You know, it's not fair to put the blame on the entire system. You know, we countlessly says in sexual assaults it's not a fraternity problem. It's not an alcohol problem. But we also can't be naive enough not to point out that there seems to be a theme happening where people have this groupthink and are able to hide behind a larger organization.

Can you give us any more insight as to what the conversation on your editorial board's been like?

We were shocked and disgusted when this information came out. You know, one of our first editorials was just somewhat emotional - us explaining that we are very frustrated that this has happened. We are disgusted. These actions are vile, and we, as a student newspaper, are putting our foot down. We're not going to stand for it. As more information has unfolded, specifically the anonymous interview that came out in Philadelphia magazine - that was another topic of one of our editorials.

I don't know that story.


There's no simple answer to that. What will happen, some of our experiments will be back up and running within two or three weeks. Some of the most complex genetic processes will probably take over a year to get back together. And, you know, disruptions like this push us to think hard about what we want to do and where we want to go.

So I think even though I wouldn't have chosen this - and it really is tremendously sad to have lost our partners in these mice - it's going to push us to think about some new directions which we might not have tried had this not happened. So there is a bit of a silver lining to that.

I wonder if your colleagues are as cheery about this, or at least as optimistic about it as you are.

You know, I've really been impressed and really hardened by the way everyone around me at NYU and people all over the world - I was talking to Ben Crowley(ph) of the New York Times, and I mentioned that I had gotten some 40-odd emails. That's doubled since then. And these are individuals who are offering to give me my own lines back, give me their own lines, to help me with space and resources, to literally take over my experiments until we get back on our feet.


A busy week at the U. S.  Federal Reserve. The central bank announced it would end its stimulus program after six years. And later in the week, the Fed's chair, Janet Yellen, gave a speech about diversity in the field of economics. She said the profession, which seems to be dominated by white men, would benefit from a wider variety of viewpoints and pointed to what she called a leaky pipeline that's prevented women and minorities from making it into the top ranks of academia. We're joined now in our studios by labor economist Julianne Malveaux. Dr.  Malveaux, thanks very much for being with us.

DR.  JULIANNE MALVEAUX: It's absolutely a pleasure. Thank you, Scott.

What do you make of that leaky pipeline analogy?

It's absolutely the case. When you look at the research from the past, white males were the norm. It was not until the '70s that folks like Janet Yellen and others introduced women into, essentially, the research - just the research. I think that some of my work and others began to introduce black women, but by and large you're talking a white male space.


I want to ask you how important you think flavors are. Yesterday, the Trump administration announced that it would ban thousands of flavors used in e-cigarettes. How much of a difference do you think that would make in discouraging kids from vaping?

They're tackling it backwards. At the end of the day, put in age verification because otherwise, every teenager would be drinking beer and going to the liquor store four, five times a day. Put in age verification. Make sure - and keep those companies - and hold them accountable. But if you put in age verification as an adult product, that is all you need to do.

So how much business do you stand to lose once this ban on thousands of flavors goes into effect?

That remains to be seen. I don't know. And I don't think it will go into effect. I think, at the end of the day, cooler heads will prevail because what's going to happen is you have to have the understanding and the knowledge and have all the information available to you prior to making such a drastic statement and doing something that will ultimately drive most people back to cigarettes.


You know, while the cat was away the mice could play, and the gangsters increased their power, because being gangsters, a lot of them didn't have to serve. You know, they got out of the draft and a lot of men were aware and effort was focused elsewhere. So, their power increased and that's why you had a lot of gang wars at the end of the '40s and the beginning of the '50s. And I grew up in that era. But I also grew up with gangsters, because my father had to deal with them in various capacities and we lived among. . .

Your father ran the film company.

My father ran London Films. He made films like "The Red Shoes," "The Third Man. "And he had had a long career in the film business, which was bifurcated with a career in intelligence. He had to deal with gangsters, and sometimes he would take me with him. Also, I went to school with their children. So, my rendition of gangsters is a little different from screenwriters' rendition of gangsters because screenwriters only know what they see in other movies. I actually grew up with these people and I think I have a pretty realistic take on it.

I was struck by something that Harry Copeland tells his aunt at one point in Staten Island. He says there was more light and air in the war than now. What did that mean?

Well, that I take from my own experience.


Thank you so much, Scott.

Let me put this bluntly. In the 1970s, Argentina was in the grip of what was called the Dirty War. People being disappeared. Which side was man now known as Pope Francis on?

I think he was on the wrong side. I think he didn't understand the consequences of what the junta meant to do when it came to power. He had been very involved as a young man in politics. He was interested in communism.

But then he turned really to the right. He was an admirer of Juan Domingo Peron, the soft man of Argentina - to put it somehow. And he joined or was on the margins of a right-wing peronist group. And there were a lot of his priests who were very much on the left-wing side. And what happened is that he essentially failed to protect two of his most radical priests by demanding essentially that these priests leave the Jesuit order.


It came as a bigger surprise over the last three to six months when our young scientist Robert Rohde was able to adopt really excellent statistical methods and push the record back to 1753. With such a long record, we could then separate out the signatures of solar variability, of volcanic eruptions, of El Nino and so on. And actually, to my surprise, the clear signature that really matched the rise in the data was human carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. It just matched so much better than anything else. I was just stunned.

You know, you wrote in your book, even, page 75: The evidence shows that global warming is real, and the recent analysis of our team indicates that most of it is due to humans.

(Technical difficulties). . .  And then we had these new results. I was much more cautious in the version of the book that was sent around for pre-review, and then we managed to get the new results in the new book.

You know, you've been criticized on both sides of the aisle, as they say now. I think some scientists are saying: Why did you publish - why didn't you publish it in legitimate, peer-reviewed journals first?


Well, in some states, let's say New Mexico, Latinos went for Obama 69 to 30. So that was quite decisive. And in Colorado, it was also a decisive victory, 73 to 27 for Obama.

You know, thinking back to the primaries, there was a question at one point about whether Barack Obama would be able to appeal to Latinos. This was sort of one of the great problems he was supposed to have. And he seems to have solved that problem rather decisively.

Now, let's talk about white voters. That was also a big question mark. And he did get a firm portion of white voters, the largest share of white support of any Democrat in a two-man race since 1976. But still more white voters went for McCain.

One of things that Obama was able to do is shrink that margin. Republicans tend to do better with white voters and have traditionally done better. So, it's not surprising that they went to the Republican. What's important for Obama as a governing matter is that he was able to shrink that margin, that he doesn't seem to have a quote, unquote "problem" with those kinds of voters. Again, this was a big issue during the primaries and in the general election, and, in fact, among younger white voters, he did quite well.


And it was remarkable to find these little details that people had. Oh, yes, when he was in college, you know, he belonged to this - some society. I'm forgetting the name right now. But the idea of it was to perfect one's dancing and etiquette. And the next door neighbor said he was always very interested in, you know, in correct speech and in, sort of, you know, elegantly holding himself out and that this was something that just went back, back, back, back, back.

Alan Feuer tells Alan Feuer's story in two articles in The New York Times, the most recent, "The Secret Life of a Society Maven. "You could find a link to that on our website. Go to npr. org, click on TALK OF THE NATION. And, Alan Feuer, thank you so much for sharing your story.

Oh, my pleasure.

Alan Feuer is a reporter for The New York Times. Tomorrow, after a gun battle outside the prime minister's house in Tripoli, we'll talk about progress and pitfalls and the ripples of revolution in Libya. Join for us that. It's the TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. I'm Neal Conan in Washington.


Again, I don't sign off on absolutely everything Nancy Pelosi, Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer or Kevin McCarthy may tweet or declare. I don't. I'm not the endorser of anyone. And I have pushed back on statements that I do believe do exacerbate the very climate and culture that I just referenced. Indeed. But to put the onus exclusively on the president when on the other side of the aisle there are calls of uber-racism and absolutely. . .

When has Nancy Pelosi ever told anybody to go back where they came from?

No, Nancy Pelosi hasn't told anyone to come back where they came from. But there have been policies and exacerbated hyperbole in rhetoric as it pertains to statements made on both sides - Democrats and Republicans - that have led to this sort of climate. So to put the onus exclusively on the president would not be fair. Are there things the president has stated or tweeted that I have disagreed with?Absolutely. But the same thing on the other side of the aisle.

What do you see as your role in the days ahead?


I think Gary offers central location. It's close to a number of freeways. There's access to Chicago. There's certainly lower cost of living for employees. Yeah, the employees will be generously compensated. But, you know, moving into a larger market - Chicago, Boston, possibly some places like Austin - you're going to have a lot of that income gobbled up immediately by real estate and housing. And I think for Gary, it's a tremendous opportunity to turn a corner.

Yeah, but what about the tax rate?

Tax rate - I mean, it's more generous than Illinois, so, certainly for businesses and corporations. So there's that appeal there. And I know there's been, you know, conversation with the governor of Indiana, Governor Holcomb, about kind of preparing this plan. I can't speak to how much of that has happened or not. But I think that's another advantage.

There's so many cities preparing a bit for Amazon's second headquarters. But will the winner have to grant so many tax breaks, it won't wind up being that much of an economic gain?


Tell me how you grew up.

Well, my grandparents raised me. When their - they had - they've been foster parents for as long as I can remember. And I was actually the first child other than their own that they actually took care of, and they raised me since I was six months old.

