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I don't see a lot of it either, and I think it is very essential, because if you listen to TJ and you listen to me, I think that we're talking about the same issues, and we want the same aspirations. People who are older need to understand that the struggles that we have been so proud of in the past are honored. But just reflecting and celebrating the past is not going to take us to the future. We have to connect with the new generation of leaders. Policy Link seeks to advance a new generation of policies, but it won't happen without a new generation of leaders. And the new generation of leaders needs to understand that there's a lot of wisdom from the past that can help in the struggle for the future.

Well, I think he's going to certainly reflect the president's overall approach, which is that we should be focused on finding ways to reduce the national debt over time in future decades. Let's look at long-term spending, but for right now while the job market is still so weak, they want to see continued help for the social safety net. For example we just got through this battle about extending unemployment benefits. And yes that costs the government money, but it does give people who are unemployed some cash so they can go to the store to spend it, and that was considered a fairly effective stimulus, or at least seen that way by the Obama administration.

The Soviet Union and Western allies may have shared a common enemy during World War II, but they didn't share common values. Communists supported by the USSR began to threaten elected governments in Europe after the war. And in 1949, Western states created the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. NATO served as a bulwark against Soviet expansion throughout the Cold War. Our next guest is the civilian who led the NATO alliance when tensions with Russia began to heat up again over Ukraine. Anders Fogh Rasmussen served as NATO's secretary general from 2009 to 2014. He joins us from Switzerland. And sir, the West made common cause with Stalin to bring down Adolph Hitler. Why can't they get together today to honor Russian sacrifices and victory in Europe Day?

When an Iraqi wedding reception is attacked by American planes killing some 45 civilians that is called collateral damage, an accidental cause of war. When an American Army ranger is killed by another American soldier in a firefight in Afghanistan, that is called friendly fire. And friendly fire can be so embarrassing to the Army that it may have to be kept secret from his family and from the world. That's what happened in the case of Pat Tillman, disclosed three years later in an inspector general's report. Now, we learn that accounts of the circumstances of Pat Tillman's death were altered as it went up the chain of command. On whose orders? By the time the job was finished, four generals and five other officers had had some hand in concocting the elaborate lie.

No, I'm not suggesting that. I'm saying it could. I think there are Republicans who, in the last several days, have raised serious concerns over this latest revelation because these are the same Republicans who are raising serious concerns over the breaches by the National Security Agency. So I think there is something going on on Capitol Hill now around this Alito nomination and for many people who thought that this was a done deal, I'm suggesting it may not because I don't think it's just Democrats who are troubled by this notion of constitutional rights being violated and a potential Supreme Court justice who was saying he doesn't have problems with the extent of executive power and not putting a check on that power.

This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. We do not know who murdered former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko with an obscure radioactive isotope in London this fall. We also do not know who shot and killed Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya in Moscow earlier this year. Just a couple of weeks ago, former Russian Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar claimed that he'd been poisoned in Ireland. So far, there's no explanation for that, either. However, there does appear to be a pattern of threats and assassinations of critics of Russian President Vladimir Putin that many lay on a shadowy network of former KGB agents.

President Felipe Calderon needs a good news story right now. He arrives in the halls of Washington at a time when criticism of his deadly drug war is increasing dramatically, his political party is faltering and the Mexican economy is attempting to claw its way back after the global economic meltdown of 2009. Calderon has staked his political career on fighting the powerful Mexican drug cartels and disrupting the flow of narcotics to the United States. So far, that fight has left some 24,000 people dead in Mexico since Calderon took office in December of 2006. Kidnapping and extortion by the cartels is also on the rise, and there appears to be no end in sight to the violence.

Bye-bye. We'll have more of your calls in a moment and talk more with Stanley about his new book "Save the World On Your Own Time." If you'd like to join us, give us a call, 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. We'll also find out what Stanley Fish thinks about some of the ways that colleges raise money today. Should a school take money from tobacco companies, for example or invest in a company that does business with Sudan? We'll ask him and take more of your calls. Again, 800-989-8255. Email, talk@npr.org. Stay with us. I'm Neal Conan. It's the Talk of the Nation from NPR News.

You know, you can't really rely on micro-targeting to chop and dice the American people into little categories that you then appeal to very specific, tailored messages. There has to be an overarching vision for America that we're all a part of. We're not all just demographics, and there's a lot of that. You know, these terms like boomer, gen X, millennial - these are advertising terms. And as a political person, you have to think in much larger terms than advertising. You have to think in the human experience of America, our history, our future together. And I think Hillary is in a very strong position to do that.

Well, we had a - I had an interview with another senior official at the Iranian Foreign Ministry who wanted to talk for background because he wanted to be more candid. He spoke very fluent English. And we asked him as well what the United States should do in Iraq. And this is what he said. The United States should work to establish stability and security in Iraq. It should train the Iraqi security forces. It should bolster the government in Baghdad of Prime Minister Nouri al-Miliki. That's what Iran wants to do. And the United States should reconstruct the country. And I said to him, that's the strategy and the approach of the Bush administration. And he just smiled.

Right. Well, remember, also, he's speaking now to a German audience, and he assumes that the Europeans are better educated in that kind of classical literature and memory than Americans would be. But, you know, that speech was such a militant statement of anti-Cold War thinking, and that was not his general style, but he caught the spirit of that moment, and of course, that crowd was almost hysterical. In fact, some of the people on the podium, the Germans with him, wondered whether the hysteria of the crowd signified that they could have another Nazi regime in Germany because there was such a kind of emotionalism to it. I was in Germany talking about my Kennedy book a few years ago, and there was a display at the German Historical Museum, Berlin Historical Museum, and the crowds have turned out. To this day, there's a kind of affection for Kennedy, a kind of attraction to him that resonates with this speech that he made in '63.

Again, my objections are if journalists - legitimate ones - do not conspire to break into government computers, if we condone that, then your computer isn't safe, and my computer isn't safe. And also, when I've had journalists call me when I've been in government with a story that conceivably could harm sources, for example, or could bring harm to other Americans, they would give you a chance to make your case. And sometimes, they would hold parts of a story, and sometimes they wouldn't. You would lose your case sometimes, and sometimes you would win it. And I've done that with major newspapers and found them extremely responsible and recognized the dilemma they struggle with. There was none of that with him.

Well, what's obvious is that they both have trained a barrage of television ads on the TV audiences in Florida. And McCain's ads, as you'd might expect, center on Obama's - his allegations that Obama lacks experience, and also tries to raise questions about his judgment, by referring to his association with people like former Weather Ground - Weather Underground leader, Bill Ayers, and things like that. Obama has ads that try to link John McCain to George Bush, and talk a lot about him voting with the president 90 percent of the time, and they even have a video clip of McCain himself affirming the statistic.

Yeah. So the scale that originally Ito had said - we accepted a little over $500,000 for the lab. He said he's accepted somewhat over a million dollars for his private investments. But The New Yorker revealed yesterday that Jeffrey Epstein had been involved in landing gifts from others of about $7.5 million. The question of concealing the ties - these were very conscious acts. You had a development officer, which is to say a fundraising officer, Peter Cohen, at that time saying that Epstein's name couldn't be involved in logging the $2 million gift by Bill Gates. They wanted to hide that it had been done at Epstein's impetus. That's his words, not mine. In - people around the office, according to the article in The New Yorker by Ronan Farrow, called him Voldemort - he who must not be named - a high conscious effort.

Well, let me just go back to the previous question. Members of - who are close to the president, they've tried to float this narrative that these guys were here to do some work, some security work for the central bank. But the president of the central bank has debunked that and said he knows nothing about that at all. And even yesterday, the prime minister himself says they were not here for the central bank. But yes, who hired them, and why were they here, and what are their jobs - we do not know, and hopefully the next couple of days we can find out.

Bye-bye. My name is Sabrina(ph) - this, from email. I'm a composer-percussionist, and I found that my career has been much more successful online, in the electronic realm, than face to face. The idea of a young, Latina, classical composer does not fit the mold of an old, European, male composer riddled with wrinkles and old ideas. So instead, I use my blog, Facebook, and a women's group called the International Alliance for Women in Music, to promote my music. I found that college groups are much more receptive to a female composer. For example, Conductor Michael Engelhardt's Millikin University's Women's Chorale premiered my multimedia oratorio creation. P.S. - I usually correspond with a gender-neutral name until I have a job or commission. Thank you for the great conversation. Thank you for that, Sabrina.

That's right. In 2006, after a series of incidents along the border, Israel launched an invasion of Lebanon. It was a very costly conflict. A lot of Israeli civilians were killed in rocket attacks by Lebanon against Israel, and, of course, many people were killed in Lebanon. But the result of that campaign was that there have been three years of quiet along the border. There have been very few incidents. And Israel's basically been at peace with Lebanon for three years. Now, they don't expect that continue. Once again, Hezbollah has amassed another very large arsenal of rockets in southern Lebanon. And from the Israeli point of view, it's only a matter of time before there's another conflict. But again, they've bought that time.

I would love to come back to New Orleans, but I have a grandson. My daughter is trying to keep her job. The job that she has has closed down to people elsewhere or part-time jobs in the future. She has to get a full-time job somewhere else. We would love to come back to New Orleans, but what is there for us to come back to New Orleans to? Another question I'd like to ask: If they open these hotels, it's not just tourists. You have a lot of business and associations who have conventions and meetings in New Orleans, large meetings. So they...

We do need to better fund public education but we also - and I want to be clear about the robbing Peter to pay Paul - in many states and in many school districts in this country, we have funding formulas that disadvantage high poverty schools, that disadvantage high poverty school districts. So we have to, you know, pouring more money through a formula that is unfair is not necessarily the right thing to do. We've got to level up these high poverty schools because, as you said, kids who go to Head Start get, you know, good support in the beginning. Then we put them in, you know, not so good public schools. And by third grade, the impact of Head Start begins to wane, and that kills me because they always, like, you know, they blame Head Start for that. But that's, like, blaming my gym that I'm getting fat when I stop going to the gym. But we've got to provide, you know, Head Start recognizes the fact that it takes more to educate poor kids. And if we could take that same ethic up through the public schools, we'd be a lot better off.

Yes. OK. I wanted to say, you know, I grew up in a two-parent household, and I think it's just very important to get back to that tradition. And I understand that it may not work like that because, in my situation, my mom - or my biological mom was a single parent, and my dad raised my sister and I and remarried another woman. So she became our stepmom, and they both did an excellent job. But, you know, by having - I'm a single parent of three children, and if I can talk to young people out there and let them know that, hey, you know what, try to find, you know, be patient and wait on that person and try to find that person to – because you definitely need help. And try to find that - just wait on that person to assist you with those children because it's just - it's very stressful.

I think it was when my parents moved out of our neighborhood, our original neighborhood. I'd grown up in sort of a lower middle-class Latino neighborhood, and we moved to an affluent neighborhood and all of a sudden everything changed. So we moved to this affluent neighborhood and I started going to public school there. And some of the people who were there were bussed in from my old neighborhood. And all of a sudden, they were like, well, you know, you're not one of us anymore. First of all, you're black. Second of all, you know, you have money. So, you know, don't act as if you can still kind of participate in our culture.

In June of 1990, I hosted Mandela at a broadcast town meeting in Harlem. I questioned his choice of allies. I think I know better than you, Mr. Koppel, he began. And the largely African-American crowd exploded in laughter and cheers. There were many years, after all, when most of the world's leaders were not lining up to pay tribute to Nelson Mandela. He took his friends where he could find them. The man who came out of prison in 1990 was a tough, pragmatic politician, in the very best sense of that word. When, as president, Mandela reached out the hand of reconciliation to his former enemies and jailers, he did so not as some sort of secular saint, but as a clear-eyed, single-minded leader who knew what had to be done to avoid a blood bath.

Well I do want to echo the sentiments of your other guest today in that, you know, it really is a three-pronged approach with policy, communities, families and even individuals. And so we do want to have a lot of prevention in place which means making sure that policies are in place so that kids have access to the different activities that will improve their health. In terms of the individual family, we have some programs here that actually work with families to really change the behaviors that had lead to overweight. And I was very pleased when you started your segment, you started with the health consequences of overweight. Because a lot of people may still believe that them being overweight we see the physical thing as a problem but really it's the medical complications that we are concerned about. And so if you can stress to individuals, stress to families, like mentioned, the consequences they're going to have primarily as young adults or when they're in their 30s. When they're pretty much in the prime of their life, we're very concerned about their quality of life at that point with those chronic diseases.

Well, they don't mean exactly what you may think by that. Herrings have a whole separate system connected to the swim bladder where they're pushing air around and sometimes letting it loose. And this is how they rise and fall in the water. And so it's by letting the air loose that they apparently also communicate. And at the Ig Nobel ceremony, one of the teams, who's from the Sweden, told us how they got involved with this, and this turned out to be the best part of the story. So there's these two Swedish marine biologists, and they study fish, porpoises, whatnot. And about 15 or 20 years ago, the Swedish prime minister, Carl Bildt, was sort of on the warpath, repeatedly for years, telling the Swedish public that they were being invaded by submarines from their big neighbor, from Russia. And he kept saying this and there wasn't really any proof. There was an incident, years before, that was a sort of an oddball thing, but he kept saying there are submarines, and he kept saying they're even coming into Stockholm harbor, into our capital. He had the navy, the Swedish navy, put microphones in the water in Stockholm harbor. And they came up with a recording with sounds like rapids, metallic tapping, and so they thought and the prime minister thought, OK, we've got proof. Prime minister's planning to get up in public and announce that the Russians are basically attacking us.

