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In the Washington of 2016, even when the policy can be bipartisan, the politics cannot. And in that sense, this year shows little sign of ending on Dec. 31. When President Obama moved to sanction Russia over its alleged interference in the U. S. election just concluded, some Republicans who had long called for similar or more severe measures could scarcely bring themselves to approve. House Speaker Paul Ryan called the Obama measures ”appropriate” but also ”overdue” and ”a prime example of this administration’s ineffective foreign policy that has left America weaker in the eyes of the world.” Other GOP leaders sounded much the same theme. ”[We have] been urging President Obama for years to take strong action to deter Russia’s worldwide aggression, including its operations,” wrote Rep. Devin Nunes, . chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. ”Now with just a few weeks left in office, the president has suddenly decided that some stronger measures are indeed warranted.” Appearing on CNN, frequent Obama critic Trent Franks, . called for ”much tougher” actions and said three times that Obama had ”finally found his tongue.” Meanwhile, at and on Fox News, various spokesmen for Trump said Obama’s real target was not the Russians at all but the man poised to take over the White House in less than three weeks. They spoke of Obama trying to ”tie Trump’s hands” or ”box him in,” meaning the would be forced either to keep the sanctions or be at odds with Republicans who want to be tougher still on Moscow. Throughout 2016, Trump has repeatedly called not for sanctions but for closer ties with Russia, including cooperation in the fight against ISIS. Russia has battled ISIS in Syria on behalf of that country’s embattled dictator, Bashar Assad, bombing the besieged city of Aleppo that fell to Assad’s forces this week. During the campaign, Trump even urged Russia to ”find” missing emails from the private server of his opponent, Hillary Clinton. He has exchanged public encomiums with Russian President Vladimir Putin on several occasions and added his doubts about the current U. S. levels of support for NATO — Putin’s longtime nemesis. There have also been suggestions that Trump’s extensive business dealings with various Russians are the reason he refuses to release his tax returns. All those issues have been disquieting to some Republicans for many months. Sens. John McCain, . and Lindsay Graham, . C. prominent senior members of the Armed Services Committee, have accepted the assessment of 17 U. S. intelligence agencies regarding the role of Russia in the hacking of various Democratic committees last year. That includes the FBI and CIA consensus that the Russian goal was not just to discredit American democracy but to defeat Clinton and elect Trump. They say the great majority of their Senate colleagues agree with them, and McCain has slated an Armed Services hearing on cyberthreats for Jan. 5. But the politicizing of the Russian actions — the idea that they helped Trump win — has also made the issue difficult for Republican leaders. It has allowed Trump supporters to push back on the intelligence agencies and say the entire issue is designed to undermine Trump’s legitimacy. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has so far resisted calls for a select committee to look into the Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. He has said it is enough for Sen. Richard Burr, . C. to look into it as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Typically, Republican leaders and spokesmen say there is no evidence that the actual voting or tallying on Nov. 8 was compromised, and that is true. But it is also a red herring, as interference in those functions has not been alleged and is not the focus of the U. S. intelligence agencies’ concern. For his part, Trump has shown little interest in delving into what happened. He has cast doubt on the U. S. intelligence reports to date and suggested ”no one really knows what happened.” He also has suggested that computers make it very difficult to know who is using them. This week, Trump said it was time to ”get on with our lives and do more important things.” However, at week’s end he did agree to have an intelligence briefing on the subject next week. The has not wanted the daily intelligence briefings available to him in recent weeks, preferring that they be given to the men he has chosen as his vice president (Mike Pence) and national security adviser (Mike Flynn) with Trump taking them only occasionally. The irony of this controversy arising at the eleventh hour of the Obama presidency can scarcely be overstated, and it defines the dilemma facing both the outgoing president and the incoming party in control. Obama appears to have been reluctant to retaliate against the Russian hacking before the election for fear of seeming to interfere with the election himself. The Republicans, meanwhile, have for years called for greater confrontation with the Russians, with Obama usually resisting. Obama did join with NATO in punishing the Russians with economic sanctions over the annexation of Crimea. Those sanctions may have been painful, coming as they did alongside falling prices for oil — the commodity that keeps the Russian economy afloat. On other occasions, despite Russian provocations through surrogates in Syria and elsewhere, Obama did not make overt moves to force Russia’s hand. That includes occasions when Russia was believed to be hacking critical computer systems in neighboring Ukraine, Estonia and Poland. But this week, following a chorus of confirmation from the U. S. intelligence community regarding the Russian role in computer hacking in the political campaign, Obama acted. He imposed a set of mostly diplomatic actions such as sanctioning some Russian officials, closing two diplomatic compounds and expelling 35 Russian diplomats. There may have been more damaging measures taken covertly, and some Russophobes in Washington held out hope for that. But the visible portion of the program scarcely amounted to major retribution. And Putin saw fit to diminish the Obama sanctions further by declining to respond. Although his government has steadfastly denied any interference in the U. S. election, Putin rejected his own foreign minister’s recommended package of responses. (He even sent an invitation for U. S. diplomats to send their children to a holiday party in Moscow.) That allowed Putin to appear for the moment to be ”the bigger man,” even as he spurned Obama and kept up what has looked like a public bromance with Trump, who tweeted: ”Great move on delay (by V. Putin) I always knew he was very smart!” At the moment it may seem that the overall Russia question amounts to the first crisis facing the Trump presidency. Whether forced by this campaign interference issue or not, Trump must grasp the nettle of a relationship Mitt Romney once called the greatest threat to U. S. security in the world. To be sure, Trump needs to dispel doubts about his ability to stand up to Putin, who has bullied and cajoled his way to center stage in recent world affairs. But Trump also seems determined to turn the page on past U. S. commitments, from free trade philosophy to funding of NATO and the United Nations. And if his Twitter account is any guide, Trump shows little concern about the conundrum others perceive to be facing him. Above all, Trump has shown himself determined to play by his own rules. A year ago, many were confident that would not work for him in the world of presidential politics. We are about to find out whether it works for him in the Oval Office.

Donald Trump has used Twitter — his preferred means of communication — to weigh in on a swath of foreign policy issues over the past few weeks. His comments give a glimpse into how his incoming administration will deal with pressing foreign matters — but also highlight how reactionary comments on social media can immediately spur international concern and attention. And his staff has indicated that taking to Twitter to air his concerns or, often, grievances, won’t end once he enters the Oval Office. On Wednesday, Trump blasted the U. S.’s abstention from the U. N. Security Council vote on Israeli settlements earlier this month. The tweets came just hours before Secretary of State John Kerry gave a speech defending the decision and calling the continued building of settlements on Palestinian territory in the West Bank a threat to the solution in the region. Trump’s support for Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — who has had a fraught relationship with President Obama — may be the biggest forthcoming shift in immediate foreign policy between the outgoing and incoming administrations. Throughout the campaign, he pledged that his administration would be a steadfast ally of Israel. To underscore that, Netanyahu replied to one of Trump’s morning tweets, thanking him — and also his children Donald Jr. and Ivanka, who are close advisers — for their support. Ivanka converted to Judaism when she married her husband, Jared Kushner. An Israeli official told CNN the government will give the Trump administration ”detailed, sensitive information” proving that the U. S. worked to push through the resolution. The Obama administration has denied those claims. Last week, after the U. S. decided not to veto the resolution, Trump also tweeted that ”things will be different” come his inauguration, and then on Monday he again blasted the U. N. as ineffective. The Israeli settlement issue has been at the forefront in recent days, but last week Trump also weighed in on nuclear issues. In a tweet, Trump called for the U. S. to strengthen its nuclear arsenal. MSNBC’s Morning Joe reported that the told them he wanted an ”arms race. We will outmatch them at every pass.” As the Washington Post’s Dan Zak told NPR’s Robert Siegel on All Things Considered last Friday, Trump was inconsistent in his statements about nuclear weapons during the campaign. ”Trump said, you know, he’d be the last to use nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are a horror. He seemed to understand what they’re capable of doing,” Zak said. ”At the same time, he said it was only a matter of time until countries like South Korea and Japan get nuclear weapons. He seemed to tacitly or not so tacitly endorse proliferation, again going against decades of international policy.” Trump also slammed China for its seizure of an unmanned U. S. Navy underwater drone, calling it ”unpresidented” in a tweet before correcting the typo in a new tweet. After talks with the Pentagon, China agreed to return the drone, but then Trump later said the country should keep it. It’s not the first time Trump has stoked tensions with China. In a stark break with protocol, Trump spoke on the phone with Taiwanese President Tsai earlier this month. Beijing considers Taiwan to be a renegade province and doesn’t recognize it, and most other countries don’t either. The U. S. has operated under a ”one China” policy for more than four decades. Throughout the campaign, Trump blasted China for taking away U. S. jobs and claimed it was intentionally devaluing its currency to boost exports. He has blasted U. S. companies that manufacture goods in China, but as a New York Times story noted Wednesday morning, many of his daughter Ivanka’s clothing and shoe lines are made in China much of Trump’s own apparel line is also made overseas, including in China.

Donald Trump is unabashedly praising Russian President Vladimir Putin, a day after outgoing President Obama issued tough sanctions against the country in response to alleged cyberattacks intended to influence the U. S. elections. In a tweet Friday afternoon, Trump responded to Putin’s decision not to expel U. S. diplomats from Russia in kind after Obama ordered 35 Russian diplomats to leave the country — admiring the Russian leader’s strategic approach over President Obama, which is the theme of Trump’s ongoing praise of Putin. Earlier Friday, Putin instead signaled he would wait to decide how to move forward until Trump takes office, giving him someone in the Oval Office who has been much friendlier and quite generous with his praise — a stark break from decades of U. S. foreign policy. The Russian Embassy in the U. S. also retweeted Trump’s post, which he pinned to his Twitter timeline so it would remain at the top. Trump also posted it to Instagram. On Thursday, President Obama issued a stinging rebuke to Russia after U. S. intelligence officials concluded the country had directed hacks into Democratic National Committee emails and the personal email account of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. In a statement, Obama said ”all Americans should be alarmed by Russia’s actions.” Trump’s praise of Putin stands in stark contrast not just with the outgoing administration, but with top leaders of his own party. GOP congressional leaders backed Obama’s actions on Thursday, albeit criticizing the president for being too late in taking a strong stance against Russia. House Speaker Paul Ryan called the sanctions ”overdue” but ”appropriate” and said that ”Russia does not share America’s interests.” ”The Russians are not our friends,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said in a statement, calling the sanctions a ”good initial step.” Obama has pointed to the impact of past sanctions by the U. S. and Europe in the wake of the annexation of Crimea, maintaining that his approach has damaged Russia’s economy and isolated the country on the world stage. Trump released a brief statement Thursday evening in response to the latest actions by Obama against Russia simply stating that, ”It’s time for our country to move on to bigger and better things.” He said he would meet with U. S. intelligence officials regarding the cyberhacking, though Trump has repeatedly cast doubt on their findings and throughout the campaign dismissed reports that Russia was behind the attacks. Trump raised eyebrows throughout the campaign with his praise of Putin. ”He’s running his country, and at least he’s a leader, unlike what we have in this country,” Trump said in an interview with MSNBC in December 2015. He was pressed by host Joe Scarborough on the killings of political figures and journalists critical of Putin and deflected. That interview came just after Putin praised Trump as ”talented.” Later in the campaign, Trump suggested Russia should find emails missing from Hillary Clinton’s time as secretary of state, which his aides later said was a joke. At the time, Trump tried distancing himself from Putin. ”I never met Putin. I don’t know who Putin is. He said one nice thing about me. He said I’m a genius. I said, ’Thank you very much’ to the newspaper, and that was the end of it,” Trump said. But not long after, Trump was heavily criticized for saying Putin wasn’t going into Ukraine, even though his country had already annexed Crimea. The Republican nominee also repeated his praise of Putin as ”a leader far more than our president has been” at a national security town hall in early September. One of the most memorable clashes in Trump’s debates with Hillary Clinton was when the Democratic nominee accused him of being a ”puppet” of Russia. Trump shot back: ”No puppet. No puppet. You’re the puppet.” He often criticizes the ”reset” with Russia that Clinton led in the early days of the Obama administration, even as Trump himself repeatedly has called for friendlier relations with Moscow. With three weeks until Inauguration Day, Trump has increasingly used his Twitter feed to weigh in on foreign policy — violating usual protocols where the winner of an election avoids interfering in the foreign policy actions of the sitting president. Trump’s staff has said such use of Twitter to weigh in on foreign policy won’t end once he’s in the Oval Office. So far, he’s outlined his opposition to the United States’ abstention from the U. N. Security Council vote on Israeli settlements earlier this month. Trump has also criticized China for its seizure of an unmanned U. S. Navy underwater drone, before saying the country that he’s often criticized should keep the drone. And Trump has also called for the U. S. to strengthen its nuclear arsenal and recently seemed to encourage a nuclear arms race with Russia — perhaps because he believes his strategic approach to Putin will work better than Obama’s.

Updated at 2:50 p. m. ET, Russian President Vladimir Putin says Russia won’t be expelling U. S. diplomats in a response to U. S. sanctions, as his foreign minister had suggested earlier Friday. Instead, he says he will decide how to move forward depending on the actions of Donald Trump’s administration. Trump took to Twitter on Friday afternoon to praise Putin’s decision, calling it a ”great move.” On Thursday, the White House announced sanctions against Russia in response to what it called ”a campaign of operations” against the U. S. — including actions meant to interfere with the U. S. presidential election. On Friday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov went on state TV and called the sanctions ”antics” that Russia can’t leave unanswered. He said the U. S. provided no evidence for its claims of Russian cyber operations, NPR’s Lucian Kim reports. ”The Kremlin has consistently denied accusations that its hackers had broken into the Democratic National Committee or tried to sway the U. S. election,” Lucian notes. And he proposed specific counteractions Russia could take. As we reported Thursday, President Obama’s executive order calls for 35 Russian diplomats — described by the White House as ”intelligence operatives” — to be expelled from the U. S. and for two Russian facilities in the U. S. to be closed. Sanctions will also be imposed on several Russian individuals and organizations, and Obama’s statement says more actions will be taken, ”some of which will not be publicized.” Lavrov announced plans for Russia to respond in kind, as Lucian reported from Moscow. Lavrov’s plan, which needed Putin’s approval, called for 35 American diplomats to be expelled and for U. S. diplomats to ”lose access to two buildings, just as Russian diplomats will no longer be able to use two retreats in Maryland and New York,” Lucian reports. But just two hours after Lavrov’s comments, Putin announced that nothing of the sort was happening. Putin called the Obama administration’s actions provocative and said Russia had grounds for a response. He said the Kremlin would reserve the right to a countermeasure — but that it would not ”stoop to the level of irresponsible diplomacy,” as Lucian translated it. At least for now, no diplomats will be expelled or barred from using facilities in Moscow, he said. Any actions will wait until Trump takes office. ”It is regrettable that the Obama administration is ending its term in this manner,” Putin said. ”Nevertheless, I offer my New Year greetings to President Obama and his family. ”My season’s greetings also to Donald Trump and the American people. I wish all of you happiness and prosperity.”

