Two gunmen were killed by security forces in the attack. What do we know about them?

Not much; details are still emerging. They both seem to be from the provinces in Tunisia, possibly near the Algerian border. They seem to have had some sort of involvement with terrorist organizations prior to the attack. There are reports out that at least one of the gunmen traveled to Libya in order to get training either with the so-called Islamic State, or ISIS, or possibly an al-Qaida-linked group.

By some accounts, about 3,000 people - Tunisians - have left for the conflicts in Iraq, Syria and Libya. Why so many?

Well, there's a variety of factors that are driving people to go. One is that Tunisia has been a success story in the transition towards democracy. But with that came political liberalization that society wasn't quite prepared for. All of a sudden a lot of radical preachers, who had been kept under wraps by an authoritarian government, were allowed to preach their messages on the streets and in mosques. And that inspired a number of young men to go abroad and to fight. And then finally it's just because there's a lot of opportunities to fight. I mean, Tunisia is a relatively stable country despite the attacks, but it's surrounded by unstable countries, particularly Libya. And Syria is just a plane ride or two away, so it's attractive for a number of young men to go fight abroad. Their motives are various, but there's a lot of opportunities for them to go, so they're taking them.


And just quickly, we could have started our conversation with North Korea or Russia. The world is out there, isn't it?

It is, indeed, and it's not giving the U. S.  a break to get its act together. North Korea seems headed for a crisis. The Russia relationship may be as well. The president has said he will sign the bill stiffening sanctions on Russia and making it more difficult even for himself to lift those sanctions. The Russians have already begun retaliating for that, so more to come.

More to come. NPR's Ron Elving. Thank you, sir.

Thank you, Don.


And how - it has a unique design to it. Who designed it and why does it have the shape it has?

That's a really interesting question. There's - it's actually a complicated story. The chief architect was a man named John Graham Jr. , had a large architectural firm. He was mainly known as the man who invented the first really successful shopping mall, which was here in Seattle, Northgate. He had the task of creating the Space Needle. But he - they got stuck on the design. They had a doodle on a napkin. He had a bunch of architects who began looking at a tower-like structure. They were inspired by a tower, a broadcast tower in Germany, in Stuttgart, which had a restaurant on it. And so they knew they wanted an observation deck. But they were kind of open to what else they would do. They thought about putting a planetarium up there and a helicopter pad.

No kidding.

Yeah. They considered all kinds of things. And - but they were stuck on coming up with a design that was really a wow design. So John Graham hired as a consultant a professor from the University of Washington named Victor Steinbrueck. He's known locally in Seattle as architect-activist who saved the Pike Place Market. But he was a designer, and he worked on the Space Needle design.


Yeah. It's very strange. We are being admonished to go everywhere and spend. And we're also told that spending is what got us into this ditch in the first place. And further, that once we're done spending and get out of the ditch, we really need to stop spending so much and start saving.

So it gets even more confusing because there's going to be some magical moment at which we are to stop shopping and start saving.

Seems like we're in that magical moment, but it's not magical.

(Laughing) No, it's not magical. But I think we're still at the moment where we're supposed to be at spending. And of course, that's not happening.


It was like a brick carriage house. Inside, there was just one room on the first floor and one room on the second floor, so it was an intimate house for a non-intimate family.

Her deep craving for intimacy would lead her to music. And it turns out the things Ani DiFranco wanted to say were exactly what a generation of women coming of age in the '90s wanted to hear.

(Singing) Squint your eyes and look closer. I'm not between you and your ambition. I am a poster girl with no poster. I am 32 flavors and then some.

Ani DiFranco talks about those early years in her new memoir. It's called "No Walls And The Recurring Dream. "


There are supporters of President Trump's - not necessarily card-carrying Republicans, but some - who look at Barack Obama and say just the fact that he existed, that he was president of the United States, made America more divided. Do you agree with that?

I actually think it polarized Americans because it allowed people to spread this false notion that, look, you have a black president. This black president is a representation of people of color taking over. And when people of color take over, they're going to ruin white lives. Even though the evidence showed that he and others like him were actually creating equal opportunity, were actually making, in certain ways, the lives of white people better. But it allowed people to manipulate Americans into believing that the problem, that the reason why they were struggling was because of black politicians or Latinx immigrants. And then it said to those very people, I will be your savior.

By your definition, is Donald Trump a racist?

Without question. And in many ways, he embodies nearly every aspect of a racist. He's someone who regularly expresses racist ideas, like Latinx immigrants are invading this country, that Mexicans are animals, that black people live in hell, that their communities are infested. But then he simultaneously is supporting policies that specifically target racial groups. We're seeing what's happening at the southern border. We see the ways in which his policies, he's not seeking to protect black people being killed by police. We can see the Muslim ban.


Fiscal Armageddon, Democrats helping the Bush administration, Republicans bulking. These are historic times indeed. We actually verified this by calling Clyde Wilcox, professor of Government at Georgetown University. I asked if he had ever seen anything quite like this.

Yeah. During the Regan administration, it would often be the case, that House Republicans in particular would not go along with some of Reagan's proposals. And so he would manage to get to get support by winning majority of Democrats and a few Republicans.

But one of the things that when really complicated financial legislation like this happens, often times it takes Congress a little while to deliberate and put together coalitions. And the high pressure to get this done very, very quickly is not usually a sign of Congress doing it's best. When Congress gets a bill passed really, really fast there's almost always significant things they need to go back and change later.

You mentioned the similarities to the Reagan administration, it seems like one key difference here is that so much of this is happening so close to an election.


That's absolutely the case. Turkey is the 16th or, by another measure, 17th largest economy in the world. Turks are wealthier than they've been in the past. And that is part of the secret to Erdogan's success. And that is why if there was an election today, I think there's no doubt that Prime Minister Erdogan would win. Perhaps he wouldn't get 49. 95 percent of the vote, but he would certainly get a very large number of votes. There is a growing middle class of people who vote on one issue and one issue only, and that's on their pocketbooks.

Add that to a core constituency and the fact that the opposition parties are extraordinarily weak, don't have much to offer Turks in the way a positive vision for Turkey's future, and Prime Minister Erdogan, despite this being the greatest political crisis of his decade at power, would still prevail.

Give us an idea of who is at these demonstrations, which groups. Are these the disaffected, the people who voted against him, the people who lost the last election, as he puts it?

It's certainly those people. There has been a contingent of secular urban but not all elite people who've come out who have felt hemmed in and marginalized over the course of the last decade. And they're - because their parties have been so ineffective in challenging the Justice and Development Party, they are now finding their voices in the street. Prime Minister Erdogan has wanted to finger the main opposition party, the Republican People's Party, for the demonstrations. That's certainly not the case.


No. In this part of Mozambique, it's a complete anomaly. It's unheard of. This close to the equator such a powerful storm, it's not something anybody was expecting.

And I understand that you were just in Beira, which was covering the cyclone that you mentioned there. And how is a second major storm going to affect the ability of government and aid organizations to respond?I mean, just give us a sense of what they're currently - what they've been dealing with already and how they might adapt to this latest storm.

Well, it's a massive humanitarian operation unfolding in central Mozambique where I hit last month. There are dozens of agencies trying to reach the lost communities that still haven't received aid. And by some estimates, there are still over a hundred thousand people who have not yet received any assistance. The logistics of reaching these remote communities is extremely complicated, especially given that a lot of the roads have been washed out or partially blocked, causing bottlenecks. And yes, it's not an easy business getting the bare necessities to these communities.

So, finally, as I mentioned, you're a photojournalist. Could you just give us a sense of one or two of the images that have that have really stayed with you as you've covered these two major storms?


Sometimes, small complaints can trigger absurdly large medical bills. We're joined now by Dr.  Elisabeth Rosenthal, editor-in-chief of our partner Kaiser Health News, to talk about a bill to treat a toenail fungus and what happened next. Welcome to the program.

Thanks for having me.

The bill we're talking about is $1,469 for medication for a woman here in Washington, D. C.  Tell me the story.

Well, Anne Soloviev went to her dermatologist just for a skin check. She didn't even realize she had a toenail problem. And the physician assistant who saw her said, oh, you have toenail fungus. Let us call in a prescription. And she thought, yeah, sure. Why not.


First of all, Ford says it doesn't need the money right now. It needs a line of credit in case. And they believe that they can make it, that they can make it through these hard times. So, there is one big difference. They don't have to go to the extremes that, say, GM does, who say they need money right now.

Jean, I'd like to go back to GM for a moment, and I know you mentioned Larry Burns is a friend. If you were to point out one thing that you think that they're not doing that they should be doing at General Motors, what would that be?

You know, they have been just slow, very slow. They have brought out many, many vehicles in the past - and he is absolutely correct when he says, you know, nine of the last 10 vehicles that have come out have been great vehicles. Two of the next 24 will be what Congress is asking them to do.

So, they're addressing the issues. They have the Chevy Cruise. They have the Malibu, which was an Automobile Magazine All-Star last year, its first year out. We called it better than a Camry. They have a Malibu hybrid. They have the Cadillac line, CTS, CTSV. They have Volt. They have very good vehicles coming out. They have been perhaps slow to ax the ones that are not so good.

Jean Jennings is the editor of Automobile magazine. Thanks, Jean.


We reached out to everyone. And basically, they said, as so many doctors are want to say, we don't think about price when we prescribe. We just want to give, you know. . .

The best thing that's out there.

The best. But I'd have to say in this case there's not even proof that this is the best. In the studies that got this drug approved, this drug was only effective in curing toenail fungus from 6 to about 9 percent of the time after 11 months of treatment. So it's not even a very effective drug.