Although my mom lived there as well, she was always - you know, raised me as well, but I lived in their house. I always kept myself around something musical, whether it was being in a play where I played the drunk daughter, or sneaking out to the studio to make a, you know, a demo that never became anything. But you know, it was all a part of what I felt I needed to do beyond, you know, those - that house and beyond church. You know, I was always looking for something to do outside of that - of those four walls.

In this book, you talk about some really rough times you went through. Being held out a window by an abusive boyfriend who threatened to drop you to your death, being beat up, being manipulated. Why do you feel that it was important to put all that in the book?


Right. Reckitt Benckiser made Suboxone Film. It was actually made by a division of the company called Indivior, which the parent company spun off five years ago. This is an opioid medication that's actually used to treat people recovering from addiction. You take it by dissolving it under your tongue rather than in tablet form. And back in April, Audie, the Justice Department filed criminal charges, claiming this drug was marketed using false claims that it's safer, less prone to abuse than cheaper alternative drugs. The feds said the company earned billions of dollars bilking healthcare providers and insurers, including Medicaid.

The $1. 4 billion - what is the U. S.  government going to do with that money?

Yeah. Well, most of this will go into the federal government's coffers. But interestingly here, $200 million will be divided up between any states that sign onto the settlement - the money going to reimburse their Medicaid budgets.

But if the company doesn't make this drug anymore and now you've got the spin-off company that makes it, why did they agree to this huge payout?


He was all those things. I. . .

Did his brother's death, in a sense, liberate him to seek a new identity, to travel, to get to know and reflect the world?

I think that shook him deep to his soul. But I think the other thing that happened was his father's stroke. He had to get his father off his back. Joe Kennedy Sr.  was a formidable but, I think, menacing figure in his life who took a sweet, young seventh born who he had called a runt and encouraged him to become tough and ruthless - first a jock at Harvard, getting his letter with a broken leg, and then becoming this enforcer for his brother.

That's what won, finally, the attention of the old man. And only when he was tough did the old man respect him. And I think when his father became incapacitated, Bobby began to resort to who he was as a kid. As a kid, he was - he hung around all the time with African-American kids. Those were his playmates, even in Hyannis. He was - he, you know, Father Feeney - when Father Feeney said no salvation outside the Catholic Church, he railed against that, which was so extraordinary in that very Catholic family.


Right. So a lot of this book takes place in a world that is slightly adjacent to our own perhaps. And my wife and I are both Jewish, and we really wanted to keep our wedding very small and very simple. We didn't invite a lot of people, and a lot of people were very upset about that. But we really wanted to keep it simple and not have a big to-do. And I was shocked that even when we were both in agreement about that of how complicated it was to just have this small, simple wedding. And some of the things we wanted, I couldn't explain to you why it was that - you know, why must we get married under a chuppah?I don't know, but we both have to. Or, like, the food - I go, oh, we'll just get, like, some takeout. It's only 20 people. We're not getting takeout for our wedding.

And then I thought we were on the same page on this.

I thought we were on the same page.

We've had conversations about this.


So, this is an exciting moment for us to take a look at ourselves. So, you know, first of all, how do you compare this presidential race with ones in the past?

Can't do it. This is not like any presidential race in the past. We have already had the first woman candidate to be this close to being nominated. The first Hispanic candidate to be a major candidate. First Mormon. We have the first African-American nominee, now presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party. And we also had a very interesting race on the Republican side that would have been kind of a barnburner in its own right. So, this has been a much more interesting presidential race that we've had in my lifetime. And it's just got an awful lot of facets of great news value.

So, how would you say, what would you say even coverage is?What is the goal really?

The best thing you can do is to reach the end of the campaign and have people say, well, we got a fair look at the candidates from the beginning to the end. We got a fair look at the two nominees of the major parties. We got a fair look at the third party candidates. And we got a fair look at all the competitors back in the primaries. I don't think you can say that at all is going to be exactly the same number of minutes devoted to each.


There's been considerable criticism of even this temporary deal in advance - in the U. S.  Congress, as you note; in Israel, in Saudi Arabia. How do we understand the ground of those disagreements?

Well, on paper a lot of the criticism seems overblown. I mean, it's more an argument about unintended consequences. As the Obama administration describes this package, the relief is just a fraction of what Iran is going to continue to lose over the next six months, if there is a deal. In the oil sector alone, Iran's losing an estimated $5 billion a month. And officials say there's no way they're going to get $25 billion out of what's on the table here. But the latest argument from the opponents is more psychological. If the international business community senses that there is a trend towards lifting sanctions altogether, there could be some kind of a rush to get in early, start doing business again, beat out the competition. So, if you don't trust Iran, and apparently don't trust the business community either, there is an argument to be made that the value of this sanctions relief could turn out to be higher.

NPR's Peter Kenyon in Geneva. Thank you so much.

You're welcome, Scott.


No. There's no sort of smoking gun theory about that. So our philosophy is anytime you can get your hands on some antimatter, you should take a really careful look. And the best way to do that is with atomic physics techniques to look at the spectrum of antihydrogen. What kind of light does it like to absorb and emit?Is that the same color of light that hydrogen absorbs and emits?

So also in the meantime, we've built a new machine we call ALPHA-2, which is improved and upgraded, that will allow us to actually shine laser light on trapped antihydrogen. So when we come back online in 2014, we have a brand-new machine. We'll have some lasers to shine on it, and it's a really very exciting time for us.

Can you keep it trapped for longer than 16 minutes?

You know, it's not really worth looking because it's long enough. We showed with the microwave experiment that that was long enough. I have to tell you, it's an incredibly boring experiment to do. You know, you trap your antihydrogen. You wait for 16 minutes and you release it. You know, go have a coffee or something while you're - it just doesn't tell you anything more that we really need to know right now.


No, he's not. I mean, you know, these Democratic candidates, it's essentially partisanship that's slipping in. You have them pretty split amongst the general election overall - Bernie Sanders, not very well-liked overall - 55%. And President Trump himself, his approval rating is only 41%, among the highest he's had for strongly disapproving at 45%. And it looks like a lot of the economic worries over the summer are starting to take a bit of a toll on him.

So does that mean that people think - clearly they have issues with his policies. According to your poll, does it mean they think he's going to lose?

Actually, no, (laughter) that's kind of surprising here that most Americans or more Americans think he's going to win reelection than lose by a 46%-to-37% margin. You know, people have a mostly positive outlook on the economy, and that really is buoying him right now.

We also have a result from a special election in North Carolina that we need to talk about. This was for the House seat that was up for grabs. The Republican won, but the margin of victory was still pretty small. And this was someone President Trump had campaigned for. What should he and his reelection team take from this, if anything?


So what about this contest?

What the CDC is trying to do is not just figure out what's going on right now with the flu, but what's going to happen in a week or two weeks out. Traditionally, we do what's called surveillance, which is what's going on right now in the United States. And that's a really hard problem because if you think about it, without using something like Twitter, you have to ask people what's going on. And the CDC does this; they do a very good job. But it takes them about two weeks to get those responses collected. What we're trying to do is predict things like what week is going to be the worst for the flu season; when is it going to end?

Do you run the risk of putting through the algorithms a lot of tweets from people who don't use, let's say, a word like fever in the same way people with flu would use it?

It's actually very tricky to use Twitter in order to get a flu rate. So, for example, someone might say, I have Bieber fever, which is not actually a disease that we care about tracking.


Yeah, well, when I was a young, little Muppet baby version of myself, you know, I mean - I guess people were right in that I was kind of a punk kid. I was anti-everything. I was anti-capitalist, first of all. I just don't have a lot of respect for profit motive. So as an artist, you know, I had a hard time. You know, when I was living hand to mouth, you know, my first manager - as a teenager, you know - tell people you have tapes for sale. Like, no, no.

(Laughter) You didn't even want to do that.

I just feel like a jerk. I didn't want to. I couldn't do it. I couldn't do it.

What I loved about the book was that I didn't come away with an impression that you suffered from self-doubt. You kind of always knew that it just didn't matter how hard it was, you were just - this was your thing.


Ooh. Ooh. So small dive.

You need to be very careful. Keep your limbs in.

And why - what's so fascinating about espresso?

Well, one of things that espresso drinkers will know probably is that when you have an espresso straight, not a latte, not a cappuccino, just a straight little mug of espresso, when it comes out to you, it has this frothy, foamy thing on top. It's a little thin layer of tiny bubbles. It's a little lighter in color, and it's called the crema.


And what's your budget been?

Our budget is around $130,000. And that might sound like a lot, but it's a lot - it's way, way cheaper than, you know, most space programs.

SpaceX probably spends that on lunch.

Sounds about right.


Good to be with you, Scott.

Marked difference in tone between President Trump's comments that we just heard and the tweet he posted just after Judge Kavanaugh's testimony on Thursday - what happened?

You could say it was an incredible difference, Scott. Earlier in the week, the president had scoffed openly at Dr.  Ford's story. Now the president seems deeply impressed, calls her testimony very compelling. Some of this could be the different ways the president gets information. He apparently watched her on television. Or it could be about the different ways he communicates - on Twitter, on one hand, versus TV coming from the Oval Office. And as to which are his true feelings, as the president says, we'll have to see.

Reports are that, at any given time, 20 percent of U. S.  households were tuning in. And that, of course, doesn't count people who watched in airports, at work and public places. Used to be, we all tuned in for moon landings. This week, it was for a symbolic event, that it's become for many, but also the story of two people and what happened one night in 1982.


