You could wear it on your clothing?

Right. Well, their hope is - I mean, the - I think the sort of grand dream here is that if you make these little pocket factory sort of easy, you know, easy to install in cities, then inventors and companies who might have a need for micro solar but didn't want to go through the rigmarole of acquiring those panels before might incorporate them. So you could have sort of more micro solar use. That's their grand dream, although of course they say, you know, who knows?

Well - but you see, working - so the Video Pick of the Week is the video - it's up on our website at sciencefriday. com, in Flora's backyard. You get a little peek. . .

Yeah. Don't judge me.


So things like Hillary Clinton's speeches - the Goldman Sachs speeches - I think those do pass the public interest test. Even given the importance of those few newsworthy items, if you ask me, is the dumping of this much private information and this much internal conversation - the damage this does to our political system - is it worth a few news items if I had a binary choice - all of it or none of it?

I would say we haven't gained that much. But the ideal wouldn't be that binary choice. The ideal would be that such leaks and hacks would go to responsible journalists who would go through this and would identify what is actually in the public interest.

But these - this day and age - wouldn't people say the news organization is concealing information - that they want the chance to look at the original documents and decide for themselves?

I think, in this day and age, we really need to figure out when to hold back. In the past, news was driven by scarcity. There wasn't enough news. And you sent around journalists. And you said, let's find out what's going on.


I think, at this point, the way to sanitize everything and start to rebuild confidence - and it's going to be difficult - is just for everybody to open up and say, look, here is where we are. Here are the assets that are still on our books. None of that stuff tends to panic people. There's a lot of bad news there, but people are smart enough to realize that, if they're not being told something, it's probably because the news is bad. And I think, once you just get it all out there, it would help quite a bit.

Henry, always great to talk to you.

You, too. Thank you so much for having me.

Henry Blodget is the CEO of the financial news site clusterstock. com.


You know, I initially wasn't sure if I was going to go back after Katrina. But I think that I was so - you know, I realized, you know, that there's that whole song, "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?"I didn't get it until I left after the storm and I was evacuated in Atlanta for a period of about six months. And it just started setting in that, you know, New Orleans is truly a special place. I felt like I could have a better impact if I were back in the city trying to help people. And so that drew me back to the city. I mean, it truly is an amazing place, and as far as whether or not I'll go back now, definitely. I can't see leaving New Orleans at this point. And I know some people don't understand that. They might think that's sort of silly, but it truly is a unique city. And the people are amazing. The culture is amazing, and so it's just such a hard place to stay away from.

Do you ever wonder, why us twice now?

You know, yeah, what are the chances?And it's so crazy because the anniversary of Katrina was just on August 29th, and that was - I remember evacuating on a Sunday, the storm hit on a Monday, and the same thing has kind of happened now, though I evacuated Saturday, the storm hit on Monday. So it's just very unusual.

Thena, thank you so much for sharing your story with us. Good luck to you also.


Thanks for having me.

So why have all these Democrats decided just to go ahead and run for president and not even bother with trying to win a Senate seat?

(Laughter) I do think that there is quite a lot of enthusiasm in the party about the idea of taking on Donald Trump. But I do think that, you know, the Senate is always an appealing option. And as we've seen in past cycles that have hotly contested presidential races - 2016 being the most recent example - you know, you do have Senate candidates that get into the race, like Marco Rubio in 2016, right up until the last minute. I think you're going to see a lot of really smart, good candidates running up and down the ticket next year.

There were a number of Republican and Democratic senators over the past couple of years who've declined to run for reelection and on their way out the door said, look; it's just not the job it used to be. It's intensely partisan. And we haven't gotten a lot accomplished. Wouldn't that have the effect of also discouraging people for running for that job?


I grew up in a small town where there were no poets. There were brilliant carpenters and electricians and people who did things with their hands. I wanted to make something with my hands too. I just wanted to make something a little different.

And so I needed models to sort of tell me that I could do that. Now, I am hopefully urging on another generation, the next generation of young, passionate, risk-taking, truth-telling writers to say, don't be afraid of this, you can do this, just have the resolve to do it, and it'll work itself out.

Even if you're working at Kinko's overnight?

Even if you're working at Kinko's it will, you know, you - there are jobs everywhere for poets of passion, you know?Some of them are in the academy.


Well, you know, call me an old fashioned guy, but I like to see the U. S.  and the Russians figuring out areas where we can cooperate and going at it from there. So I think it's a good idea. But I do have a little caution about the notion that you bring people together and they're going to hit the side of the head with the palm of their hand and say, oh. Now we see this other guy isn't so bad.

Actually, they've been murdering each other for a couple of years now. And so bringing people together isn't necessarily going to help. I think what's more important is not so much getting people around a table, as getting people around some ideas for what this crazy country is going to look like in the future.

Again, going back to the example of Dayton, you said getting people together in one room did not work so well there.

Oh. You know, we had an opening banquet, which we had in this museum. I mean, it was an air museum, so, ironically, above the head of one the Serbs, we had a cruise missile, which had recently. . .


Yes. We've had - you know, when it first started, there was some congressional interest. But I mean, nobody can do anything, right?I mean, the Trump administration doesn't appear to listen to anybody but Donald Trump.

There is wide bipartisan support for the U. S.  taking a tougher line with China. But what sort of deal would you like to see?

I mean, I'd be happy if they just took away the 25% tax so I could compete on a level playing field, right?The tariffs they imposed on our lobsters in China never bothered anybody because it was equal for everybody, so it was no harm, no foul. I don't expect to get a better trade tariff rate than the Canadians when this is over, if it's ever over. You just can't sit here and wait forever.

Yeah. So if things continue the way they are for a few more months, is there a real threat that you guys will go out of business?


They knocked on the door once. And they knocked - barged into his fifth-floor flat and found the two of them in bed together. So that was the impetus to get a case of adultery against my mother.

Helen was forced to give baby James up to be raised by John Graham, who then divorced her. Father Sullivan was dragged back to his religious order. Graham says Sullivan spent the next 16 years being quote, "rehabilitated" at what was known as a priest prison in Essex, N. Y.  Can I ask you, when you look at the church now and that it took so long to get this answer, what do you think about the way this was handled?

Well, it was handled poorly because they could have told me from day one, yes, your Father Sullivan's son. And I have some documents that show my father had a relationship with a woman. Other documents they said were purged. And I believe those documents were about me. They didn't have to put me through this emotional trauma of exhuming his body. It's just terrible.

Now that you have your answer, what's next for you?


So every time that you have, you know, even life in a - in the House of Representatives means you need to be there. You need to deal and wheel and pork(ph) and everything. Grillo's going to be at home. So what is going to happen?His 150 MPs will go on the phone and say, Beppe, what are we going to do with this?It's ridiculous. So that's one point.

And the second point is Beppe Grillo's people and Beppe Grillo's deputies are actually younger, much younger, and I suspect much wiser and quieter than he is.

So expect some of them to say, look, we promised Italians to change this country, we're going to do that. And so they already proved that in Bologna, where I am, actually. It's - they've been successfully here in Emilia-Romagna. They were successfully in Parma and in Sicily. They cut deals all the time, American style, really cutting deals on the legislative floor without the parties, and they were very successful.

Well, you've said what you thought should happen. What's your best guess as to what you think will happen?


I'm Farai Chideya, and this is News & Notes.

1. 5 million. That's the number of people reportedly incarcerated in the United States. Beginning in the 1980s, the nation saw an ever-expanding prison industry, designed to manage a steady stream of new felons and recidivists. Now some states are finding they can't afford the billions of tax dollars supporting the prison system. Rethinking the role of rehabilitation may be part of the answer. That's what Jennifer Gonnerman says. She's a journalist covering the prison beat, and her latest article kicks off a special edition of Mother Jones magazine that examines the prison system. Jennifer, great to have you on.

Thanks so much for having me, Farai.

So this is a whole special issue on the issue of prisons. Your article talks about the economic impact the prison system is having on the nation. So what kind of money are we talking about?


And no nearby bases as there were in Italy. Yet there's also the case of - it's going to be very difficult to get international or at least United Nations backing for an intervention in Syria.

That's right. The chances of getting that past Russia and China, I think, are - that would be a very, very heavy lift. You had - when Bill Clinton went to war in Kosovo, he knew that he couldn't get Russia to approve that through the U. N.  Security Council. And instead what he said was that I'll get the approval of NATO. So it won't just be an American mission. This will be a multilateral venture. So it's not just the United States saying that the United States is acting in the name of humanity. It's a whole lot more governments also saying the same thing. And I think that gives it an added credibility and added legitimacy.

As you mentioned, the Arab League supported the campaign against Gadhafi in Libya. In the present-day case with Syria, the chances of getting something through the Security Council are harder and in part because China and Russia feel as though the U. N.  Security Council approval, which is sort of the standard for international legitimacy, that the U. N.  Security Council resolution that they approved was to stop potential mass killing but not necessarily to overthrow Gadhafi's regime.

That President Obama looked at what a no-fly zone could do and realized it would not do enough. He needed to authorize that aircraft could strike ground targets as well.


So most of the players in the money sports, in football and basketball at the Power Five schools, are black. So 56 percent of the basketball players - men's basketball players - are black. Fifty-five percent of the football players are black. But 2. 4 percent of the students at these schools are black men. And so this is -

Only?

Only 2. 4 percent. I know. That was shocking to us, too. But there's this weird paradox that happens, right?So you have black men on these campuses who are basically invisible in the classrooms. But at any given time and during any given academic year, the most high-profile undergraduate at one of these universities is likely to be a black basketball phenom or a black football star.

