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One of the things that we're really known for is a very simple tomato sauce - spaghetti with tomato and basil. And we take those tomatoes and we peel them and seed them, and then we just cook them for about 45 minutes with a little bit of salt and infuse the olive oil with garlic, basil and crushed red pepper, and then we very simply crush it with one of those big potato mashers that you see. And then we just serve it with a little spaghetti that we toss and add a touch of basil to, a little Parmesan cheese. And its one of those dishes that people come back to the restaurant for all the time. What I love about tomatoes in general is that you can do something so simple with them and achieve such a great product with it.

Yeah, I've been - Im on several committees and things in Washington with Jeff. And, you know, I think the good news about his appointment is that I think he understand a lot of these issues. Im hopeful that he can have a positive impact on helping to get jobs moving again and also to get some of these policies. I think once you get the policies in place, you'll get companies making investments because investments require understanding the long term, not just putting some stimulus money in place or some investment tax credits. Those are short-term fixes. We really need some longer term policies in place. And then, you know, I think when I heard the president saying we need to set a better environment for business here in the U.S. If we do that and everyone understands what the rules are, then you're going to see people make investments. Then the market will work.

Well, you know, I live in Beirut, which is the capital of rumors. And everyone is giving scenarios in Beirut of what, you know, of what Syria, what Iran, what Israel might do as a diversionary tactic. So absolutely, it's part of the conversation out here. But I think the bottom line is that while Iran remains, probably, the only country that has influence in Syria at this point - and when I say influence, I mean that it could pressure it to do something. You might have said that about Turkey weeks ago, but I think, again, that was before the government really went into full survival mode.

You may have thought a crisis was over when North Korea said it would shut down a nuclear reactor. Maybe not quite. North Korea's agreement last month was supposed to be a first step toward giving up its nuclear weapons, but it left many issues unresolved. And during later negotiations, the North Koreans walked out. North Korea wants the U.S. to return millions of dollars in frozen funds. And it wants the money back before it begins to address ending its nuclear program. A hint of North Korea's plans may have come in a recent comment from its chief negotiator. He suggested that at the end of the process, North Korea could keep its nuclear weapons with the blessing of the United States.

You know what, the whole way that that went down, it doesn't really sit well with me. Yes, I am a lesbian and I am also African-American but, you know, I take issue with the fact that there are those in the gay community and the gay leadership that feel that, you know, if they want something then that's the way it is without confirming with anyone else, and a lot of times these are white gay folks. And I'm sorry, the issue with Isaiah transcended beyond, you know, white gays and lesbians and how they feel -there's also was an African-American issue with also an African-American gay and lesbian issue. At the end of the day, no one really knows what was said. I didn't see a YouTube clip and no one else saw a YouTube clip - all were going on is hearsay. I think that Isaiah put in his time. He made his amends. He apologized. He did more than I would have done because I certainly wouldn't have done any PSAs for anyone. He did all of that and they still turned around and fired him, and that's absolutely wrong and it sends the wrong message.

This is Talk of the Nation. I'm Neil Conan in Washington. And here are headlines from some of the stories we're following here today at NPR News. A court in Thailand ousted the prime minister today for hosting a TV cooking show. Anti-government protesters cheered the court's ruling, they've demanded his resignation since last month. But he may be back. His party plans to re-nominate him as prime minister. And Barack Obama today criticized President Bush's plan to bring home 8,000 troops by February. He said the president's plan comes up short. Meanwhile, Republican John McCain and running mate Sarah Palin campaign in Ohio. Details on those stories and, of course, much more later today on All Things Considered. Tomorrow on Talk of the Nation, tactics, money, and votes, how John McCain and Barack Obama plan to win the election. Ken Rudin, our political junkie, joins us at the Newseum, next Talk of the Nation from NPR News. Yesterday, a U.S. federal judge ruled in favor of author J.K Rowling and barred publication of "The Harry Potter Lexicon." The book was to have been a guide to the character's terminology and locations in the best-selling books. The judge cited copyright infringement and said the lexicon borrowed too much of Rowling's creative work for its purposes as a reference guide and would cause her irreparable harm as a writer.

Well, I think that Mr. Appelbaum pointed to the fact that sometimes it works better than other times, but I think if we're focusing this on Barack Obama's accomplishments in the Illinois Senate, it's very telling that he passed significant legislation dealing with affordable housing. It did get the state to make more investments than we ever had before through the state donation tax - got a 26 million dollars a year, but it did involve these public-private partnerships. It is a model that I believe in until today, and he was one of the early leaders and somebody that we applauded at the time with the kind of legislation that was brought to us by housing advocates and public officials as a way to increase availability of affordable housing and revitalize communities.

Yes, it is a civil war to me. You can call it whatever you like. This has to stop. These young killers in the street are just boys. They've become killers and they don't realize that. They're just being used by both factions. They're being used by the political leaders who are shouting every day on the satellite TV news shows. These so-called leaders in suits are the real killers, turning our boys into murderers. It will take generations to recover from all of these. It will take so long to change this violent culture we've become. It becomes so easy for any young boy to hold the gun and to shoot. We now have a generation of damaged youth.

...including New York. But having said that, look, Lyndon Johnson probably helped elect, if not did elect John Kennedy in 1960. When Bill Clinton named Al Gore, a fellow baby boomer, a fellow southerner - I mean, that was against conventional wisdom, but I think it was very effective. And we've known - we've seen for the less 7, 8 years what Dick Cheney meant to the Bush White House about - regarding foreign policy and substantial roles in policies. So a vice president does mean a lot. And especially means a lot for John McCain, given the fact that he's 71 years old, he would be - if elected, the oldest person ever elected to the White House. And he has had health problems in the past, he has had cancer.

Well, watching the comments this morning from the Friends of Syria conference in Istanbul, you saw Secretary Clinton threatening in unspecified ways that if Syria doesn't get on board there will be serious consequences. I think more important the prime minister of Turkey, Prime Minister Erdogan, said much the same thing. He said that if this U.N. Security Council effort to resolve the conflict fails, there will be no choice but to support the Syrian people's right to self-defense, which means supplying weapons. Because Turkey is on Syria's border, it could mean more aggressive Turkish moves toward creating a safe zone. The problem is that the underlying difficulties of military intervention remain, even as the logic of it, the drive toward it grows greater. The problem is that this is a country that has deep sectarian tensions, as do many in the Middle East, and an effort to back the opposition could shatter the state structure and army in Syria much as we saw the army and state structure shattered in Iraq. And we know the consequences, that people retreated to sect and tribe and you had, for several years in Iraq, a really brutal civil war that left so many dead. And I think U.S. policymakers want to avoid that outcome if they possibly can.

Forty seconds, OK. The quick question is the China Study is - well, it's a collaboration between Cornell, Oxford University and Chinese universities that looked at diet versus disease (unintelligible) counties in China. It is actually not true. This is one of the amazing - the China Study has become sort of the bible of the vegan diet movement. And it's actually not true. If you look at the raw data in the China Study, there is no relationship between animal protein and cancer - animal protein consumption and cancer mortality in that study. Anything more than that, I'd be happy to talk about the China Study for minutes to hours. That's all I can say. All right. I want to thank - I'm afraid that we're out of time. But Gary Taubes, I want to thank you for joining us. You are at home in Berkeley, California, the author of "Why We Get Fat," and "Good Calories, Bad Calories." Gary Taubes, thanks very much for joining us.

Oh, yeah, they basically ran away from the L-word. There's no question about that. But the larger issue and the larger problem is, whether you like it or not, the Republican Party has a clear identity. You know what they stand for, whether you agree with it or not. You don't know what Democrats stand for, and I think that has hurt them. And I think it also has hurt them that any little group that come along they try to associate themselves with instead of taking some strong position. Until you really know and you really redefine what you are as a Democrat, they're going to continue to lose.

Well, he was using pretty simple instrumentation, what are called Geiger tubes. You probably heard of Geiger counters that make very sort of broad-brush, fairly crude kind of measurements of radiation. They don't distinguish very clearly between different energies or different particles even. And today, we have much, much improved technology, very sophisticated instruments that can see with better spatial resolution, better temporal resolution and especially better energy resolution extending up to the very highest energies. And so modern technology combined with flying spacecraft sort of in the right place and, of course, at the right time really helps us to do a far superior job to anything that's been done before.

When I moved to Harare in 1985, social justice was at the core of Zimbabwe's national health policy. The new government emerged from a long war of independence and immediately proclaimed a socialist agenda: health care services, primary education became essentially free. A massive expansion of rural health centers placed roughly 80 percent of the population less than a two-hour walk from these facilities, a truly remarkable accomplishment. In 1980, the year of independence, 25 percent of Zimbabwean children were fully immunized. By 1990, a mere decade later, this proportion stood at 80 percent. I felt tremendously privileged to be part of this transformation, a revolution. The excitement, the camaraderie, was palpable. Working side by side with brilliant Zimbabweans — scientists, doctors, activists — I felt connected not only to an African independence movement, but to a global progressive public health movement. But there were daunting challenges. Zimbabwe reported its first AIDS case in 1985, the year I arrived. I had taken care of a few patients with AIDS in the early 1980s, when I did my medical training at Harlem Hospital, but — we had no idea what lay in store for Africa. Infection rate stood at about two percent in my early days there. These would soar to one out of every four adults by the time I left Harare 17 years later. By the mid-1990s, I'd told hundreds of people in the prime of life that they were HIV-positive. I saw colleagues and friends die, my students, hospital patients, die. In response, my colleagues and I set up a clinic. We did condom demonstrations. We launched school education and workplace interventions. We did research. We counseled the partners of infected men about how to protect themselves. We worked hard, and at the time, I believed that I was doing my best. I was providing excellent treatment, such as it was. But I was not talking about structural change. Former UN Secretary Kofi Annan has spoken candidly about his personal failure leading to the Rwandan genocide. In 1994, he was head of the UN peacekeeping department. At a 10-year memorial for the genocide, he reflected, "I believed at the time I was doing my best, but I realized after the genocide that there was more I could and should have done to sound the alarm and rally support." The AIDS epidemic caught the health community unprepared, and today, when the World Health Organization estimates that 39 million people have lost their lives to this disease, I'm not alone in feeling remorse and regret at not having done more earlier. But while living in Zimbabwe, I didn't see my role as an advocacy or a political one. I was there for my technical skills, both my clinical and my research epidemiology skills. And in my mind, my job was to take care of patients and to do research to better understand the population patterns of transmission, and I hoped that we'd slow the spread of the virus. I was aware that socially marginalized populations were at disproportionate risk of getting and dying of AIDS. And on the sugar plantations, which really more closely resembled feudal fiefdoms than any modern enterprise, 60 percent of pregnant women tested HIV-positive. I worked to show how getting infected was not a moral failure but instead related to a culture of male superiority, to forced migrant labor and to colonialism. Whites were largely unscathed. As health professionals, our tools were pitifully weak: imploring people to change their individual behaviors, use condoms, reduce number of partners. Infection rates climbed, and when treatment became available in the West, treatment that remains our most potent weapon against this virus, it was unaffordable to the public sector across Africa. I didn't speak out about the unequal access to these life-saving drugs or about the underlying economic and political systems that were driving infection rates in such huge swaths of the population. I rationalized my silence by reminding myself that I was a guest in the country, that sounding the alarm could even get me kicked out, keep me from doing good work, taking care of my patients, doing much-needed research. So I didn't speak out about the government's early stance on AIDS. I didn't voice my concerns loudly enough. Many doctors, health professionals, may think I did nothing wrong. Our pact with our patients, the Hippocratic Oath and its variants, is about the sanctity of the patient-doctor relationship. And I did everything I could for each and every patient of mine. But I knew that epidemics emerge along the fissures of our society, reflecting not only biology, but more importantly patterns of marginalization, exclusion, discrimination related to race, gender, sexuality, class and more. It was true of AIDS. It was true just recently of Ebola. Medical anthropologists such as Paul Farmer, who worked on AIDS in Haiti, call this structural violence: structural because inequities are embedded in the political and economic organization of our social world, often in ways that are invisible to those with privilege and power; and violence because its impact — premature deaths, suffering, illness — is violent. We do little for our patients if we fail to recognize these social injustices. Sounding the alarm is the first step towards doing public health right, and it's how we may rally support to break through and create real change together. So these days, I'm not staying quiet. I'm speaking up about a lot of things, even when it makes listeners uncomfortable, even when it makes me uncomfortable. And a lot of this is about racial disparities and institutionalized racism, things that we're not supposed to have in this country anymore, certainly not in the practice of medicine or public health. But we have them, and we pay for them in lives cut short. That's why sounding the alarm about the impact of racism on health in the United States, the ongoing institutional and interpersonal violence that people of color face, compounded by our tragic legacy of 250 years of slavery, 90 years of Jim Crow and 60 years of imperfect equality, sounding the alarm about this is central to doing my job right as New York City's Health Commissioner. In New York City, premature mortality — that's death before the age of 65 — is 50 percent higher for black men than white ones. A black woman in 2012 faced more than 10 times the risk of dying related to childbirth as a white woman. And though we've made enormous strides in reducing infant mortality rates, a black baby still faces nearly three times the risk of death in its first year of life as compared to a white baby. New York City's not exceptional. These statistics are paralleled by statistics found across the United States. A recent New York Times analysis reported that there are 1.5 million missing black men across the country. They noted that more than one out of every six black men who today should be between the ages of 25 and 54 years have disappeared from daily life, lost either to prison or premature death. There is great injustice in the daily and disproportionate violence faced by young black men, the focus of recent protests under the banner #BlackLivesMatter. But we have to remember that enduring and disparate rates and the occurrence and outcome of common medical conditions — heart disease, cancer, diabetes, HIV — diseases that may kill slowly and quietly and take even more black lives prematurely. As the #BlackLivesMatter movement unfolded, I felt frustrated and angry that the medical community has been reluctant to even use the word "racism" in our research and our work. You've probably felt something every time I've said it. Our medical students held die-ins in their white coats, but the medical community has largely stood by passively as ongoing discrimination continues to affect the disease profile and mortality. And I worry that the trend towards personalized and precision medicine, looking for biological or genetic targets to better tailor treatment, may inadvertently cause us to lose sight of the big picture, that it is the daily context, where a person lives, grows, works, loves, that most importantly determines population health, and for too many of us, poor health. As health professionals in our daily work, whether in the clinic or doing research, we are witness to great injustice: the homeless person who is unable to follow medical advice because he has more pressing priorities; the transgender youth who is contemplating suicide because our society is just so harsh; the single mother who has been made to feel that she is responsible for the poor health of her child. Our role as health professionals is not just to treat our patients but to sound the alarm and advocate for change. Rightfully or not, our societal position gives our voices great credibility, and we shouldn't waste that. I regret not speaking up in Zimbabwe, and I've promised myself that as New York City's Health Commissioner, I will use every opportunity I have to sound the alarm and rally support for health equity. I will speak out against racism, and I hope you will join me, and I will join you when you speak out against sexism or any other form of inequality. It's time for us to rise up and collectively speak up about structural inequality. We don't have to have all the answers to call for change. We just need courage. The health of our patients, the health of us all, depends on it. (Applause)

