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That is not the final step. Whether Keystone goes forward is now up to President Obama. He has said he'd veto this bill because the project is still being reviewed by the executive branch. We've listened to many different views on Keystone, and, this morning, one voice of opposition. This pipeline, if built, will transport heavy crude oil from Canada's tar sands to the Gulf Coast. Extracting tar sands oil is an intensive process that produces more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional drilling. Susan Casey-Lefkowitz is director of programs at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy organization, and I asked her what's at stake in this debate.

Well, you know, it's an interesting question, because it's an issue of what you see and what you want to see. You know, when you had black people who were in very subservient positions, it would be very easy for whites to say, well, blacks are just very happy. You remember that was one of the myths about us. We're just very happy, and, you know, they just love to do this kind of stuff. And it was really like, no. If you really want to open your eyes and see it, you can see that we really have no choice. And so the irony is that we can now, because of the struggles of the 1960s, afford to go to another country where we have that same kind of blind eye. So we can say, oh, okay, she's just really, really extremely sexual, and she's just completely into you. Or we can look at it and say, well, was that brother who had to shine white folks' shoes really that happy when he was grinning, you know, all the time?

Well, I think the situation with Jackie would be similar no matter what she did for a living. I think she's passionate and smart, and wherever she ended up in her life, she would end up being probably the best at doing it, and she sticks to it for a long time so that she can be the best at doing it. I think she's been a nurse forever and ever. So, I think had that doctor been a woman, her reaction would have been the same. I think she doesn't want anyone to get in the way of her getting done what needs to get done because she knows how it needs to get done. So, I respect that in any person, a man or a woman or a kid, for heaven's sake. You know, if there's someone who may be, status-wise in a higher place, it's irrelevant because the work that needs to get done is of primary importance.

I would say, in the United States, we are seeing different pressures. Of course, the kinds of things - trends that get the most attention are violent attacks on journalists. But there are much more subtle means of pressuring control that go on in the United States since the terrorist attacks of September 11th. For example, the climate for press freedom has changed in terms of what stories, you know, are more controversial to cover, sort of more subtle means such as that or a pressure from governments or even financial pressures for media owners. These are all very important topics as well, and they impact the coverage that we read every day as news consumers.

When they left, they went on, you know, to do more damage to people who lived beside us and down the hill. They tried to destroy every black business, school and church. Our school - Dunbar School - was blasted with dynamite, and my father's store was destroyed. I mean, there was nothing left but one big safe. It was so big they couldn't carry it away, so they had to leave it in the middle of the rubble. To me, I guess the most shocking thing was seeing people to whom you had never done anything to irritate, who just took it upon themselves to destroy your property because they didn't want you to have those things, and they were teaching you a lesson. Those were all new ideas to me. But I guess that's part of the growing up process.

And then you look at the longer term, you see in both the U.S. and Europe this big demographic shift that's going to put a ton of pressure on government spending. Basically, there will be a lot more elderly people who qualify for government retirement benefits and government health care benefits, and there will be relatively fewer working people to support them. So in Europe, we saw this recently starting to play out when we saw street protests in France, when the government raised the retirement age. And in the U.S., we're seeing it this week in the case of Medicare and Social Security, you know, both of which are big issues that President Obama's debt commission is trying to work out.

All right. Let's get some questions in from listeners, including listeners here in the audience. If you are out there listening on the radio, 800-989-8255 is our phone number. Our e-mail address is talk@npr.org. Our guests are Ed Gillespie, a former chairman of the Republican Party, Donna Brazile, who ran Al Gore's campaign in the year 2000. And let's get a question in from the audience here in studio 4A. Mr. CHRIS URBAN(ph) (Student, George Mason University): Yes sir, thank you very much. My name is Chris Urban, and I'm a public policy major at George Mason University. And my question to the panel is with respect to the medium, the other day after the president's State of the Union address, I was driving to work and I happen to have satellite radio. And on one channel there was TalkLeft - the channel is actually called TalkLeft - and then the other, it's TalkRight. So I listen for about 5 minutes to TalkLeft, listened for about five to 10 minutes to TalkRight, and…

Yes, it does. And I think it is important to keep in mind that the British system of counterterrorism is a pretty good one. And on average, the British have foiled one major terrorist attack every year. But like every European service, the British have had a capacity problem. The number of people that have turned up on their radar screen in recent years has been so large that even a very sophisticated system like the British one has struggled. And the more - the more cases you have, the more difficult the judgment calls become. Who do you watch? Who do you consider to be acutely dangerous? And so that's been really difficult. And mistakes happen in those cases.

But he said - and I think quite rightly - there's going to be a timeline in both of those cases for withdrawal. And you know, he signed up for this when he ran for office. It includes commander-in-chief, and he said he was going to devote the resources necessary to the Afghan War, and he has done that, as you point out, tripling the force, making quite a commitment. But as General Petraeus, the commander there, just testified recently, there are gains, but it's fragile and reversible. Now, when something is fragile and reversible, that is not a solid win. That is not a stable situation. So it's difficult, but this is Obama facing the reality of being commander-in-chief when you're in two wars.

Yeah. We have - you know, when I went back and took a look at this, we find about a quarter of the kids under 25 now are enrolled in some kind of additional schooling. You know, they're enrolled in school and about - but the interesting thing with that group, Linda, is about half of them work. So that there is still very high work rates, even among people who are enrolled in school. And those who are enrolled in school, they tend to actually be working. About two-thirds of them who work are also working in professional, technical, managerial jobs. So the people that are going into these graduate programs, they're going much more on a part-time basis. They have professional jobs and they're trying to build that resume, you know, with an MBA or an MPH or whatever that whole range of degrees are, particularly as they see these adverse labor market conditions.

My - I did have one comment. And in mind with what Hank said about, you know, African-American in the last three decades or plus of essentially making their own humor and essentially healing with humor. And I feel that with Bruno, it was more or less the same thing. I saw the movie, and I had some visceral reactions to some of - the way people responded to him and not him in and of himself because he's a comedian, and that's what he's trying to portray. I just felt that their reactions were very visceral, and that upset me personally. But then I think of the millions of people who will see this movie and already have seen this movie who get a good laugh out of it and they're healed with that humor. And that's basically my thought. I'm a gay male and I'm married here - excuse me - Massachusetts and that's how I feel about the movie.

It was a very important dynamic because I wanted to explore the generational rift between Luce and Harriet. And this was obviously in the play. But what I loved about that was it gave an opportunity to explore and have a conversation around how blackness is defined and also to have a real conversation around what kind of progress we have and haven't made in the course of the last 40, 50, 60 years. Harriet is a product of the liberal revolution of the '60s, of civil rights and certain attitudes towards what it means to exist out in the world as a black person in a dominant white society. She is someone who, you know, most would describe as subscribing to respectability politics about who you have to be in order to survive. And ultimately, there's this existential debate between her and Luce, who is trying to test out theories about who he can be in this world and asking a really, really important question about who you get to be and what kind of progress you can make beyond the generation that came before you? And that's really at the heart of the conflict between these two characters.

Yeah, and I guess if you're someone of a certain age and used to seeing them as I am, like, Italy are kind of - when you think of the World Cup, there's a few nations. You mentioned Germany, Brazil. You've got to throw in Argentina. And then you always throw in Italy as well. It's a passionate soccer country. They were in pieces (laughter) when they didn't qualify. But I think it kind of goes to show if your program isn't running on full-steam, you can't rely on the past. You can't rely on legacy, and you can't rely on your name anymore. Soccer has become a lot more sophisticated. And with some investment and a bit of luck, a lot of teams are performing a lot better than they may have done in the past. I mean, you only have to look to Iceland, the world's smallest - World Cup's smallest ever of a country. They're coming to their second straight tournament. We're all looking forward to seeing them and their supporters.

Yes, I think there's no question. In fact, I wrote a story this week that said this is an unusual matchup of the candidate who was supposed to have no chance of winning re-election against the candidate who was supposed to have no chance of winning the primary. All the polls had showed that Akin was not supposed to be winning the primary, but he did. He did handily. Congressman Akin often underperforms in polls. So even some of these polls that show her with a few points ahead, that's something that most of us who have been covering him for a long time keep that in mind. He often underpolls. He actually performs better on election night.

Well, in general, I think - well, one thing, I guess, even though I do also know people of color who were born Jewish, you know, whether - because parent was or - what have you. However, it still is a big presumption that I converted. So, I could say that I wear my conversion on my sleeve. You know, there are other people, Caucasians, who convert who probably don't get noticed as much. So, I would say, again, the biggest difference there is that I'm usually asked more often than not about the process, you know, why did you convert? How did you convert? This is your first couple of questions - were to me. I do hear those questions a lot. So, I think that's probably the biggest difference. Outside of that curiosity, as they - as some people would, even if this was a Caucasian person who had converted, if they knew that, they may also ask the same questions of that person. But in terms of being treated differently within the conservative Jewish movement, because I am a convert, I again do not find that to be the case. I do know there are differences if you were within the...

The big U.S. insurance company is still trying to sell its life insurance unit in Asia. AIG says the sale would be a major step toward paying back the federal government for at least part of the billions in bailout money it received. The British financial services company Prudential had agreed to a $35 billion deal. Prudential was forced back to negotiations after its investors balked at the price tag. Talks of lowering the price to $30 billion began last week. Reports have surfaced that Prudential investors still aren't satisfied with the lower price. The two companies are racing to beat a June 7th deadline, when Prudential investors are due to vote on a deal.

Yes. I find it hard to believe. A friend of mine said if I didn't know you were sick, I wouldn't know you were sick. It's very strange because I feel - except when I'm on chemo, and you get the side effects - I have no symptoms. I feel fine. I look the way I always looked. And so I know the cancer's in there. I've seen the pictures of it. I've seen the scans. But it's sort of surreal. It's more intellectual than anything else. I have cancer because they told me. That's the only reason I know I have cancer. I did have some symptoms when I had a brain tumor. I started to slur, and oddly enough, none of my friends sort of commented on it. One friend thought I was drunk at one point, and I would say, you know, I don't drink during the day. That's not my style. But otherwise I wouldn't know. And I think a lot of people go without knowing for years.

You know, I guess the best way to discuss this is I had someone who said to me, my employer makes $250,000 a year and I am pleading with the government not to raise his taxes, because if his taxes get raised, I'm out of a job. So for many people who feel, well, if you're making $250,000 a year or you run a small or medium-owned business, of course the Bush tax cuts, you know, should be allowed to go out of place. These people are wealthy, they should be taxed. There are a lot of people who will say, you know what? That's going to have a negative impact on me. I may lose my job. Don't get rid of the tax cuts because I need to be in a position where somebody is able to actually hire me and keep me on the payroll.

Well, there's a lot of sons out there. He's not just the only one. He's just one of the - he was one of the squeakier wheels. And there are a lot of them out there - a lot. But that's what this game does. People don't - they don't understand. Inside these locker rooms, those are great laboratories for human behavior. You see it all there. And it's not all - it's not all what people think. There's a lot of sensitivity there. There's a lot of care in there. And those championship teams, they - they're kind of attached together.

I really like that song. Yeah, it's a little rap about hot chili peppers and romance. And the young man who's singing it - his name is Songe - he's speaker of a language called Aka, A-K-A. And Aka is spoken - it's actually spoken in the same villages as the previous language, the one with the fish. And what I find fascinating is that here's an endangered language. It has almost no social economic value outside of a few remote mountain villages. And that young man, Songe, he speaks five languages fluently. So he is a global citizen. He uses the Internet. He sends text messages. And he could very easily abandon his heritage language and speak, you know, the other four languages he knows: English, Nepali, Hindi, Assamese. But here, he's made a strategic decision to not only teach his language but to do something new and virtuoso with it. And that's really the key to the survival of languages: people taking pride in it, making it cool for the younger generation to speak it, and doing something creative with it.

Well, in this case, the second star is about 1 percent the brightness of the other star. And so if you're on that planet, you'd see the main star, which is not too different than our sun. It would rise and set each day. And then near it, you know, not too far off in the sky, roughly half of your - if you hold your fist down at your arm's length, roughly half that size would be the separation. And so you'd see this dimmer companion sometimes trailing, sometimes leading. Every week, you'd see the two stars eclipse each other. And so it'd be a very interesting show.

And the, you know, in those days, race relations in this city were appalling. The Metropolitan Police were, you know, almost entirely white. It was just a dreadful situation, but, you know, things have moved on in the last 25 years. And what happened very quickly was the situation got hijacked by a kind of lawlessness that was so far beyond anything related to race relations that it's almost that this young man, Mark Duggan is his name, had been completely forgotten within 24 hours of the violence occurring. And it built over a couple of nights, and the third night was Monday night into Tuesday morning, and that's when London burned. Sixteen thousand police went into the street in London last night, and the rioting - copycat rioting spread into provincial cities. The whys and wherefores are very difficult to explain. I mean, because it's a question of sociology, I think, Neal, more than politics. Twenty-five years ago, there were real political issues about racism and immigrants being represented in the institutions of society.

Yes. There will be enough Republican defections to deny him 218 Republican votes. When he did this at the end of the last Congress on the fiscal cliff, those folks that voted no on the fiscal cliff deal were praying that it got 218 votes but they could still go home and puff out their chests and say I didn't vote for it. I stood up, you know. But again, that's how stuff gets done. It's not pretty. But that's how stuff gets done. And so what you did have - and this, again, goes back to the age-old whipping process - you had Republicans who said if you need me, I'll vote for it. The difference with this bunch is that there's a bigger bunch that are saying I don't care if you need me or not. I'm not going to be part of the go-along-to-get-along team, and so don't even come bother me again.

There is no line. The line is, you know, for the individual to draw. I think you have to be aware that those lines exist, but that line is sometimes thick, sometimes thin, sometimes broken, sometimes it can be crossed by who's telling the joke and who's listening to the joke, it's, you know, it's--I don't know if there's a word that means real and not real at the same time, but it's something--you have to, you know, if you're being offensive you have to take into account that, you know, you're taking a risk and that people will be offended. And I get offended sometimes when I hear a comedian say oh, you know, they had no right to be offended, you know, don't limit my free speech. But a person has a right to feel offended and that's part of the risk that you take by, you know, putting your humor out there.

The court may well address it. There were some questions from the bench today about the Geneva Convention. The position that we argued to the court was, and it didn't come up so much in oral argument as was submitted in the briefing, that this was a capture of an individual in the context of an armed conflict between two members of the Geneva Convention, the United States and Afghanistan. He was apprehended in Afghanistan in November of 2001 and in that context, the longstanding practice of the United States, ever since the ratification of the Geneva Convention in the 1950s, has been that in that context, if someone claims the protections of the Geneva Conventions, they are afforded P.O.W. status until an Article Five hearing makes a determination of whether they deserve that status. And that's all we're asking with respect to the Geneva Convention. And in fact, Justice Sutter was quite pointed in his questioning on that matter.

It wouldn't matter who you name - Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman, any of the great violinists who are out there today - they've all spent time in this room at Bein & Fushi. Sometimes they call me up not because they think I'm going to buy anything, but they know I like looking. And of course, that's sometimes dangerous and expensive, like walking into a Ferrari dealership, especially when they say, hey, here are the keys. Would you like to take it around the block? See that? It's a Strad - one of the two that are in the shape of a guitar.

I'm a middle-school orchestra slash music, general music teacher. And it's really interesting to me to find a lot of my eighth graders tend to - well, let me put it this way. In the beginning of the school year I give them a question - what did they want to get out of this music - general music class? Half of them wanted to find out about, you know, classical musicians or composers, I should say. Mozart, Beethoven, you know, all your normal ones. And the other half actually wants to know where - you know, AC/DC came from or a little bit more of the heavy metal. So, I guess my question is how would you as a critic, and you take your son - I mean, I have 29 middle schoolers and it's half and half. How could - how could I get through all of them to enjoy opera a little bit more?

Well, a couple of things. The best way to be able to observe, track and detect these near-Earth objects is by means of telescopes, either on the ground or out in space, perhaps in orbit around the sun, perhaps in orbit around the Earth - but get them out of the atmosphere that so distorts the images. And right now we're going to having witnesses from the administration next Wednesday, including from NASA, telling us what they're doing right now, what their capability is and what more we need to do. And quite frankly I think we do need to spend more money on this particular - on this particular subject, but we need to prioritize our spending within NASA.

Let's talk about issues a little bit further because Iraq clearly the top issue of the day. But abortion, immigration, religion, tax reform, race relations all came up and were touched upon during the debate. But it seems to me, and I'd like to get your thoughts on it, that the war and the president's performance remain one of the big problematic areas for GOP contenders. Because number one, they have to appease the party faithful to get the nomination. And then they have to try to appease an angry electorate to win the White House. An example is - this clip from John McCain.

