It's as lethal as Ebola. He's putting it in, putting - taking blood samples and putting them into little tubes that'll go back to a lab in the U. S.  with help from some very gutsy and proficient Bangladeshi collaborators. It's tough work, it's dramatic work, it's scary work, but they love it.

And you too. I mean, you know, some of - literally a paragraph began: Before I knew it, I was helping trap monkeys in a shrine in Bangladesh. And I think. . .

That was with another wonderful researcher named Lisa Jones-Engel and her physician husband, Gregory Engel. They were looking for viruses in monkeys, yes, in macaques, long-tailed macaques and other macaques that, in some parts of Southeast Asia, become habituated as temple monkeys.

And this was a temple in northeastern Bangladesh where I was helping them trap these monkeys so that, again, they could tranquilize them, take blood samples, looking for a virus called simian foamy virus. How's that for a name?That's one of my favorites. Simian foamy virus. And - which is a marker, which is, so far, as we know, a harmless virus when it passes into humans.


Where are you right now?

I'm in Columbia, South Carolina.

Now you evacuated on Saturday. Was that because it was mandatory or did you make up your own mind?

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


It's really interesting. You know, they've been involved on and off in sort of smaller ways. But you know, they put out a press release. They're filing lawsuits. There's a lot of speculation as to why now. Some of it may be just they feel like these laws have finally gone too far. Some of it may be there's a woman president of the AMA and a woman past president and there'll be a woman president next year. For a group that's long been older, whiter and more male, that's changing.

So what kind of stance had they taken in the past?

Well, the AMA has been kind of everywhere on abortion. The AMA in the late 1800s led the fight to make abortion illegal in the United States. That was part of their effort to sort of centralize power over the medical profession. They wanted to get rid of unlicensed practitioners like midwives, who had traditionally been involved with women's reproductive health. And they really didn't change that position until just before Roe v.  Wade. And even when Roe v.  Wade happened, the effort to liberalize abortion laws in the U. S.  was really led by the legal profession, not by the medical profession.

You reached out to the American Medical Association - seems like maybe they're not so comfortable with this new stance. Can you tell us what you learned?


Oh no. I think the debate is a crucial - the presidential race, even if you look at state by state. The key battleground states going in to November - Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, Michigan, all those states, very, very close. We saw in 1980 a very close race between Carter and Reagan. Once Reagan did really well on that debate, it boosted him and gave him a landslide victory. People are - even though there's three debate plus a vice presidential debate, people are expecting that the presidential race will be won or loss in these debates.

I saw CNN running a poll of expectations a little earlier today. People thinking that Senator Obama might do much better than Senator McCain in these debates. So, how will you know who's won?

Well, because I will tell you, you'll hear me on NPR. No. But I think the real reason is look, a lot of people thought that Al Gore would wipe the floor with George W.  Bush in 2000 and then somehow the media focused on Al Gore's sighs. Not a size, but sighs. His audible sighs during it. So, it's very interesting how we decide to focus on what's important and what's not important, which is unfortunate many times. But I think, it won't be after one debate you'll have three debates and then everybody will sit back and decide what happens.

Ken, I'll be guided by your wisdom tonight. NPR political editor, Ken Rudin. Thanks, Ken.


I will say that it has been the economic situation. Although, it looks good on paper, and it looks good theoretically. But the poverty is very high. We have seen that he has been closing all the public spaces and shut down any kind of politics. He has been arrested over than 80,000 Egyptians since 2013 to now. Dozens, hundreds of mass death sentence have been issued by his courts. Dozens have been executed every year. So there is unprecedented crackdown and unprecedented repressions that not even existed during the Mubarak era, which some people could say that Mubarak's era was a liberal era for Egypt if it's compared to what we have - we are living under now. Egypt is very fragile and far away from being stable.

We're hearing the call to prayer, of course, behind you. Did I hear you say that you might look back on the Mubarak era as a liberal, enlightened, progressive era for Egypt?

I would say that the significant differences between Mubarak and Sissi - Mubarak was a dictator. Let's agree on this. But there is a level of repression that actually will not cripple the state to function. And that was the situation under Mubarak. So the level of repression right now under Sissi really cripples the state of functioning.

Mr.  Zaree, does - near as you can tell, does President Sissi still have the support of the military who helped him gain power?


The advice I'd give to others is, do your homework, and don't be afraid to do it. The one rule I gave myself was, it's OK if you fail. And coming from a type-A legal background, you don't make any mistakes. But in business, you have to be flexible. So, I allowed myself the freedom to make those mistakes and grow from them.

Have there been any moments when being an African-American entrepreneur has either hurt you or at least given some food for thought?

I'll take the food for thought. I'm a member of the International Spa Association. That's a pretty high-end spa group. And that market's OK, but other trade shows I would do, people would walk up and they'd say, oh, is this a black skin-care company?And I'm thinking, well, everybody has skin, irrespective of who you are - because they see me there. Even though the woman on the cover, model is - she's kind of every woman. She's actually Filipino and German, but people can't tell her background. But when they see my face there, they assume it's a company just for African-American skin, which is not the case.

When you think about that aspect of marketing, do you think that black companies that market directly to African-Americans, just very briefly, have an advantage or disadvantage over businesses like yours?


We also heard singer-songwriter Ben Harper on that track. He wrote most of the songs on this album. He produced it. How did you two meet?Why do you think you clicked with him?

Well, Ben had written me a song for one of my other albums - "Livin' On A High Note. "And that song was "Love And Trust"

(Singing) Do what you can. Do what you must. Everybody's trying to find some love and trust. I walk the line. I walk it for us. See me out here trying to find some love and trust.

I fell so in love with that song. And every time we'd sing it, the audience - they would just roar, you know. It turned out so well. So I - we'd been singing it for a couple of years then. I ran into Ben on the road. That's where we would always meet up - somewhere on the road. And I told him. I said, Ben, that song - you have got to write me another song. He said, well, Mavis, why don't I write you 11 songs?I said, why don't you do that?He said, let's make an album. I said, sounds good to me. You know, I said, I don't know if I could handle 11 good songs from Ben Harper. He said, oh, yeah, you can handle it, Mavis.


And why were charter schools exempted from those stipulations in the first place?

It was never in the original law. You got to remember, this law was written in 1992. We were only the second in the country to have one. And there was a lot that was not anticipated. This is before online schools, virtual schools. . .

Yeah.

. . . Existed. It's before remote schools existed. There's just a lot it didn't consider.


Let me just unpack that. SIT: sexually transmitted infection?

Yes.

That's - okay. So, you've got a lot of diversity in the book, people of all races. Did you make a choice as to how to portray not just body size diversity of issue diversity, but also racial diversity?

Well, absolutely. I think that it's very important for a variety of reasons. Number one: Women need to be able to see themselves in print. So I made sure to include Asian women, Indian women, black, Hispanic women, white women, all shapes and sizes and all different types of bodies - not just super skinny, not just very large, but everybody in between: flat butts, big butts, big boobs, little boobs. . .

Everything's in "Body Drama. "And I did that because we want to see ourselves, but we're also really curious about what other people look like. And it's that information and acknowledgement that can really help us get over our own body drama, by seeing, oh, wow - I hear this from all the girls who look at the book. Oh, okay. My boobs aren't that bad after all.

And I'd take that to mean that women are sitting around looking in the mirror and then looking at the airbrushed magazines and looking at the surgically enhanced pornography. And when you see actual, real representations of bumpy nipples, of large areola, of imperfect sizes, where one is bigger than the other, then you can look in the mirror and say, all right. Well, actually, I am normal.


But the increase in numbers, I mean, you're talking about going onto reefs and having hundreds to thousands times as many starfish on a reef as you normally would see, and that's a big difference.

Yeah, and you think of some of the runoff that might be coming onto the reef.

There's a lot of evidence that it is. The smoking gun hasn't been found yet, but there's a lot to think that the runoff may be contributing to this. We're definitely - the Australian data show that they're seeing more frequent outbreaks of these sea stars in recent decades, and they think that especially nutrients but other parts of runoff may be to blame.

If you can get them - get the die-off under control, how much of a recovery could we expect from the reef system?


They asked me to consider that, you know, almost without exception, these are young people in federal facilities who are separated from their families. They're in a strange place. They're dealing with stress and uncertainty every day. They fled poverty. They fled possibly violence in their home countries. And so they desperately need the semblance of a daily routine.

And analogously, if you look at studies done in hospital settings with chronically ill children, when they have access to play, they do better. They heal faster. They have lower levels of stress. And similarly, after natural disasters like Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Katrina, there started to be interest in the therapeutic benefits of play access.

A very simple thing that Dr.  Cantor told me is that when your brain is being bombarded with stress hormones every day, you actually need to move your body even more than usual so you can get oxygen to your brain. And this oxygenation - it helps buffer potentially long-term damage.

Just in our last 30 seconds, what does the law say here?Could there be legal challenges?


That's right. They assumed, as I think much of the media assumed, that the Clinton campaign was going to be a true juggernaut. And when it collapsed I went back and talked to the people directly involved, and they knew it was not a juggernaut. The word they used repeatedly, and I'm talking her top people, more than a dozen of them, the word they used repeatedly is that the campaign was dysfunctional.

They had some big names running their campaign, but when I just went through the simple process of checking out their biographies, I found that their campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, had never worked in a presidential campaign before. Their deputy campaign manager, Mike Henry, had never worked in a presidential campaign before. Even Howard Wilson, who became a media superstar, he was her communications director, he had never worked in a presidential campaign before.

