Rabbi, how are you and the other people doing this profound work doing, feeling, thinking about?

Well, I cannot speak for anyone else. I can only answer you the same answer I've given everyone since Saturday night when they've asked how I'm doing. And the answer is, ask me in a few days. And I'll try to figure it out. Right now I'm not - I'm focused on what I and others - there's so many people working day and night on this issue and on other communal issues. It's inspiring to see. But right now I haven't even allowed myself to cry because if I do, I will fall apart. And I will not be able to do what has to be done. As the days go by, it's getting harder and harder for me to push those tears back. So I'm going to probably need a corner soon just to fall apart in. But right now we have work to do.

At some point, Rabbi Wasserman, that synagogue becomes a place of worship once again. Will that be difficult for you?

Well, that's not my synagogue. I'm the rabbi at one of the other synagogues.


Well, there have been dozens, many dozens of studies now over the last 20 years, and more that strongly suggest that men who are not circumcised are at higher risk of HIV infection from heterosexual intercourse.

Consistently, we see at least a 60 percent reduction in risk for men who are circumcised. And it's a relatively simple surgical procedure. It takes about 15 or 20 minutes normally for adults. It's done under local anesthesia.

There's a lot of demand for it. In many African countries now, there are long wait lists at the public hospitals of men wanting to get circumcised, and there just are not the resources there for them to do it.

Thabo Mbeki, the president of South Africa, was reviled by some people when he said poverty was the cause of AIDS. Regardless of whether or not you think his statement is literally true, is there a grain of truth to it?


It's a common complaint about poetry. It's the oldest form of expression, but what can it do for us now in an age of social media, Twitter, Facebook and national urgency?Poet Claudia Rankine's new collection, her fifth, has an answer. Its cover shows a black hoodie against a white background, recalling Trayvon Martin. And it's a very personal meditation on race in America. The book is called "Citizen: An American Lyric. "It was a finalist for the National Book Award. Claudia Rankine joins us now. Thank you, welcome to the program.

Good morning, Eric. Thank you for having me.

Before we chat, I want to give listeners a sense of your book. It reads like a series of kind of diary entries, so to speak, and an anatomy of encounters with perceived racism. I'd like you to read, if you would. Could you start "You Are In The Dark"?

Sure. (Reading) You're in the dark, in the car, watching the black, tarred street being swallowed by speed. He tells you his dean is making him hire a person of color when there are so many great writers out there. You think maybe this is an experiment, and you're being tested or retroactively insulted or you have done something that communicates this is an OK conversation to be having. Why do you feel comfortable saying this to me?You wish the light would turn red or a police siren would go off so you could slam on the brakes, slam into the car ahead of you, fly forward so quickly both your faces would suddenly be exposed to the wind.


We're talking about 2. 8 million people. Has the rise of temporary workers figured into, at least, the statistical improvement of the U. S.  economy for some people?

It has. Overall, about one seventh of the total job growth has been in the temp sector. The temp sector is growing nine times faster than the overall private sector as a whole. And the 2. 9 million workers represents a record number, both in the number of temp workers and in the percentage of the economy that they make up.

You know in "Harvest Of Shame," Edward R.  Murrow very famously said, the people we're showing you in this documentary have picked your Thanksgiving bounty with their bare hands, and this is how they live. What should we look at in our everyday lives that might remind us of how we're dependent on temp workers to get by?

It's very similar in how the goods change by the season. If you look at Valentine's Day, they pack our chocolates. If you look at Memorial Day, the barbecue grills are packed by temp workers. At Christmas, all the clothing and toys and gifts we get - the same things we saw in "Harvest Of Shame," how workers get hired, how much they're paid, how they're transported to work is exactly the same thing that's happening here. The only difference is now that instead of picking things we're packing things.


You know, in the post-Katrina era, Scott, the assumption has been that when a hurricane comes, you focus on that and set other things aside. So it was jarring when the president went ahead with his summit with Kanye West. And as you say, it was a major full-media presence in the Oval Office.

But the president's theme all week has been to keep the focus on the president. He's had a flurry of news availabilities - way more than usual. In fact, in the last month, he's had more than in all the time previously in his presidency - very flashy events, campaign rallies around the country, night after night.

And that happens just as the cable operations - television, news - has - well, they've begun to lose interest in some of those rallies. They're not covering them from beginning to end anymore, sometimes not covering them all - at all, perhaps because they do seem to be news-free campaign events, and maybe because they've become so frequent.

Does this week's sudden stock sell-off raise questions about what had seemed to be so much good news about the economy, including that historically low unemployment rate?


And then, from that point, he had a great change in his life. Because with that adverse discharge, dishonorable discharge, he wasn't able to secure the kinds of benefits that he wanted to, and he had to overcome that. And I think the great story of his life is what he did afterwards, for the duration of his life and leading his family. He was an ordinary person under remarkable circumstances.

Now unfortunately, he passed away in 1984. So how did you get involved with the case?

Well, it all goes back to Jack Hamann, who is an author who wrote the book. He did some research, he found out, he's from the Seattle-Fort Lawton area. Discovered there was something very unusual in terms of the courts martial, and then sought to investigate the matter. And when he did, he uncovered, essentially, just a tremendous miscarriage of justice, very well documented. He researched it, he published the book.

And at that time, the family members came forward as he did more and more research in terms of trying to find and locate the individuals. And from there, I became involved when the - last September, when Congressman McDermott's office asked me to assist some of the individuals with their cases before the Army Board for Correction of Military Records. And that's how I, for example, got to know the Townsell family.


Perhaps it really was all Steve Bannon inviting Michael Wolff into the White House, giving him unfettered access. But the White House is - and the West Wing is a small place. And it's hard to ignore. I certainly saw Michael Wolff when I was covering - when I've been covering the White House for the last year. It's kind of hard to ignore the guy.

Yeah. And just briefly, I'm just curious about this idea that somehow, you know, this may not really damage the president. I mean, how much of a blow do you think this will be?Or is this just another one of these scandals that seems to erupt and then be forgotten when the next one comes in?

I think it has a small, marginal, cumulative effect, right?I mean everybody sort of has baked in that that the president is not normal, is not - certainly not a normal president, doesn't operate in the normal way. I think what will change - say, that 36, 38 percent approval to something a lot worse - is if something happens catastrophic, if there's a drop a severe drop in the stock market or, God forbid, some kind of national security disaster, something bad for the Mueller investigation. This is only hurting his ability to weather a big storm like that. It's giving nobody who's on the fence, trying to figure out if they can still support him any reason to do so.

That's Michael Warren, a senior writer at the Weekly Standard. Thanks for coming in.


Well, some people put onion in. Others say no. Some people put a dash of white wine in. Others say you couldn't possibly do that.

Oh, this is a foodie controversy, not a controversy controversy.

Oh, yeah, it's a foodie controversy, and it truly, in this case, it's not that important.

(Laughter) I understand there's a social media campaign going on now in the food world to support relief following the earthquake.


Yeah. Yeah.

It could've taken a long time to write.

Yeah. Some playwright, you know, trying to, trying to, you know, solve the Alzheimer's problem. So, yeah.

But it can pull you in, right?You know, these mysteries of science.


Hi, Alex.

So, Barack Obama doesn't actually take office for about two more months. So is it fair to call Mumbai a test for him?

Well, obviously the tremendous economic crisis the country's going through is something that threatens to derail Obama's train before it leaves the station in terms of his inauguration on January 20th. But Alex, when you think about the terrorist attack in Mumbai, what you have is a situation where this has been identified by the American public as a potential point of weakness. The Bush administration has also said that when it comes to vulnerability, there's a pattern with terrorists identifying moments of political transition as prime for attacks. So in so many ways, this is a test for the president-elect, and what we've seen so far is the president-elect being quite aware of it. He had a briefing from Secretary of State Rice on Thanksgiving Day over the phone on the situation. They have established a team of people from the Obama transition team to interact with the State Department operation center. So right now, Barack Obama, I think, is finding himself having to be a quick study, but a quick study with so much on the line - literally the safety of the world.

And Juan, what is the protocol here for how a president-elect handles a situation like this while there is still a current president in office?


Well, I think one of my roles - at least the way I pretty much defined my life and work for 35 years in the academy and was quite lucky in serendipitous ways began teaching at Yale at the time of the moment that's now considered, I guess, the revolutionary moment at Yale with the Black Panthers and Bobby Seale and Erica Huggins and others.

So, I always saw a kind of resistive undercurrent in the university even at its Ivy League level. And I've tried to identify myself in the academy with that resistive undercurrent. And I've tried to maintain an integrity of my public appearances and what I write that never refuses to look at the fact that racism, in my estimation, is more rampant in the United States and globally than ever before.

One can say is the glass half-full or half-empty. I think that's mere casuistry. It seems to me that the glass is empty for the majority of Americans now, not just black Americans, and it's not near any liquid refreshments source that I know of, the foreclosures, the economics of the present time, the war.

It seems to me that Henry Louis Gates Jr.  and Cornel West made a deliberate turn at a certain point in their career and decided, in the case of Mr.  Gates for example, that he was not going to do another profoundly brilliant book in his…

Well, professor, I'm sorry, we have to wrap this up. There's a lot there, but thank you so much, Professor Baker.


I joined in April 2016. And I did not get my security results until June of 2018. I spent more than two years in limbo. And that period was mind-crushing.

Yeah. And then what happened in July?

I got a call from my recruiter. And they said that I did not clear my background checks due to my foreign ties with my parents in Pakistan.

