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Lynda Blackmon Lowery was the youngest person to march all the way from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. She was just 15.

Lowery, who still lives in Selma today, has written a book for young readers about her experience. Turning 15 On The Road To Freedom: My Story of the 1965 Selma Voting Rights March is an illustrated memoir.

"I would like for young people to know that each day of your life is a journey into history," Lowery tells NPR's Arun Rath. "You have the ability to change something each day of your life. Believe it or not, people, it can't happen without you."

INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS

On first hearing Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. speak in Selma
When Reverend King Started to speak, the whole church got quiet. Reverend King was talking about voting rights and how our parents was going to get the right to vote, but we would have to do it non-violently. He had a standing ovation.

On being arrested with other kids out marching for voting rights
I like to tell people by the age of 15 I had been jailed nine times. The first time we actually went to jail, I was kinda scared. But we had each other's back. What we were going to do with each other's backs, I don't know because those big policemen had guns and so forth. But we were there for each other.

On what happened to her on Bloody Sunday in 1965
On Bloody Sunday I was very near the front. I was, like, in the nineteenth line from the front. When we got to the crest of the bridge, the top of the bridge, and we saw all these men in blue — that was the Alabama State Troops. We saw the Sheriff Jim Clark and deputies, and we saw his posse. They were on horseback. I really wasn't afraid that day until we got down there, all the way to the state troopers, and they said we were an illegal assembly and we had to disperse, and I heard this POP POP sound. Later I found out it was teargas. And I remember I couldn't breath, and I was scared. I was on my knees and somebody grabbed the back of my collar, [my] coat, and started pulling me backwards. And I guess I was resisting because they grabbed the front of my lapel and I bit the hand that was on the front of the lapel. And I hear that horrible N word. And I felt him hit me twice.
I ended up with seven stitches over my right eye. I still have that scar. And twenty eight stitches in the back of my head, and I still have a knot in the back of my head from that.

On why she then joined the voting rights march all the way to Montgomery
I was 14, I wasn't a threat to anybody. There was really about 3200 people that left Selma on that march that day. But only 300 were allowed to walk all the way from Selma to Montgomery, and I was among that 300. I was terrified. But I also knew that if I did not embrace this fear, or take this fear, it would one day own me.

Read an excerpt of Turning 15 on the Road to Freedom

We tend to think of fugitive slaves ... individually running away, hiding in the woods during the day and traveling at night. But Gay's records indicate that certainly by the 1850s, when the transportation system was well-matured, many of these fugitives escaped in groups, not just alone. ... And they escaped using every mode of transportation you can imagine. They stole carriages — horse-drawn carriages — from their owners, they went out on boats into [the] Chesapeake Bay, little canoes, and tried to go north. Large numbers of them came either on boat from Maryland or Virginia, places like that — they stowed away on boats, which were heading north, often assisted by black crew members — ... or by train. The railroad network was pretty complete by this point and quite a few of these fugitives managed to escape by train, which is a lot quicker than going through the woods. ...

The records that [Gay] kept give a real sense of the ingenuity of many of these fugitives in figuring out many different ways to get away from the South.

On fugitives leaving family behind

Everybody left somebody behind, whether it was a child, parents, brothers, sisters, cousins, et cetera. ... Occasionally you did have family groups managing to escape together, but obviously escaping with a young child would be a rather difficult thing — it would make it much more likely you'd be captured. So this record and other documents of the time are full of rather heartbreaking stories of people who got out and then had to figure out, "Well is there any way I can get some of my relatives [out]." That was not very easy most of the time. ...

Most of the slaves who escape and who are mentioned in this record are young men — men in their 20s, basically. ... Maybe a quarter were women. ... This is part of the human tragedy of slavery that even the act of escaping put people in an almost insoluble kind of dilemma.

On the typical dangers on the way to freedom

The whole South was kind of an armed camp. There were obviously police forces around, there were slave patrols. These were people whose job was to watch out on the roads for slaves who were off their farms or plantations for any reason. ...

Then there was the general status of slaves, you might say. Under the law ... every white person was supposed to keep their eyes open for slaves who were violating the law in some way. You could be stopped by any white person and be asked to show your papers. If a slave was on the road in some way they had to have "free papers" to prove they were a free person or some kind of pass from their owner giving them permission to go to a town or to visit another plantation or something like that.

“ The Underground Railroad was interracial. It's actually something to bear in mind today when racial tensions can be rather strong: This was an example of black and white people working together in a common cause to promote the cause of liberty.

- Eric Foner, author of 'Gateway To Freedom'

Frederick Douglass — who escaped from Maryland before the Underground Railroad was really operative in a strong way in 1838 — ... he wrote in his autobiography about the fear that he felt [that] every white person might be after him. ...

There were professional slave catchers, some of whom went to the North. I give stories of people who were seized in Philadelphia or New York City, sometimes without any legal process at all, and just grabbed and taken to the South, back to slavery.

On how the Underground Railroad was organized

We think of [the Underground Railroad] as a highly organized operation with set routes and stations where people would just go from one to the other, maybe secret passwords. It wasn't nearly as organized as that. I would say it's better described as a series of local networks ... in what I call the "metropolitan corridor of the East," from places like Norfolk, Va., up to Washington, Baltimore, in places in Delaware, Philadelphia, New York and further north. There were local groups, local individuals, who helped fugitive slaves. They were in communication with each other. Their efforts rose and fell. Sometimes these operations were very efficient; sometimes they almost went out of existence. The Philadelphia one basically lapsed for about seven or eight years until coming back into existence in the 1850s.

So one should not think of it as a highly organized system. ... What amazed me is how few people can accomplish a great deal. In New York City, I don't think more than a dozen people at any one time were actively engaged in assisting fugitive slaves, but nonetheless, they did it very effectively. ... I developed a great deal of respect for what a small number of people can do in very difficult circumstances. After all, they are violating federal law and state law by helping fugitive slaves.

On the myth that white abolitionists were the heroes

The No. 1 myth, which I don't think is widely held today but certainly had a long history, is that the Underground Railroad, or indeed the entire abolitionist movement, was [the] activity of humanitarian whites on behalf of helpless blacks — that the heroes were the white abolitionists who assisted these fugitive slaves. Now, they were heroic — and I admire people like that who really put themselves on the line to do this — but the fact is that black people were deeply involved in every aspect of the escape of slaves. ...

In the South, [escapees] were helped by mostly black people, slave and free. When they got to Philadelphia or New York City, local free blacks assisted them all the way up. ...

The Underground Railroad was interracial. It's actually something to bear in mind today when racial tensions can be rather strong: This was an example of black and white people working together in a common cause to promote the cause of liberty.

One of the most sought-after opera singers in the world was once fired because she was thought too large to wear a little black dress. In 2004, Deborah Voigt was set to star at London's Royal Opera House in Richard Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos. It's one of her signature roles. But producers cancelled her contract. They said she wouldn't meet the theatrical demands of the role.

Voigt is just fine today. She ended up using her settlement to pay for gastric bypass surgery and ultimately slimmed down and glammed up her career. But there have been a lot of operatic swan-dives along the way. Voigt, who has performed with Luciano Pavarotti and with Plcido Domingo and in opera houses throughout the world, has written a memoir, Call Me Debbie: True Confessions of a Down-to-Earth Diva, about her trials and triumphs onstage and off. Voigt spoke with NPR's Scott Simon about food addiction, losing weight, gaining confidence and the thrill of making her voice soar over a huge orchestra.

Scott Simon: Your book opens with a particularly distinguished voice telling you, "You're here to sing."

Deborah Voigt: That's true, it does. It was a very special moment that I still think of very often, and I, at that time, thought it was the voice of God telling me that I was meant to sing. I have continued to feel that way throughout my career and I've had to remind myself of that inspiration many times along the way.

Is it fair to say your parents weren't saying the same thing?

My parents encouraged me to sing in church and that's what they knew. But the idea of pursuing something professionally was not on their radar.

Did you always have what I'll term a "difficult relationship" with food?

I think the difficulty of the relationship didn't really present itself until I began to gain weight and had to look at it more seriously. I just liked to eat, like anybody else does, but I had parents who were very weight-conscious and my mother struggled with her weight quite a bit, and the more you tell someone they can't have something, the more they want it. Years would go by and food became, really, my best friend.

Doesn't a certain amount of weight help opera singers project?

It does, to a certain extent. We talk about our support system, and when we take a breath certain muscles are engaged which help us to project our sound. As a very, very heavy woman, I didn't even have to think about singing. I would take a breath and all the poundage on me would automatically engage those muscles and the sound would go flying out over an orchestra. Many of the great stars of the past have been barrel-chested women and men of some stature. But there's a difference between that and someone who is morbidly obese, which is where I ultimately went with my eating.

Could you tell me about your audition for Georg Solti? I really admired him as head of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra all those years and, I don't know — it made me like him less.

I understand where you're coming from. It certainly made me like him less as well. But to a certain extent I understand where he was coming from. He was considering having me be his Isolde for a recording of Tristan und Isolde he was making, and he asked me to come and audition for him. So I went, I sang and I sang very well. He liked what I had sung and he got up and he walked across the room and said to me, "Why are you so fat? Is it the food?"

And I ... my mouth fell open because I thought, "What a question to ask," because you're considering me for a recording. I would understand if we were going to be doing a production onstage together and there were production concepts and images to be considered, but this was a recording, so what difference did it make? We had a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony coming up in about six months and he said to me, "Ms. Voigt, if you will lose the weight I will take you for the recording," and I did. I went on a diet and the next time I saw him I was down maybe 45, 50 pounds at the most. And it was enough to convince himself that I could appear on this recording. And sadly, Georg Solti passed away before we were able to make this recording.

