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I hope we've heard the last of people saying, "This would never be a scandal in Europe." They usually mean "sex scandal," and by now I think Americans are entitled to boast that we've become as blase about politicians with their pants down — or, in the case of Anthony Weiner, pec-flexing with his shirt off — as Europeans like to think they are.

Mr. Weiner is now running for mayor of New York. This week Eliot Spitzer, the former governor who resigned following a scandal, announced that he'll run for New York City comptroller.

One of his opponents on the ballot, by the way, is the madam of the "escort service" of which the governor was once a customer. I'll bet Martha Raddatz and Jim Lehrer would arm-wrestle to moderate that candidates' debate!

In recent years a whole string of briefly-disgraced politicians of both parties have run and won following the kind of scandals that were once presumed to leave an American politician so shattered they'd have to become lobbyists.

When the story of President Clinton's involvement with a White House intern broke in the 1990s, I had a sandwich someplace one night — some people might call it a bar — and heard a happy cacophony of accents, gossiping.

They were British, French, and Italian reporters chirruping, "You Americans are such Puritans. This would never be a story in our country," after which I wanted to ask, "Then what brought you all the way over here?"

President Clinton was acquitted at his impeachment trial; he still soars near the top of those Most Admired Person in America polls.

But we may not be blase in the European manner. A lot of the American politicians who have run for office following sex scandals say that enduring such public disgrace has deepened their character. As Mr. Spitzer told the Morning Joe show this week, "You go through that pain, you change."

So Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's former prime minister, is unapologetic about what are called his "bunga-bunga" parties. But American politicians stray and say that it builds character.

If any group is entitled to complain that they've been maligned by the press blaring about such scandals, it's not politicians. It's Puritans.

This week Edmund S. Morgan, the distinguished historian of early America, died at the age of 86. In The Puritan Dilemma and other books, Mr. Morgan, in the words of the Washington Post, "showed that the Puritans had a healthy interest in sex, despite their reputation for dour rectitude."

I guess you don't become Founding Fathers by "dour rectitude" alone. It turns out that not even the Puritans were such Puritans.

When an oil-laden train derailed last weekend, it turned into an inferno that killed dozens in Lac-Megantic, a small town in Quebec.

This week, the Canadian tragedy is morphing into something very different. It is becoming Exhibit A in the political case for building pipelines — as well as for opposing them.

How could the same tragedy prove opposite points? Listen in to the debate:

"With the ongoing increases in shale oil production in states like North Dakota, Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico, it's likely that shipments of oil by rail could double again within a few years, significantly increasing the likelihood of a rail disaster in the U.S., like the one in Canada," Mark Perry, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote on the conservative research group's website.

Those vast new supplies of oil should be moved through pipelines, not on tracks, he argues.

At the same time, pipeline opponents say the rail catastrophe bolsters their real point — that oil and gas are simply too dangerous to transport by any method over long distances. Lac-Megantic proves that it's time to leave fossil fuels behind and move on to much safer wind- and solar-energy options, the argument goes.

The Canadian calamity will increase "public consciousness of the dangers inherent in transporting oil and oil products," Andrew Leach, an energy economist at the University of Alberta, wrote in an op-ed essay. Moreover, it will lead to "increased calls for alternatives to oil rather than alternative means of transporting oil."

The word battle, being fought out in blog posts and editorial pages, has a focus: the Keystone XL pipeline. The White House is still weighing the potential impact of building a 1,179-mile, 36-inch-diameter oil pipeline, which would transport Canadian heavy crude oil to the Texas Gulf Coast.

In March, the U.S. State Department released a Draft Supplementary Environmental Impact Statement saying the pipeline would cause "no significant impacts to most resources along the proposed Project route."

Still, the Obama administration has not decided whether to issue a construction permit while awaiting further study. "The State Department is going through the final stages of evaluating the proposal," Obama said last month during a speech about climate change.

Pipeline supporters say that no matter what environmentalists want to dream about for energy in the distant future, the reality today is that the world is thirsty for oil. And that means oil is going to move — one way or another — from the wellhead to the refinery. And right now, Canadian oil production is booming, so it needs to get to refineries and global markets.

As oil production has surged in North America, energy companies have increased the number of U.S. rail shipments of crude oil and refined petroleum products to 356,000 carloads in the first half of this year, up 48 percent from the same period last year, the Energy Information Administration said Wednesday.

Perry of the American Enterprise Institute argues that as these shipments increase, dangers will multiply for people living near railroad tracks. "The Keystone XL pipeline makes perfect economic and perfect environmental sense, and it's only politics that will hold up its approval," he said.

Pipeline opponents say the Lac-Megantic catastrophe should push Obama to commit the nation to building a new infrastructure dedicated to solar and wind power sources. Stopping Keystone now "prevents a massive piece of essentially permanent fossil fuel infrastructure from being established," wrote Chris Tackett, the social media editor for Treehugger, a website focused on "sustainability."

That final report is not expected until at least late summer or early fall. If the project gets a green light from the Obama administration, the pipeline would be carrying 830,000 barrels of oil every day from Canada to U.S. refineries.

Saying that the post has been "the highlight of my professional career," Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced Friday morning that she is stepping down to become president of the University of California.

Her statement followed a U.S. Reuters report that broke the news.

And the Los Angeles Times reported earlier in the morning that:

"Napolitano's nomination by a committee of UC regents came after a secretive process that insiders said focused on her early as a high-profile, although untraditional, candidate who has led large public agencies and shown a strong interest in improving education."

The morning's major economic news:

— Inflation. Wholesale prices rose 0.8 percent in June from May, fueled by a 2.9 percent surge in the price of energy products, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says. As drivers can confirm, a 7.2 percent jump in the cost of gasoline was responsible for most of that boost.

Reuters says the overall increase in wholesale prices was "more than expected" and may be a sign that the economy is picking up speed — which in turn could mean that the Federal Reserve will soon feel it can stop trying to give the economy a boost.

— The Fed. Bloomberg News reports that "Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers is indicating to President Barack Obama's Wall Street supporters that he wants to become Federal Reserve chairman, according to people familiar with the matter, as he keeps in touch with senators who would vote on the nomination."

Summers was Treasury secretary in the later years of the Clinton administration, and was a top economic adviser to President Obama during his first term in office.

Bernanke's second term as chairman expires Jan. 31, 2014. It's thought he does not want to stay on and that President Obama will be looking for a new person to lead the central bank.

The battle for the city of Dera'a in southern Syria has become a test of an American pledge to give military support to rebels fighting Syrian President Bashar Assad. After a string of defeats, the rebels have scored rare victories around Dera'a.

But in interviews,rebel commanders passing through neighboring Jordan say those gains could be lost without a dependable arms pipeline and promised U.S. support.

Yasser Aboud, a thin, intense former colonel in the Syrian army, commands the joint operations center for southern Syria.

"We have made excellent gains on the ground," he says, "liberating entire villages."

Aboud explains that the rebels now control a significant area just north of the Jordanian border all the way to Al-Balad, a neighborhood in the historic district of Dera'a.

But the Syrian army has mounted a counteroffensive, he says.

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"NSA leaker" Edward Snowden is set to meet Friday at Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport with representatives of Russian and international human rights organizations, Russia's RIA Novosti is reporting.

Afterward, he'll reportedly issue or make a statement.

USA Today adds that Transparency International, a global corruption watchdog, is among the organizations expected to be there. It "confirmed to USA Today that the group received an invitation from Snowden, in which he says that as someone who openly advocates human rights he wanted to meet with activists."

Snowden, who is wanted for prosecution in the U.S. over the secrets he spilled to The Guardian and The Washington Post about National Security Agency surveillance programs, has been living in legal limbo at the airport since he arrived there from Hong Kong on June 23. Snowden has reportedly been in the airport's transit zone since then. He's seeking asylum in another country.

Among the most likely places he could end up: Boliva, Nicaragua or Venezuela. As we reported Thursday, many are watching closely (and jumping at any and all rumors) to see where he ends up.

Snowden's meeting with the groups is reportedly going to happen in the late afternoon, local time — around 9 a.m. ET. We'll watch for news from it.

For centuries, the act of refusing food has turned human bodies into effective political bargaining chips. And so it's no surprise that the prisoners desperate to leave Guantanamo after, in some cases, nearly a dozen years there, have turned to hunger strikes on and off since 2005 to try to win their release.

For years, the Pentagon officials who run the detention camp have responded by force-feeding prisoners. Currently, some 45 of the 104 hunger-striking captives are receiving the procedure, as many people learned this week when a graphic video featuring Yasiin Bey, the rapper and actor formerly known as Mos Def, went viral. While Bey's performance may be part publicity stunt, doctors say it does help expose the unethical treatment and some of the pain of the Gitmo detainees subjected to force-feeding.

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The spotlight on Egypt has focused on the the political fallout from the military coup that toppled an elected but deeply unpopular government. But if you think Egypt's politics are a mess, just consider the economy.

Tourism, a major revenue generator, has been hurting since the Arab uprisings of 2011 that toppled Hosni Mubarak. Foreign investment has shriveled. Unemployment in many industries has soared. Inflation has risen, making everyday goods more expensive. And there's a black market in currency and fuel.

"Over the last few months, there have been shortages of diesel fuel for trucks, long lines at gas stations," says Samer Shehata, an assistant professor of Arab politics at Georgetown University. "More recently, there have been gasoline shortages, and long lines for personal cars. There have also been electricity outages — sometimes during the day."

These are just short-term problems, says Caroline Freund, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. But they are problems that must be tackled by Egypt's interim government.

"What you have in the short run is a real need of a semblance of stability and security so tourism and investment can come back. Because the economy can't come back without that," she says.