Your foreign ties - your foreign ties were the fact that you were born in Pakistan to Pakistani parents.


You know, and you're not going to get, you know, 80,000, you know, ticket-holders to hold it down. So you know, you just kind of figured out - you know, some days I've toughed it out. Some days I've gone on air with a very bad migraine, because that's my job.

Has anyone ever just run a tackle into you by accident, shaken up your brain, anything?

I have never been sideline road-kill. I've made it a point to always know where the action is and to not get caught up in it. There are times, though, when my back is turned, I'm doing a stand-up, for example, and you could see everybody. Their eyes are getting big, and they're just kind of like - you know, my cameraman's really good about pulling me out of the way.

So no, I haven't had any kind of brain scramble to that extent, but yeah, I can see where you're going. A lot of these players who suffer from concussions, eventually, you know, sometimes they can turn into migraine sufferers as well.


Quite a bit. They know nothing is going to happen unless Washington can help some way. That's why they want to hear the president come here and talk about people like them. And I guess I want to make it clear that nobody really wants a handout here. That's not what this is about. Nobody wants the president to come in and somehow bail out Elkhart. What we want is a chance to get back to work.

So, what is the big industry there?I've read that RVs are a big industry.

This place is commonly referred to as the RV capital of the world and, they build RVs; they build trailers; they build auto parts here. Basically, this is a place that makes stuff, and we can make virtually anything. And if this economy does shift to a green economy, if we start developing green energy sources, we can make the parts necessary to make that happen.

So, if you have a 60,000 population there and 16,000 people are out of work, that's nearly a third.

Mm-hmm. The county is bigger than 60,000, of course, and the county is. . .


Are we talking about resveratrol here?

Well, the resveratrol discovery was about 10 years ago. We, my colleagues and I, made that discovery. But what we've done since then is use that as a - just a stepping stone, a proof of concept to make much more potent synthetic drug-like molecules that are just in the beginnings of human clinical trials. And this paper is about the finding that these molecules from grapes and the synthetics all seem to work through this one particular gene, genetic pathway we call the sirtuin pathway.

Let's back up a little bit and talk about the study you did in mice. What did you find - what did you give the mice, and what did you find there?

Well, originally we found resveratrol just in a test tube, looking for molecules that would turn on this enzyme, this protein that seems to defend against diseases in aging. We then moved to nematode worms and flies. We've done some work with bees even. The mouse study was in 2006.


The schemes that Vee and Noel eventually come up with - they begin collecting for the Dunkirk Widows and Orphans Fund. . .

That's right.

. . . Which is their own pockets. They're illegal, but were they wrong?

That's the whole dilemma. It's wrong, but Noel decides it is a lesser wrong than a crime he stumbles upon later in the book because it hurts no one. And it's this distinction between legally wrong and morally wrong which sets the whole plot on course in the second half when Vee and Noel come across someone who really is causing pain and trouble to other people by their illegal activities.


Yes, definitely. Over the past several years, something called the field of behavioral economics has been gaining support. It used to be considered sort of a quirky field. Basically, what behavioral economics is, is it's trying to take sort of methods and insights of psychology and apply them to economics to at least temper this idea of the, sort of, rational economic man. And I think when you see these kind of panics, that only lends credence to this idea.

Well, now there is plenty of situations to study and look at, and maybe this is an exciting time for economists. John Maynard Keynes came out of the Great Depression as a visionary. What do you see as the new hot field of study, based on what's happening now?

Well, I do think trying to explain what happened to lead up to this crisis and trying to figure how to get out of it is only going to drive more people into trying to look at the psychology of economic behavior. I think also just fields like banking regulation, which have not been considered very sexy for a long time, are going to draw a lot more new, young, smart academics.

And what about market bubbles?


Yes, it has. Theater has definitely been an escape to just, you know, work on the show, work on the production and see the magic of it going up and seeing that art. And theater has just become so much more diverse. All these stories that just tell these stories about people that you don't usually hear about. Whether they're queer, brown, black, trans, undocumented, it's all these stories. And I think that it's really magical, and it really paints like a really great picture of everybody on stage.

What shows have you worked on?

Here at VCU, we just closed "Into The Woods. "

Well, lots of luck to you - very good speaking with you.


About a year ago, my husband started getting Facebook friend invitations from like every girl he ever went to school with, and it seemed as if half of them confessed crushes on him.

Lissa Soep quickly figured out social networking sites not only allowed her to get back in touch with people - her husband could reconnect with folks from his past, too. But it turns out that's not all bad.

These were girls frozen in his memory with teenage breasts, AP English minds, and a sense that anything was possible. Like this one girl from seventh grade. She friended my husband on Facebook and then reminisced about the day his family moved away. She put on her favorite dress, painted her nails purple, and worked up all her courage to hug him goodbye. Isn't that so funny, she wrote. How silly we are as kids?

You think I'd be mad or at least threatened by all this nostalgia, but I wasn't. For a split second, at least, my husband was less familiar to me, and I mean that in a good way. With so many people my age riding Facebook like a time machine to our past lives and loves, you might expect the site would be breaking up marriages or at least unleashing all sorts of digital infidelity. Some of that is happening.


We've seen so many figures come and go in this administration. This one's unusually swift. What happened?

Well, the lack of experience was the first thing that jumped out. Ratcliffe has been a prosecutor and a small-town mayor in Texas. He was in his third term in Congress, very strong partisan supporter of the president but didn't have this intelligence background that previous holders of this job have had.

He got a very cool reception from Senate Republicans. Most of their statements praised the outgoing Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, but some of them didn't even mention Ratcliffe. Some people on the Hill said they didn't even really know who he was. Richard Burr, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, today said, I respect John Ratcliffe's decision to withdraw. So this was this really tepid response he seemed to be getting.

Not only that - as reporters started digging into his resume, they found some of his claims didn't quite hold up. What can you tell us?


One morning in early December, 23-year-old Andrew Black of Vermont bought a gun. And a few hours later, he used that gun to kill himself. We first spoke to Andrew's mother, Alyssa Black, shortly after her son's death. She was calling for Vermont to pass legislation requiring a cooling-off period between when a person can walk into a gun store and walk out with a firearm.

A bill requiring a 24-hour waiting period moved to the top of the Vermont Senate's agenda earlier this year. It passed in both houses. And then last week, it was vetoed by Governor Phil Scott. Alyssa Black joins me now.

Welcome to WEEKEND EDITION.

Thank you for having me again.

Vermont would have been one of a handful of states to mandate time between buying a firearm and actually receiving the firearm. What was your reaction to Governor Scott's veto?


So, people like him, which I believe there are a lot of them out there, you know, and people like Oprah, for instance, you know, people like that. I mean, they need help. You know, $100, 1,000 - maybe $20 you know, it can help people. And people in Africa are human beings just like you and others. So, they feel the pain. They are suffering every day. So, you know, here I am doing music. I'm not rich, you know, I am not rich, but I want to share a little bit of what I have with the ones that we left behind.

What do you want to be your legacy in the world of music because there's the philanthropy you're doing but then there's also the music that you're doing. What do you plan to do in the future?

I want to be able to play music to please Americans, and I want to be able to make them see just the beauty of music, not just African music but just the gift of music. That's my goal — to make people happy, to make them dance.

Well, Shiko, I'm so glad that we got a chance to talk. Thank you.


Good to be with you, Scott.

Do you think President Trump was essentially trying to back off and ease tensions with Iran this week?

Scott, let's begin by saying there was relief, widespread and bipartisan, when the president pulled back instead of pulling the trigger. But the larger confrontation he's created here still has very few avenues for escape. It's possible this show of last-minute restraint may make renewed negotiations possible, but it could also heighten the tension to the point where the Iranians cannot come to the table. They have complicated domestic politics to deal with, just as we do. So the moment of hesitation on the president's part could ultimately produce an even greater degree of anxiety, an even more disastrous hour of reckoning.

A number of people have questioned parts of the president's account, especially a statement that he wasn't given or asked for - whatever it was - an estimate of casualties until the strikes had almost begun.


Well, I want to understand it as my friend, Fanon, as my idol, Fanon. I want to understand it, and it is quite complicated, but in another way it's quite simple.

And when I say race, I should stipulate. I don't mean simply black and white. By race, I mean any idea or notion that divides human beings into more than one kind. And then the next step of race and racism and racialized thinking is to figure out a scheme through which or by which because of this difference, manufactured difference, one group or another can take advantage of other groups.

So it sits over our shoulder, and it's part of what's the motivation for our going into Iraq. It's keeping young black men in prison in a totally disproportionate way. It's the cause of abuse against women. Race is a villain, and I wish I could wave a magic wand, but I can't. It's too deeply embedded in our nature.

You mentioned how race is linked to, among many other things, the prison system. And you've had, I'm sure, much too much experience with it, more than you'd like with both your brother and your son incarcerated.

You have sections in your book where your brother is - you and your brother are talking about the nature of hope and whether hope can be debilitating in the context of being someone who's incarcerated.


What can Americans learn from 18 years of war?That's what the U. S.  has faced since the 9/11 attacks in 2001. James Mattis was in position to learn. The Marine veteran served in Afghanistan and Iraq and was defense secretary under President Trump until he resigned. Mattis has a memoir - "Call Sign Chaos. "He avoids direct criticism of the president. When we spoke yesterday, we asked if the president thinks long term, and Mattis said only that people around him do. The general describes his own detailed planning. Before leading a force into Iraq in 2003, he read thousands of years of history of Alexander the Great and others who invaded that region before him.