I'm intrigued by this now very famous incident at the Royal Opera House. They knew who you were. You're one of the best-known opera stars in the world. Why did they sign you?

Well, that was ultimately the question. They signed the contract and engaged me in good faith. I have been there twice before; it wasn't a secret that I was a big girl, so that was where the problem lay. But in opera, if, for whatever reason, when a contract is fully executed, the designer or director decides that you're not appropriate to the part, that discussion is had and then the opera house gives you something equivalent to that role. But in this particular case, the Royal Opera House didn't have anything else available, and that was where the problem really came to the forefront, that this was a bigger issue than just this particular director.

So you had the gastric bypass surgery, as we noted, and a lot of the book is what happens thereafter. Did you discover that slimming down is not all you thought it would be?

It certainly has been life-changing and I'm much happier in this body than I was. The problem was, is that gastric bypass is a tool to losing weight for someone who is morbidly obese and who has not had any success. But underneath that are some sort of emotional problems that have to be dealt with or the problem will reoccur. And those were never dealt with. The lack of self-esteem and personal criticism did not go away when the weight did. So in that respect, maybe it was not as easy as I thought it would be.

Debbie, what was going on as you look back on it now?

I think it was a basic lack of confidence in myself, a feeling like I couldn't be in my own skin. And it's not for any reasons that I'm able to really define. It is what it is, and I felt the need to escape from that, whether it be throwing myself headlong into my career — which I did very well, and for a long time was like a horse in a race with blinders on — to finding that I had more time to think about my life and throwing that emotion into relationships, because that was sort of a buzz or a way to sort of anesthetize myself. But for whatever reason, I have this uncomfortability when I'm with myself that I've had to learn to live with.

Still?

Still, yes. Much easier these days, though, with much greater success.

Singing all over the world — I mean, from small towns to great concert stages — do you recall a moment, maybe one night, where you thought to yourself, "Boy, that voice was right?"

[Laughs] There have been a few. I think often about performances that I did of the role of Sieglinde in Richard Wagner's Die Walkre. She has a very, very difficult life, her husband is very abusive to her and she's very unhappy, but she has an incredible amount of hope in her. And I happen to be singing this role on stage at the Met for the first time and my tenor was Plcido Domingo. And I just remember being onstage, and in these rare moments you're very much in the moment, and you don't think about how the audience is reacting or is the orchestra too loud, or do I look okay in this costume. You're very present with each other as performers, and I just knew that things were going so well, and when the curtain went down for the first act and we went to take our bows, the applause from the audience was something that was so enormous, it had an actual presence to it. It was like sort of a rush of air over our bodies, and it was just one of the most amazing experiences of my life.

Read an excerpt of Call Me Debbie

Americans for Prosperity, the most prominent arm of the Koch brothers' organization, put Republican lawmakers on notice Thursday, setting out a conservative agenda for Congress. AFP leaders say it will be pushed by the group's grass-roots supporters in 34 states.

Tim Phillips, president of AFP, said at a Washington press conference that congressional Republicans "failed miserably" a decade ago, especially on cutting the federal budget. "They've been given a second chance by the American people," he said, "and we're going to hold them accountable. We're determined about that."

The agenda covers three areas: taxes, including repeal of the estate or death tax; energy, headlined by a call to build the Keystone XL pipeline; and health care, which includes repealing the Affordable Care Act. Phillips noted that Washington has debated all of the issues for years.

AFP is best known for its TV advertising and its financing by billionaire industrialists David and Charles Koch and other, undisclosed, wealthy donors. AFP is a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization, not a political committee, and thus isn't required to disclosure its contributors.

AFP spent more than $17 million on television in the 2014 midterm elections, according to the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks political advertising. Much of the money went into ads framed around accountability, urging voters to look critically at Democratic incumbents' votes on controversial issues.

In 2012, Wesleyan reported that AFP spent about $36 million in the presidential race and about $9 million in Senate contests.

Until now, AFP has almost completely avoided the Republican Party's internal battles — a stance that seems ready to change with the emphasis on "accountability." Phillips said AFP will use grass roots and a variety of other avenues to pressure Republicans on Capitol Hill.

"Hopefully it will be encouraging," he said. "But in cases where we need to hold them accountable, we'll look at everything. But for today, let's just say we're going to hold them accountable."

When Maajid Nawaz was growing up in Essex, England, in the 1990s, the son of Pakistani parents, he first found his voice of rebellion through American hip-hop.

"It gave me a feeling that my identity could matter — and did matter — growing up as a British Pakistani who was facing racism from whiter society," Nawaz tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross, "but also confusion about where my family was from and not really fitting into either culture."

At age 16, Nawaz was transformed from a disaffected British teenager to an Islamist recruiter when he joined the Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir. Nawaz continued his college studies and spent a year abroad in Egypt, where he continued his recruiting. As a result, he was imprisoned for four years, starting in 2002.

It was while in prison, surrounded by several prominent jihadist leaders, that Nawaz realized he wanted to take a different path. He was reading George Orwell's Animal Farm and came to a new understanding of "what happens when somebody tries to create a utopia."

"I began to join the dots and think, 'My God, if these guys that I'm here with ever came to power, they would be the Islamist equivalent of Animal Farm," Nawaz says.

He says he began to see that it's "impossible to create a utopia."

“ "Everything falls apart. I lost all my friends. ... My marriage fell apart. I suffered my second identity crisis. I'm very, very lucky to have been able to get through it."

- Maajid Nawaz, co-founder of the think tank Quilliam

"I'm living up close and seeing [the radicals'] everyday habits and lifestyle, I thought, 'My God, I wouldn't trust these guys in power,' because when I called it, back then, and said, 'If this caliphate, this theocratic caliphate, was ever established, it would be a nightmare on earth,' " Nawaz says.

A year after his release, at the age of 24, Nawaz left the Islamist group and its ideology. He later co-founded the think tank Quilliam, which is dedicated to countering extremist beliefs.

"Now, when we see what ISIL [the self-proclaimed Islamic State] is doing in the name of this theocratic caliphate, I believe I have been vindicated that these guys, any of them, if they ever got to power, they would be committing mass atrocities," Nawaz says.

Nawaz is the author of the memoir Radical: My Journey Out of Islamist Extremism. He's now running for Parliament in England as a Liberal Democrat party candidate.

Interview Highlights

On what led to his initial interest in radical Islam

In my case, it began with a perceived sense of grievance, in particular, around the racism I was facing domestically, in my home county of Essex in England, and abroad with the genocide that was unfolding in Bosnia, which, if you can imagine a genocide unfolding on the continent in which you live, it has a very, very lasting impact on one's psyche.

TED Radio Hour

How Does An Islamist Extremist Change His Mind?

So, in Bosnia, the case was there were white, blond-haired, blue-eyed Muslims who were being slaughtered and identified as Muslims. That really touched me.

But I really didn't grow up religious and I didn't grow up acknowledging my Muslim identity. For me, I was a British Pakistani. So Bosnia and the domestic racism wasn't sufficient for me to turn to Islamism.

But, at the same time, I got into American hip-hop and listening to American hip-hop, in fact a bit like the Kouachi brothers [the brothers who carried out the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris], listening to heavily politicized American rap in what's known as its "golden era" in the '90s.

I got into groups such as Public Enemy and Chuck D ... and I got into N.W.A. I got into all sorts of hip-hop that was heavy on social commentary, whether [it was] N.W.A. and commentary heavy on some of the crime, the gangs and the racism that they faced on the streets of Compton, or Public Enemy, which was very heavy politically. And hip-hop in the '90s began moving towards the nation of Islam and the 5 percenters, black nationalist movements, very much so these movements embraced a form of Islam, Malcom X's form of Islam prior to his change.

Radical

My Journey Out of Islamist Extremism

by Maajid Nawaz and Tom Bromley

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What this music did for me is it gave me a sense of empowerment. It gave me a voice.

On the four years he spent in prison in Egypt

I was in prison with pretty much the who's who of the jihadist and Islamist scene of Egypt at the time, and Egypt was the cradle of Islamism for the world — it's where it began and where jihadism began as well.

I was in prison with the assassins of the former president of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, who was killed in 1981. Those who weren't executed in that case were given life sentences and two of those were with me in prison.

I was in prison with the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood ... the general guide, his name is Dr. Mohamed Badie, and he currently resides back in prison.

I was in prison with the leader of Hizb ut-Tahrir, my own group. I was also in prison with some other jihadists who were professional bomb-makers and others some affiliated to al-Qaida and some affiliated to [Egyptian Islamic] Jihad and other such Egyptian groups, but I also interestingly had liberal political prisoners with me in Egypt and beyond that.

There was a group known as the Queen Boat Case who were gay Egyptians who have been imprisoned for being gay and then there were Christians who had converted to Islam and there were Muslims who had converted to Christianity. So we had a running joke in prison under [former Egyptian President] Hosni Mubarak and that was: In Egypt, if you change your mind from anything to anything you get put in prison. ...

You can imagine the sorts of conversations that the gay guys would be having with the assassins of Sadat. So, in a sense, it was a very, very thorough education — political education — for me over the course of those four years.

On how difficult it was to leave Hizb ut-Tahrir and start over

Everything falls apart. I lost all my friends. There are members — very, very close and dear members — of my family. I'm talking immediate family who simply don't speak to me anymore and haven't done so for years. My marriage fell apart. I suffered my second identity crisis, and I was very, very lucky to have been able to get through it.

There were people who had sampled my voice from speeches when I was an Islamist and made them the chorus of pro-Islamist rap songs who then began talking about me as an apostate. Everything turned on its head and I had to rebuild my life, I had to finish my degree, because, of course, I still had one year left in my university. And I had to find a job and the challenge, of course, was also that people didn't want to employ someone who had been a political prisoner in the war on terror.