But there are deeper problems the country faces in the long run: high unemployment, an overly regulated private sector, which benefited from crony capitalism under Mubarak; and expensive fuel and food subsidies, which must be reduced if Egypt is to get a much-needed loan from the International Monetary Fund.

"They need to create 600,000 new jobs each year just to absorb the new entrants to the labor market, and they don't have the economy to generate that many jobs," says Bruce Rutherford, an associate professor of political science at Colgate University. "This is the core challenge."

Part of the problem is a private sector that hasn't grown fast enough.

"One of Egypt's core structural challenges is to create a private sector that can compete in the global market," says Rutherford, author of Egypt after Mubarak: Liberalism, Islam, and Democracy in the Arab World. Right now they can't, he says, because Egyptian goods can't match the quality and price of goods from Asia that are so popular in the global marketplace.

"The long-term issues will take some time to address," Freund says. "Part of the problem is that in tackling them you may add to the short-term pain that is already present. But right now, the most urgent thing is political stability."

There are some signs that help is on the way. In response to Mohammed Morsi's ouster as president, the United Arab Emirates has pledged $3 billion to Egypt, Saudi Arabia pledged $5 billion and Kuwait $4 billion.

And some of the chronic problems under Morsi — long fuel lines, high crime — seem to have diminished almost overnight. The New York Times notes that some of the sudden improvements in Egypt suggest a conspiracy to undermine the deposed Muslim Brotherhood president.

NPR's Leila Fadel is also reporting on the post-Morsi changes:

"At a gas station in central Cairo, Mohsen Fahmy waits to fill up his tank. But today there is no hours-long line.

"Everything is available now, he says.

"Almost overnight, the power cuts and diesel shortages that have plagued Egypt are mysteriously gone.

"Analysts say it's a sign of just how uncooperative the entrenched anti-brotherhood bureaucracy was when [Islamist President Mohammed] Morsi was in power.

"And now that it has been knocked out of power, liberal Egyptian businessmen say they're ready to put money back in Egypt, says business tycoon Naguib Sawiris: 'People like us who have held back now for two years will come back now and we will start with ourselves, we won't wait for others to come. Because if the Egyptians don't invest in their own country, who's going to believe in their country?' "

"On a recent trip to Afghanistan, I uncovered a potentially troubling example of waste that requires your immediate attention."

That's one of the opening lines of a letter the U.S. special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction sent to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel this week. In it, Special Inspector General John Sopko detailed how a contract worth $34 million was used to build a facility U.S. troops will never use.

It's the latest in a string of reports on waste from Sopko, who recently detailed how the U.S. spent more than $770 million on aircraft for Afghanistan that its military can't use. In some cases, the best solution to the problem may simply be to demolish the facilities and destroy the equipment.

"If Congress appropriates the money, they will spend it," Sopko says of the U.S. military's construction arm, in a conversation with NPR's Robert Siegel on today's All Things Considered.

As for how this situation came to be, Sopko cites the reluctance to re-open complicated funding legislation as one possible reason. Getting answers has been complicated, he writes, due to the regular rotation of military and civilian personnel at bases in Afghanistan.

"The joke in my office is, we will eventually see a base where on one side of the base they're destroying it, while on the other side they're building it," Sopko says. "And they will probably meet in the middle."

The facility in question is at Camp Leatherneck, the U.S. Marine base in Helmand Province. The history of the project, originally intended as a command center for the "surge" of U.S. troops into Afghanistan, reveals gaps in planning, coordination, and execution, Sopko says.

Called the Regional Command-Southwest Command and Control Facility, the new building offers 64,000 square feet of space for more than 1,000 military personnel, including accommodations for a three-star general. It's the "Taj Mahal" of command centers, Sopko tells Robert.

"However, even under the best case scenario, only 450 people may be able to use the building today," Sopko told Hagel in his report, "which would result in excessive operation and maintenance costs because the cooling systems would be underutilized."

The Afghan government also isn't likely to be able to use the facility because it was built to U.S. standards — its electrical system uses 60 Hertz (cycles per second) and 120 volts, for instance, instead of the Afghan standard of 50 cycles and 220 volts, according to the report.

The Army asked Congress to fund the command center back in February of 2010, Sopko says. Less than three months later, a request was submitted to cancel the project. But it was begun anyway, and was completed last November.

"After the Army said it would not use the facility, the Marines were supposed to move in," Sopko tells Robert.

But in 2010, Sopko says, the Marine Corps general said, "I don't want it, don't build it, I won't use it. So stop construction. A year later, construction began."

When Robert asks if the project may have proceeded because no one wanted to cancel the contract for a private U.S. business, Sopko says he's still investigating why the construction was ordered to proceed — and who gave that order. But he doesn't fault the contractor, he says.

"The contractor did what they were told," Sopko says. "It's actually the best building I have ever seen in Afghanistan. It's better than my current headquarters — it's better than the Pentagon."

"It's just useless, you're saying," Robert says.

"It's just useless. It's a $34 million waste of the taxpayers' money," Sopko answers.

"This is just the tip of the iceberg," he says. "There are plenty of buildings, and plenty of equipment that was purchased, that is not needed."

To the question of whether such projects were begun even as the U.S. military was pulling out of Afghanistan, Sopko says, "Oh, absolutely."

Aside from the financial impact, such construction projects can also come at an extremely high cost to everyone who works on them, as they require U.S. troops to provide security from militants' attacks during construction.

"People have lost their lives over that — building these buildings, or building roads, or building culverts — that we're never going to use," Sopko says. "That's the real tragedy of it."

And in proof that his earlier joke — about the military tearing one building down, even as they're building it — wasn't made entirely in jest, Sopko describes a recent finding by the Pentagon's inspector general, who just last month noted that the new command center's emergency exits had safety problems.

"So they spent another $100,000 to make repairs on a building that they're tearing down," he says.

Asked how that can be, Sopko says, "One hand doesn't know what the other hand is doing."

A veteran investigator, Sopko has been in his current position for about a year. And he says that despite the poor execution of construction projects that he has detailed, things are beginning to improve.

"We are starting to see people in the executive branch listen to us, and make some changes; we've seen a number of proposals in legislation coming out of our recommendations," he says. "So, we're getting their attention and we're slowly trying to turn around the ship. But a lot of money has already been wasted."

Earlier this year, a report by the Government Accountability Office found that U.S. agencies had "allotted $79.7 billion for reconstruction and relief in Afghanistan between fiscal years 2002 and 2012."

As for the command center in Afghanistan, Sopko says, "We're going to find out who continued the construction after the general said, 'Don't build it.'"

SIGAR Report On Camp Leatherneck In Afghanistan

The Republican Party seems like two parties these days. In the Senate, Republicans joined a two-thirds majority to pass an immigration bill. But in the House, Republicans are balking.

Strategist Alex Lundry says it's hard to figure out the way forward when your party's base of power is the House of Representatives.

"One problem we have in the wilderness is that there are a thousand chiefs," he says. "And it is hard to get a party moving when you don't have somebody at the top who is a core leader who can be directive."

One such leader was supposed to be Marco Rubio, the charismatic, young Hispanic senator from Florida. Of all the prospects for the GOP presidential nomination in 2016, Rubio has been the most visible. He took a leadership role on immigration, and he's been taking it on the chin from his party's anti-amnesty base.

Pete Wehner, a former aide to President George W. Bush, says conservatives gave Rubio the benefit of the doubt at first. But within the past month or so, he says, "Rubio has absorbed a lot of blows, and the criticisms against him have really amped up," Wehner says. "And he's going to emerge from this immigration debate in some respects a weakened and wounded figure."

If Rubio does run for president, he will have to compete in early states like Iowa. Steve Deace, an Iowa conservative activist and talk show host, says Rubio's support of a path to citizenship for immigrants in the United States illegally has hurt him.

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* A Minnesota father berates a Target manager after a coupon mailing offers his teen daughter a discount on baby furniture and maternity wear, only to discover that the young woman is in fact already pregnant. (Data mining? Working like it was designed to.)

* A New York City comic, frustrated with his experience at an Apple Genius Bar, takes to Facebook to quote Fight Club on the virtues of the Armalite AR-10 semiautomatic, after which a New York City SWAT team pays him a visit — and not to discuss the cinema.

* British police use social-media traffic to pre-emptively arrest a gaggle of London street-theater types made up as a zombie wedding party, holding them for more than 24 hours so 2011's royal nuptials could proceed without risking the involvement of braaaaains.

There's more, including the one about the AOL data dump suggesting that this one guy might have been planning his wife's murder ... or might have been a TV crime-drama writer Googling for plot ideas. But you get the idea: There's a lot of detail about you out there, and it's subject to a whole lot of scrutiny — and an awful lot of potential misinterpretation.

As for that second question, Hoback and his team suggest, with a kind of enervated fatalism, that between the headlong rush to make a killing on search and social media and a political establishment not eager to preside over another Sept. 11, there's not much hope of re-bottling the privacy genie.

To put it another way: With the Facebooks and the AT&Ts of the world hungry to know you better for the bottom line's sake, and with the government empowered to ask them to pass along what they know without the bother of a Fourth Amendment search-and-seizure test, the goose of privacy has been cooked, sauced and served.

But then we, the film points out gently but sternly, are as culpable as any gung-ho G-man or grasping Google exec for the situation we find ourselves in. The assembled privacy activists, from ACLU attorneys to the bespectacled, bemused musician Moby, are quick to point out that our hungry adoption of a digital lifestyle has meant the creation of a culture in which everyone's an informant on a scale the Stasi could never have dreamed of.

Each shared selfie, each sepia-toned short video, each oh-so-clever status update, under these Terms and Conditions, is an opt-in that involves a certain measure of surrender — to a new status quo we've been astonishingly willing to (click) accept.

