And a lot of people might ask, how are you measuring innovation and creativity?

Well, most people measure innovation typically by looking at rates of patenting. Now people have become to track the number of start-up companies emerging in urban centers or the venture capital. And the good news is that cities are upping the ante. New York now, Manhattan is the second highest center for venture capital-backed start-up companies behind only Silicon Valley. But the other caution I wanted to make, and I think you know and folks listening know I'm a dyed-in-the-wool urbanist, that also places like Silicon Valley, which are somewhat car-dependent, can work. They can emulate many of the functions of the city.

So as we begin to build denser cities, the key is not just piling up people in buildings higher and higher and higher and creating vertical suburbs where people just interact in the building, it's to build cities that can be dense, that can have multi-story buildings, that can be close together. But having that interaction is a key part of keeping our cities innovation and creative not only here but in those emerging economies around the world.

Is there a difference in expense as well?Some of those older buildings in New York, hardly any place in Manhattan that anyone would describe as cheap, but they're less expensive in SoHo or Chelsea than they are in one of those big high-rise buildings in Midtown.


Yeah. I mean, maybe you should - give it a shot. And then let me try it after.

That is so good.

Converted her. Fan of grapefruit.

You know why?'Cause it doesn't taste like grapefruit.

Right. Is it good?Is it to boozy?


Colin Powell - not one black candidate on the ticket, but two. That would be remarkable.

Well, let's also remember Colin Powell is a Republican. He would establish a kind of bipartisan bridge. And if you want to say, yes, it's a ticket of two African-Americans, which it would be, it is already a ticket of one African-American. So people who have perhaps a problem with that might not necessarily have that much more of a problem with two.

And I think that the advantage that it would have would be to say, we're kind of, in a sense, taking race off the table here. We're not talking about electing the first black president. We're asking you to vote for Barack Obama and Colin Powell and look at those two individuals.

It's a really interesting suggestion, I would imagine that a number of Democrats would say, wait a minute, he was on the wrong side on Iraq. Plus, we've got our own guys. We want a Democrat, a real Democrat. Who's out there?


The Staples Singers, Booker T and the MGs, Isaac Hayes and more - but the Stax tale isn't just one of another record company that became an international sensation. It's a story of tragedy - business and personal. But most importantly, it's a tale that features racial harmony in a city with a troubled racial history. In the late '50s and early '60s, Memphis, Tennessee was a city divided.

It was a city that you might say had hate pulsing through its veins.

That's author Robert Gordon. He lives in Memphis. His new book is "Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion. "But Stax didn't start as an explosion of soul. The owners of Stax Records, Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton, set out to do something very different.

They were two white siblings. Jim was a white country fiddle player. You just wouldn't believe how far black music was from their minds at the time.


Well, here's my question for you as a photographer. When you have a person who is as photographed as Barack Obama has been and for God's sake is going to be for the next four years, how do you find a shot that separates you from the rest of the crowd of photographers when he is your subject and target?

Well, certainly, that is an exceedingly difficult thing to do. But you try and capture, you know, the moment because he is a man that connects with the crowd and with the message that he has. So you're looking for that little twinkle in his eye or that little different look that he may have.

But frankly, Tony, a lot of my work was gauging the crowd as they were entranced with the day, and it was such a wonderful group - such a wonderful experience for ua all to be there. And I tried to capture some of this on film because there were black people, there were white people, there were Asian people, there were brown people there. And I have never been in a mob like today, just in terms of the density of the crowd. But everyone was so cool. And when they announced that - when they introduced the then-president-elect and he came - I mean, it was a roar, and you try and capture some of that on film.

Now, I have about 20 seconds for you to answer this. When he actually put his hand on the Bible and said - and accepted the oath, were your cameras trained on the crowd at that moment and did you get a shot?


At dusk tonight - the Belmont stakes, and an engaging chestnut named California Chrome has a chance to be the first horse to win the Triple Crown - a sweep of all three of the major thoroughbred races since 1978. We're honored now to be joined by Laura Hillenbrand. She's a horse rider by trade, of course she's author of the perpetual best-selling "Seabiscuit. "Laura, thanks so much for being with us.

I'm so happy to be here Scott.

What is there about the Belmont stakes that frustrates so many great four-legged athletes who've already won two big races?

They call it the test of their champion for a reason. It is a tricky race. It's run around the biggest track in the country so strategy is different. You have to move a different place. It's a race that requires a lot of the jockey.

The thing that makes it the hardest in terms of sweeping the whole Triple Crown is the horse that gets there with a chance to win it as California Chrome has. They've already competed in the Derby and the Preakness, which are two incredibly difficult races. And now, in the span of five weeks, they have to try the third one. And it's the hardest one of all, the longest one of all. It's really asking a huge amount of them. And that's why, in my whole racing fan life, I have never seen a horse sweep the Triple Crown. I've seen 12 horses go to the Belmont with a chance to win it, and all of them have failed.

California Chrome is called the people's horse, kind of like Seabiscuit.


(Laughter).

I was going to go as Robert Siegel, so that'll be perfect.

Esquire magazine's editor at large A. J. Jacobs. Happy Halloween, A. J.

Thank you. Happy Halloween, Scott.


Yeah, they hired an engineer from Southern California, a guy named John Minasian. And Minasian was an expert in towers, and he built rocket gantries for Cape Canaveral for the Saturn rockets. He also built missile testing gantries for the Air Force at Edwards Air Force Base and broadcast towers. And he contributed pretty significantly to the Needle design in terms of - for one thing, being from Southern California, he'd studied with Richter at Caltech. He said you're going to - we're going to put in a foundation that will stand the test of time.

Mm-hmm. And it has been and, you know, you're in a very tectonic part of the world. There are a lot of earthquakes that happen here. I imagine that was taken into account in the design.

Yeah. They did wind tunnel test at the University of Washington, and they basically doubled the load so that it was twice the required code at the time. I talked to an engineer who worked on the project says it could - it'll stay standing with a nine point, you know, quake.

Wow. Well, and was it designed with the Cold War in mind?We were right in the middle of the coldest past of the Cold War at that time.


Well, they all have different - they work differently, you know, in terms of the receptors they hit, in terms of how they're metabolized in our body and how they interact with our body's tissue. So each one is a very different animal in trying to attack.

Is this something that a drug company would be interested in developing, if you found some research or did some of the basic research?

I really wish it would, but I think a lot of big drug companies don't feel that drug addicts are a great investment. So they've kind of shied away from looking at therapies for addiction. I wish they would get more involved, that's for sure.

Well, what about something for an overdose?You don't have to be a drug addict to have an overdose.


In the fall of 2017, Bowe Bergdahl was dishonorably discharged from the U. S.  Army for deserting his post in Afghanistan years earlier. His rank was reduced. He had to pay a fine, but he did avoid prison time. And on the day Bergdahl was sentenced, President Trump tweeted that his sentence was a, quote, "complete and total disgrace. "This wasn't the first time Trump had weighed in on the case. On the campaign trail, he had called Bergdahl a dirty, rotten traitor and said he should be executed for deserting.

Now, this week, a panel of military judges ruled that Trump's comments were evidence of what's called unlawful command influence. That's when someone higher up on the chain of command tries to influence the outcome of a military trial. Here to further explain unlawful command influence is Stephen Vladeck. He teaches military justice at the University of Texas School of Law. Welcome.

Thanks for having me.

So I should first mention that while these military judges did find evidence of unlawful command influence, they still declined to change Bergdahl's sentence in any way. Bergdahl still lost his appeal. That said, what were the specific comments from Trump that these judges took issue with?


It's going to be tough to do that tonight if there's a clear trend early, and there's a reason why, it's the Internet. Everyone's going to be look at the Internet. The Internet's going to be full of all kinds of numbers, exit polls, there are going to be all sorts of people predicting one way or another.

And the cable operators, the cable television news operations, CNN, Fox, MSNBC are going to in a tremendous competition to see which one of them can call it first, and that's going to pull the broadcasters over. So I don't think people in California can expect that the East Coast will not be talking about a winner, if there is a clear winner, before the polls close in California. Now, that isn't necessarily a good thing, I'm not trying to put a. . .

Right.

Put a happy face on it, it does make people in California feel angry to hear the race declared over hours before the polls close in that state. But because it's going to be on the Internet just about every where, and I suspect we'll start seeing it on cable television, it's going to be hard for the networks to resist the temptation to do the same.


Who happens to be black.

You know.

And happens to be benched right now.

Happens to be benched. What do you make of this?I think Vince's issues I think are quite different from Tarvaris. I think there was a lot of pressure on Vince from the time he came out of Texas to kind of be the black Johnny Unitas, and he's going to - they'll both have an opportunity to sit and watch, and hopefully come back with a vengeance.

One really quick other black quarterback not in the league at the moment, in Atlanta, Michael Vick. Is Matt Ryan, the replacement, making Atlanta Falcon fans forget Michael Vick?


Oh, by all means. I mean, the family in particular has been just, I mean, courageous. I've been at this 50 years now, and sometimes families withdraw, and we understand that. But this family has been a model of participation in all of the rallies, the demonstrations that we've had, and some of the members will be arrested. Therefore, they have sent a message across the city, indeed across the nation, rallying young people because Sean was about 22, 23, rallying young people to this cause.

Now, you and Reverend Sharpton's National Action Network were involved in protests around the shooting death of Amadou Diallo. Civil disobedience played a big role in those protests. What do you think those protests taught you, or what did you learn from them?