Incoming Texas Gov. Greg Abbott created a stir last week during a speech to the conservative and influential think tank the Texas Public Policy Foundation, where he accused Texas cities of contributing to the "California-ization" of Texas.

"The truth is, Texas is being California-ized with bag bans, fracking bans, tree-cutting bans," Abbott said. "We're forming a patchwork quilt of bans and rules and regulations that is eroding the Texas model."

The Texas model Abbott refers to is a conservative vision of the state's business interests unburdened by regulation, legal obligations and taxes. But while state government is Republican through and through, Texas cities are mostly Democratic.

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As the Texas Legislature has become more and more conservative, it's become clear to the state's cities that if they don't pass environmental regulations — requiring business permits for junkyards, charging developers for clear-cutting lots, surcharges on plastic grocery bags — nobody will.

When the small city of Denton, which has been inundated with natural gas wells, overwhelmingly passed a law banning fracking inside its city limits, the state filed a lawsuit to block the new law within hours. Abbott says the state Legislature needs to put a stop to these laws before they impact the state's economic growth.

"Unchecked overregulation by cities will turn the Texas miracle into the California nightmare," he said. "This is a form of collectivism. Some cities claim that the trees on private property belong to the community!"

Had the governor stuck to defending the oil and gas industry in his speech, it likely would have passed unnoticed — it's hardly news when Texas politicians champion the oil and gas industry's privilege to do pretty much anything it wants. It was Abbott's derision of the cities' other attempts to regulate themselves that agitated.

Even the conservative Dallas Morning News took umbrage in an editorial headlined, Since When Did A Plastic Bag Ordinance Become A Collectivist Plot?

"Gee, we didn't think a city ban on polluting plastic bags meant we were turning into socialists. We just have bags in trees," the editorial board wrote. "With all due respect, Texas is light years from becoming Sacramento or Moscow, and the freedom to frack, litter and run junk yards at will isn't our idea of the 'Texas model.' "

Abbott, currently the state's attorney general, gets sworn in as governor next week, and the cities know his words are no idle threat — he's got most of the Legislature right behind him.

And it's not just regulations at risk — it's civil rights protections too. Four North Texas legislators plan to introduce a bill that would nullify any equal-rights ordinances passed by Texas' cities, including the LGBTQ protection bill passed recently by Plano. The civil rights safeguards offered by Houston, Austin, Fort Worth, El Paso, San Antonio and Dallas also would be erased from the books.

Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings, a Democrat, says he has no interest in picking a fight he knows he'd lose. Instead, he'll make arguments that Republicans themselves have been making for decades: that local control is the best control, that Dallas has different needs than Big Spring — a city of 23,000 in West Texas — and that they should be able to make those decisions themselves.

The cries that the new governor's battle with his cities is the height of Republican hypocrisy — "oh, sure, it's all about local control until the Democrats are the ones in control" — may be ringing from the Democratic heavens, but Republicans say that's not so.

Chuck DeVore, vice president of policy at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the institute where Abbott gave his eye-opening speech, argues it's not hypocrisy for the state to intervene if it's in the cause of freedom.

"What we're trying to do here is to secure liberty," says DeVore, "and it matters not whether your liberty is eroded by the federal level, the state level or the local level — if it's eroded, it's eroded."

Besides, DeVore says, it's completely legitimate for states to exercise authority over local government while demanding restrictions on Washington's authority: "It was the states in this country's history that existed first — they called into being federal and local government."

The 140-day session of the Texas Legislature began yesterday. For the state's cities, it's likely to be quite a ride.

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A housing shortage for asylum seekers in Germany has led one city to propose a controversial solution that would place 21 refugees in a barracks on the grounds of a Nazi-era concentration camp.

Carsten Morgenthal, who is a spokesman for the city of Schwerte in North Rhine Westphalia, tells the Westdeutsche Allgemeine newspaper it isn't the first time this would be done.

Two decades ago, Schwerte officials also placed refugees at what was once a forced labor branch of the notorious Buchenwald camp during World War II.

Schwerte officials say the building they plan to use for the latest asylum seekers was actually built after the war. In addition to lodging the earlier refugees, it's been used as a kindergarten, a warehouse and an artist's studio.

But other German officials — including the premier of North Rhine Westphalia – say the plan is unacceptable.

A growing chorus is criticizing Schwerte for being insensitive toward the refugees and the camp's painful history. Rikola-Gunnar Luettgenau who is deputy director of the Buchenwald memorial, told DPA news agency what the city is proposing is a "bad solution."

Schwerte's leaders say they are surprised by the outcry, but refuse to budge.

"All buildings can't be taboo 70 years after the Second World War," Mayor Heinrich Boeckeluehr told Zeit Online.

In an interview with German public radio's Mitteldeutschen Rundfunk, Birgit Naujocks, who heads the NRW Refugee Council, called on the city to instead use repurposed shipping containers for the refugees. The city dismissed that idea as too expensive.

With an ever growing number of refugees arriving in Germany, the national government is asking local governments to contend with the newcomers.

The figures are still being tabulated, but United Nations officials say that in 2014 Germany likely had its highest number of asylum seekers in the past two decades – more than twice as many as France and 20,000 more than the U.S.

One in five of those coming to Germany is from Syria, while significant numbers are also coming from Afghanistan, Eritrea, Kosovo and Serbia.

Germany

When upscale food trucks roared into popularity a few years ago, the folks running them praised their rolling operations as far cheaper and simpler to launch than a bricks-and-mortar restaurant.

Now, entrepreneurs are finding similar advantages in food bikes.

Brewers, chefs, baristas and even farmers are turning to pedal-powered vehicles to bring their goods to consumers — and, sometimes, actually produce them on the street.

The environmental benefits of ditching a motor are obvious — fewer emissions into the urban air. It also makes sense financially: A fully outfitted food bike costs just several thousand dollars — a fraction of the price of a food truck, which will runs tens of thousands.

But the main appeal, it seems, is far simpler.

i i

Worksman Cycles makes trikes for food vending as well as cycles for general deliveries. Most of its customers are independent businesses, but some are larger national chains like gourmet food purveyor Harry and David, whose food bike is pictured above. Courtesy of Worksman Cycles hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of Worksman Cycles

Worksman Cycles makes trikes for food vending as well as cycles for general deliveries. Most of its customers are independent businesses, but some are larger national chains like gourmet food purveyor Harry and David, whose food bike is pictured above.

Courtesy of Worksman Cycles

"It's more convenient being on a bike," says Vincent Sterne, owner of Two Rivers Cider Company in Sacramento, Calif.

Sterne has been delivering cider kegs and bottles by bike to bars and retailers for 18 years.

"I go to all the local beer festivals on my bicycle, and I pull in and get set up and pull out again faster than anyone in a truck," says Sterne, who uses four company bicycles. One of them is actually a moving bar: a cargo bike fitted with keg mounts and tap handles that he pedals to special tasting events. "I just roll up and turn on the CO2," he says. "It's that easy."

Charlie Wicker, owner of Trailhead Coffee Roasters, uses a pair of cargo bikes for all deliveries within the six-mile radius of urban Portland, Ore. He even has the capacity to pull over anywhere to brew and serve coffee. He says riding even a heavily loaded bicycle in a congested city is swifter and more efficient than using a vehicle.

"We're doing high volumes of retail business within the Portland area, and we use bikes because it works," Wicker says.

i i

Curbside Creamery's Tori Wentworth dishes out free samples at a recent First Friday event held in Oakland's Temescal Alley. Jenny Oh/KQED Bay Area Bites hide caption

itoggle caption Jenny Oh/KQED Bay Area Bites

Curbside Creamery's Tori Wentworth dishes out free samples at a recent First Friday event held in Oakland's Temescal Alley.

Jenny Oh/KQED Bay Area Bites

He can carry 200 pounds of coffee at a time — even uphill — and says he pedals 600 to 700 pounds weekly to Portland cafes, grocery stores and restaurants. And he says he can make his routine delivery circuit faster than competing coffee purveyors, whom he sometimes slips quietly past in downtown gridlock.

"On a bike, you're basically impervious to traffic jams," he says. "I can calculate my delivery time down to the minute."

Around the country, the fleet of food bike vendors is swelling — from the Taco Bike in Nashville to the West Sac Veggie Trike in Sacramento.

Portland-based Metrofiets Cargo Bikes is among the companies supplying the growing industry. Co-owner Phillip Ross says demand has ballooned beyond what he and partner James Nichols can keep up with.

Ross says he has shipped custom-built cargo bicycles to customers around the country and even to Europe. Most are fitted just for packing and transport. Some are also rigged for cooking, food prep and draft beverage service. At least one had an operating sink.

One of his earlier customers was Hopworks Urban Brewery, a Portland brewpub for which Metrofiets built a custom bar bike, fitted with keg mounts, tap handles, a pizza rack in the rear and solar panels to power an MP3 player at party events.

i i

Bicycle Coffee serves its brews at the Grand Lake Farmer's Market in Oakland, Calif. Courtesy of John Romankiewicz hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of John Romankiewicz

Bicycle Coffee serves its brews at the Grand Lake Farmer's Market in Oakland, Calif.

Courtesy of John Romankiewicz

Metrofiets is a two-person outfit. Worksman Cycles, based in Queens, N.Y., is huge by comparison. The company, which has 55 employees, has been building custom bikes and trikes since 1898, says co-owner Wayne Sosin. He says firms big and small have long recognized the marketing value of a company bicycle.

"The public sees a bike or tricycle as charming, not like a truck spewing fumes," Sosin says. A bike, he says, can work like a "moving billboard."

Sosin says he's built rigs for large companies including Whole Foods, Domino's Pizza, Starbucks and Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, which uses them as room service vehicles between buildings.