But well. . .

If you go through the list of Obama people, the top four, five, six people had not just worked in presidential campaigns before, but they worked in that critical area which gets very little attention, but is absolutely essential, and that's called field operations. It means going into states, setting up shop, organizing, getting people door knocking, getting people calling and getting delegate victories.


And the president did a victory dance in the end zone on Twitter after he was fired. He said Andrew McCabe being fired is a great day. He said he knew all about the lies and corruption going on at the highest levels of the FBI. Then what happened was even more significant because the president's private lawyer John Dowd released a statement saying that now that McCabe has been fired, he hopes that acting Attorney General Rosenstein will follow Jeff Sessions' lead and bring an end to the Mueller investigation. Now, at first, Dowd said he was speaking for the president when he issued this statement. Later, he backtracked, although it doesn't really matter.

Yeah. It's not news, though, that the president hates the Mueller probe. He's been pretty vocal about that on Twitter. Why is his lawyer statement so important?

It's important because it's a change in the legal strategy. Up until now, Donald Trump has always stopped short of saying something that could be perceived as an order to Rod Rosenstein to fire Mueller. He's always said, no, I'm not going to fire him. He's even said he looks forward to talking to him. Now it looks like they're opening a new phase, openly calling on the Department of Justice to shut down the Mueller investigation.

The Democrats have been pretty vocal. I've been seeing a lot of their reaction. Do we know what the Republicans in Congress have been saying or doing?


But writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers report that they have been able to trace back the origins of viticulture in France to about 500 BC, using a combination of archaeological detective work and biomolecular approaches in the lab. And one of the men who's been studying the origins of winemaking for many years, the man some people call the Indiana Jones of wine, is Patrick McGovern, scientific director of the Biomolecular Archaeology Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia.

He's authored many books, including "Ancient Wine: A Search for the Origins of Viniculture," "Uncorking the Past: The Quest for Wine, Beer and Other Alcoholic Beverages. "He joins us this week. Welcome.

Hello, Ira, nice to talk to you.

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


No. And this is just a temporary fix. We're now about to put in some type of permanent action to help them further.

Boy, you know, I know it went viral and there are a lot of people to thank, but I can't get over the fact that it began with you. And there are just so many of us who say, oh, that's terrible. Someone should do something. You decided to make yourself that someone.

Yeah. I mean, there was a lot of people pulling up, dropping off food, blankets, and that's fine. Well, below zero, the food was getting cold as soon as someone set it out there.

Yeah. Well, sounds like you've changed their lives and they've changed yours.


OK.  Let's start with those navigators you spoke of. Now, in what way have they been considered quite necessary?

So the navigators give people in-person one on one help to help choose a health plan and to sign up. And, you know, health insurance is very confusing. There's deductibles. There are the premiums. There are copayments, so it's really hard to know what services you're going to get and what it's really going to cost. But HHS says after several years, they aren't really necessary anymore because now people understand insurance better, so they don't need that kind of intensive help. Navigator defenders, though, don't agree because they say now their role is to get to those people who still after all these years haven't gotten insurance.

The ones that in a way are most confused. . .

Exactly.


Of course.

Why if the students two were traveling in five buses - why the target was just two?And also, these two buses were exactly the two buses that the army and the Federal Police - start to monitor it since three hours before. I mean, these two buses were the two buses where the students were traveling from the school to Iguala. Why?So what I was able to found is that in these two buses were inside in secret parts of the bus. . .

The secret compartment.

. . . Yes - heroin - 2 millions of heroin. They. . .


Well, the president fires the attorney general. The new guy fires the special counsel. History repeats itself. No, the president - President Nixon understood the Constitution. He understood how to govern. He knew he was walking a tightrope. So when a lot of different people in Congress, the public, the courts stood up and showed their courage and they were outraged and started to push back, he backed down. He let the investigation continue. And 10 months later, he resigned. This time it looks like a circus where the clowns are walking a tightrope in slow motion and some people are cheering as if it's a joke. But it's not a joke.

Mr.  Doyle, I must say you sounded almost wistful speaking about Richard Nixon.

(Laughter) Well, yeah. You know, I've never compared Richard Nixon to Thomas Jefferson before. Never thought I should. But I told someone yesterday that compared to Donald Trump, Richard Nixon is Thomas Jefferson.

All right. I'll leave that as your opinion.


Right, right. Yeah, I mean, that's the obvious question to ask, and we're not really sure. I mean, the biggest difference is that it's not producing these radio jets at the rate it should be. So typically the central galaxy in a cluster is shooting out these really bright jets that you can see from here in the radio. But this one is giving off - instead of radio, it's giving off a lot of gamma ray and X-ray, and so it seems to be almost confused about what type of black hole it is. It's giving off sort of quasar-like emission rather than this sort of more quiet, more gentle emission.

Hmm, who am I, asks the black hole?

(Unintelligible). How is this cluster discovered?

So it was initially discovered a few years ago by the South Pole Telescope, which is a telescope that's essentially built to find these really massive clusters. And so it looks at light from the Big Bang, which is a background radiation; it looks for shadows in that light. And these clusters are so massive that they're going to cast a shadow in this background radiation. And so that's how this cluster was first found.


I think the purpose of the announcement today was, at least to some extent, about the huffing and puffing that Ilan Goldenberg mentioned in the prior commentary. But it's also, I think, a reaction to some sense that there was an appearance that the policy had begun to soften a bit because of the president's decision not to retaliate and some of his seemingly conciliatory rhetoric over the weekend.

Right. So after a year or so of what the Trump administration describes as a maximum pressure campaign on Iran, how do you increase the pressure from maximum, I guess, is the question.

Well, and that's the dilemma that the administration is beginning to face - that once you've sanctioned all of the major industries and sectors of the Iranian economy, there's very little that you can do that's not already redundant or just largely incremental. It also, I think, highlights the fact that the Iranian economy - what's left of it - has become more insular and less interconnected, which means whatever economic activity continues in Iran today is going to be more resilient to U. S.  penalties.

Now, the White House says this is all a means of getting Iran to the negotiating table. Do you think these steps are likely to do that, likely to have that effect?


Yeah, it looks absolutely beautiful.

'Cause I've seen this painting - it's enormous. (Laughter) And I'm trying to picture, A, what that's like for people and, B, why you thought it was important for the public to see it as it was happening.

Well, I think there's two factors. And one is that the painting is - it's very large. So you know, removing it from the galleries would also present a certain amount of risk. And the other thing is that it's not really possible at this time to say how long the research or the treatment will actually take. All in all, this is really the best possible scenario to actually treat it in the galleries, where it can be followed by the public. I think the public actually find it fascinating to look behind the scenes.

I'm sure you couldn't have imagined that the painting would have been attacked with a bread knife, and you're doing quite the operation here. So what are some of the challenges and obstacles that, you know, are making you guys nervous?


Absolutely not - no deal. You know, Congress recognized, when the Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1970, that California was the first to set their own car standards, even before we had a federal agency dealing with air pollution. And they have allowed California, for the last 50 years, to set emission standards that are more stringent than the federal government. So California has been the laboratory of innovation when it comes to reducing emissions from cars.

Is the auto industry essentially telling the Trump White House it's going to be - it's going to create market instability for us to have to manufacture according to U. S.  national standards and California national standards?

That's one of the issues. But it's more than that. Because if the Trump administration moves forward rolling back the standards, California and 18 other states that reflect more than 50% or 60% of the car sales in the country will challenge that decision in courts. And it will take three to four years. . .

Oh.


What I can tell you is that they are very interested in immigration. They are very concerned about the numbers of people who have been crossing the border in recent months, and they feel like Congress isn't giving the president what he wants. You know, I've been talking to voters both here and in the area yesterday. And I'd ask people - you know, what is the most important issue to you?And again and again and again, they brought up immigration.

Describe the scene for us there in Orlando. I know people have been camping out for this rally. What's the atmosphere like?

It's this, you know, festival atmosphere that often pops up around a Trump rally. There were people lined up, as you say. I came out at 8 o'clock this morning and walked around, and the line was very, very, very long. And then it turned into Woodstock because there was a massive thunderstorm - I mean, just an unbelievable thunderstorm and lightning and thunder. And there was a sign that went up on a big electronic board that said, we encourage you to take shelter. No one took shelter. Everybody stayed exactly where they were in line as mud just built up around them on the ground. They weren't about to get out of line.

OK. This is the mud part of Woodstock, not the free lover, psychedelics part of Woodstock.


Yes - beat me with a rifle - butt of a rifle.

Calvin Woods was also prosecuted for preaching against segregation. It was the law then.

I was speaking out against segregated buses. I was guilty of that and told them that they pay their money to sit down where there's a seat. And you don't have to get up, give anybody your seat unless that's what you want to do. So I was arrested, sentenced to six months hard labor and fined $500.

Calvin Woods and hundreds more in Birmingham were American heroes. But he says he'd like his children and his 60-some grandchildren to know it is always right to do right.


And 18-year-old?

Yeah, from the Internet.

Don't try this - well, he tried it at home, I guess.

He's - I mean, so he's, you know, he sent me like his amazing pictures of jet engines in what looks like a basement, you know, flaming out.


The way I coped with these disasters was seeing myself as the hero of my own story and thinking oh, okay, in the story, the guy survives. He doesn't kill himself. He doesn't commit himself to a mental hospital. He actually survives and thrives and overcomes these obstacles.