From your reporting on this, though, why do doctors do this?They say it's not about cost, but is there an ulterior motive - something that makes certain doctors push certain medicines?


Congress looked like they might get some kind of deal on immigration this past week. Didn't happen. What did happen?

They had a big sit-down meeting among all the House Republicans, and they talked about a deal, but they didn't reach one. The problem is that one faction within the House Republican caucus wants to protect the DREAMers, the people in the U. S.  illegally who were brought here as children. The other faction at the opposite end of the spectrum opposes anything they see as amnesty. And they want full funding for Trump's border wall with Mexico and a number of other changes to current law on legal immigration as well.

So it's not clear how much of that can get worked out, even among House Republicans, let alone with the Senate or the president.

I have to ask, how does the director of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, hold onto his job?It seems like every few hours, there's charges of some kind of new ethical infraction. Yeah. I mean, he would have been let go from a greeter position at Walmart by now.


You know, it's quite clear that it is a cherry-picked narrative. But reading it makes you wonder if that's an insult to cherries.

(Laughter) Which, after all, have many valuable antioxidants. Before it was released, a lot of Democrats said the result of releasing the memo would be catastrophic. Last night and today, many Democrats seem to be saying, is that all you got?Are you kidding?

Well, for some, it's more a dud than a slam dunk. But at the same time, of course, the Democrats want to release their own memo - their critique memo - their response or rebuttal. And that's going to be the big focus when we get back here on Monday.

Rod Rosenstein - long for his position in the Justice Department?


We are made to meet a quota as well as deadlines. There are about eight different numerical measures that we have to meet during our rating period, which is generally two years. But this latest rating period is one year because they introduced this concept last October. So during our rating period, during this one year, we're expected to complete 700 cases. And we're expected to do a lot of these within specific timelines. It really is very, very dire circumstance for our judges.

And let's say that a judge does not meet his or her quota. What happens?You mentioned financial interests. Does the judge lose his or her job?

So the judge may lose his or her job because, at the end of the rating period, the judge would have to then justify why those numbers have not been met. And the agency will have to determine whether the judge's justification is appropriate or not. And for the agency to impose a singular quota on all of us, as if we are all interchangeable, is absolutely mind-boggling.

We are in El Paso, looking at how this is playing out. What are you hearing from immigration judges in El Paso in particular?


What does it mean to have a populist party and right-wing party win the parliamentary majority?

Oh, it's a very simple answer to a difficult question. We don't know. It's an experiment, not only for Italy, for the whole of Europe. I mean, for Italy today, June the Second is like the 14th of July in the United States. It's our birthday. The Italian Republic was born 72 years ago in 1946, and we never had anything like that. You know, the 5-Star are closer with sort of South American populist movement.

Yeah.

You know, you have good and bad over there. And the Northern League is a right-wing party. What will they do together?I don't know. I wish them luck.


What options are open now for the United States to undertake this week, this month, if necessary?

Yeah. I think what the United States really has to concentrate on now is the root cause of the humanitarian catastrophe that is engulfing all of Syria's neighbors, to say nothing of Syria itself. The real driver behind this is the practice of the Assad regime, which was described in a U. N.  report released on the 4th of June as systematic crimes against humanity. And the main one is the shelling of populated areas not under regime control. The use of artillery, aircraft, even scud missiles to terrorize people in these urban areas and in these towns and villages - this is what's driving the humanitarian crisis. And this is what I think the United States really has to take a look at in terms of a response. The response may be timed to some ultimate finding about chemical weapons use but the danger is that the chemical weapons then can become a distractor here. What's really right in front of our face right now is a humanitarian catastrophe that is engulfing not only Syria but its neighbors.

Ambassador Frederic Hof, who's now with the Atlantic Council. Thank you so much, sir, for coming in.

Scott, it's been a real pleasure. Thank you.


As far as race goes, you know, many of the African-American women who came forward about what Cosby did to them struggled with that, too. And in the end, they concluded, as I conclude, that he's not your typical African-American defendant. He had seven attorneys at his second trial. How many do you know that could have the income level to afford that?It's about power and privilege and wealth, and that's what allowed him to escape justice for so long.

That's Nicole Weisensee Egan. Her new book is "Chasing Cosby: The Downfall Of America's Dad. "We spoke with her from member station WHYY in Philadelphia.

Nicole Egan, thanks so much for talking to us.

Thank you.


That's quite a big change. Now either at this point people just think the Master of the Universe have all crashed, but they haven't, they haven't yet.

And I'm sure they'll figure out a way to survive and thrive.

I'm not - I don't - I'm not asking for anybody - tears for them because nobody is going to - a lot of these people have already put away the necessary nut, they call it. That is an amount of money that you've salted away in weather proof investments, that will yield enough interest for you to live a very high life in a place like Greenwich. I would say though that today, that nut has to be at least $40 million. If interest rates on bonds sink low enough, you might need 50 million. But I think it wouldn't hurt to live a little more simply, you know.

Tom Wolfe, he's the author of "Bonfire Of The Vanities". Thank you very much.


And it might take you until next summer to finish "Wolf Hall," to be ready.

So this is - I want to correct the misapprehension that this is a hard book to read. This is a - like, a - certainly a long piece of psychologically realistic fiction. But you - from the minute you meet Thomas Cromwell, you really are going to be sucked in. And if - if you are a "Game Of Thrones" watcher who is interested in how power corrupts, how an intensely human, brilliant person can, you know, become the kind of person that maybe dragon fires a whole village or - I don't know - takes down the Catholic Church and murders a queen, then, you know, "Wolf Hall" is for you. Plus, you then will have the benefit of being right on time in March, when the third one comes out.

What about for your friend, the - the I-don't-do-fiction reader, the reader that wants to read. . .

I don't know any of those people. (Laughter).


So, you know, I like to dance, and I danced with several young ladies. And I said, your partner?I don't even know who your partner was. That's when it started. He just hauled off and hit me. And you know me. I swung back on him, and that was it. So it was a several gangs that were in the city at that time, and us being new, moving in from the county, it was just, you know, one of those territorial challenging things and because Vance was there, he's 18 months younger than me. We hung out together.

That's why we talked about it at family gatherings because we scrapped among each other because of closeness of age and being boys. But when it came to somebody bothering one of us, the other one had its back. So later on we learned that the guy I hit had his jaw wired, so it won us a lot of respect. We were going to Clifton Junior High School then, and one of the girls that had invited us, her father was an undertaker. He had a small place to march his funeral.

Very well respected.

Very well respected, yeah. They had a little rural house at that time on North Avenue. But we fought that day, and we were wearing little barracuda coats, that little trench coat that were something at that time. Like, I remember just being surrounded by guys, and you know, this is the way you want to be. My back was against the door. They pulled Vance out by his coat, and I just remember, you know, yelling to him, don't go down.


Passe blanc - it's a phrase well-known in color-conscious corners of the black community. American literature is chock full of stories of light-skinned black folks passing for white. But, whites passing for black?That's a phenomena not so well mapped. History has provided us with examples of white entertainers in black face, and white artist performing black music form from R&B to rap. But, whites who have actually sought to become blacks, some of them successfully, is the subject of a new and fascinating book by Baz Dreisinger, excuse me. It's called "Near Black: White to Black, Passing in American Culture. "Baz, welcome to News &Notes.

Thanks for having me.

You call whites passing as blacks "white passers. "Central to this notion of white passing is proximity as you say in the book, let's talk about what you mean. Is that like blackness rubbing off on people?

It is, really. It starts in the 19th century as a kind of anxiety about black becoming closer to white, sometimes physically, sometimes metaphorically with the end of slavery, and it transforms into this notion that somehow, proximity to blackness has a kind of contagious character. And contagion is a metaphor that's used quite often in the narratives, and in the discourse surrounding white people passing for black, that the idea that being close can somehow transform one's racial identity.


Well, you have one-stop shops where you have - when a person comes for a building permit or something, you have everything available for them in one office. So they don't have to go from city hall to public works to somewhere else. So that one-stop shop really facilitated recovery.

Meaning people would go to this one office, would be able to get all the permits they needed?

Right, all the permits and permission. And it's also absolutely essential that there are solid partnerships between all agencies in the government, the county, the city, public works and the school district. Everybody has to be on the same page moving forward.

City planners in Houston are going to have to make some tough choices. What advice do you have for them?


What do you think, though, the message is to other countries like China and Russia right now?I mean, we have important talks on the horizon with North Korea. We are in between secretaries of state. We don't even have an ambassador, for example, to South Korea. Ivanka Trump is now doing some of the South Korean diplomacy. What state is our diplomacy in right now?

Well, you know, whenever you file - change a secretary of state, it is disruptive because Rex Tillerson had a year to develop relations with his counterparts and heads of state and government. And that's now been disrupted. On the other hand, the question foreigners always ask is, does the secretary of state speak for the president?And there were questions raised about that because of some of the things President Trump is reported to have said about Rex Tillerson. I think the good news is that by designating Mike Pompeo and expressing confidence in him, I think it will reassure foreign leaders that when Mike Pompeo is secretary, he indeed will be speaking for the president. That's a plus.

Former national security adviser Stephen Hadley, thank you so very much for joining us.

Nice to be with you.


But what he did is he went out and explained the policy to the public and rationalized it, basically provided the sort of intellectual underpinnings for Greenspan's policies in two important areas. One, that they shouldn't target speculative bubbles, so that justified not doing anything about the housing market. And two, arguing that there was what they referred to as a global savings glut, which justified a big spending binge in the United States.