Good morning.

Good morning.

The U. S.  has been unstoppable so far. Should the American women be worried about the Dutch?

Well, yes, the U. S.  has been amazing so far. They've only allowed three goals the entire tournament, and they've now won 11 World Cup games in a row, which is a record. But this could be a tricky match against the Netherlands. This Holland team has made it to the final by upsetting teams that were supposed to beat them. And this is, actually, only their second time playing in a World Cup. They made it to the round of 16 four years ago in Canada. But then they won the 2017 European Championships, and they've only gotten stronger since then.

All right, we'll get to Megan Rapinoe in a second. But I want to ask about the Dutch side first. Who are you watching there?


How did that affect you and your political consciousness or your sense of your place in Iran?

Well, my father's jailed especially, but also the way my parents were, always made me feel politically suspicious of whoever was in power.

You know, and I think that I have kept that in a sense. And to be politically active, not in the sense of wanting to ever myself become part of any political group or clique, but there were certain values, certain principles, that became very important. And I felt that that is the main thing, not to compromise those principles, not to be, as my father used to say, not to be ashamed of yourself. But it's really, really, I think, changed my world forever. I could never ever again trust anything. If my father, who, one moment was one of the most popular mayors Tehran ever had - I was in Switzerland at the time, and you know, we would see his picture with General De Gaulle in Paris Match, or with the king of Denmark, with the chancellor of Germany; you know, he seemed to be top of the world - and the next moment almost, he would be in jail. If that could happen so easily, then I realized that anything could happen and you cannot trust at least the political life.

Azar Nafisi, coming up, we continue our discussion. She talks about the sexual abuse she had been silent about and how that influenced her view of Nabokov's novel "Lolita. "


Yeah. If you've ever heard stories about people who win the lotto, their lives are in inalterably changed by that. It's a hard thing to imagine. And for NPR and The Salvation Army, these huge gifts - and it's important to point out that The Salvation Army got close to 10 times more than NPR did - it was challenging.

How do you continue to reach out to donors when you've received this windfall?In the case of NPR, how do you explain, in this complex matrix that we've got of member stations in the network, how the money will get dispersed?In the case of The Salvation Army, Joan asked for recreation centers to be built all around the country. But The Salvation Army really wasn't equipped to do that. It had done it once in San Diego, where Joan lived, but it wasn't something that was in their wheelhouse, so to speak.

So yeah, it's a terrible burden. It's a wonderful one, but it was complicated for both organizations.

How fair or accurate is the idea that Joan Kroc gave away Ray Kroc's money to a lot of places and causes of which he would not have approved?


I think it's actually the opposite. And Jay Inslee ran as the climate candidate, but it turns out there are several climate candidates. So if you are a voter who's looking for someone who wants to overhaul the entire economy over the coming decades, to transition to renewable energy, massively cut down on greenhouse gas emissions, you have your pick - Beto O'Rourke has a plan to do that, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden to a more moderate degree, others. Many have put forward plans that would go far further than what the Obama administration tried to do on this.

Inslee did have the most detailed plan. He did talk about this the most. But that really didn't allow him to end up to stand out on the front. And you're right; most polls show that climate change is one of Democratic voters' top issues. This is something that this year Democrats are regularly talking about, voters are asking about, it's a topic in debates. In the past, that hasn't been the case. This has often been an issue that ends up getting ignored during elections.

You mentioned Bernie Sanders. He just rolled out a big climate plan. How does his proposal compare to the other plans we've seen?

I think it's fair to say this is the most aggressive plan yet.


All right.

OK, but anyway, we're all working at the same - working so hard and so long on trying to get something done because we're - people like me are doing this because they love the country, and they're worried about it. We've got a lot of us around, and we're trying to find our place in this thing, and it looks like the White House and the Republicans do have a way to get information in.

It's very hard for changes to be made and agreements. I don't know how they're doing that. It's a very strange kind of organization. But. . .

Well, let me ask you, how much did the election change things?There's the same cast of characters, pretty much.

Well, I - people that aren't there negotiating, and I'm not there, but people that aren't are speculating on all kinds of things, in terms of the president is playing with more power, he acts like a tyrant because he won the election. I don't really see that at this point, that there is any big change because of the election.

Well, the president, if he campaigned on one thing, it was raise taxes on the wealthy.


Make sure you got the right booty shorts on.

Well, it depends on the job you're applying for, I guess.

Yeah. I guess it does. No. I think you're bringing up something that's happening not only in the employment sector, but also for college admissions, and all types of things. So it's finding itself, trickling down into other areas. So the bottom line, first foremost, remember that the Internet is a public space. All right?Anything that you put up there can ultimately - I don't care if you're password protected or not. Ultimately that could be copied, found, and reposted somewhere else. So first and foremost, make sure that your content that you're revealing of yourself is something that you're comfortable with showing to a possible employer or a college admissions officer.

Secondly, use it to your advantage. Use these things like LinkedIn. You create your own blog site. Make sure that some of the discussion that is out there about you, you're controlling that. Make sure you have your own presence online. So talk about some of the extracurricular activities, your hobbies, your interests, things that you've done really, really well or you're very proud about, and take advantage of some of that. I think that's something to really take consideration of because this is a time where people are actually looking at these online sources, and you have to separate between your social life and your business life, and be able to understand how to do that in this online world.


(Laughter) I have no idea. I know that the pope - his five most famous words may be - who am I to judge?- which is about gay people. And I know that he has gay friends. You know, one of the people that he met with during his papal visit in the United States was a gay friend and his partner. So he's open to what he calls a culture of encounter and accompaniment. He's certainly in favor of listening to people and meeting them where they are. And so on that page, you know, we agree.

You suggest in a couple of sections of the book that there must be priests who are LGBT, but they are faithful to their vows of chastity.

Yeah, I know them. And, you know, by saying that a priest is gay, it doesn't mean that he's breaking his promise of celibacy or his vow of chastity or, you know, lesbian nuns. And one of the challenges for the church is to recognize these people and to see them as the gifts that they are as all LGBT people are to the church. They are gifts, beloved children of God who bring certain gifts and certain talents to our church, to the community.

Father James Martin - his book, "Building A Bridge: How The Catholic Church And The LGBT Community Can Enter Into A Relationship Of Respect, Compassion, And Sensitivity" - thanks so much for being with us.


Kenneth, generally this song is called the Negro national anthem or the black national anthem. Finally, we turn to Anise Benerman(ph) in Durham, North Carolina, who wrote in about the segment called "Ready to get married but can't find a mate. "She said it hit close to home.

I'm one of those early 30s never married, no kids, African-American females. I make decent money but I am by no means well off. I've had brothers tell me they can't do anything for me after finding out where I reside and what I drive. Besides economics, appearance and what's pleasing to the eye has a lot to do with marriage statistics in our community. I've been told that I was cute for a dark girl, but they prefer redbones. They like longer hair, thinner thighs and all sorts of superficial nonsense. I think a lot of brothers have taken on the European standards of beauty.

And that's it for letters. Thank you for writing, and please keep yours coming.

To write to us, just log on to npr. org and click on Contact Us. When you get there, you'll see lots of shows to choose from. Make sure you pick News & Notes when you write to us.


Why?

Because it's like they don't have an agenda. They are just naturally funny.

I see a little boy break a grown man down so bad, one time, in the mall. We was in the sunglass department. The man tried on the sunglasses, he put the glasses on, he looked down at the little boy, he said, how these look?Little boy looked at him, he said, "They look good, now all you got to do is get your teeth fixed. "

Kids don't have an agenda. They just say what they see and then old people they just tell the truth. So - so, you know. I live in South Florida. And where I live is a predominantly retirement community. And one day, you know, how the new - the new fashion thing is your bra strap shows. You know, you could wear like a tube top and you have a fashion bra-bra, fashionable bra one. So I'm standing in line at the post office and this old lady taps me on the shoulder, she goes, sweetheart, your bra is showing.

And I look at her like, but it's pink. So I love that. I love people that are like generally funny and just on it.


This strikes me as a bit like saying, well, we don't want to stigmatize people on food stamps, so we're going to give food stamps to wealthy people so they also will buy their groceries for food stamps. This is an astonishing thing. This is the ultimate in corporate welfare.

Big banks like JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America essentially were forced by the Fed or very much had their arms twisted by the Fed and the Treasury to take $25 billion. Some somewhat smaller banks had to take 20 billion. So a lot of this money was just an enormous sum to be given to these big institutions.

Let me ask, why did they agree if they think they didn't need it?

Well, I think essentially - well, when you're dealing with Uncle Sam, you essentially are given an offer you can't refuse. OK, well, you don't want to take this money if you don't want to, but good luck next time you want anything from us. And I think that they were - essentially were coerced into taking this money.


Because unlike candidates, which have to disclose their fundraising and spendings to the Federal Elections Commission, outside groups - a lot of them are basically incorporated nonprofits, they're businesses. And they don't really have a legal mandate to disclose. They're simply communicating a message. So what these Federal Communication Commission filings do is give us a sense of what they're spending on the biggest ticket item in politics right now, which is television advertising.

So how do these new rules make what you do easier?

