What's new

This week, the photo editing software Adobe Photoshop turned 25 years old. The program is an industry juggernaut — so famous that the word "Photoshop" has come to be synonymous with image manipulation.

But when the software started, says co-creator Thomas Knoll, it was a personal project. He and his brother John started working on the program in the late 1980s.

"It was originally a project that my brother and I were doing together for our own mutual use and enjoyment," Knoll tells NPR's Arun Rath. "It was not intended until a couple months into the process that we would even try to make it into a commercial application."

Back in 1987, Thomas started making digital tools for image processing as part of a Ph.D. program. John was working as a camera operator for George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic.

John saw computer graphics as the future of special effects, and soon realized that a lot of people would want to get their hands on this image processing technology.

"He said, 'Would you mind if I showed this around? I think I can sell this,' " Knoll recalled. "So he spent a lot of time driving around Silicon Valley, doing demos of the very early versions of Photoshop, trying to find a company that would be interested in publishing it."

i

"Jennifer In Paradise," a photo of Jennifer Walters in Bora Bora in August 1988, was the first color image to ever be Photoshopped. John Knoll used the image of his then-girlfriend (now wife) to demo Photoshop to potential users. John Knoll hide caption

itoggle caption John Knoll

"Jennifer In Paradise," a photo of Jennifer Walters in Bora Bora in August 1988, was the first color image to ever be Photoshopped. John Knoll used the image of his then-girlfriend (now wife) to demo Photoshop to potential users.

John Knoll

Adobe was that company. They acquired the rights and published Adobe Photoshop 1.0 on Feb. 19, 1990. Twenty-five years later, Adobe Photoshop is still the industry standard for photo editing software.

"There [were] image processing programs on the market already when we released, but when users compared them they found Photoshop to be both the most powerful and the easiest to use," Knoll says. "So we managed to dominate the market because of that."

Today, almost everyone who needs to analyze or alter photos uses Photoshop, including graphic designers, photographers and even doctors and medical examiners.

It's so commonplace that in 2006, the Oxford English Dictionary added Photoshop as a verb. Knoll says it's important to keep in mind that image manipulation was not invented by Photoshop.

i

"Dreamscape," courtesy of Jimmy Williams, shows how Photoshop can be used to create fantastical landscapes. But the program's inventors note that photo manipulation predated Photoshop. Jimmy Williams hide caption

itoggle caption Jimmy Williams

"Dreamscape," courtesy of Jimmy Williams, shows how Photoshop can be used to create fantastical landscapes. But the program's inventors note that photo manipulation predated Photoshop.

Jimmy Williams

"There were previously very sophisticated people in darkrooms who could do very good photo composites that you couldn't tell from reality," Knoll says. "What Photoshop did was sort of democratize that ability."

But some people would inevitably use these tools irresponsibly.

"A lot of the uses of Photoshop are wonderful and creative," he says. "There are a few uses where people are being unethical with it and like any tool, it's not the fault of the tool that happens."

Knoll sees a positive side to the pervasiveness of Photoshop.

The Picture Show

Fake It 'Til You Make It: What Came Before Photoshop

"It certainly raises awareness that you can't trust an image as truth without having other means of verification," he says. "People have a more healthy skepticism when they see photography."

Over the years, Knoll says some upgrades to Photoshop have even surprised him, such as the "content-aware fill" feature that seamlessly fills in areas when you cut someone out of a photo. He's not willing to make specific predictions, but he guarantees there are more surprises in store.

"When Photoshop first came out, computers were about one million times as slow as the computers of today," he says. "As computers continue to get faster, more things will become possible in the future."

Photoshop

From what people remember, he fell like a tree. Malcolm X, all six feet, four inches of him, had taken a shotgun blast to the chest and a grouping of smaller-caliber bullets to the torso while onstage at the Audubon Ballroom in Washington Heights on Feb. 21, 1965. After a ghastly moment of stasis, he careened backward. His head hit the floor with a crack.

A detail that witnesses often omit, in part because it seems more of an afterthought given the circumstances, is that Malcolm X never got to say what he'd gone to the Audubon Ballroom to say.

He'd arrived, by all accounts, grumpy — critical, irritable, hectoring. The week before, his Long Island home had been firebombed. The Nation of Islam, which owned the house, promptly evicted him from the cinders and, way down in the winter of 1965, his family was homeless. What's more, Malcolm X, like the mythical Cassandra, sensed that death was near. He believed that his former brothers in the Nation were plotting to kill him. In the meantime, Malcolm X's nascent organizations, called Muslim Mosque Incorporated and the Organization of Afro-American Unity, were too young to survive without him. And to add a rancid cherry to this rotten parfait, his guest speaker at the Audubon Ballroom had canceled.

The best part of Malcolm X's day was probably going to be that speech. He was one of the all-time great public speakers. And while Malcolm X may have had a natural leaning toward dramatic interpretation, for him public speaking was a learned skill. At the age of 21, he was a middle school dropout and prison inmate who, "didn't know a verb from a house." Three months shy of his 40th birthday, he was an international media presence, a voracious reader, tough debater (Howitzer-like) and a leading proponent of black nationalism.

One of the many compelling features of The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley is that he doesn't make public speaking look easy. That's because public speaking isn't easy. And after nearly 50 years of debate over Malcolm X's political views, religious convictions, racial attitudes, gender biases and historical accuracy, this seems a good time to praise his autobiography for its tutorial on oratory.

With a mix of self-deprecating humor, straight talk and withering criticism of, well, everyone — Malcolm X conveys that public speech should not be attempted until the speaker has something to say. It's a fundamental truth that many of us forget. Oratory is born of knowledge and as Malcolm X says, "You couldn't have gotten me out of books with a wedge." When books were scarce, he provided his own reportage — speaking authoritatively about how African-Americans and people of color worldwide were faring based on his own travels and observations. The multitude of books on those topics came well after his trips to the Middle East, Africa and Europe.

Malcolm X debates at London's Oxford Union at Oxford University in 1964, defending the proposition that "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice."

Haley writes that Malcolm X often resisted overstating his professional achievements. But in the autobiography, our hero comes close to boasting about his talent for debate. "I have always loved verbal battle, and challenge," Malcolm X says. The reader can almost imagine him licking his lips. He revels in past skirmishes. But the reader also can count on Malcolm X to admit when he was on the ropes. He says of one opponent, "He got me so mad, I couldn't see straight."

Often, Malcolm X kept a mean-spirited remark in his back pocket, some emergency kryptonite of a personal nature that he could use to crush an opponent in the eyes of the audience. Biographer Manning Marable describes a Malcolm X who wasn't above loud-capping his opponents, insulting them, or undermining their authority based on whom they married, befriended or quoted. Otherwise, his manners were impeccable.

But Malcolm X also enjoyed a fair fight. His 1963 debate with friend James Baldwin is a good example. Based solely on the audio, Baldwin won. But on videotape, Malcolm X's intensity and wit steal the show. As he says in the autobiography, "Anyone who has ever heard me on radio or television programs knows that my technique is non-stop, until what I want to get said is said."

In his 1963 book, The Negro Protest, Kenneth Clark, a psychology professor and public television interviewer, made this criticism of Malcolm X's technique: "One certainly does not get the impression of spontaneity. On the contrary, one has the feeling that Minister Malcolm has anticipated every question and is prepared with the appropriate answer." To Clark's way of thinking, Malcolm X had stumbled into a pitfall of oratory. He was perhaps too studied at times — his responses impassioned, but rote.

The only sure way to exit the ghetto of predictability in public speaking is a seismic change in worldview, which is something that Malcolm X reportedly experienced. A 1964 pilgrimage to Mecca seemed to change his fundamental understanding of race relations, religion and the world at large. As a result, opinions that were once fixed, became more nuanced, surprising his closest allies.

Near the end of his autobiography, Malcolm X admonishes his readers to be more flexible, saying, "Children have a lesson adults should learn, to not be ashamed of failing, but to get up and try again. Most of us adults are so afraid, so cautious, so 'safe' and therefore so shrinking and rigid ... that it is why so many humans fail."

Had Malcolm X lived to make his remarks at the Audubon Ballroom, there's no telling what he might have said. Haley writes that he'd decided to talk about the need for black people to stop fighting one another, an idea that fit within his growing allegiance to both black nationalism and Pan-Africanism.

Given the acrimony between Malcolm X and his adversaries, however, the death threats, the fire bombing, the eviction and the irreparable break from the Nation of Islam, a peace-loving speech might have flopped. But the 400 people in the audience (save the assassins) were there because they were curious to hear what Malcolm had to say. That number included his wife and their four little girls, who as daughter Atallah Shabazz later said had started the day excited, "to get dressed and go see Daddy."

Which brings us to the ultimate lesson of public speaking: The speaker is never as important as the audience. It's for the benefit of the audience that the speaker labors to make his or her ideas known. Malcolm X died in midday, in mid-life, and perhaps most importantly, in mid-sentence. His killers robbed the audience of the ideas it had come to hear. Fortunately, the autobiography fills in some of what went missing. The last lines are powerful:

"And if I can die having brought any light, having exposed any meaningful truth that will help to destroy the racist cancer that is malignant in the body of America — then all of the credit is due to Allah. Only the mistakes have been mine."

Gwen Thompkins is host of the program Music Inside Out with Gwen Thompkins on member station WWNO in New Orleans and teaches public speaking at Tulane University in New Orleans.

Malcolm X

This week, the photo editing software Adobe Photoshop turned 25 years old. The program is an industry juggernaut — so famous that the word "Photoshop" has come to be synonymous with image manipulation.

But when the software started, says co-creator Thomas Knoll, it was a personal project. He and his brother John started working on the program in the late 1980s.

"It was originally a project that my brother and I were doing together for our own mutual use and enjoyment," Knoll tells NPR's Arun Rath. "It was not intended until a couple months into the process that we would even try to make it into a commercial application."

Back in 1987, Thomas started making digital tools for image processing as part of a Ph.D. program. John was working as a camera operator for George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic.

John saw computer graphics as the future of special effects, and soon realized that a lot of people would want to get their hands on this image processing technology.

