Well, it is. It starts off in Pumalin Park, which is temperate rain forest - so think of the coast of British Columbia - all the way down into the grassland/steppe areas toward the tip of the country. It really encompasses almost every ecotone that one would find in the south of the country.

We should note this is now the largest private donation of land to a government ever. You and your husband ran this place as a park for a long time. I've been there. And it is indeed just one of the most beautiful places I've ever been. Why hand it over to the government of Chile?

Well, you know, we grew up within the national parks here in the United States. And there is a sense of, I would even say, ownership by every American who goes through the front gates of Yellowstone or Yosemite, that those are public parks. They belong to everybody. And Chile is no different. We hope that somehow between the creation of national parks, the development of what we call economic development as a consequence of conservation that precious masterpieces of the country will be preserved forever.

Have you gotten guarantees, though, that the government of Chile will run it in a way that's sustainable?There have been concerns about the capacity of the government of Chile to really run these parks in the same way that you've run them.


Are you going to zap it and drill it?Because I know you have a big drill onboard, too.

Yes, we will. We hope to. The idea of this drive is to give us time to check out the rest of the sampling hardware. We will be able to take ChemCam laser measurements as we go, but we do need to do a little bit more work to check out the scoop, for example, and the drill. And so that'll take us, you know, probably another month or so to get all that hardware checked out.

By that point, we hope to be at the - in the area of the Glenelg area, and so it'll be good timing to try to get our first samples.

So you'll be testing out while you're moving, along the way?


The field is shrinking. That's the first thing that's happened. There are going to be 10 candidates and only 10. And for the first time, you're going to see the top three candidates standing next to each other in the center stage. That's Joe Biden, who's been leading the polls, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. And what most people are waiting to see is if there will be a Warren-Biden clash.

OK. So of those three candidates you just named, Joe Biden remains still at the top of the Democratic field. But he hasn't had really great debate performances. So the one question I have is, how much do debates really matter to the campaign?

You know, you can make an argument that the debates really haven't mattered much because look at Joe Biden. He's still on top of the field even though he has not had a good performance in the debates. Elizabeth Warren has moved up steadily, but not because of anything she did in the debates. It's because she's had all these plans, and she's performed well on the campaign trail. But in one sense, the debates are having an impact, and it's a negative one because the overall image of the Democrats and their policy ideas has gotten more negative among the general electorate as this debate season has gone on.

Interesting. The debates have not been great PR for the Democratic Party. Well, Elizabeth Warren has been gaining support the past few months. She's going to be facing Joe Biden onstage for the first time. What do you think her hardest challenges are going to be onstage?


And in the end, what has speech enabled us to do as a species?

It's enabled us to think up strategies to head off what you think might be about to happen, and the strategies depend upon memory. And speech is a fantastic memory device. There's absolutely nothing like it, and I think it's time for people who are interested in evolution to say that the theory of evolution applies only - only to animals.

Tom Wolfe - his book - "The Kingdom Of Speech. "Thanks so much for being with us.

My pleasure, thank you very, very much for having me, Scott.


I wish, by this time, I had better news. Our colleagues in the U. N.  system are now reporting that at least 2. 3 million people have been uprooted. Officially, there are 1. 2 million internally displaced. And don't forget that a year ago, there were no displaced people and now Ukraine is in the top 10 countries in the world with large displaced populations. We can tell you also that the humanitarian situation is very dire. Well over 6,000 - almost 7,000 - people have been killed and almost 17,000 have been injured. There's very little water, food, medical supplies available, so life is very, very difficult. But the problem for Ukraine, of course, is it's been well over a year now that the conflict has been active, so you can imagine the strain on the system and on society's fabric.

Ukraine says that Russian humanitarian convoys are carrying weapons across the border.

We have no way to verify that but what we do observe - we have a sister border monitoring mission on the Russian side of the border and they do report when these convoys cross - what time, how many vehicles, whether they're inspected. But I can't recall one time where we've actually reported that we've seen arms or anything like that. But I do have to point out is that we're not able to enter these vehicles.

Is this frustrating work, Mr.  Bociurkiw?


A degree, yeah.

Yeah. We're talking Jay Kang about his article that ran in The New York Times magazine this past weekend, "That Other School Shooting. "And you're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

I wanted to ask you about another Korean-American you ran into. An Eagle Scout who, in fact, wanted to build a memorial garden.

Yeah, Kinsa Durst. He was - I think he is 19 now. You know, he's the type of the kid that I think every parent wants to, you know, at some way, their kid to grow up to be. He had sort of the same reaction that I had. And it was interesting to me that, you know, somebody so young who's father was not Korean but his father was Caucasian but living in Korea, I think, for a while, would be so honest about this idea that this reflects violent Koreans because Virginia Tech also happened, which I think is a quote he gave me verbatim.

And instead, you know, instead of sort of - I guess, sort of, wallowing in the shame of it or trying to suppress the connection or even sort of bearing it with post-modern, sort of, academic speak about how we, you know, no one person should represent anybody else. And he went on built a peace garden in front of the school with commemorative stones for the dead. And on - during one of the memorial services that I attended, he gave this talk about how he wanted to help Korean and American relations.


So, you're a beauty journalist living in London, and your life is very cosmopolitan - very British in some ways. You say that this experience made you feel even more British. But it took you 10 years to decide whether or not to really seek out your biological family. Take me through that process that you had of trying to make that decision.

Well, like you said in the introduction, when I was 19, as far as I knew, I didn't have any family. When my family in the U. K.  adopted me from the orphanage in Eritrea, they were told I had no family. My father was dead. My mother was dead. I was, you know, quite literally an orphan.

And so it was only when my father went back to Eritrea in 1993 for the independence celebrations that he visited the orphanage that they got me from. He left a photograph of me there with - there was actually the nun who was in charge of my adoption was still there. She's very so old now, but she was still there.

And he left a photo of me because he thought it would be a nice thing to do. And several months after he returned, we got a letter from somebody who said he was my brother, and basically, it turned out that after my father had left Eritrea, this nun had got in touch with my family, and that's when everything started to unravel.


There is also a pledge now by this, again, outside group, the opposition coalition, to actually try to form a government in exile as soon as this weekend. It's a long-time coming.

Yeah. This has been going on for a while. They've talking about forming this government in exile for a long time. As we've seen with many of these different Syrian opposition groups, the political groups, the people who are based outside, they have a hard time. There's some reasons for that. I mean, it's hard for someone to say they want to claim responsibility as the leader of a group because they immediately become a target, their families become a target from the Syrian regime. But there's also just a lot of disagreement about who should lead. Should he be from the south?Should he be from the capital - he or she?Should he be a she?

You know, and, you know, secular, Islamist, which group - Christian minority, majority Sunni, so these are the questions that they're all hammering out. There's supposed to be a meeting in the coming ways. We've heard that that might be postponed.

Really?


No, no. It definitely can't. And the argument that you sort use is it's just growing too fast, and we're seeing it as it was six billion years ago almost. So if they grew that fast for six billion years, it would be just far too big.

Oh.

So it probably only lasts for a measly 100 million years or so.

Where do you go from here with this work?


So, Emery, let's find out a little bit more about where you started and your family. You grew up in Hilton Head. And a lot of folks know it now as a resort town, but I'm sure it's changed a lot. What do you remember from your childhood?

Oh, I remember Hilton Head when they were only about 1,500 people, at most, living here. I grew up here in the '40s and the '50s and I tell folks that I thought everybody in the world was Gullah except Dick and Jane.

So what does Gullah mean to you?What does it mean in terms of how you speak, how you dress, how you tell stories?Tell us what it means on the inside to be a part of Gullah culture.

Well, to be a part of Gullah culture meant that you pretty much knew who you were - we still do know who we are. And by that, I mean, everything that we saw when we grew up, Gullah people produce it - we produce our own food, we produce our own stories because we told them to one another, and made our boats, gather our own food, had our own spiritual life because we have little praise houses in every neighborhood. And the leaders of those praise houses were Gullah family members. And family was very important because families live close together. To us, Gullah was a world to itself.


. . . Transparency. They want to know how we got to this point so that no presidential candidate, Democrat or Republican, ever sees something like this happen to them.

So you would like to see an investigation of the investigation. You do think that's a productive use of time.

What I want to make certain is we know that bad actors are rooted out and that we are going to be well served by individuals who realize we are a nation of laws, that we will abide by the rule of law. And you are going to have law enforcement there that is to uphold the law.

Marsha Blackburn is a Republican senator from Tennessee. She sits on the Judiciary Committee. Thank you very much for joining us.


So after more than a week of protesting, it seems like you may be about to get what you've been asking for. There's a deal to sell the mine and money set aside to pay back wages. Does that mean you're heading home?

No. It's a step in the right direction. What's been set aside is like probably around 35, 40% of back wages on that. And they decided that they won't stay until we've been fully reimbursed.

The deal has set aside about $450,000 of an estimated 2 1/2 million that are owed to the miners.

Right. Right. That's the deal. That's Kopper Glo stepping up.

You know, some local officials have said you're actually depriving yourselves of money by blocking the tracks because you are blocking coal that would otherwise get sold. What do you say to that?


And prior to that, they'd had him ahead by double digits again. So, there is a rhythm within each of these polls where it goes up and down a little bit, and if you want something to rely on, you need to look at the range within each poll.

So, why is that people reacting to the news each day, or to ads, or to stuff they see on the Internet?What is it?

