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A transcript of President Obama's remarks on possible U.S. military action in Syria, as released by the White House:

Good afternoon, everybody. Ten days ago, the world watched in horror as men, women and children were massacred in Syria in the worst chemical weapons attack of the 21st century. Yesterday the United States presented a powerful case that the Syrian government was responsible for this attack on its own people.

Our intelligence shows the Assad regime and its forces preparing to use chemical weapons, launching rockets in the highly populated suburbs of Damascus, and acknowledging that a chemical weapons attack took place. And all of this corroborates what the world can plainly see — hospitals overflowing with victims; terrible images of the dead. All told, well over 1,000 people were murdered. Several hundred of them were children — young girls and boys gassed to death by their own government.

This attack is an assault on human dignity. It also presents a serious danger to our national security. It risks making a mockery of the global prohibition on the use of chemical weapons. It endangers our friends and our partners along Syria's borders, including Israel, Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon and Iraq. It could lead to escalating use of chemical weapons, or their proliferation to terrorist groups who would do our people harm.

In a world with many dangers, this menace must be confronted.

Now, after careful deliberation, I have decided that the United States should take military action against Syrian regime targets. This would not be an open-ended intervention. We would not put boots on the ground. Instead, our action would be designed to be limited in duration and scope. But I'm confident we can hold the Assad regime accountable for their use of chemical weapons, deter this kind of behavior, and degrade their capacity to carry it out.

Our military has positioned assets in the region. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs has informed me that we are prepared to strike whenever we choose. Moreover, the Chairman has indicated to me that our capacity to execute this mission is not time-sensitive; it will be effective tomorrow, or next week, or one month from now. And I'm prepared to give that order.

But having made my decision as Commander-in-Chief based on what I am convinced is our national security interests, I'm also mindful that I'm the President of the world's oldest constitutional democracy. I've long believed that our power is rooted not just in our military might, but in our example as a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. And that's why I've made a second decision: I will seek authorization for the use of force from the American people's representatives in Congress.

Over the last several days, we've heard from members of Congress who want their voices to be heard. I absolutely agree. So this morning, I spoke with all four congressional leaders, and they've agreed to schedule a debate and then a vote as soon as Congress comes back into session.

In the coming days, my administration stands ready to provide every member with the information they need to understand what happened in Syria and why it has such profound implications for America's national security. And all of us should be accountable as we move forward, and that can only be accomplished with a vote.

I'm confident in the case our government has made without waiting for U.N. inspectors. I'm comfortable going forward without the approval of a United Nations Security Council that, so far, has been completely paralyzed and unwilling to hold Assad accountable. As a consequence, many people have advised against taking this decision to Congress, and undoubtedly, they were impacted by what we saw happen in the United Kingdom this week when the Parliament of our closest ally failed to pass a resolution with a similar goal, even as the Prime Minister supported taking action.

Yet, while I believe I have the authority to carry out this military action without specific congressional authorization, I know that the country will be stronger if we take this course, and our actions will be even more effective. We should have this debate, because the issues are too big for business as usual. And this morning, John Boehner, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell agreed that this is the right thing to do for our democracy.

A country faces few decisions as grave as using military force, even when that force is limited. I respect the views of those who call for caution, particularly as our country emerges from a time of war that I was elected in part to end. But if we really do want to turn away from taking appropriate action in the face of such an unspeakable outrage, then we just acknowledge the costs of doing nothing.

Here's my question for every member of Congress and every member of the global community: What message will we send if a dictator can gas hundreds of children to death in plain sight and pay no price? What's the purpose of the international system that we've built if a prohibition on the use of chemical weapons that has been agreed to by the governments of 98 percent of the world's people and approved overwhelmingly by the Congress of the United States is not enforced?

Make no mistake — this has implications beyond chemical warfare. If we won't enforce accountability in the face of this heinous act, what does it say about our resolve to stand up to others who flout fundamental international rules? To governments who would choose to build nuclear arms? To terrorist who would spread biological weapons? To armies who carry out genocide?

We cannot raise our children in a world where we will not follow through on the things we say, the accords we sign, the values that define us.

So just as I will take this case to Congress, I will also deliver this message to the world. While the U.N. investigation has some time to report on its findings, we will insist that an atrocity committed with chemical weapons is not simply investigated, it must be confronted.

I don't expect every nation to agree with the decision we have made. Privately we've heard many expressions of support from our friends. But I will ask those who care about the writ of the international community to stand publicly behind our action.

And finally, let me say this to the American people: I know well that we are weary of war. We've ended one war in Iraq. We're ending another in Afghanistan. And the American people have the good sense to know we cannot resolve the underlying conflict in Syria with our military. In that part of the world, there are ancient sectarian differences, and the hopes of the Arab Spring have unleashed forces of change that are going to take many years to resolve. And that's why we're not contemplating putting our troops in the middle of someone else's war.

Instead, we'll continue to support the Syrian people through our pressure on the Assad regime, our commitment to the opposition, our care for the displaced, and our pursuit of a political resolution that achieves a government that respects the dignity of its people.

But we are the United States of America, and we cannot and must not turn a blind eye to what happened in Damascus. Out of the ashes of world war, we built an international order and enforced the rules that gave it meaning. And we did so because we believe that the rights of individuals to live in peace and dignity depends on the responsibilities of nations. We aren't perfect, but this nation more than any other has been willing to meet those responsibilities.

So to all members of Congress of both parties, I ask you to take this vote for our national security. I am looking forward to the debate. And in doing so, I ask you, members of Congress, to consider that some things are more important than partisan differences or the politics of the moment.

Ultimately, this is not about who occupies this office at any given time; it's about who we are as a country. I believe that the people's representatives must be invested in what America does abroad, and now is the time to show the world that America keeps our commitments. We do what we say. And we lead with the belief that right makes might — not the other way around.

We all know there are no easy options. But I wasn't elected to avoid hard decisions. And neither were the members of the House and the Senate. I've told you what I believe, that our security and our values demand that we cannot turn away from the massacre of countless civilians with chemical weapons. And our democracy is stronger when the President and the people's representatives stand together.

I'm ready to act in the face of this outrage. Today I'm asking Congress to send a message to the world that we are ready to move forward together as one nation.

Thanks very much.

Mohammed Badie, the top leader of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, has suffered a heart attack while in jail, Reuters reports quoting the state-run al-Ahram newspaper on Saturday.

However, state-run news agency MENA has denied a report by the private al-Nahar website, citing security sources, that Badie had died.

Many of the Brotherhood's leaders were imprisoned in recent weeks in the toughest crackdown the group has faced.

Badie, considered the movement's spiritual leader, was arrested on Aug. 20 at his apartment in the eastern Cairo district of Nasr City.

Is President Obama falling into a trap of his own making?

The Obama administration has assiduously avoid intervening in Syria, where more than two years of conflict has left upwards of 100,000 people dead.

Even against that backdrop of so much suffering, there's a case to be made that the use of chemical weapons is an entirely different matter.

"International peace and security depend on certain taboos that are easily recognized when they are broken," says Ian Lustick, a University of Pennsylvania political scientist. "It can be more important for an intervention to take place because nuclear or chemical or biological weapons are used, as opposed to just measuring how many people are killed."

Obama said Friday he hasn't decided on launching a military response against President Bashar Assad's regime in Syria. But having warned that use of chemical weapons would cross a "red line," Obama may feel compelled to do so.

"We cannot accept a world where women and children and innocent civilians are gassed on a terrible scale," Obama said.

Airstrikes may or may not put an end to the use of chemical weapons in Syria. But they certainly won't end the conflict there.

"This is a potentially game-changing move by the Obama administration that's very risky for his overall foreign policy," says Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal-leaning think tank. "It can risk getting him pulled in, in ways he himself doesn't know."

Here is the danger: If Obama acts now, he will have himself crossed a line that will make it difficult for the U.S. to retreat back to the sidelines.

Obama says his goal will not be to end the Assad regime or even tilt conditions on the ground. But it will be difficult to sustain an argument that chemical weapons are an issue entirely separate from the broader conflict — especially if and when Syria retaliates against the U.S. or neighboring allies such as Lebanon or Israel.

"Sometimes credibility is too simply evoked as how you're perceived, but at a certain point you do get trapped by your promises," says David Ekbladh, a historian and expert on U.S. foreign relations at Tufts University. "This is one of those times,"

A Wary Nation

An NBC News poll released Friday found that 79 percent of Americans believe Obama should win approval from Congress before taking military action in Syria.

Given the low esteem in which Congress is generally held these days, such a strong desire for congressional signoff is a clear indication of the public's wariness of the U.S. getting involved in Syria.

"The shadow of Iraq still hangs heavy in the minds of many people," Katulis says. "On all national security questions, especially in the Middle East, the public is just tired. It's done."

If the bombing campaign goes well — if there aren't any American casualties and Assad capitulates in some fashion rather than retaliating — public opinion will turn around quickly, Katulis argues.

But he points out that there are many risks involved in this type of operation. He warns that even the attempt to respond to the use of chemical weapons could backfire, with hard-liners in the Assad regime further emboldened to use any tools they have to hand.

"I'm skeptical that one strike, or set of strikes, will be the end of it," says Jeremi Suri, an international historian and author of Liberty's Surest Guardian: American Nation-Building From the Founders to Obama. "The negative scenario if we do this is that Syria does something that involves Lebanon and Israel."

The Case For Responding

Suri argues that not responding with force at this point would essentially give a green light not just to Assad but to other dictators, who would conclude that they could use chemical weapons with impunity.