"He said, 'Would you mind if I showed this around? I think I can sell this,' " Knoll recalled. "So he spent a lot of time driving around Silicon Valley, doing demos of the very early versions of Photoshop, trying to find a company that would be interested in publishing it."

i

"Jennifer In Paradise," a photo of Jennifer Walters in Bora Bora in August 1988, was the first color image to ever be Photoshopped. John Knoll used the image of his then-girlfriend (now wife) to demo Photoshop to potential users. John Knoll hide caption

itoggle caption John Knoll

"Jennifer In Paradise," a photo of Jennifer Walters in Bora Bora in August 1988, was the first color image to ever be Photoshopped. John Knoll used the image of his then-girlfriend (now wife) to demo Photoshop to potential users.

John Knoll

Adobe was that company. They acquired the rights and published Adobe Photoshop 1.0 on Feb. 19, 1990. Twenty-five years later, Adobe Photoshop is still the industry standard for photo editing software.

"There [were] image processing programs on the market already when we released, but when users compared them they found Photoshop to be both the most powerful and the easiest to use," Knoll says. "So we managed to dominate the market because of that."

Today, almost everyone who needs to analyze or alter photos uses Photoshop, including graphic designers, photographers and even doctors and medical examiners.

It's so commonplace that in 2006, the Oxford English Dictionary added Photoshop as a verb. Knoll says it's important to keep in mind that image manipulation was not invented by Photoshop.

i

"Dreamscape," courtesy of Jimmy Williams, shows how Photoshop can be used to create fantastical landscapes. But the program's inventors note that photo manipulation predated Photoshop. Jimmy Williams hide caption

itoggle caption Jimmy Williams

"Dreamscape," courtesy of Jimmy Williams, shows how Photoshop can be used to create fantastical landscapes. But the program's inventors note that photo manipulation predated Photoshop.

Jimmy Williams

"There were previously very sophisticated people in darkrooms who could do very good photo composites that you couldn't tell from reality," Knoll says. "What Photoshop did was sort of democratize that ability."

But some people would inevitably use these tools irresponsibly.

"A lot of the uses of Photoshop are wonderful and creative," he says. "There are a few uses where people are being unethical with it and like any tool, it's not the fault of the tool that happens."

Knoll sees a positive side to the pervasiveness of Photoshop.

The Picture Show

Fake It 'Til You Make It: What Came Before Photoshop

"It certainly raises awareness that you can't trust an image as truth without having other means of verification," he says. "People have a more healthy skepticism when they see photography."

Over the years, Knoll says some upgrades to Photoshop have even surprised him, such as the "content-aware fill" feature that seamlessly fills in areas when you cut someone out of a photo. He's not willing to make specific predictions, but he guarantees there are more surprises in store.

"When Photoshop first came out, computers were about one million times as slow as the computers of today," he says. "As computers continue to get faster, more things will become possible in the future."

Photoshop

This week, the photo editing software Adobe Photoshop turned 25 years old. The program is an industry juggernaut — so famous that the word "Photoshop" has come to be synonymous with image manipulation.

But when the software started, says co-creator Thomas Knoll, it was a personal project. He and his brother John started working on the program in the late 1980s.

"It was originally a project that my brother and I were doing together for our own mutual use and enjoyment," Knoll tells NPR's Arun Rath. "It was not intended until a couple months into the process that we would even try to make it into a commercial application."

Back in 1987, Thomas started making digital tools for image processing as part of a Ph.D. program. John was working as a camera operator for George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic.

John saw computer graphics as the future of special effects, and soon realized that a lot of people would want to get their hands on this image processing technology.

"He said, 'Would you mind if I showed this around? I think I can sell this,' " Knoll recalled. "So he spent a lot of time driving around Silicon Valley, doing demos of the very early versions of Photoshop, trying to find a company that would be interested in publishing it."

i

"Jennifer In Paradise," a photo of Jennifer Walters in Bora Bora in August 1988, was the first color image to ever be Photoshopped. John Knoll used the image of his then-girlfriend (now wife) to demo Photoshop to potential users. John Knoll hide caption

itoggle caption John Knoll

"Jennifer In Paradise," a photo of Jennifer Walters in Bora Bora in August 1988, was the first color image to ever be Photoshopped. John Knoll used the image of his then-girlfriend (now wife) to demo Photoshop to potential users.

John Knoll

Adobe was that company. They acquired the rights and published Adobe Photoshop 1.0 on Feb. 19, 1990. Twenty-five years later, Adobe Photoshop is still the industry standard for photo editing software.

"There [were] image processing programs on the market already when we released, but when users compared them they found Photoshop to be both the most powerful and the easiest to use," Knoll says. "So we managed to dominate the market because of that."

Today, almost everyone who needs to analyze or alter photos uses Photoshop, including graphic designers, photographers and even doctors and medical examiners.

It's so commonplace that in 2006, the Oxford English Dictionary added Photoshop as a verb. Knoll says it's important to keep in mind that image manipulation was not invented by Photoshop.

i

"Dreamscape," courtesy of Jimmy Williams, shows how Photoshop can be used to create fantastical landscapes. But the program's inventors note that photo manipulation predated Photoshop. Jimmy Williams hide caption

itoggle caption Jimmy Williams

"Dreamscape," courtesy of Jimmy Williams, shows how Photoshop can be used to create fantastical landscapes. But the program's inventors note that photo manipulation predated Photoshop.

Jimmy Williams

"There were previously very sophisticated people in darkrooms who could do very good photo composites that you couldn't tell from reality," Knoll says. "What Photoshop did was sort of democratize that ability."

But some people would inevitably use these tools irresponsibly.

"A lot of the uses of Photoshop are wonderful and creative," he says. "There are a few uses where people are being unethical with it and like any tool, it's not the fault of the tool that happens."

Knoll sees a positive side to the pervasiveness of Photoshop.

The Picture Show

Fake It 'Til You Make It: What Came Before Photoshop

"It certainly raises awareness that you can't trust an image as truth without having other means of verification," he says. "People have a more healthy skepticism when they see photography."

Over the years, Knoll says some upgrades to Photoshop have even surprised him, such as the "content-aware fill" feature that seamlessly fills in areas when you cut someone out of a photo. He's not willing to make specific predictions, but he guarantees there are more surprises in store.

"When Photoshop first came out, computers were about one million times as slow as the computers of today," he says. "As computers continue to get faster, more things will become possible in the future."

Photoshop

Like many of the "technical" Academy Awards, the sound editing category has long been dominated by men.

But a woman was nominated this year — just the fifth woman ever in the 30 or so years the sound editing award has been a competitive contest.

She's nominated for the WWII biopic Unbroken, based on the best-selling biography of Louis Zamperini, the Olympic runner and prisoner of war who turned to alcoholism after the war and eventually became a born-again Christian. (She shares the nomination with her co-editor, Andrew DeCristofaro.)

And her name, like mine, is Becky Sullivan.

I had to meet her. We sat down for an interview at her office at Universal Studios, and she told me about her career as one of the few women working in movie sound, and her challenging work on Unbroken.

Career Beginnings

Sullivan grew up in the San Fernando Valley, not too far from the Universal Studios back lot where she works now. In her early 20s, Sullivan knew she wanted to get into the movie business. The only connection she had to the industry was a friend of a friend who was a sound editor.

i

Sound editor Becky Sullivan has worked in the industry for nearly 30 years. This is her first Oscar nomination, and she's only the fifth woman to receive a nomination in the sound editing category. Jason Kempin/Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption Jason Kempin/Getty Images

Sound editor Becky Sullivan has worked in the industry for nearly 30 years. This is her first Oscar nomination, and she's only the fifth woman to receive a nomination in the sound editing category.

Jason Kempin/Getty Images

"And this guy said to me, 'Hey, you know what? We need a receptionist at the front desk,' " she remembers. "So during the day I was the receptionist, and at night, at 6 o'clock til midnight, I would stay and work with the sound editors."

"It was a lot of hard work. There wasn't many women doing it at all at that time," she says. "It was a pretty large sound editing company. At the time that I started, I was the only woman [apprentice] they had."

She began to focus on ADR — short for automated dialogue replacement. Often, the set of a movie shoot is noisy, and the dialogue recorded during filming isn't clean. There's no way to separate out that noise, she explains, so you have to re-record it.

"You bring [the actors] onto the stage, and you show them what was shot on production, and we go through line by line and re-record their dialogue."

Sullivan became an ADR expert, working the dialogue for films like RoboCop, Bill And Ted's Excellent Adventure, The Fugitive and, more recently, The Avengers.

In the last 10 years, Sullivan has become a supervising sound editor — the top dog of the sound editing team, head of her own crew. Unbroken is her first Academy Awards nomination.

"It's really a dream come true," she says. "I remember being 7 years old, sitting in front of the TV watching the Oscars. So to be there, and to be one of a very [small] group of women who've ever been nominated — that feels pretty fantastic."

The Challenges Of Unbroken

ADR plays a huge role in Unbroken. In the film, Louis Zamperini and two crew members are stranded on a raft in the middle of the Pacific for 47 days.

In reality, director Angelina Jolie filmed those scenes on a giant tank of water in Australia, near a highway and an amusement park.

"So when you record dialogue, you're going to pick up the sound of the traffic and the people yelling on the roller coasters. And you can't separate that," she says.

Sullivan had the three actors come back into the studio to re-record their lines.

"We laid them on the floor on the ADR stage," she explains — normally, actors would stand to record. "[We] put different pieces of couches and chairs around them, and built them a little 'raft' on the ground ... and I took all the water bottles off the stage. No one was allowed to drink water, because on the raft, they were thirsty. And their throats get drier and drier as we go through their journey."

That was just one of the film's challenges. Jolie wanted the film to sound as authentic as possible.

i

To make the scenes aboard the plane sound as authentic as possible, Becky Sullivan and her crew spent a day recording the sounds of Witchcraft, the only surviving unmodified B-24 bomber. The Collings Foundation hide caption

itoggle caption The Collings Foundation

To make the scenes aboard the plane sound as authentic as possible, Becky Sullivan and her crew spent a day recording the sounds of Witchcraft, the only surviving unmodified B-24 bomber.

The Collings Foundation

Most of the movie's first act is set on a B-24 bomber. Sullivan hunted down the only surviving unmodified B-24 and spent a day recording all of the plane's various sounds: clangs from the cockpit, overhead fly-bys, engines firing and stalling and the bomb bay doors.

