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Well, in the beginning I belonged to a group that was very, very small. We only had about 12 members. But that continued to grow and grow and grow, and then eventually the group I belonged to got absorbed into another group, and then eventually we got absorbed in what was known as Western Hammerskins. And then Western Hammerskins became part of Hammerskin Nation, which is now a - it's a global entity. It's not just here in the United States, but it has regions. So it started off, like, with 12, and now, you know, Hammerskins are, you know, I would estimate 50,000, 60,000 strong.

‘If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what the very word “citizenship” means.’– Theresa May, Conservative Party conference, 2016I grew up in a small Devon village nestled in a remote, crooked valley below the wilderness of Dartmoor. My father was the local rector, with a group ministry of four parishes in the valley. I attended a grammar school in Exeter. The village boys went in the other direction, to the grammar in Newton Abbot or, more often, the secondary modern in Kingsteignton. I hated school, felt alienated from study, teachers, fellow pupils, the lot. The village lads, rural working class, were my friends. We played football, explored the woods and streams around; played table tennis in the youth club; went to the village disco; learned to smoke and drink together. But I was never one of them. I spoke with a different accent, and our expected futures had divergent trajectories: they would leave school at 16, find manual work on a farm or at the local quarry, while I would sit A levels and follow my elder sister to a university, and a life, far away. As it happened, I failed to follow this course, and, adrift between social classes, I left school at 16 too. I could say the teaching was poor (our O-level texts were ruined by a lazy and arrogant English teacher. It would be 10 years before I could bear to revisit those works, to discover with astonishment that this teacher had, with a kind of anti-pedagogical genius, alienated his entire fifth form from two of the jewels of the English language: Wilfred Owen’s war poetry and William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night). I could say I was unhappy (our mother had left the family home three or four years earlier). I could say I was uncomfortable in my own skin (I’d had operations and a long spell in an orthopaedic hospital). And, though these were true, they weren’t the whole story. My father was a ‘man’s man’ who’d had extraordinary wartime experiences liaising with communist partisans in Yugoslavia; he’d played rugby for Bath. He was a priest committed to his ministry, for whom doubt was an intrinsic element of faith; but also, a fierce intellectual, who loved political or religious argument over gin and cigarettes. And he was also a gentle man, who’d brought up my sisters and myself alone, a tender, loving father. I rebelled against him the only way I could: by disappointing him. I challenged the way his political convictions had been compromised; I told him Christ had been right, he should give up everything, live simply, among the people. My father was perplexed. I took on the first of a succession of menial jobs, on building sites and elsewhere. I travelled a little, without breaking away. In the summer of 1977, I was still living at home. Suspicion emanated from him, as if he thought I had designs on his son Boz had joined the village football team the season before, unusual in that he was a biker, generally a breed apart, who shunned social norms like sport. We played together at centre-back. Boz was tough, his every tackle and header were made with fearless commitment. I cleared up around him, but he also made me braver than I was (if only because I had the assurance that, if an opponent kicked me, Boz would sort him out). It was months into the season before I realised that, besides his physical power, Boz was a highly intelligent reader of the game. He flew into a challenge, where the temptation was to see simply the challenge, but he could make it only because he’d anticipated how play would unfurl to that point. Boz was soon made captain. Before each game, he drew us into a tight huddle, and said the same thing: ‘Boys. Get that fuckin ball before they do.’ I had a car, and gave Boz a lift to away games. When I called on him, walking to their council house set back from the road, his father often answered the door. The man didn’t trust me. Suspicion emanated from him, as if he thought I had designs on his son. Looking back, he was right; I just didn’t realise it. The taboos of the time – an internal taboo strongest of all – meant that only in hindsight was it obvious that Boz was the first love of my life. I was walking through the village early one summer evening when I heard the rich throaty growl of bikes behind me. Two went past, but one dawdled. ‘Jump on, bud,’ Boz said. ‘We’re goin up the moor.’ I was generally timid, cautious; even now, the spontaneity with which I responded was passive. I did not act of my own volition but did as I was told, and climbed on behind Boz. It was the first time I’d been on a motorbike. I’d observed how passengers put their hands on a metal bracket at the back of the seat. It had struck me as an unnatural position (like watching present day footballers avoiding handball by defending with their arms behind their backs). Now, as Boz accelerated into the curves of the unwinding road before us, it felt suicidally precarious. I did what I knew I shouldn’t and put my arms around Boz. This was what a female passenger could, indeed should, do. I understood how inappropriate it was for me to, but chose shame over certain death. The greater shame would be Boz’s, though, and I prepared myself for him to bring the bike to a halt and tell me to get off. He did not. The terrifying speed at which Boz rode was incomprehensible. Any second, an unforeseen hazard – oil on the road; a bird flying out of a hedge – could inflict death or agonising mutilation. Why ride so close to that edge? But gradually my brain adjusted. The landscape hurtled by less alarmingly. I leaned closer to Boz, inhaled the patchouli scent impregnating his leather jacket. We caught up with his companions, and rode to a farm beyond Manaton whose taciturn tenant sold us plastic flagons of cheap rough cider. Jim on one bike, Sharon on the back of Benjy’s, I knew by sight. We nodded to each other. The ritual reminded me of how my father’s curate carried out various arcane blessings at a communion service We rode past North Bovey and then, manoeuvring the bikes through a gate, onto a track and up to Easdon Tor. We could have parked up and walked, but it seemed a point of honour for these boys to get their bikes all the way to wherever they were heading; to go on foot would have been a comedown. But the grass was dry and cropped close to the ground by the ubiquitous sheep, so passage was easy enough. At the Tor, there were four other bikers – three boys, one girl, on three bikes – from Moretonhampstead, apparently. They too acknowledged me with an incurious nod. We sat around, drinking, smoking. One of the Moreton lads had a lump of Lebanese dope; he intermittently requested normal cigarettes, which he broke open and used the tobacco, sprinkled with hash, to roll large spliffs. We watched him silently. The ritual reminded me of the way my father’s curate carried out various arcane blessings and preparations of the bread and wine at a communion service. Then the spliff was passed around. Jim pulled a battery-operated radio/cassette player out of his pannier and set it on a boulder. He inserted a tape of Sin after Sin, Judas Priest’s latest album. ‘Can you turn that squeaker up, bud?’ Boz asked. ‘It’s on max,’ Jim told him. Now and then, someone got up and went off for a piss. When they returned, they often danced in a perfunctory manner for a bit, getting into the groove, before resuming their place on the grass. The two girls danced together for a while. The rest of us watched lazily. ‘Hear that Polson cunt give Johnny Sidwell a hidin t’other week,’ said one of the Moreton crew. ‘He’s a mean fucker.’ ‘He’s a hard fucker.’ ‘I’d like to see Boz here get a hold of him.’ ‘Reckon you could take him, Boz?’ Boz shrugged modestly, and took a swig of cider. I felt a thrill at the notion of acceptance into this society of rural outlaws ‘Why did he beat up Johnny, anyways?’ ‘Reckoned he was eyeing up his bird.’ ‘Was he?’ ‘I don’t know why anyone would,’ said Sharon. ‘Have you seen her?’ Everyone laughed at that. ‘Cat’s got her claws out,’ said Benjy. ‘Come here.’ He leaned over and pulled Sharon towards him. ‘I love you when you’re mean, babe.’ Conversation limped along like this: a bit of gossip, widening into opinion and banter, then dying away. The sun was setting. Silence prevailed once more. Two of the Moreton boys got into an argument and one suddenly went for the other, and they were on the ground, wrestling furiously. It looked serious to me, I felt an urge to pull them apart, as I sometimes did at football, but the others barely took any notice except to laugh and jeer at the boys’ inexpert grappling. Then one appeared to prevail, they heaved each other up, dusted themselves off, and embraced, before hitting the cider. I was clearly the outsider. I wore a tracksuit top over my T-shirt rather than a leather jacket, I had no home-made tattoos and, if I was to speak, then my standard middle-class accent would have announced my alienness. I said nothing. No-one addressed me, asked me anything, questioned my presence. They knew I’d come with Boz – and we all knew that his girlfriend, Mo, refused to ride on his bike – and that was enough. Might I be admitted to the gang? Could I be, if I proved myself? If I had LOVE and HATE inked across my knuckles? If I bought a leather jacket and invited them to help me baptise it – and by extension myself – with whisky, piss and chicken’s blood; then, later, patchouli oil? If I got my own wheels? If I wrestled with Boz? I felt a thrill at the notion of acceptance into this society of rural outlaws. Even if the activity, like the music, was kind of boring. At home, we had a family tree, printed on a sort of pseudo-parchment. I believe my paternal grandfather had visited the British Museum when it mounted an exhibition on genealogy, and, if you could trace your ancestors back a generation or two, you stood a chance of connecting with one of a set of lineages the Museum had prepared. Thus, some weeks later our grandfather received in the post this proof of our heritage going back to and beyond Charlemagne. To be precise, to Charlemagne’s great-grandfather, Pepin the Fat. As a boy, I occasionally consulted this family tree (hundreds of close facsimiles doubtless moulder at the back of attics around the country). It excited me to gaze at Frederick the One-Eyed, Duke of Swabia or Grayza, Duke of Hungary; Anne of a noble Bulgarian family or Adelheid of Alsace. I traced the countries these fanciful ancestors came from on maps (seeding a lifelong cartographical enchantment) and assimilated the liberating message that I was not merely an Englishman; a Devon boy. Already part Welsh through our maternal grandfather, this heterogeneous lineage meant my sisters and I had a right to multiple identities. A variety of genes had flowed through the generations, and we had a claim of inheritance on as many of them as we wished. Boz had no family tree, fictional or otherwise. His father worked at Trusham Quarry, his grandfathers were both farm labourers, and going back further was to get lost in mists of family myth: a great-grandmother who bred hens that folk came from distant counties to buy; a great-grandfather who laid out a gypsy boxer at the Okehampton fair. What Boz took for granted was that they all toiled on the land for meagre reward, going back through time to peasants and serfs and no doubt beyond, unchanged, forever – and that this was both an inevitable and an honourable state of affairs. Boz himself had a job on a pig farm, over Hennock way, which he considered an improvement on his father’s position at the quarry; an authentic reconnection with the past. I was disturbed and fascinated by the man, so unlike my own father I took this at face value, appreciating the worth of working with animals, on the land, in the open air. Until, driving up that way, I realised that the farm I was passing, a large Union Jack on a flagpole by the house, was the one where Boz worked. And that the ominous row of low buildings meant these pigs were kept indoors; it was a factory. Boz’s father was a known bully. He knocked his boys about (Boz was the eldest of three) and beat his wife when he was inebriated, which was increasingly often. Sometimes, Boz came to my house to hang out and he’d be seething. I came to recognise the particular mood: it was always to do with his father, and Boz didn’t wish to talk about it. I was disturbed and fascinated by the man, so unlike my own father – and notwithstanding his evident distaste for me. He was an implacable force in my friend’s family. Women rarely left their abusive husbands in those days – the mother who had scandalously abandoned her family was mine, and she’d done so less for escape than excitement. Children, needless to say, had no appeal against a domestic tyrant. I occasionally learned about him from other people. He’d had a dispute with a neighbour. Rather than bring in the council, or the police, he’d sorted it out with his fists. Except that he hadn’t: the neighbour did call the police. Boz’s father was arrested and charged, and received a suspended sentence. When we’d come to the village, my father had visited one household after another to introduce himself. Boz’s father refused to see him: Boz’s mother had to explain that a previous rector had ‘upset’ him as a boy, by choosing a different child to light the candles before a church service. ‘He swore he’d have nothin to do with the Church,’ she said. ‘Once his mind’s made up, you can’t change it.’ Parenting has a curious way of providing an example that the child doesn’t even notice. Even as I tussled with my father, I began reading the Russian novels in his study. He bequeathed me his curiosity; my cultural antennae were up. BBC2 was showing foreign films on a Friday night. One evening, Boz was round, and we watched Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970). For me, it was a revelation. By the end, my jaw ached from smiling with what I can only describe as aesthetic pleasure. Boz had fallen asleep. I woke him and he stumbled out, muttering: ‘Them subtitled films ain’t for me, bud.’ As with our concocted family tree and the translated novels in my father’s library, the foreign language of the film – and others I now devoured – enticed me. The subtitles of foreign films were a window, while for Boz they were a barrier. How come I had this appetite for the exotic, the multiplicity of experience, while Boz did not? Meanwhile, punk had burst on the scene. I bought vinyl records at the Left Bank shop in Exeter and wore out needles playing them on my record player at home. This urban, working-class music spoke to a shy, rural middle-class boy; it gave me an impetus and a confidence to start writing short stories. The Clash were playing Torquay Town Hall: I bought tickets, and played their exhilarating first album to Boz. Cultural class barriers remained, peppered with turnstiles that let people through in one direction but not the other He listened, and shrugged. ‘Reckon I’ll stick with metal, bud,’ was his verdict. I’d been born at the end of an era of high and low culture, distinctions that were already crumbling: the middle and upper classes abandoned their prejudices to enjoy popular music, cinema, comedy. Bob Dylan’s lyrics were as dazzling as John Keats’s poetry; the Beatles were making music for the ages. Television democratised access: my middle-class generation may not have been taken to football matches by our rugger-playing fathers, but the game was given to us through the cathode-ray tube. What was clear was the degree to which this democratisation of culture was a one-way ticket. Yes, the privileged saw the value of what they’d considered beneath them, and demanded access. What largely failed to materialise was movement in the opposite direction. Despite libraries and museums, despite the best efforts of teachers, curators, publishers and many others, only a select few – largely working-class grammar-school kids – seized on serious literature, opera, art. Cultural class barriers remained in Britain, peppered with turnstiles that let people through in one direction but not the other. My father was an authoritative figure, both because of his position as rector and on account of his natural bearing. It was noticeable how the villagers changed how they spoke when addressing him: what they thought of as properly, stiff and wary, with a grammatical formality. Boz was different. He spoke with my father just as he spoke with me (minus the swearing, I guess) and the two of them got on well. My father attended our football games when he could, and I used to wonder whether he’d played rugby more elegantly, like me, or fiercely, like Boz. The Teign river came down from the moor, snaking through a long, wooded valley between Chagford and Dunsford. Boz gave me a lift there one August evening. It was my fourth such excursion, still an outsider, a more or less silent guest. Bad Reputation by Thin Lizzy played on Jim’s cassette player. We drank rough cider for a while; they indulged in their desultory, inconclusive conversation. ‘Hey,’ I said, during a long pause. ‘Anyone fancy a bit of target practice?’ I pulled the pistol out of my pocket. ‘It’s only an airgun,’ I admitted, ‘but we might have a laugh?’ I could hardly have made a finer contribution – other than a bigger gun. The other guys responded with immediate enthusiasm, which they masked by poking fun at my ‘pea-shooter’, as Benjy called it. I’d brought some cardboard targets and we spiked these on tree branches, and had intense competition for as long as the box of pellets I’d brought lasted. Poor shots were ridiculed mercilessly. The girls – there was an extra Moretonhampstead lass that evening – were given a turn, and teased when (perhaps just as well, given the sexism of the subculture and the era) they missed the target. I won the shooting competition, such as it was. Of course, I had an unfair advantage: it was my gun and I’d had a lot of solitary practice, which the others were not slow to point out – along with plenty of euphemisms along the lines of Watch out, girls, this one knows how to shoot straight. Still, I could feel a new warmth towards me. I’d noticed a bruise or two on his knuckles, but paid them no heed; he often carried wounds from his work We’d resumed drinking and smoking dope. Boz stumbled off for a piss, and Jim said: ‘You all hear what matey boy done?’ ‘Boz? No.’ ‘Give him a good fuckin hidin, that’s what.’ ‘Who? Polson?’ ‘No. His old man.’ ‘Jesus wept.’ ‘You are pullin my plonker.’ ‘The bastard started up again, Boz wouldn’t take it no more.’ Boz had said nothing to me. I was shocked, but I shouldn’t have been: Jim was his much older friend. I’d noticed a bruise or two on his knuckles, but paid them no heed; he often carried wounds from his work. ‘Yeh,’ Jim said. ‘Our boy’d had enough.’ ‘I don’t blame him.’ ‘Me neither.’ When Boz came back into the clearing, he received, to his surprise, a round of applause. ‘Well done, buddy.’ ‘Good on you, Boz.’ Boz looked wryly at Jim, and said to the assembled company: ‘Someone’s been talkin.’ ‘Did you beat him bad?’ ‘No,’ Boz said, modestly. ‘Well, ask Jim, he’s seen him.’ ‘Cunt’s got a hell of a shiner,’ Jim informed us. ‘Swollen’s so he can see fuck all out of it.’ ‘He had it comin, Boz,’ Benjy said. ‘Yeh,’ Boz agreed. ‘I don’t reckon he’ll knock us about now.’ ‘Includin your Mum?’ Sharon asked. ‘If he hits her again, I’ll kill him,’ Boz replied, matter of factly. I don’t think any of us doubted him. It was my last outing with the bikers. As for my own father, my absurd rebellion couldn’t last. In fact, it wasn’t rebellion at all. The fledgling writer inside me had simply intuited that he’d be best left alone to incubate whatever talent he might have, to read and write without the mediation of tutors, much less the distraction of a proper job. Psychologically, I belonged among the losers, not the winners, but temperamentally I just needed time and space. I finally left home, with years of menial jobs ahead, scribbling away. Mobile phones were some years in the future, but back then few homes in the village even had their own landline. The council houses set back from the lane had a red phone box situated halfway up: you could dial the number and let it ring until someone was walking past; they’d pick up and, if you were lucky, fetch the person you wanted. Late on Saturday morning on the day before I left, I called the number. No one answered. I pictured the phone ringing in the empty phone box, in a vacant world. So I walked up through the village to Boz’s house. His father answered the door. He did not say anything, simply stood there, staring at me, assessing me, daring me to speak. His black eye was almost healed: a dark purplish line was still visible beneath it. ‘Is Boz in?’ I asked. ‘Who wants him?’ his father demanded. He knew full well who I was. Why was he asking? What did he want? I was at a loss. He was being pointlessly antagonistic, and I lacked some male reflex, some pocket of testosterone, that enabled one to respond to machismo. Tall and skinny (‘A streak of piss,’ according to our stout goalkeeper, Kendo), I’d never learned to fight. The idea of punching someone, never mind being struck myself, was dreadful. I’d actually asked Boz for advice, but all he’d said was: ‘Hit ’im first, bud, hit ’im hard.’ Which didn’t really help. Boz performed two contradictory actions: he ignored but also shoulder-barged his father Boz’s father stared at me through hooded eyes – at midday, on a Saturday, perhaps he was meanly drunk already. A spasm of defiance swam through my nervous system. ‘Me,’ I said. ‘I want him. Is he in?’ ‘He might be.’ Our little stand-off was resolved abruptly. Boz appeared through the gloom of the house interior. Reaching the doorstep, Boz performed two contradictory actions: he ignored but also shoulder-barged his father. Off balance, the old man tottered forward, past me. ‘Come on in, bud,’ Boz said. I stepped inside. Boz let me past, then tossed some coins onto the ground outside. ‘Fuck off down the pub,’ he told his father, and closed the door. He led the way, into the front room. I was ready to discuss his father, but Boz appeared to have dismissed him from his mind already. ‘How you doin?’ ‘Not bad,’ I said. ‘I’ve come round to tell you I’m heading off, tomorrow.’ Boz grinned. ‘Finally. I was wonderin if you was ever goin to get round to it.’ I’d never spoken with Boz of plans to leave – not that I’d ever really had any. ‘Were you?’ ‘You don’t belong round here. You wants to get out. The world is yours, bud.’ ‘I’m going somewhere even more remote, actually. A cottage in Wales.’ Boz frowned, then he grinned again, like he’d sussed my secret intention. ‘You’re gonna write that fuckin book a yours.’ ‘That’s the idea. Well, get started, at least.’ ‘Good,’ Boz said. ‘Good.’ He nodded, in agreement with himself, his approval of my plan. I smiled. He smiled. I nodded. It was awkward. I’d never been inside his, or indeed any of the other village boys’ houses. Playing host, to a guest, in his parents’ home, was clearly a novel experience for Boz too. Inspiration came to me. ‘I could kill a cuppa,’ I said. Relieved, Boz bounced to his feet. ‘How d’you take it?’ ‘Milk, no sugar, thanks.’ While Boz was gone, I looked around the small, tidy front room. It felt unused; there was a layer of dust on the mantelpiece. Communal life presumably took place in the kitchen. Two armchairs faced a settee across a bare coffee table. There were paintings on the walls, landscapes with lurid sunsets. The TV must be in the kitchen, I figured, but there was something else missing. I scanned the room, and it struck me: there were no books. Not a single one. Sitting there, I understood that the ladder of Boz’s upbringing had a rung missing, and though he was just as intelligent as me, he would likely never read a novel or volume of poetry; not watch a serious play or another subtitled film; go willingly to any of the great art galleries or museums. Was it simply that he had not been provided with a crucial example, as I had, so that his cultural tastebuds had not been awakened, but lay dormant, his access denied to an immeasurably rich realm of human experience that I was just beginning to get a glimpse of? Boz came back with two mugs of tea. ‘What are your plans?’ I asked him. Boz rolled a cigarette. ‘Just sold the bike,’ he said. ‘She’ll do me good. This place’ll do me, too, this fuckin beautiful country’ I was gobsmacked. Boz adored his Triumph Bonneville, he worshipped it. ‘What are you getting?’ I asked. ‘Don’t tell me you’re going Japanese?’ ‘Never,’ Boz spat. ‘No, I’ve gone and got myself four wheels, haven’t I?’ ‘A car? You are kidding.’ ‘I’ll need it, with Mo. She won’t go on the bike.’ ‘I didn’t know you two were so serious.’ Boz shrugged. ‘She’s up the spout, bud.’ He opened his palms in a helpless gesture, grinning, as if he had no idea how it’d happened. ‘I thought she was takin care of all that. She’s on about us gettin hitched; reckons we’ll get on the housin list easy.’ ‘Sounds like she’s sorting you out, man.’ Boz smiled. After swallowing a mouthful of tea, he lowered his head, clearly considering something. Then he raised it and said: ‘I can tell you; I can’t tell the others, they won’t understand. They’re like kids. You, you’re leavin, and anyway, you’re not, you know, one of us, bud, no offence. But the truth is, I can’t hardly wait to have kids. Mo’s a brilliant bird and she’ll do for me. She’ll do me good. This place’ll do me, too, this fuckin beautiful country. Mac up the farm wants to step back from the day-to-day and let me take over.’ ‘Wow,’ I said. ‘Really? Amazing, Boz.’ ‘Don’t get me wrong, bud, I loved the bikin and the birds and the dope, all that. But, fuck it, I’m 20 years old. It’s time to grow up.’ Boz took the empty mugs into the kitchen. How strange it was: my life was about to open up, to expand, into unknown terrain; his was about to contract into a limited future that was just what he wanted. I was on my feet when Boz returned, and he accompanied me to the door. We hugged each other. I inhaled his masculine smell of sweat, unwashed clothes, a faint trace of patchouli. Neither of us said ‘Keep in touch’ or ‘Don’t be a stranger.’ Instead, Boz reached up, grasping the back of my head with both hands. He pulled me to him and kissed my forehead. Then he relaxed his grip, a little, so that we were almost pressing our brows against each other; in a huddle, a secret space. ‘Fuckin fly,’ he whispered. ‘Do it for me, brother.’ Boz let go, we looked at each other. I nodded. ‘Thank you, man,’ I said, and turned, and walked away down the garden path, and into the lane.

