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2024 Brings New Gun Restrictions in Several States

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2024 Brings New Gun Restrictions in Several States

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Well, mass shootings are, of course, one of the hardest problems in the gun safety world to solve.

But, nonetheless, some of the laws that have been adopted are targeting these mass shootings. For instance, Washington state has expanded gun background checks in an effort to try to keep guns out of the hands of people who will commit mass shootings.

A waiting period can also potentially help prevent a mass shooting to the extent that it's a crime of passion that one does without much thought and consideration. Still, other states like Illinois have banned the weapons that are most commonly used in high-profile mass shootings, those military-style assault rifles with high-capacity magazines.

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2024 brings new gun restrictions in several states

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New gun safety laws are taking effect in a handful of states in the new year. While the country ended 2023 with more mass shootings than days in the year, new laws in California, Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota and Washington are aimed at preventing gun violence.

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1000 Hours Outside: "The Largest Uncontrolled Experiment Humanity Has Every Performed on its Own Children"

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1000 Hours Outside: "The Largest Uncontrolled Experiment Humanity Has Every Performed on its Own Children"

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Luminary is a podcast streaming platform that gives you access to 500k+ shows, when and where you want. Sign up today and be the first to try @hearluminary!

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NY Times "Screens in the Classroom: Tool or Temptation?"

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NY Times "Screens in the Classroom: Tool or Temptation?"

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Screens in the Classroom: Tool or Temptation?

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Key points

Encourage students to find mentors and practice patience as they discover what's best for themselves.

Using career exploration tools and working with professionals can help quickly uncover important insights.

Compensation is more than money; it's all the ways we nurture our best selves.

For college students, the journey toward finding a fulfilling career can feel exciting, daunting, and sometimes downright hopeless. With numerous possibilities and variables, it's essential for students to approach this process with intentionality. Ultimately, I want students to find the sweet spot or intersection of their abilities, interests, and compensation. In this post, I'll explore strategies to help you guide your struggling college kiddo to align these key factors and effectively navigate their career path. I've created this model from life satisfaction, financial success, and career development research combined with my experience advising students for more than two decades.

Assessing Abilities

Understanding their strengths and areas for growth is fundamental to identifying career opportunities that align with their abilities. Here are some steps to assess those abilities:

1. Self-reflection: Take time to reflect on academic strengths, skills developed through extracurricular activities, and feedback from professors, mentors, or previous employers.

2. Skills assessment tools: Use online assessment tools or career services offered by the college to identify strengths, interests, and potential career paths based on their abilities.

3. Internships and experiential learning: Participate in internships, co-op programs, or volunteer opportunities to gain hands-on experience and further assess their abilities in real-world settings.

Identifying Interests

Exploring interests is essential for finding a career that brings you fulfillment and satisfaction. Consider the following strategies to identify their interests:

1. Reflect on hobbies and activities. Think about activities or subjects enjoyed outside of academic coursework. Hobbies and interests can provide valuable insights into potential career paths. Not everything we love to do is a realistic career path, but those things could provide good information about what motivates us when life is challenging.

2. Conduct informational interviews. Reach out to professionals in fields that interest them and conduct informational interviews to learn more about their career paths, daily responsibilities, and the skills required for success.

3. Take elective courses. Explore elective courses in different disciplines to broaden their knowledge and discover new interests that may influence their career decisions.

Evaluating Compensation

While compensation is an essential consideration in career planning, it's essential to strike a balance between financial goals and personal fulfillment. I define compensation more broadly and include not only financial, health care, and 401k but also things like flexibility, opportunities, and freedom or autonomy. Getting paid a lot is great, but there are other forms of compensation important to acknowledge. Here's how to effectively evaluate compensation:

1. Research salary trends. Use online resources and salary comparison tools to research salary trends and average compensation for roles in their desired field and geographic location.

2. Consider long-term growth opportunities. Encourage them to peek around the corner-what does the industry or sector look like not immediately after graduation, but 5 years after graduation? Evaluate not only the starting salary but also the potential for career advancement, professional development opportunities, and benefits offered by prospective employers.

3. Assess financial, travel, and psychological needs. Take into account financial obligations, such as student loans, living expenses, and long-term financial goals, when evaluating compensation packages. Also consider how much time they mentally need to be around family, take time off, and maybe just have opportunities for a healthy lifestyle.

Finding Alignment (or Intersection!)

Once they've assessed their abilities, identified interests, and evaluated compensation considerations, it's time to find positions that provide that sweet spot of intersection. Here's how to do so effectively:

1. Prioritize values. Consider personal values, career aspirations, and lifestyle preferences when evaluating potential career opportunities. Choose a career path that aligns with values and long-term goals. They can always make more money, but time is the only non-replenishable resource (again, look at the research on what people regret at the end of their lives-no one says they wished they worked more or made more money).

2. Seek mentorship and guidance. Engage with mentors, career counselors, or professionals in the desired field for guidance and advice. Their insights and experiences can help them make informed decisions about your career path.

3. Stay open to opportunities. When students are unsure what to do, I encourage them to either (a) flip a coin (seriously-there's research on this) or (b) make a decision right now that leads to more options later on. Encourage them to also remain flexible and open-minded as they explore different career paths. Be willing to adapt and pivot based on new experiences, insights, and opportunities that arise along the way.

Finding a career that clicks with their abilities, interests, and compensation goals is a journey that requires self-reflection, exploration, and strategic planning. By assessing their strengths, identifying their passions, and evaluating compensation considerations, they can navigate their career path with confidence and clarity. Add in some patience and they'll be well prepared and in the best frame of mind. Lastly, remind them to prioritize alignment with values and long-term goals as they embark on the journey. Shortcuts lead to long disappointment and regret.

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Ability, Interest, and Compensation: How to Choose a Career

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The simplest formula for helping students find a compass heading.

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Pew Research Center's Global Attitudes Project

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From work to travel to personal hobbies, people across the 17 publics surveyed draw meaning and fulfillment from the activities that make up their daily lives. This is particularly the case when it comes to people's occupations and careers, which are a top-three source of meaning in many publics. People mention finding meaning in myriad aspects of their work, such as the mission of their own profession, their coworkers, or the sense of personal growth it provides them. On the other hand, some people - particularly older adults - find meaning in the absence of work: retirement. People also rely on their personal hobbies, education, volunteer work and travel for a sense of purpose, referencing everything from listening to music to international trips.

Occupation and career

Work is one of the most common sources of meaning for adults around the world: A median of 25% across the 17 publics mention their job, career or profession. In 12 of the 17 publics surveyed, work is among the top three most mentioned topics - and in Spain, it ranks even higher than family and children.

As one Italian man put it, "In accordance with the Italian Constitution, to have a job and dignity. Most of all to have a job, because without a job it is difficult to have dignity." "I have a job I like and that is fundamental for a person," explained one Spanish woman.

Many emphasize how work provides them with a sense of accomplishment and personal growth. As one man in the Netherlands explained, "The most important thing for me is work. I think it is very important to build my career, to build my life, so that I'm doing better and better. And the way to do that is to take a lot of personal responsibility and work hard." Another man in Japan remarked, "I got the job that I wanted, so being able to keep doing that. I'll have left my mark when I look back on my life."

On the other hand, some people mention difficulties or challenges in their professional life. "In my job I don't feel satisfied because they don't give me personal days," explained one Italian woman.

Like with finding meaning in family, people between the ages of 30 and 49 are typically the most likely to find meaning in their job or career. For example, in Italy, 59% of those ages 30 to 49 say work gives them meaning, while roughly half or fewer of any other age group agree. Still, mentions of work are quite prominent among most other age groups, though notably lower among those 65 and older.

"I run two companies and work as a salesperson. I work with producing and selling groceries. Work is what is most satisfying right now. I find it very fun and work about 100 hours per week." -Man, 21, Sweden

Wealthier and more educated adults are also more likely to mention finding meaning in their work. In many cases, higher earners are twice as likely or more to mention their jobs as lower earners. For example, 28% of those earning above the median income in the UK mention their job or career, compared with 11% of those with incomes at or below the median. Similar differences also appear between those with and without postsecondary degrees. In the U.S., work was brought up by roughly a quarter (26%) of those with college degrees, but just 11% of less educated adults mentioned work.

Retirement

When describing what gives them meaning and satisfaction in life, some mention enjoying - or looking forward to - their retirement years, though in no public surveyed do more than 4% mention it. Those who do focus on retirement tend to emphasize how it affords them the freedom to do more of what they enjoy. "I have more time for me. I'm exploring new options, new things, and I'm enjoying the next chapter in my life," explained one Australian woman. "[I] don't have financial stress. I can go traveling and visit around. Life is very convenient," said another woman in Taiwan. Others enjoyed the slower place in life, like a man in New Zealand who explained, "My lifestyle is very slow these days so I am satisfied." And some responses were more succinct, like the man in the UK whose entire response was simply the remark, "The fact that I no longer work."
"I'm retired so I don't have to get up early, I'm free and can do whatever I want. There's nobody to tell me what to do." -Man, 62, Belgium
Unsurprisingly, retirement is more commonly mentioned by older adults in nearly all of the publics surveyed. In Germany, for example, 9% of those ages 65 and older mention their retirement, while almost no one ages 64 and under brings it up.

Hobbies and recreation

Across the 17 publics surveyed, a median of 10% mention finding meaning in personal hobbies and recreational activities, ranging from a high of 22% in the UK to a low of 3% in South Korea. In the UK, hobbies are the third most commonly cited source of meaning, following only family and friends. In Greece, Japan and Taiwan, hobbies rank in the top five sources of meaning.

Respondents highlight myriad types of recreational activities. One Briton, for example, explained that he enjoys "watching movies and having access to internet, football, music, entertainment and museums." Others reference things like reading, playing music, attending cultural events or simply relaxing and spending time at home.

Many people cite pastimes that allow them to spend time outdoors, often connecting their hobbies with an appreciation of nature. One Canadian, for example, replied that she gets meaning from "... being able to go outside [and] going on walks" while others highlight the benefits of being able to surf, ski or bicycle in the beautiful surroundings.

"Creating books, writing, I do particularly enjoy capturing what I see and it's quite [fulfilling] for me. Having something to collect as well. I collect cameras and electronics, I find that an [interesting] hobby." -Man, 23, Singapore

In eight publics surveyed, young people are significantly more likely to cite personal hobbies as meaningful parts of their lives. This difference is greatest in Greece, where roughly three-in-ten 18- to 29-year-olds reference recreational activities, compared with 7% of those ages 65 and older. In five publics, men are more likely to mention their hobbies than are women, including Australia, where 14% of women do so compared with 23% of men. In some places, those on the ideological left and those who are more educated are also more likely to mention hobbies than those on the right and those with less education, respectively.

Travel and new experiences

Occasionally, people mention traveling and having new experiences as part of what gives their life meaning. One French man, for example, explained, "I have a full and meaningful life, and I have traveled a lot and had lots of experiences, so compared to others I think I have a wonderful life." Likewise, a Japanese woman explained that "I think I have a pretty good life traveling to many countries with my husband, kids and grandkids."

In all publics surveyed, travel is mentioned infrequently. These mentions show up most often in Australia and New Zealand, with 4% in these places bringing up traveling and having new experiences. Only 1% in Japan, Singapore and Taiwan do the same, and virtually no one in South Korea brings up travel. This makes travel the least frequently mentioned source of meaning in South Korea (along with pets). For other publics, travel does not make it into the top 10.

Some people indicate they find meaning from travel within their own country, and others specify international travel and encountering different cultures as something they find satisfying. One man in Spain said that he finds it meaningful "to have more freedom to travel the world, [with] ease of movement between countries, not only between European Union countries but also others."

"... I travel around the world and have been to a lot of places. I can see different things in different countries." -Man, 24, New Zealand

In four countries, including the U.S., those with higher incomes are somewhat more likely to mention travel as a source of meaning than those with lower incomes. For example, in the U.S., 6% of people with incomes at or above the national median mention travel as something meaningful, compared with 2% of those with lower incomes.

Some respondents also mention travel in the context of COVID-19, bemoaning the inability to travel given current restrictions. One woman in the U.S. declared, "It's been more stressful at work because of the pandemic. What keeps me going is hope, hope that one day I will be able to get on a plane again for vacation and leave this country."

Education and learning

Some respondents also mention education and learning when discussing what provides meaning in their lives. In these cases, people mention attending university, staying informed and the pursuit of knowledge more generally. For one German woman, meaning in life comes from continuous learning: "Life is about learning new things, about progress, and staying curious." Another Dutch man instead referenced his formal education: "I started university in the Netherlands. I am very happy about that. Because I am a refugee, I didn't think I could go to university, but it turned out to be possible. It's great that it's possible." In a handful of places, those on the ideological left are also somewhat more likely to mention learning than those on the right.

Fewer than one-in-ten bring up education in all publics surveyed. Education comes up most frequently in Australia and Sweden, where 8% refer to learning in the context of meaning in their lives. Similar shares also bring up learning in New Zealand. In most places, education is roughly the 10th most mentioned source of meaning.

"I view life as an endless opportunity to learn and be informed. Self-discovery. We can do little for the world, so we should start by working on ourselves first. I find this journey of discovery fulfilling." -Man, 54, Italy

Across all places surveyed, younger adults ages 18 to 29 are more likely than older adults 65 and older to bring up education. For instance, 31% of Swedish adults under 30 bring up learning while only 1% of Swedes 65 and older do the same.

Service and civic engagement

Service to the community and civic engagement are part of a meaningful life for some people, ranging from a high of 7% who say this in the U.S. to a low of 1% in France, Germany, Greece and South Korea. Only in Singapore, Italy and Taiwan did service rank as a top 10 source of meaning.

Some people speak in general terms about the benefits of service and trying to make the world a better place. For example, one American man stated, "I feel it is important to treat people with kindness and respect, to work to correct injustices, to encourage people to use their talents in a positive way, and to bring good cheer into people's lives. In short, to have a positive impact on the world."

Others explicitly focus on the types of service that they do, like specific volunteer activities or work with particular causes. One Australian woman shared that she "started off doing a lot of volunteer jobs looking after the farms during the drought, so giving the farmers respite and at no charge whatsoever." A man from France said, "Volunteering during the pandemic brings me a lot of satisfaction, it's my way to contribute."

"I raise my grandkids to be aware of how to avoid wasting food, and to recycle. I volunteer, giving mothers guidance about buying local and cooking their own meals, instead of buying industrial products." -Woman, 70, Belgium

In some countries, people with more education tend to be more likely to say they draw meaning from some type of community engagement or service. In Australia, 8% of people with at least a postsecondary degree include community service in their answer about what gives them meaning, compared with 4% of those with less education.

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From work to travel to personal hobbies, people across the 17 publics surveyed draw meaning and fulfillment from the activities that make up their daily

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Most Black adults describe themselves as at least somewhat successful (66%) and view personal success in terms of their ability to provide for their families (82%). Still, Black Americans experience pressure to live up to these goals, with majorities saying they feel a great deal or fair amount of pressure to have enough money (71%) and be able to provide for their families (68%).

Assessing personal success

Roughly one-quarter of Black adults (26%) personally consider themselves extremely or very successful, 40% say they are somewhat successful, and one-third say they are a little or not at all successful.

By age

Black adults ages 50 and older are more likely than those under 50 to consider themselves successful. Conversely, Black adults ages 18 to 29 are more likely than older Black adults to consider themselves only a little or not at all successful.

By education

Black adults with a bachelor's degree or higher are more likely than Black adults with some college or with a high school diploma or less education to consider themselves extremely or very successful. And those with a high school education or less are more likely than those with higher levels of education to consider themselves a little or not at all successful.

By income

The higher their income level, the more likely Black adults are to consider themselves extremely or very successful. Black adults with upper family incomes are more likely than those with middle or lower incomes to say they are extremely or very successful.

Defining personal success

About eight-in-ten Black adults say that being able to provide for their family (82%) and being happy (80%) are essential to their personal definition of success. Smaller majorities say the same about having enough time to do things they want to do (65%) and having a job or career they enjoy (56%).

Roughly half of Black Americans or fewer say owning their own home (52%), using their talents and resources to help others (50%), making their family or community proud (37%) and being married (23%) are important to their personal definition of success.

By age

Black adults ages 50 and older are less likely than younger Black adults to say having enough time to do things they want to do, having a job or career they enjoy, making their family or community proud and being married are essential to their personal definition of success.

By education

Black adults with at least a bachelor's degree are more likely than those with less education to say most of these measures are essential to their personal definition of success. Those with a high school diploma or less education are less likely than other Black adults to say any of these goals are essential in defining success.

Similar shares of Black adults with at least a bachelor's degree and those with less education say owning their own home, making their family or community proud, or being married are essential to their personal definition of success.

By nativity

Black immigrants are more likely than Black adults born in the U.S. to say being able to provide for their family, being happy, having enough time to do things they want to do, owning their home and being married are essential to their personal definition of success.

By ethnicity

Black non-Hispanic adults are more likely than Black multiracial non-Hispanic or Black Hispanic adults to say owning their own home is essential to their personal definition of success. They are also more likely than Black Hispanic adults to say being able to provide for their family and being happy are essential to how they define success.

Pressure to be successful

When it comes to these traditional measures of success, Black Americans feel pressures to accomplish certain things for themselves and for their community. Similar shares say they feel a great deal or a fair amount of pressure to have enough money to do the things they want to do (71%) and be able to provide for their family (68%).

Slightly smaller shares say the same about being happy (62%), having a job or career they enjoy (58%), owning their own home (50%), using their talents and resources to help others (48%), and making their family or community proud (43%).

More than half of Black adults who are currently married (55%) say they feel a great deal or fair amount of pressure to stay married, while 20% of unmarried Black adults feel at least a fair amount of pressure to get married.

By gender

Black women are more likely than Black men to say they feel a great deal or fair amount of pressure to have enough money to do the things they want to do, be happy, have a job or career they enjoy, use their talents and resources to help others, and make their family or community proud.

By age

Black adults under 50 are more likely than older Black adults to feel a great deal or fair amount of pressure to have enough money, have a job or career they enjoy, own their own home, use their talents and resources to help others, make their family or community proud, and - depending on their marital status - stay or get married.

By income

Black adults with lower levels of family income are more likely than those with higher levels of income to say they feel a great deal or fair amount of pressure to be happy, use their talents and resources to help others, and to make their family or community proud. They are also more likely than those with upper incomes to say they feel at least a fair amount of pressure to be able to provide for their family. And Black adults with lower and middle incomes are both more likely than those with upper incomes to feel pressure to have a job or career they enjoy.

Notably, Black adults with upper incomes are about as likely as other Black adults to feel a great deal or fair amount of pressure to have enough money to do the things they want to do.

By nativity

Black immigrants are more likely than Black adults born in the U.S. to feel a great deal or fair amount of pressure to have a job or career they enjoy and to own their own home.

Strategies for becoming successful

Thinking more broadly about success, majorities of Black adults say having self-confidence (79%) and having financial stability (75%) are essential to helping a person achieve success.

Far fewer see personal relationships having a significant role in success. Smaller shares say having supportive family members (54%), having connections to people who can help open doors on their behalf (41%) or having mentors who can provide advice and guidance (39%) are essential in helping a person achieve success. Two-in-ten Black adults say the same about having a college degree.

By gender

Black women are more likely than Black men to say having financial stability, supportive family members, mentors and a college degree are essential to helping a person achieve success.

By age

Black adults ages 18 to 29 are more likely than other Black adults to say having a college degree is essential to helping a person achieve success. Overall, younger Black adults are more likely than older Black adults to say financial stability, connections to people who can open doors on their behalf, and having a college degree are essential. Black adults 50 and older are more likely than younger Black adults to say having supportive family members is essential.

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1. How Black Americans view personal success

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Most see themselves as at least somewhat successful and view personal success in terms of providing for their families. They also feel pressures to achieve success.

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10% Happier: Modern Life is Making You Sick but it Doesn't Have To.