Well, I could think they're reacting to something, I just like - we like to think the stock market is responding to some kind of real news or conditions. But it's not all that clear that it's all that rational, and the same is true of the political polls as well.

So, given that up and down in each individual poll, you have to think a lot of it has to do with the internal processes of poll taking, and then poll analysis. They weigh the polls, they look at whether or not their sample of the public really matches the demographic mix of the public, and then they weigh of responses of people to try to match that statistical model.


The fighting between Israel and the Palestinians reminds us that world events do not wait for changes of leadership in Washington. President-elect Barack Obama will not take office for another three weeks, which means he'll watch from the sidelines as the current administration responds to a crisis that Obama will inherit very soon. For some analysis of this moment, we're joined now by NPR's senior Washington editor Ron Elving, who's with us most Mondays. Hi Ron.

Good to be with you, Madeleine.

Well, so how much is President-elect Obama being consulted on the U. S.  response at this point?

Not so much consulted as kept informed. He gets regular security briefings, of course. He had one on Sunday. He has had conversations with Secretary of State Rice, and he is expected to talk today to his own incoming national security adviser, General James Jones, and also to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is his own nominee, of course, for Secretary of State. She's certainly sharing in a lot of the information. She's a senator; she's on Armed Services; she's been immersed in much of this for many years; she's had top clearances; and I'm sure the Obama folks are sharing with her.

And how much does his stated policy regarding the Middle East - how much does it differ from the Bush administration's?


The president said Mr.  Bolden, has there ever been a negro on the White House detail protecting and guarding the president of the United States?I said not to my knowledge, Mr.  President. He said, would you like to be the first one?I said yes, sir, Mr.  President.

And he said, I'll be looking forward to seeing you in Washington, D. C. , and that's how I happened to be appointed to the White House detail.

You had that moment, this incredible moment, and then you write very early in the narrative, in the book, about an agent who was not so friendly. You describe him saying I'm going to tell you something, and I don't want you to ever forget it. You're a (censored). You were born a (censored), and when you die, you'll still be a (censored). So act like one.

What did you really face when it came to dealing with your colleagues?


Here's a novel idea for how to fix the auto industry, nationalize it, or at least nationalize the biggest American carmaker, GM. That's Los Angeles Times car columnist Dan Neil's idea. And, Dan, you mean basically just stop fooling around with bridge loans or anything like that and just outright buy GM?

Yeah, I don't see that the federal money that they're talking about really will save GM. I also think that, you know, we should just be intellectually honest about this. If this money, federal money, is going to come with all these conditions, including the idea that Congress is going to weigh in and adjudicate their future business plans, I mean, its nationalization. Just call it that and embrace it and move on.

What would be the advantages to owning GM?

It'd be cheaper than a loan that we'd never get back. Also, General Motors is a very, very strong company with, you know, something like $50 billion in real assets. And it's done a lot of the work to turn itself around. That's one of the ironies is that it was turning the giant ocean liner around when it happened to hit an iceberg, which was the credit crisis and some other problems that have made their chronic liabilities acute. But I think General Motors is a good investment.


In a word, Ari - schadenfreude. I think at this moment, whether you look at politics or society in general, there is a lot of concern about fraud, about misrepresentation, people not being who they say they are, not to mention a lot of resentment of wealth and privilege and all the trappings that come with it. And the way this story has unfolded, the fact that these families really seem to believe that the rules should not apply to them - that's been galling to many people.

And then look at the setting, right?So elite colleges are the source of such cultural fascination. Some would say obsession. Highly selective colleges - you know, they only enroll about 1 percent of all college students. So they're very, very small. But then again, they have these brands that are known all over the world. And they're supposed to stand for merit, for hard work, for the best and the brightest.

And so when you look at something like this or, even bigger, the legacy admissions or the fact that some wealthy donors can write a check and get their kid into college that way supposedly, it - all of this is really going to undermine the idea of having institutions in our society that represent hard work and being kind of excellent.

So where do these cases go from here?


Yeah. We need to start thinking about them now, and people are thinking about it. There's researchers now who are working on thinking about stuff like how do you find a person who's DNA is really robust against radiation damage because of course radiation damage is a huge concern in space travel and in living on other worlds. And right now there are researchers who have gotten a little funding from NASA and a little funding from other sources to look at how does DNA repair itself after radiation damage and is there a variation between people. Are there some people who might be better suited for space travel or are there some sets of genes that make people better at dealing with that?

Well, Annalee, thank you for giving us optimism today about wiping out the - most of the people or life on Earth. Annalee Newitz is author of "Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction. "Thank you very much, Annalee, for coming on this show.

Thank you for having me.

You're welcome.


They also break up the states into more subregions than the current exit polls do. They think that this is going to help them be more accurate. And Fox and AP are pretty confident that their results are better than the traditional exit polls in some ways. They actually did shadow polls with the new system in three big specials this year - special elections in the 6th Congressional District in Georgia, the New Jersey governor's race and the Alabama Senate race. And guess what - they got the winner right in all three.

That sounds promising. But are there pitfalls to this way of doing things?I mean, are people asking questions about whether or not they are going to be able to keep their winning streak?

Yes (laughter). And there's a big degree of risk when you're not actually speaking to voters. They're not actually speaking to people who have gone and voted. There's always a number of people who say they're going to vote who don't. And this is an experiment. AP and Fox - even though they're putting this - they're operationalizing this, they acknowledge that there are some demographic shortcomings. They found this in their tests in their poll. They underestimated in Alabama, for example, the number of black voters who would show up. But like scientists, they acknowledge those shortcomings. And they're going to be tinkering with their models along the way. So we may have something good eventually, but it's a whole new Wild West era here.

What has been the reaction to this from the pollsters at this conference that you're at?


The downside to getting more attention, like Marco Rubio, is more criticism. And he seems to get more direct criticism from his opponents as he rises in the polls.

No question. The young senator from Florida, though, is really the hot ticket in New Hampshire right now. He is expected to do no worse than third. He's certainly in the running for second John Kasich is also in the running here. Everyone coming up, of course, a little behind Donald Trump still at this point. But it's Rubio who has the national momentum then going on into South Carolina if he does well in New Hampshire. South Carolina is on the 20th. And he'll have real appeal in Nevada on the 23rd.

What about Bernie Sanders?His lead in the polls just seems to be growing. According to reports, he might be on "Saturday Night Live" on Saturday night, just before the vote. Hillary Clinton tried to suggest that just because he's a guy from next door in Vermont.

You know, he was well-known here from the start of course. But there's so much more to it than that. His numbers are still going up at this point. And even for Democrats who expect Clinton to be the nominee eventually, Bernie is still their feel-good vote. He is a get-it-off-your-chest vote. And, you know, Democrats have never really liked a coronation. They want a contest. And Clinton is not connecting to voter concerns on an emotional level. And she's not communicating a clear message either here or elsewhere in the country. That's why the national polls have narrowed. And you know it's going to be hard to tell Larry David and Bernie Sanders apart tonight.


Ground-based solar is only good when the sun is shining. And this applies to wind energy, too. It's only good when the wind is blowing. You have to have fossil fuel generators, standing by to pick up the load when the wind stops blowing, or the sun stops shining. So that has to be figured into the economics of wind- and ground-based solar. And, of course, you don't have either of those problems with a solar power satellite.

What would my electricity bill look like if I were getting solar power beamed down from satellites?What would it cost me?

That is hard to come by, but the best estimates we have, it's somewhere between eight to 20 cents a kilowatt hour.

Well 20 cents a kilowatt hour would be very expensive electricity.


And it's interesting, your book had pictures of the hands of some of the great catchers of those days, gnarled and twisted. Anybody who played catcher could expect to be crippled - their hands - for the rest of their lives.

Exactly. And people would say, you know, I don't know what this guy looks like but just look for a catcher's hands. And as soon as you'll see - you see those hands, you recognize, oh, that's - that must be who it was.

Are there stories about Deacon White?You mentioned he traveled from team to team. I guess he had one fantastic year in Boston. But what kind of a man was he?Do we know?

He was a really high-character man. In a time when baseball had a lot of guys who spent their evenings drinking and carousing, Deacon - he was known as Deacon because he went to church and he was a Sunday school teacher. And family came absolutely first for him.


Thank you.

You introduced your own proposal based on an idea that you've called unilateral disarmament. Can you explain that?And I'm assuming it doesn't have anything to do with guns.

No, absolutely not. Democrats have used the term unilateral disarmament when it comes to redistricting a number of times. It seems more often than not that it's Democrats taking the mantle of reform and Republicans not following suit. And so I have proposed a bill - and I will be proposing it again this year - for a two-state compact between us and Virginia.

Maryland does have some issues with redistricting that we do need to solve, and we do want to put it to a truly independent commission to be able to draw those lines. But Virginia has the same problems in the opposite direction. And I think if you look across the map, I think there are more states that have a Republican redistricting problem than a Democratic one. And so my bill, in addition to creating an independent commission, also requires that before we implement, Virginia does, as well.

So basically, everyone has to drop their arms at the same time. I want to get to the crux of the matter, though. Let's talk about Maryland. Democrats have a huge advantage in the state, and they hold seven of the state's eight seats in Congress. Is that good for the people of your state?Can it really show their will?


Well, this technology is fantastic. Basically, if you're about to rear-end someone, this technology will first warn you. And if you don't act, it will hit the brakes for you. And the data show that it could reduce rear-end crashes by 40 percent or more.