What could a multi-thousand-year-old battle teach you that would be relevant in the 21st century?

Well, there's enduring aspects of leadership, and plus geography doesn't change. And so when you read about the challenges they faced, it gets you thinking about your own. I knew we were going to be operating very deep inside the Middle East, and I had to decide what was the right manner in which I wanted the troops to go in. So I used words from antiquity. From a Roman general, I used no better friend, no worse enemy. We were going in to liberate the Iraqi people from Saddam. We were not going in to dominate them. I didn't want triumphalism. I wanted to go in with a sense of first do no harm.

So you read thousands of pages and then tried to boil it down to a few phrases, or in some cases even a word, that you could pass on to thousands of people.


He wanted two basic political reforms. The major one is called open primary electoral system. And essentially, what that means, instead of having Democrats run against Democrats and Republicans against Republicans in primary elections in the state, you would throw all of them into the mix and the top two vote-getters would advance to the general election. And the idea, if you believe proponents, is that it would allow kind of more moderate candidates to survive what are now hardest in the primary election. Instead, that you'll be catering to kind of a more moderate, wider electorate in the primary.

So, finally there is a budget. How has Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger reacted to this?

He hasn't said a whole lot yet, but his - I know that his staff is celebrating. This is a huge win for the governor. The framework is essentially what he's been calling for, for months. He's been urging both political parties to come out of their ideological corners. This has been his calling card for the past year, and if you look at the outline that he unveiled three months ago, this budget blueprint is essentially everything that he asked for. It's a major win for the governor.

And in his latest version of the budget, who were the big winners and losers?


How do you think people view the people that you grew up with now?

Well, I think - especially when we're talking about Appalachia, I think it's the same stereotypes we've been dealing with forever. I got off a plane in Arizona, and the person who was driving me said, you know, what do people where you come from think of your books?And before I could answer, she said, or can they read?

Oh.

And I looked at her, and I was kind of angered by that. But at the same time, I don't think she meant it that way. But I said, you know, of course we can read. And we even got shoes, you know. I think, in a lot of ways, we're dealing with the same stereotypes we've dealt with forever.


So Iran, I think, is going to respond to what it sees as its advantage. If the Trump administration were prepared to say we're going to remove a good part of the sanctions on Iran if you will sit down at the table, I think Iran would probably take that very seriously. The Trump administration, because of its opposition to the nuclear deal, created a crisis that really wasn't necessary.

And it could get worse. There is a real chance of misperception and misunderstanding that leads to military conflict. And I think this is something that nobody wants.

That's Gary Sick. He's a senior research scholar at Columbia University's Middle East Institute. Mr.  Sick, thank you so much for talking to us.

It was a pleasure.


But sometimes people get caught up in the moment, and a lightweight reminder can actually help them rethink what they're doing or what they're saying. And so it's not supposed to be the solution that we hang our hat on for all of bullying. It's supposed to be one of many tools to try to prevent bullying from happening in the first place.

One controversial idea that I know you are thinking about is the idea of making the number of likes private. Right?

Yeah.

So when a person posts to Instagram their image, lots of people can click on a little heart that shows I love this thing. And some people get a high off of that - right?- when they - 'cause it's a big popularity contest in a way. If you make that private, doesn't that get to the heart of what Instagram is?


Which he said, actually, publicly.

Well, yeah. But then to go one step further and say we recognize Russia's sovereignty over Crimea - now, that will be an astonishing step. I think the more sinister and conspiratorial version is that Trump basically says to Putin that he no longer believes in NATO, that America has got no intention of honoring its Article 5 commitment to intervene if a NATO ally is attacked and effectively says, look. Vladimir, Europe is U. S. -free of influence. If you want to do some kind of adventure in the Baltics or revisit Ukraine or do something else, we are not going to intervene.

Is there a concern within Europe at this point about the relationship between President Putin and President Trump?

I think concern doesn't really capture it. I think it's worse than that. I think it's dismay because you have to bear in mind that what happened in the United States in 2016 has also happened on the European continent and continues to happen. And it's working. I mean, that's not to say that it's just Russia that is creating these forces. But what Putin is doing very cynically and very cleverly is to instrumentalize fault lines in European society over Brexit, over the economy, over austerity and to encourage populism. So we now have a far-right government in Italy, in Hungary, in Poland. And, essentially, Russia likes all this very much.


Tell us about the test. What is the implicit association test?How does that work?

This is a procedure that's sort of fun to play with. You can take it yourself on the Internet. It's a procedure that involves four steps. And first you're asked to rapidly classify white and black faces by pressing a left-side computer key for black faces or a right key for white faces. That's an easy test.

Second, same type of test, but now you're pressing the left key for unpleasant words, words like hurt or failure, and the right key for pleasant words for words like joy and love. That's an easy task, too.

Then it begins to get more difficult. We combine the tasks, the third step. Now the left key is for either white faces or unpleasant words, and the right key is for either black faces or pleasant words. This combination of two easy tasks can be quite difficult.


The so-called Energy Climate Czar, I think people are calling it. I suppose if we have a car czar, we have to have a climate czar. This is supposedly going to be Carol Browner, who was the head of EPA in both Clinton administrations, actually, I think probably the longest serving EPA director.

She's a lawyer. She used to work with Al Gore in the Senate. She has earned herself quite a reputation when she was working for President Clinton as a tough regulator, someone who defended the Clean Air Act vigorously against lawsuits brought by industry questioning some of the scope of the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. So she comes with, again, quite a lot of green credentials and reputation for being very savvy on how Washington works.

And finally, Chris, can you tell us a bit about who is going to head up Mr.  Obama's EPA?

Again, the name that's being bandied about quite a bit about is a woman named Lisa Jackson. She is a chemical engineer, and she is working currently as the environment - she started working as the environment head for the state of New Jersey in 2006. And again, she also worked at EPA during the Clinton years, so we've got a couple of people here who were Clinton executives and environmental movers and shakers during the Clinton administration.


The reason for this shrinkage, the leagues will tell you, is that televised sport has beaten the live experience. As the TVs got better, the traffic got worse, I guess. And the couch beckoned. I just got back from Disney World. Disney movies are clearly cheaper and easier to get to than the live experience. And yet millions more people flock to the Magic Kingdom than did 10 years ago. There is an "Avatar" ride that had a wait time of - let me check the app. It's on an app now - three hours, five minutes. But with baseball and football, there is so little attention paid to the experience in the park. How about good Wi-Fi or some milling-about zones and food that challenges our collective delusion that Dodger Dogs aren't inferior, cylindrical foodstuffs?We have been gaslit about Fenway Franks.

Then there's the gouging. The New York Jets will charge you 40 to $50 for parking. And when you enter the stadium, you have to watch the New York Jets. Owners can continue to shrink their stadiums and their ambitions or they can start rewarding fans who literally give their teams the home field advantage as something other than chickens to be plucked or geese to be fattened before slaughter. Don't the fans have enough experience with slaughter, especially when we're talking about fans of the Jets, Rays and Raiders?

(Singing) Take me out. . .

No, I'm not going to do that. Commentator Mike Pesca hosts the Slate podcast The Gist, which is still very affordable and welcomes new fans. He also wrote the book "Upon Further Review. "


That's a long drive.

It is. Yeah. Two days.

So was there poker - what happens in those buses on that long trip?

You know, I'm afraid to tell you.


I was one of those kids raised on whole wheat spaghetti and NPR every day in the car, but especially on weekends when we drove the hour from the relatively small town of Hanford, California, where I grew up, to the big city where we shopped at Costco and saw movies that never made it to our town. It was all NPR all the time.

It was 1995 and my family was taking an epic cross-country trip to see America from the windows of a minivan. I was hoping the letters would land us a tour of NPR during the few days we were planning to spend in Washington, D. C.  That little letter writing campaign and the people who responded changed my life. And I don't mean that in some abstract way.

First I heard from Cokie. Whatever you do don't major in communications, she said. And then Scott Simon invited my family into his home where we sat on a peach-colored leather couch and my little brother played with Scott's ancient cat. His advice - consider majoring in philosophy. I did. It was one of the hardest things I've ever done, but it taught me how to break apart arguments, how to ask the right questions. Liane Hansen responded too.

High school senior Tamara Keith. . .


Bummer.

Yeah, it is.

David Roth is the founder of the independent sports website The Classical. Thanks so much for talking with us.

Thanks for having me.


And so my point is that with the fact that they didn't seem to have old and outdated technology, you couple that now with an administration that's new, that basically, I say he made it into the White House due to the speed of the Internet. So you have a bunch of people that are used to using Facebook, social networking, mobile phones and wireless connectivity, and then you take them back into what feels like the '80s. That's just not going to work.

It seems really bizarre. I have another question for you, and I don't know if you have the answer to it or not. Since the president - I want to talk about the BlackBerry again - since the president was allowed to keep his BlackBerry, are we to assume that there has been some sort of technological advancement with regard to security that the president's BlackBerry would have, that my BlackBerry and your BlackBerry don't have?

Yeah.

My BlackBerry and your BlackBerry sitting by the fire.


I will walk down the red carpet, yes, yes.

Oh, man, that's exciting, huh?Tell us what it was like when you found out, and tell us you found that you had been nominated for Grammy Award, your first.