I think that - I don't own any bank stocks myself. There are two key reasons. First of all, I don't really know the banking industry that well, but second, I don't really like the banking industry much right now. I do believe that this was mainly a political move. I don't begrudge the president making political moves. After all, he's in politics. But I think that the banks wouldn't have agreed to do this unless he didn't really cost them too much. And I don't actually think that this probably prevents a lot of the problems that I think will continue this throughout the banking industry. After all, what may have started as sort of a subprime, remember? I think it was this March or April where that news broke - the big surprise and what hurt the market so much over the summer. And since then, as we found out, it wasn't just subprime mortgages was it? It was actually that friend of yours that respectable professional who lives down the other end of the block who's also now a little bit in trouble.

Well, it's a great question. I mean, the first year we did it, the EW Holiday Movie Cliche Checklist, I didn't actually call it that when I was, you know, acquiring all the movies from the publicists. I just said, oh, it's sort of a fun chart that we're going to do. And you know, it came out with that title. And then in year two when I did it, you know, I called them up and I said, so we're doing this thing. And they said, yeah, the Cliche Checklist. We want in. And so, they actually really embraced it. And it's gotten the point during the fact-checking stage, I watch so many of these movies and I'm full, you know, with so many facts that I will double-check something with them. And I'll leave this publicist unnamed, but there was a publicist who actually sent me an email and was saying, you know, in your fall off roof/ladder category? We really think we deserve a checkmark in that category, even though our character fell through the roof, not off the roof. So, it can get pretty heated.

I want to address the issue of compassion. Compassion has many faces. Some of them are fierce; some of them are wrathful; some of them are tender; some of them are wise. A line that the Dalai Lama once said, he said, "Love and compassion are necessities. They are not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive." And I would suggest, it is not only humanity that won't survive, but it is all species on the planet, as we've heard today. It is the big cats, and it's the plankton. Two weeks ago, I was in Bangalore in India. I was so privileged to be able to teach in a hospice on the outskirts of Bangalore. And early in the morning, I went into the ward. In that hospice, there were 31 men and women who were actively dying. And I walked up to the bedside of an old woman who was breathing very rapidly, fragile, obviously in the latter phase of active dying. I looked into her face. I looked into the face of her son sitting next to her, and his face was just riven with grief and confusion. And I remembered a line from the Mahabharata, the great Indian epic: "What is the most wondrous thing in the world, Yudhisthira?" And Yudhisthira replied, "The most wondrous thing in the world is that all around us people can be dying and we don't realize it can happen to us." I looked up. Tending those 31 dying people were young women from villages around Bangalore. I looked into the face of one of these women, and I saw in her face the strength that arises when natural compassion is really present. I watched her hands as she bathed an old man. My gaze went to another young woman as she wiped the face of another dying person. And it reminded me of something that I had just been present for. Every year or so, I have the privilege of taking clinicians into the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau. And we run clinics in these very remote regions where there's no medical care whatsoever. And on the first day at Simikot in Humla, far west of Nepal, the most impoverished region of Nepal, an old man came in clutching a bundle of rags. And he walked in, and somebody said something to him, we realized he was deaf, and we looked into the rags, and there was this pair of eyes. The rags were unwrapped from a little girl whose body was massively burned. Again, the eyes and hands of Avalokiteshvara. It was the young women, the health aids, who cleaned the wounds of this baby and dressed the wounds. I know those hands and eyes; they touched me as well. They touched me at that time. They have touched me throughout my 68 years. They touched me when I was four and I lost my eyesight and was partially paralyzed. And my family brought in a woman whose mother had been a slave to take care of me. And that woman did not have sentimental compassion. She had phenomenal strength. And it was really her strength, I believe, that became the kind of mudra and imprimatur that has been a guiding light in my life. So we can ask: What is compassion comprised of? And there are various facets. And there's referential and non-referential compassion. But first, compassion is comprised of that capacity to see clearly into the nature of suffering. It is that ability to really stand strong and to recognize also that I'm not separate from this suffering. But that is not enough, because compassion, which activates the motor cortex, means that we aspire, we actually aspire to transform suffering. And if we're so blessed, we engage in activities that transform suffering. But compassion has another component, and that component is really essential. That component is that we cannot be attached to outcome. Now I worked with dying people for over 40 years. I had the privilege of working on death row in a maximum security [prison] for six years. And I realized so clearly in bringing my own life experience, from working with dying people and training caregivers, that any attachment to outcome would distort deeply my own capacity to be fully present to the whole catastrophe. And when I worked in the prison system, it was so clear to me, this: that many of us in this room, and almost all of the men that I worked with on death row, the seeds of their own compassion had never been watered. That compassion is actually an inherent human quality. It is there within every human being. But the conditions for compassion to be activated, to be aroused, are particular conditions. I had that condition, to a certain extent, from my own childhood illness. Eve Ensler, whom you'll hear later, has had that condition activated amazingly in her through the various waters of suffering that she has been through. And what is fascinating is that compassion has enemies, and those enemies are things like pity, moral outrage, fear. And you know, we have a society, a world, that is paralyzed by fear. And in that paralysis, of course, our capacity for compassion is also paralyzed. The very word terror is global. The very feeling of terror is global. So our work, in a certain way, is to address this imago, this kind of archetype that has pervaded the psyche of our entire globe. Now we know from neuroscience that compassion has some very extraordinary qualities. For example: A person who is cultivating compassion, when they are in the presence of suffering, they feel that suffering a lot more than many other people do. However, they return to baseline a lot sooner. This is called resilience. Many of us think that compassion drains us, but I promise you it is something that truly enlivens us. Another thing about compassion is that it really enhances what's called neural integration. It hooks up all parts of the brain. Another, which has been discovered by various researchers at Emory and at Davis and so on, is that compassion enhances our immune system. Hey, we live in a very noxious world. (Laughter) Most of us are shrinking in the face of psycho-social and physical poisons, of the toxins of our world. But compassion, the generation of compassion, actually mobilizes our immunity. You know, if compassion is so good for us, I have a question. Why don't we train our children in compassion? (Applause) If compassion is so good for us, why don't we train our health care providers in compassion so that they can do what they're supposed to do, which is to really transform suffering? And if compassion is so good for us, why don't we vote on compassion? Why don't we vote for people in our government based on compassion, so that we can have a more caring world? In Buddhism, we say, "it takes a strong back and a soft front." It takes tremendous strength of the back to uphold yourself in the midst of conditions. And that is the mental quality of equanimity. But it also takes a soft front — the capacity to really be open to the world as it is, to have an undefended heart. And the archetype of this in Buddhism is Avalokiteshvara, Kuan-Yin. It's a female archetype: she who perceives the cries of suffering in the world. She stands with 10,000 arms, and in every hand, there is an instrument of liberation, and in the palm of every hand, there are eyes, and these are the eyes of wisdom. I say that, for thousands of years, women have lived, exemplified, met in intimacy, the archetype of Avalokitesvara, of Kuan-Yin, she who perceives the cries of suffering in the world. Women have manifested for thousands of years the strength arising from compassion in an unfiltered, unmediated way in perceiving suffering as it is. They have infused societies with kindness, and we have really felt that as woman after woman has stood on this stage in the past day and a half. And they have actualized compassion through direct action. Jody Williams called it: It's good to meditate. I'm sorry, you've got to do a little bit of that, Jody. Step back, give your mother a break, okay. (Laughter) But the other side of the equation is you've got to come out of your cave. You have to come into the world like Asanga did, who was looking to realize Maitreya Buddha after 12 years sitting in the cave. He said, "I'm out of here." He's going down the path. He sees something in the path. He looks, it's a dog, he drops to his knees. He sees that the dog has this big wound on its leg. The wound is just filled with maggots. He puts out his tongue in order to remove the maggots, so as not to harm them. And at that moment, the dog transformed into the Buddha of love and kindness. I believe that women and girls today have to partner in a powerful way with men — with their fathers, with their sons, with their brothers, with the plumbers, the road builders, the caregivers, the doctors, the lawyers, with our president, and with all beings. The women in this room are lotuses in a sea of fire. May we actualize that capacity for women everywhere. Thank you. (Applause)

Well, it's certainly not comfortable for us to be viewed in any way as embracing Michael Vick, and it is a risk. We hope that people know that we are not in any way tolerant of his past behavior. But the work of the Humane Society is all about social change. It's about individual change, people doing better in terms of their relationships with animals. And this is a very difficult case and a very difficult circumstance, but if Michael Vick can change, I think that that might give us, you know, greater hope for the broader possibilities in society, but it's really up to him.

Well, here we've got a lot of great shows nominated. We've got "Downton Abbey." We've got "House Of Cards." We've got "Madmen." I think "Game Of Thrones" is a big contender here, but the real conflict may be between "Breaking Bad" and HBO's "True Detective." Now, "Breaking Bad" gets my vote for wrapping up last year with one of the best endings we've seen on a series ever on television. But "True Detective" got buzz, and that's largely because of a great performance from movie star Matthew McConaughey. And some people in the TV industry are crying foul. I mean, they're saying because McConaughey never intended to do more than one season of this show, it should be more an anthology miniseries than a series. But shows like "True Detective" and "American Horror Story," they are redefining what a series really is.

Last week, Congress took up critical debates on the way ahead in Iraq, which boiled down to three broad alternatives: stay the course, pull U.S. and allied forces out as soon as possible, or rethink strategy in Iraq. All these options present difficult choices. None is risk free. So, what's the best way ahead? Our number, if you'd like to join the conversation, is 800-989-8255, 800-989-TALK. The e-mail address is talk@npr.org. Later in the program, fathers and family courts on the TALK OF THE NATION Opinion Page this week. But first, the war - what's ahead in Iraq. We'll talk later in the program with military analyst William Arkin, and with Leslie Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations, who argues that the best bad choice is to abandon the idea of a centralized government and construct a federated Iraq.

Yes, absolutely. And they all contribute chemicals to the air in an aircraft. When we're talking about the ozone, the chemistry involving ozone, it's important to realize that ozone reacts with only a subset of the pollutants typically found in the air. It reacts with compounds that have unsaturated carbon-carbon bonds. If you think of cooking oils and you think of saturated cooking oils and unsaturated cooking oils, ozone reacts with the unsaturated cooking oil not the saturated cooking oil. So about 10 percent of the organic pollutants that you find in an aircraft have unsaturated bonds and will react with ozone to make something else.

So, when you look at The New York Times and their partnership with the Discovery Channel. The New York Times now does incredible pieces with Discovery Channel in investigative journalism. That's the new model that newspapers are going to start pursuing. And I don't necessarily think it's going to be a bad thing. Because oftentimes when you look at today's newspapers, much of it is filler and much of it is wire service copy. There are very few papers in this country that are doing original reporting because the cost of it so tremendous. It's the main reason why you have broadcast television networks that don't really have foreign news bureaus anymore. CNN still has probably the widest reach of any American television broadcast network. But that's been cut back years ago.

The question really is not, is this bad for democracy? The legal question is, can we even measure this? Should we get into it? Is this a political question that we should stay out of? And can we define what's extreme gerrymandering? And does that - in the words of Justice Kennedy, who's likely to be the deciding vote in this case - if you play around with these districts too much, have you devalued one party's voters so much that you are denying them their First Amendment right of freedom of association so that their votes don't count as much?

I'm a native New Orleanian, and while this is a tremendous tragedy from a historical perspective, New Orleans was a city that was very sick as far as--the school system was abysmal, and many about to be taken over by the state. The political system has been inherently corrupt. And this, from a therapeutic standpoint, might be a golden opportunity to really rethink and rework not only the physical city, but also the psychological part of the city, and get rid of some of that corruption. It, to me, is sort of a cleansing. And this tragedy, I mean, from a personal perspective, has cost my family dearly. Three of my family members are now no longer living in New Orleans right now. So we need to look at the other side of this. This is a city with major problems, and now we're going to be able to, hopefully, do it again and do it much better.

Yes. Like, for instance, Margaret Houston, she had the breast tumor, after her second pregnancy, that had grown very painful. And she wrote Houston a letter and said: This is going to be a trifle of an operation. It will be very short. I will sit down and take it like a soldier. She bit on a silver coin and had a breast tumor removed, survived and had six more children. These women did hold the household. So Margaret Houston had eight children. She raised them, stayed at home, hardly - never went to Washington, didn't go to Austin very much. And it was amazing what they could do by themselves. And so, really, the title of my book "Unflinching Courage" comes from the women and their bravery.