We are on a plateau. If you look at the numbers overall in the United States, there haven't been any significant decreases over the past 10 years. In young people, on the other hand, in adolescence, we've seen significant decreases in the past decade, but not in the adults. And I think what that may mean is that the strategies that we've used for prevention, which have been very, very effective, have enabled us to attract those individuals that are responsive to them, and we're left with those that become (unintelligible) genetic vulnerability or other vulnerabilities have a much harder time to stop smoking or engaging on smoking behaviors.

We can predict the track along which an NEO could hit the Earth pretty reliably long before we can predict exactly where on that track it will be. And an incomplete diversion of the asteroid would just move it from my country to your country. And that could easily be interpreted as a threat, which is why the early experiments have to be done collaboratively so that everybody understands what the other country is doing and agrees that it's all being done to best help everyone, not just a single country. How do you convince people we need to spend the money on this? There's a chart in this study, averaging out the risks of death from various disasters. If you base this on the impact, the impacts pale in comparison to earthquakes.

To me, it doesn't. And empirically, that plays out. One of the things I set out to do in the beginning of my research was to take stock of where we had been. By the time I was doing my work, schools had resegregated to the point that they were shortly before desegregation. And this is a similar story across a lot of American cities but an especially painful one here in Memphis, where we also have to grapple with the fact that this is where the dream in certain kinds of ways was assassinated. And so when we think about housing, when we think about labor, when we think about transportation - these are the ways in which things feel the same and, in some ways, worse in terms of what's possible for a movement about the city, for wages, for a living and to educate children in environments that are safe and invested in them as people and citizens of our city.

You know, I think we're going to become a more tolerant country. I certainly hope that we will. I mean, we have young people dating folks of other races, having friendship groups of other races, and the young people in the U.S. are not just Hispanics. There are large numbers of African-Americans, large numbers of Asians that are part of this younger group. As they grow up with this multicultural environment, we hope that they'll bring those attitudes into the labor force, into politics, and we won't have this kind of contentious back and forth that we sometimes see that rears its head even in this immigration debate that we're having.

Absolutely critical and obviously our whole innovation economy and what we do depends on educated, bright, motivated young people going into the work force and particularly going in to start companies. Usually, where we've made up for the shortfall, and you hear about the shortfall in the U.S. of educating engineers and scientists. I'm not sure that's really that accurate. But normally, where we make up for that shortfall is by allowing the brightest people from other countries to immigrate here. So more than half the CEOs, for example, in Silicon Valley that have created all that wealth are foreign born.

I think China, given the leverage China has over North Korea when you talk about trade, when you talk about, if you will, the crude oil that comes in from China - over 90 percent of their needs come from China. China has the leverage. And again, it goes back to a peace and friendship treaty of 1961 with North Korea to tell Kim Jong Un, come back to negotiations because it's going beyond the pale. And conflict on the Korean Peninsula is not in anyone's interest, and certainly not in China's. The spillover into China would be immense. I personally believe North Korea would listen to China and come back to talks.

Well, I think that points to the lack of involvement of the Bush administration in this conflict. It's interesting because the Bush administration was the first country in the world, I believe, to declare the situation in Darfur a genocide after considerable political pressure by African activists here in Washington and around the country. But then after that, nothing happened. And in fact Colin Powell at the time suggested that we can use the word. But then what? It doesn't really mean anything and it turns out that seems to be the case. There's been a great deal of continuing pressure on the Bush administration in the form - certainly here in Washington - of full page newspaper ads urging people to contact members of Congress and the White House so that the United States government would take a more active role in Sudan.

I feel like - and Bunny talks about this in her book too a lot, which is a great read. Bunny, she shocked me. She actually really did. The thing about the music industry that it did to my family is we were unprepared for what was out there. And nobody was interested in preparing us for our lives being saved, us staying healthy, us staying away from addiction and drugs. All they were interested in is molding us and grooming us to be artists, to do interviews, posture, standing, interviewing (unintelligible), how to hold a fork right. Those type of things that would sell CDs, album, that would make you TV-ready but not life-ready. And so I feel like there was a moral responsibility. Barry Gordy and every one of the record companies and still even so now. Everyone in the records owes their artist to, you know, give them precaution. You know, serve them properly. To treat them not just as a product but as a person, you know? And that's one thing I regret, is that we were treated as product and not persons. You know, not people.

That's right. And he was not speaking very well. He was mumbling and he didn't know what he was really saying and he was all over the map. And then he was finally asked the question: And when this travel law effective? And he said, immediately, or so forth. So immediately. And that unleashed a lot of interest in the journalists who were there. And Tom Brokaw from the United States went back to the Brandenburg Gate and began to announce that the wall was open, because he just heard it directly from Gunter Schabowski, the press spokesman. And we in the U.S. embassy, of course we're looking for what did the government have to say? Well, they didn't really know. They didn't have anything written. It took us an hour and a half to get a statement from the Eastern German government that you have to have a visa to travel, and Germans - East Germans didn't have passports. So it was very hard to get a visa. But we thought, sure enough, they will follow through. They're good, orderly people. They will get visas, and the next day they will be travelling.

On her way past the bus, she opened both its double doors on the house side and starting with the yard sale leftovers on the porch, she began to load it up, from the back to the front. Adam and Eve went in first. Then, the fringed scarves and damp underwear from the bathroom in plastic bags. She packed all the bead working supplies in a box. She did not try to be quiet, and Jeremy and Crystal came out of the spare room and stood dazed and mute. Jeremy was the first to catch on. He pulled on a T-shirt and then his shoes, hopping on first one foot and then the other. I'm sorry, said Alice, scooping up Doobie. I need the space. But the bus, said Crystal. We have to get the bus fixed. It won't run. It will roll, said Alice. She shoved an armful of quilts into the bus and quickly slammed the double doors before they swelled against it. Jeremy scampered into the passenger side and Crystal crawled into the driver's seat, still trying to say things. Alice dumped Doobie into Jeremy's lap and slammed the door. There was that good old Volkswagen snap. Put it in neutral, she called out, and she got behind the bus and pushed.

Our problems about our economic situation don't stem from any lack of desire, certainly. They stem from lack of opportunity in which racial discrimination was allowed to keep us from those opportunities. You know, we don't have as many African-American-owned businesses or just, say, mom and pop businesses in the community. Not because we don't want to do that kind of work, it's because, one, historically we've been denied the access to capital, even our own money, if you will, in order to build those businesses overtime. And now that we're at this particular stage in our history in America, we need to be applauded for having found ways to get around the historical discrimination that others did not have to endure but we managed to do it and succeed in spite of that.

But Means was not Mohican. He was an Oglala Lakota from the Pine Ridge Reservation of South Dakota. Means was born in 1939 and raised in the extreme poverty of reservation life. By the late 1960s, frustration over oppression of Native Americans sparked the American Indian Movement. Means was quick to join and in 1973, he helped spearhead the armed occupation of the town of Wounded Knee. That 71-day standoff included numerous gun battles between American Indians and federal agents, leaving two people dead. As a central figure, Means took part in the negotiations with South Dakota's U.S. senators. Here's an excerpt from the WGBH documentary series "We Shall Remain."

Yeah. I mean, this is one of the sort of the main reasons, the chief reasons that the people who haven't joined Facebook yet cite, which is this lack of control over their information, and more generally, they're giving up some of their privacy, which I think is a big issue that people have with social networks - I should caution, not a huge issue, because as you said, 175 million people are on Facebook and they're joining at a rate of a few hundred thousand every day around the world. So, there are lots of people who seem to have no issues with this, with privacy and social networks. But among people who haven't joined yet, this seems to be one of the main reasons.

We're talking today about getting noticed and how to do it. If you've been trying to get yourself noticed in the job market, call and tell us what works: 800-989-8255. Email us: talk@npr.org. Here's an email that we got from Chelsea in San Francisco. I'm the intern coordinator at a non-profit photography gallery and recently received an intern application cover letter with the closing salutation: huggles. While I don't require a high level of formality from my interns, I do expect a certain level of professionalism, especially when they're trying to put their best foot forward and impress me. The author of the letter stands out in my mind, but not in a positive way.

Well, Ken, it's - there's no doubt, and it's no coincidence that red-state Democrats are really hoping Barack Obama is going to be our nominee. Why? Because they think he's electable in red states. They - we've made great progress in the West. We now have a majority of the governors in the West. And we were picking up Senate and House seats in numbers we never thought possible before. That has to continue. And the only way it's going to continue is to build on the 50-state strategy that you've heard a lot about, but also that we have a nominee who feels comfortable going into the South Dakotas and the Kansas and the Colorados and other states west of the Mississippi. That's happening, and we are very excited about them.

When your parents' home gets destroyed and three of your siblings' homes get destroyed, and all of your friends and relatives, including our home, really just gets in a position where the city that you knew and you love gets hurt, the rule of thumb is you go where you're most needed. And I feel like this is where I am most needed and can be most useful at this time, because the city is going to need something very unique. All the things that were okay pre-Katrina in New Orleans, things that were just average, are really not acceptable. We're in a situation down here where we were on our backs, now we're on our knees--and I just feel like it's the place where I need to be right now.

That's an ad from the anti-immigration political action group Team America. They've been peppering the airwaves here in a full assault on Cannon's stance on immigration. Cannon, like most conservatives, supports a crackdown on illegal immigration. But at the same time, he, like President Bush, also supports a guest worker program that would hire illegal immigrants for hard-to- fill jobs. And that's what this race is all about. Cannon is facing a stiff challenge in Tuesday's primary from businessman John Jacob. Jacob is a political neophyte, but has caught lightning in a bottle with the immigration issue. In a recent debate, Jacob says he sees this primary as a bellwether that's resonating nationally.

You know, I don't have much trust in these games. There was a game a week or so ago before Katrina, and look what it gained us. I would add, however, that the - you made mention of the evacuation, and I think the record of New Orleans' evacuation has been much maligned and unfairly so, I think, in national media. I just read yesterday in the New York Times an otherwise excellent editorial. It spoke of the bungled evacuation of New Orleans. And the fact of the matter is, and I think Ray Nagin deserves a lot of credit for this, the evacuation of New Orleans in Katrina was a huge success. To get 80 percent of a major American city out of harm's way on short notice is an extraordinary feat that we did not see duplicated, by the way, in Houston when Rita came its way.

Well, one might--is tempted to say is this simply a case of the enemy of my enemy is my friend in the case of Harry Reid. Brownback, the Republican, is perhaps the most outspoken pro-life senator on the Judiciary Committee, so it's interesting that he's staying uncommitted so far. And as for Harry Reid, the Democratic leader, he's gotten a lot of pushback today from other Democratic senators, who are not at all willing to give Miers the thumbs-up yet. Yesterday I think a lot of the Democrats were relieved that the president hadn't poked them in the eye, but today I'm sensing some second thoughts. And the Bush press conference is a good indication of sort of the double-edged sword that the president is using on this nomination. The more he stresses Miers' loyalty, the more he says how much he knows about her, the more he says that she won't change, the more he feeds into the charge of cronyism. And that opens Miers up to the charge that she won't be independent, she won't serve as an adequate check on the executive branch; that she'll not be willing to rule against her longtime friend and boss.

It took Harold a while to draw his way into his editor's heart at Harper & Row. Her name was Ursula Nordstrom, and this is what she wrote in 1954 after first reading the draft of "Harold" she received from Crockett Johnson, whose real name was David Johnson Leisk. `Dear Dave,' she wrote, `The dummy of "Harold and the Purple Crayon" came this morning, and I've just read it. I don't know what to say about it. It doesn't seem to be a good children's book to me, but I'm often wrong. And this post-children's book week Monday finds me dead in the head. I'd probably pass up "Tom Sawyer" today. Let me keep the dummy a few days, will you?' Luckily, Nordstrom reconsidered. "Harold" has sold more than two million copies and has never gone out of print. He also went on to draw himself through six more adventures, including "Harold's Trip to the Sky" and "Harold at the North Pole."

The baby was born about mid-2010, somewhere in Mississippi, don't know where, about 100 miles from Jackson, and the mother had not had any prenatal care. When she was tested herself for HIV, which would be routine in this kind of situation, the doctors found that she was positive. And so they realized that her baby was at very high risk of having the virus herself. And so they transferred that baby fortunately very quickly to the University of Mississippi in Jackson. And there, an infectious disease specialist named Hannah Gray recognized that this was a very high-risk baby, and so she decided to go beyond the usual protocol for these kinds of situations and give this child, within about 31 hours of birth, a regimen of three antiviral drugs that attack HIV and...

So he began by sprinkling a few old English words into the text. Then he went all the way until it was nearly incomprehensible. And finally, he pulled back on the throttle to create what he calls a shadow tongue - a mashup of old and new. The main character is a rebel, an insurgent who tries to fight back against the invading French. As a reader, I found that the language starts as an obstacle and quickly pulls you deep into the world of the novel. Kingsnorth says this is because the words we use to describe our world shape our perception of it.

Well, I think those are great compliments. I mean, it makes it sound like we really know what we're doing. Maybe we've never really been that satisfied with what we've done or I think mostly it's that we stumble upon things a lot by accident. There's this thrill of kind of the unknown, or the thrill of something failing and turning into something else, that we kind of want to happen. And I think that song, the "Convinced of the Hex" song, was really one of the very first tracks that we felt like a lot of weird, unexpected but very fresh things happened on.

Well, as I say, I think her example actually is one of the examples of what we're going to see as we sort of work our way through this recession. The kinds of opportunities that are opening up in professions are either very high specific-skill positions, or they're going to be very low-risk positions for the employer; in other words, somebody I can bring in this week and send out next week. In her case, it was a very specific-skill job, and those people are finding positions in this economy, even in education, which - I mean, as you look at school districts across the state, they are laying off teachers. Education schools are starting to have trouble getting students in the front door because of the declining opportunity in the field.

