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Well, Cruz hopes that the damage from all of the attacks Trump has been taking will finally start to show tomorrow. And, you know, there's talk that floats around about - it's going to have to be a contested convention for anybody other than Trump to win. Cruz folks dismiss that. They think they'll be ahead in delegates, and they think that's, like, a trick to steal the nomination from Ted Cruz. John Kasich, however, told reporters today that it looks like - he thinks that's where this is headed, to a contested convention. He sees nothing wrong with it. He says if you don't get the needed delegates, the 1,237, in advance, it's not like you have a claim on it. Give a listen.

Well, let's hold off on that for just a second, Ron. Let me come back to you on the idea of who votes for Ray Nagin, who has made himself--I mean, it's very interesting: Ray Nagin was not initially viewed as a black candidate per se. He wasn't running as the black candidate, he was the corporate candidate and the candidate of the white business community in New Orleans first time around. This time around, he has recast himself as the black candidate, but Mitch Landrieu was able to get 20 percent of the black vote. So what does that mean?

Huge problem. Right now we have a situation where the US is occupied both in Iraq and Afghanistan, so we are, in effect, fighting two wars on two different fronts at a time when the United States has declared a war on terrorism, which theoretically is a war that is borderless, a war that really has no end and doesn't have a clear state as an enemy. It's clear that you need to have a different strategy with respect to the military and how that military's deployed under these circumstances that we've had in the past, and it's not clear that the Defense Department or this administration has devised such a strategy.

Yeah, it's fun to watch people have a worst vacation than yours, but the critics are split on the latest from writer/director Eli Roth. Even though Newsday finds it savagely witty and the Hollywood Reporter shouts a bloody satisfying sequel, many detractors agree with Real View's complaint: nothing in "Hostel II" is inspired or clever, simply by the book. And if "March of the Penguins" and "Happy Feet" are in your TiVo, well, then "Surf's Up" is made just for you and the kids. This animated comedy tells the tale of a penguin who was born to surf and enters a major competition. Everyone from Shia LaBeouf to Jeff Bridges provide vocal talent.

I don't know that we're seeing what is the beginning of a war, but I think we are seeing what is an unmistakable collision path that the two are on. The reason I say it may not yet be a war is because the Iranians at this point, I think, are quite keen on consolidating their position within Syria, and they're not really interested in getting into a full-scale conflict with Israel at this stage. The problem, however, is that the Iranians are basically determined to build in Syria what they have produced in Lebanon with Hezbollah and 120,000 rockets. And Israel is equally convinced and equally determined that they can't accept that kind of an outcome. So what you're seeing is the beginning of a skirmish. The question is whether or not it will expand into a war over time.

: Let me ask you about that first trip to the market. Because it happened on a very cold day, I think there was even a little snow maybe, and I think you didn't know what you were going to find at the market that day. Our first day at the farmer's market, I think was really - it was a really a metaphor for the whole year. We went down there expecting nothing, and we found so much. We found enough to make a week of good meals. And we came to see the changing seasons as something like a menu of ever- changing options from which to choose to make our meals.

I think it depends what they're planning to do. I think in those other countries now you're increasingly seeing legislation that means you can be convicted for planning to go join an organization or conduct a terrorist act abroad. And I think some of the arrests we saw take place this week were linked to that. On the other side, if you've got people who are, you know, planning a direct terrorist act, the more complicated people are the individuals who've maybe returned from a battlefield like Syria and Iraq. And if the intelligence services know that they've been out there, but at the same time this individual hasn't got any, you know, photographic evidence or other evidence on their person that shows that they were there, then, you know, it becomes a much, much harder picture to actually know what you can exactly arrest them for.

Former Attorney General ROLAND BURRIS (Democrat, Illinois): I presented my credentials to the secretary of the Senate, and advised that my credentials were not in order and I would not be accepted nor would I be seated, nor would I be permitted on the floor. Burris was appointed by Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. Blagojevich was recently charged with trying to sell the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Obama. But instead of recusing himself from making an appointment, the governor went ahead and defiantly named Burris as his pick. If seated, Burris would be the fourth black senator since reconstruction, and we've got an update on the story from NPR's Midwest reporter, Cheryl Corley. She joins us from Chicago. Hi, Cheryl.

No, and I can only imagine there will be many, many ads, most of them in Spanish, that will be reminding Latino voters of what Romney said during the primaries. And since he hasn't definitely reversed that position, that is the definitive statement from him so far. But for the president, he does have a real challenge. He won the Latino vote two to one last time. Polls show he's still winning it two to one over Romney. But he's not going to be able to win unless he can not only get that percentage of the Latino vote but also boost turnout.

No, I, you know, I actually, I love the news. I love politics and thinking about it, so I'm doing that all the time. But when it comes to actually thinking about things as far as a cartoon, because of my loud children I save that for the office. And I really have a set thing that I do every day. I get in around noon, my editor has imposed that limit on me. I can't get in at 2:00 in the afternoon anymore, so I have to be in by noon. But I get in, and I sit there and I'm reading things, I'm reading the New York Times and the Atlanta Journal Constitution and various newspapers, various websites, various political blogs. Around 3:00, I liken this to a runner's high, I get sort of this silliness high, where I can take these serious topics and sort of get them across using humor, hopefully.

But Rosoff goes on to say that for Microsoft, it's about more than just the ad revenue itself. As Google has continued to grow and rack up enormous profits, it has begun to offer things like word-processing and spreadsheets over the Web for free. If you use those, you don't have to buy Microsoft software. Yahoo! undoubtedly taken aback by the boldness of Microsoft's bid, said in a statement that its board would evaluate the proposal carefully and promptly. Even if Yahoo! agreed to the takeover, the deal would still face scrutiny by U.S. and European regulators. Wendy Kaufman, NPR News, Seattle.

Yup. My initial thoughts on that was a lot of frustration, you know? There's a lot of sweat, blood and tears that went in to defending that valley and try to aid the people there, you know, and that it was all just given up. And the reality of that environment over there is those fighters are going to somewhere else, whether it be to Asadabad or Camp Blessing or over the Sherak Valley or Pech River Valley. The reality is a fighter is going to be there no matter what. And I felt that I left a lot of my heart and soul in the Korengal Valley. You know, it was such a incredible place. And to pull out and give up on it, you know, it's a little frustrating.

This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. Here are the headlines from some of the other stories we're following here today at NPR News. The federal government is assisting in efforts to rescue 13 miners trapped in a West Virginia coal mine. Rescue and safety specialists are on the scene. A robot has been brought in to explore areas in the mine that are unsafe for people, though apparently now they've decided to try to accelerate their operation and the robot will not be used. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has announced a list of cities that are eligible for the next round of urban security grants. However, those cities must first submit regional applications detailing how that money will be spent. You can hear details on those stories and much more later today on "All Things Considered" from NPR News.

Yeah. And that was a conscious decision to make sure that we understood the consequences. Mr. O'DEA: Right. Actually I do a thing in high schools these days called the Consequences of Choice where I go to schools and I tell kids my story. And I tell them what happened as a result of the things that I did in a hope that they understand that if they make choices like I made, there's a great chance that they'll experience the consequences that I experienced. Look, I used drugs and I sold drugs and my father did the same. His drug was alcohol. He used alcohol. He sold alcohol. He owned a brewery. I - the only difference was mine was illegal and his was legal at the time.

Well, no, casinos aren't the problem that hurt the wetlands, the building of thousands of miles of canals and pipelines to get oil from the Gulf of Mexico to the mainland and the leveeing of the Mississippi River, which used to flood every year and deposit sediment to rebuild and replenish the wetlands. Those are the two real causes of the loss of an acre of land per hour that's been going on for 30 years. It is truly a slow-motion disaster, and your question is correct. The cypress forests in the wetlands have a remarkable capability to absorb and to reduce both wind and storm surge intensity as they approach the city. So they're a very important part of our defense.

When you're teaching in the schools that parents are bigots because they believe and teach their children that marriage is the union of a man and a woman, that is a profound consequence. That's how things change in these states, and I have no doubt that we're going to see the sorts of things we saw in Vermont, when innkeepers are fined because they don't want to have a same-sex couple in their inn, we're going to see that in these states, and at that point will look up and say yeah, there are real consequences. And there can be more votes in these states.

I'm standing on a rooftop, looking out over London. At the moment, everything is quiet. For reasons of national as well as personal security, I am unable to tell you the exact location from which I'm speaking. Off to my left, far away in the distance, I can see just that faint, red, angry snap of anti-aircraft bursts against the steel blue sky. I was up here earlier this afternoon. And looking out over these housetops, looking all the way to the dome of St. Paul's, I saw many flags flying from staffs. No one ordered these people to put out the flags, they simply feel like flying the Union Jack above their roof. No one told them to do it, and no flag up there was white. I can see one or two of them just stirring very faintly in the breeze now.

My six words are: Stop seeing black boys are predators. And I must say that it was - it came about because I heard you talking about it on the show yesterday, but this is something that I think about quite a bit. You know, I do have sons, and when the Trayvon story came up, it brought back some of my own concerns about these kind of random acts that - and a lot of young men are less likely to come forward, you know, out of fear of being embarrassed. Maybe they don't even say anything to their parents. But I had an incident with one of my sons that he did talk to me about. He was walking down the street one night, and he's in his 20s, and an elderly white man walks quickly up to him, raises his hands in the air and says, I give. And my son just turned around and just rapidly went in the other direction. He was terrified.

Yeah. Absolutely. From my own experience, just in the last couple of weeks, I was in a very small book shop that I was not familiar with in Grand Lake, Colorado, and the proprietor was waiting on another customer and talking about all of what she could provide for their particular needs. And the store was tiny but it had kids' books, it had the bestsellers, but it had a very fine selection of local interest books. And the store proprietor was also telling the customer about how she could provide downloads for e-books through Google. And, you know, size does not necessarily mean that you can't provide wonderful service.

It is, in some ways, just a rhetorical shift, and it's the speaker embracing the status quo, which was - now a majority of Democrats support an impeachment inquiry. She was not one of them. Now she is. Now, that is hugely important - hugely important - because you cannot bring articles of impeachment to the floor without the speaker's support, and we weren't there. We're still not there, but as of today, it's the first time that Pelosi's saying we could get there. From a practical standpoint, you're right. Not that much changes. The committees are moving full steam ahead, as they already have been. Democrats did come out of the meeting. We talked to Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who's been a big advocate for impeachment already, saying what's different is there is a new sense of urgency and a new sense of party unity, that an impeachment inquiry is the right thing to do.

Oh, sure. I mean, read - the Uniform Code of Military Justice is very explicit on that. If you are - if you have been ordered to perform an illegal act, you are not obligated to carry out. And the old saw about I was following orders doesn't apply anymore, and all you have to do is go an look at the Nuremberg War Crime Trials in 1947, '48 to see how a whole new dimension was created when the horrors of World War II were propagated in many ways by Axis generals who claimed after the war they were only following orders. No, that's - the code of conduct for an officer is very, very explicit in that regard.

In the hope that maybe there's no additional problems from the weather in the next month or so, clean-up, debris removal--how is that going? Vice Adm. ALLEN: It's going pretty good. It's never fast enough as anybody would want--most people would want. There are a lot of neighborhoods where there was a significant amount of debris. It kind of comes in two pieces. We have large contracts through the Corps of Engineers that allows us to go through and remove debris from right-of-way areas, public right of ways. We also after negotiating with the state and gaining right-of-entry approval from private homeowners can do that also. There are some legal issues associated with that because there's some indemnification required. If for some reason the property was damaged, but we have a very, very robust debris removal project that's going on right now, and actually we call it debris management because, depending on what you recover, it's disposed of in different ways. Vegetation is chipped and reduced; you have what they call white goods, which are like refrigerators. And then there has to be waste that has to be segregated and treated differently. And that's all going on right now.