"The president and his closest advisers really don't want to get involved in Syria — their bias is against this," he says. "But the president feels that the use of chemical weapons crosses a line that is really dangerous."

Over the past 20 years, the U.S. has on several occasion used cruise missiles or other types of air strikes to respond to challenges, without getting more deeply embroiled in conflicts in any immediate or lasting way.

Recall the strikes against Iraq in 1998 in the wake of a threat against former President George H.W. Bush, for example, or following the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that same year.

"This is not President Obama saying we're going to have the third big war after Iraq and Afghanistan," says Alan Kuperman, a professor of public affairs at the University of Texas who has written about humanitarian interventions.

"He's being very, very clear about a very discreet strike that will uphold a norm, which will also help Obama by restoring his credibility," Kuperman says.

Controlling Events

If there is conclusive proof that the Assad regime ordered a chemical weapons attack, that justifies a military response by the U.S., Kuperman says.

"Even before their use in World War I, people recognized that chemical weapons have a speed and horror that's different from someone being shot," says Ekbladh, the Tufts historian. "There's a difference between killing people with artillery shells and using chemical weapons as a blanket to smother 1,400 people quickly."

But Ekbladh says you can practically read the frustration on Obama's face in recent days. He appears to know that "tit always leads to tat," as Ekbladh says.

In a situation as muddled as Syria, separating out the issue of chemical weapons use from the rest of the conflict will be almost impossible. Once the bombing starts, Obama may feel, as Abraham Lincoln did during the Civil War, that he is unable to control events, but rather risks being controlled by them.

"It seems to me that we are going to be engaged in a strike because he had a lack of wisdom to avoid laying down a red line," says Rajan Menon, a political scientist at City College of New York. "This is the second time the red line has been crossed, so now he's boxed in."

Urdu: Goya

Urdu is the national language of Pakistan, but it is also an official language in five of the Indian states. This particular Urdu word conveys a contemplative "as if" that nonetheless feels like reality and describes the suspension of disbelief that can occur, often through good storytelling.

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As a U.S. military strike on Syria looks increasingly likely in the next few hours or days, various publications are weighing in on what such an attack would accomplish and what would happen next.

Here's a sampling of opinion:

The BBC's Tara McKelvey says:

"The US military would most likely use Tomahawk cruise missiles for an attack on the Syrian government forces. These missiles are now stored on destroyers in the eastern Mediterranean.

"The missiles would not be fired at places where chemical weapons might be stored, since poisonous gas could spread or chemical agents could fall into the wrong hands.

"Instead, military facilities would be targeted — radio centres, command posts and missile launchers, says Douglas Ollivant, who served as an operations officer with the Army's Fifth Cavalry Regiment in Iraq.

"The initial military operation would be fast."

Egypt is quieter these days. Protests against the ouster of Islamist President Mohammed Morsi have subsided for now. And the military-appointed interim government is firmly in charge.

Yet, Egypt remains deeply polarized. And the middle is a lonely place to be.

Some of the young revolutionaries who led the 2011 uprising against the regime of Hosni Mubarak feel they are back to square one, battling authoritarian forces on both sides.

At 9:00 on a recent evening, Aalam Wassef stands on his balcony and bangs a spoon against a pot. The noise echoes in the neighborhood but no one else returns the clattering sound.

The video artist and activist yells "masmouaa," the Arabic word that means "to be heard."

“ I don't trust anyone. If I say anything about the Muslim Brotherhood, people say all the bad things about them. If I praise the government, then I'm a remnant of the old regime. So even if I have faith in someone I can't voice my opinion.

There's a heated debate over the use of antibiotics in farm animals. Critics say farmers overuse these drugs; farmers say they don't.

It's hard to resolve the argument, in part because no one knows exactly how farmers use antibiotics. There's no reliable data on how much antibiotic use is intended to make animals grow faster, for instance, compared to treating disease. Many public health experts say the government should collect and publish that information because antibiotic-resistant bacteria are an increasingly urgent problem. But many farm groups are opposed.

James Johnson, a professor of medicine and infectious disease at the University of Minnesota, is among those pushing for better data. He faces the problem of drug-resistant bacteria firsthand. When he prescribes antibiotics to patients, he increasingly has to ask himself, "Will this drug even work?"

"Resistance is turning up everywhere, and increasingly involves our first-line, favorite drugs," he says. "Everyone knows that we're in a real crisis situation."

There's no easy way out of the crisis because antibiotics are so valuable. Everybody wants to use them. Yet the more they're used, the more likely it is that bacteria will become resistant to them.

Johnson preaches restraint, using the drugs only when they're clearly necessary. He also says that we need to know much more about how antibiotics are currently being used. "Otherwise, we're sort of flying blind," he says.

"Are we flying blind right now? Or do we have the information we need?" I ask.

"Not at all. I think we're mostly flying blind, at least in the U.S.," Johnson says.

There's no comprehensive source of data on how doctors prescribe antibiotics to people, and there's even less information about drugs that are given to chickens, turkeys, hogs and cattle.

That's a big blind spot because antibiotics are commonly used on the farm to treat disease, to prevent disease and to help animals grow faster.

This stream of antibiotics does create drug-resistant bacteria. And people can be exposed to those bacteria through a variety of pathways.

It's set off a fierce debate over how much this contributes to the overall problem of drug-resistant infections. Morgan Scott, a researcher in the College of Veterinary Medicine at Kansas State University, is trying to arrive at an answer. "As a researcher, it's a very intriguing area," he says. "But it's also frustrating because the data are really not there."

The only solid numbers on antibiotic use on the farm come from the Food and Drug Administration. Every year, the FDA lists the total quantity of antibiotics sold for use in farm animals, divided up by major drug class.

But Scott says those overall totals don't tell him what he'd like to know. "At the moment, we really can't identify whether certain uses of antibiotics are more or less risky than others," he says.

He'd love to know the patterns of antibiotic use — which drugs are used on each kind of animal, for what purpose, nationwide. If scientists tracked this over many years, they might be able to see which patterns of use create more drug-resistant bacteria.

There is a country that does collect this information. Denmark has led the world in efforts to control antibiotic use and antibiotic resistance. Every year it publishes a big volume of numbers — and Scott can't get enough of them. "Diving into these data, and visiting Denmark, is kind of like Disneyland for those of us who like big data," he says.

There are lots of people who want something similar for farms in the United States. They include public health experts, but also activist groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists. Congress is considering a bill that would force the FDA to collect this data and publish it.

But pharmaceutical companies and agricultural groups don't like that idea. They don't believe antibiotic use in animals is causing much of a problem for human health. They also don't think that detailed national statistics would even be useful.

"The amount of antibiotic used does not correlate to the potential public health threat," says Ron Phillips, a spokesman for the Animal Health Institute, which represents companies that sell veterinary drugs.

According to Phillips, if you really want to figure out which agricultural practices produce drug-resistant bacteria, you should study them up-close. Look at a few individual farms, examining what drugs are used and how bacteria adapt.

But don't create a national data collection system, he says. It would be a waste of money, and the numbers would just be misused by advocacy groups that are campaigning to restrict the use of antibiotics by farmers. "The widespread quotes that you see about how much is used in animal medicine, as opposed to human medicine — those are meant to scare people, not to inform people," he says.

One the other hand, Scott thinks better numbers could actually mean less suspicion and fear. Many people want to know exactly what meat producers are doing, he says. When they can't find the information they want, they're inclined to assume the worst.

In perhaps the largest nationwide fast-food strike in history, the employees who make your 99-cent burgers and tacos were planning strikes in 50 U.S. cities Thursday. Workers are calling for a $15 minimum wage and hoping to raise attention to the fast-food industry's low pay and limited prospects. The current federal minimum wage standard is $7.25 per hour.

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Every time you turn around it seems like there's a new streaming music service. Pandora was among the first a decade ago. Rdio launched in 2010. Spotify came to the U.S. in the summer of 2011. Apple and Google plan to join the fray this year. Music producer Jimmy Iovine is launching a service tied to his headphone brand Beats by Dr. Dre.

What's odd is they are all jumping into a business that, so far, doesn't seem to be turning a profit.

The Record

Paying The Piper: Music Streaming Services In Perspective

Organizers say workers at fast-food restaurants in cities across the nation will walk off their jobs Thursday in what's expected to be the largest such strike so far, The Associated Press writes.

As the wire service adds:

"Thursday's planned walkouts follow a series of strikes that began last November in New York City, then spread to cities including Chicago, Detroit and Seattle. Workers say they want $15 an hour, which would be about $31,000 a year for full-time employees. That's more than double the federal minimum wage, which many fast food workers make, of $7.25 an hour, or $15,000 a year."

In perhaps the largest nationwide fast-food strike in history, the employees who make your 99-cent burgers and tacos were planning strikes in 50 U.S. cities Thursday. Workers are calling for a $15 minimum wage and hoping to raise attention to the fast-food industry's low pay and limited prospects. The current federal minimum wage standard is $7.25 per hour.

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A U.S. bankruptcy judge on Thursday indicated that he's leaning in favor of a allowing American Airlines to emerge from bankruptcy, clearing a major obstacle to the carrier's planned merger with US Airways.

Judge Sean H. Lane said he is "finding the arguments in favor of confirmation fairly persuasive" to allow American, which filed for Chapter 11 in November 2011, to emerge from bankruptcy.

Lane reportedly could sign off on a restructuring plan for AMR Corp., American's parent, on Sept. 12, according to The Associated Press.

