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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

Though many of us lamented the saga of this year’s U. S. presidential election, the news was too momentous to tune out. Indeed, many of the year’s biggest stories on NPR. org were all about politics. The top 20 most popular stories from the past year ranged from fact checks to mosquito bites, from Aleppo to taxes, and how to raise kids who will thrive, whatever the future brings. Here they are: the stories from a year we won’t soon forget. Here Is What Donald Trump Wants To Do In His First 100 Days, The top story of the year — and in fact, the top story of all time on NPR. org, with more than 17 million views — was one that we didn’t write. It’s a memo from Donald Trump, released in October, setting his agenda for his first 100 days in office. FACT CHECK: Donald Trump’s First 100 Days Action Plan, NPR’s reporters and editors took a deep dive into that plan for the first 100 days: How much of his proposed agenda can Trump really pull off? They assessed what it would take, for instance, to eliminate two federal regulations for each new regulation that’s added, as Trump said he wants to do. Who Benefits From Donald Trump’s Tax Plan? Trump promised to ”massively cut taxes for the middle class, the forgotten people, the forgotten men and women of this country, who built our country.” During a town hall meeting on NBC’s Today, he said he believes in raising taxes on the wealthy. But some economists say Trump’s tax plan would benefit the 1 percent the most. Fact Check: Trump And Clinton Debate For The First Time, Though some have claimed we’re now in the ” era,” NPR. org readers aren’t buying it. Our live fact check of the first debate between Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton drew nearly 10 million page views, becoming what was at that point our most viewed story ever. FACT CHECK: Clinton And Trump Debate For The 2nd Time, The second debate was a testy one, and our political team assessed the accuracy of the candidates’ statements on everything from the deficit and the Affordable Care Act to Trump’s comments about women and Clinton’s email server. Fact Check And Full Transcript Of The Final 2016 Presidential Debate, This was the debate that added the terms ”bad hombre” and ”nasty woman” to our lexicon. NPR’s political team dug into the of the candidates’ statements about guns, abortion, immigration and more. Shades Of 2000? Clinton Surpasses Trump In Popular Vote Tally, As the final votes were tallied, Clinton became the fifth U. S. presidential candidate to win the popular vote but lose the election. The structure of the Electoral College makes it theoretically possible for a candidate to win the White House with less than 30 percent of the popular vote. Live Coverage: Election Night 2016, Then there was election night itself. Trump’s victory caught many by surprise, and our live blog tracked the triumphs and tears as results emerged in contests around the country. Donald Trump Might Be In Real Trouble This Time, After the Republican Convention in July, Trump’s poll numbers went into a slump. NPR’s Ron Elving delved into the factors that were hampering Trump at the time. A Wounded Child In Aleppo, Silent And Still, Shocks The World, The image of one child, wounded and bleeding from the head, became a symbol of the Syrian conflict’s brutality, with airstrikes that often targeted hospitals. For 70 Years, A Mug In Auschwitz Held A Secret Treasure, In a mug belonging to Jews sent to the concentration camp at Auschwitz, museum conservators discovered a false bottom, concealing a gold necklace and a gold ring inlaid with stones. The jewelry had remained hidden all these years. What’s The Best Way To Keep Mosquitoes From Biting? The best way to avoid the Zika virus is to not get bitten by mosquitoes in the first place. NPR talked to researchers — many of whom spend a lot of time in jungles and marshes — about the pros and cons of repellents including DEET, lemon eucalyptus and good long sleeves. One scientist adds this fashion tip: Tuck your pants into your socks. Attention, Students: Put Your Laptops Away, With the advent of laptops and tablets, many students started typing notes, because it’s often faster than writing. But it turns out that the slowness of taking notes by hand is what helps students process information and actually understand the concepts they’re writing down. How To Raise Brilliant Children, According To Science, Two developmental psychologists offer a new framework to help parents cultivate the skills their children will actually need to thrive in the world: ”If we don’t rear children who are comfortable taking risks, we won’t have successes.” Groundhog Day: Punxsutawney Phil Did Not See His Shadow, It might have been the chilly weather that day or just a love for Bill Murray movies, but readers needed to know the latest meteorology. Phil’s verdict: Winter was on its last legs. WATCH: Nails Impersonations Of Trump, Clinton, Obama, Sanders, From the depths of an exhausting election, a bit of mirth emerged in the form of Jack Aiello, graduation speaker extraordinaire. What would the candidates say about the cinnamon rolls at Thomas Middle School? You’ll have to watch the video. Suspect Purchased Guns Legally Ahead Of Deadliest Shooting In Modern U. S. History, In June, a gunman opened fire on a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla. killing at least 50 people before he was shot dead by police. The suspect, Omar Mateen, pledged allegiance to ISIS in a 911 call before the attack. Mateen legally purchased a long gun and a handgun in the days before the attack. Minnesota Gov. Calls Traffic Stop Shooting ’Absolutely Appalling At All Levels’ Philando Castile, a black man, was fatally shot by a police officer in suburban St. Paul, Minn. in July. Castile had notified the officer that he was licensed to carry a handgun and was reaching for his wallet at the officer’s request when he was shot. His death, streamed live on Facebook by his girlfriend, sparked national outrage. Gwen Ifill, Host Of ’Washington Week’ And ’PBS NewsHour,’ Dies, Gwen Ifill, one of the most prominent political journalists in the country, died in November. ”I’m very keen about the fact that a little girl now, watching the news, when they see me and Judy [Woodruff] sitting side by side, it will occur to them that that’s perfectly normal — that it won’t seem like any big breakthrough at all,” Ifill said in a 2013 interview. In Victory For Protesters, Army Halts Construction Of Dakota Pipeline, In December, the Army Corps of Engineers denied a permit for the construction of a key section of the Dakota Access Pipeline, to the cheers of protesters who had built a sprawling camp that was then covered in snow. That decision essentially halted construction of the oil pipeline, just north of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.

With so much attention paid to women in 2016, from Hillary Clinton to Wonder Woman, it’s easy to lose sight of women who are blazing a trail in and countries. In ways big and small, these women have moved the needle on gender equality by being activists, role models or simply taking a stand. Here’s a roundup of some of the many memorable women we profiled on Goats and Soda in 2016. Halima Aden, the beauty pageant contestant who wore a burkini The wanted to compete for Miss Minnesota USA and didn’t let the fact that she is a hijabi — a Muslim woman who wears hijab — stop her. In the swimsuit portion of the competition, she wore a burkini, a type of modest swimwear specially made for hijabis. She grabbed headlines for her confidence, from the States to Somalia. ”Beauty isn’t ” she says. ”If I can find different ways to spread that message, I will.” Sitawa Wafula, founder of Kenya’s first mental health hotline Wafula has bipolar disorder, but she had a hard time getting diagnosed in her native Kenya. Some people thought she was cursed — and even worse, there just weren’t many mental health facilities in Kenya where she could get good information about her condition or medications. So she established Kenya’s first text message mental health hotline so anyone in the country could send in questions to trained volunteers. She’s become a role model in Kenya — and this year, named one of her country’s 40 women under 40. Shahd a mom who slammed a teacher who shamed her daughter, When Swerki’s daughter stripped nude in front of some boys in preschool, the teacher was frantic, acting as if the girl had ruined her future. At first, Swerki was filled with panic and shame. But she was determined to raise her daughter to be comfortable with her own body — an awareness she herself wasn’t taught as a young Palestinian girl. ”I will never allow anyone to control my reactions and feelings toward any incident happening to my daughter. To my husband. To me. To my life,” she says. Jacqueline de Chollet, a Swiss aristocrat who tackles child marriage, What was supposed to be a vacation to northern India ended up changing her life — and the lives of almost 200 child brides and other girls. After a chance encounter with a woman in a remote village, de Chollet, the daughter of a Swiss baron, was inspired to start a school for girls in Jodhpur. Called the Veerni Institute, the school requires parents to sign a contract stating that they won’t send their daughter to live with her husband until the girl graduates from high school. In exchange, the girl gets free room, board and education. Petrona Choc Cuc, a victim of sexual violence who testified against her abusers It happened during Guatemala’s civil war in the 1980s, but Choc Cuc hadn’t forgotten. This year, the Mayan Indian went to court and told a judge how soldiers killed her husband, captured her and her daughter, and repeatedly raped her. Many women were too scared to come to court, but not Choc Cuc. Her testimony was critical. In February, two military officials were sentenced to over 100 years of prison each for their war crimes. Rita Superman, a police chief who fights human trafficking, Superman has found that sometimes a conversation is all it takes to turn a victim’s life around. She shares the story of Sylvia, from Bulgaria, who was arrested in Cyprus for prostitution. Superman asked her: Do you like what you’re doing? Are you satisfied with your work? No one had ever asked Sylvia those questions before. Sylvia was inspired to go to a shelter and press charges against her captor. It’s moments like these that moved the U. S. State Department to honor Superman this year for her activism against human trafficking. Neetu, child bride turned wrestler She was a child bride. Today, she’s a wrestler eyeing the 2020 Olympics. Neetu, a athlete, an occasional Bollywood actor and a mom of two, is seen as an inspiration in India. ”She’s changed everything,” says a woman from her village. ”Everybody believes that a girl can now say — ’I want to do something.’ ”

As the 115th Congress is sworn in Tuesday, Republicans will be poised to control Washington with a stronger hand than they have in a decade — with the Senate, House and the White House in GOP control once Donald Trump takes office on January 20. This past November, Republicans held their congressional losses to a minimum, helped by an unexpectedly strong GOP wave behind Trump. After losing just two Senate seats, they’ll hold a edge (two independents caucus with Democrats). In the House, Republicans lost six seats, giving them a majority. House Speaker Paul Ryan boasted shortly after Election Day that the ”new unified Republican government” would be ”focused on turning Trump’s victory into real progress for the American people.” And as NPR congressional correspondent Susan Davis explained, there is precedent for a unified government pushing through sweeping changes early on: ”When the White House and Congress have been controlled by the same party, Washington has produced some of the most sweeping — albeit politically polarizing — legislation aimed at shifting the political trajectory of the nation toward the cause of the party in power. ”In particular, the first congressional session of a new administration — when public approval is generally at its highest for the incoming president — has produced some recent presidents’ most memorable legislative imprints.” GOP congressional leaders and Trump agree on many things — paramount among them their best chance ever to repeal and replace Obamacare, in addition to rolling back federal regulations and increasing infrastructure projects. But there are some looming showdowns between the incoming president and members of his own party on Capitol Hill — many of whom were less than supportive of Trump in the primaries and lukewarm on his prospects in the general election. Top Republicans have already signaled their break with Trump over alleged Russian cyberattacks intended to interfere with the U. S. elections. After President Obama announced sweeping sanctions against the country last week, Ryan called the response ”overdue” but ”appropriate.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the sanctions were a ”a good initial step” and reiterated his support for a congressional investigation into the supposed interference. Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain is planning a hearing for Thursday into the breach, with three top intelligence officials set to testify. Trump, however, has said the country should ”move on” from the cyberattacks. During the campaign he repeatedly praised Russia and its president Vladimir Putin, casting doubt that they were behind the intrusion. He even praised Putin as ”very smart!” after his muted response to sanctions from the Obama administration. Trump has, however, agreed to meet with U. S. intelligence officials regarding the cyber breaches this week. Congress is prepared to get a jump start on confirming Trump’s Cabinet nominees as well, with hearings on some top appointees beginning next week. But many of his most important picks are controversial, particularly Secretary of State nominee Rex Tillerson. The Exxon Mobil CEO’s ties to Russia and Putin have already raised concern, and he’s sure to be pressed about the new sanctions as well. Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions’s nomination for attorney general could be contentious too. While sitting members typically receive deference from their peers, Democrats will draw attention to his past failure to get confirmation as a federal judge because of alleged racist remarks made in the past. Another looming fight will be when Trump makes his pick for the Supreme Court to succeed the late Justice Antonin Scalia. President Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland languished last year as Republicans declined to take up his nomination. The process of repealing the Affordable Care Act is expected to get started this week as the Senate is expected to take up a budget measure that would begin the process of dismantling President Obama’s signature domestic achievement. But it won’t come quickly. Without a replacement plan on the table, some Republicans are wary of moving too quickly to dismantle the healthcare law for fear it would roil insurance markets if no fix is ready to be implemented. Soon after the members of the 115th Congress are sworn in on Tuesday, their next task will be to officially Ryan as speaker. And while there’s little drama expected, there could still be defections once the voice vote is held on the House floor, particularly from hardline Trump supporters. Two years ago, John Boehner had 25 members of his own party vote against him. When Boehner stepped down in October 2015, only nine other Republicans voted for someone other than Ryan. Ryan distanced himself from Trump just before Election Day after damaging audio emerged of Trump bragging about groping women. The two have since reconciled, but there have been signs of discord among the base. At a rally last month in Ryan’s home state of Wisconsin, the speaker was booed. And while Trump quieted the dissenters, he did caution that if Ryan ever opposed him their relationship might not be so rosy any longer. ”Honestly, he’s like a fine wine: Every day goes by, I get to appreciate his genius more and more,” Trump told the Wisconsin crowd on Dec. 13. ”Now, if he ever goes against me, I’m not going to say that, OK?” It may have been a joke, but speaks to the strain in the most powerful relationship in Washington.

Democrats may have lost the House and the Senate over the past eight years, but they always had one thing: President Barack Obama — and his veto pen — in the White House. That won’t be the case next year, when Republicans find themselves with all the power in Washington for the first time since 2006. The capitol’s new power dynamic — and the aggressive agenda Republican leaders are laying out for 2017 — is forcing Democrats to make some tough strategic choices about how they’ll work as a minority party. The starting point in the conversation Democrats are having with themselves right now is this: Republicans in Congress spent almost all of the past eight years opposing President Obama, and they seem to have reaped a lot of political rewards for the block opposition. GOP leaders will get to set the agenda in Congress next year. And among their first orders of business will be voting on a Supreme Court nominee picked by President Donald Trump. That’s after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell rejected any hearings, let alone votes, for Obama’s pick, Merrick Garland. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is quick and careful to reject an approach of wholesale opposition, though. She recently described Democrats’ approach as ”always trying to find a place where we can find a common goal. Giving [Republicans] credit, or saving face, whatever it happens to be.” ”We would be hopeful that there are some places that we can work together,” Pelosi said. But when Pelosi and other Democrats talk about working with Trump, that common goal is conditional. They say Trump would have to be willing to do things they care about — like, perhaps, following through on a promise to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on infrastructure projects. ”We think it should be large. He’s mentioned a trillion dollars. I told him that sounds good to me,” incoming Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer recently told ABC News. Highlighting differences, But otherwise, Democrats are confident that drawing out their differences with the new president will be a winning strategy. ”Our big leverage is the public,” Pelosi said, expressing confidence that public opinion sides with Democrats when it comes to issues like not making major changes to Medicare and Social Security. Democrats are eager to draw the contrast on those sorts of topics, and see those particular wedge issues as a big reason why they won back the House and Senate in 2006, the last time Republicans held so much power in Washington. That’s why, while Republicans like McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan are focusing on repealing Obamacare, Pelosi, Schumer, and other Democrats keep talking about the possibility of wholesale Medicare changes. ”Republicans here in Washington are gearing up for a war on seniors,” Schumer warned at a recent Washington press conference with a ”hands off our Medicare” message. Schumer said Senate Democrats will give ”one heck of a hearing” to Rep. Tom Price, Trump’s pick for the Department of Health and Human Services and a longtime Medicare critic. Democrats think they can generate a lot of positive headlines by grilling Trump’s cabinet picks. ”These are, with a few exceptions, radical nominees, the likes of which we have never seen in this country,” said Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut. Democrats see hearings as a way to continue emphasizing their key concerns about Trump, like the fact he never released his tax returns, and the ongoing question of how he’ll avoid problems as president. They see Secretary of State nominee Rex Tillerson’s hearing as an avenue to highlight Russia’s attempt to disrupt the presidential race, and Trump’s warm words toward Russian President Vladimir Putin. A big choice on Obamacare, But highlighting contrasts can only go so far, when Republicans set the Congressional agenda. At some point, Democrats still face a choice. Do they do their best to block every single big initiative, or try to work with Republicans to make it more ? Sarah Binder studies Congress at the Brookings Institution, and said Democrats do have leverage. ”On most measures, whether it’s spending bills, deregulation, repeal . That all requires cooperation from at least eight Democrats.” That’s because while Republicans will control the Senate with 52 seats, they’ll need at least 60 votes to advance bills in the chamber. The hardest political calculus could be Obamacare. Republicans can repeal the landmark law without any Democratic votes, using the budget reconciliation process that helped pass the initial law. But they’d need Democratic support in the Senate to pass a replacement plan, since the measure would be subject to filibuster. Blocking any sort of replacement plan, and then trying to lay the blame for disappearing health care coverage on Trump and Republicans, would be a bold, if callous, political move. ”Are they kind of, as a party, constitutionally adverse to that type of strategy? Many people think so,” said Binder. ”That they just value government and legislative action too much to do that to the process.” Indeed, many Democrats might want to work with Republicans to keep as much of Obamacare as they can. But helping give Trump a big legislative accomplishment could make him more popular. And it could anger progressive activists. ”It is the responsibility of this minority of Democrats in Congress to block, obstruct, disrupt, and do whatever they can,” filmmaker Michael Moore recently argued on CNN. He issued a warning to Democrats who may consider cutting deals with Trump: ”In the same way that the Tea Party was there in 2009, myself and thousands like me are going to be at those town halls in the district in the spring. And we will primary these Democrats if they don’t do their job.” Warnings like that may be why leaders like Schumer are quick to qualify any talk about working with Trump on issues like infrastructure spending. ”When we oppose Trump on values, or if his presidency takes a dark, divisive turn, we’re going to do it ” he told ABC News. Pelosi knows Democrats all across the country are anxious. But she’s urging patience as the party tries to make its case to voters. ”Somebody used the analogy of, it’s like telling somebody they married the wrong person or their art is fake,” she recently told reporters. The first scenario is something many people have seen happen to a friend or family member. The second? Maybe not as much. Still, Pelosi’s point was that American voters did choose Trump and the GOP this year. ”They bought it. They’ll find out sooner or later whether they made a mistake,” she said, arguing that it’s better to let the married couple or art connoisseur make that discovery themselves, than to be told by an outside party. Pelosi has seen voters reject Democrats, come back to the party, and then reject them again. She said she is patient enough to point out the key differences between the parties, and wait for voters to eventually come back.

There’s more methane gas in the atmosphere than there used to be, by every scientific measure. The Obama administration has been trying to stem the increase of this powerful greenhouse gas, but the incoming Trump administration appears bent on keeping the government’s hands off methane. The gas comes from agriculture, especially flooded agricultural lands like rice fields, as well as from the digestive tracts of livestock. But it’s also the main component of natural gas some methane escapes from leaky oil and gas operations. Whatever the source, scientists have found that, after many years of very little change, concentrations of methane in the atmosphere have increased by 3 percent over the past eight years. ”Methane concentrations in the atmosphere are surging faster than any time in the last 20 years,” environmental scientist Rob Jackson, of Stanford University, told NPR. Jackson and his colleagues have long tracked various sources of methane, as it emanates from oil and gas wells, city sewers and manure pits he recently published scientific papers on global as well as local concentrations of the gas. ”We understand some of the reason for (the increase),” he said, ”but not all of the reasons.” Other climate researchers have confirmed Jackson’s findings, and point out that methane warms the atmosphere at about 30 times the rate carbon dioxide does. Jackson said the recent increase convinces him that methane deserves as much, if not more, immediate attention as carbon dioxide, the main contributor to greenhouse gas. Scientists point to agriculture as the likeliest source of the new methane, especially in Asia and Africa. Feeding more people has meant more rice fields, more livestock and more manure — all sources of methane. There also is some evidence that small changes in the chemistry of the atmosphere may be allowing methane to stay aloft longer than usual, giving it more time to warm the air. But Jackson noted that there are other sources. ”We also see evidence for some increase from the fossil fuel sector,” he said, meaning drilling, processing and the transporting of natural gas. Recent research shows that leaks from the natural gas supply chain are more widespread than previously thought. The U. S. government is taking steps to stem that source of methane. The Environmental Protection Agency has written regulations to make companies plug methane leaks at new or modified oil and gas operations, and at the operations on some federal land. But the oil and gas industry believes the government is overreaching. That debate is likely to flare up when Donald Trump takes office. Trump has said that environmental regulations drive up the cost of doing business and kill jobs his choice to head the EPA, Scott Pruitt, the attorney general of Oklahoma, has made similar claims that the agency has a history of overly regulating oil and gas companies. Jack Gerard, who leads the American Petroleum Institute, told reporters in November that he wants the incoming Trump administration to dump the regulations. ”Methane (regulation) is a top priority, and we’ll be pursuing that aggressively,” Gerard said. Some oil and gas companies have already sued to stop the regulations, which aren’t yet in effect. ”I think everybody understands that there needs to be methane regulation, and it’s really a question of degree,” Steve Leifer, an environmental lawyer at Baker Botts, a legal firm that represents oil and gas companies, told NPR. ”I know the industry is very concerned. They are taking it very, very seriously.” Oil and gas representatives argue that the recent research shows that the biggest source of methane is agriculture, along with natural sources like wetlands. That may be true, but Mark Brownstein, a lawyer with the Environmental Defense Fund, said he believes that’s a red herring. ”I think the debate over what’s caused the rise has served to obscure the fact that emissions are already too high,” Brownstein told NPR. You have to start somewhere, he said, and capturing leaked methane from oil and gas operations is easier than changing agriculture practices. In fact, stopping methane leaks should make economic sense for the oil and gas sector, he said: Methane is a commodity, and leaked methane is money lost. Brownstein’s organization, along with university researchers and natural gas companies, has studied how much gas is leaking. ”Let’s keep in mind what’s at stake here,” he said. ”We’re wasting enough natural gas every year to serve the needs of 7 million homes.” So far, oil and gas interests haven’t been convinced. Gerard points out that the industry is voluntarily reducing leaks and doesn’t need federal enforcement. Leifer, the attorney representing oil interests, told NPR the debate will likely end up in court, along with lots of other pending environmental regulations. ”There is no major rule that isn’t going to go to court,” he said. ”You just can’t find one.” That shouldn’t be surprising, he said. Every change of administration in Washington means more business for lawyers.