Well, it was a pretty remarkable day yesterday. If you remember, some of the earlier court appearances by Saddam Hussein and some of his cohorts, some of the senior guys in Saddam Hussein's government, every time they came into court, they made speeches, they disrupted the proceedings, they heckled people, they tried to intimidate people. And the original judge, the judge who had the case, more or less let it happen. And he spoke to Saddam Hussein with great respect, which troubled a lot of Iraqis who watched it on television, and didn't seem able to control his courtroom. It was becoming kind of a standstill.

Yeah. I mean, there is a huge debate, of course, about whether really communism or fascism was the worst tragedy during the 20th century. Of course Russians, there's no doubt, were giving their lives in vast quantities, many more than any other of the allied powers, in the defeat of Hitler, but it has to be said that many, many millions of more Russians and those from the former Soviet space also died thanks to the totalitarian repressions in the gulags. And what's striking and rather depressing, of course, is that not only has that sense of nostalgia for Stalin hung around amongst an older generation, but under Putin you started to see really a kind of an increase again of the symbolism of Stalin, a lot more messages and signs that really are quite worrying.

That's part of the argument. It's a very, very important part of it, and the Supreme Court agreed with that in the Michigan cases. We think that these programs are even easier to defend, because it's not as if there are a set of seats that are set aside for African American students. You may not get to go to a particular school because you're African American or because you're white, to the extent that's a factor in a particular placement decision. Because all that's at issue is diversity. It's not getting a minimum number of white seats or a minimum number of black seats.

And that hasn't happened because there's been a split between parties who oppose the terms of the bailout and parties who support the terms of the bailout. And the parties that support the terms of the bailout are the mainstream parties who just were pummeled at the polls. People really punished them. The party that came in second is a party called Syriza. They're a leftist party. They were in 2009 a very small party with, you know, just a tiny percentage of the votes in Parliament. But now they've surged because people have really connected to that message that the euro is associated with pain, and the bailout is associated with pain. And they want some politician to go to Brussels and stand up to the Europeans and say no more austerity. There's got to be another way for us to recover from this recession.

The DSM is a guide or a manual, which assists health care providers in recognizing symptoms that patients may be suffering from in determining what is the most accurate diagnosis that should be applied to them. It's used really as a companion or a complement to the International Classification of Disease system, which is the coda that all doctors in all countries across the world use for designating disorders or illnesses that people suffer from. But the ICD provides simply a name and a code number. It doesn't provide a descriptive list of the symptoms and signs and historical course that the illness follows. So the DSM provides really an elaboration or a list of the different elements that define the diagnosis.

And then not all these pools are the same. The way this works is that after five or six years a rod is taken out of the reactor and retired to the pool. At first it's hot and then it gets cool. So each pool has its own mix of really hot rods and and so to speak - and not so hot ones. That could be why they've have so much trouble with one of the reactors - number four. It was shut down for maintenance last November. And when they do that, they move all the rods from the reactor over to the pool, so that would mean a lot of very hot fuel rods in that pool.

I would like to believe it's true (laughter). To tell you the truth, we have stopped them from selling this illegal insurance policy. I'm sure they were making money from that. But they need the money to survive is what they're saying. Because the way they bully and browbeat is, they say to these politicians, if you don't support the NRA position, they will campaign against you. I know they do that because they've done it to me. Tell you what, Don - I'm going to be speaking with the other governors and the attorneys general across the country. This insurance product is sold in other states. And I believe it violates the law of many other states, and I'm hoping to expand this all across the country. And if they think New York hurt their pocketbook, well, let's see what happens when the other states also join in. I think we could make a serious dent on their coffers, and that would be good for everyone.

You know, it's a delightful situation, because everything that Brian says is true. And because of that I'm, and many other people have spent time on the theory. There are things that, however, it doesn't come close to doing, apart from - I think we've talked enough about experiment and I'm very glad we agree about that. If you really put quantum mechanics together with a description of space, then we know from general considerations that the notion of space should disappear just like the notion of the trajectory of a particle disappears in quantum mechanics into a more general notion of a quantum state, and then we have the idea that a particle is either a wave of a particle, depending on what questions we ask about it.

And so there is something that sort of struck me about the fact that when someone gets so angry that they feel the need to put in writing -call someone of color a banana-eating jungle monkey, you know, which is the type of language that I don't think even David Duke would have been so silly as to put in writing, and yet when someone feels so angry they need to do that, when someone feels so angry they need to rip up a poster of Rosa Parks, when someone feels so angry that they need to call a member of Congress the N-word and put it in writing, that says to me that that's someone who's angry - not just angry but afraid that they're losing their country.

Well, I want to move to another topic, because this is one - you know, Israel, Palestine, the Middle East, it's something we're going to revisit against and again on our Roundtable. But I want to ask you about something a little closer to home. It's D.C. police and surveillance. D.C. put up a whole bunch of surveillance cameras after 9/11 mainly and was hoping that it would crack down on crime, and this was modeled after what was going on in London with surveillance cameras. But last weekend, 11 people were shot, four died. Residents said that one shooting happened within yards of the cameras. Even some police officers say it's not a deterrent.

Right, and in 2000 Dr. Claudia Henschke, along with her colleague Dr. Yankelevitz, they had been working together for many years. They set up a foundation, apparently, to accept the money. Weill Cornell also got involved - the head of the medical school and a person on the board of overseers of the medical school also joined this charity. And this charity then became the funnel through which the Liggett money was used to fund research. Now, they wouldn't really tell us where the money went. Most of the money went to fund consultants, which is somewhat unusual, actually, in research. About 700,000 dollars went actually back to Weill Cornell. But most important, I think that they then as they wrote their studies over the next bunch of years, including a landmark study in the New England Journal of Medicine, did not disclose in those studies that they had been underwritten in part by a cigarette maker. Had they disclosed that, they probably would not have been published in either the New England Journal of Medicine or in the Journal of the American Medical Association where they also had a study and some letters. So, it's a fairly big deal in lung cancer, if you take money from a cigarette company. People in lung cancer particularly are extremely sensitive about that, so you have to be very upfront about it.

With mixed feelings. I think probably the main feeling is we, the people, have not been consulted enough. Yes, the G8 leaders were talking to African leaders, but they didn't feel that there was enough input from African people, and they feel a bit disappointed, because although it looks on paper as if a lot more money has been pledged to Africa, a lot of the campaigners, the aid campaigners are saying, `This is really fiddling with figures' and that there's not a lot of new money. But when you talk to the ordinary, average African, they say, `Well, if they are talking about us, if they want to lift us out of poverty, why didn't they talk to us?'

The rockets and artillery shells have continued to fly back and forth today, with pretty devastating effects. I mean, as you said, this day has brought the single deadliest Hezbollah rocket attack, which killed 10 people at least in northern Israel, just north of Qiryat Shimona. Lebanese security forces are saying that five civilians were killed by an Israeli airstrike in south Lebanon, and that several more bridges in the north have been destroyed, and two people have reportedly been killed by an Israeli attack in the Bekaa Valley on a base belonging to a militant Palestinian group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. You know, the list goes on in all its dreadful detail, and I'm afraid it will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

So this is something - the settlement was worked out over a couple of years of very zealous, arm's-length negotiations with the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild, who were representing absent authors and publishers. And this is actually the set-up that was bargained for as a very beneficial outcome for rights holders, you know, precisely because it does start the revenues coming and set up the Book Rights Registry, which is a new, totally independent entity, you know, controlled by authors and publishers that has the mandate to go find the rights holders and to give them their money and to show them how to exercise that control.

Those are sounds that you will only hear near the Alakai Swamp on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, and only if you are very, very lucky. That's because the tiny birds that make these sounds are extremely rare. They're known as Kauai Creepers, and by most accounts, they are now teetering on the very brink of extinction. Local ornithologists say this species desperately needs the federal help that would come with an endangered species listing, but the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has chosen not to do that. Instead, it has added these birds to the endangered species candidate list. Douglas Crofta(ph), who oversees the listing of endangered species, says that's where some rare plants and animals end up after they are found to be at risk…

Well, I think that the proponents, the opponents of the test have argued that California's education is very, there are some real inequities there. You have a class of students who have gone to the poorest schools, they've had the least experienced teachers. Often they've been taught math by teachers who are uncredentialed. And there's a strong argument made that these kids who have been showing up for four years, passing their courses, to deny them a diploma now in that context is unfair. There was also a lobby on behalf of special education students, and they actually succeeded this year in getting a one-year reprieve for that group of students. They won't be required to pass the exam this year.

Both CNN and a person with the Obama transition team confirmed that Gupta is under close consideration for the job of U.S. surgeon general. It's not a done deal yet, as Gupta is still being scrutinized. Currently, Gupta is a medical correspondent on CNN and a contributing reporter on CBS News. The 39-year-old neurosurgeon is also an assistant professor on the medical faculty of Emory University in Atlanta. In recent decades, the surgeon general has basically been a cheerleader for good public health practices and above all, a communicator. But Gupta was a White House fellow during the second Clinton administration, and the Washington Post is reporting that Gupta has been offered a voice in developing public-health policy by Obama. His appointment would also depend on confirmation by the full U.S. Senate. Gupta is perhaps best known for reporting on the health-care implications of dangerous events such as Hurricane Katrina and the invasion of Iraq.

I'd go down to the platoon level, for sure. I think 40 to 50 is an ideal number for dealing with almost any of the kinds of attacks that al-Suri speaks about in his global Islamic resistance call. And again, they'd be quickly complimented by other first responders. And in fact, first responders might be there before the specialists. And again, I think if we take this approach, we become almost like the antibodies attacking this invading organism. And I think we have to look at ourselves more as in need of an immune system. That much more is - makes use of the kind of network I'm talking about.

