Niagara Falls used to be one of the biggest cities in New York. But since the 1960s, its population has fallen by more than half. Now, Niagara Falls must stay above 50,000 residents or lose its status as a city — and millions in state and federal funds that act as life support. As the 2020 census looms, city leaders are bracing for the worst, while experimenting with new ways to attract residents.
A group of respected world leaders who call themselves "The Elders" have made it their goal to find solutions for a host of intractable global problems. Two members, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and former President of Ireland Mary Robinson discuss their accomplishments and ongoing projects.
Both candidates have been on their talking points about high gas prices. But Bloomberg Businessweek contributor Roben Farzad says there's only so much elected officials can do to control prices at the pump. He speaks with host Michel Martin as a part of NPR's "Solve This" series, looking at issues driving the election.
President Obama made history again on Thursday, becoming the first sitting president to vote early in person. His vote came at the end of a three day campaign blitz.
We've been looking at how technology has totally changed what it means to watch television or a movie. One of the biggest changes has been in demand — people want a baseball game — on their smartphone, wherever they are, right now. They want to pull up a video and stream it — on their laptop or phone, immediately, with no wait.
So, where is all this going? If the younger generation is demanding this much from their screens today, what will things look like in a few decades? Jessica Helfand, author of Screen: Essays on Graphic Design, New Media and Visual Culture, tells NPR's David Greene that it's a worrying trend.
More From Our Series
How We Watch What We Watch
Near the end of the 19th century, an 8-year-old Polish Jewish violin prodigy moved to the capital of European classical music: Berlin. Bronislaw Huberman was more than accepted. He was hailed throughout the continent and endorsed by one of his favorite composers, Johannes Brahms. Yet Huberman is now best known for leading an exodus from Europe, a story told by Josh Aronson's documentary Orchestra of Exiles.
In his early years, Huberman was utterly absorbed by music. That preoccupation was economic as well as aesthetic: He began performing at 12 and was soon supporting his family. The kid wasn't a novelty act. "He had the best right hand of anybody," says violinist Pinchas Zukerman, one of several virtuosos who appear in the movie to praise Huberman.
World War I politicized the prodigy, and despite his immersion in German culture, Huberman was not one of those European Jews who considered Nazism a passing fad. When Jewish musicians were banned from teaching, studying and performing with or for non-Jews, Huberman began making plans to relocate the finest Jewish players to Palestine. He's credited with saving about 1,000 people — musicians and their families and friends, and anyone else he could get out of Germany, Austria and several other countries that soon would fall to Hitler's armies.
There are ironies to this story, notably that Huberman himself didn't abandon Europe. As the menace grew, the violinist moved from Berlin to Vienna and then Switzerland. He died in that country in 1947, a year before Israel was established. Huberman was present when the Palestine Symphony Orchestra made its debut in Tel Aviv in December 1936, under guest conductor Arturo Toscanini. But he didn't perform, lest he upstage the new ensemble.
Also, he may have been a little tired. Earlier that year, Huberman played 42 benefit concerts across the United States to finance the orchestra. He capped the effort with a New York fundraising dinner at which Albert Einstein was the guest of honor. Much of the money for the orchestra was raised in the U.S., a country that refused to accept Jewish refugees from Europe.
Part of the lore of Huberman's 1936 tour is that his Stradivarius was stolen backstage at Carnegie Hall. Joshua Bell, who now owns the violin, appears in the movie, but doesn't actually tell the story of how he ended up with it.
Enlarge Pro-Or
The real Palestine Symphony Orchestra, subject of Aronson's documentary.
Journalist Jacqueline Trescott started at The Washington Post in the 1970s, during a time of social and political upheaval. But she made her mark by covering the arts, theater and film. Trescott speaks with host Michel Martin about being a young African-American reporter, starting her career at that tumultuous time.
Actor and comedian D.L. Hughley has never shied away from controversy, offering his tough, unapologetic opinions on race, money, politics and even his family. Hughley joins host Michel Martin share his critique of American leaders and to talk about his new book. Advisory: This conversation may not be comfortable for all listeners.
