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Yes, there have been protests over the last couple of days, really since the President got here. In New Delhi and elsewhere across the country, tens of thousands of people in some of these places marching. Some are angry about this nuclear deal. Some are angry about globalization. Some are angry about the war in Iraq. Some are just, they just don't like President Bush's policies, so they're protesting his presence here. But I can tell you, there is a great deal of security on the streets. Virtually every corner you go by there is somebody, a police officer or some military personnel with machine guns. Just really taking security very seriously.

Well, you got both, Ed. You have certainly problems in employment, racism, all that. We know that. But everybody doesn't respond to that. Everybody who's a victim of racism doesn't go out and start killing people. So we have to be clear about that and not use it as an excuse. I think another component--and the point I was going to make was--is how the criminal justice system values or devalues black life. If you look--for example, I was looking at the numbers in the Tookie Williams case out in California. If you look at people on death row, it's (technical difficulties) about 33 percent are black (technical difficulties) Hispanic. Slightly higher percentage are actually white, surprisingly. But not one person is on death row in California for murdering a black person. So this criminal justice system devalues black life and that's part of it as well.

And, you know, one other commen, just - and I think that those were some great ideas. One thing, too, that we found is when people are doing more kind of a social networking, entertainment-related Web surfing, we find that they're more likely to click though on ads, whereas people that are from an older generation doing research, kind of heads down genealogy research, they're very less likely to click on these advertisements, and also the volume of traffic is not quite as great. But we are going to be adding print ordering services would you think that's going to be a strong revenue stream for us because we get lots of requests for that. And the only thing I'd like to mention is the Web site is e-yearbook.com. And I'll take the comments off the line, thank you.

Fifty years later in 1976, Negro History Week became Black History Month. Is it still relevant in 2007? If you talk to young black Americans, the leaders and events we celebrate are ancient history. They say they're sick of hearing about slavery. They're more interested in Ludacris and P. Diddy than DuBois and Malcolm. Others say a separate month ghettoizes black history. If you ask me, Black History Month is still relevant. We still need the short, cold month of February devoted to from whence we came. Without it, future generations won't even know or care that the ever present problems of black people are slowly but steadily slip-sliding off America's radar.

She claims Spain's banking system is one of the healthiest in the world. And Spanish banks do appear to be in good shape, at least so far. Santander is one of the world's top 10 banks and the biggest in Spain. In the first half of this year, it made six and a half billion dollars in profit. The bank began as a tiny savings institution in the northern Spanish city of Santander. Its chairman, Emilio Botin, is a fourth-generation banker with a reputation as an extremely shrewd investor. In a videocast to a meeting of international bankers in London this summer, the 74-year-old chairman explained how Santander stayed out of the subprime mess.

In the past, the Supreme Court has ruled that having defendants wear prison clothing when they appear before a jury impermissibly prejudices the defendant's right to a fair trial. And the court has struck down convictions in cases where there was a mob atmosphere or circus atmosphere in the courtroom. But the court has never ruled on whether spectators can wear buttons or make other kinds of silent statements. This term, the court accepted a case for review that could have answered that question, but it was a state case involving intervention by the lower federal courts. And that for reasons only lawyers can love complicated things a lot.

And initially I was looking at everything else, but us in that proposal. It was like all these other reasons, uh it's you know whoever may be. The forces on each side of the political aisle that push presidents, that push elected leaders to the ideological end of the spectrum, so that they don't come together and get things done. But I'm a centrist at heart, and you know as I went through and was writing this book I constantly questioned my own interpretations and assumptions of events because I wanted to get to the right conclusions that I felt comfortable with that it was the truth from my perspective and I think I've done that.

It's Tuesday, and time to read from your comments. Chris Kohls(ph) heard our conversation with Colum McCann on writers and writing, where we asked you to tell us whether you write about what you know or about what you wanted to know. He sent us this email: For me, writing is blending what I know with what I want to learn. When I wrote my first novella, I used what I knew from being a father and a husband and blended it with what I learned from research in the scientific and political aspects of the story. I'm currently writing stories that require me to research things I know nothing about firsthand, but I have met people who do some of the things I'm writing about. And it's a way to learn more about what's important to them in their walk of life. Writing is a journey, and I am often enriched by what I've learned along the way.

Well, the beginning in the first one was taking a quote from the Associated Press for an event or a - I think it was a news conference that I missed, taking a quote that had been published in the Associated Press that day, because at that time, it wasn't published on the Internet, but we got the wire service during the day - and using it as if I had been there, not putting the attribution on. You know, in the grand scheme of things, is that huge? You know, I think in retrospect now it's pretty big, but it feels very small in the moment.

Thank you, Neal. I want to be clear that I am not suggesting that at this point the United States or the United Nations or anybody fight their way in on the ground. What I am suggesting is that if it becomes necessary in the short term, that we be prepared to use air strikes to persuade the Sudanese government that it's in it its interest to allow the United Nations to deploy consensually. And in that regard, what I'm suggesting is not very different than what I understand the caller to be suggesting. The imposition of a no-fly zone would require essentially the same sort of air asset commitment that I'm suggesting. In fact, a no-fly zone may be more asset intensive and time-consuming because you have to patrol and police a no-fly zone 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It was a very ambitious endeavor and a dangerous endeavor in the context of northern Iraq. What we've managed to do subsequently on the ground is far more worrisome, and I suggest that we can simply persuade the Sudanese to let the U.N. in consensually and take out its critical air assets that are killing civilians in the process.

Some might say that focusing on the images of looters vs. finders misses the big picture. The last thing we need to hear right now is a lecture about the power of positive images during one of the most tragic events of American history. I understand this perspective, and in most cases I'd agree. The entire `positive black image' argument is bankrupt. We don't need positive images. We need images that reflect reality, images that cause people to think hard about where we are as Americans and where we need to be. But think on this: If police perceive the biggest problem they face to be that of looters, and they perceive these looters to be largely black, then they will be more likely to use deadly force. Calling for the media to be more responsible in this case is not simply a matter of being respectful. It is a matter of keeping a dire situation from further devolving into terror. It is a matter of public safety. In this case, it is not enough for reporters to report the news and for news photographers to take the pictures. What we need now are people with the capacity to bring sanity to an insane situation.

Right. There's sort of two or three major steps that would have to be done forward from that announcement. For instance, if you look at the video, the clip that went along with it, which I believe was a simulated user's-eye view, the video augmentation was essentially a tickertape strip across the top of the field of vision. And so one of the first things that - improvements that one would really hope for would be very high resolution, say, 4,000 pixels by 4,000 pixels. And that's the sort of thing that actually is probably easier to do with very, very small displays than with very, very large ones. So if there were a market for it, I think we would start seeing that, which would mean that you would then have, in your eyeglasses, the capability that you now spend thousands of dollars for to hang a 100-inch flat-panel TV screen on your wall.

Well, you know, that's a great point. And in past years, I sort of made the same point of that, the symbolism of making cuts. We could not afford to have any more bridges to nowhere, because that undermined people's confidence that their tax dollars were being spent well, and they weren't willing to make the real sacrifices in the budget. But as a result of the terrible economic recession that we've gone through and the high sort of cost that that takes on the economy, we now don't have as much time to sort of go through symbolic cuts and then pay freezes and then gradually, ever-so-gradually, get to the real parts of the budget.

So whichever you do, if you drive fast, if you drive slow, you're going to harm other people. Really, if you get anywhere near a car, it's what kind of harm you prefer to do here. Would you rather have more accidents, or would you rather have worse accidents? There are other factors. You mentioned fuel consumption. There's also the notion of -by driving the speed limit, you set an example of law-abiding conduct that conceivably could influence other people. That's good. It shows respect for the law. On the other hand, you're also likely to provoke a certain amount of road rage.

Right now, the Jena Six. Did the mainstream media miss the story? And what does this say about how the media covers race in the U.S.? You're welcome to join us by calling 800-989-8255. The e-mail address is talk@npr.org. Still with us is Shawn Williams. He blogs at dallassouthblog.com. We're also joined by Steven Holmes, a national editor at the Washington Post. Steven Holmes, before the break, I want to come you. We heard a caller, George, who was talking about an interesting take on the story that, you know, this has been overblown. That this was just really a case of a bunch of thugs who beat up a white guy.

I think what's changed is actually there's a lot more to do. Because in the old days you could, you know, tell your colleagues at the beginning of the process essentially what the book was like and you could, you know, do your best to introduce the book to book-sellers that you knew and so on. But there wasn't a ton to do. Now with online media and other aspects of modern life, there's a ton to do, and it takes a lot of time, and we have to work very, very hard to get our books above the tree line.

In Las Vegas, there's an old adage that the house always wins, which is to say that even when casinos make big payouts, they never cut into profits. But we notice that gambling revenues in Vegas are down 4 percent in the past year. That's a rare event. Revenues have only dipped once since the 1970s, and that was after the September 11th attacks. And even then they only drop by 1 percent. We were curious if people are gambling less because of current economic troubles. So we called Robert Goodman; he's a professor of economics at Hampshire College and he's also the author of "The Luck Business."

Well, you know, I actually read that slightly differently. When I heard about the specific comments and the castration and sort of the anger in which it was delivered, even though it was a whisper of. I immediately began to think back historically about, you know, the ways and which powerful black men, or uppity black men were punished. And it was, you know, the threat of castration was very real in the 19th century. And there's a moment of irony that Jesse Jackson would want to assert his power, his relevance, to Barack Obama's campaign by placing himself over Barack in a sense in suggesting that he is the man and also capable of taking Barack's manhood away.

Well, in fact, I think part of the reason for some of the high doses, particularly in drugs like this which can be fairly toxic, they give them to you with a patch, a drug patch. Drug patches don't work all that effectively. When they're sort of done, you can still end up with 60 to 80 percent of the drug in the patch. And so when you have to be disposing of these things very carefully, but it also means when this stuff is applied to the skin, or like if you have salves or other things that you're slathering on the skin, you can imagine it doesn't all get absorbed, and what doesn't is ready to come off.

Well, for a long time we knew that melanoma and certain other tumors were controlled or could be controlled by our immune system, because there were cases, very rare but very provocative cases of patients in which their own tumors suddenly disappeared without any chemotherapy. So - and this idea that the immune system was playing a role had been around for a long time. It's true for several other cancers, but not all cancers, as far as we know. And then - but there were many early attempts to try to activate the immune system against cancer, and they had not worked out. And the field was sort of full of dead and - you know, there was the death and debris of scientists. But then, through a series of long investigations, it turns out there are certain drugs that can activate the immune system, and in this case work against melanoma.

Remember; there have been news reports for a few days now that three Trump campaign advisers or aides met with an FBI asset in the course of the campaign. People close to the investigation say that was because the FBI didn't want word to get out that Trump or the Trump campaign was under investigation for possible collusion with Russians in the course of 2016. So as opposed to calling those aides in and interviewing them quite publicly or taking other steps, they sent an informant in to talk to those folks. Now, this is a counterintelligence investigation, not just a criminal one. And in counterintelligence investigations, the FBI and other government agencies often use these kinds of informants to go in and gather information secretly often to protect the privacy of people who are being investigated. And, Don, these require very high-level approvals at Justice and the FBI. They're not just something one guy can do.

Yeah, that's a great question. You know, we talk a lot about music therapy in our book. It was very effective in helping her, especially in the beginning stages of her therapy, kind of getting her language ability going again. Your ability to sing and music is in the right side of her brain, and Gabby was injured on the left. So very early on, even though she couldn't formulate an entire sentence, she could sing an entire song. And that's true even today. And we - she continues with - she does get some music therapy each week, even today, and it's very effective.

I write about food. I write about cooking. I take it quite seriously, but I'm here to talk about something that's become very important to me in the last year or two. It is about food, but it's not about cooking, per se. I'm going to start with this picture of a beautiful cow. I'm not a vegetarian — this is the old Nixon line, right? But I still think that this — (Laughter) — may be this year's version of this. Now, that is only a little bit hyperbolic. And why do I say it? Because only once before has the fate of individual people and the fate of all of humanity been so intertwined. There was the bomb, and there's now. And where we go from here is going to determine not only the quality and the length of our individual lives, but whether, if we could see the Earth a century from now, we'd recognize it. It's a holocaust of a different kind, and hiding under our desks isn't going to help. Start with the notion that global warming is not only real, but dangerous. Since every scientist in the world now believes this, and even President Bush has seen the light, or pretends to, we can take this is a given. Then hear this, please. After energy production, livestock is the second-highest contributor to atmosphere-altering gases. Nearly one-fifth of all greenhouse gas is generated by livestock production — more than transportation. Now, you can make all the jokes you want about cow farts, but methane is 20 times more poisonous than CO2, and it's not just methane. Livestock is also one of the biggest culprits in land degradation, air and water pollution, water shortages and loss of biodiversity. There's more. Like half the antibiotics in this country are not administered to people, but to animals. But lists like this become kind of numbing, so let me just say this: if you're a progressive, if you're driving a Prius, or you're shopping green, or you're looking for organic, you should probably be a semi-vegetarian. Now, I'm no more anti-cattle than I am anti-atom, but it's all in the way we use these things. There's another piece of the puzzle, which Ann Cooper talked about beautifully yesterday, and one you already know. There's no question, none, that so-called lifestyle diseases — diabetes, heart disease, stroke, some cancers — are diseases that are far more prevalent here than anywhere in the rest of the world. And that's the direct result of eating a Western diet. Our demand for meat, dairy and refined carbohydrates — the world consumes one billion cans or bottles of Coke a day — our demand for these things, not our need, our want, drives us to consume way more calories than are good for us. And those calories are in foods that cause, not prevent, disease. Now global warming was unforeseen. We didn't know that pollution did more than cause bad visibility. Maybe a few lung diseases here and there, but, you know, that's not such a big deal. The current health crisis, however, is a little more the work of the evil empire. We were told, we were assured, that the more meat and dairy and poultry we ate, the healthier we'd be. No. Overconsumption of animals, and of course, junk food, is the problem, along with our paltry consumption of plants. Now, there's no time to get into the benefits of eating plants here, but the evidence is that plants — and I want to make this clear — it's not the ingredients in plants, it's the plants. It's not the beta-carotene, it's the carrot. The evidence is very clear that plants promote health. This evidence is overwhelming at this point. You eat more plants, you eat less other stuff, you live longer. Not bad. But back to animals and junk food. What do they have in common? One: we don't need either of them for health. We don't need animal products, and we certainly don't need white bread or Coke. Two: both have been marketed heavily, creating unnatural demand. We're not born craving Whoppers or Skittles. Three: their production has been supported by government agencies at the expense of a more health- and Earth-friendly diet. Now, let's imagine a parallel. Let's pretend that our government supported an oil-based economy, while discouraging more sustainable forms of energy, knowing all the while that the result would be pollution, war and rising costs. Incredible, isn't it? Yet they do that. And they do this here. It's the same deal. The sad thing is, when it comes to diet, is that even when well-intentioned Feds try to do right by us, they fail. Either they're outvoted by puppets of agribusiness, or they are puppets of agribusiness. So, when the USDA finally acknowledged that it was plants, rather than animals, that made people healthy, they encouraged us, via their overly simplistic food pyramid, to eat five servings of fruits and vegetables a day, along with more carbs. What they didn't tell us is that some carbs are better than others, and that plants and whole grains should be supplanting eating junk food. But industry lobbyists would never let that happen. And guess what? Half the people who developed the food pyramid have ties to agribusiness. So, instead of substituting plants for animals, our swollen appetites simply became larger, and the most dangerous aspects of them remained unchanged. So-called low-fat diets, so-called low-carb diets — these are not solutions. But with lots of intelligent people focusing on whether food is organic or local, or whether we're being nice to animals, the most important issues just aren't being addressed. Now, don't get me wrong. I like animals, and I don't think it's just fine to industrialize their production and to churn them out like they were wrenches. But there's no way to treat animals well, when you're killing 10 billion of them a year. That's our number. 10 billion. If you strung all of them — chickens, cows, pigs and lambs — to the moon, they'd go there and back five times, there and back. Now, my math's a little shaky, but this is pretty good, and it depends whether a pig is four feet long or five feet long, but you get the idea. That's just the United States. And with our hyper-consumption of those animals producing greenhouse gases and heart disease, kindness might just be a bit of a red herring. Let's get the numbers of the animals we're killing for eating down, and then we'll worry about being nice to the ones that are left. Another red herring might be exemplified by the word "locavore," which was just named word of the year by the New Oxford American Dictionary. Seriously. And locavore, for those of you who don't know, is someone who eats only locally grown food — which is fine if you live in California, but for the rest of us it's a bit of a sad joke. Between the official story — the food pyramid — and the hip locavore vision, you have two versions of how to improve our eating. (Laughter). They both get it wrong, though. The first at least is populist, and the second is elitist. How we got to this place is the history of food in the United States. And I'm going to go through that, at least the last hundred years or so, very quickly right now. A hundred years ago, guess what? Everyone was a locavore: even New York had pig farms nearby, and shipping food all over the place was a ridiculous notion. Every family had a cook, usually a mom. And those moms bought and prepared food. It was like your romantic vision of Europe. Margarine didn't exist. In fact, when margarine was invented, several states passed laws declaring that it had to be dyed pink, so we'd all know that it was a fake. There was no snack food, and until the '20s, until Clarence Birdseye came along, there was no frozen food. There were no restaurant chains. There were neighborhood restaurants run by local people, but none of them would think to open another one. Eating ethnic was unheard of unless you were ethnic. And fancy food was entirely French. As an aside, those of you who remember Dan Aykroyd in the 1970s doing Julia Child imitations can see where he got the idea of stabbing himself from this fabulous slide. (Laughter) Back in those days, before even Julia, back in those days, there was no philosophy of food. You just ate. You didn't claim to be anything. There was no marketing. There were no national brands. Vitamins had not been invented. There were no health claims, at least not federally sanctioned ones. Fats, carbs, proteins — they weren't bad or good, they were food. You ate food. Hardly anything contained more than one ingredient, because it was an ingredient. The cornflake hadn't been invented. (Laughter) The Pop-Tart, the Pringle, Cheez Whiz, none of that stuff. Goldfish swam. (Laughter) It's hard to imagine. People grew food, and they ate food. And again, everyone ate local. In New York, an orange was a common Christmas present, because it came all the way from Florida. From the '30s on, road systems expanded, trucks took the place of railroads, fresh food began to travel more. Oranges became common in New York. The South and West became agricultural hubs, and in other parts of the country, suburbs took over farmland. The effects of this are well known. They are everywhere. And the death of family farms is part of this puzzle, as is almost everything from the demise of the real community to the challenge of finding a good tomato, even in summer. Eventually, California produced too much food to ship fresh, so it became critical to market canned and frozen foods. Thus arrived convenience. It was sold to proto-feminist housewives as a way to cut down on housework. Now, I know everybody over the age of, like 45 — their mouths are watering at this point. (Laughter) (Applause) If we had a slide of Salisbury steak, even more so, right? (Laughter) But this may have cut down on housework, but it cut down on the variety of food we ate as well. Many of us grew up never eating a fresh vegetable except the occasional raw carrot or maybe an odd lettuce salad. I, for one — and I'm not kidding — didn't eat real spinach or broccoli till I was 19. Who needed it though? Meat was everywhere. What could be easier, more filling or healthier for your family than broiling a steak? But by then cattle were already raised unnaturally. Rather than spending their lives eating grass, for which their stomachs were designed, they were forced to eat soy and corn. They have trouble digesting those grains, of course, but that wasn't a problem for producers. New drugs kept them healthy. Well, they kept them alive. Healthy was another story. Thanks to farm subsidies, the fine collaboration between agribusiness and Congress, soy, corn and cattle became king. And chicken soon joined them on the throne. It was during this period that the cycle of dietary and planetary destruction began, the thing we're only realizing just now. Listen to this, between 1950 and 2000, the world's population doubled. Meat consumption increased five-fold. Now, someone had to eat all that stuff, so we got fast food. And this took care of the situation resoundingly. Home cooking remained the norm, but its quality was down the tubes. There were fewer meals with home-cooked breads, desserts and soups, because all of them could be bought at any store. Not that they were any good, but they were there. Most moms cooked like mine: a piece of broiled meat, a quickly made salad with bottled dressing, canned soup, canned fruit salad. Maybe baked or mashed potatoes, or perhaps the stupidest food ever, Minute Rice. For dessert, store-bought ice cream or cookies. My mom is not here, so I can say this now. This kind of cooking drove me to learn how to cook for myself. (Laughter) It wasn't all bad. By the '70s, forward-thinking people began to recognize the value of local ingredients. We tended gardens, we became interested in organic food, we knew or we were vegetarians. We weren't all hippies, either. Some of us were eating in good restaurants and learning how to cook well. Meanwhile, food production had become industrial. Industrial. Perhaps because it was being produced rationally, as if it were plastic, food gained magical or poisonous powers, or both. Many people became fat-phobic. Others worshiped broccoli, as if it were God-like. But mostly they didn't eat broccoli. Instead they were sold on yogurt, yogurt being almost as good as broccoli. Except, in reality, the way the industry sold yogurt was to convert it to something much more akin to ice cream. Similarly, let's look at a granola bar. You think that that might be healthy food, but in fact, if you look at the ingredient list, it's closer in form to a Snickers than it is to oatmeal. Sadly, it was at this time that the family dinner was put in a coma, if not actually killed — the beginning of the heyday of value-added food, which contained as many soy and corn products as could be crammed into it. Think of the frozen chicken nugget. The chicken is fed corn, and then its meat is ground up, and mixed with more corn products to add bulk and binder, and then it's fried in corn oil. All you do is nuke it. What could be better? And zapped horribly, pathetically. By the '70s, home cooking was in such a sad state that the high fat and spice contents of foods like McNuggets and Hot Pockets — and we all have our favorites, actually — made this stuff more appealing than the bland things that people were serving at home. At the same time, masses of women were entering the workforce, and cooking simply wasn't important enough for men to share the burden. So now, you've got your pizza nights, you've got your microwave nights, you've got your grazing nights, you've got your fend-for-yourself nights and so on. Leading the way — what's leading the way? Meat, junk food, cheese: the very stuff that will kill you. So, now we clamor for organic food. That's good. And as evidence that things can actually change, you can now find organic food in supermarkets, and even in fast-food outlets. But organic food isn't the answer either, at least not the way it's currently defined. Let me pose you a question. Can farm-raised salmon be organic, when its feed has nothing to do with its natural diet, even if the feed itself is supposedly organic, and the fish themselves are packed tightly in pens, swimming in their own filth? And if that salmon's from Chile, and it's killed down there and then flown 5,000 miles, whatever, dumping how much carbon into the atmosphere? I don't know. Packed in Styrofoam, of course, before landing somewhere in the United States, and then being trucked a few hundred more miles. This may be organic in letter, but it's surely not organic in spirit. Now here is where we all meet. The locavores, the organivores, the vegetarians, the vegans, the gourmets and those of us who are just plain interested in good food. Even though we've come to this from different points, we all have to act on our knowledge to change the way that everyone thinks about food. We need to start acting. And this is not only an issue of social justice, as Ann Cooper said — and, of course, she's completely right — but it's also one of global survival. Which bring me full circle and points directly to the core issue, the overproduction and overconsumption of meat and junk food. As I said, 18 percent of greenhouse gases are attributed to livestock production. How much livestock do you need to produce this? 70 percent of the agricultural land on Earth, 30 percent of the Earth's land surface is directly or indirectly devoted to raising the animals we'll eat. And this amount is predicted to double in the next 40 years or so. And if the numbers coming in from China are anything like what they look like now, it's not going to be 40 years. There is no good reason for eating as much meat as we do. And I say this as a man who has eaten a fair share of corned beef in his life. The most common argument is that we need nutrients — even though we eat, on average, twice as much protein as even the industry-obsessed USDA recommends. But listen: experts who are serious about disease reduction recommend that adults eat just over half a pound of meat per week. What do you think we eat per day? Half a pound. But don't we need meat to be big and strong? Isn't meat eating essential to health? Won't a diet heavy in fruit and vegetables turn us into godless, sissy, liberals? (Laughter) Some of us might think that would be a good thing. But, no, even if we were all steroid-filled football players, the answer is no. In fact, there's no diet on Earth that meets basic nutritional needs that won't promote growth, and many will make you much healthier than ours does. We don't eat animal products for sufficient nutrition, we eat them to have an odd form of malnutrition, and it's killing us. To suggest that in the interests of personal and human health Americans eat 50 percent less meat — it's not enough of a cut, but it's a start. It would seem absurd, but that's exactly what should happen, and what progressive people, forward-thinking people should be doing and advocating, along with the corresponding increase in the consumption of plants. I've been writing about food more or less omnivorously — one might say indiscriminately — for about 30 years. During that time, I've eaten and recommended eating just about everything. I'll never stop eating animals, I'm sure, but I do think that for the benefit of everyone, the time has come to stop raising them industrially and stop eating them thoughtlessly. Ann Cooper's right. The USDA is not our ally here. We have to take matters into our own hands, not only by advocating for a better diet for everyone — and that's the hard part — but by improving our own. And that happens to be quite easy. Less meat, less junk, more plants. It's a simple formula: eat food. Eat real food. We can continue to enjoy our food, and we continue to eat well, and we can eat even better. We can continue the search for the ingredients we love, and we can continue to spin yarns about our favorite meals. We'll reduce not only calories, but our carbon footprint. We can make food more important, not less, and save ourselves by doing so. We have to choose that path. Thank you.