A Jewish farming couple from Canada says it has shepherded the sheep of the bible back to the Holy Land after centuries in exile. With donations from Jewish and Christian supporters, and some help from the Israeli government, Jenna and Gil Lewinsky have airlifted 119 furry members of the Jacob Sheep breed from their farm in Abbotsford, British Columbia, to Israel. Jacob Sheep are found in the U. K. and North America, but the Lewinskys say the breed originally roamed the Middle East and ancient Israel, and their spotted and speckled coats match the description in the Book of Genesis of Jacob’s flock. ”You know that Israel is built on Jewish people returning. Now you have a case of an animal from the Old Testament also returning,” said Gil Lewinsky from a customs loading dock at Israel’s international airport near Tel Aviv. Several times a week in recent weeks, an Air Canada jet touched down at the airport carrying a group of the Lewinskys’ fluffy Jacob Sheep in its cargo. ”Come, Israel, come!” farmer Jenna Lewinsky said to one reticent animal, coaxing him out of his shipping crate. Each animal comes with a Hebrew name. About two years ago, the Lewinskys wanted help with their spiritual mission to repatriate Jacob Sheep to their biblical homeland, and they contacted Eitan Weiss, then the head of cultural relations at the Israeli embassy in Ottawa. ”I was like, what the hell? Sheep?” Weiss recalled. ”I don’t know. It sounded very, very odd, I had to say. But when I did the homework and when they sent me some material, I said, I think this is an amazing story.” The Israeli Agriculture Ministry was not as enthused. Canada is not on Israel’s list of approved countries for livestock import. But the Israeli ambassador to Canada got involved, and the Agriculture Ministry granted a exception for the Jacob Sheep. Curious to learn more about the sheep’s pedigree, I visited sheep expert Elisha Gootwine at the Israeli Agriculture Ministry’s research organization, the Volcani Center. ”Jacob Sheep are related to Jacob the same as the American Indians are related to India,” Gootwine said with a chuckle, standing inside the research center’s sheep pen. The Jacob Sheep are originally British and got their name in the late 19th century because their spots and speckles called to mind Jacob’s sheep from the Bible, Gootwine said. Generally, all sheep can be traced back to the Near East, he said, because sheep were first domesticated in the Fertile Crescent. But the Jacob Sheep breed, according to Gootwine, is not indigenous to ancient Israel. Zohar Amar, a senior lecturer in the Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology at University in Israel, who studies the flora and fauna of ancient Israel, said the Jacob Sheep breed ”may have a long history in the U. K.,” but, ”according to all of the scientific indications we have (historical and zoological sources) it has no connection to the ancient sheep breeds” of ancient Israel. ”Anyway, it’s a nice breed and people will be happy to see it,” Gootwine said. ”It is a good story. For journalists, not for scientists.” ”So, it’s just, it’s a myth,” I said. ”Yes. But what is wrong with myth? If you enjoy it, why not?” Gootwine replied. The Lewinsky farmers say the biblical roots of the Jacob Sheep are not a myth. They’ve traced the breed’s route from ancient Israel to the Iberian Peninsula to England to North America ” and now, to Israel. The Lewinskys are currently setting up a farm for the sheep near Jerusalem, and they are continuing to solicit donations for support. Five of their sheep died shortly after arriving in Israel. Meanwhile, the Israeli Foreign Ministry is planning a welcome home ceremony for the animals. Is Israel their original home? The Israeli Foreign Ministry’s Eitan Weiss said he sees it as a matter of faith.

As Donald Trump prepares to become president, he’s promising to explain how he’ll deal with the many conflicts of interest posed by his businesses and charitable foundation, even as he insists they pose ”no big deal.” But short of selling his properties and putting the proceeds in a blind trust, it’s not clear that Trump can completely resolve the controversies over his many businesses. ”There’s a uniform consensus among everyone who does government ethics for a living . .. those who are still in government and those who have left government, that Donald Trump must divest,” says Norm Eisen, former ethics adviser to President Obama, and a fellow at the Brookings Institution. ”He’s got to sell his holdings, through using a blind trust or the equivalent of it, as every president has done for 40 years.” Since his election, Trump has settled some outstanding legal disputes, including lawsuits over Trump University and unionization drives at hotels in Las Vegas and Washington, D. C. Trump’s efforts to put these issues behind him suggest he recognizes that he and his family face serious conflicts of interest, Eisen says. ”That being said, [Trump’s actions] are not enough. They are baby steps, when what we need is a giant leap,” Eisen says. Trump says he will hold a press conference soon to explain his plans for his extensive network of businesses, but hasn’t said when it will take place. An earlier press conference to address the issue was canceled in December. His transition team cited the complexity of Trump’s businesses and said he needed more time to decide what to do. But Trump himself suggested to reporters in Palm Beach last week that addressing the conflicts was a simple matter and said his businesses are ”no big deal.” ”When I ran, people knew I have a very big business. So, I mean, they elected me at least partially for that reason. So I think that’s going to work out very easily. It’s actually a very simple situation,” he said. One issue that Trump appears eager to put behind him involves his charity, the Trump Foundation. Trump has been accused of using money from the charity, most of which was donated by other people, to pay expenses related to his businesses. The foundation has acknowledged ” ” on its tax returns, although it’s unclear what specific violations took place. Trump announced on Christmas Eve that he would shutter the foundation, a move that makes sense, says former IRS official Philip Hackney, associate professor of law at Louisiana State University. ”It begins to eliminate a minor conflict. I really think the Trump Organization is a much more significant conflict than the Trump Foundation was ever close to being,” Hackney says. But the New York ’s office, which is investigating the charity, quickly scotched the idea of shutting it down prematurely. Closing the foundation too soon could complicate the investigation, Eisen says. ”We don’t want any information to disappear into the ether when the charity closes. That’s a particular problem for Donald Trump because he has a propensity for secrecy,” he says.

The Islamic State issued a statement on Monday saying it was responsible for the attack at a New Year’s Eve celebration at a nightclub in Istanbul, Turkey, in which at least 39 people were killed. The Amaq News Agency published the statement: ”In continuation of the blessed operations that Islamic State is conducting against the protector of the cross, Turkey, a heroic soldier of the caliphate struck one of the most famous nightclubs where the Christians celebrate their apostate holiday.” NPR’s Peter Kenyon reports the ISIS claim hasn’t been verified. On Sunday, Peter reported that Turkish officials identified several possible culprits for the shooting, including the Islamic State, Kurdish militants or groups. Turkey’s news agency says that nearly of the people killed were foreign nationals. Clubgoers from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Lebanon and France are thought to have been killed. Funerals for some of the Turkish victims began on Sunday. A woman was killed in the attack. Peter reports that her father warned her not to go but she insisted — wanting to be with her friends. Nearly 70 people were wounded in the attack, among them a businessman from Delaware, according to the State Department. reports that Michael Raak of South Philadelphia says his brother, William Jacob Raak, called on New Year’s Eve to say he had been shot in the leg. The search for the attacker, who has not yet been identified, is still underway, says Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu. Police believe he carried out the attack alone. The Associated Press reports: Hurriyet and Karar newspaper reports Monday cited unnamed security officials saying that authorities have determined that the gunman who killed 39 people comes from a Central Asian nation and is believed to be either from Uzbekistan or Kyrgyzstan. Police had also established similarities with the attack at Ataturk Airport in June and was investigating whether the same IS cell carried out both attacks. NPR’s Peter Kenyon reported on Weekend All Things Considered that Turkey’s prime minister says the attacker left his weapon at the scene and fled in the chaotic aftermath. At Reina, one of Istanbul’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. The U. N. Security Council condemned the attack in a statement, calling it a ”heinous and barbaric terrorist attack.” Both the White House and State Department condemned the attack. The assault on the nightclub 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.

On a September day in 1940 while much of Europe was engulfed in war, four teenagers were walking through a forest in southern France when their dog fell down a hole. As they called for it they heard an echo. Crawling in to rescue the dog, the boys discovered a cave with hundreds of prehistoric animals painted across its walls and ceiling. It turned out to be one of the world’s best examples of prehistoric art. The Lascaux cave became a popular tourist site after World War II. But it had to be sealed off to the public in 1963 because the breath and sweat of visitors created carbon dioxide and humidity that would damage the paintings. Now the French government has spent $64 million building a near perfect replica to recreate the original cave — and the emotions of that first discovery. To see the replica, which is next to the actual cave, you begin outside, at the top of the adjoining museum. Visitors walk slowly down toward the cave entrance. All the while, sounds of the surrounding forest on a summer day are played on speakers. This specific order to the visit, referred to as the museum’s sequencing, is important to recreating an authentic experience, says Dina Casson, who was part of the team that worked on the museum’s design. ”When you visit the original cave, you’re actually walking through the forest with these sounds,” says Casson. Casson says recreating the impression of going underground and coming out again — from light to darkness to light again is also important. One member of her team was allowed into the original cave. ”That was one of the things that he said was so powerful,” says Casson. ”This sense of being outside, then inside, then outside.” Once inside the replica, the temperature is cool and constant, just like the real cave. As eyes adjust to the darkness there are suddenly animals everywhere. The more than 600 paintings and a thousand engravings in the actual cave were done 20, 000 years ago. Using a laser light to point out details, archeologist Chadelle says these early human artists used very advanced techniques. ”You can see how they used a magnesium pencil for the black horns of this bull,” he says. ”And for the softness of the muzzle they used another technique. They blow dried paint made from natural ochre colors through a tool crafted from hollow bird bones.” Chadelle used to give tours in the original cave, which he says eventually became a victim of its own success. ”There were so many visitors that people were passing out inside the cave from all the carbon dioxide.” Chadelle says in the 1950s the hole the boys climbed through was opened up so a giant fan could be installed to help circulate the air. ”That’s why this replica is almost more real than the real cave,” says Chadelle. ”Because it has that original hole the boys climbed through.” Guillaume Colombo is the director of the new cave and museum complex at Lascaux. He says the art was so well preserved for so long because the cave was sealed tight — like a cork in a champagne bottle. ”So the cave wasn’t affected by sudden temperature changes,” says Colombo. ”And another reason it was protected is there’s a layer of clay in the soil that waterproofs the cave. That’s why Lascaux has no stalactites or stalagmites. It’s a dry cave.” Standing in the first big room of the cave replica, known as The Hall of Bulls, prehistorian Jean Clottes says the animals don’t really represent what these Cro Magnon humans would have hunted and eaten at the time. ”That would have been mammoth or reindeer,” he says. Clottes says the many bulls and horses were likely animals that played a role in the beliefs and spiritual life of these early humans. There are many mysteries surrounding the Lascaux cave paintings. For example, experts don’t really know how long it took to complete them. ”There was a code and a certain style they all follow, so we are pretty sure they were done by a small group, and in just a few years,” says museum director Colombo. ”But we don’t know if it was a few years within a hundred years or a thousand years.” Colombo says the paintings were most likely done by a couple generations of painters who passed down the knowledge. Such questions can be explored in interactive exhibits in the museum. Each visitor is offered a personalized tablet available in 10 languages. The glass museum looks as if it was slipped into a fault line on the hillside. Norwegian Thorsen Kjetilis is one of the architects. He calls the museum a link between past and present. ”It is a very contemporary building cut into the landscape and out of the landscape,” says Kjetilis. ”It’s just at the borderline between the vertical forest where the original cave lies behind us, and the horizontally of the farmlands in front.” The whole complex, known as Lascaux IV, is the third and most ambitious attempt to replicate the famous cave. It is precise down to three millimeters thanks to 3D digital scanning of the actual cave. Every nook and cranny is recreated using polysterine and resin, and the latest fiberglass techniques. Francis Ringenbach led the team of 34 artists who reconstructed the cave walls and ceilings and then copied the paintings onto them. He calls the job ”colossal.” Ringenbach says to reproduce the art, images of the paintings were projected onto the walls and copied pixel by pixel. The painstaking work gave them a real appreciation for the skills of the prehistoric artists. Ringenbach says they had a real level of mastery, and used the surface of the cave. ”These animals are not positioned by chance,” he says. ”For example, the eye of this bison is not engraved, it’s a natural cavity they exploited to make the eye.” Ringenbach says the more his team worked, the more astonished they were. ”Putting ourselves in the context made us realize how difficult the conditions were. They were working in darkness and working from memory to do these compositions.” Ringenbach said the prehistoric painters would also have had scaffolding that was fairly comfortable. ”They certainly weren’t working on a branch.” At times, he says the copy job became emotional. ”There were moments when I realized that I must be doing the exact gestures and movements of the prehistoric artist. And that’s when a little shiver would go down my spine,” he says.

Hundreds came out New Year’s Day to ride the train in New York City, cheering as it left the station. That may sound odd, but this wasn’t just any subway or any old station, it was the stuff of urban legend: the Second Avenue subway line. To understand the crowd, you have to go back to the 1920s when the idea for the subway line was first floated, but never left the station because the Depression hit. The idea was revived again in the 1950s as a replacement for the elevated trains, but city planner Robert Moses decided to spend money building expressways instead. In 1968, the city finally got federal funding to build a subway on Second Avenue. It was expected to cost $220 million. The TV show Mad Men even worked in a reference to the plan when Peggy Olson, one of the main characters, goes apartment hunting on the East Side that year on the show. But it didn’t happen because in 1975 the city was broke. By the 1990s overcrowding on the sole East side line had become untenable so the idea for a Second Avenue subway line was revived, and in 2004, a plan was approved. The first phase would include three new stations that go from 72nd Street to 96th Street. The Metropolitan Transit Authority even gave a deadline: 2013. And a cost: $3. 8 billion. But the public was skeptical, as that deadline was pushed back to 2015 and costs crept up. The MTA finally settled on Dec. 31, 2016. On New Year’s Eve, at a newly renovated station on 72nd Street, Gov. Andrew Cuomo held an opening night party. There was a band, a newsstand was converted into a beer bar, and the cavernous station was filled with purple, pink and orange lights. The governor helped secure more than a billion dollars in federal funding for the project and the MTA, and appoints their board members. At the New Year’s Eve party he told the more than 500 invited guests that the Second Avenue Subway is vindication of his vision. ”We needed to show people that government works and we can still do big things and great things and we can still get them done,” Cuomo said. The final cost for the three stations, and two miles of track was $4. 5 billion. And on Sunday morning, it officially opened to the public. ”I am so excited. I’ve been waiting for this for years and I’m thrilled to be on the first train,” said Lillian Redl. Redl, who lives nearby, says the new line will shave nearly 20 minutes off her commute. And the new stations filled with colorful tile art, including 12 portraits by the artist Chuck Close, are snazzy. ”I love the high ceilings, it looks like there might be some soundproofing so I’m really pleased about that,” she said. And this announcement is sweet music to her ears: ”This is a Q train via the Second Avenue line.” train enthusiast Jared Margulis was impressed with the clean elevators, but had one suggestion: ”I think they got to work on the train, because the train did not say the right stop that the train is going to.” Residents are concerned that the new line will also bring higher rents that could push residents out. The next phase will extend the line to 125th Street and is estimated to cost $6 billion. Tunneling could start in the next two years.

What to expect when you’re expecting a baby dinosaur? Expect to wait. That’s the conclusion of a study by researchers at Florida State University who determined how long it took dinosaurs to hatch from their eggs by studying their teeth. Much like tree rings, teeth have growth lines called lines of von Ebner that can be used to estimate the age of an animal. Researchers had expected dinosaurs might take the same time to hatch as bird, between a week and a half and three months. But in fact, they stayed in the shell far longer — between three and six months. The leader of the study, Florida State University professor of anatomy and vertebrate paleontology Greg Erickson, says you can think of it like layers of paint. Every day, a liquid layer of dentine fills in the inner portion of the tooth and mineralizes, leaving distinct growth lines on the tooth that scientists can measure. The researchers studied two types of dinosaurs, Protoceratops andrewsi and Hypacrosaurus stebingeri. These two dinosaurs produced eggs that range from the smallest known dinosaur eggs, to some of the largest. ”The Hypacrosaurus had a four kilogram egg — imagine that as four times larger than the egg of an ostrich,” says Erickson. ”They look like volleyballs.” The eggs revealed that dinosaurs probably spent about three to six months inside the egg before hatching, depending on the size of the dinosaur. The long incubation time of the eggs could have played a role in the extinction of dinosaurs after the extinction event. ”You can imagine after the asteroid hit all of a sudden the resources went to nothing,” says Erickson ”Even when they (dinosaurs) did reproduce, they had extremely long incubation periods on top of it.” Unfortunately for the dinosaurs, animals that reproduce quickly are better equipped to adapt to challenges and are more likely to survive extinction events. The biggest limitations to the study are the number of specimens the researchers were able to analyze. While dinosaur eggs are fairly common fossils, intact eggs containing a skeleton are very rare. Erickson and his colleagues hope to look at more dinosaurs, including carnivorous dinosaurs, to see if their speculations about incubation times are true for all types of dinosaurs. The new research published in the journal PNAS on Monday.

John Grant is not your . He’s a superstar overseas, but he’s relatively unknown in the U. S. where he was born. He lives in Iceland and speaks four languages. He’s openly gay. And he’s HIV positive, as well as a recovering alcoholic and drug addict. Grant’s journey from obscurity in Buchanan, Mich. to playing gigs at London’s Royal Albert Hall started in the 1990s with his band The Czars, which released eight albums over 12 years. This was a big deal for Grant, who had come from a home where his parents were convinced he needed to be ”fixed” because of his sexual orientation. ”When I was young, people were so disgusted by me,” Grant says. ”Before I even knew that I was gay . .. everybody else had it figured out and, you know, they were letting you know.” Even as The Czars gained critical acclaim, Grant submerged dysfunctional relationships and anxiety in an oblivion of alcohol and drugs. ”I spent a lot of time caring, and it drove me to really just try and annihilate my brain,” he says. ”I just felt that I was going to fall apart if I didn’t learn to be myself.” The Czars split. Grant stopped drinking, and he stopped making music for a couple of years of recovery. He says he began to find the courage to bring out his whole self through his first two solo records. He sang about being HIV positive, and railed against a bad boyfriend. Ultimately, Grant realized he was dealing with severe depression. ”Sometimes I still can’t believe how much it can beat me down,” he says. BBC 6 Music Presenter Mary Anne Hobbs says Grant’s songs can be painfully . ”Most songwriting, even if it’s based on a true story . .. is embellished in some way,” she says. ”But John’s lyrics — they’re so true they might as well be written in blood.” Grant says people close to him have questioned whether it’s good to expose so much of himself, but he says he enjoys performing intensely personal music. ”Sometimes, you might be feeling like you’re dredging things up, but that isn’t usually what’s happening,” he says. ”Usually, you sort of dealt with it and went through it when you wrote the song. And then when you perform it, there’s just the joy of connecting with people.” Pioneering singer and broadcaster Tom Robinson was one of the first rockers to come out as gay and mix music with LGBTQ liberation. He says Grant’s 2015 record, Grey Tickles, Black Pressure, exudes a powerful confidence. ”If I had heard a song like ’Snug Slacks’ when I was a gay teenager in the ’60s, I think he could have saved me 10 or 15 years of heartache and pain,” Robinson says. ”It’s so great to hear somebody making music this unashamed and yet this irresistible.” Grant says he wants listeners to hear the fun in his music, because that’s a part of him, too. ”I want it to be a mixture of pain and laughter,” he says, ”which is a good representation of what life is like.”

Since George Washington penned his farewell address in 1796, announcing he would not seek and laying out his hopes and fears for the nascent country, presidential farewell speeches have become a tradition in the peaceful and democratic transfer of power. President Obama announced Monday that his farewell speech will be Tuesday, Jan. 10 in Chicago. It will be held at McCormick Place, the venue for Obama’s 2012 Election Night celebration. In announcing the speech, Obama said he’s just starting to write his remarks but that he’s ”thinking about them as a chance to say thank you for this amazing journey, to celebrate the ways you’ve changed this country for the better these past eight years, and to offer some thoughts on where we all go from here.” Presidential farewell speeches have historically been a chance for presidents to defend their accomplishments and lay out their hopes for the future. In some cases, the speeches have included pointed warnings that reverberate long after the speech has ended. For example, in his farewell address on Jan. 17, 1961, President Dwight Eisenhower warned the country about the growing might of the military, and specifically about the ” complex,” the relationship between the U. S. armed forces and defense contractors. NPR’s Tom Bowman reported on the lasting impact of this speech in 2011, noting that it ”has become a rallying cry for opponents of military expansion.” Bowman said: ”Eisenhower was worried about the costs of an arms race with the Soviet Union, and the resources it would take from other areas — such as building hospitals and schools. ”Bowman says that in the speech, Eisenhower also spoke as someone who had seen the horror and lingering sadness of war, saying that ’we must learn how to compose differences not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.’ ”Another concern, Bowman says, was the possibility that as the military and the arms industry gained power, they would be a threat to democracy, with civilians losing control of the complex.” In his farewell address on Jan. 15, 1953, President Harry Truman reflected on and defended his decision to drop the atomic bomb in Japan and mused about the start of the Cold War era. He said: ”I suppose that history will remember my term in office as the years when the ”cold war” began to overshadow our lives. I have had hardly a day in office that has not been dominated by this all — embracing struggle — this conflict between those who love freedom and those who would lead the world back into slavery and darkness. And always in the background there has been the atomic bomb.” President Ronald Reagan named the deficit as one of his regrets in his address to the nation on Jan. 11, 1989. He called out ”popular culture” saying: ”For those who create the popular culture, patriotism is no longer the style. Our spirit is back, but we haven’t reinstitutionalized it. We’ve got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom. . .. And freedom is special and rare. It’s fragile. It needs production. So we’ve got to teach history based not on what is in fashion, but what is important.” In President Bill Clinton’s speech on January 18, 2001, Clinton hailed the economic progress under his administration and called for the U. S. to be a beacon of freedom and peace in the world. He also saluted America’s diversity, saying: ”In our hearts and in our laws, we must treat all our people with fairness and dignity, regardless of their race, religion, gender or sexual orientation and regardless of when they arrived in our country, always moving toward the more perfect union of our founders’ dreams.” President George W. Bush delivered his farewell address on Jan. 15, 2009. Despite his dismal approval ratings and a limping economy, he said, ”You may not agree with some of the tough decisions I have made, but I hope you can agree that I was willing to make the tough decisions.” He also called Obama’s election ”a moment of hope and pride for our whole nation.” Obama leaves office with his approval rating at a high, according to Gallup. Despite Obama’s conciliatory speech about Donald Trump, and his administration’s ongoing transition work, Trump tweeted on Dec. 28: ”Doing my best to disregard the many inflammatory President O statements and roadblocks. Thought it was going to be a smooth transition — NOT!” With the country fiercely divided after the election, Obama is expected to continue to strike a hopeful tone about the incoming Trump administration. And with much of his policy legacy — including his executive actions on immigration and the Affordable Care Act — at stake, it’s likely Obama will use his address to defend his actions.