The argument was that China doesn't spend enough. The rest of Asia doesn't spend enough. If the world economy is not going to go into recession, it's up to the American consumer to keep demand up. So we shouldn't worry too much if American saving rates is zero and America's on a spending binge.

In retrospect, both of those arguments, you know, seem to be if not completely wrong, certainly very questionable given where they got us. And Bernanke, you know, played an important role in coming up with them. So sure, he's partly responsible for the Greenspan policies. But not totally, as I say. Greenspan was the senior policy maker.

Now in retrospect, it was just a few months ago, but still it seems like a long time ago. A lot of people are saying that the decision that Bernanke and Paulson made to let Lehman Brothers fail was really key because that really led to the credit markets freezing up. And so, why did Bernanke, why did he decide to let Lehman go under?


One day, Africa appears as a mass of crinkly brown veins. Another, it's become vivid streaks of orange and gold. Crimson and violet squiggles around Australia could be an abstract painting. It seemed that Commander Kelly never got tired of what he could see out the window and what he could make us see in an entirely new way. When the capsule bearing Kelly and cosmonauts Kornienko and Volkov parachuted to a landing in Kazakhstan earlier this month, that fantastic journey came to a close. Back home in Houston, Scott Kelly will be poked and prodded, weighed and measured, all in the name of science. And his terrestrial tweets now bring their own delights. He posted video of his first plunge into a pool.

Man, that feels good.

A few days later, there was Scott Kelly with his arms stretched overhead and a big smile, looking up at a dark sky.

My first rain in more than a year. Awesome.


Hurricane Dorian, now a Category 4 storm, is stalled over the northern Bahamas. It's moving at just 1 mile an hour as it pulls away and begins a turn to the north toward the southeastern United States. Storm surges, estimated at 15 to 20 feet, are crashing onto Grand Bahama Island. Over the weekend, Dorian left thousands of people on Abaco Island to the east without roofs, transportation and communications. Lindsay Thompson is with the Bahamas National Emergency Management Agency. She did not have any immediate information on casualties.

Preliminary information indicates that there is extensive flooding. Of course, there will be infrastructural damage when you have that level of a storm - a hurricane - historic, as well - passing through an island, which is relatively flat, as well. There's a lot of sand dunes. And so there is a concern for us with excessive flooding.

What about injuries?

Well, we haven't had any reports of injuries. Not that there aren't any, but we just don't have any reports of injuries as yet, if there are any.

Well, how much were the islands able to prepare for Hurricane Dorian?I mean, to stock up on adequate supplies, to make sure people got to shelters safely. Do you think there was enough time in advance?


What about the whole impact of race in this socioeconomic equation. There's many times when black Americans are viewed as the canary in the coal mine. And you see unemployment's number rising faster in the black community than you do in America at large. What is happening now and what is going to unfold, do you think, in African-American communities?

Well, we could see continued spikes on the black unemployment rate. African-Americans are the one who are more likely to exhaust unemployment benefits because we are more likely to have long-term unemployment. So this is a real strain coming up for the African-American community if we continue to see job cuts take place.

The unemployment rate for blacks tends to spike early on when job growth slows and then we tend to be the last hired. And then when jobs actually start being cut, we start to lose because we tend to also be the first ones fired.

Give me some examples of what might happen in a place like Washington, D. C.  You know, you're at Howard University, you're in the heart of Washington, D. C.  and it's a very, in some ways, very much a typical African-American community-based city, in other ways completely diverse both socioeconomically and racially. How do you see the poor African-American neighborhoods in the District being affected potentially by some of the trends in jobs and some of the trends in the economy?


Earmarks and pork-barrel spending are as American as a bridge to nowhere. They're little, and sometimes not so little, holiday packages designed to win the votes of senators and representatives for national legislation with government money that's earmarked to directly benefit their states or districts. Many Democrats have groused about the latest examples that have been added, often in hand-written scrawls, into the new tax bill. Norman Ornstein is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and joins us now. Norm, thanks for being with us.

A pleasure, Scott.

What are some of the earmarks you've noticed in this tax bill?

Well, we have, of course, the most famous one, which is now being called with hashtags all over Twitter, the Corker kickback, named for Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee who had famously said quite early on I will not vote for any tax bill that adds a dime to the deficit and then turned around at the last minute and voted for this one with a provision added very, very late in the game to provide additional benefits to a particular set of real estate LLC's, as they're called, a particular kind of corporation. And Corker has significant investments in them, as does Donald J.  Trump and other members of the Trump family - something that would specifically give them millions in additional tax benefits.


Whichever direction the U. S.  is going, it's clearly not great news for the Europeans, who Iran is very close to their borders. It's just next door in the Middle East. And we've seen what happens in the Middle East doesn't tend to stay there and has direct consequences for the Europeans. So the Europeans have been trying to urge, sadly, unsuccessfully so far, for the U. S.  side to show a bit more pragmatism and realism about what it's expecting from Iran.

At the same time, you have said that Iran knows all the, quote, "red buttons. "Can you talk about what that means and how that can contribute to escalation?

Iran has essentially been living as a neighbor to the United States, if you think about it, for 20 years. Why?Since the invasion of Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq, which are two big, bordering countries to Iran. . .

Where there is an American troop presence.


(Unintelligible).

Right.

Like a lawn. Just colonies everywhere. Then after a week, there are fewer. You still would not want to drink it. After three weeks, there is nothing.

Wow.


Yes.

And even lesbians, people like Ellen, who are incredibly powerful in Hollywood, and in the entertainment industries across the board. Why is that not the case for - why can't there be the equivalence in the African-American world?

Yeah, you're absolutely correct, you know, and I state those claims before, you know, and - you know, like a Bill Ga - I mean David Geffen, Ellen, Rosie, George Michael, John - Elton John, Lance Bass, like a lot of these people, you know, unfortunately are white counterparts, and colleagues are able to come out of the closet.

Their community supports them, because as I expressed in my book, they have a nurturing environment, where for them, sex and sexuality has always been a dialog and a discussion within their community. They have communities where they exist, and they help support one each other - one another, especially (unintelligible) in Los Angeles, you have West Hollywood. In Atlanta, you know, you have the Midtown area. In D. C. , you have Dupont, San Francisco. New York, you have Chelsea.


. . . Which is tsk-ahh. . .

(Laughter)

. . . Which people might think is a very sort of girly kind of sound. But - I mean, I have no defense for that.

What's the linguistic translation of that?


What about the SPF factor?Does SPF 30 protect you twice as much as, say, SPF 15 and half as much as 60?

Great question. So it's - actually the way that the studies are done it's a little bit confusing because an SPF of 15 protects you from 93 percent of UVB rays, and it's only UVBs that SPF actually tells you about. Now, an SPF of 30 is going to protect you from 97 percent of those UVB rays. And when you get up to 50, you're only protecting yourself from 98 percent. So you can notice it's partial percentage points differences. . .

Yeah.

. . . between that 30 to 50. And when you get up to that 100 range, it's even a smaller difference, and that's the reason why the FDA is going to release new guidelines for rules of how we're going to label our sunscreens. And it's going to finally happen this December, so that we're not actually be able to have a sunscreen higher than 50 because it really gives people a false sense of security when they're using those higher numbers when they're really not getting that as much.


It was you coming forward that helped open the floodgates in that case with Larry Nassar. Do you believe there are other abuse cases in the Southern Baptist Church that have yet to come to light?

Oh, absolutely. You know, survivors live in silence for so long. And one of the reasons that they do - the main reason they do is because they watch how society talks about abuse. And they watch how our culture treats abuse victims. And that's one of the primary things we need to change. We have to let them know that they are safe when they come forward before they're going to be able to speak up. Our cultural and societal response to those survivors who have spoken up is really going to set the tone for whether or not others feel free to come forward.

And may I ask, as someone who's prominently working on this within the church while obviously wanting to respect the anonymity of people coming forward, do women come to you and tell you their stories?

They do all the time. And oftentimes, I am the first disclosure. And I consider that an absolute privilege to be trusted with their stories. It's not something I ever take for granted.


No, but then - you know, and then somebody would come up - I think it was Carlene, who was our nurse, came up with the idea. Well, cut it into slices. And then you can lay out the slices - like, all this so that we can keep from doing the - like, that's why they give you a rectory - so that you could serve the church. Like, give it up.

(Laughter) That's hilarious. What do you think you got out of writing this book?And what do you hope other people get out of reading your book?

I think I got back the experience. In "Law And Order," you always see the crazy criminals take trophies, and they put them in a box and cement them down in the basement. I think I do that with grief. I think we - I put the fun things in there, and then I lock it up. I wanted all of this back. You know, I wanted the laughter. I wanted her. I wanted those years with my family. I wanted access to them again. And I wanted to do it while keeping company with all kinds of other people who are isolated by the very nature of caregiving. I wanted that back in my life, available to me.

We've been speaking with Lorene Cary. Her latest book is "Ladysitting: My Year With Nana At The End Of Her Century. "And Lorene was kind enough to join us from the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches.


Thank you so much for wanting to talk to me.

When someone says to you, tell me about your mother, it's not a simple question, is it?

Oh, not at all, man, not at all. I look forward to it, though. My mother's an incredible model. And like most Americans, she just had a rough patch, and she was not comfortable talking about a lot of those rough patches. She had me when she was a sophomore at Jackson State University, and she got a job teaching at Jackson State maybe four or five years later after she started graduate school, so we moved to Jackson probably in 1979, 1980. And Jackson was home, and books were really home for me. She just made me read and write before I could do anything I wanted to my entire life. I thank her for my writerly practice that I still have now, but that writerly practice also enabled me to write into a lot of the gaps and a lot of the terror that I think she probably did not want me to write into.