We have very scarce information, but we do know that they probably planned it several days in advance. Some suspicious activity was detected a few days ago on some remote servers belonging to TV5Monde. And the technical services now think they were inside before the real attack started. So they took their time to get access to whatever they wanted, and then just started getting deeper into the servers. But the actual methods used is not quite clear yet. We do know that the start of it all was a simple e-mail containing some malicious codes that somebody probably opened by mistake, mistaking it for a legitimate e-mail, and then they could get inside the first computer and then probably work their way up from there.

How well is Toys "R" Us going to do? They're in the tank! How well is KB Toy going to do? They just came out of bankruptcy! They closed 600 stores! So it is not an easy picture. We've got 19 square feet of retail space out there for every man, woman and child in America. Online sales are doing tremendous! It's up 25 to 30 percent, so think about this. Here are these lunatics out there building more and more shopping centers and what are Americans doing? They're buying online! Does this make any sense to you, exploding all that Easter--the fastest growing channel is online sales. Don't you think that's going to impact real estate? I think so. So maybe these guys ought to inject themselves with some sanity. Even though they can get all the money they want, nothing makes sense.

Yeah. You know, the - I don't know. I mean, I - again, I don't want to speak too confidently here. And the last thing I want to do is tar a generation in any way. I mean, there is tremendous variation in people of every generation. You know, we do know from surveys - you know, Jean Twenge who is a psychologist at San Diego State has measured the attitude, the self-expressed attitudes of young people today, versus prior generations when they were the same age. And, you know, she has found that these kids, you know, they do dislike work for work's sake, more than previous generations. They do want work tailored to their interests and lifestyles more than previous generations. And so, I mean, those are facts and I think they do kind of paint a worrying picture in this recession. Now, you know, whether this generation is actually going to turn out to be less entrepreneurial than prior generations, I don't know. I mean, that is what a lot of employers have said. I think that the difference - I dont want to say, you know, even if that's true, I doubt it will be an extremely dramatic difference. But these are things that I at least worry about.

Existentialism has had many alleged births. Famous ones include the melancholy of Søren Kierkegaard’s Copenhagen, Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, and the Parisian glamour of Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1945 lecture ‘Existentialism Is a Humanism’. There are also less famous ones: one is the constant interplay of biography, theatre and philosophy in the work of Gabriel Marcel; another is the slow brew of psychology and philosophy in Karl Jaspers’s Heidelberg. That the latter is comparatively unknown is a strange quirk in the history of philosophy. After all, his work initiated one particular strain of French existentialism, and it is not an exaggeration to say that behind every famous existentialist thinker in the early half of the 20th century lurks Jaspers. Jaspers’s thought was avidly discussed in French philosophical circles in the 1930s, not least as it was developed concurrently along Heidegger’s own existentialism. Yet his philosophy is comparatively neglected, appearing only to set the scene before the real existentialists get there. Indeed, in setting out his own account of existentialism, Sartre’s survey of the field mentions that there are Christian existentialists, specifying both Marcel and Jaspers as Catholic. While the former was definitely a Catholic, and a key originator of French existentialism, Jaspers was not – he hailed from a particularly Lutheran part of Germany; and, although a cursory study of his philosophy shows that he often refers to God, a closer look reveals no denominational markers. This mislabelling and misunderstanding seems to be Jaspers’s fate: even in his native Germany, his philosophical reputation was soon eclipsed by Heidegger’s, and influential figures such as Theodor Adorno and Georg Lukács were critical or dismissive of his thought. Jaspers is then something of a forgotten father of existentialism. However, perhaps being a forgotten father of a philosophical movement is impressive considering he was not a philosopher in the first place. Born in 1883 in Oldenburg, Jaspers initially studied law before training to be a doctor. Although interested in philosophy throughout his studies, in particular Baruch Spinoza and Immanuel Kant, he specialised as a psychiatrist. During his studies in Heidelberg, he met his wife Gertrud, who hailed from an Orthodox Jewish family. Despite his focus on medicine, even in his clinical and theoretical work in psychology, his engagement with philosophy persisted. Notably, his first book, a psychiatric textbook Allgemeine Psychopathologie (1913), took the philosopher Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology as a starting point for understanding and categorising mental illness, as well as drawing on Wilhelm Dilthey’s distinction between understanding and explaining to develop his approach to psychiatry, writing in the preface that the task of the psychiatrist is ‘to learn to observe, ask questions, analyse, and think in psychopathological terms’. Despite the success of this book both in Germany and abroad, Jaspers moved away from psychiatry: first to psychology, then to philosophy. From 1919 onwards, he both taught and wrote on more overtly philosophical topics, bringing them into conversation with psychology. This is clear in his book Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (1919), or ‘The Psychology of Worldviews’, a transition work between psychology and philosophy. In this book, he sought to lay out and explore basic psychological dispositions and mental attitudes. Human mental life is constituted by a division between the subject and the object, and our other antinomical worldviews spring from this original antinomy. Those worldviews and their construction are not neutral, and the task of human existence is to come up to the limits of our worldviews, and be able to confront and choose more authentic possibilities. Often, the psychological analyses are punctuated by discussions of Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche – in particular, Kierkegaard’s stress on the choice that each individual must make and commit to. The importance of this text for his thought is that it introduces one of his most influential ideas – that of boundary or limit situations (‘Grenzsituationen’). These are situations in which the subject experiences dread, guilt and anxiety, where we experience a lack of unity and stability: ‘everything is fluid, is in the restless movement of being in question, everything is relative, finite, split into opposites, never whole, absolute, essential,’ as Jaspers put it. Although a negative experience, these situations allow the human consciousness to confront its limits and restrictions, and move beyond them. A worldview is a shell that then insulates us from experiences that challenge our worldview Faced with a boundary situation (which here includes death, suffering, chance and guilt), Jaspers wrote that: the actual – thinking, feeling, acting – human stands, so to speak, between two worlds: before him the realm of objectivities, behind him the powers and abilities of the subject. His situation is determined from both sides, before him the object, behind him the subject, both infinite, both inexhaustible and impenetrable. On both sides lie decisive antinomies.From this situation, one must act, and transcend those boundaries. This ‘living process’ (‘lebendige Prozeß’) involves casting off the worldview that you have come to the limits of, and creating another. Much like a hermit crab, a worldview is a shell that we enclose and encase ourselves within. That shell then insulates us from experiences that challenge our worldview. The task of psychology is to engage with this tendency in human nature, and bring the subject out of these shells (‘Gehäuse’). However, it is not that we are then without worldviews, but we exchange them constantly, in a process. The exchange of a worldview is simultaneously a dissolution and a re-founding, ‘not a one-off process but instead always a new Form of living Dasein,’ as Jaspers put it. That process of dissolution and reconstitution is necessary, as ‘without resolution there would be torpor, without encasement, annihilation’. Although not overtly a work of existential philosophy, traces of this work persist in Jaspers’s later, more existentialist oeuvre. This shift in focus led to a change in his academic position. Initially appointed to teach psychology at Heidelberg, he was given a professorship in philosophy in 1922. During his time in Heidelberg, he began an exchange of letters with Heidegger, and they kept up a correspondence that later became strained when Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in 1933. Despite the impact they both had on existentialism in Germany and France, their later relationship was marked by criticism and disagreement. On Heidegger’s recommendation, Jaspers also supervised Hannah Arendt’s doctorate on the concept of love in Saint Augustine – and formed a friendship with her that endured until his death. Other connections at Heidelberg included the sociologist Max Weber and the philosopher Ernst Bloch. The changing climate in German universities during the rise of Nazism had repercussions for Jaspers: as a result of his personal views and his marriage, he was removed from teaching in 1937 and placed under a publication ban in 1938. Unable to leave Germany or find positions elsewhere, he and his wife kept cyanide capsules to hand in case they were arrested. As his reputation, postwar, was largely untarnished, Jaspers became a renowned public figure, albeit politically rather than philosophically. He then achieved renown by writing texts on democracy, on the idea of the university, an exploration of personal, collective, and metaphysical German guilt and responsibility, and on the questions raised for humanity by the existence and use of nuclear weapons. However, dissatisfaction with German political life led him to relinquish his German citizenship and move to Basel, taking up Swiss citizenship. Philosophically, Jaspers is most renowned for his philosophy of existence, or ‘Existenzphilosophie’, which is laid out in his three-volume work Philosophie (1932). Despite laying it out as a philosophy of existence, he does not see this as a work of existentialism. In the epilogue to the third German edition of Philosophie, he remarks that he thought he had invented the term ‘existentialism’ during his publication ban, only to find, post-1945, that it had in fact turned up in France, attached to a philosophy that was similar in some way and yet also different from his thought. Jaspers distanced himself from Sartre’s existentialism, seeing that this philosophy was neither one he anticipated nor sought to pursue. However, Jaspers’s thought contains many themes that can confidently be said to be key to existentialism: a focus on the individual, the importance of particular emotions and states, the call to decide something about oneself, and a mandate to live authentically. When hemmed in by guilt, suffering and death, we come up decisively against the finite reality of our existence Jaspers’s distancing from a more popular idea of existentialism has much to do with the aims and ends of his philosophy of existence. In the three-volume Philosophie, the aim is to explore how to exist in the world philosophically. Rather than an act of reasoning, philosophy is an activity: it is a relationship towards the world. The three volumes of Philosophie can be seen as instruction manuals. They start from the position of the self, which finds itself immediately within a world, and from there one has to find out how to exist, rather than what existence is. The three volumes of his Philosophie each deal with different aspects of human existence and engagement in the world: orientation, existence, and metaphysical transcendence, as well as forms of knowledge associated with those aspects (objective knowledge, subjective self-reflection, and symbolic interpretation of the metaphysical). These stages of existence are continuously bound together with one another – we find ourselves in the world, we question ourselves and find we cannot ground or justify ourselves, and we look beyond ourselves to find the truth of existence. Following on from his earlier psychological explorations, the focus in his philosophy of existence is on the individual and our relationship to the world around us. The individual is within the world but not at one with the world. However, as the individual is situated in the world, we cannot entirely separate ourselves from the world. We are torn between our individuality and the wholeness that the world seems to offer. Certain situations remind us of this more than others. As before, these are boundary or limit situations, here demarcated as guilt, suffering or death. We can never avoid these situations: life is never free from suffering or feelings of guilt, and we cannot escape death. In them we come up against the antinomy between ourselves and the world. We may feel we are subjects who have an infinite capacity, who feel boundless but, when hemmed in by guilt, suffering and death, we come up decisively against the finite reality of our existence. In these situations, we have to act. We cannot stagnate or just remain in them, we have to either transcend these situations or not. We can cement ourselves further in ‘Dasein’ (mere existence) or transcend into ‘Existenz’. That movement of transcendence, of making a decision about ourselves, then brings about a new relationship to the world in which we have found ourselves. That movement, which then becomes a continuous process, is what it means to exist philosophically. We have to decide something about ourselves, settle something for ourselves, and do so without any certainty or outside affirmation, or objective knowledge. To be in Existenz is to exist authentically. I either allow the course of things to ‘decide about me – vanishing as myself, since there is no real decision when everything just happens – or I deal with being originally, as myself, with the feeling that there must be a decision,’ wrote Jaspers. Grenzsituationen or limit situations offer us the opportunity to become ourselves, as when we enter them with open eyes and decide for ourselves in relation to them, then we ‘live philosophically as Existenz’. It is all well and good to say that we must make this movement, but what exactly do we move towards, and how do we do it? It is helpful to view this movement as a Kierkegaardian leap of faith translated into a more-or-less everyday psychological occurrence. There are other Kierkegaardian aspects to this movement too, not least how it is marked by anxiety. However, we do not quite remain suspended over 70,000 fathoms à la Kierkegaard, as Jaspers sees that Existenz provides us some relief from that. That relief is connected with his own particular take on God, who metaphysically grounds the movement of transcendence. Jaspers’s aim in relation to God is not to believe, but to have a faith that is a movement towards something in which we should believe. In transcendence there is a movement towards unity and stability, but this movement can never reach its end. This constantly delayed knowledge is how we are to engage, symbolically, with the metaphysically transcendent, which is communicated to Existenz in ciphers. Within the world, we can identify traces or ciphers of transcendence – found in art, aspects of religion, nature, and philosophy. As ‘there is no identity of Existenz and transcendence’, transcendence does not and cannot come directly to Existenz. Instead ‘it comes to mind as a cipher, and even then not as an object that is this object, but athwart all objectivity, so to speak,’ Jaspers wrote. The cipher ‘mediates between Existenz and transcendence’. The cipher further illustrates the restive, moving nature of Existenz: it brings transcendence to mind but not in a way that transcendence, God or the cipher becomes fully known or an object for the mind. Instead, ‘never to approach the hidden God directly is the fate which a philosophical Existenz must bear. Only the ciphers speak, if I am ready,’ wrote Jaspers. The answer to human existence can never be given as it is always still arriving. Instead, we are that which always strives beyond ourselves. An aspect of this is that we also actively take part in this communication of transcendence, immersed in a shifting and polyvalent cipher-writing. If transcendence is fixed in the mundane world and categories, that results in shipwreck This is an interpretative task that can never be completed but that we are nevertheless drawn to. For example, we ourselves write a cipher as we relate to a God that is personal to us. God, as transcendence, always remains remote from us, but we create our own cipher of God, in which transcendence comes closer to us. This never brings us to God, and nor does it resolve the tension. However, that movement plays out in the world as an ‘enthusiasm for the beauty of existence’. After all, we cannot escape the world nor should be want to and, Jaspers wrote: ‘I really love transcendence only as my love transfigures the world.’ This is not to say that his philosophy is a religious philosophy. For Jaspers, any religious philosophy makes God, and therefore Existenz, known. In doing so, life is then decided for you, rather than you finding it yourself. Instead, Existenz must remain inconclusive, and God must be, and ever remain, a mystery. We do, however, have to have faith. But not in the God of the philosophers nor of theology, but instead in ‘the being of a transcendence realised in each Existenz, yet veiled from all’. Faith is not rest or stability, it is a constant tension between itself and unbelief. The idea of God promises oneness, freedom and self-origination, and we are able to ascertain the true philosophical idea of God only as thinking fails. From that, we know that God is, but not what God is. We relate to God in the movement of transcendence but, as God is hidden and unknowable, that movement is an uncategorisable but constant demand. The character of each individual Existenz is therefore one of constant choice, restlessness, and movement towards the divine. It has to be oriented towards God for, if transcendence is fixed in the mundane world and categories, that results in shipwreck (‘Scheitern’), in failure. Jaspers’s system demands God – existentially, personally, and psychologically – but refrains from speaking of the being of God. As such, Jaspers differentiates between religious existence and philosophical existence. Our relation to the transcendent and to God must not come at the expense of the inconclusiveness and the activity of philosophising. The deity, in Jaspers, must be searched for and related to, even as it remains necessarily hidden, and this emphasis on human freedom is another thread binding him to existentialism. Religious and mystical existence, on the other hand, means sacrificing your authentic choice to transcend, or removing yourself from the world in which you find yourself. Jaspers’s existential philosophy is open to religious philosophy, but his stress on the unknowability of transcendence and the delay in the cipher abstracts the divine in his thought. Yet when we think of existentialist philosophy, aside from Kierkegaard, it is not something we think as directed towards the divine. It does, however, contain many other typical aspects of existentialist thought: a stress on anxiety, the awareness of death, the importance of the individual choice, and the freedom to make it. I would say that this is one of the many reasons why we should still read Jaspers today. Jaspers gives responsibility and an end to that freedom, and provides a way out of despair and anxiety while not sacrificing the restlessness in existence. Secondly, his thought provides a helpful anchor in exploring the history of existentialism. It is here that Sartre’s mischaracterisation of Jaspers as a Catholic existentialist helps. That Sartre thought this – most likely due to Marcel’s use of Jaspers – sheds light on how his narrative about what existentialism is and how it came to be is not necessarily reliable. Through attention to Jaspers, we can see that what became known as French existentialism could easily have been something else: one still about the self and its choices, but with a self that is not as alone and abandoned in the Universe. All this makes Jaspers hard to categorise and systematise, which is arguably a reason he is not widely read or known. His philosophy is for the individual, and his presentation of the individual reaching ever-hopefully towards an unknowable God requires more faith than a philosophy that just relates to the world. Yet, paradoxically, that focus beyond the world is what is of value – remaining in the world, and reaching only towards the world, broken and imperfect as it and we are, perhaps does more frequently lead to failure and shipwreck. Following his philosophical path, by necessity, leads to uncertainty and a certain restlessness, a certain inchoateness, rather than straightforward optimism or decisiveness. That is another reason why, although Jaspers had a huge impact on the development of existentialism, his thought was not taken up in the same way that Heidegger’s or Sartre’s was. That, along with his turn towards more popular philosophy and political engagement, has relegated his more sustained philosophical work to a particular time and place in the development of existentialism. But then that may be the final lesson Jaspers teaches us – his philosophy can take us back to ourselves, to life, and help us live it as self-aware individuals trying to find meaning.