So I'm going to talk about work; specifically, why people can't seem to get work done at work, which is a problem we all kind of have. But let's sort of start at the beginning. So, we have companies and non-profits and charities and all these groups that have employees or volunteers of some sort. And they expect these people who work for them to do great work — I would hope, at least. At least good work, hopefully, at least it's good work — hopefully great work. And so what they typically do is they decide that all these people need to come together in one place to do that work. So a company, or a charity, or an organization of any kind, unless you're working in Africa, if you're really lucky to do that — most people have to go to an office every day. And so these companies, they build offices. They go out and they buy a building, or they rent a building, or they lease some space, and they fill this space with stuff. They fill it with tables, or desks, chairs, computer equipment, software, Internet access, maybe a fridge, maybe a few other things, and they expect their employees, or their volunteers, to come to that location every day to do great work. It seems like it's perfectly reasonable to ask that. However, if you actually talk to people and even question yourself, and you ask yourself, where do you really want to go when you really need to get something done? You'll find out that people don't say what businesses think they would say. If you ask people the question: Where do you need to go when you need to get something done? Typically, you get three different kinds of answers. One is kind of a place or a location or a room. Another one is a moving object, and a third is a time. So here are some examples. I've been asking people this question for about 10 years: "Where do you go when you really need to get something done?" I'll hear things like, the porch, the deck, the kitchen. I'll hear things like an extra room in the house, the basement, the coffee shop, the library. And then you'll hear things like the train, a plane, a car — so, the commute. And then you'll hear people say, "Well, it doesn't really matter where I am, as long as it's early in the morning or late at night or on the weekends." You almost never hear someone say, "The office." But businesses are spending all this money on this place called the office, and they're making people go to it all the time, yet people don't do work in the office. What is that about? (Laughter) Why is that? Why is that happening? And what you find out is, if you dig a little bit deeper, you find out that people — this is what happens: People go to work, and they're basically trading in their work day for a series of "work moments" — that's what happens at the office. You don't have a work day anymore. You have work moments. It's like the front door of the office is like a Cuisinart, and you walk in and your day is shredded to bits, because you have 15 minutes here, 30 minutes there, and something else happens, you're pulled off your work, then you have 20 minutes, then it's lunch, then you have something else to do ... Then you've got 15 minutes, and someone pulls you aside and asks you a question, and before you know it, it's 5 p.m., and you look back on the day, and you realize that you didn't get anything done. We've all been through this. We probably went through it yesterday or the day before, or the day before that. You look back on your day, and you're like, "I got nothing done today. I was at work. I sat at my desk. I used my expensive computer. I used the software they told me to use. I went to these meetings I was asked to go to. I did these conference calls. I did all this stuff. But I didn't actually do anything. I just did tasks. I didn't actually get meaningful work done." And what you find is that, especially with creative people — designers, programmers, writers, engineers, thinkers — that people really need long stretches of uninterrupted time to get something done. You cannot ask somebody to be creative in 15 minutes and really think about a problem. You might have a quick idea, but to be in deep thought about a problem and really consider a problem carefully, you need long stretches of uninterrupted time. And even though the work day is typically eight hours, how many people here have ever had eight hours to themselves at the office? How about seven hours? Six? Five? Four? When's the last time you had three hours to yourself at the office? Two hours? One, maybe? Very, very few people actually have long stretches of uninterrupted time at an office. And this is why people choose to do work at home, or they might go to the office, but they might go to the office really early in the day, or late at night when no one's around, or they stick around after everyone's left, or go in on the weekends, or they get work done on the plane, in the car or in the train, because there are no distractions. Now there are different kinds of distractions, but not the really bad distractions, which I'll talk about in a minute. And this whole phenomenon of having short bursts of time to get things done reminds me of another thing that doesn't work when you're interrupted, and that is sleep. I think that sleep and work are very closely related — not because you can work while you're sleeping and sleep while you're working. That's not really what I mean. I'm talking specifically about the fact that sleep and work are phase-based, or stage-based, events. Sleep is about sleep phases, or stages — some people call them different things. There are five of them, and in order to get to the really deep ones, the meaningful ones, you have to go through the early ones. If you're interrupted while you're going through the early ones — if someone bumps you in bed, or there's a sound, or whatever happens — you don't just pick up where you left off. If you're interrupted and woken up, you have to start again. So you have to go back a few phases and start again. And what ends up happening — you might have days like this where you wake up at eight or seven in the morning, or whenever you get up, and you're like, "I didn't sleep very well. I did the sleep thing — I went to bed, I laid down, but I didn't really sleep." People say you go "to" sleep, but you don't go to sleep, you go towards sleep; it takes a while. You've got to go through phases and stuff, and if you're interrupted, you don't sleep well. So does anyone here expect someone to sleep well if they're interrupted all night? I don't think anyone would say yes. Why do we expect people to work well if they're being interrupted all day at the office? How can we possibly expect people to do their job if they go to the office and are interrupted? That doesn't really seem like it makes a lot of sense, to me. So what are the interruptions that happen at the office but not at other places? Because in other places, you can have interruptions like the TV, or you could go for a walk, or there's a fridge downstairs, or you've got your own couch, or whatever you want to do. If you talk to certain managers, they'll tell you that they don't want their employees to work at home because of these distractions. They'll sometimes also say, "If I can't see the person, how do I know they're working?" which is ridiculous, but that's one of the excuses that managers give. And I'm one of these managers. I understand. I know how this goes. We all have to improve on this sort of thing. But oftentimes they'll cite distractions: "I can't let someone work at home. They'll watch TV, or do this other thing." It turns out those aren't the things that are distracting, Because those are voluntary distractions. You decide when you want to be distracted by the TV, when you want to turn something on, or when you want to go downstairs or go for a walk. At the office, most of the interruptions and distractions that really cause people not to get work done are involuntary. So let's go through a couple of those. Now, managers and bosses will often have you think that the real distractions at work are things like Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and other websites, and in fact, they'll go so far as to actually ban these sites at work. Some of you may work at places where you can't get to certain sites. I mean, is this China? What the hell is going on here? You can't go to a website at work, and that's the problem? That's why people aren't getting work done, because they're on Facebook and Twitter? That's kind of ridiculous. It's a total decoy. Today's Facebook and Twitter and YouTube, these things are just modern-day smoke breaks. No one cared about letting people take a smoke break for 15 minutes 10 years ago, so why does anyone care if someone goes to Facebook or Twitter or YouTube here and there? Those aren't the real problems in the office. The real problems are what I like to call the M&Ms, the Managers and the Meetings. Those are the real problems in the modern office today. And this is why things don't get done at work, it's because of the M&Ms. Now what's interesting is, if you listen to all the places that people talk about doing work, like at home, in the car, on a plane, late at night, or early in the morning, you don't find managers and meetings. You find a lot of other distractions, but not managers and meetings. So these are the things that you don't find elsewhere, but you do find at the office. And managers are basically people whose job it is to interrupt people. That's pretty much what managers are for. They're for interrupting people. They don't really do the work, so they make sure everyone else is doing work, which is an interruption. We have lots of managers in the world now, and a lot of people in the world, and a lot of interruptions by these managers. They have to check in: "Hey, how's it going? Show me what's up." This sort of thing. They keep interrupting you at the wrong time, while you're actually trying to do something they're paying you to do, they tend to interrupt you. That's kind of bad. But what's even worse is the thing that managers do most of all, which is call meetings. And meetings are just toxic, terrible, poisonous things during the day at work. (Laughter) We all know this to be true, and you would never see a spontaneous meeting called by employees. It doesn't work that way. The manager calls the meeting so the employees can all come together, and it's an incredibly disruptive thing to do to people — to say, "Hey look, we're going to bring 10 people together right now and have a meeting. I don't care what you're doing, you've got to stop doing it, so you can have this meeting." I mean, what are the chances that all 10 people are ready to stop? What if they're thinking about something important, or doing important work? All of a sudden you tell them they have to stop doing that to do something else. So they go into a meeting room, they get together, and they talk about stuff that doesn't really matter, usually. Because meetings aren't work. Meetings are places to go to talk about things you're supposed to be doing later. But meetings also procreate. So one meeting tends to lead to another meeting, which leads to another meeting. There's often too many people in the meetings, and they're very, very expensive to the organization. Companies often think of a one-hour meeting as a one-hour meeting, but that's not true, unless there's only one person. If there are 10 people, it's a 10-hour meeting, not a one-hour meeting. It's 10 hours of productivity taken from the rest of the organization to have this one-hour meeting, which probably should have been handled by two or three people talking for a few minutes. But instead, there's a long scheduled meeting, because meetings are scheduled the way software works, which is in increments of 15 minutes, or 30 minutes, or an hour. You don't schedule an eight-hour meeting with Outlook; you can't. You can go 15 minutes or 30 minutes or 45 minutes or an hour. And so we tend to fill these times up when things should go really quickly. So meetings and managers are two major problems in businesses today, especially at offices. These things don't exist outside of the office. So I have some suggestions to remedy the situation. What can managers do — enlightened managers, hopefully — what can they do to make the office a better place for people to work, so it's not the last resort, but it's the first resort, so that people start to say, "When I really want to get stuff done, I go to the office." Because the offices are well-equipped; everything is there for them to do the work. But they don't want to go there right now, so how do we change that? I have three suggestions to share with you. I have about three minutes, so that'll fit perfectly. We've all heard of the Casual Friday thing. I don't know if people still do that. But how about "No-talk Thursdays?" (Laughter) Pick one Thursday once a month, and cut it in half, just the afternoon — I'll make it easy for you. So just the afternoon, one Thursday. First Thursday of the month, just the afternoon, nobody in the office can talk to each other. Just silence, that's it. And what you'll find is that a tremendous amount of work gets done when no one talks to each other. This is when people actually get stuff done, is when no one's bothering them or interrupting them. Giving someone four hours of uninterrupted time is the best gift you can give anybody at work. It's better than a computer, better than a new monitor, better than new software, or whatever people typically use. Giving them four hours of quiet time at the office is going to be incredibly valuable. If you try that, I think you'll agree, and hopefully you can do it more often. So maybe it's every other week, or every week, once a week, afternoons no one can talk to each other. That's something that you'll find will really, really work. Another thing you can try, is switching from active communication and collaboration, which is like face-to-face stuff — tapping people on the shoulder, saying hi to them, having meetings, and replace that with more passive models of communication, using things like email and instant messaging, or collaboration products, things like that. Now some people might say email is really distracting, I.M. is really distracting, and these other things are really distracting, but they're distracting at a time of your own choice and your own choosing. You can quit the email app; you can't quit your boss. You can quit I.M.; you can't hide your manager. You can put these things away, and then you can be interrupted on your own schedule, at your own time, when you're available, when you're ready to go again. Because work, like sleep, happens in phases. So you'll be going up, doing some work, and then you'll come down from that work, and then maybe it's time to check that email or I.M. There are very, very few things that are that urgent, that need to happen, that need to be answered right this second. So if you're a manager, start encouraging people to use more things like I.M. and email and other things that someone can put away and then get back to you on their own schedule. And the last suggestion I have is that, if you do have a meeting coming up, if you have the power, just cancel it. Just cancel that next meeting. (Laughter) Today's Friday, usually people have meetings on Monday. Just don't have it. I don't mean move it; I mean just erase it from memory, it's gone. And you'll find out that everything will be just fine. All these discussions and decisions you thought you had to make at this one time at 9 a.m. on Monday, just forget about them, and things will be fine. People will have a more open morning, they can actually think. You'll find out all these things you thought you had to do, you don't actually have to do. So those are just three quick suggestions I wanted to give you guys to think about. I hope that some of these ideas were at least provocative enough for managers and bosses and business owners and organizers and people who are in charge of other people, to think about laying off a little bit, and giving people more time to get work done. I think it'll all pay off in the end. So, thanks for listening. (Applause)

Well, there is a movement to kind of do it with cell phone cameras. Some people are putting 2D barcodes on the actual business cards. So you can scan it in that way and get that information without having to type it all in. And then there's also the idea of synching it over an iPhone. For instance, there's an application called Bump, where you just rub two iPhones together and it transmits that information wirelessly. But I think business cards still have cache. I don't think we're going to see business cards go away completely any time soon until there's one, really good, elegant solution for dealing with them.

Well, I mean, quite clearly U.S.-Pakistani relations over the past eight years in particular have been this balancing act of giving money and expecting something in return. And, you know, obviously, not everything that was expected was given on the part of the Pakistani. But the U.S. must see it not just as a moral imperative, but a strategic one. You're going after the Taliban, but you're certainly trying to win the hearts and minds of the Pakistani people, especially in places like Fatah. And if aid is not forthcoming to these people, if they see the government as being an oppressive government and if they see the U.S. collaborating and funding this effort, quite clearly you're losing that battle.

Indeed. He underscored that he's ready to take risks for peace, which was exactly Yitzhak Rabin's formula back in the early '90s when he decided to make peace. So, yes, I think he strove to take on that mantle of peacemaker. He didn't really make much of Iran, even though Iran is much more on his mind. And I think that this is a recognition on his part that there's a mood shift in Israel - not that noticeable from here but I've just been in Israel and I felt it very strongly, that the public was really shocked at the way in which the whole world seemed to turn against it over the flotilla crisis. And they really felt in a corner and wondering what lay ahead in their future with this effort to delegitimize Israel and delegitimize its use of force as well. And I think there's a public mood of wanting their leadership to take an initiative, to try to use politics and not just force. And I think the prime minister is responding to that.

You're right, Alex. Normally, countries that are developing a nuclear weapons program don't reveal that program until after they've tested a nuclear weapon, and then they do solely because they can't hide it anymore. The North Koreans have taken a much different tack. In February, they said, `We have a nuclear weapon.' Kim Gye Gwan, who's the vice foreign minister and the lead negotiator for North Korea on the nuclear talks, which have been stalled since last June, looked right in our camera and says, `We have nuclear weapons.' And I said, `Are you building more?' And he says, `Yes, we are building more.' And I asked him many other questions about their long-term missile capabilities, and he was a little bit more vague on that. But the bottom line is the North Koreans want the world to believe that they have nuclear weapons, even though no Western scientists have seen one, and they haven't tested one. And they've actually grown quite frustrated at skeptics outside of North Korea who don't believe it.

Alex, thank you for your service, and those are great comments. This shows I think that the strength of mind of our current military. I mean obviously, Alex is someone who has strong religious convictions on that that they tell him a certain thing about homosexuality and yet he has the openness of mind plus the experience. I mean he served with gay or lesbian members - I don't know which it was in his particular case - and he sees that we're able to work together on that. This generation has grown up very differently than mine. I mean, I'm an old guy. When I went to high school, there were no gays or lesbians. Of course, there were, but at that time, it was worse to be a gay or lesbian than it was to be a communist or Marxist or something like that. Now, this generation has grown up with images on TV, in media, they've known gays and lesbians high school, in college, stuff like that. There's an acceptance there and understanding. It's a very different age and it would be a mistake to impose, I think in essence, the prejudices of the past on the current military.

Well, that's an excellent question, Farai. I think that we need to understand that when we talk about how we define the movement in the 21st century, community has changed completely. Now, I meet folks who are from parts of Long Island or suburban New Jersey and other areas who want to do something for the community, but they feel like they're not doing being reached out, too, because there's this notion that if you're black, it has to be one way - you only have to - you only can talk about certain kinds of issues. And that's wrong as well.

Hi. I have a PhD in philosophy and I've been teaching for 20 years and I could not agree with Professor Fish more. I found that most students come to us with their characters already very well formed for better or worse and that as one of the schools I taught at said it is our job to shape students' souls. I find that we're not equipped to do that, that that's incredibly arrogant to assume that we are, and as someone who's from a low-income working class background, I know that I learned my values and ethics from my family and the people with whom I grew up, not in academia. So I'm curious as to why it is that we are in the minority. I'm interested in seeing if - whether Professor Fish has anything to say about that, as to why we are on the minority on that.

That's correct. That's really the big question. The buzz here in Europe is people were really wondering if Lance can come back to the top levels to what it takes to win a race like the Tour de France. We're talking three weeks racing, every day 100 percent, that the winning and losing margins come down to percentage points. The big question is, is he capable of coming back from the three and a half year stop by the time he comes back to the Tour next year. Can he regain that fitness to win? No one knows the answer to that right now.

Democracy was an interesting finding as well. We found that people generally said that democracy, greater democracy, would help Muslims progress. When we asked them what do they admired about the West, an open-ended question. People would actually say in their own words things like the rule of law, transparency of government, accountability. The very things that we would say are building blocks of the democratic society. But when asked, is the U.S. serious about the establishment of democratic governments in this region? The answer was, in many cases, no. So, an admiration of democracy but a lack of - a great deal of skepticism that the U.S. was actually serious about it.

Michael Edwards joined the military shortly after 9/11. Before that, he ran a vegetarian catering company. Fine dining is now Edwards' specialty, but his military career didn't start with amuse-bouche or vichyssoise. He cooks for thousands of sailors aboard the aircraft carrier the USS John C. Stennis. CS1 EDWARDS: I started out working in S2, which is basically the galley for the enlisted people. It's the largest volume of people that you're cooking for. And we cooked in these huge, these large coppers. They call them coppers. They're massive steam kettles where you can cook all your food, and you have a row of them, so that the person who's good at that has a metal paddle, and they call him the copper king. And that's what they do. They just put out an enormous amount of food four times a day because you know, on an aircraft carrier, it's like a floating city, so you have people awake 24 hours a day.

And so the scar's back out there where everybody can see it. But now, today, dealing with life in itself, well, I've learned enough that it doesn't bother me. I go uptown and get my lunch, and I don't wear a hat anymore and people can see the scar. I go to church in uptown. But I have - my point is that, especially young kids, the parents can go out of their way to say it's okay to be curious and ask questions of the person that has that scar. And there were always - there's about two or three people in my fourth grade that were curious in a good way, and they helped me out by still associating with me. And their curiosity, coincidentally, later in life, they developed careers in sciences.

Maj. Gen. GASKIN: Our recruiting is going extremely well. And, as you know, this is an all-volunteer service and that this generation, many a generation is outstanding group of young men and women who feel that they like to do things more than for themselves, and they would like to participate in the freedom of not only America, but those who want the opportunities that they love and cherish around the world. So, these young men and women come in to Marine Corps expecting to deploy, expecting to be the nation's 911, and expecting to follow the principles and ideas of our nation. So, I've have seen that the morale is good. I've seen that these young men and women have a very clear understanding of what we are trying to do in Iraq. And I think that they support that by their volunteering to be a part of the Marine Corps.

Just the founder of a 260-million-dollar-a-year business, Patagonia, known for its high-quality outdoor wear and its customers who are practically devout. And now he's just the author of a new book outlining his unconventional business philosophy. It's called "Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman." Yvon Chouinard is an outdoorsman who begin forging climbing equipment because he could design and make things that were better than what else was available. He says he runs his privately owned company now in order to make money to support environmental causes. And Yvon Chouinard doesn't look like a typical businessman, dressed here in khakis and a polo shirt and wearing hemp Converse sneakers on his feet.

When you are living in Jerusalem, you are living in a city that has Jews and Palestinians, Muslims and Christians, of course. The interaction is in daily life. When I'm taking to fix my car, I will meet workers that are Palestinians. When I will go to the hospital, if I need something from the hospital, I will meet doctors that are Palestinians. You cannot separate the two communities. We are living together. If you are now taking away 300,000 Palestinians that are living in the city, then you are making the financial situation of the city, the financial system of the city, to collapse. As if you are taking the 600,000 Jews that are living in the city out of the city, the financial system will collapse.

Right. It's still - last year was still the best year on record. You have to understand that the jobs report is based on a sample that has sampling variation that goes up and down every month. And there's a very positive trend for employment for people of all races. And that blip really looked quite a bit different from the rest of the report, and it's something that our statisticians think is related to the sampling properties of the jobs report. And it'll be reversed next month or two. And, you know, at the next jobs report, I'm happy to come back and talk about it.

Even though I live in Victor, New York, which is near Rochester, I was born and raised in the Bronx. And some of my earliest memories are of the subway in the - from the '50s. I used to think that the subways were singing a song because of the rhythm of the subways. We traveled on the subway a lot as a very, very little girl. And I would get kind of irritated when no one else could hear the songs that the subways were singing. But I also wanted to share an incredible novel about the building of the subways called "This Side of Brightness" by Colum McCann, and it follows a group of sandhogs and then subsequent generations. And it's about both the subways in a historical context, and also in a kind of psychological and mythical context. And it's absolutely beautiful. And for anyone who has a relationship with the subways, it's really an incredible experience to read that book. And so I thank you for your wonderful program.