AP says:

"Such a decision would only leave one obstacle — although a big one — to American's proposed merger with US Airways. That would be an antitrust lawsuit filed by the government earlier this month."

The Obama administration appears poised to attack Syria after concluding Bashar Assad's government used chemical weapons, but many members of Congress say they haven't been briefed enough about why military action is warranted.

Opinions about Syria are all over the map, with many lawmakers saying the president cannot proceed without first getting authorization from Congress.

What's been irritating to a lot of lawmakers is that Obama doesn't seem to be asking for their permission at all. But whether the president is legally required to seek congressional approval before — for instance — launching cruise missiles into Syria is an issue that leaves even legal scholars furrowing their brows.

"The Constitution doesn't give me any quick answer to this," says Jesse Choper, who teaches constitutional law at the University of California, Berkeley. "It does say that Congress shall have the power to declare war. Well, the president would say, 'I am not declaring war. I am simply implementing foreign policy.' "

A 1973 statute, the War Powers Resolution, forbids armed forces to fight more than 60 days without congressional approval. But does that mean the president can unilaterally start military action basically anytime he wants?

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas recently argued on Fox News that "the only justifiable reason" for engaging the military is "to protect our national security."

If you want a Supreme Court case clarifying the president's powers as commander in chief, legal experts say: Good luck. The cases that really deal with that question date to the mid-19th century. So lawmakers have been spending this week offering their own constitutional interpretations.

"Look, I say this respectfully, but it is not the king's army," says Republican Rep. Scott Rigell of Virginia.

Rigell has gotten dozens of House members to sign on to a letter demanding that the president ask for the official blessing of Congress before attacking Syria. Some House and Senate members have been briefed by the president, but Rigell says more should be included — even if it means reconvening Congress during its summer recess.

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Who Are Syria's Friends And Why Are They Supporting Assad?

Organizers say workers at fast-food restaurants in cities across the nation will walk off their jobs Thursday in what's expected to be the largest such strike so far, The Associated Press writes.

As the wire service adds:

"Thursday's planned walkouts follow a series of strikes that began last November in New York City, then spread to cities including Chicago, Detroit and Seattle. Workers say they want $15 an hour, which would be about $31,000 a year for full-time employees. That's more than double the federal minimum wage, which many fast food workers make, of $7.25 an hour, or $15,000 a year."

Getaway

Director: Courtney Solomon

Genre: Action, Crime

Running Time: 90 minutes

Rated PG-13 for intense action, violence and mayhem throughout, some rude gestures, and language

With: Ethan Hawke, Selena Gomez, Jon Voight, Paul Freeman

I don't remember when I first realized that books could go away, that they could — and did — pass into obscurity or out of print. Myra Breckinridge by Gore Vidal, All About H. Hatterr by G.V. Desani, Speedboat by Renata Adler, the sublime An Armful of Warm Girl by W.M. Spackman. Each of them, snuffed out. It seemed a scandal. But I vividly recall becoming aware that particular books were prone. To take chances with language or form was to court extinction.

But every now and then, if the moment is right, if the culture is finally ready or a champion found, these books return. (Most of the novels mentioned above have been brought back into print, though Myra has not. Vidal's heroine so intent on "the destruction" of the American male still waits for her moment.) This summer I'm reading and recommending books that have been restored to us, that have been reissued, reimagined or — in one instance — presumed lost and discovered for the first time.

On conversations with the subjects, decades after the experiment

"[Bill Menold] doesn't sound resentful. I'd say he sounds thoughtful and he has reflected a lot on the experiment and the impact that it's had on him and what it meant at the time. I did interview someone else who had been disobedient in the experiment but still very much resented 50 years later that he'd never been de-hoaxed at the time and he found that really unacceptable."

On the problem that one of social psychology's most famous findings cannot be replicated

"I think it leaves social psychology in a difficult situation. ... it is such an iconic experiment. And I think it really leads to the question of why it is that we continue to refer to and believe in Milgram's results. I think the reason that Milgram's experiment is still so famous today is because in a way it's like a powerful parable. It's so widely known and so often quoted that it's taken on a life of its own. ... This experiment and this story about ourselves plays some role for us 50 years later."

When you go to the Dead Sea for a float in its extraordinarily buoyant waters, signs warn you not to drink a drop. "Did you swallow water?" one Dead Sea do's and don'ts list asks. "Go immediately to the lifeguard."

I've never sipped the stuff, but on one visit — it's less than an hour's drive from Jerusalem, between Israel, Jordan and the Israeli-occupied West Bank — I did pry several chunks of salt off an encrusted rock along the shore and took them home in a plastic cup. I thought they might grind up nicely and add an exotic taste, plus an interesting conversation piece, to our table.

But one big lick changed my plans. The salt burned my tongue a bit, like the Dead Sea water does to cuts on your body when you're floating. My casually harvested chunks also left a bitter aftertaste at the back of my throat.
So when I heard about someone marketing Dead Sea salt as a gourmet specialty, I was curious. It turns out that Israeli entrepreneur Ari Fruchter's salt from the Dead Sea is different.

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The Obama administration said Wednesday that it is moving ahead with a rule that would requiring health plans to accommodate households that don't have traditional bank accounts.

One in four of the uninsured people eligible for federal insurance subsidies doesn't have a bank account, according to a report released earlier this year by the tax preparation firm Jackson Hewitt. The report dubbed people without connections to traditional financial institutions the "unbanked."

An estimated 8.5 million people without health coverage would have difficulty getting tax credits to help them buy insurance on marketplaces that open Oct. 1, if health plans barred certain payment methods. Those include cashier's checks, money orders and prepaid debit cards that are popular with low-income households.

Shots - Health News

Latest Health Hurdle: Buying Insurance Without A Bank Account

The U.S. economy expanded at a 2.5 percent annual rate in the second quarter, the Bureau of Economic Analysis said Thursday.

The new estimate was a sharp upward revision from the bureau's initial report on growth in the spring. A month ago, BEA thought gross domestic product had expanded at just a 1.7 percent annual rate from the end of March through June.

Stronger-than-thought growth could mean that the Federal Reserve, which has been watching for the right moment to begin reducing its efforts to give the economy a boost, will decide that the time has come. Investors' concern about what might happen if the Fed does start to scale back its huge bond-buying program are one reason financial markets have been nervous in recent weeks.

Of course, if traders decide that good news about the economy is ... well, good news ... that might give financial markets a boost.

Behind the upward revision in GDP: U.S. firms exported more goods than previously thought.

Bloomberg News analyzes the news and writes that:

"The improvement is consistent with projections that the U.S. has been able to weather the fallout of government budget cuts and higher taxes and is poised to pick up once those restraints fade. Gains in employment and home prices that are shoring up confidence signal households will sustain spending, the biggest part of the economy.

" 'The economy is doing fine,' said Brian Jones, a senior U.S. economist at Societe Generale in New York, who projected a 2.5 percent gain in GDP. 'It is going to weather the sequestration. Growth will accelerate in the second half.' "

Seattle-based coffee giant Starbucks has announced it's going to expand to Colombia.

The country is known for its Arabica beans and for the mythical coffee farmer Juan Valdez. He's helped sell Colombia's coffee for 50 years. Starbucks has cafes in 50 countries. And now, it's coming to perhaps the country most associated with coffee.

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"I'm sitting out in the room with everyone else," Sheridan points out. "I get no special treatment; there's no corner office."

That layout is by design. Sheridan says obliterating layers of management can leads to faster decision-making — and more important, motivated and empowered employees. At Menlo, the whole office, or sometimes subcommittees, decide who gets hired and who gets fired. Promotions, raises and budgeting are all decided by the team. The company's emphasis on transparency extends to details like the budget, which is posted on the wall for everyone to see. Email communication is frowned upon in favor of face-to-face talking.

"We've seen more of a trend toward flattening organizations," says Stephen Courtright, a Texas A&M business professor who specializes in studying self-governing offices. He says because the tech industry needs to adapt quickly and competition for the best employees is fierce, giving employees freedom helps them move much faster.

"Those industries are just unstable, rapidly changing, and they are trying to harness creativity and innovation. So it is that speed of the technology environment that has prompted organizations to rethink the way they structure the organization," Courtright says.

But it doesn't fix all problems. The gaming company Valve also boasts of being bossless and has gotten a lot of attention for it. But Jeri Ellsworth, a former programmer at Valve Corp., said her time there "felt a lot like high school."

"What I learned from Valve is that I don't think it works," Ellsworth told The Grey Area podcast and reported in Wired magazine. "I think that if you give complete latitudes with no checks and balances, it's just human nature [employees] are gonna try to minimize the work they have to do and maximize the control they have."

At Menlo, the employees say the culture prevents that. "It really doesn't happen that way," says Menlo developer Eric Schreffler. "And that's partly because of the people who were here from the beginning."

As more companies shift to flatter structures, Courtright says workers should decide what rewards you're seeking at work when making job decisions.

"In a flat organization, moving up the chain of command is not the reward for performing well, because in a flat organization there's not a big chain of command to climb up. Basically the reward in a flat organization is being able to work on new and challenging creative tasks," Courtright says.

And that newness is what keeps Menlo's Lisa Ho coming back.

"We say we're a learning organization, so we're always learning and trying new things, which is very cool," she says.

"I'm sitting out in the room with everyone else," Sheridan points out. "I get no special treatment; there's no corner office."

