery.’ Others insist that we are so far removed from the legacy of slavery, segregation, displacement and genocide that restitution is inappropriate. They contend that the people who would receive the restitution are descendants and not the people personally harmed. As a historical matter and according to conventions established for such restitution, these arguments don’t hold up, especially given the pernicious influence of racism in the US well after the passage of Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s. Indeed, even if it were true that descendants are unharmed (which it is not), aren’t we obligated to provide restitution to the nearest living successor? Part of living in a society is helping to right the wrongs for which the group is responsible – whether you were personally involved or not. The harm done by the collective incurs an obligation; that obligation doesn’t get dissolved when the harmed person dies. If that were true, it would create a cascade of terrifying, morally perverse incentives – like the US killing anyone and everyone harmed (or, at least, everyone not already killed by the harm itself) to avoid the cost of restitution. When a government tortures people, including innocent civilians, its ethical obligation is to pay restitution to those people – not kill them to sweep the atrocity under the rug. The obligation to pay restitution for harms persists until the debt is settled. That’s how it works.

Well, it's a real mix of Fatah members. Some are Fatah loyalists working in the Palestinian security services, some are armed factions within Fatah, militant members of one of the branches of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. Others are just angry rank and file Fatah supporters. Many in this movement, which has dominated Palestinian politics for four decades which led the push for an independent Palestinian state, they're still in a state of shock that they lost and lost so badly in Parliamentary elections. They're shocked that Hamas will now effectively take control of forming a new government and these protestors are venting their anger and frustration at Fatah officials and they're demanding Fatah not join with Hamas in any power sharing alliance. Fatah leaders, so far, have said they will not join in.

Well of course, we're all friends, and a lot of people seem to think that, you know, because you're females in hip-hop that it's catty and it's this, that and the other. But we've supported each other, each of us have supported each other in some way prior to that. But when we got together, it was kind of the first time that we actually had the opportunity to be on stage, work with each other. We actually rehearsed together, we came up with ideas. The show you'll see later on, we came - we all had collectively brought something to the table with that. So it was a good - it was a really good feeling, and to portray that on the stage, we felt the energy.

Yes. There's a significant legal challenge. As all the major business groups here is on the chamber of commerce, the contractors association, restaurant and hotel associations, they have all banded together and filed lawsuits at federal court. The first lawsuit that was filed was tossed out on a technicality and then it was refilled, and there was a request to put it for a temporary restraining order that would have essentially barred the law from taking effect temporarily, but that was thrown out on Friday. So as it stands, it looks like the law will go forward. Those lawsuits will continue to make their way through the court system. But as it stands, it looks like they'll - will have this go on effect on January 1st.

On ancestry. But as Dr. Ossorio mentioned, it's not just that. It's biology is one component to disease but social factors are a big component as well. We study asthma, and curiously in the United States the population with the highest asthma prevalence and death rates are Puerto Ricans, and the group with the lowest are Mexicans. And here and that's somewhat paradoxical because the U.S. Census defines them as being Hispanic. Now, we know on an ancestry level that they differ dramatically by ancestry on average. And so one of the questions that we and others around the country are trying to identify are what are those biologic factors, if any, are playing a role in risk of disease. But we also recognize that one of the biggest determinants of asthma is environmental factors.

There is some price gouging, I think, when you get to five dollars. On the other hand, when you're talking about what's happening with production, the fact is that there are almost immediate shortages. Gas stations have the gas that they have under their stations to pump, that's all they have. They have to get deliveries of other gas and it's more scarce, it costs them more. So if someone decides, in anticipation of price rises, to raise the price on the gas under their station, that's not fair but it's somewhat reasonable. But when they take it from a few cents to five dollars, if it was being posted as $3.65, which was the national average, and then you get up to five dollars, that does seem to be a bit much.

Well, you know something? I mean, you know, here's the problem about having such a long pre-presidential campaign season and that is before the voters even get a chance to do it, but we smarty-pants analysts all wrote off Newt Gingrich early in the year when, basically, his entire staff quit en mass. His fundraising numbers were really, really down. He was basically an asterisk in the poll and, actually, a similar thing happened to John McCain in 2007 when his staff quit and we said he was finished, too. And, of course, that showed how much we knew. But the thing about Newt Gingrich is that he was always the smartest guy in the class. Just ask him. He'll tell you he is the smartest guy in the class, but he does have a very good debating style. Now, some people think it's a little condescending. Some people think it's a little mean the way he'll attack the moderators like, what a stupid you asked, or he'll roll his eyes at the absurdity. How dare you ask me such a question like that? But for the most part, his answers have been solid. They're not critical of his opponents. He's more critical of President Obama and the media, than he is on the fellow Republicans.

Joe, thanks for the call, and we'll expect you at the Douthat's Thanksgiving next year. Here's an email from Valerie in Roanoke. I think personal stories, anecdotes, et cetera, are used for political purposes - whether that's to humanize the candidate, illustrate their commitment to an ideal, show the importance of family life, et cetera - then those aspects of the candidate's life are fair game. However, if something is outside of the political campaign and the rhetoric, then it should be viewed as off-limits. The commenter should also stay away from personal attacks and stay in the realm of political relevance. Well, boy, there's another blurry line.

Yeah, I was restrained. This is jargony. This is so, you know, this is so simple: Don't have nuclear weapons, Iran. You know, and I think people say, well, I'm the only one who's saying it. No, I'm not. I finished my U.N. speech, dozens of ambassadors - you know, they can't clap, you know, there are cameras and, you know, it's all political correctness. They come around, in the back. They shake my hand and they say: Prime minister, you spoke for us. I don't have to tell you what the Arab countries are thinking. Many in Europe, many elsewhere, they get it. Sure, we all want to see a genuine diplomatic and peaceful solution. But, no, we don't want to be hoodwinked. We're not gullible. We're not suckers.

So one of the characters lost her sister in the Holocaust and is incredibly driven to bring this program to life because she feels as if she could read her sister's diary to this program and get her sister another chance at being alive. So there is something incredibly attractive about it. You know, there are characters in the book who feel as if they have to stand up for a robot's right to exist. And I find that argument really compelling as well because any time in history we've said that being isn't fully alive or that being is unnatural, we've been terribly, terribly wrong.

It is dramatic because, of course, as we know, as we've seen, we saw it with Joe Lieberman, the independent from Connecticut, then we saw it with Ben Nelson, the Democrat from Nebraska, that every senator - since you need 60 votes, any senator who had some kind of personal pique or something that he or she wants to get out of the leadership for their state, they can do it because every vote counts. So we saw the Democratic leadership in the name of Harry Reid give Ben Nelson of Nebraska whatever he wanted, and that was softer language on abortion. Of course, the pro-life people say that that wasn't strong enough. The pro-choice people said it went far too far. But Ben Nelson's on board. It also exempted Nebraska from paying some Medicare payments that other states have to pay for.

Well, what you have is a kind of democratic revolt against cuts and austerity. You have it more sharply in Greece, where the political system appears to have broken down to some degree and which is scaring quite a lot of people. And in France, you have it in a much milder form. Nicolas Sarkozy was thrown out of office by a narrow margin partly because people don't like him more than his policies, but they were also very attracted to the socialist Francois Hollande's notion that you can get to save this French social model with more taxes on other people, rather than on yourselves, and fewer budget cuts. So it's a different way, the French hope, of getting to the same place softer and gentler.

We go to Sweden now, where voting stations have closed in what's been described as the most unpredictable and competitive election there in decades. The specific contest is for seats in the 349-seat national legislature. But the election is also about the country's response to Europe's refugee crisis. Sweden took in about 160,000 refugees in 2015. It's not a large number, but it was the most per capita in Europe. Now the nationalist, anti-immigration Sweden Democrats, a group with roots in the neo-Nazi movement, is poised to win at least enough seats to influence the direction of the new government. Journalist Maddy Savage is in Stockholm, and she's with us now via Skype with an update on today's vote. Maddy, welcome. Thanks so much for joining us.

In flexing his authority over McChrystal, Mr. Obama invited comparisons to Harry Truman firing Douglas MacArthur. But unlike Truman, the president has no disagreement with his general over wartime strategy. In fact, Mr. Obama is basically following the troop-intensive, counterinsurgency strategy that McChrystal championed over the objections of people like Vice President Biden, who wanted a smaller commitment of U.S. forces. By immediately replacing McChrystal with David Petraeus, the president managed to project continuity for that strategy. And he told aides he's minimizing the risk of losing ground in Afghanistan. Petraeus is credited with helping to turn around a losing war effort in Iraq he literally wrote the book on counterinsurgency warfare.

Yeah. One problem is that humans respond very well to things that are in our sensory field. We respond emotionally to things that we see with our eyes, and things like the Great Barrier Reef dying or these other Caribbean reefs dying, it's really an abstraction. And we were able to respond to the - when the twin, you know, the World Trade Centers were bombed or the airplanes went into it because we have this visceral emotional reaction and we're willing to put it lots of resources to respond to those issues. And we really need to somehow get ourselves to the point where we're responding to the carbon dioxide problem with the same vigor. And, you know, how we move people there, I don't know. But certainly, studies like ours that suggests that ecosystems that have existed on this planet without any problem for many, many tens of millions of years, because of what we do in the few tens of years, disappear.

He's actually looking out for some licensing from FCC at this time. I'm sure he would like to put a line. And I think he raised a lot of money for Obama. I saw him at the DNC running around at the arena. And you know, people were - there was a lot of chatter about his presence there, it just seemed odd. And a lot of people are saying well he's raising a lot of money for Obama now. And you know - but a lot of people - I am still not over the - you know, and somebody wrote in to BBN, and this is not coming from me, so I just want to make this clear. But during the height of those comments that he made, and this is how he has viewed among some folks in the black community. And that is, he is a surefire candidate for coon of the year.

And reach people. And, K'naan, that's something you wrote about, I thought, quite eloquently in your piece. You're trying to reach people. And what's wrong with making a message that reaches a lot of people? K'NAAN: Yeah. No, I think that's the conundrum, is that you want to reach people, but you also want to reach them in the most authentic way that you can reach them as well because there's no sense in reaching the - one of the goals, which is that you've now have - you now have a mass market and an audience that's listening, but they're in love with a song that means absolutely nothing to you. And so that's the catch which you have to - which all of us have to kind of be careful about, is to reach your goal authentically is probably, in the end, going to mean much more to you than having reached it in a false way.

Well, first of all, they do show that there was a substantial increase in the number of poor people in the United States last year. Three-point-seven million more individuals fell below the poverty line than in 2008. And the poverty rate itself - 14.3 percent - is the highest it's been since 1994. Officials say that the main reason is the lack of work. It's, you know, definitely a driving factor. But interestingly, median income in the United States was basically unchanged between 2008 and 2009. And officials say that one of the reasons appears to be not only the unemployment insurance benefits that people received, but that there was also an increase in Social Security benefits, and, in fact, poverty dropped for Americans 65 and older last year as a result of that. At the same time, poverty rose the most for children. Almost 21 percent of U.S. children now live in poor families. It also went up a lot more for Hispanics than it did for both blacks and non-Hispanic whites.

This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. There's been a series of front-page stories about the sex lives of senior military officers in recent days, none more prominent than the affair that ended the CIA career of retired General David Petraeus. Many regarded General Petraeus as a model officer. His wife, Holly Petraeus, has worked long and hard on issues that affect military families. There's no reason to believe that infidelity happens more or less often in the military than anywhere else, but this is a relatively small and relatively tight-knit community. Beyond issues of military ethics, security and leadership, these high-profile cases of infidelity are also starting other, more painful, private conversations about military marriages, frequent deployments and cheating.

Thanks. I have to just confirm everything these people are saying. I moved to Anchorage five years ago from a very urban setting in the Midwest, and I couldn't wait to get out of there. So excited to come up here to what I thought, well, first I moved up to Fairbanks and I thought I was going to just get into this pristine environment where, you know, we were just kind of starting from scratch in a beautiful setting. And I was never so depressed with, like, the first month that we went to the dump and found out that people in Alaska, for the most part, are living just as badly as they do in the lower 48 where, you know, all the acid rain and everything is supposedly starting from.

Our guests, again, are Stella Rotaru, who works as a repatriation assistant for the International Organization for Migration, who helps Moldovan victims of human trafficking get back home. Also with us, William Finnegan of The New Yorker, who wrote the article "The Countertraffickers: Rescuing the Victims of the Global Sex Trade," and you're listening to Talk of the Nation, coming to you from NPR News. Here's an email from Marcia. "I was terrifically moved by the profile of Stella in The New Yorker. I wish more of us had your courage and your dedication. Do you know of any agencies or any way one might sponsor a young woman victimized by trafficking so that she might have a chance at life?"

No, I don't think that that's the intention, but I don't doubt that it will certainly add expense. It will reduce choices that are available to consumers. It will make it more difficult for people to operate these kind of restaurants. You know, Neal, you said earlier, well, you know, if it cost, you know, tens of thousands of dollars, that's not a whole of money from McDonalds. After New York implemented this law - New York City implemented this rule back in the summer - the Associated Press did a story on the impact that it was having on, you know, on various restaurateurs, and I was struck in particular by a quote that was in the story from a guy who, you know, runs something called Singas Famous Pizza, which, of course, you know, the vast majority of Americans will never had heard since it's in Borough of Queens. He's got 17 restaurants, 17 pizza places. He qualified for the law, and you know, the AP story quotes him as saying that the new rule has been an absolute nightmare. Just to read to you one line from this thing:

And he lost today - a five-to-four vote. This is a relative - this is an interesting case, although a relatively narrow decision. John Roberts spoke for the court and he said if a student puts up a sign promoting something illegal - in this case drugs - he can be punished. The - Sam Alito and Anthony Kennedy, who joined Roberts on the result - it's really interesting - they said they would not have gone along had the message been political or social. In other words, if a student holds up a sign and says, Down With Bush or Allah is Great, that's protected by free speech, but not if the student is - has a sign or a T-shirts or is otherwise advocating something that's illegal.

Yeah. I mean, talking about family is actually another hassle, because you hide your job from everyone else but not your family, of course. They know what you do, they know what kind of risk you're facing, and they see - they saw many journalists being involved, many translators, many people who helped journalists getting their jobs done in Iraq, you know, facing death and violence during the past years. But, for this particular incident, let me tell you that I haven't actually told my family yet, because I know that my family, which is my mother and sister, you know, they won't know, because they are now living in Syria, and they don't get the chance to actually listen to NPR. So, I actually try to sit on it until I go on vacation, or I see them, you know, in the next couple of weeks, and then I will tell them about it, because they will never believe you that you're OK. Even though like you're talking to them, you laugh, you make jokes about it, they just will not believe you. They will be horrified, and I knew that. So I still actually - I still haven't told them yet.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: Studies have shown that low levels of serotonin can cause many problems, such as depression and anxiety. If not addressed properly, these effects can be dangerous. And it's not just websites or drug commercials. This idea that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain brought on by a deficit of serotonin is repeated in news accounts and in doctors' offices. It is a very sturdy little narrative. But for many scientists who research depression, this explanation no longer satisfies. Here's Dr. Joseph Coyle, a professor of neuroscience at Harvard Medical School, who's also the editor of psychiatry's most prestigious journal, the General Archives of Psychiatry.