The problem is that what looks right for one viewer, might be wrong for another viewer. Maybe they were taller or shorter, and likewise maybe the person who calibrated it was touching with one part of their finger, and the person using it is touching with a different part of their finger. All of these issues can lead to some of the confusion, where people think they're pressing one candidate, and it selects the other. You know, voters could be advised to, if it doesn't work, try aiming high, and if that doesn't work, try aiming low, and see if you can figure it out, but not everybody is going to be able to do that.

Well, Tony, we have so many people who have become addicted to credit cards. Minimum payments of 2 to 4 percent mean that the $500 stereo that you charge today, you know, they'll ask you for $15 a month, and you'll be paying for it 10 years later. So it's important to impose financial discipline. Obviously the way that it's going to happen will be a shock if you've been paying the $15 and you get the bill that says $30. But this--in fact, we have so much debt in America and African-American people are especially vulnerable to that credit card debt because we don't have the home equity debt, which is also being dealt with this year. So it's a good thing in the long run. In the short run, a lot of people are going to get pinched. It's a good time right now, at the end of the year, for people to take a look at what they owe, how they intend to pay it back, and cut up some of those cards.

Yes. Charon is not included in my book because it's not quite a planet. It's even less of a planet than Pluto may be now, but it does figure in astrologers' charts. They definitely count it in. And the 12th - that 12th planet, no. What was really interesting was the 10th planet which was for a long time called Xena and which really forced the issue of the planet definition because that body is larger than Pluto. So if Pluto was a planet, then Xena would have been, too. But it is not, and it has now gotten its official name of Eris, which convinces me that scientists still have a sense of humor.

Well, I was backpacking throughout China. And in southern China, there's this little town called Guilin. And I wanted to go from Guilin the south-most point of China, which is Hainan Island. And, you know, I had been doing the trains. And I saw a sleeper bus. I had never seen this before. It's a sleeper bus, where beds are lined up parallel to the sides of the bus. And what I didn't anticipate is that the beds were going to be most uncomfortable. I'm 6-foot-3 and I'm, you know, I'm bigger than the average Chinese person. So I was already uncomfortable. And not only that, but the bus driver seemed to have four songs on the CD that was playing...

Imata raun paiga? (‘What is she doing?’) – my husband’s grandmother, Digna, asks him. The ‘she’ Digna is referring to is me. What I am doing is rather simple: I am wrapping my four-month-old son in a baby sling, his face toward my chest, in a calm, reassuring embrace. But my husband’s grandmother, who has raised 12 children in a small village in the Ecuadorian Amazon, does not think of this mundane gesture as being anything normal. ‘Why is she wrapping the baby like that?’ she insists, with genuine surprise. ‘This way the baby is trapped! How is he even able to see around?’ Squished inside the wrap, my son immediately starts crying, as if confirming his great-grandmother’s opinion. I bounce him up and down, in the hope of soothing his cries. I turn to Digna and say: ‘This way he is not overstimulated, he sleeps better.’ Digna, who has since passed away, is a wise, dignified woman. She simply smiles and nods, saying: ‘I see.’ I keep bouncing up and down, walking back and forth across the thatched house, until my son eventually snoozes and I can breathe again. The relief of being able to breathe again: that’s perhaps a feeling familiar to most new parents. Like many other people I know, I also almost lost my mind after the birth of my first child. It’s hard to tell how the madness began: whether it started with the kind and persistent breastfeeding advice of the midwives at the baby-friendly hospital where I gave birth, or with a torn copy of Penelope Leach’s parenting bestseller, Your Baby and Child: From Birth to Age Five, first published in 1977, confidently handed to me by a friend who assured me it contained all I needed to know about childcare. Or maybe it was just in the air, everywhere around me, around us: the daunting feeling that the way I behaved – even my smallest, most mundane gestures – would have far-reaching consequences for my child’s future psychological wellbeing. I was certainly not the only parent to feel this way. Contemporary parenting in postindustrial societies is characterised by the idea that early childhood experiences are key to successful cognitive and emotional development. The idea of parental influence is nothing new and, at a first glance, it seems rather banal: who wouldn’t agree, after all, that parents have some sort of influence over their children’s development? However, contemporary parenting (call it what you like: responsive parenting, natural parenting, attachment parenting) goes beyond this simple claim: it suggests that caretakers’ actions have an enormous, long-lasting influence on a child’s emotional and cognitive development. Everything you do – how much you talk to your children, how you feed them, the way you discipline them, even how you put them to bed – is said to have ramifications for their future wellbeing. This sense of determinism feeds the idea of providing the child with a very specific type of care. As a document on childcare from the World Health Organization (WHO) puts it, parents are supposed to be attentive, proactive, positive and empathetic. Another WHO document lists specific behaviours to adopt: early physical contact between the baby and the mother, repeated eye contact, constant physical closeness, immediate responsiveness to infant’s crying, and more. As the child grows older, the practices change (think of parent-child play, stimulating language skills), yet the core idea remains the same: your child’s physical and emotional needs must be promptly and appropriately responded to, if she is to have an optimal development and a happy, successful life. Like other such parents, in the first few postpartum months I also engaged, rather unreflectively, in this craze. However, when my son was four months old, during a period ridden with chaos, parental anxiety, sleep deprivation and mental fogginess, my husband and I made the decision to leave Europe. We packed our clothes and a few other things and hopped on a flight to Ecuador. Our final destination: a small Runa Indigenous village of about 500 people in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Our decision wasn’t as mad as it sounds. The Ecuadorian Amazon is where my husband grew up and where his family currently lives. It is also the place where I have been doing research for more than a decade. We wanted to introduce our newborn to our family and friends in the village, and we didn’t think twice before going. I could not yet imagine the repercussions this decision would have on me, both as a mother and as a scholar. I ended up in frantic searches across the village to find my baby, under the perplexed stares of neighbours In the first weeks of our stay in my husband’s village, family and neighbours quietly observed how I took care of my son. He was never out of my sight, I was there always for him, promptly responding to (and anticipating) any of his needs. If he wanted to be held or breastfed, I would interrupt any activity to care for him. If he cried in the hammock, I quickly ran to soothe his cries. Our closeness soon became the subject of humour, and then, as the months passed, of growing concern. Nobody ever said anything explicitly to me or my husband. Most Runa Indigenous people – the community to which my husband belongs – are deeply humble and profoundly dislike to tell others how to behave. Yet it became clear that my family and neighbours found my behaviour bizarre, if not at times utterly disconcerting. I did not really understand their surprise nor did I, in the beginning, give it too much thought. People, however, started rebelling. They did so quietly, without making a fuss, but consistently enough for me to realise that something was going on. For instance, I would leave my baby with his dad to take a short bath in the river and, upon my return, my son would no longer be there. ‘Oh, the neighbour took him for a walk,’ my husband would nonchalantly say, lying in the hammock. Trying desperately not to immediately rush to the neighbours’ house, I would spend the following hours frenetically walking up and down in our yard, pacing and turning at any sudden noise in the hope that the neighbours had finally returned with my son. I was never able to wait patiently for their return, so I often ended up engaging in frantic searches across the village to find my baby, under the perplexed stares of other neighbours. I usually came back home emptyhanded, depressed and exhausted. ‘Stop chasing people! He will be fine,’ my husband would tell me affectionately, giving me the perfect pretext to transform my anxiety into anger for his fastidiously serene and irresponsible attitude. At the end, my son always came back perfectly healthy and cheerful. He was definitely OK. I was not. On another occasion, a close friend of ours who was about to return to her house in the provincial capital (a good seven hours from our village) came to say goodbye. She took my son in her arms. She then told me: ‘Give him to me. I will bring him to my house, and you can have a bit of rest.’ Unsure whether she was serious or not, I simply giggled in response. She smiled and left the house with my son. I watched her walking away with him and I hesitated a few minutes. I did not want to look crazy: surely she was not taking away my five-month-old son? I begged my husband to go to fetch our baby just in case she really wanted to take him away. When we finally found them, she was already sitting in the canoe, holding my son in her lap. ‘Oh, you want him back?’ she asked me with a mischievous laugh. To this day I am not sure whether she would have really taken him or whether she was just teasing me. As an anthropologist, I admit, I should have known better. Scholars who work on parenting and childrearing have consistently shown that, outside populations defined as WEIRD (white, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic), children are taken care of by multiple people, not solely their mothers. The dyad of the mother-child relationship upon which so much of psychological theory rests reflects a standard Western view of the family as a nuclear unit – where parents (and, more specifically, mothers) are in charge of most childcare. In most places in the world, relationships with grandparents, siblings and peers are as important as the ones with the parents. As a new mother, however, it was difficult to appreciate this reality, especially when people were not merely claiming my son as their own but also clearly showing to me that what they thought was important for a child’s proper development differed quite dramatically from my own beliefs. This became clear one day when Leticia, my husband’s aunt, came to visit us. Leticia had in the past affectionately joked about how caring and loving I was toward my son, and how amazed she was at the time and attention I devoted to him. As we were sitting together in our thatched house, Leticia took my son in her arms and started playfully talking with him. She tenderly touched his nose and laughed. ‘Oh poor little baby,’ she exclaimed suddenly. ‘Poor little baby, what will you do if your mother dies?’ She kissed him on the cheek. ‘You will be an orphan! Alone and sad!’ she laughed cheerfully. She then turned around so that I was no longer in my son’s sight. ‘Look! There is no more mama! She is gone, dead! What will you do, my dear?’ She kissed him again and laughed softly. In her landmark book on Inuit child socialisation, Inuit Morality Play (1998), the anthropologist Jean Briggs describes how Inuit adults ask children very similar questions. ‘Want to come to live with me?’ asks an unrelated woman to a toddler whose parents she is briefly visiting. Briggs argues that this kind of difficult teasing – which might sound inappropriate, even offensive to a Euro-American – helps young children think about matters of extreme emotional complexity, such as death, jealousy and loneliness. She describes at great length how, for the Inuit she worked with, this kind of teasing ‘cause[s] thought’. Likewise, I also often hear my family engaging in this kind of teasing with older children: this was, however, the first time I had become the target of it. For if Leticia’s teasing was intended to ‘cause thought’, my son was certainly not the only person she was encouraging to think. To let children face the world re-orients their attention towards sociality, toward others Hers was not just an admonishment on the perils of a too-exclusive attachment, a reminder of the eternal fluctuations of life and death. It was also an invitation for me, as a mother, to take a step back and let my son encounter and be held by others, lest he be ‘alone and sad’. In a place like a Runa village, where cooperation, work and mutual help are so important for living a good life, Leticia seemed to be telling me, my son truly needed to be with other people beyond his mother. Leticia’s episode made me think about Digna’s puzzlement at the way I carried my baby. Despite the calm, respectful response Digna gave me at the time I was wrapping my son, she must have thought I was crazy. What could the concept of sensorial overstimulation have meant to her? Runa children are carried around in a sling with their faces toward the outside, all the time, everywhere, from dawn to night, under the rain and the sun, in the garden and in the forest, at parties that go on for hours where they fall asleep to the sounds of drums, cumbia music, and the excited yells of dancers. When Digna carried my son, she did so the way all Runa women do: either on her back, or on her hip. Digna made sure he could turn his face to the outside world. ‘This way he can see everything,’ she said to me. I started from the assumption that my child needed to be protected from the world, his face safely turned toward his mother; she thought that a child needs to be turned toward other people, toward the world, because he belongs to it. Overstimulation, for Digna, was just the necessary work a baby has to do to become a participant in a thriving, exciting social life. To let children face the world re-orients their attention towards sociality, toward others. In one of their papers, the psychologists Barbara Rogoff, Rebeca Mejía-Arauz and Maricela Correa-Chávez beautifully describe how Mexican Mayan children pay more attention to their surroundings and to other people’s actions compared with Euro-American children. They explain the difference with the fact that Mayan children, unlike their Euro-American counterparts, are expected to actively take part in community life from early on. The practice of paying attention to social interactions, this encouragement to turn toward the community, seems to start, at least among the Runa, well before babies can speak or help at home. It starts, as Digna put it, by literally turning their faces toward the world. If the idea of an exclusive, preponderant relationship between mother and son might have seemed alien to our Runa family, equally strange, if not plain wrong, was the idea that a child’s needs should be always and promptly met by her caretakers. This is another central idea of current parenting philosophies: children’s emotions, needs and desires should be not merely accommodated, but also promptly, consistently and appropriately responded to. This translates into a form of care that is highly child-centred, whereby children are treated as equal conversational partners, praised for their achievements, encouraged to express their desires and emotions, stimulated through pedagogical play and talk, often with considerable investment of time and resources. These practices encourage the gentle cultivation of what the anthropologist Adrie Kusserow has defined as ‘soft individualism’, in which self-expression, psychological individualism and creativity are core values. It is not a coincidence that these are also qualities promoted in a neoliberal society where entrepreneurship, self-realisation and individual uniqueness are deemed paramount for success and happiness. This approach is premised on the fantasy that there is a ‘natural’ way to raise humans Taking this worldview up a notch, some people claim that findings from neuroscience support the goal of ‘optimal’ brain development as foundational to a child’s future success and happiness. The ideology is presented as if based on indisputable scientific evidence, but let us not be fooled. The approach fits perfectly with neoliberalism and has its origin in the culture of the US middle-upper class. Proponents describe the intensive care that results from this pursuit as ‘natural’, drawing on idyllic and stereotyped accounts of childrearing in ‘traditional’ non-Western societies. There is a popular book I am often given as a gift by other parents whenever I mention that I work in the Amazon and am interested in children. It is The Continuum Concept: Looking for Happiness Lost (1975) by Jean Liedloff. The back cover of the German edition shows the author in the jungle: she stands, tall and blonde, in a shirt and a leopard-print bikini next to a bare-breasted Ye’kuana woman and her sleeping baby. The book – a bestseller in the so-called natural parenting movement – tells the story of Liedloff who, after living for two years with the Carib-speaking Ye’kuana of Venezuela, discovers the recipe for raising well-balanced, independent, happy children. This amazing result is accomplished, we are told, through practices such as co-sleeping, responsive care and natural birth. Liedloff’s book, like the natural parenting movement, is based on the idea that people in industrialised Western countries have lost touch with the childrearing ways of our ancestors. Bringing together attachment theory, as well as a simplified theory of human evolution and cherrypicked information about childcare in non-Western societies, this approach is premised on the fantasy that there is a ‘natural’ way to raise humans. While responsive parenting and ‘natural’ parenting are not exactly the same, they can be thought of as two dots on a continuum: they both assume there is an optimal way to raise children that, if not followed, has negative consequences. The type of childrearing that both models encourage is also equally intensive and child-centred. What these accounts, which claim roots in anthropology, fail to reflect is that, outside of postindustrial affluent societies, no matter how cherished, children are very rarely the centre of adults’ lives. For instance, Runa children, while affectionately cared for, are not the main focus of their parents’ attention. In fact, nothing is adjusted to suit a child’s needs. No canoe trip under a merciless sun is modified to meet the needs of a baby, let alone of an older child. No meal is organised around the needs of a young child. Parents do not play with their children and do not engage in dialogical, turn-taking conversations with them from an early age. They do not praise their children’s efforts, nor are they concerned with the expression of their most intimate needs. Adults certainly do not consider them as equal conversational partners. The world, in other words, does not revolve around children. This is because children are not relegated to a child-only world nor deemed too fragile to engage in difficult tasks. From an early age, Runa children participate fully in adults’ lives, overhearing complex conversations between adults on difficult topics, helping with domestic tasks, taking care of their younger siblings. Participating in the adult world means that sometimes children can get frustrated, or denied what they want, or feel deeply dependent on others. At the same time, there is so much that they gain: they learn to pay close attention to interactions around them, to develop independence and self-reliance, and to forge relationships with their peers. Most importantly, in this adult world, they are constantly reminded that other people – their parents, their family members, their neighbours, their siblings and peers – also have desires and intentions. The psychologist Heidi Keller and colleagues wrote that good parenting for many societies is primarily about encouraging children to consider the needs and wants of others. The Runa are no exception. They enormously value qualities such as social responsiveness and generosity – capacities deemed indispensable for living a good life in a closely knit community. These presuppose the ability to acknowledge and respond to other people’s desires and needs. Runa childrearing practices reflect these priorities. The very idea that children’s needs and desires should be always and promptly met by caretakers is completely foreign to the Runa. Instead, not answering to some of these needs and desires might be a valuable practice. The goal here is to transform a child into someone who recognises that her own will is just one among many This is evident in an episode that occurred shortly after we arrived in Ecuador. I was then zealously following the breastfeeding instructions I received from the midwives (exclusive and on demand! In a quiet place and without interruptions! As recommended by the WHO! And the baby-friendly hospital initiative!) I was baffled when one day, right in the middle of breastfeeding, our neighbour, Luisa who was sitting next to me, placed her hand on my breast and took the nipple away from my son. He looked at me surprised. He grunted loudly. Luisa laughed. ‘Do you want your milk, little baby? Do you really want it?’ She kept my breast away from him. I watched her teasing him, trying to escape from her without looking rude or excessively defensive. ‘Your poor mama!’ she continued without paying attention to me: ‘Just leave her alone! This is not yours!’ My son became purple with rage and twisted in my arms. Luisa laughed again, removed her hand and kissed his little hand. I did not know how to react: my feelings ranged between confusion and anger. I asked my husband why she would do such a thing. He stared at me blankly. ‘To tease the baby! To let him know that the breast is not really his,’ he answered matter of factly. Why did Luisa make my son purposefully uncomfortable? What was her goal? The more I reflected on this, the more I began to see the teasing as crystallising a central moral lesson: in stating ‘this breast doesn’t belong to you, it is your mother’s’, Luisa redirected my son’s attention to the presence and desires of others. The intentional, playful refusal to attend to a baby’s desire for milk invites him (and anyone else present) to acknowledge that he is not the only one who has a will and desires in an interaction. It is exactly by these acts of playful refusal, by not promptly responding to their children’s will, by not making them the centre of their world, that the Runa cultivate in their children an awareness of other people’s needs and of their own place within a dense web of relationships. The childrearing goal here is to transform a child into someone who recognises and acknowledges that her own will is just one among many. Unlike what parenting books might tell us, there is simply no single recipe for good parenting. This is because each act of parenting is always and inescapably an ethnotheory of parenting: a set of practices that aim to shape a good person in a given society. Of course, one doesn’t need to travel to all the way to the Amazon to realise that. Step out of the privileged space of what Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich in 1979 called ‘the professional-managerial class’, and the kind of debates surrounding childcare are likely to be very different. However, because this is a parenting ideology produced by a cultural and political elite that has a tremendous power in the world, it has quickly become normalised. What is most worrying is to see this ideology being increasingly exported, under the guise of evidence-based early childhood interventions, to the Global South. Promoted by organisations such as the WHO, the World Bank and UNICEF, such interventions aim to teach low-income families in the Global South to become responsive carers and optimise their children’s cognitive and emotional development through the adoption of ‘appropriate’ behaviour. These programmes assume optimal childcare to be a universal, objective, neutral fact that can be easily translated into a plethora of handy practices. This model of childrearing (and its more extreme neuroscientific version, where every act is seen as enhancing or hurting the brain) is anything but apolitical and acultural. Instead, it finds its origin in a specific culture and socioeconomic context where everything (including children’s abilities) can be measured and optimised in terms of future life success. To assume one cultural model of childcare is universally applicable to children everywhere, as WHO and others do, is dangerous. Not only do such programmes encourage culturally specific childrearing with little scientific basis, they also depict any type of care that deviates from the norm as in need of correction. Like early missionaries who travelled around the world teaching the natives how to be ‘good’, such interventions assume that parents in the Global South need to be taught how to raise their children properly. Following current orthodoxy, Runa childrearing – with its casual breastfeeding, abrupt weaning, no extensive parent-child play, no lengthy adult-child talk – would be described as ‘lacking’ in so many respects. And yet, my Runa friends and family thought my own childcare practices were conspicuously inadequate to raise a child in the context of their community life. Their observations, their puzzlement and their quiet defiance of my own childcare practices remind us that, whenever we talk about childrearing, we are not talking about achieving some objective child development based on irrefutable scientific evidence, but rather about a moral project: a moral project about what kind of people we would like our children to become, what society we would like to live in, and what kind of economy we would like to serve. As my Runa friends and family have subtly but relentlessly demonstrated, there is more than one way to flourish as humans in this world.