What did you find out about if these stars are actually getting the education that they've been promised?


I went back to Nepal in 2013 to write about the same supply chains feeding guys making cameras for the iPhone 5 in Malaysia. And some of the families that I wrote about at the time and got together and - was this woman, this magnetic woman who lit up the room, who was leading the conversation that everybody was deferring to. She was cutting off the men, which you also don't see much of in Nepal. And I didn't even recognize her.

And it was the same young woman. This woman, who was broken when I saw her in 2005 at this ashram, had just completely transformed her life. She not only made herself self-sufficient, but she rebuilt herself emotionally and has just this incredible self-awareness about everything that's happened to her and her refusal to be a victim and to rise up and face KBR Halliburton as a key witness in this case.

I was about to ask. How. . .

Yeah.


Right, so I would assume we'll continue seeing kind of similar-shaped tablets, you know, a large screen, maybe one to three buttons on the face. There hasn't been a lot of design innovation on the tablet front, which is kind of disappointing, but we probably will start seeing more innovative smartphone designs in the future.

Now, when we talked before, before the trial, the analysts were saying this is really not about Samsung, it's about Google and its Android operating system. That's the shot across the bow.

Right.

How will that affect Google?


First week of the season, a young boy - he has the ball over his head. He's ready to make the throw-in. And a spectator on the sideline puts her hands on the child's shoulders, spins him around so he'd be redirecting the ball to a different player. So I blew my whistle. And I said - is this your child?And she said, no, this is not my child. So I explained to her, I said, you can never, ever, ever, ever touch a player.

So this was a cry for civility, not I'm sick and tired and can't take it anymore?

That's correct. This is a cry for civility. This is a plea for everyone to join me and everyone else who believes that we can have a fun, fair and safe experience in which sanity is expressed on the sideline.

Well, it sounds that you're complaining less that your feelings were hurt than the youngsters might be getting a very bad example of what it is to be an adult.


So from your teens into your 40s, you become an increasingly successful auto repair entrepreneur and businessman. What makes you, in your 40s, wind up in medical school?

I really wanted to grow the business or - I didn't really know exactly which direction I wanted to go into, but I felt like I needed some foundational training in business if I were to do this correctly. So I ended up checking out some local colleges to see who had a degree program and came across Ursuline College in Pepper Pike.

But it was while I was at Ursuline that I discovered my desire for medicine that came back from how I felt when I was a child. And it was during a biology class. And it was the first day of class when I walked in there, in the first hour, that my life changed.

How?What happened?


Tomorrow marks the end of the longest presidential campaign to date. This election looks like it might break all voter turnout records, and plenty of civil and voting rights groups are out there working to make sure you have a place to turn if you're having trouble voting. One of them is the NAACP. In September, Benjamin Jealous became the youngest man to lead the country's oldest and largest civil rights organization. He's got plenty of information about how to protect your vote. Ben, how are you?

I'm doing well.

So you are the head of this storied organization that has had so much to do with African-Americans in voting. You think about where we've been in the past decade with the contested 2000 election. What should people know firstoff about going to the polls and doing it in a way that protects their vote?

You know, there's really two things that I say to folks. You know, first is that you should be prepared, you know. You should really think about the time you need and make sure, you know, if you need to have somebody to watch the kids that you just take care of it. This is one of the most important things that you'll do in the next year, and just be prepared.


That is Binyamin Appelbaum. He writes about economics for The New York Times, and he's written a new book, called, "The Economists' Hour" that traces what he calls a revolution in the way we think about economists.

This quiet but really important revolution that happens, really, beginning in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, where economists begin to gain tremendous influence over public policy in the United States.

In fact, that young economist who told his wife he had no future at the Fed, that was Paul Volcker. He became one of a small group of economists who made themselves indispensable to U. S.  presidents. Volcker rose to become the chairman of the Federal Reserve in the Carter and Reagan years.

So I asked Appelbaum, how did a bunch of economists go from nobodies to being important people?And he said it's pretty simple. In an era of real economic problems, they promised solutions.


Do you have any reason that any of these nominees that have evaded the question of Brown v.  Board being correctly decided - do you have any reason to believe that they would be in support of overturning Brown v.  Board?

I think that the real attempt here is if you decline to answer questions about Brown v.  Board, it becomes internally logical to also declined to answer questions about Roe, which is back on the table. And so the way to sort of elide that conversation is to say, I won't talk about any of those precedents, and I won't talk about Brown. So it looks really principled, but it's a way of moving the goalposts about what you won't talk about.

Dahlia Lithwick is a senior editor at Slate. Thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you for having me.


The truth of the matter is people like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, beneficiaries of affirmative action, would not have been at Harvard or at Yale have there not been those programs and obviously, they were completely qualified to be there as are all of the other black and Latino and women students in prestigious, elite higher education institutions in this nation.

You've fought and you lost. I'm talking about the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative of 2006. Now, we're talking about five more states. Really, what are you trying to do if these measures pass?

I think if they pass, then we're going to be filing lawsuits in every single one of the states where they've been passed - in Oklahoma, in Arizona, in Colorado, in Nebraska, in each and every one of those states - and very much like the march of the Supreme Court that was made by Thurgood Marshall nearly 50 years ago now to get Brown versus Board of Education. We're going to be going to the Supreme Court in saying overturn the new (unintelligible). You can't have an America in which states decide to eliminate the only programs that have brought about successful integration of higher education and of every occupation in this nation.

Now, Ward Connerly said of economic affirmative action was okay so you know, rich and poor but not racial or gender. How do you feel about those distinctions?


That's right. That's the difference between income tax and the payroll tax, exactly that.

Exactly, exactly.

Ron Elving, NPR senior Washington Editor, always laying it out for us. He joined me here in Studio 3A. Ron, thank you so much.

Thank you, Celeste.


Another major story that might have been overlooked in a busy week - North Korea said this week it won't denuclearize until U. S.  withdraws forces from South Korea and Japan. Do you have. . .

That has. . .

Yes, go ahead.

I'm sorry. I was just going to say that has been North Korea's position forever. Their view of denuclearization is that they give up their nuclear weapons when the United States gives up its nuclear weapons. We haven't had nuclear weapons stationed in South Korea since 1992. That's not what the North Koreans are talking about. And if the president had actually had listened to North Korean experts, proliferation experts, he would have understood that when the North Koreans were agreeing to complete denuclearization, that meant the U. S.  denuclearizing, too.


Correct. But writ large, this is not going to have the sort of change that the authors of the memo anticipate it will have because mandatory detention ability is useless without beds. All of the detention beds are already full. And the only way there would be new beds is if the Congress authorized new beds, and that was a massive fight in the last appropriations bill. There's no reason to think that that massive fight will move any further in this appropriations bill.

Right. Now, you're a member of an advisory council for the Department of Homeland Security that issues recommendations to the department on various issues. Last night, your group issued a set of emergency actions that DHS should take immediately to address the flow of migrants at the border. And this was one of the concerns you flagged - that there aren't enough asylum officers, judges or even buildings to process all the migrants.

Correct. That's exactly right. I think if you have two alternatives, one - on one side is a border wall of 2,000 miles and a massive deprivation of rights, which is sort of one way of solving this, and another extreme on the other end, which is do nothing and continue to allow the situation that's happening now to increase in numbers.

A compromise in the middle would be do not diminish the rights people have but expedite the consideration of what we're ultimately trying to consider. And I think that is right down the middle. You know, zero to a hundred, that's right there at 50 of what, maybe, can be a bipartisan compromise.


Is he crankery and colorful, or does he cross the line?

Judge Ellis is a judge who is - likes to run a clean and efficient trial. He doesn't like trials to veer off - off course. In other words, he wants the parties to present the evidence that the jurors need to hear to render a decision. Along the way, he's active - maybe more active than other judges. He can be difficult to both parties, and he can be stern.

Is there any reason for either side to worry that there could be grounds for an appeal in his conduct so far?

I'd say no. The standard for a judge's behavior that would - in other words, that would rise to the level of an appellate issue - is fairly high. In essence, it has to be a situation where the judge is substituting - the effect of his conduct is to substitute his judgment for that of the jurors. Comments that he makes to counsel can be solved with a curative instruction. We saw that a couple of days ago.

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


Part of the problem is a shortage of funds. The other problem is here in Lebanon, the government has a very strict rule on refugee settlements - nothing permanent. So, the only thing that you can have is plastic and wood, and that means that families live on dirt floors. Now, aid workers have been working around the clock to deliver thermal blankets and extra food. But the snow closed off some of these mountain roads over the past few days, so many refugees are out of reach until this storm passes.

Let's go back to that seizure of a warehouse of supplies by Islamist rebels, 'cause that certainly seemed to change U. S.  policy. How did that wind up changing Western policy?

Well, the seizure happened last Friday - details are a little hazy. But fighters from some of Syria's most powerful Islamist brigades took over this warehouse. There was more than a million dollars of U. S. -supplied equipment there. According to a U. S.  State Department official, it included nine pickup trucks, four buses, office and communication equipment and 50,000 meals ready to eat - army rations. All of this was intended for the Western-backed Free Syrian Army under the command of General Salim Idris.

Does the fact that the rebels were able to take control of a supply storehouse suggest that this was a huge loss for the Free Syrian Army, which is even further set them back on their heels.


Thank you for having me.

You all have investigated conditions at these facilities and concluded that Customs and Border Protection should stop detaining migrants there altogether - right?- in the Rio Grande Valley Sector. Can you just describe what you've seen?