Many whose attendance in God's house on a weekly basis was mandatory will sympathize with the young Jeffrey banging his head against the pew in boredom or furtively reading human biology books in his father's office. Or with the a-w-k-w-a-r-d scene in which he shares his newfound apostasy with his parents — an announcement that meets with silent, blank stares.

On the other hand, Brown conveys his own sense of the divine in small moments: a stubbed toe, fear of bugs, a confusing childhood memory, acts of kindness in everyday life. These trifles are infused with meaning and cherished by the author in a way that evokes the New Testament notion of Jesus in all things — but for Brown, without the Jesus part. He acknowledges, in another series of panels overlooking glorious mountain vistas, that where others see God's presence he sees beauty and wonder, but not a celestial presence.

Like all accomplished serial memoirists, Brown has mastered the art of mining the same veins of material over and over — looking at the same incidents from a different vantage point, highlighting a new stream of consciousness, focusing on an event that took place offstage in a previous work or with added bathos, in this case, abetted by the birth of his son. With each new round of toil he extracts new, rough-hewn gems — of which A Matter of Life is the most profound.

Did I mention that Brown's work is hilarious? That you will smile and laugh throughout? That you'll be inspired by the Brown family's goodness and gentle relationship with each other and the world? Reading this is a joy. Rereading it is, too.

Read an excerpt of A Matter Of Life

From the headlines this week, I almost expected to see a hen clucking outside NPR's headquarters this morning.

"Chickens Flood Shelters As Backyard Farmers Call It Quits," Time exclaimed. "Hipster farmers abandoning urban chickens because they're too much work," Canada's National Post wrote. As the headlines would have it, hens are getting dumped once their egg-laying years are over.

But are hipsters really the fair-weather farmers they're being portrayed as? Not necessarily.

A closer look at at the backyard farming industry reveals another underlying cause for the spike in unwanted chickens. And it's not the hens that are the major problem but the roosters, says Susie Coston of Farm Sanctuary in New York.

Urban chicken farming has exploded in popularity over the past few years. (Who doesn't want a pet that makes your breakfast?) In response, many cities have made it legal for residents to keep egg-laying hens, but they still prohibit roosters. The gentlemen are just too loud for urban living, Coston says.

Here's where the problem begins. When urban farmers order hens online, as is popular, suppliers can't tell 100 percent if they're sending a lady or a gentleman.

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Chicken Diapers? Urban Farming Spawns Accessory Lines

"Probably the most important one is that the way that these projects are structured is that these companies don't just build a system like you would build a road, like a contractor would build a road, and then hand it over to the city to operate and maintain. They stay involved, and, you know, in many cases with technologies, like cloud computing, the infrastructure that's providing a service to that city — say, you know, running the traffic signals — may not actually be physically located in that city. It may not even be in the same country. And so, essentially a city is outsourcing its brains."

On whether using technology to run a city more efficiently is a good thing

"It's a wonderful thing, and I think it's really our only hope right now, given the challenges we face in the coming century around climate change [and] mass urbanization all over the planet. What I'm trying to do with my work is just to get us to confront those risks, because over the last five years, you know, since these big technology companies really started this push towards building smart cities and selling smart cities, there hasn't been a really robust discussion about the risks."

Read an excerpt of Smart Cities

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

U.S. District Judge Denise Cote delivered a stinging assessment of Apple on Wednesday when she ruled that the company knowingly "participated in and facilitated a horizontal price-fixing conspiracy." In her opinion, she wrote, "The evidence is overwhelming that Apple knew of the unlawful aims of the conspiracy," adding that in order to believe Apple's version of events, "a fact-finder would be confronted with the herculean task of explaining away reams of documents and blinking at the obvious." The five major publishers that were accused of colluding with one another and Apple — Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster — had all settled. But Cotes still took the publishers to task, saying that consumers "suffered in a variety of ways from this scheme" and criticizing Macmillan CEO John Sargent and Apple Senior Vice President Eddy Cue as "unreliable" witnesses. Cote has not yet set a date for a damages trial. Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr said in a statement, "We've done nothing wrong and we will appeal the judge's decision."

Judy Blume talks to Rookie Magazine about banned books, adolescent relationships and why Margaret will be "an A cup for life." She says, "There are so many kinds of longing. The longing to fit in, the longing to figure it out, the emotional longing for friendship and being accepted — these are all as important as physical longing."

For The Rumpus, Suzanne Koven speaks to Oliver Sacks about hallucinations. Koven asked, "[W]ould you say hallucinations sometimes come from a part of the brain that isn't part of the 'self?' " Sacks responded, "Yes, well that's what the muse is. Or the devil!"

Penguin asks street artists to make over the covers of 10 of their "Modern Classics" books, including Don DeLillo's Americana and The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid.

At The Millions, Matthew Seidel gives a history of silly walks in literature, from Aristophanes to Samuel Beckett: "To add one final example to our menagerie of walkers, we lurch into an H.P. Lovecraft horror tale and find a stride so inhumanly macabre that it becomes almost comic (as most B-movie adaptations of the Dagon or Cthulhu mythos make clear)."

The U.S.-Mexico border plays a starring role in the new FX series The Bridge.

Characters in the television crime drama, which premieres Wednesday night, regularly cross back and forth through the border between El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Jurez, Mexico. The show's dialogue also frequently switches between English and Spanish, setting a new standard for bilingual drama on American television.

The story unfolds on the Bridge of the Americas, where a woman's body left on the border (literally) brings together two police detectives — one from the U.S. (played by Diane Kruger) and the other from Mexico (played by Demin Bichir).

"The woman [on the bridge] appears to be an American judge," explains the show's executive producer, Elwood Reid.

But then it gets gross. (That's a warning for those of you who are faint of stomach.) When the law enforcement agents attempt to pull the body away, the body separates into two.

"The lower half of the body are the legs of a 16-year-old prostitute from Jurez, and the upper half of the body happens to be an anti-immigration judge from Texas," Reid says.

Sounds pretty gruesome, right? Like some premise straight out of a Scandinavian crime novel?

Well, that's kind of close.

Keeping It Real

The Bridge is actually a remake of a Scandinavian TV series. The American version is produced by the Shine Group, which originally planned to set the remake along the U.S.-Canada border, according to Reid.

"[They thought,] 'Hey! It's a Danish-Swedish program. It should be set up in somewhere cold and northern in the U.S.' And I was just sort of seduced by this idea of Mexico," he says.

One problem: Reid, who calls himself an "average white guy from Cleveland," is not an expert on the U.S.-Mexico border. Plus, he doesn't speak much Spanish.

So, after he and his co-executive producer Meredith Stiehm wrote a few episodes in English, they recruited a Spanish-speaking director (Gerardo Naranjo of Miss Bala) and actors from Mexico, including Oscar nominee Demin Bichir.

As Mexican detective Marco Ruiz, Bichir slides in and out of English and Spanish as he and his American counterpart track down a serial killer, who is leaving a trail of victims on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Most scenes with Bichir and his character's colleagues and family in Mexico are completely in Spanish with English subtitles. "A great deal of the series happens in Ciudad Jurez, so that's how we try to keep it real," Bichir explains.

That level of linguistic authenticity is unusual on English-language TV networks in the US. But it's a goal that Reid says he and his creative team take seriously when they shoot scenes in Mexican Spanish, which are usually written first in English.

"I'm constantly corrected and humbled on set by our cast," Reid says. "The [Spanish-speaking] guy hanging our lights will basically tell me, 'That's wrong! You're using the wrong word there!' "

Cable's Bridge To A Latino Audience?

Using the right words has been important for The Bridge not just on the set but also for the show's marketing. The FX Network has been actively courting a Latino audience for the show with Spanish-language ads and press conferences. There are also plans to rebroadcast episodes completely dubbed in Spanish on MundoFox.

Bichir hopes the series will attract a wide audience. But he admits those more familiar with the realities of living on the U.S.-Mexico border — both positive and negative — may find the show's depiction to be a little one-sided.

"There will be some scenes where production decides to be a little rough on the way we show certain sides of Mexico," Bichir says. "I think it's important that people know that this is not a documentary. This is fiction, and we're telling a story."

It's a story in English and in Spanish that Elwood Reid says is an attempt by a premium cable channel to reach out to an audience underserved by American television.

"You know, there's not a Sopranos for Spanish speakers. There's not a Mad Men," he says. "But we're reaching out to that audience and saying, 'Come over here and look at what premium cable has to offer. We're telling stories about things that matter to you.' And I think language is a huge part of that."

But can language help make this border crime drama a hit?

Audiences will decide when The Bridge premieres Wednesday night on FX.

We have to confess: When we heard that Twinkies will have nearly double the shelf life, 45 days, when they return to stores next week, our first reaction was — days? Not years?

Urban legend has long deemed Twinkies the cockroaches of the snack food world, a treat that can survive for decades, what humanity would have left to eat come the apocalypse. The true shelf life — which used to be 26 days — seems somewhat less impressive by comparison.

While the Twinkie is indeed a highly processed food — its three dozen or so ingredients include polysorbate 60, sodium stearoyl lactylate and others that could only come from a lab — it isn't any more so than thousands of other food products out there.

"It is absolutely typical of all processed foods," says Steve Ettlinger, who spent five years tracing the origins of ingredients in many processed foods for his book, Twinkie, Deconstructed.

"Perhaps disappointing to foodies, it's mostly flour and sugar," he tells The Salt.

So why does the Twinkie persist in the popular imagination as a paragon of delicious, unnatural food creations? Perhaps it is the way the snacks seem to override our senses. Unwrapped from their plastic packaging, these sponge cakes appear impossibly soft, their filling so creamy — not rancid, as logic tells us that any milk product left out for days must surely be.