And in addition to that, you've also had kidney problems, and you talk really frankly about just how much strength it took you to do really basic things because you were constantly dealing with your body rebelling against you.

Yeah, I'm going through that right now. I'm on the top of the list for a transplant now, and I don't really want a transplant right now because I'm doing all right. So at this point, I'm kind of bring it on. I'm just, you know, I can take it.

What about the good stuff?There are many good things in your life, and two of them are Eva and Chet(ph), your kids. What are they like?


It was interesting, because my first novel, "Platitudes," was pretty fictional. My second two novels, "Right Here, Right Now" and "Home Repairs," especially "Home Repairs," was pretty autobiographical.

So this time, I really wanted to try my hand at writing a novel about myself. So I tried to write it as artfully as you would write a novel with the same kind of conceits that I put into, let's say, "Platitudes," like kind of funny screenplays and music lyrics and footnotes, and write it artistically but tell the story of my life.

And that was the tricky part, to see myself as a character and not as myself.

You have - at one point in the book, you talk about all these dreams that you had to write books and to direct, and you write: I'm convinced that my delusion of seeing the story of my life as just that, a grand story, is the only thing that has staved off even more debilitating mental illnesses.


To be honest, I don't trust Obama not a bit.

Why?

Because he keeps saying things which doesn't exist. And we were, as Arab countries, hoping when he was new elected that maybe he is a bit better than the former Bush. But it seems to be that every president come to the United States is not carrying on anything except what's help Israel, which it's their little tribe to be care.

What do you think a U. S.  military strike might do on the ground?And I know you can't necessarily know where any bombs would fall, but how do you think that'll affect your life?


So, Bill, what do you make of the president's remarks?

Every time I hear President Bush talk about billions, I start thinking about Carl Sagan and talking about billions of stars and billions of this. Part of the problem when I listen to and consider what President Bush is talking about is more what he doesn't talk about, that U. S.  aid to Africa is significant in terms of dollar amounts that are mentioned, but as a percentage of what the United States does offers internationally, it's actually not all that significant.

A couple of years ago, I did a little research on this and discovered that U. S.  aid to Africa, if you withdraw Egypt, is less than Israel. That is - that the total aid is less than the aid to one country, a key ally of the United States. So that figure told me a little bit about the priorities of the United States.

The second thing is that there are regularly strings attached to U. S.  aids. So whether it's the assistance to combat HIV and AIDS, there are these strings around the issue of abstinence, abstinence only, as a condition for significant amounts of aid to combat that disease. A second issue is that whereas the United Nations has had a internationally recognized program combating AIDS/HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, the Bush administration has refused to give full funding to that U. N.  program and instead was more interested in setting up its own bureaucracy to offer assistance, which seems to be run contrary all of the rhetoric about a, you know, that conservatives often offer about eliminating costs.


It's like a bird treadmill. I mean, it's the same idea, right?

Right.

And the point of this study, which Ivo Ros is doing, was to figure out how much energy it takes to fly. So they have a little heart monitor hooked up to the cockatiels. But again, like imagine what this is like for the cockatiels. So there's all this training involved because for a bird to be flapping their wings and not going anywhere is really weird. So they have to, you know, encourage them not to sit on the bars. And it just was. . .

There's no scenery changing.


And one thing I have learned in writing "Big Game" is that the NFL is a big club. We think we know everything; there's all this insider access that the NFL sells. But Colin Kaepernick, Donald Trump - these are outsiders who sort of stormed the club in their own ways. And they try to reveal things. And Colin Kaepernick, by way of this lawsuit, is going to put some very, very uncomfortable people in open court, potentially, in ways that could really expose a lot and sort of open a lot more Pandora's boxes.

Moving on in your book, I infer that Donald Trump might never have become president if the NFL owners had let him buy a football team.

That is the great thought experiment here. Donald Trump - he's tried to get into the NFL for maybe about four decades. If Donald Trump had gotten the Buffalo Bills in 2014, and it's not clear that he was ever close - he was sort of laughed out of the room in some ways - the NFL might have a very different headache or non-headache from the White House. And Donald Trump could be torturing them from within.

Well, why didn't they like his bid for the Bills or any other team he's made over the years?


Ms.  C.  VIVIAN STRINGER (Basketball Coach, Rutgers University; Author, "Standing Tall"): I'm fine, Farai. How are you?

I'm doing great. Now in this book, you only really address the Imus controversy at the end because you have had so many different life experiences: coal-miner's daughter, integrated a cheerleading squad. What did you learn from your childhood?

You know, I learned that you have to stand up. You don't make excuses for the things that you don't have. You have to work hard. I try to have shortcuts, but you have to be willing to pay the price. And at the end of the day, you know, whatever happens, you must learn to define yourself and use your own measuring stick rather than that of others. And I thought that my parents were tremendous leaders and taught me how to stand up, and that's what I attempt to do with the young people that I'm working with now.

You really spend a lot of loving moments talking about your father, who sacrificed a lot for your family. He was a musician and took a job so that he could support you guys. What did you learn from him?


The Census Bureau has been examining that very vigorously. What tends to be a common result is if you use data from retail, you tend to under enumerate those who aren't connected economically. That tends to be poorer people, transient people, children - precisely those that are hard to enumerate in general.

So the world of the future I think we all think is some complicated blend of these organic digital sources with traditional methods. You can't use one or the other. We need to use both. And some of the innovation proposed for the 2020 census actually involves trying to use those data wisely when we can.

Robert Groves - he oversaw the 2010 census and is currently the provost of Georgetown University. Thanks so much for being with us, sir.

It was wonderful talking to you, Scott.


It's been wet in Texas this year, really wet, with record amounts of rain, and that means Texas right now is hot, wet and green. This is making the animal world happy, particularly insects. Take the tarantula hawk wasp for example. What - you've never heard of it?Well, it's so big and so nasty that it attacks tarantulas, who are, as you know, themselves big and nasty. Texas Parks and Wildlife invertebrate biologist Ben Hutchins joins me now from Austin to tell us about this wasp. Hi, Ben.

Hi.

OK, so I've been doing a little research and the tarantula hawk can wrestle and then throw these big, hairy Texas tarantulas onto their backs and then sting them into submission. How in the world is this possible?

Well, it's a pretty spectacular show. And, you know, we actually have several different species of tarantula hawk, and each one has its own different approach. So some will actually flip over onto their back and crawl upside down underneath of the tarantula to sting the tarantulas. Others will dart under there and grab the rear leg of the tarantula and then flip it over. And the tarantula hawk will actually use its back legs to pin down the tarantula's fangs to keep itself from getting bit. And then it delivers that sting, usually at a chink in the armor of the tarantula, so at joints in the legs or in the abdomen of the tarantula. And they can sting multiple times as well, so they'll get in there and make sure that that tarantula is paralyzed.


Four. Four. We have two children.

You're a fam of four. And you are in the hospital, all four of you?

Were in the hospital, yes.

So what do you plan to do when the storm stops?


Yes, the mother of Norway. Yeah, that was - she was scheduled to be at this camp basically from breakfast through dinner. And there was a photographer, a newspaper photographer named Sara Johannessen who had been sent to document this, to hang out with Gro for the day. Breivik had planned to kidnap her. Expecting her to be there all day, he had planned to kidnap her and videotape himself beheading her. Now - he says this now. Whether or not that's true, it's - who can really say. But Gro was supposed to be there.

The only reason she wasn't is it was a terribly, terribly rainy day. The island was muddy and sloppy, and she decided to leave early. And Sara, who had been shooting some landscapes - I mean, it's beautiful, beautiful country there - Sara almost missed it. She didn't know that Gro was leaving. And she had to sprint down the hill to catch the ferry, which turned out to be the last ferry off the island that day. And then Sara got back. When she left Utoya, she drove back to Oslo and was parking her car when the bomb went off a block away.

And she immediately went to work from a light feature on the former prime minister to documenting one of the worst incidents in Norwegian history.

Exactly. I mean, she just sprinted right towards - she sprinted towards the blast and just - yeah.


. . . He maintained a hold too long. That hold became deadly force. . .

Right.

. . . That his commissioner decided was not necessary at the point that it was being used.

However, there was a long review of not just the commissioner. . .


I think myself and Terrell Tilford and Addis Art Gallery, we started to create a wonderful sort of section and really watched the neighborhood change. You know, you change from the car repair shops and you get little cafes and so on. And, unfortunately, what happens with most artists is that you make a place more beautiful, and everybody puts the rent up.

So, off to the eastern outpost of Atwater Village, which had one gallery when I got there two years ago, which now has - it's about to open its seventh gallery. So, I think I've got a track record of bringing good stuff with me.

Tell us about the kind of artists you represent?

Well, one of the things - just before I do that, I think it also sort of represents your neighborhood as well because the clientele that comes in the door is considerably different. And so, I have now Armenians and Asians and Africans, and it's exactly how I pictured it in my mind. And it's coming true there.

The artists that I show are basically artists of the African Diaspora, number one. The fact that I am an Angelino, and I live in Los Angeles, I show Angelino artists, as well. If you happen to be an immigrant who lives in Los Angeles, and you're a fantastic artist, I am very happy to see your work as well.


The Rough Riders were a unique volunteer regiment that was formed in the first days of the Spanish-American War. At the time, the U. S.  military was really small, and they needed to bulk up really quickly. So the U. S.  Army went out and recruited cowboys, athletes, people who you could train pretty quickly. And a lot of it was the brainchild of Theodore Roosevelt.