Well, you know, we've been doing this across the years. There's nothing new about a civil disobedience. But having 1,200 people arrested in a daily civil disobedience venture is phenomenal. It made an impact upon the police department itself and upon the politics in New York. Giuliani was the mayor at that time.

We hope that we will have a residential law. That is to say that policemen should live where they work. So that would mean you kill where you live. And I suspect that if you're going to kill where you live, you'll be more inclined not to kill, and we hope that there would be an independent civilian complaint review board that would review the behavior of the police.


So what is the argument that tech companies make about the feasibility of designing technology that would satisfy everyone's concerns?

We're not all on the same page here. So most of us in the technology community are opposed to what we call backdoors that would allow law enforcement to tap in. And the reason is is if you put a backdoor in, hackers can presumably get a hold of that backdoor as well and break it open. So you make systems less secure for everyone if you do that.

At a Senate hearing this month, FBI Director James Comey says he thinks that experts in this field aren't really trying hard enough to give the government access without also putting confidential data at risk. That is, I took it to mean that he's - thinks that if you try hard enough, you can think of something that is not a backdoor, that's different so that not everybody could get into it.

You know, yes, you can always argue that a backdoor can be built that's more secure, you know, and more difficult to get to and only law enforcement's going to get there. But nobody in the field of security believes that's ultimately going to provide this same protection that a tight end-to-end solution has without a backdoor. So I don't think it's a lack of will. I think it's an issue of what people view as constitutional rights under the Fourth Amendment, number one, and what customers and business partners expect around the world from secure computing systems. And it's a difference of view.


I want to ask you about an episode in which math, science figures into the plot even if you don't realize it at first. And this is "Springfield or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Legalized Gambling," where Homer gets endowed with Henry Kissinger's brain.

Of course, that comes about because - I don't know how to explain this - Henry Kissinger uses the loo, and his thick glasses fall into the loo. And Homer puts them on, and he's endowed with this perception.

Well, the thing about that is that it sounds like Pythagoras' theorem. So he gets it all wrong. It sounds right, but it's wrong. And he's actually quoting the scarecrow from "The Wizard of Oz" - because when the scarecrow gets his diploma, he reels off exactly the same equation. It sounds impressive, but it's actually all wrong.

And you say in the book that your judgment is, it was calculatedly wrong because of the way Ray Bolger must have had to rehearse to be able to make that recitation.


Like, do they even know really how to describe it?

It's been heart-wrenching. You know, I'm a parent. I have a have an almost 3-year-old, and I, you know, had to try to interview some kids about that age over the last week and even kids a little bit older. One in particular who sticks out of my mind was a 7-year-old who, you know, I asked one question - who'd you come to the U. S.  with?She said, my aunt, and then she just broke down in tears and couldn't really say anything else.

The government is basically making the argument that they want to make sure that they connect kids with their proper legal guardians. I mean, is that in conflict with trying to protect them?

It is absolutely the government's responsibility above all to reunify kids with parents where that's appropriate and where that's in their best interest. What really worried me about speaking with kids on the border who had been held for, as I said, weeks in the Clint detention facility was that there has no evidence that anyone was making any efforts to reunify these kids with parents. I personally started tracking down parents where I could to connect them with their children. And in every case, they had had no idea where their child was, and no one had contacted them.


Hmm. Was this a candidate for the - one of your Ig Nobel Prizes?

Everything's a candidate for the Ig Nobel Prize. This one has not won. But the disturbing thing here is what it says that - is that there's a lot of science out there done over generations that assumes that damage to bones had to come from teeth or from knives beforehand. Now we know a lot of damage to bones happens from the chemicals inside the body. So there's a lot science out there that people believe in that may not be quite so correct.

And is that one of the reasons why you put a lot of these stories together in your book, to talk about what science is out there that people may not be aware of?

Yeah, yeah. And I'd like to say that this particular story, by the way, I'm kind of happy with the headline I came up with for that. I called it "The Tasting of the Shrew. "


They have. About 40-plus have gone, probably as we talk, a number of them have left.

He's not considered a good candidate to lead the party to victory in a general election, I gather.

No, no, he's not. The leadership's come to him very late in life. He's a poor communicator. And that makes it very difficult to win over votes. He excites a section of Britain young people who will turn out in their thousands for his rallies and his meet and. . .

They feel the Bern.

They feel the Bern. The comparisons, again, you can see parallels between what is happening in Britain with what is happening in America. And they're not false. They're not invented.

Kevin Maguire of the Daily Mirror who joined us on Skype, thanks very much for being with us.


So, what I think is, at least, a part of the solution is, when we do something, to take a small group and to stay with them. I stayed with a group of girls for a year at a time for over a decade, and I did see two or three people who called me a couple of years later, Judge, I just want to tell you how well I am doing.

It's not a great answer. It's not the answer everybody wants to hear because it's not a panacea, and it's work intensive while the success rate is low, but I think it's what has to be done.

Judge, always great to talk to you.

Always.

That was News & Notes contributor, Judge Lynn Toler. She's a former municipal court judge and now hosts the syndicated television show, "Divorce Court. "She joined us from the studios of KJZZ in Temple, Arizona.


I agree. I was shocked - really shocked - when I found them. And then many things happened to me with Chopin through my life.

Such as?

Well (laughter), you're not going to believe this if you don't believe in the unknown normal. But I had a death mask of Chopin given to me. Some friends came over, and they said, what's that?I said, it's death mask of Chopin. That's what they used to do in those days. When someone died, they'd get someone to put wax on his face and make this death mask as a memorial. I took it off - down. I said, please be careful with it because it's, you know, very unique. There are only two or three in the world. My wife was there. My son was there - he was about 17 - and these two friends. And, suddenly, a fluid started coming out of one of the eyes. And I put my hand into this fluid, and it was salty. So I guess there was no question in my mind these were tears. What I felt was that Chopin was happy that he could communicate somehow with the current world.

You know, I learned one thing. People who are negative about these kinds of unknown normal things - they will never change. They'll always find another way that it could've happened or try to find another way that it could've happened. But I just give up try to convince them because they won't ever be convinced. The ones who are skeptics - once they hear about it, they say, oh, actually, it's real.


Exactly.

They look like USB drives that you could sneak into a classroom.

And put in a backpack - and, frankly, most parents aren't going to have the first clue what it is. And what the picture is underneath it, the caption says, Mom, it's a USB drive. That is expressly targeted to students. And I want to shut that practice down in my state.

Is there any difference between the suit that you put forward this week against these eight companies and the suit you filed in the spring against Juul?


The State Department has said that the ambassador concluded her three-year diplomatic assignment in Kyiv as planned, that there was no kind of retribution or she was not yanked back unceremoniously. Why are there doubts on that in the diplomatic community?

My understanding is that Ambassador Yovanovitch had been expected to stay on in her position through the end of the summer. And then suddenly in May, there was a torrent of criticism, including a tweet by the president's son, Don Jr. , calling her a joker and calling for her dismissal and a bunch of Fox News segments criticizing her. And then, lo and behold, she was called back, and the explanation was put out that this was as planned. But it was completely inconsistent with everything else we understood about her term and expected tenure in Ukraine. And the notion that this was done to coincide with a transition of power in Ukraine is very far from standard practice. That doesn't make any sense.

I can see your eyebrows raised from here about this whole story. And I guess what is the lesson that you think other State Department workers are taking from this?Is it the idea that you're vulnerable to attack from the president?Is it becoming a target of right-wing sites?Like, what is the thing that you think will have a chilling effect?

The core problem here, which Congress is appropriately focusing on in the impeachment hearings, are primarily about, is the president abusing his power and what looks like withholding military assistance to a vulnerable partner country in order to advance his political aims?So that's No. 1, and that's front and center.


Yes, of course. Even other aspects which are today very interesting, for example, pollution or noise reduction, so this was also the interest of Ferdinand Porsche to create an electric car, because there was no admission, there was no noise. Ja.

So why didn't it go into production widespread?

It went into production a few years later. In the year 1900, he further developed the idea of an electrical car with a hybrid system. So in addition to the electrical power supply, he placed two combustion engines in another car, and a few cars were sold as the first hybrid cars in the world in the year 1902.

So why did the combustion engine become predominant in the industry, do you think?

The problem was the weight of the cars. This battery pack weighs around 500 kilograms, so this was almost half the weight of the whole car. And the combustion engines, they were much smaller then. So I think it turned from the electrical engines into the combustion engines. And then they made their way to the successful, still successful, power supplies for the cars of the future.


So they're easy to identify, too.

I wish they were even easier. . .

But at least we can, and that's I think going to be really good. And that leads to this, you know, kind of futuristic way where you could put a little nanochip in the blood for people who are at risk of heart attacks, and then it could constantly have the blood under surveillance of these cells and then send a signal to one's cell phone, a heart attack app, which you would get the alert that, you know, something's brewing over the next several days.

Yeah, maybe a Facebook update, too.


Thanks. Glad to be with you.

So what we've been hearing a lot about is basically just a failure of these negotiations to move forward. Before we get to the nuts and bolts of it, from an economic level, how are people in Detroit dealing with what appears to be a reluctance on the part of the federal government to really enter into a bailout?

Well, I think there are really two key emotions that are at play in Detroit right now. One is fear. People are very scared because the auto industry is so important to metro Detroit, thousands and thousands and thousands of jobs. If one or more of the automakers were to go under, the ripple effect here would be catastrophic because the plant is affected and then the suppliers are affected and the restaurants are affected and the shopping malls are affected. So there'd be such a horrible cascading effect.