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10% Happier: Modern Life is Making You Sick but it Doesn't Have To.

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There's so much to be grateful for in modern medicine. We can all agree that we would not do as well in a world with no Advil or dentistry. And yet, our guest today, who is a renowned doctor, says modern medicine is overlooking something crucial: the pernicious impact that modern living has on our minds and bodies. In other words, we are surrounded by these hidden societal and structural sources of stress and we aren't thinking about how to treat and prevent these factors that are degrading our happiness and our immune systems.

Dr. Gabor Maté is a bestselling author with an expertise on everything from stress to addiction to ADHD. His latest book is called, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

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‍ Content Warning: This episode has mentions of child abuse, sexual trauma, suicide and addiction

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In this episode we talk about:

What he means by "the myth of normal"

How diseases, such as autoimmune conditions, are an "artifact of civilization"

How to begin to tackle what Dr. Maté calls, "the social sources of illness"

His definition of trauma and the difference between "big T traumatic events" and the trauma of "wounding"

How trauma in society is so normalized that we don't even recognize it

Whether the term trauma is overused

Why comparing suffering is a fruitless endeavor

What he means by "the necessity to be disillusioned"

The power and possibility of psychedelics

Why he thinks we should incorporate shamanic medicine into our western medical framework

And what he means by "undoing self-limiting beliefs" and how these beliefs show up in our everyday lives

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‍ Where to find Gabor Maté online:

Website: drgabormate.com

Social Media:

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Books Mentioned:
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Other Resources Mentioned:
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#586. Modern Life Is Making You Sick, but It Doesn't Have To | Gabor Maté - Ten Percent Happier

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There's so much to be grateful for in modern medicine. We can all agree that we would not do as well in a world with no Advil or dentistry. And yet, our guest today, who is a renowned doctor, says modern medicine is overlooking something crucial: the pernicious impact that modern living has on our minds and bodies.

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WNYC Studios - Radiolab Presents: More Perfect

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TikTok Turns to Creators to Fight Possible Ban

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TikTok Turns to Creators to Fight Possible Ban

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Animals and Empathy

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Do animals feel empathy? Does an elephant have consciousness? Can a dog plan ahead? These are some of the questions that award-winning environmental writer Carl Safina teases out in his new book, Beyond Words: How Animals Think and Feel.

Ranging far and wide across the world, from the Ambroseli National Park in Kenya to the Pacific Northwest, he shows us why it is important to acknowledge consciousness in animals and how exciting new discoveries about the brain are breaking down barriers between us and other non-human animals.

Speaking from Stony Brook University on Long Island, New York, where he is a visiting professor in the school of journalism, he explains how elephants routinely display empathy; why U.S. Navy underwater tests in the Pacific Northwest should be stopped; and how his own pet dogs prove his theories.

Your book suggests that animals have thought processes, emotions, and social connections that are as important to them as they are to us. Why is it important to know this?

It's important to know who we are here on Earth with. We talk about conservation of animals by numbers, but those are just numbers. Watching animals my whole life I've always been struck by how similar to us they are. I've always been touched by their bonds and been impressed-occasionally frightened-by their emotions.

Life is very vivid to animals. In many cases they know who they are. They know who their friends are and who their rivals are. They have ambitions for higher status. They compete. Their lives follow the arc of a career, like ours do. We both try to stay alive, get food and shelter, and raise some young for the next generation. Animals are no different from us in that regard and I think that their presence here on Earth is tremendously enriching.

You state that consciousness is not merely a human experience and cite the Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness drafted in 2012. Tell us about this new interpretation and how it relates to our fellow creatures.

The issue over consciousness, like many aspects of animal behavior, is confused by a lack of definitions people agree on. We tend to use the word consciousness to mean a variety of different things. Some people say if you can plan years ahead it shows consciousness, but that just shows planning.

If you're having a mental experience, you are conscious. The question really is, do other species have mental experiences or do they sense things without having any sensation of what they are experiencing? Like a motion sensor senses motion but it probably doesn't experience that it senses motion. Animals do-they react to movement: fight or flight or curiosity.

It is incredible to me there is still a debate over whether animals are conscious and even a debate over whether human beings can know animals are conscious. If you watch mammals or even birds, you will see how they respond to the world. They play. They act frightened when there's danger. They relax when things are good. It seems illogical for us to think that animals might not be having a conscious mental experience of play, sleep, fear or love.

So why are many scientists adverse to the idea that animals have consciousness?

In the beginning there was almost no neurology, nothing was known of how mental processes worked. Animal behavior was based on fables, like foxes are clever, tortoises are persistent. So scientists said, "All we can know about animals is based on what they do. We can only describe what they do. We can't know anything about their minds." Unfortunately, that hardened into a straightjacket assumption that if we can't know anything about their minds, we can't confirm consciousness.

Meanwhile, people have spent decades watching wild animals. People who watch wild animals don't question whether they're conscious or not because we see incredible intricacies of behavior and vast ranges of personalities. I'm talking about vertebrates: mammals like elephants and cats, but also birds.

It's very obvious that animals are conscious to those who observe them. They have to be in order to do the things they do and make the choices that they do, and use the judgments that they use. However, in laboratories the dogma persists: don't assume that animals think and have emotions-and many scientists insist that they do not.

With the public, I think it's quite different. Many people simply assume that animals act consciously and base their belief on their own domestic animals or pets. Other people do not want animals to be conscious because it makes it easier for us to do things to animals that would be hard to do if we knew they were unhappy and suffering.

I love how you reveal the important aspects of play in the animal world and the relationship between adults and children, so similar to our own.

When the public sees wild animals they feel lucky to see elephants, or they might go to Yellowstone and see wild wolves. Researchers spend decades watching these creatures and see individuals. Many researchers have names for the animals and recognize the different personalities. Some are bold; some are shy. Some are more aggressive; some are mellower; some babies are much more assertive.

They see that first time mothers aren't as sure about what to do, and experienced mothers are more relaxed and confident. They see that some wolves are very assertive and aggressive and other wolves forbear. If there is a fight, some wolves will kill other wolves, but other wolves won't, even when they beat them in a fight.

What you see when you actually get to know wild animals is very different from a casual sighting. If you saw human beings doing nothing but drinking water or running around a field, would you think that is all there is to human beings? If you know the people drinking the water or running around, you have a different experience watching them.

Empathy is another characteristic that animals and human beings share. Can you tell us more about how empathy is expressed by animals in extraordinary circumstances-both with humans and other animals?

Many people think that empathy is a special emotion only humans show. But many animals express empathy for each other. There are documented stories of elephants finding people who were lost. In one case, an old woman who couldn't see well, got lost and was found the next day with elephants guarding her. They had encased her in sort of a cage of branches to protect her from hyenas. That's seems extraordinary to us but it comes naturally to elephants.

People have also seen humpback whales help seals being hunted by killer whales. There is a documented account of a humpback sweeping a seal on its back out of the water, away from the killer whales. These things seem extraordinary and new to us because we have only recently documented these incidents. But they have probably been doing these kinds of things for millions of years.

Both elephants and killer whales are suffering dramatic losses in their population. Connect these two creatures for us and what challenges they face in the modern world?

I tried to take a break from writing about conservation to write about what animals do in their natural lives. I focused on three of the most protected populations of animals in the world-elephants in national parks in Kenya, wolves in Yellowstone National Park, and killer whales in the Pacific Northwest; in all three cases I found that these protected animals are still being killed by people.

Elephants have been undergoing a tremendous slaughter since 2009, when the powers that be decided China could import ivory from dead elephants. As a result, elephant populations are being devastated by poachers throughout Africa and Asia.

In the case of the wolves in Yellowstone National Park, the U.S. removed endangered species status from wolves outside the parks. So, when wolves from the parks stray outside, they're often shot and it is usually the alpha pack leaders who are killed. When wolf packs lose their alpha male or female, they often break up. The younger wolves don't have the knowledge to survive that adults have.

Killer whales have very poor reproduction because the salmon stock they depend on is so depleted that they don't get enough food and are not in good enough condition to bear young. The young don't survive well, either. Killer whales are full of toxic chemicals that they get from their food and the polluted waters where they swim around Washington State and West Coast of the United States. Even though they're endangered and they're supposed to be afforded the strictest protections, the Navy also continues to test live bombs in areas where these whales swim.

One pod that desperately needed a young, healthy female had their only young female killed by massive hemorrhaging in her ear canals. A Navy bomb explosion was recorded on the listening devices of the whale researchers the day she died. It's very distressing that even when we are supposedly protecting these animals they're not being protected by our own government.

Do you have animals in your everyday life? If so, tell us how they confirm or disprove your theories.

I was never much of a dog person because I was interested in free-living, wild animals, but I have two dogs now and I cannot believe how much I love these dogs and how much they are part of our family.

They know exactly who we are. They know who strangers are. They are often very, very happy. Occasionally they get frightened by things that are strange or they aren't sure what's going on.

The only thing they cannot do is speak to us in full sentences, but they communicate all the time. They know what they would like to do and they can plan a little bit. They may not plan what they're gonna do next week, but they know when they want to go out or when they want to get us to take them out for a run.

When we take them to a certain beach, they know exactly what the routine there is, even if we haven't been to that beach in months. When we take them over to my mother's, they remember that the shed in her backyard has cottontail rabbits under it and they always run straight to the shed to investigate.

You use the term "vivid" to describe the lives of animals. Explain.

I've studied wild animals a lot and I'm always struck by how extremely alert they are and how well they sense what's going on around them. They're much more aware, compared to humans. Modern day humans go outside and don't see, hear or sense very well. Our senses have dulled over thousands of years of civilization and settled living. I think that an animal's experience of life is much sharper and clearer. That's why I use the term "vivid".

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Yes, Animals Think And Feel. Here's How We Know

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The author of a new book also says that animals can feel empathy, like the humpback whale that rescued a seal.

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I'm Jad Abumrad.

Robert Krulwich:

I'm Robert Krulwich.

This is radio lab. Very good to actually be back here talking to you.

Robert Krulwich:

Yes, it's been a while.

Robert Krulwich:

Where have you told those people who might've missed what you been doing, what you've been doing, so they will not miss it.

We just finished our first mini season of our first spinoff called More Perfect.

Robert Krulwich:

When are you going to have part two.

Part two is a coming soon. I don't know. Not tomorrow.

Robert Krulwich:

But, but net but not long because we, yeah, there's there, there are definitely stories to tell for sure. And you know, and if you, if you haven't checked it out, check it out at radiolab.org/moreperfect. We're really proud of it.

Robert Krulwich:

Let me rescue you from this awkward situation by bring back into Radio Lab where I'd like to begin by building a tall, dark, dense green forest making towering trees to your left.

Robert Krulwich:

Okay. Right. And I, yeah, I need a bird. A lot of birds actually, and a little wind. So just give me some,

Robert Krulwich:

Yeah, birds please. Birds.

Why did, like we haven't even started this,

Robert Krulwich:

Why? Isn't this what you do. You'd give me, like, I want wind, birds,

I'm not like your sound puppet here.

Robert Krulwich:

But I can't, how do I, all right, nevermind. This story.

You'll get your sound at some point.

Robert Krulwich:

Begins with a woman or, and at the time actually she was a very little girl who loved the outdoors and I mean really loved the outdoors.

Suzanne Simard:

When I was a little kid I would be in the forest and I just eat the forest floor. And I know lots of kids do that. But I was like,

Robert Krulwich:

You mean you got down on all fours and just,

Suzanne Simard:

I would just eat the dirt.

Robert Krulwich:

This is Suzanne Simard.

Suzanne Simard:

And so my mom always talks about how she had to constantly be giving me worm medicine because I was, I always had worms.

Robert Krulwich:

She's a forestry professor at the university of British Columbia and might as well start the story back when she was a little girl.

Suzanne Simard:

Well when I was a kid, I grew up in the rainforests of British Columbia, and my family spent every summer in the forest.

Robert Krulwich:

And her family included a dog named Jigs.

Suzanne Simard:

And so in this particular summer when the event with Jigs happened,

Robert Krulwich:

what kind of dog is Jigs, by the way?

Suzanne Simard:

He was not a Wiener dog. He was a, what was he?

Robert Krulwich:

You don't know what your dog,

Suzanne Simard:

Not a Basset hound, but he was a beagle.

Robert Krulwich:

Suzanne Simard:

He was a curious dog.

Robert Krulwich:

And on this particular day, she's with the whole family. They're all out in the forest. It was summertime and Jigs at some point just runs off into the woods, just maybe to chase a rabbit, whatever. Couple of minutes go by.

Suzanne Simard:

And all of a sudden we could hear this barking and yelping and we were all like, Oh my goodness, Jigs is in trouble. And so the whole family and uncles and aunts and cousins, we all rush up there.

Robert Krulwich:

But they followed the sound of the barking and it leads them to an outhouse.

Robert Krulwich:

And when they go in,

Suzanne Simard:

There is Jigs at the bottom of the outhouse. Probably six feet down at the bottom of the outhouse pit.

Robert Krulwich:

Suzanne Simard:

You know, where we've all been, you know, doing our daily business. He'd fallen in, he's looking up at us, quite scared and very unhappy that he was covered and uhm, and toilet paper. And of course we had to get Jigs out. I mean, Jigs was part of the family and,

Robert Krulwich:

Since he was so deep down in there,

Suzanne Simard:

We had to dig from the sides.

Robert Krulwich:

To sort of like widen the hole.

Suzanne Simard:

Basically expanding it from a kind of a column of a pit to something that we could actually grab onto his front legs and pull them out. And so we were digging away and Jigs was, you know, looking up with his paws, you know, looking at us waiting.

Robert Krulwich:

And they're digging and digging and digging and all of a sudden she says she looks down into the ground and she notices all around them where the soil has been cleared away. There are roots upon roots upon roots in this thick, crazy tangle.

Suzanne Simard:

We're sitting on the exposed root system, which has like, it is like a mat. It's, it's like, it's just a massive mat of intertwining, exposed roots that you could walk across to never fall through.

Robert Krulwich:

She says, it was like this moment where she realizes, Oh my God, there's this whole other world right beneath my feet.

Suzanne Simard:

Jigs had provided this incredible window for me, you know, in this digging escapade to see how many different colors they were, how many different shapes there were, that they were so intertwined. As abundant, as what was going on above ground. It was magic for me.

Well, what, so what's the end of the story? Did Jigs, did Jigs emerge?

Suzanne Simard:

Jigs emerged. We pulled Jigs out and we threw him in the lake with a great deal of yelping and cursing and swearing, and Jigs was cleaned off.

Robert Krulwich:

But that day with the roots is the day that she began thinking about the forest that exists underneath the forest. And now if you fast forward roughly 30 years, she then makes a discovery that I find kind of amazing. She's working in the timber industry at the time. This is by the way, what her entire family had done, her dad and her grandparents.

Suzanne Simard:

And when I came on the scene in the 1980s as a Forester, we were into industrial, large scale, clear cutting in Western Canada, huge machines, loaders and cats.

Robert Krulwich:

She says a timber company would move in and clear cut an entire patch of forest and then plant some new trees.

Suzanne Simard:

And you know, my job was to track how these new plantations would grow.

Robert Krulwich:

And she says she began to notice things that, you know, one wouldn't really expect, like trees of different species are supposed to fight each other for sunshine. Right? You've heard that.

Yeah, absolutely. They shade each other out.

Robert Krulwich:

They shade each other out. And they fiercely, you know, they, they push each other away so they can get to the sky. But she was noticing that in a little patch of forest that she was studying, if she had, say, a birch tree next to a Fir tree. And as she took out the birch,

Suzanne Simard:

The Douglas fir became diseased and, and died. There was some kind of benefit from the birch to the Fir. There was a healthier community when they were mixed, and I wanted to figure out why.

Robert Krulwich:

Well of course there could be a home, any number of reasons why, you know, one tree is affected by another, but she had a kind of maybe call it a Jigs-ian recollection.

Robert Krulwich:

Yes. Because she knew that scientists had proposed years before that maybe there's an underground economy that exists among trees that we can't see. And she wondered whether that was true.

Suzanne Simard:

And so I designed this experiment to figure that out. It was a simple little experiment.

Robert Krulwich:

Here's what she did. She went into the forest, got some trees,.

Suzanne Simard:

Douglas fir, birch and cedar. And then I would cover them in plastic bags. So I'd seal the plant the tree in a plastic bag. And then I would inject gas. So tagged with a, with an isotope, which is radioactive.

Robert Krulwich:

So these trees were basically covered with bags that were then filled with radioactive gas.

Suzanne Simard:

Robert Krulwich:

Which the trees,

Suzanne Simard:

Would just suck up through photosynthesis.

Robert Krulwich:

So now they have the radioactive particles inside their trunks in their branches.

Suzanne Simard:

We had a Geiger counter out there. As soon as we labeled them, we used the Geiger counter to -- and ran it up and down the trees, and we could tell that they were hot, they were boo boo boo boo boo, right?

Robert Krulwich:

And the idea was she wanted to know like once the radioactive particles were in the tree, what happens next? Would they stay in the tree or would they go down to the roots? And then what happens? And what she discovered is

Robert Krulwich:

that all these trees, all these trees that were of totally different species, were sharing their food underground. Like if you put a food into one tree over here, it would end up in another tree, maybe 30 feet away over there. And then a third tree over here. And then a fourth tree over there. And a fifth tree over there. Sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, 10th, 11th, all in all turns out one tree was connected to 47 other trees all around it. It was like, it was like a huge network.

Suzanne Simard:

And we were able to map the network. And what we found was that the trees were the biggest and the oldest were the most highly connected. And so we, you know, we identified these as kind of like hubs in the network.

Robert Krulwich:

And when you look at the map that you see your circles sprouting lines and then connecting to other circles also sprouting lines and it begins to look a lot like an airline flight map, but even more dense.

Suzanne Simard:

It's just this incredible communications network that, you know, people had no idea about in the past, because we couldn't, didn't know how to look.

It's definitely crazy. I mean, you're out there in the forest and you see all these trees, and you think they're individuals just like animals, right?

Robert Krulwich:

But no, they're all linked to each other.

Robert Krulwich:

This is Jennifer Frazier. She's a science writer.

And I write a blog called the Artful Amoeba at Scientific American.

I like your title.

Robert Krulwich:

I spoke to her with our producer Ledif Nasser and she told us that this, this network has developed a kind of a nice punny sort of name.

The Wood Wide Web.

Robert Krulwich:

The Wood Wide Web.

Robert Krulwich:

You mean, like the World Wide Web? It's now the Wood Wide Web? It sounds a little like Elmer Fudd. The Wood Wide Web.

So this Wood Wide Web, is this just like the roots, like what she saw in the outhouse?

Robert Krulwich:

No, no, no, no, no, no. It's far more exciting than that and sophisticated and interesting and astonishing. It is. It involves a completely separate organism. I haven't mentioned yet. I mean this is going places.

What creature? Where are we going?

Robert Krulwich:

I'm not going to tell you. I'm going to just go there. I mean we went and looked for ourselves. I don't know where you were that day. Annie McEwen, Stephanie Tam, our intern, and he's our producer. We decided all to go to to check it out for ourselves, this thing I'm not telling you about, we went to the Bronx to the Botanical Gardens, because,

That's far you have to travel here in New York to get to actual greenery.

Robert Krulwich:

Actually, there's beautiful green sward New York has and when we went up there there was this tall man waiting for us. An expert.

Roy Halling:

Robert Krulwich:

His name is Roy Halling. And Roy, by the way, comes out with the strange, it's like a rake.

He's got a trowel.

Robert Krulwich:

But it has like an expandable,

Roy Halling:

It's a truffle rake.

Robert Krulwich:

Oh, it's an extend,

Robert Krulwich:

Oh listen to that.

Oh, that sounds dangerous.

Robert Krulwich:

So we're up there in this, in this old forest with this guy.

Roy Halling:

So there's an Oak tree right there. It should have some.