Jolie filmed those sequences in an aircraft on a sound stage, but that sound was nowhere close to what a WWII dogfight would have sounded like in real life. So Sullivan and her crew had to make it from scratch, using the B-24 sounds they recorded, gun recordings, wind sounds and, of course, ADR.

Voting for the Sound Editing Oscar

The Academy Award for sound editing has always been a little mysterious to me. The winners always seem relatively random (and it doesn't help that there's also an award for sound mixing).

I appealed to the expert opinions of two Academy Award-winning sound editors, Karen Baker Landers and Per Hallberg of the Formosa Group. As a team, they won in 2007 and 2012 for The Bourne Ultimatum and the James Bond film Skyfall. (Baker Landers was the fourth woman to be nominated, and the first to win twice.)

"Ninety percent of the sound that you hear in the film has been replaced by us," Baker Landers explains. "It's 50 percent of the experience ... just start watching films and imagine if there were no sound. I think sometimes sound gives so much credibility to a picture."

Hallberg says that the best sound editing is often invisible.

Related Stories

Movie Interviews

What's In A Roar? Crafting Godzilla's Iconic Sound

Movies

Jurassic Bark: How Sound Design Changed Our Imaginations

Movie Interviews

'The Sounds Of Star Wars,' Now At Fans' Fingertips

"The illusion for the audience is to feel that when they're watching the movie, that's actually what that [sound] was and how it went down, and that it's seamless."

The category isn't any easier for them to predict, though.

"It's a crapshoot," Baker Landers says with a laugh.

"You can never tell," Hallberg adds. "There's a lot of voters, and I think the reality is that a large percentage of them doesn't quite, quite know either how to vote."

On the other hand, Becky Sullivan certainly knew who to vote for.

"I did! I voted for myself. I couldn't help it. I was the only woman on there!" she laughs.

We can't help ourselves, either — back in her office, we Google our name. Neither of us is result #1. It turns out there's a fashion designer named Becky Sullivan.

"You know what, I kinda need her help right now, because I have no idea what I'm going to wear to the Oscars," Sullivan jokes.

Academy Awards

Three British teenagers are believed to be on their way to Syria, lured by militants from the self-declared Islamic State.

Scotland Yard has issued an urgent appeal for any clues that may lead to the whereabouts of the school girls, because police say if they make it to Syria, they may never be able to return.

"We are extremely concerned for the safety of these young girls and would urge anyone with information to come forward and speak to police," Counter Terrorism Command Commander Richard Walton said in a statement. "Our priority is the safe return of these girls to their families."

Scotland Yard says that Shamima Begum, 15; Kadiza Sultana, 16; and a third 16-year-old girl who police are not identifying left their home on Tuesday before 8 a.m.

Police say the three friends gave their parents a "plausible reason" as to why they would be out Tuesday. The girls then headed to Gatwick Airport, where they boarded a Turkish Airlines flight.

The BBC reports that the case has already sparked discussion about how these girls could be moved to leave their families and join extremist organizations. The network adds:

"Home Secretary Teresa May said it was important 'to look at the whole question of the ideology that is driving these actions.'

" 'We're very clear as a government that we need to look at extremism across the whole spectrum and that's why we're working on an extremism strategy.'

"Salman Farsi, a spokesman for the East London Mosque, said she thought the girls had been misled.

" 'I do not know what was promised to them. It is just sad. I think the girls need to know they have done nothing wrong. They have been manipulated.' "

This case echoes the case from Colorado, where three teenagers from the Denver suburbs left home with plans to join the Islamic State. The girls in that case were intercepted by authorities in Frankfurt, Germany.

Islamic State

United Kingdom

England

Is Apple about to change our lives again?

The company's stock has been on the rise this week, partly because of a rumor that Apple wants launch a line of cars, and do by 2020.

Wall Street and Silicon Valley are excited, but people in the car business? Not so much.

"Why in the would would any sane company want to get into the car business right now, when the risks essentially are huge?" says Bill Visnic, Senior Editor with Edmunds.com, the automotive website.

Recalls, labor relations and safety regulations are just a few of the challenges. And the rewards haven't always been great — just count up the bankruptcies.

i

A visitor presses the new Apple's CarPlay touch-screen commands in March 2014 inside the Volvo Estate concept car displayed at the Swedish carmaker during the press day of the Geneva Motor Show in Geneva. Rumors this week suggested that Apple wants to move on to building its electric car, a historically perilous venture. Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images

A visitor presses the new Apple's CarPlay touch-screen commands in March 2014 inside the Volvo Estate concept car displayed at the Swedish carmaker during the press day of the Geneva Motor Show in Geneva. Rumors this week suggested that Apple wants to move on to building its electric car, a historically perilous venture.

Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images

"The margins in the car business are remarkably thin" Visnic says.

He points out that Apple can turn a profit of a few hundred dollars on an iPhone — the same cut a car dealer is happy to make on a sedan that costs 30 times as much.

Matt Anderson, curator of transportation at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich., says it's been nearly a century since a new car company really established itself.

"Some people would argue that the door kind of closed to new entrants in the automobile industry in the 1920s, when Walter Chrysler got in," he says.

Anderson says all kinds of companies in the past century got in the car business — watch companies, bike companies carriage companies — because it seemed a natural fit to them. Almost all failed.

Sears and Roebuck — a disruptive innovator much like Apple in the early 20th century — produced a automobile from about 1908 to 1912.

"They certainly had a built-in name recognition and customer base, so maybe it didn't seem so far a leap for them," Anderson says.

Sears got out the business as the pace of the industry picked up and Henry Ford's Model T began to take off.

The lesson seems to have been that you can't make the car business a side project.

Bob Lutz, who in the past 50-plus years has been an executive at all three of the big Detroit companies, says every few years he got to know a reformer who came along with plans to reinvent the business — Preston Tucker, John DeLorean, Swatch founder Nicholas Hayek.

The Salt

If Apple Made iMilk And Nike Sold Fruit: Designer Groceries As Art

The Two-Way

Apple's Success Continues Under Tim Cook, But Steve Jobs Still Looms Large

All Tech Considered

Apple Sold 30,000 iPhones An Hour Last Quarter, Scored Record Profits

"[Hayek] decided that we in the car business were all dummies, were all a bunch of dinosaurs, and so he was going to do what he called the Swatch car," Lutz says. "He invested a great deal of his own money, and lost it all."

That company eventually got bought, and evolved into what are now Smart cars, a division of Daimler AG.

Lutz is on the board of several tech startups and says he can understand the ambition to fix the car business from young hungry tech people.

The thing is, lead times in the tech world for developing and producing a product are as short as weeks or months — but because of safety and fuel regulations in the car business, getting a product to market takes years.

And launching a buggy product with plans to provide fixes down the road isn't tolerated, an idea that comes as huge surprise to those in the tech world.

So is Apple really going to build actual cars with factories and all the headached? Bill Visnic, Bob Lutz and other car insiders don't think so, suggesting Apple instead is angling to be the default operating system for vehicles in the future.

Lutz says he thinks it would be good for the industry if Apple were a player in the automotive space, especially as autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicle systems develop.

"That would be a huge business" he says "That's a far better business proposition than trying to build your own car."

electric cars

Automotive Industry

Apple

Here's a tough Oscar trivia question: Who is the only person to twice achieve the feat of receiving nominations for acting, writing and directing on the same film?

Wait. Was that not hard enough? Try naming the four worst-performing Best Picture winners from the past 10 years.

Trivia champions live for questions like this. That's why they flock to O'Brien's Pub in Santa Monica, Calif. Regulars such as Brad Rutter (Jeopardy!'s leading all-time money winner) and Daniel Avila (a game show staple since 1984) compete over a $75 bar tab.

These people have won hundreds of thousands of dollars — if not millions — in televised trivia contests. So why bother to hang out in this green-ceilinged Irish bar a few blocks from the beach?

"Some trivia places ask what sunk the Titanic. Here, they ask you to name all the passengers."

- Warren Usui, three-time Jeopardy winner

Three-time Jeopardy! winner Warren Usui explains: "Some trivia places ask what sunk the Titanic. Here, they ask you to name all the passengers."

Usui modestly describes himself as "better than the average bear." But movies are admittedly not his specialty. So the 60-year-old computer programmer prepared for Oscar trivia night by memorizing every single Oscar-winning Best Picture. In order.

Usui attends this trivia night faithfully, Adam Waldowski does not. He comes only once a year — for the Oscar quiz.

"I watch about 400 movies a year," he says. "I've seen thousands of Oscar nominees. It never comes in handy. Except for tonight."

Download The Quiz

ROUNDS ONE AND TWO: 30 Questions About Oscars Past And Present

HANDOUT 1: Each of these cartoon icons represents a Best Picture winner. They've been grouped into sets of four. Name each film, as well as the theme that unites each group.

HANDOUT 2: Identify which Best Actress winner wore each of the dresses when she won. We'll give you anagrams of the actress' names.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Waldowski and his team — including Cliff Galiher, Josh Haroutunian, Turner Hay and Hans von Walter — are destroying everyone else at O'Briens.

"No, no no. I know this," groans Stefan Goodreau, as quizmistress Rebecca Ward asks, "Of this year's nominees for best director, whose last three feature films all began ... with the same letter?"

Goodreau, a five-time Jeopardy! winner, correctly comes up with director Alejandro Irritu — of Birdman, Biutiful and Babel. But he has lots of help. His team includes Tim Jones, a Ph.D candidate studying animation history, and Jackie Fox, a trivia buff who also happens to be the former bassist of the pioneering 1970s all-female band, The Runaways. As they puzzled over such questions as, "Which is the most Oscar nominated family?" I couldn't resist asking if they ever longed to reach for their phones and just ... Google it.

"Would you bring an atom bomb to a duck hunt?" scoffed Warren Usui in response. But then he grew thoughtful. Right now, he said, the Oscars seems like a big deal. But in 20 years, who will care who won best actress or best picture in 2015? Only the trivia buffs, like him.

O'Brien's Irish Pub Oscar Quiz

Feb. 18, 2015

Quizmasters - Jonathan Dinerstein and Rebecca Ward

[Answers are below]

ROUND ONE

1. Name the only three Best Picture winners that are longer than 3 hours.

2. What is the longest ever title of a film nominated for Best Picture? What is the longest title of a film nominated for Best Picture this year?