This weekend, a slew of newspapers in key swing states including Ohio are expected to release their endorsements for the presidency and other elected positions.
Such external validation is highly prized by candidates, but it's no longer entirely clear why.
The Columbus Dispatch gave a strong endorsement of GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney last week, saying President Obama had failed: "Romney brings a wealth of executive experience in the private sector and the public sector that dwarfs that of Obama."
The Dispatch is the dominant paper in central Ohio, a swing region in one of the most vital swing states for this presidential field.
Voters Not Swayed
Yet even those voters who read the paper say they could have guessed who won its endorsement blindfolded.
"The Dispatch is traditionally a very conservative newspaper," said Matthew Burton, a 41-year-old stay-at-home father and Obama fan who lives just outside Columbus with his family. "There's the saying they've always endorsed every Republican since Woodrow Wilson. I'd be more surprised if they endorsed a national Democrat."
In interviews, a dozen voters suggested they put little to no stock in the editorials, even when they read the papers, and even when they fervently agree with those endorsements.
"Honestly, it doesn't influence me at all. There's definitely an underlying mistrust in the media from my perspective," said restaurant manager Mark Piscionari, a Romney supporter who said he preferred "doing my own research and doing my own homework."
"The endorsement really has no impact on my thought — or who I will vote for," said computer consultant Chris Malloy, who said he remained unsure of how he will vote. "My opinion is as valid as the editor of the newspaper, and it's my vote, so I will decide for myself."
"I think the people should be the ones to make the decisions — as opposed to these newspapers," said Himie-Budu Shannon, a deacon at an Episcopalian church. He said he will drive a bus from his church to voting stations on Election Day, a tacit move to get out the vote for his preferred candidate, Obama.
He said it did not influence him for a moment that his hometown Cleveland Plain Dealer strongly supported Obama for a second term. Asked if he remembered when he last relied on newspapers for guidance, Shannon responded: "As a child. Not since I became mature."
Newspapers' Decline
It's not that these Ohioans — and others like them — are not plugged in. They said they follow politics closely through the Drudge Report, NPR, cable news, PBS NewsHour to the Economist and the Guardian. All cited online aggregators such as Google News and Yahoo News.
That's reflective of newspapers' status in many markets: fading print monopolies struggling with sharply reduced paid circulation compared with a decade ago.
Newspapers in some smaller cities dotted across the country still bear names that betray (or honor, take your pick) their partisan roots, such as Foster's Daily Democrat in New Hampshire and the Waterbury Republican-American in Connecticut.
The move toward objectivity as a journalistic aim in reporting mirrored the decline of vibrant multi-newspaper towns, as surviving newspapers wanted to capture readers, not alienate them.
Some major papers, including the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the St. Paul Pioneer Press and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, no longer make presidential endorsements. USA Today never did. And yet campaigns fixate over which candidate has won more, as the Washington Post recently wrote.
On Wednesday, Obama yielded to criticism from the Des Moines Register, the largest paper in the swing state of Iowa, and allowed publication of the full text of his off-the-record interview with the newspaper's executives.
David Holthaus. the new editorial page editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer, set modest goals for the paper's endorsement. He said it's a civic duty to give readers the benefits of the paper's research. The Enquirer is set to announce its choice this weekend.
"What we would like to see is our voice added to the voices across the country," Holthaus said, "and, in that way, present what's important for our community and our readers and have a way to speak directly to the campaigns."
Paul Beck, political science professor emeritus at Ohio State, said such editorials now only really matter for local races — like judgeships.
"People who pay any attention to presidential politics have all this information about it," said Beck, who has tracked elections for more than 40 years. "They've seen the candidates in the debates. They have seen ... countless ads on television — so many that they are probably tuning them out as well. The newspaper endorsements are, I suspect, minor elements, if at all."
Some polling from Pew Research Center and others offers some support for that conclusion.
Can Newspapers Sway Undecided Voters?