Robert Krulwich:

And he starts digging with his rake at the base of this tree. He shoves away the leaves, he shoves away the top soil.

Can the tree feel you ripping the roots out like that?

Roy Halling:

Robert Krulwich:

And so now we're down here. Pulled out a sapling root, of some sort?

Roy Halling:

It's just getting started, they're called feeder roots.

Robert Krulwich:

We're carefully examining the roots of this Oak tree on our knees with our noses in the ground. And we can't see anything. I mean I see the dirt.

Robert Krulwich:

You see anything white yet? You see anything,

Roy Halling:

It's like I said, it's early in the season, so.

Robert Krulwich:

He said something about that's the wrong season. I thought, okay, so this is just stupid. But then,

Roy Halling:

Finally. Do you have the lens?

Robert Krulwich:

He gives us a magnifying glass, you know one of those little jeweler's glasses? Handheld?

Roy Halling:

Have a look there.

Robert Krulwich:

And he hands it to Annie.

Roy Halling:

You see it there?

Roy Halling:

Robert Krulwich:

Let me, can I see it?

Yeah, go for it.

Robert Krulwich:

Oh my gosh, I do see them.

What do you see?

Robert Krulwich:

Little white threads attached to the roots.

Robert Krulwich:

Smaller than an eyelash. Maybe just a 10th the width of your eyelash, but white translucent and hairy sort of.

Robert Krulwich:

And while it took us a while to see it, apparently these little threads in the soil,

They're everywhere.

Robert Krulwich:

And when you measure them, like one study we saw, found up to seven miles of this little threading

Suzanne Simard:

In a pinch of dirt.

Robert Krulwich:

What is thing? Is it like, is it a plant? What is it?

Robert Krulwich:

What kind of creature is this thing?

Yes. What is it?

Robert Krulwich:

This is the fungus. Which by the way is definitely not a plant.

They're are some other kind of category, and for a long time they were thought of as plants, but now we know after having looked at their DNA of fungi are actually very closely related to animals. They're one of our closest relatives, actually.

Robert Krulwich:

Now back in the day,

This all has a history, of course.

Robert Krulwich:

When people first began thinking about these things, we're talking in the 1600s, they had no idea what they were or what they did, but ultimately they figured out that these things were very ancient because if you look at 400 million year old fossils of some of the very first plants,

You can see even in the roots of these earliest land plants,

Robert Krulwich:

You can see those threads.

This is a really ancient association.

Robert Krulwich:

And then later scientists finally looked at these things under much more powerful microscopes and realized the threads weren't threads really, they were actually,

Robert Krulwich:

These little tubes.

Tubes. And the tubes branch, and sometimes they reconnect.

Robert Krulwich:

So there seem to be under the ground, this fungal freeway system connecting one tree to the next, to the next to the next. People speculated about this, but no one had actually proved it in nature in the woods until Suzanne shows up.

Suzanne Simard:

And there was a lot of skepticism at the time. But over the next two decades, we did experiment after experiment after experiment that verified that story. And,

Wait a second, wait a second, what is this? Why is this network even? They're like, why would the trees need a freeway system underneath the ground to connect and why would the, why would the fungi want to make this network?

Suzanne Simard:

Why are they going to this trouble of creating this big network?

Suzanne Simard:

Well they do it because the tree has something, the fungus needs and the fungus has something that tree needs.

Robert Krulwich:

Let me just back up for a second so that you could, you can, to set the scene for me.

Robert Krulwich:

When you go into a forest, you see a tree, a tall tree. So what is the tree do?

What's its job?

Robert Krulwich:

What's its job? It's soaks in sunshine takes the CO2 out of the air, carbon dioxide, which has of course carbon, C, in it.

Robert Krulwich:

Yeah. And it keeps the C.

Suzanne Simard:

Carbon, which is science speak for food,

Robert Krulwich:

It turns that carbon into sugar, which it uses to make its trunk and its branches. Anything thick you see on a tree is just basically air made stuff.

Carbon and sugar are the same thing?

Robert Krulwich:

Yeah. You can think of the carbon is basically the sugar that builds the tree. However, if that's all they had was carbon.

Roy Halling:

It'd only be this tall.

Robert Krulwich:

Oh, that's Roy, again, he's holding his hand maybe a foot off the ground.

Robert Krulwich:

It would be a teeny tree?

Roy Halling:

It would be smaller.

Robert Krulwich:

So if all a tree could do is get carbon from the air, you'd have a tree the size of a tulip. A floppy tulip. Huh. A tree needs something else. And what a tree needs are minerals.

Minerals from the soil. Very similar to the sorts of vitamins and minerals that humans need.

Robert Krulwich:

What kind of minerals does a tree need?

Suzanne Simard:

Like nitrogen and phosphorous.

Suzanne Simard:

Potassium and calcium and,

Why? What do these do for the tree?

Robert Krulwich:

Like can a tree stand up straight without minerals or can,

Suzanne Simard:

Robert Krulwich:

Suzanne Simard:

No, so for example, lignin is important for making a tree stand up straight. And lignin is full of nitrogen, but also compounds like nitrogen is important in DNA, right? It's an integral part of DNA.

Robert Krulwich:

Oh, so this is, like, crucial. If I want to be a healthy tree and reach for the sky, then I need, I need rocks in me somehow. Liquid rocks.

Suzanne Simard:

You do. You need the nutrients that are in the soil.

Robert Krulwich:

And that's where the fungus comes in.

Suzanne Simard:

The fungus has this incredible network of tubes that it's able to send out through the soil, and draw up water and mineral nutrients that the tree needs.

Wait. I thought, I thought tree roots just sort of did, like, I thought, I always imagined tree roots were kind of like straws. Like, the tree was, like, already doing that stuff by itself, but it's the fungus that's doing that stuff?

Yes, in a lot of cases it is the fungus. Because tree roots and a lot of plant roots are not actually very good at doing what you think they're doing.

Robert Krulwich:

She says the tree can only suck up what it needs through these -- mostly through the teeny tips of its roots, and that's not enough bandwidth.

Wait. So, okay. So the fungus is giving the tree the minerals.

Robert Krulwich:

What is the tree given back to the fungus?

Robert Krulwich:

Remember I told you how trees makes sugar?

Robert Krulwich:

So that's what the tree gives the fungus. Sugar.

The fungi needs sugar to build their bodies, the same way that we use our food to build our bodies.

Suzanne Simard:

They can't photosynthesize. They can't take up CO2. And so they have this trading system with trees.

Robert Krulwich:

She says what will happen under the ground is that the fungal tubes will stretch up toward the tree roots, and then they'll tell the tree,

Suzanne Simard:

With their chemical language, I'm in the neighborhood. Can you, will you soften your roots so that I can invade your root system? And the tree gets the message, and it sends a message back and says, Yeah, I can do that.

Robert Krulwich:

And then those little tubes will wrap themselves into place.

Roy Halling:

Well, you can see the white stuff is the fungus.

Robert Krulwich:

And we saw this in the Bronx. The little threads just wrapping themselves around the tree roots.

Roy Halling:

The last kind of part of the root gets tangled just around the edge.

Robert Krulwich:

And it's in that little space between them that they make the exchange.

What exchange would that be, Robert?

Robert Krulwich:

That would be sugar, minerals, sugar, sugar, minerals, sugar, sugar, minerals, mineral sugar, minerals, sugar, minerals, and so on.

What? I forgot to ask you something important.

Robert Krulwich:

If the, if the tube system is giving the trees, the minerals, how is it getting it? The minerals?

Robert Krulwich:

How's it getting the minerals?

Is it just pulling it from the soil?

Robert Krulwich:

Well, that's a miracle. That's like that is I got to say doing this story. This is the part that knocked me silly.

We'll be right back.

I'm Jad Abumrad.

Robert Krulwich:

I'm Robert Krulwich.

This is radio lab and uh, so wait, what was the, what was the answer to my question about how, how does a fungus get the minerals?

Robert Krulwich:

Oh, it's, it's a three pronged answer. What a fungus does is it, it hunts it mines, it fishes, and it strangles.

What, how the hell,

Robert Krulwich:

I'm not making this up. In 1997 a couple of scientists wrote a paper which describes how fungi.

Have developed a system for mining.

Robert Krulwich:

Jennifer says that what the tubes do is they worm their way back and forth through the soil until they bump into some pebbles.

These little soil particles,

Robert Krulwich:

Packets of minerals, and then

They secrete acid and these acids come out and they start to dissolve the rock.

Robert Krulwich:

It's like they're drilling.

And the fungus actually builds a tunnel inside the rock and it can reach these little packets of minerals and mine them.

If you look at these particles under the microscope, you can see the little tunnels they curve. Sometimes they branch, they look just like mining tunnels.

Robert Krulwich:

This is very like if you had a little helmet with a light on it, like a human would.

Yeah, maybe not with a helmet, but yeah,

It's like Snow White and the Seven Tubes or something.

Robert Krulwich:

And that's just the beginning. Jennifer told Letif and I about another role that these fungi play,

And that's hunter.

Robert Krulwich:

What do you mean? Like the plant is hunting?

Robert Krulwich:

Oh, hunting for water. I mean the fungus fungus is,

No, no, no. The fungus is hunting.

The fungus hunter!

Robert Krulwich:

How do you meet? How do you mean?

So there's these little insects that lives in the soil, these just adorable little creatures called springtails.

Robert Krulwich:

They're sort of flea-sized and they spend lots of time munching leaves on the forest floor.

Suzanne Simard:

They're called springtails, because a lot of them have a little organ on the back that they actually can kind of like deploy and suddenly, boing!, they spring way up high in the air.

Robert Krulwich:

In the David Attenborough version. And if you want to look on YouTube, he actually takes a nail,

David Attenboro:

This pin will give you an idea.

Robert Krulwich:

And he pokes it at this little springtail, and the springtail goes boing! And you don't see it anywhere. It's gone.

David Attenboro:

Into the air.

Robert Krulwich:

Then of course because it's the BBC, they take a picture of it. It's doing like a triple double axle back flip or something into the sky.

David Attenboro:

It's the equivalent of a human being jumping over the Eiffel Tower.

Robert Krulwich:

One of the things they eat is fungus.

Robert Krulwich:

But then scientists did an experiment where they gave some springtails some fungus to eat. They sort of put them all together in a dish and then they walked away and then they came back,

And they found that most of the springtails were dead.

Robert Krulwich:

Instead of eating the fungus, it turns out the fungus ate them.

Suzanne Simard:

In the little springtail bodies that were a little tubes growing inside them.

Suzanne Simard:

And this is what makes it even more gruesome. They somehow have a dye, and don't ask me how they know this or how they figured it out, but they have a little stain that they can put on the springtails to tell if they're alive or dead. When they did this, they saw that a lot of the springtails that had the tubes inside them were still alive.

Oh, that's cruel.

Suzanne Simard:

Robert Krulwich:

The fungus were literally sucking the nitrogen out of the springtails, and it was too late to get away. No boink anymore.

Suzanne Simard:

And then they did experiments with the same fungus that I'm telling you about that was capturing the springtails and they hooked it up to a tree.

Robert Krulwich:

And then they did experiments with the same fungus that I'm telling you about that was capturing the springtails, and they hooked it up to a tree.

Suzanne Simard:

Well, 25% of it ended up in the trees.

Robert Krulwich:

So they figured out who paid for the murder.

Robert Krulwich:

The trees did.

Is there anyone whose job it is to draw little chalk outlines around the springtail?

Robert Krulwich:

Inspector Tail is his name. He's the only springtail with a trench coat and a fedora.

Robert Krulwich:

I have even, I can go better than even that. There's, they have found salmon in tree rings, like as in the fish.

Robert Krulwich:

In the tree. Well, in a way.

How in the hell?

Robert Krulwich:

Apparently, bears park themselves in places and grab fish out of the water, and then, you know, take a bite and then throw the carcass down on the ground. The fungi, you know, after it's rained and snowed and the carcass has seeped down into the soil a bit, the fungi then go and they drink the salmon carcass down and then send it off to the tree.

Robert Krulwich:

And the tree has,

That's fucking bananas.

Robert Krulwich:

Evidence of salmon consumption. I was like, floored.

Wow, that's insane.

Robert Krulwich:

Salmon rings in trees.

That's insane.

Robert Krulwich:

And look, and beyond that there are forests, there are trees that the scientists have found where up to 75 percent of the nitrogen in the tree turns out to be fish food.

From just bears throwing fish on the ground?

Robert Krulwich:

Yeah. So you, if you would take away the fish, the, the trees would be like blitzed, hobbled really.

And is it as dramatic in the opposite direction? Like the fungus seem to be giving the trees a lot of minerals. At, like, from the trees perspective, how much of their sugar are they giving to the fungus?

Robert Krulwich:

Oh. Well, I asked Suzanne about that. Like, two percent or 0.00000001 percent? Or,

Suzanne Simard:

No. Well, people have been measuring this in different forests and ecosystems around the world, and the estimate is anywhere from 20 to 80 percent will go into the ground.

Robert Krulwich:

Wait, wait, wait, what?

Suzanne Simard:

Yeah. 20 to 80%.

Robert Krulwich:

Of the tree's sugar goes down to the mushroom team?

Suzanne Simard:

Into the roots, and then into the microbial community, which includes the mushroom team, yeah.

Robert Krulwich:

The point here is that the scale of this is so vast, and we didn't know this until very, very recently. You have a forest, you have mushrooms. Now, it turns out that they're networked, and together they're capable of doing things, of behaviors, forestrial behaviors, that are deeply new. We're just learning about them now, and they're so interesting.

Robert Krulwich:

Just for example,

Suzanne Simard:

Let's say it's -- times are good. The tree has a lot of sugar. I don't really need it all right now. I'll put it down in my fungi. And then when times are hard, that fungi will give me my sugar back and I can start growing again.

Robert Krulwich:

What do mean, the fungi will give me my sugar back?

It's like a bank? It's like a savings account?

Suzanne Simard:

It is! It is like a bank!

Robert Krulwich:

She says, we now know the trees give each other loans.

Oh yeah. Back and forth. Seasonally. They can also send warning signals through the fungus.

Suzanne Simard:

Yeah. So we've done experiments, and other people in different labs around the world, they've been able to figure out that if a tree's injured,

Robert Krulwich:

It'll cry out in a kind of chemical way.

Suzanne Simard:

And those chemicals will then move through the network and warn neighboring trees or seedlings.

That's something bad is happening. I'm under attack.

Suzanne Simard:

There's an enemy in the midst.

Robert Krulwich:

So if a beetle were to invade the forest, the trees tell the next tree over, Here come the, like Paul Revere, sort of?

Suzanne Simard:

Yes. That seems to be what's what happens.

Robert Krulwich:

So you can -- you can see this is like a game of telephone. One tree goes Uh-oh. The next one goes, Uh-oh. And then they do stuff.

Suzanne Simard:

They start producing chemicals that taste really bad.

Robert Krulwich:

So the beetles don't want to eat them.

Suzanne Simard:

It'll go ick, I don't want that.

Robert Krulwich:

One of the spookiest examples of this Suzanne mentioned, is an experiment that she and her team did where they discovered that if a forest is warming up, which is happening all over the world, temperatures are rising, you have trees in this forest that are hurting. They don't do well in warm temperatures and their needles turn all sickly yellow. They will send out a Oh, no! This is not so good signal through the network. But also,

Suzanne Simard:

The other important thing we figured out is that, as those trees are injured and dying, they'll dump their carbon into their neighbors. So -- so carbon will move from that dying tree. So its resources, its legacy will move into the mycorrhizal network into neighboring trees.

Robert Krulwich:

Oh, so it says to the newer, the healthier trees, here's my food, take it, it's yours.

Suzanne Simard:

Or it could be like, okay, I'm not doing so well, so I'm going to hide this down here and my, mycelium.

Robert Krulwich:

Okay. I don't know if you're a bank or if you're an, so it's not necessarily saying give it to the new guy.

Suzanne Simard:

Well we don't know. I mean again, it's a tree. It doesn't think, but,

Robert Krulwich:

I know, I'm just trying to make sure I understand this. I realize that none of these conversations are actually spoken.

Give it to the new guy?

Robert Krulwich:

Give it to the new, but that's what she's saying.

Suzanne Simard:

Robert Krulwich:

Suzanne says she's not sure if the tree is running the show and saying like, you know, give it to the new guy or maybe it's the fungus under the ground is kind of like a broker and decides who gets what.

Suzanne Simard:

You know, I don't completely understand.

Robert Krulwich:

She says, one of the weirdest parts of this though is when sick trees give up their food, the food doesn't usually go to their kids or even to trees of the same species. What the team found is the food ends up very often with trees that are new in the forest and better at surviving global warming. It's as if the individual trees were somehow thinking ahead to the needs of the whole forest.

Suzanne Simard:

So we know that Douglas fir will take, a dying Douglas fir, will send carbon to neighboring Ponderosa pine. And so why is that? Like so, and I think that, you know, the whole forest, then, there's an intelligence there that's beyond just the species.

Robert Krulwich:

Wait a second. Wait a second. You just used a very interesting word.

Suzanne Simard:

I know Robert. I have, you know what? It's 10 o'clock out to go.

Robert Krulwich:

Oh, all right.

Suzanne Simard:

This is getting so interesting.

Robert Krulwich:

Unfortunately, right at that point, Suzanne basically ran off to another meeting, but,

Suzanne Simard:

Hello, Suzanne speaking.

Robert Krulwich:

Oh there you are, hi.

Suzanne Simard:

Robert Krulwich:

Robert Krulwich:

We did catch up with her a few weeks later.

Robert Krulwich:

When we last left off, I'm just saying, you just said intelligence. Now, isn't, doesn't, don't professors begin to start falling out of chairs when that word gets used regarding plants?

Suzanne Simard:

Yes. We don't normally ascribe intelligence to plants, and plants are not thought to have brains, but when we look at the below ground structure, it looks so much like a brain, physically, and then now that we're starting to understand how it works, we are going well. There's so many parallels.

I do find it magical. I think there is something like a nervous system in the forest, because it's the same sort of large network of nodes sending signals to one another. It's almost as if the forest is acting as an organism itself. You know, they talk about how honeybee colonies are sort of super organisms, because each individual bee is sort of acting like it's a cell in a larger body. Once you understand that the trees are all connected to each other, they're all signaling each other, sending food and resources to each other, it has the feel, the flavor, of something very similar.

Robert Krulwich:

Special thanks to Dr. Teresa Ryan of the University of British Columbia, Faculty of Forestry, to our intern Stephanie Tam, to Roy Halling and the Bronx Botanical Garden, and to Stephenson Swanson there.

And to Annie McEwen and Brenna Farrow who both produced this piece.

Robert Krulwich:

All right, Krulwich.

Robert Krulwich:

Okay. It's time, time for us to go and lie down on the soft forest floor.

Yeah, and hopefully not be liquefied by the fungus beneath us.

Robert Krulwich:

Nice final thought. Bye everybody. Bye. I'm Robert Krulwich.

I'm Jad Abumrad.

Robert Krulwich:

For Radio Lab.

Thanks for listening.

Start of message.

Roy Halling:

This is Roy Halling, researcher specializing in fungi at the New York Botanical Garden.

This is Jennifer Frazer, and I'm a freelance science writer and blogger of The Artful Amoeba at Scientific American.

Roy Halling:

Radio Lab is produced by Jad Abumrad.

By Jad Abumrad.

Roy Halling:

Dylan Keefe is our Director of Sound Design.

Soren Wheeler is Senior Editor.

Roy Halling:

Jamie York is our Senior Producer.

Our staff includes Simon Adler, Brenna Farrow, David Gebel.

Roy Halling:

Matt Kielty, Robert Krulwich, Annie McEwen, Andy Mills, Latif Nasser, Malissa O'Donnell.

Kelsey Pagett.

Roy Halling:

Arianne Wack.

And Molly Webster.

Roy Halling:

With help from Alexandra Leigh Young, Jackson Roach, and Charu Sinha.