Erica Abad glides down the ancient canals of Xochimilco, a borough of Mexico City, on her boat. Her cousin, Efren Lopez, steers their boat — called a chalupa — by pushing against the canal floor with a long wooden pole, while Abad flips a sizzling quesadilla on a steel griddle fitted into the boat. When a group of people on a nearby barge signal to them to order some quesadillas, Lopez navigates the boat toward them. And Abad places a few more quesadillas on the griddle for their customers. As the quesadillas turn golden, with the cheese inside perfectly melted, she fills them with huitlacoche (a deliciously earthy fungus that grows on organic corn) mushroom, chorizo, squash blossom and other ingredients. Abad’s chalupa is among many selling traditional Mexican street food and drinks, including sopes (a tortilla topped with refried beans, chorizo or ground beef, lettuce, salsa and a grated salty cheese called cotija) roasted corn and pulque (an alcoholic drink made from the fermented sap of an agave plant). The boats are surrounded by floating chinampas — gardens — with plants and small animals, like frogs, crayfish and salamanders. One chinampa is allegedly haunted, with creepy toy dolls hanging from nooses on trees. Gliding past these gardens and boats are Xochimilco’s famous trajineras — vibrantly painted barges — that are filled with people knocking back micheladas (a spicy drink made with Clamato, beer and lime). Some barges even have mariachi bands playing on them. This is a typical day in this ancient borough, whose name means ”the garden of flowers” in Nahuatl, a language of the Aztecs. The chinampas were built centuries ago by indigenous settlers, who had found themselves surrounded by wetlands and needed to create spaces for growing plants like cactus, bougainvillea, bonsai and dahlias. So, they made floating gardens with tree branches, soil and mud, and tied them to juniper trees on the banks, to hold them in place. Over the years, the older gardens sank and new ones were on top of them. Today, the chinampas are no longer tethered to the banks. They look like little floating islands with plants, houses and other buildings on them. The canals, which once helped transport goods from Xochimilco to other places, have evolved into a popular day trip destination in the last century. This borough’s history, beauty and a continuing campaign to protect the place from deterioration led UNESCO to declare it a World Heritage Site in 1987. Locals and tourists visit to enjoy the scrumptious street foods and alcohol, with the colorful sights and sounds all around. Lined up along the concrete loading dock is a long line of trajineras, with bright, swirly shapes and floral patterns painted on them. Their colors and designs have been an unchanging part of the boats for hundreds of years, reflecting the indigenous roots of the culture here. The trajinera have modern names these days — like Fernanda, Beatriz and Shakira. A newlywed couple, their wedding guests and a mariachi band dressed in white, board a trajinera with ”nuestra boda” (”our wedding”) spelled out in roses on an arched metal covering that shades the seated passengers. They drink and dance on their way to their reception, passing barges with a bachelorette party and a family enjoying lunch. You can spend an hour or four making your way down the long canals and experience a visual and aural symphony. There’s music everywhere. There are mariachi bands for hire. Or you can simply enjoy the Latin pop or club jams by rapper DMX blaring from rented stereos on passing trajineras. Dancing and singing at the top of your lungs are encouraged. As you float down the canals that once were inhabited by the Aztec and other indigenous communities, you’re treated to the smell of frying oil from boats selling quesadillas or the steam from boats selling elote (roasted corn smothered in butter, crema, cotija cheese, lime and hot sauce). And when you’re hungry, the boats will feed you and ply you with beer. The street food here is special — made with local ingredients deeply embedded in Mexico’s history. For example, the huitlacoche fungus goes back to the Aztecs, who gave it its somewhat unappetizing name, which means ’raven’s excrement.’ Food vendors take pride in the quality and taste of their food. Lopez says all their quesadilla fillings are slow and patiently cooked at home before bringing it to her chalupa. And here in Xochimilco, you can enjoy these delicacies in a setting unlike anywhere in the world.

Congress is back in session on Tuesday, and leaders of both houses say their first order of business will be to repeal Obamacare. If they do that, it will be a slap in the face to President Obama just three weeks before he leaves the White House. The Affordable Care is the outgoing president’s signature achievement, marked by an elaborate signing ceremony in March 2010 at the White House, with lofty speeches from the vice president and Obama himself. ”Today, after almost a century of trying, today after over a year of debate, today, after all the votes have been tallied, health insurance reform becomes law in the United States of America,” Obama said that day, to long applause from the assembled crowd. And Joe Biden famously leaned over to remind the president that it was ”a big f****** deal.” But Republicans have been vowing to repeal the law since the day it passed, and they’ll soon have a sympathetic president in the White House to sign whatever bill they send him. ”We will repeal the disaster known as Obamacare and create new health care, all sorts of reforms that work for you and your family,” Donald Trump vowed last month in Orlando. That new health care plan hasn’t been fleshed out yet by Trump or his allies in Congress. So they say they’ll vote to get rid of Obamacare, but delay its demise until they come up with a replacement that will cover the millions of people who have insurance thanks to the law. Insurance companies and health care analysts are worried. ”I don’t see how you talk to any [insurance] carrier and give them any desire to hang around to see what they replace it with,” says Dr. Kavita Patel, an internist at Johns Hopkins University Hospital and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. ”Why would you stick around for that?” Patel worked in the White House and helped create the Affordable Care Act. But she’s not alone in her concern. Last month the health insurance trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans sent a letter to lawmakers asking them to keep in place many of the financial incentives that are central to the law — including subsidies for patients to help them buy insurance and cover copayments, and a provision that eliminates some taxes on insurers. The American Academy of Actuaries also warned in its own letter that a repeal of the ACA without replacing it would be dangerous to the health of the insurance market. Still, Republicans appear determined to move ahead with the vote as soon as this week. Some history: Democrats rammed the Affordable Care Act through Congress in 2010 with no Republican support. It was a huge, complicated law and, like most legislation, it was flawed. Over the subsequent six years, Republicans, who were angry at the way the Affordable Care Act was passed, refused to cooperate in any actions that would be seen as helping it succeed. Instead, they promised in speeches and television interviews to repeal it entirely. In fact, the House has voted more than 60 times over the years to do just that. ”There’s no getting around the fact that lots of Republicans campaigned hard against the ACA and a lot of them won, including the person at the top of the ticket,” says James Capretta, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. But even with control of both chambers of Congress and with Trump in the White House, Republicans can’t simply repeal Obamacare. They would need the help of at least a handful of Democrats to overcome a filibuster. Democrats can’t, however, filibuster budget bills. So Republican leaders have decided to defund Obamacare, eliminating the tax penalties for those who don’t buy insurance and the subsidies to help people pay their premiums. Essentially, that guts the law’s main elements. The problem for Republicans is that today, an estimated 20 million people get their insurance through Obamacare. About 10 million buy policies through the exchanges set up by state and federal governments, and most of those patients get subsidies to help pay the premiums. And millions more are covered because the law allows states to expand the number of people who are eligible for Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor. So people who had conditions that shut them out of the insurance market before the ACA passed, or people who had reached lifetime benefit limits, generally like the law. But, then there are people like Will Denecke, who is mad because his insurance costs have gone up since Obamacare passed. Before the law was enacted, he spent about $340 a month on health insurance. ”Incredibly, we got a notice from my health care company, Moda, which has been having financial problems, that my premium was going up to $930,” he said last October. He’s a urban planning consultant in Portland, Ore. and, unlike most people in Obamacare, he makes too much money to qualify for government subsidies. ”I’ve had health insurance my whole life, but it’s just offensive in principle to think of spending $1, 000 a month on health care insurance when there is a good chance I won’t need it,” he said. He was considering just letting his coverage lapse. And, on the other side, you’ve got people like Leigh Kvetko of Dallas. She takes 10 medications every day because she’s had two organ transplant procedures, and the drugs are part of her daily regimen to survive. After Obamacare passed, she was able quit her job at a big company and start a business with her husband, because she could finally get individual insurance. ”This particular plan, the fact that they cannot discriminate against me because of how I was born, was a lifesaver, literally,” she says. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady told the Washington Times last month that consumers needn’t worry. ”We can assure the American public that the plan they’re in right now, the Obamacare plans, will not end on Jan. 20, that we’re going to be prepared and ready with new options tailored for them,” he said.

Almost a million elephants roamed Africa 25 years ago. Assessments of their population now vary but suggest there are fewer than half that many. The main reason for the decline is ivory. Despite a 1989 ban on ivory trade, poachers continue to kill elephants for their tusks. Now China, the destination for most of that ivory, has announced it will shut down its domestic ivory market. Wildlife experts had thought that the international ban on ivory trade would slow or even stop the killing of elephants for their tusks. It didn’t. In fact, the killing got worse. That’s mostly because the ban didn’t cover older ivory, that is, ivory taken from elephants before the 1989 ban. So people are still killing elephants but passing off their ivory as old, and therefore legal to trade. John Robinson, with the Wildlife Conservation Society, says efforts to stop the supply of ivory at the source, in Africa, have not been very successful. ”Addressing the demand is absolutely essential if we are going to deal with the poaching issues,” he says. The biggest source of demand for ivory has been China. ”Almost all the ivory is for carving,” says Robinson. ”China has had a history of doing so. Whole tusks are carved into elaborately assembled pieces of one kind or another.” Now China has agreed to close down that legal trade by the end of 2017. Robinson says it’s an announcement conservationists have been waiting for since 2015, when U. S. and Chinese officials started negotiating an end to China’s trade. ”Certainly closing down domestic ivory in China will have a dramatic impact,” says Robinson. ”The Chinese market is the largest ivory market in the world.” Says conservation expert Elly Pepper at the Natural Resources Defense Council: ”It’s a game changer and could be the pivotal turning point that brings elephants back from the brink of extinction.” The Chinese government has laid out an extensive plan that includes putting ivory carvers to work on existing museum pieces or other projects. The government says it will also educate the public on the consequences of ivory trading for elephant populations. The Obama administration already has shut down almost all trade in ivory in the U. S. and several states have their own bans. Robinson says the Chinese decision may help convince other countries that trade in ivory, such as Vietnam, the United Kingdom and Japan, to do the same.

The second day of January is National Science Fiction Day, an unofficial holiday that corresponds with the official birthdate of Isaac Asimov, the enormously influential and prolific scientist and writer of science fiction. The start of the new year is also a good moment to reflect on the future — an exercise familiar to both writers and readers of science fiction. But where New Year’s resolutions typically extend over weeks or months, the imagined futures of science fiction usually unfold years or centuries from the present. Interstellar travel and space colonization, if they come at all, aren’t coming in 2017. But maybe Jan. 2 is a good moment to take a longer view. What do the possible futures of 2067, or 3017, mean for the decisions we ought to make today? In an essay published in 1978, Isaac Asimov advocated for a ” ” way of thinking, a way of thinking that should inform the of the present. He wrote: ”No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the word as it will be — and naturally this means that there must be an accurate perception of the world as it will be. This, in turn, means that our statesmen, our businessmen, our Everyman, must take on a science fictional way of thinking, whether he likes it or not or even whether he knows it or not. Only so can the deadly problems of today be solved.” The ”fictional” in Asimov’s ” ” thinking shouldn’t be misread. Asimov wasn’t calling for baseless speculation, but for systematic and scientifically informed prediction — an appreciation for possible futures, all the while acknowledging their contingency on our current actions and the many uncertainties involved. If this form of thinking is for Everyman (and Everywoman) what does it mean for us, in 2017? Adopting a longer view helps clarify which problems merit special attention. New Year’s resolutions are often focused on the self — with dieting and exercise topping many people’s lists. But looking a century into the future can change that focus from the self to future generations. For me, that highlights climate change and inequality as deadly problems of today, and science and education as crucial investments. thinking isn’t a reason to give up on dieting or exercise. But it might be a reason to consider a more ambitious set of resolutions for 2017 (and for 3017, too). Tania Lombrozo is a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She writes about psychology, cognitive science and philosophy, with occasional forays into parenting and veganism. You can keep up with more of what she is thinking on Twitter: @TaniaLombrozo

Creatine, a chemical constituent of meat and fish that’s legally been sold online, in supermarkets, health food stores and vitamin shops for at least a couple of decades, may be the most commonly used supplement marketed. But the safety and effectiveness of creatine hasn’t been rigorously analyzed by the Food and Drug Administration in the way that drugs are evaluated. And while proponents argue that the supplement’s long history of use by many athletes suggests it’s relatively safe for healthy adults, pediatricians warn that it’s unclear whether the supplement might harm the growing muscles and bones of kids and teens. That hasn’t been studied. The American Academy of Pediatrics specifically recommends against its use by adolescents, and most of the flavored powders, tablets, energy bars and drink mixes containing creatine bear warning labels that the supplement is not recommended for anyone under 18. Even so, use of the supplement among teens seems to be rising, particularly among young male athletes. Researchers at the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Children’s Medical Center of New York wondered whether retailers were appropriately cautioning high schoolers and middle schoolers not to take the stuff. So they did a little survey: A undergraduate, a member of the research team, called 244 health food stores across the U. S. posing as a football player seeking to increase his muscle strength. In each phone call he asked workers at the stores for their recommendations about which, if any supplements he should take. More than two thirds of the sales associates recommended creatine to the caller — despite the label clearly warning against its use by young people. The researchers published their findings in in the February 2017 issue of the journal, Pediatrics. ”The biggest concern for teens is the potential impurity of the supplement,” says Dr. Michelle LaBotz, a pediatrician in private practice who specializes in sports medicine and the cautionary position paper on creatine for the American Academy of Pediatrics Council on Sports Medicine Fitness. Because the FDA only lightly regulates dietary supplements, LaBotz explains, the purity of these creatine products cannot be assured some have been found to be contaminated with other substances, including testosterone, which can impair a child’s ability to grow and develop bone. The body is an ”amazing machine which functions, for the most part, beautifully on its own,” says Dr. Ruth Lynn Milanaik, who led the study. ”There’s no need to rush the game of muscle mass, which can be added slowly and healthfully through clean living, a good diet and exercise,” Milanaik tells Shots. LaBotz says a solid, strength training program can increase a teen’s strength by 30 percent or more in 12 weeks, and is far more effective than taking creatine. Milanaik says her findings should be considered a ”call to arms” for parents, coaches, pediatricians and retailers, to address and discuss potential risk of supplement use, especially with adolescent athletes.

Men who work out may be using legal supplements to the point that it’s harming their emotional or physiological health, according to a recent study. The preliminary study, presented Thursday at the American Psychological Association’s annual convention, recruited 195 men ages 18 to 65 who went to the gym at least twice a week and regularly consumed legal or supplements — things like whey protein, creatine and . Participants answered questions about their supplement use as well as their body image, eating habits and gender roles. ”The heyday for illicit supplements for the average man is over,” says Richard Achiro, lead author of the study and a registered psychological assistant at a private practice in Los Angeles. ”The bulky Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone are not what most men are seeking to achieve now. They want to be both muscular and lean, and it makes sense that [legal supplements] are what they’re using or abusing.” Forty percent of participants, who were all men, increased their supplement use over time, while 22 percent were replacing regular meals with dietary supplements. Eight percent of participants were told by their physician to cut back on supplement use because of health side effects, and 3 percent were hospitalized for related kidney or liver problems, which can be caused by excessive use of protein powders and other supplements. Men who used dietary supplements inappropriately also were more likely to have behaviors associated with eating disorders. Achiro is no stranger to the culture of workout supplements. His interest was piqued when he noticed throughout college and graduate school how common it was for his male friends to use supplements before or after workouts. ”It became more and more ubiquitous,” Achiro says. ”Guys around my age who I knew — I’d go to their apartment and see a tub of some kind of [protein] powder.” Not to mention that this has become a industry that’s grown exponentially in the recent decade or so, he adds. Achiro was surprised to find that most studies focused on illicit supplements such as hormones and steroids and gave little thought to the role of legal supplements, which are readily available at supermarkets and college bookstores. One big factor behind supplement use is body dissatisfaction, the study found. The men internalize a particular set of cultural standards of attractiveness usually depicted by the media: healthy, muscular and lean, ”like Zac Efron,” says Achiro. And they’re unhappy that their own bodies don’t meet that ideal. But the study also found that the men using supplements were more likely to feel gender role conflict, which Achiro explained as underlying insecurity about one’s masculinity. ”This isn’t just about the body,” Achiro says, ”What this is really about is what the body represents for these men. It seems that the findings in part [show] this is a way of compensating for their insecurity or low .” Abusing whey protein and the like can also put gymgoers at risk for other health problems such as body dysmorphic disorder, also known as muscle dysmorphia, and related body image disorders. ”Body dysmorphic disorder used to be referred to as reverse anorexia,” Leigh Cohn, a spokesman for the National Eating Disorder Association, says. ”Someone with anorexia will feel they need to continue to get thinner and lose weight. With bodybuilders, they act in the same kind of manner. They acknowledge that they’re ripped, but are obsessed with certain body parts that they find inadequate. This drive for muscularity preoccupies them. Supplements serve them the same way diet products serve someone with an eating disorder,” Cohn says. For people affected by body dysmorphic disorders, this constant and compulsive behavior takes over their lives — they are constantly and can be unhappy, dissatisfied, or have low . ”Think about competitive athletics on the high school and college level. Lots of these guys are encouraged by coaches and trainers to take these supplements,” says Cohn. ”This isn’t thought of as a negative behavior but can have negative consequences.” The silver lining, Achiro points out, is that 29 percent of study participants knew that they had a problem of overusing supplements. But they might not be aware of possible underlying psychological factors. ”Guys think taking supplements is healthy, [they’re] convinced it’s good for them, [it’s] giving them all kinds of nutrients they wouldn’t be getting otherwise,” says Cohn. ”[This is] ignorance about what proper nutrition is.” It’s also not unusual for people diagnosed with body dysmorphic disorder or its characteristics to also have a high incidence of depression, anxiety and alcoholism, Cohn adds. Although the research is preliminary and has yet to be Achiro hopes his research puts the issue on the map and encourages researchers to replicate his work. ”This is just the very beginning. There’re still tons to look at,” he says.

There are a lot of reasons victims of sexual assault choose not to report it. High on that list is fear of retaliation, so many victims won’t come forward unless they can stay anonymous. The criminal justice system cannot guarantee that kind of confidentiality for accusers and the accused. Further, when sexual assault is reported to law enforcement, a majority of cases never make it to trial. In fact, only 3 percent to 18 percent of sexual assaults lead to a conviction, according to research funded by the Justice Department. But a court case involving the University of Kentucky has highlighted how confidentiality can complicate justice. Jane Does on campus, Student victims have the option of reporting sexual assault to their school’s Title IX office. Title IX is the federal law that prohibits gender discrimination on campus. These offices are also tasked with investigating allegations of sexual misconduct and these investigations come with the advantage of guaranteed anonymity for both the accusers and the accused. The two women at the center of this case were graduate students in the University of Kentucky Entomology Department when they said their adviser sexually assaulted them. NPR spoke with both women as well as the accused. Because this story is meant to focus on the system, we’re respecting the confidentiality of the accused and the accuser. We’ll refer to the women as Jane Doe 1 and Jane Doe 2, and the accused as the professor. NPR obtained a report prepared by the University of Kentucky’s Title IX office in which the Jane Does allege the professor groped them and said sexually suggestive things to them while attending separate conferences with him. The Jane Does told NPR that confidentiality was the most important thing for them when they decided to go to the university’s Title IX office with their allegations. Jane Doe 2 said they never wanted to go through the courts because they couldn’t afford to be named. ”I just spent a good portion of my life in grad school trying to further my career and if I’m labeled as someone who filed a sexual assault claim against a professor, that could very easily backfire against me,” Jane Doe 2 says. ”There’s a lot of people in academia who think that there are women who make up stuff like this.” Jane Doe 2’s concerns about retaliation in her professional life is just one of many reasons victims of sexual assault choose not to come forward. Research shows that only about 35 percent of rape or sexual assault cases are reported. On college campuses, the percentage of incidents that go unreported is more than 90 percent, according to the National Sexual Violence Research Center. The Title IX office launched an investigation and after months of interviewing dozens of people and collecting all sorts of evidence, they found enough of it to move to the next step: an official hearing. Who presides over Title IX hearings can vary from school to school, but they are typically run by school officials and do not involve law enforcement. If those presiding over the hearing found the professor guilty, everything would go on his employment record. But that hearing never took place because the professor was allowed to resign, highlighting what Jane Doe 2 calls a loophole in the Title IX system. ”Not just at UK but at every single university, if a professor resigns before there’s a hearing then he’s allowed to move on to another university potentially victimizing more students,” she says. In a statement to NPR, the professor said there is no truth to the allegations and that he resigned to protect his family from the publicity and stress of a hearing. Seeking justice, This gets to the heart of why letting universities handle sexual assault investigations can be problematic. You can’t remain anonymous in a criminal case as the Constitution guarantees the right to face our accusers. It’s different going through a university Title IX office, where the primary focus is protecting accusers. The office keeps their identities confidential and there’s even a different burden of proof. Frustrated that there would never be an official hearing, the Jane Does reached out to the university’s independent student newspaper, The Kentucky Kernel. Marjorie Kirk was the first person at the paper to hear the women’s story. Kirk is a journalism student at the school who had made a name for herself as an investigative reporter. ”It was March and a person walked in asking for someone to talk to and I said, ’I can talk’ and they basically unloaded this huge story on me,” Kirk says. After hearing the Jane Does’ story, Kirk was troubled by the lack of transparency on the university’s part and wanted to dig deeper. ”I felt an obligation to the safety of other people to try and report this,” says Kirk. ”And that’s why we started this battle for open records.” The newspaper filed two Freedom of Information Act requests seeking all the documents related to the investigation. The university turned over some records, but not all of them citing a law called the Federal Education Rights and Privacy Act — or FERPA, which protects the privacy of student records at all public schools and universities. ”And this institution, the University of Kentucky, has consistently held that student information, particularly in cases that might identifying a student in a sexual assault, sexual misconduct case, must be held confidential,” says Jay Blanton, a spokesman for the university. So the newspaper appealed to the Kentucky attorney general, who sided with the newspaper. But the university still wouldn’t give up the records and because of a quirk in Kentucky law that says the attorney general cannot be named as a party in a lawsuit, the University of Kentucky took its own student newspaper to court in order to block the documents from being released. For Kirk, the move was reinvigorating. She really did believe the university could have simply redacted names and other identifying details and now she’d get to prove it in court. This time a lot more was at stake than just one professor leaving campus without a hearing. ”A decision would be for all the marbles,” said Kirk. ”It would affect any decision that a judge anywhere would try to come up with for similar documents. They would see this decision and likely follow the precedent.” Kirk says that just two days after the lawsuit was filed, two people who said they were acting as representatives of the Jane Does showed up in her office — a point the Jane Does dispute because they say they did not have two representatives. Though the Jane Does had consented to giving The Kernel 21 redacted pages of the investigation, they say they didn’t tell anyone to leak the full investigation to The Kernel. Ultimately, though, The Kernel ended up with the full report.” In the more than 100 pages were interviews with witnesses and emails where one of the women confronted the professor about his behavior. The investigation also included the professor’s version of events. So Kirk began writing. She’d publish her first story after receiving the documents on Aug. 13, but the investigation didn’t stop there. ”And as we dug into the system a little more, we saw there was much more to this than one professor,” she says. ”And so the scope definitely grew into a system that universities were enabling.” Pushing forward, pulling back, While Marjorie Kirk was on a crusade, the Jane Does watched with growing concern. They were happy with the first few articles. The women got to maintain their anonymity and the professor was named. But then their personal story mushroomed into something they hadn’t signed on for: dozens of articles and an open records fight. In an effort to put a spotlight on one broken system, the Jane Does stumbled upon another. can be successful in exposing . But media outlets ultimately have say on how they pursue stories and aren’t subject to the same rules as the court or universities. So it’s really not surprising that The Kernel took the story and tried to expose as much as they could. In November, the women filed a brief actually taking the University of Kentucky’s side. ”There needs to be some sort of reporting system for professors accused of sexual misconduct while still protecting the privacy of victims like me and Jane Doe 1,” says Jane Doe 2. ”And the records that Marjorie is calling for, those hundreds of pages of documents aren’t necessary for that reporting system.” Judge Thomas Clark of the Fayette County Circuit Court tells NPR he plans to issue an opinion sometime in the next two weeks. But in the meantime, we still have a university struggling to protect students and hold employees accountable, a crusading journalist sued by her own school and two women still searching for a more perfect form of justice. Ashley S. Westerman is a graduate of the University of Kentucky.

You can only dissect a year for so long before another, hopefully better one comes along. So let’s set aside 2016 — with its celebrity deaths, political upheaval and, yes, great music — and take a moment to look ahead to the best music of 2017. For a quick primer on 2017 music, here’s a world tour of sorts — one that runs through Mali (Tinariwen) the U. K. (Little Simz) Brooklyn (Sinkane, who’s also lived in Sudan, London and Ohio) Canada (Japandroids) and, finally, NPR’s hometown of Washington, D. C. (Priests). Hear a song from each below.

