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Every parent eventually faces the question of when to let their kid travel alone, across the street, through the neighborhood, or across town. And every single one worries that something terrible might happen. Of course, they also worry that protecting their child will stifle independence. Well, recently, Lenore Skenazy left her nine-year-old son at Bloomingdale's in Manhattan. She equipped him with a subway fare card, a map, 20 dollars, and several quarters in case he needed to call home, and congratulated both him and herself when he arrived safely. Skenazy wrote about the trip home alone in her column in the New York Sun and found that some of her readers wanted to call Child Services.

Nissen was able to catch a ride on a helicopter back to the Kathmandu Valley, where he's now trying to reach his embassy. On the streets of the capital, some shops are reopening, but electricity is scant. Thousands of people displaced by this earthquake are camping out on pretty much every available piece of green space here. At a noisy traffic circle smack in the middle of the city, three families are even camped out under a tarp on the small median. Due to the continuing aftershocks, the government has advised people to sleep outside out in the open. The lucky ones have tarps. It's been raining heavily at night. Over at a police station, hundreds of families are crammed onto the lawn. Rajon Gautan came here from his village about 90 kilometers away. It was hard hit - total devastation, he says. So he and his family made it to Kathmandu hoping to get help - no luck so far. They did manage to scrape together enough money to buy some water out on the street.

Now, I'm willing to take serious advice about better eating. Goodness knows battling obesity is one of the most serious challenges in the U.S. today. But living abroad helped me to see just how obsessed we are in the U.S. about giving each other tips about what not to put in our mouths. Just for fun, here are a few other gems from Men's Health: If you're hungover, choose asparagus. I'll quote the magazine: "When South Korean researchers exposed a group of human liver cells to asparagus extract, it suppressed free radicals and more than doubled the activity of two enzymes that metabolize alcohol." Really? OK. How about this one? Practice total recall, the magazine says. The magazine quotes British scientists who said if you think about your last meal before snacking, you'll remember how satisfying that meal was and you'll be less in the mood to snack. Well, I call bologna. I can't remember the last time - I was thinking back to my ham and cheese sandwich and that suddenly made me less interested in the pretzels in the front of me on my desk.

I think there are legitimate issues with respect to the Syrians. I mean, let's take them at their word. Let's assume that they are prepared to withdraw heavy equipment and military forces from some of the cities. Let's assume they are prepared to release prisoners. The real problem with the Annan plan is not that. The real problem is that it's posited on the assumption that Assad will be part of the solution. And it seem to me, having gone down the road that he has chosen, at the cost of so much pain and so much blood, sanctioning that sort of approach in an open-ended process that somehow leaves Assad in control of the transition I think is a wrong-headed move.

Well, you know, when you think about the folks who have been paired together - I mean just go back to, you know, the first Reagan candidacy and, you know, when they were going to the primary season, and George Bush referred to his economic policy as voodoo economics, you know, they don't have a problem with that mudslinging when they decided to come together and be president and vice president. So I think this is all stuff that's just a process of the primary period and trying to establish who's going to get the nomination. I think folks always kiss and make up, you know, if what's on the line is the ability to win the White House.

There is still sentencing, so that is going to happen at a later date. But yes, there are - should be no more trials for Michael Slager. Now, it's worth remembering that just a couple months after this shooting in 2015, Dylann Roof shot nine - shot and killed nine black worshipers in Charleston. And this has been a very turbulent time for the city of Charleston and sometimes even the state of South Carolina. And one thing the family members mentioned is that they were glad that both these people were brought to justice and that this turbulent time is ending for the city.

The president said some of his efforts have begun to pay off. The tax cuts in the stimulus package are now showing up in workers' pay checks and mortgage rates have fallen, so many home owners can save money by refinancing. But Mr. Obama said many families and businesses still find it hard to borrow the money they need, and the nation is still hemorrhaging hundreds of thousands of jobs every month. Mr. Obama has tried repeatedly to highlight some hopeful signs while still acknowledging the serious challenges ahead. Rutgers political scientist Ross Baker says it's a fine line the president has to walk.

But I also think that he's making a distinction between the workplace and personal relationships. And in many ways, I think it's much easier to be honest in workplace situations because the relationships are transient. There are often status differences. It gets much harder when you're talking about personal relationships. And I think very often on a personal - if he want a sustained relationship with someone, you can't always be 100 percent honest with them because the consequences of constantly telling them yes, in fact, you are gaining weight, yes, that dress looks terrible. Saying those kinds of things over and over no matter how nicely phrased they are, are going to be somewhat destructive.

Each of these songs represents a scene, a movement, in some cases, a sonic revolution that completely altered the course of popular music. They're all also calling cards, almost, for those cities, songs totally linked with their city's identity, and it might be why you probably consider them to be music cities. Now, the magical mythical thing, the thing we kind of all love about stories like these is that those cities weren't doing anything in particular to make those moments happen. There's no formula for capturing lightning in a bottle. A formula didn't give us grunge music or introduce Tupac to Dr. Dre, and there's definitely no blueprint for how to open your record business in a South Memphis neighborhood that, turns out, is home to Booker T. Jones, William Bell and Albert King. So this is just something that happens, then, right? When the stars perfectly align, great music just happens. And in the meantime, New York and Nashville can churn out the hits that come through our radios, define our generations and soundtrack our weddings and our funerals and everything in between. Well, I don't know about you, but the very idea of that is just deadly boring to me. There are musicians all around you, making powerful, important music, and thanks to the internet and its limitless possibilities for creators to create music and fans to discover that music, those zeitgeist songs don't have to be handed down to us from some conference room full of songwriters in a corporate high-rise. But also, and more importantly, we can't decide that it's just something that happens, because music is about so much more than hits, those big, iconic moments that change everything. It's more than just entertainment. For so many of us, music is truly a way to navigate life. A means of self-expression, sure, but it also helps us find our self-worth and figure out who we are. It connects us with other people as almost nothing else can, across language barriers, across social and cultural and economic divides. Music makes us smarter and healthier and happier. Music is necessary. What if you lived in a city that believed that, that said, "We're not waiting for that hit song to define us. We're a music city because music is necessary." By seeing music as necessary, a city can build two things: first, an ecosystem to support the development of professional musicians and music business; and second, a receptive and engaged audience to sustain them. And those are the two critical elements of a music city, a city whose leaders recognize the importance of music for our development as individuals, our connection as a community and our viability as a vibrant place to live. See, smart cities, music cities, know that thriving nightlife, a creative class, culture is what attracts young, talented people to cities. It's what brings that lightning. And no, we can't predict the next egg that will hatch, but we can create a city that acts like an incubator. To do that, first, we've got to know what we've got. That means identifying and quantifying our assets. We need to know them backward and forward, from who and what and where they are to what their impact is on the economy. Let's count our recording studios and our record labels, our historic landmarks and our hard-core punk clubs. We should count monthly free jazz nights and weekly folk jams, music schools, artist development, instrument shops, every lathe and every luthier, music museums open year round and music festivals open just one weekend a year. Now, ideally through this process, we'll create an actual asset map, dropping a pin for each one, allowing us to see exactly what we've got and where organic momentum is already happening. Because it's not enough to paint in broad strokes here. When it comes to specific support for music locally and a broad understanding of a music brand nationally, you've got to have the receipts. Next, we'll need to identify our challenges. Now, it's important to know that, for the most part, this won't be just the opposite of step one. We won't gain a whole lot by simply thinking about what's missing from our map. Instead, we need to approach this more holistically. There are lots of music venues on our map. Awesome. But are they struggling? Do we have a venue ladder, which just means, can an artist starting out at a coffee house open mic see a clear path for how they'll grow from that 25-seat room to a hundred-seat room and so on? Or are we expecting them to go from a coffeehouse to a coliseum? Maybe our challenges lie in city infrastructure: public transportation, affordable housing. Maybe, like in London, where the number of music venues went from 400 in 2010 to 100 in 2015, we need to think about protections against gentrification. The mayor of London, in December of last year, actually added something called the "Agent of Change" principle to the city's comprehensive plan. And the name says it all. If a real-estate developer wants to build condos next to an existing music venue, the developer is the agent of change. They have to take the necessary steps for noise mitigation. Next, and this is a very big one, we need leadership, and we need a strategy. Now we know there's a lot of magic in this mix: a lot of right people, right place, right time. And that will never stop being an important element of the way music is made, the way some of the best, most enduring music is made. But there cannot be a leadership vacuum. In 2018, thriving music cities don't often happen and don't have to happen accidentally. We need elected officials who recognize the power of music and elevate the voices of creatives, and they're ready to put a strategy in place. In music cities, from Berlin to Paris to Bogotá, music advisory councils ensure that musicians have a seat at the table. They're volunteer councils, and they work directly with a designated advocate inside of city hall or even the chamber of commerce. The strongest strategies will build music community supports like this one inward while also exporting music outward. They go hand in hand. When we look inward, we create that place that musicians want to live. And when we look outward, we build opportunities for them to advance their career while also driving attention back to our city and leveraging music as a talent-attraction tool. And here's something else that will help with that: we've got to figure out who we are. Now, when I say Austin, you probably think "live music capital." And why? Because in 1991, leadership in Austin saw something percolating with an existing asset, and they chose to own it. By recognizing that momentum, naming it and claiming it, they inevitably caused more live music venues to open, existing spaces to add live music to their repertoire, and they created a swell of civic buy-in around the idea, which meant that it wasn't just a slogan in some tourism pamphlet. It was something that locals really started to believe and take pride in. Now, generally speaking, what Austin created is just an assets-based narrative. And when we think back to step one, we know that every city will not tick every box. Many cities won't have recording studios like Memphis or a songwriter and publishing scene like Nashville, and that's not a dealbreaker. We simply have to find the momentum happening in our city. What are our unique assets in comparison to no other place? So, if all of that sounds like something you'd like to happen where you live, here are three things you can do to move the needle. First, you can use your feet, your ears and your dollars. Show up. Be that receptive and engaged audience that is so necessary for a music city to thrive. Pay a cover charge. Buy a record. Discover new music, and please, take your friends. Two, you can use your voice. Buy into the assets-based narrative. Talk about and celebrate what your city has. And three, you can use your vote. Seek out leadership that doesn't just pay lip service to your city's music, but recognizes its power and is prepared to put a strategy in place to elevate it, grow it and build collaboration. There really is no telling what city could be defined by a certain scene or a certain song in the next decade, but as much as we absolutely cannot predict that, what we absolutely can predict is what happens when we treat music as necessary and we work to build a music city. And that is a place where I want to live. Thank you. (Applause)

A lot of them are, yes. I mean a lot of the people are doing - are people who are the street sweepers and the garbage men, and they're doing jobs that you can't really picture a Saudi doing. But on the other hand, there's also a lot of very inexpensive foreign workers working as teachers in the schools, and working in shops, and working in jobs that Saudis maybe would take if they were able to get more pay for them but because there are so many millions of these inexpensive foreign workers, the wages have been depressed throughout the economy.

The dispute between Japan and China over small islands in the East China Sea is escalating. The two nations first dispatched unarmed vessels to stake their claims, then patrol boats. Unarmed aircraft came next. Most recently both sent fighter jets over the islands. The Senkakus, as they're called in Japan, are uninhabited but set in a strategic location between Okinawa and Taiwan. If you'd like to see exactly where they're situated, you can go to our website at npr.org, click on TALK OF THE NATION. On a recent visit to China, Joseph Nye heard officials there describe the dispute in the context of containment. Part of what they see is a campaign by the United States and its allies to isolate China and restrict its navy's access to the Pacific. Joseph Nye is a university distinguished professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He served as assistant secretary of defense in the Clinton administration. His op-ed "Work with China, Don't Contain It" ran in The New York Times over the weekend. He joins us now on a smartphone from his office in Cambridge. Nice to have you back with us.

But first, how do you get your news, and how has that changed? Is the news as important to you as it used to be? Do you read, listen or watch as much as you did a year ago? Tell us your story. Our number is 800-989-8255. Our email address is talk@npr.org. And, of course, you can join the conversation at our website. Go to npr.org, and click on TALK OF THE NATION. Later in the program, it's basketball time, March Madness. Or is it March Sadness? But first, Amy Mitchell joins us. She's the acting director for the Pew Research Center Project for Excellence in Journalism. Their annual "State of the News Media" report was released today.

Look, you know, most certainly anytime there is a collective endeavor, anytime there is collective action, there is also social change. And not only is this an expression of the need for certain kinds of services in the public sphere or certain kinds of safe spaces in the public sphere to express their opinion, but it's also a call for social change and for a future that is more interactive or more realistic in its way of dealing with social stigma and issues that are otherwise - you know, may be silenced or not given a voice in the public sphere.

That was the issue in California, whether the state had done enough to get its most vulnerable students over the hump. A judge said no, ruling that tens of thousands of English learners and low-income minorities were stranded in inferior schools with few resources. Judge Robert Freedman said as long as that's the case, California's exit exam discriminates. Jack O'Connell, Superintendent of Public Instruction insists the exam is not meant to be a punishment but a tool to identify those very students who need help. Mr. JACK O'CONNELL (State Superintendent of Public Instruction): If we hold our school system accountable then we will get more attention, more focus, more resources to that group of students. If you exempt any group of students; we won't be doing our job.

Well, I was disappointed. But my disappointment isn't actually fair to Israel, because I had such an idealistic view. Sort of a Leon Uris "Exodus" view of a perfect state with perfect people, that I inevitably wound up holding people to standards that no humans can be held to. It was a roller coaster for me. There were moments, in the army in particular, in which I was disappointed with Israeli society, and with the behavior of the Israeli army. There are other moments in which I realized the Israelis are holding themselves to an extraordinary standard of behavior, given the difficult circumstances. So, each day would bring a new experience, and it would be a conflicting experience.

It's that way in a lot of states. I would also note - I mean, it's - I think it was B.J. - no, Jay was saying earlier, this is very much a matter of traits meeting certain environments. And we tend to focus on behaviors instead of traits and mistake behaviors for traits. Driving fast on the highway is not a trait. It's a behavior, which is one expression of several traits. But in different environments, these things can be more dangerous than others, and just as in states where the driving age is higher, in cultures where driving is not as essential, they are not - the death rate among teens is lower because they're not - they don't have this toxic mix of being 16, maybe drinking and driving. So there's always this interplay, and you can hopefully adjust the environment to keep them safer.

Well, as you heard just now, I mean, he had a very clear position on torture - firstly, that it doesn't work. And even if that - even if it did work, it would be immoral to do it. That was his view bred in that prison cell in Hanoi. Ultimately, he was able to pass into law, or help pass into law, a total prohibition on the use of torture by U.S. personnel - military or otherwise. And it was a legislative battle that stretched more than a decade. His experience as a former POW also gave him the moral authority for some of his foreign policy prescriptions. He was the most prominent of the national security hawks in the Senate and quite controversially was a leading booster for the Iraq War. Part of his logic was that minority populations in Iraq were being killed. He had this real sense of moral justice that led him to advocate on behalf of Syrian people and Ukrainian people and Kurdish people, people who were suffering. Ultimately, though, he would admit just this year that the Iraq War was a mistake, one that he had a fair share of the blame for.

Yes. Switchgrass is a fabulous plant but other grasses, big blue stem, little blue stem, another one called the Indian grass - depending upon the soil, they're actually better than switchgrass. And what we found in a paper we published in Science just about a year ago is there's a step beyond just growing a monoculture. We found that when we put a mixture of these productive prairie grasses in with a mixture of prairie legumes and some other prairie plants, that those mixtures gave us much more energy per acre than did any one of those grasses, including switchgrass growing by itself. And they also stored more carbon in the soil than did switchgrass by itself or any of the other plants by themselves. So it might be a route toward almost restoring prairie on degraded land to a high diversity mixture of species but biased towards these very productive grasses and legumes - that combination may prove to be a very good way both to store carbon in the soil and give a better greenhouse gas (unintelligible) for the fuel and to get a lot more energy per acre without having to fertilize and use pesticides and so on.

The best way I can say I use my faith is that I just walk by a certain, you know, Godly principle. I don't force what I believe and whom I believe on anyone. I just lead a life that exemplifies Christ. And so people will ask me, well, why are you so different? You know, what is it all about? And that would give me the opportunity to share, you know, the faith that I believe in. But I don't do anything other than to just try to walk with integrity and honest values and allow God to get the glory for all that he has allowed to accomplished, even through this business. And even attracting, you know, artist like a Janet or a Ludacris or an Alicia Keys to our company has just been basically been because of God's favor, and the fact that I continue to walk in obedience the way He's asked me to do.

Well, it's been a big hit. They're standing by her for many reasons, but one of them is that they could never get anyone else confirmed by the Senate as the secretary of Health and Human Services. And there are many people in the White House who are angry at her for the botched rollout. But the hit, politically, is big. For the president, the problem is that this isn't just his signature legislative achievement. It also goes to the heart of the promise of the Obama presidency. Remember, he said he didn't want bigger government or smaller government. He wanted smarter government. And he was going to prove that government could work for middle-class people, and the health care law was the prime example. And there are even some conservatives who say that this botched rollout is undermining liberalism itself. So for now, a very big hit.