3. This year the same four people have won the acting awards given by BAFTA, SAG, and the Golden Globes (in a drama). Who are they?

4. J.K. Simmons, the odds-on favorite to win Best Supporting Actor, currently features in two long-running television ad campaigns, one live-action, and one a voice performance. Name the two products he pitches.

5. Only twice have non-professional actors won acting awards. In both cases, they were portraying fictionalized versions of real war victimhood they suffered. Name the films for which they won.

6. Who is the only person to twice achieve the feat of receiving nominations for acting, writing and directing for the same film?

7. Match the films nominated for Best Foreign Language Film with their countries of origin. Films: Ida, Leviathan, Tangerines, Timbuktu, Wild Tales, Countries: Argentina, Estonia, Mauritania, Poland, Russia

8. Which of this year's acting nominees had no speaking lines in his or her film debut in a named role? That debut performance came in a film nominated for Best Picture.

9. Write down the names of the following actors: Cate Blanchett, Ben Kingsley, James Cromwell, James Caan. For each one, name the film nominated for Best Animated Feature in which they provide a voice performance.

10. Of this year's nominees for Best Director, two have had their last three feature films have begun with the same letter. Name both.

11. In both 2011 and 2014, the same two actors appeared in Oscar-nominated films playing characters employed by MI6. Name the two actors and the two films.

12. The Black List is annual inside-Hollywood industry survey of the most buzzed-about unproduced screenplays. Name the three films nominated for Best Picture this year that had previously appeared on the Black List.

13. Name the only two films for which two people shared the Best Director award.

14. Adjusted for inflation, four of the ten lowest domestic grossing Best Picture winners of all time are films from the last ten years. Name those four.

15. What is the most Oscar-nominated family?

ROUND TWO

16. Who is the only person to direct films which garnered nominations in all four acting categories, in back to back years?

17. What living person has won the most Oscars?

18. Who is the only non-Caucasian person to win Best Director?

19. Since the expansion of the Best Picture field from five to up to 10, who is the only person to be nominated for Best Director without his or her film also being nominated for Best Picture?

20. During the ceremony, the Oscar orchestra will, as usual, accompany the proceedings live. They won't be, however, anywhere inside the Dolby Theatre. Where will they be?

21. When giving your acceptance speech, how long do you have before the orchestra begins to play you off?

22. Who was the only adult person to receive an official Oscar statuette from the Academy (not an Academy Juvenile Award) which was other than the standard size? (Including non-competitive recipients)

23. Bradley Cooper has now been nominated for an acting Oscar in three consecutive years. If he is nominated again next year, he will tie a record among male actors, held by which two actors?

24. What was the first Best Picture winner in color?

25. What is the only Bond song to win Best Song?

26. According to Academy rules, how long must a film be to be eligible as a feature film?

27. There are two films tied for most nominations this year, with nine each. What actor appears in both of them?

28. What two characters have generated the most acting nominations for their portrayals? (Hint: real people.)

29. I will play four audio clips of people accepting Academy Awards. For each, name the recipient.

Tie Breaker: List as many as you can of the venues in Los Angeles County which have hosted the Academy Awards.

ROUND ONE ANSWERS

1. Gone With the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia, Ben-Hur – point each

2. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb; Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) – 1 point each

3. Eddie Redmayne, Julianne Moore, J.K. Simmons, Patricia Arquette – point each

4. Farmers Insurance, M&M's (voice of the yellow M&M) – 1 point each

5. The Best Years of Our Lives (Harold Russell, hooks for hands), The Killing Fields (Haing S. Ngor, doctor oppressed by Khmer Rouge) – 1 point each

6. Warren Beatty (Heaven Can Wait, Reds) – 1 point

7. Ida - Poland, Leviathan - Russia, Tangerines - Estonia, Timbuktu - Mauritania, Wild Tales - Argentina – point each

8. Robert Duvall, who played Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird – 1 point

9. Blanchett - How To Train Your Dragon 2, Kingsley - The Boxtrolls, Cromwell - Big Hero 6, Caan - The Tale of Princess Kaguya – point each

10. Alejandro Irritu (Birdman, Biutiful, Babel), Richard Linklater (Boyhood, Before Midnight, Bernie) – 1 point each

11. Benedict Cumberbatch, Mark Strong, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Imitation Game – point each

12. American Sniper, The Imitation Game, Whiplash – point each

13. West Side Story (Robert Wise & Jerome Robbins), No Country For Old Men (Joel & Ethan Coen) – 1 point each

14. No Country for Old Men (2007 - $88M), 12 Years a Slave (2013 - $56M), The Artist (2011 - $47M), The Hurt Locker (2009 - $18M) – point each

15. The Newmans (Alfred - 45, Randy (nephew) - 20, Thomas (son) - 12, etc.) – 1 point

ROUND TWO ANSWERS

16. David O. Russell (Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle) – 1 point

17. Alan Menken (eight - four for song, four for score) – 1 point

18. Ang Lee – 1 point

19. Bennett Miller, for Foxcatcher – 1 point

20. Playing live remotely from the Capitol Records Building – 1 point

21. 45 seconds – 1 point

22. In 1939, the Academy awarded a special Oscar, consisting of one regular sized statuette and seven miniature ones, in recognition of the achievement of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, to Walt Disney – 1 point

23. Marlon Brando, Al Pacino – 1 point each

24. Gone With the Wind – 1 point

25. "Skyfall" – 1 point

26. Forty minutes – 1 point

27. Edward Norton (Birdman, The Grand Budapest Hotel) – 1 point

28. A: Henry VIII (Charles Laughton, Robert Shaw, Richard Burton), Elizabeth I (Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett x2) – 1 point each

29. Jack Palance, Adrien Brody, Joe Pesci, Anna Paquin – point each

TIE-BREAKER ANSWER

Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, Ambassador Hotel, Biltmore Hotel, Grauman's Chinese Theatre, Shrine Auditorium, Academy Award Theater, Pantages Theatre, Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Kodak/Dolby Theatre

If you want even more of O'Brien's Oscar trivia, download the cartoon round and the dress round.

ANSWERS FOR THE CARTOON ROUND:

12 Years A Slave, Around the World in 80 Days, Million Dollar Baby, It Happened One Night Theme: Numbers

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Deer Hunter, Dances With Wolves, The Silence of the Lambs Theme: Animals

Gigi, Mrs. Miniver, Rebecca, Annie Hall Theme: Women's names

The Sound of Music, Chicago, My Fair Lady, Oliver! Theme: Musicals

Forrest Gump, The Bridge on the River Kwai, How Green Was My Valley, On The Waterfront Theme: Geographical features

The French Connection, An American in Paris, American Beauty, The English Patient Theme: Nationalities.

ANSWERS FOR THE DRESS ROUND:

Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Julie Andrews, Barbra Streisand, Faye Dunaway, Diane Keaton

Sally Field, Shirley MacLaine, Kathy Bates, Jodie Foster, Helen Hunt

Gwyneth Paltrow, Julia Roberts, Hilary Swank, Natalie Portman, Jennifer Lawrence

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, speaking on the one-year anniversary of a bloody day of anti-government protests in Kiev that precipitated the ouster of his Moscow-backed predecessor, accuses Russia of having a direct role in the killing of dozens of activists.

Poroshenko told a crowd gathered for the first anniversary of the clashes that a top Kremlin aide, Vladislav Surkov, "led the organization of groups of foreign snipers on [Kiev's] Maidan."

As we reported several weeks after last year's killings, an inquiry into the killings conducted by Interior Minister Arsen Avakov concluded that former President Viktor Yanukovych "employed gangs of killers, kidnappers and thugs to terrorize and undermine the opposition during Ukraine's tumultuous winter of discontent," but said nothing of any direct involvement from Moscow. Yanukovych has denied the charge.

More than 100 were killed by gunfire in the square, many hit by snipers.

Poroshenko's remarks come as Kiev's forces have been driven out of strategic areas of the country's east by Russian-backed separatists.

The Ukrainian president also accused Moscow of sending in tanks and missile batteries to aid the rebels in direct violation of a cease-fire deal that went into effect nearly a week ago.

crisis in Ukraine

Russia

There's some relief on the way for parents who worry what their young children may be watching on the internet. YouTube is set to release a new app that will offer more age-appropriate viewing for kids. An official with YouTube says the app - YouTube Kids - is due to be released by Google on Monday. It will initially be available only on Android devices.

A screen shot of the new app shows a simple and brightly colored layout. There are five icons which let children choose, among other things, between TV shows, music or search. Engadget.Com says younger kids, who can't type, can search with their voice. Unlike the regular YouTube home page, there's no comments section.

The screen shot highlights some of the shows that will be available, including Sesame Street, Mother Goose Club and Thomas the Tank Engine. YouTube says there will also be selections from DreamWorks TV, National Geographic Kids, and the puppet masters at the Jim Henson Company.

YouTube says the app was tested by children and family advocacy groups, and will include a timer that will limit the length a child can watch. The app will also allow parents to turn sound and search on and off.

According to USA Today, Google was responding to parents' ongoing concerns about what their young children were watching. The newspaper quotes Shimrit Ben-Yair, the app's project manager. He says "family-friendly fare is a booming buisness on YouTube." Ben-Yair says year after year, the company has seen 50% growth in viewing time on YouTube, but it's around 200% for family entertainment channels.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Google will have to comply with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, which is overseen by the Federal Trade Commission.

children

YouTube

Google

Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez has given West Coast dockworkers and the Pacific Maritime Association an ultimatum. If they don't resolve their ongoing labor dispute, he'll move neogotiations from the west coast to Washington, D.C.

The labor dispute started nine months ago, between the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) of shipping lines and terminals and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), which represents 20,000 dockworkers.

The dock workers' contract expired June 30. All negotiations take place behind closed doors, but one of the current issues is the ILWU's demand for the right to fire arbitrators. Under current rules, neutral arbitrators preside over labor disputes between workers and the PMA.

Those talks broke down in recent weeks.

The standstill is costing millions of dollars a day. NPR's Jackie Northam reports that the transpacific route, from Asia to the 29 West Coast seaports of the U.S., is one of the world's most lucrative routes. Cargo ships carry everything from produce to cars to electronics.