Like most journalists, I'm an idealist. I love unearthing good stories, especially untold stories. I just didn't think that in 2011, women would still be in that category. I'm the President of the Journalism and Women Symposium — JAWS. That's Sharky. (Laughter) I joined 10 years ago because I wanted female role models, and I was frustrated by the lagging status of women in our profession and what that meant for our image in the media. We make up half the population of the world, but we're just 24 percent of the news subjects quoted in news stories. And we're just 20 percent of the experts quoted in stories. And now, with today's technology, it's possible to remove women from the picture completely. This is a picture of President Barack Obama and his advisors, tracking the killing of Osama bin Laden. You can see Hillary Clinton on the right. Let's see how the photo ran in an Orthodox Jewish newspaper based in Brooklyn. Hillary's completely gone. (Laughter) The paper apologized, but said it never runs photos of women; they might be sexually provocative. (Laughter) This is an extreme case, yes. But the fact is, women are only 19 percent of the sources in stories on politics, and only 20 percent in stories on the economy. The news continues to give us a picture where men outnumber women in nearly all occupational categories, except two: students and homemakers. (Laughter) So we all get a very distorted picture of reality. The problem is, of course, there aren't enough women in newsrooms. They report at just 37 percent of stories in print, TV and radio. Even in stories on gender-based violence, men get an overwhelming majority of print space and airtime. Case in point: This March, the New York Times ran a story by James McKinley about a gang rape of a young girl, 11 years old, in a small Texas town. McKinley writes that the community is wondering, "How could their boys have been drawn into this?" "Drawn into this" — like they were seduced into committing an act of violence. And the first person he quotes says, "These boys will have to live with this the rest of their lives." (Groans, laughter) You don't hear much about the 11-year-old victim, except that she wore clothes that were a little old for her and she wore makeup. The Times was deluged with criticism. Initially, it defended itself, and said, "These aren't our views. This is what we found in our reporting." Now, here's a secret you probably know already: Your stories are constructed. As reporters, we research, we interview. We try to give a good picture of reality. We also have our own unconscious biases. But The Times makes it sound like anyone would have reported this story the same way. I disagree with that. So three weeks later, The Times revisits the story. This time, it adds another byline to it with McKinley's: Erica Goode. What emerges is a truly sad, horrific tale of a young girl and her family trapped in poverty. She was raped numerous times by many men. She had been a bright, easygoing girl. She was maturing quickly, physically, but her bed was still covered with stuffed animals. It's a very different picture. Perhaps the addition of Ms. Goode is what made this story more complete. The Global Media Monitoring Project has found that stories by female reporters are more likely to challenge stereotypes than those by male reporters. At KUNM here in Albuquerque, Elaine Baumgartel did some graduate research on the coverage of violence against women. What she found was many of these stories tend to blame victims and devalue their lives. They tend to sensationalize, and they lack context. So for her graduate work, she did a three-part series on the murder of 11 women, found buried on Albuquerque's West Mesa. She tried to challenge those patterns and stereotypes in her work and she tried to show the challenges that journalists face from external sources, their own internal biases and cultural norms. And she worked with an editor at National Public Radio to try to get a story aired nationally. She's not sure that would have happened if the editor had not been a female. Stories in the news are more than twice as likely to present women as victims than men, and women are more likely to be defined by their body parts. Wired magazine, November 2010. Yes, the issue was about breast-tissue engineering. Now I know you're all distracted, so I'll take that off. (Laughter) Eyes up here. (Laughter) So — (Applause) Here's the thing: Wired almost never puts women on its cover. Oh, there have been some gimmicky ones — Pam from "The Office," manga girls, a voluptuous model covered in synthetic diamonds. Texas State University professor Cindy Royal wondered in her blog how are young women like her students supposed to feel about their roles in technology, reading Wired. Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired, defended his choice and said there aren't enough women, prominent women in technology to sell a cover, to sell an issue. Part of that is true, there aren't as many prominent women in technology. Here's my problem with that argument: Media tells us every day what's important, by the stories they choose and where they place them; it's called agenda setting. How many people knew the founders of Facebook and Google before their faces were on a magazine cover? Putting them there made them more recognizable. Now, Fast Company Magazine embraces that idea. This is its cover from November 15, 2010. The issue is about the most prominent and influential women in technology. Editor Robert Safian told the Poynter Institute, "Silicon Valley is very white and very male. But that's not what Fast Company thinks the business world will look like in the future, so it tries to give a picture of where the globalized world is moving." By the way, apparently, Wired took all this to heart. This was its issue in April. (Laughter) That's Limor Fried, the founder of Adafruit Industries, in the Rosie the Riveter pose. It would help to have more women in positions of leadership in media. A recent global survey found that 73 percent of the top media-management jobs are still held by men. But this is also about something far more complex: our own unconscious biases and blind spots. Shankar Vedantam is the author of "The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives." He told the former ombudsman at National Public Radio, who was doing a report on how women fare in NPR coverage, unconscious bias flows throughout most of our lives. It's really difficult to disentangle those strands. But he did have one suggestion. He used to work for two editors who said every story had to have at least one female source. He balked at first, but said he eventually followed the directive happily, because his stories got better and his job got easier. Now, I don't know if one of the editors was a woman, but that can make the biggest difference. The Dallas Morning News won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for a series it did on women around the world, but one of the reporters told me she's convinced it never would have happened if they had not had a female assistant foreign editor, and they would not have gotten some of those stories without female reporters and editors on the ground, particularly one on female genital mutilation — men would just not be allowed into those situations. This is an important point to consider, because much of our foreign policy now revolves around countries where the treatment of women is an issue, such as Afghanistan. What we're told in terms of arguments against leaving this country is that the fate of the women is primary. Now, I'm sure a male reporter in Kabul can find women to interview. Not so sure about rural, traditional areas, where I'm guessing women can't talk to strange men. It's important to keep talking about this, in light of Lara Logan. She was the CBS News correspondent who was brutally sexually assaulted in Egypt's Tahrir Square, right after this photo was taken. Almost immediately, pundits weighed in, blaming her and saying things like, "You know, maybe women shouldn't be sent to cover those stories." I never heard anyone say this about Anderson Cooper and his crew, who were attacked covering the same story. One way to get more women into leadership is to have other women mentor them. One of my board members is an editor at a major global media company, but she never thought about this as a career path, until she met female role models at JAWS. But this is not just a job for super-journalists or my organization. You all have a stake in a strong, vibrant media. Analyze your news. And speak up when there are gaps missing in coverage, like people at The New York Times did. Suggest female sources to reporters and editors. Remember — a complete picture of reality may depend upon it. And I'll leave you with a video clip that I first saw in [1987] when I was a student in London. It's for The Guardian newspaper. It's actually long before I ever thought about becoming a journalist, but I was very interested in how we learn to perceive our world. Narrator: An event seen from one point of view gives one impression. Seen from another point of view, it gives quite a different impression. But it's only when you get the whole picture, you can fully understand what's going on. [The Guardian] Megan Kamerick: I think you'll all agree that we'd be better off if we all had the whole picture.

Arthur Miller also wrote a description of the first performance of "Death of a Salesman." And when they were rehearsing, Lee J. Cobb - the great actor who was the first person to play the role - Miller describes him, you know, reading the words off a page in the early rehearsals, just kind of slouching in his chair, mumbling almost incomprehensively for days and days on end; to the point where they began to worry if they had really chosen the wrong actor. And then a moment came where Lee J. Cobb stood up and suddenly was Willy Loman. He suddenly was in that role. I wonder if that process is the process of understanding, really, where this guy is coming from.

Well, at this point, what they're saying is he just walked out of his combat outpost on the outskirts of Kandahar. This is a very, very - it was a very dangerous place about a year and a half ago when I was there. Now it's a little bit better. He was working with Green Berets at this outpost, and they were reaching out to villages, setting up defensive networks, governance and so forth. And what they're saying is that shortly before dawn, he just walked out of this combat outpost and he, you know, was carrying his personal weapon, M-4 assault rifle, and he walked into a couple of villages and systematically, they say, killed 16 men, women and children, and then walked back to the outpost and just turned himself in and said I want to see a lawyer. But, again, this is what investigators are saying. You know, this hasn't - he hasn't been charged yet and clearly hasn't gone to trial, of course.

I want to ask about something else we've heard from voters here in Florida, Mayor Buckhorn. You mentioned that Secretary Clinton has done well among African-Americans. We've interviewed African-Americans in the last day or so and heard people not only say they support her but they support her more because of Donald Trump. They disapprove of Donald Trump. But at the same time, Donald Trump is doing very well in the Republican primary, as you know. And we have heard in the last day or so from Democrats - white Democrats - who've said I voted for Obama, but I'm disillusioned, can't do it anymore and a couple of them even said they're going over to Trump. Is there a real danger that the Democrats could lose this state in November?

There are always limits, and I think the excitement among scientists is figuring out how you can push those limits farther back. But obviously - I mean what caused the Big Bang has long been considered a question that is not approachable by science, because you can't see what happened before the Big Bang, you can't test any ideas you can have. You can have tons of ideas and - but they become metaphysics as opposed to physics if you can't test them. But it's been interesting to see over the years and decades and so on that people have been able to move that line about, you know, where the limits of knowledge are, back and back and back. And as Dr. Zee was suggesting, you know, it's possible we could even get a hint about whether there is a creator of our universe, which has always been considered one of the untestable questions.

(Reading) This guy comes out of a building across the street. He's walking his dog. But the guy just keeps his normal pace. He doesn't adjust his pace to the dog's. It's like he's silently saying: Chill out. We will only ever go as fast as I want us to go. I feel like I'm that dog, and you're my companion, walking me only as fast as you want to go. So here I am, telling you over a voice mail that I think we're incompatible. I don't even have the decency to do this over email. Wait, that came out wrong. I'm not trying to break up with you. God, I can't believe I almost left a breakup message when that is, like, the last thing this message is about. I'm having a hard time getting to my point. So anyway, I'm pregnant. Call me?

Well, that's an interesting question. I know the Army surgeon general's office right now is looking about 11 deaths of soldiers who were outpatients in these new Warrior Transition Units. And some of them were the result of accidental overdose of prescription drugs. We've got soldiers who were on multiple potent medications, methadone, morphine and powerful pain relievers. So there've been these overdoses including some of these deaths. And the Army is trying to figure out what - how to prevent some of these. In addition to the risk assessment that General Tucker talked about, there's also new rules trying to prevent access to liquor by some of the soldiers who are on some of these drugs. But there have been some really pretty horrible deaths including one of a soldier at Fort Knox, Gerald Cassidy, last September. It took about three days before someone checked on him and it was like he was alive but unconscious for a few days before people at the Warrior Transition Unit - and this was in Fort Knox actually - found him. And as a result some people lost their jobs there.

The initials IMF are in the news most days. But what does the International Monetary Fund do? Is it a banker of last resort for failed economies and a hand up for sputtering ones, or is it sometimes a scold that says - you don't get a penny until you change your ways? When news reports say the IMF says - who's actually talking? Liaquat Ahamed, who was once head of the investment division at the World Bank, has advised hedge funds and won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for history for his book "Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke The World." He's now collaborated on a new book with photographs by Eli Reed that try to show the IMF as a human institution. Their new book is called "Money And Tough Love: On Tour With The IMF." Liaquat Ahamed joins us in our studios. Thanks so much for being with us.

How far we have come? Because what I'm saying is, it depends on perspective and also the whole picture. Because I think, you know, it does say something when you have a program that is specifically - from what I understand, you can correct me if I'm wrong - there to help African-American men excel to their highest potential. So if we are going to have, you know, this kind of, you know, excelling of someone from another race, I think people are going to draw conclusions. And I want to know, is this really competitive? You know, on their side.

One of the organizers at a protest against Forever21. The film, "Made in LA" is part of the PBS series "POV." It debuted last night. In some places, it airs elsewhere over the next couple of weeks. If you work in the garment industry, if you have questions about how your clothes are made and who makes them. 800-989-8255. E-mail is talk@npr.org. Or you can join the conversation on our blog at npr.org/blogofthenation. Almudena Carracedo is the director and producer of "Made in LA." She joins us from NPR West in Culver City, California. Thanks very much for joining us on TALK OF THE NATION today.

Yeah. One of the unusual things about the end of the exhibit where we talk about solutions is not only do we just - we don't just show these technologies. We talk about the problems and the advantages of each, for instance, nuclear power which is disfavored by a lot of people. I myself am rather skeptical of it. It's very expensive. It carries with it the threat of exposure to terrorists and proliferation of bomb-grade materials. Solar energy is terrific. It has a light footprint, but it happens to be expensive as of today. Carbon capture and storage, sucking the carbon dioxide out of a power-plant stream - a waste stream...