That's the disease, dengue fever. And it's nasty. It's transmitted by a mosquito. It can be deadly, but even if it doesn't kill you, it knocks you out with a week or more of really high fever and a pounding headache. Billions of people around the world are at risk for getting dengue. O'Neill's big idea for stopping dengue didn't involve a vaccine or a medicine. Instead, it involved the mosquito that transmits the disease. There are two parts to the idea. First, find a way to treat mosquitoes in the lab so they can no longer carry dengue. Next, release those mosquitoes and find out not only if they'll survive outside the lab, but actually replace the native population of mosquitoes. He showed he could do both of those things in those two Nature papers last year.

When I was a child, it was really a beautiful and wonderful thing. You know, I was one of 11 children, and it was kind of easy to get lost in that. But I felt like I was doing what God wanted. And that imbued my daily life with so much meaning and joy and intensity, which was really very wonderful to feel like God had reached down from the sky and tapped me on the shoulder and chosen me to be his daughter, which is how it was phrased to us. It was only when my adolescence started to unfold and I started to have desires and interests that went beyond the world I was supposed to fit into that things started to become more tense and more conflicts arose.

That's right. That's a real concern for the United States as well, and that's why you're seeing this pivot toward Asia in the coming years. The U.S. wants to have a larger presence in the area. That means probably more money for the Air Force and the Navy. And there's concern clearly with China, and where is China going. Are they going to - you know, they're spending a lot more on their military. They're flexing their muscles. They're pushing into the South China Sea in disputes with the Japanese over some of those islands. And that's something that a lot of people in the Pentagon are watching and concerned about in the next couple of years.

Jennifer Pharr Davis set the unofficial record for fastest thru-hike on the Appalachian Trail earlier this summer. She joined us from member station WCQS in Asheville, North Carolina. You can find a link to her blog, where her journey's chronicled, go to npr.org, and click on TALK OF THE NATION. Her book "Becoming Odyssa: Adventures on the Appalachian Trail" is available now. Tomorrow, we'll talk with Lauren Dolgen, the creator of "16 and Pregnant," about teen moms and TV. And we'll call it freaky Tuesday. We'll continue our summer movie festival with best body-switch movies. This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan.

And I'm sure - have you been in touch with members of your former command and celebrating with them? State Sen. ZINKE: Well, our(ph) member was called it the Broken Flipper Club. It's the former members that are retired, and like myself, you know, still stay active in certain reaches of the Department of Defense. And you know, it's just a great day, I think, for America. It's certainly a great day for the SEALs. But you know, the SEALs are one of the group that was involved, and you know, this is a culmination of a 10-year effort, in which there's a lot of players, a lot of dedication, and fortunately for the U.S., we came out on top.

Well, you know, I don't worry about it that much personally because I think, ultimately, that's what voters are for. Voters are there to vote out people who they don't think do a good job to listen to the arguments and to make the correct decisions. The other thing that I think it may be the candidates are grateful for independent expenditures, but they have no control over them and they're not in a position to say, well, if you spend money for me, I'll do this. The minute they do that, it all becomes illegal. So I think that's really the difference.

No, there was this tremendous relationship of trust, and the story of John Githongo is basically that trust being steadily whittled away. In 2004 he began to hear reports, rumors, people were coming into his office giving him information. A lot of the information he got was from civil servants who were passing him files and letters and telling him what they were hearing. And they were hearing that there were a series of dotty contracts being signed off by people in key ministries which involved - in the end it was nearly a billion dollars. These were military and security contracts and in return Kenya was going to get almost nothing because they were being signed with shadow companies that were little more than addresses. The key one was based in Liverpool. Behind it there was just a shop front. There was nothing there.

Well, first of all, the media does not portray addiction in its correct light, and I do believe it has a huge responsibility. And where the media is, you know, being irresponsible is that the only time that we're really talking about the crisis - the drug crisis in this country, which is at epidemic proportions - is when a celebrity gets arrested. And then we're all talking about that particular celebrity and what's wrong with Hollywood, which I think is totally irresponsible, because what Hollywood represents is America, and what is happening here is happening in the rest of the country. And when you want to talk about film, you know, all you've got to do is look at that great movie "Knocked Up," where, you know, it's so funny with, you know, those guys smoking pot every day and being totally blitzed. And you know, it's funny but it's sad, because so much of our youth today are doing exactly that.

I think I very much do. And I think as Scott Horsley just reported, the president talked about the danger of jumping into stuff that does not turn out well and gets us mired in very difficult situations. I think that he's got a problem because very early on he said if they use chemical weapons, it's a red line, we have to do something. But I think he is very reluctant to choose between one side where you have al-Qaida and the other side where you have Hezbollah. And there is not good policy that he can think of that would involve heavy American intervention. Having said that, I think the latest reports on chemical weapons are going to increase the pressure on the Western countries to do something, but we don't know what that is.

All we know is that they're still searching for people who were on the ground when the helicopter went down. It seems the helicopter was going in to reinforce a unit of soldiers on the ground who'd requested support, and it then crashed, killing all 16. And now, only now, do we learn that the original unit are still missing. The military's not saying much about it except that they don't have reason to believe that they are dead or injured, but we don't know if that means they've been in touch with them since Tuesday. The helicopter crashed on Tuesday. We're not very clear as to where they are and what sort of state they're in. We don't also know how many of them are, but we understand it's a small group.

Well, and I totally understand that. I mean, for a lot of us, we have to ask ourselves, how much of a fan am I of investing overall? Am I going to be spending much time looking at this? Do I even want to buy stocks directly or do I just want to buy mutual funds? And if I buy mutual funds, maybe at the very least, I should know two things. First, what is the goal of that fund, and you know, how are they measuring that? For example, what is socially conscious and what is not and what are their actual criteria underneath that label? And then second, you always want to know how much is my fund charging me one year after another. That's the great hidden question for most investors.

Right. Well, that's true but I have used ain't and I'm fairly willing to bet that you yourself have used ain't as have most of your listeners. And one of my favorite things that I found was that people who complain about ain't - and this really came up in the United States after Merriam-Webster's third international dictionary was published in 1961. A lot of people saw them as kind of giving their seal of approval to ain't, which they really weren't. And several people really took them to task - particularly Dwight Macdonald, prominent New York intellectual. Except if you read through all of Dwight Macdonald's writing, you will find that he uses the word ain't. And he's using it in a jocular sense. But, he is in fact using the word ain't. And we all use the word ain't. There is nothing that says that jocular language use is not - doesn't count. It counts, it's just we're using it in a particular social register.

Certainly. It's been a motivating factor to a young man who comes from a fatherless home, for a young man who has educational difficulties. It's really standing in the trenches with that young man from beginning to end to provide the level of service that they feel that you care and you really want them to be successful. If you could say I'm a coach, I'm a coach. But I'd like to also say I'm more of a life skills coach, teaching these young men the type of things that they need that will make them productive citizens, that will make them effective parents, that will make them the type of young men who will strengthen the fabric of our American society.