Indeed, most of the items on Twinkies' long list of ingredients go into pulling off that hat trick. Normally, you need butter, milk and eggs to give cakes their moisture and tenderness.

The spotlight on Egypt has focused on the the political fallout from the military coup that toppled an elected but deeply unpopular government. But if you think Egypt's politics are a mess, just consider the economy.

Tourism, a major revenue generator, has been hurting since the Arab uprisings of 2011 that toppled Hosni Mubarak. Foreign investment has shriveled. Unemployment in many industries has soared. Inflation has risen, making everyday goods more expensive. And there's a black market in currency and fuel.

"Over the last few months, there have been shortages of diesel fuel for trucks, long lines at gas stations," says Samer Shehata, an assistant professor of Arab politics at Georgetown University. "More recently, there have been gasoline shortages, and long lines for personal cars. There have also been electricity outages — sometimes during the day."

These are just short-term problems, says Caroline Freund, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. But they are problems that must be tackled by Egypt's interim government.

"What you have in the short run is a real need of a semblance of stability and security so tourism and investment can come back. Because the economy can't come back without that," she says.

But there are deeper problems the country faces in the long run: high unemployment, an overly regulated private sector, which benefited from crony capitalism under Mubarak; and expensive fuel and food subsidies, which must be reduced if Egypt is to get a much-needed loan from the International Monetary Fund.

"They need to create 600,000 new jobs each year just to absorb the new entrants to the labor market, and they don't have the economy to generate that many jobs," says Bruce Rutherford, an associate professor of political science at Colgate University. "This is the core challenge."

Part of the problem is a private sector that hasn't grown fast enough.

"One of Egypt's core structural challenges is to create a private sector that can compete in the global market," says Rutherford, author of Egypt after Mubarak: Liberalism, Islam, and Democracy in the Arab World. Right now they can't, he says, because Egyptian goods can't match the quality and price of goods from Asia that are so popular in the global marketplace.

"The long-term issues will take some time to address," Freund says. "Part of the problem is that in tackling them you may add to the short-term pain that is already present. But right now, the most urgent thing is political stability."

There are some signs that help is on the way. In response to Mohammed Morsi's ouster as president, the United Arab Emirates has pledged $3 billion to Egypt, $5 billion to Saudi Arabia, and $4 billion to Kuwait.

And some of the chronic problems under Morsi — long fuel lines, high crime — seem to have diminished almost overnight. The New York Times notes that some of the sudden improvements in Egypt suggest a conspiracy to undermine the deposed Muslim Brotherhood president.

NPR's Leila Fadel is also reporting on the post-Morsi changes:

"At a gas station in central Cairo, Mohsen Fahmy waits to fill up his tank. But today there is no hours-long line.

"Everything is available now, he says.

"Almost overnight, the power cuts and diesel shortages that have plagued Egypt are mysteriously gone.

"Analysts say it's a sign of just how uncooperative the entrenched anti-brotherhood bureaucracy was when [Islamist President Mohammed] Morsi was in power.

"And now that it has been knocked out of power, liberal Egyptian businessmen say they're ready to put money back in Egypt, says business tycoon Naguib Sawiris: 'People like us who have held back now for two years will come back now and we will start with ourselves, we won't wait for others to come. Because if the Egyptians don't invest in their own country, who's going to believe in their country?' "

We have to begin with a discussion of how Camp, NBC's new summer comedy-drama series premiering Wednesday night at 10, begins.

We see a dock, a lake, and sailboats. We hear affable pop music. Kids walk around a woodsy locale, some in swimsuits carrying air mattresses. Others ride a paddleboat on the lake. Others are sailing, swimming, and playing tether ball in front of a teepee. Two carry an inflatable boat past one walking a bike. We slowly approach a car. "You're going to love it," says a father's voice, assuring his son he'll get outdoors and earn money. The sullen kid, wearing a gray hoodie, doesn't want his dad to "leave [him] here." There isn't even internet! Dad gruffly but lovingly says it wouldn't hurt the kid to see the sun once in a while and stop watching depressing documentaries. "This is not going to be some coming-of-age movie," the kid meta-narrates. "I'm not changing who I am."

Just then, a blue convertible pulls up with a pair of hot-looking but indifferent parents dropping off a gorgeous but quiet girl. Hoodie Boy gives up, gets out, and is hugged goodbye by his dad. Quiet girl gets the stink-eye from a pretty blonde and her friends as they saunter past. Both sets of parents drive off. Hoodie Boy, his hood now down, spots Quiet Girl. The music swells. He stares. She sees him and smiles and walks by, suddenly in slow motion. They share a brief moment. Someone walks by with a fishing pole. The music cuts — with a metallic clink rather than the expected record-scratch — as the hook catches in Hoodie Boy's nose and he screams in pain. The word "CAMP," in red letters, is stamped across a freeze-frame of his comedic agony.

I give you this play-by-play so you can understand just how closely they are hewing here to every clich about camp movies. Later, Rachel Griffiths will be introduced as Mackenzie, the frenzied camp director, recently divorced from her scuzzy husband who left her for a bikini waxer and is threatening to force her into selling the camp. (Save the camp! Naturally. It wouldn't be a camp show without the need to save the camp.) Her awkward, horny, virgin son — who, like Hoodie Boy, is here to be a junior counselor — has only one goal for the summer. Perhaps you can guess what it is. Elsewhere, two young counselors who have had an off-again on-again relationship awkwardly reconnect, but she encounters a somewhat-older-townie attraction that seems in the early going to be straight out of Mystic Pizza.

Aside from an intriguing sideline about Awkward Son getting over his reflexive use of the words "faggy" and "retarded" — which his friends treat not with some massive conflict but with an eye-rolling "dude, you sound like a fool" attitude that's rather refreshing — there's nothing new in the pilot. There's nothing you haven't seen in Meatballs, or in the TV movies of the '80s where, for instance, Michael J. Fox and Nancy McKeon were camp counselors together. You will see entire scenes coming before they happen, and there's a good chance you could plot out a good portion of the next 12 episodes after this.

What Camp reflects, I think, is that broadcast networks in general, and NBC in particular, have had limited to no luck competing with cable when it comes to serious, thoughtful, ambitious dramas. And in fairness, it's not for lack of trying. Where they continue to have success, though, is with reality shows like The Voice — the things people use to fill the other part of their viewing schedule. Television viewing is part art and part entertainment (and often both, obviously), and so far, broadcast is struggling on the art side but alive on the entertainment side. That's why broadcast gets more ratings than Emmys.

Camp is just supposed to be pleasant and diverting, sweet and funny, something to watch with an iced tea and the fan blowing. And as diversion, it's really not bad, despite the clichs. It's just very, very simple, formulaic television of the kind you easily could have seen anytime after about 1970. In a way, if they're just going to be entertaining and not so ambitious, it's better to make something like Camp, which kicks back and embraces its old-school nature, than it is for them to look for new ways to get people to debase themselves. (I greatly prefer this to last summer's reality show Stars Earn Stripes, for instance, and to NBC's Ready For Love dating show. Yuck.)

For as lacking in ambition as Camp is — and it is severely lacking in ambition, as of the pilot anyway — it has a woozy, sleepy, summery charm. You wouldn't want every show to be like this, but it may not be a bad thing to have something like this.

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From the headlines this week, I almost expected to see a hen clucking outside NPR's headquarters this morning.

"Chickens Flood Shelters As Backyard Farmers Call It Quits," Time exclaimed. "Hipster farmers abandoning urban chickens because they're too much work," Canada's National Post wrote. As the headlines would have it, hens are getting dumped once their egg-laying years are over. (Isn't that always the way, ladies?)

But are hipsters really the fair-weather farmers they're being portrayed as? Not necessarily.

A closer look at at the backyard farming industry reveals another underlying cause for the spike in unwanted chickens. And it's not the hens that are the major problem but the roosters, says Susie Coston of Farm Sanctuary in New York.

Urban chicken farming has exploded in popularity over the past few years. (Who doesn't want a pet that makes your breakfast?) In response, many cities have made it legal for residents to keep egg-laying hens, but they still prohibit roosters. The gentlemen are just too loud for urban living, Coston says.

Here's where the problem begins. When urban farmers order hens online, as is popular, suppliers can't tell 100 percent if they're sending a lady or a gentleman.

The Salt

Chicken Diapers? Urban Farming Spawns Accessory Lines

As astute commentators pointed out in an earlier Parallels post about the vagaries of getting a drink in the Middle East, that isn't the only place where the laws regulating alcohol are more than a touch confusing, or where there's debate over them.

Some Americans don't need to look any further than their own local bar.

Commenter Glenn Zanotti shared his perspective:

"If the Southern Baptist Convention had its way, buying alcohol here in the Dallas area would be just as difficult. As it is, I have to drive 20 miles for a bottle of Bourbon. I used to have to drive to the next town to buy a six-pack of beer. Thank goodness for the separation of church and state — voters decided to allow beer and wine sales in my suburban city about 10 years back. Now I can buy beer and wine close to home, but not that evil liquor. Maybe we'll change that in another 10 years."

Egypt's crisis has ignited a familiar debate over U.S. foreign policy where the combatants cluster around two basic viewpoints: The U.S. is doing too little, and the U.S. is doing too much.

So which is it? Is America shrewdly orchestrating events behind the scenes, or is it just an impotent bystander in the Egyptian drama? It depends on whom you ask.

In very broad terms, many Egyptians feel the U.S. has a sinister hand in most every development, while many American pundits feel the Obama administration has been unable or unwilling to tap U.S. influence to guide events in Egypt.

"The U.S. ambassador to Egypt wields so much potential influence that Egyptians obsess daily over whom she is meeting, and they concoct wild conspiracies based on trivial events," Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution wrote in The Washington Post. "The assumption in Egypt, as in much of the Arab world, is that nothing happens unless the United States wills it."