I couldn’t help feeling a little apprehensive before my meeting with Thomas Clements. The British 30-year-old has what used to be called Asperger’s Syndrome, and describes himself as ‘slightly autistic’. Until our meeting in London, I’d had few close encounters with autistic people, so I wondered how to act, and how he might respond to my actions. Would he make eye contact with me? Should I try to shake his hand? Despite my apprehension, the meeting went well. Clements gets extremely confused in a group of people, and avoids those kinds of situations, but has no problem with one-on-one interactions. We met in the West End, had chicken katsu curry for lunch, and then walked into nearby Chinatown, his favourite part of town. It quickly became apparent that Clements is remarkably gifted. Like most people with ‘high-functioning’ autism, he is obsessed with a few subjects, and revels in immersing himself in them. I learnt that he is deeply fascinated by China and Japan, and has lived in both countries, where he worked as an English teacher. (He said he felt more comfortable and ‘accepted’ in both countries than he ever has in the United Kingdom – by virtue of being foreign, which often ‘masked’ the behavioural quirks for which he would normally be admonished.) As we walked through Chinatown, he spoke what sounded like fluent Mandarin and Cantonese, to order first a pair of pig buns from a street vendor, and then two small bottles of Chinese moonshine from a supermarket. As well as his linguistic abilities, Clements has a comprehensive knowledge of arthouse cinema, and of American, British and Chinese hip hop. His exceptional abilities are undoubtedly linked to being what he calls an ‘Aspie’ – but he doesn’t regard autism as a gift. For Clements, autism makes daily life more difficult. It is something he could do without. ‘I don’t really know what social cues are, and I have no idea what people mean by “body language”,’ he told me. ‘I despise superficial chit-chat, so I’ve offended many people without even realising it. Conversations with me are usually one-sided, because I tend to steer them towards the things I’m interested in, and overload others with information without considering their level of interest, but I’m learning to tone it down.’ As a result of this, building and maintaining relationships is extremely difficult for Clements, and finding a girlfriend is even harder: for autistic men such as him, ‘opportunities for having sex with someone are slim, and the chances of being able to find a long-term sexual partner are even slimmer,’ he said. Clements lives independently in a shared house near Cambridge, and earns a living as a German-English translator; but life for his younger brother Jack, who lies on the opposite end of the ‘spectrum’, is completely different. ‘Jack doesn’t communicate verbally as we do,’ Clements wrote in his self-published book The Autistic Brothers: Two Unconventional Paths to Adulthood (2018): [Jack] can utter single words and basic phrases, but his ability to construct spontaneous sentences is limited … [He] will never be able to live the life of an ordinary adult. He will require fulltime care for the rest of his life, which will necessitate someone keeping his bottom clean. We all love him dearly, but at the same time we are forced to swallow the bitter pill that he will never have a career, a house, a car or a family like the rest of us. This is a tough thing to come to terms with.Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a condition, or range of conditions, characterised by difficulty with social interactions and communication, restricted interests, repetitive behaviours, and sensory sensitivity, symptoms that ‘hurt the person’s ability to function properly in school, work, and other areas of life’, as the US National Institute of Mental Health puts it. The fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (2013), or DSM-5, lists three severity levels for ASD, based on the extent of social communication impairment and restricted, repetitive patterns of behaviour. The diagnostic criteria for Level 1 autism include ‘difficulty initiating social interactions’, ‘atypical or unsuccessful responses to social overtures of others’, ‘[odd and typically unsuccessful] attempts to make friends’ and ‘problems of organisation and planning [that] hamper independence’. Level 2 includes ‘marked deficits in verbal and nonverbal social communication skills’, ‘limited initiation of social interactions’, ‘markedly odd nonverbal communication’, as well as ‘inflexibility of behaviour’, ‘difficulty coping with change’ and ‘distress and/or difficulty changing focus or action’. Level 3 includes ‘severe deficits in verbal and nonverbal social communication skills [which] cause severe impairments in functioning’, ‘very limited initiation of social interactions, and minimal response to social overtures from others’, ‘extreme difficulty coping with change’, ‘restricted/repetitive behaviours [that] markedly interfere with functioning in all spheres’, and ‘great distress/difficulty changing focus or action’. People diagnosed with Level 3 autism tend to have great difficulty interacting with others, and can appear to lack social skills altogether. For example, the DSM-5 describes ‘a person with few words of intelligible speech who rarely initiates interaction and, when he or she does, makes unusual approaches to meet needs only, and responds to only very direct social approaches’, adding that such individuals require ‘very substantial support’ in their daily lives. By contrast, people with Level 1 autism can function independently with some support. (Level 3 corresponds closely to the 11 cases reported by the Austrian-American psychiatrist Leo Kanner in his classic paper from 1943, while Level 1 corresponds to the mild form of autism described by the Austrian paediatrician Hans Asperger in the 1930s.) About 40 per cent of children with autism do not talk at all Estimates of the prevalence of autism vary widely, and appear to have increased dramatically in the past two decades. A press release issued in 2012 by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated that the prevalence in eight-year-old children in the US was one in 88, representing a 78 per cent increase from the estimate in 2004; the latest CDC estimate stands at about one in 59. The World Health Organization estimates that one in 160 children worldwide has autism, noting that there are ‘many possible explanations’ for the apparent increase in prevalence, ‘including improved awareness, expansion of diagnostic criteria, better diagnostic tools and improved reporting’. It notes, however, that the rate of autism in low- and middle-income countries, especially in Africa and Latin America, is unknown. Despite lengthy research, I could find no figures regarding how many of those diagnosed with autism fall into each of the three severity levels but, according to the CDC, about 40 per cent of children with autism do not talk at all, and at least a quarter acquire basic language at 12-18 months of age, but then lose it. The results of a longitudinal study in Australia published in 2016 are somewhat consistent with this estimate: overall, it found that 26.3 per cent of the 246 autistic children sampled were using ‘fewer than five spontaneous and functional words’ by the end of the study, and 36.4 per cent exited the study not using ‘two-word phrases’; these figures were slightly higher according to different measures and the parents’ reports, which indicated that nearly 30 per cent were not ‘naming at least three objects’ consistently, and more than 43 per cent not using ‘phrases with a noun and verb’ consistently at the end. Autism often presents with co-morbidities. More than half of children with ASD also have an intellectual disability (defined as having an IQ below 70), and up to half exhibit symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Autistic children are psychiatrically hospitalised much more frequently than others, with 13 per cent of their hospital visits being due to a psychiatric problem, compared with 2 per cent for children without ASD. In autistic adults, the lifetime prevalence of anxiety and depression is 42 per cent and 37 per cent respectively. Autism also commonly co-occurs with epilepsy, with the highest rate in those whose IQ is below 40. Autism is arguably one of the most controversial subjects of our time. Due partly to a lack of understanding of its causes, current discourse on this subject is a narrative jungle strewn with young, overgrown and ill-conceived ideas jostling for a spot in the sun, including uncompassionate ‘refrigerator mothers’, microbial infections, vaccinations, and environmental pollutants and toxicants, to name but a few. Into this maelstrom came the neurodiversity movement, whose advocates celebrate autism as a gift that is an integral part of identity. They promise to make the voices of autistics heard, and to improve their quality of life by making the world more accepting of, and accommodating for, them, after decades of being marginalised and victimised. However, in recent years, there has been a backlash against this – growing numbers of people are now speaking out against the neurodiversity movement, claiming that it does not represent them and, more importantly, that it ignores the plight of those with severe autism. The term ‘neurodiversity’ was coined in the late 1990s by the sociologist Judy Singer, who argued that autistic people had been oppressed in much the same way as women and gay people, and suggested that their brains are merely wired differently from those of ‘neurotypical’, or nonautistic, people. The movement is an extension of the civil rights movement and the deaf pride movement that emerged after the introduction of cochlear implants. Writing in The Atlantic magazine in 1998, the investigative journalist Harvey Blume said: ‘Neurodiversity may be every bit as crucial for the human race as biodiversity is for life in general.’ In the past decade, neurodiversity’s popularity has grown enormously, largely because of the buzz surrounding Steve Silberman’s book NeuroTribes (2015). Today, the internet and mass media are replete with articles proclaiming the benefits of employing people with autism, who have a hidden potential that can benefit endeavours such as branding and design – if only we can stop thinking of them as being disabled. This way of thinking has now entered the mainstream: in the US, for example, representatives of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network have advised federal government policymakers on how they believe issues such as healthcare and community integration will affect autistic people; and in the UK, the Labour Party in 2018 launched an Autism Neurodiversity Manifesto, with the social model of disability as one of its key principles. On the face of it, this sounds admirable – the neurodiversity movement has indeed empowered many with autism, most recently, the young climate campaigner Greta Thunberg who described it as her ‘superpower’. But the movement is proving to be harmful in a number of ways. Firstly, neurodiversity advocates can romanticise autism. While many with mild forms of autism might lead relatively ‘normal’ daily lives with little or no assistance, many who are more severely affected cannot function properly without round-the-clock care. Yet John Marble, the self-advocate and founder of Pivot Diversity – an organisation in San Francisco that aims to ‘pivot autism towards solutions which empower autistic people, their families and employers’ – posted on Twitter in 2017: ‘THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS SEVERE AUTISM, just as there is no such thing as “severe homosexuality” or “severe blackness”.’ Worryingly, this trend of romanticising autism has extended to other conditions that can be severe, debilitating, and life-threatening. There are now groups of self-advocates who celebrate depression and schizophrenia. This could also be related to the growth of pro-anorexia websites, as well as the more recent emergence of ‘addiction pride’. The idea that autism is ‘a variation of normal’ is at odds with scientific understanding of the condition. The general consensus among neuroscientists is that autism has neurodevelopmental origins, with recent research showing that it is associated with abnormalities in brain cell numbers and white-matter structure, and defects in synaptic pruning, the process by which unwanted synaptic connections are eliminated. The research also shows that genetics plays a major role: each autistic individual carries a large number of very rare or unique gene variants, together with extra copies of genes, deleted genes and other chromosomal disruptions. Some of these are inherited, while others are generated anew at fertilisation and during the earliest stages of development. Thus, it seems that every person with autism harbours a unique combination of such genetic variations, which manifest as a unique set of behavioural symptoms. Neurodiversity advocates label those who express a desire for treatment or cure as Nazis and eugenicists However, neurodiversity advocates reject the medical model of autism, in favour of an as-yet undetermined social model that blames the problems faced by autistic people on systematic ‘ableist’ discrimination. Some of their reasons for doing so are valid. Historically, autistic people have existed on the margins of society, and have been victimised by the medical-industrial complex that aimed to coercively eliminate them and others considered to be disabled. For example, Asperger was complicit in the Nazi regime’s euthanasia programme for disabled children. Since then, the medical view of autism has changed dramatically. Researchers and clinicians do not want to eradicate autism – they aim to understand it in order to develop treatments for those who want them. Despite many important medical advances, there is still a lack of understanding of the causes of autism, which leaves many parents desperate, and makes them willing to try just about anything to help their children. Consequently, there is a huge market for ineffective or untested treatments and quack remedies – from craniosacral therapy and neurolinguistic programming to therapies that claim to enhance ‘upper chest “emotional breathing” to help us to learn through emotional charge on experience’ and wearable devices that use so-called Bilateral Alternating Stimulation-Tactile technology to transfer ‘alternating vibrations to alter the body’s fight, flight or freeze response to stress and anxiety’, which apparently restores ‘homeostatic nervous system functioning, allowing you to think clearly and experience calm’. Neurodiversity advocates still label those who express a desire for treatment or cure as Nazis and eugenicists. ‘When we fight for autism rights, we are fighting for our continued existence,’ wrote the self-advocate Jackson Connors in the People’s World newspaper this June. ‘Against our dehumanisation. Against a “cure”, which is a dogwhistle for ableist eugenics. And against the systems that push so many of us to poverty and suicide.’ In their zealous pursuit of autistic rights, some advocates have become authoritarian and militant, harassing and bullying anyone who dares to portray autism negatively, or expresses a desire for a treatment or cure. This extends to autism researchers in academia and the pharmaceutical industry, and also to the parents of severely autistic children. One widely used treatment is Applied Behavioural Analysis (ABA), which involves intensive one-on-one therapy sessions aimed to develop social skills. However, neurodiversity advocates consider ABA to be cruel and unethical, and campaign for withdrawal of government funding for the treatment. Furthermore, they are trying to legitimise self-diagnosis of autism. ‘Neurotypicals continue to dominate the conversation and speak over autistic voices, which ultimately reinforces a pathologising viewpoint about us, and centres around the idea that somehow we fundamentally cannot speak for ourselves,’ wrote Solveig Standal on the Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism blog this April. Standal continues: Yes, ultimately some of us will come to realise that they are not really autistic, but the exploration still helps them find answers about themselves, and no one is harmed in the process. However, when we deny someone’s autistic identity, we shut them out of the whole process, deny them access to the tools they need to better access the healthcare system, and potentially deny them their formal diagnosis altogether.While many among the autism researchers are aware of these problems and find the situation extremely frustrating, very few are willing to speak up, for fear of jeopardising their research funding, offending a highly sensitive patient and parent population, or being targeted for harassment themselves. In recent years, however, growing numbers of parents and carers have begun speaking up against the neurodiversity movement, saying that the way its advocates portray autism does not resonate with their own experiences of the condition. One of them is Bruce Hall, the 65-year-old father of twins Jack and James, 18, in California. ‘The boys both have severe autism and intellectual disabilities, and their behaviour has always been very challenging,’ Hall told me. ‘Up to the age of nine, James would throw tantrums and scream for hours. He can speak a little now, although you wouldn’t understand much of it. Jack doesn’t speak at all.’ Hall and his wife Valerie published a book called Immersed: Our Experience with Autism (2016), describing in detail daily life with their children: In public, the boys may throw a fit at any moment – we can’t predict it, and we can’t be certain of the cause. It could be because of the lights, or the sounds, or the number of people around. It could be because they don’t feel well or because they’re just tired. It could be a combination of these things, or none of them.Even typical kid-friendly entertainments do not ensure that the boys will react positively. Their understanding of situations is limited, as is their tolerance … what normal kids consider fun, autistic kids may consider baffling and terrifying.The disconnect between the neurodiversity narrative and the experiences of severely affected autistics led another group of advocates to establish the National Council on Severe Autism, based in San Jose in California and launched earlier this year. ‘I have two kids with nonverbal autism,’ said Jill Escher, founding president of the organisation. ‘It’s an extremely severe neurodevelopmental disability – they can’t talk, can’t read or write, can’t add one plus one, and lack any capacity for abstract thought. [Neurodiversity advocates] trivialise this, and cherrypick naive, feel-good stories that portray autism falsely instead of grappling with the reality.’ ‘Some aspects of [the neurodiversity movement] are very convenient for all autism advocates, because we all want to portray our children in a way that will engender acceptance,’ she added. ‘If my kid’s having a meltdown at the supermarket, or taking his clothes off, or screaming, I want people to appreciate that his behaviour comes out of a difference in his brain wiring. But do I think his behaviour and wiring is natural? Absolutely not.’ A group of marginalised people are hyper-marginalising the very people they claim to be advocating for The neurodiversity movement is dividing both the autism community and autism researchers. Advocates make the distinction between autistics and ‘neurotypicals’, or nonautistics. This fosters an ‘us versus them’ mentality, wherein nonautistic people are regarded as an oppressive enemy. It also fosters intolerance towards different ways of thinking about autism, as well as a deep and unhealthy mistrust of the scientific and medical communities. Ironically, a social-justice movement that aims to highlight the ways in which autistic people have been mistreated by society is now directly responsible for the mistreatment of the most vulnerable of all autistics – many of whom are too severely affected by their condition to speak up for themselves. In standing up for their rights, a group of marginalised people are effectively hyper-marginalising the very people they claim to be advocating for. They have monopolised the public discourse on autism, and continue to do whatever they can to silence any dissenting voices; this inability to debate and try to reach compromise is a problem not only for the autistic community, but for wider society. It also poses a major problem for autism research. Scientists are now beginning to realise that there is selection bias against autistics with intellectual disabilities throughout all fields of autism research; although nearly half of the autistic population also has an intellectual disability, the majority of research has focused on those with relatively intact language and cognition. Thus, individuals considered to be ‘low-functioning’ are being overlooked by the research community. ‘The movement is harmful because they’re trying to terrorise people into silence, and we’re just a few of the many victims of their bullying and smear campaigns,’ Escher said. ‘There’s a toll on scientific research, too, because the neurodiversity platform apparently doesn’t believe it’s important to investigate the causes of autism.’ It is, therefore, time to start thinking differently about neurodiversity, and to recognise the importance of free speech in the public discourse on autism, because if neurodiversity means anything, it means accepting that we all think differently, and that not everyone takes pride in being autistic. ‘If you’re happy being autistic and think of it as part of your identify, that’s great, and I don’t want to upset you or hurt you, but don’t tell me I can’t try to help ease my sons’ suffering,’ said Hall. ‘For them, autism is a life-altering, cruel disability, and I’d do anything to help them feel good and give them a better quality of life.’ ‘Neurodiversity advocates ignore the harsh realities of severe autism, and want to forget about my sons and others like them,’ he added. ‘They’ve done a good job of hijacking the message and monopolising the discourse on autism, and are controlling the narrative so tightly that people like my sons will have no choice in the world.’ Thomas Clements echoes this sentiment – as he wrote in The Guardian last month, the trivialisation of autism by neurodiversity advocates comes at the expense of those at the lower end of ‘the spectrum’, like his brother Jack.

The Fair Pay Act is a piece of legislation that has been introduced by Senator Harkin. It would actually require that firms do more to ensure that workers that are doing the same kinds of jobs are actually being paid similarly. One of the insidious ways that you see the pay gap playing out in our economy is that you have workers that have similar kinds of skills that are required for their job and they're doing similar kinds of tasks. But because we call them by different names and one is a job that tends to be held by women and one is a job that tends to be held by men, and lo and behold the job that intends to be held by men is paid more than the other, that is what this Fair Pay Act seeks to do.

For the rest of the hour, we're going to look at the latest in hydrogen-fuel-cell cars. Now, maybe you didn't know that there are some hydrogen-fuel-cell cars. And Honda has announced plans to lease - to lease its hydrogen-fuel-cell cars to the public. Well, it's really just a select few members of the public in Southern California. Honda's car is called FCX Clarity. They're set to roll out of the production line, roll out on those lines this month, and Honda says they will lease just about 200 cars to customers in the first three years of production. The lease is not going to be cheap. It's going to run about 600 dollars a month, hydrogen not included.

Twice what it was last year, and it was big then. Last year, they passed bills in 34 states. So it shows the extent of the problem. A lot of the bills, you know, they try to impose harsher penalties on businesses who hire illegal immigrants, or give law enforcement more leeway to detain them, or make it harder for the undocumented to qualify for various social services. So I think this trend is going to continue. The impact is hard to assess so far because a lot of these bills haven't taken effect yet. One person I spoke with said a lot of them really kind of duplicate what federal law already says. So we'll see what impact they have.

So Gila monsters aren't very fleet of foot. They're slow. They go out and search very slowly for their prey, and they use their sense of smell to detect these things. So what they tend to find are animals that are in nests. We're talking quails, they lay their eggs on the ground so they can find those eggs and eat those; any rabbits or rodents, some of the desert mice and desert rats that will have their babies in nests, they'll actually go and eat those guys because they're so slow they can't run fast enough to catch something like an adult rabbit. So they eat nestlings, always.

Farming, you know, we think of it as so natural. Farming is a great artifice. You simply cannot farm without speech. For example, if you can't tell your son, son, look, this here's seeds. Now you take your seeds and you've got to put them in the ground where I tell you, put them in a straight line and if you don't do that, you're not going to have any ears of corn this summer. Well, you just can't farm without being able to tell somebody what to do. It's a prime example of why I feel that humans should not be called Homo Sapiens, which means, man reasoning or rational man, but Homo Loquax, man talking. In fact, Loquax can also mean talkative or garrulous.

This is NEWS AND NOTES. I'm Ed Gordon. Black intellectuals: do they matter in an age where pop stars make policy and politicians are former movie stars? On today's special Labor Day Roundtable, NPR's Farai Chideya takes this question on with three black intellectuals: Algernon Austin, a sociologist and author of Getting it Wrong: How Black Intellectuals Are Failing Black America - John McWhorter, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America - and Barbara Ransby, an associate professor of history and African-American Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago and author of Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. Farai began by asking the group what it's like to be a black intellectual in today's pop culture-driven society.

I went in the wrong direction for 50 years or so and got into politics. And I (laughter) - but after a time when I said everything I had to say, I decided that there was - well, the Village Voice decided by firing me that it was time for me to find some other kind of work. And eventually, I stumbled on what I'd loved from the time I was 5 or 6, but I didn't know how to draw in that style at 5 or 6 or 10 or 15 or 20. So I learned at 80. I've got a slow learning curve.

In fact one of the people I was closest to was actually, according to him, fourth in line in another state, I'm not going to say which, but another state, and in the Aryan Brotherhood. He'd been in prison since 1973 and did 28 years and was recently released. But he - I mean, he's 5'2", he's a Vietnam veteran, he's well-read, he wears glasses, and he actually taught me chess. I lived on the same - in the same dormitory. But the respect that he got and the maturity that he handled that, it's a 900-man yard, and with one word he made the decisions in passing, walking through halls, in the chow hall was a big place. And - but he conducted himself with a level of maturity that, you know, it's almost scary.

Well, I think one of the reasons why it's not in control yet is really quite fundamental. One of the things you need to control cholera is that you have to have good water systems and good sanitation systems. And although there has been some progress in that regard in Haiti over the last four and a half years, there really has not been the kind of transformative change that needs to happen. Most poor people living in the countryside or living in the urban slums, they don't have a place to go to the toilet and that just leads to cases of diarrheal disease, and especially cholera now that cholera is there in the country.

Unfortunately, crime is not something that's missing from our national parks, and national parks are typically not very heavily policed. In fact, some of the most popular hiking trails at Organ Pipe National Park, along our border in Arizona, are now closed to the public because they've become too dangerous. There are too many people smuggling things across the border, too many drug gangs running rampant, and if you run into trouble somewhere out in the wilderness, you should be able to defend yourself from that source of trouble just the way that our ancestors did as they settled this continent.

He makes me feel very cynical. One thing about best actresses, which he brought up - this was, I think, a very good year. There are - it's a perennial complaint, you know, that there are no good roles in Hollywood for women, especially for women who are viewed in the movie industry as older, which means, you know, over 25. But this year, we have Helen Mirren, Penelope Cruz, Judi Dench, Kate Winslet and Meryl Streep - three of them over 50 and, you know, standing out from I think a very crowded and impressive field. So it was a very good year in that regard, which is, I think, encouraging and worth mentioning.

And actually, we now have inaugurated real new directions in the study of genetics and theory of advanced social evolution. Some of this, as I suggested earlier, has come from our knowledge of other species of animals that have achieved advanced social evolution. The most advanced stage which humans have is called eusocial evolution, and it entails cooperation based upon altruistic behavior. And it is now, I think, inevitable that we turn in both the two dozen cases that have occurred in the history of life that we know of - only about two dozen cases - of species reaching that very high level. Many of them were social insects.

The great fear is that they'll be lost to posterity. It's not necessarily a bad thing if Oprah Winfrey wanted to buy them and donate them to the Library of Congress. The great fear is that a speculator will buy them and then turn around and sell them piecemeal, on the grounds that to maximize the revenue you want to get a thousand collectors to pay lots and lots of money to have some original document from the Freedom Rides or something in Dr. King's handwriting to President Kennedy on their wall. And if that's true, they'll be disbursed and essentially lost. I've done my work. I won't be using them, but the scholars of the future and the citizens of the future who will be deprived of new interpretations of freedom and democracy will be at a loss if these things are disbursed.

But it follows three years where he's basically destroyed every norm of common civility and the rules by which we used to do our politics. And so we've entered a world where a lot of people apparently treat politics as a cult, as, like, the most important form of identity, which is asking more of politics than it can bear, and then who think politics is a war to the death between two opposing sides, which is also not true. Politics is a competition between two sides with partial truths. And so we've got this catastrophizing view of politics which filters down to disturbed people.

He won the argument and led CIA for a little more than a year until Bill Clinton became president. By the end of the decade, Gates had landed at Texas A&M. He became president of the University in 2002. Robert Bednarz has been a professor at the school for 35 years. The Gates he describes doesn't sound much like the blunt, demanding CIA officer. Dr. ROBERT S. BEDNARZ (Geography, Texas A&M University): We were skeptical initially because of his background, but he turned out to be a wonderful administrator and very strongly believed in the notion of shared governance and consensus building and that sort of thing.

Dean Singleton, the CEO of the Denver-based Media News Group, has recently surfaced in the newsrooms of the Inquirer, the Mercury News, and the Pioneer Press of St. Paul, Minnesota, as though he were kicking the tires. His company already owns the Denver Post, the Detroit News, and other papers. The Gannett Company, the owners of USA Today and the Detroit Free Press, has more papers than any other company in the country. But Gannett's used to higher profit margins than Knight Ridder's big papers enjoy. A new Merrill Lynch analysis said the strongest suitors would be MediaNews Group with a partner like Gannett, or the McClatchy Company. McClatchy owns papers in Minneapolis, Sacramento, and Raleigh, North Carolina. It's considered a champion of strong regional newspapers that might have to take on significant debt to buy Knight Ridder. None of the companies involved would comment for this story.

...Which - I don't know if it's his door or some part of the house, but everyone in the podcast in S-Town, they were talking about, you know, sometimes you just sit around and listen to the creakings in this house. So it was pretty amazing to hear that in the recording, yeah. Well, John - yeah. John took his own life in 2015. When John sent me emails, you know, discussing his depression and his loneliness, I didn't want to preach to him, but I just encouraged him. I said, you know, I'm hoping you continue recording, you know, and working more on music. Again, I knew nothing about anything about him. I just thought it would help transform his feelings of loneliness into, you know, more of a content solitude, which is, you know, kind of easy to say but not always easy to do. So I didn't want to preach to him, but, you know, I saw a lot of promise in his music. So I did try to encourage that.

Well, what's interesting is that I've been speaking to pastors here in Nashville, a lot of whom are rooted in civil rights history, many of them even came to this area because of it. And others who grew up after, in the post civil rights movement - even the era of sort of the Black Power movement, where the kind of theology that Reverend Wright has talked about preaching. I talked to Reverend Raymond Bowman, he's a pastor of the Spruce Street Baptist Church in Nashville. And he told me that they agree with the central tenets of what the pastor says, and they don't see themselves changing because of what's been happening this past week.