Exactly. And, you know, my whole line of thinking throughout this reporting processes is, you know, I wouldn't have even been reporting the story if the book publisher, the agent, the movie producer had done the same level of vetting that, you know, any serious magazine or journalist does with their own stories. And it's amazing that, you know, he told this story twice on the "Oprah Winfrey Show" and not one person, you know, stepped back to say, wait a minute, like, is this very fantastical, amazing love story that seems like the product of a Hollywood movie actually fiction, like it turns out to be?

Well, there's many - there's a variety of things the Occupy Wall Street movement seems to be about. And I'm been following it pretty intensely. There are things that the liberals want the Occupy Wall Street movement to be about, and that is primarily the issue of income inequality. But I think if you talk to the occupiers and if you read their theorists, the people that write the books that inspire the people to occupy Wall Street or McPherson Square here in Washington, D.C., they have other concerns. And they're much more against everything - against the structure of government in this country, against globalization, against war. It's not just the issue of income inequality for them.

That's exactly right. And, obviously, we being here in New York we only know too well, Charlie Rangel. And from those of us from the more conservative side of the spectrum, the image of Charlie Rangel being the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, does kind of scare us. But I mean it is true. I mean you've got a number of senior Democrats - John Conyers is another one, Henry Waxman is another - who have in a sense been trying to stick it out for, you know, a few more sessions in the hope that the Democrats can retake control, and they can actually become chairmen of their committees.

Hi, yeah, I am a Republican. And I was going to vote for Ron Paul originally. I do not feel that women, just because they are women, we should vote for them. And after I saw Sarah Palin, I do respect her in the sense that she is, you know, very intelligent. She has gotten to where she's gotten to, but so has Barack Obama. And I feel that, you know, as - you know, they both speak very well. I mean, they both caught me in that sense that they're very good orators. They're both very smart. They both have gotten to where they've gotten to. But for some reason, I feel that Barack Obama has really, you know, taken lead because, I mean, there's things that she even said, like, for example, when she said, what does a vice president do? So things like that that she says has really just completely turned me off on her ticket.

They were. But, see, I thought it was just a big bluff. I was like, yeah, this will be pretty easy. I mean, really, how hard is it going to be? Just change a couple of diapers, run the kids around on a few errands. Even right now, I'm actually driving my car. I know I should not be - I'm actually sitting in my driveway. I just pulled in here. It's - I just picked up my middle child from pre-school. I had to wake my toddler up from a nap to load him into the van to go to pre-school, and then I'm going up to the bus stop, which yesterday, actually, my daughter forgot to get off the bus because she's too engrossed in reading, and I ended up having to chase the bus around for two miles while I coordinated with the main office and then the bus office, trying to find out what stop they will let her off at.

This week the federal government reported that the economy isn't doing well. Well, you don't need to be a Wall Street analyst to know that. But it's not as bad as it had predicted. But does that matter to homeowners who are on the verge of foreclosure, or investors who are worried about their 401(k)s, or the 51,000 people who lost their jobs in July? John C. Bogle is the founder of The Vanguard Group. He joins us from Lake Placid, New York. Jack, thanks very much for being with us. Mr. JOHN CLIFTON "JACK" BOGLE (Founder, The Vanguard Group): Good to be with you, Scott.

In their memo ‘On the Abolition of the English Department’ from 1968, the lecturers Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (then known as James Ngũgĩ), Henry Owuor-Anyumba and Taban lo Liyong spearheaded an educational revolution at the University of Nairobi in Kenya. Eager to sweep out the vestiges of British colonialism from the university’s English Department, they proposed abolishing it, to be replaced with ‘a Department of African Literature and Languages’. They also suggested a revised curriculum that emphasised the centrality of Africa via the study of its oral and written literature, art and drama. Building on this manifesto for literary emancipation, Ngũgĩ later drew attention to the immense significance of the written language in his essay collection Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986). Here, the Kenyan scholar bid farewell to the English language as his literary medium and vowed to write all future works in Swahili and his native Gĩkũyũ. Instead of espousing colonial languages on the African continent, Ngũgĩ urged fellow African writers to develop literature in their mother tongues. Snapshots from Ngũgĩ’s career underline the real-life stakes of liberation work. After Kenya gained independence from Britain in 1963, Ngũgĩ worked with Kenyan farmers at the Kamĩrĩĩthũ Community Education and Cultural Centre to create plays that interrogated unchecked political control in their country. Soon after the 1977 performance of Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want, 1977) – a play co-authored with Ngugi wa Mirii, about a crumbling love affair between a poor woman and the son of her wealthy landlord – Kenyan government officials arrested Ngũgĩ. Following his release from prison and protracted exile, he returned to Nairobi and survived a violent assault. These glimpses into Ngũgĩ’s life lay bare the challenging position in which writers who seek to revamp lopsided archives find themselves. These archives are, to quote Saidiya Hartman in ‘Venus in Two Acts’ (2008), ‘asterisk[s] in the grand narrative of history’, and writers-cum-archivists determine their parameters. Those who are not invested in liberation work may believe that they can produce impartial and authoritative additions to these archives, but it is reckless to presume that writers’ lived experiences do not affect their output. Writers cannot step outside of their historical present any more than they can step outside of their bodies. Ngũgĩ’s work highlights the benefits of identifying biases and rectifying gaps in imbalanced archives. Nonetheless, there are consequences associated with such initiatives. For instance, while recent scholars such as Donna Zuckerberg and Sarah Bond have received praise for calling to task racist ideologies masquerading as relics of Greco-Roman antiquity, they have also had death threats in response to Zuckerberg’s book on white supremacist receptions of Roman imperial history and Bond’s research on polychromy on ancient Greek sculptures. Such vitriol reminds invested parties that there remains a need for a vast community of thinkers who are willing to apply precision and equity to their research. Only those who examine their convictions to ensure that they are not perpetuating prejudices can help move the needle forward. For the field of ancient Greek and Roman studies, unchecked subjective biases can all too easily lead to literary colonialism, as is the case in Grace Hadley Beardsley’s The Negro in Greek and Roman Civilization: A Study of the Ethiopian Type (1929). Corrosive ideology has also entered the public sphere, as is apparent in the appropriation of ancient Greek and Roman history by hate groups. Intent on countering these mishandlings of the past, I have elsewhere spoken and written about diverse representations of blackness in Greek antiquity. Continuing to channel Ngũgĩ’s liberation work, I explore ancient portrayals of black people from a variety of locations. The subsequent tracing of blackness in ancient Crete, ancient Nubia and ancient Greece unsettles the hierarchy that tends to emerge in discussions of the past. In particular, the privileging of some histories (read: European) over others (read: African) in the academic and public spheres have unfairly monopolised the parameters of ‘antiquity’. Geopolitical renderings of blackness that overlay ancient countries onto modern maps with no regard for historical context promote neocolonial narratives. Moving away from these subjective hierarchies, I champion an examination of ancient blackness based on themes, such military might and travel. This approach offers alternative ways of looking at skin colour that does not reproduce the virulent narrative of anti-Black racism. As part of my interrogation of my own historical context, I have also thought carefully about the orthography of blackness I use in this piece. I have adopted a referential practice in which I shift between lowercase ‘black’ and uppercase ‘Black’. Lowercase ‘black’ denotes people with black skin colour and phenotypic features including full lips, curly hair and a broad nose in ancient art, while uppercase ‘Black’ refers to a modern, socially constructed group of people whose melanin is merely one of its distinguishing traits. One of the earliest known depictions of black people outside of Africa appears on the wall of the ancient royal palace of Knossos in Crete. Under the auspices of King Minos, the legendary ruler of Crete whose name eventually became the label for an entire community, the mythical architect Daedalus is said to have constructed the earliest iteration of Knossos. A 20th-century reconstruction of this palace, which flourished in various forms between 1,700 BCE and 1,400 BCE, features the ‘Captain of the Blacks’ fresco, as it is popularly known, depicting three figures in flight. From left to right, three men run in close succession. They bear almost complete resemblance to each other, except for skin colour and height: the two men in the rear have black skin and are taller than the leader of the trio, who has brown skin. These bare-chested men wear skirts with a striped trim and two bands around each ankle. The shorter man in the scene holds two long, narrow objects in his right hand, and wears a feather in his hair. The Minoan ‘Captain of the Blacks’ fresco wall art from the House of Frescoes, Knossos Palace, 1350-1300 BCE. Heraklion Archaeological Museum/AlamyArthur Evans, the lead excavator at this site (1900-1930), concluded that the fresco depicted a Minoan commander leading ‘Nubian’ (a term I will discuss later) soldiers to fight against Greece. In concordance with his appraisal, I see this scene as a depiction of military might during the Minoan period. I urge you to gaze at this fresco with Minoan viewers – not modern notions of skin colour – in mind. Putting this fresco into its historical context helps to resist the impulse to slap modern conflations of skin colour and violence on this piece. In other words, this expansive view frees ancient blackness from the constraints under which it operates in modernity. By privileging military might over skin colour, we can move towards a more liberatory viewing practice of blackness. A geographical jump from Crete to Nubia adds to our expansive archive of blackness. The ancient country that spans the southern region of modern Egypt and the northern region of Sudan is known by different names: ‘Nubia’, etymologically linked to the Old Nubian napi (‘gold’) and Middle Egyptian nbw (‘gold’), and ‘Aithiopia’, transliterated from the ancient Greek aithō = ‘I blaze’ and ops = ‘face’, to name a few. A 13th-century BCE frieze painted on the walls at the temple of Beit el-Wali in Nubia (present-day Egypt) depicts two rows of black and brown people. In a reconstructed painting of part of this scene, 18 men walk towards Ramses II, under whose reign the temple was built, with gifts in hand. They lead a retinue of animals, including a giraffe, lion, goat, deer and ostrich; their bounty also includes blunt instruments, pointed spears and a basket with an effigy of a person inside. Eleven men appear on the top half and seven on the bottom, all clad from the waist down in animal or fabric wraparound skirts. Their side profiles reveal their shared features: full lips, curly hair and a hoop earring. In terms of skin colour, some men are black and some are brown. Barring their different shades, there is no clear distinction between the various men in this scene. Frieze of 18 men with gifts for Ramses II, temple of Beit-el Wali, Nubia. Photo by AlamyBased on similar imagery elsewhere – such as in the Theban tomb of Huy – that portrays the historically fraught relationship between Nubia and Egypt, it is probable that these black and brown men depict Nubians, people who were embroiled in an ongoing power struggle with their Egyptian neighbours. Despite the contentious relationship between Nubia and Egypt, here the military prowess of the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II is on full display. He immortalises his control of Nubia for future generations (even though Nubia regained its sovereignty – and even ruled Egypt in the Twenty-fifth Dynasty). In this vein, Ramses II invites viewers of all time periods to recollect a moment in history when Egypt was the powerhouse in the Nile Valley region. As for the presentation of skin colour, this scene depicts brown and black people as equally indebted to Ramses II. This flexible portrayal of the Nubians’ skin colour suggests that Egyptians did not treat black skin as the Nubians’ sole distinguishing trait. Even so, this wall painting encourages people to view artistic representations of Nubians through a lens that is multicoloured, rather than monochromatic. Wall painting of Nubians carrying plates, private tomb of Huy, Thebes. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Photo by GettyJumping ahead several hundred years, Athens in the 5th century BCE offers numerous portrayals of black people on drinkware used in the symposium. At such lively drinking parties, various Greek inhabitants, including poor men, male immigrants and perhaps women, indulged in boisterous activities. Guests played games and professed their erotic desires, sometimes at the same time. Participants engaged in these lively pursuits, all the while consuming copious amounts of wine. Emboldened by liquid courage, revellers came face to face with representations of black people on their drinkware, including horn-shaped cups (rhyta), wide-mouthed cups (skyphoi), and two-faced (or janiform) high-handled drinking cups (kantharoi). Skin colour may not have been at the forefront of the ancient revellers’ minds as they drank from these cups As revellers drank wine from a horn-shaped rhyton depicting a black person engulfed within the jaws of a crocodile, they remained safe from the violent scene at hand. In other words, the horn-shaped cups granted them a sense of security, allowing them to witness black people trying to escape the clutches of reptiles without putting themselves in danger. Crocodile eating a black man, terracotta rhyton, 350-300 BCE. Courtesy the Met Museum, New YorkAny attempts to interpret this imagery benefits from readers interrogating their own assumptions regarding skin colour in the 21st century. Without examining one’s historical context, it is all too easy for modern racist ideology to masquerade as historical facts, which in turn can erroneously render black skin colour as inherently brutal. In the context of the symposium, the sight of the violent fate awaiting the black figures on the horn-shaped cups perhaps encouraged drinkers to curb their drinking habits to avoid drowning in wine. Alternatively, a travel warning might have lurked behind this imagery: those revellers who intended to travel across the Mediterranean might find themselves caught in the mouths of a hungry crocodile whose appetite has been whetted by human flesh. In other words, even though skin colour may be the most striking element in this sculpture for a modern audience, it may not have been at the forefront of the ancient revellers’ minds as they drank from these cups. An implicit call for restraint among wine-guzzling symposiasts also appears in scenes painted on the wide-mouthed skyphoi from the sanctuary of Kabeiroi in Boeotia, in central Greece. At this site, five cups recall a memorable scene from Homer’s ancient Greek epic The Odyssey, in which the nymph Circe coaxes the eponymous hero Odysseus to drink a potion that will transform him into a pig. On one of these late 5th-/early 4th-century BCE cups, both Circe and Odysseus are portrayed as squat, black figures. Barring some fabric draped over his left arm and his brimmed hat, Odysseus is completely disrobed. His erect penis, pronounced nipples and potbelly are on full display. Armed with a sheath in his left hand and a sword in his right, he seems poised to attack Circe. Circe and Odysseus on a skyphos from the sanctuary of Kabeiroi in Boeotia, Greece. Image © Ashmolean Museum, University of OxfordUnlike her naked houseguest, the curly haired Circe wears a chiton-like dress. Abandoning the loom behind her, Circe holds a wide-mouthed skyphos in her left hand and a stick in her right with which she mixes a potion. Her modest appearance disguises her powerful talents with which she magically transforms Odysseus’s men into utterly helpless creatures. The contrast between her unassuming looks and her cunning skill mirrors the deceptively powerful role of wine in the symposium. In the event that revellers underestimate this seemingly innocuous drink, the imagery of Circe on these wide-mouthed cups gently cautions drunken symposiasts to pace themselves, lest they transgress acceptable limits of intoxication and end up in dire straits, like Odysseus’s men-turned-pigs. Similar to the horn-shaped rhyta discussed above, skin colour is not the most remarkable element on this wide-mouthed cup. Remaining in the Athenian symposium, another visual example of blackness circumvents the modern categories of ‘Black’ and ‘White’. A janiform kantharos currently in the collection of the Princeton University Art Museum presents two faces. A curly haired black face with full lips and a broad nose appears on one side, and a headband-wearing brown face with thin lips and a narrow nose on the other. The fused clay, most apparent at the neck of the cup, draws attention to the inexorable connection between the two faces. The cup invites multiple versions of difference: viewers may understand the two faces as opposing or complementary. A janiform or two-faced kantharos, 480-470 BCE, Greece. Courtesy the Princeton University Art MuseumThe depiction of two faces fused in one cup cuts across any permanent hierarchy of colour that viewers might be tempted to map onto Greek antiquity. In the minds of modern viewers who are not aware of the ways that cultural conditioning can infiltrate their perspective, there may appear to be an imbalanced presentation of the different faces on these cups. The sharp lines that distinguish each face from the other may mislead them to perceive the cup as a vivid antecedent of 19th-century Jim Crow segregation laws in the United States. Despite some people’s tendencies to draw these short-sighted conclusions, it is worth emphasising that there is no simple colour binary at play here. To be sure, colour was part of a larger apparatus of distinction on ancient Greek pottery, but its valence was not perpetually fixed. Close scrutiny of portrayals of black people in their historical context helps to dismantle the troubling assumptions that this ancient blackness operates in the wake of the transatlantic slave trade. Simply put, ancient Greek representations of black people demand more robust interpretations than the inaccurate ‘blackness = inferiority’ trope that European enslavers generated to justify the violence they meted out to fellow humans. Mindful of the gap between renditions of black people in antiquity and the lived experience of Black people in modernity, I turn to poetry as a closing example of a revamped archive. In the poem ‘To Those of My Sisters Who Kept Their Naturals’ (1980), Gwendolyn Brooks provides a blueprint for unearthing silences. In this ode to Black women and their unprocessed hair, the Black female narrator turns away from the society in which the disrespect for Black women runs rampant, and she aims to free Black women from any doubts of their intrinsic worth. Under her careful tutelage, readers are primed to look beyond predetermined parameters to access performances of liberation. In her words: To Those of My Sisters Who Kept Their Naturals Never to look a hot comb in the teeth      Sisters!     I love you.     Because you love you.Because you are erect. Because you are also bent. In season, stern, kind. Crisp, soft – in season. And you withhold. And you extend. And you Step out. And you go back. And you extend again.Resisting societal pressure to hail the hot comb, the narrator develops an inclusive project of hair politics. The punctuation undergirds the shared sisterhood in this undertaking. First, the narrator’s opening exclamation (‘Sisters!’) demands that her intended listeners heed her call. The succinct sentence that follows (‘I love you.’) encapsulates the narrator’s message of adoration. The period at the end of each ensuing clause allows each of the sisters’ loving qualities to stand on its own, while the repeated conjunctions (‘because … and’) situate each clause as part of a collective unit. In addition to the camaraderie undergirding the poem’s opening lines, the text’s visual presentation lends itself to comparison with a single strand of curly hair. Readers who turn their head to the side when reading the entire poem will notice that it resembles an undulating curl pattern. From this angle, each staccato phrase contributes to the long curlicue of hair. The narrator uses hair as a vehicle through which she praises the resilience of Black women. Her oscillating observations enumerate the positive qualities of Black women via their hair: straight or curly, harsh or gentle, rigid or pliable, all are worthy of her love. Her embrace of passive and active vocabulary (‘you are also bent’, ‘you Step out’) further demonstrates the versatility of her subjects. Despite the unnamed forces that have bent them, they insist on forging ahead. Moreover, the narrator’s repetition of verbs of movement (‘you Step out … you go back’) counteracts the immobility that has driven some women to ‘look a hot comb in the teeth’. The narrator’s message of solidarity encourages her sisters to embark on a restorative journey toward their own liberation. Brooks’s poetic reorientations of Black identity offer a creative way to approach silences in the archives. In concert with Ngũgĩ’s appeal in 1986 for literature written in African languages, Brooks demands that readers make space for the voices of Black people. In this vein, I have carved out some space for multidimensional representations of blackness in antiquity. It is my hope that, in the future, people examine their convictions and context to ensure that they are not perpetuating silences or prejudices. The task ahead is a challenging one. Opening up reductive presumptions, teasing apart overlapping representations – not to mention addressing voices that are missing from the archive – requires committed confrontation. Nonetheless, it is only with vigorous and persistent revising of static presumptions across disciplines that we can equitably untangle the archive of blackness.

Absolutely. And some very courageous people were involved in that. You know, one of the curiosities of the Syrian regime is that this regime thrives on the prospect of crisis. When I was in Damascus early in 2012, I was told by a friend of mine, a civilian, that the regime had already begun taking down the statues of Hafez al-Assad, the old dictator and the father of the current president. In other words, very early on this regime for its own authoritarian, slightly paranoid reasons had begun secreting all of this archaeology. And according to professor Abdulkarim, they have saved already 99 percent of the museum collections within Syria. So much of what you see on the TV where you see statues, you see Nimrud, you see Palmyra being exploded - that's the outdoor archaeology which couldn't be hidden away. But there are lots of very courageous people on both sides who are working against the grain to try and save this for better days.

The courage she had, and the fight she gave, says her father, told us that we could not be silent. And it told other girls that they must stand up for themselves, save themselves. He added: Now all the sleeping girls have been awakened. Women say they won't stay quiet any longer. If injustice happens they will fight. This is a very big change and a very good thing, he says. Two and half months on, the ordeal is still raw, the events re-playing in their minds. The victim's younger brother, age 20, holds on to the image of his sister fighting back as six men assailed her.

Well, there would be less holding or less purchases by China of U.S. Treasury notes if there's an effect on that current account. So their purchases come from the fact that they sell to the outside world a lot more than they buy from the outside world, and they have to do something with that extra money. What they usually do with it is put - we think, they put most of it in U.S. Treasury. Actually, what they do with it is a fairly closely held secret. So if this extra spending means that their current account surplus becomes smaller, then there's less available to buy U.S. Treasuries, and you'd expect U.S. interest rates to go up a bit. But I'm not sure that's what's going to happen. The experts, the people who are looking very closely at China's trade pattern, are thinking that their surplus may be about the same next year as it is this year. And in any case, we're not expecting a big effect there. So that probably is not a big first-order effect.