Al Jazeera reported Wednesday that the U.S. State Department has funded a number of private groups that were actively involved in opposing Mohammed Morsi, the democratically elected president who was ousted by the Egyptian military on July 3 following massive street protests.

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Many whose attendance in God's house on a weekly basis was mandatory will sympathize with the young Jeffrey banging his head against the pew in boredom or furtively reading human biology books in his father's office. Or with the a-w-k-w-a-r-d scene in which he shares his newfound apostasy with his parents — an announcement that meets with silent, blank stares.

On the other hand, Brown conveys his own sense of the divine in small moments: a stubbed toe, fear of bugs, a confusing childhood memory, acts of kindness in everyday life. These trifles are infused with meaning and cherished by the author in a way that evokes the New Testament notion of Jesus in all things — but for Brown, without the Jesus part. He acknowledges, in another series of panels overlooking glorious mountain vistas, that where others see God's presence he sees beauty and wonder, but not a celestial presence.

Like all accomplished serial memoirists, Brown has mastered the art of mining the same veins of material over and over — looking at the same incidents from a different vantage point, highlighting a new stream of consciousness, focusing on an event that took place offstage in a previous work or with added bathos, in this case, abetted by the birth of his son. With each new round of toil he extracts new, rough-hewn gems — of which A Matter of Life is the most profound.

Did I mention that Brown's work is hilarious? That you will smile and laugh throughout? That you'll be inspired by the Brown family's goodness and gentle relationship with each other and the world? Reading this is a joy. Rereading it is, too.

Read an excerpt of A Matter Of Life

Police in Quebec are not holding out hope that any of the people still missing after Saturday's train derailment and explosions in the town of Lac-Mgantic are alive.

With 20 bodies found so far and another 30 people still unaccounted for, that means the death toll is expected to be around 50. Authorities are telling the families of those still missing to prepare for the worst.

CBC News writes that:

" 'We informed them of the potential loss of their loved ones,' said Quebec police inspector Michel Forget, who came to [a Wednesday] afternoon news briefing from a meeting with families of the dead and unaccounted. 'You have to understand that it's a very emotional moment.' "

We have to confess: When we heard that Twinkies will have nearly double the shelf life, 45 days, when they return to stores next week, our first reaction was — days? Not years?

Urban legend has long deemed Twinkies the cockroaches of the snack food world, a treat that can survive for decades, what humanity would have left to eat come the apocalypse. The true shelf life — which used to be 26 days — seems somewhat less impressive by comparison.

While the Twinkie is indeed a highly processed food — its three dozen or so ingredients include polysorbate 60, sodium stearoyl lactylate and others that could only come from a lab — it isn't any more so than thousands of other food products out there.

"It is absolutely typical of all processed foods," says Steve Ettlinger, who spent five years tracing the origins of ingredients in many processed foods for his book, Twinkie, Deconstructed.

"Perhaps disappointing to foodies, it's mostly flour and sugar," he tells The Salt.

So why does the Twinkie persist in the popular imagination as a paragon of delicious, unnatural food creations? Perhaps it is the way the snacks seem to override our senses. Unwrapped from their plastic packaging, these sponge cakes appear impossibly soft, their filling so creamy — not rancid, as logic tells us that any milk product left out for days must surely be.

Indeed, most of the items on Twinkies' long list of ingredients go into pulling off that hat trick. Normally, you need butter, milk and eggs to give cakes their moisture and tenderness.

The Federal Reserve must ensure the U.S. job market is in full health before it begins to ease its aggressive bond-purchasing program, its top officials said at the Fed's latest policy meeting. This afternoon, the central bank released the minutes of the Federal Open Market Committee meeting of June 18 and 19.

In that session, the officials cited a moderate pace of economic expansion, but said it was coupled with an unemployment rate that remains high.

The Fed officials confirmed earlier descriptions on what conditions would have to exist before they consider removing the supports that were put in place to foster America's economic recovery from recession, often known as quantitative easing. Those supports include two large monthly purchases: $45 billion in longer-term Treasury securities, and $40 billion in mortgage-backed securities.

"Most participants expected inflation to begin to move up over the coming year as economic activity strengthened," according to the minutes, "but many anticipated that it would remain below the Committee's 2 percent objective for some time."

The committee's members also said they would eventually seek to cushion the blow that the policy's end might inflict on the markets, saying in a joint statement that "a highly accommodative stance of monetary policy will remain appropriate for a considerable time after the asset purchase program ends and the economic recovery strengthens."

The committee said it will keep "the target range for the federal funds rate at 0 to 1/4 percent and currently anticipates that this exceptionally low range for the federal funds rate will be appropriate at least as long as the unemployment rate remains above 6-1/2 percent, inflation between one and two years ahead is projected to be no more than a half percentage point above the Committee's 2 percent longer-run goal, and longer-term inflation expectations continue to be well anchored."

The minutes of the meeting, which flesh out the bank's decision last month to leave its stimulus plan intact, have been eagerly awaited by investors. Stocks rose in the minutes after the details were released at 2 p.m. ET, Reuters says.

Voting against the adoption of the joint statement were James Bullard, president of the St. Louis Federal Reserve, and Esther L. George, president of the Kansas City Fed.

Bullard dissented, the Fed says, because he believes that "in light of recent low readings on inflation, the Committee should signal more strongly its willingness to defend its goal of 2 percent inflation. He pointed out that inflation had trended down since the beginning of 2012 and was now well below target."

George's dissent was based on "the ongoing improvement in labor market conditions and in the outlook," saying that the situation requires "a deliberate statement from the Committee at this meeting that the pace of its asset purchases would be reduced in the very near future."

George added that she is concerned about creating imbalance in the financial system in the future, if the aggressive monetary stimulus continues.

In looking at the broader economic outlook, "Most participants anticipated that growth of real GDP would pick up somewhat in the second half of 2013," according to the minutes, with economic growth expected to strengthen further in the next two years.

After the Federal Open Market Committee meeting last month, the financial markets "freaked out," according to David Wessel, economics editor of The Wall Street Journal.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's remarks at the time sent a shockwave through the markets when he suggested the Fed's stimulus could end.

Wessel tells Morning Edition host Renee Montagne that "Bernanke tried to explain that if, and only if, the economy kept improving, the Fed would begin later this year to reduce the amount of money it's pumping into the economy later this year."

The markets interpreted Bernanke's comments to mean interest rates would increase, which prompted a sell-off in bonds and stocks.

The Fed is buying $85 billion in bonds a month to help keep borrowing low. That economic move has encouraged borrowing and spending.

Dennis Lockhart, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, told an audience in Marietta, Ga., last month that what the Fed was trying to do for the economy was similar to how a smoker who wants to quit begins using a nicotine patch.

The markets, however, took it to mean the Fed was going to quit "cold turkey," Lockhart said.

"It took speeches by half a dozen other Fed officials and about a dozen other metaphors to clarify Bernanke's clarification," Wessel says.

Stocks have largely recovered since Bernanke made his stimulus comments, but there has been a surge in long-term interest rates.

The benchmark, 10-year Treasury rate "has gone from below 1.7 percent at the beginning of May to nearly 2.7 percent this week," Wessel says. And in the latest Freddie Mac survey, mortgage rates have gone from about 3.4 percent to 4.3 percent.

"The market is pushing up interest rates because the incoming news on the U.S. economy has been encouraging and in part because markets are anticipating the day when the Federal Reserve won't be trying so hard to keep rates down," he adds.

There could be further clarification of the Fed's plans at 2 p.m. Wednesday with the release of the minutes from the June meeting.

And there's always the chance the markets could get agitated again when Bernanke speaks about two hours later at a conference in Cambridge, Mass. He is expected to talk about the central bank's track record throughout its 100-year history.

"The entire wall becomes part of a very demanding, rigorous and yet terrifically exuberant composition," she says. "Isn't it exuberant?" Indeed, the gallery feels cheerful — and, at the same time, serene.

Kelly himself was not feeling so cheerful the day museum director Kosinski spoke of exuberance. He'd been at a Phillips dinner the night before, felt ill the next morning, and went back home to Spencertown, N.Y. He missed the 90th-birthday party the museum put together, with champagne, birthday cake and the obligatory birthday song.

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Just last year, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell was a hot Republican prospect, ranked among the nation's most respected state leaders, and was touted as prime vice presidential material.

Those heady days are long gone.

After a seemingly endless series of reports about alleged ethical lapses by the buttoned-down, fiscally conservative governor, no one talks about his political promise anymore.

Instead, the rumor mill generates talk of his impending resignation, with the governor's spokesman denying via Twitter a weekend blog report that he would step down from office.

Over the past 48 hours, the drip, drip, drip of embarrassment and drama — which already included an alleged donor-paid designer gown for the first lady, a pricey Rolex watch for the governor and $15,000 in catering for his daughter's wedding — became a downpour.

— The Washington Post reported late Tuesday that McDonnell and his sister allegedly received $70,000 from a big political donor, a gift that the governor failed to disclose. And that McDonnell's wife, Maureen, allegedly received a "previously unknown $50,000 check" from the same donor, dietary supplement maker Jonnie R. Williams Sr.

— Just a day earlier, news outlets including the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported that the governor reimbursed the state nearly $2,400 for food and toiletries purchased with a state credit card to supplement back-to-college care packages for his children.

— And, adding to the deluge, reports also surfaced Tuesday that McDonnell's 21-year-old son, Sean, had been arrested the previous weekend for public intoxication in Charlottesville, where he and his twin brother attend the University of Virginia.

What happened to the onetime rising star? Hubris? Entitlement? Virginia's lax gift laws?