Yes. And that is absolutely the case. I am not a mental health professional, although I'm fortunate to be married to one. But there are great mental health needs in Haiti. The translator that I helped - or helped me tell this one individual he was going to die, it was very difficult for him as he had just gone through an earthquake himself with his own family and his own needs, and then he was dealing with the shock of having to tell someone that he's going to die. So the mental health needs in that country, I'm sure, will be great for a long, long period of time.

Cognitive psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons have spent their careers studying how our brains trick us into thinking we see and know much more than we actually do. Why we misremember important events but remain absolutely certain we're right and why our intuition so often fails us. If you have a story of a snap decision gone wrong or a memory that turned out to be a little bit departed from reality, tell us your story. 800-989-8255 is the phone number. Zap us an email, talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website. That's at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION.

Yeah. I mean, my impression in this in most of the places I've trained with a student that was that this was an exclusively physician health conference and it was for physicians, by physicians, where, if there was a case where it was a bad outcome, the group of specialists would meet and discuss the case. And then, without pointing fingers, would try and sort out what happened. I think it's a tremendous opportunity to learn as a team, if you begin to include other people in the process and really is worth considering as we go forward and try to make these relationships more sound.

And, well, the president still insists on raising about 20 percent of that through new taxes. In any case, stay with us. Louise Story is with us, a reporter for the New York Times. We're talking about what would happen if there is no agreement and the U.S. government defaults for the first time in history. In a moment, the head of the big U.S. investment firm PIMCO will join us to tell us why, from his perspective, a default should be avoided at all costs, even though his company might make some money in it. If you've given any thought to what happens to you in the event of a government default, our phone number is 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. Stay with us. I'm Neal Conan. It's the TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly that. So they said to me, you know, we found you a job, and it's at a place called the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. But if I'm honest with you, I didn't really know what that was. I was like, what is that? And he said, it's a drama school, and I was like, great, you know? I mean, I'd been in prison for a while, so I was probably thinking there's going to be some attractive ladies floating around, you know? That's what came into my head initially. Anyway, they sent me there. So the first feeler chef asked me to do - he said Michael, I need you to chop up the vegetables because we start serving the students at 12 o'clock. So I started doing what I could do, and he was like, whoa (ph). Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. That's way too slow. Because, you know, chefs have a way of chopping up veg where they kind of, like, glide through it. Like, vrrrrrh (ph). I couldn't do that. So he was like, we can't work like that, so unfortunately, we're going to have to move you onto the bar.

Not under current circumstances. And one of the major reasons for that is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has said that these measures are just not necessary. He and other Republicans have said that the relative lack of interference in the 2018 midterms signal that law enforcement and the intelligence community have basically all the tools that they need, although midterms and presidential elections are kind of a different animal. But Republicans have said and pointed to the fact that Congress has passed Russia sanctions in 2017 and the fact that Congress has already allocated nearly $400 million in election security grants to states over the last year.

This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. Take just a few examples from the last year of campaigning. Businessman Herman Cain tossed his hat into the ring to find his personal life on the front page. Groomed as the frontrunner, Governor Rick Perry of Texas was humbled by a primetime gaffe. And it's hard to count the insults leveled at President Obama. Throw in endless campaigning, fundraising calls, attack ads, rubber chicken, compromises and the substantial risk that after all that you lose, why would anybody vote for - run for president or mayor or city council? If you decided to run for office, why? If you thought about it and didn't, why not? Give us a call, 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website. That's at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION.

This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan, in Washington. As painful as it may be for some of us, we're talking with John McNally about high school. He collected a series of essays full of awkward moments and painful memories in a new book, "When I Was a Loser: True Stories of (Barely) Surviving High School". You can read his introduction to that book at npr.org/talk, and as always, you're invited to join us. Were you a loser? How did you make it through high school? Have you embraced your inner geek? 800-989-8255, 800-989-TALK. E-mail is talk@npr.org. Also with us is Julianna Baggott, a contributor to the book and author of the novel "Girl Talk".

So we think that death is death. Death is the end. And I think that Pablo Neruda has been resting for the last 40 years, resting in bones, but not resting in spirit. I understand perfectly the need of the present to revisit the past, particularly when the past was so violent and so subjective. The forces of Augusto Pinochet took over the country on September 11, 1973. And in doing so, they also took over Chilean history and decided how to remember it. The effort now is to dig out the bones and try to see if there is another version of Chilean history. But it strikes me that that other version has already been accepted, and that is the version of the people, the people that have embraced Pablo Neruda and that know that oppression might conquer the present but will not ultimately be triumphant overall. And that if you remain steadfast, if you are committed and more than anything if you are devoted to the truth and the truth as presented through words, ultimately, you will prevail. I can see this as an effort at reconciliation...

Well, the White House talks about reaching out to Democrats, but Democrats have been sending very hostile signals on that. And I think part of the problem is Democrats would be interested in tax reform as long as it doesn't shift the burden between rich and poor very much - or maybe even shifts it in the direction of the poor and the middle class - where most Republicans seem more interested in cutting taxes on business because they think that'll improve investment, make the economy grow better, and it'll get eventually to workers. So right now, I'd say there's very little chance of Democrats joining this party.

So the official word from the White House is that they have received the letter, and - here is the line - as with all properly authorized oversight requests, the White House will review the letter and will provide a reasonable response in due course. What is more notable is what comes from Abbe Lowell, the lawyer for Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. And he says that Cummings' claims are not completely accurate and are being misreported. He says that when he was asked about Kushner using WhatsApp, he didn't - he told the committee that he didn't know that that topic was on the agenda and that the best place to ask those questions was the White House. And he says that he never said Jared Kushner's communications with foreign officials or leaders - that Jared Kushner's communications were with officials or foreign leaders, just that they were with some people.

I'm Douglas Nicholls. I'm the mayor of City of Yuma. We have had a long history dealing with immigration. And we're in a better position now that we have a barrier that was constructed in 2006. I believe it's - would be effective in most places, although I'm not completely convinced it's for every installation. A physical barrier is a very kind of first-step deterrent. Immigration reform would be the primary (laughter) wish list item and then just more facilities, family shelters. There - we have no ICE family shelter here in Arizona, so those individuals need to be moved to Texas. So we need those kind of facilities here. And then immigration judges are on my wish list. If we had immigration judges that were available at the border, processing could happen quicker. And we could relieve some of the flow that's coming through.

We're going to turn now to a question. What happens to a prolific artist's creative work after he or she dies? The recent death of Prince has raised that question in a big way. There are reportedly more than 1,000 tracks in Prince's vault, causing fans to wonder what will happen to all that material? Earlier this year, the estate of Detroit hip-hop producer J Dilla released "The Diary." That posthumous album comes 10 years after his death. As NPR's Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi reports, the story of J Dilla's latest record gets to the heart of just how complicated it can be to finish an artist's incomplete work.

I think that's exactly right. I mean, a kind word - but also one, and I think the great gifts that friends or family can give to someone who is fighting cancer is just a little bit of normalcy. I don't always want to talk about it. I want to talk about the latest movie or TV or sports or something like that. You know, let's talk politics, let's go out to dinner, let's do something else - because you live with it 24 hours a day. It's never very far from your mind, and someone who will just give you a break from that is incredibly valuable.

Well, the fear is of course when March 29 rolls around, and if the U.K. leaves without any deal, tariffs would kick in, in terms of being able to export cars over to the European Union, as well as engines. And that would make cars here a lot more expensive, much less competitive in Europe. And there's an industry group that estimates this could add billions of dollars in costs to the cars in terms of their prices. Well, remember the reason that many foreign carmakers actually set up factories here in the U.K. is because of tariff-free trade with the European Union. And a no-deal Brexit could end all that. Now, the question you asked - which is, why now? - it's pretty clear that the - these - particularly these auto companies, they want to put maximum pressure on Parliament to approve Prime Minister May's deal, which is scheduled for a vote as early as next week, and begin to end what for them has been 2 1/2 years of complete economic uncertainty.

Hi, well, I just agree a lot with Sasha, that in these cases we really don't learn things. I think it's more reminders. I know when I first heard the news, I just thought immediately about, you know, if my loved ones were connected with it or who I could possibly know who might be affected by this and just really about the fragility of life. I feel like there's so many instances where, you know, just to cope, we have to move through life without thinking about death, but these awful events are just such a big reminder that, you know, not to be morose but death is imminent and that we really have to just appreciate every single chance we get and really, you know, let the people we love know and really just tell everyone and do all that we can for others and hope that that can create, you know, a better society, a better world where perhaps we can transcend these things so they won't happen anymore.

Well, what I was calling is that my wife and I are in our mid-40s, about 80k, your solid middle class and no kids. And we have - we're refinancing our house to get a lower mortgage payment. I'm actually at my bank's parking lot right now; I'm going in to sign the papers. We're going to put off some home remodeling that we were going to do. And my wife was seriously thinking about taking a two-year leave of absence going back to college to get her masters and now we're reconsidering that decision, maybe waiting a year or two to see if things improve. We're in good shape but we're a little worried about the future, you know. It's like we've got some cash reserves. And as far as investments, we both have 401(k)s. We've got about 120K in them. And we've gone a little more conservative with them and we don't really worry too much about that, we figure if the market goes down we just get to buy more and eventually it'll all be able to go back up.

Yeah, exactly. The case of China is interesting because China makes it a practice in its Africa policy to claim non-interference in a country's politics. And that makes it a favorite in places like Sudan and like Zimbabwe, which have some very basic problems. But these African countries also have natural resources that China desires. And so there's this quid pro quo, so to speak. And Russia, of course, is, you know, perhaps arguably the world's largest supplier of illicit arms, and that's, you know, a connection, as well. And, of course, North Korea has trained some Zimbabwean soldiers and has a good relationship with Mugabe. So you can see there's a connection.

Well, the list was striking in that most of these people who were killed were older. All but two were 65 or older. We know that there was a baby-naming ceremony going on in one of the three services that was happening at the synagogue yesterday - three different services. But we don't know which of the services were struck by the gunman. The names here, just looking them over - there were the two brothers in their 50s were the youngest. They were brothers - they were at the service, a married couple in their mid 80s. The oldest woman was 97. So it really is striking that this was an elderly community that was massacred.

It's not a question of Britain being intimidated. It's a question of revising a policy, which has (unintelligible) to be totally wrong. What has Britain benefited from this war, which has caused mayhem and chaos and anarchy in Iraq? It hasn't improved the situation, and it has increased the threat to this country. You see, if there is a problem somewhere, we have to go to the roots of the problem in order to be able to solve it. The government of Tony Blair kept insisting that this was an ideological problem. We don't accept this. People don't do this because of ideology, although ideology may be resorted to as a pretext or as a source of legitimizing the act. Because there is a political crisis, people are driven to desperation, and elements, whether within the community here or elsewhere, might be tempted to use force in order to avenge the killing of what they believe to be their brothers and sisters elsewhere in the world.