Now, I said it will be standard by 2022, but if I buy a new car today, am I likely to have this feature?

Honestly, it's 50-50. If we look at 2019 model year data, about half of the automakers sell vehicles where the technology comes standard. Toyota, for example, and Honda have been making a lot of this technology standard on their vehicles. With the others, you may have to pay thousands of dollars to get that technology.

Is there something troubling about offering a safety feature that can save lives that costs thousands of dollars extra?


Thank you.

Are there drawbacks to this kind of partnership?

Are there drawbacks to partnering with Bashar al-Assad?None that I can think of, Scott.

None that I can - of course, there are practical drawbacks. Which is to say when you partner or with a lying terrorist, it's not a stable relationship. They're not really good at stable relationships except with other lying terrorists. And there are profound moral consequences to this. And you know, you don't envy Barack Obama in this situation because he doesn't want to be a partner - in a perverse way, partner - with this terrible man and this terrible regime. On the other hand, if you can remove the chemical weapons from Syria, and that's an enormous if, who wouldn't jump at that chance?


I'm doing quite well. Always great to talk to you. We just heard from Deroy Murdock, who gave an analysis as a conservative, as a Libertarian conservative that basically said the president is doing us wrong by moving ahead with a program like TARP. Party lines have been divided over this, you know, within the Democratic and Republican parties. What's your perspective on the usefulness of TARP and how the money that has not been allocated is best used?

Well, let me kind a give you a little bit of the history of TARP. As you know, we were confronted with an emergency situation where the secretary, Secretary Paulson, came to us and said, we're in a crisis.

Over the weekend prior to his being in contact with us about our crises, he had engineered a big sale on Wall Street because it appeared that if one of the big banks that was involved in the sale had gone bust-up on that weekend prior to the markets opening on Monday morning, it would have triggered a depression.

When he came to us as the treasurer, knowledgeable about the economy, describing the dire situation, he had a four-page proposal. It really did shake everybody up. But we tried to put some meat on the proposal and not just give him what he was asking for with no strings attached.


I think, in essence, it's just because of what might happen if this ruling stands - court challenges, that Mexico will see a huge increase in asylum-seekers. And it's just something they aren't prepared to do. Look. Detention facilities in the southern border are overcrowded. They're dirty. They're ill-equipped for such large numbers now. And shelters are the same, they're at overcapacity at the southern and the northern Mexican borders.

So describe the system that is in place. I mean, Mexico must have some resources in place to handle the existing flow of asylum-seekers.

Yes, it has a Refugee Assistance Commission. It's called COMAR. And Mexico has a long history of accepting refugees. It was one of the biggest countries to take in Jews during the Holocaust. It took in the Spanish during their civil war, Guatemalan refugees during that country's long civil war. So it has always dealt with refugees. But the agency is overwhelmed. The numbers now coming into Mexico are huge.

For the first eight months this year, nearly 50,000 migrants have received refugee status or protection. That's almost a 70% increase over the same time last year. And Mexico's acceptance rate is pretty high too in some categories. You know, to get refugee protection asylum in Mexico, the bar is a lot lower than it is in the U. S. But Venezuelans are almost - get - 100% of the time they receive asylum, Guatemalans not so much.


Maybe they pass along in bodily fluids. Maybe they pass along through the air, on a cough or a sneeze. And those are the ones that become not just outbreaks but epidemics and pandemics.

And some humans are even call super-spreaders. Can you - do we know why some people are super-spreaders?

Well, we don't know why, but we know that it happens, this phenomenon of super-spreaders. It's a little bit similar to the famous case of Typhoid Mary, but a super-spreader is a person who becomes infected with one of these diseases, and then Typhoid Mary didn't show symptoms, but these super-spreaders generally show severe symptoms, and they pass their infection along to more than their share of secondary cases of other people.

For instance when SARS, SARS virus spilled over into humans in Southern China and then got to Hong Kong in 2003, it was amplified out of Hong Kong and went on to Toronto and Hanoi and Beijing and Singapore. But one of the reasons it was amplified is because there were a couple of super-spreaders in the case of SARS, two men who were very sick and who really spewed the virus out and infected a lot of health care workers.


How concerned are you, if at all, about the fact that the changes will now mean that the president, the head of the party, George Bush, will not be attending the convention, not be giving an address as he was scheduled to tonight, nor will Dick Cheney?

Well, I'm, you know, I was kind of halting between two opinions about that, whether the president would be there. I don't think that that would change very much. Of course, if you noticed, the president has not been very, very involved in the campaign of Senator McCain so far as public appearances. So that - and of course, that cemented my decision not to go, because when the president and the vice president was going to go, you know - and I feel that I have an obligation to the citizens that I serve as a committee person to be back home. The whole team didn't need to go.

Had the president and vice president gone, are you saying you would have gone then in that instance?

It would have been - in other words, the decision for me would have probably been harder for me to make the decision. But it was easy knowing that President Bush wasn't going to go.


Well, I think a lot of us have become inert to that. Certainly, we have problems in spades. And for any journalist who wants to come to the city and write about its resurgence, which is taking place in pockets in the city, they do well not to generalize because it shows that you're turning a blind eye to the people who've struggled the hardest to stay here.

Michael Jackman is managing editor of the Detroit Metro Times. Thanks so much for being with us.

It's my pleasure.

This is NPR News.


And one alternative for officials looking to monitor nonviolent offenders as they await trial are electronic monitoring devices - ankle bracelets. But according to a report in The New York Times, ankle monitors are often provided by private companies that can charge large fees for their services. In fact, defendants are often left to foot the bill - up to $10 a day. If they don't pay up or miss payments, they may end up behind bars anyway.

We wanted to talk about this, so we've called Blake Strode, executive director of ArchCity Defenders. They're one of the civil rights groups that brought a class-action lawsuit against the city of St.  Louis, which led to this week's cash bail changes. Blake Strode, welcome. Thanks so much for talking to us.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

So, first, would you just tell us the two big changes that the Missouri Supreme Court ruling is supposed to bring about?


Well, interestingly enough, Tracy and Amy have actually played husband and wife eight previous times in different productions. And so many of the audience members come in and actually mistake them for a real couple, which they are not, unlike Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, who were a real couple. And so it's interesting. Onstage they do come across as two people who have been together forever with all of those ineffable qualities of love and marriage and cruelty.

I'll put the plot just this way: a small college town dinner party from hell, in which the host and hostess play destructive verbal games. So, how do you get an audience to watch a three-hour play of a dinner party that they'd probably want to leave from as soon as possible?

There's a lot of wit. Of course, Edward Albee's classic play. And on stage, they're in this confined space. Unlike the film, they can't the leave the room. They can't get in the car and drive around. And so I think they rely a lot on their physicality and the comedy of that, the destruction of that. It's really interesting to see them sort of reinterpret this play just in one space with completely new characters. And it's as if this play were written five years ago instead of 50.

To the best of your knowledge, did they update it or is it just that, is it that penetrating?


No, not at all. And I've been pretty much apolitical my entire adult life. But this election is obviously quite different than previous presidential elections. So I just thought - I thought it was necessary to jump in and use my voice.

Why?

The prospects of Donald Trump being president just scare the hell out of me. And that's coming after having initially, you know, supported him and hoped that he would be 180 degrees different from what he turned out to be.

I mean, am I wrong?I seem to remember there was a time when you offered to be the running mate for either of them.

Oh, sure. Yeah, a lot of that was a little bit tongue-in-cheek. I didn't really expect that to happen. But, you know, there was a time when Donald first got into the race where I would talk to him on the phone.


Oh yes, in fact the conventional laser was only two years old, and it taught us that light could be coherent. But it didn't say anything about a semiconductor and whether the semiconductor would do this. And actually the furor started with Rediker's group from Lincoln Laboratories, MIT, reporting that they had gotten good spontaneous light out of gallium arsenide.

And then several of us went home and realized there ought to be a way to make that coherent, into a laser, and we did it. And - but I'm the guy that was crazy enough to make my own homemade alloy, which a lot of people didn't think would work, and shift it up to where the eye could see. And that's the whole basis of it.

Ah, did you - why did it take 50 years?

Well because these crystal systems are complicated, how to grow them is complicated. There are wrong methods and arguments about right ways to proceed, and it just - it's a zig-zag process. You make a bad move, and then you're going to make another move to find your way, and it just took a long while to get there.


OK, now let's talk nuts and bolts here, Nick. How close are we to actually getting something of practical use outside of the experimental laboratory here?

We don't know because we're relying on technology to improve to bring those prices down. But we've looked at what's been going on in the last few years, driven by genome research. And the most expensive stage is synthesizing DNA - the prices there drop by a factor of 10 about every five years. So 10 years from now, it will be 100 times cheaper, and our projections are that at that point it's something you or I might be able to afford to do for information that was of great value to us that we wanted to keep on something like a 50-year time scale.

And that's something like - you know, maybe that will be my children taking a video recording of their wedding and wanting to put that somewhere safe for their grandchildren. It will be expensive, but it will be possible. And if you care enough about the information you want to pass down through a couple of generations, you might choose to do it.

I'll place it on the shelf right next to my 3-D printer when I. . .


They are, yes, they're getting longer. Yeah, the Earth's spinning down. And this actually goes back to George Darwin's original idea that the Earth could have been spinning really fast because being the son of Charles Darwin, he was familiar with the fossil record, and there were these puzzles when you looked at certain fossils that should have little layers accreted on the - you know, I think it was corals every day.