Our executive director is on the ground, as well as working with other members of the community. They are there to provide support to the community - first, to help liaise with federal law enforcement with whom we've a relationship, a longstanding relationship. The second, to help the community organize itself to help start the healing process. And third, to help them answer those questions that they get from the media, the questions that we, you and I, are talking about today - who are the Sikhs - how do you respond to those questions, how do you explain such a deeply personal thing as your faith to someone who sticks a microphone in your face.

The official IRNA news agency quoted judiciary sources as saying Ali Akbar Siadat had been hanged at Tehran's Evin prison. He was convicted of passing what was described as sensitive military information to Israel. IRNA said the information included intelligence regarding Iranian fighter jets and missile programs. Siadat was said to have met with Israeli agents in Turkey, the Netherlands and Thailand over a number of years, receiving tens of thousands of dollars in payment. He was arrested in 2008 while trying to leave Iran with his wife. Iranian judiciary sources were quoted as saying Siadat's attorney was present for his trial, but that could not be confirmed and there was no statement from any defense attorney on the execution.

But he and every other Ossetian interviewed say the thousands of Georgians who lived here until earlier this month cannot return. In a backlash after Georgian troops came in, Russian and South Ossetian forces razed the Georgian villages on the outskirts of the capital. Looted and burned, they're now nothing more than heaps of rubble. With each stage of this struggle, positions harden. Rumors become facts. The latest? Black American soldiers accompanied Georgian troops two weeks ago. Everyone repeats the same story, though there's no evidence to substantiate it. Ossetian officials describe how Georgian soldiers ripped open the bellies of pregnant Ossetian women. Despite the lack of any proof, this is now part of Ossetia mythology.

Well, the original protest on Friday was called for out of concern that the military was trying to secure power even after elections. But now protesters are more explicit. They're calling outright for the ruling military council to turn power over to a civilian government. They say they've lost their trust in the army's ability to manage the transitional period, and they cite missteps, human rights violations and broken promises. On the other hand, the cabinet has called these protests deliberate chaos. Prime Minister Sharaf has explicitly asked demonstrators to leave the square and has urged them to think about the interests of the country, which seems to mean stability and a smooth electoral process.

I'm going to speak to you about the global refugee crisis and my aim is to show you that this crisis is manageable, not unsolvable, but also show you that this is as much about us and who we are as it is a trial of the refugees on the front line. For me, this is not just a professional obligation, because I run an NGO supporting refugees and displaced people around the world. It's personal. I love this picture. That really handsome guy on the right, that's not me. That's my dad, Ralph, in London, in 1940 with his father Samuel. They were Jewish refugees from Belgium. They fled the day the Nazis invaded. And I love this picture, too. It's a group of refugee children arriving in England in 1946 from Poland. And in the middle is my mother, Marion. She was sent to start a new life in a new country on her own at the age of 12. I know this: if Britain had not admitted refugees in the 1940s, I certainly would not be here today. Yet 70 years on, the wheel has come full circle. The sound is of walls being built, vengeful political rhetoric, humanitarian values and principles on fire in the very countries that 70 years ago said never again to statelessness and hopelessness for the victims of war. Last year, every minute, 24 more people were displaced from their homes by conflict, violence and persecution: another chemical weapon attack in Syria, the Taliban on the rampage in Afghanistan, girls driven from their school in northeast Nigeria by Boko Haram. These are not people moving to another country to get a better life. They're fleeing for their lives. It's a real tragedy that the world's most famous refugee can't come to speak to you here today. Many of you will know this picture. It shows the lifeless body of five-year-old Alan Kurdi, a Syrian refugee who died in the Mediterranean in 2015. He died alongside 3,700 others trying to get to Europe. The next year, 2016, 5,000 people died. It's too late for them, but it's not too late for millions of others. It's not too late for people like Frederick. I met him in the Nyarugusu refugee camp in Tanzania. He's from Burundi. He wanted to know where could he complete his studies. He'd done 11 years of schooling. He wanted a 12th year. He said to me, "I pray that my days do not end here in this refugee camp." And it's not too late for Halud. Her parents were Palestinian refugees living in the Yarmouk refugee camp outside Damascus. She was born to refugee parents, and now she's a refugee herself in Lebanon. She's working for the International Rescue Committee to help other refugees, but she has no certainty at all about her future, where it is or what it holds. This talk is about Frederick, about Halud and about millions like them: why they're displaced, how they survive, what help they need and what our responsibilities are. I truly believe this, that the biggest question in the 21st century concerns our duty to strangers. The future "you" is about your duties to strangers. You know better than anyone, the world is more connected than ever before, yet the great danger is that we're consumed by our divisions. And there is no better test of that than how we treat refugees. Here are the facts: 65 million people displaced from their homes by violence and persecution last year. If it was a country, that would be the 21st largest country in the world. Most of those people, about 40 million, stay within their own home country, but 25 million are refugees. That means they cross a border into a neighboring state. Most of them are living in poor countries, relatively poor or lower-middle-income countries, like Lebanon, where Halud is living. In Lebanon, one in four people is a refugee, a quarter of the whole population. And refugees stay for a long time. The average length of displacement is 10 years. I went to what was the world's largest refugee camp, in eastern Kenya. It's called Dadaab. It was built in 1991-92 as a "temporary camp" for Somalis fleeing the civil war. I met Silo. And naïvely I said to Silo, "Do you think you'll ever go home to Somalia?" And she said, "What do you mean, go home? I was born here." And then when I asked the camp management how many of the 330,000 people in that camp were born there, they gave me the answer: 100,000. That's what long-term displacement means. Now, the causes of this are deep: weak states that can't support their own people, an international political system weaker than at any time since 1945 and differences over theology, governance, engagement with the outside world in significant parts of the Muslim world. Now, those are long-term, generational challenges. That's why I say that this refugee crisis is a trend and not a blip. And it's complex, and when you have big, large, long-term, complex problems, people think nothing can be done. When Pope Francis went to Lampedusa, off the coast of Italy, in 2014, he accused all of us and the global population of what he called "the globalization of indifference." It's a haunting phrase. It means that our hearts have turned to stone. Now, I don't know, you tell me. Are you allowed to argue with the Pope, even at a TED conference? But I think it's not right. I think people do want to make a difference, but they just don't know whether there are any solutions to this crisis. And what I want to tell you today is that though the problems are real, the solutions are real, too. Solution one: these refugees need to get into work in the countries where they're living, and the countries where they're living need massive economic support. In Uganda in 2014, they did a study: 80 percent of refugees in the capital city Kampala needed no humanitarian aid because they were working. They were supported into work. Solution number two: education for kids is a lifeline, not a luxury, when you're displaced for so long. Kids can bounce back when they're given the proper social, emotional support alongside literacy and numeracy. I've seen it for myself. But half of the world's refugee children of primary school age get no education at all, and three-quarters of secondary school age get no education at all. That's crazy. Solution number three: most refugees are in urban areas, in cities, not in camps. What would you or I want if we were a refugee in a city? We would want money to pay rent or buy clothes. That is the future of the humanitarian system, or a significant part of it: give people cash so that you boost the power of refugees and you'll help the local economy. And there's a fourth solution, too, that's controversial but needs to be talked about. The most vulnerable refugees need to be given a new start and a new life in a new country, including in the West. The numbers are relatively small, hundreds of thousands, not millions, but the symbolism is huge. Now is not the time to be banning refugees, as the Trump administration proposes. It's a time to be embracing people who are victims of terror. And remember — (Applause) Remember, anyone who asks you, "Are they properly vetted?" that's a really sensible and good question to ask. The truth is, refugees arriving for resettlement are more vetted than any other population arriving in our countries. So while it's reasonable to ask the question, it's not reasonable to say that refugee is another word for terrorist. Now, what happens — (Applause) What happens when refugees can't get work, they can't get their kids into school, they can't get cash, they can't get a legal route to hope? What happens is they take risky journeys. I went to Lesbos, this beautiful Greek island, two years ago. It's a home to 90,000 people. In one year, 500,000 refugees went across the island. And I want to show you what I saw when I drove across to the north of the island: a pile of life jackets of those who had made it to shore. And when I looked closer, there were small life jackets for children, yellow ones. And I took this picture. You probably can't see the writing, but I want to read it for you. "Warning: will not protect against drowning." So in the 21st century, children are being given life jackets to reach safety in Europe even though those jackets will not save their lives if they fall out of the boat that is taking them there. This is not just a crisis, it's a test. It's a test that civilizations have faced down the ages. It's a test of our humanity. It's a test of us in the Western world of who we are and what we stand for. It's a test of our character, not just our policies. And refugees are a hard case. They do come from faraway parts of the world. They have been through trauma. They're often of a different religion. Those are precisely the reasons we should be helping refugees, not a reason not to help them. And it's a reason to help them because of what it says about us. It's revealing of our values. Empathy and altruism are two of the foundations of civilization. Turn that empathy and altruism into action and we live out a basic moral credo. And in the modern world, we have no excuse. We can't say we don't know what's happening in Juba, South Sudan, or Aleppo, Syria. It's there, in our smartphone in our hand. Ignorance is no excuse at all. Fail to help, and we show we have no moral compass at all. It's also revealing about whether we know our own history. The reason that refugees have rights around the world is because of extraordinary Western leadership by statesmen and women after the Second World War that became universal rights. Trash the protections of refugees, and we trash our own history. This is — (Applause) This is also revealing about the power of democracy as a refuge from dictatorship. How many politicians have you heard say, "We believe in the power of our example, not the example of our power." What they mean is what we stand for is more important than the bombs we drop. Refugees seeking sanctuary have seen the West as a source of hope and a place of haven. Russians, Iranians, Chinese, Eritreans, Cubans, they've come to the West for safety. We throw that away at our peril. And there's one other thing it reveals about us: whether we have any humility for our own mistakes. I'm not one of these people who believes that all the problems in the world are caused by the West. They're not. But when we make mistakes, we should recognize it. It's not an accident that the country which has taken more refugees than any other, the United States, has taken more refugees from Vietnam than any other country. It speaks to the history. But there's more recent history, in Iraq and Afghanistan. You can't make up for foreign policy errors by humanitarian action, but when you break something, you have a duty to try to help repair it, and that's our duty now. Do you remember at the beginning of the talk, I said I wanted to explain that the refugee crisis was manageable, not insoluble? That's true. I want you to think in a new way, but I also want you to do things. If you're an employer, hire refugees. If you're persuaded by the arguments, take on the myths when family or friends or workmates repeat them. If you've got money, give it to charities that make a difference for refugees around the world. If you're a citizen, vote for politicians who will put into practice the solutions that I've talked about. (Applause) The duty to strangers shows itself in small ways and big, prosaic and heroic. In 1942, my aunt and my grandmother were living in Brussels under German occupation. They received a summons from the Nazi authorities to go to Brussels Railway Station. My grandmother immediately thought something was amiss. She pleaded with her relatives not to go to Brussels Railway Station. Her relatives said to her, "If we don't go, if we don't do what we're told, then we're going to be in trouble." You can guess what happened to the relatives who went to Brussels Railway Station. They were never seen again. But my grandmother and my aunt, they went to a small village south of Brussels where they'd been on holiday in the decade before, and they presented themselves at the house of the local farmer, a Catholic farmer called Monsieur Maurice, and they asked him to take them in. And he did, and by the end of the war, 17 Jews, I was told, were living in that village. And when I was teenager, I asked my aunt, "Can you take me to meet Monsieur Maurice?" And she said, "Yeah, I can. He's still alive. Let's go and see him." And so, it must have been '83, '84, we went to see him. And I suppose, like only a teenager could, when I met him, he was this white-haired gentleman, I said to him, "Why did you do it? Why did you take that risk?" And he looked at me and he shrugged, and he said, in French, "On doit." "One must." It was innate in him. It was natural. And my point to you is it should be natural and innate in us, too. Tell yourself, this refugee crisis is manageable, not unsolvable, and each one of us has a personal responsibility to help make it so. Because this is about the rescue of us and our values as well as the rescue of refugees and their lives. Thank you very much indeed. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: David, thank you. David Miliband: Thank you. BG: Those are strong suggestions and your call for individual responsibility is very strong as well, but I'm troubled by one thought, and it's this: you mentioned, and these are your words, "extraordinary Western leadership" which led 60-something years ago to the whole discussion about human rights, to the conventions on refugees, etc. etc. That leadership happened after a big trauma and happened in a consensual political space, and now we are in a divisive political space. Actually, refugees have become one of the divisive issues. So where will leadership come from today? DM: Well, I think that you're right to say that the leadership forged in war has a different temper and a different tempo and a different outlook than leadership forged in peace. And so my answer would be the leadership has got to come from below, not from above. I mean, a recurring theme of the conference this week has been about the democratization of power. And we've got to preserve our own democracies, but we've got to also activate our own democracies. And when people say to me, "There's a backlash against refugees," what I say to them is, "No, there's a polarization, and at the moment, those who are fearful are making more noise than those who are proud." And so my answer to your question is that we will sponsor and encourage and give confidence to leadership when we mobilize ourselves. And I think that when you are in a position of looking for leadership, you have to look inside and mobilize in your own community to try to create conditions for a different kind of settlement. BG: Thank you, David. Thanks for coming to TED. (Applause)

Sergeant Major, I just like to thank you and Lisa for doing what you're doing, first off. And my comment is pretty simple. TRICARE, as you know, is the military HMO that serves us all. My wife and I have had some difficulties. Our - after being deployed for three years, the stress of the deployments and in-between got to be too much, and she had some substance abuse issues. And it's pretty hard taking care of your family from the other side of the world, but we were able to surround her and love her and get her to a great place and get her better. But my question to you, Sergeant Major, is with TRICARE, do you happen to know if there are any initiatives out there for them to improve some of their mental health services, especially for spouses?