Our fact-checkers are Eva Dasher and Michelle Harris. And remember, if you're a springtail, don't talk to strange mushrooms. Actually that's good advice for anyone.

Roy Halling:

Thank you. Bye.

End of message.
New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio's programming is the audio record.

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From Tree to Shining Tree | Radiolab | WNYC Studios

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I'm Jad Abumrad. Robert Krulwich: I'm Robert Krulwich. This is radio lab. Very good to actually be back here talking to you. Robert Krulwich: Yes, it's been a while. Robert Krulwich: Where have you told those people who might've missed what you been doing, what you've been doing, so they will not miss it.

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At the heart of Mark McClusky's new book is this basic premise: "At this point," he writes, "we've made most of the big leaps in our natural physical capacity." And for elite athletes today, pushing boundaries and breaking records is all about "the aggregation of marginal gains." Lots of tiny improvements that, put together, can make a big difference.

Those improvements can be gained by using everything from the latest elixirs - beet juice! - to data-driven science - athletes wearing high-tech monitoring devices that can send real-time performance data to coaches during a game.

Here & Now's Robin Young talks to Mark McClusky, editor of Wired, about his new book, " Faster, Higher, Stronger: How Sports Science Is Creating A New Generation Of Super-athletes And What We Can Learn From Them."
By Mark McClusky Introduction

Christopher Gore pauses and smiles as I ask him the Question. We're sitting in a conference room at the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra, where he's the head of the physiology department. We've just spent the past hour digging into the complex process that powers our cells at a muscular level, like our own little graduate molecular biology seminar. I've come more than seventy-five hundred miles to the AIS to try and understand the secrets that the scientists, athletes, and coaches at the institute have uncovered in their decades of work to improve human performance. Getting to pick the brain of someone like Gore, who has done groundbreaking research on altitude training, on drug testing, and on precooling athletes for better performance in hot conditions, is a jump right into the deep end of the pool.

Near the end of our interview, after probing him with questions on all the ways that he tries to optimize elite athletes, I ask Gore what he's learned from all his experience and research that can be applied to everyday athletes. After a moment, he says, "Well, these elite athletes, they aren't like us."

And that's surely true. Part of what fascinates us about the world's great athletes is how different they are from you and me. When we watch LeBron James drive through the lane with his unmatched combination of power and grace, we don't kid ourselves into thinking that we might be able to do the same thing-we marvel at his unique abilities. When we watch Mike Trout crush a fastball into the gap and sprint around the bases, we feel awe at his athletic gifts. When we watch an Olympic skier like Lindsey Vonn barrel down the hill, we shake our heads in respect for her fearlessness and aggression.

Like many writers who are drawn to sports, I'm an athlete myself, although at a far lower level than these stars. When I was a kid, I was an OK bike racer, but never made it to the top ranks. Even when I was riding hundreds of miles a week, I saw other competitors who had invested less time and energy pass me by. Looking back, I realize this may have been what planted the seed for this book in my mind-were they just naturally better than I was? Did they work harder? Or had they found smarter ways to train that offered them greater benefits? Had they found some secret that I wasn't aware of?

In the years I've been writing about sports and technology at Sports Illustrated and WIRED, I've been chasing the answers to some of these questions. Having covered three Olympic Games and countless other sporting events, I've talked to athletes, coaches, and scientists about what goes into the development of truly great performers, the kind of competitors whom we tell our kids we are lucky to see do their thing. What I've come to believe is that there aren't any easy answers to the question of what makes a great athlete-so many factors have to come together to give us transcendent performers like Serena Williams and Usain Bolt. But there is a thread that unites our best athletes and teams today, and that's an increasing focus on science and technology as a way to push the boundaries of human performance.

Throughout this book, I'll argue that over the past century, we've made massive improvements in the athletic world through a better understanding of our bodies and how they can be trained. But we've seen recently that it's becoming harder and harder to improve at the same rate-it's much more difficult to smash a world record than it used to be. Because of this, athletes have to be smarter about their training-surrounding themselves with a savvy team of scientists and technologists becomes basically essential. Although races can still be won through hard work and effort, they are increasingly won by competitors who not only work hard, but are smarter than the competition as well.

Here's an example from a very different world: Arie de Geus was an executive at Royal Dutch Shell for thirty-eight years, most prominently as the head of the company's strategic planning. While de Geus was there, Shell became one of the largest companies in the world, partly through his group's innovations in what's called "scenario planning," a technique that helps businesses and organizations develop flexible long-term plans by trying to envision scenarios that might play out in the future. In the mid-1980s, de Geus and his team had possession of research that suggested that the price of oil, then twenty-eight dollars a barrel, might begin to decline, perhaps down to fifteen dollars a barrel (in these days of a hundred dollars per barrel of crude oil, this seems quaint).

De Geus and his team challenged the management at Shell to imagine how they would react to such a situation. When the price of oil plummeted as predicted (and all the way to ten dollars a barrel), the company had the advantage of having considered what to do in a way that much of its competition hadn't. Rather than being frozen by panic, the company was able to quickly change how it evaluated new drilling projects, emphasizing their cost rather than just the expected output of oil. De Geus had a particular saying that encapsulates the lessons he drew from such situations: "The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage."

De Geus's observation was repeated to me by Scott Drawer, the former head of research and innovation at UK Sport, one of the most successful athletic organizations of the past decade. To Drawer, this is the principle on which really great elite-athletic organizations need to be built. You may have better athletes or worse athletes, and that will change over time. But you can still find ways to improve by ensuring that you're always learning as much and as quickly as you can. "It's all about the pace at which you can move. You've got to be willing to take risks and try things out in high per-formance," says Drawer. "Because even if it doesn't work, you can learn from it. It's the willingness to engage in that process that's most crucial."

De Geus's quote points out that, really, all any of us can do is keep our eyes and ears-and most important, our mind-open to all possibilities in a given situation, with a willingness to try things and learn from them, whether we fail or succeed. All of us, from elite athletes and teams to weekend warriors, can become stuck in our ways and our thinking, and we can find ourselves falling behind competitors who are more nimble, more willing to experiment, and more comfortable with pushing the boundaries.

This is the great joy and torment about working on the cutting edge of science and performance. Today's greatest innovations are tomorrow's baseline, and you have to keep moving forward. That's the only way to continue our physical and intellectual growth as a species; it's the only way we'll continue to run faster, jump higher, and become stronger.

Throughout the years I've spent reporting on this intersection of science and sports, I've found that there are many things that elites do-not just specific tools and techniques they use, but ways of approaching problems-that can be applied to the rest of us. As we explore the world of elite performance, I've tried to highlight those lessons along the way. But as Gore notes, there are also things elites do that only work for them because of their unique physiology or abilities-we'll look at plenty of those things as well.

I hope that as we dive into the world of sports science together, you'll feel the same awe for the scientists and technologists, as well as the athletes, that I do. The myth of the lone athlete toiling away for years in pursuit of a gold medal is a romantic but outdated notion. Today's reality is more complicated and, I think, even more impressive.

Mark McClusky, editor of Wired and author of "Faster, Higher, Stronger: How Sports Science Is Creating A New Generation Of Superathletes And What We Can Learn From Them." He tweets @markmcc.

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How Athletes Are Getting 'Faster, Higher, Stronger'

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At the heart of Mark McClusky's new book is this basic premise: "At this point," he writes, "we've made most of the big leaps in our natural physical capacity." And for elite athletes today, pushing boundaries and breaking records is all about "the aggregation of marginal gains."

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"If you imagine less, less will be what you undoubtedly deserve," Debbie Millman counseled in one of the best commencement speeches ever given, urging: "Do what you love, and don't stop until you get what you love. Work as hard as you can, imagine immensities..." Far from Pollyanna platitude, this advice actually reflects what modern psychology knows about how belief systems about our own abilities and potential fuel our behavior and predict our success. Much of that understanding stems from the work of Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, synthesized in her remarkably insightful Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (public library) - an inquiry into the power of our beliefs, both conscious and unconscious, and how changing even the simplest of them can have profound impact on nearly every aspect of our lives.

One of the most basic beliefs we carry about ourselves, Dweck found in her research, has to do with how we view and inhabit what we consider to be our personality. A "fixed mindset" assumes that our character, intelligence, and creative ability are static givens which we can't change in any meaningful way, and success is the affirmation of that inherent intelligence, an assessment of how those givens measure up against an equally fixed standard; striving for success and avoiding failure at all costs become a way of maintaining the sense of being smart or skilled. A "growth mindset," on the other hand, thrives on challenge and sees failure not as evidence of unintelligence but as a heartening springboard for growth and for stretching our existing abilities. Out of these two mindsets, which we manifest from a very early age, springs a great deal of our behavior, our relationship with success and failure in both professional and personal contexts, and ultimately our capacity for happiness.

The consequences of believing that intelligence and personality can be developed rather than being immutably engrained traits, Dweck found in her two decades of research with both children and adults, are remarkable. She writes:

For twenty years, my research has shown that the view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life. It can determine whether you become the person you want to be and whether you accomplish the things you value. How does this happen? How can a simple belief have the power to transform your psychology and, as a result, your life?

Believing that your qualities are carved in stone - the fixed mindset - creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over. If you have only a certain amount of intelligence, a certain personality, and a certain moral character - well, then you'd better prove that you have a healthy dose of them. It simply wouldn't do to look or feel deficient in these most basic characteristics.

[...]

I've seen so many people with this one consuming goal of proving themselves - in the classroom, in their careers, and in their relationships. Every situation calls for a confirmation of their intelligence, personality, or character. Every situation is evaluated: Will I succeed or fail? Will I look smart or dumb? Will I be accepted or rejected? Will I feel like a winner or a loser? . . .

There's another mindset in which these traits are not simply a hand you're dealt and have to live with, always trying to convince yourself and others that you have a royal flush when you're secretly worried it's a pair of tens. In this mindset, the hand you're dealt is just the starting point for development. This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts. Although people may differ in every which way - in their initial talents and aptitudes, interests, or temperaments - everyone can change and grow through application and experience.

Do people with this mindset believe that anyone can be anything, that anyone with proper motivation or education can become Einstein or Beethoven? No, but they believe that a person's true potential is unknown (and unknowable); that it's impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil, and training.

At the heart of what makes the "growth mindset" so winsome, Dweck found, is that it creates a passion for learning rather than a hunger for approval. Its hallmark is the conviction that human qualities like intelligence and creativity, and even relational capacities like love and friendship, can be cultivated through effort and deliberate practice. Not only are people with this mindset not discouraged by failure, but they don't actually see themselves as failing in those situations - they see themselves as learning. Dweck writes:

Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better? Why hide deficiencies instead of overcoming them? Why look for friends or partners who will just shore up your self-esteem instead of ones who will also challenge you to grow? And why seek out the tried and true, instead of experiences that will stretch you? The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it's not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset. This is the mindset that allows people to thrive during some of the most challenging times in their lives.

This idea, of course, isn't new - if anything, it's the fodder of self-help books and vacant "You can do anything!" platitudes. What makes Dweck's work different, however, is that it is rooted in rigorous research on how the mind - especially the developing mind - works, identifying not only the core drivers of those mindsets but also how they can be reprogrammed.

Dweck and her team found that people with the fixed mindset see risk and effort as potential giveaways of their inadequacies, revealing that they come up short in some way. But the relationship between mindset and effort is a two-way street:

It's not just that some people happen to recognize the value of challenging themselves and the importance of effort. Our research has shown that this comes directly from the growth mindset. When we teach people the growth mindset, with its focus on development, these ideas about challenge and effort follow. . . .

As you begin to understand the fixed and growth mindsets, you will see exactly how one thing leads to another-how a belief that your qualities are carved in stone leads to a host of thoughts and actions, and how a belief that your qualities can be cultivated leads to a host of different thoughts and actions, taking you down an entirely different road.

[...]

The mindsets change what people strive for and what they see as success. . . they change the definition, significance, and impact of failure. . . they change the deepest meaning of effort.

Dweck cites a poll of 143 creativity researchers, who concurred that the number-one trait underpinning creative achievement is precisely the kind of resilience and fail-forward perseverance attributed to the growth mindset. She writes:

When you enter a mindset, you enter a new world. In one world - the world of fixed traits - success is about proving you're smart or talented. Validating yourself. In the other - the world of changing qualities - it's about stretching yourself to learn something new. Developing yourself.

In one world, failure is about having a setback. Getting a bad grade. Losing a tournament. Getting fired. Getting rejected. It means you're not smart or talented. In the other world, failure is about not growing. Not reaching for the things you value. It means you're not fulfilling your potential.

In one world, effort is a bad thing. It, like failure, means you're not smart or talented. If you were, you wouldn't need effort. In the other world, effort is what makes you smart or talented.

But her most remarkable research, which has informed present theories of why presence is more important than praise in teaching children to cultivate a healthy relationship with achievement, explores how these mindsets are born - they form, it turns out, very early in life. In one seminal study, Dweck and her colleagues offered four-year-olds a choice: They could either redo an easy jigsaw puzzle, or try a harder one. Even these young children conformed to the characteristics of one of the two mindsets - those with "fixed" mentality stayed on the safe side, choosing the easier puzzles that would affirm their existing ability, articulating to the researchers their belief that smart kids don't make mistakes; those with the "growth" mindset thought it an odd choice to begin with, perplexed why anyone would want to do the same puzzle over and over if they aren't learning anything new. In other words, the fixed-mindset kids wanted to make sure they succeeded in order to seem smart, whereas the growth-mindset ones wanted to stretch themselves, for their definition of success was about becoming smarter.

Dweck quotes one seventh-grade girl, who captured the difference beautifully:

I think intelligence is something you have to work for ... it isn't just given to you.... Most kids, if they're not sure of an answer, will not raise their hand to answer the question. But what I usually do is raise my hand, because if I'm wrong, then my mistake will be corrected. Or I will raise my hand and say, 'How would this be solved?' or 'I don't get this. Can you help me?' Just by doing that I'm increasing my intelligence.

Things got even more interesting when Dweck brought people into Columbia's brain-wave lab to study how their brains behaved as they answered difficult questions and received feedback. What she found was that those with a fixed mindset were only interested in hearing feedback that reflected directly on their present ability, but tuned out information that could help them learn and improve. They even showed no interest in hearing the right answer when they had gotten a question wrong, because they had already filed it away in the failure category. Those with a growth mindset, on the other hand, were keenly attentive to information that could help them expand their existing knowledge and skill, regardless of whether they'd gotten the question right or wrong - in other words, their priority was learning, not the binary trap of success and failure.

These findings are especially important in education and how we, as a culture, assess intelligence. In another study of hundreds of students, mostly adolescents, Dweck and her colleagues gave each ten fairly challenging problems from a nonverbal IQ test, then praised the student for his or her performance - most had done pretty well. But they offered two types of praise: Some students were told "Wow, you got [X many] right. That's a really good score. You must be smart at this," while others, "Wow, you got [X many] right. That's a really good score. You must have worked really hard." In other words, some were praised for ability and others for effort. The findings, at this point, are unsurprising yet jarring:

The ability praise pushed students right into the fixed mindset, and they showed all the signs of it, too: When we gave them a choice, they rejected a challenging new task that they could learn from. They didn't want to do anything that could expose their flaws and call into question their talent.

[...]

In contrast, when students were praised for effort, 90 percent of them wanted the challenging new task that they could learn from.

The most interesting part, however, is what happened next: Dweck and her colleagues gave the students a subsequent set of harder problems, on which the students didn't do so well. Suddenly, the ability-praised kids thought they weren't so smart or gifted after all. Dweck puts it poignantly:

If success had meant they were intelligent, then less-than-success meant they were deficient.

But for the effort-praised kids, the difficulty was simply an indication that they had to put in more effort, not a sign of failure or a reflection of their poor intellect. Perhaps most importantly, the two mindsets also impacted the kids' level of enjoyment - everyone enjoyed the first round of easier questions, which most kids got right, but as soon as the questions got more challenging, the ability-praised kids no longer had any fun, while the effort-praised ones not only still enjoyed the problems but even said that the more challenging, the more fun. The latter also had significant improvements in their performance as the problems got harder, while the former kept getting worse and worse, as if discouraged by their own success-or-failure mindset.

It gets better - or worse, depending on how we look at it: The most unsettling finding came after the IQ questions were completed, when the researchers asked the kids to write private letters to their peers relaying the experience, including a space for reporting their scores on the problems. To Dweck's devastation, the most toxic byproduct of the fixed mindset turned out to be dishonesty: Forty percent of the ability-praised kids lied about their scores, inflating them to look more successful. She laments:

In the fixed mindset, imperfections are shameful - especially if you're talented - so they lied them away. What's so alarming is that we took ordinary children and made them into liars, simply by telling them they were smart.

This illustrates the key difference between the two mindsets - for those with a growth one, "personal success is when you work your hardest to become your best," whereas for those with a fixed one, "success is about establishing their superiority, pure and simple. Being that somebody who is worthier than the nobodies." For the latter, setbacks are a sentence and a label. For the former, they're motivating, informative input - a wakeup call.

But one of the most profound applications of this insight has to do not with business or education but with love. Dweck found that people exhibited the same dichotomy of dispositions in their personal relationships: Those with a fixed mindset believed their ideal mate would put them on a pedestal and make them feel perfect, like "the god of a one-person religion," whereas those with the growth mindset preferred a partner who would recognize their faults and lovingly help improve them, someone who would encourage them to learn new things and become a better person. The fixed mindset, it turns out, is at the root of many of our most toxic cultural myths about "true love." Dweck writes:

The growth mindset says all of these things can be developed. All - you, your partner, and the relationship - are capable of growth and change.

In the fixed mindset, the ideal is instant, perfect, and perpetual compatibility. Like it was meant to be. Like riding off into the sunset. Like "they lived happily ever after."

[...]

One problem is that people with the fixed mindset expect everything good to happen automatically. It's not that the partners will work to help each other solve their problems or gain skills. It's that this will magically occur through their love, sort of the way it happened to Sleeping Beauty, whose coma was cured by her prince's kiss, or to Cinderella, whose miserable life was suddenly transformed by her prince.

This also applies to the myth of mind-reading, where the fixed mindset believes that an ideal couple should be able to read each other's minds and finish each other's sentences. She cites a study that invited people to talk about their relationships:

Those with the fixed mindset felt threatened and hostile after talking about even minor discrepancies in how they and their partner saw their relationship. Even a minor discrepancy threatened their belief that they shared all of each other's views.

But most destructive of all relationship myths is the belief that if it requires work, something is terribly wrong and that any discrepancy of opinions or preferences is indicative of character flaws on behalf of one's partner. Dweck offers a reality check:

Just as there are no great achievements without setbacks, there are no great relationships without conflicts and problems along the way.

When people with a fixed mindset talk about their conflicts, they assign blame. Sometimes they blame themselves, but often they blame their partner. And they assign blame to a trait - a character flaw.

But it doesn't end there. When people blame their partner's personality for the problem, they feel anger and disgust toward them.

And it barrels on: Since the problem comes from fixed traits, it can't be solved. So once people with the fixed mindset see flaws in their partners, they become contemptuous of them and dissatisfied with the whole relationship.

Those with the growth mindset, on the other hand, can acknowledge their partners' imperfections, without assigning blame, and still feel that they have a fulfilling relationship. They see conflicts as problems of communication, not of personality or character. This dynamic holds true as much in romantic partnerships as in friendship and even in people's relationships with their parents. Dweck summarizes her findings:

When people embark on a relationship, they encounter a partner who is different from them, and they haven't learned how to deal with the differences. In a good relationship, people develop these skills and, as they do, both partners grow and the relationship deepens. But for this to happen, people need to feel they're on the same side. . . . As an atmosphere of trust developed, they [become] vitally interested in each other's development.