I teach at the University of Virginia, where the 19th-century founder has become controversial and divisive. For many students, alums and state legislators, Thomas Jefferson remains a pioneer of higher education and a champion of democratic values. But critics charge that Jefferson imbued the university with a malign legacy by holding scores of people in slavery and expressing a racist rhetoric that contradicted his sporadic statements of antislavery principle. The university’s home city, Charlottesville, has ceased to celebrate Jefferson’s birthday. The campus’s most conspicuous statue to Jefferson now attracts both Leftist vandals and rallies by neo-Confederates, to the equal discomfort of those who find enduring value in his ideas. Used to separating people sharply into villains or heroes, Americans struggle to accept that a person of the past might both inspire as a democrat and alarm as an exploiter, and could promote both higher education and racist speculation. It could balance our assessment if we restored Jefferson to his own revolutionary times, when leaders promoted a new culture appropriate to their radical new form of government: a republic. Jefferson tried to navigate a narrow course by advancing democracy without directly confronting the slave system of his beloved Virginia. His solution lay in founding a university. Isaac Granger Jefferson (1775 -1846) formerly enslaved by Thomas Jefferson. Daguerreotype. Courtesy the Tracy W. McGregor Library of American History, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia.Rejecting rule by kings and aristocrats, the leaders of the American Revolution designed a new, more participatory form of government, known as a republic. They regarded that republic as precious yet vulnerable to both internal subversion and foreign intervention by hostile monarchs and nobles. American leaders noted with alarm that previous republics in Europe had been short-lived and usually small: cantons or city-states. How then could a vast union of diverse American states sustain a form of government that had always failed in the past? America’s revolutionary leaders insisted that republics required an educated citizenry – in contrast to monarchies that dominated by dazzling subjects who remained ignorant and credulous. In a republic, common men were sovereign, so they had to protect their rights and perform their duties as citizens. Otherwise, they could be duped by reckless demagogues who appealed to resentments, provoking violent anarchy. In such a nightmare scenario, a military despot – an American Caesar – would seize power to restore order at the expense of free government. Or a foreign power might invade to impose rule by aristocrats and a king. In 1805, Jefferson noted: ‘I have looked on our present state of liberty as a short-lived possession, unless the mass of the people could be informed to a certain degree.’ Another early governor of Virginia asserted in 1806 that education ‘constitutes one of the great pillars on which the civil liberties of a nation depend.’ Rejecting the colonial legacies of monarchy, the American founders wanted the next generation to learn a new culture appropriate to a republic. In Pennsylvania, a leading reformer, Benjamin Rush, insisted: ‘We have changed our forms of government, but it remains yet to effect a revolution in our principles, opinions, and manners so as to accommodate them to the forms of government that we have adopted.’ Schools needed to produce well-informed protectors of republican government. ‘If the common people are ignorant and vicious,’ Rush concluded, ‘a republican nation can never be long free.’ He sought ‘to convert men into republican machines’ in order to ‘fit them more easily for uniform and peaceable government.’ During the colonial era, only New England’s towns had sustained public grammar schools, and those towns mandated just a few weeks of schooling in the winter when family farms needed less labour. Elsewhere in the new nation, grammar schools were fewer and reliant on private tuition – which excluded the poorest people. Throughout the new union, the children of wealthy families could learn Latin, advanced mathematics and some science by going on to private academies. Fewer young men went on to colleges, which were even more expensive and exclusive. Neither women nor African Americans could attend, and most young white men could not afford the tuition. In 1800 the United States had only 18 colleges. The largest, Yale, had 217 students that year. Collectively just 1,200 students attended college: a mere 1 per cent of adolescent males in the country. Education seemed especially poor in Virginia, the union’s most powerful and important state, which lacked any public schools and had one college, William and Mary, in financial decline. Most adults could neither read nor write. Wealthy planters educated their own children with tutors or at private schools. Loath to pay higher taxes to educate common whites, the gentry preferred to hire tutors to prepare their sons for private academies and colleges, often in another state. Jefferson distrusted Virginia’s county elites as self-perpetuating cabals of selfish men. He sought to erode their power by introducing a more meritocratic political system through improved public education. He distinguished between the old ‘artificial aristocracy’ of inherited privilege and a new ‘natural aristocracy’ of virtue and talents. Despite inheriting wealth and slaves, Jefferson considered himself a natural aristocrat because he defended the interests of common men. Above all, Jefferson sought to educate their children, who would learn the principles of republicanism. Informed citizens would elect as their leaders the natural aristocrats committed to defending free government. Some of those common students might learn enough to rise into the higher ranks of society. In 1813, Jefferson preached that ‘Worth and genius [should be] sought out from every condition of life, and compleately prepared by education for defeating the competition of wealth & birth for public trusts.’ He’d told George Washington in 1786: ‘It is an axiom in my mind that our liberty can never be safe but in the hands of the people themselves, and that too of the people with a certain degree of instruction. This it is the business of the state to effect, and on a general plan.’ Government had to act through education to reshape society for the benefit of everyone. Jefferson dared not challenge the powerful slaveholders, who meant to keep enslaved people illiterate In 1778, Jefferson proposed a radical educational system meant to transform Virginia along republican lines. To weaken the counties, he would subdivide them into several ‘hundreds’, each the size of a township, where through direct democracy the voters would build schools and hire teachers to educate every white girl and boy. The best boys (but no girls) would advance to county academies where the rich would pay tuition but the best poor boy from each hundred school would earn a charity scholarship. In turn, the finest charity graduate from each academy would merit a college scholarship. Jefferson explained that, under his three-tiered system, ‘the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually.’ His programme had two goals, both political: to train for republican leadership ‘a few subjects in every state, to whom nature has given minds of the first order’ – and to enable every common man ‘to read, to judge & to vote understandingly on what is passing’. Jefferson’s proposal provided scant education for girls and none for African Americans, who were two-fifths of the population. He dared not challenge the powerful slaveholders, who meant to keep enslaved people illiterate and dependent. Nor could he conceive of emancipation unless linked to mass deportation of freed people far away to Africa. In 1796, he rebuffed a Quaker abolitionist who proposed to raise charitable funds to educate slaves. Jefferson warned that schooling could only deepen the unhappiness of slaves with their lot: ‘Ignorance and despotism seem made for each other.’ While seeking to uplift poor whites through education, he meant to keep Blacks in slavery and ignorance until some uncertain future when they could be freed and exiled from the state. Despite Jefferson’s concessions to racial and gender inequality, the state legislature baulked at adopting his educational plan, deeming it too expensive. Most legislators preferred to keep taxes low as the best way to win re-election. One leading Virginian, William Branch Giles, declared in 1818 that, if poor people wanted to educate their children, let them drink less whiskey and spend the savings on tuition. Giles sought to ‘teach the citizen that it is his indispensable duty to educate his own child; that it is a right sacred and unalienable.’ Therefore, any government that taxed all citizens to educate the poor man’s son would ‘make itself a despotism and himself a slave’. Nothing alarmed a white slaveholder more than the prospect of a powerful government treating him like a slave by raising his taxes. In 1796 – 18 years after Jefferson’s initial proposal – the state legislature passed a watered-down version of his proposal. That bill invited every county government to implement Jefferson’s system with county, rather than state, taxes to finance it. No county did so. Jefferson protested that ‘the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to [the] kings, priests, and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.’ The failure of Jefferson’s proposal distressed the small pool of well-educated Virginians. In 1809, the state’s governor, John Tyler (the father of a future president of the same name), complained: ‘Scarcely a common country school is to be found capable of teaching the mother tongue grammatically.’ He blamed the parsimony of state legislators appealing to the cheapest instincts of the voters: ‘He who can go back from the assembly and tell his constituents he has saved a penny secures his popularity against the next Election.’ Visionary leaders insisted that preserving a republic required improving the common people through education. But a republic empowered common voters who lacked schooling, and they often baulked at paying for others to go to school. They also thought that the future voters needed no more education than they had received. After retiring as president of the United States in 1809, Jefferson sought to revive his vision of democratic education for Virginia. During the late 1810s, the state expected a windfall in federal money to reimburse Virginia for damages and expenditures incurred during the war of 1812. The state also reaped new funds by chartering bank and canal corporations. The enhanced revenue, however, would suffice only to fund either a new state university or a broad system of local, public schools for common people – but not both. One leading legislator, Charles Fenton Mercer, proposed to prioritise state funds for primary schools as the way to help most people and to best bolster republican government. Jefferson disagreed. He and his legislative allies favoured building a university located in his hometown of Charlottesville. Erecting Jefferson’s expensive architecture sucked up most of the state’s funds for education. Jefferson knew that a university would depend on paying customers drawn from the elite families of Virginia. Never quite the egalitarian that Americans sometimes wish him to be, he believed in elite rule; he just wanted to improve the planter class into a meritocracy through education. He reasoned that the new university would train leaders, who would, during the next generation, democratise the state and in the future create a public system of schools to benefit common white people. Few of Virginia’s legislators, however, shared Jefferson’s longer-term vision for a more democratic state. So he pitched his university on more conservative grounds: as the best way to defend Virginia’s way of life against meddling northerners. During the 1810s, Virginia’s leaders became sensitive to northern criticism of their slave system. The criticism made them dread the increasing power of northern states in the union thanks to a more rapid population growth in that region. Declaring that ‘knowledge is power’, Jefferson claimed that Virginia was losing clout in a union that he imagined as a zero-sum game. If northern states were winning, his state was losing. Rather than improving after the republican revolution, education had decayed in Virginia. Jefferson lamented: The mass of education in Virginia, before the revolution, placed her with the foremost of her sister colonies. What is her education now? Where is it? The little we have we import, like beggars, from other states; or import their beggars to bestow on us their miserable crumbs.Appealing to the force of racism, in 1820 Jefferson warned the state’s leaders that Virginia risked ‘the degradation of becoming the Barbary of the union; and of falling into the ranks of our own negroes.’ These genteel young men learned to resent any effort to control them as treating them like slaves Jefferson promised that a university would rescue Virginia from its economic and political decline in the union. He touched a nerve, for state legislators shared his dread of domination by Yankees. His protégé, Francis Walker Gilmer, warned that an educational gap exposed Virginia to invasion by tricky northerners venturing south for economic gain: ‘These rascals are overrunning the country; squatting everywhere, turning teachers, politicians, &c. and our legislature will soon be filled with them.’ Virginians worried that northern instructors would take over their common schools and academies, corrupting their nation’s youth with northern values. Many young gentlemen left the state to study at northern universities. Virginia’s leading newspaper, the Richmond Enquirer, endorsed a new state university as the best means to avoid losing the new generation. With considerable exaggeration, the editor, Thomas Ritchie, calculated that 500 young Virginians annually went to northern states for higher education. Many, Ritchie warned in 1805, ‘return[ed] fraught with the most pernicious prejudices’ – by which he meant antislavery ideas. In fact, young Virginians clung to their prejudices in a strange land. For example, the Virginian Hugh Blair Grigsby denounced his professors at Yale as ‘a diminutive and low-minded set’ of ‘canting hypocritical wretches, who come from New England’. But fear trumped reality to persuade leading Virginians that they needed to repatriate their young men by building a new university. Jefferson baulked at confronting the prejudices of his fellow Virginians, especially the majority who defended slavery. In 1785, when only 42 years old, he announced that it was too late for him to transform society. Let younger men take the lead in emancipating the enslaved and democratising the state constitution: ‘It is to them I look, to the rising generation, and not to the one now in power, for these great reformations.’ Students were supposed to accomplish what Jefferson and his generation could not, or would not, do. By building a university, Jefferson claimed to keep faith with his radical goals, even as he backed away from pushing them. In 1810, Jefferson explained: ‘The boys of the rising generation are to be the men of the next, and the sole guardians of the principles we deliver over to them.’ Gambling that the sons of wealthy planters would liberalise Virginia in the future was a desperate bet. At a new university, Jefferson would have to remake young Virginians, but it was quixotic to expect other Virginians to emulate the self-discipline that led him to devote his life to mastering a daunting array of languages, literatures and sciences. Other genteel Virginians enjoyed life more than books. They ate, drank, laughed, gambled, hunted and danced but rarely studied. During the 1780s, a visitor concluded: Self-content, the Virginian avoids all efforts of mind and body involving anything beyond his pleasure. He reads, but he does not study so as to make a display of learning … Thus the young people of Virginia follow after their fathers.Jefferson confronted this aversion to intellectual life within his own family. His son-in-law, John Wayles Eppes, warned his son (and Jefferson’s grandson) that too much learning ‘crouds the brain with so many ideas as to prevent the exertion of Jud[g]ment which alone renders them valuable.’ His boy should study only during ‘the time not occupied by useful and necessary recreation.’ Southern gentlemen attended college to test and refine their masculine honour – and to watch one another for weaknesses. External appearances and performances seemed more valuable than acquiring abstract knowledge. They cherished flashy and fashionable attire, elegant posture, polished manners, lavish generosity at buying drinks for friends, witty conversation, and prowess at playing cards. Growing up in slave-owning families, these genteel young men learned to bully and dominate – and to resent any effort to control them as insulting, as treating them like slaves. When insulted, they challenged one another to duels. Hot, impetuous and impatient for honour and superiority, young gentlemen presented a daunting challenge to any reformer who aspired to create a brave new generation of improved Virginians. The University of Virginia opened in 1825, and building the university had expended the state’s bounty, leaving no money for scholarships. Giving priority to his expensive architectural design for the institution, Jefferson had forsaken his original educational plan to provide charity scholarships to promote social mobility. Reliant on tuition for operating costs, the University of Virginia (UVA) charged more than any other college in the union. Almost all the students came from wealthy southern families that held many people in slavery. Drunken and riotous, the students defied the authority of their professors, harassing them at night and beating two of them. Jefferson despaired when he discovered that his own pampered grand-nephew, Wilson Miles Cary, was a ringleader of the disturbances. The university didn’t reform the southern students, who dominated the university. True to the interests of their privileged families, UVA graduates resisted democracy and clung to slavery. As lawyers, planters, state legislators and constitutional delegates, they opposed expanding the electorate, rejected proposals for public schools, and blasted antislavery ideas as treasonous. Instead of inspiring liberal reformers, the new university prepared leaders for a southern Confederacy that rebelled against the union in 1861. Today, the University of Virginia has become far larger, more complex and cosmopolitan. During the past 60 years, it made new commitments to diversity and equal opportunity, including the long-overdue admission of women and African-Americans. We can celebrate the university for what it has overcome, rather than for how it began. By changing, it honours the principles that Jefferson expressed, but had failed to secure in his own time: the pursuit of democracy, the expansion of public education, and the pursuit of truth wherever it leads. We need statues of past leaders less to inspire us with reverence than to remind us of our complicated past and the difficulties of achieving reforms. At UVA, Jefferson’s statue will always mean different things to various people. For me, it brings to mind a cautionary tale of great value: that even the most talented men could take the wrong turn. Jefferson’s notion of reforming society through generational change persists in how Americans think about education today. We continue to treat educational reform as the easiest, cheapest and best way to improve US society. Adults seem too set in their ways and ideas to sway. By contrast, young people appear malleable. If shaped by suitable teachers, the young can grow into the sort of people that Americans want, and produce a better society in the next generation. But we cannot agree on the right means, such as more testing for students or more money for schools, or on the ultimate goals: to remake students into consistent egalitarians or rugged individualists. We expect schools to remake students into the sort of people that we cannot persuade our contemporaries to be. This places unrealistic expectations on teachers, schools and students. Adolescents have their own passions and interests. If you want to change society, you had better do so more directly rather than through school curriculums that you imagine will incline young people to do your future bidding. However, by improving conditions in schools, we enhance teachers’ ability to inspire and inform students, who need the resources to decide for themselves how to become creative and responsible citizens. Good schools are sufficient ends in their own right.

He felt that the case that the president made wasn't supported by what he knew. And within, you know, less than two weeks, columnist Bob Novak wrote a piece in which he disclosed that the choice to send former Ambassador Wilson to Africa may have been influenced by his wife, and he named his wife, that was by a CIA operative by the name of Valerie Plame. Now as it turned out, Valerie Plame's designation appears to have been undercover and so within a couple of weeks, a hue and cry arose. Mr. Wilson charged that her identity was disclosed and therefore her career compromised as an undercover agent as an act of retribution by the administration, you know, for what he had done--for his criticism.

Yeah, I think that's where the heart of the problem lies. I don't think it was wrong for Obama to recognize people's anger and frustration. Whether you want to term that "bitterness" is another matter. But I think it's more complicated to explain the voting patterns. We do know that in the 2004 election, for some working-class voters, they didn't see a big difference in policy between the Republicans and the Democrats. And that was an election where there was a number of what we would term "social issues." So for example, here in Ohio, there was a bill on the November ballot about putting limits on gay marriage, outlawing gay marriage in the state.

Dear Future Me, I wish you could come visit me, take me by the hand and tell me that everything is all right. I'm pretty much at rock bottom right now. I lost my job. I lost the love of my life. I had this pain in my back that won't seem to go away. I've hit bottom enough that I'm writing to my future self on a stupid Web site. You can't get much worse than that. I read some other people's entries and they made me cry. I realized that I'm not the only one suffering in the world. I hope things are better now. It is your birthday. Are you doing anything exciting? You better be. Past Me.

Well, they're going to say that you get a tax break. Nancy Pelosi in that clip said most Americans do not get a tax break from this bill. That's factually inaccurate. Next year, about 80 percent of the households will get a tax cut, and they average about 2,000 bucks. That's pretty good for most households. People like me always say, well, they're worried about the deficits, and they'll punish the Republicans. That's never actually happened. So I don't think the tax bill will be a big problem for the Republicans. When people see more money in their paycheck, they'll be happy. But that's not what people are going to be voting on, I don't think. They're voting on Donald Trump. They're voting on the effectiveness of the Republican Party. And there, the numbers - you don't have to be a genius to see. When one party or another - the generic ballot - the - which party do you prefer has up to a - like, a nine-point edge, that party has a tidal wave election. And the Democrats right now have a 13-, 14-point advantage. So that's just a massive swing. And you know, it's quite possible the Republicans will lose both houses.