It was his particular idea of who was manly enough to be in a regiment with him. Is that fair to say?

Well, it was - he - yes, he did a lot of the vetting himself. And it certainly was a lot of, yes, his conception of what it meant to be manly. And so you not only had a lot of people from the West but also a lot of Ivy League football players. The No. 1 and the No. 2 tennis player in the country quit tennis to join, and that was the kind of thing that he loved.

Were these celebrities in some cases?

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


So do you think this would leave us in a better or worse position after these talks?I mean, it's a question whether or not this will actually go anywhere.

Well, it's - I mean, there's always a possibility that you would have the division laid out and follow-up meetings that strengthen that effort, and it goes somewhere productive. And that's what we all hope for. We'd like to see a denuclearized Korean peninsula. But I suspect it will be more of a pronouncement in which the two countries express interest in that direction. And then the details will get bogged down.

Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, thank you so much for speaking with us.

You're very welcome. Take care now.


And he didn't live much longer did he?

No. He was - he went back to Vermont, discovered that he had cancer, and dying probably six or eight months after that. One of the things that is very difficult to convey to outsiders is the extent to which heartbreak played such a physical, tangible role in people's decline after the storm, and that certainly people had ailments that may have been bothering them even before the storm, but it seemed that the psychological and emotional toll of the failure of the levees really was that much more exacerbated. You find people who may have had blood pressure problems all their lives suddenly dying of stokes, and we in New Orleans believe firmly that that was because of the pressures brought about as a result of the hurricane and the failure of the levees.

Is that why some people refer to this documentary as a requiem?

Indeed. I mean, we like to refer to it more as a love poem for the city because much of what we really focus on is not the storm at all. A lot of it is to tell you about how important this neighborhood was, to give you some sense of what it feels like to be in the middle of a street parade in the Faubourg Treme. Give you a sense of what our musicians are dealing with and talking about. Give you some sense of what people are writing about. We hesitate to call this a Katrina film. It really is a love poem to New Orleans.


Up next, some improbable humor. If you're a loyal listener, you know my next guest. He's been a SCIENCE FRIDAY regular for, oh, 20 years. Wow. Every year on the Friday after Thanksgiving. You know that. We play the first annual Ig Nobel Awards. They awards given to science that makes you laugh and then makes you think. Marc Abrahams is the co-founder and the emcee of the Ig Nobels. He's also the editor and founder of the Annals of Improbable Research, and he writes a weekly column for The Guardian. Welcome, Marc.

Hello, Ira.

Hi there. Marc is going to join each month to share with us some of the unusual scientific research he comes across. And I think it's fitting for you to be here, Marc, as we're going to announce the winner of our joke show. I know you have a great sense of humor, at least that's what they tell me. No, I know that you do.

In theory, I'm honored to be here today.


To be fair to President Trump, while tariffs, in my view, represent appalling economic policy, they are a reasonable political tactic in seizing the attention of a foreign government - in this case, China. And he succeeded on that. But in terms of the outcome that he produces, it'll be a classic case of the glass being either half-full or half-empty, depending on who looks at it.

Market access and a reduction in the U. S.  trade deficit with China over time - the glass will be more than half full. But on the others, the glass will get progressively empty. And I would be surprised, particularly on that question of state subsidy for China's high-technology industries, whether we'll see much substantive Chinese movement at all.

Do you think that Chinese leaders respect President Trump and his negotiating style?

I think the Chinese see in Trump two things. One is a preparedness to double down on these trade negotiations over a long period of time to extract maximum change in the Chinese position. So they see Trump as exercising American strength.


Well, I needed to write about this in the same way I needed to write about the St.  Paul's School experience. It changed my life. It turned it upside down. There was so much love inside. It's like a Scotch egg, you know, with love under this crust of confusion and rage and mistakes. And my only way to understand that is to write it.

How'd you come up with ladysitting (ph)?I love it.

That was the word we used in our house for staying with Nana. My grandmother would sometimes say, I guess you have to get somebody to babysit me. We'd say, no, no, Nana. We're going to get somebody to ladysit you. And it was sort of the way we could acknowledge - like, you had to acknowledge her vulnerability but not in a way that was hurtful or made her feel even more vulnerable.

Well, it's an elegant solution to that. That's kind of what the book is about - is how. . .


And I understand you are going to stay with us for at least a - the half hour to kind of help us understand the context of this, so we thank you for that. But let's just start with this week. I think a lot of people feel that this has been a particularly violent week. You've been tracking all known instances of gun violence in the United States since 2013, so what do you think?I mean, does this week stand out?

The last eight days really do. We've had four incidents of over 10 killed or injured, and that's unusual in an eight-day, 10-day period. We've had nine incidents over the last year and four of them in the last eight days.

And the archive home page keeps a list of statistics. And I do want to mention to people that this is available to the public. That's part of the purpose of your archives - so that the public can have sort of a shared set of facts here. It lists 253 total mass shootings in 2019 as of today. First of all, how do you define mass shooting?And secondly, how does this year compared to others so far?

Well, we define mass shootings as any incident where four or more victims are shot or killed. And we make that distinction because we believe that it's very important that we look at the injured as well as those killed. So anything that is four or more, that reaches that threshold - that's considered a mass shooting.


And if these valleys are so remote, how did these civilizations develop in this unforgiving area?

Well, that's the thing. We're only now starting to realize that this so-called virgin or impenetrable jungle in prehistoric times was anything but. It was very heavily settled. There were many thousands of people living in these areas, and it wasn't virgin jungle. It was more like a tended garden. They cleared huge areas for farming. They terraced. They built irrigation canals. They built roads. They built enormous pyramids and structures.

And the idea that the rainforest of Central and South America - the soils were too poor to support major agriculture and large populations turns out to be a false idea. In fact, even in Amazonia, they're now realizing that these supposedly impenetrable jungles in Amazonia were, in fact, heavily settled by people in prehistoric times.

And they are remote today, but not too remote to be of interest to loggers.


Yeah?

But that was one that you know, through all the red tape, it actually made it to the record.

So, from an audience standpoint, Miles Davis, it was crazy to see him in the '80s. You know, back to the audience, head down, blow a couple of notes, walk off stage for half hour and come back. What was it like working with him during that time?

Well, during the '80s I think he was passed that. I think it was more like that in the '60s. In the '80s, he was very open. I mean, he was a good friend to me. I spent a lot of personal time with him, you know, at his house and just chatting, and he would paint, you know, and we would just hang out, man. I spent a lot of quality time with him, you know.

You also are into blues, obviously. "The Good Girl Blues" that was the last CD. . .


Well, yeah. He calls Obama a bad or sick guy. That is an extraordinary thing to hear from a sitting president about his predecessor. We should note there has been no reaction from President Obama yet and no evidence, no confirmation, to support this claim. But it's not going to calm the waters.

Boy, we have investigations that are unfolding at the FBI. There are several committees that are gathering at Capitol Hill. What's the landscape they're looking at right now?

So, as you said, the FBI is investigating. We don't have a lot of visibility into where they are in that investigation or what the time frame is because they don't comment on active investigations. We just know that they are - they're doing them. On the Hill, we have - we know a little bit more. The Intelligence Committees have the lead on investigating all of the Russia stuff. We know they are reviewing documents. They're trying to think about who to call to come testify. And they confirmed this week - the House Intelligence Committee, for example, confirmed they are looking into links between Russia and the campaigns; also looking into all these recent leaks of classified information.

I must say, it doesn't seem like the last scalp has been put on the wall.


He ended up in a small town in Alabama where he did have an encounter with a local police officer. At that point, he told police he had had a canoeing accident. They led him to a local motel. He checked in, paid cash. The police came back later to try to locate him. And by that time, he'd wandered off into the woods.

Why might Mr.  Schrenker want people to believe he was dead?

Well, it turns out he faces just a host of financial problems, also some personal problems, I might add. The Indiana Securities Division, the Indiana Insurance Commissioner are both looking into very serious allegations of misappropriated money from his financial company.

And do you think, even given these problems, he might have had enough assets to help him flee the country?


That is true. Although, I wouldn't call myself a dolphin trainer or any of that. I did start working with dolphins as a high school job, going into college, back in the 1970s.

And what did you do?

I started out there as a diver. I, you know, fancied myself a junior Jacques Cousteau. But in real terms, my job was to scrub tanks for the most part.

Are we looking at a new time in, what I'll call the display world, the museum world, the animal world, in which, I think, institutions that try and have animals available for people to get to know them are rethinking the whole terms of captivity?


We should note that Chico was never a part of DeBarge proper. Chico was solo. This is his hit 'Talk To Me' from 1986.

(Singing)

Talk to me baby, talk to me girl. You know, I really think you oughta

In 1988, Chico and his older brother Bobby were convicted on charges of conspiracy to distribute cocaine. The conviction put a quick end to a promising career. Each of the brothers served years in prison. Bobby later died from complications of AIDS. Like his sister, Chico was willing to open up about some of the pain of the road they've traveled. But he is also gearing up to release a new album. I ask how he felt about this next stage of his career.

I'm excited, but I'm - it was kind of new for me with the mission I have before me. Because of course, as you know, all of us are talking about, you know, a lot of things we've been through that a lot of people didn't know in the family. And the name of my album is "Addiction. "Because I ended up wearing those shoes. I never thought in my life that I would be - you know, I'd actually knocked people, you know, for having that. And I got stabbed, you know.