Right. Everyone was kind of shocked by the brutality and the rapidity. They just went in. And no one knew what was going on. They didn't tell France, Britain or the U.S. or Japan. They told no one what was going on because the Algerian army, they - this is a thing - this is an issue of national pride and survival for Algeria. These terrorists struck the heart of the country, the economic heart, oil and gas. And Algeria fought a 10-year civil war with these same people, these Islamists. It was a brutal war. Up to 200,000 Algerian citizens died. Their doctrine of the Algerian state is to never negotiate with terrorists. For the Algerian state, this was an absolute catastrophe. Even in the worst days of the civil war in the '90s, no Jihadist ever seized an energy facility. So they had to strike back. They had to end it fast. And this is the way they react against their terrorists.

Well, it's very different. It seemed a bit like a war zone when I first arrived. The people you saw in the streets were troops in camouflage, and in the days after that there were lots of other folks, many of them armed, and lots of people with boats and pickup trucks doing search and rescue and that sort of thing. Chaotic situation. None of the hotels were open. And things are getting back to normal now. Well, not--`normal' is too strong a word, but there's activity--recovery activity now, and the streets are now busy with workers in the Central Business District trying to get things going. There are utility trucks all over trying to get the power up. And so you see now things moving forward and making progress every day, and in the early days, you know, it didn't seem like there was progress being made. It was just sort of chaos.

But in terms of was it worth it, absolutely not. When you look at the trillion dollars that we spent, when you look at – I think - and I apologize if my number is incorrect, but I think 4,483 U.S. servicemen killed in Iraq, and that's, you know, not even counting the just tens of thousands of Iraqi civilian casualties that we saw, just a horrific war. You know, you think back to the maelstrom of violence in 2005, 2006, 2007, which Tom was a firsthand witness to, and it's hard to say that the war was with it. And in addition, especially for me as also an Afghanistan veteran, the way in which we shifted the vast majority of our military and intelligence resources away from Afghanistan and are now dealing with the aftermath of that decision today.

We want to spend a few more minutes on Politics. And you cannot have missed, unless you were seriously committed to not paying attention, that the big political and journalism story of the last week was that Donald Trump, the Republican frontrunner, bypassed the last debate before the Iowa caucuses because he objected to the participation of moderator Megyn Kelly as well a press release defending her, apparently authored by Fox president Roger Ailes. Beyond the Trump tantrum, we wondered if this had something bigger to say about the state of the media and politics and how politics is practiced today. So to talk about all this, we've called our media panel back together. With us today is Ryan Grim, Washington bureau chief for The Huffington Post. Welcome back, thanks for coming.

Right. Well, we certainly do need a moment to step back and think about the way that we talk to one another. The discourse in this country is outrageous. But I do want to point out that for every conservative pundit who's outraged over what Samantha Bee said, remember; we elected a president who, you know, said on tape that he grabs women by the genitals. At the same time, you know, there's all this outrage from people like Sean Hannity. I'm curious when he was worried about this type of misconduct. Was it before or after, you know, two heavy hitters in Fox News were sexually assaulting and abusing women, his own colleagues? I mean, I don't like when women are used and exploited as political props, and I see that going on as well, and it's unacceptable.

Other than both those towns, and in each, the Brazilian community plays a role somewhere between sought after exotic, and loner. There's a phrase that the Brazilians like to use to explain this, fazia(ph) America. While I can translate fazia America as either doing America, or making America, it pretty much means earning as much as you can before jetting back home--hardly the stuff of which local intercultural amity is constructed. Although most Brazilians could easily blend into the average African-American family album, some bristle at what they see as the fixed dualities of black and white identity in America. Their range of self-description, both here and in Brazil, dips into a Crayola box that would put all of New Orleans to shame. Mulatto, Mestizo, Crayola, Blanca, Amerindian, Afro-Amerindian. On paper, the action in Brazil is all about mixing your apples and oranges, and Brazilians carry that image of themselves, part ideal, part fiction, everywhere they go.

Do you remember your first kiss? Or that time you burned the roof of your mouth on a hot slice of pizza? What about playing tag or duck, duck, goose as a child? These are all instances where we're using touch to understand something. And it's the basis of haptic design. "Haptic" means of or relating to the sense of touch. And we've all been using that our entire lives. I was working on my computer when my friend, seeing me hunched over typing, walked over behind me. She put her left thumb into the left side of my lower back, while reaching her right index finger around to the front of my right shoulder. Instinctively, I sat up straight. In one quick and gentle gesture, she had communicated how to improve my posture. The paper I was working on at that very moment centered around developing new ways to teach movement using technology. I wanted to create a suit that could teach a person kung fu. (Laughter) But I had no idea how to communicate movement without an instructor being in the room. And in that moment, it became crystal clear: touch. If I had vibrating motors where she had placed each of her fingers, paired with motion-capture data of my current and optimal posture, I could simulate the entire experience without an instructor needing to be in the room. But there was still one important part of the puzzle that was missing. If I want you to raise your wrist two inches off of your lap, using vibration, how do I tell you to do that? Do I put a motor at the top of your wrist, so you know to lift up? Or do I put one at the bottom of your wrist, so it feels like you're being pushed up? There were no readily available answers because there was no commonly agreed-upon haptic language to communicate information with. So my cofounders and I set out to create that language. And the first device we built was not a kung fu suit. (Laughter) But in a way, it was even more impressive because of its simplicity and usefulness. We started with the use case of navigation, which is a simplified form of movement. We then created Wayband, a wrist-wearable device that could orient a user toward a destination, using vibrating cues. We would ask people to spin around and to stop in a way that they felt was the right way to go. Informally, we tried this with hundreds of people, and most could figure it out within about 15 seconds. It was that intuitive. Initially, we were just trying to get people out of their phones and back into the real world. But the more we experimented, the more we realized that those who stood to benefit most from our work were people who had little or no sight. When we first approached a blind organization, they told us, "Don't build a blind device. Build a device that everyone can use but that's optimized for the blind experience." We created our company WearWorks with three guiding principles: make cool stuff, create the greatest impact we can in our lifetimes and reimagine an entire world designed for touch. And on November 5, 2017, Wayband helped a person who was blind run the first 15 miles of the New York City Marathon without any sighted assistance. (Applause) It didn't get him through the entire race due to the heavy rain, but that didn't matter. (Laughter) We had proved the point: that it was possible to navigate a complex route using only touch. So, why touch? The skin has an innate sensitivity akin to the eyes' ability to recognize millions of colors or the ears' ability to recognize complex pitch and tone. Yet, as a communications channel, it's been largely relegated to Morse code-like cell phone notifications. If you were to suddenly receive a kiss or a punch, your reaction would be instinctive and immediate. Meanwhile, your brain would be playing catch-up on the back end to understand the details of what just occurred. And compared to instincts, conscious thought is pretty slow. But it's a lightning bolt compared to the snail's pace of language acquisition. I spent a considerable amount of time learning Spanish, Japanese, German and currently Swedish, with varying degrees of failure. (Laughter) But within those failures were kernels of how different languages are organized. That gave our team insight into how to use the linguistic order of well-established languages as inspiration for an entirely new haptic language, one based purely on touch. It also showed us when using language mechanics wasn't the best way to deliver information. In the same way a smile is a smile across every culture, what if there was some underlying mechanism of touch that transcended linguistic and cultural boundaries? A universal language, of sorts. You see, I could give you buzz-buzz-buzz, buzz-buzz, and you would eventually learn that that particular vibration means "stop." But as haptic designers, we challenged ourselves. What would it be like to design "stop?" Well, based on context, most of us have the experience of being in a vehicle and having that vehicle stop suddenly, along with our body's reaction to it. So if I wanted you to stop, I could send you a vibration pattern, sure. Or, I could design a haptic experience that just made stopping feel like it was the right thing to do. And that takes more than an arbitrary assignment of haptic cues to meanings. It takes a deep empathy. It also takes the ability to distill human experience into meaningful insights and then into haptic gestures and products. Haptic design is going to expand the human ability to sense and respond to our environments, both physical and virtual. There's a new frontier: touch. And it has the power to change how we all see the world around us. Thank you. (Applause)

...Is wondering, where is this Republican concern about deficits? The deficit is approaching a trillion dollars. I mean, we - the Republicans, when Democrats are in power, say this is a terrible thing. They've cut taxes. They put us in a situation - us, the country - in a situation where the only way to stimulate the economy is to add further to this thing, and the other - which is why the president goes back-and-forth on whether to do this. But the other striking thing that we saw is whenever President Trump approaches challenging Republican orthodoxy - except on trade - he immediately backs away. And that's where the backing away on guns is concerned. He rhetorically likes to challenge Republican orthodoxy and sound like a populist. And then he just says, no, I'm going back to where the rest of the party is.

Without challenging it. And I don't mean - I think what the military is doing is great and what the secret services are doing fine, but that's just one aspect of it. And it's a very expensive, time-consuming, resource-consuming aspect. I think we need now to really engage, get into neighborhoods where - that are majority Muslim here in the U.S. and in Europe, and offer Muslims an alternative model framework -be it secular or an alternative theology such as Christianity or, I don't know, Buddhism. But let's compete on the marketplace of ideas because right now, radical Islam has a monopoly on it, especially in Muslim communities.

Well, I think Senator Obama, more than any other candidate in either party, has harnessed the power of the Internet. I think he has one of the best Web sites and has one of the best resources of information for people who are seeking information about his campaign. And of course, he's raised more money than anybody else from the Democrat side of the ledger at least for campaign contributions. So I think Senator Obama has looked at the Internet and said, this is my little corner of the world, this is something I should run on. And former governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, has done much of the same thing of his very impressive Web site. But specifically sticking to Mr. Obama, yes, I do think that he feels he can distinguish himself from his other candidates and his other rivals for his technological prowess. And I think he's done a great job with it.

And we simply have to wake up. In the 21st century, it's not military that is the main issue. It is economic. And we need, as the caller said, investment in people in the United States. We need to tell them the truth about what we have to do to compete in a world economy that will become increasingly competitive, and we have to focus on that and not focus on a war in the far-distant place as a first resort. Obviously, you know, you can have an operation that goes after terrorists in various parts of the world, but you don't want a war like in Iraq. You don't want the long commitment that's been made in Afghanistan. You need to have the ability to respond to crises and to preempt, and you need adaptability in military matters.

Yes, but Olympia Snowe said her vote only is about the vote in the Finance Committee. It doesn't guarantee how she's going to vote one way or the other on the Senate floor. But if the goal is to keep Olympia Snowe in the fold, that means there's no public option, and that means that the liberals like Jay Rockefeller, Chuck Schumer, other Democrats who have been pushing for the public option may not get what they want. So there may be some dissention in the Democratic ranks, as well. Are they willing to go so far to get one Republican vote and alienate a lot of the progressive Democrats?

Well, over the span of a child's life, a month isn't that bad, and I think that's one of the things, that's really the hard part is that, you know, we don't - as parents we don't want our kids to be miserable, you know, and that's the tough thing about this challenge is that, you know, a lot of parents are just tired. And when you come home from a hard day of working, and you just want to get dinner out of the way, and you don't want the whining or the complaining - I've been through it, believe me. You just want to give them what they want, and you want them to kind of be quiet and just eat.

Well I think it just goes to prove that, you know, primaries and general elections are two different things. And what candidates who are good at campaigning, and John McCain is among them, can do is to reposition themselves in the general elections. So here in the primaries the Republicans largely folded up the big tent, they went nasty on immigration, they ignored African-American voters, but now that they have a candidate, they can kind of pull it together and start going for big-tent GOP politics again, and they've got the time to do it. As long as the Democratic Party stays in its primary mode, it can't start positioning its candidate for a general election run.

Right, and, as we know, just like when your momma knocks on the door, that knock and announce doesn't always work. She just knocks and simultaneously comes in, so, you know, it's one of those things that, until you're out there on the front line, it's hard to sometimes gather all that goes on. We only got to two subjects today. We wanted to talk about six professors -black professors departing Duke University. We'll talk about that on Monday, as well as whether or not corporations like Cristal want to be associated with rappers. Jay-Z feels that that is not the case with his favorite drink, and is now boycotting it. We'll talk about that, as well.

Well, it is going to depend. But you see that, you know, basically, this divide between the Congress and the White House over the use of spending is really coming to a hit. You know, this is - it's kind of on now. And, you know, especially the differences between Congress and the White House over domestic programs and war spending. And I think that's kind of the backdrop of the whole thing. You know, the president's asked for, you know, an additional $200 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and yet, you know, he's vetoed a children's health insurance bill, you know, twice, stem cell research bills and I think that you're seeing a lot of pushback. And, of course, with Democrats controlling the Congress, you can have that pushback.

So somewhere we have to have a process, and our country through the years has worked very, very hard to create a very solid process. It requires that we do research, that we show through scientific research that a drug has medical efficacy and that it goes through a very strict protocol before it's approved. And to totally by-step that process and totally ignore that process, it takes us back, really, to the dark ages. It takes us back to a time when we had snake oil salesmen out there declaring tonics and all kinds of things medicine and duping the American public, and I don't think we want to go back to those days.

Well, I do think that one of the major challenges and opportunities that we have ahead of us is education. I don't need to tell you or your listeners that right now higher education costs too much for everybody who's in that and getting a good education costs individuals too much money. At the same time, it's costing society too much money to have so many people in the grips of a bad education. So that's one of the things I think that we have ahead of us that's looking for innovation and looking for compassion and looking for new ways of thinking.

Barbara Ambros of Chapel Hill was listening and sent this comment. While I appreciate that you're covering Japanese funerals, I wish you would not just focus on funerals alone. Other religious organizations are engaging in aid relief for the living. They've opened their doors to the displaced, are collecting donations and distributing food and basic necessities, thus the contributions of Japanese religious institutions in this time of crisis go beyond the performance of funerals. And in one piece of news today, in Japan, Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko spent an hour visiting with evacuees at a Tokyo center. The emperor also appeared on live television to talk about the continuing nuclear crisis. He expressed hope that the situation would get no worse and offered a prayer for people's safety.

Well, what you make me think of is some polling numbers on gay marriage and white evangelical Christians. And you find in the polling numbers that younger evangelicals are much more favorable toward gay marriage than their parents and especially their grandparents, that even in the white evangelical community, the conservative Christians that Dr. Mohler is talking about, there is this inching toward approval. So, in my mind, I think it's just a matter of history, it's just a matter of time. As Martin Luther King said, the arc of history is long but it's bent toward justice. And I think that in 10 or 20 years, this is not going to be an issue anymore.

If you missed any of those conversations, you can still listen online or download the podcast. Go to npr.org, just click on TALK OF THE NATION. And that's also where you can sign up for our email newsletter. You'll get a daily update about what's coming up on the show and find out how to join the conversation. Again, go to npr.org, click on TALK OF THE NATION and look for the newsletter sign-up box. As always, if you have corrections or observations, the best way to reach us is by email. The address is talk@npr.org. Please tell us who you are and where you're writing from, and give us some help on how to pronounce your name.

