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They've been everywhere this week: dire warnings about threats posed by across-the-board federal spending cuts.

Unless Congress acts, the cuts are due to take effect a week from Friday. The administration is trying to drive home the ways that could affect you.

For example, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood warned Friday that air traffic controllers will have to take unpaid days off beginning in April. Fewer controllers on the job could mean airport delays, and some airlines may decide to cancel flights.

"Look, this is very painful for us because it involves our employees," LaHood said. "But it's going to be very painful for the flying public."

LaHood, a former Republican lawmaker, says he has been calling some of his old colleagues in Congress, urging them to undo the automatic spending cuts.

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Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is known as a deal maker.

In recent weeks, it seems the senator has done his best to get as much ink as possible, talking about things that do play well with the conservatives in his home state, including immigration and gun control.

Graham also held up the nomination of Chuck Hagel as defense secretary to get more answers about what happened in Benghazi, even as he admitted Hagel had nothing to do with it.

Republican senators who have shown moderate leanings have been hit with primary challenges from the right recently, and while no serious challenger has emerged yet in South Carolina, there are a whole lot of people hoping one does.

"There are some legitimate concerns to be asked about Benghazi ... [and] Chuck Hagel," says Tom Davis, Republican state senator in South Carolina. "That being said, I do think it is fair to say that there has been a conscious effort on the part of Sen. Graham to elevate his role in those debates."

Davis says that masks votes Graham has taken that conflict with small government ideals. Graham voted for the bank bailout, once worked on climate change legislation and voted for the recent fiscal cliff deal that allowed taxes to rise on the wealthiest Americans.

"All of those things have caused individuals to wonder whether or not [Graham] is representative of the type of conservative or the type of Republican that we need in Washington, D.C. right now," he says.

For a while, Davis was discussed as a possible primary challenger but he bowed out to focus on his agenda as a state senator.

Graham is widely praised for his constituent services, and his campaign war chest is formidable. He already has $4 million cash on hand, and that is why political consultant Chip Felkel doesn't think Graham has much to worry about.

"He may have opposition from some corners on the right, but at the end of the day it's going to be more talk and less walk," Felkel says.

So far, political action committee The Conservative Club for Growth, often a king-maker in Republican primaries, is still just watching South Carolina.

They've been everywhere this week: dire warnings about threats posed by across-the-board federal spending cuts.

Unless Congress acts, the cuts are due to take effect a week from Friday. The administration is trying to drive home the ways that could affect you.

For example, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood warned Friday that air traffic controllers will have to take unpaid days off beginning in April. Fewer controllers on the job could mean airport delays, and some airlines may decide to cancel flights.

"Look, this is very painful for us because it involves our employees," LaHood said. "But it's going to be very painful for the flying public."

LaHood, a former Republican lawmaker, says he has been calling some of his old colleagues in Congress, urging them to undo the automatic spending cuts.

Related Stories

It's All Politics

A User's Guide To Washington Jargon

No place has been as riveted by Oscar Pistorius and the Valentine's Day shooting death of his girlfriend as South Africa.

But even before this sensational story burst into the headlines, South Africans were fiercely debating issues that are more or less permanent fixtures in this country — crime, and violence against women.

Crime has always been high in poorly policed black areas, and whites have felt it more in recent years as well. It seems most everyone has been victimized, and many more than once. Well-off South Africans live behind high walls, they pay private security firms to patrol their neighborhoods, they have state-of-the-art security systems, and some of them are armed.

So when Pistorius said in court that he mistook his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp for an intruder breaking into his home, he was offering an explanation that struck a chord with many of his countrymen.

Yet South Africa is also a place where violence against women is out of control, from rape on the streets to abuse between a man and his female partner. In fact, before the Pistorious case, the newspapers and talk shows were focused on the gruesome gang rape and murder of teenager Anene Booysen in a small town outside Cape Town.

Public protests and marches that had been planned around the Booysen case went ahead as scheduled this week. The only change the organizers made was to add Steenkamp's name to the long list of victims.

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This interview was originally broadcast on Feb. 7, 2013.

Bradley Cooper, who is nominated for an Academy Award for his performance as the bipolar Pat Solitano in Silver Linings Playbook, tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that he and director David O. Russell approached the role with the idea that Cooper would "play as real and authentic as [h]e could."

The role is informed by Russell's son, who has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Says Cooper: "I definitely felt that anchor for [Russell]."

The film itself is adapted from the novel of the same name by Matthew Quick, and the Pat character is integral to the line it walks between comedy and drama.

“ It was all about being a real tone. ... If you have two characters that have no filter and are going to have a discussion about the medicines that they take, chances are, comedy could, you know, be a byproduct. And that ... occurred when Tiffany Maxwell and Pat Solitano have that discussion around the dining room table about Klonopin and trazodone and all of the various drugs that they take.

Here's a headline that may sound familiar: Miami is in the middle of a condo boom.

Just seven years ago, Miami had a similar surge in condo construction. But it all came crashing down. There was an international banking crisis, and the Florida real estate bubble burst — taking down investors and many developers.

But new towers are once again reshaping the city's skyline.

Peter Zalewski, a real estate consultant with Condo Vultures, says 19 condo towers are now in the works in Miami, with 7,000 total units.

U.S.

Miami's Condo King Changed City's Skyline

Italy's election campaign has been dominated by an upstart comedian-turned-politician whose Five Star Movement is soaring in the polls. The movement is not expected to win in the weekend vote, but its strong presence in Parliament could be destabilizing and reignite the eurozone crisis.

Beppe Grillo is a standup comedian and the country's most popular blogger; 63 years old, with a mane of grey curly hair, he's hyperactive and foul-mouthed. His last name means "cricket," and he's the most charismatic politician in Italy today.

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It's not as elegant as some languages, but neither is it as impenetrable as, say, an economics textbook or the iTunes user agreement.

"We have our own language on Capitol Hill," says Don Ritchie, head of the Senate Historical Office.

That language — the budget terms and political euphemisms that fly freely through the air in Washington, D.C. — often ends up seeping into the nation's discourse.

Reporters and bloggers pick up and spread terms such as "sequester" and "debt ceiling limit." The next thing you know, you just might find yourself using such jargon as you talk with friends about what a mess the country is in. But most people understandably might not be able to tell a COLA from a COBRA. It's primarily Beltway insiders who speak fluent acronym.

"Politics, like any other field, has its own language, its own jargon," says Martin Medhurst, a professor of political science and rhetoric at Baylor University. "It would be an odd field that didn't."

Beltway Berlitz

Match these terms to their correct Washington meaning:

Conference
A) A meeting you hope to sneak out of to play golf.
B) The way the House and Senate align different versions of legislation.

Impoundment
A) What happens to your car after it gets towed.
B) A power presidents had not to spend funds approved by Congress, up until 1974.

Message
A) Something that pops up on your phone.
B) Any thought or idea expressed briefly in a plain or secret language and prepared in a form suitable for transmission by any means of communication.

Oversight
A) Something that has been overlooked.
B) Increased attention to an issue, say, the Benghazi killings.

Reconciliation
A) The course your marriage counselor hopes you'll take.
B) A procedure for matching new budget policies with existing law.

Answers: (B) in every case. The definition for "message" is official Defense Department language. "Oversight" is a trick question, because (B) is correct on Capitol Hill while (A) is correct everywhere else.

— Alan Greenblatt

The New York Times points out something rather interesting about an otherwise mundane business story. Wal-Mart's fourth-quarter earnings report tells the tale of how changes in the tax code has both helped corporations and hurt them.