Well - and we do have to get to that, don't we?


We often ignore the unevolved brain or what's sometimes called the reptilian brain. So zombies exist in the reptilian brain in the movies. And as it turns out, in the real world, humans have what we sometimes refer to as our zombie brain. And you might think about it as autopilot.

Like when you're driving the car. And you sort of zone out. And you don't even remember the way that you got to where you're going.

That's the perfect example.

And there are real-world applications for this speculation, right?Because there are murder cases where the perpetrator says that they zoned out. And there's a big debate about how conscious they were of what they were doing.


It is fiction, but of course I was able to draw on my experience. I developed my expertise in the agency in nuclear counter-proliferation. And that's why that's the main theme of this first book, hopefully in a long series. But it's sort of ripped from the headlines.

Vanessa's asset is shot just after she disregards the signal to abort their meeting. Does she blame herself?

She does. There is definitely a sense that when you, as a CIA ops officer, when you are handling assets, they are delivering to you their trust and their well-being. And you feel very protective of them, even if they're not very nice people.

So, who do spies talk to when they have a bad day at the office?


UNIDENTIFIED SPORTSCASTER #4: And you can just tell the way the big fellow was laughing, he thinks that's it.

. . . But his new book is a tribute to another legend, his coach at UCLA, John Wooden. Their 50-year-long friendship started on the court at Pauley Pavilion and grew over lunch at VIP's Cafe in Tarzana and long afternoons of easy conversation in coach Wooden's den. This week on Out of Bounds, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, author of "Coach Wooden And Me. "He joins me now from NPR West. Welcome so much to the program.

Thank you very much, nice to talk to you.

At the beginning of the book, you write about how you and coach Wooden when you first met were an odd couple sitcom waiting to happen. Tell us about who you were then.


We didn't finish, and he died before it could finish, but we got 30, 34 hours of tapes, something like that. And one thing that became clear in those tapes and all the time that I spent with him is that he would never speak ill of another human being. He always went out of his way to find the good in people who are adamantly apposed to his entire agenda.

I mention this because I think one of the things that tended to dismay him toward the end of his life, at least in my experience of talking to him, was how divided we were in our politics. That people fought - that people that disagreed with them weren't just opponents, but enemies. That somehow condemnation, the politics of hatred, the politics even of mocking people, as opposed to sitting down and talking to them, never made any sense to him.

To Thurgood Marshall, politics was the art of the possible. The idea was to sit down and get things done, not to get applause by mocking your opposition. I really learned a lot from the time I spent with him, and that's perhaps the strongest lesson that I learned. And I think applying it to today's world, while I think he'd be very proud to see a black man with a chance to be elected to the presidency, he'd be very sad to see how the supporters on both sides spend so much time mocking and hating the candidate on the other side.

Well, Stephen Carter, thank you.


And thanks for your service to the United States.

I appreciate it.

Why did you want to join the U. S.  military?

I'm not just another U. S.  Army recruit. I was born and raised in a conservative city of Pakistan, near Kashmir. My father owned a small local newspaper in which he recommended the diplomatic solution of Kashmir conflict - due to which, he had to face a lot of threats from state and not-state actors. Because of these threats, he had to close down his newspapers, and I had to move to a boarding school outside my city.


Curative instruction meaning, I'm sorry I said that. Disregard that.

Exactly. Yeah, I made a mistake - mea culpa. I shouldn't have said that. Please disregard what I said and don't hold it against the counsel for either of the parties.

Dramatic testimony from Richard Gates, Manafort's former business partner, this week who essentially said, look. Paul Manafort's a crook. And I know because I am, too. And we schemed together to steal money. That's an argument the defense can turn against the prosecution in a way, though, too, isn't it?

Absolutely. So what the defense may try to do is say, what we're dealing with here is a criminal, a dishonest individual from start to finish. He is being sponsored - his testimony is being sponsored by the government. But you can't trust him. After all, look at all the things he's done. He's stolen, in fact, not only from others but from his own business associate, Mr.  Manafort.


Race is so divisive. What can we learn from your relationship with a white man from a different generation?

That's what "Coach Wooden And Me" is about. It's about the fact that despite all the differences here in America, we come together on so much that we agree on, you know, our love for sport. Basketball fans across all ethnicities and socioeconomic lines, everybody loves hoops. And that's where we come together, within our country and with other countries of the world.

When you talk about your friendship with coach Wooden in the book, you use the word accomplishment. Why that word?Is having an enduring friendship and accomplishment?

Yeah, I think so because it's something that you have to work at. It just doesn't come. Building up trust and love and affection with someone else, you've got to take some risks. You could fail. It is an accomplishment, you know, because it tests your judgment and, what is your commitment?


From what we can tell, they've donated from - I think it was over a hundred countries in terms of geography. It just sort of struck a nerve across the world.

Why do you think that is?

I think a big part of it was that Tesla as a man is sort of someone that a lot of people, maybe, sympathized with because he's kind of a geek at heart. He's sort of this unsung hero, and he did all of these wonderful things for us and didn't really get much credit during his career. So with this sort of crowd funding campaign, it was almost an opportunity for the world to make it up to him.

What drew you to getting involved?


I gather there were women who asked you for medical help.

Yes. So some of the women who had been raped asked to know if they were pregnant. One of the most heartbreaking things I would have to do would be to confirm for women that they were, indeed, pregnant as a result of rape. Some of them were requesting testing for sexually transmitted infections, which we couldn't do on the boat, but we helped to arrange in Italy once we arrived there.

One of the things I say about my Doctors Without Borders work is that I often come across the best of humanity, but I also come across the worst of humanity. And these women, especially, told me of things that had happened to them that it never occurred to me that humans could do that to one another.

All right, Dr.  Giles, you have at least a few ears in America right now. What do we need to hear?


Right. No, you hit it right on. The - no glass is unbreakable, certainly, and when you strengthen the glass this much, there's tremendous compressive stress put in the surface of the glass. So when you do actually manage to break it, that kind of force, the energy that's stored in the glass causes it to shatter, like you say, pretty impressively.

So you make the glass itself in upstate New York there at Corning. And then you have to ship it to China for them to put it in the phones.

We make the glass. We don't make it here in Corning, New York, we make it in plants around the world. We have a plant in Kentucky and Taiwan and Japan. And yes, we make large sheets of this glass, and then we put it into crates, and then we ship it to companies called finishers, most of them are in China, and those are the companies that actually cut the glass into the pieces, drill holes, polish, et cetera, into the shapes of the parts that go onto the devices.

Why can't you - I'm sorry, why can't you make it the shape itself beforehand?


You know, World War II is very cut-and-dry. It was like, these are the bad guys, you know. We're fighting for, you know, freedom. And not just for Europe, but for ourselves, for our people, to prove that we are more than what people say we are. That's not happening in Iraq.

Well, Professor, thanks for the interview.

Well, thank you.

Yvonne Latty is author of "We Were There: Voices of African-American Veterans from World War II to the War in Iraq. "She's also a professor in the department of journalism at New York University.


Again, I was a founding chairman. I feel an obligation, and I think, in times like these, we do need the arts to really lift our spirits.

Can you give an example maybe of how a piece of art might fill that goal?A lot of people - just to play devil's advocate - might say, people are losing their homes to foreclosure. What is a piece of art going to do?What would you say?

Well, I think, if one goes to a performance, whether it's a theater, symphony, or museum and sees an exhibition, it lets your mind get away from the economic trauma we're all living in. It lifts our spirits.

Is there a particular piece of art - you have so many in your collection - but is there one you can think of now where you look at and you might see hope in what otherwise might look like a dour time to some?


Yeah. Some of the Republicans who used to sound the alarm about rising deficits during the Obama administration seem less concerned about that now. I'm not sure if that's because they've gotten some new economic theory. It may have more to do just with who's in charge. During the recession, we saw dire warnings about debt-to-GDP ratios. Those turned out not to be true. A better question might be, you know, what are we running up the debt for?

During World War II, the country ran huge deficits, and I think history generally considers that money well spent to preserve democracy, defeat the Nazis. We'll see how history judges deficit spending now to provide tax cuts and boost government spending in an economy that's already close to full employment.

That is NPR's White House correspondent Scott Horsley. Thanks so much.

Good to be with you.


That's right. In the last few years where, as a fugitive, when he was living in Belgrade, he eked out this living as a new age guru. He grew a big bushy white beard, had glasses, had a top knot at the top of his head tied up with a black ribbon. He presented this rather remarkable monk-like figure and, as you say, hid in plain sight. He was often at seminars and conferences about alternative medicine.

He went to his local bar and he didn't sit on the sidelines there. He took center stage and actually played a kind of Balkan fiddle called a gusle. And everyone stood around and clapped and applauded him. And he was sitting under a portrait of Radovan Karodzic, this man who was the hero for most of the people in the bar. And not one of them spotted the resemblance.

He lived across the stairwell in his block of flats from a woman who worked with Interpol. And her - every time she went into work, she logged on to her computer and saw the world's most wanted, including Osama bin Laden and Radovan Karodzic. And the penny never dropped. It was like a long-running performance that only came to an end really when his brother made a vital slip.

He made a phone call, right?What happened?


Oh, I really like the scene at DefCon. I don't think there's a single corner of the U. S.  or, you know, maybe even the world, where people take their privacy more seriously.