So fear is number one, and I think number two is anger. People see how roughly the automakers were treated, and people feel that they were being treated as autoworkers, roughly as well, when at the same time you see, you know, on a Sunday night Citibank gets $20 billion without a second thought. So people here are very angry about the different treatments Wall Street and the automakers have received.


And it changed your behavior with your friends and family, right?

Oh, absolutely. I became alienated from most of my friends and everything because I wasn't there for them or with them. They had out to social events and things, my social event was to get to the casino as quickly as I could in order to gain money.

And what did it do to your marriage?

Well, I got a divorce. I ended up in divorce. I ended up with my wife getting everything plus the kids. And basically, I was out in the streets trying to survive.


The happiness course has been running for a couple of weeks. Any immediate reaction?

Teachers are telling me that they themselves are finding lot of calmness, lot of improvement in their behavior because they also sit into mindfulness with their students. So that's bringing a change in the teacher's approach also.

You've been sitting in on a lot of these classes. Are you happier?

Yeah, I'm feeling happier because if my kids are happier, my teachers are happier, then an education minister himself is happier.


That was a time that postwar era in India when you had a tremendous amount of aspiration for development in the air. Nehru was the first Prime Minister of independent India. And there was a sense in the air of the chance for a collective progress that many, many different kinds of people who came from different backgrounds could actually participate in, could share in. And I think the momentum of that time also swept my own grandparents up. Their condition was precarious.

The jacket that my grandfather was wearing was borrowed. The jewelry that my grandmother is wearing was costume jewelry. I think the prosperity that you see in that image is less about the wealth that they have in hand at that moment and more about that future horizon that they might feel is already coming within their reach.

What do you think your grandfather's story might tell us about today's India?

What I think is so interesting about looking at the life of someone like my grandfather over the course of nearly a century is that you see that there is a kind of ongoing momentum of change that exists throughout his life and that takes him and those alongside him in many different directions. That these patterns of change that we see now in India have been with us for some time and have had a lot to do with the kinds of aspirations that people like my grandparents as well as my own parents grew up with.


And it's not just the president who's criticizing him. He's facing a lot of pressure from Republicans on the Hill, as well. Is that right?

That's very much so. McCabe was dragged up to Capitol Hill twice last week. He spent around eight hours testifying behind closed doors for the House Intelligence Committee. That was about Russia. And he spent a little more than eight hours with the House Oversight and House Judiciary Committees a few days later talking about the Clinton matter.

Now, there's one thing in particular that Republicans want to talk to McCabe about, and that's a senior FBI agent by the name of Peter Strzok, who's been in the news a lot. He worked on both the Mueller probe and the Clinton investigation, and he sent highly charged, politically charged text messages about Trump. Now, Strzok was removed from the Russia investigation, but those text messages have given Republicans a lot of ammunition for their allegations of political bias.

With about 30 seconds left, what sort of effect does all of this criticism from the president, from Republicans on the Hill have on the FBI?


. . . they don't mean. . .

Herring, (unintelligible).

Well, they don't mean exactly what you may think by that. Herrings have a whole separate system connected to the swim bladder where they're pushing air around and sometimes letting it loose. And this is how they rise and fall in the water. And so it's by letting the air loose that they apparently also communicate. And at the Ig Nobel ceremony, one of the teams, who's from the Sweden, told us how they got involved with this, and this turned out to be the best part of the story.

So there's these two Swedish marine biologists, and they study fish, porpoises, whatnot. And about 15 or 20 years ago, the Swedish prime minister, Carl Bildt, was sort of on the warpath, repeatedly for years, telling the Swedish public that they were being invaded by submarines from their big neighbor, from Russia. And he kept saying this and there wasn't really any proof. There was an incident, years before, that was a sort of an oddball thing, but he kept saying there are submarines, and he kept saying they're even coming into Stockholm harbor, into our capital. He had the navy, the Swedish navy, put microphones in the water in Stockholm harbor. And they came up with a recording with sounds like rapids, metallic tapping, and so they thought and the prime minister thought, OK, we've got proof. Prime minister's planning to get up in public and announce that the Russians are basically attacking us.


Conceivably they can, if there is an issue or something that's hanging fire that is of tremendous interest to the voters. I don't think Troopergate up in Alaska has ever really captured the voters' imagination. There are some people who have been following it closely, there was one determination by the legislative committee that was looking at it, now we have a somewhat different one from the executive committee. I don't think the election has been about Troopergate.

As for the death of Senator Obama's grandmother, certainly that is a tragic timing of this event, if in fact Barack Obama were to be elected president tonight, for his grandmother to have died just one day shy of having witnessed this, would be sad indeed. But whether that is going to change people's votes again, I think is unlikely.

Well Ron, we look forward to talking to you as the result unfold and we continue our coverage.

Indeed we will.


Thank you. My mistake.

. . . Just 10 days apart.

We included France, which is nice. I apologize.

No, I'm glad to include them. Is it possible Italy will leave the eurozone, or is that just talk?


Right. And the car companies wanted a bigger tax credit for consumers to buy their cars, and they didn't get that.

And I think one of the controversies over that is, who do you give it to and what do you give it for?Because you have to remember that GM, Ford and Chrysler build a substantial number of cars in Mexico and Canada. You also have carmakers like Toyota, Honda and Mercedes building cars in the United States. So, would it be American-built or built by an America-based company?And that is part of the reason why we're not seeing that.

So, GM and Chrysler will be unveiling their plans on Tuesday. What if they don't pass muster?What if Treasury doesn't like them?

First of all, the plans that they unveil on Tuesday, they will then have to go back and then finalize the terms by March 31st. There's an expectation by some people in the auto industry that they will go to the Treasury Department, say, your terms are too strict for us. Look at the economy, we can't possibly meet them. And that they'll just rewrite the terms of these loans. In fact, I would say there's a pretty wide expectation of that happening. But when the Bush administration actually gave the loans, they said that the money was meant to possibly pave the way for an orderly Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing. And so, now the question will be, can they actually restructure, or will we see one of these companies file for bankruptcy?


I'm Farai Chideya, and this is News & Notes. How much are you willing to spend on a bottle of fine wine?Thirty dollars?Maybe 60?How about more?And how do we know what makes a wine premium?There are nearly 6,000 wineries in the U. S.  African-Americans own fewer than a dozen. Stephen Sterling is one of those owners, and he's on a quest to educate African-Americans about the pleasures of fine wine.

Stephen is a co-owner of the family owned Esterlina Vineyards and Winery and Everett Ridge Vineyards and Winery. He's also the president of the Association of African-American Vintners. Welcome, Stephen.

Welcome. Thank you for having the African-American Vintners as part of your show today.

Well, give us some examples of some of the fancier places that your wine has been served.


How do we explain what happened here?

Well, this all started about 8 o'clock Pacific Time last night when this man, who, as you said, was believed to be an airline employee, stole a Horizon Airlines Q400 turboprop plane. This is a small, 80-passenger aircraft used for regional hops. He managed to take off from Sea-Tac Airport - a major airport. And he stayed airborne for about the next 60 to 90 minutes. During this time, North American Aerospace Defense Command, also known as NORAD, launched those two F-15 fighter jets from Portland, Ore. , to intercept the plane. As you heard, the man was in contact with air traffic control. They were trying to get him to land. And then just after 9 o'clock local time, the plane crashed on that small island, caught fire. NORAD says the F-15s did not fire upon the aircraft. And the man is presumed dead.

What do we know about him?

Not much. Alaska Airlines, the parent airline to Horizon Air, put out a statement saying it believes this man was a ground service agent employed by Horizon. They say that he took the plane from a maintenance position, which means that this was not a plane scheduled last night for passenger service. We don't know what motivated him to take the plane and do this. But during those communications with air traffic control, he did describe himself - and I'm quoting here - as "a broken guy with a few screws loose. "Those are his words.


As we mentioned, polls show that a strong majority of Republicans do still support the death penalty. You're one of the growing number of those, though, who have called for repealing it. And there has been a move, as we said earlier, in some red states to repeal the death penalty. What do you think accounts for that shift?Is it just about economics?

No, I don't think it's solely economics. But, again, you know, most Republicans are pro-life. And when you start looking at the abortion issue and the life issue, you start to have to ask yourself, am I being consistent when I'm looking at the death penalty?

And, you know, for the longest time, the death penalty from the criminal law standpoint was there only for society's revenge. You know, it doesn't serve the other goals of criminal law. There's no rehabilitation of anybody. There's no study that shows that it helps prevent crime. So we're really kind of in that Old Testament retribution. And I think as we move more and more away from that and then factor in the economics, there's a real reason to get rid of it.

You mentioned, though, religion in politics as well as economics. I'm curious - how do you think about the morality of this question of the death penalty?


But some of the people you were just talking about are format breakers, who are a little bit of R&B, some soul. They pull back from influences from the past but they put their own stamp on it. Sonia, what do you like right now coming out of Atlanta?What are some of your favorites?

You know, I liked hearing the bumper music that you guys are playing in between - those are current songs, but when I think about - well, you know, first it was Goodie Mob and the "Cell Therapy. "So, I was thinking about what Cee-Lo is doing now is part of Gnarls Barkley.

As a songwriter, when you think about it, this guy wrote "Don't You" for the Pussycat Dolls, turned around and that is a big commercial. I mean, this guy is an incredible talent. The album that he's put out now with Gnarls Barkley is good. I can't wait to hear what TI's going to say, now that he has been through what he has been through.