The UAW, actually, I think, only really wants to hold these shares until they can find private buyers so they can fund their health care systems better than they are. The UAW is taking a huge risk, but they have no alternative. And that is, they're accepting the equity in the company because the company cannot cover its obligations to its retirees. So they're getting the stock in the company as sort of option two, not option one. And I'm sure if there's any way they can dispose of it to fund their health care funds better, they would be happy to do it.

Starting next fall, the New Orleans Times-Picayune will publish only three print issues a week. The 175-year-old paper is the biggest metropolitan newspaper in the country to stop daily circulation. The Times-Picayune's owners cited declining advertising revenues and the need to shift its focus online. This announcement comes amid some good news for newspapers. Billionaire Warren Buffett announced last week he's buying 63 newspapers from Media General. And this week, he indicated he's not done. In a memo to publishers, Buffett said his company, Berkshire Hathaway, would seek to buy more small to midsize newspapers. Buffet says he believes newspapers can thrive if they stop giving away their content for free.

And, the second point I want to make is the most important day in her life, for every one of us here at this moment in this church, except when she embraced her faith, the next most important day was April the 5th, 1968, the day after her husband was killed. She had to say, What am I going to do with the rest of my life? We would've all forgiven her, even honored her, if she said, I have stumbled on enough stony roads. I have been beaten by enough bitter rods. I have endured enough dangers, toils, and snares. I'm going home and raise my kids. I wish you all well.

Thanks, Neal. Yeah. I just had a couple, quick points to make, and I do feel underrepresented. But I think there's two bigger issues, systemic issues at play here. And that's the influence of gerrymandering and special interests. You know, even if you increase the number of representatives, which would create - you know - more representatives that might, you know, have third parties like the Green Party or the Libertarians. The problem is, you're still going to have these hyperpartisan districts, and I think that we see that going on. And the other problem is, without fixing campaign finance, you might have more members of the House of Representatives, but you still have an equal opportunity for them to be beholden to the special interests, even if there's less money involved in each, individual race. I think that without public financing, we still run into that problem.

Oh, Arthur Vandenberg. You know, Arthur Vandenberg was a Michigan senator, who in 1940 was pretty much an isolationist. He didn't think America should get involved in overseas conflicts, at least in - unless it was absolutely necessary. But by 1945, he was an interventionist. He believed World War II is the right call and he was willing to right, work with Democrats, and he works with Harry Truman in 1947 and (unintelligible) to create the National Security state that we have now, the CIA, the Martial plan, the two worked very closely and it was a kind of famous friendship. I think one example of bipartisanship that we often remember.