Yeah. There's - I tell another story about a man named Abu Gamal, who we caught in a house full of suicide bombers, and through some very innovative ways of interrogating and using new methods of interrogation that relied on knowledge of Arab culture, I was able to convince him to sell out his cause. But this is a man who joined al-Qaeda because he had a second wife he couldn't afford. She had a shopping habit. We used to say she loved the blue jeans and bling. And he ultimately had joined al-Qaeda because he needed to pay bills. His business wasn't doing well, and his wife was spending a lot. And when I realized what motivated him - what truly motivated him was his loss of respect for himself. And I offered him a way to get that back, and then he became cooperative.

Figueroa says it will also cut down on the trauma that many kids experience having to go inside prison to visit a parent. And that's heartening to kids like A.J. Minor, who says he would've liked something like this when his mom was in prison. A. MINOR: A visit with your parent like that would actually keep a kid from running away, because they know that if they stay there they can have a visit with their parent every week, every couple of days. It's so much more nourishing. For someone that's going through it right now, hang on. You will be able to see them.

Hi. Yeah. You know, my dad had given me - well, he'd sent us a series of about six to a dozen audiotapes when he was in Vietnam. I was pretty young at the time, but I had a chance to listen to them again a couple of years ago and actually have them transcribed and considered trying to do a repository of, you know, battle area audiotapes of which is too much of a task for me at the time. But that's probably one of the biggest objects as it was that I have from my dad's life. He's still with us, but it's really a treasure and a way looking through his life in a time when I had no access to it really.

My question is: I'd like to know how helping the very low minimum wage, raising it to, say, approximately $7 is going to help those that personally I feel are in more need, which would be around the $9 to $11 an hour wage, which is bumping them out of the lower brackets, reducing the amount of governmental help that they have. And most of the minimum wage people that I see are of a younger generation, whether it be those still in high school. And I'd like to know how that's going to help the lower middle class, which are the ones I feel need the most help.

But the consensus was that the choice that he's described is a false one, that you don't have to buy Russian support on issues that involve our national interests and their national interests. On an issue like Iran, if we're going to be able to cooperate, it's got to be because each government sees it as consistent with its national security to work together. And if it doesn't, you won't have any lasting cooperation. Meanwhile, it needs to be possible, and, in the view of our group, is possible to be pretty emphatic and direct about those areas where we don't agree, and think the issue of Iran is a pretty good one. In the past year, as I mentioned, I think Russian policie's actually become more constructive. At the same time that they've heard more criticism, even from President Bush and Secretary Rice, about their internal developments. So, we don't think this is a tradeoff that needs to be made. I think its actually kind of unsophisticated to say that, you know, the Russians will only play ball with us if we protend they're a democracy.

And you know, New Orleans is not back to, quote-unquote, normal yet. My little hometown, a very small community hit by a hurricane six years ago, and there are still some buildings, maybe, that need to be torn down that shouldn't be there or some parts of the economy that have not even recovered yet. And to think about how long that takes for a country that has the kind of resources that the United States does and then to look at what you see here and the scope of the damage here and try to figure out, you know, it's going to be decades.

I'm standing in front of you today in all humility, wanting to share with you my journey of the last six years in the field of service and education. And I'm not a trained academic. Neither am I a veteran social worker. I was 26 years in the corporate world, trying to make organizations profitable. And then in 2003 I started Parikrma Humanity Foundation from my kitchen table. The first thing that we did was walk through the slums. You know, by the way, there are two million people in Bangalore, who live in 800 slums. We couldn't go to all the slums, but we tried to cover as much as we could. We walked through these slums, identified houses where children would never go to school. We talked to the parents, tried to convince them about sending their children to school. We played with the children, and came back home really tired, exhausted, but with images of bright faces, twinkling eyes, and went to sleep. We were all excited to start, but the numbers hit us then: 200 million children between four to 14 that should be going to school, but do not; 100 million children who go to school but cannot read; 125 million who cannot do basic maths. We also heard that 250 billion Indian rupees was dedicated for government schooling. Ninety percent of it was spent on teachers' salary and administrators' salary. And yet, India has nearly the highest teacher absenteeism in the world, with one out of four teachers not going to school at all the entire academic year. Those numbers were absolutely mind-boggling, overwhelming, and we were constantly asked, "When will you start? How many schools will you start? How many children will you get? How are you going to scale? How are you going to replicate?" It was very difficult not to get scared, not to get daunted. But we dug our heels and said, "We're not in the number game. We want to take one child at a time and take the child right through school, sent to college, and get them prepared for better living, a high value job." So, we started Parikrma. The first Parikrma school started in a slum where there were 70,000 people living below the poverty line. Our first school was on a rooftop of a building inside the slums, a second story building, the only second story building inside the slums. And that rooftop did not have any ceiling, only half a tin sheet. That was our first school. One hundred sixty-five children. Indian academic year begins in June. So, June it rains, so many a times all of us would be huddled under the tin roof, waiting for the rain to stop. My God! What a bonding exercise that was. And all of us that were under that roof are still here together today. Then came the second school, the third school, the fourth school and a junior college. In six years now, we have four schools, one junior college, 1,100 children coming from 28 slums and four orphanages. (Applause) Our dream is very simple: to send each of these kids, get them prepared to be educated but also to live peacefully, contented in this conflict-ridden chaotic globalized world. Now, when you talk global you have to talk English. And so all our schools are English medium schools. But they know there is this myth that children from the slums cannot speak English well. No one in their family has spoken English. No one in their generation has spoken English. But how wrong it is. Girl: I like adventurous books, and some of my favorites are Alfred Hitchcock and [unclear] and Hardy Boys. Although they are like in different contexts, one is magical, the other two are like investigation, I like those books because they have something special in them. The vocabulary used in those books and the style of writing. I mean like once I pick up one book I cannot put it down until I finish the whole book. Even if it takes me four and a half hours, or three and half hours to finish my book, I do it. Boy: I did good research and I got the information [on the] world's fastest cars. I like Ducati ZZ143, because it is the fastest, the world's fastest bike, and I like Pulsar 220 DTSI because it is India's fastest bike. (Laughter) Shukla Bose: Well, that girl that you saw, her father sells flowers on the roadside. And this little boy has been coming to school for five years. But isn't it strange that little boys all over the world love fast bikes? (Laughter) He hasn't seen one, he hasn't ridden one, of course, but he has done a lot of research through Google search. You know, when we started with our English medium schools we also decided to adopt the best curriculum possible, the ICSE curriculum. And again, there were people who laughed at me and said, "Don't be crazy choosing such a tough curriculum for these students. They'll never be able to cope." Not only do our children cope very well, but they excel in it. You should just come across to see how well our children do. There is also this myth that parents from the slums are not interested in their children going to school; they'd much rather put them to work. That's absolute hogwash. All parents all over the world want their children to lead a better life than themselves, but they need to believe that change is possible. Video: (Hindi) SB: We have 80 percent attendance for all our parents-teachers meeting. Sometimes it's even 100 percent, much more than many privileged schools. Fathers have started to attend. It's very interesting. When we started our school the parents would give thumbprints in the attendance register. Now they have started writing their signature. The children have taught them. It's amazing how much children can teach. We have, a few months ago, actually late last year, we had a few mothers who came to us and said, "You know, we want to learn how to read and write. Can you teach us?" So, we started an afterschool for our parents, for our mothers. We had 25 mothers who came regularly after school to study. We want to continue with this program and extend it to all our other schools. Ninety-eight percent of our fathers are alcoholics. So, you can imagine how traumatized and how dysfunctional the houses are where our children come from. We have to send the fathers to de-addiction labs and when they come back, most times sober, we have to find a job for them so that they don't regress. We have about three fathers who have been trained to cook. We have taught them nutrition, hygiene. We have helped them set up the kitchen and now they are supplying food to all our children. They do a very good job because their children are eating their food, but most importantly this is the first time they have got respect, and they feel that they are doing something worthwhile. More than 90 percent of our non-teaching staff are all parents and extended families. We've started many programs just to make sure that the child comes to school. Vocational skill program for the older siblings so the younger ones are not stopped from coming to school. There is also this myth that children from the slums cannot integrate with mainstream. Take a look at this little girl who was one of the 28 children from all privileged schools, best schools in the country that was selected for the Duke University talent identification program and was sent to IIM Ahmedabad. Video: Girl: Duke IIMA Camp. Whenever we see that IIMA, it was such a pride for us to go to that camp. Everybody was very friendly, especially I got a lot of friends. And I felt that my English has improved a lot going there and chatting with friends. There they met children who are with a different standard and a different mindset, a totally different society. I mingled with almost everyone. They were very friendly. I had very good friends there, who are from Delhi, who are from Mumbai. Even now we are in touch through Facebook. After this Ahmedabad trip I've been like a totally different mingling with people and all of those. Before that I feel like I wasn't like this. I don't even mingle, or start speaking with someone so quickly. My accent with English improved a lot. And I learned football, volleyball, Frisbee, lots of games. And I wouldn't want to go to Bangalore. Let me stay here. Such beautiful food, I enjoyed it. It was so beautiful. I enjoyed eating food like [unclear] would come and ask me, "Yes ma'am, what you want?" It was so good to hear! (Laughter) (Applause) SB: This girl was working as a maid before she came to school. And today she wants to be a neurologist. Our children are doing brilliantly in sports. They are really excelling. There is an inter-school athletic competition that is held every year in Bangalore, where 5,000 children participate from 140 best schools in the city. We've got the best school award for three years successively. And our children are coming back home with bags full of medals, with lots of admirers and friends. Last year there were a couple of kids from elite schools that came to ask for admissions in our school. We also have our very own dream team. Why is this happening? Why this confidence? Is it the exposure? We have professors from MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, Indian Institute of Science who come and teach our children lots of scientific formulas, experiments, much beyond the classroom. Art, music are considered therapy and mediums of expression. We also believe that it's the content that is more important. It is not the infrastructure, not the toilets, not the libraries, but it is what actually happens in this school that is more important. Creating an environment of learning, of inquiry, of exploration is what is true education. When we started Parikrma we had no idea which direction we were taking. We didn't hire McKinsey to do a business plan. But we know for sure that what we want to do today is take one child at a time, not get bogged with numbers, and actually see the child complete the circle of life, and unleash his total potential. We do not believe in scale because we believe in quality, and scale and numbers will automatically happen. We have corporates that have stood behind us, and we are able to, now, open more schools. But we began with the idea of one child at a time. This is five-year-old Parusharam. He was begging by a bus stop a few years ago, got picked up and is now in an orphanage, has been coming to school for the last four and a half months. He's in kindergarten. He has learned how to speak English. We have a model by which kids can speak English and understand English in three month's time. He can tell you stories in English of the thirsty crow, of the crocodile and of the giraffe. And if you ask him what he likes to do he will say, "I like sleeping. I like eating. I like playing." And if you ask him what he wants to do, he will say, "I want to horsing." Now, "horsing" is going for a horse ride. So, Parusharam comes to my office every day. He comes for a tummy rub, because he believes that will give me luck. (Laughter) When I started Parikrma I began with a great deal of arrogance of transforming the world. But today I have been transformed. I have been changed with my children. I've learned so much from them: love, compassion, imagination and such creativity. Parusharam is Parikrma with a simple beginning but a long way to go. I promise you, Parusharam will speak in the TED conference a few years from now. Thank you. (Applause)

I'm a emergency physician in Charleston, South Carolina at a relatively small community hospital, Summerville Medical Center. I'm actually in the car, on my way to a shift now. I'm going to be coming in about an hour early. It's like - I had a shift yesterday, which was one of the busiest that I've experienced in a long, long time, mostly because people coming in concerned, mostly, about their children having a fever, cough, and worried, obviously, about the swine flu. And the - we haven't seen any cases here in Charleston. As a matter of fact, I haven't seen an actual influenza case for a number of weeks, although we are testing for it.

Well, we get people at different stages, which is very interesting. We have some authors that come to us pretty much with just a manuscript. Then we have other people that will come to us after they have completed some of the steps - meaning they may already have a cover design. They may already have a title picked out. They may already have even printed some books already, and depending on really what it is that they need and what I see from my expertise as far as what they may need to change and start the process over again, those are the things that we help them out with. Some people, you know, may have cover treatments that are just not going to work in the market place, and we will coach them and advise them of new and innovative cover treatments that may help increase awareness and bring people to their project. Some folks don't understand that exterior layout is just as important as interior layout, so proper typesetting as well as professional editing is key in putting out your own work. There are a lot of...

Yes. Well, sorry about that. But I dedicated, literally dedicated my life and my career to exploration of space, ultimately achieved a Ph.D. in engineering, went into the aerospace industry. I recently retired as an executive. And last night it's amazing, I was playing "2001: Space Odyssey" for a friend of mine who was 3 years old at the time, and she had never seen the movie and I started crying. And she said, what is wrong? And I said, we could have achieved all of this. We could have done everything here. And she said, well, why didn't we? And I said, we've lost the vision. And I said, unfortunately, I think I will die before we ever get it back.

No, not quite really that, in jail. I mean I used to be there with some of - locked up with some of our comrades. So it used to be more of a high moral (unintelligible). There was quite a lot of poetry and a lot of singing. But also from there, after 1976 when I joined the youth organization in the South African Nation of Congress I was with a poetry group called the Ancestors of Africa. It was supported by the late Dr. Fabian Fabril(ph) who was sort of like - he gave me more of my insight about politically what was happening in the country.

So about 40 percent of the people got better with usual care compared to about 60 percent who had acupuncture. But here's an interesting twist to the findings, some of the back pain patients got just pressure put on the acupuncture points, no needles. And it turns out that these folks did just as well as the people who got standard acupuncture. The results beg the question, what explains the healing effect for those who experience them? And Cherkin says, he doesn't know. It's not clear. It could be that stimulating these standardized points does cause a specific physiological process that reduces pain.

We took a copy of the first edition of the paper that we did 150 years ago and peeled out the middle and left the old masthead and did a note to our readers, thanking them for a 150 years. And I worked on it last night, and by the time I was done with it, I was sick of it. And got up this morning and got the paper out, and I started crying at the breakfast table. It was just so sad to see it and the work that we've done with it. It was a sad day, but I'm very proud of what we did today.

Well, you know, most of what we do is in the low points of the world and - because we only go where the most-hurting people are. So one of the things you have to deal with is just the constant exposure to human suffering. But I think our finest hours have been when we have become champions for major issues in our world. And I think I'd point first to the AIDS pandemic. In the early 2000s, there was a lot of ignorance around what AIDS was doing to Africa. Americans were largely unaware. And of course, AIDS was stigmatized. And so we went on a 15-city tour of the United States, speaking to pastors, speaking to business leaders, speaking to the press, trying to raise awareness and support for AIDS in Africa. And it was a high point because we were instrumental in lobbying for the PEPFAR program, the President's Emergency Plan For Aids Relief, that came under President Bush. And it was the largest foreign-assistance program ever passed by Congress since the Marshall Plan back in the 1940s. And we helped to turn the tide for HIV and AIDS. And the PEPFAR initiative alone has probably saved 12 million lives and counting.

Sure. I think it's very important, though, to think a lot about what happens now because everything that's happened up to now was a selection process. And you can even debate how much the media should have a role in selection. So there's a whole question about that. There's no question we have a crucial role now, and that crucial role is providing to all of the citizens of the country the information that they need to make sound decisions. In my view, which is, you know, not the universal view among journalists, our role is not to lean into or away from any particular candidate, but to lean very hard into full-throated information - to reveal whatever needs to be revealed, to explain what needs to be explained.

This is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. I'm Neal Conan. Boylston Street in Boston reopened early this morning, nine days after bombs blew up near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. It's one sign the city is starting to move on, though the investigation continues, and the people injured in the bombing - more than 250 according to the Boston Public Health Commission - are mostly on the mend. But as their physical scars heal, the mental ones for the injured and also for witnesses and other survivors may take longer to deal with. If you've survived a sudden, unexpected event like the one in Boston or the fire and explosion in West, Texas, call and tell us your story. What's it been like after the event?

To be a renter, yes. The basic story is that we've had an unprecedented run-up in housing prices since the mid-90s, interestingly coinciding with the stock bubble. I talk about having a housing bubble alongside the stock bubble as you had in Japan in the '80s. And what happened is if you look since 1995, house prices have risen by about 70 percent after adjusting for inflation. Now, if we go back in the whole post-war period, house prices had just kept even with the rate of inflation. And Robert Shiller, a very prominent columnist at Yale, actually has gone back to the 1890s and finds for that whole century, 1895 to 1995, we have house prices, again, nationwide average, just keeping pace with inflation.

Yeah. I think we love to see this is as a children's phenomenon. Look at those funny kids. Look at those fads, you know, whether it's Pop Rocks or whatever those kids are doing this days. But the same thing happens with adults. You know, it's more expensive. It's - rather than $10, it's $100 or a $1,000, but it has to be the flat screen TV. We have to have that new iPod Touch, you know, the new iPhone 3GS. We have to have it. Otherwise, we're, you know, not going to be happy. And so the same thing happens, but you're very right. Among different demographics or different niches, it's a different gift. But the process is very similar.

Yeah. We rap in Wolof, it's our natural language. But also, we rap in French. So, and then some English. But also, the thing is like, people are so interested about what we're doing because we are not just doing hip-hop but be like, more activist and also talking about, like, problems in Senegal and issues that the community are living there. Because we have like a problem about the politics, about, you know, about leaders who's like, heading the country into, like, in a hole. So we're like, as the youths from the country, we think that we can use our voice to make change.

Way before the first selfie, the ancient Greeks and Romans had a myth about someone a little too obsessed with his own image. In one telling, Narcissus was a handsome guy wandering the world in search of someone to love. After rejecting a nymph named Echo, he caught a glimpse of his own reflection in a river, and fell in love with it. Unable to tear himself away, Narcissus drowned. A flower marked the spot of where he died, and we call that flower the Narcissus. The myth captures the basic idea of narcissism, elevated and sometimes detrimental self-involvement. But it's not just a personality type that shows up in advice columns. It's actually a set of traits classified and studied by psychologists. The psychological definition of narcissism is an inflated, grandiose self-image. To varying degrees, narcissists think they're better looking, smarter, and more important than other people, and that they deserve special treatment. Psychologists recognize two forms of narcissism as a personality trait: grandiose and vulnerable narcissism. There's also narcissistic personality disorder, a more extreme form, which we'll return to shortly. Grandiose narcissism is the most familiar kind, characterized by extroversion, dominance, and attention seeking. Grandiose narcissists pursue attention and power, sometimes as politicians, celebrities, or cultural leaders. Of course, not everyone who pursues these positions of power is narcissistic. Many do it for very positive reasons, like reaching their full potential, or helping make people's lives better. But narcissistic individuals seek power for the status and attention that goes with it. Meanwhile, vulnerable narcissists can be quiet and reserved. They have a strong sense of entitlement, but are easily threatened or slighted. In either case, the dark side of narcissism shows up over the long term. Narcissists tend to act selfishly, so narcissistic leaders may make risky or unethical decisions, and narcissistic partners may be dishonest or unfaithful. When their rosy view of themselves is challenged, they can become resentful and aggressive. It's like a disease where the sufferers feel pretty good, but the people around them suffer. Taken to the extreme, this behavior is classified as a psychological disorder called narcissistic personality disorder. It affects one to two percent of the population, more commonly men. It is also a diagnosis reserved for adults. Young people, especially children, can be very self-centered, but this might just be a normal part of development. The fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual describes several traits associated with narcissistic personality disorder. They include a grandiose view of oneself, problems with empathy, a sense of entitlement, and a need for admiration or attention. What makes these trait a true personality disorder is that they take over people's lives and cause significant problems. Imagine that instead of caring for your spouse or children, you used them as a source of attention or admiration. Or imagine that instead of seeking constructive feedback about your performance, you instead told everyone who tried to help you that they were wrong. So what causes narcissism? Twin studies show a strong genetic component, although we don't know which genes are involved. But environment matters, too. Parents who put their child on a pedestal can foster grandiose narcissism. And cold, controlling parents can contribute to vulnerable narcissism. Narcissism also seems to be higher in cultures that value individuality and self-promotion. In the United States, for example, narcissism as a personality trait has been rising since the 1970s, when the communal focus of the 60s gave way to the self-esteem movement and a rise in materialism. More recently, social media has multiplied the possibilities for self-promotion, though it's worth noting that there's no clear evidence that social media causes narcissism. Rather, it provides narcissists a means to seek social status and attention. So can narcissists improve on those negative traits? Yes! Anything that promotes honest reflection on their own behavior and caring for others, like psychotherapy or practicing compassion towards others, can be helpful. The difficulty is it can be challenging for people with narcissistic personality disorder to keep working at self-betterment. For a narcissist, self-reflection is hard from an unflattering angle.

Well, so I'm in Monmouth County, New Jersey, in the town of Long Branch, and just a few towns to the north of me, the storm surge is already being felt pretty severely. You know, we saw whole residential blocks underwater, basically, with the water sort of beginning to lap at the front steps of houses, and in some cases even heading up into the houses. So, you know, and what's amazing about this is that this is low tide. You know, we saw water crest this morning around seven and, you know, and recede, but we're bracing for an even higher tide this evening, and, you know, already we're seeing a lot of water in the streets. So it's, you know, going to be a long night here, I'm afraid.