Well, that's I think still to be determined. Basically, the high court gave Mr. Hill the ability to file a civil rights lawsuit in regard to lethal injection, which he claimed the process was cruel and unusual. However, the court, in that unanimous opinion, gave the district federal court no instructions as to what to do with that civil lawsuit. So essentially, what the district court in Tallahassee did - and it was backed by the appellate court in Atlanta - it essentially said: well, OK, you've filed it but we're going to decline to give you a hearing on it, we're not going to hear anything about the merits of whether lethal injection is indeed cruel and unusual.

Now, drop those French fries. If you have any idea how many calories you were about to eat, you'd never super-size again. At least, that's what the state of Massachusetts hopes. Governor Deval Patrick announced a plan to require big chain restaurants to post calorie counts for almost everything on the menu, part of a program dubbed Mass in Motion, or what Jeff Jacoby called a new war on obesity and classic nanny-state policy. In a column for yesterday's Boston Globe, he argued, is it really the job of the state to coerce restaurants into confronting diners with information most of them aren't interested in anyway? California, New York City and Seattle already require such information on menus. So, if you've eaten in a restaurant that posts calorie counts, did it change the way you ordered? 800-989-8255 is our phone number. Email us, talk@npr.org. You can also get into the conversation on our Web site at npr.org; just click on Talk of the Nation. Jeff Jacoby, a columnist for the Boston Globe, joins us now from the studio of member station WBUR in Boston. Nice to have you on the program today.

Built in the 18th century, Havana's La Cabana fortress was the largest Spanish colonial fortification in the Americas. It's been a grim place for much of its history, serving as a military garrison, a prison and the site of some notorious firing squad payback after the Cuban revolution. But, this month, as the center of Havana's Biennial, it makes for an art gallery like no other. In the cavernous space of what was once a large prison cell, 30-year-old Oswaldo Gonzalez has spent weeks installing a piece he calls Domestic Scene. With nothing more than carefully cut pieces of cardboard, masking tape and backlit strips of brown paper, he's recreating something like a cozy living room, complete with a soothing fireplace and windows.

The hostage that no one knew was missing. That's the headline the Times of London used in January to describe the strange and harrowing story of Phil Sands, a British journalist in Iraq off and on since 2003. On the day after Christmas, Sunni insurgents captured Sands and two Iraqis after the trio had mistakenly made a wrong turn on the streets of Baghdad. Sands spent six days with his captors who threatened to behead him before American soldiers raided the insurgent's compound on New Year's Eve. Neither the soldiers nor anyone else in the world knew Sands was missing. Phil Sands recounted his story in this month's British edition of GQ Magazine. He joins us now from a studio at the BBC in London.

The indigenous population, which goes back, again, to just about the time of the apostles, was a population that lived within Saddam's Iraq and, relatively speaking, had religious freedom, access to education and lived in relatively good relations and peace with their Muslim neighbors. With the invasion of Iraq and its occupation, and then the growing militancy in that post-period between Sunni and Shia militants, Christians got caught in a crossfire. And for many of the militants, their sense is not only that they are anti the other form of, let's say, Islam, but they introduce an ideology, which is anti-U.S., anti-Christian European countries and anti-the Christians within their own countries. And that's when the bombing of churches, the killings, et cetera, and then the exodus of significant numbers of Iraqi Christians occurred during that period.

That's a better-than-average survival rate. So it provides a hint that GBV-C could be helping people fight off Ebola. Or it could simply be that 20- to 40-year-olds are more likely to have GBV-C infections and more likely to survive Ebola, as he says in a study published in the Journal of Virology. O'Connor needs more data to sort this out. Whatever the case, he's found huge quantities of this virus in the people who were infected with it. O'CONNOR: So the cells are being hijacked. They're being used as factories to produce lots of virus. And yet, for reasons that we completely don't understand, the immune system seems to think that's OK and ignore it.

I think people would call that a tax, and the Republican Party has a pretty strong aversion to that right now. Anything really that is even a revenue increase, anything that would bring money into the government that is not already coming into the government has been defined by many of the current Republicans, not only Tea Party members but by some of the senior members of the Republican Party in the Senate, as a tax increase. So if any dollar being separated from a taxpayer anywhere in America and brought to Washington, figuratively speaking, is considered a tax increase, it's very hard to imagine that even a dedicated request, and the caller's suggestion would not fall in that category.

Sure. I talked to a senior Vatican cleric who is in the room who had no idea that this was going to happen today. From what I'm just seeing, Neal, only two cardinals were told over the last couple of days, and one of them was told, I think, on Friday in a private meeting. And, you know, this guy told me he didn't know Latin terribly well, but everybody's eyes, like those who did know Latin, their eyes just started going off when Benedict - this was a routine ceremony, fairly routine, for the canonization of new saints, to announce the dates when new saints would be made. And then at the end, the pope pulls out this statement in Latin and starts reading it - well, thing is, since Vatican II, since you don't have to say mass in Latin anymore, most priests, most bishops, even some cardinals don't know Latin. And so this guy was telling me that he - people's eyes, among those who knew Latin, just started going off in the room, so that everybody knew something was - crazy was going on. And the pope walked out, and apparently, there was just dead silence in the room. Everybody was stunned.

Most of the Iraqis in El Cajon are Chaldean, Iraqi Catholics. The local Chaldean church says it has 37,000 members in a city that had about 100,000 residents in the last census. Refugees who have even a distant relative in El Cajon are being sent here because the State Department emphasizes family reunification. Even though he has relatives in the States, Eunus Cananian(ph) had no desire to move to America until he lost everything in the war: his house, his possessions, his life savings. He tells me in the hallway of the Adult Education Center during a break, tears filling his eyes, about being kidnapped in Baghdad.

Well, it's kind of funny. I was listening to his description of how he approached African-American literature when he was younger, and my experience was almost the polar opposite. My parents owned a record store/bookstore when I was growing up, and so I was surrounded, literally inundated, by black literature. And I read so much of it, that it wasn't until like high school and college that I started catching up with the white canon, because I had read so much of the black. And my experience was that I, in wanting to be a writer, I struggled with the thought that I had to make my work speak to these huge, kind of monumental issues that African Americans deal with, racial injustice and economic injustice, and all that kind of stuff, civil rights. If I wanted to be a black writer, that I couldn't write about some of the more mundane, but crucial issues that affect our day-to-day lives.

As you say, Alex, they can't come to this with clean hands. They're both members of this Congress, both senators. But they still will try to run against Washington and run against Congress as best as they can. Because that's always been so successful for presidential candidates and there are certainly things that each of these two candidates don't like about the performance of this Congress. John McCain will, of course, say that they are spending too much money and if it is going to be a Democratic Congress, they should have a Republican president in the White House to veto their bills and to do what George Bush is doing, resisting this Congress. On the other hand, Barack Obama will say, that's precisely the problem. That Congress can't get anything done because it is constantly at loggerheads with the president. We need to be more bipartisan and we need to work across the branches of government from executive to legislative branch. That would be his argument and they will both spend a far amount of their time bashing what the other one represents in Congress.

At 11:21, I get a knock on my door from the boss of my boss and she says, can I see you for a minute? So I said, of course. I was in a meeting with my assistant. I got up immediately. I went to her office. She handed me an e-mail, and I looked as I do first thing - I always look at the very top, whose it sent from. It was sent from Lizette Reynolds(ph). I've never met this lady, I don't know her. I do know that she is a Bushie(ph), a Bush-appointee that was put - placed in a position at our agency, and sits at the right hand of the commissioner. Right away, of course, I sat up, I looked at the first line and it said, this is an offense that warrants termination, or the very least, reassignment of duties.

That's very true, actually. That's another case of us being favored - is a sense that we can always turn around and say we've had enough and go home. But, that's what makes them so brave is the fact that they are fighting for their country and they are fighting for their homes. It's strange that, if a Kurdish young man of 18 as well, 10 years younger than me, can volunteer to fight for his country and no one would blink an eyelid. But it takes a young man from the United Kingdom or from the United States or from Canada or Australia to go out and fight for the media and for the British government and for the governments around the world to say, ah, right, this is interesting and actually start to take notice. That was the - my main motivation for going.

Bindi's finished "Bindi: The Jungle Girl". She's designed a clothing range. We opened a new retail store. I started Crikey Magazine in the news agencies in Australia. I've continued our international crocodile rescue program, our research program. We're building a new wildlife hospital, which will open in March, to take twice as many sick, injured and orphaned animals. All these because I feel so compelled not to let what Steve lived and died for disappear. And I can assure you, I don't wake up everyday feeling great. I wake up everyday and I am that determined woman and that's not going to stop. I've got a great family. I've got people like you, Molly. And I have to tell you, Molly, come to Australia Zoo. You want to meet Molly. She's a very special saltwater crocodile.

As bad as all that is, it's not the biggest problem facing commercial real estate. What many commercial landlords are worried about is the same thing that's bedeviling homeowners, businessmen, and the economy at large. That is the lack of available credit. ..TEXT: Banks and other institutions that back commercial real estate are calling on Congress to use some of the federal TARP money to help restart an important part of the system - commercial mortgage-backed securities. These are close relatives of the mortgage-backed securities that are blamed, in part, for the housing meltdown. Christopher Hoeffel of the Commercial Mortgage Securities Association says the commercial securities are more highly regulated than their residential counterparts, and they're vital to the industry, accounting for more than half of all financing before the downturn. Hoeffel says something needs to be done because many commercial property owners will soon be in dire need of refinancing.

Yeah. That's an excellent question. So we really just have one gene that codes for the oxytocin receptor, but we have these things called polymorphisms, which is just a term for many forms, that produce two or more different flavors in the same population. So the oxytocin receptor has various polymorphisms, and we just focus on one that has been plied to maybe be a role in transcription and signaling of this particular hormone. And now, we're not a product of our genes. There's no such thing as a gay gene or a divorce gene or a depression gene. I was quite a skeptic coming into this field. But we know that we are a product of many, many genes that influence our behaviors but also our life experiences, our environment, our upbringing and our culture. So we're finding this relationship, but we're not claiming that this gene is responsible for everything.

I don't want to call it rationing. I think there are two things to think about here. One, the cost control measure that both McCain and Obama have proposed are pretty minimal. In fact, one blogger calls them cost-containment light, and I think I would agree with that. They're not really going to do very much toward denting this $2.7 trillion healthcare bill that we have. So what's really needed here, and that other countries do much better than we do on this, is that they kind of limit some of the technology. That's not to say they don't use the technology or the same things we do. In England, for example, girls don't get Pap smears until they're 25. When I look at the Canadian system, MRIs are not routinely done for sports injuries. In this country, we do ration care. We ration to people who don't have health insurance, which is pretty much people at the low end of the economic ladder. In order to really get a handle on the cost, that conversation has to take place. And neither candidate has been leading us in that direction.

Well, first of all, I think with former secretary - Senator Chuck Hagel, there's a kindred spirit with Hagel, I think. First of all, he's, you know, he endorsed President Obama back in 2008, instead of his former Republican colleague, John McCain. And they have similar views on the use of the American military. Chuck Hagel through his Vietnam experience is very wary of committing U.S. troops on these long wars, never-ending wars. And also he believes that the Defense budget should be cut even more, unlike many Republicans. So along those lines they're sort of kindred spirits, I guess you could say.

And so she knew my birthday. She knew information about me. And that's what I found disgusting is that my dad had used us children as a means of gaining access to his victims and giving them a sense of comfort and security, when there really wasn't that. So my anger is in him using us and also in me having to tell my children. But beyond that, though, I was just in shock when it first came out. I didn't have time to have emotions about it. I was just surviving every day, trying to get through high school, then, you know, changing high schools and leaving the abusive relationship that I was in. And then eventually I met my wonderful husband that we've been married for for 12 years. And I didn't really feel emotion about my dad until I got a chance to have a safe environment, and my husband created that in our home.

Cindy(ph) in Fresno found the economy hit industry harder and earlier than some and was able to plan for it. I could see the future of newspapers ahead and left my job there about five years ago. While I was still there, I started taking community college classes to explore retooling as an elementary school teacher. I tried PR and decided to keep pursuing the credential until I had to student teach. I am in my second year of teaching, still paying off my 11k loan and enjoying what I do. It's possible to retrain when you accept the reality as it unfolds in front of you and plan ahead. I think some people are in the boat they're in because they didn't see the signs or there were no signs or they were in debt beyond their means and couldn't correct their course. I still miss the newsroom, but it doesn't exist now like the one I remember. I enjoy the personal connection I can make in teaching.

Sure. It's one of the truisms of American politics that Labor Day is the time when most of the public just begins to pay attention to politics. I think we all need to be careful about having any idea of what's going to happen two months from now on Election Day. The fact that almost nobody in Alaska predicted that Lisa Murkowski was going to lose in her own Republican primary, that's one of a million illustrations of experts always being surprised by elections. But it is clear, on the one hand, that a lot of the fundamental forces certainly seem to be fairing the Republicans now - economic distress, some of the Democrats being confused on the message, the usual fall-off that happens in the midterm elections and the fact that the Democrats took a lot of close elections two years ago and four years ago. So there's a lot of marginal seats that are naturally Republican seats, which are in play.