One veteran of four Republican presidential campaigns, Dan Schnur, cited two factors: a shift in political strategy and a rise in polarization reflected both in the tone of new media outlets, such as Fox News and the Huffington Post, and the outlook of voters themselves.
"The primary goal of a presidential campaign in the 21st century is no longer to persuade a dwindling number of undecided voters — but rather to find a way to inspire and excite and motivate your strongest supporters," said Schnur, the director of the Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California. "A newspaper endorsement is much more effective at persuading someone who hasn't made up their minds."
And yet — for all that — Schnur, who was the communications director for Republican John McCain's presidential bid in 2000, disagreed with what has become the new conventional wisdom outside political circles.
"If you are the newspaper in the most important swing market in the most important swing state in a very close presidential election, you still matter a lot," Schnur said. "And the Columbus Dispatch endorsement really does matter."
(Dispatch editorial page editor Glenn Sheller declined to be interviewed for this story, writing in an email that he did not trust NPR to treat Republicans or conservatives fairly.)
Schnur said that Republicans could ensure that people far beyond the Dispatch's readership would learn of its endorsement, by incorporating it into TV advertisements, social media updates, radio commercials and direct mailings to convey momentum toward the White House and rally the faithful.
So in this case, Schnur said, limited to a vital battleground region, Buckeye newspaper editorialists might well help stimulate a few more Romney voters to hustle to the polls, and help pick a president.
Some recent numbers suggest housing industry is much better off. New home sales were up 5.7 percent in September, 27 percent higher than last year's levels. That comes on the heels of some other promising numbers out last week on construction activity.
There is a remarkable change going on in Mogadishu, Somalia — often dubbed the world's most dangerous city. For starters, it may not deserve that title anymore.
Last year, African Union forces drove the Islamist militant group al-Shabab out of Mogadishu. Now, Somalia has a new president and prime minister who have replaced the corrupt and unpopular transitional government.
Hope is edging aside despair, and Mogadishu is coming back to life.
It's hard to believe, but people are talking about "the Mogadishu boom." With more and more displaced Somalis moving back to the city every day, now there are traffic jams.
Enrollment at the Hamar Jajab Primary School has doubled since the last academic year. The city's first gas stations and a supermarket are under construction. Scaffolding is up and buildings are getting new coats of paint. There are 15 new radio stations, and with no regulation of anything in Somalia, the FM dial is a free-for-all.
Enlarge Dai Kurokwa/EPA/Landov
This building, like many others in Mogadishu, has been gutted by years of street fighting. Rebuilding will be a massive undertaking, but construction companies are returning.
Annalisa Quinn is the Books intern at NPR.
During my senior year of college, I plowed through all 27,803 lines of the Iliad and the Odyssey in Greek, with a lot of coffee and a reasonable amount of crying in library cubicles.
I loved Homer. But the spare, plot-driven lines of dactylic hexameter left certain essential questions unanswered — was Patroclus cute? Was Helen good in bed? I had read Adele Geras' young adult novel Troy when I was 12 or 13, years before I touched Homer, and it had given me the lasting impression that ancient Greece was a smoldering pit of lust filled with golden-haired virgins. Disappointingly, in Homer, heroes tend to be simply "good," "noble" and, occasionally, "large." This meant that even as I translated the Greek, my head would supply snatches of Troy. I'd read about Zeus and pictured him with eyes "like liquid gold," per Geras' rapturous descriptions.
The Iliad is probably a better poem for never describing the size of Helen's breasts or the exact shade of Paris' hair (a "spun gold," if you believe Geras). But there is something immensely satisfying about the unabashed sentimentalism and lush prose of Geras's Troy after the cryptic sparsity of the original, in which the city falls only by implication, when its hero, Hector, dies. We never see it go down, which is both masterful and frustrating. But Troy provides us with flames, destruction and trysts among the ruins.