Well, it's a pretty funny story, because since I'm an indie artist and this is my first foray into the industry, let alone this part of it, I wasn't really expecting anything and I didn't even know when the Grammys were being announced. That's how far off I was. And I was sitting at home in my jammies, actually, watching "Top Chef. "I might have been watching even watching it on TV, I don't know, but the phone rang and it was my producer, who also co-writes my songs with me. And he said, um, I think you've been nominated for Grammy. I was like, shut up.

I was, like - I didn't even know I've been submitted. Like, nobody told me that I had been submitted. I just wasn't even thinking about it. So, it was really crazy. It took a couple of hours, actually, for me to believe him. Like, I actually hung up on him.


You know, there are a number of reporters who've contacted me that have said, what do you we do?I've got sinusitis. What do I do?It clearly is a prevalent problem in the general population. But clearly, we need controlled clinical trials to determine the efficacy of these kinds of interventions. And the FDA has ruled that if we are doing such trials, we need investigational drug status for every species that we want to instill into a patient to treat our disease.

So it maybe a while before we can actually get to a point where we would be instilling these kinds of organisms into the sinuses. But it's certainly another way of thinking about treating chronic inflammatory disease, of the sinuses, at least. There's certainly prostins in the gastrointestinal tract. For example, when there's recalcitrant C.  difficile, clostridium difficile infection, which is this thing that outgrows when patients have had, again, a lot of antimicrobials and have depleted diversity. Fecal transplant works very well.

So taking the feces of a spouse or a relative, and basically repopulating the gastrointestinal tract with those species, has a rate of 91 percent efficacy. So I think we could consider this for mucosal services as, perhaps, the general rule that this kind of restoration ecology approach to try to reinstate the healthy protective organisms in this niches, maybe an alternative strategy for treating some of these chronic inflammatory diseases.

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


(Laughter).

David Hockney is obviously not myself. But it's the same process of writing. I'm trying to understand from the inside. I am not interested in the factual truth. My book is very factual. I read everything. It's as accurate as it can be. I cannot invent. He's alive. The man is alive. He's 81. I cannot invent his life. But what interested me is really the emotional truth. How could he be a figurative artist at a time when everybody was abstract?Try to imagine this young David Hockney arriving from his provincial town in London at the age of 22 and discovering that figurative painting, which is what he's doing, is not done.

He has a friend at the school who says, oh, you cannot paint like Monet after Pollock. And David Hockney hears this and thinks, oh, my God, if I continue painting the way I was painting, I'm done for. I will never be well-known. So it is complicated. And I tried to place myself in his mind. He tried to become an abstract painter. But he was very depressed. And his friend, at some point, told him, you know, stop thinking about being a contemporary artist. It doesn't matter. You are contemporary. You live in your time. Just paint what matters to you.

You - I mean, it's extraordinary that you didn't know David Hockney before you started looking into this only a few years ago. And now that you've done so much research into his life, what is the thing that is more resonant to you?


I'm well. I'm going to read a bit from the editorial. You're answering attacks on Maryland Representative Elijah Cummings and on his district, which includes Baltimore. And you wrote, (reading) it's not hard to see what's going on here. The congressman has been a thorn in this president's side, and Mr.  Trump sees attacking African American members of Congress as good politics, as it both warms the cockles of the white supremacists who love him and causes so many of the thoughtful people who don't to scream.

So it seems that you think this is all very much premeditated, and it's not just, as some have said, the president responding to Fox News.

Yes. Well, I think it clearly is - both things are going on at the same time. I think Fox News gives him the ammunition he needed, and he gave it probably about, you know, two seconds of thought to find an opportunity to slam Representative Cummings who, of course, has been critical of his border policy, and so he took it. And so 750,000 people woke up in the 7th District yesterday being told that they were the worst place in the country by the president of the United States.

When you first read those tweets, what was your thought?


Exactly.

OK.  Go on. So after two weeks, what happens?

Well, she defies the ban. And as she was docking in the port, the ship rammed a small police boat that was blocking her - caused some damage, but no injuries. But she was arrested, and she was charged with what prosecutors actually claim was an act of war. Rackete also faces charge of abetting illegal immigration, and the NGO could face a fine of up to $57,000.

What does she say - the captain?Does she say, I was just - I needed to dock the ship?


Everyone has to be themself. In West Virginia, you can't just transform yourself. You can't be something you're not. You know, West Virginia, we'll shake your hand, look in your eye. We'll see your soul. We know if you're fooling us or not. Forget about having a D or an R by your name. They're thinking, oh, now, just because you're Republican, you're going to win. People in West Virginia still vote for the person. So they still know I'm still Joe. I've been Joe from day one. I was born Joe. And I'll die Joe.

One of the things that we've seen, specifically in red states where Democrats have done well, is that they haven't spoken about the president. They've distance themselves from discussing President Trump. I mean, your state is a state that Trump won by more than 65 percent. I mean, will you be discussing the president?

Let me say this - in 2012, Mitt Romney beat Barack Obama by 35 percentage points in West Virginia. I won by over 20 percent. That's a 55, 60-percent swing. So, people in West Virginia will pick the person.

So no discussing the president?


So over the years, we've had competitions on piano, bass, drums, trumpet, saxophone, hand drums, vocals and have launched a number of careers. Marcus Roberts won our very first competition and Joshua Redman won the competition on sax in 1991. And there are many others from Jackie Terrason to Jay Manhide(ph) and others. And so, this year is the saxophone. We have a great panel of judges - the great Wayne Shorter, Jimmy Heath, Jane Ira Bloom, David Sanchez and Greg Osby are all coming out to judge this group of students.

They will be of young people. They must be under the age of 30, and they've been guaranteed a recording contract by the Concord Music Group. So the first place winner walks away with a recording contract along with a $20,000 scholarship. The second place has a $10,000 scholarship, and the third is five.

All right, I actually want to talk about someone. You've talked about a bunch of people who have been involved with this competition. But one of them is Lionel Loueke, a guitarist from Benin. And he thought that you were Herbie Hancock after he had auditioned for the Monk Institute. He's gone on to record a debut album for Blue Note, and let's listen to a little bit of him playing live in the NPR Studios in New York.

So, what do you hear when you hear his music?


Hello, Ira, nice to talk to you.

Why do they call you the Indiana Jones of. . .

Well because I've gone out around the world, you know, doing different archaeological investigations, which have turned up some pretty unusual fermented beverages (unintelligible).

Like what?


When I get into the personal material, I'm really thinking about what it means to transition from states of longing to states of having and dwelling and inhabiting. I'm really trying to examine, OK, what is it like to have things, to have relationships, to have people close by, and how is that state of having introduce a whole different set of complexities than states of longing?

There's also a tension that you draw out within yourself. You tell the story of your pregnancy, while at the same time telling the story of how you were diagnosed with an eating disorder in college. And I wonder if you could read just a bit of that section.

Yeah.

(Reading) Pregnancy wasn't a liberation from prior selves so much as a container holding every prior version of myself at once. I didn't get to shed my ghosts so fully. It was easy to call my doctor absurd when she'd chided me for gaining 5 pounds in a month rather than 4 and harder to admit that I'd honestly felt shamed by her in that moment. It was harder to admit the part of me that felt a secret thrill every time a doctor registered concern that I was, quote, "measuring small. "This pride was something I'd wanted desperately to leave behind. I worried that it was impeding your growth, which was really just the distillation of a deeper fear - that I would infect you with my own broken relationship to my body, that you would catch it like a dark inheritance.


So how would it come to be that the FAA would tell Boeing, in effect, inspect yourself?

Well, people may be surprised to hear it, but, in fact, that's the norm. For years now, the FAA, with lack of funding and resources, has delegated increasing amounts of this work to industry. And when it comes to certifying new airplanes, that means to Boeing. The FAA, of course, is supposed to have final sign-off on everything. But I talked to one engineer who was involved in the certification of the MAX - told me that there wasn't complete and proper review of the documents. Review was rushed to reach certain certification dates.

And the document that you were looking at - does it show that engineers had real safety concerns a long time ago about this specific system?

No, that document doesn't express their - it's the analysis that went into certification. The feedback I got from safety engineers was that they weren't happy with certain aspects of that analysis that was - that, in the end, was signed off. For example, it allowed that the system would be triggered by a single sensor on the side of the fuselage called the angle of attack sensor. That was faulty on the Lion airplane, and it triggered the whole system. And that's, we believe, what caused the Lion Air crash.


Yeah, just a little.

(Laughter).

Did the Roy Moore allegations come far enough before the election to swing the vote?Or are people just not telling pollsters the truth because it's a loaded subject?

Well, I think that Roy Moore was already pretty unpopular with a certain part of the Republican electorate in Alabama. So he has solid support among people who have known him for years and like what he's doing. But if you're a Republican who voted for Luther Strange, who was his primary opponent, you might be making the choice of, do I sit at home, or do I go out and vote for Doug Jones?

And I think what'll really, you know, end up swinging the election are these Republican voters who really just find what Moore did a bridge too far. They already didn't like him. And now this is just beyond the pale for them. So I do think, you know, in the polling average, it's not great for for Roy Moore at all. So we might definitely see a change. And I think Alabama being rated a toss-up is kind of a crazy thing to see. . .


There isn't. And I think the interesting thing about this government is they have cut the Argentine military budget so severely in the last few years that even if Argentina wanted to invade the Falklands, they would be incapable of doing so. So that's one good thing.

So what does this campaign amount to then besides words?