What it all comes down to is that a mindset is an interpretative process that tells us what is going on around us. In the fixed mindset, that process is scored by an internal monologue of constant judging and evaluation, using every piece of information as evidence either for or against such assessments as whether you're a good person, whether your partner is selfish, or whether you are better than the person next to you. In a growth mindset, on the other hand, the internal monologue is not one of judgment but one of voracious appetite for learning, constantly seeking out the kind of input that you can metabolize into learning and constructive action.

In the rest of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Dweck goes on to explore how these fundamental mindsets form, what their defining characteristics are in different contexts of life, and how we can rewire our cognitive habits to adopt the much more fruitful and nourishing growth mindset.
Public domain photographs via Flickr Commons

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Fixed vs. Growth: The Two Basic Mindsets That Shape Our Lives

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"If you imagine less, less will be what you undoubtedly deserve," Debbie Millman counseled in one of the best commencement speeches ever given, urging: "Do what you love, and don't stop until you get what you love. Work as hard as you can, imagine immensities..."

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Such sweeping conclusions, even if they are not endorsed by the author, make me frown. And frowning - as one learns on Page 152 of this book - activates the skeptic within us: what Kahneman calls "System 2." Just putting on a frown, experiments show, works to reduce overconfidence; it causes us to be more analytical, more vigilant in our thinking; to question stories that we would otherwise unreflectively accept as true because they are facile and coherent. And that is why I frowningly gave this extraordinarily interesting book the most skeptical reading I could.

System 2, in Kahneman's scheme, is our slow, deliberate, analytical and consciously effortful mode of reasoning about the world. System 1, by contrast, is our fast, automatic, intuitive and largely unconscious mode. It is System 1 that detects hostility in a voice and effortlessly completes the phrase "bread and. . . . " It is System 2 that swings into action when we have to fill out a tax form or park a car in a narrow space. (As Kahneman and others have found, there is an easy way to tell how engaged a person's System 2 is during a task: just look into his or her eyes and note how dilated the pupils are.)

More generally, System 1 uses association and metaphor to produce a quick and dirty draft of reality, which System 2 draws on to arrive at explicit beliefs and reasoned choices. System 1 proposes, System 2 disposes. So System 2 would seem to be the boss, right? In principle, yes. But System 2, in addition to being more deliberate and rational, is also lazy. And it tires easily. (The vogue term for this is "ego depletion.") Too often, instead of slowing things down and analyzing them, System 2 is content to accept the easy but unreliable story about the world that System 1 feeds to it. "Although System 2 believes itself to be where the action is," Kahneman writes, "the automatic System 1 is the hero of this book." System 2 is especially quiescent, it seems, when your mood is a happy one.

At this point, the skeptical reader might wonder how seriously to take all this talk of System 1 and System 2. Are they actually a pair of little agents in our head, each with its distinctive personality? Not really, says Kahneman. Rather, they are "useful fictions" - useful because they help explain the quirks of the human mind.

To see how, consider what Kahneman calls the "best-known and most controversial" of the experiments he and Tversky did together: "the Linda problem." Participants in the experiment were told about an imaginary young woman named Linda, who is single, outspoken and very bright, and who, as a student, was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice. The participants were then asked which was more probable: (1) Linda is a bank teller. Or (2) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement. The overwhelming response was that (2) was more probable; in other words, that given the background information furnished, "feminist bank teller" was more likely than "bank teller." This is, of course, a blatant violation of the laws of probability. (Every feminist bank teller is a bank teller; adding a detail can only lower the probability.) Yet even among students in Stanford's Graduate School of Business, who had extensive training in probability, 85 percent flunked the Linda problem. One student, informed that she had committed an elementary logical blunder, responded, "I thought you just asked for my opinion."

What has gone wrong here? An easy question (how coherent is the narrative?) is substituted for a more difficult one (how probable is it?). And this, according to Kahneman, is the source of many of the biases that infect our thinking. System 1 jumps to an intuitive conclusion based on a "heuristic" - an easy but imperfect way of answering hard questions - and System 2 lazily endorses this heuristic answer without bothering to scrutinize whether it is logical.

Kahneman describes dozens of such experimentally demonstrated breakdowns in rationality - "base-rate neglect," "availability cascade," "the illusion of validity" and so on. The cumulative effect is to make the reader despair for human reason.

Are we really so hopeless? Think again of the Linda problem. Even the great evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould was troubled by it. As an expert in probability he knew the right answer, yet he wrote that "a little homunculus in my head continues to jump up and down, shouting at me - 'But she can't just be a bank teller; read the description.' " It was Gould's System 1, Kahneman assures us, that kept shouting the wrong answer at him. But perhaps something more subtle is going on. Our everyday conversation takes place against a rich background of unstated expectations - what linguists call "implicatures." Such implicatures can seep into psychological experiments. Given the expectations that facilitate our conversation, it may have been quite reasonable for the participants in the experiment to take "Linda is a bank clerk" to imply that she was not in addition a feminist. If so, their answers weren't really fallacious.

This might seem a minor point. But it applies to several of the biases that Kahneman and Tversky, along with other investigators, purport to have discovered in formal experiments. In more natural settings - when we are detecting cheaters rather than solving logic puzzles; when we are reasoning about things rather than symbols; when we are assessing raw numbers rather than percentages - people are far less likely to make the same errors. So, at least, much subsequent research suggests. Maybe we are not so irrational after all.

Some cognitive biases, of course, are flagrantly exhibited even in the most natural of settings. Take what Kahneman calls the "planning fallacy": our tendency to overestimate benefits and underestimate costs, and hence foolishly to take on risky projects. In 2002, Americans remodeling their kitchens, for example, expected the job to cost $18,658 on average, but they ended up paying $38,769.

The planning fallacy is "only one of the manifestations of a pervasive optimistic bias," Kahneman writes, which "may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases." Now, in one sense, a bias toward optimism is obviously bad, since it generates false beliefs - like the belief that we are in control, and not the playthings of luck. But without this "illusion of control," would we even be able to get out of bed in the morning? Optimists are more psychologically resilient, have stronger immune systems, and live longer on average than their more reality-based counterparts. Moreover, as Kahneman notes, exaggerated optimism serves to protect both individuals and organizations from the paralyzing effects of another bias, "loss aversion": our tendency to fear losses more than we value gains. It was exaggerated optimism that John Maynard Keynes had in mind when he talked of the "animal spirits" that drive capitalism.

Even if we could rid ourselves of the biases and illusions identified in this book - and Kahneman, citing his own lack of progress in overcoming them, doubts that we can - it is by no means clear that this would make our lives go better. And that raises a fundamental question: What is the point of rationality? We are, after all, Darwinian survivors. Our everyday reasoning abilities have evolved to cope efficiently with a complex and dynamic environment. They are thus likely to be adaptive in this environment, even if they can be tripped up in the psychologist's somewhat artificial experiments. Where do the norms of rationality come from, if they are not an idealization of the way humans actually reason in their ordinary lives? As a species, we can no more be pervasively biased in our judgments than we can be pervasively ungrammatical in our use of language - or so critics of research like Kahneman and Tversky's contend.

Kahneman never grapples philosophically with the nature of rationality. He does, however, supply a fascinating account of what might be taken to be its goal: happiness. What does it mean to be happy? When Kahneman first took up this question, in the mid 1990s, most happiness research relied on asking people how satisfied they were with their life on the whole. But such retrospective assessments depend on memory, which is notoriously unreliable. What if, instead, a person's actual experience of pleasure or pain could be sampled from moment to moment, and then summed up over time? Kahneman calls this "experienced" well-being, as opposed to the "remembered" well-being that researchers had relied upon. And he found that these two measures of happiness diverge in surprising ways. What makes the "experiencing self" happy is not the same as what makes the "remembering self" happy. In particular, the remembering self does not care about duration - how long a pleasant or unpleasant experience lasts. Rather, it retrospectively rates an experience by the peak level of pain or pleasure in the course of the experience, and by the way the experience ends.

These two quirks of remembered happiness - "duration neglect" and the "peak-end rule" - were strikingly illustrated in one of Kahneman's more harrowing experiments. Two groups of patients were to undergo painful colonoscopies. The patients in Group A got the normal procedure. So did the patients in Group B, except - without their being told - a few extra minutes of mild discomfort were added after the end of the examination. Which group suffered more? Well, Group B endured all the pain that Group A did, and then some. But since the prolonging of Group B's colonoscopies meant that the procedure ended less painfully, the patients in this group retrospectively minded it less. (In an earlier research paper though not in this book, Kahneman suggested that the extra discomfort Group B was subjected to in the experiment might be ethically justified if it increased their willingness to come back for a follow-up!)

As with colonoscopies, so too with life. It is the remembering self that calls the shots, not the experiencing self. Kahneman cites research showing, for example, that a college student's decision whether or not to repeat a spring-break vacation is determined by the peak-end rule applied to the previous vacation, not by how fun (or miserable) it actually was moment by moment. The remembering self exercises a sort of "tyranny" over the voiceless experiencing self. "Odd as it may seem," Kahneman writes, "I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me."

Kahneman's conclusion, radical as it sounds, may not go far enough. There may be no experiencing self at all. Brain-scanning experiments by Rafael Malach and his colleagues at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, for instance, have shown that when subjects are absorbed in an experience, like watching the "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly," the parts of the brain associated with self-consciousness are not merely quiet, they're actually shut down ("inhibited") by the rest of the brain. The self seems simply to disappear. Then who exactly is enjoying the film? And why should such egoless pleasures enter into the decision calculus of the remembering self?

Clearly, much remains to be done in hedonic psychology. But Kahneman's conceptual innovations have laid the foundation for many of the empirical findings he reports in this book: that while French mothers spend less time with their children than American mothers, they enjoy it more; that headaches are hedonically harder on the poor; that women who live alone seem to enjoy the same level of well-being as women who live with a mate; and that a household income of about $75,000 in high-cost areas of the country is sufficient to maximize happiness. Policy makers interested in lowering the misery index of society will find much to ponder here.

By the time I got to the end of "Thinking, Fast and Slow," my skeptical frown had long since given way to a grin of intellectual satisfaction. Appraising the book by the peak-end rule, I overconfidently urge everyone to buy and read it. But for those who are merely interested in Kahneman's takeaway on the Malcolm Gladwell question it is this: If you've had 10,000 hours of training in a predictable, rapid-feedback environment - chess, firefighting, anesthesiology - then blink. In all other cases, think.

THINKING, FAST AND SLOW

By Daniel Kahneman

Correction: December 18, 2011

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Thinking, Fast and Slow - By Daniel Kahneman - Book Review

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Such sweeping conclusions, even if they are not endorsed by the author, make me frown. And frowning - as one learns on Page 152 of this book - activates the skeptic within us: what Kahneman calls "System 2."

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Malcolm challenges his assistant Camille to the Law School Admissions Test. He gets halfway through, panics, runs out of time, and wonders: why does the legal world want him to rush?

REFERENCE DOCS

Malcolm Gladwell is president and co-founder of Pushkin Industries. He is a journalist, a speaker, and the author of six New York Times bestsellers.

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Malcolm challenges his assistant Camille to the Law School Admissions Test. He gets halfway through, panics, runs out of time, and wonders: why does the legal world want him to rush? Malcolm Gladwell is president and co-founder of Pushkin Industries. He is a journalist, a speaker, and the author of six New York Times bestsellers.

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Revisionist History tries to make sense of the conundrum of PED use in baseball, using the 500-year-old philosophical techniques of St. Ignatius. Part one of a three-part series on the moral reasoning of the Jesuit order.

Malcolm Gladwell is president and co-founder of Pushkin Industries. He is a journalist, a speaker, and the author of six New York Times bestsellers.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Revisionist History tries to make sense of the conundrum of PED use in baseball, using the 500-year-old philosophical techniques of St. Ignatius. Part one of a three-part series on the moral reasoning of the Jesuit order. Malcolm Gladwell is president and co-founder of Pushkin Industries.

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MOLLY: We're gonna start with a conversation that I had with Jad a few weeks ago.

MOLLY: So, I like medical stories.

JAD: Mm-hmm. This I know about you.

MOLLY: This you know. And I read this website called StatNews.com, which does sort of really -- it's like a new website out of Boston.

MOLLY: I mean, basically it's this collection of really amazing, like, medical reporters, and I will click on stories that look interesting. And there was one about we've just grown embryos -- human embryos for a long time in a lab.

MOLLY: And that was when I read the phrase "The 14-day rule" for the first time, and it was that apparently there's this thing that you can't grow an embryo in a lab past 14 days.

MOLLY: Which I didn't even know you could grow an embryo in lab at all.

MOLLY: Or -- or that people were. Or that -- I mean, I guess I knew IVF happened.

MOLLY: Like test tube babies.

JAD: How long if -- in the average IVF situation, how long is an embryo in a dish for?

MOLLY: And then I realized I didn't actually even know that, either. So then I just spun out. So like, the whole article was just interesting to me because I was like ...

MOLLY: I don't know about any of this.

ROBERT: Oh, and I'm Robert Krulwich. This is Radiolab.

MOLLY: And today on Radiolab. We're gonna zip down a wormhole into another universe, and Robert you're coming with me.

ROBERT: Okay. What -- tell me about this universe before I buy a ticket.

MOLLY: The universe -- oh, okay. You're going to want to buy a ticket, because in this universe are twins and souls and mice and something called the primitive streak. And they're all gathered together around a certain rule.

ROBERT: And remind me again what the rule was?

MOLLY: Well, so you know how you can fertilize an egg? You get an egg and a sperm and you put them together.

MOLLY: Fertilizes the egg?

MOLLY: And then the egg -- the fertilized egg, it multiplies, multiplies, cell divides.

MOLLY: So a scientist could take it to watch it grow to learn about human development. But then they have to stop at day 14.

ROBERT: Is this is a medical kind of thing? Or a science limitation?

MOLLY: It is -- it's medical -- it's all those things. It's medical and it's science and there's, like, philosophy and ethics, and obviously religion. And ...

ROBERT: And that's the ticket I'm buying, huh?

MOLLY: Yeah, you're buying it now, right?

ROBERT: I see. The whole shebang.

LEROY WALTERS: I have water.

LEROY WALTERS: I'll take a sip.

MOLLY: And we're going to begin with this guy, LeRoy Walters.

MOLLY: He was an ethicist at Georgetown University, now retired. And to me, he is sort of the father of the 14-day rule.

LEROY WALTERS: I never -- I never thought of myself as the father of the 14-day rule.

MOLLY: But he is. He totally is.

LEROY WALTERS: Well, we shouldn't forget the context of '73.

MOLLY: All right. So 1973, Leroy has recently graduated with a doctorate in ethics from Yale University and he's settling into his job. And at the time, medicine and ethics were on sort of a collision course.

LEROY WALTERS: Yes, yes. Mm-hmm.

CLIP NEWSCASTER: Good evening.

CLIP NEWSCASTER: In a landmark ruling, the Supreme Court today legalized abortion.

MOLLY: Roe v. Wade happens.

CLIP POLITICIAN: It is clear, at least under present law, that unborn fetus is not a person within the meaning of the Constitution.

MOLLY: But just six months after that decision ...

CLIP NEWSCASTER: The issue of fetuses and research done with them ...

LEROY WALTERS: Fetal research became a hot topic.

CLIP POLITICIAN: Some of the testimony in here is shocking.

MOLLY: There were news reports ...

CLIP POLITICIAN: Of butchering and cutting up ...

MOLLY: About dissecting fetuses, even an instance of decapitating fetuses.

MOLLY: And then around the same time ...

CLIP NEWSCASTER: ... used as a human guinea pigs.

LEROY WALTERS: Research involving human beings.

CLIP NEWSCASTER: The controversial Tuskegee syphilis study ...

MOLLY: News reports of the syphillis studies that were done on African-American men without their knowledge.

LEROY WALTERS: There was the sterilization of ...

CLIP NEWSCASTER: Two daughters had been sterilized without their informed consent ...

LEROY WALTERS: ... women with intellectual disabilities.

CLIP NEWSCASTER: ... experiments in genetic research.

MOLLY: Genetic engineering was coming into its own. You have all these questions swirling about like, how we feel about the human body, whether or not we want to experiment on it? What do we protect, and what don't we protect? It's just sort of this whirlwind, and ...

CLIP ANNOUNCER: You are about to see a historic birth ...

MOLLY: Then most relevant for our story ...

CLIP ANNOUNCER: We are going to deliver her by Cesarean section.

LEROY WALTERS: Scientists in the UK ...

CLIP DOCTOR: We are now incising the uterus itself.

LEROY WALTERS: Produced a child with the aid of in vitro fertilization.

MOLLY: The first baby that was born from an embryo that was grown inside a tube.

LEROY WALTERS: Baby Louise Brown.

CLIP DOCTOR: Baby's not opened her eyes yet.

LEROY WALTERS: Everyone in the world was fascinated, but there were people who predicted doom.

LEROY WALTERS: That in vitro fertilization would lead to reproduction as a form of manufacture.

MOLLY: So the government was grappling with, we need more regulations or we need as a country to think about, like, what are ethical guidelines are.

CLIP NEWSCASTER: The department of Health, Education and Welfare ...

MOLLY: And they put together something called the Ethics Advisory Board.

CLIP NEWSCASTER: The panel of doctors, laymen, academics ...

MOLLY: Even a Jesuit priest.

CLIP NEWSCASTER: To consider ...

CLIP ANNOUNCER: ... some fundamental moral and ethical questions ...

CLIP NEWSCASTER: questions involved in test tube human fertilization.

CLIP NEWSCASTER: Its meetings and discussions open today.

MOLLY: Now, as part of those meetings, the board will call on these expert witnesses. And one of those witnesses was our Boy LeRoy.

LEROY WALTERS: Right. The staff director ...

MOLLY: And they asked LeRoy, like, ethically tell us what we should be thinking about when it comes to embryos?

LEROY WALTERS: And how we are to regard them.

MOLLY: And he says, "Well, there's a spectrum. And on the one side, you could argue ...

LEROY WALTERS: ... that human embryos should be protected from the time of fertilization forward.

MOLLY: We shouldn't even be growing embryos in a lab at all.

MOLLY: Then there's the other side.

LEROY WALTERS: ... the most permissive position was that research could be done until about eight weeks ...

LEROY WALTERS: A fetus at about eight weeks can have a reflex response to a stimulus.

MOLLY: At some point a committee member turns to LeRoy and she says, where would you draw the line? He pauses and he says, "Well ..."

LEROY WALTERS: I would say for me, 14 days.

MOLLY: Well, LeRoy had a couple different arguments. For one, before 14 days ...

LEROY WALTERS: About 50% of early human embryos are simply sluffed off.

MOLLY: They're just sort of shed from the woman's uterus.

LEROY WALTERS: And don't develop further.

MOLLY: So the thinking was, if we're already losing 50% of them, naturally ...

LEROY WALTERS: We don't have strong moral obligations toward early human embryos.

LEROY WALTERS: You can even pose it as a metaphysical question. If these are important beings, why do 50 percent of them disappear, and we never have any knowledge of them?

MOLLY: Argument number two?

LEROY WALTERS: Early embryos can split into two.

LEROY WALTERS: Or two separate embryos can recombine ...

MOLLY: Like, before 14 days an embryo doesn't know if it's one embryo or if it's, like, gonna be one person or if it's gonna be two people. So as LeRoy put it, it doesn't have a ...

LEROY WALTERS: A biological identity.

MOLLY: And that happens right around 14 days.

MOLLY: Argument number three ...

LEROY WALTERS: The primitive streak appears.

JAD: The primitive streak appears?

LEROY WALTERS: The primitive streak is the first indication of a -- an axis of the future body.

MOLLY: People see it as, like, a -- the body starting to organize itself.

LEROY WALTERS: You might say it's the outline of the spinal cord that will develop later on.

JAD: It's the first hint of, like ...

LEROY WALTERS: All of those seem to kind of converge around 14 days.

MOLLY: Eventually the committee decides to take LeRoy's suggestion and recommend that all research on human embryos be stopped at 14 days.