As the Times puts it, during the fourth quarter of last year, "the tax code gave and the tax code took away."

The paper explains:

"The company reported higher-than-expected fourth-quarter earnings on Thursday of $1.67 a share, up from $1.51 a share a year ago, largely because of tax credits that brought its corporate tax rate lower than usual.

"But the recent payroll-tax increase and an Internal Revenue Service delay in processing tax returns hit consumers, and that affected the holiday period and sales in February. For the fiscal fourth quarter, which ended Jan. 31, sales at stores open at least a year rose 1 percent at Wal-Mart stores in the United States; analysts had expected a 1.7 percent increase."

Citing American slavery to make a point about contemporary politics can be downright tricky business, as some public figures have recently learned firsthand.

Take Rep. Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who's running for the Senate seat previously held by Secretary of State John Kerry. He caused a kerfuffle by citing, in the same breath, the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United campaign-finance decision and the opinion of a much earlier court, the infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision. In that case, the court told a black man seeking to be freed from slavery that he had no constitutional right to sue for his freedom.

Markey's remarks at a Tuesday campaign stop were first reported on BuzzFeed and captured on video and uploaded, of course, to YouTube:

"I want to go to the United States Senate in order to fight for a constitutional amendment to repeal Citizens United. The whole idea that the Koch brothers, that Karl Rove can sa, 'We're coming to Massachusetts, we're coming to any state of the union with undisclosed amounts of money,' is a pollution that must be changed. And the Constitution must be amended. The Dred Scott decision had to be repealed — we have to repeal Citizens United."

Friends in Karachi had me over for a beer Sunday evening. It wasn't hard for them to do. Alcohol is broadly outlawed in Pakistan, but with so many exceptions and so little enforcement, you can usually find something — in this case, tallboy cans of Murree's Millennium Brew from a Pakistani brewery.

Several of my friends were fathers, raising kids in a city where the number of homicides exceeded 2,000 last year. They told me they're not comfortable letting their younger children go out to play. Instead the kids play cricket, the national obsession, in apartment building hallways. One father is holding off buying furniture so his kids can push their bikes around the dining room.

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Tucked away in a back street of Semarang, a city in Indonesia's Central Java province, is a tiny, four-table restaurant. In the cramped kitchen, Mahmudi Haryono whips up a plate of ribs — lunch for two customers.

He brings it out and serves it to two Indonesian soldiers in olive drab uniforms.

Haryono is smiling and cool as a cucumber. But he acknowledges that after getting out of jail a few years ago, serving men in uniform set butterflies aflutter in his stomach.

"Sometimes, I felt insecure," he says, sitting down at a table to talk as the soldiers eat. "I thought that perhaps somebody wanted me to be rearrested. Or maybe somebody was setting me up."

Haryono, a former terrorist, has traded his rifle for a chef's spatula. His broken dreams of global jihad help to explain a little bit why Indonesia — home to the world's largest Muslim population — has not become the hotbed of terrorism that many have feared.

After all, between 2002 and 2009, homegrown Indonesian terrorist groups staged deadly attacks almost every year, making them some of al-Qaida's most effective affiliates. The most prominent of these is the militant group Jemaah Islamiyah.

The Birth Of A Jihadist

After graduating from high school in 1995, Haryono visited an Islamic boarding school founded by Jemaah Islamiyah's spiritual mentor, Abu Bakar Bashir, and run by younger radicals. The turbaned men there were among the very few Indonesians with personal ties to Osama bin Laden. Some of them would go on to stage the notorious Bali bombing in 2002, which killed 202 people, including seven Americans. He also read the work of famous Islamists, such as Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, a leading member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s and '60s.

They inspired him to wage jihad in Bosnia and Afghanistan. But Haryono had no money, and no way to get there.

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Kurt Vonnegut once said, "What makes life worth living are the saints. ... They can be longtime friends or someone I meet on a street. They find a way to behave decently in an indecent society."

And so it is with Gyanesh Kamal, a man I met at India's Kumbh Mela, one of the oldest festivals on Earth. To the uninitiated, this spiritual spectacle is a discombobulating din of prayers, loudspeakers and pilgrims so ceaseless it disorients the senses.

Tens of millions of Hindu pilgrims gather every 12 years for this festival that plays out on the banks of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers in the northern city of Allahabad. Considered to be the world's largest religious festival, the Kumbh Mela lasts nearly two months, with the final bathing day this year on March 10.

On a recent visit, I randomly wandered into the compound of one akhara, or Hindu sect, that dates back 800 years, in search of someone who could enlighten me on the mysteries of this noise and devotion.

Out of nowhere a voice beckoned: "Can I help you?"

I swirled around and found a bear of a man, bespectacled and wrapped in layers of clothes that accentuated his girth.

His invitation began what was to be an eight-hour lesson in Hinduism and humanity.

A Lesson About Fire

Kamal, 56, said the basic tenet of Hinduism is "to know what you are." That earth, water, sky, air and fire are the five elements that life embodies, including the human body.

"Fire?" I asked incredulously.

"Love is a fire," he said, "cruelty is a fire, affection is fire. ... Fire is the beginning and the end in Hinduism. When fire came, man became civilized."

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The rumor mill has been churning out speculation about what's next from Apple. The latest fodder comes from the Apple Insider blog, which found an Apple patent filing pointing to a smart watch with a flexible touchscreen display.

So it seems Apple is throwing the traditional watch look out the window and bringing back the slap bracelet.

Apple filed an application for a "Bi-stable spring with flexible display" with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in August 2011.

The application describes a design that has a flexible display with a strap made of a bi-stable spring made of thin steel. When worn, the watch's "on-board sensors, like gyroscopes and accelerometers, would aid in orienting the screen's information toward the user," Apple Insider noted.

This information still leaves a lot of room for further designing and determining the watch's capabilities. According to Bloomberg, 100 product designers are working on the new watch, which many Apple watchers have dubbed the iWatch. "The team's size suggests Apple is beyond the experimentation phase in its development," Bloomberg said.

Other companies are also interested in bringing smart watches to market. Samsung, one of Apple's largest smartphone competitors, may also be working on one, if rumored leaks are to be believed.

Lunatik debuted as a Kickstarter project in 2010; the company provides iPod Nano owners with a mount and strap to change their device into a watch for $20 to $50. Pebble, also once a Kickstarter, is a $150 smart watch compatible with iPhones and Android that contains a few of its own apps, but is mostly supported by Bluetooth technology.

The eerily Apple-esque i'm Watch from Italy has similar abilities as smartphones, with built-in speakers and a microphone; all information is stored in the "i'm Cloud." With all that hardware, the design is bulky and costs about $400.

Wearable technology seems to be a rising trend, most notably with Google reaching out to the public for ideas for its Glass project. ABI Research estimates that by 2018 — just five years from now — sales of wearable computing devices will hit 485 million units, NPR's Steve Henn notes.

"But smart devices on your eyes or your wrist aren't the only changes in store," Steve says. "A startup called Sonitus could replace your ear buds and Bluetooth cyborg accessory with a device you slip over your molars. It uses bone conduction in your head to transmit sound. Google filed a patent to use bone conduction in connection with Google Glass."

Pretty soon, carrying around a smartphone will be so old school.

Lizzy Duffy is an intern on NPR's Social Media Desk.

We've all heard that drone strikes directed against al-Qaida and other militants have been on the rise, but now Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC), has put a number on deaths by U.S. unmanned aerial vehicle: 4,700.

Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, rattled off the death toll during a talk he gave to the Easley Rotary Club in Easley, South Carolina, Tuesday afternoon.

"We've killed 4,700," Graham said.