She had been alone in the electronic waiting room for a long time. Yet the face that appeared in the two-dimensional window was composed and thoughtful as she tilted her head to show the angle of her right jaw. ‘It’s my ear,’ she said. ‘It’s hurting something fierce.’ She brought the smartphone closer to her ear canal, so that its camera might show what lay within. But without lighting and an otoscope, all I could see from where I sat was a dark, blurry hole that filled the computer monitor. Welcome to the hybrid clinic. In my case, it’s part of the East Baltimore Medical Center, about a mile from Johns Hopkins University Medical School where I teach, and even closer to the city jail and juvenile detention building. The waiting room is packed today. A row of exam rooms bear signal flags coloured red, yellow, blue, green. The signal flags let me know if a patient is waiting; if a patient has been seen; if a lab result is waiting; or if a patient is ready to go. Urgent-care doctors can easily fall behind schedule, so I’m used to keeping an eye on the hallways to see how many people are waiting for me. For those beaming in for a telemedical encounter – now roughly a quarter to a third of the patients on my schedule – it’s harder. There are no coloured flags in the hallway. While I had been scanning the clinic, she had been waiting a half-hour in the ether, and I hadn’t noticed. Telepresence is not the same thing as presence. She accepted my apologies with an easy wave and moved on. ‘I don’t know what happened, but this ear pain just won’t go away,’ she said. ‘It’s like the time when I was cleaning out my ear with a bobby pin and my daughter jumped out and surprised me and I pushed the bobby pin all the way into my ear.’ She paused. ‘Except this time there was no bobby pin.’ Was any bloody discharge coming from her ear? No. Was there fever or chills, nausea or vomiting? No. Was her hearing affected at all? No. Was there anything meaningful I could do through this link connecting my clinic to her smartphone? No. The physician Clarence John Blake would have sympathised. In 1880, this founding faculty member of the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary struggled with the limits of medical care by telephone. He recalled with some humour how quickly he and his colleagues had conjured new, far-reaching applications for the new phone, immediately after the first demonstration by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876. They envisioned a new specialty of telephone consultants who ‘would each settle themselves down in the centre of a web of wires’ and listen to ‘the heart-beats of a nation’, diagnosing and treating patients at a distance. But four years later the promise had not come to pass. Of the many new gadgets proposed to help make telephones into long-distance stethoscopes, Blake sighed, ‘none have as yet, even in a slight degree, answered this purpose.’ Blake had been one of the first to see the medical potential of the telephone. His predictions spread along with sensational stories of ‘tele’-medicine, like the 1879 report of a teledoctor in Cincinnati that appeared both in the Journal of the American Medical Association and in The British Medical Journal. Late one night, a physician in Ohio was summoned by a caller who feared his coughing child had a bad case of the croup: a true emergency. Instead of making a midnight ride to the house of the caller, the technologically savvy physician asked the father to simply ‘hold his child for a few moments before his telephone’. Using the phone as a long-distance stethoscope, the ‘practised ear of the physician’ determined the cough was not croup; there was no emergency. Father, child and physician were all able to go back to sleep, and by the time the physician saw the patient in the morning ‘all symptoms of laryngismus stridulus had disappeared, and the child was apparently quite well.’ The fortuitous story of the careful and clever Cincinnati paediatrician and his fortunate little patient was not how most telemedicine encounters went, however. In his audiological research and clinical practice, Blake simply could not translate the theoretical abilities of the telephone into the practical demands of everyday care. His attempts to use the telephone as a stethoscope reported no positive results, except ‘in one instance only, of the suspicion of a barely perceptible “thud”, no sound which could be referred to the heart as its source was heard.’ Instead, he heard all sorts of artefacts. These ambient and distorted sounds came from the electrical grounding of the device: ‘the snapping and crackling noises indicative of earth currents, the clicking of the Morse instruments, and the sound of a “fast speed transmitter” on the Western Union lines running along the Providence railroad, and the ticking of the clock connected with the Observatory in Cambridge.’ The ‘web of wires’, as Blake put it, failed to create a specialty of telephone medicine, in part because of ‘the very delicacy of the telephone … and its almost fatal propensity – if such an expression may be used – to pick up sounds that did not belong to it.’ Sometimes, the telephone brought too little information, sometimes it brought too much. The promise of telemedicine may be much closer at hand now than it was a century or so ago The web of wires that extended into hospital, clinic and home brought about new understandings of an electronic network as both an abstract concept and a material thing. In the early 20th century, hospitals modernised and grew more and more specialised, and telephone wires formed its rapidly branching nervous system. As telephones became a common feature of the middle-class home, and patients increasingly used them to call their doctors, a new form of telephone triage soon became part of medical practice. When was it OK to give medical advice over the phone? And when was it dangerous to do so? What kind of ailments, like the ear complaint I was being called to see, required the presence of the doctor or the body of the patient? When was telepresence ‘good enough’ for medical practice – and when was it just a form of substandard care? There are vast differences in the social norms of technology and the political economy of care that separate the medical use of the 19th-century telephone from the health apps of the 21st-century smartphone. As a physician, however, in my hybrid clinic every week of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, I have found some similarities too. Some limitations of practising medicine through electronic media link the frustrated 19th-century ear doctor and the frustrated 21st-century ear patient. They are not solvable by better tech. The promise of telemedicine may be much closer at hand now than it was a century or so ago – as close as the smartphones found in the pockets or purses of more than 85 per cent of the US population. Yet the fact remains that some forms of care require more physical presence than others. The platform we now call telemedicine or telehealth was born of frustration with the limits of the technology of the telephone. Kenneth Bird, the Boston-based physician who coined the term ‘telemedicine’ a half-century ago, thought that television could solve the shortcomings of telephone medicine. At the time, Bird staffed his own hybrid urgent-care clinic at Boston Logan International Airport. The doctor was in person during peak commuting hours, and on call by telephone and pager for the nurses who staffed the clinic 24 hours a day. One of his first telephone patients had a hip injury too tricky to understand over the phone, and had to be sent to the hospital. ‘If only I could see the patient,’ Bird thought, he could have saved her that ambulance ride. ‘If I could see a space launch 1,000 miles away in Florida, and hear an astronaut’s heartbeat 1,000 miles up in space,’ he continued, ‘then there was no reason why a patient a few miles away couldn’t be seen and his vital signs checked, while a nurse led him through a physical examination.’ A grant from the US Public Health Service, a collaboration with local TV engineers, a set of specialised cameras, microwave towers and a lot of coaxial cable allowed Bird to transform the tiny airport clinic into a ‘wired clinic’. Its cameras patched directly to a special multimedia room in the Massachusetts General Hospital. Telepresence, to Bird, permitted a ‘dynamic interaction which allows interpersonal communication across distance to recreate, and even enhance [my emphasis], face-to-face communication.’ Bird drew heavily on the media theorist Marshall McLuhan, especially his observations that, in the electronically interconnected society of postwar America, ‘ours is a brand-new world of allatonceness’, as he and his co-author Quentin Fiore put it in The Medium Is the Massage (1967): ‘“Time” has ceased, “space” has vanished.’ So too with the clinic: the teledoctor defined ‘telemedicine’ as ‘the practice of medicine without the usual physician-patient physical confrontation’. Interactive television created new possibilities of being together, even when apart. He hoped the TV frame could engineer more than ‘good enough’ medicine; it could deliver better medicine Telepresence brought peril as well as promise. How could a doctor or patient know whether the video quality was good enough to simulate the face-to-face presence of a direct physical examination? Artefacts or poor focus might lead to a missed diagnosis. Measures of parity obsessed Bird and the TV engineers who set up the clinic. They assembled archives of visual data to establish where, exactly, to set the threshold of ‘good enough’ diagnostic image quality. If a doctor could see a lesion in the blood vessels of the conjunctivae in person – that is, the red streaks in the ‘whites’ of your eyes – would that same lesion be visible to another doctor looking at that eye on a TV screen several miles away? Consider the photographic prints pasted onto the page in the figure below, depicting three television screens, which themselves depict images of the eye exams of a model patient at three different camera settings. In hundreds of images like these, testing the influence of different permutations of cameras, lenses and video-enhancement algorithms on the ability to distinguish key features on microscopic, radiological and physical examinations, Bird launched a new science of similarity, documenting the equivalence of telepresence and physical presence. In a well-designed telemedical interface, argued Bird in a 1970 paper co-authored with the lead nurse practitioner Marie Kerrigan, ‘the fundamental doctor-patient relationship is not only preserved, but often it is actually augmented, enhanced, and seemingly more critically focused.’ Let’s consider the terms more closely, as Bird and Kerrigan did. Bird’s microwave transmitters ‘augmented’ the signal to travel long distances; he developed image ‘enhanced’ filters for TV signal processing; and the ability to shift between wide-angle and long-lens cameras allowed his teleclinic to be ‘critically focused’. In his more expansive moments, Bird hoped the TV frame could engineer more than ‘good enough’ medicine; it could deliver better medicine. ‘Telemedicine can provide as much or more [my emphasis],’ he insisted, ‘than the actual physical presence and direct interviewing of the physician.’ Despite these hopes, in fact many doctors and patients found telepresence to be a poor substitute for physical presence. Television medicine provided more modes of contact than telephone medicine, but was still limited to sight and sound and the constraints of the camera frame. The absence of touch, of smell and of the sensibility we use to navigate interpersonal interactions persisted. The sociologist Joel Reich, in a 1974 report on telemedicine that took Bird’s clinic as its principal model, tried to catalogue all the things not present in telemedical encounters. Reich’s account of telemedicine is a history of the senses: visual and aural were present, yes, but olfactory, gustatory, thermal and haptic channels were not. They were all missing, and their absence was crucial. ‘Until such a time as Smell-o-Vision became a reality,’ Reich half-joked, ‘with contemporary interactive television the loss of the olfactory channel is complete.’ Reich compiled a list of roughly 50 diseases for which the use of smell might still play a part in routine diagnosis. The clinical significance of losing smell (and taste, for that matter) was minuscule, but they were losses all the same. Nor was it clear that a nurse practitioner, standing in the same room as the patient, could develop an adequate language for describing odours verbally to a physician on the other end of a telemedical circuit. A similar concern related to the relevance of colour. Bird’s studies of visual thresholds for telemedical parity assumed black-and-white television was more practical for telediagnosis. When colour was relevant, for example, when diagnosing a skin rash, practitioners on both ends could refer to numbered codebooks (analogous to the Pantone Color chart) to convey the right colour. Colour could be standardised and rendered legible at both ends of the black-and-white television circuit in ways that smell could not. These losses paled in comparison with losing touch, or the ‘haptic channel’. Some elements of touch, like the sensation of hot and cold, could be captured using thermometric sensors and transmitted electronically as graphs, charts or raw numerical data. Yet the single quantum of temperature could not contain all the qualitative information captured by a physician’s hand on a clammy brow. The haptic channel also works two-ways: the hand of the physician is both a sense organ and a means of providing communication, reassurance, a form of therapy in its own right. Another hand, perhaps that of a nurse practitioner in the same room with the patient and the television camera, might act as a limited prosthesis for some of these functions, but not all. The problem of presence and absence is coupled to the matter of justice and fairness Bird suggested that other technologically mediated senses and agreed-upon codes of interaction would compensate for the loss of touch. ‘There are several uses of telemedicine circuitry,’ he noted, ‘in which a modification of the normal co-presence ritual may have to be considered eventually.’ After all, wasn’t our own presence in the three-dimensional world in part a construct of our shared social reality, a set of etiquettes and protocols that had evolved over millennia but could be re-engineered to work, perhaps better, in electronic forms? Just as deep-sea divers learned to communicate with coded hand gestures in a benthic environment that did not permit oral communication, doctors and patients could figure out new codes for telemedicine. Bird focused on proofs of parity, and since then much of the scientific literature on telemedicine has likewise been concerned with demonstrating that the services provided by medicine at a distance are equivalent, even if not identical, to those provided by flesh-and-blood encounters. This evidence is uneven: well-developed in the highly visualised fields of radiology and pathology, or in tele-vanguard fields of psychiatry, neurology and cardiology. It is harder to document in more generalist fields, including primary care internal medicine, obstetrics and gynaecology, and paediatrics, and especially difficult in procedure-based surgical fields. The difference between these fields is not absolute but relative. It is a difference of stakes and proof, and who faces the risks and costs if something is lost along the way. Something is always lacking in telepresence, but advocates hope that this something is relatively trivial to the task at hand. If it is not, then the primary value of telemedicine (in offering access to care where care is otherwise absent) becomes a cynical falsehood. In truth, the problem of presence and absence is coupled to the matter of justice and fairness. If the difference between telepresence and presence is trivial, then insisting on presence in effect denies care to many who may not be able to visit in person. On the other hand, if the difference between presence and telepresence is significant, then the promotion of telemedicine becomes the endorsement of a debased form of ‘good enough, but not really good’ care. And if that second-class form of care is delegated to those who are already the victims of classism or racism or both, then telemedicine is constructing another form of segregated care. Several times in the past century, an emerging communications technology has promised a means to knit together the divided fabric of US society, to integrate marginalised communities without needing to engage with the structural matters responsible for those divisions. In the 1970s, cable television promised to knit US society back together as a newly ‘wired nation’. ‘The stage is being set for a communications revolution,’ wrote the journalist Ralph Lee Smith, as ‘every home and office will contain a communications centre of a breadth and flexibility to influence every aspect of private and community life.’ Just a few years earlier, the report of the US president Lyndon Johnson’s National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (the Kerner Commission) had exposed in granular detail systemic inequalities in education, policing, employment, housing and welfare within US cities, and called for large-scale federal spending to redress them. Instead of following any of these recommendations, however, the Johnson administration commissioned a new Task Force on Communications Policy to evaluate the role that interactive satellite and cable television might play in healing the urban crisis in the US. ‘If it is true,’ Smith concluded in his book The Wired Nation (1972), ‘as it seems to be, that cable TV is about to effect a revolution in communications, it must be said that a revolution has rarely been created by persons of less revolutionary intent.’ In retrospect, it seems deeply misinformed to suggest that an information technology on its own could reverse the accelerating vector of postwar urban segregation. This process, whose origins can be traced serially through racially restrictive covenants, federal redlining maps, and brutal policies of urban renewal, systematically circumscribed and denied services to the predominantly Black and Latino communities they pathologised. Yet the promise of cable telemedicine had the ear of the federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and of the Rockefeller Foundation. These funders supported the emergence of a national telemedical network that would extend the benefits of modern medicine to marginalised and underserved populations. Cable TV could immediately connect physicians concentrated in affluent urban and suburban centres to underserved communities of the inner city and rural areas alike. In the 1970s, the federal government sponsored at least 14 telemedical demonstration programmes. They were each designed to showcase the use of interactive television to counteract a different social disparity in healthcare access. These programmes targeted a variety of underserved populations, from rural white settlements in remote areas of Vermont and New Hampshire, to inner-city Latino and Black communities in Harlem and the West Side of Chicago. Other projects explored the potential of telemedicine in reducing the steep healthcare disparities found across Inuit and American Indian reservations from Alaska to Arizona, the rapidly industrialising island population of Puerto Rico, and the growing prison population of the Miami-Dade County Correctional System. The goal was to provide evidence of feasibility, efficacy and acceptability: to lay the groundwork for nationwide telemedical networks. By 1972, the Wagner Homes clinic served 1,300 children, but lacked the budget to support a full-time physician Harlem became an important site for imagining technological fixes to resolve what some called the ‘medical ghetto’. At nearby Mount Sinai Hospital, the Harlem native and second-generation physician Carter L Marshall proposed a telemedical solution to disparities in access to care. Marshall’s earlier work had emphasised the interplay of biological and social forces that shaped community health. He was aware that many East Harlem residents resisted setting foot in the hospital until they were so ill as to be beyond the reach of medical help. He hoped that the right kind of communications platform could help bring these people into care at an earlier stage of illness – and at an earlier stage of life. Marshall envisioned a paediatric outreach programme that would stretch directly from the Mount Sinai Hospital into the structure of Harlem’s tenements and public housing projects themselves, using medical television. ‘There are two ways you can look at problems that involve the delivery of health services,’ Marshall told The New York Times in 1973, shortly after establishing a telemedical link between Mount Sinai and a community health centre in the Wagner Homes Projects at 121st Street and Fifth Avenue. One of them is to fix the structure of the healthcare system itself. The other is to use technology to circumvent these fundamental problems. ‘Our interest here,’ he continued, ‘is how we can adapt technology to the delivery of health services, regardless of the organisational framework.’ Pointing to the Kerner Commission report on civil disorder and the subsequent focus on cable communications, Marshall suggested that Harlem was an ideal place to study the potential for cable television (CATV) to reduce disparities in access to healthcare. ‘We at Mt Sinai,’ he stated, ‘are in a unique position vis-à-vis CATV in that we are located in the franchise area of the TelePrompTer Corporation,’ and so could form a ‘unique partnership between a voluntary medical setting and the private sector of CATV.’ The timing could not have been better. New York’s mayor John Lindsay had just declared the city a model for exploring the social benefits of cable connectivity. TelePrompTer had just announced a new Harlem storefront studio on 125th Street. The company could point to recent programming on sickle cell disease as evidence of its commitment to use cable television to advance the health of the Black community. Reverend C T Vivian, head of the Harlem-based Black Center for Strategy and Community Development, called TelePrompTer’s move ‘the first time to my knowledge that an independent Black group has been able to develop a relationship with a CATV company that would allow for creative programming out of the Black condition on an independent basis.’ When TelePrompTer came under fire for not being a Black-owned business, it noted that more than half its workforce was made up of African American and Puerto Rican New Yorkers. Federal funding for telemedicine was about demonstration, not implementation TelePrompTer’s dedicated coaxial lines linked Mount Sinai’s high-tech hospital with a community clinic in the Wagner Homes projects. By 1972, the Wagner Homes clinic served 1,300 children, but lacked the budget to support a full-time physician. With continuous cable links, Marshall hoped full-time medical services could become available to more residents of Wagner Homes and surrounding public-assistance housing projects, encouraging Harlem residents to seek out formal healthcare. Each station had a TeleMation camera with a 9-inch direct video monitor and a 19-inch receiver, with wide-angle and zoom lenses and microphones. The clinic was staffed by nurse practitioners (who spent most of their time at the Wagner Homes clinic) and paediatricians (who spent most of their time at the Mount Sinai Hospital). In an early report to the National Cable Television Association, the Mount Sinai team explained their plans to expand the cable link to other health stations, schools, daycare centres and – ultimately – into every home in Harlem. Yet many Black and Latino parents in East Harlem were wary of Mount Sinai. Well before the racism of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study by the US Public Health Service was exposed in 1972, activists in the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords Organization had criticised mainstream, private academic medical centres like Mount Sinai as indifferent at best and ‘genocidal’ at worst toward the minoritised communities who lived alongside their campuses. Many Harlem residents understood that recent shifts in federal and state healthcare funding – including the New York State Ghetto Medicine Program that funded private hospital outreaches to community health centres such as Wagner Homes – also threatened funding for public institutions such as the municipal Harlem Hospital. Mount Sinai was singled out by the chair of East Harlem Health Council, Robert Palese, as a private entity receiving ‘huge sums’ under the Ghetto Medicine Program, ‘without answering the health needs of the poor people in the community’. The opening of the TelePrompTer storefront on 125th Street and the Mount Sinai demonstration in Wagner Homes both received extensive publicity. It was a success story that showed how cable television could bridge the ‘sociocultural gulf that separates inner-city residents from healthcare resources’. Yet the success of this federal pilot programme was followed by market failure. Having proved the efficacy of telecommunications with nurse practitioners, in 1975 the federally funded contract was terminated. As a spokesperson for the National Center for Health Services Research drily noted, the demonstration was successful at its stated goals and now ‘the project has gone about as far as it could go.’ Federal funding for telemedicine was about demonstration, not implementation. The physician and civil rights activist John Holloman, who practised at nearby Harlem Hospital – warned that demonstration projects involving minority health were often more concerned with short-term gains than long-term commitments. ‘When a demonstration model designed and operated by whites proves to be unsuitable, no one makes a fuss about the inefficiency or inexperience,’ Holloman pointed out. ‘Someone simply writes it up as a part of the study, presents it at a conference, and then a new model is designed and tried until the best way is found to make things work properly. We [the Black community] must have the equal right to make mistakes, to fail, and to try again.’ Yet in these evaluations of communications technologies in community health, the purse strings were rarely held by those in the community. As a result, even when a programme like the Wagner Homes telemedicine project succeeded, the political and economic commitment to support it could still fail, all the same. Wary as he was of demonstration projects, Holloman nonetheless held out hope that this demonstration might yet produce meaningful responses to enduring social problems. He continued to advocate for telemedical technologies as a bridge to equalise access to medical care. His position was just as pragmatic as any 21st-century actor trying to advocate for health equity using the eHealth, mHealth and wearable technologies of the present moment. As a new vehicle for bridging social divides, telemedicine – then as now – offers possibilities for improving public health and empowering communities. Holloman understood racism as a part of daily life – yet, if the long-term solutions to its problems required larger budgets and timescales, why not begin with smaller projects that could be operationalised on a shorter timescale, through laying a few miles of coaxial cable and hooking a camera to a television set? That TV failed to resolve healthcare disparities might, in retrospect, seem inevitable. But understanding how the promise of a technological fix to a political problem can continue to hold enduring appeal for many who should know better just grows more urgent now. Telemedicine has offered only a thin slice of health equity to the patients I serve, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t provided anything. Nor did it completely fail the woman whose ear pain I was unable to diagnose via smartphone. I saw her again, towards the end of my shift, this time in an examination room off the main hallway. She was able to walk the few blocks over from her home in a nearby public housing project. There was some unpleasant weather along the way; her coat, hanging on a hook on the door, was still shedding its last few drops of water on the floor. But her ear was there too, and much easier to see. The outside of her ear was tender to touch. Her ear canal had an angry red line flecked with white discharge, but the eardrum looked healthy and pink. An outer ear infection, then. Easy to treat with the right antibiotic drops, but hard to see on a smartphone. Could you design an otoscope attachment to snap onto the camera on her phone? Sure. Amazon, at latest check, had a few dozen of them for sale, some with built-in ‘earwax removers’ and ‘infection detectors’. Perhaps one day there will be a run on them as there was a run on pulse oximeters in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. But most patients I see don’t have blood pressure cuffs at home, they don’t have pulse oximeters at home, and they don’t tend to have digital stethoscopes or otoscopes either. In the hybrid clinic, the smart suite is not laid out evenly for all comers. Like a grain of sand in the shell of an oyster, it might help to build something luminous and beautiful My patient’s experience should not be taken as an example of the inevitable failure of telemedicine. Telemedicine still served her as a form of triage, and helped her find her way in to the clinic and ultimately to a successful cure. We need to understand that information technologies are always only a form of triage, a temporary patch that points towards the work to build a better medical system. Early telemedical technologies did not end health disparities, but for a little while they did enable federal funders and a coalition of stakeholders to come together around a shared goal of engineering equal access to healthcare. That is an example of how technologies can produce limited forms of social change, even if they cannot serve as replacements for long-term investment and political will. The segregation of our medical system is not the same as it was when Holloman insisted that we turn our gaze towards, and not away from, our medical ghettos – but steep disparities and systemic racism continue to impact the experience and outcomes of healthcare in the United States. Although new technologies such as the telephone and the television could not themselves undo the political and social forces that drove systemic racism, argued Holloman in 1969, ‘telephonic and two-way closed-circuit TV can be established to link the ghetto physician to the medical centre, services that could be put into operation almost at once.’ These technologies were readily at hand. Why not use them? It was not naive for Holloman to hope, a half-century ago, that a new tool might break the cycles of disappointment of the past. That the right technology could serve as a catalyst to level the steep asymmetries of access that characterised US healthcare. That it might be a nidus of change, like a grain of sand in the shell of an oyster, to help build something luminous and beautiful. Nor is it naive for us to want to believe, even today, that the new communications technologies through which medicine is now being practised might bend the arc of our bloated, inefficient and unjust healthcare system just a bit closer to that of the equitable and just society in which we hope to live. But what Holloman saw so clearly then, we must now strive to remember: technology alone will never accomplish this uniquely human endeavour. The responsibility is ours to see it through.

Now, certainly Mars is one and a half times further away from the sun than the Earth is. It may turn out that nuclear energy is needed. The way to get these supplies to the base on Mars is to assemble them robotically from a position close by. Now, the reason I say that is about - over 10 years ago, we had two spacecraft, Spirit and Opportunity, on opposite sides of Mars. They were supposed to last 90 days. The first one kind of stopped moving after five years, and the other one is still operating. Now, the program manager, Steve Squyres, of these two programs has said, verbally and in writing, that what those two have done in five years - the trek that they've done, what they've looked at, controlled from Earth one day at a time could have been done in one week if we had human intelligence in orbit around Mars.