That's something that has come up quite a bit.

Agreement's vacated if he. . .

Precisely, yeah.

Yeah. As someone with your experience, knowing lawyers on both sides, I gather - has the prosecution laid out a convincing case in the couple of weeks it's had?


And they would need 60 votes to do that bill, which means they would need at least eight Democrats and probably more to come on board to essentially re-pass some form of health care legislation to offer insurance to people on the individual market. I think realistic people in this debate on both sides of the equation say that is the most unrealistic option at this stage.

Do you hear any concern from Republican leaders or individual Republican legislators about the public opinion polls that suggest that the Republican health care proposals are extravagantly unpopular, less than 20 percent?

They are fully aware of how unpopular this legislation is. But I will tell you, Scott, every single conversation I have had with a Republican lawmaker on Capitol Hill is they say not doing anything on health care - letting this bill fail - is the worst possible political outcome because it is the singular thing that they have all campaigned on. It is the reason why they believe they have congressional majorities in the White House. And to fail on that would completely deflate the Republican base and structurally weaken the party going into the midterm elections.

But Mitch McConnell at the same time can't pull some Democrats over with a plan.


And what has it gotten back?

There was a record 455 films and television productions that were shot in Georgia in the last fiscal year. And they represented a $2. 7, you know, billion in direct spending, which they estimate brings in $9. 5 billion in total economic impact. So these numbers are really huge. And they have been a huge destination for feature films, and not just any sort of feature films, expensive blockbusters, the biggest of those being Marvel's "Avengers" movies, which shot at Pinewood Studios in Atlanta, which is a big production facility.

As we mentioned, studios and media companies have sent some warning signals. How likely, though, is an actual boycott?

These laws have sort of been spreading. And production people here in Hollywood are sort of taking a wait-and-see approach. And this abortion ban isn't supposed to take effect until January of 2020. So we have this sort of in-between time where a lot of studios and producers and executives are trying to figure out what the best course of action is, and do they keep projects there in the meantime?Should it be overturned before it's enacted, then Hollywood doesn't really have to worry about pulling out their productions.


I'm going to have to go to Food Lion, which is 15 miles away, or the Piggly Wiggly.

Which is how far away?

Fifteen miles, and there's also a Wal-Mart, a big Wal-Mart, but I'm not going to that.

Yeah, on principal, right?


Ritualized.

. . . ritualized into something much larger.

What did you find?You lived there for months. You've learned a form of Indonesian close to their own Asmat tongue. Were they ashamed about what had happened to Michael Rockefeller?

If you ask them, they don't want to talk about it. They say yes, we used to be cannibals, but we don't want to talk about that. We're not cannibals now. They have been converted to Catholicism, but they also have multiple wives and live in this rich spirit world that is outside of Catholicism. So it's very difficult to get them to talk about actual cannibalism and Michael Rockefeller, in particular. They're frightened to talk about it.


OK.

I was interrupting a story, which I hated to do, but I have to do. Go ahead. Go ahead. Please.

OK.  Back to the intrigue. So anyway, the Swedish prime minister told the scientists, you're wrong. It's submarines and he's planning to get up in public and start this big international incident. And the scientists said, go ahead. But if you do that, we're going to get up in public and tell people that, no, it's not submarines, it's herrings and it's herrings' farting. And so the prime minister backed down, never made the announcement. But I'm told by reporters in Sweden, that over the years, he's continued to tell people that it really is and was Russian submarines. And he's now the foreign minister of Sweden. So he's still in a position of power. Kind of interesting, huh?

Yeah. You know, I wonder if you can visually document, you know, the gas release of any of that stuff and come back with. . .


And for a minute, I was shocked, like something you see in the movies. It happens to other people. It doesn't happen to yourself. And then as I thought about it, then I put all the pieces of my childhood back together - all the sorrow, all the issues, all the neglect, all the - you know, John Graham just being who he was with me. He wasn't really fatherly. So it all made sense.

But that was just the first of many revelations and obstacles Graham would run into over the next 25 years in his quest to prove who his real biological father was. He talked to family members. He hired a detective. He dug through newspapers and public records. And it culminated this year in an exhumation and a DNA test. He got the results back this past week. Graham's biological father was Thomas Sullivan, a Catholic priest from Massachusetts.

It's been emotional. You know, I knew, you know, based on every - all the circumstantial evidence that it would be my father. But you still have that apprehension that something could go wrong at the last minute with the results.

And when you say emotional, I'm assuming just the knowing that this is actually the person who was your dad.


I think what to look at closely is oil, and oil here on the island. Cuba has - is not able to meet its own energy demands by itself and has become very dependent for the last 20 years on Venezuela's cheap oil that they're sending to Cuba. What they've done is made an exchange where Cuba gets the oil that it needs, and then Cuba sends doctors and professionals to Venezuela. And that has been severely hurt by the economic crisis in Venezuela right now. And you see that in there's gas rationing right now, and the Cuban government trying to get as much as they can in dollars and foreign currency.

One thing that they've done - you know those classic U. S. , American cars that are still here on the island?Well, those taxi drivers are feeling the pinch of the gas shortages and the oil situation right now. They have to pay very high licenses. This is new only in the last couple months. And they have gas rationing cards that they can only buy a certain amount of gasoline every month.

And Raul Castro has actually come out and warned that hard, austere times are coming. Are Cubans concerned about what they might be facing?

Definitely. And you hear that a lot.


Nice to be here.

And remind us of what you reported last week - a room filled with brains must be a startling sight.

It certainly is. Dozens of brains in glass jars - it's what's left of this collection at the University of Texas that came here in 1986 from the Austin State Hospital. It was a mental institution here in town. So they kind of sat in a closet in a basement lab for about 25 years until they were happened upon by a photographer here in town named Adam Voorhees. And he started to dig into them a little bit more and, you know, found that a hundred of these brains were missing, that half the collection had gone missing over the decades that they'd been sitting there.

And there was some news this week about what might've happened to those brains.


Yes. In all three cases, she raised both significant, substantive problems with granting these people a security clearance relating to things like foreign influence, business conflicts of interest, personal conduct and so on. And then she raised very serious problems about what the process was. In fact, it sounded like she was trying to explain to her supervisor how the process worked. He could indeed overrule her, but he needed to write out an explanation of why and explain why the specific concerns that she raised were addressed by other factual evidence that he had available to him. Apparently none of that ever happened. And that's obviously a very dangerous breach in the protocol.

This whistleblower, Tricia Newbold - she spoke of at least 25 instances where the Personnel Security Office was overruled by more senior members of the administration. Is 25 a lot?Do you know?

Well, it seems like it's a lot historically. That's one of the things we wanted to determine.

It seems more frequent than the usual. . .


Now, there are a handful of things we know about the narrator of your book, Alice Hare. She's a philosophy graduate. She's adopted. She has complicated relationships with her adoptive and her birth relations. And she is obsessed with a slightly older woman, a Japanese writer called Mizuko Himura. So could you sort of pick it up from there?

I think you're totally right in saying that she is completely obsessed with this older woman. And I think part of the reason why that happens is because her own story is very dim. And in place of any sort of certainty about who she is or where she comes from or what her own origin story might be, she starts to fixate on this woman who, for her, is this mixture of some parallels that she perceives between them, but equally quite a lot, I think, of wishful thinking and this sort of imaginary bond she assumes them to share.

Now, Alice's relationship to Mizuko in real life is a creation, right?I mean, she's done all this research. She's googled all over the place.

(Laughter).


Tony, it's been a long time.

It has been a long time.

It's good to hear your voice, my friend.

Listen, Gil, you were one of the official inauguration photographers traveling with the Biden motorcade yesterday, in front of the Capitol today. I guess I should ask you this, did you get the money shot you were looking for?

Well, I'm working with a great team of photographers too. We're with the obamaphotobook. com group. We're the official inaugural book photographers, and certainly, I encourage any of your listeners, if they took any photographs here in Washington, D. C.  or even at home, send them in. We may include those photographs in the book. It's obamaphotobook. com, and you know, yeah, I got some - I think some decent photographs.

But yesterday was a particularly wonderful day because there was only one photographer plus myself with the vice president. And then to everyone's surprised, the then-President-elect Obama showed up at the Biden event, and so we got some - I think some pretty good stuff.


This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Scott Simon. What's past is prologue is a line from Shakespeare. In politics, what's past can be a time bomb to explode or fizzle. Dr.  Ben Carson leads in some national polls, but he's now being asked about claims he's made about his past. And Jeb Bush, who's fallen into single digits, may have political problems with the new biography about his beloved father, and all just before the next Republican debate. NPR senior editor and correspondent Ron Elving joins us. Ron, thanks for being with us.

Good morning, Scott.

I would guess nobody doubts Dr.  Carson's a superb surgeon with an amazing personal story. But he's had to handle questions this week about a temper he said he once had to overcome an acclaim he's made about West Point.

You know, being the frontrunner gives you a kind of claim to scrutiny that no one else gets. And CNN was unable to corroborate Dr.  Carson's stories about his violent youth, including a stabbing incident where he says his knife blade broke off on the belt buckle of a friend. The implication is that these stories have been enhanced or exaggerated for effect to, you know, improve the story of his personal redemption. And that story also includes what he has called his full tuition scholarship to West Point, where, it turns out, he did not even apply.