"Sometimes you hit innocent people, and I hate that, but we're at war, and we've taken out some very senior members of al-Qaeda," he added.

But as The Hill notes, the CIA and Pentagon have yet to publicly disclose the actual casualty count from U.S. armed drone operations.

Unofficial casualty estimates stemming from armed drone operations have put the death toll at between 1,900 to 3,200. Most of those strikes have taken place in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere in the Mideast and North Africa.

However, Graham's spokesman Kevin Bishop told The Hill on Wednesday the senator was not quoting actual casualty figures provided by DOD or Langley, but citing independent analysis of the program.

The Academy Award-nominated documentary 5 Broken Cameras tells the story of Bil'in, a modest Palestinian village perilously close to an Israeli settlement in the West Bank.

After the Israeli government began putting up its West Bank separation barrier, Bil'in resident Emad Burnat picked up a video camera, and in 2005 began a multiyear documentary project.

Israelis say the barrier has been successful in preventing Palestinian attacks, including suicide bombings. Palestinians argue that the barrier has cut them off from agricultural land and effectively serves as a border slicing through territory the Palestinians believe should be part of a future state.

Maximina Hernandez says she begged her 23-year old son, Dionicio, to give up his job as a police officer in a suburb of Monterrey. Rival drug cartels have been battling in the northern Mexican city for years.

But he told her being a police officer was in his blood, a family tradition. He was detailed to guard the town's mayor.

In May 2007, on his way to work, two men wearing police uniforms stopped Dionicio on a busy street, pulled him from his car and drove him away. That same day, the mayor's other two bodyguards were also abducted. Witnesses say the kidnappers wore uniforms of an elite anti-drug police unit. The three men haven't been seen since.

'It's So Bleak'

At a weekly meeting at a downtown Monterrey human-rights center, relatives of the disappeared hold hands and pray. There is no shortage of heartbreaking stories here, says Sister Consuelo Morales Elizondo.

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Kurt Vonnegut once said, "What makes life worth living are the saints. ... They can be longtime friends or someone I meet on a street. They find a way to behave decently in an indecent society."

And so it is with Gyanesh Kamal, a man I met at India's Kumbh Mela, one of the oldest festivals on Earth. To the uninitiated, this spiritual spectacle is a discombobulating din of prayers, loudspeakers and pilgrims so ceaseless it disorients the senses.

Tens of millions of Hindu pilgrims gather every 12 years for this festival that plays out on the banks of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers in the northern city of Allahabad. Considered to be the world's largest religious festival, the Kumbh Mela lasts nearly two months, with the final bathing day this year on March 10.

On a recent visit, I randomly wandered into the compound of one akhara, or Hindu sect, that dates back 800 years, in search of someone who could enlighten me on the mysteries of this noise and devotion.

Out of nowhere a voice beckoned: "Can I help you?"

I swirled around and found a bear of a man, bespectacled and wrapped in layers of clothes that accentuated his girth.

His invitation began what was to be an eight-hour lesson in Hinduism and humanity.

A Lesson About Fire

Kamal, 56, said the basic tenet of Hinduism is "to know what you are." That earth, water, sky, air and fire are the five elements that life embodies, including the human body.

"Fire?" I asked incredulously.

"Love is a fire," he said, "cruelty is a fire, affection is fire. ... Fire is the beginning and the end in Hinduism. When fire came, man became civilized."

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Afghan President Hamid Karzai issued a decree in 2009 banning violence against women. But the parliament, which is currently on its winter recess, has been unable to pass it and give it permanence as a law.

There's major disagreement on key provisions where Islamic and secular law come into conflict. And activists say the gains made in women's rights since the fall of the Taliban in 2001 are slipping away.

Masooda Karokhi, a female member of parliament, has been pushing to get the proposal through the male-dominated legislature.

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A Different Perspective

Although this type of augmented, advanced technology seems to make things easier and readily accessible, for some, it can't replace the little things in life. As NPR's Linda Holmes wrote last year:

"I don't want my glasses to remind me, 'See Jess tonight 6:30.' I want to suddenly remember that I'm meeting Jess at 6:30 and have it make me smile — 'Oh, hey, this is the night I'm hanging out with Jess!'"

The movie Beasts of the Southern Wild is a fairy tale of a film. It might not seem to have much in common with documentaries about evangelical Christians in Uganda or the billionaire Koch brothers. But these films were all funded by a not-for-profit group called Cinereach. It was started by a couple of film school graduates who are still in their 20s. And now, with Beasts, it has a nomination for Best Picture at this year's Oscars.

Cinereach funded almost all of the $1.5 million budget for Beasts of the Southern Wild, the immersive art-house film about a child who's figuratively and literally adrift in Louisiana swamp country. Named Hushpuppy, and played by youngest-ever Best Actress nominee Quvenzhane Wallis, she vows to survive: "They think we're all gonna drown," she says. "But we ain't going nowhere."

The movie has earned more than $12 million, along with multiple awards and Oscar nominations.

Michael Raisler, at 27 years old, is one of the Best Picture nominee's producers and the creative director of Cinereach, which he founded with Philipp Engelhorn when the two were classmates at New York University's film school. They found that they shared a love for movies and a passion for social change. "Our key goal is to support what we call 'vital stories artfully told,' " he says.

As they learned about the film business, Raisler and Engelhorn learned that the money didn't go to the good movies; it went to the movies that would make more money. Engelhorn decided he wanted his film production company to be separate and apart from worries about commercial viability: "We're not protecting a potential upside or profit potential; we're protecting the vision."

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Sometimes behind what appears to be a mere grammatical issue hides a much deeper question of meaning.

The reader can easily check, after glancing at a handful of books and articles, including here at 13.7, that the word "universe" sometimes is capitalized and sometimes not. How is that decided, exactly? And who decides it? A choice is being made every time an author (or, more realistically, an editor) refers to the cosmos as "Universe" or as "universe." Let's ponder the reasoning behind this choice.

The most common position and, in my opinion, the worst, is to simply adopt "universe" indiscriminately. [Editor's note: That's largely what we've done here on 13.7, until today.] But what universe is this, exactly?

According to modern cosmological theories, and the burgeoning field of philosophical cosmology, we must be careful when we refer to the cosmos. There are several "universes" and so a distinction is essential for clarity.

Let's anchor our discussion on the most concrete knowledge we have, our observations. This is a choice already, one that shows my own preference to stay close to the spirit of the physical sciences, that is, to what is empirically validated.

We know that the information we can obtain about the cosmos, what we can "see," is limited in two ways. First, since nothing travels faster than light, information from a far away object like a galaxy takes time to reach us. Second, the cosmos we live in is time limited, starting 13.7 billion years ago in the event we call Big Bang (capitalized or not? [Editor's Note: Not. But we can change that policy today, too!]).

Putting the two together, we conclude that, at most, we can receive information (in the form of electromagnetic radiation — light, radio waves, etc.) from objects that emitted it 13.7 billion years ago. A bit more precisely, since the first stars and galaxies appeared around 200 million years after the "bang," our limit is for objects that emitted information some 13.5 billion years ago.

What exists beyond this information boundary — called the "horizon" — is inaccessible to us. (There are different kinds of "horizon," but we will stick with this one for clarity.) So, we can talk of the "observable universe," that comprises everything that we can measure (and what we can't yet). This part of the cosmos, that we know is out there, I like calling the Universe, since it's a concrete entity that includes all that we can know. Its boundary, the horizon, sits at a distance of about 46 billion light-years from us, the distance traveled by light in 13.7 billion years. (Why not 13.7 billion light-years away? Because the ongoing cosmic expansion gives light a boost, increasing its traveled distance by roughly a factor of three.)