You know, go deep back into the fossil record, and you start to see 400 layers accreted per year instead of 365. And so there was this evidence that there were more days per year, which indicates that the days were shorter. And so our days are lengthening, the months are lengthening. There's nothing you can do about it.

I think that's a great place to call it. Thank you, Dr.  Asphaug, for coming and joining us on the show.

Oh, you're most welcome, thank you.


Sounds like if you could meet with the president again, you would tell him the same thing you told him last time.

That's exactly right. Matter of fact, obviously that was the announcement there, but he was heading to Japan. And in the Oval Office, I said, Mr.  President, we need a trade agreement with Japan. We're losing market share there right now because others are entering that market at a lower tariff rate than what we are. Canada is taking our market share that we worked hard to earn. And the longer this goes on, the more harm it is. It's going to be the more difficult force to be able to regain. And so, Mr.  President, when you're talking to Abe, please let's get back into have a free trade agreement with Japan.

Is it frustrating though that you would have to tell them the same thing again when you thought less than two weeks ago you had a fix?

Well, compared to me not planting my corn, it's not that frustrating. So - but, you know, I think you've got to be understanding that on the rural playing field that yes, there are other issues. We can be patient. We know that - I would have a tendency to agree that there is unfair trade practices in other areas, and those need to be addressed. To a certain effect, we're getting sideswiped because it's not our product. It is what it is, but I think we need those that - we are true believers in free and fair trade. And so we want that in all sectors of society.


We've been covering the life and legacy of President George H. W. Bush today. A look now at his foreign policy; the first major foreign crisis for the U. S.  after the end of the Cold War occurred during his presidency. In August of 1990, Saddam Hussein, the leader of Iraq, ordered his army to invade Kuwait. The small gulf country was a major supplier of oil to the U. S.  Saudi Arabia was also worried. So in December, the United States launched Operation Desert Shield. We're going to turn now to a well-traveled war correspondent, our colleague, NPR's Deborah Amos. She arrived in Saudi Arabia two days after the invasion of Kuwait and was there for the duration. Deb, thanks so much for being with us.

Good morning, Scott.

Tell us about Gulf War I. It was preceded by a lot of diplomacy, wasn't it?

Well, he - President Bush is remembered for this phrase - this will not stand, this aggression against Kuwait will not stand. Here was a leader who - he was the last president who served in World War II. He was a diplomat. But what was important about the way he embraced this war, he was proud of being prudent. You know, it's said that. . .


And one more email.

And one more email, yeah. And it was quite literally the last email that I opened. And the email said, basically, Dear, Mr.  Feuer. Ever since I saw your story on the other Alan Feuer one year ago, I've been meaning to get in touch with you. I didn't want to do so while Alan was alive. Now, that he has passed away, would you like to know the truth about his background?

Well, you know, she - this woman who was, in fact, Alan's step niece. So, you know, imagine a, you know, a niece coming in by second marriage essentially. She went on to kind of flash out the family relationships, and she told me that while this life of grand society that I, in fact, had witnessed myself was absolutely true, the sort of back story that Alan had held up - Austrian blue blood, you know, mother live too long - all these stuff was, in fact, not true. And she said that, you know, if I wanted to get in touch with her, she would tell me, in fact, what the truth was. So I got in touch with her.

And this is a story of a man not from Austria but, in fact, born in Brooklyn and raised in Westchester?


Was it an easy decision for you to make?What was going through your mind when you made that switch?

No, it was definitely - it was easy decision for me to make. You know, before this, I wasn't really a very political person. As far as the guns go, you know - I don't try to talk too much about because I know becomes too polarizing. We have, you know, people that go to the right, and people go to left, and they forget about making schools safe. Listen. I believe in the Second Amendment. I believe in the right for people to bear arms. But I think that we can come to common ground to make responsible laws and decisions in how we can make our society safer.

You have two sons who are also in the Broward County School System. What have you talked about with them as they've headed back to school this year?

Sure. So I've had some tough conversations with them. I bought them a ballistic-resistant backpack.


But he knew deep inside that he did. He used to tell us that we walk - this is his quote. He used to tell us all the time. We walk on floors that we never scrubbed. We walk through doors that we never opened. I love that he never forgot where he came from.

And, speaking of beginnings, you were a white woman from Canada.

Right.

He was also known for hiring a large number of African American clerks at a time - and apparently, this is still not as common as many people. . .


He explained that that track was inspired by some of my darker paintings. And it certainly is a very, you know, intense piece. As the track goes on towards the end, you just hear a creaking sound. . .

SOUNDBITE OF TOR LUNDVALL AND JOHN B.  MCLEMORE'S "HIS DARKER PAINTINGS")

. . . Which - I don't know if it's his door or some part of the house, but everyone in the podcast in S-Town, they were talking about, you know, sometimes you just sit around and listen to the creakings in this house. So it was pretty amazing to hear that in the recording, yeah. Well, John - yeah. John took his own life in 2015. When John sent me emails, you know, discussing his depression and his loneliness, I didn't want to preach to him, but I just encouraged him. I said, you know, I'm hoping you continue recording, you know, and working more on music. Again, I knew nothing about anything about him. I just thought it would help transform his feelings of loneliness into, you know, more of a content solitude, which is, you know, kind of easy to say but not always easy to do. So I didn't want to preach to him, but, you know, I saw a lot of promise in his music. So I did try to encourage that.

That was musician and painter Tor Lundvall talking about his new album, "Tor Lundvall Presents: Witness Marks - The Works of John B.  McLemore".


So our school is actually majority minority, meaning we have a lot of immigrants and a lot of minorities in our school. And my school is very diverse, but also the administration, they do a very good job of accommodating to all of our needs. I don't say it enough in every interview, but my school is a great school. I don't hate my principal or any of the people in my school. I just think they made a mistake, and this is a learning opportunity for them.

So in the end, why didn't you just say, and remember, tomorrow is the first day for the rest of your life, have a great summer?

(Laughter) Why didn't I just give a generic speech?Because I feel like if change is going to happen, we are going to have to speak outside of the guidelines and we are going to have to break a few boundaries. What adults think that we want to hear at graduation is completely incorrect because all the graduating students that spoke to me afterwards, they were happy that I mentioned the names. And they were happy of the message I was trying to send to them because we have been living with these realities for a while. I'm not introducing a new idea at graduation when I say those names. I'm just remembering and paying respect and really making them understand the privilege.

What are you going to do now?


You have more than one toe.

OK. Right now we don't have any big toes. A big toe was swallowed in 2013 on purpose. And then we were using the alternate toe, but that only lasted for about two and a half years and just literally fell apart. So now we're working on what we call the secondary toes next to the big toe. So we're looking for big toes. If anybody out there has an extra big toe, we would really like it.

And, apart from the toe, what exactly goes into a sour toe cocktail.

OK. According to Yukon Health, it has to be served in 80-proof alcohol. So that could be whiskey, rum, tequila. The traditional is Yukon Jack. Captain Dick Stevenson's favorite drink - he's the guy who started the toe in 1973.


I guess that's the point. We don't know who it is.

But I will give you a little clue. Watch Murray State, from the highly unheralded Ohio Valley Conference, mainly because of one player. It is a super-guard named Ja Morant. He leads the nation in assists per game. He loves to dunk. He is an absolute whirl on the court. And where he came from is the fun part of this story. So he was way off the radar screen of coaches and scouts. He was a high school kid from a small town in South Carolina. A Murray State assistant goes down to his town to scout some players. So he's in this gym. He gets hungry and asks someone, OK, where's the concession stand?They tell him. He leaves the main gym.

On his way to the concession stand, he hears a basketball bouncing in a side gym. He pokes his head in, and who does he see?Ja Morant playing in a three-on-three game. He is dazzled. He calls the head coach of Murray State and says, this kid's going to be a pro. He's now in the tournament, and he's coming to an NBA city soon.

Wow.


I heard you talking to Ron about how people react - or how President Bush was reacting today, and people here who watched the speech on the Jumbotron at the restaurant where I am actually laughed at Bush's reaction shots during President Obama's speech, particularly when President Obama said America is a friend of each nation and we are ready to lead.

But other than that, people here were rapt. They sat with tears in their eyes. Couples held onto each other. They cheered through the speeches. They cheered when the Carters and Clintons came out. They even cheered when Obama's daughters were taking pictures with the camera. People here were really excited.

Would you say that there was a generational difference noticeable at all between the people who were there who responded to what they saw on the Jumbotron?

Actually, no. Where I am, people brought their children, people brought their grandparents. It was a very racially-mixed crowd, and I actually spoke to one woman. She's 64. Her name's Renee Durant(ph). She was here in 1968 during the riots. She said she was so glad to be alive to see this. Her 96-year-old father, who was in an assisted-living facility in Virginia, was watching it as well, and they were so glad to be here. Across the table from her was a white couple who brought their toddler, who was wearing an Obama T-shirt. They were equally glad to be here. It was really quite something to watch. Very emotional.

So from their standpoint, it clearly is, truly is a new day and a new way of looking at things, correct?


I'm not so sure that it was missed, per se. I think it's been there at the forefront of the news for a really long time. I just don't think that we saw the potential that it would impact the election in the way that it did, insofar as it's tied up in these other economic and social struggles that are occurring within the same communities.