After the countdown to New Year’s, Americans start thinking about upping the intensity of their workouts or making room in their schedule for a boot camp. But the men and women of the Hadza, a group of in Northern Tanzania, have no need for resolutions to be more active. Anthropologist Herman Pontzer, an associate professor at Hunter College, and his collaborators distributed GPS units with heart rate monitors to a group of Hadza adults. The goal was to use the gadgets to pinpoint the level of physical activity in Hadza life. What Pontzer and his collaborators reported in a study published in October in the American Journal of Human Biology is that the Hadza are moving much of the time, typically in moderate and sustained activity rather than vigorous bursts. There’s a theory that human physiology evolved through hunting and gathering to require aerobic exercise, so that’s what the researchers were interested in testing. The 46 subjects — 19 male and 27 female with a mean age of 32. 7 — had their heart rates tracked over four periods, covering both rainy and dry seasons. This data was matched up with what the researchers have learned about the Hadza’s cardiovascular health by testing 198 subjects (including 30 also in the study). Their findings: An examination of blood pressure, cholesterol and other biomarkers shows no evidence of risk factors for cardiovascular disease. The typical Hadza day begins at sunrise. The Hadza wake up in grass huts in the middle of the savanna and mill about while figuring out plans and eating breakfast. Then the men set out with a bow and arrows, covering miles and miles to track prey, such as giraffes, impalas and zebras. ”They don’t run,” Pontzer notes, unless, of course, ”someone jumps out of the bushes at them.” But they walk pretty much continuously, with just a single break at midday to avoid the worst heat. If they’re striking out with hunting, Pontzer says, they might chop into trees to get wild honey. Women go out in groups, along with children under the age of 2, who are usually wrapped up snug on mom’s back. They pick berries at such a rapid clip that Pontzer admits he couldn’t keep up with the pace. The tougher task is digging into the hard and rocky ground with a sharpened stick to collect tubers, which are a staple of their diet. The upper body workout can take hours, Pontzer says. It all adds up to about 135 minutes per day of physical activity. Contrast that to the current recommendations from the U. S. Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion of at least 150 minutes per week. And only about 10 percent of Americans achieve that guideline, Pontzer says. This Hadza study is ”very relevant,” says Oxford University associate professor Charlie Foster, who is deputy director of the research group on Population Approaches to Disease Prevention and president of the International Society for Physical Activity and Health. In a sense, he says, humans are all still . ”We’re good at gathering food whenever we can. We just don’t have to go very far,” Foster says. ”Within 100 meters of your front door, you can probably buy a coffee.” And what many humans are hunting for these days is an exercise strategy that requires as little time as possible — hence, the rising popularity in the Western world of short, interval training programs, says Foster, who was not part of the study. So one detail about the Hadza research that stands out to him is that they pretty much take the opposite approach. Is there a way for Westerners to design an equivalent exercise to tuber digging? ”Maybe if you garden aggressively,” Pontzer says. But he advises against mimicking the exact patterns of Hadza lives and instead recommends thinking about what you can learn from them. ”What the Hadza study says is that you don’t block out an hour. You put a bit of activity into everything you do. Forget this artificial distinction between exercise and life. Try to change things so you’re doing them more actively,” Pontzer says. And keep on doing them as the years go by. One of the researchers’ key findings is that the level of ”moderate and vigorous physical activity” doesn’t drop off as Hadza age. ”You see and men and women keeping up,” Pontzer adds. ”There’s no sitting on a .” The same is true with Hadza kids. As soon as toddlers are old enough to skip foraging with mom, they join a mob of children who basically just run around all day, Pontzer says. Other than some limited opportunities to go to school, ”a Hadza kid has never spent a day inside because there is no inside,” he says. Maybe that’s another lesson to learn from the Hadza, Foster adds. When it comes to exercise, he says, ”You’re never too young to start.”

Some prominent conservatives have signed on to a letter warning Donald Trump that he needs to sell off his businesses to address his many conflicts of interest. ”Respectfully, you cannot serve the country as president and also own a business enterprise, without seriously damaging the presidency,” says a letter sent Monday by a bipartisan group of politicians, ethics advocates and academics. The letter was signed by several moderate Republicans, including former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, former Minnesota Gov. Arne Carlson and former Rep. Mickey Edwards of Oklahoma, who was chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee. But the signers also include some conservatives, including Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute, and political consultant John Pudner of Take Back Our Republic, which seeks to build GOP support for campaign finance reform. Pudner was instrumental in the successful Tea effort to unseat Majority Leader Eric Cantor, a Virginia Republican. He also is a contributor to Breitbart News, which has been managed in recent years by Trump’s senior counselor, Stephen Bannon. A Trump supporter, Pudner said that cleaning up Washington had been a central part of the ’s campaign and that now he needs to follow through. ”He made such a theme of things like the revolving door and the ways in which decisions can be influenced, not for the public good,” Pudner said. ”If you have the presidency and people are going to question every week, ’Why is he making this decision? Is there some business angle on it?’ I just think it undercuts so much of the reason that people did support him.” Other signatories included several groups, such as People for the American Way, Public Citizen, Common Cause and the Revolving Door Project, as well as liberal Democrats such as Zephyr Teachout of Fordham University School of Law and Harvard Law School’s Laurence H. Tribe. Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway told CNN on Monday that a news conference is planned for Jan. 11 to address conflicts of interest. But she added that the date might shift, depending upon the advice of Trump’s lawyers. In the past, Trump has said he will turn over his companies to his grown children to operate. The letter notes that the has begun to address some of the conflicts he faces, terminating real estate deals in Brazil, Azerbaijan and Argentina and announcing plans to close his charitable foundation. ”That is a good start, but we wish to be clear that the only way to solve the problems you face remains divesting your business enterprises into a blind trust managed by an independent trustee or the equivalent,” the letter stated. You can read the letter in its entirety here:

There aren’t many Shakers left. Sister Frances Carr, one of three remaining members of the religious group commonly known as the Shakers, died Monday at the age of 89. According to the group’s website, Carr died due to cancer at the Shaker community at Sabbathday Lake in New Gloucester, Maine, ”surrounded by the community and her nieces.” The group’s formal name is the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, founded in 1747 in Manchester, England. Critics called them ”Shaking Quakers” for their style of worship which included ”ecstatic and violent bodily agitation.” Persecution led them in 1774 to emigrate to the New World, where they established their first community in upstate New York. The persecution didn’t end for the group that advocated pacifism, gender equality, communal ownership and celibacy. Still, the community survived and attracted more than 5, 000 followers spread out over 18 communities in 10 states just before the Civil War. Along the way, Shaker communities were credited with creating distinctive furniture and devices such as the broom and circular saw. The Shakers’ utopian communities declined after the Civil War. What remains today is the Shaker community at Sabbathday Lake. Sister Frances Carr was a orphan when she was left in the care of the Shakers, according to The Associated Press. The surviving members of the religious group are Brother Arnold Hadd, 60, and Sister June Carpenter, 78. Hadd told The Associated Press that even in her final days Carr had hoped that the Shaker community would grow again, and that she would not be among the ”last” Shakers.

It’s been 150 years since Fisk University opened in Nashville to educate freed slaves after the Civil War. The school’s later students would become prominent black leaders of the Harlem Renaissance and the civil rights movement. But the small school is still grappling with a dilemma that’s been there since the start: how to become financially sustainable. Fisk is perhaps most widely known for its music, but that legacy is intertwined with money. Just five years after the Fisk Free Colored School was founded in 1866, Congress stopped funding black colleges. Historian Reavis Mitchell says money dried up. ”When the school reached the point of less than a dollar left in the treasury, when there was no hope, a student chorus was put together in the fall of 1871,” he says. That chorus of nine students called the Fisk Jubilee Singers set out on its first national tour. ”They would present themselves — some the children of slaves, a few enslaved themselves — and the world was astonished by these young people from this place called Fisk,” Mitchell says. The Jubilee Singers became legendary. They performed at the White House for President Ulysses S. Grant. They traveled to England and sang for Queen Victoria, who instructed her court painter to create their portrait, which still hangs at Fisk today. And the tours worked. With the money the singers raised, Fisk bought the land it sat on and built the campus’ first permanent building. It’s a point of pride even today. At Fisk events, speakers frequently invoke the original nine Jubilee Singers, thanking them for their dedication to the school. But as their legacy lives on, so does the financial burden they tried to relieve. Fisk nearly went bankrupt in the 1980s. Then, a decade ago, it set off a long legal battle when it tried to sell famous paintings donated by Georgia O’Keeffe. The school was later put on temporary probation for its finances. That’s not to say it’s always been shaky. Marybeth Gasman at the Penn Center for Minority Serving Institutions actually wrote her dissertation on what she calls Fisk’s golden years — the 1940s and ’50s. ”And that’s really the last time that Fisk had like real financial success,” Gasman says. ”They were at the helm of [historically black colleges and universities].” To get back to that point, Gasman says, Fisk needs a few things. It needs stable leadership as the school has been cycling through presidents lately. It also needs to buckle down on fundraising by getting potential donors excited about the school today, not just its history. ”No one’s going to give to Fisk merely because of Jubilee Singers or Jubilee Hall,” Gasman says. ”They want to see what Fisk is doing now.” That’s the biggest challenge for Jens Frederiksen, who is in charge of fundraising at Fisk. He says he wants to move the school away from its reputation of being strapped for cash. ”I think for a long time we were probably mired down in a few familiar narratives that sort of usurped all the press,” he says. Instead, Frederiksen wants to highlight academics. For example, Fisk is nationally ranked for its master’s program in physics. He’s also trying to increase alumni and private company donations. The Jubilee Singers still have a role in all of this, 150 years later. They’re seen as ambassadors for the university as they travel around the country to perform. But this time, the fortunes of the school no longer rest on their voices.

Lawmakers returned to Washington and wasted no time getting to work on the repeal of Obamacare. Sen. Mike Enzi, . introduced a resolution just hours after the new Congress convened Tuesday that will serve as the vehicle for repealing much of the president’s signature health care law. ”Today, we take the first steps to repair the nation’s broken health care system, removing Washington from the equation and putting control back where it belongs: with patients, their families, and their doctors,” Enzi, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said in a press release on his website Tuesday. It’s the first step in Republican lawmakers’ plan to fulfill their most ardent campaign promise — to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with a Republican alternative. Republicans have to use a special legislative maneuver, called a budget resolution, to undo the ACA because they don’t have enough votes to overcome a Democratic filibuster in the Senate. Budget bills aren’t subject to filibuster, so lawmakers will be able to repeal the parts of the law that have budget and tax implications. That means they can essentially gut the law, removing all the subsidies that help and people buy health insurance and getting rid of the smorgasbord of taxes — on medical devices, insurance companies and wealthy individuals — that pay for those subsidies, Enzi’s resolution calls on the Senate to get a bill to the Budget Committee by Jan. 27. Republican lawmakers say they don’t want the 20 million people who have newly gained insurance because of the ACA to lose their coverage. So they plan to phase out Obamacare over time while they devise a replacement plan that they say will make affordable health insurance available to everyone, without the mandate to buy insurance if you don’t want it. Many analysts are skeptical that this ”repeal and delay” strategy will work. ”The most likely end result of ’repeal and delay’ would be less secure insurance for many Americans, procrastination by political leaders who will delay taking any proactive steps as long as possible, and ultimately no discernible movement toward a real marketplace for either insurance or medical services,” said Joe Antos and James Capretta of the conservative American Enterprise Institute in a blog published Tuesday in Health Affairs. Antos and Capretta say a partial repeal with no replacement would lead insurance companies to pull out of the Obamacare market altogether, leaving those who get coverage there today with no insurance at all. It’s not clear exactly what will be included in the actual repeal bill. The best model we have now is a bill passed by the House and Senate and vetoed by President Obama last year. That bill eliminated the mandate for individuals to have insurance coverage right away but delayed the other parts of the repeal for two years. ”I can see how it would be hard for Republicans to maintain the individual mandate, which is possibly the most objectionable part of the ACA in their view,” says Larry Levitt, a senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation. ”On the other hand, getting rid of the individual mandate immediately risks a collapse of the individual insurance market.” The ACA includes the mandate to ensure that both sick and healthy people buy insurance to spread the costs across a broad population and keep premiums low. If Republicans follow the model of last year’s bill and eliminate the mandate immediately, many healthy people would forgo insurance, and the price of coverage for sick people would spiral out of control, analysts say. ”That is a prescription for health plan disaster during this transition and brings into question just how many plans would stay in the program for 2018,” says Robert Laszewski, a health policy consultant.

The House and Senate are back in Washington today for the start of the 115th Congress. With GOP control of both chambers and soon the Oval Office, Republicans are promising an aggressive agenda that will prioritize the repeal of the current president’s signature achievement, the Affordable Care Act. The Senate is expected to start that process with a budget resolution this week. After the pomp and circumstance of taking the official oath and the of new members is complete, the top Congressional priority is usually given the honor of being introduced as House Resolution 1, or ”H. R. 1” for short. With the rollback of Obamacare working first through the Senate, Republican Speaker Paul Ryan will not take the privilege of introducing that as H. R. 1, but looking back at the first bill to be introduced in the House in past sessions of Congress gives a glimpse at the priorities of legislators at the time. American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, Speaker at bill introduction: Nancy Pelosi, . Control of House: Democratic Control of Senate: Democratic Final action on bill: Signed into law by President Barack Obama The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 is the official name for what is generally known as ”the stimulus.” Washington was 180 degrees from where things are in 2017 — Democrats had control of both the House and the Senate and Barack Obama had just won the presidency. Speaker Nancy Pelosi used the H. R. 1 designation for the bill which was intended to address the effects of the Great Recession. Eventually Congress passed the behemoth $787 billion plan, which aimed to save or create millions of jobs and funneled spending to highway infrastructure investments, improvements to public housing and expanding broadband access to underserved areas. Before its passage, President Obama lobbied hard to get congressional Republicans to support the legislation, but the measure failed to garner a single GOP House member and only three Republican senators. Continuing Appropriations Act, 2011, Speaker at bill introduction: John Boehner, Control of House: Republican Control of Senate: Democratic Final action on bill: Died in the 112th Congress, but later became the legislative vehicle for Disaster Relief Appropriations Act in the next Congress. Following the 2010 midterm elections, Republicans picked up a net total of 63 House seats and regained control of the chamber. Much of the Democrats’ historic losses were blamed on a sluggish economy and backlash to the passage of the Affordable Care Act. With Republicans back in control of the House, Speaker John Boehner sought to make good on the GOP promise to restore ”fiscal sanity” and cut back on government spending. He used H. R. 1 to introduce Rep. Hal Rogers’ Continuing Appropriations Act, 2011 bill to do just that. In a statement, Rogers said at the time that the bill’s spending reductions were ”historic.” ”HR 1 provides $1. 028 trillion for discretionary programs through the remainder of fiscal year 2011, a level $100 billion below the level President Obama requested in his fiscal year 2011 budget one year ago.” But this was the start of the ” ” era of Congress — not a whole lot was being done with a divided government as Democrats maintained control of the Senate and White House. Though the bill passed easily in the House and was sent over to the Senate, no consequential action was made on it. That is not until December of 2012. By that time two major events had taken place: President Obama was and Hurricane Sandy walloped the East Coast with New York and New Jersey taking the brunt of the storm. It was one of the costliest storms in our nation’s history and more than 100 people died in the U. S. alone. When the Senate finally took action on the measure, it became the legislative vehicle to supply funds for disaster relief efforts. The Senate amended the bill and passed it late in the year. According to the website GovTrack. us, the bill died in the 112th Congress because differences between the House and Senate versions of the measure were never resolved. The bill was reintroduced in the 113th Congress and came to be known as the Disaster Relief Appropriations Act, 2013. Implementing Recommendations of the Commission Act of 2007, Speaker at bill introduction: Nancy Pelosi, Control of House: Democratic Control of Senate: Democratic Final action on bill: Signed into law by President George W. Bush, Nancy Pelosi’s first legislative action as Speaker of the House was bringing this bill up for a vote. Fresh off their sweeping gains in the 2006 midterm elections that gave Democrats control of Congress, members were eager to demonstrate their national security prowess as the Iraq War dragged on Republicans. It had been more than five years since the 2001 terrorist attacks and Democrats intended to make good on a campaign promise to put in place many of the recommendations put forth by the Commission, which was released in July 2004. The highlights of this legislation included funding increases to state and local government efforts and mandating the Department of Homeland Security inspect all cargo arriving in the U. S. by sea and plane. A provision was added before President Bush signed it into law favored by many Republicans that shielded Americans who report suspicious activity to authorities. When he signed it into law in August 2007, Bush said he was ”pleased” by this addition but also called for Congress to take further oversight action. ”There is still other work to be done. I continue to believe that Congress should act on the outstanding Commission recommendations to reform the legislative branch’s oversight of intelligence and activities, which the Commission described as dysfunctional.” Congressional Accountability Act of 1995, Speaker at bill introduction: Newt Gingrich, Control of House: Republican Control of Senate: Republican Final action on bill: Signed into law by President Bill Clinton, Like our previous entry, this piece of legislation was the first introduced at the beginning of a Congress in which one party, this time the Republicans, were fresh off historic gains. The 1994 midterms elections, commonly referred to as the ”Republican Revolution,” saw the GOP take control of the Senate and seize control of the House for the first time in 40 years. Seeking to put forth conservative principles outlined in the ”Contract with America,” which the new House Speaker Newt Gingrich was chief architect of, the Congressional Accountability Act of 1995 was given the status of H. R. 1. This bill made certain that rules governing private sector workplaces are applicable to Congress. The bill passed the House with no opposition . The Senate passed their version in similarly overwhelming fashion and President Clinton signed it into law. The action would apply a number of major laws to Congress including the Fair Labor Standards Act, which establishes minimum wage and overtime pay to employees, and the Americans with Disabilities Act that prohibits discrimination against people physical or mental challenges. The law also established the Office of Compliance, which covers more than 30, 000 federal workers. It is a independent federal agency created to enforce the law and to serve as a place for workers to file complaints. Regulation Reform Act of 1981, Speaker at bill introduction: Thomas ’Tip’ O’Neill, Control of House: Democrat Control of Senate: Republican Final action on bill: Died in the House, This bill was introduced in the 97th Congress and was intended to make regulations more and directed each federal agency to provide instructions on how the public could take part in the regulatory process. The bill also required agencies to include instructions for the public to obtain agency reports on ”each proposed and final major rule instructions.” Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill slated regulation reform for the H. R. 1 designation following the landslide 1980 elections marked the start of the conservative Reagan era. That election returned Republicans to control of the Senate for the first time in a quarter century, in addition to giving the GOP the White House back. Other than a few hearings held by a House Rules Subcommittee, this bill went nowhere and eventually died in the House without coming up for a vote.

One of the most stressful questions a new parent confronts is, ”Who’s going to take care of my baby when I go back to work?” Figuring out the answer to that question is often not easy. When NPR, along with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, surveyed more than 1, 000 parents nationwide about their child care experiences, a third reported difficulty finding care. Searching far and wide, finding little Megan Carpenter, a new mother who lives in Alexandria, Va. knows well the feeling of desperation that can come with the search for safe, quality infant care. She had a hard deadline — 16 weeks after her baby was born her maternity leave would end and she would have to return to her job at a nonprofit that serves homeless and women. So she and her husband started looking for child care early, only a few months into her pregnancy. ”At our first few interviews we were asking a lot of questions and were really trying to get a feel for the place,” Carpenter recalls. ”And by place 10 or 11, our only question was, ’Do you have a spot?’ ” The answer to that question, time and again, was ”no.” That meant getting on a lot of waitlists — and paying a hefty, nonrefundable waitlist fee each time. ”There were a lot of places that were totally willing to take our $100 or $200 waitlist fee,” Carpenter says. ”We spent over $1, 000 in waitlist fees — many of which I never heard from again.” By the time baby Cora arrived, the couple still had no prospects. Ultimately, Carpenter and her husband persuaded their mothers to take time away from their jobs and fly out from Georgia and Missouri to watch Cora in shifts until a spot at one of the centers opened up. Scenarios like this are playing out all around the U. S. An analysis of some 7, 000 ZIP codes by the Center for American Progress describes roughly half as ”childcare deserts.” While Megan Carpenter’s experience is representative of what many working parents go through, Narinder Walia’s is a scenario. Walia lives in Fremont, Calif. and works in biotech. Her baby boy, Avin, was born on Halloween 2014. During Walia’s maternity leave, trying to find child care nearly became a job. ”I made calls,” she says. ”Some were not accepting infants. Or they were full.” Of the roughly six dozen centers, only three were able to offer her a slot. Of those, she says, two were messy and disorganized. The third option, an facility, set off some red flags. But it was the best available. Walia says her main reservation was that the center catered to toddlers and older children. Still, the owner assured her, it could handle a baby. What ultimately happened on Avin’s first day at this facility is every parent’s worst nightmare. ”I was on the way to go pick him up,” recalls Walia, ”and the Kaiser ER called me.” You have to come over, they told her. Your son is here. To settle Avin for his first nap on her watch, the paid caregiver had put the baby in his bassinet — a move that goes against established guidelines set by the American Academy of Pediatrics and is against standard practice in the infant care field. Research has established that placing babies to sleep puts them at higher risk of sudden infant death syndrome. The caregiver told Fremont police that she turned Avin onto his back after about 15 minutes, and that he stopped breathing a short time later. On his first day away from his mother, Avin died — he was 3 months old. The coroner’s report confirms SIDS as the cause of death. ”I couldn’t wrap my head around it,” says Walia, straining to recount the day. ”He was smiling. He was a big baby, all chubby. There was nothing wrong with him. Even at the first and second checkup the doctor was like, ’Mama, keep doing what you’re doing. The baby’s doing really well.’ ” What happened to Walia’s family is rare. But it’s the deepest fear of parents who face severely limited child care choices. ”The market really doesn’t work” These experiences — from disruptive frustration to tragedy — leave many parents wondering why the supply of quality, licensed infant care in the U. S. does not meet the demand for it. The answer boils down to the fact that child care, particularly infant care, is an extremely low profit field. Costs are high, factoring in real estate, supplies, insurance and, above all, labor. Many states require a ratio of one caregiver to every three or four babies. And, on the other side of the equation, centers can’t significantly raise their prices. According to a recent report by the nonpartisan think tank New America, parents in the United States pay, on average, $9, 589 a year for care of children from birth to age 4 — that’s more than the average cost of college tuition ($9, 410). Many parents can’t afford to pay more. So, low profits — combined with high liability and the need to navigate complex regulations — make for an uninviting business climate. And, in this climate, the waitlist has become a tool necessary for providers’ financial survival, to buffer against unfilled spots and lost income. A select few providers are thriving, though. Over the past 30 years, the company Bright Horizons has grown to operate more than 1, 000 child care centers in 42 states and the District of Columbia. So, what’s the company’s secret? ”We’ve convinced employers to invest over a billion dollars, in either capital investments or subsidies, for their working families,” says Bright Horizons CEO Dave Lissy. ”That just didn’t exist before we pioneered the model.” Some employers, including Home Depot, Starbucks and Chevron, have partnered with Bright Horizons to establish child care centers primarily for their workers. These employers pay most, or even all, of the cost to build the facilities. ”After that’s all done,” Lissy says, ”on average, tuitions are funded 75 percent by parents and 25 percent through employer subsidies.” That means parents pay their college sum, and the employers that partner with Bright Horizons pay even more on top of that. Bright Horizons is able to build these bright, cheerful centers because of this generous underwriting by employer partners. Without that cushion, the rest of the child care sector is largely operating on profit margins, slow to grow and fragile. That industrywide weakness was a central finding of New America’s study of child care nationwide. ”The thing to remember about child care is that the market really doesn’t work,” says Brigid Schulte, an author of the study. ”It’s like education. When you look at the education market, it also doesn’t work. It has to be subsidized. It has to be seen as a public good, and the same sort of economic logic works in the [age] early care and learning situation as well. We just haven’t thought about it like that.” An infrastructure investment? The idea of child care as a public good has increasing resonance with policy thinkers from the left and right. ”There definitely is an issue of child care supply,” says Angela Rachidi, research fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. ”It’s an issue up and down the income scale.” Of all the ways the government could spend public money, investing in child care, she says, should be a priority. ”Not only does that then benefit children,” Rachidi says, ”but it also helps the parents work.” Katie Hamm, senior director of early childhood policy at the Center for American Progress, agrees. Without much greater public support of the child care industry, she says, demand for licensed infant care will continue to outpace supply. But she takes heart from a campaign season where heavy emphasis was placed on the challenges American workers face when it comes to child care and the need for infrastructure investment. She sees the two issues as interconnected. ”It seems like there might be some consensus, both with the incoming administration and among members of Congress, that we need an infrastructure investment,” says Hamm. ”A lot of people talk about that and mean roads and bridges. But before parents get on roads and bridges and support our economy, they need child care.” For Walia, the mother from Fremont, Calif. more good quality infant care can’t come soon enough. She is expecting another child any day. ”I’m kind of being very hesitant even just thinking about the child care service right now,” she says. ”In my mind I just want to hold him tight and not let him go. But obviously that’s not practical.”