I am a computer science and engineering professor here at Carnegie Mellon, and my research focuses on usable privacy and security, and so my friends like to give me examples of their frustrations with computing systems, especially frustrations related to unusable privacy and security. So passwords are something that I hear a lot about. A lot of people are frustrated with passwords, and it's bad enough when you have to have one really good password that you can remember but nobody else is going to be able to guess. But what do you do when you have accounts on a hundred different systems and you're supposed to have a unique password for each of these systems? It's tough. At Carnegie Mellon, they used to make it actually pretty easy for us to remember our passwords. The password requirement up through 2009 was just that you had to have a password with at least one character. Pretty easy. But then they changed things, and at the end of 2009, they announced that we were going to have a new policy, and this new policy required passwords that were at least eight characters long, with an uppercase letter, lowercase letter, a digit, a symbol, you couldn't use the same character more than three times, and it wasn't allowed to be in a dictionary. Now, when they implemented this new policy, a lot of people, my colleagues and friends, came up to me and they said, "Wow, now that's really unusable. Why are they doing this to us, and why didn't you stop them?" And I said, "Well, you know what? They didn't ask me." But I got curious, and I decided to go talk to the people in charge of our computer systems and find out what led them to introduce this new policy, and they said that the university had joined a consortium of universities, and one of the requirements of membership was that we had to have stronger passwords that complied with some new requirements, and these requirements were that our passwords had to have a lot of entropy. Now entropy is a complicated term, but basically it measures the strength of passwords. But the thing is, there isn't actually a standard measure of entropy. Now, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has a set of guidelines which have some rules of thumb for measuring entropy, but they don't have anything too specific, and the reason they only have rules of thumb is it turns out they don't actually have any good data on passwords. In fact, their report states, "Unfortunately, we do not have much data on the passwords users choose under particular rules. NIST would like to obtain more data on the passwords users actually choose, but system administrators are understandably reluctant to reveal password data to others." So this is a problem, but our research group looked at it as an opportunity. We said, "Well, there's a need for good password data. Maybe we can collect some good password data and actually advance the state of the art here. So the first thing we did is, we got a bag of candy bars and we walked around campus and talked to students, faculty and staff, and asked them for information about their passwords. Now we didn't say, "Give us your password." No, we just asked them about their password. How long is it? Does it have a digit? Does it have a symbol? And were you annoyed at having to create a new one last week? So we got results from 470 students, faculty and staff, and indeed we confirmed that the new policy was very annoying, but we also found that people said they felt more secure with these new passwords. We found that most people knew they were not supposed to write their password down, and only 13 percent of them did, but disturbingly, 80 percent of people said they were reusing their password. Now, this is actually more dangerous than writing your password down, because it makes you much more susceptible to attackers. So if you have to, write your passwords down, but don't reuse them. We also found some interesting things about the symbols people use in passwords. So CMU allows 32 possible symbols, but as you can see, there's only a small number that most people are using, so we're not actually getting very much strength from the symbols in our passwords. So this was a really interesting study, and now we had data from 470 people, but in the scheme of things, that's really not very much password data, and so we looked around to see where could we find additional password data? So it turns out there are a lot of people going around stealing passwords, and they often go and post these passwords on the Internet. So we were able to get access to some of these stolen password sets. This is still not really ideal for research, though, because it's not entirely clear where all of these passwords came from, or exactly what policies were in effect when people created these passwords. So we wanted to find some better source of data. So we decided that one thing we could do is we could do a study and have people actually create passwords for our study. So we used a service called Amazon Mechanical Turk, and this is a service where you can post a small job online that takes a minute, a few minutes, an hour, and pay people, a penny, ten cents, a few dollars, to do a task for you, and then you pay them through Amazon.com. So we paid people about 50 cents to create a password following our rules and answering a survey, and then we paid them again to come back two days later and log in using their password and answering another survey. So we did this, and we collected 5,000 passwords, and we gave people a bunch of different policies to create passwords with. So some people had a pretty easy policy, we call it Basic8, and here the only rule was that your password had to have at least eight characters. Then some people had a much harder policy, and this was very similar to the CMU policy, that it had to have eight characters including uppercase, lowercase, digit, symbol, and pass a dictionary check. And one of the other policies we tried, and there were a whole bunch more, but one of the ones we tried was called Basic16, and the only requirement here was that your password had to have at least 16 characters. All right, so now we had 5,000 passwords, and so we had much more detailed information. Again we see that there's only a small number of symbols that people are actually using in their passwords. We also wanted to get an idea of how strong the passwords were that people were creating, but as you may recall, there isn't a good measure of password strength. So what we decided to do was to see how long it would take to crack these passwords using the best cracking tools that the bad guys are using, or that we could find information about in the research literature. So to give you an idea of how bad guys go about cracking passwords, they will steal a password file that will have all of the passwords in kind of a scrambled form, called a hash, and so what they'll do is they'll make a guess as to what a password is, run it through a hashing function, and see whether it matches the passwords they have on their stolen password list. So a dumb attacker will try every password in order. They'll start with AAAAA and move on to AAAAB, and this is going to take a really long time before they get any passwords that people are really likely to actually have. A smart attacker, on the other hand, does something much more clever. They look at the passwords that are known to be popular from these stolen password sets, and they guess those first. So they're going to start by guessing "password," and then they'll guess "I love you," and "monkey," and "12345678," because these are the passwords that are most likely for people to have. In fact, some of you probably have these passwords. So what we found by running all of these 5,000 passwords we collected through these tests to see how strong they were, we found that the long passwords were actually pretty strong, and the complex passwords were pretty strong too. However, when we looked at the survey data, we saw that people were really frustrated by the very complex passwords, and the long passwords were a lot more usable, and in some cases, they were actually even stronger than the complex passwords. So this suggests that, instead of telling people that they need to put all these symbols and numbers and crazy things into their passwords, we might be better off just telling people to have long passwords. Now here's the problem, though: Some people had long passwords that actually weren't very strong. You can make long passwords that are still the sort of thing that an attacker could easily guess. So we need to do more than just say long passwords. There has to be some additional requirements, and some of our ongoing research is looking at what additional requirements we should add to make for stronger passwords that also are going to be easy for people to remember and type. Another approach to getting people to have stronger passwords is to use a password meter. Here are some examples. You may have seen these on the Internet when you were creating passwords. We decided to do a study to find out whether these password meters actually work. Do they actually help people have stronger passwords, and if so, which ones are better? So we tested password meters that were different sizes, shapes, colors, different words next to them, and we even tested one that was a dancing bunny. As you type a better password, the bunny dances faster and faster. So this was pretty fun. What we found was that password meters do work. (Laughter) Most of the password meters were actually effective, and the dancing bunny was very effective too, but the password meters that were the most effective were the ones that made you work harder before they gave you that thumbs up and said you were doing a good job, and in fact we found that most of the password meters on the Internet today are too soft. They tell you you're doing a good job too early, and if they would just wait a little bit before giving you that positive feedback, you probably would have better passwords. Now another approach to better passwords, perhaps, is to use pass phrases instead of passwords. So this was an xkcd cartoon from a couple of years ago, and the cartoonist suggests that we should all use pass phrases, and if you look at the second row of this cartoon, you can see the cartoonist is suggesting that the pass phrase "correct horse battery staple" would be a very strong pass phrase and something really easy to remember. He says, in fact, you've already remembered it. And so we decided to do a research study to find out whether this was true or not. In fact, everybody who I talk to, who I mention I'm doing password research, they point out this cartoon. "Oh, have you seen it? That xkcd. Correct horse battery staple." So we did the research study to see what would actually happen. So in our study, we used Mechanical Turk again, and we had the computer pick the random words in the pass phrase. Now the reason we did this is that humans are not very good at picking random words. If we asked a human to do it, they would pick things that were not very random. So we tried a few different conditions. In one condition, the computer picked from a dictionary of the very common words in the English language, and so you'd get pass phrases like "try there three come." And we looked at that, and we said, "Well, that doesn't really seem very memorable." So then we tried picking words that came from specific parts of speech, so how about noun-verb-adjective-noun. That comes up with something that's sort of sentence-like. So you can get a pass phrase like "plan builds sure power" or "end determines red drug." And these seemed a little bit more memorable, and maybe people would like those a little bit better. We wanted to compare them with passwords, and so we had the computer pick random passwords, and these were nice and short, but as you can see, they don't really look very memorable. And then we decided to try something called a pronounceable password. So here the computer picks random syllables and puts them together so you have something sort of pronounceable, like "tufritvi" and "vadasabi." That one kind of rolls off your tongue. So these were random passwords that were generated by our computer. So what we found in this study was that, surprisingly, pass phrases were not actually all that good. People were not really better at remembering the pass phrases than these random passwords, and because the pass phrases are longer, they took longer to type and people made more errors while typing them in. So it's not really a clear win for pass phrases. Sorry, all of you xkcd fans. On the other hand, we did find that pronounceable passwords worked surprisingly well, and so we actually are doing some more research to see if we can make that approach work even better. So one of the problems with some of the studies that we've done is that because they're all done using Mechanical Turk, these are not people's real passwords. They're the passwords that they created or the computer created for them for our study. And we wanted to know whether people would actually behave the same way with their real passwords. So we talked to the information security office at Carnegie Mellon and asked them if we could have everybody's real passwords. Not surprisingly, they were a little bit reluctant to share them with us, but we were actually able to work out a system with them where they put all of the real passwords for 25,000 CMU students, faculty and staff, into a locked computer in a locked room, not connected to the Internet, and they ran code on it that we wrote to analyze these passwords. They audited our code. They ran the code. And so we never actually saw anybody's password. We got some interesting results, and those of you Tepper students in the back will be very interested in this. So we found that the passwords created by people affiliated with the school of computer science were actually 1.8 times stronger than those affiliated with the business school. We have lots of other really interesting demographic information as well. The other interesting thing that we found is that when we compared the Carnegie Mellon passwords to the Mechanical Turk-generated passwords, there was actually a lot of similarities, and so this helped validate our research method and show that actually, collecting passwords using these Mechanical Turk studies is actually a valid way to study passwords. So that was good news. Okay, I want to close by talking about some insights I gained while on sabbatical last year in the Carnegie Mellon art school. One of the things that I did is I made a number of quilts, and I made this quilt here. It's called "Security Blanket." (Laughter) And this quilt has the 1,000 most frequent passwords stolen from the RockYou website. And the size of the passwords is proportional to how frequently they appeared in the stolen dataset. And what I did is I created this word cloud, and I went through all 1,000 words, and I categorized them into loose thematic categories. And it was, in some cases, it was kind of difficult to figure out what category they should be in, and then I color-coded them. So here are some examples of the difficulty. So "justin." Is that the name of the user, their boyfriend, their son? Maybe they're a Justin Bieber fan. Or "princess." Is that a nickname? Are they Disney princess fans? Or maybe that's the name of their cat. "Iloveyou" appears many times in many different languages. There's a lot of love in these passwords. If you look carefully, you'll see there's also some profanity, but it was really interesting to me to see that there's a lot more love than hate in these passwords. And there are animals, a lot of animals, and "monkey" is the most common animal and the 14th most popular password overall. And this was really curious to me, and I wondered, "Why are monkeys so popular?" And so in our last password study, any time we detected somebody creating a password with the word "monkey" in it, we asked them why they had a monkey in their password. And what we found out — we found 17 people so far, I think, who have the word "monkey" — We found out about a third of them said they have a pet named "monkey" or a friend whose nickname is "monkey," and about a third of them said that they just like monkeys and monkeys are really cute. And that guy is really cute. So it seems that at the end of the day, when we make passwords, we either make something that's really easy to type, a common pattern, or things that remind us of the word password or the account that we've created the password for, or whatever. Or we think about things that make us happy, and we create our password based on things that make us happy. And while this makes typing and remembering your password more fun, it also makes it a lot easier to guess your password. So I know a lot of these TED Talks are inspirational and they make you think about nice, happy things, but when you're creating your password, try to think about something else. Thank you. (Applause)

It's just astonishing. I mean, this whole pulling up their socks argument implies that, as a matter of fact, Iraqis do prefer to live amidst chaos and bloodshed, or that they are lazy or incompetent. And certainly, we share none of the blame for what's gone wrong there. It's just astonishing to me. This fundamental misunderstanding that comments like Senator Lott's imply - that he and people like him have - is that what's going in Iraq is not people being lazy or wanting to live in death and misery. It's the fact that you have a very sectarian country, where two groups - predominantly the Shiite Arabs and the Sunni Arabs - are playing a winner takes all game for power. They're not interested in compromise. They're not interested in going up. They're working very, very hard to kill each other and defeat each other.

Right. I think the key words are lots of luck. His name is Jonathan Tasini. He's hoping to replicate what Ned Lamont pulled off in Connecticut when he beat Joe Lieberman, because his argument is against Hillary Clinton's support for the war when she voted in 2002 for the authorization to go to war. But one, Hillary Clinton has $44 million in the bank. Tasini has, I think, carfare, and about that - maybe lunch money. Plus the fact that Hillary Clinton has done - she has distanced herself not so much from her vote in 2002, but she has criticized the president on the conduct of the war, she has called for Rumsfeld's resignation, and she has really distanced herself, unlike Lieberman, who stood very - who supported the war far longer than many Democrats felt he should have.

I think one of the things that the consumer fails to understand is that the merchant doesn't buy an item. They buy an order. So if somebody buys, let's say, 200 blouses and spends $50,000 on it, and then they manage to sell at least some of those blouses, and rather than the 50,000, they've got $70,000 in the bank. They can afford to liquidate the ones that are left. And that therefore what we see as the discount on the product, the merchant is simply discarding the end-runs of the order for whatever they can get for them. And I think we, as a consuming public, are deeply confused about what value is. And that extends from commodity products to the clothing that we wear. And almost all of us have had the experience of buying something and celebrating how cheap it was or how much of a deal that we've gotten, gotten it home and realized that maybe it wasn't quite the bargain that we thought it was. And I'm certainly hopeful that we as consumers are waking up to the fact that we need fewer and better things, and that while we have to negotiate on the prices, we as Americans have gotten much too fat in our closets and fat in our bellies, and we all need to go on a diet.

Yeah, that's actually a term coined by a sociologist named H. Stith Bennett, and it's the idea that we sort of - we have a language of recording that we learn. Which is I think why the Tone Tests could work because people did not have any sort of recording consciousness. I mean, obviously most of them had probably heard some recorded sound, but they weren't saturated with recordings the way we are in our lives today. And so, really we kind of come into the equation knowing that we're supposed to hear a record and kind of translate it into something that sounds like real life.

The government unveiled this plan to deal with the marriage crisis. Young people are very strapped financially and it's hard to get married, and so the government schemed for this, which it called semi-independent marriage, essentially was a route for young men to be able to secure legal and piously sanctioned sex while denying women any of the legal rights or the social status that would come with being properly married. When I think of the last four years, women - and we're talking about these educated women who would never conceive of the fact that they couldn't even type their gender into Google and be able to get search results, are finding that they're being demeaned even at this level.

But that's not an easy argument for Democrats to make. The economy is doing much better but people don't feel it. The average family's income hasn't gone up since 1999. Not all the Democrats fault, of course, but still a heavy anchor on the party that's supposed to represent the middle class. In the exit polls, 63 percent of people who voted said the economic system favors the wealthy; a Democratic message if there ever was one, but one-third of those people voted Republican. Geoff Garin points out that voters also supported, by large majorities, Democratic positions on the environment, immigration and the economy.

As protests continue in Iran, both demonstrators and many Western reporters rely on Twitter, a social networking site where users can send very short messages to large lists of readers. The government has blocked cell phones and a lot of Web sites, but there are workarounds that make Twitter difficult to stop. There's also no way to check the accuracy of tweets, who's sending them and why. And some dispute exactly how influential Twitter is to begin with. Do you think American journalists should rely on Twitter for information? And if you've been in contact with someone in Iran through Twitter, give us a call: 800-989-8255, email us: talk@npr.org. There's a conversation at our Web site too. Go to npr.org, click on TALK OF THE NATION.