Well, we conducted over 120 interviews with migrants, and we've heard pretty horrendous stories, from being denied access to water to being held outdoors in a pen for three days without access to showers or medicine for children. The conditions are pretty horrific.

You mentioned you've interviewed families seeking asylum there. Can you give an example of a story that stuck with you - someone talking about what it was like to try and get health care treatment that they need?


I'm Farai Chideya and this is News & Notes. Ratings for her daytime show are down, her magazine circulation numbers are falling, and a poll shows her popularity just isn't what it used to be. Is Oprah paying a price for publicly supporting Barack Obama's presidential campaign?

Plus, Jennifer Hudson won an Oscar for "Dream Girls," so why did she take a small part in a big film?Plus, Laurence Fishburne gets a Tony Award nomination for his portrayal of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. To help us talk about these issues, we've got our entertainment guru, Allison Samuels of Newsweek Magazine. How're you doing?

Good. How are you?

You look fabulous because we're on camera. But it's a webcast, so we're working things out. So, good thing we both look fresh and smiling.

OK, yeah, always.


And you basically called this a zero sum game?

That's right. You have these bad assets, and what we're doing is moving them around from one place in our society, in our economy, to another. It doesn't change the nature of the losses. The banks lent money in a bubble. The bubble is broken. Collateral value of the assets is limited, and these are bad assets now. Now, it's not quite a zero row sum game, because if we have bad incentives, which result when you have a misalignment between ownership and control, when you provide insurance, you can have a negative sum game.

And I think that's the real worry that we are about to wind up in a negative sum game.

So given what the banks are facing now, what would you suggest?


And yet we see, at this particular moment in time, isolationism on the rise. We see it in Brexit. We see it here in the United States. Does that make the fight against genocide more difficult?

Oh, I think it absolutely does. There's been a lot of progress in the last 25 years, including the creation of their doctrine that's called Responsibility to Protect, which says that the United Nations has a responsibility to protect the people of a country when their own states fail to do so. What happens if that multilateralism falls apart is that we start to question those powers that do intervene. You start to question their motives in those instances where multilateralism falters.

That's David Simon, director of Yale's Genocide Studies Program. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Lulu.


Well, right. And no U. S.  commander - speaking from experience - would put the aircraft in that kind of a situation. And for your audience, that reason is that, unlike aircraft - surveillance aircraft in the past, the kind of sensor systems that are onboard this drone are such that they can see dozens and dozens and dozens of miles away from the aircraft. So, you know, it's flying up above 50,000 feet over the Strait of Hormuz. It can monitor the entire strait plus see inside Iran without having to fly over it.

Just a little bit more detail, if you would, on this. . .

Sure.

. . . Specific drone - we're told it was an RQ-4 Global Hawk surveillance drone. Do you have any sense of how many of those are out flying over the region, how widely used they are?What intel are they collecting?


This was back in 1982?

'82. But I think people thought, oh, my God, you know, you can't put a black person's heart in a white person. You cannot possibly put a woman's heart in a man. I mean, it's interesting that with the heart, sort of the emotions we ascribe to it get all wrapped up in the medical techniques also.

So they got beyond that. And you write about this group of researchers and doctors in Houston - big egos, big personalities and a big state (laughter). Tell us about these two pioneers who had this incredible rivalry that helped shape this field - Dr.  Denton Cooley and Dr.  Michael DeBakey.

When I started looking into it again, it was kind of like the right stuff for heart surgeons. These were people with outsized personalities and outsized wills. And the story really starts in Houston with the theft of an artificial heart from Michael DeBakey's lab. And DeBakey at the time was perhaps the most famous heart surgeon or surgeon in the world. And his nemesis was a guy named Denton Cooley, who, for a time, worked under him and got tired of waiting for Dr.  DeBakey to put this artificial heart in someone. So he purloined it with the man who had designed it into DeBakey's lab and put it in a man. And the operation, to some extent, was a success because the patient lived. And this became the most famous feud in medical history.


I believe she lacks political will to get the job done, which is one of the reasons that the nurses are supporting Bernie Sanders. If our health isn't achievable, then what's she doing running for president?You don't give up on health. You can give up on a lot of things. And there's compromises to be made. But when it comes to the health of my children, of our families, of our communities, you don't give up on people.

You know, of course, that the math is against Senator Sanders becoming the Democratic candidate.

I - you know, I look at the things far beyond math. I look at the mass momentum, just like in sports. I mean, Bernie - you know, we look at sports teams. . .

Hillary Clinton has won, at the moment, I believe, something like 3 million votes more than Senator Sanders.


I didn't worry about it too much, but I - you know, I love life. I love to be out there in the field with these scientists. I take the same precautions they take. If they're wearing respirator masks and goggles and latex gloves, then I wear the same - rubber boots, gowns or whatever. And I try and stay three feet or 4four feet behind them. I try not to let them hand me a giant fruit bat.

In one case, Lisa Jones-Engel did say, here, David. Pin this monkey to the ground while I take a blood sample from this other one. And I thought about that a little bit.

Did you think twice?

I said - well, I didn't think - well, I said, sure, and I held it to the ground. And then I thought, this is not exactly what I signed up for, but, you know, you need to pitch in a little bit in these circumstances.


Well, that might be true. But I just think to put someone on a list for leering - to put that word on a list as an accusation is a pretty strong statement. This is a list being circulated in the business. This is a list meant to affect people's reputations and their careers. Another thing was something like leading multiple women on online was one of the charges on that list. And you know, that's a pretty common thing. And I would say leering's a pretty common thing. So do we really want to put that in writing and like besmirch somebody's reputation over something like that?I don't know.

But should it be a pretty common thing?

Well, these are sort of sleazy behaviors. And maybe they should not. But I'm just not sure these are criminal acts. And I suppose what I want to do is kind of separate what's a real abuse of power or a criminal act from what is kind of like everyday sleazy behavior that we wish wouldn't happen. I mean, we wish it wouldn't happen. But do we want people to lose their jobs over it?

In this article, you write at length about about Lorin Stein, who was until a few weeks ago the editor of Paris Review, who has acknowledged behavior he says he regrets. And you point out the fact that he has has nurtured and supported the careers of many successful women writers. Does one justify the other?Can you expect to get exonerated on that?


My parents are fine. My mom evacuated as soon as they got notice. My dad required an assisted evacuation. He actually ended up being rescued by a community service worker up there. He was trying to get out of Paradise on his motorized chair. He saw the community service worker, who managed to get him in the truck. And they escaped to the fire station using a hiking trail, actually.

I assume if he could call you, he would, right?

Paradise is a retirement community. A majority of the population lives on a fixed income, including my uncle. He did not have a cellphone. He only had the landline. He didn't use social media.

Yeah.


Yeah, we were on vacation; my family and I were out on the boat, and it was a beautiful, sunny day in the Abacos, in the Bahamas.

This is Erik Nourrie of Florida.

Typical crystal clear, beautiful Bahama waters. And the kids were playing and swimming. And I took my mask and snorkel and spear, and went out to a little channel there to hunt.

Nothing unusual - Erik hunts for dinner often. He spearfishes. And pretty quickly, he spots a good-sized fish darting around.


Well, a pretty disturbing picture has emerged of these two men online - some interest in, I guess, Nazism and Russian communist iconography. And beyond that, very little is known. I mean, they're a mystery to us. They are currently still on the run. Their families have spoken a little bit and have now sort of gone quiet.

And I think the whole country and beyond is just waiting to see where and when these two men might pop up or if indeed they will at all. There's a good chance, at this point, they might also be dead.

Well, police were zeroing in on a community that they thought might be their chance at finding them. And they called in drones and helicopters and boats and the military. But it sounds like they might be scaling back now. I mean, are they giving up?

Yeah, I mean, the problem is these young men had quite a head start. Initially, they were only believed to be missing and even thought to be potential victims after their vehicle was found burned out in B. C. So. . .


That was just - what I did, I picked students that I've had in class before. I'm a business education teacher. So I made sure they were students that really were comfortable with the computer and they could get the information that I needed. So I really just gave them - I rented my classroom out for - actually I did it for two Saturdays. And I had five students come in each time. And I just gave them topics that I wanted questions about. And then I just had one or two of those students verify the information, and then I went back over and I verified it as well.

You've got a company now called Jornic DVD Games. What are your plans in terms of the company?Are you going to try and put out more titles?

Absolutely. After - I'm looking at putting out one more title before the Christmas holiday, but I haven't decided. I'm looking at a couple, but I haven't made a decision yet.

You're still going to teach, and you're going to try to design more games. Are you afraid that, you know, are you afraid of losing your shirt in business?Because you know, there's nothing guaranteed.


No. And the thing is that this book, to me, it was very important that it's not just a bunch of recipes put in a nice book. It's also really a document of food culture. And I think that out of those 700 or something recipes that are in the book, there are probably at least 50 of them that I doubt that anyone is actually going to cook. But they're still really important because they explain something about food culture, you know.

Yeah. And, I mean, I'm just guessing - blood pancakes with smoked reindeer fat makes the point that the Sami people, living in arduous circumstances, have to make use of every part of the reindeer.

It does, you know. It tells that story in a really, really clear and very good way.

If we were to say - chef, could you make us one recipe from this book, what might you try?


I was wondering if we should do - or if such a thing exists, that human microbe projects, like the Human Genome Project.