S. WESTERMAN: They didn't let me go into the nursery. They brought you out to the gardens or the little courtyard. And you cried a lot. And you looked up, and then you grabbed onto my blouse, and then you wouldn't let go. A. WESTERMAN: I, of course, don't remember any of this. I was only 10 months old. I also don't remember when I officially became an American citizen, two years later in 1990, just before my younger brother was born. Eventually, my parents would have two biological children. The number of transnational families like mine would continue to grow. In the '90s, China opened its doors and eventually became the country with the most adoptees placed in the U.S. The number of international adoptions continued to climb, eventually peaking in 2004 when State Department numbers showed that almost 23,000 children were adopted into the U.S. Then the drop-off began.

These bones are here at the nation's premier Natural History Museum because they're unusual. They were found in the rocky cliffs of Angola overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. Angola is not a country known for fossils. Few scientists have looked there. Half a century of civil war made it too dangerous. But geologically, Angola, on the west coast of Africa, is special. Two-hundred-billion years ago, Africa was part of the supercontinent. Then that continent started unzipping down the middle. Eventually, Africa and South America drifted apart. The South Atlantic Ocean filled in the gap between them. And then sea creatures moved in. Paleontologist Louis Jacobs from the Southern Methodist University has been digging in Angola since 2005. He says fossils from its coastline tell the story of the ocean's earliest days.

In her book Mother of Invention: How Good Ideas Get Ignored in an Economy Built for Men (2021), the writer Katrine Marçal argues that many useful innovations have failed to catch on because they are deemed ‘too feminine’ by marketers. A classic example is the wheeled suitcase. The wheel was invented in ancient Mesopotamia, however the possibility of attaching it to a case went against the whole idea of men showing off their strength by lugging heavy objects around, which is why wheeled suitcases weren’t a thing until 1972. As Marçal wrote in The Guardian: ‘Gender answers the riddle of why it took 5,000 years for us to put wheels on suitcases.’ Quantum is the scientific equivalent of suitcase wheels. The reason this useful innovation hasn’t caught on, or been rolled out, more generally in areas such as economics isn’t because it’s impractical or too hard – it’s because it’s too feminine. Or rather, too Female, in a sense to be defined below. Now, that assertion will seem ridiculous to many readers for a number of reasons – beginning with the idea that quantum has somehow been ignored or repressed. Quantum physics is widely recognised as being a huge success, and is lauded for its ability to predict and explain the bizarre behaviour of tiny subatomic particles. For example, quantum physics says that subatomic entities can be in more than one place at the same time (superposition) and show both particle-like behaviours and wave-like behaviours including interference (they can cancel each other out). Something like the position of a particle is inherently indeterminate, and only takes on a definite value when measured through a poorly understood process of wave function collapse. Particles can also become mysteriously entangled, so that a measurement on one tells us something about an entangled partner, even if it is at the far end of the Universe. The ability to make sense of all this is rightly regarded as one of the triumphs of science. Everyone also knows that quantum mechanics is both hard and highly counterintuitive, which is why only university graduates in physics and mathematics are typically exposed to it. As one university website once reassured its audience: ‘It’s OK to be a bit baffled by these concepts, since we don’t experience them in our day-to-day lives. It’s only when you look at the tiniest quantum particles – atoms, electrons, photons and the like – that you see intriguing things like superposition and entanglement.’ In this view, if quantum ideas haven’t reached a broader audience, that is a good thing, because they would be misunderstood and therefore ripe for abuse. As the physicist Sean Carroll stated in his portentously titled book The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself (2016): ‘No theory in the history of science has been more misused and abused by cranks and charlatans – and misunderstood by people struggling in good faith with difficult ideas – than quantum mechanics.’ The philosopher Slavoj Žižek similarly warned of ‘New Age obscurantist appropriations of today’s “hard” sciences which, in order to legitimise their position, invoke the authority of science itself.’ Stand back, social scientists, and leave the heavy lifting to the experts. Quantum economics in particular sounds like ‘physics envy’ taken to its logical conclusion. Indeed, the assertion that quantum ideas – developed for tiny particles – could have anything to do with human systems such as the economy will seem patently absurd to most physicists. It is well known in physics that quantum effects wash out at larger scales, where classical behaviour dominates. Finally, quantum mechanics isn’t commonly perceived as being feminine. For one thing, it is the ultimate example of a ‘hard’ reductionist science – it even has ‘mechanics’ in the name. Its ‘founding fathers’ were mostly young men in their 20s. In the postwar era it gained much of its funding and prestige from its association with nuclear weapons, which are pretty butch (and are one place where quantum effects don’t wash out). And anyway, science cares about objective results – not things such as gender. Indeed, the whole notion of gender is highly contested and the idea that entire scientific disciplines can be assigned gender labels is just unreconstructed, unsophisticated, reductionist nonsense that will offend and repel scientists, feminists and anyone with a brain. So how on earth can it make sense in the electronic pages of this magazine to say that quantum hasn’t caught on because it is too girly? To start with, while quantum ideas certainly caught on in physics, they have had very little influence so far on the way that most people think about the world – apart from musings on things such as quantum healing, and something of a moment back in the 1970s with books such as The Tao of Physics (1975) by Fritjof Capra. Mentioning quantum ideas in polite conversation will see you marked as a phoney or worse. In his definition of what he calls the ‘Intellectual Yet Idiot’, Nassim Nicholas Taleb includes anyone who ‘has mentioned quantum mechanics at least twice in the past five years in conversations that had nothing to do with physics’. (Guilty as charged!) Contrast that with the success and general social acceptability of mechanistic thinking, which is part of a Western scientific tradition whose roots extend to ancient Greece, and which has affected the way we think about everything from human psychology to the financial markets. As the political scientist Alexander Wendt has noted, for example, the social sciences are based on a number of fundamental assumptions: 1) that the elementary units of reality are physical objects (materialism); 2) that larger objects can be reduced to smaller ones (reductionism); 3) that objects behave in law-like ways (determinism); 4) that causation is mechanical and local (mechanism); and 5) that objects exist independent of the subjects who observe them (objectivism?).In other words, they are based on the cogs and levers of pre-quantum physics. No possibility of superposition or entanglement there. In economics, prices are assumed to be mechanistically determined by the ‘invisible hand’ of global capitalism, where the actions of informed, rational, independent utility-optimising agents – aka rational economic man – conspire to drive prices to their optimal level, subject only to occasional ‘frictions’ or ‘market failures’, which might slow or impede the process. Markets are seen as being subject to random external perturbations that make them unpredictable, but this is a far cry from the indeterminacy of quantum systems. One reason for this lack of uptake, as mentioned above, might be that quantum ideas really are hard for normal people, or at least those without a degree in quantum mechanics, to understand. This is certainly the standard message. Quotes that are commonly, if perhaps apocryphally, attributed to esteemed physicists include the observations that quantum mechanics is ‘fundamentally incomprehensible’ (Niels Bohr); ‘If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics’ (Richard Feynman); and ‘You don’t understand quantum mechanics, you just get used to it’ (John von Neumann). However, it is more accurate to say that subatomic particles are hard to understand because they’re weird and almost no one has direct experience of them. And it is easy to imagine those men (and they do always seem to be men) saying the same thing about their spouses, or even their pets. ‘No one truly understands George, my tabby cat. He is a mystery even unto himself.’ Physicists tend to confuse their models with reality – after all, these are the same people who would prefer to believe that most of the Universe has somehow been rendered invisible as ‘dark matter’ than entertain the rather reasonable idea that the problem is with the ‘law’ of gravity. But in mathematical terms, quantum theory mostly boils down to being just a different form of probability, which is the next simplest after the usual one, and which naturally incorporates effects such as superposition and entanglement. The field of quantum cognition, for example, isn’t about comparing humans to invisible particles; it is about using quantum probability to model the way that decisions are shaped by things such as uncertainty and context, as when the way a question is framed or posed affects the answer. Physicists are protective of quantum ideas, but often dislike aspects of them at the same time In fact, the quantum physicist Niels Bohr borrowed the idea of superposition from the late 19th-century philosopher and psychologist William James, who had remarked on the human ability to hold conflicting ideas in our heads at the same time. And the concept of entanglement is hardly foreign to human experience. As Žižek also observed: A fact rarely noticed is that the propositions of quantum physics which defy our common-sense view of material reality strangely echo another domain, that of language, of the symbolic order – it is as if quantum processes are closer to the universe of language than anything one finds in ‘nature’, as if, in the quantum universe, the human spirit encounters itself outside itself …Researchers in the field of ‘quantum natural language processing’ would agree. So somehow we went from quantum physicists adopting words and concepts from social life, to social scientists omitting the same things from their study of social life. As the comedian John Cleese quipped: ‘people like psychologists and biologists have still got physics envy, but it’s envy of Newtonian physics and they haven’t really noticed what’s been happening the last 115 years.’ Viewed this way, the concern from physicists that quantum ideas will be ‘misused and abused’ in the social sciences, to use Carroll’s phrase, seems a little forced. For example, there was little outcry from physicists about what the quantitative analyst Paul Wilmott and I called the ‘industrial-scale abuse of mathematical models’ by the financial sector that led to the crisis of 2007-8. So perhaps the problem is not with the misuse of physics-inspired models, but with worries about quantum ideas in particular. Another reason for these concerns seems to be related to a kind of queasiness around quantum ideas in the first place. There is a strange dichotomy at play, where physicists are protective of quantum ideas, but often dislike aspects of them at the same time, and deal with this dislike by adopting a highly formal and abstract way of presenting the subject. Albert Einstein commented that the theory reminded him of ‘the system of delusions of an exceedingly intelligent paranoiac, concocted of incoherent elements of thought’, and spent years trying to show it was wrong or incomplete. More recently, the late physicist Steven Weinberg said in an interview that quantum mechanics ‘has a number of features we find repulsive … What I don’t like about quantum mechanics is that it’s a formalism for calculating probabilities that human beings get when they make certain interventions in nature that we call experiments. And a theory should not refer to human beings in its postulates.’ (Perhaps it works better as a model of human beings.) One problem is that, while physicists tend to claim ownership over the interpretation of quantum mathematics, they themselves have never reached a settled interpretation of what it all means. The notion of wave function collapse, for example, leads to all kinds of quandaries, which is why physicists continue to debate it, or come up with alarming alternatives such as the Many-Worlds hypothesis where, instead of the wave function collapsing, the Universe splits off into alternative paths. The test for the use of quantum methods in the social sciences is not, then, whether people are just like particles. It is whether, if these methods hadn’t existed, social scientists would have had to invent them. Of course, this suggests another potential explanation for why quantum ideas are not applied outside of physics – which is that they just don’t work. But there is increasing evidence that they do. And what seems extraordinary, is the fact that for so long they hadn’t even been tried. I first wrote about this for Aeon four years ago in an essay that made a case for a theory of quantum economics. The idea is that money is best understood as a quantum social technology, with quantum properties of its own. In financial transactions, for example, value can be modelled as a probabilistic wave function which ‘collapses’ down to an exact number when money is exchanged. When you put your house up for sale, you might have a fuzzy idea of its worth, but the actual price is only determined when a deal is made. An idea that seems bizarre in physics makes perfect sense in economics. Financial contracts such as mortgages and other loans entangle the debtor and the creditor in a fashion that can be modelled using quantum mathematics. The debtor is treated as being in a superposed state, balanced somewhere between a propensity to honour the debt and a propensity to default. Methods from quantum cognition can handle those phenomena, such as mental interference between incompatible concepts, that first inspired quantum physicists. And the argument that quantum effects don’t scale up has no relevance to economics. The idea isn’t that money inherits its quantum properties from subatomic properties, but that its properties can be modelled using quantum mathematics (the aim isn’t to use more maths, just different maths where needed). For example, the creation of money can be expressed using a quantum circuit in a way that captures effects such as uncertainty, power relationships, and so on. The effects of this substance scale up all the time (it’s called the financial system), and, like dark matter, exert a huge pull over the economy that goes undetected by classical approaches. Of course, the article immediately attracted fierce criticism, and not just from internet trolls. One respected science writer described the piece on Twitter as ‘a load of hogwash’. Other physicists piled on to mock the article or accuse me that I had no idea how things like the mathematics of entanglement work (for the record, I am a mathematician, and it’s not that hard). One commenter summarised their feelings like this: ‘I feel bad for all the professional economists who might come across this nonsensical essay … Bad writer, bad.’ As someone who has long written about and critiqued our use of mathematical models in areas ranging from weather forecasting to particle physics to economics, I am used to receiving robust feedback on my work – but something about this felt different, like I had crossed a line. So what is it that makes quantum special? What is it that makes physicists so excited about maintaining control over it? And what line had I crossed which made the article so ‘bad’? The answer, oddly, might have something to do with gender – not with mine, or anyone else’s, but rather with a classical conception of gender. Part of my above-mentioned critique of science is that the way we approach the subject is affected by a degree of bias, which can be traced back to the birth of Western philosophy and science in ancient Greece. Greek philosophy was dualistic and also what we would describe as blatantly sexist. The Pythagoreans, for example, saw the Universe as governed by opposing principles, which were divided into Good and Evil, and which included Male versus Female. Women were allowed into the group, but the female archetype was still associated with darkness and evil. Plato described women as originating from morally defective souls in Timaeus, and he and Aristotle excluded them from their schools. The split between genders was tied up, in Greek philosophy, with the split between the real world and abstract ideas. The former was associated in Greek culture with the Female principle, the latter with the Male principle. According to the science writer Margaret Wertheim, writing in The New York Times: ‘Mathematics was associated with the gods, and with transcendence from the material world; women, by their nature, were supposedly rooted in this latter, baser realm.’ There were no female philosophers to argue against this, because they weren’t admitted to the club. A performative emphasis on hard objectivity is the scientific equivalent of lugging a heavy suitcase up a flight of stairs Since then, science has been dominated by men. In his book The Masculine Birth of Time, the 17th-century inventor of the scientific method, Francis Bacon, described the role of science as being to ‘conquer and subdue [Nature]’ and ‘storm and occupy her castles and strongholds’. When the Royal Society was founded in 1660, its secretary Henry Oldenburg, a theologian and natural philosopher, defined its aim as being to construct a ‘Masculine Philosophy’. Women began to be admitted to universities in significant numbers only in the early 20th century, with physics departments among the last to open their doors. As the philosopher Sandra Harding wrote in 1986: ‘Women have been more systematically excluded from doing serious science than from performing any other social activity except, perhaps, frontline warfare.’ With the result, as the physicist and feminist scholar Evelyn Fox Keller put it in 1985, that modern science was developed ‘not by humankind but by men.’ As already mentioned, quantum physics was constructed mostly by a small group of young men. All of this has affected the way we do science. The philosopher Mary Midgley compiled a list of opposites in 1985, reminiscent of the Pythagoreans’ idea of opposing principles, which included: Hard / SoftReason / Feeling, EmotionObjective / SubjectiveQuantity / QualityMale / FemaleClarity / MysteryMidgley commented that the list served for scientists as a ‘mental map … marked only with the general direction “keep to the left”’. A similarly performative emphasis on hard objectivity – the scientific equivalent of lugging a heavy suitcase up a flight of stairs, while sweating profusely and wearing a rictus grin – is seen even in the social sciences, which take their cues from physics. In 1913, the psychologist John B Watson wrote: ‘Psychology, as the behaviourist views it, is a purely objective, experimental branch of natural science … it can dispense with consciousness in a psychological sense.’ A century later, the political scientist Alexander Wendt noted that ‘in most of contemporary social science there seems to be a “taboo” on subjectivity’, which is odd given that social relations are surely based largely on subjective factors. Economics seems to be something of an extreme case, and remains, as the sociologist Elaine Coburn observed in 2016, ‘remarkably “pre-feminist”’. According to the economics professor Veronika Dolar: ‘there’s a strong case to be made that economics is the worst academic field in which to be a woman.’ One recent study used data science to analyse the gender gap, and concluded that the discipline was best described as ‘a crushing and unrewarding environment for female economists’. Not much of an advance over the ancient Greeks. Mainstream economists, as the political economists Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan noted in 2021, see their field as ‘the “hardest” social science of all’, which again has shaped the way it is practised. The feminist economist Julie A Nelson wrote in 1996 that: ‘Analytical methods associated with detachment, mathematical reasoning, formality, and abstraction have cultural associations that are positive and masculine, in contrast with methods associated with connectedness, verbal reasoning, informality, and concrete detail, which are culturally considered feminine.’ And yet most mainstream economists would reject the idea that their discipline has been shaped by such factors. Consider, for example, the paper from 2020 in which the Nobel Memorial prize-winning economist George Akerlof puzzled over the question of why economics ‘gives rewards that favour the “hard” and disfavour the “soft”’. There is an entire section titled ‘Reasons for Bias toward Hard’, which manages to avoid the obvious one, namely association with a certain kind of masculinity. Indeed, his piece does not even mention words such as ‘women’, ‘female’ or ‘gender’. Obviously, he had never read Midgley, who had already explained how the map worked 35 years earlier. Now, I should again point out (and I feel my audience shrinking as I type – bad writer, bad) that this argument, raised in previous books, about the ongoing influence of ancient archetypes on modern science, doesn’t elicit a unanimously positive response; one physicist even worried that it was intended as a joke on the reader, which I can assure you is not the case (though humour is a help). Perhaps scientists see themselves as truth seekers who are free of such cultural influences. However the issue does seem especially relevant to the quantum approach – because quantum mixes hard and soft by design. A defining feature of quantum mechanics, after all, is that it looks hard, but the picture that it paints of reality is soft and fuzzy. In many respects it isn’t a hard science, but a soft science. A wave equation, for example, looks hard when it is written out as a mathematical formula – but it is an equation of a wave, which is soft. Instead of atoms being hard and independent – as the feminist theologian Catherine Keller notes, there is a strong correspondence between the ‘separate, impenetrable’ Newtonian atom and the male sense of self – they are indeterminate and entangled. Instead of predictive certainty, we have the uncertainty principle. If quantum mechanics had been invented, and its evolution and interpretation shaped, mostly by women instead of those young men – if its ‘founding fathers’ had been ‘founding mothers’ – we would be calling it the most feminist theory ever. Quantum is therefore a soft science dressed up to look hard. When male physicists first stumbled upon these ‘soft’ quantum properties of matter, it is unsurprising that, rather than embrace their classically defined feminine side, they reacted by adopting a hardcore mathematical approach summed up later by the physicist David Mermin as the direction to ‘Shut up and calculate!’ Which, to non-physicists, reads like: ‘Keep away – this is much too hard!’ In contrast, the social science version counted women and feminists among its first inventors. Danah Zohar, who trained as a physicist, described how her book The Quantum Self (1990) was inspired in part by her experience of pregnancy and early motherhood: ‘There is something deeply feminine about seeing the self as part of a quantum process.’ Or as the feminist theorist (and trained physicist) Karen Barad put it in her quantum-queer-feminist (if that’s a thing) book Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2007): ‘Existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not pre-exist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating.’ The concept of ‘rational economic man’ will be replaced with something a little more uncertain and entangled One of the most obvious features of modern science is that it carries with it the imprint of ancient divisions and biases. And one of the most obvious features of quantum ideas is that they undermine everything that might be considered ‘Hard’ and ‘Male’ about reality according to this (rather dated) scheme. Instead of being clearly defined and firmly independent, both mind and matter are better described as indeterminate and entangled. Which goes a long way to explain the rather remarkable fact that these quantum tools and ideas, which are designed to analyse such properties, have been effectively kept in their box for more than a century. Of course, the universe is not ‘Male’ or ‘Female’ and nor does it align itself with ancient Greek archetypes. However, it would be naive to think that the same can be said of the human pursuit of science. In particular, as Barad wrote: ‘It would be ironic to find that the physical sciences, those sciences that have traditionally been most exclusive of women and people of colour, are unmarked by the politics of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and other critical social variables.’ Or to think that the same variables have not affected economics. Over the past few years, interest in applying quantum methods to other fields has grown considerably. Wendt and his colleagues received a grant from the Carnegie Corporation to host a series of ‘quantum bootcamps’ for social scientists. These are held at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at the Ohio State University, and taught by an eclectic group, whose specialities include philosophy, psychology, physics, political science and applied mathematics (I present a section on quantum economics). And one group that certainly sees potential in quantum ideas is the specialist area of quantitative finance – as evidenced in by the Financial Times headline in 2020: ‘Wall Street Banks Ramp Up Research Into Quantum Finance.’ The excitement is, so far, mostly driven by the potential of using quantum computers, but interest is growing in ‘quantum-native’ applications, based on ideas from quantum economics, which can run on custom quantum circuits. An article in The Economist in 2021 noted that ‘finance bears a striking resemblance to the quantum world’ and concludes: ‘One way or another, finance will catch up.’ The real long-term impact of quantum ideas in economics won’t be to help traders make money, but to change the way that we think about the economy by replacing the concept of ‘rational economic man’, which serves as the atom of the classical model, with something a little more uncertain and entangled. As the former central banker Andrew Sheng told the Bretton Woods Committee, in a report commemorating the 75th anniversary of that postwar economic agreement: A quantum paradigm of finance and the economy is slowly emerging, and its nonlinear, complex nature may help the design of a future global economy and financial architecture … Financial assets and virtual liabilities have quantum characteristics of entanglement with each other that are not yet fully understood … All of these developments suggest that using a new ‘quantum’ imagination, the Bretton Woods framework can be reengineered …In other words, the time has come to strap quantum wheels onto our models of the economy, and the world. This isn’t hard. It’s the opposite of hard.