Back in sort of the bad old days, the pre-2012 days, you would actually hop in your car, and if you had five or six television stations in your market, you would go to to five or six television stations and root through physical files to find out what groups were behind these ads. And the things in those files were valuable, not only because they sort of told you the volume of advertising in dollar terms and how many spots they were running, but also sometimes they were the only hints of who was actually behind an ad, you know. A lot of these groups have names like Mom For Apple Pie. Well, who is was Mom For Apple Pie?Sometimes the FCC files were your only hope to kind of figure out - oh, this is actually attached to this Republican or this Democratic organization.

And in your state this year, there has been a time of spending already. On the Republican side, there are a couple of big names that of been doing this - Americans For Prosperity and Crossroads GPS. And I think we have an ad for Americans For Prosperity.


Look. We - no - we have low-skilled workers who come to this country all the time. . .

Low skills is different than no skills.

. . . Well, low skill - that's what the chief was talking about. We're talking about bringing in the best and brightest from around the world. That's not what is occurring now. But let's not pretend for a second we have a mean, heartless immigration policy. We have the most generous immigration policy in the world. So to pretend as though, somehow, we're closing off to the world is just ridiculous. What this president and what the chief of staff was talking about is we want people in this country who have a lot to offer the United States, who are the best and the brightest. And right now our immigration system as such - we don't get that.

I'm afraid I got to come back to the McCain question one more time because, you know, we wouldn't keep asking it if someone in the White House would say, look. I wish it hadn't happened. He's a great American. He's given great service to the country. He might be in his last days. Let's just shut down this controversy and say, thank you for everything you've done for America. But why won't the White House say that?


Hi.

Let's talk a little bit about Title IX. The law is conceived as a way to protect and support women. It's a federal law. Universities can have their funding taken away if they don't do enough to address complaints. You are a self-described feminist. Where do you think the law is wrong in your case and more broadly?

Well, what happened was that Title IX, which started out, you know, as something about equity for things like women's sports, was expanded in 2011 to include sexual harassment or creating, like, a hostile environment on campus. You know, very vague sorts of things can now be charged under Title IX. So since then, because they didn't really specify how campuses should do this, there's just an incredible amount of overreach because all the campuses are afraid of losing their federal funding and also being seen on soft - as soft on sexual assault. And, you know, there certainly is a sexual assault problem, but whether that should be handled. . .

I was about to say, I mean, that's clearly an issue on campuses.


Well, the children have Medicaid, just due to our lower income. We are available to some of the state aid, which is very welcome. Fortunately, we haven't had to use it too much. We do have a couple of kids with some special needs that are addressed, but the other three haven't had much need for it.

Even in difficult times you need a little break. You need to get away and do something to remind yourself that life is fun sometimes, too. What you do if you have any extra money and you can go somewhere?

We did get away for a family vacation this summer, went down to North Carolina. We do the bargain movie theaters. We do - the kids are very busy at school and we try to keep them going on all these field trips and what not.

Ohio, where you are, this was a famous battleground state in the election, and you know, we've had all these undecided voters. And we are asking people these questions that feel intrusive, even to us as we ask them, but can you tell me how you voted?

Well, I was undecided, I guess, or uncommitted up until Monday evening, and to be honest with you, I couldn't bring myself to vote for either one of the two major parties. I just felt that neither one of them represented the change that we actually needed in this country. So - and I will just leave it at that.

All right. Jon Diebold in Cincinnati, Ohio. What's your restaurant?


And there is a desperate need both for international humanitarian law to be observed in the conduct of the war to protect civilians but also for a move towards political negotiations and a political settlement, because it is now nearly two years since I sat at the United Nations with foreign ministers from the Gulf States who said they wanted a political settlement then. But it is no closer, and the bombing has undoubtedly deepened the divide inside Yemen and made it far harder to bring peace.

And this is the conduct of the war by Saudi Arabia?

The Saudi-led coalition has air power. The Houthis, who are an Iranian-backed rebel group, are on the ground. It's not the job of these humanitarians to take sides in the conflict. We don't take sides in the conflict. What we do is call out the abuse of international humanitarian law on all sides. And the striking thing about the Yemen conflict and the three other countries that are in danger of famine in Africa - in Somalia, in South Sudan that we've talked about, north and northeast Nigeria - these are man-made famine.

Mr.  Miliband, you've been a politician. How do you sustain interest in problems that are very remote from the lives of everyday Americans?


But we don't know what types of tools the Denisovans made. The Neanderthals lived in Western Eurasia and in Europe, and the Denisovans seem to have lived in the eastern parts of Eurasia, and we don't have a well-defined group of skeletons or archaeology that we know must have been left behind by a group.

But amazingly, we do have a genome sequence from the Denisovans, and we can use the genome sequence to study how they're related to Neanderthals and modern humans.

How do you get such an accurate reading of a genome from a 50,000-year-old bone?I mean, it would seem - you know, it's an old bone.

Yeah, it's really old. So ancient DNA is an amazing field that's really become revolutionized over the last few years because of the revolution for medical genetics, from genomics, which has made the cost of DNA sequencing come down by a factor of about 100,000 over the last decade and especially in the last year by many thousand-fold.


I - you've made that point. Let me get to one last question, if I could. President Trump cited Canada as a model of merit-based system, but several news organizations and the Canadian Council of disabilities have pointed out that Stephen Hawking wouldn't be permitted to immigrate in Canada under their system because it does not admit handicapped and disabled people. Do you want that for the United States too?

Well, a merit-based system needs to focus on education and skills, but there is also room for immediate family members to come as well. Canada's point system really contributes only about 15 percent of Canada's annual immigration now. It used to be much higher. It's all in, you know, how you set it up. And we need to be more nimble in our immigration system and look at the outcomes of our immigration policy the way Australia does and be ready to change it if it's not meeting our needs, particularly our economic needs.

Jessica, we. . .

I think that we can do both.

Jessica Vaughn of the Center for Immigration Studies, thanks so much.


We're going to talk through this now with Jamil Jaffer. He was a lawyer in the White House under President George W.  Bush. And he was senior counsel to the House intel committee. He joins us now. Welcome back.

Thanks, Lulu. Good to be here.

All right. We have the Democratic memo. What have you learned from reading it?

Well, look. I think that what we've learned is there's a real debate here between the two sides about the substance of this application on Carter Page, the FISA application and the three renewals. And, you know, what was going on here?According to the Republican memo, it was a highly slanted investigation. Information from this dossier, which has largely been discredited now, was used to obtain the surveillance.

And for the Democrats, you see a response that says, no, in fact, there were lots of sources of information. The memo was but one source and that this was a long, ongoing investigation long before they even heard about the memo. And we ought not believe the Republicans' claims. And so we have a very clear now debate. The American people can read both memos and have a honest discussion about, you know, who has the right of this here.


Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And I think that before Manny was traded, you say that C. C. was the hands-on favorite, but man, I think the impact that Manny has made on what was a moribund Dodgers team is sensational. I think if the voting was held right now and was fair, I think Manny Ramirez would be the MVP of the National League. What he's done there is incredible.

But it's not going to happen, is it?

Well, if there's justice in the world, and as you and I know there is justice in the world, I think it could happen. I mean, look at what he's done. I mean, he's made - he's helped them make shambles out of that race just because of him. C. C. 's done an excellent job, but Milwaukee is fading. Los Angeles is just becoming strong, and then there's the whole irony of Manny hooking up with his former archrival Joe Torre. And just the idea of these two guys grinding an axe against their former teams, which used to be archrivals, I just think the drama is just too - it's just too delicious. That's why I really think it should be Manny.

All right, let's end this with this connection. Since you've talked about Manny, then you talked about Joe Torre, formerly of the New York Yankees, now let's talk about Yankees stadium, which closes it's doors, last game ever in Yankee Stadium this Sunday. I know that you live close to the ballpark. Are you sad, Mr.  New Yorker?


Yes.

And so tell me about this toilet.

OK. This is a prototype that was displayed after one year of research. So eight major universities around the world were tasked with coming up with a new approach to completely handle the waste, basically, with no traditional urban infrastructure. In other words, it should operate in the absence of an electrical grid. It should operate in the absence of piped-in water, the subject of your previous conversations. And it should basically function at low cost and be available to the developing world within a three to four-year period of time.

And what is yours - what does your prototype look like?


That is correct. I was a young editor. And Fleming was a charming man. I liked him enormously. I liked him better than I liked his books actually. He had my first novel and was very, very kind to me about that. Ayn Rand was another case all together. She and I really didn't get along. But she was a tough cookie.

Among the many question this novel keeps raising is it invites the reader to try to figure out what are we really?And it's asking what's the position of the novel, the story, not even just the novel as a forum, but the story.

What I've learned doing this kind of work is that fiction is the most conservative of the arts. If you think historically what has happened in music or among the poets - Whitman in the 19th century just destroying romantic poetry and building a whole kind of new thing. The ideas carried along by the artists who keep changing, keep looking for more, or for something truer, something greater. But generally speaking, the insistence on storytelling of a realistic nature has predominated and continued in the old ways. So, what I'm guided by - perhaps it's futile - is Ezra Pound's injunction. When he was talking to the poets, he said make it new, make it new. And that's what must have been provoking me when this book came along.

Well, E. L.  Doctorow. His new novel, "Andrew's Brain. "Thanks so much for being with us.