And to be clear again, you're not saying that people that have a problem with opioids or drug or alcohol voted for Donald Trump so much as people who live in those communities that have been affected by it statistically in your study voted for Donald Trump.

Well, that's right. And I can't say necessarily who voted for Donald Trump, but we have to remember that addiction and depression and these diseases and deaths of despair go far beyond the individuals themselves who are affected by them. They affect friends and family members and coworkers and first responders and service providers and employers in communities who are dealing with the struggles of these and experience the same sort of frustration and anxiety that are associated or wrapped up within diseases and deaths of despair.

You conclude your study by - I believe the quote is community level well-being played an important role in this election.


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

We get it.

Uh-huh.

We Shakespeare fans.


The former late head of Fox News.

That's right. And so he was pretty enamored of Herman Cain's life story - that he was this, you know, pizza magnate and that he had this 9-9-9 plan. And he was very kind of compelling character.

So not necessarily the current president?

Well, no. But, I mean, I can't say that, you know, Donald Trump doesn't invade the psyche a little bit. I was around Donald Trump quite a bit during those years. And I did interview him quite a bit. So he also permeated some of my thought process. But that wasn't who I was channeling.


The Iowa caucus is a communal affair. People don't cast ballots alone in voting booths. They go to caucuses where people speak out and eventually cast a vote. Opinion polls don't matter in caucuses, only the number of supporters who come to a caucus and vote for a candidate. And if you're wondering, no alcohol is served, though I do remember an extraordinary strawberry pie in Indianola, Iowa. NPR political editor Domenico Montanaro joins us. Domenico, thanks so much for being with us.

Thank you for having me.

The Democrats and Republicans do it differently, don't they?

They certainly do. Republicans, very simple, can get that out of the way pretty easily. People start to make speeches. They try to win over people to vote. But then people just fold over their papers, turn them in. It's a very informal secret ballot. Democrats on the other hand. . .


I actually haven't done the calculation, but if you can separate the light of the planet from the star, then you can do spectroscopy on it. And so you can look for the biomarkers of CO2 and methane and water and those kinds of gases, and that will tell you whether there's processes going on that generate oxygen and such, which tells a lot about whether there's biology going on on the planet.

This has been described as an unexpected discovery. Why was it so surprising?

Well it was because we weren't particularly looking for planets. Based on the work we did on 40307, we realized that the activity of the star is masking a lot of the potential planet signals. So that sort of clued the lead author, Mikko, into developing a technique that can more carefully and more accurately model the activity due to spots and flares on the surface of the star.

And it - so what we decided to do then, since we didn't know anything about star activity, was to pick a star that had lots of observations, thousands of observations from multiple groups, but didn't have any known planets around it, figuring we would just be studying only the activity. And when we learned how to model that activity and removed it from the analysis, out popped five planets very unexpectedly.


I don't think about what they don't have. I don't think in those terms. But for me, you know, I was not only the Budget Committee chairman and the chief architect of the '97 agreement where we balanced the budget for the first time since we walked on the moon and had big surpluses, but I also served on the Armed Services Committee, so I was deeply engaged in national security policy. And my private sector experience was invaluable. And now I am an executive of, you know, one of the most important states in America. I don't mean just politically, but economically. And no matter who you are - drug addicted, mentally ill, working poor, autistic, disabled, minority - you're all in the Ohio family. Everybody should have a chance to rise. That's our philosophy in Ohio and that's my philosophy for America.

Do you want to overturn the Affordable Care Act?

I'd like to replace it with a health care system that would be market-driven, that would begin to shift us to quality-based health care rather than quantity-based health care. In other words, with the primary care doctor being the shepherd to shepherd us through our health care needs, with insurance companies and hospitals working together to share profits, to share the gains they make by keeping people healthy rather than treating them on the basis of how they're sick.

It's often pointed out that you use the Affordable Care Act law to expand Medicaid coverage in Ohio. Does that suggest to you that the law known as Obamacare has helped people?


Let's wrap up, Ron, by talking about taxes. The House wants to try to pass a tax bill - an overhaul bill - by Thanksgiving. What can we look forward to there?

This week, we should see the pigs start coming out of the poke. The tax chairman on the House side, Republican Kevin Brady, is going to show us what his details show - legislative language. We're going to find out really who's going to be paying more, who's going to be paying less. And that could really kick off some political fallout.

Right because, obviously, the devil is in the details. And the vote could be very slim, at least on the Senate side, right?They can't afford to lose many at all.

That's right. Maybe they can lose 2 and still prevail in the Senate because their margin is basically 2. But we've got Rand Paul from Kentucky and Bob Corker of Tennessee both saying they don't want to add to the deficit. As it stands now, this plan would add 1. 5 trillion to the national debt.


It certainly looks like he has taken a fatal downturn, and he needs to turn his campaign around totally. And he needs to show us that he really wants it. He has the organization, the money. There is still time. There'll be more debates. He can do it if he really wants it, but he's got to show us that.

A lot of talk about the way CNBC ran the debate. And as a matter of fact, the Republican National Committee has suspended its agreement with NBC for a later debate. How do you read this?

Another effective counterpunch, really. Moderators had tough questions here. They were challenging, and they bordered at times on the insulting, contemptuous. The candidates were bristling at this. And then Ted Cruz really unloaded on it with a big screed about the mainstream media bias, and it brought down the house - very sympathetic audience, by the way. And all of the candidates started fighting back, things got unruly. And then after the debate, the candidates' staffs all complained to the Republican National Committee chairman, and he pulled the plug on NBC's contract. You know, we're going to have some - probably see some format changes here with regard to some of the other upcoming debates on other networks that the Republicans have contracted with.

Regardless of any political motives, could the debate format stand some tinkering after we've seen three of them?


Forty gigabytes. OK, so you're - I mean, you're doing pretty good. I mean, the average person actually carries around 1,700 songs. I had no idea, I don't carry that many songs with me.

Yeah, I have a lot.

And this is just some - so they launched this in back in 2003. I don't know how - you know, in Internet time, you start to forget how soon these things were launched, but it's been less than about - a little over five years and over 8 - 5 billion songs. They have over 8million tracks, and I did the math on this, it's what?It's 2. 6 million songs every day that they've sold, 2. 6 since iTunes started - million.

So we have to wrap up but before we let you go, does this mean that the essential question of, is the music industry going to die, is resolved?Meaning, that people will pay for music, they're just going to pay for it online, or is that whole question of revenue for the music industry still very present?


Right. As far as I could tell, it wasn't so much derogatory as he wanted to create a mental picture to the listeners, you know, on radio, to say, OK, it was created in one big bang and so on.

And so what was his big blunder?

So the big blunder was - so he came up with a theory that was - that the universe is in a steady state. Namely the universe is always the same. It always was the same and always will be the same. And - but he also knew that the universe is expanding. So for the universe to stay the same, for example, for the density of matter to not change, he had to create matter in the universe. Because as the universe was getting larger, he had to have new matter there for the density to stay the same.

So this in itself was not a blunder. When he suggested this, it was a beautiful idea because, you know, we say the universe is the same everywhere and in every direction. And he wanted to add to that and that every time. So that, you know, sounded very elegant.

The blunder was that after about 15 years, when evidence started accumulating that this is really not the way the universe behaves but in fact the universe does evolve and change, he stubbornly refused to accept that.


Yeah, that was easy. Planet Fitness was the best job actually because I could do my little squats behind the desk. There was always time to just like mess around and just do whatever.

But Uber seems like that would offer a lot of storytelling possibilities.

Oh, my gosh, it did.

Do you think we'll find some of that in your songs at some point?


It's a very large number. According to my client, it's only happened on one or two occasions, and she recalls one fairly recently in the last administration where a decision was overridden, but the supervisor explained the rationale and how the security concerns were mitigated. And she was willing to go along with his decision because it made sense.

In your client's complaint, the 25 people who were given security clearances are not named, but there has been reporting that President Trump overrode the decision of career officials to grant his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a clearance. Can you tell us whether he's one of the people involved here?

I can't comment on that. My client is not willing to discuss individual security determinations. She thinks it would be improper.

Now that these accusations are in the hands of Congress and in the public eye, where does it go from here?


Inside of his house, family pictures decorate the walls and the fridge. Les has 15 great grandchildren. He grew up in an orphanage, and he couldn't wait to leave to join the military. And so in early 1944, he boarded a ship and crossed the Atlantic Ocean to go to the frontline.

I loved that sailing on, of course. It was so dramatic. You could see all these ships bobbing up and down on the ocean. And destroyers were weaving in and out of them to make sure they uncovered any mines or anything.

When he got to England for the first time, he met other paratroopers who'd already seen combat. Les was a rookie with something to prove.

It was hard to make friends.


I think hemp is certainly an opportunity for small-scale farmers like myself. And I see the future of agriculture in trouble on the major commodities such as corn, wheat and soybeans because these prices are too low for farmers to stay in business.

And is that because the timing is such that, you know, waiting it out has different meaning in farming than it does in other jobs, for example, right. I mean, like, waiting out, you have to plan so far ahead and - that you can't just - it's not a 90 day problem. Is that what I'm hearing from you?

Exactly. And for the people that are listening, most Americans pay their bills every 30 days. Farmers pay their bills basically twice a year. Like right now, I'm getting ready to sell my winter wheat, which is coming for harvest next month. So I receive a payday there - hopefully it's a fair payday - and then my soybean crop later on this fall.