Correct. They control the biggest companies in Russia pretty much. Igor Sechin, who's the deputy head of the Putin staff, is the chairman of Russia's largest oil company, Rosneft. Gazprom, Russia's biggest company of all and the huge gas monopoly, has several members of the KGB on its management board and in its banks and affiliated companies. So I mean, if you just take those two, in addition you could look at the Russian company which is a monopoly for arms trading, which has grown into a huge industrial conglomerate, which is controlled by a close friend and a former colleague of Vladimir Putin, Sergei Chemizov, it's a pretty extensive economic and financial empire. A lot of these companies are in state hands. And these people control enormous cash flows going through these companies.

Next week, the U.S. Supreme Court reconsiders affirmative action. On Wednesday, it will hear oral arguments in the case of Fisher versus University of Texas. The plaintiff, Abigail Fisher, is a white woman who says she was denied admission because of her race. Her case is the first to reach the high court since 2003, when it re-affirmed that public colleges and universities could consider race as one of many factors in admissions decisions. Ahead of the arguments, we want to hear your thoughts. Is there still a place for affirmative action in 2012 and why? We'd love to hear about the experiences that shape your answer. Again, the question: Is there a place for affirmative action today and why. To answer, go to NPR.org and click on Contact Us at the bottom of the page. Also, please be sure to put Affirmative Action in the subject line.

It's a - yeah, but, you know, this is the first time a secretary of state has gone to the African Union, and this administration has really made a push out of talking about the importance of regional bodies, talking about the importance of regional players, like South Africa, for instance. So, you know, she had her moment and her chance to talk about the need to get African states on the right side of this. The problem is - and she even acknowledged it in the speech, you know, Gadhafi has actually paid for a good part of the African Union's budget. He's helped poorer African states pay for their A.U. membership and even their United Nations membership dues. So, you know, U.S. officials had the feeling going into this that he's bought off plenty of African leaders, and the only way to shake this up is to speak bluntly about it.

Yeah, I was listening and I was actually kind of moved by what I heard. But what I wanted to talk about was something more scientific. I was diagnosed in April of 1995. And at that time, a doctor told me, well, son, you have two years to live. And I didn't get treated for a while. But when I actually did end up going in the hospital and having PCP, my T-cells fell below 200. And they said at the time I had AIDS. I didn't really understand what that meant, if below 200 was always AIDS and above 200 was simply HIV positive. And, you know, it's kind of confusing today. Some people say, HIV positive, some people say AIDS. And I say HIV positive. But, there's a stigma with saying that you have AIDS. So, think about it.

Well, Kelly, the El Nino weather effect has caused a year-long drought, and that's drastically lowered water levels in the main hydroelectric dam, which provides about two-thirds of Venezuela's electricity. Critics also say that the government's failed to upgrade the electrical grid. And one other thing - electric subsidies mean that people pay just pennies a month for their electric bills, so that deprives the government of money to invest in the system. Now, the upshot of all this is that the government has ordered nationwide power rationing, except for in Caracas. And now, it's trying to save energy by giving state employees five-day weekends. And the idea is that, you know, you won't be using power at public buildings. They'll all be shut down, and that may save energy. However, it's not really clear that this is going to work because a lot of these public employees might just go home and turn on their TVs and computers and hairdryers.

I think it's sort of - it's a complete opposite. It's a polar opposite of what we see the country going towards, which is a country that is not, you know, totally white. It is very mixed. But yet these are the movies that are successful, and they got nominated for Oscars. I mean Elizabeth gets nominated for an Oscar every time they make a movie, and I feel like you know, black actresses are just out of luck because you're not going to get a role in that. And behind the scenes, I can't imagine that it's any better when it comes to actually working on the film. So you just sort of wonder like where Hollywood is heading when this is period of time that they are choosing to focus on.

Well, at the beginning, you see, we lost some very, very important masterpieces, like the Warka vase, like the mask of the lady from Warka, but these came back. But now one of the most important pieces that is still missing is the headless statue, half-natural-size, of the Sumerian King Natum(ph), which--we still don't have it. And, by the way, this piece is inscribed on the back shoulder, and it could be one of the rare examples, the first examples, of this mentioning the word `king' in the history of mankind. So this is--I mean, every single piece has its own significance.

Well, historically there have been and are very large Lebanese expatriate communities in South America and Africa and, more recently now, in North America. And of course the vast, vast majority of those communities are perfectly law-abiding and wonderful people. But within those communities, over the course of the Lebanese civil war, you had some people who were providing support back home to one or another side of the civil war. And in the wake of the civil war, that continued. And as Hezbollah became the primary powerhouse on the Shia political, social and military side of the equation, support for the group continued to flow from the Shia Lebanese expatriates, some of whom were only supporting the group because it supported the Shia community back home and others because they supported the group's opposition to Israel, opposition to the West and sometimes even its axe militancy at home and abroad.

The court would not allow recordings, sparing the American public the sound of a U.S. Army staff sergeant methodically and repeatedly confessing to murder. The words were prepared by lawyers but that made them no less chilling. For each victim, Bales read and re-read variations of the same statement. He said he left his base, observed his victim. He formed the intent to kill his victim and then he did kill his victim with a firearm. Sixteen times, Bales read that paragraph. Finally, the judge, Colonel Jeffrey Nance, asked him why. Bales replied that it was something he'd asked himself a million times, but that he had no explanation. He also offered no apology.

I think at the beginning of the segment, you had a man, Tony, who talked about being - having been bullied and then becoming the bully. And we have a couple authors who talk about that, too, and the feeling of power that they felt. I mean, there's a lot of different reasons people will sometimes bully, and I think there's a lot of different feelings that it can create. And it's really brave to admit that you have been the victim of bullying, but it's also incredibly brave to admit that you have been the one who has been perpetuating that pain.

I have recently, the last couple of weeks, been kind dreading my long runs. I'm trying to turn that into an attitude of gratitude, and forcing myself after church to literally say intentions to myself that this is going to be a beautiful run. You're grateful to have this time for yourself despite, you know, whatever else is happening in the world and whatever's busy. This is my time, and I feel like overall in my life, this is my time - meaning, I'm the only one who can walk out the front door after I tie my laces and get it done, and nobody else can do that for me.

I saw them design, and they're installing machinery, and then we finally start to talk about the product, and I realize that it's a little ring, nylon-covered, steel ring that connects to the strap of a brassiere, and this is what these guys are making. You know, it weighs less than half a gram. It's 1.2 millimeters thick. But this is you know, this is their product, and this is all they're going to be making in this factory, and it's, you know, you sort of realize all of this energy. This is a huge amount of investment from these two people. They have all these workers, they've got a big space, they're getting all this equipment, and it's all going to create something that we would take for granted.

Right. And I think that's really quite pervasive in Zaatari - and not just in Zaatari, but throughout Jordan - with the refugees who, as Andrew Harper said, are flooding Jordan. And I think that - that's an answer that's a political answer. It's one we, obviously, need to pay attention to. In the meantime, it's really important to see that people can take some kind of control over some aspects of how they feel and think, and how their bodies move, and what their daily life is like. So it's a beginning, in a situation where the political situation is in the control of the larger world; where they can at least have a sense of control over themselves and - I think this is very important in refugee camps as well - a sense of active participation in doing things that are productive in the camp, and for those who are living among the general population.

Medicaid's one of those issues that could make you scratch your head and say, `How did you get into politics in the first place?' But it is one of those issues that, while it's not real high profile I think amongst a lot of Americans--as a matter of fact, I think the president shows the wrong crisis to focus on. Long before Social Security goes bankrupt, Medicaid is going to bankrupt all the states, and this is an issue that really plays a critical role in 58 million Americans' daily lives. We've got to find a way to solve it. Although I've got to add that we can't fix Medicaid in its entirety unless we also look at fixing the overall health-care system. A lot of the Medicaid's problems are the same thing in the private health insurance, that are the same thing that Americans of every income strata have to face.

Well, the challenge that Tim has at the Sun is fascinating, because as you manage your costs and you have to manage your newsroom and shrink it to - so that it's sustainable, do you reach a point at which you begin to lose readers because they say, well, this isn't the same paper that it used to be? Tim's clearly right that in every community the newspaper has more boots on the ground, is the largest news gathering organization. And what we're seeing, I think, is, at the same time as some of these reporters who leave newspapers are creating niche Web sites that are trying to cover communities or cover specific subjects, you also have government, which is trying to talk directly to voters through - Barack Obama's got 13 million, apparently, emails. You've got corporations who are doing this. That also is more of a challenge for news organizations, because they've got to somehow monitor those private conversations, those unfiltered conversations, for the rest of us. So, the task of journalism is actually enlarging, while the resources to do it are shrinking and the ways that people are getting news is expanding, and it's very tough.

Well, I want to point out the artist who song this song; his name is Boris Larramendi. And he comes down pretty hard first on the Cuban government, saying that my people are still suffering the misery and the whims of this government that, you know, they're still escaping on rafts or they're having to prostitute themselves to survive. And they still have to do whatever the government tells them to do. And then on the other hand he's making reference to September 11th and to the war in Iraq and basically saying they're sending the missiles to the wrong place. That really has nothing to do with what happened on September 11th.

The U.S. officials have been very careful, especially President Obama, in his statement. He didn't go as far as to say, Pakistani cooperation or our partnership with Pakistan led us to this. He thanked the Pakistanis for cooperation and then expressed in a very general sense that led us to this point. Other U.S. officials, the White House terror advisor and Leon Panetta, have been a bit more blunt about the - either not consulting the Pakistanis or the lack of cooperation from the Pakistanis on this. So it's a troubled relationship. It's a relationship that is extremely difficult and where there are frustrations on both sides. But it's an extremely important, if not essential, relationship for both countries.

So now I'm going to - this is important to understand what we're doing because a lot of the work that is so complex today, particularly in certain parts of the system - at least in our work that we have done that we have to have started up pits where we drop this tunnel-boring machine and so forth, that we do cut and cover. And we have to move all the utilities around, so that's an issue. But to answer your question, the skyscrapers are really well-designed, okay, and many of them have a foundation on rock. And at the level and the location that we are actually boring, we are not disturbing them. Yet we have what I refer to as the fragile buildings, and along Second Avenue I have identified about 225 of them in the area that we're working. These were buildings that were put together in - built at the end of the 19th century, somewhere, 1860s to 1890s, on a rubble foundation. And every time we go by, they vibrate. They - we are very careful to...

Hi. Yeah, I just wanted to share my story. I'm a dual military couple. My wife is in Iraq right now. I'm back home in Fort Hood. While she was on this deployment, I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, and I had to spend six weeks in the hospital. And that meant that my wife had to try to run our household from 8,000 miles away. It's just an example of how difficult this can be on both spouses, really. After having four deployments, you know, I kind of met my breaking point, and thank God she was able to run things as well as she could from overseas.

For years, the U.S. has tried various tactics to curb North Korea's provocative behavior, but sanctions aimed against the country's elite and suspending food aid only left North Korea further isolated, its people hungrier. In 2008, the U.S. removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism in a failed bid to save a crumbling nuclear disarmament agreement. Now these options are on the table again as the Obama administration considers how to respond to the cyberattack on Sony Pictures. Victor Cha, author of "The Impossible State: North Korea, Past And Future" says re-designating the country as a state sponsor of terrorism, which would include more sanctions, would require particularly close review.