But the Universe doesn't necessarily end at the boundary of what we can see. Very possibly, it extends beyond the measurable.

In fact, from a different vantage point in space, the observable universe will extend into different regions, that, like partially overlapping soap bubbles, may or not include ours. This is somewhat like the horizon we see from a beach; we know the sea goes on even if we can see it directly.

This continuation of the cosmos beyond the visible into regions which, presumably, are not so different from what's within our Universe, I call the universe. I don't think it deserves the "U" because we can only infer its existence and don't really know what's there. We can speculate that what's beyond the horizon won't be very different from what we see within it, but we can't be sure. (Unless we wait a real long time ... ) According to this choice, despite the "u," the universe contains the Universe.

Is that logical? You be the judge. It's hard to say when you don't have all the facts in hand.

Regardless, we must continue on. After all, today we speculate that the universe may not be unique, but part of a vast entity called the "multiverse." The multiverse itself may contain an enormous number of universes, possibly even an infinite number of them, although infinite is not something we can ever measure. We just don't know if the multiverse exists.

Worse, it seems to be impossible to confirm its existence, given that it naturally extends well beyond our Universe. At most, as some colleagues have calculated, we may obtain information of neighboring universes, if they have collided with ours in the past. (So far, we don't have anything indicative that this has happened.) Even so, to know of a neighbor or two is not the same as knowing about a country or a continent with hundreds of millions of people, or of an infinite multiverse. Concretely, we only have our Universe, even if our ideas may fly boundless across expanses beyond what we know.

Not a bad deal, really, given that we know so little of what's going on right here within our own cosmic information bubble.

Time again for a home-viewing recommendation from NPR movie critic Bob Mondello. Today, Bob suggests a tale of moral crisis — On the Waterfront, in a freshly restored Blu-ray version from Criterion.

Mugs and palookas, racketeers and dockworkers, mob boss Lee J. Cobb running the union with an iron fist, Marlon Brando tripping up its control when Eva Marie Saint urges him to go to the feds and rat out the rats.

"I've never met anyone like you," she tells him when he demurs at first. "There's not a spark of sentiment or romance or human kindness in your whole body."

"What good does it do you," he asks, "besides get you in trouble?"

Director Elia Kazan knew from trouble. Two years before making On the Waterfront, he'd named names in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, becoming the most notorious Hollywood figure in the Communist witch hunts of the 1950s. Though screenwriter Budd Schulberg always denied a connection to the film's plot, Brando's character is also called to testify, and is also castigated and reviled before giving a full-throated defense of his testimony.

Kazan wrote many years later, in 1988, that he intended the parallels: "When Brando, at the end, yells at Lee Cobb, the mob boss, 'I'm glad what I done — you hear me? — glad what I done!' that was me saying, with identical heat, that I was glad I'd testified as I had."

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Consumer prices were flat in January, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says. But a driving force behind that good news has reversed itself since then. According to BLS, gasoline prices fell 3 percent last month. In February, though, gas prices have risen sharply. So watch for next month's BLS report on consumer prices to tell a different story.

Also this morning, the Employment and Training Administration reports that the number of first-time claims for jobless benefits rose by 20,000 last week, to 362,000. The increase was slightly larger than economists expected.

For the most part, the number of weekly claims has stayed within a range of 350,000 to 400,000 since the fall of 2011. They've been another in a series of signs that the U.S. labor market is only slowly recovering from the 2007-09 recession.

A Different Perspective

Although this type of augmented, advanced technology seems to make things easier and readily accessible, for some, it can't replace the little things in life. As NPR's Linda Holmes wrote last year:

"I don't want my glasses to remind me, 'See Jess tonight 6:30.' I want to suddenly remember that I'm meeting Jess at 6:30 and have it make me smile — 'Oh, hey, this is the night I'm hanging out with Jess!'"

The murder case against South African athlete Oscar Pistorius was "dealt serious blows" on Thursday, as The Guardian puts it, when it was revealed in court that the lead investigator faces attempted murder charges himself. They stem from an unrelated incident in 2011.

Detective Hilton Botha, prosecutors told the court, faces seven charges of attempted murder. He and two other police officers are accused of firing at a "minibus taxi loaded with passengers," the Guardian adds. They were allegedly drunk at the time.

Prosecutors said they had not known until Wednesday about the charges against Botha, reports South Africa's News 24.

As The New York Times writes, "the disclosure seemed to present one more setback for the prosecution's efforts over days of hearings to deny bail for Mr. Pistorius."

The Times adds, though, that "South African news reports said the 2011 shooting happened when the officers were pursuing a man accused of murdering and dismembering a woman before putting the body parts into a drain. ... Mr. Botha was quoted in South African news reports as denying claims that he was drunk during the alleged shooting. He said he and other officers had aimed at the wheels of the minivan without causing injuries."

Unless Congress acts, across-the-board spending cuts scheduled to take effect March 1 will be felt throughout the government. Some of the most visible effects will be noticed by air travelers.

Officials predict that cutbacks at the Federal Aviation Administration could lead to takeoff delays and fewer flights overall.

The FAA's work is done largely out of public view, in airport control towers and regional radar centers, in hangars and workshops. But if the spending cuts, known in Washington-speak as sequestration, start taking effect on schedule, the importance of that backstage work will move front and center.

Danny Werfel of the Office of Management and Budget said at a Senate hearing last week that the sequester will take a toll at the FAA.

"FAA is going to face a cut of roughly $600 million under sequester," Werfel said. "A vast majority of their 47,000 employees will be furloughed for one day per pay period for the rest of the year, and, as importantly, this is going to reduce air traffic levels across the country, causing delays and disruptions for all travelers."

In a letter to agency employees, FAA Administrator Michael Huerta said the temporary layoffs would require "a reduction in FAA services to levels that can be safely managed by remaining staff."

Marion Blakey, who used to head the FAA and is now CEO of the Aerospace Industries Association, says she agrees cutbacks will not go unnoticed.

"If sequestration goes into effect, level-headed people all over this town, all over Washington, are saying, 'Yes, it will have a major effect on the aviation system,' " she says. "And this isn't doomsday; this isn't some sort of science-fiction plot that we're all talking about. This is reality, and it's reality coming up next month."

Blakey says more than 2,000 air traffic controllers will be furloughed at one time or another, and there will be ripple effects.

"It's one of those things that when you start cutting back on service, it affects even community airports, because, after all, they don't have the flights coming in," she says. "The landing fees, the concessions, the parking lot — all of those sources of revenue suffer."

Blakey says that could mean an annual loss of $1 billion in tax revenues.

It's not only controllers who face furloughs. There are thousands of FAA technicians, who fix equipment such as radar and navigation systems.

It's All Politics

Whose Sequester Is It Anyway?

Maximina Hernandez says she begged her 23-year old son, Dionicio, to give up his job as a police officer in a suburb of Monterrey. Rival drug cartels have been battling in the northern Mexican city for years.

But he told her being a police officer was in his blood, a family tradition. He was detailed to guard the town's mayor.

In May 2007, on his way to work, two men wearing police uniforms stopped Dionicio on a busy street, pulled him from his car and drove him away. That same day, the mayor's other two bodyguards were also abducted. Witnesses say the kidnappers wore uniforms of an elite anti-drug police unit. The three men haven't been seen since.

'It's So Bleak'

At a weekly meeting at a downtown Monterrey human-rights center, relatives of the disappeared hold hands and pray. There is no shortage of heartbreaking stories here, says Sister Consuelo Morales Elizondo.