Somewhere today, in the here and now, in the world as it is, a soldier sees he's outgunned but stands firm to keep the peace. Somewhere today, in this world, a young protestor awaits the brutality of her government but has the courage to march on. Somewhere today, a mother facing punishing poverty still takes the time to teach her child, scrapes together what few coins she has to send that child to school because she believes that a cruel world still has a place for that child's dreams. Let us live by their example. We can acknowledge that oppression will always be with us and still strive for justice. We can admit the intractability of deprivation and still strive for dignity. Clear-eyed, we can understand that there will be war and still strive for peace. We can do that, for that is the story of human progress; that's the hope of all the world; and at this moment of challenge, that must be our work here on Earth. Thank you very much.

Lieutenant Colonel BARRY JOHNSON (Spokesman, Multi-National Force Command in Baghdad): Very often, we would send in the Iraqi security forces to an area or a neighborhood, because they know it best. Because they can communicate better with the people, while the American forces will provide them some support if needed. O'HARA: Transferring more of the burden to Iraqi security forces means that more of them are getting killed. Colonel Laughrey says the data on casualties among Iraqi security forces is less reliable than the figures on Americans. But, he says the Iraqi military and police are experiencing more casualties than in the past.

Oh, that - well, one of the things that they told us was to make sure they knew exactly where to go without any fumbling around. In other words, we looked on maps. We tried to find the place. And we were directed to not seek directions from any place other than a police station if we absolutely had to, because as soon as you appeared on the front door and rang that doorbell - as soon as they opened the door, they knew. And you could see it on their face and you could just see their world collapse. And it was heart wrenching. But I felt that it was a duty that probably had the greatest importance of just about anything I ever had to do. And I did it with the greatest amount of feeling that I could without - I guess, you know, it sounds strange - but without becoming emotionally involved. Does that sound sort of strange? I guess...

I'd like to reimagine education. The last year has seen the invention of a new four-letter word. It starts with an M. MOOC: massive open online courses. Many organizations are offering these online courses to students all over the world, in the millions, for free. Anybody who has an Internet connection and the will to learn can access these great courses from excellent universities and get a credential at the end of it. Now, in this discussion today, I'm going to focus on a different aspect of MOOCs. We are taking what we are learning and the technologies we are developing in the large and applying them in the small to create a blended model of education to really reinvent and reimagine what we do in the classroom. Now, our classrooms could use change. So, here's a classroom at this little three-letter institute in the Northeast of America, MIT. And this was a classroom about 50 or 60 years ago, and this is a classroom today. What's changed? The seats are in color. Whoop-de-do. Education really hasn't changed in the past 500 years. The last big innovation in education was the printing press and the textbooks. Everything else has changed around us. You know, from healthcare to transportation, everything is different, but education hasn't changed. It's also been a real issue in terms of access. So what you see here is not a rock concert. And the person you see at the end of the stage is not Madonna. This is a classroom at the Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria. Now, we've all heard of distance education, but the students way in the back, 200 feet away from the instructor, I think they are undergoing long-distance education. Now, I really believe that we can transform education, both in quality and scale and access, through technology. For example, at edX, we are trying to transform education through online technologies. Given education has been calcified for 500 years, we really cannot think about reengineering it, micromanaging it. We really have to completely reimagine it. It's like going from ox carts to the airplane. Even the infrastructure has to change. Everything has to change. We need to go from lectures on the blackboard to online exercises, online videos. We have to go to interactive virtual laboratories and gamification. We have to go to completely online grading and peer interaction and discussion boards. Everything really has to change. So at edX and a number of other organizations, we are applying these technologies to education through MOOCs to really increase access to education. And you heard of this example, where, when we launched our very first course — and this was an MIT-hard circuits and electronics course — about a year and a half ago, 155,000 students from 162 countries enrolled in this course. And we had no marketing budget. Now, 155,000 is a big number. This number is bigger than the total number of alumni of MIT in its 150-year history. 7,200 students passed the course, and this was a hard course. 7,200 is also a big number. If I were to teach at MIT two semesters every year, I would have to teach for 40 years before I could teach this many students. Now these large numbers are just one part of the story. So today, I want to discuss a different aspect, the other side of MOOCs, take a different perspective. We are taking what we develop and learn in the large and applying it in the small to the classroom, to create a blended model of learning. But before I go into that, let me tell you a story. When my daughter turned 13, became a teenager, she stopped speaking English, and she began speaking this new language. I call it teen-lish. It's a digital language. It's got two sounds: a grunt and a silence. "Honey, come over for dinner." "Hmm." "Did you hear me?" Silence. (Laughter) "Can you listen to me?" "Hmm." So we had a real issue with communicating, and we were just not communicating, until one day I had this epiphany. I texted her. (Laughter) I got an instant response. I said, no, that must have been by accident. She must have thought, you know, some friend of hers was calling her. So I texted her again. Boom, another response. I said, this is great. And so since then, our life has changed. I text her, she responds. It's just been absolutely great. (Applause) So our millennial generation is built differently. Now, I'm older, and my youthful looks might belie that, but I'm not in the millennial generation. But our kids are really different. The millennial generation is completely comfortable with online technology. So why are we fighting it in the classroom? Let's not fight it. Let's embrace it. In fact, I believe — and I have two fat thumbs, I can't text very well — but I'm willing to bet that with evolution, our kids and their grandchildren will develop really, really little, itty-bitty thumbs to text much better, that evolution will fix all of that stuff. But what if we embraced technology, embraced the millennial generation's natural predilections, and really think about creating these online technologies, blend them into their lives. So here's what we can do. So rather than driving our kids into a classroom, herding them out there at 8 o'clock in the morning — I hated going to class at 8 o'clock in the morning, so why are we forcing our kids to do that? So instead what you do is you have them watch videos and do interactive exercises in the comfort of their dorm rooms, in their bedroom, in the dining room, in the bathroom, wherever they're most creative. Then they come into the classroom for some in-person interaction. They can have discussions amongst themselves. They can solve problems together. They can work with the professor and have the professor answer their questions. In fact, with edX, when we were teaching our first course on circuits and electronics around the world, this was happening unbeknownst to us. Two high school teachers at the Sant High School in Mongolia had flipped their classroom, and they were using our video lectures and interactive exercises, where the learners in the high school, 15-year-olds, mind you, would go and do these things in their own homes and they would come into class, and as you see from this image here, they would interact with each other and do some physical laboratory work. And the only way we discovered this was they wrote a blog and we happened to stumble upon that blog. We were also doing other pilots. So we did a pilot experimental blended courses, working with San Jose State University in California, again, with the circuits and electronics course. You'll hear that a lot. That course has become sort of like our petri dish of learning. So there, the students would, again, the instructors flipped the classroom, blended online and in person, and the results were staggering. Now don't take these results to the bank just yet. Just wait a little bit longer as we experiment with this some more, but the early results are incredible. So traditionally, semester upon semester, for the past several years, this course, again, a hard course, had a failure rate of about 40 to 41 percent every semester. With this blended class late last year, the failure rate fell to nine percent. So the results can be extremely, extremely good. Now before we go too far into this, I'd like to spend some time discussing some key ideas. What are some key ideas that makes all of this work? One idea is active learning. The idea here is, rather than have students walk into class and watch lectures, we replace this with what we call lessons. Lessons are interleaved sequences of videos and interactive exercises. So a student might watch a five-, seven-minute video and follow that with an interactive exercise. Think of this as the ultimate Socratization of education. You teach by asking questions. And this is a form of learning called active learning, and really promoted by a very early paper, in 1972, by Craik and Lockhart, where they said and discovered that learning and retention really relates strongly to the depth of mental processing. Students learn much better when they are interacting with the material. The second idea is self-pacing. Now, when I went to a lecture hall, and if you were like me, by the fifth minute I would lose the professor. I wasn't all that smart, and I would be scrambling, taking notes, and then I would lose the lecture for the rest of the hour. Instead, wouldn't it be nice with online technologies, we offer videos and interactive engagements to students? They can hit the pause button. They can rewind the professor. Heck, they can even mute the professor. So this form of self-pacing can be very helpful to learning. The third idea that we have is instant feedback. With instant feedback, the computer grades exercises. I mean, how else do you teach 150,000 students? Your computer is grading all the exercises. And we've all submitted homeworks, and your grades come back two weeks later, you've forgotten all about it. I don't think I've still received some of my homeworks from my undergraduate days. Some are never graded. So with instant feedback, students can try to apply answers. If they get it wrong, they can get instant feedback. They can try it again and try it again, and this really becomes much more engaging. They get the instant feedback, and this little green check mark that you see here is becoming somewhat of a cult symbol at edX. Learners are telling us that they go to bed at night dreaming of the green check mark. In fact, one of our learners who took the circuits course early last year, he then went on to take a software course from Berkeley at the end of the year, and this is what the learner had to say on our discussion board when he just started that course about the green check mark: "Oh god; have I missed you." When's the last time you've seen students posting comments like this about homework? My colleague Ed Bertschinger, who heads up the physics department at MIT, has this to say about instant feedback: He indicated that instant feedback turns teaching moments into learning outcomes. The next big idea is gamification. You know, all learners engage really well with interactive videos and so on. You know, they would sit down and shoot alien spaceships all day long until they get it. So we applied these gamification techniques to learning, and we can build these online laboratories. How do you teach creativity? How do you teach design? We can do this through online labs and use computing power to build these online labs. So as this little video shows here, you can engage students much like they design with Legos. So here, the learners are building a circuit with Lego-like ease. And this can also be graded by the computer. Fifth is peer learning. So here, we use discussion forums and discussions and Facebook-like interaction not as a distraction, but to really help students learn. Let me tell you a story. When we did our circuits course for the 155,000 students, I didn't sleep for three nights leading up to the launch of the course. I told my TAs, okay, 24/7, we're going to be up monitoring the forum, answering questions. They had answered questions for 100 students. How do you do that for 150,000? So one night I'm sitting up there, at 2 a.m. at night, and I think there's this question from a student from Pakistan, and he asked a question, and I said, okay, let me go and type up an answer, I don't type all that fast, and I begin typing up the answer, and before I can finish, another student from Egypt popped in with an answer, not quite right, so I'm fixing the answer, and before I can finish, a student from the U.S. had popped in with a different answer. And then I sat back, fascinated. Boom, boom, boom, boom, the students were discussing and interacting with each other, and by 4 a.m. that night, I'm totally fascinated, having this epiphany, and by 4 a.m. in the morning, they had discovered the right answer. And all I had to do was go and bless it, "Good answer." So this is absolutely amazing, where students are learning from each other, and they're telling us that they are learning by teaching. Now this is all not just in the future. This is happening today. So we are applying these blended learning pilots in a number of universities and high schools around the world, from Tsinghua in China to the National University of Mongolia in Mongolia to Berkeley in California — all over the world. And these kinds of technologies really help, the blended model can really help revolutionize education. It can also solve a practical problem of MOOCs, the business aspect. We can also license these MOOC courses to other universities, and therein lies a revenue model for MOOCs, where the university that licenses it with the professor can use these online courses like the next-generation textbook. They can use as much or as little as they like, and it becomes a tool in the teacher's arsenal. Finally, I would like to have you dream with me for a little bit. I would like us to really reimagine education. We will have to move from lecture halls to e-spaces. We have to move from books to tablets like the Aakash in India or the Raspberry Pi, 20 dollars. The Aakash is 40 dollars. We have to move from bricks-and-mortar school buildings to digital dormitories. But I think at the end of the day, I think we will still need one lecture hall in our universities. Otherwise, how else do we tell our grandchildren that your grandparents sat in that room in neat little rows like cornstalks and watched this professor at the end talk about content and, you know, you didn't even have a rewind button? Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)

This is a new day. And I have a sister who has a tattoo, got it in her 40s. Many adults I know have tattoos or are getting them. And it really should be considered a matter of personal choice. And I think that, you know, this is the - this is one of the great lessons in terms of parenting is that we try to raise our children so that by the time they're in their teens and later teens, we're turning their lives over to them. And so, you say, look, here's the story with tattoos. When you're 18, if you choose this, that's your choice. The consequences are as follows. But should you disown? I mean, it's one thing if your child chooses to get a tattoo that's so visible and if it's a symbol of hate or something that - or if it's against your religion, that's another matter. But in terms of just a personal choice, I think it should not be a deal breaker.

Well, first, I'd like to say that there have not been any violations of the planetary protection requirements by the Curiosity rover. As it turns out, the Gale Crater landing site is a place where rovers - or any spacecraft - would need to be clean, but they don't actually need to be sterile. The requirement for sterility is in order to be able to touch ice, and we don't expect there to be ice at the equator of Mars. So that was, if you will, a sort of saving grace of this whole procedure. It turned out, yes, there was this problem with the communication, that the mission planners did take the drill out of the box and put it in the drill. But as it turned out, with the Gale Crater landing site, there is no violation, and so no effect on the science operation. It should be really exciting to see what they get.

No. I did not have to wrestle with that moral question, although that's a legitimate moral, even biological, question, and I understand that. But the reason it's a little bit simpler than wrestling with it is that, in the in vitro fertilization process, they create more fertilized eggs than are needed, simply because it often doesn't work, and they don't have to re-do the process, and they keep them in a frozen state, and then as people either have children, or for whatever reason decide not to go forward, they, basically, take the embryos out of that frozen state and discard them as hospital waste. So you're, basically, talking about using those, and they're going to be discarded as hospital waste, so no matter what word you want to use, destruction, killing, you can describe it however you want, it's gonna happen anyhow, as opposed to be able to be--to use them for research with the sign-off, obviously, of everybody involved in the process, including the creators of the embryo, and, if that's the case, if that's the equation that we're dealing with, it's pretty simple. We want to help everybody in the world, particularly, Americans, with this research, and I think it should go forward.