From photography, illustration and video, to data visualizations and immersive experiences, visuals are an important part of our storytelling at NPR. Interwoven with the written and the spoken word, images — another visual language — can create deeper understanding and empathy for the struggles and triumphs we face together. We told a lot of stories in 2016 — far more than we can list here. So, instead, here’s a small selection of our favorite pieces, highlighting some of the work we’re most proud of, some of the biggest stories we reported, and some of the stories we had the most fun telling. Transport yourself to Rocky Mountain National Park, with all its sights and sounds, in an immersive geology lesson with Oregon State University geology professor Eric Kirby, who discusses the geologic history of the Rockies in video. ”Today, Indians use much less energy per person than Americans or Chinese people. Many of its 1. 2 population live on roughly $2 a day. But what if all of those people had electricity at night, a refrigerator, a car? ”With ambitious goals to improve the standard of living, and 400 million people lacking reliable electricity, ’This means we need to enhance the energy supply by four to five times what it is now,’ says Ajay Mathur, a climate expert who runs the Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi. He says that no matter how fast India increases its clean energy, like solar and wind, the country will probably also double its use of coal between now and 2030. ”Todd Stern, who served till last month as the top U. S. envoy on climate change, says India has a steeper hill to climb than any other country. ’There is no country, probably, with a bigger challenge — looking at the number of people, the level of their economic growth, the number of people who don’t have access to electricity,’ he says.” Can India’s Sacred But ’Dead’ Yamuna River Be Saved? India’s Big Battle: Development Vs. Pollution, In India’s Sundarbans, People And Tigers Try To Coexist In A Shrinking Space, ”Trying to understand the Trump Organization is a daunting task. Donald Trump has not released his tax returns, so the best clues about his privately held business interests come from a financial disclosure form he released in May. ”The document covers scores of pages with small type, and suggests he is financially involved with hundreds of companies, including some that simply license his name. ”A dive into that disclosure form, submitted to the Office of Government Ethics, shows his largest sources of revenue are golf courses and rents. But his interests are far flung, and include media, retail, entertainment and much more. ”Those business interests are affected by government agencies and policies. NPR scoured this document to create an overview of some of his business assets and operations (excluding debts) and the possible areas where conflicts may arise.” The protests at the Standing Rock Reservation, which started in early 2016, had small roots but grew into the thousands, drawing support from Native Americans from across the country, as well as activists who joined in solidarity against the proposed route of the Dakota Access Pipeline just north of the reservation. In December, those protests won a concession from the federal government: The Army Corps of Engineers announced it would deny the permit necessary to build the oil pipeline in that area. In Their Own Words: The ’Water Protectors’ Of Standing Rock, Protesters Mark A Solemn Thanksgiving Day At Standing Rock, Protesters, Police Still Clashing Over Disputed North Dakota Pipeline, N. D. Pipeline Protester: ’It’s About Our Rights As Native People’ ”Up to 1 in 5 kids living in the U. S. shows signs or symptoms of a mental health disorder in a given year. So in a school classroom of 25 students, five of them may be struggling with the same issues many adults deal with: depression, anxiety, substance abuse. And yet most children — nearly 80 percent — who need mental health services won’t get them. ”Whether treated or not, the children do go to school. And the problems they face can tie into major problems found in schools: chronic absence, low achievement, disruptive behavior and dropping out. ”Experts say schools could play a role in identifying students with problems and helping them succeed. Yet it’s a role many schools are not prepared for.” ”Grapefruit’s bitterness can make it hard to love. Indeed, people often smother it in sugar just to get it down. And yet Americans were once urged to sweeten it with salt. ”Ad campaigns from the first and second world wars tried to convince us that ’Grapefruit Tastes Sweeter With Salt!’ as one 1946 ad for Morton’s in Life magazine put it. The pairing, these ads swore, enhanced the flavor. ”In our world, these curious culinary time capsules raise the question: Does salt really make grapefruit taste sweeter? And if this practice was once common, why do few people seem to eat grapefruit this way today?” Rio de Janeiro hosted the world’s elite athletes in an Olympics that promised transcendent moments in sports — and potential controversies outside of the competition. The Summer Games began Aug. 5, and more than 10, 000 athletes from 206 countries participated. From concerns over the Zika virus and Russian athletes banned on doping charges to incredible wins by the U. S. women’s gymnastics team and sweet moments of support, the 2016 Olympics was one of the biggest events — and biggest stories — of the year. ’A Fantasy Of A Fantasy’: U. S. Fencer Jason Pryor On Reaching The Olympics, In Rio’s Favelas, Benefits From Olympics Have Yet To Materialize, How The Olympic Medal Tables Explain The World, ”Philando Castile spent his driving career trapped in a seemingly endless cycle of traffic stops, fines, court appearances, revocations and reinstatements, raising questions about bias, race and luck. ”Castile’s trouble with traffic stops began when he still had his learner’s permit. He was stopped a day before his 19th birthday. From there, he descended into a seemingly endless cycle of traffic stops, fines, court appearances, late fees, revocations and reinstatements in various jurisdictions. ”Court records raise big questions: Was Castile targeted by police? Or was he just a careless or unlucky driver? ”An NPR analysis of those records shows that the cafeteria worker who was shot and killed by a police officer during a traffic stop in a St. Paul, Minn. suburb, was stopped by police 46 times and racked up more than $6, 000 in fines. Another curious statistic: Of all of the stops, only six of them were things a police officer would notice from outside a car — things like speeding or having a broken muffler.” During a week in Cleveland, photographer Gabriella Demczuk explored the ways that people embraced and challenged the Republican Party’s mission in this election — both from inside and outside the party. Then in Philadelphia, Demczuk continued her exploration of the fractures in America’s political system, examining the Democratic Party’s attempt to make itself ”stronger together.” True Believers, Protesters And Trump: Scenes From Cleveland, Dissent, Drama And Unity At The Democratic Convention, ” ’With recent events and political environment, these weapons will be harder to get a hold of.’ ’This is what your dreams it could be when it grows up.’ ’I can meet . .. near the FL Mall in Orlando or any other time.” ”Cash is king.’ ”These classified advertisements for weapons were listed on Armslist, a website where anyone can advertise a firearm they’d like to sell, and anyone can contact a seller with an offer to buy. The site is legal. But there’s no way to know whether buyers and sellers who meet through Armslist are following federal, state or local background check rules. ”We wanted to see how many firearms — defined here as handguns and rifles able to rapidly fire a large number of bullets, one shot per trigger pull, without having to reload — can be currently found on Armslist, and how quickly new listings appear. This provides a window into the difficulty of regulating access to a type of weapon frequently used in mass shootings.” Our favorite albums of the year draw from all of the genres we cover at NPR Music, from rock, pop and to classical, jazz, electronic and international artists. These are the records NPR Music couldn’t stop playing — albums that speak to a moment and a lifetime, that party, and that exist in their own worlds. Our list of the year’s best songs may begin with Beyoncé and end with Drake, but between those two stars you’ll find a mix that celebrates all of the music we love. These are the pop anthems, rallying cries, party jams, riff rockers, perfumed piano pieces and emotional exorcisms that we loved to share this year. ”Across the country, private organizations, groups and individuals quietly have been working to ease the plight of Syrian refugees. More than 11, 000 have arrived in the U. S. this year, fulfilling a pledge by the Obama administration. That figure far exceeds the number of Syrian refugees accepted during the previous four years of the Syrian war, and the White House is calling for a big bump in the overall number of refugees next year. ”It had been a long journey for Osama and Ghada and their four kids, who are among the nearly 5 million Syrians who have fled their homeland since the war began in 2011. They survived the war in Syria and had struggled for three years as refugees in Jordan when they were notified by the U. N. refugee agency, UNHCR, that they had been accepted for resettlement in the U. S.” ”There are huge gaps in school funding between affluent and districts. And, with evidence that money matters, especially for disadvantaged kids, something has to change. ”School Money is a nationwide collaboration between NPR’s Ed Team and 20 member station reporters exploring how states pay for their public schools and why many are failing to meet the needs of their most vulnerable students.” Is There A Better Way To Pay For America’s Schools? Why America’s Schools Have A Money Problem, President Obama spoke to NPR as he prepared to leave Washington for the holidays, reflecting on the year that was, the 2016 campaign and other news, plus revealing what he’s hearing from citizens. In the exit interview, NPR’s Steve Inskeep asked Obama about Russian interference in the U. S. election, executive power, the future of the Democratic party and his future role.

I did not want to join yoga class. I hated those beatific instructors. I worried that the people in the class could fold up like origami and I’d fold up like a bread stick. I understood the need for stretchy clothes but not for total anatomical disclosure. But my hip joints hurt and so did my shoulders, and my upper back hurt even more than my lower back and my brain would. not. shut. up. I asked my doctor about medication and he said he didn’t like the side effects and was pretty sure I wouldn’t, either. So I signed up for Gentle Mind and Body Yoga, the of yoga classes. I think the principle is that you get into some pose that has cosmic implications and then hold the pose until you are enlightened or bored silly. I like the bridge pose, where you lie flat on your back and put a rubber block under your butt. I purely hate the eagle pose, where you wind your arms around each other and then wrap your legs around each other and stand on one foot I drop like a sprayed mosquito. The teacher is forgiving: ”Yogi’s choice,” she says, meaning that I’m now a yogi and I can do what I want. She says we’re not trying to get anywhere, and I deeply appreciate not trying to get anywhere. I enjoy a stretchy pose where you sit with a knee crossed over a leg and the opposite arm wrapped around the knee but the point is, says the teacher, to wring the toxins out of your internal organs. I’m not going to wring out my internal organs. Sometimes she wants us to lower our shoulders and raise our chests to open up our hearts — a phrase that gives me creeps. The best is the sponge or corpse pose, which is what it sounds like. I’m fully competent at being a sponge, except you’re supposed to breathe in all the way up your left side and breathe out on your right because this activates your left and right brains. I just breathe on both sides. Then we sit on some blankets that smell like unwashed humanity, with legs crossed. The teacher says this is called sukhasana which means easy seat, but it’s no such thing. So I stretch my legs out in front of me, yogi’s choice. We end in sukhasana with our hands in prayer and say to each other namaste, which is apparently Sanskrit for the godhead in me salutes the godhead in you, but which my brain hears as basta, which is Italian for stop it, enough. I’m OK with all this, even the pretend science which I’m free to ignore or better yet, to subject to my fellow Last Word on Nothing blogger Michelle Nijhuis’ stellar B******* Prevention Protocol (BPP) which in these days of blatant disinformation if you haven’t read, clipped out and taped to your computer screen, you may as well join an ant colony. Some b. s. you don’t need a protocol to detect, so I didn’t even try to find out whether twisting my body wrings the toxins out of my internal organs or whether breathing through my left nostril stimulates my right brain. But it’s true that after yoga, climbing steps doesn’t hurt, waiting for Greek carryout promised 15 minutes ago isn’t irritating, and on the drive home my brain doesn’t do anything except drive. Does yoga work? I’d answer this, but working through the full BPP takes time. So I took three shortcuts. One, I searched for yoga and efficacy in PubMed, the database of the National Library of Medicine, and skimmed the titles of review articles. No answer, or rather, too many answers: yoga for cancer, chronic low back pain, diabetes, cystitis, sleep disorders, hypertension, schizophrenia, depression, multiple sclerosis. And that was just on the first page. The second shortcut was no better. I searched the website of the National Academies Press, which publishes independent scientific analyses for the government. Yoga showed up in studies on pain management, alternative medicine, improving bus operators’ health and teens’ sleep habits, obesity, fitness, Gulf War syndrome, astronaut care and PTSD. The third shortcut was the Cochrane Reviews, independent reviews of medical information: same thing — yoga for asthma, cardiovascular disease, epilepsy. Bill Broad has probably answered all these questions in his book The Science of Yoga, but I’m not going to read it. My rule for any one thing that affects so many different diseases and functions is that it affects none of them and completely fails the BPP. Or else it affects something huge and general like mood or immune function that in turn affects everything else. What with lots of kinds of yogas, lots of different diseases, lots of different kinds of studies and entities like mood or immune function, I’m giving up. I haven’t a clue whether yoga helps at all, let alone how. You’re on your own here. For myself, I’ll keep going, not because it’s not b. s. but because I like occasionally painless stairs and quiet brains. Besides, I’m finally getting competent at the infant version of the sun salute and I’ve learned never to look at the other people in the class. But I have no plans to advance to Beginning Yoga. Ann Finkbeiner is a science writer whose books include After the Death of a Child and The Jasons. She is of the blog The Last Word on Nothing, where this essay first appeared.

With a who has publicly supported the debunked claim that vaccines cause autism, suggested that climate change is a hoax dreamed up by the Chinese, and appointed to his Cabinet a retired neurosurgeon who doesn’t buy the theory of evolution, things might look grim for science. Yet watching Patti Smith sing ”A Hard Rain’s Fall” live streamed from the Nobel Prize ceremony in early December to a room full of physicists, chemists and physicians — watching her twice choke up, each time stopping the song altogether, only to push on through all seven wordy minutes of one of Bob Dylan’s most beloved songs — left me optimistic. Taking nothing away from the very real anxieties about future funding and support for science, neuroscience in particular has had plenty of promising leads that could help fulfill Alfred Nobel’s mission to better humanity. In the spirit of optimism, and with input from the Society for Neuroscience, here are a few of the noteworthy neuroscientific achievements of 2016. One of the more fascinating fields of neuroscience of late entails mapping the crosstalk between our biomes, brains and immune systems. In July, a group from the University of Virginia published a study in Nature showing that the immune system, in addition to protecting us from a daily barrage of potentially infectious microbes, can also influence social behavior. The researchers had previously shown that a type of white blood cells called T cells influence learning behavior in mice by communicating with the brain. Now they’ve shown that blocking T cell access to the brain influences rodent social preferences. It appears that interferon, an immune system factor released from T cells, is at least partly responsible for the findings. A single injection of interferon into the mice’s cerebrospinal fluid, the clear, protective fluid that bathes the brain and spinal cord, was enough to restore social behaviors. Lead author Jonathan Kipnis from the University of Virginia speculates that there might be an evolutionary linkage here — one protecting us from the increased pathogen exposure that comes with socializing. He also says the findings could help improve our understanding and treatment of brain disorders. Of course these findings were in rodents, but earlier work by Kipnis suggests that the brain and immune system communicate in similar ways in humans. Major advances were also made this year in joining human with machine. In October 2015, Hanneke de Bruijne, a Dutch woman with Lou Gehrig’s disease, received a brain implant that would allow her to communicate simply by thinking. Eighty percent of patients suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, as the condition is also known, ultimately have trouble communicating because of muscle paralysis. At its extreme, this paralysis results in a tragic state called syndrome, in which patients remain fully aware but can’t express themselves they become locked inside their own bodies. The new therapy, which comes on the heels of similar work out of East Tennessee State University, was developed by a team from the University Medical Center Utrecht in collaboration with Medtronic. It consists of four electrodes implanted over the motor region of the brain that connect to a wireless transmitter implanted in the chest. After 28 weeks of training, the device was able to recognize brain activity patterns that occur with thinking about typing a particular letter. Though de Bruijne’s muscles still can’t move, this interface can now translate her brain waves — or her ”thoughts” — into text. Among the biggest neuroscience drug advances of the year was the Food and Drug Administration’s Dec. 23 approval of Biogen’s Spinraza, or nusinersen, the first treatment for spinal muscular atrophy. Spinal muscular atrophy is the No. 1 genetic cause of death in infants. Those affected by the devastating disorder carry a gene mutation that renders them unable to produce a protein essential to survival of neurons in the spinal cord. Gradually stripped of their abilities to walk, eat and breathe, most children struck with the disease don’t make it past 2 years old. Spinraza is a gene therapy that boosts the production of the essential protein. Despite possible side effects, which include bleeding complications, kidney toxicity and infection, the drug appears to work so well that two recent clinical trials were stopped early, as it was deemed unethical to withhold treatment from babies assigned to placebo groups. As with many other drugs for rare diseases, the price of Spinraza is expected to be high to help recoup research costs — perhaps as high as $250, 000 per year. The Alzheimer’s disease community also received welcome news this year. After hundreds of failed trials of potential treatments over the past couple of decades, the experimental drug aducanumab, also produced by Biogen, was found in early trials to slow the cognitive decline that comes with Alzheimer’s. And then there was the ongoing resurgence of psychedelic medicine. It’s been pretty well established that the hallucinogenic anesthetic ketamine may be an effective antidepressant. Now we have some potentially groundbreaking findings for psilocybin, the active compound in ”magic mushrooms.” Two clinical trials found that just a single high dose of the drug is effective at treating symptoms of both depression and anxiety in patients. Scientists are unsure just how psilocybin works to relieve mental duress. But one theory holds that it disrupts thought and fixation — common in those suffering from depression — allowing selfless cognition and experience to occur. In both trials the intensity of the patients’ ”mystical experiences” correlated with the decrease in symptoms. Both research groups strongly caution against recreational use or with magic mushrooms, but the findings have many experts and institutions reconsidering the of negative counterculture stigma surrounding psilocybin. The list of neuroscientific advances from the past 12 months goes on: The Human Connectome Project gave us the most complete map of the cerebral cortex to date a Canadian group revealed in part how fear memories are formed scientists at Mount Sinai charted the neurocircuitry behind social aggression. Still, the field of neuroscience remains, at best, in adolescence. As British novelist Matt Haig wrote in The Telegraph in 2015, ”Neuroscience is a baby science. . .. We know more about the moons of Jupiter than what is inside of our skulls.” As the year’s abundant advances attest, there is plenty of room left for discoveries in the coming year and beyond — and plenty of creative, eager researchers to make them. Bret Stetka is a writer based in New York and an editorial director at Medscape. His work has appeared in Wired, Scientific American and on The Atlantic. com. He graduated from University of Virginia School of Medicine in 2005. He’s also on Twitter: @BretStetka

I was standing by the airport exit, debating whether to get a snack, when a young man with a round face approached me. I focused hard to decipher his words. In a thick accent, he asked me to help him find his suitcase. As we walked to baggage claim, I learned his name: Edward Murinzi. This was his very first plane trip. A refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo, he’d just arrived to begin his American life. Beside the luggage carousel at Washington’s Reagan Airport, he looked out at the two lanes of traffic and the concrete wall beyond. ”So this is America?” he said. From finding his bag to finding his apartment and finding a job, there was a lot for Edward to learn. Later, he acknowledged that while he was standing in the airport looking for his luggage, he felt the magnitude of the task before him. He says questions were zipping around his head: ”How will I start? You get scared. How will I manage?” After he found his bag and I called his caseworker to come and pick him up, we parted ways. He thanked me for being his ”Airport Teacher.” But, it seemed to me, he needed a teacher for the rest of America. That might as well be Claire Mukundente’s job description — not in Edward’s case but for many other refugees. Halfway across the country, in Chicago, Mukundente works for the Association, a nonprofit, and spends her days visiting new refugees and helping them adapt to a new country. How Does The Stove Work? Today, she’s headed into a apartment building on the city’s north side. On the second floor, Alexia Mukambalaga and six of her family members share a apartment. They arrived two weeks ago from Congo — by way of Rwanda and Niger. The family crowds around a folding table for lunch — some standing, others sitting. Within minutes of meeting them, they ask Mukundente why the food in America tastes like pineapples. It’s so sweet, they tell her. Mukundente says food is always one of the first lessons: How to get it, how to cook it and what’s healthy. She helps the family figure out what goes in the freezer and fridge, and how to use a stove. Mukundente says many Congolese have spent more than a decade in refugee camps, so a lot of the stuff in a kitchen is brand new to them. Grocery stores, too. ”Shopping can be a big deal, especially for your own food,” says Claire Mukundente. She often accompanies new arrivals to the grocery store, explaining how to evaluate dozens of different cereal brands and why it’s important to avoid the sugary drinks. Then she moves on to other lessons: the banking system and bus routes, social norms and gender dynamics. Mukundente says they talk about ”almost everything.” She says these families have learned a lot shuttling between countries and refugee camps, but when they come to a place like Chicago, many of those skills don’t translate. But Mukundente insists that she’s not their teacher. Instead she says, ”I see them as myself. Like me, when I came.” Claire Mukundente fled Rwanda in the 1990s during the genocide. And after traveling through seven countries, she arrived in Chicago. She cleaned hotel rooms, tried to learn English and scrambled to find daycare for her three kids. Ten years ago, she decided to start teaching other refugees what she’d learned. But not all refugees have someone like Claire Mukundente. Three months after I met Edward at the airport, I visited his apartment. It was about 30 minutes outside Washington, and he shared it with several other refugees. (He has since moved to Louisville, Ky.) Sitting in the living room that doubled as his bedroom, he told me that soon after arriving he realized he needed to be his own teacher. So, he started observing everything. ”I tried to observe very silently,” he said in the room that functions as his living room, bedroom, kitchen and dining room. He learned to read a map and a bank statement. But Edward says there was more he called them ”invisible lessons — ideas.” The biggest one? ”Time was paramount to every success in America.” Edward said that, during his 20 years in a refugee camp in Uganda, time had never before been linked to money. Just being a person meant you got a food ration, he said. But here, he got a job — as a line worker — and he was paid hourly. ”Time was important. Important!” He told me that things have been hard during his first three months — America hadn’t quite been the Promised Land he expected. ”I remember the story in the Bible: The Exodus.” Back in the refugee camp, Edward said, he always thought life would be easy in America, akin to the Biblical land of milk and honey. But now, he finds himself having to remember that the Israelites struggled, as refugees and newcomers. Eventually though, they learned to adapt to life in a new land. Edward says he hopes he will too.