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The New York Times Co. will continue shedding assets, this time announcing it is looking to sell The Boston Globe.

The New York Times reports the company said it was looking to sell off the Globe and "other New England properties" to "focus energy and resources on its flagship newspaper."

The Boston Globe reports the Times bought the paper in 1993 for $1.1 billion, "a record in the newspaper business."

The Globe adds:

"The Times Co. last tried to sell the Globe in 2009, after first threatening to shut the newspaper down because it was losing money. After receiving wage cuts and other cost-saving concessions from Globe employees, the Times Co. decided not to sell at that time, because it had received bids lower than it had hoped from two different business groups.

"Since then, the Times Co. has sold a number of its other properties. The Globe and its online businesses BostonGlobe.com and Boston.com turned an operating profit in 2012, according to people involved in the company's results."

Another pleasure of The Jackal's Share derives from the whirlwind travel that Webster's investigations demand. That aforementioned dinner conversation takes place in Dubai, where Webster has flown for a meeting with Qazai's son. The descriptions of Webster's hotel — the soaring and surrealistic Burj Al Arab, with its opulent restaurants and lowly Indian and Thai service workers — lend a touch of decadence to this tale, as do the images of Qazai's tasteful townhouse in London and his golden villa on Lake Como. Webster's surroundings, though, aren't always so lavish: In particular, his unplanned stay in a Moroccan jail is redolent of what Raymond Chandler dubbed "the smell of fear." That smell becomes overpowering when Webster's own family falls in danger of being sacrificed to his obsessions.

Webster is yet another incarnation of that familiar figure in suspense fiction: the guy who just can't leave well enough alone. While his boss at Ikertu seems content to take Qazai's money and write up an agreeable character testimonial, Webster can't restrain his hotshot tendencies.

In Jones' much-acclaimed debut novel, The Silent Oligarch, published in this country last year, Webster chased down gangsters and crooked bureaucrats in the crumbling former Soviet Union; here, he's running himself ragged in the Middle East and North Africa, among other environs. The fact that there's corruption aplenty around the globe and that Webster seems to have stamina in reserve is terrific news for fans of first-class thrillers.

Read an excerpt of The Jackal's Share

The Academy Award-nominated documentary 5 Broken Cameras tells the story of Bil'in, a modest Palestinian village perilously close to an Israeli settlement in the West Bank.

After the Israeli government began putting up its West Bank separation barrier, Bil'in resident Emad Burnat picked up a video camera, and in 2005 began a multiyear documentary project.

Israelis say the barrier has been successful in preventing Palestinian attacks, including suicide bombings. Palestinians argue that the barrier has cut them off from agricultural land and effectively serves as a border slicing through territory the Palestinians believe should be part of a future state.

On the extension of the tours of duty in 2007

"When the tours were extended ... especially in 2007, all these troops in Iraq and Afghanistan were about to go home, and then their tours were extended three or four months. It wasn't something that really registered for me as a reporter in Washington, D.C., at the time, but when I was reporting this book it became very clear that it was one of the more traumatic events of the deployment for the troops there in 2006-2007. They thought they were going home: 'We have survived. We made it. I only have two more days and then I'm going home. I will see my wife. I will see my baby. I survived. I lived.' ... And all of a sudden word came in that their tours were extended three or four months. It was crushing ... because they were convinced that this decision would mean somebody would lose their life who ultimately would not have."

On writing explicitly about the effect of weapons like RPGs on the human body

"I just thought it was important that people actually know what the effect of a rocket propelled grenade on the human body is. It's amazing to me that I'm in my 40s and I'm a journalist and I've covered these wars, and I had no idea and I really couldn't find much description out there. I had to go to a special Army medical journal to find what the effect of an RPG is on the human body: the fact that first comes the shock wave and then comes the shrapnel."

On how covering an on-the-ground story about Afghanistan changed the way he thinks about the way the war is discussed domestically

"I had been covering the back and forth with [Afghan President Hamid] Karzai and the White House and President Obama, and I had been covering the White House's views of the election in Afghanistan in August 2009 and how corrupt it was and how riddled with problems the entire process was, but what was missing from my coverage — and this is one of the reasons I wrote this book — is what does that mean for Pfc. Kevin Thomson, stationed in the mortar pit at the bottom of three steep mountains in Kamdesh? What does that mean for Spc. Stephan Mace? Because it did have a direct effect.

More On 'The Outpost'

The Two-Way

Medal Of Honor Recipient Thinks About Men 'He Was Not Able To Save'

On what Facebook could be doing to help stem cyberbullying

"Facebook has a lot of influence over kids who are mean. They know from their own data that when they tell kids that they've posted something inappropriate [and] they ask them to take it down, those kids don't re-offend. Facebook's line on this to me was that they have a very low recidivism rate, and so to me, that suggests that Facebook can really use its influence to the good with kids in a way it has been reluctant to do so far, because it doesn't want to be seen as uncool."

On one bullying situation that Bazelon feels was handled intelligently by school counselors and administrators

"[The guidance counselor] decided one of those relationships [among the three girls] was a pretty equal relationship, and she could sit two of the kids down together, and they had enough residual trust and liking for each other that they might be able to talk it out with her help. And she did that, and in fact the girls told me that they had found that helpful. But then when the girl who was really the main bully in this scenario ... this guidance counselor decided, you know, 'This isn't going to work to sit these kids down together because it may be that the bully will say what she thinks the adult wants to hear in the room, and then there will be all kinds of consequences once the kids leave.'

"And so with that girl she sent that girl to the principal — and in this school it was unusual for kids to get sent to the principal for discipline, he was kind of reserved for the harder cases — and I asked that girl what this meeting was like. She said, 'You know, he appealed to me for help. He said, 'Look, we have a problem and you're the one who can stop it.' And she liked the idea that he was turning to her and that she had had this moment with him, and so she cut it out. She said that she felt like she wanted to help him in the way he had asked."

Read More On Bullying

Education

In Bullying Programs, A Call For Bystanders To Act

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Mitt Romney will make his return to the political world at next month's Conservative Political Action Conference, the host American Conservative Union announced Wednesday.

"The thousands gathered at CPAC this year are eager to hear from the former 2012 GOP presidential candidate at his first public appearance since the elections," ACU Chairman Al Cardenas said in a statement. "We look forward to hearing Governor Romney's comments on the current state of affairs in America and the world, and his perspective on the future of the conservative movement."

The conference, being held March 14-16 outside the nation's capital, will also feature a string of high-profile potential 2016 presidential contenders, including former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin; former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush; Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul; Florida Sen. Marco Rubio; and Romney's running mate, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan.

Romney dropped out of the 2008 presidential race at that year's CPAC conference.

He attended last year's event at a time when he was slogging through a series of Republican primaries. In his speech, Romney called himself "a severely conservative Republican governor" — a phrase that won immediate derision from both his primary rivals and the likes of Rush Limbaugh.

S.V. Dte is the congressional editor on NPR's Washington Desk.

New Zealand seems to be the destination of choice for wayward Antarctic penguins.

The BBC reports that a Royal penguin was found Sunday washed ashore on a beach in New Zealand, where another penguin, a three-year-old emperor dubbed "Happy Feet," turned up in June 2011. Months later, Happy Feet was released, ostensibly destined for a return to his homeland. Sadly though, he is believed to have been eaten, possibly by a shark, sometime after his release into the Southern Ocean.

Veterinarians say the latest arrival, "Happy Feet, Jr.," is being cared for at a Wellington Zoo. Scientists there believe the "young male" may have departed about a year ago from a breeding colony on Macquarie Island, more than 1,200 miles away, and drifting been around since then.