Ford and General Motors both reacted Tuesday to Donald Trump’s continued criticism of U. S. companies manufacturing products in Mexico. Ford announced it would cancel its $1. 6 billion plans to build a plant in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, and instead invest an additional $700 million to expand an existing plant in Michigan to make autonomous and electric vehicles. That comes on the heels of another decision in November to keep production of some small SUVs at its plant in Kentucky. That announcement came a couple of hours after Trump took to Twitter to criticize General Motors: ”General Motors is sending Mexican made model of Chevy Cruze to U. S. car free across border. Make in U. S. A. or pay big border tax!” GM responded that only a small number of hatchback models are manufactured in Mexico and sold at U. S. car dealers. ”All Chevrolet Cruze sedans sold in the U. S. are built in GM’s assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohio. GM builds the Chevrolet Cruze hatchback for global markets in Mexico, with a small number sold in the U. S.” Why did Ford change its mind? The move marks a departure for Ford, whose CEO last month said it was looking forward to working with the Trump administration on trade but that it very likely wouldn’t change plans for its $1. 6 billion factory. Now CEO Mark Fields tells NPR that Trump’s rhetoric was a factor in reversing the earlier decision, but one of several factors. He says the carmaker was influenced by promises of new tax and regulatory reforms and the prospect of keeping jobs at home. ”Ford is a global automaker, but our home . .. is right here in the United States,” he said. What is the significance of this change? It means 700 additional Ford jobs will come to Michigan, and Ford says every factory job is likely to create another seven related jobs. ”We’ve created 28, 000 jobs and we’ve invested $12 billion in the U. S. in our plants in the last five years,” Fields said in a press conference. Shifting a factory itself would not be news but for the fact that it is highly unusual for companies to respond to direct, public pressure from an incoming president. ”I know from talking to business people that no major firm wants to be a subject of a Trump tweet,” says Gary Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He says companies realize Trump controls the Justice Department, the Defense Department, the IRS, Treasury and regulatory agencies, and ”the amount of control that intersects with what companies are doing is enormous.” Will such moves inspire retaliatory trade barriers that hurt other U. S. firms and cost American jobs? Trump has pledged to rework U. S. trade agreements, including the North American Free Trade Agreement. Trump has also called for high tariffs on companies that manufacture products overseas and then import them for sale in the U. S. The question is how broad such tariffs would be, and whether American trading partners would object and retaliate with similar measures. So far, Trump has (or claims to have) put pressure on American companies including Carrier, Sprint, Ford, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and GM. But Hufbauer says if Trump makes good on actually raising tariffs, ”I think some form of retaliation [from other countries] is almost certain.” Who’s next, and what is the possible economic impact? So far, tweeting trade and other corporate policy has played well for Trump. He has targeted Boeing for a potentially large contract to build a new Air Force One, and he criticized Lockheed Martin for its expensive fighter jet contracts. Hufbauer says it remains unclear what the economic impact of all this will be. So far, the tweets have gotten a massive amount of media attention, and that may mean it will continue and that others — consumer brands in particular — could find themselves targets. ”Some people may wrongly think this is the way to create jobs in the U. S.,” Hufbauer says. ”My estimate is that this kind of thing [companies responding to tweets] is not going to have a major effect,” and it is not in keeping with a economy,” says David Dollar, senior fellow for the Brookings Institution.

Donald Trump said Tuesday that he intends to nominate Robert Lighthizer as his U. S. trade representative, potentially signaling a major overhaul of U. S. trade policy once Trump takes office. Lighthizer has long advocated a tougher stand on trade with China, which is in line with Trump’s campaign rhetoric. Lighthizer, 69, was deputy U. S. trade representative under former President Ronald Reagan during a time of ferocious trade wars with Japan. He has spent the past three decades as a Washington, D. C. lawyer primarily representing U. S. steelmakers in trade cases. He would replace Michael Froman, who led negotiations for the Partnership, a massive trade deal devised to link the economies of the U. S. and 11 other Pacific nations. Trump says the TPP would take away American jobs and has vowed to pull out of the deal. He has also threatened to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, hammer out new bilateral deals and slap punitive tariffs on a number of U. S. trading partners seen as violating trade rules. Lighthizer gained plenty of experience negotiating tough bilateral trade deals on everything from steel to grain during his time in the Reagan administration, according to a statement from Trump’s office. The says Lighthizer will do an ”amazing job helping turn around the failed trade policies which have robbed so many Americans of prosperity.” One target would be China, which Lighthizer has accused of unfair trade practices. He wrote in 2010 congressional testimony that years of passivity had allowed the U. S. trade deficit to grow ”to the point where it is widely recognized as a major threat to our economy.” Going forward, he wrote, U. S. policymakers needed to take a more aggressive approach in dealing with China. Lighthizer won’t be the lone voice on trade in the Trump administration. Peter Navarro, widely considered a China hawk, will head up a new trade council. Trump’s pick for commerce secretary, billionaire investor Wilbur Ross, also could play a role on trade policy. Lighthizer’s nomination quickly drew praise from many Democrats calling for a change in U. S. trade policy. Richard Neal, . ranking member of the House Ways and Means Committee, called Lighthizer a skilled negotiator whose nomination could ”signal a welcome move in a new direction for the Republican Party.” Still, Neal acknowledged that many Republicans are advocates of free trade deals, saying Lighthizer’s ability to change policy will depend on whether he is ”able to overcome the resistance he is likely to face within his party.”

After a storm of criticism, including from Donald Trump, House Republicans have reversed themselves and restored the current rules of the Office of Congressional Ethics. GOP members met Tuesday afternoon and agreed by unanimous consent to withdraw a change to House rules approved late Monday evening, before the new Congress was sworn in, that would have weakened the ethics office, an independent watchdog first established in 2008 under House Democrats. According to lawmakers in the room, GOP leaders said the change was a distraction from their agenda and that the issue needed further vetting. Public outcry, opposition from ethics watchdog groups, a divided GOP, and two tweets from Trump critical of the rules change prompted a swift reversal of the proposal authored by House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte, . Trump questioned, via Tweet, Congress’ priorities. He tweeted a pair of posts saying that while the OCE was ”unfair,” Congress had more important issues to take up, including tax reform and health care. Inclusion of the ethics measure threatened to bring down the entire rules package — the governing rules of the chamber — that is headed for a vote later Tuesday. The majority party traditionally passes the rules package on its votes alone, and a defeat would have been an embarrassing start for Republicans in the new Congress. House Ethics Chairwoman Susan Brooks, . said that the ethics panel will review the proposal and come back to the conference with any recommendations by late summer or early fall. Republicans said they would like to have Democratic to any proposed changes to the OCE. Several Democrats in recent years have also voiced criticism of the OCE, but Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, . who played a critical role in establishing the office, has fought back any efforts to reduce its role. Pelosi said in a statement that ”House Republicans showed their true colors last night” and decried ”the toxic dysfunction of a Republican House that will do anything to further their special interest agenda, thwart transparency and undermine the public trust.” Democrats did not immediately comment on whether they would take part in an Ethics Committee review. Opposition to the gutting of the office was swift and came from some unexpected sources in addition to Trump. Exhibit A: Jack Abramoff, the former lobbyist, whose conviction on charges helped lead to the creation of the OCE, told Politico the Republicans’ action was ”exactly the opposite of what Congress should be doing.” Former Rep. Bob Ney, who also served time after being convicted as part of the same scandal, said, ”House Republicans should not have done this and also the way they did it without announcing it is not a public policy to be proud of.” Judicial Watch, the conservative group that has led efforts to release former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails, called the House rules change ”shady and corrupt” and a ”drive by effort” to eliminate the OCE, as well as ”a poor way for the Republican majority to begin ’draining the swamp.’ ” House Speaker Paul Ryan had issued a statement saying many members feel that after eight years, the office ”is in need of reform.” Ryan argued the office would continue to operate independently and still take complaints from members of the public. He said the House Ethics Committee would merely provide oversight of the complaints office but insisted that the office ”is not controlled by the committee.” The Project on Government Oversight also chimed in, saying ethics watchdogs like the OCE ”need to be strengthened and expanded — not taken out back and shot in the middle of the night.”

Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly is leaving the cable network for a role at NBC News. In a statement Tuesday on her Facebook page, Kelly said, ”I have decided to end my time at FNC, incredibly enriched for the experiences I’ve had.” Kelly has been an icon for conservatives, but her decision to move to NBC, a network that Donald Trump and some conservative pundits have branded as ”liberal,” is not a complete surprise. As NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik reports, Kelly’s career change follows a period of turbulence in her relationship with the network: ”[Kelly’s move] comes in the aftermath of her explosive accusations that former Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes had sexually harassed her earlier in her career. And that was on the heels of her colleague Gretchen Carlson alleging the same in a lawsuit. That led to the departure of Ailes and to significant questions about what path Fox News would take forward. Her departure only raise the stakes for Fox.” Kelly butted heads with Ailes and her network colleagues at other times as well. When Trump, angered by a question she asked him during a debate, attacked her repeatedly during the campaign, Kelly said she didn’t feel supported by the network. In an interview with NPR’s Kelly McEvers, she said, ”My boss, Roger Ailes, was not able to stand Trump down. My friend Sean Hannity, who is a big Trump booster as you know, he was not able to stand Trump down. No one was able to stop his antics.” In the interview, Kelly said she received threats from Trump supporters for months. Kelly’s move to NBC News was first reported by The New York Times. Her contract with Fox News expires this summer, and the Times says rival networks were not prepared to match Fox News’ offer, reported to be ”more than $20 million a year.” The newspaper adds: ”The NBC News chairman, Andrew Lack, wooed Ms. Kelly away from Fox News by offering her a triple role in which she will host her own daytime news and discussion program, anchor an Sunday night news show and take regular part in the network’s special political programming and other coverage.” The exact terms of her new contract are not yet known. Kelly started at Fox News 12 years ago as a legal correspondent and quickly rose through the ranks to become one of the network’s biggest stars. Since October 2013, she has hosted her own nightly program called The Kelly File, becoming the host on cable news after her Fox News colleague Bill O’Reilly, according to TVNewser, a website that tracks TV ratings.

When spirits entrepreneur Steven Grasse considered writing a book about early American cocktails, he already knew it was a subject that had been, in his own words, ”done to death.” Ultimately, the book he did write, Colonial Spirits: A Toast to Our Drunken History, tells the story of a time when water was full of deadly bacteria, making alcohol the safest liquid to consume. As Grasse says, ”this book is about survival.” Colonists, transplanted to a New World, were faced with the task of old recipes, often with unfamiliar new ingredients. Alcohol was a godsend in the Old World, sipped by adults and children alike. In the New World, imbibing called for experimentation. There was plenty of trial and error, and, in Grasse’s view, an unexpected recipe for democracy. ”Before democracy, there were spirits, and from spirits we created taverns,” writes Grasse in the book, ”and it was in those taverns that we laid out the blueprint for a new kind of country. . .. In other words, we got drunk and invented America.” With witty illustrations by Reverend Michael Alan — think Pennsylvania Dutch folk art crossed with Edward Gorey — Colonial Spirits thumbs its nose, ever so slightly, at the American obsession with mixology and fussily precise cocktails. It does so by providing just one simple premise outlined on Page 3: ”In relating these recipes to you, and updating them for modern times, it was of the utmost importance to us that you — yes, you — would not die or even be hospitalized should you choose to make or imbibe them.” In all honesty, some of this stuff could kill you. In fact, on Page 154, you’ll find out that, yes, some home distillers were desperate enough to try making alcohol from sawdust — which Grasse reminds us would actually be methanol. So, yes, you’d die if you imbibed it, which is exactly why you won’t find a recipe for it in Colonial Spirits. What you will find, however, is Ass’s Milk, Cock Ale, and Lambswool (only one of them does not actually involve farm animals) with a history of each concoction in question and modernized versions that sound, actually quite palatable. ”I wanted to make this like a Betty Crocker kind of book,” says Grasse. ”This is not a book for snooty mixologists. These are culinary folktales.” While many of those mixologists tend to laud the recipes by Jerry Thomas, the bartender generally credited with popularizing mixed drinks beginning in the 1850s, Grasse’s view is that cocktails existed well before Thomas was behind the bar. ”Cocktailing, as we know it,” says Grasse, ”was a result of industrialization and the rise of leisure time. But punch was clearly a cocktail, just served in a communal bowl.” Sharing and crafting history is a hallmark of Grasse’s career, which has included creating Hendrick’s gin, Sailor Jerry’s rum and Art in the Age craft spirits. A team of 65 employees in Grasse’s company, Quaker City Mercantile, did copious amounts of historical research into the alcoholic recipes of early America. They dug through 17th, 18th and 19th century manuscripts detailing the booze preferences of Gen. Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boys, a failed attempt during the 1500s to establish a vineyard in what is now Jacksonville, Fla. and how rum was considered to be a cure for syphilis, malaria and even death. Many of the recipes are unfailingly simple: Spruce Ale starts with spruce essence made from Douglas fir tips (be sure to pluck those tips from actual spruce trees instead of some possibly poisonous lookalike, the book cautions, so you don’t, you know, die) which is added to chilled ale. The Everlasting Syllabub ended up being a favorite of illustrator and recipe tester Alan, who says, ”It’s essentially a big bowl of whipped cream that you incorporate a little bit of alcohol into. There’s really nothing bad about that.” During the process of recipe testing for the book, Grasse’s unique position as a distillery owner also gave him the opportunity to make a production of one of the recipes, Martha Washington’s Cherry Bounce, a classic blend of brandy, cherries and sugar, typically enjoyed during winter as a fresh taste of summer. The updated version, made at Grasse’s Tamworth Distilling in New Hampshire, incorporates rye whiskey and smoked cardamom for a modern twist on a Colonial favorite, while also tipping a hat at George Washington, who was one of America’s largest whiskey producers. ”When I look at cocktail books, I don’t really get a context,” says Grasse. ”So my goal was to present the historical context behind these recipes, while making it relatable to the modern reader. I like to retell these stories in a way that people can digest.” He pauses. ”We’re inspired by history, but not slaves to it,” he says. ”At the end of the day, the point is to have fun and maybe learn something at the same time.”

Every year in the U. S. more than 30, 000 people die from things related to guns. That puts guns ahead of HIV, Parkinson’s disease, malnutrition, hypertension, intestinal infection, peptic ulcer, anemia, viral hepatitis, biliary tract disease, atherosclerosis and fires. Yet, the funding for research on gun violence lags far behind other leading causes of death, according to a study published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Researchers evaluated the leading causes of death in the U. S. and plotted them against the funding and publication of research dedicated to to them. The researchers wrote: ”Gun violence had 1. 6% of the funding predicted ($1. 4 billion predicted, $22 million observed) and had 4. 5% of the volume of publications predicted (38, 897 predicted, 1738 observed) from the regression analyses. Gun violence killed about as many individuals as sepsis. However, funding for gun violence research was about 0. 7% of that for sepsis and publication volume about 4%. In relation to mortality rates, gun violence research was the cause of death and the funded cause of death after falls.” NPR’s Cheryl Corley reports that in a different study published Tuesday by JAMA Internal Medicine, researchers studied gun violence in Chicago over an period to explain how it can spread like an infectious disease.” She said medical advocates have long argued that gun violence is a public health crisis, and that the researchers say their study helps prove this point. Cheryl says that: ”Yale University sociologist Andrew Papachristos said researchers treated the idea of gun violence literally and created a network from more than 100, 000 individuals at risk of getting shot. ” ’These gunshot victims — they’re in very small social networks. They tend to cluster together in these networks. And really what our study shows is that gun violence cascades over time,’ Papachristos said.” Papachristos said the study in JAMA Internal Medicine helps show there must be a more coordinated approach to drive gun violence down, one that treats it as a public health epidemic and not just a policing problem. The research published in JAMA offers an explanation for the lack of funding: A 1996 congressional appropriations bill that banned funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to be used to ”advocate or promote gun control.” The authors of the study note that ”similar restrictions were subsequently extended to other agencies (including the National Institutes of Health) and although the legislation does not ban research outright, it has been described as casting a pall over the research community.” Research, though, has proved an effective tool in driving down mortality rates from other leading causes of death. David Stark, one of the JAMA study’s leaders and medical director of the Institute for Next Generation Healthcare at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, told The Washington Post that deaths can be reasonably compared to motor vehicle deaths. According to the newspaper, he said: ”I think a good parallel can be drawn to motor vehicle accidents. Those kill about the same number of people, but that has been decreasing substantially. . .. All of that really starts from essential public research that determines the proximate causes of accidents — and it’s only with research that you can start to develop plans and policies and initiatives.”

Demarco Webster Jr. was helping his dad move to a new apartment a few months ago, when he was shot and killed. His stepdad, Juawaun Hester, says they had intentionally waited to start the move until after midnight in order to avoid any trouble. Hester says Demarco didn’t even like going outside if he didn’t have to. ”I don’t understand man, and you know what’s going on now is like the future children, the good children, the smart children, with scholarships and they’re the ones who’s dying to the gun violence,” Hester says. Hester says just one day after his stepson was killed, his neighbor’s twin teenage boys were both fatally shot, too. Two more deaths in what has been a very bloody year in Chicago. The city has logged more than 700 homicides this year, more than any other major U. S. city, In September, the city surpassed last year’s total of about 470 killings. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel recently announced the city would hire about 1, 000 new people to work in the police department. ”These officers will be assigned directly to the streets of our communities,” Emanuel says. ”To work with residents in partnership to confront gun violence.” But many residents are skeptical that having more cops will stop the murders. The Rev. Marshall Hatch has a church in Chicago’s West Garfield Park neighborhood, one of the most violent in the city. He says relations between the police and the community have deteriorated since late last year when a video showed a Chicago officer fatally shooting Laquan McDonald, a young black man. ”They’ve seen it in their best interest to pull back and not be aggressive,” Hatch says. ”That probably has helped fuel a lot of the surge of violence that we’ve seen this year.” Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson said earlier this month that fallout from the shooting of McDonald has contributed to the spike in violence this year. But he says his officers are in a bind. ”They’re cautious about the national narrative that’s out there right now, so they’re careful about how they do police,” Johnson says. ”But at the same time the biggest reason for this spike is because our repeat guys just don’t fear the judicial system.” Johnson says Illinois needs tougher sentencing laws for repeat gun offenders. And locking up gang leaders did help in the late ’90s — the last time the city saw this level of killing. But University of Illinois Criminologist John Hagedorn says that comparison is far from perfect. ”[In the late ’90s] we were at the downward slope of organized gang wars that racked Chicago,” he says. ”Homicides were often called by leaders who were locked up in prison. They were intentional kinds of violence. Today the violence is spontaneous it’s local. The gangs are no longer structured and citywide. They are small cliques of kids. The reasons for the homicides are often insults, accidental events — very difficult kinds of things to contain.” Hagedorn says in the late 1990s Chicago police ”cleared” about of all the city’s homicides — meaning they knew or thought they knew the culprit. Now, the Chicago police only clear about a quarter of all killings. ”So we are dealing with a different kind of situation, which calls for some different policing strategies,” Hagedorn says. ”But mainly it should tell the city that is has to address the roots of desperation.” Kyisha Weekly knows that desperation. Weekly says she tries hard not to think of her friend Candice Curry, who was shot and killed in a park when they were both 13 years old. Curry was the victim of a on Aug. 10, 1998 in Bronzeville, according to a Chicago Tribune article published days after she was killed. ”She was at my house before she went to the park, and I was telling her to wait on me while I got dressed, and she just wanted to go to the park,” Weekly says. ”So I told her I’d meet her up there. And she went to the park and got shot.” Weekly says she remembers a group of boys from the neighborhood coming by her house and telling her Curry had been shot. At first, Weekly thought her friend would pull through, but Curry died that night. Weekly remembers Curry as a pretty, girl who liked to jump rope. ”Our favorite spot to go to was called Route 66. It was a skating place, and it was skating on one side and dancing on the other side,” Weekly says. ”So our parents used to think that we used to go for the skating, and we used to go for the dance part until one day my grandma came and picked us up and saw all the people and how rowdy they were. She was like, ’No, no, no, y’all can’t come back up here.” Weekly says a few years after Curry was killed, a second member of the group, Charlene Johnson, was killed by another girl she had been fighting with over a boy. Weekly says she has also lost a brother and a nephew to gun violence. ”I try not to think about it,” she says. ”Sometimes I drink a lot to not think about the stuff that has happened in my life.” Now, Weekly says she hardly goes outside, except to take her daughter to the aquarium or park. ”I love my baby. That’s why you can’t sit on the bus stop with your kids,” Weekly says. ”People getting shot, they’re shooting women, it’s out of control.” Despite the loss of her friend in 1998, Weekly says she is certain the violence is worse now. It was rare then, she said, for an innocent victim such as Curry to get caught in the crossfire. But not anymore. ”The gangbangers [in the ’90s] used to make sure the kids were in the house before they started shooting, Weekly says. ”They used to care then about kids, but now they just don’t. It’s the little kids. They’ll be 13 or 14 years old with guns. If somebody looks at them wrong. ..they want to pull out their guns and start shooting. And it’s like they’re shooting with their eyes closed because they’re hitting innocent people.” Member station WBEZ has been revisiting families affected by homicides in 1998, the last time the city suffered more than 700 murders. See more of their work here.