The novel follows various Trojan women during the siege and destruction of the city and features several love triangles, an unwanted pregnancy, and sometimes shockingly bad prose ("There's a fire burning in my body, and only you can put it out"). Xanthe and Marpessa are a pair of sisters in love with the same boy, the unsubtly named Alastor (Greek for "vengeful spirit"), and together they survive the deaths of Hector, Achilles, Priam and, eventually, the destruction of the city.
Troy is unrelated to the 2004 film of the same name starring Brad Pitt and his glistening abdominals, but in some ways the two Troys are kindred spirits, both far more focused on Eros than Ares and not above a certain amount of melodrama. That being said, Troy-the-novel has considerably more taste than Troy-the-film, although I feel confident that Geras could have captured the sinister pre-battle gleam of Achilles' hairless chest in prose better than anyone, had she so chosen. Instead, everything in Troy has a sort of vague erotic wash — never pornographic but always suggestive.
Homeric epic has spawned countless literary retellings, some magnificent (Vergil's Aeneid), some odd (Thomas Bridges' A Burlesque Translation of Homer), and some magnificently odd (Statius' Achilleid, a first century Latin mini-epic featuring Achilles in drag). But this soap opera of a novel will always be my favorite example of trashy Homeric fan fiction.
My Guilty Pleasure is produced and edited by Ellen Silva and Rose Friedman.
Russia's Rosneft oil company inked a $55 billion deal to buy out TNK-BP. The acquisition is subject to Russian government approval. But if finalized, it could pump more oil and gas than Exxon Mobil.
On April 8, 2003, in the early days of the Iraq War, the Kachadoorian family found themselves in the middle of a firefight at a major intersection in Baghdad.
They had approached the intersection in three cars and didn't respond to Marines' warnings to stop and turn around; so the Marines opened fire, killing three men and shooting a young woman in the shoulder, not realizing that the people in the car were civilians.
Lu Lobello was one of those Marines. He doesn't know if his bullets were responsible for the Kachadoorians' deaths and injuries, and he maintains that the Marines did exactly what they were trained to do in that situation.
But years later, still haunted by the experience and dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder, Lobello started researching the incident, looking for everything he could find about that day. That's when he stumbled across Dexter Filkins' 2003 account of the tragedy in The New York Times. Lobello says the article helped answer his questions about why the family drove toward the gunfight.
"My reasoning was they were driving toward us, of course they're an enemy. Why would anyone drive towards the sound of a battle?" Lobello tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "And when I read from their point of view, [which] Dexter talked about in his article, it just shook me because it all seemed so plausible."
Filkins tells Gross that, in the early years of the Iraq War, Iraqis driving into American checkpoints led to many casualties. In this instance, the Kachadoorians were trying to get home, which was just around the corner from the firefight.
According to Filkins, the family was confused and too frightened to turn around, because the house they had been staying at had just been bombed. So they decided to try to make it through, with tragic consequences.
"And then if you flip that around, you're like a 20-year-old American soldier; you're scared to death; you don't know what is coming at you," Filkins says.
Enlarge James Hill/Courtesy of The New Yorker
Dexter Filkins earned a George Polk award in 2004 for his coverage of Fallujah. His book, The Forever War, is about his experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The BBC is dealing with its worst crisis in decades. At the heart of the affair: allegations that the late BBC entertainer Jimmy Savile serially sexually abused underage women. The BBC now is having to defend how it handled an investigative report into the charges.
Have you ever seen a rerun episode that made you want to watch more of a show — even a whole season? With so many TV channels and so many shows to keep up with, it's possible that some of them could completely pass you by.
But there are also many ways to watch a show, even if it's no longer on the air. Take the medical drama House, which ended its run on FOX in May.
To watch an episode today, you could go to Netflix, where you can pay $7.99 a month to stream videos. But it only has House DVDs. So you go to Hulu. It has a few episodes. If you pay for Hulu Plus — which costs the same as Netflix — you can watch the final season, the one where House goes to jail.
Finding Popular Shows
While many TV shows are available online, distribution deals often complicate where they can be seen:
Latest season?