But Barack Obama blew right straight through half a million, a million. He's now approaching a million and a half donors. And of course they are not all giving the maximum amount of money, most of them are just giving 100 dollars or less, or 200 dollars or less. Nonetheless, the size, the base of that fundraising operation means that he can raise all the money that he needs, including, very possibly, money that would go to help retire Hillary Clinton's campaign debt after she does drop out, assuming some day she does.

Well Ron, thanks so much.

Thank you, Farai.

That was NPR's senior Washington editor Ron Elving, and he joined me at NPR headquarters in Washington, D. C.


(Laughter) You know, initially, these started as two separate essays - an essay about pregnancy and an essay about my eating disorder that I had been trying to write for 15 years. And, you know, on one level, there was, you know, a very physical experience of stepping on the scale at my doctor's office and thinking, oh, this is the first time I've wanted the scale to read higher, and remembering back to this secret scale in my closet in college and how I would go in obsessively and religiously and just want the number to be lower and lower and thinking, what's the difference between that self then and this self now?

But it was also important to say, I think we can get really attached to these conversion narratives of self to say, I was this way back then, and I've gone 180 degrees, and I'm a totally different self now; I've left that old self behind. But I don't think that's how it works. I don't think we leave our old selves behind. I think we have to reckon with them. And this essay is also me reckoning with the ways that I've changed and with the ways that the ghosts of the old selves and the old fixations are still there, too.

Leslie Jamison, thank you so much for your time.

Thank you so much for your questions and for having me.


Like we have a song together called, "You Think You Got It Bad. "And what I do is, you know, we'll play the track. Then we'll ask him what do he think it needs?And he goes in the studio and do it. You know, it's never something like boy, you can write something for somebody else. You just have to leave everybody creatively open and just hope that it'll all work out.

(Singing) Everything happens for a reason. . .

Now, one of your collaborators, T. I. , was just sentenced to jail on weapons charges. He's, you know, hasn't started serving, yet. But you spent some time in jail yourself. And do you have any advice for someone like T. I. on how to deal with doing time?

Yeah. I think, you know, it is an opportunity. I mean, it's kind of a sad opportunity. I hate to, you know, get an opportunity to have a lot of time with yourself like that. But seeing as if you do, you have the ability to focus on something completely. You have no other outside circumstances that just need your attention like that. You know, he could, you know, write songs. He could find the cure to cancer. He could do anything, man.


You don't have to do that. You are not alone in this process.

(Laughter).

Really, when you're ordering a bottle of wine, you only need to give two pieces of information - one, your budget. And do not be ashamed. Do not be embarrassed. We all have a budget. Secondly, your taste. Now, that could be as specific as saying, I had an incredible Adelsheim Oregon pinot noir the other night - what do you have like that?Or it could be as broad as saying, I like things that smell like peach.

And from there, if you have a good sommelier, they're going to be able to guide you to the hidden gems on that menu. And I have to say, it's a pleasure to be able to have a conversation with someone about what they like and to take them on a journey through this glass of wine because a good glass of wine is that. I didn't believe it in the beginning, but I came around to really experience it as a way to travel through time and place without ever leaving your seat.


So his plan is pretty sweeping and includes gun control measures, and he calls for the end to the federal death penalty. But there's one big, overarching aspect of it - this grant program intended to incentivize states to incarcerate people less and rehabilitate people more. Broad strokes, he says he's looking to shrink the incarcerated population.

Now, his plan has drawn some criticism, maybe most loudly from New Jersey senator Cory Booker, who is himself running for president. He called Biden's plan, quote, "inadequate. "And he also said that it doesn't go far enough - that, for example, it should make more use of the president's clemency powers, that it should legalize marijuana instead of simply decriminalizing it. But also, very pointedly, Booker called Biden, quote, "an architect of mass incarceration" - this really big insult that he lobbed at him.

Now, that strong words there.

Yes. Yes. And it's a reference to the 1994 crime bill, which critics and some experts say contributed to mass incarceration of African American men in America. So one thing that we are seeing here - it's an ongoing dynamic in this race - is that, on the one hand, Joe Biden uses his long resume, his long political career to his benefit on the trail. He uses it as a way of saying, look - I'm qualified to do this. But on the other hand, that long career means that his opponents have found a lot of past Biden positions and actions that they are weaponizing against him.


And then bringing production back to the United States is not possible and realistic because we don't have a labor pool here. The president is closing the borders to low-skill labor. So who's going to make the product?

Now, if President Trump does go through with imposing tariffs on toy imports from China after the holiday season - let me ask you - could you afford to maintain most of your production in China still?

Well, we really won't have a choice but to find a way to afford it. And the one way to afford it is, we will have to, at some point during the course of 2020, begin to pass the tariffs along to the consumer.

So how much of a price hike are we talking for, say, like, a Cutetito?


They were still very poor. She still was saddled with this really enormous burden of caring for a child who's both extremely physically disabled and HIV positive, and I think she really struggled with - you know, she wanted to live, and she still is doing very well, but she also - she had these demons that kept pursuing her, I think.

You have a really interesting section where you talk about basically ethical decisions that reporters have to make. And, in essence, you say reporters, most reporters, wouldn't think anything of taking a government minister out for a fancy dinner, but they wouldn't buy mealy-meal and vegetables for a poor family. And yet they're extracting the same, if not more, amounts of information from the poor family as from the government minister.

You made a decision in some of these cases to really try to help the family. How did you make that decision?

Well, I mean, I think I realized from the very beginning when I was starting the process of doing research for this book that I wasn't going to be able to maintain a completely objective journalistic stance, you know, if the idea was to go back again and again over a long period. And you know, one of the advantages of writing a book as opposed to a newspaper article or something shorter is that you do have the luxury of being able to explain that relationship to the readers.


When you lament where the company is, do you feel there are steps that can be taken to bring it back to the loftier values that, you know, you first believed were true?

Yeah, I think there are steps, but I don't think they're kind of what Uber should do. I think they're what regulators and lawmakers and sort of society should do. I mean, sort of a very easy step would be to, you know, re-examine this independent contractor status of their drivers and see if there's some way to have them be employees or gain some equity in the company. That would be one way.

So basically you're saying, as we're about to hoo and ha over the massive figure of possibly a hundred billion dollars in worth - regulators, pay attention and protect the drivers and the little people in the game?

Yeah. And I think actually, you know, Uber going public may prompt that - which we are seeing strikes. We are seeing protests from drivers. And we're in this moment where lawmakers, presidential candidates, regulators are paying more attention to this industry and its effects on the world. So I don't think Uber's IPO is going to be the end of the story for its drivers and for its culture. I think it's, you know, maybe the beginning of a new, more restrictive, you know, oversight over the company.


Oh, the case is certainly not closed. Don't forget. You have the inspector general that will be issuing the report very soon on the whole origin of this claim backed up by the Steele dossier that the president was colluding with the Russians. We now know the Steele dossier was a complete fabrication.

We should note Mueller declined to take questions on that today, so we didn't get any light shed on that today. Go on.

Correct. And right behind that, we have the U. S.  attorney's office investigating misconduct in both the intelligence and justice agencies. And we expected that to come out. And it has to because this is the use of the most powerful agencies in the federal government. And if, as is now becoming apparent, they were being used not by the Russian government but by the American government first to influence the 2016 election - and having failed that, to then undermine the duly elected president - that is a major development in American history. And we have to get on top of it.

Republican Congressman Tom McClintock of California - Congressman, thanks so much.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.


It may be, except that the month of May had largely passed before the latest round of trade threats began. So these numbers appear to have more to do with where the overall economy stands after roughly a decade of expansion. We're well into the late stage of the cycle. And some degree of slowdown may be expected. Still, the weak jobs numbers highlighted the dangers of more trade war at this moment.

Impeachment continues a kind of slow roll. Now, you've made the distinction between an impeachment inquiry and actual impeachment proceedings. I wonder if this distinction is lost on many of the American people as they respond to public opinion polls. I mean, Senator Pelosi - or Speaker Pelosi said this week she thinks a lot of people think that impeachment means removing the president from office. Of course, it doesn't.

It doesn't unless the Senate goes along, and you're right. It's a tough issue to poll in part because of that misimpression. And as we have said before, the percentage that favor impeachment as they understand it is well under half. And in fact, it's lower than it was back in September. And the number of House members who favor impeachment has grown. It's up around 60, but that's still only about a quarter of the total Democratic caucus. So this is less a broad mandate from the people than it is a rallying cry for the activist core.

NPR, the PBS NewsHour and Marist organization polled the views of Americans on abortion, and there are both lots of nuance but also some clear generalities, aren't there?


Take Darwin, for example. His theory of evolution by natural selection, the key to that theory, the way favorable traits are passed on, it's through genes. The only problem is Darwin did not understand genetics. In fact, his original idea of how inheritance worked would have been discredited. It would have discredited the whole process of evolution.

And it's just one of the fascinating stories in my next guest's book, "Brilliant Blunders: From Darwin to Einstein. "Mario Livio is the author. He's also an astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. Welcome back to SCIENCE FRIDAY, Dr.  Livio.

Thank you for having me, Ira.

All these people made great mistakes.


Hate is the easier part. I hate being away from my kids and my family. That's really tough to be gone as much as I am. And I love to play live for people. I love to see people, you know, enjoy themselves and enjoy music. And when it's my music it's even better.

What do you think is going to happen to art as we go through these tough times?