Yes, there are a variety of types of human microbe projects at this point. So there are two gut projects right now that aim to characterize difference in gut microbes of people around the world. One of those in American Gut and is uBiome. And both of those projects, people can either donate or pay money to have their gut microbes sequenced.

And when they do, they can see what they have, and the scientists are going to see how that relates to what we know. And so in a way that's a beginning step. But what I think we kind of hope for is to have something akin to Mendelian genetics, where we can predict, you know, why you have a specific set of microbes and microbe genes. But we're very far from that still.

In the 30 seconds we have left, how can people get involved if they want their own microbes sampled and surveyed?


Now, your assessment is far more kind, I think, than that of the fan base. And I'm basing that on a tweet from the Tampa Bay Lightning Twitter feed, which said this. We don't have any words. We know you don't want to hear them. We understand your anger, your frustration, your sadness. Everything you're feeling, we get it. This isn't the ending we imagined and certainly not the one we wanted. Thank you for being there the entire way.

Have you ever seen a team this apologetic?

(Laughter) No, but they have a lot to apologize for. I mean, the only other team in the history of the four major sports that had this kind of success in the regular season and then didn't win a playoff game was the 2011 Green Bay Packers. They went 15 and 1 in the regular season and then lost to the New York Giants in the first round of the NFL playoffs. But in that case, we're talking about one game. This is a team that had four chances to win a game, and they couldn't do it.

And now Columbus is the toast of the NHL. Will there be a Blue Jackets bandwagon?


Voice of America - they wanted to know what was going on; the events on Tiananmen. And there was one chilling story that I remember. Chinese television rebroadcast an interview from American TV. A demonstrator called Chinese leaders killers, and then the scene froze, and a telephone number flashed on the screen with a text urging people to turn this guy in.

Wow.

And within hours, the guy was arrested. And we could see him being taken into a police station.

With such fear in Beijing, how were you able to report the story?


And does it help to have someone like Drake courtside (laughter)?

I think for some people it does. I think the power of celebrity is something that is immensely powerful. And he's someone that just adds to the level of attention that's happening here. This is going to be the first championship series for a major sport in Canada in the Internet era, and every bit of notoriety helps, and Drake is a part of that.

Bruce Arthur, sports columnist for the Toronto Star. Thank you for talking about the Raptors with us, and best of luck.

Absolutely. My pleasure. Thank you.


. . . In a sense, were our forebears. And some of them were heroes.

Yeah, and lost their lives - one woman, in particular, staying at her post even though she probably knew that, given the scope of what was about to happen, she was going to lose her life. But she stayed.

This is Hettie Ogle.

Hettie Ogle - to send messages down the valley. But the problem is, once you get those messages down there, how do you disseminate it?


. . . Positions. What will you be looking for, Danielle?

You're right. They back a lot of the same policies - like "Medicare for All," a $15 minimum wage, that sort of thing. And so they have some basic, similar ideas on economics. They both talk about inequality a lot, for example. So one big thing I'm going to look for is just what, if any, daylight emerges between them on some of these really big issues. But aside from that, I'm going to be watching their rhetoric because they do talk about their ideas in different ways.

Elizabeth Warren, for example, tends to talk about how she likes capitalism, but she thinks it needs some major, major fixing. Bernie Sanders, of course, considers himself a democratic socialist, so that's one way they might clash. But aside from that, they tend to frame their ideas in different ways. Bernie Sanders frames his stump speech as being about big, overarching goals about revolution. He brings in these big national inequality statistics over time and says these things need to change. And his supporters love that. Now, Warren, on the other hand, has branded herself in a different way. You may have heard her slogan by now, the. . .

She has a plan.


Well, the short answer's yes. The deforestation program in Brazil has been enormously successful. Between 2004 and 2012, deforestation fell by more than 80%. That's a shocking success. The challenge is that since 2012, deforestation has ticked up. There's also been a backlash against some of the environmental policies that were put in place under the former government.

Well, as we mentioned, Germany and Norway recently decided to pull their funding out of this Amazon Fund. What made them do that, specifically?

So this is largely an international response to concerns that deforestation is on the rise. And in particular, it's a response to the rhetoric that the administration of Jair Bolsonaro has been putting out. Bolsonaro has basically said to the people in the country that deforestation is OK, development at all costs is OK.  And a lot of scientists fear that that message is starting to take hold, that landowners in the hinterlands in the Amazon are starting to listen, and now they're burning their fields and they're taking advantage of this.

So do you think this latest move by Norway and Germany to freeze their funds could actually sway Bolsonaro?


Thanks again for tackling a subject that is often times neglected for discussion. But all too often it's the source of so much pain and misery in our community. When a family member suffers from an addiction, the entire family suffers. Emotionally, socially, and financially. Shows like yours help to bring the stigma of addiction out of the shadows.

As part of that series, we talked to a mother who said that she believed her son committed suicide because of the game EverQuest. While I tried to challenge our guest on that direct link, we decided to ask the game's maker for a response. Here's some of the statement from Sony Online Entertainment. EverQuest is a phenomenally popular game because it provides players with a fun, social, and interactive online experience. EverQuest is a game. The majority of the hundreds of thousands of subscribers play the game in moderation. As with any form of entertainment, it is the responsibility of each individual player to monitor his or her own playing habits, and prioritize his or her time as necessary.

And finally, Aljore Stallings(ph) in Glen Burnie, Maryland, wrote in about the interview we did with Cullen Jones. If you'll remember, he's the second African-American swimmer to win a gold at the Olympics.

She wrote, I am giving you praise and kudos for your interview of Cullen Jones. I am so glad to hear of a black person achieve success in a sport that isn't traditionally the norm for black folks. I do hope it encourages more young black people to look into learning to swim. It has encouraged me a whole lot.


You mean somebody rational?
Yeah, someone he could work with.
Yeah.
That would be very good.


You described some playwrights, Beckett, for example, as somebody whose work seems to back away from you the closer you get it. But Miller's play, you say, is not like that.

No. It wasn't like - my experience with Chekhov and Beckett was just what you call - that they get harder and harder as you go. But with "Salesman," surprisingly, because it's fully as great a play as those others, it did welcome us and come toward us day by day. And then, we did a fairly smart thing, which is that we had a workshop just for ourselves for almost a month, and nobody ever saw it and we didn't perform it, but we just worked on it. And then as per plan, we went away for over three and a half months.

And then when we came back, we went into rehearsal and then finally got onstage and did it. And the three and a half months living and doing other things made a surprisingly big difference. It just sank into everybody and took enormous strides all on its own, and that was both exciting and surprising in its extent. And also, it was a clue to what was going to continue to happen, which is that it just burrowed deeper and deeper into the actors and they - into one another, and they have become a family. And they're - what goes on between them is - I've never seen - in my experience, I've never seen it quite like this.

Philip Seymour Hoffman obviously plays the lead role. Is - did the play come first or the actor come first?


Sure. Well, before she becomes a pirate, she tries shoplifting. And when Gwen is shoplifting, she imagines herself as named Octavia. She imagines herself to much more glamorous persons, so there's a little bit in this book that's here.

(Reading) She remembered what it was called - shoplifting - and pictured lifting the whole place, the aisles tilting and tumbling their baubles and trinkety treasures into her pockets. Pink razors for her burnt leg and then a keychain she thought Naomi would like. And when she realized she could steal for other people, it was an avalanche, a chew bone for Toby the II, more stuff for Naomi, a stuffed bear and a tiny license plate that said Naomi. Three flasks of perfume, curvy and shapey like internal organs in her pockets, and she was done with Mother's Day for ages.

Her father liked the electronic things, which were behind locked cabinets. But she grabbed a slick stereo magazine and managed to slip into one of her boots. It would be a way to warm him for taking the bus by herself. By now she was thirsty and rounded a corner to open a fridge and grab an iced tea in a bottle that felt so good in her hands. It was One Universe Green Tea, which the label said was good for the immune system and for Octavia's skin. No one had stopped her. No one had spoken to her. It was smooth sailing. All for one and one for all.

So is there a straight line from that to piracy or just adolescence?


He says he's thrilled, but he doesn't want to celebrate too much because he worries about other academics who are having a tough time.

Mark Shaleki(ph) used to work in a recording studio owned by Capitol Records.

But as we all know, the music business was in a tailspin even before the recession hit.

So Mark opened his own studio. He charges his clients less, but he says he's making more money than he did working for the man.

Theresa Tomas was laid off at a bank. She was working for the man. She had been there for five years, and then she contacted a company that she had worked for back when she was in college.


Fall color is peaking in New York's Adirondack Mountains. There's already been a first dusting of snow on the summits. North Country Public Radio's Brian Mann set out in his canoe to take in autumn's big show near Lake Placid, and he sent us back this audio postcard.

I'm paddling up the Chubb River, wildness all around me, tamaracks here by the shore and willows. This could easily be northern Canada. It's really crisp out here. You can really taste fall now in the air. And there is this kind of stained-glass look to the hillsides, like splashes of crimson red. I mean, just truly tropical red.

There's brilliant sun, and the maple and birch are lit up. As the river winds into the mountain valley, it narrows and narrows again, so I'm squeezing through a vein of water to get to the hiking trail, willow branches squeaking against the canoe. I pass a beaver lodge and turn. And suddenly, I'm right on top of a pair of indignant mallards that go whirring into the sky.

All right, guys, don't mean to scare you.


Milliseconds. It happens really quick, and it's something that you just don't think about. It actually just a reflex and it happened. And it was like I said a rarity. The one prior to mine was in 1927. So it was 40 some years between the one that was made and mine.