Yeah, I don't think there's been a response to it yet - not that I've seen. And I guess, you know, it puts a cloud on it. The special relationship was given a boost by the birth of Meghan's and Prince Harry's baby. And that was seen as sort of a good omen ahead of this visit, unfortunately, now is being, obviously, overshadowed by what Donald Trump has said. That may be a prelude to what he may say about other people here.

And I think the concern is that Donald Trump will use this and kind of abuse the invitation. He'll be given all the kind of welcome that he can expect in a royal visit. But is he going to return the favor, or is he going to bring up these tricky diplomatic issues, which are kind of flies in the ointment in the relationship as it currently stands?

So, Dominic, what I'm hearing from you is that there's a great deal of apprehension from the actual government that invited him. So is anything likely to come out of this trip that might be beneficial to the United Kingdom?

Well, if you talk to diplomats that - and their answer is that these state visits are hugely important. But in the background, there's a lot of sort of diplomatic nitty-gritty going on. There's a lot of business deals being made. And the hope is that this continues to cement that relationship, which we're told is greater than the sort of personal relationship currently in the heart of it.


Well, she isn't calling Israel evil, but she is still using language that is anti-Semitic. The impact that it has is devastating. It's inflammatory. And unfortunately, I think it just causes more conflict. It makes it harder to have the kinds of policy conversations that she claims she wants to have on these difficult and fraught topics.

I'm sorry if this sounds naive, but why is a phrase like it's all about the Benjamins, baby, offensive to many Jews?

Well, it feeds into the classic stereotype of Jews controlling the world with our money, working behind the scenes to buy control over politicians and government policies. Part of it was the way in which she communicated it, too. It was a provocative and glib way of doing it, and it would have been much, I think, far more acceptable to say we need to have a conversation about the influence generally of money in politics, the influence of lobbyists and politics. And let's have a conversation without using the inflammatory language about these things.

So when Representative Omar tweeted anti-Semitism is real and I'm grateful for Jewish allies and colleagues who are educating me on the painful history of anti-Semitic tropes, how do you react to that?


It's always the fights inside the family that can get rough. Things got rough this week in the Democratic Party after freshman Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota made more remarks many saw as anti-Semitic. The House finally passed an anti-hate resolution condemning anti-Semitism and - well, a lot of things, I think, including dandruff. Did it solve or aggravate divisions?Susan Davis, NPR congressional correspondent, joins us. Sue, thanks so much for being with us.

Good morning, Scott.

Everything better now?

(Laughter) Well, every Democrat in the end did vote for the resolution, so they were unified in the end, but it certainly did provide a roadmap for the kind of divisions we might see going forward.


The Pythians were a black baseball team in Philadelphia from about 1866 to 1872. And they were damn good. And like just about every other dimension of his life, he used that arena to fight for equality.

And he met a tragic end, I gather.

Yup. Much like Martin Luther King, he had his young life cut short by gunfire from a white assassin.

I don't understand how America doesn't know so much about him and why Philadelphia took so long to recognize him.


Times like this, when the economies of states are in default, can states really afford this?

I really don't think they can, and in many, many states, legislatures are starting to agree with that idea and to really rethink their priorities. I mean, every dollar that you spend building and running a prison is a dollar that's not spent on a public university or healthcare or roads and bridges. At this point, Kansas, Texas and at least 11 other states are taking a very serious look at how to try out some new strategies that will curb their prison population, shrink the number of people behind bars so they can save a little money, reduce some recidivism and have money for other budget priorities.

Well, back up and tell us how we got here, because in your article you say in 1970 our prisons held fewer than 200,000 people. What happened?

A number of things happened. But primarily, it's what's called our nation's war on drugs. And I say so-called war on drugs, because, you know, we like to use that metaphor all the time on everything. But essentially a new host of sentencing practices took hold in the early '70s and spread across the country. Mandatory minimum sentences, meaning that the amount of drugs involved in a particular crime would affect the severity of the punishment. So even if you're a low-level drug mule, for example, the amount of drugs you were carrying was going to ensure that you get a very large sentence, perhaps even more than a drug king pin if that person was caught without a lot of drugs.


Yeah.

Most people don't know that. But you lose several days of shelf, whether it's in code or out of code. Or do you leave the milk out on the counter while your kids are having breakfast?There's all kinds of ways in which, if you handled it properly, you extend the life.

Mr.  Rauch, is there any concern among, let's say the people that might own a Trader Joe's or some other food store today, that somehow, your places are going to be potentially under-pricing them?

Well, I think that - well, first, you'd have to ask them. But most of what we'll be selling will be fruits and vegetables, freshly prepared product, stuff that's really not brand-driven. And they're in areas that frankly, are underserved, that - you know, there aren't Trader Joe's in the inner-cities in America, at least to my knowledge.


The doctor who looked at the girl apparently waged a very diligent effort to stop the family separation. He tried to persuade the agent for the next several hours on Thursday not to separate the family. It was left unresolved Thursday night. The doctor even stayed an hour beyond his shift trying to protect the family. The next morning, he came back to work. There was another agent on duty. He convinced that agent not to separate the family, and the family was allowed to stay together in the United States.

You are very plugged in down there in this region, been working there for years. Did Border Patrol have anything to say to you about what happened?

I asked the Department of Homeland Security for comment yesterday. The local Customs and Border Protection officials referred me to them. They had no response at all.

OK. So Tania, Joseph and the kids now allowed to stay in the United States. What happens next for them?


I did a little research. Paul Cluxton is now running a car dealership.

Is that right?

Yeah. So what do you see in your future?

It's hard to tell right now. I'm just trying to get a good education and see where that takes me.

Want to play basketball in the pros?

Yeah, that's definitely a dream of mine. To play overseas somewhere would be pretty awesome. And so I'm always going to work towards that. But for right now, I'm just not really sure what I'm going to do after college. But just trying to live each day and then try to get better in every aspect.


We're not paid a huge salary by a league at all. Instead, our income comes almost exclusively from sponsorship deals with inked apparel companies, like Nike and ASICS, that keeps them bound for three to five years. And we don't get rich.

No, point taken. Well, when you decided to have a baby, like, what happened?I mean, did you tell your contact at Nike?Did your agent speak to them?Like, what happened?

Back in 2012, I just finished the Olympic year. And I finished fifth at the Olympics. I noted hey, you know, you guys, it's - I'm looking at my contract here, and there aren't any protections in place. And they would not provide me with what would happen to me. That led us to kind of seeking out other options. ASICS came into play and kind of stated the same thing. Hey, I plan on expanding my family. ASICS at the time had said, we appreciate full athletes. Come over here. And so I did. I finished a year with them in which I finished with a bronze medal at world championships.

And so in that off-year, I'd hoped that we would conceive and be able to have our daughter and return to the sport. And I did conceive. I did have my daughter. And my daughter was two months old. And I got a phone call that said, I want to talk about your contracts in regard to your performance this year - which means - you mean the year that I've been with child?And then I was - my payment was reduced.


Well, the justification I think is a good one for nonprofit organizations like Scholarly Societies that really do operate on pretty much a cost recovery model. The commercial ventures, though, that have the profit margins in the 30 and 40 percent range, there really is no justification. They're profit-maximizing businesses, which is fine. The question is, should such businesses be built around information that's vital to the public's good and the public's health?

When these scholars do articles, who gets - do they get any of that money?

They're unpaid. The authors of these articles traditionally contribute the work of writing the articles, the work of reviewing and verifying the information, and they're not paid.

I can see why universities might feel that they were paying too much.


Hello!And that's when my cousin goes. She goes, why did you keep having that head rag on. 'I was like because my hair was sweated and it was either a head rag or Afro. . .

With a head rag. I've already cried on television with no eyebrows. What more can - what more - what could I do now to embarrass myself?Nothing.

All right, last thing. When you reach the age of many of your neighbors. . .

Mm-hm.


Isabelia Herrera, welcome. Thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

Now, you write about something that might be a surprise to some. But you write that many people within the Latino community bristle at the term Hispanic. Why is that?

Yeah. I think these conversations have been going on for a while now. But now we're seeing them enter into more mainstream spaces. The question with the term Hispanic is primarily about its connection to Spain. The term Hispanic basically includes that colonial relationship to Spain. So it refers to people who are of Spanish descent, either living in Latin America or the U. S.  And I think that now, as, you know, we're re-evaluating what that term and what that identity means, there's a lot of questions around that connection to Spain.


Even 43 years ago, the - climate change was an issue. We just didn't know it yet. Among the things that was occurring that has occurred since then has been an amazing improvement in climate science.

There has been - there were very few meteorologists beyond those doing the, you know, the daily weather reports. Climate science was not a big thing because climate had not been changing. I mean, the period since the beginning of agriculture, 11,000 years ago, has been one of rather remarkable climate stability. So the idea of climate change is a relatively recent concept. And then - and the process of human-driven climate change is quite recent historically.

And we look at, oh, I guess, probably the biggest example is looking at the past through either tree rings or ice cores to get an idea of what has happened in previous periods of climactic change.

Yeah. It's - I mean, we look at these indirect indicators to sort of reconstruct earlier periods in the earth's history or in human history. And what we do know is that for the 11,000 years since agriculture began, things have been sort of stable. But now, suddenly, the farmers now on the land are the first generation of farmers to have to cope with climate change. I mean, we've always had to. When I was farming back in the '50s, we had to worry about weather, you know, and how the weather would affect that particular year's crop. If climate change was not on the - on our minds then, we didn't even know that we were we were going to be changing climate as we now are.