Well, that's true to some extent, but I think that it's settled out a bit. I mean, what you saw right after Katrina was that corporations and individuals with the financial means to basically pay cash for homes, did so. And so, for example, in September, in a month in which we'd normally sell, say 600 to 700 homes, we actually sold nearly 2,000 homes in the Baton Rouge area. But as a got close toward the end of the year we saw both the rate of sales slow down and we also saw the pricing slow down as well. And I think what you're seeing there, Robert, is that a lot of folks that have the means to come up with a short-term solution obviously did it. But now we've got a much, much bigger group of folks who are still kind of in limbo waiting to see what's going to happen with their insurance settlement, waiting to see what's going to happen with Federal support from President Bush and Congress.

Yeah, as you can see, they have two bunks back here in the back. Like I told you, there's six of us stay here. We don't have a washing machine and dryer so they get washed the best way they can. They have a foldout sofa right there that two of us sleep on. As you can see, it's not big enough for two people because I weigh 204 pounds myself and this is where I sleep and another guy that's bigger than me. It's not a good living environment for six people but we have to make do with what we can being as though we don't have anywhere else to go.

Yeah, I don't think anyone's really trying to stay yet in the parts of New Orleans that you saw most on television. Anything that was flooded is just unappealing as a place to be. You don't--it smells. You know, you've seen interior flooded homes there. You know, they're very sad and they're disastrous and you don't want to be there. I think there are people trying to get into and stay to places, like Algiers on the other side of the river, which never flooded. I think there are quite a few people over there. A lot of them never left; others have come in. And they're there if they're willing to sit in the dark. Actually in Algiers now, you have power, too. You know, it's pretty liveable.

I went along with it. I didn't believe that Iraqi WMD was a threat. I think it was obvious that Iraq did not have the one WMD that we really have to worry about above all others, and that's nuclear weapons and it wasn't even remotely close to acquiring it. But I did feel the people of Iraq, who are 80 percent Kurds or Shiites, deserve something different. I thought the war likely would lead to the break-up of the country, but I wish I'd been more skeptical. I saw the incompetence. I saw the lack of planning at the Pentagon even before the war. But I never grasped that we would actually enter Baghdad with no plan to provide security in that city, and I was there four days after the city fell. I never imagined that we would send - instead of sending qualified professionals to run the occupation government, that this would be a place for true believers and young Republicans to earn large salaries and play at nation-building and accomplish nothing. And so I didn't think we would be in this ghastly situation.

Yeah, I was not out in Jamaica at all. I came out to myself by the end of high school, so I was 16, 17 at that time. I felt like I was the only lesbian in Jamaica. I did not feel like I fit in. And also, my family was in the church, so it was kind of hard. Even if I came out, it wouldn't have been easy for me and my family then. They - I told one girlfriend in high school, and she looked at me like I had grown two horns on my head. But coming to America, that was actually where I met a lot of other Jamaican lesbians. And this was online.

Yes. I'm in the military medical system, and I just wanted to comment that there are many instances where you not only have a lot of different passwords that you have to come up with, but you cannot re-use the passwords that you had in the past 20 times. And they require you to change them every three to six months. And for all these different systems, it gets to the point where you have to think of something that is so common that if somebody whenever does discover it, they'll probably going to discover, you know, being able to crack a whole bunch of different accounts that you have.

Well, certainly religion can produce anxiety for some people. There are cases sadly where Buddhists have engaged in violent behavior, and I cite one of those, the case about a decade ago in Tokyo when a Buddhist-related group released sarin gas in a Tokyo subway system, and I tell the story of that--book--around the theme of blind obedience to this particular leader. But I think there is more of a problem historically, speaking as a historian of religion--I think there is a bigger problem particularly with the monotheistic traditions and particularly with Christianity and Islam, the two largest religious traditions, both of whom can easily fall into these patterns of exclusivism and absolutism, and they are missionary in orientation, which is probably a contributing factor as well, that you don't find in the same way with, say, the Hindu tradition or Shinto in Japan on a widespread basis.

That's true. And when you think about it that's not a very efficient way of teaching the subject. Because what that means is if you've got a first grader who goes on to the next grade and they've sort of raced through a series of topics they may end up having to spend a good portion of their second grade year going back and reviewing. That's long been identified as a major problem in math. I think that one of the challenges that the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics talked about and really math experts all around the country is how to teach it well the first time and make sure students learn at the first time so that you don't end up with this sort of cyclical process of having to go back and review things that you should have gotten down pat the first time.

Do you worry about what is going to kill you? Heart disease, cancer, a car accident? Most of us worry about things we can't control, like war, terrorism, the tragic earthquake that just occurred in Haiti. But what really threatens humanity? A few years ago, Professor Vaclav Smil tried to calculate the probability of sudden disasters large enough to change history. He called these, "massively fatal discontinuities," meaning that they could kill up to 100 million people in the next 50 years. He looked at the odds of another world war, of a massive volcanic eruption, even of an asteroid hitting the Earth. But he placed the likelihood of one such event above all others at close to 100 percent, and that is a severe flu pandemic. Now, you might think of flu as just a really bad cold, but it can be a death sentence. Every year, 36,000 people in the United States die of seasonal flu. In the developing world, the data is much sketchier but the death toll is almost certainly higher. You know, the problem is if this virus occasionally mutates so dramatically, it essentially is a new virus and then we get a pandemic. In 1918, a new virus appeared that killed some 50 to 100 million people. It spread like wildfire and some died within hours of developing symptoms. Are we safer today? Well, we seem to have dodged the deadly pandemic this year that most of us feared, but this threat could reappear at any time. The good news is that we're at a moment in time when science, technology, globalization is converging to create an unprecedented possibility: the possibility to make history by preventing infectious diseases that still account for one-fifth of all deaths and countless misery on Earth. We can do this. We're already preventing millions of deaths with existing vaccines, and if we get these to more people, we can certainly save more lives. But with new or better vaccines for malaria, TB, HIV, pneumonia, diarrhea, flu, we could end suffering that has been on the Earth since the beginning of time. So, I'm here to trumpet vaccines for you. But first, I have to explain why they're important because vaccines, the power of them, is really like a whisper. When they work, they can make history, but after a while you can barely hear them. Now, some of us are old enough to have a small, circular scar on our arms from an inoculation we received as children. But when was the last time you worried about smallpox, a disease that killed half a billion people last century and no longer is with us? Or polio? How many of you remember the iron lung? We don't see scenes like this anymore because of vaccines. Now, it's interesting because there are 30-odd diseases that can be treated with vaccines now, but we're still threatened by things like HIV and flu. Why is that? Well, here's the dirty little secret. Until recently, we haven't had to know exactly how a vaccine worked. We knew they worked through old-fashioned trial and error. You took a pathogen, you modified it, you injected it into a person or an animal and you saw what happened. This worked well for most pathogens, somewhat well for crafty bugs like flu, but not at all for HIV, for which humans have no natural immunity. So let's explore how vaccines work. They basically create a cache of weapons for your immune system which you can deploy when needed. Now, when you get a viral infection, what normally happens is it takes days or weeks for your body to fight back at full strength, and that might be too late. When you're pre-immunized, what happens is you have forces in your body pre-trained to recognize and defeat specific foes. So that's really how vaccines work. Now, let's take a look at a video that we're debuting at TED, for the first time, on how an effective HIV vaccine might work. (Music) Narrator: A vaccine trains the body in advance how to recognize and neutralize a specific invader. After HIV penetrates the body's mucosal barriers, it infects immune cells to replicate. The invader draws the attention of the immune system's front-line troops. Dendritic cells, or macrophages, capture the virus and display pieces of it. Memory cells generated by the HIV vaccine are activated when they learn HIV is present from the front-line troops. These memory cells immediately deploy the exact weapons needed. Memory B cells turn into plasma cells, which produce wave after wave of the specific antibodies that latch onto HIV to prevent it from infecting cells, while squadrons of killer T cells seek out and destroy cells that are already HIV infected. The virus is defeated. Without a vaccine, these responses would have taken more than a week. By that time, the battle against HIV would already have been lost. Seth Berkley: Really cool video, isn't it? The antibodies you just saw in this video, in action, are the ones that make most vaccines work. So the real question then is: How do we ensure that your body makes the exact ones that we need to protect against flu and HIV? The principal challenge for both of these viruses is that they're always changing. So let's take a look at the flu virus. In this rendering of the flu virus, these different colored spikes are what it uses to infect you. And also, what the antibodies use is a handle to essentially grab and neutralize the virus. When these mutate, they change their shape, and the antibodies don't know what they're looking at anymore. So that's why every year you can catch a slightly different strain of flu. It's also why in the spring, we have to make a best guess at which three strains are going to prevail the next year, put those into a single vaccine and rush those into production for the fall. Even worse, the most common influenza — influenza A — also infects animals that live in close proximity to humans, and they can recombine in those particular animals. In addition, wild aquatic birds carry all known strains of influenza. So, you've got this situation: In 2003, we had an H5N1 virus that jumped from birds into humans in a few isolated cases with an apparent mortality rate of 70 percent. Now luckily, that particular virus, although very scary at the time, did not transmit from person to person very easily. This year's H1N1 threat was actually a human, avian, swine mixture that arose in Mexico. It was easily transmitted, but, luckily, was pretty mild. And so, in a sense, our luck is holding out, but you know, another wild bird could fly over at anytime. Now let's take a look at HIV. As variable as flu is, HIV makes flu look like the Rock of Gibraltar. The virus that causes AIDS is the trickiest pathogen scientists have ever confronted. It mutates furiously, it has decoys to evade the immune system, it attacks the very cells that are trying to fight it and it quickly hides itself in your genome. Here's a slide looking at the genetic variation of flu and comparing that to HIV, a much wilder target. In the video a moment ago, you saw fleets of new viruses launching from infected cells. Now realize that in a recently infected person, there are millions of these ships; each one is just slightly different. Finding a weapon that recognizes and sinks all of them makes the job that much harder. Now, in the 27 years since HIV was identified as the cause of AIDS, we've developed more drugs to treat HIV than all other viruses put together. These drugs aren't cures, but they represent a huge triumph of science because they take away the automatic death sentence from a diagnosis of HIV, at least for those who can access them. The vaccine effort though is really quite different. Large companies moved away from it because they thought the science was so difficult and vaccines were seen as poor business. Many thought that it was just impossible to make an AIDS vaccine, but today, evidence tells us otherwise. In September, we had surprising but exciting findings from a clinical trial that took place in Thailand. For the first time, we saw an AIDS vaccine work in humans — albeit, quite modestly — and that particular vaccine was made almost a decade ago. Newer concepts and early testing now show even greater promise in the best of our animal models. But in the past few months, researchers have also isolated several new broadly neutralizing antibodies from the blood of an HIV infected individual. Now, what does this mean? We saw earlier that HIV is highly variable, that a broad neutralizing antibody latches on and disables multiple variations of the virus. If you take these and you put them in the best of our monkey models, they provide full protection from infection. In addition, these researchers found a new site on HIV where the antibodies can grab onto, and what's so special about this spot is that it changes very little as the virus mutates. It's like, as many times as the virus changes its clothes, it's still wearing the same socks, and now our job is to make sure we get the body to really hate those socks. So what we've got is a situation. The Thai results tell us we can make an AIDS vaccine, and the antibody findings tell us how we might do that. This strategy, working backwards from an antibody to create a vaccine candidate, has never been done before in vaccine research. It's called retro-vaccinology, and its implications extend way beyond that of just HIV. So think of it this way. We've got these new antibodies we've identified, and we know that they latch onto many, many variations of the virus. We know that they have to latch onto a specific part, so if we can figure out the precise structure of that part, present that through a vaccine, what we hope is we can prompt your immune system to make these matching antibodies. And that would create a universal HIV vaccine. Now, it sounds easier than it is because the structure actually looks more like this blue antibody diagram attached to its yellow binding site, and as you can imagine, these three-dimensional structures are much harder to work on. And if you guys have ideas to help us solve this, we'd love to hear about it. But, you know, the research that has occurred from HIV now has really helped with innovation with other diseases. So for instance, a biotechnology company has now found broadly neutralizing antibodies to influenza, as well as a new antibody target on the flu virus. They're currently making a cocktail — an antibody cocktail — that can be used to treat severe, overwhelming cases of flu. In the longer term, what they can do is use these tools of retro-vaccinology to make a preventive flu vaccine. Now, retro-vaccinology is just one technique within the ambit of so-called rational vaccine design. Let me give you another example. We talked about before the H and N spikes on the surface of the flu virus. Notice these other, smaller protuberances. These are largely hidden from the immune system. Now it turns out that these spots also don't change much when the virus mutates. If you can cripple these with specific antibodies, you could cripple all versions of the flu. So far, animal tests indicate that such a vaccine could prevent severe disease, although you might get a mild case. So if this works in humans, what we're talking about is a universal flu vaccine, one that doesn't need to change every year and would remove the threat of death. We really could think of flu, then, as just a bad cold. Of course, the best vaccine imaginable is only valuable to the extent we get it to everyone who needs it. So to do that, we have to combine smart vaccine design with smart production methods and, of course, smart delivery methods. So I want you to think back a few months ago. In June, the World Health Organization declared the first global flu pandemic in 41 years. The U.S. government promised 150 million doses of vaccine by October 15th for the flu peak. Vaccines were promised to developing countries. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent and flowed to accelerating vaccine manufacturing. So what happened? Well, we first figured out how to make flu vaccines, how to produce them, in the early 1940s. It was a slow, cumbersome process that depended on chicken eggs, millions of living chicken eggs. Viruses only grow in living things, and so it turned out that, for flu, chicken eggs worked really well. For most strains, you could get one to two doses of vaccine per egg. Luckily for us, we live in an era of breathtaking biomedical advances. So today, we get our flu vaccines from ... chicken eggs, (Laughter) hundreds of millions of chicken eggs. Almost nothing has changed. The system is reliable but the problem is you never know how well a strain is going to grow. This year's swine flu strain grew very poorly in early production: basically .6 doses per egg. So, here's an alarming thought. What if that wild bird flies by again? You could see an avian strain that would infect the poultry flocks, and then we would have no eggs for our vaccines. So, Dan [Barber], if you want billions of chicken pellets for your fish farm, I know where to get them. So right now, the world can produce about 350 million doses of flu vaccine for the three strains, and we can up that to about 1.2 billion doses if we want to target a single variant like swine flu. But this assumes that our factories are humming because, in 2004, the U.S. supply was cut in half by contamination at one single plant. And the process still takes more than half a year. So are we better prepared than we were in 1918? Well, with the new technologies emerging now, I hope we can say definitively, "Yes." Imagine we could produce enough flu vaccine for everyone in the entire world for less than half of what we're currently spending now in the United States. With a range of new technologies, we could. Here's an example: A company I'm engaged with has found a specific piece of the H spike of flu that sparks the immune system. If you lop this off and attach it to the tail of a different bacterium, which creates a vigorous immune response, they've created a very powerful flu fighter. This vaccine is so small it can be grown in a common bacteria, E. coli. Now, as you know, bacteria reproduce quickly — it's like making yogurt — and so we could produce enough swine origin flu for the entire world in a few factories, in a few weeks, with no eggs, for a fraction of the cost of current methods. (Applause) So here's a comparison of several of these new vaccine technologies. And, aside from the radically increased production and huge cost savings — for example, the E. coli method I just talked about — look at the time saved: this would be lives saved. The developing world, mostly left out of the current response, sees the potential of these alternate technologies and they're leapfrogging the West. India, Mexico and others are already making experimental flu vaccines, and they may be the first place we see these vaccines in use. Because these technologies are so efficient and relatively cheap, billions of people can have access to lifesaving vaccines if we can figure out how to deliver them. Now think of where this leads us. New infectious diseases appear or reappear every few years. Some day, perhaps soon, we'll have a virus that is going to threaten all of us. Will we be quick enough to react before millions die? Luckily, this year's flu was relatively mild. I say, "luckily" in part because virtually no one in the developing world was vaccinated. So if we have the political and financial foresight to sustain our investments, we will master these and new tools of vaccinology, and with these tools we can produce enough vaccine for everyone at low cost and ensure healthy productive lives. No longer must flu have to kill half a million people a year. No longer does AIDS need to kill two million a year. No longer do the poor and vulnerable need to be threatened by infectious diseases, or indeed, anybody. Instead of having Vaclav Smil's "massively fatal discontinuity" of life, we can ensure the continuity of life. What the world needs now are these new vaccines, and we can make it happen. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. So, the science is changing. In your mind, Seth — I mean, you must dream about this — what is the kind of time scale on, let's start with HIV, for a game-changing vaccine that's actually out there and usable? SB: The game change can come at any time, because the problem we have now is we've shown we can get a vaccine to work in humans; we just need a better one. And with these types of antibodies, we know humans can make them. So, if we can figure out how to do that, then we have the vaccine, and what's interesting is there already is some evidence that we're beginning to crack that problem. So, the challenge is full speed ahead. CA: In your gut, do you think it's probably going to be at least another five years? SB: You know, everybody says it's 10 years, but it's been 10 years every 10 years. So I hate to put a timeline on scientific innovation, but the investments that have occurred are now paying dividends. CA: And that's the same with universal flu vaccine, the same kind of thing? SB: I think flu is different. I think what happened with flu is we've got a bunch — I just showed some of this — a bunch of really cool and useful technologies that are ready to go now. They look good. The problem has been that, what we did is we invested in traditional technologies because that's what we were comfortable with. You also can use adjuvants, which are chemicals you mix. That's what Europe is doing, so we could have diluted out our supply of flu and made more available, but, going back to what Michael Specter said, the anti-vaccine crowd didn't really want that to happen. CA: And malaria's even further behind? SB: No, malaria, there is a candidate that actually showed efficacy in an earlier trial and is currently in phase three trials now. It probably isn't the perfect vaccine, but it's moving along. CA: Seth, most of us do work where every month, we produce something; we get that kind of gratification. You've been slaving away at this for more than a decade, and I salute you and your colleagues for what you do. The world needs people like you. Thank you. SB: Thank you. (Applause)