People pay their own way, right?Why do they go?

Well, people come here for a mix of reasons, OK?Some people are coming here for skills building. There are little villages in DefCon - as they're called. So one village, for example, teaches you how to break locks. Another village is focused on social engineering. And that's when you can learn to how to use the deep web - the parts of the web that are not on Google - to fish for information, which is a great tool for a journalist to have. Other people come here for recruitment. While this is a very countercultural space and you have, you know, mohawks and tattoos - even face tattoos - you know, this is also a place where the establishment comes over to look for their next talent. So you actually have a lot of side-conversations between people that look very different. And you can tell that people are talking about jobs and career.

Have they played spot the fed this year?I mean, has there been any government presence - any NSA on site?


Some analysts call the decision a compromise rather than a punt, but the ruling leaves open many questions about what's next for affirmative action. We're joined now, as we often are, by David Savage, Supreme Court correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune newspapers. He joins us by phone from his office here in Washington. David, always good to have you with us.

Hi Neal.

Waiting a long time for this decision on a case the justices seemed to have picked to issue a sweeping ruling on affirmative action.

Yes, this is one that the most surprising aspect of it is what they didn't do. When this case came up for argument in October, it sure looked like the case that the conservatives had wanted to basically say no to affirmative action. Five of them are very familiar with this subject and have in the past been very skeptical of the idea of using race.


And eventually the crowd around him - the crowd of press, kind of got a little bigger. And he sort of looked around and said, maybe this is not something I should be laughing about because, you know, we are in a different age.

Mark, I've got to tell you - this is why I watch the Super Bowl, but I can't watch football during the regular season. It is hard for me to look at those talented athletes and think half of them, if not more, are going to wind up being permanently damaged by what I'm watching them do on the field.

I will tell you, Scott, that the National Football League is very worried about the likes of you and people like you, of which there are many, who are taking a more closer moral look at what they're watching. I mean, football, for many years, has been the great spectacle of American life. Every year, it's, like, 70 or 75 of the most watched television shows in America are almost always football games. We love football.

Having said that, there are a lot more people, and it happens every year. And you have research that comes out every week, it seems, and testimonials from retired players and researched brains from dead players that tell us a little bit more. And as we get smarter, I think the league, you know, has to try to keep up with some kind of rule changes and equipment changes.


Well, we don't have a clear answer on that. That's not something that either side is answering in black and white. But the unusual nature of this information sharing certainly raises that question again with Manafort. And Manafort of course does face the possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison with the conviction in Virginia and then the plea deal in Washington. And the president certainly didn't do anything this week to try to head off talk of a possible pardon.

No, he - in fact, he said that's still on the table. Why should I take it off the table, right?

Exactly. exactly.

And a March 5 sentencing date for Paul Manafort, right?


I mean, well, first of all, it's a real place. It's called Highclere. So when it's blown up to the big screen, it's not like a set that looks chintzy and you can see the seams. This is a real dining room, a real library. And you see some of the grounds. The grounds, it turns out - I didn't know this - were landscaped by a man with one of my favorite names, Capability Brown.

(Laughter) Love that.

He's a famous landscape architect. And he did the original Highclere grounds. And they look great.

I was amazed, watching it, at how many plotlines they were able to squeeze in. I left, like, counting them.


Yeah, he's a great story, absolutely. Another great story, though, before I let you get away from here is Mike Tomlin, headed to the Super Bowl, in what, his second, third year as a coach?That's pretty impressive.

Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think Jim said this is not just he's his brother, but that, you know, his kind is - he leads a group of very young coaches, and I think in front of our eyes we've seen this transformation from the sort of old, recycled guys to all these young bloods with a lot of perk and energy.

You know, the Rooney Rule that Jim Brown made reference to with Art Rooney hiring, the Rooney family hiring Mike Tomlin, this is an example of, give a brother a chance and some good things can happen.

Yeah. We need a Rooney Rule on the media, Tony. Of course, we'll get to that next month, but. . .


Well, I guess you could say almost anything is possible. But I can tell you that I think the program has shown almost no effectiveness. I think at their height, they did four arrests one year. That was costing over $200 million per arrest. CNN had a story that said sleep-deprived, medicated, suicidal and armed federal air marshals in disarray. Years ago, another - a former member of Congress told me one time, he said we did everything we really needed to do when we locked the cockpit doors. That very inexpensive thing has probably done more for air security than anything else.

I mean, it's tempting, and certainly we do it in the news business, to look at a figure like $9 billion and say, you know, figure out what that cost per arrest and everything. But I wonder, isn't it in a sense worth, I don't know, a billion dollars a year to the American people to have that deterrent aboard?Because as people in the program have pointed out, if something happens, there's no one else to call upon for help in an airliner.

Well, you could justify almost anything on that basis. But I will tell you that on any cost-benefit analysis, this program does not hold muster. I can tell you also that while a billion dollars might not seem like much money in the whole federal government. . .

Oh, no, it's a lot of money. Don't get me wrong. . .


For decades there has been this idea that women were not professional unless they were torturing around in a heel. But I think if you strip all that away and go down to really base level, we've got to admit that, you know, it is - it's patriarchal, and it's misogynistic. It's this idea that women should be sort of slowed down and debilitated.

So I think it's quite tricky. I think, you know, in the paragraph you just read out, I was trying to sort of explore that duality that we get with a lot of these conversations. We have it around, you know, bikini waxes and makeup and a lot of the sort of traditional trappings of femininity, this idea that it can be something we enjoy doing and that we sort of take a pleasure in doing. But it's impossible to know whether we would be doing it if we lived outside a patriarchal society.

So why do you say you suspect that they might be over?

Well, fashion really has led us in a certain direction. So for the last few years, we've seen the rise of the fashion sneaker. We've seen, you know, magazine editors, models, celebrities comfortably kind of bouncing around in sneakers. And suddenly, dress codes have changed. So it's completely acceptable to turn up to quite a smart party wearing a lovely dress with a pair of sneakers on the bottom. This summer we've seen the rise of the ugly sandal as well.


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?

I wouldn't say that. Maybe that first week he did, but there will only be one Michael Vick. Remember, Tony, Michael Vick was the most exciting quarterback in the NFL, and there's still talk and anticipation of him playing when he gets out.

All right. Let's move on to baseball because we're moving into the time of the year, at least for me, when baseball really becomes interesting. This year we had a couple of blockbuster trades involving Manny Ramirez going from Boston to the Dodgers, and we also had C. C. Sabathia going from the Cleveland Indians to the Milwaukee Brewers, and they turned their respective teams around. So, the question is, are they - should they be considered as MVP candidates even though they've only been there a short time?


We recommend - we have a lot of recommendations. We think they're very practical. It can be done. Some of them are internal in the government themselves. There are internal changes Congress needs to make so that it can be more effective in this, and other commissions have recommended them. Now, let's do it. Let's get it done.

We want the life science community to work with the government about how to self-regulate. In other words, what kind of protocols can we use so that we can keep track of high containment labs better. And then, we say we need to emphasize Pakistan. Now, it's funny that this report is coming out now because we saw in the course of this that Pakistan is an epicenter for all of these risks that we're talking about.

Jim Talent, former senator from Missouri, thank you.

Thank you.


Right. And people in Detroit and in Michigan have seen that up close. Detroit is one of the country's leading cities for foreclosures, and people have just seen the values of their houses plummet there. What do you hear from your readers?

Well, they're very angry. And the next question is, well, who are they angry at?And the answer seems to be, well, who's available. If McCain is doing a swing through the suburbs today, they'll be mad at McCain. If the Democratic governor of Michigan, Jennifer Granholm, visits Detroit, they'll be mad at her. Both candidates still have favorable ratings above 50 percent. That's a little bit at variance with what I'm hearing anecdotally from readers. They seem much more polarized than that, and the Obama people seem much more hateful towards McCain and vice versa.

And what do they want to hear from the candidates?

They want to hear how the candidates are going to stem the hemorrhaging of manufacturing jobs in Michigan or alternatively, what they're going to replace those jobs with. Michigan has been struggling with job losses, foreclosures and high unemployment for well over a year now. And there's anger, but there's also a little bit of numbness at the constant patter of bad news.


What does the president want?Do we know?

That is the question. And it seems to be constantly changing. On Tuesday at the White House meeting, the president told lawmakers essentially, if you come up with a compromise, I'll sign what you send me. And so they did come up with a. . .

Yeah, he said I'll sign it. I'll take the heat. Yeah.

Exactly. And so they thought they had done that. And he rejected it. The White House has never put a particularly fine policy detail on what they want. I think it's fair to say he wants a win. And on this issue, it's tough for him because he needs to be able to bring something back to his base on a key issue in his campaign but also come up with a deal that Democrats can vote for.


How are you, Scott?

Fine, thanks, but I don't have to answer a lot of these questions from persnickety grammar people. Why was the internet capitalized in the first place?

Well, that's a good question. The internet is wholly generic, like the telephone or electricity. It never was trademarked. It's not based on any proper noun. And I think the best reason for capitalizing in the past may just have been the term was new. I read that at one point people, capitalized phonograph, so maybe it was something like that, but now it's a routine part of daily life.

Is it in anyway because to a lot of people, the internet is a place?


Yeah, gosh.

And so I got up and ran. And it wasn't too far. But I just - at that moment, I thought, I don't want to be shot in the back, and I need to find some cover. And there's really no place to hide. But there are these. . .

You found a little, like, alcove that you could duck into.

There was a little alcove, yeah. And I just made myself as small as I could in that little corner.