Asgard, a realm of wonders, was where the Norse Gods made their home. There Odin’s great hall of Valhalla towered above the mountains and Bifrost, the rainbow bridge, anchored itself. But though their domain was magnificent, it stood undefended from the giants and trolls of Jotunheim, who despised the gods and sought to destroy them. One day when Thor, strongest of the gods, was off fighting these foes, a stranger appeared, riding a powerful gray horse. The visitor made the gods an astonishing offer. He would build them the greatest wall they’d ever seen, higher than any giant could climb and stronger than any troll could break. All he asked in return was the beautiful goddess Freya’s hand in marriage— along with the sun and moon from the sky. The gods balked at this request and were ready to send him away. But the trickster Loki concocted a devious plan. He told the gods they should accept the stranger’s offer, but set such strict conditions that he would fail to complete the wall in time. That way, they would lose nothing, while getting most of the wall built for free. Freya didn’t like this idea at all, but Odin and the other gods were convinced and came to an agreement with the builder. He would only have one winter to complete the wall. If any part was unfinished by the first day of summer, he would receive no payment. And he could have no help from any other people. The gods sealed the deal with solemn oaths and swore the mason would come to no harm in Asgard. In the morning, the stranger began to dig the foundations at an astonishing speed, and at nightfall he set off towards the mountains to obtain the building stones. But it was only the next morning, when they saw him returning, that the gods began to worry. As agreed, no other people were helping the mason. But his horse Svadilfari was hauling a load of stones so massive it left trenches in the ground behind them. Winter came and went. The stranger kept building, Svadilfari kept hauling, and neither snow nor rain could slow their progress. With only three days left until summer, the wall stood high and impenetrable, with only the gate left to be built. Horrified, the gods realized that not only would they lose their fertility goddess forever, but without the sun and moon the world would be plunged into eternal darkness. They wondered why they’d made such a foolish wager— and then remembered Loki and his terrible advice. Suddenly, Loki didn’t feel so clever. All of his fellow gods threatened him with an unimaginably painful death if he didn’t find some way to prevent the builder from getting his payment. So Loki promised to take care of the situation, and dashed away. Outside, night had fallen, and the builder prepared to set off to retrieve the final load of stones. But just as he called Svadilfari to him, a mare appeared in the field. She was so beautiful that Svadilfari ignored his master and broke free of his reins. The mason tried to catch him, but the mare ran deep into the woods and Svadilfari followed. The stranger was furious. He knew that the gods were behind this and confronted them: no longer as a mild-mannered mason, but in his true form as a terrifying mountain giant. This was a big mistake. Thor had just returned to Asgard, and now that the gods knew a giant was in their midst, they disregarded their oaths. The only payment the builder would receive— and the last thing he would ever see— was the swing of Thor’s mighty hammer Mjolnir. As they set the final stones into the wall, the gods celebrated their victory. Loki was not among them, however. Several months would pass before he finally returned, followed by a beautiful gray foal with eight legs. The foal would grow into a magnificent steed named Sleipnir and become Odin’s mount, a horse that could outrun the wind itself. But exactly where he had come from was something Loki preferred not to discuss.

The session was adjourned, and when the witness took the stand again, the defendant had been put in another room to watch the proceeding on a monitor. The former child soldier no longer felt intimidated. He told how soldiers kidnapped him and forcibly trained him in warfare. With special protection measures for former child soldiers, the court seems to have ironed out the kinks of the trial's first days. Since then, a succession of young witnesses have told harrowing tales of the conflict in the Ituri region of northwestern Congo. Antonia Pereira(ph) is one of the idealistic young staffers in the prosecutor's office. Over a drink at a cafe in The Hague, the 27-year-old Brazilian says she believes the first trial is already having a deterrent effect.

Thank you. I have a funny story. Years ago, I mean, before I even knew I was a linguist, I heard a piece by George Carlin where he talks about growing up in New York City and how that, you know, all the kids, you know, inevitably all of the white kids would imitate the black kids. He said, you never once would hear a black kid - a black boy say, hey, let's go down to the drugstore and get some ice cream sodas. It was always, you know, the white kids going, say, man, let's get on down to the drugstore.

The real heroine of "The Woman in White" isn't the innocent Laura Fairlie, who frankly is a bit dull, but her older half-sister, a poor and physically unattractive spinster called Marion Halcombe, whose daring and intelligence as a novel's real engines. Marion is the ultimate crime fighter, and the fact that she steals the show without being beautiful or rich is a tribute to Collins' forward thinking. The evil Count Fosco is so beguiled by Marion's cleverness that he falls half in love with her, and writes, "I lament afresh the cruel necessity which sets our interests at variance, and opposes us to each other. Under happier circumstances how worthy I should have been of Miss Halcombe, how worthy Miss Halcombe would have been of me."

There are many criteria by which to judge a society. Dostoyevsky recommended examining its prisons. Gandhi said to look at how it treats its weakest members. If you want to discover a society’s attitude towards authority, or to gauge the power of its official belief system, I suggest that you could do worse than look at its relationship with detective fiction. Crime stories are one of the oldest literary genres, dating back at least as far as Cain and Abel. But the genre that concerns me here is the crime story’s modern descendant, in which a felony is committed in mysterious circumstances and then an individual follows clues and makes deductions to discover what happened. This is a relative innovation: the first modern detective novel is usually attributed either to William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), or to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841). There is no doubt, however, that the 1860s saw the arrival of detective fiction as a whole. This was the decade that saw the publication of Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), ‘the first, the longest and the best modern English detective novel’, in the opinion of T S Eliot. In France, Émile Gaboriau published his first roman judiciaire in 1866; L’affaire Lerouge was a big success and spawned a series of novels starring the detective Monsieur Lecoq. Methodical and smooth — certainly in his later cases — Lecoq was an inspiration for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (although in A Study in Scarlet Sherlock Holmes dismisses him as a ‘bungler’). Why should detective fiction have emerged at this time? There are some conspicuous material factors. Industrialisation and the growth of literacy meant that more people than ever before were able to read. To satisfy this new market, new machinery was developed that could produce cheap books in vast numbers. Booksellers in Britain set up stalls in stations. Their best-sellers were sensationalist, the kind of stories sneered at by literary types: ‘the tawdry novels which flare in the bookshelves of our railway stations,’ the poet and critic Matthew Arnold complained in 1880, ‘and which seem designed, as so much else that is produced for the use of our middle class, for people with a low standard of life’. Unabashed, ordinary readers were hungry for this kind of stuff; when the first detective novels came along, they lapped them up. Of course, detective fiction could hardly have come about if not for the advent of the detective himself. The Metropolitan Police in London created its ‘Detective Branch’ in 1842, and the first of its policemen to come to wide public notice was Jack Whicher, who was called in to investigate a notorious child murder in Wiltshire in 1860 (the subject of the recent book The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale). Newspapers followed the Road Hill House case avidly, describing every twist and development, until there was barely a person in the country who did not have a theory about who had killed the three-year-old Francis Kent. All of these elements were undoubtedly important. But why did detective stories become such huge best-sellers almost overnight? What accounted for the sudden fascination with the figure of the detective? The unlucky Francis Kent’s father happened to be a government factory inspector, another profession that emerged at around this time, and yet factory inspectors didn’t suddenly become heroes of the popular imagination. The solution can be found if we ask ourselves what a detective actually does. If nothing else, he (and, later, she) is a problem-solver; someone who can restore order where there is chaos. Faced with the worst crime (what could be more existentially troubling than a murder?), the detective gives us answers to the most pressing and urgent questions: not only whodunit, but how and why and what it means. He does all this by taking us on a journey, discovering pieces of evidence, seeking out hints and clues. In the best examples of this game, we see everything that the detective sees, yet we are unable to solve the crime ourselves. Only the detective, in a final display of mastery, can reach the correct conclusion. We need him, with his special knowledge and abilities, to make sense of it all. In other words, a detective is a kind of priest. Throughout history, priestly castes have boasted a unique capacity to answer the great riddles of existence, and it is surely more than a coincidence that, during the detective fiction boom of the 1860s, intellectual developments in Britain were profoundly undermining the Church’s traditional monopoly on such matters. In 1859, after two decades of delay, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. The theory of evolution did not emerge from nowhere; even before Darwin’s ideas went public, many were already moving away from the literal interpretation of the Bible stories. But no single event played such an important part in the shift from a religious to a secular society, and no other book did so much to shake the authority of clerics and their official answers. This left a cultural vacuum, and in a changing world full of new dangers and problems, the fictional detective stepped into the breach. One only needs to look at the names of famous sleuths to see how deeply they draw on the authority of religion. The most obvious example is John Rhode’s forensic scientist Dr Priestley in the 1920s, followed in the 1950s by John Creasey’s Commander George Gideon (think hotel Bibles). Even among contemporary characters, names with religious connotations are common: Adrian Monk and John Luther have both been recent hits on television, while Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen, James Patterson’s Alex Cross and Leslie Charteris’s Simon Templar, alias ‘The Saint’, are hugely popular literary creations. It isn’t only the names that give the game away. Consider Holmes, the greatest fictional detective of them all. He is (probably) celibate. He acts in the ordinary world, but his natural habitat is a mystical retreat in which he isolates himself for weeks, emerging with insights that can resolve the perplexities of those around him. His London address at 221B Baker Street is a kind of monastery in the heart of the metropolis. ‘For days on end,’ Dr Watson reports, ‘he would lie upon the sofa in the sitting-room, hardly uttering a word or moving a muscle from morning to night.’ Holmes is like a Franciscan, periodically leaving the friary to offer wisdom to the wider community. Or perhaps he is a shaman, locked in his refuge, taking powerful drugs and communing with spirits before returning to ordinary life with mysterious powers and solutions. The first Holmes short story ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ (1891) clearly exhibits the great detective’s other-worldly nature. Living alone after Dr Watson’s marriage, Holmes has stayed in his rooms for weeks, ‘buried among his old books’ and taking cocaine. Upon the arrival of a certain Count Von Kramm, Holmes quickly demonstrates his superior powers of perception, revealing the count’s true identity as the King of Bohemia. Later, the detective disguises himself — as a clergyman — in order to discover the secrets of the opera singer Irene Adler, who is suspected of blackmailing the king. Holmes contrives the threat of a symbolically resonant inferno, and Adler promptly reveals where she is hiding a compromising photo of the monarch, thus solving the mystery. In a final twist, Adler tricks Holmes and vanishes with the photo. Watson declares that for Holmes she was always ‘the woman’, the only one he ever really admired, but of course he has no physical relationship with her. With his supernatural powers and tantalisingly glimpsed human flaws, Holmes is a disguised and idealised vision of priesthood, fit for an age that was painfully losing its faith in priests. No wonder he was popular. One of Holmes’s best-loved rivals goes a step further. G K Chesterton’s Father Brown is actually a priest — a quiet bumbler with an unfailing intuition for mysterious crimes. Like Holmes, he often disarms his prey by disguising his true character. In the first Father Brown short story ‘The Blue Cross’ (1910), both the master thief, Flambeau, and Valentin, the Parisian detective chasing him across England, are completely taken in by the little priest’s naive, ‘mooncalf’ demeanour. Although Chesteron was not a Catholic when he started writing the stories, he converted in 1922, midway through the series, and Father Brown is based on Father John O’Connor, the priest who influenced his conversion. Chesterton’s intention was to construct ‘a comedy in which a priest should appear to know nothing and in fact know more about crime than the criminals’, using his understanding of human nature. By creating an investigating cleric, Chesterton might have been trying to close the gap, to put the genie of secularisation back into the bottle and restore the prestige of the priesthood. But it wasn’t to be. The fictional detective is not simply a replacement for a deposed caste of clerics. He represents a challenge to any system that claims to offer all the answers. When organised religion lost its monopoly on belief, many countries turned to other forms of ideology, creating political or politicised ‘priests’. In almost all of these cases, detective fiction enjoyed a brief burst of popularity before being snuffed out or bullied into toeing the line of the new, post-religious regime. In 19th-century Russia, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Anton Chekhov had written crime fiction, but proper detective stories did not take off until after the 1917 revolution and the fall of the Tsar. The ‘Pinkerton Phenomenon’ of the 1920s, named after the real-life crime-fighter Allan Pinkerton, scourge of Jesse James, inspired a wave of pulp novels, usually featuring swashbuckling, American-style heroes fighting international crime. These sold in their millions, but the Soviet government was never comfortable with the genre: Stalin banned it, and the restrictions remained in effect until after his death in 1953. Italy followed a similar pattern. In 1929, the book publisher Mondadori started bringing out I libri gialli — cheap detective novels with yellow covers, which sold in huge numbers. However, just like with the Soviet regime, the Fascist state disapproved and banned the genre entirely in 1943. True-crime stories were very popular in 19th-century Germany, and a few writers dabbled in crime fiction. However, detective fiction did not begin in earnest until after the end of the First World War and the fall of the Kaiser. One of the most influential of the new authors was Erich Kästner, author of Emil and the Detectives (1929). When they came to power in 1933, the Nazis burned Kästner’s books, but they did not ban the detective genre outright. Instead, they controlled it, outlawing foreign detective writers and ensuring that German Krimis — which were hugely popular — depicted honest and highly competent policemen upholding the rule of law. The genre became, in effect, a part of the Nazi propaganda machine. Bucking the pattern slightly, there was no early flourishing of detective fiction in Spain. Then again, despite a brief period of liberalisation during the Second Republic of the 1930s, the Church did not surrender its hold on power until the dying days of General Franco’s Catholic regime. The genre really came to life with Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and his Pepe Carvalho novels, the first of which came out in 1972, when the dictatorship was on the point of collapse and Spaniards were looking towards a new, democratic future. Written in an almost surreal style, with a food-loving ex‑Marxist hero who had also worked in the past for the CIA, the novels captured much of the energy and experimentalism of post-Franco Spain. The hard-boiled writers simply took the cowboy from the wild frontier of mountains and prairies and transplanted him to a new hostile locale: the mean streets And what about those countries that didn’t replace the Church with an all-encompassing political ideology? Here the American experience is particularly interesting. Pulp detective stories like those that appeared in Black Mask magazine were hugely popular in the US following the First World War. Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1930) was the first truly distinctive American detective novel. Three years later, Prohibition — the most blatant imposition of religious authority in US history — came to an end, and by 1939 the genre had come of age with Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, in which the detective Philip Marlowe made his debut. The rise of this American ‘hard-boiled’ style marked a fundamental shift. Tired of the purely intellectual puzzling of the British writers of the Golden Age of detective fiction, with their murders resembling stage conjuring tricks, Chandler and Hammett wanted to produce something authentically gritty. Their stories were influenced by the cowboy, a home-grown US archetype whose civic-minded decency and austere self-reliance both call to mind the figure of the sleuth. But the cowboy inhabited an unforgiving, anarchic world, far from the cosy drawing rooms of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot. If you leave aside the mystery elements of their plots, it would not be much of an exaggeration to say that the hard-boiled writers simply took the cowboy from the wild frontier of mountains and prairies and transplanted him to a new hostile locale: the mean streets of the cities. In such an environment, only a very imperfect heroism is possible. In The Big Sleep, Chandler’s Marlowe is quite ineffective at preventing further bloodshed: several people are murdered before we reach the mystery’s resolution. Worse, the killer of Rusty Regan, whose disappearance the detective was called in to solve in the first place, is eventually revealed to be the daughter of Marlowe’s own client. In a murky world of blackmail and homosexuality — then a scandalous subject — there are no clear good guys and bad guys. The hero ends up killing people, while the murderer turns out to be insane and is sent to an asylum. This was radical. The essential structure of previous detective novels persists — a crime is committed and, by the end of the book, it is resolved. But unlike Holmes or Poirot, the US detective is not a ‘master’. He is not superhuman or pure. He doesn’t belong to an elect, with knowledge beyond the grasp of ordinary people. He is one of us, as ordinary and fallible as the reader. And so the detective no longer furnishes his solutions from a position of superiority. He struggles to overcome crises — to solve mysteries — just like anyone else. He muddles through until, in the end, he finds some kind of answer, though it is rarely the neat resolution of an Agatha Christie novel. Loose ends are left trailing; the crime might have been solved, but the world remains as messy and difficult as it was before. Perhaps such a leap could only have taken place in the US, with its separation of church and state. The result, however, was to revive a genre that was in danger of becoming a footnote of literary history. Now that he was everyman, the detective became a mirror into which any society could gaze. Perhaps a traditional police detective such as Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse, attuned to hidden messages and ethereal harmonies, might confine his investigations to the quasi-monastic world of Oxford, but more recent detectives give clues as to the underlying preoccupations or our time. Just look at their names: Jo Nesbø’s Harry Hole, Mark Billingham’s Tom Thorne and Arnaldur Indriðason’s Detective Erlendur (from the Icelandic for ‘outsider’) all point to a sense of isolation and emptiness, a world where, perhaps, no meaning or meanings can ever be found. At the same time, the common targets of the contemporary detective’s investigations — corrupt politicians, or the failures of entire institutions, as in the US TV series The Wire — show clearly where the threats to our society are to be found. In the beginning, the very existence of a fictional detective was a challenge to state ideology. Today’s detectives continue to fight for a better world, struggling to expose the forces that constrain and destroy us. The genre remains astonishingly popular; according to the Bowker Books and Consumer survey, in 2012 readers in the UK bought 35 million crime novels, which constitutes a third of all fiction titles. Here’s evidence that, in the West at least, despite threats to our liberties, we are not yet living in an authoritarian regime. But it also shows how little we now trust any totalising world-view to resolve our existential crises. We have gone beyond believing in belief. The modern detective — cynical, world-weary but stubborn and compulsively probing — reflects our own attempts to find answers about existence. Not through the mouthpieces of social order, but by ourselves, as individuals, each in his or her own way. Day by day. Murder by murder.