Yes, you put it very well because one of the motifs of the novel is that modernism of the late 4th century is on the horizon, so almost everything is changing. The way that people make war, it's more science than honor. Catapults are on the horizon. Sophisticated tactics - Aeneas' tactics is one of the characters who represents - he's going to write a book on it, and he actually did do that. And then religion is changing. People want more than just big humans that don't die. They want a moral sense. They want their gods to be better than men, not worse. And Pythagoras offers to this group of frenzied and idealistic Thebans something of transcendence in a way they don't find with traditional Olympian gods. And yet, that said, there's a lot of characters in the novel who say you're betraying the Olympians. We're gonna lose something. War is no longer the way it was. Likus(ph) and the Spartans are courageous, and they'd adjudicate fight by their muscle and their sword and spears, and that's honorable in a way. So there's a dichotomy there.

Yeah, he was speaking with The Times of London and Germany's Bild newspaper. And in that joint interview, he did say the NATO alliance is important to him, but he also reiterated a charge he made during the campaign, saying NATO's not doing enough to fight terrorism. He also complained about NATO members that are not meeting spending targets for their own defense. Now, some Europeans have bristled at this. French President Francois Hollande said Europe doesn't need advice from what he called outsiders. Trump's NATO comments are also at odds with his own nominee for defense secretary. Nominee James Mattis told Congress last week the NATO alliance is vital to U.S. national security.

Well, the administration has not been candid. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee; first New Yorker to do so. And she spoke to a group yesterday and talked about some of the challenges and their attempt to raise the size of the Army, because you have situations, Ed, where two family members are married and they have children. Their grandparents have to take the children because both parents are deployed in different places, especially if they're in one of the special branches of the Army, Special Ops or something like that. You have situations where people who are in the Reserves signed up for six months, and it's going on two years, and their are spouses, who may have been non-working spouses, don't know how to keep the money together. So you really are placing a lot of pressure on people whose engagement, they assumed, was relatively limited. And the only way to spread that burden around is to increase the size of the Army. So Rumsfeld has been very disingenuous in his presentation, because even as they're doing this, the back story is they're offering people $40,000, up to $40,000, to join a branch of the military, because we don't have enough people there. So this study simply confirms what people in the military and people on the inside have been saying, even as our secretary of Defense has been spinning just a different story.

And then, through a combination of genetics and mathematics, one can find out when the, let's say, the mother virus must have emerged. And that's probably the beginning of the 20th century. And in the meantime, also, my team found that in - from chimpanzees in Gabon, and then from the zoo in Antwerp, the town that I was working, that some chimpanzees carry a virus that is very, very similar to the one that we find in people. And so - and then putting all that together told us the story, basically, that for probably a long time HIV or an HIV - ancestor of HIV was infecting chimpanzees with not necessarily a lot of problems. And then at some point, it jumped over to, yeah, to some hunter, probably.

Well, that effort got a bit of a boost earlier this year when donors at a Beijing conference on avian and human influenza pledged nearly $2 billion to fight the disease. So, what is the state of the pandemic, the animal pandemic, are countries prepared to deal it, or what is the best way to head of the spread of the virus? There is a plan out in this week's issue of the journal Nature for a network of labs, like those run by the U.S. military, to track the disease in places lease able to handle an outbreak, but maybe the places where this outbreak might show up first. So, we're going to talk about avian flu update this hour, for the rest of the hour this segment, 1-800-989-8255. You're more than welcome to give us a call. Let me introduce my guests. Dr. David Nabarro is the senior United Nations systems coordinator for Avian and human Influenza at the Winn Development Group in New York. He joins us today by phone. Welcome to the program, Dr. Nabarro.

Lastly, the repercussions of allowing a health care system in Puerto Rico to collapse because it doesn't have its fair share of funding is that a lot of the U.S. citizens in Puerto Rico will move to the states now. You know this has been happening for a while, and let me tell you a little bit about the impact on health care alone. For every dollar that (unintelligible) spend on Puerto Rico for health care, that same citizen - the federal government and the state government will have to spend $4. So we feel that this needs to be stressed more to the administration stating that it is not a bailout, and it is just our fair share of money for health care.

Right, so the next day I went to school, I went to high school, and that's when I started to realize this was really serious. I heard my name being whispered in the hallways. I had my friends that I would eat lunch with, they were talking to me about how their moms had saw my dad on the news and how they were nervous about them associating with me or being around me. And then I found out it was for the murder of his fiancee, Julie Winningham, who I had met on a summer break, just briefly, but up to that point I didn't even know who he had killed.

Perhaps the most famous dream prediction comes from the Bible. Pharaoh dreams of standing by the Nile. Seven sleek, fat cows emerge from the river, followed by seven scrawny, ugly cows that eat the plump, succulent ones. But what does it mean? There’s a pattern, isn’t there? Good is followed and overwhelmed by bad. And seven comes into it. Pharaoh summons Joseph, who interprets the dream – seven years of abundance will be followed by seven years of famine. The input is valuable. Now Pharaoh can anticipate and conserve for the bad years. But if Pharaoh can predict, why doesn’t he just dream of seven plentiful years and seven starvation years? What’s with the cannibalistic cows? Do these cows represent an associative pattern in Pharaoh’s experience? And how would identifying a pattern enable prediction, anyway? It has to do with the way the brain works; it doesn’t passively receive information about the external world but, rather, actively interprets that information and looks for patterns in it. If everything were random, there would be no patterns, and prediction would be impossible. You can predict only by discerning a pattern in your experience (or knowledge, which is a sub-set of your experience). Are there regularities or sequences in events? Do some events generally occur with others? If there are associative patterns in events, they can be used to help predict what will happen next. Some patterns are deterministic and logical. For example, day follows night. Day and night are, therefore, associated as a sequence in the human mind, and we can predict that day will occur after night. Another example: traffic is worst at commuter times, and heavy traffic is associated with commuting. This isn’t an association determined by natural law but, without human intervention to stagger commuter times or alter traffic flows, you can still predict the bad traffic around 8am. Some patterns are much less obvious. We call them ‘probabilistic’ because they are based on events that have a tendency only to co-occur, so we cannot be as confident in predicting them. Predicting the behaviour of living beings, human and animal, is a probabilistic task. Based on their past behaviour, you know it is likely that they will do certain things but you don’t know for sure. Their behaviour is not random but neither is it determined. Living beings can always surprise you. For example, I am a research academic with limited teaching hours. Most of my time is spent writing papers at home. It is not easy to predict when I will go into the university. The most obvious logical predictor is if I have teaching, but I will swap teaching if I have a research engagement. Another predictor is a booked meeting, but if an urgent research deadline looms I will skip the meeting. So although being at the university has a tendency to co-occur (and be associated) with teaching and meetings, it is by no means determined by them. A less obvious predictor is an invitation to have coffee with an interesting colleague. If I am scheduled to teach and attend a meeting and also have the chance to join a colleague for coffee, it is very likely that I’ll be on campus – but it is still only a probability, albeit a strong one. On the other hand, I could be at the university just to have coffee with a colleague or because I am moving from one office to another, though these are much less likely to co-occur. That said, having coffee with a colleague on the same day I am moving office are probabilistic predictors of me being at the university. What has all this got to do with dreaming? While awake, we are good at spotting logical, deterministic patterns. We tend to suppose that we need to be awake to function, but this is not the case. In every 24-hour period, there is another state when our brains are just as active, some researchers think more active. This state is rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, when most dreams occur. During REM, we are better at spotting the less obvious or ‘remote’ associations that predict probabilistic events. Several experimental studies demonstrate this. In 1999, Robert Stickgold, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, and colleagues demonstrated that after being woken from REM sleep you make more remote associations than you would if you had been awake for some time. For example, when prompted with a word such as ‘hot’, study participants were more likely to respond with ‘sun’, whereas the fully awake brain generally elicited the word ‘cold’ – a more obvious association, like night-and-day. In 2009, Denise Cai, a psychologist at the University of California, and colleagues administered tests in which words appeared to be unrelated. Consider a word sequence such as ‘falling’, ‘actor’, and ‘dust’. Those with more REM are better able to come up with the word that links all of them: ‘star’. In a study published in 2015, Murray Barsky, a sleep researcher at Harvard Medical School, and colleagues looked at probabilistic associations in more depth. They had their participants predict one of two probabilities – ‘sun’ or ‘rain’ – based on descriptions of associated events. They then compared the performance of participants who took a nap containing REM sleep with those who stayed awake, finding that REM subjects routinely had better scores. Based on all this, I argue that we are better at making non-obvious word-based associations after REM sleep because our brains are primed during that sleep – by our dreams – to spot non-obvious, probabilistic patterns of experience and events. This means that if someone wanted to predict whether I would be at the university on any particular day, they would have a higher chance of success soon after having a dream. In some ways, our brains function differently during REM sleep as opposed to when we are awake. One key difference can be found in the lateral prefrontal cortex, located behind the forehead on both sides of the head. These areas are responsible for logical reasoning, planning and maintaining focus on the most obvious solutions to problems. Among other things, the prefrontal cortex prevents ‘mind-wandering’. But, for solutions to difficult problems, based on remote associations, mind wandering or ‘thinking outside the box’ might be just what is required to make non-obvious connections. This point was made by the psychologist Carlo Reverberi and colleagues from the University of Milano-Bicocca in a paper published in 2005. The team gave patients with lateral prefrontal damage a difficult problem requiring ‘thinking outside the box’, and found that they actually performed better than a control group of normal individuals. But we don’t need a brain injury to tap into the skill. During REM sleep, the lateral prefrontal cortex is deactivated, impeding logical reasoning but strengthening the kind of non-obvious, remote associations required for making connections and intuitive leaps. Familiar people, places and events appear in our dreams but, with the lateral prefrontal cortex deactivated, we hardly ever experience them as they are in reality. Instead, people, places and experiences are recombined to render the familiar unfamiliar and often bizarre. I argue that the familiar becomes bizarre because in a REM dream we do not experience memories per se. Instead, we form an image that associates with memories of experiences. A dream image is bizarre because it portrays a pattern created by combining associated elements of different people, places or events. Our brains in REM sleep are primed to identify remote associations or non-obvious patterns between people, places and events in much the same way that, following REM sleep, we are better able to associate the word ‘star’ with ‘falling’, ‘actor’ and ‘dust’. But there is more: the best way to remember that ‘star’ is associated with ‘falling’, ‘actor’ and ‘dust’ would be to combine these in an image: a famous actor, say Tom Cruise, covered in dust and falling from a star. In short, I argue, dream images probably appear bizarre to us when awake because they associate elements from different experiences to identify a pattern. Moreover, such bizarre images help us to remember simply because we recall strange events much more readily than mundane ones. A powerful image from my personal dream repertoire, the ‘Sand-cloth house’, might look like the image which accompanies this essay. And here are extracts from my dream report about this bizarre house: Now I am walking along a quiet suburban road of neat houses with open front gardens … Something is a bit wrong – even though the day is sunny and all seems fine … The last house down by the bridge at the end of the road seems to be under construction. As I approach this last house, I notice how odd it looks – its shape appears rounded but is not clearly delineated. Then I see that something is covering the house. But I can’t work out what this is – maybe it’s a vast piece of cloth …Then I perceive the colour – it’s yellow – and I see that the house is covered in sand. I feel afraid. Suddenly the scene ahead has changed – now I am approaching a beach…If, based on this dream, I were to ask you what associates ‘house’, ‘cloth’, and ‘sand’, you would get the answer wrong. The answer is ‘death’, but how would you know? It is my dream, not yours – my experiences are being combined, and you don’t know what they are. I’m awake when remembering my dream – so even I find it hard to work out the connections because my awake brain isn’t primed to identify remote, non-obvious associations. Much of my behaviour when awake might be determined by unconscious associations created and expressed in dreams I cannot recall But the associations relate to my eldest son, who is thinking of buying a house that someone has died in. As a child, I used to be very afraid of dying in quicksand, and I had a childhood traumatic experience in a house when I anticipated that a loved one would die. Dead people are covered with cloth or a shroud (a cultural association we all share). In light of my personal, lived experience, ‘death’ emerges as the hidden meaning in the sand-cloth-house image, which I have remembered because the dream woke me up. But the vast majority of dreams are not remembered, and we never become conscious of them. However, dreams may be retained at an unconscious level. There is a big difference between unconscious retention and conscious remembering. As much as 98 per cent of brain activity is unconscious, and retained dreams could be an aspect of this. Much of my behaviour when awake might be determined by unconscious associations created and expressed in dreams I cannot recall. When my son told me he was thinking of buying a house someone had died in, I wanted to say ‘Don’t buy that house.’ I love walking on the beach but I never do this alone, perhaps because of a (usually unconscious) fear of quicksand. Based on my experiences in early childhood, I find it difficult to be in a house alone at night. It required the conscious memory of my dream to take all this apart. The ability to identify patterns is a hallmark of the human mind. Our visual system has an almost infinite capacity for pattern recognition. But why would our awake brains specialise in identifying logical, deterministic patterns while our brains in REM sleep are better at detecting probabilistic ones? And why do the REM dream images – which portray these probabilistic patterns – remain unconscious? The answers to these questions might lie in evolutionary imperatives: we dreamed to survive. As the evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky declared in the title of his essay: ‘Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution’ (1973). REM sleep emerges from evolutionarily ancient brain networks. All mammals (including humans) have REM sleep with its characteristic rapid eye movements. Animals lack the language skills to support complex thoughts but it is likely that they think through images. Most probably, early humans would have thought through images, too. This image-based thought might be highly conserved in the evolutionarily ancient mechanisms of REM sleep. The reason why REM sleep identifies non-obvious probabilistic patterns and retains them in unconscious images might reflect what life was like for early humans. Just staying alive would have been a struggle for early humans. In The Art of Thought (1926), the British social psychologist Graham Wallas speaks of the evolutionary imperative to recognise non-obvious associations or patterns among, for example, different kinds of scraps that are all ‘food’, or animals from different species that are all predators. He referred to this ancient form of pattern-recognition as the ability to see ‘resemblance in difference’. Sand, cloth and house are all different but, based on my experience, they all mean ‘death’ to me. My ability to see this might have evolutionary roots in my early ancestors’ capacity to recognise that, although lions, snakes and hyenas are all different, they are all predators and all meant ‘death’. My bizarre sand-cloth-house might follow the same principles as an associative REM dream image that combines a lion, a hyena and a snake to form a ‘lienake’. If a first step for early humans was to associate creatures that were predators, and a second step was to identify any obvious predictors of their behaviour, a third step was to try to discern any non-obvious, probabilistic pattern in their behaviour so that danger could be avoided. What was life like for early humans? The conventional wisdom is that, until agriculture emerged about 10,000 years ago, humans were nomadic hunter-gatherers. But were early humans more gatherers than hunters? Were they really nomadic? Few animals are nomadic. Most occupy stable habitats for a season, a few years or even a lifetime. The space used by animals on a regular basis is the ‘home range’, a concept known to Charles Darwin. A home range would be chosen because it offers opportunities to gather food (hunting is dangerous) and consume water. For early humans, places near rivers or lakes where fish were plentiful would have been attractive to settle. Natural resources such as water, fish, fruit and nuts are ‘clumped’ rather than distributed in an even or random manner. Consequently, early humans would have frequently visited resource-rich places, often undertaking tours of a series of such locations. Clearly, locations with an abundance of natural resources attract many animals. Animals must visit waterholes but these are perilous places as both prey and predators congregate there: lions lie in ambush in the vegetation that surrounds waterholes, and snakes ensnare prey near water. On the other hand, mates can be found at waterholes, so they offer sexual and social opportunities, too. Equally, competitors will visit waterholes. Predicting when predators and competitors will be absent but mates present enhances survival and reproduction. Unconscious, predictive mental images ensure rapid responses to danger But prediction is difficult because the behaviour of animals and humans is based on probabilities, not certainties. Predictions depend on being able to discern probabilistic patterns in past experience. Anticipating when predators, competitors and mates will be at the waterhole is not that dissimilar to predicting when I will be at the university. The approach to a resource-rich place such as a waterhole is the most dangerous time because predators conceal themselves in its immediate vicinity. If an early human saw a flash of yellow (a lion, perhaps) while approaching, unconscious image-based predictions, formed through prior predator sightings and associations between these sightings and other events, would rapidly inform whether to continue or to retreat. In such potentially life-threatening situations any action must be fast. Unconscious, predictive mental images ensure rapid responses to danger. The schematic diagram below represents such a situation. The early human usually undertakes a tour of places 1 to 5 in that order but, on this occasion, on approaching the waterhole (position 4) some possible indication of danger triggers an unconscious mental image. On the basis of this predictive image, a retreat back to a refuge (position 3) is made: This gathering tour involves journeys between a series of landmarks that would have involved predicting sequences. For example, if the early human had just left the food resource at position 2, it could predict that a refuge (position 3) came next on the tour, and the waterhole after that. Such logical predictions could be made with confidence. On the other hand, what might occur at these landmarks could not be predicted with confidence because it involved the behaviour of other living beings. Such fundamental and enduring early human experiences might have given rise to dual brain states – the awake state and the REM dreaming state. While awake, our conscious thought is more logical and sequential. We can spot deterministic patterns and use them to predict what will happen next with some confidence. During REM dreaming, our brains are better at identifying the probabilistic patterns that underlie the behaviour of living creatures. These patterns are portrayed in unconscious images, which are retained for the awake state. Whenever fast, instinctive action is required, archetypically in dangerous situations, unconscious images associate past experience to predict the probable significance of, for example, an ambiguous flash of yellow. This gives rise to a somewhat surprising conclusion. In our evolutionary past, we dreamed to survive. While we can’t say that dreams come true, we can say that they predict. I don’t believe that I will ever walk along a suburban street, see a house smothered in sand, and feel afraid. But I do think that my dreams identify probabilistic patterns in my experiences that, in the past, were used to predict experiences at ‘landmark’ places. And if you think about it, dreams can also predict how I will act in certain situations because I unconsciously anticipate their consequences. For example, you now know that if someone I love is thinking of buying a house a person has died in, I will want to say: ‘Don’t buy that house.’ If you knew what the associations I make in dreams mean, you would be able predict things about me. But if you don’t share my experiences, I don’t think you can interpret my dreams. Pharaoh summoned Joseph from a dungeon to interpret his cannibalistic cow dream. We will never know what experiences Pharaoh associated to engender the image of seven cannibalistic cows. Only you can interpret your own dreams. Yet Joseph needed to come up with something convincing pretty quickly. An interpretation that made Pharaoh feel important would have been a good idea. I don’t believe Joseph could know what the dream ‘really meant’ because he wasn’t Pharaoh. But he knew Pharaoh and weather cycles in Egypt, so he was able to offer a likely predictive narrative. In evolutionary terms, the visual code that REM dreams provide remained unconscious or ‘hidden’ so that early humans could make quick decisions in situations of potential danger or reward, for example, on approach to a waterhole. In modern life, we still make daily tours of familiar places to gain resources: we leave home to drive to work so that we get paid; we visit the supermarket, have a coffee with a friend, and go to the gym to keep fit. But although we might be avoiding enemies and competitors while looking for mates on these tours of ‘landmark’ places, we don’t face anything like the dangers our ancestors did when they encountered other living creatures. We no longer have to dream to survive. But our ability to identify probabilistic patterns in past experiences during REM dreaming is still quite useful, because we still face uncertainties. The ‘hidden’ code helps us act intuitively and rapidly to navigate them. Does it help to try to decipher a hidden dream code? Yes, particularly if a hidden code is making you fearful in situations that are not actually dangerous. Like me being afraid when alone in a house. You might think you know yourself, but you will have more insight still if you understand yourself through your dreams.