If movies were trying to be more realistic, perhaps the way to summon Batman shouldn’t have been the — it should have been the bat squeak. New research from the Bat Lab for at Tel Aviv University found that bats are ”vocalizing” more information than many researchers previously thought. And researchers were able to decipher what the bats were squeaking to each other about — often they were bickering over things like food, sleep and mating. ”It’s not as if now we can understand everything. It’s not as if we have a dictionary,” says Dr. Yossi Yovel, a at Tel Aviv University and a member of the Bat Lab. ”But what we’ve found is that this cacophony that you could hear . .. actually contains much more information than previously believed. So, all of [this] shouting, all of these vocalizations that were previously all categorized as aggressive vocalizations, we can now divide them,” Yovel tells NPR’s Scott Simon. ”For example, we can classify whether the bats are arguing over food or over mating or over sleeping position or over other contexts,” he says. ”We can recognize the individuals vocalizing and we can even, to some extent, say who they are vocalizing to.” In a recent study, Yovel, along with researchers Yosef Prat and Mor Taub, monitored groups of Egyptian fruit bats with audio and video recording for two and a half months. They say they analyzed almost 15, 000 bat vocalizations. Egyptian fruit bats are one of a small number of animal species to communicate within their species, instead of ”broadcasting” their message. Bats do more than argue, Yovel says. But Egyptian fruit bats spend a lot of time arguing. ”Nearly all of the communication calls of the Egyptian fruit bat in the roost are emitted during aggressive pairwise interactions, involving squabbling over food or perching locations and protesting against mating attempts,” the researchers write. ”What they’re saying is stuff like: Why did you wake me up? Get out of my way,” Yovel says. ”In the case of mating, it’s usually the female protesting against a male who is trying to mate with her.” Context in bat communication was one focus of the study. If we humans say the word ”apple,” we imagine certain characteristics just from that word alone: a red color, a round shape, a certain taste, Yovel explains. ”This is something that is [a] very very important factor in human communication.” He says animals almost never demonstrate this ability. But their research shows that vocalizations between bats have more of this type of context than researchers knew about before. One goal of the research on bats is to apply it toward general knowledge of how different animals — including humans — communicate. ”It’s all part of a big question: How complex is animal communication?” Yovel says. ”Identifying context specific calls can be a first step toward the recovering of meaning in animal communication,” the researchers write. ”Understanding the encapsulated information in animal vocalizations is central to the study of sociality, communication, and language evolution.” So is there a translator in the works? ”Step by step we are getting closer to deciphering their communication,” Yovel says. ”I don’t think we will — not in my time, at least — be able to really talk with them.”

Eighteen years ago, on New Year’s Eve, David Fisher visited an old farm in western Massachusetts, near the small town of Conway. No one was farming there at the time, and that’s what had drawn Fisher to the place. He was scouting for farmland. ”I remember walking out [to the fallow fields] at some point,” Fisher recalls. ”And in the moonlight — it was all snowy — it was like a blank canvas.” On that blank canvas, Fisher’s mind painted a picture of what could be there alongside the South River. He could see horses tilling the land — no tractors, no big machinery — and vegetable fields, and children running around. This is David Fisher’s American Dream. It may not be the conventional American Dream of upward economic mobility. But dreams like his have a long tradition in this country. Think of the Puritans and the Shakers and the Amish. These American dreams are the uncompromising pursuit of a difficult ideal. The scene that David Fisher imagined, on the New Year’s Eve almost two decades ago, has turned into reality. It’s called Natural Roots Farm. To get to the farm, you have to leave the motorized world behind. Cross the South River on a swinging footbridge, and there in front of you are seven acres of growing vegetables, neatly laid out in rows. It’s early in the fall, on this day the hillside beyond the fields is glowing with red and yellow leaves. It’s idyllic, almost magical. Anna Maclay is out checking on the fields. ”I came originally as an apprentice in 2002,” she tells me. ”Totally fell in love with the land. I just thought, ’I want to live here!” Her wish came true in a way she hadn’t expected. She and David Fisher fell in love and got married. They now have two children: Leora and Gabriel. It’s a harvest day on the farm and David and Anna have some help. They’re joined by Emmet Van Driesche, who lives nearby on his own farm, and two apprentices, Kyle Farr and Calixta Killander, who are living and working on the farm for a year. Together, they’ll need to fill a wagon with spinach, beets, broccoli and a host of other vegetables and herbs. About two hundred customers have bought shares in the farm’s harvest. Among them is Maggie Potter. She arrives with her children to pick up her produce. ”It’s not only having the vegetables — the nourishment for our own bodies. It’s creating community, making friends along the way,” she says. If this all sounds like a vision of peace and contentment, take a closer look. Watch David Fisher at work. While the apprentices stick together in the fields, chatting as they work, Fisher works by himself, cutting greens off just above the soil, hacking out heads of broccoli. He moves quickly, with purpose in every step, almost never stopping, from daybreak until dusk. And when you talk with him, it becomes even clearer: He’s a very driven man. He’s driven, in fact, by a kind of desperation. And to understand it, you need to know his life story. David Fisher grew up in the suburbs north of New York City, in the village of Pleasantville, in Westchester County. He spent summers at a rustic camp in the Adirondacks. ”You could only get there by boat, you couldn’t drive there,” Fisher says. ”No electricity, bathe in the lake, live all summer in a tent.” Then, at the end of every summer, he’d get on a train back to Grand Central Station and it would hit him. ”Noise, steel and concrete and lights everywhere,” he recalls. It was an overwhelming sensory experience, and for young David, it wasn’t a pleasant one. When he was 15, that paradigm shift was more than he could take. He was overtaken by despair over the environmental fate of the earth. ”I was like this is craziness. The whole thing. Civilization as I’m seeing it is absurd. The way that humans are living on, consuming, destroying the earth is absurd,” he says. ”The only thing I could see to do was pack up and flee.” He determined to drop out of high school his parents forced him to get a diploma, graduating early. Then, Fisher got as far as he possibly could from houses and highways and smokestacks. He hung out in the west, skiing and backpacking, immersing himself in nature to ”soothe his soul,” as he puts it. He loved it, but he still knew, in the back of his mind, that it was just an escape. It wasn’t an enduring path out of his despair about the world. One day, when Fisher was 20 years old, he was back on the East Coast, visiting a friend at Hampshire College, here in western Massachusetts, and he wandered into the college’s small organic farm. It was another overwhelming sensory experience, but the opposite of Grand Central Station: ”Autumn leaves raining down, and the lush fields of vegetables and cover crops. Open the barn door, and the tables are lined with this abundance of earthy, healthy, vital produce. And I was like, ’Wow! ’” He felt like he was seeing, for the first time, a way to live immersed in the natural world, and also be productive. To make a living. He started learning to farm, from other farmers. And then he found this land near the town of Conway. You can call this farm utopian, if utopia is the kind of place where you work extra hard and live very frugally so that you can grow food in a way that’s more in harmony with nature. For instance: Half of the land on this farm is always devoted to ”cover crops” that don’t produce any food that customers will buy. The purpose of these crops is simply to protect and nourish the soil. His most defining choice, though, is to rely on horses as the primary source of power on the farm. Two of them, Pat and Lady, pull a wagon full of vegetables from the fields across the river and up a hill to a small barn beside the road where families come to pick up their produce. Kyle Farr, one of the apprentices, holds the reins and directs the horses with cryptic words and sucking sounds. David Fisher is committed to horses partly because it makes the farm more . ”It’s so direct,” he says. He doesn’t have to rely on fossil fuels. ”The fuel is there in the grass. The power is right there, in the form of these live animals.” Also, he says, horses force you to work at a more natural rhythm. But there’s a cost, in the form of time. Horses need care and feeding every day, whether they’re pulling a wagon that day or not. Fisher learned this past year that two former apprentices at Natural Roots Farm who had learned to work with horses here and then adopted this method on their own farms, recently went back to farming with tractors. It bothers him. But he’s not giving up. Because for him, working with horses is one small answer to the despair that led him here. ”The environmental crisis is heavy. It’s a heavy, heavy situation. And to find any hope of effecting some sort of change, or examples [of change] is critical to my emotional, psychological ” he says. Over breakfast that day, I ask David, ”Are you a perfectionist?” He starts to deny it, but Anna cuts in. ”Yes!” she says. He and Anna both tell me that David’s driving ambition to build a better farm — constantly working, always starting some new project — has led to conflict between them. ”This is the disagreement,” Anna says softly. ”I always think that we need to take on less, you know?” They’ve managed to keep this farm afloat for almost two decades now, but ”it’s still a serious struggle to make the economics of it work out,” David says. And apart from worries about money, they have to manage the logistics of a complicated life — 200 families depending on a steady supply of produce from their farm, children in school and playing soccer, and their car parked on the other side of the river, a walk from their rustic home. ”There’s not a lot that’s easy about living this way,” she says. ”But most of it feels pretty right. And I guess that’s turned out to be more important, for me.” Those are the words they often use, talking about their choices. This small, alternative American Dream, for them, just feels right.

For years now, some of the best, wildest, most moving or revealing stories we’ve been telling ourselves have come not from books, movies or TV, but from video games. So we’re running an occasional series, Reading The Game, in which we take a look at some of these games from a literary perspective. I played the game through the first time in something like a perfect state of awe and terror. Enraptured is, I think, the word that best describes it. Carried away completely into this ruined, beautiful world and the story of Joel and Ellie in The Last of Us. Normally such a completionist — so obsessed with exploring every hide and hollow in these imaginary worlds I throw myself into — in this instance I simply rolled with the narrative. Ran when running was proper. Slogged through dark and rain and snow and sunshine. Stood my bloody ground when left with no other options. Joel came to love Ellie, his surrogate daughter, and Ellie came to love Joel, the only father she’d ever known. And I (a father, with a daughter roughly Ellie’s age, with Ellie’s vocabulary and Ellie’s strange, discordant humor) loved Ellie, too. So when I reached the endgame and was presented with a terrible choice (no spoilers . .. yet) I drew my guns and slaughtered my way to the end credits, alight with fury and sure knowledge that I’d made the only choice I could. Second run: The beats are all the same, the story a known thing. Joel and Ellie fight zombies and soldiers and bandits and madmen. They lose friends and see sunrises and, this time, I play with an awful wisdom. Cassandra’s curse. I know how this story ends and I have made up my mind that, this time, I will make the other choice. The right one (morally, mathematically, humanistically) and so I walk with ghosts the whole way, right up to the end, and then . .. And then I make the exact same choice again. I can’t make the other. It hurts too much. Because that is how good the storytelling is in The Last Of Us. It makes you care so deeply for a bunch of pixels in the shape of a teenage girl that you will damn the whole world twice just for her. (OK, so now we’re gonna get spoilery. Fair warning.) The Last Of Us is a zombie story. It is incredibly derivative, borrows liberally from a hundred different books and movies, is structurally simplistic, melodramatic, viscerally violent, and despite all this (or, arguably, because of all this) tells one of the most moving, affecting and satisfying stories you’ll find anywhere. At its heart, it is the story of Joel — a broken and thief and smuggler living 20 years deep into a zombie apocalypse. He and his partner, Tess, are forced into a job that requires them to smuggle a young girl out of the Boston quarantine zone and deliver her to an army of revolutionaries because, of course, this girl is The One — the only person ever to be immune to the that turns infected people into gross, murderous mushroom zombies. That young girl is Ellie. And, unsurprisingly, the job does not exactly go as planned. If this all sounds familiar, that’s fine because it is familiar. The is a stock frame — tested and dependable. It is a road trip story in the same way that Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is, or Mad Max: Fury Road. Go from point A to point B, survive the journey, get there whole. And there’s nothing at all wrong with a simple narrative architecture when it is being used to support complex character arcs, as it is here. The Last Of Us is a simple road trip story underneath, existing in service to the complex and rich redemption story on top. All the stakes and ruination are laid out in the first 10 minutes, in a prologue so powerful that it’ll break your heart even if you don’t have one. Joel loses his daughter on the night the world ends, his little girl dying in his arms, under the gun of a panicked soldier trying to hold back the infected. When Ellie floats into his life two decades later, the jaded gamer in you says, Oh, so here’s where he learns to love again. . .. And you’re right. But then you watch it happen — in tiny moments like when Ellie, blowing off caution, walks a rickety plank between two buildings and Joel glances briefly down at the watch he wears, a gift from his daughter that he’s been wearing for 20 years — and you participate in it happening (protecting her, defending her, eventually becoming her for an extended chunk of the game in a brilliant bit of perspective switching) and it all just clicks. This is a love story — one of the best narratives ever told. Which is when that ending comes and you are presented with the ultimate parental nightmare scenario: Will you sacrifice the life of your child to save the world? Not a stranger, a friend or even a spouse, but your own daughter (which is what Ellie is now — Joel’s daughter, blood or no). Because in Ellie lives the cure to the mushroom zombie plague. But in order to create it, she has to die. I started a third playthrough before writing this piece. I am walking slow, taking my time, listening to Ellie read from her joke book, watching her swarmed by fireflies on the outskirts of Boston and admiring the natural beauty and deep environmental storytelling of the game. Nature has reclaimed most of this abandoned world, giving us an unusual apocalypse run riot with wildflowers. And while I have not made it to the end yet, I know it’s coming. I know the choice I’m going to have to make. And I know exactly what I’m going to do. Jason Sheehan is an a former restaurant critic and the current food editor of Philadelphia magazine. But when no one is looking, he spends his time writing books about spaceships, aliens, giant robots and ray guns. Tales From the Radiation Age is his latest book.

For years now, some of the best, wildest, most moving or revealing stories we’ve been telling ourselves have come not from books, movies or TV, but from video games. So we’re starting an occasional series, Reading The Game, in which we take a look at some of these games from a literary perspective. In the beginning, I breathed only methane. Seeded onto a pinkish and poisoned world of scouring winds, I stumbled from my broken spaceship, unsure of my footing or anything else. I saw strange plants moving, the stalagmite spikes of ore deposits like plutonium fangs, the wreckage of my crash, dust. When I moved, I heard nothing but the crunch of my heavy boots and the occasional chime from my spacesuit — followed, always, by the weirdly autotuned computer voice in my ear saying, ”Environmental protection falling . ..” And hers was the only human voice left to speak in the whole of this impossible universe. And I was hooked. No Man’s Sky (released in its original form in August of 2016 by indie studio Hello Games, and updated just a couple weeks ago) is a bauble, an amazement that borders on magical in its opening hours, becomes almost hypnotically comfortable at a certain point, then simply majestic in its scope and incomprehensible size. It is, at its most elemental, a procedurally generated universe in a box — one containing 18 quintillion planets, all unique, all created, sculpted and populated by nothing more than random numbers and some math. Because of this hugeness, it is a lonely game. Land on a planet and it is yours alone. Land on ten, twenty, a hundred, and you will likely never see anything more than the traces left behind by other amateur spacemen who came this way before you. But the loneliness is part of the point of it. It is a game created to make you feel small in the face of the (nearly) infinite. So as I play, I do so in a universe empty of man. Or at least so close to empty that the difference between truth and the fiction I am building in my head is statistically null. No Man’s Sky comes in at polar ends of a long narrative spectrum. On the one side, there’s the story of the game, which is just terrible. At worst, it is incomprehensible gibberish about ancient civilizations and lost artifacts. And at it’s best, it ain’t much better — failing on many basic levels to tell a about the universe being a simulation (which, you know, it is) where the player (also called ”the Traveler”) is tasked by its creator to explore his way to the center of everything, essentially making the player a kind of landlord checking in on all the tenants. But on the other hand, it is also the best game I have ever experienced for storytelling. To crack the hissing cockpit of my spaceship and peek out through the trees of an alien forest, to run from robots or watch herds of galloping slugs running across the plains of a desert — these are experiences made for children of the Dark Ages who gobbled pulp like candy and lay back on cold hills, staring up into the sky and dreaming of what was out there for geeks who’ve never wanted for anything so much as they have for a spaceship, a jetpack, a ray gun and unlimited horizons. The only human in the universe, I played in a silence that was nearly complete, and loved No Man’s Sky precisely for its emptiness and for the way that even the few aliens I ran into spoke no language I knew. Granted, this changes. You learn words. You upgrade your stuff. If you’re me, you ignore the skeleton construct of the game’s story and simply roam. With the new update, I was suddenly granted the ability to build bases, to run freighters between stars, but that almost felt like work and I just shrugged and ignored most of it for the joys of simply romping around the ’verse, telling myself stories that were better than anything that lived within the construct of the game’s narrative. I could spend days hunting for just the right beach, the right view, or playing alien zoologist, meticulously cataloguing the space dinosaurs on one world, then scare myself half to death by stumbling upon sea monsters at the bottom of a shallow, purple sea, jump into my ship, blast off, run from some pirates, and be bounding through the snows of an ice planet ten minutes later. The quest for the center of the universe, for the of No Man’s Sky’s story, was far less interesting than the small, quiet, private stories that lived over every hill and horizon on every new world I discovered. No Man’s Sky does not tell a great story, but it contains multitudes of them. And any time it begins to grow dull or rote or predictable, all I have to do is look up, into the starry sky, and wonder what else might be out there. And then go find out for myself. Jason Sheehan is an a former restaurant critic and the current food editor of Philadelphia magazine. But when no one is looking, he spends his time writing books about spaceships, aliens, giant robots and ray guns. Tales From the Radiation Age is his latest book.

The Colorado River is like a giant bank account for seven different states. Now it’s running short. For decades, the river has fed growing cities from Denver to Los Angeles. A lot of the produce in supermarkets across the country was grown with Colorado River water. But with climate change, and severe drought, the river is reaching a crisis point, and communities at each end of it are reacting very differently. Just outside Boulder, Colo. surrounded by an evergreen forest, is Gross Reservoir. Beverly Kurtz and Tim Guenthner live just out of eyesight from the giant dam. And that’s on purpose. ”I could have built a house that overlooked the reservoir,” Kurtz says. But, she says, ”It’s choking off a wild river, which in my opinion is never a good thing.” Kurtz and Guenthner have a newfound job in retirement: fighting a proposed expansion to Gross Reservoir’s dam. The utility that owns it, Denver Water, wants to raise the concrete dam 131 feet. ”It doesn’t make any sense to build a dam and disrupt the environment here when down the line, that’s not going to solve the problem,” Kurtz says. The problem is that Colorado’s population will nearly double by 2050. Future residents will need more water. Denver Water CEO Jim Lochhead says more storage is part of the solution. It’s also an insurance policy against future drought. ”From Denver Water’s perspective, if we can’t provide clean, reliable, sustainable water 100 years from now to our customers, we’re not doing our job,” Lochhead says. Demand for Colorado River water is already stretched thin. So it may sound crazy that places like Colorado and Wyoming want to develop more water projects. Legally, that’s something they are entitled to do. Wyoming is studying whether to store more water from a Colorado River tributary. ”We feel we have some room to grow, but we understand that growth comes with risk,” says Pat Tyrrell, who oversees Wyoming’s water rights. Risk because in 10 or 20 years there may not be enough water to fill up expanded reservoirs. A drought has dramatically decreased water supply even as demand keeps growing. And climate change could make this picture worse. It makes Tyrrell’s job feel impossible. ”You understand the reality today of a low water supply,” he says. ”You also know that you’re going to have permit applications coming in to develop more water. What do you do?” Tyrrell says that as long as water is available, Wyoming will very likely keep finding new ways to store it. But a future with less water is coming. In California, that future of cutbacks has already arrived. The water that started in Colorado flows more than 1, 000 miles to greater Los Angeles. So even in the sixth year of California’s drought, some lawns are still green. ”Slowly but surely, the entire supply on Colorado River has become less reliable,” says Jeffrey Kightlinger, who manages the Metropolitan Water District in Southern California. He notes that the water level in Lake Mead, the biggest reservoir on the river, has been plummeting. An official shortage could be declared next winter. ”And that’ll be a historic moment,” Kightlinger says. It’s never happened before. Arizona and Nevada would be forced to cut back on how much water they draw from the river. California would be spared that fate, because it has senior water rights. So you wouldn’t expect to hear what Kightlinger says next. ”We are having voluntary discussions with Arizona and Nevada about what we would do proactively to help,” he says. California could help by giving up water before it has to, between 5 percent and 8 percent of its supply. Kightlinger isn’t offering this out of the goodness of his heart if Lake Mead drops too low, the federal government could step in and reallocate all the water, including California’s. ”We all realize if we model the future and we build in climate change, we could be in a world of hurt if we do nothing,” Kightlinger says. This idea of cooperation is somewhat revolutionary after years of lawsuits and bad blood. Recently, farmer Steve Benson was checking on one of his alfalfa fields near the Mexican border. ”We know there’s a target on our back in the Imperial Valley for the amount of water we use,” he says. This valley produces of the country’s vegetables in the winter — with water from the Colorado River. In fact, for decades, California used more than its legal share of the river and had to cut back in 2003. This area, the Imperial Irrigation District, took the painful step of transferring some of its water to cities like San Diego. Bruce Kuhn voted on that water transfer as a board member of the district. ”It was the single hardest decision I have ever made in my life,” he says. Kuhn ended up casting the deciding vote to share water, which meant some farmers have had to fallow their land. ”It cost me some friends,” he says. ”I mean, we still talk but it isn’t the same.” Soon, Kuhn may have to make another painful decision about whether California should give up water to Arizona and Nevada. With an emergency shortage looming, Kuhn may have no choice. Grace Hood is a reporter with Colorado Public Radio. Lauren Sommer reports for KQED.