I would say certainly distrust in government has to rise. Listen, the Tea Party and members - Republican members of Congress have been claiming for a long, long time that they were being politically targeted or at least targeted by the IRS. Now it turns out there's a lot of substance. For whatever motivation, that was absolutely true. And so how can you - that'll - this is a very cynical country about government right now, and a lot of these storylines, the overreach in the national security state, the IRS and the Justice Department, these underline the basic cynicism and distrust people have toward their government.

And I have a story to tell you about my cancer. It was way back in the mid-'90s. And I was having trouble with holding my water, especially in the morning, and I'd have to urinate every half - three quarters of an hour. And I went to the family doctor, told him my problem. He suggested I go see a urologist. I went there. Urologist did a PSA, if I recall. The number was high. He did some ultrasound of the prostate, many biopsies, that the ultrasound showed some - something that wasn't right. After the biopsy, it proved that there was no problem. And - but still, I was having trouble holding my water. I changed urologist, who did the same thing a couple of times. And he decided that it wasn't the prostate after all, but it could have been the bladder. So he took a scope and looked inside the bladder and found bladder cancer.

Well, a couple of things happened. First of all, the debate performance on Saturday night was not exactly a strong suit for Barack Obama. And Hillary Clinton looked like she was getting beaten up by the two men, John Edwards and Barack Obama. And I think that offended some people. And Hillary was tough, let's be honest. The other thing was it was her meltdown on Monday morning. And a lot of people are saying, well, people were reacting to her tears. I actually don't think so. Remember, she was targeting older women. She was targeting poorer families. And they don't listen - no offense - to public radio. They do listen to talk radio. And conservative talk radio was all over her about the tears. They were brutal. I mean, brutal. And I know a lot of women - and I actually made calls this morning - who basically were so angry because they weren't sure what they were going to do. But after hearing those attacks on a credible, articulate woman who could, in fact, be president, they walked into the voting booth, they took their middle finger, and they voted for Hillary Clinton because they said, you know what, they've got a stop.

Up next, the search for intelligent life. Well, it's sort of been put on a respirator. Funding cutbacks have forced the University of California at Berkeley to halt operations at the Allen Telescope Array. You know, you've seen pictures of that. That's the cluster of radio telescope dishes out in the desert and used by researchers to search for radio signals from distant places, signals that might tell us that we are not alone in the universe. So what happens now? Joining us to talk about it is Jill Tarter. She's the director of the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. Welcome back to SCIENCE FRIDAY, Dr. Tarter.

Well, there are a number of arguments. One is that, you know, they say that, one, it is an important part of the culture here and has been for a long time. And for a lot of people, that is true. For a lot of people, it's not. There are a lot of people who've never been to a cockfight. You know, speaking with folks last night, I also heard from a lot of people who don't believe it is a cruel sport because they said, you know, look, if you've got two roosters around each other, they're going to start to fight naturally. Which is true but, you know, it's different from putting them into a ring, of course. And then of course, there's the huge economic impact. There are so many people who make a living off of cockfighting here in Puerto Rico, and tens of thousands of people may lose work because of this ban.

Michelle Higgins is the Practical Traveler columnist at The New York Times. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. I want to read an email here from Jay(ph) in Oregon, writes, I have two kids, ages 3 and 5, and I think boarding early is crazy. The last thing I want to do when flying is to spend extra time sitting trapped on a plane. And I guess that's one point of view also. It's tough to keep the sometimes antsy kids happy on board and getting there early makes it that much tougher. What I'm wondering, Michelle, do you think that airlines are, in fact, trying to discourage families from traveling? It's maybe less lucrative or more hassles than it's worth?

And I agree with Jasmyne on that. Yes, we have to do this because the country, the country is going to sink if this continues. And I'm not so sure after this bailout - this is why I'm saying there should be punitive action, there should be some kind of response, criminally or otherwise, because we can't just take our money - and this is our money - put it in the hands of the same people who stole it from us - it's like a guy who stuck you up, that stuck you up, and then you come back and say, oh, you want this money? I gave you everything I had, take my clothes. So essentially, you have to do something to make sure that they don't come back and do it again. And you have to give a similar kind of consideration to even individuals who took these sub-prime loans. They're acting like - on the radio show I do, people were saying, oh, well, these are dumb people. They signed up for these sub-prime loans. No, they're not dumb people. The economy allowed people to convince people to do some things that may not have been the best thing for the economy.

You're listening to Talk of the Nation: Science Friday. I'm Flatow. A little bit later on, we'll talk about a new concept in making a microscope on a chip. But next, the Olympics! They are one week away, and the city of Beijing is scrambling to clean up its polluted air, some of the worst in the world, get it clean in time for the games. Officials are taking cars off the road. They are closing down factories. And while the Chinese are implementing their pollution plan and looking for signs of blue skies, a few top athletes have already dropped out due to potential health hazards. Others are preparing for their events, trying to minimize exposure to the smoggy air, doing things like training elsewhere, or wearing face masks when they are in the Chinese capital city. And joining me now with a report on Beijing's pollution plan is Jocelyn Ford, a science journalist, who is our blogger in Beijing for sciencefriday.com, where she's done some really excellent blogs on our website. Welcome to the program, Jocelyn.

He's not. He's not. He's been known primarily--he's a 26-year-old from Utah who's been known mostly as the only guy in cycling who could moonlight as a correspondent on "The Daily Show." He's absolutely hilarious. When you ask him his favorite sport, he will sincerely go into how much he loves croquet. And then if you ask him how he trains, he will mention the video "Salsa With the Stars" that he's been practicing to. He's very funny. And the interesting thing about Dave is, like a lot of bike racers, some very unfunny things have happened to him. He broke his leg and his wrist a year and a half ago when he was sideswiped by an SUV, and he had a terrible crash just a little more than a year ago which gave him a concussion and nearly put him out of the sport. Lance is famous for coming back after cancer, for coming back from a very difficult situation. But as you get into bike racing, you realize that all of these guys are coming back from something. You know, as the saying goes, they don't pick the sport as much as the sport chooses them.

And I think right there, if you listen to that clip, Stewart's doing something very sharp. He's both acknowledging the seriousness - if you watch the full episode - of what Brian Williams did to Williams' credibility and damaging by extension NBC news. But also, he's putting in contrast. And he's saying, look, this isn't on the scope of the failure to report thoroughly on claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which proved not to be the case. He's saying this is a minor transgression compared to other media sins that don't always get the same coverage or mea culpas.

They run the gamut. They can run - they can be problems associated with a second malignancy - a second type of cancer that's induced by the treatment - chronic cardiac problems such as congestive heart failure or cardiac failure, kidney failure, chronic lung problems. It really is a very, very wide range of problems. If I can just echo something that Dr. Shad just mentioned, that I think that the - that what I hoped that the piece that I wrote would generate - would be a call for education. But not only just education for our patients and their families, for how they can take care of themselves better in the future - and I think that was echoed by one of your callers - but also education for the wider group of primary care physicians who by and large are taking care of these patients out in the community.

I wrote the poem "Offering" upon waking up from a dream. And the poem deals with the complicated relationship that I had with my father and the imagery in the poem concerns the series of nightmares that I had following my father's death. In a way, I defied my father by leaving home early and striking out and seeking my own independence. Ultimately, I became something that my father never imagined me being, and that's an artist. So I think of the poem as a tribute to the creative process. But I also feel that the poem was a step towards forgiving my father and healing that disconnection that we had.

...is - he is not - he's putting his fellow men in danger when he does that. He's not doing his job. So it is - it's not as if having - you know, calling into question Obama's decision is, you know, simply this comes from a liberal stand point of oh gosh, you know, it's all so terrible and let's give everybody a condolence letter and flowers. And that'll make it all OK. You know, I understand the military culture. It's - they don't want this happening. It's not good for war to have people killing themselves in a combat zone.

So I had been looking for work, and started utilizing my military network and called a friend of mine who I had heard through the rumor mill was doing drone work. He explained what he was doing. I thought it sounded interesting. It was definitely something new. My initial impressions of drones was basically a mix of skepticism and sarcasm. In my mind, it was the geek squad, a bunch of gamers sitting around a console, chatting it up and not really being the consummate aviation professionals that, you know, I am or was used to working with. And I really didn't think that a drone operator could ever be as proficient as a glamorous helicopter pilot.

So the report says that even before Trump was sworn in, the transition team began discussing a plan to push for a Saudi nuclear project. The report notes for about seven months in 2016, including during the presidential transition, Flynn also served as an adviser to IP3 International. That's a private company seeking to build nuclear plants in Saudi Arabia. The whistleblowers we've been talking about said that Flynn continued to press for this company, advocate for this idea after he joined the White House, which presents a pretty substantial conflict of interest if that's true. Flynn, as you might recall, was fired in February 2017 for lying about his contacts with the Russian ambassador.