So we plan our operations a year out. And I thought by now that there would be a big change in the commodity price for soybeans. And that simply hasn't happened. And this president is playing footsie with American agriculture and American farmers here.


I think it's really important to say that scientists are really late to the party. Science has been under attack for a long time. And really, what's happened is that scientists are scared to engage with politics. They're worried about looking biased. They're worried about their funding. But really that's been a terrible strategy. It's meant that bad science policy decisions have been made.

But would you be holding this march, do you think, if it were President Hillary Clinton in the White House?

I think there is a catalyst in seeing how intense the attacks are right now. We have to acknowledge that, yes.

Are there specific goals you all are trying to achieve in terms of advancing one policy or another?


. . . Quote, "a slap in the face" and then said, it was like him spitting on me. Must hurt to hear those words from your mother, even thirdhand.

Not necessarily. I mean, my mom is a very strong-willed person. And it's something to where I disagree with her very wholeheartedly and very politely. And even if it does hurt, I know that that's not a reaction that is deserved. So I try not to take it too much to heart.

Yeah. You don't doubt her love, but you do question her judgment.

Yeah, absolutely. That's a great way to put it. And I think a lot of people that are in a similar situation as mine can question a parent's, you know, love or care for their child to deny them a medical procedure. And some people can even compare vaccines to something like a seat belt. How would you love a child and deny them the safety of a seat belt?


Yeah, it was a - it opens - they - a trade fair and Dismas notes that there are two adjacent booths, each offering a complete crown of thorns for sale.

(Laughter).

He thinks, you know, unfortunate placement there, you know?But these things existed.

And at one point, Dismas is told to translate the Shroud of Turin. Is that 16th century spin?


Ambassador Araud, that raises a larger question: What's the future of the United Nations if it can't find a common course of action for what is one of the preeminent disasters on the planet?

But, you know, I'm always, frankly, I'm always a bit surprised by this sort of question because actually United Nations itself, you know, it's a group of these united nations. The United Nations may work on when its members decide to work together on a lot of issues. For instance, the (unintelligible) conflict. The members of Security Council are so divided that the U. N.  can't do anything, as you know. So, the United Nations is effective when on some issues, the member states decide that they have a common interest to find a common solution. And there are a lot of issues where we don't succeed to do it. Frankly, on Afghanistan, Iraq, the (unintelligible) conflict, the whole of the U. N.  is very marginal. There are issues in Africa where we are working together. But on a lot of issues we simply can't, and it's not the responsibility of the United Nations; it's the responsibility of the nations, which disagree.

Yeah. Looking forward to your next rotation?

My next rotation, it's in 15 months.


Might give them a viral moment on YouTube.

It could, indeed, give them a viral moment on YouTube. So that's part of the game that's being played. But what the Democrats are trying to do here is educate the public about what this president did and how he did it. And they've got a witness who has impeccable credentials. I don't think the Republicans are going to try to undercut this man. He is one of them. And he served his country. And he did this not because he was looking for a job. He did it because he thought somebody had to do it.

Well, let's get down to the prognostication part of this conversation. Robert Mueller has been pretty plain about how he doesn't want to testify and has nothing to say beyond the report. Do you support his logic?

Well, you know, there've been some very powerful commentary about his position. A former deputy solicitor general, deputy attorney general, a fellow by the name of Donald Ayer wrote a rather sharply worded piece kindly but clearly saying that Mueller had a duty to actually go beyond the four quarters (ph) because of what's happened. Attorney General Barr has tried to discredit his work. He's actually belittled his work. And as Ayer says, you know, this man's got to step up and defend his work and not be rolled over. I think he'll do that.


Right. Exactly. As you said, at the end of a marathon, basically everybody's carrying something often for a runner who's coming in over the line. So what now seems suspicious might seem less so. Although when you look at the faces of the two suspects on the video, they didn't seem - they seemed like they did stand out a bit. I'm not saying that I would've noticed it, trained observer that I am. But. . .

Mm-hmm. That's right.

. . . as we all think that we are. But again, in hindsight, 20/20, as they always say.

And 20/20 hindsight, again, the questions have to be asked. Is it fair to ask the Boston Police Department, did you drop the ball considering the sacrifices everybody made in the week that followed?


Well, you know, this is having a lot of different effects. So you know, some of the students have been expelled. Their admissions have been revoked. Some of the coaches have been fired. They face charges - athletic coaches who were involved in misrepresenting people as being recruits. And of course the legal cases are going to continue to unfold.

But I'm also interested in how it's unfolding in the broader culture at large. You know, whether you look at things like - we had a big debate last year about Harvard and affirmative action. And these conversations about things like legacy admissions are really bringing us to a broader conversation about, what do these elite colleges really offer?You know, the fact that they have nonprofit status - are they really serving the public, or are they just acting in a way that's really inflating their own bottom line and their own brands?

And so I think there's a broader conversation about, are there better ways to have admissions?And can we define excellence in education some other way other than, you know, something that's really expensive and only lets in about 5 percent of people who get to apply?

And for all that conversation, just in our last 30 seconds or so, do you see signs of systemic change coming?


We don't really know at this moment. But we do know that Director Comey has been under tremendous pressure ever since his announcement back in July. Republicans have been ripping him for not going further than his criticism of Secretary Clinton, which was quite strong, for her extreme carelessness.

And, you know, Donald Trump has been casting doubt on the legitimacy of the whole process. And here's the thing - the director might well have expected that if there is something being discussed internally at the FBI about these Weiner emails, whatever they are, that would become public at some point, whether he wanted that to happen or not. And he didn't want to appear to have suppressed them.

What's your estimation, as we speak today, on how this affects the presidential election in 10 days?

Well, let's start with the obvious, it's a tremendous boon to the Trump campaign. They've been thrown a life preserver of sorts. They had just had another week of mostly bad news, mostly down in the polls. We had just learned how far behind they are in terms of fundraising. We found out that the candidate himself had not contributed nearly as much money to the effort as he had promised back in 2015. And there was beginning to be something of an air of resignation about elements of the Trump campaign. . .


And this was a, well, not too far down the road from Berkeley but a little less glamorous.

The school, I think, was, you know, you have moments in your reporting where this sort of weight of what has happened weighs on you. And I think that when that happened to me, it was just on my fourth or fifth visit to the school. And I just looked at the building and just saw how unremarkable it was and just how forgettable it was. I mean, it was - the closest thing to that building in that industrial stretch of Oakland is a Wal-Mart. Actually, some of the employers from Wal-Mart came down and put up a sign of support.

But there is nothing there. And, you know, the insides of the school are in bad conditions, and the idea that this was a university, like, you never ever would have suspected that this was a place of learning. And, you know, across the Bay Area and also across Southern California, there are a lot of these, sort of, for-profit, small, I guess, learning institutions that cater towards immigrants who need a cheaper form of education.

A degree


Really bad, bad things.

Those are very difficult things to cope with, and certainly, those are realities unfortunately for millions of Americans. There are some things that we can do things about and there are some things we can't do things about. But if we focus on how you change the way you look at it, what you do, how you communicate, clarifying and prioritizing your values, becoming part of the community, helping other people, you don't have to wait six months to do those things. You can start doing some of those things today.

You don't even have to wait till you're laid off to do these things. Let's just put that out there.

You know, it's a way of living your life that works well all the time, but it's a great set of tools to have during this particular time, the time in between jobs.


Well, I think - you know, I think there's always a push and pull between the White House and the State Department. But this was a little bit different because I certainly had not seen situations in which State - because it was being so very gutted and because we didn't have many senior officials - was getting left out of so much that was being attempted.

Have you seen a shift within the State Department since Mike Pompeo has come onboard?Obviously, Rex Tillerson oversaw a reduction of staff. We saw 60 percent of high-level, career State Department diplomats leave the service, you among them. Has that trend reversed itself under Mike Pompeo?

There are very encouraging signs in terms of Secretary Pompeo's attention to management issues, lifting hiring freezes, trying to move forward. Those are relatively narrow in scope of what he's trying to do right now. And I think in terms of policy changes, it's impossible to tell whether those will make a difference in terms of either retention of people or attraction of new people, et cetera. So my view right now is, you know, sort of we'll see. But it is always better for the State Department to have in place a secretary who has the president's ear and has a good relationship with him. So in that respect, I think most State Department officials are pleased. But it's early days yet.

That was Roberta Jacobson, the former U. S.  ambassador to Mexico. We'll be taking WEEKEND EDITION to Mexico this coming week, where we'll get the view from our neighbor to the south ahead of their pivotal elections. That's a week from today.


Well, the - there in every single state, and the data changes state by state, but in every single state, there is a huge disproportionality between the number of particularly African-Americans, but also Latino youths, who wind up in high-level facilities, as opposed to Caucasians youth who wind up in high-level facilities.

And by high level you mean the higher security, more. . .

I mean, higher - yes, more intensive, more secure facilities. Ironically, or maybe not so ironically, when you look at high - facilities that have a high-level of treatment, you'll see disproportionally white youth in the high-level of treatment facilities. But from the very first day, when we start with arrests, which I'm sure you're very familiar with, but moving on through the system, there is continuous and increased disproportionality.

That doesn't even deal with the real disproportionality in the system, between families that have assets, and the families that have fewer assets. So, youth in the juvenile justice system are primarily African-Americans and Latinos that are almost entirely low-income youth.