Ah, to work in France: plenty of vacation and a workweek. And, as of Jan. 1, a new law that gives French employees the right to disconnect. Companies in France are now required to stop encroaching on workers’ personal and family time with emails and calls. The law was part of an overall labor bill that provoked months of street demonstrations and divided the country. The controversy was mostly over a single provision that made it easier for French companies to fire people. But nearly everyone supports the provision allowing workers to walk away from emails and ignore their smartphones when they’re out of the office. French Labor Minister Myriam El Khomri commissioned a 2015 study that warned of the health impact of what she called ” .” It showed that more and more French people could not get away from work — even when they weren’t there. Labor lawyer Patrick Thiebart argues that burnout and other issues are on the rise because of an overload of digital demands on employees. ”If an employee receives emails during all their weekends and at night until 11 p. m. then I can assure you that at a certain point in time, it can negatively impact his health,” he says. The new law stipulates that companies with more than 50 workers must negotiate with employees and unions and agree on a policy to reduce the intrusion of work into private lives. ”Of course your boss shouldn’t send you emails on a Sunday when you’re at lunch, enjoying a leg of lamb and a good Bordeaux,” says Bernard Vivier, who runs the Higher Institute of Work, a think tank that focuses on the French workplace. ”It’s so French to throw a law at every kind of problem,” he says. But he doesn’t think a law can fix this one. Such ills must be changed by management and through new practices, he says. It’s a complicated issue, notes Thiebart, the lawyer, because digital culture also offers employees freedom and flexibility. ”Everybody is happy with the smartphones and the new technology,” Thiebart says, ”because employees can work at home and don’t have to spend time and money in commuting. And for companies, they can save money because they don’t need all the staff on the premises.” Many large European companies and government departments already recognize the right of their employees to disconnect from work. Companies such as Volkswagen and Daimler, and French insurer Axa, have taken steps to restrict messaging — including Volkswagen’s limited email server connections on evenings and weekends. Thiebart says that isn’t such a good idea, since many businesses operate across several time zones. But he says his clients, many of them large corporations, are not hostile to the new French law. They believe a lack of downtime decreases the productivity of their workforce. At a Paris gym where people are working up a sweat after a day at the office, many are still attached to their devices. Jean Luc Bauché is lifting weights, wearing white earbuds connected to a smartphone in his pocket. He says it’s a great idea to be able to disconnect. But he doesn’t think it’s possible. ”You can pass laws to protect people from dangers like speeding,” he says, ”but this law won’t work because it’s counter to the way society is evolving.” Bauché says he’s the only person he knows who turns his phone off at night when he sleeps. ”Most people don’t dare,” he says. ”They’re afraid they’ll miss something.”

Viridiana Martinez’s parents brought her to the U. S. illegally when she was 7. But it wasn’t until she was in her 20s, when she took the microphone at a rally in Durham, N. C. that she ”came out” as being unauthorized herself. Martinez, now 30, has been on the front lines of the immigrant rights movement in North Carolina ever since. She the North Carolina Dream Team, which advocated for immigrants who were brought to the U. S. illegally by their parents. She was once arrested at a demonstration in Atlanta, risking being turned over to immigration agents for the sake of protest. A year ago, she helped launch Alerta Migratoria, a hotline that immigrants in North Carolina can call to report the presence of ICE agents in their communities (it forwards calls to her cellphone). In other words, Martinez is just the kind of person you might expect to be terrified by Trump’s ascension to the presidency, given his promise to deport millions of immigrants in the country illegally and repeal President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has granted Martinez and 730, 000 young immigrants like her work permits and temporary protection from deportation. And yet, sitting on a futon in her tidy apartment in Raleigh recently, Martinez said she wasn’t upset by Trump’s victory. In fact, quite the opposite. ”I’m actually happy that Donald Trump won,” she said. ”I am. I’m very happy, because this is an opportunity to take a new approach at immigrant rights organizing.” For Martinez and others advocating on behalf of immigrants, this election has surfaced some unexpected opportunities. In the battle over the fates of people in the country illegally, Trump’s election may look like a victory for those who would have the federal government expel as many as possible. But people like Martinez are finding that the simple fear of that possibility has given their efforts a shot in the arm. Viewing Trump as a grave threat to their immigrant communities, many local lawmakers are reacting to his deportation proposals with the kind of defiance that advocates have been asking of them for years. ”I mean, sure, it sucks that it took Donald Trump winning,” Martinez said, ”but it’s already moving people to act.” She was referring to reports from across the country of mayors, police chiefs, city council members dozens of public officials who have vowed to defy Trump should he try to enlist them to deport people. Though the has scaled back his most sweeping campaign promise to deport all 11 million immigrants in the country illegally, many local officials are taking no chances. ”If the federal government wants our police officers to tear immigrant families apart, we will refuse to do it,” New York Mayor Bill De Blasio said in a speech days after the November election. In Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti announced a $10 million fund to provide lawyers for immigrants facing deportation. ”We don’t know how far the new administration will go when it comes to our nation’s immigration policy,” he said, ”but we all heard the rhetoric.” In smaller cities and towns, from Arizona to Iowa to North Carolina, officials have taken a similar tone. This is exciting for activists like Martinez. During the past eight years, many efforts to advance immigrant rights in the absence of a federal immigration reform bill were aimed at persuading the Obama administration to act unilaterally through programs like DACA. Now, in anticipation of Trump, the strategy appears to be shifting. Activists say they’ll focus on persuading local officials to be more aggressive in protecting immigrants in the country illegally from the federal government. ”In the coming years you’re going to see people fighting to establish new civil rights protections in cities by forging new ground with policies that might not have been deemed possible even as recently as two months ago,” said Chris Newman, legal director for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, a immigrant advocacy group. The public statements many local officials have made in recent weeks, he said, suggest that cities will be receptive to this strategy. Officials in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago have already started acting. For activists like Martinez, there’s a tinge of frustration over the fact that it took Trump’s election to spur this response. ”Because the reality is, we just came out of a presidency where the administration has deported more immigrants than any other,” she said. ”And the only reason this is happening now is because our is Donald Trump.” It’s hard to say for sure whether Obama outdeported all of his predecessors. Interpreting the statistics can be tricky because the government’s method for tracking deportations has changed over time. Department of Homeland Security figures indicate the Obama administration will have deported about 3 million people by the time the president leaves office. The George W. Bush administration deported roughly 2 million. Martinez said that for years, she has been watching families get torn apart by Obama’s deportation policies. So, while Trump’s rhetoric has been alarming, she said she sees little substantive difference between his most recent proposal — to deport 2 to 3 million immigrants he says have criminal records — and what Obama has already done. ”It’s like a guy who tells you you’re ugly to your face versus a guy who tells you you’re pretty, but then turns around and tells his friend, ’Damn, she’s ugly!’ ” Martinez said. Martinez said the problem is that for the past eight years, many local officials were convinced by the ”you’re pretty” guy — Obama, in this case — and didn’t feel the need to take as forceful a stance against his deportations as they now are taking against Trump. ”I think people were conformed, complacent,” she said, ”and they felt that under a Democratic presidency things could not be bad that President Obama was a friend of immigrants, even though that was far from the truth.” Obama, critics like Newman and Martinez say, believed that to gain Republican support for an immigration reform bill that included legalization for millions, he also had to prove he could be tough on enforcement. It was a strategic gambit that failed, Newman said. Obama deported millions while Republicans blocked immigration reform efforts that might have made it possible for immigrants in the country illegally to gain legal status. ”And he was able to, on a certain level, get away with it” among his allies, Newman said, ”as long as people believed that he was also in favor of something that might not have ever been possible — namely, comprehensive immigration reform.” Kevin De Leon, the Democratic leader of the California state Senate, represents a heavily immigrant district in Los Angeles. Earlier this month, he introduced a bill he calls the California Values Act. It would prohibit police departments from devoting resources to enforcing federal immigration laws. Addressing unauthorized immigrants in a statement announcing the bill, De Leon said ”the state of California will be your wall of justice.” This is the sort of thing activists in California have been asking for for years, through a campaign called ”ICE Out of California.” The campaign’s goal has been to persuade local and state officials to kick Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents out of local jails to make it harder for them to take immigrants into federal custody when they’re arrested by local police. Asked to consider the argument that a lot of these new measures should have been put in place years ago, given Obama’s deportation record, De Leon said he understands why many activists might feel that way. ”But this is very different,” he said. He called Trump’s deportation promises during the campaign unprecedented. ”It’s a very pernicious, type of campaigning that we have yet to ever see. And I think that is the major difference.” De Leon said part of what concerns him about Trump is his unpredictability. The promised so many things, has changed his posture on major issues so many times, that it’s impossible to know exactly what he’ll do, De Leon said. Because of that, he said, California has to ”prepare for the worst.” Martinez is skeptical that it will get any worse. Trump is a businessman, she said, and he understands the value of immigrant labor. Still, she said she appreciates the steps officials are taking to enshrine into law protections for immigrants at the local level. She and fellow activists in Durham have a list of proposals they plan to bring to the City Council, which has proved to be . of Durham’s recent population growth has come from immigration, both legal and illegal. Newman, of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, said that as justified as many immigrant advocates are in fearing a Trump presidency, there’s also reason to believe some good will come of it. In the past, liberal leaders have held out hope for an immigration reform bill, he said. Now they seem to agree that a sensible bill is unlikely under a government controlled by conservatives. ”And the absence of that possibility has in some ways been liberating for local policymakers,” he said. Now, Newman said, he expects local leaders and activists will start to ”experiment with a range of decentralized tactics” that will make cities the locus for policies aimed at better treatment of immigrants. ”Legalization from below,” he called it. In some cities it’s already started, with initiatives like the legal defense fund in LA and the refusal by many cities to put their law enforcement officers at the disposal of federal immigration agents. Officials in other cities have said they will look into becoming sanctuary cities, jurisdictions with policies to protect immigrants who are in the country illegally. The city of Santa Ana, Calif. took that step in December. Newman said that activists in other cities are organizing to push their local leaders to follow suit.

Beijing’s sky appears blue at the beginning of the video. Then it completely disappears from view, blotted out by a cloud of brown smog. The video shot Sunday by Chas Pope, a British citizen, dramatically illustrates the extent of China’s pollution problem. Pope says the thick haze moved into Beijing over the course of 20 minutes. Dozens of Chinese cities have suffered heavy smog for nearly a month. ”State media report that 72 Chinese cities are under pollution alerts,” NPR’s Anthony Kuhn reports from Beijing. ”Environmental officials have fined some 500 factories that have failed to cut emissions as the alerts require, and some 10, 000 heavily polluting vehicles that are on the roads in violation of the alert.” Some 40, 000 inspectors have been deployed to make sure everyone is complying with required emissions cuts, Anthony adds. of the Chinese cities are on red alert, the most severe level of air pollution, according to a statement from the country’s Ministry of Environmental Protection. Schools in areas were suspending classes, the ministry said. It added that conditions were expected to improve by Friday. The crackdown on industries that are violating environmental regulations is part of China’s larger ”war on pollution,” now in its third year, Reuters reports. The news service says it’s ”aimed at reversing the damage done to its skies, soil and water after decades of untrammeled economic growth.” But there are major challenges in curbing pollution. Recently, ”state media have also reported that some local environmental authorities are tampering with air quality monitors to make pollution look lighter than it actually is,” Anthony says. China’s pollution issues also are exacerbated in the winter. According to The New York Times, ”residents have come to expect such dense air pollution in late fall and winter, as people burn coal to heat their homes.” A recent World Health Organization study found that China had the most deaths in the world attributable to air quality in 2012 — at 1, 032, 833.

It’s 1968 in New Bordeaux, La. On the surface all looks tranquil as you drive through the bustling city in your red Pontiac, tapping your foot to Sam Cooke’s ”Chain Gang.” But as you take a sharp left down a winding back alley, an alarming sight gives you pause. Behind you, trucks painted with the Confederate flag begin to appear, the white men behind the wheel angry and visceral as they shout racial slurs. Your name is Lincoln Clay. You’re a biracial man — but in this place, this time, you’re black, and instances of racism and bigotry are commonplace. This is Mafia III, an video game developed by Hangar 13 and published by 2K Games. It’s a game that, in a lot of ways, meticulously adopts and adapts from the racial and political history of the era. And it’s become a provocative and in some ways cathartic alternate reality that directly confronts gamers of all walks of life with the reimagined raw trials of a protagonist rarely featured by the industry. The game’s authentic use of past racial tensions isn’t the crux of the plot — its premise is similar to other Mafia games, in which a protagonist goes up against the mob. But their presentation is heavy and deliberate. Senior writer Charles Webb says the creators wanted to spark players’ consciousness without overindulging in a history lesson. ”One of the things I’m really, really proud of is we’ve kind of created this game of empathy,” Webb says. ”This is what it was like to occupy this space, as this particular type of person, as a young black man in 1968 in the South.” Grounded in history, As you drive throughout the city or make a pit stop for some quick cash, music of the era — Nina Simone or Janis Joplin — keeps you company. News broadcasts reflect the period, announcing tragedies like the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or the arrests of Freedom Riders. ”We attached ourselves to this idea of the documentary. It gets you to think about how have things changed, if at all,” says Creative Director Haden Blackman. The writers say they did extensive research, studying films, documentaries and literature, including The Trials of Muhammad Ali The Black Power Mixtape the James Baldwin debates with William F. Buckley from 1965 and Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War. The writers cited ”The Ballot or the Bullet,” speech from April of ’64 by Malcolm X as a primary influence. An invisible character by the name of ”The Voice” delivers evidence of this research: As a radio personality, he often speaks directly to the player, providing critical commentary and analysis of the prejudice and injustices within this reimagined narrative. ”Being able to have him as this ’voice of the people’ in the city, especially of the marginalized, specifically black community, at the time — it’s one of those things that really helps tie things together,” says Senior Writer Ed Fowler. ”The way that it evokes the time and still resonates today speaks to many things, just in general in our world right now.” ’Scared as all ’ With so much history involved, the team admits the game’s subject matter can be, at times, grueling and potent. As Clay, you go on a mission to dismantle the Ku Klux Klan and confront other white supremacists groups on numerous side quests. You hear racial slurs and witness hateful acts against . The police watch you — always. The game’s open world is abundant but you, the player, are not welcome in every aspect of its landscape, simply on the basis that you are you. The ambiance of bigotry — quiet or bombastic — is consistent, whether in hateful glances when you walk through areas reserved for ”whites only” or the seemingly increased police presence when you stroll through predominantly white suburbs. The team knew the game had the potential to be polarizing. ”I was definitely scared, scared as all ” Webb says. ”It was very important to our team as a whole to hammer home to be authentic and true to the period, and that’s a fine line . .. not only respecting how hostile this space might be toward Lincoln but also figuring out ways to not make it completely repellent to the player.” It all appears to have worked, as Mafia III became the title by 2K Games, with more than 4 million units shipped in the first week. But despite the game’s positive reception, some reviewers have argued that its excessive and chaotic violence overshadows the abuse black and brown people experienced during the era, as The Verge’s Chris Plante has argued: ”A black man lynching a white man in the American South in 1968 is an arresting image, except its power is undercut by the game’s pace. It takes no time to unpack what we’re seeing, let alone acknowledge that, below the hanging man, fester dozens of other men murdered by Lincoln Clay.” Female representation, Still, Mafia III inches away from the familiar tropes of ’ games. One of them is the poor depiction of women, who are often heavily sexualized or subservient to the male protagonist. In Mafia III, women hold their own and serve more than just atmosphere, which Webb says was a deliberate move. There’s Cassandra, the head of the Haitian mob then Alma Diaz, who runs smuggling operations and Nicki Burke, a lieutenant in the Irish mob. And then there’s the inner circle of Clay’s friends and family, most of whom are black and help shape the narrative. This batch of characters joins a small group of other individuals of color from recent major games: Marcus Holloway from Watch Dogs 2, antagonist Nadine Ross from Uncharted 4 and Lee Everett from The Walking Dead Telltale games universe and others. Yet, many groups remain highly underrepresented in the gaming industry, which has faced criticism, for instance, not only for the rarity of protagonists of color, but also for their voices being performed by white voice actors. A 2009 study found that Latinos were virtually unrepresented as playable characters, while were largely featured in sports games or similar titles that reinforce stereotypes. A possible harbinger? S. Craig Watkins, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, says the tech industry is commonly under fire for its lack of diversity, while the video game industry hasn’t been held ”nearly as accountable.” The vast majority of game developers are white — the results of a 2015 survey by the International Game Developers Association suggest that only about 3 percent of makers are African American and 7 percent are Latino. Meanwhile, several studies have found that black and Latino children and teenagers spend more time per day playing video games. ”The statistics are shifting and telling us that who plays games is no longer this imagined idea of the white straight adolescent male who is at home in their parents’ basement,” says Edmond Chang, a visiting assistant professor at the University of Oregon. ”The industry has really failed in certain ways to catch up.” Watkins says Mafia III could be a harbinger for the industry. ”The idea that a studio would even consider investing the resources, the time, the human capital to develop a game like Mafia III,” he says, ”that’s a really interesting approach to what the gaming world and experience might look like.” And Blackman, the creative director, says he’s proud of the game sparking important dialogue. ”We’re not so naive as to think that a single game could cure racism — and that was never our intent,” Blackman says. ”But at the end of the day, if we make people think about race and we make people think about what’s happening today, I think we’ve done something that very few games have done.” Iman Smith is a freelance reporter. You can follow her on Twitter at @ImanThePress.

One in five Americans is religiously unaffiliated. Yet just one of 535 members of the new Congress is. That’s what the latest data from the Pew Research Center show on the opening day of the 115th Congress. The nation’s top legislative body remains far more male and white than the rest of the U. S. population as well, but religion is one of the more invisible areas where legislators in Washington simply aren’t representative of the people they represent. Only Arizona Democratic Rep. Kyrsten Sinema admits to being ”unaffiliated,” which Pew defines as people who are atheist, agnostic or who describe their religion as ”nothing in particular.” That means only 0. 2 percent of Congress is unaffiliated, compared with 23 percent of U. S. adults. That group is than any religious group in America, as Pew found in 2015. Meanwhile, nearly 91 percent of congressional members are Christian, compared with 71 percent of U. S. adults. Here’s a full breakdown of how Congress’ religious affiliations compare with those of the U. S. population: America’s nonreligious are young — and not politically organized, Why the massive gap? For one, religiously unaffiliated people tend to be young, and Congress just isn’t that young. In the 114th Congress, the average age for House members was 57 years old and for senators it was 61. (To a modest extent, this is a reflection of age rules: Senators must be 30 or older, and representatives have to be at least 25.) But groups that identify as ”nothing in particular,” agnostic and atheist — the three groups that make up the unaffiliated in Pew’s definition — are among the youngest ”religious” groups in America. So it may be that once Americans start electing more millennials to Congress, there will be a greater share of nonreligious people elected as well. In addition, younger Americans tend to have much lower voting rates than older people. That may also contribute, though the logic requires a couple of leaps — if this means the (relatively young) religiously unaffiliated population isn’t voting as much, and if the religiously unaffiliated are more drawn to likewise unaffiliated politicians — that could also help explain the lack of ”nones” in Congress. Likewise, the inverse is true: If older (and more religious) Americans are voting for more religious politicians, it means less room for the nonreligious ones. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, the unaffiliated Sinema is also relatively young for a congressional member at 40.) One more potential reason unaffiliated people aren’t in power: Not being affiliated often also means not being politically cohesive. ”They may be unaffiliated they may be atheist they may be agnostic . .. but they’re not part of some club,” said Margie Omero, a Democratic strategist at Purple Strategies, to NPR in 2015. ”You could certainly argue that evangelicals are not monolithic in terms of their policy beliefs, but there’s no denying that there’s more of an organization around organized religion than there is around disorganized atheism.” Atheism doesn’t poll well, It’s true that Americans remain at least somewhat open to atheist officeholders. In one regular polling question, Gallup asks Americans what types of people they would (or would not) vote for as president. For example, 91 percent of Americans say they would vote for a Jew and 81 percent say a Mormon. percent of Americans would vote for an atheist. That’s not only a majority but a record high for atheists. Then again, it’s very low compared with Jews and Mormons (and Christians in general, who have made up all of the presidents to date) and the numbers altogether suggest that America’s nonreligious have a long way to go before they become mainstream as politicians. That 58 percent put atheists next to last on Gallup’s list, above socialist (at 47 percent) and on par with Muslim (60 percent). Not only that, but atheist is still far more of a minus than a plus for voters. According to one 2014 Pew poll, just over half of Americans said that knowing a presidential candidate was atheist would make them less likely to vote for that candidate only 5 percent said ”more likely” (the remaining 41 percent said it ”wouldn’t matter”). It’s not exactly ”nones” (atheists are only one subset of unaffiliated Americans) and it’s a question about voting for president, but it at least sends a message: Being nonreligious is still not a big selling point for many voters.

Updated at 1 p. m. ET, Turkish authorities made multiple arrests Tuesday as they search for the person who attacked an Istanbul nightclub in the early hours of New Year’s Day, killing at least 39 people. A lone gunman shot his way into the Reina nightclub, which was packed with holiday revelers. Police arrested two foreign nationals who they described as suspects at Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport, according to the Anadolu news agency. They reportedly searched the pair and took them to police headquarters in Istanbul. ”The country remains on high alert, especially at transport hubs and border crossings,” NPR’s Peter Kenyon in Istanbul reported. The two arrests follow earlier media reports Tuesday — which were later reversed — that police had identified the suspected gunman at the Reina nightclub. The TRT World news network showed images of a passport from Kyrgyzstan belonging to someone it identified as the suspected gunman and named that person, as Peter reports, but the broadcaster stopped showing the passport page shortly after without explanation. (We have since removed that name as well from this post.) Police later denied that the passport was linked to the shooting, as Peter reported. He added: ”The Hurriyet newspaper says police detained a woman in the town of Konya who’s described as the wife of the main suspect in the attack. According to the paper, she told police her husband never showed any sympathy for ISIS, which has claimed responsibility for the attack.” Turkish authorities have released a ”selfie” video purportedly showing the gunman walking along a city street. Turkish authorities did not say when the video was recorded or how they obtained it. Peter reported: ”The claim of responsibility by ISIS prompted Turkey’s deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus to say Turkey’s response will be to step up military attacks against ISIS in northern Syria. ”That escalation appears to have already begun. The military tells the Anatolia News Agency that Turkish attacks have killed at least 18 ISIS fighters in the past 24 hours, and at least 150 ISIS targets have been hit by airstrikes or tank and artillery fire in recent days.” Police have conducted raids in Istanbul neighborhoods, Peter reported, and 14 people were being held for questioning in connection with the attack, in addition to the pair from the airport.