Currently about 50 ships are anchored offshore the West Coast waiting to be unloaded. Disruptions are forcing companies to put on more ships and reroute them to Canada. But it's a temporary and very uneasy solution: Vancouver and Prince Rupert, B.C., can't handle the same volume as the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Meanwhile U.S. East Coast ports are very busy with ships arriving from Asia via the Suez canal.

NPR's Sonari Glinton and Kirk Siegler report that the meat and produce industries are taking a hit. California's prized navel oranges are caught up in the dispute. It's also backing up the entry of truck parts and blue jeans to the U.S.

Yesterday Wal-Mart stores warned that the situation could affect its selection of goods. The Los Angeles Times quotes Jonathan Gold, vice president of supply chain and customs policy at the National Retail Federation: "The nation's retailers and supply chain stakeholders cannot afford another week of uncertainty at the Pacific ports. Dozens upon dozens of ships and thousands of containers are held out at sea, and where hundreds of millions of dollars in consumer goods, inventory and merchandise sit idle."

The global shipping industry is a ferociously competitive business, and the Transpacific route — from Asia to the West Coast seaports of the U.S. — is considered one of the most lucrative routes. Normally, cargo ships carrying everything from fruits and vegetables to cars and electronics can count on getting into a berth at one of the 29 West Coast seaports in a reasonable time.

Now it can take up to two weeks to berth the enormous cargo ships, thanks to contract disputes between the shipping lines and the union representing 20,000 dockworkers. About 50 cargo ships are anchored offshore, waiting to be unloaded.

"Ships are just stuck doing nothing, they're just losing money and at the same time schedules are going to pot," says Janet Porter, an editor with Lloyds List, a shipping industry news provider.

The ongoing disruptions at the West Coast seaports are forcing companies to put on more ships and re-route them. That includes heading north to ports in British Columbia, Canada. Stephen Brown, the president of the Chamber of Shipping of BC, says shipping companies already began diverting to ports in western Canada in May when negotiations between West Coast dock workers and ship owners first began. He says that tailed off for awhile when it looked like the negotiations were going well.

"And then about 3 months ago when the slowdown began, and ships became significantly delayed, then we saw another round of diversion to Canadian ports, to Vancouver and Prince Rupert," he says.

The problem is Vancouver and Prince Rupert can't handle the volume of ports such as Los Angeles and Long Beach and so get congested. Canada also doesn't have the rail and road networks like those along the West Coast of the U.S. so it takes longer to move cargo once it's unloaded. There are other alternatives, such as ports in Mexico and along the Gulf Coast.

Brown says the U.S. East Coast ports are very busy with ships coming in from Asia via the Suez Canal. He says it take a bit longer in terms of sailing distance. Also, freight rates — the cost to ship a container — are now higher on the East Coast because of the demand.

"But in terms of the costs that are being incurred in the delays, that additional freight rate doesn't seem to be the issue, it's more one of trying to get some sort of reliability out of the supply chain," he says.

Timothy Simpson, a communications director with shipping giant, Maersk Line, says shipping companies have to try to take in every variable, such a bad weather or work slowdowns, that could affect the supply chain. He says it can be a guessing game.

"You have to look at what's happening today and how we're going to adjust. you know that's really the best way that we found to manage it," he says.

Still, Simpson says Maersk Line has a team that meets daily to review all those variables that can affect the shipping industry.

global trade

shipping

trade

Canada

The green flag drops on the NASCAR season this Sunday, with the Daytona 500. NASCAR enters its new year with a giant TV contract and a revamped playoff system that led to wrecks, fights and some higher ratings last year.

But the sport is still nowhere near as well-viewed or attended as it was before the recession.

NASCAR's new playoff system came down to drivers Kevin Harvick and Ryan Newman, racing neck and neck last November. Harvick held off Newman over the final few laps of the final race of the year to win the championship.

Playoffs normally end this way: Whoever wins the final contest wins it all. But before last year, NASCAR's postseason was nothing like other sports.

"The strategy before used to always be consistency," says Gene Haas, co-owner of Harvick's racing team.

Highlights of the final few laps from the 2014 championship feature NASCAR's new playoff format, where the winner takes all.

NASCAR calls its playoffs "the Chase." The Chase used to be a convoluted point system where it didn't matter if you won races as long as you finished in the top 10 pretty often.

Last season, NASCAR became more like other sports, with knockout rounds and a winner-take-all championship.

"The strategy now is win — win at all costs — because that's what moves you up and then there's a lot of Hail Mary passes," Haas says.

In stock car racing, "Hail Marys" sometimes mean wrecks, and then, fistfights.

Jeff Gordon, Brad Keselowski and their pit crews were in an all-out brawl in Texas in November, with both drivers getting a little bloody. When the fight started, the crowd went wild — and TV ratings for the next race spiked.

The Two-Way

Jeff Gordon Says 2015 Will Be His Last Full NASCAR Season

StoryCorps

African-American NASCAR Driver Raced Like 'A Great Artist'

Sports

It's Winner-Take-All In NASCAR's New Chase

Sports

Too Young To Drive, But Old Enough For NASCAR

In fact, more people watched several of the playoff races, including the championship, than had in years, according to Sports Media Watch.

Gordon, a four-time champion who is retiring after the upcoming season, says the changes are working.

"We had to reinvent ourselves, and the Chase format last year was phenomenal," Gordon says. "And I think that that really kind of got the buzz back."

But even though more people turned on the TV for the final Chase races, viewership for NASCAR's playoffs overall was down slightly from the year before.

Attendance continues to be a challenge, too. The Atlanta Motor Speedway is tearing out 17,000 seats — and it's not the only one. At the Charlotte Motor Speedway, there is a gaping hole where an entire section of stands used to be. Construction crews are getting rid of 41,000 seats.

To put that in perspective, if you took that many seats out of most NFL stadiums, you'd be cutting their seating capacity in half.

This is a business adjusting to its post-recession reality. Admissions revenue at the major tracks is down steeply from their peaks in 2007 and 2008.

i

Construction crews are tearing down 41,000 seats at the Charlotte Motor Speedway. Michael Tomsic/WFAE hide caption

itoggle caption Michael Tomsic/WFAE

Construction crews are tearing down 41,000 seats at the Charlotte Motor Speedway.

Michael Tomsic/WFAE

But Charlotte Speedway General Manager Marcus Smith says NASCAR may have turned the corner.

"We've seen the curb flatten, and now we're seeing it tick up a little bit," Smith says. "So as the economy improves and with gas prices lower, it really puts more money in people's pockets, and we're seeing that show up in the ticket office."

He says the speedway is ahead with ticket sales for the 2015 season.

And keep in mind, low attendance for NASCAR is still huge compared with many other sports. The Charlotte Speedway, for example, will still have room for roughly 90,000 people after it removes all those seats.

NASCAR CEO Brian France says the sport measures its success partly online now, too.

"[A b]illion downloads and millions of people every week, unique users on our site, so when you judge it all, this is not only the most dominant motor sport in North America by a wide margin," France says, but it's also competing well with other sports.

NBC and Fox Sports are combining to pay more than $8 billion for NASCAR TV rights over the next 10 years.

Fox Sports President Eric Shanks says because of changing trends in how people watch TV, sports are one of the few things people still watch live.

"Twenty years ago, no NASCAR race would've ranked in the top 20 prime-time shows. Now NASCAR is a top five prime-time show," Shanks says.

NASCAR

It's said that every writer spends his or her entire life working on a single poem or one story. Figuratively, of course, this means that writers are each possessed by a certain obsession. As such, their entire body of work, in one way or another, is generally an attempt to dimension some part of that obsession, ask questions about it, answer them and then ask many new questions.

But — writer or not — I think that's true of any life; we all have an obsession that permeates and shapes our lives. In my case, my life is my art, and my art is my life — one in the same — and my personal and artistic obsession comes down to a single word, one question: What is home? And all that word calls to mind with respect to family, community, place, culture and national loyalties. A word, a universal question that we all ask ourselves, especially in a country like the United States, home to so many peoples and cultures.

My obsession began long before I was a writer, perhaps before I was even born. Let me explain. As I like to say, tongue-in-cheek: I was made in Cuba, assembled in Spain and imported to the United States, meaning that my mother left Cuba in 1967 seven months pregnant with me (my soul is Cuban, I claim); she boarded a flight to Spain with one suitcase, my father and my 6-year-old brother in her arms. Shortly after I was born in Madrid, we emigrated once again to the United States — Manhattan.

i

Blanco says his recordatorio, a memento of his birth, shows that "I was a man of the world before I could even walk." Richard Blanco hide caption

itoggle caption Richard Blanco

Blanco says his recordatorio, a memento of his birth, shows that "I was a man of the world before I could even walk."

Richard Blanco

In one of the images I share here, to the right, is a memento (un recordatorio) of my birth. It shows that by the time I was 45 days old, I figuratively belonged to three countries and had lived in two world-class cities. Adding to my confusion, for reasons I don't understand, there are also images of the Eiffel Tower and the Swiss Alps! The photo shown in the memento is my first newborn photo, which is also the photo of my green card — my first ID in the United States. I was a "man of the world" before I could even walk. Before I even learned to say my first word, I was subconsciously asking those questions that would obsess me all my life and work: Where am I from? Where is home? Where do I belong?

Adding to my obsession, in 1972 we moved to a galaxy far, far away: Miami, where I grew up between two imagined worlds. One world was the 1950s and '60s Cuba of my parents and grandparents — that paradise, that homeland so near and yet so foreign to where we might return any day, according to my parents. A homeland that I had never seen.

The other, less obvious world was America. To paraphrase Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Liz Balmaseda: "We love living in Miami because it's so close to the United States — and you don't need a passport." And indeed, I grew up in a very undiverse community. Everybody was Cuban, from the grocer to the mayor, the gardener to the doctor. Typical of a child, I contextualized America through food, commercials, G-rated versions of our history in textbooks and television shows, especially The Brady Bunch. More than a fiction or fantasy, I truly believed that, just north of the Miami-Dade County line, every house was like the Brady house, and every family was like them. I longed to be a "real" American like Peter Brady (or Marsha Brady, given my burgeoning homosexuality!).

i

Richard, aka "Little Riqui," celebrating his third birthday with his brother Caco, his mother, Geysa, and his father, Carlos — all dressed in their 1970s best! Richard Blanco hide caption

itoggle caption Richard Blanco

Richard, aka "Little Riqui," celebrating his third birthday with his brother Caco, his mother, Geysa, and his father, Carlos — all dressed in their 1970s best!