Yeah, well, I was one of the first Macintosh buyers. In 1984, I brought my Macintosh to MIT as a freshman. And so I'm a big Mac fan. Years later, though, I did realized, you know, your previous speaker mentioned how the Windows, you know, there's more viruses, in Macs there aren't as many viruses. Certain people choose certain computers, you know. Certain people are certain thinking types. You know, the whole MBTI type definitions? And I have a feeling that there are certain people who like seeing things in the abstract. I mean, if you recall when the Macintosh came out, some people said, all right, a desktop. I get it. Paper. I get it. Whereas, there were those people who were like, you know, that doesn't look like you're doing business.

Absolutely, and I think that the FBI and other law- enforcement organizations have gone to great pains to say that this is a tiny fraction. I mean, think about how big the Minneapolis Somali community is. It's anywhere between 40,000 and 70,000 people, and you've got two dozen young men, around, about, around that number who have actually left. So clearly that's this tiny little sliver of the community. But what's interesting here is that the fear is actually on many levels, right? The first level is just put yourself in the shoes of these parents, who in one case, and this is in the story we did this morning, there was this young boy named Mustafa(ph) who said to his mother, I'm going to go do my laundry. I'll be right back.

The court started out with a pool of about 80 potential jurors. And after dismissing those who couldn't serve, that number was whittled down to about 30. That 30 were given a questionnaire and send home with instructions from the judge to fill this form out and return tomorrow morning. The questionnaire will be used to help reduce the number of jurors to 12. The judge told them not to discuss the case with anyone, to stay away from Google and Twitter. And he said that this is the sort of case that many people have views on. They were told, by the way, that the case could last up to six months.

But at least one of the Bahraini detainees, Juma Al Dossary, is being held at Guantanamo's Camp Five, which is for those prisoners considered to have high intelligence value. The U.S. Military and the FBI say Al Dossary is implicated in, among other things, the 1996 Khobar Towers bombings that killed 19 Americans and that he trained at Al-Qaida camps. Al Dossary's lawyer, Colangelo-Bryan, disputes those charges. Isa Al Merbati(ph), another Bahraini held at Guantanamo, is suspected of receiving weapons training in Afghanistan, and of being a member of Abu Sayyaf, an Islamist organization with links to al-Qaida. Merbati's lawyer, Christopher Karagheuzoff, also dismisses those charges.

John(ph) emailed from Rock Island, Illinois, to confess: I was in an advanced chemistry class with two other students in college. The teacher explained one of us would get an A, one would get a C, and the other an F. To give myself an advantage, I used the program function on my calculator to put in equations and examples. I do not have remorse because in the real world, we will have access to those equations and examples, but I did need to study and work to know how to use those equations. Another listener profited from cheating, literally. I saw cheating in the form of economics. I saw the demand rise for students who couldn't handle their workload, and for a price I would help alleviate their suffering. I was able to pay my whole semester off with the revenue I took in from just one econ class. That email from Vinnie Parker(ph) in Pinole, California.

And there's been a major development in Palestinian politics. Dissidents in the ruling Fatah movement have broken away to form a new party to contest next month's parliamentary elections in the West Bank and Gaza. The new movement is called The Future. It's led by Marwan Barghouti. He's now in an Israeli prison serving time for terrorist offenses but remains the Palestinians' most popular political figure. The Future movement also includes a top leader of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, which has claimed responsibility for dozens of attacks on Israelis. That man, Nasser Juma, says he's now directing his energies to reforming the Palestinian Authority. NPR's Linda Gradstein reports.

Well, what it means to form a coalition is that the key thing is the Shiite didn't get an outright majority, so they're going to have to bring in other groups to be able to get the two-thirds that they need to vote for president and therefore, form a government. The Sunnis have about a fifth of the seats, which puts them neck and neck with the Kurds. The talk is now, forming a unity government, where the Sunnis will be represented, unlike they were last time. The idea is that by giving the Sunnis a stake, it will quell the mostly Sunni-lead insurgency. Now, Iraqi politics don't happen in a vacuum. There are more and more signs in Iraq that the country is splitting apart along ethnic and (unintelligible) lines. The United States has a vested interest in seeing a broadly based popular government put in place. They're exerting a lot of pressure, and they have really been courting the Sunnis and pressuring the Shiites to bring them together. It remains to be seen, though, what is going to happen. These groups all have competing agendas.

You don't have to do a judicial review every time. We've had this in the past that you didn't have to. You have almost the equivalent of an administrative subpoena. I'm saying that in a broad sense, not in the technical sense. You don't need it every time. But you do need some kind of a check and balance. You cannot have - there's no justification for the vast bulk of these national security letters. They're just a very wide fishing net and if we allow ourselves as a nation to get used to that sort of thing without somebody saying stop, this is a very slippery slope.

I agree with you 1,000 percent, and I would encourage you to get on the site of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, also known as the ACIP. We think it's really important that the information that we use to come to recommendations is entirely transparent. The ACIP is the non-governmental body, coordinated by the CDC, with the world's experts in the different diseases that makes recommendations for vaccination, whether it's influenza or any other vaccine that we recommend. Every meeting of the ACIP is an open meeting, it's webcast. It's available for people to see. Every paper that's provided to the ACIP is entirely open and in the public domain, and all of the articles, all of the scientific research that we base our decisions on, that's all available. We would rather overcommunicate than undercommunicate the bases of our decisions because we know there are people who are suspicious.

Well, you know, I mean, athlete's foot is not an associative(ph) disease as some of the things we've been talking about and although it is a nuisance, air travel does, however, play a major role in driving disease emergence. It's not really that air travel is where diseases originate, but it's a great way for diseases to spread around. And either through humans that are infected get on an airplane in one region and spreading a pathogen to a completely new part of the world; or in the trade, as Michael said, the trade in wildlife which is growing every year. Now there are dates on the global trade - global and travel, and they show pretty clearly this rising, despite the fuel costs, and it's predicted to continue to rise and in some places more than others. So I think what this does is it makes those more at risk of a pandemic from one of these emerging diseases.

Well, I was pretty right radical before joining the army when I was 18. And the service itself totally changed my perspective on all this Israeli-Palestinian situation. And I've seen the way they live. I've seen the way the repression they have. The attitude that the (inaudible) to the army, starting their service, it's - personally I was with a lot of hatred. And a couple of years ago, I kind of had this revelation that we are the Spartans of the millennium, in a way. And living in the shadows of soldiers all of the time. And your father was a soldier, and your neighbor was a soldier. Just kind of grew up to be a fighter deep down in your core, in your head and your mind and it's - and listening to the other comments of the caller before me, I was - finishing the army was one of the happiest - my service was one of the happiest days in my life. And I don't think I will ever do - go and do that service back again.

Eliska's husband landed a job working for a railroad company. He worked all the way up from a helper to an electrician. Like so many migrants north, she landed a job in manufacturing, first at a box-making factory, and later, at General Motors. But Milwaukee was never a perfect fit. To this day, it remains deeply segregated, and thousands of miles from the Barrieres' roots in Louisiana. It also has a small, black middle class. So when one of their daughters moved from Detroit to suburban Atlanta in 1991, the whole family soon followed. Eliska jokes that her daughter Karen was reluctant.

That's right. That's right. But I have to say that if that were the case, then no church could get any kind of tax benefit or any tax exemption could be in jeopardy. So - and the government has made a decision that churches will receive tax exemptions. So, you know, I was thinking about this when I was interviewing Scott Hoffman. I thought of what Job said, the thing that I've greatly feared has come upon me, meaning that churches probably are shaking in their boots about this. Because I think there could be a possibility that tax exemptions begin to be chipped away.

I remember 20 years ago or so when you were coming down at some of these bases, they looked like nothing more than dumps. The rusted material, the 20 or 30 years of rusting tin cans out back, the old machinery. We've had bases where they would go and pick up the - oh, you want to see a penguin? They'd go pick them up. They were just pushing them out of their way; there wasn't this concern for the wildlife. But when people started visiting and seeing this, there's been an enormous change in the way the bases operate and the way the base conduct themselves regarding the environment and the wildlife. And that was largely due to visitors.

Well, I think they're beginning to have some impact. I think it begins to start a conversation. And professor Steinberg can talk about this better than I can, but I think it's beginning to have an impact in the juvenile-justice arena, the question of whether it really makes sense, as we've done over the last 30 years, to make it easier and easier to try kids well before they're 18 as adults, put them in adult facilities. I don't think it's convinced anyone for the reasons the professor states, that it - you can't make a link between what a brain looks like at 25 versus 16 and say, well, this is going to affect behavior. But it's a way of opening a door to think about whether kids are really at a different stage, even if they're committing horrible crimes, whether they're more rehabitable than an adult would be.

Well, Preval was part of the movement with Aristide. And, I mean, he is considered as someone of a much more lower profile and was not, you know, is a charismatic speaker and so forth in the way that Aristide was, I think hailed by many people outside of Haiti as someone who would, you know, understand the bureaucratic context and so forth. But he's certainly still continues some of that movement. Now there are fissures within that party as well that continue to activate Haitian politics. But he's certainly - you know, he comes out of the last movement and that's still in many ways what helps define his stature in Haitian society.

It's nice to be hammered in the brain. But my experience with music didn't start with this or, I kind of took it over from my dad, who was a musician. He was the guy with the guitar who was chasing all the girls. You know, I grew up to sounds of Jimi Hendrix, in particular the Band Of Gypsies record. It has nothing to do with the fact that it calls Band of Gypsies, I didn't know what it calls, actually, until I moved here, because we had it on a tape. But that record, I probably heard it about ten thousand times by the age I was five. So here I come, you know? And...

Yeah. I was staking out the courthouse on Friday along with a bunch of other reporters. The thinking is that there was a hearing on Friday in the appeals court and a case that somehow relates to the Mueller investigation - the special counsel investigation. But court officials closed the entire floor during the arguments. So we staked out the elevators. We staked out the parking garage. The lawyers involved got away without being seen. You know, it's hard to know how big a deal this is. But it is a sign of how intense the interest in this investigation has become.

A little bit, yes. And honestly, there was inspiration from a lot of these cases that we see with unarmed black people losing their lives. Michael Brown - when he lost his life, there was more focus on what he had done sometimes than what was done to him. And I looked at Khalil because I know Khalils. I see Khalils every single day. I grew up with Khalils who have made decisions that may not be the best. But at the time when Khalil is in his last moments of his life, his past should not have an effect on what happens to him in that moment. So Khalil is a combination of a lot of what we see with young black men, particularly, when they lose their lives.

Here, in the lobby of Uganda's parliament building, there's an installation showing the potentially disastrous effects of climate change. And the sign says: The choices, actions and agreements made now will determine which future becomes reality. Whoever wrote that might well have been describing the political climate of the country. Ugandans may soon have a choice to make. Homosexuality has been illegal here for more than 100 years. But today, lawmakers are considering legislation that would go further. The Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009 would impose seven-year jail sentences on consenting adults who engage in gay sex. It would give life sentences to people in same-sex marriages. It was extradite gay Ugandans living abroad and prosecute them.