Broadcast by
Online
Subscription
Restrictions
Breaking Bad
Yes
AMC ($), Netflix ($)
With cable subscription
Yes
None
Downton Abbey
Not until January 2013
PBS
PBS.org
No, first 2 seasons available online
3rd season is available, but only in the U.K.
House
In syndication
FOX
Final season is on iTunes and Amazon.
Yes
Earlier seasons are available, but cannot be streamed on Netflix.
30 Rock
Yes
NBC
Netflix ($), NBC.com
Depends
NBC.com and HULU stream 5 latest episodes (free). But if you miss them, you can pay Apple or Amazon per episode.
"I'm not crazy," the figure says, standing alone in a dark room, as if trying to convince himself.
"I'm not crazy?" almost a question this time.
"I'm not crazy. I'm not crazy. I'm not crazy!" he yells, finally making up his mind.
And of course, he sounds crazy.
Meet Beeshu, an avatar of the embattled president of Syria, Bashar Assad, rendered in paper mache and mounted on someone's finger. He's the star of the show Top Goon and the inspiration for its title.
The show — a darkly funny series about a group of Syrian characters rendered as finger-puppets — recently created and produced by Syrian activists and posted on YouTube.
But to this day, no one knows their real names.
That's because the regime in Syria is still standing, and those who want to bring it down face detention, beating, sometimes torture, and sometimes death.
An Underground Operation
In other words, the Top Goon team is totally underground.
Watch a few episodes and you'll understand why. Episode Two, "Who Wants to Kill a Million?" is a clear reference to the tens of thousands of people who have died at the hands of the regime since the anti-government uprising began more than a year and a half ago.
In Episode Five, Beeshu's own children begin protesting against him, asking him why the president of the country has to kill so many.
In Episode Eight, Beeshu's father, the longtime dictator Hafez Assad, comes back from the dead and tells him to use maximum force.
YouTube
This episode of Top Goon featured the Syrian president on the left, a member of the security forces on the right, and a photo of the former president, Hafez Assad, who is the father of the current leader.
A new regulation in Greece is requiring supermarkets to label and reduce prices of nonperishable food sold after the recommended day of consumption. The government says such goods have been sold since 1989, but at the same price as nonexpired perishable goods. Now, supermarkets must set the goods aside on a separate shelf and mark the price down. Are Greeks welcoming the change or suspicious about lax regulation?
Russia's Rosneft oil company inked a $55 billion deal to buy out TNK-BP. The acquisition is subject to Russian government approval. But if finalized, it could pump more oil and gas than Exxon Mobil.
Transcript of the third debate between President Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney, Oct. 22 in Boca Raton, Fla., moderated by Bob Schieffer of CBS. Source: Federal News Service
Editor's Note: NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future.
BOB SCHIEFFER: Good evening from the campus of Lynn University here in Boca Raton, Florida. This is the fourth and last debate of the 2012 campaign, brought to you by the Commission on Presidential Debates. This one's on foreign policy. I'm Bob Schieffer of CBS News. The questions are mine, and I have not shared them with the candidates or their aides.
The audience has taken a vow of silence — no applause, no reaction of any kind except right now when we welcome President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney. (Sustained cheers, applause.)
Gentlemen, your campaigns have agreed to certain rules and they are simple. They have asked me to divide the evening into segments. I'll pose a question at the beginning of each segment. You will each have two minutes to respond, and then we will have a general discussion until we move to the next segment.
Tonight's debate, as both of your know, comes on the 50th anniversary of the night that President Kennedy told the world that the Soviet Union had installed nuclear missiles in Cuba — perhaps the closest we've ever come to nuclear war. And it is a sobering reminder that every president faces at some point an unexpected threat to our national security from abroad. So let's begin.
NPR Post-Debate Coverage
Foreign policy takes center stage in 2012's final presidential debate. Whoever wins on November 6th faces difficult challenges on Libya, Syria, China and other issues. At the top of the list: What the U.S. should do about Iran's nuclear ambitions.
Rwanda recently won a seat on the United Nations Security Council. The Rwandan government got the seat despite U.N. reports that it's supporting an armed insurgency inside the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo. Host Michel Martin speaks with Rwandan Foreign Minister Louise Mushikiwabo about the Security Council and the controversy.