My meeting took many weeks and some string-pulling to arrange. It is not an interview, as such, insists Father Nephon, a Patriarchal archimandrite, or senior abbot, but an ‘audience’. I feel slightly daunted. Both the Dalai Lama and the Pope are known as ‘His Holiness’, but Bartholomew I, 270th Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople and spiritual leader of some 300 million Eastern Orthodox Christians worldwide, is ‘His All-Holiness’. There are other ancient Patriarchs in the Eastern Church, in Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria, but he is ‘first among equals’. I’m following in the footsteps of George Bowen, my great-grandfather, who visited the Ecumenical Patriarch in 1848 while researching the first guidebook to modern Greece. Bowen, a Hellenophile but also an admirer of the Ottoman pashas, wondered if the time would come when Greece would reclaim its former capital at Constantinople — something that then seemed a possibility. However, history has dictated otherwise, and after decades of what Turkey’s dwindling ethnic Greek minority describes as sustained persecution, the Patriarchate in Istanbul — the holiest centre of the Eastern Orthodox Church — is today in danger of extinction. The Patriarchate shelters within a walled enclave in the traditionally Greek district of Fener, north-west of the historic centre of old Constantinople. In Bowen’s day, Fener was home to Greeks who amassed fortunes working for the sultans and in banking and trade. Then, this cosmopolitan Ottoman city — straddling the two continents of Europe and Asia — was noisy with Turkish, Greek, Ladino, Armenian, Arabic and a variety of Levantine voices, while churches co-existed alongside synagogues and mosques. Now, however, Turkey’s orientation is shifting eastward, and nationalism, a potent but largely secular force that drove modernisation in Turkey for more than a century, is taking a decidedly Islamist turn. Tolerance is narrowing. Greeks, departing in huge numbers, have abandoned entire streets of Fener to Anatolian squatters, leaving the Partiarchate a beleaguered Christian island. Not that its high stone walls guarantee protection: in 1997 a grenade was hurled into the citadel and a deacon lost his arm. My great-grandfather described the Patriarch’s office as painted with flowers and birds, ‘like a second-rate Italian Inn’ On the entrance steps of the Patriarchate, young men in identical black suits talk into mobile phones. I assume they are security guards but discover they are monks, disguised in mufti because the secular Turkish state prohibits all but the Patriarch from wearing religious garb outside church property. I enter the Patriarchate by a side door, the main gate having been locked since the Greek War of Independence broke out in 1821; the Turks dragged Patriarch Gregorius V from the Easter service and hanged him from it. I wonder if such inherited memories make it difficult for the two communities to live together, or if the very survival of the Patriarchate, now some 1,700 years old, is, rather, an example of how Christianity can co-exist with Islam. Nikos, an ernest-looking young cleric with close-cropped hair, is my appointed guide. Meeting me in the small courtyard lined with Ottoman-style clapboard offices, he offers to show me round the Italianate church of St George. Stone, incense, chandeliers: it takes a moment for my eyes to adjust and take in the gilded baroque iconostasis — a screen of icons. St George’s is modest compared with the former Patriarchate church of Hagia Sophia, the golden pride of Byzantium until the conquering Ottomans converted it into a mosque in 1453. We pause to admire two glass and marble caskets containing the fourth-century bones of two of the Church’s founding fathers, St John Chrysostom and St Gregory the Theologian. Nikos also points out a precious portion of Christ’s whipping post, and the coffined remains of St Theophano, which he claims secrete myrrh. ‘I’ve seen it for myself,’ he says, with an adamant flourish. I check my watch. ‘Don’t worry,’ Nikos says, ‘we’ll be on time’. He hurries us across the courtyard and up the crimson-carpeted marble stairs of the Patriarch’s House to the third floor, where the Hall of the Throne, the Hall of the Patriarchs, and the Holy Synod Room are located. Then we slip along hushed carpeted corridors to wait in a lobby on a row of green velvet chairs. Lay functionaries in black suits go back and forth on important-seeming business. The walls are hung with prints of old Istanbul, not that I make the mistake of saying the word ‘Istanbul’, here of all places. For this is the tiny but still beating heart of Constantinople, New Rome, capital of Byzantium and — until the Turkish conquest — cradle for a millennium of the Eastern Orthodox Church. It was in this city that much of the orthodox Christian liturgy was devised, and that church councils were held to define exactly what it all meant. And it was from Asia Minor (which includes modern Turkey) that much of the New Testament originated. A bearded monk in black robes opens a door, frowns at me, then closes it again. A phone call goes unanswered. Secretaries bearing clipboards hurry past. There is an air of reverence, which does little to allay my nerves. ‘How should I greet him?’ I ask Nikos. Members of his flock kiss his hand, but Nikos says he will probably shake mine. Someone signals from the end of the corridor. Nikos stands, straightens his suit. ‘He’s ready to see you now.’ In 1848, my great-grandfather described the Patriarch’s office as painted with flowers and birds, ‘like a second-rate Italian Inn’. Today, it’s like stepping into a box of Christmas decorations. There are panelled walls and a wooden ceiling hung with a crystal chandelier. The room is cluttered with ornate faux-Louis XV occasional tables covered in glass dishes containing shiny baubles and framed photographs of the Patriarch shaking hands with dignitaries — including President Barack Obama. The walls are lined with gilt-legged chairs, upholstered in scarlet brocade. His All-Holiness is bent over a desk piled with papers. He picks up a sheet and signs it, lifts another then drops it where it came from, as if weary with the paperwork. While his office glitters, he is modestly robed in a black floor-length cassock, his only adornment a medallion on a neck chain bearing an icon of the Virgin and Child. His pale 72-year-old skin is spotted with age like foxed paper, and his grey hair is cropped, not knotted at the nape like most monks’. From his head rises a cylindrical black hat, with a brief black veil (indicating celibacy) hanging down the back. A square-trimmed white beard adds to the festive feel, but Bartholomew I is no cuddly Santa. ‘He’s tough and shrewd, and he’s had to be,’ Sir Timothy Daunt told me as I prepared for my audience. A former British Ambassador to Turkey who has seen inside the country’s political intriguing, Sir Timothy added, ‘I admire Bartholomew. He hasn’t had an easy time.’ His All-Holiness looks up over unframed glasses, as if suddenly aware of my presence, and gives my hand a bony — but firm — shake. He gestures courteously towards some brocade chairs to his left. ‘What do you wish to discuss?’ he asks, sitting back behind his desk. I explain that my great-grandfather visited his predecessor in 1848, and that I am interested to know how things have changed since then. He seems intrigued by the connection and fetches a red leather tome that lists his 269 predecessors. Regarding me under hooded lids, he says: ‘My mission remains the same as it was then: to serve the Eastern churches. But circumstances are very different. It’s been difficult under the Turkish Republic, very difficult.’ It is not hard to see what he means. The historic hostility between Greece and Turkey, played out in microcosm in Constantinople, is legendary, and the Patriarchate has long been caught between the two, most recently over the Cyprus conflict. According to Hürriyet, Turkey’s leading daily newspaper, some Turks, among them Nurşen Mazıcı, Marmara University’s influential history professor, still suspect the Patriarchate of being a nest of spies with a secret weapons cache, who continue to espouse the Megali Idea — the Great Idea to reclaim all former Hellenic lands for Greece, with Constantinople as its capital. ‘We have suffered lots of tormenting by the government and extremists,’ Bartholomew I says. He has been jeered, spat upon, had his windows smashed. Orthodox cemeteries have been desecrated. Thousands of buildings belonging to the Greek Orthodox community, including schools and hospitals, have been confiscated, and most destroyed or sold. I am surprised by his candour, given how the government scrutinises his every word, but mostly he has to be circumspect. For example, he does not mention the 2012 report by the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), which lists Turkey as one of the world’s worst violators. This is wise. In a loose interpretation of anti-terrorist laws, directed nominally against the Kurds, government critics are increasingly being silenced. The Committee to Protect Journalists, an independent non-profit organisation, reports that there are currently 76 Turkish journalists in gaol, more than anywhere in the world — almost twice the number in Iran, and three times the number in China. I’d read that a festering sore is the government’s closure in 1971 of Turkey’s only Orthodox seminary, on the island of Halki, under a law prohibiting private universities that was originally designed to protect the secular education system from religious influence. By law, priests have to be born in Turkey, but they have nowhere in Turkey to train; meanwhile, clergy coming from abroad are not eligible to apply for residence and work permits. This means the pool of priests — and potential patriarchs — is shrinking. Elpidophoros Lambriniadis, Metropolitan of Bursa, in northwestern Turkey, grew up abroad. Although he was persuaded to return and regain his Turkish citizenship, and now seems to be waiting in the wings to succeed Bartholomew I, it may prove hard in future to find anyone qualified to take on the role. ‘I studied at the Halki seminary myself,’ Bartholomew I says. ‘Its closure offends human dignity.’ Patriarch Bartholomew I visits the Holy Trinity Monastery library during a visit of the Greek Orthodox theological college on the island of Halki, off Istanbul. Photo by Mustafa Ozer/AfpAnother difficulty Bartholomew faces that while the Ecumenical Patriarchate is the supra-national centre of the entire Orthodox world, the Turkish state does not recognise this in any formal sense, only acknowledging Bartholomew I as leader of the tiny ethnic Greek minority, known as the Rum, in Turkey itself. This community has dwindled since the 1923 population exchanges that accompanied the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and under various pressures generated by the Cyprus conflict – including government-inspired riots in 1955 – and the mass emigrations during the politically unstable 1980s and ’90s. Since 1912, Turkey’s Rum population has plummeted from 1.8 million to 2,500. Only 250 children remain in Rum minority schools today. If the trend continues, Bartholomew I is in danger of becoming a shepherd without a domestic flock. Meanwhile, the loyal Orthodox diaspora views the See of Constantinople as the ancient repository of its collective faith, but if there are not enough Turkish-born clergy from which to choose a future Patriarch, they are in danger of losing that repository. The Patriarchate itself could become a relic — as venerated but ultimately lifeless as a casket of Byzantine bones. From 1923 on, Turkey has officially been a secular republic, and religion in public life was, accordingly, zealously suppressed. At the same time, forced population exchanges meant that the national population became overwhelmingly Muslim and ethnically Turkish. Today, there are mixed messages everywhere. The state maintains its official veneration of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the secular republic’s founding father, whose portrait, by law, is still displayed in every public building and institution. And the lure of the West endures: Western goods are eagerly snapped up by a youthful population riding an economic boom. Turkey’s desire to join the EU is not yet dead, and is supported by Bartholomew I as a way of diffusing racism and stabilising Turkey’s institutions, including the Patriarchate. At a governmental level, too, Greek and Turkish relations have thawed somewhat, despite ongoing tension over Cyprus. The Greek government has been a crucial supporter of Turkey’s EU bid. On the other hand, there has been a popular revival of religious observance, prompted both by nationalism and a desire to fill a spiritual void. At street level, the litmus test is the headscarf, worn by increasing numbers of articulate professional women, including the wives of both Turkey’s president, Abdullah Gül, and its prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The hijab remains illegal for civil servants, and although the government’s recent attempt to legalise its adoption in state universities was overturned by the courts, women are ignoring the ban in rising numbers. Despite a government that wishes to be seen as reformist by the EU, some Islamists are growing more extreme. The Turkish pianist Fazil Say, for example, is currently awaiting trial for reportedly insulting Islam on Twitter; he could be imprisoned for 18 months. I took the 90-minute ferry ride across the Sea of Marmara, and found the hill-top seminary in a flurry of redecoration for its anticipated re-birth This push-me pull-you between secular and Islamic, military and civilian, West and East, is being played out at the highest level, with the pro-Islamic civilians of the ruling Justice and Development Party — the AKP — currently on top. The secularist military old guard, 325 of whom were gaoled in September 2012 for alleged anti-government conspiracies, looks outdated next to the youthful thrusts of the so-called ‘Islamic Calvinists’, many of them businessmen turning away from the West to find fresh markets in the East. A university professor, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of the security service, described it to me as a ‘bloodless revolution’. But interestingly, Bartholomew I insists that things have improved recently. In 2010, he won a landmark ruling from the European Court of Human Rights to regain the vast 19th-century church-run orphanage on the island of Prinkipos (Turkish Büyükada) near Istanbul, which was confiscated in 1997. Bartholomew I had also received promising news about the seminary on the neighbouring island of Halki. In March 2012, President Obama (presumably with an eye on Greek-American votes back home) made Halki an international human rights issue by raising it with Prime Minister Erdoğan, and Erdoğan — keen to keep on good terms with the US and Greece — said he saw no reason why the seminary shouldn’t re-open. Two days before my audience, I took the 90-minute ferry ride across the Sea of Marmara, and found the hill-top seminary in a flurry of redecoration for its anticipated re-birth. Inside a red-carpeted chamber with portraits of Metropolitans on panelled walls, a group of ancient bearded monks were drinking tea, like wizards. I tiptoed away, but there was a shout, and a young Greek priest robed in black, hair knotted in a ponytail, introduced himself as Father Samuel. He offered to show me round. In the deserted classrooms there stood rows of black-painted desks and old-fashioned blackboards, unused for more than 40 years. ‘Halki will re-open any day now,’ he assured me confidently. His optimism, like Bartholomew’s, may prove premature. Some secularists warn that permitting a private religious college could pave the way for hate-preaching radical Muslim madrasas, while other people ask why Greeks in Turkey should have a theological college when Athens doesn’t even have an official mosque — the only European capital without one. For now, Halki remains closed. At the Patriarchate, the door opens and a secretary heads towards me bearing a tray with a glass and a long-handled spoon. It looks worryingly medicinal. Sitting in water is a sweet chewy ball of vanilla-flavoured ‘mastic’. I am touched by the courtesy, but also struck by the unintended symbolism: in Greece, this natural resin is called the ‘tears of Chios’, after the island where it is traditionally produced, and where, in 1822, the Turks slaughtered thousands of Greeks, a massacre that has been immortalised by Delacroix. Memories are long here, but Bartholomew I cannot count on Greece’s continuing financial help. A former Greek Consul-General in Istanbul told me that, in his opinion, supporting the Rum and the Patriarch has forced Greece to make too many compromises, such as allowing 100,000 Turks to remain in Greece after the 1923 population exchanges, and not retaliating more vigorously over the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. With most Rum having left Turkey, he considered the Patriarchy an unnecessary and — given Greece’s deepening economic crisis — expensive obstruction. ‘Are you Orthodox?’ Bartholomew I asks me abruptly, and seems not to mind when I say no. He gives me a crucifix in a red box, then opens a glass jar and hands me a shiny foil-wrapped chocolate. It would feel like leaving Santa’s grotto until I remember how tenaciously Bartholomew I has fought for his Rum community and the Patriarchy, and how he wrested from the Vatican the relics of St John Chrysostom and St Gregory the Theologian which had been looted by the Crusaders. Seeking a modern role, he is a high-profile champion of the environment; he organises ‘Peace and Religious Tolerance’ conferences, campaigns for EU membership, and has visited North Africa and the Middle East, including Iran, to meet political and religious leaders, the first Christian leader to attempt such inter-faith rapprochement. As a speaker of Greek and Turkish (alongside five other languages), Bartholomew I had transcended the Patriarchate’s fusty anachronism to become a mediator between Muslims and Christians. ‘Like the Turkish Republic,’ he tells me, ‘we have a foot in both worlds,’ then adds: ‘Clashes of civilisations are not inevitable; different cultures and different faiths can coexist in peace.’ Rather than becoming a holy martyr to the split between Europe and Asia, Bartholomew I is trying to straddle the faultline. In this way the Patriarchate might flourish. Not such a relic after all, perhaps.

If you knew of a child who was being forced by a parent or guardian to sleep on a cold concrete floor in overcrowded surroundings, with screaming lights always on overhead that made it hard to sleep, had limited access to a bathroom, no way to brush their teeth, no soap and no towel, would you do something? Call the police or juvenile authorities to say, a child is being mistreated; you should do something. This week, the U.S. government went to court to argue that it's acceptable to keep thousands of migrant children detained in U.S. custody. Let me repeat that - thousands of children in U.S. custody, exactly in such conditions.

There were some other instances of close calls, for example 1976 when North Koreans had killed two American officers at Panmunjom, (unintelligible) the security area, and then commander of U.S. forces in Korea, now they call it Combined Forces Command here in Korea, and he was ordered to take any action he would see fit to counter North Korean provocation at that point. And that was a time the United States flew B-52 bombers, and that scared North Koreans to death, and finally Kim Il Sung, then leader of North Korea, signed a statement of regret, which we interpreted as an apology to the United States. That's the first time it did.

Well, I think that - as I said, I think the folks in uniform - the judges, the counsel, and the members that'll sit on the jury - I think you'll find that they're going to think for themselves. So I think the uniform folks are going to do their best to do justice. But my concern is you have some political appointees that, you know, have a vested interest in trying to make sure that we achieve a certain outcome. And in my view they need to be removed from this process. It's a military commission. The military ought to be running it, not political appointees.

The shooter is almost always male. Of the past 129 mass shootings in the United States, all but three have been men. The shooter is socially alienated, and he can’t get laid. Every time you scratch the surface of the latest mass killing, in a movie theatre, a school, the streets of Paris or an abortion clinic, you find the weaponised loser. From Jihadi John of ISIS to Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris at Columbine, these men are invariably stuck in the emotional life of an adolescent. They always struggle with self-esteem – especially regarding women – and sometimes they give up entirely on the possibility of amorous fulfilment. There are different levels of tactical coordination, different ostensible grievances and different access to firearms, but the psyche beneath is invariably the same. When Christopher Harper-Mercer fatally shot a professor and eight students at Umpqua Community College in Oregon on 1 October 2015, he revealed his own sexual frustrations, writing: ‘I am going to die friendless, girlfriendless, and a virgin.’ And before Elliot Rodger killed six people and injured 14 more near the University of California, Santa Barbara on 23 May 2014, he uploaded a YouTube video explaining his desire for dark ‘retribution’ – to punish women for rejecting him, and punish sexually active men for having more fun than him. Robert L Dear Jr, who went on a shooting spree at Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs on 27 November 2015, had been arrested years earlier after a neighbour complained that Dear hid in bushes and tried to peer into her house. An online personal ad posted by Dear sought partners for sadomasochistic sex. Most recently, Omar Mateen, who shot and killed 49 people at the Pulse bar in Orlando, Florida, was a failure with women – his two wives reported being afraid of his violent tendencies. And he might have been a deeply frustrated closeted homosexual, or at the very least obsessively fixated on sexuality. It has become commonplace to argue that terrorist attacks are not about religion but politics or economics. Such interpretations usually recreate the terrorist as a cost-benefit actor, redressing economic or political imbalance. But if we’re willing to accept that these acts might only seem to be religious but are really something else, then we need to consider carefully whether we are right about the something else. Freudian interpretations of the news might be out of style, but we would do well to revitalise them (with updated data from social sciences and biology). The facts of toxic masculinity are rarely discussed after mass shootings, as we beat the usual drums of gun control and mental health. Or toxic masculinity is blithely attributed to some patriarchal conspiracy that is unconsciously educated into boys. But consider the bigger, evolutionary picture. Social life requires the domestication of men. This is not some contemporary political interpretation of maleness. It’s a biological generalisation that applies to most social mammals. Intermale aggression must be turned into guardian instincts, if primate societies (such as ours) are to attain stability. Males must transform from little tyrants, competing for females, to selfless bodyguards and potential providers. In a way, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, since the life history of a contemporary man seems to replicate the hominin trajectory of increased cooperation – increased pair bonding, increased male involvement in parenting, and the attendant emotional pacifications that are required. Even the biochemistry of the domesticated man changes, as fatherhood significantly reduces troublesome testosterone levels. This is the timeworn process in which young men become stakeholders in society. For the most part, men undertake this transformation willingly, but usually with conditions. The ancient social contract, underwritten by androgens and oestrogens, is that a man will get a woman. He expects to get a partner, children and status. The execution of this ancient contract is imperfect and bears directly on the long historical record of male crime. As everyone knows, most violent crime is male (eg, a 2011 US Department of Justice report reveals that almost 90 per cent of all homicide perpetrators are men). Without a partner or sexual fulfilment, many men remain emotionally juvenile – aggressively impulsive, self-serving and potentially violent. Young men who cannot find a place in the socialisation process will often take up a disdainful hostility towards domestication itself. The terminal rebel takes shape. A mild version of this was articulated two decades ago in Chuck Palahniuk’s now classic novel Fight Club (1996) and its later movie adaptation. But far more chilling than alienated urbanites secretly fighting in basements is the rise of ISIS, Boko Haram and other violently antisocial brotherhoods. Historically, religions such as Islam and Christianity have played an important role in domesticating their respective male populations, but at a cost. Religion tries to manage eros for the sake of social harmony, but it does so indirectly by demonising desire and the body. The ascetic Christian presbyter Origen (184-254 CE) not only pronounced that his own body was alien to him, but was rumoured to have had himself castrated as a young man so that he could, without scandal, become a scriptural teacher for young women. Ascetic repressions, without creative outlet, often increase violent energy. Revenge fantasies and righteous religious narratives (that glorify suffering) help justify the punishment of everyone who is successful. Now add guns to the dynamic, and the story writes itself. For the terminally frustrated male, the promise of women slaves is an enticing, albeit horrifying, recruitment tool The jihadi loser has the ultimate frustration: as he develops through puberty, he acquires some of the most intense emotional drives of the human operating system – in particular, lust – but his culture informs him that his own desire, his own body, and the bodies of women, are impure and require repudiation. That interminable frustration can be channelled into a zealous mission to purify everything in the acid of an imaginary and bogus strain of religion. Male power is thought to be diminished – a kind of purity defilement – from uncontrolled women (the alluring single woman or the infidel) but when a woman is in some ‘appropriate’ state of affiliation (the obedient wife) there is no pollution and the male’s power is increased by his domination of her. This is not essentially different from the sanctioned sexuality one finds in other Axial age religions, East and West. Indeed, Islam is historically far less concerned with sexual asceticism than Christianity, as the role model of the many-married Muhammad demonstrates by contrast with that of Jesus. Yet the fear and loathing of emancipated female sexuality is a palpable drive within contemporary radical Islam. And the rape cultures of Boko Haram and ISIS represent a further devolution of the ‘controlled female’ fantasy, with rape and slavery sanctified as an act of worship. There’s little to no theological underpinning for this stuff, but there is an irresistibly tempting psychodynamic for frustrated young men who are easily drafted into a pathological band of brothers. For the terminally frustrated male, the promise of women slaves is an enticing, albeit horrifying, recruitment tool. The pre-modern West also demonised desire. But in the contemporary West, natural sexual frustration is intensified by a culture that throws sex in your face at every turn, reminding you that you’re not getting any. These are existential issues because they resonate – rightly or wrongly – at the core of how many men see themselves. The problem is that many of our social norms and cultural narratives increase rather than defuse resentment. And resentment is the psychological fuel that gets the fire of violence going, whatever the ideological justification. Resentment is the hunger for revenge, fed by the feeling of powerlessness. It was Friedrich Nietzsche who built upon Søren Kierkegaard’s use of the French word ressentiment to emphasise that this is far more than a subjective feeling. Ressentiment is also a value system and a moral appraisal of others’ actions. The individual who feels oppressed and excluded is feeling envy and insecurity, but he tells himself that he is in fact the morally superior being. Nietzsche argued that the whole of Christianity was born out of ressentiment: when the powerless Jewish minority inside the Roman Empire could not attain status in the oligarchic structures and the martial virtue system, they slowly reversed the Roman value system – making suffering into a virtue and weakness into ‘the good’. The arrogant Romans might run the empire, but the meek would inherit the kingdom of God. Sigmund Freud expanded Nietzsche’s genealogical analysis of resentment into a more wide-ranging psychodynamic phenomenon – one that occurs in all of us, and still fuels social values and norms. Our obsession with fairness, for example, emerges out of our childhood resentment that others have more. As Freud wrote in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921): ‘If one cannot be the favourite oneself, at all events nobody else shall be the favourite.’ Lest you think this is just psychoanalytic speculation, consider the animal studies. The 2003 experiment by Frans de Waal and Sarah Brosnan on capuchin monkeys is often held to ‘prove’ the innate primate instinct of fairness. Two capuchins, in adjacent cages, were trained to take a token from a trainer and then trade the token back for a piece of food. Each monkey could easily witness the barter of the other. The food reward for this barter was usually a slice of cucumber, which capuchins like to eat. But grapes are loved by capuchins as a delicacy. If one monkey bartered her token and received only a cucumber slice, but then watched as the other monkey received a grape for the same kind of token, the first monkey would become incensed – refusing to play on, throwing cucumbers back at the experimenter, protesting and even punishing the lucky grape recipient. This experiment has been over-interpreted by journalists and even scientists themselves to illustrate a fairness module in primates. Well-intentioned liberal academics regularly intone the experiment as an ancient ethical position that extends from grape payment to Occupy Wall Street and beyond. But I submit that the experiment does not illustrate an ancestral fairness module or even a fairness instinct. The actions of the capuchin monkeys are simply an expression of mammalian emotional systems, and do not appear to be moral (or normatively principled) at all. Envy and resentment are powerful in social animals, and while they might eventually scale up to social contracts, they are not moral per se. Neuroscientists such as Jaak Panksepp and Kent Berridge have shown that primates like us, as well as other mammals, have a very strong seeking or wanting system (driven by dopamine). Once this desire system is triggered, it ratchets up expectation – motivating the mammal in powerful ways (toward food, sex, etc). Panksepp describes this blind intentionality as a ‘goad without a goal’, and this generic drive can be tethered to specific reward pursuits. The dopamine flood is at the high-water mark just before attaining the goal, not during the reward consummation. Now, thwarting or frustrating the culmination of that seeking drive immediately activates the rage system, and results in behaviours as trivial as tantrums or profound as murder. Rage is an innate brain circuit that runs from the amygdala regions, through the stria terminalis, to the hypothalamus and down to the periaqueductal gray of the midbrain. It is the same emotional neurochemistry, albeit ramped up, that propels the more extreme forms of ‘blowing your top’ or ‘running amok’. Adult tantrums, filled with resentment, and facilitated by weapons, become tragedies in the order of the Orlando shooting This is the science of resentment, and it adds the inner theoretical ‘guts’ to the organic resentment that Nietzsche and Freud observed. Or, to follow Freud’s hydraulic metaphor, it adds the fluid dynamics to the Id pressure-and-release system. When we add this neuroscience of frustration to the chimpanzee research, we observe that exasperation amplifies exponentially when we perceive (correctly or incorrectly) that others are satisfying their desires, and we are not. That perception transforms frustration into resentment and even rage. It’s hard to admit that our high moral principles might be descended from temper tantrums, but just as a grown woman is no longer the little girl she was, so too our tantrums grow up and get converted into healthier social norms. Our tantrums evolve from personal feelings to reasoned principles with cognitive justifications for egalitarian notions of the good. The oak is not just the acorn. But what happens when our tantrums don’t grow up, don’t transmogrify into healthy impulses and norms of justice? Adult tantrums, filled with resentment, and facilitated by weapons, become tragedies in the order of the Orlando shooting. These insights are important because it is not enough to simply label lone-wolf shooters and other malefactors as ‘mentally ill’. Toxic maleness, and the specific hydraulics of hate are grounded in originally adaptive biological structures, which need cultural management to find healthy expression. As the neuroscientist Joe Herbert pointed out earlier this year in Aeon, young men are coiled tight by testosterone, which drives risk-taking behaviour in the service of competition for females (the ancient adaptive imperative). Tilt the balance of young inter-male aggression just slightly, and you get the fanatic mindset that we see in jihadi movements and US antifederalist extremism alike. My view is that the lone-wolf doesn’t have a theory as much as a feeling. Those feelings of resentment are a combination of thwarted affective drives (limbic system) plus cognitions about culpability (neocortex). The weaponised loser tries to make sense of his emotions by supplying causal stories and moral judgments about why he doesn’t have the sexual satisfactions, wealth or status that he expects. The people he thinks do have those satisfactions and freedoms must be brought low or punished, and the unattainable women who withhold their pleasures must be humiliated and destroyed. The sociologist Jack Katz analyses the criminal mind in Seductions of Crime (1988), pointing out that many murderers see themselves, at least at the moment of slaughter, as righteous avengers. ‘What is the logic of rage,’ Katz asks, ‘such that it can grow so smoothly and quickly from humiliation and lead to righteous slaughter as its perfectly sensible (if only momentarily convincing) end?’ In both cases, the subject has a feeling of impotence or powerlessness. He feels victimised by forces outside himself (in the case of humiliation) and by forces inside himself (in the case of rage). The lone shooter who feels repeatedly humiliated at what he perceives as the visible success of others – the emancipation of women; the social acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people; the integration of refugees – feels like his very identity is being broken and degraded. Rage promises to retake the situation and correct his perverse moral landscape. The frustrated male casts about for a ‘cause’ of his misery, and mistakes the increasing power of newly emancipated communities for his depletion The ‘logic’ Katz discovers is more topographic than syllogistic, but can be evidenced in the telling metaphors of ordinary language. Humiliation ‘lowers’ one. It makes one feel small. Humiliation reduces, diminishes, lessens, shrinks, dispirits, depresses, casts down. Rage reverses this downward trajectory. Rage ‘rises up’, ‘blows up’. ‘It may start in the pit of the stomach,’ Katz explains, ‘and soon threatens to burst out of the top of your head.’ The rageful are cautioned to keep their lids on, and not to blow their tops. In response to the descent of humiliation, rage might be said to be a psychological ascent (with terrible consequences). The discrepancy between what the shooter wants and what he gets is eventually theorised, but in a lazy way – he adopts the ISIS ideology, or a Westboro Baptist Church-style Christianity, or homophobia, or antifederalist patriotism, or whatever is ready to hand. The frustrated male casts about for a ‘cause’ of his misery, and mistakes the increasing power of newly emancipated communities for his depletion. Whether it is the son of Muslim migrants who turns his rage on the LGBT community, or the hater of Muslim migrants who turns his rage upon the political champion of migration, the same hydraulic of hatred is at work. The lone-wolf and the jihadist group might not be as far apart as we think. The fanatical ideology of ISIS or Boko Haram is just the last ingredient added to a bubbling cauldron of male frustration, rage and resentment. As the anthropologist Scott Atran wrote recently in Aeon, most jihadists don’t even know much about Islam. A few well-chosen pugilistic Quran quotes and homophobic or misogynistic slogans can rile up a resentful male to all kinds of evil. The wellspring of this evil is not in the religion, nor even the economic conditions, or the socially constructed patriarchy, but in profound, implacable resentment. Other factors converge, as Atran notes, to help sculpt resentment into warfare, including the ‘band of brothers’ promise of jihad – which answers to deep-seated social yearnings in isolated and alienated young men. So what can be done? If male frustration and resentment is the unifying psychodynamic underneath homegrown lone-wolves and international extremists alike, then how do we address such root frustration? Every human society has contended with the challenge of containing and redirecting male frustration and rage: these responses can be categorised into a few varieties. One well-worn path is that we should accommodate frustration. The conservative religious responses examined earlier fall into this accommodation paradigm. Most of these ‘endurance’ forms of asceticism try to overcome desire by devaluing the body, but there are healthier alternatives. Secular Stoicism and Buddhism, for example, offer less alienating therapies. In Buddhism one uses meditation to pry a space between our impulse and our action. The Buddhist recognises, for example, that he is filling with resentment in this moment, and that he can, with training, detach from that feeling and observe it. Detaching from resentment, and noticing its natural impermanence, is a way to attain some freedom over such enslaving passions. Another major response to malignant frustration is redirection. In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud offered a taxonomy of three such redirection techniques: ‘powerful deflections’, ‘substitutive satisfactions’, and ‘intoxication’. The last of these needs little explanation beyond Freud’s own quoting of the German poet Wilhelm Busch: ‘The man who has cares, has brandy too.’ But powerful deflections, include the healthy distractions of work, be it physical or intellectual. Indeed, Voltaire’s Candide used gardening as a great diversion, keeping frustration and misery – and we could add resentment – at bay. Traditionally, African Samburu and Maasai groups carefully redirect the intense sexual frustration of young men – who are radically excluded from marriage by their elders until they reach their 30s – into cattle-raiding, hunting and warfare. This transforms a potentially toxic energy into something beneficial for the group. it might be possible to reduce resentment by engineering actual libido satisfactions Substitutive satisfactions include the myriad forms of distraction and surrogate fulfilment: art, fantasy, religion. In contemporary life, many young men channel aggression, resentment and unspent libido into hours of online gaming. Of course, it might prove difficult to wean a weaponised loser off a real-life action drama, and replace it with an Xbox or PlayStation version. Athletic sport remains a more promising redirect for excess libido, competitiveness and surplus energy – after all, George Orwell referred to international sport as ‘war minus the shooting’ – and even the sublimated violence of sport occasionally boils over into outright aggression, especially among hyper-aroused male fans. Finally, besides accommodation and redirection of frustration, it might be possible to reduce resentment by engineering actual libido satisfactions – for example, many groups, including Amnesty International, think that sex work should be decriminalised, and this might allow a socially sanctioned means for the frustrated male to consummate his male identity without stigma. That is a controversial option, but it shouldn’t be ruled out a priori. In a seemingly sci-fi alternative, probably closer than we imagine, virtual reality sex and fembots are in mid-stage development among the Silicon Valley and Tokyo cognoscenti. Japanese sex dolls paired with virtual reality were unveiled to great delight at the Oculus Game Jam in 2013. And the US developer Matt McMullen is working on an ‘animate’ doll called Realbotix that promises to overcome our usual uncanny detachment from the surrogate human and give users an emotionally fulfilling sexual relationship. I have no idea if this sort of alternative to malignant frustration will work, but desire is a strange animal, and it has shown itself capable of diverse and unpredictable investments. The thing that will not work, however, is just talking to men. Male desire and craving are not intellectualised away with some didactic lecture about how the brain or the economy works, or some sermon about what Jesus or Muhammad want from you. Desire must be redirected into some form of non-destructive expression, or defused, not just talked about. It’s the job of culture to help with this redirection, and the Abrahamic cultural traditions have outlived their effectiveness in doing so. We need to get working on some new cultural inventions to domesticate resentment and the hydraulics of hate, or the growing pack of weaponised losers will make political terrorism look tame by comparison.