Just to put everything in context, and to kind of give you a background to where I'm coming from, so that a lot of the things I'm going to say, and the things I'm going to do — or things I'm going to tell you I've done — you will understand exactly why and how I got motivated to be where I am. I graduated high school in Cleveland, Ohio, 1975. And just like my parents did when they finished studying abroad, we went back home. Finished university education, got a medical degree, 1986. And by the time I was an intern house officer, I could barely afford to maintain my mother's 13-year-old car — and I was a paid doctor. This brings us to why a lot of us, who are professionals, are now, as they say, in diaspora. Now, are we going to make that a permanent thing, where we all get trained, and we leave, and we don't go back? Perhaps not, I should certainly hope not — because that is not my vision. All right, for good measure, that's where Nigeria is on the African map, and just there is the Delta region that I'm sure everybody's heard of. People getting kidnapped, where the oil comes from, the oil that sometimes I think has driven us all crazy in Nigeria. But, critical poverty: this slide is from a presentation I gave not that long ago. Gapminder.org tells the story of the gap between Africa and the rest of the world in terms of health care. Very interesting. How many people do you think are on that taxi? And believe it or not, that is a taxi in Nigeria. And the capital — well, what used to be the capital of Nigeria — Lagos, that's a taxi, and you have police on them. So, tell me, how many policemen do you think are on this taxi? And now? Three. So, when these kind of people — and, believe me, it's not just the police that use these taxis in Lagos. We all do. I've been on one of these, and I didn't have a helmet, either. And it just reminds me of the thought of what happens when one of us on a taxi like this falls off, has an accident and needs a hospital. Believe it or not, some of us do survive. Some of us do survive malaria; we do survive AIDS. And like I tell my family, and my wife reminds me every time, "You're risking your life, you know, every time you go to that country." And she's right. Every time you go there, you know that if you actually need critical care — critical care of any sort — if you have an accident — of which there are many, there are accidents everywhere — where do they go? Where do they go when they need help for this kind of stuff? I'm not saying instead of, I'm saying as well as, AIDS, TB, malaria, typhoid — the list goes on. I'm saying, where do they go when they're like me? When I go back home — and I do all kinds of things, I teach, I train — but I catch one of these things, or I'm chronically ill with one of those, where do they go? What's the economic impact when one of them dies or becomes disabled? I think it's quite significant. This is where they go. These are not old pictures and these are not from some downtrodden — this is a major hospital. In fact, it's from a major teaching hospital in Nigeria. Now that is less than a year old, in an operating room. That's sterilizing equipment in Nigeria. You remember all that oil? Yes, I'm sorry if it upsets some of you, but I think you need to see this. That's the floor, OK? You can say some of this is education. You can say it's hygiene. I'm not pleading poverty. I'm saying we need more than just, you know, vaccination, malaria, AIDS, because I want to be treated in a proper hospital if something happens to me out there. In fact, when I start running around saying, "Hey, boys and girls, you're cardiologists in the U.S., can you come home with me and do a mission?" I want them to think, "Well there's some hope." Now, have a look at that. That's the anesthesiology machine. And that's my specialty, right? Anesthesiology and critical care — look at that bag. It's been taped with tape that we even stopped using in the U.K. And believe me, these are current pictures. Now, if something like this, which has happened in the U.K., that's where they go. This is the intensive care unit in which I work. All right, this is a slide from a talk I gave about intensive care units in Nigeria, and jokingly we refer to it as "Expensive Scare." Because it's scary and it's expensive, but we need to have it, OK? So, these are the problems. There are no prizes for telling us what the problems are, are there? I think we all know. And several speakers before and speakers after me are going to tell us even more problems. These are a few of them. So, what did I do? There we go — we're going on a mission. We're going to do some open-heart surgery. I was the only Brit, on a team of about nine American cardiac surgeons, cardiac nurse, intensive care nurse. We all went out and did a mission and we've done three of them so far. Just so you know, I do believe in missions, I do believe in aid and I do believe in charity. They have their place, but where do they go for those things we talked about earlier? Because it's not everyone that's going to benefit from a mission. Health is wealth, in the words of Hans Rosling. You get wealthier faster if you are healthy first. So, here we are, mission. Big trouble. Open-heart surgery in Nigeria — big trouble. That's Mike, Mike comes out from Mississippi. Does he look like he's happy? It took us two days just to organize the place, but hey, you know, we worked on it. Does he look happy? Yes, that's the medical advice the committee chairman says, "Yes, I told you, you weren't going to be able to, you can't do this, I just know it." Look, that's the technician we had. So yes, you go on, all right? (Laughter) I got him to come with me — anesthesia tech — come with me from the U.K. Yes, let's just go work this thing out. See, that's one of the problems we have in Nigeria and in Africa generally. We get a lot of donated equipment. Equipment that's obsolete, equipment that doesn't quite work, or it works and you can't fix it. And there's nothing wrong with that, so long as we use it and we move on. But we had problems with it. We had severe problems there. He had to get on the phone. This guy was always on the phone. So what we going to do now? It looks like all these Americans are here and yes, one Brit, and he's not going to do anything — he thinks he's British actually, and he's actually Nigerian, I just thought about that. We eventually got it working, is the truth, but it was one of these. Even older than the one you saw. The reason I have this picture here, this X-ray, it's just to tell you where and how we were viewing X-rays. Do you figure where that is? It was on a window. I mean, what's an X-ray viewing box? Please. Well, nowadays everything's on PAX anyway. You look at your X-rays on a screen and you do stuff with them, you email them. But we were still using X-rays, but we didn't even have a viewing box! And we were doing open-heart surgery. OK, I know it's not AIDS, I know it's not malaria, but we still need this stuff. Oh yeah, echo — this was just to get the children ready and the adults ready. People still believe in Voodoo. Heart disease, VSD, hole in the heart, tetralogies. You still get people who believe in it and they came. At 67 percent oxygen saturation, the normal is about 97. Her condition, open-heart surgery that as she required, would have been treated when she was a child. We had to do these for adults. So, we did succeed and we still do. We've done three. We're planning another one in July in the north of the country. So, we certainly still do open-heart, but you can see the contrast between everything that was shipped in — we ship everything, instruments. We had explosions because the kit was designed and installed by people who weren't used to it. The oxygen tanks didn't quite work right. But how many did we do the first one? 12. We did 12 open-heart surgical patients successfully. Here is our very first patient, out of intensive care, and just watch that chair, all right? This is what I mean about appropriate technology. That's what he was doing, propping up the bed because the bed simply didn't work. Have you seen one of those before? No? Yes? Doesn't matter, it worked. I'm sure you've all seen or heard this before: "We, the willing, have been doing so much with so little for so long — (Applause) — we are now qualified to do anything with nothing." (Applause) Thank you. Sustainable Solutions — this was my first company. This one's sole aim is to provide the very things that I think are missing. So, we put my hand in my pocket and say, "Guys, let's just buy stuff. Let's go set up a company that teaches people, educates them, gives them the tools they need to keep going." And that's a perfect example of one. Usually when you buy a ventilator in a hospital, you buy a different one for children, you buy a different one for transport. This one will do everything, and it will do it at half the price and doesn't need compressed air. If you're in America and you don't know about this one, we do, because we make it our duty to find out what's appropriate technology for Africa — what's appropriately priced, does the job, and we move on. Anesthesia machine: multi-parameter monitor, operating lights, suction. This little unit here — remember your little 12-volt plug in the car, that charges your, whatever, Game Boy, telephone? That's exactly how the outlets are designed. Yes, it will take a solar panel. Yes a solar panel will charge it. But if you've got mains as well, it will charge the batteries in there. And guess what? We have a little pedal charger too, just in case. And guess what, if it all fails, if you can find a car that's still got a live battery and you stick it in, it will still work. Then you can customize it. Is it dental surgery you want? General surgery you want? Decide which instruments, stock it up with consumables. And currently we're working on oxygen — oxygen delivery on-site. The technology for oxygen delivery is not new. Oxygen concentrators are very old technology. What is new, and what we will have in a few months, I hope, is that ability to use this same renewable energy system to provide and produce oxygen on site. Zeolite — it's not new — zeolite removes nitrogen from air and nitrogen is 78 percent of air. If you take nitrogen out, what's left? Oxygen, pretty much. So that's not new. What we're doing is applying this technology to it. These are the basic features of my device, or our device. This is what makes it so special. Apart from the awards it's won, it's portable and it's certified. It's registered, the MHRA — and the CE mark, for those who don't know, for Europe, is the equivalent of the FDA in the U.S. If you compare it with what's on the market, price-wise, size-wise, ease of use, complexity ... This picture was taken last year. These are members of my graduating class, 1986. It was in this gentleman's house in the Potomac, for those of you who are familiar with Maryland. There are too many of us outside and everybody, just to borrow a bit from Hans — Hans Rosling, he's my guy — if the size of the text represents what gets the most attention, it's the problems. But what we really need are African solutions that are appropriate for Africa — looking at the culture, looking at the people, looking at how much money they've got. African people, because they will do it with a passion, I hope. And lots and lots of that little bit down there, sacrifice. You have to do it. Africans have to do it, in conjunction with everyone else. Thank you. (Applause)

This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Robert Siegel, sitting in for Neal Conan, who's out sick today - and we are broadcasting today from Fort Dix in New Jersey. Just 15 miles north of here, about 1,200 American men and women face off against Iraqi insurgents - or they come the closest you can to that experience in New Jersey. They're in what is called the FOB, the Forward Operating Base, at Fort Dix. It includes a mock Iraqi village called Balad, where soldiers learn to avoid ambushes, to identify improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, and to fend off Arabic-speaking Iraqis who are armed with AK-47s. The point of this, of course, is to prepare these soldiers for war. Most of them will be leaving for Iraq or Afghanistan within the next few months. Since September 11th, 2001, some 93,000 National Guard and Army Reserve troops have trained here at Fort Dix before shipping out. Do they leave here prepared for the tasks that lie ahead? We've come here to find out how those men and women get ready for war. And later in the program, we'll hear about some laughter on the front lines. Stand-up comedian Tom Irwin entertains the troops in Iraq, and he'll perform for us here at Fort Dix.

Thank you. The American people have lost confidence in two major institutions - corporate America, in other words, Wall Street, and Congress. And one of the reasons why we haven't been able to do anything about this is corporate America buys off Congress, to either not regulate them or let them do what they want to. If Obama provided the leadership to get Congress to completely stop taking corporate America - corporate donations from PACs and all special-interest money, and limit their campaign financing to $100,000 it would restore America's confidence in our leaders so we would believe they weren't being paid off by corporations and that they were actually representing us and actually regulating corporate America.

Well, I think some people have chalked off what happened last night to some mean-spiritedness, and I think that when you take a step back, you realize that what happens in parts of our country affect all of our country and that our country's markets then began to affect the rest of the world. So, I think that when you step back and take a broader view of how important this industry is to so many things, you see what the real impact's going to be. I was surprised this morning to hear that because of the lack of advertising from the auto industry during the daytime that daytime soaps are now being affected of all things. And you don't realize that actor's salaries are being cut, and that goes right into the heart of the economies in New York and California. So, when you think about this in a small way in terms of, well, you know, the Midwest is suffering or Detroit is suffering, you really need to look further than that. You need to look at the impacts across the country and eventually across the globe, if the current administration doesn't come up with something that will save two of these three automakers by January.

It is--you are exactly right. Americans have learned how to do some things extremely well, and other things we have not learned about at all. This rate of smoking, in addition to being low--it actually used to be much higher in the U.S., but half of the people who ever smoked have quit. Smoking tobacco is one of the most addictive substances we know of, yet people have managed to figure out how to get rid of that. On the obesity side, America is--if you look at the sort of developed countries of Western Europe and North America--America is the most obese country. And the second most obese country isn't even very close. So we have figured out how to cure our addiction to tobacco, and we have substituted an addiction for food in its place.

Trump is calling on Carson and the secretaries of Labor, Treasury, Agriculture and other agencies to take a fresh look at their public assistance programs. There are already work requirements for most programs, things like SNAP or food stamps, housing assistance and cash welfare. But millions are granted exemptions because they are caring for a relative or enrolled in job training. The administration wants agencies to review who gets those exemptions. Critics, though, say imposing tougher mandates just doesn't work. The real problem, they say, is that many poor people do have jobs, but the wages aren't enough to survive on.