OK. Let's talk about the actual record. You know, you make a big thing about this, Amity, but the REA, the Rural Electrification Administration, electrified 90 percent of the country, not the private sector. Government could succeed in doing something. The Civilian Conservation Corps planted three billion trees. The road that most listeners drove in on today, many listeners, was built by the WPA or one of the work projects that restored people's hope in the future. It gave them a job and something to live for. We are at a pivot point now in the country, a hinge, as it was described yesterday, that's very similar to where we've been before and why Barack Obama has said this is a new defining moment for our nation. Herbert Hoover and George W. Bush believed that if your home was about to be foreclosed upon, it was none of the government's concern. You are on your own.

Well, I mean, I think that the one thing that's the most important takeaway from this is that the small group of people that were hunting him, in some ways, were real, true American heroes. You had a guy named Frank Pellegrino, who was a former accountant and a lawyer who was a very idiosyncratic FBI agent. And he realized the dangers of KSM early on. He had a lot of trouble finding other FBI agents to work with him on this because, you know, it was hard work, it was a lot of international travel. And to get promoted in the FBI, you're basically promoted on the number of arrests you make and cases you make, and that doesn't happen in terrorism. So he looked around, and he found a guy who was assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force who was a Port Authority cop named Matt Bashir, and then these two guys basically traveled the world together. And they basically gave up their lives, you know, their family life and so on, and spent most of their time overseas hunting KSM.

Yeah, but none of the really big awards, I think, were surprises. I think that everybody, most of the sort of handicappers I had been following had it pretty much down to "The Hurt Locker" and "Avatar" maybe, although "Avatar" felt like it was losing some steam late in the game. "Hurt Locker" had picked up a couple of big guild awards and things like that that tend to be signs of what's to come. So I think by the time that happened, "The Hurt Locker" was probably the odds-on favorite. I don't think there were any big surprises among any of the major winners, as a matter of fact.

Well, I think one of the things about Stonehenge is that it must have embodied lots of different purposes. I mean, my favorite view is that this is built as a place of the ancestors, and the reason for thinking that is that we've got a wooden version of Stonehenge just a couple of miles upstream. We know it's the same date as the stone version and they've both got very similar features, avenues linking them to the river. And the stone version, we've now recovered the - sorry, the wooden version, we've recovered the entire plan and it's so very similar that these are almost - this is the same architect, I would say, designing the two.

Well, there were some cassettes that were made for me by an actor at one of the first gigs that I did when I was about 15 years old. I worked for a company called The First Amendment, which was an improv company - an actor's improv company, like "Whose Line is It Anyway" or the Second City of Chicago - and I was like a silent movie pianist. I would underscore whatever they did in terms of improvised sketches. One of the actors was a great jazz fan, and he had made some compilation cassettes for me. And the first piece on there was Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers with Horace Silver, or actually, Horace Silver with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers.

You know, well - hopefully, we'll be able to get your line a little cleaned up. We could hear you but there's some difficulty there. We apologize to the audience for that. We're going to work on it. You mentioned polling, and that's an interesting point. I'd like to come to Michael Fletcher to talk about that because on the heels of the New Hampshire primary, Newsday put out an article slug where did pollsters go wrong in New Hampshire. What is the role of the political pundit and what's the point of listening to them if they're wrong, or at least, not always right.

But, you had this odd sense of - you know what, there was one turnoff for an ecolodge, a quote, unquote "ecolodge." And there were, you know, hundreds upon hundreds of cars stacked up to get into the ecolodge. I mean, the whole notion of, sort of, what the countryside means in China, as compared to what we might think of as the countryside, I think is really changing. There are so many more people headed out there, escaping the cities on weekends, going to guesthouses and villas and extended-stay homes, and it has real consequences on, obviously, the environment. We heard a lot about this in terms of habitat, especially for giant pandas, which is one of the stories we're working on. You know, what happens when the land that those animals can use gets encroached on by more and more people who are going out there to hang out and have a weekend.

So that was Lord Grantham telling his chauffer that we're going to have to step on it. And step on it is another Americanism. It starts off as an American expression, and it was in use in the 1910s. There were chauffeur expressions being used to describe acceleration: Step on it, step on her, step on her tail - sort of imagining the pedal to be like the tail of an animal, like a cat that you would step on, and it would jerk forward. Those were American expressions, and they would eventually get across the Atlantic. But to imagine that Lord Grantham was up on the latest American slang in 1917 strains the imagination just a bit.

Well, as I started to get to know my grandfather when I was kind of a preteen, and he came from this really, this long line of kind of radical Irish socialists, secularists, intellectuals. And just it was something that was very charismatic to me. It was very attractive. And the other side of that is for me, as I grew up, I found that just being white wasn't enough. I needed something - I needed a scaffold, as it were, to sort of tell my story. And so I increasingly identified myself as Irish, as Irish-American, even though, you know - I mean I guess by blood I may be, you know, slightly more than 50 percent Irish, but the rest is - I mean, there's probably half-a-dozen different countries where my ancestors come from. You know, but there did come a point where I sort of needed that. I needed that identity. And so ever since then, I've sort of - you know, that's sort of what I've latched onto and what I've decided.

And I'm sorry, but I wanted to get this thing there before we have to go. That - the reason that the Earth's axis is tilted is the real reason for the seasons. And we think that early on, there was a collision, maybe one, maybe more of smaller forming planets with the Earth, which knocked us over. And so our planet has this tilted axis and has all the phenomena that we've been talking about. But not every planet had an accident like this. Venus orbits with its head held straight up. It has no seasons. Jupiter orbits with its head held straight up, and it has no seasons. So although we love the seasons and we kind of accept it as part of life on Earth, it's not a cosmic requirement. Now, I'm sure we'll find many planets out there among other stars that have no sense of winter or summer or anything like seasons.

Oh, I know in my fantasy, I would like to see more African-Americans go towards the right or even towards the center. And the reason why I say that is because, listen, there's a book out called "Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party's Buried Past" by a Bruce Bartlett, and he talks about this whole antebellum history of the Democratic Party and the adherence to apartheid in this country and to Jim Crow laws. So I mean, the bottom line is that the Republicans do not hold a candle to the Democrats as far as their history when it comes down to racism. So now, we're starting to see some of these things, I think that it's time for black folk to become more, I guess, more intelligent about their vote.

Yeah, well, I think probably stopping and frisking is an effective instrument of law enforcement. However, I think that given the enormous discretion that police officers have in the use of that instrument, and given these sort of background sensibilities around race that animate our society, it's inevitable that in practice what stopping and frisking is going to be in part, in addition to being a law-enforcement instrument, is racial profiling and a reminder to the vast majority of 20 to 50-year-old, 5-foot to 7-feet-tall black men that they live in a society where a cop, excuse the expression, can pull you over and put his hands on you and run through your pockets just because he doesn't like the way that you looked at him, just because he got out of the wrong side of the bed that morning. So the theory about this as a law-enforcement instrument is one thing. But the day-to-day lived experience in East New York, Brooklyn, in Harlem, or on the subway or whatever of being a young black man, when any policemen who feels like it that morning who doesn't like your body language and the way that you look at him can run his hands through your pocket, and if he finds a joint in there or something like that can collar you and carry you off to prison and make a thug out of you.

So - and that's not been such a big issue so far. We've been able to do that with the extra grain. The problem that we're beginning to see and get worried about is that you have very large countries that used to be self-sufficient in grain, notably China, with 1.3 billion people, India with 1.2 billion people, Pakistan with nearly 200 million people, now beginning to become so water-short that they can't be food self-sufficient anymore. And as they begin to look to the international grain market to buy more food, it's going to force prices up. And they'll be able to afford it, but what worries a lot of us is what that means for the people in South Asia and particularly sub-Saharan Africa that are hungry even today. And so that tension is going to worsen.

And sure enough, in 1835, it was in the sky, and people know this. And in 1910, it did come around again. But what I wondered - because he was so specific about it - was it in the sky, visible the night or the day he died, April 21st, 1910? We're coming up on 100th anniversary. I discovered that Harvard College Observatory was tracking it with their telescope. And on the morning of April 21st, the scientist there walked outside into Cambridge, Massachusetts, looked up at the sky and made their observations of the tail of the comet visible for the first time with the naked eye. That gave a little tingle in my spine.

We recently have eliminated the electronic voting devices that tabulate here in Johnson County. I'm a former elections technician. I'm actually currently running for the auditor's seat, and I found that the voters really appreciated that we are no longer using the devices that tabulate. We've moved to an automark device, which simply prints the ovals in for the voters and then that is taken, instead, into the tabulator, which has a paper trail. I know you've already talked about the voting equipment but I'm just hearing from voters that they really like the switch here in Johnson County. The big concern that I'm hearing about, though, is the implementation of Election Day registration and the concern is for the potential that someone could vote theoretically 57 times, hence the number of precincts we have because, you know, we're still...

But, first, confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito are nearing an end. Today's the fourth day. The judge is finished taking testimony--taking questions from senators on the Judiciary Committee. Yesterday tempers flared between Senator Edward Kennedy and Committee Chairman Arlen Specter over Judge Alito's inability to remember whether he was a member of a college group called Concerned Alumni of Princeton. That group was started by some Princeton alumni in the '70s to protest the admission of women to Princeton and the increased admission of minorities. Also yesterday, the judge's wife, Martha-Ann Alito, left the hearing room in tears after an exchange by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham who asked Judge Alito if he was, quote, "a closet bigot." As the hearings wind down, we want to take your questions. Have you learned anything new about Samuel Alito, the man? Do you have questions about how the nomination process works? What exactly is a unitary executive, and what are presidential signing statements? These terms and many others have come up this week. We'll find out what they mean. You can call with your questions. Our number in Washington: (800) 989-8255, (800) 989-TALK. Our e-mail address: totn@npr.org.

Mm. We'll talk - can you stay with us a few more minutes? We're going to take a break. We'll come back and talk more with Alfred McEwen, principal investigator on the HiRISE camera that's part of this satellite that's going around Mars, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, taking these - snapping these pictures, sending back so much data, so many photos. It takes years to sift through them and see these photos. So stay with us. We'll be right back after this break. Our number: 1-800-989-8255. Go to our website at sciencefriday.com. You can see the pictures of the streaks coming down the site of the slopes of these hills. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break. I'm Ira Flatow. This is SCIENCE FRIDAY, from NPR.

He was married five times and struggled with an addiction to amphetamines, which contributed to his death in 1982, at the age of 53. Just a couple of months later, Blade Runner opened, the first in a now substantial series of movies based on his work. Reissues of many of his books are available in hardback editions, and some critics now describe him as one of the most important writers of the 20th century. The latest film adaptation is A Scanner Darkly, which is in theaters now. Our main focus this hour is the work of Philip K. Dick and his growing influence and reputation.

Today, though, we focus on how, and when, and how honestly, we talk with each other about race. We'll hear from three people who address these issues, on a blog, in a newspaper column, at neighborhood meetings, and we need to hear from you, too. Have you ever spoken honestly about race with someone of another race? What did you learn? Tell us your story. Our phone number is 800-989-8255. Our email address is talk@npr.org. You can also share your story on our blog. That's at npr.org/blogofthenation. Dawn Turner Trice of the Chicago Tribune started a blog in response to Senator Barack Obama's call for a national dialogue on race. It's an open forum for people of all backgrounds to discuss their experiences about race, and she joins us now from the studio in Chicago, where she's a columnist for the Tribune, and mediates a blog called "Exploring Race." Dawn Turner Trice, nice to have you on the program today.

Well, it is strange. I mean, he was impeached by a close vote of a 114 to one in the Illinois House, and now, of course, it goes to the Senate, where two-thirds are needed to convict him and remove him from office, probably happen later this month. Blagojevich insists that he has not committed any crimes and he'll be proven innocent and he - and for all we know, he might be. I mean - but the point is, many times impeachment cases is more political. A lot of people, a lot Democrats, insist that the Bill Clinton impeachment trial was more about politics than anything he may have done wrong. And so - but it was very surreal thing today for Rod Blagojevich to preside in the State Senate as they were swearing in the new members, the same members who will try him later this month.

The hot morning sun cast its pale yellow and unforgiving glare across the great Mohave Desert, and it was not yet even 8 in the morning. I was working the first cup of coffee, enjoying the cool air-conditioning, when I heard his voice - smooth as warm chocolate, and soothing as a mother's embrace. He spoke of his passion, of his desires, and of his secreted foray into the steamy and sensual world of forbidden love. This is not the first time, nor will it be the last, when I am carried away to lofty heights and the vehicle that is his persona.

Drool exactly. But he did - but, you know, he also wasn't the savior of the Republican Party that a lot of people said, if only Fred Thompson would get in. He seemed a little unsteady at times, but really he almost, more than anything else, he seemed irrelevant. He seemed - it seemed to me that the dynamic at least at last night's - yesterday afternoon's debate was between the two sensible frontrunners. And I'll tell you why I call them two frontrunners, but Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney. Rudy Giuliani clearly leading in the national polls, he has been for several months. Mitt Romney leads in Iowa and New Hampshire, the first two contests of 2008. So - and the two of them really sparred against each other on economic policy on their records in Massachusetts and New York City.

The judge in Washington has sentenced Paul Manafort to serve almost four years in prison. Add that to the punishment Manafort received in Virginia last week. That means he'll spend about seven and a half years behind bars total. The D.C. judge, Amy Jackson, was not buying Paul Manafort's remorse yesterday. She said he used other people's money to support his own extravagant lifestyle. Too many houses for one family to enjoy, too many suits for one man to wear, she said. She also said that Paul Manafort had spent his whole life spinning. He treated the legal process the same way. Problem is, Judge Jackson said, courts is one - courts are one of the places where facts still matter. And she said, saying I'm sorry I got caught is not an effective plea for leniency.