The BBC quotes Lisa Argilla, a vet at the zoo, as saying the flightless aquatic bird had possibly struggled to find enough food and come ashore to go through his seasonal molting.

"It's very weak, doesn't want to stand. It's making very small progress every day but it's still in critical condition," Ms. Argilla told the TVNZ channel.

Argilla told the French news agency AFP that Happy Feet, Jr. was having some kidney trouble and she said "hopefully we can reverse that, feed him up and bring him back to good health," but she added that it's "touch and go for at the moment."

The penguin was found on Sunday by Jenny Boyne, who was walking along Tora beach on New Zealand's Wairarapa coast, says The New Zealand Herald.

"She saved this bird's life. I don't think he would've survived another night without veterinary attention," Argilla said.

Stepping forward now because he thought others were about to "breach this privacy," former New Mexico Sen. Pete Domenici has told the Albuquerque Journal that he fathered a son outside of his marriage more than 30 years ago.

The mother is Michelle Laxalt, the daughter of another prominent Republican politician — former Utah Sen. and Gov. Paul Laxalt. Their son is Adam Paul Laxalt, a lawyer in Nevada according to the Journal.

Domenici told the Journal that Michelle Laxalt had asked that he not reveal Adam's parenthood "and I have tried to honor that pledge and so has she."

In a statement, Michelle Laxalt said she and Domenici felt they now have to reveal the news because "recently information has come to me that this sacred situation might be twisted ... and shopped to press outlets large and small in a vicious attempt to smear, hurt and diminish Pete Domenici, an honorable man, his extraordinary wife, Nancy, and other innocents."

Adam Laxalt "participated in the drafting" of Domenici's statement, the former senator told the Journal.

Domenici added that his "past action has caused hurt and disappointment to my wife, children, family and others. For that I am solely responsible. My family has been aware of these events for several months. I have apologized as best as I can to my wife, and we have worked together to strengthen our relationship." Domenici and his wife have eight children.

Domenici, 80, served in the Senate from 1973 to 2009. Michelle Laxalt is a Washington-based lobbyist who, as Politico says, "frequently appears on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, Fox Business, and Canadian TV to provide news analysis." The Associated Press reports that "public records show she is now 58 and her son is 34." Adam Laxalt was born during Domenici's and Paul Laxalt's first terms in the Senate.

The Washington Post notes that:

"Domenici is not the only lawmaker (or former lawmaker) to have hidden a child. Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), who is unmarried, recently disclosed that he had a 24-year-old daughter whom he learned about three years ago. A 2008 drunken driving incident led former Rep. Vito Fossella (R-N.Y.) to acknowledge his long-running affair and out-of-wedlock daughter. Essie Mae Washington-Williams, the mixed-race daughter Strom Thurmond kept secret for 70 years, died earlier this month. She revealed her parentage only after her father, a former senator from South Carolina, died in 2003."

Friends in Karachi had me over for a beer Sunday evening. It wasn't hard for them to do. Alcohol is broadly outlawed in Pakistan, but with so many exceptions and so little enforcement that you can usually find something — in this case, tallboy cans of Murree's Millennium Brew from a Pakistani brewery.

Several of my friends were fathers, raising kids in a city where the number of homicides exceeded 2,000 last year. They told me they're not comfortable letting their younger children to go out to play. Instead the kids play cricket, the national obsession, in apartment building hallways. One father is holding off buying furniture so his kids can push their bikes around the dining room.

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Former Democratic Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr.'s once-bright political career is expected to officially end Wednesday morning in a Washington, D.C., courtroom.

As NPR's David Schaper tells our Newscast Desk, the son of Rev. Jesse Jackson is expected to plead guilty to a federal criminal charge that he used campaign funds on lavish personal expenses. The younger Jackson's wife, former Chicago alderwoman Sandi Jackson, is expected to plead guilty later today to having knowingly filed false tax returns.

It was just last Friday, as Eyder reported, when Jackson Jr. was charged with misuse of campaign funds and word broke that he was expected to plead guilty. The Chicago congressman had resigned his seat last November — shortly after winning reelection — as allegations grew that he had used campaign money to purchase, among other things, a $43,000 watch, a $4,600 fedora once worn by Michael Jackson and $5,000 worth of furs.

All told, it's estimated that about $750,000 of campaign funds were misspent on personal goods and services.

Today's court hearing could reveal more details about Jackson Jr.'s "alleged crime spree," says the Chicago Tribune. It adds that "attorneys familiar with public corruption investigations said the amount of campaign cash allegedly converted to personal use in this case is the largest of any that they can remember."

"Sentencing is not expected for several weeks," writes the Tribune. "Jackson Jr. faces up to five years in prison, while [his wife] faces up to three years, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia." They have two children, according to the newspaper: "a 12-year-old daughter and a 9-year-old son."

Jackson Jr., 47, spent most of 2012 away from his office on a medical leave. It was later revealed that he was being treated for bipolar depression.

We'll watch for news from today's court hearing and update this post later.

One of the more popular things on the site is a bust of Yoda, and some designers on Thingiverse are doing amazing things with it. Someone turned it into a vase for flowers, another used math (fractals) to hollow it out in an incredibly beautiful, illegal way.

"Yoda is not just something we can copy and duplicate — Yoda is protected by copyright," says Michael Weinberg, a lawyer at Public Knowledge, a group that advocates for an open Internet.

He recently wrote a couple of white papers on 3-D printing, copying and the law. He says even when designers take an object like that and change it, it's still legally protected.

"That at least triggers a copyright analysis," he says. "So the question is sort of two fold."

The first question that arises is copyright violation, Weinberg says. Someone might be worried about copyright infringement when creating some incredible Yoda bust. But the real question is how the owners, Lucasfilm and Disney, react to that, he adds.

So far, the two companies haven't done anything. But the era of benign neglect on Thingiverse may be coming to an end.

'Sue The Genie Back Into The Bottle'

Recently, Moulinsart, which owns the rights to the cartoon Tintin, served Thingiverse with a Millennium Digital Copyright Act takedown notice. The company insisted that the site remove printing designs of Tintin's cartoon moon rocket.

Weinberg says Moulinsart was well within its legal rights, but he thinks the move was a mistake. People printing out copies of Tintin's rocket were the company's mega-fans, he says. Instead of attacking them, Weinberg adds, the company would have been better off selling digital designs to print out Tintin himself.

Moulinsart didn't respond to our request for comment.

"The technology is coming whether we like it or not," Weinberg says. "And so, as a CEO of one of these companies you can spend a lot of time and money trying to sue it out of existence — and sue the genie back into the bottle — or you can spend that same time and money and apply it towards finding a way to use the technology to your advantage."

Reader's Digest, the venerable magazine that has battled declining readership, may be in trouble: Its parent company has filed for bankruptcy protection for the second time in less than four years.

RDA Holding Co. said Sunday it plans to emerge from Chapter 11 in less than six months, adding that the restructuring will allow its debt to be cut by about 80 percent, to $100 million in that time. The magazine will continue to be published during the period.

The company said a group of secured noteholders were giving the company $45 million to support its operations during the process as part of a $105 million loan to pay off its exiting bank debt.

"I think it probably is the end for Reader's Digest," David Sumner, professor of journalism at Ball State University, tells our Newscast unit. "It's facing problems from two or three different levels – from declining readership, advertising, more so than the vast majority of American magazines."

The average reader of the magazine, Sumner says, is .her 50s, and her household income is between $50,000 and $60,000.

"It has one of the least attractive audiences for advertisers," he says.