Yeah.

We were able to test the tongue and found that it is uber soft. It is actually 10 times softer than the human tongue.

Tongue-wise, what does this accomplish?

So the soft tongue and the sticky saliva which exists on the tongue work together to actually increase adhesion. And the frog is able to catch very hairy things, like tarantulas or even other frogs, which are slippery. And it's able to use this amazing tongue with this amazing adhesive to capture things in the blink of an eye.


When you have to design clothing for patients, what has to be taken into consideration?

We worked with nurses to say OK, which parts of the body do you need to be able to get to?And so we came up with - for women, we have a back-opening dress, which is actually the closest thing to a hospital gown. But you would never guess it. I've worn it in the playground. I've worn it to the supermarket. But it has all that ease of opening in that it opens at the back. And it also has openings down the arms and a very discreet opening to the stomach.

Why is it important to have patients feeling better about the way that they look?

Well, if you feel self-confident - and therefore in charge of your medical treatment - then you are much more likely to want to get up and move around and ultimately recover faster. But there's also a very physical aspect of it, which is if you don't do those things, if you just stay in bed, there's actually a higher risk of infection. And you lose your muscle tone, which makes walking ultimately harder. So your hospital stay becomes longer.


I am deeply skeptical of that.

It's true, it's true. It's the - the analysis depends on the content of the air and the water in the specific place where your mother - the area where your mother was living when she was pregnant with you because that's the first bone that forms in your body as a part of the skull bone, apparently. Just as we can take a section of your thigh bone and that will give us a longitudinal picture of where you've been living for the last seven years.

Wow.

It's magic, isn't it?It's exactly those wild moments that I love, and there's a case in the book from - we were talking about insects earlier. . .


So Virginia was demographically the ideal Barack Obama success story. It was not a one color success story. It was a multicolored — he even did better than he's done anywhere else among Latinos. So Virginia is really, if you will, the marquee state for the Barack Obama coalition that he wants to put together.

What about independent voters?Independents or particularly first time voters seemed to have come out.

Yes. In fact, first time voters are largely a creation in this particular cycle of the Barack Obama campaign. That's why they came out. It isn't just because they are suddenly interested in the political process; it's Obama. And in Virginia in particular Obama did so well among independents that he was the reason largely that Mike Huckabee threatened John McCain at all in Virginia. Otherwise McCain would have counted on five to 10 percentage points more from independents who were being attracted over to the other side by Barack Obama.

Before we let you go, there are so many ways to crunch the delegates on the Democratic side. But specifically in terms of delegates that the two candidates have won, in the primaries and caucuses, how are they standing now?


They know - they see the world as a number of systems. You know, a matrix is a system stuck together, and they know we're vulnerable at a lot of different points. And that's the reason we're seeing more and more groups using these kinds of methods.

They're formidable. I mean, nobody should think of this as a terribly unequal struggle between, you know, the international community and the terrorist. They're a formidable opponent, and we need to act across a broad spectrum to stop them.

So what can be done about this opponent?

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


Ebola has now spread to the largest city in eastern Congo, Goma, where at least three cases have been confirmed. Today marks exactly one year since the outbreak was declared in Congo. And so far, more than 1,800 people have died. This makes it the second deadliest Ebola outbreak in history.

NPR's Eyder Peralta has been following this story. He joins us now from his base in Nairobi. Nader, I want to start with just the significance of these cases in Goma.

Yeah, I mean, what it tells us is that this outbreak is still not contained. And it also tells us that some of the mechanisms that should be in place to contain Ebola still have some problems. Health authorities tell us that the latest case in Goma involves a minor. Authorities believe he was infected when he traveled hundreds of miles back home on a motorcycle. And he started having symptoms shortly after he got back to Goma on July 22. And he sought health care several times. But his case didn't raise alarm until July 29. That's seven days later. That means he had a chance to have contact with a lot of people. And he had a large family. He had 10 kids.

And now we've gotten word that his 1-year-old daughter has tested positive. As health authorities put it, there is now an active transmission chain in Goma. And they are fully expecting more new infections.


No, I didn't, actually. You know, I thought - you know, it was a possibility. We were kind of going into it blind, hoping we could - you know, my family and I, when I say we - we could get some money.

You know, a lot of people would look at you and say, you had such a promising future in football, possibly. You had a free ride to college and, you know, you gave that all up. Do you really feel like, you know, it was the right thing?

Yeah. You know, I think I would rather be - not to say that I couldn't get injured with anything else in life, because I can. I think living a life injury free is much better than not having to pay off student loans. But at the same time, being in pain and having trouble walking and maybe possibly knee and hip surgeries and things like that - and, you know, head injuries of course, with the memory - so I think I'd rather, you know, I'd rather be paying off student loans than having trouble getting down the stairs or something in the morning or, like, something like that.

And now you have equal offers for basketball or. . .


Thank you.

This study was conducted by some FDA researchers. Can you tell us more about what they found?

They found that some of the chemical active ingredients in sunscreen - oxybenzone, avobenzone - was absorbed through the skin. But they did not make a determination about whether or not that meant health effects - health side effects from that absorption.

You were behind Consumer Reports' extensive ranking of sunscreens. So in light of this news, how should we think about our choice of sunscreen?What should we look for?


Quite simply, did the White House ever interfere in your administration of your duties and your ability to properly forward this information, if you thought it appropriate, to the intelligence committees?

Bradley Moss is a lawyer specializing in issues of national security, including whistleblowers.

Thank you for taking the time to explain it to us.

Anytime.


Because they believe what the United States has done violates its WTO obligations. The United States promised, as part of a series of tariff negotiations, to limit its tariffs on steel to 0 percent duties and to limit its tariffs on aluminum to somewhere between 0 and 6 percent on average. And secondly, they're complaining because one of the other rules of the WTO is that you cannot discriminate as among WTO members. And, here, the United States is applying the steel and aluminum tariffs to some countries but not to Korea, not to Brazil, not to Australia, not to Argentina. So the other complaint is, at its core, that there's been discrimination against the EU, Canada Mexico and the other countries that are subjected to the tariffs.

Could this dispute turn into something more serious, depending on what the WTO rules?

Well, if it ruled, it would hear this complaint and figure out whether they agree or don't agree with the European Union or Canada or any of the challenges. And I think the chances that the WTO will decide against the United States are very, very strong. I mean, it's a very clear case of a violation. What will get tricky for the WTO is, what are they going to do about the defense that the United States intends to raise?

So that defense is national security, apparently?


A big gamble - why?

Well, because there could be very negative consequences. I mean, first of all, they could lose. The Houthi rebels in Yemen could defy the bombing and succeed in taking over the country, which would be a mighty embarrassment, especially because Iran would then step in to fill the aid and friendship vacuum in Yemen. You could get civilian collateral damage in which the Saudis would be seen to be bombing Sunni Muslims in a neighboring country. Yemen is already the poorest country in the region and its prospects are getting worse, not better. If you get a complete state failure or breakdown of services in Yemen, which is also running out of water, you could have an uncontrollable flow of refugees or other trouble for Saudi Arabia.

You haven't mentioned the possibility that this whole thing might open the door for al-Qaida, the al-Qaida in Yemen, to take advantage of the chaos.

Well, that's also correct. I mean, it's sort of the mirror image of the situation in Iraq. There, the fight against ISIS has sort of obscured the fight for control of the country. And in Yemen, the Saudis are taking on the Houthis, which could in fact relieve Houthi pressure on al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, a group which is the Saudis' dedicated mortal enemy.


We've only just begun to look at this, right?So we've only used one kind of treatment of 12 hours of light and 12 hours of darkness. And we've only looked at cabbage so far. And under our experimental conditions, we find that these chemicals accumulate most in the day, it may be midday, and they go down at night. And there's about a two-fold difference.

Wow.

But much more would need to be done to know really when the best time of day would be to eat different kinds of vegetables.

OK. So you started with cabbage. Are there any other veggies that look enticing, so to speak, for you to study or sort of similar to a cabbage cycle?


Right.
Just a little.
You could put honey. . .
Yeah. Agave just. . .


Well, they've arrested these two men. One is an official in the office of the governor of the province. The other is the president of the university. Those would seem to be two pretty prominent individuals. Does anyone know what's happened to them, where they are?

That's still murky right now. We know they've been arrested. We don't know where they're being held, and according to Iraqi officials, they've apparently been arrested on charges of committing violence, committing terrorism. We don't much - really much more than that.

So we have this day in Iraq. It begins with this pretty normal thing, a visit from a - from the leader of a neighboring country, and then this kind of a development, which doesn't sound normal at all. It leaves you kind of wondering, one step forward, one step backwards.

Sure, but, you know, what it really illustrates is how uneven the security situation in Iraq is. Sure, you're seeing signs of progress. You're seeing neighboring leaders and neighboring countries visit. You are seeing violence levels down, but there are still large parts of Iraq that could explode at any moment. And it really shows how little the security situation is in many areas.


Yeah.

I'm also told by White House officials the Secret Service director was not connected to security questions at Mar-a-Lago. It was in the works before the latest security breach there - Chinese woman with a lot of passports and hard drives.

Right.

But - so this is not necessarily directly connected to immigration unlike Nielsen's resignation, which was immigration-related.