I'm a big TI fan. I am still a bit OutKast fan. You look at OutKast, just completed their ballet this past weekend. I mean, these people are looking at the music as just kind of a launching pad into a lot of different mediums and you can't help but be proud to see such talent being recognized and explored in so many different mediums.


This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Flora Lichtman, filling in for Ira Flatow, who's out today. This week, the FDA approved a new influenza vaccine for this year's flu season, and soon enough summer will be over and you'll be standing in line again at your pharmacy or doctor's office, participating in that yearly ritual - your annual vaccination allocation.

But what if that didn't have to happen?Imagine a world without the seasonal flu shot. What if one shot could protect you against flu forever and protect you against all flus, including avian flu and swine flu?

Well, you'll have to keep imagining for a while yet because there's no universal vaccine, but researchers are working on it. And joining me now to talk about the effort is Dr.  Gary Nabel. He's the head of the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases - that's part of the NIH - and he's co-author of a paper this week in the journal Science Translational Medicine on the topic. Welcome to the program, Dr.  Nabel.

Thank you.

So what's the difference between a universal vaccine and the one that I get every year?


So you get a sense of how this whole thing is going. Obviously, we should then inject alcohol into the situation. For his new show, Brad spent some time around Austin, Texas. So to cap off the visit, we made a cocktail - a paloma made out of a spirit called sotol, distilled from a plant that grows in the Texas desert.

All right. So first up. . .

Yeah.

. . . We're going to mix it with a little grapefruit. OK, I'm going to make a little grapefruit juice.


Good morning.

Jason, there's still no power on much of the island, which is astounding. It's five weeks now. What is it like?What have you seen to undertake a recovery from a hurricane when you still don't have power?

And part of what is crazy is it's not just Hurricane Maria. Hurricane Irma came through here two weeks before that. So there's some people who've been almost two months without power. But people are making an effort. They're out there. I see people, you know, cleaning up by hand. People are out there with hand tools trying to, you know, cut 2-by-4's to rebuild things when, you know, they don't have power tools. You've got people who are living in high-rises. It's kind of amazing sometimes walking around at night here in San Juan. You got these tall buildings. And you'll just see some candles flickering in the - and that's the only light in this entire high-rise.

I went out last night, actually, to try to catch some of the World Series. And some of the bars are starting to reopen. But everywhere that you go, the only power that people have is running off of generators or running off of some solar power. You really do not see people getting much power from the grid.


I also asked Precious Shumba if President Mugabe would have to leave Zimbabwe if he loses the election.

If Mugabe loses, it is widely expected he will have to negotiate on almost every facet of his life. So the issue of whether he would stay here in Zimbabwe or elsewhere entirely depends on the new administration probably led by the opposition.

Finally, I asked Precious, who lives in the poor urban heart of the capital city, why he chooses to stay in the country and if he ever questions being a journalist in Zimbabwe where his career is risky and sometimes dangerous.

It would be an act of cowardice if I were to say, I cease to be a journalist. I feel I'm accountable and needs to contribute to public discourse. So I'm not really intimidated or really afraid of what might happen to me.


Yeah. Did we once all have them and they went away somehow?Or what - why did some of us have the healthy population and some of us don't?

Well, that's all down to exposures. And, you know, one of the things that clearly can deplete a microbiome of diversity is antimicrobial use, which clearly is more prevalent in use and perhaps inappropriately.

Antibiotics, you mean.

Exactly. In the last several decades. That's clearly one obvious approach to deplete the diversity. The other thing is, we think that viral infections, which frequently perceive these kind of chronic outcomes in inflammatory disease, including in the sinuses, they may actually perturb the microbiome and induce, perhaps, inflammation from the host that actually kills some of these protective organisms.


I know I could have summitted. Yes, however - yes, I wasn't willing to lose my fingers or a tip of a finger, even, for the summit of K2.

Nick, this climbing season in the Himalayas is done for you. Do you think that you would think about K2 again?

I'm actually pretty sure I will think about K2 again. It's always been a dream of mine to be up there, and it is quite painful to have gotten so close to the summit and turn around. So maybe not next year, maybe not the year after, but I can say, in my life, I will for sure come back here. There's something about this mountain that just draws us all to it.

But you know, you know now, this is the deadliest mountain in the world.


Wow.

. . . Actually the night he died. So he was a very well-respected young person by our staff, by our students and our community. And, you know, it was a very shame that that did happen.

I'm so impressed. I gather the youngsters themselves in your school came up with the idea of electing them king and queen. I got to tell you. . .

Yeah, you know, you think about social media as something that's bad sometimes. Well, they - her friends and his friends kind of started a little social media thing and the adults weren't even totally aware. And they wanted to - they wanted to have them be king and queen. Now, it wasn't, you know, the whole school. It wasn't everybody. It was a very tight group of kids that really. . .


Different things. Some people have heard of the Ig Nobel Prize, many have not. To some of them - there have been some winners who have been waiting for it for years. More typically they're not quite sure what it is. Our standard policy, which - it has a few twists now and then. But in general, when we've chosen somebody, we will quietly get in touch with them, offer them the prize and give them the opportunity to quietly to decline the honor. And if they say no, that's fine, that's it. We never mention it. We don't even keep records. We give it to somebody else. But happily for us, not many people decline. Almost everybody accepts.

And some of them - do they actually go on to win the real Nobel Prize?

That's happened at least once. In the year 2000, we gave the Ig Nobel Prize in psychics to two physicists in England, Andre Geim and Michael Berry, who were, and are, quite eminent physicists. They won the Ig Nobel Prize that year for using magnets to levitate a frog. I don't know if you've seen the videos on the Web of that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.


. . . Battles. Yes. It was bloody, but it was also joyous because we're - all three of us - just super fans of Nancy Hale's.

I mean, people always ask fiction writers - as you would know better than anyone - how much of your writing, how much of your protagonist is you. And writers always say, it's fiction. You know, I made it all up. But you write that with Hale, it's - it actually really matters to know what her life story was when you're reading these stories.

You know, every story that a fiction writer writes has something of them in them. And I had to go through her story and sort of understand where they came from in her life. She wrote so close to the bone to her own life in many ways, and you can see herself in her characters in these stories - in a lot of them.

All right. So let's get to some of the stuff she writes about because she writes about things that are uncomfortable to discuss today in 2019 - must have been incredibly edgy at the time she was writing some of these. She writes about mothers feeling ambivalent about their children. She writes about how oppressive marriage can be. She writes beautifully about female desire. I actually wanted to let you read a little bit from one of her stories, titled "Midsummer. "


What the government says they're doing is addressing the problem with intelligence, which means being aware of rifts like this inside the gangs before they become violent. Fifty-five dead shows that that strategy failed here. And the governor says he's not renewing the contract of the private company that runs these prisons. Now they are taking these transfer measures. You know, they're using the intelligence that they have to transfer some gang leaders to a maximum security prison and then moving 200 other inmates who they say have received death threats. And that's their measures right now. The city is also under alert. There are police on the streets making sure this doesn't spill out into gun violence on the streets. And, you know, we'll see over the next few days whether that can contain even more possible violence.

Interesting that you say it's a private company that is running these prisons. Given that, why are these facilities so out of control?These are profit-making enterprises.

Watchdog groups have been sending out red flags about prison overcrowding in Brazil for many years now, and so it really is a political will issue. Many experts, after the tragedy of the past few days - including a U. N.  spokesperson yesterday - say that to really address this problem, you have to reduce overcrowding. And countrywide, prisons are around 70% over capacity and around 137% in this state alone.

Just quickly - Brazil's new president, Jair Bolsonaro, is a guy who talks tough on crime. Has he said anything about this?


(Laughter).

He's just taking everything and ratcheting it up.

This song in particular has become a kind of proving ground for generations of musicians.

What about the listener experience, though?Does it have the same emotive quality that "Kind Of Blue" has?

I feel like there's emotion in "Giant Steps. "But it is certainly - you know, if you want to talk about "Kind Of Blue" as sort of relaxing-into-your-armchair-with-a-cocktail vibe. . .


Well, what would that serious diplomacy look like?I mean, I - the United States would have to - what?- accept a. . .

It's a fair question, you know, why diplomacy would work now when it's failed in the past. I think that the breakout is a game-changer for the United States because we're directly - become directly vulnerable to North Korea. But it's also a game-changer for China because they'll either - they'll have to live with the strategic consequences of a breakout, which could - are unknown. South Korea could reassess its non-nuclear status.

So I think the conjunction of factors that we can bring China into play would have the goal of obtaining a nuclear - a freeze to lock in North Korea at its current level of capabilities. And for China - I think the conjunction of factors is that for China, they would retain their buffer in North Korea. And they would prevent these adverse strategic consequences. North Korea would maintain its minimum deterrent, and the regime would remain in power. For the United States, it would prevent this breakout, and it would offer us a not-great narrative. But we would say that this is an interim agreement toward the long-term goal of denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula.

Well Mr.  Litwak, in the minute we have left, can you really trust any - the process of reaching or signing any agreement with a regime like North Korea's?


Yeah. It's hard to understand today just how much the catcher, especially in the 1870s, dominated the baseball game. A single baseball game was - really revolved around the catcher's ability to harness what the pitcher was pitching, and everything revolves around that. The pitcher couldn't use his best pitches if he had - he didn't have confident - confidence in the catcher.