Griswold say the inclusion of mental health as an essential insurance benefit under the federal health law and the passage of the Mental Health Parity Act were huge victories for her profession. Insurance companies, for example, must charge the same co-pays and deductibles for mental health as they do for medical conditions. And patients used to paying $150 for a visit will, with some limitations, be covered by their health plan, says Dr. Katherine Nordal of the American Psychological Association. DR. KATHERINE NORDAL: I do think some people have paid for mental health and behavioral health care out of pocket because they didn't have mental health insurance. I think to the extent that individuals have health insurance, they are going to expect their providers to accept the health insurance.

And as you mentioned, the gag of the show which is revealed in the pilot episode is that while Pearce's brain is his greatest strength and his greatest asset, it's also his Achilles' heel because he is, in fact, a paranoid schizophrenic, and he suffers from many of the symptoms that schizophrenics do, including visual and auditory hallucinations. And these hallucinations and delusions often make his life very, very difficult. But we discover in the course of the series that sometimes these hallucinations and delusions will be giving him insights into things that his conscious mind can't quite make sense of and help him ultimately solve these crimes.

Of course, many people have had to leave their homes. That includes everyone within 12 miles of the plant, this evacuation zone. And people another six miles beyond that have had to stay indoors. And there's been a - there -most of the radiation that has been spread through this area came, apparently, from one big outburst on March 15th. Radiation levels jumped pretty substantially at that point, although they're still well within the point where scientists can, you know, can't(ph) actually measure an increase of the risk. And the levels have been falling steadily over the past couple of days. So that's encouraging.

Twenty years ago, our attention was focused just 20 miles down the road from the town of West. In 1993, federal agents clashed with David Koresh's Branch Davidian community, near Waco. On April 19th, the order was given for military tanks to fire tear gas into the dwellings of the apocalyptic group, to try to force them out. A fire broke out; and some 80 children, women and men perished. It is remembered as one of the darkest chapters in U.S. law enforcement. Two decades later, some of the Branch Davidians who survived the raid are still believers, while a new church group has moved onto that land. NPR's John Burnett has our report.

Well, we can be accused of being fussy, I suppose. I would say we care a lot about the words we use and think a lot about them. Are we launderers? Maybe, but there's an important point here. We are communicators and we do need to make clear what that word was and we can telegraph it in some ways. But if the stories we're telling are ruined for some listeners because our grammar is wrong or because we've slipped in a naughty word or two or that's the only thing they hear, then we're probably not communicating as effectively as we could. But like Nina says, when there are times we think it's editorially important that those words be aired, we've done it. We'll do it again, and it's a case-by-case basis.

It's now around 6:10. The Clark County people have a whole bunch of questions running through their heads. First among them, do we get to keep our jobs? Ric can't answer that. Umpqua will only need about a third of the Clark County staff. But it's too soon to let each person know whether or not he or she just lost their job. The Bank of Clark County no longer exists. It's not quite Umpqua Bank yet. The FDIC is in charge. The bank has to open its doors Tuesday morning. Monday was MLK Day. To make that happen, the FDIC needs the Bank of Clark County staff to help them. And so they make an announcement: as of right now, for tonight and this weekend, you are all temporary employees of the FDIC. We need your help. Ken Moody was the vice president of information systems at the Bank of Clark County.

The Plastics Industry Association did not respond to interview requests. But one of the world's biggest straw makers, Tetra Pak, says it's trying to develop little paper straws to go along with its juice boxes. It says the long-term ambition is to make all of its packaging out of plants, not petroleum or metals. But there's a kink in the straw ban narrative. Those compostable plastic straws, they don't degrade in the ocean. They stick around for years and can harm the turtles or birds or whales that try to eat them just like the petroleum-based straws that Seattle has banned. Advocates encourage people to choose paper straws over the compostable plastic. Paper ones can dissolve in the ocean in a matter of hours.

But - so I was going against the grain, and so I was kind of seen as doing something that wasn't going to pay off, but that was realistic for that particular period of time. And why that was realistic, I had worked at the Post Office. And working there, I interacted with men and women who had master's degrees. I also interacted with people who were porters on train, who had gone to law school but they couldn't get jobs prior to the 1970s and the occupations that they have been trained for. So my family thought that the same thing would happen to me. That I was going to be frustrated because I would have all this education, and I wouldn't be able to use this education. But a new door had opened. Even though it had only slightly opened, it had opened. And so I was taking advantage of it but because I was a pioneer, I was seen as doing something that wasn't going to be beneficial for me in the long run.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the slowly thawing waters of the world economy, some over-leveraged Middle Eastern real estate company announces it can't pay its debt. It's not just any old Middle Eastern real estate company though, it's Dubai World, the state-backed investment arm of the city-state of Dubai. And it isn't just small change - $60 billon worth of debt. Dubai World is the company behind that big palm-tree luxury housing development on the sand banks of the Persian Gulf that's been photographed from outer space. The problem is, of course, that, at the moment, no one is buying luxury houses on sand banks shaped as palm trees that can be seen from outer space. Professor Avinash Persaud of investment analysts Intelligence Capital says never mind the credit default swaps that brought down Western banks last year, this is a slightly more traditional form of financial problem.

Well, what you have is, you know, he had four stars on his epaulettes. And he talked about his relationship to the military. To some extent, it was a response to concern that a military man would be put in position of heading the CIA. You had Carl Levin, the senator from Michigan, asking quite explicitly, you know, are you able to express differences with your superiors, in this case, the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. Michael Hayden said, absolutely yes. And you referenced the tie. I mean, he said, you know, he wears the tie, but it's not, that he's not tied and limited, choked in terms of what he can say to people at the Pentagon. And this is a casual way to refer to it, but the reality is that there's concern that Hayden wouldn't be sufficiently independent. And Hayden, I think, did a pretty good job of trying to speak to that issue, that he is able to separate himself out despite the uniform and the tie.

This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. Thirty years ago, Muhammad Yunus made a loan of $27 to some villagers in his native Bangladesh and changed the world. In the three decades since, Yunus issued tiny amounts of credit - micro-loans he calls them - to more than 16 million people, most of them women and all of them too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans. As founder of the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh, the economist turned conventional banking and conventional capitalism on its head, and his goal is nothing less than the elimination of poverty worldwide. For his 30 years of work, Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank will receive this year's Nobel Peace Prize next month in Oslo, Norway. Muhammad Yunus joins us in just a moment.

Authorities in Nigeria are trying to negotiate the release of nine foreign oil workers. The group, which includes three Americans, was kidnapped by militants in Saturday in the oil rich Niger Delta. There have been a series of attacks on key oil installations there. The militants are demanding more control of the region's oil wealth for local people in the Delta. NPR's West Africa correspondent, Ofeibea Quist-Arcton, has just been on assignment in the region, and she joins us now from her base in Senegal. So, Ofeibea, the group that's holding the oil workers is called the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, and it's fairly new in Nigeria, but well organized, I gather. How strong is it?

I am an astrodynamicist — you know, like that guy Rich Purnell in the movie "The Martian." And it's my job to study and predict motion of objects in space. Currently we track about one percent of hazardous objects on orbit — hazardous to services like location, agriculture, banking, television and communications, and soon — very soon — even the internet itself. Now these services are not protected from, roughly, half a million objects the size of a speck of paint all the way to a school bus in size. A speck of paint, traveling at the right speed, impacting one of these objects, could render it absolutely useless. But we can't track things as small as a speck of paint. We can only track things as small as say, a smartphone. So of this half million objects that we should be concerned about, we can only track about 26,000 of these objects. And of these 26,000, only 2,000 actually work. Everything else is garbage. That's a lot of garbage. To make things a little bit worse, most of what we launch into orbit never comes back. We send the satellite in orbit, it stops working, it runs out of fuel, and we send something else up ... and then we send up something else ... and then something else. And every once in a while, two of these things will collide with each other or one of these things will explode, or even worse, somebody might just happen to destroy one of their satellites on orbit, and this generates many, many more pieces, most of which also never come back. Now these things are not just randomly scattered in orbit. It turns out that given the curvature of space-time, there are ideal locations where we put some of these satellites — think of these as space highways. Very much like highways on earth, these space highways can only take up a maximum capacity of traffic to sustain space-safe operations. Unlike highways on earth, there are actually no space traffic rules. None whatsoever, OK? Wow. What could possibly go wrong with that? (Laughter) Now, what would be really nice is if we had something like a space traffic map, like a Waze for space that I could look up and see what the current traffic conditions are in space, maybe even predict these. The problem with that, however, is that ask five different people, "What's going on in orbit? Where are things going?" and you're probably going to get 10 different answers. Why is that? It's because information about things on orbit is not commonly shared either. So what if we had a globally accessible, open and transparent space traffic information system that can inform the public of where everything is located to try to keep space safe and sustainable? And what if the system could be used to form evidence-based norms of behavior — these space traffic rules? So I developed ASTRIAGraph, the world's first crowdsourced, space traffic monitoring system at the University of Texas at Austin. ASTRIAGraph combines multiple sources of information from around the globe — government, industry and academia — and represents this in a common framework that anybody can access today. Here, you can see 26,000 objects orbiting the earth, multiple opinions, and it gets updated in near real time. But back to my problem of space traffic map: What if you only had information from the US government? Well, in that case, that's what your space traffic map would look like. But what do the Russians think? That looks significantly different. Who's right? Who's wrong? What should I believe? What could I trust? This is part of the issue. In the absence of this framework to monitor space-actor behavior, to monitor activity in space — where these objects are located — to reconcile these inconsistencies and make this knowledge commonplace, we actually risk losing the ability to use space for humanity's benefit. Thank you very much. (Applause and cheers)