We're going to begin this hour following two developing stories. Odessa, Texas, police officials say at least five people were killed and 21 others injured in a shooting spree. Three law enforcement officers were shot. And a person believed responsible was also shot and killed. We are going to continue to follow that story and provide updates as details are confirmed.

But now we're going to turn to the Bahamas, where they are bracing for Hurricane Dorian. The Category 4 storm is gaining strength and approaching Category 5 status. It's expected to make landfall on the northwestern part of the islands tomorrow, and some short-term models predict as much as 64 inches of rain could could fall over the Northern Bahamas once the storm stalls. Joining us from the Bahamas is Rick Lohr. He is the general manager of the Abaco Beach Resort. That's in Marsh Harbour on the island of Abaco, which is in the path of the storm.

Mr.  Lohr, thanks so much for joining us.

My pleasure.

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


Yes.

. . . Origins of the book.

So the seeds of this book really were planted within me 18 years ago. I've been carrying them and nurturing them for a very long time. In 2001, I was a young, queer immigrant woman here in the United States, and I was really urgently seeking a deeper understanding of my own country of origin, Uruguay, and how it connects to queer truths and histories.

I was going through my own personal moment where my parents were disowning me and saying that I couldn't be both gay and Uruguayan at the same time. In Uruguay, it is true that, you know, 20 years ago, queer voices were much less visible. I mean, in all of my research of the dictatorship history, the queer stories are simply not recorded.


Yeah. So the brain obviously is functioning at a much higher level, but we should understand that the brain alone is not causing the weight loss. The brain's metabolism is causing for different reaction to occur in your body, like increased stress, like loss of appetite, like disturbed sleep patterns. And because of all of these different factors that the brain is setting off - that is the reason they're losing weight.

I want to talk about world champion Magnus Carlsen from Norway. You learned about his training regimen. Tell me about the moment he realized that he needed a competitive edge and what he did to get it.

Yeah. So it's interesting with Magnus Carlsen - he realized early on that fixing small things, like what he drinks during the course of a game, will alter the way he functions, especially in the last hour or so of the game. And so one of the things that was really fascinating about this was when I was talking to his dad. His dad was like, oh, we went to the Olympic Training Center. And they were told immediately that the orange juice that he was drinking was causing for the sugar levels to take a huge dip in the fifth and sixth hours of game. And so they were asked to replace that with milk.

Meaning he'd have a little energy crash. So the idea is you need to keep yourself sustained with something that gives you energy but won't have the crash and that you need to do that even if you're not skiing, right. . .

Exactly. Exactly.


Right. You have this really shocking statistic in your article where you say that personal consumption amounts to 70 percent of the American economy.

Yeah, that's right. Basically, we are the engine of our own economy. And for far too long apparently, we've just been swiping our Visa cards willy nilly and pumping up this economy. The worry is that when we stop doing that, which is what's happening, our economy is going to sag.

So you went out to see if it was sagging. You went to the Mall of America. What did you find?

The most ambitious mall in the United States, the mall that is doing the most to put you in the fugue state that allows you to spend. They're up against it at the Mall of America. What I found was a lot of people who weren't shopping all that much and a lot of people that were counting their pennies in a way that they never had before.


There are plenty of great public colleges like UCLA. They used to be much cheaper than equally strong private colleges. But now the price of many public colleges is rising fast, and that leaves some high school students with little or no choice for higher education, including African-American students. So what options do you have if you want to get an education but don't want to run up years' worth of student loans?We'll ask economist and author Dr.  Julianne Malveaux; she is the president of Bennett College. Hi, Dr.  Malveaux.

Hi Farai, how are you?

I'm great. Across the country, though, public and state universities are reporting anywhere from a 5 to 8 percent tuition increase for the upcoming year. Why is that?

Costs are rising. If you are running a college, you are looking at energy costs, you are looking at the same costs that the rest of the nation is looking at. And so people are raising tuitions to go along with that. Some of us are not. Bennett College's tuition has been stable for the last three years. We are not raising tuition this year. But many colleges are looking at the costs and saying, we've got to meet it. In addition, frankly, there have been years where colleges have not raised costs, and now people are trying to catch up. In some state universities, people have not seen raises in two or three years, they have seen pay freezes, and so now we are trying to catch up. Lots of people are trying to catch up.


Let's start with what's happening in those factories that produce or produced all those goods that we just couldn't get enough of during the boom. What's happening there now?

The scene on the shop floors in China is a grim one. There are tens of thousands of factories being closed, many thousands already shuttered. Those numbers don't tell you how big those factories are. China has factories with everything from five people in them to 150,000 people in them.

But the story is bad. I mean, if you just count the migrant workers who have lost their jobs in the last seven months, that count's up to over 10 million. And that's a government number, so it's probably low.

So, it could be many more than 10 million.


So what I've heard today is that the attack that was feared has begun. The Kurds are already moving people to try to defend their positions against the Turkish tankers. And that raises the problem that worries me most, which is that the ISIS prisoners who are being held are - about 11,000 of them, I'm told - could begin to escape, posing a whole new security problem for the U. S.  and all of its allies.

I'm going to talk about the implications of that in a bit. But first, I want to walk through some of the various players in this conflict and their objectives. First, Turkey - what do they hope to gain from this move?

Turkey has said for many months now that it wants a security corridor in northern Syria. It has deep animosity toward the Syrian Kurdish group known as the YPG, which it says is part of the PKK. Forgive all the initials. But these are - they're Kurdish nationalist groups, and the Turks claim that they're terrorists, that they've attacked and killed Turks. So they want the security corridor.

The problem is that the Turks, in trying to take the zone, risk destabilizing an area where security was won at great cost by the Syrian Kurdish militia known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, aided by U. S.  Special Forces. So there's fear that this area will just descend into chaos quickly as the Turkish troops come in.


Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So he's not exactly saying that what he said was offensive.

Or maybe he's, like, opening up, like, a hotline for people to call up and be like, hey, listen; I was - being very charitable there.

Right, OK.  And then meanwhile, while all of this is going on with Shane Gillis, another one of the new cast members who was announced this week for "SNL" was Bowen Yang, who's actually the show's first Asian American cast member, so this is kind of awkward timing.


Nice to be here, Lulu.

Why study Mars's core?What can it teach us?

We know the outside of Mars, and we understand the inside of the Earth. And one of the reasons we're interested in Mars is because it's a planet of a similar sort of size to the Earth and Venus. So getting into the interior of it will help us understand how long it took for it to cool down because it's now a cooler planet than the Earth. It no longer does all that exciting plate tectonic stuff that the Earth does. And we'll get a sense of how stiff the external crust is, how malleable the mantle is and whether the core is liquid or not. Those are all the things that really matter for the physics of the Earth, so we assume they're going to matter for the physics of Mars, too.

The first successful Mars landing was almost 50 years ago, which is quite a while. And many have failed since then. Why?How hard is it actually to get there?


So that was kind of a puzzle. Why do we have this sort of high density of angular momentum in the Earth-moon system, and the other planets are spinning slower?And so it came up with this idea that hey, Mars hit the Earth, gave it its spin, not Mars itself but a planet like Mars. . .

Is that the Theia, or is that something different?

That's Theia. That's the Mars-sized planet that people have been invoking all these years, for about the last 40 years now. And that led to detailed models and dozens and dozens of papers exploring this idea of fleshing out various scenarios. And in the last 10 years, we really thought we were approaching the endgame, where we could make the Earth, we could give it its spin, we could, you know, make a moon. . .

And you had it all wrapped up?


All right.

. . . I will say. . .

My generation.

(Laughter) This is - you know, the past two years have, of course, been dominated by the Russia investigation, the Mueller probe. And that was centered on the idea of foreign influence in the 2016 election from Russia. And now we have, you know, what appears to be a conversation between President Trump and the president of Russia's neighbor Ukraine talking about looking into a political opponent, Joe Biden, and his son. And so this does raise questions, again, about foreign interference and what the president is inviting or doing heading into the 2020 campaign.

If we can get a yes-or-no question, have you confirmed that this is the subject of the whistleblower's complaint?


There's a voice that we have not heard a lot from lately and I want to ask you about it. I'm talking about fed chief Ben Bernanke. He seems to have all but disappeared from the headlines. Why is that we aren't hearing more from him as the stimulus package gets debated?

Well, Bernanke's role is to manage U. S.  monetary policy - what does money cost, bank regulations, all that stuff. So frankly he doesn't have very many arrows in his quiver yet left. He's got - I think we're down to, you know, under one percent for the federal funds rate. So there's not a lot of pontificating around interest rates that Bernanke can do. He ought to be of greater voice around the stimulus especially around as you - strategy, the bad bank strategy you mentioned.

I believe that what he's doing really is letting the Obama economic team get their feet wet. Very, very soon we ought to be hearing that he and the Treasury secretary have met. He's not an Alan Greenspan. If you think back to 1992 when Clinton was elected, Greenspan immediately jumped out there and was almost a jockeying between Greenspan and Clinton. And Greenspan made it clear, hey, I'm the money guy, I'm in charge of this, guys. And he, you know, he went to the White House, he had very long meeting with Clinton. It's been written about by - it's been written about it, you know, the Washington Post reporter has written extensively about that meeting, Carl F - Bernstein.

Bernstein.


The Booger-Eater is - and that's an important character in here in that he sort of Rafe's first real friend. And he's a kid - I'm really - it's a big deal to me, beyond physical bullying, verbal bullying. And with this kid, you know, he was nicknamed the Booger-Eater when he was, like, three or four years old and it stuck with him. And that happens to kids. They kind of get a caricature and it's very hard for them to get away from it.