Transcript of the third debate between President Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney, Oct. 22 in Boca Raton, Fla., moderated by Bob Schieffer of CBS. Source: Federal News Service
Editor's Note: NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future.
BOB SCHIEFFER: Good evening from the campus of Lynn University here in Boca Raton, Florida. This is the fourth and last debate of the 2012 campaign, brought to you by the Commission on Presidential Debates. This one's on foreign policy. I'm Bob Schieffer of CBS News. The questions are mine, and I have not shared them with the candidates or their aides.
The audience has taken a vow of silence — no applause, no reaction of any kind except right now when we welcome President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney. (Sustained cheers, applause.)
Gentlemen, your campaigns have agreed to certain rules and they are simple. They have asked me to divide the evening into segments. I'll pose a question at the beginning of each segment. You will each have two minutes to respond, and then we will have a general discussion until we move to the next segment.
Tonight's debate, as both of your know, comes on the 50th anniversary of the night that President Kennedy told the world that the Soviet Union had installed nuclear missiles in Cuba — perhaps the closest we've ever come to nuclear war. And it is a sobering reminder that every president faces at some point an unexpected threat to our national security from abroad. So let's begin.
NPR Post-Debate Coverage
Sheila Heti is the author of How Should a Person Be?
My father gave me The Dice Man when I was 13 years old. It's a novel narrated in the voice of Luke Rhinehart, a jaded psychoanalyst, whose home and professional life have become so boring that he decides, one night, to rule his life by the whim of a die. If it turns up a one, he thinks, he'll sleep with his wife's best friend, Arlene.
The book is overtly a stab at the psychoanalytic industry, but is also, I think now, a look at the mind of a gambler and an addict. Luke Rhinehart is both of these things — he's also impulsive, anti-social, and nonconformist. Throw in the randomness of the die, and you get a novel saturated with violence and sex. I asked my father a few months ago, "Why would you give that book to a 13-year-old? Wasn't I a little young?"
"But it was so interesting!" he said.
It was. And for me, it felt like everything. That summer, I foisted my copy onto my best friend, Leah. She read its 300 pages as swiftly as I had done. Then we both began living by the die: "If it turns up even, we'll bum a cigarette from the next guy we see..."
I knew what I really wanted the die for; like it had helped Luke Rhinehart pursue Arlene, I hoped the die would maneuver me closer to the object of my desire: "If it's a one, I will leave Leah's bed when she's asleep and sneak into her brother Jordan's..."
So I had Jordan read the book, and soon he was living by the die. This was deeply maddening to Leah (I pretended to be irritated, too, when he would show up at dinner and place down beside his plate a red die with white dots; copy-cat!), but secretly I was thrilled. Now we all were speaking the same language. Life could begin.
That summer, we played games we otherwise wouldn't have devised, games we took really seriously, that involved stripping and kissing and more, over by the tennis courts near Leah's house, a die spinning in the center of the circle where we sat: Leah, her brother, another friend and I. It was one of the most thrilling periods of my life — the dawning of our adolescent sexuality — and something of that book lodged itself deep within me. I think I never lost the sense that a life lived spontaneously, as if by chance, would always be a fuller, more exciting and truer life, than one led by the earnest evaluation of options.
You don't need a die to gamble. You can gamble by making impulsive decisions, you can gamble with your reputation, by mindlessly spending, or promising impossible things on a whim; it can be an entire way of being. In the book, Luke Rhinehart finds himself in ever more compromising and humiliating scenarios, usually in the presence of those he respects and loves the most, like his colleagues and family. I have, too. Most of us have.
Luke Rhinehart could not be considered an acceptable model for any young person setting out in life. Yet rereading the book, I see the enormous effects it's had on me — good and bad. At age 13, The Dice Man was the perfect tool — the most complicit tool imaginable — behind which I could hide my desires, and eagerly enter the world of adults.