Cults, generally speaking, are a lot like pornography: you know them when you see them. It would be hard to avoid the label on encountering (as I did, carrying out field work last year) 20 people toiling unpaid on a Christian farming compound in rural Wisconsin – people who venerated their leader as the closest thing to God’s representative on Earth. Of course, they argued vehemently that they were not a cult. Ditto for the 2,000-member church I visited outside Nashville, whose parishioners had been convinced by an ostensibly Christian diet programme to sell their houses and move to the ‘one square mile’ of the New Jerusalem promised by their charismatic church leader. Here they could eat – and live – in accordance with God and their leader’s commands. It’s easy enough, as an outsider, to say, instinctively: yes, this is a cult. Less easy, though, is identifying why. Knee-jerk reactions make for poor sociology, and delineating what, exactly, makes a cult (as opposed to a ‘proper’ religious movement) often comes down to judgment calls based on perceived legitimacy. Prod that perception of legitimacy, however, and you find value judgments based on age, tradition or ‘respectability’ (that nice middle-class couple down the street, say, as opposed to Tom Cruise jumping up and down on a couch). At the same time, the markers of cultism as applied more theoretically – a single charismatic leader, an insular structure, seeming religious ecstasy, a financial burden on members – can also be applied to any number of new or burgeoning religious movements that we don’t call cults. Often (just as with pornography), what we choose to see as a cult tells us as much about ourselves as about what we’re looking at. Historically, our obsession with cults seems to thrive in periods of wider religious uncertainty, with ‘anti-cult’ activism in the United States peaking in the 1960s and ’70s, when the US religious landscape was growing more diverse, and the sway of traditional institutions of religious power was eroding. This period, dubbed by the economic historian Robert Fogel as the ‘Fourth Great Awakening’, saw interest in personal spiritual and religious practice spike alongside a decline in mainline Protestantism, giving rise to numerous new movements. Some of these were Christian in nature, for example the ‘Jesus Movement’; others were heavily influenced by the pop-cultural ubiquity of pseudo-Eastern and New Age thought: the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (aka the Hare Krishna), modern Wicca, Scientology. Plenty of these movements were associated with young people – especially young counter-cultural people with suspicious politics – adding a particular political tenor to the discourse surrounding them. Against these there sprang a network of ‘anti-cult’ movements uniting former members of sects, their families and other objectors. Institutions such as the Cult Awareness Network (CAN) formed in 1978 after the poison fruit-drink (urban legend says Kool-Aid) suicides of Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple. The anti-cult networks believed that cults brainwashed their members (the idea of mind control, as scholars such as Margaret Singer point out, originated in media coverage of torture techniques supposedly used by North Korea during the Korean War). To counter brainwashing, activists controversially abducted and forcibly ‘deprogrammed’ members who’d fallen under a cult’s sway. CAN itself was co-founded by a professional deprogrammer, Ted Patrick, who later faced scrutiny for accepting $27,000 from the concerned parents of a woman involved in Leftist politics to, essentially, handcuff her to a bed for two weeks. But that wasn’t all. An equal and no less fervent network of what became known as counter-cult activists emerged among Christians who opposed cults on theological grounds, and who were as worried about the state of adherent’s souls as of their psyches. The Baptist pastor Walter Ralston Martin was sufficiently disturbed by the proliferation of religious pluralism in the US to write The Kingdom of the Cults (1965), which delineated in detail the theologies of those religious movements Martin identified as toxic, and provided Biblical avenues for the enterprising mainstream Christian minister to oppose them. With more than half a million copies sold, it was one of the top-selling spiritual books of the era. Writing the history of cults in the US, therefore, is also writing the history of a discourse of fear: of the unknown, of the decline in mainstream institutions, of change. Every cultish upsurge – the Mansons, the Peoples Temple, the Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church (or Moonies) – met with an equal and opposite wave of hysteria. In 1979, the US sociologists Anson D Shupe, J C Ventimiglia and David G Bromley coined the term ‘atrocity tale’ to describe lurid media narratives about the Moonies. Particularly gruesome anecdotes (often told by emotionally compromised former members) worked to place the entire religious movement beyond the bounds of cultural legitimacy and to justify extreme measures – from deprogramming to robust conservatorship laws – to prevent vulnerable people falling victim to the cultic peril. True or not, the ‘atrocity tale’ allowed anti-cult activists and families worried about their children’s wellbeing (or their suspicious politics) to replace sociological or legal arguments with emotional ones. This terror peaked when atrocity tales began outnumbering genuine horrors. The ‘Satanic panic’ of the 1980s brought with it a wave of mass hysteria over cult Satanists ritually abusing children in daycare centres, something that seems entirely to have been the product of false memories. In the now-discredited bestselling book Michelle Remembers (1980) by the psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder and his patient Michelle Smith (later, Mrs Lawrence Pazder), the lead author relates how he unlocked Smith’s memories of Satanic childhood. This influential atrocity tale influenced the three-year case in the 1980s against an administrator of the McMartin Preschool in Los Angeles and her son, a teacher, that racked up 65 crimes. The prosecution spun a fear-stoking narrative around outlandish claims, including bloody animal mutilations. The number of convictions? Zero. But mass-media hysteria made Satanic panic a national crisis, and a pastime. And yet it is impossible to dismiss anti-cult work as pure hysteria. There might not be Satanists lurking round every corner, lying in wait to kidnap children or sacrifice bunny rabbits to Satan, but the dangers of spiritual, emotional and sexual abuse in small-scale, unsupervised religious communities, particularly those isolated from the mainstream or dominant culture, is real enough. It is also keenly contemporary. The de-centred quality of the US religious landscape, the proliferation of storefront churches and ‘home churches’, not to mention the potential of the internet, makes it easier than ever for groups to splinter and fragment without the oversight of a particular religious or spiritual tradition. And some groups are, without a doubt, toxic. I’ve been to compounds, home churches and private churches where children are taught to obey community leaders so unquestioningly that they have no contact with the outside world; where the death of some children as a result of corporal punishment has gone unacknowledged by church hierarchy; or where members have died because group leaders discouraged them from seeking medical treatment. I’ve spoken to people who have left some of these movements utterly broken – having lost jobs, savings, their sense of self, and even their children (powerful religious groups frequently use child custody battles to maintain a hold over members). In one Reddit post, James Chatham, formerly a member of the Remnant Fellowship, a controversial church founded by the Christian diet guru Gwen Shamblin, listed every reason he’d been punished as a child: Allow me to give you a short list of the super-crazy [discipline] I recieved [sic] ‘Gods loving discipline’ for.Opening my eyes during a prayerJoking with adults (That joked back with me) …Saying that i don’t trust ‘Leaders’ (Their name for those that run the church) Asking almost any question about the bible.Trying to stop another kid from beating my skull in …Sneezing …Not being able to stand for 30 minutes straight with no break.Asking if my mother loved me more than god.Does such extreme disciplinarianism make the Remnant Fellowship a cult? Or does the question of labelling distract us from wider issues at hand? We label cults ‘cults’ because they’re easy pickings, even if their beliefs are no more outlandish than reincarnation The historian J Gordon Melton of Baylor University in Texas says that the word ‘cult’ is meaningless: it merely assumes a normative framework that legitimises some exertions of religious power – those associated with mainstream organisations – while condemning others. Groups that have approved, ‘orthodox’ beliefs are considered legitimate, while groups whose interpretation of a sacred text differs from established norms are delegitimised on that basis alone. Such definitions also depend on who is doing the defining. Plenty of ‘cults’ identified by anti-cult and counter-cult groups, particularly Christian counter-cult groups such as the EMNR (Evangelical Ministries to New Religions), are recognised elsewhere as ‘legitimate’ religions: Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, even the Catholic Church have all come under fire, alongside the Moonies or the Peoples Temple. To deny a so-called ‘cult’ legitimacy based on its size, or beliefs, or on atrocity tales alone is, for Melton, to play straight into normative definitions of power. We label cults ‘cults’ because they’re easy pickings, in a sense; even if their beliefs are no more outlandish, in theory, than reincarnation or the transubstantiation of the wafer in the Catholic Eucharist. In a paper delivered at the Center for Study of New Religions in Pennsylvania in 1999, Melton said: ‘we have reached a general consensus that New Religions are genuine and valid religions. A few may be bad religion and some may be led by evil people, but they are religions.’ To call a group – be it Scientology or the Moonies, or the Peoples Church – a cult is to obscure the fact that to study it and understand it properly, both sociologically and theologically, we must treat it like any other religion (Melton prefers the term ‘New Religious Movements’). His point underscores the fact that questions of legitimacy, authority and hierarchy, and of delineation between inner and outer circles, are as much the provenance of ‘classical’ religious studies as of any analysis of cults. Whatever our knee-jerk reaction to Scientology, say, and however much we know that compounds where members voluntarily hand over their savings to charismatic leaders are creepy and/or wrong, we cannot forget that the history of Christianity (and other faiths) is no less pockmarked by accusations of cultism. Each wave of so-called ‘heresy’ in the chaotic and contradictory history of the Christian churches was accompanied by a host of atrocity tales that served to legitimise one or another form of practice. This was hardly one-sided. Charges were levied against groups we might now see as ‘orthodox’ as well as at groups that history consigns to the dustbin of heresy: issues of ecclesiastical management (as in the Donatist controversy) or semantics (the heresies of Arianism, for example) could – and did – result in mutual anathema: we are the true church; you are a cult. Of course, the uncomfortable truth here is that even true church (large, established, tradition-claiming church) and cult aren’t so far apart – at least when it comes to counting up red flags. The presence of a charismatic leader? What was John Calvin? (Heck, what was Jesus Christ?) A tradition of secrecy around specialised texts or practices divulged only to select initiates? Just look at the practitioners of the Eleusinian mysteries in Ancient Greece, or contemporary mystics in a variety of spiritual traditions, from the Jewish Kabbalah to the Vajrayāna Buddhist tradition. Isolated living on a compound? Consider contemporary convents or monasteries. A financial obligation? Christianity, Judaism and Islam all promote regular tithing back into the religious community. A toxic relationship of abuse between spiritual leaders and their flock? The instances are too numerous and obvious to list. If we refuse any neat separation between cult and religion, aren’t we therefore obligated to condemn both? Only ontological metaphysical truth can possibly justify the demands that any religion makes upon its adherents. And if we take as writ the proposition that God isn’t real (or that we can never know what God wants), it’s easy to collapse the distinction with a wave of a hand: all religions are cults, and all are probably pretty bad for you. The problem with this argument is that it, too, falls down when it comes to creating labels. If we take Melton’s argument further, the debate over what makes a cult, writ large, might just as easily be relabelled: what makes a religion? Besides, accusations of cultism have been levelled at secular or semi-secular organisations as well as metaphysically inclined ones. Any organisation offering identity-building rituals and a coherent narrative of the world and how to live in it is a target, from Alcoholics Anonymous to the vegan restaurant chain the Loving Hut, founded by the Vietnamese entrepreneur-cum-spiritual leader Ching Hai, to the practice of yoga (itself rife with structural issues of spiritual and sexual abuse), to the modern phenomenon of the popular, paleo-associated sport-exercise programme CrossFit, which a Harvard Divinity School study used as an example of contemporary ‘religious’ identity. If the boundaries between cult and religion are already slippery, those between religion and culture are more porous still. In his seminal book on religion, The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), the anthropologist Clifford Geertz denies that human beings can live outside culture (what he calls the capital-M ‘Man’). Everything about how we see the world and ascribe meanings to symbols, at a linguistic as well as a spiritual level, is mediated by the semiotic network in which we operate. Religion, too, functions within culture as a series of ascriptions of meaning that define how we see ourselves, others, and the world. Geertz writes: Without further ado, then, a religion is: (1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing those conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic. Such a definition of religion isn’t limited to groups with formal doctrines about ‘God’, but encompasses any wider cultural narrative of the self in the world. Geertz’s definition – somewhat dated now – has been updated: most notably by postcolonial thinkers such as Talal Asad, who argue that Geertz overlooks one of the most significant mechanisms for meaning-making: power. How we conceive of God, our world, our spiritual values (a hunger for ‘cleansing’ in yoga, or for proof of strength, as in CrossFit, or for salvific grace) is inextricable both from our own identities and our position within a group in which questions of power are never, can never be, absent. Even the narratives that many religions, cults and religious-type groups promulgate – that they are in some sense separate from ‘the others’ (the Hebrew word for ‘holiness’, qadosh, derives from the word for separation) – are themselves tragically flawed: they are both apart from and firmly within the problems of a wider culture. Cults don’t come out of nowhere; they fill a vacuum, for individuals, and for society at large Take, for example, the cultural pervasiveness of ideals of female thinness. It is precisely the aspirational desire to be Kate-Moss skinny that allows a Christian diet programme such as Remnant to attract members in the first place (don’t eat too much; it’s a sin!). So too does it allow cults of ‘wellness’ to take hold: a woman who is already obsessed with cleansing toxins, making her body ‘perfect’ and ‘clean’, and ‘purifying’ herself is more likely to get involved with a cult-like yoga practice and/or be susceptible to sexual abuse by her guru (a not uncommon occurrence). Likewise, the no less culturally pervasive failure of mainstream institutions – from the healthcare system to mainline Protestant churches – to address the needs of their members gives rise, with equal potency, to individuals susceptible to conspiracy theories, or cultish behaviours: to anything that might provide them with meaningfulness. The very collapse of wider religious narratives – an established cultural collectivism – seems inevitably to leave space for smaller, more intense, and often more toxic groups to reconfigure those Geertzian symbols as they see fit. Cults don’t come out of nowhere; they fill a vacuum, for individuals and, as we’ve seen, for society at large. Even Christianity itself proliferated most widely as a result of a similar vacuum: the relative decline of state religious observance, and political hegemony, in the Roman Empire. After all, the converse of the argument ‘If God isn’t real then all religions are probably cults’ is this: if a given religion or cult is right, metaphysically speaking, then that rightness is the most important thing in the universe. If a deity really, truly wants you to, say, flagellate yourself with a whip (as Catholic penitents once did), or burn yourself on your husband’s funeral pyre, then no amount of commonsense reasoning can amount to a legitimate deterrent: the ultimate cosmic meaningfulness of one’s actions transcends any other potential need. And to be in a community of people who can help reinforce that truth, whose rituals and discourse and symbols help not only to strengthen a sense of meaningfulness but also to ground it in a sense of collective purpose, then that meaningfulness becomes more vital still: it sits at the core of what it is to be human. To talk about religion as a de facto abuse-vector of hierarchical power (in other words, a cult writ large) is a meaningless oversimplification. It’s less an arrow than a circle: a cycle of power, meaning, identity, and ritual. We define ourselves by participating in something, just as we define ourselves against those who don’t participate in something. Our understanding of ourselves – whether we’re cradle Catholics, newly joined-up members of the Hare Krishna, or members of a particularly rabid internet fandom – as people whose actions have cosmic if not metaphysical significance gives us a symbolic framework in which to live our lives, even as it proscribes our options. Every time we repeat a ritual, from the Catholic Mass to a prayer circle on a farm compound to a CrossFit workout, it defines us – and we define the people around us. Today’s cults might be secular, or they might be theistic. But they arise from the same place of need, and from the failure of other, more ‘mainstream’ cultural institutions to fill it. If God did not exist, as Voltaire said, we would have to invent him. The same is true for cults.

According to legend, once every thousand years a host of sea monsters emerges from the depths to demand tribute from the floating city of Atlantartica. As the ruler of the city, you’d always dismissed the stories… until today, when 7 Leviathan Lords rose out of the roiling waters and surrounded your city. Each commands 10 giant kraken, and each kraken is accompanied by 12 mermites. Your city’s puny army is hopelessly outmatched. You think back to the legends. In the stories, the ruler of the city saved his people by feeding the creatures a ransom of pearls. The pearls would be split equally between the leviathans lords. Each leviathan would then divide its share into 11 equal piles, keeping one, and giving the other 10 to their kraken commanders. Each kraken would then divide its share into 13 equal piles, keeping one, and distributing the other twelve to their mermite minions. If any one of these divisions left an unequal pile or leftover pearl, the monsters would pull everyone to the bottom of the sea. Such was the fate of your fabled sister city. You rush to the ancient treasure room and find five chests, each containing a precisely counted number of pearls prepared by your ancestors for exactly this purpose. Each of the chests bears a number telling how many pearls it contains. Unfortunately, the symbols they used to write digits 1,000 years ago have changed with time, and you don’t know how to read the ancient numbers. With hundreds of thousands of pearls in each chest, there’s no time to recount. One of these chests will save your city and the rest will lead to its certain doom. Which do you choose? Pause the video to figure it out yourself. Answer in 3 Answer in 2 Answer in 1 There isn’t enough information to decode the ancient Atlantartican numeral system. But all hope is not lost, because there’s another piece of information those symbols contain: patterns. If we can find a matching pattern in arabic numerals, we can still pick the right chest. Let’s take stock of what we know. A quantity of pearls that can appease the sea monsters must be divisible by 7, 11, and 13. Rather than trying out numbers at random, let’s examine ones that have this property and see if there are any patterns that unite them. Being divisible by 7, 11, and 13 means that our number must be a multiple of 7, 11, and 13. Those three numbers are all prime, so multiplying them together will give us their least common multiple: 1001. That’s a useful starting place because we now know that any viable offering to the sea monsters must be a multiple of 1001. Let’s try multiplying it by a three digit number, just to get a feel for what we might get. If we try 861 times 1001, we get 861,861, and we see something similar with other examples. It’s a peculiar pattern. Why would multiplying a three-digit number by 1001 end up giving you two copies of that number, written one after the other? Breaking down the multiplication problem can give us the answer. 1001 times any number x is equal to 1000x + x. For example, 725 times 1000 is 725,000, and 725 x 1 is 725. So 725 x 1001 will be the sum of those two numbers: 725,725. And there’s nothing special about 725. Pick any three-digit number, and your final product will have that many thousands, plus one more. Even though you don’t know how to read the numbers on the chests, you can read which pattern of digits represents a number divisible by 1001. As with many problems, trying concrete examples can give you an intuition for behavior that may at first look abstract and mysterious. The monsters accept your ransom and swim back down to the depths for another thousand years. With the proper planning, that should give you plenty of time to prepare for their inevitable return.

Imagine that when you walked in here this evening, you discovered that everybody in the room looked almost exactly the same: ageless, raceless, generically good-looking. That person sitting right next to you might have the most idiosyncratic inner life, but you don't have a clue because we're all wearing the same blank expression all the time. That is the kind of creepy transformation that is taking over cities, only it applies to buildings, not people. Cities are full of roughness and shadow, texture and color. You can still find architectural surfaces of great individuality and character in apartment buildings in Riga and Yemen, social housing in Vienna, Hopi villages in Arizona, brownstones in New York, wooden houses in San Francisco. These aren't palaces or cathedrals. These are just ordinary residences expressing the ordinary splendor of cities. And the reason they're like that is that the need for shelter is so bound up with the human desire for beauty. Their rough surfaces give us a touchable city. Right? Streets that you can read by running your fingers over brick and stone. But that's getting harder to do, because cities are becoming smooth. New downtowns sprout towers that are almost always made of concrete and steel and covered in glass. You can look at skylines all over the world — Houston, Guangzhou, Frankfurt — and you see the same army of high-gloss robots marching over the horizon. Now, just think of everything we lose when architects stop using the full range of available materials. When we reject granite and limestone and sandstone and wood and copper and terra-cotta and brick and wattle and plaster, we simplify architecture and we impoverish cities. It's as if you reduced all of the world's cuisines down to airline food. (Laughter) Chicken or pasta? But worse still, assemblies of glass towers like this one in Moscow suggest a disdain for the civic and communal aspects of urban living. Right? Buildings like these are intended to enrich their owners and tenants, but not necessarily the lives of the rest of us, those of us who navigate the spaces between the buildings. And we expect to do so for free. Shiny towers are an invasive species and they are choking our cities and killing off public space. We tend to think of a facade as being like makeup, a decorative layer applied at the end to a building that's effectively complete. But just because a facade is superficial doesn't mean it's not also deep. Let me give you an example of how a city's surfaces affect the way we live in it. When I visited Salamanca in Spain, I gravitated to the Plaza Mayor at all hours of the day. Early in the morning, sunlight rakes the facades, sharpening shadows, and at night, lamplight segments the buildings into hundreds of distinct areas, balconies and windows and arcades, each one a separate pocket of visual activity. That detail and depth, that glamour gives the plaza a theatrical quality. It becomes a stage where the generations can meet. You have teenagers sprawling on the pavers, seniors monopolizing the benches, and real life starts to look like an opera set. The curtain goes up on Salamanca. So just because I'm talking about the exteriors of buildings, not form, not function, not structure, even so those surfaces give texture to our lives, because buildings create the spaces around them, and those spaces can draw people in or push them away. And the difference often has to do with the quality of those exteriors. So one contemporary equivalent of the Plaza Mayor in Salamanca is the Place de la Défense in Paris, a windswept, glass-walled open space that office workers hurry through on the way from the metro to their cubicles but otherwise spend as little time in as possible. In the early 1980s, the architect Philip Johnson tried to recreate a gracious European plaza in Pittsburgh. This is PPG Place, a half acre of open space encircled by commercial buildings made of mirrored glass. And he ornamented those buildings with metal trim and bays and Gothic turrets which really pop on the skyline. But at ground level, the plaza feels like a black glass cage. I mean, sure, in summertime kids are running back and forth through the fountain and there's ice-skating in the winter, but it lacks the informality of a leisurely hangout. It's just not the sort of place you really want to just hang out and chat. Public spaces thrive or fail for many different reasons. Architecture is only one, but it's an important one. Some recent plazas like Federation Square in Melbourne or Superkilen in Copenhagen succeed because they combine old and new, rough and smooth, neutral and bright colors, and because they don't rely excessively on glass. Now, I'm not against glass. It's an ancient and versatile material. It's easy to manufacture and transport and install and replace and clean. It comes in everything from enormous, ultraclear sheets to translucent bricks. New coatings make it change mood in the shifting light. In expensive cities like New York, it has the magical power of being able to multiply real estate values by allowing views, which is really the only commodity that developers have to offer to justify those surreal prices. In the middle of the 19th century, with the construction of the Crystal Palace in London, glass leapt to the top of the list of quintessentially modern substances. By the mid-20th century, it had come to dominate the downtowns of some American cities, largely through some really spectacular office buildings like Lever House in midtown Manhattan, designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. Eventually, the technology advanced to the point where architects could design structures so transparent they practically disappear. And along the way, glass became the default material of the high-rise city, and there's a very powerful reason for that. Because as the world's populations converge on cities, the least fortunate pack into jerry-built shantytowns. But hundreds of millions of people need apartments and places to work in ever-larger buildings, so it makes economic sense to put up towers and wrap them in cheap and practical curtain walls. But glass has a limited ability to be expressive. This is a section of wall framing a plaza in the pre-Hispanic city of Mitla, in southern Mexico. Those 2,000-year-old carvings make it clear that this was a place of high ritual significance. Today we look at those and we can see a historical and textural continuity between those carvings, the mountains all around and that church which is built on top of the ruins using stone plundered from the site. In nearby Oaxaca, even ordinary plaster buildings become canvasses for bright colors, political murals and sophisticated graphic arts. It's an intricate, communicative language that an epidemic of glass would simply wipe out. The good news is that architects and developers have begun to rediscover the joys of texture without backing away from modernity. Some find innovative uses for old materials like brick and terra-cotta. Others invent new products like the molded panels that Snøhetta used to give the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art that crinkly, sculptural quality. The architect Stefano Boeri even created living facades. This is his Vertical Forest, a pair of apartment towers in Milan, whose most visible feature is greenery. And Boeri is designing a version of this for Nanjing in China. And imagine if green facades were as ubiquitous as glass ones how much cleaner the air in Chinese cities would become. But the truth is that these are mostly one-offs, boutique projects, not easily reproduced at a global scale. And that is the point. When you use materials that have a local significance, you prevent cities from all looking the same. Copper has a long history in New York — the Statue of Liberty, the crown of the Woolworth Building — but it fell out of fashion for a long time until SHoP Architects used it to cover the American Copper Building, a pair of twisting towers on the East River. It's not even finished and you can see the way sunset lights up that metallic facade, which will weather to green as it ages. Buildings can be like people. Their faces broadcast their experience. And that's an important point, because when glass ages, you just replace it, and the building looks pretty much the same way it did before until eventually it's demolished. Almost all other materials have the ability to absorb infusions of history and memory, and project it into the present. The firm Ennead clad the Utah Natural History Museum in Salt Lake City in copper and zinc, ores that have been mined in the area for 150 years and that also camouflage the building against the ochre hills so that you have a natural history museum that reflects the region's natural history. And when the Chinese Pritzker Prize winner Wang Shu was building a history museum in Ningbo, he didn't just create a wrapper for the past, he built memory right into the walls by using brick and stones and shingles salvaged from villages that had been demolished. Now, architects can use glass in equally lyrical and inventive ways. Here in New York, two buildings, one by Jean Nouvel and this one by Frank Gehry face off across West 19th Street, and the play of reflections that they toss back and forth is like a symphony in light. But when a city defaults to glass as it grows, it becomes a hall of mirrors, disquieting and cold. After all, cities are places of concentrated variety where the world's cultures and languages and lifestyles come together and mingle. So rather than encase all that variety and diversity in buildings of crushing sameness, we should have an architecture that honors the full range of the urban experience. Thank you. (Applause)

Well, I know that, I know that, you know, there's a lot of people who think that, you know, impact on a few individual machines, you know, could have a big effect. And then the other comment I've got is on the notion of having a sort of a receipt. You know, we've got several hundred years of practicing elections, the whole point of which has been to keep the ballots secret, to not have any kind of proof as to how a particular - which way a particular person voted. You know, the notion of that was to prevent voter fraud. You give him a receipt, they take it back to, you know, whoever put them up to this and they can prove how they voted…

Hi. I'm on the road so I don't know if I'll lose you with my cell phone. If I do, I'll just listen to your answer. I just have a quick question for Elizabeth about 15-year fixed rate mortgages versus 10-year fixed rate mortgages versus 30. Is there a reason why one should do a 30-year fixed mortgage over a 15-year fixed mortgage if one has the - in their budget - a monthly, the monthly payment enough to pay for a 15-year mortgage in terms of investing that money in something else? And I'll just listen to your question, or your answer.

Hi. This seems to be an example of a phenomenon that I find very troubling, which is the - what seems like the increasing frequency of proxy fighting proxies, like, if Israel is bombing Syria so the United States can send a message to Iran, it seems like more and more, what was, you know, Hamas and Hezbollah, being a proxy for Iran and, you know, the Pakistani intelligence forces kind of operating through forces in Afghanistan. If you can kind of separate yourself from accountability for your actions and you empower other parties to act for you, doesn't this kind of open a whole can of worms that could be very dangerous?

Well, I'm not as optimistic as Mary is today. Of course, she is there so I have to yield to some respects to what she sees there. Actually, when I speak with people from New Orleans, they pretty much reflect the attitude that Bob Herbert wrote recently in a New York Times piece in which he called it - New Orleans is an open wound. And when I think about how America is basically perceiving New Orleans now, I think we know more about the record of the New Orleans Saints, the football team, than we actually know about what people are dealing with. And I think when you read about New Orleans or when you see reports, there's not much good news coming.

So the city of Fargo had very minimal damage to property. You know, there are some streets that will need some work and so forth, and there's a lot of cleanup, probably $3 million worth of cleanup, tearing down some of the dikes that the corps of engineers built and so forth. So, no, things are good in the city limits right now. The process where it is more difficult is in the western - in our western county or Cass. They have a lot of overland flooding. There's a lot of farms that are still getting to their farms by boats from roads that are built a little higher and so forth.

I saw him coming out of the administration building, and I was kind of thrilled, and I watched him proceed up to the stage. I was sitting fairly close. And everybody was sitting anxiously waiting for him. There was a great burst of rain just before he spoke. And then the skies cleared as if, you know, God was about to speak and descend on the people. And he raised his hand, sort of, and, you know, acknowledged the standing ovation. He obviously loves adulation. His personality is geared for that sort of thing. And he had no notes - from what I could tell - and he spoke offhandedly for 20 minutes, reflecting on how awful the world is and what can we do to change the world. And he said, basically, we've got to have a sense of community.