For the last installment of NPR’s holiday recipe series, NPR founding mother Susan Stamberg lays out her special New Year’s Eve recipe for caviar pie. Here it is, so you can make it yourself. 6 egges, chopped3 tbs mayonnaise1 cup red onion, minced cream cup sour cream, Mix the eggs with the mayonnaise. Spread on bottom of oiled spring pan or pie pan. Sprinkle with the minced onion. Soften with the cream cheese. Blend the mixture with the sour cream until smooth. Spread over minced onion with wet spatula. (Smooth it out with your fingers.) Cover with wax paper. Chill three hours or overnight. To serve: Spread and cover top with black caviar. Knife around sides of pan. Lift off the spring belt or just cut into wedges and lift out with pie knife. Serve with lemon slices and good crackers. I like eating it with a fork, like pie. Others spread it on crackers. Makes about 10 servings.

Being overweight can raise your blood pressure, cholesterol and risk for developing diabetes. It could be bad for your brain, too. A diet high in saturated fats and sugars, the Western diet, actually affects the parts of the brain that are important to memory and make people more likely to crave the unhealthful food, says psychologist Terry Davidson, director of the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience at American University in Washington, D. C. He didn’t start out studying what people ate. Instead, he was interested in learning more about the hippocampus, a part of the brain that’s heavily involved in memory. He was trying to figure out which parts of the hippocampus do what. He did that by studying rats that had very specific types of hippocampal damage and seeing what happened to them. In the process, Davidson noticed something strange. The rats with the hippocampal damage would go to pick up food more often than the other rats, but they would eat a little bit, then drop it. Davidson realized these rats didn’t know they were full. He says something similar may happen in human brains when people eat a diet high in fat and sugar. Davidson says there’s a vicious cycle of bad diets and brain changes. He points to a 2015 study in the Journal of Pediatrics that found obese children performed more poorly on memory tasks that test the hippocampus compared with kids who weren’t overweight. He says if our brain system is impaired by that kind of diet, ”that makes it more difficult for us to stop eating that diet. . .. I think the evidence is fairly substantial that you have an effect of these diets and obesity on brain function and cognitive function.” The evidence is growing. Research from the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience published in July found that obese people have less white matter in their brains than their lean peers — as if their brains were 10 years older. A more recent study from researchers at the University of Arizona supports one of the leading theories, that high body mass is linked to inflammation, which affects the brain. But if we understand how obesity affects the brain and memory, then maybe we could use that relationship to prevent people from becoming obese in the first place. Lucy Cheke, a psychologist at the University of Cambridge, says her study in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology this November gives her some idea of how to do that. Her researchers asked obese and lean people to do a memory task that’s a virtual treasure hunt. The subjects had to hide something in a scene across various computer sessions, then they were asked what they hid, where they hid it and in which session. The obese people were 15 to 20 percent worse than lean ones in all aspects of the experiment. The finding confirmed what other researchers had already seen in rodents. ”This really picks apart spatial, item and temporal memory, as well as, crucially, the ability to integrate them,” which Cheke says is ”one of the most fundamental aspects of memory.” If you’re obese, she says, you might just be ”10 to 15 to 20 percent more likely to not quite remember where you put your keys.” Diet isn’t necessarily destiny. People can compensate. As American University’s Davidson puts it, ”Let’s say I had a kid and I gave him a diet and he showed hippocampal dysfunction. That kid may not do worse in school.” But, Davidson adds, the processes that help the kid do well in school may be impaired. When that happens, the kid would have to work harder and be more motivated and would ”have a tougher go of it.” Cheke says with the link between obesity and the brain growing as a field of research, we could see more ways of targeting obesity. For example, if the issue is that the diet of obese people degrades their memory and makes them more likely to overeat, then maybe making their meals more memorable would help them eat less of the bad stuff. Cheke says there’s already some research showing that if you watch TV while you eat lunch, you’ll eat more and also be more likely to get hungry in the afternoon and later to eat more at dinner. She says not watching TV while you eat is one of the ”small easy changes that people can make that don’t involve a lot of and that don’t involve a lot of sacrifices, but that can still make a significant difference into how much you’re eating.” However, even though we are beginning to understand that obesity affects the brain, we don’t exactly know how, says John Gunstad, professor and director of the Applied Psychology Center at Kent State University in Ohio. He points out that obesity changes a lot about the body: blood sugar levels, the cardiovascular system, inflammation levels throughout the body. Any one of those things could affect the brain. ”Most likely, the effect of obesity on the brain is related to not just one cause but a combination of causes,” Gunstad says. Davidson is also moving forward by studying how to break the vicious cycle of a Western diet, obesity and brain changes. But he says the underlying idea that obesity affects the brain is clear. ”It’s surprising to me that people would question that obesity would have a negative effect on the brain, because it has a negative effect on so many other bodily systems,” he says, adding, why would ”the brain would be spared?” Alan Yu is a freelance reporter who also contributes to the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. You can follow him on Twitter: @Alan_Yu039.

Who’s the YouTube star of 2016? Adele singing carpool karaoke and the Japanese comic who made the viral video were among the top 10 videos of the year. But there was lots of competition around the world. This month, YouTube Rewind released its list of the top 10 most popular YouTube videos in nearly 40 countries and regions, based on how many people viewed and shared them. Here’s a sampling from some of the places we cover in our blog. With nearly 6. 7 million views, Nigeria’s top video of the year features a comedic faceoff between Emanuella Samuel and a gang of bullies nearly twice her size. ”You’re not afraid of me right?” she shouts (even though she is clearly afraid of them). The video, titled ”I’ll Beat You,” is also ranked among the top 10 most popular videos in South Africa and Uganda. Last year, a new dance — the na goore — brought out the moves in Senegal. This year, something old is new again: sabar, a traditional Senegalese dance set to energetic drumbeats and characterized by ” lifts and springing jumps,” as a New York Times dance critic put it. Abandoned during the French colonization of the 1800s, sabar between the 1960s and 1980s under the country’s first president in the period as a point of national pride. The video has picked up close to 1. 4 million YouTube views. It’s the old game ”Truth or Dare” played between a dad and his son — part of an infomercial from India’s first furniture rental company in an attempt to woo millennial shoppers. The ad garnered 1. 5 million views in just four days and is among the top 10 most popular videos in the country, with more than 6 million views. Dad starts off with innocent questions ”What is the capital of Nagaland” and then goes in for the kill: ”You have alcohol bottles hidden in your flat?” Perhaps it’s no surprise that Trevor Noah’s skewering of South African president Jacob Zuma was the top video of 2016 in The Daily Show host’s home country. Zuma has been facing calls to resign after having been accused of corruption and political mismanagement. In the clip, Noah pokes fun at Zuma’s use of $15 million in state funds to ”renovate his house” — including the installation of a pool, which Zuma said was actually a ”fire pool” whose water would be used to put out any fires. And then there’s his inability to read aloud the numeral ”769, 870.” A video of a talk show that ponders the future of the Arabic language has racked up 9. 1 million views. The host asks some kids to name different animals. They know the English words ”giraffe,” ”crocodile” and ”owl” but go blank when asked to say the names in Arabic. And it’s not just a joke: The National, a newspaper in the United Arab Emirates, reports that experts are increasingly concerned about young Arabs speaking a hybrid language — usually Arabic laced with English — to sound more sophisticated and modern. The trailer for Disney’s Queen of Katwe — a movie based on a true story about a young chess champion rising out of the slums — was the fourth video in the East African country, with 1. 8 million views. As NPR previously reported, this is possibly the first Disney movie to be set in the Africa with all black actors. One of the top videos of 2016 from Mexico come from the second most subscribed YouTuber in the world. A native Chilean who likes to rant, he’s known mainly by his stage name HolaSoyGerman — Spanish for ”hello, I am German,” which is his first name, pronounced Herman. He has over 30 million subscribers and 2. 9 billion views. His most popular video this year, in which he enthusiastically spews out a string of thoughts on food, has reached 24 million viewers. He dramatizes, for example, his frustration of opening a bag of chips only to find filled mostly with air. The original video didn’t break Indonesia’s top 10 list, but the song itself clearly struck a chord. The popular video in that country, with 8. 3 million views, is a version of the song by comedian Andre Taulany on an Indonesian talk show. The bit is just one of many imitations of the viral but routine, showing that sometimes all it takes is a catchy beat and a silly dance to bring the world together.

Here’s a quick roundup of some of the you may have missed on this week’s Morning Edition. Clean that screen, It’s time to talk about germs. Yes, germs. In a somewhat startling announcement your smartphone may have five times more germs than a toilet seat. It’s OK, I just looked at my beloved little iPhone in disgust, too. All of this is according to the Japanese mobile company NIT, which seems to be exploiting the grossness that is your handheld device. As Morning Edition host David Greene said Monday, the company has installed special rolls of paper in bathrooms at Tokyo’s Narita Airport. The rolls look like toilet paper, except they have some writing on it, which says ”Welcome to Japan. ..wipe your smartphone with this.” The toilet paper then encourages you to log on to NIT’s wifi network and enjoy some quality web surfing. It’s probably a good idea to wipe your phone down now that you’re done reading. In cold coffee, It’s common knowledge that journalists follow the money to uncover stories. Just ask David Fahrenthold. But when it comes to the police officers, well, they follow the coffee cups and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. At least that’s what happened with some police officers in Cheyenne, Wyo. As Morning Edition host David Greene said Tuesday, the officers have accused Zachary Munoz of burglary. They say he targeted a business called 4 Rivers Equipment and a JCPenney store. Police used DNA to connect the crimes. Apparently, Munoz left his coffee cup at JCPenney and a half eaten PBJ sandwich at the equipment store. So remember what your mother told you, DNA is evidence that can be traced, and it’s important to clean up after yourself. No one likes a messy burglar. Home for the holidays, Stuffed animals have all the fun these days. And this definitely stands true for Eleanor Dewald’s stuffed bear, Teddy. As Morning Edition host Rachel Martin said Tuesday, Dewald was flying from Dallas to Detroit with Teddy by her side. But when she got off the plane, Teddy somehow managed to stay behind. Dewald’s mom sounded the call on social media and airline agent, or should we say modern day hero, Steven Laudeman, located the bear, who was unfortunately on top of a trash can. Before sending Teddy back, Laudeman took the fluffy fella on a tour of the plane cockpit, the tarmac and into the gift shop. Teddy snapped some pictures alongside the other stuffed animals there. Needless to say Teddy gets some major street cred and bragging rights for his holiday adventure. Raise a glass cup, What would parties and be without some hearty libations? Sad! And what would hold the liquid courage we drink if red Solo cups weren’t there? Good question. Well New Year’s Eve parties tend to have plenty of drinks, which means there will be plenty of those red Solo cups floating around, but this year you need to raise your plastic cup to the oncoming 2017 and Robert Hulseman. Hulseman invented the red Solo cup and as Morning Edition host David Greene said Friday, the inventor died at age 84. His family told the Chicago Tribune that Hulseman knew every employee’s name and went to Catholic Mass on Sundays. Beyond his success of creating the cup, he also inspired a Toby Keith party song. So this weekend, we’ll fill them up and lift them up to Hulseman.

Ben Johnston doesn’t follow the rules of music. Sure, he’s got degrees from two colleges and a conservatory. But from an early age, Johnston heard music differently. When he was growing up in Georgia, he questioned the standard scales he was taught in school. ”I played by ear and I invented my own chords,” he says. In Western music, we’re taught that there are set notes in scales, but there is actually an infinite number of pitches in between those notes. They’re called microtones, and those are the notes Johnston likes to work with. ”String Quartet No. 4,” Johnston’s take on ”Amazing Grace,” is probably his and work. At his home in Madison, Wis. surrounded by a flock of peacocks and a herd of barn cats, the composer says the work has its roots in his childhood, in slavery and in his desire to hear what the song might have sounded like if Beethoven had covered it late in his career. It was actually Johnston’s love of the Glenn Miller Orchestra and Broadway show tunes that made him want to be a composer. Then, during World War II, he heard Stan Kenton’s band. ”It was the first time I heard real jazz improvisation,” Johnston says. ”Immediately, I could get it by ear. It changed my whole approach to harmony.” After the war, he apprenticed with the iconoclastic American composer and Harry Partch and studied with composers Darius Milhaud and John Cage. All of them encouraged him to follow his own path. Johnston later became a mentor himself — he taught at the University of Illinois for over three decades. Composer Larry Polansky, who studied under Johnston there, says Johnston’s work is groundbreaking and necessary. ”We need Jackson Pollock, we need John Ashbery, we need James Joyce and we need Ben Johnston,” he says, ”because they do question something that generally goes unquestioned.” Polansky, who went on to become a professor himself, says Johnston taught him there was more to music than the standard Western scale. ”To enforce and entrain a very specific set of pitches and reify them as somehow natural . .. just doesn’t make any sense,” he says. Johnston has used all of the notes he can wrangle in dance music, percussion pieces and orchestral work, but he spent the bulk of his career — almost four decades — composing 10 unique string quartets. Johnston, who celebrated his 90th birthday this year, recently received a special present: the completion of a more than effort to record them all. The Kepler Quartet formed in 2002 with the specific intention to record these compositions — and it took 14 years of rehearsing and recording to get them all down. Eric Segnitz, the group’s second violinist, says the rehearsal process required both learning and unlearning. ”There was a fair amount of invention and learning curve and getting rid of any preconception of what a chord actually sounds like,” he says. Segnitz says what struck him even more than the complexity of the music was the way Johnston has never veered from his vision. ”There are all sorts of pressures on modern composers to reach an audience, to be popular — it’s like high school, basically,” he says. ”So the fact that someone has cut through all that is very meaningful.” That doesn’t mean the composer can’t be playful. In his ”String Quartet No. 10,” Johnston subtly teases a traditional tune through four movements. ”You build up this enormous expectation until finally you get to the end and . .. we reveal the tune,” he says. ”It turns out to be ’Danny Boy!’ ” Johnston now wants musicians to take his ideas into the future. He sees his string quartets as a foundation, and he wants others to build upon his tunings — and keep making what he calls the ”sounds that people never thought they wanted to hear.”

David Bowie, Prince and George Michael are all pop icons who died in 2016. But there is something else that connects them: They all helped to redefine the concept of masculinity in pop culture. Cultural critic Wesley Morris has been thinking about how these artists performed gender and sexuality. He recently wrote in The New York Times that in today’s climate, ”The Princes and the George Michaels seem as radical as ever.” Morris joined NPR’s Ari Shapiro to discuss how Bowie, Prince and Michael called upon their audiences to reimagine what it is to be a man. Hear their full conversation at the audio link and read an edited transcript below. Ari Shapiro: Let’s start with David Bowie. He was the oldest of the three, and he kind of paved the way in the 1970s. How do you think he changed our view of manliness? Wesley Morris: Sort of by suggesting that it didn’t exist, for at least the first 10 or 11 years of his career. He was part of a wave of artists who were interested in — and I don’t know how conscious it was — but it definitely was a reaction against a kind of standard notion [of what] men are supposed to do, any sort of male cliché. So paint a picture of what he did — how he performed his version of what it meant to be a man. For one thing, he was limber. He seemed very loose. He was what I imagine the people who might have tormented him, or tormented kids like him, would have called a ”sissy” — on the nicer end, I guess, the less mean end. I think that he was really interested in his femininity more than he was interested in his masculinity. He spent a lot of time creating these personae that were androgynous — they weren’t from this planet. Right. As much as he dissolved the border between male and female, he also kind of dissolved the border between human and alien. I mean, he made every aspect of what was normal about being human seem foreign. I think that Ziggy Stardust period was probably the most obviously queer period that he performed in. He was interested in this makeup and these platforms and this hair, and it was neither male nor female, and I think that was what was so disconcerting about him. But also, if you were a kid, it was kind of weirdly exciting, because these ideas of gender and masculinity and femininity are these acquired notions. I think that if you’re ignorant of what they signify, you see this person signifying none of it and it kind of blows your mind. Prince was 12 years younger he took what David Bowie did and ran with it. How would you describe the way he evolved from the version of masculinity that Bowie presented? It was incredibly sexual. Not only was he interested in acquiring it — he liked having it. He liked making sure the person he was having it with was happy. And yet he sang about it in his very falsetto voice that doesn’t sound typically masculine at all. No, no. And it has a tradition in popular music, obviously: He’s doing what people like Little Richard do. I mean, he was a seducer, [but] he wasn’t doing the thing that a lot of RB artists were doing — like ”Yeah, baby, you and me. We got something so special.” He doesn’t turn the lights low. And he he’s also doing it while wearing boas, high heels, eyeliner, makeup. And if not being a man in the way that we think of men was something that didn’t hurt your art or hurt your sales, then why not continue to pursue it? The thing about the ’80s in particular was just how we had become. There was the burgeoning of the American action movie. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s career as an action hero began. Sylvester Stallone moving from Rocky not just to Rambo, but to things like Cobra and Over The Top. This was a time when Michael Douglas was the sexiest man alive. And people who were gay, defying gender norms, were dying of AIDS. Yes. And so you have this tension between straight culture — and you have, in somebody like Prince, this person who is really queering the difference between these two. He was singing about heterosexual sex while looking anything but conventionally heterosexual. How do you explain the success of Bowie and Prince and these other pop stars in an era of such ? Their songs were good. [Laughs] Let’s get to the third member of this trifecta of musicians who exploded masculinity and who died in 2016 — and that is George Michael. What was he doing that was different from Bowie or Prince? He seemed to be the person who was most clearly gay. Well, he was. I mean, unlike the other two, he was gay. Right, but at the height of his popularity, he wasn’t out. But he was the person who, more than anybody else, if you had a gaydar, he set it off. That shot in the video for ”Faith” that’s focused on the seat of his jeans, just swinging back and forth. Yeah, there’s that. I think that by the time the ”Faith” video came around — it was his first solo album — he wanted to have a look that separated him from Wham! And this very sort of butch, rockabilly thing that he went for was so different than the other George Michael that it was arresting. That video just completely eroticized him: I mean, the camera is rising up his body as moving around this contraption that’s spinning. It’s great. How standard was it at that time for a male body like that to be the object of the camera’s gaze? Because it’s so much more common for the camera to gaze upon a gorgeous woman, especially in a music video. Right, like the express train to Elvis is immediate. And the express train to James Brown it goes there, too. I think the thing is that it’s immediate and it’s unmediated. You are allowed to look at this body in a way that you weren’t allowed to look at Elvis’ while he danced. It’s obviously a tragedy — a coincidence of the calendar — that all three of these artists died in 2016. But do you think that when you put the three of them together, you see something about the evolution, or maybe devolution, of masculinity in pop music? Yeah. I mean, to have that happen in a year in which we were the propriety of maleness with regard to women, and excusing it as just the thing that men do? You’re talking about the presidential race talk about sexual assault, things like that. Yes, yes. And I think that just looking at what the coming administration is going to look like, it’s gonna be full of generals, full of men who have exerted power in this very traditional way. I think that we go through these waves, these periods. It’s gonna be really interesting to see what the next three or four years turns up — in terms of how you might be able to trace some from people like your Princes and David Bowies and George Michaels to whatever is happening in music in two years.