Richard Blanco

I sense there is a general misconception that children of immigrants and exiles embrace their given culture and heritage since childhood. For me, at least, that wasn't the case; there was an initial rejection of my cubanidad due to a generational and linguistic divide. Whatever my parents and grandparents liked was immediate grounds for rejection. They listened to salsa, I listened to AC/DC; they spoke Spanish, my brother and I insisted on English. And this is how I spent most of childhood and adolescence until I was mature enough — in my early 20s — to let those questions that had subconsciously lingered in me surface: Where am I from? Where is home? Where do I belong?

That's when I started writing, and the full onset of my obsession began. Through my poetry, I came out of my Cuban closet and retraced my childhood, going over the fine details of all that I had questioned my whole life. As author Anas Nin noted: "We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect." I certainly did.

In that reconnaissance of my culture, I eventually returned to Cuba for the first time. I say "returned" because in my mind it was like returning to everything I felt I had somehow known all my life, from the years of letters from my relatives that my mother would read aloud to me, from the black-and-white photos of cousins that looked like me, from all the family folklore and gossip I had heard. It all came to life the moment I stepped off the plane, as if I had lived on the island all my life. But I hadn't.

The experience of visiting Cuba filled in many blanks in my life, but only half my life. I soon realized — as we all do when we travel — that I was as American as I was Cuban. And despite any yearnings to return to live in the "homeland," I might as well been an immigrant from the 19th century who couldn't physically or psychologically return to the mother county. Since that first trip, I have returned many times to Cuba, and each time I learned a little more about who I am as a Cuban and, ironically, who I am as an American. I look forward to the new relationships on the horizon between Cuba and the United States. Maybe someday it will all merge into a hybrid that suits who I am.

i

Richard, aka "Little Riqui," modeling by the pool of a roadside motel on the family's drive from New York City to Miami, when they moved in 1972. Richard Blanco hide caption

itoggle caption Richard Blanco

Richard, aka "Little Riqui," modeling by the pool of a roadside motel on the family's drive from New York City to Miami, when they moved in 1972.

Richard Blanco

After my visits to Cuba, I said to myself: "Well, let's finally go and live in America." I left Miami for my first creative writing professorship, at Central Connecticut State University in Hartford. "Oh boy," I thought, still clinging to my romanticized version of America epitomized by New England: sleigh rides in the snow singing "Jingle Bells" ("in a one horse hope and say?"); Brady Bunch houses with chimneys exhaling curlicues of smoke; pilgrims in gold-buckled shoes; me and Martha Stewart doing arts and crafts in Westport every week.

What was I thinking? Well, I was still clinging to my romanticized/commercialized sense of the America I "knew," still wanting to be that "true" American. Of course, that fantasy soon flattened out into reality. Now what? Neither of my two imaginary worlds — Cuba or America — had proven to be true. So I caught the travel bug and decided to explore the world with my same obsession: Where am I from? Where is home? Where do I belong? Was it Venice, Paris or Madrid where I was born? It soon dawned on me what Pascal noted: "The sole cause of a man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room." What was that "room" that I had left?

i

Richard, aka "Little Riqui," on his first visit to the iconic Miami Seaquarium during the heyday of Flipper. Richard Blanco hide caption

itoggle caption Richard Blanco

Richard, aka "Little Riqui," on his first visit to the iconic Miami Seaquarium during the heyday of Flipper.

Richard Blanco

My answer was Miami. I figured it was the only place I belonged — or belonged to me. That city — just like I found myself — was caught between the two imaginary worlds I knew so well; that city understood me. And so I moved back there after nearly 14 years away, expecting that nothing had changed because no one had asked my permission. But it had. Sadly, it was no longer the city where I grew up or the city I left as an adult. Gladly, it had become a beautiful, dynamic city nonetheless, but not the one I had expected. The experience spoke to me of the old adage: You can never come back home. Now what?

Naturally, I moved to Bethel, Maine (insert sarcasm here), at the other end of I-95 — the northern-most state, as far away as I could get from Miami. The move wasn't made entirely on purpose — there was a practical reason: My husband, Mark, had a great business opportunity there. And I thought: "What the hell — why not?" Secretly, though, I was still wishing for that ever-illusive Brady Bunch house that I hoped I might find there. I didn't. But in Maine, I settled into a certain peace, believing that all my life I would feel like un desterado — a banished man without land, earth. I had almost accepted that — then the White House called and asked me to write a poem about America for President Obama's second inauguration.

i

Richard, aka "Little Riqui," after a day at the beach, in the arms of his father, Carlos, and with his uncle Toti, brother Caco and cousin Mirita. Richard Blanco hide caption

itoggle caption Richard Blanco

Richard, aka "Little Riqui," after a day at the beach, in the arms of his father, Carlos, and with his uncle Toti, brother Caco and cousin Mirita.

Richard Blanco

Wow. Suddenly all those questions about home and place and belonging surfaced again. How could I write a poem for a country that I wasn't sure I belong to? I wasn't really American, was I? It wasn't only a creative challenge, but an emotional, cultural and spiritual one, as well. In retrospect, I understand that the inaugural poem I wrote, "One Today," was infused with all my longing for, and my obsession with, the idea of home.

While sitting on the platform next to my mother, waiting to be called up to the podium to read my poem to the entire nation, I turned to her and said: "Well, I guess we are finally americanos." She gave me a gentle smile as if saying, I know, I know. For the first time in my life I knew I had a place at the American table. I had found my place. The greatest gift of the whole experience was to realize that I was home all along — home was in my own backyard, so to speak.

I spoke the first line of the poem, "One sun rose on us today," and I understood that "us" meant my story, the story of my mother (who grew up in a dirt-floor home in Cuba) and the stories of all the 800,000 people present before me, as well as the millions of lives I was indirectly representing. We were — and always will be — a grand part of the grand American narrative, a narrative that is still being written. America is a work-in-progress — ever changing and fluid — and we need to rework the rhetoric, the conversation, because from its very inception our nation has been about immigration and immigrants, who are not a drain on us, but the essence of who we are and our very survival economically, politically, culturally and — most importantly — spiritually.

Richard Blanco and Michel Martin will head to Miami next week to hear more about how immigration is shaping the American story. Michel will host an event there in partnership with member station WLRN.

Richard Blanco

Miami

Immigration

Poetry

Cuba

Late last year, a Spanish judge prohibited Uber from operating in Spain, after protests by taxi drivers. Days later, the company announced it was closing down operations here.

But less than two months later, it's reinvented itself as UberEATS, converting its network of drivers into food deliverymen.

Customers in Spain can log onto the same Uber smartphone app which they used to request rides (though they may need to update the app; Spanish telecom operators were ordered to block the original app after a judge's ruling in December). A new option labeled UberEATS allows users to order food from participating restaurants. The service is part of a partnership with the Spanish foodie website Plateselector.

Uber debuted this new service in Barcelona last night, promising food delivery in 10 minutes or less. The company already provides a similar service in Los Angeles and Beverly Hills, called UberFRESH.

"The global fame of Spanish gastronomy, the cosmopolitan character of Barcelona and Spaniards' great acceptance of new opportunities in the 'on-demand' economy, are the main reasons the company chose Barcelona as the first city outside the U.S. to launch UberEATS," the company said in a statement emailed to journalists.

Most dishes cost around $11, with about a $3 delivery fee. Just like with the ride-share service, customers with GPS-enabled smartphones can watch a little taxi icon getting closer, delivering their meal.

In addition to Spain, Uber faces ride-share bans in South Korea, Thailand, India and France. It also faces stiff resistance from taxi drivers and unions in Germany, Belgium and elsewhere. In India, Uber was criticized as unsafe after allegations that a woman was raped by her Uber driver. And in Sydney, Australia, the company came under fire for jacking up prices during a hostage crisis.

Nevertheless, the five-year-old San Francisco-based company has expanded to more than 50 countries. Uber is privately-held, but has been valued by investors at more than $40 billion.

That's a lot of takeout food.

Late last year, a Spanish judge prohibited Uber from operating in Spain, after protests by taxi drivers. Days later, the company announced it was closing down operations here.

But less than two months later, it's reinvented itself as UberEATS, converting its network of drivers into food deliverymen.

Customers in Spain can log onto the same Uber smartphone app which they used to request rides (though they may need to update the app; Spanish telecom operators were ordered to block the original app after a judge's ruling in December). A new option labeled UberEATS allows users to order food from participating restaurants. The service is part of a partnership with the Spanish foodie website Plateselector.

Uber debuted this new service in Barcelona last night, promising food delivery in 10 minutes or less. The company already provides a similar service in Los Angeles and Beverly Hills, called UberFRESH.

"The global fame of Spanish gastronomy, the cosmopolitan character of Barcelona and Spaniards' great acceptance of new opportunities in the 'on-demand' economy, are the main reasons the company chose Barcelona as the first city outside the U.S. to launch UberEATS," the company said in a statement emailed to journalists.

Most dishes cost around $11, with about a $3 delivery fee. Just like with the ride-share service, customers with GPS-enabled smartphones can watch a little taxi icon getting closer, delivering their meal.

In addition to Spain, Uber faces ride-share bans in South Korea, Thailand, India and France. It also faces stiff resistance from taxi drivers and unions in Germany, Belgium and elsewhere. In India, Uber was criticized as unsafe after allegations that a woman was raped by her Uber driver. And in Sydney, Australia, the company came under fire for jacking up prices during a hostage crisis.

Nevertheless, the five-year-old San Francisco-based company has expanded to more than 50 countries. Uber is privately-held, but has been valued by investors at more than $40 billion.

That's a lot of takeout food.

Late last year, a Spanish judge prohibited Uber from operating in Spain, after protests by taxi drivers. Days later, the company announced it was closing down operations here.

But less than two months later, it's reinvented itself as UberEATS, converting its network of drivers into food deliverymen.