Miller retorted that people can make up their own minds, but that she had not previously been satisfied her source's consent was voluntary. President Bush had previously ordered all administration staffers to release reporters from any promises of confidentiality in the CIA leak case, but after conversations between their lawyers, Libby wrote Miller and then called her directly in jail this month to make sure she knew he meant it. In media interviews, Libby's lawyer, Joseph Tate, said he was surprised Miller hadn't figured that out a lot sooner. The case stretches back two years to the disclosure of CIA agent Valerie Plame's name in a Robert Novak column. Novak cited two senior administration officials in identifying Plame as he wrote about her husband, a former ambassador and a critic of the White House. Fitzgerald was appointed to determine if a crime was committed. The knowing disclosure of a covert operative's identity by a government official can be a felony, and there's no federal law shielding reporters from being compelled to testify.

When the CIA was planning to grab Bin Laden in Afghanistan in the late '90s, that wouldn't have been an extraordinary rendition. That would have been an abduction. But most cases, the individual is actually detained by the authorities of the country in which they're in and then they are moved to the other country. And this is done outside of the extradition process, because those countries are afraid of being identified as cooperating with the United States in its counterterrorism efforts. And they are afraid that their publics will be intolerant of that. And these are usually countries in the Muslim world.

Yeah, we've been hearing about this for days. It's been a dozen days since Hurricane Maria made landfall. I just want to give you one little detail that gives a sense of the desperation that some people feel. And it's a sign - a handmade sign - that people have hung over the freeway outside a neighborhood called Playita in San Juan, Puerto Rico. And it simply says, necesita agua y comida. We need water and food - SOS - one of many cries for help that people are still expressing. And a resident of that neighborhood says, we feel like we're running out of time.

You know, for a good part of the show, he just enjoyed it - you heard Garth Brooks singing "American Pie" there. Garth Brooks also did a rendition of "Shout." I looked over at the little glass enclosure where the Obamas were sitting along with the vice president-elect Joe Biden and his wife and some other members of their party, and they were on their feet. And the girls were throwing their hands up to "Shout." So, they enjoyed the show. But then, the president-elect came and made a speech toward the end, certainly recognizing the theme here. All the great presidents who had come before from Abe Lincoln to FDR to John F. Kennedy.

It's amazing isn't it? I never come across such a moral panic ever in all my poor linguistic life. And it's because people imagine things about texting which without any evidence at all really just because they hear some kids like you did on your trailer a few minutes ago shouting out a few abbreviations here and there, they think that this are entirely used in texting, that text messages consist of nothing else but these abbreviations. In actual fact, when you do some analysis like I had to do for the book, I collected, you know, thousands and thousands of these things and went through them. Do you know what proportion of words are actually abbreviated in text messages? It's less than 10 percent on average. So, they aren't use as often as people think they are, and that's why it isn't such a big deal.

But the housing market this spring, statewide, is probably the best in five years. Nothing fancy. We've been in the top five states in employment growth for the last two years. We have the benefits of marked-down rents, now that technology bubble's blown, and we're getting a renewed flow of people into the state. We feel the headwind of rising interest rates and after-effects of some foolish lending and borrowing, but there is no housing bubble blowing here. Fannie Mae's regulator, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, says that Colorado homes appreciated six percent in 2005, and the Denver area gained four and a half percent. Not great, but not a foreclosure crash either.