My first job was as a lawyer. I was not a very happy or inspired lawyer. One night I was driving home listening to a radio report, and there is something very intimate about radio: a voice comes out of a machine and into the listener’s ear. With rain pounding the windscreen and only the dashboard lights and the stereo for company, I thought to myself, ‘This is what I want to do.’ So I became a radio journalist. As broadcasters, we are told to imagine speaking to just one person. My tutor at journalism college told me that there is nothing as captivating as the human voice saying something of interest (he added that radio is better than TV because it has the best pictures). We remember where we were when we heard a particular story. Even now when I drive in my car, the memory of a scene from a radio play can be ignited by a bend in a country road or a set of traffic lights in the city. But potent as radio seems, can a recording device ever fully replicate the experience of listening to a live storyteller? The folklorist Joseph Bruchac thinks not. ‘The presence of teller and audience, and the immediacy of the moment, are not fully captured by any form of technology,’ he wrote in a comment piece for The Guardian in 2010. ‘Unlike the insect frozen in amber, a told story is alive… The story breathes with the teller’s breath.’ And as devoted as I am to radio, my recent research into oral storytelling makes me think that Bruchac may be right. A couple of years ago, I wrote a book about the storytellers of Morocco, collecting more than 30 tales in the process. When I read some of them aloud to one of my friend’s children, these stories came alive in a way that I had not expected. The gurgles and shrieks of delight from the bunk beds encouraged me to put more into the performance. It was like the relationship between an actor and his audience, each emboldening the other in a virtuous circle. My own daughter is only four, and for the past few years I have read to her almost every night. Beneath the duvet, a wide-eyed face hangs on every word, correcting me if I have the audacity, incompetence or sheer laziness to miss anything. Why do we love stories? And why do we love hearing them spoken aloud, in person? Psychologists and literary scholars have devoted a good deal of thought to the first question. Perhaps, they suggest, fiction helped mankind to evolve social mores. In a 2008 study by the psychologist Markus Appel, professor at the University of Koblenz-Landau in Germany, people who watched drama and comedy on TV as opposed to news had substantially stronger beliefs in a just world. Stories do this ‘by constantly marinating our brains in poetic justice’, according to Jonathan Gottschall, author of The Storytelling Animal (2012). On the other hand, perhaps storytelling is a sort of flight simulator that allows us to practise something without getting hurt. Keith Oatley, professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, believes that stories are an ancient virtual reality technology: we get to imagine what it would be like to confront a dangerous man or seduce someone else’s spouse without suffering the consequences. Whatever the evolutionary explanation, narrative seems to occupy a very central position in our thought patterns. In an extraordinary experiment in 1944, two psychologists, Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel, made a film in which lines, triangles and a circle moved around on the screen. Out of 114 people who saw the film, only three reported seeing just random objects; the others all made a story out of it, and attributed personality traits to the shapes, such as ‘shy’, ‘spoiled’ or ‘crafty’. Our brains seem wired to try to seek out a narrative. It is how we make sense of the world. In a 2001 study by Robin Mello at the University of Wisconsin, children were asked for their responses to stories they heard in class. To her surprise, Mello found that the children focused less on the story’s content and more on how it was told. They enjoyed the way the teller made up funny voices for the different characters, and said reading the stories silently from books was boring. Stories may be how we make sense of the world, but the heart of the story is the human voice. In the House of Commons in London this summer, an actress read Agatha Christie’s story ‘The Kidnapped Prime Minister’. Around 50 people listened, rapt. This unusual event was the culmination of a process that started last year when the journalist and writer Elizabeth Day began to read aloud to a few friends at an art gallery in Mayfair. She was overwhelmed by the appetite for what she calls ‘adult Jackanory‘ (after the BBC’s long-running storytelling show), an interest that was strong enough to launch spin-off events in New York. Those who attend her ‘Pin Drop’ storytelling sessions talk of a strange feeling of other-worldliness and calmness that lingers with them long after they leave. One man said it made him feel like a ‘defenceless child again’. Day herself described the appeal as ‘halfway between thinking and meditation’. She believes that reading aloud is more intimate than theatre because all the scenery and props have been stripped away, leaving only the listeners’ imaginations: the theatre of the mind. Day thinks the readings have tapped into a long-forgotten tradition that we still feel in our bones. Speaking from my own experience, just one session left me emotionally drained and speechless, as if I had just emerged from a cinema after a particularly powerful film. For days afterwards, I kept thinking about the characters in the story. ‘it’s very powerful and waves of emotion sweep through the audience. It is a collective cathartic experience’ Sally Pomme Clayton is a writer and performer who spearheaded storytelling as performance in the UK in the 1980s. She told me: ‘When I’m performing, I have this sensation that I am trying to bring the audience together, almost to be one ear. When you can bring them into that one place, it’s very powerful and waves of emotion sweep through the audience. It is a collective cathartic experience.’ She agrees with Bruchac that recordings can never catch the essence of that experience. ‘The audience bring their own inner lives to the event,’ she said, ‘and it makes this magic happen. It cannot be captured in any way. It’s nourishing, uplifting, inspiring and hopeful… The audience is living the experience of the characters, suffering with them and having some possibility of hope or transformation at the end of the story.’ This idea of profound identification with a character matches something I heard from Abderrahim El Makkouri, the master storyteller who gave me the first Moroccan tale for my book. For decades, he has performed in the main square in Marrakech, the Jemaa el-Fna, competing with fire-eaters, snake-charmers and monkey-keepers. Abderrahim says that when he is in full flow, his listeners become so immersed in his tale that if he says ‘the hero draws his sword’, the audience ducks to avoid the imaginary weapon. And he might be surprised to learn that science has an explanation for this effect. In 1992, the neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues at the University of Parma in Italy implanted electrodes into a monkey’s brain to try to find out which neural areas were responsible for commanding a hand, for instance, to grab a nut. They found that a certain region of the monkey’s brain lit up not only when it grabbed a nut, but also when it saw another monkey do so. Many scientists now believe that we have the same so-called ‘mirror neurons’, neural networks that activate when we observe someone else experiencing an emotion. Their hypothesis suggests that when, for example, we watch a film or a play, these neurons fire in our brains. We experience the same emotions as the fictional characters, as if we were experiencing them for real. But whatever mirror or microscope we hold in front of the brain, there is still no doubt that something very profound happens to us when we listen to a story. ‘A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens,’ wrote the American novelist Reynolds Price in the essay ‘A Single Meaning’ (1978). ‘[It is] second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence.’ There is nothing as captivating as listening to a human voice saying something of interest. It connects us to one another and the past in a peculiarly and perhaps scientifically unfathomable way. For example, the Reader Organisation, based in Liverpool, is another UK group that arranges book readings. Its founder Jane Davis recalled that, during its sessions, a 60-year-old woman who was suffering from a chronic debilitating disease felt an easing of her pain. By comparison, the consumption of stories via electronic media can leave us feeling peculiarly undernourished, dissatisfied and unfulfilled, as if we had just gulped down fast food. Despite an insatiable desire for more, we rarely feel uplifted, and it’s not often that we think about the characters for days afterwards. Storytelling is the oldest, purest and most direct form of human communication. Modern technology is no substitute for this unique compact between narrator and listener. A few years ago, Moroccan television broadcast a series of programmes to find the best storyteller in Morocco. Like the UK TV show Pop Idol, contestants performed before a panel of experts who criticised them, à la Simon Cowell, for not putting enough passion into a scene or not delivering a strong enough punchline. The show was a surprise hit, and no one was more amazed than Abderrahim El Makkouri, who nearly won. But the actual winners were not really storytellers. They were a group of troubadours who performed a bawdy slapstick sort of comedy, sometimes with monkeys. Abderrahim’s love of stories goes back a long way. His mother died when he was a baby, so he was brought up by his grandmother. He sought solace and escape in her stories and then, for decades, Moroccans sought the same from him. When he started performing in the 1970s, there were 18 storytellers or hlaykia in the Jemaa el-Fna. Now he is the only one. He told me that he is trying to teach his son Zoheir to be a hlayki too. But since the documentary Al-Halqa (2010) was made about the two of them, Zoheir has suffered some sort of mental breakdown. His father thinks he might have got carried away with being a film star and could not cope when it all came to an end. It seems like a metaphor for the storyteller in general. The hlayki is exposed to modernity and it is killing him. Perhaps stories help us defeat our own inner demons. In the end, what could be more important than that? Abderrahim has seen other storytellers come and go. One of his former colleagues has become a beggar, and another is shining shoes. Abderrahim went to see the local mayor but the man threw him out of his office. When I asked the master storyteller what might happen to his trade, he replied: ‘Only God knows.’ Folklorists say that all stories can be reduced to a hero overcoming a monster, although it might not always be a literal one. Perhaps stories help us defeat our own inner demons. In the end, what could be more important than that? Will Zoheir overcome his demons, take over from his father, and save the storytellers from oblivion? Only God knows. Here’s the first story that Abderrahim told me, called ‘The King and his Prime Minister’. A king accidentally slices off part of his finger. His easy-going prime minister remarks: ‘It’s good’. In a fit of temper, the king puts the minister in prison. Later, the king goes on a voyage and gets kidnapped. He is about to be sacrificed when the high priest notices that his finger is disfigured, which makes him unsuitable for sacrifice. The king is thus spared and goes free. When the king comes home and releases the prime minister, he turns to ask: ‘How was your time in jail?’ ‘It’s good,’ the prime minister replies. ‘How can prison be good?’ the king asks, amazed. ‘Well,’ the prime minister replies, ‘if you had taken me on your voyage, you would have escaped but I would have been sacrificed.’ Every time I read this story it takes on a different meaning, like a gemstone held up to the light from different angles. At first I simply thought it was funny. Then I decided its message was that things will work out for the best, even if it does not always seem so. But my translator told me that the story is really about sacrifice and refers to the tale of Abraham and Isaac. A Jewish friend said she had heard the same story from her Rabbi and someone else said they had come across it in Buddhist thought. The prime minister also belongs to a long line of comic characters, or ‘wise fools’. In Afghanistan he is called Nasruddin. I recently came across this quote from the 13th-century Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi, which seems to sum it all up: ‘From the point of view of man, a thing may appear to be good or evil. But from the point of view of God, everything is good.’ Perhaps it is in this accepting spirit that many people, even as they feel sad about the demise of the Moroccan storytellers, ultimately say ‘So what?’ The world has lost many things, from dodos to snuff boxes, and we cannot lament them all. Why is storytelling so important? When my daughter can read for herself, she might not want me to read to her. The same has happened on a global scale. When societies learn to read they no longer need storytellers to read to them. But then, not that many societies even learn to read and write. Out of an estimated 6,000 languages spoken in the world today, two thirds never had a written form. On average, one of those oral languages dies every two weeks. When a language that has never been written down dies, it is as if it has never been. We have then lost a unique interpretation of the world and our existence. This reminds me of a saying in Marrakech: ‘When a storyteller dies, a library burns.’ Abderrahim rarely performs in the main square any more. I asked him why and he gazed at a point in the distance. ‘Look, there is no room and it is too noisy.’ Nowadays, he said, Moroccans would rather watch DVDs or use the internet than listen to him. Modernity and electronic media in particular is killing the storyteller. ‘When electricity came,’ as they say in Ireland, ‘the fairies flew out the window.’ Bruchac warns that we ignore the power of oral narration at our peril: ‘If we imagine that technology can take the place of the living human presence experienced through oral tradition, then we diminish ourselves and forget the true power of stories.’ But maybe, just maybe, some are fighting back. In France, for example, the original troubadours died out in the 14th century. But there are now around 200 storytelling festivals every year, according to one of the country’s most prominent performers, Abbi Patrix. In Britain, we cannot boast of such a revival, but the success of events such as Pin Drop suggests our hunger for stories is undiminished. The raw power of that extraordinary and immediate presence is always there to be discovered once again.

The documents released at the National Archives late yesterday afternoon number in the thousands of pages, but only a relative few are in Roberts' own words. What there is, however, is an indication of why the Democrats want to see more from Roberts' years in the Reagan White House and from his tenure as a political deputy to Solicitor General Kenneth Starr during the administration of President George H.W. Bush. The focus yesterday, though, was on the years 1981 to '82. From the moment of his arrival at the Justice Department in the fall of 1981, Roberts was immersed in the legal and political battles of the day. Ironically, his first assignment was to work on a team preparing Supreme Court nominee Sandra Day O'Connor for her Senate confirmation hearings. In a memo for an international departmental history, Roberts described his role in preparing draft questions and answers for O'Connor. Quote, "The approach was to avoid giving specific responses to any direct questions on legal issues likely to come before the court, while at the same time demonstrating through the answer a firm command of the subject matter and arguments on both sides."

…that Dylan played his electric guitar. But it's always been a part of me. In fact, that - at that time, it was very new to me because we were just so strictly gospel. And we were being invited to folk festivals, and what I saw was, you know, that they were just all about love, you know. And I mean, love came in all colors. You know, the flower children, the blast of the tie dye, you know. And it was - my eyes were just - I couldn't see enough. I couldn't hear enough, you know. And it was just a time for me - a different time for me that I loved.

The administration had never acknowledged that it was bound by the Geneva Conventions, but the administration had always taken the position that it was complying with the Geneva Conventions to the extent that it felt that it could, and that it shouldn't be criticized for junking the protections because even though it didn't feel it was bound, it was doing the right thing. And one can argue about that. I believe that's the basis for their statement today, that nothing's changing. I have to remind you that - I don't mean that disrespectfully at all - that this is an administration that says that it doesn't practice torture, but it's possible to say that only because it defines torture so narrowly that nothing's included. Here it says it's been complying with the Geneva Conventions, but what constitutes compliance is the whole question.

The bulk of President Bush's visit to Israel will revolve around the celebration of the establishment of the Jewish state. Among their activities, the president and First Lady will host a reception at an Israeli museum. They'll tour the ancient mountaintop fortress of Masada, where in the first century A.D., hundreds of Jewish rebels killed their wives, children, then each other rather than become slaves to the Romans who were set to invade the fortress. National security adviser Stephen Hadley says the trip is to demonstrate U.S. support of Israel. He describes the visit as a mix of symbolism and substance.

Well, if you're in a situation where you somehow have prior knowledge or information that the person you're dealing with may come in with a very, very low offer. Then it seems to me wise to get your offer on the table. We've had that a few times. We did have once with Michael Jordan, where we were renewing his contract after a few years in the Bulls. And the owner, I wanted a very large sum of money in the $40 to $50 million range. And the owner was talking and I saw a note on his table, on this piece of paper. That he was talking about $4 million. So, I realized, I didn't want him to make the first offer and start at $4 million. So, I turned it around and said: Jerry - it was Jerry Reinsdorf - I said, let me make the first offer. And I opened with about $45 million and he said, wait a minute, I'm at about four. And I said, well, there's a real gap then between us.

And as people at both ends of the spectrum are concerned about today, about there being the opportunity, the possibility, that something like the Nazis, a group like the Nazis will again rise in this country - now personally I think it's ridiculous, I don't believe that at all. But what I find very important is the fact that there are people on both ends who believe it. You have people at the far right who quite literally think - make analogies between Hitler and Obama - I don't really understand it, but that's what they do. And then there are many others at the other side who make the same kind of remarks about groups like the Tea Party.

Well, Sam, thanks for the question. The federated Iraq - most of the Iraqis on any side of the aisle that you talk to among the three major groups with the exception of the Kurds - certainly where the contention is between the Sunnis and the Shias do not see that. Now, there is a thought that the Shia's form of government is different from a Sunni's in the sense that they would see a weaker central government with stronger power in the provinces as contrasted with the stronger government when Sunnis were in power. As a matter of political ideology, not so much tied to Saddam Hussein, but the way the Sunnis look at power as a whole. But I think most people do not want to move towards a federation. They don't mind the provinces having more power and authority, but not a federated Iraq. In terms of the military operation in Baghdad, you have to remember that the operation in Baghdad was the main effort but there was also a very significant support in operation in all - to use an American term - all the suburbs around Baghdad. Because that is where the al-Qaida were. And from those bases around Baghdad, they were conducting operations inside of it. Very much of the al- Qaida presence has been driven away from those areas based on the operations that have been conducted in the last few months. And the security in Baghdad, there was definitely cleansing from the Shia militia of Sunnis in some of those neighborhoods - I saw that in some neighborhoods, it's very dramatic - and forcing Sunnis to move out of those neighborhoods. But nonetheless, that there is still potential for huge violence there. And it was only when the people were being protected did that stop.

But I think of more immediate concern to most people is that we are omnivores. We're generalists. We do need those 50 different nutrients, 20 or 30 of which are plant compounds. And if we're just getting all our food from this one crop, we're not getting the lycopene, we're not getting the beta carotene, we're not getting all those other very important chemicals. And that's one of the reasons that you have people on a heavy fast-food diet who are actually overweight who are malnourished. In Oakland, near where I live, there are kids, very well fed on fast food, who come in to clinics with things like rickets.

Well, the first thing you worry about - well, it's just the total mass. Okay? Because we want to put about two square kilometers of collecting area of the antennas on the moon, that's a lot. But you can actually sit down and work out, you know, how thick a wire is, how the mass of the metal you like to make it out of the area you need. And it actually comes out to, you know, just that kind of calculation that the total mass is less than what NASA is planning for the capability of the launch vehicles to the moon. So that's good, we passed that test. And if you work out the power requirements, those are also quite high, and that's something that's actually quite uncertain at this time. We're going to have to work out, you know, what the requirements actually are and find out from NASA what the plans are for power in the moon and whether solar rays could handle it, that sort of thing. And if we use solar rays, the sun only shines two weeks, and then it doesn't shine for two weeks, we have to store the energy. So there are all these considerations.

I think these are really interesting candidates to point to because during their campaigns they talked a lot about clean energy, and especially in both cases they talked a lot about wind energy and various kinds of renewable power. I think one of the things that you might see coming from this Congress - if the Congress can't get a consensus around some kind of climate change legislation that would be across the board and would put caps on the economy as a whole, then I think you might be able to see some kind of smaller steps that are important and could have an impact of pushing the economy towards what is becoming more and more popular kinds of clean energy like wind energy.

And as we heard, the scene now shifts to New Hampshire. Many of the presidential candidates have already arrived there. We will be broadcasting all this morning from here at Smokey Row, a coffee house in Des Moines. And just recapping the final count in Iowa, the Republican winner, Ted Cruz, with a finish by Donald Trump in second place and not at all far behind Marco Rubio. Hillary Clinton, we learned this morning, the Iowa Democratic Party saying that she beat out Bernie Sanders very narrowly - literally narrowly. Some of the precincts here in Iowa were decided by the flip of a coin.

Correct, and what administration officials will tell you privately is that they just - they use this analogy all the time of teaching someone how to ride a bike and you keep your hand on the back of the bicycle seat. And they'll say in Baghdad we let go of the bicycle seat too soon. And, you know, I think one of the interesting things that's been going on in Iraq is that Sunni attitudes, they traditionally have been the more nationalist - they have represented the more nationalist rejection of the presence of American troops in Iraq. With the increase in sectarian violence, you've begun to see some Sunni leaders sing a different tune about American troops. And U.S. officials will tell you - and I believe this is true - that when they go to Baghdad, Iraqis will tell them: The one person we feel comfortable opening the door for when they come knocking in the middle of the night is an American soldier.