LEROY WALTERS: With high expectations, we submitted the report to Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Joseph Califano on May 4th, 1979. And on July 19th, 1979, before he could respond, Secretary Califano was fired by President Jimmy Carter.

MOLLY: It was part of a whole cabinet shake-up.

LEROY WALTERS: And so the report has been sitting on shelves, gathering dust. And there has never been a formal response.

MOLLY: It did end up becoming a guideline in the U.S. It's actually an international guideline, but we never actually needed it, because 14 days ...

LEROY WALTERS: That was so far beyond the capacity of researchers to culture early embryos, that it also seemed like a safe -- a safe marker, a safe boundary.

MOLLY: Because -- and this is the interesting thing ...

MOLLY: ... with IVF, we're familiar with like days zero, one, two, three, four, five, six, which is about the time they put the embryo into the mother.

MOLLY: And so nobody had ever really seen how an embryo develops from days 7 through 14.

MOLLY: You can't photograph it through the body for, like, various reasons. For one, no one ever knows they're pregnant that early. Like, when did you and your wife realize you were pregnant? It's like a month after the fertilization happens.

JAD: Yeah, it's funny. It's like when she -- you, even if you're trying, you don't actually know for weeks until ...

MOLLY: Yeah. And it's so small that even if you did know, the way it attaches to the uterus, it sort of burrows in, and you kind of can't see it.

MOLLY: And at the same time, scientists are pretty sure that this is a very important moment in development and they just can't get to it.

ROBERT: Wait -- wait a second. Life Magazine 50 years ago, published these gorgeous pictures of -- of a fertilized cell, and then beautiful little baby with eyes, you know, just ...

MOLLY: Yeah, but the -- that -- they have pictures of sperms and eggs, then there's a blank spot until at least three and a half weeks. So that magazine spread ...

ROBERT: Oh, so -- so Life didn't show the first few -- the second or third ...

ROBERT: You -- you're saying that there is a place in the development of the human being that no scientist has seen?

MAGDALENA ZERNICKA-GOETZ: So this is this kind of period which in the textbook you will find described as a black box.

MOLLY: Which brings us to Magdalena.

MAGDALENA ZERNICKA-GOETZ: So I'm Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, at the University of Cambridge in the UK.

MOLLY: She for years, had been trying to figure out how to grow embryos during this period.

MAGDALENA ZERNICKA-GOETZ: But for those experiments ...

MOLLY: And the problem was at this point, the embryo is beginning to attach to the mother's uterus, and so it just need certain things from the mother. And if you try and grow it in a dish, it just shrivels up and dies.

MAGDALENA ZERNICKA-GOETZ: Yes, yes. So at the time we were trying really scratch our heads and come up with the most enriching environment we could imagine.

MOLLY: Like, maybe I can, like, recreate that really warm, cozy home, but in a dish without the mom.

JAD: Interesting. So it's like experimenting. Like, what is the right bath that the growing embryo needs?

JAD: To sort of get what it needs.

MOLLY: Yeah. And they decided that, while they were still trying to figure it out, they would just do it on mice embryos first.

MOLLY: And so she started essentially just coming up with, like, chemistry concoctions. They started with the gel ...

MAGDALENA ZERNICKA-GOETZ: Which was of particular elasticity.

MOLLY: Sort of gloppy and gooey. And then they toss in a serum made from ...

MAGDALENA ZERNICKA-GOETZ: Human placentas.

MOLLY: Added some hormones.

MAGDALENA ZERNICKA-GOETZ: Like progesterone.

MAGDALENA ZERNICKA-GOETZ: Fibroblast growth factors.

MOLLY: And of course a dash of ...

MAGDALENA ZERNICKA-GOETZ: Laminin fibronectin.

MOLLY: This sounds like it -- like someone would sell this as, like, a face cream or something.

MOLLY: They even tried serum from ...

MAGDALENA ZERNICKA-GOETZ: Bat's placentas.

MOLLY: That actually really didn't work.

MAGDALENA ZERNICKA-GOETZ: That was not so good as the serum from the human placenta.

MAGDALENA ZERNICKA-GOETZ: Yes.

MOLLY: For five years they put stuff in, they pulled stuff out, they tried everything, until they ended up with something that, at least on mice seemed to work really well. And so they thought, "Okay, maybe it's time we try this with human embryos."

MAGDALENA ZERNICKA-GOETZ: We took two embryos, just two human blastocysts ...

MOLLY: Put them in a dish with their chemical concoction and ...

MAGDALENA ZERNICKA-GOETZ: Amazingly ...

MAGDALENA ZERNICKA-GOETZ: One of them did make it ...

MOLLY: To 13 days. The other one didn't.

MAGDALENA ZERNICKA-GOETZ: But one made it, right?

MOLLY: Suddenly they had an embryo that was growing happily into day eight. Day nine. Day 10. Day 11. And they were able to see all of these moments in human development that no one had ever seen before. And -- and guess what Robert?

MOLLY: I got to see them, too.

MOLLY: I did! Do you want to come?

ROBERT: Of course, I want to come.

ROBERT: We should go right now. I mean ...

MOLLY: We are gonna go, but we're gonna actually have to take a break first.

MOLLY: So we'll be back in a bit.

[ADVERTISEMENT]

ROBERT: Okay, we're back. I am Robert Krulwich.

ROBERT: This is Radiolab. And today, the 14-day rule.

MOLLY: Last we left you, we had just met a woman who managed to grow a human embryo in a lab right up to the 14-day line.

ROBERT: And now we get to see it, right? That's what you promised.

MOLLY: One earphone on, one earphone off. Good luck. Good luck.

MOLLY: Lucky enough for me, there is in embryology lab right here in New York. Rockefeller University.

MOLLY: Hi, how are you? It's nice to meet you.

ALI BRIVANLOU: So you're a radio scientist.

MOLLY: Uh, I fake being a scientist, but ...

MOLLY: Ali's team, building off of Magdalena's work, they were also growing human embryos in the lab to the 14-day mark. So he invited me up to see them.

ALI BRIVANLOU: Today is -- you would realize that your eyes are seeing something that no other human beings has ever seen, except the group in this lab.

MOLLY: And obviously Magda's lab.

MOLLY: Wait. How many people are in this lab that you think saw it?

ALI BRIVANLOU: I think we're a total of 25.

MOLLY: So then I'll be, like, 26?

MOLLY: So Ali has to step out of the room.

MOLLY: I'm excited. Thank you, Ali.

MOLLY: And he passes me off to the guy that runs, like, the human embryology research at the lab.

MOLLY: And a lab technician.

CECILIA PELLEGRINI: Cecilia Pellegrini.

MOLLY: Cecilia Pellegrini?

CECILIA PELLEGRINI: Yes.

MOLLY: [whispers] Walking through a cool lab. It's very big and everyone's looking at me.

MOLLY: Lots of benches and microscopes and people pipetting, and ...

MOLLY: So a fridge. There's a little sticky note on the fridge that says 'Experiment 27 embryos here."

CECILIA PELLEGRINI: So we keep them in ...

MOLLY: And Cecilia pulls out, like, a plastic box. It has a blue bottom and, like, a white opaque top.

MOLLY: The lid just came off.

MOLLY: And inside, there was kind of like a microscope slide, and the embryos were attached to that. But there was condensation on it, so we had to wait, like, 10 minutes.

MOLLY: I feel weirdly nervous.

MOLLY: But eventually we, like, looked down into this, like, little square well.

MOLLY: Okay. It's, like, 10 millimeters by 10 millimeters, and it has a little bit of liquid in it.

MOLLY: And then inside that liquid ...

MOLLY: Wow, this is a human embryo!

JAD: How big is it? How big is an embryo?

MOLLY: Oh my God, it's so small!

JAD: [laughs] It's like we talk about 14 days, and in my mind I do imagine a tiny little human. Is it even human-like at that point?

CECILIA PELLEGRINI: Tiny dot right there.

MOLLY: No. It's just a little white dot.

MOLLY: Holy crap, that's really small. That's like a grain of sand.

CECILIA PELLEGRINI: Yeah, it's about that size.

MOLLY: And it looks like -- I kept also thinking that it looked like if you took a sheet of typing paper, and you took a pin and you poked a hole in the paper and a little pinpoint of light came through.

JAD: That's what it looks like?

MOLLY: It looks like that.

MOLLY: I cannot believe that goes into a 5' 9" tall human being.

CECILIA PELLEGRINI: Mm-hmm.

MOLLY: So that was a day-12 embryo we were looking at with our naked eye, but Gist and Cecilia also took me over to this badass microscope.

MOLLY: What do I -- I don't want to break anything.

GIST CROFT: Yeah, you're not gonna break it. I'll show you how to do it.

MOLLY: So we could look at a bunch of images and see the development of an embryo day by day, starting with ...

CECILIA PELLEGRINI: You see right here, like, you have the embryo mass.

ROBERT: What are you -- what does it look like?

MOLLY: It looks very lunar to me.

MOLLY: Blown-out gray sphere that has, like, modeled surfaces. But inside of it are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of cells.

GIST CROFT: There's trophectoderm, primitive endoderm, and there's epiblast.

MOLLY: There were, like, three different types of cells, but to me it, like, looked like a simple structure. And then ...

CECILIA PELLEGRINI: This is the same embryo the next day.

MOLLY: Wait. Is this Day Nine? Oh, whoa! It looks totally different. So ...

MOLLY: It starts to get a little more complex.

GIST CROFT: Now we can see nuclei.

MOLLY: Is that what all those bright spots are?

GIST CROFT: Yeah. There's a nucleus. There's a nucleus.

MOLLY: Huh. Can we switch from nine to 10?

CECILIA PELLEGRINI: Mm-hmm.

MOLLY: So what are those oil droplet looking things?

GIST CROFT: Those look like oil droplets, don't they?

MOLLY: Now there are these, like, spherical balls around the edges, and it could be any number of things but Gist thinks they might be fat, like lipid. And the embryo, it starts forming, like, the asymmetry, like you see things move to different areas of the cell.

GIST CROFT: It makes a hollow shell inside.

MOLLY: And then your inner got cavity, that starts to form and ...

GIST CROFT: There's all of a sudden a new cell type we've never seen, the yolk sac trophectoderm cells.

MOLLY: So a totally new type of cell no one's ever seen before.

GIST CROFT: So we don't know where it comes from, and neither does anyone else.

CECILIA PELLEGRINI: Day 11.

MOLLY: I get excited every time you open one of them. Okay, day 11 ...

MOLLY: Day 11 didn't really, like, look that different to me.

MOLLY: Day 12 has a lot more going on.

GIST CROFT: That's the origin of the placenta.

MOLLY: Day 13, there's all this brightness at the bottom in the upper left hand corner.

GIST CROFT: These could be epiblast cells.

MOLLY: Wait, remind me again. The epiblast is ...

GIST CROFT: That is the -- the cell type from which the entire body eventually emerges.

MOLLY: Gist says those are the cells that all of the body comes from. Like, all the other stuff is mostly just support.

JAD: Oh, wow. So it's like the -- it's like the primal, like, primordial cells.

MOLLY: It's the foundational cells.

JAD: Foundational cells.

MOLLY: So I actually got there on day 13 of the experiment. So all of the embryos were just sort of waiting to get to day 14. And so that was it.

GIST CROFT: So let's shut this down and get this guy back in the incubator.

MOLLY: And then I was just sort of spit back out into the real world.

JAD: Are they learning fantastically new amazing things based on this? Are they ...

MOLLY: Well, like the -- the big takeaway that both of the groups had was that this embryo grew for another week without any maternal input. And it grew basically as it should have grown.

ALI BRIVANLOU: Which was mind-blowing to me and to all of my colleagues, that the human embryo will behave in a self-organizing manner in a complete absence of maternal inputs at least for 14 days.

MOLLY: Like, I think they always thought even if they got the chemistry right, there'd be some sort of system breakdown because it wasn't getting input from the mom.

MOLLY: I always, like, keep thinking of it as, like, the anti-Mother's Day message. The embryo doesn't need you. Happy Mother's Day! But the -- the one pro -- pro-mom thing is by the -- by the end, in between day, like, 12 to 14, it became clear that it started needing maternal input.

JAD: I see. Like what? Do they know?

MOLLY: Well, so they -- this is a part I thought was cool was, like, they saw that the embryo started forming tunnels and pathways for the mom to, like, infiltrate.

MOLLY: So there were little tubes and pathways that formed where, like, nerve attachment could happen and, like, circulation. So it prepares itself in this week for the mom and the connection.

JAD: That's really cool. It's like -- it's like hooking itself up to the network in a way.

MOLLY: I know. It's funny. It's like coming online as, like, a human being.

JAD: Coming online. Yeah, that's a good way to put it.

MOLLY: The other cool thing was Gist told me that right around day 10 along the edges of the embryo, this hormone shows up that your body doesn't have before, it's called, like, a gonadotropin. So you know when you take a pregnancy test, the thing it's reading is that hormone.

JAD: Oh, is that -- he thinks, like, the embryo broadcasting?

MOLLY: Boom Boom. Like, out to the rest of the body. Like, "I'm here. I'm here. Look at this hormone!"

JAD: Wow, that's super cool.

MOLLY: What is it like to look through a microscope and see Day Eight when we've been stopped at Day Seven since the 1970s or Day Nine or Day 10?

ALI BRIVANLOU: It's hard to describe it. When people receive the digital image of the Hubble telescope, those first few eyes who are getting it in their screens, I guess it has to be something very similar to that. When I look inside of our own anatomy at the time where nobody knows that we even exist, is the same as looking at dimensions that we have never imagined we will ever see because we didn't even know they exist.

MOLLY: But then at day 14 you have to essentially embalm it. You, like, can make it stop growing and freeze in the place that it's at. They call it fixing.

ROBERT: But if they wanted to, could they go past 14 days?

MOLLY: Maybe. But Ali, he said that as they got closer to Day 14, they noticed changes in the embryo that made it clear that it started needing more than just the current bath that it was in.

MOLLY: But like, and Brivanlou says this too, and Magdalena says this, it's like every day feels like an accomplishment. You'll be like, "Oh my gosh, you grew another day!" And then you start, like, cheering it on. You're like, "Grow another day! Grow another day! Oh my gosh, you're at Day 12!" And it becomes like you're, like, championing it, and then you're like, "Okay, stop. You're done."

MOLLY: And I felt like when I was standing there, I was like, "Oh that's abrupt, because I wanted it to grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. But obviously, I don't want it to grow, grow, grow too far. So I was like, "Go to Day 15." Then I'm like, "Go to Day 16." And then I'm like, "When does the joy in my voice stop?" Like this -- eventually, I'm gonna -- I'm gonna hit a point where I'm like, "That's uncomfortable."

ALI BRIVANLOU: This is something that touches us in the root of our own definition of our being and existence and individuality. It becomes a little bit like a Pandora box. So yes, you want to open it, but you have to be ready to see what's in it.

ROBERT: If technology has now moved it a whole nother week, so we can go for 14 days, maybe it's pretty soon you can go a whole nother week and then a whole nother week. Like, what -- does that mean the rule's going to have to change?

MOLLY: That is the conversation that's happening right now. Basically, once this research was published, there were commentaries and articles and columns about what do we do about the 14-day rule. And there's conferences, there's a conference in Boston that's happening in the fall.

ROBERT: But what are your choices though? Like, you could choose ...

MOLLY: You could -- could do any number of things. It depends on where you sort of throw down a biological or moral marker that you feel comfortable with. Like, you could keep it at 14 days and sort of keep it around, like, this idea of twinning and the primitive streak. You could move it a week out to, say, to day 21 when there's interesting sort of neural folds and divisions that are starting to happen in the brain. You could go to eight weeks. But it could also go back to zero.

ROBERT: Oh, so there's no consensus on ...

MOLLY: No. No, there's no consensus. And the scientists are the first to say, like, they don't want to make this decision. They just think, like, maybe we should have this conversation as a group, so the society decides, not us.

MOLLY: But it's just like, if you say that, like, it's as amazing as, like, the Hubble telescope, how does it feel when you're like, "I've gotten this far, and now I have to end it?"

ALI BRIVANLOU: So that's the toughest question you're going to ask me today. For me for sure, it was important to stop the experiment where there was still a message that we could convey that would not offend people. This is more than just science. One of the greatest challenge in reproductive biology, especially in human reproductive biology, is to make sure that you don't offend people's sense of identity, dignity, religion.

MOLLY: And so Ali, he finds himself trying to keep all of these different perspectives in his head all at once.

ALI BRIVANLOU: So for example, if the Catholic point of view is human origin is conception, then I have to respect also the Jewish point of view that says, "You know what? It's at heartbeat." I also have to respect the Muslim point of view about the origin of human life, which surprisingly for once seems to be similar to the Jewish point of view. It's also heartbeat. I also have to respect the Buddhist point of view. And what about the Hindus? The Buddhist says if you don't cut the umbilical cord, then you're not independent, you're not a human being. You don't call an organ a human being because it's attached to you. A Hindu says, "I don't know what you guys are talking about. There is no origin or end. We're circles within circles within circles. I'm a butterfly today. I'm going to die and come back as a tiger. I'm going to die and come back as a human, then come back as an elephant. What origin? A circle does not have an origin." So I am for the progress of science. I am for gaining knowledge. It's my job. It's the way I'm wired. As a human being, I satisfy our sense of curiosity. And there is nothing more curious to me than our own origin.

MOLLY: So then that would be like, you would love to know like what happens on day 21?

ALI BRIVANLOU: Absolutely. And I like to think that before I die, we will know what happens on day 21.

MOLLY: This episode was produced by Annie McEwen with help from Matt Kielty and Brenna Farrell and Simon Adler, and I actually think the entire Radiolab staff had something to do with this episode. So thanks guys. And I want to thank the research library at Georgetown University.

ROBERT: Thank you for listening.

ANSWERING MACHINE: To play the message, press 2.

LEROY WALTERS: This is LeRoy Walters. I'm a retired faculty member from Georgetown University, where I was part of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics and the philosophy department. Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad. Dylan Keefe is our Director of Sound Design. Soren Wheeler is Senior Editor. Jamie York is our Senior Producer. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Brenna Farrell, David Gebel, Matt Kielty, Robert Krulwich, Annie McEwen, Latif Nasser, Melissa O'Donnell, Arianne Wack and Molly Webster, with help from Nigar Fatali, Alexandra B. Young, Charu Sinha, Percia Verlin and W. Harry Fortuna. Our fact-checkers are Eva Dasher and Michelle Harris. That's it. Thanks. Bye.

ANSWERING MACHINE: End of message.

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The Primitive Streak | Radiolab | WNYC Studios

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MOLLY: We're gonna start with a conversation that I had with Jad a few weeks ago. MOLLY: So, I like medical stories. JAD: Mm-hmm. This I know about you. MOLLY: This you know. And I read this website called StatNews.com, which does sort of really -- it's like a new website out of Boston.

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WASHINGTON - It wasn't the first time President Obama denounced a hate crime in the aftermath of a mass shooting, and it wasn't the first time he expressed resolve in the face of a terrorist attack.

And it certainly wasn't the first time he called for action to keep firearms out of the hands of would-be killers.

But Sunday's remarks following the Orlando nightclub shooting were the first to incorporate all three of those themes.

It was at least the 14th time that President Obama spoke to the nation in the immediate aftermath of a mass shooting - and the sixth time within just the past year.

Obama himself has acknowledged that his remarks have become all too predictable. "Somehow this has become routine. The reporting has become routine. My response here, from this podium, has become routine," Obama said last October, following the shooting at an Oregon community college.

A look what Obama said, and when, on mass shootings over the years:

"Today, as Americans, we grieve the brutal murder - a horrific massacre - of dozens of innocent people. We pray for their families, who are grasping for answers with broken hearts. We stand with the people of Orlando, who have endured a terrible attack on their city. Although it's still early in the investigation, we know enough to say that this was an act of terror and an act of hate. And as Americans, we are united in grief, in outrage, and in resolve to defend our people....