Humans have been fascinated with speed for ages. The history of human progress is one of ever-increasing velocity, and one of the most important achievements in this historical race was the breaking of the sound barrier. Not long after the first successful airplane flights, pilots were eager to push their planes to go faster and faster. But as they did so, increased turbulence and large forces on the plane prevented them from accelerating further. Some tried to circumvent the problem through risky dives, often with tragic results. Finally, in 1947, design improvements, such as a movable horizontal stabilizer, the all-moving tail, allowed an American military pilot named Chuck Yeager to fly the Bell X-1 aircraft at 1127 km/h, becoming the first person to break the sound barrier and travel faster than the speed of sound. The Bell X-1 was the first of many supersonic aircraft to follow, with later designs reaching speeds over Mach 3. Aircraft traveling at supersonic speed create a shock wave with a thunder-like noise known as a sonic boom, which can cause distress to people and animals below or even damage buildings. For this reason, scientists around the world have been looking at sonic booms, trying to predict their path in the atmosphere, where they will land, and how loud they will be. To better understand how scientists study sonic booms, let's start with some basics of sound. Imagine throwing a small stone in a still pond. What do you see? The stone causes waves to travel in the water at the same speed in every direction. These circles that keep growing in radius are called wave fronts. Similarly, even though we cannot see it, a stationary sound source, like a home stereo, creates sound waves traveling outward. The speed of the waves depends on factors like the altitude and temperature of the air they move through. At sea level, sound travels at about 1225 km/h. But instead of circles on a two-dimensional surface, the wave fronts are now concentric spheres, with the sound traveling along rays perpendicular to these waves. Now imagine a moving sound source, such as a train whistle. As the source keeps moving in a certain direction, the successive waves in front of it will become bunched closer together. This greater wave frequency is the cause of the famous Doppler effect, where approaching objects sound higher pitched. But as long as the source is moving slower than the sound waves themselves, they will remain nested within each other. It's when an object goes supersonic, moving faster than the sound it makes, that the picture changes dramatically. As it overtakes sound waves it has emitted, while generating new ones from its current position, the waves are forced together, forming a Mach cone. No sound is heard as it approaches an observer because the object is traveling faster than the sound it produces. Only after the object has passed will the observer hear the sonic boom. Where the Mach cone meets the ground, it forms a hyperbola, leaving a trail known as the boom carpet as it travels forward. This makes it possible to determine the area affected by a sonic boom. What about figuring out how strong a sonic boom will be? This involves solving the famous Navier-Stokes equations to find the variation of pressure in the air due to the supersonic aircraft flying through it. This results in the pressure signature known as the N-wave. What does this shape mean? Well, the sonic boom occurs when there is a sudden change in pressure, and the N-wave involves two booms: one for the initial pressure rise at the aircraft's nose, and another for when the tail passes, and the pressure suddenly returns to normal. This causes a double boom, but it is usually heard as a single boom by human ears. In practice, computer models using these principles can often predict the location and intensity of sonic booms for given atmospheric conditions and flight trajectories, and there is ongoing research to mitigate their effects. In the meantime, supersonic flight over land remains prohibited. So, are sonic booms a recent creation? Not exactly. While we try to find ways to silence them, a few other animals have been using sonic booms to their advantage. The gigantic Diplodocus may have been capable of cracking its tail faster than sound, at over 1200 km/h, possibly to deter predators. Some types of shrimp can also create a similar shock wave underwater, stunning or even killing pray at a distance with just a snap of their oversized claw. So while we humans have made great progress in our relentless pursuit of speed, it turns out that nature was there first.

I don't think it's an either/or conversation. I think that it's both. I think that they truly believe - and I truly believe - that life begins when a heartbeat begins, and ending that heartbeat is - should be criminal. And the conversation - I mean, you could say, you know, ending abortion won't end abortion. You could very easily extrapolate that to the gun control conversation; making all guns illegal on actually take guns off the street. So there's - you can't say that you can't legalize something or not legalize something and but not sort of see that policy implication for other issues that are your pet issues.

Yesterday, at visiting hours, my brother looks a little bit more like himself. He is laughing, no longer sullen, no longer afraid to look us in the eye. He seems hopeful, even, his first opportunity for parole in just six months, a new cell assignment. He's even made a friend. What kind of a person wants someone she loves to pay and keep paying? What kind of person tallies in her mind every harm done her? I sit on my hands. I avoid his eyes. But there is no escaping the new quality of his voice. If I didn't know better, I would think he was the same man, the same as before the accident, the same brother I have always known.

I do. You know, it was interesting, when I interviewed the lead detective, you know, for me, I always felt that, you know, there's a pretty big hurdle that the prosecution, the crown was asking the jury to go over in terms of proving intent. You know, you could prove that he was careless, that he was neglectful, you know, that uncaring, but can you prove that he meant to kill these people? And, you know, the detective said to me that he felt that, you know, that Aziga had gone through this stormy divorce. His wife had custody of his children. He was angry at his God, angry at his life. And that he was a man looking for payback. He was looking to hurt people. And, you know, the real damming thing for him in the case was that, you know, he actually had a couple of these women calling him from hospitals to say they'd been infected. You know, are you positive? Did you test positive? And he kept saying no. So, you know, the crown kept…

So I think one of the reasons why this president and this attorney general now is in a lot of hot water is because they have not told the truth. They have not come forward to say why they dismissed some of these prosecutors. And until we get to the bottom of it, until members of Congress are able to hear the testimony, I have every reason to suspect there was a little hanky-panky going on. So I think the sooner the president gets this behind him, the better our country will be, our system of justice, the rule of law. And perhaps he needs to find a new attorney general, somebody who doesn't have the stink that this one has in terms of this controversy and scandal.

They all want to talk, to tell me their problems, she says. They don't have money. They want discounts. She lets them bargain her down. Dimitris and Angeliki lived frugally, like most Greeks of their generation. They saved and avoided credit cards. They sometimes splurged on a beach vacation or a night out at the theatre. Now, they avoid buying meat. It's just too expensive. And they don't drive anywhere because the price of gas has skyrocketed. They stoke the fireplace to avoid burning heating oil, which has also gotten more expensive. They'd planned to retire in his ancestral village in the Peloponnese. Now, that plan is off because his state pension has been cut.

Well, certainly. Actually, I do agree with something the caller alludes to, and that's the requirement to be creative. One of the things that we are really trained well to do in disaster medicine is to be creative and to use the resources available to us. When I work in emergency department in Baltimore, I have virtually any technological, advanced medical - whatever you want, it's there when I need it. And that's just not the case during a disaster. And so, we - and the caller says he made up as he went along, I would say we are creative as needed. There was another patient that I took care of in Haiti who I clinically diagnosed with what's known as PCP pneumonia, which is a complication of (unintelligible) AIDS. And the treatment for PCP pneumonia is generally thought to be Bactrim, Bactrim, Bactrim - meaning the first choice of medication is Bactrim, the second choice is Bactrim, the third choice is Bactrim.

Most of it's spent, you know, paying for everything from electricity, to running production lines, to paying the salaries of the workers. One of the big problems right now is the company isn't earning enough revenue to offset all these costs. Sales have been staggeringly bad, I think much worse than anybody expected. Last month, if we go to February, for GM, it was down nearly 53 percent, year on year. GM lost about $30 billion last year. So what we've seen is the recession is really putting people off from buying cars. As you know, it's a very expensive thing to do for people. And so that means GM just isn't getting the revenue it needs to keep going.

I think typically it is not because I think that you are creating a situation where you might make a large number of consumers not want to buy your product. And if you're really forward-looking, you're thinking about growing your market over time. And so you don't want to close off necessarily any opportunities to be able to grow that market by having, again, a message that you might believe as an individual or that even might be infused within the DNA of the company, to have that message misinterpreted in your mind by a group of consumers who will then potentially react in a way that we're seeing now, for example, with social media and information going around the world so quickly, such groundswell of consumer dissent that emerged from this issue.

Hi. I've personally been somewhat unhappy with the Sierra Club, and mostly regarding a local debate that's going on in Boulder regarding our open space lands. And a lot of the environmental groups, their position is, you know, the open space lands, they should be kept for wildlife, they should be, you know, to preserve the natural environment. And on the other side of the debate is that people want to use the land, we want to hike on them, we want to rock climb, and walk our dogs. And some groups like the Sierra Club seem to feel that there's a conflict there. And our position is that, you know, hiking, preserving the land for passive recreational use is saving the land. And the Sierra Club, by taking such an extreme position on this, is alienating its own supporters. And people like me, I no longer want to support the Sierra Club because they're choosing the wrong battles in my opinion.

Yeah, I think they're extremely widespread. And one of the interesting elements of this research is it suggests that these biases are held by the whole culture. Black police officers can be shown to act in biased ways to get black motorist. Or you know, women can be shown to act and sexist ways against other women. There's been a lot of work trying to figure out how to reverse these subtle stereotypes. And I came by an interesting new study. Calvin Lai and Brian Nosek, at the University of Virginia, they asked teams of scientists to come up with rapid interventions that can reverse these subtle biases. And the scientists came up with 18 different techniques, which they ran on more than 11,000 volunteers to see which of these techniques could reverse these subtle unconscious biases.

And so, consequently, it affected him where the skin color started changing at a certain age. Michael knew that with all of his talent nobody's going to come see someone with spots. And so he goes to the right chemists and the right scientists, and they create some injections that bleaches him white. Now when that first case come up, which was a fraud--when you sit around and take ordinary people and say, `Well, he wouldn't have settled out of court'--and let me tell you what that settlement was. It wasn't no $30 million. It was X amount of million dollars goes in the bank for escrow, and all that dad is able to get out of that is the interest off of that. He got a rude awakening. But let me tell you two things that came out of that trial. All over the world, they talk about the black family in America. We saw the black family. We saw the black family sitting there every day as a family unit. Let me tell you something else. That jury watched Michael every day, and as the world talk about how weird he is--well, Pee Wee Herman weird; he don't have to go to jail for it--they got to see a Michael Jackson every day and heard people lying on him, people--they didn't know they were lying. Michael did, and Michael never had negative attitudes. He never flinched. He never looked evil. He never--and I'm sure that had a profound effect on the jury.

Amy Madison Austin wrote from Shinglehouse, Pennsylvania: It's not always so easy to get food stamps. In 2007 when my husband was still working for the post office, his hours were reduced, his check was $945 every two weeks. It was difficult for a family of six to live on that. We could not get food stamps because we have a farm and we take depreciation for the equipment, which made us look like we had much more money that we really did. It was an incredibly difficult time for us. We talked with A.J. Jacobs about his experiment taking a number of massive open online courses and his New York Times piece "Two Cheers for Web U!" Helen Gearhart wrote from Beaverton, Oregon: I took Coursera's modern and contemporary poetry. I was skeptical that poetry could be taught in this format. It worked because there was a combination of watching discussions among the teaching assistants and professor. Every two weeks, there was an online webcast discussion, which made everything lively.

Well, you know, there has been this little bit of a group hug. And I do want to give AP some credit for actually recognizing that. I think this was a good thing that they actually came a little heavy handed, although I do think that they should have learned from the Recording Industry of America - Association of America and others, but they have come back together, talked about this and said, hey, look, we need to figure out ways that this doesn't jeopardize our business. AP's business, for those that don't know, they have paid members, news sources to the tune of about 1,500 daily papers pay for that service. So they're absolutely right in wanting to protect their intellectual property, especially if bloggers are copying and pasting a whole AP article and then making that seem like that that's their material and then selling ads around that. That should be illegal. So, they have made a group hug. They are working more around this, and I think things have relaxed a little bit since the fury started.

Well, the big change with the Voting Rights Act is that Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act is currently dead. And this is a premature death because no one disputes the fact that there are still numerous problems in the covered jurisdictions. It is an ideological death. It reminds me, in fact, of an opinion that the Supreme Court issued exactly 100 years ago, in 1903, and this is an opinion brought to my attention by James Blackshire, who's a civil rights lawyer in Alabama. And essentially in the 1903 case, the Supreme Court said if the great mass of white people in Alabama don't want blacks to vote, there's nothing we can do about. And that's what I hear in the echoes of the - the case was called Giles versus Harris, and Mr. Giles was supported by Booker T. Washington in this civil rights case. And I feel the same sense of the Supreme Court just denying the role, the important role that it plays in our country and in many ways putting the burden on the people who have been discriminated against, s opposed to the people in power who continue to discriminate.

If you don't have a passport, we're going to send you to a secondary examination where you will be engaged in a conversation with one of the examining officers from customs and border protection. And at the point, they will try to determine to their satisfaction that you are in fact a U.S. citizen and you are in fact who you claim to be. Generally speaking, it's not going to be a big deal, but we are going to give them a verbal and a written notification of what the requirements are. And we're going to strongly suggest that, you know, future travels, they come back to United States with a passport.

...out on Friday, if I may - that China in the last couple of weeks very interestingly has made some suggestions that have appeared a little bit more conciliatory. And, you know, it's a bit like old-style Kremlinology. You know, you go through the verbs that they use and they - these seemed to be slightly softer verbs than what they used previously. And there's a little bit of that about it. But China is walking a very difficult line between insisting on what it sees its sovereign rights and indeed places where it can get hold of cheap hydrocarbons, of getting fuel that it needs for its growth, but also not annoying all of its neighbors so much that they go running to the umbrella of the United States, which is basically what's happened over the last couple of years. And the whole pivot, so-called pivot, of President Obama back bringing the U.S. military, reinforcing U.S. military presence in Asia announced in Bali last November is a result of China pushing it too far in the last two years and pushing its luck and saying things in a little bit too much of a belligerent way. And so, it is realizing the very difficult task it has in dealing with the South China Sea. And certainly, it is a potential flashpoint. So I think a lot of people are looking at these recent comments and saying, well, any progress is good, anymore slightly more soft line from Beijing on how it will deal with this is good.

My family grew up listening to Jean Shepherd broadcasting from the Limelight on radio in New York, and we were a transplanted Illinois family. So the most I've ever laughed in my entire life, where it hurt, was listening to a Jean Shepherd show. But my favorite part of the movie was, again, the character of Dad that Darren McGavin played, because he was our dad. I mean, that's the way the dads of that time were. You know, they went out - the only time we saw them was when they came home from work, and they went right back. I loved it. (Unintelligible) to this day.