In 1992, Juan Rivera was arrested for the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl in Waukegan, Illinois. On the night of the murder, Rivera was wearing an electronic ankle bracelet in connection with unrelated burglary charges, and this bracelet showed he’d been at home. Yet, based on a tip, police decided to arrest him. Rivera had a low IQ and a history of emotional problems, which psychologists knew would make him highly suggestible. The police chose to ignore that when they grilled him for several days and lied to him about the results of his polygraph test. By the end of the fourth day, having endured more than 24 hours of round-robin questioning by at least nine different officers, Rivera signed a confession. His first confession was inaccurate, however, so police kept questioning him until he got it right. Confessions have extraordinary power, so police believed it despite a lack of physical evidence. So did a jury, which found Rivera guilty; and a judge, who sentenced him to life without parole. In 2005, DNA tests excluded Rivera as the source of the semen recovered from the body. But the prosecutor devised a theory that the 11-year-old victim had had sex with another man previously, and that Rivera did not ejaculate when he raped her after that. A jury found Rivera guilty a second time. Finally, after another appeal in 2011, Rivera’s lawyers were able to set him free. He had been wrongfully imprisoned for nearly 20 years. Rivera’s case represents a tragic miscarriage of justice. Seen another way, it’s also the result of bad science and anti-scientific thinking – from the police’s coercive interview of a vulnerable person, to the jury’s acceptance of a false confession over physical evidence, including DNA. Unfortunately, Rivera’s case is not unique. Hundreds of innocent people have been convicted by bad science, permitting an equal number of perpetrators to go free. It’s impossible to know how often this happens, but the growing number of DNA-related exonerations points to false convictions as the collateral damage of our legal system. Part of the problem involves faulty forensics: contrary to what we might see in the CSI drama shows on TV, few forensic labs are state-of-the-art, and they don’t always use scientific techniques. According to the US National Academy of Sciences, none of the traditional forensic techniques, such as hair comparison, bite-mark analysis or ballistics analysis, qualifies as rigorous, reproducible science. But it’s not just forensics: bad science is marbled throughout our legal system, from the way police interrogate suspects to the decisions judges make on whether to admit certain evidence in court. More than 50 years ago, C P Snow, the British scientist and novelist, warned that the division between ‘two cultures’ – science and the humanities – makes it harder to solve the world’s problems. There’s a ‘two cultures’ problem in our legal systems too, in the contrasting methodologies of science and the law. The scientific method involves making observations, constructing a hypothesis, and testing that hypothesis with an experiment that others can repeat. You can trust your results if others can reproduce them. The legal approach involves making an argument. Tasked with the job of arriving at a verdict, legal professionals gather information under strict rules of evidence and subject it to rigorous cross-examination. For guidance, they look to precedent: you can trust your legal theory if previous courts have approved it. In this way, legal practice tends to move forward more slowly than science. The gap between the two methodologies – enquiry versus argument, testing versus precedent – is where innocent people sometimes can fall. Science and the law have always had an uneasy relationship. But with the growing importance of forensics in the courtroom and scientific methods in prosecuting crime, it’s become critical to marry the two disciplines. The question is, how? Science has been intertwined with the law for almost as long as the jury trial has been in existence. Records show that as early as the 1600s physicians were brought to court to give expert opinions, such as how long after the death of her husband a woman could bear a child. By the mid-1800s, experts on both sides of the Atlantic were called on to testify about a variety of subjects, such as the chemical signs of poisoning and the mental state of accused murderers. What really brought science into court, though, was the development of forensic science in the late 19th century. Led by the French physician Alexandre Lacassagne, a coterie of experts in Europe pioneered many of the techniques still used today, including footprint analysis, the use of markings on a bullet to match it to a gun, and chemical reagents to see if a stain was a biological fluid such as semen or blood. Beyond freeing innocent people, DNA exonerations have provided a kind of core sample into what goes wrong in our justice system Those developments became pivotal in criminal justice, and they caused verdicts to be ever more science-based. Lacassagne hoped the science would grow like other scholarly fields, conducted at institutes affiliated with universities. But instead of becoming part of the university system, forensic science moved to police departments and government laboratories. There, researchers focused on practical applications without questioning underlying hypotheses or imposing the rigour practiced by classic science labs. When techniques such as bullet-matching and bite-mark analysis resulted in false convictions, the errors were seen as anomalies rather than signs that the science itself was wrong. That changed with the DNA revolution of the 1990s. Unlike prior forensic sciences, DNA technology emerged directly from the laboratories of universities and scientific institutes, with all the statistical proofs and controls of real science. The technology allows scientists to spot certain sequences in our genetic material that occur with a known frequency in various populations. This means that scientists can state with statistical accuracy the chances of your DNA matching a sample from a crime scene – usually on the order of one in a few billion – something that traditional forensic scientists cannot do. To see how deeply the DNA revolution cuts into traditional crime-solving techniques, consider the gold standard of evidence: fingerprints. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) maintains the world’s largest database of fingerprints, with more than 70 million samples in its criminal master file, and uses advanced computer algorithms to help match them to samples gathered at crime scenes. It’s a highly sophisticated, multi-level analysis. In the end, though, the identification comes down to simple human judgment: a series of experts who eyeball the results. Such judgments are compromised because experts rarely get to compare complete sets of fingerprints. Police usually find partial prints at a crime scene – a smudge or only a portion of a print. They’ll examine several points on those fragments and see if they match similar points on a suspect’s fingerprints. Unlike with DNA, no one has done the statistical analysis to see if more than one person can have the same points of comparison. The fact that DNA was a proven, quantified science made it a critical tool in reversing wrongful convictions – 321 in the US alone since 1992, when the Innocence Project was launched at Yeshiva University in New York. Innocence Projects have also sprung up in Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Holland, Australia and New Zealand. Beyond freeing innocent people, DNA exonerations have provided a kind of core sample into what goes wrong in our justice system. If DNA represents hard, scientific fact, then the evidence it contradicts is by definition wrong. In 2011, Brandon L Garrett, a law professor at the University of Virginia, dug into that issue by analysing thousands of pages of legal records and court transcripts from 220 of the then-250 exonerations. He found that an overwhelming majority of wrong decisions resulted from flawed science-related procedures, such as eyewitness errors, faulty lab procedures and false confessions. Garrett is not alone: many legal scholars are using case histories from the DNA-exoneration database as a way of examining the systemic problems of our police departments and courts. They’re consistently finding that the law lags far behind science. As a result, certain practices remain accepted long past their expiration date – both in the investigation of crimes and in trials. Consider the investigation of arson. For generations, arson investigators, usually former fire-fighters, were taught to look for the signs of arson by their predecessors, who based their knowledge on practical experience. A body of common knowledge developed, none of which was backed by laboratory science. An example: the dark splotches on the floor of a burnt building, or ‘spill patterns’, meant that someone had used gasoline or another accelerant to start the fire. But starting in the late 1980s, scientists who conducted extensive laboratory research found that fire behaved differently than previously thought. Spill patterns had more to do with the ventilation of a working fire than the liquid that might have started it. In other words, probably hundreds of convictions have been based on incorrect findings of arson. The most notorious of these was the 2004 execution in Texas of Cameron Todd Willingham for the arson-related murder of his three daughters. Experts have since determined that the fire was probably accidental or undetermined at best. Although scientists are working to bring about change, and have created national standards for investigation, the majority of investigators continue to be trained in the old ways. confessions have a ripple effect: once a suspect admits to a crime, almost all other evidence changes to support it Other flawed science can influence investigations. Most surveys cite eyewitness identification as the most common cause of wrongful convictions, largely because the science of memory is misunderstood. For many years most people assumed that memory was like a videotape – that when you accessed someone’s memory you could get a fairly accurate description of what happened, and that the more times you accessed it, the more accurate the description would become. Psychologists now compare memory to trace evidence, easily contaminated by the process of collecting it, such as the nature of a line-up or the casual remarks a police officer might make. Each time the police re-interview a witness or congratulate her for identifying a culprit, they contaminate that memory a little bit more, while at the same time making the witness more confident. By the time a case goes to trial, the witness can be absolutely certain and absolutely wrong – a dangerously persuasive combination for a jury. The result has been some notorious cases of false identification in which people were imprisoned for decades before finally being freed by DNA evidence. The damage doesn’t stop with a single mistake. What’s alarming about the use of faulty science during investigations is that one error begets others, steering investigators down the wrong track. For example, over the past couple of decades, psychologists have learned that the persistent interrogation method used by most police produces a certain percentage of false confessions. That’s not surprising: the method, called the Reid technique, is based on 1950s-era psychology that scientists have shown to be inherently coercive. But once a suspect confesses, a cascade of bad decisions can occur, according to Saul Kassin, who has been researching false confessions for more than 35 years. Kassin, a psychology professor at John Jay College in New York and at Williams College in Massachusetts, has found that confessions have a ripple effect: once a suspect admits to a crime, almost all other evidence changes to support it, from alibis to the interpretation of physical evidence. Not even retracting the confession can set things right. That’s what happened in the case of Rivera, whose coerced confession was powerful enough to dissuade one jury from accepting DNA evidence. Another case involves Michael Ledford, a Virginia resident charged with setting a fire that injured his wife and killed his one year-old son. Investigators originally classified the fire as of ‘undetermined’ origin because they could find no evidence to support arson. A month later, Ledford confessed after an exhaustive interrogation following an all-night shift at his place of employment, in which he was falsely told that he had failed a polygraph exam. (Unlike their counterparts in the UK and Canada, US police are permitted to lie during interrogations.) It was only after that confession that investigators re-classified the fire and managed to find evidence to support arson. You could say that the confession enabled investigators to bootstrap their work, but fire experts hired by the defence say it was a classic case of a confession distorting forensics. Ledford was found guilty and is serving a 50-year sentence. An important part of the scientific process involves recognising human bias and preventing it from affecting results. For that reason, scientists use double-blind studies. When evaluating a drug for clinical trials, neither the doctors nor the patient knows who has been given the experimental drug and who the placebo. It is only after the experiment has been concluded that the scientists are unblinded. That way their wishful thinking can’t influence their findings. Not so with the legal profession, which accumulates biases every step of the way. Most police, when they show a line-up to a witness, know which face belongs to the suspect. Studies have shown that that simple knowledge can lead an officer to unconsciously influence the witness who, in turn, can pick the favoured suspect, who might not be the perpetrator. Itiel Dror, a cognitive psychologist at University College London, has shown that the knowledge of a case can influence even fingerprint experts. In one well-known study in 2005, Dror and his colleagues recruited five UK fingerprint experts with a combined 85 years’ experience. He showed the experts two sets of prints that each of them had matched in actual cases five years earlier. Then he played a trick: rather than tell them where the prints really came from, he told them they came from a well-known case of a fingerprint mismatch. After examining the prints, three of the experts declared the prints a mismatch, reversing their own judgments from several years before. One expert couldn’t decide, and only one held firm to his previous position. Dror concluded that even fingerprint experts were vulnerable to ‘irrelevant and misleading contextual influences’. Once faulty science gets into the legal system, it’s rare that the system screens it out; for, although science has self-correcting mechanisms at each step of the process, the legal system has few. The most notable such mechanism in the US is the Daubert standard, a 1993 US Supreme Court decision that is supposed to enforce rigorous standards for science in the courtroom. That decision gives judges a gatekeeper role – to make sure that any expert evidence or testimony is screened for scientific reliability. In other words, the science can’t be merely generally accepted or grandfathered in; it must have been peer-reviewed and evaluated with a quantified error rate. many judges feel that they lack the scientific background to challenge the government’s experts ‘When a forensic technician says: “I know it when I see it,” the judge should say: “Wait a minute, is that all you have?”’ says David Faigman, professor of law at the University of California in San Francisco. ‘You have to at least articulate the variables.’ That hasn’t happened, mainly because defence lawyers rarely challenge forensic science. Those attorneys usually represent poor people, so don’t have the money to hire their own experts. In contrast, lawyers in civil suits, who stand to make bundles of money, do. Still, judges shouldn’t have to rely on defence attorneys to screen out weak science. Under the Daubert standard, judges can, and should, challenge the evidence. But many judges feel that they lack the scientific background to challenge the government’s experts. As a result, they fall back on lessons learned in law school: when in doubt, look back to precedent. But precedent, like old science, can be wrong. In one notable case, the judge of a district court in Denver agreed with the defence attorney that latent fingerprint comparison fails to meet scientific standards because it has no statistical error rate. Yet the judge admitted the evidence anyway. After all, wrote the judge, fingerprinting had been used, ‘all over the world for almost a century’. That’s the kind of reasoning that justified bloodletting. Then there’s the jury, our traditional common-sense arbiter of truth. Judges and lawyers have an almost religious belief in the adversarial system, in which two lawyers fight it out in front of the jury, and good judgment prevails. Yet that too fails the test of science. The jury system was designed centuries ago, when common knowledge could deal with just about any case that might come along. The world has become more complicated since then. Furthermore, the adversarial system – in which one side is right and the other is wrong – forces expert witnesses to ‘rigidify’ their views, in the words of Susan Haack, a legal scholar at the University of Miami. Expert witnesses are more likely to say they’re 100 per cent certain than to present a nuanced or numbers-based conclusion. Intimidated by this process, jurors sometimes lean on their intuition, influenced by the confidence of eyewitnesses and the demeanor of experts. ‘He just looked guilty’ is the common refrain of jurors who find themselves confounded by the scientific evidence. ‘There’s no villain here,’ says Jennifer Mnookin, professor of law at the University of California, Los Angeles. ‘It’s more a system problem, when you get underfunded defence attorneys, zealous prosecutors, and judges who take refuge in the familiar and safe. It all adds up to a system that’s not very good at self-reflection or change.’ Unlike their US colleagues, UK police no longer push for confessions, which they consider inherently unreliable Fortunately, there’s been progress. This summer, the FBI and other US federal agencies adopted a policy of electronically recording all interrogations – a move that is certain to reduce the number of coercive interrogations and false confessions. Many police forces in the US have modified their line-up procedures to conform to modern psychological science, making them less likely to contaminate eyewitness memory. The US Department of Justice has established a national commission to convene panels of policy experts to tease out exactly which practices are science-based and how to make them more so. They’re also examining human biases, such as tunnel vision (seeing things only one way) and confirmation bias (in which you select evidence to confirm what you already think) that influence supposedly objective lab findings. Several other nations have taken similar measures. The UK has made a bolder move. Stung by several false confession scandals in the 1990s, the UK Home Office organised a committee of psychologists, lawyers and police officials to completely remake their interrogation procedures and bring them in line with modern cognitive psychology. The new process did away with the US-style accusatory interrogations and substituted interviews that more resemble journalistic fact-finding. Unlike their US colleagues, UK police no longer push for confessions, which they consider inherently unreliable. Progress is coming to the courtroom, too. In the US state of Texas, which leads the nation in both executions and exonerations, lawmakers have passed a ‘junk science writ’ that makes it possible to appeal a conviction if you can show it was based on outmoded science. This law saved the life of Robert Avila, who was scheduled for execution last January for stomping to death a 19-month-old boy he was babysitting. During Avila’s 2001 trial, medical experts testified that the toddler’s injuries could not have been caused by his four-year-old brother, who had been wrestling with him in the next room. Since then, the science of biomechanics has evolved: last year, experts showed that a 40 lb child falling on the toddler could indeed have caused the injuries that killed the toddler. Avila’s case is pending an appeal. But those changes are piecemeal, and don’t address the fundamental schisms between science and the law. In the US, a group of legal scholars is hoping to fix that, by borrowing an idea from science-based industries such as aviation and medicine. The idea is to approach injustices as errors in the system, rather than one-off exceptions to the rule or individual mistakes. According to James Doyle, the Boston attorney who developed the idea, a systems analysis of the Rivera case would examine how community pressure, tunnel vision by the police, flawed interrogation training, laxity of the judge, and a host of other factors allowed bad science to work its way through the system and convict an innocent man. Several nations are examining a novel Australian method of vetting science in the courtroom, called ‘hot tubbing’, or ‘concurrent evidence’. Rather than pit one scientific expert against the other, the judge sits all the experts together, where they present their analyses, question each other, and eventually arrive at a consensus. Rather than a battlefield, the process resembles a scientific discussion. None of this is to say that our legal system is hostile to scientific procedures. Indeed, we know as much as we do about false convictions today because evidence has become more scientific, not less. But the more that we can blend the two cultures by bringing science into police stations and courts – not only with specific techniques, but with the core principles of the scientific method – the more just our legal system will be.

Well, I think the important thing that I tell the president and what we try to advise him is that while there's evidence that people are suggesting that the president's support is eroding, we believe that we're making great strides to benefit African-Americans. And in the end, the facts will be supported and will be the reason why I think African-Americans and history will prove that this president has served our community well. For example, education opportunities. Under the president's No Child Left Behind initiative, the national report card came out about a month ago and it shows that the community that has benefited most from raising the standards and no longer accepting the soft, you know, bigotry of low expectations are African-Americans. Our kids closed the gap by 13 points in reading and math, and that's significant. Home ownership is up in our community. These are issues that--under this president's watch we've made a commitment and we're following through to achieve that commitment, that more African-Americans will own their homes. Businesses--African-Americans more than white Americans are likely to want to start their own businesses, and that's been part of the policies of this administration. So while I think there's been some damage in terms of the media coverage and how they try to portray the president, the policies that he promotes, whether it be education, health care, home ownership, helping people make right choices to get out of poverty, focusing on our youth, and, you know, the safety-net issues, this president's record is a strong one that we'll continue to remind him of and the American people of.

I was in seventh grade in 1993 when Marie C Wilson and Gloria Steinem launched the Ms Foundation’s Take Our Daughters to Work Day, intending to show us young women that a big, wide world existed beyond our gender and our bodies. For me, it did just that, although it also seeded a lifetime obsession with bodies in a different sense. For while many of my classmates were sitting with a parent in a tidy office, I spent that inaugural daughter-at-work day in an autopsy room watching my father, a pathologist and former county coroner, dissect a dead man. That man was a grizzled old farmer and he was delivered to the basement for autopsy at my dad’s hospital dressed in a long-sleeved shirt and denim overalls, a detail I remember clearly but that seems odd when I think about it now. I called my dad a few weeks ago to ask why the farmer wore overalls to his autopsy, and why there was an autopsy at all, which also seems unusual today. Dad doesn’t remember the case, one of so many over the years, but said there was likely no witness to the farmer’s death, in which case his doctor might have requested an autopsy to exclude an accident, suicide, or homicide. As for the clothes? That happens sometimes. People do, after all, often die while dressed. In our phone call I learned, too, that Dad doesn’t even remember taking me into the autopsy room. ‘I did that?’ he asked, laughing, incredulous. ‘An autopsy? Really?’ For me, the memory is clear. I remember that the farmer was the first dead body I’d seen. I remember standing at the edge of a cold room in oversized scrubs rolled up at the ankles and watching my dad, similarly dressed, struggle with the legs of the man’s overalls. I remember thinking that dead bodies don’t bend. I can see the farmer’s generous potbelly smiling at the ceiling after my dad finally stripped the clothes from him and laid him out, fully naked, on a metal gurney. I remember watching my dad as he wheeled the gurney to the centre of the room and transferred the man to an autopsy table, positioned under a bright light and over a drain. I can hear my dad dictating each step to a tape recorder in a business-like tone and, although I can’t make out the words, I remember that they seemed to be in a foreign language. I remember the long, Y-shaped incision the scalpel made on the man’s torso. I especially remember watching my dad cleave through the outer edges of the man’s ribs with an electric Stryker saw and then lift off his chest like the lid of a box. I also remember thinking: is that really my dad? At the end of the autopsy, Dad rooted around the farmer’s still heart. Then he presented me with two grisly lumps in his gloved hands while earnestly explaining the difference between them. One was a tiny pre-mortem blood clot and the other a larger, post-mortem blood clot. In the former, the blood cells are mixed and the mass is uniform because the blockage formed when the blood still circulated. In the latter, the blood cells separate into distinct layers of yellow and red. If Dad found more of these pre-mortem clots and if the microscope confirmed what they were, we’d know that the farmer had died of a heart attack. I don’t remember feeling scared or uncomfortable, but rather in awe at the scene in front of me. At the work my dad did. At the things that can happen to your body once you’re gone. And for the first time, it hit me that, after I die, part of me will remain. Some of my strongest childhood memories involve gathering around the dinner table with my family and listening to stories of death. Of course this sounds morbid, but we were just doing what many families do over a shared meal, which is to talk about the kind of day each of us had. And for my dad, the day usually involved the dying or the dead. The stories weren’t always about autopsies. Sometimes, Dad told us about receiving a hunk from a mysterious growth that a surgeon had cut from a patient, who still lay open on an operating table down the hall. Dad would quick-freeze the piece of tissue and slice it into thin cross-sections with something like a deli slicer. Then, he would put the translucent shavings on a slide, stain them purple and pink, and look at them under a microscope for the deadly harbinger of cancer. When I was young, the name for this process — frozen section — made me think of grocery stores. Sometimes, the frozen section helped save the life of the person on the operating table: the doctors caught the cancer early, before it had spread, and removed the growth there and then. In others, the procedures came too late. These, Dad told with a heavy voice. Other tales were about identifying a particularly rare disorder. Here, Dad described digging through medical literature and textbooks and then comparing one image of purple-pink-stained cellular architecture to another to look for distinctive patterns. My favourites, however, were the coroner stories, which were ghastly in a way that absorbed me as a child but that carry a different weight now in my adult mind (although, with today’s ubiquitous forensics television shows, I suppose solving unusual deaths fascinates us all). There was the one about the woman who shot her husband through the common carotid artery with a .357 Magnum, and the cautionary tale of the toddler who was crushed by the wheel of a school bus. That one still haunts me. What I learned is this. To study the human body, nothing but a real one comes close Then there is the story I’d beg for whenever I had friends at the house for dinner or a sleepover, which now makes me wonder why they ever came back. It begins with Dad stepping out of his car in the wide rural farmland of north-east Kansas to the staccato retorts of gunshots. Startled, he turned to the sheriff waiting to take him to a death scene, who drawled: ‘Don’t worry. They’re just gettin’ the last of the dogs.’ My dad was there to examine the limited remains of an elderly couple who had died and to piece together what had happened to them. Based on the eviction notice in the mailbox and the half-packed car, he deduced that the couple had been moving out of their dirt-floored shack. The woman’s medical history suggested she couldn’t walk; her remains in the bed indicated she’d died there. Perhaps she had been waiting for her husband to help her to the car after he’d finished loading it. Instead, he’d had a heart attack in the thick summer heat. The hypothesis made sense, anyway, from the man’s own medical records and the suitcases that sat in the dusty drive between the shack and the open car. Unable to walk or to yell for the nearest neighbour miles down the road, the woman slowly wasted away. All that was left of the man was a piece of his occipital bone, from the lower part of his skull. What happened to the rest of him? Through interviews, county deputies learned that the couple had befriended a pack of feral dogs. The dogs were accustomed to being fed scraps from the shack. When the couple died, the hungry dogs turned on them. It’s a horrible, sad story, yes. However, to my child’s mind at sleepovers, it was like a ghost story. But better. Twenty years after my Take Our Daughters to Work Day experience, although I am still young and in good health, I’ve been reliving that autopsy scene as I contemplate what will happen to my body when I die. We humans have a unique faculty for existential navel-gazing; to understand the difference between is and was, between life and death. We can trace the path of a life to its logical conclusion: no matter the precautions, the detours, or the scenic routes, some day it will end. And once I get past the paralysing, trapped-animal fear that accompanies such thoughts, I start to wonder what will happen next. What path might my body take once whatever makes me ‘Me’ is gone? I don’t mean this in a spiritual way. Many people come to accept death through the promise that they will live on in an afterlife or through reincarnation, but these aren’t my beliefs. Nor do I share the view of the gerontologist who wants to cure ageing altogether, or the futurist who is waiting patiently for the singularity; to me, both seem like just another way to avoid accepting death, under the veil of science rather than religion. What I’m talking about is what will happen to my shell, my physical remains, when I die. I’d like to have control over where my body will go and what it might do, even in death. I find comfort in knowing I have a say. The thought of being immediately sealed in an expensive box or cremated does not appeal. I understand that such longstanding cultural traditions console the people who remain behind, but to me it seems that my body would be wasted in either case. Before it reaches its final resting place, I want my body to be useful. To do this, I need to think of a way for my death to make life better for the living. One option is to donate usable organs to someone who needs them: corneas for the blind, skin grafts for the badly burned, or a variety of other organs, from the heart to the kidneys to the lungs, for the diseased. I’ve already been an organ donor for as long as I can remember; it’s printed on my driver’s licence under a red cartoon heart. But lately, when I’ve thought about dying, I’ve wondered if, for me, this is the most meaningful donation. Coincidentally, my driver’s licence is due for renewal at the end of this year. I recently wrote a short article on the different ways in which whole-body donations are used in research and in medical education. As I interviewed the scientists and doctors involved in this work, I realised that my questions about the anonymous cadavers they use were not just for the purpose of writing my article. The subtext was that I was asking how my body would be used, should I decide to leave it as an anatomical gift. I’m told by those who have experienced it that the relationship between medical students and their first cadaver is a special one What I learned is this. To study the human body, nothing but a real one comes close. There are usable proxies — computer models and crash-test dummies, for example. But neither replaces the real thing and, in fact, both are built and tuned with data collected from cadavers. Without input from real bodies, with their real anatomical complexity, neither substitute would exist. There are never enough whole-body donations. In any given year, researchers make do with what they’ve been given, but they could always use more. There are obstacles: a person or their surviving family must give consent, different legal frameworks exist from one country or region to the next, and some bodies aren’t suitable for all areas of research. Not every donation programme is what it seems, either, and the best way to ensure that my body goes to research is to donate through a state anatomical board or a medical school. Many areas of research require cadavers. Scientists who study the biomechanics of injury, for example, want to understand how the human body gets hurt so that they can help to prevent it. They craft controlled tests to understand the impacts a cadaver can withstand. Then, after translating these measurements to a model or a dummy, they test and perfect the protective gear that keeps us safe. My body, I learned, could help improve safety belts in a car or seats in a train. My brain might help designers make helmets that mitigate the traumatic brain injuries an American football player sustains in a rough tackle, or a soldier gets from the shockwave of a bomb blast. When the research is done, if my family wishes, they can have my cremated remains (in which case, I wouldn’t mind if my ashes are spread somewhere I once loved). If not, I might be honoured alongside other unclaimed donors by a plaque, a tree, or a solemn annual ceremony. Forensic scientists, too, use cadavers in their work. A handful of universities take donated bodies and plant them in the ground or place them in a secluded wood. Then the scientists map out the time it takes for the blowflies, dermestid beetles, and other scavengers to render the bodies to bones. This, I suppose, is a different sort of reincarnation — to become part of the ecosystem of a field or forest floor. It might seem a grim end, but the data can help forensic researchers identify the time when a person died and what injuries they might have suffered, which in turn helps law enforcement officers to solve murders. If I were to choose this route, my body might eventually be used to recreate a specific crime scene — hanged in the forest, or stuffed in a car trunk — which could help a coroner solve a case, or a cop bring a killer to justice, just as my dad once helped unravel deadly crimes. Maybe this would bring some solace to a grieving family. Afterward, my skeleton might rest in box in a forensics collection, occasionally living on in the form of research on the ageing of bones. These are all worthy legacies, but there is one more option for whole-body donation, a longstanding tradition in medical training, that feels a better fit for me. Every first-year medical student takes a gross anatomy course in which they dissect a human cadaver. This is their first patient. It might be the first dead body they have ever seen or touched. When they enter the gross anatomy room, they might see two- or three-dozen different bodies, each a unique example of the dizzying array of human size and shape. I’m told by those who have experienced it that the relationship between medical students and their first cadaver is a special one. The cadaver provides knowledge the student wouldn’t have otherwise; the student is awed and thankful for the gift. One physician I interviewed told me: ‘You learn the facts, but you come out of the process with appreciation, with a reverence for this majestic structure in front of you. And you appreciate a human being in a very different way.’ In this scenario, if I were to choose it, my body might teach a future doctor the physical landmarks for inserting a spinal tap, or for ruling out appendicitis. A surgeon might learn to dissect the delicate nerves in my hands. Or, perhaps, a pathologist might realise the difference between a pre-mortem and post-mortem blood clot. It’s a heavy decision, to choose where you’ll go when you die, and a deeply personal one. Many people don’t want to bother, and some don’t even get a say. For me, I choose an active role, and I’m lucky to have that opportunity. I haven’t made a final decision yet, but a medical school body donation application form is saved on my computer desktop. Maybe, by December 31 of this year — the day my driver’s licence expires, as well as my birthday — I will fill out this application and drop it in the mail.

Yes, I love it, and yeah, regarding this movie, I have also watched this movie, and it's very unique in the sense that - I am from India, and I've heard about the slums, but to see that on big screen in such a way, it was very profound to me, and I couldn't believe the living conditions of these children. And juxtaposed against this "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?" theme, it was very unique for me. I really don't watch Bollywood movies or any of these movies. They're not of my age, I guess. I mean, I don't - they don't interest me. But this movie was very unique, and it's just sometimes heartbreaking to watch these little kids, you know, living those conditions that you hear about, but when you see it on the big screen, it's just unbelievable.