"We are still learning all the facts. This is an open investigation. We've reached no definitive judgment on the precise motivations of the killer. The FBI is appropriately investigating this as an act of terrorism. And I've directed that we must spare no effort to determine what - if any - inspiration or association this killer may have had with terrorist groups. What is clear is that he was a person filled with hatred. Over the coming days, we'll uncover why and how this happened, and we will go wherever the facts lead us....

"This is an especially heartbreaking day for all our friends - our fellow Americans - who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. The shooter targeted a nightclub where people came together to be with friends, to dance and to sing, and to live. The place where they were attacked is more than a nightclub - it is a place of solidarity and empowerment where people have come together to raise awareness, to speak their minds, and to advocate for their civil rights.

"So this is a sobering reminder that attacks on any American - regardless of race, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation - is an attack on all of us and on the fundamental values of equality and dignity that define us as a country. And no act of hate or terror will ever change who we are or the values that make us Americans.

"Today marks the most deadly shooting in American history. The shooter was apparently armed with a handgun and a powerful assault rifle. This massacre is therefore a further reminder of how easy it is for someone to get their hands on a weapon that lets them shoot people in a school, or in a house of worship, or a movie theater, or in a nightclub. And we have to decide if that's the kind of country we want to be. And to actively do nothing is a decision as well."

"On Saturday, another one of our communities was terrorized by gun violence. As many of you read, six people were gunned down in a rampage in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Before I joined all of you, I called the mayor, the sheriff, and the police chief there, and told them that they would have whatever federal support they needed in their investigation. Their local officials and first responders, by the way, did an outstanding job in apprehending the individual very quickly. But you got families who are shattered today.

"Earlier this year, I took some steps that will make it harder for dangerous people, like this individual, to buy a gun. But clearly, we're going to need to do more if we're going to keep innocent Americans safe. And I've got to assume that all of you are just as tired as I am of seeing this stuff happen in your states. So that's an area where we also need to partner and think about what we can do in a common-sense way, in a bipartisan way, without some of the ideological rhetoric that so often surrounds that issue."

"The one thing we do know is that we have a pattern now of mass shootings in this country that has no parallel anywhere else in the world. And there are some steps we could take not to eliminate every one of these mass shootings, but to improve the odds that they don't happen as frequently: common-sense gun safety laws, stronger background checks.

"And so my hope is that we're able to contain this particular shooting, and we don't yet know what the motives of the shooters are, but what we do know is that there are steps we can take to make Americans safer, and that we should come together in a bipartisan basis at every level of government to make these are rare as opposed to normal. We should never think that this is something that just happens in the ordinary course of events, because it doesn't happen with the same frequency in other countries."

"There's been another mass shooting in America, this time in a community college in Oregon. That means there are more American families, moms, dads, children, whose lives have been changed forever. ...

"We talked about this after Columbine and Blacksburg, after Tucson, after Newtown, after Aurora, after Charleston. It cannot be this easy for somebody who wants to inflict harm on other people to get his or her hands on a gun.

"And what's become routine, of course, is the response to those who oppose any kind of common-sense gun legislation. Right now, I can imagine the press releases being cranked out: 'We need more guns,' they'll argue, 'fewer gun safety laws.' Does anybody really believe that? ...

"And of course, what's also routine is that somebody somewhere will comment and say, 'Obama politicized this issue.' This is something we should politicize. It is relevant to our common life together, to the body politic....

"I hope and pray that I don't have to come out again during my tenure as president to offer my condolences to families in these circumstances. But based on my experience as president, I can't guarantee that. And that's terrible to say. And it can change."

"My main message right now is obviously the deepest sympathies of the American people to the four marines that have been killed. It is a heartbreaking circumstance for these individuals who have served our country with great valor to be killed in this fashion. And although the families are still in the process of being contacted, I want them to know that I speak for the American people in expressing our deepest condolences and knowing that they have their full support - our full support as they try to overcome the grief that's involved here."

"Michelle and I know several members of Emanuel AME Church. We knew their pastor, Reverend Clementa Pinckney, who, along with eight others, gathered in prayer and fellowship and was murdered last night. And to say our thoughts and prayers are with them and their families and their community doesn't say enough to convey the heartache and the sadness and the anger that we feel. Any death of this sort is a tragedy. Any shooting involving multiple victims is a tragedy. There is something particularly heartbreaking about the death happening in a place in which we seek solace and we seek peace, in a place of worship.

"We don't have all the facts, but we do know that, once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun."

"That this occurred now - as Jews were preparing to celebrate Passover, as Christians were observing Palm Sunday - makes this tragedy all the more painful. And today, as Passover begins, we're seeing a number of synagogues and Jewish community centers take added security precautions. Nobody should have to worry about their security when gathering with their fellow believers. No one should ever have to fear for their safety when they go to pray."

"Any shooting is troubling. Obviously, this reopens the pain of what happened at Fort Hood five years ago. We know these families. We know their incredible service to our country and the sacrifices that they make. Obviously, our thoughts and prayers were - are with the entire community. And we are going to do everything we can to make sure that the community at Fort Hood has what it needs to deal with the current situation, but also any potential aftermath.

"We're heartbroken that something like this might have happened again. And I don't want to comment on the facts until I know exactly what has happened, but for now, I would just hope that everybody across the country is keeping the families and the community of Fort Hood in our thoughts and in our prayers. The folks there have sacrificed so much on behalf of our freedom. Many of the people there have been on multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. They serve with valor, and they serve with distinction. And when they're at their home base, they need to feel safe."

"So we are confronting yet another mass shooting, and today it happened on a military installation in our nation's capital. It's a shooting that targeted our military and civilian personnel. These are men and women who were going to work, doing their job protecting all of us. They're patriots, and they know the dangers of serving abroad, but today they faced the unimaginable violence that they wouldn't have expected here at home."

"We've endured too many of these tragedies in the past few years. And each time I learn the news, I react not as a President, but as anybody else would: as a parent. And that was especially true today. I know there's not a parent in America who doesn't feel the same overwhelming grief that I do.

"The majority of those who died today were children, beautiful little kids between the ages of 5 and 10 years old. They had their entire lives ahead of them: birthdays, graduations, weddings, kids of their own. Among the fallen were also teachers, men and women who devoted their lives to helping our children fulfill their dreams."

"I think all of us recognize that these kinds of terrible, tragic events are happening with too much regularity for us not to do some soul searching and to examine additional ways that we can reduce violence. ..

"We don't yet know fully what motivated this individual to carry out this terrible act. If it turns out, as some early reports indicate, that it may have been motivated in some way by the ethnicity of those who were attending the temple, I think the American people immediately recoil against those kinds of attitudes, and I think it will be very important for us to reaffirm, once again, that in this country, regardless of what we look like, where we come from, who we worship; we are all one people, and we look after one another, and we respect one another."

"Even as we learn how this happened and who's responsible, we may never understand what leads anybody to terrorize their fellow human beings like this. Such violence, such evil is senseless. It's beyond reason. But while we will never know fully what causes somebody to take the life of another, we do know what makes life worth living. The people we lost in Aurora loved, and they were loved. They were mothers and fathers. They were husbands and wives, sisters and brothers, sons and daughters, friends and neighbors. They had hopes for the future, and they had dreams that were not yet fulfilled.

"And if there's anything to take away from this tragedy, it's the reminder that life is very fragile. Our time here is limited, and it is precious. And what matters at the end of the day is not the small things, it's not the trivial things, which so often consume us and our daily lives. Ultimately, it's how we choose to treat one another and how we love one another."

"Gabby Giffords was a friend of mine. She is not only an extraordinary public servant, but she is also somebody who is warm and caring. She is well liked by her colleagues and well liked by her constituents. Her husband Mark Kelly is a Navy captain and one of America's valiant astronauts. It's not surprising that today Gabby was doing what she always does: listening to the hopes and concerns of her neighbors. That is the essence of what our democracy is all about. That is why this is more than a tragedy for those involved. It is a tragedy for Arizona and a tragedy for our entire country."

"My immediate thoughts and prayers are with the wounded and with the families of the fallen, and with those who live and serve at Fort Hood. And these are men and women who have made the selfless and courageous decision to risk and at times give their lives to protect the rest of us on a daily basis. It's difficult enough when we lose these brave Americans in battles overseas. It is horrifying that they should come under fire at an Army base on American soil."

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14 mass shootings, 14 speeches: How Obama has responded

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WASHINGTON - It wasn't the first time President Obama denounced a hate crime in the aftermath of a mass shooting, and it wasn't the first time he expressed resolve in the face of a terrorist attack. And it certainly wasn't the first time he called for action to keep firearms out of the hands of would-be killers.

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Let's just start it from the top. Okay, you ready? Robert Krulwich: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Jad Abumrad: All right. So for reporter Sheri Fink, who works at the New York Times and is author of the book Five Days at Memorial, you could say it all began with two tents.

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Art returns to the public after 80 years

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Art returns to the public after 80 years

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Antiquities are everywhere in the Italian capital. But incredibly, one of the most important collections was hidden away for decades:

"It's like having 600-plus works of art drop out of the sky," enthused archeologist Darius Arya, who met correspondent Seth Doane at Rome's Capitoline Museum. "This figure right here is just out of the textbooks. I mean, the sort of thing that we've all studied but we've never seen."

It's the first time in about 70 years these pieces are on public display.

Doane asked, "Is there any way to rank this collection?"

"This is at the top," Arya laughed. "This is the greatest private collection of ancient Roman antiquity."

It belongs to one of Rome's most powerful aristocratic families, the Torlonias, who over generations spent their banking fortune accruing art.

The collection is a who's-who of antiquity: Busts of every emperor, sarcophagi, and reliefs. The 94 ancient Greek and Roman marbles on exhibition are just a fraction of the 620 owned by the noble family.

Doane asked, "Why did this sit locked away for so long?"

"It's just very complicated," Arya replied. "You have many different intentions of a family, you have many different intentions of the city, you have many properties, you have great costs."

Let's just say it "took a while" to work out the details.

Over the years, the Italian state tried to persuade the Torlonias to sell or display the works. Plans to create a museum repeatedly fell through. Instead, the statues sat locked away in Rome until February of last year, when "Sunday Morning" was allowed in.

We cannot reveal the exact location, but archeologist Salvatore Settis, the exhibit curator, let Doane get a glimpse before the precious marbles went on display. They were still restoring them, after sitting out-of-sight for decades.

"Did you know that this collection was just somewhere waiting to be seen?" asked Doane.

"Everybody knows this," he replied.

He knew because Prince Alessandro Torlonia published this catalogue in the 1880s, which was very unusual in the late nineteenth century. Each piece was photographed and numbered, but viewable only in two dimensions.

Doane said of the display, "It's incredible to be surrounded by all of this."

"Yeah, because each and every one of those pieces has a different story," Settis said.

And the collection also serves as a history of restoration techniques. While, today, we'd leave fragments, in the past the style was to reconstruct what was missing.

Settis said, "One of the statues was put together, probably in 17th century, out of 112 different pieces of at least three different qualities of marble."

Sometimes the "newer" additions are more significant. The head on an ancient goat was added around 1620 by famed sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini. "Spectacularly beautiful," Settis called it.

The Torlonia family acquired pieces though the purchase of villas packed with art, and sometimes carried out their own archeological excavations on their properties.

Settis said, "When I first came in here, I was surprised by the number, though I knew the number."

"So, if you knew the number, why were you surprised?" asked Doane.

"Because seeing things in a book and seeing things in the real world is a totally different thing. It was a really moving, really a great experience."

It's an experience more can have. The marbles are set to travel across Europe, and likely to the U.S., as this remarkable record of our collective history is finally shared.

For more info:

Story produced by Anna Matranga and Aria Shavelson. Editor: Carol Ross.

See also:

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Ancient art returns to public view in Rome

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Antiquities are everywhere in the Italian capital. But incredibly, one of the most important collections was hidden away for decades: "It's like having 600-plus works of art drop out of the sky," enthused archeologist Darius Arya, who met correspondent Seth Doane at Rome's Capitoline Museum. "This figure right here is just out of the textbooks.

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Co-hosts Alix Spiegel and Lulu Miller ask the question, "Are my thoughts related to my inner wishes, do they reveal who I really am?" The answer can have profound consequences for your life.

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A high school girl wakes up one day with a pain in her hip. Days pass and the pain gets worse and doctors don't know what to do. Formerly a dancer, she can now barely get out of bed. What could be wrong? It turns out she has a disease afflicting thousands of teenage girls all over the country. In this episode we look at what's known as "amplified pain syndrome." But the episode is much more than a medical mystery. We look at how our culture's massive effort to address pain has paradoxically increased it. And we follow one young girl as she struggles through a bizarre and extreme treatment program.

Read this story on our Health blog, Shots.

Special thanks to the following musicians:

Steven Riche - Constellations

Jonathan Barlow - Over Oceans

Firephly - Running

Ramtin Arablouei - 5 Pack

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Dragons hoard treasure, deep in their lairs. They don't show it off to their neighbors. Revisionist History applies dragon psychology to the strange world of art museums, with help from Andy Warhol, J.R.R. Tolkien, a handful of accountants and the world's leading hoarding expert.

SOURCES AND LINKS
METROPOLITAN MUSEUM'S 2018-2019 FINANCIAL REPORT MICHAEL O'HARE ON KEEPING MUSEUMS FINANCIALLY ACCOUNTABLE STUFF: COMPULSIVE HOARDING AND THE MEANING OF THINGS BY GAIL STEKETEE AND RANDY FROST

Malcolm Gladwell is president and co-founder of Pushkin Industries. He is a journalist, a speaker, and the author of six New York Times bestsellers.

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Dragons hoard treasure, deep in their lairs. They don't show it off to their neighbors. Revisionist History applies dragon psychology to the strange world of art museums, with help from Andy Warhol, J.R.R. Tolkien, a handful of accountants and the world's leading hoarding expert.

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[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad. A couple months ago, the More Perfect team and I released a doc called The Gun Show, which was sort of an off-angle look at the history that underlies how we talk about guns in this country. It landed right after the mass shooting in Vegas. Unfortunately, here we are again. We noticed that a lot of More Perfect listeners were sharing this doc in the wake of what happened in Florida. So we thought we would share it with Radiolab listeners who haven't heard it yet. It's reported by a guy named Sean Rameswaram. At the time, Sean was a producer at More Perfect. He's since gone on to start a daily podcast at Vox called Today Explained. I encourage you to check out that show. Sean is amazing. In the meantime, here's The Gun Show.

SEAN RAMESWARAM: I think we should start with one of the most confusing sentences in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

SEAN: Not that one. No, I got a different one. "A well-regulated militia, comma, being necessary to the security of a free state, comma, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, comma, shall not be infringed.

JAD: Say it one more time. Say -- I'm sorry.

JAD: And do it -- do it with the commas again.

SEAN: Sure. "A well-regulated militia, comma, being necessary to the security of a free state, comma, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, totally unnecessary comma, shall not be infringed.

SEAN: Adam Winkler, who wrote the book on the Second Amendment. And that book is called Gunfight.

SEAN: He's a professor of law ...

SEAN: Which is like a nerdy, professorial joke. But like, seriously, what is it? And, like, it had to be this one? Couldn't it have been the amendment about, like, quartering soldiers in your house that was really confusing?

SEAN: No, it's the one about guns that they made, like, just indecipherable.

SEAN: So when this thing was written, we had just fought this war with the British, this Revolutionary War. And they tried to win it right from the get-go by coming for our guns. So these new states are looking at this new federal government, they're going like, "Meh, we don't know if we want to trust you quite yet." So there's this second amendment that says, "You guys can fight back."

JAD: Like, the feds aren't gonna disarm you. You can -- your militias can keep your guns.

SEAN: That's I think what we agree on. But then after that, you just look at the sentence, then it's not just the commas that are confusing. If you look at the sentence as a whole ...

SEAN: There's some noun confusion. I mean, it's obvious that the sentence is about someone's right to bear arms, but who? Who gets that right? At the beginning of the sentence you get ...

SEAN: The militia. States have a right to form militias, to assemble groups of people. And those people got to have their guns. That's easy enough. But then later in the sentence, there's ...

SEAN: The people. Which people? Those people over there in the militia? All people? If you mean all people, why did you say militia? It's like the first clause seems to point to some sort of collective right to bear arms, and the second clause seems to point to some individual right to bear arms.

SEAN: This is Jill Lepore.

SEAN: She's also a professor of American History.

SEAN: And Jill says from the beginning, when people thought about the Second Amendment, they tended to just focus on the first part.

SEAN: That this confusing sentence was widely read as this collective militia right, not an individual one.

SEAN: Jill says that just didn't exist.

SEAN: This is Stephen Halbrook. He's represented the NRA in several cases.

SEAN: He actually thinks A) the sentence is just fine as is.

SEAN: B) the framers were thinking about an individual right to bear arms.

JAD: So which -- which was it?

SEAN: That's -- that's a really good question, Jad. I mean, it's a complicated one too. What I can tell you is that, you know, people I spoke to for the story said at least in the 20th century when the -- when the Second Amendment was taught in law schools, it was taught as this -- it was taught as this sort of antiquated, outdated thing that had to do with militias, not so much individual rights. But Jill Lepore, Stephen Halbrook, and their respective sides, something they can both agree on is that this super-sacred Second Amendment, this third rail of our American politics today, that just was not a thing. It was not like that.

SEAN: People ignored this amendment.

SEAN: Don't get me wrong. This is not to say people didn't think about guns. People had guns, states regulated guns. But for most of our history, the Second Amendment it was like -- it was like sort of the runt of the Bill of Rights litter. Like, no one argued about it.

SEAN: There was no fight. No fight.

SEAN: Because there was this window of time where all of this changes, the script just flips. There's 200 years of everything being chill, and then suddenly you get this.

SEAN: So basically in just a flash, the Second Amendment goes from being ignored to being ...

SEAN: Explosive, to being radioactive. And in the process, we start to read the thing totally differently. All of a sudden, it's this hotly debated thing that's got nothing to do with that first part and everything to do with the second part.

SEAN: Everything to do with my personal right. And me.

SEAN: And what I want to know is, how did that happen? How did we start reading the Second Amendment the way we do now? And what I found out is that, in the modern history of the gun rights movement and -- and how we read the Second Amendment can be boiled down to these three totally unrelated, disjointed-seeming, revolutionary events.

SEAN: One, an invasion in Sacramento.

SEAN: Two, a revolt in Cincinnati.

SEAN: Number three, a reckoning at the Supreme Court of the United States.

JAD: So you're gonna tell me the story in three chapters?

[MORE PERFECT INTRO]

NARRATOR: Chapter 1. The Invasion.

SEAN: Yeah. So this transition from the militia to the individual, my right to bear arms, you could argue that that whole individual gun rights movement started in the 1960s with the Black Panthers in Oakland.

SEAN: Just to give some context. This is 1966. It's been an exceptionally bad time for race relations all over the country.

SEAN: Protesters are being beaten at sit-ins. There's attack dogs and hoses. And in particular ...

SEAN: There was major tension between the Black community and the police.

SEAN: October, 1966, Bobby Seale and his friend Huey P, Newton, they start this organization called the Black Panthers.

SEAN: Now Huey, Bobby's co-founder ...

SEAN: He was going to the University of San Francisco's School of Law, and one day he's sitting there as you do in law school, thinking about the law, thinking about Malcolm X, thinking about what he can do in Oakland. And it hits him.

SEAN: That they could argue that the Second Amendment gave them a right to have a gun.

JAD: And no one had ever said that before?

SEAN: But Adam Winkler says people who argued that were in the minority. They weren't taken too seriously. This was one of the first times that the individual rights reading was forced into the mainstream, because coming out of law school class, Huey tells Bobby if we have a right to bear arms, we individuals?

SEAN: Huey pointed to that second half of the Second Amendment.

SEAN: He also pointed to a California state law that said you could carry a gun as long as it wasn't concealed.

SEAN: Bobby told me about the first time they did it.