PG-13 is produced and edited by Ellen Silva and Rose Friedman with production assistance from Annalisa Quinn.
At Disneyland, the video game character Swampy the Alligator has edged his way onto gift shop shelves once solely dominated by film characters like Mickey Mouse and all those princesses. He's the star of "Where's My Water?" — Disney's first original mobile gaming hit, with over a hundred-million downloads.
President Obama and GOP presidential nominee Gov. Mitt Romney are getting ready to answer any and all possible questions about foreign policy for Monday night's debate, the last one before the Nov. 6 election.
Iran, Israeli-Palestinian talks and China are among likely topics for the debate — and also major issues awaiting the next president. Each case is a matter of building and maintaining alliances while applying pressure to protect U.S. interests.
In some areas, the heated rhetoric from the candidates on the stump and in the debate may look very different from the actual policies they'll pursue if elected.
Guy Raz, host of weekends on All Things Considered, speaks with three experts about conflicts and countries that are likely to come up in Monday's presidential debate in Boca Raton Fla.
The Panel
Stephen Walt is a professor of international affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and co-author of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.
Jane Harman, a former Democratic congresswoman from California, is president and CEO of the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan policy center.
Richard Perle is a defense policy adviser to many political leaders, most recently to the George W. Bush administration. He's a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy, a center-right think tank.
Enlarge Lucas Jackson /Reuters /Landov
At the U.N. Sept. 27, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used a graphic to show how far he says Iran will be by mid-2013 in a quest to develop nuclear weapons.
Sheila Heti is the author of How Should a Person Be?
My father gave me The Dice Man when I was 13 years old. It's a novel narrated in the voice of Luke Rhinehart, a jaded psychoanalyst, whose home and professional life have become so boring that he decides, one night, to rule his life by the whim of a die. If it turns up a one, he thinks, he'll sleep with his wife's best friend, Arlene.
The book is overtly a stab at the psychoanalytic industry, but is also, I think now, a look at the mind of a gambler and an addict. Luke Rhinehart is both of these things — he's also impulsive, anti-social, and nonconformist. Throw in the randomness of the die, and you get a novel saturated with violence and sex. I asked my father a few months ago, "Why would you give that book to a 13-year-old? Wasn't I a little young?"
"But it was so interesting!" he said.
It was. And for me, it felt like everything. That summer, I foisted my copy onto my best friend, Leah. She read its 300 pages as swiftly as I had done. Then we both began living by the die: "If it turns up even, we'll bum a cigarette from the next guy we see..."
I knew what I really wanted the die for; like it had helped Luke Rhinehart pursue Arlene, I hoped the die would maneuver me closer to the object of my desire: "If it's a one, I will leave Leah's bed when she's asleep and sneak into her brother Jordan's..."
So I had Jordan read the book, and soon he was living by the die. This was deeply maddening to Leah (I pretended to be irritated, too, when he would show up at dinner and place down beside his plate a red die with white dots; copy-cat!), but secretly I was thrilled. Now we all were speaking the same language. Life could begin.
That summer, we played games we otherwise wouldn't have devised, games we took really seriously, that involved stripping and kissing and more, over by the tennis courts near Leah's house, a die spinning in the center of the circle where we sat: Leah, her brother, another friend and I. It was one of the most thrilling periods of my life — the dawning of our adolescent sexuality — and something of that book lodged itself deep within me. I think I never lost the sense that a life lived spontaneously, as if by chance, would always be a fuller, more exciting and truer life, than one led by the earnest evaluation of options.
You don't need a die to gamble. You can gamble by making impulsive decisions, you can gamble with your reputation, by mindlessly spending, or promising impossible things on a whim; it can be an entire way of being. In the book, Luke Rhinehart finds himself in ever more compromising and humiliating scenarios, usually in the presence of those he respects and loves the most, like his colleagues and family. I have, too. Most of us have.
Luke Rhinehart could not be considered an acceptable model for any young person setting out in life. Yet rereading the book, I see the enormous effects it's had on me — good and bad. At age 13, The Dice Man was the perfect tool — the most complicit tool imaginable — behind which I could hide my desires, and eagerly enter the world of adults.