Tom Bailie grew up on a dryland farm in Mesa, Washington, just downwind from the massive Hanford plant founded in 1943 to produce plutonium for the Manhattan Project. Bailie often served as an informal spokesman for the ‘downwinders’, the people who believed they were poisoned by fission products that flowed from the plant on air currents, along underground aquifers, and down the Columbia River on the dry plains of eastern Washington. Bailie shows up in dozens of articles and almost every book about Hanford. Talking to him, it’s easy to see why. He has the gift of gab spiced with a knack for colorful sound bites. He also looks, dresses and drawls just like a farmer on the Western range should, which makes for good copy. Because it takes historians a long time to research a story, I got to know Bailie well. Over the years, we became friends. The first time I met him, we climbed into the swather he used for cutting crops and rode up and down a field of alfalfa he was getting ready for export to Japan. He told me that the former CNN journalist Connie Chung had ridden in the same seat. I got the message that he was offering me a photo-op worthy of national TV. As he drove, he kept up a monologue. ‘When I was a kid in the 1950s, I used to love Buck Rogers, and one day I looked out the window to see men in space suits shoveling dirt from our front yard into little metal boxes. I was thrilled, but my mom panicked. She ran out and asked the scientists what was wrong. “Nothing, M’am,”’ Bailie cuffed his hand over his mouth to mimic a voice behind an assault mask, ‘“everything is just fine.”’ The scientists asked for the beaks and feet of the geese his father had shot, then they left. ‘I finally realised,’ Bailie announced on another day, ‘why me and my buddies are still going strong, and the goodie-two-shoes we went to school with are sick or dead.’ ‘Why, Tom?’ ‘Because when their mothers told them to eat their vegetables and drink their milk, they did! Meanwhile, me and my friends snuck off to the store and bought Twinkies and Coke.’ One day, Bailie took me to a low-slung, cement-block building abandoned behind chain-link fencing. It was the old Pasco slaughterhouse. ‘These guys in tan suits used to pull up in beige cars marked with consecutive plates. They were looking for our crooked lambs and calves,’ he said. He leaned closer to make sure I was listening. ‘Twenty per cent of our livestock were malformed. The feds would go in, say something to the manager, and then come out with stainless steel containers. They were collecting organs — like regular body snatchers.’ There are some truths that most people don’t believe, not because they are not true but because, like the mythical prophet Cassandra, society is resistant to them When he ran for the state legislature in the 1980s, Bailie says he started to notice something. He campaigned among senior citizens (‘because they vote’). In some communities, people in their 90s were still farming. His campaign manager came from the same neighbourhood as him. Bailie asked him: ‘Why we don’t have any old folks?’ ‘They all died of cancer.’ ‘Why is that?’ ‘I don’t know.’ Bailie asked the elderly farmers if they used pesticides. ‘Yes, we did,’ they told him, ‘until that communist lesbian bitch Rachel Carson came along.’ ‘See,’ Bailie said to me, ‘everyone used DDT, so that didn’t make the difference.’ Bailie said he saw a pattern. The communities where elderly people still lived were in the valleys, but they were missing in hamlets on the hillsides. When I gave him a blank stare, he pencilled out for me how the wind followed the contours of the land, funnelling up through the edges of valleys. ‘Me and my buddies are still going strong’: Tom Bailie. Photo courtesy Kate BrownIn the decades after the Chernobyl disaster, state-funded scientists in the United States determined that landscapes polluted with radioactive isotopes from weapons production required $100 billion amelioration programmes. In these places, residents had been exposed to low doses of ionising radiation since the mid-1940s, longer than anywhere else in the world. Richland, Washington, was a model city re-built in 1943 for plutonium plant operators. Scientists claimed that the local testimonies of chronic illness and sick children were scientifically anecdotal; that, on average, rural inhabitants were no less healthy than other populations. Internationally, experts argued that people living near radioactive zones in the US, Ukraine and Russia were just fine. If they were sick, it was because they had ‘radiophobia’, or they drank too much, smoked and had poor diets. In this light, recent reports of deformed barn swallows in the Chernobyl zone and mutant butterflies appearing a year after the meltdown of three reactors in Fukushima make for especially worrying copy. Butterflies and birds don’t smoke, drink, or suffer from radiophobia. For the past seven years, I have spent a great deal of time in the radiated traces of the world’s first plutonium plants — the Hanford factory in eastern Washington State and the Mayak plant in the southern Russian Urals. As countries from the Middle East to the Baltics gear up for a new generation of nuclear power reactors, it is worth taking another look at how scientists laid claim to the ‘truth’ to dismiss the testimony of local farmers such as Tom Bailie, and how farmers fought back to cast doubt on the experts. As Bailie tells it, he didn’t always harbour suspicions of government agents in unmarked cars. He said he was once a freedom-loving, take-it-or-leave-it American patriot. He tried to enlist during the Vietnam War, and was rejected because of birth defects. Even so, he spurned the hippies and peace movement, and was proud of living alongside the plutonium plant in a community of like-minded people who knew the value of a strong defence. After the Chernobyl disaster, however, de-classified documents showed that the Hanford plant’s routine dumping of radioactive waste exceeded the Chernobyl blast several times over. This news gradually eroded Bailie’s political certainties. In the early 1990s, along with 5,000 other plaintiffs, he filed suits against five corporations that had operated Hanford for the US government. The ‘downwinders’ waited anxiously for the results of a federally funded Hanford Thyroid Disease Study (HTDS), hoping it would provide determining evidence. But the case, which seemed so clear to plaintiffs living in areas where most people seemed to be chronically ill, proved elusive. In the last decades of the 20th century, lawyers representing manufacturers had created a highly restrictive set of court rules dictating the evidence necessary to prove damages from environmental contamination. Scientists drawing on American-directed studies of Japanese bomb survivors narrowed the field of inquiry to a few carcinomas and thyroid disease. Downwinders, however, connected their sheep born without eyes to birth defects in their children. The thyroid study did not address genetic effects, or many other health problems that Russian scientists discussed in medical literature as ‘chronic radiation syndrome’. Taking his lead from the study, the US district judge Alan McDonald severely limited the number of claimants in the downwinder case. He ruled that, to be eligible, plaintiffs had to prove they had received a dose of radiation high enough to cause twice the number of cancers that would occur in the population at large. During the heated debates that followed, the science of ‘experts’ was often pitted against local knowledge wielded by farmers and ‘lay people’. In angry meetings in eastern Washington, scientists pulled out charts and graphs showing how impossible it was that anyone had been harmed by the plant: ‘on average’, they were well within permissible doses. Locals replied that what the scientists said made no sense, that in their communities they could pinpoint the places where most people had health problems. The scientists discussed ions, rads and isotopes. They clashed with people who wanted to talk about their loved ones’ immune disorders and tumors. The dry, bristling Seattle-based experts reminded many people of the arrogant Hanford scientists, whom the downwinders believed had caused their problems in the first place. It isn’t that one form of knowledge, expert or local, was right and the other wrong. Both local and expert knowledge were limited and reflected diverging interests. Because the record of ingested and ambient radioactive isotopes was nearly impossible to trace backward in time, both forms of knowledge were, in the end, circumstantial. In court and congressional hearings, however, science wielded by experts was seen as ‘objective’ and ‘disinterested’, while women tallying up their sick children and neighbours were labeled ‘subjective’ and ‘anecdotal’. How did Bailie, with his high-school education, come to the same conclusions as an army of Hanford researchers with multi-million dollar budgets? As the case dragged on, Bailie staked his social capital on proving that the plutonium plant had caused his parents’, aunts’, uncles’ and sisters’ cancers, and possibly his own birth defects and infertility. As a child, he told me one night over dinner, he had long stays in the Hanford-funded hospital where he was put in an iron lung for a mysterious paralysis. He remembered a strange blue light, the door to a ward guarded by soldiers, and being awakened to shouts. When he asked the nurse what was wrong, she hushed him, saying: ‘Go back to sleep. Those are just the men from Hanford.’ I never knew what to make of Bailie’s stories. As he spoke, I’d often have a vertiginous sensation that I’d entered the studio of a midnight talk radio show and wasn’t allowed to leave. Sometimes uncouth and usually inappropriate, he would ramble from conjecture to rumor to conspiracy. His stories were hard to follow and much, much harder to believe. A couple of journalists have said as much, one calling him a blowhard. Bailie might be the most oft-quoted unreliable narrator in American history. He knew he didn’t sound credible. ‘I’m a kid, they give us milkshakes and pass a meter over our stomachs; there’s a naval base in landlocked Pasco. My friend’s father who runs the train depot is really, my friend tells me, an FBI agent, and no one around here but me seems to think all this is strange.’ Unreliable narrators are often worth listening to. There are some truths that most people don’t believe, not because they are not true but because, like the mythical prophet Cassandra, society is resistant to them. So I seek out unreliable narrators and then cross-check the facts. Almost everything Bailie told me panned out. The Hanford plant: streams of air and water follow idiosyncratic patterns to deposit fission products across the land. Photo courtesy of the Department of EnergyIn the early 1960s, scientists did collect samples from local farms and took ‘bioassays’ of wild game and livestock. They tested the drinking water and collected bovine thyroids from slaughterhouses in the towns of Pasco, Mesa and as far away as Wenatchee. From 1949, Hanford researchers also harvested the organs of plutonium workers and workers on neighboring farms. Investigators funded by the Atomic Energy Commission secretly gathered bones of children worldwide to measure radioactive fallout. The Richland hospital did have a guarded ward with cement-lined rooms, to protect staff from the bodies of patients too radioactive to go near. Twinkies and poor diet might indeed have helped Bailie. Hanford studies showed that people who ate food purchased in grocery stores had lower counts of radioactive by-products. Another study showed that pigs on poor feed retained fewer radioactive isotopes than those on healthy diets. Bailie’s guess that farmers living on the hills had more exposure than those below also fitted with the Hanford researchers’ descriptions of plumes of radioactive iodine heading ‘upslope into the valleys’. Over the years, Bailie tipped me off about plant accidents. He gave me little lectures on topography, soil qualities and the path of radioactive particles through a digestive track. ‘But what do I know?’ he would say at the end of his monologues. ‘I’m just a dumb farmer.’ He had a point there, too. How did he, with his high-school education, bouncing around country roads in a battered Chevy, come to the same conclusions as an army of Hanford researchers working on classified studies with multi-million dollar budgets? Science understands complex processes by simplifying them. Radiation pathway studies were based on models, averages and aggregate populations, with a streamlined view of single isotopes entering the body through singular routes. But radioactive effluents don’t really spread through environment as a generalised statistical aggregate. In reality, they collect at random points because air currents, river eddies and groundwater follow idiosyncratic patterns to deposit fission products unevenly across the land. At these hot spots, bodies were drenched in fission products, not at average levels but at great intensities. Scientists breezing in from Seattle had only a cursory grasp of the hot spots, which is not surprising. To determine where and how hot they were, they would have had to go over the exposed 75,000 sq mile territory inch by inch, measuring in three dimensions: plants, roots, soil, ground water and cubic air vertically up to 2,000 feet. They would have had to know the land the way children know the back lot, the way a farmer understands the nutrients of his soil, the drainage, dips and turns of a field, the vagaries of wind and weather. To do a thorough epidemiological study, the scientists would have had to get to know the population on intimate terms, not just the people living there but also those who had moved or died. It would take knowing who had had a miscarriage, who was sick with what, which couples had trouble with fertility, which kids were somehow just not right. In short, it would require the kind of knowledge people in extended families or close-knit communities possess. The Hanford and Seattle scientists, sequestered by day on the nuclear reservation, often transplanted from elsewhere to the lab headquarters in Richland where they were seen as arrogant and socially isolated, did not have that kind of knowledge. As the community divided into people who backed the plutonium plant and those who suspected they had been poisoned, Bailie became a lightning rod But Bailie did. He carried around folders of clippings and documents, and he put that information to work alongside his farmer’s understanding of local history, geography, geology and climate, mixed in with gossip, rumor, family lore and coffee-shop conjecture. He talked to every reporter who called him until his wife just about divorced him. A lot of fellow farmers wished that Bailie would shut up before their crops were stigmatised as radioactive and lost value. As the community divided into people who backed the plutonium plant and those who suspected they had been poisoned, Bailie became a lightning rod. Lots of people, including friends and family, stopped talking to him. He suddenly had trouble extending his credit lines at the town bank, and he lost his farm. Meanwhile, the downwinders’ lawsuit was languishing in court. Delaying the case again, Judge McDonald told the press that ‘the government’s limited resources should be focused on [nuclear] clean-up and not diverted by litigation’. Ten years passed with no hearing, then another five years. The defence had good reasons to postpone the case. The federal government was committed to covering all legal fees for the five former contractors being sued, so corporate defence lawyers had no motivation to settle out of court or resolve the issue speedily. The Chicago law firm, Kirkland and Ellis, racked up $28 million in legal fees, all of it bankrolled by taxpayers. Downwinders, on the other hand, had neither time nor deep pockets. Many plaintiffs were elderly or sick. They struggled with medical bills and their lawyers worried over the mounting legal costs. To top off the injustice, in 2000 the federal government agreed to pay up to $150,000 each to former Hanford employees with radiation-related health problems. Downwinders were exasperated to see that while their claims were denied, workers who had submitted to the risks and secrecy of making plutonium got a payout. The whole process felt like a fix. Rather than concede defeat, the downwinders did something remarkable. They took the burden of research into their own hands. Several activists convinced the Center for Disease Control (CDC) to review the original thyroid study, which had found no significant health effects among downwinders. The CDC determined that the thyroid study researchers had overstated their conclusions, underestimating the population’s doses, and that, in fact, the subject population had three times more cases of thyroid disease than expected. These contradictory assessments made sense when the downwinders discovered that lawyers for the defence firm had sat in on the first meetings of the original dose reconstruction study in order to design the study for ‘litigation defence’. The downwinders also learned that Judge McDonald owned an orchard directly across the river from Hanford. Acknowledging that his agricultural holdings could decline in value if a jury found Hanford hazardous, the judge finally had to recuse himself. A Hanford decontamination cell in 1954. Photo courtesy of the Department of EnergyThe downwinders embarked upon a new kind of people’s epidemiology. Joining forces with doctors, scientists and social justice advocates, they devised a health survey that they distributed to friends, neighbors and family members in grocery stores and churches. They canvassed anyone who might have been exposed to internally ingested radioactive isotopes. The survey asked about the kind of specific factors — family health, diet, landscape, and wind patterns — that might contribute to localised exposure to radiation. Analysing the results from 800 completed surveys, the downwinders compared disease rates with those among a control population. They found the affected population to be six to 10 times more likely to have thyroid disease and other illnesses. The community-based study contradicted the original government-funded reports, but its results squared with tests that Hanford scientists had run on animals over the years, and that Russian scientists had conducted on populations exposed to the Mayak plutonium plant in the southern Urals. Perhaps no less importantly, the downwinders’ epidemiology validated people’s knowledge about their health and landscapes. That felt good after a decade of being told they were wrong and ignorant. In 2009, Bailie took me to his high-school reunion. The class of 1968 was meeting at Michael’s Café in downtown Connell, less a town than a strip off the highway. It has a hotel, a state prison, a food processing plant, and a string of mobile homes. Twenty-five years had passed since locals learned of Hanford’s dangerous emissions. Even so, as we went in, Bailie said it wouldn’t be a good idea to mention thyroid or health problems. ‘People don’t want to talk about that.’ He looked nervous, perhaps expecting to get dressed down for bringing a snooping historian to the class reunion. While he went off to greet old friends, I sat down at a table and prepared to make small talk. I didn’t get a chance. Pat rolled up in a wheelchair. She told me she had multiple sclerosis, as did her sister. She said she used to pick peaches down in Ringold, across the river from the plant. She attributed her illness to Hanford. Linda chimed in that her mother had troubles with her thyroid. Her father, always slim and active, had heart problems very young. Crystal (thyroid and lung cancer, never smoked) said she never bothered with that downwinder business on account of her own health problems, but when her daughter got cancer and was diagnosed infertile, that made her angry. Gwen (thyroid disease) didn’t look well. Her husband had to heave her from her walker to a chair. The classmates all grew up on land opened in the early 1950s for irrigation, farms just downwind from Hanford. They talked about the green books the scientists gave them in the 1960s to record every bushel of wheat and pound of potatoes. All that crazy detail, they laughed. Bailie joined us and turned to Gwen. ‘Remember how your mother used to say she didn’t feel well because of the water? And your father used to say: “You’re crazy, woman! That is a 1,200 foot artesian well.” Remember that?’ Bailie asked. ‘No one knew then that we shared an aquifer with Hanford’s leaking waste tanks. We all drank from that aquifer.’ Becoming agitated, he pulled out a dinner napkin and drew a line marking a country road. He made an X over the Holmes’ farm. ‘She got bone cancer. The girls both had thyroid problems.’ His pen turned a 45-degree angle. ‘She drowned her deformed baby in the bathtub and then committed suicide.’ Bailie marked out two more farms: ‘She had leukemia, and up there the baby was born with no head.’ Bailie stopped at Gwen’s farm. Gwen’s mother died of leukemia in her 40s. Her father also died of cancer. Gwen had a lifetime thyroid condition (and died a few years after the reunion). ‘That’s what we used to call the death mile,’ he said. A man walked up to our table. He’d had a few drinks. His eyes were red, his speech slurred. He said Bailie was full of bull. He had grown up on a downwind farm and he was fine. ‘We have plenty of 87-year-olds around here.’ Bailie nodded and blinked, abnormally silent. The other classmates stared at their laps. I was surprised. I’d never known Bailie to back down from a debate. Later he told me that the interloper suffered from serious health problems. ‘I couldn’t argue,’ he said. ‘I felt sorry for him.’ Bailie had been reviled in his community. In his obstinate refusal to stop talking, he pointed out how some truths, visible to the naked eye, had been overlooked, while silences had begotten certainties. By 2009, there was only one drunken man at the reunion left to question him. Those crazy stories he had been telling for decades no longer sounded so crazy. Before Bailie and other downwinders started talking, there had been no real debate about Hanford’s health effects. Instead, there was an appearance of scientific debate that washed out in an often-calculated confusion and uncertainty. Until the downwinders started making a noise, there was no debate because there were no sick people. Sick Hanford workers, sick farmers and sick neighbours silently suffered alone for years, never realising they shared a fate with thousands of others. In the years after Chernobyl, as the downwinders talked, met, campaigned and traveled to Japan, Ukraine and the southern Urals, they came to learn of multitudes like themselves. The diseased bodies of self-proclaimed downwinders helped to map the invisible geographies of contamination, hidden for decades in the interior American West. Using their own bodies as evidence, they pointed to the gaping contradiction in the claim that, while the nuclear reservation itself was deemed dangerous enough to require more than $100 billion to clean up, the people living next to the reservation were safe. In their frustration at experts used to zoning territory into ‘clean’ and ‘contaminated’ and compartmentalising information based on laboratory procedures, the downwinders created alternative ways to produce knowledge. And it paid off, at least to a point. A schedule of cases in various classes (thyroid cancer, thyroid disease, hyperthyroidism and ‘other’) is now working its way through the legal system. Trials are planned for 2013. In 2005, plaintiffs won two of six bellwether cases for thyroid cancer, and had the other four cases reversed on appeal. Based on that success, downwinders won some leverage in settling out of court. Most payments, however, are tied to dose estimates that are still highly contested, and the settlements are very small ($2,500-$150,000). They come nowhere close to covering medical and legal bills. Is it a victory, then? Lawyers for the defence and for the plaintiffs both claim they’ve won. Kevin Van Wart, the lead counsel for Kirkland and Ellis, says that by halving the original 5,000 plaintiffs they saved tax-payers from funding cases that should never have gone to court. The downwinder lawyer Richard Pierson believes that his clients have the victory because the Department of Energy has finally acknowledged the need to settle with payouts. Officials can no longer claim that there was no connection between Hanford pollutants and the downwinders’ thyroid conditions. Meanwhile, Tom Bailie, who lost his own farm, drives a truck in his nephew’s fields for minimum wage. For him, for now, this small triumph will have to suffice. Excerpted from Plutopia: Nuclear Families in Atomic Cities and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters by Kate Brown. Copyright © 2013 by Kate Brown, published by Oxford University Press US, April 2013. Reprinted with the permission of the Author, all rights reserved.

Oh, it was the most exciting - one of the most projects I've ever worked on because usually, I'm working for entertainers or designers, and there's an unreality to that, which is interesting because it's the world of illusion. Whereas, what was exciting about this event was it was real people. It wasn't models. And everybody was going to the same event. So it was like approaching a military operation so that nobody wore the same hat, nobody had the same color, nobody had the same styling. And it was an infectious experience because everybody was very excited. It was the biggest, greatest show on Earth that day.

And I'm Audie Cornish. We're reporting this week on what happens to veterans who leave the service with less than honorable discharges; troops who made big mistakes while still in uniform - used drugs, drove while drunk or worse - and got kicked out of the military. Turns out that discharge is something of a life sentence. These vets often lose access to veterans' health care and other benefits, and it's hard for them to find jobs. Our story today is about one Marine and his two-decade-long odyssey. And it's also sort of a love story, as NPR's Quil Lawrence explains.

But we decide based on the threats and the likely consequences. At the top of our list are anthrax and smallpox as the two agents that in the hands of terrorists could produce catastrophical loss of life. And, therefore, we've made a major effort in this development arena to try to ensure that we have the kinds of countermeasures to address them. In the case of anthrax, we already have in the stockpile well over a billion antibiotics, pills that can be available to help prevent the development of the anthrax symptoms should people be exposed. But the vaccine that we're acquiring is intended to be a complementary measure to the antibiotics that we already have. We already also have enough smallpox vaccine for every man, woman and child in the country, but we're moving ahead to acquire a safer version of the smallpox vaccine for those individuals who would be at some risk of taking the current vaccine.

The fire engine is hit sideways by Saudi diplomats driving in from Vermont who fall, some of them into New Hampshire, and some - at this point my brain is spilling over with - I can't contain all this information. So on the - everybody else's textbooks just had underlinings and highlighters. Mine had thousands of little cartoons of firemen, fire engines, state lines, in order for me just to keep these things in my head. And I had all my life been - it's not like I'm dumb or anything, but I just couldn't - well, you know this, because you were my noun replacer for years.