Well, a green-collar job is really a blue-collar job that's been upgraded to better respect the environment. So you want to think about not the PhDs, but the Ph-Do's, you know, the skilled laborers, the people who are putting up those solar panels, people who are manufacturing wind turbines, weatherizing and retrofitting buildings so they don't leak so much energy. You know, people who are involved in water conservation, urban gardening. All of the hard and skilled and smart work that is required to help beat global warming. The good thing about a green-collar job is, everything that is good for the environment, that's good for energy independence, that's good for the fight against global warming, is a job. Solar panels don't put themselves up. And so the same things that can be used to beat global warming can also be used to power our way through the recession.

I don't come to you today as an expert. I come to you as someone who has been really interested in how I get better at what I do and how we all do. I think it's not just how good you are now, I think it's how good you're going to be that really matters. I was visiting this birth center in the north of India. I was watching the birth attendants, and I realized I was witnessing in them an extreme form of this very struggle, which is how people improve in the face of complexity — or don't. The women here are delivering in a region where the typical birth center has a one-in-20 death rate for the babies, and the moms are dying at a rate ten times higher than they do elsewhere. Now, we've known the critical practices that stop the big killers in birth for decades, and the thing about it is that even in this place — in this place especially, the simplest things are not simple. We know for example you should wash hands and put on clean gloves, but here, the tap is in another room, and they don't have clean gloves. To reuse their gloves, they wash them in this basin of dilute bleach, but you can see there's still blood on the gloves from the last delivery. Ten percent of babies are born with difficulty breathing everywhere. We know what to do. You dry the baby with a clean cloth to stimulate them to breathe. If they don't start to breathe, you suction out their airways. And if that doesn't work, you give them breaths with the baby mask. But these are skills that they've learned mostly from textbooks, and that baby mask is broken. In this one disturbing image for me is a picture that brings home just how dire the situation is. This is a baby 10 minutes after birth, and he's alive, but only just. No clean cloth, has not been dried, not warming skin to skin, an unsterile clamp across the cord. He's an infection waiting to happen, and he's losing his temperature by the minute. Successful child delivery requires a successful team of people. A whole team has to be skilled and coordinated; the nurses who do the deliveries in a place like this, the doctor who backs them up, the supply clerk who's responsible for 22 critical drugs and supplies being in stock and at the bedside, the medical officer in charge, responsible for the quality of the whole facility. The thing is they are all experienced professionals. I didn't meet anybody who hadn't been part of thousands of deliveries. But against the complexities that they face, they seem to be at their limits. They were not getting better anymore. It's how good you're going to be that really matters. It presses on a fundamental question. How do professionals get better at what they do? How do they get great? And there are two views about this. One is the traditional pedagogical view. That is that you go to school, you study, you practice, you learn, you graduate, and then you go out into the world and you make your way on your own. A professional is someone who is capable of managing their own improvement. That is the approach that virtually all professionals have learned by. That's how doctors learn, that's how lawyers do, scientists ... musicians. And the thing is, it works. Consider for example legendary Juilliard violin instructor Dorothy DeLay. She trained an amazing roster of violin virtuosos: Midori, Sarah Chang, Itzhak Perlman. Each of them came to her as young talents, and they worked with her over years. What she worked on most, she said, was inculcating in them habits of thinking and of learning so that they could make their way in the world without her when they were done. Now, the contrasting view comes out of sports. And they say "You are never done, everybody needs a coach." Everyone. The greatest in the world needs a coach. So I tried to think about this as a surgeon. Pay someone to come into my operating room, observe me and critique me. That seems absurd. Expertise means not needing to be coached. So then which view is right? I learned that coaching came into sports as a very American idea. In 1875, Harvard and Yale played one of the very first American-rules football games. Yale hired a head coach; Harvard did not. The results? Over the next three decades, Harvard won just four times. Harvard hired a coach. (Laughter) And it became the way that sports works. But is it necessary then? Does it transfer into other fields? I decided to ask, of all people, Itzhak Perlman. He had trained the Dorothy DeLay way and became arguably the greatest violinist of his generation. One of the beautiful things about getting to write for "The New Yorker" is I call people up, and they return my phone calls. (Laughter) And Perlman returned my phone call. So we ended up having an almost two-hour conversation about how he got to where he got in his career. And I asked him, I said, "Why don't violinists have coaches?" And he said, "I don't know, but I always had a coach." "You always had a coach?" "Oh yeah, my wife, Toby." They had graduated together from Juilliard, and she had given up her job as a concert violinist to be his coach, sitting in the audience, observing him and giving him feedback. "Itzhak, in that middle section, you know you sounded a little bit mechanical. What can you differently next time?" It was crucial to everything he became, he said. Turns out there are numerous problems in making it on your own. You don't recognize the issues that are standing in your way or if you do, you don't necessarily know how to fix them. And the result is that somewhere along the way, you stop improving. And I thought about that, and I realized that was exactly what had happened to me as a surgeon. I'd entered practice in 2003, and for the first several years, it was just this steady, upward improvement in my learning curve. I watched my complication rates drop from one year to the next. And after about five years, they leveled out. And a few more years after that, I realized I wasn't getting any better anymore. And I thought: "Is this as good as I'm going to get?" So I thought a little more and I said ... "OK, I'll try a coach." So I asked a former professor of mine who had retired, his name is Bob Osteen, and he agreed to come to my operating room and observe me. The case — I remember that first case. It went beautifully. I didn't think there would be anything much he'd have to say when we were done. Instead, he had a whole page dense with notes. (Laughter) "Just small things," he said. (Laughter) But it's the small things that matter. "Did you notice that the light had swung out of the wound during the case? You spent about half an hour just operating off the light from reflected surfaces." "Another thing I noticed," he said, "Your elbow goes up in the air every once in a while. That means you're not in full control. A surgeon's elbows should be down at their sides resting comfortably. So that means if you feel your elbow going in the air, you should get a different instrument, or just move your feet." It was a whole other level of awareness. And I had to think, you know, there was something fundamentally profound about this. He was describing what great coaches do, and what they do is they are your external eyes and ears, providing a more accurate picture of your reality. They're recognizing the fundamentals. They're breaking your actions down and then helping you build them back up again. After two months of coaching, I felt myself getting better again. And after a year, I saw my complications drop down even further. It was painful. I didn't like being observed, and at times I didn't want to have to work on things. I also felt there were periods where I would get worse before I got better. But it made me realize that the coaches were onto something profoundly important. In my other work, I lead a health systems innovation center called Ariadne Labs, where we work on problems in the delivery of health care, including global childbirth. As part of it, we had worked with the World Health Organization to devise a safe childbirth checklist. It lays out the fundamentals. It breaks down the fundamentals — the critical actions a team needs to go through when a woman comes in in labor, when she's ready to push, when the baby is out, and then when the mom and baby are ready to go home. And we knew that just handing out a checklist wasn't going to change very much, and even just teaching it in the classroom wasn't necessarily going to be enough to get people to make the changes that you needed to bring it alive. And I thought on my experience and said, "What if we tried coaching? What if we tried coaching at a massive scale?" We found some incredible partners, including the government of India, and we ran a trial there in 120 birth centers. In Uttar Pradesh, in India's largest state. Half of the centers basically we just observed, but the other half got visits from coaches. We trained an army of doctors and nurses like this one who learned to observe the care and also the managers and then help them build on their strengths and address their weaknesses. One of the skills for example they had to work on with people — turned out to be fundamentally important — was communication. Getting the nurses to practice speaking up when the baby mask is broken or the gloves are not in stock or someone's not washing their hands. And then getting others, including the managers, to practice listening. This small army of coaches ended up coaching 400 nurses and other birth attendants, and 100 physicians and managers. We tracked the results across 160,000 births. The results ... in the control group you had — and these are the ones who did not get coaching — they delivered on only one-third of 18 basic practices that we were measuring. And most important was over the course of the years of study, we saw no improvement over time. The other folks got four months of coaching and then it tapered off over eight months, and we saw them increase to greater than two-thirds of the practices being delivered. It works. We could see the improvement in quality, and you could see it happen across a whole range of centers that suggested that coaching could be a whole line of way that we bring value to what we do. You can imagine the whole job category that could reach out in the world and that millions of people could fulfill. We were clearly at the beginning of it, though, because there was still a distance to go. You have to put all of the checklist together to achieve the substantial reductions in mortality. But we began seeing the first places that were getting there, and this center was one of them because coaching helped them learn to execute on the fundamentals. And you could see it here. This is a 23-year-old woman who had come in by ambulance, in labor with her third child. She broke her water in the triage area, so they brought her directly to the labor and delivery room, and then they ran through their checks. I put the time stamp on here so you could see how quickly all of this happens and how much more complicated that makes things. Within four minutes, they had taken the blood pressure, measured her pulse and also measured the heart rate of the baby. That meant that the blood pressure cuff and the fetal Doppler monitor, they were all there, and the nurse knew how to use them. The team was skilled and coordinated. The mom was doing great, the baby's heart rate was 143, which is normal. Eight minutes later, the intensity of the contractions picked up, so the nurse washed her hands, put on clean gloves, examined her and found that her cervix was fully dilated. The baby was ready to come. She then went straight over to do her next set of checks. All of the equipment, she worked her way through and made sure she had everything she needed at the bedside. The baby mask was there, the sterile towel, the sterile equipment that you needed. And then three minutes later, one push and that baby was out. (Applause) I was watching this delivery, and suddenly I realized that the mood in that room had changed. The nurse was looking at the community health worker who had come in with the woman because that baby did not seem to be alive. She was blue and floppy and not breathing. She would be one of that one-in-20. But the nurse kept going with her checkpoints. She dried that baby with a clean towel. And after a minute, when that didn't stimulate that baby, she ran to get the baby mask and the other one went to get the suction. She didn't have a mechanical suction because you could count on electricity, so she used a mouth suction, and within 20 seconds, she was clearing out that little girl's airways. And she got back a green, thick liquid, and within a minute of being able to do that and suctioning out over and over, that baby started to breathe. (Applause) Another minute and that baby was crying. And five minutes after that, she was pink and warming on her mother's chest, and that mother reached out to grab that nurse's hand, and they could all breathe. I saw a team transformed because of coaching. And I saw at least one life saved because of it. We followed up with that mother a few months later. Mom and baby were doing great. The baby's name is Anshika. It means "beautiful." And she is what's possible when we really understand how people get better at what they do. Thank you. (Applause)

The first thing I would do is put out a caution to us because what I see the Congress doing, and what I saw this last year, is us actually performing bad medicine, and that is that we get stuck in the idea of treating the symptom rather than treating the disease. And whether you go to Harvard or whether you go to Thomson Reuters, there's some facts we know about health care in America. And the facts we know is one out of every three dollars that gets spent doesn't help anybody get well and doesn't prevent anybody from getting sick.