In November, the typically straitlaced Office of Government Ethics surprised observers with a series of tweets mimicking Donald Trump’s bombastic style, exclamation points and all: ”Brilliant! Divestiture is good for you, good for America!” The controversy was : (1) The OGE doesn’t typically air its positions publicly, advising White House transition teams behind the scenes. (2) Trump hadn’t promised the total divestitures of business interests implied by the tweets. New records shared with NPR on Friday show that behind the curious tweets was the head of the OGE himself, Director Walter Shaub Jr. In two emails, dated Nov. 30, just several minutes apart, Shaub sent to OGE Chief of Staff Shelley Finlayson the nine tweets that took the Internet by storm that day. He then followed up with a link to a legal document referenced in one of the tweets and writes: ”Get all of these tweets posted as soon as humanly possible.” The emails were part of a document shared with NPR in response to disclosure requests under the Freedom of Information Act. OGE is generally tasked with overseeing ethics in the executive branch of the government, and so it’s one of the agencies looking into Trump’s business interests and the conflicts of interest they create for the as he takes over the reins of the country in January. As NPR’s Jim Zarroli has reported: ”With his vast network of licensing deals, golf courses and commercial real estate, Trump and his family stand to profit from his presidency to an unprecedented degree. Virtually any decision Trump makes could affect part of his domestic or international business empire.” Several OGE officials did not respond to requests for comment on Friday. It’s still unclear why — if Shaub’s tweets were deliberate — they were temporarily deleted on the day they were posted. At the time, an OGE spokesman said the agency was enthused by Trump’s indicated interest (on Twitter) in avoiding conflicts of interest. Despite the stylistic peculiarity of OGE’s tweets, Shaub’s position on Trump’s conflicts of interest is not secret. He appears to be on a campaign to get Trump to divest, as shown by his lengthy letter released earlier this month. ”I think that there’s a uniform consensus among everybody who does government ethics for a living . .. that Donald Trump must divest — he’s got to sell his holdings or use a blind trust or the equivalent, as every president has done for 40 years,” says Norm Eisen, a fellow at the Brookings Institution. ”So I took the tweets as an expression of that view,” says Eisen, who has served as special counsel for ethics and government reform in the Obama White House. ”This is an undebatable position in our profession.” NPR had requested, under FOIA, that the agency share all emails related to the Twitter postings on Nov. 30 and related to Donald Trump. Only one exchange appeared to involve a member of the Trump team. On the day of the tweetstorm, Shaub emailed ”D. McGahn” — presumably Donald McGahn, the former chief of the Federal Election Commission whom Trump picked to be White House counsel — to notify him of the press inquiries and the OGE’s response. OGE redacted about 15 pages among a week’s worth of emails, describing them as ”draft” or ”internal notes” or ”draft communications plan.” The vast majority of the disclosures were media inquiries from the month of November — but also troves of messages from members of the public received around the time of the tweets. There are dozens and dozens of emails, letters and even a postcard (of Alexander Hamilton with a black eye?) expressing concerns about Trump’s business holdings and conflicts of interest. Many writers criticized OGE’s tweetstorm others welcomed its candid commentary. Most writers encouraged OGE to hold up the ethics law and standards. NPR’s Jim Zarroli contributed to this report.

This is the time of year when everybody is making predictions for next year, and everybody is making resolutions for the things they plan to do. But it’s a Pop Culture Happy Hour tradition that while we do these things too, we also revisit the ones from last year to see whether we have any ability to know what’s going to happen (rarely!) and any tendency to follow through on our own plans (sometimes! ). As she has for the last two years, Kat Chow of NPR’s Code Switch team sits down with us to check in. What will the Oscars bring? Did Kat get her dad using Netflix? Just how much is Stephen promising to write? What habit is Glen trying to break? All this and lots, lots more on this special New Year’s edition of Pop Culture Happy Hour. Here’s Glen’s chart, by the way. As always, we close with what’s making us happy this week. Stephen is happy about sharing a new show with his kid, Glen is happy about a film that ”aches for you to be charmed by it,” Kat is happy about an upcoming book you’re sure to hear more about, and I’m happy about a feature Glen recently completed and the return of a favorite reality franchise. Thank you for listening this year, and follow us on Twitter to get good stuff in 2017: me, Stephen, Glen, Kat, producer Jessica, and producer Mike.

Terrorist attacks, hurricanes, a divisive U. S. election, Brexit — 2016 has not been easy. With the year coming to an end, we thought it was time to get some serious perspective — from the scale of the entire universe. We’re tackling big questions: what scientists know, and what they have yet to learn. So before you ring in another year, take a moment to contemplate the billions of years that led to 2017 and the billions more yet to come. ”That happens to be my absolute favorite question,” says Chuck Bennett, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University. He points out that the theory says the universe started out dense and hot, and that it has been expanding and cooling for 13. 8 billion years, but, he says, ”the theory doesn’t actually say what happened right at the beginning.” You can follow our laws of physics back in time, he says, but they break down close to the start, when things were unspeakably fiery and close together. Still, there may be clues from the weird world of quantum physics. In that world, strange stuff can happen, like particles can just appear out of nowhere. ”Even if you take something that’s a complete vacuum, you’ve gotten all of the particles and dust and everything out of the way, in quantum mechanics you still have particles popping in and out of existence all the time,” explains Bennett. So maybe the kernel that became our universe just randomly and spontaneously appeared. ”It seems bizarre, but that is kind of the going thinking about this,” Bennett says. And if you want to think about something even more bizarre, consider this point made by Caltech theoretical physicist Sean Carroll. If the big bang was the first moment in time, that creates a conundrum: ”There’s no verbs before time itself exists, right? There’s no popping into existence, there’s no fluctuating, there’s no quantum mechanical craziness, there is literally nothing,” says Carroll. You might be tempted to try to answer this question by stepping outside the universe so you can take a gander. But, obviously, that’s impossible. ”There is no such thing as outside the universe, as far as we can tell,” says Carroll. Even though the universe has been expanding for about 14 billion years, that doesn’t mean it’s ballooning out into some other realm. ”I know it’s difficult to wrap our minds around,” says Carroll, ”but it’s just getting more and more of it, even though it’s not expanding into anything at all.” So if we can’t leave the universe, all we can do is look around inside. Let’s say you flew off the Earth, out of our solar system, out of the Milky Way galaxy, out of our cluster of galaxies, and flew on and on. How far could you go? ”We don’t 100 percent know,” says Janna Levin, a theoretical physicist at Columbia University. ”What we see of the universe is vast. We know that the universe is something like 90 billion across.” But that’s just the part we can see. Anything beyond that has to remain a mystery, because stuff out there is so far away, its light will never be able to reach us. ”It makes logical sense to assume the universe goes on beyond that boundary. It would be kind of magical if we were just happening to be able to see right to some boundary and then something crazy happened beyond that, like galaxies ceased to exist,” says Levin. ”I mean, that just seems nuts.” So the universe goes on, but is it infinite? ”It is somewhat unimaginable but quite possible that our universe simply goes on forever,” says Bennett. To us, the universe seems flat, so maybe it’s like an endless sheet of paper. But on the other hand, people used to think the Earth was flat, too, because people saw flat land stretching to a horizon, beyond which they could not see. These days, the idea of a flat Earth seems silly — we know it’s really a huge sphere. ”Our universe might be like that,” says Bennett, noting that the universe might be curved and might even curve back on itself like a sphere, ”but on a scale that is truly enormous.” If so, and you headed off into the universe, going straight in one direction, you would eventually find yourself right back where you started. You might think this is one of the easier questions about the universe to answer. But you would be wrong. ”All the stuff we’ve ever seen in the laboratory, all the kinds of particles and matter and energy, that only makes up 5 percent of our universe,” says Carroll. Five percent! So what is the rest of the universe made of? Well, one biggie is something called dark matter. About 25 percent of the universe is dark matter, which is quite literally dark. ”It just doesn’t interact with light at all,” says Bennett. ”It doesn’t give off any light it doesn’t absorb light it doesn’t scatter light there’s no way to see it. The only way we know that it’s there is because it has gravitational effects.” Scientists discovered dark matter when they looked at the motion of galaxies and realized that something unseen had to be exerting a gravitational pull. Dark matter may be some kind of particle that we just haven’t detected yet. The rest of the universe — 70 percent — is something even more crazy, called dark energy. It appears to be some kind of energy that’s inherent to empty space, and it acts to push the universe apart, speeding up its expansion. Like dark matter, dark energy is another big mystery. ”Other than the fact that we don’t quite understand 95 percent of the universe, we’re doing really well,” jokes Bennett. All of the world’s leading theoreticians, who write whole books about the universe, just have to live with this state of affairs. ”You’re entitled to say, if you’re so smart, why don’t you tell me what that dark matter is? And I’ll have to confess I don’t know,” says Jim Peebles, Albert Einstein professor of science, emeritus and professor of physics, emeritus at Princeton University. He’s not depressed, however, that so much of the universe remains unknown. ”I think I’d be depressed if everything were nearly all known,” says Peebles, ”but I don’t feel any danger of that happening.” Let’s face it people tend to be pretty . ”If you look back at the history of astronomy, you know, we used to think that the Earth was the center of the solar system. Everything was about us,” says Bennett. Even when we figured out that Earth went around the sun, and the sun was part of the Milky Way galaxy, we thought our galaxy was the center of the universe. ”Then we learned no, it’s just one galaxy out of hundreds of billions of galaxies out there,” he notes. With that track record in mind, it’s natural to wonder whether our whole universe isn’t so special — if it’s just one among many. ”We don’t know yet,” says Bennett, ”but it’s very possible.” Given that scientists believe the seed that started our universe may have spontaneously popped into existence through a kind of quantum weirdness, that presents an obvious question: If that could happen once, why not more than once? ”So then you have this kind of array of universes in which ours is not unique,” says Bennett. How many universes could there be? ”A really, really big number,” says Carroll. But since everything we can observe and poke and prod is, by definition, part of our universe, it’s unclear how we could ever detect some other universe. This is why some thinkers worry that pondering the multiverse is more like philosophy than science. It’s sort of fun to think about whether our universe is solitary, and it’s a legitimate question, says Peebles, ”but since we’ll never be able to answer it, I can’t get very excited.” But maybe this idea could be testable. Imagine if you had two universes that were expanding and ran into each other, says Bennett. If another universe bumped into ours, there could be ways to tell. In fact, there have been efforts to search the skies for evidence of that kind of impact, but there’s no sign it ever happened. Which might be a good thing, since that kind of event ”would be very dangerous at least for people in one of the universes or the other because one of them would probably be destroyed,” Bennett says. ”Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice,” wrote Robert Frost in his famous poem Fire and Ice. He favored fire but, hedging his bet, added that: I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice. These days, most astrophysicists are guessing the universe will end as cold as ice. The universe, which started out hot and dense, has been expanding and cooling for nearly 14 billion years. We now know it’s actually expanding faster and faster. ”This is like hyperdrive on the cooling,” says Bennett. ”So it’s the ice solution. Everything would grow dimmer and dimmer you would stop seeing things in the sky everything would grow dark and cold.” As everything gets farther and farther apart, each particle of the universe will eventually end up completely alone. It all sounds bleak. But, cheer up! Ending with fire is still possible. Since dark energy is pushing the universe to expand faster and faster, and physicists don’t know what dark energy is, it’s possible that it might just decay or go away, making our expanding universe slow down. ”Maybe even reverse its course for all we know, and then what? Then we go back to kind of a fiery end,” says Levin. She explains that everything would fly back together toward a big crunch, which is like the big bang happening in reverse. Fire or ice, either way, the end is coming. But not for a long while. ”We think it will be at least a quadrillion years before the last star burns out,” says Carroll, noting that this is 1, 000 trillion years. Our own sun will burn out way sooner, in about 5 billion years. Though Carroll says that’s kind of a parochial concern, when you consider that our Milky Way galaxy has around 100 billion stars and is just one of trillions of galaxies. ”So we are not significant on the cosmic scale. We are not important to the universe. That’s the bad news,” says Carroll. The good news is that, even with our puny brains, we’ve managed to figure that out.

We all experience stress at work, no matter the job. But for teachers, the work seems to be getting harder and the stress harder to shake. A new report out this month pulls together some stark numbers on this: percent of teachers say they feel high daily stress. That’s on par with nurses and physicians. And roughly half of teachers agree with this statement: ”The stress and disappointments involved in teaching at this school aren’t really worth it.” It’s a problem for all of us — not just these unhappy teachers. Here’s why: ”Between 30 and 40 percent of teachers leave the profession in their first five years,” says Mark Greenberg, a professor of human development and psychology at Penn State. And that turnover, he says, costs schools — and taxpayers — billions of dollars a year, while research (like this and this) suggests teacher burnout hurts student achievement, too. Greenberg has studied America’s schools for more than 40 years, and, with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (also an NPR funder) he helped author the new brief exploring teacher stress. He says teachers feel frazzled for many reasons, including testing and the fact that many students are themselves coming to school stressed. As for the fixes, Greenberg recommends a few. New teachers who receive steady mentoring are less likely to quit. Workplace wellness programs can also help. But both require schoolwide, even districtwide . If that’s not realistic, Greenberg suggests a fix that is well within every teacher’s control, one that just might surprise you . .. Mindfulness, That’s right, mindfulness. For teachers. Patricia Jennings wrote the book on it (literally). It’s called Mindfulness For Teachers. Jennings was a teacher herself for two decades and now studies stress in the classroom as a professor and researcher at the University of Virginia. The Journal of Educational Psychology will soon publish a study of her work in New York City, teaching mindfulness to more than 200 educators in schools. Jennings says the teachers who received mindfulness training ”showed reduced psychological distress and time urgency — which is this feeling like you don’t have enough time. And then improvements in mindfulness and emotion regulation.” Translation: These teachers were better able to cope with classroom challenges and manage their feelings, which made it easier for them to manage their students’ big feelings. And that, says Jennings, helps students learn. What is mindfulness? Definitions vary, but Jennings likes to think of it this way: attending to things in the moment with curiosity and acceptance. If this all sounds a bit . .. squishy, rest assured, there’s even research on how mindfulness can help reduce stress in U. S. Marines preparing for deployment. Meria Carstarphen is not a teacher but knows a thing or two about classroom stress. She has run a couple of big city school systems and is now superintendent in Atlanta. Carstarphen says she advises new teachers: You can’t take care of your students if you don’t take care of yourself. ”Put your oxygen mask on first,” she tells her rookies. ”Then we’ll talk about everybody else.”

When John Fahey recorded The New Possibility in 1968 to make a few bucks off Christmas sales every year, his album title turned out to be emblematic of the solo guitar’s potential. The music grows decades later, rung out in steel vibration and wrung out from tradition. In 2016, there was an incredible bounty of guitar music across Americana, jazz, ambient, psychedelic, experimental music and what Fahey labeled American Primitive. For sake of focus, these 10 unranked records (and a few honorable mentions) were all primarily made by one person with the guitar as the primary instrument. That’s why you don’t see the stellar records made by Chris Forsyth, Mary Halvorson, William Tyler or Cian Nugent this year, as they were backed by bands that understand their singular approaches to the instrument. Instead, these records celebrate new possibilities in the solo exploration of six and 12 strings.

This year was one of hacks, exploding smartphones, months of debating encryption and the proliferation of augmented reality, VR, cars and fake news. But there were lots of other stories — some of them off the beaten path — that illustrated the constantly evolving and hugely influential relationship that we have with technology around us. Can you remember (or guess) some of the numbers and facts gleaned from 10 of NPR’s tech stories of 2016?

From West Virginia to Wyoming, coal country overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump and his message that he will bring coal jobs back. Now, those same voters are eyeing his incoming administration closely, careful to see if he will keep his promises to revive the coal industry and get miners back to work. These hopes have become increasingly desperate as the industry has floundered. U. S. coal production in 2016 is projected to be at its lowest level since 1978, and over the past few years, the country has lost about 30, 000 coal jobs. That means hard times for places like Wyoming’s Powder River Basin. Three of the region’s four main coal producers were in bankruptcy in 2016. Two of them laid off hundreds of miners at once. Still, the community of Gillette, Wyo. — as the Energy Capital of the Nation — is breathing a sigh of relief lately. Production has ticked back up past where it was at this time last year, and some mines are even hiring workers back. ”I do believe that my friends and are safe for now,” says coal miner Stacey Moeller. She believes that ”for one more year, we’re going to be coal miners.” And Trump’s win has buoyed her hopes, as well as those of investors. The day after the election, coal stock prices leaped and many in coal communities celebrated. For Moeller, a single mom and lifelong Democrat, the decision was complicated. ”I did vote for Donald Trump,” Moeller says. ”It’s really hard to even say that because I so dislike his rhetoric. But I voted for him on one singular issue, and that was coal.” She’s not alone. Dave Hathaway of Pennsylvania will be watching Trump, as well. Since the coal mine he worked in closed a year ago, he spent much of 2016 looking for work. The search gained urgency when his son Deacon was born in August. On Election Day, Hathaway made a choice he hopes will help his job prospects. ”I voted for Trump — I mean, a coal miner would be stupid not to,” Hathaway says. He says he’s had a hard time finding a job to replace the $80, 000 he made working in the coal mines under Greene County, Pa. a few miles from the West Virginia border. Hathaway recently found a job at a nearby mine. While he thinks Trump’s election means he’ll have a better shot at keeping his new job, he didn’t like a lot of things Trump said during the campaign. ”He is a whacko he’s never going to stop being a whacko,” Hathaway says. ”But I mean, the things he did say — the good stuff — was good for the coal mining community. But we’ll see what happens.” That message clearly resonated in Greene County, where over the last four years a third of the coal mining jobs — like Dave Hathaway’s — disappeared. Trump won the county by 40 points, eight years after Barack Obama basically tied John McCain there. Tom Crooks, vice president at R. G. Johnson, a construction company that builds mine shafts, witnessed the decline of the coal industry firsthand. ”Two years ago this week we had 145 employees,” Crooks says. ”Right now, we have 22.” Crooks doesn’t use the phrase ”war on coal,” but he does think federal regulations mounted by the Environmental Protection Agency under President Obama have weighed down his industry. One example is the EPA’s Clean Power Plan. That rule, which Trump has pledged to eliminate, limits the amount of carbon dioxide from power plants. Instead, Crooks wants to see more government research into making coal as clean as possible. ”Really, what’s happened over the last eight years is the smart people stopped working on coal, in part because of the way the federal government and the state governments looked at us,” Crooks says. ”We just want them to start looking to coal as an option.” Leigh Paterson is a reporter with Inside Energy, a public media collaboration focusing on America’s energy issues. Reid Frazier is a reporter for The Allegheny Front, a public radio program based in Pittsburgh that covers the environment.