So I - you either roll your eyes or you laugh at what politicians will do in support of their most fundamental instincts, which as I said is to preserve their own political viability.

It strikes me as not being all that different from what the Chinese badminton team did to try to get a better opponents in the next round.

Well, except there's one difference, right?The badminton team got thrown out of the Olympics. And in this one, if it works, you get elected to the U. S.  Senate.

It's also interesting, Senator McCaskill has said previously she's going to be much too busy campaigning to go to the Democratic National Convention to be photographed, presumably, with President Obama. She doesn't want to do that. I would think, now, congressman Akin may find himself much too busy to go to Tampa.


It's probably a combination of both. The sense that people have out there is that there is certainly a level of speculator buying by local investors, by local real-estate investors. But you know, there's quite a number of loans also being made to first-time buyers and others who are looking to move and so forth.

And meanwhile, there are various plans to try to get homeowners to hang on to their homes, to stay in their homes and avoid foreclosures, one coming out from the FDIC's Sheila Bair. Tell us about that.

Yeah. So, the plan that Ms.  Bair talked about yesterday at a hearing in Washington was that if servicers - these are mortgages companies that basically handle collections and billing on behalf of investors and banks - if they agree to modify some of these troubled loans in a way that the government says you should do, then the government would agree to shoulder any or shoulder a part of the future loss under this loan.

So, who would that help, the homeowners or the banks?


I am not a dog owner. I would say I'm an aspiring dog owner. Just a couple of weeks ago I did a review of robot pets. This is the only kind of pet that I think I would be responsible enough to take care of.

OK. So cockroaches was number one. Dogs was number four. What was two and three?

Well, number two was why don't humans have a mating season?It turned out that there's an entire chapter of a book by Jared Diamond, the author of "Guns, Germs, and Steel," that looks at just that question. And question number three was about a photograph from an old issue of Life magazine showing the descendants of George Washington. The person wanted to know, who is the current living descendant of George Washington?And, I guess, who would be king of America if George Washington had been king?That question has been answered most recently in an article for Ancestry magazine.

Slate. com's Daniel Engber. Thank you, Dan.


They had contracts for a five-star hotel in Amman, Jordan. They wound up being held in a room for 45, 50 days without knowing what was going to become of them. They were loaded into gypsy taxicabs, driven down the most dangerous road in the world, the Amman to Baghdad highway, which I think you had some experience with, as well, right?

Indeed, too many times. The Highway of Death.

And, predictively and foreseeably, they were kidnapped from two cars that got away from the rest. It was the first mass execution video of this horrible modern era of terrorist theater that we've all come to know, but it was a blip. The deaths of contractors - it was a parade every day. It was horrible, and it's the most horrible thing I've ever seen in my life. And, sadly, I had to watch it several times just to understand, you know, what happened to them really.

Your book begins with Kamala.


Yes. (Laughter). I suppose you're right. I mean, that may follow. But I. . .

(Laughter).

. . . Wanted to explore a masculine archetype. And that's what Daddy is. He is larger than life. He's almost too big to exist. He's straight out of mythology. He's very strong and reassuring, and he sticks by his children, et cetera. But he's also - you know, he's got this troubled streak. This sort of - this violence in him. He's entirely defined by his body, his physicality, his strength. And Cathy arrived, saying, actually, what happens when these ideals are instilled in someone who doesn't inhabit the right physicality?Or she's somebody who has a very similar temperament to her father, but she doesn't have his strength. And she's a girl. And how does she stitch together those dual identities?

Yeah. There is - not to give too much away, but there's an act of violence in the book in which a woman takes a man's life. She sees it as her only way to survive. And I have to ask if recent events and recent debates and soul searching we've had in both our countries makes the scene even more telling.


Condemnation continues of President Trump's profane language about several foreign countries, using an especially crude word. And a warning - you're about to hear that word. At a bipartisan meeting with legislators on Thursday, the president asked why the United States would want immigrants from, quote, "shithole countries. "Until last week, roughly 200,000 Salvadorans in the U. S.  held temporary protected status. That was put in place after the devastating earthquakes hit that country in 2001. But the White House says it'll end those protections and give Salvadorans until September 2019 to return to El Salvador or face deportation.

Carlos Dada is the founder of El Faro, a news site based in San Salvador, and joins us from there. Carlos, thanks so much for being with us.

Thank you for having me, Scott.

What's the reaction in El Salvador been to the president's comments and, for that matter, your personal reaction?


With us now, author and economist Julianne Malveaux, she is president of Bennett College. Welcome, Dr.  Malveaux.

Greetings, Farai. How are you?

I'm doing well, but some people aren't. And let's talk about these figures and really, what is shifting in our economy right now in terms of the different sectors where people are losing these tens of thousands of jobs?

Well, people are looking ahead and they're very uncertain, and that's what we see in markets. We see people laying people off. We also have some challenge in financial market. Certainly, the Bear Stearns' crisis raises all kinds of questions. The housing market, of course, we've talked about that on this program several times, but the fact is that we see a stagnancy. We don't see growth. We see houses that are overvalued. Lots of people in mortgage crisis. People who bought homes within the last five years finding that they overpaid for their homes and they couldn't sell them in what they paid for them, so they're stuck. That removes liquidity.


(Laughing) You would think, but its this weird sort of a - the more I get to know them, the more they become different objects with such different ingredients that I love them more with each passing day.

(Laughing) So I have a burrito specimen here with me in the studio. And I'm going to unwrap. . .

Is it in wax paper or tinfoil?

It is in both tinfoil and wax paper.


I have been late. Now I'm right on time. And I make mistakes, but at least they're mine. I'd sign my life away on a dotted line Just to get the love I deserve. . .

That's News & Notes. Glad you could join us. Nicole Childers, Christabel Nsiah-Buadi and Geoffrey Bennett produced the show. Sasa Woodruff is the editor. Sonata Lee Narcisse directs. The technical director is Sherene Strausberg. Marcia Caldwell and Shawn Corey Campbell are our drive engineers. The News & Notes staff includes Roy Hurst, Geoffrey Gardner, Devin Robins, Zachary Slobig, Joanne Griffith, Drew Tewkesbury, Allison Samuels and Jim Wallace. To listen to the show or subscribe to the podcast, visit our Web site, nprnewsandnotes. org. To join the conversation or sign up for the newsletter, visit our blog at nprnewsandviews. org. News & Notes was created by NPR News and the African-American Public Radio Consortium. On Monday, short on cash these days?Well, what if your neighborhood got together and started printing its own money?It's already happening. We'll look at the spread of customized community currency.

(Singing) Growing up too fast. I have the best friends you could ever have, But I don't know what I got 'til it's gone. . .

Because I lose every single game I play 'Cause I'm a slave to my distractions. I climb a mountain for every mess I make, But can't get no satisfaction.


And let's just say, it was a fishing expedition. It was financed by Trump's opponents in both parties. Some fishing expeditions do come back with fish. And if this one actually did and some of that finds its way into the hands of special independent prosecutor Bob Mueller's investigators, then the dossier might, in some sense, inform their questions about Russian interference because all of this was about Trump's ties to people in Russia.

Right. And those questions about Russian interference will also be front and center in the upcoming hearings that we mentioned for the tech giants - Facebook, Twitter and Google executives who are going to be before Congress over two days this coming week. What will they be grilled about?

You know, in recent days, we have learned a good deal more about how extensive the Russian involvement in social media was, particularly the number of ads running on Facebook and how they were targeted. And some of this was using some of the people in Facebook who work with advertisers - big advertisers - and who help you target exactly the people you're trying to reach.

So this might have been - it appears to have been one of the main ways in which these Russian elements were trying to put a big thumb on the scale in the 2016 election.


Yeah.

. . . "Giant Steps" is more like leaning forward in the passenger seat of a speeding racecar, (laughter) you know?

All right. Let's listen to another good album from 1959. This is "Take Five" from Dave Brubeck, his album "Time Out. "

If "Kind Of Blue" is sitting in an armchair with a martini or a cocktail, this - speaking of vices - feels like smoking in an alley to me.

(Laughter) And so much of that attitude comes from the sound of the alto saxophonist, Paul Desmond, who - actually, his tone was once described by a jazz critic in terms of a dry martini.


Do you report them?

Yeah. I mean, I can call up, you know, different agencies if I have enough information. And in this instance, I did. I do know that, you know, a couple days later, I saw the same person was booked into the jail for domestic violence. You know, for me, that helps me to sleep at night because just maybe that firearm that I would've sold that person - what would it have done if it would've been used in that crime?

Were there other instances where maybe something bought from your store, you know, was used to commit a crime, or is this the first time that you've had to deal with something like this?

You know, it comes around. This is the first time where it's been national, and we've had all kinds of coverage of it. But it is not an uncommon thing to have the FBI or the ATF call up and say, we need to know this person's information or what happened with this situation. That happens probably every couple months.


Well, we've seen - it's become more difficult under the Trump administration for members of the military to get citizenship. It's been more difficult for them to get paperwork filed for their family members. It's more difficult for them to prevent the deportation of their family members.

Well, how are they making it more difficult?What examples do you have?

During the Obama administration, Janet Napolitano had created a program called basic training naturalization. It allowed the troops to get their citizenship really quickly. And the Trump administration has eliminated that program. They've also made it harder for the troops to file applications for citizenship. And it's taking much longer for them to make a decision on those applications. Recently they also announced they were going to close some of the international USCIS offices that process people for citizenship overseas, which will make it even more difficult for military members.