So it's not so much - yeah, health workers have been targets by the rebel groups - but it's that the population has started to distrust the health workers. So - and I should say - it's, you know, a small group of people. I mean, overwhelmingly, the population is cooperating. We've had 17,000 people - more than that - who have taken this experimental vaccine. But you know, there are these pockets of resistance where you have people who - you know, there are rumors that the vaccinators are actually part of a plot to spread the disease. Or you'll have safe burial teams come in. And you know, one or two times a week, there'll be an attack on the safe burial team. And then, you know, when there's an attack on the civilian population by the rebel group, they'll sometimes - neighborhoods or entire cities will declare a day of mourning and protest where everything is shut down, and there's protests. And the health workers just can't get around.

We may get an historic meeting between President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un - or maybe not. This past week, Trump accepted an invitation to meet with the North Korean head of state over giving up its nuclear weapons. But then a day later, the White House appeared to add a precondition. The summit would only happen if North Korea took, quote, "concrete, verifiable action." For its part, North Korea has said it is willing to pause further nuclear and ballistic missile testing while talks are underway. For more, we reached Sig Hecker via Skype. He's a former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He first visited North Korea's nuclear facilities in 2004 in an unofficial capacity and came and went half a dozen more times in the next few years. Welcome.

Chris Anderson: Elon, what kind of crazy dream would persuade you to think of trying to take on the auto industry and build an all-electric car? Elon Musk: Well, it goes back to when I was in university. I thought about, what are the problems that are most likely to affect the future of the world or the future of humanity? I think it's extremely important that we have sustainable transport and sustainable energy production. That sort of overall sustainable energy problem is the biggest problem that we have to solve this century, independent of environmental concerns. In fact, even if producing CO2 was good for the environment, given that we're going to run out of hydrocarbons, we need to find some sustainable means of operating. CA: Most of American electricity comes from burning fossil fuels. How can an electric car that plugs into that electricity help? EM: Right. There's two elements to that answer. One is that, even if you take the same source fuel and produce power at the power plant and use it to charge electric cars, you're still better off. So if you take, say, natural gas, which is the most prevalent hydrocarbon source fuel, if you burn that in a modern General Electric natural gas turbine, you'll get about 60 percent efficiency. If you put that same fuel in an internal combustion engine car, you get about 20 percent efficiency. And the reason is, in the stationary power plant, you can afford to have something that weighs a lot more, is voluminous, and you can take the waste heat and run a steam turbine and generate a secondary power source. So in effect, even after you've taken transmission loss into account and everything, even using the same source fuel, you're at least twice as better off charging an electric car, then burning it at the power plant. CA: That scale delivers efficiency. EM: Yes, it does. And then the other point is, we have to have sustainable means of power generation anyway, electricity generation. So given that we have to solve sustainable electricity generation, then it makes sense for us to have electric cars as the mode of transport. CA: So we've got some video here of the Tesla being assembled, which, if we could play that first video — So what is innovative about this process in this vehicle? EM: Sure. So, in order to accelerate the advent of electric transport, and I should say that I think, actually, all modes of transport will become fully electric with the ironic exception of rockets. There's just no way around Newton's third law. The question is how do you accelerate the advent of electric transport? And in order to do that for cars, you have to come up with a really energy efficient car, so that means making it incredibly light, and so what you're seeing here is the only all-aluminum body and chassis car made in North America. In fact, we applied a lot of rocket design techniques to make the car light despite having a very large battery pack. And then it also has the lowest drag coefficient of any car of its size. So as a result, the energy usage is very low, and it has the most advanced battery pack, and that's what gives it the range that's competitive, so you can actually have on the order of a 250-mile range. CA: I mean, those battery packs are incredibly heavy, but you think the math can still work out intelligently — by combining light body, heavy battery, you can still gain spectacular efficiency. EM: Exactly. The rest of the car has to be very light to offset the mass of the pack, and then you have to have a low drag coefficient so that you have good highway range. And in fact, customers of the Model S are sort of competing with each other to try to get the highest possible range. I think somebody recently got 420 miles out of a single charge. CA: Bruno Bowden, who's here, did that, broke the world record.EM: Congratulations. CA: That was the good news. The bad news was that to do it, he had to drive at 18 miles an hour constant speed and got pulled over by the cops. (Laughter) EM: I mean, you can certainly drive — if you drive it 65 miles an hour, under normal conditions, 250 miles is a reasonable number. CA: Let's show that second video showing the Tesla in action on ice. Not at all a dig at The New York Times, this, by the way. What is the most surprising thing about the experience of driving the car? EM: In creating an electric car, the responsiveness of the car is really incredible. So we wanted really to have people feel as though they've almost got to mind meld with the car, so you just feel like you and the car are kind of one, and as you corner and accelerate, it just happens, like the car has ESP. You can do that with an electric car because of its responsiveness. You can't do that with a gasoline car. I think that's really a profound difference, and people only experience that when they have a test drive. CA: I mean, this is a beautiful but expensive car. Is there a road map where this becomes a mass-market vehicle? EM: Yeah. The goal of Tesla has always been to have a sort of three-step process, where version one was an expensive car at low volume, version two is medium priced and medium volume, and then version three would be low price, high volume. So we're at step two at this point. So we had a $100,000 sports car, which was the Roadster. Then we've got the Model S, which starts at around 50,000 dollars. And our third generation car, which should hopefully be out in about three or four years will be a $30,000 car. But whenever you've got really new technology, it generally takes about three major versions in order to make it a compelling mass-market product. And so I think we're making progress in that direction, and I feel confident that we'll get there. CA: I mean, right now, if you've got a short commute, you can drive, you can get back, you can charge it at home. There isn't a huge nationwide network of charging stations now that are fast. Do you see that coming, really, truly, or just on a few key routes? EM: There actually are far more charging stations than people realize, and at Tesla we developed something called a Supercharging technology, and we're offering that if you buy a Model S for free, forever. And so this is something that maybe a lot of people don't realize. We actually have California and Nevada covered, and we've got the Eastern seaboard from Boston to D.C. covered. By the end of this year, you'll be able to drive from L.A. to New York just using the Supercharger network, which charges at five times the rate of anything else. And the key thing is to have a ratio of drive to stop, to stop time, of about six or seven. So if you drive for three hours, you want to stop for 20 or 30 minutes, because that's normally what people will stop for. So if you start a trip at 9 a.m., by noon you want to stop to have a bite to eat, hit the restroom, coffee, and keep going. CA: So your proposition to consumers is, for the full charge, it could take an hour. So it's common — don't expect to be out of here in 10 minutes. Wait for an hour, but the good news is, you're helping save the planet, and by the way, the electricity is free. You don't pay anything. EM: Actually, what we're expecting is for people to stop for about 20 to 30 minutes, not for an hour. It's actually better to drive for about maybe 160, 170 miles and then stop for half an hour and then keep going. That's the natural cadence of a trip. CA: All right. So this is only one string to your energy bow. You've been working on this solar company SolarCity. What's unusual about that? EM: Well, as I mentioned earlier, we have to have sustainable electricity production as well as consumption, so I'm quite confident that the primary means of power generation will be solar. I mean, it's really indirect fusion, is what it is. We've got this giant fusion generator in the sky called the sun, and we just need to tap a little bit of that energy for purposes of human civilization. What most people know but don't realize they know is that the world is almost entirely solar-powered already. If the sun wasn't there, we'd be a frozen ice ball at three degrees Kelvin, and the sun powers the entire system of precipitation. The whole ecosystem is solar-powered. CA: But in a gallon of gasoline, you have, effectively, thousands of years of sun power compressed into a small space, so it's hard to make the numbers work right now on solar, and to remotely compete with, for example, natural gas, fracked natural gas. How are you going to build a business here? EM: Well actually, I'm confident that solar will beat everything, hands down, including natural gas. (Applause)CA: How? EM: It must, actually. If it doesn't, we're in deep trouble. CA: But you're not selling solar panels to consumers. What are you doing? EM: No, we actually are. You can buy a solar system or you can lease a solar system. Most people choose to lease. And the thing about solar power is that it doesn't have any feed stock or operational costs, so once it's installed, it's just there. It works for decades. It'll work for probably a century. So therefore, the key thing to do is to get the cost of that initial installation low, and then get the cost of the financing low, because that interest — those are the two factors that drive the cost of solar. And we've made huge progress in that direction, and that's why I'm confident we'll actually beat natural gas. CA: So your current proposition to consumers is, don't pay so much up front. EM: Zero.CA: Pay zero up front. We will install panels on your roof. You will then pay, how long is a typical lease? EM: Typical leases are 20 years, but the value proposition is, as you're sort of alluding to, quite straightforward. It's no money down, and your utility bill decreases. Pretty good deal. CA: So that seems like a win for the consumer. No risk, you'll pay less than you're paying now. For you, the dream here then is that — I mean, who owns the electricity from those panels for the longer term? I mean, how do you, the company, benefit? EM: Well, essentially, SolarCity raises a chunk of capital from say, a company or a bank. Google is one of our big partners here. And they have an expected return on that capital. With that capital, SolarCity purchases and installs the panel on the roof and then charges the homeowner or business owner a monthly lease payment, which is less than the utility bill. CA: But you yourself get a long-term commercial benefit from that power. You're kind of building a new type of distributed utility. EM: Exactly. What it amounts to is a giant distributed utility. I think it's a good thing, because utilities have been this monopoly, and people haven't had any choice. So effectively it's the first time there's been competition for this monopoly, because the utilities have been the only ones that owned those power distribution lines, but now it's on your roof. So I think it's actually very empowering for homeowners and businesses. CA: And you really picture a future where a majority of power in America, within a decade or two, or within your lifetime, it goes solar? EM: I'm extremely confident that solar will be at least a plurality of power, and most likely a majority, and I predict it will be a plurality in less than 20 years. I made that bet with someone —CA: Definition of plurality is? EM: More from solar than any other source. CA: Ah. Who did you make the bet with? EM: With a friend who will remain nameless. CA: Just between us. (Laughter) EM: I made that bet, I think, two or three years ago, so in roughly 18 years, I think we'll see more power from solar than any other source. CA: All right, so let's go back to another bet that you made with yourself, I guess, a kind of crazy bet. You'd made some money from the sale of PayPal. You decided to build a space company. Why on Earth would someone do that? (Laughter) EM: I got that question a lot, that's true. People would say, "Did you hear the joke about the guy who made a small fortune in the space industry?" Obviously, "He started with a large one," is the punchline. And so I tell people, well, I was trying to figure out the fastest way to turn a large fortune into a small one. And they'd look at me, like, "Is he serious?" CA: And strangely, you were. So what happened? EM: It was a close call. Things almost didn't work out. We came very close to failure, but we managed to get through that point in 2008. The goal of SpaceX is to try to advance rocket technology, and in particular to try to crack a problem that I think is vital for humanity to become a space-faring civilization, which is to have a rapidly and fully reusable rocket. CA: Would humanity become a space-faring civilization? So that was a dream of yours, in a way, from a young age? You've dreamed of Mars and beyond? EM: I did build rockets when I was a kid, but I didn't think I'd be involved in this. It was really more from the standpoint of what are the things that need to happen in order for the future to be an exciting and inspiring one? And I really think there's a fundamental difference, if you sort of look into the future, between a humanity that is a space-faring civilization, that's out there exploring the stars, on multiple planets, and I think that's really exciting, compared with one where we are forever confined to Earth until some eventual extinction event. CA: So you've somehow slashed the cost of building a rocket by 75 percent, depending on how you calculate it. How on Earth have you done that? NASA has been doing this for years. How have you done this? EM: Well, we've made significant advances in the technology of the airframe, the engines, the electronics and the launch operation. There's a long list of innovations that we've come up with there that are a little difficult to communicate in this talk, but — CA: Not least because you could still get copied, right? You haven't patented this stuff. It's really interesting to me. EM: No, we don't patent.CA: You didn't patent because you think it's more dangerous to patent than not to patent. EM: Since our primary competitors are national governments, the enforceability of patents is questionable.(Laughter) (Applause) CA: That's really, really interesting. But the big innovation is still ahead, and you're working on it now. Tell us about this. EM: Right, so the big innovation— CA: In fact, let's roll that video and you can talk us through it, what's happening here. EM: Absolutely. So the thing about rockets is that they're all expendable. All rockets that fly today are fully expendable. The space shuttle was an attempt at a reusable rocket, but even the main tank of the space shuttle was thrown away every time, and the parts that were reusable took a 10,000-person group nine months to refurbish for flight. So the space shuttle ended up costing a billion dollars per flight. Obviously that doesn't work very well for — CA: What just happened there? We just saw something land? EM: That's right. So it's important that the rocket stages be able to come back, to be able to return to the launch site and be ready to launch again within a matter of hours. CA: Wow. Reusable rockets.EM: Yes. (Applause) And so what a lot of people don't realize is, the cost of the fuel, of the propellant, is very small. It's much like on a jet. So the cost of the propellant is about .3 percent of the cost of the rocket. So it's possible to achieve, let's say, roughly 100-fold improvement in the cost of spaceflight if you can effectively reuse the rocket. That's why it's so important. Every mode of transport that we use, whether it's planes, trains, automobiles, bikes, horses, is reusable, but not rockets. So we must solve this problem in order to become a space-faring civilization. CA: You asked me the question earlier of how popular traveling on cruises would be if you had to burn your ships afterward.EM: Certain cruises are apparently highly problematic. CA: Definitely more expensive. So that's potentially absolutely disruptive technology, and, I guess, paves the way for your dream to actually take, at some point, to take humanity to Mars at scale. You'd like to see a colony on Mars. EM: Yeah, exactly. SpaceX, or some combination of companies and governments, needs to make progress in the direction of making life multi-planetary, of establishing a base on another planet, on Mars — being the only realistic option — and then building that base up until we're a true multi-planet species. CA: So progress on this "let's make it reusable," how is that going? That was just a simulation video we saw. How's it going? EM: We're actually, we've been making some good progress recently with something we call the Grasshopper Test Project, where we're testing the vertical landing portion of the flight, the sort of terminal portion which is quite tricky. And we've had some good tests. CA: Can we see that?EM: Yeah. So that's just to give a sense of scale. We dressed a cowboy as Johnny Cash and bolted the mannequin to the rocket. (Laughter) CA: All right, let's see that video then, because this is actually amazing when you think about it. You've never seen this before. A rocket blasting off and then — EM: Yeah, so that rocket is about the size of a 12-story building. (Rocket launch) So now it's hovering at about 40 meters, and it's constantly adjusting the angle, the pitch and yaw of the main engine, and maintaining roll with cold gas thrusters. CA: How cool is that? (Applause) Elon, how have you done this? These projects are so — Paypal, SolarCity, Tesla, SpaceX, they're so spectacularly different, they're such ambitious projects at scale. How on Earth has one person been able to innovate in this way? What is it about you? EM: I don't know, actually. I don't have a good answer for you. I work a lot. I mean, a lot. CA: Well, I have a theory.EM: Okay. All right. CA: My theory is that you have an ability to think at a system level of design that pulls together design, technology and business, so if TED was TBD, design, technology and business, into one package, synthesize it in a way that very few people can and — and this is the critical thing — feel so damn confident in that clicked-together package that you take crazy risks. You bet your fortune on it, and you seem to have done that multiple times. I mean, almost no one can do that. Is that — could we have some of that secret sauce? Can we put it into our education system? Can someone learn from you? It is truly amazing what you've done. EM: Well, thanks. Thank you. Well, I do think there's a good framework for thinking. It is physics. You know, the sort of first principles reasoning. Generally I think there are — what I mean by that is, boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there, as opposed to reasoning by analogy. Through most of our life, we get through life by reasoning by analogy, which essentially means copying what other people do with slight variations. And you have to do that. Otherwise, mentally, you wouldn't be able to get through the day. But when you want to do something new, you have to apply the physics approach. Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics. It's really counterintuitive. So I think that's an important thing to do, and then also to really pay attention to negative feedback, and solicit it, particularly from friends. This may sound like simple advice, but hardly anyone does that, and it's incredibly helpful. CA: Boys and girls watching, study physics. Learn from this man. Elon Musk, I wish we had all day, but thank you so much for coming to TED. EM: Thank you. CA: That was awesome. That was really, really cool. Look at that. (Applause) Just take a bow. That was fantastic. Thank you so much.