SEAN: He says it was a weekend night, a police officer had pulled over some guy. And they started watching from down the street, and a crowd starts to gather.

SEAN: So you got this white cop on one side of the street.

SEAN: And on the other side of the street, you got a dozen black guys holding shotguns.

SEAN: He told me the moment the cop noticed. He immediately stopped what he was doing with the guy he had pulled over and walked over to them and said ...

SEAN: And this is where the dominoes start to fall. The standoff resolved themselves peacefully, but the cops in Oakland are not happy. And they -- they immediately start running this up the chain.

SEAN: So this bill, the Mulford Act, is up for debate at the California state capitol in Sacramento. And Bobby Seale decides the Panthers should be there for the debate and that they should take their guns.

SEAN: So they roll up to the assembly in Sacramento. And guess who happens to be waiting for them right there on the front lawn of the assembly?

JAD: What are we talking what year are we talking now?

SEAN: Guess who's governor?

JAD: I don't know. Who was the governor?

SEAN: So you got Ronald Reagan.

SEAN: And a bunch of white kids.

SEAN: Hanging out on the front lawn of the -- of the State Building in Sacramento. And this is the 1960s. This would be insane now.

SEAN: And he says some of the kids ...

SEAN: So Reagan's like, "What's going on?" The press is like, "What's going on?" And Bobby Seale ...

ARCHIVE CLIP, Bobby Seale: The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense calls upon the American people in general ...]

ARCHIVE CLIP, Bobby Seale: ... and the Black people in particular, to take careful note of the racist California Legislature, which is now considering legislation aimed at keeping the Black people disarmed and powerless at the very same time racist police agencies throughout the country are intensifying the terror, brutality, murder and repression of Black people.]
BOBBY SEALE: Et cetera.
SEAN: And he says while he was reading that ...

SEAN: Grab Ronald Reagan ...

SEAN: And when they got off the elevator, he asked someone which way to the spectator section so the Panthers could watch the legislature debate the bill.

JAD: Wait. they walked into the state capitol with -- with shotguns?

SEAN: And then all hell breaks loose.

SEAN: You can point to this forgotten, unknown moment here in the State Building in Sacramento as, like, the game changer for the conversation about guns in America. Because suddenly overnight ...

SEAN: But in being introduced to the world, you had a lot of people going, "Wait, what? Like, there's a bunch of Black men rolling around with guns?"

JAD: Walking into the Capitol Building?

SEAN: When there's kids around?

SEAN: Now, people have all kinds of opinions about the Black Panthers and what they did, particularly after Huey Newton ...

SEAN: ... later that same year was arrested for shooting and killing a cop.

SEAN: The case was eventually dismissed, but what seems clear is that the Black Panthers decision to use the Second Amendment to arm themselves to show up armed at the state capitol in California ...

SEAN: In California, but also federal gun control.

SEAN: Suddenly, America was like, "We've got to get guns off the streets."

SEAN: Every action creates a reaction. And at the same time that this Panthers thing is hitting front pages of newspapers around the world, you've got assassinations, you've got race riots, you've got Vietnam protests. All of a sudden, everyone's clamoring for gun control. Democrats and Republicans. In fact ...

SEAN: Reagan. That was the exact same day as the Black Panthers showed up at the state capitol in Sacramento with their shotguns.

JAD: So Reagan. Reagan was into gun control.

SEAN: Reagan's got his fingerprints all over this thing. What's happening here is the Black Panthers show up in the capital, Sacramento, and Ronald Reagan react. They create some gun control. Then there's even more gun control, even federal gun control. And a lot of people are sitting at home watching this and they start to get very upset. Which brings us to ...

NARRATOR: Chapter 2. The Revolt.

SEAN: These two guys, John Aquilino.

SEAN: They get us there. And they've both been into guns pretty much their entire lives.

SEAN: But neither one of them was particularly hard core about their gun beliefs until around the time the Black Panthers came along.

SEAN: John told me, Joe as well that it wasn't the Panthers themselves that were the problem.

SEAN: It was all the gun control laws that came in the wake of the Panthers.

SEAN: Joe says he starts to see gun shops in his neighborhood close. Like, the furniture store in Buffalo that used to have ...

SEAN: They stop selling them. And he says that just really bothered him because the reason you have a gun is for protection.

SEAN: Which wasn't an abstract idea for him. Buffalo in the '60s and '70s, not the safest place in the world. His house was even broken into.

SEAN: Joe says he and his wife and his dog huddled in one room with a gun while these two guys stormed through his house and robbed him.

SEAN: Joe's whole relationship with firearms is sort of predicated upon that -- this idea that it's for self-defense. And here he's got people breaking into his house. He's got the cops not being there for him. He's got the government trying to take his gun away. So what do you do? You join the NRA.

SEAN: But this came at a moment where the NRA was at this crossroads unlike any it had seen before or since. Back when Joe joined in the early '70s ...

SEAN: Because according to Adam Winkler it was never meant to be.

SEAN: And, you know, you don't hear much about the NRA's founders ...

SEAN: Yeah, for, like, a hundred years their main focus was, like, teaching Boy Scouts how to shoot straight.

SEAN: It's like the NRA's version of Playboy. Guns instead of girls.

SEAN: The NRA at that point was sort of like a gun trade group. They were not super political, and -- and the people who ran it ...

SEAN: They were just like these wealthy businessmen who like to hunt, according to Joe.

SEAN: But you had all these people coming in, like Joe and like John ...

SEAN: And this would lead to this straight-up head-on collision at the NRA. Now, right when Joe and John joined the NRA, the organization had just for the first time sort of set up this lobbying arm.

SEAN: John actually got hired to work there in 1976.

SEAN: That's what they both wanted it to do.

SEAN: In the mid-'70s, the part of the NRA that lobbied politicians had to rent office space from the hotel next door to the NRA.

SEAN: Right after he was hired ...

SEAN: Sell the headquarters there.

SEAN: The older guard didn't seem to have the stomach for whatever gunfight some members wanted to have.

SEAN: They thought, like, "Maybe we should try and kind of get out of this whole gun business thing."

SEAN: John says there was even a moment when a report surface that suggested ...

SEAN: This is from one of those meetings.

SEAN: Now prior to this big meeting, there had been little meetings.

SEAN: Joe and a few other guys ...

SEAN: They'd been going back and forth.

SEAN: One point they even met up.

SEAN: And they decided to form a small but fierce faction within the NRA.

SEAN: And this tiny group planned a coup.

SEAN: The Federation members were all wearing buttons that said National Rifle Association with the word 'Rifle' underlined.

SEAN: They spread out through the crowd.

SEAN: Pledge of Allegiance.

SEAN: When it came time for the members' part of the meeting where members submit proposals which happens in, like, this super parliamentary sort of way. This guy ...

SEAN: He was part of their group.

SEAN: Translation. We've got these 15 demands.

SEAN: The demands are basically, number one: we demand that the NRA not move its headquarters.

SEAN: We demand the Institute for Legislative Action, which you want to kill, should have more power.

SEAN: And we demand that the current NRA leadership be replaced.

SEAN: So the Federation guys making all these demands ...

SEAN: That was running the meeting ...

SEAN: Every time the Federation guy would make a motion ...

SEAN: And then the floor debate would begin. People would start to speak for and against each amendment. The Federation members would use their walkie-talkies to coordinate who spoke at what microphone.

SEAN: So as each of the 15 amendments are being debated, the insurrectionists are running around in their orange caps with their walkie-talkies trying to rally support from everyone.

SEAN: But Joe says one of the big turning points is when a guy named Bob Kukla gets up to the mic. He was at the time the head of the Institute for Legislative Action. He gets up to the mic.

SEAN: You remember cassette tapes, right? This was one that Bob Kukla secretly recorded.

SEAN: But what you hear on this tape is Bob Kukla talking to his bosses at the NRA, and they're yelling at him.

SEAN: They're basically like, "Bob, shut up!"

SEAN: Over the course of this one nine-hour meeting on a hot steamy night in Cincinnati, every single one of those 15 proposals was passed.

SEAN: Ensured the NRA wouldn't change its name. They fired the leadership.

SEAN: And maybe the biggest change, the most important change was that the Institute for Legislative Action, this political lobbying arm of the NRA, it was given the keys to the car. They were not the bastard stepchild anymore. They were the NRA.

SEAN: And just shortly after this coup, the NRA bolts this abridged version of the Second Amendment right on the wall, front and center in its headquarters.

SEAN: Nice, clean, totally uncomplicated sentence.

SEAN: I asked John, like, what about the militia part of the sentence? Why doesn't the NRA ever talk about that?

SEAN: Post-coup, the NRA took a very hard line on gun control, and became an irrepressible political force in America.

SEAN: They start pouring millions of dollars into lobbying, and just a few years after that Cincinnati revolt, the NRA endorses its first presidential candidate.

SEAN: At this point, everyone and their uncle leaves out the militia part of the Second Amendment, which is why Americans eventually start to forget that the militia clause or whatever you want to call it even exists.

SEAN: This is Jill Lepore again.

SEAN: But even if -- even if the Panthers and the President and the American people are all down to sort of forget about this militia clause of the Second Amendment, it didn't mean a lot without the courts. And the courts, particularly the Supreme Court, weren't buying it.

SEAN: Yeah, so the Supreme Court obviously not dying to have this conversation at the moment. But it's not just the Supreme Court, if you look at the federal courts, the entire federal court system in America, there has not once in our history at this point over 200 years been a single instance of some gun law, some state local gun law getting up to a court and the court going, "You know what? You can't do this. It violates the Second Amendment." That's just not even happening.

JAD: There wasn't a Second Amendment smackdown anywhere in federal court?

SEAN: This isn't -- this isn't a thing.

SEAN: And getting the Supreme Court to weigh in on it? That doesn't even look like it could be a thing. It doesn't even look like much more than a fantasy until ...

SEAN: Dick Heller showed up.

SEAN: And changed everything.

JAD: This is The Gun Show for More Perfect, featured here on Radiolab. We'll continue in a moment.

JAD: That's Sandy Levinson, professor at the University of Texas law school. I'm Jad Abumrad here with Sean Rameswaram. All right, so Sean ...

JAD: It's -- I guess now it's time for Chapter 3, Dick Heller, right?

SEAN: Yeah, we're gonna get to Dick, but first here's what's going on in America. The Second Amendment has become one of those issues that can get you elected. Academics have begun to have a vigorous debate about its meaning. But the Supreme Court is still staying out of it. They're leaving this up to the states which already have all sorts of gun laws of their own to deal with. But then ...

SEAN: But then George W. Bush is elected. The NRA likes George W. Bush.

SEAN: UCLA law professor Adam Winkler again.

SEAN: And almost right after he gets into office, Bush's Attorney General ...

SEAN: This public letter to the NRA ...

SEAN: And that was a first. It's a big deal. Before this, all the decisions had kind of veered in the other direction.

SEAN: Now one thing you need to know about these guys is that they weren't necessarily doing it for the guns.

SEAN: For them, it was more about getting the government to back off.

SEAN: So that was their angle.

JAD: That's -- that is interesting. I've always wondered why the gun rights movement has become such a proxy war for, like, anti-government-ism.

SEAN: Yeah. Well I mean, if you think about it, and this is something Professor Sandy Levinson told me, is that sort of embedded in this amendment is the very idea that you can take up arms ...

SEAN: ... to protect yourself and your fellow man from tyranny.

SEAN: Anyway, getting back to the story, these three libertarian lawyers, they decide to put together a case. And their idea was to target this really restrictive gun law in DC.

SEAN: But in order to challenge that law, they needed to find a plaintiff.

JAD: Interesting. How do you find a plaintiff? You look for somebody who got robbed? What do you do?

SEAN: They found a guy who was gay.

SEAN: Who had previously been assaulted when he lived in California because he was gay.

SEAN: And he wanted a gun to protect himself.

SEAN: She was trying to protect herself against local drug dealers, and the cops actually told her she should get a gun which was illegal.

SEAN: So they had this whole group.

SEAN: And the problem they ran into was that all of these super sympathetic plaintiffs didn't have this very special thing they needed to bring a case.

SEAN: Like, if you're gonna bring a case ...

SEAN: You have to show some physical concrete proof that harm has been done, that you've been denied a gun. And none of the plaintiffs had that. Except for one guy.

SEAN: So he actually gets paid by the Freedom.

SEAN: I met Dick right outside the Supreme Court, the building where he became famous. He's a slim 75-year-old white guy, sports glasses that look straight out of the '70s.

SEAN: I actually happened to meet him in DC the day after Trump won the election.

SEAN: The President-elect was visiting the White House. They were protesters everywhere.

SEAN: Most of the protesters that were passing us were white, but just as a few young Black men pass us by, he says ...

SEAN: We ended up talking at the Hyatt which is just down the street from the Supreme Court. And -- and Dick explained to me that his journey with guns, like John and Joe, began pretty casually. Like, 1976, he's living in DC. And one day he's sitting at home.

SEAN: Different Matt Dillon.

SEAN: But then just a few months after he got that gun ...

SEAN: A trend that started with the Mulford Act and the Black Panthers back in Sacramento hits Washington, DC.

SEAN: You get that gun law which outlawed all handguns.

SEAN: Eventually, he decides on option D: give the gun to his brother.

SEAN: Dick made his gun visitation situation sound functional, but I think like any long-distance relationship it mostly sucked, because more and more he didn't feel safe where he lived.

SEAN: It's clear that living through the crack epidemic in DC really shaped a lot of Dick's views on guns. So in the years after the handgun ban, Dick starts the very long process of finding a way to get his gun back to DC. And he eventually even quits his desk job to pursue getting his gun back full time.

SEAN: Golly! Just like that, Dick was able to have a gun in DC, but only during the day and only while he was working.

SEAN: He finally starts looking for some help, some legal help.

SEAN: And right around the time Dick's out there looking for some help, turns out these lawyers are out there looking for some Dick.

SEAN: He wasn't their ideal, sympathetic guy.

SEAN: You know, because of that plantation thing he said, or he would always talk smack about the federal government in interviews.

SEAN: So he wasn't their favorite plaintiff, but ...

SEAN: And he had this denial slip or whatever it's called. He like, literally had this physical proof of his grievance. And this simple, technical, arbitrary, little stupid piece of paper gave him what's known as standing to bring the case.

SEAN: Regardless, he became their guy, and these three lawyers they take the case to the DC court.

NARRATOR: Chapter 3. The Reckoning

SEAN: This was the first time in our history the Supreme Court would directly try to figure out what the Second Amendment means.

SEAN: DC's lawyer Walter Dellinger gets up and jumps right into it.

SEAN: And he sort of begins with this central question. Like, what was James Madison thinking when he wrote this super confusing sentence, like, 200 years ago? Was he thinking about the individual people and their right to own a gun? Or was he thinking about the collective right of the militia to own a gun?

SEAN: And he says if you look at the phrase ...

SEAN: How it was used at the time ...

SEAN: Dellinger says that if you look at some of Madison's rough drafts of the Second Amendment, it's pretty clear that when he says people have a right to bear arms, all he really means is, like, report for duty.

SEAN: Chief Justice Roberts jumps in and is like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa."

SEAN: If they meant just the people in the state militias ...

SEAN: At this point everyone sort of jumps in. A bunch of justices start interrupting each other. It's kind of like a scrum. And they're all trying to figure out okay, so when Madison wrote the phrase ...

SEAN: Like, who were the people he was talking about?

SEAN: Was the people just the militia, or everyone, all the people? What is the relationship between the second part of the sentence, the people part, and the first part of the sentence, the militia part?

SEAN: Scottish Highlanders for some reason. At one point ...

SEAN: They even sort of start to diagram Madison's sentence.

SEAN: And the net result according to Adam Winkler was the four liberals ...

SEAN: Seem to want to emphasize the militia part of the sentence. And then you had the four conservative justices.

SEAN: Who seem to want to emphasize the people part of the sentence. The second part.

SEAN: And Team People's team captain, the quarterback, the first chair that day was without a doubt Justice Antonin Scalia.

SEAN: This is Joan Biskupic.

SEAN: She's also written a biography of Justice Scalia.

SEAN: What you hear throughout the arguments is that Scalia is very, very forwardly pressing the sort of individual rights argument.

SEAN: And justices like David Souter ...

SEAN: Are arguing back saying, "What about the collective? The militia?" This goes on for well over an hour, the justices sort of grilling the lawyers, arguing amongst themselves, everybody trying to figure out what was in James Madison's head. Until finally Justice Breyer, one of the liberal justices is like ...

SEAN: Forget what Madison intended. There is no way for us to know. Let's talk about now. Let's talk about gun violence. This sentence was most definitely written about muskets. What about handguns and assault rifles? What is reasonable now?

SEAN: Alan Gura basically argues when you take away people's guns, they're gonna be less prepared if and when they enlist in the Army. To which Justice Breyer's like, "They can still practice shooting ...

SEAN: Which weren't banned in DC.

SEAN: That, by the way, was Justice Scalia telling Alan Gura how to answer Justice Breyer's question.

SEAN: Anyway, the oral arguments last 97 minutes, far longer than most other cases. And going into the arguments ...

SEAN: And as with all of these close cases ...

SEAN: One of the first things he said was about bears. Like, not bear arms, but grizzly bears. And the point Kennedy was trying to make was clear: don't you think the framers had other reasons that they wanted people to have guns other than just being in a militia? Like, what about people being in their homes and just needing to defend themselves?

SEAN: RIP the militia clause. December 15, 1791, to June 26, 2008. A pretty good run, if I'm being honest. For the first time in the history of these United States, the courts definitively declared that the Second Amendment gives every American the right to a gun for self-defense.

SEAN: Of course, not everyone agreed.

SEAN: This is Jack Rakove.

SEAN: He filed a brief for the court, and he says Scalia's reading of the history is just wrong.

SEAN: You could argue that we shouldn't even be talking about history.

SEAN: And that ultimately -- and here he echoed Justice Stevens in his dissent.

SEAN: But -- there's a very big but.

SEAN: And this is another thing that we tend to forget. The decision says every individual has a right to bear arms, but most interestingly, like, the decision also says of course, we need gun control. The word Heller has come to represent, like, Second Amendment rights. Like, are you for Heller or are you against Heller? Even though being for Heller is being for gun control.

SEAN: Yeah, it is. I mean, after all this time, it's still just totally confusing. You have a right to a gun, but the government has a right to regulate it. Dick Keller gets his gun back in DC, but DC still also has all sorts of gun regulations. And you see the same pattern all over the country. Some states are lenient, some are super strict, and both approaches seem to comply with Heller. In a way, the Heller Decision is just like all those commas and clauses that we started with in James Madison's sentence. It's this confusing declaration that leaves the door wide open for interpretation. Which obviously sucks. We could have used a little more clarity on how to live with this Second Amendment right to bear arms. But that door being open, it gives us an opportunity, I think. An opportunity to get it right, to fix it. And it seems like now would be a pretty good time.

JAD: That was The Gun Show from More Perfect, and producer Sean Rameswaram. Huge thanks to him. Check out his show, Today Explained on Vox. Thanks to Adam Winkler. We drew a lot of the information from this episode from his book, Gunfight. Thanks also to Suzie Lechtenberg, Kelly Prime, Julia Longoria, Sarah Qari, Jenny Lawton, Alex Overington and the full More Perfect team which includes, you know, Cristian Farias, Linda Hirshman, Elie Mystal, David Gable and Michelle Harris. Thank you to Oyez for all the Supreme Court audio. They're a free law project in collaboration with the Legal Information Institute at Cornell. Leadership support for More Perfect is provided by the Joyce Foundation. Additional funding is provided by the Charles Evans Hughes Memorial Foundation. I'm Jad Abumrad. Thanks for listening.
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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Gun Show | More Perfect | WNYC Studios

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
RADIOLAB INTRO] JAD ABUMRAD: This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad. A couple months ago, the More Perfect team and I released a doc called The Gun Show, which was sort of an off-angle look at the history that underlies how we talk about guns in this country.