When Miranda was a teenager in the 1990s, he liked to make eclectic mixtapes for his friends. In those cassettes, he experimented with the rise and fall of energy in music: A musical theater number might play after a song, only to be followed by an oldie or an obscure pop song. It was through mixtapes that he could bridge the gap between two seemingly opposing passions — Broadway and rap. ”I think I learned more about writing scores for Broadway by making mixtapes . .. than I did in college,” the actor, composer and lyricist tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. In 2008, Miranda’s first musical, In The Heights, won four Tony Awards, and in 2016, Hamilton — a infused retelling of the Founding Father’s life — won 11 Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize. Though Miranda stepped away from his Hamilton role in July, he remains busy with other projects. He wrote several songs for the Disney animated film Moana, and he’s preparing to star in a film sequel of Mary Poppins. Looking ahead, Miranda says he doesn’t feel pressure to duplicate or exceed the success of Hamilton. ”If you think in terms of topping, you’re in the wrong business,” he says. ”I remember getting that question after In the Heights. ’It’s your first musical and you won the Tony, how are you going to top it?’ I’m like, ’I went from broke substitute teacher to Broadway composer. I will never make a leap that big in my life again.’ ” On what it was like to play Alexander Hamilton every night It was an enormous challenge to do that show every night, and yet who to blame but myself? I wrote the part! And it was also the most thrilling roller coaster every night. You know, I got to fall in love, I got to win a war, I got to write words that inspired a nation. Getting to go through that experience, it’s something I’ll never get old of, which is why I really tried to downplay my departure as much as possible, because I don’t think I’m remotely done with it. On Donald Trump’s tweet calling for the theater to be a safe place after the Hamilton cast read a statement directed to Vice Mike Pence, who attended a performance soon after the election, Here’s where I agree with the : The theater should always be a safe space. . .. I think one of the reasons Hamilton has been embraced by people of every stripe on the political spectrum is that theater is one of the rarest places where we still come together. You may take a totally different conclusion from Hamilton than I do, based on your ideology and your politics and your life experience, but we all sat in a room together and we watched the same thing, and that doesn’t happen anymore. As you can see from this election, we have our own sets of facts based on who we listen to. Which news organization gets our business determines the facts that get in our head. So I think one of the things that makes theater special is, first of all, it’s one of the last places you put your phone away, and second of all it’s one of the last places where we all have a common experience together. So to that end, I agree with [Trump’s comment]. I don’t agree with his characterization of what we did. I think anyone who sees that video sees [actor Brandon Victor Dixon] silencing the boos . .. from the audience itself, who . .. nine days after the election are still working through that thing. I can’t speak to that, but I know that Brandon quieted the boos and made a plea to lead all of us. I don’t believe there’s anything remotely resembling harassment in what we’ve done. On the life he dreamed of as a kid I have two wonderful, supportive and very practical parents who are like, ”You’re really talented and really creative. You should be a lawyer,” because there’s a safe path there. I knew I was never going to be a lawyer. I knew that I wanted to make movies, and I wanted to write shows. On his love of Disney musicals growing up, I had the great joy of being 9 years old when The Little Mermaid came out, and I went and saw that three times in the theater. Then I dragged my parents back and my family back to see it a couple more times. I don’t know why it changed my life as much as it did. I think Sebastian the crab had a big amount to do with it — the fact that this calypso number happens under the water just knocked my socks off when I was a kid. It had this power over me. I would perform that thing — I would jump up on my desk in fourth grade and sing that song. Then I had the good fortune of being a kid during that really kind of amazing run of musical animated films. It’s Little Mermaid, followed by Beauty and the Beast, followed by Aladdin, followed by The Lion King. That’s an incredible run. And what’s been exciting is animation has changed so much. There’s this incredible Pixar golden age, and really golden age from all these other studios as well, and it feels like we’re in another one of those where musicals have a seat at the table. You’ve got Tangled, you’ve got Frozen, next to Inside Out, next to Zootopia, and it’s exciting to be a part of that tradition again. On the music that influenced him as a teenager My sister is as responsible as anyone for giving me good taste in music. I remember stealing her copy of Black Sheep’s A Wolf In Sheep’s Clothing and learning ”Engine, engine number nine, on the New York transit line.” I think that’s probably the first rap song I really worked hard to memorize in sixth grade, but then also Naughty by Nature and Queen Latifah. The music you love when you’re a teenager is always going to be the most important to you, and I find that it’s all over the score of Hamilton. . .. These are all New York, East Coast, ’90s rappers, and that’s when I was a teenager. On between the Latin American neighborhood he grew up in and his school with affluent white kids If you want to make a recipe for making a writer, have them feel a little out of place everywhere, have them be an observer kind of all the time . . .. I won the lotto when I got into Hunter — to get a great, free, public school education sort of saved my family, and I was aware of it. I was aware that I was at a school with kids who were really smart. And I also had friends in the neighborhood who went to the local school, and I remember feeling that drift happen. . .. The corner that I lived on was like this little Latin American country. It’s one in which the nanny who lived with us and raised us, who also raised my father in Puerto Rico, never needed to learn English. All of the business owners in and around our block all spoke Spanish, and yet I’d go to school and I’d be at my friends’ houses on the Upper East Side and Upper West Side and I’d be the one translating to the nanny who spoke Spanish. So it’s interesting to become a Latino cultural ambassador when you’re 7.

Opening punches were thrown in what one top Democrat today called ”the first big fight” of the new congressional year — the promise by Donald Trump and GOP lawmakers to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. President Obama met with Democrats on Capitol Hill while Vice Mike Pence sat down with Republicans, as each side prepared for the skirmishing in the days and months ahead. Asked what advice he gave Democrats in the meeting about the legacy program that bears his name, Obama responded, ”Look out for the American people.” It was likely Obama’s last visit to the Capitol before the inauguration of his successor. White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Obama told the lawmakers he wished he were in their place. ”The word he used was ’envy,’ ” Earnest said, ”for the opportunity they have” to fight GOP repeal efforts. Pence told reporters that Trump will sign executive orders on his first day in office to begin implementing the repeal of Obamacare, saying it was ”the first order of business.” The incoming administration, Pence said, is working right now on ”a series of executive orders that will enable that orderly transition to take place even as the Congress appropriately debates alternatives to and replacement of Obamacare.” He did not offer any specifics on what those orders would entail. He said Republicans will be taking a ” approach” with a combination of executive and legislative actions. The new leader of Senate Democrats, Chuck Schumer of New York, said GOP lawmakers seek ”to rip health care away from millions” of Americans, ”which will create chaos.” In his short, prepared statement, he repeated the word ”chaos” four times. Schumer said Democrats in both the House and the Senate are united in their opposition to Republican attempts to ”make America sick again.” House Speaker Paul Ryan said Republicans asserted, however, that there would be ”an orderly transition, so that the rug is not pulled out from under the families,” which he said are currently ”struggling” under Obamacare. But replace it with what? Ryan offered no specifics, except to insist Republicans do ”have a plan to replace it. We have plenty of ideas to replace it.” But House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, addressing reporters after hearing from Obama, said Republicans don’t have the votes for a replacement plan. Pelosi blasted an approach that some Republicans have discussed, that would repeal the ACA but delay its effect to give lawmakers time to come up with a replacement. She called the strategy ”an act of cowardice.” Trump himself weighed in today via his preferred method of communicating, tweeting that ”Republicans must be careful in that the Dems own the failed Obamacare disaster” and ”Don’t let the Schumer clowns out of this web.” He warned that ”massive increases of ObamaCare will take place this year and Dems are to blame for the mess. It will fall of its own weight — be careful!”

Desmond Tutu, South Africa’s former Anglican archbishop and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, recently celebrated his 85th birthday with an interesting message: He wants the option of an assisted death. Tutu has largely retired from public life, but is still considered the moral conscience of South Africa for his leading role in the fight against apartheid. Some were taken aback when Tutu said he wants the option to end his life when he chooses. ”As a Christian, I believe in the sanctity of life, and that death is a part of life,” Tutu said in a recent video. ”I hope that when the time comes I am treated with compassion and allowed to pass on to the next phase of life’s journey in the manner of my choice.” An assisted death is currently illegal in South Africa. The Supreme Court of Appeal reaffirmed that stance in December when it struck down a lower court’s ruling that granted an applicant the right to an assisted suicide. Tutu, who has lived with prostate cancer for decades and has been in and out of the hospital in recent years, says he supports efforts around the globe to legalize the procedure. ”I pray that politicians, lawmakers and religious leaders have the courage to support the choices terminally ill citizens make in departing Mother Earth with dignity and love,” he said. Tutu made that video for advocacy groups that support laws. At the St. Alban’s Anglican Cathedral in the capital Pretoria, the organ starts to play as parishioners file into the stone church, which sits among tall government buildings. Musima Gwangwa, who is attending the service, says Tutu’s leadership in ending apartheid, and the stances he has taken on human rights around the world, serve as a model that Anglicans like her should try and emulate. ”He’s more than an icon for us,” she says, adding that she supports his position. Not all parishioners agree. For Richard Botha, the archbishop’s decision is a confounding one. He calls Tutu a global elder and someone who is willing to call out leaders for poor judgment. But Tutu’s support for assisted death does not comport with Botha’s religious beliefs. ”I won’t remember him for that. I will remember him for his credentials and his human rights struggle,” says Botha. Tutu has largely stopped giving interviews and declined NPR’s request. But he’s been making his feelings known in editorials in which he described as ”disgraceful” Nelson Mandela’s final days before his death in 2013. He described how Mandela, widely known as Madiba, was used as a political prop in photo ops, despite being unable to communicate. ”It was an affront to Madiba’s legacy,” Tutu wrote in The Guardian newspaper in 2014. He went on to argue that South Africa needed to revisit its laws regarding a person’s right to die. South African judges wrote in their recent ruling that they would welcome action by Parliament, meaning the legislature, and not the courts, should determine whether assisted death will be permitted in South Africa. Advocates for assisted death could take the case to the Constitutional Court. Whatever the outcome, advocates say Tutu’s support for the issue can guide conflicted people across the globe. ”It helps to hear a person who has dedicated his life to religion, and about whom there’s no question they are deeply religious, say there’s no incompatibility in religious faith and medical aid in dying,” says Barbara Coombs Lee, who leads Compassion and Choices, a group that lobbies for assisted death in the U. S.

If you’re looking for a diet plan that suits your lifestyle, a new list of rankings from U. S. News World Report has you covered. Most dieters are familiar with commercial plans such as Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig — both of which continue to make the magazine’s list for top diets. But a range of options offer fresh approaches, including the MIND diet, the diet (a diet) and the Ornish diet — which is ranked top for heart health. The annual rankings list includes 38 different diets, all of which have been evaluated by a panel of doctors, nutritionists and other health professionals. ”Each profile is an exhaustive look at what it’s like to be on each plan,” says Angela Haupt, assistant managing editor for health at U. S. News. The diets are ranked in categories, from ”easiest diets to follow” to ”best diets overall” to ”fastest weight loss.” The diet makes the cut in the fastest category. The diet was developed by a nutrition scientist at the University of Toronto. ”It’s a spin on the Atkins diet. It calls for 31 percent of daily calories to come from plant proteins, 43 percent from plant fats and 26 percent from carbs,” explains Haupt. The claim is that dieters can lose 8 pounds a month, while improving blood levels of triglycerides, cholesterol levels and blood pressure. ”Our experts say it’s superior to Atkins and good for fast weight loss, but it can be tough to follow, since guidance is scarce. You’re largely on your own, which can deter some dieters,” Haupt tells us. Other diets that rank high include the Ornish diet, based on the plan developed by Dr. Dean Ornish. This diet approach is touted as a way to reverse diabetes and heart disease. The diet moved up a notch from the 2016 list. It emphasizes fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, soy products, nonfat dairy, as well as some ”good fats that contain fatty acids,” according to a description on the diet’s website. The Mediterranean diet retains a top spot as well. As the reviewers explain in the diet’s profile: ”There isn’t ’a’ Mediterranean diet. Greeks eat differently from Italians, who eat differently from the French and Spanish. But they share many common understandings.” A Mediterranean diet pyramid was developed by Oldways, a nonprofit in Boston, working with researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health. The U. S News reviewers point out: ”The secret [of a Mediterranean diet] is an active lifestyle, weight control, and a diet low in red meat, sugar and saturated fat and high in produce, nuts and other healthful foods.” Another bonus: A little red wine with meals is not frowned upon. If keeping your noggin sharp is a high priority, the MIND diet — which is ranked No. 3 on the list of Best Diets Overall — combines the DASH diet approach (which was originally designed to help people control high blood pressure) and the Mediterranean diet. According to the U. S. News reviewers, MIND — which was developed by researchers at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago — focuses on foods that influence brain health. So what are some changes from last year’s rankings of Best Diets? The vegan diet moved up to No. 16 on the Best Diets Overall List. (Last year it was No. 21.) And SlimFast dropped from No. 15 on the list of Best Diets Overall down to No. 20. Two other diets that slipped in the rankings: Atkins fell on the Best Diets list, and Biggest Loser also slipped in the Best Diets for Healthy Eating category. The paleo diet hangs on. It’s ranked 36th out of 38 in the Best Diets Overall category. The main knocks against it: Reviewers say the produce aisle and meat counter tend to be expensive, and the diet can be hard to follow while dining out. Reviewers note that dieters will need to get accustomed to ordering breadless sandwiches and skipping many other menu items that contain grains and dairy. Also noted: Alcohol is not part of a true paleo diet. Why the changes in rankings? ”Our expert panelists reviewed and rescored each diet, and their scores vary each year based on program changes, new research and general evolution of thinking in the diet and nutrition space,” Haupt tells us.

Rex Tillerson, Donald Trump’s nominee for U. S. secretary of state, is severing his ties with Exxon Mobil. The former chairman and CEO is in line to receive a $180 million retirement package. Tillerson, who has spent his entire career at Exxon, would have reached mandatory retirement age in March. The company announced that it will pay him in cash for the more than 2 million shares he would have received over the next 10 years and that the money will be transferred to an independently managed trust. If confirmed as secretary of state, Tillerson also has committed to sell the more than 600, 000 Exxon shares he currently owns. The deal means he will give up about $7 million dollars, compared with what he would have received had he retired in March as planned. The deal was worked out to comply with federal ethics rules. Tillerson has promised not to return to the oil and gas industry for 10 years. If he violates the agreement, he would forfeit all the money in the trust, which would be given away to charities chosen by the trust manager. All this is meant to reassure senators that Tillerson would not be unduly influenced by Exxon Mobil if he were to become America’s top diplomat. He still has an uphill battle for confirmation. Democrats have yet to agree on confirmation hearings tentatively set for Jan. 11, and senators on both sides of the aisle will likely question Tillerson about his close relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin. As Exxon Mobil CEO, he was opposed to U. S. sanctions on Russia, which got in the way of his company’s project with Russian energy company Rosneft to drill in the Arctic. Tillerson met Wednesday with the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Ben Cardin, who has been an outspoken critic of Russia and a supporter of sanctions. The Maryland senator said he had a ”candid” discussion with Tillerson. ”Russia is not a friend of the United States,” Cardin told reporters outside his office, saying he thinks ”that is a strong bipartisan message you will hear during the confirmation process.” Cardin also said he didn’t have time to review Tillerson’s divestment and ethics plan before the meeting and that he still wants to see three years of his tax returns. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker, . has argued that there’s no need for that. He said the agreement that Exxon Mobil’s board reached with Tillerson to comply with conflict of interest requirements is ”all tidied up and done.” Sens. Marco Rubio and John McCain, both Republican members of the foreign relations committee, also have expressed concerns about Tillerson’s views on Russia.

Dylann Roof delivered his opening statement in a South Carolina courtroom Wednesday, as the penalty phase of his federal trial got underway. Roof, who was convicted last month of murdering nine black churchgoers, will be representing himself as jurors weigh whether to give him the death penalty or life in prison. His remarks were brief, focused only on defending his decision to dismiss his lawyers for this phase of the trial. He said it’s ”absolutely true” that he chose to represent himself so that his lawyers would not present evidence of mental illness. ”The point is I’m not going to lie to you,” Roof said. ”There’s nothing wrong with me psychologically.” He did not address his crimes or the prosecution’s opening remarks against him. U. S. District Judge Richard Gergel approved the white supremacist’s request to serve as his own counsel after a second hearing on his mental competency. The request for — and its approval — came over the protests of Roof’s own lawyers. Roof has said he will not call witnesses or experts to the stand during this phase of the trial. Still, earlier this week, Gergel laid out strict rules for Roof’s conduct while acting as his own lawyer. ”In an order, the judge detailed how Roof can behave while in court,” Alexandra Olgin of South Carolina Public Radio reports. ”He cannot approach witnesses, the jury or the bench and has to give opening statements from behind a podium.” Roof killed nine parishioners at Charleston’s historically black Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on June 17, 2015. In a confession taped shortly after he was taken into custody, Roof made plain his racial motivations, adding: ”I am guilty. We all know I’m guilty.” It took less than three hours last month for the jurors to concur. They found him guilty of charges ranging from murder and attempted murder to obstruction of religious belief and damage to religious property. Federal prosecutors, who are pursuing the death penalty, delivered a much longer opening statement. Assistant U. S. Attorney Nathan Williams focused his remarks on those who died in the shooting, and on what he called Roof’s lack of regret. Central to the latter argument is a journal that prosecutors say Roof wrote in after his arrest. In the journal, excerpts of which were presented to courtroom reporters, Roof allegedly says that ” have to pay for what they’ve done.” ”I created the biggest wave I could,” Roof allegedly wrote. ”I did all I can do, now it is in the hands of my brothers.” In concluding his remarks, Williams warned that the testimony to come will be worse than what jurors have heard yet: ”It will be heartbreaking,” the prosecutor said. The penalty phase of the trial resumed Wednesday with prosecutors calling their first witnesses. The prosecution plans to call up to 38 people as witnesses and experts during this phase of the trial, according to The Associated Press. This is not the only trial that Roof is facing — and not the only possibility for capital punishment. ”After the federal proceedings,” reports NPR’s Debbie Elliott, ”Roof is scheduled to be in state court early next year on murder charges that also carry the possibility of a death sentence.”

A crowded commuter train crashed into a bumper block and partially derailed as it pulled into Brooklyn’s Atlantic Terminal on Wednesday morning, according to N. Y. officials. The FDNY says at least 103 people sustained injuries. ”It appears that the train was heading into the station, at 10 or 15 miles per hour, and did not stop,” WNYC’s Stephen Nessen tells our Newscast unit. ”It hit a bumper block the front two cars were lifted off the tracks. One of the rails actually pierced the bottom of the front car.” The crash happened during peak morning commuting time, when between 600 and 700 people were on the Long Island Rail Road train originating from Far Rockaway, Queens, Nessen adds. ”People just went flying,” passenger Donette Smith told The New York Times. ”Bodies were everywhere. It was very scary.” The injuries reported so far have been largely minor: WNYC reports that the most serious is a broken leg. The chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Thomas F. Prendergast, told the Times that most of the injuries were sustained when the train ”came to an abrupt stop after crashing into the bumper block at the end of the track.” Nessen says it’s still unclear what caused the train to crash: ”Trains pulling into the station do automatically slow down but it is up to the conductor to hit the brake finally for the train to stop and in this case, it appears that didn’t happen. Investigators are still looking into what happened.” Prendergast also suggested that responsibility may lie with the train’s conductor. ”At that speed, it’s pretty much the locomotive engineer’s responsibility to stop the train,” he said, according to Reuters. Gov. Andrew Cuomo told reporters at the scene that it could have been worse. The crash is drawing comparisons to September’s train crash in the nearby Hoboken Terminal in New Jersey, which killed one person and injured more than 100 others. The Times quotes Cuomo as saying that the train in the Hoboken crash ”was coming in much faster, did much more damage, hurt many more people.”

Amid this week’s firestorm over Republicans’ attempt to weaken the Office of Congressional Ethics (and subsequently, backpedal on that attempt) you may have seen this chart floating around the Internet. It depicts data from Google Trends about Americans’ search interest in learning who their congressional representatives are, with a pronounced spike around 9 a. m. Tuesday. The Hill reported this on Tuesday, with the The New York Times later referencing the trend. The conclusion some are drawing is that people looked up their representatives, then called them to complain about the ethics issue, and that the groundswell of support got Congress members’ attention. And, indeed, some Congress members reported that these phone calls did influence them. But there’s a issue with this data, and with all Google Trends data — the problem of scale. While there’s a ”spike” here, there’s no way to tell how big it is without comparing it to other popular — or unpopular — search terms. Depending on what you’re comparing it to, that spike is little more than a speed bump. Here, for example, is the ”who is my representative” search compared to searches for ”Obamacare” in the U. S. over the past week. The spike nearly disappears here — as of 9 a. m. Tuesday, ”who is my representative” registered at 7 on this chart, compared to 60 for Obamacare. But then, maybe that’s not fair. Obamacare is a really big topic in the news right now. Let’s try a Google search term that’s still but with less mass appeal, like infrastructure. The spike is a bit more apparent here, but it’s still dwarfed even by searches for the relatively nonsexy topic of infrastructure. The really striking comparisons come when you compare this ”spike” to searches for topics. How about a newly released, poorly reviewed movie? What about a certain pop superstar who recently gave a catastrophic performance on national TV? OK, so the spike for Mariah Carey happened a couple of days earlier, but you get the picture. It’s true that Google Trends data can say something about what people care about, and that can be in a democracy where politicians are theoretically supposed to represent those cares. For example, researchers reported in October that Trump searches outstripped Hillary Clinton searches. They subsequently concluded that ”this could be evidence that Mr. Trump is doing better than the polls project.” But when that data is presented without a reference point, it can overstate the importance of a particular search trend. In fact, to get a term that has comparable volume to the Congress member search, you have to get creative and do a lot of random Googling. As it turns out, searches for ”who is my representative” are roughly equal to searches for a 1990s trend that people have mostly forgotten. So searches for ”who is my representative” spiked, surpassing Beanie Baby searches for the first time in . .. well, a long time. None of this is to say that this spike didn’t matter lots more people than usual did Google their Congress members’ offices, and anecdotal evidence suggests that there was an increase in people calling their Congress members. But it is to say that Google data on only one search term can misrepresent the size of a phenomenon. Yes, plenty of people were Googling their Congress members this week. But plenty more were watching that Mariah video.

Louisiana is losing its coast at a rapid rate because of rising sea levels, development and sinking marshland. Officials are trying to rebuild those marshes and the wetlands, but much of the coast can’t be saved. This makes Louisiana’s history an unwitting victim. As land disappears and the water creeps inland, ancient archaeology sites are washing away, too. Richie Blink was born and raised in Plaquemines Parish, La. — way down south of New Orleans along the Mississippi River. Now he works for the National Wildlife Federation. When he was a kid, his dad showed him a special place in Adams Bay, where they’d go fishing. ”We would come out of the floodgates and my dad would say ’Head for the Lemon Trees! ’” Blink says. What’s locally known as the ”Lemon Trees” is a stand of weathered old trees on a grassy tuft of land. It’s a landmark for fishermen, but Blink says they would rarely stop there to hunt or fish because it’s a sacred Native American site. ”The legend goes that you were always to bring some kind of sacrifice, so somebody left some lemons for the ancestors,” Blink says. And those grew into big trees with lemons. But as land was lost to the Gulf of Mexico, saltwater made its way into the freshwater marsh, killing off the trees and other plants. The trees stand like skeletons on the edge of this scrappy, island. Waves beat against the dirt, washing it away, exposing shards of ancient pottery. ”You can see, it’s just everywhere . .. there’s just shards of it all over the place,” Blink says. ”This is earthen pottery made by natives. This site is in the process of being destroyed. It only has a few more years left.” This ancient Native American site is an important archaeological find. It’s one of many historic sites being forever lost to the Gulf as rising seas and saltwater intrusion eat away at Louisiana’s fragile marshes. Two sites like this are lost each year. When Blink saw how fast the land was eroding he decided to find an archaeologist and ask for help. That led him to Brian Ostahowski. Ostahowski says he gets a lot of calls like this, at least once a month. People who say: ” ’I have a great archaeological site in my backyard,’ ” Ostahowski says. ”And chances are they usually do.” So he hopped in a boat with Blink and went out to the ”Lemon Trees.” ”Richie wasn’t lying,” Ostahowski says. ”This is actually a very, very important archaeological site.” Based on the pottery and soil, Ostahowski says native people lived at the site 300 to 500 years ago. The pieces of broken pottery are probably from an ancient trash pile, called a midden. There could even be human remains there. ”You’re talking about a whole ceremonial center that could tell you about lifeways, or the change of lifeways, that’s going to be completely gone within 10 years,” he says. ”It maybe took 300 years of occupation there.” Three hundred years to build it — and in just 10 years it could be erased. Ostahowski took samples of the soil for radiocarbon dating. Unlike the usual archaeology dig, Ostahowski wants to excavate the mound as soon as possible and study the pottery shards and oyster shells. But the truth is, there just isn’t much time. ”We’re talking about different ways that we can come up with kind of an emergency action, or emergency excavations,” Ostahowski says. He wants to learn more, like how long people lived there and how many different occupations there might have been. These details could help fill gaps in our understanding of the prehistoric Plaquemine culture, which includes tribes that lived on the lower Mississippi before Europeans came. For Blink, it’s more than ancient history at stake. It’s personal history, where he grew up. He honors that in his own way, like two weeks ago when he brought out some lemons. Under a windswept tree, on top of the small mound, a handful of dried up lemons sits in the shade.