That layout is by design. Sheridan says obliterating layers of management can leads to faster decision-making — and more important, motivated and empowered employees. At Menlo, the whole office, or sometimes subcommittees, decide who gets hired and who gets fired. Promotions, raises and budgeting are all decided by the team. The company's emphasis on transparency extends to details like the budget, which is posted on the wall for everyone to see. Email communication is frowned upon in favor of face-to-face talking.

"We've seen more of a trend toward flattening organizations," says Stephen Courtright, a Texas A&M business professor who specializes in studying self-governing offices. He says because the tech industry needs to adapt quickly and competition for the best employees is fierce, giving employees freedom helps them move much faster.

"Those industries are just unstable, rapidly changing, and they are trying to harness creativity and innovation. So it is that speed of the technology environment that has prompted organizations to rethink the way they structure the organization," Courtright says.

But it doesn't fix all problems. The gaming company Valve also boasts of being bossless and has gotten a lot of attention for it. But Jeri Ellsworth, a former programmer at Valve Corp., said her time there "felt a lot like high school."

"What I learned from Valve is that I don't think it works," Ellsworth told The Grey Area podcast and reported in Wired magazine. "I think that if you give complete latitudes with no checks and balances, it's just human nature [employees] are gonna try to minimize the work they have to do and maximize the control they have."

At Menlo, the employees say the culture prevents that. "It really doesn't happen that way," says Menlo developer Eric Schreffler. "And that's partly because of the people who were here from the beginning."

As more companies shift to flatter structures, Courtright says workers should decide what rewards you're seeking at work when making job decisions.

"In a flat organization, moving up the chain of command is not the reward for performing well, because in a flat organization there's not a big chain of command to climb up. Basically the reward in a flat organization is being able to work on new and challenging creative tasks," Courtright says.

And that newness is what keeps Menlo's Lisa Ho coming back.

"We say we're a learning organization, so we're always learning and trying new things, which is very cool," she says.

The White House says President Obama will issue two new executive orders on guns – one to curb the import of military surplus weapons and another that closes a loophole allowing some felons to get around background checks.

The two actions — to be announced by Vice President Joe Biden at the swearing-in of Todd Jones, the new director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — will join 23 others that the president has issued in an effort to reduce gun violence.

They are part of a set of recommendations from the vice president unveiled in January.

"Even as Congress fails to act on common-sense proposals, like expanding criminal background checks and making gun trafficking a federal crime, the President and Vice President remain committed to using all the tools in their power to make progress toward reducing gun violence," the White House said in a statement on Thursday.

According to the statement, "felons, domestic abusers, and others prohibited from having guns" can skirt background checks by registering the weapon as a trust or corporation.

"The proposed rule requires individuals associated with trusts or corporations that acquire these types of weapons to undergo background checks, just as these individuals would if the weapons were registered to them individually," the statement says.

The second would halt a practice of special approvals to import U.S.-made military weapons from other countries. The White House says since 2005, the government has authorized the reimport of more than 250,000 such firearms.

The new policy would "deny requests to bring military-grade firearms back into the United States to private entities, with only a few exceptions such as for museums," the statement says.

As the U.S. and its allies seemingly move closer to some type of military action in response to Syrian President Bashar Assad's alleged use of chemical weapons to kill hundreds of his own people, one of the policymakers who led the U.S. into war with Iraq is saying the Obama administration has not made the case for why striking Syria is in the USA's national interest.

"There really hasn't been any indication from the administration as to what our national interest is with respect to this particular situation," Donald Rumsfeld, secretary of defense when the U.S. attacked Iraq in 2003, said Wednesday evening on the Fox Business Network's Cavuto. The most important issues in the region, Rumsfeld added, are "Iran's nuclear program and the relationship between Iran and Syria — the Assad regime — with respect to funding terrorists that go around killing innocent men, women and children; including Americans."

Rumsfeld's comments came shortly after President Obama appeared on The PBS NewsHour. During that interview, the president said the U.S. has concluded that the Assad regime is responsible for last week's chemical weapons attack. While he had not yet made a decision about how to respond, Obama added that:

"If, in fact, we can take limited, tailored approaches, not getting drawn into a long conflict, not a repetition of, you know, Iraq, which I know a lot of people are worried about. But if we are saying in a clear and decisive but very limited way — we send a shot across the bow saying, 'stop doing this' — that can have a positive impact on our national security over the long term, and may have a positive impact on our national security over the long term and may have a positive impact in the sense that chemical weapons are not used again on innocent civilians."

When you go to the Dead Sea for a float in its extraordinarily buoyant waters, signs warn you not to drink a drop. "Did you swallow water?" one Dead Sea do's and don'ts list asks. "Go immediately to the lifeguard."

I've never sipped the stuff, but on one visit — it's less than an hour's drive from Jerusalem, between Israel, Jordan and the Israeli-occupied West Bank — I did pry several chunks of salt off an encrusted rock along the shore and took them home in a plastic cup. I thought they might grind up nicely and add an exotic taste, plus an interesting conversation piece, to our table.

But one big lick changed my plans. The salt burned my tongue a bit, like the Dead Sea water does to cuts on your body when you're floating. My casually harvested chunks also left a bitter aftertaste at the back of my throat.
So when I heard about someone marketing Dead Sea salt as a gourmet specialty, I was curious. It turns out that Israeli entrepreneur Ari Fruchter's salt from the Dead Sea is different.

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A week without water can easily kill the average person.

But a garden that goes unwatered for months may produce sweeter, more flavorful fruits than anything available in most mainstream supermarkets — even in the scorching heat of a California summer. Commercial growers call it "dry farming," and throughout the state, this unconventional technique seems to be catching on among small producers of tomatoes, apples, grapes, melons and potatoes.

At Happy Boy Farms, near Santa Cruz, sales director Jen Lynne believes dry farming could be an important agricultural practice in the future, when water will likely be a less abundant resource.

But the taste of her dry-farmed Early Girl tomatoes is the main reason chefs, wholesalers and individuals around the country are increasingly calling to place orders. She notes that many calls come from places where rain falls through the summer, making dry farming impossible.

"Once you taste a dry-farmed tomato, you'll never want anything else," she says, adding that she could be selling hundreds of 14-pound cases per day if her 10-acre tomato field could meet the demand.

At Whole Foods Market in Sebastopol, about 50 miles north of San Francisco, dry-farmed tomatoes have become a shopper attraction, according to produce buyer Allan Timpe.

"People definitely come here to get them," he says. "Once someone tastes a dry-farmed tomato, you've got a customer for life."

Timpe also carries locally grown, dry-farmed potatoes, which he says "are dense and really flavorful."

The idea behind dry farming is that by restricting a plant's water intake, its fruits wind up with less water content and a greater density of sugar and other flavor compounds. But the practice isn't as simple as just cutting off the water. First, dry farming in sandy soil, through which water drains easily, doesn't work. Just as importantly, the plants, or trees, must be dry-farmed from the time they're planted.

"We get the plants going with a little water, then cut it off after a few weeks," says Kevin McEnnis, who dry farms Early Girl tomatoes at Quetzal Farm in Santa Rosa.

Then, he explains, as the young but quickly growing vines become thirsty, they send their roots deeper underground than they otherwise would to find moisture, which can remain in the soil all year.

A technique that also helps dry farmers lock water underground is frequently tilling the top foot of soil into a fluffy dust layer. Underground moisture that creeps upward through the earth cannot break through this layer, and it remains below the surface.

But farming without irrigation has a major drawback: dramatically reduced yields.

Stan Devoto, a farmer in Northern California, says his dry-farmed trees produce 12 to 15 tons of apples per acre per year. Irrigated trees, on the other hand, may bear 40 or 50 tons. And McEnnis says he harvests about 4 tons of tomatoes off his acre of vines each summer and fall, whereas conventional growers may reap 40 tons per acre.

Indeed, in most areas of conventional agriculture, dry farming is unprofitable and unusual. Exceptions include most European wine grapes — which local winemaking laws actually require be grown without irrigation — and much of America's grain production.

Paul Vossen, a University of California farm adviser in Sonoma County, says many people who dry farm do so only because they have no water with which to irrigate their land. "They do it because they have to, and so they'll make it part of their marketing strategy," he says.

But winemaker Will Bucklin, of Old Hill Ranch in the Sonoma Valley, has an underground water supply. Still, he dry farms 15 acres of old-vine Syrah, Zinfandel and other varieties; he's one of just a few California winemakers currently dry farming. His grapes are smaller, and yields at harvest time slightly lower, than on irrigated vineyards.

"But the small size of the berries means there is a lower juice-to-skin ratio," Bucklin says.

Since grape skins contain flavor-making tannins and polyphenols, dry farming can — at least in theory — produce richer, more intense wines. Bucklin concedes that he isn't certain that a novice taster, or even an expert one, could tell a dry-farmed wine from a conventional one in a blind tasting.

But in a highly populated state where water tables are dropping and rivers dwindling to trickles, Bucklin is confident, at least, of one thing:

"I'm using a lot less water than my neighbor."

A week without water can easily kill the average person.

But a garden that goes unwatered for months may produce sweeter, more flavorful fruits than anything available in most mainstream supermarkets — even in the scorching heat of a California summer. Commercial growers call it "dry farming," and throughout the state, this unconventional technique seems to be catching on among small producers of tomatoes, apples, grapes, melons and potatoes.

At Happy Boy Farms, near Santa Cruz, sales director Jen Lynne believes dry farming could be an important agricultural practice in the future, when water will likely be a less abundant resource.