I think one practical issue, Neal, is that this doesn't appear to affect states. They talked about political subdivisions of the states, municipalities. A lot of the Section 5 litigation involves states like Georgia or Alabama or Louisiana, either changing its voting - for example voter ID laws or sometimes the makeup of the state legislature. Those are statewide issues, and the states are still subject to Section 5. They can't, as I read the decision, they can't opt out, and so that's a very important practical - had they struck down the law, all the states would have been out, too.

Well, starting in 2008, the U.S. government hand control over the Sons of Iraq program to the Iraqi government, and that's where things began to sort of fall apart. The Sons of Iraq movement say that they didn't get all that they had been promised. A lot of the jobs were never offered, salaries were lower than they expected, some of the jobs were quite menial. And then a lot of the guys began to get arrested by Iraqi forces. This Shias in Maliki's government, some of them regarded the Sons of Iraq as thugs or terrorists and a number of them were arrested. Quite a few remain arrested. Hundreds, in fact, are believed to still be in detention awaiting trial.

Well, this latest offer, as you mentioned, is worth about $17 billion, $63 a share, and that's $2 a share more than the last Chevron bid several weeks ago. Chevron is also reportedly bringing more cash to the table in this offer, though it is still a cash and stock. And Unocal's board already jumped on the sweetened deal; it said yes. And that means that it has rejected what is a still-higher bid from the Chinese National Offshore Oil Company, CNOOC. It's offering $18 1/2 billion cash. And that, of course, has sparked quite a bit of political concern on Capitol Hill. CNOOC is 70 percent owned by the Chinese government.

And too much of the bad cholesterol, LDL. In fact, there are a few islanders that have a disease called Tangier's Disease, which is an extreme case of low HDL, or absent HDL - characterized by orange tonsils, yellow spleen and liver - but it's pretty rare. But that's just an extreme case of the problem here. There's so much heart disease here that, you know, you really have to be very preventatively oriented. You have to make sure people's cholesterol is correct, their blood pressure is controlled, that if they have diabetes, that that's controlled very tightly. Even doing that the best you can, the amount of disease here is so high compared to the mainland.

Chemical weapons are defined in Article 2 of the treaty that bans chemical weapons as a munition or a device or a piece of equipment especially designed to distribute chemical warfare agents. But they're also defined as any toxic chemical, and that spreads this much larger than the classic warfare agents that everyone knows of, the nerve agents Sarin and VX and mustard gas, things that are specifically in a category that is prohibited except for - for defensive purposes. But it spreads - that definition spreads it much, much broader, and so if indeed some toxic chemical is involved, that's still a no-no.

Well, I had a question, a comment, that I understand the complexity and the subjectivity of classifying information. In the Department of Defense, there's a concept we term essential elements or friendly information. And what makes it difficult is that a particular segment or item of information in and of itself may not be significant. But if your potential adversary can collect enough of those small pieces of information, you can, you know, like a puzzle, eventually you start to see the big picture. And so I'm not a classifier, but I can sympathize a bit with the difficulty of being one because it's a big grey area to decide just how far somebody should go in order to protect a small, apparently, in and of itself, insignificant piece of information. I'll let you and your guests comment on that.

Bye-bye. Here's an email from Jen in St. Augustine. You guys are killing me. I'm depressed to be missing the Folk Fest for the first time in 16 years. I just moved to Florida, can't make it this year. I guess I'm a new attendee, from the Ben & Jerry's years to the present. But I have nothing but the fondest memories of watching the shows over the years in the amazing Fort Adams State Park. In 1993, I went back to my car in the pouring rain to get my raincoat and was offered a ride. On my long trek back, the gentleman who drove me went right to the backstage area letting me off where the musicians congregated. He told me to stay dry and introduced himself as George. Thank you, Mr. Wein, for the ride and for adding to my great memories.

The series of explosions began this morning with the first at a parking lot at one of the checkpoints outside Baghdad International Airport. Then, around midday, another explosion in the Central Baghdad neighborhood of Karada. Then, several hours later, two bombs in quick succession: A suicide car bomb exploded near a checkpoint in the Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City, and then the devastating blast at the Sadriyah market. Late this afternoon, there were two more car bombs, both aimed, it appears, at Iraqi police targets. The overall death toll was one of the highest ever in Baghdad. It was certainly the most deadly day in the Iraqi capital since the U.S.-led security crackdown began in mid-February.

Well it does-it has an authorization that was passed in 2003, but the authorization was based on two facts as they presented them to the country at the time. One was the presence of weapons of mass destruction and the presence of Saddam Hussein. We of course now know that the weapons of mass destruction were a fraud, this didn't exist at all and of course Saddam Hussein is gone. So the rationale for entering the war several years ago is no longer the case. There's a totally different set of facts on the ground and to rely on a previous authorization to escalate the number of troops on the ground at this point I think is unwarranted. Well you've got a civil war today. That's why we're sending troops into Baghdad to try and get in the middle of a civil war. That's very different than weapons of mass destructions and visions of a mushroom cloud.

It was interesting. While I was working on the piece, friends would ask me - well, are you going to talk about, like, pollution and the mess coal has us in? And I went - I was thinking no, no, no. I'm really looking at these people and their lives, and I felt like, you know, I really can't not put this in the piece. I really wanted the piece to be about us. You know, we are these people. And the way I did that was just to make a list of all the things you do every day that use coal - that still use coal because probably - I think something like 50 percent of our energy is coal-fueled today - like, you know, bake a cake, drill a hole, call your girlfriend on the phone, send a message...

You also have to have luck to decipher which of the countless small boats that cross the Mamore from Bolivia is carrying drugs. Brazilian and U.N. counter drug officials say those little boats and small planes that make 20-minute flights are flooding Brazil with Bolivian cocaine. The reasons are simple: Brazil, long the world's number two consumer of cocaine after the United States, is seeing consumption rise fast. And Bolivia is responding to the demand, according to U.N. and U.S. data. Bo Mathiasen is a senior U.N. drug official who tracks the cocaine trade, and he says traffickers are pioneering new markets.

Well, there you get into the practical aspects of it. It's very possible that she's not going to get sick. It's possible that she is going to get sick. She's more likely to get sick if she's in close contact with her daughter, and her daughter - you know, if you look at the Centers for Disease Control recommendations on having someone sick in your home, the idea is to keep them as isolated as possible. And you know, with a kid, that can be kind of tough. You know, your child is sick, you really don't want to stay six feet away from them. You know, if you stay six feet away from this person, and you wash your hands, and you know, do all the other recommended activities, it's probably okay. You know, at some point - it's a hard thing to do. You know, if you want to be completely safe, if you're in a high risk group, for example, if you have asthma or you have underlying heart disease, you might want to be especially careful. If you're healthy and don't have these chronic things, you still want to be a little careful, you know, not to be around that co-worker if the co-worker's coughing, not to pick up things the co-worker's handled if the co-worker isn't keeping his or her hands clean. You want to be a little careful.

Well, the Consumer Electronics Show is where a lot of robots are going to be unleashed, and one of the things is robot cars or autonomous cars or self-driving cars. Now, the Society of Automotive Engineers created these levels. They have five levels. So level one would be a little bit of driver assistance, functions like steering wheel or cruise control or adaptive cruise control. And these levels go all the way up to level five, which is no steering wheel and you don't need to do anything. The car can come to you and pick you up and doesn't need you to go at all.

Some people seem to think so. Sir Richard Branson does, $200,000 apiece. He's got a lot of people signed up. There are other people that have progressive ways that can do the same thing. There's an organization called Golden Spike that is going to land people on the moon. Now, I was very skeptical when I heard about that. What are you going to use to get there? How are you going to get there? Well, the way that - you're not going to find that many billionaires, but if I understand what they do, they're interested in the countries that do not have a space program. They would like to have a role model that that country can afford to send to the surface of the moon. Doesn't that make sense? It makes sense to me. You may run out of...

So there has been no change, basically, for the last two years in Part B premiums. So for those people who have seen no change, they'll have this small, three-and-a-half-dollar increase in their premiums. For new people, people who just got on Medicare and weren't subject to that hold-harmless, as it's called, they've been paying $115 a month in there Medicare premiums. Or for people who were very high-income so whose Social Security check wouldn't have gone down because of this, they'd also been paying that $115 a month Part B premium. So their premiums will actually go down to $99. They'll see a $15-a-month decrease.

Well, the two biggest had to do with quarterbacks, and both are returning quarterbacks. One is Tom Brady, coming back from injury with the New England Patriots. And we all want to see if he can recapture the magic of that 18 and 0 season, which resulted in an upset loss in the Super Bowl. He's back, and a lot of people think that he's good enough to take the Patriots back to the Super Bowl. And of course, the other story, the returning quarterback is Michael Vick, coming back from a different type of hiatus. It wasn't injury. It was stupidity that put him in jail for two years. He is back as a backup quarterback with the Philadelphia Eagles. And really, the story there isn't so much what he's able to do on the field, because he's not going to play that much, but whether or not he can really put together his life off the field again and not make the horrible mistakes that he made before.

About a year ago, I asked myself a question: "Knowing what I know, why am I not a vegetarian?" After all, I'm one of the green guys: I grew up with hippie parents in a log cabin. I started a site called TreeHugger — I care about this stuff. I knew that eating a mere hamburger a day can increase my risk of dying by a third. Cruelty: I knew that the 10 billion animals we raise each year for meat are raised in factory farm conditions that we, hypocritically, wouldn't even consider for our own cats, dogs and other pets. Environmentally, meat, amazingly, causes more emissions than all of transportation combined: cars, trains, planes, buses, boats, all of it. And beef production uses 100 times the water that most vegetables do. I also knew that I'm not alone. We as a society are eating twice as much meat as we did in the 50s. So what was once the special little side treat now is the main, much more regular. So really, any of these angles should have been enough to convince me to go vegetarian. Yet, there I was — chk, chk, chk — tucking into a big old steak. So why was I stalling? I realized that what I was being pitched was a binary solution. It was either you're a meat eater or you're a vegetarian, and I guess I just wasn't quite ready. Imagine your last hamburger. (Laughter) So my common sense, my good intentions, were in conflict with my taste buds. And I'd commit to doing it later, and not surprisingly, later never came. Sound familiar? So I wondered, might there be a third solution? And I thought about it, and I came up with one. I've been doing it for the last year, and it's great. It's called weekday veg. The name says it all: Nothing with a face Monday through Friday. On the weekend, your choice. Simple. If you want to take it to the next level, remember, the major culprits in terms of environmental damage and health are red and processed meats. So you want to swap those out with some good, sustainably harvested fish. It's structured, so it ends up being simple to remember, and it's okay to break it here and there. After all, cutting five days a week is cutting 70 percent of your meat intake. The program has been great, weekday veg. My footprint's smaller, I'm lessening pollution, I feel better about the animals, I'm even saving money. Best of all, I'm healthier, I know that I'm going to live longer, and I've even lost a little weight. So, please ask yourselves, for your health, for your pocketbook, for the environment, for the animals: What's stopping you from giving weekday veg a shot? After all, if all of us ate half as much meat, it would be like half of us were vegetarians. Thank you. (Applause)

This is the opening scene of the play called Bangin'. Bangin' is about a gang-related shooting that took the life of a teenager named Katrina Carr. That's right, her real name was Katrina and the play was first staged in Durham before the storm. A main character is Tony, Katrina's boyfriend. Tony joins a gang without telling Katrina, putting her in the wrong place at the wrong time. Jonathan Odom(ph) plays Tony. Odom is a student at the North Carolina School of the Arts and he taught at the camp. He says it took a while for the boys to open up and participate.

And I'm Renee Montagne. Waving mostly American flags, hundreds of thousands gathered across the country to rally for immigration changes. The Day Without Immigrants attracted widespread participation by legal and illegal immigrants from San Francisco to New York, Chicago, and Miami. Here in Los Angeles, two major ports in the area came to a halt after truck drivers didn't show up for work. Construction sites were quiet, some restaurants closed. The workers had headed downtown, where police counted 650,000 people at two major rallies, some going to both. Up north in Salinas, where Cesar Chavez led the Farm Workers' Movement 30 years ago, a rally emptied the fields and transformed the city.

Well, it's a book that is thinking in different ways about compassion. How does a person go about learning to care about the lives of other people? And one of the places that I've looked for examples of when that has, and more often, hasn't happened is history. So there are a number of poems in the book that are threads of antebellum history in this country and seeing if some of those voices might be able to tell us something useful now. And then there are other poems that come out of my lived experience, you know, right here and now in the 21st century that are helping me to look more closely at the ways that I see or don't see other people.

All right. Well, Spencer, how about this. I mean, you know, there's some jobs that - let's be real, it's a little bit easier to get time off than others. I mean, if you were an Emergency Room ICU nurse, probably not so easy to just say, hey, I'm just going to be off for a little bit. Other jobs maybe a little easier. But here's a political spin that's just been put on this. MSNBC host Rachel Maddow argued that long voting lines were the modern-day equivalent of the poll tax, and she argued that if you have to take leave and pay for that leave in order to stand in long lines, you were paying for the right to vote. Some people view that as a long stretch of an argument, but what do you think? Do you buy that?