Well, it's important to say that it's increased the rate very, very little, a couple of percentage points at best, and it's not clear that it's the only reason why the number of adoptions of black kids by white parents has increased. So that's important to say. Second, we simply haven't done a good enough job. When we see a law that has been in effect for a dozen years, and we don't see anything, I was going to say dramatic, but even substantial, as a change, as a positive change, then I think it's fair to say, let's take a look at it. Let's see if there's a better way to do it. And that's the role of that the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute played. We're a research and policy organization. We didn't have a horse in this race, so to speak. We don't place kids or anything. We wanted to see what's working, what's not, and what we discovered is that we could probably do this better.

Well, on the ground for the average Somali, it's even more exasperating. As many people know, over 80,000 people have been displaced in the last two years, 60,000 have been killed, 30,000 are injured and suffering from a myriad of health problems. Many people who were displaced are actually now twice displaced. First, from the capital city of Mogadishu, and now, from towns - neighboring towns in and around Somalia. Practically, what this is, is that the Ethiopian troops, although they've missed the deadline for withdrawal, are trying to withdraw from the country of Somalia, since their occupation is very unpopular with Somalis. Somalis want to govern themselves, and want to have the right to be politically autonomous. And they feel that the role of Ethiopia and it's backed by the U.S. government is keeping them from doing that. But with their withdrawal comes increased fighting. The Somali insurgent forces, some of which are organized, some of which are not organized, were taking over bases that Ethiopian troops are evacuating. And for the African Union forces, who are mostly - almost all - from Uganda and Burundi, they feel like they're unable to do their jobs as peacekeepers, and want the ability to be able to protect Somalis by using force.

You're quite right. Saif al-Islam was arrested by part of a Zintani militia in the deep south of Libya, and that shows you the scope that some of the militias now have. And he's been held in Zintan ever since, despite demands by the International Criminal Court for him to be handed over to them for trial as a result of a United Nations resolution empowering them to do so and despite the fact that the Libyan government itself wishes to actually conduct the trial. And as a result, it's open to some doubt as to whether he's going to receive a trial which would be really fair. And that's a measure, indeed, of the fragmentation of the security scene inside Libya today.