There are some other characters: Dweebs, Smurf.

The Legend.

The Legend, yeah.


I do. And there was a series that was done on PBS. I think it was - I can't remember which report - I think it was Andrea Mitchell, I'm not sure, where she did a lot of interviews with Generation Next. And these are the young people in our society who are just going into high school. And these are the young people in our society who are just going in to high school. And these are young people who have totally different ideas about race than we do and how they can get along with each other. But what was missing was concrete information, science and history and an understanding of social structure, so that they could have these conversations. So part of what I'm excited about is this is a project that gives young people, who are already thinking about bridging gaps and already thinking about bridging divides of culture and race, to have tools to talk about this in ways that our generation did not.

Yolanda, thank you so much.

You are welcome.

Yolanda Moses is on the advisory board of a project called "Race - Are We So Different?"She's also vice-provost for diversity and conflict resolution at the University of California at Riverside.


No. And it's hard one wisdom that is a positive thing, you know?What would we be if we didn't learn from where we've been?And I think the more effort you spend pushing things away so that you don't have to feel them, see them, experience them, the more exhausted you become. And it's just inevitable that your arms go down and you have to go through them. And so that's what I think of as what's happened here with this record.

Mary Chapin Carpenter, who's on tour here in St.  Louis in support of her new album, "Ashes and Roses. "You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. We have time for another song.

We do?

And magically, you've changed guitars silently.


Yeah, Charles Bergquist is usually the victim of doing it.

Well, thank you, Charles.

And this year, it's September 20th?

September 20th. It's a Thursday night and the winners are going to be coming and great secrecy from five continents.


The European ambassador was musing about a possible project used as old British plantation - very impressive - deep in the mountains of Central Africa. You know, in Southern Sudan, you get up at these pretty big mountains, 7 - 10,000 feet and, oh, beautiful plantation of perfectly straight trees that have been growing for 60 years, untouched. So the investors say, well, we've helped them, you know, get a project going to make timber out of a few of these and open a road and then they can use the money to get more tools, and then they'll use that to get a little cottage system going for eco-tourists. And it could happen.

It could happen, but you also point out the same roads can be use by the poachers?

Yes. There is that threat. Most people in South Sudan really don't know what poaching is. This is how they've lived for centuries. It's a rural society so they rightly view it as their way of their way of survival, but does sweep the forest clean of animals. I'll say the only animals I saw in the forest were dead.

Though you did ran into a wild boar.


How does it manifest?

Well, it's strange. But I think I can see it in the eyes of people when they approach me. And a lot of mothers who have lost their children do approach me, and I can see it. I can feel it even before they reach me. And it's like it's a secret society that nobody wants to be a part of, but we offer one another comfort because we know the pain that we still feel.

So more conversations like this, more personal revelations, more scrutiny, more campaigning, having to defend your husband's record, the anxiety of a potential loss after giving so much - are you really ready to do this again (laughter)?

I am ready. I am ready. I wouldn't have done it. . .


They have been sheltered. And now, several of - because Salvini said, I won't accept them unless other countries take them. And several other European countries have agreed to divide them up.

And meanwhile, in general, migrants are continuing to come to Europe in big numbers.

Not really. There's been a huge drop in the first six months of this year - 2,100, compared to about 14,300 the year before. That's an 85% drop.

Yeah.


And we simply took surgical samples of the sinus lining from patients with chronic sinusitis and healthy individuals who didn't have sinus disease but were in for surgery for different indications. And we simply compared those samples and asked the question, what's different between patients with chronic sinusitis and healthy individuals?And we show that the sinusitis patients had this incredible collapse of the microbial community in their sinus cavity.

And they were characterized by having kind of an outgrowth or an enrichment of this one bacterium called corynebacterium tuberculostearicum - it's quite a mouthful - and we know very little about it. And as it turns out, this organism typically lives on the skin and really doesn't do anything harmful there. But in the context of a loss of the microbial diversity and this organism there in very high numbers, this is what characterized the patients.

So we moved on to look at this in mice and to really see if something that we consider to be not very harmful in one context could, under this depletion of the microbiome, cause hallmarks of disease. And that's indeed what we found in our murine studies, in our mouse studies.

So if you had a healthy population to offset the bad bacteria, that kept you feeling better and not. . .


OK.

OK.  Palace Council?

Well, the term palace council in the title is left as a semi-mystery to the reader, but I'll give a bit of a clue. It's a clue to the structure of the conspiracy that Eddie and Aurelia spend the book trying to tease out. The conspiracy that I mentioned influenced the highest levels of American government. I kind of like the name, because the idea of a palace council is the advisors behind the throne, rather than the people exercising authority. And that's, of course, how the powerful families in this book see themselves.

Agony?

The term Agony in the novel is the name of a radical, left-underground group in the 1960s that blows things up. I made up the name, but not the idea. Eddie's sister, Junie (ph), disappears early in the novel, then turns up later on as a member of this radical, underground group, and Eddie spends most of the novel really trying to search for his sister. For him the conspiracy isn't central, for him his sister is central. Aurelia, my other protagonist, is trying to track down the conspiracy. Eddie runs into the conspiracy while trying to track down his sister.


Yes.

Do you consider the experiment a success, and should it be replicated?

I do consider it a success because they did not get in trouble again. The essays that they wrote - at least the one that the defense attorney made available to us - the student wrote that he understood. So to me, it worked. And my hope, my dream, my goal would be that this is not an unusual disposition that causes people to write about it in the newspaper or for me to be interviewed. I would love for this to be a standard disposition all over the place.

Alex Rueda, the deputy commonwealth attorney for Virginia, thank you very much.

Oh, my pleasure.


Thanks, Scott.

What's the latest - quick shutdown or will it last?

It became pretty clear by early evening on Friday that there would be a shutdown, so it sort of began with a whimper. Members had already adjourned and gone home at midnight when the shutdown officially started. Where we're at as the bill is in the Senate, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said the next vote is going to be on what can pass. And that is a bill that's going to need to be able to overcome a 60 vote hurdle and have the guarantee from President Trump that he will sign it. Negotiations are expected to continue through the weekend. In the House, lawmakers have been told that they'll be given 24 hours' notice before there's a vote. What needs to happen is one party is going to have to blink. Either Republicans and the president are going to have to agree to less money for the wall or Democrats are going to have to agree to it but try to extract some kind of compromise to make it something they can support. You know, the wall has just become just this volatile political symbol of this presidency. So it's added and loaded of all the politics between the two parties that doesn't make compromise very easy on this.

And it's the third - the third shutdown in a year. This is becoming a habit. Remind us how the federal government and citizens are affected by a shutdown like this.


So there's a hard position, and there's also a soft position. But at this point, really, how do they engage?'Cause what are they engaging with?

Well, let me ask you about something you said. You said there's hesitancy about decoupling. Are there voices within China that say, maybe we should pursue a more isolationist trade strategy?Is that what that means, decoupling?

China, actually - to be honest with you, this is a Sputnik moment for them. They're not going to talk decoupling now but, actually, they're working on it. This has served China to be a real wakeup call that you can't depend on the U. S. , and you can't be dependent on the U. S. , whether it's for agriculture goods or whether for technology. And so they've been doing this for years, and now they're just redoubling their efforts to get suppliers from different parts of the world. And also, Xi Jinping talks a lot about self-reliance.

I mean, when you talk about China beginning to redouble efforts to become more economically independent, to build up their own, say, technology industry, do they have the capacity to do that, and how long would it take?


And they also said that there was going to be no one within 500 miles of you, right?

Yeah. They did. And I live in Florida. So 500 miles is practically the entire state. And there's seven of us living in this state alone.

So what is your advice to other kids of donors?

I would say just always keep an open mind. And I'm very fortunate that my donor has been receptive to meeting siblings. But, you know, there are some donors out there that want to remain completely anonymous. And so I would say, you know, if the donor is that way, then the best thing to do is just find siblings because it's one of the greatest connections you can ever have.


Yeah.

So, does that mean that Mom and Dad, one's a doctor, one's a lawyer?

No, it was more - I would just say that the type of upbringing I had - actually, my parents are divorced, and they have been most of my life, but everybody actually refers my mother as Clair Huxtable, because she kind of reminds everybody of that character. My dad is a little silly like Bill Cosby, and I was always Denise. I was the wild kid and kind of the wild card in the family. I'm the only artist in the family and always had the weird clothes and a wild hair. So. . .

Now, let's talk about this song - I know you're going to sing it for us in a moment - "Wanna Be. "Listening to the lyrics of it, it sounds as if it's a person who is trying to figure out who she is for herself.


Well, we make them act like Trojan horses. One of the innate abilities they have is that for some reason they just chase these very difficult-to-reach migratory cancer cells in human brain. And because of this innate ability, we can then load them with these, you know, Greek soldiers, as you said in the introduction, in this case as a way of killing brain cancer cells, and they reach, they get these cancer cells. And in our experimental studies, at least in an in-vitro study, they seem to have a very good efficacy.

Is this in mice?Are you doing this in mice?

Well, we - the paper that we publish right now is all in-vitro, and it was a proof of principle that we can get these cells from human fat. And the series of experiments that we're doing in the laboratory right now are precisely in rodents, in mice.

Mm-hmm. And they're able to cross that blood-brain barrier and go into the brain?