Right. I was--it was shortly after the election, and all my friends were kind of sulky and whiny, saying, 'Oh, we should secede' or 'We have to move to Canada,' and so forth. And I was thinking of ways to cheer them up and I thought, well, they could read the works of the stoic philosophers, but that's maybe not the most constructive thing. And then I thought, 'Wait a minute. There might be a silver lining in this.' Bush, in a way, might be our friend, and the reasoning is this: If you live in one of the blue states that voted for Kerry, you're probably living in one of the more prosperous regions of the country. The liberal enclaves are, you know, on the coast, in cities like New York and Boston; and the West Coast and the Great Lakes states. And that part of the country, there's a greater part of the federal tax burden than the red states that voted for Bush. Now Bush, of course, has already lowered our taxes twice, in 2001 and 2003, I believe, and when he did that, he made things easier on the blue states. Because, in fact, the blue states send more money to Washington than they get back and the red states get back more than they send. So the blue states, where the liberals by and large live, are actually subsidizing the red states. And I remember this, you know, came vividly to mind years ago when Newt Gingrich was railing against the federal government and someone pointed out that, you know, 'Hey, Newt Gingrich's congressional district gets much more from Washington than they send in.' So actually, his district is sort of the welfare case, dependent on the federal government.

Carrion is more accepting of the statue, especially since it was bringing in tourists. But Puerto Rico's indigenous people, the Tainos, bitterly objected, citing Columbus's infamous treatment of Indians here and throughout the Americas. The sculpture's modern-day journey to Arecibo was controversial, too. Its Russian creator originally offered it to several U.S. cities. All of them declined. Puerto Rico accepted but kept the huge pieces in storage for more than a decade. Ricardo Dominich, an Army veteran, says he's thrilled the statue finally landed in Arecibo. He just hopes his town sees better times soon. They still don't have water, electricity or cell service.

Oh, they were tremendously interested in global warming because they had - by this time, during the 1800s, they discovered that Europe had once been covered by glaciers and that the shape of Europe was shaped by these glacial retreats. And they very much - it was very much part of the itinerary for the Discovery expedition and then the Nimrod and the Terra Nova was that this is one place where they could study the glaciers that are still of the size that were in Europe. They noted the retreat, and they documented the retreat of the glaciers in Antarctica. They were talking about - they were trying to study how much had retreated, how it moved out of dry valleys. Scott had discovered the first dry valleys in the Antarctic during his Discovery expedition. They were documenting global warming, climate change over time.

Especially after 2016, there have been lots of shifts in the West as well - in Europe, too. And many people, unfortunately, the elections in America did not make things easier. Many people started questioning, can we really trust the ballot box? Can the ballot box be manipulated? I think we're all going through very turbulent times. In the past, there used to be this assumption that some parts of the world were liquid lands and there were more turbulence. And some other parts of the world - namely the West - was supposed to be more safe and stable and solid. But I think more and more, we're starting to understand that, in fact, this division, this hierarchal geography is quite artificial. And, in fact, we're all living in liquid times like the late Zygmunt Bauman told us years ago.

Such concerns kept neither Nelson nor a dozen Republicans from voting in late May for $33 billion in funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - all of which would add to the deficit. The House passed that war funding last week, but because the House added $10 billion to keep teachers from being laid off, the bill once again needs the Senate's approval. That will likely be contentious, as will the Senate's consideration of the annual defense authorization bill. Some Republicans are threatening to filibuster that measure because it contains a provision they strongly oppose -a repeal of the don't ask, don't tell policy that prohibits openly gay people from serving in the military.

Indeed, and we covered her passing on NPR. Now Miriam Makeba was known as Mama Africa, the mother of Africa, because she was probably the best-known African singer in the world, not just a woman singer. Because she embodied not only the pan-African spirit of the 1960s when she lived in exile in the United States. But of course, she embodied the anti-apartheid struggle in exile through song. But she really embraced the whole continent. She came from South Africa, she said, South Africa which, in a way, was cut off from the rest of the continent, but she got to know Africa so well. She traveled extensively. She sang with liberation struggle leaders, those who were fighting for independence. And she said that it was so important for her to see black African presidents at the start of the organization of African Unity. She said it was, there was such a vision, such a passion, Africans working together. And that was really very much in her music throughout her more than 50 years as a singer.

We're going to start today's program by looking ahead to an important vote expected this week in the U.S. House on immigration - something that's become one of this country's most polarizing issues. Actually, there could be two votes because there are two different bills, both drafted solely by Republicans, who, as you probably know, currently control both houses of Congress. One is sponsored by Congressman Bob Goodlatte. It's considered a hard-line measure that would cut legal immigration sharply and give only temporary status to the group known as DREAMers. Those are young people brought to the U.S. illegally as children. The other being circulated by the House leadership is being described as a compromise. It would give DREAMers greater legal protections and offer a slow route to a more permanent legal status, but it would also cut legal immigration and set aside billions to fund a border wall. And this is all taking place against the backdrop of an issue that's captured much attention this week - the Trump administration's policy of separating children from parents seeking asylum at the southern border, part of their zero tolerance policy toward border crossers. We wanted to hear from someone who has been deeply involved in the immigration debate, so we've called Congressman Jeff Denham of California. He is a Republican. He is running for re-election in a competitive district, and it's a diverse district that has almost equal numbers of white and Latino voters, and he's on the line with us now.

And that was continued right through to Scott's day, and my great-uncle, on his first expedition, was the sort of last practitioner where pencil and paper was more important than the camera as a means of making a scientific record. But Scott was - you know, he's from that era where science and human progress were taken as goods. You know, it's before our cynical age, after World War I and Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II - you know, human progress was considered an unmitigated good. And he believed that the camera and modern technology could open up the polar regions.

In the lobby of a fancy hotel in Madrid, Arabs and Israelis who were here 15 years ago greet each other warmly. There are smiles and laughs, sometimes even hugs and kisses. There was Palestinian legislator Hanan Ashrawi, former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami, former Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmad Maher, and the former Jordanian Prime Minister Abdul Salam Majali. Many personal relationships have survived, even flourished, despite the flaring hatreds between their peoples. But two Syrians sitting at a table in the corner want nothing of the camaraderie. One is President Bashar Assad's legal adviser, Riad Daoudi. The other, Bushra Kanafani, is a foreign ministry spokeswoman.

I think that they will there are plenty of things that people in the military disagree with that they do because that's our job. I mean, you know, we serve in the military because we love our country. We may not agree with the administration, but it doesn't matter. There should be I think our military should reflect our country, and our country includes people who are homosexuals. I personally, I am an atheist, and until very recently, I didn't feel comfortable saying that around my colleagues. But now in the military, it's a climate of acceptance, and I can say whatever I feel about my belief system, and there's mutual respect among my colleagues.

You’re overseeing the delivery of crucial supplies to a rebel base deep in the heart of enemy territory. To get past Imperial customs, all packages must follow a strict protocol: if a box is marked with an even number on the bottom, it must be sealed with a red top. The boxes are already being loaded onto the transport when you receive an urgent message. One of the four boxes was sealed incorrectly, but they lost track of which one. All the boxes are still on the conveyor belt. Two are facing down: one marked with a four, and one with a seven. The other two are facing up: one with a black top, another with a red one. You know that any violation of the protocol will get the entire shipment confiscated and put your allies in grave danger. But any boxes you pull off for inspection won’t make it onto this delivery run, depriving the rebels of critically needed supplies. The transport leaves in a few moments, with or without its cargo. Which box or boxes should you grab off the conveyor belt? Pause the video now if you want to figure it out for yourself! Answer in: 3 Answer in: 2 Answer in: 1 It may seem like you need to inspect all four boxes to see what’s on the other side of each. But in fact, only two of them matter. Let’s look at the protocol again. All it says is that even-numbered boxes must have a red top. It doesn’t say anything about odd-numbered boxes, so we can just ignore the box marked with a seven. What about the box with a red top? Don’t we need to check that the number on the bottom is even? As it turns out, we don’t. The protocol says that if a box has an even number, then it should have a red top. It doesn’t say that only boxes with even numbers can have red tops, or that a box with a red top must have an even number. The requirement only goes in one direction. So we don’t need to check the box with the red lid. We do, however, need to check the one with the black lid, to make sure it wasn’t incorrectly placed on an even-numbered box. If you initially assumed the rules imply a symmetrical match between the number on the box and the type of lid, you’re not alone. That error is so common, we even have a name for it: affirming the consequent, or the fallacy of the converse. This fallacy wrongly assumes that just because a certain condition is necessary for a given result, it must also be sufficient for it. For instance, having an atmosphere is a necessary condition for being a habitable planet. But this doesn’t mean that it’s a sufficient condition – planets like Venus have atmospheres but lack other criteria for habitability. If that still seems hard to wrap your head around, let’s look at a slightly different problem. Imagine the boxes contain groceries. You see one marked for shipment to a steakhouse and one to a vegetarian restaurant. Then you see two more boxes turned upside down: one labeled as containing meat, and another as containing onions. Which ones do you need to check? Well, it’s easy – make sure the meat isn’t being shipped to the vegetarian restaurant, and that the box going there doesn’t contain meat. The onions can go to either place, and the box bound for the steakhouse can contain either product. Why does this scenario seem easier? Formally, it’s the same problem – two possible conditions for the top of the box, and two for the bottom. But in this case, they’re based on familiar real-world needs, and we easily understand that while vegetarians only eat vegetables, they’re not the only ones who do so. In the original problem, the rules seemed more arbitrary, and when they’re abstracted that way, the logical connections become harder to see. In your case, you’ve managed to get enough supplies through to enable the resistance to fight another day. And you did it by thinking outside the box – both sides of it.

Well, he has never hidden his dislike for the inter-religious meetings John Paul promoted, fearing the faithful would get the impression that Catholicism and Islam are on the same footing. Moreover, this is a Eurocentric pope, and one of his prime concerns is Europe's loss of faith and the memory of its Christian roots. Many analysts say that Benedict fears that in an increasingly secular and multi-cultural Europe, Catholicism will become just one option on the religious table. At the same time, he sees Muslim immigrants in Europe as more comfortable and self-assured in manifesting their religion, and therefore as a threat to Christian values.

This is - this virus is actually a great therapeutic candidate mostly because we know it's extremely safe in humans. It's been used probably for over 200 years now to vaccinate young children, to protect them from infection from smallpox disease. And so we know we it has an incredibly safe safety record. It's been used around the world hundreds of millions of times and is very, very safe. It also has an ability to travel within the blood system. We knew that from the biology that's been discovered by many other groups. And it has a large what we call cloning capacity or ability to carry extra genetic payloads, which allow us to arm it and make it even more potent.

And there's another price residents of Shanghai are paying for development: air pollution. The last few days, air pollution approached hazardous levels there. The same is true in the capital city of Beijing and across north and east-central China. A thick, heavy fog moved into the region Monday, trapping smog and wreaking havoc on airports and highways, some of which had to be shut down. As visibility dropped, the Shanghai Daily reported, that traffic police were called at one point to rescue 10 people who had mistakenly walked onto a major elevated road and gotten lost. A Shanghai meteorologist blamed the fog on high humidity, then a dramatic drop in temperature. The fog and smog are expected to stick around for several more days.

15th century Europeans believed they had hit upon a miracle cure: a remedy for epilepsy, hemorrhage, bruising, nausea, and virtually any other medical ailment. This brown powder could be mixed into drinks, made into salves or eaten straight up. It was known as mumia and made by grinding up mummified human flesh. The word "cannibal" dates from the time of Christopher Columbus; in fact, Columbus may even have coined it himself. After coming ashore on the island of Guadaloupe, Columbus' initial reports back to the Queen of Spain described the indigenous people as friendly and peaceful— though he did mention rumors of a group called the Caribs, who made violent raids and then cooked and ate their prisoners. In response, Queen Isabella granted permission to capture and enslave anyone who ate human flesh. When the island failed to produce the gold Columbus was looking for, he began to label anyone who resisted his plundering and kidnapping as a Caribe. Somewhere along the way, the word "Carib" became "Canibe" and then "Cannibal." First used by colonizers to dehumanize indigenous people, it has since been applied to anyone who eats human flesh. So the term comes from an account that wasn't based on hard evidence, but cannibalism does have a real and much more complex history. It has taken diverse forms— sometimes, as with mumia, it doesn't involved recognizable parts of the human body. The reasons for cannibalistic practices have varied, too. Across cultures and time periods, there's evidence of survival cannibalism, when people living through a famine, siege or ill-fated expedition had to either eat the bodies of the dead or starve to death themselves. But it's also been quite common for cultures to normalize some form of eating human flesh under ordinary circumstances. Because of false accounts like Columbus's, it's difficult to say exactly how common cultural cannibalism has been— but there are still some examples of accepted cannibalistic practices from within the cultures practicing them. Take the medicinal cannibalism in Europe during Columbus's time. Starting in the 15th century, the demand for mumia increased. At first, stolen mummies from Egypt supplied the mumia craze, but soon the demand was too great to be sustained on Egyptian mummies alone, and opportunists stole bodies from European cemeteries to turn into mumia. Use of mumia continued for hundreds of years. It was listed in the Merck index, a popular medical encyclopedia, into the 20th century. And ground up mummies were far from the only remedy made from human flesh that was common throughout Europe. Blood, in either liquid or powdered form, was used to treat epilepsy, while human liver, gall stones, oil distilled from human brains, and pulverized hearts were popular medical concoctions. In China, the written record of socially accepted cannibalism goes back almost 2,000 years. One particularly common form of cannibalism appears to have been filial cannibalism, where adult sons and daughters would offer a piece of their own flesh to their parents. This was typically offered as a last-ditch attempt to cure a sick parent, and wasn't fatal to their offspring— it usually involved flesh from the thigh or, less often, a finger. Cannibalistic funerary rites are another form of culturally sanctioned cannibalism. Perhaps the best-known example came from the Fore people of New Guinea. Through the mid-20th century, members of the community would, if possible, make their funerary preferences known in advance, sometimes requesting that family members gather to consume the body after death. Tragically, though these rituals honored the deceased, they also spread a deadly disease known as kuru through the community. Between the fictionalized stories, verifiable practices, and big gaps that still exist in our knowledge, there's no one history of cannibalism. But we do know that people have been eating each other, volunteering themselves to be eaten, and accusing others of eating people for millennia.