The ban, which was first adopted or imposed by the immigration department, and then I think in the early 1990s, legislated by the U.S. Congress, simply grows out of fear and hysteria over HIV AIDS. I mean, that what's drove that in 1987. There's no rational reason to have this ban, and in fact, HIV AIDS is the only disease explicitly named in any of the governmental regulations concerning immigration. And that's hysteria, that's all that was. There's one issue that still remains, you know, there's still argument in the Congress over this, particularly among Republicans who now say easing these restrictions would cost too much money. And you know, I'm not sure how that calculation is made. The Senate bill actually proposes a rise in visa fees, I think a dollar for the first three years, and then two dollars over the next five years. The House bill has no such provisions. So, that argument still remains.

And there are things that we think we can do at the federal level and we need strong federal leadership. The president, on his own, has substantial authority to reduce carbon pollution from power plants, new and existing ones. Department of Energy can strengthen up plants energy standards, efficiency standards, to reduce emissions and save consumers money at the same time. And other agencies, besides EPA and DOE, have strong focus on climate. We have an international agreement in place, called the Montreal Protocol to deal with the chlorofluorocarbons that were causing destruction of the upper ozone layer. And if we strengthen that, we would do a lot to reduce our contributions to climate change. There's no silver bullet. There's no one thing. It's not one thing or another. It's got to be balanced, and we had - just got to keep moving forward. Although, I'm going to have excuse myself.

Well, look; I asked that question of our pollster Lee Miringoff of Marist, and his response was this - quote, "the result of hearings, at least in the short run, is the Republican base has awakened." So it does appear, yes, it has been the Kavanaugh hearings because we polled a week earlier, and we've seen this change. He also stressed that there's - a month from the election, any number of things can and have happened in that amount of time. And whether Kavanaugh eventually gets through or is eventually sunk will really have some influence on how fired up Republican voters are. Anything can happen in those 34 days.

Well, Maggie may be referring to the fact that yesterday, at the end of his presentation, Steve Jobs announced that he's changing the name of the company from Apple Computer to just Apple. And here's the deal. Right now, most of their revenues still come from the Macintosh computer. Although it has a very small market share, this is probably the most successful period in the history of the Macintosh. They are growing at four times the rate of the rest of the computer industry, and they're profitable, and you know, you can just ask around, look around at your friends and neighbors, you will see more people switching over than probably you have ever remembered.

Yeah. I think that's right, particularly with the scenery of France. It is a true tour of the country. The route changes each year. Some years, it goes in a counterclockwise circle around France. This year going clockwise, where it's hitting the Alps mountains before the Pyrenees. And you're seeing tiny villages. You're seeing just breathtaking mountainscapes. You go into the Pyrenees, you see the Basque flags and the fans wearing orange, cheering. And also, the cinematography that they're using at this point is outstanding. You're seeing not only the wide shots from helicopters, but these cameramen on motorbikes within the race are the true daredevils of the race. They get some amazing footage.

The invitation to the Vatican is significant in two ways. One, it shows - at least to Palestinians - that the pope wants to be involved in this conflict. And, again among Palestinians, it's seen as a real boost. It might add a dimension, something to the Israeli-Palestinian relationship. But we should exactly at who he invited. The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, is the Palestinian political leader. He's the force behind negotiations with Israel. But the Israeli president, Shimon Peres, is obviously an Israeli leader. He's a very popular one. But he is about to retire. He is not directly involved in the peace process. And he is already very outspoken about supporting peace, even making sacrifices for peace - a line he said in his greeting to Pope Francis today. The pope did not invite Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. And the Vatican says this is not a political meeting per se.

For a long time--I just want to add one other factor. For a long time, I've proposed, but haven't gotten very far with--but maybe we can now--that new houses ought to be insured for the first 30 years for disasters--in other words, floods and winds, etc. That policy ought to be bought by the developer and sold with the house. And that would mean that developers would have to be very careful about where they built houses or they would be stuck with houses they couldn't sell because of the high cost of insuring them for the 30-year period of a mortgage.

And we have competitors we never had who are buying, like you say, China. I think part of it is a mind-set problem, and it's a political problem--maybe you'll agree with this--that there is really no leadership on an energy policy like we would need. Lay it out: X, Y, Z. And I think--and we talk about hydrogen--you're right. It's not ready to go, but most people you talk to say we should get there. There's not the research money going into it, there's not the political will to say, `This is a Manhattan Project,' `This is a space shot proj--you know, a moon race project. This is the kind of thing we have to get going now.' And by constantly saying...

The State Department said last week that it will no longer issue visas to the same-sex partners of foreign diplomats and employees of U.S.-based international organizations unless the partners are legally married before the end of the year. A spokesperson from the State Department said that the policy, quote, "ensures consistent treatment between opposite-sex partners and same-sex partners," unquote. But critics point out that many of the families affected by the policy come from countries where same-sex marriage is not an option. And these critics argue that, if those couples choose to get married in the United States, they could face persecution back home. But if they do not marry, some partners could face deportation. James Wally Brewster is a former U.S. ambassador to the Dominican Republic under President Obama. And he has been speaking out about this, so we called him. Ambassador Brewster, thank you so much for talking with us.

It really made me enormously - it made - for a year, I tried not to do it. For a year, I kind of sat at the kitchen table and did all his homework for him and all his assignments. And I thought, I can't countenance the notion of a young man not having a high school education because I grew up in a tradition where you were told, correctly or not, that, if you didn't get a university education, you were going to end up living in a box somewhere in Los Angeles. So, you know, I was completely mortified. And then it took me another - once I actually let him drop out of school, you know, you're kidding yourself if you think you can force a six-foot-four teenage boy to go to school. You're deluding yourself. But even once I let him out, for a year and a half, I woke up with what appeared to be sort of angina pectoris...

Well, I do - this is a terrible tragedy that has happened, and my heart goes out to the family. And I believe that we do need to get some answers to the questions that have been raised. And that's why I believe that hearings are important - that we better understand exactly what happened. And then we can take the appropriate action to make sure that local law enforcement are responding properly, that they are trained, that they have the right type of equipment. It seems like those are all questions that have been raised and that we need to make sure that we get answered.

Let's bring in another voice here because you raise an interesting - Don, the congressman raised an question. I mean, it's - Donald Trump is sitting there, and Bernie Sanders has told his supporters that Donald Trump would be the last person they should consider. But, you know, we're in a state here - Pennsylvania could be very crucial. And with us here in the studio Jim Davis who's the Democratic chairman of Fayette County, Pa. It is an area south of Pittsburgh. It is coal and steel country. And Jim, you and I have talked about, over the course of this campaign, that Donald Trump can be appealing to some Democrats. What are you seeing in your part of the state right now?

For Hillary Clinton, I would think, given the fact that she still remains frontrunner, we could talk about what these polls mean, you know, all these months in advance, but the fact that Hillary Clinton does seem to have a healthy lead over her - the rest of the field, she probably wants as many candidates as possibly to just, you know, have a big field. Whereas John Edwards and other candidates - like John Edwards, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, Barack Obama, Bill Richardson - they would love to shorten the field, at least get rid of the Kuciniches and the Gravels who are not showing so well in the polls and so they can go after the sensible frontrunners like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Silicon Valley is obsessed with disruption, but these days, the biggest disruptor didn't come out of Silicon Valley. It came out of steel towns in Ohio, rural communities in Pennsylvania, the Panhandle in Florida. And this last US presidential election was the mother of all disruptions. Once again, politics is personal. Millions of Americans became activists overnight, pouring into the streets in record numbers in record time. (Laughter) The election has done to family holiday dinners what Uber has done to New York City's taxi system. Couples have broken up and marriages disrupted. And the election is doing to my private life what Amazon is doing to shopping malls. These days, the ACLU is on the front lines 24/7, and even if I manage to sneak away for a couple of miles on the treadmill, any cardio benefit I get is instantly obliterated when I read another presidential tweet on the headline scroll. Even my secret pleasure of studying the Italian painters have been infected by politics. Now, I study, even stalk, the old masters. This is my desk, with a postcard exhibition of some famous and obscure paintings mostly from the Italian Renaissance. Now, art used to provide me with a necessary break from the hurly-burly of politics in my daily work at the ACLU, but not anymore. I was at the Women's March in San Francisco the day after inauguration, and the crowd was chanting, "This is what democracy looks like." "This is what democracy looks like." And there I was holding my sign and my umbrella in the rain, and I flashed on an old painting that first captivated me many years ago. I struggled to remember the different pieces of an actual painting of good and bad government. It was almost like the old master was taunting me. You want to know what democracy looks like? Go back and look at my frescoes. And so I did. In 1339, Ambrogio Lorenzetti finished a monumental commission in the governing council chamber of Siena's Palazzo Pubblico. It's a painting that speaks to us, even screams to us, today. "Art is a lie that makes us realize truth," Pablo Picasso once said. And as we search for the truth about government, we should keep Ambrogio's work, not a lie but an allegory, in our collective mind's eye. During Lorenzetti's time, the political legitimacy of Italian city-states was often on very shaky ground. Siena was a republic, but there had been enormous unrest in the two decades leading up to the commission. Siena's political leaders, who would literally govern under the eyes of these allegorical figures, were Lorenzetti's intended audience. He was cataloging the obligations of the governing to the governed. Now, you can spend years studying these frescoes. Some scholars have. I'm hardly an art historian, but I am passionate about art, and a work this massive can overwhelm me. So first, I focus on the big stuff. This is the allegory of good government. The majestic figure here in the middle is dressed in Siena's colors and he personifies the republic itself. Lorenzetti labels him "Commune," and he's basically telling the Sienese that they, and not a king or a tyrant, must rule themselves. Now, surrounding Commune are his advisors. Justice is enthroned. She's looking up at the figure of wisdom, who actually supports her scales of justice. Concord, or Harmony, holds a string that comes off the scales of justice that binds her to the citizens, making them all compatriots in the republic. And finally we see Peace. She looks chilled out, like she's listening to Bob Marley. When good government rules, Peace doesn't break a sweat. Now, these are big images and big ideas, but I really love the small stuff. Along another wall, Lorenzetti illustrates the effects of good government on the real and everyday lives of ordinary people with a series of delicious little details. In the countryside, the hills are landscaped and farmed. Crops are being sown, hoed, reaped, milled, plowed, all in one picture. Crops and livestock are being brought to market. In the city, builders raise a tower. People attend a law lecture, a TED Talk of the 14th century. (Laughter) Schoolchildren play. Tradesmen thrive. Dancers larger than life dance with joy. And watching over the republic is the winged figure Security, whose banner reads, "Everyone shall go forth freely without fear." Now, what's amazing about these images from 800 years ago is that they're familiar to us today. We see what democracy looks like. We experience the effects of good government in our lives, just as Lorenzetti did in his life. But it is the allegory of bad government that has been haunting me since November 9. It's badly damaged, but it reads like today's newspapers. And ruling over bad government is not the Commune but the Tyrant. He has horns, tusks, crossed eyes, braided hair. He obviously spends a lot of time on that hair. (Laughter) Justice now lies helpless at his feet, shackled. Her scales have been severed. Justice is the key antagonist to the Tyrant, and she's been taken out. Now, surrounding the Tyrant, Lorenzetti illustrates the vices that animate bad government. Avarice is the old woman clutching the strongbox and a fisherman's hook to pull in her fortune. Vainglory carries a mirror, and Lorenzetti warns us against narcissistic leaders who are guided by their own ego and vanity. On the Tyrant's right is Cruelty. Treason, half lamb, half scorpion, lulls us into a false sense of security and then poisons a republic. Fraud, with the flighty wings of a bat. On the Tyrant's left, you see Division. She's dressed in Siena's colors. "Si" and "No" are painted on her body. She uses a carpenter's saw to chop her body in half. And Fury wields the weapons of the mob, the stone and knife. In the remainder of the fresco, Lorenzetti shows us the inevitable effects of bad government. The civic ideals celebrated elsewhere in this room have failed us, and we see it. The once beautiful city has fallen to pieces, the countryside barren, the farms abandoned. Many are in flames. And in the sky above is not the winged figure Security, but that of Fear, whose banner reads: "None shall pass along this road without fear of death." Now, the final image, the most important one, really, is one that Lorenzetti did not paint. It is of the viewer. Today, the audience for Lorenzetti's frescoes is not the governing but the governed, the individual who stands in front of his allegories and walks away with insight, who heeds a call to action. Lorenzetti warns us that we must recognize the shadows of Avarice, Fraud, Division, even Tyranny when they float across our political landscape, especially when those shadows are cast by political leaders loudly claiming to be the voice of good government and promising to make America great again. And we must act. Democracy must not be a spectator sport. The right to protest, the right to assemble freely, the right to petition one's government, these are not just rights. In the face of Avarice, Fraud and Division, these are obligations. We have to disrupt — (Applause) We have to disrupt our lives so that we can disrupt the amoral accretion of power by those who would betray our values. We and we the people must raise justice up and must bring peace to our nation and must come together in concord, and we have a choice. We could either paint ourselves into the worst nightmare of Lorenzetti's bad government, or we can stay in the streets, disruptive, messy, loud. That is what democracy looks like. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: First of all, wow. Obviously, many people passionately — you spoke to many people passionately here. I'm sure there are other people here who'd say, look, Trump was elected by 63 million people. He's far from perfect, but he's trying to do what he was elected to do. Shouldn't you give him a chance? Anthony Romero: I think we have to recognize the legitimacy of him as president versus the legitimacy of his policies. And when so many of the policies are contrary to fundamental values, that we're all equal under the law, that we're not judged by the color of our skin or the religion we worship, we have to contest those values even as we recognize and honor the fact that our democracy rendered us a president who is championing those values. CA: And the ACLU isn't just this force on the left, right? You're making other arguments as well. AR: Well, you know, very often we piss everyone off at one point. That's what we do. And we recently were taking stands for why Ann Coulter needs to be able to speak at Berkeley, and why Milo has free speech rights. And we even wrote a blog that almost burnt the house down among some of our members, unfortunately, when we talked about the fact that even Donald Trump has free speech rights as president, and an effort to hold him accountable for incitement of violence at his marches or his rallies is unconstitutional and un-American. And when you put that statement out there to a very frothy base that always is very excited for you to fight Donald Trump, and then you have a new one saying, "Wait, these rights are for everybody, even the president that we don't like." And that's our job. (Applause) CA: Anthony, you spoke to so many of us so powerfully. Thank you so much. Thank you. (Applause)

Fouad Zaban is the head coach of the Fordson High School football team in Dearborn. The families on the show share the same religion and national origin, but lead different lives. We'd like to hear from Muslim Americans. If you've seen the show, does "All-American Muslim" reflect your experience? Give us a call: 800-989-8255. Email us: talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website. That's at npr.org; click on TALK OF THE NATION. Wajahat Ali joins us now from a studio in Berkeley, California. He's a playwright, a lawyer and a commentator who wrote a piece on the show earlier this month, for The Guardian. And it's nice to have you back.

In 1965, Helen Gurley Brown's sex positive, ultra-optimistic message got her all the way to the helm of Cosmopolitan magazine. At the time, it was floundering as a monthly known for fiction. Without any editing experience, she turned it into the wildly popular sexy, women-focused, hugely profitable glossy we know today. By the time she was gently shown the door in 1997, after over 30 years, the magazine had become an icon. Decades worth of variations on how to please your man. She, too, had become an icon of ruthless glamour, wealth and sexual freedom. But there was another issue Helen Gurley Brown cared passionately about - financial self-sufficiency for women. Getting a job and working your way up, like she did.

The Bush administration is trying to get Iraqi lawmakers to agree to what's called a status of forces agreement. The White House isn't saying a lot about what's in it. Iraqis, though, say it allows for up to 58 American military bases to operate in Iraq indefinitely. It also gives immunity from prosecution to U.S. troops and to private military contractors. And it allows the U.S. to determine whether or not a hostile act against Iraq by another country is an act of aggression. Leila Fadel of McClatchy Newspapers is here with more. She's in Baghdad. And Leila, tell us about that last provision. What does that mean, exactly?

In his career as well. Since joining the Colts in 1998, Manning led his team to the playoffs 11 times; two AFC championships; a Super Bowl victory in 2007; four Most Valuable Player awards. Beyond the numbers, he became the most famous and popular professional athlete in Indianapolis - which says a lot in a basketball state. Well-mannered, his name on a children's hospital, now Indy fans are preparing to go through what San Francisco 49er fans went through when Joe Montana finished his career in Kansas City; or when New York Jets fans watched Joe Namath finish with the L.A. Rams.