Well, it's tricky. I've always said it's, you know, people think it's quite easy to compose a lonely heart ad, and it isn't. It's impossible to condense yourself into 30 words, you know. But one of the easiest ways to do it is to get a friend or someone you know to write it for you. So I asked my wife, if you were my friend rather than my wife, what would you put? And her idea was well, doesn't smell as much as you might think for someone with such a fat neck, and still has a little bit of money left on one of his credit cards, not quite as flatulent as you'd expect. It's about as good as I've ever got.

That's correct. To lay the groundwork, the largest portion of the photovoltaics market today is based on wafers of silicon, not too dissimilar from the silicon wafers that are used in the integrated circuit industry to make all of the chips in our phones, and computers and such. That technology is very efficient at converting the sunlight to electricity, but it's rather expensive in no small part due to the cost of that silicon wafer itself. For a number of years, people have worked on replacing that silicon wafer with something inexpensive, and the most promising of those different strategies have been to go to thin films of material, where you put think coatings of photoactive materials on inexpensive substrates like glass or metal foil, or even plastics. Unfortunately, in order to get very high-quality thin films, people traditionally have had to use expensive vacuum deposition techniques. Again, akin to what's used in the integrated circuit industry.

This song, you know, I avoided this song so much it became a favorite. Rex Rideout, my executive producer, said: Led, I have this song for you. I want you to hear. I want you to at least demo it. And I kept going: I don't want to. It's too sensual. It's too much describing how I like my man. The lyrics were more risqu� than what you hear now. So, I said, well, if I can change the lyrics around, I'll demo it. And we ended up using the demo. So what you hear is the first takes of everything.

And her group was out with a video, David, the day of Kennedy's resignation, saying, this is our moment; we have to seize it - and urging activists to lobby lawmakers. Abortion rights supporters, on the same token, are taking this very seriously and reaching out to their grassroots. I've heard Kennedy's departure described as devastating and extremely concerning because he was the swing vote, and on abortion, had often voted to uphold abortion rights in some really key cases. So, of course, now this fight goes to the Senate. The confirmation process will be intense. And senators on both sides seen as potentially vulnerable or likely to be open to crossing party lines will be getting a lot of attention.

It's not such a far-fetched idea that Europe could try to solve its migrant crisis by helping create a safe zone to keep displaced Syrians in their own country rather than fleeing to Turkey and then Europe. The safe-zone idea keeps resurfacing along, with calls for a no-fly zone, despite resistance from the White House as pressure grows in Europe to halt the flow of people to its borders. That wasn't the original impetus for a safe zone. Turkey has long called for a humanitarian corridor, through which aid could get to those who need it most. And U.S.-backed opposition rebels would love a no-fly zone where nearby civilians wouldn't be exposed to the deadly barrel bombs of the Syrian military. But Syrian author and blogger Abu Dandachi says the idea of putting refugees in the safe zone is troubling.

So what do we look at when we look at these numbers? Can we find a silver lining? If we talk about the miniscule number, albeit applauded by those of us who watch these people grow--and whether we want to admit it or not, we are still African-Americans, a very small community, and find pride in people who attain this status--if that is such a miniscule number, and by definition, 42 percent of African-Americans are born in this country into poverty, when we look at those two numbers and juxtapose them, is there a silver lining out here, Dr. Hamer--Professor Hamer? I'm sorry.

Staff Sergeant David Wyatt, Lance Corporal Squire Wells, Sergeant Carson Holmquist, Gunnery Sergeant Thomas Sullivan - those are the four U.S. Marines who were killed this week when a gunman opened fire at two military facilities in Chattanooga, Tenn. And today a Navy petty officer who was injured in the attack died from his wounds. The suspected shooter, Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez, was shot and killed by police. Officials are investigating it as a terrorist attack. Federal investigators are focusing on a trip that he made last year to Jordan, as well as his online activities in search of a motive. Chattanooga is beginning to grieve in the wake of the attack. Emily Siner from member station WPLN reports that community turns to faith for comfort and solidarity.

In June, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, sent a cable back to Washington urging the U.S. to offer immigrant visas to all Iraqi employees who worked for the U.S. government. He wrote that Iraqi staff members are the targets for violence. And unless they know there is some hope of a visa, they may continue to flee. State Department Spokesman Sean McCormack says the U.S. is working with Congress to address this. He also said the U.S. has brought in 133 Iraqi refugees this year. And the State Department hopes to get 2,000 more through the refugee procedures by the end of September.

Yes. In 1985 - what seems like a long time ago to most people, to me it just seems like yesterday - I was staff director when we put together Gramm-Rudman-Hollings. And it was the same kind of dilemma we face now. How do you get a debt increase passed through a Senate that doesn't want to do it without guarantees of cuts in spending? It took us six months and about three short-term extensions of the debt limit to finally get that done. My suspicion is that we'll go through a very similar process right now. So we're going to pass a debt increase. The question is what will Republicans and Democrats require so they can go back home their constituents and say, yeah, I voted for 17 trillion, but listen, this is what I got in return. I think a lot of folks are fighting, right now, about what process that one entail.

Well, if you really look in the beginning at the camp - early on in the campaign, the Democratic - before the Democratic primaries. Hillary Clinton was a favorite choice of most African-Americans, especially African-American political leaders and elected officials. Now how did that change? How did that dynamic change? It changed because he was able to do two things, and it was masterful. Number one, no racial identification. That was set in stone. But the second thing is he doubled back and actually did slightly play the race card in the sense of bringing Oprah in. Went to South Carolina, appealed to the blacks there, which is very important to jumpstart the campaign, the primary season. And guess what? He was able to actually masterfully juggle two ends on the - certainly, man for everyone, but at the same time, I'm not running away from who I am, an African-American. Not bi-racial, by the way.

Oh absolutely. We've seen that time and time again, in every election season, at least in 1964, where there were Americans who clearly believed that the person, not the policy should govern their choice. Look, this election is going to be a change election, and I think Senator Obama, as well as Senator McCain, must define the kind of change that they want to bring about. When 80 percent of the American people believe that the country is on the wrong track, that's 80 percent, that's a consensus. And when you see the kind of frustration and anxiety among voters with the economy, there is no question that Senator Obama, as well as Senator McCain must appeal to voters based on their pocket book interest, but at the same time there will be personal characteristics that people will say, look, I like Senator Obama because he inspires me, he has bold new ideas.

I feel like that the difference between white churches is they deal more with a moral issue than they have with social issue because we're all people. We're going to deal with what affects us. And the churches that we attend are going to be the same. And I just feel like that's the biggest difference that we need to really have a big spiritual awakening. And we need to have a social movement in this country to where we all can come together as one because I believe that's the biggest difference, just keeping this race as alive is. Blacks deal with more of social injustices, and the whites look at things more on an intellectual and a moral judgment in their churches.

Yeah, I do. You know, there's a lot of talk about get rid of conventions, they don't serve a purpose anymore. But I do think they serve a purpose for the party regulars. They're the ones who in the next 10 weeks will carry the fight to door-to-door campaigning, will carry the fight to rallies. And for them, the convention is like taking three days' worth of five-hour energy drinks. It sort of recharges their batteries, number one, and gets them ready for the arduous fall campaign. And number two, there's something very American about Pennsylvanian Democrats meeting and talking to Washington State Democrats or Oregon Democrats or Alabama Democrats. So, I would never get rid of conventions. I think they serve a very salutary purpose.

Yeah. You know, it's a - because it is a fact of life. And I think it's a sobering thing, but the funny thing is that our parents tried to tell us this. You know, when you're really feeling down in the dumps with teenage angst your parents would try to tell you, hey, this, too, shall pass. You know, 10, 20 years from now, you're going to be laughing at this, and you're going to be way over here, those other kids are going to be way over there. Of course, you don't hear them at all, you know. The, you know, the adolescent brain tunes that out entirely. But later, especially - I think this is why the 20th year reunion is so important because by then you've had kids of your own and teenage kids of your own, and you start to see how high school is always ridiculous regardless of what generation happens to confront it. But, you know, the kids can't understand that until they've been through it themselves.