I mean, some of these crises have long legs. I mean, this Katrina and tsunami and - the Asian tsunami, that went on for quite a while. It looks like there's still - that this one could go on for a while because they're still uncovering a lot of problems, a lot of suffering, a lot of needs. So this could go on for a while. So I encourage people to stay with it and continue to follow it and think in terms of giving money for the emergency needs and then thinking about giving money later for needs as they arise.

The indictment of Al-Arian and the three other men was largely made possible by the USA Patriot Act, in particular a provision that makes it easier for the government to use material gathered by intelligence agencies in a criminal prosecution. Federal prosecutors won't comment on the case outside of court, but in pretrial hearings and court documents, they've indicated they'll introduce documents and wire taps that they say link Al-Arian and the others with more than a dozen attacks committed by Palestinian Islamic Jihad. They also plan to call as witnesses families of those killed by suicide bombers in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. Moffitt maintains the case is not about terrorism but about Sami Al-Arian's political views and US foreign policy in the Mideast. For years, while Steve Emerson and others were raising concerns about him, Al-Arian was active in American politics. Moffitt says at the trial, he plans to introduce pictures and videos of Al-Arian meeting with a wide range of US officials, including then presidential candidate George W. Bush.

It does, but you see the Sadrists, Muqtada's family, have traditionally been Iraqi nationalists and anti-Iranian. Then from about 2003 when he opposed the U.S. occupation, I think it was really a case of the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and he began to move towards the Iranians. He's in Iran now. But does he trust them, do they trust him? No, not really, but I think it is a great mistake and really a very damaging mistake to think that anything the Iraqi Shia do is as pawns of the Iranians. I mean they do it because it's in their own interest. They get help from the Iranians. And as for this, you know, do the Iranians arm - do they get arms, does the Mahdi army get arms from the Iranians? I'd have thought so, yes, but I mean, arms - as long as you have money you can get arms in Iraq. It's - that's really not a problem. That the Mahdi army has complained to be, yeah, we get - said, you know, we get arms from the Iranians, but they charge us an enormous amount of money. They don't deny it, they just complain about the price. You know, there's a peculiar situation at the moment which maybe people don't quite appreciate, which is the two governments that support the present Iraqi government most are one, the United States, and secondly Iran. There's a Shia government there, a Shia state. They just quarrel about who has most influence over their government.

He was credited with just about the most fantastic achievement that you could have it at that time. He was credited with being equal to the greatest of the ancients. Particularly, he was specifically hailed by the people who bestowed his name on this hemisphere with being the new Ptolemy, the modern equivalent of the most famous and revered geographer of the Ancient world. And you go to remember, this is the time of the Renaissance in Europe. So to be equal to the greatest of the ancients was just about the biggest career move you could make it at the time.

Well, it's always, and I find this very true when I talk to students, a delicate balance between completely discouraging them, and being unrealistic, or as I say, really not being honest about, what I think, I would agree with Tom, is the somewhat alarming situation out in the media. However, I think what sustains us here training students, and I think sustains most good journalists, is the belief that journalism is an absolutely essential bridge between the world and citizens. And that without it, we will have a brain dead country incapable of really making intelligent decisions. So, I think we look at ourselves as being in a very switchy wind. We don't really know quite where true north is in the sense of where things are going. But we do have an abiding faith that people need to know, that storytelling is absolutely essential, and whether it's done in newspapers, magazines, on the internet, through interactive new media, however, that there is going to be an essential role for journalists for some time to come. The problem is how do you pay them?

Oh, that's a very difficult question, but - on one level. But there's just so many things. As you noted with the little clip that you had of his voice, he was absolutely brilliant but he was also able to tell things in a very amusing, personal, funny way. He could be a standup comic for Jon Stewart. The line of my book, all governments lie, is taken from another part, which is the bottom, underlying part. Is but danger lies in wait for countries who officials smoke the same hashish they give out. And I think right now he'd be looking at a lot of problems going on in this administration and the hashish that has been smoked.

Well, you know, this is really the last card that Prime Minister George Papandreou had left to play. Greeks are so down on the Socialist government and on the austerity measures. And they're looking around and they're seeing an economy that was much worse off than it was two years ago. They see the wage cuts and the pension cuts and the tax hikes and they're like when is this all going to stop, because the debt isn't going down and the austerity measures are killing the middle class. The unemployment rate, it just came out, is now 17.5 percent, which is almost double what it was before austerity. Personal bankruptcies, homelessness, even suicides are all on the rise. So you know, people are like, when is this going to stop? A poll last Sunday by the Greek newspaper To Vima said that nearly 60 percent of Greeks view the latest deal negatively.

Well, I really do think, Tony, that this is going to get resolved by demographics more than anything else, more than judges or legislatures or ballot initiatives. All the evidence that we've seen is that public opinions show - for whatever reason public opinions show that Americans have become more and more comfortable with gay rights over time, and that - and I think this goes a little bit to Evan Wolfson's point, you know, as we see movies and we meet neighbors and we have teachers in the schools, we no longer have that sense of other that makes us think that there is something sort of this really horrifying going on. And so I think you're seeing a huge difference, for instance, in the way young people in America view these issues, as compared to older people in America. And I think this issue, in some ways, is just going to get resolved over time as, you know, you cited to the anti-miscegenation cases, Loving, you know, as cultural views shift. And people just come to a point where they say, you know, I can't really think of five good reasons that this hurts my marriage. I think that's how it's going to change.

Here, at least there is a crackling fire, and dry noodles to feed the 3,000 people huddling inside. The center is staffed by volunteers. Even the government of well-organized, wealthy Japan is struggling to cope with the magnitude of the disaster. A million and a half homes now have no water. Nearly 2 million homes have no electricity, and there have been 150 aftershocks since the earthquake on Friday. Well, we were just driving to the shore there, and a guy has just ridden past us on his bike, waving his arms. And our driver here is saying that he's shouting: tsunami, tsunami, warning. And so we're actually now turning right around, right now. We'll go back. Yes? Go back. OK. We're going right back up to the higher ground. Things are very jittery here.

He pointed to a map with dots where the smell was reported, and arrows to show wind patterns and triangles to show processing plants in New Jersey. Mayor Bloomberg said a team of investigators put it all together. The wind was blowing west to east from New Jersey across the Hudson. The odor reports came on days when the wind speed was moderate and the air somewhat humid. Investigators found that the odor came from a compound that uses fenugreek seeds. Fenugreek is an ingredient often used in vanilla, maple and butterscotch flavorings. One New Jersey company that processes fenugreek is called Frutarom.

Welcome to "Planet Terror," a spoof of zombie gross-outs in which Robert Rodriguez has fun overstating what you might call the essentials of the living-dead genre - carnage, cannibalism and cleavage. Here and there, the director also adds innovations of his own. I don't recall another zombie movie featuring melting genitalia, for instance. And what filmmakers can do with body fluids in an age of digital manipulation goes way beyond the spattered-ketchup school of filmmaking. Doesn't sound like your cup of bile? Well, it's admittedly not for the faint of heart, or of stomach. But how do you feel about car chases?

Republicans say, not so fast. We are the party of values. We're the party of ideas. We've become the natural party of government. We still control both houses of Congress, which gives us control of the legislative agenda. And with so many safe seats come November, we can concentrate our money and our resources on the relatively few races that might be close. Well, later in the program, a conversation with one of the stars of the new documentary Word Play. A couple of weeks ago, we looked at Democrats in the Democrats in the midterms, today, another giant-sized edition of our regular Political Junkie feature. If you have questions about Republican's tactics and strategies for the midterm, give us a call. If you voted Republican before, are you going to vote the same way in November and why, or why not?

Exactly right because all the things that double, all the chronic diseases that double every eight to nine years, if you can alter aging, successfully (unintelligible) aging, you extend the healthy lifespan really much more effectively than success in preventing one disease. There's actually a statistic that people, if you're protected from all atherosclerosis, which is a common cause, most-common cause of death, of all cancers, which is the second-most-common cause of death in the aging human population, if you prevent all those deaths, your average increase in lifespan will only be about 10 years, roughly the same as the effect here of rapamycin alone.

Hi I'm Andrea Gibson and this is my poem "The Nutritionist." The nutritionist said I should eat root vegetables Said if I could get down 13 turnips a day I would be grounded, rooted. Said my head would not keep flying away to where the darkness lives. The psychic told me my heart carries too much weight Said for 20 dollars she’d tell me what to do I handed her the twenty, she said “stop worrying darling, you will find a good man soon.” The first psychotherapist said I should spend 3 hours a day sitting in a dark closet with my eyes closed and my ears plugged. I tried it once but couldn’t stop thinking about how gay it was to be sitting in the closet. The yogi told me to stretch everything but truth, said focus on the outbreaths, said everyone finds happiness if they can care more about what they can give than what they get. The pharmacist said klonopin, lamictil, lithium, Xanax. The doctor said an antipsychotic might help me forget what the trauma said The trauma said don’t write this poem. Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones But my bones said “Tyler Clementi dove into the Hudson River convinced he was entirely alone.” My bones said “write the poem.” To the lamplight. Considering the river bed. To the chandelier of your fate hanging by a thread. To everyday you could not get out of bed. To the bulls eye of your wrist To anyone who has ever wanted to die. I have been told, sometimes, the most healing thing we can do- Is remind ourselves over and over and over Other people feel this too The tomorrow that has come and gone And it has not gotten better When you are half finished writing that letter to your mother that says “I swear to God I tried” But when I thought I hit bottom, it started hitting back There is no bruise like the bruise loneliness kicks into your spine So let me tell you I know there are days it looks like the whole world is dancing in the streets when you break down like the doors of their looted buildings You are not alone and wondering who will be convicted of the crime of insisting you keep loading your grief into the chamber of your shame You are not weak just because your heart feels so heavy I have never met a heavy heart that wasn’t a phone booth with a red cape inside Some people will never understand the kind of superpower it takes for some people to just walk outside Some days I know my smile looks like the gutter of a falling house But my hands are always holding tight to the ripchord of believing A life can be rich like the soil Make food of decay Turn wound into highway Pick me up in a truck with that bumper sticker that says “it is no measure of good health to be well adjusted to a sick society” I have never trusted anyone with the pulled back bow of my spine the way I trust the ones who come undone at the throat Screaming for their pulse to find the fight to pound Four nights before Tyler Clementi jumped from the George Washington bridge I was sitting in a hotel room in my own town Calculating exactly what I had to swallow to keep a bottle of sleeping pills down What I know about living is the pain is never just ours Every time I hurt I know the wound is an echo So I keep a listening for the moment when the grief becomes a window When I can see what I couldn’t see before, through the glass of my most battered dream, I watched a dandelion lose its mind in the wind and when it did, it scattered a thousand seeds. So the next time I tell you how easily I come out of my skin, don’t try to put me back in just say here we are together at the window aching for it to all get better but knowing there is a chance our hearts may have only just skinned their knees knowing there is a chance the worst day might still be coming let me say right now for the record, I’m still gonna be here asking this world to dance, even if it keeps stepping on my holy feet you- you stay here with me, okay? You stay here with me. Raising your bite against the bitter dark Your bright longing Your brilliant fists of loss Friend if the only thing we have to gain in staying is each other, my god that’s plenty my god that’s enough my god that is so so much for the light to give each of us at each other’s backs whispering over and over and over “Live” “Live” “Live”

Well, yes. Not public so much as private conversations that I've had in which they are trying to focus on the good news here, the idea that the new NIE, which of course, Madeleine, represents the best intelligence of all the 16 agencies across the government that collect intelligence, that there's now opportunity here to say, you know what, if sectarian violence has diminished, if Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is able to do a better job of limiting corruption, going after even his fellow Shia who are involved in corruption, or militias that are destabilizing the country, then they do see the possibility for improvement. But overall, they don't see that that's likely in the next, you know, in the next few months.

Assassinations of military personnel have been rising in Damascus. The general is willing to reveal some alarming statistics. He says the casualty rate for soldiers has doubled since the U.N. monitors arrived. He says on average, 15 dead and 15 injured every day in the capital. At night, he says, he can hear shooting from his office. This is where he works and sleeps. It's too dangerous to go back home, he says. Back on the ward, these wounded soldiers are struggling with severe injuries, often inflicted by army deserters, men who once served on the same side. Twenty-four-year-old Lieutenant Heithem al-Bukai says he was shot by a sniper in the northern province of Idlib a few days ago. A government escort translates and helps him with his remarks.