Customers in Spain can log onto the same Uber smartphone app which they used to request rides (though they may need to update the app; Spanish telecom operators were ordered to block the original app after a judge's ruling in December). A new option labeled UberEATS allows users to order food from participating restaurants. The service is part of a partnership with the Spanish foodie website Plateselector.

Uber debuted this new service in Barcelona last night, promising food delivery in 10 minutes or less. The company already provides a similar service in Los Angeles and Beverly Hills, called UberFRESH.

"The global fame of Spanish gastronomy, the cosmopolitan character of Barcelona and Spaniards' great acceptance of new opportunities in the 'on-demand' economy, are the main reasons the company chose Barcelona as the first city outside the U.S. to launch UberEATS," the company said in a statement emailed to journalists.

Most dishes cost around $11, with about a $3 delivery fee. Just like with the ride-share service, customers with GPS-enabled smartphones can watch a little taxi icon getting closer, delivering their meal.

In addition to Spain, Uber faces ride-share bans in South Korea, Thailand, India and France. It also faces stiff resistance from taxi drivers and unions in Germany, Belgium and elsewhere. In India, Uber was criticized as unsafe after allegations that a woman was raped by her Uber driver. And in Sydney, Australia, the company came under fire for jacking up prices during a hostage crisis.

Nevertheless, the five-year-old San Francisco-based company has expanded to more than 50 countries. Uber is privately-held, but has been valued by investors at more than $40 billion.

That's a lot of takeout food.

With the Greek government worried it will run out of money by next month, finance ministers from the Eurozone are meeting in Brussels Friday to decide whether to approve Greece's request for an extension on bailout loans that have kept it afloat.

But even as the negotiations go on, there are reports that Germany and others might be prepared for Greece to leave the Eurozone altogether if it doesn't come to terms.

German newspaper Der Spiegel reports that officials at the European Central Bank have been preparing for a possible Greek exit. And Bloomberg News says "Germany and its allies are ready to let Greece leave the euro unless Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras accepts the conditions required," in a story citing the finance minister of Malta.

At this point, it's impossible to tell whether that threat is genuine, or if it's meant to soften Greece's stance in the talks. The recently elected Tsipras has promised to take a hard line against what he deems interference in Greek affairs, campaigning on a promise of ending austerity measures.

Greece made its latest proposal Thursday, just over a week before an extension is due to expire. The request was immediately rebuffed by Germany — but there were signs Friday that the two sides might be working toward a compromise, with a representative of German Chancellor Angela Merkel calling the request "a starting point."

From Athens, NPR's Joanna Kakissis reports:

"The new Greek government said it will go along with most of the bailout agreement, which has given Greece billions in loans.

"But it refuses to enact more austerity measures, because Greek leaders say the deep spending cuts and tax hikes have destroyed the economy. Germany, which has financed most of the loans to Greece, says Greece must stick to austerity or risk losing aid."

Today, Reuters quotes a senior Greek official who says, "We have covered four fifths of the distance, they also need to cover one fifth."

As the Two-Way reported yesterday, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schuble quickly rejected Greece's proposal, despite its inclusion of new concessions.

That rejection "met with ample criticism," news agency Deutsche Welle reports, citing officials in the European Union and Germany's government who said that Greece had offered a viable starting point for a solution.

Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel is quoted by Deutsche Welle saying, "[It is] a giant step by the Greek government to accept that without a program, there won't be aid." He added, "we must all stop issuing ultimatums."

Friday's meeting comes days after both Greece and its European partners walked out of talks after only hours of discussion, a development that led many to wonder if Greece might be headed for bankruptcy or an exit from the Eurozone — or both.

eurozone

European Union

Greece

It's said that every writer spends his or her entire life working on a single poem or one story. Figuratively, of course, this means that writers are each possessed by a certain obsession. As such, their entire body of work, in one way or another, is generally an attempt to dimension some part of that obsession, ask questions about it, answer them, and then ask many new questions.

i

Blanco says his recordatorio, a memento of his birth shows "I was a man of the world before I could even walk." Richard Blanco hide caption

itoggle caption Richard Blanco

Blanco says his recordatorio, a memento of his birth shows "I was a man of the world before I could even walk."

Richard Blanco

But — writer or not — I think that's true of any life; we all have an obsession that permeates and shapes our lives. In my case, my life is my art, and my art is my life — one in the same — and my personal and artistic obsession comes down to a single word, one question: What is home? And all that word calls to mind with respect to family, community, place, culture and national loyalties. A word, a universal question that we all ask ourselves, especially in a country like the United States, home to so many peoples and cultures.

i

Richard a.k.a 'Little Riqui' celebrating his third birthday with his brother Caco, his mother Geysa and father Carlos — all dressed in their 1970's best! Richard Blanco hide caption

itoggle caption Richard Blanco

Richard a.k.a 'Little Riqui' celebrating his third birthday with his brother Caco, his mother Geysa and father Carlos — all dressed in their 1970's best!

Richard Blanco

My obsession began long before I was a writer, perhaps before I was even born. Let me explain. As I like to say — tongue-in-cheek: I was made in Cuba, assembled in Spain, and imported to the United States, meaning that my mother left Cuba in 1967 seven months pregnant with me (my soul is Cuban, I claim); she boarded a flight to Spain with one suitcase, my father, and my six-year-old brother in her arms. Shortly after I was born in Madrid, we emigrated once again to the United States — Manhattan.

In one of the images I share here is a memento (un recordatorio) of my birth; it shows that by the time I was 45 days old, I figuratively belonged to three countries and had lived in two world-class cities. Adding to my confusion, for reasons I don't understand, there are also images of the Eiffel Tower and the Swiss Alps! The photo shown in the memento is my first, newborn photo, which is also the photo of my green card — my first I.D. in the United States. I was a "man of the world" before I could even walk. Before I even learned to say my first word, I was subconsciously asking those questions that would obsess me all my life and work: Where am I from? Where is home? Where do I belong?

i

Richard a.k.a 'Little Riqui' modeling by the pool of a roadside motel on the family's drive from New York City to Miami when they moved down in 1972. Richard Blanco hide caption

itoggle caption Richard Blanco

Richard a.k.a 'Little Riqui' modeling by the pool of a roadside motel on the family's drive from New York City to Miami when they moved down in 1972.

Richard Blanco

Adding to my obsession, in 1972 we moved to a galaxy far, far away: Miami, where I grew up between two real-imagined worlds. One world was the 1950s and 1960s of my parents and grandparents — that paradise, that homeland so near and yet so foreign to where we might return any day, according to my parents. A homeland that I had never seen.

The other, less obvious world was America. To paraphrase Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Liz Balmaseda: "we love living in Miami because it's so close to the United States — and you don't need a passport." And indeed, I grew up in a very un-diverse community. Everybody was Cuban, from the grocer to the mayor, gardener to doctor. Typical of a child, I contextualized America through food, commercials, G-rated versions of our history in text books and television shows, especially The Brady Bunch. More than a fiction or fantasy, I truly believed that, just north of the Miami-Dade County line, every house was like the Brady house, and every family was like them. I longed to be a "real" American like Peter Brady (or Marsha Brady, given my burgeoning homosexuality!).

i

Richard a.k.a 'Little Riqui' on his first visit to the iconic Miami Seaquarium during the hey-day of Flipper. Richard Blanco hide caption

itoggle caption Richard Blanco

Richard a.k.a 'Little Riqui' on his first visit to the iconic Miami Seaquarium during the hey-day of Flipper.

Richard Blanco

I sense there is a general misconception that children of immigrants and exiles embrace our given culture and heritage since childhood. For me at least, that wasn't the case; there was an initial rejection of my cubanidad due to a generational and linguistic divide. Whatever my parents and grandparents liked was immediate grounds for rejection. They listened to salsa, I listened to AC/DC; they spoke Spanish, my brother and I insisted on English. And this is how I spent most of childhood and adolescence until I was mature enough — in my early twenties — to let those questions that had subconsciously lingered in me, surface: Where am I from? Where is home? Where do I belong?

i

Richard a.k.a 'Little Riqui' after a day at the beach, in the arms of his father Carlos and with his uncle Toti, brother Caco, and cousin Mirita. Richard Blanco hide caption

itoggle caption Richard Blanco

Richard a.k.a 'Little Riqui' after a day at the beach, in the arms of his father Carlos and with his uncle Toti, brother Caco, and cousin Mirita.

Richard Blanco

That's when I started writing and the full onset of my obsession began. Through my poetry, I came out of my Cuban closet, and retraced my childhood, going over the fine details of all that I had questioned my whole my life. As author Anas Nin noted: "We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect." I certainly did.

In that reconnaissance of my culture, I eventually returned to Cuba for the first time. I say "returned" because in my mind it was like a returning to everything I felt I had somehow known all my life on account of the years of letters from my relatives that my mother would read aloud to me, from the black-and-white photos of cousins that looked like me, from all the family folklore and gossip I had heard. It all came to life the moment I stepped off the plane, as if I had lived on the island all my life. But I hadn't.

The experience of visiting Cuba filled in many blanks in my life, but only half my life. I soon realized — as we all do when we travel — that I was as American as I was Cuban. And despite any yearnings to return to live in the "homeland," I might as well been an immigrant from the 19th century who couldn't physically or psychologically return to the mother county. Since that first trip, I have returned many times to Cuba, and each time I learned a little more about who I am as a Cuban and, ironically, who I am as an American. I look forward to the new relationships on the horizon between Cuba and the United States. Maybe someday it will all merge into a hybrid that suits who I am.

After my visits to Cuba, I said to myself: "Well, let's finally go and live in America." I left Miami for me first creative writing professorship at Central Connecticut Sate in Hartford. "Oh boy," I thought, still clinging to my romanticized version of America epitomized by New England: sleigh rides in the snow singing Jingle Bells ("in a one horse hope and say?"); Brady Bunch houses with chimneys exhaling curly cues of smoke; pilgrims in gold-buckled shoes; me and Martha Stewart doing arts and crafts in Westport every week.

What was I thinking? Well, I was still clinging to my romanticized/commercialized sense of the America I "knew," still wanting to be that "true" American. Of course, that fantasy soon flattened out into reality. Now what? Neither of my two imaginary worlds — Cuba or America — had proven to be true. So I caught the travel bug and decided to explore the world with my same obsession: Where am I from? Where is home? Where do I belong? Was it Venice, Paris, or Madrid where I was born? It soon dawned on me what Pascal noted: "The sole cause of a man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room." What was that "room" that I had left?