Who were the Neanderthals? Even for archaeologists working at the trowel’s edge of contemporary science, it can be hard to see Neanderthals as anything more than intriguing abstractions, mixed up with the likes of mammoths, woolly rhinos and sabre-toothed cats. But they were certainly here: squinting against sunrises, sucking lungfuls of air, leaving footprints behind in the mud, sand and snow. Crouching to dig in a cave or rock-shelter, I’ve often wondered what it would be like to watch history rewind, and see the empty spaces leap with shifting, living shadows: to collapse time, reach out, and allow my skin to graze the warmth of a Neanderthal body, squatting right there beside me. The business of archaeology is about summoning wraiths from the graveyards of millennia, after the vagaries of decay and erosion have done their work. Everything begins as fragments. Yet in recent years, poring over these shards has produced a revolution in our understanding of Neanderthals. Contrary to what we once thought, they were far from brutish, ‘lesser’ beings, or mere evolutionary losers on a withered branch of our family tree. Rather, the invention of new dating techniques, analysis of thousands more fossils and artefacts, and advances in ancient DNA research have collectively revealed the extent to which the lives of Neanderthals are braided together with our own. When Western science first encountered the Neanderthals in 1856, they were a jumble of bones – one of which was a broken skull dome. Blasted out of the rock by a pair of Italian miners in the Kleine Feldhofer cave in Germany’s Neander Valley (‘Neandertal’), enough remained of the weirdly flat skull with colossal brow ridges to hint at something alien yet human-like. The upper face bespoke a prodigious nose between cavernous eye sockets; there were also limb bones, bulkier than any known human’s. From the beginning, Neanderthals, dubbed Homo neanderthalensis, were tantalising in their incompleteness. Shortly after, an entire skull emerged at the other end of Europe: in Gibraltar (on British soil, no less, to the delight of the London intelligentsia). The Forbes’ Quarry skull had actually been found some years earlier, in 1848, but had gone mostly unremarked in a museum collection. The bone itself was hidden by a coating of hardened sediment, and its nature obscured by the fact that nobody was primed to ‘see’ extinct hominins (the group of primates that includes humans, our immediate ancestors and other vanished human species). But in December 1863, Thomas Hodgkin, a visiting physician with experience in ethnography and anatomy, recognised the skull’s significance. He suggested it be sent to his friend George Busk, who had translated the analysis of the Feldhofer bones from German. When the skull arrived in London in July 1864, it removed any uncertainty about the Neanderthals’ link to us: lacking a primitive ape-like muzzle, these apparitions from an unknown aeon were decidedly and disturbingly human-like. In the wake of this first flurry of discoveries, further Neanderthal specimens sprang up across Europe – until in 1908, a nearly complete skeleton of an adult male was disinterred from the La Chapelle-aux-Saints cave in France. The publication of the find included illustrations made with cutting-edge Edwardian technology, in the form of 3D ‘stereo’ photographs. Reconstructions of the ‘Old Man’ of La Chapelle varied widely from hairy ‘ape man’ to a tidy-bearded – albeit shirtless – member of the bourgeoisie. But anatomically, at least, it was no longer possible to argue that he and his kind were closer to nonhuman animals than to living people. Now scholars began asking the deeper question: so Neanderthals looked the part, but were they truly ‘people’, like us? Societies have long obsessed about what separates humans from nature. The question goes far deeper than surface appearances. The reality of the Neanderthals – predicted nowhere in religious texts or the science of the day – represented a profound culture shock to the mid-Victorian worldview. The rise of geology and palaeontology, and Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace’s presentation of the evidence for natural selection in 1858, amplified the shock. There was no way the world was just a few thousand years old, or that humans were fashioned wholesale from on-high. If Genesis could not be trusted, then what could? Scientific discoveries never occur in a social vacuum. The Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus formalised the ladder of life in 1758, when he crowned white European males as the ‘type specimen’ of our species. At a stroke of his pen, everyone else on the planet was demoted to a nonstandard, inferior version of humanity – identified by supposedly less advanced physiques, character and culture. In such a world, it was logical that the skull and bones from the Neander Valley were immediately compared with ethnic groups branded the most ‘brutal’ by their colonisers. In 1863, the English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley claimed a striking similarity between Neanderthal brow ridges and the ‘lowering, threatening expression’ he perceived in the skulls of Aboriginal peoples – ignoring the clear difference in anatomical shape. The European intellectual elite were mostly blind to the possibility that Neanderthals were evidence of a common heritage for living people. Instead, they saw ‘scientific’ proof of the racist hierarchies that positioned non-Europeans as less evolved – although remaining puzzled that ‘savages’ nevertheless appeared to possess brains as big as those filling their own top hats. Up until the 1960s, scientists were still publishing theories of human evolution proposing that different races had budded off the human family tree sooner than others, with Caucasians the most recent arrivals, and therefore the least ‘primitive’. It’s now clear that Neanderthals weren’t any less ‘evolved’ than us These ideas have cast a long shadow over the study of Neanderthals. While the science has advanced dramatically in the past decade, popular perceptions and media coverage are still catching up. The big picture now points to early hominins evolving in Africa before dispersing outward in waves. In Europe, Neanderthals appeared in fossil records as a distinct population more than 400,000 years ago, and went on to occupy a vast swathe of Eurasia. Then they vanished 42,000-40,000 years ago. This period also witnessed the appearance in Europe of another hominin species: us, Homo sapiens. For decades, most of the scientific community believed this conjunction implied causation. It was assumed that humans replaced Neanderthals without interbreeding – the implication being that Neanderthals could not compete with our ‘superior’ capacities. Influential theories typecast them as creatures who were intrinsically antisocial, even to their own kind. Palaeoanthropologists believed that Neanderthals’ social networks resembled chimpanzees’, in which members tend to treat ‘out-group’ counterparts as enemies to be driven away or eliminated, not fellows with whom to communicate or interact. This inference stemmed from the fact that Neanderthals generally moved their tools short distances from the source of the stone to the site where they were discovered – brushing aside the rare but widespread presence of artefact transfers over 100 km. However, it’s now clear that Neanderthals weren’t any less ‘evolved’ than us. Nor is there much decisive evidence that they were fundamentally less social or less inclined to mingle with those outside their tribe. They simply travelled on their own path, running roughly in parallel to ours, albeit with different twists and turns in the trail. They were not parochial cul-de-sac Europeans, but instead lived across immensely varied lands well into Asia – even towards the shores of the Pacific, if some Chinese stone tools are any indicator. They were capable hunters and knowledgeable gatherers; artisan crafters across a range of materials. Weathering multiple glacial cycles, they survived extreme climate change as rapid and severe as the worst predictions for the coming centuries. Exploring who the Neanderthals really were is complex, not least because each facet of their lives was interconnected. Finding out what they ate – in some cases, based on the microscopic remains of food found cemented between their teeth – can shed light on where they went, how often they moved around, and whether they planned ahead. At first, researchers assumed that Neanderthals were hunters; one of the very earliest reconstruction drawings included a spear, and by the late-19th century archaeologists were looking out for traces of butchered animal remains. Yet because many more sites were preserved from glacial periods than warm climates, scientists concluded that Neanderthals must have lived predominantly in harsh environments, where they barely clung on. By the 1960s, it was widely believed that Neanderthals were primarily carnivores who dwelt in frigid surroundings with very little vegetation. This was in part based on ignorance of Indigenous plant use in comparable habitats, but also because anthropology was male-dominated, and particularly focused on the lives of big-game hunters. Reactions against this perspective, however – including from feminist scholars – pointed out that a significant proportion of calories came from the ‘slow and steady’ second part of the hunter-gatherer equation: not only plants, but small-game hunting and fishing. In reality, people who live by foraging are deeply embedded in their environment, and everyone, including women, elders and young children, takes part. These shifts in perspective brought plants and creatures such as birds back into the picture, but their evidence among Neanderthals remained elusive in the archaeological record. The nadir came during the 1980s, when scholars proposed that the vast amounts of bones and teeth in Neanderthal sites weren’t even from hunting, but scavenging. This left Neanderthals skulking around the fringes of hyena or lion kills, grabbing scant scraps without invoking the ire of ‘true’ predators. However, this scenario was also overturned as archaeology began to mature as a discipline throughout the final decades of the 20th century. A new array of methods, and a growing awareness of bias due to outdated excavation and collection standards, brought our perception of Neanderthals into much sharper resolution. In the decades since, evidence from hundreds of sites has been meticulously parsed and amassed, revealing the Neanderthals as top-level team hunters. They took on mighty beasts including bears, rhinos and possibly mammoth, using finely honed wooden spears for close-quarters jabbing; others were likely thrown like javelins. The myth of speedy critters such as birds or rabbits being out of reach has been crushed, while seafood was at least sometimes on the menu. Strand-line gathering was practised, whether for shellfish or the odd washed-up marine mammal, and maybe freshwater fish. Plants supplemented this varied carnivorous diet. Neanderthals made their living across a huge geographical area, from North Wales down to Palestine, and eastwards nearly halfway across Siberia, so it’s no wonder we find preserved morsels of figs, olives, pistachios and date palm in caves across the Mediterranean and West Asia. In archaeological sediments and on stone tools, remnants of tubers (wild radish, water lily) and seeds (wild cereal, peas and lentils) have also been discovered. All this tells us that Neanderthals were very likely chowing down on cooked food more diverse than meat. Perhaps food was as important to social identity tens of millennia ago as it is for us today. What if the first Homo sapiens walked into dark caves to find walls blazing with ancient visions? Aside from the visceral satisfaction of a full belly, did the Neanderthals experience passions at a more profound level? Were they capable of self-expression, and abstract thought? Archaeologists are nudging closer to affirmative answers. Paintings found at three caves in Spain – La Pasiega, Maltravieso and Ardales – include red-daubed stalactites and flowstone, a clean vertical line and, most enchanting of all, a stencilled silhouette of a hand. Just recently, scientists applied a dating technique measuring the radioactive decay of uranium-thorium in the minerals encrusting the paintings, thereby revealing a minimum age. The results were startling: the oldest ranged from 67,000-52,000 years, appearing some 20,000-7,000 years before we believe that H sapiens arrived in Europe. For many scholars, this represents strong evidence that Neanderthals were responsible. (Others are more hesitant: dating millimetre-thick flowstone layers is complex, and some results suggested contamination.) Cave art at La Pasiega, Spain dated by researchers at the University of Southampton to between 67,000 and 52,000 years old. Photo by P. Saura.Studies across Europe had already found that many cave paintings rested on a substratum of red hand-stencils, lines and dots. The line image at the La Pasiega site seems connected to a ladder-like form, although the other parts might have been added later. Even so, the findings raise the possibility that the first H sapiens entering Europe’s caves walked into the darkness to find, not blank canvases, but walls blazing with ancient visions. If genuine, these discoveries have exposed a hidden layer of Neanderthal self-expression, sitting beneath the more famous Upper Palaeolithic oeuvre. Perhaps painting was even something our species actually learned, rather than being the independent wellspring of art. Some of the Neanderthals’ creations carry more than a hint of the eldritch – structures so old that their attribution is unquestionable. In the 1990s, hundreds of metres deep inside the Bruniquel cave in southern France, researchers uncovered stalagmites snapped off and arranged into two rings, encircling smaller piles. But it was only in 2013, after a suspiciously old radiocarbon measurement was taken, that researchers began studying them in detail. Over 174,000 years ago, it seems that Neanderthals walked into the isolated chamber and carefully built these large circular structures. More than 400 pieces from the central parts of the stalagmite columns were placed in layers, some balanced on top of each other, others standing in parallel. Many had been extensively burned, and blazes had been kindled in the small piles. At least some of the fuel was bone, potentially including bear, which isn’t easy to set and keep alight. So far there are no artifacts, and no explanation for the rings, but these structures would have taken time and planning to create, and the foresight to provide sufficient illumination underground. Research is ongoing – most excitingly, to see what lies beneath the floor, entombed in calcium carbonate – but Bruniquel has already opened a vista onto a Neanderthal mind as elaborate as our own. It’s important to add a note of caution to all this, since Palaeolithic archaeology is still full of ‘unknown unknowns’. It’s true that we have no fossil evidence for H sapiens west of the Danube delta – never mind southern Iberia – before 45,000 years ago, which leaves Neanderthals as the chief suspects for the paintings. But absence of bones does not prove absence of hominins, and we know that H sapiens were making their way into the Levant by at least 150,000 years ago. So the case is not entirely closed for the cave art, even if the 3D creation at Bruniquel seems secure. Still, these revelations have radically altered our understanding, and expectations, of what Neanderthals did in their daily lives – which now includes the possibility of more esoteric practices. Alongside the archaeological evidence, genetics is the second pillar of the recent scientific reappraisal of the Neanderthals. Increasingly refined data suggest that humans and Neanderthals shared an ancestor around 800,000-700,000 years ago, before they split along different evolutionary paths. This process could even have taken place within genetically diverse but interconnected hominin populations that evolved in Africa, and moved out from there to the Near East and farther lands. In 2010, researchers analysed the genome of three Neanderthal individuals, and compared the data with modern humans from various parts of the world. Based on genetic links, it seems that some time after 200,000 years ago, early H sapiens emerging from Africa interbred with Eurasia’s indigenous hominin inhabitants. That’s why the genomes of all living people – with the exception of those from sub-Saharan Africa – contain a small percentage of Neanderthal DNA. However it happened, the science is clear: to produce the amount of DNA surviving today, taking into account complex processes of selection against Neanderthal genes and less fertile hybrids, there must have been an awful lot of sex between the communities. This finding rocked the scientific world, and shredded the ‘replacement without interbreeding’ story of the Neanderthals’ decline. Living people preserve a stunning 20 per cent, maybe more, of the Neanderthal genome, albeit as a somewhat tattered archive that’s distributed between different populations. Even more surprisingly, it’s not Western Europeans who have the most Neanderthal DNA: East Asians have up to a fifth more. There were also numerous phases of hybridisation. The earliest known encounter happened more than 220,000 years ago, when a female ancestor of H sapiens mated with a male Neanderthal – much earlier than other known interbreeding between the two groups. At the other end of the temporal scale, the jaw of a human who lived 40,000 years ago in Romania reveals that he counted a Neanderthal among his ancestors just four to six generations back – right at the time when they were about to disappear from the fossil record. The girl was a first-generation hybrid: her mother Neanderthal, her father Denisovan In the same year as the Neanderthal DNA announcement, humans were introduced to another long-lost cousin we didn’t even know we had – and with whom we’d also merged. Since the 1970s, Russian scientists had been excavating the Denisova cave in western Siberia. Among thousands of bones they’d found was the tip of a child’s pinky finger. Genetic analysis published in 2010 revealed it to be an entirely unknown hominin population. The ‘Denisovans’, as they were called, were a ‘sister’ group to the Neanderthals, branching off around 600,000-430,000 years ago. A sizeable proportion of the Denisovan genome survives in us, and scientists have pieced together evidence that we interbred with them multiple times. Many more Denisovans have now been identified at the same site, from tiny scraps of bone or even DNA in the cave sediment itself. Yet we still have no idea what these people really looked like, beyond the fact some had dark eyes and skin. In yet another twist, it turns out the Neanderthals and Denisovans were close contemporaries, living in the same region for thousands of years. During protein sampling aimed at locating more hominins among unidentified bones from the cave, one stood out. Researchers had chanced upon a bone fragment from a girl, probably a teenager, who was a first-generation hybrid: her mother a Neanderthal, her father a Denisovan. Even more incredibly, her paternal ancestry revealed an even older genetic record of mixing between these populations, hundreds of generations before. It’s hard to square these narratives of repeated contact and reproduction with the archaeological record of the Neanderthals’ sudden demise. Everything we’ve found, whether from new excavations or improved dating, has drawn the noose tighter around that period of time around 40,000 years ago, when Neanderthals’ distinctive skeletal and material remains disappear. Given the chronological resolution that’s possible so far back, this is tantamount to an almost simultaneous vanishing across their entire geographical range. Yet the genetics shows that they were not extinguished, but rather engulfed in a human flood. H sapiens weren’t their executioners so much as their assimilators. It’s not clear how or why the encounters that led to interbreeding took place. For starters, we shouldn’t treat Neanderthals or early H sapiens as monolithic entities; in reality, the population dynamics must have been enormously varied, with groups spreading out and mingling in different ways in different places. What about the result of all these trysts: with whom, and how, were the hundreds, if not thousands, of hybrid babies raised? Basic anatomy, combined with neurocognitive and psychological research, both imply that these youngsters needed care, support and love to survive and flourish – just as our own offspring do. But does this mean that entire groups merged physically and culturally, or that our mixed genetic dossier is the byproduct of a profusion of ‘one-offs’, accidental encounters that accumulated over 100,000 years? At present we can make only hazy guesses. Beyond the advances in science, these changes in perspective on Neanderthals are the fruit of a longstanding cultural obsession. Since 1856, we have been trying to capture the likeness of these people – and yes, Neanderthals must indeed be seen as people, albeit of another kind. Yet the portrait is never finished. With each new archaeological advance, they edge closer and closer to us, feeding our hunger to know ever-more intimate details. Yet something lurks: niggling, uncanny. Evolution has primed us with extraordinarily sensitive face-detection capabilities, but this comes with a deep-brain warning system. When faces are not obviously fake, but fall short of hyper-realistic, they snag our reflex recognition while also triggering alarm. This disquieting aversion to aberrance, the so-called ‘uncanny valley’ effect, was observed in people’s reactions to robots as far back as the 1970s. One explanation for the ‘dyspathy’ it evokes is a protective instinct, helping us recognise threats from cadavers or the diseased. The Neanderthals induce something similar, a mirror image of us in so many ways, yet somehow aslant. Their liminal quality, at some anthropic edge, produces an uneasy tension. We mentally flinch at the same time as being drawn towards them, because they force us to reconsider how we mark the borders of humanity. This is why the hand stencil at Maltravieso is so breathtaking. It’s a manifestation of corporeality, proof that all those untouchable skeletons in museum cases were once real, vital bodies. Until that point, the rare cases of Neanderthal ‘trace fossils’ were little more than blurred outlines, mostly footprints at just a few sites. A single, clear fingerprint was found around 50 years ago during industrial open-cast mining in the foothills of the Harz Mountains in Germany. It was imprinted on the surface of a piece of soft birch tar. Cooked from bark, this is the world’s first synthetic material, a natural glue used to join stone tip to wooden handle. The Neanderthal who sat fashioning the tool 80,000 years ago, wreathed in astringent fumes, was probably thinking about the near future – how much longer the stone edge would last, when the season would shift – little knowing these actions would stretch to a world thousands of generations later, as a single finger pressed a whorl into the softened tar. Corporeal encounters with the Neanderthals can bewitch us because they perform a sort of temporal sorcery. Hands pressed on cave walls seem to imbue the rock with the memory of warmth; bodies moving against each other 50,000 years ago become time-travellers in the blood of their descendants. The changing visions we have conjured in our imaginations are made manifest in how Neanderthals are represented in artistic recreations – from the strikingly bestial and depressed-looking creatures of the Victorian era, to the exquisite digital portraits of the contemporary artist Tom Björklund, whose Neanderthals certainly think, feel and dream as much as we do. There is no cognitive chasm between us, just as there was no reproductive barrier Today, the story of the Neanderthals is still in flux. It is only 10 years since the watershed DNA discovery and subsequent demolition of their status as evolutionary dead-losses. We now know there were no Neanderthal endlings, no last lonely survivors. Many researchers now question whether we can even think of them as a different species. All the new evidence calls into question the way we have theorised their lives, often involving lists of standards they must meet to be considered genuinely human. ‘Modern’ behaviour has always been a very particular version of how we like to think of ourselves. A classic example – still being played out in arguments over re-excavation of the La Chapelle site – is at what point are we prepared to grant Neanderthals a conception of death? Too often, clear evidence for special treatment of the deceased is not enough; only a perfectly cut grave, the epitome of ‘proper’ Christian burial, is considered proof of meaningful social practices. The next step is to kick our habit of narcissism and self-projection, and try to illuminate the Neanderthals on their own terms. We must do more than swing between a fetish and fear of exoticism versus a naive belief that they were ‘just like us’. Taking the archaeology at face value, and according the same standards of proof we permit for early H sapiens, shows that there is no cognitive chasm between us, just as there was no reproductive barrier. The fascination should lie in the variety of Neanderthals’ ways of life, and what they reveal not only about our deep connection, but also about the parallel stories of hominins on Earth. Our confusion about Neanderthals and their place in our prehistory mirrors certain debates in astronomy – another discipline that deals in difficult-to-imagine spans of time and space. Pluto, our Solar System’s outsider, had long been classed as a planet, if a rather remote and disappointing one. But new observational technologies have allowed us to see that the Kuiper belt, the zone at the edge of the solar system where interstellar space begins, isn’t Pluto’s lonely empire; instead, it is speckled with a vast population of other astronomical bodies. When Pluto was consequently reclassified as a ‘dwarf planet’, the research refocused attention on more interesting and nuanced questions than its contested planetary status. What were these other Kuiper belt worlds like, and where did they come from? How did they relate to Pluto, and more pressingly, what could we do to learn more about them? Human origins research in the past decade has discovered its own Kuiper belt of mysterious hominins. Some, like the Denisovans, are just now coming into view, while others probably lurk undetected. But no matter how large the family becomes, as our first-found relations, the Neanderthals will feel closest: a foil for what we were, are and might yet be. Yet their relatedness to us is hardly the most interesting thing about them. Instead of a cautionary tale of a disreputable cousin, they are a uniquely precious mirror that refracts, rather than reflects. Far from some primitive offshoot, Neanderthals should be more accurately understood as another of nature’s experiments in humanity.

Well, yes, in fact up until this morning - and so perhaps the generals know something we don't - they were saying they weren't going to leave at the end of the month. Now, at a press conference a short while ago, they in fact did say that they will be leaving on June 30, even though the constitution, the new constitution, is not in place, which is something they said they - that they would not leave until that happened. But they seem to have changed their mind. Having said that, though, they are changing some of the powers that this president will have. This is not going to be a Mubarak presidency in the sense of him - or whoever takes charge being in charge of everything. He'll be able to name the cabinet, including the defense minister, but he won't be able to control the military, he won't be able to declare war without the approval of the military. Even the country's budget is in question. And the generals also said they will be sharing legislative power with the president until a new parliament is named.

I think much of it has. I mean, those officials, Guy, who met, you know, for those two long summits in Brussels, they thought they had really bought themselves some political space and some time, you know, by coming to this broad agreement. Banks would, under this deal, take a loss of 50 percent on Greek debt. There was also an agreement to boost the power and the leveraging power of the rescue fund, among other measures. You know, now, just a few days later, markets are tanking. Politicians are quarreling. They're pointing fingers. And, you know, we've got predictions of possible doom coming out of some capital. So, it's certainly sparked new tensions, you know, heading into this important G20 meeting in France starting on Thursday.

So true. So true. Clare and I were in a cell together for 12 days and, you know, I'm just so thankful we had each other because it was incredibly boring. We couldn't go outside. We couldn't have access to any literature and really couldn't even see the sunshine. And we spent so much time trying to piece together what was going to happen next, which was very difficult. So turned to a lot of prayer, some, you know, exercise in a room (unintelligible) and you know, different topics of conversation over the nights, you know, life stories, most influential movies, people. So we tried to make it happen and just - just waiting in this kind of cell, not knowing what was their next move.

That was stare decisis for Roberts at the time. The critical thing to keep in mind is that his prior confirmation proceeding involved his nomination to a lower federal court, and lower federal court judges are generally bound to follow the decisions of a higher court, namely the Supreme Court. The critical thing here, of course, is that Roberts is being nominated to the Supreme Court where justices are free to reconsider prior decisions and are not bound by lower court decisions. There are no--and they're not bound by local or higher court decisions. They are the highest court. So Roberts will have a degree of liberalization here, in a sense, to be himself. And that's the critical question. What--OK, who is he? What will he do?

They're actually surprisingly powerful, and have been for a while, on specific regulation and laws that apply to cars. In California and many other states, smog rules do not apply to classic cars. And I heard from a gentleman today from one of the California regulators of smog who said, specifically, this trade group based here in California got that exemption. And in the case of Cash for Clunkers, they were originally opposed to the bill altogether. As a compromise with legislators, they agreed to not fight it in return for getting this exclusion put in so that they would protect those cars. But if you talk to the trade group, which is called the Specialty Equipment Market Association, they'll tell you that, in general, they would prefer Cash for Clunkers never existed.

Yes it is because what she said, not to sugarcoat it, exactly. I try to let the children - well, give the children an awareness. I tried to build their awareness for down the road as they go to the higher grades, kindergarten, first grade, third grade because some of these children might have brothers and sisters or cousins that are in gangs and they might think they're cool by standing in the corner 'cause one of my little boys, some of those boys are cool and I should know, they are not cool because they hurt people and they make people sad, mommies and daddies become very sad if they shoot someone with a gun or they use an - like one of my little boys, they can use knives too, teacher. And I said, that's right and I think it's just being able to talk to them at their level of understanding. The guns and the gang bangers fighting, and gangs bring sadness to families because if you get involved in a gang, someone can get hurt because there is gang violence. Or guns, if a relative has a gun in the home or for safety reasons, like one of my little boys said, his uncle has a gun for safety reasons, but what about them going and touching it by accident because they don't know that it's - they know that it's real but sometimes they, you know, video games and everything, they're, oh, I can touch it, you know, I can shoot it, and then I won't die.

This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. Just about everyone's image of a psychiatrist's office includes a long couch, dim lights and a doctor with a notepad asking: And how did that make you feel? A stereotype, of course, and way out of date at that. Over the past 20 years, few professions have seen more change than psychiatry. Weekly, 45-minute appointments are largely a thing of the past. Many psychiatrists see patients for 15 minutes, one after another. Instead of listening, they ask a series of questions, write out prescriptions, and refer their patients to a psychologist or to a social worker for therapy.

Good. I just - I heard all these comments about yearbooks, and I guess I just had something to say about this social networking aspect. I personally preferred Facebook because, after buying all these yearbooks and hundreds of pages, only being in there three times, I can go on Facebook and go back a couple years, and all the stuff I've done and print out my favorites. Snd now I have a photo album of me and all my friends and all my memories, instead of me and a bunch of people who I graduated with and probably wouldn't remember their name if I ran into them at the grocery store.

Rasputia, also played by Murphy, is cruel, selfish and abusive. She sucker punches him in the face and cheats on him. Even on her wedding day, she's so disgusting the congregation gusts in horror when her veil is lifted at kiss the bride. Rasputia is so over-the-top offensive, so beyond crude, that one has to wonder when Eddie Murphy wrote the script with his brother Charles, what were these black men thinking. Don't they know about the myth of black matriarchy? An infamous theory by Senator Patrick Moynahan is suggested that black women's overbearing strength was the root cause of the breakup of black families. It was met with waves of protests from African-American scholars and activists that continue even today. Don't they know that the majority of black women will never marry in their lifetime? And that Moynahan's implied reasoning remains unspoken all around us, that she is so unfeminine and animalistic, this dark-skinned thing, so emasculating to the male ego that no sane black man could possibly want her? It's also as though the Murphy brothers were unaware of that more than 80 percent of black women are either overweight or obese and that this too is the cause of suffering on an epidemic scale from type two diabetes to high blood pressure to heart failure to heart failure and early strokes.