Well, they're trying to put economic pressure on Britain. And I think actually the British are a little bit worried about it. They are stopping cruise ships that come from the Falklands, not allowing them to dock in Argentina. They are pressuring the Chileans to cut off the one air link between Chile and the Falkland Islands. They are calling on Argentine manufacturers to cut down on the import of British goods. And I think the worry is that they will make this into a regional campaign, that they will try and persuade the Brazilians, the Peruvians and others to start putting economic pressure on Britain as well.

And the rallying cry of anti-colonialism has a lot of residents in South America.


This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Scott Simon. Spies try to protect America from its enemies, but does that mean spying on friends too?The steady drip of intelligence leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden continues with the revelations that the National Security Agency tapped the mobile phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The Guardian newspaper broke the story this week and also reported that the U. S.  spy agency intercepted 70 million phone calls and text messages in France. Now, the response from Germany and France has been swift, and as you might imagine, sharp. Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister, called the spying shocking and unacceptable. He told Le Monde: We cooperate in the useful way in the fight against terrorism but that does not justify everything. P. J. Crowley is a former U. S.  assistant secretary of state for public affairs. He joins us in our studios. Thanks so much for being with us.

P. J. CROWLEY: Pleasure to be here, Scott.

Are Germany and France shocked, shocked like in Casablanca, or are they truly surprised?

There's scambling(ph) going on here, yes. I mean, Europeans have a different view of privacy than Americans do. So, I think there is a difference of attitude or perspective on this. That said, I don't think it should shock anyone that governments spy on each other.

Well, but these are allies.


Yeah. This is, again, completely innovative. You know, part of the problem that we have with tall buildings is building them all out of glass and then having to go to gymnastics to kind of cover them up on the outside, and we see that in America. But in intense solar environments like the desert, it makes even less sense.

This is an innovative way to control this. It actually, to my knowledge, for the first time creates this skin on the outside made up of, you know, hundreds of modules, which can open and close by computer control, depending on the angle of incident sun. So if the sun's on the other side of the building, the modules open up and allow natural daylight into the space. And if the sun is incident on the building, then those modules close up and block the sun from entering.

Is what makes a tall building great the ability to actually look like it fits in with the rest of the buildings in the neighborhood or the culture of the people?

I believe so. That's - you know, as a professor, that's the thing that I advocate. I believe that a Chinese tall building or a, you know, an American tall building or a Middle Eastern tall building should be different to each other in the same way that, you know, religious and other architecture is clearly identifiable.


So is this new policy on Iran loud huffing and puffing or a strong and proportionate response?Well, for one view on it, we are joined by Suzanne Maloney. She was an adviser to the State Department on Iran issues during the George W.  Bush administration, and she is now with the Brookings Institution. Welcome.

Thank you.

So we heard the president say that these sanctions are going to deny access to key financial resources from the senior leaders of Iran. Do you have a sense of what exactly the sanctions are going to do?

I think that may be a bit of an overstatement about denying key economic resources to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Iran is already heavily sanctioned. In fact, many of the organizations and institutions that are associated with the Office of the Supreme Leader that were highlighted in today's announcement have already been subject to American sanctions.


Well, I got to, or. . .

Or I'm doomed. I do think it is a good time for independent artists, period. And I feel like soul music in this country really has told the story of black Americans in this country, and right now the field is kind of narrow. So, from city to city, you go and you listen to the radio, and you try to find soul music on the radio, you're either listening to hip-hop, or you're listening to oldies and dusties and R&B.

So, there's a whole big huge chasm which some of us live in part of the time at least, where where's this music?Where is the new soul music?Where are the people that are writing the classics that are going to be around in 20 years, and 30 years, and 40 years?

Well, in addition to your own songs, you have sung other folks' work. And in 2004, you sang on a tribute album for Luther Vandross. Here's a little bit of "Forever, For Always, For Love. "


Dr.  Jason Karlawish is a professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He says the most significant breakthrough in Alzheimer's research is that doctors no longer have to wait until after a patient has died to diagnose the disease.

DR.  JASON KARLAWISH: We are beginning to be able to see the disease during life. Imaging techniques are allowing us to see things like amyloid buildup in the brain using PET scan imaging. We can also see it on MRI scanning and spinal fluid analysis. These are still emerging concepts but the notion that it can, quote, "only be diagnosed with an autopsy" is, I think, a fading notion.

What are the treatment options that are available at this moment?

Pharmacologic treatments are certain available. They're modest in their affects in modifying the clinical symptoms of the disease for relatively short periods of time. But there are other treatments, though, that are effective. Psychological and educational and behavioral interventions have clearly been shown to reduce the burden of disease on patients as well as families.


That we've got to put this behind us. If we keep worrying about all that happened and all the things that have been unfair - the whole thing is unfair. We're going to have to move past it and look forward with hope so that we can move on with our lives.

Loren Lighthall is the principal of Paradise High School.

Thank you very much, and we wish you so much luck in your next chapter.

Thank you.


Well, it's very important when dealing with Iran understanding that they're not an ally of the United States. They are an adversary. They're - one, that they're a nation that is the world's largest state sponsor of terror. We often talk about the nuclear activity of Iran over the course last several years - but other activities where they've developed ICBMs in violation of international treaties and Security Council resolutions where they have worked to help the Houthis overthrow a foreign government in Yemen trying to build a land bridge across the Middle East to the West. They call Israel the little Satan and America the great Satan. And the list goes on.

So in dealing with Iran and understanding that they're an adversary, we also have to approach them knowing that they don't respect weakness. They only respect strength. And we're talking about the Iranian regime. . .

OK.

. . . Because Iran's filled with millions of very - you know, good people who want a free, stable, prosperous, democratic country for themselves. They've wanted it for a long time. So the administration's approach is with eyes wide open understanding this adversarial threat. And with regards to the leverage that brought the Iranians to the table in the first place, the problem with the JCPOA included - well, several things. One was sunset provisions, issues with the verification regime. So, you know, but I'd love to see which way you want to go from there because. . .


That is amazing. And I want to ask about another thing here, as well, and that has to do with homeownership, which I know you have focused on. The percentage of people who own their own homes is on the way down.

That's right. The share of Americans who own their own homes, which soared during the housing boom of the 2000s, is now lower than it was back in 1995. It's turned up a little bit lately, but it's - the decline is particularly pronounced among young people - among people under age 40. In fact, when you look across the expansion, the scars of the Great Recession are most evident in people who are really the younger generations.

You know, when you talk about the difference between winners and losers, you can see it here. Home prices have gone up, which means if I already own a home, I'm in great shape and feel wealthy. But if I haven't bought in yet, I'm going to have trouble getting in.

That's absolutely true.


Earlier this week, viewers of the CBS drama "The Good Fight" were greeted by an 8 1/2-second-long image. It read, CBS has censored this content. Content was a piece of animation, along with a song, that took critical aim at Chinese censorship, often of American products, and the importance of a Chinese market to U. S.  businesses, sometimes at the expense of U. S.  values.

The animator who brought that bit to life is Steve Angel. He joins us now from Toronto. Mr.  Angel, thanks so much for being with us.

My pleasure. Happy to talk to you.

And I should disclose I'm a special contributor to "CBS Sunday Morning," a production of CBS News. Since we can't see that scene for ourselves, could you describe it to us?


Not a bad thing. Oh, yes. But my favorite apple that's in the book - that's mentioned in the book - is called the Pitmaston Pineapple. And it tastes of nuts and honey, but it also has a kind of pineapple finish - faint taste of pineapple at the end. And - but I love them so much that I have planted my own Pitmaston Pineapple tree. And in a couple years, I'm really hoping it bears fruit.

Tracy Chevalier's new novel is "At The Edge Of The Orchard. "

Tracy Chevalier, it's good to talk to you. Thanks so much.

Thank you.


The report we got yesterday on jobs was not the greatest, but it wasn't bad. Unemployment rate still at 3. 7%; that's historically low. The numbers were a little soft. We also heard the Federal Reserve Board chairman say he doesn't foresee a recession right away. And yet, the markets closed mixed, and the sentiment is still that the overhanging shadow of the trade war is the main issue on the mind of the markets and of businesses looking forward.

And finally, the president's self-inflicted controversy over whether he was told Alabama was threatened by a hurricane - and he used his own Sharpie to alter a map - seems to be lasting longer than the storm.

Oh, I wish it would. This began as a simple mistake, with the president warning and frightening people who were not in danger. So it was corrected right away by the weather service and could have been forgotten by now. Instead, the president has insisted on reviving it and doing so daily.

The latest is a statement from the parent agency of the National Weather Service saying the forecasters in Alabama were wrong to reassure the people of that state and correct the president last weekend. Weather forecasters in and out of government, in and out of Alabama, all rallying to the defense of the weather service forecasters there. All the data and the videotape confirm that. The parent agency in the White House have not responded to questions about this latest twist in the ongoing saga.


Oh, this is - this is about the rarest of the rare thing you could see. This is when Venus crosses in front of the sun. We had this happen in June 2004, but we're going to have a repeat here June 5, 2012. And we need to urge everybody to go see this thing because we are not going to live to see the next one. The next time this'll happen will be the year 2117.

Now, it's not quite as dramatic as a solar eclipse or anything like that, it's a little subtle, and may I do my sting impression?Is that OK?

Go ahead.

(Singing) There'll be a little black spot on the sun that day.


So I want to try making now the Syrian version of ful.

OK.

OK, I'm going to grab the red beans.

Helou got this recipe from Haj Abdo (ph), a vendor in Aleppo. All he made was ful and always had a crowd. That's how she first noticed the old man. This was years before a war broke out in Syria. She says his shop and the whole neighborhood is gone now. But back then, locals absolutely raved about his cafe. And while his ful is typically Syrian, it uses the sesame paste called tahini. Abdo had a special technique.