PG-13 is produced and edited by Ellen Silva and Rose Friedman with production assistance from Annalisa Quinn.
In a sterile white boardroom in ABC Family's headquarters in Los Angeles, two young women are assiduously ignoring a spread of cookies in favor of two more important things: their laptops and a live broadcast of the show Pretty Little Liars playing on a large flatscreen TV.
Twenty-eight-year-old Dalia Ganz is the show's social-media manager. She's patiently teaching one of the beautiful young actors on the show how to live-tweet this episode.
"Include #prettylittleliars in your answers," she instructs. That is a literal transcription of her words.
Eric McCandless/ABC Family
The popularity of ABC Family shows like Pretty Little Liars has encouraged mainstream stars like Adam Lambert to get in on the action.
Friday, Twitter agreed to pull racist tweets after a French organization threatened to sue. The company has resisted efforts to police its content. But hate speech is illegal in many European countries, and anti-hate groups there are grappling with how to deal with the challenge of social media.
At the Paris office of the French Union of Jewish Students, Vice President Elie Petit takes calls while he works on his computer. He shows how it all began on Oct. 10. The Twitter hashtag #unbonjuif, or "a good Jew," prompted a flood of anti-Semitic tweets. The tweets poured in for days.
"In France, we don't call this, as Twitter said ... abuse content," Petit says. "This is not abuse content. It's the call for murder of Jews, and this is a crime in France."
Many European countries have strict laws against hate speech targeted at specific groups. The policies evolved in the aftermath of the Holocaust, which came about after years of Nazi hate propaganda.
Petit and his colleagues held a conference call Thursday night with Twitter executives in California and tried to explain the French point of view. But he says Twitter refused to delete the tweets, claiming the demand must come from national authorities or police.
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The slogan "Long Live the Great Communist Party of China" is emblazoned on the wall outside the Beijing compound where the country's leaders live and work.
But now that party is under pressure to change as it prepares for a once-in-a-decade transition of power, which starts at a party congress scheduled to begin Nov. 8.
Change could be in the air in China, as the country's leaders wrestle with the fallout of a damaging scandal encompassing murder, corruption, abuse of power and sex.
Even a staid party publication is warning it faces a dead end if it doesn't move to change its political and social system.
High oxblood walls ring the leadership compound, punctuated by cameras above and policemen beneath. Very few people are party to the intense power struggles that may be playing out inside these walls.
But outside the walls of power, there's growing criticism of the legacy this generation of leaders has left after a decade in power.
"I don't think these 10 years will be seen as having achieved all that much for China," says Susan Shirk, a former State Department official during the Clinton administration and China expert at the University of California, San Diego. "There's tremendous criticism inside China of the way this administration has made a U-turn and set China back."
Discontent From Many Quarters
President Obama and GOP presidential nominee Gov. Mitt Romney are getting ready to answer any and all possible questions about foreign policy for Monday night's debate, the last one before the Nov. 6 election.
Iran, Israeli-Palestinian talks and China are among likely topics for the debate — and also major issues awaiting the next president. Each case is a matter of building and maintaining alliances while applying pressure to protect U.S. interests.
In some areas, the heated rhetoric from the candidates on the stump and in the debate may look very different from the actual policies they'll pursue if elected.
Guy Raz, host of weekends on All Things Considered, speaks with three experts about conflicts and countries that are likely to come up in Monday's presidential debate in Boca Raton Fla.
The Panel
Stephen Walt is a professor of international affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and co-author of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.
Jane Harman, a former Democratic congresswoman from California, is president and CEO of the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan policy center.
Richard Perle is a defense policy adviser to many political leaders, most recently to the George W. Bush administration. He's a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy, a center-right think tank.
Enlarge Lucas Jackson /Reuters /Landov
At the U.N. Sept. 27, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used a graphic to show how far he says Iran will be by mid-2013 in a quest to develop nuclear weapons.