Yeah. So it's an eight-page strategy document on company letterhead. And it talks about all the ways that this huge private equity company, Colony, with billions of dollars under management, can make money from its relationships in Washington and around the world. Colony's founder is Tom Barrack. He was an early supporter of Donald Trump's campaign. And after Trump won, he asked him to be chairman of his inaugural committee. So Inauguration Day comes January 20, 2017, brings a lot of rich people from around the country, quite a few foreign guests. And the following month, this strategic plan is circulated, outlining how Colony should set up a D.C. office. They talk about convening international ambassadors, with members of the Trump administration making new business opportunities. Here's a quote - "the key is to strategically cultivate domestic and international relations while avoiding any appearance of lobbying." And it goes on to say that no other firms, quote, "can currently match the relationships or resources that we possess."

Under a 2008 federal law, minors caught by the border patrol are handed over to the Department of Health and Human Services which coordinates their care and finds them safe housing until their cases are decided. In a statement, Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley says the Department of Health and Human Services informed his staff that since January, at least 139 of those unaccompanied children have been released to sponsors in Iowa. At Des Moines's Trinity Las Americas United Methodist Church, hundreds fill the sanctuary during a rally this week. Bible verses in English and Spanish are posted on the sides of the pews. Connie Ryan Terrell, the executive director of the Interfaith Alliance says there are plenty in the city ready to take the undocumented minors in.

al-Jazeera English is quite different from al-Jazeera Arabic. It's a sister channel. Yes, they have the same financier. They have the same managing director. But the stuff are quite separate. It's run along very separate lines because at the end of the day, it's trying to reach a very separate audience who have different cultural values, who have a totally different experience of news. Obviously, westerners have had the luxury of good, high quality news for a long time. Arabs, on the other hand, they're interested in different things. And the programs on al-Jazeera Arabic reflect that. For example, there's more programs about Islam, as you would expect, since most Arabs and Muslims. So the channels are actually quite different.

The unique calling of the Dominicans is to teach. Most of the nuns will leave the convent and step out into the world to work at schools and colleges. They're decidedly not monastic. They've appeared on "Oprah" and the "American Bible Challenge" quiz show. During the first eight years spent in the convent, a period called Initial Formation, life inside the mother house remains intensely private and filtered - without the distractions of TV, Internet or smartphones. But it's not without fun. In addition to praying for nearly four hours a day, the sisters have time to cook Mexican food and play ultimate Frisbee in full habits.

Well, if you've seen the "Ice Age" cartoon movie, like, you know, most kids have, you know that little squirrel that's running around collecting seeds? It's kind of the star of the show. And a number of researchers across Siberia and North America here, too, we've been working on these records of Ice Age ground squirrels because they seem to have been these amazing little botanists. What they did during the Ice Age times, 30,000 years ago, they ran around and collected seeds and fruits and leaves and stuff. They carried them underground into their burrows and they used that for hibernation. And the remains of these nests and seeds are buried deeply in the permafrost.

I think that was true in the beginning of this conflict. What I think you see happening right now is as the numbers of American service personnel continue to climb--those that are killed, I think even those people in the heartland now are beginning to question the wisdom of not having an exit strategy in Iraq. It's one thing to say you're going to go in, but it's another thing to say, `How are you going to get us out?' And he's facing the same sort of Vietnam problem that Lyndon Johnson faced. You know, it's easy to commit war. It's how do you end this thing? And I think even people in his own party are now saying, `Mr. President, it's time. You have to put forth a plan to tell us how you're going to pull our troops out of Iraq.' They have no plan, and they are faced with a fight that they were totally unprepared for, and now you see chaos breaking out. He talks about terrorism, you can't create--you can't allow, you know, al-Qaeda to have Iraq. Well, he created the conditions for al-Qaeda to have Iraq, and now we're stuck.

And they sold their pies frozen in local grocery stores. Was a good business. And then what happened was a few big national pie companies started coming into Utah and selling their own frozen pies in the grocery stores. Utah Pie did keep selling pies in lots of stores, made a profit most years. But still they argued that those big companies were using their size unfairly, that the companies were selling their pies too cheaply in Utah. There was an antitrust case, went all the way to the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court found that the big pie companies had violated antitrust law. They found in favor of the little local pie company.

Yeah. Officials do say that the river crested last night. It does seem to be receding. You know, it's hard to say, but in certain areas, certainly we do see dramatic differences even in the level of water. There was - one of the tributaries to the Cumberland River, called Richland Creek, is near where I live. On Sunday, it was over its bounds by far. They were doing water rescues all through that area. Yesterday, I was able to drive through it. I was able to drive right over the creek and look down on it. And that's receded all the way down into its banks, which is really promising.

President-elect Donald Trump has started making cabinet appointments, and they are already controversial. As appointments continue to roll out, we'll bring you multiple perspectives. Today, one view of Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, who is the president-elect's choice for attorney general. He's a former U.S. attorney for Alabama, and his selection has been celebrated on the right and strongly criticized on the left because of his record on issues such as immigration and race. To tell us more, we're joined by Georgetown law Professor Paul Butler. He is a former federal prosecutor. And he is a critic of Senator Sessions' record on civil rights. He's with us now from New York. Professor Butler, thanks so much for joining us.

Yes. And the story, as we have it, is that once Agrippina, his second wife, has persuaded him to adopt her horrible son Nero as his heir, Claudius became unnecessary. And the question when you're poisoning people is slow or quick poison. Slow poison, of course, goes unnoticed. It looks like an illness, like poor Litvinenko. I must say my heart grieves for that man. So the slow poison was the less obvious method. They tried slow poison and it didn't seem to work very well, so then they resorted to instant poisoning in a dish of mushrooms, I suppose Amanita muscaria instead of nice, safe mushrooms.

It is a tepid response, but it is in fact a response. And to date, we've had practically no useful responses. And I also think that the United Nations Human Rights Council needs to do something on Darfur. They do things on other issues and they also have been highly controversial because of some of the stuff that they have done. But I think it's high time, and I was glad that Kofi Annan challenged them to do something. And so now they are going to send these five qualified team members with their special Sudan investigator from the United Nations to actually go there on the ground and come back and have something to say and try to highlight the issues.

I would stay - you know, I'd probably - I've been asked by my editors to go see it and to take a video crew and stay there and interview all the pathetic guys who had to go, but I just figured I don't want to humiliate men anymore. Men have been humiliated enough, you know, over the past several - since, I guess, Phil Donahue was hatched, and I don't think we really need more humiliation by showing men being dragged to this movie about shoe - what the - have you ever seen a pair of these 500-dollar shoes?

Right, I think so. These are like two of the world's champions, talked about but not read books. And reading "The Odyssey," I was stunned to realize that it's not meant for the ninth-graders whose throats we try to stuff it down. It's like a guide to being a middle-aged person. Where Odysseus, who's at the time of the action of "The Odyssey" in his mid-40s, he's had this junky job with this bad boss, Agamemnon. He's been fighting in this war that's based on a lie. He just wants to get home to his family. He misses his family and he's kind of sick of it. And I thought, that sounds like middle age. That sounds like my world. I recognize that place. And so I just found in "The Odyssey" this sort of guidebook for how to face the world in the middle of your life. And I think in many ways that's what Homer had in mind.

It was vague and over broad. That's what didn't pass the smell test. What is just cause? They say that they - a sex offender can leave for just cause. So how do you define just cause? Is that a trip to the pharmacy to get some Aspirin, or does it have to be a medical emergency? And also, they are saying Halloween-related contact with children, does that mean a man - and I believe that was one of the four sex offenders who brought this says, I have a nephew ,or a son or something that's living in my house, does that mean I cannot carve a pumpkin in my own home with my child?

Well, one thing I hear more and more about is dropping all by bipartisan negotiations altogether and slamming a bill through with only Democratic votes. There's a set of Senate rules called reconciliation rules that would allow Democrats to block a Republican filibuster and pass a health care bill with only 51 votes. But the rules are very strict, so only the contentious portions of the bill would be passed that way. Everything else - the stuff that most lawmakers actually agree on, like barring insurance companies from excluding customers based on preexisting conditions and so on, that stuff would be put together in a separate bill that would likely sail through the House and Senate and even get Republican votes. So, in the next six weeks, say, we might see two different bills take shape here.

No, it's really not. I mean, the wild card has absolutely boosted interest in baseball down the stretch as we can see in the National League. More teams - maybe more mediocre teams remain in the hut longer. It's also good for business. You've got more playoff games, more fans, more opportunities to sell advertisements and then go to the ballpark. But you've absolutely diminished the value of winning the division, which used to be paramount in baseball. You remember back that race in the early 1990s, Atlanta and San Francisco each won 103 games, one of them didn't make the playoffs. So, I think something has to change.

The Fed slashed interest rates yesterday. The benchmark interest rate is now at a record low, fluctuating between one quarter of one percent and zero. That's the rate the banks charge each other to borrow money, and the Fed's move was designed to help thaw the credit freeze and get the economy moving again. But it also affects the rest of us, whether we're trying to get loans for business or to buy a house or a car. It affects the interest on our savings accounts and shifts incentives on what we do with our money. Yesterday, the stock market responded to the move with an enthusiastic rally. And in the Los Angeles Times today, financial writer Tom Petruno called it shock-and-awe. If you have questions about how this might affect you, if it has already, our phone number is 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. Tom Petruno's piece today is titled "How the Fed's Shock-and Awe Move Could Affect You", and he joins us today by phone from the Los Angeles Times. Nice to have you on the program.

At this very moment, hundreds of people are digesting a couple of other classic images, literally. Today, at the Smithsonian American Art Museum here in Washington, a double portrait of Barack Obama and Abraham Lincoln was on display. The subjects are familiar territory for artists of course, but the medium is not. This portrait was made of almost 6,000 little decorated cupcakes. They were arranged in a pattern that when seen from above, created an image of the two tall men from Illinois. Call it "large scale cupcake pointillism." The treats were baked in Buffalo. They were frozen and arrived at the museum yesterday in the back of a U-Haul, 40 plastic boxes.

Rudd now faces several thorny disputes with China. Today, he expressed concern over the detention in China of Australian mining executive Stern Hu, who is suspected of illegally obtaining trade secrets. Hu's firm Rio Tinto recently snubbed China's bid to buy a stake in the firm, which would have been China's biggest overseas acquisition to date. And in May, an Australian Defence White Paper cited China's growing military might as the main reason why Australia should boost defense spending and double its submarine fleet by the year 2035. Andrew Davies is a defense expert at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in Canberra. He says that Australia faces a more complicated security environment and must prepare for more contingencies

Rosa Parks said something that was enormously audacious, and she inspired a community to follow her path. And that's what we're honoring this week, two things: We're honoring Rosa Parks having the audacity to stand up to power; and we're honoring this community for engaging in a yearlong collective effort to change the city. My grandmother used to tell me it wasn't easy sustaining a boycott for a year. When it got really cold or it got really hot, you know, people weren't necessarily eager to not have the comfort of the buses. But the community still had a confidence and a courage, and I think it should inspire us today.

A few years ago, I set out on a mission to find God. Now, I'm going to tell you right up front that I failed, which, as a lawyer, is a really hard thing for me to admit. But on that failed journey, a lot of what I found was enlightening. And one thing in particular gave me a lot of hope. It has to do with the magnitude and significance of our differences. So, I was raised in America by Indian parents — culturally Hindu, but practicing a strict and relatively unknown religion outside of India called Jainism. To give you an idea of just how minority that makes me: people from India represent roughly one percent of the US population; Hindus, about 0.7 percent; Jains, at most .00046 percent. To put that in context: more people visit the Vermont Teddy Bear Factory each year than are followers of the Jain religion in America. To add to my minority mix, my parents then decided, "What a great idea! Let's send her to Catholic school" — (Laughter) where my sister and I were the only non-white, non-Catholic students in the entire school. At the Infant Jesus of Prague School in Flossmoor, Illinois — yes, that's really what it was called — we were taught to believe that there is a single Supreme Being who is responsible for everything, the whole shebang, from the creation of the Universe to moral shepherding to eternal life. But at home, I was being taught something entirely different. Followers of the Jain religion don't believe in a single Supreme Being or even a team of Supreme Beings. Instead, we're taught that God manifests as the perfection of each of us as individuals, and that we're actually spending our entire lives striving to remove the bad karmas that stand in the way of us becoming our own godlike, perfect selves. On top of that, one of the core principles of Jainism is something called "non-absolutism." Non-absolutists believe that no single person can hold ownership or knowledge of absolute truth, even when it comes to religious beliefs. Good luck testing that concept out on the priests and nuns in your Catholic school. (Laughter) No wonder I was confused and hyperaware of how different I was from my peers. Cut to 20-something years later, and I found myself to be a highly spiritual person, but I was floundering. I was spiritually homeless. I came to learn that I was a "None," which isn't an acronym or a clever play on words, nor is it one of these. It's simply the painfully uninspired name given to everyone who checks off the box "none" when Pew Research asks them about their religious affiliation. (Laughter) Now, a couple of interesting things about Nones are: there are a lot of us, and we skew young. In 2014, there were over 56 million religiously unaffiliated Nones in the United States. And Nones account for over one-third of adults between the ages of 18 to 33. But the most interesting thing to me about Nones is that we're often spiritual. In fact, 68 percent of us believe, with some degree of certainty, that there is a God. We're just not sure who it is. (Laughter) So the first takeaway for me when I realized I was a None and had found that information out was that I wasn't alone. I was finally part of a group in America that had a lot of members, which felt really reassuring. But then the second, not-so-reassuring takeaway was that, oh, man, there are a lot of us. That can't be good, because if a lot of highly spiritual people are currently godless, maybe finding God is not going to be as easy as I had originally hoped. So that is when I decided that on my spiritual journey, I was going to avoid the obvious places and skip the big-box religions altogether and instead venture out into the spiritual fringe of mediums and faith healers and godmen. But remember, I'm a non-absolutist, which means I was pretty inclined to keep a fairly open mind, which turned out to be a good thing, because I went to a witch's potluck dinner at the LGBT Center in New York City, where I befriended two witches; drank a five-gallon jerrican full of volcanic water with a shaman in Peru; got a hug from a saint in the convention center — she smelled really nice — (Laughter) chanted for hours in a smoke-filled, heat-infused sweat lodge on the beaches of Mexico; worked with a tequila-drinking medium to convene with the dead, who oddly included both my deceased mother-in-law and the deceased manager of the hip-hop group The Roots. (Laughter) Yeah, my mother-in-law told me she was really happy her son had chosen me for his wife. Duh! But — (Laughter) Yeah. But the manager of The Roots said that maybe I should cut back on all the pasta I was eating. I think we can all agree that it was lucky for my husband that it wasn't his dead mother who suggested I lay off carbs. (Laughter) I also joined a laughing yoga group out of South Africa; witnessed a woman have a 45-minute orgasm — I am not making this up — as she tapped into the energy of the universe — I think I'm going to go back there — (Laughter) called God from a phone booth in the Nevada desert at Burning Man, wearing a unitard and ski goggles; and I had an old Indian guy lie on top of me, and no, he wasn't my husband. This was a perfect stranger named Paramji, and he was chanting into my chakras as he tapped into the energy forces of the Universe to heal my "yoni," which is a Sanskrit word for "vagina." (Laughter) I was going to have a slide here, but a few people suggested that a slide of my yoni at TED — even TEDWomen — not the best idea. (Laughter) Very early in my quest, I also went to see the Brazilian faith healer John of God at his compound down in Brazil. Now, John of God is considered a full-trance medium, which basically means he can talk to dead people. But in his case, he claims to channel a very specific group of dead saints and doctors in order to heal whatever's wrong with you. And although John of God does not have a medical degree or even a high school diploma, he actually performs surgery — the real kind, with a scalpel, but no anesthesia. Yeah, I don't know. He also offers invisible surgery, where there is no cutting, and surrogate surgery, where he supposedly can treat somebody who is thousands of miles away by performing a procedure on a loved one. Now, when you go to visit John of God, there are all kinds of rules and regulations. It's a whole complicated thing, but the bottom line is that you can visit John of God and present him with three things that you would like fixed, and he will set the dead saints and doctors to work on your behalf to get the job done. (Laughter) Now, before you snicker, consider that, at least according to his website, over eight million people — including Oprah, the Goddess of Daytime TV — have gone to see John of God, and I was pre-wired to keep an open mind. But to be honest, the whole thing for me was kind of weird and inconclusive, and in the end, I flew home, even more confused than I already started out. But that doesn't mean I came home empty-handed. In the weeks leading up to my trip to Brazil, I mentioned my upcoming plans to some friends and to a couple of colleagues at Google, where I was a lawyer at the time. And I might have mentioned it to a couple more people because I'm chatty, including my neighbor, the guy who works at the local coffee shop I go to each morning, the checkout lady at Whole Foods and a stranger who sat next to me on the subway. I told each of them where I was going and why, and I offered to carry three wishes of theirs down to Brazil, explaining that anyone going to see John of God could act as a proxy for others and save them the trip. And to my surprise, my in-box overflowed. Friends told friends who told friends, and those friends apparently told more friends, other strangers and the guys at their coffee shops, until it seemed that days before I left for Brazil that there was no one who did not have my email address. And at the time, all I could conclude was that I had offered too much to too many. But when I actually reread those messages a few years later, I noticed something completely different. Those emails actually shared three commonalities, the first of which was rather curious. Almost everyone sent me meticulous details about how they could be reached. I had told them, or their friends had told them, that along with the list of the three things they wanted fixed, I needed their photo, their name and their date of birth. But they gave me full addresses, with, like, apartment numbers and zip codes, as if John of God was going to stop by their house and see them in person or send along a package. It was as if, in the highly unlikely event that their wishes were granted by John of God, they just wanted to make sure that they weren't delivered to the wrong person or the wrong address. Even if they didn't believe, they were hedging their bets. The second commonality was just as curious, but far more humbling. Virtually everyone — the stranger on the subway, the guy at the coffee shop, the lawyer down the hall, the Jew, the atheist, the Muslim, the devout Catholic — all asked for essentially the same three things. OK, there were a couple of outliers, and yes, a few people asked for cash. But when I eliminated what were ultimately a handful of anomalies, the similarities were staggering. Almost every single person first asked for good health for themselves and their families. Almost universally, they next asked for happiness and then love, in that order: health, happiness, love. Sometimes they asked for a specific health issue to be fixed, but more often than not, they just asked for good health in general. When it came to happiness, they each phrased it slightly differently, but they all asked for the same specific subtype of happiness, too — the kind of happiness that sinks in and sets down roots in your soul; the kind of happiness that could sustain us, even if we were to lose absolutely everything else. And for love, they all asked for the kind of romantic love, the soul mate that we read about in epic romantic novels, the kind of love that will stay with us till the end of our days. Sorry, that's my husband. Crap! Now I forgot my place. (Laughter) (Applause) So by and large, all of these friends and strangers, regardless of their background, race or religion, all asked for the same things, and they were the same things that I really wanted, the simplified version of the basic human needs identified by social scientists like Abraham Maslow and Manfred Max-Neef. No one asked for answers to the big existential questions or for proof of God or the meaning of life like I had set out to find. They didn't even ask for an end to war or global hunger. Even when they could have asked for absolutely anything, they all asked for health, happiness and love. So now those emails had a third commonality as well. Each of them ended in the exact same way. Instead of thanking me for carting their wishes all the way to Brazil, everyone said, "Please don't tell anyone." So I decided to tell everyone — (Laughter) right here on this stage, not because I'm untrustworthy, but because the fact that we have so much in common feels especially important for us all to hear, especially now, when so many of the world's problems seem to be because we keep focusing on the things that make us different, not on what binds us together. And look — I am the first to admit that I am not a statistician, and that the data I presented to you that I just accumulated in my in-box is more anecdotal than scientific, more qualitative than quantitative. It is, as anyone who works with data would tell you, hardly a statistically significant or demographically balanced sample. But nonetheless, I find myself thinking about those emails every time I reflect back on the bias and prejudice that I've faced in my life, or when there's another hate crime or a senseless tragedy that underscores the disheartening sense that our differences might be insurmountable. I then remind myself that I have evidence that the humbling, unifying commonality of our humanity is that, even when presented with the opportunity to ask for anything at all, most of us want the same things, and that this is true no matter who we are, what name we call our god, or which religion, if any, we call home. I then also note that apparently some of us want these things so badly that we would email a None, a spiritually confused None like me — some might say otherwise confused as well — and that we would seek out this stranger and email her our deepest wishes, just in case there is the remote possibility that they might be granted by someone who is not a god, much less our god, someone who is not even a member of our chosen religion, someone who, when you look at him on paper, seems like an unlikely candidate to deliver. And so now, when I reflect back on my spiritual quest, even though I did not find God, I found a home in this: even today, in a world fractured by religious, ethnic, political, philosophical, and racial divides, even with all of our obvious differences, at the end of the day, and the most fundamental level, we are all the same. Thank you. (Applause)

Mr. Obama then turned to the issue of health care. That too, he said, has to be part of any economic recovery plan because of the toll escalating health care costs are taking. The president also spoke of investing in new kinds of energy and in a new energy infrastructure. It will create jobs, he said, and be good for the environment. The speech lasted 52 minutes and it wasn't until the final 10 that Mr. Obama switched to foreign policy. He said he's reviewing U.S. policies in Afghanistan, where troops levels are being increased; and in Iraq, where a plan for significant reductions could come soon.