Updated Jan. 1 at 9:56 a. m. ET, At least 39 people were killed and 69 others wounded during New Year’s celebrations Saturday after a gunman opened fire at an Istanbul nightclub. At least 16 of those killed were foreign nationals. Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu told reporters that the attacker entered the Reina nightclub and began shooting at random, NPR’s Peter Kenyon tells our newscast. The killer then changed clothes and left, says the minister. The manhunt for the attacker, who has not yet been identified, is still underway, Soylu adds, as police believe he carried out the attack alone. Provincial Gov. Vasip Sahin has described the incident as a terrorist attack. ”A terrorist with a weapon . .. brutally and savagely carried out this incident by firing bullets on innocent people who were there solely to celebrate the New Year and have fun,” Sahin told reporters. At Reina, one of the city’s most popular nightclubs, it’s believed some 500 to 600 revelers were celebrating the start of the new year. Reuters reports that the attacker shot at a police officer and at civilians before entering the nightclub. Many inside were said to have jumped into the neighboring Bosphorus waterway in an attempt to save themselves from the gunfire. A Turkish cabinet minister told the Anatolia News Agency that citizens of Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Libya and Lebanon are among the dead, Peter reports. In addition, the Israeli Foreign Ministry says a young woman was killed in the attack. Peter adds: ”The interior minister named several possible culprits, including Islamic State, Kurdish militants or groups.” According to the Associated Press, several ambulances and police vehicles were dispatched to the scene, an area described as ”on the shore of the Bosphorus Strait in the Ortakoy district.” The cosmopolitan neighborhood is home to many clubs, restaurants and art galleries. Says Reuters: ”Security measures had been heightened in major Turkish cities, with police barring traffic leading up to key squares in Istanbul and the capital Ankara. In Istanbul, 17, 000 police officers were put on duty, some camouflaged as Santa Claus and others as street vendors, state news agency Anadolu reported.” This latest attack comes just two weeks after Russian ambassador, Andrei Karlov, was shot dead by Turkish policeman Mevlut Mert Altintas and three weeks after a bomb attack killed 44 people at a football stadium in Istanbul. A Kurdish militant group claimed responsibility for the latter. Turkey, which is part of the U. S. coalition against Islamic State, has faced numerous security threats. In all, there were at least six attacks in Turkey in 2016, claiming more than 200 lives. Meantime, the White House is condemning the attack, calling it a ”horrific terrorist attack” and offering to assist Turkey. According to the AP, White House spokesman Eric Schultz says President Obama — who is vacationing with his family in Hawaii — ”was briefed on the attack by his national security team and asked to be updated as the situation develops.” The AP adds: ”White House National Security Council spokesman Ned Price says the attack on ’innocent revelers’ celebrating New Year’s shows the attackers’ savagery. He says the U. S. sends thoughts and prayers to the relatives of those killed. ”Price says the U. S. supports its NATO ally Turkey as both countries fight terrorism.” Turkey’s Bloody Year, ”It was a horrible year,” journalist Mustafa Akyol told NPR’s Ailsa Chang on Sunday morning. ”We had a bloody coup attempt . .. almost 300 people were killed, then a very brutal crackdown began after that and thousands of people found themselves in jail with, I think, exaggerated charges in my view — at least some of them. ”Then, the terror attacks, both the PKK — which is a Kurdist, separatist group with a secular ideology, and ISIS. They both organized major attacks inside Turkey.” Akyol’s latest column, published just hours before the attack, enumerated the many tragic events of 2016, calling it Turkey’s ”worst year ever.” ”And you know what is the worst?” he writes. ”There is no guarantee that the future will be any better. There is no assurance that all this will prove to be a temporary crisis rather than the new normal.” ”What we need at this time is not more conspiracy theories,” Akyol told NPR. ”Not a more authoritarian government. But really, national unity based on understanding and tolerance and reconciliation. We’re not there though, unfortunately yet.”

On the morning of Jan. 1, Los Angeles residents and visitors alike awoke to see the iconic Hollywood sign had been altered overnight. Some were delighted. A number of posts on Instagram Sunday are captioned things like, ”I love this city!” and ”Let’s keep it!” Police were, perhaps, less amused: They were investigating the vandalism Sunday, and said the male prankster was recorded by security cameras wearing all black at around 3 a. m. He could face a misdemeanor trespassing charge if caught. This actually isn’t the first time this has happened. Whether it was a tribute, or an accident, the vandal mimicked a similar prank that was done 41 years ago today by Daniel Finegood, on Jan. 1, 1976: The day California’s relaxed marijuana law took effect. According to the LA Times, Finegood did a number of similar stunts, changing the sign to read ”Ollywood” to protest the worship of Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North during the hearings in 1987, and ”Oil War” in 1990 as a political statement about the Persian Gulf War. The ”Hollyweed” prank, however, seems more like a celebration than a protest. The AP suggests it might be a gesture to the approval of Proposition 64 in November, which legalized recreational use of marijuana.

In September, reproductive endocrinologist John Zhang and his team at the New Hope Fertility Center in New York City captured the world’s attention when they announced the birth of a child to a mother carrying a fatal genetic defect. Using a technique called mitochondrial replacement therapy, the researchers combined DNA from two women and one man to bypass the defect and produce a healthy baby boy — one with, quite literally, three genetic parents. It was heralded as a stunning technological leap for in vitro fertilization, albeit one that the team was forced to perform in Mexico, because the technique has not been approved in the United States. The technique is spreading quickly, gaining official approval this month from the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority in the U. K. The move will allow clinics to apply for permission there to carry out the treatment, with the first patients expected to be seen as early as next year. But for all the accolades, the method also has scientists concerned that the fatally flawed mitochondria can resurface to threaten a child’s health. Earlier this month, a study published in Nature by Shoukhrat Mitalipov, head of the Center for Embryonic Cell and Gene Therapy at the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland, suggested that in roughly 15 percent of cases, the mitochondrial replacement could fail and allow fatal defects to return, or even increase a child’s vulnerability to new ailments. The findings confirmed the suspicions of many researchers, and the conclusions drawn by Mitalipov and his team were unequivocal: The potential for conflicts between transplanted and original mitochondrial genomes is real, and more sophisticated matching of donor and recipient eggs — pairing mothers whose mitochondria share genetic similarities, for example — is needed to avoid potential tragedies. ”This study shows the potential as well as the risks of gene therapy in the germline,” Mitalipov says. This is especially true of mitochondria, because its genomes are so different than the genomes in the nucleus of cells. Slight variations between mitochondrial genomes, he adds, ”turn out to matter a great deal.” Mitochondria are the energy powerhouses inside our cells, and they carry their own DNA, separate from our nuclear genome. The danger lies in the fact that mitochondria are in some ways like aliens inside our cells. Two billion years ago they were bacteria basking in the primordial soup. Then one such microbe merged with another bacterium, and over evolutionary time, the two formed a complete cell. The bacteria eventually evolved into mitochondria, migrating most of their genes to the cell nucleus and keeping just a few dozen, largely to help them produce energy. Today, our nuclear genome contains around 20, 000 genes, while a scant 37 genes reside in the mitochondria. And yet the two genomes are intensely symbiotic: 99 percent of mitochondrial proteins are incorporated from the nucleus. Mitochondria also still divide and replicate like the bacteria they once were, and that constant replication means that mutations arise 10 to 30 times more often in mitochondrial genes than in the nucleus. If too many mitochondria become dysfunctional, the entire cell suffers and serious health problems can result. Faulty mitochondria are implicated in genetic diseases, as well as many chronic conditions from infertility to cancer, cardiac disease and neurodegenerative diseases. That’s because when mitochondria falter, the energy system of the cell itself is compromised. A baby could solve the problem by overriding faulty mitochondria, but it also raises the stakes, because the procedure does not completely replace the defective mitochondria with healthy ones. When the mother’s nucleus is transferred, it’s like a plant dug up out of ground — a bit of the original soil (in this case, the mother’s mitochondria) is still clinging to the roots. That creates a situation that never happens in nature: Two different mitochondrial genomes from two different women are forced to live inside the same cell. In most cases, a tiny percentage (usually less than 2 percent) of the diseased mitochondria remain — but that tiny percentage can really matter. In his new study, Mitalipov crafted embryos from the eggs of three mothers carrying mutant mitochondrial DNA and from the eggs of 11 healthy women. The embryos were then tweaked to become embryonic stem cells that could live forever, so they could be multiplied and studied. In three cases, the original maternal mitochondrial DNA returned. ”That original, maternal mitochondrial DNA took over,” Mitalipov says, ”and it was pretty drastic. There was less than 1 percent of the original maternal mitochondrial DNA present after replacement with donor DNA and before fertilization, and yet it took over the whole cell later.” Mitalipov warns that this reversal might not only occur in the embryonic stem cells it could also occur in the womb at some point during the development of a baby. Complicating things further, Mitalipov found that some mitochondrial DNA stimulates cells to divide more rapidly, which would mean that a cells containing the maternal mitochondrial DNA could eventually dominate as the embryo developed. Some mitochondrial genomes replicate much faster than others, says University of California molecular biologist Patrick O’Farrell, who called Mitalipov’s research both impressive and in keeping with his own thinking on the matter. A diseased mitochondrial genome could behave like a bully, O’Farrell says, and having a large impact on the baby at any time. It could also affect that child’s future offspring. ”The diseased genome might stage a sneak comeback to afflict subsequent generations,” O’Farrell says. On the other hand, he says, the could act as ”superheroes,” if they carry healthy, fit DNA that is able to a mutant genome. The nuclear genes donated by a father could also influence the behavior of the mitochondria in ways we cannot yet predict, O’Farrell says. For example, the father might introduce new genes that favor the replication rate of a defective bully genome. Or the father might introduce genes that help a ”wimpy” healthy genome survive and thrive. Mitalipov’s proposed solution to the problem is to match the mitochondria of the mother and the donor, since not all mitochondria are alike. Human mitochondria all over the earth are in a sense a billion or more clones of their original mother, passed down in endless biblical begats from mother to child. Yet, even as clones, they have diverged over time into lineages with different characteristics. These are called haplotypes. O’Farrell mentions blood types as a comparison. Just as you would not want to transfuse blood type A into someone with blood type B, you might not want to mix different lineages. And while he says he thinks the idea of matching lineages is brilliant, he suggests going a step further. ”I say let’s . .. try to get a match with the dominating genome so that the defective genome will ultimately be completely displaced.” In fact, he adds, the ideal would be to look for one superhero genome, the fastest replicator of all — one that could displace any diseased genome. To find out which branches are super replicators, O’Farrell hopes to collaborate with other laboratories and test the competitive strength of different haplotypes. Earlier this year, O’Farrell’s laboratory published work showing that competition between closely related genomes tends to favor the most beneficial, while matchups between distantly related genomes favor super replicators with negative or even lethal consequences. There are, he says, at least 10 major lineages that would be distinct enough to be highly relevant. Mitalipov says that most of the time, matching haplotypes should ensure successful mitochondrial transfers. However, he cautions that even then, tiny differences in the region of the mitochondrial genome that controls replication speed could cause an unexpected surprise. Even in mitochondria from the same haplotype, there could be a single change in a gene that could cause a conflict, he says. In his study, Mitalipov zeroes in on the region that appears responsible for replication speed. In order to find out a mother’s haplotype, he says, full sequencing is necessary, and this region from the donor’s egg should also be looked at to be sure it matches the mother’s. Today, it costs a few hundred dollars to sequence a woman’s mitochondrial genome. But battles between mitochondrial genomes are only one part of the emerging story. Some research suggests that nuclear genes evolve to sync well with a mitochondrial haplotype, and that when the pairing is suddenly switched, health might be compromised. Research in fruit flies and in tiny sea creatures called cephalopods shows that when the ”mitonuclear” partnership diverges too much, infertility and poor health can result. In some cases, however, the divergent pairs are above average and can actually lead to better health. Swapping as little as 0. 2 percent of mitochondrial DNA in laboratory animals ”can have profound effects on the function of cells, organs, and even the whole organism, and these effects manifest late in life,” according to mitochondrial biologist Patrick Chinnery of the University of Cambridge, writing in November in The New England Journal of Medicine. Because of all these unknowns, a U. S. panel recommended last February that mitochondrial replacement therapy, if approved, implant only male embryos so that the mitochondrial germline would not be passed down through the generations. Most scientists approve of this advice, but biologist Damian Dowling of Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, has reservations about even this solution. His own research in fruit flies shows that males may actually be more vulnerable than females to impaired health from mitochondrial replacement. Since females pass on mitochondria, natural selection will help daughters sift out any mutations that might be harmful to them, and keep their nuclear and mitochondrial genes well matched. Males aren’t so lucky: If mutations don’t harm females but do harm males, the males may have to suffer impaired fertility and go to their graves earlier. This is known as the ”mother’s curse” — a term coined by geneticist Neil Gemmell of the University of Otago in New Zealand to describe the biological baggage that mothers unwittingly pass down to their male babies. The bottom line, according to biologist David Rand of Brown University, who studies mitochondrial genomes, is that when you swap mitochondria, the reaction is ”highly unpredictable.” And that’s why many experts are calling for caution even amid all the excitement following the Mexico trial — though there is reason to believe they aren’t being heard. A baby has now been born in China, and two more may soon be born in Ukraine, according to Nature News. Zhang, meanwhile, continues to encourage potential patients in Mexico: ”We have received interest both locally and abroad,” he says, ”and we invite people to learn more about the treatment.” Doug Wallace, head of the Center for Mitochondrial and Epigenomic Medicine at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, is among those calling for a more methodical approach to the technique, though he says he doesn’t think there’s any way to put the brakes on now. ”I think what’s happened is we’re going to see more and more trials and some families are going to be exceedingly fortunate — and perhaps some will be an unfortunate part of the learning set.” Research on mitochondria has to catch up, Wallace says, and while matching haplotypes is a good idea, it isn’t so easy to do in practice. ”Finding women to be egg donors is going to be a major limitation,” he says — especially when you’d first have to survey a large group to find compatible mitochondrial DNA. Still, for women desperate to conceive a healthy child this may seem reasonable. Wallace adds that mitochondrial replacement therapy might find favor even outside those seeking to avoid passing on fatal genetic mutations — such as older women simply facing reduced fertility. ”There’s no proof that’s the case,” he says, but if it came to pass, that could mean a therapy that might change the DNA of tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of babies conceived by this method. That would have a real impact on the future of society, Wallace adds, and we don’t yet fully understand all of the implications. ”I think it’s an exciting possibility,” he says, ”but also a little disconcerting.” Jill Neimark is an science journalist and an author of adult and children’s books. Her most recent book is ”The Hugging Tree: A Story About Resilience.” A version of this article originally appeared at Undark, a digital science magazine published by the Knight Science Journalism Fellowship Program at MIT.

In an effort to take advantage of the intimate relationships between stylists and their clients, a new law in Illinois will require salon professionals to receive training in domestic as part of their licensing process. The law, which goes into effect Sunday, aims to educate beauty professionals to recognize signs of abuse. But stylists won’t be required to report violence, and are protected from any liability. The legislation was introduced by state Rep. Fran Hurley, who told the Chicago Tribune, ”There’s an openness, a freeness, a relationship that last years or decades between the client and the cosmetologist. They’re in a position to see something that may or may not be right.” Joan Rowan is a hair stylist who owns two salons — one on the South Side of Chicago, and the other in Oak Lawn, Ill. She says that for many years now she’s been providing training for her own staff about what to do if they think someone is in trouble. Rowan says that clients do sometimes talk to her about what is going on in their lives. ”And sometimes they tell you so much they never come back again, because they’re afraid, or they’re embarrassed, they don’t know what to do.” ”I’ve had women, you know, when you’re washing their hair, they have bumps on their head, you know, they ’ran into a door again,’ ” Rowan says. ”I’ve been a hairdresser for 41 years. One in three women have violence in their lives. So yes, I have talked to women.” The training that the stylists will receive is an hourlong ”awareness and education” program called Listen. Support. Connect. It was designed by Chicago Says No More, a coalition of domestic violence advocacy groups, in partnership with Cosmetologists Chicago. Kristie Paskvan, the founder of Chicago Says No More, says she knows that an hourlong training isn’t going to make anyone an expert. ”We’re not asking the salon professionals to intervene. We’re just asking them to have the tools in case the clients ask for information,” she says. ”There’s something like 88, 000 salon professionals that will be trained in the next two years,” Paskvan says. ”That’s 88, 000 more individuals that will be able to have conversations with family and friends and clients, and that raises awareness about domestic violence and sexual assault.”