Moving through a busy street grid by bike may be easy, but cooking on one isn't. Sometimes it isn't even legal, as dishwashing stations and refrigeration may be required onsite by state health codes.

"If I put all that extra stuff on my bike, it would become a food truck," says Alfonso Dominguez, owner of El Taco Bike. So Dominguez preps all the tacos at his family's Oakland, Calif., restaurant, then pedals them to parties and street festivals for sale.

Berkeley resident John Romankiewicz, who will soon be serving Chinese crepes off a food bike called Jian Bing Johnny's, hopes to amend existing law for the benefit of all food bikes. What he wants is for health officials to allow food bike operators to cook and serve food without onsite refrigeration for up to four hours — the same time limit granted to stationary food purveyors. This, he says, would grant wiggle room to work with.

"I'll just pack up before the four-hour mark, and I'll bring lots of spatulas," he says, so he doesn't have to wash them.

Europe's fleet of food bikes is advancing at least as quickly as America's.

Wheely's Caf is a Scandinavian concept aimed at creating a global franchise of trike-based coffee shops. A company called Foodlogica runs solar-powered trikes that operate "last-mile" food delivery services in Amsterdam.

There is even a $15,000 coffee-brewing bike, made by a London company called Velopresso, that grinds roasted beans via pedal-power, then brews you a cup of joe.

Clever—but Trailhead Coffee's Wicker says he isn't interested in such gimmicks.

"We aren't a circus show," he says. "This is a viable business."

mobile food vendors

food bikes

food trucks

Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe have agreed to pay $415 million to settle a lawsuit that alleges they secretly conspired in their employee hiring practices, NPR's Aarti Shahani reports.

Plaintiffs say the companies set and limited employee salaries and agreed not to poach one another's workers, Aarti reports.

"The settlement filed in federal court in San Jose, California is 35 million dollars above the amount that U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh indicated was fair a few months back. If she approves the deal, the companies get to avoid going to trial — and having potentially embarrassing details leak out about backdoor deals."

Intel

lawsuit

price fixing

Adobe

Apple

Google

Throughout the Ebola outbreak the two big questions have always been: How bad is this going to get? And when is it going to end?

Current data show that the numbers of new cases are dropping in all three of the hardest-hit West African countries. A new study predicts Ebola could be eliminated from Liberia by June.

But Ebola specialists are leery of predictions, even from the most reputable of sources.

"The idea of predicting infectious disease is relatively new. It's not like weather predictions," says Jeffrey Shaman, who despite the novelty of the field has been posting forecasts of the number of Ebola cases in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia since September.

Shaman is an associate professor at Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University in New York. He says that the main challenge in creating models to predict the direction of the Ebola outbreak has been a lack of reliable information. Case reporting was all over the map, from non-existent to sketchy to not bad.

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Dire Predictions On Ebola's Spread From Top Health Organizations

"The information we have, our window into it, is very limited from where we sit," he says. "We don't know how much of it is reliable, whether there are biases that are shifting, whether the [new] practices and controls are coming into effect and working as well as we hope they would. All that will change the dynamics of the disease."

This squishy information may explain why so many past predictions have been so far off base.

Early on officials at the World Health Organization predicted that Ebola would be contained at only a few hundred cases. A few months later the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was predicting up to 1.4 million cases by January 20, 2015 in Sierra Leone and Liberia alone. That calculation turned out to be wildly inflated. As of this week, WHO has counted roughly 21,000 cases.

It wasn't just the CDC that got it wrong. Back in August, before the outbreak really began to pick up steam, the chief scientist at Britain's Department for International Development said the worst of the crisis appeared to have passed in Guinea. After his declaration, the incidence of Ebola in Guinea would increase nearly fivefold from roughly 30 cases a week in early August to more than 150 cases a week in early December.

Researchers have also had a hard time guessing where the virus will pop up next.

Dr. David Relman, professor of infectious disease, microbiology and immunology at Stanford University's medical school, said in early November, "I don't think there's going to be a huge outbreak here, no. However, as best we can tell right now, it is quite possible that every major city will see at least a handful of cases." That hasn't happened. So far there've been only four Ebola cases diagnosed in the U.S. — the initial case of Liberian Thomas Eric Duncan at Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas in September; Nina PHam and Amber Vinson, two of the nurses who treated him; and Dr. Craig Spencer of Doctors Without Borders, who'd just returned from Guinea to New York.

Other respected researchers predicted that Ebola would spread throughout much of Africa and also to Europe. Those dire scenarios haven't occurred.

Shaman of Columbia University says part of the problem with making predictions during this outbreak is that researchers have very little experience with Ebola and none with Ebola in West Africa.

"This is completely novel territory," he says.

"Nobody was really anticipating a West African Ebola outbreak that would penetrate throughout the countries and in particular into the cities. That it would overwhelm the limited medical and public health infrastructure, that it would kill 50 percent of the nurses in many of the areas and would just break the backs of these countries. Nobody expected that."

So in an outbreak in which researchers are struggling just to understand the present, it's not surprising that they have an extremely hard time predicting the future.

West Africa

ebola

In health insurance prices, as in the weather, Alaska and the Sun Belt are extremes. This year Alaska is the most expensive health insurance market for people who do not get coverage through their employers, while Phoenix, Albuquerque, N.M., and Tucson, Ariz., are among the very cheapest.

The best insurance deals by region and county

$166 Phoenix, Ariz. (Maricopa)
$167 Albuquerque, N.M. (Bernalillo, Sandoval, Torrance and Valencia count)
$167 Louisville, Ky. (Bullitt, Jefferson, Oldham and Shelby)
$170 Tucson, Ariz. (Pima and Santa Cruz)
$170 Pittsburgh, Pa. (Allegheny and Erie)
$179 Western Pennsylvania (Beaver, Butler, Washington, Westmoreland, Armstrong, Crawford, Fayette, Greene, Indiana, Lawrence, McKean, Mercer, and Warren)
$181 Knoxville and Eastern Tennessee (Anderson, Blount, Campbell, Claiborne, Cocke, Grainger, Hamblen, Jefferson, Knox, Loudon, Monroe, Morgan, Roane, Scott, Sevier, and Union)
$181 Minneapolis-St. Paul (Anoka, Benton, Carver, Dakota, Hennepin, Ramsey, Scott, Sherburne, Stearns, Washington, and Wright)
$184 Memphis and suburbs (Fayette, Haywood, Lauderdale, Shelby, and Tipton)
$189 North of Minneapolis (Chisago and Isanti)

(Premiums are for the lowest-cost silver plan for 40-year-olds, but in most cases, the areas with the highest and lowest premiums stay the same no matter the age.)

In this second year of the insurance marketplaces created by the federal health law, the most expensive premiums are in rural spots around the nation: Wyoming, rural Nevada, patches of inland California and the southernmost county in Mississippi, according to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation, which has compiled premium prices from around the country. (KHN is an independent program of the foundation.)

The most and least expensive regions are determined by the monthly premium for the least expensive "silver" level plan, which is the type most consumers buy and covers on average 70 percent of medical expenses. Premiums in the priciest areas are triple those in the least expensive areas. The national median premium for a 40-year-old is $269, according to the foundation.

Along with the three southwestern cities, the places with the lowest premiums include Louisville, Ky., Pittsburgh and western Pennsylvania, Knoxville and Memphis, Tenn., and Minneapolis-St. Paul and many of its suburbs, the analysis found.

Starting this month, the cheapest silver plan for a 40-year-old in Alaska costs $488 a month. (Not everyone will have to pay that much because the health law subsidizes premiums for low-and moderate-income people.) A 40-year-old Phoenix resident could pay as little as $166 for the same level plan.

That three-fold spread is similar to the gap between last year's most expensive area — in the Colorado mountain resort region, where 40-year-olds paid $483—and the least expensive, the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area, where they paid $154.

Minneapolis remained one of the cheapest areas in the region, although the lowest silver premium rose to $181 after the insurer that offered the cheapest plan last year pulled out of the market. Premiums in four Colorado counties around Aspen and Vail plummeted this year after state insurance regulators lumped them in with other counties in order to bring rates down.

The areas and counties with the highest premiums

$488 Alaska (entire state)
$459 Ithaca, NY (Tompkins)
$456 Bay St. Louis, Mississippi (Hancock)
$446 Plattsburgh, NY (Clinton)
$440 Rural Wyoming (Albany, Big Horn, Campbell, Carbon, Converse, Crook, Fremont, Goshen, Hot Springs, Johnson, Lincoln, Niobrara, Park, Platte, Sheridan, Sublette, Sweetwater, Teton, Uinta, Washakie, and Weston)
$428 Vermont (entire state)
$418 Rural Nevada (Churchill, Elko, Eureka, Humboldt, Lander, Mineral, Pershing, and White Pine)
$412 Casper, Wyoming (Natrona)
$410 Inland California (Imperial, Inyo, and Mono)
$401 Cheyenne, Wyoming (Laramie)

(Premiums are for the lowest-cost silver plan for 40-year-olds, but in most cases, the areas with the highest and lowest premiums stay the same no matter the age.)

Alaska's lowest silver premium rose 28 percent from last year, ratcheting it up from 10th place last year to the nation's highest. Only two insurers are offering plans in the state, the same number as last year, but the limited competition is just one reason Alaska's prices are so high, researchers said. The state has a very high cost of living, which drives up rents and salaries of medical professionals, and insurers said patients racked up high costs last year.

Ceci Connolly, director of PwC's Health Research Institute, noted that the long distances between providers and patients also added to the costs. Restraining costs in rural areas, she said, "continues to be a challenge" around the country. One reason is that there tend to be fewer doctors and hospitals, so those that are there have more power to dictate higher prices, since insurers have nowhere else to turn.