"Probably a combination of all those," says Virginia politics guru Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics. "Almost everyone who knows McDonnell is very surprised."

In an exclusive interview Tuesday with WTVR, the CBS affiliate in Richmond, the state capital, the embattled governor addressed the controversies that have engulfed him — from the small (purchasing items for his children) to the large (alleged gifts from donor Williams).

"I have been both disappointed, but, it's hurt me personally," McDonnell, 59, told CBS 6 anchor Lorenzo Hall. "Thirty-seven years and no one has raised questions about my integrity or my character."

He told Hall that Williams, and his company, Star Scientific, "has received no state benefits, no economic development grants, no targeted money out of the budget, no board appointments; they've really received nothing."

In the interview, McDonnell, whose $175,000 annual salary is tied for fifth highest among the nation's governors, also dismissed resignation rumors. Here's what he said:

"I don't know where these things are coming from. Some of the press accounts have been completely out of control, about rumors, about resignation and so forth. ... I am thoroughly enjoying and being incredibly productive I think, with my team, as governor of Virginia. We've got an awful lot of things we want to do. There have been a number of irresponsible rumors that have been put out."

That was before the latest Washington Post report of alleged additional unreported money gifts from Williams.

The McDonnell drama already featured his wife's hawking of a Star Scientific dietary supplement during a governor's mansion luncheon, a federal investigation into allegations that mansion chef Todd Schneider used food paid for by the state for his own catering business, and state inquiry into the governor's financial disclosures.

Virginia is the last state in the nation that limits its governors to a single term, so there's no re-election campaign to worry about.

As for McDonnell's once-promising future, Sabato, known for his "Crystal Ball" political predictions, had this to say: "McDonnell's political career is over. Guaranteed. As the Old English texts conclude, 'Greed is the root of all evil.' "

After the Federal Open Market Committee meeting last month, the financial markets "freaked out," according to David Wessel, economics editor of The Wall Street Journal.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's remarks at the time sent a shockwave through the markets when he suggested the Fed's stimulus could end.

Wessel tells Morning Edition host Renee Montagne that "Bernanke tried to explain that if, and only if, the economy kept improving, the Fed would begin later this year to reduce the amount of money it's pumping into the economy later this year."

The markets interpreted Bernanke's comments to mean interest rates would increase, which prompted a sell-off in bonds and stocks.

The Fed is buying $85 billion in bonds a month to help keep borrowing low. That economic move has encouraged borrowing and spending.

Dennis Lockhart, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, told an audience in Marietta, Ga., last month that what the Fed was trying to do for the economy was similar to how a smoker who wants to quit begins using a nicotine patch.

The markets, however, took it to mean the Fed was going to quit "cold turkey," Lockhart said.

"It took speeches by half a dozen other Fed officials and about a dozen other metaphors to clarify Bernanke's clarification," Wessel says.

Stocks have largely recovered since Bernanke made his stimulus comments, but there has been a surge in long-term interest rates.

The benchmark, 10-year Treasury rate "has gone from below 1.7 percent at the beginning of May to nearly 2.7 percent this week," Wessel says. And in the latest Freddie Mac survey, mortgage rates have gone from about 3.4 percent to 4.3 percent.

"The market is pushing up interest rates because the incoming news on the U.S. economy has been encouraging and in part because markets are anticipating the day when the Federal Reserve won't be trying so hard to keep rates down," he adds.

There could be further clarification of the Fed's plans at 2 p.m. Wednesday with the release of the minutes from the June meeting.

And there's always the chance the markets could get agitated again when Bernanke speaks about two hours later at a conference in Cambridge, Mass. He is expected to talk about the central bank's track record throughout its 100-year history.

There is no one definition of a summer book. It can be a 1,000-page biography, a critically acclaimed literary novel, a memoir everyone is talking about — or it might be your favorite guilty pleasure: romance, crime, science fiction. Whatever you choose, it should be able to sweep you away to another world, because there is nothing like getting totally lost in a book on summer day. Here are a few books that swept away some of our favorite critics.

When Alfredo Corchado went to cover Mexico for The Dallas Morning News, he was determined not to focus on drugs and crime but rather to cover issues critical to the country's future — immigration, education and the economy.

But it seems the drug cartels had other plans. Corchado has spent years reporting on the savage violence of drug gangs and the corruption and ineptitude that enabled their reign of terror in much of the country, much of which he explores in his new book, Midnight In Mexico: A Reporter's Journey Through A Country's Descent Into Darkness.

The book is part memoir, part recent history of Mexico's struggle for peace amid chaos. Corchado was born in Mexico but grew up mostly in the United States in a family of California farmworkers. He was working in the fields and eventually dropped out of high school. He thought that the fields were where he would spend his life. This began to slowly change one day when a television crew arrived and asked questions.

"I was 13," Corchado recalls to Fresh Air's Dave Davies. "I was trying to look like I was 15. They came up to me and they started asking me all these questions: 'What's it like working in the fields? What's it like not having sanitation?'"

In retrospect, Corchado says he came away from the experience with a new sense of empowerment and awareness that he had a voice and that others might care about what he had to say. Much later when he decided to become a journalist, this moment became one of the many turning points in his life.

He is now the Mexico bureau chief for The Dallas Morning News and has reported for numerous U.S. papers, including The Wall Street Journal.

New York City has long been considered the nation's epicenter for all things culinary. The borough of Manhattan had more than 6,000 restaurants at last count. And the city has the most three-star Michelin-starred restaurants in the country — closing in on Paris.

But lately, some cooks have begun to go elsewhere to make names for themselves.

Among the reasons for the culinary exodus: Chefs' obsession with local ingredients is making smaller communities a lot more appealing.

In the good old days, which weren't actually all that long ago, it was easy for people like chef Peter Hoffman to hire experienced cooks. Lately, though, the chef shortage has turned his recruiting process into something of an extreme sport.

"I began to ask myself the questions: 'What is going on?' " Hoffman says. "'Where has everybody gone?' "

Hoffman used to post an ad on Craig's List for his farm-to-table restaurant, Back Forty West, in New York's Soho neighborhood, and then watch the resumes roll in.

These days? It's either bupkis or a slew of applicants with just a few months of experience — at restaurants like McDonald's.

"I sat down in certain desperate moments and sent an email to every single cook that I knew," he says, "and said, 'We're looking, we need people.' And what I got back for the most part were, 'Sorry, dude, wish I could help you, I'm in the same boat.' "

No cooks in Manhattan? Careers in food have never been more fashionable. It feels like you can't turn on the TV without seeing a pack of "cheftestants" battling for a chance at stardom.

But for those who don't make it, New York is no picnic. The going rate for cooks in Manhattan is $10 an hour — $12 if you are lucky. And the commute to a place you can actually afford to live on that kind of money can be long.

Shanna Pacifico, the head chef at Back Forty West, has lived in the city for 14 years. Over that time, she has shared apartments in cheaper neighborhoods. Now, she finally has her own one-bedroom — though she's about to be kicked out and is struggling to find a studio for less than $1,700 a month.

Pacifico still thinks it's worth it to be in New York. But she does dream of greener pastures — "a new York City with cheaper rent and an easier lifestyle," Pacifico says.

In other words, Utopia.

But for other chefs, Utopia doesn't look like New York. It's a smaller, more affordable city with its own vibrant food culture — like Austin, Texas, Madison, Wis., or Chapel Hill, N.C. Those places have the added advantage of being more connected to the farms they buy from — something that is a badge of honor in today's restaurant world.

As Clark Wolf, a restaurant consultant based in New York and Sonoma County, Calif., puts it: "I used to say, 'If it grows in Manhattan, scrape it off. Alright?' "

David Levi is a native New Yorker who cooked most recently at a restaurant called Perry Street in Manhattan's West Village. He has now moved to Portland, Maine, where later this year, he plans to open his own restaurant. His new eatery will forgo kitchen staples such as lemon and even sugar, offering exclusively local foods. To build it will cost him, he says, just one-tenth of what it would in Manhattan.

"Because rent is just so much lower, it just gives you a lot more freedom to not drive yourself completely crazy and take a few more risks," Levi says.

Still, chefs like Levi will miss New York — a little. It's why he says he's keeping his New York-cell phone number: "It's the only part of New York that's affordable."

According to The Associated Press:

"Bob Clark, supervisory archivist at the Roosevelt library in New York, said he wasn't aware of any other similar film. A spokeswoman for the National Archives concurred.

" 'With respect to whether or not this is the earliest or only existing footage of FDR in a wheelchair, we cannot state that this is definitively the case, although such footage is certainly rare,' Laura Diachenko said in an email."

There is no one definition of a summer book. It can be a 1,000-page biography, a critically acclaimed literary novel, a memoir everyone is talking about — or it might be your favorite guilty pleasure: romance, crime, science fiction. Whatever you choose, it should be able to sweep you away to another world, because there is nothing like getting totally lost in a book on summer day. Here are a few books that swept away some of our favorite critics.

It may seem counterintuitive, but there's a body of evidence to suggest that the millions of Americans with a diet soda habit may not be doing their waistlines — or their blood sugar — any favors.

As the consumption of diet drinks made with artificial sweeteners continues to rise, researchers are beginning to make some uncomfortable associations with weight gain and other diseases.

For instance, as researcher Susan Swithers writes in a new opinion piece published in the journal Trends in Endocrinology and Metabolism, "accumulating evidence suggests that frequent consumers of these sugar substitutes (such as aspartame, sucralose, and saccharin) may also be at increased risk of ... metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease."

If you listen to my conversation on Here & Now, you'll hear that there are two schools of thought here. Not everyone is convinced that diet soda is so bad.