In 1917 a pivotal event occurred for art and philosophy: Marcel Duchamp unveiled his artwork Fountain in Alfred Stieglitz’s New York studio. This was simply a porcelain urinal, signed ‘R. Mutt’. Fountain was notorious, even for avant-garde artists. It has become one of the most discussed works of art of the 20th century. The Society of Independent Artists rejected it, though every artist who paid the exhibition fee was supposed to have their work shown. For almost a century, it has remained a difficult artwork. The philosopher John Passmore summed up Fountain as: ‘a piece of mischief at the expense of the art world’, though many have taken it very seriously. No doubt there was some tomfoolery involved – Duchamp did not choose a urinal randomly. Yet there is more to Fountain than nose-thumbing. What makes this artwork so striking is its philosophical contribution. Commentators often highlight the influence of Fountain on conceptual art, and this most ‘aggressive’ readymade, as Robert Hughes put it, has certainly had an enduring legacy. In 2004, it was voted the most important 20th-century work by hundreds of art experts. From Andy Warhol to Joseph Beuys to Tracey Emin, this urinal inspired artists to reconsider the traditional artwork. Instead of paintings and sculptures, art was suddenly Brillo boxes, an unmade bed, or a light-bulb plugged into a lemon: ordinary objects, some readymade, removed from their original contexts and placed on display in art galleries. The art critic Roberta Smith sums it up this way: ‘[Duchamp] reduced the creative act to a stunningly rudimentary level: to the single, intellectual, largely random decision to name this or that object or activity “art”.’ As we will see, Duchamp’s choice was not random at all, but Smith’s description points to the broader shock that Duchamp’s work prompted: if this can be art, then anything can. Since then, scholars have discussed Fountain to demonstrate a shift away from aesthetics to thought. As the philosopher Noël Carroll notes, it’s possible to enjoy thinking about Duchamp’s work without actually looking at it, which cannot be said for Henri Matisse’s vivid paintings or Barbara Hepworth’s dignified stone sculptures. These traditional ideas, as we will see, are all important to Fountain. But they do not go far enough. They treat Fountain as art, but of a mocking sort: a kind of intellectual heckling that nudged artists to taunt and scoff more academically at their own field. Our explanation of the artwork’s power is much more controversial: we believe that Fountain is art only insofar as it is not art. It is what it is not – and this is why it is what it is. In other words, the artwork delivers a true contradiction, what’s called a dialetheia. Fountain did not simply usher in conceptual art – it afforded us an unusual and intriguing concept to consider: a work of art that isn’t really a work of art, an everyday object that is not just an everyday object. How is this possible? Let’s begin with the obvious: Duchamp’s Fountain really was a urinal. Not a painting or sculpture of a urinoir – though the latter might raise interesting philosophical questions – but the real thing, a token of a particular type – there were many visually indistinguishable urinals that came off the same production line. And just as importantly, Duchamp had no involvement whatsoever in designing or making the urinal that was the raw material for his artwork. His contribution was to sign the urinal, and exhibit it as art. In his paper ‘Art, Philosophy, and the Philosophy of Art’ (1983), the philosopher Arthur Danto gave a helpful account of what happened when Duchamp did this. The urinal became, as Danto puts it, ‘about something’. It was no longer primarily a useful object – it was primarily a meaningful object. This is because the urinal was now part of what Danto called ‘the artworld’, in a 1964 article of the same name. The artworld is, simply put, a milieu in which objects can gain a new power: to express something beyond their ordinary utility. They are part of a new category, ‘art’, and gain a message that can be distinguished from their use or exchange value, and from the new category itself (a distinction we will come back to later). This is the famous aspect of art that the eye cannot, in Danto’s word, ‘descry’, the non-visual aspect of some visual art. Warhol made his Brillo boxes from plywood, rather than taking boxes from a dry goods store; Duchamp didn’t make a urinal, he displayed it in a new contextThis expression is not representation, as often understood: mimesis, or copying the likeness of some object. Mark Rothko’s most popular paintings, for example, do not represent any particular objects, but they certainly have a message: of awe, or the sublime. So, within the artworld, objects express ideas and feelings – sometimes by resemblance, sometimes not. The point is not that objects outside the artworld cannot have a message – the signs on a public toilet are straightforwardly ‘about’ something. The point is that, once they are within the artworld, objects can gain a new significance over and above their common use. They do not simply name an object or show its function: they make a statement of some sort. Duchamp’s Fountain embodied a statement about art itself. This, as we will see, is why it is dialetheic. Danto gives the example of Warhol’s soap boxes (the artistic grandchildren of Duchamp’s urinal), arguing that they ‘made some kind of statement about art, and incorporated into their identity the question of what that identity is’. The same was true of Duchamp’s urinoir, though it is important to realise that Warhol made highly realistic copies of Brillo boxes from plywood, rather than exhibiting the boxes from a dry goods store; Duchamp, in contrast, didn’t make a urinal, he merely displayed it in a new context. To see the specifics of Duchamp’s message, it helps to briefly detail the historical background. In the early 20th century, visual art was still chiefly associated with craft: the physical transformation of paint, clay and so on. But it was often seen to have more value than simple craft: some intimation, through beauty, of spiritual or philosophical truths. As the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu noted in Distinction (1979), the artist worked with or against matter to afford some moral, metaphysical or at least aesthetic vision, which was ‘higher’ than ordinary commerce and labour. Duchamp’s Fountain was the antithesis of this. There was no obvious craft – and certainly no fine artistry. The urinal was designed and manufactured to some standard, but one of utility, not aesthetics. Duchamp was overt about this, mocking critics who later tried to find the beauty in the urinal. ‘I threw… the urinoir into their faces,’ he complained in 1961, ‘and now they come and admire it for its beauty.’ As this suggests, the urinal was also a ‘low’ object: something to be urinated on, not gazed at for its loveliness or spiritual truths. It was, in the words of E H Gombrich, an attempt to ‘cock a snook at the solemnity and pomposity of Art with a capital A’. In other words, the message of Fountain was one of mockery: of modern ideals of art. It mocked, not by parodying fine art, but by being its stark opposite: uncrafted by the author, ugly, utilitarian, vulgar, ubiquitous, and so on. they call it art because it is the right kind of thing, in the right time and place – and exhibited by the right kind of artist This specific message is important, as it provides an argument against the thought that art is simply anything we call by that name. As we saw, Duchamp’s urinal was not chosen arbitrarily by the artist. The object’s very specific qualities contributed to its message. And this was achieved at a very specific historical era. Too early, and Fountain would have been incomprehensible as art, even for the avant-garde. Too late, and it would have been passé. Just as importantly, Duchamp already had some sway in the artworld – what Bourdieu calls ‘capital’, within the field of art. In this light, it cannot be argued that something is art simply because it is called so by members of the artworld. Rather, they call it so because it is the right kind of thing, in the right time and place – and exhibited by the right kind of artist. So we might say that any object can potentially be art, but never actually: the artworld is always a specific milieu that authorises some artists, messages and objects and not others. So Fountain is not art simply because it is called ‘art’. It is art because Duchamp deemed it so with his signature and exhibition, and the message of this deeming was recognised and, over time, accepted by members of the artworld. It is also important to deal with the opposite claim: that Fountain is simply not art at all. Now, it was, indeed, not art; but to say that it was simply not art is to miss the point. True, the urinal does indeed have very low aesthetic value, as defined by the philosopher Monroe Beardsley. It is unlikely to afford what Beardsley calls an ‘aesthetic experience’, because its perceptual qualities are unremarkable. But this does not mean that Fountain is simply not art. Duchamp’s work is art with a higher conceptual than aesthetic value. But this judgment is possible only because it is art; because it is part of the artworld, and able to be evaluated for, among other things, its aesthetic value. What makes this evaluation philosophically interesting is that Fountain, as an artwork, has a message: that it is not art. This is a vital point, and often missed by traditional accounts of the work. Fountain is screaming: ‘I am not art’, but doing so from a plinth in an art show. It carries its message by rejecting implicitly all the traditional markers for the category of art: beauty, craftsmanship, uniqueness, artistic personality, along with the standard ideals of edification, expression or aesthetic pleasure. This message is one of so-called ‘anti-art’. What gives the work its power is that it is not art; but that, at the same time, it is art. The urinal, as we have seen, was chosen by Duchamp precisely because it was antithetical to the basic ideas of art in the early 20th century. Put simply: it is because the urinal is not art that it has its particular artistic message; and it is only because it is art that it has a message at all. Of course, it can carry other messages as well, for example, that contemporary ideas of art are misguided, that craft is not essential to art, that beauty in art is optional. But it can carry such messages only because, in the artworld of its time, it was not art. So Duchamp’s contribution to the history of modern art can be put like this: ‘This both is art and is not art.’ It is an obvious and bald contradiction. Yet for many in the artworld, this proposition was – implicitly or explicitly – true. That’s what made Fountain so immediately fascinating, and what has invited so many essays, artworks and gallery visitors. Duchamp’s urinal rightly draws attention because it grounds a dialetheia: a true contradiction, something that traditional logicians believe to be an impossibility. perhaps Duchamp’s artwork is just wrong about itself? Perhaps it’s teasing us Dialetheism is the view that some contradictions are true, and so disputes what philosophers call the principle of non-contradiction: roughly, the idea that the same statement can’t be both true and false at the same time. Though some have challenged this principle in the history of Western philosophy – the most notable dissident being, arguably, Hegel – it has been high orthodoxy in Western philosophy since Aristotle’s convoluted and dubious defence of it in his Metaphysics 4. In the past 30 years, we have seen new advocates of dialetheism appear. The advocacy has its home in modern formal logic (as we shall see in a moment), and is supported by all of its tools. Perhaps surprisingly, there is now a lively debate in the area, because the principle of non-contradiction seems so firmly based in common sense. If an animal is a cat, it can’t simultaneously not be a cat. It is either Thursday or not Thursday: it can’t be both Thursday and not Thursday on the same day, here and now. But beware, as Ludwig Wittgenstein said, of an inadequate diet of examples! In this case, the dialetheism works like this. The object’s category is ‘art’. And as art, it has a message. In this case, its message is about its own category: it says to the viewer – truly – ‘this is not art’. The dialetheia arises because the message requires the very category it rejects, art; and because this rejection is its message within this category. The rejection of its status as an artwork is the very thing that makes it an artwork, which it rejects – and so on. This invites the reply that it is simply false to say that Fountain isn’t a work of art. It just carries the message that it is not. Thus, a sign might display the message: ‘This is written in red’, while in fact it is written in black. In short: perhaps Duchamp’s artwork is just wrong about itself? Perhaps it’s teasing us, saying ‘I might not really be art’. But Fountain can carry the message that it is not art only because it is not art – because its very entry into the artworld is defined by its rejection of art. Had it simply been art in an unproblematic sense – if, for example, Duchamp had chosen to paint an oil painting of a urinal – it could not have carried this message. This contrasts with the sign that is what it is because it has a message inscribed on it. So consider René Magritte’s 1928-9 painting of a pipe. This literally bears the message ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe.’ The very words carry a message. By contrast, Fountain bears no explicit message. It conveys its message by being what it is. It is not art, and that is how it conveys its message. That is precisely why it is art. Put another way: contradiction is essential to Fountain as art. And if it didn’t embody a contradiction, it wouldn’t be half as interesting; we wouldn’t still be talking about it. It might seem that the paradox of the urinal is a cultural oddity: something that could happen only in the strange world of contemporary art; but, actually, it fits a much larger pattern of something being the case because it is not the case: p because it is not the case that p. Perhaps the most frequently discussed candidates for dialetheia are the logical paradoxes of self-reference, such as the famous liar paradox (concerning the sentence ‘This very sentence is not true’). These are apparently genuine arguments that end in contradictions, with this logical form: p and it is not the case that p. The paradoxical arguments that deliver these contradictions can be of different kinds, but one of these is of the form with which we are now concerned. Consider König’s paradox. This concerns ordinals. Ordinals are numbers that extend the familiar counting numbers 0, 1, 2, … beyond the finite. After all the finite numbers, there is a next number, and then a next number plus one, and so on. Crucially, these numbers preserve the property of the counting numbers that any collection of them has a least member. How far, exactly, the ordinals go is a somewhat vexed question, both mathematically and philosophically, but it is not contentious that there are many more ordinals than can be represented by the phrases of a language with a finite vocabulary, such as English. This can be shown by a perfectly rigorous mathematical proof. Now, if there are ordinals that cannot be referred to in this way, then, by the properties of the ordinals, there must be a least such ordinal. Consider the phrase ‘the least ordinal that cannot be referred to’. This obviously refers to the number in question. This number, then, both can and cannot be referred to. But note that it is precisely the fact that it cannot be referred to that allows us to refer to it. That is, it is referable because it is not referable: p because it is not the case that p. In a similar way, Fountain is art because it is not art. The similarity between the Fountain paradox and some paradoxes of self-reference invites the question of whether self-reference is involved in the former. A little thought shows that it is. The art work includes the message ‘this is not a work of art’, and so refers to itself. While not all dialetheias involve self-reference, self-reference is obviously a rich source of them. Traditional discussions of self-reference have concentrated on spoken or written language. What our discussion shows is that they can occur in other media, such as the visual, too. These, just as much as ordinary language, can convey information; the information can be self-referential; and the self-reference can engender paradox. It was Duchamp’s genius to have found a way of presenting an object that was simultaneously both art and non-art. It is high time that we recognised that Duchamp’s contribution was profoundly and intentionally paradoxical.