But the taste of her dry-farmed Early Girl tomatoes is the main reason chefs, wholesalers and individuals around the country are increasingly calling to place orders. She notes that many calls come from places where rain falls through the summer, making dry farming impossible.

"Once you taste a dry-farmed tomato, you'll never want anything else," she says, adding that she could be selling hundreds of 14-pound cases per day if her 10-acre tomato field could meet the demand.

At Whole Foods Market in Sebastopol, about 50 miles north of San Francisco, dry-farmed tomatoes have become a shopper attraction, according to produce buyer Allan Timpe.

"People definitely come here to get them," he says. "Once someone tastes a dry-farmed tomato, you've got a customer for life."

Timpe also carries locally grown, dry-farmed potatoes, which he says "are dense and really flavorful."

The idea behind dry farming is that by restricting a plant's water intake, its fruits wind up with less water content and a greater density of sugar and other flavor compounds. But the practice isn't as simple as just cutting off the water. First, dry farming in sandy soil, through which water drains easily, doesn't work. Just as importantly, the plants, or trees, must be dry-farmed from the time they're planted.

"We get the plants going with a little water, then cut it off after a few weeks," says Kevin McEnnis, who dry farms Early Girl tomatoes at Quetzal Farm in Santa Rosa.

Then, he explains, as the young but quickly growing vines become thirsty, they send their roots deeper underground than they otherwise would to find moisture, which can remain in the soil all year.

A technique that also helps dry farmers lock water underground is frequently tilling the top foot of soil into a fluffy dust layer. Underground moisture that creeps upward through the earth cannot break through this layer, and it remains below the surface.

But farming without irrigation has a major drawback: dramatically reduced yields.

Stan Devoto, a farmer in Northern California, says his dry-farmed trees produce 12 to 15 tons of apples per acre per year. Irrigated trees, on the other hand, may bear 40 or 50 tons. And McEnnis says he harvests about 4 tons of tomatoes off his acre of vines each summer and fall, whereas conventional growers may reap 40 tons per acre.

Indeed, in most areas of conventional agriculture, dry farming is unprofitable and unusual. Exceptions include most European wine grapes — which local winemaking laws actually require be grown without irrigation — and much of America's grain production.

Paul Vossen, a University of California farm adviser in Sonoma County, says many people who dry farm do so only because they have no water with which to irrigate their land. "They do it because they have to, and so they'll make it part of their marketing strategy," he says.

But winemaker Will Bucklin, of Old Hill Ranch in the Sonoma Valley, has an underground water supply. Still, he dry farms 15 acres of old-vine Syrah, Zinfandel and other varieties; he's one of just a few California winemakers currently dry farming. His grapes are smaller, and yields at harvest time slightly lower, than on irrigated vineyards.

"But the small size of the berries means there is a lower juice-to-skin ratio," Bucklin says.

Since grape skins contain flavor-making tannins and polyphenols, dry farming can — at least in theory — produce richer, more intense wines. Bucklin concedes that he isn't certain that a novice taster, or even an expert one, could tell a dry-farmed wine from a conventional one in a blind tasting.

But in a highly populated state where water tables are dropping and rivers dwindling to trickles, Bucklin is confident, at least, of one thing:

"I'm using a lot less water than my neighbor."

Some of the latest developments related to the crisis in Syria and the increasing likelihood that the U.S. and its allies will soon launch missile strikes on targets there in response to last week's alleged use of chemical weapons by the regime of President Bashar Assad:

— U.N. Security Council. Britain "has drafted a resolution condemning the chemical weapons attack by Assad & authorising necessary measures to protect civilians," Prime Minister David Cameron's office announced on its official Twitter page early Wednesday.

That resolution, Cameron's office added, "will be put forward at a meeting of the five permanent members of the Security Council later today in New York."

Now, as NPR's Philip Reeves tells our Newscast Desk, attention will:

"Focus on what the options encompassed by the words 'necessary measures.' Cameron is trying to convince a skeptical parliament and public to support plans to join the U.S. in a military strike against President Assad's regime. This faces resolute opposition from Russia and China — both permanent member of the Security Council. But by putting forward the resolution, Cameron can argue that he at least tried to get U.N. Security Council backing."

Parallels

New at 11:35 a.m. ET: Who Are Syria's Friends And Why Are They Supporting Assad?

The Obama administration appears poised to attack Syria after concluding Bashar Assad's government used chemical weapons, but many members of Congress say they haven't been briefed enough about why military action is warranted.

Opinions about Syria are all over the map, with many lawmakers saying the president cannot proceed without first getting authorization from Congress.

What's been irritating to a lot of lawmakers is that Obama doesn't seem to be asking for their permission at all. But whether the president is legally required to seek congressional approval before — for instance — launching cruise missiles into Syria is an issue that leaves even legal scholars furrowing their brows.

"The Constitution doesn't give me any quick answer to this," says Jesse Choper, who teaches constitutional law at the University of California, Berkeley. "It does say that Congress shall have the power to declare war. Well, the president would say, 'I am not declaring war. I am simply implementing foreign policy.' "

A 1973 statute, the War Powers Resolution, forbids armed forces to fight more than 60 days without congressional approval. But does that mean the president can unilaterally start military action basically anytime he wants?

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas recently argued on Fox News that "the only justifiable reason" for engaging the military is "to protect our national security."

If you want a Supreme Court case clarifying the president's powers as commander in chief, legal experts say: Good luck. The cases that really deal with that question date to the mid-19th century. So lawmakers have been spending this week offering their own constitutional interpretations.

"Look, I say this respectfully, but it is not the king's army," says Republican Rep. Scott Rigell of Virginia.

Rigell has gotten dozens of House members to sign on to a letter demanding that the president ask for the official blessing of Congress before attacking Syria. Some House and Senate members have been briefed by the president, but Rigell says more should be included — even if it means reconvening Congress during its summer recess.

Related NPR Stories

Parallels

Who Are Syria's Friends And Why Are They Supporting Assad?

Opponents of the Affordable Care Act often talk about how unpopular it is.

And this month's tracking poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation bears them out. Negative views of the law (42 percent) top positive ones (37 percent).

But Republicans who have been barnstorming the country this month to garner support for defunding the law when Congress returns from its summer break might want to look at another part of the poll. The unpopularity of the law with many Americans doesn't mean they necessarily support starving it of money.

In fact, 57 percent of respondents said they disapproved of cutting off funding to the law as a way of blocking its implementation. Thirty-six percent of those surveyed approved of the idea. Eight percent didn't know or refused to answer.

All those numbers are roughly the same as they've been all year. And they're within a few percentage points of where they were in January 2011.

The most common reason not to defund the law? "Using the budget process to stop a law is not the way our government should work," said 69 percent of those asked. Fifty-six percent said "without funding the law will be crippled and won't work as planned."

But this month's poll could give supporters of the law pause, too.

You know all that stuff we've been hearing about how young people (who are critical to the enrollment effort) are most likely to be influenced by their moms?

Well, that's not what they told these pollsters. The most trusted sources of information about the health law are doctors or nurses, followed by pharmacists and then federal and state health agencies.

On the other hand, the most common places people actually have heard about the law are the news media (81 percent) and friends and family (49 percent).

And how much do they trust that information? Not so much. Only 18 percent said they would trust it "a lot."

What about social-networking sites like Facebook and Twitter? They've been useful in getting the word out — 23 percent of those surveyed said they'd heard something about the health law on social media in the past month. But only 3 percent said they trust it "a lot."

With just over a month to go before enrollment is set to begin, it looks like opponents and supporters both have their work cut out.

The Obama administration appears poised to attack Syria after concluding Bashar Assad's government used chemical weapons, but many members of Congress say they haven't been briefed enough about why military action is warranted.

Opinions about Syria are all over the map, with many lawmakers saying the president cannot proceed without first getting authorization from Congress.

What's been irritating to a lot of lawmakers is that Obama doesn't seem to be asking for their permission at all. But whether the president is legally required to seek congressional approval before — for instance — launching cruise missiles into Syria is an issue that leaves even legal scholars furrowing their brows.

"The Constitution doesn't give me any quick answer to this," says Jesse Choper, who teaches constitutional law at the University of California, Berkeley. "It does say that Congress shall have the power to declare war. Well, the president would say, 'I am not declaring war. I am simply implementing foreign policy.' "

A 1973 statute, the War Powers Resolution, forbids armed forces to fight more than 60 days without congressional approval. But does that mean the president can unilaterally start military action basically anytime he wants?

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas recently argued on Fox News that "the only justifiable reason" for engaging the military is "to protect our national security."

If you want a Supreme Court case clarifying the president's powers as commander in chief, legal experts say: Good luck. The cases that really deal with that question date to the mid-19th century. So lawmakers have been spending this week offering their own constitutional interpretations.

"Look, I say this respectfully, but it is not the king's army," says Republican Rep. Scott Rigell of Virginia.

Rigell has gotten dozens of House members to sign on to a letter demanding that the president ask for the official blessing of Congress before attacking Syria. Some House and Senate members have been briefed by the president, but Rigell says more should be included — even if it means reconvening Congress during its summer recess.

Related NPR Stories

Parallels

Who Are Syria's Friends And Why Are They Supporting Assad?

South Africa has come a long way in dealing with AIDS. The country has been successful in getting drug treatment to millions of people infected with HIV.

But the country still has one of the highest rates of HIV infection in the world — and the virus continues to spread. Nearly 400,000 South Africans are infected with HIV each year.

One health clinic in the heart of Johannesburg is attempting to break the HIV cycle by focusing on people at extremely high risk for infection — prostitutes.