For instance, a study I reported on last year by researchers at Boston Children's Hospital found that overweight teens did well when they switched from sugar-laden drinks to zero-calorie options such as diet soda.

But it's also hard to ignore the gathering body of evidence that points to potentially bad outcomes associated with a diet soda habit.

One example: the findings of the San Antonio Heart Study, which pointed to a strong link between diet soda consumption and weight gain over time.

"On average, for each diet soft drink our participants drank per day, they were 65 percent more likely to become overweight during the next seven to eight years" said Sharon Fowler, in a release announcing the findings several years back.

Another bit of evidence: A multi-ethnic study, which included some 5,000 men and women, found that diet soda consumption was linked to a significantly increased risk of both type-2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome.

So, what gives? How could consuming less sugar set the stage for more weight gain and an increased risk of disease?

Well, since being overweight is a major contributor to the development of type 2 diabetes, it's possible that some diet-soda drinkers suffer from a mindset problem: They justify eating lots of high-calorie foods because their drinks are calorie-free.

It's the "hey, I'll go ahead and have those fries and a cheeseburger, since I'm having a Diet Coke" mentality.

It's also possible that something much more complicated and nuanced is happening in the bodies and brains of diet soda drinkers.

As Swithers points out, "Frequent consumption of high-intensity [artificial] sweeteners may have the counterintuitive effect of inducing metabolic derangements."

Say what? Metabolic derangements?

One theory is that diet soda may throw off the metabolism by blunting the body's responses to sugar.

You see, from the moment sugar touches our lips, our bodies start to release hormones to begin processing the sugar. It's part of a feedback loop that helps the body predict what's coming.

But if we develop a habit of consuming artificial sugar, our bodies may get confused. And it might not respond the same when we consume real sugar. "We may no longer release the hormones" needed to process sugar — or at least, not as much of them as before, Swithers told me during an interview.

And researchers think this change in hormone levels could contribute to increases in how much we eat, says Swithers, "as well as to bigger spikes in our blood sugar, which may be related to things like diabetes."

Now, Swithers says much more research is needed to nail down what's happening when people consume artificial sweeteners.

What is clear is that diet soda consumption continues to rise. Women tend to lead the way, and increasingly, children are popping open the calorie-free sodas that mom and dad are drinking.

Update: After we published our post, we received this statement from the American Beverage Association:

"Low-calorie sweeteners are some of the most studied and reviewed ingredients in the food supply today. They are safe and an effective tool in weight loss and weight management, according to decades of scientific research and regulatory agencies around the globe."

But it's actually not the eating that most interests Christensen, and she's really no good at the self-mythologizing at which so many food writers excel. Instead, she has written a memoir that while tracking her relationship to food and describing some incredibly satisfying meals she has had, is really more concerned with the heartbreak and loneliness that shape an individual creative life.

She's a classic child of the 1960s and '70s, complete with parents who are alternately absent and overbearing, and a surrounding culture that treats children as an afterthought. She had a distant, narcissistic hippie dad who shattered her and her two sisters' bohemian Berkeley upbringing by turning his violent temper on their mother, who responded by taking her girls to Arizona to enroll in a Ph.D. program in psychology. Christensen establishes a pattern of wanting to outtough her father while discovering that she craves feminine retreat from the world. The blue-plate specials of the title were her mother's nickname for the relatively wholesome, unadorned meals the family enjoyed in Arizona. Later Christensen becomes no stranger to French cuisine (albeit of less than four-star caliber), thanks to a pre-college stint in France made possible by her family's involvement with the international Rudolph Steiner movement.

More Kate Christensen

Critics' Lists: Summer 2013

Sneak Preview: 5 Books To Look Forward To This Summer

It's a political ticket only Jon Stewart could dream up.

With Anthony Weiner leading the race for New York mayor in some polls, fellow Democrat Eliot Spitzer now hopes to appear on the same ballot in the city comptroller slot.

This latest news comes in a season that has already seen the return of South Carolina Republican Mark Sanford to the House.

"Sanford's success led to Weiner's reassessment, and Weiner's positive polls have led to Spitzer's thinking, 'Why not me?' " says Lara Brown, a political scientist who wrote a dissertation on congressional scandals.

But given the bruising reception his candidacy received — The New York Daily News' cover headline Monday read "Lust for Power," while the New York Post went with "Here We Ho Again" — Spitzer's decision raises a different question: Why do men who have become national laughingstocks seek a return to office?

"Guys like Sanford and Weiner and now Spitzer just cannot keep away from the public eye," says Dennis Johnson, a professor of political management at George Washington University and proprietor of the website congressionalbadboys.com. "I would call that a pathology."

Possibility For Redemption

It's not certain that either Weiner or Spitzer will prevail. There is, however, some logic to an attempted return to the public arena: This is a time when all manner of political comebacks seem possible.

Former President Bill Clinton, who was impeached for lying about sex with a White House intern, is now among the country's most popular and respected politicians, and his wife is the early front-runner for president in 2016.

What makes a disgraced politician want to come back is probably what made him run in the first place: some combination of ego and a genuine belief he has something valuable to offer.

"The ego and voltage that drove them to get where they've gotten is not easily switched off, even after what the kids today are calling an 'epic FAIL,' " says Robert Thompson, a pop culture professor at Syracuse University. "This is especially true in an era where there are examples of people who have overcome scandal and indiscretion, such as Bill Clinton and others."

All of this represents something new in American politics. Plenty of politicians have weathered scandals, and many have enjoyed post-scandal success in lobbying and media.

Spitzer himself, since resigning as governor of New York in 2008 following revelations that he'd been a client of an escort service, has worked as an online columnist and cable television commentator.

But people who have been driven from office under the most humiliating circumstances have not historically sought to subject themselves again to the judgment of voters.

On The Attack

In the classic 1941 film Citizen Kane, the title character's political ambitions are wrecked by the revelation of an extramarital affair.

"Today, he'd make a TV ad attacking his opponent for intruding on his personal life," says Jack Pitney, a government professor at Claremont McKenna College.

Something like that dynamic played out in real life last year. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich pronounced himself "appalled" that CNN's John King would bring up his cheating on an ex-wife during a Republican presidential debate.

Gingrich's attack on the reporter — and the media in general — helped propel him to a rare victory in the South Carolina primary.

But that's actually a fairly unusual tactic. Most scandal-pocked pols adopt an apologetic stance. Sanford and Weiner have both done public penance for their past sins (an extramarital affair in Sanford's case, lewd behavior online in Weiner's).

"I strayed, I erred, I violated a code of behavior I should not have, and the public understands what I'm saying," Spitzer told Bloomberg News.

Times Have Changed

Although sex scandals can easily upend a career, attitudes may be shifting.

Today's popular culture is more forgiving of transgressions — not only providing a sympathetic forum for repentant politicians on talk shows, but framing entire television series such as Scandal from the point of view of the offenders.

"If we were talking about a guy like Eliot Spitzer or Mark Sanford in 1975, I don't care how much they apologized, it was going to be hard to run for elected office after that," says Thompson, the Syracuse professor.

Things are different now. We're accustomed to celebrities trading on sex tapes rather than being ruined by them. Standards are still different for elected officials than for movie stars, but people understand they're human. And they've seen ample evidence at this point that some are bound to misbehave.

As long as that misbehavior is not tied directly to their job performance, they may well be forgiven, says David Doherty, a Loyola University Chicago political scientist who has studied public attitudes about scandal.

"Having been involved in a scandal is not a deal-breaker in the eyes of many citizens," he says. "The public is, in some circumstances, willing to forgive these transgressions, or at least give greater weight to other characteristics, such as their policy positions or apparent leadership skills."

Democrats aren't getting any younger. At least, their top leaders aren't.

Voters under the age of 30 were key to President Obama's electoral success. But Obama's going gray and his most prominent potential successors aren't paragons of youth.

Hillary Clinton, who would be the presumptive Democratic favorite for president the minute she should decide to run, will be 69 in 2016. Vice President Joe Biden is already 70.

The party's congressional leaders aren't spring chickens, either. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California are both 73. Pelosi's top two lieutenants in House leadership are also septuagenarians.

Overall, the average age of Democrats in Congress tops 60, with the party's caucuses in both the House and Senate skewing older than the Republicans.

"Their leadership is out of step with their base," says GOP consultant David Carney. "It's also very white and main-line religious."

Despite all this, Democrats harbor little doubt that they can continue to run up big margins among young voters.

The party has been an easier fit for a generation that tends to be more liberal than the country as a whole on social issues such as gay marriage and abortion, as well as the role the federal government ought to play in American life.

"What has attracted young people to the Democratic Party has much more to do with ideas and ideology than it does with personalities," says Scott Keeter, a pollster at the Pew Research Center.

More Liberal Socially

Obama, who was 47 when he first took office, depended on the youth vote, particularly in his reelection effort.

His share of the vote of those under 30 actually slid from 66 percent to 60 percent between 2008 and 2012, but young voters made up his margin of difference in essential states such as Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Virginia.

"It didn't hurt that Barack Obama was younger and energetic," Keeter says. "He was able to use not only his personal qualities but his affinity for technology and new ways of organization to his advantage in building a strong base of support among young people."

But, Keeter points out, the Democratic advantage among young people predates Obama's rise. Democrats carried younger voters in both 2004 and 2006.

Younger voters are more likely to be liberal and identify themselves as Democrats than the population as a whole. Nearly two-thirds of those under 30 favor same-sex marriage rights and keeping abortion legal in most cases, according to exit polling last November — much higher numbers than among those who are older.

"The other side happens to be full of younger faces with old ideas," says Mo Elleithee, a Democratic consultant who worked on Clinton's 2008 campaign.

Minority Advantage

One big factor playing in the Democrats' favor is the fact that more young people today are made up of racial and ethnic minorities than has been true in the past. Groups such as Hispanics and African Americans are giving Democrats heavy support.