I made up my own mind. I figured that at some point it would turn into a mandatory evacuation and I wanted to get ahead of the traffic.

You know, to have gone through this once is bad enough. To be going through it a second time, I can't even imagine what that must have been like. As you were getting closer to having to make the decision to get up and get out, what went through your mind?

I immediately remembered what it was like three years ago, and I think that I was in sort of disbelief. I couldn't believe that I was going through it again. And I - the first thing I thought of was OK, what do I need to take with me that I want to see again?Because I immediately thought of what happened during Katrina and how, you know, it just caught us all off guard, and I just wanted to be prepared.

What did you take?


You know, we've had numerous issues here over the past three to four, almost six months because our portion of the river has been closed to barge traffic for far longer than that. Once you get to certain points, river stages - they shut off that barge traffic. And even if the barge traffic were to be able to be taking place, a number of the grain terminals aren't able to load those barges because the water is so high, the infrastructure in place just isn't able to load those barges. So we've been having the hit, I guess, you'd say of that for quite some time, especially when those grain terminals are still full from last fall's harvest.

How much of your supply gets transported on the Mississippi?

Pretty much a hundred percent of our corn and soybean production goes to those river terminals and then, in turn, goes to the export market.

And at the same time that this is happening, you're also looking at a possibly escalating trade war with China. How is that exacerbating what you're going through right now?


What we've looked at in Britain is the idea of looking at the model we have for regulating broadcasting where broadcasters hold licenses. There's an independent regulatory body that oversees those licenses. And they get to judge in the round, do they have effective policies in place to make sure that they are producing good quality content?They respond to complaints properly. And if they're found not to be upholding the terms of their license, then the regulator can take action against them.

Mr.  Collins, we need to ask you this week - you are a member of the Conservative Party - how will you vote on Prime Minister May's proposal to leave the EU?

I won't be supporting the prime minister's proposal when we vote on it on Tuesday. In leaving the European Union, the idea's that we would take more control of the direction of the country. And there are some technical aspects of the deal which potentially lock us into a trading (ph) relationship with the rest of Europe that we'd have no right to break and that I think suits the rest of the EU. And so I won't be supporting the deal on Tuesday, and I'd like the prime minister to go back to Europe.

Damian Collins, chairman of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee of the British House of Commons, thanks so much for being with us.


How do you feel about the United States now?

It was my home, and it is my home. And it will be my home because I have nowhere else to go. If I went somewhere else, I wouldnt be alive.

Is there something you'd like the Army and the Department of Defense and everyone to know about you?

I am more patriotic than many Americans. I am ready to lay my life down for this country and for the safety of its people. Im not a bad person, and I have never committed a crime. My life is in danger if the institutions like USCIS and DOD does not help me.


No. There have not been significant infrastructure improvements since that storm. County voters passed a $2. 5 billion bond a year ago, but these projects take time, and most are still in the design phase. They haven't started construction. And the city of Houston doesn't have a comparable funding source, and so the city and county are both mostly waiting on federal aid for disaster recovery. And that's been extremely slow to arrive.

Help me understand this a little bit better here. Is there a political consensus in the area about what needs to be done?Does that exist?

Probably mostly yes to that. I think people agree that we need to do more projects, dig more detention basins, accelerate widening and deepening of the bayous, the streams and rivers that run through the area. I think most people are generally on the same page about that. It's just a question of money. But you've got to remember that our infrastructure, even at current standards, is only designed to accommodate maybe one or two inches of rain per hour, and the county got four, five, six inches of rain in one hour. And some areas got 30 inches in little more than a day, when our region usually - the city usually gets 50 inches of rain in a year. No infrastructure system is going to be able to handle that kind of storm without flooding.

Maybe people aren't ready for this conversation yet. Are people marrying the bigger conversation about climate change with the local conversation about infrastructure?Are people ready to talk about that?


OK.  And do we know what happens next?I mean, what are authorities looking at next?What do they say they are doing in response to this?

Well, right now, they are - this incident is under investigation right now. The FBI is calling this murder investigation. The police chief is saying they are looking at capital murder charges for the suspect.

That is Reporter Monica Ortiz Uribe in El Paso, Texas, where she's been reporting on the events there all day. Monica, thank you so much for talking with us.

You're welcome.


Oh, lovely to be here, Neal.

And everybody knows Frederick Douglass met with Abraham Lincoln at the White House, what, 35, 40 years earlier. What's the big deal about Booker T.  Washington coming to dinner?

Well, what happened was African-Americans were invited to meet in offices. They built the White House. They worked for the various presidents. But they were never ever invited to sit down at the president's table. And when that happened, the outrage was just unbelievable.

And you write that the outrage was not - it was about crossing that social line. Yes, you can talk to African-Americans, you can have relations with them, business dealings, all kinds of relationships but not sit down at dinner, not have a social relationship.


I think the crash of the stock market, along with a shooting war in Iraq and a shooting war in Afghanistan made wonkiness less toxic and less unappealing. The Democrats would always field these sort of wonky smartypants candidates. And. . .

Michael Dukakis and John Kerry.

Michael Dukakis and John Kerry, you know, Al Gore, and they were clearly knowledgeable. But the Republicans would always say, yeah, but you wouldn't want to have a beer with them. They don't understand you. They don't understand the American people. And even though our candidate - George W.  Bush comes to mind - may not be an intellectual powerhouse, he understands real people.

And, in fact, there has been in American politics for a long time - you can go all the way back to Adlai Stevenson in the '50s is a prime example - an anti-intellectual fear in American politics, that intellectuals really didn't get it, and they shouldn't be put in high office. But the relative wonkiness of Obama and Joe Biden seemed more appealing to the relative unwonkiness of John McCain and especially Sarah Palin. And I think that helped removed the taint, really, of being smart.


It's lonely. That's why, in many ways, the CIA is the world's biggest dating agency, I think. I imagine it's much like two actors that get married because they understand that universe. You know, I'm pretty sure that the agency's divorce rate is rather high.

You've written a story here with shootings and chases and champagne in suites at the Four Season. But is a lot of spy craft people just scrunched over their laptops sipping coffee?

I would say more likely there's a lot of downtime. You spend a lot of time waiting. You're waiting in a bar or in a restaurant or at a corner to make your meeting. You're doing a lot of surveillance detection routes to make sure that no one is on your tail. You can't put that in a book before the reader puts it down really quickly. However, both Sarah and I felt very strongly we wanted to make it a realistic portrait, particularly of a female operations officer in the CIA. For the most part, to my mind, they come across as how they're portrayed in popular culture is paper dolls - really props more than anything else. And I wanted a strong but realistic character.

A sidebar: have any of the revelations that there have been in recent weeks about the National Security Agency surprised or outraged you?


People should not affiliate with parties by race or ethnicity; they should affiliate to parties based on the ideas and the proposals of each party. And the former is happening, and it's extremely toxic. It divides our country in a dangerous way, and it really diminishes our democracy.

So what direction would you like to see the party take?I mean, what would be your ideal vision?

Well, I think the party was on a good path after the 2012 election. When any organization or individual faces a setback, I think the important thing to do is to be honest with yourself and identify how you can get better. And if you're a political party, that means how you can appeal to more people.

And of course, there will always be people beyond the reach of either political party, but to be able to get big things done, whichever party is in power is going to have to be able to convince a good majority of the American people that their way is the right way, and the Republican party isn't doing that. They're trying to win by maximizing this base strategy. And again, that can result in election victories, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to be able to accomplish big things for the country.


This week, Ira, it's out there. This one's loopy. That's a joke, and you're going to find out why.

It's literally loopy.

It's literally loopy.

You're not - you were looking at me saying loopy. So. . .


Shelter in place. Stay away from windows. Maybe get in a reinforced room like a bathroom, something with no windows. The building I'm in - we're retreating to the inner corridors right now. And there's a stairwell inside that - we have some kids with us. We're putting the kids in there. We're putting pets in crates in bathrooms - just to get to the safest part of the building you're in. Stay away from the windows. And wait for the winds to go down.

Just to give us a little bit of context, you know, how have the Keys weathered major storms in the past?Is - how does this hurricane fit into the history of Key West and its exposure to storms?

Yet to be seen. But to me, it looks like the most serious one since the 1935 Labor Day hurricane, which was a Category 5. It went across Islamorada. In the upper Keys, it took out the overseas railway, and it killed more than 400 people. So Key West has seen other impacts since then. Wilma, in 2005, sent about a 5, 6-foot storm surge over the islands - and not just U. S. , a lot of the Keys. So that was a pretty serious impact. But nothing like this - not a Category 4.

Nancy Klingener of member station WLRN. We'll be checking in with you, we hope. Please stay safe.


What does she say - the captain?Does she say, I was just - I needed to dock the ship?

She said, I was respecting international law. And in fact, there are many constitutional experts here in Italy - also say that the decree is in violation of Italy's constitution and its treaties on international law, the U. N.  convention on asylum and on the right of anybody to come into a country and ask for asylum.

Now, issues of immigration and migrants, how to handle them - this has been front and center in Italy for years. How are Italians reacting to this case?How do they view the captain - what she was trying to do here?

Well, the reactions are as polarized as the country is, and she's a symbol of the divisions over the government's anti-migrant policies. Many on the center-left treat her as a heroine, while Salvini has called her a pirate and an outlaw. The media's dubbed this the battle of the two captains - Captain Rackete of the Sea-Watch and Salvini, who's known to his populist followers as il capitano.