The 21st century has already welcomed back Karl Marx (1818-1883), rather on the assumption that he had faded away and has now returned to haunt us. After the financial crashes of 2008, his leonine face appeared on international news magazine covers, feature articles in quality broadsheets, TV documentaries and blogposts. The questions Why now? and Why Marx? are easily answered: capitalism suddenly appeared unstable, unmanageable, dangerously fragile and anxiously threatening. It was possibly in an unstoppable downward spiral, pushing individuals, families, whole nations into penury and subsistence. It also appeared hugely unfair and internally contradictory in very dramatic ways: banks ‘too big to fail’ would get taxpayer bail-outs, recklessness and fraud would go unpunished, the super-rich beneficiaries of oligarchical stitch-ups would maintain their ‘high net worth’. Invocations of risk, competition, ‘free’ markets and rising living standards for all no longer seemed credible. So what were we all to think? As the most stringently systematic critic to date of capitalism, author of a weighty treatise on the subject, and iconic revolutionary intellectual and ‘grand old man’, Marx seemed a likely candidate to enlighten readers of the Financial Times, Der Spiegel, even Time and Newsweek. As an established figure in the liberal arts curriculum, and way more colourful than any number of drily theoretical economists (even including the very charming John Maynard Keynes), the very familiar bushy-bearded communist would guarantee us an alternative view, and secure a lively public debate. Dim and distant echoes of the Cold War, West vs East, freedom-loving peoples vs enslaved subjects of Iron Curtain tyrannies, etc – all this mid-20th-century fame actually did Marx some good, having made him indelibly historical without (perhaps surprisingly) totally demonising his thought or discrediting his intellect. Any number of biographies, commentaries, philosophical critiques and political polemics attempted to do him down, particularly from the early 1950s through later decades and well into the 1980s, right up to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. But a counter-movement had also swelled up in the 1960s, and eventually it overtook the ‘Stalinist Terror’ anti-communist, anti-Soviet, anti-‘Red China’, anti-Marx bluster. Two short books of the later 1930s had already laid the groundwork: Sidney Hook’s From Hegel to Marx (1936), written and published in the United States, and Isaiah Berlin’s Karl Marx (1939), written and published in the United Kingdom. While not uncritical of Marx, and not disconnected from the authors’ own political views, these two books established an important genre: in these works Marx was elevated for the first time to the highest ranks of European philosophy by academic writers who – though writing then as quite young men – soon became notable scholars of repute and made their careers at the highest levels of academia (New York University, and All Souls College, Oxford, respectively). Though writing in English, both were fluent in German and – at least by the standards of the time – well-informed researchers using primary sources. Whatever the vicissitudes of their personal opinions and political positions over the years, these tomes survived, unblemished by anything other than scholarly controversy. That scholarly and loosely philosophical approach was widely taken up when a ‘humanist Marx’ hit the headlines in the 1960s and caught a wave of student protest, religious activism, ‘Third World’ rebellion and wars of national liberation. The Stalin or Mao version of Marx, and the hermetic East-facing debates that they engendered, looked decidedly stale in Latin America, at the Second Vatican Council, on the anti-war student barricades in the US and France, and anywhere else that the arrogant practice of Great Power politics had caused offence or disaster. The ‘humanist Marx’ was a world-class intellectual up for debate, rather than a communist icon to be adored or defamed. He was youthful – just in his mid-20s, his texts were hitherto little-known, and moreover they were sketchy, puzzling and sympatico. His editorially titled ‘economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844’, though published in 1932 for German scholars, were circulating among French intellectuals only from the later 1940s, and hit the Anglophone world in translation at the very end of the 1950s. Several bestselling English versions appeared, but neither communist nor anti-communist Cold Warriors had much to say about them, since the concepts therein – famously ‘alienation’ and ‘species-being’ – had featured nowhere in the orthodoxies through which Marxists and anti-Marxists alike had operated ideologically. Most people could spot Marx’s image and register him as a big-browed intellectual. Many would assume – given the Cold Warrior echoes – that he was Russian (which he wasn’t), but then on discovering that he was German, many Anglophones found him just about as alien, yet still appealing. Both Stalin and Mao had helpfully provided ‘official’ accounts of Marx’s thought – with due acknowledgement to his very influential friend Friedrich Engels – and there were committed intellectuals on both sides who were more than fluent in the relevant arcana of ‘dialectical’ and ‘historical’ materialism. However, the new ‘humanist Marx’ was quite insulated from all this, since his 1844 manuscript thoughts were ‘Hegelian’ (without anyone’s ‘dialectics’) and ‘historical’ (without anyone’s ‘materialism’). In their own way, they appeared to be quite original, so the youthful Marx could be taken on his own terms, predating any Marxisms at all, and thus any Cold War battlelines, whether intellectual or geographical. One of David McLellan’s first and most influential and successful paperback books was simply titled Marx Before Marxism (1970). Significantly, the ‘humanist Marx’ had raised the question of economics, though not in the way that 20th-century economists had made familiar, whether they were conventional micro- or macro-economists, or Marxist economists in Moscow or Cambridge. The former ‘mainstream’ economists overwhelmingly ignored Marx and dismissed Marxist economics as politically biased and lacking in rigour; meanwhile, scholars and apparatchiks well-versed in Marxist economics despised ‘mainstream’ economists as uncritical proponents of capitalism. But both sides shared many presumptions and concepts nonetheless in theorising capitalism. Refreshingly, the ‘humanist Marx’ had set the stage for an examination of capitalist society in ways that bypassed all these efforts in economics, of whichever opposing camp. ‘Alienation’ was neither economics nor Marxist, so it suited the New Left of the 1960s. It functioned as a political critique that required relatively little study, given the brevity of Marx’s early manuscript notes-to-self. In particular, the ‘humanist Marx’ needed no study at all in conventional economics textbooks, based as they were (and still are) on rather abstractly asocial and ahistorical presumptions, and on evidential reasoning that is easily converted to mathematics. The early Marx’s theory of alienation, however, was rather less vague than it sounds, given that the word refers to feelings of ‘otherness’ or ‘separation’ or ‘estrangement’. In these manuscripts – now canonical as a widely translated text and ubiquitously excerpted for university reading lists – Marx was talking about capitalism as workers experience it, though in terms that were rather more psychological than sociological, but still historically specific, referring to mechanised production, wage-labour employment, and real or metaphorical assembly-line conditions. The new ‘humanist Marx’ was on-side with visionary intellectuals, uncontaminated with Stalinist political terror The ‘alienations’ detailed in Marx’s ruminations were of workers from products, workers from processes, workers from each other, and workers from their ‘species-being’. The first three could be easily visualised (even without, as was true of many student readers, much experience of such grinding conditions), whereas the last term was intriguingly philosophical and pointed towards something systemically ‘out of whack’ with ‘the human condition’ – quoting the title of another widely read and self-evidently Germanic book of the times by Hannah Arendt, published in 1958. Any number of deeply felt, loosely organised and generally inchoate critiques of industrial modernity could then adopt Marx, extending even to the Catholic liberation theology and Latin American peasant-farmer activisms. Thus the ‘humanist Marx’ could evidently stretch way beyond the author’s self-declared and relentlessly argued atheism, and triumph over the still-extant anti-religious persecutions conducted by communist militants in self-styled Marxist regimes. Philosophers, such as John Plamenatz, István Mészáros, Allen W Wood, Bertell Ollman, Kostas Axelos and David Leopold, forgave the rather simple moralising about factory or factory-like working conditions, which had overtones of industrial sociology and ‘pop’ psychology, since ‘species-being’ offered a suitable puzzle that connected with a familiar concern: what is it to be human? And to be ‘realised’ as such, ‘as a species’? What makes humans different from (other) animals exactly? And how should society be organised so as to fulfil this ‘essence’? Marx’s sketches provided some interesting if incomplete answers, unburdened with references and footnotes (which scholars in philosophy very ably provided over the years). He wrote that humans raise ideas creatively and therefore make history, as opposed to animals whose nature is repetitiously instinctive and narrowly species-delimited. His view was that humans can produce their social lives in the manner of any species, and can indeed remake themselves – even physically and sensuously, as well as morally and culturally – as they do so. If modern industrial production could be redeemed from the everyday numbness (or worse) of this four-fold crisis of alienation, then ultimately humans could flourish in a wholly transformed social setting. Such decidedly non-capitalistic relations of production, distribution, consumption and exchange would then permit individual fulfilment within a community worthy of the species potential. Thus, the new ‘humanist Marx’ was on-side with visionary, even religious intellectuals, and evidently uncontaminated with Stalinist political terror and Maoist cultural revolution. He was compatible with the quotidian miseries and angst of both factory work and chronic unemployment, with both the commodified sterility of bourgeois consumerism and the banality of mass-produced commercial culture. One-Dimensional Man (1964) by Herbert Marcuse was an update and re-visioning of Marx’s youthful manuscripts, which its author had been reading in the 1930s in Germany. As the ebullience of the 1960s faded into defeat, co-optation, disillusionment and ‘burn out’, so the ‘humanist Marx’ faded into the kind of manageable disputation that excites undergraduates in coursework essays and seminar debates. The end point of this process was a popular, prize-winning biography by the journalist Francis Wheen, Karl Marx: A Life (1999), reducing ‘humanism’ to the ‘humane’ in a highly readable character study. After the financial crashes of the 21st century, Marx would have to be renewed again to become relevant. What would do the trick? Marx’s magnum opus, the famously unreadable and unread Das Kapital (1867), was clearly waiting for rediscovery. Again, the ground had been well-prepared, in the usual posthumous way, by further ‘unknown’ manuscripts (this time from Marx’s middle age). This much larger compilation of (yet more) notebook materials had the editorially given and highly Germanic title Grundrisse, or ‘Foundations’ of a critique of political economy. Originally published in two volumes (1939 to 1941), it surfaced in a post-War German paperback reprint, followed by translations in the early 1970s. In popular excerpts and academic discussion, the Grundrisse was very much stage-two for students of the ‘humanist Marx’. Here was something intriguingly rough-draft, quite rambling, good discussion material, and often quite historical. But it was clearly focused on capitalism as a unique historical phenomenon and systematic social formation. While evidently less philosophical, and far more economic, than the earlier thinking, the writing was nonetheless pleasing for its lack of rigour, compared with the more closely argued opening chapters of Capital, volume 1 (which was often as far as many readers got before deciding they’d had enough). In short, the first volume of Capital was a predictable stage-three in regenerating Marx (perhaps somewhat in the manner of Doctor Who). It had long ago been dismissed by ‘mainstream’ economists, and its leaden and arcane ruminations on value – beloved by many Marxist study groups up until the 1960s – had had little contact with, or relevance to, the Soviet, Chinese, Cuban and Vietnamese communist regimes and headline Great Power issues. However, the new interest in Capital, sparked by financial op-eds in the 2000s, wasn’t a case of back to the future, reviving interest in the orthodoxies of the ‘labour theory of value’, ‘theory of surplus value’, ‘organic composition of capital’, or even ‘the falling rate of profit’. Rather, the humanist-philosophising Marx became the sit-in Marx of economics-minded anti-globalisation activists and Occupy Wall Street protesters. Protest movements, like revolutions, are often summed into history as failures since hopes and dreams are never fully realised. The fiery leaders of today often disappear into regression and obscurity, or suffer the recriminations due to those who take power and thus make concessions or engineer reversals. It is important to remember now that the spontaneously generated Occupy movement was actually quite large in terms of numbers and quite wide in terms of geographical spread: estimates suggest nearly 1,000 cities in approximately 80 countries, with many hundreds of thousands of people involved, starting in late 2011 and running strong for about a year. The globalised interlocking activities of mega-rich corporations, financial institutions and governmental agencies (including defence and security establishments) were pilloried in manifestos, statements and press releases as exploitative, anti-democratic and unjust. Generally, ‘neo-liberalism’ performed a signifying function in these critiques, referencing the winding down of welfare states and the ratcheting up of inequalities, between nations and economies, as well as between individuals and income-groups. Any number of striking statistical representations would tell you that a tiny group of people (overwhelmingly male) owned as much as the poorest 50 per cent of humanity, or that any one mega-billionaire was worth more than so-many national economies put together. Many politicians, business people, governmental regulators and ‘Lefty’ celebrities hastened to get on-side, or at least to make sympathetic noises. Das Kapital is now the book that portrays capitalists as vampires, sucking the blood of child labourers Marx was certainly present in this, though as a spectral éminence grise rather than a banner-high icon (too reminiscent of former, Cold War scenarios). But then the ideas of his activist days – particularly in the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848 ) – have worked their way through CliffsNotes and similar ‘cheat sheets’ into popular consciousness to the point where citational reference isn’t needed, and wouldn’t be helpful anyway. The Manifesto had been published anonymously, and Marx – though publicity-seeking for the socialist movement – didn’t construct himself then or later as a guru-author or cult leader (quite the opposite). The Communist Party, of the Manifesto’s title, was an aspiration generated by a tiny international committee, and even in the revolutions of 1848 it disbanded such organisation as it had, merging with the anti-authoritarian fray of broadly democratic crowds and political groups. By 2011, Marx and Engels’s ideas were freely circulating online in the animation compilation Communist Manifestoon (which is excellent, and a must-watch, by the way). The Marx-of-the-moment, though, isn’t exclusively the property of Occupy, but readily appears in thoughtful reporting and comment with rather more specific points of reference. Here a Marx-of-the-metaphor arises from Capital, vol 1, where reporters and commentators, in tune with the times, are looking for catchy critical ‘takes’ on capitalism. Style triumphs over content, and trope over proposition, making Marx’s very divergence from the dry logics of econometrics an advantage. Capital is now the book in which Marx portrays capitalists as vampires, sucking the blood of child labourers; as werewolves, howling and hungry for worker-prey; of ‘magic caps’ worn by economists to make the realities of capitalist exploitation disappear. The sarcastic Marx of the ‘send-up’ gets a look-in here, too, portraying economists as the bumbling numbskulls Seacole and Dogberry (from William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing), and then scoffing at their very evident yet hypocritical self-satisfactions. In sum, Marx’s critical edge, sharpened in successive reworkings of his one truly major published book, has come to the fore in presenting a critical yet readable ‘take’ on capitalism. Underlying this ‘take’ is a notion that capitalism is in fact a system, with essential properties that can, in principle, be specified. Marx is arguing passionately that ‘mainstream’ economists, contrary to the self-serving claims that there is no alternative, have simply got the wrong principles. Or at least his writing is helping to generate economic principles that offer a more realistic ethics, a more developed commitment to democracy, and a more thorough exploration of the relationship between markets and freedoms. This is not to say that Marx provides all this, in Capital, vol 1, or elsewhere. He doesn’t. But then we don’t solve our problems ‘by the book’, anyway. Metaphors are potent in conveying meaning, indeed metaphors are meanings as we make them. They don’t have to be a substitute for, or a ‘way in’, to more rigorous theories of proposition, syllogism and conclusion. They actually make Marx’s argument for his readers, alongside, and just as much as, his formal explication. This must be so, otherwise they wouldn’t be there. Essentially, Marx is saying (albeit in my own words here): Dear Reader, just as you don’t believe in witches, goblins and fairies, or in vampires, werewolves and magic, you should have as little faith in the concepts and theories of an economics that takes capitalism for granted, and constructs an ‘economic man’ in its image. Our social experience of capitalism is a historical product, a human construct, not a necessary or eternal truth following from human nature, God’s will, or the progress of history. You know that social systems have been radically otherwise in the past, that money is a relatively recent historical invention, and that the ever-expanding spiral of capitalist aggrandisement benefiting a tiny minority (and concomitant ‘austerities’ for the 99 per cent, as in the Occupy slogan) is a product of the past few decades. If the institutions of democracy and the laws of property are more than ever on the side of the 1 per cent (or lately, the 0.01 per cent, in some comments), then it’s time to struggle and ‘take back control’!Marx also warned that those with advantages will fight (or more usually hire poorer people to fight for them) to maintain the system from which they benefit. He also counselled that neither he nor anyone else can reasonably pretend that social change in opposition to it is all very simple and easy to implement. One of Marx’s powerful and ubiquitous metaphors from Capital, vol 1, is ‘the fetishism of commodities’, most often wrongly taken in a neo-Freudian sense to refer to an undue preoccupation with consumer products and advertisers’ values. That’s not what he meant. ‘Social relations between things, and thingly relations between people’ is rather more like it, as a summary of what’s really wrong. Or in other words, we have created a world of markets and prices (‘social relations between things’) that we experience as an everyday and often brutal reality (‘thingly relations between people’). Indeed, many of us become the kind of people who merge with economic realities and thus become inured to, or unconscious of, any brutality in the normality at all. Marx’s ‘take’ on capitalism is that the social world could be otherwise, less brutal and less destructive, if we organise to make it otherwise. But it won’t, if we don’t.

I think that's exactly right, David. There's been a lot of concern in science about this kind of publication bias affecting the integrity of science and the perceptions of integrity of science. There's been a lot of efforts to try and clean it up in recent years. On the specific question of bilingualism, this study doesn't debunk the idea that learning multiple languages can be good for you. It can allow you to read a different kinds of literature and travel more widely. So there's all kinds of benefits to learning multiple languages. What it does suggest, though, is that the brain benefits of bilingualism - that idea might be a little more complicated than has been presented so far.

In general. Now we're talking about 90 percent of our insect herbivores are specialists, just like the monarch, but that leaves 10 percent that are generalists that have wider host ranges, and I've actually just finished a study at the University of Delaware looking at how well these generalists are able to use plants that they did not co-evolve with, and I looked at things like the white martussic(ph) moth, which is the most generalized insect in the mid-Atlantic state, and the bag worm, which is the second-most-generalized insects, and they have dozens and dozens of plant genera that they can eat. But when I try to rear them on plants that evolved in China, in almost all cases they died in the first - or right after they were hatched out of their egg. And it was very few exceptions. The bag worm, for example, did survive on Norway maple, but that was the only alien that it survived on.

Hi my name is Glenn Weyant and I am a sounds sculptor living in Tucson, Arizona. One of the passions I have right now is amplifying objects, both found and in public spaces, that sort of thing. The way that I do this is a use a contact microphone, which is very similar to a stethoscope in that you place it on something and it picks up the vibrations and the sounds that are occurring from that object. What I did was go down to Nogales, Arizona, which is a town on the border with Mexico and the United States. There is a wall that separates the United States from Mexico in Nogales. It is made of mostly steel salvaged from helicopter pads used by the U.S. military in Vietnam and Desert Storm. I went to the wall with my contact microphone and my gear, hooked up the microphone to the wall. I had a cello bow and began to play it.

Well one is Brother Derrick, whom the odds maker at Pimlico Race Course lists at three to one, and the other is Sweet Northern Saint, who's at four to one. Brother Derrick is seen as the real threat. At the Kentucky Derby he had to start in the number 18 post position in a crowded field of 20 horses, that put him all the way on the outside of the track. He had to slow down a couple of times in the pack, but still he recovered to finish fourth and the feeling is he really didn't get a chance to show his full power.

He - it's - I mean, you may remember, Neal, when that film came out -I think it's 1957, thereabouts - it was a real landmark. And in an industry that had to sometimes excise scenes with integrated jazz bands - for example, the Benny Goodman Quartet - before they could run in the South, the idea of a black actor and a white actor portraying characters who were chained together was of enormous symbolic significance in - during the civil rights movement. And, in fact, you mentioned his breakthrough. His breakthrough came earlier. I mean, I remember him as Houdini in the film of the same name, playing another famous Jew. And he...

I think that at this point in #MeToo - you know, we're two years into the sort of latest, most public phase - you know, it's been, as Caitlin said, you know, these two years of many very public allegations. And I do think it's a really great time to think about what consequences are appropriate, how do we do investigations correctly? I do think it's a great time to think about what justice looks like and how to really serve that for all parties involved in these kinds of things. But the concern I have is that a lot of the conversations that I've seen around what does justice look like seem to sort of treat it as a zero-sum game where if we say we're concerned about maybe someone faced consequences that were too severe, maybe we don't like the way the investigation went, then it seems to go so quickly to shaming the women who came forward. So women who had allegations against this man who has worked at the LA Times - they came forward. They said certain things. And we can say, you know, we think, well, how should the LA Times have handled this, or how should we handle this as a public responding to these allegations?

Not surprisingly, Barry recommends that everyone anywhere near a flood zone, get to know their policy, look at the details. He says underestimating risks, is a frequent mistake. Less than 18 percent of Americans have flood insurance, but there is some confusion. The fact is, no one but the Federal Government will give you flood insurance. What a lot of homeowners don't understand, is that their home-owners policy will cover fire or wind damage, but only insurance through the National Flood Insurance Program covers them in case of a flood. Mike Barry says, another problem is that people just don't expect to flood.

Well, Angela Merkel wants very tough - and here's the key word - enforceable limits on the level of greenhouse gases in the air. She wants to cut them in half by mid-century and she's been pressing other G-8 nations on that issue. The White House says that's the wrong approach. It has not signed on. President Bush has instead proposed - just last week, in fact - a series of international summits to set some goals. Again, no targets, some goals. The official position from the White House is, hey, there's a lot we all agree on here, but don't look for any specifics.

How is it we live in a society that places different values on different human lives? Why isn't Wallace's life worth the same amount of police resources as someone else's? Why doesn't his case call for the same length segment as someone else's? The color of a missing person's skin does affect how much or how little their case will be covered. I know this. I researched the topic as a journalism student. But no amount of research could prepare me for being the person trying to get my missing loved one's picture on the news. No statistic could keep me from getting my feelings hurt when news producers and assignment desk editors say, well, if there's nothing new, we're not going to do the story. Maybe it's as hard for people to look at Wallace's photo and think, possible victim, but the reality is big, strong black men are one of the more typical victims in violent crimes. A few weeks ago, I attended the funeral of a big, strong black 24-year-old man. He was friend of Wallace's, a good guy, and he was the victim of a violent crime.

Here's an email we have from Lavi Salawe(ph) in Los Angeles: My friend Richard Adams died in Los Angeles on Monday, December 17. He was the plaintiff in the first federal lawsuit to demand recognition of same-sex marriage after he married Tony Sullivan in Boulder, Colorado, in 1975. Adams filed a green card petition for Sullivan as his spouse and received a one-sentence denial from the L.A. district director of the NINS: You have failed to establish that a bona fide marital relationship can exist between two - I'm going to use the word he's used in this quotation - faggots. That set off a decade-long legal battle. They lost. The couple, however, we together until the end. I was with Richard and Tony on Saturday morning, two days before his death at their home in Hollywood, working with them on a challenge to DOMA, that's the Defense of Marriage Act, and an almost complete documentary film about their life and their long battle.