Stocks in two major computer chip companies - Qualcomm and Broadcom, two major ones - were down 6% today. Google dropped 2%. And this was after Google said it would stop supporting Android devices for phones made by Huawei because the company was on the Commerce Department's blacklist. Google is a major software provider for Huawei. And if these restrictions went on for months, Google could take a beating.

Correct me if I'm wrong here, Jackie, but didn't the U. S.  back off last year in a somewhat similar way shortly after blacklisting another Chinese telecom company?

That's right. It was a company called ZTE, and they were on the blacklist. And it went on for a while. And they were on the verge of bankruptcy. And this is a major Chinese corporation - almost went bust until the Trump administration reversed that decision and allowed U. S.  companies to supply it again. So it's the same sort of scenario. But, Mary Louise, the Trump administration has been tightening the screws on Huawei for months now in part because it has links to the Chinese government.

And U. S.  intelligence agencies believe Huawei could use its equipment to spy on the U. S.  and its allies. The administration asked Canada to arrest and extradite one of Huawei's senior officials. And administration officials have been fanning out across the world asking allies, pressuring allies not to use Huawei equipment. So up until now, it's been a full-court press by the administration to contain the company.


Thanks. Good to be with you.

So you start your book by talking about a conversation you had with your young son. Tell us about what prompted that.

Well, he was 7 years old. He got in the car, put his seatbelt on, and he said to me, Mom, do you know what a hooker and a stripper are?And I was a little bit floored because I had been pretty much the mother from hell in terms of making sure that I knew everything he had ever seen, and I was the one that was acculturating my children. I wasn't having the media do it, and what the story turned out to be is he'd been at the playground that day and a bunch of boys had been talking about a video game that one of them had been playing. He told me that, Mom, you know, if you kill enough people, you get to go into a room where a lady takes off her top. That's what a stripper is. And if you kill more people and you get to a higher level of the game, you get to go into a room where a lady takes off all her clothes. That's what a hooker is. Well, needless to say, I was really floored because without anything coming from me or the home, he already had in his mind a connection between violence and killing and sexuality.

So what did you do?


But won't you be driving down the price of platinum if you start bringing it back to Earth?

I'll tell you, Ira, nothing would make me happier. The story of aluminum, if you - it's a really interesting one if you go and look it up.

Yeah.

Even though aluminum is 10 percent of our Earth's crust, we could never get to it until the 18th century because it was in oxides and we didn't know how to get it. So back in the day of Napoleon's court, when he had his most VIP guests, he would pull out the aluminum and leave the gold and silver for the nobles.


Can you give a practical example of that?

So companies like Starbucks. Starbucks was the place people went. It was the third place, not home and not the office. Can they rekindle that connection people have between Starbucks and their lives?

So how do you build an emotional connection with Starbucks, especially at a time where people are saying, 3. 75 for a latte?No thank you.

Yeah. The key word here is the experience. What are the experiences that you render to people as they go about their day?And those experiences can be online. Those experiences can be offline. They can be - how do you live and emote with a company like Starbucks or with a company like Microsoft or with a small company, with a product that you might buy -an ice cream that you might like.


Well, there have been reports - I mean, certainly the separatist commander that we spoke to today said that they, in fact, are moving westward. There have been some reports of fighting in a village not far from here. But the large-scale offensive that sort of seemed to be happening earlier in the week has slowed for now.

And anything about a Ukrainian fighter jet being shot down?There were some reports this week.

Yes, this is the third jet in recent times that has been shot down. And in this case, the Ukrainians claim it was some sort of Russian missile launcher that brought it down. There's been no response from the Russian side. Of course, the Russians deny there are any Russian troops here at all. They say if anyone's here, they're volunteers. And, in fact, the commander that we spoke to - the separatist commander who claims he's from Odessa - says that they have some volunteers, but these are a very tall or short people. A one-eyed sniper was one person that he referred to and said these are not people who would be serving in the Russian military.

NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, thanks very much for being with us.


Now, I understand South Dakota doesn't have an income tax. So is that why collecting sales tax is particularly important to your state?

That's right. The sales tax is about 63 percent of our state's general budget. So that's what we used to help on education and other important functions of government. We chose to use the sales tax rather than a state income tax.

So the better business has been for online retailers. The worst news, that's been for your state's budget.

That's exactly right. I mean, the United States Supreme Court has estimated that this is costing South Dakota between $48 and $58 million every year, which is a significant hit to our budget.


We're coming over the initial shock. It's a very strange situation to live in one of the wealthiest countries in the world. And we have been living in more luxury than almost any other nation on this planet, and now all of a sudden we find ourselves almost like beggars.

You talk about the swift difference between being so wealthy to now being in a totally different place. Is this what everyone - is the average person going through something like this?Or is this just a select few that went from being so wealthy to so not wealthy?

The general public here has been very, very well off. But now people that are starting to lose their jobs - hundreds of people that used to work in the banks have been losing their jobs recently. We know that a lot of companies are going to become bankrupt. We had almost no unemployment in the past years. We've been importing workers from Eastern Europe because we didn't have enough people to work in our companies.

So, how are people coping with this?Are they selling off their belongings?What are they doing?


Actually, you know, the property itself is a mess. It's been broken into by, like, vandals, and it looks like the inside of the Titanic. But I was talking to someone a few days ago, actually, who was saying that when they originally - the new - after Tesla lost the land, a film company came in and took it over and was working there, producing film for like 40 years. And a lot of Tesla's old equipment was still there. So what they actually ended up doing with a lot of it was just burying it. So there's actually some people think that some of his old stuff is still underneath there, including - there's a room and he built some sort of underground resonance chamber. I don't know what that means; it sounds impressive. But it might still be down there like this giant, big, crazy Tesla room. So, you know, I don't. . .

That would be exciting.

That would be cool to dig out stuff, but I don't know if it's there or not. But it still kind of gives the property a bit of, I don't know, bit of magic.

So what's the plan for the property?I mean, you guys raised enough money to build it, I think with a grant from New York State too?


So in your polling, in your research, do you find that it's going to come down to maybe a couple thousand votes from these unaffiliated voters and on what issues?Or will they vote?

It is likely at the moment to be a very narrow victory. President Bush won in 2004 with five percent. That was 100,000 votes. In other words, if it is one percent, that would be 20,000 votes, and right now, the polls are moving around in just single percentage points. So it could be that narrow.

Now, I have read that Colorado is going to be this year's Florida and Ohio, that this is going to be the state that decides the election.

I think it could be, and the interesting thing is that Obama and Palin were both in Jefferson County a couple of days ago, indicating that there may be actually even a county that could be looked at to be beyond an entire state.


It's the first time we've described a new medicinal leech species from North America in 40 years. And it has a number of characteristics that make it as a new - considered a new species.

What's up with the three jaws?Is this common?

Most leeches in this group and other groups have three jaws, but the number of teeth in those jaws is more variable.

So why three jaws?What do they need them for?


One of the things I've always loved about the Democratic Party is that it is a big-tent party, and it embraces opportunity for all people. And I'm running for president because I think my life experience can address this Trump-fueled national crisis of division that has been moving us backward. And I look at my experience of bringing people together - businesses and nonprofits and Republicans and Democrats - and to really get things done, to get to near-universal health care, create the No. 1 economy in the country for three consecutive years - I think that record stands for itself.

Governor John Hickenlooper, thank you so much for joining us.

You bet, Noel. Thank you so much.

That's former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, talking to us for our Opening Arguments series.


I'm personally not. I'm going to ask Teller if he is.

I'm honest - I'm not a card guy. And that's a card move, right?

JOE #1: That's a card - yes, it's a card flight. And it's an illusion where you have four cards that are facedown. And when you spread the cards, one of the cards just turns face up, and it look as if from the spectator's point of view that the card just magically turns face up. It doesn't look like you're doing any sleight whatsoever. But the reason that's so hard, or that was so hard for me to pick up, was that - just the timing of the sleight with what we needed to do to take the spectator's eyes away at that particular moment. There's a timing issue.

Joe, give us civilians an idea of how long you would work on that.


Claire Messud's "The Burning Girl" is a novel about two girls, Cassie and Julia, who make each other who they are. Cassie's the bold one who looks for rules to break. Julia is the voice of caution and conscience who'd like a little of Cassie's daring. We had one mind, as Julia recall, and could roam its limits together. They grow apart in middle school. Cassie hangs out with the more conspicuously popular crowd. Julia's hurt but becomes aware that Cassie is on the verge of disaster. Julia may be the one person to help pull her back.

"The Burning Girl" is the latest novel from Claire Messud, author of "The Emperor's Children" and other acclaimed novels. She's also taught creative writing and special programs at many colleges and joins us from New York. Thanks so much for being with us.

Thanks, Scott, for having me.

What's the special intensity of being BFFs as youngsters?


Well, they were talking about a lot of hype for the new technologies just around the corner. I mean, CES is very much a kind of a tech bubble in some ways. So it's nonstop hype about new technologies like 5G, like smart devices and, that I found, not really a ton of talk about what has become a very prevalent conversation in tech, which is, how are companies using the data that they kind of need to offer a lot of these services?

Haven't a lot of Americans become aware of the fact that we are the product?

I think that's a - sometimes an oversimplification. But, you know, there's a bit of a creep factor now, to put it in the plainest terms. You click agree and maybe, you know, ads follow you around the net or - that's sort of the mildest form of these things. But in the sort of worst-case scenario, as you said, you know, your data might be sold in sort of an unethical way. We're all a little bit more wary, at least over here, about that kind of thing.

Over here in contrast to where?