The company has taken several steps amid declining revenue. Here's more from The Associated Press:

"As revenue declines, Reader's Digest has been selling off some of its assets. Its food website Allrecipes.com went for $175 million last year, and it sold its Every Day with Rachael Ray cooking magazine in late 2011. Meredith Corp., publisher of the Better Homes and Gardens magazine, bought both.

"Reader's Digest paid circulation fell 0.6 percent to 5.5 million at the end of last year, according to the Alliance for Audited Media. That was about where it stood after cutting its guaranteed circulation in 2009. But in 1995, Reader's Digest had circulation of more than 15 million."

For 2013, Levins is working with the John James Audubon house in Key West, Fla., recreating local delicacies like turtle soup, oysters on the half shell, okra, Spanish limes and a roasting pig. And Mount Vernon has commissioned her to make 70 pieces of meat —whole hams, hog jowls, middlings (bacon slabs) and pork shoulders — for its newly refurbished smokehouse. It's said that of all the food produced at Mount Vernon, Martha Washington was particularly proud of her hams.

When she gets a commission, Levins dives into the history books, researching the period, location and socio-economic background of the site's former inhabitants. She has several shelves of period cookbooks that she turns to for insight, and also finds visual inspiration in the still-life paintings of Golden Age Dutch masters – who taught the rest of the world a thing or two about making art that looks good enough to eat.

"You need a good eye for color and subtle shading if your foods are to look like the real thing," she says.

Clay, papier-mch, and plaster of Paris can all be raw ingredients for Levins' inedible vittles, depending on the look she's going for. Strips of rubber latex work great for sauerkraut, she says. What doesn't make the cut? Organics – as in materials that could attract critters or mold.

Over the years, Levins' work has taken over the first floor of her New Jersey home — with half-sculpted roast pigs' heads looming over the family room couch. And her family knows not to go digging through the freezer, less they stumble upon one of the less-appealing real foods she uses as a model — say, a raw beef tongue.

Ironically, perhaps, for someone whose personal space is now dominated by food, Levins says she hates to cook.

But she loves history.

This interview was originally broadcast on Dec. 13, 2010.

The HeLa cell line — one of the most revolutionary tools of biomedical research — has played a part in some of the world's most important medical advances, from the polio vaccine to in vitro fertilization.

The cell's power lies in its immortality, or ability to be kept alive and grown indefinitely. But few people know that the cells originally belonged to a poor Southern tobacco farmer named Henrietta Lacks who was being treated for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins University when her doctor reserved samples of her body tissue for his research. Lacks died of cancer 60 years ago, but her cells — taken without her knowledge or consent — are still alive today.

Writer Rebecca Skloot spent years researching Lacks and tells her story in The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks.

Skloot tells NPR's Neal Conan that in 1951, when Lacks' cells were first harvested, there was a different understanding of what doctors could and could not do.

"We didn't even have the concept of informed consent that we have today," she says. "Taking of tissue samples was absolutely standard — but so was doing things like injecting people with radioactive material to see what kind of harm that would do."

Skloot says that 60 years ago, doctors could never have known what their experiments would lead to.

"They didn't know what DNA was, they didn't know what we could someday learn from these samples," she says. "So the idea that there would some day be rights associated with cells would just have been baffling to them."

This interview was originally broadcast on Dec. 13, 2010.

The HeLa cell line — one of the most revolutionary tools of biomedical research — has played a part in some of the world's most important medical advances, from the polio vaccine to in vitro fertilization.

The cell's power lies in its immortality, or ability to be kept alive and grown indefinitely. But few people know that the cells originally belonged to a poor Southern tobacco farmer named Henrietta Lacks who was being treated for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins University when her doctor reserved samples of her body tissue for his research. Lacks died of cancer 60 years ago, but her cells — taken without her knowledge or consent — are still alive today.

Writer Rebecca Skloot spent years researching Lacks and tells her story in The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks.

Skloot tells NPR's Neal Conan that in 1951, when Lacks' cells were first harvested, there was a different understanding of what doctors could and could not do.

"We didn't even have the concept of informed consent that we have today," she says. "Taking of tissue samples was absolutely standard — but so was doing things like injecting people with radioactive material to see what kind of harm that would do."

Skloot says that 60 years ago, doctors could never have known what their experiments would lead to.

"They didn't know what DNA was, they didn't know what we could someday learn from these samples," she says. "So the idea that there would some day be rights associated with cells would just have been baffling to them."

Abraham Lincoln's black stovepipe hat is an icon. It seemed to enhance his height, emphasize his dignity and, I suppose, keep his head warm.

There is a stovepipe hat at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Ill., soiled and slightly brown with age. Lincoln is said to have given it to William Waller, a farmer and political supporter in Jackson County, Ill., and kept by his family for decades.

But that veracity of Lincoln's hat has been questioned. This week several members of the state panel that oversees the Lincoln library called for the Illinois State Police to conduct DNA testing of the hat to see if Abraham Lincoln ever really wore it.

"I think we have a credibility gap with this hat," said board member Tony Leone.

Waller's family had kept the hat, along with the story that Lincoln had given it to the farmer as a token of thanks for his support at one of his famous 1858 debates with Stephen A. Douglas. But the Chicago Sun-Times has discovered a 1958 affidavit in which a Waller descendant says Mr. Lincoln gave her father-in-law the hat "during the Civil War in Washington."

Of course there was no cellphone camera to record the moment the hat was handed over; no tweet to bleat, "Look what some Illinois pol gave me instead of a windshield scraper!"

Louise Taper, the California collector who donated the hat to the library, says she is untroubled by what the newspaper takes to be a discrepancy.

"Family stories get muddled and mashed together all the time," she told us.

By the way: The hat fits. It's 7 1/8 inches — Lincoln's head size — and in those days, top hats were custom-made. It also bears the mark of his Springfield hat maker.

Over the years, every scrap of paper on which Abe Lincoln scribbled is preserved and analyzed. But when William Waller got that hat, be it in Illinois or Washington, Abe Lincoln was on the edge of failure — losing a senatorial campaign or a civil war — not the kind of fame that got his face carved into mountainsides.

But farmer Waller kept that hat his whole life and passed it on to his son, who was a five-term state legislator who died in 1956. His second wife sold it to a collector and attached that affidavit.

James Cornelius, the Lincoln library's curator, told us that calls to test the hat for DNA are even worse than a bad idea." DNA tests on a 160-year-old hat would not be conclusive and could harm what is, after all, not a bloody shirt in a murder trial, but something that's been deemed a historical artifact. And the suggestion that the hat be vacuumed for traces of Abe Lincoln's dandruff just made him laugh. In the end, Lincoln's legend is larger than a size 7 1/8 hat.

Last year, Payam Rajabi got a new job and had to leave Toronto and his girlfriend, Clare, and move to San Francisco. All that left him feeling a little down — until he came up with his upsy, downsy valentine idea.

He jumped on his bike, opened his iPhone to a map of San Francisco, and tracking himself with a GPS, he rode 27 miles around the city, taking 2 1/2 hours, burning 1,135 calories and carefully etching a heart shape onto a city map ... like this ...

Gentlemen of a certain age might make a nostalgic note that today, Valentine's eve, is the 80th birthday of Kim Novak.

One of Miss Novak's most famous movie roles was in Picnic, where she played the gorgeous ingenue who could've married the son of the richest man in town but instead fell for a hunk of a bum who was an old football star.

Picnic is being revived on Broadway, as is Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, where — guess what? — Maggie, played by the beautiful Scarlett Johansson, is married to a hunk of a bum who is a former football star.