Well, I love hearing that want, need, wear, read thing because I think the point is you have to have a plan that is grounded in your values about how you see consumerism, how you see commercialism, how you see all these different issues. You know, one of my rules that - and I'm admittedly not great at it yet but I've got to practice is this sort of, like, one in, one out. Like, we can welcome any toy or any gift into the house. If something goes out, then we donate it or share it. And, like, just teaching that sort of, like, we have - we're very fortunate. We have everything we need - we have running water, we have vaccines, we have, you know, good food to eat, all that kind of stuff. So everything passed that is something where we want to keep some balance. The other really important tip is if you're fortunate enough to have grandparents in your kid's life, know that they are the enemy, and they will undermine whatever plan you have...

She had, in fact, done that. Actually, she hadn't hacked into it. She'd hired somebody to do it, and that was what was interesting to me, is that there are these concerns, these businesses out there, probably overseas, who say that for Web-based email, you give them a $100, and they will give you the password of whatever email address you want. And off she went from there. She hacked - she purchased the password for her boyfriend, then she purchased the password for his wife, then she purchased a password for his other girlfriends and then for his kids, and from there started harassing him and the feds got involved.

Well, I was trading a lot of messages and live tweeting myself last night. And there were lots of people cracking jokes about it online. But I coined a new term for watching this production, which was bored-watching. Despite special effects, like a computer-generated Tinkerbell, and some great production numbers, the two leads just weren't charismatic enough to command that stage. And that three-hour length was like an endurance test. So by the midpoint, people were posting all kinds of odd jokes. And by the end, I saw this post from an account named @sloganagain. And they said, next year, they should just give Meryl Streep a bottle of vodka and the script to "Oklahoma!" and see what she does.

The things we make have one supreme quality — they live longer than us. We perish, they survive; we have one life, they have many lives, and in each life they can mean different things. Which means that, while we all have one biography, they have many. I want this morning to talk about the story, the biography — or rather the biographies — of one particular object, one remarkable thing. It doesn't, I agree, look very much. It's about the size of a rugby ball. It's made of clay, and it's been fashioned into a cylinder shape, covered with close writing and then baked dry in the sun. And as you can see, it's been knocked about a bit, which is not surprising because it was made two and a half thousand years ago and was dug up in 1879. But today, this thing is, I believe, a major player in the politics of the Middle East. And it's an object with fascinating stories and stories that are by no means over yet. The story begins in the Iran-Iraq war and that series of events that culminated in the invasion of Iraq by foreign forces, the removal of a despotic ruler and instant regime change. And I want to begin with one episode from that sequence of events that most of you would be very familiar with, Belshazzar's feast — because we're talking about the Iran-Iraq war of 539 BC. And the parallels between the events of 539 BC and 2003 and in between are startling. What you're looking at is Rembrandt's painting, now in the National Gallery in London, illustrating the text from the prophet Daniel in the Hebrew scriptures. And you all know roughly the story. Belshazzar, the son of Nebuchadnezzar, Nebuchadnezzar who'd conquered Israel, sacked Jerusalem and captured the people and taken the Jews back to Babylon. Not only the Jews, he'd taken the temple vessels. He'd ransacked, desecrated the temple. And the great gold vessels of the temple in Jerusalem had been taken to Babylon. Belshazzar, his son, decides to have a feast. And in order to make it even more exciting, he added a bit of sacrilege to the rest of the fun, and he brings out the temple vessels. He's already at war with the Iranians, with the king of Persia. And that night, Daniel tells us, at the height of the festivities a hand appeared and wrote on the wall, "You are weighed in the balance and found wanting, and your kingdom is handed over to the Medes and the Persians." And that very night Cyrus, king of the Persians, entered Babylon and the whole regime of Belshazzar fell. It is, of course, a great moment in the history of the Jewish people. It's a great story. It's story we all know. "The writing on the wall" is part of our everyday language. What happened next was remarkable, and it's where our cylinder enters the story. Cyrus, king of the Persians, has entered Babylon without a fight — the great empire of Babylon, which ran from central southern Iraq to the Mediterranean, falls to Cyrus. And Cyrus makes a declaration. And that is what this cylinder is, the declaration made by the ruler guided by God who had toppled the Iraqi despot and was going to bring freedom to the people. In ringing Babylonian — it was written in Babylonian — he says, "I am Cyrus, king of all the universe, the great king, the powerful king, king of Babylon, king of the four quarters of the world." They're not shy of hyperbole as you can see. This is probably the first real press release by a victorious army that we've got. And it's written, as we'll see in due course, by very skilled P.R. consultants. So the hyperbole is not actually surprising. And what is the great king, the powerful king, the king of the four quarters of the world going to do? He goes on to say that, having conquered Babylon, he will at once let all the peoples that the Babylonians — Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar — have captured and enslaved go free. He'll let them return to their countries. And more important, he will let them all recover the gods, the statues, the temple vessels that had been confiscated. All the peoples that the Babylonians had repressed and removed will go home, and they'll take with them their gods. And they'll be able to restore their altars and to worship their gods in their own way, in their own place. This is the decree, this object is the evidence for the fact that the Jews, after the exile in Babylon, the years they'd spent sitting by the waters of Babylon, weeping when they remembered Jerusalem, those Jews were allowed to go home. They were allowed to return to Jerusalem and to rebuild the temple. It's a central document in Jewish history. And the Book of Chronicles, the Book of Ezra in the Hebrew scriptures reported in ringing terms. This is the Jewish version of the same story. "Thus said Cyrus, king of Persia, 'All the kingdoms of the earth have the Lord God of heaven given thee, and he has charged me to build him a house in Jerusalem. Who is there among you of his people? The Lord God be with him, and let him go up.'" "Go up" — aaleh. The central element, still, of the notion of return, a central part of the life of Judaism. As you all know, that return from exile, the second temple, reshaped Judaism. And that change, that great historic moment, was made possible by Cyrus, the king of Persia, reported for us in Hebrew in scripture and in Babylonian in clay. Two great texts, what about the politics? What was going on was the fundamental shift in Middle Eastern history. The empire of Iran, the Medes and the Persians, united under Cyrus, became the first great world empire. Cyrus begins in the 530s BC. And by the time of his son Darius, the whole of the eastern Mediterranean is under Persian control. This empire is, in fact, the Middle East as we now know it, and it's what shapes the Middle East as we now know it. It was the largest empire the world had known until then. Much more important, it was the first multicultural, multifaith state on a huge scale. And it had to be run in a quite new way. It had to be run in different languages. The fact that this decree is in Babylonian says one thing. And it had to recognize their different habits, different peoples, different religions, different faiths. All of those are respected by Cyrus. Cyrus sets up a model of how you run a great multinational, multifaith, multicultural society. And the result of that was an empire that included the areas you see on the screen, and which survived for 200 years of stability until it was shattered by Alexander. It left a dream of the Middle East as a unit, and a unit where people of different faiths could live together. The Greek invasions ended that. And of course, Alexander couldn't sustain a government and it fragmented. But what Cyrus represented remained absolutely central. The Greek historian Xenophon wrote his book "Cyropaedia" promoting Cyrus as the great ruler. And throughout European culture afterward, Cyrus remained the model. This is a 16th century image to show you how widespread his veneration actually was. And Xenophon's book on Cyrus on how you ran a diverse society was one of the great textbooks that inspired the Founding Fathers of the American Revolution. Jefferson was a great admirer — the ideals of Cyrus obviously speaking to those 18th century ideals of how you create religious tolerance in a new state. Meanwhile, back in Babylon, things had not been going well. After Alexander, the other empires, Babylon declines, falls into ruins, and all the traces of the great Babylonian empire are lost — until 1879 when the cylinder is discovered by a British Museum exhibition digging in Babylon. And it enters now another story. It enters that great debate in the middle of the 19th century: Are the scriptures reliable? Can we trust them? We only knew about the return of the Jews and the decree of Cyrus from the Hebrew scriptures. No other evidence. Suddenly, this appeared. And great excitement to a world where those who believed in the scriptures had had their faith in creation shaken by evolution, by geology, here was evidence that the scriptures were historically true. It's a great 19th century moment. But — and this, of course, is where it becomes complicated — the facts were true, hurrah for archeology, but the interpretation was rather more complicated. Because the cylinder account and the Hebrew Bible account differ in one key respect. The Babylonian cylinder is written by the priests of the great god of Bablyon, Marduk. And, not surprisingly, they tell you that all this was done by Marduk. "Marduk, we hold, called Cyrus by his name." Marduk takes Cyrus by the hand, calls him to shepherd his people and gives him the rule of Babylon. Marduk tells Cyrus that he will do these great, generous things of setting the people free. And this is why we should all be grateful to and worship Marduk. The Hebrew writers in the Old Testament, you will not be surprised to learn, take a rather different view of this. For them, of course, it can't possibly by Marduk that made all this happen. It can only be Jehovah. And so in Isaiah, we have the wonderful texts giving all the credit of this, not to Marduk but to the Lord God of Israel — the Lord God of Israel who also called Cyrus by name, also takes Cyrus by the hand and talks of him shepherding his people. It's a remarkable example of two different priestly appropriations of the same event, two different religious takeovers of a political fact. God, we know, is usually on the side of the big battalions. The question is, which god was it? And the debate unsettles everybody in the 19th century to realize that the Hebrew scriptures are part of a much wider world of religion. And it's quite clear the cylinder is older than the text of Isaiah, and yet, Jehovah is speaking in words very similar to those used by Marduk. And there's a slight sense that Isaiah knows this, because he says, this is God speaking, of course, "I have called thee by thy name though thou hast not known me." I think it's recognized that Cyrus doesn't realize that he's acting under orders from Jehovah. And equally, he'd have been surprised that he was acting under orders from Marduk. Because interestingly, of course, Cyrus is a good Iranian with a totally different set of gods who are not mentioned in any of these texts. (Laughter) That's 1879. 40 years on and we're in 1917, and the cylinder enters a different world. This time, the real politics of the contemporary world — the year of the Balfour Declaration, the year when the new imperial power in the Middle East, Britain, decides that it will declare a Jewish national home, it will allow the Jews to return. And the response to this by the Jewish population in Eastern Europe is rhapsodic. And across Eastern Europe, Jews display pictures of Cyrus and of George V side by side — the two great rulers who have allowed the return to Jerusalem. And the Cyrus cylinder comes back into public view and the text of this as a demonstration of why what is going to happen after the war is over in 1918 is part of a divine plan. You all know what happened. The state of Israel is setup, and 50 years later, in the late 60s, it's clear that Britain's role as the imperial power is over. And another story of the cylinder begins. The region, the U.K. and the U.S. decide, has to be kept safe from communism, and the superpower that will be created to do this would be Iran, the Shah. And so the Shah invents an Iranian history, or a return to Iranian history, that puts him in the center of a great tradition and produces coins showing himself with the Cyrus cylinder. When he has his great celebrations in Persepolis, he summons the cylinder and the cylinder is lent by the British Museum, goes to Tehran, and is part of those great celebrations of the Pahlavi dynasty. Cyrus cylinder: guarantor of the Shah. 10 years later, another story: Iranian Revolution, 1979. Islamic revolution, no more Cyrus; we're not interested in that history, we're interested in Islamic Iran — until Iraq, the new superpower that we've all decided should be in the region, attacks. Then another Iran-Iraq war. And it becomes critical for the Iranians to remember their great past, their great past when they fought Iraq and won. It becomes critical to find a symbol that will pull together all Iranians — Muslims and non-Muslims, Christians, Zoroastrians, Jews living in Iran, people who are devout, not devout. And the obvious emblem is Cyrus. So when the British Museum and Tehran National Musuem cooperate and work together, as we've been doing, the Iranians ask for one thing only as a loan. It's the only object they want. They want to borrow the Cyrus cylinder. And last year, the Cyrus cylinder went to Tehran for the second time. It's shown being presented here, put into its case by the director of the National Museum of Tehran, one of the many women in Iran in very senior positions, Mrs. Ardakani. It was a huge event. This is the other side of that same picture. It's seen in Tehran by between one and two million people in the space of a few months. This is beyond any blockbuster exhibition in the West. And it's the subject of a huge debate about what this cylinder means, what Cyrus means, but above all, Cyrus as articulated through this cylinder — Cyrus as the defender of the homeland, the champion, of course, of Iranian identity and of the Iranian peoples, tolerant of all faiths. And in the current Iran, Zoroastrians and Christians have guaranteed places in the Iranian parliament, something to be very, very proud of. To see this object in Tehran, thousands of Jews living in Iran came to Tehran to see it. It became a great emblem, a great subject of debate about what Iran is at home and abroad. Is Iran still to be the defender of the oppressed? Will Iran set free the people that the tyrants have enslaved and expropriated? This is heady national rhetoric, and it was all put together in a great pageant launching the return. Here you see this out-sized Cyrus cylinder on the stage with great figures from Iranian history gathering to take their place in the heritage of Iran. It was a narrative presented by the president himself. And for me, to take this object to Iran, to be allowed to take this object to Iran was to be allowed to be part of an extraordinary debate led at the highest levels about what Iran is, what different Irans there are and how the different histories of Iran might shape the world today. It's a debate that's still continuing, and it will continue to rumble, because this object is one of the great declarations of a human aspiration. It stands with the American constitution. It certainly says far more about real freedoms than Magna Carta. It is a document that can mean so many things, for Iran and for the region. A replica of this is at the United Nations. In New York this autumn, it will be present when the great debates about the future of the Middle East take place. And I want to finish by asking you what the next story will be in which this object figures. It will appear, certainly, in many more Middle Eastern stories. And what story of the Middle East, what story of the world, do you want to see reflecting what is said, what is expressed in this cylinder? The right of peoples to live together in the same state, worshiping differently, freely — a Middle East, a world, in which religion is not the subject of division or of debate. In the world of the Middle East at the moment, the debates are, as you know, shrill. But I think it's possible that the most powerful and the wisest voice of all of them may well be the voice of this mute thing, the Cyrus cylinder. Thank you. (Applause)

You're listening to Talk of the Nation: Science Friday. I'm Ira Flatow. Are you a fan of Barack Obama on Facebook? Over - oh, almost three and a half million people are, or maybe you're one of the 23,000 people who follow Al Gore on Twitter, signing on to get update in his doings; or maybe you're a content provider, sending your videos to YouTube or your photos to Flickr; or perhaps you're listening to Science Friday right now, or your avatar is, in Second Life; or maybe you're Twittering us right now at SciFri, as we talk about this whole new world of social communities. From the election to hurricane-recovery efforts, 2008 was really a big year for social media online, and joining me now is one of the biggest proponents of interaction and interconnection, Tim O'Reilly. He's founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media. You might know them from the line of animal computer books or the magazines, such as a Make and Craft, or you might know Tim from Twitter as some 19,000 people do. They're Twitter partners with them. Welcome to the program, Tim. Mr. TIM O'REILLY (Founder, O'Reilly Media): Thanks for having me.

Oh, it's only problems. I mean, this is really hard. You know, a campaign is incredibly difficult and full of wear and tear on the best day. And it's emotionally exhausting and draining, and this is only going to make it more difficult. But as anybody who's faced cancer will tell you: What's the alternative, you know? If you could do it with cancer or without cancer, you'd do it without cancer. But if you're facing the diagnosis she is and your choice is do I keep doing what I dreamt of or do I go home and have everybody wait for me to die. And if that - you know, I respect her choice.