Now, I understand that you were one of the people who started a program to recruit people who aren't U. S.  citizens into the U. S.  military. That program was known as MAVNI - Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest. The program has effectively been suspended - right?- but it already started slowing down during the Obama administration. Is that right?


Thank you for having me.

So first, let me ask, you know, how bad is the outbreak?How many people have died?And what did you see as you traveled into the countryside?

At the moment, there have been 600 confirmed and suspected cases according to the ministry of health. You know, the biggest worry is that the virus or the disease is spreading slowly or down south to Goma, which is the regional capital in eastern Congo. If Ebola hits Goma, then there are real fears that the crisis could spread globally because the city sits on the border with Rwanda. And it also has an international airport. And, you know, international organizations like the WHO have already started kind of contingency plans by setting up a treatment center there and vaccinating future frontline workers.

Now, as you traveled, you found that these regional militias known as the Mai-Mai were really interfering with the health workers, and the health workers sort of had to negotiate in order to be able to get to people to help them.


So, right then, your life changed. You quit your job. You made plans to leave your family for a year and go to China.

Well, yeah. My weight had gotten so out of control that I wasn't even working at that time, unable to work.

So, when you got there seven months ago, how much did you weigh?

I weighed approximately 646 pounds.


Well, I think it's complicated, to be honest with you. I think part of it is that I wanted to appear strong. I wanted to appear as if I could suck it up and take whatever came my way with a sense of humor. I wanted to be taken seriously and not, you know, is one of those women who somehow was overly emotional or naggy or, you know, to complain about, you know, the things that were often said to me or in my presence about other women. And so for me, that was constantly an inner conflict that I was trying to manage. And frankly, there was a lot of productivity probably that went into having to manage that kind of thing that really is real.

Do you think that culture drove out women from the national security environment?I mean, women working in that sect are vastly outnumbered by men?

There's no doubt. We all have our own red lines and our own saturation points that we get to with us. But there's absolutely no doubt. And I say that on the basis of - you know, of data because of women coming to me over time. And sometimes their reasons for leaving were cloaked in other things. But I think that very clearly for a lot of them who were willing to, you know, be a bit more forthright in why they were choosing to leave was the exhaustion.

What is the impact in your view when you don't have women in senior leadership positions?What do women bring to the table?


Well - and very fortunately because the plane at the time he bailed out was headed more or less straight for a densely populated area - Pensacola, Florida. And if you look at the map, it came down just a few miles outside of town, also not far from the Gulf. That plane almost - he almost did guide it into the Gulf maybe 10 miles away.

And since this plane crashed, has anybody heard from Marcus Schrenker?

Well, supposedly one of his friends or acquaintances did get an email from him today. The county sheriff's office in Milton, Florida, which is sort of coordinating the crash investigation, said they couldn't confirm that email, but there were reports that he did send out this email.

Business reporter for the Indianapolis Star, Jeff Swiatek, thank you.


And again, art is predicated. Art lives off of, you know, making a lot of errors. And I certainly now feel like I've got, like, you know, a ton of space in which to kind of screw up and from that screw-up hopefully do something really nice.

Do you think you'll still be in that same world that you've written about in your other books, or will you - you don't know yet.

Yeah, I mean, I don't want to for this next book. This next book, I'm trying to make kind of more of a science-fictiony type book. But you never know until the book is finished what in the world it's going to be. I have dreams for my books, but it's like having dreams for your kids. You know, you want your kids to be this serious engineer or doctor, and they turn around, and they're kind of a crazy left-wing artist, and you're like darn, how did that turn out?

You know, you're known for taking a long time to finish your books, as well, I think.


I'm fine, thanks. Let's begin with the playoffs from last week. The Steelers beat the Bengals.

Brutal game.

Ugly, wasn't it?Not just ugly, vicious. That's what I mean.

It was a vicious game and also a game that - I've watched a lot of sports. I've never seen a team do so many dumb things as the Bengals did to lose that game in the final minutes.


And what a mess it's going to be because you've got 73 British seats out of 751 total. So once Brexit happens, presuming it does, you've got, you know, basically 10% of the Parliament that's just going to vanish. Some of those seats that will go to U. K.  candidates now will be abolished altogether, and others will be redistributed to other member states, who also very much would've liked to have that happen before these elections. But the U. K.  is going to play a huge role in electing a body that it won't even be a member of long-term.

It sounds incredibly messy. I want to ask also about these nationalist and far-right candidates more broadly across the European Union, since we're in a time where that sentiment is on the rise. How are those candidates expected to do in places like France and Italy?

Well, France and Italy are two places where they're expected to do quite well. You've got Marine Le Pen running basically neck-and-neck with President Emmanuel Macron's party. So that certainly is disconcerting to the mainstream political parties. And, of course, Italy's Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini is one of the most popular politicians in all of Europe. So some of those parties are expected to do quite well.

And, in fact, they were just holding a meeting of 12 of these far-right parties this weekend, banding together trying to rally support ahead of the elections. And if you listen to them, they say that they could come in even second or a third political group, but polls show them still down around fourth.


Billion with a B. And they have their own cable channels. I mean, they're major sports players. And almost all that revenue comes from two sports, men's basketball and football.

So where does all of that money go?

Not to the student athletes. Under NCAA rules, they're amateurs. They cannot be compensated beyond their scholarships and the cost of attending college. But it goes to coaches' salaries. It goes to facilities. It goes to the conference commissioners who all make an excess of $2 million now. There are a lot of people who are millionaires because of these sports. And so everyone gets paid except for the student athletes.

So how does race factor into all of this?


It is. There is an auction being held out of Boston that is auctioning off the first Hasselblad camera to fly in space. This was the first professional quality camera that astronauts used to photograph the Earth.

Now, since it went to space and since it was the first thing of its kind to go to space, what sort of price is that going to bring?

It's really hard to tell. This is a fascinating piece of history and just to put this into some perspective, another Hasselblad camera that's sort of the direct lineage of this camera - that was said to have flown to the moon - sold earlier this year for nearly a million dollars. And that camera had a lot of questions about its history. This one has a really solid history in terms of - we know what astronauts used it, we know how it was obtained. So there's a lot of excitement about the possibility of this camera setting a new record, maybe breaking the seven figure amount.

Robert Pearlman is the editor of an online magazine called collectSPACE. Mr.  Pearlman, thank you for talking to us.


Madam de Pompadour was the mistress of Louis XV and a style-setter. A painting shows her at her vanity table with her mirror, her makeup brush and compact, wearing a shockingly low-cut gown. Her preening went on for hours, so she'd receive visitors as she put on her makeup.

She had incredibly good taste, and hired only the most important, the most well-known furniture designers, painters. She was very cultured, and she created amazing furniture. And this table was made for her Chateau Bellevue. And it's impeccably made. The marquetry is fantastic. It's all about her life and who she is and her lifestyle. And so you should notice that on the top of the bronze-gilt mounts of the legs, there are little castle tops representing where she lives, her chateau. And then the top shows all of her interests - her interests in gardening and nature, her interest in music. And this was, obviously, commissioned by her and was to make to show her interests and her likes.

There are exquisite combs in the exhibit. Some of them are decorated with precious gems, others made out of rubber, and some made out of ebony and ivory. But they were not all used for beauty alone.

The interesting thing about the double-sided combs: the wide tooth is to comb hair, and the narrow end is to comb out the lice.


I thought that our spin was slowing down.

We are slowing down. We're slowing down but only because we're transferring it to the moon, and so the - if you count both of these bodies today, that spin should be remained constant throughout the course of solar system history.

And what they're suggesting is that you can lose spin from the Earth-moon system and transfer it to the sun-Earth system. And it's a very complex calculation. I mean, it's not just trivial that it took 30, 40 years to figure this out. But once that is on the table, and you say hey, I can start with an Earth that's spinning with a period of two hours, now you have an Earth, that if you were to look at this - and you can download the simulations from Science magazine - and you can see that - or from Harvard - and you can see that this Earth looks kind of like a muffin.

It's spinning so fast, it's got kind of a two-to-one axis ratio. And so their solution is hey, I can make the moon out of Earth's mantle, I'll just sort of hit it with a tiny projectile - you know, not tiny but much smaller than we thought previously - so Theia becomes smaller.


Yes, I - my mom has a cleaning company, and she cleans for a lawyer here locally. And once she started working there, it just turned into, like, a really big place. Like, it was not easy for her to do by herself, so. . .

You pitch in after school or on weekends or. . .

We took Sundays and sometimes Fridays to clean up the office, which was probably the best days for us because after church, we'd just head towards the office and clean.

And that all went to your quince fund.


Well, I think some tariffs do. I think this is a misguided policy. It was not thought out well. Of course, it helps the big steel companies, but it's going to affect all the downstream manufacturing jobs. You know, we're asking for help for them to grant our exclusions that we filed. And it can be approved by President Trump just by signing the exclusion, and that's what we're asking him to do.

Mr.  Pratt, will the people who lost their jobs at Mid Continent be able to find jobs elsewhere?

It will be tough in our area. I mean, it's an area of 17,000 people. We're the second-largest employer in the area, employing over 500 at one time. And it will be tough for them to find other jobs.

In the 2016 election, Donald Trump got 80 percent of the vote in Poplar Bluff and in surrounding counties. Has local support for President Trump changed because of what is happening to your company?