Oh, I think art will survive. During these times, movies and music don't seem to suffer that much because, I mean, music gets you through all this stuff.

And where are you headed next?I mean, in terms of creatively. Are you going to go back and make another country album?I mean, what do you think - besides touring, which I know you are. . .


Yeah, I think it's good. You know, I think it's a good thing. I mean, obviously you're not always going to hear what you want to hear, but you know, it's all part and parcel of growing up and you just kind of like taking things on board. Whether you, you know - it's really down to you whether you want to take a lot of what they say on board. But I actually enjoy reading it, and I don't expect every review to be glowing or anything like that. But I think it's important to kind of know what people feel, and think about your music out there.

(Singing)

In your eyes you'll always be the greatest Something to celebrate it

This is a little bit of a digression, but there are so many people who are African-Brits, or African-Americans, in the sense of having immigrated from Africa, or having parents who did. And I think that there's a moment in time, in the U. S.  in part, because you have a Barack Obama, where people are saying, Oh, well yeah, there's all these different flavors of blackness. How does that play into your work at all?

I don't really - I don't think I'm effected by that, as such, because I kind of am originally I - you know, I was born in Zambia, so I'm African first and foremost.

But you came over so young.


Yes. Well, the Mayan mom would then just drop the kid off with the neighbor or the aunt and say, fine. I'm going to spend the day at the beach by myself. No worries (laughter). This actually brings up a second thing about the Mayan parenting style that's really different from us. And that's this idea that the Mayan mom is not stuck in a box.

Not stuck in a box. What does that mean?

So in our culture, there's this idea that the ideal thing for kids is, like, a stay-at-home mom who focuses her attention on the children. That ends up in practice being is that you have Mom stuck in a box, an apartment in the city, a big house in the suburbs. But if you look around the world, this is not how the parent-child relationship evolved at all or how kids have been raised for hundreds of thousands of years. Instead, the kids are raised by a whole slew of people - grandmas, aunts, nosy neighbors. And so what we do is actually really strange and maybe, arguably, one of the most untraditional family forms that has existed.

Wow. So I guess the takeaway for this Mother's Day is. . .


NPR's Tovia Smith has been following the story from Boston and joins us now. Tovia, let's begin with what you saw in court today.

Well, Felicity Huffman actually broke down in tears in court as she explained to the judge that her daughter knew nothing about the scam and that her daughter's accommodation for extra time on tests was legit. But she then pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit mail fraud, admitting that she paid $15,000 to get her daughter's SAT scores boosted by having someone correct the answers after the daughter took the test.

And we know Huffman is among the most high-profile of defendants, along with the other Hollywood star Lori Loughlin, but another parent also pleaded guilty in court today, and that is LA businessman Devin Sloane, who was involved in a different angle of this scam. He paid bribes to get his son recruited to the USC water polo team even though the son was never a competitive player. And the dad went so far as to get someone to photoshop pictures of his son to look like he was. And he paid $250,000 in bribes that were disguised as charitable donations.

Sloane and Huffman are among 20 parents, coaches, others to plead guilty. What are they hoping for?


People on the ground are really panicking. Women, children, families have been, on a daily basis for the last four months, been in an area where there's been bombing, airstrikes, ground offensives that has really made their life impossible. More than 400,000 had to run to safety within the governorate in an area where 3 million people are living. We've had more than a hundred incidents of health clinics, schools, water distribution points, a market that received a direct strike, which was really - has tolled, so far, more than 500 deaths and a total panic where one sees entire villages and towns deserted, people running to safety.

So our biggest concern is really the protection of civilians. The basic rule of war - that residential areas, civilians should be respected and protected - it is violated at this point in the Idlib area. And that's really something that is not acceptable.

We should remind people, in fact, a direct intentional attack on civilians is a war crime, isn't it?

It is. If it's proven that it's intentional, it is.


Tom Durkin, the voice of the Triple Crown. He is retiring in August. This will be his last Belmont stakes. Good luck to you, OK.

All right Scott. And new when you retire, maybe we'll go out and play golf or something.

(Laughter). All right. Golf huh. Let's go to the track.

Did B. J. Leiderman write this?He wrote our theme music. You're listening to WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News.


Hi, David.

So we have heard so many different messages, I mean, from President Trump in terms of removing U. S.  forces, keeping U. S.  forces there, claims of victory, backing off claims of victory. What exactly is the situation right now?

Well, the U. S. -backed coalition does appear to be in the final stages of the actual combat. But what exactly the victory entails, what it achieves, how final it proves to be, those are all still open questions. Over the weekend, the Syrian Democratic Forces, the SDF - they're the ones actually in there trying to seize this last bit of ISIS control - said it would be over in a matter of days. There could still be some intense fighting, though, between now and then.

SDF commanders say some of those airstrikes that have been pounding the ground were targeting vehicle bombs left by ISIS. There was a Twitter post from an SDF spokesman. He said three car bombs were taken out. And there's - he also said it's going to be over soon, this battle. There's estimates hundreds of ISIS fighters are left. They're not going anywhere without a fight. But it sounds like a victory over those fighters is being portrayed as more a question of when rather than if.


What do people need most right now?

People are getting really frustrated in the area that was hardest hit. We went by a shelter where you've got hundreds of people packed into a school. You know, they have not had any aid that's come in there. You know, food has been cut off. You've got some areas that have been just completely cut off from any access at all, including, you know, cellphone service, so people haven't been able to even communicate.

The needs are absolutely huge. I mean, there's just large swaths of the southwest of this country that were just, sort of, completely crushed by this hurricane. And, you know, it's even kind of hard to even tally what is going to be needed but certainly roofing material so that people can get back into their homes. And there's definitely going to be a need for food and water in these areas.

What are the problems in getting aid to arrive?


Super Saver and Calvin Borel one full length from Derby here. Noble's Promise runs in second. Patty O'Connell is now third. Make Music for Me, Big Mountain, (Unintelligible) on the outside and they're coming down to the finish. And it is Super Saver.

Wow. Now it occurred to me, when we were during some preparation on you - like a baseball announcer, all he or she has to do is go, when there's a home run - Yoho.

(Laughter).

But you have to rattle off eight or nine names that might have been unfamiliar to you - just a couple of - I mean, how you do it?


You have tough words for President Obama in your Sun-Times column that's been posted now. Let me quote you, "The president doesn't hurry, not even when his city is bleeding. "

Those tough words are a function of - he's at the top of the Department of Justice. The Department of Justice - the feds seldom, if ever, hurry. And this - if they did engage in this - would be a civil rights case. While - when Laquan McDonald was shot and lay bleeding on the pavement after 16 bullets entered his body, the fact of the matter was that Ferguson, Mo. , had already jumped off. We were in the midst of other police situations in other major urban areas involving black youth and largely white officers. And so there was a real feeling of a cauldron boiling, and something - needed more largely than was being done to address it.

In Chicago, are there political implications here?

There are certainly political implications. When Laquan McDonald was shot, Rahm Emanuel was entering a tougher than normal mayoral re-election cycle. This would not have done well for him, so the city kept it quiet. But worse than that, Scott, worse than that is that the city and the union did not tell the truth about what happened. They both said hours after. . .


The Trump administration - or at least the president - have indicated previously they don't share this conclusion. Saudi Embassy says the claims and the purported assessment are false. Now, let's note - President Trump has often criticized the U. S.  intelligence establishment, saying they're not right on Russia. Oh, yeah. They were the ones who said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

We have to ask, is there any indication in this CIA report, which has sources inside, that this is some kind of attempt by what the president's supporters call the deep state to bring him into line?

No, I don't think so. I mean, the CIA - you know, for all of the ways that the president somehow misunderstands how they operate - is looking at this situation objectively. And, yes, to some degree, they are factoring in subjective judgments about how people behave, like the crown prince. But this is not an attempt, I think, to, you know, bring the crown prince to heel or to somehow influence policy.

And we should note, too, the president, I mean, has been briefed on the CIA's findings. And what we understand is that he keeps resisting them because he doesn't have, I guess, the smoking gun. He keeps asking, well, where's the body?Or, show me the definitive proof that Mohammed bin Salman ordered this. And, you know, it doesn't always work that way.


Let me ask you this. Do you know Pat Cipollone?

We've met.

I assume he is also very familiar with the Constitution having gotten as far as he has in his legal career.

Look, he's doing what his client wants him to do.


Absolutely. I played hockey starting when I was 3, 4 years old, loved to go see the Canucks here in my hometown and, you know, certainly not only saw a lot of fights but kind of internalized the message that they were inherently good and valuable to the game of hockey.

And what happened that changed your view of the fighting?

So I went to a junior hockey game here in Vancouver. And it was just a regular night out with the boys, Friday night, drinking some beers, sat down in my seventh row seat. And it was one of those games where the gloves beat the puck to the ice. So there's a fight before the game even starts. And the crowd rises up around me. There's this guttural thunder. You hear it. And usually I would have been right there kind of cheering it along or not really paying it much mind.

But for some reason in that moment, I really zoned in on the two players' faces, and in that moment realized they're just children, and had to ask myself in that moment, what are we doing?We're 10,000 adults in a big room cheering for two kids to pulverize each other's faces. And I looked at the program, indeed - 16 and 17 years old. I've never been able to look at fighting the same since. But it would be a lie to say that there aren't a lot of people who are hockey fans who sincerely love this practice and this tradition.