My answer was Miami. I figured it was the only place I belonged — or belonged to me. That city — just like me — caught between the two imaginary worlds I knew so well. The city that understood me. And so I moved back there after nearly 14 years away, expecting that nothing had changed, because no one had asked my permission. But it had. Sadly it was no longer the city where I grew up or the city I left as an adult. Gladly, it had become a beautiful, dynamic city nonetheless, but not the one I had expected. The experience spoke to me of the old adage: You can never come back home. Now what?

Naturally, I moved to Bethel, Maine (insert sarcasm here) at the other end of I-95 — the northern-most state, as far away as I could get from Miami. Not entirely on purpose, there was a practical reason: my husband Mark had a great business opportunity there. And I thought: "What the hell — why not?" Though secretly I was still wishing for that ever-illusive Brady Bunch house that I hoped I might find there. I didn't. But in Maine, I settled into a certain peace, believing that all my life I would feel like un desterado — a banished man without land, earth. I had almost accepted that — then the White House called and asked me to write a poem about America for President Obama's second inauguration.

Wow. Suddenly all those questions about home and place and belonging surfaced again. How could I write a poem for a country that I wasn't sure I belong to? I wasn't really American, was I? It wasn't only a creative challenge, but an emotional, cultural, and spiritual one as well. In retrospect, I understand that the inaugural poem I wrote, "One Today," was infused with all my longing for, and my same obsession with the idea of home.

While sitting on the platform next to my mother, waiting to be called up to the podium to read my poem to the entire nation, I turned to her and said: "Well, I guess we are finally americanos." She gave me a gentle smile as if saying, I know, I know. For the first time in my life I knew I had a place at the American table. I had found my place. The greatest gift of the whole experience was to realize that I was home all along — home was in my own backyard, so to speak.

I spoke the first line of the poem: "One sun rose on us today..." and I understood that "us" meant my story, my mother's story (who grew up in a dirt-floor home in Cuba), and the stories of all 800,000 people before me, as well as the millions of lives I was indirectly representing. We were—and always will be—a grand part of the grand American narrative, a narrative that is still being written. America is a work-in-progress—ever changing and fluid—and we need to rework the rhetoric, the conversation, because from its very inception our nation has been about immigration and immigrants, who are not a drain on us, but the essence of who we are and our very survival economically, politically, culturally and—most importantly—spiritually.

Richard Blanco and Michel Martin will head to Miami next week to hear more about how immigration is shaping the American story. Michel will host an event there in partnership with member station WLRN.

Richard Blanco

Miami

Immigration

Poetry

Cuba

When we walked into a shopping mall in Tehran, Pooya Shahsiah was waiting for us at the top of the escalator. She's the co-owner of a trendy little shop on the second floor that sells shirts, scarves, cups and jewelry. Cloth hangs along the walls in reds and yellows and blues.

There is, for example, a purple shirt with a colorful illustration of a rooster crowing. Parts of the rooster are made out of Persian words.

Shahsiah says it was inspired by a Persian poem, and she's applied the same design to scarves and mugs. It's all from the same collection, she says: a poem about a new day, a new dawn.

Is that a metaphor?

Yes, most of our work consists of metaphor, she says. When she says "our work," she means her work with her friend and business partner Sara Noghani.

They're both in their 30s, and stylishly dressed, as you'd expect of the proprietors of a clothing shop. They met years ago, as college students, and lived through what seemed like a new dawn in Iran.

Related NPR Stories

Parallels

Iran's Jews: It's Our Home And We Plan To Stay

They remember casting their first votes ever for a reformist president elected in the 1990's.

Parallels

On Iran's Streets, 'Death To America' ... And Hope For A Nuclear Deal

"We say, 'You are spending your golden age when you're a student," Shahsiah says.

Parallels

'You Are Invited': Isolated Iran Seeks Foreign Tourists

They went to cinemas, plays, and concerts more freely than at other times. It wasn't so complicated making friends with men. That brief moment of openness was soon stifled by a conservative reaction.

Yet Shahsiah's friend Noghani says the mere memory of greater openness still carries them forward.

"It was very great for us ... because we were young, because we could do many things and we were a little bit free," she says.

They've lived off that memory through more restrictive, and more troubled, recent times. They got a sign of just how troubled when they started selling another silkscreened shirt.

This one featured a single Persian word, omid, or hope.

When they started showing customers the shirt, they got a divided reaction.

Some people loved it. But others thought they were being too hopeful and said things like, "Are you serious?"

Dashed Hopes

Many Iranians are reluctant to place too much faith in today's new moment of possibility, symbolized by the 2013 election of President Hassan Rouhani, who promised greater openness.

Far outside Tehran, in the city of Isfahan, we met a man who recalls another moment of anticipation.

Ahmad, a student who asked that we only use his first name, recalls the 2009 presidential election, when it seemed that a reform presidential candidate was likely to win. Instead the reform side lost in a disputed vote count, and president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad remained in office.

"Personally, I really lost my, you know, hope," he says. "Because many people my age wanted to make a new change, build a new country."

But that didn't happen.

"You know, the election is just something for decoration," he adds.

Asghar Pourheydar-Shirazi uses a hammer and a nail to engrave intricate patterns on a vase at his shop in Isfahan. He was optimistic following the country's 1979 revolution, but says the economy has fared poorly for decades. At 64, he works 10 to 12 hour days. Molly Messick/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Molly Messick/NPR

Now, he expects only modest change from Rouhani. And though he has not given up on the country he loves, he is making plans to study abroad.

We spoke with Ahmad in a centuries-old square in Isfahan. Pointed arches surround that square. Little tourist shops fill many of the arches.

Diminished Expectations

In one of those shops we found one more Iranian with his own approach to moments of anticipation and hope.

Asghar Pourheydar-Shirazi, was sitting on a chair, holding a hammer in one hand and a nail in the other. He was using them to etch patterns into the surface of a giant metal vase.

He's engraving unbelievably intricate patterns, by hand, on a vase. It's work he's been doing for 50 years. He even said he could engrave an image of my face on the vase if I wanted.

"If I make a mistake it becomes a new design," he says.

This too is a kind of metaphor for how Shirazi has survived in this business so long — and the way he gets by in Iran, where he says business has been poor for decades.

Shirazi recalls his own moment of anticipation. Shortly after Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution, he says, business boomed.

Then came the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, which Shirazi went off to fight in and business has been weak ever since.

As with his work, Shirazi just adjusted to Iran's economic mistakes. In the good times, he made a living working four or five hours a day. Now he works 10 to 12 hours. He's 64 now, and has put five of his six children through college.

He quietly supports Iran's president in his efforts to open up the country and the economy, but he hasn't seen much change yet, and doesn't seem to worry much about it anyway.

He just keeps working. When he finished talking he put down a spare nail and went back to cutting his patterns.

Iran

It's a painful time to be in the oil business. With the price of crude oil about half what it was six months ago, companies large and small are being pressured to cut costs.

On the front lines are oil services companies that do everything from drilling to providing electrical power at well sites. Hundreds of thousands of jobs are threatened as companies try to adjust.

Gary Evans, CEO of the oil and gas company Magnum Hunter Resources, has a tough message for the people who provide critical services to companies like his: "We've got to lower our cost," he said to a packed auditorium in Houston last week.

He says that means the services his company provides — everything from fracking to trucking — are going on sale, big-time.

When there's a big sale coming at Neiman Marcus, Evans says, you don't spend your money until the sale prices appear. And right now, he's waiting for the deep discounts in oil services before he spends any more money.

"No drilling, no completion, no fracking, no nothing. Cut it completely off. ... We tell our vendors, 'When you're ready to do it at 40 percent below what you were charging me in December, we'll go back to work.' "

Related NPR Stories

Business

Planning Through Oil Booms Helps Small Producers Weather The Busts

Oil Industry Sees Layoffs, Even As Jobs Numbers Rise Elsewhere

Low Oil Prices Great For Consumers, Less So For Investors

The room is silent, absorbing the prospect of a 40 percent cut in income.

"I hate to say that to a lot of my service company friends, but that's the reality," Evans says. "We've had over a 50 percent drop in commodity prices, so we've got to have a bigger drop in service costs."

Out in the hallway after Evans' bombshell, Ken Sapien says his engineering firm, RRC, which provides things like seismic survey and electrical grid designs for drilling sites, is feeling the squeeze.

"Yes, we've been approached by a few of our clients, asking us to drop our prices," Sapien says. And the firm doesn't have much choice if it wants to hang on to business, he says.

"If you don't take the cut, there's somebody out there that's gonna work for that price. So ... for us, it's more about the relationship. I mean, money is important, don't get me wrong. But it means more to continue to have those guys as our clients."

Earlier this month, Halliburton, a giant in the oil services businesses, said it is laying off up to 6,400 workers. Before that, Baker Hughes, which is merging with Halliburton, announced it's slashing about 7,000 jobs. And another giant, Schlumberger, is slashing 9,000 jobs. More than 100,000 industry layoffs have been announced worldwide so far.

Clint Walker is general manager of CUDD Energy Services, a medium-sized player in the oil fields that provides services including fracking, water management and well control. "There's a tremendous amount of people" being laid off in the industry, he says. "And the thing about these jobs — they're good-paying jobs. Most of these jobs are in the $80,000 to $120,000 range."

Walker says what his firm provides to oil companies is knowledge, sophisticated equipment, reliability and safety. He says that becomes a challenge if your income is cut 40 percent.

"You just have to get through it, and create enough cash flow in order to maintain that equipment," he says. "Because the last thing you want to do is put a piece of equipment that's not reliable and — God forbid — get anybody hurt out there."

As Walker suggests, the deep cost-cutting could increase the risks of accidents and injured workers. It could also increase the risk of accidents that damage the environment.

That's an unwelcome prospect for an industry already under scrutiny because of its use of controversial hydraulic fracturing, not to mention incidents like the massive BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

Walker says the industry can only hope for a quick turnaround in prices. But another big increase in oil inventories was announced Thursday — sending prices lower once again.

oil drilling

energy

oil prices

Jobs

oil

layoffs