But Republicans have not yet found the secret sauce that can break their losing streaks with minorities or young voters.

They can boast of more governors and senators who are in their 40s than Democrats (as well as more prominent politicians who belong to minority groups), but that hasn't been enough to woo those under 30.

"Paul Ryan is a young guy" — the Wisconsin representative was 42 when he served as the GOP's vice presidential pick in 2012 — "but he didn't do well with young voters because of his ideas and his vision," Elleithee says.

Gray Hairs Aren't So Bad

There was indeed some polling evidence last year that showed young people didn't care much for Ryan, says Peter Levine, who directs CIRCLE, a Tufts University center that studies youth voting behavior.

"I don't think the actual age of the candidate is a big deal for youth," he says.

But voters often do like to support people who look like them. When it comes to younger national prospects, Democrats don't have a deep bench.

Even the party's younger presidential hopefuls — Govs. Andrew Cuomo of New York and Martin O'Malley of Maryland — are in their 50s. Worse, the party was trounced at the state level in 2010, leaving fewer officeholders to be groomed for the future.

Look for the party to showcase Newark Mayor Cory Booker, who is 44, if he wins election to the Senate from New Jersey this fall.

The question going forward, Levine says, is not whether Democrats will field youthful candidates, but can they hang on to their "huge advantage" among younger voters.

There may be some erosion, but at this juncture, the evidence suggests Democrats remain in a stronger position than the GOP.

"We can't ever take it for granted," Elleithee says. "Having said that, I would rather be us than the other side when it comes to the discussion with young voters. Their sell is a harder one than ours is."

If only Huston had kept to these meticulously drawn action sequences, which punctuate the narrative with a forward-moving drive. But the action comes bracketed with a load of rhetoric, page after page tricked out in a blinding avalanche of lists of 21st century mishaps and mayhem that sounds like a blend of William Gibsonish future patter and Thomas Pynchonesque conspiracy mash. Take this description of material from a cache of maps that Jae finds in a file box, once the property of a murdered high-level CIA boss. "Brazil highlighted, undersea telecom cable landings and several mineral resources. Battery grade manganese, niobium, etc. India. Chromite mines. Pharmaceuticals manufacturing, chemotherapy agents," and then an info-dump of TOP SECRET CIA files. "War. Inlet. Penultimate. Cause. Contraction. Tides. Resources ... Bio-disaster event horizon. Liquid metal fast breeder reactor. Orbital mirror array. Al Qaeda franchise structure. Black start. Neutron poison ..." This keeps on pouring from the page, eventually overwhelming the physical action itself.

"What has happened before," Huston writes, "are any number of things that feel similar. 9/11. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. London subway bombings. Bombay attack. Madrid bombings. Asian Tsunami. European heat wave. Darfur. Somali pirates" and so on — and on — into a novel I couldn't wait to read and ultimately found terribly disappointing. Alas, like that drug Dreamer from Huston's previous work, it put me to sleep.

Read an excerpt of Skinner

When Alfredo Corchado went to cover Mexico for The Dallas Morning News, he was determined not to focus on drugs and crime but rather to cover issues critical to the country's future — immigration, education and the economy.

But it seems the drug cartels had other plans. Corchado has spent years reporting on the savage violence of drug gangs and the corruption and ineptitude that enabled their reign of terror in much of the country, much of which he explores in his new book, Midnight In Mexico: A Reporter's Journey Through A Country's Descent Into Darkness.

The book is part memoir, part recent history of Mexico's struggle for peace amid chaos. Corchado was born in Mexico but grew up mostly in the United States in a family of California farmworkers. He was working in the fields and eventually dropped out of high school. He thought that the fields were where he would spend his life. This began to slowly change one day when a television crew arrived and asked questions.

"I was 13," Corchado recalls to Fresh Air's Dave Davies. "I was trying to look like I was 15. They came up to me and they started asking me all these questions: 'What's it like working in the fields? What's it like not having sanitation?'"

In retrospect, Corchado says he came away from the experience with a new sense of empowerment and awareness that he had a voice and that others might care about what he had to say. Much later when he decided to become a journalist, this moment became one of the many turning points in his life.

He is now the Mexico bureau chief for The Dallas Morning News and has reported for numerous U.S. papers, including The Wall Street Journal.

The title of the third episode is "Dais Of The Dead" (Manbar al-mawta), and it talks about the killings of Syrians from both sides — but also about the torture and detention of protesters, and explosions and car bombs, which have become increasingly common in Damascus.

Season 3 begins airing this week, when Ramadan falls this year. The series still follows the government line: that Syria is the last country standing against imperial powers and criticizes the opposition-in-exile as living comfortably abroad as it drives people on the streets in Syria to their deaths. It portrays rebels as thugs and hooligans.

The message is clear: You better stay with the government or chaos will unfold.

"Of course, it will show in the beginning that the regime committed a few mistakes, but the encoded message is that because of the chaos that followed, it is better to stay under regime control despite all its flows," says Mutasem Abou Al Shamat, a 30-year-old human resources specialist based in Doha, Qatar.

"It is the first time a TV series is addressing what has been happening in the country so of course I have to watch it," he says.

The show's scriptwriter, Samer Radwan, was detained last month on his way back to Damascus from Beirut. But a friend of Radwan who asked not to be named says the detention most likely was not related to the show.

"The script was approved by censors but Radwan, who is an Alawite, would often write Facebook statuses critical of the government," the friend says. "I think that is more likely the reason behind his detention."

Lebanon Spillover

This series was shot entirely in Lebanon; filming for many other Syrian TV shows also take place, at least partly, in Lebanon.

Television production has been a lucrative business, so it's no wonder producers want to continue their work despite upheaval at home.

"For security reasons the TV and art production is moving to Lebanon," says Raafat Al-Zakout, a Syrian actor and director. "Because of clashes, there are no safe locations to shoot in Syria."

Clacket Productions, the company behind Wilada min Al-Khasira, is thinking of opening an office in Beirut, says Oula Mohammad, a managing producer at Clacket, who adds that the company's main office will remain in Damascus.

Clacket also produces another TV series, Sanaoud Baada Qalil — "We Will Return Soon" — which focuses on the Syrian middle-class leaving Damascus. It's also partly shot in Lebanon.

Some remain optimistic, like Haytham Chamass, a Lebanese film director and producer.

"(Syrian TV series') strength was always a good script, good actors, and that they tackled social issues close to the Arab street," says Chamass. "I think the production moving here will actually raise the level of Lebanese productions."

But not everyone is happy.

"At the end of the day, people want jobs and Syrians want to continue working," says one Lebanese producer, who asked to remain anonymous. "Syrian directors are bringing their cameraman, their actors and staff. Not everyone is happy about that in Lebanon."

It seems tensions are high even in the field of art.

If you are going to shell out cash sending a kid to college, you might as well get in on their fun too. That's how my daughter's post-modern lit class slammed me into The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot.

It is, arguably, one of the most important poems of the 20th century. At least that is what they told her and that is what my dad told me when he first gave me a copy as a boy. But she had a class that helped her understand the poem. Alone in my study I didn't get it ... again (sorry Dad).

Sitting there, book in hand, not understanding what I had just read I had to ask myself: is this any different than my experience with physics?

Poems and poetry are, for me, a deep a form of knowing, just like science. Yes, obviously, they are different. But each, in its way, is a way to understand the world.

But what does it mean for a poem to be hard? Is it the same thing as when science is hard? Should we expect to need a class to help us understand poetry, just as we expect needing one for electromagnetism? Where, exactly, do we expect to find our truths and how hard should we expect to fight for them?

To help me answer my questions I was lucky to find John Beer, a poet and professor of English at Portland State University. Beer is author of the much praised The Waste Land and Other Poems. It takes guts to give your work the same title as Eliot's and by all accounts he pulled it off.

In response to my question, "What does it meant for a poem to be hard?" Beer said:

There are, it seems, as many ways for a poem to be difficult as there are for it to be a poem at all. For most people, a lot of poetry written before the twentieth century will be a challenge: the vocabulary will often be unfamiliar, the syntax may be more complicated than we are accustomed to reading, and allusions, especially to classical learning, abound.

When he went to work for the nation's spy agencies, "I believed in the goodness of what we were doing" and in the "nobility of our intentions to free oppressed people overseas," says the so-called NSA leaker, Edward Snowden, in a month-old video posted online Monday by The Guardian.

But in the recording, which appears to be an effort to show Snowden explaining his motivation for spilling secrets about National Security Agency surveillance programs, he goes on to say that the nation's leaders are "misleading the public and misleading all publics in order to create a certain mindset in the global consciousness."

"The structures that exist," Snowden says in an apparent reference to U.S. power structures, are "working to their own ends to extend their capabilities at the expense of the freedom of all publics."

Snowden says on the video that the NSA "doesn't limit itself to foreign intelligence ... it collects all communications that transit the United States."

While not offering specifics, President Obama and his national security team have told Americans that surveillance programs are aimed at foreign communications and that the contents of Americans' phone calls and Internet exchanges are not monitored.

The Guardian and The Washington Post broke stories early in June about materials leaked by Snowden that revealed details of NSA programs that sweep up information about phone calls and Internet activity. Since then, other revelations have followed — including word that the NSA has spied on representatives of the European Union.

Snowden, who was in Hong Kong when he taped the interview with the Guardian, has since flow to Moscow. For the past two weeks, he's thought to have been in the transit zone of the airport there. Snowden is seeking asylum in another nation. Bolivia, Nicaragua and Venezuela have offered him safe haven. But it's not clear if he can get to any of those nations. Meanwhile, the U.S. is seeking to prosecute him.