Some people, they thinking the sanction will bring the government down. The other people, they think that sanctioning Iran will damage more regular people's life. This is the war. The sanction is some kind of economic war. So war started long time ago based on the economy.

And finally, before we let you go, you know, in - there have been times in the past that Iranian Americans have mobilized, you know, despite the fact that - as you said, that there are lots of different perspectives about the relationship and how it should proceed. But most recently, for example, there were - Iranian Americans were organizing around opposing the Trump administration's efforts to make it harder for people from predominantly Muslim countries to come here - the so-called Muslim travel ban. Is there any sense, do you have any sense that the community is mobilizing in any particular way now, as these tensions are rising?Or is it just too soon, and people just aren't sure - aren't really sure what to do?

For the majority of the people, it is not time yet. Everything is just going back and forth. One day, they're attacking. Ten minutes later, they said, we stopped the attack. So people, they don't know what's going on. But still, in majority of the community, you are mostly against the war, no matter from each side.

That is Raza Goharzad. He hosts the show "Politics And Society With Reza Goharzad" on KIRN in Los Angeles. It's also known as Radio Iran. He also hosts a television show which is seen in Iran.


I would just think about grilling as like any other type of cooking technique. It's really about time and temperature. So if you know how to cook at your stove, you understand high heat, medium heat, low heat, you can replicate that on a grill. It just has to do with how big a pile of charcoal you have and where it is in its lifecycle. So it's very hot at the beginning, and then it cools off a little bit. And then I would say simplify your seasonings. I have a whole section in my book that's all about salt, pepper, olive oil and lemon juice as being really essential and really fantastic.

OK.  Carla, you know I'm putting you on the spot here now - OK.  charcoal or gas?

Oh, this is a great question. I think that they're both great. I have charcoal. I love cooking over live fire. But if what you have is a gas grill and it gets you outside, enjoying cooking outside and making something that you love, then lean into your gas grill. It's all good.

That's Carla Lalli Music, food director at Bon Appetit magazine. She's the author of "Where Cooking Begins: Uncomplicated Recipes To Make You A Great Cook. "Carla, thanks so much for joining us. Happy Fourth.


I have. I was, yes, one of the scholars who figured it out by searching on Google. And it turns out that Jack of jack-o'-lantern fame was not such a terrible guy. In fact, he's quite clever and entrepreneurial. And he almost outwitted the devil, so that's the Irish folktale. Jack tricked the devil into climbing a tree to get him an apple. And then Jack carved a cross on the tree trunks so the devil couldn't get down. So Jack says I'll take away the cross if you promise never to send me to hell. So they made a deal, but, of course, the devil being the devil, he found a loophole. So he didn't send Jack to hell, but Jack was consigned to walk the earth forever, holding a lantern to light his way. And by the way - this is important - the lantern was made of a turnip, not a pumpkin. So somewhere along the line, the turnip industry got really screwed.

Have you ever opened the door and seen a trick of trick-or-treater dressed as B. J. Leiderman, who writes our theme music?

(Laughter) No. But that's a great idea for my kids today.

(Laughter).


Well, I think it was more like blind anger, as anyone would probably if you have, you know, the highest elected person in the land telling you that the - an entire congressional district is rat-infested and miserable and a horrible place when, of course, that's not true. And you have to sort of question his judgment, as this is not hardly the first time he has done something like this.

I'll put it bluntly. Did you take the bait?I mean, it seems like these repeated attacks are designed to cause controversy and to cause the media to engage.

Well, I think you've really hit the nail on the head. That's the - that is the professional problem that we all have in covering this president. But if you have this carefully considered, you know, sort of - you know, this is some academic or intellectual argument, it's going to be - fall on deaf ears as well. So at some point, you know, you have to take the measure of the moment and decide where you're going to go.

And I think, you know, this particular tweet that - actually series of tweets and somewhat echoed again this morning - is just beyond the pale. I mean, it's just so obvious what's going on. It's just not excusable, so you just have to stand up for the people who don't have a voice in this.


Yeah. They've been sacrificing already with their money and with their talents. The choice is theirs to move back permanently or to invest and to visit. The Shabab will not be, inshallah, any longer a threat to anyone. The famine luckily has been averted. The rain has come in a big way. The country is now ready for its daughters and sons to get involved so that we sustain the progress that has been made.

What has been the reaction of the Somali community to your advice?

They have welcomed it. The community was enthusiastic to hear the hopeful developments in Somalia. I guess they will make their decisions based on my advice but also on their own evaluation of the situation.

But you have personal experience leaving Somalia as well and then coming back. You went to school in Montreal. You were the U. S.  ambassador.


Well, I didn't, but a professor of mathematics at Macalester College and one of his students did that. And they use this stuff called social network analysis, which is what the NSA uses to identify key terrorists and, you know, the people that they want to send the drones after. But these guys at Macalester College took that same method and applied it to "Game Of Thrones. "

Is it as simple as they just add up all the mentions on social media platforms or what?

In a sense it is. It's a matter - it's - look at the networks, you look at the strengths of the connections between the networks and almost always you find that one or two nodes come to the top, and they're the most important nodes. And they're the ones who, in a terrorist network, if you take them out, it causes significant damage to the network. And in the case of "Game Of Thrones," if you took out Tyrion, it would make a huge difference to the rest of the story. So he's the one that is most likely to survive through the entire series.

Unless of course he gets a better offer from another series and they decide they have to write him out. But I'm interested in the fact that it can be used to penetrate what's going on in a supposedly secret terrorist network.


(Laughter) Yeah. I don't think that it's a straight line from smoking marijuana to fanaticism or radicalization. But I do think that there's something that happens to boys becoming men that is a series of rites of passage and tampering or becoming involved with illicit drugs or having sex. Or any of these taboo things are some of these portals that kids go through, boys especially. And fanaticism to me, as I was witnessing it in a global way, was the last portal. And I wanted to write something that charted these transitions from just a little bit outside the line to a little bit more outside the line until finally there is no way back.

The Boston Marathon bombings are an important touchstone in this book. And they're felt personally by Alireza's friends in Laguna Beach.

That's something that I thought about a lot when I was sort of following the story of the Boston Marathon bombings and how it was to be Muslim in this country and to be a Muslim man in a place that's already slightly turned against you. But I imagined a situation in which someone in your very close community was affected by an act of terrorism, and you are of the Muslim family, what the ramifications would be like in that community.

And I took it a few steps further and then did research and found that it wasn't that uncommon for people who were related to, you know, Russian immigrants or children of Muslims or practicing Muslims to experience racism in high school afterwards. It tends to be that people are looking for someone to blame.


Yeah.

. . . So the interest rates, your ability to borrow. And the chancellor has put a lot of emphasis on providing credit to new home buyers. House prices are up quite steeply in some parts of the U. K. , which gives everyone a short-term feeling of prosperity, and maybe it encourages them to spend. Where that leads to five years down the road is another question.

What do you think politicians are going to make of this?And I mean in the U. S.  as much as the U. K.

Well, it's interesting. A couple of years ago, the U. K.  debate about austerity was quite relevant to the United States. Now I think it seems very distant. We've somewhat put our budget woes behind us. Now, I understand that there's no perfect long-term budget deal.


And we just kept saying, Emily will come. Emily will come. She's going to come. She's going to come. And all of a sudden, as we get to that opening, this arm just reaches out and grabs my son. And she says, I'm here. I'm here. I'm here. It's Emily. And we all just buckled our knees and fell to the ground and hugged her. And then we just had to get up and move.

Fifty-eight people died in the shooting. Five hundred and forty-six more were wounded. Thousands of people went through a massacre. Melissa Barham and her loved ones escaped without physical wounds.

I just remember driving out of Vegas, headed towards southern California as dawn broke. And I hadn't cried at all. And then I got to our off ramp for our house off the freeway. I stopped there. I just started bawling and crying. And then it was just a couple blocks to our house. And my husband was waiting for us. I left the keys in the car. I left everything in the car. And I just walked up to him and buried my head in his chest and said, I got everybody home and completely fell apart.

And how are you doing?

I'm sad. I'm depressed. I feel like I've aged. Like, I'll look at my reflection in the mirror when I get out of the shower. You know how you catch a glimpse of yourself when you're out and about?


We look for simple answers, so we look at the Sudan sometimes as Islam versus Christianity. That's not really what's at stake. Or we look at it as the Arabs against the non-Arabs. We don't look at the problems that are the result of the boundaries that were set up. We don't look at the impact of the changing climate. We don't look at the issues of oil, we don't look at the corrupt government that's running the Sudan.

So, we don't spend the time, and then what happens is we throw up our hands when there is no easy solution. I think part of what would help, frankly, is more programs like yours, where there's a deeper examination as to the roots of the situation. And, I think, then people would be less likely to fall into fatigue. But when you're looking for simple answers and they don't arrive, I think people would rather just hide under the pillows.

Here's another case of tough decisions to be made. We have talked about attacks against African immigrants who come to South Africa. Now, it seems that there is Ugandan - attacks against Ugandans, there have been attacks against Zimbabweans and Mozambiquens.

There's a new commission by the president to try to look into this attack - series of attacks. What's that commission trying to do?


Well, this case is about responsibility. And one of the examples that's been seen a lot lately was one of the ones that shook me to the core when I first saw it. It was an advertisement. And the tagline on the advertisement was, consider your man card reissued. What kind of society allows manhood to be defined in this way?