By contrast, in Maricopa County, Phoenix's home, the lowest silver premium price dropped 15 percent from last year, when Phoenix didn't rank among the lowest areas. A dozen insurers are offering silver plans. "Phoenix, during the boom, attracted a lot of providers so it's a very robust, competitive market," said Allen Gjersvig, an executive at the Arizona Alliance for Community Health Centers, which is helping people enroll in the marketplaces.

The cheapest silver plan in Phoenix comes from Meritus, a nonprofit insurance cooperative. The plan is an HMO that provides care through Maricopa Integrated Health System, a safety net system that is experienced in managing care for Medicaid patients. Meritus' chief executive, Tom Zumtobel, said they brought that plan's premium down from 2014. The insurer and the health system meet regularly to figure out how to treat complicated cases in the most efficient manner. "We're working together to get the best outcome," Zumtobel said.

Katherine Hempstead, who oversees the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's research on health insurance prices, found no significant differences in the designs of the plans that would explain their premiums. "In most of the plans – cheap or expensive – there seemed to be a high deductible and fairly similar cost-sharing," she said.

Alaska

Health Insurance

Arizona

In the U.S., roughly 10,000 people reach retirement age every day. And though not everyone who turns 62 or 65 retires right away, enough do that some companies are trying to head off the problem.

Dave Tobelmann, who for 33 years developed new products for General Mills, retired five years ago at age 57 — around the same time as a number of other colleagues. "Yeah, I went to a lot of retirement parties," Tobelmann says.

Losing veteran workers is a challenge, even for big companies like General Mills.

"Let's say you have 30 people retire in a year and the average years of experience is 30 years. So you just had 1,000 years walk away. That's hard to lose," Tobelmann says.

The need is not across the board; not all retirees are in demand. But the older worker brain drain is a big concern for industries like mining and health care. They are trying to retain older employees because demand is increasing and fewer younger workers are rising through the ranks.

In a survey out this week, the Society for Human Resource Management reports that a third of employers expect staffing problems in coming years.

"When you have large numbers that are leaving and a pipeline that is not entirely as wide as the exit pipeline, you will have temporary gaps," says Mark Schmit, executive director of the association's research arm.

Take, for example, the insurance business.

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"The average age is in the late 50s in this industry," says Sharon Emek, who sold an insurance business five years ago after three of the four partners reached retirement age. She then started Work At Home Vintage Employees, a company that contracts insurance-industry retirees.

"It's a big crisis within the industry where they're trying to recruit young talent and keep young talent and the industry is constantly writing about the problem," Emek says.

Employers are trying to hang onto older talent by offering flexible work hours, more attractive health care benefits or having retirees return to mentor younger workers. And more people are, in fact, working later — either because they want to, or have to. According to AARP, nearly 19 percent of workers over age 65 work (about one in five), compared to about 11 percent (one in 10) three decades ago.

Soon after retiring, Tobelmann returned to General Mills. He works through YourEncore, a staffing firm specializing in retiree placement. Procter & Gamble, Boeing and other companies started YourEncore to prepare for Baby Boomers retiring. Tobelmann says the benefits for the company are obvious.

“ "It's kind of a running joke around here that we have their retirement party on Friday and they show up again on Monday."

- Dale Sweere of Stanley Consultants

"I already know how to speak the language, I know how the company operates, I know how the businesses operate, I know how they make money, I know how projects proceed, I know all the processes," he says.

At Michelin North America, more than 40 percent of the workforce is approaching retirement age. Retirees have, on average, two and a half decades of experience. Dave Stafford, who heads human resources for the company, says last year, it had to plan around losing most of a lab team made up entirely of older workers.

"If we're doing our job well, we'll know that there's risk, we'll start to staff to compensate for the fact that that risk may come to fruition," he says.

Michelin encourages retirees to stick around part-time, especially those in technical maintenance, where talent is chronically scarce. But it's not always easy to accommodate.

"Sometimes they have a very limited number of hours that they want to work, and to try to work around their schedule sometimes can be a bit of a challenge," says Dale Sweere of Stanley Consultants, an engineering consulting firm based in Muscatine, Iowa.

But Sweere says the company has always offered phased retirement because experienced workers have relationships with clients that are valuable to hang onto. "It's kind of a running joke around here that we have their retirement party on a Friday and they show up for work again on Monday," Sweere says.

Easter is still far away, but in the United Kingdom, the weeks after Christmas are when stores begin stocking Cadbury's iconic Creme Eggs – those foil-wrapped chocolates filled with gooey "whites" and "yolks" made of candy.

For many people there, the eggs aren't just sweets – they're "edible time capsules that take consumers back to their childhood with every mouthful," as the U.K.'s Telegraph put it.

So perhaps that explains why Cadbury's decision to tweak both the recipe and packaging for the creme eggs is leading to outrage across Britain, leaving chocolate lovers, as one headline declared, in "shellshock!"

And what exactly did Cadbury do? For starters, the confectioner reduced the number of eggs in a pack from six to five. More importantly, it also changed the recipe of the chocolate shell.

i i

Cadbury Creme Eggs on the production line at a Cadbury factory in Birmingham, U.K. For many, the eggs are filled not just with gooey candy "whites" and "yolks" but with childhood memories. Simon Dawson/Bloomberg via Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption Simon Dawson/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Cadbury Creme Eggs on the production line at a Cadbury factory in Birmingham, U.K. For many, the eggs are filled not just with gooey candy "whites" and "yolks" but with childhood memories.

Simon Dawson/Bloomberg via Getty Images

A spokesman for Cadbury told the British tabloid The Sun that the company's signature Dairy Milk, which has been used to create the chocolate shell for more than four decades, will now be replaced with "standard cocoa mix chocolate." The British press describes consumers as "enraged," "furious" and "up in arms" over the news. (Editors' note: For the record, American Cadbury Creme Eggs are staying the same — the shell is made by Hershey's. We think the British version is tastier.)

What's the big deal? Our own Alison Richards, who edits science and food coverage at NPR and is British born and raised, broke it down for us.

"I think it's kind of a guilty pleasure that really does belong to childhood," Alison says.

"Christmas would be over, life would be a bit dreary and gray, and then, the first Cadbury Creme Eggs would begin to show up in their glittery, colored paper," she says. "And this would be like a promise of things to come. Forget daffodils — it was the Cadbury Creme Eggs — all about the eggs. ... It was a treat."

A seasonal treat, that is — none of the stores near us in Washington, D.C., had them in stock yet. Alas, we haven't had the chance to taste test the changes to the beloved egg.

And while Alison admits it is theoretically possible she could end up loving the new Cadbury eggs, that was certainly not the reaction chocolatier Paul A. Young had when he did a taste test for the BBC.

"It's a different texture," Young told the BBC. "It's very, very pasty. It's just — the chocolate is now as sweet as the filling. I don't think it's a massive, significant difference, but for me, it's not the same enjoyable experience as I was used to."

While nostalgia is largely driving the uproar, we wondered what today's British kids make of the changes. We caught up with some 7- and 8-year-olds walking out of a theater production of Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, of all things, in London. What's the verdict on the new recipe?

"They taste scrumptious!" one child opined.

Another declared the old recipe "a bit better."

A third piped up, "I like the new recipe."

So it would seem the jury is still out.

Regardless, Cadbury is unlikely to backtrack. It's now owned by Mondelez, a spin off from Kraft. Mondelez's U.K. office didn't respond to our request for comment, but it has said that a "range of economic factors" influenced the decision to change Britain's beloved Easter treat.

cadbury

British food

chocolate

Last week's shootings in Paris shocked the French. Many received another jolt when they learned that some Muslim schoolkids refused to join in the minute of national silence observed across the country following the Charlie Hebdo attacks.

The newspaper Le Figaro quoted one teacher in a heavily Muslim neighborhood in the eastern city of Strasbourg as saying that 80 percent of her students did not participate.

At the Pierre de Geyter Middle School in St. Denis, a largely Muslim suburb north of Paris, Iannis Roder has taught history for the last 15 years. He says the day after the killings at the Charlie Hebdo magazine, the school staff knew they would have problems.

"Our pupils – a minority – didn't want to do the minute of silence because they thought that Charlie Hebdo was a newspaper that didn't have the right to make these caricatures," says Roder.

i i

Iannis Roder is a history teacher in the largely Muslim suburb of St. Denis, north of Paris. He said some of his students considered the Charlie Hebdo cartoons to be blasphemy and believed that Islam took precedence over French law. Eleanor Beardsley/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Eleanor Beardsley/NPR

Iannis Roder is a history teacher in the largely Muslim suburb of St. Denis, north of Paris. He said some of his students considered the Charlie Hebdo cartoons to be blasphemy and believed that Islam took precedence over French law.

Eleanor Beardsley/NPR

Roder says the students called it blasphemy and he had to explain that blasphemy is a religious concept, and doesn't exist in French law.

"That was very difficult to explain because their point of view, their lives, are very religious. And they are convinced that the religion is above the law of the French Republic," he says.

Roder says nearly all the students thought the killings were wrong, but purely for religious reasons. He says he finds that worrisome.

France has some 5 million Muslims, the largest Muslim population in Western Europe. Muslim leaders have condemned the attacks and many ordinary Muslims are worried about being stigmatized. Since the killings at Charlie Hebdo and the kosher grocery there have have been incidents of vandalism at dozens of Muslim sites across the country.

Speaking in parliament, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said it's not acceptable that Jews should live in fear in France or that Muslims should be ashamed. France welcomes both, he said. But many Muslims say there is a double standard. They say anti-Semitism is treated as a crime, while Islamophobia is tolerated.