The thing is, I wonder if people in the stands even realized what had happened - because this goes by so quickly. It's not even like watching a home run. If you watch a home run the ball kind of hangs in the air for three or four seconds or so. This is over even faster than that. Bang.

To tell you the truth. On my part it was such a rarity that even I had not thought about the unassisted part of the play. I realized at the time that it was a triple play. You know, it was all three outs, but had never really thought about the unassisted part because it was such a rarity that no one ever really talked about them.

Ron, was that moment it for you in your baseball career?Is that - what could be better than that?


The majority of them are coming from sub-Saharan Africa. They're trying to make the very perilous Mediterranean crossing to Europe. They're seeking jobs, a better life. They're fleeing conflict. Unfortunately the Europeans have this closed-door policy where they're basically putting these migrants back into Libya, basically subcontracting the migrant policy to Libyan militias. The migrants are kept in a series of horrid detention centers where they're subjected to torture, abuse, forced labor. And with this recent war, their situation has just gotten worse.

Stay with the recent war for a second because I want you to put what has just happened into the context of what is happening more broadly in Libya, which of course has been stuck in civil war for many years now. But this latest outbreak of violence began just in April. Is that right?

That's right - on April 4 when the militia forces aligned with General Khalifa Haftar - he's a renegade general - launched an attack on the internationally recognized government in Tripoli. He was claiming to liberate the capital from militias. But in fact, it was really just a power grab, and it's plunged the country into another round of civil war - horrendous conditions for civilians, over 700 deaths and thousands of people displaced from their homes.

And I'm wondering how to square the situation now with - I remember interviewing you last year. You had a new book just out on Libya. You were telling me. . .


O'Rourke. Yeah, let's talk about Beto.

Yeah, Beto O'Rourke. He made a hell yes promise to buy back assault weapons and to push for mandatory buyback of assault weapons. What do you make of this?

That was a dramatic highlight of the debate and grabbed a lot of people, got a lot of mentions. But such moments do not make legislation. Congressional Democrats don't have a clear majority for an assault weapons ban, let alone gun takeaways. They're still hoping for universal background checks or - on people buying guns. But to pass the Republican Senate and actually get enacted, even that much would need the backing of the president and the approval of the federal courts. We are still a long way from meaningful gun measures, despite the carnage we saw from guns in August and so many other recent months and years.

And let's stay in the realm of Congress for this last question, Ron. As of today, where do you assess where Democrats stand on the question of impeachment at the moment?


That's right, yeah. I mean, these - the owners of these brains in life, you know, they lived at this state hospital. Just looking at the condition of the brains now I can only imagine what they endured in life and now their brains were taken by questionable means. It's not entirely clear if it was legal for them to be taken by the doctor at the state hospital and then they were put in these jars. And it's upsetting to look at them, honestly, to see, you know, to imagine the circumstances of their life and then to see them there - it makes you consider your own brain, I suppose.

Well, a tough story to report. Thank you for doing it, Matt.

No problem.

Matt Largey, of member station KUT in Austin.


Yes, sir.

The Post and Courier, which is the newspaper there in Charleston, they got an article that between 1982 and 2011 there have been 25 high school track-related deaths either to the discus, the shot put or the javelin.

Correct.

And some, I mean, you know, some pretty gruesome descriptions of javelin injuries. You're not intimidated by that?


Just quickly, what about men?

Men. Well men, we tend to focus more on outcomes and process. And so we kind of, you know, focus almost exclusively on the outcomes. We tend to like win-lose scenarios, as opposed to negotiating for win-win. And then, men, we tend to be command and control leaders, where as women can be more inclusive and interactive. And so we really have to work on those traits.

Has anyone ever given you static for trying to do the Mars-Venus thing, about how you see men and women?

Well, because it's really my opinion, and they typically let me have that opinion. But again, it's really a broad statement, so I'm not saying all men or all women, but just as a rule, they're some observations that I've had over the years.


There's been such wild swings. You know, in 2014, we were here talking about a dreadful harvest in Italy that was mostly due to the olive oil fruit fly, which was a big problem following a warmer-than-usual winter. This year, it's a deep freeze. And among farmers in Italy, they feel like these extreme swings are happening more often. Experts that we talked to believe that climate change is a factor.

I don't know the Olive Oil Times.

(Laughter) Well, you should. It's the most read olive oil publication. You know, it seems niche, but there are 3 million people around the world who make - who work to make olive oil. It's a very important food, one of the healthiest products that the Earth provides us. And there's a lot to tell. It's also a cultural cornerstone for the Mediterranean region and the rest of us.

Curtis Cord, publisher of the Olive Oil Times, we'll be reading it. Thanks so much, Mr.  Cord.


And I went and bought bread. I made a really good salsa and started selling tortas at a bus stop. Of course, everybody thought I was nuts. And my friends used to make a lot of fun of me - you know, no girl is going to like you because you sell food on the street. And I'd say, no, you're totally wrong. I said, I'm an entrepreneur (laughter). I have my own business.

Now he's executive chef and partner in the James Beard-nominated Taqueria del Sol, a counter-service chain in Georgia and Tennessee. In the kitchen of one of the Atlanta restaurants, he shows me how to make his turnip greens. It starts with a little butter and oil.

We're going to build the sauce for greens. And you want to saute your garlic, a few onions, your pepper. In this case, we use the chile de arbol.

The chile de arbol pepper brings some heat. It sautes with the onion and garlic until the peppers start to release their oils.


Well, tell us first, let's go back. How did you find out about this because I know they try and keep this very secret?How did you find out you had been awarded the MacArthur Grant?

I kind of got punked a little bit. I mean, it's the best way to get punked you could imagine, but they called me into the offices, I was going to be in Chicago for an event, and they basically called me in more or less under the pretense that they wanted me to talk about some candidates that I was recommending.

So of course I kind of scampered in to sort of support the folks that I was hoping would get it, and they just sort of surprised me with this, you know, this incredible gift and just, you know, it kind of just blew my brains open.

So they really did manage to keep it a secret?


Well, this is extremely complicated. And there doesn't seem to be a single kind of way at looking at this for all the different countries. Every country is wrestling with how to manage this. There's little legal precedent in many ways. One problem is that if you put people on trial back home, it's very difficult to get the evidence that you maybe need to actually be able to prosecute someone. So some people in - for example, in Germany have floated the idea of re-upping the sort of Nuremberg trials that were used to prosecute Nazis.

Wow.

In other cases, some have created laws to say, you know, going to Syria was itself a crime. So we've been following the case of an Austrian girl who was 15 when she left Austria. And we've been told that if she comes back, she probably would serve prison time for having gone to Syria. And there's even - the Kurdish authorities in Syria are talking about perhaps trying to set up an international tribunal to actually try these people in Syria or in Iraq.

NPR's Ruth Sherlock in Beirut.


Oh, sheesh. I'll play a little bit of "I Knew a Lady. "

OK, I knew a lady too.

I'm sure you did.

(Singing) I knew a lady. And she was fine. She had a pretty face And a troubled mind. All she wanted was a little fun. She got dancing feet. She wanted to get it on. All the Lord's children need to be saved All the Lord's children lost in these days All the Lord's children in the frying pan Good God, Almighty throw up your dang hands All the Lord's children out on these streets All the Lord's children fighting for peace All the Lord's children up off your knees Good God, Almighty Come dance with me Oh, oh, oh, oh All the Lord's children feeling the pain All the Lord's children trying to maintain All the Lord's children trying to kill the brain With two vodka din(ph) And a glass of champagne Don't do it Huh, it ain't gonna work All she wanted was a little fun She got dancin' feet she want to get it on.


Honestly, much to my mother's chagrin, I think I would like to come back to the Middle East and continue to cover a lot of the developments here, maybe Afghanistan, continue to cover a lot of our diplomatic efforts abroad.

I think that the next four to eight years of the Obama administration are going to be incredibly interesting, with a lot of the diplomatic efforts to just to try to put a lot of the things back together. Certainly, what's going on now in the Gaza Strip is incredibly interesting, as well. So I think, once I learn the business and learn a lot of skills, I'd love to go abroad as a foreign correspondent someday.

Army Captain Nate Rawlings with the First Brigade Combat Team of the 4th Infantry Division joining us from Baghdad. And it's been great speaking with you. Have a great new year.

Thank you. Happy New Year to you, too.


Physically in our experiment that took up - we couldn't really measure it in a scientific way, but between you and me, it's like a speck of dust.

All that stuff on a speck of dust.

Yeah.

And how much room would you need to store all the information in the world?


Well, number one, we were astounding that something over 2,000 years old decided to put roots on itself and live again. So, after the jubilation - and there was real jubilation at Archangel - we came up with the grand idea of using these trees that were lost to the world and planting them in old growth forest groves. And I'm happy to say that we're well on our way of attaining that goal.

As I understand, old growth forest, it won't look like much of anything for a few hundred years.

Well, that's not true. What most people don't understand about coast redwoods and giant sequoias is that they're probably the second-fastest-growing tree on earth that I know of, only second only to the eucalyptus. And they will grow 10 feet a year, and that is a lot of stored carbon in a very short period of time. Groves of those or forests of those will really make a measurable dent in the CO2 imbalance in our atmosphere.

Why are they planted in Port Orford?


Those of who are interested, who have taken the time to listen to historians, listen to money experts tell us what might happen when that ratio of the debt to the gross product of the country gets big, and it's so big that it's carrying 200 or 300 percent, they just tell you right off you don't have any functioning country.