Well, not entirely. There are certain things we don't know. We obviously don't know if they have made a decision to get nuclear weapons or not. And it's worth noting that, you know, the supreme leader of Iran, Ali Khomeini, has repeatedly said that he would consider this un-Islamic, that Iran is not going that route. There's also the question of how significant it would be if they did. People who are opposing military action now would argue even if Iran did get a nuclear weapon, it's not a very militarily powerful state. Israel itself has a sizable nuclear arsenal and could retaliate if it were attacked. So there's really no existential threat to Israel. And that's an issue that ought to be discussed at the same time we're talking about the question of what Iran may or may not be up to.

Well, I think a lot of people will hope that it doesn't. You know, when this cease-fire started out, there were a lot of people who were extremely skeptical. There had been similar initiatives previously in Syria which had not been successful. There continued to be this heavy drumbeat of civilian deaths, of attacks on opposition-held areas. You know, we saw these well-documented attacks, probably by the Russian Air Force or the Syrian Air Force, on medical facilities. And people were skeptical at that time that there was a real will that the cease-fire would continue, that it would work, but it has. It hasn't been perfect. It's been very problematic, but we've seen a very significant drop in civilian casualties. And I think it's important not to forget that. So there's a lot of people that are kind of holding their breath, hoping this will continue and that peace talks will continue. But the thing is, another aspect of the cease-fire was meant to aid delivery. You know, people are suffering not just from violence, but from their areas being cut off - usually by regime forces - from food aid, from medical aid. And over the last week or two, we have seen a growing chorus of voices from the United Nations and from American officials saying, you know, this is not happening in good faith. So the cease-fire is highly imperfect. The aid deliveries are getting more difficult. But I think there's a lot of people that'll still be hoping that it will, you know, kind of hang on by its fingernails.

Later in the program, Donna Brazile and Ed Gillespie will stay with us to talk about the 2008 presidential campaign with the Political Junkie. If you have questions about the candidates dropping out or signing up, the effect of earlier primaries or politics of Iraq, you can send us e-mail now. The address is talk@npr.org. And use that same address if you want to praise of bury partisanship. We surely want to hear competitive ideas, but maybe not schoolyard taunts. The e-mail address again is talk@npr.org. Our phone number is 800-989-8255 - that's 800-989-TALK. We'll also take questions from the audience here in the studio. And we'll begin with Ed Gillespie. Why is partisanship important?

Before empires and royalty, before pottery and writing, before metal tools and weapons – there was cheese. As early as 8000 BCE, the earliest Neolithic farmers living in the Fertile Crescent began a legacy of cheesemaking almost as old as civilization itself. The rise of agriculture led to domesticated sheep and goats, which ancient farmers harvested for milk. But when left in warm conditions for several hours, that fresh milk began to sour. Its lactic acids caused proteins to coagulate, binding into soft clumps. Upon discovering this strange transformation, the farmers drained the remaining liquid – later named whey – and found the yellowish globs could be eaten fresh as a soft, spreadable meal. These clumps, or curds, became the building blocks of cheese, which would eventually be aged, pressed, ripened, and whizzed into a diverse cornucopia of dairy delights. The discovery of cheese gave Neolithic people an enormous survival advantage. Milk was rich with essential proteins, fats, and minerals. But it also contained high quantities of lactose – a sugar which is difficult to process for many ancient and modern stomachs. Cheese, however, could provide all of milk’s advantages with much less lactose. And since it could be preserved and stockpiled, these essential nutrients could be eaten throughout scarce famines and long winters. Some 7th millennium BCE pottery fragments found in Turkey still contain telltale residues of the cheese and butter they held. By the end of the Bronze Age, cheese was a standard commodity in maritime trade throughout the eastern Mediterranean. In the densely populated city-states of Mesopotamia, cheese became a staple of culinary and religious life. Some of the earliest known writing includes administrative records of cheese quotas, listing a variety of cheeses for different rituals and populations across Mesopotamia. Records from nearby civilizations in Turkey also reference rennet. This animal byproduct, produced in the stomachs of certain mammals, can accelerate and control coagulation. Eventually this sophisticated cheesemaking tool spread around the globe, giving way to a wide variety of new, harder cheeses. And though some conservative food cultures rejected the dairy delicacy, many more embraced cheese, and quickly added their own local flavors. Nomadic Mongolians used yaks’ milk to create hard, sundried wedges of Byaslag. Egyptians enjoyed goats’ milk cottage cheese, straining the whey with reed mats. In South Asia, milk was coagulated with a variety of food acids, such as lemon juice, vinegar, or yogurt and then hung to dry into loafs of paneer. This soft mild cheese could be added to curries and sauces, or simply fried as a quick vegetarian dish. The Greeks produced bricks of salty brined feta cheese, alongside a harder variety similar to today’s pecorino romano. This grating cheese was produced in Sicily and used in dishes all across the Mediterranean. Under Roman rule, “dry cheese” or “caseus aridus,” became an essential ration for the nearly 500,000 soldiers guarding the vast borders of the Roman Empire. And when the Western Roman Empire collapsed, cheesemaking continued to evolve in the manors that dotted the medieval European countryside. In the hundreds of Benedictine monasteries scattered across Europe, medieval monks experimented endlessly with different types of milk, cheesemaking practices, and aging processes that led to many of today’s popular cheeses. Parmesan, Roquefort, Munster and several Swiss types were all refined and perfected by these cheesemaking clergymen. In the Alps, Swiss cheesemaking was particularly successful – producing a myriad of cow’s milk cheeses. By the end of the 14th century, Alpine cheese from the Gruyere region of Switzerland had become so profitable that a neighboring state invaded the Gruyere highlands to take control of the growing cheese trade. Cheese remained popular through the Renaissance, and the Industrial Revolution took production out of the monastery and into machinery. Today, the world produces roughly 22 billion kilograms of cheese a year, shipped and consumed around the globe. But 10,000 years after its invention, local farms are still following in the footsteps of their Neolithic ancestors, hand crafting one of humanity’s oldest and favorite foods.

We are in the midst of a - sort of a typical Trumpian (ph) cycle. What we don't know is whether we're in the middle of it or whether it's over. But what we do know is that he tweeted on Thursday disputing the official death toll from Hurricane Maria, which is based on an estimate. And he then again, late Friday night, tweeted, no way - exclamation point, all caps - in regard to that death count. That prompted the governor of Puerto Rico, Ricardo Rossello, to tweet that he'd be very much willing to walk the president through the scientific process of the study that was conducted by George Washington University. And then he says, quote, "There is no reason to underscore the tragedy we have suffered in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria."

He's now sitting down, trying to look at actual names. It's kind of hard to see. It doesn't really - it wouldn't really suit her character. She likes being in the public eye and she clearly reveled in the attention that the presidential campaign brought her. It wouldn't give her the same kind of immediacy and as Ken alluded to before, you know, the nose to the grindstone in the Senate really was just a stepping stone to run for president. She has not been one to sort of enjoy just burrowing down and not having any attention the way a Supreme Court justice does. So it's an easier leap, I think, to see her in the Secretary of State role because of that kind of profile.

Well, I know for a fact that I needed more training. I did not know - I mean, I've learned a lot this year, but walking in day one, I didn't know how to deal with a student who was going to stand up in class and cuss at me for 10 minutes straight. I didn't know how to deal with a student who was really struggling with basic literacy and how to reach them. I didn't know how to deal with a lot of the situations I've seen. And I have a huge amount of emotionally disturbed students, and I needed more training. I needed so much more training, and I feel like I've really in some ways failed these students this year.

Not at all. It was just a matter of inefficiency and bad judgment. The third factor, there's fire, there's earthquake, first of all, then there's fire, and then there's dynamiting. Indiscriminate. Using the wrong explosives. Unfortunately there wasn't water and the natural response to that is to do something. So there was a great deal of explosives stored in the Bay area, because we had just come off the Spanish American War and the Philippine Campaign, and there was a lot of mining going on in the Sierra Nevada, and they grabbed--everyone grabbed, firemen, army soldiers, civilians, whomever, just grabbed as much explosives as they could lay their hands on and use it indiscriminately and in the wrong way and just spread the fire. So that was not a matter of graft. It was just bad judgment.

It took Jack Abramoff to put skybox lobbying in the spotlight. Abramoff and two colleagues have plead guilty in the Justice Department probe. All three of them site sports tickets as important elements in bribery schemes. Abramoff kept boxes for Washington Wizards basketball, Washington Capitols hockey, Baltimore Orioles baseball, and of course Washington's ever-popular Redskins. He financed the skyboxes not through his law firm, but with his own private company, and the name on the skybox door was Jack Abramoff's. This all cost $1.5 million a year. Four of Abramoff's Indian tribe clients split the bill. In return he hung photos and artwork from the tribe in the skyboxes where his congressional guests would see it.

Well, it's a new agency. It put 22 agencies that, historically, did not really communicate with each other. They're now in the Department of Homeland Security. What I would encourage the present secretary to do is take the leadership role necessary so that we can communicate better with each other. I have not been satisfied with how Secretary Chertoff has allowed things to communicate with not only members of Congress but the public at large. So you will see Democrats force in the department not only to come up with plans but to communicate with the public on what is important and what the public needs to do to help secure America also.

Thanks for taking my call. I guess this, in a way, it's related to what your last caller just said. I'm an anthropology graduate student. One of the most important things we're taught is that the notion of biological race is something that we've sort of constructed to support this idea of otherness, that there isn't any clear line between, you know, a white person and a black person. The race essentially doesn't exist. And it's something that seems very hard for people to swallow because it's so engrained in how we talk about things. They think it's something that might be important to talk about and insert into sort of the discourse surrounding all of it. And one of the things made me think of this is because I have a - for lack of better word - a mixed race nephew. And his family, when he talked about things, it's very much with this sort of a dichotomy in mind. And they - his mother had expressed to me her gratitude for Disney making a movie - I think their most recent, "Princess and the Frog" or something...

Something that's really remarkable about the current moment and Dave Chappelle is that he went from a moment - or, you know, several years of total scarcity and total absence to almost total oversaturation. This is the fifth hourlong special we've gotten inside a year and a half, and this is not the first time he's expressed a lot of these ideas, especially about transgender people. And, you know, you brought up the idea that it's not necessarily his job to be constructive. But we're talking about a comedy special, and I do think it's his job to be funny. I do think we're reaching the point where it's starting to actively negatively affect his art and his ability to be kind of a surprising and innovative and on-the-bleeding-edge figure in our popular culture.

It's very important. The Tlass family is a keystone of the Sunni Alawite alliance that's been the bedrock of this regime for 40 years. The fact that they have bailed out says that this regime is falling apart and the essential alliances are falling apart. Increasingly, this struggle is becoming one of sectarian communities, the Alawites against the Sunnis. In the beginning, this was - it seemed like - angry young men from the countryside. The Sunnis were low class. They had rural districts. They had nothing to lose. For a long time, everybody has been saying, where's the Sunni elite? How come they're not defecting? Well, here is, you know, Mr. Sunni elite defecting.

Yeah. I think it's a fascinating place for a lot of reasons. One, I think it tells us a lot about the South - right? - and what the South is and what the South isn't and how the South is changing. I think it does give us a lot of clues into gentrification, the good and the bad. I mean, yeah, this is an area that's got, you know, James Beard Award-winning restaurants. But then if you drive 30 minutes outside of town, you're in counties with real poverty, real Appalachian poverty. And so I think all that juxtaposition leads to this really, really interesting place. You've got folks that moved to Western North Carolina to get away from it all because they're way to the right, and they might be a prepper (ph). They might be somebody who's sort of on the right extreme and fringe or you might have somebody who's way in the left extreme and fringe - right? - the kind of people that are keeping rabbits for pets or meat. So it's a fascinating place. I think it's a microcosm of the country in a lot of different ways, and it's a beautiful one, too.

It is a very close race. And every week, we see a new poll that shows one candidate ahead over the other. And then in the next week it switches again. Look, it's just going to come down to the wire. I think a lot of it will depend on the national race. Even though Scott Brown is a Republican in a true blue state like Massachusetts, he's really staked out an independent image with a lot of voters. I think a lot of them still remember him as a special election candidate, who ran as a kind of an alternative voice a couple of years ago. But on the other hand, Elizabeth Warren is also much stronger candidate than I think a lot of even Democrats expected she would be.

But when she, for example - I think when the reality that these were her last few days, or even hours, beginning to crash in on her, when she just looked up and said: I guarantee you, those great deathbed speeches, they were all written in advance. I mean, that's just so funny and wise, I think it deserves to be shared. And when she just looked up at me and said: Oh Earth, you're too beautiful for anyone to realize, I think we could all stand to learn that, to know that in our bones. And when she told me, she said: Honey, always take time with people in their 80s. I hear her voice coming back into mind now: Always take time with people in their 80s, because for more than a decade they've been looking right across the street at death and they know what's really important in life. I don't know about you but I'm - I can stand to hear that message.