Not far from the school in St. Denis is a housing project with soulless gray apartment buildings that have bars on the first-floor windows. Muslim immigrants came to live and work in places like this 40 years ago, when the economy was booming. Now the work has dried up, and the next generation feels stuck here.

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"I'm not saying what they did was good," Hakim Dridi says of the killers.

But, he adds, "those cartoonists shouldn't have been doing that. They know Muslims are practicing their religion and they should leave them alone. They provoked it and they knew it was coming because they had a bodyguard."

The men have been watching a video on a large computer screen behind the counter, which is showing the police assault last Friday on the kosher market, where one attacker was killed after he killed four Jews in the store.

The men watching the video believe it was staged.

They also say there's no way one of the Kouachi brothers who attacked Charlie Hebdo would have left his ID in the car.

The conspiracy theories pour out. One of the men says the two attacks were a plot by France, the U.S. and Israel to give Israel more power. They say it's unfair the world's media talks for weeks about Jewish deaths, but says nothing when Muslim children die.

Their narrative seems worlds away from the "Je Suis Charlie" demonstrations in Paris just a few miles away.

Back at the school, teacher Iannis Roder says he and his colleagues warned there was a problem in Paris suburb schools some 15 years ago, but nobody listened.

"Today, they open their eyes and say, 'Oh my God, there are people in France that don't share the values of the French Republic,'" he says. "For us, that's not a surprise, we knew that for a long time."

France

Comedy Central's television show Broad City has been compared to Girls and Sex and the City, but when co-creators, co-writers and co-stars Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer were creating the web series that ended up being a prototype of their TV show, they were actually channeling Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm.

"We didn't realize it was going to be character development for a TV show later," Glazer tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "I think we looked to Larry David more than anybody else."

Broad City is about two single 20-somethings, also named Abbi and Ilana, who live in New York City, have dead-end jobs and spend a lot of time hanging out, smoking weed and making each other laugh.

“ It cracks us up; the minutiae, the muck that you have to wade through in this city. ... It is this sick, masochistic romance that New Yorkers — permanent New Yorkers — have with the city, where they love how tough they are.

- Ilana Glazer, co-creator and co-star of 'Broad City'

Jacobson's character, Abbi Abrams, is a janitor at a high-end gym.

"[She's] cleaning all sorts of disgusting things up, mostly bodily fluids and remnants," Jacobson says. "But [she] dreams of bigger things and her social life mostly consists of hanging out with her best friend, Ilana, who pulls her out of her comfort zone into these crazy adventures."

Glazer's character, Ilana Wexler, is a free-spirited, loyal "hedonist," according to Glazer.

"She likes to feel good; she likes pleasure," she says. "I feel like at this point in her life the most important thing is her friendship with Abbi — that's the grounding through-line for my character."

The web series was produced between 2009 and 2011.

"It was like Curb ... because they were these short slices that didn't wrap up usually, or they were just little segments of these characters' lives," Jacobson says.

Glazer and Jacobson met at the improv comedy group the Upright Citizens Brigade, which was co-founded by Amy Poehler. The two used their improv community in their web series, often featuring guest stars, including Poehler. Later, when the Broad City duo pitched their show as a TV series, Poehler came on board as an executive producer.

The Comedy Central series begins its second season on Wednesday.

Interview Highlights

i i

Ilana Glazer (left) and Abbi Jacobson met through the improv comedy group the Upright Citizens Brigade, which was co-founded by comedian Amy Poehler. Lane Savage/Courtesy of Comedy Central hide caption

itoggle caption Lane Savage/Courtesy of Comedy Central

Ilana Glazer (left) and Abbi Jacobson met through the improv comedy group the Upright Citizens Brigade, which was co-founded by comedian Amy Poehler.

Lane Savage/Courtesy of Comedy Central

On the ease with which their characters talk about bodies and sex

Jacobson: I think I grew up in a more conservative way. We were not always talking about our bodies or sex or anything. It was never discouraged, but it was not encouraged or dinner talk. Or, I didn't really share much, but I grew up with an extremely supportive family. I think that's part of how Ilana and my voice developed when we were writing the show; that became much more of a thing than it was for me growing up.

On Glazer being in an anti-drug club in high school

Glazer: It was vaguely Christian, or it felt like it. And my brother Eliot had done it years earlier. We used to gather and talk about how cool it was that we didn't do drugs.

Jacobson: So one day some bad kid from the tracks came and pulled you out of this?

Glazer: I just got a boyfriend who was a huge stoner and was like, "Ohhh, finally." I knew it was my calling.

On telling New York City-centric stories

Glazer: We try to do the most New York [things that happen to us]. ... Like Abbi in the first season with the mail, with the package, going to North Brother Island for that package, that's just so New York-centric. Getting a package in New York City is different than getting a package anywhere else. Our show is a lot about suburban transplants still being in awe of the city, even when it's a really annoying result that you have to endure.

Jacobson: I think about our show a lot where it's as if you're walking through just this gross block and there's trash and people peeing and spitting on you and then you turn the corner and look up and it's like, "Oh right, I'm in New York. This is the most beautiful city in the world." ...

Glazer: We love the mundane. It cracks us up; the minutiae, the muck that you have to wade through in this city. It cracks us up. It is this sick, masochistic romance that New Yorkers — permanent New Yorkers — have with the city, where they love how tough they are. Like, friends who move to L.A. are like, "Over it! Later!" But there's some sort of pride that New Yorkers have.

On how Judd Apatow films influenced their comedy

Glazer: Movies like The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up came out during a really formative time for us — high school, college years. There's like acute elements — like pot use — and then more diffuse, everywhere elements — like challenging the characters to talk the way we do in real life and using slang that we're using right now and honestly "the kids" are using right now. We'll put that into the show. ...

Jacobson: Superbad, too. I mean, they are really wonderful at showing a natural friendship and I think that's what our show is all about. Without a doubt, that's one of the best movies about a friendship that's changing.

On getting their web series noticed

Jacobson: Our web shorts are still not widely viewed at this point. They were never viral. Basically, we had both worked these SEO — search engine optimization — jobs, we had both worked these different jobs that dealt with ... the Internet and using social media. ... We sort of made this spreadsheet of press outlets that we felt needed content. And so we thought about our web series and we thought, "Well, what different types of places would be interested in this?" OK, it's about two women; OK, it's about New York City; OK, it's about Jews; OK, it's about stoners —

Glazer: — broke people. So you go to those subsets and look for those kinds of blogs.

Jacobson: And you do research and we made a spreadsheet of all these different sites and then you have to research and find the editors or the writers and different contacts and you just start emailing them and you hope that some people will write some articles. ... It was very slow and steady, but every little article, every little blog post was such a big deal for us because it got the word out. I have to say, because we came out of this amazing community [Upright Citizens Brigade], Facebook built our show.

Glazer: That was the main vehicle for the show. We counted those "likes" more than YouTube views.

On the growth of their characters in the future

Glazer: It doesn't feel like we've told that many stories. ... I mean, [in] season two I do think the characters grow in an organic way, not in a necessarily pointed way, but we're still figuring out how far they get.

Jacobson: Each episode is for the most part 24 hours, maybe a little more, maybe a little less. There's really only been — you've only seen 10 days of these characters' lives. There's not a ton of time that has passed. I just sort of love thinking about other shows, I love thinking about Seinfeld, about how they didn't really change.

Glazer: They didn't have to change. I feel also that this is only our first TV show. We plan on doing — writing and performing — for a long time.

Why do some of us like to slather hot sauce or sprinkle chili powder onto our food, while others can't stand burning sensations in our mouth?

It probably has to do with how much we've been socially pressured or taught to eat chili, according to Paul Rozin, a cultural psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied attitudes toward food for decades.

We first read about Rozin's research on spicy food in Tasty: The Art and Science of What We Eat. It's a new book by John McQuaid that's been excerpted in the Wall Street Journal and was featured Sunday on Weekend Edition.

The Salt

'Tasty': How Flavor Helped Make Us Human

We asked Rozin to tell us more about his work on spice tolerance. Here's part of our conversation, edited for brevity and clarity.

How did you get interested in researching spicy foods?

The chili pepper is a subject of great interest to the public because so many can't stand [it].

My wife, Elisabeth Rozin, had written a book called Ethnic Cuisine, in which she proposed a theory of cuisine: that most cuisines in the world except in northern Europe have a characteristic flavor that they put on all their foods.

And that flavor in Mexico is chili and it is on virtually every savory food they eat. Chili pepper, when it came to Europe, tasted so bad. So this terrible-tasting food comes over along with potatoes and tomatoes and all these other relatively good ones, and it becomes a major flavoring in the cuisines of West Africa, of South Asia and a good part of Southeast Asia. And it makes their food taste better to them.

The Salt

How To Tiptoe Into The Hot Sauce Craze

So I got curious about how the hell that happened.

You went to Mexico in the 1980s to study this, right?

I lived in a village [near Oaxaca, in southern Mexico] for a month and saw how they dealt with their chili peppers, how they served their meals. It was a traditional village that just had gotten electricity; nobody had a refrigerator. I discovered that at about 4 or 5 years old, the kids started liking [chili]. In the village of 1,500 people, everyone over the age of 4 or 5 loved hot chili.

Now, the animals in the village, the dogs and the pigs, eat the garbage. So they're eating hot chili every day because that's in the sauce on everything. And I couldn't find a single animal in the village — I tested a few (by giving the pigs and dogs a choice between a cheese cracker and a cracker with hot chili sauce) — that preferred the one with chili.

I thought that was a really interesting finding. And I think that this is a very special human characteristic — the ability to overcome an innate aversion and make it into a pleasure.

How do you think we overcome these aversions?