Well, the film opened our film festival here in New York City, and one of the things that hit me when I saw it for the first time, I have been several times in Toronto, in Montreal. I mean, I know those cities very well because both have festivals that we attend. But this is the first time that we were exposed to a film going deep into the African descent community, to be specific, the Afro-Caribbean community, and show some of the problems that we can see in other cities of the world. And this is a film that very well backs up the idea that we have in the festival that we want to show the global black experience. There are many things that people of African descent go through all over the world, and it's� I mean, independently of the language, the colonizer at the beginning of their history and things like that. You realize that there are common things, and this is a film that deals with that, and not only that, this is a film that tries�

He comes to the operating room late, greets no one, and berates the nurse for not setting up the stepstools the way he likes. He tells the resident she doesn’t know the anatomy and sighs when she adjusts her grip on a surgical tool. He slaps the hand of the medical student when she reaches for the retractor to pull back skin for a clearer view. The operating room is tense for hours. ‘I need a different clamp,’ he says at one point, ‘this one is too dull.’ ‘I’m on it,’ says the scrub nurse. ‘You’re not,’ he retorts, ‘or else it would already be in my hand.’ All of us adorned in blue scrubs and surgical caps stand on edge, braced against the next wrathful outburst. ‘I want to see the tip of my blades,’ the resident explains, staring intently at the monitors where her laparoscopic instruments have not quite come into view. ‘Just cut,’ the lead surgeon barks at her. By the end of the operation, the intern’s hand shakes as he sutures the wounds closed, to the beat of the running condescending commentary on his halting speed and less-than-perfect stitches. One doesn’t have to work in a hospital long to experience or observe some form of disrespect. This is hardly a secret. The bullying culture of medicine has been widely written about and portrayed in popular media. In one study, published in 2012 and conducted over the course of 13 years at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, more than 50 per cent of medical students across the US said they experienced some form of mistreatment. Behind closed doors, we share advice on whom to hang around and whom to avoid. At the start of my third year of medical school, when we would finally enter the hospital wards, we had an orientation: ‘Wear a raincoat,’ the doctor standing at the podium advised. I could expect to get rained on. For the most part, I’ve been pleasantly surprised. The majority of doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals I’ve worked with have been courteous and respectful: strong teachers and compassionate caregivers. I have met colleagues whom I would feel honoured to work alongside in the future and mentors whom I’d want to treat my own family should they become ill. I’ve been amazed by residents who work 24-hour shifts and somehow still have the energy to teach those who do not yet know as much as they do. I both admire them and am grateful for them. But there is a reason those orientation warnings exist. The surgeon who chides the nurse for her inability to be in two places at once? The nurse who snaps at the medical student for reading the patient’s chart the same moment she wants to write it in? They are a substantial, troubling minority, and they can set the mood for the rest. Most of my friends in medicine have witnessed flagrant episodes of hospital bullying and have juicy tales to tell. But medical disrespect is usually far less dramatic, dished out in the form of ‘micro-aggressions’: exasperated sighs, a sarcastic tone, the dismissal of alternative ideas. It’s the subtle put-downs about a trainee’s competence that erode confidence; the public shaming for an incorrect answer on rounds; or the denial of simple privileges such as taking a chair or reading a chart. It’s the psychological effect of being called by your rank instead of your name, or having it made clear that your presence is a burden instead of a help. It’s being ignored. It’s other team members looking on when the disrespect occurs, afraid to challenge it and defend those lower on the totem pole. These are the acts that affect our state of mind in small but cumulative ways. This is the stuff that creates a culture. You learn to deal. This is how it is. That’s the system. It’s ingrained. You excuse bad behaviour with the platitude: ‘That’s just the way (s)he is.’ You appreciate from your elders that it could be much worse – at least they can’t throw scalpels at you anymore. You make allies and whisper in solidarity with those in the trenches alongside you. You train yourself, just as they advised you on your very first day, to wear a raincoat. You start to wear it, and it becomes thicker as your training progresses. You add boots and an umbrella. Then, as you get better and more confident, perhaps you become impatient with the inevitable lack of expertise in the new trainees. Maybe in a few years, you start to rain on others. We’ve known for years that entering the ranks of medicine means developing a thick skin to criticism and being made to feel small. For a long time there was a mystique that this culture held everyone to high standards, and it was the price we paid for the care we got. What is disturbing is the increasing recognition that bullies are not only bad people to be around – they’re bad doctors, too. Get admitted to any hospital, and you might notice that no longer is a single doctor on your case. Contrary to popular television scriptwriting, treating patients is rarely about the inspired intervention of one brilliant physician or surgeon. Rather, we work more like an ecosystem, with every organism in the hierarchy contributing to the whole. In the old days, interns straight out of medical school would man the hospital wards, see very sick patients, and learn to become doctors by practising on them. They’d experiment, they’d figure out stuff, and they’d grow. And sometimes, when they were wrong, patients would pay the price. Today, we still recognise that newly minted doctors must be trained, but there are more checks and balances in place for patient safety. Interns still see very sick patients and propose plans of action, but those plans are run by more experienced doctors before being implemented. In teaching hospitals, we meet on team rounds daily, discuss updates on patients, and talk through goals for the day. Questions get run by senior residents, and senior residents run things they’re unsure of by attending physicians. Whenever there is uncertainty, the question works its way up the hierarchy. At the same time, decision-making reports back down, so that the newest of the doctors carry out the plans and learn by doing. So far, so good – this is a better system than it used to be. But it is also much more dependent on the communication and relationships among different members of the team. Now, enter the culture of disrespect. Suppose an attending physician makes withering critiques or unreasonable requests. A resident, hoping to avoid such abuse, slowly but surely starts to hold back. She holds back some questions for fear of burdening and, under the constant stress of being scolded, becomes immersed in details of efficiency. Whether she intends it or not, she gives off vibes of unavailability, spending hours hunched over a computer in the physician’s conference room cranking out progress notes and scheduling patient appointments. Meanwhile, a patient starts to take a turn for the worse, but it’s not completely clear-cut – his vitals are just a bit off, his belly seems distended, and he complains of abdominal pain but is also known to the team as someone who complains. The nurse hesitates to voice her concerns to the resident, who is swamped doing paperwork and updating discharge summaries exactly the way the attending prefers. The patient continues to go downhill, and by the time word gets out the patient is much sicker – and needs to be treated far more aggressively – than would otherwise have been the case. A substantial body of data attributes medical errors to interactions among hospital workers. Calls for improved patient safety gained traction from the late 1980s through the early ’90s, when Australian researchers reported a shocking find: the vast majority of medical errors, some 70‑80 per cent, are related to interactions within the health care team. In the early 2000s, a report by the Joint Commission that accredits health care organisations in the US studied adverse events over a 10‑year period and discovered that communication failure was the number-one cause for medication errors, delays in treatment, and surgeries at the wrong site. It was also the second leading cause of operative mishaps, postoperative events, and fatal falls. The link between harsh words and medical errors was reignited in 2012 when Lucian Leape, professor of health policy at the Harvard School of Pub­lic Health, published a two-part series in Academic Medicine. ‘A substantial barrier to progress in patient safety is a dysfunctional culture rooted in widespread disrespect,’ Leape and his co-authors asserted. ‘Disrespect is a threat to patient safety because it inhibits collegiality and co-operation essential to teamwork, cuts off communication, undermines morale, and inhibits compliance with and implementation of new practices.’ It’s not that jerky personalities are reserved for those at the top. There are nice people and mean people at every rank. But in a system dependent on the proper functioning of hierarchy, it works like this: when anger and intimidation flow down, information stops flowing up. The chain of communication becomes clogged. In a system dependent on hierarchy, it works like this: when anger and intimidation flow down, information stops flowing up This information block goes beyond doctor-doctor interactions. In a now-classic, 1986 study by William Knaus and colleagues at the ICU Research Unit in Washington DC, communication between nurses and physicians was the single factor most correlated with increased mortality in hospital intensive care. Meanwhile, newer research by Alan Rosenstein and Michelle O’Daniel at the healthcare alliance VHA West Coast in California has identified a pervasive trend in which nurses are reluctant to call physicians – even as a patient deteriorates. Some of the most popular reasons provided, according to their research? Intimidation. Fear of confrontation. Concerns about retaliation. In another study by Rosenstein and O’Daniel, nurses and physicians self-reported behaving badly in near-equal numbers. Most felt this behaviour resulted in increased errors, lower quality of care, and lower patient satisfaction. Seventeen per cent could name a specific adverse event that occurred as a direct result of disrespectful behaviour. When someone is unpleasant or demeaning, something switches in the minds of those on the receiving end: they sacrifice honest communication to save face. I’ve seen it in action so many times that the pattern has become predictable. Preoccupied with fear of appearing incompetent, team members keep uncertainties under wraps. Other times the opposite occurs. Annoyed that they’re being denigrated and prideful themselves, others fight back – even when they’re unsure of the thing they’re fighting about. Once I saw two residents argue back and forth in front of the attending about a finding on a physical exam; the issue was unrelated to the patient’s illness, and the fight, a clash of egos, took mental energy and focus away from the patient’s needed care. Many in medicine actively protect the culture of disrespect because they hold a fundamentally flawed idea: that harshness creates competence Contrast that with cultures steeped in mutual respect. I’ve been on some truly outstanding medical teams that worked in opposite ways. Though everyone knew their place in the hierarchy, it also felt more egalitarian. Patients came before pride. The senior staff told others how to reach them and opened the lines of communication. Nurses attended morning rounds with the doctors; their input was valued and they were kept in the loop at every step. One night, we were on call with a ‘watcher’ – that is, a patient who could take a turn for the worse quickly. The resident made clear her door was open – literally and metaphorically. The nurses came by often and clarified orders. When the patient began to look even slightly ill, the nurse immediately got the doctor. They examined the patient together as the doctor explained what to do next and why. Questions were encouraged. Communication was crystal-clear. And the patient did well. Yet despite such outcomes, many in medicine actively protect the culture of disrespect because they hold a fundamentally flawed idea: that harshness creates competence. That fear is good for doctors-in-training and, by extension, good for patients. That public shaming holds us to higher standards. Efforts to change the current climate are shot down as medicine going ‘soft’. A medical school friend told me about a chief resident who publicly yelled at a new intern for suggesting a surgical problem could be treated with drugs. The resident then justified his tirade with: ‘Yeah, yeah, I know I was harsh. But she’s gotta learn.’ Arguments such as these run counter to all the data we have on patient outcomes. Brutality doesn’t make better doctors; it just makes crankier doctors. And shame doesn’t foster improvement; it fosters more mistakes and more near-misses. We know now that clinicians working in a culture of blame and punishment report their errors less often, pointing to fear of repercussion. Meanwhile, when blame is abolished, reporting of all types of errors increases. We can no longer deny the facts. Bad cultures lead to bad outcomes. Jerks do not make good medicine. They foster a backwards atmosphere that degrades trust, tarnishes open communication, and promotes cover-ups. Creating a culture of respect is not just about feeling good, for its own sake. It’s better for patient care. Pointing out dysfunction is easier than solving it. The million-dollar question is: does it have to be like this? And if not, how can it be improved? Some medical programmes are already taking steps to tackle disruptive interactions. A leader here, the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, began to address the problem as early as 1995; they created workshops and training sessions, established a Gender and Power Abuse committee, and developed mechanisms to accept confidential reports of mistreatment. More recently, Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston developed a model for team restoration following disruptive interactions. Programmes to spot and eliminate disrespect work well with one-time instances of explosive behaviour. But from my experience, the worst offenders are serial offenders. That some have made it to the top of the food chain suggests there was no sufficient deterrent for behaving that way. That must change. Medical trainees are already evaluated on many qualities these days. The powers-that-be can prioritize respectful behavior on that list. If we evaluate and ultimately promote trainees on honest communication and keeping their egos in check, we’ll cultivate good behaviour from the start. We can’t ignore a system that takes loads of formerly ‘nice’ people and churns out jaded, bitter, and gruff ones At the same time, change should emerge from within the hospital itself. Instead of looking away sheepishly when our colleagues are mistreated and apologising for bad behaviour with tired mantras, we should push back. Bullies have ripple effects. Medical students mimic the behaviour of residents who mimic the behaviour of attendings until a problem with attitude can extend from a few people to an entrenched culture. Instead of riding that wave, we could shun bad behaviour. This is easier said than done. But cultures change because people within commit to changing them; it won’t come by decrees. A culture that shames bullying makes the bully look like the bad guy, rather than making the recipient look weak. In a similar vein, we should put an end to the premium that the medical establishment places on saving face. This is a hazard. It feeds the egotistical environment that can lead to ignoring input and failing to ask for help. It creates doctors who value looking like they know what they’re doing at all times more than actually doing what is best. Finally, we should be getting to the root of the behaviour. Why do people behave badly? Some are just jerks. Some imitate jerks. But we also can’t ignore a system that takes loads of formerly ‘nice’ people and churns out jaded, bitter, and gruff ones. We have to call attention to the external factors that can contribute. The lack of sleep. The poor hours. The system that overbooks and overworks. Environments such as these persist in part because of our unique vantage point in taking care of others at some of the worst points in their lives. How can I say ‘I’m tired’ or ‘I’m hungry’ or ‘He hurt my feelings’ in the face of such profound human suffering? Yet it’s hardly absurd to ask for better working conditions. When working in a system that treats us all humanely, we’re more likely to be humane to each other, and to our patients.