I bring this up especially because last month, Brent Musburger, doing play-by-play for ESPN, was pilloried for allegedly being sexist because he gushed about how Miss Alabama was going out with the Alabama quarterback.

Of course she is.

If Mr. Musburger was guilty of anything it was failing to note what a cliche he was dealing in. As Tennessee Williams and William Inge and scores of lesser writers have written, it is all so true: Beautiful women fall for football stars — especially quarterbacks.

If football had been around in Shakespeare's time, the Bard would've had Juliet ditch Romeo for Flacco. "Flacco, Flacco, wherefore art thou Flacco?"

Where have you been, critics of Brent Musburger? Going back before Jane Russell fell for Bob Waterfield, through Joe Namath and on past Tom Brady, pretty ladies have thrown themselves at field generals.

But, we seem to have a new trend this Valentine's. More and more, athletes are falling in love with athletes.

Why, Danica Patrick is actually going out with a competitor race driver, Ricky Stenhouse Jr.; the No. 1 golfer in the world, Rory McIlroy, is canoodling with Caroline Wozniacki, who used to be the No. 1 tennis player.

Love seems to have worked better for the golfer. He went to the top of the rankings after the romance started, while Ms. Wozniacki nosedived.

Give her a ring, Rory. After all, another top tennis player, Maria Kirilenko, recently became engaged to Alex Ovechkin, one of the best hockey players in the world, and Maria's been on a tear ever since Alex proposed.

And now comes the news that Tiger Woods, who rather famously — or infamously — prefers blondes, is at least "good friends" with Lindsey Vonn, the great skier.

When Vonn had a terrible accident on the Austrian slopes last week, the gallant Mr. Woods sent his private plane to fetch her — sort of the modern equivalent of Sir Walter Raleigh spreading his cape in the puddle for her majesty.

There've been a few all-athletic romances in the past — Ralph Kiner and Nancy Chaffee, Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf, Florence Griffin and Al Joyner, Nomar Garciaparra and Mia Hamm — but perhaps especially now that there are so many more female athletes, sports stars are connecting in the workplace just like everybody else.

However, even at Valentine's, quarterbacks still seem to prefer beauty queens, and vice versa.

Let's make this perfectly clear at the outset: I don't work for NPR, and what I'm about to say doesn't represent NPR. I'm but a lowly freelancer they're dumb enough to publish a bunch, and what I say now I say as me, which is to say:

1. An inveterate Superman nerd, and

2. A gay dude.

DC Comics has hired Orson Scott Card to write the first two issues of a new digital-first Superman comic. I won't be reading it.

It will be the first piece of Superman-affiliated pop culture that I will bypass in my 45 long and geeky years on this planet, and I am a man who saw Superman IV: The Quest For Peace in the damn theater. (Jon Cryer as Lex Luthor's bitchin' New Wave nephew Lenny! Superman repairing the Great Wall of China by STARING AT IT, because suddenly "spackle-vision" is evidently a thing he's got now! A banana-yellow villain in a gold-lam codpiece!)

(... OK, the codpiece was pretty rad, actually.)

Why will I be giving Card's Superman a miss? Three reasons.

First: Card isn't just a guy whose opinions I happen to disagree with. Trust me, the comics industry is rife with writers, artists and editors whose politics I don't share, who hold views they're quite public about in interviews and various internet forums, and I would defend — to the mild inconvenience! — their right to hold those views. This isn't about that.

Card is different. Card is an activist. He sits on the board of the National Organization for Marriage, an entity entirely devoted to attacking and defeating marriage equality, and spending millions and millions of dollars lobbying to do so.

(One comics site has warned that boycotting Card's Superman book represents the kind of thinking that "leads to witch hunts." OK. I mean, I generally associate the term "witch hunt" with innocent people getting falsely accused and pressed to death by stones, not with one hugely successful millionaire bigot having to explain to his accountant why a side-project made an infinitesimal amount less money than he'd hoped it would, but let that go.)

Second: If Card were writing any other character — Ant-Man, Matter-Eater Lad, Batroc the Leaper — even a high-profile character like Iron Man, whom he did write for a while — you wouldn't see this reaction.

Because Superman is different.

Superman is not a superhero. He's the superhero. He created the very concept of the superhero, and everything that's touched on that concept for the past 75 years — we are talking vast swaths of popular culture — exists because of him. Regardless of how you feel about Superman and superheroes, you can't deny the cultural impact the character has made, and continues to make. Why, someone could write an entire book on the subject. And call it Superman: The Unauthorized Biography, say. And have it published by Wiley on April 1. And make it available for pre-order now.

The third reason I'm skipping Card's Superman is to me the most central, and most personal, and it has less to do with how popular Superman is, and much more to do with who he is. And what he stands for.

Superman is an ideal. He represents our best self. That's what he's for.

He's not the hero we identify with — that's what Spider-Man is for. Spider-Man worries about rent, and girlfriends, and his sick Aunt May still, again, some more. In him, we see ourselves as we are.

In Superman, we see ourselves as we hope to be. It's right there in the name — he's not "Pretty Good Man" or "Doesn't Suck Man"; he's Superman. He personifies our noblest ideals, ideals we believe in, and strive for, but only inconstantly attain: Truth and Justice, but also Fairness and Compassion.

He is a man born with tremendous gifts, who could do anything he wants. Anything at all. And what he chooses to do, first and always, is to help others.

In Action Comics #1 from 1938, Siegel and Shuster slapped together a one-page origin story in which he discovers his powers. We don't actually see him in the baby-blue longjohns until the very last panel of this introduction.

But when we do see him for the very first time, these are the first words that appear directly below, the first epithet applied to this newly minted creation as it was unleashed upon the world:

Champion of the Oppressed.

There it is, coded into his creative DNA from the very beginning: He fights for the little guy.

And that's why this bugs me, and why I'm not the least bit curious about what Card's Superman might be like.

DC Comics has handed the keys to the Champion of the Oppressed to a guy who has dedicated himself to oppress me, and my partner, and millions of people like us. It represents a fundamental misread of who the character is, and what he means.

It is dispiriting. It is wearying. It is also, finally, Not For Me.

One of the other nicknames that accrued to Superman right away – that predates "Man of Steel" by a good amount – is "The Man of Tomorrow." And much of his early iconography bears a distinctive Socio-Realist, Diego Rivera vibe: Lots of burnished golden sunrises, eyes raised to the horizon, gazing into the future.

Because that's where he lives, Superman. And that's what he says to us: We can do better. We can be better, to ourselves, and to each other.

Hey, DC Comics? Be better.

North Carolina National Guardsman Tracy Johnson is an Iraq War veteran and an Army widow.

She is also one of the first gay spouses to lose a partner at war since the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell."

On Feb. 14, 2012, Tracy married her longtime partner, Staff Sgt. Donna Johnson. But eight months later, Donna was killed by a suicide bomber while serving in Khost, Afghanistan.

"That day, I had a bad feeling," Tracy tells her mother-in-law, Sandra Johnson, during a visit to StoryCorps. "I immediately starting scouring the news websites, and it said that ... three U.S. soldiers were killed in Khost, Afghanistan, and I knew, obviously, that's where she was stationed."

But she had to wait to find out if her fears were legitimate.

"I knew that any communication about Donna was going to come to you guys because even though we were married, I wasn't considered her next of kin," Tracy says.

Donna's sister called and told Tracy that people from the military were at her mother's house. Tracy grabbed a copy of their marriage certificate and went to the house.

"I said, 'You know, I am her wife and I brought documentation,' " she recounts. The notification officer looked at it and asked for a copy.

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