So he really was a sort of iconic folk hero, dominated the game in a way that I think no player ever has before or since and - at a point to where people resented it and would say, you know, this is a game played by two players while the other seven just kind of watch.

The pitcher and the catcher and everybody else watches. The catcher's - well, we are familiar with the crouched position right behind home plate. That was not what they did in the 1870s.

No. They stood, sometimes a little stooped but mostly straight up, and they would just catch the ball and be ready to throw it to bases immediately. And the way that they would throw it sort of made them look like gunslingers. And so that really fed into the whole icon of them, the whole idea of them as American folk heroes.


Well, could payments like this then allow the defendants in this case - who obviously are either wealthy or supported by very wealthy people - allow the defendants to buy their way out of criminal punishments of any kind?

I think that's conceivable. But I think, in this case, there would still be punishment. It would - they would probably still be incarcerated, although it's a very opaque process. So it's not very clear. I mean, this is - these are not trials like in the United States where you can go in and watch the court proceedings unfold day after day. These are all very cloaked processes in Saudi Arabia.

Looming behind all of this, of course, is the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, who's denied any culpability and, of course, is not on trial in any way. Does blood money offer him a way to wipe this case away without facing any particular accountability?

Well, it - not completely. But it does - you know, the Khashoggi children have been awfully restrained in their public positions about all of this. Right?They have not condemned the kingdom. They've not gone after Mohammed bin Salman. And this is a way to making sure they sort of stay quiet. This is a way for that to happen.


Does the seriousness of this cast a shadow on the White House?Are they concerned about what, for instance, is going to be coming out today?

I think it casts a huge shadow over the White House. I think it's very serious. I want Congress to conduct full oversight on it. And I think we need to look at it. I think Congress and I think Republicans and Democrats have a duty, no matter who's in the White House, to ask tough questions, and the president can push back when they think they overreach.

Finally, with the president calling this a hoax and a scam, do you think that is wise?

Well, I - you know, I'm not going to comment on every description the president. . .


Well, approved solar filters are what you really need. The cheapest and I think probably the best way is to go with these welder's glasses. They're called number 14 welder's glasses. They're a very dark shade. You go into a welding store, and you say you want number 14, they know what you're doing. They always look at me and they say, oh, you're going to look at the sun?I say yeah, that's what I'm going to do.

And so you want to get those glasses. They usually cost about five, six bucks or so. And then you can put those up to your face and look right at the sun all you want. Then you can also get filters for your telescopes, binoculars, that type of thing. But really, we recommend making this into a social situation.

As astronomers, we always like company, and we recommend people to join or find any astronomical groups that are in their area, because there are astronomy clubs all over the country, and they love to share their expertise, and on these days of the eclipse on the 20th and the Transit on the 5th, join up with one of them because it's a lot of fun having a sun party.

Wow, and you can find these - you can find more information on your website, or. . .


Linda Greenhouse is co-author of "Before Roe v.  Wade: Voices that Shaped the Abortion Debate Before the Supreme Court's Ruling. "She joins us by phone from her office in New Haven, where she now teaches at Yale Law School. Good to have you back on the program.

Oh, thanks very much.

And one of the documents you reprinted is the story of Dr.  Jane Hodgson. What's her part in Roe v.  Wade?

Well, she didn't have a direct part in Roe against Wade. Jane Hodgson was a very courageous obstetrician-gynecologist in St.  Paul, Minnesota in the early 1970s. Before Roe she was a Mayo Clinic-trained doctor. And she decided to test, to challenge the Minnesota criminal abortion law. She had a patient who had contracted German measles very early in her pregnancy. And people my age might remember, before there were immunizations, that there were epidemics of German measles that swept through the country, and when it hit somebody early in pregnancy, it had a very high probability of causing serious birth defects.


You know what else my mother said?You should talk to more people in their 80s because they've looked across the street at death for a decade. And they know what's really important in life.

Your mother was smart. Now, I'm talking as one of the people in the 80s. Nobody wants to hear that you met Harry Truman, you know. Shh.

(Laughing) You didn't meet Harry Truman, did you?

I met Harry Truman. But you know what I mean?Nobody's interested. They want to know you've met Rihanna, and that kills me.


'Cause there are a lot of industries now that can point to the fact that they are using fewer people to sometimes produce even greater revenues.

Well, that's what using fewer people will sometimes do. It certainly will - using fewer people will increase the productivity of the people that you are using. And we had been living through an age where we are adapting to a transformative technology - the Internet. I mean, this has enormous effects on the workplace. But, you know, I'm a mere writer. I wouldn't even know how to begin to answer the question you just asked; how much of this is a fundamental shift in the economy and how much of it is a result of the way we've led our financial lives?

Michael Lewis, what should, in your mind, Americans learn from the financial crisis in Europe?

The thing that has interested me the most is the role of the big financial institutions in our economy. I think over the period of the last several decades, they have spun out of control; that they are too big to fail, which means that the normal sort of mechanism of a market economy is not allowed to work in a financial sector. That normal mechanism is creative destruction. It's, you know, someone builds a better one and the old one dies. And I would have thought the big lesson from the period of 2007, 2008 is that we can't really build an economy based on such institutions. It's like building your house on sand.


Yeah, and that sounds a little anthropomorphic. I mean, they live in those reservoir hosts inconspicuously. Obviously viruses don't have purposes, so it's not their purpose to hide, but they disappear. They go somewhere where we can't find them.

Scientists - Ebola spilled over for the first time in 1976, and scientists still don't know what the reservoir host of Ebola is.

If you want to get in on the conversation, ask David Quammen a question, it's 1-800-989-8255, 1-800-989-TALK. Now these are called zoonosis, is that - did I get that right?

That's right, yeah, zoonoses. A zoonosis is an animal infection that's transmissible to humans. It might or might not cause disease in humans. Sometimes these things spill over, and they become innocent passenger viruses in humans. But if the zoonosis spills over and does cause disease, then we call that a zoonotic disease. And about 60 percent of our infectious diseases are zoonotic.


. . . Of Puerto Rico. (Laughter) So that would leave the secretary of the Department of Education fourth in line. And he took over that agency from Julia Keleher, who is facing corruption charges in federal court.

Oh, my goodness.

And I think it's important to remember that the arrest of the former Department of Education secretary almost three weeks ago initiated this head-spinning series of events that has led to Governor Rossello's announcement last Wednesday that he was resigning.

Mr.  Trelles, I just want to know because we're going so far down the line of succession, is there some point in the rules where the governorship just falls to you, that it's the editor of Radio Ambulante who becomes governor of Puerto Rico?


Would it be ethical to do this, you know, some of this work in humans?Would it take away some of the stigma about using embryonic stem cells?

Well, there's a whole lot of issues to consider in that I think a lot of people are going to have to involved in working through and thinking about under what circumstances it would be permissible to use this kind of approach in humans if the science really supports the idea that this kind of approach could generate cells that look like eggs from human pluripotent stem cells. I think the two key factors, I mean one key factor is that you would want to do this in the context of an effort, you know, for in vitro fertilization, in the course of reproduction rather than just generating embryos for the sake of research by fertilization.

And secondly, you would only want to go forward, I think, if you were sure enough from the preliminary studies that the eggs really looked healthy and normal and really felt like they had a chance of giving rise to successful pregnancies because you wouldn't want to engage in in vitro fertilization with a patient if there really wasn't much chance of having a successful pregnancy.

Is there any reason - going the opposite direction of thought, is there any reason to believe this would not work in humans?


The cease-fire that was supposed to halt fighting between Russian separatists and the Ukrainian government has not taken hold. Really, it never seems to have started. Shelling and dying has continued this week with both sides insisting the other had violated the cease-fire agreement. Separatist rebels have taken control of the city of Debaltseve, which serves as a key rail hub in Ukraine. Ivo Daalder is the president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and the former NATO ambassador. He joins us now. Thanks very much for being with us, Mr. Ambassador.

Oh, it's great to be here.

Do you think a cease-fire is even practical?

Well, I think the only way you're going to get a cease-fire is if one side stops shooting because clearly the Russians and the Russian-backed separatists are bent on continuing to fight. They were never interested in the cease-fire in the first place. We saw that in the Minsk negotiations more than a week ago when they refused to have an immediate cease-fire. They wanted to have a delay. So they could take this city of Debaltseve, but we now also see continued fighting in the south near Mariupol and in other parts of the region.


But turning 70, that's got to be a bit of a shock.

No, it isn't. Really, I keep wondering what everybody's amazed about it. You know, I feel excited the same as I did when I was 37 and that has carried on pretty much the same all those years. I feel no difference at all. Somebody's told me, or I heard in the radio or something, someone said that Mark Twain said age is a case of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter. So I just amble merrily forward. I don't care. I don't hide my age. I think hiding you age is a bit as sensible as acting(ph) your street number.

Well, acting, let's go to that for just a moment. I want to ask you about that Dustin Hoffman movie where. . .

That was a smooth maneuver.


We were sure supposed to. Somewhere along the line things, sort of, broke down and it's obviously disturbing that we haven't come as far as we thought in that time.

As you looked at what happened before the attack in Benghazi, what do you think are the important lessons to be taken away there?

You know, I think that right now it's hard to tell what the lessons are because there's no clear chain of accountability or decision making. The first question you ask yourself is who is in charge of this thing?You had a mission - a State Department mission on the ground.