Well, logistically, the thing that would take the immediate pressure off the Border Patrol stations for the children would be to get them into Office of Refugee Resettlement custody faster. ORR is the agency that's responsible for taking care of them until they can find a family member or someone else in the U. S.  to sponsor them. And that system got bottled up in 2014 under the Obama administration when you first started to have large numbers of Central American children coming.

Now you have even higher numbers. And that's been exacerbated by the administration separating the parents from the children, which they are not doing on a large scale but they're still doing on a small scale. So you're just having too many children coming into the Border Patrol stations too quickly and not enough leaving to go into the custody of ORR quickly enough. So that's an immediate bottleneck that needs to be resolved.

Well, what would happen. I mean, how could these children be moved out of there more quickly?I mean, I take it that the first thing to do would be not separate them from their parents, so you presumably have an adult who can be responsible for them. That would be thing one.

Right.


We're talking with Joan Vennochi, the columnist for the Boston Globe, about a piece she wrote on the opinion page there today. It's called "Did the police let their guard down?"You can find a link to it at our website. Go to npr. org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. And this is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

And as you said earlier, it is impossible to secure the 26. 2 miles of the event, the huge crowds, like, 28,000 runners that gather to start the race, the crowds at the finished line, everything along the route. But Boston is not alone. Every city in town across the country has a big event. Do you think after Boston, police everywhere are going to have to look into their security?

Well, that seemed to be the feeling of people who know more about terrorism and security issues than I do, that again priority shift with time, there is a complacency that comes over certainly smaller towns and cities. I think New York City and L. A. , you know, places like that probably think about more than we thought about it here. It just seemed like something that could never happen. And until it does, you just think of it as something fairly remote, even though Boston certainly had a very direct connection to 9/11 since the planes left from here.

But, yeah, I mean, I think it makes - it's going to make the experts, again, think about the tradeoffs. Again, you can' protect against everything. But is there a way you want to rejigger what happens at the finish line?


I have credit, but it was delayed. I've never had trouble getting credit here in Brazil. I've always paid my bills, and so credit's available for me. But this year, the credit promises were made, but then the credit wasn't going to arrive until it was too late to order the fertilizer and actually work out the logistics of receiving it. And so it's changed my plans a lot this year.

And timing is really essential for farmers. So, how is that going to play out there with your 2000 acres of soy?

The 2,000 acres I'm going to plant this year are technically for another farmer. I'm not going to farm anything in my own name this year. And that's common enough, really; I'm not alone in that. Total acreage of corn and soybeans could easily be down this year in Brazil. Most people expect there to be less corn, a lot less cotton, and also less of some of the food crops like rice and edible beans. So, it's caused everyone to plant less than they normally would.

Where do all of those crops grown in Brazil - corn, wheat, and soy - where do they get exported to?


I've always felt like with Britain that there was always a kind of low-grade racism that one experienced almost on a daily basis. Like, in America, you feel it's a much bigger convulsion. And the society is kind of reckoning with it in a more sincere but more troubled way. In England, it was always very light, you know?So it was - you'd come in and the guys on the walkie-talkie would be like, ah, you're the Indian fellow who's going with Gabriella. And it was like - so like. . .

A limerick.

Yeah. The first line of a limerick. But obviously, there was an implication because at that point, there was no one of my shape and size and color around, you know?So it was definitely there.

You focus in this piece on Princess Michael of Kent, who recently, of course, caused controversy when she wore a blackamoor brooch when she met Meghan Markle, who is biracial. And you say that that isn't surprising that she would have done something like that.


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.

And you hit it, and off of the equator of this rapidly spinning muffin comes this stuff, and it's mostly Earth's mantle.

Little muffin that becomes the moon.


Can you explain to us why a general manager or coach wouldn't, just in football terms, necessarily snap at the opportunity to sign Colin Kaepernick?

I think you have to ask yourself, can this player, in this case a quarterback, can he help us win?And how do you win in the league right now?It is not 40 years ago when you can win 17 to 10. You have to rack up the offense. And what Kaepernick basically does - his skill set, the best part of it - is he does not throw many interceptions. He had four last year against 16 touchdown passes. That's a really good ratio.

But someone like Matt Ryan of the Falcons is throwing the ball down the field on these fading outs towards the sideline on a rope. And that's not something Kaepernick has the accuracy really to do. So he's someone who helps you tread water, don't make mistakes, and other players on the team can come to the fore and make the plays that win a game. So in a way, he's a bit of an anachronism. His timing is not ideal for the league right now.

I'm a Bears fan. And I got to tell you that I was skeptical that Colin Kaepernick wasn't being signed because of his political stand. And then the Miami Dolphins signed Jay Cutler. . .


When I listen to you talk, I feel like the worst possible - the most hurtful insult someone could ever fling at you is, you're not authentic.

And she falls to the ground, and she curls into a ball. And. . .

What is it about authenticity that if it were lacking, it's mortally wounding for you?

Yeah. I mean, if you're telling someone they're not authentic, then what are you saying?I guess you could say the opposite of authenticity is - I don't want to just say fake because there's another word.


They thought he was a clown. They didn't think he was serious. There's obviously a lot of history because he owned the USFL's New Jersey Generals. But no, I mean, I think between the league looking at his books or wanting to look at his books and people seeing the way Trump has operated over the years, I think many of these people or most of these people wanted no part of doing business with him.

This book, I think it's fair to say, begins with your adoration for Tom Brady. And the. . .

It doesn't begin with it, but yes, it is definitely a part of it. I have to be transparent about my. . .

Oh, yes.


What do you think needs to change now for the culture of harassment and sexual abuse to shift?

Well, I think what we're doing now is the biggest part. What has kept this quiet for so long is the fact that every victim felt that they were alone and felt that they were the only one. And they felt that their pain wasn't a big enough deal to bring it up and inconvenience other people. But now that you're seeing that so many other people are suffering and you're not the only one, we're all starting to stand up and do something about it. So we need to continue to talk about it, and we need to continue to find ways to keep this from happening anymore.

Kyle Stephens, I hope you can step out of the limelight for a while and, yeah, continue to heal. Thank you so much for talking with us.

Thanks, Lulu.


Scott Snyder is the senior fellow for Korea studies and the director of the program on U. S. -Korea policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

And you mentioned that parade of prime ministers in Tokyo. Mr.  Abe himself was a short-term prime minister as he got himself into some trouble on nationalist, among other issues. Is he likely to trim his sails back towards the center this time?He ran a pretty nationalist campaign.

Well, those specialists who have had direct contact with him suggested he's really a realist and a pragmatist. And that, in fact, last time when he was prime minister, he did curb some of those rhetorical impulses and, in fact, opened up kind of a new page in the relationship between Japan and China. Certainly, that sort of statesmanship is in great demand at this stage given the increasing tensions in the regional environment.

And the - as his rule maybe ephemeral, we will have to see. China, the new leaders there can look forward to a decade, if history - recent history is any guide. I guess, we've seen two now transitions of power in China that were reasonably predictable. But as they look ahead, does that suggest caution?Does that suggest - what signs are you looking for, what indicators as to what they will do on the crucial issue, for example, of political reform?


Well, I think on the third CD you definitely want to show some level of growth. I think your first album is your introduction. Your second album needs to show consistency. And your third album has to show growth in order for you to have a fourth album.

(Singing) You are a star, and you are perfect just the way you are. Keep on dreaming, keep on shining. . .

So, "Keep On Dreaming," one of your songs, folds in the loop from Suzanne Vega's "Tom's Diner. "And you have echoes of songs by other artists throughout the CD, but not samples per se. Why did you choose that approach?

You know, I think people want to be able to hear something familiar while hearing something new. It kind of ties it all together, like the "Tom's Diner" sample, it's just, it's like, she managed to be able to convey a certain feeling just off a melody that she had. She didn't really even say anything, but "duh duh da da, duh duh da da. "You know what I'm saying?And I think that's something that I wanted to mimic in this song. It's not a lot of words, but it's really just a feeling that I was trying to convey.


One option for mothers who feel they aren't able to properly raise a child is to surrender their infants anonymously. So-called safe-haven laws let moms give up their children at local hospitals, police and fire stations without legal consequence. They're intended as a way to save babies from grim fates. Pete Pircsh is a state senator in Nebraska.

2004, a 2-day-old infant was abandoned in a canal near the Elkhorn River in Norfolk. The baby had been dead for about two days at the time it was discovered. In 2007, a woman found a baby boy abandoned in a tote bag between a trash bin and a discarded TV, and there are other incidents like that.

This summer, Nebraska became the last state in the nation to pass a safe-haven law, and theirs is a bit different. Pirsch wrote an amendment to the bill that says children as old as 19 can be left at safe havens. Most states only allow parents to drop off their children if they're less than a year old.

If they're on the point where they, out of frustration or anger, may actually injure the child, then this is a vastly superior system to set up because it will take the child from that position of danger and place him into a safe environment.


Ultimately, with everything that's transpired since that conversation, I don't. I wish I could take it back. And often people will say, but then you'd have never had this essay. And it wouldn't have been the same. And I think, I could've written other essays. Yeah, ultimately I opened up something that was actually closed for me. When people read that piece, they said to me, oh, I wonder - I hope this was very healing for you. I hope you worked through what happened to you through this essay.

My reaction to that is, I actually did already work through that. There's a reason it took 17 years to write that piece - because I had to work through that, and the box was closed. And by opening it up again and bringing those people back into my life, ultimately it wasn't worth it. But I can't take that back now.