Murmuration refers to the phenomenon that results when hundreds, sometimes thousands, of starlings fly in swooping, intricately coordinated patterns through the sky. Maybe you’ve seen a murmuration video before. But this one is especially beautiful. It was shot earlier this month in Wales, at Cosmeston Lakes in the Vale of Glamorgan, and posted on Facebook by the BBC Cymru Wales. Why do I love this short video so much? It’s all about science. Just how do the starlings manage to fly in such an amazingly coordinated way? A few years ago, George F. Young and his colleagues investigated starlings’ ”remarkable ability to maintain cohesion as a group in highly uncertain environments and with limited, noisy information” — a nice description of what goes on in a murmuration. Going in, Young et al. already knew that starlings pay attention to a fixed number of their neighbors in the flock, regardless of flock density — seven, to be exact. Their new contribution was to figure out that ”when uncertainty in sensing is present, interacting with six or seven neighbors optimizes the balance between group cohesiveness and individual effort.” Young et al. analyzed still shots from videos of starlings in flight (flock size ranging from 440 to 2, 600) then used a highly mathematical approach and systems theory to reach their conclusion. Focusing on the birds’ ability to manage uncertainty while also maintaining consensus, they discovered that birds accomplish this (with the least effort) when each bird attends to seven neighbors. In following this role of seven, then, the birds are part of a dynamic system in which the parts combine to make a whole with emergent properties — and a murmuration results. That’s just incredibly cool. Also, starlings are essentially an invasive species in this country. They were famously introduced to North America at New York City’s Central Park in the 1890s by Shakespeare enthusiasts who wanted all the bird species ever mentioned by Shakespeare to inhabit this continent. With starlings, they certainly succeeded: 200 million of these birds now inhabit North America. They aren’t welcomed by everyone. As the Cornell Lab of Ornithology puts it, starlings in the U. S. are ”sometimes resented for their abundance and aggressiveness.” In this Scientific American piece, they’re even called a ”menace.” The murmuration video invites us to see them with fresh eyes. Barbara J. King is an anthropology professor emerita at the College of William and Mary. She often writes about the cognition, emotion and welfare of animals, and about biological anthropology, human evolution and gender issues. Barbara’s most recent book on animals is titled How Animals Grieve, and her forthcoming book, Personalities on the Plate: The Lives and Minds of Animals We Eat, will be published in March. You can keep up with what she is thinking on Twitter: @bjkingape

Armed men reportedly attacked a jail in the Philippines, killing a guard and allowing more than 150 prisoners to escape. The attack took place at the North Cotabato District Jail in Kidapawan, a city on the island of Mindanao, just after 1 a. m. local time on Wednesday, according to the BBC. It added that ”authorities suspect the gunmen are linked to Islamist separatist groups.” newspaper The Philippine Star reported that the strike was carefully planned: ”Superintendent Peter Bungat, provincial jail warden, said the attack began with a power outage that plunged the facility into darkness, followed by heavy gunfire aimed at the buildings inside its fenced compound. ”Bungat said one of his subordinates, Jail Officer 1 Hexel Rey Desibo, was killed in the ensuing encounter with the gunmen who attacked from the rear of the jail compound. ’It was not a jailbreak. It was a planned rescue of certain detainees,’ he said.” The BBC noted that the 100 or so attackers were ”armed with rocket propelled grenades and snipers’ rifles,” and far outnumbered the jail staff of around 20 people. The broadcaster added: ”In the chaos following the attack, 158 prisoners were able to put a ladder against a back wall and escape. Many of the 1500 inmates at the jail are linked to the various Islamic insurgent group in Mindanao. The authorities are already blaming the attack on the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters, a faction which has refused to join the protracted peace talks with the central government.” A spokesman for the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters denied the group was involved in the attack, according to the Star. The assault was the third in 10 years at the Cotabato jail, the newspaper said. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, whose war on drugs has led to the deaths of thousands of people, hasn’t yet publicly commented on the attack and mass escape.

Frenchman Robert Marchand set a new world record Wednesday when he cycled 22. 547 kilometers (about 14 miles) in an hour — at the age of 105. Wearing a purple and yellow cycling suit, pink helmet and yellow glasses, Marchand completed 92 laps at the Velodrome National, an indoor track near Paris that’s used for elite cycling events. According to The Associated Press, he set a new record for the age group and received a standing ovation from people in the crowd, who chanted ”Robert, Robert” as he rolled to a stop. Still, he said he could have done better. ”I did not see the sign warning me I had 10 minutes left,” Marchand said, according to the AP. ”Otherwise I would have gone faster, I would have posted a better time. I’m now waiting for a rival.” For comparison, the U. K.’s Bradley Wiggins rode 54. 526 kilometers (about 34 miles) in 2015 and holds the record for the men’s hour, the BBC reported. ”I am not here to be champion. I am here to prove that at 105 years old you can still ride a bike,” Marchand said, per Eurosport. His ride Wednesday was incredible, but Marchand’s entire life has been a series of singular events. The AP has this on his background: ”Marchand, a former firefighter who was born in 1911 in the northern town of Amiens, has lived through two world wars. He led an eventful life that took him to Venezuela, where he worked as a truck driver near the end of the 1940s. He then moved to Canada and became a lumberjack for a while. ”Back in France in the 1960s, Marchand made a living through various jobs that left him with no time to practice sports. ”He finally took up his bike again when he was 68 years old and began a series of cycling feats. ”The diminutive Marchand — he is 1. 52 meters ( ) tall and weighs 52 kilograms (115 pounds) — rode from Bordeaux to Paris, and Paris to Roubaix several times. He also cycled to Moscow from Paris in 1992. ”Ten years later, he set the record for someone over the age of 100 riding 100 kilometers (62 miles).” So what’s his secret? Marchand’s coach and friend Gerard Mistler told the AP it’s simple: He eats fruits and vegetables, doesn’t smoke, drinks wine only on occasion, goes to bed at 9 p. m. and exercises every day. Mistler, perhaps cognizant of the cloud of doubt that hovers over impressive cycling performances, told the news service: ”If [he] had been doping, he would not be there anymore.” As if this story couldn’t get any better, here’s some amazing photos of the feat.

People think of black holes as nightmare vacuum cleaners, sucking in everything in reach, from light to stars to Matthew McConaughey in the movie Interstellar. But, in real life, black holes don’t consume everything that they draw in. ”They’re actually pretty picky eaters,” says Jedidah Isler, an astrophysicist at Vanderbilt University. She spends most days chipping away at one of the universe’s biggest mysteries: How do the huge, overactive black holes, known as quasars, work? ”They are billions of times the mass of our own sun,” she says. ”I like to call them ’hyperactive,’ in the sense that they are just taking on a lot more than an average black hole.” And these monster black holes tend to do something strange. They not only reject material, but they use it to put on a space version of a fireworks show, shooting out shredded stars and other things in a stream of light and charged particles. ”Think of them as cosmic water hoses that are spewing out all kinds of particles and light,” says Isler. These are some of the most powerful particle streams ever observed, causing chaos in their host galaxies. Theoretically speaking, if an unlucky planet happened to cross paths with one of those jets, Isler says, it would not be pretty. ”It would basically destroy the planet completely. It would completely eviscerate anything that got in its way,” she says. She added, ”You know, things are being eviscerated in space all the time. It’s part of what makes it fun.” Isler specializes in the subset of quasars that happen to have their jet streams of material pointed toward Earth. These are called blazars, or ”blazing quasars.” Telescopes built in the last decade, like NASA’s Fermi Space Telescope, have spotted a few thousand blazars. But don’t panic. ”Thankfully, they are far enough away that they are not going to have any negative impact on us as human beings,” Isler says. One of the closest blazars is 2. 5 billion away. ”But they do serve as really interesting laboratories to understand these really exotic systems,” she says. ”They are able to accelerate particles to 99. 99 percent of the speed of light,” Isler says. ”How does that happen? So, I’m interested in where along that jet do we get this acceleration, and what is the physical mechanism that is responsible for the acceleration of particles that we see?” By analyzing data from a large sample of blazars, she and her colleagues have found that some particles exhibit acceleration closer to the black hole than expected, suggesting that differences in blazar jets occur because of an internal process, like turbulence, as opposed to a more consistent factor, like how quickly the blazars draw in material. If the scientists can figure out how these natural particle accelerators work, they may begin to understand the physical laws that guide these unusual black holes, and maybe a lot of other systems out there that are capable of pulling things in and flinging them out. ”That process happens at many different scales across the universe with many different systems,” Isler says. For example, when planets form, they pull nearby material into what are called protoplanetary disks. Sometimes, they shoot that material out in jets, too, though on a much smaller, weaker scale than blazars do. ”There may be some way that this process is universal in our cosmos,” she adds. Understanding supermassive, hyperactive black holes could be a first step in figuring that out.

Several civil rights activists were arrested Tuesday night for staging a at Sen. Jeff Sessions’ office in Mobile, Ala. to protest his nomination as U. S. attorney general. The was staged by the NAACP and portions were broadcast live online. The NAACP has sharply criticized Sessions’ record on civil rights, voting rights and criminal justice reform. Six of the activists were apparently arrested, including NAACP President and CEO Cornell William Brooks. The NAACP highlighted Sessions’ history with voting rights as a major factor in the protest. Brooks told The Associated Press that Sessions ”does not acknowledge the reality of voter suppression while mouthing faith in the myth of voter fraud.” He also noted that Sessions once prosecuted civil rights activists on charges of voter fraud. As NPR’s Nina Totenberg has reported, those charges were dismissed by a jury, and civil rights groups described the prosecution as attempted intimidation of black voters. The NAACP cited Sessions’ ”record of racially offensive remarks and behavior” as another reason the group objects to his nomination. As Nina explained in November, Sessions was nominated for a federal judgeship in the ’80s. He was rejected by a Senate after he acknowledged having made racially insensitive remarks and calling several civil rights groups — including the NAACP — ” .” He later denied making some of the remarks, which ”seemed to add a credibility problem to his troubles,” Nina wrote. After making public statements objecting to Sessions’ nomination, the NAACP turned to civil disobedience. Brooks tweeted on Tuesday that the activists with him in Mobile were prepared to be arrested for their protest. The began on Tuesday morning at Sessions’ office in Mobile, Ala. the AP reports: ”Demonstrators refused a request by the manager of the building — which includes several other tenants in addition to Sessions — to leave when the building closed for the day at 6 p. m. Police could be seen on video footage . .. handcuffing the six protesters and [escorting] them to a police van. ” ’We all are aware of the laws of trespass. We are engaging in a voluntary act of civil disobedience,’ Brooks told the officers who arrived at the scene.” AL. com reports that ”according to Mobile County jail records all six of the arrested members have been charged with criminal trespassing.” The was part of a statewide protest against Sessions, Kyle Gassiott of Troy Public Radio reports for NPR. ”Sessions has five offices in cities across the state, including Birmingham, Montgomery, and Mobile, and at each of the five locations members of the NAACP held press conferences protesting his nomination for attorney general,” Gassiott says. Sessions was in Washington, D. C. as the protests in Alabama were unfolding, the AP writes. A spokeswoman for Sessions said in a statement that ”false portrayals” of Sessions ”will fail as tired, recycled, hyperbolic charges that have been thoroughly rebuked and discredited,” the AP reports. Meanwhile, more than 1, 200 law school professors have signed a letter urging the Senate to reject Sessions’ nomination. ”Nothing in Senator Sessions’ public life since 1986 has convinced us that he is a different man than the attorney who was deemed too racially insensitive to be a federal district court judge,” the professors write, citing his prosecution of civil rights activists and ”consistent promotion of the myth of fraud,” among other things. ”All of us believe it is unacceptable for someone with Senator Sessions’ record to lead the Department of Justice,” they write. Sessions’ former chief counsel, who is black, told The Washington Post that the ”smear campaign” accusing Sessions of racial insensitivity needs to stop.

Vocalist Xenia Rubinos ended 2016 with a bang: Her album Black Terry Cat was singled out in lists by NPR Music, The New York Times and Rolling Stone. That kind of recognition is a major deal for an independent artist with a artistic vision. Alt. Latino first recognized that vision back in 2012, when we featured a track from Rubinos’ first EP, Magic Trix. After we first heard Black Terry Cat earlier this year, we rushed her and her band into our office for a mesmerizing Tiny Desk concert that only hints at the magic of her live show. That’s what we’re always trying to do at Alt. Latino: find and then support artists whose vision and imagination stops you in your tracks and opens up new worlds of sounds and ideas. So when Rubinos and her band passed through D. C. while on tour recently, we asked her to bring some music so we could discuss art, life and the joys of subtlety. It’s a spirited conversation, and we can’t wait for the next one.

Imagine being able to collect the DNA of a human ancestor who’s been dead for tens of thousands of years from the dirt on the floor of a cave. Sounds fantastic, but scientists in Germany think they may be able to do just that. If they’re successful, it could open a new door into understanding the extinct relatives of humans. Most ancient DNA is extracted from bones or teeth. Matthias Meyer of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig says you don’t need very much of the bone less than a thousandth of an ounce will do. But there’s a problem. Anthropologists hate to give away any of their precious bones. ”We’ve been recently trying to explore new sources of ancient human DNA,” Meyer explains, ”as the fossil record is very limited.” He and his colleagues began to wonder if maybe they didn’t need an intact bone at all. Many of these interesting bones come from caves. What if, over the millennia, some of the bones had just degraded into a kind of dust, and fallen to the floor of the cave. It would be easy enough to get at that dust. ”You just take a shovel with some dirt, and then you look for DNA,” says Meyer. He says other scientists have recovered DNA from a variety of species from the floors of caves. Meyer now has some of this ancient human DNA from cave floors, and he’s been able to begin analyzing it. But there are problems to solve before he can make sense of the data. He’ll have to develop methods to be certain that the DNA came from an ancient human bone, and not a more recent human cave explorer or some contaminating bacteria. And the DNA they’ll get will be in tiny snippets. Piecing together the big picture will be tricky. Meyer says they’re making headway with those issues. Now, let’s say you can get lots of DNA that you know comes from an ancient human ancestor. What do you do with it? Plenty, says Janet Kelso, a colleague of Meyer’s at the Max Planck Institute. ”We’ve initiated a project just this year to try and generate sequences from a large number of Neanderthals, to try to understand something about the Neanderthal population histories,” Kelso says. Even though they’re gone now, Neanderthals were in Europe and western Asia for more than 300, 000 years, she says. During that time the climate in those areas changed dramatically. At times glaciers covered a large chunk of the landscape. If archaeologists can get DNA samples from Neanderthals at various time points in their history, Kelso says, ”we can see how were they adapting to the environment. How did they differ over time? Can we understand what happened to them in the end? That may not be something you can tell from the sequence, but it would be interesting to try.” Another question is just how often Neanderthals and modern humans had sex with one another. ”Was this something that was happening relatively regularly over some time?” she and other scientists wonder, as they try to piece together what was happening during each era. ”Was it something that was quite rare?” Kelso says most modern human populations have at least some genetic connection to Neanderthals. But there are many questions about when and where Neanderthals made their contributions to the modern human gene pool. It would be pretty amazing if the answers came from dirt on the floor of caves.

The machinery inside Conner Bottling Works doesn’t sparkle like it used to. In fact, everything and everybody in here looks like they could use a break. ”We are the last independent bottler in the state of New Hampshire,” says Dan Conner, part of the fifth generation to work here. ”A hundred and years, from start to today. Never shut down, never stopped.” Launched in 1863, the first Conners bottled only beer, but in the 1890s, the company branched out into sodas. During Prohibition, harder drinks were made out back, while a friendly sheriff reportedly looked the other way. And then in 1938, the company laid out $2, 400 for the Dixie, a new bottling machine manufactured in Baltimore that has more than earned its keep. ”They put it in here brand new,” says Tom Howcroft, the only working inside the factory. ”It’s been in this spot ever since, working just about every day.” Watching soda get made is more pleasant than watching, say, sausage. Howcroft lines up the gleaming glass bottles, with each one rattling along toward the spigots. He knows it’s a scene right out of a sitcom. ”Laverne Shirley, the one that a lot of people bring up, with the conveyor belt,” says Howcroft. The gleaming bottles move down the line, first passing under the syruper that deposits two ounces of cane sugar and flavoring. Then, a stream of carbonated water, followed by the cap. ”Which happens with a big clang,” Howcroft says. The bottles then get a quick rinse from a tiny sprinkler. After they dry, they get a label, and finally, a taste test. ”It doesn’t taste anything like Coke, doesn’t taste anything like Pepsi,” says Howcroft. ”Like a traditional cola.” Traditions rolls deep here at Conner, and that’s thanks in part to the current owner, Tom Conner, who started working here ”when I was old enough to walk across the driveway from the house there. You didn’t have a choice back then.” Child labor rules have changed, and so have the economics of soda making. For starters, there’s not much local competition. ”At one time there were 60 bottlers in New Hampshire,” says Tom Conner. ”And we just happen to be the only ones left.” That ability to hang on has started paying off. The company’s line of sodas, sold under the name Squamscot Beverages, are now carried in more than 600 stores around the country. The Squamscott is a river that runs through southeastern New Hampshire, as well as the name of the Native American tribe that settled in the region. Customers can choose from 27 different flavors, including root beer, cherry cola, fruit bowl and ginger ale. There are even some options, much to Tom Conner’s chagrin. ”I don’t care for it. I know people like it. Some people have to drink it, and we make it. And let it go at that,” he says. During the holidays, the biggest demand is for Squamscot Beverages’ limited edition Mistletoe Mist, which is only available for about a month, unless it runs out sooner. It’s a family recipe Tom isn’t about to reveal. ”My parents used to take a mixture of different flavors, and they’d pour it into a punch bowl whenever they had holiday parties. And then we thought we’d just pour it into the bottle, cap it and call it something good,” he says. Mistletoe Mist is pinkish, citrusy and not really all that seasonal. But like a good punch, it goes well with whatever else is kicking around. ”Rum is good with it, vodka is good with it. But you can put anything you want in it,” he says. Everything in moderation, he cautions, though he ignores any concerns that too much soda is bad for your teeth. His smile reveals a mouth full of pearly whites, all his own. ”Well, most of them. You know, a couple broke off, had them fixed. But [my son] 40 years old, never had a cavity,” says Tom. ”So tell a dentist that.” After showing off his grin, his warehouse and the delivery truck, there’s one last item to see on the Conner family property. ”We can walk out back and see the solar system,” he says. Tom’s not talking about the celestial bodies that twinkle down upon his soda operation. Instead, it’s the 156 solar panels that power the entire factory. They’re big on tradition here at Conner Bottling, but are happy to update things if it makes financial sense. This story aired on New Hampshire Public Radio.

An Israeli military court has convicted a soldier of manslaughter for shooting and killing a Palestinian assailant who was already incapacitated. The shooting happened in the occupied West Bank in March of 2016, and was captured on camera. The judges found that Sgt. Elor Azaria acted in cold blood when he shot and killed Abdel Fattah NPR’s Joanna Kakissis reports from Jerusalem: ” had been shot and wounded after stabbing an Israeli soldier. Eleven minutes later, Azaria shot the motionless in the head. ”A human rights activist filmed the killing. The video went viral. ”Many Israelis say Azaria was justified because he feared might have been wearing an explosive belt. But Azaria’s superior officers say his actions contradict the army’s ethical standards.” On Wednesday, as three military judges announced that Azaria had been found guilty, hundreds of Azaria’s supporters outside the army base where the trial took place chanted ”God is with him,” Joanna reports. The case has been deeply polarizing in Israel, The Associated Press reports. It’s rare for an active member of the Israeli military to be charged with manslaughter. The AP reports: ”The verdict caps a saga that has deeply divided the country. Defense officials have criticized Sgt. Elor Azaria’s conduct, while large segments of the Israeli public, along with members of the nationalist ruling coalition, have rallied behind him. ”In delivering her verdict, Col. Maya Heller systematically rejected all of Azaria’s defense arguments, saying ’the fact that the man on the ground was a terrorist does not justify a disproportionate response.’ ” Azaria is set to be sentenced on Jan. 15, according to the AP.

”Dogs are better than human beings,” wrote Emily Dickinson, ”because they know but don’t tell.” That sentiment comes to mind when considering Emily Bitto’s debut novel, which showcases a dazzling, gabby and ultimately doomed collection of stray human beings. Assembled under one bohemian roof in 1930s Australia, most of these characters tell all to a fault. But one, an adolescent girl named Lily, sees all but keeps her mouth firmly shut — until she comes to narrate this book. Framed as a memoir drafted in 1985, when Lily has grown to maturity, The Strays invites readers into a world that is by turns disturbing and magical. The art scene in Melbourne burns white hot. Painters find themselves characterized as decadents in the newspapers and do their best to live up to the reputation. A canvas of riotous and erotic oils, the creative ferment comprises the narrative backdrop of The Strays. In the foreground is the story of two young girls who fall deeply in love and create an intensely private relationship amid the adult chaos that reigns around them. From the day they meet as in grade school, narrator Lily adores Eva Trentham. The exotic Eva lives with her parents Evan and Helena and two sisters in a grand heirloom of a house surrounded by rambling, sumptuous gardens. Lily assesses the sharp differences between the Trentham household and the boring, bourgeois, suburbia where she has been raised by her utterly conventional mother and father Helena and Evan love their daughters, but that does not preclude them from partying nightly in front the kids. Helped along by generous doses of ”reefer,” as Bitto refers to marijuana throughout, the rolling revelry also features toothsome feasts, nudity, moonlit trysts and far too much wine. The father of the clan takes a notion to defecate in the garden with everybody watching, which given the outrageous milieu is about par for the course. Lily is gobsmacked by the goings on. The adults are too feckless to shield their offspring, neglecting to send the young ones off to bed when it gets late. The girls themselves grab whatever stimulant they can get their hands on. Our narrator acclimates herself ”to being invisible, to being secretly in love with the people I lived with every day.” And the strays keep arriving, painters who move in with their slim suitcases, their brushes, oils and ”turps” (turpentine) — and their ambitions. Bankrolled by Helena’s inheritance, the Trentham property increasingly functions as a arts commune. As a Lily sees her future ”unfurling in the sunlight.” Taking up writing, secretly, as a voyeur, she finds herself ”learning the habit of attention, of noticing the world in all its ravishing detail and complexity.” The adolescent journals form her personal mode of and eventually become the foundation for the ”memoir” that the grownup Lily presents in The Strays. ”Sometimes,” Lily tells us, ”I felt myself to be a dog under the table, scrounging after dropped morsels. I was sly and skulking like a dog has to be.” Word pictures which elevate the ordinary to exquisite appear throughout Bitto’s novel, appropriate to a book that focuses so much on the glory of art: ”The air there smelled of dry bush, gum leaves and wet clay, like the heavy blocks we used in pottery class, our teacher slicing them to pieces with a string tied between two clothes pegs.” It’s all too wonderful to last, of course. Eva, who prides herself as a young teen on a dive from a cliff into the local quarry, suddenly grows up, engages in truly bad behavior, and distances herself from her crestfallen buddy Lily. They had shared a bed, with limbs entangled, ”an intimate, entwined existence.” With precise and graceful turns of phrase, Bitto reveals the bond of passion between the two girls, which seems unbreakable but inevitably snaps under all that can’t be said. And she delivers all of this with a grace and eloquence which rival that of the young friends’ bond. Jean Zimmerman’s latest novel, Savage Girl, is out now in paperback. She posts daily at Blog Cabin.