Yeah. This is really kind of a year of reckoning for Big Pharma. Insys Therapeutics, Purdue Pharma, Teva Pharmaceuticals - they've agreed to pay more than half a billion dollars between them to state and federal agencies. And these shockwaves just keep rolling through the drug industry. In May, seven Insys executives were found guilty on racketeering charges. That company later declared bankruptcy. Purdue Pharma, another big player - they've talked openly about filing for Chapter 11. And Johnson & Johnson, a really big name-brand company - they're in court right now in Oklahoma. That state's attorney general is demanding $17 billion in compensation. And this is really the kind of opioid-related legal chaos that Reckitt Benckiser is hoping to leave behind.

Now that Reckitt Benckiser has made this deal, are they cleared from future litigation?

Well, they're not. And this is one thing that the industry is afraid of - that they'll make these big payouts and still face lingering liability. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports more than 200,000 Americans have died from prescription opioid overdoses. A lot of communities have been very hard-hit, so there are a lot of potential lawsuits out there. Reckitt Benckiser is still being sued right now by dozens of states. Their attorneys general have filed those suits. Some of those states may choose to take part in this federal settlement, but others could keep fighting in court. And that could mean a push for separate settlements.

That's North Country Public Radio's Brian Mann. He covers opioid litigation for NPR.


Diane Standaert of the nonprofit Center for Responsible Lending in Washington, D. C. , joins us now. Thanks very much for being with us.

Thanks for the opportunity to speak with you.

We're talking about car title loans and consumer finance loans. What are the differences?

Car title loans typically carry 300 percent interest rates and are typically due in 30 days and take access to a borrower's car title as security for the loan. Consumer finance loans have no limits on the rates that they can charge and also take access to the borrower's car as security for the loan. And so in some states, such as Virginia, there's very little difference between the predatory practices and the consequences for consumers of these types of loans.

How do people get trapped?


Yes.

What's your view of the impact of this money arms race on American democracy?

Well, nowadays, people don't - not several million dollars, but several hundred million dollars. And the Supreme Court's ruling on Citizens United is one of the stupid and most counterproductive decisions that the Supreme Court of the United States has ever made. And I think it has basically taken away a lot of the Democrat ideals of elections in the United States that we've enjoyed down through the previous generations. So I think it's completely distorted the democratic purity or legitimacy of our elections in the United States.

Legitimacy - that's strong words.


So, overall, I'm immensely proud of my team for what we were able to accomplish. We didn't have some major university backing us or major corporation backing us. We had two launches, and unfortunately neither one made it, but we got very, very close.

What went wrong?

We had a successful first stage burn. And unfortunately, seconds into the second stage burn, the vehicle spiraled out of control and basically disintegrated.

So, again, you're all college students, but nobody is getting paid. Nobody's getting college credit for this.

That's right. We're investing thousands of hours completely voluntarily.


Well, you know, that's another thing. So sometimes what happens to, you know, big scientists, you know, scientist that really have been enormously successful, is that as they grow older they don't feel as if they can continue, you know, with kind of mainstream incremental science after they have done something really big in the past. And as a result they adopt something that is completely outside of mainstream because they think, a-ha, maybe I'll make yet another huge contribution.

And that has happened to Pauling with Vitamin C.  And it happens to others too, you know, that at old age they suddenly pick up on something. Yes, it happened to Hoyle, Fred Hoyle, who is another person that I discuss on the concept of how did life evolve, you know, and so on. It's not a topic I discuss much in the book, but he started saying that probably all of life on Earth came from outer space and things like that and so on. So it happens.

Mm-hmm. This is SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR. I'm Ira Flatow talking with Mario Livio, author of "Brilliant Blunders: From Darwin to Einstein," talking about great blunders that happened. Speaking about those kinds of blunders late in life, Bill Shockley, who was one of the inventors of the transistor, also got into trouble about views about racism late. . .

Yeah. Unfortunately it is more common than we would like.


Rising gas prices are forcing consumers and the auto industry to make drastic changes. Today we wrap up our multimedia series Road Trippin' with a look at some solutions to the soaring fuel costs. Toyota and Honda have been making popular hybrid gas-electric cars and they generally get better mileage than gas-only engines and save some wear and tear on the environment. Pump prices have consumers dumping their SUVs and pickup trucks for smaller, more fuel-efficient cars. Now the other major car companies are jumping onto the fuel efficiency bandwagon. With us to talk about some of those changes is BMW spokesperson Dave Buchko. Thanks for joining us.

Thank you.

So gas-electric hybrid cars have been on U. S.  roads since Honda started selling the Insight in 2000. Companies like GM, Honda and BMW are looking now at developing hydrogen-powered cars. What does that mean, how do those work?

Well, there are different approaches to how to - to hydrogen vehicles. We've been at this longer than anybody. We've been at this for more than 25 years. And so when we started looking at hydrogen, what we were looking for initially was an alternative to gasoline as a way of powering an internal combustion engine, which is normal - you know, in a normal car engine. So quite different from what we see with fuel cells. But we've continued to develop the internal combustion engine powered by hydrogen because we think that that has a lot of potential and a lot of relevance.


It does. He talks about it almost every day. He's preparing the ground for it. But a lot of conservatives - and I think this starts with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell - are deeply concerned about it. They see this border issue - whether they see the border issue as a national emergency or not, they do see such a declaration as a bad precedent, something that a future president could use to do things that conservatives regard as radical, such as higher taxes on the ultra-rich or "Medicare-for-all. "

Another week of Roger Stone's wardrobe. Might a judge put an end to his fashion parade?

And to his parade of TV appearances perhaps. There is a federal judge in the District of Columbia contemplating a gag order on this case. That could be a mercy for all concerned, not least Roger Stone's longtime buddy, who is now in the White House.

Thanks so much, Ron Elving, NPR senior political editor.


The United Nations World Food Programme has to cut back on the food that it gives out to some of the most imperiled people in the world. In Ethiopia, for example, it's had to lower the daily calorie intake for hundreds of thousands of refugees that it feeds in the camps there. Now, this is partly due to funding shortfalls, but there is also a growing need for food aid as the globe's conflicts continue. Peter Smerdon joins us now from Nairobi. He's the spokesperson for the World Food Programme in East Africa. Mr.  Smerdon, thanks for being with us.

My pleasure.

What kind of hard decisions do to the folks in your program have to make?

Basically, when we haven't got enough money, we have to decide who's not going to get food. And most of the people we serve are dependent on the United Nations World Food Programme for their food needs - in many cases, 100 percent because either they fled countries in conflict, and they have absolutely no money, no jobs and no assets left or because they're refugees, and they are confined to camps. They are not allowed to work. And they have no money, either.


Yeah, they were. They were celebrities in the sense that they were the children of the tycoons and the kind of lords of the Gilded Age, the sort of people who grew up in Newport and Fifth Avenue and had names that resonated for a public that, you know, much like today, they know who has the money, who has the power.

Who was Theodore Roosevelt at the time that he was helping to organize this regiment?

So Theodore Roosevelt was - at the time, he was 38 years old. He had gone through a number of careers. He had been a politician. He had been a rancher. He was a historian. But he felt like life was actually passing him by and that he had not really found that thing that motivated him. And so when the war came along, which is something he advocated for, he knew immediately that he had to not just sit at a desk but actually go out and participate.

So I get that you had heard of the Rough Riders. If you read very much American history, you encounter them because of, well, Theodore Roosevelt, for starters. But what made you think there was more to this story than a few brilliant names?


Abby Wambach was a major soccer star - two Olympic gold medals, the all-time highest goal score among women and men internationally, global recognition. But when Barnard College, the all-women's school in New York City, asked her to give its commencement address last year, she felt underqualified. So she poured her heart into her speech and decided to turn it into a rallying cry for women.

That hard work paid off. Her speech went viral, and she's now turned it into a book about leadership for people everywhere. It's called "WOLFPACK: How To Come Together, Unleash Our Power, And Change The Game. "Abby Wambach is with us from Colorado Public Radio to talk about some of the leadership lessons in her new book.

Abby, welcome to the show.

Wow. That was that was maybe the best introduction that I've gotten. . .


We all do need advice. And, obviously, you're so vulnerable when you have a kid. You're scared. You don't know what to do. So what is this stuff based on?

You know, it's based on people's experiences. But some of it is actually really based on old, old advice. So if you look at the history of parenting books, you can see that advice is kind of recycled over and over again, tweaked a little bit for the fashion of the time. So, for instance, this idea that babies need to feed at a certain time - that's from the 1700s.

Oh, OK. So this is old advice that keeps on getting recycled through the ages. But is it necessarily bad advice?

No, it's not - I'm not here to say that it's bad advice. But there's a big hole in these parenting books and from the experts. And that's that this advice is almost solely based on the Western experience, the Western culture. And if you look around the world, there's so many other ways to do things.


And, of course, in "Hamlet" there's that famous play within a play, which, in my version, was a book within a book. And in this book, in "Romeo And/Or Juliet," there's actually two books within a book. When Juliet is taking that sleeping potion, she's out of the play for 42 hours. And while she's knocked out, she has a dream, which is "A Midsummer Night's Dream. "And you can play through that as Juliet in her subconscious.

And when Romeo's banished to Mantua, he's also kicked out of the narrative for a while. And he can visit the library and read a book called "Fair Is Foul And/Or Foul Is Fair" which is obviously "Macbeth" done in this format. So I tried to cram all the Shakespeare I could into this because I'm not sure there's that many other plays that would lend themselves so easily to this format.

It has to be a play with which people are generally familiar, too.

Well, that's the fun of it, right, because you know what these characters are supposed to be like. And when you kind of push them off the rails a little bit, there's a sense of breaking the rules that's a lot of fun, I think. It's fun to write (laughter).