Theoretically everyone in that mission, including that special operations team that supposedly could've reacted to this thing was working for the head of mission, which in this case was a deputy chief of mission since the ambassador was the individual involved. And it's unclear to me even at this point if he had the authority to launch that special operations team or whether someone outside that chain of command and Department of Defense or Southern Command, or pardon me, in Special Operations Command, you know, overruled that. And it's never become obvious to me what that chain of command was. And it seemed to me that would be one of the first questions the congressional people are asking - doing the inquiries should've been asking.


Right.

Or La Scala in Milan. And now you debuted at the Met this fall. What was that like?

It was pretty awesome. And it all didn't really hit me until the curtain came down after the first performance. Because up until then, I was just, you know, trying to rehearse and trying to work, you know, really hard, and make sure that, you know, I was doing everything I needed to do. And even going out on stage the first time, it really didn't hit me, because I was just trying to stay focused. But once the curtain came down and we were doing the curtain calls, and I could actually see out to the house how many people were out there, and, you know, the whole occasion of it all didn't strike me until then. And boy, it was just - it was amazing, because for any young American singer, that's the place you're shooting for, it's the pinnacle of the opera world. And it was great. Just thinking about it sitting here right now, I was just - yeah, I'm just - I'm really grateful to have had that experience.

Yeah, I can only imagine. Well, let's talk a little bit more about the role that you were playing, General Leslie Groves in the opera "Doctor Atomic" by John Adams. And it's a modern opera about the countdown to the first test of the atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert during World War II. Let's start out by listening to you.


Well, it's definitely run by individual nations but individual nations with their systems tied together. And that happens both geographically but also temporally. You know, one of the key tools for observations that feed the weather models are the polar-orbiting satellites. It's so well-integrated that the European polar orbiters cover the earth in each local time's morning, and the American orbiters come in the afternoon.

I mean, that's a sort of pattern that has been essential to making sure that, you know, we have the latest observations from every part of the earth's atmosphere. It's about this sort of continually humming system to step forward in time and correct slightly and, you know, keep spitting out a changing forecast that hopefully gets better and better.

And so up until now, it's been governments that have been obviously calculating the weather for the greater good. But you call privatization a major threat to weather forecasting. Explain.

Yes, it's a 150-year-old system of governments collaborating with each other as a global public good. You know, in the '60s, it was something that President Kennedy saw as a sort of counterpoint to the space race. You know, meteorology was a way that governments could collaborate. But more recently, we potentially have a kind of bifurcation. You know, we potentially have forecasts for the haves and forecasts for the have-nots.


So your book looked at air pollution in a number of countries, but we want to talk about a chapter that discusses the development of the Clean Air Act here in America. And you call this a landmark moment for public health. How come?

Well, the Clean Air Act of 1970 was really a revolutionary piece of legislation for its time. And I think in retrospect, it really stands as one of the most consequential laws in modern American history. A couple of congressionally commissioned studies since 1970 have found - literally - that the regulations enacted under the Clean Air Act have saved millions of American lives since that time and trillions of dollars.

So that's an extraordinary impact. It's one that's sometimes invisible to us. We obviously don't know if we haven't had a heart attack, haven't had an asthma attack, haven't lost a loved one because the air was cleaner than it otherwise would have been. But nonetheless, the science demonstrating that that's true is very solid.

You also call this the start of a new era in America's modern history - in what way?


No, I don't think the passage of time has narrowed options for action but time is indeed the enemy. We've seen a persistence of this regime in Syria create a humanitarian crisis that is not only torturing the Syrian people but it's having massive effects on the neighborhood.

The U. N.  panel reported this week on evidence of chemicals weapons, which, of course, the Obama administration had once called a red line. What's your assessment of their reaction?

I think there's little doubt on the part of anybody that the regime has employed chemical weapons against the Syrian people. It's a remarkably small percentage of casualties are accounted for by this practice but it is a particularly bad practice. But the United States had a very traumatic experience with this business of weapons of mass destruction 10 years ago in Iraq. The administration wants to get it right this time. It wants to be able to present a case that is accurate and irrefutable.

That being said, does it run the risk with a protracted delay seeming as if they're countenance in the use of chemical weapons?


It's the gear for your grinds video.

The coffee decoder series.

And with some very surprising results. Thank you, Flora.

Thanks, Ira.


And the story is conveyed through the eyes of this young woman, this farmer's wife, who discovers it, actually, in a - she's kind of in an awkward situation. She's going somewhere where she's not supposed to be, and she sees it and she's not allowed to tell anyone. But she feels it's her personal burning bush. She takes it as a warning to go back.

I wanted to write it initially through her eyes so that you, too, would not know what you are seeing. But later. . .

If SCIENCE FRIDAY didn't spoil it.

Well, yeah. But you see what I mean?Because it is about perception and how we need to be - to understand what we're seeing before we can really see it, that's really key to understanding this whole issue of climate change and why we see or don't see what's right in front of us.


And why the neighborhoods around Logan?What was going on then?

The people who lived on or in the vicinity of Neptune Road were having a very, very big problem. The airport grew and grew and grew, and needed more and more land. And the people on Neptune Road were so hurt by the noise pollution because at that point the airplanes would land and take off right over their street often enough that there was extensive noise pollution. And I have this one picture - I think you probably saw it - of the teenagers on the overpass, and some of them are not even paying attention to the airplane overhead, and it could be that some of them are now hearing impaired in this photograph.

I mean, you take a look at some of your photographs and the planes are astonishingly close. I mean, it feels that you can almost reach up and hold onto one of the wheels.

And I documented cracks in walls in the homes, people with severe hearing problems. It just went on and on and on.


If you're a minority professional and you grow up understanding that there will be expectations placed upon you that you have to overcome, the reality of it is, if you go into this thinking you can just be good you'll end up with a mediocre career. And so "Good is Not Enough" is really just a sounding call to minority professionals saying, hey, you know, we can be players at this level but we can't just play good, we have to excel.

Let's break down a few of the things you say matter. One is networking. Why so important?

Networking is so important because in this day and age a lot of the jobs, a lot of the opportunities that will come your way will not be through Monster, will not be through the want ads, it will be through networking. And so from a career perspective the opportunities will come your way from networking, but more importantly networking is a great opportunity to learn from others who have been down the road that you're trying to go. For example, if, I met a company right now - I'm at Pitney Bowes, and I love being there - but if I were to look at an opportunity at IBM, if I had a network that includes someone at IBM, I could actually call and get a better idea of what it is I'm stepping into, because corporate culture is just critical.

But how do you find someone who is a peer or a mentor at another company?


Yeah, it's still very present. I don't think it's still very accurate. I think what this proves is that 5 billion songs is $5 billion, and so they are still saying that global music sales have dropped 8percent to about 19. 4 billion, according to the phonographic industry.

So they are seeing some sales still decline, but you're seeing digital music rise, so I think these music labels are needed to get with the program and get over this fear of piracy, and - and look at this say, you know what?Five billion songs, that's a lot of music that anyone could be buying. I mean, that's just - you know, at the end of the day, that's a lot of music to be purchased.

Mario, thanks so much.

Thank you, Farai.

Mario Armstrong is News & Notes regular technology contributor, and he joined us from the studios of the Baltimore Sun.


We should say this is a multi-level chess game, and we can only see the top level - the overt actions, not the covert. But these diplomatic measures that we can see do seem like gestures, really, only. And economic sanctions are the real deal. Russia has suffered economically in recent years from sanctions. They do hate those sanctions. But, of course, what they really hate is low oil prices.

Has the Obama administration been late to recognize the threat from Russia?

Perhaps not to recognize the threat but slow to get serious about it. After the Crimea sanctions, there were lots of other provocations, Syria being the worst, Obama clearly not willing to go to war in Syria. So Russia has had something of a free field of fire as it were. But as far as the cyberhacking of this election campaign, the administration did sound the alarm last fall, but they did not go to the mat, in part, because they didn't want to appear to be interfering with the election themselves. And let's face it, they thought Hillary Clinton was going to win anyway.

Ron, this was the administration that said we needed to do a reset with Russia. What happened?


And then it's like, it kind of makes it more of a treat.

(Singing) You took me from the shelter of a mother I had never known…

I read that - about you having, as we all do, ups and downs in life. In 1977, I read that your mother died, which was a painful period for you.

Very.

But the very next year, you gave birth to a son.


From an economic perspective, they certainly don't seem to. All the evidence suggests that stadiums are not good economic drivers. But that being said, that doesn't mean that there is not value in a stadium. There are things like quality of life, things like civic pride. But ultimately, a lot of the economists I spoke to landed on the fact that what you need to do is have honest conversations among taxpayers and voters in terms of what you want to spend and why. Don't tell taxpayers that the stadium is going to make them rich because it's not going to. But it may enrich your life if you're a fan. And so take that into account and think about it the same way you would a golf course or an arts district. Is this something that you want to pay for?It's not an investment, but it's consumption.

You are awfully impressed by the art and craft of grounds crews.

Oh, I was.

A clever grounds crew can mean a difference in close games, can't it?


So the president, I think, recognized that leverage and negotiated with them. I would have preferred a longer debt ceiling as well, closer to 18 months. But I do recognize the reality of the situation. We're providing relief to the hurricane victims from Harvey. And we're keeping the government running for three months. And we have a three-month debt ceiling. The agreement was reasonable. And again, those very same members who are complaining about it would have never voted for a better deal anyway.

I have to ask. You're from a swing district. I gather you spoke with Speaker Ryan before news of your declining to run for re-election got out. Did the speaker try and change your mind?