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On conversations with the subjects, decades after the experiment

"[Bill Menold] doesn't sound resentful. I'd say he sounds thoughtful and he has reflected a lot on the experiment and the impact that it's had on him and what it meant at the time. I did interview someone else who had been disobedient in the experiment but still very much resented 50 years later that he'd never been de-hoaxed at the time and he found that really unacceptable."

On the problem that one of social psychology's most famous findings cannot be replicated

"I think it leaves social psychology in a difficult situation. ... it is such an iconic experiment. And I think it really leads to the question of why it is that we continue to refer to and believe in Milgram's results. I think the reason that Milgram's experiment is still so famous today is because in a way it's like a powerful parable. It's so widely known and so often quoted that it's taken on a life of its own. ... This experiment and this story about ourselves plays some role for us 50 years later."

The New York Times' website isn't working for us, and many other users, again this morning. As All Tech Considered reported Tuesday evening, the Times appears to be the victim of another hacking by the Syrian Electronic Army — a pro-Assad organization that has previously taken over the websites of other U.S. news organizations, including NPR.

The Times has created an alternate website to display its stories. Click here to get there. Among the top stories there as of 7 a.m. ET:

— "Obama Weighs 'Limited' Strikes Against Syrian Forces."

— "Arab League Rejects Attack Against Syria."

— "Strike on Syria Would Lead to Retaliation on Israel, Iran Warns."

— "Merrill Lynch in Big Payout for Bias Case."

— "Times Site Is Disrupted in Attack by Hackers."

Some of the latest developments related to the crisis in Syria and the increasing likelihood that the U.S. and its allies will soon launch missile strikes on targets there in response to last week's alleged use of chemical weapons by the regime of President Bashar Assad:

— U.N. Security Council. Britain "has drafted a resolution condemning the chemical weapons attack by Assad & authorising necessary measures to protect civilians," Prime Minister David Cameron's office announced on its official Twitter page early Wednesday.

That resolution, Cameron's office added, "will be put forward at a meeting of the five permanent members of the Security Council later today in New York."

Now, as NPR's Philip Reeves tells our Newscast Desk, attention will:

"Focus on what the options encompassed by the words 'necessary measures.' Cameron is trying to convince a skeptical parliament and public to support plans to join the U.S. in a military strike against President Assad's regime. This faces resolute opposition from Russia and China — both permanent member of the Security Council. But by putting forward the resolution, Cameron can argue that he at least tried to get U.N. Security Council backing."

He survives the perilous journey, which is narrated for us by a disembodied voice that announces his/her/it's presence as "the Third Wind." This mysterious force, like Athena in the Odyssey, comes to assist the hero whenever he seems to have completely exhausted his human powers. And believe me, he needs help — as does the entire tribe — to get through a hard winter and rekindle the fires of spring, hunt for fat-restoring game, and weather the weather that frequently serves as the dangerous backdrop to all sorts of tribal woes and misfortunes. It's all set against a landscape that Robinson describes with the exact and loving care of an inspired geographer: hills, valleys, streams, and rivers make up the home of Loon's struggling clan, led by the aging shaman — Thorn — whom he, as it turns out, is destined to replace.

As Loon comes of age as a hunter and a man, makes his kills and takes a wife, the endless round of days and seasons assume a palpable urgency; just when it seems as though the boy become adult will triumph over natural adversity, a party of "northers," a separate people who live mostly in snow and ice and have trained wolves to help them track and hunt, kidnap his wife.

The perilous trek to find and reclaim Loon's wife makes up only part of this gorgeous book that — like the best of its kind — gives you feel of a life we might dream about but will never otherwise know. It's rich with a sense of natural forces ruling beyond the visible, with bridges to the world of the departed, and a deep and abiding feeling of life powerfully fixed in earth, water, sky, and air, while at the same time attuned to changes in the seasons. It's a connection that these days we no longer feel much of — but Robinson brings it vividly alive, as when on the verge of spring the ice of winter begins to melt, so that "upstream and downstream the river was groaning ... crying out for release, for the chance to run free and see the sun again ... Big jagged plates were rising out of the shattered patches of river ice, as if something underneath was pushing to be free..." The sight of this pushes Thorn the shaman to push Loon in turn to say the appropriate poem in which knowledge of the changing of the seasons is transmitted from year to year and beyond. "Great salt sea deep trail of the dead," Loon recites as the river unlocks before his — and our — eyes. "We burn holly for you to break the ice."

As you can hear, Robinson keeps stylization of the language to a minimum, without stooping too low, so that the story itself can break free of the page and linger in the mind — which worked for me. Maybe it's because the world he creates feels so authentic and complete, but for several nights running, something happened to me that's never happened to me before, in all the years I've been reading novels. I dreamed I was living in Loon's world, traveling in the same tribe, along streams and rivers, through forest and over hills in an ancient state of mind.

Read an excerpt of Shaman

In his recipe, the dumplings are made of semolina plus a little bulgur. The filling is seasoned ground beef. The kubbeh are cooked in a sour soup.

Camp participant Aviv Raz, 13, is thrilled to make kubbeh.

"My grandma makes kubbeh every Friday," she says. "And all the family, they come, they eat kubbeh, all the cousins. It's great."

Like hummus, kubbeh is one of those dishes that is well loved, with local varieties from Iraq to Egypt.

The kids start by sharpening big knives. They chop onions, garlic and celery for the meat filling.

Raz and her friends brown the beef in a heavy skillet,

Then they chop more celery, chard and zucchini for the soup. While the soup steams and the meat browns, they mix the dough for the dumplings. This is the hardest part to get right because of the semolina, a coarse flour ground from hard durum wheat.

"The semolina ... reacts differently from wheat flour or from rice flour," Shlomi, the chef, explains. "That's why it's more thick than the Asian dumplings that we know. It's soft, but you want to feel it, you know, the texture in your mouth."

He shows the kids how to first, grease their fingers, then roll a bit of dough into a ball, flatten it, put a little meat in the middle then pinch it shut. Raz pats away happily.

Chef Shlomi tastes the broth and calls for more lemon. Raz and her friends gently slide the dumplings into the soup. Finally, the kubbeh and other comfort foods cooked at camp on this day are set out for lunch. Chef Shlomi tries a dumpling.

His verdict?

"The texture of the dough [is] really, really good, soft, like it's supposed to be," he says. "Maybe a little salt in the filling, and a bit more vinegar, lemon."

Raz rates her work tasty, but nothing compared to her grandma's kubbeh.

The New York Times' website isn't working for us, and many other users, again this morning. As All Tech Considered reported Tuesday evening, the Times appears to be the victim of another hacking by the Syrian Electronic Army — a pro-Assad organization that has previously taken over the websites of other U.S. news organizations, including NPR.

The Times has created an alternate website to display its stories. Click here to get there. Among the top stories there as of 7 a.m. ET:

— "Obama Weighs 'Limited' Strikes Against Syrian Forces."

— "Arab League Rejects Attack Against Syria."

— "Strike on Syria Would Lead to Retaliation on Israel, Iran Warns."

— "Merrill Lynch in Big Payout for Bias Case."

— "Times Site Is Disrupted in Attack by Hackers."

(Update at 12:32 p.m.: A new paragraph — second-to-last — was added to reflect sporadic uses of chemical weapons after World War I.)

The use of chemicals weapons last week in Syria, if proved, would put the conflict there on a short list of occasions in which the deadly weapons have been used.

Here is a look at the previous times chemical weapons were deployed in modern times:

Tokyo Subway Attack, March 1995

Thirteen people were killed and 6,000 injured when members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult attacked Tokyo's subway system with sarin gas.

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(We added a new top to this post at 1:15 p.m. ET.)

"Anyone who approaches this logically" would conclude that the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad is responsible for last week's chemical weapons attack near Damascus that reportedly left hundreds dead and thousands more injured, White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters early Tuesday afternoon.

His sharp words came on day when speculation about the likelihood of U.S.-led missile strikes on Syria increased. While the U.S. has concluded — even as it continues to examine the evidence — that Assad's forces are to blame for the attack, Carney said President Obama is still considering "the appropriate response."

The author is a Syrian citizen in Damascus who is not being further identified out of safety concerns.

Most residents of Damascus believe that a U.S. military strike is on the horizon, but few think it will have a dramatic impact on the course of a war that has already been raging for more than two years.

Those who follow the government line often speak about a U.S. conspiracy to overthrow the country's leader, Bashar Assad, as other Arab leaders have been toppled in recent years.

And even those who have backed the uprising against Assad say they are not comfortable with a Western nation attacking their country.

"Well, it's always shameful to say: 'Yes, we want foreigners — the West — to strike our country.' People don't say things like that," said Nabil, a newlywed in his early 30s. Like others interviewed for this story, he asked that only his first name be used.

Like millions of Syrians, he has been driven from his home. He and his wife, Rana, have been living with her parents in downtown Damascus for months.

"Well, let's be realistic," added Rana. "I'm not going to say I want a strike against my own country. But I do say I hope such a strike will help us out a little. We've seen so much already. Enough."

Samir, who served his mandatory military service in the late 1990s, said an attack could harm the Assad regime but it won't drive it from power.

"The strike won't necessarily change the equation on the ground. It's not meant to get rid of the regime," he said, adding that he always supported the uprising against Assad.

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(This post last updated at 2:20 p.m. ET)

Tens of thousands of people assembled on the National Mall to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 March on Washington, best known as the venue for the iconic "I Have a Dream" speech that helped galvanize the civil rights movement.