I'm struck by something that the family's lawyer told the court. He said Remington may never have known the shooter. But they had been courting him for years.

I think that's accurate. If you are selling a product and promising dominance, masculine success and a sense of outmatching your opponents in a very physical and, in fact, lethal way - I mean, who do you think that kind of advertising is going to connect with the most?

As you know, gun-makers do have broad immunity - broad protection under federal law that was passed in 2005. It's protected them from lawsuits before. Are you worried that this decision in Connecticut could be overturned by the U. S.  Supreme Court?


What kind of inspiration did it take to make you into a poet?Who did you read?When did you start reading, or did someone read to you as a child that made you love poetry?

I started reading at the age of three, and I like to think that it's because of my parents, who were working-class people, who only had - both my mother and father only graduated from the eighth grade. So that they read, and they read a lot. And put their arms around me while they read. And I'm convinced that that has a lot to do with getting you to understand how to read. I would look at their mouths and I'd look at the page, and somehow, I figured it out. Then I tortured everybody by reading every sign, everything, which I still do.

So if you had to name a few other people, and I'm sure there'd be a long list. But just one or two people who you love.

Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Kenneth Rexroth.


Help us understand. Just how good were the Lightning before this collapse?

Oh, quite good. They had 62 wins in the regular season. That tied the all-time NHL record for wins in a season. This was a team that was doing historic things in the regular season. Consider this. Thirty of their 62 victories were by three goals or more. So every time they stepped on the ice, they weren't just winning. They were blowing away their opponents.

So it's safe to say any sane hockey analyst (laughter) basically would have said that the Lightning was going to win the series, right?So what happened?

(Laughter) Well, I think Lightning defenseman Ryan McDonagh put it best. Everything that they did so well in the regular season, the Columbus Blue Jackets did it better in this series. But the bigger picture is this for the Lightning. They clinched a playoff spot in early March. They've been on cruise control for months. The Columbus Blue Jackets had to win seven of their last eight games just to get into the playoffs. So when push came to shove and adversity hit in the series, the Lightning had a bad six days compared to a great 82 games in the regular season, and then they were swept.


Right. They're kind of barracks, right?This sort of - people don't have privacy.

No privacy. In some cases, they actually look like slave cabins. I mean, they're small. They're wooden shacks. Many of them - in fact, I have not seen one. They do not have bathrooms in the living facility itself. If you don't have a bathroom in your home or in your living space, you have to walk, in some cases, quite a ways to get to the toilet, to get to a shower. And this creates another vulnerability for women and something that they always have to be careful of, especially young girls.

What needs to happen, in your view?

Oh. I sigh because it's been such a long road. I think the best way for women to protect themselves - the best way that I've seen in the many years that I've organized has actually been a union contract. And that's because a union contract has a grievance process that guarantees that there will be no retaliation, that provides a means of justice and fairness and a response that's speedy, that addresses the issue, that allows farmworkers to actually have abusive supervisors fired and go back to work and be safe. If there's no way for an abuser to be actually punished for what he's doing to the women in the workplace, then it doesn't work. It doesn't work. And women are not going to complain. They're not going to feel safe.


In the meantime, what does this mean for the elections in Afghanistan?

It certainly doesn't say anything good. The government, you know, keeps saying that it's planning to protect the polls, that it will protect the polls, that it's sending out - I think, 70,000 defense security personnel will be deployed across the country to protect the polls. But it's also said that it's going to have to shut down - almost a third of polling places that were used in previous elections will not be open because they don't feel they can protect them. So that's a pretty strong admission of the limited ability of defense forces. So this has been a violent season, and I don't think anybody expects it to become less so.

That's Pamela Constable of The Washington Post. She spoke to us from Kabul.

Thank you so much for sharing your reporting.


Yes, and I suppose my book, quite apart from being a memoir about my mother and what happened to her and this mystery - it's also a campaign against collective silence because these people who knew - they knew. And they knew, and they never said anything, all the way through, decade after decade. And I went back in the 1980s to Lincolnshire with my mother and my brother to try to find out more about everything that'd gone on. And even then, they wouldn't talk to us. They would talk about absolutely anything else, but. . .

Why not, do you think?Why were they still so protective of these old, old, old secrets?

I think that they were protecting one particular person - my mother's adopted mother, a woman called Veda Elston.

The woman you knew as your grandmother.


That will not happen. The Senate will not seat Roland Burris tomorrow, barring some major change of heart on the part of the Senate Democratic leaders. They feel that, as they had said back in December, that anyone appointed by Rod Blagojevich, who was, of course, accused of holding a kind of auction for this Senate seat to the highest bidder, anyone appointed by that governor would not be acceptable to them.

And they haven't changed their minds even though they have said repeatedly they have no objection to Roland Burris in particular to take that job. So one assumes that they will stand by that tomorrow and that Burris's appointment, that is to say his seating, will be delayed probably for a matter of several weeks.

Very briefly, Ron, the latest in the impeachment proceedings against Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, where do they stand?

State House committee on impeachment today reviewing a 54-page document reviewing all the accusations against Rod Blagojevich. We expect them to vote on impeachment this week, probably Friday.


Why would Hezbollah have anyone in Latin America except on vacation?

Well, historically there have been and are very large Lebanese expatriate communities in South America and Africa and, more recently now, in North America. And of course the vast, vast majority of those communities are perfectly law-abiding and wonderful people. But within those communities, over the course of the Lebanese civil war, you had some people who were providing support back home to one or another side of the civil war. And in the wake of the civil war, that continued. And as Hezbollah became the primary powerhouse on the Shia political, social and military side of the equation, support for the group continued to flow from the Shia Lebanese expatriates, some of whom were only supporting the group because it supported the Shia community back home and others because they supported the group's opposition to Israel, opposition to the West and sometimes even its axe militancy at home and abroad.

And what do the drug cartels get out of this arrangement?

They get their product moved. They get the proceeds of their transactions laundered. And those are the two things, along with production in the first instance, without which they don't function. And they really don't care who they do business with. They don't care if you call yourself Hezbollah or something else. Most of the people that do this for them are not terrorists. As long as you can move product and launder product, they don't really care about the rest of it.


Oh, it was wonderful. My father used to play the accordion and my brothers used to sing as well. So growing up with them, I learned a lot. It was not difficult for me to become a musician. I just have to create my own identity - that was the hard part.

(Singing in foreign language)

Some people call your sound Congo Rumba. What does that phrase mean to you and what kind of flavors do you try to put into your music?

Rumba is an old form of music that requires two people to come together and dance. It originated way back in our traditional music. Of course, the name sounds familiar because of Kuba. We know Kuba is a very strong African tradition so they played that kind of music as well. So, when it came back to us in Africa, especially in Congo, it was welcomed back home. So, it's a very old type of music, and it's about love. It's about (unintelligible). So, I like to sing for lovers. I like to sing for peace. I like to sing for people who can dance to people.

(Singing in foreign language)

You're donating percentage of the sales from the CD to the Dikembe Mutombo Foundation, and we spoke with Dikembe last year on the show. He's — just remind folks from the Democratic Republic of Congo a place for the NBA. How did you connect with his foundation?


My pleasure.

And we will get to civilization being in danger, I assure you. But first question - you just heard our interview with our Justice Department correspondent. Is it a good or bad decision not to release the Democratic memo?

I think it's a mistake. I've read the memo. And, again, our entire society is based on, you know, counterpoints. You think this. I think that. And the Socratic process is that the truth falls out as you go through that back and forth. I think it's a mistake not to release.

I have to tell you, you're one of the first public officials I've heard quote the Socratic process. I will mark that - which raises the question that you raise, why does this budget deal put civilization in danger?


Sure.

So explain to us why you gave that request, which we agree is a legitimate request.

Security. So I wrote an in-depth and possibly embarrassing report on a top aide to Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The report was on Saud al-Qahtani, who's best known in the West for masterminding the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post journalist. But he also heads up the kingdom's efforts to intimidate and silence critics, primarily through online hacking. So if there is a computer hacker sitting in Riyadh who's been tasked with finding out who wrote this report on his boss, I want to try to make his life a little bit harder.

So in terms of what you found in your research, what does Facebook mean when it says that Saudi Arabia engaged in coordinated inauthentic behavior?


For many people in Hollywood, Weinstein's behavior did not come as a surprise. Rumors had circulated for years, and that gossip network helped warn some women away from him. Anne Helen Petersen is Buzzfeed's culture writer. She argues that gossip has a vital purpose, especially in Hollywood.

You know, I don't think that all gossip is progressive or feminist. You know, gossip is a major way of policing women's behavior. But at the same time, gossip about which men are dangerous, which men you shouldn't go on to lunch alone with - that sort of information is currency that women use to protect one another.

And in this last week, a document surfaced that was essentially a burn book for men in - who work in the media. The contributors are women who work in the industry, and the accusations are anonymous. They're unsubstantiated. The complaints range from rape to being unsupportive of female colleagues. It's a real range, and it puts illegal behavior, in a way, on the same level as dislikable and unfair behavior. So when does gossip become destructive and more about maligning people than really identifying serious abusers?

This is the - you know, with the thing about gossip networks, sometimes called whisper networks, is that the reason that they work is because you know the woman who is saying the thing to you. So I can - when someone says to me, this is what type of guy this is, I can decide what to do with that information based on that woman.