Well, I did speak with both Speaker Ryan and Steve Stivers. He's chair of the Congressional Campaign Committee. And they were both, I believe, fair to say, disappointed in what - would certainly prefer that I run for re-election. There's no question about that. But they understand that, you know, these decisions are not just about politics, they're personal. And they respect that, but they clearly would prefer that I run for re-election.

You would have had a tough primary though, right?There's been rallies against you and. . .

Oh, no. There was a rally last week, but it was a - that was a buffoon bus. And it was a - it was a freak show, to be honest with you. I mean, it really was bizarre. I mean, it was a bunch of people from out of town in a bus, you know, yelling and screaming. I mean, it really was not much of anything, but. . .


Well, we fought three wars in the 20th century in Europe - we had World War I, we had World War II and we had the Cold War - because we believed that a stable united Europe was our best partner to deal with the challenges in the world. If that was true in the 20th century, it's even more true in the 21st century when it is the only partners we can find militarily, economically and politically around the world that we can count on. They're not doing enough, but they're doing more than anybody else.

If your board were to go under, were to collapse, where nationalism would ignite the kinds of dangers we saw in the 1920s, in the 1930s, we, the United States, would suffer in the same way that we did in the 1920s and 1930s.

Ivo Daalder is president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, former U. S.  ambassador to NATO. Thanks so much.

It's my pleasure.


Boy, melodrama going on, on the Washington football club whose team name I refuse to utter. Coach Shanahan benching Robert Griffin III for the rest of the season - good idea or. . .

Well, it's all part of a bigger power play. The big problem is the owner. The problem with the Redskins goes back to Daniel Snyder. He's worse than George Steinbrenner, worse than Marge Schott; worse than all of them. He's one of the worst owners that you could possibly have. When he started, he had past-prime players with Deion Sanders and Bruce Smith trying to make a splash.

We're about to run out of time. Not much time for many more worse, yes?

Awful. He's just bad.


Can I ask you, has your shop - your restaurant, which is very well known here, helped you in your endeavor?Do people walk in to give you tips, try and contact you through that?

You know, I'm not talking about this, really, to people because it probably would seem like I have a tin foil hat on my head until (laughter) - I don't know - you realize with a lot of people, I think that you think that there may be conspiracy theorists on Twitter or whatever. And then you realize, like, sometimes the conspiracy theorists are right.

Jeff Jetton, thank you so much for being with us.

Absolutely. Thank you.


How did she describe it?

It happened to be a beautiful day when she posted this picture, but you see rubble side by side with, you know, people doing their shopping, people just going about their business, school kids returning to school. It's surreal.

So there's the physical scars of this conflict, but what about the other one that you mentioned, which is justice?Will there be justice for anyone who committed atrocities?There's so much evidence of the chemical attacks, the murders, the torture, the disappearances. What happens to that?

There are some bright spots of hope - the fact that we saw - that we're starting to see indictments in European courts. You know, interestingly enough, a lot of people who were perpetrators of some of the worst crimes inside Syria, whether they did it in the name of the regime or in the name of an opposition, have found themselves in Europe and, therefore, sort of subject to European justice because other Syrians have recognized them. Other Syrians have identified them. And there might be hopes that there can be an accountability in that sense.

But I think inside Syria, you know, the actual architects of most of this - of this incredible disaster still remain at large. And not only at large or in power, but about to potentially be incredibly enriched by the reconstruction that, in theory, is coming to Syria.

So what do you think the road ahead looks like for Syria?


And a note, yesterday, on Weekend Edition Saturday, it was implied that WikiLeaks was the first to post the Macron documents. That's incorrect. For its part, WikiLeaks says it's trying to confirm their authenticity. To Nigeria next, where the government says Boko Haram has released 82 of the missing schoolgirls the group seized in a mass abduction three years ago. That kidnapping prompted global indignation and the creation of the high-profile Bring Back Our Girls campaign. NPR's Africa correspondent, Ofeibea Quist-Arcton is monitoring developments from Accra. Good morning.

Greetings.

Ofeibea, what more do you know?

President Muhammadu Buhari's spokesman has said that the release of these girls happened after mediation by the Swiss government and the International Red Cross. And it was like a prisoner swap, Lulu, because, apparently, Boko Haram detainees have been released. The presidential spokesman did not say how many but indicated that negotiations are continuing as the government has been saying over recent weeks.


Jeffrey Mann was once a hard driving college athlete. But his dreams were dashed when he suffered a series of injuries. He managed to make it to the conference finals in the 400-meter hurdle race, but came in dead last. Twenty-five years later, he decided that failure was not an option. Jeffrey Mann is a religion professor at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania. And when we spoke with him, post-race, he told us his return to the track wasn't exactly by design.

It wasn't really planned. I had been exercising and working out and doing a little bit of running on my own. And I ended up in a conversation with the head coach, here, of the track team. And as we were talking, he found out a little bit about my history and where I was at and told me that there was a possibility for me to compete in a Division III intercollegiate competition.

But that sounds theoretical. You took it seriously.

I think I was a little bit overly optimistic when I first accepted the challenge. But I thought how much could I possibly have slowed down in 25 years?And so I decided to take on the challenge and compete as a - what they call an unattached runner at a college meet.


My pleasure.

Could you just tell us what the weather is like right now?

Well, currently, it's been blue day. I mean, we've had some bands of rain come through from time to time, but it's a nice day. The water is calm. It's clouding up a little bit.

Do you have any guests at the resort at the moment?


I'd say first, over all, we have had a measure of success in reducing nuclear proliferation over the years. And so North Korea and Iran are really exceptions to what has been a successful policy. Not simply by the United States, but by the international community. I mean, we can't do this alone. We depend on international cooperation.

North Korea is an exception because it is so difficult to deal with. They have used their nuclear weapons not so much from the standpoint of making military threats, but as an instrument of extortion, to get economic concessions for what in fact is an impoverished country.

Now that leads me to my next question. We're coming down toward the close. And it's this. White-collar terrorism, is that an example of what you just described, of white-collar terrorism, extorting, using the threat to extort money?

It does have that concept to it, because it does fall in the camp - in the realm of extortion, rather than military strategy. Quickly, with regard to Iran, there is a very difficult issue, because in fact Iran's quest to be a major power, including the possession of nuclear weapons, really precedes the current administration in Iran, and is likely to be a long-term quest that isn't going to be very, very, difficult to stop.


Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, one of the things we need to be doing is making this standardized. I've talked to many people. They say, well, he never even checked what my, you know, date of birth said. I think we need to go to more of a standardized approach in order to do that.

Is there any kind of technological solution to this - I don't know - thumbprint, iris scan or something?

We have electronic health records, which are supposed to make this easier. But remember, anytime you introduce technology within sort of a complex health care system, you know, it can also have unintended consequences.

So never before would I be sitting on a patient's, you know, medical record with three different electronic health record screens open, trying to work between, you know, different patients sitting in an emergency room. So with new technologies come this additional complexity that we need to sort of be thinking about.


It really is. I mean, the fact - and he uses the microscopes that I used as a kid, right, from the '60s because those must be Bausch and Lomb or something like that.

The Zeiss microscope.

Zeiss microscope, different company.

Yeah, right. No, he said that actually if you want to get into this, you know, the cost of one of these microscopes from the '60s or '70s is about that of a computer, but it'll last you a lifetime.

Forever. The optics are just terrific.


Five cases of cholera have now been confirmed in the port city of Beira, Mozambique. And this is spreading in the wake of what the United Nations has called the worst catastrophe to hit southern Africa. A cyclone and massive flooding two weeks ago killed hundreds of people.

Earlier this morning, we were able to reach Caitlin Ryan. She is the emergency communications officer for the group Doctors Without Borders. They're also known by their French initials MSF. She is in the city of Beira, and I asked her what it's like there.

In many ways, it does feel like life is returning to the city. There's some food in the market; people have cleaned the streets. And we're starting to treat a lot of injuries of people repairing their homes. So in many ways, life is returning to normal. But in many other ways, maybe even a hundred thousand people are sleeping without roofs, they don't have enough food, and access to clean water is severely, severely limited.

Well, speaking of health problems - I mean, what can you tell me now about these cases of cholera?


I was very impressed, though. I mean, I think just getting to the athletes' village is a huge accomplishment.

Absolutely.

And I know that you have been behaving yourself in the athletes' village and elsewhere. Any closing thoughts before you bid farewell to the land of crumpets?

Closing ceremonial thoughts?I was one of those skeptics who said it could never live up to Beijing. I learned once again that every Olympic Games is its own moment. Danny Boyle, the movie director and artist behind the opening ceremony, he said a wise thing about his production. You know, don't even try to compete with China, which had that unforgettable mega-opening ceremony. Do your own thing was Boyle's attitude.


Hi, Lulu. How are you?

I'm good. How are the players that you're talking to reacting to the stand that the NFL's taken?

Well, I think they've taken the position that the NFL has decided to fully engage with this culture war initiated by the president when he first attacked the NFL players back in September. One of the questions of the book that I was asking is, who gets to be the patriot?And when the president first called the players unpatriotic, then said that they shouldn't have jobs, now he's even saying that dissenting players maybe shouldn't even be in the country. And that the NFL is going along with it, as well, I think this has really reignited some really bad blood between the players and the owners.

And how is that manifesting itself?I mean, what conversations are the players having, and what can they actually do?