The Salt

Sichuan Pepper's Buzz May Reveal Secrets Of The Nervous System

Clearly you have to be exposed to it a lot of times. But normally you would never be exposed [to hot chilies] more than once. And the reason you're exposed to it a lot is because that's what the family's serving, so you just eat it. The experience of eating it a lot somehow converts what was an aversion to a preference.

What's going to the brain is the same; there's no change in the tongue or the mouth, so it's what we call a "hedonic reversal."

It's not just in food, but coffee is bitter, and there's a lot of foods that we eat that little kids don't like — beer, etc. But we also like amusement park rides, we like to be scared, we like to cry at movies. This is an example of a very common thing in humans.

I call it "benign masochism," which is to say that we learn to like things that our body rejects. And it's benign because it doesn't hurt us.

The Salt

Black Pepper May Give You A Kick, But Don't Count On It For Weight Loss

That's interesting that we grow to like these things we first hate.

It's like getting to like smoking — when you first smoke, it's terrible. But you [may] keep going because there's social pressure. And that pressure gives you enough experience ... and somehow with that experience it usually inverts.

For some people it inverts pretty quickly. In my case, I like hot food now, but moderately hot. It took me many, many years of trying to like it, which just meant eating a lot of it. The same is true for me with beer — beer was too bitter for me. But I kept drinking it and now I like it. So I don't know what happened.

What's the most surprising thing about your findings to you?

The surprising thing was what got me to do it in the first place — that something that tastes so bad becomes [people's] favorite food. As I say, it's not just about chili pepper — it's about black coffee and ginger root and horseradish. And hot-temperature food and cold food: Most people don't like really cool food like ice water; that's a Western thing to drink beverages that are cold. Little kids don't like them.

I'm less interested in chili now than in the whole phenomenon of across cultures about how people get to like these very unpromising things. But I don't know the answer. Some part of it is social. Social forces affect what we like, and the advertising industry knows that — that's why they have endorsements by famous people.

It sounds like you're generally interested in disgust and turning disgust into acceptance?

I'm interested in that the Chinese and Southeast Asians think we're crazy for liking cheese, but they eat rotted soy and fish in their sauces.

What's the hottest thing you've ever eaten?

I had an experience at a Korean restaurant in New York. I was there with my first wife and we were sitting in there, and someone next to us, Korean people, ordered something that looked really good. We're food adventurers so we said to the waiter, "We want that." And he said, "You don't want that." And we said, "Yes, we do." And he said, "No, you don't." Well, of course we won and it came out, and it was so hot that we could barely eat it. And we forced it down because we had established our credentials, so we had to eat it.

spice

chili peppers

Mexico

On how Adam's obsession manifests itself

I scraped my heel down the back of a step in the public swimming baths in Manchester, and I became obsessed that there may have been blood on the step and so I wanted to check that. I then took a paper towel from near the sink and I pressed that to my bleeding ankle. I then became obsessed that there may have been blood on that paper towel, so I had to check on the other paper towels.

And so you get trapped in this loop where you're desperate for certainty and you can never get it — you're always checking. For example, I have a small cut on my thumb, right now, today, and I'm very aware of who I shake hands with, if they have a Band-Aid on their finger. I can spot a Band-Aid at 100 yards. I know this is ridiculous and yet a little, little part of me thinks that maybe they've got blood coming out of their wound and maybe it could get into my small cut on my thumb.

On how he repeatedly called the AIDS hotline

I hated myself for doing it and many times I would dial the number and then I would hang up before anyone answered. If someone answered, and it was a voice that I recognized, that's when I started to think, "Well, I better impersonate somebody else." Because ... I know now, that they were getting a lot of calls from people they called "the worried well" at the time. And they would say to people, "You already rung. We can't give you any more information. You need to accept it."

But what drives OCD, or at least it did in my case, was this constant need for that reassurance. ... It is humiliating, it's embarrassing, but humiliation and embarrassment were a price worth paying if you get that security, if you get that reassurance, if you get able to put your mind at rest.

On how his obsession with HIV affected (or didn't affect) his sex life

The only people who I told [about my OCD] were girlfriends ... because [sex] was an issue for me. You can have safe sex, but to be honest, [asking about someone's sexual health] is a rational question, and the OCD mind is not rational.

So I was just as worried about scraping my knee along the surface when I played soccer. I was just as worried about that — and I was still able to play soccer. You just get used to a level of constant anxiety. And the source of the anxiety almost becomes irrelevant.

“ 95 percent of people, when you ask them, have intrusive thoughts. ... Some people get an urge to jump from a high place, from a bridge or a high window. Some people get an urge just to attack people in the street. ... Some people get a really strange urge to shout out a swear word.

- David Adam, author of 'The Man Who Couldn't Stop'

So I can't tell you that I was more worried about catching HIV from sex because I was so worried about catching it from everything else that it just blended into the background.

On intrusive thoughts

Intrusive thoughts are everywhere. Everybody, or 95 percent of people, when you ask them, have intrusive thoughts. ... A very common one is when you're waiting for the train ... and you hear it start to come, some people get an urge to jump in front of the train. Some people get an urge to jump from a high place, from a bridge or a high window. Some people get an urge just to attack people in the street or when you are in a very quiet place like a church or a library. Some people get a really strange urge to shout out a swear word. Those thoughts are everywhere and in most people they pass, but the reaction to them is usually, "Woah, where did that come from?" In OCD, what happens is that they tend to, for some reason, we treat them more seriously than other people.

So for example, the intrusive thought about stepping in front of a train, someone might have that thought and they're not suicidal at all and most people would [have the thought and think], "Well, that's a bit strange. Here's the train. I'll get on it and go to work." Some people, they might think, "Well, maybe I am suicidal, or maybe I do want to jump." And so what they do is, when the train comes, they just take a step back, they change their behavior because of the thought, and that's the slippery slope because very soon, rather than take one step back you'll take two steps back.

On what causes OCD

The honest answer is that we don't know, but there are some clues. So it seems to run in families, which suggests that there is properly some kind of genetic component, although it has been difficult to pin that down to any particular genes. Certainly there is a clinical, psychological explanation, which is if you have a certain mindset, then you are more likely to misinterpret the kind of thoughts that everybody has.

There is also a sense that there are particular parts of the brain, which can't be turned off in OCD. There's a very deep part of the brain called the basal ganglia, which holds patterns for instinctive behaviors — "run away," or "fight or flight" — and those can be activated and then usually have an alert and then you have the "all clear."

And it could be that in OCD the message to give the "all clear" doesn't get through properly and so you are reacting to a stimulus that isn't there anymore, which would explain the constant need to perform the compulsions.

On whether writing the book helped him

I think it helps ... With OCD, or at least my OCD, there are two negative effects. There's the primary negative effect, which is the anxiety caused by my irrational fear of HIV and that isn't going to be affected by knowledge. You can't outthink a thought disorder. Logic is no response to an irrational thought. And so I still get anxious about HIV in loads of different ways that I shouldn't.

But there's also a secondary effect of OCD. ... Imagine other mental illnesses and some physical illnesses where ... you're so aware that you have this thing, and with OCD you keep it secret, [so] it changes your relationships with people. It makes you think that you're living a lie, that you're not being honest with people, that you have this parallel narrative that, "If only I didn't have OCD, my life would be different and I would be having this very conversation in a different way..." All that kind of stuff.

That side of it has gone now because I'm talking about it; I'm being honest about it. Learning about the science and the history helped connect me to other people.

Read an excerpt of The Man Who Couldn't Stop

mental health

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

HIV

Sunday night's Golden Globes honored television that feels different from what we had before in both content and business model. High honors went to, among others, House Of Cards, a Netflix drama starring an established movie actor; Transparent, an Amazon comedy-drama about a transgender woman with adult children; and Jane The Virgin, an offbeat CW show embracing the telenovela format and featuring a marvelous young lead who is also a woman of color. In recent weeks and months, Amazon has unveiled a new streaming device and we've learned about initiatives to provide HBO and ESPN, among others, without cable. Networks are publicly swearing off overnight ratings and Nielsen is working to broaden its measurement of viewers. Cord-cutting – going without cable entirely – isn't yet the norm, but it's on the rise, and it's no longer something only early adopters and television agnostics would consider.

It's fun to talk about change. It's fun to talk about delivery methods and new players and new gizmos, and it's definitely fun to talk about lowering or eliminating your cable bill. But there are a few important things to keep in mind.

1. This is not the first time the delivery system for television content has changed. When they unveiled the new package that would provide ESPN to the same television you have now, only through a set-top box instead of a cable box, there were reactions suggesting that this – THIS! – was the beginning of the end of television. Of course, we've already gone through a change from the antenna to the cable, the air to the cord, and it didn't kill television. It just changed the way you get fundamentally the same stuff. The idea that television, the fundamental thing that is television, means cable boxes and cable bills is very much a function of a particular and limited historical perspective. Changing the delivery system itself does not necessarily change the nature of the thing.

2. This is not the first time new players have entered the arena of making programming. Yes, it's cool that Amazon and Netflix and XBox and DirecTV and other people who come at television with a different set of incentives from broadcast, basic cable, and premium cable networks. But so far, they're boutique providers of content that's structured very similarly to cable content.

3. There is a LOT about the economics of these new providers that we just don't know. Right now, Netflix and Amazon in particular are making attention-getting, interesting shows in part because they need to establish credibility and become players. That's all they need these shows to do right now. But they're very cagey about what the viewership actually is and what it needs to be for the shows to be self-supporting. It's fascinating to watch the development of these totally weird models where Amazon gives you award-winning TV in a package with free two-day toothpaste delivery and Netflix gives you award-winning TV with a monthly subscription to stream a bunch of other stuff, but nobody really knows yet how these models are going to work in anything resembling a long term. And when you don't know exactly how the economics are going to shake out, you don't know exactly what the economic incentives are going to be, and when you don't know that, you really don't know what anybody is going to do after tomorrow.