And last - what is it, last year, the - one of the rating agencies cut the U. S.  AAA rating for the first time not because there was any great concern about the economy of the United States but because of dysfunction in Washington, because the various parties could not agree.

You got it, my friend. They did that, and they're apt to do more. And right now I guess the point we ought to talk about to you and your listeners, understanding that I'm not there, and I'm not a player, a participant, but yet I'm a player, one of the outside groups that finds his way in through cracks and corners and talks to the people over there.

I think they are trying to get something, led by the secretary of the Treasury, who's Geithner. . .


. . . The people coming forward on the basis that they were poor young girls who were often troubled families and in, you know, the care of the state.

Mr.  Ramesh, the five men arrested were all from the Pakistani community of Rotherham, and you have written about this, how did that perhaps complicate the situation?

Well, it complicated it because there was a feeling - or at least the report laid bare - this idea that people were afraid to speak out for fear of being called out as racists. Now, that's part of the story. We have a policy here of community cohesion. The government at the time wanted communities to work things out for themselves and have the gentle hand of government sort of prod them into action. But there was this idea that, you know, people couldn't speak out because of this. And unfortunately, that led to the situation - exacerbated a situation where people weren't paying attention anyway.

People were flabbergasted about the allegations about Jimmy Savile a couple of years ago, the longtime BBC host. And I wonder if people in Great Britain are turning to each other now and wondering - not to wrench things out of context - but if there's something going on and the way they behave as the nation that aids and abets a kind culture of silence when such allegations are made.


Do you think that this case is going to spur new changes to procedure or to policy regarding migrant care?

Investigations into this latest migrant death are still ongoing. The FBI, local police, CBP all have their own investigations, which may eventually shed some more light on what exactly went wrong here. But I think we're already hearing calls for these agencies to just follow the law and hand over migrant children to Health and Human Services within 72 hours as they are supposed to do. For their part, the agencies say they're trying to comply, but they need more resources. Not only are these Border Patrol stations overwhelmed, but the migrant shelters that are overseen by HHS are also near capacity.

One more thing - today the president appointed an immigration hard-liner, Ken Cuccinelli, to a post inside the Homeland Security Department. How could this affect immigration policy?

Right. This is the former attorney general of Virginia who ran for governor on a hard-line immigration platform a few years ago. He's already been a White House adviser on immigration. He has advocated for sending more troops to the border and stopping the migrant caravans that were a big story last year. Now Cuccinelli is going to have a formal role inside the Department of Homeland Security.

To me, this shows that President Trump is doubling down on his crackdown on immigrants that is likely to be a central focus of his 2020 reelection campaign. Though of course, as immigrant advocates point out, that strategy seems to have backfired, at least in part, when Republicans lost the House in last year's midterm elections.

That's NPR's Joel Rose. Joel, thank you.


UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: Under the command of General Eisenhower, Allied naval forces supported by strong air forces began landing Allied armies this morning on the northern coast of France.

Ships deposited more than 150,000 Allied troops on the beaches of Normandy. German forces were waiting in the cliffs above, and they unleashed. Meanwhile, paratroopers boarded planes, took to the air and dropped behind enemy lines.

Oh, it was a lot of noise - one after another.

What did it sound like?


That was where I really developed my love for music. That was where all the walls and lines between music were just taken down for me when I was a kid because I just loved everything. I couldn't understand why everybody wouldn't listen to a country song, everybody wasn't listening to, you know, Rock n Rolls songs. I thought it was awesome.

Radio's gotten a lot more segregated since then, hasn't it?

Yeah. That's an understatement. I mean, the - today everything is so specialty oriented. It's one kind of music and that's all you get to hear on the radio and, you know, I liked it when I was a kid and you could hear anybody on the radio station as long as it was a good song or a hit.

So you go - you're in Hootie & the Blowfish, you have any number of talents and interests musically. "Learn To Live" is doing so well commercially. Your R&B record did not find quite the same home.


Ms.  JANE D'ARISTA (Director of Programs, Financial Market Center): Commercial paper typically is about one third of the assets held by Money Market Mutual Fund. So, the fact that they have been skittish, and fear runs from their clients has meant that they have not been buying. So, the Fed has decided that it's going to buy the paper and try to get investors back in with the assurance that there is a buyer out there, namely, the Federal Reserve itself.

And Mitchell, the Fed is also doing something later this week with regards to interest rates, right?

Right. The Federal Reserve's Open Market Committee meets tomorrow and Wednesday. It seems like there's almost no chance that the Fed will sit on its hands. Economists predict an interest rate cut of either a quarter point or a half point. A half point would bring the Federal Funds Rate down to 1 percent, which would be its lowest level in four years.

Thanks, Mitchell. That's Mitchell Hartman of public radio's daily business show, Marketplace.


Yes, we're all OK.  We're all safe. We're at his house in James City, thank goodness.

Yeah. I'm told you left after the evacuation order. May I ask why?

We made the decision to stay based on the fact that all of the ATMs were out of cash, there was a gas shortage, monetary reasons and concerns of not being able to get back in. I have my father, who is in a nursing facility fighting Stage 4 Hodgkin's lymphoma, and I was really concerned about what would happen with him.

How is your father?How is your father, may I ask?


Because presidents that are about to be removed from office see the writing on the wall. Richard Nixon had a very good sense of his waning support in the Senate. And when he saw it collapse, he realized that if he hung on, he would be removed, and he would lose his presidential pension.

Interesting. So one of the complaints that President Trump is making and that his supporters are making is that this is a purely partisan process. Has that complaint been made before?Is that what people normally say?Or is there something about this particular circumstance that's different?

The reason that impeachment was kept on the shelf for over a hundred years after the Johnson impeachment process was that it was viewed by all sides in the American political community as highly partisan. But it doesn't always have to be the case. And in the Nixon era - a period when I think we saw a model impeachment process - the democratic leadership bent over backwards to make the process as bipartisan as possible.

We keep hearing all kinds of comments from - particularly from former Republican members about what members of their caucus say privately. But there's no way to know how to evaluate that. We do know that publicly, the Republicans are insisting that this is partisan. The Democrats are insisting that no, it isn't. It's a constitutional matter. Do you see from where you sit a way to bridge this difference of perspective?


Well, Pluto's official designation is a dwarf planet. And I have to tell you the people who sent this probe all the way out to Pluto are a little angry about that because when they launched it a decade ago, Pluto was still a planet.

(Laughter).

It got downgraded in the intervening years.

That seems so unfair.


In a hospital.

Yeah.

Can we ask for the story about that?I mean, you didn't go out of your way to get married in a hospital. I guess in a sense, you did - right?

(Laughter) We had applied to get married in Illinois. We had 60 days. We were never in the same town. My wife showed up, and we had one day left; and she walked in the door from Los Angeles, and I suddenly grabbed my stomach. I said, boy, I'm not feeling well. She said, you're not getting out of it that easy. But we wound up going to the emergency room. I had my gall bladder removed.


Well, things are more quiet than usual. There's many, many fewer people and cars out on the street during the day because of the day of mourning. People are just (unintelligible). And it's also the weather is really bad. There is like a storm and cold and rain, so people are staying home, and then some people go out to celebrate New Year's Eve tonight. A lot of people won't because of the situation.

But it's a situation that is reflected all over the Arab world and many other parts of the world where people are really angry about what's going on. They think Israel is using excessive force. But they feel frustrated because they can't do anything about it, and their governments aren't - seemingly aren't doing anything about it either.

Leaders are calling for an end to the violence, but there hasn't been much talk in terms of specifics. What can be done to accomplish that goal of ending these attacks?

Well, if they wanted to do something, they could a lot - diplomatically, politically, economically - but they are really more talk than action. This is the problem. The Arab leaders I think genuinely share their people's anger with what's going on in the Israeli attack. Many Arab leaders are also angry at Hamas. They don't like Hamas very much.


You know, I'm encouraged by the step. It makes it easier to deal with churches that have enabled or covered up sexual abuse. That being said, it is a framework only.

A framework only - what do you mean?

Well, it creates a new committee by which these claims can be vetted. What we don't know yet is who is going to be on that committee, what questions the committee will be asking as they consider whether or not churches are in violation of the SBC standards on sexual abuse. And so it really remains to be seen what is built on that framework.

Talk to me about the culture. I'm thinking of some reporting that our religion correspondent, Tom Gjelten, has been doing this week. He's been interviewing Southern Baptist women. And they describe a culture that is resistant to change. Has that been your experience as you've interacted with church leaders?


Possible charges and possible indictment for bribery in a number of cases - and yet, that's not - it's barely scratching the surface here in the headlines. Netanyahu is poised to have a very strong few weeks. He is meeting Secretary of State Pompeo this week in Jerusalem. He goes to Washington next week, expected to meet Trump. Brazil's new president is visiting just days before the elections, and all of this could boost Netanyahu's profile.

And of course, people are following violence in the West Bank and Gaza happening at the same time. What's happening there?

Yeah. Yesterday a Palestinian stabbed a soldier, stole his gun, commandeered a car and fired shots. An Israeli soldier and a rabbi were killed. Another soldier was badly wounded. And this comes a week after two Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire. And then in Gaza, we've been seeing some rare protests against Hamas, against tax hikes there. All of this is a reminder that even though there's been a relative period of calm here, there is continuing tension. And when violence erupts, it can impact how Israelis vote.

Do you notice intense interest in this election, Daniel?


Oh, there are lots of modern blunders but not all of them are brilliant.

To be brilliant, it has to be truly an epic blunder, is what you're saying.