You know, I always love - to me, there are two parts of the Olympic competition, A, the Opening Ceremonies and the 100-meter and the 200-meter dash in - men's and women's. That, to me, that's the Olympics, and I think that's going to be fascinating. It's just going to be fascinating. And there's always - there's always someone - there's always someone who comes out of the blue, and I don't think it'll be someone from China, but you just can't tell. They have been waiting for this for a long time, Tony. It's kind of what we did to the world in 1984, when we just ambushed everybody. So, I think it's - I think the competition is going to be phenomenal.

I can't let you get away from here, Bill Rhoden, without talking about - guess who - Brett Favre.

He's coming to your town.

Eh. . .


Well, I have to tell you, since September 11th, 2001, I haven't had a vacation. And I don't know about rest and relaxation, you know?My rest and relaxation is prayer, just trying to keep afloat, so that things don't get any worse. So, you know, I'm doing everything I can to not be stressed out about the economic situation.

Cathy Walker is a doctor living in Ardmore, Pennsylvania. Thank you, Cathy.

Thank you.

If you'd like to be a part of our real economy project, let us know. You can find us at npr. org/daydreaming.


And, of course, we have bioenergy here, too, and the debates about things like corn ethanol. That's another big contentious issue here in the Midwest. And one where, again, middle grounds might have to be found between groups that are in very different poles on that issue.

And what do you think is the most promising - again, the symbolic areas, those are always going to be difficult. But are there other conversations that could be had that, as you say, skirt the ideology?

Well, it's very interesting. Regardless of, you know, how you think of him politically, the Obama administration has actually done more, may be by accident - or may be on purpose - to think about, to take on climate change than all previous administrations, really, combined. Our CO2 emissions in the United States have gone down pretty dramatically in the last few years, partly because of the recession, of course, but partly because people are retooling and getting more efficient.

The American car fleet is getting lot more efficient. We finally got those CAFE standards going up again, which is fantastic, after about 30 years of going nowhere. And maybe that's a benefit of bailing out Detroit. We could work with them to make cars more efficient, the cars Americans want to buy. We've also - the fracking, moving away from coals, where it's natural gas, has helped a lot, although we have to watch the other aspects of fracking. And also, renewables are beginning to make a bigger and bigger dent in the American electricity supply and other energy supplies.


I would never have imagined an Ebola epidemic going at this pace because all the prior epidemics - some 20 outbreaks since 1976 - have occurred in isolated, rural areas and been primarily a handful of family members co-infected coming into a medical facility, and then the medical facility itself became the amplifier of the infection.

But this one has broken all the rules. So for the first time, we really see classic, urban, person-to-person spread in Monrovia, in Freetown and in Conakry. It has also crossed borders. So we have three countries with three different sets of policies and skills levels. And it also hit countries that had been through two of the most brutal civil wars in modern history, civil wars that pitted clan against clan, village against the village so that as this began to unfold, it unfolded in an atmosphere of deeply embedded distrust to give us the worst Ebola epidemic in history.

Laurie, what about those people that think that this might be tragic, but it's on the other side of the world, got nothing to do with us?

I don't think there's many serious voices saying that sort of thing anymore. This week, when the Security Council convened and voted on a resolution related to the Ebola epidemic, it was cosigned by 130 other nations making it the most strongly-supported resolution in the history of the United Nations. One key element of that resolution is declaring that Ebola now represents a national security threat for every nation on Earth.


Well, so certainly President-elect Trump has issued a few statements on cybersecurity, including a campaign platform. Those are pretty thin on details. And some of his statements - it's been difficult to understand whether or not he - how literally to take those particular recommendations. Of his national security hires that have been announced at this point, none are known for having particularly strong cybersecurity backgrounds. So as we see more and more people coming into the administration, we might be able to start getting a sense of what exactly this administration's cybersecurity policy might look like.

Surely when you become the administration, you have a vested interest in national cybersecurity that maybe you lacked before, don't you?

Absolutely. I think while many of his statements during the campaign did not necessarily evince well-developed policy thoughts - he's going to have to come up with more specific ideas. One thing that Donald Trump might run up against is the existence of current laws. So, for example, he's indicated a number of times that he intends to transfer a lot of the cybersecurity mission to the Department of Defense to come up with a plan for defending critical infrastructure. And there are potentially rather serious consequences to sort of the militarization of civilian cyber defense. I think that they might find themselves coming up against an existing framework that doesn't necessarily square with the broad instinct towards wanting to turn towards the military to solve this problem.

I thought the Obama administration was pretty clear in saying, after they asserted that Russian attempts to meddle in the elections had been ongoing, that the United States was going to reply in kind. Can we assume those efforts are going on now?


The African nation of Gambia may see its own peaceful transition of power but only after weeks of negotiation and threats of military intervention. After initially accepting election results that voted him out of office, the reigning president of 22 years then refused to concede for weeks - until today. When facing international pressure and dwindling support, reports came that he has agreed to step down. Ruth Maclean is the West African correspondent for The Guardian. She's in the capital of Banjul, Gambia. Ruth, thanks very much for being with us.

Thanks for having me.

And what did the president say today?

Well, the president said last night in a midnight broadcast that he would step down and that he would act in the interest of the Gambian people. And that was the last that we heard from him. But he is still in State House. He hasn't left the country yet, and he hasn't ceded power as far as we know.

So I guess it's premature to ask who would replace him.


Let me move on to another issue. I was covering both the Democratic and Republican Conventions, and one of the biggest applause lines during the Republican Conventions had to do with drilling for oil. Drill now, drill now, drill now. There is a serious set of distinctions between Senator Obama's policy towards energy and the McCain campaigns policy towards energy. Very briefly, very briefly, describe them to me, as they would affect consumers.

OK, I would say three distinct differences. One, the emphasis of McCain has been on drilling. The facts show that he U. S.  consumes 25 percent of the world's oil and has 3 percent of the reserves. So it's obvious that we cannot drill our way out of that problem.

Obama's focus has been on what can we do in the immediate run, and in the long run, to wean our dependence on oil. And that means investing in an extensive program to convert the economy with green jobs and research, deployment, development of alternative energy. And it also means efficiencies, conservation, raising fuel standards and things to reduce our demand.

So emphasizing the whole portfolio of energies and reducing our demand, but we know that ultimately we've got to move to a different source of energy, and that's the only way to do it. And that is a very big difference between the two candidates.


(Reading from diary) Woke up not feeling well. I spent the entire day online on WebMD. I can say with a hundred percent certainty that I have pleurisy, tuberculosis, brainstem cancer or an enlarged prostate. I found a great cure for whatever ails you - a coffee enema. The only negative - I could never go back to Starbucks.

I can't read this. Joan Rivers' new book is called "Diary of a Mad Diva. "She joins us from New York. Thanks so much.

Oh, it makes me so happy when you laugh.

Well, it's funny. I have to ask you, do you have as much plastic surgery as you say you do or is it kind of like Dean Martin and his drinking?


Yeah.

Sterile. Good to drink.

Well, they didn't drink it. They didn't do the ultimate test.

And I don't blame them.


Tell me about it.

I was teaching in a program called Community Studies, which was an interdisciplinary program, work-study program. You'd go to school for a while, and then you'd go out and work, and then you'd come back and write about it. And there was a woman enrolled in one of my classes who had four kids, and a husband in San Quentin. Her third husband, by whom she had no kids. This was in the 1980s, when San Quentin was experimenting with conjugal visits. She'd say, Mr.  Young, I won't be in class because it's conjugal visiting day at the 'Q'. And so I finally ask her about it. And her body language was of two kinds. She was smiling and obviously joyous when she talked about how it was to go see her husband once a month.

And then her body language changed and she got very severe, and she sat up in her seat across from my desk, and she said, and when I get back to my - to Santa Cruz, and I'm trying to do my schoolwork and take care of my kids, do my job, he can't mess with me because he's locked up in the joint. And this kind of thing. So she had obviously solved her problems. She had her man, but you know, she didn't have to put up with him all the time. But the subtext of it is about our society's policy of just warehousing people, so it's a matter of priorities.

In your work as not just a poet but as a teacher, what's your mission?


The British artist David Hockney is one of the most famous artists in the world. One of his works recently sold for $90 million, smashing the record for a living artist. But he's also led an extraordinary life, breaking barriers as a gay man and defying the expectations of the art world at every turn.

In the new novel, "The Life Of David Hockney" (ph), author Catherine Cusset imagines the thoughts, feelings and words of Hockney at pivotal periods in his life to try and puzzle out the man. She joins us now from our studios in New York. Thank you so much for being with us.

Well, thank you for inviting me.

In the forward to this book, you wrote that David Hockney took hold of you, which is why you wrote the novel. Explain what that means.


So even among homeowners, we found white people are more likely to get a buyout. So NPR's Robert Benincasa - he's my reporting partner on this project - he got a list of properties that the federal government has bought. There are about 40,00 of them. Robert filed a Freedom of Information Act request. The federal government denied it. NPR sued. Eventually, we won.

So when we got it, Robert took all the ZIP codes associated with the property addresses and linked them to U. S.  census data on demographics. And we found that nationally, sales of flood-damaged homes happened most often in places where the population was more than 85 percent white. Now, for context, the whole country is about 62 percent white.

So that's dramatic. So is the federal government responding to this now that you have seen these numbers and done this investigation?

They are. So we interviewed David Maurstad, who oversees FEMA's buyout program. And he said the program is working if it makes the community less risky, it saves property and if it potentially saves lives. It's not designed to consider demographics. And he points out correctly that they don't actually choose which properties are offered buyouts. That's what local governments do.