4. For many, many people, your cable company is your broadband internet provider. Lowering your cable bill does you very little good if your broadband bill goes up. Netflix – the limited thing that is Netflix, which does not currently provide any live anything – was estimated in November to use 35 percent of all peak-period North American downstream internet traffic. How much do you suppose ESPN will use if broadband ESPN is widely adopted? How about ESPN plus everything else everyone watches on cable? It's going to be a lot, and it's dangerous and optimistic to assume that's going to happen at no cost, which is what people are doing when they compare their current costs with the costs they would have in a future where all television was available on streaming and broadband remained the same price. It is reasonable to assume that since cable companies and internet companies are the same companies, they have given thought to where they might make up the revenue lost in cable subscriptions, particularly since in quite a few cases, the cable company is the internet company and also the content-making company (as with Comcast/NBC).

5. Cord-cutting remains a practice with economic implications. Unless you want to watch on a laptop and you have a laptop, watching most of these services on a TV involves buying a streaming device for every television on which you'd like to be able to watch your shows. And if you watch a lot of television, once you add up all these services and outfit yourself with the right devices to watch them, you're talking about an outlay that's not necessarily a great boon to people who currently subscribe to little more than basic cable.

6. There's great enthusiasm among a lot of consumers for "a la carte" television subscriptions, where you subscribe to only the channels you really watch. Right now, there are big channels that subsidize the continuing existence of little channels that few people care about. But keep in mind: some of those little channels serve people who speak languages besides English or have very specialized interests, and it may be that some of those subsidies are ones you or someone you like would be sad to lose.

7. Some of the most interesting actual progress going on in television right now as far as representation of people who have rarely seen folks like them on TV is happening on plain old broadcast television, where Shonda Rhimes has helped demonstrate that diversity on screen and off can be not only good TV but also good business – as Fox learned when its hip-hop-inflected family drama Empire debuted last week to great numbers. Large swaths of premium cable, on the other hand – much more of a "pay for quality and thoughtfulness" model, in theory – have done an absolutely dismal job with diversity for many years. The idea that the more boutique, premium, prestigious, or expensive a piece of programming is, the more likely it is to evade the weaknesses of the traditional entertainment market economy and feel fresh and vibrant is true in some ways but entirely false in others.

8. An anecdote: Yesterday, I happened to be cleaning my house while watching an old season of Survivor via streaming, through a device attached to my TV. It worked in a way I would describe as "pretty well." But at times, it buffered, stopped, choked, and spit out messages that my internet was too slow. Now, I pay for high-speed internet, and it's fine usually, but as anyone who streams video knows, it can be very mysterious why, at times, it magically doesn't work. Cable goes out too, yes. But the persnickety nature of broadband streaming remains a major obstacle to switching to streaming entirely, at least for people like me who have watched enough frozen screens and spinning logos for a lifetime.

9. A ton of people still watch television on a television, with a cable box, when it's on. A ton of television is still watched this way, every day. And it's not just sports, it's ... television. It's The Big Bang Theory and American Idol and Flash and How To Get Away With Murder. We do not live yet in a "Oh, Television? Do People Still Have Those?" universe. Lots of people are getting by without tablets and Rokus, turning on shows when they're on because they're on. Maybe that will eventually be a weird behavior, but for the moment, it's entirely standard. Whatever's coming, it's a mistake to talk about the world as if it's already here.

None of this is to rain on the revolution parade. There are certainly a lot of interesting things happening, and there's no question that he landscape in five years or even two years will look very different from now. But there's just a lot that remains unclear, and there are a lot of questions that will need answering before we know what that new landscape will look like.

President Obama's choice to be the next attorney general grew up in a state where her parents fought for the right to vote.

Loretta Lynch is a North Carolina native who hails from a long line of preachers. Her academic talent propelled her into some of the country's elite institutions.

Now Lynch is trying to win Senate confirmation as the top U.S. law enforcement officer, as the first black woman in line to hold that job.

Lynch was born 55 years ago, in Greensboro, N.C., where sit-ins and protests provided a sound track to her youth.

As a toddler, she rode on her father's shoulders to civil rights rallies. Her mother told her she picked cotton so Loretta and her brothers wouldn't have to.

"You know, her grandparents were sharecroppers," says her friend and former Justice Department colleague Robert Raben. "She's from North Carolina. It's a state in which her family could not vote."

Lynch eventually climbed to the top of her high school ladder as the valedictorian. And when she entered Harvard in the late 1970s, she joined a small community that included Sharon Malone.

"It was impossible for us not to know each other being, as you say, two African-American Southern women at Harvard, well out of our element at that time," Malone says.

The two worked together to start a chapter of the storied Delta Sigma Theta sorority, a group of black women uniting to serve the community. Malone remembers Lynch as a straight arrow, then and now.

"If you can find someone who knew you from when you were 18, 19 years old and they have nothing bad to say about you and your judgment and things that you did then? My goodness," Malone says. "Look, there's nothing to tell."

Their paths crossed again during the Obama administration. The president named Malone's husband, Eric Holder, his attorney general. Loretta Lynch became the U.S. attorney in Brooklyn.

There, she prosecuted more terrorism cases than any of her counterparts, incarcerating men who tried to blow up the New York City subway and JFK airport. Another Lynch target, former Staten Island Congressman Michael Grimm, pleaded guilty to tax evasion earlier this year.

Her friend Raben says those may be her only enemies. "There are plenty of people who don't like her," Raben says. "They happen to be incarcerated."

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Iowa Republican Charles Grassley, says he hasn't made up his mind yet about Lynch. Grassley says he'll hold hearings in the next couple of weeks to learn how she differs from her predecessor.

"I'm very interested in, is she going to be political, as I think Holder has been one of the most political attorneys general that I've served under?" Grassley says.

And how might Lynch handle a room filled with senators?

Friend and former Virginia U.S. Attorney Neil MacBride says she often decides to listen rather than jump in and offer an opinion.

But when she does talk, Lynch is a graceful speaker. And she told an audience at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in 2012, she's often mistaken for someone else.

"It's always interesting when people don't know who you are," Lynch said.
"And I don't carry a sign, you know, whatever. And so people will come in the office and they'll be looking for the U.S. attorney and they'll speak to me one way, and when they realize that I'm the person they're looking for, it may change a little bit...I certainly had the experience as a young lawyer of going to take a deposition and being mistaken for the court reporter."

And one time, she said, a white juror mistook her for the defendant she was prosecuting. Lynch also said people often wrongly expect her to be a soft touch. Not so for a woman who spends free time kickboxing with her trainer.

"They expect a certain amount of leniency or mercy from me, because I'm a woman, and if you've ever met my mother you should know that's not even in the cards," Lynch told an audience at John Jay. "She's much tougher than I am, she's a retired schoolteacher so she's seen it all."

So has Lynch, as an African-American woman who's spent most of her career in federal law enforcement. Friends say that will inform her work, especially at a time of high tension between police and minority communities. Lynch addressed the issue herself back in 2012, years before the controversial deaths of black men in Ferguson, Mo. and Staten Island, N.Y.

"I find that people want aggressive policing if they as a community feel they are part of it," she said. "They don't want aggressive policing if they feel it's being imposed upon them and they are a target."

There's one more thing about Lynch: she's the stepmother of two young adults, including one who plans to move to Washington with her if she's confirmed as attorney general.

That would make her the first mom to serve as the country's highest ranking law enforcement official.

Oh, poor Boston: where is Paul Revere when we need him to alert the citizenry? The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is coming! The International Olympic Committee is coming!

Boston: Lock up your municipal bonds and pension funds.

We always thought that Beantown was wicked smart. In fact, Boston has fancied itself as the Athens of America. Be assured, if it gets the 2024 Olympics, it can pretty much count on that. That Athens of Greece has been in financial cardiac arrest because it was conned into hosting the 2004 Games. Boston –– yes, you too can be Athens. Angela Merkel will be on your case. Grass will be growing down the middle of the Mass Pike. Faneuil Hall will be condemned. Beacon Hill, where once a team handball court so proudly stood, will now be a shantytown.

Hey Boston, you think the Curse of the Bambino was bad just because it messed up a silly baseball team for most of a century? Hold the Olympics, and the Curse of the IOC will bring down the whole city for a millennium.

Andrew Zimbalist, our premier sports economist, has, appropriately, a new book out: Circus Maximus, which details the financial disaster which comes to most every city or country that is deluded enough to host an Olympics or a soccer World Cup.

The Two-Way

Boston 2024? City Is Chosen To Bid For Summer Olympics

Boston says it can hold the Games for four and a half billion dollars. Oh sure. And they're selling six-packs of Sam Adams beer for a buck and a quarter in heaven. The IOC tells every wannabe Olympic city that the Games will bring the world to its door. In fact, Zimbalist shows, it brings in a bunch of sports nuts for 17 days, but, in the long run, actually hurts tourism. Yes, Bostonians, the Olympics are a tourist negative. The Olympics do not improve –– do NOT improve –– a city's image. It's like bidding to host an epidemic. And then when the IOC leaves town, the sucker city is stuck with a bunch of useless real estate. Boston plans to build a temporary 60,000-seat stadium. And this is the wise city that once revolted because of tea taxes.

And so, with no apologies whatsoever to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

Listen, my children, and you shall hear

Of the midsummer crash of 'twenty-four.

Hardly a bank is still alive

Since Boston took its 'lympic dive.

The IOC said Beantown'd be beaming,

One if by TV, two if by streaming.

But after the show departed the Common

The awful message finally dawned on ...

Every high-rise and condo, cottage and home

That all Boston had left was a used velodrome.

Boston

Olympics