Listening to you talk about this, I'm struck by the fact that we are hearing now a lot from women who are writing and examining their lives in sort of powerful, astonishing writing. Do you think there's something wider at play?

I think people are really paying attention now. I think people don't have an option anymore than to hear us and listen. There is such fantastic momentum. And it's really only the beginning. But it thrills me to see the books being picked up right now and the stories we're seeing. And I want that momentum to just continue and crash through.

That was T Kira Madden. Her debut memoir is "Long Live The Tribe Of Fatherless Girls. "Thank you so much.


Right. Just say en and E and - yeah.

What I think the phrase means is this feeling of glory that as humans who exist there is something marvelous about us, something magical, something stupendous, something exemplary. And I don't mean that in a religious way but perhaps religious adjacent, that we are touched by God, you know, that we have a spark. But also by nature of being on this planet, we are scarred and weathered and corrupted by the world outside of us and the flawed architecture inside of us. And so I like the phrase damaged glory because I think it represents that. And I do believe that we are all worthy of somebody who will love us in all our damaged glory.

Raphael Bob-Waksberg, thanks for speaking with us today.

Well, thank you so much.


There was a feeling over the last couple of days before I left that the military-backed ruling party was just a little taken aback by this humiliating defeat. I mean, they only won one seat and that hardliners in the party might not have taken too kindly to what happened and might want to retaliate in some way. And I think some people are afraid that some disgruntled hardliners might try to retaliate against Aung San Suu Kyi, which, of course, would be a disaster for the reform process and a disaster for the country. But so far, that hasn't happened yet, and now, they're talking about trying to reinvent themselves in the run-up to the 2015 general election.

And if last week's election results were any indication, the NLD looks like it would sweep those elections, and then what happens to the military-backed ruling party?I mean, they're out the door, and then if you - if the NLD, for example, had a majority in parliament - I know we're getting ahead of ourselves - but if they had a majority, then they could actually talk about rewriting that constitution, yeah?

And at that point, push comes to shove, no?

Push could come to shove, yes. I mean, people used to having their way for a very long time aren't usually very eager to give up what they have.


OK.

It's caviar pie. And it's the simplest thing to make, but it's - really has a punch. It's got six eggs, and you have to hard boil them. And then you chop them a little bit. You mix them with three tablespoons of mayonnaise. You spread that on the bottom of an oiled 8-inch spring pan. I can't find mine, so I just use a plain old pie plate.

So you've got this layer of eggs with mayonnaise, and you sprinkle that layer with a cup of red onion which is minced fine. Now, I'm not much of a chef, and whenever I see the word mince in a recipe, I turn the page. But in this case, the work is really worth it because it's quite delicious so mince away.

You just chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop. . .


But instead the executives went in with the don't-tell-us-what-to-do approach, and they overplayed their hand. And this has happened before in the EU with the massive privacy law and billion-dollar fines. It's clear Europe is giving big tech a smackdown. And Google, whose motto used to be, don't be evil, might consider a new motto - play nice.

So what do these new rules mean for, say, artists, for creators?How helpful is all of this to them?

Well, there could be a fascinating rift here. Last summer, Sir Paul McCartney from the Beatles - OK?- he wrote an open letter to the European Parliament. He said, music and culture matter. They don't just happen. The companies exploit artists' work. And he wanted the law overhauled. But he's a big-time artist with lawyers who can produce copyright documents - right?- and negotiate agreements with Google.

Yeah.


Absolutely. In fact, there is. It's very simple. If you go to the grocery store and you buy some blue food coloring, you can take it home. And I caution you to be very careful. It will stain the rug in your house, as I am. . .

Yeah.

. . . living proof of.

I hate it when that happens, you know.


I do. I hope I give them - my songs give them a reason to wake up, you know, and think about what is going on in the world. And hopefully they resonate with the audience, the people who are hearing them. I've always hoped from the time we started singing the freedom songs that our songs - was singing them to make a difference. You know, make a better place. Help somebody instead of hurting somebody. You know, so much we could do to make it better.

Well, it's such a delight to speak with you again. I am so excited that I get the chance to talk with you about this new album. You know I'm going to put you on the spot and ask you if you have a favorite.

All of these songs, Michel. I love every one. But I do love "Heavy On My Mind. "

(Singing) We did everything we could to slow this world down. Now my love is in the ground.


And so it seemed to be really impervious to this kind of judicial reckoning. And the fact that it's happened is, of course, all the more remarkable, because of the obstacles that had to be overcome to reach this day.

It's interesting: The current president of Guatemala served under General Rios Montt all those years ago, and he says he accepts this verdict, and will carry out the measures ordered by the tribunal in terms of apologies, but he also said there was no genocide.

Well, he was a general during the period of Rios Montt's rule, and given his own background, it was expected that he would put up more resistance than he has to this trial. And as you said, he has said he respects the ruling of the court, but he has said it's not a genocide. It is a very powerful verdict. It's - genocide has been described repeatedly as the crime of crimes, and it's very difficult to prove in a court of law. And that's one of the other reasons why this verdict was widely seen as a landmark.

So, you know, his reticence is notable. I hope that he continues to maintain the position that he will respect the rule of law in this case, as the proceedings go forward.


(Singing) Saw my father in a dream last night. He was smiling and saying you're going to be all right. And this morning I stared back at myself, feeling as empty as I've ever felt. But I keep on rolling, and I hope I've learned more of what's right than what's wrong. It's ashes and roses and time that burns when you're chasing what's already gone. Ashes and roses and hearts that break. I tried so hard to be strong. But maybe my worst but not my first mistake. Chasing what's already gone. Mm-hmm. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. Chasing what's already gone.

Thank you.

Mary Chasing - Mary Chapin Carpenter, "Chasing What's Already Gone. "She is good on guitar but she is not that good. She had some help from John Jennings, who's also with us here in the studio.

And I have to - that line, saw my father in a dream last night, smiling and saying, you're going to be all right. It seems like that must have been one of those events, his death, that you think you have to write about and you sit there and think, oh, God, what am I going to say?


Good to talk to you.

How important an event was this that Mr.  Kim missed?

It was a very important event. It's an event in a mausoleum where his father, previously ruler of North Korea is buried, interred, and so is his grandfather, the founding leader of North Korea. So it was a big deal. Kim Jong Un has not been seen since September 3, when he attended a concert in Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, with his wife.

Before that, he'd been seen frequently, but always waddling with a really bad limp. He was clearly in discomfort, and finally the North Korean authorities said he is in physical discomfort. So there's something up. We don't quite know what. The speculation is he's had surgery, he's ill, ranging right through to there's been a coup, and he's lost power or certainly being shunted away from power. That's the speculation.

Now, we're talking about somebody who - as my recollection is - he's on television every two minutes. So this must be a tremendous vacuum in the lives of North Koreans.


This appointment would make sense from the standpoint of a president, a new president, Barack Obama, wanting to assert a kind of White House control over the intelligence community. Now, Leon Panetta is not part of the intelligence community. He has had no experience with the intelligence community except as an outside observer, critic, and as one of the authors of a 2006 report on what went wrong with respect to 9/11 and also with respect to the Iraq weapons of mass destruction intelligence.

So Leon Panetta is not of the CIA. He is coming in as kind of a total outsider but somebody who has very strong confidence among not only the Barack Obama people, but also the Clinton people who are going to be at the Department of State under Hillary Clinton.

There's also word today about a choice for the post of national intelligence director, retired Admiral Dennis Blair. What can you tell us about him?

Dennis Blair has been in the Navy and in the U. S.  government for 34 years. He also worked in the White House during his long Navy career and before he was named by Barack Obama to take over this director of national intelligence job. This will actually be Leon Panetta's boss. He is in charge of the total U. S.  intelligence community, all 16 agencies, CIA, the defense agencies, and so on.

The president elect will need to pick someone else to become commerce secretary. New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson took himself out of the running because of an investigation into how some of his donors won a lucrative contract. How serious a problem is this withdrawal for the Obama transition team?


Believe me, I was - I just went into a state of shock. Yeah, it was one of those things. I mean, I guess some people's imaginations run towards good fortune all the time, but I'm sort of the kid who's always sort of preparing myself for the apocalypse. So when something good happens, it's more extraordinary even than normal.

Yeah, do you know who nominated you, by the way?

Oh hell no, and whoever did kept their secret because I had no clue.

Oh, you won't find that out. That's so interesting because I think you'd want to go and thank them.


Sometimes you have prosecutors who look at this situation and realize it was just this horrible, tragic mistake. Sometimes you have prosecutors who look at the situation and say, wait a minute, is there something wrong here?Could the parent have been on drugs?Was there some extenuating circumstances that led to this parent's forgetting?And, you know, the people who study this do recommend that prosecutors look into the circumstances of the death. There is always that small chance that the parent somehow was negligent or the parent had even intended to kill the child. But it is a small subset of the number of children that have died in this way, according to the people who study this.

People have invented technologies that would prevent at least some of these deaths. Why aren't they in more common use?

One of the reasons that technologies are not more in use is that nobody thinks that this is going to happen to them. And so they don't pay the extra money that it would take to install an optional technology or pay extra money for some kind of smart car seat that might send out an alert. And that's why the people who advocate for change are asking for legislation to make the installation of this kind of technology mandatory.

Apart from technological innovations, is there anything that a parent listening to this conversation could do to make sure that this doesn't happen to them?