The new medium would spread half-truths, propaganda and lies. It would encourage self-absorption and solipsism, thereby fragmenting communities. It would allow any amateur to become an author and degrade public discourse. Sound familiar? Such were the anxieties that the invention of printing unleashed on the world as 16th-, 17th- and 18th-century authorities worried and argued about how print would transform politics, culture and literature. The ‘printing revolution’ was by no means universally welcomed as the democratiser of knowledge or initiator of modern thought. In 1620, Francis Bacon named printing, gunpowder and the nautical compass as the three modern inventions that ‘have changed the appearance and state of the whole world’. For others, this outsized influence was exactly the problem. A few decades earlier, the scholar William Webbe complained about the ‘infinite fardles of printed pamphlets; wherewith thys Countrey is pestered, all shoppes stuffed, and every study furnished.’ Around the same time, the pseudonymous Martine Mar-Sixtus lamented: ‘We live in a printing age,’ which was no good thing, for ‘every rednosed rimester is an author, every drunken mans dreame is a booke’. Printing was for hacks, partisans and doggerel poets. In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), Jürgen Habermas argued that print enabled the establishment of an arena of public debate. Print first made it possible for average people to come together to discuss matters of public concern. In turn, their knowledge and cooperation undermined the control that traditional royal and religious powers had over information. Habermas pointed to the early 18th century as a crucial moment of change. At that time, newspapers and periodicals exploded in both number and influence. ‘In The Tatler, The Spectator and The Guardian the public held a mirror up to itself,’ Habermas noted of the impact of a trio of periodicals by the journalists Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. The new publications allowed readers to shed their personal identities as rich or poor, male or female. Instead, in print they could enter into conversation as anonymous equals rationally engaging with the topics of the day. Addison himself was not so sure about the positive effects of print. In 1714, he wrote in The Spectator: It is a melancholy thing to consider that the Art of Printing, which might be the greatest Blessing to Mankind, should prove detrimental to us, and that it should be made use of to scatter Prejudice and Ignorance through a People, instead of conveying to them Truth and Knowledge.The Tatler included a character, the ‘political upholsterer’, who was so obsessed with reading the news that he neglected his shop, leading to bankruptcy and insanity. Other contemporary commentators shared Addison’s misgivings. They would have been surprised by Habermas’s claims that print could create the ideal ‘public sphere of civil society’ consisting of ‘the critical judgment of a public making use of its reason’. Print could just as easily allow irrational, false and defamatory claims to circulate. While it is true that, over time, print came to seem the appropriate medium for public affairs, this was a process that took centuries. During that long transitional period, print borrowed from the associations of longer-standing media to establish itself as an authoritative source. In particular, the public sphere relied on the continuing power of what we now see as the quintessentially private form: the handwritten letter. The frontispiece to a 1750 reprint of The Spectator, depicting seven honest readers discussing issues of the day. Courtesy Special Collections, the University of Otago, New ZealandThe first issue of The Spectator closed with an address ‘for those who have a mind to correspond with me’, at the printer ‘Mr Buckley’s, in Little Britain’. The public answered the call. The periodical, like its predecessor The Tatler, reproduced hundreds of readers’ letters, using them to represent alternative viewpoints, provide comic relief or just fill space. Collections of handwritten letters that readers sent to Steele and Addison remain at the British Library. The publication of letters fulfilled the claims of the magazine to represent a diversity of opinion. Printed news also started out as, essentially, collections of letters to the editor. Newspapers did not routinely employ full-time reporters until the 19th century. At that point, the older meaning of ‘journalist’ – someone who keeps a journal – disappeared, and the word began to refer solely to news-gatherers. Similarly, interviews and in-person reporting did not become common until the 19th century. The earliest papers, in the 17th century, simply cut-and-pasted from letters that printers had received from correspondents around England and continental Europe. Some printers obtained letters by bribing officials with access to diplomatic correspondence. The first ‘foreign correspondents’ were diplomats who supplied intelligence offices and newspapers at the same time. In 1733, one magazine editor wrote that the meaning of the word ‘news’ was the collection of information out of letters that had arrived through the ‘Posts Foreign or Domestick’. When the wind blew toward the west, holding back ships travelling from the continent, there was no news. Therefore, the earliest forms for public discussion of politics and literature in print presented themselves as epistolary conversations. Rather than negating the personalising effects of handwritten correspondence, they relied on them to make new forms of print seem familiar and understandable. The ‘print public sphere’ made its debut as a series of letters. Intellectuals had been using letters as spaces for quasi-public engagement for decades prior to the emergence of newspapers and periodicals. In what some have called the ‘Republic of Letters’, scholars exchanged their literary and philosophical work and critiqued others’ productions. Similarly, the natural historians of the Royal Society debated experiments via letter, and sent out questionnaires with sailors travelling around the world. In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, these epistolary exchanges migrated into print. The Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions – the world’s oldest scientific journal – and the first journals for book reviews both established themselves in part by re-publication of letters. The printed versions continued to use the letter format to signal their epistolary origins. At the time, the reliance of the print public sphere on personal handwritten letters would not have seemed paradoxical. Early modern and 18th-century correspondents had a fundamentally different understanding of the letter genre than the one that prevails today. While we tend to see the space of the envelope as almost sacrosanct – making it a federal crime to open mail addressed to another – letters in the 17th and 18th centuries enjoyed no necessary connection to privacy. For one thing, ready-made envelopes did not come along until the 1840s. But even letters carefully sealed with string and wax were sometimes less than private. Writers knew letters were part-public and part-private, and it shaped how they were written The common practice would have been to read letters aloud upon receipt rather than to retire for silent, solitary perusal. Letters were also frequently written in groups with multiple correspondents adding notes or commentary. They were a kind of public property, conveying news from one place to another. They were also crucial to the functioning of business, dispatching orders and receipts, and would have been filed with other documents as general commercial papers. Writers knew this and did not presume the privacy of their letters when they were in transit. The English government had an entire office, the ‘private’ or ‘secret’ office, dedicated to opening and surveilling correspondence. In short, at any stage in its composition, transmission and reception, a letter might travel beyond the bounds of the one-to-one relationship that moderns imagine when we read a letter beginning ‘Dear X’, and ending ‘Signed, Y’ (or, in the period’s common subscriptions – ranging in degrees of intimacy and obsequiousness – ‘Your affectionate friend,’ ‘Your humble servant &c.,’ ‘Your worship’s most humble and obedient servant’). The fact that writers knew letters were part-public and part-private shaped how they were written. Sometimes writers exploited the tension inherent in this aspect of their character. A popular work of epistolary proto-fiction, Charles Gildon’s The Post-Boy Rob’d of His Mail: Or, the Pacquet Broke Open (1692), for example, purported to be a collection of 500 letters stolen by a club of gentlemen engaged in a ‘frolick’. The letters included those from a gentleman to his mistress, an aspiring poet to the editor of the Gentleman’s Journal, a ‘Country Fellow giving an account of London to his Cousin in the Country’, and an apprentice to his mother complaining about mistreatment by his master. The collection showed the range of different and subtle ways that letters worked, from the sensational to the scholarly. Letters have always helped people separated by distance to create a community of likeminded readers and writers. In recent years, scholars have often turned to the analogy of the digital network to explain the role that letters played in creating literary, intellectual, political and scientific communities. As the historian Lindsay O’Neill writes in The Opened Letter (2015): ‘networking was often the purpose of a letter … An examination of networks blurs the borders between the modern and the premodern worlds, between public and private spheres.’ By linking disparate people through decentralised networks that connected male and female, elite and plebeian, personal and professional, letters allowed people to see themselves as connected on a national and global scale. Handwritten letters first helped people to imagine themselves as members of a public – as entering into conversation with other distant, perhaps even unknown writers whom they could reach only through this medium of text. As printed periodicals and newspapers began aspiring to connect groups of people in a similar way, they used the model of the epistolary network to train readers in how to use the new medium. Print enabled a wider, less personal and more unpredictable version of the public sphere, operating on a scale beyond the reach of manuscript. Yet letters lay behind this new version of the public sphere. Many news pamphlets, for example, styled themselves as correspondence: for example, a ‘Letter from a Gentleman in Town to His Friend in the Country’ was actually a discussion of London politics. In this way, the form of the letter familiarised print. References to manuscript correspondence also offered the nascent news industry a version of what we might now call objectivity, making it seem as though printers were simply reproducing other people’s opinions rather than distributing their own – although news remained one-sided. Early news sources were frankly partisan. During the English Civil War, newsbooks representing either the Royalist or Parliamentarian perspective attacked each other with accusations such as that the author of the Mercurius Aulicus, a Royalist publication, ‘hath a commission to lie for his life, for the better advancement of his Majesties service’. The writers traded insults in an effort to convince readers. In the 18th century, most newspapers enjoyed support from political parties. In the 1720s, the British prime minister Robert Walpole subsidised several different newspapers, although he was not successful in controlling the news. Because Parliament banned the reporting of speeches and note-taking in the galleries until the late-18th century, papers often relied on individual politicians for political news. Although papers came to support themselves through advertising and sales rather than government subsidy from the late-18th century on, it remained common into the early 20th century for newspapers in the UK and the US to be affiliated with particular political stances – a model that seems to be experiencing a resurgence today with cable and digital news. Because letters imply the expectation of response, any reader could also be a source of news During the ‘golden age’ of newspapers, from the 1940s to ’80s, mainstream media recognised and pursued an ideal of objectivity. It held that reporters should not advocate from a particular political stance but should follow a procedure that would present the most verifiably factual information available. Such an ideal and method was foreign to the writers of the 18th century; ‘objectivity’ took more than 300 years to develop in its modern form. However, earlier journalists used letters in a way that signalled an awareness of the problems with partisan reporting. Incorporating letters into newspapers and periodicals demonstrated that readers were getting a variety of perspectives – they were seeing the sources and could judge for themselves. This method was a different way of recognising the same problem, distrust of biased information, that the later professional standard of objectivity tried to solve. Epistolary norms called for the writer not to impose their opinion upon the correspondent. Letters should present ‘news’ while allowing the recipient to form their own judgment. The common phrase that pieces of news were sent ‘for your information’ suggested that the writer would refrain from pushing a particular interpretation – whether or not they actually did so. In newspapers, letters retained this sense of leaving interpretation up to the reader. Many printers would simply set incoming correspondence in type, leaving the news in the words of the letter-writer. This meant that references to ‘this city’ or ‘our king’ could be parsed only contextually, and might indicate foreign circumstances. In this way, the printer disclaimed an editorial position, implying that he or she was simply reproducing the words of others. By addressing the reader through the second-person salutation (‘Dear You’), printed letters of news implied that anyone picking up the paper was a potential correspondent. And because letters also imply the expectation of response, this meant that any reader could also be a source of news – which often materialised when people wrote letters to the editor. The cyclical relationship of the epistolary network provided the logic for exchanges of printed news. Newspapers and pamphlets positioned their correspondents as sources of verification, rather than asking readers to trust the opinion of a single author, editor or printer. Newspapers’ reliance on readers’ understanding of how to read and write letters could help to deflect some of the accusations against print. By reproducing letters, the print product could seem more of a continuation from existing media than a destabilising break with the past. Letters enabled a new scale of public communication by suggesting that print rested upon a manuscript foundation. In the present-day shift to digital media and upheaval in the news industry, some idealise the printed newspaper and its ability to foster a unified understanding of the facts. Part of what has been lost, these commentators presume, is the ‘imagined community’ of newspaper readers. This sphere, as Benedict Anderson outlined in his classic study of nationalism in 1991, is one in which each individual reader is aware of the thousands of unseen others reading the same words in the same form at the same time (given the extreme ephemerality of any individual newspaper, which becomes outdated after 24 hours). In this way, the print public sphere allowed for citizens to debate topics of public interest but also implied arrival at a consensus, which would then be presented in the next day’s newspaper. But the impact of print on public opinion was not only to establish a common understanding of the facts. It took hundreds of years for news reporters to develop the concept of objectivity, which did not necessarily mean that one was personally neutral but rather that one had followed a professional procedure to obtain unbiased information. And objectivity met with immediate objections from journalists who thought that an effort to present ‘both sides’ of every story might distort rather than reveal the truth. In recent years, political operatives have exploited this weakness in the concept of objectivity to present issues such as climate change and measles vaccination as having ‘two sides’, both of which must be represented in the media. For example, by treating climate change as a partisan issue rather than as scientific fact, ‘objective’ newspaper coverage has contributed to the perception that there is still legitimate scientific debate over humans’ impact on the environment. The result is not consensus but confusion for readers, compounded by, but not a direct consequence of, the decline of printed newspapers. The public sphere was always perhaps more ideal than reality. Letters helped everyday readers understand how they could or should interact with print. But of course most people do not write letters to the editor; they consume other people’s opinions. And the personal, irrational or fake could never be banished from a world in which humans want to exchange gossip and scandal as much as – or perhaps more than – rational, enlightened debate. Understanding the complications of the public sphere 300 years ago illuminates how new media are again changing ideas about truth, fact and the news.

Let's hear from email. This is Bev(ph) in Syracuse, New York. She writes: at this stage of my life, I'm 57, surgery for grandma means surgery for my mother. Can this point actually be debatable? She's a person and should have the same rights as any other person. Actually, last week, she did need surgery. Due to a stroke, she lost the use of part of her legs. Her toes started turning blue and gangrene fit in. Surgery was the only option that I would consider, though the surgeon did say that she could opt out. I cannot fathom death by gangrene. She had her leg amputated and is recovering well. Now, she will have a chance to eventually live in the same facility as my father and to experience the joys that occur in life even at 90.

Here's an email from Mike in Rochester, New York. As a non-theist family, we celebrate Christmas much the same as most Americans, including Christmas specials, making cookies, trading gifts and of course, spending special time with loved ones. We just draw the line at the biblical fairytales and gloss over the nativity business. And I guess, Jews have to do the same thing, as far as that goes. Amy in Tucson, I was raised in the early to mid-80s in a very liberal Jewish household. While we celebrated holidays and learned the basic reason behind the Jewish holidays, we were not very religious at all. My parents did not feel a need to prevent us kids from watching any of the Christmas specials. I can't remember ever feeling like I was missing anything by not celebrating Christmas. Later in life, my mother told me she felt having a loving, spiritual and ethical household without a particular religious attachment, was a very deliberate choice.

Well, it seems to be expanding its military activities a lot and especially its ability to defend its own forces there. Last week, for instance, we know that Russia announced that it's deployed its most advanced antiaircraft system - it's called the S-400 - and that's seen as a warning to Turkey and to NATO as well because these antiaircraft missiles can hit planes at a distance of up to 250 miles away, so in other words, deep into Turkish airspace. Russia also says that it's equipping its bombers with air-to-air missiles now, meaning that they can now shoot down planes that they see as a threat.

We have nearly 100 hubs across the country in 35 states. And ours, which as you mentioned in the intro of yours is - covers the area from Richmond down to Norfolk area of Virginia. There hubs are all over the country in 34 states. In fact, many states have multiple hubs there. And there's eight Missouri. There's seven or eight in Ohio and Texas. Illinois, Missouri, Iowa have six. So there is an opportunity here for our fellow Americans here to thank these people before it's too late. Next week, as I said, I'm not sure how many are there today, but next week, there will be groups coming in from Washington state, South Dakota, a couple from New York, Buffalo and Long Island, from southern Jersey, from Ohio, Alabama. And that's just next week. Every week, it's like that from March through November. Of course, we're not doing the wintertime, a little too cold and sometimes a little too hot.

Well, I'm sure there'll be some input from the White House. And in fact, there's been a search firm - that's - been hired to interview candidates. Apparently, I just learned this the other day. Apparently, there's a rule in the Federal Government that if you're already serving on the board of a company that's getting a Federal funding, you're not eligible to serve on the second board of a company that's getting Federal funding. So, say these people who are helping to fix AIG, for example, they're not allowed to serve on the General Motors' board, which is in a way, too bad, because they would have the experience of dealing with as government overseer and putting a private company back together.