America's favorite pie is? Audience: Apple. Kenneth Cukier: Apple. Of course it is. How do we know it? Because of data. You look at supermarket sales. You look at supermarket sales of 30-centimeter pies that are frozen, and apple wins, no contest. The majority of the sales are apple. But then supermarkets started selling smaller, 11-centimeter pies, and suddenly, apple fell to fourth or fifth place. Why? What happened? Okay, think about it. When you buy a 30-centimeter pie, the whole family has to agree, and apple is everyone's second favorite. (Laughter) But when you buy an individual 11-centimeter pie, you can buy the one that you want. You can get your first choice. You have more data. You can see something that you couldn't see when you only had smaller amounts of it. Now, the point here is that more data doesn't just let us see more, more of the same thing we were looking at. More data allows us to see new. It allows us to see better. It allows us to see different. In this case, it allows us to see what America's favorite pie is: not apple. Now, you probably all have heard the term big data. In fact, you're probably sick of hearing the term big data. It is true that there is a lot of hype around the term, and that is very unfortunate, because big data is an extremely important tool by which society is going to advance. In the past, we used to look at small data and think about what it would mean to try to understand the world, and now we have a lot more of it, more than we ever could before. What we find is that when we have a large body of data, we can fundamentally do things that we couldn't do when we only had smaller amounts. Big data is important, and big data is new, and when you think about it, the only way this planet is going to deal with its global challenges — to feed people, supply them with medical care, supply them with energy, electricity, and to make sure they're not burnt to a crisp because of global warming — is because of the effective use of data. So what is new about big data? What is the big deal? Well, to answer that question, let's think about what information looked like, physically looked like in the past. In 1908, on the island of Crete, archaeologists discovered a clay disc. They dated it from 2000 B.C., so it's 4,000 years old. Now, there's inscriptions on this disc, but we actually don't know what it means. It's a complete mystery, but the point is that this is what information used to look like 4,000 years ago. This is how society stored and transmitted information. Now, society hasn't advanced all that much. We still store information on discs, but now we can store a lot more information, more than ever before. Searching it is easier. Copying it easier. Sharing it is easier. Processing it is easier. And what we can do is we can reuse this information for uses that we never even imagined when we first collected the data. In this respect, the data has gone from a stock to a flow, from something that is stationary and static to something that is fluid and dynamic. There is, if you will, a liquidity to information. The disc that was discovered off of Crete that's 4,000 years old, is heavy, it doesn't store a lot of information, and that information is unchangeable. By contrast, all of the files that Edward Snowden took from the National Security Agency in the United States fits on a memory stick the size of a fingernail, and it can be shared at the speed of light. More data. More. Now, one reason why we have so much data in the world today is we are collecting things that we've always collected information on, but another reason why is we're taking things that have always been informational but have never been rendered into a data format and we are putting it into data. Think, for example, the question of location. Take, for example, Martin Luther. If we wanted to know in the 1500s where Martin Luther was, we would have to follow him at all times, maybe with a feathery quill and an inkwell, and record it, but now think about what it looks like today. You know that somewhere, probably in a telecommunications carrier's database, there is a spreadsheet or at least a database entry that records your information of where you've been at all times. If you have a cell phone, and that cell phone has GPS, but even if it doesn't have GPS, it can record your information. In this respect, location has been datafied. Now think, for example, of the issue of posture, the way that you are all sitting right now, the way that you sit, the way that you sit, the way that you sit. It's all different, and it's a function of your leg length and your back and the contours of your back, and if I were to put sensors, maybe 100 sensors into all of your chairs right now, I could create an index that's fairly unique to you, sort of like a fingerprint, but it's not your finger. So what could we do with this? Researchers in Tokyo are using it as a potential anti-theft device in cars. The idea is that the carjacker sits behind the wheel, tries to stream off, but the car recognizes that a non-approved driver is behind the wheel, and maybe the engine just stops, unless you type in a password into the dashboard to say, "Hey, I have authorization to drive." Great. What if every single car in Europe had this technology in it? What could we do then? Maybe, if we aggregated the data, maybe we could identify telltale signs that best predict that a car accident is going to take place in the next five seconds. And then what we will have datafied is driver fatigue, and the service would be when the car senses that the person slumps into that position, automatically knows, hey, set an internal alarm that would vibrate the steering wheel, honk inside to say, "Hey, wake up, pay more attention to the road." These are the sorts of things we can do when we datafy more aspects of our lives. So what is the value of big data? Well, think about it. You have more information. You can do things that you couldn't do before. One of the most impressive areas where this concept is taking place is in the area of machine learning. Machine learning is a branch of artificial intelligence, which itself is a branch of computer science. The general idea is that instead of instructing a computer what do do, we are going to simply throw data at the problem and tell the computer to figure it out for itself. And it will help you understand it by seeing its origins. In the 1950s, a computer scientist at IBM named Arthur Samuel liked to play checkers, so he wrote a computer program so he could play against the computer. He played. He won. He played. He won. He played. He won, because the computer only knew what a legal move was. Arthur Samuel knew something else. Arthur Samuel knew strategy. So he wrote a small sub-program alongside it operating in the background, and all it did was score the probability that a given board configuration would likely lead to a winning board versus a losing board after every move. He plays the computer. He wins. He plays the computer. He wins. He plays the computer. He wins. And then Arthur Samuel leaves the computer to play itself. It plays itself. It collects more data. It collects more data. It increases the accuracy of its prediction. And then Arthur Samuel goes back to the computer and he plays it, and he loses, and he plays it, and he loses, and he plays it, and he loses, and Arthur Samuel has created a machine that surpasses his ability in a task that he taught it. And this idea of machine learning is going everywhere. How do you think we have self-driving cars? Are we any better off as a society enshrining all the rules of the road into software? No. Memory is cheaper. No. Algorithms are faster. No. Processors are better. No. All of those things matter, but that's not why. It's because we changed the nature of the problem. We changed the nature of the problem from one in which we tried to overtly and explicitly explain to the computer how to drive to one in which we say, "Here's a lot of data around the vehicle. You figure it out. You figure it out that that is a traffic light, that that traffic light is red and not green, that that means that you need to stop and not go forward." Machine learning is at the basis of many of the things that we do online: search engines, Amazon's personalization algorithm, computer translation, voice recognition systems. Researchers recently have looked at the question of biopsies, cancerous biopsies, and they've asked the computer to identify by looking at the data and survival rates to determine whether cells are actually cancerous or not, and sure enough, when you throw the data at it, through a machine-learning algorithm, the machine was able to identify the 12 telltale signs that best predict that this biopsy of the breast cancer cells are indeed cancerous. The problem: The medical literature only knew nine of them. Three of the traits were ones that people didn't need to look for, but that the machine spotted. Now, there are dark sides to big data as well. It will improve our lives, but there are problems that we need to be conscious of, and the first one is the idea that we may be punished for predictions, that the police may use big data for their purposes, a little bit like "Minority Report." Now, it's a term called predictive policing, or algorithmic criminology, and the idea is that if we take a lot of data, for example where past crimes have been, we know where to send the patrols. That makes sense, but the problem, of course, is that it's not simply going to stop on location data, it's going to go down to the level of the individual. Why don't we use data about the person's high school transcript? Maybe we should use the fact that they're unemployed or not, their credit score, their web-surfing behavior, whether they're up late at night. Their Fitbit, when it's able to identify biochemistries, will show that they have aggressive thoughts. We may have algorithms that are likely to predict what we are about to do, and we may be held accountable before we've actually acted. Privacy was the central challenge in a small data era. In the big data age, the challenge will be safeguarding free will, moral choice, human volition, human agency. There is another problem: Big data is going to steal our jobs. Big data and algorithms are going to challenge white collar, professional knowledge work in the 21st century in the same way that factory automation and the assembly line challenged blue collar labor in the 20th century. Think about a lab technician who is looking through a microscope at a cancer biopsy and determining whether it's cancerous or not. The person went to university. The person buys property. He or she votes. He or she is a stakeholder in society. And that person's job, as well as an entire fleet of professionals like that person, is going to find that their jobs are radically changed or actually completely eliminated. Now, we like to think that technology creates jobs over a period of time after a short, temporary period of dislocation, and that is true for the frame of reference with which we all live, the Industrial Revolution, because that's precisely what happened. But we forget something in that analysis: There are some categories of jobs that simply get eliminated and never come back. The Industrial Revolution wasn't very good if you were a horse. So we're going to need to be careful and take big data and adjust it for our needs, our very human needs. We have to be the master of this technology, not its servant. We are just at the outset of the big data era, and honestly, we are not very good at handling all the data that we can now collect. It's not just a problem for the National Security Agency. Businesses collect lots of data, and they misuse it too, and we need to get better at this, and this will take time. It's a little bit like the challenge that was faced by primitive man and fire. This is a tool, but this is a tool that, unless we're careful, will burn us. Big data is going to transform how we live, how we work and how we think. It is going to help us manage our careers and lead lives of satisfaction and hope and happiness and health, but in the past, we've often looked at information technology and our eyes have only seen the T, the technology, the hardware, because that's what was physical. We now need to recast our gaze at the I, the information, which is less apparent, but in some ways a lot more important. Humanity can finally learn from the information that it can collect, as part of our timeless quest to understand the world and our place in it, and that's why big data is a big deal. (Applause)

No, I don't think so. What's dismaying about these debates is, you know, it's - look, it's a tough fight. You're going to have people taking and throwing punches back and forth, it's just how backwards looking they are. It's all about who did what four or five years ago and that is just irrelevant to the concerns of voters today. So very few of these candidates or any of them arguably have really grappled with how to take conservative principles and policy and make them relevant to the concerns right now. It's instead who hired illegal aliens two or three years ago and who allegedly had a sanctuary city in New York City four or five years ago.

Yeah, one for example, from SLOPPY FIRSTS by Megan Mccafferty, a sentence that says this: "So I froze, not knowing whether I should a) laugh, b) say something or c) ignore him and keep on walking." And then in HOW OPAL MEHTA GOT KISSED: "I froze, unsure of a) what he was talking about and b) what I was supposed to do about it." That isn't quite word for word, but here's another from SLOPPY FIRSTS: "Bridget is my age and lives across the street. For the first 12 years of my life, these qualifications were all I needed in a friend. But that was before Bridget's braces came off and her boyfriend, Burke, got on and before Hope and I met in our seventh grade honors class."

Thank you, Thea. We're talking with Steve Plamann, the senior executive editor of the National Enquirer, with NPR media correspondent, David Folkenflik, and with Brian Ross, the chief investigative correspondent of ABC News. We're talking about the media's coverage of the John Edwards affair, or lack of it. If you'd like to join us, 800-989-8255. Email is talk@npr.org. This is Talk of the Nation from NPR News. And here's an email question from Renee in San Francisco. The gentleman from the Enquirer claims the Edwards story wasn't about sex. It was about hypocrisy. This is the kind of rationalization that scandalmongers have been falling back on for centuries. Shining a spotlight on sexual peccadilloes strokes the worst aspects of human nature, and of course, anyone in the public eye hides and lies and tries to protect their careers and families. The problem is society's puritanical stubbornness about sex. The National Enquirer and their ilk do nothing to help us all move beyond it. They perpetuate it and make it worse. And Steve Plamann, again, I'm sure that's not the first time you've heard something like that.

I think the local officials - because this, again, was something that was done by like a city-by-city decision, I think that they would say, yes, there was logic within their own city decisions, that they felt like either, you know, the storm would come in and then move through and everything, you know, would be fine. Others inland - it's been really interesting. Corpus Christi did not have a mandatory evacuation. This city is right on the Gulf Coast. You know, 30, 40 miles inland towns, like Victoria, Texas, did have mandatory evacuations, you know, trying to move as many people out of the town as possibly could. But, you know, that was partially because of different rivers and creeks and streams that were coming through Victoria. So they wanted to make sure that their people were out.

I don't think so. If you're the minority in the House and the minority in the Senate, and you don't control the White House, then you're going to - you have to ask yourself where are the points where we have a point of pressure? And then you have to decide what it is that you want to fight for. You have to say that clearly - not bluff at all - and we're not budging. And that's what you've got to do because the fact of the matter is every time that you negotiate you're going to come out with something that isn't great.

This is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News; I'm Ari Shapiro. As police departments and universities gain permission to fly drones overhead, one place at least is saying no. Earlier this year, Charlottesville, Virginia, became the first American city to pass legislation prohibiting the use of drones. By a three to two vote, the city council forbade the admission of information obtained by drones into state or federal courts, and endorsed a two-year moratorium on drone use in Virginia. That moratorium proposal passed the state's General Assembly late last month, it's now in the hands of Governor Bob McDonnell. So if you work in law enforcement, security or a related technology field, tell us: What's the conversation you're having about drones? Our number is 1-800-989-8255. Our email address is talk@npr.org. And you can join the conversation at our website. Go to npr.org, and click on TALK OF THE NATION.

The concern was that this kind of political march would make science seem like a partisan activity, you know, something that, you know, a political party would do rather than being a sort of set of tools to search for truth. And there was a lot of concern about whether this would backfire. And so the organizers are very careful to say that it's a nonpartisan event. But a lot of the signs were explicitly anti-Trump or winking at that, you know, there were signs saying like I'm with her pointing at a picture of the Earth. Or somebody had a sign that said grab them by the periodic table which was an obvious reference to that infamous statement on the bus that President Trump made. So, you know, there was a lot of anti-Trump activity.

Conrad Black isn't nearly as famous or unpopular in the U.S. as he is in his native Canada, where he has the kind of outsized, conservative media baron image that Rupert Murdoch has here. Black lost even more sympathy up north when he renounced his Canadian citizenship to sit in Britain's House of Lords. He named himself Lord Black of Crossharbour, after the tube station closest to his London paper, The Daily Telegraph. But his company, Hollinger International, was based in Chicago, which is why Black is being tried here. Also, the home base of one of the nation's busiest prosecutors - U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald indicted Black in 2005.

And we went to door to door. Every house we visited where someone opened the door, as soon his name, Maad Abu-Ghazalah, and showed people the literature, the responses were unbelievable. I mean, one couple said well, we'll never vote for a Muslim. If people allowed him to continue the conversation, he said, okay what is it about me that you find so objectionable? Do you favor the War in Iraq? They said no. Do you want the troops to come home? Yes. And he would say but these are all the things that I am supporting. Just read my literature. And they just said no. We're never going to vote for a Muslim, see you later.

Right. On one level, of course, it's a big marketing thing. Amazon simply made up the shopping holiday three years ago, but it serves a very powerful purpose. Because it's a sale day for members only, this is how Amazon draws people into paying $120 to become members of Amazon Prime. Today, you'll buy a membership to buy a cheap tablet during Prime Day. Tomorrow, you'll stock up your pantry with Amazon everything because you might as well. You don't want to waste that membership. Plus, the biggest Prime Day sales are on Amazon's own devices. They're giving discounts on the Alexa voice-activated smart speaker called Echo or the Fire TV Stick streaming device. All these items really loop you in into that Amazon world. And it is a really fast-growing world. Amazon has recently revealed that more than 100 million people pay for Amazon Prime membership.