Well, it has to be something that in one way or another leads to a real breakthrough. You know, this is how I define, you know, a brilliant blunder and not just something that is a big mistake. I mean there are lots of huge mistakes.

While I was writing this book, when people would ask me what is your book about, I said, you know, it's about brilliant blunders and it's not an autobiography.


Can I say [expletive]?

Nope. You sure can't. So we're going to call them useless. Giertz lives on a houseboat in Sweden and has found fame through posting videos of her useless robots online.

The first one that I did with a robot arm is called the Breakfast Machine. And it's basically a robot arm that I programmed to pour cereal and milk into a bowl and then feed it to me with a spoon. But all it does is, like, pour the cereal everywhere.

It throws the packet on the floor and it pours milk everywhere, including over me. And it doesn't actually manage to feed me anything. But it does hand me an empty spoon, so it succeeded in that part at least.


It is in both tinfoil and wax paper.

Oh, that's a good technique. You know, in San Francisco, they're really into the tinfoil wrapped, but a lot of people don't like that because it keeps the moisture in. It can get a little bit gooey or moist in unpleasant ways. So some people use wax paper but then, you know, the opposite can happen - it can dry out if you'll used tinfoil.

OK, so I understand that you have a scoring system. So walk me through this burrito. Let's dissect this thing.

OK, so I rate it on five criteria. The first category is the tortilla.


However, it's also this wonderful book about class and how we think about the way that books influence us. Every detail is amazing. I just - I - Claire Harman describes the aristocrat as being ripe and aged. It also really answers this essential question of how powerful can books be.

Barrie Hardymon, our books editor. And if you want specific recommendations, you can always tweet her @bhardymon, or tell us what you're recommending to your friends, @NPRWeekend.

Barrie, thanks for this.

You're welcome.


Well, the Central Intelligence Agency was and, you know, theoretically they also were under the control of the mission. But that's - again, and that's why the senior agency thing becomes so muddled, were they or were they not, and also that special operations team, I don't think, was a working for the CIA. I think they were, you know, DOD asset that obviously was operating in support of the mission there on the ground. So who was in-charge remains a question. Obviously, the deputy from his testimony didn't think he had the power to do that, nor was the special operations commander on the ground able to take independent action apparently without going back to D. C.

And. . .

So that really raises some questions that we really ought to get to before the next one of these things pops up.

There was also confusion. Ordinarily there would have been military aircraft - Air Force planes on call on behalf of the - to support operations, if the mission called, but they were too far away.


Thank you.

What's your game plan to recapture the glory days of Fischer versus Spassky?

Well, I think what I remember most clearly from my childhood, which inspires me in transforming chess into a spectator sport is having a radio under my pillow and listening to the Orioles games in Baltimore. Here in England, I try and remind people of listening to cricket on the radio. These were enormously popular ways of consuming sports, and you didn't really need to see anything. You have the same thing with chess. If you happen to have a computer at hand, you get brilliant new data visualization, which allows you to see with the eyes of a grandmaster. So, it's not at all the sort of paint-drying experience that you imagine.

How do you hope to get people who don't care so deeply about chess or might even not know how the game is played except the vaguely know that a checkmate is something good and the king is something that you aspire to be on the board. How do you get them interested?

Well, we don't probably. And I don't think it really matters. We hired a great media research company and we came to the amazing conclusion there are more people in America who play chess regularly now than there are people who play tennis and golf.

But to point out the obvious: the play chess, they don't watch it.


Hey, Lulu.

So, Gene, let's start by looking at the money involved in big-time college sports. You looked specifically at the Power Five.

Yup, the Power Five conferences - the SEC, the Big Ten, the Big 12, the Pac-12, and the ACC. They win all the trophies, and they make all the money. According to ESPN, in 2015, they made $6 billion.

Six billion?


Klay Thompson has made it very, very clear that despite the injury, he wants to stay there and that the Warriors have pretty much said that they're going to reward him as well for playing his guts out. He belongs with that team. The Warriors aren't going to be what they were, but, eventually, when those injuries are clear, they're still going to be a really good team.

Wimbledon begins next week. What are you watching for?

I'm watching for two things, and I'm really looking for Ashleigh Barty. I'm actually watching her in a couple of ways. One, she has the chance to become the first Indigenous player, obviously from Australia, to become world No. 1. She can do that tomorrow if she wins in the final at Birmingham. She can also - when Wimbledon begins, she can become the first Indigenous woman since Evonne Goolagong, also who was No. 1 in 1976.

My favorite player as a youth, yeah.


What drew you to getting involved?

I made a comic about him earlier this year, and I sort of rallied this fan base of Nikola Tesla fans. And then I actually was involved in this little lawsuit in June. It was unrelated to Tesla. But as part of this lawsuit, I ended up starting a charity campaign, a crowd funding campaign to raise money for cancer and for the National Wildlife Federation. And it was a huge success. We raised like 10 times the amount of money we needed. Instead of raising 20 grand, we raised $211,000.

So then I heard in August about this real estate in Long Island that was up for sale that was Nikola Tesla's old laboratory, and I figured with my army of Tesla fans on the Internet and my previous experience with crowd funding, I thought I would be the perfect person to come in and see if I could make a difference.

Your comic, I think, is titled "Why Nikola Tesla Was The Greatest Geek Who Ever Lived. "Would you mind making that case for us?


Well, after a while the winnings that I was getting wasn't enough. I always wanted more. And I found myself after a win and if I had to leave, I would always find myself the quickest opportunity to go back and win more and to win more and then I find myself going there every night and on the weekends and every opportunity. But in the winnings, I started to lose as well. And the more I lost, the more I wanted to return and reclaim my losses. And basically that got me started on a whirlwind and a cycle of - seem like never ending.

How deep do you think you were in it in terms of losses, total losses?

Oh, goodness. I would not say millions. But I would say hundreds of thousands.

And it changed your behavior with your friends and family, right?


Yeah.

I love salt.

You didn't see that coming. (Laughter) You love salt.

I totally didn't.

That's an essential mineral.


. . . and copied the symbols that most closely resembled the text. And we had a friend who lived across the street who was an artist, and he helped me translate it into proper copy. And then we resubmitted it to Stan.

And Stan was stuck.

And so he smiled, accepted defeat, and this became the first page of this book.

All right, so this came to light recently because Stanley Fischer was head of the Bank of Israel, and he's nominated to be vice chairman of the U. S.  Federal Reserve. Somebody got the idea that it was about time to find out what this is all about, I gather.

Somebody thought - somebody in my team thought that it would be fun to actually put this as a challenge, and basically promised a prize to whoever would be able to make sense of that page.


Yes, far more often. And I'm not sure we fully understand why. In this particular - the latest case, the president said he was not informed until 24 hours before Shanahan pulled out. That was just hard to believe. It's either that reflects gross incompetence on the part of his team in not telling him, or he's lying about it and/or some combination thereof. But we don't know the answer to that.

What we do know is there has been a pattern of withdrawals from nominations that were not fully vetted, or some things popped up at the last minute. You know, both the person nominated that the president wanted to be Army secretary and the person he wanted to be Navy secretary were both knocked out by disclosures that had not come up in the early vetting.

So who's supposed to find this stuff out in the early vetting?Whose responsibility is it?

There are two institutions that are responsible, take primary lead for it - nominees who require Senate confirmation. One first and foremost is the White House working in conjunction with the Internal Revenue Service, working as well with the FBI to do a thorough financial, legal and personal conduct - and that includes domestic violence - kind of search. While that is underway - and it can take a number of weeks - the Senate itself takes up a background check. And so it's almost shocking that the senators are saying they didn't know.

Every administration has some level of dysfunction. But in a White House that is running somewhat more smoothly than this one, how would this work when it's a well-oiled machine or something close to it?


Well, we think that the individual insurance markets need to be stabilized. There needs to be certainty. Right now, the insurance companies are putting together their plans for rating the 2018 insurance products, and they have no certainty from Congress regarding the support for insurance premiums for lower income people. Without knowing those, they don't know how to price their policies, and they're going to price them very high. So the bit - that's the biggest thing that needs to be addressed right now.

Dr.  Gurman, I move to ask you a question, both as a physician with a practice and the head of the AMA, how much time do you have to spend on matters that have nothing to do with medicine?

Well, unfortunately, a lot. We know from doing detailed studies where we actually follow doctors and minute to minute with a stopwatch find out what they're doing. The doctors are spending less than half of their time actually taking care of patients. So it's a big problem.

And how would you reduce that bureaucracy, though?Because, you know, bureaucracies run on (laughter) run on a paper trail in a sense.


What about people who work for somebody who's in power and might not get the same guarantees?

Well, the problem with the guarantees is that who gives them?Because now there is a highly fragmented global community of attorneys, of activists, of non-governmental organizations and foundations that can't initiate proceedings against these people. Former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet felt very safe in, you know, in a trip to Europe. And all of a sudden, he was taken into custody unexpectedly by a judge in Spain. And so, you know, no one today can offer foolproof guarantees to dictators that they will not be prosecuted once they are out of power or even if they are still in power.

If you take a look, for example, at Syria, have we seen that at play?

Yeah. Well, in Syria remember; we - the international community thought that Bashar al-Assad was gone and that his days were counted. And he's still there.


I was broke, and I like my wine, and then I saw this woman buying wine, and I was like, no way. And she even had fancy shoes on. I looked at her. She's like, it's really good. And so, I was like, so that's when I bought a Sauvignon Blanc. And I was like, I got wine for the summer, thank God. And that was when I started thinking, maybe there's food here too.