Organizers, including the Rev. Al Sharpton and King's son, Martin Luther King III, had hoped to attract 100,000 people to attend Saturday's events leading up the official Aug. 28 anniversary.

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Fifty years ago this week, when hundreds of thousands of demonstrators came from across the country to take part in the 1963 March on Washington, the city was not yet the cosmopolitan capital that it arguably is today.

But it was a mecca for African-Americans, says historian Marya McQuirter.

"Washington was definitely a different city 50 years ago," she says, "for a number of reasons. By 1957, it had become the largest majority black city in the country."

That was, in part, because of "white flight," she says, but also because D.C. was "an attractive place for African-Americans migrating from the South."

As well as from the North.

Ella Kelly came to Washington from New York's Harlem, first to study at Howard University, then to live.

"It was Southern, and you learned that very quickly," she says. "I don't mean that in a negative way. There were things such as you'd stand at the corner, waiting to take the bus, and little ladies would say, 'Good morning.' That kind of thing."

Kelly, a retired public school teacher and government worker, remembers Washington then as a beautiful city. But she remembers ugliness, too, like the time she and her husband looked at an apartment for rent.

"The manager of the building was an African-American woman," Kelly says. "There was a sign outside that said, 'Apartment available.' We knocked on the front door. She came to the door, and she said, 'We don't rent to colored.' She was a person of color. My husband and I looked at each other ... 'OK, whatever,' and we left."

That kind of segregation was not uncommon in Washington.

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Code Switch

What The March On Washington Called For, And What We Got

Fifty years ago Wednesday, John Lewis was the youngest speaker to address the estimated quarter-million people at the March on Washington.

"Those who have said be patient and wait — we must say that we cannot be patient," the 23-year-old chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) said that day. "We do not want our freedom gradually. But we want to be free now."

Aug. 28, 1963, also was the day Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous "I Have A Dream" speech, and few are as thoughtful about the significance of the day as Lewis, now a Democratic congressman from Georgia and civil rights icon.

That summer, the nation had seen black children attacked by dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham, Ala., and the murder of NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers.

In his 1963 speech, Lewis thundered: "Where is the political party that would make it unnecessary to march on Washington?"

Lonnie Bunch, director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, says Lewis originally planned to give a much angrier speech.

Johnson, a seasoned science journalist, is undaunted by the complex nature of his subject. He writes clearly and colorfully without dumbing down his material. In one passage, he gives a wonderfully concise definition of the disease. "Cancer" he writes, "is a phenomenon in which a cell begins dividing out of control and accumulating genetic damage." He's also particularly good on the seed and soil theory of metastasis, which describes how certain cancer seed cells prefer certain kinds of human tissue, and metabolic syndrome, a pathological spiral at the root of several chronic conditions.

In perhaps the book's most poignant moment, Johnson confesses that he worries his decision to not have children caused Nancy's illness. Women who don't bear children, he explains, have more menstrual cycles and are therefore exposed to more estrogen, which is a known carcinogen according the National Toxicology Program. "I told myself again that her cancer was not known to be estrogen related, that my not wanting to have children was unlikely to be the cause," Johnson writes. "But who could know?"

Who could know, indeed. Carcinogens seem to be everywhere, and data is contradictory. (Coffee is a perfect example. It has has been shown to lower oral and colon cancer risks, yet it contains 19 carcinogens, including formaldehyde). But Johnson ultimately takes some solace in cancer's randomness. "There is something comforting about knowing that cancer has always been with us," he writes, "that it is not all our fault, that you can take every precaution and still something in the genetic coils can become unsprung."

Tortellini — small circles of rolled dough folded around a filling — are one of the most renowned members of the Italian pasta family. In the land of their birth, the region near the Italian city of Bologna, they're strictly served as broth-like dumplings.

Possibly no foodstuff in Italian cuisine is surrounded by so much history and lore.

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In 1992, when Jay Leno took over from Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, he was already a familiar presence, having served as one of Carson's regular substitute hosts. Despite that experience, Leno's first few years on Tonight were rocky.

"When he started, when he was up against Letterman, Letterman beat him for the first couple of years," critic David Bianculli tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "But once Leno came ahead, he was unstoppable. He never lost that audience."

Leno had a long, successful run on Tonight, but in May 2009 he left to start his own prime-time program, The Jay Leno Show, also on NBC. That show was canceled after just a few months — and in a controversial move, Leno returned to Tonight, displacing new host Conan O'Brien.

In February 2014, Leno will step down for the second time as host of Tonight. Gross and Bianculli listen back to Leno's 1996 Fresh Air interview.

It seems almost sacrilegious to question the wisdom of Julia Child.

First with her opus Mastering the Art of French Cooking and later with her PBS cooking show, the unflappably cheerful Child helped rescue home cookery from the clutches of convenience food. She taught us how to love — and take pride in — making something from scratch.

And yet, in at least one important kitchen skill, Child got it dead wrong: rinsing raw poultry.

"I just think it's a safer thing to do," Child tells viewers in one clip from The French Chef in which she shows us the ins and outs of roasting chicken.

Novels are low-tech objects. They can't be plugged in, they've got no buttons or knobs, and they don't make your eyes pop out of your head as you watch creatures or asteroids zigzag across a screen. Usually, novels have no visual aids at all. So if you want to know what Anna Karenina looks like, well, you just have to read the book.

But Marisha Pessl's Night Film is eager to bust out of that old-fashioned, "he had blue eyes and she fell to her death" kind of storytelling. This sprawling book uses made-up documents of all kinds: newspaper clippings, photographs, police reports, magazine articles supposedly taken from publications like Time and Rolling Stone, and transcripts of chatter on an ultra-culty, closed online community called "The Blackboards," to tell its thriller of a story.

The narrator, Scott McGrath, is an investigative journalist who's long had his eye on a creepy filmmaker. Stanislas Cordova makes movies supposedly so terrifying that at so-called "red-band screenings," held in condemned buildings or tunnels under the city, some people faint in fear. This might remind you a little of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, in which there's a video that's supposed to be so incredibly entertaining that people who see it simply get totally absorbed in it and eventually die. Actually, readers have compared Pessl with Wallace before; her first novel was also brainy and fat and full of ideas. Night Film is brainy and fat and full of ideas, too, but instead of comparing it with other novels, like most book reviews, I'm tempted to compare it with movies. And that's the point.

In its best moments, reading this book is like sitting in a movie theater in wraparound darkness, feeling a deep chill that's part air conditioning, part anticipation. A lovely, granular black-and-white quality haunts the novel. Pessl has created Cordova's body of work down to the titles and plots and tiny details, as if in some deep part of herself, she really believes these movies, with names like Thumbscrew and At Night All Birds Are Black exist. But that's what novelists do: They believe their own details, and this book is obsessive in the things it describes and catalogs.

What's less obsessive, though, are the descriptions of characters. Scott McGrath, while a lively enough narrator, feels as if he's come from Central Casting, and so does Ashley Cordova, the movie director's beautiful, troubled 24-year-old former piano prodigy of a daughter, who's found dead — probably a suicide — at the bottom of an elevator shaft in Chinatown, a discovery that sets the novel in motion. McGrath, who slandered Stanislas Cordova during a TV interview years earlier, is drawn back toward the story of this man and his daughter, even though it naturally puts him in peril.

Pessl channels hard-boiled movies and pulpy paperbacks here, and as a result, everyone feels a bit like a B-movie character; even their names sound phony. They sound a little like names of characters on the TV show Dark Shadows — Barnabas Collins — which I watched every day after school with Yodels and milk, when I was 9.

But most readers of this novel will not be 9. And maybe, like me, they'll be used to reading about characters who are as fleshed out as their surroundings. Granted, that would be a challenge in this case because Pessl has created surroundings that are uncommonly full and complicated, and a story that takes you down many paths and into various subcultures, such as an S+M club and a lawless and cruel wilderness program for problem teenagers. All of it is dark, dark stuff.

Or is it?

I realized, when I finished the book, that even though it dips into the unsavory and the scary, and even though while you read it you think, ooh, this is weird, heavy stuff, there's a surprisingly good-natured quality to all of it that keeps it mostly pretty PG. As for those terrifying Cordova movies, I guess I'll have to take Pessl's word for it. I never felt any fear when I imagined watching them. I can't say I minded, actually; I'm someone who was scared to death by the original version of The Fly, especially the part where the fly has the head of a white-haired old man, and in this tiny little voice, he says "Helllllp ... meeeeee ..." Just thinking about it still creeps me out. But thinking about Night Film, does not creep me out. It gives me a sort of pleasurable feeling as I recall its highly imagined world.

There's a very nifty ending — but then there's sort of another ending, and another. It was almost as if the author didn't want to let go, and I don't blame her. It must have been a fun and exhausting book to write, a total-immersion experience. Reading it isn't exhausting at all; it's easy and enjoyable.

This book is like a big fun-house — Pessl lets you decide if you want to believe its magic. I probably won't remember all that much of the plot a few weeks from now and the characters are basically vehicles for an overarching idea more than anything else. But Marisha Pessl had an extremely cool and intricate idea for a novel, and ultimately it works. I was totally happy to sit in the darkness until the very last page, and I didn't move a muscle until the lights came up.

Meg Wolitzer's latest novel is The Interestings.