Much has been said about the physical and psychological injuries of war, like traumatic brain injury or stress disorder. But what we talk about less is how these conditions affect the sexual relationships of service members after they return from combat. Since 2000, service members who were deployed received at least 138, 000 diagnoses of PTSD. More than 350, 000 have been diagnosed with traumatic brain injury since 2000. Evidence suggests the numbers are actually higher because many don’t seek treatment. These conditions cause their own sexual side effects, such as emotional numbness, loss of libido and erectile dysfunction. And the long list of medications used to treat PTSD, TBI and other medical conditions can worsen those side effects. ’He would sleep for days’ Chuck and Liz Rotenberry of Baltimore struggled with their own challenges when Chuck returned from Afghanistan in 2011. He’s a former Marine gunnery sergeant who trained military working dogs. He left active duty in 2012. She is an Elizabeth Dole caregiver fellow, a spokesperson on issues chosen by the military caregiving foundation. For Liz and Chuck, sex had never been a problem. They’ve been married for 14 years and they’re still very much in love. Liz says she fell for Chuck in high school. He was that guy who could always make her laugh, who always had a ready and never seemed sad. But when Chuck returned from Afghanistan, their relationship would soon face its greatest challenge. Baby No. 4 was just two weeks away for sure, it was a chaotic time. But Liz noticed pretty quickly something was terribly wrong with her husband. ”I wouldn’t be able to find him in the house and he wouldn’t be outside, and I’d find him in a separate bedroom just crying,” Liz says. ”He would sleep for days. He would have a hoodie on and be just tucked away in the bed, and he wouldn’t be able to get out of bed. He would have migraines that were so debilitating that it kept him in the bed.” When Chuck was in Afghanistan, an IED — improvised explosive device — exploded 3 feet behind him. Shrapnel lodged into his neck and back. It would take three years for someone at the Department of Veterans Affairs to explicitly lay out for Liz that Chuck had developed severe stress and suffered a traumatic brain injury — and that she would need to be his caregiver. The Marine During that period, there were times Chuck estimates he was taking 15 to 16 different medications twice a day. Sex was usually the furthest thing from his mind. ”I didn’t think about it. I wanted to be with Liz, I wanted to be near her,” he says. ”When the desire was there, it was unique. It was rare, as opposed to the way it was before. And a lot of times, with the mountains of medication I was on, you know, in my head [it was] all systems go, but that message didn’t go anywhere else.” Liz noticed that Chuck stopped initiating physical affection. ”The thought of him reaching out to me to give me a hug wasn’t existent. It was like I had to give him the hug. I now had to step in and show him love,” she says. Sometimes months would go by before they would have sex. ”It started off as being pretty embarrassing, pretty emasculating,” Chuck says. ”It was like, ’Really? This too doesn’t work?’ You blame it on, ’Oh, it’s just the medication,’ or ’You’re tired,’ or whatever initially, and you don’t realize it’s stress or my brain just doesn’t work like it used to.” Liz and Chuck had never really talked about sex in any serious way before. So they kept avoiding the conversation — until this year. That’s when Chuck finally asked his primary care provider for help. The doctor prescribed four doses of Viagra a month. Liz and Chuck say the medication has improved things substantially — though they joke about how few doses the VA allots them every month. But asking for just those four doses took Chuck three or four visits to the doctor before he could work up the nerve. He says it can be especially hard for a Marine to admit he’s having problems with sex because it contradicts a so many Marines have. ”You know, as a Marine, you can do anything. You believe you can do anything, you’ve been trained to do nearly anything,” he says. ”You’re physically fit. You’re mentally sound. Those are just the basics about being a Marine.” If he has any advice for a Marine going through the same thing he and his wife are facing, he says you need to talk about it. Bring it up with your spouse. Bring it up with your doctors. ”Marines always jokingly hand out straws. You got to suck it up. You got to do what you need to do to get it done,” Chuck says. ”It’s just a different mission. . .. Don’t let your pride ruin what you worked so hard for.”

Editor’s note: This post includes language that some readers will find offensive. A rift has surfaced within the the movement closely associated with white supremacism that has been celebrating Donald Trump’s election as president. In fact, they are planning a big event around Trump’s inauguration ” the ”DeploraBall.” Organizers of the event, which plays off Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s ”basket of deplorables” swipe at some Trump supporters, have rescinded the invitation of a prominent social media personality with the movement, Tim Treadstone, better known by his Twitter handle @bakedalaska. He tweeted on Monday and racist comments that included ”it’s a common fact the media is run in majority by Jewish people, it’s similar to observing blacks are good at basketball.”

The movement, which has been associated with white nationalism, is receiving new attention. The debate about the movement is also focusing on what is the best term to describe it.

On New Year’s Day, Portland restaurant Ava Gene’s will be serving brunch to the hungry and masses. And amidst the frittatas, French toast, and grits, there will be Chef Josh McFadden’s own favorite: pasta carbonara. McFadden, who has cooked carbonara at New York Italian restaurants, fell in love with it for breakfast while living at the American Academy in Rome. A plate of spaghetti doesn’t look anything like your local greasy spoon’s special, but McFadden says the dish is a whole lot more familiar than you might think. ”It’s literally the same thing as taking toast, putting an egg on the toast, and then putting said toast in your mouth. And with coffee? Amazing.” Yes, the refined starch takes the form of noodles. But the other basic breakfast building blocks — including a dose of something in the bacon family — are the same. Hot pasta (most often spaghetti) is drained and tossed with beaten eggs, cheese (Parmigiano or pecorino Romano) and cooked pork (guanciale, pancetta, and bacon all make appearances). The hot noodles cook the eggs, which set with the pork fat and residual cooking liquid to create a lusciously rich sauce, not too different from a hollandaise. So how did a dish that hits these notes come out of Italy? According to food historian Anthony Buccini, recipes for pasta dressed with fat, eggs and cheese (cacio e uova) go back well into the 19th century. But mentions of carbonara — the dish that adds cured pork to the mix — don’t show up until after World War II. And, according to one popular theory, this might not be a coincidence. ”In effect,” says Buccini, ”the claim is that there was a joining together of American taste for — and supplies of — bacon and powdered eggs [thanks to military rations] with the local Roman love of pasta asciutta [a simple sauced dish] Roman cooks came up with the recipe to make use of the American supplies and to satisfy the foreign troops, perhaps with some prodding from those troops who missed their familiar bacon and egg combination.” It’s a beautiful story of food traditions melding and evolving. But is it true? Buccini is skeptical, noting there is ”little in the way of compelling evidence” that carbonara was inspired by American GIs, rather than being a simple variation to a large family of traditional pasta dishes. The Oxford Companion to Italian Food also rejects the WWII theory, stating: ”The absurdity of this at a time of hardship and intolerable shortages calls for no comment.” But others, like Jeremy Parzen, a food historian and translator who teaches at Italy’s University of Gastronomic Sciences, think it’s not so to conceive of American tastes shaping Italian cuisine. ”American culture played a huge role in how Italy developed after the war,” Parzen explains. ”Essentially after the war, with the Marshall Plan, we rebuilt Europe. And whereas the French became snobbish, the Italians embraced American culture. They embraced American film, American music. .. They love their own food, but they also love food from all over the world.” Until the definitive source of the carbonara is unearthed, the debate will continue. But there’s one thing almost all Italian chefs agree on — do not include cream. While this is a creamy dish, its lusciousness should come from the emulsion you get when you toss the eggs with the hot pasta and pork fat. This does require a delicate touch to get right, but it’s not much more than navigating tossing and temperature. Even with a hangover, it should be doable. And in a true nod to American palates, Chef McFadden admits that it’s not with bad with a little shake of a nice hot sauce, especially when you serve it as a breakfast.

U. S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts praised the work of federal district judges in his report on the federal judiciary, avoiding any talk of politics in regards to the country’s judicial system. Incoming president Donald Trump will have more than a 100 vacancies to fill at the district and appellate court level nationwide. He’ll also be able to fill the Supreme Court seat vacated following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. The Congress has refused to hold a hearing on President Obama’s nominee for that empty seat. The future of those judicial vacancies was a key issue in the presidential election. Roberts’ focus, however, was on the work of lower court judges, who he called ”selfless, patriotic and brave individuals.” Congress has authorized 637 district court judgeships across the country. And the people working in those positions do so largely out of the public eye, Roberts wrote. ”You might be asking at this point why any lawyer would want a job that requires long hours, exacting skill, and intense devotion — while promising high stress, solitary confinement, and guaranteed criticism. There are many easier and more lucrative ways for a good lawyer to earn a living. The answer lies in the rewards of public service. District judges make a difference every day, and leave a lasting legacy, by making our society more fair and just,” he wrote. The report also looked at differences in the filings brought to the federal judiciary. The most striking difference was the number of cases in which the United States was the defendant, which increased 55 percent. Roberts wrote that the increase was due to the U. S. Supreme Court’s decision in Welch v. United States, which provided a new basis for certain prisoners convicted under the Armed Career Criminal Act to challenge their sentences. Bankruptcy petitions fell to their lowest number since 2007 and the number of defendants charged with drug and immigration crimes both showed slight decreases. Roberts wrote that the most difficult part of a judge’s job is sentencing an individual who is found guilty of a crime. He wrote: ”The judge must consider the perspectives of the prosecutor, the defendant, and the victim, and impose a penalty that, by design and necessity, will alter the direction of the defendant’s life.”

When Octavia Spencer first read the script for Hidden Figures — based on a book about the African American women who did the math for our early space launches — she thought it was fiction because it seemed too good to be true. Her disbelief reveals how conditioned we are to think that only white men make notable contributions to science, technology, engineering and math — and how important it is that we celebrate stories of the women who do. Big Hollywood movies based on true stories are an excellent way to do this. Narrative has a role to play as well, especially when it comes to another form of popular media: Romance novels, the second largest category of fiction in the U. S. Long derided as mere smut, these days romance novels feature heroines in the STEM fields — and the prejudices and obstacles they face on the way to a personal and professional happy ever after. The romance in Courtney Milan’s Hold Me is off to a rocky start when the hero, Jay na Thalang, assumes the heroine must be a lab supply salesperson when she shows up at his graduate studies lab. Not only is Maria Lopez a woman, she’s a pretty, ”done up” woman with an interest in shoes and planning her brother’s wedding. She cannot possibly be smart enough to be worthy of his time and attention. But unbeknownst to both Jay and Maria, they are already friends online — or at least their avatars are. When they meet as just minds (enabling Jay to imagine that she is a frumpy, nerdy girl) they are friends and trusted confidants who discuss problems both scientific and, eventually, personal. As long as she isn’t an undeniably sexy female body, Jay can respect her intelligence. Much of the conflict between the hero and heroine in this book stems from the hero’s assumptions about a woman’s brains based merely on her appearance what Jay comes to realize is that the problem lies with him. Even Odds by Elia Winters continues with the theme of a woman’s body getting in the way of her brain — not for her, but for the men in the room. Isabel Suarez, a design manager at a gaming firm, just wants to focus on the work. Whereas Maria flaunts her femininity, Isabel learned she must hide hers in order to succeed professionally, so she wears baggy clothes, pulls her hair back and smiles tightly when one coworker’s comments make her uncomfortable: ”His words were teasing, but Isabel bristled. This is what she’d wanted, though. It was better just to be sexless and professional, treated like another one of the guys, if she wanted to be taken seriously.” Complications ensue when romance blossoms with her new coworker. Being open about their relationship means owning that she is more than just a sexless work automaton and opening herself up to judgment. Isabel only gets her happy ever after when she can allow both sides of herself to flourish — with the love and support of her enlightened hero (and an equally enlightened HR department). In Beginner’s Guide: Love And Other Chemical Reactions by Six de los Reyes, Kaya Rubio is happy being all brain: she lives and breathes her work as a molecular biologist and has optimized her life so she can focus on it completely. While the plot of her story is familiar — single girl seeks date for family wedding — the approach she takes is novel. When it comes to finding love, Kaya devises ”The Boyfriend Experiment” which draws on scientific principles and peer reviewed papers. Her hero is her negative control, a man so wrong he can’t possibly be right. He introduces her to romance — spontaneous, messy, emotional, pleasurable, utterly confounding logic and reason — and to another side of her herself, showing that needn’t sacrifice her heart for her brain. Being romance novels, these stories do end happily: The heroines get to be brilliant and beautiful. They can be smart and sexy and loved for it. It’s a message repeated in so many romances, whether these titles or my own historical novel, Lady Claire Is All That, which features a heroine based on Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer. Professional success doesn’t have to come at the expense of personal happiness. It’s a message that matters, especially with regard to women and heroines in STEM. Those who develop technology we use are creating the world we live in, and having women build it is the best way to ensure that the sexism and misogyny that have held us back so far isn’t baked into our future. Stories have an important task to do here: They show all the different ways smart women can succeed personally and professionally, without having to hide their brains or their bodies in order to live happily ever after. Maya Rodale is a bestselling romance author.

If you find yourself at a loss to name even one Native American food dish, you’re not alone. But a growing number of Native chefs are trying to change that. Freddie Bitsoie is one of those chefs, working to bring back indigenous foods from centuries ago, and adapting them for today’s palate so people can learn not just about their cuisines, but their cultures too. Bitsoie found his way to the kitchen of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D. C. in August after finishing a stint as the chef at an Indian reservation casino in New Mexico. NPR met up with Bitsoie in the museum’s bustling basement kitchen. Bitsoie has lectured on Native cuisine before, and occasionally he has put together menus for some Native American museums — but this is his first gig as a chef whose work is entirely devoted to preparing and spreading awareness about indigenous dishes. Bitsoie is also the first Native American chef at Mitsitam Native Foods Café. He’s a member of the Navajo tribe, and grew up in Arizona and New Mexico. As a kid, his parents spoke fluent Navajo, he says, but it wasn’t until adulthood that he grasped the impact his Native American culture had on his life. ”When you’re growing up, you’re really not aware of what your parents are trying to teach you you just want to do the things that your parents don’t want you to do,” Bitsoie says. ”Back in the ’80s when I grew up, being Native wasn’t cool, it just wasn’t the thing to do. I was lucky enough to live off of the reservation and then on the reservation, and then move back off the reservation. I had that ability to see from the inside and see from the outside.” That tug of war between native versus insider versus outsider, might explain why Bitsoie loves bridging the old and new in his cooking. One of his signature dishes is a simple soup that has evolved across regions and across centuries — and then Bitsoie decided add his own twist. ”This particular clam soup is pretty much the definition of my work,” he says. ”Because with this clam soup, indigenous people from Nova Scotia to down on to Maine, Massachusetts, had a soup that was only made with three ingredients: It was sunchoke, clam and seawater.” ”I can’t picture myself gulping seawater down voluntarily,” confesses NPR reporter Ailsa Chang. ”But at the same time, in Italian cooking people say when you cook your pasta, make sure it’s salty like the sea,” Freddie Bitsoie says. But when he cooked with NPR, Bitsoie used a substitute. ”When I look out at that ocean, I’m like, I don’t even swim in the ocean,” he laughs. Bitsoie understands that to make some traditional dishes palatable to more people, you have to tweak them. ”In developing this recipe, I wanted to still have a connection to the tribes who used to eat this dish,” he says. ”At at the same time, this was made 500, 600 years ago. So my palate is completely different from my grandmother’s palate which is even further from my grandmother’s grandmother’s palate.” So to appeal to today’s palate, he took the three original ingredients — clams, sunchokes and salt water — and added some soup basics: leeks, onions, garlic, thyme and bay leaf. It’s a balancing act, accommodating mainstream tastes while being confident enough to hold fast to Native traditions. In the culinary world, Bitsoie says, that can difficult. ”I worked for a French chef where, when I would cook something native, all he would say is, ’You did that wrong,’ ” Bitsoie says. He adds: ”The biggest example is potatoes. When people think about potatoes, in the French style of cooking, potatoes have a bite — we call it ’al dente’ in the food world. But with native food, we sauté them, and we allow them to cook, but we cover them with the lid. So the potatoes aren’t only being cooked from the bottom they’re being steamed at the same time. Each culture has their own techniques, and with native cuisine we were always told, ’You’re cooking that wrong.’ And, see, I didn’t know that because I was just growing up with the way my mom cooks.” ”Look, when I got in the food business, I was looking at my mom and I said ’You’re cooking that wrong’ and I became colonized as a chef,” Bitsoie laughs. But working at the museum cafe is a whole new chapter for Bitsoie. He can call the shots — and figure out how he wants to integrate flavors and techniques from his own culture with his formal training as a chef. When Ailsa Chang went in for the taste test, she was surprised. ”I was expecting a saltier flavor,” she says. ”It’s very delicate, I really like it.” ”And that’s what native food is,” he says, ”it’s really delicate and innocent.” Bitsoie says that’s what he’s trying to do here — create new tastes and give people a new appreciation of one of America’s overlooked, and perhaps least understood cuisines.

By day, Nicola Berlinsky and sisters Lisa Pimentel and Joanie Pimentel are all teachers at the same elementary school in southern California. By night, they’re rockers, playing together in a band called No Small Children. It sounds like a lot to balance, but the members say they often find their two careers overlapping. ”I’ll see Joanie and Lisa at work, and recess becomes a band meeting,” Berlinsky says, ”but then we start talking about our students and sharing notes about our students and really living the successes of each other’s students — and then we’re back at band practice again. They are so intertwined.” Joanie Pimentel says music feels like an ideal outlet given the work they do. ”It’s much cheaper than therapy,” she says, laughing. And Berlinsky says her students have generally been supportive of the project. ”They think it’s really funny,” she says. ”The parents do come to our shows, and so the children end up wearing our band to school, which is quite something.” The three members of No Small Children joined NPR’s Ailsa Chang to talk about their work in and out of the classroom. Hear their full conversation at the audio link.