Turns out there was lots of food. Most of it brands she hadn't heard of before or in boxes that were slightly misshapen or discolored, but what was inside tasted just fine, she says. And with a bit of creativity, Christiane realized 99-cent ingredients could turn into truly delicious dishes.

I'm really hoping that people are going to use this as an opportunity. I think the economy is going so downhill, and I think there's a way to just kind of keep a smile on your face and find cheap ways to still have fun. I hate it when people say, oh, I don't have money, so I can't do anything.

How much culinary expertise do you need?Is it good to have some basic cooking backgrounds before you take on the 99-cent cuisine?


Well, I met him on the phone first. I asked him what he did and he said: Walter, I'm a freelance central banker. Other things that came up during the phone call - the fact that he'd never tasted Coca-Cola, never eaten in a restaurant - got me to thinking, I, as a fiction writer, have to meet this guy. It would be professional malpractice if I didn't.

Now, you met him finally. He said he lived in the same apartment building as Tony Bennett, as a matter of fact. This struck you as a building where a rich person might live but. . .

Well, you know, it was a block off of Central Park. He invited me up and there was no furniture, no real food in the kitchen. But there was what appeared to be, em, maybe $80, $90 million worth of Jackson Pollocks, Rothkos, and de Koonings hanging on the walls.

Was he brilliant at some level?


I suppose that reaching young people would be the appropriate place to go to try to build a new sensibility about Africa?

I had this girl in Oakland come up to me, and she says why are you talking to us?I look around the audience here and the kids sitting alongside of me, the people who can make a difference are people with influence, people with money, and the people sitting by me have neither. I said it is so much more than you think in terms of the influence you have and the power you have, the sense of passion you have.

You know, they haven't settled yet often in high school and stuff. We get older and we seem to just settle and say, well that's the way it is and the edge seems to be taken off. But they're at high school, and at colleges, universities, they haven't settled for less and it is - it's inspiring for me as I see the activism that's happening.

Now, does it happen within your own family?I don't know the ages of your children, but I wonder if your passion has been passed down to them?


Well, let's talk about the walk back because we had seen vague reports that China was reneging on something it had agreed to but not a ton of detail. What exactly did China say, ah, we don't want to do?

Well, there's a tactical side to this, and there's something of a cultural side. The tactical side is that China, not unlike the Trump administration, is trying to get the best possible deal that it can to do as little as possible to please Trump. So it's not unusual that they would try to walk back some of their agreements at the last minute.

But the real issue is that they had agreed to make some structural changes - difficult structural changes to the Chinese economy. And this involves things like decreasing subsidies to state-owned enterprises, more guarantees of openness to American companies, protections for intellectual property. They did not like having those promises committed to paper in this 150-page agreement. Those had to be made public. And it looks like a concession to the Chinese people.

OK. So they didn't want to go as far as the Trump administration wanted them to go - at least not in writing.


Non-binary meaning they don't identify as male or female. They and many other English speakers have been using they like this for years. Here, Emily Brewster will use it in a sentence.

Here is my friend J. They will be joining us for dinner. The they is referring to this individual who is standing right here.

Now, there's been criticism of this usage - some by those who don't understand why someone might identify as non-binary but also by those who are put off by this change in grammar. They - the critics - say it's confusing to hear they are in a sentence if the speaker is only referring to one person. But our word expert disagrees. Brewster says we already do this with another pronoun.

The word you was originally a plural pronoun, and in the 14th century, it started to slide toward this use of being both plural and singular. And so when I am speaking to you, an individual, a single person, I say you are. I don't say you is. The you are is grammatical.


. . . back in the - I think the big telescopes like Hubble and other ground-based telescopes will be used to observe the impact site if any debris appears. In fact, back in 2009, there was an impact of a much larger asteroid on Jupiter that caused a really - a debris cloud on Jupiter that was about as big as the Pacific Ocean.

Wow.

And the newly repaired Hubble was used to observe that impact, and a lot was learned about that impact from Hubble observation.

So folks are really tweaking it up now. I mean, and having a good weekend, you just need a nice clear sky, and you too might discover something.


Another effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act gained steam last night. A federal judge in Texas ruled that the law is unconstitutional. We're joined now by NPR's health policy correspondent, Alison Kodjak. Alison, thanks so much for coming in.

Thanks for having me, Scott.

This decision was received last night. What's it say?

Well, it's a pretty sweeping decision, actually. This judge ruled that the entire Affordable Care Act, which famously ran more than a thousand pages long, was unconstitutional. The case was brought by 18 Republican attorneys general, and it was led by Texas AG Ken Paxton.


I think that we need to have a conversation and debate on what it means to be a Republican. Traditionally, the Republican Party stood for some level of financial conservatism. That seems to have been thrown out the window of late, as you see, got instance, with this latest debt deal, the president adding $2 trillion of additional debt to the national debt and a third of a trillion dollars in new spending over the next two years without even a debate.

I think we need to have a conversation about where we're going on trade. I think we need to have a conversation with regard to institutions and political norms which the president has thrown out. But that has historically been the glue that has held together that balance of power that makes our system work, and I think we need to have a conversation on town.

I think that some might argue that the way that those intra-party debates take place is exactly in the kinds of positions that you have had in down-ballot races. I mean, you lost the Republican primary to a candidate endorsed by President Trump, so I think some might argue, asked and answered.

Well, there's a difference between a battle and a war, and I would say that as Republicans, in some cases, we're winning battles but losing wars. So what happened in that race after I lost the primary was that for the first time in about 50 years, the seat went Democrat.


This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Scott Simon. There's a big bank on trial, but this one's not on Wall Street. The Arab Bank based in Jordan is being tried in New York federal court. They've been accused of funneling tens of millions of dollars to the families of suicide bombers and terrorists who are affiliated with Hamas. The trial will determine whether the bank should be liable for attacks that killed Americans between 2001 and 2004. Jessica Silver-Greenberg is a business reporter for The New York Times and has been covering the story. Thanks so much for being with us.

Thank you for having me.

Tell us please about the plaintiffs - in this case, survivors and families of people who were harmed in terrorist attacks?

So the plaintiffs in the case - there are almost 300 plaintiffs. And they represent those who were killed, injured or had a family member killed in 24 Hamas attacks.


Those are the main parts. So they're saying that when the mandate penalty goes away next January, the protections for preexisting conditions should go away as well. That's not exactly what the attorneys general were arguing, but that's what the Justice Department position is.

How might this change how individual people are covered and treated in this country?

Well, immediately, of course, it wouldn't. The Justice Department isn't asking for anything immediately. Obviously, this is a lawsuit, and it could take months or even years to work its way through the courts. But it does certainly raise the prospect of a court decision that would say there could be no more protections for people with preexisting conditions. That's one of the most popular parts of the health law.

We've been getting reports from all over the country about how health care premiums are going up. Why is that happening?Do you expect it to keep happening?


But he did try to shoot a president. I mean, you can't say well, if he shot the butcher it would be different. He did try to shoot a president. We hold that crime in a different category than we do other attempted murders. In fact, he had other ideas. He stalked Jodie Foster. He stalked President Carter for quite a long time.

So your position is, we're not talking about a man who just shot someone who is now gone, but somebody who at one point contemplated shooting a number of famous people.

Oh, yeah. I mean, his desire was to be a famous assassin. And I think the main point here is that the verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity was a bad verdict. There's no question that he is insane, but the legal definition of insanity is that you have to be unable to distinguish between right and wrong. And I think he knew perfectly well that it was wrong. And following that verdict, you know, they made a lot of changes in the legal system. There's now another option, of guilty and insane. They also - when Hinckley was on trial, the prosecutors had the burden of proof to prove that the defendant was sane, and now the burden is on the defense to prove insanity.

If John Hinckley were to come outside full-time, he - I think we can safely assume - would be pretty carefully monitored by, not just local police, but the Secret Service. And that's not enough guarantee?


The real problem is not Donald Trump - seven and a half years of Barack Obama and his agenda. Clear thinking people - and I'm talking about people who are in the middle, not people that are really burrowed in and would never, ever be a Democrat or never ever be a Republican - are looking at it and they're saying, is my life better?Is our country stronger?Do we have a strong standing in the world?Is this economy recovering?Is it a dynamic and robust economy?

Because we know without a dynamic and robust economy, all the other talk is just talk. We've got to have people back to work. We've got to have people looking forward to getting up in the morning and going to work. We got to have people that feel that America really is the leader of the world.

And I just am saying to my Republican friends, look, I get it. I understand that there's certain things that he's said that really you can't ever look that way, but take a look. We're still months away from the election.

Mr.  Kelly, if you were advising Donald Trump - and, you know, he might hear this - is there some magic sentence that he could come up with that would - that would help heal things over?


Thousand of miles west of the capital, trouble is brewing over a utility bill. Back in November, Veterans Day to be exact, residents of Bullhead City, Arizona, lit a flame at the town's memorial park. They called it an Eternal Flame. The plan was to keep it constantly lit to honor the fallen. But then they got the gas bill. Joining me now to tell us about that bill is Bullhead City's spokesman, Steve Johnson. Welcome to the program, Steve. And how expensive was that first gas bill you got?

The bill was about $961.

That was a pretty big initial gas bill. I'm trying to picture how big this flame is. Could you describe it for us?

It's - at its height, it's about 12 to 15 inches tall. I describe it as a kind of as a large artichoke. And it consumes a lot - well, obviously, it's consuming a lot of gas, at $900 a month. But it's a pretty tall flame.