No, it really didn't work. They thought they were going to replay that 2006 race, when George Allen had his infamous macaca moment. But it didn't work a number of reasons. First, as you said, Deeds just got a reputation as a negative campaigner without somebody who had a good set of plans, while Bob McDonnell did a very good job of trying to rebrand the Republican Party away from being labeled the party of no to a party of pragmatic solutions. And secondly, there wasn't a real clear hook on which you could now place this thesis. For example, Democrats liked to say that abortion policies are threatened, but with Barack Obama being president, it's very difficult to think that Roe v. Wade is actually…

Well, first of all, there's no plausible alternative. Look, a lot of people that voted no last night wanted that bill to pass, but simply didn't have the courage or didn't feel the need to vote for it. And that's fair enough. We didn't need the votes. Obviously, we won substantially. I think the speaker showed real leadership last night and, honestly, put himself in a position to look the president in the eye and say, look, I worked with you to get this across. I provided the votes that you needed. I allowed the vote to occur. I took some considerable political risk in doing so. So now I expect you, Mr. President, to take some political risks of your own.

This is Talk of the Nation. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. In a new book with a provocative title, Avraham Burg, the former speaker of the Knesset, Israeli parliament, argues that Israelis and Jewish people around the world should stop living so much in the shadow of the Shoah, the Holocaust. That they should reevaluate the role of the Holocaust and the collective memory of the Holocaust plays in politics, language, government policies, and in everyday lives. He describes what he calls the Shoah industry. We cling to the tragedy, he writes, and the tragedy becomes our justification for everything. We sit on the branch of past mourning. He continues, not taking off for the heights of humanity and humanism where we belong. The book, we told you, it has a provocative title. It's called, "The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From its Ashes." The author joins us in just a moment. Later, we'll also hear from one of his critics and from you. Is the Holocaust too much with us? Give us a call, 800-989-8255, email us talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website at npr.org. Just click on Talk of the Nation. Later in the hour Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Former Secretary of State William Cohen - former secretary of defense, excuse me. William Cohen joins us to talk about a new report that urges the Obama administration to take a leading role in the prevention of genocide. But first, Avraham Burg joins us here in studio 3A. Nice to have you with us on Talk of the Nation.

Instead of reading important policy tomes or history to instruct and inspire them, a politician might feel free on vacation to go to a yard sale and pick up a trashy book - take that any way you like - a bodice-busting romance, a sinister thriller or old P.G. Wodehouse stories featuring Gussie Fink-Nottle. They might also read something they disagree with - or think they will - without fear that a constituent will see them and they'll alienate their base - a current political term that sounds more like a line from Star Wars. A politician on a real vacation might feel free to see a truly mindless movie that never got close to Sundance, rather than a searing documentary that will prompt committee hearings. They might be reminded what makes people laugh, which is also valuable. Many politicians now go to fairs and hope to be photographed eating pork chops, corn dogs and quaffing a little beer, to counter stories about white wine fundraisers in Hollywood and Washington, D.C. It might be refreshing for a politician to feel free to pat their stomach and say, ooh, looks good, but just a falafel and water, thanks.

Including me, including me. I'm totally guilty of saying - I think mostly the age jokes about John McCain and that's probably because I'm young myself and it's easy to say that John McCain is older than a Twinkie you know. There's I guess some few laughs from that. But what I'm noticing is that between me, my friends, my family, my mom and my dad, everyone has something to say that's not really positive as more so negative about somebody in this campaign and it's kind of disturbing because it's bringing out a lot of deep-seated feelings about whether you have issues with someone who looks different than you or who's a different gender than you or who's in a different age range than you.

And, you know, Joe said he still supports the president. You know, he has faith in him kind of helping the country through this. But he's beginning to just almost fathom the possibility that if, you know, he doesn't come through, if this economy doesn't come back, if he doesn't have a job in three, six months that, you know, maybe he might be disappointed. So hearing people, you know, move from October, November and, you know, certainly Inauguration Day, when the excitement was just uncontrollable, to a point where, you know, it's people being a little more sober has been fascinating to watch.

Well, as you can imagine, this is a deeply polarized country, and this process has been very traumatic. It's gone on for months and months, so you're getting very different reactions. You know, if you go on social media here, you can see the top trending hashtags on Twitter are aimed at either vilifying the removal of Dilma Rousseff or celebrating it. You know, it's unclear I think at this point how to reunite these two sides, but more than anything, if you speak to average Brazilians, they want to see the economy recover. That's their main priority. The recession here is devastating, and that is what they want to see Michel Temer, who is now president of Brazil, take onboard.

Well, first, Ari, let me say that I believe the President has acted within his legal authority. And I think that's a very important point to make to your listeners. We have a long tradition of giving the executive branch the discretion to make decisions about everything from criminal justice to immigration, detention and extradition and deportation. So what the president basically has said is rather than having just blanket rules where we're going to be deporting on the same basis a young person brought here as a toddler who is now in high school, wanting to go to college, has lived his or her whole life here, one of the dreamers or those dreamer's parents, we're going to focus on the felons, the violent criminals, the people who should be deported. And I think the president has the authority to do that. I think there is precedent because other presidents have also exercised discretion.

When people are not in debt, when they're being productive, that's how this country will become stronger. I mean, that's why this country became great in the first place. It attracted immigrants like my dad. My dad also, by the way, came to this country during the Great Depression, during the midst of the toughest economic time this country ever seen. But yet as an immigrant, he saw the U.S. as a place of opportunity. That's what it is. So the cost of forgiving the student loans, that's a minor cost. Instead of spending that money in Iraq and Afghanistan, we'll be redirecting a fraction of the savings to help cover some of the student loan forgiveness.

Well, I guess, I see all the parallels with humans. But I mean, for instance, one thing they do is they show this incredible play behavior. You'll get 50 or 60 on a wire, and they'll all crowd together, completely touching each other shoulder to shoulder, and then other birds will come in from above and try to knock some of them off the wire. And - I mean, it's clearly play, and the ones that are on the wire try to avoid getting knocked off. They'll even, sometimes, hang upside down in order to avoid surrendering their place. And this will go on for, you know, five or six minutes, and then their everybody just starts to spreads out and goes about, you know, resumes preening. So they're really fascinating. And the more you look at them as we've done, the more you learn about them and the more fascinating you really become.

And by the way, unfortunately, the clip that they did show - I mean, if anybody - you know, because we did pull it up right away to see the whole context of the story, and what he was talking about is he didn't understand, you know, why people tolerated the kind of gun violence that we see in this country. But with that he said but I do understand that it is a cultural thing. It does have to do with, you know, people in the South and the Midwest that have a love affair with guns. So what unfortunately went on TV was really totally a misquote on his part. So with that being said, though, you know, you have to also look at - I've been using the word gun safety since I first came to Congress. It's not a new term for me. It's something that I believe in. It's something that I feel that - I look at - before I ever came to Congress, I was a nurse, and I worked in the intensive care unit, and I have spent over 30 years in nursing. And my job here in Congress is, in my opinion, the same.

Well, I think - I mean, first of all, these shows are funny. They're ironic, they have an edge to them that penetrates and bursts the bubble of traditional media. Young people and many older people really respond to them. And I think it's fair to say that they are very journalistic in some ways. I mean they do actual interviews with newsmakers, they use videotape and juxtapose actual video of major public figures, and they poke fun at them. And so it captures a kind of a sensibility. There is information there but that's not, you know, their reason for being. Having been on "The Daily Show," I can tell you that they don't necessarily match your answer to the question that they asked in the tape because they're, you know, it's all for fun. So - but they are clearly a way that people are getting their political - particularly political cues. And they are a force to be reckoned with. I mean there is nothing to say that journalism only comes from sources that are engaged in journalism.

PHILIP REEVES reporting: No one knows how many people are out there, living in the open in the foothills of the Himalayas, but it is a multitude; aid agencies estimates fear between two and half and three and a half million people--men, women and children--battling the cold and the rain in pathetic makeshift shelters. Eight days on, aid agencies still don't know how many tents they actually need, but the number runs into hundreds of thousands. They do know, though, that only a tiny fraction of the required number has so far reached the devastated areas. Cassa Malik(ph), a Pakistani businessman based in London, has just visited the disaster zone.

I don't think it was so much that as I actually think it was people just are ahistorical and don't really understand--some of the people who are programming their news programs understand the kind, the level of significance that this man brought, not only to the comedic world but also to social commentary. And so that's--I attribute that to some of the lack of understanding and the prominence of his story, though I think you'll see more of it as days progress. And I also think you'll see more of it, frankly, when more of the white comedians step up and remind people of the kind of influence that he had, not only on their own careers and the shaping of their own comedic routes but also what he had to say about social commentary. And then I look at something like Comedy Central and I see that show "The Mind of Mencia," the guy--the comedian. And he reminds me--he's an Hispanic comedian. He reminds me in some way of that sort of mixing of both that sharp satiric edge that Richard had but very, very funny.

Well, so far the evidence is pretty much nothing. I mean, since 2006, when North Korea conducted its first nuclear test, there have been four major resolutions come out of the U.N. Security Council, imposing sanctions on North Korea, trying to stop it from moving money, from using technology and equipment. And everything that the U.N. and the international community can do to try and stop them getting their hands on this kind of stuff. And clearly, it's amounted to very little, if anything at all. North Korea is continuing to work on its nuclear program. It's continuing to carry out all kinds of tests, including submarine ballistic missile tests. So so far, North Korea has proven to be pretty impervious to the kind of punishment that the international community can impose on it. Now, the big question here is China. China is the one that has the power to inflict some pain on North Korea. It's a main economic lifeline into North Korea. So the question now is how angry is China going to be about this - because China's biggest priority is stability in North Korea. It does not want the collapse of North Korea, hungry refugees coming over the border, American troops right (ph) up to a unified Korean born in with China. So China's actions here, you know, everybody's going to be watching to see just how angry they are.

Eleven years before Rosa Parks' famed episode, another black woman, Irene Morgan, also had refused to give up her seat on a bus in Virginia. Irene Morgan's case went to the Supreme Court and ended separate seating for blacks in interstate travel, at least on paper. My state trooper hadn't gotten the word and he was not alone. Rosa Parks marked the tipping point. After a century of racial segregation, stratification and humiliation, ordinary everyday black Americans stood up and walked. They marched. For 381 days, Montgomery black folks stood up and walked to work and shop and worship rather than spend their money to be humiliated. The new medium called television broadcast their images across the country. They boycott's success triggered the modern civil rights movement. Around the world from Poland into the Soviet Union to Tiananmen Square in China, television has found freedom-loving people singing "We Shall Overcome" and quoting Martin Luther King. All of that began in Montgomery. I remember the faces in the Greyhound bus long ago. I remember their expressions of resignation. Everybody, black and white, was doing what Jim Crow told them they had to do. When I talk to Southern white people who remember those days, most of them tell me they're glad those days are gone. Rosa Parks freed them, too.

Well this really has been spiraling and gaining momentum, Melissa. As of yesterday, it seemed like there were perhaps some isolated protests around the country. There had been some opposition leaders arrested by the government of President Kurmanbek Bakiyev. Opposition groups were angry about that. They stormed one regional government building. There were reports that they took a regional governor hostage. And then we got to today and things really spread to the capital, Bishkek. The crowd outside the main government building and the city square started to grow. There were at first rubber bullets being fired by police. And then appeared real gunshots.