Can there be any experience more kaleidoscopic in its emotions, more full of hopes and fears and just plain confusions, than that of coming to America? I'm no expert, certainly — but my research on immigration for my recent novel, as well as my own family history, points to a process of continual surprises, endless adjustments, and, at times, exhausting isolation. Old habits crash up against new ideas; the desire for a "clean slate" is betrayed by the inevitable baggage of a former life. The three books in this list (two classic and one modern), besides simply being fantastic reads, lay bare the complexities of immigrant lives in all their panoramic variety.

Lawrence Cumberbatch was only 16 when he trekked, on foot, from New York City to Washington, D.C., to join the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Lawrence, now 66, was the youngest person on the march with the Brooklyn branch of the Congress of Racial Equality.

His parents thought two weeks on the open road would be too dangerous for a teenager and made their best effort to dissuade him, Lawrence tells his son, Simeon, 39, at StoryCorps in New York.

"There's always someone in most families that everybody looks to as the authority. And in my case it was my mother's brother, Lloyd," Lawrence says. "So they did the usual, 'Go and see Uncle Lloyd. He wants to talk to you.' They were so sure [that] 'Well, he'll fix this,' " he says, laughing.

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The South African government is simplifying AIDS care, cutting treatment costs and providing antiviral drugs to almost 2 million people every day.

The country just rolled out a new treatment regimen, which involves just one pill a day and costs less than $120 a year per person. By comparison, similar treatment in the U.S. costs thousands of dollars a year for each person.

Even AIDS activists, who continue to badger the South African Health Ministry, concede that the country is attacking the disease in new and innovative ways.

The delivery of antiviral drugs through the public health care system has been so successful and saved so many lives that the overall life expectancy in the country has increased by eight years since the crest of South Africa's AIDS crisis in the mid-2000s.

Nearly 350,000 South Africans died of AIDS in 2005. But in 2012, that number dropped by nearly half to about 190,000 deaths, the government reports.

At Johannesburg General Hospital, Dr. Francois Venter, who leads the infectious disease department, says South Africa is finally making significant progress against the AIDS epidemic.

"Just anecdotally, at my hospital 10 years ago, there were people dying on the floor," he says. "It was horrible. You'd step over bodies that you were looking after."

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The use of chemicals weapons last week in Syria, if proven, would put the conflict there on a short list of occasions in which the deadly weapons have been used.

Here is a look at the previous times chemical weapons were deployed in modern times:

Tokyo Subway Attack, March 1995

Thirteen people were killed and 6,000 injured when members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult attacked Tokyo's subway system with sarin gas.

The New York Times reported at the time: "Subway entrances soon looked like battlefields, as injured commuters lay gasping on the ground, some of them with blood gushing from the nose or mouth. Army troops from a chemical warfare unit rushed to the scene with special vehicles to clear the air, and men in gas masks and clothes resembling space suits probed for clues."

Nearly 200 Aum Shinrikyo members have been convicted in connection with the attacks, and its leader, Shoko Asahara, is on death row. As Mark reported over at the Two-Way, the last suspect in the case was arrested last year after 17 years on the run.

Iran-Iraq War

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Proving once again that when it comes to economic data there's almost always a "but" to watch out for:

The housing sector has been one of the economy's stars in recent months, as we said Thursday when the news broke that sales of existing homes rose an estimated 6.5 percent in July from June.

But ...

Sales of new single-family homes fell 13.4 percent in July from June, the Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development reported Friday. What's more, the agencies revised down sharply their estimate of how strong sales of new homes were in June. Instead of running at a 497,000 annual rate, sales are now thought to have been moving along at a 455,000 annual pace as of that month.

The big revision to the June number means sales that month did not hit a 5-year-high, as previously thought. Instead, they came in at the second-highest rate since mid-2008.

MarketWatch writes that "rising mortgage rates may be behind July's drop, though the monthly data are quite volatile and economists had expected some pull back after sales gains in recent months."

The good news is that even with the drop from June to July, sales of new homes were still up an estimated 6.8 percent from their pace a year earlier, in July 2012.

It's also worth noting that the market for new homes is much smaller than the market for existing, or previously owned homes. While new home sales were running at annual rate of nearly 400,000 in July, sales of existing homes were chugging along at a 5.4 million annual rate. So, the positive ripple effects across the economy from rising sales of existing homes should be greater than the negative effects from the drop in new home sales.

But (there's that word again) as NPR's Marilyn Geewax and Chris Arnold reported last week on Morning Edition, economic optimists and pessimists both have things to talk about when it comes to housing these days.

"I'm sitting out in the room with everyone else," Sheridan points out. "I get no special treatment; there's no corner office."

That layout is by design. Sheridan says obliterating layers of management can leads to faster decision-making — and more important, motivated and empowered employees. At Menlo, the whole office, or sometimes subcommittees, decide who gets hired and who gets fired. Promotions, raises and budgeting are all decided by the team. The company's emphasis on transparency extends to details like the budget, which is posted on the wall for everyone to see. Email communication is frowned upon in favor of face-to-face talking.

"We've seen more of a trend toward flattening organizations," says Stephen Courtright, a Texas A&M business professor who specializes in studying self-governing offices. He says because the tech industry needs to adapt quickly and competition for the best employees is fierce, giving employees freedom helps them move much faster.

"Those industries are just unstable, rapidly changing, and they are trying to harness creativity and innovation. So it is that speed of the technology environment that has prompted organizations to rethink the way they structure the organization," Courtright says.

But it doesn't fix all problems. The gaming company Valve also boasts of being bossless and has gotten a lot of attention for it. But Jeri Ellsworth, a former programmer at Valve Corp., said her time there "felt a lot like high school."

"What I learned from Valve is that I don't think it works," Ellsworth told The Grey Area podcast and reported in Wired magazine. "I think that if you give complete latitudes with no checks and balances, it's just human nature [employees] are gonna try to minimize the work they have to do and maximize the control they have."

At Menlo, the employees say the culture prevents that. "It really doesn't happen that way," says Menlo developer Eric Schreffler. "And that's partly because of the people who were here from the beginning."

As more companies shift to flatter structures, Courtright says workers should decide what rewards you're seeking at work when making job decisions.

"In a flat organization, moving up the chain of command is not the reward for performing well, because in a flat organization there's not a big chain of command to climb up. Basically the reward in a flat organization is being able to work on new and challenging creative tasks," Courtright says.

And that newness is what keeps Menlo's Lisa Ho coming back.

"We say we're a learning organization, so we're always learning and trying new things, which is very cool," she says.

Tortellini — small circles of rolled dough folded around a filling — are one of the most renowned members of the Italian pasta family. In the land of their birth, the region near the Italian city of Bologna, they're strictly served as broth-like dumplings.

Possibly no foodstuff in the Italian cuisine is surrounded by so much history and lore.

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When we first started thinking about dumplings for NPR's Dumpling Week, we presumed that there wasn't much to the little balls of dough. They seemed simple, universally beloved and unencumbered by controversy.

But the semantics of the dumpling turns out to be far more fraught that we imagined. This became clear when we started wondering whether tamales, or samosas, counted as dumplings. The deeper we waded into the pool of quasi-dumpling snacks, the more we realized we needed some expert input to set us straight.

We put together this small panel to help rule on what can rightfully be called a dumpling.

Fuchsia Dunlop, a Chinese food expert and author, most recently, of Every Grain of Rice: "My definition of a dumpling is any kind of dainty little snack that's made of one ingredient wrapped around another ingredient, and usually boiled or steamed, but sometimes fried."

Ken Albala, a professor of history at the College of the Pacific: "The best way to probably define it is to say something that goes 'dump!' into the water. Something that's boiled and keeps its shape."

Frederick Douglass Opie, professor of history and foodways at Babson College and author of Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America. "A dumpling is a mass of dough about the size of a U.S. fifty cent coin or larger. Cornmeal dumplings are solid and used to soak up the flavor of whatever they are cooked in — most often soups and broths. Flour dumplings are generally larger and filled with vegetables, fruit, dairy or meat. Dumplings most likely originated in the kitchens of peasants (subsistence farmers) and proletarians (wage workers) as a savvy, cost-saving filler."

According to Dunlop and Opie, samosas and tamales can lay claim to the dumpling name.

What do you think? How would you define a dumpling?

Patina Miller first got noticed on the theater scene in 2009 as the star of Sister Act: A Divine Musical Comedy. She earned rave reviews for playing the accidental nun who led a choir to stardom. Now she's center stage again in the Broadway revival of Pippin, the musical first launched in 1972. Miller takes on the role of Leading Player, the circus artist who guides a young prince in finding meaning and magic in his life. She won this year's Tony Award for best leading actress in a musical.

Miller spoke with Tell Me More host Michel Martin about her role, which was originated by theater legend Ben Vereen 40 years ago. She also talked about the intense physical training and personal sacrifices that went into recreating Pippin.

Interview highlights

Becoming the Leading Player, and stepping into Ben Vereen's shoes

"I had worked with the director Diane Paulus before in 2007. Then I got a call from her after I left Sister Act in 2011. And she was telling me that she was gonna revive Pippin, and that she had this idea for the Leading Player to be a woman. And that immediately sparked my interest.

"I'm sure there were tons of people who were like, 'No one could ever top Ben Vereen.' So I came into this process with a challenge – a really big challenge – is how do you make Pippin different, but also how do you also take people's minds off the fact that people come in expecting Ben Vereen? And that's why I think that Diane is so smart in that she completely made it so different in making the Leading Player a woman. ... And I didn't really know Pippin that well, so I could come into it, you know it's like a blank canvas. I could just make this world my own and there wasn't something that I had to compare myself to."

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