It’s that time of year again, when I atone for my failure to make top 10 lists by simply offering a collection of 50 of the many wonderful things I read, watched or heard in 2016. (Here’s last year’s list, for reference.) Standard caveats: I don’t watch everything! I am behind on many things. That’s just the way the world is. So if something you loved isn’t here, it is not a rebuke. And: these are cultural — mostly — things. These are not the best things in the world. Like yours, my actual list of wonderful things from the year, if I wrote it in a journal instead of for work, would be a list of people and moments spent with them, of days when it was unexpectedly sunny and of the times when things suddenly felt better. But whatever journey you’re on at any given moment, you can always use more good things. So here we go. 1. The willfully — gleefully — stupid jokes of Angie Tribeca, the TBS comedy starring Rashida Jones that reminded me of Airplane! in a wonderful way that very few things do. Vive le prosthetic tongue! 2. The moment in Captain America: Civil War when a bunch of characters sit around and discuss, with seriousness, a moral dilemma. For a surprisingly long time! Searching conversations in which multiple basically good characters have very different things to say and are allowed to say them and mean them are not all that common in summer blockbusters, and this one was welcome. 3. Leslie Odom, Jr. telling the story of how he watched Shonda Rhimes yell at Art Garfunkel. It’s what talk shows are for, and it made me instantly envious of everyone who got to see it in person. 4. All of John Mulaney’s comedy special, available on Netflix, called The Comeback Kid — and from a strictly shallow perspective, John Mulaney’s tremendous blue suit. Sue me, I’m a lady who likes a great . .. suit. 5. Mike Birbiglia’s sensitive, funny, sad, honest film Don’t Think Twice, which has more affection for and understanding of a certain kind of comedy person than perhaps any piece of fiction that’s ever been written about them. It’s got a killer cast including Key, Gillian Jacobs, and Birbiglia himself, and it got some of the best reviews of the year — deservedly so. (And an R rating, by the way, which is dumb as rocks and completely unnecessary. You’d be much, much better with your teenager seeing this film than some slaughterfest with abundant death but invisible blood. Boo, ratings.) 6. The finale of the most recent season of the beloved series The Great British . As I’ve written at length, it’s a thoughtful and uplifting franchise — really! — and the most recent finale (which we Americans did indeed get in 2016) was as richly satisfying as a good slice of cake. 7. The most recent season of HBO’s Veep. I don’t want to spoil it, but while the show has always been sharp and hilarious, its unexpected and byzantine plotting (in both the sense and the sense) got utterly bazoo but somehow remained believable within the world the writers and performers have built. 8. Anna Kendrick and Stephen Colbert singing ”They Say That Falling In Love Is Wonderful.” This is also what talk shows are for. 9. Christian Siriano, fashion provocateur — in the best way. Siriano has grown from a bit of a pain in the behind when he won Project Runway to a very interesting designer and a fascinating guy to listen to. He got a lot of attention for dressing Leslie Jones for the Ghostbusters premiere, but he wound up dressing eight women for the Emmy Awards, and they represented quite a mix of sizes, races and ages. They all looked very different, and they all looked right. Siriano believes in his own vision and always has, but he also seems to believe that the purpose of women’s fashion is to serve women, not that the purpose of women is to serve women’s fashion. Good on you, CS. 10. Speaking of Ghostbusters, Kate McKinnon’s Jillian Holtzmann was one of the weirdest, greatest characters of this year and most other years, and her work on Saturday Night Live as Hillary Clinton was surprising and touching. SNL is often plagued by its institutional standing and a certain cultural (not political) conservatism, and the fact that some of what McKinnon did as Clinton was so weird as comedy — even if you didn’t think it always worked — is one of the most encouraging signs that the show remains alive. 11. Titus Burgess on WNYC’s Death, Sex Money. The discussion he had with host Anna Sale is one of the most candid, peaceful, wise conversations I can remember from any corner of public radio, and I recommend it to everyone, always. 12. ”Grandma’s Teenage Diaries,” an entry by David Rees in the New York Times Magazine’s ”Letter Of Recommendation” feature. Rees discovered some of his grandmother’s early writings, and the way he describes them is warm and lovely, but more than anything, it sheds light on the way so many of us think of our older relatives as having always been calm and settled, when in fact, they often led wild, adventurous, exciting lives all their own that we simply never saw. 13. Kristin Chirico’s BuzzFeed piece about visiting the bridal salon where Say Yes To The Dress is filmed. It doesn’t go the way she expects, and I won’t spoil it more than that. Chirico is one of my favorite writers for all sorts of reasons, and her willingness to be surprised by her own experiences is one of the big ones. 14. The Indigo Girls story in Dave Holmes’ memoir Party Of One. I enjoyed this book so much that the second time I read it, I lost all track of time and got my first bad sunburn in years. True story! : Dave’s tweetstorm about phone scammers. 15. The anniversary celebration of All Songs Considered where I saw Glen Hansard break a guitar string with the force of his which he does kind of a lot. 16. The frustrating and enlightening ”Object Anyway” episode of the podcast More Perfect. Officially about jury selection, it winds up being about the complex ways people think about race and crime. It’s great radio, and very educational, and constantly compelling. Bonus: I also love the episode ”The Imperfect Plaintiffs.” 17. ”I got this.” The U. S. women’s gymnastics team cleaned up at the Rio Olympics, but perhaps nothing thrilled me more than Laurie Hernandez, just before her beam routine, being caught on camera saying to herself, ”I got this.” 18. Take My Wife, Cameron Esposito and Rhea Butcher’s comedy series on the Seeso network. It would have been a terrific show about a complex couple even if it weren’t the regrettably rare depiction of lesbians who, as one episode points out, don’t die immediately when they have sex. 19. W. Kamau Bell’s United Shades Of America, the bracing and funny travelogue series about race and culture that seems even more needed now, as it prepares for a second season on CNN, than it did when it first aired. 20. The musical Sing Street, which seems to be about a kid who starts a band, but which also turns out to be about the bonds of friendship, the perils of romance and especially the crucial role of siblinghood for anyone who’s ever felt like they don’t quite know how to bloom in quite the place where they were first planted. 21. The year Sterling K. Brown had on both FX’s The People v. O. J. Simpson and NBC’s This Is Us. Both are shows with large casts, and no one in either group was more critical or better than he was. It’s really rare for the same actor to do such good work on both a prestige cable miniseries and a traditional broadcast drama, and Brown more than pulled it off. Absolutely my dramatic acting MVP of 2016. 22. Samantha Bee’s acceptance of the award for Outstanding Achievement In News And Information from the Television Critics Association for her TBS show Full Frontal. She spoke about the show and how grateful she was, then added, ”Now I’ll take your questions on how I achieve balance.” Like much of what she did through the year, the line was direct, funny, and cutting. So maybe don’t always ask women about balance, because it appears that they do notice. 23. Michelle Obama’s Carpool Karaoke segment with James Corden, which took a bit that was (and is) rapidly reaching overexposure and immediately made it surprising and joyful, particularly when you include the cameo appearance in the back seat. 24. Sunny Pawar in the drama Lion. Dev Patel is terrific as the adult Saroo, but before he can play a man who looks for his biological family, Pawar has to hold up a good part of the film as a very little boy who loses contact with his. In a pretty good year for kid acting, Pawar was one of my favorite discoveries. 25. ”Unbreakable.” Not everything worked in the revival of Gilmore Girls, but the performance by Sutton Foster of an original song by Jeanine Tesori and show creator Amy was an unexpected surprise that broke the format but did its job with great force. I was surprised to learn it was written for this, because it’s the kind of song you instantly feel like you’ve heard before, not in the sense of cliche but in the sense of warm familiarity. 26. The ending — perhaps too neat, but come on, that’s kind of the format — of the Downton Abbey. It didn’t precisely scratch my every itch (I don’t personally believe Downton ever quite recovered from the loss of Dan Stevens) but did give me some of the things I wanted most, and did deliver a solid dose of Matthew Goode, perhaps the most Downton man who took quite that long to be on Downton. 27. Weiner, hoo boy. There is much, especially in retrospect, that is about this documentary, which chronicles Anthony Weiner’s failed 2013 run for Mayor of New York City two years after he resigned from Congress following a sexting scandal. If you see this movie with, say, five friends, I can almost guarantee you that you will have a series of conversations about it in which the running theme is, ”I just do not get it.” There is one sequence that involves Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, just . .. pacing, that may be the most interesting thing I saw in a documentary all year. 28. Minnie Driver’s funny, singular performance as the mother to three kids including a special needs son on ABC’s Speechless, a show that has avoided about eight different potential pitfalls to become one of the best broadcast comedies on TV. Driver has needed and deserved a role just like this for years, at least as far back as her hilarious guest spots on Will Grace, and it was a delight to see her find it. (Bonus: the rest of the cast is just as strong it’s a really solid group and the show is a fine addition to ABC’s strong family comedy lineup.) 29. ”Hello?” I’m convinced that no one who really knows and likes PJ Vogt and Alex Goldman, the hosts of Gimlet’s Reply All podcast, would think it was a good idea for them to take phone calls from anyone and everyone for 48 hours straight. And it was not a good idea. It was a terrible idea, and their bizarre apparent fantasy of going without sleep (? ?) for days (? ??) while talking to strangers (? ???) on tape (? ???? !) quickly fell apart, as it should have. But what ultimately came of it was a nearly episode that contains, particularly as it progresses, moments of real grace and surprise. 30. Nothing I saw this year was more unexpectedly weird than watching the real Grandmaster Flash try to explain his art to a bunch of television critics during a preview of Netflix’s The Get Down (in which Grandmaster Flash is a character) at the Television Critics Association summer press tour. We were overmatched by what amounted to Grandmaster Flash’s TED talk, and I’m not afraid to say so. Meanwhile, The Get Down was a little bit all over the place, but the central performance from Justice Smith was a real pleasure. The show has half of its first season yet to come, and for Smith, at least, I’ll watch it. 31. Ryan Gosling leaning on a lamppost in La La Land. It pushed a button that’s been deeply programmed inside me since I saw Singin’ In The Rain, and I found it utterly delightful. The movie isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but it was my entire pot thereof. 32. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. One of the real travesties of this year was that this music mockumentary from the Lonely Island somehow slipped past people. Already, it’s got a reputation as a film much better than its flopsitude would suggest, and I firmly believe that as years pass, those of us who truly appreciated it will be vindicated. Please see it just for the songs and the celebrity cameos. 33. The second season of Catastrophe, starring Rob Delaney and Sharon Horgan — with Carrie Fisher. It started with a time jump that was clever and wise and instantly moved the story to a more interesting phase of their relationship to explore than you would have seen had the second season picked up right where the first left off. That kind of experimentation is always welcome in episodic comedy, where it’s so easy to box yourself into a corner with such matters as . .. new babies. 34. Little’s bath. While there are a lot of things about Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight to celebrate, I’ll just choose an early sequence in which Little (Alex R. Hibbert) carefully heats a pot of water on the stove. It’s a beautiful little peek at his routine — at his independence, resilience and loneliness, all of which will recur through what we see of his life, all at once. 35. The youngest tier of performers in Stranger Things — Finn Wolfhard, Millie Bobby Brown, Caleb McLaughlin, and Gaten Matarazzo. They were asked, in essence, to embody archetypes from a period they never lived through: the Steven King ’80s, when kids roamed on bikes and discovered oddities with their best friends. Nevertheless, they all came through like champs, and while the show had trouble delivering on all of its promises (as supernatural stories often do) the friendships sustained it throughout. 36. Sailor dances. I am overlapping as little as possible with Glen Weldon’s Pop Culture Advent Calendar (which offers 25 more good things from this year) but I, too, would be remiss if I didn’t mention Channing Tatum’s ”No Dames” number from Hail, Caesar! For musical aficionados, the callbacks to sailor movies, tap numbers and even Rodgers and Hammerstein (the song is a in places from ”There Is Nothing Like A Dame”) are a special treat, and Tatum can dance on my screen any time, for as long as he likes. I’m still not sure that guy has been used to the absolute height of his powers. I fear what could happen (to me) when he is. 37. Issa and Molly. There are lots of shows about friends, but not that many good shows about friends. Issa Rae’s Insecure on HBO was many wonderful things at once (I could easily have chosen the early sequence in which Issa talks to herself in the mirror, which has been rightly praised by many before me) but I treasured nothing about it more than I did the portrayal of Issa and her best friend, Molly. Their bond is their primary emotional entanglement in many ways, and therefore it’s the relationship that often has the highest stakes. 38. Michael Shannon in Loving, the story of Richard and Mildred Loving (Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga) whose Supreme Court case established that it was unconstitutional for states to ban interracial marriage. The leads in the film are absolutely divine, and Nick Kroll does good and unexpected work as their attorney. But I was also a sucker for a brief appearance by Shannon as Grey Villet, the Life photographer who took the most portraits of the Lovings while their case was pending. (Take a look at the real photos, if you never have.) 39. As if it’s not enough that Mamoudou Athie played Grandmaster Flash in The Get Down, he was also a very dreamy romantic lead in a little movie called Jean Of The Joneses, from Stella Meghie, which follows a young woman (Taylour Paige) with a sprawling matriarchal Brooklyn family. It premiered on TV One in October, and while I don’t think you can stream it right now, it’ll show up, and it will be well worth seeking out. 40. HBO’s documentary Suited, about a Brooklyn custom suiting shop that caters to transgender, nonbinary, and gender customers. It’s about identity and fashion and compassion, and it was one of this year’s best. 41. Ezra Edelman’s O. J.: Made In America. As good as the FX drama series of the Simpson trial was, I think Edelman’s documentary was even better — more stirring, more focused on the social aspects of the case, more searching. It makes the point over and over that what’s most beneficial isn’t to know more about the court case itself, but to understand the many ways in which the case, both as a series of events and as a cultural phenomenon, was created by the country where it happened. 42. Josh Gondelman’s comedy album Physical Whisper includes a track called ”Kiss Me Neck,” and in it, you’ll find one of the reasons Josh (who’s a pal and a writer for Last Week Tonight With John Oliver) is the kind of comedian he is: it’s long and involved, and then . .. the punch line doesn’t come from him. It’s somebody else’s laugh, and telling the story comes from a place of generosity. That would make it unusual in a lot of people’s repertoire, but it fits right in on this record. 43. I am obsessed with the musical The Last Five Years, and I had no worse FOMO this year than what I experienced when I missed Cynthia Erivo and Joshua Henry performing it at Town Hall in New York. Fortunately, there’s video evidence. This kind of theater experience, which is sort of a relative of the production of Company a couple of years ago with Neil Patrick Harris and Stephen Colbert, is something I could stand to see a lot more of, hopefully when I’m not traveling. 44. The Brooklyn episode ”9 Days,” in which both Jake (Andy Samberg) and Holt (Andre Braugher) got the mumps — and were quarantined together, and named their goiters — was goofy and perfect. Brooklyn is a show I’m crazy about, but never more than when they lock up Jake and Holt and just make them bump into each other in a variety of ways. 45. Emma Thompson being really just about perfect. Much of Bridget Jones’s Baby was just a nostalgia tour for — and there’s nothing wrong with that, really. But Emma Thompson shows up in a few scenes as Bridget’s and she is so funny that it makes the entire film a great bargain, just for that. (”My husband said it was like watching his favorite pub burn down.” A line delivery so good I in my living room.) 46. This fall’s fresh Emmy winners: Rami Malek for Mr. Robot, Tatiana Maslany for Orphan Black, and Louie Anderson in Baskets, Courtney B. Vance and Sarah Paulson and Sterling K. Brown for The People v. O. J. Simpson, among others, gave hope to those who would like to see the Emmys get a little more . .. well, creative in recognizing talent. Sometimes it feels like it’s all the same faces every year, and this year, it wasn’t. The rare awards show where the winners themselves were fairly frequently exciting to see. 47. All the moments in which, even while grieving, we shared thoughts about artists who died this year. While no one can feel happy, really, about losses like Prince and David Bowie and George Michael and Carrie Fisher, there is a way in which sadness frees up vulnerable thoughts, and I’m not sure we’ve ever had a better year for memorial essays and other reminders to appreciate the artists you love as loudly and unreservedly as you can. To wit: I could easily have made one of the items on this list my firm belief that nobody wrote better more consistently this year in more different ways than Rembert Browne here’s his remembrance of Phife Dawg, and here he is on George Michael’s ”Freedom ’90.” 48. Inside the NPR family, one of my favorite podcast episodes of the year was Code Switch’s ”Audie And The School Bus.” Just listen. (Bonus in this category: My Pop Culture Happy Hour and dear friend Glen Weldon’s great, great book The Caped Crusade: Batman And The Rise Of Nerd Culture. Pro tip — consider the audiobook.) 49. This was my year of Hamilton, as it was for many people. Not only did that mean I had the chance to see the show, but it meant I got to watch the #shotsoutthegrammy phenomenon on Snapchat, and I got to watch a digital puppeteer for PBS’s Splash Bubbles make a fish lip sync ”My Shot,” and it meant I got to hear Code Switch’s Gene Demby talk to George Washington himself, Chris Jackson. (By the way: I don’t love everything on the Hamilton mixtape, but I do love Dessa singing ”Congratulations. ”) Big year. 50. I don’t think it would be fair not to acknowledge that all the wonderful things there are often coexist with tremendous sadness and disappointment and fear. In that spirit, I want to close the list with Gregory Porter’s Tiny Desk Concert, which he played at NPR just after we learned that NPR photographer David Gilkey and journalist and interpreter Zabihullah Tamanna had died in Afghanistan. There had been so much crying that day that half the eyes in the building were still swollen. Porter came to us by chance, but it was just as if he’d been sent for this purpose. The concert was sorely needed and incredibly healing. And yes, it was wonderful.

For those of us at NPR, 2016 was of big news stories, so much so, it sometimes seemed the horrors in the headlines would never stop — the migrant crisis, police shootings, terrorist attacks, and on and on. But when we looked at stories that you, our NPR One listeners, loved listening to the most in 2016, it painted a very different picture of the year. The stories in NPR One indicate that you are passionate about three subjects. First, you love science and innovation. You really love the National Park Service for its 100th birthday, NPR produced a series of stories throughout the year that captured your attention. And you also enjoyed our longer, discussions with artists such as Miguel and Dua Lipa, who talked about their creative processes. Oh, and you also love stories about Finnish mail carriers. (More on that later.) First, a little bit about how we came up with this list. Our NPR One app allows you to customize your NPR experience, by skipping ahead to the stories you like or to your favorite podcasts. When you listen to a story instead of skipping it and either share that story or tap on that story’s light bulb icon (it’s our version of the ”like” button) it’s a pretty good indicator you enjoyed or appreciated that story. These are the 10 stories that had the most of these positive interactions. 1. Just Like Human Skin, This Plastic Sheet Can Sense And Heal, Joe Palca took us to a lab to meet a scientist who is trying to make artificial skin out of plastic that can feel things, heal itself and keep germs out. Zhenan Bao has a long way to go before testing the plastic skin on humans, but she’s making progress. Listen, Read, 2. Planet Money — NPR One Oil Exclusive, In an NPR One exclusive, the Planet Money team explained how crude oil becomes more than just the fuel that powers our cars and heats our homes. It’s now the basis for many other consumer products, including the dyes that color our clothes and even painkillers that cure our headaches. Listen, 3. Noteworthy: Miguel, In this piece from NPR Music’s Noteworthy documentary series, host Jason King visited psychedelic soul artist Miguel in his Los Angeles home and spoke with him in the studio where he’s working on songs for an upcoming fourth album. This is a deep, immersive listen into the world of creating music. Watch, Listen, 4. Don’t Care About National Parks? The Park Service Needs You To, The National Park Service has been a part of our country for 100 years. But Nathan Rott reports about concerns that the majority of the visitors to National Parks are white and don’t reflect the demographics of the country. He looks at some attempts to change that with new programs and efforts toward diversifying the park’s staff and visitors. Listen, Read, 5. Indian Automaker Balances Luxury With Global Sustainability, Sonari Glinton, Ari Shapiro and Susan Stamberg put a Jaguar sports car through its paces in the hills of Los Angeles. An Indian company called Tata now owns Jaguar, and it’s trying to find new approaches to limit pollution and energy consumption. Listen, 6. Finland’s Postal Service Will Mow Your Lawn, Postal service workers in Finland have long helped out the elderly by delivering food and assisting with small things around the house, but now mail carriers are available to mow lawns. Listen, 7. Noteworthy: Dua Lipa, Noteworthy host Jason King met Dua Lipa in New York the morning before her Tonight Show performance for the latest episode in the NPR Music documentary series. They spoke about how she developed her sound, why she has always wanted to be a pop star, and why breaking through in the United States is so important to her. Listen, Watch, 8. National Park Service Celebrates Its 100th Anniversary, Nathan Rott introduces us to the people behind the scenes who keep the National Parks running. Listen, 9. Blockchain Looks To Change How To Do Business Online, Blockchain is a technology that allows people to share what is basically a digital ledger. It is best known as the code that makes Bitcoin work. Don Tapscott wrote a book about blockchain and says it is the greatest innovation in computer science in years. Listen, 10. Keeping Bears Wild — Or Trying — At National Parks, There are wildlife biologists who try to keep bears in National Parks wild and away from people. We learn about the problems of ”bear jams” and ”bear selfies” and meet the people who try to the bears that get too attached to life near people. Listen, Read, Related: The Secret Sauce Behind NPR One: An Editorially Responsible Algorithm